University of Virginia Library

DASHES AT LIFE
WITH A FREE PENCIL.

2. PART II;
INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE.

PREFACE.

The following passages are extracts from the
prefaces to the English editions of the two works
included in this book—“Inklings of Adventure”
and “Loiterings of Travel:”—

It will be seen, by many marks in the narratives
which follow, that they are not the work of imagination.
The dramas of real life are seldom well
wound up, and the imperfectness of plot which
might be objected to them as tales, will prove to
the observant reader that they are drawn more
from memory than fancy. It is because they are
thus imperfect in dramatic accomplishment, that I
have called them by the name under which they
have been introduced. They are rather intimations
of what seemed to lead to a romantic termination
than complete romances—in short, they are
Inklings of Adventure. The adventures were jotted
down—the events recorded—the poems indited,
and the letters despatched, while the thought was
freshly born, or the incident freshly heard or remembered—at
the first place which afforded the
leisure—in short, during Loiterings of Travel.

For the living portraitures of the book I have a
word to say. That sketches of the whim of the
hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral
trifles, which, slight as they are, constitute in a
great measure its “form and pressure”—that these,
and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our
time, are popular and amusing, I have the most
weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell.
“Are they innocent?” is the next question. And
to this I know no more discreet answer than that
mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has
been said that sketches of contemporary society
require little talent, and belong to an inferior order
of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be well
done to attract notice at all; and if true and graphic,
they are not only excellent material for future
biographers, but to all who live out of the magic
circles of fashion and genius, they are more than
amusing—they are instructive. To such persons,
living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much
characters of history, and society in cities is as
much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a
century had intervened. The critic who finds
these matters “stale and unprofitable,” lives in the
circles described, and the pictures drawn at his
elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance; but
the same critic would delight in a familiar sketch
of a supper with “my lord of Leicester” in Elizabeth's
time, of an evening with Raleigh and
Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a
description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of
Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of
admiring nobles. I have not named in the same
sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge
of Shakspere's person and manners. What
would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be
worth now—if it were nothing but how he gave
the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap?

How far sketches of the living are a breach of
courtesy committed by the author toward the persons
described, depends, of course, on the temper
in which they are done. To select a subject for
complimentary description is to pay the most undoubted
tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have
observed, most distinguished persons sympathize
with the public interest in them and their belongings,
and are willing to have their portraits drawn,
either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer
them the compliment. It would be ungracious to
the admiring world if they were not.

The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid
to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound,
like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable

curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invisible
tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the
world.

For myself, I am free to confess that no age
interests me like the present; that no pictures of
society since the world began, are half so entertaining
to me as those of English society in our
day; and that, whatever comparison the living
great men of England may sustain with those of
other days, there is no doubt in my mind that English
social life, at the present moment, is at a higher
pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was
ever here or elsewhere since the world began—
consequently it, and all who form and figure in it,
are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity
and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady
Bellair of D'Israeli's last romance, are, to my
mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most
entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing;
and D'Israeli, by the way, is the only English author
who seems to have the power of enlarging
his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the
times he lives in. His novels are far more popular
in America than in England, because the Atlantic
is to us a century. We picture to ourselves
England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves
England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote
of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford
or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is
like the distance of time; and while all that is
minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater
lights of the age and the prominent features of society
stand out apart, and we judge of them like
posterity. Much as I have myself lived in England,
I have never been able to remove this long
perspective from between my eye and the great men
of whom I read and thought on the other side of
the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same
room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps
as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough; and
I sit down afterward to describe how he looked,
with the eagerness with which I should communicate
to my friends some disinterred description
of these renowned heroes by a contemporary
writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in
short, and would show me his magic mirror, I
should as soon call up Moore as Dryden—Wordsworth
or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton.

PEDLAR KARL.

—L'Evangile, des Femmes.

I am not sure whether Lebanon Springs, the scene
of a romantic story I am about to tell, belong to New
York or Massachusetts. It is not very important, to
be sure, in a country where people take Vermont and
Patagonia to be neighboring states, but I have a natural
looseness in geography which I take pains to mortify
by exposure. Very odd that I should not remember
more of the spot where I took my first lessons in
philandering!—where I first saw you, brightest and
most beautiful A. D. (not Anno Domini), in your white
morning-frocks and black French aprons!

Lebanon Springs are the rage about once in three
years. I must let you into the secret of these things,
gentle reader, for perhaps I am the only individual
existing who has penetrated the mysteries of the four
dynasties of American fashion. In the fourteen millions
of inhabitants in the United States, there are
precisely four authenticated and undisputed aristocratic
families. There is one in Boston, one in New
York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. By
a blessed Providence they are not all in one state, or
we should have a civil war and a monarchy in no time.
With two hundred miles' interval between them, they
agree passably, and generally meet at one or another
of the three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston, or
Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as the process
of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. You
must explain it by some theory of homœpathy or
magnetism. As it is not known till the moment they
arrive, there is of course great excitement among the
hotel-keepers in these different parts of the country,
and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants
one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many
score. The vast and solitary temples of Pæstum are
gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment.

As I make a point of dawdling away July and August
in this locomotive metropolis of pleasure, and
rather prefer Lebanon, it is always agreeable to me to
hear that the nucleus is formed in that valley of hemlocks.
Not for its scenery, for really, my dear east
ern-hemispherian! you that are accustomed to what
is called nature in England (to wit, a soft park, with a
gray ruin in the midst), have little idea how wearily
upon heart and mind presses a waste wilderness of
mere forest and water, without stone or story. Trees
in England have characters and tongues; if you see a
fine one, you know whose father planted it, and for
whose pleasure it was designed, and about what sum
the man must possess to afford to let it stand. They
are statistics, as it were—so many trees, ergo so many
owners so rich. In America, on the contrary, trees
grow and waters run, as the stars shine, quite unmeaningly;
there may be ten thousand princely elms, and
not a man within a hundred miles worth five pounds
five. You ask, in England, who has the privilege of
this water? or you say of an oak, that it stood in such
a man's time: but with us, water is an element unclaimed
and unrented, and a tree dabbles in the clouds
as they go over, and is like a great idiot, without soul
or responsibility.

If Lebanon had a history, however, it would have
been a spot for a pilgrimage, for its natural beauty.
It is shaped like a lotus, with one leaf laid back by
the wind. It is a great green cup, with a scoop for a
drinking-place. As you walk in the long porticoes of
the hotel, the dark forest mounts up before you like a
leafy wall, and the clouds seem just to clear the pine-tops,
and the eagles sail across from horizon to horizon,
without lifting their wings, as if you saw them
from the bottom of a well. People born there think
the world about two miles square, and hilly.

The principal charm of Lebanon to me is the village
of “shakers,” lying in a valley about three miles
off. As Glaucus wondered at the inert tortoise of
Pompeii, and loved it for its antipodal contrast to himself,
so do I affection (a French verb that I beg leave
to introduce to the English language) the shaking
quakers. That two thousand men could be found in
the New World, who would embrace a religion enjoining
a frozen and unsympathetic intercourse with
the diviner sex, and that an equal number of females
could be induced to live in the same community, without
locks or walls, in the cold and rigid observance
of a creed of celibacy, is to me an inexplicable and
grave wonder. My delight is to get into my stanhope
after breakfast, and drive over and spend the forenoor
in contemplating them at their work in the fields
They have a peculiar and most expressive physiognomy;

the women are pale, or of a wintry redness in
the cheek, and are all attenuated and spare. Gravity,
deep and habitual, broods in every line of their thin
faces. They go out to their labor in company with
those serious men, and are never seen to smile; their
eyes are all hard and stony, their gait is precise and
stiff, their voices are of a croaking hoarseness, and nature
seems dead in them. I would bake you such men
and women in a brick-kiln.

Do they think the world is coming to an end? Are
there to be no more children? Is Cupid to be thrown
out of business, like a coach proprietor on a railroad?
What can the shakers mean, I should be pleased to
know?

The oddity is that most of them are young. Men
of from twenty to thirty, and women from sixteen to
twenty-five, and often, spite of their unbecoming dress,
good-looking and shapely, meet you at every step. Industrious,
frugal, and self-denying, they certainly are,
and there is every appearance that their tenets of
difficult abstinence are kept to the letter. There is
little temptation beyond principle to remain, and they
are free to go and come as they list, yet there they
live on in peace and unrepining industry, and a more
thriving community does not exist in the republic.
Many a time have I driven over on a Sunday, and
watched those solemn virgins dropping in one after
another to the church; and when the fine-limbed and
russet-faced brotherhood were swimming round the
floor in their fanatical dance, I have watched their
countenances for some look of preference, some betrayal
of an ill-suppressed impulse, till my eyes ached
again. I have selected the youngest and fairest, and
have not lost sight of her for two hours, and she
might have been made of cheese-parings for any trace
of emotion. There is food for speculation in it. Can
we do without matrimony? Can we “strike,” and be
independent of these dear delightful tyrants, for whom
we “live and move and have our being?” Will it
ever be no blot on our escutcheon to have attained
thirty-five as an unfructifying unit? Is that fearful
campaign, with all its embarrassments and awkwardnesses,
and inquisitions into your money and morals,
its bullyings and backings-out—is it inevitable?

Lebanon has one other charm. Within a morning
drive of the springs lies the fairest village it has ever
been my lot to see. It is English in its character,
except that there is really nothing in this country
so perfect of its kind. There are many towns in the
United States more picturesquely situated, but this,
before I had been abroad, always seemed to me the
very ideal of English rural scenery, and the kind of
place to set apart for either love or death—for one's
honeymoon or burial—the two periods of life which
I have always hoped would find me in the loveliest
spot of nature. Stockbridge lies in a broad sunny
valley, with mountains at exactly the right distance,
and a river in its bosom that is as delicate in its windings,
and as suited to the charms it wanders among,
as a vein in the transparent neck of beauty. I am
not going into a regular description, but I have carried
myself back to Lebanon; and the remembrance
of the leafy mornings of summer in which I have
driven to that fair earthly paradise, and loitered under
its elms, imagining myself amid the scenes of song
and story in distant England, has a charm for me now.
I have seen the mother-land; I have rambled through
park, woodland, and village, wherever the name was
old and the scene lovely, and it pleases me to go back
to my dreaming days and compare the reality with the
anticipation. Most small towns in America have traces
of newness about them. The stumps of a clearing, or
freshly-boarded barns—something that is the antipodes
of romance—meets your eye from every aspect. Stockbridge,
on the contrary, is an old town, and the houses
are of a rural structure; the fields look soft and genial,
the grass is swardlike, the bridges picturesque, the
hedges old, and the elms, nowhere so many and so
luxuriant, are full-grown and majestic. The village
is embowered in foliage.

Greatest attraction of all, the authoress of “Redwood”
and “Hope Leslie,” a novelist of whom America has
the good sense to be proud, is the Miss Mitford of Stockbridge.
A man, though a distinguished one, may have
little influence on the town he lives in, but a remarkable
woman is the invariable cynosure of a community,
and irradiates it all. I think I could divine the presence
of one almost by the growing of the trees and flowers.
“Our Village” does not look like other villages.

2. II.

You will have forgotten that I had a story to tell,
dear reader. I was at Lebanon in the summer of —
(perhaps you don't care about knowing exactly when
it was, and in that case I would rather keep shy of
dates. I please myself with the idea that time gets on
faster than I). The Springs were thronged. The
president's lady was there (this was under our administration,
the Adams'), and all the four cliques spoken
of above were amicably united—each other's beaux
dancing with each other's belles, and so on. If I were
writing merely for American eyes, I should digress
once more to describe the distinctive characters of the
south, north, and central representations of beauty;
but it would scarcely interest the general reader. I
may say, in passing, that the Boston belles were à
l'Anglaise, rosy and riantes; the New-Yorkers, like
Parisians, cool, dangerous, and dressy; and the Baltimoreans
(and so south), like Ionians or Romans, indolent,
passionate, lovely, and languishing. Men,
women, and pine-apples, I am inclined to think, flourish
with a more kindly growth in the fervid latitudes.

The campaign went on, and a pleasant campaign it
was—for the parties concerned had the management
of their own affairs; that is, they who had hearts to
sell made the bargain for themselves (this was the
greater number), and they who disposed of this commodity
gratis, though necessarily young and ignorant
of the world, made the transfer in the same manner, in
person. This is your true republic. The trading in
affections by reference—the applying to an old and
selfish heart for the purchase of a young and ingenuous
one—the swearing to your rents, and not to your
faithful passion—to your settlements, and not your
constancy—the cold distance between yourself and
the young creature who is to lie in your bosom, till
the purchase-money is secured—and the hasty marriage
and sudden abandonment of a nature thus
chilled and put on its guard, to a freedom with one
almost a stranger, that can not but seem licentious,
and can not but break down that sense of propriety in
which modesty is most strongly intrenched—this
seems to me the one evil of your old worm-eaten monarchies
this side the water, which touches the essential
happiness of the well-bred individual. Taxation
and oppression are but things he reads of in the morning
paper.

This freedom of intercourse between unmarried
people has a single disadvantage—one gets so desperately
soon to the end of the chapter! There shall be
two hundred young ladies at the Springs in a given
season, and, by the difference in taste so wisely arranged
by Providence, there will scarcely be, of course,
more than four in that number whom any one gentleman
at all difficult will find within the range of his
beau ideal. With these four he may converse freely
twelve hours in the day—more, if he particularly desires
it. They may ride together, drive together, ramble
together, sing together, be together from morning

till night, and at the end of a month passed in this way,
if he escape a committal, as is possible, he will know
all that are agreeable, in one large circle, at least, as well
as he knows his sisters—a state of things that is very
likely to end in his going abroad soon, from a mere
dearth of amusement. I have imagined, however,
the case of an unmarrying idle man, a character too
rare as yet in America to affect the general question.
People marry as they die in that country—when their
time come. We must all marry is as much an axiom
as we must all die, and eke as melancholy.

Shall we go on with the story? I had escaped for
two blessed weeks, and was congratulating the susceptible
gentleman under my waistcoat-pocket that we
should never be in love with less than the whole sex
again, when a German Baron Von — arrived at
the Springs with a lame daughter. She was eighteen,
transparently fair, and, at first sight, so shrinkingly
dependant, so delicate, so childlike, that attention to
her assumed the form almost of pity, and sprang as
naturally and unsuspectingly from the heart. The
only womanly trait about her was her voice, which
was so deeply soft and full, so earnest and yet so gentle,
so touched with subdued pathos and yet so melancholy
calm, that if she spoke after a long silence, I
turned to her involuntarily with the feeling that she
was not the same—as if some impassioned and eloquent
woman had taken unaware the place of the
simple and petted child.

I am inclined to think there is a particular tenderness
in the human breast for lame women. Any
other deformity in the gentler sex is monstrous; but
lameness (the devil's defect) is “the devil.” I picture
to myself, to my own eye, now—pacing those rickety
colonnades at Lebanon with the gentle Meeta hanging
heavily, and with the dependance inseparable from
her infirmity, on my arm, while the moon (which was
the moon of the Rbine to her, full of thrilling and unearthly
influences) rode solemnly up above the mountain-tops.
And that strange voice filling like a flute
with sweetness as the night advanced, and that irregular
pressure of the small wrist in her forgotten lameness,
and my own (I thought) almost paternal feeling
as she leaned more and more heavily, and turned her
delicate and fair face confidingly up to mine, and that
dangerous mixture altogether of childlikeness and
womanly passion, of dependance and superiority, of
reserve on the one subject of love, and absolute confidence
on every other—if I had not a story to tell, I
could prate of those June nights and their witcheries
till you would think

and myself “bitten by the dipsas.”

We were walking one night late in the gallery running
around the second story of the hotel. There was
a ball on the floor below, and the music, deadened
somewhat by the crowded room, came up softened and
mellowed to the dark and solitary colonnade, and added
to other influences in putting a certain lodger in my
bosom beyond my temporary control. I told Meeta
that I loved her.

The building stands against the side of a steep mountain
high up above the valley, and the pines and hemlocks
at that time hung in their primeval blackness
almost over the roof. As the most difficult and embarrassed
sentence of which I had ever been delivered
died on my lips, and Meeta, lightening her weight on
my arm, walked in apparently offended silence by my
side, a deep-toned guitar was suddenly struck in the
woods, and a clear, manly voice broke forth in a song.
It produced an instant and startling effect on my companion.
With the first word she quickly withdrew
her arm; and, after a moment's pause, listening with
her hands raised in an attitude of the most intense eagerness,
she sprang to the extremity of the balustrade,
and gazed breathlessly into the dark depths of the forest.
The voice ceased, and she started back, and laid
her hand hastily upon my arm.

“I must go,” she said, in a voice of hurried feeling;
“if you are generous, stay here and await me!” and in
another moment she sprang along the bridge connecting
the gallery with the rising ground in the rear, and
was lost in the shadows of the hemlocks.

“I have made a declaration,” thought I, “just five
minutes too soon.”

I paced up and down the now too lonely colonnade,
and picked up the fragments of my dream with what
philosophy I might. By the time Meeta returned—
perhaps a half hour, perhaps an age, as you measure
by her feelings or mine—I had hatched up a very pretty
and heroical magnanimity. She would have spoken,
but was breathless.

“Explain nothing,” I said, taking her arm within
mine, “and let us mutually forget. If I can serve you
better than by silence, command me entirely. I live
but for your happiness—even,” I added after a pause,
“though it spring from another.”

We were at her chamber-door. She pressed my
hand with a strength of which I did not think those
small, slight fingers capable, and vanished, leaving me,
I am free to confess, less resigned than you would suppose
from my last speech. I had done the dramatic
thing, thanks to much reading of you, dear Barry
Cornwall! but it was not in a play. I remained killed
after the audience was gone.

3. III.

The next day a new character appeared on the
stage.

“Such a handsome pedlar!” said magnificent Helen
— to me, as I gave my horse to the groom after
a ride in search of hellebore, and joined the promenade
at the well: “and what do you think? he sells
only by raffle! It's so nice! All sorts of Berlin iron
ornaments, and everything German and sweet; and
the pedlar's smile's worth more than the prizes; and
such a mustache! See! there he is!—and now, if
he has sold all his tickets—will you come, Master
Gravity?”

“I hear a voice you can not hear,” thought I, as I
gave the beauty my arm, and joined a crowd of people
gathered about a pedlar's box in the centre of the
parterre.

The itinerant vender spread his wares in the midst
of the gay assemblage, and the raffle went on. He
was excessively handsome. A head of the sweet gentleness
of Raphael's, with locks flowing to his shoulders
in the fashion of German students, a soft brown
mustache curving on a short Phidian upper lip, a
large blue eye expressive of enthusiasm rather than
passion, and features altogether purely intellectual—
formed a portrait of which even jealousy might console
itself. Through all the disadvantages of a dress
suited to his apparent vocation, an eye the least on
the alert for a disguise would have penetrated his in
a moment. The gay and thoughtless crowd about
him, not accustomed to impostors who were more than
they pretended to be, trusted him for a pedlar, but
treated him with a respect far above his station insensibly.

Whatever his object was, so it were honorable, I
inly determined to give him all the assistance in my
power. A single glance at the face of Meeta, who
joined the circle as the prizes were drawn—a face so
changed since yesterday, so flushed with hope and
pleasure, and yet so saddened by doubt and fear, the
small lips compressed, the soft black eye kindled and

restless, and the red leaf on her cheek deepened to a
feverish beauty—left me no shadow of hesitation. I
exchanged a look with her that I intended should say
as much.

4. IV.

I know nothing that gives one such an elevated idea
of human nature (in one's own person) as helping
another man to a woman one loves. Oh last days of
minority or thereabout! oh primal manhood! oh
golden time, when we have let go all but the enthusiasm
of the boy, and seized hold of all but the selfishness
of the man! oh blessed interregnum of the
evil and stronger genius! why can we not bottle up
thy hours like the wine of a better vintage, and enjoy
them in the parched world-weariness of age? In the
tardy honeymoon of a bachelor (as mine will be, if it
come ever, alas!) with what joy of paradise should we
bring up from the cellars of the past a hamper of that
sunny Hippocrene!

Pedlar Karl and “the gentleman in No. 10” would
have been suspected in any other country of conspiracy.
(How odd, that the highest crime of a monarchy
—the attempt to supplant the existing ruler—becomes
in a republic a creditable profession! You are a traitor
here, a politician there!) We sat together from
midnight onward, discoursing in low voices over sherry
and sandwiches; and in that crowded Babylon, his
entrances and exits required a very conspirator-like
management. Known as my friend, his trade and his
disguise were up. As a pedlar, wandering about
where he listed when not employed over his wares, his
interviews with Meeta were easily contrived, and his
lover's watch, gazing on her through the long hours
of the ball from the crowd of villagers at the windows,
hovering about her walks, and feeding his heart on
the many, many chance looks of fondness given him
every hour in that out-of-doors society, kept him comparatively
happy.

“The baron looked hard at you to-day,” said I, as
he closed the door in my little room, and sat down on
the bed.

“Yes; he takes an interest in me as a countryman,
but he does not know me. He is a dull observer, and
has seen me but once in Germany.”

“How, then, have you known Meeta so long?”

“I accompanied her brother home from the university,
when the baron was away, and for a long month
we were seldom parted. Riding, boating on the Rhine,
watching the sunset from the bartizan of the old castletowers,
reading in the old library, rambling in the park
and forest—it was a heaven, my friend, than which I
can conceive none brighter.”

“And her brother?”

“Alas! changed! We were both boys then, and a
brother is slow to believe his sister's beauty dangerous.
He was the first to shut the doors against me, when
he heard that the poor student had dared to love his
highborn Meeta.”

Karl covered his eyes with his hand, and brooded
for a while in silence on the remembrances he had
awakened.

“Do you think the baron came to America purposely
to avoid you?”

“Partly, I have no doubt, for I entered the castle
one night in my despair, when I had been forbidden
entrance, and he found me at her feet in the old corridor.
It was the only time he ever saw me, if, indeed,
he saw me at all in the darkness: and he immediately
hastened his preparations for a long-contemplated
journey, I knew not whither.”

“Did you follow him soon?”

“No, for my heart was crushed at first, and I despaired.
The possibility of following them in my
wretched poverty did not even occur to me for
months.”

“How did you track them hither, of all places in
the world?”

“I sought them first in Italy. It is easy on the
continent to find out where persons are not, and after
two years' wanderings, I heard of them in Paris.
They had just sailed for America. I followed; but
in a country where there are no passports, and no
espionage, it is difficult to trace the traveller. It was
probable only that they would be at a place of general
resort, and I came here with no assurance but hope.
Thanks to God, the first sight that greeted my eyes
was my dear Meeta, whose irregular step, as she
walked back and forth with you in the gallery, enabled
me to recognise her in the darkness.”

Who shall say the days of romance are over? The
plot is not brought to the catastrophe, but we hope it
is near.

5. V.

My aunt, Isabella Slingsby (now in heaven, with
the “eleven thousand virgins,” God rest her soul!),
was at this time, as at all others, under my respectable
charge. She would have said I was under hers—
but it amounts to the same thing—we lived together
in peace and harmony. She said what she pleased,
for I loved her—and I did what I pleased, for she
loved me. When Karl told me that Meeta's principal
objection to an elopement was the want of a matron,
I shut the teeth of my resolution, as they say in Persia,
and inwardly vowed my unconscious aunt to this
exigency. You should have seen Miss Isabella Slingsby
to know what a desperate man may be brought to
resolve on.

On a certain day, Count Von Raffle-off (as my witty
friend and ally, Tom Fane, was pleased to call the
handsome pedlar) departed with his pack and the
hearts of all the dressing-maids and some of their mistresses,
on his way to New York. I drove down the
road to take my leave of him out of sight, and give
him my last instructions.

How to attack my aunt was a subject about which
I had many unsatisfactory thoughts. If there was one
thing she disapproved of more than another, it was an
elopement; and with what face to propose to her to
run away with a baron's only daughter, and leave her
in the hands of a pedlar, taking upon herself, as she
must, the whole sin and odium, was an enigma Late,
drank, and slept upon, in vain. One thing at last became
very clear—she would do it for nobody but me.
Sequitur, I must play the lover myself.

I commenced with a fit of illness. What was the
matter? For two days I was invisible. Dear Isabella!
it was the first time I had ever drawn seriously on thy
fallow sympathies, and, how freely they flowed at my
affected sorrows, I shame to remember! Did ever
woman so weep? Did ever woman so take antipathy
to man as she to that innocent old baron for his supposed
refusal of his daughter to Philip Slingsby? This
revival of the remembrance shall not be in vain. The
mignonette and roses planted above thy grave, dearest
aunt, shall be weeded anew!

Oh that long week of management and hypocrisy!
The day came at last.

“Aunt Bel!”

“What, Philip, dear?”

“I think I feel better to-day.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. What say you to a drive? There is the
stanhope.”

“My dear Phil, don't mention that horrid stanhope.
I am sure, if you valued my life—”

“Precisely, aunt—(I had taken care to give her a

good fright the day before)—but Tom Fane has offered
me his ponies and Jersey wagon, and that, you know,
is the most quiet thing in the world, and holds four.
So, perhaps—ehem!—you'll—ask Meeta?”

“Um! Why, you see, Philip—”

I saw at once, that, if it got to an argument, I was
perdu. Miss Slingsby, though a sincere Christian,
never could keep her temper when she tried to reason.
I knelt down on her footstool, smoothed away the false
hair on her forehead, and kissed her. It was a fascinating
endearment of mine, that I only resorted to on
great emergencies. The hermit tooth in my aunt's
mouth became gradually visible, heralding what in
youth had been a smile; and, as I assisted her in rolling
up her embroidery, she looked on me with an unsuspecting
affection that touched my heart. I made
a silent vow that if she survived the scrape into which
she was being inveigled, I would be to her and her
dog Whimsiculo (the latter my foe and my aversion)
the soul of exemplary kindness for the remainder of
their natural lives. I lay the unction to my soul that
this vow was kept. My aunt blessed me shortly before
she was called to “walk in white” (she had hitherto
walked in yellow), and as it would have been unnatural
in Whimsiculo to survive her, I considered his
“natural life” as ended with hers, and had him peacefully
strangled on the same day. He lies at her feet,
as usual, a delicate attention of which (I trust in Swedenborg)
her spirit is aware.

With the exception of “Tom Thumb” and “Rattler,”
who were of the same double-jointed family of
interminable wind and bottom, there was never perhaps
such a pair of goers as Tom Fane's ponies. My
aunt had a lurking hope, I believe, that the baron
would refuse Meeta permission to join us, but either
he did not think me a dangerous person (I have said
before he was a dull man), or he had no objection to
me as a son-in-law, which my aunt and myself (against
the world) would have thought the natural construction
upon his indifference. He came to the end of the
colonnade to see us start, and as I eased the ribands
and let the ponies off like a shot from a crossbow, I
stole a look at Meeta. The color had fled from cheek
and lip, and the tears streamed over them like rain.
Aunt Bel was on the back seat, grace à Dieu!

We met Tom at the foot of the hill, and I pulled
up. He was the best fellow, that Tom Fane!

“Ease both the bearing reins,” said I, “I am going
up the mountain.”

“The devil you are!” said Tom, doing my bidding,
however; “you'll find the road to the shakers much
pleasanter. What an odd whim! It's a perpendicular
three miles, Miss Slingsby. I would as lief be
hoisted up a well and let down again. Don't go that
way, Phil, unless you are going to run away with
Miss Von—”

thought I, and waving the tandem lash over the ears
of the ponies, I brought up the silk on the cheek of
their malaprop master, and spanked away up the hill,
leaving him in a range likely to get a fresh supply of
fuel by dinner-time. Tom was of a plethoric habit,
and if I had not thought he could afford to burst a
blood-vessel better than two lovers to break their hearts,
I should not have ventured on the bold measure of
borrowing his horses for an hour, and keeping them a
week. We have shaken hands upon it since, but it is
my private opinion that he has never forgiven me in
his heart.

As we wound slowly up the mountain, I gave Meeta
the reins, and jumped out to gather some wild flowers
for my aunt. Dear old soul! the attention reconciled
her to what she considered a very unwarrantable caprice
of mine. What I could wish to toil up that
steep mountain for? Well! the flowers are charming
in these high regions!

“Don't you see my reason for coming, then, aunt
Bella?”

“Was it for that, dear Philip?” said she, putting
the wild flowers affectionately into her bosom, where
they bloomed like broidery on saffron tapestry; “how
considerate of you!” And she drew her shawl around
her, and was at peace with all the world. So easily
are the old made happy by the young! Reader, I
scent a moral in the air!

We were at the top of the hill. If I was sane, my
aunt was probably thinking, I should turn here, and
go back. To descend the other side, and reascend
and descend again to the Springs, was hardly a sort of
thing one would do for pleasure.

“Here's a good place to turn, Philip,” said she, as
we entered a smooth broad hollow on the top of the
mountain.

I dashed through it as if the ponies were shod with
talaria. My aunt said nothing, and luckily the road
was very narrow for a mile, and she had a horror of a
short turn. A new thought struck me.

“Did you ever know, aunt, that there was a way
back around the foot of the mountain?”

“Dear, no; how delightful! Is it far?”

“A couple of hours or so; but I can do it in less.
We'll try;” and I gave the sure-footed Canadians the
whip, and scampered down the hills as if the rock of
Sisyphus had been rolling after us.

We were soon over the mountain-range, and the
road grew better and more level. Oh, how fast pattered
those little hoofs, and how full of spirit, and
excitement looked those small ears, catching the
lightest chirrup I could whisper, like the very spell of
swiftness! Pines, hemlocks and cedars, farmhouses
and milestones, flew back like shadows. My aunt sat
speechless in the middle of the back seat, holding on
with both hands, in apprehensive resignation! She
expected soon to come in sight of the Springs, and
had doubtless taken a mental resolution that if, please
God, she once more found herself at home, she would
never “tempt Providence” (it was a favorite expression
of hers) by trusting herself again behind such a pair
of fly-away demons. As I read this thought in her
countenance by a stolen glance over my shoulder, we
rattled into a village distant from Lebanon twenty
miles.

“There, aunt,” said I, as I pulled up at the door of
the inn, “we have very nearly described a circle.
Now, don't speak! if you do, you'll start the horses.
There's nothing they are so much afraid of as a woman's
voice. Very odd, isn't it? We'll just sponge
their mouths now, and be at home in the crack of a
whip. Five miles more, only. Come!”

Off we sped again like the wind, aunt Bel just venturing
to wonder whether the horses wouldn't rather go
slower. Meeta had hardly spoken; she had thoughts
of her own to be busy with, and I pretended to be fully
occupied with my driving. The nonsense I talked to
those horses, to do away the embarrassment of her silence,
would convict me of insanity before any jury in
the world.

The sun began to throw long shadows, and the short-legged
ponies figured like flying giraffes along the retiring
hedges. Luckily, my aunt had very little idea
of conjecturing a course by the points of the compass.
We sped on gloriously.

“Philip, dear! hav'n't you lost your way? It seems
to me we've come more than five miles since you
stopped” (ten at least), “and I don't see the mountains
about Lebanon at all!”

“Don't be alarmed, aunty, dear! We're very high,
just here, and shall drop down on Lebanon, as it were.
Are you afraid, Meeta?”

“Nein!” she answered. She was thinking in German,
poor girl, and heart and memory were wrapped
up in the thought.

I drove on almost cruelly. Tom's incomparable
horses justified all his eulogiums; they were indefatigable.
The sun blazed a moment through the firs,
and disappeared; the gorgeous changes of eve came
over the clouds; the twilight stole through the damp
air with its melancholy gray; and the whippoorwills,
birds of evening, came abroad, like gentlemen in debt,
to flit about in the darkness. Everything was saddening.
My own volubility ceased; the whiz of the
lash, as I waved it over the heads of my foaming ponies,
and an occasional “Steady!” as one or the other
broke into a gallop, were the only interruptions to the
silence. Meeta buried her face in the folds of her
shawl, and sat closer to my side, and my aunt, soothed
and flattered by turns, believed and doubted, and was
finally persuaded, by my ingenious and well-inserted
fibs, that it was only somewhat farther than I anticipated,
and we should arrive “presently.”

Somewhere about eight o'clock the lights of a town
appeared in the distance, and, straining every nerve,
the gallant beasts whirled us in through the streets,
and I pulled up suddenly at the door of an hotel.

“Why, Philip!” said my aunt in a tone of unutterable
astonishment, looking about her as if she had
awoke from a dream, “this is Hudson!”

It was too clear to be disputed. We were upon the
North river, forty miles from Lebanon, and the steamer
would touch at the pier in half an hour. My aunt
was to be one of the passengers to New York, but she
was yet to be persuaded of it; the only thing now was
to get her into the house, and enact the scene as soon
as possible.

I helped her out as tenderly as I knew how, and, as
we went up stairs, I requested Meeta to sit down in a
corner of the room, and cover her face with her handkerchief.
When the servant was locked out, I took
my aunt into the recess of the window, and informed
her, to her very great surprise, that she had run away
with the baron's daughter.

“Philip Slingsby!”

My aunt was overcome. I had nothing for it but to
be overcome too. She sunk into one chair, and I into
the other, and burying my face in my hands, I looked
through my fingers to watch the effect. Five mortal
minutes lasted my aunt's wrath; gradually, however,
she began to steal a look at me, and the expression of
resentment about her thin lips softened into something
like pity.

“Philip!” said she, taking my hand.

“My dear aunt!”

“What is to be done?”

I pointed to Meeta, who sat with her head on her
bosom, pressed my hand to my heart, as if to suppress
a pang, and proceeded to explain. It seemed impossible
for my aunt to forgive the deception of the thing.
Unsophisticated Isabella! If thou hadst known that
thou wert, even yet, one fold removed from the truth,
—if thou couldst have divined that it was not for the
darling of thy heart that thou wert yielding a point
only less dear to thee than thy maiden reputation—
if it could have entered thy region of possibilities that
thine own house in town had been three days aired
for the reception of a bride, run away with by thy ostensible
connivance, and all for a German pedlar, in
whose fortunes and loves thou hadst no shadow of
interest—I think the brain in thee would have turned,
and the dry heart in thy bosom have broken with surprise
and grief!

I wrote a note to Tom, left his horses at the inn,
and at nine o'clock we were steaming down the Hudson,
my aunt in bed, and Meeta pacing the deck with
me, and pouring forth her fears and her gratitude in
a voice of music that made me almost repent my self-sacrificing
enterprise. I have told the story gayly,
gentle reader! but there was a nerve ajar in my heart
while its little events went on.

How we sped thereafter, dear reader!—how the
consul of his majesty of Prussia was persuaded by my
aunt's respectability to legalize the wedding by his
presence—how my aunt fainted dead away when the
parson arrived, and she discovered who was not to be
the bridegroom and who was—how I persuaded her
she had gone too far to recede, and worked on her tenderness
once more—how the weeping Karl, and his
lame and lovely bride, lived with us till the old baron
thought it fit to give Meeta his blessing and some
money—how Tom Fane wished no good to the pedlar's
eyes—and lastly, how Miss Isabella Slingsby lived
and died wondering what earthly motive I could have
for my absurd share in these events, are matters of
which I spare you the particulars.

NIAGARA—LAKE ONTARIO—THE ST. LAWRENCE.

1. NO. I.—NIAGARA.

It was in my senior vacation, and I was bound to
Niagara for the first time. My companion was a specimen
of the human race found rarely in Vermount, and
never elsewhere. He was nearly seven feet high,
walked as if every joint in his body was in a hopeless
state of dislocation, and was hideously, ludicrously,
and painfully ugly. This whimsical exterior contained
the conscious spirit of Apollo, and the poetical susceptibility
of Keats. He had left his plough in the Green
mountains at the age of twenty-five, and entered as a
poor student at the university, where, with the usual
policy of the college government, he was allotted to
me as a compulsory chum, on the principle of breaking
in a colt with a cart-horse. I began with laughing
at him, and ended with loving him. He rejoiced in
the common appellation of Job Smith—a synonymous
soubriquet, as I have elsewhere remarked, which was
substituted by his classmates for his baptismal name
of Forbearance.

Getting Job away with infinite difficulty from a
young Indian girl who was selling moccasins in the
streets of Buffalo (a straight, slender creature of eighteen,
stepping about like a young leopard, cold, stern,
and beautiful), we crossed the outlet of Lake Erie at
the ferry, and took horses on the northern bank of
Niagara river to ride to the falls. It was a noble
stream, as broad as the Hellespont and as blue as the
sky, and I could not look at it, hurrying on headlong
to its fearful leap, without a feeling almost of dread.

There was only one thing to which Job was more
susceptible than to the beauties of nature, and that
was the beauty of woman. His romance had been
stirred by the lynx-eyed Sioux, who took her money
for the moccasins with such haughty and thankless
superbia, and full five miles of the river, with all the
gorgeous flowers and rich shrubs upon its rim, might
as well have been Lethe for his admiration. He rode
along, like the man of rags you see paraded on an ass
in the carnival, his legs and arms dangling about in
ludicrous obedience to the sidelong hitch of his pacer.

The roar of the falls was soon audible, and Job's
enthusiasm and my own, if the increased pace of our
Narraganset ponies meant anything, were fully aroused.
The river broke into rapids, foaming furiously on its

course, and the subterranean thunder increased like a
succession of earthquakes, each louder than the last.
I had never heard a sound so broad and universal. It
was impossible not to suspend the breath, and feel absorbed,
to the exclusion of all other thoughts, in the
great phenomenon with which the world seemed trembling
to its centre. A tall, misty cloud, changing its
shape continually, as it felt the shocks of the air, rose
up before us, and with our eyes fixed upon it, and our
horses at a hard gallop, we found ourselves unexpectedly
in front of a vast white — hotel! which suddenly
interposed between the cloud and our vision.
Job slapped his legs against the sides of his panting
beast, and urged him on, but a long fence on either
side the immense building cut him off from all approach;
and having assured ourselves that there was
no access to Niagara except through the back-door of
the gentleman's house, who stood with hat off to receive
us, we wished no good to his majesty's province
of Upper Canada, and dismounted.

“Will you visit the falls before dinner, gentlemen?”
asked mine host.

“No, sir!” thundered Job, in a voice that, for a moment,
stopped the roar of the cataract.

He was like an improvisatore who had been checked
by some rude birbone in the very crisis of his eloquence.
He would not have gone to the falls that
night to have saved the world. We dined.

As it was the first meal we had ever eaten under a
monarchy, I proposed the health of the king; but Job
refused it. There was an impertinent profanity, he
said, in fencing up the entrance to Niagara that was a
greater encroachment on natural liberty than the stamp
act. He would drink to no king or parliament under
which such a thing could be conceived possible. I left
the table and walked to the window.

“Job, come here! Miss —, by all that is lovely!”

He flounced up, like a snake touched with a torpedo,
and sprang to the window. Job had never seen
the lady whose name produced such a sensation, but
he had heard more of her than of Niagara. So had
every soul of the fifteen millions of inhabitants between
us and the gulf of Mexico. She was one of those miracles
of nature that occur, perhaps, once in the rise
and fall of an empire—a woman of the perfect beauty
of an angel, with the most winning human sweetness
of character and manner. She was kind, playful, unaffected,
and radiantly, gloriously beautiful. I am sorry
I may not mention her name, for in more chivalrous
times she would have been a character of history.
Everybody who has been in America, however, will
know who I am describing, and I am sorry for those
who have not. The country of Washington will be
in its decadence before it sees such another.

She had been to the fall and was returning with her
mother and a troop of lovers, who, I will venture to
presume, brought away a very imperfect impression of
the scene. I would describe her as she came laughing
up that green bank, unconscious of everything but
the pleasure of life in a summer sunset; but I leave it
for a more skilful hand. The authoress of “Hope
Leslie” will, perhaps, mould her image into one of
her inimitable heroines.

I presented my friend, and we passed the evening
in her dangerous company. After making an engagement
to accompany her in the morning behind the
sheet of the fall, we said “Good-night” at twelve—one
of us at least as many “fathom deep in love” as a thousand
Rosalinds. My poor chum! The roar of the
cataract that shook the very roof over thy head was
less loud to thee that night than the beating of thine
own heart, I warrant me!

I rose at sunrise to go alone to the fall, but Job was
before me, and the angular outline of his gaunt figure,
stretching up from Table Rock in strong relief against
the white body of the spray, was the first object that
caught my eye as I descended.

As I came nearer the fall, a feeling of disappointment
came over me. I had imagined Niagara a vast
body of water descending as if from the clouds. The
approach to most falls is from below, and we get an
idea of them as of rivers pitching down to the plain
from the brow of a hill or mountain. Niagara river,
on the contrary, comes out from Lake Erie through a
flat plain. The top of the cascade is ten feet perhaps
below the level of the country around—consequently
invisible from any considerable distance. You walk
to the bank of a broad and rapid river, and look over
the edge of a rock, where the outlet flood of an inland
sea seems to have broken through the crust of the
earth, and, by its mere weight, plunged with an awful
leap into an immeasurable and resounding abyss. It
seems to strike and thunder upon the very centre of
the world, and the ground beneath your feet quivers
with the shock till you feel unsafe upon it.

Other disappointment than this I can not conceive
at Niagara. It is a spectacle so awful, so beyond the
scope and power of every other phenomenon in the
world, that I think people who are disappointed there
mistake the incapacity of their own conception for the
want of grandeur in the scene.

The “hell of waters” below need but a little red
ochre to out-Phlegethon Phlegethon. I can imagine
the surprise of the gentle element, after sleeping away
a se'nnight of moonlight in the peaceful bosom of
Lake Erie, at finding itself of a sudden in such a coil!
A Mediterranean sea-gull, which had tossed out the
whole of a January in the infernal “yeast” of the
Archipelago (was I not all but wrecked every day between
Troy and Malta in a score of successive hurricanes?)—I
say, the most weather-beaten of sea-birds
would look twice before he ventured upon the roaring
caldron below Niagara. It is astonishing to see how
far the descending mass is driven under the surface of
the stream. As far down toward Lake Ontario as the
eye can reach, the immense volumes of water rise
like huge monsters to the light, boiling and flashing
out in rings of foam, with an appearance of rage and
anger that I have seen in no other cataract in the
world.

“A nice fall, as an Englishman would say, my dear
Job.”

“Awful!”

Halleck, the American poet (a better one never
“strung pearls”), has written some admirable verses
on Niagara, describing its effect on the different individuals
of a mixed party, among whom was a tailor.
The sea of incident that has broken over me in years
of travel, has washed out of my memory all but the
two lines descriptive of its impression upon Snip:—

“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?”

“How slowly and solemnly they drop into the
abysm!”

It was not an original remark of Mr. Smith's. Nothing
is so surprising to the observer as the extraordinary
deliberateness with which the waters of Niagara
take their tremendous plunge. All hurry and foam
and fret, till they reach the smooth limit of the curve
—and then the laws of gravitation seem suspended,
and, like Cesar, they pause, and determine, since it is
inevitable, to take the death-leap with becoming dignity.

“Shall we go to breakfast, Job?” I was obliged to
raise my voice, to be heard, to a pitch rather exhausting
to an empty stomach.

His eyes remained fixed upon the shifting rainbows
bending and vanishing in the spray. There was no
moving him, and I gave in for another five minutes.

“Do you think it probable, Job, that the waters of
Niagara strike on the axis of the world?”

No answer.

“Job!”

“What?”

“Do you think his majesty's half of the cataract is
finer than ours?”

“Much.”

“For water, merely, perhaps. But look at the delicious
verdure on the American shore, the glorious
trees, the massed foliage, the luxuriant growth even to
the very rim of the ravine! By Jove! it seems to me
things grow better in a republic. Did you ever see a
more barren and scraggy shore than the one you stand
upon?”

“How exquisitely,” said Job, soliloquizing, “that
small green island divides the fall! What a rock it
must be founded on, not to have been washed away
in the ages that these waters have split against it!”

“I'll lay you a bet it is washed away before the
year two thousand—payable in any currency with
which we may then be conversant.”

“Don't trifle!”

“With time, or geology, do you mean? Isn't it
perfectly clear from the looks of that ravine, that Niagara
has backed up all the way from Lake Ontario?
These rocks are not adamant, and the very precipice
you stand on has cracked, and looks ready for the
plunge.[1] It must gradually wear back to Lake Erie,
and then there will be a sweep, I should like to live
long enough to see. The instantaneous junction of
two seas, with a difference of two hundred feet in their
levels, will be a spectacle—eh, Job?”

“Tremendous!”

“Do you intend to wait and see it, or will you come
to breakfast?”

He was immoveable. I left him on the rock, went
up to the hotel and ordered mutton-chops and coffee,
and when they were on the table, gave two of the
waiters a dollar each to bring him up nolens-volens.
He arrived in a great rage, but with a good appetite,
and we finished our breakfast just in time to meet
Miss —, as she stepped like Aurora from her
chamber.

It is necessary to a reputation for prowess in the
United States to have been behind the sheet of the
fall (supposing you to have been to Niagara). This
achievement is equivalent to a hundred shower-baths,
one severe cold, and being drowned twice—but most
people do it.

We descended to the bottom of the precipice, at the
side of the fall, where we found a small house, furnished
with coarse linen dresses for the purpose, and
having arranged ourselves in habiliments not particularly
improving to our natural beauty, we reappeared—
only three out of a party of ten having had the courage
to trust their attractions to such a trial. Miss —
looked like a fairy in disguise, and Job like the most
ghostly and diabolical monster that ever stalked unsepultured
abroad. He would frighten a child in his
best black suit—but with a pair of wet linen trowsers
scarcely reaching to his knees, a jacket with sleeves
shrunk to the elbows, and a white cap, he was something
supernaturally awful. The guide hesitated
about going under the fall with him.

It looked rather appalling. Our way lay through a
dense descending sheet of water, along a slender
pathway of rocks, broken into small fragments, with
an overhanging wall on one side, and the boiling
caldron of the cataract on the other. A false step,
and you were a subject for the “shocking accident”
maker.

The guide went first, taking Miss —'s right
hand. She gave me her left, and Job brought up the
rear, as they say in Connecticut, “on his own hook.”
We picked our way boldly up to the water. The wall
leaned over so much, and the fragmented declivity
was so narrow and steep, that if it had not been done
before, I should have turned back at once. Two
steps more, and the small hand in mine began to struggle
violently, and, in the same instant, the torrent beat
into my eyes, mouth, and nostrils, and I felt as if I
was drowning. I staggered a blind step onward, but
still the water poured into my nostrils, and the conviction
rushed for a moment on my mind that we were
lost. I struggled for breath, stumbled forward, and
with a gasp that I thought was my last, sunk upon
the rocks within the descending waters. Job tumbled
over me the next instant, and as soon as I could clear
my eyes sufficiently to look about me, I saw the
guide sustaining Miss —, who had been as nearly
drowned as most of the subjects of the Humane Society,
but was apparently in a state of resuscitation.
None but the half-drowned know the pleasure of
breathing.

Here we were within a chamber that Undine might
have coveted, a wall of rock at our back, and a transparent
curtain of shifting water between us and the
world, having entitled ourselves à peu près to the same
reputation with Hylas and Leander, for seduction by
the Naiads.

Whatever sister of Arethusa inhabits there, we
could but congratulate her on the beauty of her abode.
A lofty and well-lighted hall, shaped like a long pavilion,
extended as far as we could see through the spray,
and with the two objections, that you could not have
heard a pistol at your ear for the noise, and that the
floor was somewhat precipitous, one could scarce imagine
a more agreeable retreat for a gentleman who
was disgusted with the world, and subject to dryness
of the skin. In one respect it resembled the enchanted
dwelling of the Witch of Atlas, where, Shelley tells
us—

It is lucky for Witches and Naiads that they are not
subject to rheumatism.

The air was scarcely breathable—(if air it may be
called, which streams down the face with the density
of a shower from a watering-pot), and our footing upon
the slippery rocks was so insecure, that the exertion
of continually wiping our eyes was attended with imminent
danger. Our sight was valuable, for surely,
never was such a brilliant curtain hung up to the sight
of mortals, as spread apparently from the zenith to our
feet, changing in thickness and lustre, but with a constant
and resplendent curve. It was what a child might
imagine the arch of the sky to be where it bends over
the edge of the horizon.

The sublime is certainly very much diluted when
one contemplates it with his back to a dripping and
slimy rock, and his person saturated with a continual
supply of water. From a dry window, I think the infernal
writhe and agony of the abyss into which we
were continually liable to slip, would have been as fine
a thing as I have seen in my travels; but I am free to
admit, that, at the moment, I would have exchanged
my experience and all the honor attached to it, for a
dry escape. The idea of drowning back through that
thick column of water, was at least a damper to enthusiasm.
We seemed cut off from the living. There
was a death between us and the vital air and sunshine.

I was screwing up my courage for the return, when
the guide seized me by the shoulder. I looked around,
and what was my horror to see Miss — standing
far in behind the sheet upon the last visible point of

rock, with the water pouring over her in torrents, and
a gulf of foam between us, which I could in no way
understand how she had passed over.

She seemed frightened and pale, and the guide explained
to me by signs (for I could not distinguish a
syllable through the roar of the cataract), that she had
walked over a narrow ledge, which had broken with
her weight. A long fresh mark upon the rock at the
foot of the precipitous wall, made it sufficiently evident:
her position was most alarming.

I made a sign to her to look well to her feet; for
the little island on which she stood was green with
slime and scarce larger than a hat, and an abyss of full
six feet wide, foaming and unfathomable, raged between
it and the nearest foothold. What was to be
done? Had we a plank, even, there was no possible
hold for the further extremity, and the shape of the
rock was so conical, that its slippery surface evidently
would not hold a rope for a moment. To jump to her,
even if it were possible, would endanger her life, and
while I was smiling and encouraging the beautiful
creature, as she stood trembling and pale on her dangerous
foothold, I felt my very heart sink within me.

The despairing guide said something which I could
not hear, and disappeared through the watery wall,
and I fixed my eyes upon the lovely form, standing,
like a spirit in the misty shroud of the spray, as if the
intensity of my gaze could sustain her upon her dangerous
foothold. I would have given ten years of my
life at that moment to have clasped her hand in mine.

I had scarce thought of Job until I felt him trying
to pass behind me. His hand was trembling as he
laid it on my shoulder to steady his steps; but there
was something in his ill-hewn features that shot an
indefinable ray of hope through my mind. His sandy
hair was plastered over his forehead, and his scant
dress clung to him like a skin; but though I recall
his image now with a smile, I looked upon him with a
feeling far enough from amusement then. God bless
thee, my dear Job! wherever in this unfit world thy
fine spirit may be fulfilling its destiny!

He crept down carefully to the edge of the foaming
abyss, till he stood with the breaking bubbles at his
knees. I was at a loss to know what he intended.
She surely would not dare to attempt a jump to his
arms from that slippery rock, and to reach her in any
way seemed impossible.

The next instant he threw himself forward, and
while I covered my eyes in horror, with the flashing
conviction that he had gone mad and flung himself
into the hopeless whirlpool to reach her, she had
crossed the awful gulf, and lay trembling and exhausted
at my feet! He had thrown himself over the
chasm, caught the rock barely with the extremities of
his fingers, and with certain death if he missed his
hold or slipped from his uncertain tenure, had sustained
her with supernatural strength as she walked
over his body!

The guide providentially returned with a rope in
the same instant, and fastening it around one of his
feet, we dragged him back through the whirlpool, and
after a moment or two to recover from the suffocating
immersion, he fell on his knees, and we joined him,
I doubt not devoutly, in his inaudible thanks to God.

2. II.—LAKE ONTARIO.

The next bravest achievement to venturing behind
the sheet of Niagara, is to cross the river in a small
boat, at some distance below the Phlegethon of the
abyss. I should imagine it was something like riding
in a howdah on a swimming elephant. The immense
masses of water driven under by the Fall, rise
splashing and fuming far down the river; and they
are as unlike a common wave, to ride, as a horse and
a camel. You are, perhaps, ten or fifteen minutes
pulling across, and you may get two or three of these
lifts, which shove you straight into the air about ten
feet, and then drop you into the cup of an eddy, as if
some long-armed Titan had his hand under the water,
and were tossing you up and down for his amusement.
It imports lovers to take heed how their mistresses
are seated, as all ladies, on these occasions,
throw themselves into the arms of the nearest “hose
and doublet.”

Job and I went over to dine on the American side
and refresh our patriotism. We dined under a hickory-tree
on Goat island, just over the glassy curve of the
cataract; and as we grew joyous with our champagne,
we strolled up to the point where the waters divide
for the American and British Falls; and Job harangued
the “mistaken gentleman on his right,” in
eloquence that would have turned a division in the
house of commons. The deluded multitude, however,
rolled away in crowds for the monarchy, and at
the close of his speech the British Fall was still, by a
melancholy majority, the largest. We walked back
to our bottle like foiled patriots, and soon after, hopeless
of our principles, went over to the other side too!

I advise all people going to Niagara to suspend making
a note in their journal till the last day of their
visit. You might as well teach a child the magnitude
of the heavens by pointing to the sky with your
finger, as comprehend Niagara in a day. It has to
create its own mighty place in your mind. You have
no comparison through which it can enter. It is too
vast. The imagination shrinks from it. It rolls in
gradually, thunder upon thunder, and plunge upon
plunge; and the mind labors with it to an exhaustion
such as is created only by the extremest intellectual
effort. I have seen men sit and gaze upon it in a cool
day of autumn, with the perspiration standing on
their foreheads in large beads, from the unconscious
but toilsome agony of its conception. After haunting
its precipices, and looking on its solemn waters for
seven days, sleeping with its wind-played monotony
in your ears, dreaming, and returning to it till it has
grown the one object, as it will, of your perpetual
thought, you feel, all at once, like one who has compassed
the span of some almighty problem. It has
stretched itself within you. Your capacity has attained
the gigantic standard, and you feel an elevation
and breadth of nature that could measure girth and
stature with a seraph. We had fairly “done” Niagara.
We had seen it by sunrise, sunset, moonlight;
from top and bottom; fasting and full; alone and together.
We had learned by heart every green path
on the island of perpetual dew, which is set like an
imperial emerald on its front (a poetical idea of my
own, much admired by Job)—we had been grave, gay,
tender, and sublime, in its mighty neighborhood, we
had become so accustomed to the base of its broad
thunder, that it seemed to us like a natural property
in the air, and we were unconscious of it for hours;
our voices had become so tuned to its key, and our
thoughts so tinged by its grand and perpetual anthem,
that I almost doubted if the air beyond the reach of
its vibrations would not agonize us with its unnatural
silence, and the common features of the world seem
of an unutterable and frivolous littleness.

We were eating our last breakfast there, in tender
melancholy: mine for the Falls, and Job's for the
Falls and Miss —, to whom I had a half suspicion
that he had made a declaration.

“Job!” said I.

He looked up from his egg.

“My dear Job!”

“Don't allude to it, my dear chum,” said he, dropping
his spoon, and rushing to the window to hide his
agitation. It was quite clear.

I could scarce restrain a smile. Psyche in the embrace
of a respectable giraffe would be the first thought

in anybody's mind who should see them together.
And yet why should he not woo her—and win her
too? He had saved her life in the extremest peril, at
the most extreme hazard of his own; he had a heart
as high and worthy, and as capable of an undying
worship of her as she would find in a wilderness of
lovers; he felt like a graceful man, and acted like a
brave one, and was sans peur et sans reproche, and
why should he not love like other men? My dear
Job! I fear thou wilt go down to thy grave, and but
one woman in this wide world will have loved thee—
thy mother! Thou art the soul of a preux chevalier
in the body of some worthy grave-digger, who is strutting
about the world, perhaps, in thy more proper carcass.
These angels are so o'er hasty in packing!

We got upon our horses, and had a pleasant amble
before us of fifteen miles, on the British side of the
river. We cantered off stoutly for a mile to settle our
regrets, and then I pulled up, and requested Job to
ride near me, as I had something to say to him.

“You are entering,” said I, “my dear Job, upon
your first journey in a foreign land. You will see
other manners than your own, which are not therefore
laughable, and hear a different pronunciation from
your own, which is not therefore vulgar. You are to
mix with British subjects, whom you have attacked
vigorously in your school declamations as `the enemy.'
but who are not therefore to be bullied in their own
country, and who have certain tastes of their own,
upon which you had better reserve your judgment.
We have no doubt that we are the greatest country
that ever was, is, or ever shall be; but, as this is an
unpalatable piece of information to other nations, we
will not stuff it into their teeth, unless by particular
request. John Bull likes his coat too small. Let him
wear it. John Bull prefers his beefsteak to a fricandeau.
Let him eat it. John Bull will leave no stone
unturned to serve you in his own country, if you will
let him. Let him. John Bull will suffer you to find
fault for ever with king, lords, and commons, if you
do not compare them invidiously with other governments.
Let the comparison alone. In short, my
dear chum, as we insist that foreigners should adopt
our manners while they are travelling in the United
States, we had better adopt theirs when we return the
visit. They are doubtless quite wrong throughout,
but it is not worth while to bristle one's back against
the opinions of some score millions.”

The foam disappeared from the stream, as we followed
it on, and the roar of the falls—

was soon faint in our ears, and like the regret of parting,
lessened with the increasing distance till it was
lost. Job began to look around him, and see something
else besides a lovely face in the turnings of the
road, and the historian of this memorable journey,
who never had but one sorrow that “would not budge
with a fillip,” rose in his stirrups as he descried the
broad blue bosom of Lake Ontario, and gave vent to
his feelings in (he begs the reader to believe) the most
suitable quotation.

Seeing any celebrated water for the first time was
always, to me, an event. River, waterfall, or lake, if
I have heard of it and thought of it for years, has a
sensible presence, that I feel like the approach of a
human being in whom I am interested. My heart flutters
to it. It is thereafter an acquaintance, and I defend
its beauty or its grandeur as I would the fair fame
and worth of a woman that had shown me a preference.
My dear reader, do you love water? Not to
drink, for I own it is detestable in small quantities—
but water, running or falling, sleeping or gliding, tinged
by the sunset glow, or silvered by the gentle alchymist
of the midnight heaven? Do you love a
lake? Do you love a river? Do you “affect” any
one laughing and sparkling brook that has flashed on
your eye like a fay overtaken by the cock-crowing,
and tripping away slily to dream-land? As you see
four sisters, and but one to love; so, in the family of
the elements, I have a tenderness for water.

Lake Ontario spread away to the horizon, glittering
in the summer sun, boundless to the eye as the Atlantic;
and directly beneath us lay the small town of
Fort Niagara, with the steamer at the pier, in which
we promised ourselves a passage down the St. Lawrence.
We rode on to the hotel, which we found to
our surprise crowded with English officers, and having
disposed of our Narragansets, we inquired the hour
of departure, and what we could eat meantime, in as
nearly the same breath as possible.

“Cold leg of mutton and the steamboat's engaged,
sir!”

The mercury in Job's Britishometer fell plump to
zero. The idea of a monopoly of the whole steamer
by a colonel and his staff, and no boat again for a
week!

There was a government to live under!

We sat down to our mutton, and presently enter
the waiter.

“Colonel—'s compliments; hearing that two
gentlemen have arrived who expected to go by the
steamer, he is happy to offer them a passage if they
can put up with rather crowded accommodations.”

“Well, Job! what do you think now of England,
politically, morally, and religiously? Has not the
gentlemanlike courtesy of one individual materially
changed your opinions upon every subject connected
with the United Kingdom of Great Britain?”

“It has.”

“Then, my dear Job, I recommend you never again
to read a book of travels without writing down on the
margin of every bilious chapter, `probably lost his
passage in the steamer,' or `had no mustard to his
mutton,' or `could find no ginger-nuts for the interesting
little traveller,' or some similar annotation. Depend
upon it, that dear delightful Mrs. Trollope would
never have written so agreeable a book, if she had
thriven with her bazar in Cincinnati.”

We paid our respects to the colonel, and at six
o'clock in the evening got on board. Part of an Irish
regiment was bivouacked on the deck, and happier
fellows I never saw. They had completed their nine
years' service on the three Canadian stations, and
were returning to the ould country, wives, children,
and all. A line was drawn across the deck, reserving
the after quarter for the officers; the sick were disposed
of among the women in the bows of the boat,
and the band stood ready to play the farewell air to the
cold shores of Upper Canada.

The line was cast off, when a boy of thirteen rushed
down to the pier, and springing on board with a
desperate leap, flew from one end of the deck to the
other, and flung himself at last upon the neck of a
pretty girl sitting on the knee of one of the privates.

“Mary, dear Mary!” was all he could utter. His
sobs choked him.

“Avast with the line, there!” shouted the captain,
who had no wish to carry off this unexpected passenger.
The boat was again swung to the wharf, and the
boy very roughly ordered ashore. His only answer
was to cling closer to the girl, and redouble his tears,
and by this time the colonel had stepped aft, and the
case seemed sure of a fair trial. The pretty Canadian
dropped her head on her bosom, and seemed divided
between contending emotions, and the soldier stood up
and raised his cap to his commanding officer, but held
firmly by her hand. The boy threw himself on his
knees to the colonel, but tried in vain to speak.

“Who's this, O'Shane?” asked the officer.

“Sure, my swateheart, your honor.”

“And how dare you bring her on board, sir?”

“Och, she'll go to ould Ireland wid us, your honor.”

“No, no, no!” cried the convulsed boy, clasping
the colonel's knees, and sobbing as if his heart would
break; “she is my sister! She isn't his wife! Father'll
die if she does! She can't go with him! She
sha'n't go with him!”

Job began to snivel, and I felt warm about the eyes
myself.

“Have you got a wife, O'Shane?” asked the
colonel.

“Plase your honor, never a bit,” said Paddy. He
was a tight, good-looking fellow, by the way, as you
would wish to see.

“Well—we'll settle this thing at once. Get up, my
little fellow! Come here, my good girl! Do you
love O'Shane well enough to be his wife?”

“Indeed I do, sir!” said Mary, wiping her eyes with
the back of her hand, and stealing a look at the “six
feet one” that stood as straight as a pike beside her.

“O'Shane! I allow this girl to go with us only on
condition that you marry her at the first place where
we can find a priest. We will make her up a bit of a
dowry, and I will look after her comfort as long as she
follows the regiment. What do you say, sir? Will
you marry her?”

O'Shane began to waver in his military position,
from a full front face getting to very nearly a right-about.
It was plain he was taken by surprise. The
eyes of the company were on him, however, and public
opinion, which, in most human breasts, is considerably
stronger than conscience, had its effect.

“I'll do it, your honor!” said he, bolting it out as
a man volunteers upon a “forlorn hope.”

Tears might as well have been bespoken for the
whole company. The boy was torn from his sister's
neck, and set ashore in the arms of two sailors, and
poor Mary, very much in doubt whether she was happy
or miserable, sank upon a heap of knapsacks, and
buried her eyes in a cotton handkerchief with a map
of London upon it, probably a gage d'amour from the
desaving O'Shane. I did the same myself with a
silk one, and Job item. Item the colonel and several
officers.

The boat was shoved off, and the wheels spattered
away, but as far as we could hear his voice, the cry
came following on, “Mary, Mary!”

It rung in my ears all night: “Mary, Mary!”

I was up in the morning at sunrise, and was glad
to escape from the confined cabin and get upon deck.
The steamer was booming on through a sea as calm
as a mirror, and no land visible. The fresh dewiness
of the morning air ashore played in my nostrils, and
the smell of grass was perceptible in the mind, but in
all else it was like a calm in mid ocean. The soldiers
were asleep along the decks, with their wives and
children, and the pretty runaway lay with her head on
O'Shane's bosom, her red eyes and soiled finery
showing too plainly how she had passed the night.
Poor Mary! she has enough of following a soldier,
by this, I fear.

I stepped forward, and was not a little surprised to
see standing against the railing on the larboard bow,
the motionless figure of an Indian girl of sixteen.
Her dark eye was fixed on the line of the horizon we
were leaving behind, her arms were folded on her
bosom, and she seemed not even to breathe. A common
shawl was wrapped carelessly around her, and
another glance betrayed to me that she was in a situation
soon to become a mother. Her feet were protected
by a pair of once gaudy but now shabby and
torn moccasins, singularly small; her hands were of a
delicate thinness unusual to her race, and her hollow
cheeks, and forehead marked with an expression of
pain, told all I could have prophesied of the history of
a white man's tender mercies. I approached very
near, quite unperceived. A small burning spot was
just perceptible in the centre of her dark cheek, and
as I looked at her steadfastly, I could see a working of
the muscles of her dusky brow, which betrayed, in one
of a race so trained to stony calmness, an unusual fever
of feeling. I looked around for the place in which
she must have slept. A mantle of wampum-work,
folded across a heap of confused baggage, partly occupied
as a pillow by a brutal-looking and sleeping
soldier, told at once the main part of her story. I felt
for her, from my soul!

“You can hear the great waterfall no more,” I said,
touching her arm.

“I hear it when I think of it,” she replied, turning
her eyes upon me as slowly, and with as little surprise,
as if I had been talking to her an hour.

I pointed to the sleeping soldier. “Are you going
with him to his country?”

`Yes.”

“Are you his wife?”

“My father gave me to him.”

“Has he sworn before the priest in the name of the
Great Spirit to be your husband!”

“No.” She looked intently into my eyes as she
answered, as if she tried in vain to read my meaning.

“Is he kind to you?”

She smiled bitterly.

“Why then did you follow him?”

Her eyes dropped upon the burden she bore at her
heart. The answer could not have been clearer if
written with a sunbeam. I said a few words of kindness,
and left her to turn over in my mind how I could
best interfere for her happiness.

3. III.—THE ST. LAWRENCE.

On the third evening we had entered upon the St.
Lawrence, and were winding cautiously into the
channel of the Thousand Isles. I think there is not,
within the knowledge of the “all-beholding sun,” a
spot so singularly and exquisitely beautiful. Between
the Mississippi and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, I know
there is not, for I have pic-nicked from the Symplegades
westward. The Thousand Isles of the St. Lawrence
are as imprinted on my mind as the stars of heaven.
I could forget them as soon.

The river is here as wide as a lake, while the channel
just permits the passage of a steamer. The
islands, more than a thousand in number, are a singular
formation of flat, rectangular rock, split, as it
were, by regular mathematical fissures, and overflowed
nearly to the tops, which are loaded with a
most luxuriant vegetation. They vary in size, but
the generality of them would about accommodate a
tea-party of six. The water is deep enough to float a
large steamer directly at the edge, and an active deer
would leap across from one to the other in any direction.
What is very singular, these little rocky platforms
are covered with a rich loam, and carpeted with
moss and flowers, while immense trees take root in the
clefts, and interlace their branches with those of the
neighboring islets, shadowing the water with the unsunned
dimness of the wilderness. It is a very odd
thing to glide through in a steamer. The luxuriant
leaves sweep the deck, and the black funnel parts the
drooping sprays as it keeps its way, and you may
pluck the blossoms of the acacia, or the rich chestnut
flowers, sitting on the taffrail, and, really, a magic passage
in a witch's steamer, beneath the tree-tops of an
untrodden forest, could not be more novel and startling.
Then the solitude and silence of the dim and
still waters are continually broken by the plunge and
leap of the wild deer springing or swimming from one

island to another, and the swift and shadowy canoe of
the Indian glides out from some unseen channel, and
with a single stroke of his broad paddle he vanishes,
and is lost again, even to the ear. If the beauty-sick
and nature-searching spirit of Keats is abroad in the
world, “my basnet to a 'prentice-cap” he passes his
summers amid the thousand isles of the St. Lawrence!
I would we were there with our tea-things,
sweet Rosa Matilda!

We had dined on the quarter-deck, and were sitting
over the colonel's wine, pulling the elm-leaves from
the branches as they swept saucily over the table, and
listening to the band, who were playing waltzes that
probably ended in the confirmed insanity of every
wild heron and red deer that happened that afternoon
to come within ear-shot of the good steamer Queenston.
The paddles began to slacken in their spattering,
and the boat came to, at the sharp side of one of the
largest of the shadowy islands. We were to stop an
hour or two, and take in wood.

Everybody was soon ashore for a ramble, leaving
only the colonel, who was a cripple from a score of
Waterloo tokens, and your servant, reader, who had
something on his mind.

“Colonel! will you oblige me by sending for Mahoney?
Steward! call me that Indian girl sitting
with her head on her knees in the boat's bow.”

They stood before us.

“How is this?” exclaimed the colonel; “another!
good God! these Irishmen! Well, sir! what do you
intend to do with this girl, now that you have ruined
her?”

Mahoney looked at her out of a corner of his eye
with a libertine contempt that made my blood boil.
The girl watched for his answer with an intense but
calm gaze into his face, that if he had had a soul,
would have killed him. Her lips were set firmly but
not fiercely together, and as the private stood looking
from one side to the other, unable or unwilling to answer,
she suppressed a rising emotion in her throat,
and turned her look on the commanding officer with a
proud coldness that would have become Medea.

“Mahoney!” said the colonel, sternly, “will you
marry this poor girl?”

“Never, I hope, your honor!”

The wasted and noble creature raised her burdened
form to its fullest height, and, with an inaudible murmur
bursting from her lips, walked back to the bow
of the vessel. The colonel pursued his conversation
with Mahoney, and the obstinate brute was still refusing
the only reparation he could make the poor
Indian, when she suddenly reappeared. The shawl
was no longer around her shoulders. A coarse blanket
was bound below her breast with a belt of wampum,
leaving her fine bust entirely bare, her small feet
trod the deck with the elasticity of a leopard about to
leap on his prey, and her dark, heavily-fringed eyes,
glowed like coals of fire. She seized the colonel's
hand, and imprinted a kiss upon it, another upon mine,
and without a look at the father of her child, dived
with a single leap over the gangway. She rose directly
in the clear water, swam with powerful strokes
to one of the most distant islands, and turning once
more to wave her hand as she stood on the shore,
strode on, and was lost in the tangles of the forest.

THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT.

There were a hundred students in the new class
matriculated at Yale College in Connecticut, in the
year 18—. They were young men of different ages
and of all conditions in life, but less various in their
mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the
widely-separate states from which they came. It is
not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French
and English, the German, and the Italian, should possess
distinct national traits: yet one American is supposed
to be like every other, though the two between
whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as
far apart, and in as different latitudes, as the Highland
cateran and the brigand of Calabria.

I looked around me with some interest, when, on
the first morning of the term, the president, professors,
and students of the university assembled in the college
chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my
brother freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing
up with our motley, and, as yet, unclassical heads and
habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes.
The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched
by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of one;
the look of command, breathing through the indolent
attitude, betrayed, in another, the young Carolinian
and slave-master; a coat of green, garnished with fur
and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than
by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it
was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complexion;
the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold expression,
stiff black coat, and serious attention to the
service, told of the puritan son of New Hampshire or
Vermont; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the
exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan
New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and himself
written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional
look at his neighbors' coats and shoulders, that might
have been construed into wonder upon what western
river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and
men!

Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two
seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple
gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more
immediate neighborhood. A youth with close, curling,
brown hair, rather under-size, but with a certain
decision and nerve in his lip which struck me immediately,
and which seemed to express somehow a confidence
in himself which his limbs scarce bore out,
stood with his back to the pulpit, and, with his foot on
the seat and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have
fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be
beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of
the college to take places at prayers and recitation
alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbor
in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated
rather more than I should else have done on his face
and manner; and as the president came to his Amen,
I came to the conclusion, that whatever might be Mr.
“S.'s” capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be
very demonstrative and uncomfortable.

The term went on, the politics of the little republic
fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or
peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by intimacy,
the different members of the class rose or fell
in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent
and spirit became more just and definite. The
“Southerners and Northerners,” as they are called,
soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before
them, that they had no qualities in common, and, of
the secret societies which exist among the students in
that university, joined each that of his own compatriots.
The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his
life on a plantation, secluded from the society of his
equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous deportment
and graceful indolence in the gay society for
which the town is remarkable; while the Vermontese,
or White-Mountaineer, “made unfashionably,” and ill
at ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and
sat down with the advantage of constitutional patience

and perseverance to the study which he would find in
the end a “better continuer,” even in the race for a
lady's favor.

It was the only republic I have ever known—that
class of freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither
in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor religion,
have I, in much searching through the world,
found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our
own republic!—its society is the very core and gall of
the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic
of letters!—the two graves by the pyramid of Caius
Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love!—of religion.
What is bought and sold like that which has the name
of the first? What is made a snare and a tool by the
designing like the last? But here—with a government
over us ever kindly and paternal, no favor shown,
and no privilege denied; every equality in the competitors
at all possible—age, previous education, and,
above all, worldly position—it was an arena in which
a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of
heart and limb he might never know in the world
again. Every individual rising or falling by the estimation
he exacts of his fellows, there is no such
school of honor; each, of the many palms of scholarship,
from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that
which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another
to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of
the feelings that stir the heart in our youth—of the
few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no
repentance—this leaping from the starting-post of
mind—this first spread of the encouraged wing in the
free heaven of thought and knowledge—is recorded in
my own slender experience as the most joyous and
the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright
honor with the tools of political ambition—he who has
leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion—
he who has loved, hoped, and trusted, in the greater
arena of life and manhood—must look back on days
like these as the broken-winged eagle to the sky—as
the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie.

2. II.

New Haven is not alone the seat of a university.
It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive
beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and
sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its central
position and accessibility, and the facilities for attending
the lectures of the college professors, render
it a most desirable place of instruction in every department.
Among others, the female schools of the
place have a great reputation, and this, which in Europe,
or with a European state of society, would
probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank
character of manners in America, a mutual and decided
advantage. The daughters of the first families
of the country are sent here, committed for two, three,
and four years, to the exclusive care of the head of
the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and
advantages of the school) associating freely with the
general society of the town, the male part, of course,
composed principally of students. A more easy and
liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world,
and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of
morals and manners so high and unexceptionable.
Attachments are often formed, and little harm is
thought of it; and unless it is a very strong case of
disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the
way of the common intercourse between lovers; and
the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman
senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and
marry—if they like. If they do not, the lady stands
as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the
gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by having
been on his knees.

Like “Le Noir Fainéant,” at the tournament, my
friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor
in the various pursuits of the university. A sudden
interference in a quarrel, in which a brother freshman
was contending against odds, enlightened the class as
to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted himself
at recitations with the air of self-contempt for
such easy excellence; he dressed plainly, but with
instinctive taste; and at the end of the first term,
having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with
his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought
with him from the west, he had acquired an ascendency
in the opinion of the class for which no one
could well account, but to which every one unhesitatingly
assented.

We returned after our first short vacation, and of
my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I
much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the
vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at
meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his
heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him.
By favor seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodging
in the town—the rest of the class being compelled
to live with a chum in the college buildings. I found
his rooms—(I was the first of the class who had entered
them)—more luxuriously furnished than I had
expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but
his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America
an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and
superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise.
How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra-civilization
in the forests of the west was a mystery
that remained to be solved.

3. III.

At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt
of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a rambling
old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle
of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town.
It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable
shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony,
to use an expressive Gallicism, “gave upon the bay.”
Long Island sound, the great highway from the northern
Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead
and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate
is divine), between the curving lip of the bay and
the interminable and sandy shore of the island some
six leagues distant; the procession of ships and steamers
stole past with an imperceptible progress; the
ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened
through the trees from behind, and (the day being one
of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting
while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun-steeped
precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood-red
maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light,
drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a
holyday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage
of an American October: but just now, while I remember
it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as
philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives—if

it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am remembering
and describing—profoundly serene, sunny
as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more
invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy;
the sort of air that the visiting angels might have
brought with them to the tent of Abraham—it is on
such days, I would record, that my own memory steps
back over the dim threshold of life (so it seems to me),
and on such days only. It is worth the translation of
our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land,
if it were alone for those immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in

Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young
ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her
pupils, of whom one was a newcomer, and the object
of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the
one day of the week when morning visiters were admitted,
and I was there, in compliance with an unexpected
request from my friend, to present him to the
agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitué in
her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to
introduce to me, a week or two before, the newcomer
of whom I have spoken above—a departure from the
ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be
a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit
claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny
as deeply as I should find agreeable. The newcomer
was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name
was Nunu.

The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines
of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in
the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry
of the nation. At present the sentiment takes
occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of
the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to
be educated at the expense of the government, and of
several young men of the same high birth to different
colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in history
that we did not plough the bones of their fathers
into our fields without some feelings of compunction.
Nunu had come to the seaboard under the charge of a
female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one
of the native schools of the west, and was destined,
though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to
her tribe when she should have mastered some of
the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an
apt scholar, but her settled melancholy, when away
from her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try
the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my
privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine
of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want
of interest, and the manner of course, with which St.
John had received my animated descriptions of the
personal beauty of the Cherokee.

“I have hunted with the tribe,” was his only answer,
“and know their features.”

“But she is not like them,” I replied, with a tone
of some impatience; “she is the beau ideal of a red
skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or
an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and
has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in
your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in
her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose
of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra.
I tell you she is divine.”

St. John called to his dog, and we turned along
the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's
house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story.

4. IV.

In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael,
steeped as their colors seem to have been in the
divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I
have scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different
models and so perfect, as were assembled during
my sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington.
They went about in their evening walks, graceful and
angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they
poured the light of their loveliness on the vegetating
oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had
yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those
days of the scale of beauty, their features are enamelled
in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by
that standard (and found wanting) of every court in
Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born.
Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of
sunshine and passion! Pale and transparent princess
—pearl of the court of Florence—than whom the creations
on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline
our eye for the shapes of heaven! Gipsy of the Pactolus!
Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis! Bright
and gifted cynosure of the aristocracy of England!—
ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wandering
over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to
remember and admire—a constellation, I almost believe,
that has absorbed all the intensest light of the
beauty of a hemisphere—yet, with your pictures colored
to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and
state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm,
I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile
if you will!) they were as lovely, and stately, and as
worthy of the worship of the world.

I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they
came in. Having never seen him, except in the presence
of men, I was a little curious to know whether
his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the
other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very
slender experience. My attention was distracted at
the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little
Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the
south), by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had
been left in the hall; and as the door opened, and the
slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the
usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing
caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight
of a recognition.

In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I
had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's
manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu
was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was
talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Georgian.

“I must apologize for my dog,” said St. John, bowing
gracefully to the mistress of the house; “he was
bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee reminded
him of happier days—as it did his master.”

Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but immediately
resumed her apparent deep study of the abstruse
figures in the Kidderminster carpet.

“You are well arrived, young gentlemen,” said Mrs.
Ilfrington; “we press you into our service for a botanical
ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be
delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you,
Mr. St. John?”

St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for
their bonnets—Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was
scarcely closed when Nunu reappeared, and checking
herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the
threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under
very powerful emotion.

“Nunu!” he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly,
and holding out his hand with the air of one who forgives
an offence.

She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a
leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endearing
epithets of her native tongue, in words that I only
understood by their passionate and thrilling accent.
The language of the heart is universal.

The fair scholars came in one after another, and we
were soon on our way through the green fields to the
flowery mountain-side of East Rock; Mrs. Ilfrington's
arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and
St. John rambling at large with the rest of the party,
but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose
Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian charity
had no bowels for broken hearts.

The most sociable individuals of the party for a while
were Nunu and Lash; the dog's recollections of the
past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreeable
than the present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs.
Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic which

she had never displayed before—sometimes fairly out-running
the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting
down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude
creature overpowered her with his caresses. The
scene gave origin to a grave discussion between that
well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular
force of childish association—the extraordinary intimacy
between the Indian and the trapper's dog being
explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that attractive
principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring
into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she
might have added a material corollary to her proposition.
If the dog and the chief's daughter were not
old friends, the chief's daughter and St. John certainly
were.

As well as I could judge by the motions of two
people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast
in the favor and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian.
Her southern indolence was probably an apology in
Mrs. Ilfrington's eyes for leaning heavily on her companion's
arm; but, in a momentary halt, the capricious
beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that
had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully
around his waist. This was rather strong on a first
acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opinion.

“Miss Temple!” said she, advancing to whisper a
reproof in the beauty's ear.

Before she had taken a second step, Nunu bounded
over the low hedge, followed by the dog, with whom
she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon
St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scarf
into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet
on the silken fragments.

“Madam!” said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfrington,
after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise
and displeasure, “I should have told you before that
your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her
father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and
have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will
believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises
me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may
have over her will be in accordance with your own
wishes exclusively.”

His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips
and frowning eyes.

“Have you seen her before since her arrival?” asked
Mrs. Ilfrington.

“My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence
that she was here: he returned from his morning ramble
with a string of wampum about his neck, which
had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift,” he added,
patting the head of the dog, and looking with a softened
expression at Nunu, who dropped her head upon
her bosom, and walked on in tears.

5. V.

The chain of the Green mountains, after a gallop of
some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut,
suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long-island sound,
and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees,
three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career
by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold precipice,
you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer perpendicular
below you; and, spreading away from the
broken masses at its feet, lies an emerald meadow, inlaid
with a crystal and rambling river, across which,
at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the
university, from what else were a thick-serried wilderness
of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice
extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on
its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of
marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serve
as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It
were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard
pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of
pine tassels overhung.

Antiquity in America extends no farther back than
the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary
ground with us—for there harbored the regicides
Whalley and Goffe, and many a breath-hushing tale
is told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Connecticut.
Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say
that this cavernous path to the mountain-top was the
resort in the holyday summer afternoons of most of the
poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen sophomores,
and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Ilfrington
and her seven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The
kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm,
and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and
a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had
not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flowers
had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded
upward.

The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in
upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had
been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to
show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of
pine-tassels; and emerging from the brown shadow of
the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage
of sighing trees overhead, a fairies' velvet beneath you,
and a view below that you may as well (if you would
not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the
water to see.

We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink
of the precipice, and gazing off over the waters of the
sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a
friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom.
We recovered our breath in silence, I alone, perhaps,
of that considerable company gazing with admiration
at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in
the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow
of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and motionless
with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly
curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow,
her small hand buried and clinched in the moss, and
her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, escaped
carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained
back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense control
of emotion.

The game of the coquettish Georgian was well
played. With a true woman's pique, she had redoubled
her attentions to my friend from the moment
that she found it gave pain to another of her sex; and
St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see
a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he
had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss
Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that teint of
opaque and patrican white which is found oftenest in
Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed toward
the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine
through the thick white petal of a magnolia; her eyes
were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the
expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or melancholy;
her teeth were like strips from the lily's
heart; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a
thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, romantic-looking,
superior, and, just now, the only victim in
the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities
which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella unamiable;
and yielded himself, as all men will, a satisfied
prey to enchantments of which he knew the
springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantress.
How singular it is that the highest and best qualities
of the female heart are those with which men are the
least captivated!

A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little
back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss
Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself
and her tamed lion; her lap full of flowers, which he
had found time to gather on the way, and her white

hands employed in arranging a bouquet, of which the
destiny was yet a secret. Next to their own loves,
ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring
the loves of others; and while the violets and already-drooping
wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or rejected
by those slender fingers, the sun might have
swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those
seven-and-twenty misses would have watched their
lovely schoolfellow the same. Nunu turned her head
slowly around at last, and silently looked on. St.
John lay at the feet of the Georgian, glancing from
the flowers to her face, and from her face to the flowers,
with an admiration not at all equivocal. Mrs.
Ilfrington sat apart, absorbed in finishing a sketch of
New-Haven; and I, interested painfully in watching
the emotions of the Cherokee, sat with my back to
the trunk of a hemlock—the only spectator who
comprehended the whole extent of the drama.

A wild rose was set in the heart of the bouquet at
last, a spear of riband-grass added to give it grace
and point, and nothing was wanting but a string. Reticules
were searched, pockets turned inside out, and
never a bit of riband to be found. The beauty was
in despair.

“Stay,” said St. John, springing to his feet.
“Lash! Lash!”

The dog came coursing in from the wood, and
crouched to his master's hand.

“Will a string of wampum do?” he asked, feeling
under the long hair on the dog's neck, and untying a
fine and variegated thread of many-colored beads,
worked exquisitely.

The dog growled, and Nunu sprang into the middle
of the circle with the fling of an adder, and seizing
the wampum as he handed it to her rival, called the
dog, and fastened it once more around his neck.

The ladies rose in alarm; the belle turned pale, and
clung to St. John's arm; the dog, with his hair bristling
upon his back, stood close to her feet in an attitude
of defiance; and the superb Indian, the peculiar
genius of her beauty developed by her indignation,
her nostrils expanded, and her eyes almost showering
fire in their flashes, stood before them like a young
Pythoness, ready to strike them dead with a regard.

St. John recovered from his astonishment after a
moment, and leaving the arm of Miss Temple, advanced
a step, and called to his dog.

The Cherokee patted the animal on his back, and
spoke to him in her own language; and, as St. John
still advanced, Nunu drew herself to her fullest height,
placed herself before the dog, who slunk growling
from his master, and said to him, as she folded her
arms, “The wampum is mine.”

St. John colored to the temples with shame.

“Lash!” he cried, stamping with his feet, and endeavoring
to fright him from his protectress.

The dog howled and crept away, half crouching
with fear, toward the precipice; and St. John shooting
suddenly past Nunu, seized him on the brink, and
held him down by the throat.

The next instant, a scream of horror from Mrs. Ilfrington,
followed by a terrific echo from every female
present, started the rude Kentuckian to his feet.

Clear over the abyss, hanging with one hand by an
ashen sapling, the point of her tiny foot just poising
on a projecting ledge of rock, swung the desperate
Cherokee, sustaining herself with perfect ease, but
with all the determination of her iron race collected
in calm concentration on her lips.

“Restore the wampum to his neck,” she cried, with
a voice that thrilled the very marrow with its subdued
fiereeness, “or my blood rest on your soul!”

St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his
hands in silent horror.

The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender
stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with
the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The
subdued student sprang to her side; but with scorn
on her lip, and the flush of exertion already vanished
from her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid
strides took her way alone down the mountain.

6. VI.

Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the
sheltered river of boyhood—had encountered the
storms of a first entrance into life—had trimmed my
boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to windward,
was lying fairly on my course. Among others
from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John,
who had shaken hands with me at the university gate,
leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in
doubt as to his real character and history as the first
day we met. I had never heard him speak of either
father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, received
a letter from the day of his matriculation. He
passed his vacations at the university; he had studied
well, yet refused one of the highest college honors
offered him with his degree; he had shown many
good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults; and,
all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I
knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of
superiority; and my knowledge went no farther. The
coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off;
and, after four years' constant association, I had not
an idea where he was going, or to what he was destined.
The driver blew his horn.

“God bless you, Slingsby!”

“God bless you, St. John ”

And so we parted.

It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the
bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgotten
there was such a being in the world. Late in the
month of October, in 1829, I was on my way westward,
giving myself a vacation from the law. I embarked,
on a clear and delicious day, in the small
steamer which plies up and down the Caynga lake,
looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring
little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we
got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern
for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight
of a group of Indians standing motionless by the
wheel. They were chiefs, returning from a diplomatic
visit to Washington.

I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened
soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding
through. The first severe frost had come, and the
miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which
is known only in America. The blood-red sugar maple,
with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian
lip, stood here and there in the forest like the
Sultan's standard in a host—the solitary and far-seen
aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spirit-like
and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer,
turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining
of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fanlike
catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun,
spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the
kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its
majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a
stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about
him to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with
its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward
in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with
its complainings; the hickory paled through its enduring
green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash
flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed
sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation,
stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating
light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of an
Indian shell was never more delicately teinted; the
still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing

with the noble things whose summer they had
shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in
her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life
she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this
universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir
and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads
darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the
death-struck glory of their companions.

The dull colors of English autumnal foliage give
you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon.
The change here is gradual; in America it is the
work of a night—of a single frost!

Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the
still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the
morning to a spectacle like this!

It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through
the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold,
purple, and crimson—had been fused in the alembic
of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light
and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf
in those countless trees had been painted to outflush
the tulip—as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of
the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals
and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let
forth their imprisoned colors to mount through the
roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden
time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the perishing
leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.

I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to
what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled,
when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the
moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder.

“St. John? Impossible!”

“Bodily!” answered my quondam classmate.

I looked at him with astonishment. The soigné
man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a
kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to
his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap
of rich otter skin; his pantaloons spread with a slovenly
carelessness over his feet; and, altogether, there
was that in his air which told me at a glance that he
had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his
leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched
between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if
he was brooding over the more idle days in which we
had been acquainted.

“And where are you bound?” I asked, having answered
the same question for myself.

“Westward with the chiefs!”

“For how long?”

“The remainder of my life.”

I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise.

“You would wonder less,” said he, with an impatient
gesture, “if you knew more of me. And, by-the-way,”
he added with a smile, “I think I never
told you the first half of the story—my life up to the
time I met you.”

“It was not for want of a catechist,” I answered,
settling myself in an attitude of attention.

“No; and I was often tempted to gratify your curiosity:
but from the little intercourse I had had with
the world, I had adopted some precocious principles;
and one was, that a man's influence over others was
vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his
history.”

I smiled, and as the boat sped on her way over the
calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on leisurely
with a story which is scarce remarkable enough
for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son
of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed
his early youth on the borders of civilization, between
whites and Indians, and that he had been more particularly
indebted for protection to the father of Nunu.
Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward
while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond
life in the different cities had taught him the caution
and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A
fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with
the means of education, and, with singular application
in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied
himself to study under a private master, fitted himself
for the university in half the usual time, and cultivated,
in addition, the literary taste which I have remarked
upon.

“This,” he said, smiling at my look of astonishment,
“brings me up to the time when we met. I
came to college at the age of eighteen, with a few
hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experience
of the rough side of the world, great confidence
in myself, and distrust of others, and, I believe, a kind
of instinct of good manners, which made me ambitious
of shining in society. You were a witness to
my déb¢ut. Miss Temple was the first highly-educated
woman I had ever known, and you saw her
effect on me.”

“And since we parted?”

“Oh, since we parted my life has been vulgar
enough. I have ransacked civilized life to the bottom,
and found it a heap of unredeemed falsehoods.
I do not say it from common disappointment, for I
may say I succeeded in everything I undertook—”

“Except Miss Temple,” I said, interrupting, at the
hazard of wounding him.

“No; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I
had my turn. You see me in my new character now.
But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, playing
my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for
a woman worth ten thousand of her—and here she
is.”

As Nunu came up the companion-way from the
cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature
so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair
of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in
the usual manner, but with the most absolute simplicity.
She had changed in those five years from
the child to the woman, and, with a round and well-developed
figure, additional height, and manners at
once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked
the chieftain's daughter. St. John took her hand,
and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes.

“That I could ever have put a creature like this,”
he said, “into comparison with the dolls of civilization!”

We parted at Buffalo; St. John with his wife and
the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake
Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara.

F. SMITH.

—Philaster.

If you can imagine a buried Titan lying along the
length of a continent with one arm stretched out into
the midst of the sea, the place to which I would transport
you, reader mine! would lie as it were in the
palm of the giant's hand. The small promontory to
which I refer, which becomes an island in certain
states of the tide, is at the end of one of the long capes
of Massachusetts, and is still called by its Indian name,
Nahant. Not to make you uncomfortable, I beg to
introduce you at once to a pretentious hotel, “squat
like a toad” upon the unsheltered and highest point
of this citadel in mid sea, and a very great resort for
the metropolitan New-Englanders. Nahant is perhaps,

liberally measured, a square half-mile; and it is
distant from what may fairly be called mainland, perhaps
a league.

Road to Nahant there is none. The oi polloi go
there by steam; but when the tide is down, you may
drive there with a thousand chariots over the bottom
of the sea. As I suppose there is not such another
place in the known world, my tale will wait while I
describe it more fully. If the Bible had been a fiction
(not to speak profanely), I should have thought
the idea of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host
had its origin in some such wonder of nature.

Nahant is so far out into the ocean, that what is
called the “ground swell,” the majestic heave of its
great bosom going on for ever like respiration (though
its face may be like a mirror beneath the sun, and a
wind may not have crisped its surface for days and
weeks), is as broad and powerful within a rood of the
shore as it is a thousand miles at sea.

The promontory itself is never wholly left by the
ebb; but, from its western extremity, there runs a
narrow ridge, scarce broad enough for a horse-path,
impassible for the rocks and sea-weed of which it is
matted, and extending at just high-water mark from
Nahant to the mainland. Seaward from this ridge,
which is the only connexion of the promontory with
the continent, descends an expanse of sand, left bare
six hours out of the twelve by the retreating sea, as
smooth and hard as marble, and as broad and apparently
as level as the plain of the Hermus. For three
miles it stretches away without shell or stone, a surface
of white, fine-grained sand, beaten so hard by the
eternal hammer of the surf, that the hoof of a horse
scarce marks it, and the heaviest wheel leaves it as
printless as a floor of granite. This will be easily understood
when you remember the tremendous rise and
fall of the ocean swell, from the very bosom of which,
in all its breadth and strength, roll in the waves of the
flowing tide, breaking down on the beach, every one,
with the thunder of a host precipitated from the battlements
of a castle. Nothing could be more solemn
and anthem-like than the succession of these plunging
surges. And when the “tenth wave” gathers, far out
at sea, and rolls onward to the shore, first with a
glassy and heaving swell as if some mighty monster
were lurching inland beneath the water, and then,
bursting up into foam, with a front like an endless and
sparry crystal wall, advances and overwhelms everything
in its progress, till it breaks with a centupled
thunder on the beach—it has seemed to me, standing
there, as if thus might have beaten the first surge on
the shore after the fiat which “divided sea and land.”
I am no Cameronian, but the sea (myself on shore)
always drives me to Scripture for an illustration of my
feelings.

The promontory of Nahant must be based on the
earth's axle, else I can not imagine how it should have
lasted so long. In the mildest weather, the groundswell
of the sea gives it a fillip at every heave that
would lay the “castled crag of Drachenfels” as low as
Memphis. The wine trembles in your beaker of
claret as you sit after dinner at the hotel; and if you
look out at the eastern balcony (for it is a wooden
pagoda, with balconies, verandahs, and colonnades ad
libitum), you will see the grass breathless in the sunshine
upon the lawn, and the ocean as polished and
calm as Miladi's brow beyond, and yet the spray and
foam dashing fifty feet into the air between, and enveloping
the “Devil's Pulpit” (a tall rock split off from
the promontory's front) in a perpetual kaleidoscope of
mist and rainbows. Take the trouble to transport
yourself there! I will do the remaining honors on the
spot. A cavern as cool (not as silent) as those of
Trophonius lies just under the brow of yonder precipice,
and the waiter shall come after us with our wine.
You have dined with the Borromeo in the grotto of
Isola Bella, I doubt not, and know the perfection of
art—I will show you that of nature. (I should like to
transport you for a similar contrast from Terni to
Niagara, or from San Giovanni Laterano to an aisle in
a forest of Michigan; but the Dædalian mystery, alas!
is unsolved. We “fly not yet.”)

Here we are, then, in the “Swallow's Cave.” The
floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and
from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look
forth upon the broad Atlantic—the shore of Ireland
the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is
a dark pool left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator,
and with the champagne in the midst, we will recline
about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned
pleasure in the east, and drink to the small-featured
and purple-lipped “Mignons” of Syria—those fine-limbed
and fiery slaves, adorable as Peris, and by turns
languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch
of piastres (say 5l. 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your
drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery
Georgian—fit dolls for the sensual Turk—is, to him
who would buy soul, dear at a para the hecatomb.

We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid, with a
hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth
side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and
dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let
into the pearly arch of heaven. The tide is at half-ebb,
and the advancing and retreating waves, which at
first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip
of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock
below, the “tenth” surge alone rallying as if in scorn
of its retreating fellows, and, like the chieftain of Culloden
Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And
now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come
forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts!—would
you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it?
It falls!—would you not think the foundation of the
deep had given way? A plain, broad enough for the
navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly
and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a
moment spell-bound in its place, and falls again as
far—the respiration of a sleeping child not more regular
and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that
it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself!
The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and
the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through
the caverns they have rent open; but beyond, in the
calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what
godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we
should stumble on such a moral in the cave!

By the deeper base of its hoarse organ, the sea is
now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down.
Hear! how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and
stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing
and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad
of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is
audible. There is fine music in the sea!

And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to
cool and darken, and the first gold teint of sunset is
stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing
opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were
paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up
through the waters. And there heaves a ship into the
horizon, like a white-winged bird lying with dark breast
on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight
of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that
comes with a welcome off the shore. She comes from
“merry England.” She is freighted with more than
merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on her
snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and
bless it; for the wind that first filled it on its way
swept through the green valley of his home! What
links of human affection brings she over the sea?
How much comes in her that is not in her “bill of
lading,” yet worth, to the heart that is waiting for it, a
thousand times the purchase of her whole venture!

Mais montons nous! I hear the small hoofs of
Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half
bottle of champagne, that “remainder biscuit,” and the
echoes of our philosophy, to the Naiads who have lent
us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly,
or Arethusa! whatever thou art called, nympth of this
shadowy cave! adieu!

Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky
descent! So! Here we are on the floor of the vasty
deep! What a glorious race-course! The polished
and printless sand spreads away before you as far as
the eye can see, the surf comes in below, breast-high
ere it breaks, and the white fringe of the sliding wave
shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching
of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted.
Oh, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily
we glide along, feeling our motion but in the resistance
of the wind, and by the trout-like pull of the
ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the
color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and
thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has
evaporated less—a slab of Egyptian granite in the
obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible.
Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is
none; and mar or deface its bright surface as you
will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of
the dust of the foot of man, by the returning sea.
You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow-quill—you
may course over its dazzling expanse with
a troop of chariots.

Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty
yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left
the sand, it holds the water without losing its firmness,
and is like a gray mirror, bright as the bosom of
the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean
over the dasher, and see those small fetlocks striking
up from beneath—the flying mane, the thorough-bred
action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in
the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's
swan, he

You would swear you were skimming the surface of
the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the
white foam of the “tenth wave” skims in beneath
wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous
element gliding away visibly beneath you.

We seem not to have driven fast, yet three miles,
fairly measured, are left behind, and Thalaba's blood
is up. Fine creature! I would not give him

We have won champagne ere now. Thalaba, and I,
trotting on this silvery beach; and if ever old age
comes on me, and I intend it never shall on aught
save my mortal coil (my spirit vowed to perpetual
youth), I think these vital breezes, and a trot on these
exhilarating sands, would sooner renew my prime
than a rock in St. Hilary's cradle, or a dip in the well
of Kanathos. May we try the experiment together,
gentle reader!

I am not settled in my own mind whether this description
of one of my favorite haunts in America
was written most to introduce the story that is to follow,
or the story to introduce the description. Possibly
the latter, for having consumed by callow youth
in wandering “to and fro in the earth,” like Sathanas
of old, and looking on my country now with an eye
from which all the minor and temporary features have
gradually faded, I find my pride in it (after its glory
as a republic) settling principally on the superior
handiwork of nature in its land and water. When
I talk of it now, it is looking through another's eyes
—his who listens. I do not describe it after my own
memory of what it was once to me, but according to
my idea of what it will seem now to a stranger.
Hence I speak not of the friends I made, rambling by
lake or river. The lake and the river are there, but
the friends are changed—to themselves and me. I
speak not of the lovely and loving ones that stood by
me, looking on glen or waterfall. The glen and the
waterfall are romantic still, but the form and the heart
that breathed through it are no longer lovely or loving.
I should renew my joys by the old mountain and
river, for, all they ever were I should find them still,
and never seem to myself grown old, or cankered of
the world, or changed in form or spirit, while they
reminded me but of my youth, with their familiar
sunshine and beauty. But the friends that I knew—
as I knew them—are dead. They look no longer
the same; they have another heart in them; the
kindness of the eye, the smilingness of the lip, are
no more there. Philosophy tells me the material
and living body changes and renews, particle by particle,
with time; and experience—cold-blooded and
stony monitor—tells me, in his frozen monotone, that
heart and spirit change with it and renew! But the
name remains, mockery that it is! and the memory
sometimes; and so these apparitions of the past—that
we almost fear to question when they encounter us,
lest the change they have undergone should freeze our
blood—stare coldly on us, yet call us by name, and
answer, though coldly to their own, and have that
terrible similitude to what they were, mingled with
their unsympathizing and hollow mummery, that we
wish the grave of the past, with all that it contained
of kind or lovely, had been sealed for ever. The
heart we have lain near before our birth (so read I the
book of human life) is the only one that can not forget
that it has loved us. Saith well and affectionately
an American poet, in some birth-day verses to
his mother—

2. II.

I have observed that of all the friends one has in the
course of his life, the truest and most attached is exactly
the one who, from his dissimilarity to yourself,
the world finds it very odd you should fancy. We
hear sometimes of lovers who “are made for each
other,” but rarely of the same natural match in friendship.
It is no great marvel. In a world like this,
where we pluck so desperately at the fruit of pleasure,
we prefer for company those who are not formed with
precisely the same palate as ourselves. You will seldom
go wrong, dear reader, if you refer any human
question about which you are in doubt to that icy
oracle—selfishness.

My shadow for many years was a gentle monster,
whom I have before mentioned, baptized by the name
of Forbearance Smith. He was a Vermontese, a descendant
of one of the puritan pilgrims, and the first
of his family who had left the Green mountains since
the flight of the regicides to America. We assimilate
to what we live among, and Forbearance was very
green, and very like a mountain. He had a general
resemblance to one of Thorwaldsen's unfinished apostles—larger
than life, and just hewn into outline. My
acquaintance with him commenced during my first
year at the university. He stalked into my room one
morning with a hair-trunk on his back, and handed me
the following note from the tutor:—

Rather relieved by my lenient sentence (for, till the
next shedding of his well-saturated coat, the sky-blue
body and red mane and tail of the president's once
gray mare would interfere with that esteemed animal's
usefulness), I received Mr. Smith with more politeness
than he expected. He deposited his hair-trunk in
the vacant bedroom, remarked with a good-humored
smile that it was a cold morning, and seating himself
in my easiest chair, opened his Euclid, and went to
work upon a problem, as perfectly at home as if he
had furnished the room himself, and lived in it from
his matriculation. I had expected some preparatory
apology at least, and was a little annoyed; but being
upon my good behavior, I bit my lips, and resumed
the “Art of Love,” upon which I was just then practising
my nascent Latinity, instead of calculating logarithms
for recitation. In about an hour, my new chum
suddenly vociferated “Eureka!” shut up his book,
and having stretched himself (a very unnecessary operation),
coolly walked to my dressing-table, selected
my best hair-brush, redolent of Macassar, and used it
with the greatest apparent satisfaction.

“Have you done with that hair-brush?” I asked, as
he laid it in its place again.

“Oh yes!”

“Then, perhaps, you will do me the favor to throw
it out of the window.”

He did it without the slightest hesitation. He then
resumed his seat by the fire, and I went on with my
book in silence. Twenty minutes had elapsed, perhaps,
when he rose very deliberately, and without a
word of preparation, gave me a cuff that sent me flying
into the wood-basket in the corner behind me. As
soon as I could pick myself out, I flew upon him, but
I might as well have grappled with a boa-constrictor.
He held me off at arm's length till I was quite exhausted
with rage, and, at last, when I could struggle
no more, I found breath to ask him what the devil he
meant.

“To resent what seemed to me, on reflection, to be
an insult,” he answered, in the calmest tone, “and
now to ask your pardon for a fault of ignorance. The
first was due to myself, the second to you.”

Thenceforth, to the surprise of everybody, and Bob
Wilding and the tutor, we were inseprable. I took
Bruin (by a double elision Forbearance became “bear,”
and by paraphrase Bruin, and he answered to the
name)—I took him, I say, to the omnium shop, and
presented him with a dressing-case, and other appliances
for his outer man; and as my inner man was
relatively as much in need of his assistance, we mutually
improved. I instructed him in poetry and politeness,
and he returned the lesson in problems and
politics. My star was never in more fortunate conjunction.

Four years had woven their threads of memory about
us, and there was never woof more free from blemish.
Our friendship was proverbial. All that much care
and Macassar could do for Bruin had been done, but
there was no abating his seven feet of stature, nor reducing
the size of his feet proper, nor making the muscles
of his face answer to their natural wires. At his
most placid smile, a strange waiter would run for a
hot towel and the doctor (colic was not more like itself
than that like colic); and for his motions—oh
Lord! a skeleton, with each individual bone appended
to its neighbor with a string, would execute a pas
seul with the same expression. His mind, however,
had none of the awkwardness of his body. A simplicity
and truth, amounting to the greatest naïveté, and
a fatuitous unconsciousness of the effect on beholders
of his outer man, were its only approaches to fault or
foible. With the finest sense of the beautiful, the
most unerring judgment in literary taste, the purest
romance, a fervid enthusiasm, constancy, courage, and
good temper, he walked about the world in a mask—
an admirable creature, in the guise and seeming of a
ludicrous monster.

Bruin was sensitive on but one point. He never
could forgive his father and mother for the wrong they
had entailed on him at his baptism. “Forbearance
Smith!” he would say to himself sometimes in unconscious
soliloquy, “they should have given me the virtue
as well as the name!” And then he would sit
with a pen, and scrawl “F. Smith” on a sheet of paper
by the hour together. To insist upon knowing his
Christian name was the one impertinence he never
forgave.

3. III.

My party at Nahant consisted of Thalaba, Forbearance,
and myself. The place was crowded, but I
passed my time very much between my horse and my
friend, and was as certain to be found on the beach
when the tide was down, as the sea to have left the
sands. Job (a synonyme for Forbearance which became
at this time his common soubriquet) was, of
course, in love. Not the least to the prejudice, however,
of his last faithful passion—for he was as fond
of the memory of an old love, as he was tender in the
presence of the new. I intended to have had him dissected
after his death, to see whether his organization
was not peculiar. I strongly incline to the opinion
that we should have found a mirror in the place of his
heart. Strange! how the same man who is so fickle
in love, will be so constant in friendship! But is it
fickleness? Is it not rather a superflu of tenderness in
the nature, which overflows to all who approach the
fountain? I have ever observed that the most susceptible
men are the most remarkable for the finer qualities
of character. They are more generous, more
delicate, and of a more chivalrous complexion altogether,
than other men. It was surprising how reasonably
Bruin would argue upon this point. “Because
I was happy at Niagara,” he was saying one day as
we sat upon the rocks, “shall I take no pleasure in
the falls of Montmorenci? Because the sunset was
glorious yesterday, shall I find no beauty in that of
to-day? Is my fancy to be used but once, and the
key turned upon it for ever? Is the heart like a bonbon,
to be eaten up by the first favorite, and thought
of no more? Are our eyes blind, save to one shape
of beauty? Are our ears insensible to the music save
of one voice?”

“But do you not weaken the heart, and become incapable
of a lasting attachment, by this habit of inconstancy?”

“How long, my dear Phil, will you persist in talking
as if the heart was material, and held so much love
as a cup so much water, and had legs to be weary, or
organs to grow dull? How is my sensibility lessened
—how my capacity enfeebled? What would I have
done for my first love, that I would not do for my last?
I would have sacrificed my life to secure the happiness
of one you wot of in days gone by: I would jump
into the sea, if it would make Blanche Carroll happier
to-morrow.”

“Sautez-done!” said a thrilling voice behind; and
as if the utterance of her name had conjured her out
of the ground, the object of all Job's admiration, and
a little of my own, stood before us. She had a workbasket

in her hand, a gipsy-hat tossed carelessly on
her head, and had preceded a whole troop of belles
and matrons, who were coming out to while away the
morning, and breathe the invigorating sea-air on the
rocks.

Blanche Carroll was what the women would call
“a little love,” but that phrase of endearment would
not at all express the feeling with which she inspired
the men. She was small, and her face and figure
might have been framed in fairy-land for bewitching
beauty; but with the manner of a spoiled child, and,
apparently, the most thoughtless playfulness of mind,
she was as veritable a little devil as ever took the shape
of woman. Scarce seventeen at this time, she had
a knowledge of character that was like an instinct, and
was an accomplished actress in any part it was necessary
for her purpose to play. No grave Machiavel
ever managed his cards with more finesse than that
little intriguante the limited world of which she was
the star. She was a natural master-spirit and plotter;
and the talent that would have employed itself in the
deeper game of politics, had she been born a woman
of rank in Europe, displayed itself, in the simple society
of a republic, in subduing to her power everything
in the shape of a single man that ventured to her
net. I have nothing to tell of her at all commensurate
with the character I have drawn, for the disposal
of her own heart (if she has one) must of course be
the most important event of her life; but I merely
pencil the outline of the portrait in passing, as a
specimen of the material that exists—even in the
simplest society—for the dramatis personæ of a
court.

We followed the light-footed beauty to the shelter
of one of the caves opening on the sea, and seated ourselves
about her upon the rocks. Some one proposed
that Job or myself should read.

“Oh, Mr. Smith,” interrupted the belle, “where is
my bracelet?—and where are my verses?”

At the ball the night before she had dropped a
bracelet in the waltz, and Job had been permitted to
take care of the fragments, on condition of restoring
them, with a sonnet, the next morning. She had just
thought of it.

“Read them out! read them out!” she cried, as
Job, blushing a deep blue, extracted a tri-colored pink
document from his pocket, and tried to give it to her
unobserved, with the packet of jewelry. Job looked
at her imploringly, and she took the verses from his
hand, and ran her eye through them.

“Pretty well!” she said; “but the last line might
be improved. Give me a pencil, some one!” And
bending over it, till her luxuriant hair concealed her
fairy fingers in their employment, she wrote a moment
upon her knee, and tossing the paper to me, bade me
read it out with the emendation. Bruin had, meantime,
modestly disappeared, and I read with the more
freedom—

Job's conclusion was more pathetic, but probably
less true. He appeared after the applause had ceased,
and resumed his place at the lady's feet, with a look
in his countenance of having deserved an abatement
of persecution. The beauty spread out the fragments
of the broken bracelet on the rock beside her.

“Mr. Smith!” said she, in her most conciliating
tone.

Job leaned toward her with a look of devoted inquiry.

“Has the tide turned?”

“Certainly. Two hours since.”

“The beach is passible, then?”

“Hardly, I fear.”

“No matter. How many hours' drive is it to Salem?”

“Mr. Slingsby drives it in two.”

“Then you'll get Mr. Slingsby to lend you his
stanhope, drive to Salem, have this bracelet mended,
and bring it back in time for the ball. I have spoken,
as the grand Turk says. Allez!”

“But my dear Miss Carroll—”

She laid her hand on his mouth as he began to remonstrate,
and while I made signs to him to refuse,
she said something to him which I lost in a sudden
dash of the waters. He looked at me for my consent.

“Oh! you can have Mr. Slingsby's horse,” said the
beauty, as I hesitated whether my refusal would not
check her tyranny, “and I'll drive him out this evening
for his reward, N'est-ce pas? you cross man!”

So, with a sun hot enough to fry the brains in his
skull, and a quivering reflection on the sands that
would burn his face to a blister, exit Job, with the
broken bracelet in his bosom.

“Stop, Mr. Slingsby,” said the imperious little belle,
as I was making up a mouth, after his departure, to
express my disapprobation of her measures, “no lecture,
if you please. Give me that book of plays, and
I'll read you a precedent. Because you are virtuous,
shall we have no more cakes and ale? Ecoutez! And,
with an emphasis and expression that would have been
perfect on the stage, she read the following passage
from “The Careless Husband:”—

“Lady Betty.—The men of sense, my dear, make
the best fools in the world; their sincerity and good
breeding throw them so entirely into one's power, and
give one such an agreeable thrist of using them ill, to
show that power—'tis impossible not to quench it.

“Lady Easy.—But, my Lord Morelove—

“Lady B.—Pooh! my Lord Morelove's mere Indian
damask—one can't wear him out: o' my conscience,
I must give him to my woman at last. I begin
to be known by him; had I not best leave him off, my
dear?

“Lady E.—Why did you ever encourage him?

“Lady B.—Why, what would you have one do?
For my part, I could no more choose a man by my
eye than a shoe—one must draw them on a little, to
see if they are right to one's foot.

“Lady E.—But I'd no more fool on with a man I
could not like, than wear a shoe that pinched me.

“Lady B.—Ay; but then a poor wretch tells one
he'll widen 'em, or do anything, and is so civil and
silly, that one does not know how to turn such a trifle
as a pair of shoes, or a heart, upon a fellow's hands
again.

“Lady E.—And there's my Lord Foppington.

“Lady B.—My dear! fine fruit will have flies about
it; but, poor things! they do it no harm; for, if you
observe, people are generally most apt to choose that
the flies have been busy with. Ha! ha!

“Lady E.—Thou art a strange, giddy creature!

“Lady B.—That may be from too much circulation
of thought, my dear!”

“Pray, Miss Carroll,” said I, as she threw aside the
book with a theatrical air, “have you any precedent
for broiling a man's brains, as well as breaking his
heart? For, by this time, my friend Forbearance has
a coup de soleil, and is hissing over the beach like a
steam-engine.”

“How tiresome you are! Do you really think it
will kill him?”

“It might injure him seriously—let alone the danger
of driving a spirited horse over the beach, with the
tide quarter-down.”

“What shall I do to be `taken out of the corner,'
Mr. Slingsby?”

“Order your horses an hour sooner, and drive to
Lynn, to meet him half way on his return. I will resume
my stanhope, and give him the happiness of
driving back with you.”

“And shall I be gentle Blanche Carroll, and no
ogre, if I do?”

“Yes; Mr. Smith surviving.”

“Take the trouble to give my orders, then; and
come back immediately, and read to me till it is time
to go. Meantime, I shall look at myself in this black
mirror.” And the spoilt, but most lovely girl bent
over a dark pool in the corner of the cave, forming a
picture on its shadowy background that drew a murmur
of admiration even from the neglected group who
had been the silent and disapproving witnesses of her
caprice.”

4. IV.

A thunder-cloud strode into the sky with the rapidity
which marks that common phenomenon of a
breathless summer afternoon in America, darkened the
air for a few minutes, so that the birds betook themselves
to their nests, and then poured out its refreshing
waters with the most terrific flashes of lightning,
and crashes of thunder, which for a moment seemed to
still even the eternal base of the sea. With the same
fearful rapidity, the black roof of the sky tore apart, and
fell back, in rolling and changing masses, upon the
horizon; the sun darted with intense brilliancy
through the clarified and transparent air; the light-stirring
breeze came freighted with delicious coolness;
and the heavy sea-birds, who had lain brooding on the
waves while the tumult of the elements went on, rose
on their cimeter-like wings, and fled away, with incomprehensible
instinct, from the beautiful and freshened
land. The whole face of earth and sky had been
changed in an hour.

Oh, of what fulness of delight are even the senses
capable! What a nerve there is sometimes in every
pore! What love for all living and all inanimate
things may be born of a summer shower! How stirs
the fancy, and brightens hope, and warms the heart,
and sings the spirit within us, at the mere animal joy
with which the lark flees into heaven! And yet, of
this exquisite capacity for pleasure we take so little
care! We refine our taste, we elaborate and finish
our mental perception, we study the beautiful, that
we may know it when it appears—yet the senses by
which these faculties are approached, the stops by
which this fine instrument is played, are trifled with
and neglected. We forget that a single excess blurs
and confuses the music written on our minds; we
forget that an untimely vigil weakens and bewilders
the delicate minister to our inner temple; we know
not, or act as if we knew not, that the fine and easily-jarred
harmony of health is the only interpreter of
Nature to our souls; in short, we drink too much
claret, and eat too much páté foie gras. Do you understand
me, gourmand et gourmet?

Blanche Carroll was a beautiful whip, and the two
bay ponies in her phaeton were quite aware of it. La
Bruyère says, with his usual wisdom, “Une belle
femme qui a les qualités d'un honnête homme est ce
qu'il y a au monde d'un commerce plus délicieux;”
and, to a certain degree, masculine accomplishments
too, are very winning in a woman—if pretty; if plain,
she is expected not only to be quite feminine, but
quite perfect. Foibles are as hateful in a woman who
does not possess beauty, as they are engaging in a woman
who does. Clouds are only lovely when the
heavens are bright.

She looked loveliest while driving, did Blanche
Carroll, for she was born to rule, and the expression
native to her lip was energy and nerve; and as she
sat with her little foot pressed against the dasher, and
reined in those spirited horses, the finely-pencilled
mouth, usually playful or pettish, was pressed together
in a curve as warlike as Minerva's, and twice
as captivating. She drove, too, as capriciously as
she acted. At one moment her fleet ponies fled over
the sand at the top of their speed, and at the next they
were brought down to a walk, with a suddenness
which threatened to bring them upon their haunches.
Now far up on the dry sand, cutting a zigzag to
lengthen the way, and again below at the tide edge,
with the waves breaking over her seaward wheel; all
her powers at one instant engrossed in pushing them
to their fastest trot, and in another the reins lying
loose on their backs, while she discussed some sudden
flight of philosophy. “Be his fairy, his page, his
everything that love and poetry have invented,” said
Roger Ascham to Lady Jane Grey, just before her
marriage; but Blanche Carroll was almost the only
woman I ever saw capable of the beau idéal of fascinating
characters.

Between Miss Carroll and myself there was a safe
and cordial friendship. Besides loving another better,
she was neither earnest, nor true, nor affectionate
enough to come at all within the range of my possible
attachments, and though I admired her, she felt that
the necessary sympathy was wanting for love; and,
the idea of fooling me with the rest once abandoned,
we were the greatest of allies. She told me all her
triumphs, and I listened and laughed without thinking
it worth while to burden her with my confidence in
return; and you may as well make a memorandum,
gentle reader, that that is a very good basis for a friendship.
Nothing bores women or worldly persons so
much as to return their secrets with your own.

As we drew near the extremity of the beach, a boy
rode up on horseback, and presented Miss Carroll with
a note. I observed that it was written on a very dirty
slip of paper, and was waiting to be enlightened as to
its contents, when she slipped it into her belt, took the
whip from the box, and flogging her ponies through
the heavy sand of the outer beach, went off, at a pace
which seemed to engross all her attention, on her road
to Lynn. We reached the hotel and she had not
spoken a syllable, and as I made a point of never inquiring
into anything that seemed odd in her conduct,
I merely stole a glance at her face, which wore the
expression of mischievous satisfaction which I liked
the least of its common expressions, and descended
from the phaeton with the simple remark, that Job
could not have arrived, as I saw nothing of my stanhope
in the yard.

“Mr. Slingsby.” It was the usual preface to asking
some particular favor.

“Miss Carroll.”

“Will you be so kind as to walk to the library and

select me a book to your own taste, and ask no questions
as to what I do with myself meantime?”

“But, my dear Miss Carroll—your father—”

“Will feel quite satisfied when he hears that Cato
was with me. Leave the ponies to the groom, Cato,
and follow me.” I looked after her as she walked
down the village street with the old black behind her,
not at all certain of the propriety of my acquiescence,
but feeling that there was no help for it.

I lounged away a half hour at the library, and found
Miss Carroll waiting for me on my return. There
were no signs of Bruin; and as she seemed impatient
to be off, I jumped into the phaeton, and away we flew
to the beach as fast as her ponies could be driven
under the whip. As we descended upon the sands
she spoke for the first time.

“It is so civil of you to ask no questions, Mr. Slingsby;
but you are not offended with me?”

“If you have got into no scrape while under my
charge, I shall certainly be too happy to shake hands
upon it to-morrow.”

“Are you quite sure?” she asked arehly.

“Quite sure.”

“So am not I,” she said with a merry laugh; and
in her excessive amusement she drove down to the sea,
till the surf broke over the nearest pony's back, and
filled the bottom of the phaeton with water. Our wet
feet were now a fair apology for haste, and taking the
reins from her, I drove rapidly home, while she wrapped
herself in her shawl, and sat apparently absorbed
in the coming of the twilight over the sea.

I slept late after the ball, though I had gone to bed
exceedingly anxious about Bruin, who had not yet
made his appearance. The tide would prevent his
crossing the beach after ten in the morning, however,
and I made myself tolerably easy till the sands were
passable with the evening ebb. The high-water mark
was scarcely deserted by the waves, when the same
boy who had delivered the note to Miss Carroll the
day before, rode up from the beach on a panting horse,
and delivered me the following note:—

I got upon the boy's horse, and hurried over the
beach with whip and spur. I stopped at the justice's
office, and that worthy seemed uncommonly pleased
to see me.

“We have got him, sir,” said he.

“Got whom?” I asked rather shortly.

“Why, the fellow that stole your stanhope and Miss
Carroll's bracelet, and passed a twenty dollar counterfeit
bill—ha'n't you hearn on't?”

The justice's incredulity, when I told him it was
probably the most intimate friend I had in the world,
would have amused me at any other time.

“Will you allow me to see the prisoner?” I asked.

“Be sure I will. I let Miss Carroll have a peep at
him yesterday, and what do you think? Oh, Lord!
he wanted to make her believe she knew him! Good!
wasn't it? Ha! ha! And such an ill-looking fellow!
Why, I'd know him for a thief anywhere!
Your intimate friend, Mr. Slingsby! Oh, Lord!
when you come to see him! Ha! ha!”

We were at the prison-door. The grating bolts
turned slowly, the door swung rustily on its hinges as
if it was not often used, and in the next minute I was
enfolded in Job's arms, who sobbed and laughed, and
was quite hysterical with his delight. I scarce won
dered at the justice's prepossessions when I looked at
the figure he made. His hat knocked in, his coat
muddy, his hair full of the dust of straw—the natural
hideousness of poor Job had every possible aggravation.

We were in the stanhope, and fairly on the beach,
before he had sufficiently recovered to tell me the
story. He had arrived quite overheated at Lynn, but,
in a hurry to execute Miss Carroll's commission, he
merely took a glass of soda-water, had Thalaba's
mouth washed, and drove on. A mile on his way, he
was overtaken by a couple of ostlers on horseback,
who very roughly ordered him back to the inn. He
refused, and a fight ensued, which ended in his being
tied into the stanhope, and driven back as a prisoner.
The large note, which he had given for his soda-water,
it appeared, was a counterfeit, and placards, offering a
reward for the detection of a villain, described in the
usual manner as an ill-looking fellow, had been sticking
up for some days in the village. He was taken
before the justice, who declared at first sight that he
answered the description in the advertisement. His
stubborn refusal to give the whole of his name (he
would rather have died, I suppose), his possession of
my stanhope, which was immediately recognised, and
lastly, the bracelet found in his pocket, of which he
refused indignantly to give any account, were circumstances
enough to leave no doubt on the mind of the
worthy justice. He made out his mitlimus forthwith,
granting Job's request that he might be allowed to
write a note to Miss Carroll (who, he knew, would
drive over the beach toward evening), as a very great
favor. She arrived as he expected.

“And what in Heaven's name did she say?” said I,
interested beyond my patience at this part of the story.

“Expressed the greatest astonishment when the
justice showed her the bracelet, and declared she
never saw me before in her life!”

That Job forgave Blanche Carroll in two days, and
gave her a pair of gloves with some verses on the
third, will surprise only those who have not seen that
lady. It would seem incredible, but here are the
verses, as large as life:—

EDITH LINSEY.

1. PART I.
FROST AND FLIRTATION.

It began to snow. The air softened; the pattering
of the horse's hoofs was muffled with the impeded vibration;
the sleigh glided on with a duller sound;
the large loose flakes fell soft and fast, and the low
and just audible murmur, like the tread of a fairy
host, melted on the ear with a drowsy influence, as if
it were a descent of palpable sleep upon the earth.
You may talk of falling water—of the running of a
brook—of the humming song of an old crone on a
sick vigil—or of the levi susurro of the bees of Hybla
—but there is nothing like the falling of the snow for
soft and soothing music. You hear it or not, as you
will, but it melts into your soul unaware. If you have
ever a heartache, or feel the need of “poppy or mandragora,”
or, like myself, grow sometimes a-weary of
the stale repetitions of this unvaried world, seek me
out in Massachusetts, when the wind softens and veers
south, after a frost—say in January. There shall
have been a long-lying snow on the ground, well-trodden.
The road shall be as smooth as the paths
to our first sins—of a seeming perpetual declivity, as
it were—and never a jolt or jar between us and the
edge of the horizon; but all onward and down apparently,
with an insensible ease. You sit beside me in
my spring-sleigh, hung with the lightness of a cobweb
cradle for a fairy's child in the trees. Our horse
is, in the harness, of a swift and even pace, and around
his neck is a string of fine small bells, that ring to his
measured step in a kind of muffled music, softer and
softer as the snow-flakes thicken in the air. Your
seat is of the shape of the fauteuil in your library,
cushioned and deep, and with a backward and gentle
slope, and you are enveloped to the eyelids in warm
furs. You settle down, with every muscle in repose,
the visor of your ermine cap just shedding the snow
from your forehead, and with a word, the groom stands
back, and the horse speeds on, steady, but beautifully
fast. The bells, which you hear loudly at first, begin
to deaden, and the low hum of the alighting flakes
steals gradually on your ear; and soon the hoof-strokes
are as silent as if the steed were shod with
wool, and away you flee through the white air, like
birds asleep upon the wing diving through the feathery
fleeces of the moon. Your eyelids fall—forgetfulness
steals upon the senses—a delicious torpor takes possession
of the uneasy blood—and brain and thought
yield to an intoxicating and trance-like slumber. It
were perhaps too much to ask that any human bosom
may go scathless to the grave; but in my own unworthy
petitions I usually supplicate that my heart
may be broken about Christmas. I know an anodyne
o' that season.

Fred Fleming and I occupied one of the seven long
seats in a stage-sleigh, flying at this time twelve miles
in the hour (yet not fast enough for our impatience),
westward from the university gates. The sleighing
had been perfect for a week, and the cold keen air had
softened for the first time that morning, and assumed
the warm and woolly complexion that foretokened
snow. Though not very cheerful in its aspect, this is
an atmosphere particularly pleasant to breathe, and
Fred, who was making his first move after a six weeks'
fever, sat with the furs away from his mouth, nostrils
expanded, lips parted, and the countenance altogether
of a man in a high state of physical enjoyment. I
had nursed him through his illness, by-the-way, in
my own rooms, and hence our position as fellow-travellers.
A pressing invitation from his father to
come home with him to Skancateles, for the holydays,
had diverted me from my usual winter journey to the
North; and for the first time in my life, I was going
upon a long visit to a strange roof. My imagination
had never more business upon its hands.

Fred had described to me, over and over again,
every person I was to meet, brothers, sisters, aunts,
cousins, and friends—a household of thirty people,
guests included; but there was one person among
them of whom his descriptions, amplified as they
were, were very unsatisfactory.

“Is she so very plain?” I asked for the twentieth
time.

“Abominably!”

“And immense black eyes?”

“Saucers!”

“And large mouth?”

“Huge!”

“And very dark?”

“Like a squaw!”

“And skinny hands, did you say?”

“Lean, long, and pokerish!”

“And so very clever?”

“Knows everything, Phil!”

“But a sweet voice?”

“Um! everybody says so.”

“And high temper?”

“She's the devil, Phil! don't ask any more questions
about her.”

“You don't like her, then?”

“She never condescends to speak to me; how
should I?”

And thereupon I put my head out of the sleigh, and
employed myself with catching the snow-flakes on my
nose, and thinking whether Edith Linsey would like
me or no; for through all Fred's derogatory descriptions,
it was clearly evident that she was the ruling
spirit of the hospitable household of the Flemings.

As we got farther on, the new snow became deeper,
and we found that the last storm had been heavier
here than in the country from which we had come.
The occasional farm-houses were almost wholly
buried, the black chimney alone appearing above the
ridgy drifts, while the tops of the doors and windows
lay below the level of the trodden road, from which a
descending passage was cut to the threshold, like the
entrance to a cave in the earth. The fences were
quite invisible. The fruit-trees looked diminished to
shrubberies of snow-flowers, their trunks buried under
the visible surface, and their branches loaded with the
still falling flakes, till they bent beneath the burden.
Nothing was abroad, for nothing could stir out of the
road without danger of being lost, and we dreaded to
meet even a single sleigh, lest in turning out, the
horses should “slump” beyond their depth, in the
untrodden drifts. The poor animals began to labor
severely, and sunk at every step over their knees in
the clogging and wool-like substance; and the long
and cumbrous sleigh rose and fell in the deep pits like
a boat in a heavy sea. It seemed impossible to get on.
Twice we brought up with a terrible plunge and stood
suddenly still, for the runners had struck in too deep
for the strength of the horses; and with the snow-shovels,
which formed a part of the furniture of the
vehicle, we dug them from their concrete beds. Our
progress at last was reduced to scarce a mile in the
hour, and we began to have apprehensions that our
team would give out between the post-houses. Fortunately
it was still warm, for the numbness of cold
would have paralyzed our already flagging exertions.

We had reached the summit of a long hill with the
greatest difficulty. The poor beasts stood panting
and recking with sweat; the runners of the sleigh
were clogged with hard cakes of snow, and the air
was close and dispiriting. We came to a stand-still,
with the vehicle lying over almost on its side, and I
stepped out to speak to the driver and look forward.
It was a discouraging prospect; a long deep valley
lay before us, closed at the distance of a couple of

miles by another steep hill, through a cleft in the top
of which lay our way. We could not even distinguish
the line of the road between. Our disheartened animals
stood at this moment buried to their breasts, and
to get forward without rearing at every step seemed
impossible. The driver sat on his box looking uneasily
down into the valley. It was one undulating
ocean of snow, not a sign of a human habitation to be
seen, and even the trees indistinguishable from the
general mass by their whitened and overladen branches.
The storm had ceased, but the usual sharp cold
that succeeds a warm fall of snow had not yet lightened
the clamminess of the new-fallen flakes, and
they clung around the foot like clay, rendering every
step a toil.

“Your leaders are quite blown,” I said to the driver,
as he slid off his uncomfortable seat.

“Pretty nearly, sir!”

“And your wheelers are not much better.”

“Sca'cely.”

“And what do you think of the weather?”

“It'll be darnation cold in an hour.” As he spoke
he looked up to the sky, which was already peeling
off its clouds in long stripes, like the skin of an
orange, and looked as hard and cold as marble between
the widening rifts. A sudden gust of a more
chilling temperature followed immediately upon his
prediction, and the long cloth curtains of the sleigh
flew clear of their slight pillars, and shook off their
fringes of icicles.

“Could you shovel a little, mister?” said the driver,
handing me one of the broad wooden utensils
from his foot-board, and commencing himself, after
having thrown off his box-coat, by heaving up a solid
cake of the moist snow at the side of the road.

“It's just to make a place to rub down them creturs,”
said he, as I looked at him, quite puzzled to
know what he was going to do.

Fred was too weak to assist us, and having righted
the vehicle a little, and tied down the flapping curtains,
he wrapped himself in his cloak, and I set heartily
to work with my shovel. In a few minutes, taking
advantage of the hollow of a drift, we had cleared a
small area of frozen ground, and releasing the tired
animals from their harness, we rubbed them well down
with the straw from the bottom of the sleigh. The
persevering driver then cleared the runners of their
iced and clinging masses, and a half hour having
elapsed, he produced two bottles of rum from his box,
and, giving each of the horses a dose, put them again
to their traces.

We heaved out of the pit into which the sleigh had
settled, and for the first mile it was down-hill, and we
got on with comparative ease. The sky was by this
time almost bare, a dark, slaty mass of clouds alone
settling on the horizon in the quarter of the wind,
while the sun, as powerless as moonlight, poured with
dazzling splendor on the snow, and the gusts came
keen and bitter across the sparkling waste, rimming
the nostrils as if with bands of steel, and penetrating to
the innermost nerve with their pungent iciness. No
protection seemed of any avail. The whole surface
of the body ached as if it were laid against a slab of
ice. The throat closed instinctively, and contracted
its unpleasant respiration—the body and limbs drew
irresistibly together, to economize, like a hedge-hog,
the exposed surface—the hands and feet felt transmuted
to lead—and across the forehead, below the pressure
of the cap, there was a binding and oppressive
ache, as if a bar of frosty iron had been let into the
scull. The mind, meantime, seemed freezing up—unwillingness
to stir, and inability to think of anything
but the cold, becoming every instant more decided.

From the bend of the valley our difficulties became
more serious. The drifts often lay across the road
like a wall, some feet above the heads of the horses,
and we had dug through one or two, and had been
once upset, and often near it, before we came to the
steepest part of the ascent. The horses had by this
time begun to feel the excitement of the rum, and
bounded on through the snow with continual leaps,
jerking the sleigh after them with a violence that
threatened momently to break the traces. The steam
from their bodies froze instantly, and covered them
with a coat like hoar-frost, and spite of their heat, and
the unnatural and violent exertions they were making,
it was evident by the pricking of their ears, and the
sudden crouch of the body when a stronger blast
swept over, that the cold struck through even their
hot and intoxicated blood.

We toiled up, leap after leap, and it seemed miraculous
to me that the now infuriated animals did not
burst a blood-vessel or crack a sinew with every one
of those terrible springs. The sleigh plunged on after
them, stopping dead and short at every other moment,
and reeling over the heavy drifts, like a boat in a
surging sea. A finer crystallization had meantime
taken place upon the surface of the moist snow, and
the powdered particles flew almost insensibly on the
blasts of wind, filling the eyes and hair, and cutting
the skin with a sensation like the touch of needle-points.
The driver and his maddened but almost exhausted
team were blinded by the glittering and a whirling
eddies, the cold grew intenser every moment, the
forward motion gradually less and less, and when, with
the very last effort apparently, we reached a spot on
the summit of the hill, which, from its exposed situation,
had been kept bare by the wind, the patient and
persevering whip brought his horses to a stand, and
despaired, for the first time, of his prospects of getting
on. I crept out of the sleigh, the iron-bound runners
of which now grated on the bare ground, but found it
impossible to stand upright.

“If you can use your hands,” said the driver, turning
his back to the wind which stung the face like the
lash of a whip, “I'll trouble you to untackle them
horses.”

I set about it, while he buried his hands and face
in the snow to relieve them for a moment from the
agony of cold. The poor animals staggered stiffly as
I pushed them aside, and every vein stood out from
their bodies like ropes under the skin.

“What are you going to do?” I asked, as he joined
me again, and taking off the harness of one of the
leaders, flung it into the snow.

“Ride for life!” was his ominous answer.

“Good God! and what is to become of my sick
friend?”

“The Almighty knows—if he can't ride to the
tavern!”

I sprang instantly to poor Fred, who was lying in
the bottom of the sleigh almost frozen to death, informed
him of the driver's decision, and asked him if
he thought he could ride one of the horses. He was
beginning to grow drowsy, the first symptom of death
by cold, and could with difficulty be roused. With
the driver's assistance, however. I lifted him out of the
sleigh, shook him soundly, and making stirrups of the
traces, set him upon one of the horses, and started
him off before us. The poor beasts seemed to have a
presentiment of the necessity of exertion, and though
stiff and sluggish, entered willingly upon the deep
drift which blocked up the way, and toiled exhaustedly
on. The cold in our exposed position was agonizing.
Every small fibre in the skin of my own face felt splitting
and cracked, and my eyelids seemed made of ice.
Our limbs soon lost all sensation. I could only press
with my knees to the horse's side, and the whole collected
energy of my frame seemed expended in the
exertion. Fred held on wonderfully. The driver had
still the use of his arm, and rode behind, flogging the
poor animals on, whose every step seemed to be the

last summons of energy. The sun set, and it was
rather a relief, for the glitter upon the snow was exceedingly
painful to the sight, and there was no warmth
in its beams. I could see my poor friend drooping
gradually to the neck of his horse, but until he should
drop off it was impossible to assist him, and his faithful
animal still waded on. I felt my own strength fast
ebbing away. If I had been alone, I should certainly
have lain down, with the almost irresistible inclination
to sleep; but the thought of my friend, and the shouting
of the energetic driver, nerved me from time to
time—and with hands hanging helplessly down, and
elbows fastened convulsively to my side, we plunged
and struggled painfully forward. I but remember
being taken afterward to a fire, and shrinking from it
with a shriek—the suffering of reviving consciousness
was so intolerable. We had reached the tavern literally
frozen upon our horses.

2. II.

I was balancing my spoon on the edge of a cup at
the breakfast-table, the morning after our arrival, when
Fred stopped in the middle of an eulogium on my
virtues as a nurse, and a lady entering at the same
moment, he said simply in parenthesis, “My cousin
Edith, Mr. Slingsby,” and went on with his story. I
rose and bowed, and as Fred had the parole, I had
time to collect my courage, and take a look at the
enemy's camp—for, of that considerable household, I
felt my star to be in conjunction or opposition with
hers only, who was at that moment my vis-à-vis across
a dish of stewed oysters.

In about five minutes of rapid mental portrait-painting,
I had taken a likeness of Edith Linsey, which I
see at this moment (I have carried it about the world
for ten years) as distinctly as the incipient lines of age
in this thin-wearing hand. My feelings changed in
that time from dread or admiration, or something between
these, to pity; she was so unscrupulously and
hopelessly plain—so wretchedly ill and suffering in
her aspect—so spiritless and unhappy in every motion
and look. “I'll win her heart,” thought I, “by being
kind to her. Poor thing! it will be something new to
her, I dare say!” Oh, Philip Slingsby! what a doomed
donkey thou wert for that silly soliloquy!

And yet even as she sat there, leaning over her untasted
breakfast, listless, ill, and melancholy—with her
large mouth, her protruding eyes, her dead and sallow
complexion, and not one redeeming feature—there
was something in her face which produced a phantom
of beauty in my mind—a glimpse, a shadowing of a
countenance that Beatrice Cenci might have worn at
her last innocent orison—a loveliness moulded and
exalted by superhuman and overpowering mind—instinct
through all its sweetness with energy and fire.
So strong was this phantom portrait, that in all my
thoughts of her as an angel in heaven (for I supposed
her dying for many a month, and a future existence
was her own most frequent theme), she always rose to
my fancy with a face half Niobe, half Psyche, radiantly
lovely. And this, too, with a face of her own, a bonâ
fide physiognomy, that must have made a mirror an
unpleasant article of furniture in her chamber.

I have no suspicion in my own mind whether Time
was drunk or sober during the succeeding week of
those Christmas holydays. The second Saturday had
come round, and I just remember that Fred was very
much out of humor with me for having appeared to
his friends to be everything he had said I was not, and
nothing he had said I was. He had described me as
the most uproarious, noisy, good-humored, and agreeable
dog in the world. And I was not that at all—
particularly the last. The old judge told him he had
not improved in his penetration at the university.

A week! and what a life had been clasped within
its brief calendar, for me! Edith Linsey was two
years older than I, and I was considered a boy. She
was thought to be dying slowly, but irretrievably, of
consumption; and it was little matter whom she loved,
or how. They would only have been pleased, if, by
a new affection, she could beguile the preying melancholy
of illness; for by that gentle name they called,
in their kindness, a caprice and a bitterness of character
that, had she been less a sufferer, would not have
been endured for a day. But she was not capricious,
or bitter to me! Oh no! And from the very extreme
of her impatience with others—from her rudeness, her
violence, her sarcasm—she came to me with a heart
softer than a child's, and wept upon my hands, and
weighed every word that might give me offence, and
watched to anticipate my lightest wish, and was humble,
and generous, and passionately loving and dependant.
Her heart sprang to me with a rebound. She
gave herself up to me with an utter and desperate
abandonment, that owed something to her peculiar
character, but more to her own solemn conviction that
she was dying—that her best hope of life was not worth
a week's purchase.

We had begun with books, and upon them her past
enthusiasm had hitherto been released. She loved her
favorite authors with a passion. They had relieved
her heart; and there was nothing of poetry or philosophy
that was deep or beautiful, in which she had not
steeped her very soul. How well I remember her repeating
to me from Shelley those glorious lines to the
soaring swan:—

There was a long room in the southern wing of the
house, fitted up as a library. It was a heavily-curtained,
dim old place, with deep-embayed windows, and so
many nooks, and so much furniture, that there was
that hushed air, that absence of echo within it, which
is the great charm of a haunt for study or thought.
It was Edith's kingdom. She might lock the door,
if she pleased, or shut or open the windows; in short,
when she was there, no one thought of disturbing her,
and she was like a “spirit in its cell,” invisible and
inviolate. And here I drank into my very life and
soul the outpourings of a bosom that had been locked
till (as we both thought) the last hour of its life—a
flow of mingled intellect and passion that overran my
heart like lava, sweeping everything into its resistless
fire, and (may God forgive her!) leaving it scorched
and desolate when its mocking brightness had gone
out.

I remember that “Elia”—Charles Lamb's Elia—
was the favorite of favorites among her books; and
partly that the late death of this most-to-be-loved author
reminded me to look it up, and partly to have
time to draw back my indifference over a subject that
it something stirs me to recall, you shall read an imitation
(or continuation, if you will) that I did for Edith's
eye, of his “Essay on Books and Reading.” I sat
with her dry and fleshless hand in mine while I read
it to her, and the fingers of Psyche were never fairer
to Canova than they to me.

“It is a little singular,” I began (looking into her
eyes as long as I could remember what I had written),
“that, among all the elegancies of sentiment for which
the age is remarkable, no one should ever have thought
of writing a book upon `Reading.' The refinements

of the true epicure in books are surely as various as
those of the gastronome and the opium-eater; and I
can conceive of no reason why a topic of such natural
occurrence should have been so long neglected, unless
it is that the taste itself, being rather a growth of indolence,
has never numbered among its votaries one of
the busy craft of writers.

“The great proportion of men read, as they eat, for
hunger. I do not consider them readers. The true
secret of the thing is no more adapted to their comprehension,
than the sublimations of Louis Eustache Ude
for the taste of a day-laborer. The refined reading-taste,
like the palate of gourmanderie, must have got
beyond appetite—gross appetite. It shall be that of a
man who, having fed through childhood and youth
on simple knowledge, values now only, as it were, the
apotheosis of learning—the spiritual nare. There are,
it is true, instances of a keen natural relish: a boy, as
you will sometimes find one, of a premature thoughtfulness,
will carry a favorite author in his bosom, and
feast greedily on it in his stolen hours. Elia tells the
exquisite story:—

“The pleasure as well as the profit of reading depends
as much upon time and manner, as upon the
book. The mind is an opal—changing its color with
every shifting shade. Ease of position is especially
necessary. A muscle strained, a nerve unpoised, an
admitted sunbeam caught upon a mirror, are slight
circumstances; but a feather may tickle the dreamer
from paradise to earth. `Many a froward axiom,'
says a refined writer, `many an inhumane thought
hath arisen from sitting uncomfortably, or from a want
of symmetry in your chamber.' Who has not felt, at
times, an unaccountable disrelish for a favorite author?
Who has not, by a sudden noise in the street, been
startled from a reading dream, and found, afterward,
that the broken spell was not to be rewound? An
ill-tied cravat may unlink the rich harmonies of Taylor.
You would not think Barry Cornwall the delicious
heart he is, reading him in a tottering chair.

“There is much in the mood with which you come
to a book. If you have been vexed out of doors, the
good humor of an author seems unnatural. I think
I should scarce relish the `gentle spiriting' of Ariel
with a pulse of ninety in the minute. Or if I had
been touched by the unkindness of a friend, Jack
Falstaff would not move me to laughter as easily as
he is wont. There are tones of the mind, however,
to which a book will vibrate with a harmony than
which there is nothing more exquisite in nature. To
go abroad at sunrise in June, and admit all the holy
influences of the hour—stillness, and purity, and
balm—to a mind subdued and dignified, as the mind
will be by the sacred tranquillity of sleep, and then to
come in with bathed and refreshed senses, and a temper
of as clear joyfulness as the soaring lark's and
sit down to Milton or Spenser, or, almost loftier still,
the divine `Prometheus' of Shelley, has seemed to
me a harmony of delight almost too heavenly to be
human. The great secret of such pleasure is sympathy.
You must climb to the eagle poet's eyry.
You must have senses, like his, for the music that is
only audible to the fine ear of thought, and the beauty
that is visible only to the spirit-eye of a clear, and for
the time, unpolluted fancy. The stamp and pressure
of the magician's own time and season must be upon
you. You would not read Ossian, for example, in a
bath, or sitting under a tree in a sultry noon; but
after rushing into the eye of the wind with a fleet
horse, with all his gallant pride and glorious strength
and fire obedient to your rein, and so mingling, as it
will, with his rider's consciousness, that you feel as
if you were gifted in your own body with the swiftness
and energy of an angel; after this, to sit down
to Ossian, is to read him with a magnificence of de
lusion, to my mind scarce less than reality. I never
envied Napoleon till I heard it was his habit, after a
battle, to read Ossian.

“You can not often read to music. But I love,
when the voluntary is pealing in church—every breath
in the congregation suppressed, and the deep-volumed
notes pouring through the arches of the roof with the
sublime and almost articulate praise of the organ—to
read, from the pew Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes.
The solemn stateliness of its periods is fitted to music
like a hymn. It is to me a spring of the most thrilling
devotion—though I shame to confess that the
richness of its eastern imagery, and, above all, the inimitable
beauty of its philosophy, stand out somewhat
definitely in the reminiscences of the hour.

“A taste for reading comes comparatively late.
`Robinson Crusoe' will turn a boy's head at ten.
The `Arabian Nights' are taken to bed with us at
twelve. At fourteen, a forward boy will read the
`Lady of the Lake,' `Tom Jones,' and `Peregrine
Pickle;' and at seventeen (not before) he is ready for
Shakspere, and, if he is of a thoughtful turn, Milton.
Most men do not read these last with a true relish till
after this period. The hidden beauties of standard
authors break upon the mind by surprise. It is like
discovering a secret spring in an old jewel. You take
up the book in an idle moment, as you have done a
thousand times before, perhaps wondering, as you
turn over the leaves, what the world finds in it to admire,
when suddenly, as you read, your fingers press
close upon the covers, your frame thrills, and the
passage you have chanced upon chains you like a
spell—it is so vividly true and beautiful. Milton's
`Comus' flashed upon me in this way. I never could
read the `Rape of the Lock' till a friend quoted some
passages from it during a walk. I know no more exquisite
sensation than this warming of the heart to an
old author; and it seems to me that the most delicious
portion of intellectual existence is the brief period in
which, one by one, the great minds of old are admitted
with all their time-mellowed worth to the affections.
With what delight I read, for the first time,
the `kind-hearted plays' of Beaumont and Fletcher!
How I doated on Burton! What treasures to me
were the `Fairy Queen' and the Lyrics of Milton!

“I used to think, when studying the Greek and
Latin poets in my boyhood, that to be made a school-author
was a fair offset against immortality. I would
as lief, it seemed to me, have my verses handed down
by the town-crier. But latterly, after an interval of a
few years, I have taken up my classics (the identical
school copies with the hard places all thummed and
pencilled) and have read them with no little pleasure.
It is not to be believed with what a satisfaction the
riper eye glides smoothly over the once difficult line,
finding the golden cadence of poetry beneath what
once seemed only a tangled chaos of inversion. The
associations of hard study, instead of reviving the old
distaste, added wonderfully to the interest of a reperusal.
I could see now what brightened the sunken
eye of the pale and sickly master, as he took up the
hesitating passage, and read on, forgetful of the delinquent,
to the end. I could enjoy now, what was a
dead letter to me then, the heightened fulness of Herodotus,
and the strong-woven style of Thucydides,
and the magnificent invention of Eschylus. I took
an aversion to Homer from hearing a classmate in the
next room scan it perpetually through his nose.

There is no music for me in the `Iliad.' But, spite of
the recollections scored alike upon my palm and the
margin, I own to an Augustan relish for the smooth
melody of Virgil, and freely forgive the sometime
troublesome ferule—enjoying by its aid the raciness
of Horace and Juvenal, and the lofty philosophy of
Lucretius. It will be a dear friend to whom I put
down in my will that shelf of defaced classics.

“There are some books that bear reading pleasantly
once a year. `Tristram Shandy' is an annual with
me. I read him regularly about Christmas. Jeremy
Taylor (not to mingle things holy and profane) is a
good table-book, to be used when you would collect
your thoughts and be serious a while. A man of
taste need never want for Sunday reading while he
can find the sermons of Taylor, and South, and Fuller—writers
of good theological repute—though, between
ourselves, I think one likelier to be delighted
with the poetry and quaint fancifulness of their style,
than edified by the piety it covers. I like to have a
quarto edition of Sir Thomas Brown on a near shelf,
or Milton's prose works, or Bacon. These are healthful
moods of the mind when lighter nutriment is distasteful.

“I am growing fastidious in poetry, and confine
myself more and more to the old writers. Castaly of
late runs shallow. Shelley's (peace to his passionate
heart!) was a deep draught, and Wordsworth and
Wilson sit near the well, and Keats and Barry Cornwall
have been to the fountain's lip, feeding their
imaginations (the latter his heart as well), but they
have brought back little for the world. The `small
silver stream' will, I fear, soon cease to flow down to
us, and as it dries back to its source, we shall close
nearer and nearer upon the `pure English undefiled.'
The dabblers in muddy waters (tributaries to Lethe)
will have Parnassus to themselves.

“The finest pleasures of reading come unbidden.
You can not, with your choicest appliances for the
body, always command the many-toned mind. In the
twilight alcove of a library, with a time-mellowed
chair yielding luxuriously to your pressure, a June
wind laden with idleness and balm floating in at the
window, and in your hand some Russia-bound rambling
old author, as Izaak Walton, good-humored and
quaint, one would think the spirit could scarce fail to
be conjured. Yet often, after spending a morning
hour restlessly thus, I have risen with my mind unhinged,
and strolled off with a book in my pocket to
the woods; and, as I live, the mood has descended
upon me under some chance tree, with a crooked root
under my head, and I have lain there, reading and
sleeping by turns, till the letters were blurred in the
dimness of twilight. It is the evil of refinement that
it breeds caprice. You will sometimes stand unfatigued
for hours on the steps of a library; or in a
shop, the eye will be arrested, and all the jostling of
customers and the looks of the jealous shopman will
not divert you till you have read out the chapter.

“I do not often indulge in the supernatural, for I
am an unwilling believer in ghosts, and the topic excites
me. But, for its connexion with the subject
upon which I am writing, I must conclude these
rambling observations with a late mysterious visitation
of my own.

“I had, during the last year, given up the early
summer tea-parties common in the town in which the
university stands; and having, of course, three or
four more hours than usual on my hands, I took to an
afternoon habit of imaginative reading. Shakspere
came first, naturally; and I feasted for the hundredth
time upon what I think his (and the world's) most
delicate creation—the `Tempest.' The twilight of
the first day overtook me at the third act, where the
banquet is brought in with solemn music by the fairy
troop of Prospero, and set before the shipwrecked
king and his followers. I closed the book, and leaning
back in my chair, abandoned myself to the crowd
of images which throng always upon the traces of
Shakspere. The fancy music was still in my mind,
when an apparently real strain of the most solemn
melody came to my ear, dying, it seemed to me as it
reached it, the tones were so expiringly faint and low.
I was not started, but lay quietly, holding my breath,
and more fearing when the strain would be broken,
than curious whence it came. The twilight deepended,
till it was dark, and it still played on, changing the
tune at intervals, but always of the same melancholy
sweetness; till, by-and-by, I lost all curiosity, and,
giving in to the charm, the scenes I had been reading
began to form again in my mind, and Ariel, with his
delicate ministers, and Prospero, and Miranda, and
Caliban, came moving before me to the measure, as
bright and vivid as the reality. I was disturbed in the
midst of it by Alfonse, who came in at the usual
hour with my tea; and, on starting to my feet, I listened
in vain for the continuance of the music. I sat
thinking of it a while, but dismissed it at last, and went
out to enjoy, in a solitary walk, the loveliness of the
summer night. The next day I resumed my book,
with a smile at my previous credulity, and had read
through the last scenes of the `Tempest,' when the
light failed me. I again closed the book, and presently
again, as if the sympathy was instantaneous, the
strain broke in, playing the same low and solemn melodies,
and falling with the same dying cadence upon
the ear. I listened to it, as before, with breathless attention;
abandoned myself once more to its irresistible
spell: and, half-waking, half-sleeping, fell again into
a vivid dream, brilliant as fairy-land, and creating itself
to the measures of the still audible music. I could
not now shake off my belief in its reality; but I was so
wrapt with its strange sweetness, and the beauty of my
dream, that I cared not whether it came from earth or
air. My indifference, singularly enough, continued
for several days; and, regularly at twilight, I threw
aside my book, and listened with dreamy wakefulness
for the music. It never failed me, and its results were
as constant as its coming. Whatever I had read—
sometimes a canto of Spenser, sometimes an act of a
play, or a chapter of romance—the scene rose before
me with the stately reality of a pageant. At last I
began to think of it more seriously; and it was a relief
to me one evening when Alfonse came in earlier than
usual with a message. I told him to stand perfectly
still; and after a minute's pause, during which I heard
distinctly an entire passage of a funeral hymn, I asked
him if he heard any music? He said he did not. My
blood chilled at his positive reply, and I bade him
listen once more. Still he heard nothing. I could
endure it no longer. It was to me as distinct and
audible as my own voice; and I rushed from my room
as he left me, shuddering to be left alone.

“The next day I thought of nothing but death.
Warnings by knells in the air, by apparitions, by mysterious
voices, were things I had believed in speculatively
for years, and now their truth came upon me
like conviction. I felt a dull, leaden presentiment
about my heart, growing heavier and heavier with
every passing hour. Evening came at last, and with
it, like a summons from the grave, a `dead march'
swelled clearly on the air. I felt faint and sick at
heart. This could not be fancy; and why was it, as
I thought I had proved, audible to my ear alone? I
threw open the window, and the first rush of the cool
north wind refreshed me; but, as if to mock my attempts
at relief, the dirge-like sounds rose, at the instant,
with treble distinctness. I seized my hat and
rushed into the street, but, to my dismay, every step
seemed to bring me nearer to the knell. Still I hurried
on, the dismal sounds growing distractingly louder,
till, on turning a corner that leads to the lovely

burying-ground of New Haven, I came suddenly upon
—a bell-foundry! In the rear had lately been hung,
for trial, the chiming bells just completed for the new
Trinity church, and the master of the establishment
informed me that one of his journeymen was a fine
player, and every day after his work, he was in the
habit of amusing himself with the `Dead March in
Saul,' the `Marsellois Hymn,' and other melancholy
and easy tunes, muffling the hammers that he might
not disturb the neighbors.”

I have had my reward for these speculations, dear
reader—a smile that is lying at this instant, perdu, in
the innermost recess of memory—and I care not much
(without offence) whether you like it or no. She
thanked me—she thought it well done—she laid her
head on my bosom while I read it in the old library of
the Flemings, and every word has been “paid for in
fairy gold.”

I have taken up a thread that lengthens as I unravel
it, and I can not well see how I shall come to the
end, without trespassing on your patience. We will
cut it here, if you like, and resume it after a pause;
but before I close, I must give you a little instance of
how love makes the dullest earth poetical. Edith
had given me a portefeuille crammed with all kinds of
embossed and curious note-paper, all quite too pretty
for use, and what I would show you are my verses
on the occasion. For a hand unpractised, then, in
aught save the “Gradus ad Parnassum,” I must own
I have fished them out of that same old portefeuille
(faded now from its glory, and worn with travel—but
O how cherished!) with a pleasant feeling of paternity:

2. PART II.
LOVE AND SPECULATION.

Edith Linsey was religious. There are many
intensifiers (a new word, that I can't get on without:
I submit it for admission into the language);—there
are many intensifiers, I say, to the passion of love;
such as pride, jealousy, poetry (money, sometimes,
Dio mio!) and idleness:[1] but, if the experience of
one who first studied the Art of Love in an “evangelical”
country is worth a para, there is nothing
within the bend of the rainbow that deepens the tender
passion like religion. I speak it not irreverently.
The human being that loves us throws the value of
its existence into the crucible, and it can do no more.
Love's best alchymy can only turn into affection what
is in the heart. The vain, the proud, the poetical,
the selfish, the weak, can and do fling their vanity,
pride, poetry, selfishness, and weakness, into a first
passion; but these are earthly elements, and there is
an antagonism in their natures that is for ever striving
to resolve them back to their original earth. But
religion is of the soul as well as the heart—the mind
as well as the affections—and when it mingles in love,
it is the infusion of an immortal essence into an unworthy
and else perishable mixture.

Edith's religion was equally without cant, and
without hesitation or disguise. She had arrived
at it by elevation of mind, aided by the habit of never
counting on her tenure of life beyond the setting of
the next sun, and with her it was rather an intellectual
exaltation than an humility of heart. She thought
of God because the subject was illimitable, and her
powerful imagination found in it the scope for which
she pined. She talked of goodness, and purity, and
disinterestedness, because she found them easy virtues
with a frame worn down with disease, and she was
removed by the sheltered position of an invalid from
the collision which tries so shrewdly in common life
the ring of our metal. She prayed, because the fulness
of her heart was loosed by her eloquence when
on her knees, and she found that an indistinct and
mystic unburthening of her bosom, even to the Deity,
was a hush and a relief. The heart does not always
require rhyme and reason of language and tears.

There are many persons of religious feeling who,
from a fear of ridicule or misconception, conduct themselves
as if to express a devout sentiment was a want
of taste or good-breeding. Edith was not of these.
Religion was to her a powerful enthusiasm, applied
without exception to every pursuit and affection. She
used it as a painter ventures on a daring color, or a
musician a new string in his instrument. She felt
that she aggrandized botany, or history, or friendship,
or love, or what you will, by making it a stepping-stone
to heaven, and she made as little mystery of it as
she did of breathing and sleep, and talked of subjects
which the serious usually enter upon with a suppressed
breath, as she would comment upon a poem or
define a new philosophy. It was surprising what an
impressiveness this threw over her in everything;
how elevated she seemed above the best of those
about her; and with what a worshipping and half-reverent
admiration she inspired all whom she did not
utterly neglect or despise. For myself, my soul was
drank up in hers as the lark is taken into the sky, and
I forgot there was a world beneath me in my intoxication.
I thought her an angel unrecognised on earth.
I believed her as pure from worldliness, and as spotless
from sin, as a cherub with his breast upon his
lute; and I knelt by her when she prayed, and held
her upon my bosom in her fits of faintness and exhaustion,
and sat at her feet with my face in her hands
listening to her wild speculations (often till the morning
brightened behind the curtains) with an utter and
irresistible abandonment of my existence to hers,
which seems to me now like a recollection of another
life—it were, with this conscious body and mind, a
self-relinquishment so impossible!

Our life was a singular one. Living in the midst

of a numerous household, with kind and cultivated
people about us, we were as separated from them as if
the ring of Gyges encircled us from their sight. Fred
wished me joy of my giraffe, as he offensively called
his cousin, and his sisters, who were quite too pretty to
have been left out of my story so long, were more indulgent,
I thought, to the indigenous beaux of Skaneateles
than those aboriginal specimens had a right to
expect; but I had no eyes, ears, sense, or civility for
anything but Edith. The library became a forbidden
spot to all feet but ours; we met at noon after our late
vigils and breakfasted together; a light sleigh was set
apart for our téle-à-téle drives over the frozen lake,
and the world seemed to me to revolve on its axle
with a special reference to Philip Slingsby's happiness.
I wonder whether an angel out of heaven would have
made me believe that I should ever write the story of
those passionate hours with a smile and a sneer! I
tell thee, Edith! (for thou wilt read every line that I
have written, and feel it, as far as thou canst feel anything),
that I have read “Faust” since, and thought
thee Mephistopheles! I have looked on thee since,
with thy cheek rosy dark, thy lip filled with the blood
of health, and curled with thy contempt of the world
and thy yet wild ambition to be its master-spirit and
idol, and struck my breast with instinctive self-questioning
if thou hadst given back my soul that was
thine own! I fear thee, Edith. Thou hast grown
beautiful that wert so hideous—the wonder-wrought
miracle of health and intellect, filling thy veins, and
breathing almost a newer shape over form and feature;
but it is not thy beauty; no, nor thy enthronement
in the admiration of thy woman's world. These are
little to me; for I saw thy loveliness from the first,
and I worshipped thee more in the duration of a
thought than a hecatomb of these worldlings in their
lifetime. I fear thy mysterious and unaccountable
power over the human soul! I can scorn thee here,
in another land, with an ocean weltering between us,
and anatomize the character that I alone have read
truly and too well, for the instruction of the world (its
amusement, too, proud woman—thou wilt writhe at
that)—but I confess to a natural and irresistible obedience
to the mastery of thy spirit over mine. I would
not willingly again touch the radius of thy sphere. I
would come out of Paradise to walk alone with the
devil as soon.

How little even the most instructed women knew
the secret of this power! They make the mistake of
cultivating only their own minds. They think that,
by self-elevation, they will climb up to the intellects
of men, and win them by seeming their equals. Shallow
philosophers! You never remember that to subdue
a human being to your will, it is more necessary
to know his mind than you own—that, in conquering
a heart vanity is the first out-post—that while your are
employing your wits in thinking how most effectually
to dazzle him, you should be sounding his character
for its undeveloped powers to assist him to dazzle you
—that love is a reflected light, and to be pleased with
others we must be first pleased with ourselves!

Edith (it has occurred to me in my speculations
since) seemed to me always an echo of myself. She
expressed my thought as it sprang into my brain. I
thought that in her I had met my double and counterpart,
with the reservation that I was a little the
stronger spirit, and that in my mind lay the material
of the eloquence that flowed from her lips—as the almond
that you endeavor to split equally leaves the
kernel in the deeper cavity of its shell. Whatever
the topic, she seemed using my thoughts, anticipating
my reflections, and, with an unobtrusive but thrilling
flattery, referring me to myself for the truth of what
I must know was but a suggestion of my own! O!
Lucrezia Borgia! if Machiavelli had but practised that
subtle cunning upon thee, thou wouldst have had lit
tle space in thy delirious heart for the passion that, in
the history of crime, has made thee the marvel and
the monster.

The charm of Edith to most people was that she
was no sublimation. Her mind seemed of any or no
stature. She was as natural, and earnest, and as satisfied
to converse, on the meanest subject as on the
highest. She overpowered nobody. She (apparently)
eclipsed nobody. Her passionate and powerful eloquence
was only lavished on the passionate and powerful.
She never misapplied herself: and what a
secret of influence and superiority is contained in that
single phrase! We so hate him who out-measures
us, as we stand side by side before the world!

I have in my portfolio several numbers of a manuscript
“Gazette,” with which the Flemings amused
themselves during the deep snows of the winter in
which I visited them. It was contributed to by everybody
in the house, and read aloud at the breakfast-table
on the day of its weekly appearance, and, quite
apropos to these remarks upon the universality of
Edith's mind, there is in one of them an essay of hers,
on what she calls minule philosophies. It is curious,
as showing how, with all her loftiness of speculation,
she descended sometimes to the examination of the
smallest machinery of enjoyment.

“The principal sources of everyday happiness,” (I
am copying out a part of the essay, dear reader), “are
too obvious to need a place in a chapter of breakfast-table
philosophy. Occupation and a clear conscience,
the very truant in the fields will tell you, are craving
necessities. But when these are secured, there are
lighter matters, which, to the sensitive and educated
at least, are to happiness what foliage is to the tree.
They are refinements which add to the beauty of life
without diminishing its strength; and, as they spring
only from a better use of our common gifts, they are
neither costly nor rare. I have learned secrets under
the roof of a poor man, which would add to the luxury
of the rich. The blessings of a cheerful fancy
and a quick eye come from nature, and the trailing of
a vine may develop them as well as the curtaining of
a king's chamber.

“Riding and driving are such stimulating pleasures,
that to talk of any management in their indulgence
seems superfluous. Yet we are, in motion or at rest,
equally liable to the caprices of feeling, and, perhaps,
the gayer the mood the deeper the shade cast on it by
untoward circumstances. The time of riding should
never be regular. It then becomes a habit, and habits,
though sometimes comfortable, never amount to
positive pleasure. I would ride when nature prompted—when
the shower was past, or the air balmy, or
the sky beautiful—whenever and wherever the significant
finger of Desire pointed. Oh! to leap into
the saddle when the west wind blows freshly, and gallop
off into its very eye, with an undrawn rein, careless
how far or whither; or, to spring up from a book
when the sun breaks through after a storm, and drive
away under the white clouds, through light and shadow,
while the trees are wet and the earth damp and
spicy; or, in the clear sunny afternoons of autumn,
with a pleasant companion on the seat beside you, and
the glorious splendor of the decaying foliage flushing
in the sunshine, to loiter up the valley dreaming over
the thousand airy castles that are stirred by such
shifting beauty—these are pleasures indeed, and such
as he who rides regularly after his dinner knows as
little of as the dray-horse of the exultation of the
courser.

“There is a great deal in the choice of a companion.
If he is an indifferent acquaintance, or an indiscriminate
talker, or has a coarse eye for beauty, or is
insensible to the delicacies of sensation or thought—
if he is sensual, or stupid, or practical constitutionally
—he will never do. He must be a man who can detect

a rare color in a leaf, or appreciate a peculiar
passage in scenery, or admire a grand outline in a
cloud; he must have accurate and fine senses, and a
heart, noble at least by nature, and subject still to her
direct influences; he must be a lover of the beautiful
in whatever shape it comes; and, above all, he must
have read and thought like a scholar, if not like a
poet. He will then ride by your side without crossing
your humor: if talkative, he will talk well, and if
silent, you are content, for you know that the same
grandeur or beauty which has wrought the silence, in
your own thoughts has given a color to his.

“There is much in the manner of driving. I like
a capricious rein—now fast through a hollow, and
now loiteringly on the edge of a road or by the bank
of a river. There is a singular delight in quickening
your speed in the animation of a climax, and in
coming down gently to a walk with a digression of
feeling, or a sudden sadness.

“An important item in household matters is the
management of light. A small room well-lighted is
much more imposing than a large one lighted ill.
Cross lights are painful to the eye, and they destroy
besides the cool and picturesque shadows of the furniture
and figures. I would have a room always partially
darkened: there is a repose in the twilight dimness
of a drawing-room which affects one with the
proper gentleness of the place: the out-of-door humor
of men is too rude, and the secluded light subdues
them fitly as they enter. I like curtains—heavy,
and of the richest material: there is a magnificence
in large crimson folds which nothing else equals, and
the color gives everything a beautiful teint as the light
streams through them. Plants tastefully arranged are
pretty; flowers are always beautiful. I would have my
own room like a painter's—one curtain partly drawn;
a double shadow has a nervous look. The effect of a
proper disposal of light upon the feelings is by most
people surprisingly neglected. I have no doubt that
as an habitual thing it materially affects the character;
the disposition for study and thought is certainly dependant
on it in no slight degree. What is more
contemplative than the twilight of a deep alcove in a
library? What more awakens thought than the dim
interior of an old church with its massive and shadowy
pillars?

“There may be the most exquisite luxury in furniture.
A crowded room has a look of comfort, and
suspended lamps throw a mellow depth into the features.
Descending light is always the most becoming;
it deepens the eye, and distributes the shadows in the
face judiciously. Chairs should be of different and
curious fashions, made to humor every possible weariness.
A spice-lamp should burn in the corner, and
the pictures should be colored of a pleasant tone, and
the subjects should be subdued and dreamy. It should
be a place you would live in for a century without an
uncomfortable thought. I hate a neat room. A dozen
of the finest old authors should lie about, and a new
novel, and the last new prints. I rather like the French
fashion of a bonbonniere, though that perhaps is an extravagance.

“There is a management of one's own familiar intercourse
which is more neglected, and at the same
time more important to happiness, than every other;
it is particularly a pity that this is not oftener understood
by newly-married people; as far as my own
observation goes, I have rarely failed to detect, far too
early, signs of ill-disguised and disappointed weariness.
It was not the reaction of excitement—not the return
to the quiet ways of home—but a new manner—a forgetful
indifference, believing itself concealed, and yet
betraying itself continually by unconscious and irrepressible
symptoms. I believe it resulted oftenest
from the same causes: partly that they saw each
other too much, and partly that when the form of eti
quette was removed, they forgot to retain its invaluable
essence—an assiduous and minute disinterestedness.
It seems nonsense to lovers, but absence is the
secret of respect, and therefore of affection. Love is
divine, but its flame is too delicate for a perpetual
household lamp; it should be burned only for incense,
and even then trimmed skilfully. It is wonderful how
a slight neglect, or a glimpse of a weakness, or a chance
defect of knowledge, dims its new glory. Lovers, married
or single, should have separate pursuits—they
should meet to respect each other for new and distinct
acquisitions. It is the weakness of human affections
that they are founded on pride, and waste with over-much
familiarity. And oh, the delight to meet after
hours of absence—to sit down by the evening lamp,
and with a mind unexhausted by the intercourse of
the day, to yield to the fascinating freedom of conversation,
and clothe the rising thoughts of affection in
fresh and unhackneyed language! How richly the
treasures of the mind are colored—not doled out,
counter by counter, as the visible machinery of thought
coins them, but heaped upon the mutual altar in lavish
and unhesitating profusion! And how a bold fancy assumes
beauty and power—not traced up through all its
petty springs till its dignity is lost by association, but
flashing full-grown and suddenly on the sense! The
gifts of no one mind are equal to the constant draught
of a lifetime; and even if they were, there is no one
taste which could always relish them. It is an humiliating
thought that immortal mind must be husbanded
like material treasure!

“There is a remark of Godwin, which, in rather
too strong language, contains a valuable truth: `A
judicious and limited voluptuousness,' he says, `is necessary
to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing
of the manners, to the refinement of the sentiment,
and to the development of the understanding; and a
woman deficient in this repect may be of use in the
government of our families, but can not add to the
enjoyment, nor fix the partiality of a man of taste!'
Since the days when `St. Leon' was written, the word
by which the author expressed his meaning is grown
perhaps into disrepute, but the remark is still one of
keen and observant discrimination. It refers (at least
so I take it) to that susceptibility to delicate attentions,
that fine sense of the nameless and exquisite tenderness
of manner and thought, which constitute in
the minds of its possessors the deepest undercurrent
of life—the felt and treasured, but unseen and inexpressible
richness of affection. It is rarely found in
the characters of men, but it outweighs, when it is, all
grosser qualities—for its possession implies a generous
nature, purity, fine affections, and a heart open to all
the sunshine and meaning of the universe. It belongs
more to the nature of woman; but indispensable as it
is to her character, it is oftener than anything else,
wanting. And without it, what is she? What is love
to a being of such dull sense that she hears only its
common and audible language, and sees nothing but
what it brings to her feet to be eaten, and worn, and
looked upon! What is woman, if the impassioned
language of the eye, or the deepened fulness of the
tone, or the tenderness of a slight attention, are things
unnoticed and of no value?—one who answers you
when you speak, smiles when you tell her she is grave,
assents barely to the expression of your enthusiasm,
but has no dream beyond—no suspicion that she has
not felt and reciprocated your feelings as fully as you
could expect or desire? It is a matter too little looked
to. Sensitive and ardent men too often marry with
a blindfold admiration of mere goodness or loveliness.
The abandon of matrimony soon dissipates the gay
dream, and they find themselves suddenly unsphered,
linked indissolubly with affections strangely different
from their own, and lavishing their only treasure on
those who can neither appreciate nor return it. The

after-life of such men is a stifling solitude of feeling.
Their avenues of enjoyment are their maniform sympathies,
and when these are shut up or neglected, the
heart is dark, and they have nothing to do thenceforward
but to forget.

“There are many, who, possessed of the capacity
for the more elevated affections, waste and lose it by
a careless and often unconscious neglect. It is not a
plant to grow untended. The breath of indifference,
or a rude touch, may destroy for ever its delicate texture.
To drop the figure, there is a daily attention to
the slight courtesies of life, and an artifice in detecting
the passing shadows of feeling, which alone can preserve,
through life, the first freshness of passion. The
easy surprises of pleasure, and earnest cheerfulness of
assent to slight wishes, the habitual respect to opinions,
the polite abstinence from personal topics in the
company of others, the assiduous and unwavering attention
to her comfort, at home and abroad, and, above
all, the absolute preservation in private of those proprieties
of conversation and manner which are sacred
before the world—are some of the thousand secrets of
that rare happiness which age and habit alike fail to
impair or diminish.”

2. II.

Vacation was over, but Fred and myself were still
lingering at Fleming Farm. The roads were impassable
with a premature THAW. Perhaps there is nothing
so peculiar in American meteorology as the phenomenon
which I alone probably, of all the imprisoned
inhabitants of Skaneateles, attributed to a kind and
“special Providence.” Summer had come back, like
Napoleon from Elba, and astonished usurping winter
in the plenitude of apparent possession and security.
No cloud foreboded the change, as no alarm preceded
the apparition of “the child of destiny.” We awoke
on a February morning, with the snow lying chin-deep
on the earth, and it was June! The air was soft
and warm—the sky was clear, and of the milky cerulean
of chrysoprase—the south wind (the same, save
his unperfumed wings, who had crept off like a satiated
lover in October) stole back suddenly from the
tropics, and found his flowery mistress asleep and insensible
to his kisses beneath her snowy mantle. The
sunset warmed back from its wintry purple to the
golden teints of heat, the stars burned with a less
vitreous sparkle, the meteors slid once more lambently
down the sky, and the house-dove sat on the eaves,
washing her breast in the snow-water, and thinking
(like a neglected wife at a capricious return of her
truant's tenderness) that the sunshine would last for
ever!

The air was now full of music. The water trickled
away under the snow, and, as you looked around and
saw no change or motion in the white carpet of the
earth, it seemed as if a myriad of small bells were ringing
under ground—fairies, perhaps, startled in midrevel
with the false alarm of summer, and hurrying
about with their silver anklets, to wake up the slumbering
flowers. The mountain-torrents were loosed,
and rushed down upon the valleys like the Children
of the Mist; and the hoarse war-cry, swelling and falling
upon the wind, maintained its perpetual undertone
like an accompaniment of bassoons; and occasionally,
in a sudden lull of the breeze, you would hear the
click of the undermined snow-drifts dropping upon the
earth, as if the chorister of spring were beating time
to the reviving anthem of nature.

The snow sunk perhaps a foot in a day, but it was
only perceptible to the eye where you could measure
its wet mark against a tree from which it had fallen
away, or by the rock, from which the dissolving bank
shrunk and separated, as if rocks and snow were as
heartless as ourselves and threw off their friends, too,
in their extremity! The low-lying lake, meantime,
surrounded by melting mountains, received the abandoned
waters upon its frozen bosom, and, spreading
them into a placid and shallow lagoon, separate by a
crystal plane from its own lower depths, gave them the
repose denied in the more elevated sphere in which
lay their birthright. And thus—(oh, how full is nature
of these gentle moralities!)—and thus sometimes
do the lowly, whose bosom, like the frozen lake, is at
first cold and unsympathetic to the rich and noble,
still receive them in adversity, and, when neighborhood
and dependance have convinced them that they
are made of the same common element, as the lake
melts its dividing and icy plane, and mingles the strange
waters with its own, do they dissolve the unnatural barrier
of prejudice, and take the humbled wanderer to
their bosom!

The face of the snow lost its dazzling whiteness as
the thaw went on—as disease steals away the beauty
of those we love—but it was only in the distance,
where the sun threw a shadow into the irregular pits
of the dissolving surface. Near to the eye (as the
dying one pressed to the bosom), it was still of its
original beauty, unchanged and spotless. And now
you are tired of my loitering speculations, gentle reader,
and we will return (please Heaven, only on paper!)
to Edith Linsey.

The roads were at last reduced to what is expressively
called, in New England, slosh (in New York,
posh, but equally descriptive), and Fred received a
hint from the judge that the mail had arrived in the
usual time, and his beaux jours were at an end.

A slighter thing than my departure would have been
sufficient to stagger the tottering spirits of Edith. We
were sitting at table when the letters came in, and the
dates were announced that proved the opening of the
roads; and I scarce dared to turn my eyes upon the
pale face that I could just see had dropped upon her
bosom. The next instant there was a general confusion,
and she was carried lifeless to her chamber.

A note, scarce legible, was put into my hand in the
course of the evening, requesting me to sit up for her
in the library. She would come to me, she said, if
she had strength.

It was a night of extraordinary beauty. The full
moon was high in the heavens at midnight, and there
had been a slight shower soon after sunset, which,
with the clearing-up wind, had frozen thinly into a
most fragile rime, and glazed everything open to the
sky with transparent crystal. The distant forest looked
serried with metallic trees, dazzlingly and unspeakably
gorgeous; and, as the night-wind stirred through them
and shook their crystal points in the moonlight—the
aggregated stars of heaven springing from their Maker's
hand to the spheres of their destiny, or the
march of the host of the archangel Michael with their
irradiate spear-points glittering in the air, or the diamond
beds of central earth thrust up to the sun in
some throe of the universe—would, each or all, have
been well bodied forth by such similitude.

It was an hour after midnight when Edith was supported
in by her maid, and, choosing her own position,
sunk into the broad window-seat, and lay with her head
on my bosom, and her face turned outward to the glittering
night. Her eyes had become, I thought, unnaturally
bright, and she spoke with an exhausted
faintness that gradually strengthened to a tone of the
most thrilling and melodious sweetness. I shall never
get that music out of my brain!

“Philip!” she said.

“I listen, dear Edith!”

“I am dying.”

And she looked it, and I believed her; and my heart
sunk to its deepest abyss of wretchedness with the
conviction.

She went on to talk of death. It was the subject

that pressed most upon her mind, and she could
scarce fail to be eloquent on any subject. She was
very eloquent on this. I was so impressed with the
manner in which she seemed almost to rhapsodize
between the periods of her faintness, as she lay in
my arms that night, that every word she uttered is
still fresh in my memory. She seemed to forget my
presence, and to commune with her own thoughts
aloud.

“I recollect,” she said, “when I was strong and
well (years ago, dear Philip!), I left my books on a
morning in May, and looking up to find the course of
the wind, started off alone for a walk into its very eye.
A moist steady breeze came from the southwest, driving
before it fragments of the dispersed clouds. The
air was elastic and clear—a freshness that entered freely
at every pore was coming up, mingled with the profuse
perfume of grass and flowers—the colors of the
new, tender foliage were particularly soothing to an
eye pained with close attention—and the just perceptible
murmur of the drops shaken from the trees, and
the peculiarly soft rustle of the wet leaves, made as
much music as an ear accustomed to the silence of
solitude could well relish. Altogether, it was one of
those rarely-tempered days when every sense is satisfied,
and the mind is content to lie still with its common
thoughts, and simply enjoy.

“I had proceeded perhaps a mile—my forehead
held up to the wind, my hair blowing back, and the
blood glowing in my cheeks with the most vivid flush
of exercise and health—when I saw coming toward
me a man apparently in middle life, but wasted by illness
to the extremest emaciation. His lip was colorless,
his skin dry and white, and his sunken eyes had
that expression of inquiring earnestness which comes
always with impatient sickness. He raised his head,
and looked steadily at me as I came on. My lips were
open, and my whole air must have been that of a person
in the most exulting enjoyment of health. I was
just against him, gliding past with an elastic step,
when, with his eye still fixed on me, he half turned,
and in a voice of inexpressible meaning, exclaimed,
`Merciful Heaven! how well she is!' I passed on,
with his voice still ringing in my ear. It haunted me
like a tone in the air. It was repeated in the echo of
my tread—in the panting of my heart. I felt it in the
beating of the strong pulse in my temples. As if it
was strange that I should be so well! I had never
before realized that it could be otherwise. It seemed
impossible to me that my strong limbs should fail me,
or the pure blood I felt bounding so bravely through
my veins could be reached and tainted by disease.
How should it come? If I ate, would it not nourish
me? If I slept, would it not refresh me? If I came
out in the cool, free air, would not my lungs heave,
and my muscles spring, and my face feel its grateful
freshness? I held out my arm, for the first time in my
life, with a doubt of its strength. I closed my hand
unconsciously, with a fear it would not obey. I drew
a deep breath, to feel if it was difficult to breathe; and
even my bounding step, that was as elastic then as a
fawn's, seemed to my excited imagination already to
have become decrepit and feeble.

“I walked on, and thought of death. I had never
before done so definitely; it was like a terrible shape
that had always pursued me dimly, but which I had
never before turned and looked steadily on. Strange!
that we can live so constantly with that threatening
hand hung over us, and not think of it always! Strange!
that we can use a limb, or enter with interest into any
pursuit of time, when we know that our continued
life is almost a daily miracle!

“How difficult it is to realize death! How difficult
it is to believe that the hand with whose every vein
you are familiar, will ever lose its motion and its
warmth? That the quick eye, which is so restless
now, will settle and grow dull? That the refined lip,
which now shrinks so sensitively from defilement, will
not feel the earth lying upon it, and the tooth of the
feeding worm? That the free breath will be choked,
and the forehead be pressed heavily on by the decaying
coffin, and the light and air of heaven be shut quite
out; and this very body, warm, and breathing, and
active as it is now, will not feel uneasiness or pain?
I could not help looking at my frame as these thoughts
crowded on me; and I confess I almost doubted my
own convictions—there was so much strength and
quickness in it—my hand opened so freely, and my
nostrils expanded with such a satisfied thirst to the
moist air. Ah! it is hard to believe at first that we
must die! harder still to believe and realize the repulsive
circumstances that follow that terrible change!
It is a bitter thought at the lightest. There is little
comfort in knowing that the soul will not be there—
that the sense and the mind that feel and measure suffering,
will be gone. The separation is too great a
mystery to satisfy fear. It is the body that we know.
It is this material frame in which the affections have
grown up. The spirit is a mere thought—a presence
that we are told of, but do not see. Philosophize as
we will, the idea of existence is connected indissolubly
with the visible body, and its pleasant and familiar
senses. We talk of, and believe, the soul's ascent to
its Maker; but it is not ourselves—it is not our own
conscious breathing identity that we send up in imagination
through the invisible air. It is some phantom
that is to issue forth mysteriously, and leave us gazing
on it in wonder. We do not understand, we can not
realize it.

“At the time I speak of, my health had been always
unbroken. Since then, I have known disease in many
forms, and have had, of course, more time and occasion
for the contemplation of death. I have never,
till late, known resignation. With my utmost energy
I was merely able, in other days, to look upon it with
quiet despair; as a terrible, unavoidable evil. I remember
once, after severe suffering for weeks, I overheard
the physician telling my mother that I must
die, and from that moment the thought never left me.
A thin line of light came in between the shutters of
the south window; and, with this one thought fastened
on my mind, like the vulture of Prometheus, I lay
and watched it, day after day, as it passed with its
imperceptible progress over the folds of my curtains.
The last faint gleam of sunset never faded from its
damask edge, without an inexpressible sinking of my
heart, and a belief that I should see its pleasant light
no more. I turned from the window when even imagination
could find the daylight no longer there, and
felt my pulse and lifted my head to try my remaining
strength. And then every object, yes, even the meanest,
grew unutterably dear to me; my pillow, and the
cup with which my lips were moistened, and the cooling
amber which I had held in my hand, and pressed
to my burning lips when the fever was on me—everything
that was connected with life, and that would remain
among the living when I was gone.

“It is strange, but with all this clinging to the world
my affection for the living decreased sensibly. I grew
selfish in my weakness. I could not bear that they
should go from my chamber into the fresh air, and
have no fear of sickness and no pain. It seemed unfeeling
that they did not stay and breathe the close
atmosphere of my room—at least till I was dead.—
How could they walk round so carelessly, and look
on a fellow-creature dying helplessly and unwillingly,
and never shed a tear! And then the passing courtesies
exchanged with the family at the door, and the
quickened step on the sidewalk, and the wandering looks
about my room, even while I was answering with my
difficult breath their cold inquiries! There was an inhuman
carelessness in all this that stung me to the soul.

“I craved sympathy as I did life; and yet I doubted
it all. There was not a word spoken by the friends
who were admitted to see me, that I did not ponder
over when they were gone, and always with an impatient
dissatisfaction. The tone, and the manner,
and the expression of face, all seemed forced; and
often, in my earlier sickness, when I had pondered for
hours on the expressed sympathy of some one I had
loved, the sense of utter helplessness which crowded
on me with my conviction of their insincerity, quite
overcame me. I have lain night after night, and
looked at my indifferent watchers: and oh how I
hated them for their careless ease, and their snatched
moments of repose! I could scarce keep from dashing
aside the cup they came to give me so sluggishly.

“It is singular that, with all our experience of sickness,
we do not attend more to these slight circumstances.
It can scarce be conceived how an ill-managed
light, or a suppressed whispering, or a careless
change of attitude, in the presence of one whose senses
are so sharpened, and whose mind is so sensitive as a
sick person's, irritate and annoy. And, perhaps, more
than these to bear, is the affectedly subdued tone of
condolence. I remember nothing which I endured so
impatiently.

“Annoyances like these, however, scarcely diverted
for a moment the one great thought of death. It became
at last familiar, but, if possible, more dreadfully
horrible from that very fact. It was giving it a new
character. I realized it more. The minute circumstances
became nearer and more real—I tried the position
in which I should lie in my coffin—I lay with
my arms to my side, and my feet together, and with
the cold sweat standing in large drops on my lip, composed
my features into a forced expression of tranquillity.

“I awoke on the second morning after the hope of
my recovery had been abandoned. There was a narrow
sunbeam lying in a clear crimson line across the
curtain, and I lay and watched the specks of lint sailing
through it, like silver-winged insects, and the thin
dust, quivering and disappearing on its definite limit,
in a dream of wonder. I had thought not to see
another sun, and my mind was still fresh with the expectation
of an immediate change; I could not believe
that I was alive. The dizzy throb in my temples was
done; my limbs felt cool and refreshed; my mind had
that feeling of transparency which is common after
healthful and sweet sleep; and an indefinite sensation
of pleasure trembled in every nerve. I thought that
this might be death, and that, with this exquisite feeling
of repose, I was to linger thus consciously with
the body till the last day; and I dwelt on it pleasantly
with my delicious freedom from pain. I felt no regret
for life—none for a friend even: I was willing—quite
willing—to lie thus for ages. Presently the physician
entered; he came and laid his fingers on my pulse,
and his face brightened. `You will get well,' he said,
and I heard it almost without emotion. Gradually,
however, the love of life returned; and as I realized it
fully, and all the thousand chords which bound me to
it vibrated once more, the tears came thickly to my eyes,
and a crowd of delightful thoughts pressed cheerfully
and glowingly on me. No language can do justice
to the pleasure of convalescence from extreme sickness.
The first step upon the living grass—the first
breath of free air—the first unsuppressed salutation of
a friend—my fainting heart, dear Philip, rallies and
quickens even now with the recollection.”

I have thrown into a continuous strain what was
murmured to me between pauses of faintness, and with
difficulty of breath that seemed overpowered only by
the mastery of the eloquent spirit apparently trembling
on its departure. I believed Edith Linsey would die
that night; I believed myself listening to words spoken
almost from heaven; and if I have wearied you, dear
reader, with what must be more interesting to me than
to you, it is because every syllable was burnt like
enamel into my soul, in my boundless reverence and
love.

It was two o'clock, and she still lay breathing painfully
in my arms. I had thrown up the window, and
the soft south wind, stirring gently among the tinkling
icicles of the trees, came in, warm and genial, and she
leaned over to inhale it, as if it came from the source
of life. The stars burned gloriously in the heavens;
and, in a respite of her pain, she lay back her head,
and gazed up at them with an inarticulate motion of
her lips, and eyes so unnaturally kindled, that I thought
reason had abandoned her.

“How beautiful are the stars to night, Edith!” I
said, with half a fear that she would answer me in
madness.

“Yes,” she said, putting my hand (that pressed her
closer, involuntary, to my bosom) first to her lips—
“Yes; and, beautiful as they are, they are all accurately
numbered and governed, and just as they burn
now have they burned since the creation, never `faint
in their watches,' and never absent from their place.
How glorious they are! How thrilling it is to see them
stand with such a constant silence in the sky, unsteadied
and unsupported, obeying the great law of
their Maker! What pure and silvery light it is! How
steadily it pours from those small fountains, giving
every spot of earth its due portion! The hovel and
the palace are shone upon equally, and the shepherd
gets as broad a beam as the king, and these few rays
that are now streaming into my feverish eyes were
meant and lavished only for me! I have often
thought—has it never occurred to you, dear Philip?—
how ungrateful we are to call ourselves poor, when
there is so much that no poverty can take away!
Clusters of silver rays from every star in these heavens
are mine. Every breeze that breaks on my forehead
was sent for my refreshment. Every tinkle and ray
from those stirring and glistening icicles, and the invigorating
freshness of this unseasonable and delicious
wind, and moonlight, and sunshine, and the glory of
the planets, are all gifts that poverty could not take
away! It is not often that I forget these treasures; for
I have loved nature, and the skies of night and day, in
all their changes, from my childhood, and they have
been unspeakably dear to me; for in them I see the
evidence of an Almighty Maker, and in the excessive
beauty of the stars and the unfading and equal splendor
of their steadfast fires, I see glimpses of an immortal
life, and find an answer to the eternal questioning
within me!

“Three! The village clock reaches us to night.
Nay, the wind can not harm me now. Turn me more
to the window, for I would look nearer upon the stars:
it is the last time—I am sure of it—the very last! Yet
to-morrow night those stars will all be there—not one
missing from the sky, nor shining one ray the less because
I am dead! It is strange that this thought
should be so bitter—strange that the companionship
should be so close between our earthly affections and
those spiritual worlds—and stranger yet, that, satisfied
as we must be that we shall know them nearer
and better when released from our flesh, we still cling
so fondly to our earthly and imperfect vision. I feel,
Philip, that I shall traverse hereafter every star in those
bright heavens. If the course of that career of knowledge,
which I believe in my soul it will be the reward
of the blessed to run, be determined in any degree by
the strong desires that yearn so sickeningly within us,
I see the thousand gates of my future heaven shining
at this instant above me. There they are! the clustering
Pleiades, with `their sweet influences;' and
the morning star, melting into the east with its transcendent
lambency and whiteness; and the broad galaxy,
with its myriads of bright spheres, dissolving into

each other's light, and belting the heavens like a girdle.
I shall see them all! I shall know them and
their inhabitants as the angels of God know them;
the mystery of their order, and the secret of their
wonderful harmony, and the duration of their appointed
courses—all will be made clear!”

I have trespassed again, most indulgent reader, on
the limits of these Procrustean papers. I must defer
the “change” that “came o'er the spirit of my dream”
till another mood and time. Meanwhile, you may
consider Edith, if you like, the true heart she thought
herself (and I thought her) during her nine deaths in
the library; and you will have leisure to imagine the
three years over which we shall skip with this finale,
during which I made a journey to the north, and danced
out a winter in your own territories at Quebec—a circumstance
I allude to, no less to record the hospitalities
of the garrison of that time (this was in 27—were
you there?) than to pluck forth from Time's hinder-most
wallet a modest copy of verses I addressed thence
to Edith. She sent them back to me considerably
mended; but I give you the original draught, scorning
her finger in my poesies.

3. PART III. A DIGRESSION.

It was a September night at the university. On the
morrow I was to appear upon the stage as the winner
of the first honors of my year. I was the envy—the
admiration—in some degree the wonder, of the col
legiate town in which the university stands; for I had
commenced my career as the idlest and most riotous
of freshmen. What it was that had suddenly made
me enamored of my chambers and my books—that
had saddened my manners and softened my voice—that
had given me a disgust to champagne and my old allies,
in favor of cold water and the Platonists—that, in
short, had metamorphosed, as Bob Wilding would
have said, a gentleman-like rake and vau-rien into so
dull a thing as an exemplary academician—was past
the divining of most of my acquaintances. Oh, once-loved
Edith! hast thou any inkling in thy downward
metempsychosis of the philosophy of this marvel?

If you were to set a poet to make a town, with
carte blanche as to trees, gardens, and green blinds,
he would probably turn out very much such a place
as New Haven. (Supposing your education in geography
to have been neglected, dear reader, this is
the second capital of Connecticut, a half-rural, half-metropolitan
town, lying between a precipice that
makes the fag-end of the Green mountains and a
handsome bay in Long-Island sound.) The first
thought of the inventor of New Haven was to lay out
the streets in parallelograms, and the second was to
plant them from suburb to water-side with the magnificent
elms of the country. The result is, that at
the end of fifty years, the town is buried in leaves. If
it were not for the spires of the churches, a bird flying
over on his autumn voyage to the Floridas would
never mention having seen it in his travels. It is a
glorious tree, the elm—and those of the place I speak
of are famous, even in our land of trees, for their surprising
size and beauty. With the curve of their
stems in the sky, the long weepers of their outer and
lower branches drop into the street, fanning your face
as you pass under with their geranium-like leaves;
and close overhead, interwoven like the trellice of a
vine, they break up the light of the sky into golden
flecks, and make you, of the common highway, a
bower of the most approved secludedness and beauty.
The houses are something between an Italian palace
and an English cottage-built of wood, but, in the
dim light of those overshadowing trees, as fair to the
eye as marble with their triennial coats of paint; and
each stands in the midst of its own encircling grassplot,
half buried in vines and flowers, and facing outward
from a cluster of gardens divided by slender
palings, and filling up with fruit-trees and summerhouses
the square on whose limit it stands. Then,
like the vari-colored parallelograms upon a chessboard,
green openings are left throughout the town,
fringed with triple and interweaving elm-rows, the long
and weeping branches sweeping downward to the
grass, and with their enclosing shadows keeping moist
and cool the road they overhang; and fair forms (it is
the garden of American beauty—New-Haven) flit
about in the green light in primitive security and freedom,
and you would think the place, if you alit upon
it in a summer's evening—what it seems to me now
in memory, and what I have made it in this Rosa-Matilda
description—a scene from Boccacio, or a
vision from long-lost Arcady.

New Haven may have eight thousand inhabitants.
Its steamers run to New York in six hours (or did in
my time—I have ceased to be astonished on that subject,
and should not wonder if they did it now in one
—a trifle of seventy miles up the sound), and the
ladies go up in the morning for a yard of bobbin and
return at night, and the gentlemen the same for a
stroll in Broadway; and it is to this circumstance that,
while it preserves its rural exterior, it is a very metropolitan
place in the character of its society. The
Armaryllis of the petty cottage you admire wears the
fashion twenty days from Paris, and her shepherd has
a coat from Nugee, the divine peculiarity of which is
not yet suspected east of Bond street; and, in the

newspaper hanging half out of the window, there is
news, red-hot with the velocity of its arrival, from
Russia and the Rocky Mountains, from the sources of
the Mississippi and the brain of Monsieur Herbault.
Distance is an imaginary quantity, and Time, that
used to give everything the go-by, has come to a
stand-still in his astonishment. There will be a proposition
in congress ere long to do without him altogether—every
new thing “saves time” so marvellously.

Bright as seems to me this seat of my Alma
Mater, however, and gayly as I describe it, it is to
me, if I may so express it, a picture of memory
glazed and put away; if I see it ever again, it will
be but to walk through its embowered streets by
a midnight moon. It is vain and heart-breaking to go
back, after absence, to any spot of earth of which the
interest was the human love whose home and cradle it
had been. But there is a period in our lives when
the heart fuses and compounds with the things about
it, and the close enamel with which it overruns and
binds in the affections, and which hardens in the
lapse of years till the immortal germ within is not
more durable and unwasting, warms never again, nor
softens; and there is nothing on earth so mournful
and unavailing as to return to the scenes which are
unchanged, and look to return to ourselves and others
as we were when we thus knew them.

Yet we think (I judge you by my own soul, gentle
reader) that it is others—not we—who are changed!
We meet the friend that we loved in our youth, and it
is ever he who is cold and altered! We take the
hand that we bent over with our passionate kisses in
boyhood, and our raining tears when we last parted,
and it is ever hers that returns not the pressure, and
her eyes, and not ours—oh, not ours!—that look back
the moistened and once familiar regard with a dry lid
and a gaze of stone! Oh God! it is ever he—the
friend you have worshipped—for whom you would
have died—who gives you the tips of his fingers, and
greets you with a phrase of fashion, when you would
rush into his bosom and break your heart with weeping
out the imprisoned tenderness of years! I could
carve out the heart from my bosom, and fling it with
a malison into the sea, when I think how utterly and
worse than useless it is in this world of mocking
names! Yet “love” and “friendship” are words
that read well. You could scarce spare them in
poetry.

2. II.

It was, as I have said, a moonlight night of unparalleled
splendor. The morrow was the college anniversary—the
day of the departure of the senior class
—and the town, which is, as it were, a part of the university,
was in the usual tumult of the gayest and
saddest evening of the year. The night was warm,
and the houses, of which the drawing-rooms are all
on a level with the gardens in the rear, and through
which a long hall stretches like a ball-room, were
thrown open, doors and windows, and the thousand
students of the university, and the crowds of their
friends, and the hosts of strangers drawn to the place
at this season by the annual festivities, and the families,
every one with a troop of daughters (as the leaves
on our trees, compared with those of old countries—
three to one—so are our sons and daughters) were all
sitting without lamps in the moon-lit rooms, or strolling
together, lovers and friends, in the fragrant gardens,
or looking out upon the street, returning the
greetings of the passers-by, or, with heads uncovered,
pacing backward and forward beneath the elms before
the door—the whole scene one that the angels in
heaven might make a holyday to see.

There were a hundred of my fellow-seniors—young
men of from eighteen to twenty-four—every one of
whom was passing the last evening of the four most
impressible and attaching years of his life, with the
family in which he had been most intimate, in a town
where refinement and education had done their utmost
upon the society, and which was renowned
throughout America for the extraordinary beauty of
its women. They had come from every state in the
Union, and the Georgian and the Vermontese, the
Kentuckian and the Virginian, were to start alike on
the morrow-night with a lengthening chain for home,
each bearing away the hearts he had attached to him
(one or more!) and leaving his own, till, like the magnetized
needle, it should drop away with the weakened
attraction; and there was probably but one that
night in the departing troop who was not whispering
in some throbbing ear the passionate but vain and
mocking avowal of fidelity in love! And yet I had
had my attachments too; and there was scarce a
house in that leafy and murmuring paradise of friendship
and trees, that would not have hailed me with
acclamation had I entered the door; and I make this
record of kindness and hospitality (unforgotten after
long years of vicissitude and travel), with the hope
that there may yet live some memory as constant as
mine, and that some eye will read it with a warmth in
its lid, and some lip—some one at least—murmur, “I
remember him!” There are trees in that town whose
drooping leaves I could press to my lips with an affection
as passionate as if they were human, though the
lips and voices that have endeared them to me are as
changed as the foliage upon the branch, and would
recognise my love as coldly.

There was one, I say, who walked the thronged
pavement alone that night, or but with such company
as Uhland's;[2] yet the heart of that solitary senior was
far from lonely. The palm of years of ambition was
in his grasp—the reward of daily self-denial and midnight
watching—the prize of a straining mind and
a yearning desire; and there was not one of the many
who spoke of him that night in those crowded rooms,
either to rejoice in his success or to wonder at its attainment,
who had the shadow of an idea what spirit
sat uppermost in his bosom. Oh! how common is
this ignorance of human motives! How distant, and
slight, and unsuspected, are the springs often of the
most desperate achievement! How little the world
knows for what the poet writes, the scholar toils, the
politician sells his soul, and the soldier perils his life!
And how insignificant and unequal to the result would
seem these invisible wires, could they be traced back
from the hearts whose innermost resource and faculty
they have waked and exhausted! It is a startling
thing to question even your own soul for its motive.
Ay, even in trifles. Ten to one you are surprised at
the answer. I have asked myself, while writing this
sentence, whose eye it is most meant to please; and,
as I live, the face that is conjured up at my bidding is
of one of whom I have not had a definite thought for
years. I would lay my life she thinks at this instant
I have forgotten her very name. Yet I know she
will read this page with an interest no other could
awaken, striving to trace in it the changes that have
come over me since we parted. I know (and I knew
then, though we never exchanged a word save in
friendship), that she devoted her innermost soul when
we strayed together by that wild river in the West
(dost thou remember it, dear friend? for now I speak
to thee!) to the study of a mind and character of which

she thought better than the world or their possessor;
and I know—oh, how well I know!—that with husband
and children around her, whom she loves and
to whom she is devoted, the memory of me is laid
away in her heart like a fond but incomplete dream
of what once seemed possible—the feeling with which
the mother looks on her witless boy, and loves him
more for what he might have been, than his brothers
for what they are!

I scarce know what thread I dropped to take up this
improvista digression (for, like “Opportunity and the
Hours,” I “never look back;”[3] ) but let us return to
the shadow of the thousand elms of New Haven.

The Gascon thought his own thunder and lightning
superior to that of other countries, but I must run the
hazard of your incredulity as well, in preferring an
American moon. In Greece and Asia Minor, perhaps
(ragione—she was first worshipped there), Cytheris
shines as brightly; but the Ephesian of Connecticut
sees the flaws upon the pearly buckler of the goddess,
as does the habitant of no other clime. His eye lies
close to the moon. There is no film, and no visible
beam in the clarified atmosphere. Her light is less
an emanation than a presence—the difference between
the water in a thunder-shower and the depths of
the sea. The moon struggles to you in England—
she is all about you, like an element of the air, in
America.

The night was breathless, and the fragmented light
lay on the pavement in motionless stars, as clear and
definite in their edges as if the “patines of bright gold”
had dropped through the trees, and lay glittering beneath
my feet. There was a kind of darkness visible
in the streets, overshadowed as they were by the massy
and leaf-burthened elms, and as I looked through the
houses, standing in obscurity myself, the gardens
seemed full of daylight—the unobstructed moon
poured with such a flood of radiance on the flowery
alleys within, and their gay troops of promenaders.
And as I distinguished one and another familiar friend,
with a form as familiar clinging to his side, and, with
drooping head and faltering step, listening or replying
(I well knew), to the avowals of love and truth, I murmured
in thought to my own far away, but never-forgotten
Edith, a vow as deep—ay, deeper than theirs,
as my spirit and hers had been sounded by the profounder
plummet of sorrow and separation. How the
very moonlight—how the stars of heaven—how the
balm in the air, and the languor of summer night in
my indolent frame, seemed, in those hours of loneliness,
ministers at the passionate altar-fires of my love!
Forsworn and treacherous Edith! do I live to write
this for thine eye?

I linger upon these trifles of the past—these hours
for which I would have borrowed wings when they
were here—and, as then they seemed but the flowering
promise of happiness, they seem now like the fruit,
enjoyed and departed. Past and future bliss there
would seem to be in the world—knows any one of
such a commodity in the present? I have not seen
it in my travels.

3. III.

I was strolling on through one of the most fashionable
and romantic streets (when did these two words
ever before find themselves in a sentence together?)
when a drawing-room with which I was very familiar,
lit, unlike most others on that bright night, by a suspended
lamp, and crowded with company, attracted
my attention for a moment. Between the house and
the street there was a slight shrubbery shut in by a
white paling, just sufficient to give an air of seclusion
to the low windows without concealing them from the
passer-by, and, with the freedom of an old visiter, I
unconsciously stopped, and looked unobserved into
the rooms. It was the residence of a magnificent
girl, who was generally known as the Connecticut
beauty—a singular instance in America of what is
called in England a fine woman. (With us that word
applies wholly to moral qualities.) She was as large
as Juno, and a great deal handsomer, if the painters
have done that much-snubbed goddess justice. She
was a “book of beauty” printed with virgin type;
and that, by the way, suggests to me what I have all
my life been trying to express—that some women
seem wrought of new material altogether, apropos to
others who seem mortal réchauffes—as if every limb
and feature had been used, and got out of shape in
some other person's service. The lady I speak of
looked new—and her name was Isidora.

She was standing just under the lamp, with a single
rose in her hair, listening to a handsome coxcomb of
a classmate of mine with evident pleasure. She was
a great fool, (did I mention that before?) but weak,
and vacant, and innocent of an idea as she was,
Faustina was not more naturally majestic, nor Psyche
(soit elle en grande) more divinely and meaningly
graceful. Loveliness and fascination came to her as
dew and sunshine to the flowers, and she obeyed her
instinct, as they theirs, and was helplessly, and without
design, the loveliest thing in nature. I do not
see, for my part, why all women should not be so.
They are as useful as flowers; they perpetuate our
species.

I was looking at her with irresistible admiration,
when a figure stepped out from the shadow of a tree,
and my chum, monster, and ally, Job Smith (of whom
I have before spoken in these historical papers), laid
his hand on my shoulder.

“Do you know, my dear Job,” I said, in a solemn
tone of admonition, “that blind John was imprisoned
for looking into people's windows?”

But Job was not in the vein for pleasantry. The
light fell on his face as I spoke to him, and a more
haggard, almost blasted expression of countenance, I
never saw even in a madhouse. I well knew he had
loved the splendid girl that stood unconsciously in our
sight, since his first year in college; but that it would
ever so master him, or that he could link his monstrous
deformity, even in thought, with that radiant
vision of beauty, was a thing that I thought as probable
as that hirsute Pan would tempt from her sphere
the moon that kissed Endymion.

“I have been standing here looking at Isidora, ever
since you left me,” said he. (We had parted three
hours before, at twilight.)

“And why not go in, in the name of common
sense?”

“Oh! God, Phil!—with this demon in my heart?
Can you see my face in this light?”

It was too true, he would have frightened the
household gods from their pedestals.

“But what would you do, my dear Job? Why
come here to madden yourself with a sight you must
have known you would see.

“Phil?”

“What, my dear boy?”

“Will you do me a kindness?”

“Certainly.”

“Isidora would do anything you wished her to do.'

“Um! with a reservation, my dear chum!”

“But she would give you the rose that is in her
hair.”

“Without a doubt.”

“And for me—if you told her it was for me.
Would she not?”

“Perhaps. But will that content you?”

“It will soften my despair. I will never look on
her face more; but I should like my last sight of her
to be associated with kindness?”

Poor Job! how true it is that “affection is a fire
which kindleth as well in the bramble as in the oak,
and catcheth hold where it first lighteth, not where it
may best burn.” I do believe in my heart that the
soul in thee was designed for a presentable body—thy
instincts were so invariably mistaken. When didst
thou ever think a thought, or stir hand or foot, that it
did not seem prompted, monster though thou wert, by
conscious good-looking-ness! What a lying similitude
it was that was written on every blank page in
thy Lexicon: “Larks that mount in the air, build
their nests below in the earth; and women that cast
their eyes upon kings, may place their hearts upon
vassals.” Apelles must have been better looking than
Alexander, when Campaspe said that!

As a general thing you may ask a friend freely to
break any three of the commandments in your service,
but you should hesitate to require of friendship a violation
of etiquette. I was in a round jacket and boots,
and it was a dress evening throughout New Haven. I
looked at my dust-covered feet, when Job asked me
to enter a soirée upon his errand, and passed my
thumb and finger around the edge of my white jacket;
but I loved Job as the Arabian loves his camel, and for
the same reason, with a difference—the imperishable
well-spring he carried in his heart through the desert
of the world, and which I well knew he would give up
his life to offer at need, as patiently as the animal
whose construction (inner and outer) he so remarkably
resembled. When I hesitated, and looked down at
my boots, therefore, it was less to seek for an excuse
to evade the sacrificing office required of me, than to
beat about in my unprepared mind for a preface to my
request. If she had been a woman of sense, I should
have had no difficulty; but it requires caution and
skill to go out of the beaten track with a fool.

“Would not the rose do as well,” said I, in desperate
embarrassment, “if she does not know that it is
for you, my dear Job?” It would have been very
easy to have asked for it for myself.

Job laid his hand upon his side, as if I could not
comprehend the pang my proposition gave him.

“Away prop, and down, scaffold,” thought I, as I
gave my jacket a hitch, and entered the door.

“Mr. Slingsby,” announced the servant.

“Mr. Slingsby?” inquired the mistress of the house,
seeing only a white jacket in the clair obscur of the
hall.

“Mr. Slingsby!!!” cried out twenty voices in
amazement, as I stepped over the threshold into the
light.

It has happened since the days of Thebet Ben Khorat,
that scholars have gone mad, and my sanity was
evidently the uppermost concern in the minds of all
present. (I should observe, that in those days, I relished
rather of dandyism.) As I read the suspicion
in their minds, however, a thought struck me. I went
straight up to Miss Higgins, and, sotto voce, asked her
to take a turn with me in the garden.

“Isidora,” I said, “I have long known your superiority
of mind” (when you want anything of a woman,
praise her for that in which she is most deficient,
says La Bruyère), “and I have great occasion to rely
on it in the request I am about to make of you.”

She opened her eyes, and sailed along the gravel-walk
with heightened majesty. I had not had occasion
to pay her a compliment before since my freshman
year.

“What is it, Mr. Slingsby?”

“You know Smith—my chum.”

“Certainly.”

“I have just come from him.”

“Well!”

“He is gone mad!”

“Mad! Mr. Slingsby?”

“Stark and furious!”

“Gracious goodness!”

“And all for you!”

“For me!!”

“For you!” I thought her great blue eyes would
have become what they call in America “sot,” at this
astounding communication.

“Now, Miss Higgins,” I continued, “pray listen;
my poor friend has such extraordinary muscular
strength, that seven men can not hold him.”

“Gracious!”

“And he has broken away, and is here at your
door.”

“Good gracious!”

“Don't be afraid! He is as gentle as a kitten when
I am present. And now hear my request. He leaves
town to-morrow, as you well know, not to return. I
shall take him home to Vermont with keepers. He
is bent upon one thing, and in that you must humor
him.”

Miss Higgins began to be alarmed.

“He has looked through the window and seen you
with a rose in your hair, and, despairing even in his
madness of your love, he says, that if you would give
him that rose, with a kind word, and a farewell, he
should be happy. You will do it, will you not?”

“Dear me! I should be so afraid to speak to him!”

“But will you? and I'll tell you what to say.”

Miss Higgins gave a reluctant consent, and I passed
ten minutes in drilling her upon two sentences, which,
with her fine manner and sweet voice, really sounded
like the most interesting thing in the world. I left her
in the summer-house at the end of the garden, and
returned to Job.

“You have come without it!” said the despairing
lover, falling back against the tree.

“Miss Higgins' compliments, and begs you will go
round by the gate, and meet her in the summer-house.
She prefers to manage her own affairs.”

“Good God! are you mocking me?”

“I will accompany you, my dear boy.”

There was a mixture of pathos and ludicrousness
in that scene which starts a tear and a laugh together,
whenever I recall it to my mind. The finest heart in
the world, the most generous, the most diffident of
itself, yet the most self-sacrificing and delicate, was
at the altar of its devotion, offering its all in passionate
abandonment for a flower and a kind word; and she,
a goose in the guise of an angel, repeated a phrase of
kindness of which she could not comprehend the
meaning or the worth, but which was to be garnered
up by that half-broken heart, as a treasure that repaid
him for years of unrequited affection! She recited it
really very well. I stood at the latticed door, and interrupted
them the instant there was a pause in the
dialogue; and getting Job away as fast as possible, I
left Miss Higgins with a promise of secrecy, and resumed
my midnight stroll.

Apropos—among Job's letters is a copy of verses,
which, spite of some little inconsistencies, I think
were written on this very occasion:—

If Job had rejoiced in a more euphonious name, I
should have bought a criticism in some review, and
started him fairly as a poet. But “Job Smith!”—
“Poems by Job Smith!”—It would never do! If he
wrote like a seraph, and printed the book at his own
expense, illustrated and illuminated, and half-a-crown
to each person that would take one away, the critics
would damn him all the same! Really, one's father
and mother have a great deal to answer for!

But Job is a poet who should have lived in the
middle ages, no less for the convenience of the nom de
guerre, fashionable in those days, than because his
poetry, being chiefly the mixed product of feeling and
courtesy, is particularly susceptible to ridicule. The
philosophical and iron-wire poetry of our day stands
an attack like a fortification, and comes down upon
the besieger with reason and logic as good as his own.
But the more delicate offspring of tenderness and chivalry,
intending no violence, and venturing out to sea
upon a rose-leaf, is destroyed and sunk beyond diving-bells
by half a breath of scorn. I would subscribe
liberally myself to a private press and a court of honor
in poetry—critics, if admitted, to be dumb upon a
penalty. Will no Howard or Wilberforce act upon
this hint? Poets now-a-days are more slaves and
felons than your African, or your culprit at the old
Bailey!

I would go a great way, privately, to find a genuine
spark of chivalry, and Job lit his every-day lamp with
it. See what a redolence of old time there is in these
verses, which I copied long ago from a lady's album.
Yet, you may ridicule them if you like!—

I am mounted upon my hobby now, dear reader;
for Job Smith, though as hideous an idol as ever was
worshipped on the Indus, was still my idol. Here is
a little touch of his quality:—

I think I must give Edith another reprieve. I have
no idea why I have digressed this time from the story
which (you may see by the motto at the beginning of
the paper) I have not yet told. I can conceive easily
how people, who have nothing to do, betake themselves
to autobiography—it is so pleasant rambling
about over the past, and regathering only the flowers.
Why should pain and mortification be unsepultured?
The world is no wiser for these written experiences.
“The best book,” said Southey, “does but little good
to the world, and much harm to the author.” I shall
deliberate whether to enlighten the world as to Edith's
metempsychosis, or no.

4. PART IV.
SCENERY AND A SCENE.

Job Smith and myself were on the return from Niagara.
It was in the slumberous and leafy midst of
June. Lake Erie had lain with a silver glaze upon
its bosom for days; the ragged trees upon its green
shore dropping their branches into the stirless water,
as if it were some rigid imitation—the lake glass, and
the leaves emerald; the sky was of an April blue, as
if a night-rain had washed out its milkiness, till you
could see through its clarified depths to the gates of
heaven; and yet breathless and sunny as was the
face of the earth, there was a nerve and a vitality in
the air that exacted of every pulse its full compass—
searched every pore for its capacity of the joy of existence.

No one can conceive, who has not had his imagination
stretched at the foot of Niagara, or in the Titanic
solitudes of the west, the vastness of the unbroken
phases of nature; where every tree looks a king, and
every flower a marvel of glorious form and color—
where the rocks are rent every one as by the “tenth”
thunderbolt—and lake, mountain, or river, ravine or
waterfall, cave or eagle's nest, whatever it may be that
feeds the eye or the fancy, is as the elements have
shaped and left it—where the sculpture, and the painting,
and the poetry, and the wonderful alchymy of
nature, go on under the naked eye of the Almighty,
and by his own visible and uninterrupted band, and
where the music of nature, from the anthem of the
torrent and storm, broken only by the scream of the
vulture, to the trill of the rivulet with its accompaniment
of singing birds and winds, is for ever ringing its
changes, as if for the stars to hear—in such scenes, I
say, and in such scenes only, is the imagination over-tasked
or stretched to the capacity of a seraph's; and
while common minds sink beneath them to the mere
inanition of their animal senses, the loftier spirit takes
their color and stature, and outgrows the common and
pitiful standards of the world. Cooper and Leatherstocking
thus became what they are—the one a high-priest
of imagination and poetry, and the other a simple-hearted
but mere creature of instinct; and Cooper
is no more a living man, liable to the common laws of
human nature, than Leatherstocking a true and life-like
transcript of the more common effect of those
overpowering solitudes on the character.

We got on board the canal-boat at noon, and Job
and myself, seated on the well-cushioned seats, with
the blinds half-turned to give us the prospect and exclude
the sun, sat disputing in our usual amicable way.
He was the only man I ever knew with whom I could
argue without losing my temper; and the reason was,
that I always had the last word, and thought myself
victorious.

“We are about to return into the bosom of society,
my dear Job,” said I, “looking with unctuous good
nature on the well-shaped boot I had put on for the
first time in a month that morning. (It is an unsentimental
fact that hob-nailed shoes are indispensable on
the most poetical spots of earth.)

“Yes,” said Job; “but how superior is the society
we leave behind! Niagara and Erie! What in your
crowded city is comparable to these?”

“Nothing, for size!—but for society—you will think
me a pagan, dear chum—but, on my honor, straight
from Niagara as I come, I feel a most dissatisfied yearning
for the society of Miss Popkins!”

“Oh, Phil!”

“On my honor!”

“You, who were in such raptures at the falls!”

“And real ones—but I wanted a woman at my elbow
to listen to them. Do you know, Job, I have
made up my mind on a great principle since we have
been on our travels? Have you observed that I was
pensive?”

“Not particularly—but what is your principle?”

“That a man is a much more interesting object than
a mountain.”

“A man! did you say?”

“Yes—but I meant a woman!”

“I don't think so.”

“I do!—and I judge by myself. When did I ever
see wonder of nature—tree, sunset, waterfall, rapid,
lake, or river—that I would not rather have been talking
to a woman the while? Do you remember the
three days we were tramping through the forest without
seeing the sun, as if we had been in the endless
aisle of a cathedral? Do you remember the long morning
when we lay on the moss at the foot of Niagara,
and it was a divine luxury only to breathe? Do you
remember the lunar rainbows at midnight on Goat
island? Do you remember the ten thousand glorious
moments we have enjoyed between weather and scenery
since the bursting of these summer leaves? Do
you?”

“Certainly, my dear boy!”

“Well, then, much as I love nature and you, there
has not been an hour since we packed our knapsacks,
that, if I could have distilled a charming girl out of a
mixture of you and any mountain, river, or rock, that
I have seen, I would not have flung you, without remorse,
into any witch's caldron that was large enough,
and would boil at my bidding.”

“Monster!”

“And I believe I should have the same feelings in
Italy or Greece, or wherever people go into raptures
with things you can neither eat nor make love to.”

“Would not even the Venus fill your fancy for a
day?”

“An hour, perhaps, it might; for I should be studying,
in its cold Parian proportions, the warm structure
of some living Musidora—but I should soon tire of it,
and long for my lunch or my love; and I give you my
honor I would not lose the three meals of a single day
to see Santa Croce and St. Peter's.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

Job disdained to argue against such a want of sentimental
principle, and pulling up the blind, he fixed
his eyes on the slowly-gliding panorama of rock and
forest, and I mounted for a promenade upon the deck.

Mephistopheles could hardly have found a more
striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three
hundred miles in the canal from Lake Erie to the
Hudson. As I walked up and down the deck of the
packet-boat, I thought to myself, that if it were not
for thoughts of things that come more home to one's
“business and bosom” (particularly “bosom”), I could
be content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and return
to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat
is a long and very pretty drawing-room afloat. It has
a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian
blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or perceptible
motion. It is drawn generally by three horses
at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred
miles a day, as softly as if you were witched over the
ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company
(say fifty people) is such as pleases Heaven; though I
must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting
the various dear friends I have made and left on that

long canal) there are few highways on which you will
meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers.
On this occasion my star was bankrupt—Job Smith
being my only civilized companion—and I was left to
the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the
scenery.

Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remember,
through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly-sown
manhood, every moment of that lonely evening.
I remember the progression of the sunset, from the
lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds,
to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star
hung over the wilderness. And I remember what I
am going to describe—a twilight anthem in the forest
—as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition
in the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyerbeer.
I thought time dragged heavily then, but I
wish I had as light a heart and could feel as vividly
now!

The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles
through the heart of the primeval wilderness of
America, and the boat was gliding on silently and
swiftly, and never sailed a lost cloud through the
abyss of space on a course more apparently new and
untrodden. The luxuriant soil had sent up a rank
grass that covered the horse-path like velvet; the
Erie water was clear as a brook in the winding canal;
the old shafts of the gigantic forest spurred into the
sky by thousands, and the yet unscared eagle swung
off from the dead branch of the pine, and skimmed the
tree-tops for another perch, as if he had grown to
believe that gliding spectre a harmless phenomenon
of nature. The horses drew steadily and unheard at
the end of the long line; the steersman stood motionless
at the tiller, and I lay on a heap of baggage
in the prow, attentive to the slightest breathing of nature,
but thinking, with an ache at my heart, of Edith
Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention it?) I was hastening
with a lover's proper impatience. I might as
well have taken another turn in my “fool's paradise.”

The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine
tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an
Ethiop's finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted the
first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and the
screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced without
waiting to be importuned, though we were listening
for the nightingale. The air, as I said before, had
been all day breathless; but as the first chill of evening
displaced the warm atmosphere of the departed
sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored bosom of the
canal, and then commenced the night anthem of the
forest, audible, I would fain believe, in its soothing
changes, by the dead tribes whose bones whiten amid
the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly yet articulately,
the suspended and wavering foliage of the birch
was touched by the many-fingered wind, and, like a
faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves rustled in the low
branches; and, with a moment's pause, when you
could hear the moving of the vulture's claws upon
the bark, as he turned to get his breast to the wind,
the increasing breeze swept into the pine-tops, and
drew forth from their fringe-like and myriad tassels a
low monotone like the refrain of a far-off dirge; and
still as it murmured (seeming to you sometimes like
the confused and heart-broken responses of the penitents
on a cathedral floor), the blast strengthened and
filled, and the rigid leaves of the oak, and the swaying
fans and chalices of the magnolia, and the rich cups
of the tulip-trees, stirred and answered with their different
voices like many-toned harps; and when the
wind was fully abroad, and every moving thing on the
breast of the earth was roused from its daylight repose,
the irregular and capricious blast, like a player on an
organ of a thousand stops, lulled and strengthened by
turns, and from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the
whisper of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging
and groaning branches of the larch and the fir, the
anthem went ceaselessly through its changes, and the
harmony (though the owl broke in with his scream,
and though the over-blown monarch of the wood
came crashing to the earth), was still perfect and without
a jar. It is strange that there is no sound of nature
out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes
into this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment
of bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or
the scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-threated
croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the outburst
of an octave flute above the even melody of an
orchestra; and it is surprising how the large raindrops,
pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of
the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself,
sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a
low burthen to the general anthem of the earth—as
it were, a single voice among instruments.

I had what Wordsworth calls a “couchant ear” in
my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while
I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love
in the wilderness.

There will come sometimes in the spring—say in
May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butterflies
are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine—
there will come, I say, in that yearning and youth-renewing
season, a warm shower at noon. Our tent
shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young
pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be
called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while
watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the
unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends
softly and warm; but with the sunset the clouds break
away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze.
The next morning you shall come out with me to a
hill-side looking upon the south, and lie down with
your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every
four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a
pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp
by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at
ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and
yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy
pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through
the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla.
There is not much variety in its music, but it is a
pleasant monotone for thought, and if you have a
restless fever in your bosom (as I had, when I learned
to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart
and the ear that it soothed and satisfied then) you may
lie down with a crooked root under your head in the
skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne
to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend,
or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no gratitude,
and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon
the wind.

Oh, how many of these harmonies there are!—how
many that we hear, and how many that are “too
constant to be heard!” I could go back to my youth,
now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture
a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that would
bring the blush upon my cheek to think how my senses
are dulled since such things could give me pleasure!
Is there no “well of Kanathos” for renewing the
youth of the soul?—no St. Hilary's cradle? no elixir
to cast the slough of heart-sickening and heart-tarnishing
custom? Find me an alchymy for that, with
your alembic and crucible, and you may resolve to
dross again your philosopher's stone!

2. II.

Everybody who makes the passage of the Erie
canal, stops at the half-way town of Utica, to visit a
wonder of nature fourteen miles to the west of it, called
Trenton Falls. It would be becoming in me, before
mentioning the falls, however, to sing the praises of

Utica and its twenty thousand inhabitants—having
received much hospitality from the worthy burghers,
and philandered up and down their well-flagged trottoir
very much to my private satisfaction. I should
scorn any man's judgment who should attempt to convince
me that the Erie water, which comes down the
canal a hundred and fifty miles, and passes through
the market-place of that pleasant town, has not communicated
to the hearts of its citizens the expansion
and depth of the parent lake from which it is drawn.
I have a theory on that subject with which I intend to
surprise the world whenever politics and Mr. Bulwer
draw less engrossingly on its attention. Will any one
tell me that the dark eyes I knew there, and whose
like for softness and meaning I have inquired for in
vain through Italy, and the voice that accompanied
their gaze—(that Pasta, in her divinest out-gush of
melody and soul, alone recalls to me)—that these, and
the noble heart, and high mind, and even the genius,
that were other gifts of the same marvel among women—that
these were born of common parentage, and
nursed by the air of a demi-metropolis? We were
but the kindest of friends, that bright creature and myself,
and I may say, without charging myself with the
blindness of love, that I believe in my heart she was
the foster-child of the water-spirits on whose wandering
streamlet she lived—that the thousand odors that
swept down from the wilderness upon Lake Erie, and
the unseen but wild and innumerable influences of
nature, or whatever you call that which makes the
Indian a believer in the Great Spirit—that these
came down with those clear waters, ministering to the
mind and watching over the budding beauty of this
noble and most high-hearted woman! If you do not
believe it, I should like you to tell me how else such
a creature was “raised,” as they phrase it in Virginia.
I shall hold to my theory till you furnish me with a
more reasonable.

We heard at the hotel that there were several large
parties at Trenton Falls, and with an abridgment of
our toilets in our pockets, Job and I galloped out of
Utica about four o'clock of as bright a summer's afternoon
as was ever promised in the almanac. We drew
rein a mile or two out of town, and dawdled along the
wild road more leisurely, Job's Green mountain proportions
fitting to the saddle something in the manner
and relative fitness of a skeleton on a poodle. By the
same token he rode safely, the looseness of his bones
accommodating itself with singular facility to the
irregularities in the pace of the surprised animal beneath
him.

I dislike to pass over the minutest detail of a period
of my life that will be rather interesting in my biography
(it is my intention to be famous enough to merit
that distinction, and I would recommend to my friends
to be noting my “little peculiarities”), and with this
posthumous benevolence in my heart, I simply record,
that our conversation on the road turned upon Edith
Linsey—at this time the lady of my constant love—for
whose sake and at whose bidding I was just concluding
(with success I presumed) a probation of three
years of absence, silence, hard study, and rigid morals,
and upon whose parting promise (God forgive her!) I
had built my uttermost gleaning and sand of earthly
hope and desire. I tell you in the tail of this mocking
paragraph, dear reader, that the bend of the rainbow
spans not the earth more perfectly than did the
love of that woman my hopes of future bliss; and the
ephemeral arc does not sooner melt into the clouds—
but I am anticipating my story.

Job's extraordinary appearance, as he extricated
himself from his horse, usually attracted the entire attention
of the by-standers at a strange inn, and under
cover of this, I usually contrived to get into the house
and commit him by ordering the dinner as soon as it
could be got ready. Else, if it was in the neighbor
hood of scenery, he was off till Heaven knew when,
and as I had that delicacy for his feelings never to
dine without him, you may imagine the necessity of
my hungry manœuvre.

We dined upon the trout of the glorious stream we
had come to see; and as our host's eldest daughter
waited upon us (recorded in Job's journal, in my possession
at this moment, as “the most comely and gracious
virgin” he had seen in his travels), we felt bound
to adapt our conversation to the purity of her mind,
and discussed only the philosophical point, whether
the beauty of the stream could be tasted in the flavor
of the fish—Job for it, I against it. The argument
was only interrupted by the entrance of an apple-pudding,
so hot that our tongues were fully occupied
in removing it from place to place as the mouth felt
its heat inconvenient, and then, being in a country
of liberty and equality, and the damsel in waiting, as
Job smilingly remarked, as much a lady as the President's
wife, he requested permission to propose her
health in a cool tumbler of cider, and we adjourned to
the moonlight.

3. III.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the existence of Trenton
Falls was not known. It was discovered, like Pæstum,
by a wandering artist, when there was a town of ten
thousand inhabitants, a canal, a theatre, a liberty-pole,
and forty churches, within fourteen miles of it.
It may be mentioned to the credit of the Americans,
that in the “hardness” of character of which travellers
complain, there is the soft trait of a passion for
scenery; and before the fact of its discovery had got
well into the “Cahawba Democrat” and “Go-the-whole-hog-Courier,”
there was a splendid wooden
hotel on the edge of the precipice, with a French
cook, soda-water, and olives, and a law was passed by
the Kentucky Travellers' Club, requiring a hangingbird's
nest from the trees “frowning down the awful
abysm,” (so expressed in the regulation), as a qualification
for membership. Thenceforward to the present
time it has been a place of fashionable resort
during the summer solstice, and the pine woods, in
which the hotel stands, being impervious to the sun,
it is prescribed by oculists for gentlemen and ladies
with weak eyes. If the luxury of corn-cutters had
penetrated to the United States, it might be prescribed
for tender feet as well—the soft floor of pine-tassels
spread under the grassless woods, being considered
an improvement upon Turkey carpets and green-sward.

Trenton Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely
know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature
which bears the name is a tremendous torrent,
whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep
into the earth—a roaring and dashing stream, so far
below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that
you would think, as you come suddenly upon the
edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some
inner world (coiled within ours, as we in the outer
circle of the firmament), and laid open by some
Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust
of this “shallow earth.” The idea is rather assisted
if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore,
a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast
depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and
rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires,
dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon
your parlor floor, would be about of their apparent size
and distinctness.

They showed me at Eleusis the well by which
Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual
visit to the plains of Thessaly—but with the
genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl
as lovely as Phryné, my memory reverted to the bared

axle of the earth in the bed of this American river,
and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière
of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my
Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the
earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton.
I confess I have had, since my first descent into
those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity
of the globe—how the deuse it can hold together with
such a crack in its bottom!

It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery
that could be laid to the charge of the moon,
for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of
moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver.
It was a night in which to wish it might never be
day again—a night to be enamored of the stars, and
bid God bless them like human creatures on their
bright journey—a night to love in, to dissolve in—to
do everything but what night is made for—sleep!
Oh heaven! when I think how precious is life in such
moments; how the aroma—the celestial bloom and
flower of the soul—the yearning and fast-perishing
enthusiasm of youth—waste themselves in the solitude
of such nights on the senseless and unanswering air;
when I wander alone, unloving and unloved, beneath
influences that could inspire me with the elevation of
a seraph, were I at the ear of a human creature that
could summon forth and measure my limitless capacity
of devotion—when I think this, and feel this, and
so waste my existence in vain yearnings—I could extinguish
the divine spark within me like a lamp on an
unvisited shrine, and thank Heaven for an assimilation
to the animals I walk among! And that is the
substance of a speech I made to Job as a sequitur of a
well-meant remark of his own, that “it was a pity
Edith Linsey was not there.” He took the clause
about the “animals” to himself, and I made an apology
for the same a year after. We sometimes give our
friends, quite innocently, such terrible knocks in our
rhapsodies!

Most people talk of the sublimity of Trenton, but I
have haunted it by the week together for its mere
loveliness. The river, in the heart of that fearful
chasm, is the most varied and beautiful assemblage of
the thousand forms and shapes of running water that
I know in the world. The soil and the deep-striking
roots of the forest terminate far above you, looking like
a black rim on the enclosing precipices; the bed of
the river and its sky-sustaining walls are of solid rock,
and, with the tremendous descent of the stream—
forming for miles one continuous succession of falls
and rapids—the channel is worn into curves and cavities
which throw the clear waters into forms of inconceivable
brilliancy and variety. It is a sort of
half twilight below, with here and there a long beam
of sunshine reaching down to kiss the lip of an eddy
or form a rainbow over a fall, and the reverberating
and changing echoes:—

maintain a constant and most soothing music, varying
at every step with the varying phase of the current.
Cascades of from twenty to thirty feet, over which
the river flies with a single and hurrying leap (not a
drop missing from the glassy and bending sheet,) occur
frequently as you ascend; and it is from these
that the place takes its name. But the falls, though
beautiful, are only peculiar from the dazzling and unequalled
rapidity with which the waters come to the
leap. If it were not for the leaf which drops wavering
down into the abysm from trees apparently painted
on the sky, and which is caught away by the flashing
current as if the lightning had suddenly crossed it,
you would think the vault of the steadfast heavens a
flying element as soon. The spot in that long gulf of
beauty that I best remember is a smooth descent of some
hundred yards, where the river in full and undivided
volume skims over a plane as polished as a table of
scagliola, looking, in its invisible speed, like one mirror
of gleaming but motionless crystal. Just above,
there is a sudden turn in the glen which sends the
water like a catapult against the opposite angle of the
rock, and, in the action of years, it has worn out a
cavern of unknown depth, into which the whole
mass of the river plunges with the abandonment of a
flying fiend into hell, and, reappearing like the angel
that has pursued him, glides swiftly but with divine
serenity on its way. (I am indebted for that last
figure to Job, who travelled with a Milton in his
pocket, and had a natural redolence of “Paradise
Lost” in his conversation.)

Much as I detest water in small quantities (to drink),
I have a hydromania in the way of lakes, rivers, and
waterfalls. It is, by much, the belle in the family of
the elements. Earth is never tolerable unless disguised
in green. Air is so thin as only to be visible
when she borrows drapery of water; and Fire is so
staringly bright as to be unpleasant to the eyesight;
but water! soft, pure, graceful water! there is no
shape into which you can throw her that she does not
seem lovelier than before. She can borrow nothing
of her sisters. Earth has no jewels in her lap so brilliant
as her own spray-pearls and emeralds; Fire has
no rubies like what she steals from the sunset; Air
has no robes like the grace of her fine-woven and ever-changing
drapery of silver. A health (in wine!) to
Water!

Who is there that did not love some stream in his
youth? Who is there in whose vision of the past
there does not sparkle up, from every picture of childhood,
a spring or a rivulent woven through the darkened
and torn woof of first affections like a thread of
unchanged silver? How do you interpret the instinctive
yearning with which you search for the
river-side or the fountain in every scene of nature—
the clinging unaware to the river's course when a
truant in the fields in June—the dull void you find in
every landscape of which it is not the ornament and
the centre? For myself, I hold with the Greek:
“Water is the first principle of all things: we were
made from it and we shall be resolved into it.”[4]

4. IV.

The awkward thing in all story-telling is transition.
Invention you do not need if you have experience;
for fact is stranger than fiction. A beginning in these
days of startling abruptness is as simple as open your
mouth; and when you have once begun you can end
whenever you like, and leave the sequel to the reader's
imagination: but the hinges of a story—the turning
gracefully back from a digression (it is easy to turn
into one)—is the pas qui coúte. My education on that
point was neglected.

It was, as I said before, a moonlight night, and
Job and myself having, like Sir Fabian, “no mind
to sleep,” followed the fashion and the rest of the company
at the inn, and strolled down to see the falls by
moonlight. I had been there before, and I took Job
straight to the spot in the bed of the river which I
have described above as my favorite, and, after watching
it for a few minutes, we turned back to a dark
cleft in the rock which afforded a rude seat, and sat
musing in silence.

Several parties had strolled past without seeing us
in our recess, when two female figures, with their
arms around each other's waists, sauntered slowly
around the jutting rock below, and approached us,
eagerly engaged in conversation. They came on to
the very edge of the shadow which enveloped us,
and turned to look back at the scene. As the head
nearest me was raised to the light, I started half to

my feet: it was Edith! In the same instant her
voice of music broke on my ear, and an irresistible
impulse to listen unobserved drew me down again
upon my seat, and Job, with a similar instinct, laid his
hand on my arm.

“It was his favorite spot!” said Edith. (We had
been at Trenton together years before.) “I stood here
with him, and I wish he stood here now, that I might
tell him what my hand hesitates to write.”

“Poor Philip!” said her companion, whom by the
voice I recognised as the youngest of the Flemings,
“I can not conceive how you can resolve so coldly to
break his heart.”

I felt a dagger entering my bosom, but still I listened.
Edith went on.

“Why, I will tell you, my dear little innocent. I
loved Philip Slingsby when I thought I was going to
die. It was then a fitting attachment, for I never
thought to need, of the goods of this world, more
than a sick chamber and a nurse; and Phil was kind-hearted
and devoted to me, and I lived at home.
But, with returned health, a thousand ambitious desires
have sprung up in my heart, and I find myself
admired by whom I will, and every day growing
more selfish and less poetical. Philip is poor, and
love in a cottage, though very well for you if you
like it, would never do for me. I should like him
very well for a friend, for he is gentlemanlike and
devoted, but, with my ideas, I should only make him
miserable, and so—I think I had better put him out of
misery at once—don't you think?

A half-smothered groan of anguish escaped my lips;
but it was lost in the roar of the waters, and Edith's
voice, as she walked on, lessened and became inaudible
to my ear. As her figure was lost in the shadow
of the rocks beyond, I threw myself on the bosom of
my friend, and wept in the unutterable agony of a
crushed heart. I know not how that night was spent,
but I awoke at noon of the next day, in my bed, with
Job's hand clasped tenderly in my own.

5. V.

I kept my tryst. I was to meet Edith Linsey at
Saratoga in July—the last month of the probation by
which I had won a right to her love. I had not spoken
to her, or written, or seen her (save, unknown to
her, in the moment I have described), in the three
long years to which my constancy was devoted. I
had gained the usual meed of industry in my profession,
and was admitted to its practice. I was on the
threshold of manhood; and she had promised, before
heaven, here to give me heart and hand.

I had parted from her at twelve on that night three
years, and, as the clock struck, I stood again by her
side in the crowded ballroom of Saratoga.

“Good God! Mr. Slingsby!” she exclaimed, as I
put out my hand.

“Am I so changed that you do not know me, Miss
Linsey?” I asked, as she still looked with a wondering
gaze into my face—pressing my hand, however,
with real warmth, and evidently under the control,
for the moment, of the feelings with which we had
parted.

“Changed, indeed! Why, you have studied yourself
to a skeleton! My dear Philip, you are ill!”

I was—but it was only for a moment. I asked her
hand for a waltz, and never before or since came wit
and laughter so freely to my lip. I was collected, but,
at the same time, I was the gayest of the gay; and
when everybody had congratulated me, in her hearing,
on the school to which I had put my wits in my
long apprenticeship to the law, I retired to the gallery
looking down upon the garden, and cooled my brow
and rallied my sinking heart.

The candles were burning low, and the ball was
nearly over, when I entered the room again, and requested
Edith to take a turn with me on the colonnade.
She at once assented, and I could feel by her
arm in mine, and see by the fixed expression on her
lip, that she did so with the intention of revealing to
me what she little thought I could so well anticipate.

“My probation is over,” I said, breaking the silence
which she seemed willing to prolong, and which
had lasted till we had twice measured the long colonnade.

“It was three years ago to-night, I think, since we
parted.” She spoke in an absent and careless tone, as
if trying to work out another more prominent thought
in her mind.

“Do you find me changed?” I asked.

“Yes—oh, yes! very!”

“But I am more changed than I seem, dear Edith!”

She turned to me as if to ask me to explain myself.

“Will you listen to me while I tell you how?”

“What can you mean? Certainly.”

“Then listen, for I fear I can scarce bring myself
to repeat what I am going to say. When I first learned
to love you, and when I promised to love you for
life, you were thought to be dying, and I was a boy.
I did not count on the future, for I despaired of your
living to share it with me, and, if I had done so, I
was still a child, and knew nothing of the world. I
have since grown more ambitious, and, I may as well
say at once, more selfish and less poetical. You will
easily divine my drift. You are poor, and I find myself,
as you have seen to-night, in a position which
will enable me to marry more to my advantage; and,
with these views, I am sure I should only make you
miserable by fulfilling my contract with you, and you
will agree with me that I consult our mutual happiness
by this course—don't you think?”

At this instant I gave a signal to Job, who approached
and made some sensible remarks about the weather;
and, after another turn or two, I released Miss Linsey's
arm, and cautioning her against the night air, left her
to finish her promenade and swallow her own projected
speech and mine, and went to bed.

And so ended my first love!

SCENES OF FEAR.

1. No. I.
THE DISTURBED VIGIL.

Such a night! It was like a festival of Dian. A
burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or
two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating
rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and
the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and
the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight
and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night's beauty.
There was no atmosphere—nothing between the
eye and the pearly moon—and she rode through the
heavens without a veil, like a queen as she is, giving a
glimpse of her nearer beauty for a festal favor to the
worshipping stars.

I was a student at the famed university of Connecticut,
and the bewilderments of philosophy and poetry
were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite natural
beauty, and the absence of all other temptation,
secure to the classic neophite an almost supernatural
wakefulness of fancy. I contracted a taste for the
horrible in those days, which still clings to me. I

have travelled the world over, with no object but general
observation, and have dawdled my hour at courts
and operas with little interest, while the sacking and
drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus, the impalement
of a robber on the Nile, and the insane hospitals
from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in my capricious
journal with the vividness of the most stirring
adventure.

There is a kind of crystallization in the circumstances
of one's life. A peculiar turn of mind draws
to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is
frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets
with more remarkable things than another, when it is
owing merely to a difference of natural character.

It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty.
I was watching a corpse. In that part of the United
States, the dead are never left alone till the earth is
thrown upon them; and, as a friend of the family, I
had been called upon for this melancholy service on
the night preceding the interment. It was a death
which had left a family of broken hearts; for, beneath
the sheet which sank so appallingly to the outline of
a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness
whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened
the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching
loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only
a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my
memory even yet, and mingles with every conception
of female beauty.

Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share
my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having read
them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed
my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the
corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled
into the garden to enjoy the quiet of the summer night.
The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops, and
the air was breathless.

The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden
flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from
the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room,
and my own predisposition to invest death with a supernatural
interest, had raised my heart to my throat.
I walked backward and forward in the garden-path;
and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even
the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed
weird and fearful.

The clock struck, and I re-entered. My companions
still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber.
I trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the
white heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow
of the curtains; and my blood seemed to freeze. At
the moment when I was turning away with a strong
effort at a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter
of wings, followed by a rush and a sudden silence,
struck on my startled ear. The street was as quiet as
death, and the noise, which was far too audible to be a
deception of the fancy, had come from the side toward
an uninhabited wing of the house. My heart stood
still. Another instant, and the fire-screen was dashed
down, and a white cat rushed past me, and with the
speed of light sprang like an hyena upon the corpse.
The flight of a vampyre into the chamber would not
have more curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder
ran cold over me, but recovering my self-command, I
rushed to the animal (of whose horrible appetite for
the flesh of the dead I had read incredulously), and attempted
to tear her from the body. With her claws
fixed in the breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infernal
spirit, she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the
stains already upon the sheet convinced me that it
would be impossible to remove her without shockingly
disfiguring the corpse. I seized her by the throat, in
the hope of choking her; but with the first pressure
of my fingers, she flew into my face, and the infuriated
animal seemed persuaded that it was a contest for life.
Half blinded by the fury of her attack, I loosed her
for a moment, and she immediately leaped again upon
the corpse, and had covered her feet and face with
blood before I could recover my hold upon her. The
body was no longer in a situation to be spared, and I
seized her with a desperate grasp to draw her off; but
to my horror, the half-covered and bloody corpse rose
upright in her fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat
with drooping arms, and head fallen with ghastly helplessness
over the shoulder. Years have not removed
that fearful spectacle from my eyes.

The corpse sank back, and I succeeded in throttling
the monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the
window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid
the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead,
and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the
violated remains, and left them again to their repose.
My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I paced
the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible
relief, dawned over the mountains.

2. No. II.
THE MAD SENIOR.

I was called upon in my senior year to watch with
an insane student. He was a man who had attracted
a great deal of attention in college. He appeared in
an extraordinary costume at the beginning of our
freshman term, and wrote himself down as Washington
Greyling, of —, an unheard-of settlement
somewhere beyond the Mississippi. His coat and other
gear might have been the work of a Chickasaw
tailor, aided by the superintending taste of some white
huntsman, who remembered faintly the outline of habiliments
he had not seen for half a century. It was
a body of green cloth, eked out with wampum and
otter-skin, and would have been ridiculous if it had
not encased one of the finest models of a manly frame
that ever trod the earth. With close-curling black
hair, a fine weather-browned complexion, Spanish features
(from his mother—a frequent physiognomy in
the countries bordering on Spanish America), and
the port and lithe motion of a lion, he was a figure to
look upon in any disguise with warm admiration.
He was soon put into the hands of a tailor-proper,
and, with the facility which belongs to his countrymen,
became in a month the best-dressed man in college.
His manners were of a gentleman-like mildness,
energetic, but courteous and chivalresque, and, unlike
most savages and all coins, he polished without “losing
his mark.” At the end of his first term, he would
have been called a high-bred gentleman at any court
in Europe.

The opening of his mind was almost as rapid and
extraordinary. He seized everything with an ardor
and freshness that habit and difficulty never deadened.
He was like a man who had tumbled into a new star,
and was collecting knowledge for a world to which he
was to return. The first in all games, the wildest in
all adventure, the most distinguished even in the elegant
society for which the town is remarkable, and
unfailingly brilliant in his recitations and college performances,
he was looked upon as a sort of admirable
phenomenon, and neither envied nor opposed in anything.
I have often thought, in looking on him, that
his sensations at coming fresh from a wild western
prairie, and, at the first measure of his capacities with
men of better advantages, finding himself so uniformly
superior, must have been stirringly delightful. It is a
wonder he never became arrogant; but it was the last
foible of which he could have been accused.

We were reading hard for the honors in the senior
year, when Greyling suddenly lost his reason. He

had not been otherwise ill, and had, apparently in the
midst of high health, gone mad at a moment's warning.
The physicians scarce knew how to treat him.
The confinement to which he was at first subjected,
however, was thought inexpedient, and he seemed to
justify their lenity by the gentlest behavior when at
liberty. He seemed oppressed by a heart-breaking
melancholy. We took our turns in guarding and
watching with him, and it was upon my first night of
duty that the incident happened which I have thus
endeavored to introduce.

It was scarce like a vigil with a sick man, for our
patient went regularly to bed, and usually slept well.
I took my “Lucretius” and the “Book of the Martyrs,”
which was just then my favorite reading, and
with hot punch, a cold chicken, books, and a fire, I
looked forward to it as merely a studious night; and,
as the wintry wind of January rattled in at the old
college windows, I thrust my feet into slippers, drew
my dressing-gown about me, and congratulated myself
on the excessive comfortableness of my position.
The Sybarite's bed of roses would have been no temptation.

It had snowed all day, but the sun had set with a
red rift in the clouds, and the face of the sky was
swept in an hour to the clearness of—I want a comparison—your
own blue eye, dear Mary! The all-glorious
arch of heaven was a mass of sparkling stars.

Greyling slept, and I, wearied of the cold philosophy
of the Latin poet, took to my “Book of Martyrs.” I
read on, and read on. The college clock struck, it
seemed to me, the quarters rather than the hours.
Time flew: it was three.

“Horrible! most horrible!” I started from my chair
with the exclamation, and felt as if my scalp were
self-lifted from my head. It was a description in the
harrowing faithfulness of the language of olden time,
painting almost the articulate groans of an impaled
Christian. I clasped the old iron-bound book, and
rushed to the window as if my heart was stifling for
fresh air.

Again at the fire. The large walnut fagots had
burnt to a bed of bright coals, and I sat gazing into it,
totally unable to shake off the fearful incubus from
my breast. The martyr was there—on the very hearth
—with the stakes scornfully crossed in his body; and
as the large coals cracked asunder and revealed the
prightness within, I seemed to follow the nerve-rending
instrument from hip to shoulder, and suffer with him
pang for pang, as if the burning redness were the pools
of his fevered blood.

“Aha!”

It struck on my ear like the cry of an exulting fiend.

“Aha!”

I shrunk into the chair as the awful cry was repeated,
and looked slowly and with difficult courage
over my shoulder. A single fierce eye was fixed upon
me from the mass of bed-clothes, and, for a moment,
the relief from the fear of some supernatural presence
was like water to a parched tongue. I sank back relieved
into the chair.

There was a rustling immediately in the bed, and,
starting again, I found the wild eyes of my patient
fixed still steadfastly upon me. He was creeping
stealthily out of bed. His bare foot touched the floor,
and his toes worked upon it as if he was feeling its
strength, and in a moment he stood upright on his
feet, and, with his head forward and his pale face livid
with rage, stepped toward me. I looked to the door.
He observed the glance, and in the next instant he
sprang clear over the bed, turned the key, and dashed
it furiously through the window.

“Now!” said he.

“Greyling!” I said. I had heard that a calm and
fixed gaze would control a madman, and with the most
difficult exertion of nerve, I met his lowering eye, and
we stood looking at each other for a full minute, like
men of marble.

“Why have you left your bed?” I mildly asked.

“To kill you!” was the appaling answer; and in
another moment the light-stand was swept from between
us, and he struck me down with a blow that
would have felled a giant. Naked as he was, I had
no hold upon him, even if in muscular strength I had
been his match; and with a minute's struggle I yielded,
for resistance was vain. His knee was now upon my
breast and his left hand in my hair, and he seemed
by the tremulousness of his clutch to be hesitating
whether he should dash my brains out on the hearth.
I could scarce breathe with his weight upon my chest,
but I tried, with the broken words I could command,
to move his pity. He laughed, as only maniacs can,
and placed his hand on my throat. Oh God! shall I
ever forget the fiendish deliberation with which he
closed those feverish fingers?

“Greyling! for God's sake! Greyling!”

“Die! curse you!”

In the agonies of suffocation I struck out my arm,
and almost buried it in the fire upon the hearth.
With an expiring thought, I grasped a handful of the
red-hot coals, and had just strength sufficient to press
them hard against his side.

“Thank God!” I exclaimed with my first breath,
as my eyes recovered from their sickness, and I looked
upon the familiar objects of my chamber once more.

The madman sat crouched like a whipped dog in
the farthest corner of the room, gibbering and moaning,
with his hands upon his burnt side. I felt that I
had escaped death by a miracle.

The door was locked, and, in dread of another attack,
I threw up the broken window, and to my
unutterable joy the figure of a man was visible upon
the snow near the out-buildings of the college. It
was a charity-student, risen before day to labor in the
wood-yard. I shouted to him, and Greyling leaped
to his feet.

“There is time yet!” said the madman; but as he
came toward me again with the same panther-like
caution as before, I seized a heavy stone pitcher
standing in the window-seat, and hurling it at him
with a fortunate force and aim, he fell stunned and
bleeding on the floor. The door was burst open at
the next moment, and, calling for assistance, we tied
the wild Missourian into his bed, bound up his head
and side, and committed him to fresh watchers....

We have killed bears together at a Missouri saltlick
since then; but I never see Wash. Greyling with
a smile off his face, without a disposition to look
around for the door.

3. No. III.
THE LUNATIC'S SKATE.

I have only, in my life, known one lunatic—properly
so called. In the days when I carried a satchel
on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half-lovely,
half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread
about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the
farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farm-house
on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by
the undignified title of Pomp's pond. An old negro,
who was believed by the boys to have come over with
Christopher Columbus, was the only other human
being within anything like a neighborhood of the
lake (it took its name from him), and the only approaches
to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost
impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp's
clearing, and that by our own door. Out of school,
Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale, sad-faced

boy, and, in the first days of our intimacy, he
had confided a secret to me which, from its uncommon
nature, and the excessive caution with which he
kept it from every one else, bound me to him with
more than the common ties of schoolfellow attachment.
We built wigwams together in the woods, had
our tomahawks made of the same fashion, united our
property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect
contentment in each other's approbation.

I had found out, soon after my arrival at school,
that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With
the first slender horn that dropped its silver and graceful
shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced,
and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood
of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one
haunted by a pursuing demon. At early twilight he
closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could
admit a ray; and then, lighting as many candles as
he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat
down with his book in moody silence, or paced the
room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy
in his fine countenance, of which, with all my familiarity
with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exercise
seemed the only relief, and when the candles
burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the
lone farm-house became too absolute to endure, he
would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately
out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the
depths of the wild forest, and walk on with supernatural
excitement till the day dawned. Faint and pale he
would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to
make his very common and always credited excuse of
illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I
soon became used to his way, ceased to follow him,
as I had once or twice endeavored to do, into the
forest, and never attempted to break in on the fixed
and wrapt silence which seemed to transform his lips
to marble. And for all this Larry loved me.

Our preparatory studies were completed, and, to
our mutual despair, we were destined to different
universities. Larry's father was a disciple of the great
Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal;
and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in
the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion,
and few are the minds that could resist a four years'
ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come
forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the
other; and in the New England states these two sects
are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering atmosphere
of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely
and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere
zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off,
to learn Latin and Greek, if it pleased Heaven, but
the mysteries of “election and free grace,” whether
or no.

Time crept, ambled, and galloped, by turns, as we
were in love or out, moping in term-time, or revelling
in vacation, and gradually, I know not why, our correspondence
had dropped, and the four years had
come to their successive deaths, and we had never
met. I grieved over it; for in those days I believed
with a school-boy's fatuity,

and I loved Larry Wynn, as I hope I may never love
man or woman again—with a pain at my heart. I
wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior
years, but his answers were overstrained, and too full
of protestations by half; and seeing that absence had
done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote
an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know,
by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for
it has nothing to do with my story; but let it pass as
an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of things
in real life has not the regular procession of incidents
in a tragedy.

Some two or three years after we had taken “the
irrevocable yoke” of life upon us (not matrimony,
but money-making), a winter occurred of uncommonly
fine sleighing—sledging, you call it in England.
At such times the American world is all
abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads
are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse
is capable; smooth as montagnes Russes, and hard
as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is diminished
to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter
brings down his venison to the cities, the western
trader takes his family a hundred leagues to buy
calicoes and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the
country, drinking mulled wine and “flip,” and shaking
the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of
their horses' bells. You would think death and sorrow
were buried in the snow with the leaves of the
last autumn.

I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a
journey to the west; certainly not for scenery, for it
was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling whiteness,
for a thousand unbroken miles. The trees were
weighed down with snow, and the houses were
thatched and half-buried in it, and the mountains and
valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea,
congealed with its yesty foam in the wildest hour of a
tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it.
The “spirit-bird” that spread his refreshing green
wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have
been an inestimable fellow-traveller. The worth of
the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green
goggles.

In the course of a week or two, after skimming over
the buried scenery of half a dozen states, each as
large as Great Britain (more or less), I found myself
in a small town on the border of one of our western
lakes. It was some twenty years since the bears had
found it thinly settled enough for their purposes, and
now it contained perhaps twenty thousand souls.
The oldest inhabitant, born in the town, was a youth
in his minority. With the usual precocity of new
settlements, it had already most of the peculiarities of
an old metropolis. The burnt stumps still stood about
among the houses, but there was a fashionable circle,
at the head of which were the lawyer's wife and the
member of Congress's daughter; and people ate their
peas with silver forks, and drank their tea with scandal,
and forgave men's many sins and refused to forgive
woman's one, very much as in towns whose history
is written in black letter. I dare say there were
not more than one or two offences against the moral
and Levitical law, fashionable on this side the water,
which had not been committed, with the authentic
aggravations, in the town of—; I would mention
the name if this were not a true story.

Larry Wynn (now Lawrence Wynn, Esq.) lived
here. He had, as they say in the United States, “hung
out a shingle” (Londonicé, put up a sign) as attorney-at-law,
and to all the twenty thousand innocent inhabitants
of the place, he was the oracle and the squire.
He was besides colonel of militia, churchwarden,
and canal commissioner; appointments which speak
volumes for the prospects of “rising young men” in
our flourishing republic.

Larry was glad to see me—very. I was more glad
to see him. I have a soft heart, and forgive a wrong
generally, if it touches neither my vanity nor my
purse. I forgot his neglect, and called him “Larry.”
By the same token he did not call me “Phil.” (There
are very few that love me, patient reader; but those
who do, thus abbreviate my pleasant name of Philip.
I was called after the Indian sachem of that name,
whose blood runs in this tawny hand.) Larry looked
upon me as a man. I looked on him, with all his
dignities and changes, through the sweet vista of
memory—as a boy. His mouth had acquired the

pinched corners of caution and mistrust common to
those who know their fellow-men; but I never saw it
unless when speculating as I am now. He was to me
the pale-faced and melancholy friend of my boyhood;
and I could have slept, as I used to do, with my arm
around his neck, and feared to stir lest I should wake
him. Had my last earthy hope lain in the palm of
my hand, I could have given it to him, had he needed
it, but to make him sleep; and yet he thought of me
but as a stranger under his roof, and added, in his
warmest moments, a “Mr.” to my name! There is
but one circumstance in my life that has wounded me
more. Memory avaunt!

Why should there be no unchangeableness in the
world? why no friendship? or why am I, and you,
gentle reader (for by your continuing to pore over
these idle musings, you have a heart too), gifted with
this useless and restless organ beating in our bosoms,
if its thirst for love is never to be slaked, and its aching
self-fulness never to find flow or utterance? I
would positively sell my whole stock of affections for
three farthings. Will you say “two?”

“You are come in good time,” said Larry one morning,
with a half-smile, “and shall be groomsman to
me. I am going to be married.”

“Married?”

“Married.”

I repeated the word after him, for I was surprised.
He had never opened his lips about his unhappy lunacy
since my arrival, and I had felt hurt at this apparent
unwillingness to renew our ancient confidence,
but had felt a repugnance to any forcing of the topic
upon him, and could only hope that he had outgrown
or overcome it. I argued, immediately on this information
of his intended marriage, that it must be so.
No man in his senses, I thought, would link an impending
madness to the fate of a confiding and lovely
woman.

He took me into his sleigh, and we drove to her
father's house. She was a flower in the wilderness.
Of a delicate form, as all my countrywomen are, and
lovely, as quite all certainly are not, large-eyed, soft
in her manners, and yet less timid than confiding and
sister-like, with a shade of melancholy in her smile,
caught, perhaps, with the “trick of sadness” from himself,
and a patrician slightness of reserve, or pride,
which Nature sometimes, in very mockery of high
birth, teaches her most secluded child—the bride elect
was, as I said before, a flower in the wilderness. She
was one of those women we sigh to look upon as they
pass by, as if there went a fragment of the wreck of
some blessed dream.

The day arrived for the wedding, and the sleigh-bells
jingled merrily into the village. The morning
was as soft and genial as June, and the light snow on
the surface of the lake melted, and lay on the breast
of the solid ice beneath, giving it the effect of one white
silver mirror, stretching to the edge of the horizon.
It was exquisitely beautiful, and I was standing at the
window in the afternoon, looking off upon the shining
expanse, when Larry approached, and laid his hand
familiarly on my shoulder.

“What glorious skating we shall have,” said I, “if
this smooth water freezes to-night!”

I turned the next moment to look at him; for we
had not skated together since I went out, at his earnest
entreaty, at midnight, to skim the little lake where we
had passed our boyhood, and drive away the fever from
his brain, under the light of a full moon.

He remembered it, and so did I; and I put my arm
behind him, for the color fled from his face, and I
thought he would have sunk to the floor.

“The moon is full to-night,” said he, recovering instantly
to a cold self-possession.

I took hold of his hand firmly, and, in as kind a
tone as I could summon, spoke of our early friend
ship, and apologizing thus for the freedom, asked if he
had quite overcome his melancholy disease. His face
worked with emotion, and he tried to withdraw his
hand from my clasp, and evidently wished to avoid an
answer.

“Tell me, dear Larry,” said I.

“Oh God! No!” said he, breaking violently from
me, and throwing himself with his face downward upon
the sofa. The tears streamed through his fingers upon
the silken cushion.

“Not cured? And does she know it?”

“No! no! thank God! not yet!”

I remained silent a few minutes, listening to his
suppressed moans (for he seemed heart-broken with
the confession), and pitying while I inwardly condemned
him. And then the picture of that lovely and
fond woman rose up before me, and the impossibility
of concealing his fearful malady from his wife, and
the fixed insanity in which it must end, and the whole
wreck of her hopes and his own prospects and happiness—and
my heart grew sick.

I sat down by him, and, as it was too late to remonstrate
on the injustice he was committing toward her,
I asked how he came to appoint the night of a full
moon for his wedding. He gave up his reserve, calmed
himself, and talked of it at last as if he were relieved
by the communication. Never shall I forget the
doomed pallor, the straining eye, and feverish hand,
of my poor friend during that half hour.

Since he had left college he had striven with the
whole energy of his soul against it. He had plunged
into business—he had kept his bed resolutely night
after night, till his brain seemed on the verge of phrensy
with the effort—he had taken opium to secure to himself
an artificial sleep; but he had never dared to confide
it to any one, and he had no friend to sustain him
in his fearful and lonely hours; and it grew upon him
rather than diminished. He described to me with the
most touching pathos how he had concealed it for
years—how he had stolen out like a thief to give vent
to his insane restlessness in the silent streets of the city
at midnight, and in the more silent solitudes of the
forest—how he had prayed, and wrestled, and wept
over it—and finally, how he had come to believe that
there was no hope for him except in the assistance and
constant presence of some one who would devote life
to him in love and pity. Poor Larry! I put up a silent
prayer in my heart that the desperate experiment might
not end in agony and death.

The sun set, and, according to my prediction, the
wind changed suddenly to the north, and the whole
surface of the lake in a couple of hours became of the
lustre of polished steel. It was intensely cold.

The fires blazed in every room of the bride's paternal
mansion, and I was there early to fulfil my office
of master of ceremonies at the bridal. My heart was
weighed down with a sad boding, but I shook off at
least the appearance of it, and superintended the concoction
of a huge bowl of punch with a merriment
which communicated itself in the shape of most joyous
hilarity to a troop of juvenile relations. The house
resounded with their shouts of laughter.

In the midst of our noise in the small inner room
entered Larry. I started back, for he looked more like
a demon possessed than a Christian man. He had walked
to the house alone in the moonlight, not daring to
trust himself in company. I turned out the turbulent
troop about me, and tried to dispel his gloom, for a face
like his at that moment would have put to flight the
rudest bridal party ever assembled on holy ground.
He seized on the bowl of strong spirits which I had
mixed for a set of hardy farmers, and before I could
tear it from his lips had drank a quantity which, in an
ordinary mood, would have intoxicated him helplessly
in an hour. He then sat down with his face buried in
his hands, and in a few minutes rose, his eyes sparkling

with excitement, and the whole character of his
face utterly changed. I thought he had gone wild.

“Now, Phil,” said he; “now for my bride!” And
with an unbecoming levity he threw open the door,
and went half dancing into the room where the friends
were already assembled to witness the ceremony.

I followed with fear and anxiety. He took his place
by the side of the fair creature on whom he had placed
his hopes of life, and, though sobered somewhat by
the impressiveness of the scene, the wild sparkle still
danced in his eyes, and I could see that every nerve
in his frame was excited to the last pitch of tension.
If he had fallen a gibbering maniac on the floor, I
should not have been astonished.

The ceremony proceeded, and the first tone of his
voice in the response startled even the bride. If it had
rung from the depths of a cavern, it could not have
been more sepulchral. I looked at him with a shudder.
His lips were curled with an exulting expression,
mixed with an indefinable fear; and all the blood
in his face seemed settled about his eyes, which were
so bloodshot and fiery, that I have ever since wondered
he was not, at the first glance, suspected of insanity.
But oh! the heavenly sweetness with which that loveliest
of creatures promised to love and cherish him, in
sickness and in health! I never go to a bridal but it
half breaks my heart; and as the soft voice of that
beautiful girl fell with its eloquent meaning on my
ear, and I looked at her, with lips calm and eyes moistened,
vowing a love which I knew to be stronger than
death, to one who, I feared, was to bring only pain and
sorrow into her bosom, my eyes warmed with irrepressible
tears, and I wept.

The stir in the room as the clergyman closed his
prayer, seemed to awake him from a trance. He
looked around with a troubled face for a moment; and
then, fixing his eyes on his bride, he suddenly clasped
his arms about her, and straining her violently to his
bosom, broke into an hysterical passion of tears and
laughter. Then suddenly resuming his self-command,
he apologized for the over-excitement of his feelings,
and behaved with forced and gentle propriety till the
guests departed.

There was an apprehensive gloom over the spirits
of the small bridal party left in the lighted rooms; and
as they gathered round the fire, I approached, and endeavored
to take a gay farewell. Larry was sitting
with his arm about his wife, and he wrung my hand in
silence as I said, “Good-night,” and dropped his head
upon her shoulder. I made some futile attempt to
rally him, but it jarred on the general feeling, and I
left the house.

It was a glorious night. The clear piercing air had
a vitreous brilliancy, which I have never seen in any
other climate, the rays of the moonlight almost visibly
splintering with the keenness of the frost. The
moon herself was in the zenith, and there seemed
nothing between her and the earth but palpable and
glittering cold.

I hurried home: it was but eleven o'clock; and,
heaping up the wood in the large fireplace, I took a
volume of “Ivanhoe,” which had just then appeared,
and endeavored to rid myself of my unpleasant
thoughts. I read on till midnight; and then, in a
pause of the story, I rose to look out upon the night,
hoping, for poor Larry's sake, that the moon was
buried in clouds. The house was near the edge of
the lake; and as I looked down upon the glassy waste,
spreading away from the land, I saw the dark figure
of a man kneeling directly in the path of the moon's
rays. In another moment he rose to his feet, and
the tall, slight form of my poor friend was distinctly
visible, as, with long and powerful strokes, he sped
away upon his skates along the shore.

To take my own Hollanders, put a collar of fur
around my mouth, and hurry after him, was the work
of but a minute. My straps were soon fastened; and,
following in the marks of the sharp irons at the top of
my speed, I gained sight of him in about half an hour,
and with great effort neared him sufficiently to shout
his name with a hope of being heard.

“Larry! Larry!”

The lofty mountain-shore gave back the cry in repeated
echoes—but he redoubled his strokes, and
sped on faster than before. At my utmost speed I
followed on; and when, at last, I could almost lay
my hand on his shoulder, I summoned my strength
to my breathless lungs, and shouted again—“Larry!
Larry!”

He half looked back, and the full moon at that instant
streamed full into his eyes. I have thought
since that he could not have seen me for its dazzling
brightness; but I saw every line of his features with
the distinctness of daylight, and I shall never forget
them. A line of white foam ran through his half-parted
lips; his hair streamed wildly over his forehead,
on which the perspiration glittered in large drops; and
every lineament of his expressive face was stamped with
unutterable and awful horror. He looked back no
more; but, increasing his speed with an energy of
which I did not think his slender frame capable, he
began gradually to outstrip me. Trees, rocks, and
hills, fled back like magic. My limbs began to grow
numb; my fingers had lost all feeling, but a strong
northeast wind was behind us, and the ice smoother
than a mirror; and I struck out my feet mechanically,
and still sped on.

For two hours we had kept along the shore. The
branches of the trees were reflected in the polished
ice, and the hills seemed hanging in the air, and floating
past us with the velocity of storm-clouds. Far
down the lake, however, there glimmered the just
visible light of a fire, and I was thanking God that
we were probably approaching some human succor,
when, to my horror, the retreating figure before me
suddenly darted off to the left, and made swifter than
before toward the centre of the icy waste. Oh, God!
what feelings were mine at that moment! Follow him
far I dared not; for, the sight of land once lost, as it
would be almost instantly with our tremendous speed,
we perished, without a possibility of relief.

He was far beyond my voice, and to overtake him
was the only hope. I summoned my last nerve for
the effort, and keeping him in my eye, struck across
at a sharper angle, with the advantage of the wind full
in my back. I had taken note of the mountains, and
knew that we were already forty miles from home, a
distance it would be impossible to retrace against the
wind; and the thought of freezing to death, even if
I could overtake him, forced itself appallingly upon
me.

Away I flew, despair giving new force to my limbs,
and soon gained on the poor lunatic, whose efforts
seemed flagging and faint. I neared him. Another
struggle! I could have dropped down where I was,
and slept, if there were death in the first minute, so
stiff and drowsy was every muscle in my frame.

“Larry!” I shouted. “Larry!”

He started at the sound, and I could hear a smothered
and breathless shriek, as, with supernatural
strength, he straightened up his bending figure, and,
leaning forward again, sped away from me like a
phantom on the blast.

I could follow no longer. I stood stiff on my skates,
still going on rapidly before the wind, and tried to
look after him, but the frost had stiffened my eyes,
and there was a mist before them, and they felt like
glass. Nothing was visible around me but moonlight
and ice, and dimly and slowly I began to retrace the
slight path of semicircles toward the shore. It was
painful work. The wind seemed to divide the very
fibres of the skin upon my face. Violent exercise no

longer warmed my body, and I felt the cold shoot
sharply into my loins, and bind across my breast like
a chain of ice; and, with the utmost strength of mind
at my command, I could just resist the terrible inclination
to lie down and sleep. I forgot poor Larry.
Life—dear life!—was now my only thought! So selfish
are we in our extremity!

With difficulty I at last reached the shore, and then,
unbuttoning my coat, and spreading it wide for a sail,
I set my feet together, and went slowly down before
the wind, till the fire which I had before noticed began
to blaze cheerily in the distance. It seemed an
eternity in my slow progress. Tree after tree threw
the shadow of its naked branches across the way; hill
after hill glided slowly backward; but my knees
seemed frozen together, and my joints fixed in ice;
and if my life had depended on striking out my feet,
I should have died powerless. My jaws were locked,
my shoulders drawn half down to my knees, and in a
few minutes more, I am well convinced, the blood
would have thickened in my veins, and stood still, for
ever.

I could see the tongues of the flames—I counted
the burning fagots—a form passed between me and
the fire—I struck, and fell prostrate on the snow; and
I remember no more.

The sun was darting a slant beam through the trees
when I awoke. The genial warmth of a large bed of
embers played on my cheek, a thick blanket enveloped
me, and beneath my head was a soft cushion of withered
leaves. On the opposite side of the fire lay four
Indians wrapped in their blankets, and, with her head
on her knees, and her hands clasped over her ankles,
sat an Indian woman, who had apparently fallen asleep
upon her watch. The stir I made aroused her, and,
as she piled on fresh fagots, and kindled them to a
bright blaze with a handful of leaves, drowsiness came
over me again, and I wrapped the blanket about me
more closely, and shut my eyes to sleep.

I awoke refreshed. It must have been ten o'clock
by the sun. The Indians were about, occupied in various
avocations, and the woman was broiling a slice
of deer's flesh on the coals. She offered it to me as I
rose; and having eaten part of it with a piece of a cake
made of meal, I requested her to call in the men, and,
with offers of reward, easily induced them to go with
me in search of my lost friend.

We found him, as I had anticipated, frozen to death,
far out on the lake. The Indians tracked him by the
marks of his skate-irons, and from their appearance
he had sunk quietly down, probably drowsy and exhausted,
and had died of course without pain. His
last act seemed to have been under the influence of
his strange madness, for he lay on his face, turned
from the quarter of the setting moon.

We carried him home to his bride. Even the Indians
were affected by her uncontrollable agony. I
can not describe that scene, familiar as I am with pictures
of horror.

I made inquiries with respect to the position of his
bridal chamber. There were no shutters, and the
moon streamed broadly into it: and after kissing his
shrinking bride with the violence of a madman, he
sprang out of the room with a terrific scream, and she
saw him no more till he lay dead on his bridal bed.

INCIDENTS ON THE HUDSON.

M. Chabert, the fire-eater, would have found New
York uncomfortable. I would mention the height of
the thermometer, but for an aversion I have to figures.
Broadway, at noon, had been known to fry soles.

I had fixed upon the first of August for my annual
trip to Saratoga—and with a straw hat, a portmanteau,
and a black boy, was huddled into the “rather-faster-than-lightning”
steamer, “North America,” with about
seven hundred other people, like myself, just in time.
Some hundred and fifty gentlemen and ladies, thirty
seconds too late, stood “larding” the pine chips upon
the pier, gazing after the vanishing boat through showers
of perspiration. Away we “streaked” at the rate
of twelve miles in the hour against the current, and
by the time I had penetrated to the baggage-closet,
and seated William Wilberforce upon my portmanteau,
with orders not to stir for eleven hours and seven minutes,
we were far up the Hudson, opening into its hills
and rocks, like a witches' party steaming through the
Hartz in a caldron.

A North-river steamboat, as a Vermont boy would
phrase it, is another guess sort o' thing from a Britisher.
A coal-barge and an eight-oars on the Thames
are scarce more dissimilar. Built for smooth water
only, our river boats are long, shallow, and graceful,
of the exquisite proportions of a pleasure-yacht, and
painted as brilliantly and fantastically as an Indian
shell. With her bow just leaning up from the surface
of the stream, her cut-water throwing off a curved and
transparent sheet from either side, her white awnings,
her magical speed, and the gay spectacle of a thousand
well-dressed people on her open decks, I know nothing
prettier than the vision that shoots by your door
as you sit smoking in your leaf-darkened portico on
the bold shore of the Hudson.

The American edition of Mrs. Trollope (several
copies of which are to be found in every boat, serving
the same purpose to the feelings of the passengers as
the escape-valve to the engine) lay on a sofa beside
me, and taking it up, as to say, “I will be let alone,”
I commenced dividing my attention in my usual quiet
way between the varied panorama of rock and valley
flying backward in our progress, and the as varied
multitude about me.

For the mass of the women, as far as satin slippers,
hats, dresses, and gloves, could go, a Frenchman might
have fancied himself in the midst of a transplantation
from the Boulevards. In London, French fashions are
in a manner Anglified: but an American woman looks
on the productions of Herbault, Boivin, and Maneuri,
as a translator of the Talmud on the inspired text. The
slight figure and small feet of the race rather favor the
resemblance; and a French milliner, who would probably
come to America expecting to see bears and buffaloes
prowling about the landing-place, would rub her
eyes in New York, and imagine she was still in France,
and had crossed, perhaps, only the broad part of the
Seine.

The men were a more original study. Near me sat
a Kentuckian on three chairs. He had been to the metropolis,
evidently for the first time, and had “looked
round sharp.” In a first of no very delicate proportions,
was crushed a pair of French kid-gloves, which,
if they fulfilled to him a glove's destiny, would flatter
“the rich man” that “the camel” might yet give him
the required precedent. His hair had still the traces
of having been astonished with curling-tongs, and
across his Atlantean breast was looped, in a complicated
zig-zag, a chain that must have cost him a wilderness
of rackoon-skins. His coat was evidently the
production of a Mississippi tailor, though of the finest
English material; his shirt-bosom was ruffled like a
swan with her feathers full spread, and a black silk
cravat, tied in a kind of a curse-me-if-I-care-sort-of-a-knot,
flung out its ends like the arms of an Italian
improvisatore. With all this he was a man to look
upon with respect. His under jaw was set up to its
fellow with an habitual determination that would
throw a hickory-tree into a shiver; but frank good-nature,
and the most absolute freedom from suspicion,

lay at large on his Ajacean features, mixed with
an earnestness that commended itself at once to your
liking.

In a retired corner, near the wheel, stood a group
of Indians, as motionless by the hour together as
figures carved in rosso antico. They had been on
their melancholy annual visit to the now-cultivated
shores of Connecticut, the burial-place, but unforgotten
and once wild home of their fathers. With the
money given them by the romantic persons whose
sympathies are yearly moved by these stern and poetical
pilgrims, they had taken a passage in the “fire-canoe,”
which would set them two hundred miles on
their weary journey back to the prairies. Their
Apollo-like forms loosely dressed in blankets, their
gaudy wampum-belts and feathers, the muscular arm
and close clutch upon the rifle, the total absence of
surprise at the unaccustomed wonders about them,
and the lowering and settled scorn and dislike expressed
in their copper faces, would have powerfully
impressed a European. The only person on whom
they deigned to cast a glance was the Kentuckian,
and at him they occasionally stole a look, as if, through
all his metropolian finery, they recognised metal with
whose ring they were familiar.

There were three foreigners on board, two of them
companions, and one apparently alone. With their
coats too small for them, their thick-soled boots and
sturdy figures, collarless cravats, and assumed unconsciousness
of the presence of another living soul, they
were recognisable at once as Englishmen. To most
of the people on board they probably appeared equally
well-dressed, and of equal pretensions to the character
of gentlemen; but any one who had made observations
between Temple Bar and the steps of Crockford's,
would easily resolve them into two Birmingham bagmen
“sinking the shop,” and a quiet gentleman on a
tour of information.

The only other persons I particularly noted were a
southerner, probably the son of a planter from Alabama,
and a beautiful girl, dressed in singularly bad
taste, who seemed his sister. I knew the “specimen”
well. The indolent attitude, the thin but powerfully-jointed
frame, the prompt politeness, the air of superiority
acquired from constant command over slaves, the
mouth habitually flexible and looking eloquent even
in silence, and the eye in which slept a volcano of violent
passions, were the marks that showed him of a
race that I had studied much, and preferred to all the
many and distinct classes of my countrymen. His
sister was of the slightest and most fragile figure,
graceful as a fawn, but with no trace of the dancing
master's precepts in her motions, vivid in her attention
to everything about her, and amused with all she saw;
a copy of Lalla Rookh sticking from the pocket of
her French apron, a number of gold chains hung outside
her travelling habit, and looped to her belt, and a
glorious profusion of dark curls broken loose from her
combs and floating unheeded over her shoulders.

Toward noon we rounded West Point, and shot
suddenly into the overshadowed gorge of the mountains,
as if we were dashing into the vein of a silver
mine, laid open and molten into a flowing river by a
flash of lightning. (The figure should be Montgomery's;
but I can in no other way give an idea of
the sudden darkening of the Hudson, and the underground
effect of the sharp over-hanging mountains as
you sweep first into the highlands.)

The solitary Englishman, who had been watching
the southern beauty with the greatest apparent interest,
had lounged over to her side of the boat, and,
with the instinctive knowledge that women have of
character, she had shrunk from the more obtrusive
attempts of the Brummagems to engage her in conversation,
and had addressed some remark to him,
which seemed to have advanced them at once to ac
quaintances of a year. They were admiring the stupendous
scenery together a moment before the boat
stopped for a passenger, off a small town above the
point. As the wheels were checked, there was a sudden
splash in the water, and a cry of “a lady overboard!”
I looked for the fair creature who had been
standing before me, and she was gone. The boat was
sweeping on, and as I darted to the railing I saw the
gurgling eddy where something had just gone down;
and in the next minute the Kentuckian and the
youngest of the Indians rushed together to the stern,
and clearing the taffrail with tremendous leaps, dived
side by side into the very centre of the foaming circle.
The Englishman had coolly seized a rope, and, by the
time they reappeared, stood on the railing with a coil
in his hand, and flung it with accurate calculation
directly over them. With immovably grave faces, and
eyes blinded with water, the two divers rose, holding
high between them—a large pine fagot! Shouts of
laughter pealed from the boat, and the Kentuckian,
discovering his error, gave the log an indignant fling
behind, and, taking hold of the rope, lay quietly to be
drawn in; while the Indian, disdaining assistance,
darted through the wake of the boat with arrowy
swiftness, and sprang up the side with the agility of a
tiger-cat. The lady reappeared from the cabin as
they jumped dripping upon the deck; the Kentuckian
shook himself, and sat down in the sun to dry; and
the graceful and stern Indian, too proud even to put
the wet hair away from his forehead, resumed his
place, and folded his arms, as indifferent and calm,
save the suppressed heaving of his chest, as if he had
never stirred from his stone-like posture.

An hour or two more brought us to the foot of the
Catskills, and here the boat lay alongside the pier to
discharge those of her passengers who were bound to
the house on the mountain. A hundred or more
moved to the gangway at the summons to get ready,
and among them the southerners and the Kentuckian.
I had begun to feel an interest in our fair fellow-passenger,
and I suddenly determined to join their party
—a resolution which the Englishman seemed to come
to at the same moment, and probably for the same
reason.

We slept at the pretty village on the bank of the
river, and the next day made the twelve hours' ascent
through glen and forest, our way skirted with the
most gorgeous and odorent flowers, and turned aside
and towered over the trees whose hoary and moss-covered
trunks would have stretched the conceptions
of the “Savage Rosa.” Everything that was not
lovely was gigantesque and awful. The rocks were
split with the visible impress of the Almighty power
that had torn them apart, and the daring and dizzy
crags spurred into the sky, as if the arms of a buried
and phrensied Titan were thrusting them from the
mountain's bosom. It gave one a kind of maddening
desire to shout and leap—the energy with which it
filled the mind so out-measured the power of the frame.

Near the end of our journey, we stopped together
on a jutting rock, to look back on the obstacles we
had overcome. The view extended over forty or fifty
miles of vale and mountain, and, with a half-shut eye,
it looked, in its green and lavish foliage, like a near
and unequal bed of verdure, while the distant Hudson
crept through it like a half-hid satin riband, lost as if
in clumps of moss among the broken banks of the
highlands. I was trying to fix the eye of my companion
upon West Point, when a steamer, with its
black funnel and retreating line of smoke, issued as if
from the bosom of the hills into an open break of the
river. It was as small apparently as the white hand
that pointed to it so rapturously.

“Oh!” said the half-breathless girl, “is it not like
some fairy bark on an eastern stream, with a spice-lamp
alight in its prow?”

“More like an old shoe afloat, with a cigar stuck in
it,” interrupted Kentucky.

As the sun began to kindle into a blaze of fire, the
tumultuous masses, so peculiar to an American sky,
turning every tree and rock to a lambent and rosy
gold, we stood on the broad platform on which the
house is built, braced even beyond weariness by the
invigorating and rarified air of the mountain. A hot
supper and an early pillow, with the feather beds and
blankets of winter, were unromantic circumstances,
but I am not aware that any one of the party made
any audible objection to them; I sat next the Kentuckian
at table, and can answer for two.

A mile or two back from the mountain-house, on
nearly the same level, the gigantic forest suddenly
sinks two or three hundred feet into the earth, forming
a tremendous chasm, over which a bold stag might
almost leap, and above which the rocks hang on
either side with the most threatening and frowning
grandeur. A mountain-stream creeps through the
forest to the precipice, and leaps as suddenly over, as
if, Arethusa-like, it fled into the earth from the pursuing
steps of a satyr. Thirty paces from its brink,
you would never suspect, but for the hollow reverberation
of the plunging stream, that anything but a
dim and mazy wood was within a day's journey. It
is visited as a great curiosity in scenery, under the
name of Cauterskill Falls.

We were all on the spot by ten the next morning,
after a fatiguing tramp through the forest; for the
Kentuckian had rejected the offer of a guide, undertaking
to bring us to it in a straight line by only the
signs of the water-course. The caprices of the little
stream had misled him, however, and we arrived half-dead
with the fatigue of our cross-marches.

I sat down on the bald edge of the precipice, and
suffered my more impatient companions to attempt
the difficult and dizzy descent before me. The Kentuckian
leaped from rock to rock, followed daringly
by the southerner; and the Englishman, thoroughly
enamored of the exquisite child of nature, who knew
no reserve beyond her maidenly modesty, devoted
himself to her assistance, and compelled her with
anxious entreaties to descend more cautiously. I lay
at my length as they proceeded, and with my head
over the projecting edge of the most prominent crag,
watched them in a giddy dream, half-stupified by the
grandeur of the scene, half-interested in their motions.

They reached the bottom of the glen at last, and
shouted to the two who had gone before, but they had
followed the dark passage of the stream to find its
vent, and were beyond sight or hearing.

After sitting a minute or two, the restless but over-fatigued
girl rose to go nearer the fall, and I was remarking
to myself the sudden heaviness of her steps,
when she staggered, and turning toward her companion,
fell senseless into his arms. The closeness of the
air below, combined with over-exertion, had been too
much for her.

The small hut of an old man who served as a guide
stood a little back from the glen, and I had rushed
into it, and was on the first step of the descent with a
flask of spirits, when a cry from the opposite crag, in
the husky and choking scream of infuriated passion,
suddenly arrested me. On the edge of the yawning
chasm, gazing down into it with a livid and death-like
paleness, stood the southerner. I mechanically followed
his eye. His sister lay on her back upon a flat
rock immediately below him, and over her knelt the
Englishman, loosening the dress that pressed close
upon her throat, and with his face so near to hers as to
conceal it entirely from the view. I felt the brother's
misapprehension at a glance, but my tongue clung to
the roof of my mouth; for in the madness of his fury
he stood stretching clear over the brink, and every
instant I looked to see him plunge headlong. Be
fore I could recover my breath, he started back, gazed
wildly round, and seizing upon a huge fragment of
rock, heaved it up with supernatural strength, and
hurled it into the abyss. Giddy and sick with horror,
I turned away and covered up my eyes. I felt assured
he had dashed them to atoms.

The lion roar of the Kentuckian was the first sound
that followed the thundering crash of the fragments.

“Hallo, youngster! what in tarnation are you arter?
You've killed the gal, by gosh!”

The next moment I heard the loosened stones as he
went plunging down into the glen, and hurrying after
him with my restorative, I found the poor Englishman
lying senseless on the rocks, and the fainting girl,
escaped miraculously from harm, struggling slowly to
her senses.

On examination, the new sufferer appeared only
stunned by a small fragment which had struck him
on the temple, and the Kentuckian, taking him up in
his arms like a child, strode through the spray of the
fall, and held his head under the descending torrent
till he kicked lustily for his freedom. With a draught
from the flask, the pale Alabamian was soon perfectly
restored, and we stood on the rock together looking
at each other like people who had survived an earthquake.

We climbed the ascent and found the brother lying
with his face to the earth, beside himself with his
conflicting feelings. The rough tongue of the Kentuckian
to whom I had explained the apparent cause
of the rash act, soon cleared up the tempest, and he
joined us presently, and walked back by his sister's
side in silence.

We made ourselves into a party to pass the remainder
of the summer on the lakes, unwillingly letting off
the Kentuckian, who was in a hurry to get back to
propose himself for the legislature.

Three or four years have elapsed, and I find myself
a traveller in England. Thickly sown as are the
wonders and pleasures of London, an occasional dinner
with a lovely countrywoman in — Square, and
a gossip with her husband over a glass of wine, in
which Cauterskill Falls are not forgotten, are memorandums
in my diary never written but in “red
letters.”

THE GIPSY OF SARDIS.

Our tents were pitched in the vestibule of the house
of Crœsus, on the natural terrace which was once the
imperial site of Sardis. A humpbacked Dutch artist,
who had been in the service of Lady Hester Stanhope
as a draughtsman, and who had lingered about between
Jerusalem and the Nile till he was as much at
home in the east as a Hajji or a crocodile; an Englishman
qualifying himself for “The Travellers';”
a Smyrniote merchant in figs and opium; Job Smith
(my inseparable shadow) and myself, composed a
party at this time (August, 1834), rambling about
Asia Minor in turbans and Turkish saddles, and pitching
our tents, and cooking our pilau, wherever it
pleased Heaven and the inexorable suridji who was
our guide and caterer.

I thought at the time that I would compound to
abandon all the romance of that renowned spot, for a
clean shirt and something softer than a marble frustrum
for a pillow; but in the distance of memory, and my

self at this present in a deep morocco chair in the
library at “The Travellers';” the same scene in the
ruins of Sardis does not seem destitute of interest.

It was about four in the lazy summer afternoon.
We had arrived at Sardis at mid-day, and after a
quarrel whether we should eat immediately or wait till
the fashionable hour of three, the wooden dish containing
two chickens buried in a tumulus of rice,
shaped (in compliment to the spirit of the spot) like
the Mound of Alyattis in the plain below, was placed
in the centre of a marble pedestal; and with Job and
the Dutchman seated on the prostrate column dislodged
for our benefit, and the remainder of the party squatted
in the high grass, which grew in the royal palace as if
it had no memory of the foot-prints of the kings of
Lydia, we spooned away at the saturated rice, and
pulled the smothered chickens to pieces with an independence
of knives and forks that was worthy of the
“certain poor man in Attica.” Old Solon himself,
who stood, we will suppose, while reproving the ostentatious
monarch, at the base of that very column now
ridden astride by an inhabitant of a country of which
he never dreamed—(at least it strikes me there is no
mention of the Yankees in his philosophy)—the old
graybeard of the Academy himself, I say, would have
been edified at the primitive simplicity of our repast.
The salt (he would have asked if it was Attic) was
contained in a ragged play-bill, which the Dutchman
had purloined as a specimen of Modern Greek, from
the side of a house in Corfu; the mustard was in a
cracked powder-horn, which had been slung at the
breast of old Whalley the regicide, in the American
revolution, and which Job had brought from the Green
mountains, and held, till its present base uses, in religious
veneration; the ham (I should have mentioned
that respectable entremet before) was half enveloped
in a copy of the “Morning Post;” and the bread,
which had been seven days out from Smyrna, and had
been kept warm in the suridji's saddle bags twelve
hours in the twenty-four, lay in disjecta membra around
the marble table, with marks of vain but persevering
attacks in its nibbled edges. The luxury of our larder
was comprised in a flask which had once held Harvey's
sauce, and though the last drop had served as a
condiment to a roasted kid some three months before,
in the Acropolis at Athens, we still clung to it with
affectionate remembrance, and it was offered and refused
daily around the table for the melancholy pleasure
of hearing the mention of its name. It was unlucky
that the only thing which the place afforded of the
best quality, and in sufficient quanities, was precisely
the one thing in the world for which no individual of
the party had any particular relish—water! It was
brought in a gourd from the bed of the “golden-sanded
Pactolus,” rippling away to the plain within pistol-shot
of the dining-room; but, to the shame of our simplicity
I must record, that a high-shouldered jug of
the rough wine of Samos, trodden out by the feet of
the lovely slaves of the ægean, and bought for a farthing
the bottle, went oftener to the unclassical lips of
the company. Methinks, now (the wind east in London,
and the day wet and abominable). I could barter
the dinner that I shall presently discuss, with its suite
of sherries and anchovy, to kneel down by that golden
river in the sunshine, and drink a draught of pure
lymph under the sky of effeminate Asia. Yet, when
I was there—so rarely do we recognise happiness till
she is gone—I wished myself (where I had never been)
in “merry England.” “Merry,” quotha? Scratch
it out, and write comfortable. I have seen none
“merry” in England, save those who have most cause
to be sad—the abandoned of themselves and the
world!

Out of the reach of ladies and the laws of society,
the most refined persons return very much to the natural
instincts from which they have departed in the
progress of civilization. Job rolled off the marble
column when there was nothing more to eat, and went
to sleep with the marks of the Samian wine turning
up the corners of his mouth like the salacious grin of
a satyr. The Dutchman got his hump into a hollow,
and buried his head in the long grass with the same obedience
to the prompting of nature, and idem the suridji
and the fig-merchant, leaving me seated alone among
the promiscuous ruins of Sardis and the dinner. The
dish of philosophy I had with myself on that occasion
will appear as a rechauffe in my novel (I intend to
write one); but meantime I may as well give you the
practical inference; that, as sleeping after dinner is
evidently Nature's law, Washington Irving is highly
excusable for the practice, and he would be a friend of
reason who should introduce couches and coffee at that
somnolent period, the digestive nap taking the place
of the indigestible politics usually forced upon the company
on the disappearance of the ladies. Why should
the world be wedded for ever to these bigoted inconveniences!

The grand track from the south and west of Asia
Minor passes along the plain between the lofty Acropolis
of Sardis and the tombs of her kings; and with
the snore of travellers from five different nations in
my ear, I sat and counted the camels in one of the
immense caravans never out of sight in the valley of
the Hermus. The long procession of those brown
monsters wound slowly past on their way to Smyrna,
their enormous burthens covered with colored trappings
and swaying backward and forward with their disjointed
gait, and their turbaned masters dozing on the
backs of the small asses of the east, leading each a
score by the tether at his back; the tinkling of their
hundred bells swarmed up through the hot air of the
afternoon with the drowsiest of monotones; the native
oleanders, slender-leaved and tall, and just now in all
their glory, with a color in their bright flowers stolen
from the bleeding lips of Houris, brightened the plains
of Lydia like the flush of sunset lying low on the earth;
the black goats of uncounted herds browsed along the
ancient Sarabat, with their bearded faces turned every
one to the faintly coming wind: the eagles (that abound
now in the mountains from which Sardis and a hundred
silent cities once scared their bold progenitors) sailed
slowly and fearlessly around the airy citadel that flung
open its gates to the Lacedæmonian; and, gradually,
as you may have lost yourself in this tangled paragraph,
dear reader, my senses became confused among the
objects it enumerates, and I fell asleep with the speech
of Solon in my ears, and my back to the crumbling
portico of Crœsus.

The Dutchman was drawing my picture when I
awoke, the sun was setting, and Job and the suridji
were making tea. I am not a very picturesque object,
generally speaking, but done as a wild Arab lying at
the base of a column in a white turban, with a stork's
nest over my head, I am not so ill-looking as you would
suppose. As the Dutchman drew for gelt, and hoped
to sell his picture to some traveller at Smyrna who
would take that opportunity to affirm in his book that
he had been at Sardis (as vide his own sketch), I do
not despair of seeing myself yet in lithograph. And,
talking of pictures, I would give something now if I
had engaged that hump-backed draughtsman to make
me a sketch of Job, squat on his hams before a fire in
the wall, and making tea in a tin pot with a “malignant
and turbaned Turk,” feeding the blaze with the
dry thorn of Syria.[5] It would have been consolation
to his respectable mother, whom he left in the Green
mountains (wondering what he could have to do with
following such a scapegrace as myself through the

world), to have seen him in the turban of a Hajji taking
his tea quietly in ancient Lydia. The green turban,
the sign of the Hajji, belonged more properly to
myself; for though it was Job who went bodily to
Jerusalem (leaving me ill of a fig-fever at Smyrna), the
sanctity of the pilgrimage by the Mohammedan law
falls on him who provides the pilgrim with scallop-shell
and sandals, aptly figured forth in this case, we will suppose,
by the sixty American dollars paid by myself for
his voyage to Jaffa and back. The suridji was a
Hajji, too, and it was amusing to see Job, who respected
every man's religious opinions, and had a little
vanity besides in sharing with the Turk[6] the dignity of
a pilgrimage to the sacred city, washing his knees and
elbows at the hour of prayer, and considerately, but
very much to his own inconvenience, transferring the
ham of the unclean beast from the Mussulman's saddle-bags
to his own. It was a delicate sacrifice to a
pagan's prejudices worthy of Socrates or a Christian.

2. II.

In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of
better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers
his home—the sea-tost boy his mother and her last
words—the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chattering
Greek is silent, for the same—the Italian forgets
his mustache, and hams la patria—and the Englishman
delivers himself of the society of his companions,
and “takes a walk.” It is something in the influences
of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day, to
maintain that morn, noon, and midnight, have their
ministry as well, and exercise each an unobserved but
salutary and peculiar office on the feelings.

We all separated “after tea;” the Suridji was off to
find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman
strolled away by himself to a group of the “tents of
Kedar” far down in the valley with their herds and
herdsmen; the Smyrniote merchant sat by the camel-track
at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a
caravan; the Green-Mountaineer was wandering around
the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was
sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of
Cybele; and I, with a passion for running water which
I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank
of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and
Alexander, and sometimes of you, dear Mary!

I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over
which the “Angel of the Church of Sardis” kept his
brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand
not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and
nearly in a line between it and the palace of Crœsus. I
must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I
stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the
strong and never-wasting under-current of early religious
feeling rushed back on me, and I involuntarily
uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the
spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never without
the Bible that was his mother's parting gift, sat on
the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the
sacred volume open at the Revelation in his hand.

“I think, Philip,” said he, as I stood looking at him
in silence, “I think my mother will have been told by
an angel that I am here.”

He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other
feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy.

“Listen, Philip,” said he, “it will be something to
tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the
Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis.”

I listened with what I never thought to have heard
in Asia—my mother's voice loud at my heart, as I had
heard it in prayer in my childhood:—

“Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have
not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with
me in white: for they are worthy.”

I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood
the Temple of Cybele. The church to which “He”
spoke “who hath the seven spirits of God and the seven
stars,” was a small and humble ruin of brick and mortar;
but, of the temple of the Heathen Mother of the
world, remained two fair columns of marble with their
curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was
strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately
even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a
moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the
eyes of Crœsus and the philosopher from Athens; and
then I turned to the living nations that I had left to
wander among these dead empires, and looking still
on the eloquent monuments of what these religions
were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread
Christendom.

We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined
temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride
to ourselves that our imaginations awake the “spirit
of the spot.” But the primitive church of Christ, over
which an angel of God kept watch—whose undefiled
members, if there is truth in Holy Writ, are now
“walking with him in white” before the face of the
Almighty—a spot on which the Savior and his apostles
prayed, and for whose weal, with the other churches
of Asia, the sublime revelation was made to John—
this, the while, is an unvisited shrine, and the “classic”
of pagan idolatry is dearer to the memories of men
than the holy antiquities of a religion they profess!

3. III.

The Ionic capitals of the two fair columns of the
fallen temple were still tinged with rosy light on the
side toward the sunset, when the full moon, rising
in the east, burnished the other like a shaft of silver.
The two lights mingled in the sky in a twilight
of opal.

“Job,” said I, stooping to reach a handful of sand
as we strolled up the western bank of the river, “can
you resolve me why the poets have chosen to call this
pretty stream the `golden-sanded Pactolus?' Did you
ever see sand of a duller gray?”

“As easy as give you a reason,” answered Job,
“why we found the turbidus Hermus, yesterday, the
clearest stream we have forded—why I am no more
beautiful than before, though I have bathed like Venus
in the Scamander—why the pumice of Naxos no
longer reduces the female bust to its virgin proportions—and
why Smyrna and Malta are not the best
places for figs and oranges!”

“And why the old king of Lydia, who possessed
the invisible ring, and kept a devil in his dog's collar,
lies quietly under the earth in the plain below us, and
his ring and his devil were not bequeathed to his successors.
What a pleasant auxiliary to sin must have
been that invisible ring! Spirit of Gyges, thrust thy
finger out of the earth, and commit it once more to a
mortal! Sit down, my dear monster, and let us speculate
in this bright moonshine on the enormities we
would commit!”

As Job was proceeding, in a cautious periphrasis,
to rebuke my irreverent familiarity with the prince of
darkness and his works, the twilight had deepened,
and my eye was caught by a steady light twinkling far
above us in the ascending bed of the river. The green
valley wound down from the rear of the Acropolis, and
the single frowning tower stood in broken and strong
relief against the sky; and from the mass of shadow below
peered out, like a star from a cloud-rack, the steady
blaze of a lamp.

“Allons! Job!” said I, making sure of an adventure,
“let us see for whose pleasure a lamp is lit in
the solitude of this ruined city.”

“I could not answer to your honored mother,” said
my scrupulous friend, “if I did not remind you that
this is a spot much frequented by robbers, and that
probably no honest man harbors at that inconvenient
altitude.”

I made a leap over a half-buried frieze that had
served me as a pillow, and commenced the ascent.

“I could as ill answer to your anxious parent,” said
Job, following with uncommon alacrity, “if I did not
partake your dangers when they are inevitable.”

We scrambled up with some difficulty in the darkness,
now rolling into an unseen hollow, now stumbling
over a block of marble—held fast one moment by the
lacerating hooked thorn of Syria, and the next brought
to a stand-still by impenetrable thickets of brushwood.
With a half hour's toil, however, we stood on a clear
platform of grass, panting and hot; and as I was suggesting
to Job that we had possibly got too high, he
laid his hand on my arm, and, with a sign of silence,
drew me down on the grass beside him.

In a small fairy amphitheatre, half encircled by a
bend of the Pactolus, and lying a few feet below the
small platform from which we looked, lay six low tents,
disposed in a crescent opposite to that of the stream,
and enclosing a circular area of bright and dewy grass,
of scarce ten feet in diameter. The tents were round,
and laced neatly with wicker-work, with their curtain-doors
opening inward upon the circle. In the largest
one, which faced nearly down the valley, hung a small
iron lamp of an antique shape, with a wick alight in
one of its two projecting extremities, and beneath it
swung a basket-cradle suspended between two stakes,
and kept in motion by a woman apparently of about
forty, whose beauty, but for another more attractive
object, would have rewarded us alone for our toil. The
other tents were closed and seemed unoccupied, but the
curtain of the one into which our eyes were now straining
with intense eagerness, was looped entirely back to
give admission to the cool night air; and, in and out,
between the light of the lamp and the full moon, stole
on naked feet a girl of fifteen, whose exquisite symmetry
and unconscious but divine grace of movement
filled my sense of beauty as it had never been filled by
the divinest chisel of the Tribune. She was of the
height and mould of the younger water-nymph in
Gibson's Hylas,[7] with limbs and lips that, had I created
and warmed her to life like Pygmalion, I should
have just hesitated whether or not they wanted another
half-shade of fulness. The large shawl of the east,
which was attached to her girdle, and in more guarded
hours concealed all but her eyes, hung in loose
folds from her waist to her heels, leaving her bust and
smoothly-rounded shoulders entirely bare; and, in
strong relief even upon her clear brown skin, the flakes
of her glossy and raven hair floated over her back, and
swept around her with a grace of a cloud in her indolent
motions. A short petticoat of striped Brusa silk
stretched to her knees, and below appeared the full
trowser of the east, of the same material, narrowed at
the ankle, and bound with what looked in the moonlight
an anklet of silver. A profusion of rings on her
fingers, and a gold sequin on her forehead, suspended
from a colored fillet, completed her dress, and left
nothing to be added by the prude or the painter. She
was at that ravishing and divinest moment of female
life, when almost the next hour would complete her
womanhood—like the lotus ere it lays back to the
prying moonlight the snowy leaf nearest its heart.

She was employed in filling a large jar which stood
at the back of the tent, with water from the Pactolus,
and as she turned with her empty pitcher, and came
under the full blaze of the lamp in her way outward,
treading lightly lest she should disturb the slumber of
the child in the cradle, and pressing her two round
hands closely to the sides of the vessel, the gradual
compression of my arm by the bony hand which still
held it for sympathy, satisfied me that my own leaping
pulse of admiration found an answering beat in the
bosom of my friend. A silent nod from the woman,
whose Greek profile was turned to us under the lamp-light,
informed the lovely water-bearer that her labors
were at an end; and with a gesture expressive of heat,
she drew out the shawl from her girdle, untied the
short petticoat, and threw them aside, and then tripping
out into the moonlight with only the full silken
trowsers from her waist to her ankles, she sat down on
the brink of the small stream, and with her feet in the
water, dropped her head on her knees, and sat as motionless
as marble.

“Gibson should see her now,” I whispered to Job,
“with the glance of the moonlight on that dimpled
and polished back, and her almost glittering hair veiling
about her in such masses, like folds of gossamer!”

“And those slender fingers clasped over her knees,
and the air of melancholy repose which is breathed into
her attitude, and which seems inseparable from those
indolent Asiatics. She is probably a gipsy.”

The noise of the water dashing over a small cascade
a little farther up the stream had covered our approach
and rendered our whispers inaudible. Job's conjecture
was probably right, and we had stumbled on a small
encampment of gipsies—the men possibly asleep in
those closed tents, or possibly absent at Smyrna. After
a little consultation, I agreed with Job that it would
be impolitic to alarm the camp at night, and resolving
on a visit in the morning, we quietly and unobserved
withdrew from our position, and descended to our own
tents in the ruins of the palace.

4. IV.

The suridji had given us our spiced coffee in the
small china cups and filagree holders, and we sat discussing,
to the great annoyance of the storks over our
heads, whether we should loiter another day at Sardis,
or eat melons at noon at Casabar on our way to Constantinople.
To the very great surprise of the Dutchman,
who wished to stay to finish his drawings, Job and
myself voted for remaining—a view of the subject which
was in direct contradiction to our vote of the preceding
evening. The Englishman, who was always in a hurry,
flew into a passion, and went off with the phlegmatic
suridji to look after his horse; and having disposed
of our Smyrniote, by seeing a caravan (which
was not to be seen) coming southward from Mount
Tmolus, I and my monster started for the encampment
of the gipsies.

As we rounded the battered wall of the Christian
church, a woman stepped out from the shadow; through
a tattered dress, and under a turban of soiled cotton set
far over her forehead, and throwing a deep shadow into
her eyes, I recognised at once the gipsy woman whom
we had seen sitting by the cradle.

“Buon giorno, signori,” she said, making a kind of
salaam, and relieving me at once by the Italian salutation
of my fears of being unintelligible.

Job gave her the good-morning, but she looked at
him with a very unsatisfactory glance, and coming
close to my ear, she wished me to speak to her out of
the hearing of “il mio domestico!”

“Amico piu tosto!” I added immediately with a consideration
for Job's feelings, which, I must do myself
the justice to say, I always manifested, except in very
elegant society. I gave myself the greater credit in

this case, as, in my impatience to know the nature of
the gipsy's communication, I might be excused for
caring little at the moment whether my friend was
taken for a gentleman or a gentleman's gentleman.

The gipsy looked vexed at her mistake, and with a
half-apologetic inclination to Job, she drew me into
the shade of the ruin, and perused my face with great
earnestness. “The same to yourself,” thought I, as
I gave back her glance, and searched for her meaning
in two as liquid and loving eyes as ever looked out of
the gates of the Prophet's paradise for the coming of
a young believer. It was a face that had been divine,
and in the hands of a lady of fashion would have still
made a bello rifacimento.

“Inglese?” she said at last.

“No, madre—Americano.”

She looked disappointed.

“And where are you going, filio mio?”

“To Stamboul.”

“Benissimo!” she answered, and her face brightened.
“Do you want a servant?”

“Unless it is yourself, no!”

“It is my son.”

It was on my lips to ask if he was like her daughter,
but an air of uneasiness and mystery in her manner put
me on the reserve, and I kept my knowledge to myself.
She persevered in her suit, and at last the truth came
out, that her boy was bound on an errand to Constantinople,
and she wished safe conduct for him. The
rest of the troop, she said, were at Smyrna, and she
was left in care of the tents with the boy and an infant
child. As she did not mention the girl, who, from the
resemblance, was evidently her daughter—I thought it
unwise to allude to our discovery: and promising that,
if the boy was mounted, every possible care should be
taken of him, I told her the hour on the following
morning when we should be in the saddle, and rid myself
of her with the intention of stealing a march on
the camp.

I took rather a circuitous route, but the gipsy was
there before me, and apparently alone. She had sent
the boy to the plains for a horse, and though I presumed
that the loveliest creature in Asia was concealed
in one or the other of those small tents, the curtains
were closely tied, and I could find no apology for intruding
either my eyes or my inquiries. The handsome
Zingara, too, began to look rather becomingly
fiere; and as I had left Job behind, and was always
naturally afraid of a woman, I reluctantly felt myself
under the necessity of comprehending her last injunction,
and with a promise that the boy should join us
before we reached the foot of Mount Sypilus, she fairly
bowed me off the premises. I could have forsworn
my complexion and studied palmistry for a gipsy, had
the devil then tempted me!

5. V.

We struck our tents at sunrise, and were soon dashing
on through the oleanders upon the broad plain of
the Hermus, the dew lying upon their bright vermeil
flowers like the pellucid gum on the petals of the ice-plant,
and nature, and my five companions, in their
gayest humor. I was not. My thoughts were of
moonlight and the Pactolus, and two round feet
ankle-deep in running water. Job rode up to my
side.

“My dear Phil! take notice that you are nearing
Mount Sypilus, in which the magnetic ore was first
discovered.”

“It acts negatively on me, my dear chum! for I
drag a lengthening chain from the other direction.”

Silence once more, and the bright red flowers still
fled backward in our career. Job rode up again.

“You must excuse my interrupting your revery, but
I thought you would like to know that the town where
we sleep to-night is the residence of the `beys of Oglou,'
mentioned in the `Bride of Abydos.”'

No answer, and the bright red blossoms still flew
scattered in our path as our steeds flew through the
coppice, and the shovel-like blades of the Turkish stirrups
cut into them right and left in the irregular gallop.
Job rode again to my side.

“My dear Philip, did you know that this town of
Magnesia was once the capital of the Turkish empire—
the city of Timour the Tartar?”

“Well!”

“And did you know that when Themistocles was
in exile, and Artaxerxes presented him with the tribute
of three cities to provide the necessaries of life, Magnesia
[8] found him in bread?”

“And Lampascus in wine. Don't bore me, Job!”

We sped on. As we neared Casabar toward noon,
and (spite of romance) I was beginning to think with
complacency upon the melons, for which the town is
famous, a rattling of hoofs behind put our horses upon
their mettle, and in another moment a boy dashed into
the midst of our troop, and reining up with a fine display
of horsemanship, put the promised token into
my hand. He was mounted on a small Arabian mare,
remarkable for nothing but a thin and fiery nostril,
and a most lavish action, and his jacket and turban
were fitted to a shape and head that could not well
be disguised. The beauty of the gipsy camp was
beside me!

It was as well for my self-command, that I had
sworn Job to secrecy in case of the boy's joining us,
and that I had given the elder gipsy, as a token, a very
voluminous and closely-written letter of my mother's.
In the twenty minutes which the reading of so apparently
“lengthy” a document would occupy, I had
leisure to resume my self-control, and resolve on my
own course of conduct toward the fair masquerader.
My travelling companions were not a little astonished
to see me receive a letter by courier in the heart of
Asia, but that was for their own digestion. All the
information I condescended to give, was that the boy
was sent to my charge on his road to Constantinople;
and as Job displayed no astonishment, and entered
simply into my arrangements, and I was the only person
in the company who could communicate with the
suridji (I had picked up a little modern Greek in the
Morea), they were compelled (the Dutchman, John
Bull, and the fig-merchant) to content themselves
with such theories on the subject as Heaven might
supply them withal.

How Job and I speculated apart on what could be
the errand of this fair creature to Constantinople—
how beautifully she rode and sustained her character
as a boy—how I requested her, though she spoke
Italian like her mother, never to open her lips in any
Christian language to my companions—how she slept
at my feet at the khans, and rode at my side on the
journey, and, at the end of seven days, arriving at
Scutari, and beholding across the Bosphorus the golden
spires of Stamboul, how she looked at me with tears
in her unfathomable eyes, and spurred her fleet Arab
to his speed to conceal her emotion, and how I felt
that I could bury myself with her in the vizier's
tomb we were passing at the moment, and be fed on
rice with a goule's bodkin, if so alone we might not
be parted—all these are matters which would make
sundry respectable chapters in a novel, but of which
you are spared the particulars in a true story. There
was a convenience both to the dramatist and the audience
in the “cetera intus agentur” of the Romans.

6. VI.

We emerged from the pinnacled cypresses of the
cemetery overlooking Constantinople, and dismount

ing from my horse, I climbed upon the gilded turban
crowning the mausoleum of a royal Ichoglan (a sultan's
page, honored more in his burial than in his life),
and feasted my eyes on the desecrated but princely
fair birth-right of the Palæologi. The Nekropolis—
the city of the dead—on the outermost tomb of whose
gloomy precincts I had profanely mounted, stands
high and black over the Bosphorus on one side, while
on the other, upon similar eminences, stand the gleaming
minarets and latticed gardens of the matchless city
of the living—as if, while Europe flung up her laughing
and breathing child to the sun, expiring Asia, the
bereaved emperess of the world, lifted her head to the
same heavens in majestic and speechless sorrow.

But oh! how fairer than Venice in her waters—
than Florence and Rome in their hills and habitations,
than all the cities of the world in that which is most
their pride and glory—is this fairest metropolis of the
Mahomets! With its two hundred mosques, each
with a golden sheaf of minarets laying their pointed
fingers against the stars, and encircled with the fretted
galleries of the callers to prayer, like the hand of a
cardinal with its costly ring—with its seraglio gardens
washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by the
gentle stream that glides out of the “Valley of Sweet
Waters;” men-of-war on one side, flaunting their red
pennants over the nightingale's nest which sings for
the delight of a princess, and the swift caique on the
other gliding in protected waters, where the same imprisoned
fair one might fling into it a flower (so slender
is the dividing cape that shuts in the bay)—with
its Bosphorus, its radiant and unmatched Bosphorus—
the most richly-gemmed river within the span of the
sun, extending with its fringe of palaces and castles
from sea to sea, and reflecting in its glassy eddies a
pomp and sumptuousness of costume and architecture
which exceeds even your boyish dreams of Bagdad
and the califs—Constantinople, I say, with its turbaned
and bright-garmented population—its swarming
sea and rivers—its columns, and aqueducts, and
strange ships of the east—is impenetrable seraglio,
and its close-shuttered harems—its bezestein and its
Hippodrome—Constantinople lay before me! If the
star I had worshipped had descended to my hand out
of the sky—if my unapproachable and yearning dream
of woman's beauty had been bodied forth warm and
real—if the missing star in the heel of Serpentarius,
and the lost sister of the Pleiades had waltzed back
together to their places—if poets were once more
prophets, not felons, and books were read for the good
that is in them, not for the evil—if love and truth had
been seen again, or any impossible or improbable thing
had come to pass—I should not have felt more thrillingly
than now the emotions of surprise and wonder!

While I stood upon the marble turban of the Ichoglan,
my companions had descended the streets of
Scutari, and I was left alone with the gipsy. She sat
on her Arab with her head bowed to his neck, and
when I withdrew my eye from the scene I have faintly
described, the tear-drops were glistening in the flowing
mane, and her breast was heaving under her embroidered
jacket with uncontrollable grief. I jumped
to the ground, and taking her head between my hands,
pressed her wet cheek to my lips.

“We part here, signor,” said she, winding around
her head the masses of hair that had escaped from
her turban, and raising herself in the saddle as if to
go on.

“I hope not, Maimuna!”

She bent her moist eyes on me with a look or earnest
inquiry.

“You are forbidden to intrust me with your errand
to Constantinople, and you have kept your word to
your mother. But whatever that errand may be, I
hope it does not involve your personal liberty?”

She looked embarrassed, but did not answer.

“You are very young to be trusted so far from your
mother, Maimuna!”

“Signor, si!”

“But I think she can scarce have loved you so well
as I do to have suffered you to come here alone!”

“She intrusted me to you, signor.”

I was well reminded of my promise. I had given
my word to the gipsy that I would leave her child at
the Persian fountain of Tophana. Maimuna was
evidently under a control stronger than the love I half-hoped
and half-feared I had awakened.

“Andiamo!” she said, dropping her head upon her
bosom with the tears pouring once more over it like
rain; and driving her stirrups with abandoned energy
into the sides of her Arabian, she dashed headlong
down the uneven streets of Scutari, and in a few minutes
we stood on the limit of Asia.

We left our horses in the “silver city,”[9] crossing to
the “golden” in a caique, and with Maimuna in my
bosom, and every contending emotion at work in my
heart, the scene about me still made an indelible impression
on my memory. The star-shaped bay, a
mile perhaps in diameter, was one swarm of boats of
every most slender and graceful form, the caikjis, in
their silken shirts, and vari-colored turbans, driving
them through the water with a speed and skill which
put to shame the gondolier of Venice, and almost the
Indian in his canoe; the gilded lattices and belvideres
of the seraglio, and the cypresses and flowering trees
that mingle their gay and sad foliage above them,
were already so near that I could count the roses upon
the bars, and see the moving of the trees in the evening
wind; the muezzins were calling to sunset-prayer,
their voices coming clear and prolonged over the
water; the men-of-war in the mouth of the Bosphorus
were lowering their blood-red flags; the shore we
were approaching was thronged with veiled women,
and bearded old men, and boys with the yellow slipper
and red scull-cap of the east; and watching our approach,
stood apart, a group of Jews and Armenians,
marked by their costume for an inferior race, but looking
to my cosmopolite eye as noble in their black
robes and towering caps as the haughty Mussulman
that stood aloof from their company.

We set foot in Constantinople. It was the suburb
of Tophana, and the suridji pointed out to Maimuna,
as we landed, a fountain of inlaid marble and brass,
around whose projecting frieze were traced inscriptions
in the Persian. She sprang to my hand.

“Remember, Maimuna!” I said, “that I offer you
a mother and a home in another and a happier land.
I will not interfere with your duty, but when your
errand is done, you may find me if you will. Farewell.”

With a passionate kiss in the palm of my hand, and
one beaming look of love and sorrow in her large and
lustrous eyes, the gipsy turned to the fountain, and
striking suddenly to the left around the mosque of
Sultan Selim, she plunged into the narrow street running
along the water-side to Galata.

7. VII.

We had wandered out from our semi-European,
semi-Turkish lodgings on the third morning after our
arrival at Constantinople, and picking our way listlessly
over the bad pavement of the suburb of Pera,
stood at last in the small burying-ground at the summit
of the hill, disputing amicably upon what quarter
of the fair city beneath us we should bestow our share
in the bliss of that June morning.

“It is a heavenly day,” said Job, sitting down unthinkingly
upon a large sculptured turban that formed

the head-stone to the grave of some once-wealthy
pagan, and looking off wistfully toward the green summit
of Bulgurlu.

The difference between Job and myself was a mania,
on his part for green fields, and on mine for human
faces. I knew very well that his remark was a leader
to some proposition for a stroll over the wilder hills of
the Bosphorus, and I was determined that he should
enjoy, instead, the pleasure of sympathy in my nevertiring
amusement of wandering in the crowded bazars
on the other side of the water. The only way to accomplish
it, was to appear to yield the point, and then
rally upon his generosity. I had that delicacy for his
feelings (I had brought him all the way from the Green
mountains at my own expense) never to carry my
measures too ostentatiously.

Job was looking south, and my face was as resolutely
turned north. We must take a caique in any case
at Galata (lying just below us) but if we turned the
prow south in the first instance, farewell at every
stroke to the city! Whereas a northern course took
us straight up the Golden Horn, and I could appear to
change my mind at any moment, and land immediately
in a street leading to the bazars. Luckily, while
I was devising an errand to go up the channel instead
of down, a small red flag appeared gliding through the
forest of masts around the curve of the water-side at
Tophana, and, in a moment more, a high-pooped
vessel, with the carved railings and outlandish rigging
of the ships from the far east, shot out into the
middle of the bay with the strong current of the
Bosphorus, and squaring her lateen sail, she rounded
a vessel lying at anchor with the flag of Palestine, and
steered with a fair wind up the channel of the Golden
Horn. A second look at her deck disclosed to me a
crowd of people, mostly women, standing amid-ships,
and the supposition with which I was about inducing
Job to take a caique and pull up the harbor after her
seemed to me now almost a certainty.

“It is a slave-ship from Trebizond, ten to one, my
dear Job!”

He slid off the marble turban which he had profaned
so unscrupulously, and the next minute we
passed the gate that divides the European from the
commercial suburb, and were plunging down the steep
and narrow straits of Galata with a haste that, to the
slippered and shuffling Turks we met or left behind,
seemed probably little short of madness. Of a hundred
slender and tossing caiques lying in the disturbed
waters of the bay, we selected the slenderest and best
manned; and getting Job in with the usual imminent
danger of driving his long legs through the bottom of
the egg-shell craft, we took in one of the obsequious
Jews who swarm about the pier as interpreters, coiled
our legs under us in the hollow womb of the caique,
and shot away like a nautilus after the slaver.

The deep-lying river that coils around the throbbing
heart of Constantinople is a place of as delicate navigation
as a Venetian lagoon on a festa, or a soiree of
middling authors. The Turk, like your plain-spoken
friend, rows backward, and with ten thousand egg-shells
swarming about him in every direction, and his
own prow rounded off in a pretty iron point, an extra
piastre for speed draws down curses on the caikji and
the Christian dogs who pay him for the holes he lets
into his neighbors' boats, which is only equalled in bitterness
and profusion by the execrations which follow
what is called “speaking your mind.” The Jew
laughed, as Jews do since Shylock, at the misfortunes
of his oppressors; and, in the exercise of his vocation,
translated us the oaths as they came in right and left
—most of them very gratuitous attacks on those (as
Job gravely remarked), of whom they could know very
little—our respected mothers.

The slackening vessel lost her way as she got opposite
the bazar of dried fruits, and, as her yards came
down by the run, she put up her helm, and ran her
towering prow between a piratical-looking Egyptian
craft, and a black and bluff English collier, inscribed
appropriately on the stern as the “snow-drop” from
Newcastle. Down plumped her anchor, and in the
next moment the Jew hailed her by our orders, and
my conjecture was proved to be right. She was from
Trebizond, with slaves and spices.

“What would they do if we were to climb up her
side?” I asked the Israelite.

He stretched up his crouching neck till his twisted
beard hung clear off like a waterfall from his chin, and
looked through the carved railing very intently.

“The slaves are Georgians,” he answered, after
awhile, “and if there were no Turkish purchasers on
board, they might simply order you down again.”

“And if there were—”

“The women would be considered damaged by a
Christian eye, and the slave merchant might shoot you
or pitch you overboard.”

“Is that all?” said Job, evolving his length very
deliberately from his coil, and offering me a hand the
next moment from the deck of the slaver. Whether
the precedence he took in all dangers arose from affection
for me, or from a praiseworthy indifference to the
fate of such a trumpery collection as his own body
and limbs, I have never decided to my own satisfaction.

In the confusion of port-officers and boats alongside,
all hailing and crying out together, we stood on the
outer side of the deck unobserved, and I was soon intently
occupied in watching the surprise and wonder
of the pretty toys who found themselves for the first
time in the heart of a great city. The owner of their
charms, whichever of a dozen villanous Turks I saw
about them it might be, had no time to pay them very
particular attention, and dropping their dirty veils
about their shoulders, they stood open-mouthed and
staring—ten or twelve rosy damsels in their teens, with
eyes as deep as a well, and almost as large and liquid.
Their features were all good, their skins without a
flaw, hair abundant, and figures of a healthy plumpness—looking,
with the exception of their eyes, which
were very oriental and magnificent, like the great, fat,
pie-eating, yawning, boarding-school misses one sees
over a hedge at Hampstead. It was delicious to see
their excessive astonishment at the splendors of the
Golden Horn—they from the desert mountains of
Georgia or Circassia, and the scene about them
(mosques, minarets, people, and men-of-war, all together),
probably the most brilliant and striking in the
world. I was busy following their eyes and trying to
divine their impressions, when Job seized me by the
arm. An old Turk had just entered the vessel from
the land-side, and was assisting a closely-veiled female
to mount after him. Half a glance satisfied me that it
was the Gipsy of Sardis—the lovely companion of our
journey to Constantinople.

“Maimuna!” I exclaimed, darting forward on the
instant.

A heavy hand struck me back as I touched her, and
as I returned the blow, the swarthy crew of Arabs
closed about us, and we were hurried with a most unceremonious
haste to the side of the vessel. I scarce
know, between my indignation and the stunning effect
of the blow I had received, how I got into the caique,
but we were pulling fast up the Golden Horn by the
time I could speak, and in half an hour were set ashore
on the green bank of the Barbyses, bound on a solitary
ramble up the valley of Sweet Waters.

8. VIII.

The art of printing was introduced into the Mohammedan
empire in the reigns of Achmet III. and
Louis XV. I seldom state a statistical fact, but this

is one I happen to know, and I mention it because the
most fanciful and romantic abode with which I am acquainted
in the world was originally built to contain
the first printing-press brought from the court of Versailles
by Mehemet Effendi, ambassador from the
“Brother of the Sun.” It is now a maison de plaisance
for the sultan's favorite women, and in all the
dreams of perfect felicity which visit those who have
once seen it, it rises as the Paradise of retreats from
the world.

The serai of Khyat-Khana is a building of gold and
marble, dropped down unfenced upon the green-sward
in the middle of a long emerald valley, more
like some fairy vision, conjured and forgotten to be
dissolved, than a house to live in, real weather-proof,
and to be seen for the value of one and sixpence. The
Barbyses falls over the lip of a sea-shell (a marble
cascade sculptured in that pretty device), sending up
its spray and its perpetual music close under the gilded
lattice of the sultana, and following it back with the
eye, like a silver thread in a broidery of green velvet,
it comes stealing down through miles of the tenderest
verdure, without tree or shrub upon its borders, but
shut in with the seclusion of an enchanted stream and
valley by mountains which rise in abrupt precipices
from the edges of its carpet of grass, and fling their
irregular shadows across it at every hour save high
noon—sacred in the east to the sleep of beauty and
idleness.

In the loving month of May it is death to set foot in
the Khyat-Khana. The ascending caique is stopped
in the Golden Horn, and on the point of every hill is
stationed a mounted eunuch with drawn sabre. The
Arab steeds of the sultan are picketed on the low-lying
grass of the valley, and his hundred Circassians
come from their perfumed chambers in the scraglio,
and sun their untold loveliness on the velvet banks of
the Barbyses. From the Golden Horn to Belgrade,
twelve miles of greensward (sheltered like a vein of
ore in the bosom of the earth, and winding away after
the course of that pebbly river, unseen, save by the
eye of the sun and stars), are sacred in this passion-born
month from the foot of man, and, riding in their
scarlet arubas with the many-colored ribands floating
back from the horns of their bullocks, and their own
snowy veils dropped from their guarded shoulders and
deep-dyed lips, wander, from sunrise to sunset, these
caged birds of a sultan's delight, longing as wildly
(who shall doubt?) to pass that guarded barrier into
the forbidden world, as we, who sigh for them without,
to fly from falsehood and wrong, and forget that same
world in their bosoms!

How few are content! How restless are even the
most spoiled children of fortune! How inevitably
the heart sighs for that which it has not, even though
its only want is a cloud on its perpetual sunshine!
We were not of those—Job and I—for we were of
that school of philosophers[10] who “had little and
wanted nothing;” but we agreed, as we sat upon the
marble bridge sprung like a wind-lifted cobweb over
the Barbyses, that the envy of a human heart would
poison even the content of a beggar! He is a fool
who is sheltered from hunger and cold and still complains
of fortune; but he is only not a slave or a seraph,
who feeling on the innermost fibre of his sensibility the
icy breath of malice, utters his eternal malison on the
fiend who can neither be grappled with nor avoided.
I could make a paradise with loveliness and sunshine,
if envy could be forbidden at the gate!

We had walked around the Serai and tried all its
entrances in vain, when Job spied, under the shelter
of the southern hill, a blood-red flag flying at the top
of a small tent of the Prophet's green—doubtless concealing
the kervas, who kept his lonely guard over the
precincts. I sent my friend with a “pinch of piastres”
to tempt the trowsered infidel to our will, and he soon
came shuffling in his unmilitary slippers, with keys,
which, the month before, were guarded like the lamp
of Aladdin. We entered. We rambled over the
chambers of the chosen houries of the east; we looked
through their lattices, and laid the palms of our hands
on the silken cushions dimmed in oval spots by the
moisture of their cheeks as they slept; we could see by
the tarnished gold, breast-high at the windows, where
they had pressed to the slender lattices to look forth
upon the valley; and Job, more watchfully alive to
the thrilling traces of beauty, showed me in the diamond-shaped
bars the marks of their moist fingers and
the stain as of lips between, betraying where they had
clung and laid their faces against the trellis in the
indolent attitude of gazers from a wearisome prison.
Mirrors and ottomans were the only furniture; and
never, for me, would the wand of Cornelius Agrippa
have been more welcome, than to wave back into
those senseless mirrors the images of beauty they had
lost.

I sat down on a raised corner of the divan, probably
the privileged seat of the favorite of the hour. Job
stood with his lips apart, brooding in speechless poeticalness
on his own thoughts.

“Do you think, after all,” said I, reverting to the
matter-of-fact vein of my own mind, which was paramount
usually to the romantic—“do you think really,
Job, that the Zuleikas and Fatimas who have by turns
pressed this silken cushion with their crossed feet
were not probably inferior in attraction to the most
third-rate belle of New England? How long would
you love a woman that could neither read, nor write,
nor think five minutes on any given theme? The utmost
exertion of intellect in the loveliest of these deep-eyed
Circassians is probably the language of flowers;
and, good Heavens! think how one of your della
Cruscan sentiments would be lost upon her! And yet,
here you are, ready to go mad with romantic fancies
about women that were never taught even their
letters.”

Job began to hum a stave of his favorite song, which
was always a sign that he was vexed and disenchanted
of himself.

“How little women think,” said I, proceeding with
my unsentimental vein, while Job looked out of the
window, and the kervas smoked his pipe on the sultana's
ottoman—“how little women think that the
birch and the dark closet, and the thumbed and dogeared
spelling-book (or whatever else more refined torments
their tender years in the shape of education),
was, after all, the groundwork and secret of their fascination
over men! What a process it is to arrive at
love! `D-o-g, dog—c-a-t, cat!' If you had not
learned this, bright Lady Melicent, I fear Captain
Augustus Fitz-Somerset would never have sat, as I
saw him last night, cutting your initials with a diamond
ring on the purple-claret glass which had just
poured a bumper to your beauty!”

“You are not far wrong,” said Job, after a long
pause, during which I had delivered myself, unheard,
of the above practical apostrophe—“you are not far
wrong, quoad the women of New England. They
would be considerable bores if they had not learned,
in their days of bread-and-butter, to read, write, and
reason. But, for the women of the softer south and
east, I am by no means clear that education would
not be inconsistent with the genius of the clime. Take
yourself back to Italy, for example, where, for two
mortal years, you philandered up and down between
Venice and Amalfi, never out of the sunshine or away
from the feet of women, and, in all that precious episode
of your youth, never guilty, I will venture to presume,
of either suggesting or expressing a new thought.
And the reason is, not that the imagination is dull, but

that nobody thinks, except upon exigency, in these
latitudes. It would be violent and inapt to the spirit
of the hour. Indolence, voluptuous indolence of body
and mind (the latter at the same time lying broad
awake in its chamber, and alive to every pleasurable
image that passes uncalled before its windows) is the
genius, the only genius, of the night and day. What
would be so discordant as an argument by moonlight
in the Coliseum? What so ill-bred and atrocious as
the destruction by logic of the most loose-spun theory
by the murmuring fountains of the Pamfili? To live
is enough in these lands of the sun. But merely to
live, in ours, is to be bound, Prometheus-like, to a
rock, with a vulture at our vitals. Even in the most
passionate intercourse of love in your northern clime,
you read to your mistress, or she sings to you, or you
think it necessary to drive or ride; but I know nothing
that would more have astonished your Venetian bionda
than, when the lamp was lit in the gondola that you
might see her beauty on the lagune in the starless
night, to have pulled a book from your pocket, and
read even a tale of love from Boccaccio. And that is
why I could be more content to be a pipe-bearer in
Asia than a schoolmaster in Vermont, or, sooner than
a judge's ermine in England, to wear a scrivener's
rags, and sit in the shade of a portico, writing love-letters
for the peasant-girls of Rome. Talk of republics
—your only land of equality is that in which to breathe
is the supreme happiness. The monarch throws open
his window for the air that comes to him past the brow
of a lazzaroni, and the wine on the patrician's lip intoxicates
less than the water from the fountain that is
free to all, though it gush from the marble bosom of a
nymph. If I were to make a world, I would have the
climate of Greece, and no knowledge that did not
come by intuition. Men and women should grow
wise enough, as the flowers grow fair enough, with
sunshine and air, and they should follow their instincts
like the birds, and go from sweet to sweet with as little
reason or trouble. Exertion should be a misdemeanor,
and desire of action, if it were not too monstrous
to require legislation, should be treason to the
state.”

“Long live King Job!”

2. PART II.

I had many unhappy thoughts about Maimuna: the
glance I had snatched on board the Trebizond slaver
left in my memory a pair of dark eyes full of uneasiness
and doubt, and I knew her elastic motions so well,
that there was something in her single step as she
came over the gangway which assured me that she
was dispirited and uncertain of her errand. Who was
the old Turk who dragged her up the vessel's side
with so little ceremony? What could the child of
a gipsy be doing on the deck of a slaver from Trebizond?

With no very definite ideas as to the disposal of
this lovely child should I succeed in my wishes, I had
insensibly made up my mind that she could never be
happy without me, and that my one object in Constantinople
was to get her into my possession. I had a
delicacy in communicating the full extent of my design
to Job, for, aside from the grave view he would take
of the morality of the step, and her probable fate as a
woman, he would have painful and just doubts of my
ability to bear this additional demand upon my means.
Though entirely dependant himself, Job had that natural
contempt for the precions metals, that he could
not too freely assist any one to their possession who
happened to set a value on the amount in his pocket;
and this, I may say, was the one point which, between
my affectionate monster and myself, was not discussed
as harmoniously as the loves of Corydon and Alexis.
The account of his expenditure, which I regularly exacted
of him before he tied on his bandanna at night,
was always more or less unsatisfactory; and though
he would not have hesitated to bestow a whole scudo
unthinkingly on the first dirty dervish he should meet,
he was still sufficiently impressed with the necessity
of economy to remember it in an argument of any
length or importance: and for this and some other
reasons I reserved my confidence upon the intended
addition to my suite.

Not far from the Burnt Column, in the very heart
of Stamboul, lived an old merchant in attar and jessamine,
called Mustapha. Every one who has been at
Constantinople will remember him and his Nubian
slave in a small shop on the right, as you ascend to
the Hippodrome. He calls himself essence-seller to
the sultan, but his principal source of profit is the
stranger who is brought to his divans by the interpreters
in his pay; and to his credit be it said, that, for the
courtesy of his dealings, and for the excellence of his
extracts, the stranger could not well fall into better
hands.

It had been my fortune, on my first visit to Mustapha,
to conciliate his good will. I had laid in my
small stock of spice-woods and essences on that occasion,
and the call which I made religiously every time
I crossed the Golden Horn was purely a matter of
friendship. In addition to one or two trifling presents,
which (with a knowledge of human nature) I
had returned in the shape of two mortal sins—a keg
of brandy and a flask of gin, bought out of the English
collier lying in the bay—in addition to his kind
presents, I say, my large-trowsered friend had made
me many pressing offers of service. There was little
probability, it was true, that I should ever find occasion
to profit by them; but I nevertheless believed
that his hand was laid upon his heart in earnest sincerity,
and in the course of my reflections upon the
fate of Maimuna, it had occurred to me more than
once that he might be of use in clearing up the mystery
of her motions.

“Job!” said I, as we were dawdling along the street
of confectioners with our Jew behind us one lovely
morning, “I am going to call at Mustapha's.”

We had started to go to the haunt of the opium-eaters,
and he was rather surprised at my proposition,
but, with his usual amiableness (very inconvenient
and vexatious in this particular instance), he stepped
over the gutter without saying a word, and made for
the first turning to the right. It was the first time
since we had left New England that I wished myself
rid of his company.

“But, Job,” said I, calling him back to the shady
side of the street, and giving him a great lump of
candy from the nearest stall (its oriental name, by the
way, is “peace-to-your-throat,”) “I thought you were
bent on eating opium to-day?”

My poor friend looked at me for a minute, as if to
comprehend the drift of my remark, and as he arrived
by regular deduction at the result, I read very clearly
in his hideous physiognomy the painful embarrassment
it occasioned him. It was only the day before, that,
in descending the Bosphorus, we had seen a party of
the summary administrators of justice quietly suspending
a Turkish woman and her Greek paramour
from the shutters of a chamber-window—intercourse
with a Christian in that country of liberal legislation
being punishable without trial or benefit of dervish.
From certain observations on my disposition in the
course of my adventures, Job had made up his mind,
I well knew, that my danger was more from Delilah
than the Philistines; and while these victims of love
were kicking their silken trowsers in the air, I saw, by
the look of tender anxiety he cast upon me, from the
bottom of the caique, that the moral in his mind would

result in an increased vigilance over my motions.
While he stood with his teeth stuck full of “peace-to-your-throat,”
therefore, forgetting even the instinct
of mastication in his surprise and sorrow, I well understood
what picture was in his mind, and what construction
he put upon my sudden desire to solitude.

“My dear Philip!” he began, speaking with difficulty
from the stickiness of the candy in his teeth,
“your respected mother —”

At this instant a kervas, preceding a Turk of rank,
jostled suddenly against him, and as the mounted
Mussulman, with his train of runners and pipe-bearers,
came sweeping by, I took the opportunity of Job's
surprise to slip past with the rest, and, turning down
an ally, quietly mounted one of the saddle-horses
standing for hire at the first mosque, and pursued my
way alone to the shop of the attar-merchant. To
dismount and hurry Mustapha into his inner and private
apartment, with an order to the Nubian to deny
me to everybody who should inquire, was the work of
a minute, but it was scarcely done before I heard Job
breathless at the door.

“Ha visto il signore?” he exclaimed, getting to the
back of the shop with a single stride.

“Effendi, no!” said the imperturbable Turk, and he
laid his hand on his heart, as he advanced, and offered
him with grave courtesy the pipe from his lips.

The Jew had come puffing into the shop with his
slippers in his hand, and dropping upon his hams near
the door, he took off his small gray turban, and was
wiping the perspiration from his high and narrow forehead,
when Job darted again into the street with a
sign to him to follow. The look of despair and exhaustion
with which he shook out his baggy trowsers
and made after the striding Yankee, was too much
even for the gravity of Mustapha. He laid aside his
pipe, and, as the Nubian struck in with the peculiar
cackle of his race, I joined myself in their merriment
with a heartiness to which many a better joke might
have failed to move me.

While Mustapha was concluding his laugh between
the puffs of his amber pipe, I had thrown myself along
the divan, and was studying with some curiosity the
inner apartment in which I had been concealed. A
curtain of thick but tarnished gold cloth (as sacred
from intrusion in the east as the bolted and barred
doors of Europe) separated from the outer shop a
small octagonal room, that, in size and furniture, resembled
the Turkish boudoirs, which, in the luxurious
palaces of Europe, sometimes adjoin a lady's chamber.
The slippered foot was almost buried in the rich carpets
laid, but not fitted to the floor. The divans were
covered with the flowered and lustrous silk of Brusa,
and piled with vari-colored cushions. A perpetual
spice-lamp sent up its thin wreaths of smoke to the
black and carved ceiling, diffusing through the room a
perfume which, while it stole to the innermost fibres
of the brain with a sense of pleasure, weighed on the
eyelids and relaxed the limbs; and as the eye became
more accustomed to the dim light which struggled in
from a window in the arched ceiling, and dissolved in
the luxurious and spicy atmosphere, heaps of the rich
shawls of the east became distinguishable with their
sumptuous dyes, and, in a corner, stood a cluster of
crystal narghiles, faintly reflecting the light in their
dim globes of rose-water, while costly pipes, silver-mounted
pistols, and a rich Damascus sabre in a
sheath of red velvet, added gorgeousness to the apartment.

Mustapha was a bit of a philosopher in his way, and
he had made his own observations on the Europeans
who came to his shop. The secluded and oriental
luxuriousness of the room I have described was one of
his lures to that passion for the picturesque which he
saw in every traveller; and another was his gigantic
Nubian, who, with bracelets and anklets of gold, a
white turban, and naked legs and arms, stood always
at the door of his shop, inviting the passers-by—not to
buy essences and pastilles—but to come in and take
sherbet with his master. You will have been an hour
upon his comfortable divans, have smoked a pipe or
two, and eaten a snowy sherbet or a dish of rice-paste
and sugar, before Mustapha nods to his slave, and produces
his gold-rimmed jars of essences, from which,
with his fat fore-finger, he anoints the palm of your
hand, or, with a compliment to the beauty of your
hair, throws a drop into the curl on your temples.
Meanwhile, as you smoke, the slave lays in the bowl
of your pipe a small pastille wrapped in gold leaf,
from which presently arrives to your nostrils a perfume
that might delight a sultan; and then, from the
two black hands which are held to you full of cubical-edged
vials with gilded stoppers, you are requested
with the same bland courtesy to select such as in
size or shape suit your taste and convenience—the
smallest of them, when filled with attar, worth near a
gold piastre.

This is not very ruinous, and your next temptation
comes in the shape of a curiously-wrought censer,
upon the filagree grating of which is laid strips of
odorent wood which, with the heat of the coals beneath,
give out a perfume like gums from Araby.
This, Mustapha swears to you by his beard, has a
spell in its spicy breath provocative as a philtre, and
is to be burnt in your lady's chamber. It is worth its
weight in gold, and for a handful of black chips you
are persuaded to pay a price which would freight a
caique with cinnamon. Then come bracelets, and
amulets, and purses, all fragrant and precious, and,
while you hesitate, the Nubian brings you coffee that
would open the heart of Shylock, and you drink and
purchase. And when you have spent all your money,
you go away delighted with Mustapha, and quite persuaded
that you are vastly obliged to him. And, all
things considered, so you are!

When Mustapha had finished his prayers (did I say
that it was noon?) he called in the Nubian to roll up
the sacred carpet, and then closing the curtain between
us and the shop, listened patiently to my story
of the gipsy, which I told him faithfully from the
beginning. When I arrived at the incident on board
the slaver, a sudden light seemed to strike upon his
mind.

“Pekhe, filio mio! pekhe!” he exclaimed, running
his fore-finger down the middle of his beard, and
pouring out a volume of smoke from his mouth and
nostrils which obscured him for a moment from my
sight.

(I dislike the introduction of foreign words into a
story, but the Turkish dissyllable in the foregoing
sentence is as constantly on an eastern lip as the amber
of the pipe.)

He clapped his hands as I finished my narration,
and the Nubian appeared. Some conversation passed
between them in Turkish, and the slave tightened his
girdle, made a salaam, and taking his slippers at the
outer door, left the shop.

“We shall find her at the slave-market,” said Mustapha.

I started. The thought had once or twice passed
through my mind, but I had as often rejected it as
impossible. A freeborn Zingara, and on a confidential
errand from her own mother!—I did not see how
her freedom, if there were danger, should have been
so carelessly put in peril.

“And if she is there!” said I; remembering, first,
that it was against the Mohammedan law for a Christian
to purchase a slave, and next, that the price, if it did
not ruin me at once, would certainly leave me in a situation
rather to lessen than increase my expenses.

“I will buy her for you,” said Mustapha.

The Nubian returned at this moment, and laid at

my feet a bundle of wearing apparel. He then took
from a shelf a shaving apparatus, with which he proceeded
to lather my forehead and temples, and after a
short argument with Mustapha, in which I pleaded in
vain for two very seducing clusters of curls, those
caressed minions dropped into the black hand of the
slave, and nothing was left for the petits soins of my
thumb and fore-finger in their leisure hours save a
well-coaxed and rather respectable mustache. A
scull-cap and turban completed the transformation of
my head, and then, with some awkwardness, I got
into a silk shirt, big trowsers, jacket, and slippers, and
stood up to look at myself in the mirror. I was as
like one of the common Turks of the street as possible,
save that the European cravat and stockings had
preserved an unoriental whiteness in my neck and
ankles. This was soon remedied with a little brown
juice, and after a few cautions from Mustapha as to my
behavior, I settled my turban and followed him into
the street.

It is a singular sensation to be walking about in a
strange costume, and find that nobody looks surprised.
I could not avoid a slight feeling of mortification at
the rude manner with which every dirty mussulman
took the wall of me. After long travel in foreign
lands, the habit of everywhere exciting notice as a
stranger, and the species of consequence attached to
the person and movements of a traveller, become
rather pleasures than otherwise, and it is not without
pain that one finds oneself once more like common
people. I have not yet returned to my own land
(Slingsby is an American, gentle reader), and can not
judge, therefore, how far this feeling is modified by
the pleasures of a recovered home; but I was vexed
not to be stared at when playing the Turk at Constantinople,
and, amusing as it was to be taken for an
Englishman on first arriving in England (different as
it is from every land I have seen, and still more different
from my own), I must confess to have experienced
again a feeling of lessened consequence, when, on my
first entrance into an hotel in London, I was taken for
an Oxonian, “come up for a lark” in term-time. Perhaps
I have stumbled in this remark upon one of those
unconfessed reasons why a returned traveller is proverbially
discontented with his home.

Whether Mustapha wished to exhibit his new pipe-bearer
to his acquaintances, or whether there was fun
enough in his obese composition to enjoy my difficulties
in adapting myself to my new circumstances, I
can not precisely say; but I soon found that we were
not going straight to the slave-market. I had several
times forgotten my disguise so far as to keep the narrow
walk till I stood face to face with the bearded
Mussulmans, who were only so much astonished at my
audacity that they forgot to kick me over the gutter;
and passing, in the bazar of saddle-cloths, an English
officer of my acquaintance, who belonged to the
corvette lying in the Bosphorus, I could not resist the
temptation of whispering in his ear the name of his
sweetheart (which he had confided to me over a bottle
at Smyrna), though I rather expected to be seized
by the turban the next moment, with the pleasant consequences
of a mob and an exposure. My friend was
so thoroughly amazed, however, that I was deep in
the crowd before he had drawn breath, and I look
daily now for his arrival in England (I have not seen
him since), with a curiosity to know how he supposes
a “blackguard Turk” knew anything of the lock of
hair he carried in his waistcoat pocket.

The essence-seller had stopped in the book-bazar,
and was condescendingly smoking a pipe, with his
legs crossed on the counter of a venerable Armenian,
who sat buried to the chin in his own wares, when
who should come pottering along (as Mrs. Butler would
say) but Job with his Jew behind him. Mustapha
(probably unwilling to be seen smoking with an Ar
menian) had ensconced himself behind a towering
heap of folios, and his vexed and impatient pipe-bearer
had taken his more humble position on the narrow
base of one of the chequered columns which are peculiar
to the bazar devoted to the bibliopolists. As
my friend came floundering along “all abroad” with
his legs and arms, as usual, I contrived, by an adroit
insertion of one of my feet between his, to spread him
over the musty tomes of the Armenian in a way calculated
to derange materially the well-ordered sequence
of the volumes.

“Allah! Mashallah!” exclaimed Mustapha, whose
spreading lap was filled with black-letter copies of the
Khoran, while the bowl of his pipe was buried in the
fallen pyramid.

“Bestia Inglese!” muttered the Armenian, as Job
put one hand in the inkstand in endeavoring to rise,
and with the next effort laid his blackened fingers on
a heap of choice volumes bound in snowy vellum.

The officious Jew took up the topmost copy, marked
like a cinq-foil with his spreading thumb and fingers,
and quietly asked the Armenian what il signore would
be expected to pay. As I knew he had no money in
his pocket, I calculated safely on his new embarrassment
to divert his anger from the original cause of his
overthrow.

“Tre colonati,” said the bookseller.

Job opened the book, and his well-known guttural
of surprise and delight assured me that I might come
out from behind the column and look over his shoulder.
It was an illuminated copy of Hafiz, with a
Latin translation—a treasure which his heart had
been set upon from our first arrival in the east,
and for which I well knew he would sell his coat
off his back without hesitation. The desire to give
it him passed through my mind, but I could see no
means, under my present circumstances, either of
buying the book or relieving him from his embarrassment;
and as he buried his nose deeper between
the leaves, and sat down on the low counter, forgetful
alike of his dilemma and his lost friend, I nodded
to Mustapha to get off as quietly as possible,
and, fortunately slipping past both him and the
Jew unrecognised, left him to finish the loves of
Gulistan and settle his account with the incensed
Armenian.

2. II.

As we entered the gates of the slave-market, Mustapha
renewed his cautions to me with regard to my
conduct, reminded me that, as a Christian, I should see
the white female slaves at the peril of my life, and immediately
assumed, himself, a sauntering and poco-curante
manner, equally favorable to concealment and to his
interests as a purchaser. I followed close at his heels
with his pipe, and, as he stopped to chat with his acquaintances,
I now and then gave a shove with the bowl
between his jacket and girdle, rendered impatient to the
last degree by the sight of the close lattices on every
side of us, and the sounds of the chattering voices
within.

I should have been interested, had I been a mere
spectator, in the scene about me, but Mustapha's unnecessary
and provoking delay, while (as I thought possible,
if she really were in the market), Maimuna might
be bartered for at that moment within, wound my rage
to a pitch at last scarcely endurable.

We had come up from a cellar to which one of Mustapha's
acquaintances had taken him to see a young
white lad he was about to purchase, and I was hoping
that my suspense was nearly over, when a man came forward
into the middle of the court, ringing a hand-bell,
and followed by a black girl, covered with a scant blanket.
Like most of her race (she was an Abyssinian), her
head was that of a brute, but never were body and limbs

more exquisitely moulded. She gazed about without
either surprise or shame, stepping after the crier with
an elastic, leopard-like tread, her feet turned in like
those of the North American Indian, her neck bent
gracefully forward, and her shoulders and hips working
with that easy play so lost in the constrained dress and
motion of civilized women. The Mercury of Giovanni
di Bologna springs not lighter from the jet of the fountain
than did this ebon Venus from the ground on which
she stood.

I ventured to whisper to Mustapha, that, under cover
of the sale of the Abyssinian, we might see the white
slaves more unobserved.

A bid was made for her.

“Fifteen piastres!” said the attar-seller, wholly absorbed
in the sale, and not hearing a syllable I said to
him, “She would be worth twice as much to gild my
pastilles!” And handing me his pipe, he waddled into
the centre of the court, lifted the blanket from the slave's
shoulders, turned her round and round, like a Venus
on a pivot, looked at her teeth and hands, and after a
conversation aside with the crier, he resumed his pipe,
and the black disappeared from the ground.

“I have bought her!” he said, with a salacious grin,
as I handed him his tobacco-bag, and muttered a round
Italian execration in his ear.

The idea that Maimuna might have become the
property of that gross and sensual monster just as easily
as the pretty negress he had brought, sent my blood
boiling for an instant to my cheek. Yet I had seen this
poor savage of seventeen sold without a thought, save
mental congratulation that she would be better fed and
clad. What a difference one's private feelings make
in one's sympathies!

I was speculating, in a kind of tranquil despair, on
the luxurious evils of slavery, when Mustapha called to
him an Egyptian, in a hooded blue cloak, whom I remembered
tot have seen on board the Trebisondian.
He was a small-featured, black-lipped, willowy Asiatic,
with heavy-lidded eyes, and hands as dry and rusty as
the claws of a harpy. After a little conversation, he
rose from the platform on which he had crossed his
legs, and taking my pro-tempore master by the sleeve,
traversed the quadrangle to a closed door in the best-looking
of the miserable houses that surrounded the
court. I followed close upon his heels with a beating
heart. It seemed to me as if every eye in the crowded
market-place must penetrate my disguise. He knocked,
and answering to some one who spoke from within,
the door was opened, and the next moment I found myself
in the presence of a dozen veiled women, seated in
various attitudes on the floor. At the command of our
conductor, carpets were brought for Mustapha and himself;
and, as they dropped upon their hams, every veil
was removed, and a battery of staring and unwinking
eyes was levelled full upon us.

“Is she here?” said Mustapha to me in Italian, as
I stooped over to hand him his eternal pipe.

“Dio mio! no!”

I felt insulted, that with half a glance at the Circassian
and Georgian dolls sitting before us, he could ask
me the question. Yet they were handsome! Red
cheeks, white teeth, black eyes, and youth could scarce
compose a plain woman; and thus much of beauty
seemed equally bestowed on all.

“Has he no more?” I asked, stooping to Mustapha's
ear.

I looked around while he was getting the information
I wanted in his own deliberate way; and, scarce
knowing what I did, applied my eye to a crack in the
wall, through which had been coming for some time a
strong aroma of coffee. I saw at first only a small dim
room, in the midst of which stood a Turkish manghal,
or brazier of coals, sustaining the coffee-pot from which
came the agreeable prefume I had inhaled. As my
eye became accustomed to the light, I could distinguish
a heap of what I took to be shawls lying in the centre
of the floor; and presuming it was the dormitory of one
of the slave-owners, I was about turning my head away,
when the coffee on the manghal suddenly boiled over,
and at the same instant started, from the heap at which
I had been gazing, the living form of Maimuna!

“Mustapha!” I cried, starting back, and clasping
my hands before him.

Before I could utter another word, a grasp upon my
ankle, that drew blood with every nail, restored me to
my self-possession. The Circassians began to giggle,
and the wary old Turk, taking no apparent notice of
my agitation, ordered me, in a stern tone, to fill his
pipe, and went on conversing with the Egyptian.

I leaned with an effort at carelessness against the
wall, and looked once more through the crevice. She
stood by the manghal, filling a cup with a small filagree-holder
from the coffee-pot, and by the light of the
fire I could see every feature of her face as distinctly
as daylight. She was alone, and had been sitting
with her head on her knees, and the shawl, which had
now fallen to her shoulders, drawn over her till it concealed
her feet. A narrow carpet was beneath her,
and as she moved from the fire, a slight noise drew my
attention downward, and I saw that she was chained by
the ankle to the floor. I stooped to the ear of Mustapha,
told him in a whisper of my discovery, and implored
him, for the love of Heaven, to get admission
into her apartment.

“Pekhe! pekhe! filio mio!” was the unsatisfactory
answer to my impatience, while the Egyptian rose and
proceeded to turn around, in the light of the window,
the fattest of the fair Circassians, from whom he had
removed every article of dress save her slippers and
trousers.

I returned to the crevice. Maimuna had drunk her
coffee, and stood, with her arms folded, thoughtfully
gazing on the fire. The expression in her beautiful
and youthful face was one I could scarcely read to my
satisfaction. The slight lips were firmly but calmly
compressed, the forehead untroubled, the eye alone
strained, and unnaturally fixed and lowering. I
looked at her with the heart beating like a hammer in
my bosom, and the impatience in my trembling limbs
which it required every consideration of prudence to
suppress. She moved slowly away at last, and sinking
again to her carpet, drew out the chain from beneath
her, and drawing the shawl once more over her
head, lay down, and sunk apparently to sleep.

Mustapha left the Circassian, whose beauties he had
risen to examine more nearly, and came to my side.

“Are you sure that it is she?” he asked, in an almost
inaudible whisper.

“Si!”

He took the pipe from my hand, and requested me,
in the same suppressed voice, to return to his shop.

“And Maimuna”—

His only answer was to point to the door, and thinking
it best to obey his orders implicity, I made the
best of my way out of the slave-market, and was soon
drinking a sherbet in his inner apartment, and listening
to the shuffle of every passing slipper for the coming
of the light step of the gipsy.

3. III.

The rules of good-breeding discountenance in society
what is usually called “a scene.” I detest it as
well on paper. There is no sufficient reason, apparent
to me, why my sensibilities should be drawn upon
at sight, as I read, any more than when I please myself
by following my own devices in company. Violent
sensations are, abstractly as well as conventionally,
ill-bred. They derange the serenity, fluster the manner,
and irritate the complexion. It is for this reason
that I forbear to describe the meeting between Maimuna

and myself after she had been bought for forty
pounds by the wily and worthy seller of essences and
pastilles—how she fell on my neck when she discovered
that I, and not Mustapha, was her purchaser and master—how
she explained, between her hysterical sobs,
that the Turk who had sold her to the slave-dealer was
a renegade gipsy, and her mother's brother (to whom
she had been on an errand of affection)—and how she
sobbed herself to sleep with her face in the palms of
my hands, and her masses of raven hair covering my
knees and feet like the spreading fountains of San Pietro—and
how I pressed my lips to the starry parting
of those raven tresses on the top of her fairest head,
and blessed the relying child as she slept—are circumstances,
you will allow, my dear madam! that could
not be told passably well without moving your amiable
tenderness to tears. You will consider this paragraph,
therefore, less as an ingenious manner of disposing of
the awkward angles of my story, than as a polite and
praise-worthy consideration of your feelings and complexion.
Flushed eyelids are so very unbecoming!

4. IV.

My confidential interviews with Job began to take
rather an unpleasant coloring. The forty pounds I
had paid for Maimuna's liberty, with the premium to
Mustapha, the suit of European clothes necessary to
disguise my new companion, and the addition of a
third person in our European lodgings at Pera, rather
drove my finances to the wall. Job cared very little
for the loss of his allowance of pocket-money, and
made no resistance to eating kibaubs at a meat-shop,
instead of his usual silver fork and French dinner at
Madame Josepino's. He submitted with the same
resignation to a one-oared caique on the Bosphorus,
and several minor reductions in his expenses, thinking
nothing a hardship, in short, which I shared cheerfully
with him. He would have donned the sugar-loaf hat
of a dervish, and begged his way home by Jerusalem
or Mecca, so only I was content. But the morality of
the thing!

“What will you do with this beautiful girl when
you get to Rome? how will you dispose of her in
Paris? how will your friends receive a female, already
arrived at the age of womanhood, who shall have
travelled with you two or three years on the continent?
how will you provide for her? how educate her? how
rid yourself of her, with any Christian feeling of compassion,
when she has become irrevocably attached to
you?”

We were pulling up to the Symplegades while my
plain-spoken Mentor thrust me these home questions,
and Maimuna sat coiled between my feet in the bottom
of the caique, gazing into my face with eyes that
seemed as if they would search my very soul for the
cause of my emotion. We seldom spoke English in
her presence, for the pain it gave her when she felt
excluded from the conversation amounted in her all-expressive
features to a look of anguish that made it
seem to me a cruelty. She dared not ask me, in
words, why I was vexed; but she gathered from Job's
tone that there was reproof in what he said, and
flashing a glance of inquiring anger at his serious
face, she gently stole her hand under the cloak to
mine, and laid the back of it softly in my palm. There
was a delicacy and a confidingness in the motion that
started a tear into my eye; and as I smiled through it,
and drew her to me and impressed a kiss on her forehead,
I inwardly resolved, that, as long as that lovely
creature should choose to eat of my bread, it should
be free to her in all honor and kindness, and, if need
were, I would supply to her, with the devotion of my
life, the wrong and misconstruction of the world.
As I turned over that leaf in my heart, there crept
through it a breath of peace, and I felt that my good
angel had taken me into favor. Job began to fumble
for the lunch, and the dancing caique shot forth merrily
into the Black sea.

“My dearest chum!” said I, as we sat round our
brown paper of kibaubs on the highest point of the
Symplegades, “you see yourself here at the outermost
limit of your travels.”

His mouth was full, but as soon as he could conveniently
swallow, he responded with the appropriate
sigh.

“Six thousand miles, more or less, lie between you
and your spectacled and respectable mother; but
nineteen thousand, the small remainder of the earth's
circumference, extending due east from this paper of
cold meat, remain to you untravelled!”

Job fixed his eye on a white sea-bird apparently
asleep on the wing, but diving away eastward into the
sky, as if it were the heart within us sped onward with
our boundless wishes.

“Do you not envy him?” he asked enthusiastically.

“Yes; for nature pays his travelling expenses, and
I would our common mother were as considerate to
me! How soon, think you, he will see Trebisond,
posting at that courier speed?”

“And Shiraz, and Isaphan, and the valley of Cashmere!
To think how that stupid bird will fly over
them, and, spite of all that Hafiz, and Saadi, and Tom
Moore, have written on the lands that his shadow may
glide throught, will return, as wise as he went, to
Marmora! To compound natures with him were a
nice arrangement, now!”

“You would be better looking, my dear Job!”

“How very unpleasant you are, Mr. Slingsby! But
really, Philip, to cast the slough of this expensive and
il-locomotive humanity, and find yourself afloat with
all the necessary apparatus of life stowed snugly into
breast and tail, your legs tucked quietly away under
you, and, instead of coat and unmentionables to be put
off and on and renewed at such inconvenient expense, a
self-renewing tegument of cleanly feathers, brushed
and washed in the common course of nature by wind
and rain—no valet to be paid and drilled—no dressing-case
to be supplied and left behind—no tooth-brushes
to be mislaid—no tight boots—no corns—no passports
nor host-horses! Do you know, Phil, on reflection, I
find this `mortal coil' a very inferior and inconvenient
apparatus!”

“If you mean your own, I quite agree with you.”

“I am surprised, Mr. Slingsby, that you, who value
yourself on knowing what is due from one highly-civilized
individual to another, should indulge in these
very disagreeable reflections!”

Maimuna did not quite comprehend the argument,
but she saw that the tables were turned, and, without
ill-will to Job, she paid me the compliment of always
taking my side. I felt her slender arm around my
neck, and as she got upon her knees behind me and
put forward her little head to get a peep at my lips, her
clear bird-like laugh of enjoyment and triumph added
visibly to my friend's mortification. A compunctious
visiting stole over me, and I began to feel that I should
scarce have revenged myself for what was, after all,
but a kind severity.

“Do you know, Job,” said I (anxious to restore his
self-complacency without a direct apology for my rudeness),
“do you know there is a very deep human truth
hidden in the familiar story of `Beauty and the Beast?'
I really am of opinion, that, between the extremes of
hideousness and the highest perfection of loveliness,
there is no face which, after a month's intercourse,
does not depend exclusively on its expression (or, in
other words, on the amiable qualities of the individual)
for the admiration it excites. The plainest features
become handsome unaware when associated only with
kind feelings, and the loveliest face disagreeable when
linked with ill-humor or caprice. People should re

member this when selecting a face which they are to
see every morning across the breakfast-table for the remainder
of their natural lives.”

Job was appeased by the indirect compliment contained
in this speech; and, gathering up our kibaubs,
we descended to the caique, and pulling around the
easternmost point of the Symplegades, bade adieu to
the orient, and took the first step westward with the
smile of conciliation on our lips.

We were soon in the strong current of the Bosphorus,
and shot swiftly down between Europe and Asia,
by the light of a sunset that seemed to brighten the
west for our return. It was a golden path homeward.
The east looked cold behind; and the welcome of
our far-away kinsmen seemed sent to us on those purpling
clouds, winning us back. Beneath that kindling
horizon—below that departed sun—lay the fresh and
free land of our inheritance. The light of the world
seemed gone over to it. These, from which the day
had declined, were countries of memory—ours, of
hope. The sun, that was setting on these, was dawning
gloriously on ours.

On ordinary occasions, Job would have given me a
stave of “Hail Columbia!” after such a burst of patriotism.
The cloud was on his soul, however.

“We have turned to go back,” he said, in a kind of
musing bitterness, “and see what we are leaving behind!
In this fairy-shaped boat you are gliding like a
dream down the Bosphorus. The curving shore of
Therapia yonder is fringed for miles with the pleasure-loving
inhabitants of this delicious land, who think a
life too short, of which the highest pleasure is to ramble
on the edge of these calm waters with their kinsmen
and children. Is there a picture in the world
more beautiful than that palace-lined shore? Is there
a city so magnificent under the sun as that in which it
terminates? Are there softer skies, greener hills,
simpler or better people, to live among, than these?
Oh, Philip! ours, with all its freedom, is a `working-day'
land. There is no idleness there! The sweat is
ever on the brow, the `serpent of care' never loosened
about the heart! I confess myself a worshipper of
leisure: I would let no moment of my golden youth
go by unrecorded with a pleasure. Toil is ungodlike,
and unworthy of the immortal spirit, that should walk
unchained through the world. I love these idle orientals.
Their sliding and haste-forbidding slippers, their
flowing and ungirded habiliments, are signs most expressive
of their joy in life. Look around, and see
how on every hill-top stands a maison de plaisance;
how every hill-side is shelved into those green platforms,
[11] so expressive of their habits of enjoyment!
Rich or poor, their pleasures are the same. The
open air, freedom to roam, a caique at the water-side,
and a sairgah on the hill—these are their means of
happiness, and they are within the reach of all; they
are nearer Utopia than we, my dear Philip! We shall
be more like Turks than Christians in paradise!”

“Inglorious Job!”

“Why? Because I love idleness? Are there
braver people in the world than the Turks? Are
there people more capable of the romance of heroism?
Energy, though it sound a paradox, is the child of
idleness. All extremes are natural and easy; and the
most indolent in peace is likely to be the most fiery in
war. Here we are, opposite the summer serai of Sultan
Mahmoud; and who more luxurious and idle?
Yet the massacre of the Janissaries was one of the
boldest measures in history. There is the most perfect
orientalism in the description of the Persian beauty
by Hafiz:—

Perhaps nothing would be so contradictory as the true
analysis of the character of what is called an indolent
man. With all the tastes I have just professed, my
strongest feeling on leaving the Symplegades, for example,
was, and is still, an unwillingness to retrace my
steps. `Onward! onward!' is the perpetual cry of
my heart. I could pass my life in going from land to
land, so only that every successive one was new. Italy
will be old to us; France, Germany, can scarce lure
the imagination to adventure, with the knowledge we
have; and England, though we have not seen it, is so
familiar to us from its universality that it will not seem,
even on a first visit, a strange country. We have satiety
before us, and the thought saddens me. I hate
to go back. I could start now, with Maimuna for a
guide, and turn gipsy in the wilds of Asia.”

“Will you go with him, Maimuna?”

“Signor, no!”

I am the worst of story-tellers, gentle reader; for I
never get to the end. The truth is, that in these rambling
papers, I go over the incidents I describe, not as
they should be written in a romance, but as they occurred
in my travels: I write what I remember. There
are, of course, long intervals in adventure, filled up
sometimes by feasting or philosophy, sometimes with
idleness or love; and, to please myself, I must unweave
the thread as it was woven. It is strange how,
in the memory of a traveller, the most wayside and unimportant
things are the best remembered. You may
have stood in the Parthenon, and, looking back upon
it through the distance of years, a chance word of the
companion who happened to be with you, or the attitude
of a Greek seen in the plain below, may come up
more vividly to the recollection than the immortal
sculptures on the frieze. There is a natural antipathy
in the human mind to fulfil expectations. We wander
from the thing we are told to admire, to dwell on
something we have discovered ourselves. The child
in church occupies itself with the fly on its prayer-book,
and “the child is father of the man.” If I indulge
in the same perversity in story-telling, dear
reader—if, in the most important crisis of my tale, I
disgress to some trifling vein of speculation—if, at the
close even, the climax seem incomplete, and the moral
vain—I plead, upon all these counts, an adherence to
truth and nature. Life—real life—is made up of half-finished
romance. The most interesting procession of
events is delayed, and travestied, and mixed with the
ridiculous and the trifling, and at the end, oftenest left
imperfect. Who ever saw, off the stage, a five-act
tragedy, with its proprieties and its climax?

2. PART III.

Ten o'clock A.M., and the weather like the prophet's
paradise,

Madame Josepino stood at the door of her Turco-Italian
boarding-house in the nasty and fashionable main
street of Pera, dividing her attention between a handsome
Armenian, with a red button in the top of his
black lamb's-wool cap,[12] and her three boarders, Job,
Maimuna, and myself, at that critical moment about
mounting our horses for a gallop to Belgrade.

We kissed our hands to the fat and fair Italian, and
with a promise to be at home for supper, kicked our
shovel-shaped stirrups into the sides of our horses, and
pranced away up the street, getting many a glance of
curiosity, and one or two that might be more freely
translated, from the dark eyes that are seen day and
night at the windows of the leaden-colored houses of
the Armenians.

We should have been an odd-looking cavaleade for
the Boulevard or Bond street, but, blessed privilege of
the east! we were sufficiently comme il faut for Pera.
To avoid the embarrassment of Maimuna's sex, I had
dressed her, from an English “slop-shop” at Galata,
in the checked shirt, jacket, and trowsers of a sailor-boy,
but as she was obstinately determined that her
long black hair should not be shorn, a turban was her
only resource for concealment, and the dark and
glossy mass was hidden in the folds of an Albanian
shawl, forming altogether as inharmonious a costume
as could well be imagined. With the white duck
trowsers tight over her hips, and the jacket, which was
a little too large for her, loose over her shoulders and
breast, the checked collar tied with a black silk cravat
close round her throat, and the silken and gold fringe
of the shawl flowing coquetishly over her left cheek
and ear, she was certainly an odd figure on horseback,
and, but for her admirable riding and excessive grace of
attitude, she might have been as much a subject for a
caricature as her companion. Job rode soberly along
at her side, in the green turban of a Hajji (which he
had persisted in wearing ever since his pilgrimage to
Jerusalem), and, as he usually put it on askew, the
gaillard and rakish character of his head-dress, and
the grave respectability of his black coat and salt-and-pepper
trowsers, produced a contrast which elicited
a smile even from the admiring damsels at the windows.

Maimuna went caracoling along till the road entered
the black shadow of the cemetery of Pera, and then,
pulling up her well-managed horse, she rode close to
my side, with the air of subdued respect which was
more fitting to the spirit of the scene. It was a lovely
morning, as I said, and the Turks, who are early risers,
were sitting on the graves of their kindred with their
veiled wives and children, the marble turbans in that
thickly-sown nekropolis less numerous than those of the
living, who had come, not to moarn the dead who lay
beneath, but to pass a day of idleness and pleasure on
the spot endeared by their memories.

“I declare to you,” said Job, following Maimuna's
example in waiting till I came up, “that I think the
Turks the most misrepresented and abused people on
earth. Look at this scene! Here are whole families
seated upon graves over which the grass grows green
and fresh, the children playing at their feet, and their
own faces the pictures of calm cheerfulness and enjoyment.
They are the by-word for brutes, and there is
not a gentler or more poetical race of beings between
the Indus and the Arkansas!”

It was really a scene of great beauty. The Turkish
tombs are as splendid as white marble can make them,
with letters and devices in red and gold, and often the
most delicious sculptures, and, with the crowded closeness
of the monuments, the vast extent of the burialground
over hill and dale, and the cypresses (nowhere
so magnificent) veiling all in a deep religious shadow,
dim, and yet broken by spots of the clearest sunshine,
a more impressive and peculiar scene could scarce be
imagined. It might exist in other countries, but it
would be a desert. To the Mussulman death is not
repulsive, and he makes it a resort when he would be
happiest. At all hours of the day you find the
tombs of Constantinople surrounded by the living.
They spread their carpets, and arrange their simple
repast around the stone which records the name and
virtues of their own dead, and talk of them as they do
of the living and absent—parted from them to meet
again, if not in life, in paradise.

“For my own part,” continued Job, “I see nothing
in scripture which contradicts the supposition that we
shall haunt, in the intermediate state between death
and heaven, the familiar places to which we have been
accustomed. In that case, how delightful are the habits
of these people, and how cheeringly vanish the horrors
of the grave! Death, with us, is appalling! The
smile has scarce faded from our lips, the light scarce
dead in our eye, when we are thrust into a noisome
vault, and thought of but with a shudder and a fear.
We are connected thenceforth, in the memories of our
friends, with the pestilent air in which we lie, with the
vermin that infest the gloom, with chillness, with darkness,
with disease; and, memento as it is of their own
coming destiny, what wonder if they chase us, and the
forecast shadows of the grave, with the same hurried
disgust from their remembrance. Suppose, for an instant
(what is by no means improbable), that the
spirits of the dead are about us, conscious and watchful!
Suppose that they have still a feeling of sympathy
in the decaying form they have so long inhabited,
in its organs, its senses, its once-admired and long-cherished
grace and proportion; that they feel the
contumely and disgust with which the features we professed
to love are cast like garbage into the earth, and
the indecent haste with which we turn away from the
solitary spot, and think of it but as the abode of festering
and revolting corruption!”

At this moment we turned to the left, descending to
the Bosphorus, and Maimuna, who had ridden a little
in advance during Job's unintelligible monologue, came
galloping back to tell us that there was a corpse in the
road. We quickened our pace, and the next moment
our horses started aside from the bier, left in a bend of
the highway with a single individual, the grave-digger,
sitting cross-legged beside it. Without looking up at
our approach, the man mumbled something between
his teeth, and held up his hand as if to arrest us in our
path.

“What does he say?” I asked of Maimuna.

“He repeats a verse of the Koran,” she replied,
“which promises a reward in paradise to him who
bears the dead forty steps on its way to the grave.”

Job sprang instantly from his horse, threw the bridle
over the nearest tombstone, and made a sign to the
grave-digger that he would officiate as bearer. The
man nodded assent, but looked down the road without
arising from his seat.

“You are but three,” said Maimuna, “and he waits
for a fourth.”

I had dismounted by this time, not to be behind my
friend in the humanities of life, and the grave-digger,
seeing that we were Europeans, smiled with a kind
of pleased surprise, and uttering the all-expressive
“Pekkhe!” resumed his look-out for the fourth
bearer.

The corpse was that of a poor old man. The coffin
was without a cover, and he lay in it, in his turban
and slippers, his hands crossed over his breast, and
the folds of his girdle stuck full of flowers. He might
have been asleep, for any look of death about him.
His lips were slightly unclosed, and his long heard was
combed smoothly over his breast. The odor of the
pipe and the pastille struggled with the perfume of the
flowers, and there was in his whole aspect a life-likeness
and peace, that the shroud and the close coffin,
and the additional horrors of approaching death, perhaps,
combine, in other countries, utterly to do away.

“Hitherto,” said Job, as he gazed attentively on the
calm old man, “I have envied the Scaligers their uplifted
and airy tombs in the midst of the cheerful street
of Verona, and, next to theirs, the sunny sarcophagus
of Petrarch, looking away over the peaceful Campagna
of Lombardy; but here is a Turkish beggar who will

be buried still more enviably. Is it not a paradise of
tombs—a kind of Utopia of the dead?”

A young man with a load of vegetables for the
market of Pera, came toiling up the hill behind his
mule. Sure of his assistance, the grave-digger arose,
and as we took our places at the poles, the marketer
quietly turned his beast out of the road, and assisted
us in lifting the dead on our shoulders. The grave
was not far off, and having deposited the corpse on its
border, we returned to our horses, and, soon getting
clear of the cemetery, galloped away with light hearts
toward the valley of Sweet Waters.

2. II.

We were taking breath on the silken banks of the
Barbyses—Maimuna prancing along the pebbly bed,
up to her barb's girths in sparkling water, and Job and
myself laughing at her frolics from either side, when
an old woman, bent double with age, came hobbling
toward us from a hovel in the hill-side.

“Maimuna,” said Job, fishing out some trumpery
paras from the corner of his waistcoat pocket, “give
this to that good woman, and tell her that he who gives
it is happy, and would share his joy with her.”

The gipsy spurred up the bank, dismounted at a
short distance from the decrept creature, and after a
little conversation returned, leading her horse.

“She is not a beggar, and wishes to know why you
give her money?”

“Tell her, to buy bread for her children,” said my
patriarchal friend.

Maimuna went back, conversed with her again, and
returned with the money.

“She says she has no need of it. There is no human
creature between her and Allah!”

The old woman hobbled on, Job pocketed his rejected
paras, and Maimuna rode between us in silence.

It was a gem of natural poetry that was worthy of
the lips of an angel.

3. III.

We kept up the valley of Sweet Waters, tracing
the Barbyses through its bosom, to the hills; and then
mounting a steep ascent, struck across to the east, over
a country, which, though so near the capital of the
Turkish empire, is as wild as the plains of the Hermus.
Shrubs, forest-trees, and wild grass, cover the apparently
illimitable waste, and save a half-visible horse-path
which guides the traveller across, there is searce
an evidence that you are not the first adventurer in the
wilderness.

What a natural delight is freedom! What a bound
gives the heart at the sight of the unfenced earth, the
unseparated hill-sides, the unhedged and unharvested
valleys! How thrilling it is—unlike any other joy—
to spur a fiery horse to the hill-top, and gaze away
over dell and precipice to the horizon, and never a
wall between, nor a human limit to say “Thus far
shalt thou go, and no farther!” Oh, I think we have
an instinct, dulled by civilization, which is like the
caged eaglet's, or the antelope's that is reared in the
Arab's tent; an instinct of nature that scorns boundary
and chain; that yearns to the free desert; that would
have the earth, like the sea or the sky, unappropriated
and open; that rejoices in immeasurable liberty of foot
and dwelling-place, and springs passionately back to
its freedom even after years of subduing method and
spirit-breaking confinement! I have felt it on the sea,
in the forests of America, on the desolated plains of
Asia and Roumelia; I should feel it till my heart
burst, had I the wings of a bird!

The house once occupied by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu stands on the descent of a hill in the little village
of Belgrade, some twelve or fourteen miles from
Constantinople. It is a common-place two-story affair,
but the best house of the dozen that form the village,
and overlooks a dell below that reminds one of the
“Emerald valleys of Cashmeer.” We wandered
through its deserted rooms, discussed the clever woman
who has described her travels so graphically, and
then followed Maimuna to the narrow street, in search
of kibaubs. The butcher's shop in Turkey is as open
as the trottoir to the street, and with only an entire
sheep hanging between us and a dozen hungry beggars,
attracted by the presence of strangers, we crossed
our legs on the straw carpet, and setting the wooden
tripod in the centre, waited patiently the movements of
our feeder, who combined in his single person the
three vocations of butcher, cook, and waiter. One
must have travelled east of Cape Colonna to relish a
dinner so slightly disguised, but, once rid of European
prejudices, there is nothing more simple than the fact
that it is rather an attractive mode of feeding—a traveller's
appetite subauditur.

Our friend was a wholesome-looking Turk, with a
snow-white turban, a black, well-conditioned beard, a
mouth incapable of a smile, yet honest, and a most
trenchant and jamissaresque style of handling his
cleaver. Having laid open his bed of coals with a
kind of conjurer's flourish of the poker, he slapped the
pendent mutton on the thigh in a fashion of encouragement,
and waiting an instant for our admiration to subside,
he whipping his knife from its sheath, and had out
a dozen strips from the chine (as Job expressed it in
Vermontese) “in no time.” With the same alacrity
these were cut into bits “of the size of a piece of
chalk” (another favorite expression of Job's), run
upon a skewer, and laid on the coals, and in three
minutes, more or less, they appeared smoking on the
trencher, half lost in a fine green salad, well peppered,
and of a most seducing and provocative savor. If you
have performed your four ablutions A.M., like a devout
Mussulman, it is not conceived in Turkey that you
have occasion for the medium of a fork, and I frankly
own, that I might have been seen at Belgrade, cross-legged
in a kibaub-shop, between my friend and the
gipsy, and making a most diligent use of my thumb
and fore-finger. I have dined since at the Rocher de
Cancale and the Traveller's with less satisfaction.

Having paid something like sixpence sterling for
our three dinners (rather an overcharge, Maimuna
thought), we unpicketed our horses from the long
grass, and bade adieu to Belgrade, on our way to the
aqueducts. We were to follow down a verdant valley,
and, exhilarated by a flask of Greek wine (which
I forgot to mention), and the ever-thrilling circumstances
of unlimited greensward and horses that wait
not for the spur, we followed the daring little Asiatic
up hill and down, over bush and precipice, till Job
cried us mercy. We pulled up on the edge of a sheet
of calm water, and the vast marble wall, built by the
sultans in the days of their magnificence and crossing
the valley from side to side, burst upon us like a scene
of enchantment in the wilderness.

Those same sultans must have lived a great deal at
Belgrade. Save these vast aqueducts, which are splendid
monuments of architecture, there is little in the
first aspect to remind you that you are not in the wilds
of Missouri; but a further search discloses, in the recesses
of the hidden windings of the valley, circular
staircases of marble leading to secluded baths, now
filled with leaves and neglected, but evidently on a
scale of the most imperial sumptuousness. From the
perishable construction of Turkish dwelling-houses, all
traces even of the most costly serai may easily have
disappeared in a few years, when once abandoned to
ruin; and I pleased myself with imagining, as we
slackened bridle, and rode slowly beneath the gigantic
trees of the forest, the gilded pavilions, and gay scenes
of oriental pleasure that must have existed here in

the days of the warlike yet effeminate Selims. It is a
place for the enchantments of the “Arabian Nights”
to have been realized.

I have followed the common error in giving these
structures in the forest of Belgrade the name of aqueducts.
They are rather walls built across the deep
valleys, of different altitudes, to create reservoirs for
the supply of aqueducts, but are built with all the
magnificence and ornament of a facade to a temple.

We rode on from one to the other, arriving at last at
the lowest, which divides the valley at its wildest part,
forming a giddy wall across an apparently bottomless
ravine, as dark and impracticable as the glen of the
Cauterskill in America. Our road lay on the other
side, but though with a steady eye one might venture
to cross the parapet on foot, there were no means of
getting our horses over, short of a return of half a mile
to the path we had neglected higher up the valley.
We might swim it, above the embankment, but the
opposite shore was a precipice.

“What shall we do?” I asked.

Job made no answer, but pulled round his beast,
and started off in a sober canter to return.

I stood a moment, gazing on the placid sheet of
water above, and the abyss of rock and darkness below,
and then calling to Maimuna, who had ridden
farther down the bank, I turned my horse's head after
him.

“Signore!” cried the gipsy from below.

“What is it, Carissima?”

“Maimuna never goes back!”

“Silly child!” I answered, “you are not going to
cross the ravine?”

“Yes!” was the reply, and the voice became more
indistinguishable as she galloped away. “I will be
over before you!”

I was vexed, but I knew the self-will and temerity
of the wild Asiatic, and, very certain that if there
were danger it would be run before I could reach
her, I drove the stirrups into my horse's sides, and
overtook Job at the descent into the valley. We ascended
again, and rode down the opposite shore to the
embankment, at a sharp gallop. Maimuna was not
there.

“She will have perished in the abyss,” said Job.

I sprang from my horse to cross the parapet on foot
in search of her, when I heard her horse's footsteps,
and the next moment she dashed up the steep, having
failed in her attempt, and stood once more where we
had parted. The sun was setting, and we had ten
miles to ride, and impatient of her obstinacy, I sharply
ordered her to go up the ravine at speed, and cross as
we had done.

I think I never shall forget, angry as I was at the
moment, the appearance of that lovely creature, as
she resolutely refused to obey me. Her horse, the
same fiery Arabian she had ridden from Sardis (an
animal that, except when she was on his back, would
scarce have sold for a gold sequin), stood with head
erect and panting nostrils, glancing down with his
wild eyes upon the abyss into which he had been
urged—the whole group, horse and rider, completely
relieved against the sky from the isolated mound they
occupied, and, at this instant, the gold flood of the setting
sun pouring full on them through a break in the
masses of the forest. Her own fierce attitude, and
beautiful and frowning face, the thin lip curled resolutely,
and the brown and polished cheek deepened
with a rosy glow, her full and breathing bosom swelling
beneath its jacket, and her hair, which had escaped
from the turban, flowing over her neck and shoulders,
and mingling with the loosened fringes of red and gold
in rich disorder—it was a picture which the pencil of
Martin (and it would have suited his genius) could
scarce have exaggerated. The stately half Arabic,
half Grecian architecture of the aqueducts, and the
cold and frowning tints of the abyss and the forese
around, would have left him nothing to add to it as a
composition.

I was crossing the giddy edge of the parapet, looking
well to my feet, with the intention of reasoning
with the obstinate being, who, vexed at my reproaches
and her own failure, was now in as pretty a rage as
myself, when I heard the trampling of horses in the
forest. I stopped mid-way to listen, and presently
there sprang a horseman up the bank in an oriental
costume, with pistols and ataghan flashing in the
sun, and a cast of features that at once betrayed his
origin.

“A Zingara!” I shouted back to Job.

The gipsy, who was about nineteen, and as well-made
and gallant a figure for a man as Maimuna for a
woman, seemed as much astonished as ourselves, and
sat in his saddle gazing on the extraordinary figure I
have described, evidently recognising one of his own
race, but probably puzzled with the mixture of costumes,
and struck at the same time with Maimuna's
excessive beauty. Lovely as she always was, I had
never seen her to such advantage as now. She might
have come from fairy-land, for the radiant vision she
seemed in the gold of that burning sunset.

I gazed on them both a moment, and was about
finishing my traverse of the parapet, when a troop of
mounted gipsies and baggage-horses came up the bank
at a quick pace, and in another minute Maimuna was
surrounded. I sprang to her bridle, and apprehensive
of, I scarce knew what danger, gave her one of the
two pistols I carried always in my bosom.

The gipsy chief (for such he evidently was) measured
me from head to foot with a look of dislike, and
speaking for the first time, addressed Maimuna in his
own language, with a remark which sent the blood to
her temples with a suddenness I had never before
seen.

“What does he say?” I asked.

“It is no matter, signore, but it is false!” Her
black eyes were like coals of fire, as she spoke.

“Leave your horse,” I said to her, in a low tone,
“and cross the parapet. I will prevent his following
you, and will join you on your own before you can
reach Constantinople. Turn the horses' heads homeward!”
I continued in English to Job, who was crying
out to me from the other side to come back.

Maimuna laid her hand on the pommel to dismount,
but the gipsy, anticipating her motion, touched his
horse with the stirrup, and sprang with a single leap
between her and the parapet. The troop had gathered
into a circle behind us, and seeing our retreat
thus cut off, I presented my pistol to the young chief,
and demanded, in Italian, that he should clear the
way.

A blow from behind, the instant that I was pulling
the trigger, sent the discharged pistol into the ravine,
and, in the same instant, Maimuna dashed her horse
against the unguarded gipsy, nearly overturning him
into the abyss, and spurred desperately upon the parapet.
One cry from the whole gipsy troop, and then
all was as silent as the grave, except the click of her
horse's hoofs on the marble verge, as, trembling palpably
in every limb, the terrified animal crossed the
giddy chasm at a half trot, and, in the next minute,
bounded up the opposite bank, and disappeared with
a snort of fear and delight amid the branches of the
forest.

What with horror and wonder, and the shock of the
blow which had nearly broken my arm. I stood motionless
where Maimuna had left me, till the gipsy, recovering
from his amazement, dismounted and put his
pistol to my breast.

“Call her back!” he said to me, in very good Italian,
and with a tone in which rage and determination
were strangely mingled, “or you die where you stand!”

Without regarding his threat, I looked at him, with
a new thought stealing into my mind. He probably
read the pacific change in my feelings, for he dropped
his arm, and the frown on his own features moderated
to a steadfast and inquisitive regard.

“Zingara!” I said, “Maimuna is my slave.”

A clutch of his pistol-stock, and a fiery and impatient
look from his fine eyes, interrupted me for an instant.
I proceeded to tell him briefly how I had obtained
possession of her, while the troop gradually
closed around, attracted by his excessive look of interest
in the tale, though they probably did not understand
the language in which I spoke, and all fixing
their wild eyes earnestly on my face.

“And now, Zingara,” I said, “I will bring her back
on one condition—that, when the offer is fairly made
her, if she chooses still to go with me, she shall be
free to do so. I have protected her, and sworn still
to protect her as long as she should choose to eat of
my bread. Though my slave, she is pure and guiltless
as when she left the tent of her mother, and is
worthy of the bosom of an emperor.”

The Zingara took my hand, and put it to his lips.

“You agree to our compact, then?” I asked.

He put his hand on his forehead, and then laid it,
with a slight inclination, on his breast.

“She can not have gone far,” I said, and stepping
on the mound above the parapet, I shouted her name
till the woods rang again with the echo.

A moment, and Job and Maimuna came riding to
the verge of the opposite hill, and with a few words
of explanation, fastened their horses to a tree, and
crossed to us by the parapet.

The chief returned his pistols to his girdle, and
stood aside while I spoke to Maimuna. It was a difficult
task, but I felt that it was a moment decisive of
her destiny, and the responsibility weighed heavily on
my breast. Though excessively attached to her—
though she had been endeared to me by sacrifices, and
by the ties of protection—though, in short, I loved
her, not with a passion, but with an affection—as a
father more than as a lover—I still felt it to be my duty
to leave no means untried to induce her to abandon
me, to return to her own people and remain in her own
land of the sun. What her fate would be in the state
of society to which I must else introduce her, had
been eloquently depicted by Job, and will readily be
imagined by the reader.

After the first burst of incredulity and astonishment
at my proposal, she folded her arms on her bosom,
and, with the tears streaming like rain over her jacket,
listened in silence and with averted eyes. I concluded
with representing to her, in rather strong colors,
the feelings with which she might be received by my
friends, and the difficulty she would find in accommodating
herself to the customs of people, to whom not
only she must be inferior in the accomplishments of
a woman, but who might find, even in the color of that
loveliest cheek, a reason to despise her.

Her lip curled for an instant, but the grief in her
heart was stronger than the scorn for an imaginary
wrong, and she bowed her head again, and her tears
flowed on.

I was silent at last, and she looked up into my face.

“I am a burthen to you,” she said.

“No, dearest Maimuna! no! but if I were to see
you wretched hereafter, you would become so. Tell
me! the chief will make you his wife; will you rejoin
your people?”

She flung herself upon the ground, and wept as if
her heart would break. I thought it best to let her
feelings have away, and walking apart with the young
gipsy, I gave him more of the particulars of her history,
and exacted a promise that, if she should finally
be left with the troop, he would return with her to the
tribe of her mother, at Sardis.

Mamuna stood gazing fixedly into the ravine when
we turned back, and there was an erectness in her attitude,
and a fierte in the air of her head, that, I must
acknowledge, promised more for my fears than my
wishes. Her pride was roused, it was easy with half
a glance to see.

With the suddenness of oriental passion, the young
chief had become already enamored of her, and, with
a feeling of jealousy which, even though I wished him
success, I could not control, I saw him kneel at her
feet and plead with her in an inaudible tone. She had
been less than woman if she had been insensible to
that passionate cadence, and the imploring earnestness
of the noble countenance on which she looked.
It was evident that she was interested, though she
began with scarce deigning to lift her eyes from the
ground.

I felt a sinking of the heart which I can not describe
when he rose to his feet and left her standing alone.
The troop had withdrawn at his command, and Job,
to whom the scene was too painful, had recrossed the
parapet, and stood by his horse's head waiting the result.
The twilight had deepened, the forest looked
black around us, and a single star sprang into the sky,
while the west was still glowing in a fast purpling gold
and crimson.

“Signore!” said Maimuna, walking calmly to my
hand, which I stretched instinctively to receive her,
“I am breaking my heart; I know not what to do.”

At this instant a faint meteor shot over the sky, and
drew its reflection across the calm mirror whose verge
we were approaching.

“Stay!” she cried; “the next shall decide the fate
of Maimuna! If it cross to the east, the will of Allah
be done! I will leave you!”

I called to the gipsy, and we stood on the verge of
the parapet in breathless expectation. The darkness
deepened around us, the abyss grew black and indistinguishable,
and the night-birds flitted past like audible
shadows. I drew Maimuna to my bosom, and
with my hands buried in her long hair, pressed her to
my heart, that beat as painfully and as heavily as her
own.

A sudden shriek! She started from my bosom, and
as she fell upon the earth, my eye caught, on the face
of the mirror from which I had forgetfully withdrawn
my gaze, the vanishing pencil of a meteor, drawn like
a beam of the sunset, from west to east!

I lifted the insensible child, impressed one long kiss
on her lips, and flinging her into the arms of the gipsy,
crossed the parapet, and rode, with a speed that tried
in vain to outrun my anguish, to Constantinople.

TOM FANE AND I.

Tom Fane's four Canadian ponies were whizzing
his light phaeton through the sand at a rate that would
have put spirits into anything but a lover absent from
his mistress. The “heaven-kissing” pines towered on
every side like the thousand and one columns of the
Palæologi at Constantinople; their flat and spreading
tops shutting out the light of heaven almost as effectually
as the world of mussulmans, mosques, kiosks,
bazars, and Giaours, sustained on those innumerable
capitals, darkens the subterranean wonder of Stamboul.
An American pine forest is as like a temple,
and a sublime one, as any dream that ever entered
into the architectural brain of the slumbering Martin.
The Yankee methodists in their camp-meetings, have

but followed an irresistible instinct to worship God in
the religious dimness of these interminable aisles of the
wilderness.

Tom Fane and I had stoned the storks together in
the palace of Crœsus at Sardis. We had read Anastasius
on a mufti's tomb in the Nekropolis of Scutari.
We had burned with fig-fevers in the same caravanserai
at Smyrna. We had cooled our hot foreheads
and cursed the Greeks in emulous Romaic in the dim
tomb of Agamemnon at Argos. We had been grave
at Paris, and merry at Rome; and we had pic-nic'd
with the beauties of the Fanar in the Valley of Sweet
Waters in pleasant Roumelia; and when, after parting
in France, he had returned to England and his regiment,
and I to New England and law, whom should
I meet in a summer's trip to the St. Lawrence but
Captain Tom Fane of the—th, quartered at the
cliff-perched and doughty garrison of Quebec, and
ready for any “lark” that would vary the monotony
of duty!

Having eaten seven mess-dinners, driven to the
falls of Montmorenci, and paid my respects to Lord
Dalhousie, the hospitable and able governor of the
Canadas, Quebec had no longer a temptation; and
obeying a magnet, of which more anon, I announced
to Fane that my traps were packed, and my heart sent
on, a l'avant courier, to Saratoga.

“Is she pretty?” said Tom.

“As the starry-eyed Circassian we gazed at through
the grill in the slave-market at Constantinople!”—
(Heaven and my mistress forgive me for the comparison!—but
it conveyed more to Tom Fane than a folio
of more respectful similitudes.)

“Have you any objection to be drawn to your lady-love
by four cattle that would buy the soul of Osbaldiston?”

“`Objection!' quotha?”

The next morning, four double-jointed and well-groomed
ponies were munching their corn in the bow
of a steamer, upon the St. Lawrence, wondering possibly
what, in the name of Bucephalus, had set the
hills and churches flying at such a rate down the river.
The hills and churches came to a stand-still with the
steamer opposite Montreal, and the ponies were landed
and put to their mettle for some twenty miles, where
they were destined to be astonished by a similar flying
phenomenon in the mountains girding the lengthening
waters of Lake Champlain. Landed at Ticonderoga,
a few miles' trot brought them to Lake George and a
third steamer, and, with a winding passage among
green islands and overhanging precipices loaded like
a harvest-wagon with vegetation, we made our last
landing on the edge of the pine forest, where our story
opens.

“Well, I must object,” says Tom, setting his whip
in the socket, and edging round upon his driving-box,
“I must object to this republican gravity of yours. I
should take it for melancholy, did I not know it was
the `complexion' of your never-smiling countrymen.”

“Spare me, Tom! `I see a hand you can not see.'
Talk to your ponies, and let me be miserable, if you
love me.”

“For what, in the name of common sense? Are
you not within five hours of your mistress? Is not
this cursed sand your natal soil? Do not

and in the years that we have dangled about, `here-and-there-ians'
together, were you ever before grave,
sad, or sulky? and will you without a precedent, and
you a lawyer, inflict your stupidity upon me for the
first time in this waste, and being-less solitude? Half
an hour more of the dread silence of this forest, and
it will not need the horn of Astolpho to set me irremediably
mad!”

“If employment will save your wits, you may invent
a scheme for marrying the son of a poor gentleman
to the ward of a rich trader in rice and molasses.”

“The programme of our approaching campaign, I
presume?”

“Simply.”

“Is the lady willing?”

“I would fain believe so.”

“Is Mr. Popkins unwilling?”

“As the most romantic lover could desire.”

“And the state of the campaign?”

“Why, thus: Mr. George Washington Jefferson
Frump, whom you have irreverently called Mr. Popkins,
is sole guardian to the daughter of a dead West
Indian planter, of whom he was once the agent. I fell
in love with Kate Lorimer from description, when she
was at school with my sister, saw her by favor of a
garden-wall, and after the usual vows—”

“Too romantic for a Yankee, by half!”

“—Proposed by letter to Mr. Frump.”

“Oh, bathos!”

“He refused me.”

“Because—”

“Imprimis, I was not myself in the `sugar line,' and
in secundis, my father wore gloves and `did nothing
for a living'—two blots in the eyes of Mr. Frump,
which all the waters of Niagara would never wash from
my escutcheon.”

“And what the devil hindered you from running off
with her?”

“Fifty shares in the Manhattan Insurance Company,
a gold mine in Florida, Heaven knows how many
hogsheads of treacle, and a million of acres on the
banks of the Missouri.”

“`Pluto's flame-colored daughter' defend us! what
a living El Dorado!”

“All of which she forfeits if she marries without old
Frump's consent.”

“I see—I see! And this Io and her Argus are now
drinking the waters at Saratoga?”

“Even so.”

“I'll bet you my four-in-hand to a sonnet, that I get
her for you before the season is over.”

“Money and all?”

“Mines, molasses, and Missouri acres!”

“And if you do, Tom, I'll give you a team of Virginian
bloods that would astonish Ascot, and throw you
into the bargain a forgiveness for riding over me with
your camel on the banks of the Hermus.”

“Santa Maria! do you remember that spongy foot
stepping over your frontispiece? I had already cast
my eyes up to Mont Sypilus to choose a clean niche
for you out of the rock-hewn tombs of the kings of
Lydia. I thought you would sleep with Alyattis,
Phil!”

We dashed on through dark forest and open clearing,
through glens of tangled cedar and wild vine, over
log bridges, corduroy marshes, and sand hills, till, toward
evening, a scattering shanty or two, and an occasional
sound of a woodman's axe, betokened our vicinity
to Saratoga. A turn around a clump of tall pines
brought us immediately into the broad street of the
village, and the flaunting shops, the overgrown, unsightly
hotels, riddled with windows like honeycombs,
the fashionable idlers out for their evening lounge to
the waters, the indolent smokers on the colonnades,
and the dusty and loaded coaches driving from door
to door in search of lodgings, formed the usual evening
picture of the Bath of America.

As it was necessary to Tom's plan that my arrival
at Saratoga should not be known, he pulled up at a
small tavern at the entrance of the street, and dropping
me and my baggage, drove on to Congress Hall,
with my best prayers, and a letter of introduction to
my sister, whom I had left on her way to the Springs

with a party at my departure for Montreal. Unwilling
to remain in such a tantalizing vicinity, I hired a
chaise the next morning, and despatching a note to
Tom, drove to seek a retreat at Barhydt's—a spot that
can not well be described in the tail of a paragraph.

Herr Barhydt is an old Dutch settler, who, till the
mineral springs of Saratoga were discovered some five
miles from his door, was buried in the depth of a forest
solitude, unknown to all but the prowling Indian. The
sky is supported above him (or looks to be) by a wilderness
of straight, columnar pine shafts, gigantic in
girth, and with no foliage except at the top, where
they branch out like round tables spread for a banquet
in the clouds. A small ear-shaped lake, sunk as deep
into the earth as the firs shoot above it, black as Erebus
in the dim shadow of its hilly shore and the obstructed
light of the trees that nearly meet over it, and
clear and unbroken as a mirror, save the pearl-spots
of the thousand lotuses holding up their cups to the
blue eye of heaven that peers through the leafy vault,
sleeps beneath his window; and around him, in the
forest, lies, still unbroken, the elastic and brown carpet
of the faded pine tassels, deposited in yearly layers
since the continent rose from the flood, and rooted a
foot beneath the surface to a rich mould that would
fatten the Sympleglades to a flower-garden. With his
black tarn well stocked with trout, his bit of a farm
in the clearing near by, and an old Dutch bible, Herr
Barhydt lived a life of Dutch musing, talked Dutch to
his geese and chickens, sung Dutch psalms to the
echoes of the mighty forest, and, except on his far-between
visits to Albany, which grew rarer and rarer
as the old Dutch inhabitants dropped faster away, saw
never a white human face from one maple-blossoming
to another.

A roving mineralogist tasted the waters of Saratoga,
and, like the work of a lath-and-plaster Aladdin, up
sprung a thriving village around the fountain's lip, and
hotels, tin tumblers, and apothecaries, multiplied in the
usual proportion to each other, but out of all precedent,
with everything else for rapidity. Libraries,
newspapers, churches, livery stables, and lawyers, followed
in their train; and it was soon established, from
the plains of Abraham to the savannahs of Alabama,
that no person of fashionable taste or broken constitution
could exist through the months of July and August
without a visit to the chalybeate springs and populous
village of Saratoga. It contained seven thousand
inhabitants before Herr Barhydt, living in his
wooded seclusion only five miles off, became aware of
its existence. A pair of lovers, philandering about the
forest on horseback, popped in upon him one June
morning, and thenceforth there was no rest for the
soul of the Dutchman. Everybody rode down to eat
his trout and make love in the dark shades of his mirrored
lagoon; and at last, in self-defence, he added a
room or two to his shanty, enclosed his cabbage-garden,
and put a price upon his trout-dinners. The
traveller now-a-days who has not dined at Barhydt's
with his own champagne cold from the tarn, and the
white-headed old settler “gargling” Dutch about the
house, in his manifold vocation of cook, ostler, and
waiter, may as well not have seen Niagara.

Installed in the back-chamber of the old man's last
addition to his house, with Barry Cornwall and Elia
(old fellow-travellers of mine), a rude chair, a ruder,
but clean bed, and a troop of thoughts so perpetually
from home, that it mattered very little what was the
complexion of anything about me, I waited Tom's operations
with a lover's usual patience. Barhydt's visiters
seldom arrived before two or three o'clock, and the
long, soft mornings, quiet as a shadowy Elysium on the
rim of that ebon lake, were as solitary as a melancholy
man could desire. Didst thou but know, oh! gentle
Barry Cornwall! how gratefully thou hast been read
and mused upon in those dim and whispering aisles of
the forest, three thousand and more miles from thy
smoky whereabout, methinks it would warm up the
flush of pleasure around thine eyelids, though the
“golden-tressed Adelaide” were waiting her goodnight
kisses at thy knee!

I could stand it no longer. On the second evening
of my seclusion, I made bold to borrow old Barhydt's
superannuated roadster, and getting up the steam with
infinite difficulty in his rickety engine, higgled away,
with a pace to which I could not venture to affix a
name, to the gay scenes of Saratoga.

It was ten o'clock when I dismounted at the stable
in Congress Hall, and, giving der Teufel, as the old
man ambitiously styled his steed, to the hands of the
ostler, stole round through the garden to the eastern
colonuade.

I feel called upon to describe “Congress Hall.”
Some fourteen or fifteen millions of white gentlemen
and ladies consider that wooden and windowed Babylon
as the proper palace of Delight—a sojourn to be
sighed for, and sacrificed for, and economized for—
the birthplace of Love, the haunt of Hymen, the arena
of fashion—a place without which a new lease of life
were valueless—for which, if the conjuring cap of King
Erricus itself could not furnish a season ticket, it
might lie on a lady's toilet as unnoticed as a bride's
night-cap a twelvemonth after marriage. I say to myself,
sometimes, as I pass the window at White's, and
see a worldsick worldling with the curl of satiety and
disgust on his lip, wondering how the next hour will
come to its death. “If you but knew, my friend, what
a campaign of pleasure you are losing in America—
what belles than the bluebell slighter and fairer—what
hearts than the dewdrops fresher and clearer—are living
their pretty hour, like gems undived for in the
ocean—what loads of foliage, what Titans of trees,
what glorious wildernesses of rocks and waters, are
lavishing their splendors on the clouds that sail over
them, and all within the magic circle of which Congress
Hall is the centre, and which a circling dove
would measure to get an appetite for his breakfast—if
you but knew this, my lord, as I know it, you would
not be gazing so vacantly on the steps of Crockford's,
nor consider `the graybeard' such a laggard in his
hours!”

Congress Hall is a wooden building, of which the
size and capacity could never be definitely ascertained.
It is built on a slight elevation, just above the strongly-impregnated
spring whose name it bears, with little attempt
at architecture, save a spacious and vine-covered
colonnade, serving as a promenade on either side, and
two wings, the extremities of which are lost in the distance.
A relic or two of the still-astonished forest
towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy
group of firs; and, five minutes' walk from the
door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on
the village in its primeval grandeur, like the spirits of
the wronged Indians, whose tracks are scarce vanished
from the sand. In the strength of the summer solstice,
from five hundred to a thousand people dine together
at Congress Hall, and after absorbing as many
bottles of the best wines of the world, a sunset promenade
plays the valve to the sentiment thus generated,
and, with a cup of tea, the crowd separates to dress
for the nightly ball. There are several other hotels
in the village, equally crowded and equally spacious,
and the ball is given alternately at each. Congress
Hall is the “crack” place, however, and I expect that
Mr. Westcott, the obliging proprietor, will give me the
preference of rooms, on my next annual visit, for this
just and honorable mention.

The dinner-tables were piled into an orchestra, and
draped with green baize and green wreaths, the floor
of the immense hall was chalked with American flags
and the initials of all the heroes of the Revolution, and
the band were playing a waltz in a style that made

the candles quiver, and the pines tremble audibly in
their tassels. The ballroom was on the ground floor,
and the colonnade upon the garden side was crowded
with spectators, a row of grinning black fellows edging
the cluster of heads at every window, and keeping
time with their hands and feet in the irresistible sympathy
of their music-loving natures. Drawing my hat
over my eyes, I stood at the least-thronged window,
and concealing my face in the curtain, waited impatiently
for the appearance of the dancers.

The bevy in the drawing-room was sufficiently
strong at last, and the lady patronesses, handed in by
a state governor or two, and here and there a member
of congress, achieved the entree with their usual intrepidity.
Followed beaux and followed belles. Such
belles! Slight, delicate, fragile-looking creatures, elegant
as Retzsch's angels, warm-eyed as Mohammedan
houries, yet timid as the antelope whose hazel orbs
they eclipse, limbed like nothing earthly except an
American woman—I would rather not go on! When
I speak of the beauty of my countrywomen, my heart
swells. I do believe the New World has a newer
mould for its mothers and daughters. I think I am
not prejudiced. I have been years away. I have
sighed in France; I have loved in Italy; I have bargained
for Circassians in an eastern bezestein, and I
have lounged at Howell and James's on a sunny day
in the season; and my eye is trained, and my perceptions
quickened: but I do think (honor bright! and
Heath's “Book of Beauty” forgiving me) that there
is no such beautiful work of God under the arch of
the sky as an American girl in her bellehood.

Enter Tom Fane in a Stultz coat and Sparding
tights, looking as a man who had been the mirror of
Bond street might be supposed to look, a thousand
leagues from his club-house. She leaned on his arm.
I had never seen her half so lovely. Fresh and calm
from the seclusion of her chamber, her transparent
cheek was just tinged with the first mounting blood,
from the excitement of lights and music. Her lips
were slightly parted, her fine-lined eyebrows were
arched with a girlish surprise, and her ungloved arm
lay carelessly and confidingly within his, as white,
round, and slender, as if Canova had wrought it in
Parian for his Psyche. If you have never seen a
beauty of northern blood nurtured in a southern clime,
the cold fairness of her race warmed up as if it had
been steeped in some golden sunset, and her deep blue
eye darkened and filled with a fire as unnaturally resplendent
as the fusion of crysoprase into a diamond,
and if you have never known the corresponding contrast
in the character, the intelligence and constancy
of the north kindling with the enthusiasm and impulse,
the passionateness and the abandon of a more burning
latitude—you have seen nothing, let me insinuate,
though you “have been i' the Indies twice,” that
could give you an idea of Kate Lorimer.

She waltzed, and then Tom danced with my sister,
and then, resigning her to another partner, he offered
his arm again to Miss Lorimer, and left the ballroom
with several other couples for a turn in the fresh air
of the colonnade. I was not jealous, but I felt unpleasantly
at his returning to her so immediately. He
was the handsomest man, out of all comparison, in the
room, and he had dimmed my star too often in our
rambles in Europe and Asia, not to suggest a thought,
at least, that the same pleasant eclipse might occur in
our American astronomy. I stepped off the colonnade,
and took a turn in the garden.

Those “children of eternity,” as Walter Savage
Landor poetically calls “the breezes,” performed their
soothing ministry upon my temples, and I replaced
Tom in my confidence with an heroic effort, and turned
back. A swing hung between two gigantic pines, just
under the balustrade, and flinging myself into the cushioned
seat, I abandoned myself to the musings natural
to a person “in my situation.” The sentimentalizing
promenaders lounged backward and forward above me,
and not hearing Tom's drawl among them, I presumed
he had returned to the ballroom. A lady and gentleman,
walking in silence, stopped presently, and leaned
upon the railing opposite the swing. They stood a
moment, looking into the dim shadow of the pine-grove,
and then a voice, that I knew better than my
own, remarked in a low and silvery tone upon the
beauty of the night.

She was not answered, and after a moment's pause,
as if resuming a conversation that had been interrupted,
she turned very earnestly to her companion, and asked,
“Are you sure, quite sure, that you could venture to
marry without a fortune?”

“Quite, dear Miss Lorimer!”

I started from the swing, but before the words of
execration that rushed choking from my heart could
struggle to my lips, they had mingled with the crowd
and vanished.

I strode down the garden-walk in a phrensy of passion.
Should I call him immediately to account?
Should I rush into the ballroom and accuse him of
his treachery to her face? Should I drown myself in
old Barhydt's tarn, or join an Indian tribe, and make
war upon the whites? Or should I—could I—be magnanimous—and
write him a note immediately, offering
to be his groomsman at the wedding?

I stepped into the punch-room, asked for pen, ink,
and paper, and indited the following note:—

Having despatched it to his room, I flew to the stable,
roused der Teufel, who had gathered up his legs in the
straw for the night, flogged him furiously out of the
village, and giving him the rein as he entered the forest,
enjoyed the scenery in the humor of mad old Hieronymo
in the Spanish tragedy—“the moon dark, the
stars extinct, the winds blowing, the owls shrieking,
the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock
striking twelve!”

Early the next day Tom's “tiger” dismounted at
Barhydt's door, with an answer to my note, as follows:—

“`Comedy!' call you this, Mr. Fane?” I felt my
heart turn black as I threw down the letter. After a
thousand plans of revenge formed and abandoned—
borrowing old Barhydt's rifles, loading them deliberately,
and discharging them again into the air—I flung
myself exhausted on the bed, and reasoned myself back
to my magnanimity. I would be his groomsman!

It was a morning like the burst of a millennium on
the world. I felt as if I should never forgive the birds
for their mocking enjoyment of it. The wild heron
swung up from the reeds, the lotuses shook out their
dew into the lake as the breeze stirred them, and the

senseless old Dutchman sat fishing in his canoe, singing
one of his unintelligible psalms to a quick measure
that half maddened me. I threw myself upon the
yielding floor of pine-tassels on the edge of the lake,
and with the wretched school philosophy, “Si gravis
est, brevis est,” endeavored to put down the tempest
of my feelings.

A carriage rattled over the little bridge, mounted the
ascent rapidly, and brought up at Barhydt's door.

“Phil!” shouted Tom, “Phil!”

I gulped down a choking sensation in my throat, and
rushed up the bank to him. A stranger was dismounting
from his horse.

“Quick!” said Tom, shaking my hand hurriedly—
“there is no time to lose. Out with your inkhorn,
Mr. Poppletree, and have your papers signed while I
tie up my ponies.”

“What is this, sir?” said I, starting back as the
stranger deliberately presented me with a paper, in
which my own name was written in conspicuous letters.

The magistrate gazed at me with a look of astonishment.
“A contract of marriage, I think, between
Mr. Philip Slingsby and Miss Katherine Lorimer, spinster.
Are you the gentleman named in that instrument,
sir?”

At this moment my sister, leading the blushing girl
by the hand, came and threw her arms about my neck,
and drawing her within my reach, ran off and left us
together.

There are some pure moments in this life that description
would only profane.

We were married by the village magistrate in that
magnificent sanctuary of the forest, old Barhydt and
his lotuses the only indifferent witnesses of vows as
passionate as ever trembled upon human lips.

I had scarce pressed her to my heart and dashed the
tears from my eyes, when Fane, who had looked more
at my sister than at the bride during the ceremony, left
her suddenly, and thrusting a roll of parchment into
my pocket, ran off to bring up his ponies. I was on
the way to Saratoga, a married man, and my bride on
the seat beside me, before I had recovered from my
astonishment.

“Pray,” said Tom, “if it be not an impertinent
question, and you can find breath in your ecstasies,
how did you find out that your sister had done me
the honor to accept the offer of my hand?”

The resounding woods rung with his unmerciful
laughter at the explanation.

“And pray,” said I, in my turn, “if it is not an impertinent
question, and you can find a spare breath in
your ecstasies, by what magic did you persuade old
Frump to trust his ward and her title-deeds in your
treacherous keeping?”

“It is a long story, my dear Phil, and I will give you
the particulars when you pay me the `Virginia bloods'
you wot of. Suffice it for the present, that Mr. Frump
believes Mr. Tom Fane (alias Jacob Phipps, Esq.,
sleeping partner of a banking-house at Liverpool) to
be the accepted suitor of his fair ward. In his extreme
delight at seeing her in so fair a way to marry into a
bank, he generously made her a present of her own
fortune, signed over his right to control it by a document
in your possession, and will undergo as agreeable
a surprise in about five minutes as the greatest lover
of excitement could desire.”

The ponies dashed on. The sandy ascent by the
Pavilion Spring was surmounted, and in another minute
we were at the door of Congress Hall. The last
stragglers from the breakfast-table were lounging down
the colonnade, and old Frump sat reading the newspaper
under the portico.

“Aha! Mr. Phipps,” said he, as Tom drove up—
“back so soon, eh? Why, I thought you and Kitty
would be billing it till dinner-time!”

“Sir!” said Tom, very gravely, “you have the honor
of addressing Captain Thomas Fane, of his majesty's
—th Fusileers; and whenever you have a moment's
leisure, I shall be happy to submit to your perusal a
certificate of the marriage of Miss Katherine Lorimer
to the gentleman I have the pleasure to present to you.
Mr. Frump, Mr. Slingsby!”

At the mention of my name, the blood in Mr.
Frump's ruddy complexion turned suddenly to the
color of the Tiber. Poetry alone can express the
feeling pictured in his countenance:—

George Washington Jefferson Frump, Esq., left
Congress Hall the same evening, and has since ungraciously
refused an invitation to Captain Fane's wedding
—possibly from his having neglected to invite him on
a similar occasion at Saratoga. This last, however, I
am free to say, is a gratuitous supposition of my own.

LARKS IN VACATION.

1. CHAPTER I.
DRIVING STANHOPE PRO TEM.

In the edge of a June evening in the summer vacation
of 1827, I was set down by the coach at the gate
of my friend Horace Van Pelt's paternal mansion—a
large, old-fashioned, comfortable Dutch house, clinging
to the side of one of the most romantic dells on
the North river. In the absence of his whole family
on the summer excursion to the falls and lakes (taken
by almost every “well-to-do” citizen of the United
States), Horace was emperor of the long-descended,
and as progressively enriched domain of one of the
earliest Dutch settlers—a brief authority which he exercised
more particularly over an extensive stud, and
bins number one and two.

The west was piled with gold castles, breaking up
the horizon with their burnished pinnacles and turrets,
the fragrant dampness of the thunder-shower that had
followed the heat of noon was in the air, and in a low
room, whose floor opened out so exactly upon the
shaven sward, that a blind man would not have known
when he passed from the heavily-piled carpet to the
grass, I found Horace sitting over his olives and claret,
having waited dinner for me till five (long beyond the
latest American hour), and, in despair of my arrival,
having dined without me. The old black cook was
too happy to vary her vocation by getting a second
dinner; and when I had appeased my appetite, and
overtaken my friend in his claret, we sat with the
moonlight breaking across a vine at our feet, and coffee
worthy of a filagree cup in the Bezestein, and debated,
amid a true embarras des richesses, our plans
for the next week's amusement.

The seven days wore on, merrily at first, but each
succeeding one growing less merry than the last. By
the fifth eve of my sojourn, we had exhausted variety.
All sorts of headaches and megrims in the morning,
all sorts of birds, beasts, and fishes, for dinner, all sorts
of accidents in all sorts of vehicles, left us on the seventh
day out of sorts altogether. We were two discontented
Rasselases in the Happy Valley. Rejoicing
as we were in vacation, it would have been a relief to
have had a recitation to read up, or a prayer-bell to
mark the time. Two idle sophomores in a rambling,

lonely old mansion, were, we discovered, a very insufficient
dramatis personæ for the scene.

It was Saturday night. A violent clap of thunder
had interrupted some daring theory of Van Pelt's on
the rising of champagne-bubbles, and there we sat,
mum and melancholy, two sated Sybarites, silent an
hour by the clock. The mahogany was bare between
us. Any number of glasses and bottles stood in their
lees about the table; the thrice-fished juice of an
olive-dish and a solitary cigar in a silver case had been
thrust aside in a warm argument, and, in his father's
sacred gout-chair, buried to the eyes in his loosened
cravat, one leg on the table, and one somewhere in
the neighborhood of my own, sat Van Pelt, the eidolon
of exhausted amusement.

“Phil!” said he, starting suddenly to an erect position,
“a thought strikes me!”

I dropped the claret-cork, from which I was at the
moment trying to efface the “Margaux” brand, and
sat in silent expectation. I had thought his brains as
well evaporated as the last bottle of champagne.

He rested his elbows on the table, and set his chin
between his two palms.

“I'll resign the keys of this mournful old den to the
butler, and we'll go to Saratoga for a week. What
say?”

“It would be a reprieve from death by inanition,”
I answered, “but, as the rhetorical professor would
phrase it, amplify your meaning, young gentleman.”

“Thus: To-morrow is Sunday. We will sleep till
Monday morning to purge our brains of these cloudy
vapors, and restore the freshness of our complexions.
If a fair day, you shall start alone in the stanhope, and
on Monday night sleep in classic quarters at Titus's
in Troy.”

“And you!” I interrupted, rather astonished at his
arrangement for one.

Horace laid his hand on his pocket with a look of
embarrassed care.

“I will overtake you with the bay colts in the
drosky, but I must first go to Albany. The circulating
medium—”

“I understand.”

II.

We met on Monday morning in the breakfast-room
in mutual spirits. The sun was two hours high, the
birds in the trees were wild with the beauty and elasticity
of the day, the dew glistened on every bough,
and the whole scene, over river and hill, was a heaven
of natural delight. As we finished our breakfast, the
light spattering of a horse's feet up the avenue, and
the airy whirl of quick-following wheels, announced
the stanhope. It was in beautiful order, and what
would have been termed on any pare in the world a
tasteful turn-out. Light cream-colored body, black
wheels and shafts, drab lining edged with green, dead-black
harness, light as that on the panthers of Bacchus—it
was the last style of thing you would have
looked for at the “stoup” of a Dutch homestead.
And Tempest! I think I see him now!—his small inquisitive
ears, arched neck, eager eye, and fine, thin
nostril—his dainty feet flung out with the grace of a
flaunted riband—his true and majestic action and his
spirited champ of the bit, nibbling at the tight rein with
the exciting pull of a hooked trout—how evenly he
drew!—how insensibly the compact stanhope, just
touching his iron-gray tail, bowled along on the road
after him!

Horace was behind with the drosky and black boy,
and with a parting nod at the gate, I turned northward,
and Tempest took the road in beautiful style. I
do not remember to have been ever so elated. I was
always of the Cyrenaic philosophy that “happiness is
motion,” and the bland vitality of the air had refined
my senses. The delightful feel of the reins thrilled me
to the shoulder. Driving is like any other appetite,
dependant for the delicacy of its enjoyment on the
system, and a day's temperate abstinence, long sleep,
and the glorious perfection of the morning, had put
my nerves “in condition.” I felt the air as I rushed
through. The power of the horse was added to my
consciousness of enjoyment, and if you can imagine a
centaur with a harness and stanhope added to his living
body, I felt the triple enjoyment of animal exercise
which would then be his.

It is delightful driving on the Hudson. The road is
very fair beneath your wheels, the river courses away
under the bold shore with the majesty inseparable
from its mighty flood, and the constant change of outline
in its banks gives you, as you proceed, a constant
variety of pictures, from the loveliest to the most sublime.
The eagle's nest above you at one moment, a
sunny and fertile farm below you at the next—rocks,
trees, and waterfalls, wedded and clustered as, it
seems to me, they are nowhere else done so picturesquely—it
is a noble river, the Hudson! And every
few minutes, while you gaze down upon the broad
waters spreading from hill to hill like a round lake, a
gayly-painted steamer with her fringed and white awnings
and streaming flag, shoots out as if from a sudden
cleft in the rock, and draws across it her track of
foam.

Well—I bowled along. Ten o'clock brought me
to a snug Dutch tavern, where I sponged Tempest's
mouth and nostrils, lunched and was stared at by the
natives, and continuing my journey, at one I loosed
rein and dashed into the pretty village of—, Tempest
in a foam, and himself and his extempore master
creating a great sensation in a crowd of people, who
stood in the shade of the verandah of the hotel, as if
that asylum for the weary traveller had been a shop for
the sale of gentlemen in shirt-sleeves.

Tempest was taken round to the “barn,” and I ordered
rather an elaborate dinner, designing still to go
on some ten miles in the cool of the evening, and having,
of course, some mortal hours upon my hands.
The cook had probably never heard of more than
three dishes in her life, but those three were garnished
with all manner of herbs, and sent up in the best
china as a warranty for an unusual bill, and what with
coffee, a small glass of new rum as an apology for a
chasse café, and a nap in a straight-backed chair, I
killed the enemy to my satisfaction till the shadows of
the poplars lengthened across the barnyard.

I was awoke by Tempest, prancing round to the
door in undiminished spirits; and as I had begun the
day en grand scigneur, I did not object to the bill,
which considerably exceeded the outside of my calculation,
but giving the landlord a twenty-dollar note,
received the change unquestioned, doubled the usual
fee to the ostler, and let Tempest off with a bend forward
which served at the same time for a gracious bow
to the spectators. So remarkable a coxcomb had probably
not been seen in the village since the passing of
Cornwallis's army.

The day was still hot, and as I got into the open
country, I drew rein and paced quietly up hill and
down, picking the road delicately, and in a humor of
thoughtful contentment, trying my skill in keeping the
edges of the green sod as it leaned in and out from the
walls and ditches. With the long whip I now and
then touched the wing of a sulphur butterfly hovering
over a pool, and now and then I stopped and gathered
a violet from the unsunned edge of the wood.

I had proceeded three or four miles in this way,
when I was overtaken by three stout fellows, galloping
at speed, who rode past and faced round with a
peremptory order to me to stop. A formidable pitchfork
in the hand of each horseman left me no alternative.
I made up my mind immediately to be robbed

quietly of my own personals, but to show fight, if necessary,
for Tempest and the stanhope.

“Well, gentlemen,” said I, coaxing my impatient
horse, who had been rather excited by the clatter of
hoofs behind him, “what is the meaning of this?”

Before I could get an answer, one of the fellows
had dismounted and given his bridle to another, and
coming round to the left side, he sprang suddenly into
the stanhope. I received him as he rose with a well-placed
thrust of my heel which sent him back into the
road, and with a chirrup to Tempest, I dashed through
the phalanx and took the road at a top speed. The
short lash once waved round the small ears before me,
there was no stopping in a hurry, and away sped the
gallant gray, and fast behind followed my friends in
their short sleeves, all in a lathering gallop. A couple
of miles was the work of no time, Tempest laying his
legs to it as if the stanhope had been a cobweb at his
heels; but at the end of that distance there came a
sharp descent to a mill-stream, and I just remember
an unavoidable milestone and a jerk over a wall, and
the next minute, it seemed to me, I was in the room
where I had dined, with my hands tied, and a hundred
people about me. My cool white waistcoat was matted
with mud, and my left temple was, by the glass
opposite me, both bloody and begrimed.

The opening of my eyes was a signal for a closer
gathering around me, and between exhaustion and the
close air I was half suffocated. I was soon made to
understand that I was a prisoner, and that the three
white frocked highwaymen, as I took them to be, were
among the spectators. On a polite application to the
landlord, who, I found out, was a justice of the peace
as well, I was informed that he had made out my mittimus
as a counterfeiter, and that the spurious note I
had passed upon him for my dinner was safe in his
possession! He pointed at the same time to a placard
newly stuck against the wall, offering a reward for the
apprehension of a notorious practiser of my supposed
craft, to the description of whose person I answered,
to the satisfaction of all present.

Quite too indignant to remonstrate, I seated myself
in the chair considerately offered me by the waiter,
and listening to the whispers of the persons who were
still permitted to throng the room, I discovered, what
might have struck me before, that the initials on the
panel of the stanhope and the handle of the whip had
been compared with the card pasted in the bottom of
my hat, and the want of correspondence was taken as
decided corroboration. It was remarked also by a bystander
that I was quite too much of a dash for an
honest man, and that he had suspected me from first
seeing me drive into the village! I was sufficiently
humbled by this time to make an inward vow never
again to take airs upon myself if I escaped the county
jail.

The justice meanwhile had made out my orders,
and a horse and cart had been provided to take me to
the next town. I endeavored to get speech of his
worship as I was marched out of the inn parlor, but
the crowd pressed close upon my heels, and the dignitary-landlord
seemed anxious to rid his house of me.
I had no papers, and no proofs of my character, and
assertion went for nothing. Besides, I was muddy,
and my hat was broken in on one side, proofs of villany
which appeal to the commonest understanding.

I begged for a little straw in the bottom of the cart,
and had made myself as comfortable as my two rustic
constables thought fitting for a culprit, when the vehicle
was quickly ordered from the door to make away
for a carriage coming at a dashing pace up the road.
It was Van Pelt in his drosky.

Horace was well known on the road, and the stanhope
had already been recognised as his. By this
time it was deep in the twilight, and though he was instantly
known by the landlord, he might be excused
for not so readily identifying the person of his friend
in the damaged gentleman in the straw.

“Ay, ay! I see you don't know him,” said the landlord,
while Van Pelt surveyed me rather coldly; “on
with him, constables! he would have us believe you
knew him, sir! walk in, Mr. Van Pelt! Ostler, look
to Mr. Van Pelt's horses! Walk in, sir!”

“Stop!” I cried out in a voice of thunder, seeing
that Horace really had not looked at me, “Van Pelt!
stop, I say!”

The driver of the cart seemed more impressed by
the energy of my cries than my friends the constables,
and pulled up his horse. Some one in the crowd cried
out that I should have a hearing or he would “wallup
the comitatus,” and the justice, called back by this expression
of an opinion from the sovereign people, requested
his new guest to look at the prisoner.

I was preparing to have my hands untied, yet feeling
so indignant at Van Pelt for not having recognised
me that I would not look at him, when, to my surprise,
the horse started off once more, and looking back, I
saw my friend patting the neck of his near horse, evidently
not having thought it worth his while to take
any notice of the justice's observation. Choking with
rage, I flung myself down upon the straw, and jolted
on without further remonstrance to the county town.

I had been incarcerated an hour when Van Pelt's
voice, half angry with the turnkey and half ready to
burst into a laugh, resounded outside. He had not
heard a word spoken by the officious landlord, till after
the cart had been some time gone. Even then, believing
it to be a cock-and-bull story, he had quietly
dined, and it was only on going into the yard to see
after his horses that he recognised the debris of his
stanhope.

The landlord's apologies, when we returned to the
inn, were more amusing to Van Pelt than consolatory
to Philip Slingsby.

2. CHAPTER II.
SARATOGA SPRINGS.

It was about seven o'clock of a hot evening when
Van Pelt's exhausted horses toiled out from the Pine
Forest, and stood, fetlock deep in sand, on the brow
of the small hill overlooking the mushroom village of
Saratoga. One or two straggling horsemen were returning
late from their afternoon ride, and looked at
us, as they passed on their fresher hacks, with the curiosity
which attaches to new-comers in a watering-place;
here and there a genuine invalid, who had
come to the waters for life, not for pleasure, took advantage
of the coolness of the hour and crept down
the foot-path to the Spring; and as Horace encouraged
his flagging cattle into a trot to bring up gallantly
at the door of “Congress Hall,” the great bell
of that vast caravanserai resounded through the dusty
air, and by the shuffling of a thousand feet, audible as
we approached, we knew that the fashionable world
of Saratoga were rushing down, en masse, “to tea.”

Having driven through a sand-cloud for the preceding
three hours, and, to say nothing of myself, Van
Pelt being a man, who, in his character as the most
considerable beau of the University, calculated his first
impression, it was not thought advisable to encounter,
uncleansed, the tide of fashion at that moment streaming
through the hall. We drove round to the side-door,
and gained our pigeon-hole quarters under cover
of the back-staircase.

The bachelors' wing of Congress Hall is a long, unslightly,
wooden barrack, divided into chambers six feet
by four, and of an airiness of partition which enables

the occupant to converse with his neighbor three rooms
off with the ease of clerks calling out entries to the
leger across the desks of a counting-house. The
clatter of knives and plates came up to our ears in a
confused murmur, and Van Pelt having refused to dine
at the only in upon the route, for some reason best
known to himself, I commenced the progress of a long
toilet with an appetite not rendered patient by the
sounds of cheer below.

I had washed the dust out of my eyes and mouth,
and, overcome with heat and hunger, I knotted a cool
cravat loosely round my neck, and sat down in the one
chair.

“Van Pelt!” I shouted.

“Well, Phil!”

“Are you dressed?”

“Dressed! I am as pinguid as a pate foie gras—
greased to the eyelids in cold cream!”

I took up the sixpenny glass and looked at my own
newly-washed physiognomy. From the temples to the
chin it was one unmitigated red—burned to a blister
with the sun! I had been obliged to deluge my head
like a mop to get out the dust, and not naturally remarkable
for my good looks, I could, much worse than
Van Pelt, afford these startling additions to my disadvantages.
Hunger is a subtle excuse-finder, however,
and, remembering there were five hundred people in
this formidable crowd, and all busy with satisfying their
appetites, I trusted to escape observation, and determined
to “go down to tea.” With the just-named
number of guests, it will easily he understood why it
is impossible to obtain a meal at Congress Hall, out of
the stated time and place.

In a white roundabout, a checked cravat, my hair
plastered over my eyes a la Mawworm, and a face like
the sign of the “Rising Sun,” I stopped at Van Pelt's
door.

“The most hideous figure my eyes ever looked
upon!” was his first consolatory observation.

“Handsome or hideous,” I answered, “I'll not
starve! So here goes for some bread and butter!”
and leaving him to his “appliances,” I descended to the
immense hall which serves the comers to Saratoga, for
dining, dancing, and breakfasting, and in wet weather,
between meals, for shuttlecock and promenading.

Two interminable tables extended down the hall,
filled by all the beauty and fashion of the United States.
Luckily, I thought, for me, there are distinctions in this
republic of dissipation, and the upper end is reserved
for those who have servants to turn down the chairs
and stand over them. The end of the tables nearest
the door, consequently, is occupied by those whose
opinion of my appearance is not without appeal, if they
trouble their heads about it at all, and I may glide in,
in my white roundabout (permitted in this sultry
weather), and retrieve exhausted nature in obscurity.

An empty chair stood between an old gentleman
and a very plain young lady, and seeing no remembered
faces opposite, I glided to the place, and was soon lost
to apprehension in the abysm of a cold pie. The table
was covered with meats, berries, bottles of chalybeate
water, tea appurtenances, jams, jellies, and radishes,
and, but for the absence of the roast, you might have
doubted whether the meal was breakfast or dinner,
lunch or supper. Happy country! in which any one
of the four meals may serve a hungry man for all.

The pigeon-pie stood, at last, well quarried before
me, the debris of the excavation heaped upon my plate;
and, appetite appeased, and made bold by my half
hour's obscurity, I leaned forward and perused with
curious attention the long line of faces on the opposite
side of the table, to some of whom, doubtless, I was to
be indebted for the pleasures of the coming fortnight.

My eyes were fixed on the features of a talkative
woman just above, and I had quite forgotten the fact
of my dishabille of complexion and dress, when two
persons entered who made considerable stir among
the servants, and eventually were seated directly opposite
me.

“We loitered too long at Barhydt's,” said one of the
most beautiful women I had ever seen, as she pulled
her chair nearer to the table and looked around her
with a glance of disapproval.

In following her eyes to see who was so happy as
to sympathize with such a divine creature even in the
loss of a place at table, I met the fixed and astonished
gaze of my most intimate friend at the University.

“Ellerton!”

“Slingsby!”

Overjoyed at meeting him, I stretched both hands
across the narrow table, and had shaken his arm nearly
off his shoulders, and asked him a dozen questions, before
I became conscious that a pair of large wondering
eyes were coldly taking an inventory of my person
and features. Van Pelt's unflattering exclamation
upon my appearance at his door, flashed across my
mind like a thunderstroke, and, coloring through my
burned skin to the temples, I bowed and stammered I
know not what, as Ellerton introduced me to his
sister!

To enter fully into my distress, you should be apprized
that a correspondence arising from my long and
constant intimacy with Tom Ellerton, had been carried
on for a year between me and his sister, and that, being
constantly in the habit of yielding to me in manners of
taste, he had, I well knew, so exaggerated to her my
personal qualities, dress, and manners, that she could
not in any case fail to be disappointed in seeing me.
Believing her to be at that moment two thousand miles
off in Alabama, and never having hoped for the pleasure
of seeing her at all, I had foolishly suffered this
good-natured exaggeration to go on, pleased with seeing
the reflex of his praises in her letters, and, Heaven
knows, little anticipating the disastrous interview upon
which my accursed star would precipitate me! As I
went over, mentally, the particulars of my unbecomingness,
and saw Miss Ellerton's eyes resting inquisitively
and furtively on the mountain of pigeon bones
lifting their well-picked pyramid to my chin, I wished
myself an ink-fish at the bottom of the sea.

Three minutes after, I burst into Van Pelt's room,
tearing my hair and abusing Tom Ellerton's good nature,
and my friend's headless drosky, in alternate
breaths. Without disturbing the subsiding blood in his
own face by entering into my violence, Horace coolly
asked me what the devil was the matter.

I told him.

“Lie down here!” said Van Pelt, who was a small
Napoleon in such trying extremities; “lie down on
the bed, and anoint your phiz with this unguent. I see
good luck for you in this accident, and you have only
to follow my instructions. Phil Slingsby, sunburnt,
in a white roundabout, and Phil Slingsby, pale and well
dressed, are as different as this potted cream and a dancing
cow. You shall see what a little drama I'll work
out for you!”

I lay down on my back, and Horace kindly anointed
me from the trachea to the forelock, and from ear to
ear.

“Egad,” said he, warming with his study of his proposed
plot as he slid his fore-fingers over the bridge of
my nose, “every circumstance tells for us. Tall man
as you are, you are as short-bodied as a monkey (no
offence, Phil!) and when you sit at table, you are rather
an under-sized gentleman. I have been astonished
every day these three years, at seeing you rise after
dinner in Commons' Hall. A thousand to one, Fanny
Ellerton thinks you a stumpy man.”

“And then, Phil,” he continued, with a patronising
tone, “you have studied minute philosophy to little
purpose if you do not know that the first step in winning

a woman to whom you have been overpraised, is
to disenchant her at all hazards, on your first interview.
You will never rise above the ideal she has
formed, and to sink below it gradually, or to remain
stationary, is not to thrive in your wooing.”

Leaving me this precocious wisdom to digest,
Horace descended to the foot of the garden to take a
warm bath, and overcome with fatigue, and the recumbent
posture, I soon fell asleep and dreamed of the
great blue eyes of Fanny Ellerton.

II.

The soaring of the octave flute in “Hail Columbia,”
with which the band was patriotically opening the
ball, woke me from the midst of a long apologetic letter
to my friend's sister, and I found Van Pelt's black
boy Juba waiting patiently at the bed-side with curling-tongs
and Cologne-water, ordered to superintend
my toilet by his master, who had gone early to the
drawing-room to pay his respects to Miss Ellerton.
With the cold cream disappeared entirely from my
face the uncomfortable redness to which I had been a
martyr, and, thanks to my ebony coiffeur, my straight
and plastered locks soon grew as different to their
“umquhile guise” as Hyperion's to a satyr's. Having
appeared to the eyes of the lady, in whose favor I
hoped to prosper, in red and white (red phiz and white
jacket), I trusted that in white and black (black suit
and pale viznomy), I should look quite another person.
Juba was pleased to show his ivory in a complimentary
smile at my transformation, and I descended to
the drawing-room, on the best terms with the coxcomb
in my bosom.

Horace met me at the door.

“Proteus redivivus!” was his exclamation. “Your
new name is Wrongham. You are a gentle senior,
instead of a bedeviled sophomore, and your cue is to
be poetical. She will never think again of the monster
in the white jacket, and I have prepared her for
the acquaintance of a new friend, whom I have just
described to you.

I took his arm, and with the courage of a man in a
mask, went through another presentation to Miss Ellerton.
Her brother had been let into the secret by
Van Pelt, and received me with great ceremony as his
college superior; and, as there was no other person at
the Springs who knew Mr. Slingsby, Mr. Wrongham
was likely to have an undisturbed reign of it. Miss
Ellerton looked hard at me for a moment, but the
gravity with which I was presented and received, dissipated
a doubt if one had arisen in her mind, and
she took my arm to go to the ball-room, with an
undisturbed belief in my assumed name and character.

I commenced the acquaintance of the fair Alabamian
with great advantages. Received as a perfect
stranger, I possessed, from long correspondence with
her, the most minute knowledge of the springs, of her
character, and of her favorite reading and pursuits,
and, with the little knowledge of the world which she
had gained on a plantation, she was not likely to penetrate
my game from my playing it too freely. Her
confidence was immediately won by the readiness
with which I entered into her enthusiasm and anticipated
her thoughts; and before the first quadrille was
well over, she had evidently made up her mind that
she had never in her life met one who so well “understood
her.” Oh! how much women include in that
apparently indefinite expression, “He understands
me!”

The colonnade of Congress Hall is a long promenade
laced in with vines and columns, on the same
level with the vast ball-room and drawing-room, and
(the light of heaven not being taxed at Saratoga)
opening at every three steps by a long window into
the carpeted floors. When the rooms within are lit
in a summer's night, that cool and airy colonnade is
thronged by truants from the dance, and collectively
by all who have anything to express that is meant for
one ear only. The mineral waters of Saratoga are no
less celebrated as a soporific for chaperons than as a
tonic for the dyspeptic, and while the female Argus
dozes in the drawing-room, the fair lo and her Jupiter
(represented in this case, we will say, by Miss Ellerton
and myself) range at liberty the fertile fields of
flirtation.

I had easily put Miss Ellerton in surprised good
humor with herself and me during the first quadrille,
and with a freedom based partly upon my certainty of
pleasing her, partly on the peculiar manners of the
place, I coolly requested that she would continue to
dance with me for the rest of the evening.

“One unhappy quadrille excepted,” she replied,
with a look meant to be mournful.

“May I ask with whom?”

“Oh, he has not asked me yet; but my brother has
bound me over to be civil to him—a spectre, Mr.
Wrongham! a positive spectre.”

“How denominated?” I inquired, with a forced indifference,
for I had a presentiment I should hear my
own name.

“Slingsby—Mr. Philip Slingsby—Tom's fidus
Achates, and a proposed lover of my own. But you
don't seem surprised!”

“Surprised! E-hem! I know the gentleman!”

“Then did you ever see such a monster! Tom
told me he was another Hyperion. He half admitted
it himself, indeed; for to tell you a secret, I have corresponded
with him a year!”

“Giddy Miss Fanny Ellerton!—and never saw
him!”

“Never till to-night! He sat at supper in a white
jacket and red face, with a pile of bones upon his plate
like an Indian tumulus.”

“And your brother introduced you?”

“Ah, you were at table! Well, did you ever see in
your travels, a man so unpleasantly hideous?”

“Fanny!” said her brother, coming up at the moment,
“Slingsby presents his apologies to you for not
joining your cordon to-night—but he's gone to bed
with a head-ache.”

“Indigestion, I dare say,” said the young lady.
“Never mind, Tom, I'll break my heart when I have
leisure. And now, Mr. Wrongham, since the spectre
walks not forth to-night, I am yours for a cool hour
on the colonnade.”

Vegetation is rapid in Alabama, and love is a weed
that thrives in the soil of the tropics. We discoursed
of the lost Pleiad and the Berlin bracelets, of the five
hundred people about us, and the feasibility of boiling
a pot on five hundred a year—the unmatrimonial sum
total of my paternal allowance. She had as many negroes
as I had dollars, I well knew, but it was my cue
to seem disinterested.

“And where do you mean to live, when you marry,
Mr. Wrongham?” asked Miss Ellerton, at the two
hundredth turn on the colonnade.

“Would you like to live in Italy?” I asked again,
as if I had not heard her.

“Do you mean that as a sequitur to my question,
Mr. Wrongham?” said she, half stopping in her walk;
and though the sentence was commenced playfully,
dropping her voice at the last word, with something, I
thought, very like emotion.

I drew her off the colonnade to the small garden
between the house and the spring, and in a giddy
dream of fear and surprise at my own rashness and
success, I made, and won from her, a frank avowal of
preference.

Matches have been made more suddenly.

III.

Miss Ellerton sat in the music-room the next morning
after breakfast, preventing pauses in a rather interesting
conversation, by a running accompaniment
upon the guitar. A single gold thread formed a fillet
about her temples, and from beneath it, in clouds of
silken ringlets, floated the softest raven hair that ever
grew enamored of an ivory shoulder. Hers was a
skin that seemed woven of the lily-white, but opaque
fibre of the magnolia, yet of that side of its cup turned
toward the fading sunset. There is no term in painting,
because there is no touch of pencil or color, that
could express the vanishing and impalpable breath
that assured the healthiness of so pale a cheek. She
was slight as all southern women are in America, and
of a flexible and luxurious gracefulness equalled by
nothing but the movings of a smoke-curl. Without
the elastic nerve remarkable in the motions of Taglioni,
she appeared, like her, to be born with a lighter specific
gravity than her fellow-creatures. If she had
floated away upon some chance breeze you would only
have been surprised upon reflection.

“I am afraid you are too fond of society,” said Miss
Ellerton, as Juba came in hesitatingly and delivered
her a note in the hand-writing of an old correspondent.
She turned pale on seeing the superscription, and
crushed the note up in her hand, unread. I was not
sorry to defer the denouement of my little drama, and
taking up the remark which she seemed disposed to
forget, I referred her to a scrap-book of Van Pelt's,
which she had brought home with her, containing
some verses of my own, copied (by good luck) in that
sentimental sophomore's own hand.

“Are these yours, really and really?” she asked,
looking pryingly into my face, and showing me my
own verses, against which she had already run a pencil
line of approbation.

“Peccavi!” I answered. “But will you make me
in love with my offspring by reading them in your own
voice.”

They were some lines written in a balcony at daybreak,
while a ball was still going on within, and contained
an allusion (which I had quite overlooked) to
some one of my ever-changing admirations. As well
as I remember they ran thus:—

“And who was this `sweet lover,' Mr. Wrongham?
I should know, I think, before I go farther with so expeditious
a gentleman.”

“As Shelley says of his ideal mistress—

It was but an apostrophe to the presentiment of that
which I have found, dear Miss Ellerton! But will you
read that ill-treated billet-doux, and remember that
Juba stands with the patience of an ebon statue waiting
for an answer?”

I knew the contents of the letter, and I watched the
expression of her face, as she read it, with no little
interest. Her temples flushed, and her delicate lips
gradually curled into an expression of anger and scorn,
and having finished the perusal of it, she put it into
my hand, and asked me if so impertinent a production
deserved an answer.

I began to fear that the eclaircissement would not
leave me on the sunny side of the lady's favor, and felt
the need of the moment's reflection given me while
running my eye over the letter.

“Mr. Slingsby,” said I, with the deliberation of an
attorney, “has been some time in correspondence with
you?”

“Yes.”

“And, from his letters and your brother's commendations,
you had formed a high opinion of his character,
and had expressed as much in your letters?”

“Yes—perhaps I did.”

“And from this paper intimacy he conceives himself
sufficiently acquainted with you to request leave
to pay his addresses?”

A dignified bow put a stop to my catechism.

“Dear Miss Ellerton!” I said, “this is scarcely a
question upon which I ought to speak, but by putting
this letter into my hand, you seemed to ask my opinion.”

“I did—I do,” said the lovely girl, taking my hand,
and looking appealingly into my face; “answer it for
me! I have done wrong in encouraging that foolish
correspondence, and I owe perhaps to this forward
man a kinder reply than my first feeling would have
dictated. Decide for me—write for me—relieve me
from the first burden that has lain on my heart
since—”

She burst into tears, and my dread of an explanation
increased.

“Will you follow my advice implicitly?” I asked.

“Yes—oh, yes!”

“You promise?”

“Indeed, indeed!”

“Well, then, listen to me! However painful the
task, I must tell you that the encouragement you have
given Mr. Slingsby, the admiration you have expressed
in your letters of his talents and acquirements, and the
confidences you have reposed in him respecting yourself,
warrant him in claiming as a right, a fair trial of
his attractions. You have known and approved Mr.
Slingsby's mind for years—you know me but for a few
hours. You saw him under the most unfavorable
auspices (for I know him intimately), and I feel bound
in justice to assure you that you will like him much
better upon acquaintance.”

Miss Ellerton had gradually drawn herself up during
this splendid speech, and sat at last as erect and
as cold as Agrippina upon her marble chair.

“Will you allow me to send Mr. Slingsby to you,”
I continued, rising—“and suffer him to plead his own
cause?”

“If you will call my brother, Mr. Wrongham, I
shall feel obliged to you,” said Miss Ellerton.

I left the room, and hurrying to my chamber, dipped
my head into a basin of water, and plastered my long
locks over my eyes, slipped on a white roundabout,
and tied around my neck the identical checked cravat
in which I had made such an unfavorable impression
on the first day of my arrival. Tom Ellerton was soon
found, and easily agreed to go before and announce me
by my proper name to his sister; and treading closely
on his heels, I followed to the door of the music-room.

“Ah, Ellen!” said he, without giving her time for
a scene, “I was looking for you. Slingsby is better,
and will pay his respects to you presently. And, I
say—you will treat him well, Ellen, and—and, don't
flirt with Wrongham the way you did last night!—
Slingby's a devilish sight better fellow. Oh, here he
is!”

As I stepped over the threshold, Miss Ellerton gave
me just enough of a look to assure herself that it was
the identical monster she had seen at the tea-table,
and not deigning me another glance, immediately commenced
talking violently to her brother on the state of
the weather. Tom bore it for a moment or two with
remarkable gravity, but at my first attempt to join in
the conversation, my voice was lost in an explosion of
laughter which would have been the death of a gentleman
with a full habit.

Indignant and astonished, Miss Ellerton rose to her
full height, and slowly turned to me.

“Peccavi!” said I, crossing my hands on my bosom,
and looking up penitently to her face.

She ran to me, and seized my hand, but recovered
herself instantly, and the next moment was gone from
the room.

Whether from wounded pride at having been the
subject of a mystification, or whether from that female
caprice by which most men suffer at one period or
other of their bachelor lives, I know not—but I never
could bring Miss Ellerton again to the same interesting
crisis with which she ended her intimacy with Mr.
Wrongham. She proffered to forgive me, and talked
laughingly enough of our old correspondence; but
whenever I grew tender, she referred me to the “sweet
lover,” mentioned in my verses in the balcony, and
looked around for Van Pelt. That accomplished
beau, on observing my discomfiture, began to find out
Miss Ellerton's graces without the aid of his quizzingglass,
and I soon found it necessary to yield the pas
altogether. She has since become Mrs. Van Pelt,
and when I last heard from her was “as well as could
be expected.”

3. CHAPTER III.
MRS. CAPTAIN THOMPSON.

The last of August came sweltering in, hot, dusty,
and faint, and the most indefatigable belles of Saratoga
began to show symptoms of weariness. The stars
disappeared gradually from the ballroom; the bar-keeper
grew thin under the thickening accounts for
lemonades; the fat fellow in the black band, who
“vexed” the bassoon, had blown himself from the
girth of Falstaff to an “eagle's talon in the waist;”
papas began to be waylaid in their morning walks by
young gentlemen with propositions; and stage-coaches
that came in with their baggageless tails in the air, and
the driver's weight pressing the foot-board upon the
astonished backs of his wheelers, went out with the
trim of a Venetian gondola—the driver's up-hoisted
figure answering to the curved proboscis of that stern-laden
craft.

The vocation of tin-tumblers and water-dippers was
gone. The fashionable world (brazen in its general
habit) had drank its fill of the ferrugineous waters.
Mammas thanked Heaven for the conclusion of the
chaperon's summer solstice; and those who came to
bet, and those who came to marry, “made up their
books,” and walked off (if they had won) with their
winnings.

Having taken a less cordial farewell of Van Pelt
than I might have done had not Miss Ellerton been
hanging confidingly on his arm, I followed my baggage
to the door, where that small epitome of the inheritance
of the prince of darkness, an American stagecoach,
awaited me as its ninth inside passenger. As
the last person picked up, I knew very well the seat
to which I was destined, and drawing a final cool
breath in the breezy colonnade, I summoned resolution
and abandoned myself to the tender mercies of
the driver.

The “ray of contempt” that “will pierce through
the shell of the tortoise,” is a shaft from the horn of
a new moon in comparison with the beating of an
American sun through the top of a stage-coach. This
“accommodation,” as it is sometimes bitterly called,
not being intended to carry outside passengers, has a
top as thin as your grandmother's umbrella, black, porous,
and cracked; and while intended for a protection
from the heat, it just suffices to collect the sun's
rays with an incredible power and sultriness, and exclude
the air that makes it sufferable to the beasts of
the field. Of the nine places inside this “dilly,” the
four seats in the corners are so far preferable that the
occupant has the outer side of his body exempt from
a perspirative application of human flesh (the thermometer
at 100 degrees of Fahrenheit), while, of the
three middle places on the three seats, the man in the
centre of the coach, with no support for his back, yet
buried to the chin in men, women, and children, is at
the ninth and lowest degree of human suffering. I
left Saratoga in such a state of happiness as you
might suppose for a gentleman, who, besides fulfilling
this latter category, had been previously unhappy in
his love.

I was dressed in a white roundabout and trowsers
of the same, a straw hat, thread stockings, and pumps,
and was so far a blessing to my neighbors that I looked
cool. Directly behind me, occupying the middle of
the back seat, sat a young woman with a gratis passenger
in her lap (who, of course, did not count among
the nine), in the shape of a fat and a very hot child
of three years of age, whom she called John, Jacky,
Johnny, Jocket, Jacket, and the other endearing diminutives
of the namesakes of the great apostle. Like
the saint who had been selected for his patron, he was
a “voice crying in the wilderness.” This little gentleman
was exceedingly unpopular with his two neighbors
at the windows, and his incursions upon their legs
and shoulders in his occasional forays for fresh air,
ended in his being forbidden to look out at either window,
and plied largely with gingerbread to content him
with the warm lap of his mother. Though I had no
eyes in the back of my straw hat, I conceived very
well the state in which a compost of soft gingerbread,
tears, and perspiration, would soon leave the two unscrupulous
hands behind me; and as the jolts of the
coach frequently threw me back upon the knees of
his mother, I could not consistently complain of the
familiar use made of my roundabout and shoulders in
Master John's constant changes of position. I vowed
my jacket to the first river, the moment I could make
sure that the soft gingerbread was exhausted—but I
kept my temper.

How an American Jehu gets his team over ten
miles in the hour, through all the variety of sand, ruts,
clay-pits, and stump-thickets, is a problem that can
only be resolved by riding beside him on the box. In
the usual time we arrived at the pretty village of Troy,
some thirty miles from Saratoga; and here, having exchanged
my bedaubed jacket for a clean one, I freely
forgave little Pickle his freedoms, for I hoped never
to set eyes on him again during his natural life. I was
going eastward by another coach.

Having eaten a salad for my dinner, and drank a
bottle of iced claret, I stepped forth in my “blanched
and lavendered” jacket to take my place in the other
coach, trusting Providence not to afflict me twice in

the same day with the evil I had just escaped, and feeling,
on the whole, reconciled to my troubled dividend
of eternity. I got up the steps of the coach with as
much alacrity as the state of the thermometer would
permit, and was about drawing my legs after me upon
the forward seat, when a clammy hand caught me
unceremoniously by the shirt-collar, and the voice I
was just beginning to forget cried out with a chuckle,
“Dada!”

“Madam!” I said, picking off the gingerbread from
my shirt as the coach rolled down the street, “I had
hoped that your infernal child—”

I stopped in the middle of the sentence, for a pair
of large blue eyes were looking wonderingly into mine,
and for the first time I observed that the mother of
this familiar nuisance was one of the prettiest women I
had seen since I had become susceptible to the charms
of the sex.

“Are you going to Boston, sir?” she inquired, with
a half-timid smile, as if, in that case, she appealed to
me for protection on the road.

“Yes, madam!” I answered, taking little Jocket's
pasty hand into mine, affectionately, as I returned her
hesitating look; “may I hope for your society so
far?”

My fresh white waistcoat was soon embossed with a
dingy yellow, where my enterprising fellow-passenger
had thrust his sticky fist into the pockets, and my sham
shirt-bosom was reduced incontinently to the complexion
of a painter's rag after doing a sunset in gamboge.
I saw everything, however, through the blue eyes of
his mother, and was soon on such pleasant terms with
Master John, that, at one of the stopping-places, I inveigled
him out of the coach and dropped him accidentally
into the horse-trough, contriving to scrub him
passably clean before he could recover breath enough
for an outery. I had already thrown the residuum
of his gingerbread out of the window, so that his familiarities
for the rest of the day were, at least, less
adhesive.

We dropped one or two way-passengers at Lebanon,
and I was left in the coach with Mrs. Captain and
Master John Thompson, in both whose favors I made
a progress that (I may as well depone) considerably
restored my spirits—laid flat by my unthrift wooing at
Saratoga. If a fly hath but alit on my nose when my
self-esteem hath been thus at a discount, I have
soothed myself with the fancy that it preferred me—a
drowning vanity will so catch at a straw!

As we bowled along through some of the loveliest
scenery of Massachusetts, my companion (now become
my charge), let me a little into her history, and at the
same time, by those shades of insinuation of which
women so instinctively know the uses, gave me perfectly
to comprehend that I might as well economize
my tenderness. The father of the riotous young gentleman
who had made so free with my valencia waistcoat
and linen roundabouts, had the exclusive copyhold
of her affections. He had been three years at
sea (I think I said before), and she was hastening to
show him the pledge of their affections—come into
the world since the good brig Dolly made her last
clearance from Boston bay.

I was equally attentive to Mrs. Thompson after this
illumination, though I was, perhaps, a shade less enamored
of the interesting freedoms of Master John.
One's taste for children depends so much upon one's
love for their mothers!

It was twelve o'clock at night when the coach rattled
in upon the pavements of Boston. Mrs. Thompson
had expressed so much impatience during the last
few miles, and seemed to shrink so sensitively from
being left to herself in a strange city, that I offered my
services till she should find herself in better hands,
and, as a briefer way of disposing of her, had bribed
the coachman, who was in a hurry with the mail, to
turn a little out of his way, and leave her at her husband's
hotel.

We drew up with a prodigious clatter, accordingly,
at the Marlborough hotel, where, no coach being expected,
the boots and bar-keeper were not immediately
forthcoming. After a rap “to wake the dead,” I set
about assisting the impatient driver in getting off the
lady's trunks and boxes, and they stood in a large
pyramid on the sidewalk when the door was opened.
A man in his shirt, three parts asleep, held a flaring
candle over his head, and looked through the half-opened
door.

“Is Captain Thompson up?” I asked rather brusquely,
irritated at the sour visage of the bar-keeper.

“Captain Thompson, sir!”

“Captain Thompson, sir!!” I repeated my words
with a voice that sent him three paces back into the
hall.

“No, sir,” he said at last, slipping one leg into his
trowsers, which had hitherto been under his arm.

“Then wake him immediately, and tell him Mrs.
Thompson is arrived.” Here's a husband, thought I,
as I heard something between a sob and a complaint
issue from the coach-window at the bar-keeper's intelligence.
To go to bed when he expected his wife and
child, and after three years' separation! She might
as well have made a parenthesis in her constancy!

“Have you called the captain?” I asked, as I set
Master John upon the steps, and observed the man
still standing with the candle in his hand, grinning
from ear to ear.

“No, sir,” said the man.

“No!” I thundered, “and what in the devil's name
is the reason?”

“Boots!” he cried out in reply, “show this gentleman
`forty-one.' Them may wake Captain Thompson
as likes! I never hearn of no Mrs. Thompson!”

Rejecting an ungenerous suspicion that flashed
across my mind, and informing the bar-keeper en passant,
that he was a brute and a donkey, I sprang up
the staircase after a boy, and quite out of breath, arrived
at a long gallery of bachelors' rooms on the fifth
floor. The boy pointed to a door at the end of the
gallery, and retreated to the banisters as if to escape
the blowing up of a petard.

Rat-a-tat-tat!

“Come in!” thundered a voice like a hailing trumpet.
I took the lamp from the boy, and opened the
door. On a narrow bed well tucked up, lay a most
formidable looking individual, with a face glowing
with carbuncles, a pair of deep-set eyes inflamed and
fiery, and hair and eyebrows of glaring red, mixed
slightly with gray; while outside the bed lay a hairy
arm, with a fist like the end of the club of Hercules.
His head tied loosely in a black silk handkerchief, and
on the light-stand stood a tumbler of brandy and water.

“What do you want?” he thundered again, as I stepped
over a threshold and lifted my hat, struck speechless
for a moment with this unexpected apparition.

“Have I the pleasure,” I asked, in a hesitating
voice, “to address Captain Thompson?”

“That's my name!”

“Ah! then, captain, I have the pleasure to inform
you that Mrs. Thompson and little John are arrived.
They are at the door at this moment.”

A change in the expression of Captain Thompson's
face checked my information in the middle, and as I
took a step backward, he raised himself on his elbow,
and looked at me in a way that did not diminish my
embarrassment.

“I'll tell you what, Mr. Milk-and-water,” said he,
with an emphasis on every word like the descent of a
sledge-hammer; “if you're not out of this room in
two seconds with your `Mrs. Thompson and little

John,' I'll slam you through that window, or the devil
take me!”

I reflected as I took another step backward, that if
I were thrown down to Mrs. Thompson from a fifth
story window I should not be in a state to render her
the assistance she required; and remarking with an
ill-feigned gayety to Captain Thompson that so decided
a measure would not be necessary, I backed
expeditiously over the threshold. As I was closing
his door, I heard the gulp of his brandy-and-water,
and the next instant the empty glass whizzed past my
retreating head, and was shattered to pieces on the
wall behind me.

I gave the “boots” a cuff for an untimely roar of
laughter as I reached the staircase, and descended,
very much discomfited and embarrassed, to Mrs.
Thompson. My delay had thrown that lady into a
very moving state of unhappiness. Her tears were
glistening in the light of the street lamp, and Master
John was pulling away unheeded at her stomacher,
and crying as if he would split his diaphragm. What
to do? I would have offered to take her to my paternal
roof till the mystery could be cleared up—but I
had been absent two years, and to arrive at midnight
with a woman and a young child, and such an improbable
story—I did not think my reputation at
home would bear me out. The coachman, too, began
to swear and make demonstrations of leaving us in the
street, and it was necessary to decide.

“Shove the baggage inside the coach,” I said at
last, “and drive on. Don't be unhappy Mrs. Thompson!
Jocket, stop crying, you villain! I'll see that
you are comfortably disposed of for the night where
the coach stops, madam, and to-morrow I'll try a
little reason with Captain Thompson. How the devil
can she love such a volcanic specimen!” I muttered
to myself, dodging instinctively at the bare remembrance
of the glass of brandy-and-water.

The coachman made up for lost time, and we rattled
over the pavements at a rate that made Jocket's hullybaloo
quite inaudible. As we passed the door of my
own home, I wondered what would be the impression
of my respectable parent, could he see me whisking
by, after midnight, with a rejected woman and her
progeny upon my hands; but smothering the unworthy
doubt that re-arose in my mind, touching the
legitimacy of Master John, I inwardly vowed that I
would see Mrs. Thompson at all risks fairly out of
her imbroglio.

We pulled up with a noise like the discharge of a
load of paving-stones, and I was about saying something
both affectionate and consolatory to my weeping
charge, when a tall handsome fellow, with a face as
brown as a berry, sprang to the coach-door, and seized
her in his arms! A shower of kisses and tender epithets
left me not a moment in doubt. There was
another Captain Thompson!

He had not been able to get rooms at the Marlborough,
as he had anticipated when he wrote, and
presuming that the mail would come first to the post-office,
he had waited for her there.

As I was passing the Marlborough a week or two
afterward, I stopped to inquire about Captain Thompson.
I found that he was an old West India captain,
who had lived there between his cruises for twenty
years more or less, and had generally been supposed a
bachelor. He had suddenly gone to sea, the landlord
told me, smiling at the same time, as if thereby
hung a tale if he chose to tell it.

“The fact is,” said Boniface, when I pushed him a
little on the subject, “he was skeared off.”

“What scared him?” I asked very innocently.

“A wife and child from some foreign port!” he answered
laughing as if he would burst his waistband,
and taking me into the back parlor to tell me the particulars.

A LOG IN THE ARCHIPELAGO.

The American frigate, in which I had cruised as
the ward-room guest for more than six months, had
sailed for winter quarters at Mahon, and my name was
up at the pier of Smyrna, as a passenger in the first
ship that should leave the port, whatever her destination.

The flags of all nations flew at the crowded peaks of
the merchantmen lying off the Marina, and among them
lay two small twin brigs, loading with figs and opium
for my native town in America. They were owned by
an old schoolfellow of my own, one of the most distinguished
and hospitable of the Smyrniote merchants,
and, if nothing more adventurous turned up, he had
offered to land me from one of his craft at Malta or
Gibraltar.

Time wore on, and I had loitered up and down the
narrow street “in melancholy idleness” by day, and
smoked the narghile with those “merchant princes”
by night, till I knew every paving-stone between the
beach and the bazar, and had learned the thrilling
events of the Greek persecution with the particularity
of a historian. My heart, too, unsusceptible enough
when “packed for travel,” began to uncoil with absence
of adventure, and expose its sluggish pulses to
the “Greek fire,” still burning in those Asiatic eyes,
and I felt sensibly, that if, Telemachus-like, I did not
soon throw myself into the sea, I should yield, past
praying for, to the cup of some Smyrniote Circe.
Darker eyes than are seen on that Marina swim not in
delight out of paradise!

I was sitting on an opium-box in the counting-house
of my friend L—n (the princely and hospitable merchant
spoken of above), when enter a Yankee “skipper,”
whom I would have clapped on the shoulder for
a townsman if I had seen him on the top of the minaret
of the mosque of Sultan Bajazet. His go-ashore black
coat and trowsers, worn only one month in twelve,
were of costly cloth, but of the fashion prevailing in
the days of his promotion to be second mate of a cod-fisher;
his hat was of the richest beaver, but getting
brown with the same paucity of wear, and exposure to
the corroding air of the ocean; and on his hands were
stretched (and they had well need to be elastic) a pair
of Woodstock gloves that might have descended to
him from Paul Jones “the pilot.” A bulge just over
his lowest rib gave token of the ship's chronometer,
and, in obedience to the new fashion of a guard, a fine
chain of the softest auburn hair (doubtless his wife's,
and, I would have wagered my passage-money, as pretty
a woman as he would see in his v'yage)—a chain, I
say, braided of silken blond ringlets passed around his
neck, and drew its glossy line over his broad-breasted
white waistcoat—the dewdrop on the lion's mane not
more entitled to be astonished.

A face of hard-weather, but with an expression of
care equal to the amount of his invoice, yet honest and
fearless as the truck of his mainmast; a round sailor's
back, that looked as if he would hoist up his deck if
you battered him beneath hatches against his will;
and teeth as white as his new foresail, completed the
picture of the master of the brig Metamora. Jolly old
H—t, I shall never feel the grip of an honester hand,
nor return one (as far as I can with the fist you crippled
at parting) with a more kindly pressure! A fair
wind on your quarter, my old boy, wherever you may
be trading!

“What sort of accommodations have you, captain?”
I asked, as my friend introduced me.

“Why, none to speak of, sir! There's starboard
birth that a'n't got much in it—a few boxes of figs, and
the new spritsail, and some of the mate's traps—but I
could stow away a little perhaps, sir.”

“You sail to-morrow morning?”

“Off with the land-breeze, sir.”

I took leave of the kindest of friends, laid in a few
hasty stores, and was on board at midnight. The next
morning I awoke with the water rippling beside me,
and creeping on deck, I saw a line of foam stretching
behind us far up the gulf, and the ruins of the primitive
church of Smyrna, mingled with the turrets of a
Turkish castle, far away in the horizon.

The morning was cool and fresh, the sky of an oriental
purity, and the small low brig sped on like a
nautilus. The captain stood by the binnacle, looking
off to the westward with a glass, a tarpaulin hat over
his black locks, a pair of sail-cloth pumps on his feet,
and trowsers and roundabout of an indefinable tarriness
and texture. He handed me the glass, and, obeying
his direction, I saw, stealing from behind a point of
land, shaped like a cat's back, the well-known topsails
of the two frigates that had sailed before us.

We were off Vourla, and the commodore had gone
to pay his respects to Sir Pulteney Malcolm, then lying
with his fleet in this little bay, and waiting, we
supposed, for orders to force the Dardanelles. The
frigates soon appeared on the bosom of the gulf, and
heading down, neared our larboard bow, and stood for
the Archipelago. The Metamora kept her way, but
the “United States,” the fleetest of our ships, soon
left us behind with a strengthening breeze, and, following
her with the glass till I could no longer distinguish
the cap of the officer of the deck, I breathed a
blessing after her, and went below to breakfast. It is
strange how the lessening in the distance of a ship in
which one has cruised in these southern seas, pulls on
the heartstrings!

I sat on deck most of the day, cracking pecan-nuts
with the captain, and gossiping about schooldays in
our native town, occasionally looking off over the hills
of Asia Minor, and trying to realize (the Ixion labor of
the imagination in travel) the history of which these
barren lands have been the scene. I know not whether
it is easy for a native of old countries to people these
desolated lands from the past, but for me, accustomed
to look on the face of the surrounding earth as mere
vegetation, unstoried and unassociated, it is with a constant
mental effort alone that I can be classic on classic
ground—find Plato in the desert wastes of the
Academy, or Priam among the Turk-stridden and
prostrate columns of Troy. In my recollections of
Athens, the Parthenon and the Theseion and the solemn
and sublime ruins by the Fount of Callirhoe stand
forth prominent enough; but when I was on the spot
—a biped to whom three meals a day, a washerwoman,
and a banker, were urgent necessities—I shame
to confess that I sat dangling my legs over the classic
Pelasgicum, not “fishing for philosophers with gold
and figs,” but musing on the mundane and proximate
matters of daily economy. I could see my six shirts
hanging to dry, close by the temple of the Winds, and
I knew my dinner was cooking three doors from the
crumbling capitals of the Agora.

As the sun set over Ephesus, we neared the mouth
of the gulf of Smyrna, and the captain stood looking
over the leeward-bow rather earnestly.

“We shall have a snorter out of the nor'east,” he
said, taking hold of the tiller, and sending the helmsman
forward—“I never was up this sea but once
afore, and it's a dirty passage through these islands in
any weather, let alone a Levanter.”

He followed up his soliloquy by jamming his tiller
hard a-port, and in ten minutes the little brig was running
her nose, as it seemed to me, right upon an inhospitable
rock at the northern headland of the gulf.
At the distance of a biscuit-toss from the shore, however,
the rock was dropped to leeward, and a small
passage appeared, opening with a sharp curve into
the miniature but sheltered bay of Fourgas. We
dropped anchor off a small hamlet of forty or fifty
houses, and lay beyond the reach of Levanters in a
circular basin that seemed shut in by a rim of granite
from the sea.

The captain's judgment of the weather was correct,
and, after the sun set, the wind rose gradually to a violence
which sent the spray high over the barriers of
our protected position. Congratulating ourselves that
we were on the right side of the granite wall, we got
out our jolly-boat on the following morning, and ran
ashore upon the beach half a mile from town, proposing
to climb first to the peak of the neighboring hill,
and then forage for a dinner in the village below.

We scrambled up the rocky mountain-side, with
some loss of our private stock of wind, and considerable
increase from the nor'easter, and getting under the
lee of a projecting shelf, sat looking over toward Lesbos,
and ruminating in silence—I, upon the old question,
“an Sappho publica fuerit,” and the captain probably
on his wife at Cape Cod, and his pecan-nuts, figs,
and opium, in the emerald-green brig below us. I
don't know why she should have been painted green,
by-the-by (and I never thought to suggest that to the
captain), being named after an Indian chief, who was
as red as her copper bottom.

The sea toward Mitylene looked as wild as an eagle's
wing ruffling against the wind, and there was that
smoke in the sky as if the blast was igniting with its
speed—the look of a gale in those seas when unaccompanied
with rain. The crazy-looking vessels of
the Levant were scudding with mere rags of sails for
the gulf; and while we sat on the rock, eight or ten
of those black and unsightly craft shot into the little
bay below us, and dropped anchor—blessing, no doubt,
every saint in the Greek calendar.

Having looked toward Lesbos an hour, and come to
the conclusion, that, admitting the worst with regard
to the private character of Sappho, it would have been
very pleasant to have known her; and the captain
having washed his feet in a slender tricklet oozing
from a cleft in a rock, we descended the hill on the
other side, and stole a march on the rear to the town
of Fourgas. Four or five Greek women were picking
up olives in a grove lying half way down the hill, and
on our coming in sight, they made for us with such
speed, that I feared the reverse of the Sabine rape—
not yet having seen a man on this desolate shore; they
ran well, but they resembled Atalanta in no other possible
particular. We should have taken them for the
Furies, but there were five. They wanted snuff and
money—making signs easily for the first, but attempting
amicably to put their hands in our pockets when
we refused to comprehend the Greek for “Give us a
para.” The captain pulled from his pocket an American
dollar-note (payable at Nantucket), and offered it
to the youngest of the women, who smelt at it and returned
it to him, evidently unacquainted with the Cape
Cod currency. On farther search he found a few of
the tinsel paras of the country, which he substituted
for his “dollar-bill,” a saving of ninety-nine cents to
him, if the bank has not broke when he arrives at Massachusetts.

Fourgas is surrounded by a very old wall, very much
battered. We passed under a high arch containing
marks of having once been closed with a heavy gate;
and, disputing our passage with cows, and men that
seemed less cleanly and civilized, penetrated to the
heart of the town in search of the barber's shop, café,
and kibaub shop—three conveniences usually united
in a single room and dispensed by a single Figaro in
Turkish and Greek towns of this description. The
word café is universal, and we needed only to pronounce
it to be led by a low door into a square apartment
of a ruinous old building, around which, upon a
kind of shelf, waist-high, sat as many of the inhabitants
of the town as could cross their legs conveniently.
As soon as we were discerned through the smoke by
the omnifarious proprietor of the establishment, two

of the worst-dressed customers were turned off the
shelf unceremoniously to make room for us, the fire
beneath the coffeepot was raked open, and the agreeable
flavor of the spiced beverage of the east ascended
refreshingly to our nostrils. With his baggy trowsers
tucked up to his thigh, his silk shirt to his armpits,
and his smoke-dried but clean feet wandering at large
in a pair of red morocco slippers, our Turkish Ganymede
presented the small cups in their filagree holders,
and never was beverage more delicious or more
welcome. Thirsty with our ramble, and unaccustomed
to such small quantities as seem to satisfy the
natives of the east, the captain and myself soon became
objects of no small amusement to the wondering beards
about us. A large tablespoon holds rather more than
a Turkish coffee-cup, and one, or, at most, two of
these, satisfies the dryest clay in the Orient. To us,
a dozen of them was a bagatelle, and we soon exhausted
the copper pot, and intimated to the astonished
cafidji that we should want another. He looked
at us a minute to see if we were in earnest, and then
laid his hand on his stomach, and rolling up his eyes,
made some remark to his other customers which provoked
a general laugh. It was our last “lark” ashore
for some time, however, and spite of this apparent
prophecy of a colic, we smoked our narghiles and
kept him running with his fairy cups for some time
longer. One never gets enough of that fragrant liquor.

The sun broke through the clouds as we sat on the
high bench, and, hastily paying our Turk, we hurried
to the seaside. The wind seemed to have lulled, and
was blowing lightly off shore; and, impatient of loitering
on his voyage, the captain got up his anchor and
ran across the bay, and in half an hour was driving
through a sea that left not a dry plank on the deck of
the Metamora.

The other vessels at Fourgas had not stirred, and
the sky in the northeast looked to my eye very threatening.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and the
captain crowded sail and sped on like a sea-bird,
though I could see by his face when he looked in the
quarter of the wind, that he had acted more from impulse
than judgment in leaving his shelter. The heavy
sea kicked us on our course, however, and the smart
little brig shot buoyantly over the crests of the waves
as she outran them, and it was difficult not to feel that
the bounding and obedient fabric beneath our feet was
instinct with self-confidence, and rode the waters like
their master.

I well knew that the passage of the Archipelago was
a difficult one in a storm even to an experienced pilot,
and with the advantage of daylight; and I could not
but remember with some anxiety that we were entering
upon it at nightfall, and with a wind strengthening
every moment, while the captain confessedly had made
the passage but once before, and then in a calm sea of
August. The skipper, however, walked his deck confidently,
though he began to manage his canvass with a
more wary care, and, before dark, we were scudding
under a single sail, and pitching onward with the heave
of the sea at a rate that, if we were to see Malta at all,
promised a speedy arrival. As the night closed in we
passed a large frigate lying-to, which we afterward
found out was the Superbe, a French eighty-gun ship
(wrecked a few hours after on the island of Andros).
The two American frigates had run up by Mitylene,
and were still behind us: and the fear of being run
down in the night, in our small craft, induced the
captain to scud on, though he would else have lain-to
with the Frenchman, and perhaps have shared his
fate.

I stayed on deck an hour or two after dark, and before
going below satisfied myself that we should owe
it to the merest chance if we escaped striking in the
night. The storm had become so furious that we ran
with bare poles before it; and though it set us pretty
fairly on our way, the course lay through a narrow
and most intricate channel, among small and rocky
islands, and we had nothing for it but to trust to a
providential drift.

The captain prepared himself for a night on deck,
lashed everything that was loose, and filled the two
jugs suspended in the cabin, which, as the sea had
been too violent for any hope from the cook, were to
sustain us through the storm. We took a biscuit and
a glass of Hollands and water, holding on hard by the
berths lest we should be pitched through the skylight,
and as the captain tied up the dim lantern, I got a
look at his face, which would have told me, if I had
not known it before, that though resolute and unmoved,
he knew himself to be entering on the most
imminent hazard of his life.

The waves now broke over the brig at every heave,
and occasionally the descent of the solid mass of water
on the quarter-deck seemed to drive her under like a
cork. My own situation was the worst on board, for
I was inactive. It required a seaman to keep the deck,
and as there was no standing in the cabin without great
effort, I disembarrassed myself of all that would impede
a swimmer, and got into my berth to await a wreck
which I considered almost inevitable. Braced with
both hands and feet, I lay and watched the imbroglio
in the bottom of the cabin, my own dressing-case
among other things emptied of its contents and swimming
with some of my own clothes and the captain's,
and the water rushing down the companion-way with
every wave that broke over us. The last voice I heard
on deck was from the deep throat of the captain calling
his men aft to assist in lashing the helm, and then,
in the pauses of the gale, came the awful crash upon
deck, more like the descent of a falling house than a
body of water, and a swash through the scuppers immediately
after, seconded by the smaller sea below, in
which my coat and waistcoat were undergoing a rehearsal
of the tragedy outside.

At midnight the gale increased, and the seas that descended
on the brig shook her to the very keel. We
could feel her struck under by the shock, and reel and
quiver as she recovered and rose again; and, as if to
distract my attention, the little epitome of the tempest
going on in the bottom of the cabin grew more and
more serious. The unoccupied berths were packed
with boxes of figs and bags of nuts, which “brought
away” one after another, and rolled from side to side
with a violence which threatened to drive them through
the side of the vessel; my portmanteau broke its lashings
and shot heavily backward and forward with the
roll of the sea; and if I was not to be drowned like a
dog in a locked cabin, I feared, at least, I should have
my legs broken by the leap of a fig-box into my berth.
My situation was wholly uncomfortable, yet half ludicrous.

An hour after midnight the captain came down, pale
and exhausted, and with no small difficulty managed
to get a tumbler of grog.

“How does she head?” I asked.

“Side to wind, drifting five knots an hour.”

“Where are you?”

“God only knows. I expect her to strike every
minute.”

He quietly picked up the wick of the lamp as it
tossed to and fro, and watching the roll of the vessel,
gained the companion-way, and mounted to the deck.
The door was locked, and I was once more a prisoner
and alone.

An hour elapsed—the sea, it appeared to me,
strengthening in its heaves beneath us, and the wind
howling and hissing in the rigging like a hundred
devils. An awful surge then burst down upon the
deck, racking the brig in every seam: the hurried
tread of feet overhead told me that they were cutting

the lashings of the helm; the seas succeeded each
other quicker and quicker, and, conjecturing from the
shortness of the pitch, that we were nearing a reef, I
was half out of my berth when the cabin door was
wrenched open, and a deluging sea washed down the
companion-way.

“On deck for your life!” screamed the hoarse voice
of the captain.

I sprang up through streaming water, barefoot and
bareheaded, but the pitch of the brig was so violent
that I dared not leave the ropes of the companion ladder,
and, almost blinded with the spray and wind, I
stood waiting for the stroke.

“Hard down!” cried the captain in a voice I shall
never forget, and as the rudder creaked with the strain,
the brig fell slightly off, and rising with a tremendous
surge, I saw the sky dimly relieved against the edge
of a ragged precipice, and in the next moment, as if
with the repulse of a catapult, we were flung back
into the trough of the sea by the retreating wave, and
surged heavily beyond the rock. The noise of the
breakers, and the rapid commands of the captain
now drowned the hiss of the wind, and in a few minutes
we were plunging once more through the uncertain
darkness, the long and regular heavings of
the sea alone assuring us that we were driving from
the shore.

The wind was cold, and I was wet to the skin.
Every third sea broke over the brig and added to the
deluge in the cabin, and from the straining of the
masts I feared they would come down with every succeeding
shock. I crept once more below, and regained
my berth, where wet and aching in every joint, I
awaited fate or the daylight.

Morning broke, but no abatement of the storm.
The captain came below and informed me (what I had
already presumed) that we had run upon the southernmost
point of Negropont, and had been saved by a
miracle from shipwreck. The back wave had taken
us off, and with the next sea we had shot beyond it.
We were now running in the same narrow channel for
Cape Colonna, and were surrounded with dangers.
The skipper looked beaten out; his eyes were protruding
and strained, and his face seemed to me to have
emaciated in the night. He swallowed his grog, and
flung himself for half an hour into his berth, and then
went on deck again to relieve his mate, where tired of
my wretched berth. I soon followed him.

The deck was a scene of desolation. The bulwarks
were carried clean away, the jolly-boat swept off, and
the long-boat the only moveable thing remaining.
The men were holding on to the shrouds, haggard and
sleepy, clinging mechanically to their support as the
sea broke down upon them, and, silent at the helm,
stood the captain and the second mate keeping the
brig stern-on to the sea, and straining their eyes for
land through the thick spray before them.

The day crept on, and another night, and we passed
it like the last. The storm never slacked, and all
through the long hours the same succession went on,
the brig plunging and rising, struggling beneath the
overwhelming and overtaking waves, and recovering
herself again, till it seemed to me as if I had never
known any other motion. The captain came below
for his biscuit and grog and went up again without
speaking a word, the mates did the same with the same
silence, and at last the bracing and holding on to prevent
being flung from my berth became mechanical,
and I did it while I slept. Cold, wet, hungry, and
exhausted, what a blessing from Heaven were five
minutes of forgetfulness!

How the third night wore on I scarce remember.
The storm continued with unabated fury, and when
the dawn of the third morning broke upon us the captain
conjectured that we had drifted four hundred
miles before the wind. The crew were exhausted
with watching, the brig labored more and more heavily,
and the storm seemed eternal.

At noon of the third day the clouds broke up a little,
and the wind, though still violent, slacked somewhat
in its fury. The sun struggled down upon the lashed
and raging sea, and, taking our bearings, we found ourselves
about two hundred miles from Malta. With
great exertions, the cook contrived to get up a fire in
the binnacle and boil a little rice, and never gourmet
sucked the brain of a woodcock with the relish which
welcomed that dark mess of pottage.

It was still impossible to carry more than a hand's
breadth of sail, but we were now in open waters and
flew merrily before the driving sea. The pitching and
racking motion, and the occasional shipping of a heavy
wave, still forbade all thoughts or hopes of comfort,
but the dread of shipwreck troubled us no more, and
I passed the day in contriving how to stand long
enough on my legs to get my wet traps from my
floating portmanteau, and go into quarantine like a
Christian.

The following day, at noon, Malta became visible
from the top of an occasional mountain wave; and still
driving under a reefed topsail before the hurricane, we
rapidly neared it, and I began to hope for the repose
of terra firma. The watch towers of the castellated
rock soon became distinct through the atmosphere of
spray, and at a distance of a mile, we took in sail and
waited for a pilot.

While tossing in the trough of the sea the following
half hour, the captain communicated to me some embarrassment
with respect to my landing which had not
occurred to me. It appeared that the agreement to
land me at Malta was not mentioned in his policy of
insurance, and the underwriters of course were not responsible
for any accident that might happen to the
brig after a variation from his original plan of passage.
This he would not have minded if he could have set
me ashore in a half hour, as he had anticipated, but
his small boat was lost in the storm, and it was now a
question whether the pilot-boat would take ashore a
passenger liable to quarantine. To run his brig into
harbor would be a great expense and positive loss of
insurance, and to get out the long-boat with his broken
tackle and exhausted crew was not to be thought of.
I knew very well that no passenger from a plague port
(such as Smyrna and Constantinople) was permitted
to land on any terms at Gibraltar, and if the pilot here
should refuse to take me off, the alternative was clear,
I must make a voyage against my will to America!

I was not in a very pleasant state of mind during the
delay which followed; for, though I had been three
years absent from my country and loved it well, I had
laid my plans for still two years of travel on this side
the Atlantic, and certain moneys for my “charges” lay
waiting my arrival at Malta. Among lesser reasons,
I had not a rag of clothes dry or clean, and was
heartily out of love with salt water and the smell of
figs.

As if to aggravate my unhappiness, the sun broke
through a rift in the clouds and lit up the white and
turreted battlements of Malta like an isle of the blessed
—the only bright spot within the limits of the stormy
horizon. The mountain waves on which we were
tossing were tempestuous and black, the comfortless
and battered brig with her weary crew looked more
like a wreck than a seaworthy merchantman, and no
pilot appearing, the captain looked anxiously seaward,
as if he grudged every minute of the strong wind rushing
by on his course.

A small speck at last appeared making toward us
from the shore, and, riding slowly over the tremendous
waves, a boat manned by four men came within hailing
distance. One moment as high as our topmast, and
another in the depths of the gulf a hundred feet below
us, it was like conversing from two buckets in a well.

“Do you want a pilot?” screamed the Maltese in
English, as the American flag blew out to the wind

“No!” roared the captain, like a thunder-peal,
through his tin-trumpet.

The Maltese, without deigning another look, put
up his helm with a gesture of disappointment, and
bore away.

“Boat ahoy!” bellowed the captain.

“Ahoy! ahoy!” answered the pilot.

“Will you take a passenger ashore?”

“Where from?”

“Smyrna!”

“No—o—o—o!”

There was a sound of doom in the angry prolongation
of that detested monosyllable that sunk to the
bottom of my heart like lead.

“Clear away the mainsail,” cried the captain getting
round once more to the wind. “I knew how it
would be, sir,” he continued, to me, as I bit my lips in
the effort to be reconciled to an involuntary voyage of
four thousand miles; “it wasn't likely he'd put himself
and his boat's crew into twenty days' quarantine
to oblige you and me.”

I could not but own that it was an unreasonable expectation.

“Never mind, sir,” said the skipper, consolingly,
“plenty of salt fish in the locker, and I'll set you on
Long Wharf in no time!”

“Brig ahoy!” came a voice faintly across the waves.

The captain looked over his shoulder without losing
a capful of wind from his sail, and sent back the hail
impatiently.

The pilot was running rapidly down upon us, and
had come back to offer to tow me ashore in the brig's
jolly-boat for a large sum of money.

“We've lost our boat, and you're a bloody shark,”
answered the skipper, enraged at the attempt at extortion.
“Head your course!” he muttered gruffly to
the man at the helm, who had let the brig fall off that
the pilot might come up.

Irritated by this new and gratutious disappointment,
I stamped on the deck in an ungovernable fit of rage,
and wished the brig at the devil.

The skipper looked at me a moment, and instead of
the angry answer I expected, an expression of kind
commiseration stole over his rough face. The next
moment he seized the helm and put the brig away
from the wind, and then making a trumpet of his two
immense hands, he once more hailed the returning
pilot.

“I can't bear to see you take it so much to heart,
sir,” said the kind sailor, “and I'll do for you what I
wouldn't do for another man on the face o' the 'arth.
All hands there!”

The men came aft, and the captain in brief words
stated the case to them, and appealed to their sense
of kindness for a fellow-countryman, to undertake a
task, which, in the sea then running, and with their
exhausted strength, was not a service he could well
demand in other terms. It was to get out the longboat,
and wait off while the pilot towed me ashore and
returned with her.

“Ay, ay! sir,” was the immediate response from
every lip, and from the chief mate to the black cabin-boy,
every man sprang cheerily to the lashings. It
was no momentary task, for the boat was as firmly set
in her place as the mainmast, and stowed compactly
with barrels of pork, extra rigging, and spars—in short,
all the furniture and provision of the voyage. In the
course of an hour, however, the tackle was rigged on
the fore and main yards, and with a desperate effort
its immense bulk was heaved over the side, and lay
tossing on the tempestuous waters. I shook hands
with the men, who refused every remuneration beyond
my thanks, and, following the captain over the
side, was soon toiling heavily on the surging waters,
thanking Heaven for the generous sympathies of home
and country implanted in the human bosom. Those
who know the reluctance with which a merchant captain
lays-to, even to pick up a man overboard in a fair
wind, and those who understand the meaning of a forfeited
insurance, will appreciate this instance of difficult
generosity. I shook the hard fist of the kind-hearted
skipper on the quarantine stairs, and watched
his heavy boat as she crept out of the little harbor
with the tears in my eyes. I shall travel far before I
find again a man I honor more heartily.

THE REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL.

1. PART I.

It was in the golden month of August, not very
long ago, that the steamer which plies between St.
Mark's Stairs, at Venice, and the river into which
Phaeton turned a somerset with the horses of the sun,
started on its course over the lagoon with an unusual
God-send of passengers. The moon was rising from
the unchaste bed of the Adriatic (wedded every year
to Venice, yet every day and night sending the sun
and moon from her lovely bosom to the sky), and while
the gold of the west was still glowing on the landward
side of the Campanile, a silver gleam was brightening
momently on the other, and the Arabic domes of St.
Mark and the flying Mercury on the Dogana paled to
the setting orb and kindled to the rising with the same
Talleyrand-esque facility.

For the first hour the Mangia-foco sputtered on her
way with a silent company; the poetry of the scene,
or the regrets at leaving the delicious city lessening
in the distance, affecting all alike with a thoughtful
incommunicativeness. Gradually, however, the dolphin
hues over the Brenta faded away—the marble
city sank into the sea, with its turrets and bright spires
—the still lagoon became a sheet of polished glass—
and the silent groups leaning over the rails found
tongues and feet, and began to stir and murmur.

With the usual unconscious crystallization of society,
the passengers of the Mangia foco had yielded
one side of the deck to a party of some rank, who had
left their carriages at Ferrara in coming from Florence
to Venice, and were now upon their return to the city
of Tasso, stomaching, with what grace they might, the
contact of a vulgar conveyance, which saved them the
hundred miles of posting between Ferrara and the
Brenta. In the centre of the aristocratic circle stood
a lady enveloped in a cashmere, but with her bonnet
hung by the string over her arm—one of those women
of Italy upon whom the divinest gifts of loveliness are
showered with a profusion which apparently impoverishes
the sex of the whole nation. A beautiful woman
in that land is rarely met; but when she does appear,
she is what Venus would have been after the contest
for beauty on Ida, had the weapons of her antagonists,
as in the tournaments of chivalry, been added to the
palm of victory. The marchesa del Marmore was apparently
twenty-three, and she might have been an
incarnation of the morning-star for pride and brightness.

On the other side of the deck stood a group of
young men, who, by their careless and rather shabby
dress, but pale and intellectual faces, were of that class
met in every public conveyance of Italy. The portfolios
under their arms, ready for a sketch, would have
removed a doubt of their profession, had one existed;
and with that proud independence for which the class

is remarkable, they had separated themselves equally
from the noble and ignoble—disqualified by inward
superiority from association with the one, and by accidental
poverty from the claims cultivation might give
them upon the other. Their glances at the divine
face turned toward them from the party I have alluded
to, were less constant than those of the vulgar, who
could not offend; but they were evidently occupied
more with it than with the fishing-boats lying asleep
on the lagoon: and one of them, half-buried in the
coil of rope, and looking under the arm of another,
had already made a sketch of her that might some day
make the world wonder from what seventh heaven of
fancy such an angelic vision of a head had descended
upon the painter's dream.

In the rear of this group, with the air of one who
would conceal himself from view, stood a young man
who belonged to the party, but who, with less of the
pallor of intellectual habits in his face, was much better
dressed than his companions, and had, in spite of
the portfolio under his arm, and a hat of the Salvator
breadth of rim, the undisguisable air of a person accustomed
to the best society. While maintaining a
straggling conversation with his friends, with whom he
seemed a favorite, Signor Basil employed himself in
looking over the sketch of the lovely marchesa going
on at his elbow—occasionally, as if to compare it with
the original, stealing a long look from between his
hand and his slouched hat at the radiant creature sitting
so unconsciously for her picture, and in a low
voice correcting, as by the result of his gaze, the rapid
touches of the artist.

“Take a finer pencil for the nostril, caro mio!” said
he; “it is as thin as the edge of a violet, and its transparent
curve—”

“Cospetto!” said the youth; “but you see by this
faint light better than I: if she would but turn to the
moon—”

The signor Basil suddenly flung his handkerchief
into the lagoon, bringing its shadow between the queen
of night and the marchesa del Marmore; and, attracted
from her revery by the passing object, the lady
moved her head quickly to the light, and in that moment
the spirited lip and nostril were transferred to the
painter's sketch.

“Thanks, mio bravo!” enthusiastically exclaimed
the looker-on; “Giorgione would not have beaten
thee with the crayon!”—and, with a rudeness which
surprised the artist, he seized the paper from beneath
his hand, walked away with it to the stern, and leaning
far over the rails, perused it fixedly by the mellow
lustre of the moon. The youth presently followed
him, and after a few words exchanged in an undertone,
Signor Basil slipped a piece of gold into his
hand, and carefully placed the sketch in his own portfolio.

2. II.

It was toward midnight when the Mangia-foco entered
the Adige, and keeping its steady way between
the low banks of the river, made for the grass-grown
and flowery canal which connects its waters with the
Po. Most of the passengers had yielded to the drowsy
influence of the night air, and, of the aristocratic party
on the larboard side, the young marchesa alone was
waking: her friends had made couches of their cloaks
and baggage, and were reclining at her feet, while the
artists, all except the signor Basil, were stretched fairly
on the deck, their portfolios beneath their heads, and
their large hats covering their faces from the powerful
rays of the moon.

“Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night,”
said the waking artist, in a low and respectful tone,
as he rose from her feet with a cluster of tuberoses she
had let fall from her hand.

“It is indeed lovely, Signor Pittore,” responded the
marchesa, glancing at his portfolio, and receiving the
flowers with a gracious inclination; “have you touched
Venice from the lagoon to-night?”

The signor Basil opened his portfolio, and replied
to the indirect request of the lady by showing her a
very indifferent sketch of Venice from the island of
St. Lazzaro. As if to escape from the necessity of
praising what had evidently disappointed her, she
turned the cartoon hastily, and exposed, on the sheet
beneath, the spirited and admirable outline of her own
matchless features.

A slight start alone betrayed the surprise of the
highborn lady, and raising the cartoon to examine it
more closely, she said with a smile, “You may easier
tread on Titian's heels than Canaletti's. Bezzuoli has
painted me, and not so well. I will awake the marquis,
and he shall purchase it of you.”

“Not for the wealth of the Medici, madam!” said
the young man, clasping his portfolio hastily, “pray
do not disturb monsignore! The picture is dear to
me!”

The marchesa, looking into his face, and with a
glance around, which the accomplished courtier before
her read better than she dreamed, she drew her
shawl over her blanched shoulders, and settled herself
to listen to the conversation of her new acquaintance.

“You would be less gracious if you were observed,
proud beauty,” thought Basil; “but while you think
the poor painter may while away the tediousness of a
vigil, he may feed his eyes on your beauty as well.”

The Mangia-foco turned into the canal, threaded
its lily-paved waters for a mile or two, and then, putting
forth upon the broad bosom of the Po, went on
her course against the stream, and, with retarded pace,
penetrated toward the sun-beloved heart of Italy. And
while the later hours performed their procession with
the stars, the marchesa del Marmore leaned sleepless
and unfatigued against the railing, listening with mingled
curiosity and scorn to the passionate love-murmur
of the enamored painter. His hat was thrown aside,
his fair and curling locks were flowing in the night
air, his form was bent earnestly but respectfully toward
her, and on his lip, with all its submissive tenderness,
there sat a shadow of something she could not define,
but which rebuked, ever and anon, as with the fierce
regard of a noble, the condescension she felt toward
him as an artist.

3. III.

Upon the lofty dome of the altar in the cathedral of
Bologna stands poised an angel in marble, not spoken
of in the books of travellers, but perhaps the loveliest
incarnation of a blessed cherub that ever lay in the
veined bosom of Pentelicus. Lost and unobserved on
the vast floor of the nave, the group of artists, who had
made a day's journey from Ferrara, sat in the wicker
chairs hired for a baioch during the vesper, and drew
silently from this angel, while the devout people of
Bologna murmured their Ave Marias around. Signor
Basil alone was content to look over the work of his
companions, and the twilight had already begun to
brighten the undying lamps at the shrine, when he
started from the pillar against which he leaned, and
crossed hastily toward a group issuing from a private
chapel in the western aisle. A lady walked between
two gentlemen of noble mien, and behind her, attended
by an equally distinguished company, followed that
lady's husband, the marchese del Marmore. They
were strangers passing through Bologna, and had been
attended to vespers by some noble friends.

The companions of the signor Basil looked on with
some surprise as their enamored friend stepped confidently
before the two nobles in attendance upon the

lady, and arrested her steps with a salutation which,
though respectful as became a gentleman, was marked
with the easy politeness of one accustomed to a favorable
reception.

“May I congratulate miladi,” he said, rising slowly
from his bow, and fixing his eyes with unembarrassed
admiration on her own liquid but now frowning orbs,
“upon her safe journey over the marches! Bologna,”
he continued, glancing at the nobles with a courteous
smile, “welcomes her fittingly.”

The lady listened with a look of surprise, and the
Bolognese glanced from the dusty boots of the artist
to his portfolio.

“Has the painter the honor to know la signora?”
asked the cavalier on her right.

“Signor, si!” said the painter, fiercely, as a curl
arched the lady's lip, and she prepared to answer.

The color mounted to the temples of the marchesa,
and her husband, who had loitered beneath the madonna
of Domenichino, coming up at the instant, she
bowed coldly to the signor Basil, and continued down
the aisle. The artist followed to her carriage, and
lifted his hat respectfully as the lumbering equipage
took its way by the famous statue of Neptune, and
then with a confident smile, which seemed to his companions
somewhat mistimed, he muttered between his
teeth, “Ciascuno son bel giorno!” and strolled loitering
on with them to the trattoria.

4. IV.

The court of the grand-duke of Florence is perhaps
the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access in
all Europe. The Austrian-born monarch himself,
adopting in some degree the frank and joyous character
of the people over whom he reigns, throws open
his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries, to the
strangers passing through; and in the season of gayety
almost any presentable person, resident at Florence,
may procure the entree to the court balls, and start
fair with noble dames and gentlemen for grace in
courtly favor. The fetes at the Palazzo Pitti, albeit
not always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are always
brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the
court, though they draw the line distinctly enough to
their own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the
motley waltz and mazurka, and either from good-nature
or a haughty conviction of their superiority, never
suffer the offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be suspected,
by the multitude who divert them. The
grand-duke, to common eyes, is a grave and rather
timid person, with more of the appearance of the
scholar than of the sovereign, courteous in public, and
benevolent and earnest in his personal attentions to
his guests at the palace. The royal quadrille may be
shared without permission of the grand chamberlain,
and the royal eye, after the first one or two dances of
ceremony, searches for partners by the lamp of beauty,
heedless of the diamonds on the brow, or the star of
nobility on the shoulder. The grand supper is scarce
more exclusive, and on the disappearance of the royal
cortege, the delighted crowd take their departure,
having seen no class more favored than themselves,
and enchanted with the gracious absence of pretension
in the nobilita of Tuscany.

Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo
Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and
sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher stories
of the palace open forth on a level with the delicious
gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of
smaller apartments, fitted up with a cost and luxury
which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here
lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and
more sacred by the propinquity of the admitted world
in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of royalty
is enclosed a tide of life as silent and unsuspected
by the common inhabitant of Florence as the flow of
the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian
main. Here the invention of the fiery genius of Italy
is exhausted in poetical luxury; here the reserved and
silent sovereign throws off his maintein of royal condescension,
and enters with equal arms into the lists of
love and wit; here burn (as if upon an altar fed with
spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncalculating
passions of this glowing clime, in senses refined
by noble nurture and hearts prompted by the
haughty pulses of noble blood; and here—to the
threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure—press all
who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it
in their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passare
is accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its
splendor.

Some two or three days after the repulse of the
signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of
travelling artists were on their way from the grand gallery
at Florence to their noonday meal. Loitering
with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via
Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and
looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft
of the Campanile (than which a fairer figure of religious
architecture points not to heaven), they took
their way toward the church of Santa Trinita, proposing
to eat their early dinner at a house named, from
its excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La
Birra. The traveller should be advised, also, that by
paying an extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this
renowned eating-house an old wine sunned on the
southern shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a
certain redolence of Boccaccio—scarce remarkable,
since it grew in the scene of the Decameron—but of a
virtue which, to the Hundred Tales of Love (read
drinking), is what the Gradus ad Parnassum should
be to the building of a dithyrambic. The oil of two
crazie upon the palm of the fat waiter Giuseppe will
assist in calling the vintage to his memory.

A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining
Palazzo arrested the attention of the artists as they
were about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of
a dark-green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of
the duke's breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed
and posed on his seat a la d'Orsay, the signor Basil.
His coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his
gloves were of primrose purity.

The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality
of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their
companion at the gate of Florence, as travellers part,
without question, and they met without reserve to part
as questionless again. The artists were surprised at
the signor Basil's transformation, but no follower of
their refined art would have been so ill-bred as to express
it. He wished them the bon appetito, as a tall
chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at
home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang
through the gateway, and the marble court of the
palace rang with his prancing hoofs.

He who was idle and bought flowers at the Café of
the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as he sat
in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the
richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Palazzo
Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The
dark old Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye
down upon it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight
with closed vizor to his unbonneted and laughing
page. The crimson curtains of the window opening
upon the terrace, at the time of our story, reminded
every passing Florentine of the lady who dwelt within
—a descendant of one of the haughtiest lines of English
chivalry—resident in Italy since many years for
health, but bearing in her delicate frame and exquisitely
transparent features, the loftiest type of patrician
beauty that had ever filled the eye that looked
upon her. In the inner heaven of royal exclusiveness

at the Pitti—in its constellation of rank and wit—the
lady Geraldine had long been the worshipped and ascendant
cynosure. Happy in a husband without rank
and but of moderate fortune, she mainta'ned the spotless
character of an English wife in this sphere of
conventional corruption; and though the idol of the
duke and his nobles, it would have been like a whisper
against the purity of the brightest Pleiad, to have
linked her name with love.

With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer
cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of
silk, and a slight stand within arm's length holding a
vase of flowers and the volume from which she had
been reading, the lady Geraldine received the count
Basil Spiriford, some time attaché to the Russian embassy
at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in
her beauty), and at present the newly-appointed secretary
to the minister of the same monarch near the
court of Tuscany.

Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture
of a long absent and favored friend, the count Basil
ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster
fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaintances
of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they
would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may
drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy.
The secretary knew his species, and the lady Geraldine
was one of those women for whom the soul is
unwilling to possess a secret.

After the first inquiries were over, the lady questioned
her recovered favorite of his history since they
had parted. “I left you,” she said, “swimming the
dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come
to shore?”

“Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made
life worth the struggle! For the two extremes, however,
you know what I was at Paris—and yesterday I
was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero!”

Lady Geraldine laughed.

“Ah! you look at my curls—but Macassar is at a
discount! It is the only grace I cherished in my incognito.
A resumer—I got terribly out of love by the
end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in
debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and
the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo
kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I
dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a
vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of
wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse,
have been two years looking at life without spectacles
at Venice.”

“And painting?”

“Painting!”

“Might one see a specimen?” asked the lady Geraldine,
with an incredulous smile.

“I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the
possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth
floor of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in
that fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a
drawing or two—”

He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently
brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a wayworn
and thinly furnished portfolio. The lady Geraldine
turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice,
but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start.

“La Marchesa del Marmore!” she exclaimed, looking
at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy
eye.

“Is it well drawn?” he asked quietly.

“Well drawn? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael.
Do you really draw so well as this, or”—she added,
after a slight hesitation—“is it a miracle of love?”

“It is a divine head,” soliloquized the Russian, half
closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a
distance, as if to fill up the imperfect outline from his
memory.

The lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. “My
dear Basil,” she said seriously, “I should be wretched
if I thought your happiness was in the power of this
woman. Do you love her?”

“The portrait was not drawn by me,” he answered,
“though I have a reason for wishing her to think so.
It was done by a fellow-traveller of mine, whom I wish
to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it
here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons
a nos moutons—la marchesa was also a fellow-traveller
of mine, and without loving her too violently, I owe
her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way.
Will you assist me to pay it?”

Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the
good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments
of gratitude, the lady Geraldine inquired simply how
she could serve him.

“In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Florence,”
he said, “I have put myself, as you will see,
au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks
to my Parisian renown, the duke has enrolled me already
under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow
night I shall sup with you in the saloon of Hercules
after the ball is over. La marchesa, as you well know,
has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to
set foot within those guarded penetralia—soit her malicious
tongue, soit the interest against her of the men
she has played upon her hook too freely. The road
to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold,
and I would take the toll. Do you understand me,
most beautiful lady Geraldine?”

The count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the
fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to
put into his hand the following night the illuminated
ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too generously,
a debt of gratitude; and plucking a flower from
her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at
twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the
gate, he turned on foot toward the church of San
Gaetano, and with an expression of unusual elation in
his step and countenance, entered the trattoria, where
dined at that moment his companions of the pencil.

5. V.

The green lamps glittering by thousands amid the
foliage of the Boboli had attained their full brightness,
and the long-lived Italian day had died over the distant
mountains of Carrara, leaving its inheritance of light
apparently to the stars, who, on their fields of deepening
blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an unseen
host in the depths of heaven, himself the foremost
and the most radiant. The night was balmy and
voluptuous. The music of the ducal band swelled
forth from the perfumed apartments on the air. A
single nightingale, far back in the wilderness of the
garden, poured from his melodious heart a chant of
the most passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the
body-guard stationed at the limit of the spray of the
fountain leaned on his halberd and felt his rude senses
melt in the united spells of luxury and nature. The
ministers of a monarch's pleasure had done their utmost
to prepare a scene of royal delight, and night and
summer had flung in their enchantments when ingenuity
was exhausted.

The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a
blaze of light scarce endurable from its deeply-sunk
windows, looked like the side of an enchanted mountain
laid open for the revels of sorcery. The aigrette
and plume passed by; the tiara and the jewel upon
the breast; the gayly dressed courtiers and glittering
dames; and to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed
like the realized raving of the improvisatore when he
is lost in some fable of Araby. Yet within walked
malice and hate, and the light and perfume that might
have fed an angel's heart with love, but deepened

in many a beating bosom the consuming fires of
envy.

With the gold key of office on his cape, the grand
chamberlain stood at the feet of the dowager grand
dutchess, and by a sign to the musicians, hidden in
a latticed gallery behind the Corinthian capital of the
hall, retarded or accelerated the soft measure of the
waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the chairs of
state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames
nearest allied to royal blood; one solitary and privileged
intruder alone sharing the elevated place—the
lady Geraldine. Dressed in white, her hair wound
about her head in the simplest form, yet developing
its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary, her
eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fringed
with lashes a shade darker than the light auburn
braided on her temples, and the tint of the summer's
most glowing rose turned out from the threadlike parting
of her lips; she was a vision of loveliness to take
into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his soul
the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth
and age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Geraldine!
thou wilt read these passionate words from
one whose worship of thy intoxicating loveliness has
never before found utterance, but if this truly-told tale
should betray the hand that has dared to describe thy
beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of pity, breathe
from those bright lips a prayer that he may forget
thee!

By the side of the lady Geraldine, but behind the
chair of the grand dutchess, who listened to his conversation
with singular delight, stood a slight young
man of uncommon personal beauty, a stranger apparently
to every other person present. His brilliant uniform
alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diplomacy;
and the marked distinction shown him, both by the
reigning queen of the court, and the more powerful
and inaccessible queen of beauty, marked him as an
object of keen and universal curiosity. By the time
the fifth mazurka had concluded its pendulous refrain,
the grand chamberlain had tolerably well circulated
the name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the renowned
wit and elegant of Paris, newly appointed to
the court of his royal highness of Tuscany. Fair
eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and beating bosoms
hushed their pulses as he passed.

Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression.
Count Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon
the first principle he kept his place between the grand
dutchess and Lady Geraldine, exerting his deeply-studied
art of pleasing, to draw upon himself their exclusive
attention. Upon the second principle, he was
perfectly unconscious of the presence of another human
being; and neither the gliding step of the small-eared
princess S— in the waltz, nor the stately
advance of the last female of the Medici in the mazurka,
distracted his large blue eyes a moment from their
idleness. With one hand on the eagle-hilt of his
sword, and his side leaned against the high cushion of
red velvet honored by the pressure of the lady Geraldine,
he gazed up into that beaming face, when not
bending respectfully to the dutchess, and drank steadfastly
from her beauty, as the lotus-cup drinks light
from the sun.

The new secretary had calculated well. In the
deep recess of the window looking toward San Miniato,
stood a lady nearly hidden from view by the muslin
curtains just stirring with the vibration of the music,
who gazed on the immediate circle of the grand dutchess
with an interest that was not attempted to be disguised.
On her first entrance into the hall, the marchesa
del Marmore had recognised in the new minion
of favor her impassioned lover of the lagoon, her slighted
acquaintance of the cathedral. When the first shock
of surprise was over, she looked on the form which
she had found beautiful even in the disguise of pover
ty, and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would
have claimed in public the smile she had given him
when unobserved, she recalled with delight every syllable
he had murmured in her ear, and every look she
had called forth in the light of a Venetian moon. The
man who had burned upon the altar of her vanity the
most intoxicating incense—who had broken through
the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw
his homage at her feet—who had portrayed so incomparably
(she believed) with his love-inspired pencil
the features imprinted on his heart—this chance-won
worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as she had
thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere and
become a legitimate object of love; and, beautified by
the splendor of dress, and distinguished by the preference
and favor of those incomparably above her, he
seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection of adorable
beauty. As she remembered his eloquent devotion to
herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman
whom she hated and had calumniated—a woman who
she believed stood between her and all the light of existence—she
anticipated the triumph of taking him
from her side, of exhibiting him to the world as a falcon
seduced from his first quarry; and never doubting
that so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman
of the paradise she had so long wished to enter, she
panted for the moment when she should catch his eye
and draw him from his lure, and already heard the
chamberlain's voice in her ear commanding her presence
after the ball in the saloon of Hercules.

The marchesa had been well observed from the first
by the wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art
(so necessary to his profession) of seeing without appearing
to see, he had scarce lost a shade of the varying
expressions of her countenance; and while she
fancied him perfectly unconscious of her presence, he
read her tell-tale features as if they had given utterance
to her thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph,
the effect of his brilliant position upon her proud and
vain heart; watched her while she made use of her
throng of despised admirers to create a sensation near
him and attract his notice; and when the ball wore on,
and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance
upon the lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a
momentary curl of triumph on his lip, as she took up
her concealed position in the embayed window, and
abandoned herself to the bitter occupation of watching
the happiness of her rival. The lady Geraldine had
never been so animated since her first appearance at
the court of Tuscany.

It was past midnight when the grand-duke, flushed
and tired with dancing, came to the side of the lady
Geraldine. Count Basil gave place, and, remaining a
moment in nominal obedience to the sovereign's polite
request which he was too politic to construe literally,
he looked down the dance with the air of one who has
turned his back on all that could interest him, and,
passing close to the concealed position of the marchesa,
stepped out upon the balcony.

The air was cool, and the fountain played refreshingly
below. The count Basil was one of those minds
which never have so much leisure for digression as
when they are most occupied. A love, as deep and
profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving thread
for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican; yet,
after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he
raised himself upon the marble balustrade, and perfectly
anticipating the interruption to his solitude which
presently occurred, began to speculate aloud on the
dead and living at that hour beneath the roof of the
Pitti.

“A painter's mistress,” he said, “immortal in her
touch of her paramour's pencil, is worshipped for centuries
on these walls by the pilgrims of art; while the
warm perfection of all loveliness—the purest and divinest
of highborn women—will perish utterly with the

eyes that have seen her! The Bella of Titian, the
Fornarina of Raffaelle—peasant-girls of Italy—have,
at this moment, more value in this royal palace than
the breathing forms that inhabit it! The lady Geraldine
herself, to whom the sovereign offers at this moment
his most flattering homage, would be less a loss
to him than either! Yet they despise the gods of the
pencil who may thus make them immortal! The dull
blood in their noble veins, that never bred a thought
beyond the instincts of their kind, would look down,
forsooth, on the inventive and celestial ichor that inflames
the brain, and prompts the fiery hand of the
painter! How long will this very sovereign live in the
memories of men? The murderous Medici, the ambitious
cardinals, the abandoned women, of an age gone
by, hang in imperishable colors on his walls; while of
him, the lord of this land of genius, there is not a bust
or a picture that would bring a sequin in the market-place!
They would buy genius in these days like
wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened.
Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a pope
and his cardinals: Titian was an honored guest for the
doge. The stimulus to immortalize these noble friends
was in the love they bore them; and the secret of their
power to do it lay half in the knowledge of their characters,
gained by daily intimacy. Painters were princes
then, as they are beggars now; and the princely art is
beggared as well!”

The marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon
the balcony, leaning on the arm of the grand
chamberlain. The soliloquizing secretary had foretold
to himself both her coming and her companion.

“Monsieur le comte,” said the chamberlain, “la
marchesa del Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your
acquaintance.”

Count Basil bowed low, and in that low and musical
tone of respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit,
made him irresistible to a woman who had a soul to be
thrilled, he repeated the usual nothings upon the beauty
of the night; and when the chamberlain returned
to his duties, the marchesa walked forth with her
companion to the cool and fragrant alleys of the garden,
and, under the silent and listening stars, implored
forgiveness for her pride; and, with the sudden abandonment
peculiar to the clime, poured into his ear
the passionate and weeping avowal of her sorrow and
love.

“Those hours of penitence in the embayed window,”
thought Count Basil, “were healthy for your
soul.” And as she walked by his side, leaning heavily
on his arm, and half-dissolved in a confiding tenderness,
his thoughts reverted to another and a far sweeter
voice; and while the caressing words of the marchesa
fell on an unlistening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned
back to the lighted hall.

6. VI.

As the daylight stole softly over Vallombrosa, the
luxurious chariot of the marchesa del Marmore stopped
at the door of Count Basil. The lady Geraldine's suit
had been successful; and the hitherto excluded Florentine
had received, from the hand of the man she had
once so ignorantly scorned, a privilege for which she
would have bartered her salvation: she had supped at
his side in the saloon of Hercules. With many faults
of character, she was an Italian in feeling, and had a
capacity, like all her countrywomen, for a consuming
and headlong passion. She had better have been born
of marble.

“I have lifted you to heaven,” said Count Basil, as
her chariot-wheels rolled from his door; “but it is as
the eagle soars into the clouds with the serpent. We
will see how you will relish the fall!”

2. PART II.

The grand-duke's carriages, with their six horses
and outriders, had turned down the Borg'ognisanti,
and the “City of the Red Lily,” waking from her
noonday slumber, was alive with the sound of wheels.
The sun was sinking over the Apennine which kneels
at the gate of Florence; the streets were cool and
shadowy; the old women, with the bambina between
their knees, braided straw at the doors; the booted
guardsman paced his black charger slowly over the
jeweller's bridge; the picture-dealer brought forward
his brightest “master” to the fading light; and while
the famous churches of that fairest city of the earth
called to the Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gallantry
and beauty of Tuscany sped through the dampening
air with their swift horses, meeting and passing
with gay greetings amid the green alleys of the Cascine.

The twilight had become gray, when the carriages
and horsemen, scattered in hundreds through the interlaced
roads of this loveliest of parks, turned by common
consent toward the spacious square in the centre,
and drawing up in thickly-serried ranks, the soirée on
wheels, the reunion en plein air, which is one of the
most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence,
commenced its healthful gayeties. The showy carriages
of the grand-duke and the ex-king of Wurtemberg
(whose rank would not permit them to share in
the familiarities of the hour) disappeared by the avenue
skirting the bank of the Arno, and with much delicate
and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen
of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embarrassed
press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together
on the southern edge of the piazza. The beaux in the
saddle, disembarrassed of ladies and axletrees, enjoyed
their usual butterfly privilege of roving, and with light
rein and ready spur pushed their impatient horses to
the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most powerful;
the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there
over the pawing of restless hoofs; an occasional scream
—half of apprehension, half of admiration—rewarded
the daring caracole of some young and bold rider;
and while the first star sprang to its place, and the dew
of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of
the belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the
field (simplicity, like virtue, is its own reward!), the
low murmur of calumny and compliment, of love and
lightheartedness, of politeness, politics, puns, and poetry,
arose over that assembly upon wheels: and if it
was not a scene and an hour of happiness, it was the
fault neither of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions
of nature and fortune. The material for happiness
was there.

A showy calêche with panels of dusky crimson, the
hammer-cloth of the same shade, edged with a broad
fringe of white, the wheels slightly picked out with the
same colors, and the coachman and footman in corresponding
liveries, was drawn up near the southern edge
of the Piazzi. A narrow alley had been left for horsemen
between this equipage and the adjoining ones,
closed up at the extremity, however, by a dark-green
and very plain chariot, placed with a bold violation of
etiquette directly across the line, and surrounded just
now by two or three persons of the highest rank leaning
from their saddles in earnest conversation with the
occupant. Not far from the colêche, mounted upon
an English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man
had just drawn rein as if interrupted only for a moment
on some pressing errand, and with his hat slightly
raised, was paying his compliments to the venerable
Prince Poniatowski, at that time the Amphytrion of
Florence. From moment to moment, as the pauses
occurred in the exchange of courteous phrases, the
rider, whose spurred heel was close at his saddle-girths,
stole an impatient glance up the avenue of

carriages to the dark-green chariot, and, excited by
the lifted rein and the proximity of the spur, the graceful
horse fretted on his minion feet, and the bending
figures from a hundred vehicles, and the focus of
bright eyes radiating from all sides to the spot, would
have betrayed, even to a stranger, that the horseman
was of no common mark. Around his uncovered temples
floated fair and well-cherished locks of the sunniest
auburn; and if there was beauty in the finely-drawn
lines of his lips, there was an inexpressibly fierce spirit
as well.

2. II.

The count Basil had been a month at Florence. In
that time he had contrived to place himself between
the duke's ear and all the avenues of favor, and had
approached as near, perhaps nearer, to the hearts of
the women of his court. A singular and instinctive
knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, perfected
and concealed by conversance with the consummate
refinement of life at Paris, remarkable personal
beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness for which
no one could divine a reason in a character and fate
else so happily mingled, but which at the same time
added to his fascination, had given Count Basil a command
over the varied stops of society, equalled by few
players on that difficult and capricious instrument.
His worldly ambition went swimmingly on, and the
same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures as
well. The love of the marchesa del Marmore, as he
had very well anticipated, grew with his influence and
renown. A woman's pride, he perfectly knew, is difficult
to wake after she has once believed herself adored;
and, satisfied that the portrait taken on the lagoon, and
the introduction he had given her to the exclusive penetralia
of the Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was
complete, he left her love for him to find its own food
in his successes, and never approached her but to lay
to her heart more mordently the serpents of jealousy
and despair.

For the lady Geraldine the count Basil had conceived
a love, the deepest of which his nature was capable.
Long as he had known her, it was a passion
born in Italy, and while it partook of the qualities of
the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and well-founded
respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship.
At their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely Englishwoman,
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere
of her own country, was moving in the dissolute,
but skilfully disguised society of the Faubourg
St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness of the
pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally unsuspicious
of others. The perfect frankness with which
she established an intimacy with the clever and accomplished
attaché, had soon satisfied that clear-sighted
person that there was no passion in her preference,
and, giddy with the thousand pleasures of that metropolis
of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled
admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and confiding
friendship. He had thus shown her the better
qualities of his character only, and, charmed with his
wit and penetration, and something flattered, perhaps,
with the devotion of so acknowledged an autocrat of
fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for
him that had all the earnestness of love without its
passion. They met at Florence, but the “knowledge
of good and evil” had by this time driven the lady
Geraldine from her Eden of unconsciousness. Still
as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps as pure in
heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice
had introduced into her manners those ostensible cautions
which, while they protect, suggest also what is
to be feared.

A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He
had left the vitreous and mercurial clime of France,
with its volatile and superficial occupations, for the
voluptuous and indolent air of Italy, and the study of
its impassioned deifications of beauty. That which
had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure—a
pursuit which palled in the first moment of success,
and was second to his ambition or his vanity—had become,
in those two years of a painter's life, a thirst
both of the senses and the imagination, which had
usurped the very throne of his soul. Like the Hindoo
youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood
elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his
heart to what he held so lightly, and brought the
costly sacrifice of time and thought to its altars. He
had fed his eyes upon the divine glories of the pencil,
and upon the breathing wonders of love in marble, beneath
the sky and in the dissolving air in which they
rose to the hand of inspiration; and with his eye disciplined,
and his blood fused with taste and enthusiasm,
that idolatry of beauty, which had before seemed
sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires in his mind,
and his senses were intoxicated with the incense.
There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the
atmosphere and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes
a warmer hue in its study of the fair models of antiquity,
the senses in turn become more refined and
intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is
loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion
of instinct, she is happy if she can retain her empire
by habit, or the qualities of the heart. That divine
form, meant to assimilate her to the angels, has never
been recognised by the dull eye that should have
seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter
or the statuary, or to his who has made himself conversant
with their models, is added the imperishable
enthusiasm of a captivating and exalted study. The
mistress of his heart is the mistress of his mind. She
is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which
exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the
fine arts, takes another form, and becomes a woman's
rival and usurper. She is like nothing in ambition—
she is like nothing in science or business—nothing in
out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the chase, or the
acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling passion,
she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart,
and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a
flagging fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection,
even, that she is his refuge when unfit for that
which occupies him most—in his fatigue, his disappointment,
his vacuity of head and heart. He thinks
of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is
forgotten with the first thought of his favorite theme—
for what has a woman's loveliness to do with that?

Count Basil had not concluded his first interview
with the lady Geraldine, without marvelling at the new
feelings with which he looked upon her. He had
never before realized her singular and adorable beauty.
The exquisitely turned head, the small and pearly
ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly moulded chin, the
clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy
and brightness in the lips, and a throat and bust than
which those of Faustina in the delicious marble of the
Gallery of Florence might be less envied by the queen
of love—his gaze wandered over these, and followed
her in the harmony of her motions, and the native and
unapproachable grace of every attitude: and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in
his mind, and the statues he had half worshipped
seemed to descend from their pedestals depreciated.
The lady Geraldine, for the first time, felt his eye.
For the first time in their acquaintance, she was offended
with its regard. Her embarrassment was read
by the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang
into being a passion, which perhaps had died but for
the conscious acknowledgment of her rebuke.

Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the

second chapter of this simply true tale commences,
but one of the two leading threads in the count Basil's
woof had woven well. “The jealous are the damned,”
and the daily and deadly agony of the marchesa del
Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to
the lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened
relief. His dearest joy forwarded with equal step his
dearest revenge; and while he could watch the working
of his slow torture in the fascinated heart of his
victim, he was content to suspend a blow to which
that of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said
Count Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring
lip, “takes cognizance but of the murder of
the body. It has no retribution for the keener dagger
of the soul.”

3. III.

The conversation between the Russian secretary
and the prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful
bow from the former to his horse's neck; and the
quicker rattling of the small hoofs on the ground, as
the fine creature felt the movement in the saddle and
prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more
upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of
Florence. The narrow lane of carriages, commencing
with the showy caléche of the marchesa del Marmore,
and closed up by the plain chariot of the lady Geraldine,
was still open, and with a glance at the latter
which sufficiently indicated his destination, Count
Basil raised his spurred heel, and with a smile of delight
and the quickness of a barb in the desert, galloped
toward the opening. In the same instant the
marchesa del Marmore gave a convulsive spring forward,
and, in obedience to an imperative order, her
coachman violently drew rein and shot the back and
forward wheels of the caléche directly across his path.
Met in full career by this sudden obstacle, the horse
of the Russian reared high in air; but ere the screams
of apprehension had arisen from the adjacent carriages,
the silken bridle was slacked, and with a low bow to
the foiled and beautiful marchesa as he shot past, he
brushed the hammer-cloths of the two scarce separated
carriages, and at the same instant stood at the
chariot window of the lady Geraldine, as calm and
respectful as if he had never known danger or emotion.

A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face
as he leaped past the unhappy woman, and the drama
of which that look was the key was understood in Florence.
The lady Geraldine alone, seated far back in
her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for the
smile with which she greeted its hero; and unconscious,
as well, of the poignant jealousy and open mortification
she had innocently assisted to inflict, she
stretched her fair and transparent hand from the carriage,
and stroked the glossy neck of his horse, and
while the marchesa del Marmore drove past with a
look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dispersing
nobles and dames took their way to the city
gates, Count Basil leaned close to the ear of that loveliest
of breathing creatures, and forgot, as she forgot
in listening to the bewildering music of his voice, that
the stars had risen, or that the night was closing
around them.

The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot
of the lady Geraldine took its way to the town, and,
with the reins loose upon his horse's neck, Count
Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in the revery of a
tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed
stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose
silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping
hoofs, and the challenge of the duke's forester, going
his rounds ere the gates closed, had its own deepthroated
echo for its answer. The Arno rippled
among the rushes on its banks, the occasional roll of
wheels passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio,
came faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the
pointed cypresses of the convent of Bello Sguardo
laid their slender fingers against the lowest stars in the
southern horizon, and with his feet pressed, carelessly,
far through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his
bosom, the softened diplomate turned instinctively to
the left in the last diverging point of the green alleys,
and his horse's ears were already pricked at
the tread, before the gate, of the watchful and idle
doganieri.

Close under the city wall on this side Florence,
the traveller will remember that the trees are more
thickly serried, and the stone seats, for the comfort
and pleasure of those who would step forth from the
hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are mossy
with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst
of this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the
careless and forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and
the next moment starting aside, a female sprang high
against his neck, and Count Basil, ere awake from his
revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade across his bosom.

With the slender wrist that had given the blow
firmly arrested in his left hand, the count Basil slowly
dismounted, and after a steadfast look, by the dim
light, into the face of the lovely assassin, he pressed
her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited
emotion, to his lips.

“Twice since the Ave-Maria!” he said in a tone of
reproachful tenderness, “and against a life that is your
own!”

He could see, even in that faint light, the stern compression
of those haughty lips, and the flash of the
darkest eyes of the Val d'Arno. But leading her gently
to a seat, he sat beside her, and with scarce ten
brief moments of low-toned and consummate eloquence,
he once more deluded her soul!

“We meet to-morrow,” she said, as, after a burst
of irrepressible tears, she disengaged herself from his
neck, and looked toward the end of the avenue, where
Count Basil had already heard the pawing of her impatient
horses.

“To-morrow!” he answered; “but, mia carissima!”
he continued, opening his breast to stanch the blood of
his wound, “you owe me a concession after this rude
evidence of your love.”

She looked into his face as if answer were superfluous.

“Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me
till the Ave-Maria.”

For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesitated.
Though the step he demanded of her was apparently
without motive or reason—though it was one
that sacrificed to a whim her station, her fortune, and
her friends—she hesitated but to question her reason
if the wretched price of this sacrifice would be paid—
if the love, to which she fled from this world and heaven,
was her own. In other countries, the crime of infidelity
is punished: in Italy it is the appearance only
that is criminal. In proportion as the sin is overlooked,
the violation of the outward proprieties of life is
severely visited; and while a lover is stipulated for in
the marriage-contract, an open visit to that lover's
house is an offence which brands the perpetrator with
irremediable shame. The marchesa del Marmore
well knew that in going forth from the ancestral palace
of her husband on a visit to Count Basil, she took
leave of it for ever. The equipage that would bear
her to him would never return for her; the protection,
the fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends,
would all drop from her. In the pride of her youth
and beauty—from the highest pinnacle of rank—from
the shelter of fortune and esteem—she would descend,
by a single step, to be a beggar for life and love from
the mercy of the heart she fled to!

“I will come,” she said, in a firm voice, looking

close into his face, as if she would read in his dim features
the prophetic answer of his soul.

The count Basil strained her to his bosom, and starting
back as if with the pain of his wound, he pleaded
the necessity of a surgeon, and bade her a hasty goodnight.
And while she gained her own carriage in secrecy,
he rode round to the other gate, which opens
upon the Borg'ognisanti, and dismounting at the
Café Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usually
assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveller,
Giannino Speranza, who had sketched the marchesa
upon the lagoon, and made an appointment with him
for the morrow.

4. IV.

While the count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily,
the just Fates were preparing for him a retribution in
his love. The mortification of the marchesa del Marmore,
at the Cascine, had been made the subject of
conversation at the prima sera of the lady Geraldine;
and other details of the same secret drama transpiring
at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's
feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly
and fully upon her. His motives for pretending to
have drawn the portrait of the lagoon—for procuring
her an admission to the exclusive suppers of the Pitti
—for a thousand things which had been unaccountable,
or referred to more amiable causes—were at once
unveiled. Even yet, with no suspicion of the extent
of his revenge, the lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity
for the unconscious victim, and a surprised disapproval
of the character thus unmasked to her eye. Upon
further reflection, her brow flushed to remember that
she herself had been made the most effective tool of
his revenge; and as she recalled circumstance after
circumstance in the last month's history, the attention
and preference he had shown her, and which had gratified
her, perhaps, more than she admitted to herself,
seemed to her sensitive and resentful mind to have
been only the cold instruments of jealousy. Incapable
as she was of an unlawful possion, the unequalled fascinations
of Count Basil had silently found their way
to her heart, and if her indignation was kindled by a
sense of justice and womanly pity, it was fed and
fanned unaware by mortified pride. She rang, and
sent an order to the gate that she was to be denied for
the future to Count Basil Spirifort.

The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his
hand, and before leaving her presence to communicate
the order, he presented her with a letter. Well
foreseeing the eclaircissement which must follow the
public scene in the Cascine, the count Basil had left
the café for his own palazzo; and, in a letter, of which
the following is the passage most important to our
story, he revealed to the lady he loved a secret, which
he hoped would anticipate the common rumor:—

* * * * “But these passionate words will have
offended your ear, dearest lady, and I must pass to a
theme on which I shall be less eloquent. You will
hear to-night, perhaps, that which, with all your imagination,
will scarce prepare you for what you will
hear to-morrow. The marchesa del Marmore is the
victim of a revenge which has only been second in my
heart to the love I have for the first time breathed to
you. I can never hope that you will either understand
or forgive the bitterness in which it springs; yet
it is a demon to which I am delivered, soul and body,
and no spirit but my own can know its power. When
I have called it by its name, and told you of its exasperation,
if you do not pardon, you will pity me.

“You know that I am a Russian, and you know the
station my talents have won me; but you do not know
that I was born a serf and a slave! If you could rend
open my heart and see the pool of blackness and bitterness
that lies in its bottom—fallen, drop by drop,
from this accursed remembrance—there would be little
need to explain to you how this woman has offended
me. Had I been honorably born, like yourself, I
feel that I could have been, like you, an angel of light:
as it is, the contumely of a look has stirred me to a
revenge which has in it, I do not need to be told, the
darkest elements of murder.

“My early history is of no importance, yet I may
tell you it was such as to expose to every wind this
lacerated nerve. In a foreign land, and holding an
official rank, it was seldom breathed upon. I wore,
mostly, a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at Venice
I had time to brood upon my dark remembrance,
and it was revived and fed by the melancholy of my
solitude. The obscurity in which I lived, and the occasional
comparison between myself and some passing
noble in the Piazza, served to remind me, could I have
forgotten it. I never dreamed of love in this humble
disguise, and so never felt the contempt that had most
power to wound me. On receiving the letters of my
new appointment, however, this cautious humility did
not wait to be put off with my sombrero. I started
for Florence, clad in the habiliments of poverty, but
with the gay mood of a courtier beneath. The first
burst of my newly-released feelings was admiration for
a woman of singular beauty, who stood near me on
one of the most love-awakening and delicious eves
that I ever remember. My heart was overflowing, and
she permitted me to breathe my passionate adoration
in her ear. The marchesa del Marmore, but for the
scorn of the succeeding day, would, I think, have been
the mistress of my soul. Strangely enough, I had
seen you without loving you.

“I have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse
you, my rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in
the cathedral of Bologna. The look she gave me
there sealed her doom. It was witnessed by the companions
of my poverty, and the concentrated resentment
of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a
man, I must have struck him dead where he stood:
she was a woman, and I swore the downfall of her
pride.”

Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter,
Count Basil returned to the pleading of his love. It
was dwelt on more eloquently than his revenge; but
as the lady Geraldine scarce read it to the end, it need
not retard the procession of events in our story. The
fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan
lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow cleared, as if
by a sweep from the wing of her good angel, of the
troubled dream which had overhung it, and in brief
and decided, but kind and warning words, replied to
the letter of Count Basil.

6. V.

It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini
from the hills were settling to their siesta on the steps
of the churches, and against the columns of the Piazza
del Gran' Duca. The artists alone, in the cool gallery,
and in the tempered halls of the Pitti, shook off
the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and
thought upon the immortal canvass from which they
drew; while the sculptor, in his brightening studio,
weary of the mallet, yet excited by the bolder light,
leaned on the rough block behind him, and with listless
body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the last
touches upon his marble.

Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to
the wheels of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aristocratic
sleepers of the Via del Servi, and with a lash
and jerk of violence, the coachman of the marchesa
del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noonday repose,
brought up her showy calêche at the door of
Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxu

rious vehicle was pale, but the brightness of joy and
hope burned almost fiercely in her eye.

The doors flew open as the marchesa descended,
and following a servant in the count's livery, of whom
she asked no question, she found herself in a small saloon,
furnished with the peculiar luxury which marks
the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened like a painter's
room. The light came in from a single tall window,
curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at
which, on her first entrance, a young man stood
sketching the outline of a female head. As she advanced,
looking eagerly around for another face, the
artist laid down his palette, and with a low reverence
presented her with a note from Count Basil. It informed
her that political news of the highest importance
had called him suddenly to the cabinet of his
chef, but that he hoped to be with her soon; and,
meantime, he begged of her, as a first favor in his
newly-prospered love, to bless him with the possession
of her portrait, done by the incomparable artist who
would receive her.

Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart
of the marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read
the letter again, and grew calmer; for it was laden with
epithets of endearment, and seemed to her written in
the most sudden haste. Never doubting for an instant
the truth of his apology, she removed her hat, and
with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she
shook out from their confinement the masses of her
luxuriant hair, she approached the painter's easel, and
with a forced cheerfulness inquired in what attitude
she should sit to him.

“If the signora will amuse herself,” he replied,
with a bow, “it will be easy to compose the picture,
and seize the expression without annoying her with a
pose.”

Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the unhappy
marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios
and prints, and while she apparently occupied herself
in the examination of these specimens of art, she was
delivered, as her tormentor had well anticipated, to the
alternate tortures of impatience and remorse. And
while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her
eyes grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful
painter, forgetting everything in the enthusiasm of his
art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject,
transferred too faithfully to the canvass that picture of
agonized expectation.

The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the
gay world of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole,
rolled past the Via dei Servi on their circuitous way
to the Cascine, and saw, with dumb astonishment, the
carriage and liveries of the marchesa del Marmore at
the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept by
the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there
their astonishment redoubled: for in the window of
the Casino dei Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and
laughing with a group of lounging exquisites, stood
Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied and listless
of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction to be
drawn from this sequence of events; and when they
remembered the demonstration of passionate jealousy
on the previous evening in the Cascine, Count Basil,
evidently innocent of participation in her passion, was
deemed a persecuted man, and the marchesa del Marmore
was lost to herself and the world!

Three days after this well-remembered circumstance
in the history of Florence, an order was received from
the grand-duke to admit into the exhibition of modern
artists a picture by a young Venetian painter, an
elève of Count Basil Spirifort. It was called “The
Lady expecting an Inconstant,” and had been pronounced
by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private
view, to be a masterpiece of expression and color. It
was instantly and indignantly recognised as the portrait
of the unfortunate marchesa, whose late aban
donment of her husband was fresh on the lips of common
rumor; but ere it could be officially removed,
the circumstance had been noised abroad, and the
picture had been seen by all the curious in Florence.
The order for its removal was given; but the purpose
of Count Basil had been effected, and the name of the
unhappy marchesa had become a jest on the vulgar
tongue.

This tale had not been told, had there not been
more than a common justice in its sequel. The worst
passions of men, in common life, are sometimes inscrutably
prospered. The revenge of Count Basil,
however, was betrayed by the last which completed
it; and while the victim of his fiendish resentment
finds a peaceful asylum in England under the roof of
the compassionate Lady Geraldine, the once gay and
admired Russian wanders from city to city, followed
by an evil reputation, and stamped unaccountably as a
jattatore.[1]

LOVE AND DIPLOMACY.

It was on a fine September evening, within my time
(and I am not, I trust, too old to be loved), that Count
Anatole L—, of the impertinent and particularly
useless profession of attaché, walked up and down before
the glass in his rooms at the “Archduke Charles,”
the first hotel, as you know, if you have travelled, in
the green-belted and fair city of Vienna. The brass
ring was still swinging on the end of the bell-rope, and,
in a respectful attitude at the door, stood the just-summoned
Signor Attilio, valet and privy councillor
to one of the handsomest coxcombs errant through
the world. Signor Attilio was a Tyrolese, and, like
his master, was very handsome.

Count Anatole had been idling away three golden
summer months in the Tyrol, for the sole purpose,
as far as mortal eyes could see, of disguising his fine
Phidian features in a callow mustache and whiskers.
The crines ridentes (as Eneas Sylvius has it) being now
in a condition beyond improvement, Signor Attilio had
for some days been rather curious to know what course
of events would next occupy the diplomatic talents of
his master.

After a turn or two more, taken in silence, Count
Anatole stopped in the middle of the floor, and eying
the well-made Tyrolese from head to foot, begged to
know if he wore at the present moment his most becoming
breeches, jacket, and beaver.

Attilio was never astonished at anything his master
did or said. He simply answered, “Si signore.”

“Be so kind as to strip immediately, and dress yourself
in that travelling suit lying on the sofa.”

As the green, gold-corded jacket, knee-breeches,
buckles, and stockings, were laid aside, Count Anatole
threw off his dressing-gown, and commenced encasing
his handsome proportions in the cast-off habiliments.
He then put on the conical, slouch-rimmed hat, with
the tall eagle's-feather stuck jauntily on the side, and
the two rich tassels pendant over his left eye; and, the
toilet of the valet being completed at the same moment,
they stood looking at one another with perfect gravity
—rather transformed, but each apparently quite at home
in his new character.

“You look very like a gentleman, Attilio,” said the
count.

“Your excellency has caught to admiration, l'aria

del paese,” complimented back again the sometime
Tyrolese.

“Attilio!”

“Signore?”

“Do you remember the lady in the forest of
Friuli?”

Attilio began to have a glimmering of things. Some
three months before, the count was dashing on at a
rapid post-pace through a deep wood in the mountains
which head in the Adriatic. A sudden pull-up
at a turning in the road nearly threw him from his
britska; and looking out at the “anima di porco!” of
the postilion, he found his way impeded by an overset
carriage, from which three or four servants were endeavoring
to extract the body of an old man, killed
by the accident.

There was more attractive metal for the traveller,
however, in the shape of a young and beautiful woman,
leaning, pale and faint, against a tree, and apparently
about to sink to the ground, unassisted. To bring a
hat full of water from the nearest brook, and receive
her falling head on his shoulder, was the work of a
thought. She had fainted quite away, and taking her,
like a child, into his arms, he placed her on a bank by
the road-side, bathed her forehead and lips, and chafed
her small white hands, till his heart, with all the distress
of the scene, was quite mad with her perfect
beauty.

Animation at last began to return, and as the flush
was stealing into her lips, another carriage drove up
with servants in the same livery, and Count Anatole,
thoroughly bewildered in his new dream, mechanically
assisted them in getting their living mistress and dead
master into it, and until they were fairly out of sight,
it had never occurred to him that he might possibly
wish to know the name and condition of the fairest
piece of work he had ever seen from the hands of his
Maker.

An hour before, he had doubled his bono mano to
the postilion, and was driving on to Vienna as if to sit
at a new congress. Now, he stood leaning against the
tree, at the foot of which the grass and wild flowers
showed the print of a new-made pressure, and the
postilion cracked his whip, and Attilio reminded him
of the hour he was losing, in vain.

He remounted after a while; but the order was to
go back to the last post-house.

Three or four months at a solitary albergo in the
neighborhood of this adventure, passed by the count
in scouring the country on horseback in every direction,
and by his servant in very particular ennui, brings
up the story nearly to where the scene opens.

“I have seen her!” said the count.

“Attilio only lifted up his eyebrows.

“She is here, in Vienna!”

“Felice lei!” murmured Attilio.

“She is the princess Leichstenfels, and, by the
death of that old man, a widow.”

“Veramente?” responded the valet, with a rising
inflexion; for he knew his master and French morals
too well not to foresee a damper in the possibility of
matrimony.

“Veramente!” gravely echoed the count. “And
now listen. The princess lives in close retirement.
An old friend or two, and a tried servant, are the only
persons who see her. You are to contrive to see this
servant to-morrow, corrupt him to leave her, and recommend
me in his place, and then you are to take
him as your courier to Paris; whence, if I calculate
well, you will return to me before long, with important
despatches. Do you understand me?”

“Signor, si!”

In the small boudoir of a masio de plaisance, belonging
to the noble family of Leichstenfels, sat the
widowed mistress of one of the oldest titles and finest
estates of Austria. The light from a single long win
dow opening down to the floor and leading out upon
a terrace of flowers, was subdued by a heavy crimson
curtain, looped partially away, a pastille lamp was
sending up from its porphyry pedestal a thin and just
perceptible curl of smoke, through which the lady
musingly passed backward and forward one of her
slender fingers, and, on a table near, lay a sheet of
black-edged paper, crossed by a small silver pen, and
scrawled over irregularly with devices and disconnected
words, the work evidently of a fit of the most
absolute and listless idleness.

The door opened, and a servant in mourning livery
stood before the lady.

“I have thought over your request, Wilhelm,” she
said. “I had become accustomed to your services,
and regret to lose you; but I should regret more to
stand in the way of your interest. You have my permission.”

Wilhelm expressed his thanks with an effort that
showed he had not obeyed the call of mammon without
regret, and requested leave to introduce the person
he had proposed as his successor.

“Of what country is he?”

“Tyrolese, your excellency.”

“And why does he leave the gentleman with whom
he came to Vienna?”

“It est amoureux d'une Viennaise, madame,” answered
he ex-valet, resorting to French to express
what he considered a delicate circumstance.

“Pauvre enfant!” said the princess, with a sigh
that partook as much of envy as of pity; let him
come in!”

And the count Anatole, as the sweet accents reached
his ear, stepped over the threshold, and in the coarse
but gay dress of the Tyrol, stood in the presence of
her whose dewy temples he had bathed in the forest,
whose lips he had almost “pried into for breath,”
whose snowy hands he had chafed and kissed when the
senses had deserted their celestial organs—the angel
of his perpetual dream, the lady of his wild and uncontrollable,
but respectful and honorable love.

The princess looked carelessly up as he approached,
but her eyes seemed arrested in passing over his features.
It was but momentary. She resumed her
occupation of winding her taper fingers in the smoke-curls
of the incense-lamp, and with half a sigh, as if
she had repelled a pleasing thought, she leaned back
in the silken fauteuil, and asked the new-comer his
name.

“Anatole, your excellency.”

The voice again seemed to stir something in her
memory. She passed her hand over her eyes, and
was for a moment lost in thought.

“Anatole,” she said (oh, how the sound of his own
name, murmured in that voice of music thrilled
through the fiery veins of the disguised lover!)
“Anatole, I receive you into my service. Wilhelm
will inform you of your duties, and—I have a fancy
for the dress of the Tyrol—you may wear it instead
of my livery, if you will.”

And with one stolen and warm gaze from under his
drooping eyelids, and heart and lips on fire, as he
thanked her for her condescension, the new retainer
took his leave.

Month after month passed on—to Count Anatole in
a bewildering dream of ever deepening passion. It
was upon a soft and amorous morning of April, that a
dashing equipage stood at the door of the proud palace
of Leichstenfels. The arms of E— blazed on the
panels, and the insouciants chasseurs leaned against
the marble columns of the portico, waiting for their
master, and speculating on the gayety likely to ensue
from the suite he was prosecuting within. How could
a prince of E— be supposed to sue in vain?

The disguised footman had ushered the gay and
handsome nobleman to his mistress' presence. After

rearranging a family of very well-arranged flowerpots,
shutting the window to open it again, changing
the folds of the curtains not at all for the better, and
looking a stolen and fierce look at the unconscious
visiter, he could find no longer an apology for remaining
in the room. He shut the door after him in a
tempest of jealousy.

“Did your excellency ring?” said he, opening the
door again, after a few minutes of intolerable torture.

The prince was on his knees at her feet!

“No, Anatole; but you may bring me a glass of
water.”

As he entered with a silver tray trembling in his
hand, the prince was rising to go. His face expressed
delight, hope, triumph—everything that could madden
the soul of the irritated lover. After waiting on
his rival to his carriage, he returned to his mistress,
and receiving the glass upon the tray, was about
leaving the room in silence, when the princess called
to him.

In all this lapse of time it is not to be supposed that
Count Anatole played merely his footman's part. His
respectful and elegant demeanor, the propriety of his
language, and that deep devotedness of manner which
wins a woman more than all things else, soon gained
upon the confidence of the princess; and before a
week was passed she found that she was happier when
he stood behind her chair, and gave him, with some
self-denial, those frequent permissions of absence from
the palace which she supposed he asked to prosecute
the amour disclosed to her on his introduction to her
service. As time flew on, she attributed his earnestness
and occasional warmth of manner to gratitude;
and, without reasoning much on her feelings, gave
herself up to the indulgence of a degree of interest in
him which would have alarmed a woman more skilled
in the knowledge of the heart. Married from a convent,
however, to an old man who had secluded her
from the world, the voice of the passionate count in
the forestt of Friuli was the first sound of love that had
ever entered her ears. She knew not why it was that
the tones of her new footman, and now and then a look
of his eyes, as he leaned over to assist her at table,
troubled her memory like a trace of a long-lost dream.

But, oh, what moments had been his in these fleeting
months! Admitted to her presence in her most
unguarded hours—seeing her at morning, at noon, at
night, in all her unstudied and surpassing loveliness—
for ever near her, and with the world shut out—her
rich hair blowing with the lightest breeze across his
fingers in his assiduous service—her dark full eyes,
unconscious of an observer, filling with unrepressed
tears, or glowing with pleasure over some tale of love
—her exquisite form flung upon a couch, or bending
over flowers, or moving about the room in all its native
and untrammelled grace—and her voice, tender, most
tender to him, though she knew it not, and her eyes,
herself unaware, ever following him in his loitering
attendance—and he, the while, losing never a glance
nor a motion, but treasuring all up in his heart with
the avarice of a miser—what, in common life, though
it were the life of fortune's most favored child, could
compare with it for bliss?

Pale and agitated, the count turned back at the call
of his mistress, and stood waiting her pleasure.

“Anatole!”

“Madame!”

The answer was so low and deep it startled even
himself.

She motioned him to come nearer. She had sunk
upon the sofa, and as he stood at her feet she leaned
forward, buried her hands and arms in the long curls
which, in her retirement, she allowed to float luxuriantly
over her shoulders, and sobbed aloud. Over
come and forgetful of all but the distress of the lovely
creature before him, the count dropped upon the cushion
on which rested the small foot in its mourning
slipper, and taking her hand, pressed it suddenly and
fervently to his lips.

The reality broke upon her! She was beloved—
but by whom? A menial! and the appalling answer
drove all the blood of her proud race in a torrent upon
her heart, sweeping away all affection as if her nature
had never known its name. She sprang to her feet,
and laid her hand upon the bell.

“Madame!” said Anatole, in a cold proud tone.

She stayed her arm to listen.

“I leave you for ever.”

And again, with the quick revulsion of youth and
passion, her woman's heart rose within her, and she
buried her face in her hands, and dropped her head in
utter abandonment on her bosom.

It was the birthday of the emperor, and the courtly
nobles of Austria were rolling out from the capital to
offer their congratulations at the royal palace of
Schoenbrunn. In addition to the usual attractions
of the scene, the drawing-room was to be graced by
the first public appearance of a new ambassador,
whose reputed personal beauty, and the talents he had
displayed in a late secret negotiation, had set the whole
court, from the queen of Hungary to the youngest
dame d'honneur, in a flame of curiosity.

To the prince E— there was another reason for
writing the day in red letters. The princess Leichstenfels,
by an express message from the emperess,
was to throw aside her widow's weeds, and appear
once more to the admiring world. She had yielded
to the summons, but it was to be her last day of splendor.
Her heart and hand were plighted to her Tyrolese
minion; and the brightest and loveliest ornament
of the court of Austria, when the ceremonies of the
day were over, was to lay aside the costly bauble
from her shoulder, and the glistening tiara from her
brow, and forget rank and fortune as the wife of his
bosom!

The dazzling hours flew on. The plain and kind
old emperor welcomed and smiled upon all. The
wily Metternich, in the crime of his successful manhood,
cool, polite, handsome, and winning, gathered
golden opinions by every word and look; the young
duke of Reichstadt, the mild and gentle son of the
struck eagle of St. Helena, surrounded and caressed
by a continual cordon of admiring women, seemed forgetful
that opportunity and expectation awaited him,
like two angels with their wings outspread; and haughty
nobles and their haughtier dames, statesmen, scholars,
soldiers, and priests, crowded upon each other's
heels, and mixed together in that doubtful podrida,
which goes by the name of pleasure. I could moralize
here had I time!

The princess of Leichstenfels had gone through the
ceremony of presentation, and had heard the murmur
of admiration, drawn by her beauty, from all lips. Dizzy
with the scene, and with a bosom full of painful and
conflicting emotions, she had accepted the proffered
arm of Prince E— to breathe a fresher air upon
the terrace. They stood near a window, and he was
pointing out to his fair but inattentive companion the
various characters as they passed within.

“I must contrive,” said the prince, “to show you
the new envoy. Oh! you have not heard of him.
Beautiful as Narcissus, modest as Pastor Corydon,
clever as the prime minister himself, this paragon of
diplomatists has been here in disguise these three
months, negotiating about—Metternich and the devil
knows what—but rewarded at last with an ambassador's
star, and—but here he is: Princess Leichstenfels,
permit me to present —”

She heard no more. A glance from the diamond

star on his breast to the Hephæstion mouth and keen
dark eye of Count Anatole, revealed to her the mystery
of months. And as she leaned against the window
for support, the hand that sustained her in the
forest of Friuli, and the same thrilling voice, in almost
the same never-forgotten cadence, offered his impassioned
sympathy and aid—and she recognised and remembered
all.

I must go back so far as to inform you, that Count
Anatole, on the morning of this memorable day, had
sacrificed a silky but prurient mustache, and a pair
of the very sauciest dark whiskers out of Coventry.
Whether the prince E— recognised in the new
envoy the lady's gentleman who so inopportunely
broke in upon his tender avowal, I am not prepared to
say. I only know (for I was there) that the princess
Leichstenfels was wedded to the new ambassador in
the “leafy month of June;” and the prince E—,
unfortunately prevented by illness from attending the
nuptials, lost a very handsome opportunity of singing
with effect—

supposing it translated into German.

Whether the enamored ambassadress prefers her
husband in his new character, I am equally uncertain;
though from much knowledge of German courts and
a little of human nature, I think she will be happy if
at some future day she would not willingly exchange
her proud envoy for the devoted Tyrolese, and does
not sigh that she can no more bring him to her feet
with a pull of a silken string.

THE MADHOUSE OF PALERMO.

He who has not skimmed over the silvery waters of
the Lipari, with a summer breeze right from Italy in
his topsails, the smoke of Stromboli alone staining the
unfathomable-looking blue of the sky, and, as the sun
dipped his flaming disk in the sea, put up his helm for
the bosom of La Concha d'Oro, the Golden Shell, as
they beautifully call the bay of Palermo: he who has
not thus entered, I say, to the fairest spot on the face
of this very fair earth, has a leaf worth the turning in
his book of observation.

In ten minutes after dropping the anchor, with sky
and water still in a glow, the men were all out of the
rigging, the spars of the tall frigate were like lines pencilled
on the sky, the band played inspiringly on the
poop, and every boat along the gay Marina was freighted
with fair Palermitans on its way to the stranger
ship.

I was standing with the officer-of-the-deck by the
capstan, looking at the first star which had just sprung
into its place like a thing created with a glance of the
eye.

“Shall we let the ladies aboard, sir?” said a smiling
middy, coming aft from the gangway.

“Yes, sir. And tell the boatswain's mate to clear
away for a dance on the quarter-deck.”

In most of the ports of the Mediterranean, a ship-of-war,
on a summer cruise, is as welcome as the breeze
from the sea. Bringing with her forty or fifty gay
young officers overcharged with life and spirits, a band
of music never so well occupied as when playing for a
dance, and a deck whiter and smoother than a ballroom
floor, the warlike vessel seems made for a scene
of pleasure. Whatever her nation, she no sooner
drops her anchor, than she is surrounded by boats from
the shore; and when the word is passed for admission,
her gangway is crowded with the mirth-loving and
warm people of these southern climes, as much at
home on board, and as ready to enter into any scheme
of amusement, as the maddest-brained midshipman
could desire.

The companion-hatch was covered with its grating,
lest some dizzy waltzer should drop his partner into the
steerage, the band got out their music-stand, and the
bright buttons were soon whirling round from larboard
to starboard, with forms in their clasp, and dark eyes
glowing over their shoulders, that might have tempted
the devil out of Stromboli.

Being only a passenger myself, I was contented with
sitting on the slide of a carronade, and with the music
in my ear, and the twilight flush deepening in the fine-traced
angles of the rigging, abandoning myself to the
delicious listlessness with which the very air is pregnant
in these climates of paradise.

The light feet slid by, and the waltz, the gallopade,
and the mazurka, had followed each other till it was
broad moonlight on the decks. It was like a night
without an atmosphere, the radiant flood poured down
with such an invisible and moonlike clearness.

“Do you see the lady leaning on that old gentleman's
arm by the hammock-rail?” said the first lieutenant,
who sat upon the next gun—like myself, a
spectator of the scene.

I had remarked her well. She had been in the ship
five or ten minutes, and in that time, it seemed to me,
I had drunk her beauty, even to intoxication. The
frigate was slowly swinging round to the land breeze,
and the moon, from drawing the curved line of a gipsy-shaped
capella di paglia with bewitching concealment
across her features, gradually fell full upon the
dark limit of her orbed forehead. Heaven! what a
vision of beauty! Solemn, and full of subdued pain
as the countenance seemed, it was radiant with an almost
supernatural light of mind. Thought and feeling
seemed steeped into every line. Her mouth was large
—the only departure from the severest model of the
Greek—and stamped with calmness, as if it had been
a legible word upon her lips. But her eyes—what can
I say of their unnatural lightning—of the depth, the
fulness, the wild and maniac-like passionateness of their
every look?

My curiosity was strongly moved. I walked aft to
the capstan, and throwing off my habitual reserve with
some effort, approached the old gentleman on whose
arm she leaned, and begged permission to lead her out
for a waltz.

“If you wish it, carissima mia!” said he, turning to
her with all the tenderness in his tone of which the
honeyed language of Italy is capable.

But she clung to his arm with startled closeness, and
without even looking at me, turned her lips up to his
ear, and murmured, “Mai piu!”

At my request the officer on duty paid them the compliment
of sending them ashore in one of the frigate's
boats; and after assisting them down the ladder, I stood
upon the broad stair on the level of the water, and
watched the phosphoric wake of the swift cutter till
the bright sparkles were lost amid the vessels nearer
land. The coxswain reported the boat's return; but
all that belonged to the ship had not come back in her.
My heart was left behind.

The next morning there was the usual bustle in the
gunroom preparatory to going ashore. Glittering uniforms
lay about upon the chairs and tables, sprinkled
with swords, epaulettes, and cocked hats; very well-brushed
boots were sent to be rebrushed, and very
nice coats to be made, if possible, to look nicer; the
ship's barber was cursed for not having the hands of
Briareus, and no good was wished to the eyes of the
washerwoman of the last port where the frigate had
anchored. Cologne-water was in great request, and
the purser had an uncommon number of “private interviews.”

Amid all the bustle, the question of how to pass the

day was busily agitated. Twenty plans were proposed;
but the sequel—a dinner at the Hotel Anglais, and a
“stroll for a lark” after it—was the only point on which
the speakers were quite unanimous.

One proposition was to go to Bagaria, and see the
palace of Monsters. This is a villa about ten miles
from Palermo, which the owner, Count Pallagonia, an
eccentric Sicilian noble, has ornamented with some
hundreds of statues of the finest workmanship, representing
the form of woman in every possible combination,
with beasts, fishes, and birds. It looks like the
temptation of St. Anthony on a splendid scale, and is
certainly one of the most extraordinary spectacles in
the world.

Near it stands another villa, the property of Prince
Butera (the present minister of Naples at the court of
France), containing, in the depths of its pleasure-grounds,
a large monastery, with wax monks, of the
size and appearance of life, scattered about the passages
and cells, and engaged in every possible unclerical
avocation. It is a whimsical satire on the order,
done to the life.

Another plan was to go to the Capuchin convent,
and see the dried friars—six or eight hundred bearded
old men, baked, as they died, in their cowls and beards,
and standing against the walls in ghastly rows, in the
spacious vaults of the monastery. A more infernal
spectacle never was seen by mortal eyes.

A drive to Moureale, a nest of a village on the mountain
above the town—a visit to the gardens of a nobleman
who salutes the stranger with a jet d'eau at every
turning—and a lounge in the public promenade of
Palermo itself—shared the honors of the argument.

I had been in Sieily before, and was hesitating which
of these various lions was worthy of a second visit,
when the surgeon proposed to me to accompany him
on a visit to a Sicilian count living in the neighborhood,
who had converted his château into a lunatic asylum,
and devoted his time and a large fortune entirely to
this singular hobby. He was the first to try the system,
now, thank God, generally approved, of winning
back reason to these most wretched of human sufferers
by kindness and gentle treatment.

We jumped into one of the rattling calesini standing
in the handsome corso of Palermo, and fifteen minutes
beyond the gates brought us to the Casa dei Pazzi.
My friend's uniform and profession were an immediate
passport, and we were introduced into a handsome
court, surrounded by a colonnade, and cooled by a
fountain, in which were walking several well-dressed
people, with books, drawing-boards, battledores, and
other means of amusement. They all bowed politely
as we passed, and at the door of the interior we were
met by the count.

“Good God!” I exclaimed—“she was insane,
then!”

It was the old man who was on board the night before!

“E ella?” said I, seizing his arm, before he had
concluded his bow, quite sure that he must understand
me with a word.

“Era pazza.” He looked at me as he answered,
with a scrutiny, as if he half suspected my friend had
brought him a subject.

The singular character of her beauty was quite explained.
Yet what a wreck!

I followed the old count around his establishment
in a kind of dream, but I could not avoid being interested
at every step. Here were no chains, no whips,
no harsh keepers, no cells of stone and straw. The
walls of the long corridors were painted in fresco, representing
sunny landscapes, and gay dancing figures.
Fountains and shrubs met us at every turn. The
people were dressed in their ordinary clothes, and all
employed in some light work or amusement. It was
like what it might have been in the days of the count's
ancestors—a gay château, filled with guests and dependants,
with no more apparent constraint than the
ties of hospitality and service.

We went first to the kitchen. Here were ten
people, all, but the cook, stark mad! It was one of
the peculiarities of the count's system, that his patients
led in his house the lives to which they had previously
been accustomed. A stout Sicilian peasant
girl was employed in filling a large brasier from the
basin of a fountain. While we were watching her
task, the fit began to come on her, and after a fierce
look or two around the room, she commenced dashing
the water about her with great violence. The cook
turned, not at all surprised, and patting her on the
back, with a loud laugh, cried, “Brava, Pepina!
brava!” ringing at the same moment a secret bell.

A young girl of sixteen with a sweet, similing countenance,
answered the summons, and immediately
comprehending the case, approached the enraged
creature, and putting her arms affectionately round her
neck, whispered something in her ear. The expression
of her face changed immediately to a look of delight,
and dropping the bucket, she followed the young
attendant out of the room with peals of laughter.

“Venite!” said the count, “you shall see how we
manage our furies.”

We followed across a garden filled with the sweetest
flowers to a small room opening on a lawn. From
the centre of the ceiling was suspended a hammock,
and Pepina was already in it, swung lightly from side
to side by a servant, while the attendant stood by, and,
as if in play, threw water upon her face at every approach.
It had all the air of a frolic. The violent
laughter of the poor maniac grew less and less as the
soothing motion and the coolness of the water took
effect, and in a few minutes her strained eyes gently
closed, the hammock was swung more and more
gently, and she fell asleep.

“This,” said the count, with a gratified smile, “is
my substitute for a forced shower-bath and chains;
and this,” kissing his little attendant on the forehead,
“for the whip and the grim turnkey.” I blessed him
in my heart.

“Come!” said he, as we left the sleeper to her repose,
“I must show you my grounds.”

We followed him to an extensive garden, opening
from the back of the château, laid out originally in the
formal style of an Italian villa. The long walks had
been broken up, however, by beautiful arbors with
grottoes in their depths, in which wooden figures, of
the color and size of life, stood or sat in every attitude
of gayety or grotesqueness. It was difficult, in the
deep shadow of the vines and oleanders, not to believe
them real. We walked on through many a winding
shrubbery, perfumed with all the scented flowers of
the luxuriant climate, continually surprised with little
deceptions of perspective, or figures half concealed in
the leaves, till we emerged at the entrance of a charming
summer theatre, with sodded seats, stage, orchestra,
and scenery, complete. Orange-trees, roses, and
clematis, were laced together for a wall in the rear.

“Here,” said the old man, bounding gayly upon the
stage, “here we act plays the summer long.”

“What! not with your patients?”

“Si, signore! Who else?” And he went on to
describe to us the interest they took in it, and the singular
power with which the odd idea seized upon their
whimsied intellects. We had been accompanied from
the first, by a grave, respectable looking man, whom I
had taken for an assistant. While we were listening
to the description of the first attempt they had made
at a play, he started out from the group, and putting
himself in an attitude upon the stage, commenced
spouting a furious passage in Italian.

The count pointed to his forehead, and made a sign
to us to listen. The tragedian stopped at the end of

his sentence, and after a moment's delay, apparently
in expectation of a reply, darted suddenly off and disappeared
behind the scenes.

“Poveretto!” said the count, “it is my best actor!”

Near the theatre stood a small chapel, with a circular
lawn before it, on which the grass had been lately
much trodden. It was surrounded partly by a green
bank, and here the count seated us, saying with a significant
look at me, that he would tell us a story.

I should like to give it you in his own words—still
more with his own manner; for never was a tale told
with more elegance of language, or a more natural
and pleasant simplicity. But a sheet of “wire-wove”
is not a Palermitan cavaliere, and the cold English
has not the warm eloquence of the Italian. He laid
aside his hat, ordered fruit and wine, and proceeded.

“Almost a year ago I was called upon by a gentleman
of a noble physiognomy and address, who inquired
very particularly into my system. I explained
it to him at his request, and he did me the honor, as
you gentlemen have done, to go over my little establishment.
He seemed satisfied, and with some hesitation
informed me that he had a daughter in a very desperate
state of mental alienation. Would I go and
see her?

“This is not, you know, gentlemen, a public institution.
I am crazy,” he said it very gravely, “quite
crazy—the first of my family of fools, on this particular
theme—and this asylum is my toy. Of course it is
only as the whim seizes me that I admit a patient; for
there are some diseases of the brain seated in causes
with which I wish not to meddle.

“However, I went. With the freedom of a physician
I questioned the father, upon the road, of the
girl's history. He was a Greek, a prince of the Fanar,
who had left his degraded people in their dirty and
dangerous suburb at Constantinople, to forget oppression
and meanness in a voluntary exile. It was just
before the breaking out of the last Greek revolution,
and so many of his kinsmen and friends had been sacrificed
to the fury of the Turks, that he had renounced
all idea of ever returning to his country.

“`And your daughter?'

“`My dear Katinka, my only child, fell ill upon receiving
distressing news from the Fanar, and her
health and reason never rallied after. It is now several
years, and she has lain in bed till her limbs are withered,
never having uttered a word, or made a sign
which would indicate even consciousness of the presence
of those about her.'

“I could not get from him that there was any disappointment
of the heart at the bottom of it. It seemed
to be one of those cases of sudden stupefaction, to
which nervously sensitive minds are liable after a violent
burst of grief; and I began, before I had seen her,
to indulge in bright hopes of starting once more the
sealed fountains of thought and feeling.

“We entered Palermo, and passing out at the other
gate, stopped at a vine-laced casino on the lip of the
bay, scarcely a mile from the city wall. It was a
pretty, fanciful place, and, on a bed in its inner chamber,
lay the most poetical-looking creature I had ever
seen out of my dreams. Her head was pillowed in an
abundance of dark hair, which fell away from her forehead
in masses of glossy curls, relieving with a striking
effect, the wan and transparent paleness of a face which
the divinest chisel could scarce have copied in alabaster.
Dio mio!—how transcendant was the beauty of
that poor girl!”

The count stopped and fed his memory a moment
with closed eyes upon the image.

“At the first glance I inwardly put up a prayer to
the Virgin, and determined, with her sweet help, to
restore reason to the fairest of its earthly temples. I
took up her shadow of a hand, and spread out the thin
fingers in my palm, and as she turned her large wan
dering eye toward me, I felt that the blessed Mary
had heard my prayer, `You shall see her well again,'
said I confidently.

“Quite overcome, the prince Ghika fell on the bed
and embraced his daughter's knees in an agony of
tears.

“You shall not have the seccatura, gentlemen, of
listening to the recital of all my tedious experiments
for the first month or two. I brought her to my house
upon a litter, placed her in a room filled with every
luxury of the east, and suffered no one to approach
her except two Greek attendants, to whose services
she was accustomed. I succeeded in partially restoring
animation to her benumbed limbs by friction,
and made her sensible of music, and of the perfumes
of the east, which I burned in a pastille-lamp in
her chamber. Here, however, my skill was baffled.
I could neither amuse nor vex. Her mind was beyond
me. After trying every possible experiment, as it
seemed to me, my invention was exhausted, and I
despaired.

“She occupied, however, much of my mind.
Walking up and down yonder orange-alley one sweet
morning, about two months ago, I started off suddenly
to my chamber with a new thought. You would
have thought me the maddest of my household, to
have seen me, gentlemen. I turned out by the shoulders
the regazza, who was making my bed, washed
and scented myself, as if for a ball, covered my white
hairs with a handsome brown wig, a relic of my coxcombical
days, rouged faintly, and, with white gloves,
and a most youthful appearance altogether, sought
the chamber of my patient.

“She was lying with her head in the hollow of her
thin arm, and, as I entered, her dark eyes rested full
upon me. I approached, kissed her hand with a respectful
gallantry, and in the tenderest tones of which
my damaged voice was susceptible, breathed into her
ear a succession of delicately-turned compliments to
her beauty.

“She lay as immovable as marble, but I had not
calculated upon the ruling passion of the sex in vain.
A thin flush on her cheek, and a flutter in her temple,
only perceptible to my practised eye, told me that the
words had found their way to her long-lost consciousness.

“I waited a few moments, and then took up a ringlet
that fell negligently over her hand, and asked permission
to sever it from the glossy mass in which the
arm under her head was literally buried.

“She clutched her fingers suddenly upon it, and
glancing at me with the fury of a roused tigress, exclaimed
in a husky whisper, `Lasciate me, signore!”

“I obeyed her, and, as I left the room, I thanked
the Virgin in my heart. It was the first word she had
spoken for years.

“The next day, having patched myself up more
successfully in my leisure, in a disguise so absolute
that not one even of my pets knew me as I passed
through the corridor, I bowed myself up once more to
her bedside.

“She lay with her hands clasped over her eyes, and
took no notice of my first salutation. I commenced
with a little raillery, and under cover of finding fault
with her attitude, contrived to pay an adroit compliment
to the glorious orbs she was hiding from admiration.
She lay a moment or two without motion, but
the muscles of her slight mouth stirred just perceptibly,
and presently she drew her fingers quickly apart,
and looking at me with a most confiding expression
in her pale features, a full sweet smile broke like sudden
sunshine through her lips. I could have wept for
joy.

“I soon acquired all the influence over her I could
wish. She made an effort at my request to leave her
bed, and in a week or two walked with me in the garden.

Her mind, however, seemed to have capacity
but for one thought, and she soon began to grow unhappy,
and would weep for hours. I endeavored to
draw from her the cause, but she only buried her face
in my bosom, and wept more violently, till one day,
sobbing out her broken words almost inarticulately, I
gathered her meaning. She was grieved that I did not
marry her!

“Poor girl!” soliloquized the count, after a brief
pause, “she was only true to her woman's nature. Insanity
had but removed the veil of custom and restraint.
She would have broken her heart before she had betrayed
such a secret, with her reason.

“I was afraid at last she would go melancholy mad,
this one thought preyed so perpetually on her brain—
and I resolved to delude her into the cheerfulness necessary
to her health by a mock ceremony.

“The delight with which she received my promise
almost alarmed me. I made several delays, with the
hope that in the convulsion of her feelings a ray of
reason would break through the darkness; but she
took every hour to heart, and I found it was inevitable.

“You are sitting, gentlemen, in the very scene of our
mad bridal. My poor grass has not yet recovered, you
see, from the tread of the dancers. Imagine the spectacle.
The chapel was splendidly decorated, and at
the bottom of the lawn stood three long tables, covered
with fruits and flowers, and sprinkled here and
there with bottles of colored water (to imitate wine),
sherbets, cakes, and other such innocent things as I
could allow my crazy ones. They were all invited.”

“Good God!” said the surgeon, “your lunatics?”

“All—all! And never was such a sensation produced
in a household since the world was created.
Nothing else was talked of for a week. My worst patients
seemed to suspend for the time their fits of violence.
I sent to town for quantities of tricksy stuffs,
and allowed the women to deck themselves entirely
after their own taste. You can conceive nothing like
the business they made of it! Such apparitions!—
Santa Maria! shall I ever forget that Babel?

“The morning came. My bride's attendants had
dressed her from her Grecian wardrobe; and with her
long braid parted over her forehead, and hanging back
from her shoulders to her very heels, her close-fitted
jacket, of gorgeous velvet and gold, her costly bracelets,
and the small spangled slippers upon her unstockinged
feet, she was positively an angelic vision of beauty.
Her countenance was thoughtful, but her step was
unusually elastic, and a small red spot, like a rose-leaf
under the skin, blushed through the alabaster paleness
of her cheek.

“My maniacs received her with shouts of admiration.
The women were kept from her at first with
great difficulty, and it was only by drawing their attention
to their own gaudier apparel, that their anxiety
to touch her was distracted. The men looked at
her, as she passed along like a queen of love and
beauty, and their wild, gleaming eyes, and quickened
breaths, showed the effect of such loveliness upon the
unconcealed feelings. I had multiplied my attendants,
scarce knowing how the excitement of the scene
might affect them; but the interest of the occasion,
and the imposing decencies of dress and show, seemed
to overcome them effectually. The most sane guests
at a bridal could scarce have behaved with more propriety.

“The ceremony was performed by an elderly friend
of mine, the physician to my establishment. Old as I
am, gentlemen, I could have wished that ceremony to
have been in earnest. As she lifted up her large liquid
eyes to heaven, and swore to be true to me till death, I
forgot my manhood, and wept. If I had been younger
—ma che porcheria!

“After the marriage the women were invited to sa
lute the bride, and then all eyes in my natural party
turned at once to the feast. I gave the word. Fruits,
cakes, and sherbets, disappeared with the rapidity of
magic, and then the music struck up from the shrubbery,
and they danced—as you see by the grass.

“I committed the bride to her attendants at sunset,
but I could with difficulty tear myself away. On the
following day I called at her door, but she refused to
see me. The next day and the next I could gain no
admittance without exerting my authority. On the
fourth morning I was permitted to enter. She had resumed
her usual dress, and was sad, calm, and gentle.
She said little, but seemed lost in thought to which
she was unwilling or unable to give utterance.

“She has never spoken of it since. Her mind, I
think, has nearly recovered its tone, but her memory
seems confused. I scarce think she remembers her
illness, and its singular events, as more than a troubled
dream. On all the common affairs of life she seems
quite sane, and I drive out with her daily, and have
taken her once or twice to the opera. Last night we
were strolling on the Marina when your frigate came
into the bay, and she proposed to join the crowd and
go off to hear the music. We went on board, as you
know; and now, if you choose to pay your respects
to the lady who refused to waltz with you, take another
sip of your sherbet and wine, and come with
me.”

To say more would be trespassing perhaps on the
patience of my readers, but certainly on my own feelings.
I have described this singular case of madness
and its cure, because I think it contains in itself the
seeds of much philosophy on the subject. It is only
within a very few years that these poor sufferers have
been treated otherwise than as the possessors of incarnate
devils, whom it was necessary to scourge out
with unsparing cruelty. If this literal statement of a
cure in the private madhouse of the eccentric conte
—, of Palermo, induce the friends of a single unfortunate
maniac to adopt a kind and rational system
for his restoration, the writer will have been repaid for
bringing circumstances before the public which have
since had much to do with his own feelings.

MINUTE PHILOSOPHIES.

A summer or two since, I was wasting a college vacation
among the beautiful creeks and falls in the
neighborhood of New York. In the course of my
wanderings, up-stream and down-stream, sometimes
on foot, sometimes on horseback, and never without
a book for an excuse to loiter on the mossy banks and
beside the edge of running water, I met frequently a
young man of a peculiarly still and collected eye, and
a forehead more like a broad slab of marble than a human
brow. His mouth was small and thinly cut; his
chin had no superfluous flesh upon it; and his whole
appearance was that of a man whose intellectual nature
prevailed over the animal. He was evidently a
scholar. We had met so frequently at last, that, on
passing each other one delicious morning, we bowed
and smiled simultaneously, and, without further introduction,
entered into conversation.

It was a temperate day in August, with a clear but
not oppressive sun, and we wandered down a long

creek together, mineralizing here, botanizing there,
and examining the strata of the ravines, with that sort
of instinctive certainty of each other's attainments
which scholars always feel, and thrusting in many a
little wayside parenthesis, explanatory of each other's
history and circumstances. I found that he was one
of those pure and unambitious men, who, by close
application and moderate living while in college, become
in love with their books; and, caring little for
anything more than the subsistence, which philosophy
tells them is enough to have of this world, settle down
for life into a wicker-bottomed chair, more contentedly
than if it were the cushion of a throne.

We were together three or four days, and when I
left him, he gave me his address, and promised to write
to me. I shall give below an extract from one of his
letters. I had asked him for a history of his daily
habits, and any incidents which he might choose to
throw in—hinting to him that I was a dabbler in literature,
and would be obliged to him if he would do it
minutely, and in a form of which I might avail myself
in the way of publication.

After some particulars, unimportant to the reader,
he proceeds:—

“I keep a room at a country tavern. It is a quiet,
out-of-the-way place, with a whole generation of elms
about it; and the greenest grass up to the very door,
and the pleasantest view in the whole country round
from my chamber-window. Though it is a public
house, and the word `HOTEL' swings in golden capitals
under a landscape of two hills and a river, painted
for a sign by some wandering Tinto, it is so orderly a
town, that not a lounger is ever seen about the door;
and the noisiest traveller is changed to a quiet man, as
if it were by the very hush of the atmosphere.

“Here, in my pleasant room, upon the second floor,
with my round table covered with choice books, my
shutters closed just so much as to admit light enough
for a painter, and my walls hung with the pictures
which adorned my college chambers, and are therefore
linked with a thousand delightful associations—I
can study my twelve hours a day, in a state of mind
sufficiently even and philosophical. I do not want for
excitement. The animal spirits, thanks to the Creator,
are enough at all times, with employment and
temperate living, to raise us above the common shadows
of life; and after a day of studious confinement,
when my mind is unbound, and I go out and give it
up to reckless association, and lay myself open unreservedly
to the influences of nature—at such a time,
there comes mysteriously upon me a degree of pure
joy, unmingled and unaccountable, which is worth
years of artificial excitement. The common air seems
to have grown rarer; my step is strangely elastic; my
sense of motion full of unwonted dignity; my thoughts
elevated; my perceptions of beauty acuter and more
pleasurable; and my better nature predominant and
sublime. There is nothing in the future which looks
difficult, nothing in my ambition unattainable, nothing
in the past which can not be reconciled with good: I
am a purer and a better man; and though I am elevated
in my own thoughts, it will not lead to vanity,
for my ideas of God, and of my fellow-men, have been
enlarged also. This excitement ceases soon; but it
ceases like the bubbling of a fountain, which leaves
the waters purer for the influence which has passed
through them—not like the mirth of the world, which
ebbs like an unnatural tide, and leaves loathsomeness
and disgust.

“Let no one say that such a mode of life is adapted
to peculiar constitutions, and can be relished by those
only. Give me the veriest worldling—the most devoted,
and the happiest of fashionable ephemera, and
if he has material for a thought, and can take pride
in the improvement of his nature, I will so order his
daily round, that, with temperance and exercise, he
shall be happier in one hour spent within himself,
than in ten wasted on folly.

“Few know the treasures in their own bosoms—
very few the elasticity and capacity of a well-regulated
mind for enjoyment. The whole world of philosophers,
and historians, and poets, seem, to the secluded
student, but to have labored for his pleasure; and as
he comes to one new truth and beautiful thought after
another, there answers a chord of joy, richer than
music, in his heart—which spoils him for the coarser
pleasures of the world. I have seen my college chum
—a man, who, from a life of mingled business and
pleasure, became suddenly a student—lean back in his
chair, at the triumph of an argument, or the discovery
of a philosophical truth, and give himself up for a few
moments to the enjoyment of sensations, which, he
assured me, surpassed exceedingly the most vivid
pleasures of his life. The mind is like the appetite—
when healthy and well-toned, receiving pleasure from
the commonest food; but becoming a disease, when
pampered and neglected. Give it time to turn in upon
itself, satisfy its restless thirst for knowledge, and it
will give birth to health, to animal spirits, to everything
which invigorates the body, while it is advancing
by every step the capacities of the soul. Oh! if
the runners after pleasure would stoop down by the
wayside, they might drink waters better even than
those which they see only in their dreams. They will
not be told that they have in their possession the golden
key which they covet; they will not know that the
music they look to enchant them, is sleeping in their
own untouched instruments; that the lamp which
they vainly ask from the enchanter, is burning in
their own bosoms!

“When I first came here, my host's eldest daughter
was about twelve years of age. She was, without being
beautiful, an engaging child, rather disposed to be
contemplative, and, like all children, at that age, very
inquisitive and curious. She was shy at first, but soon
became acquainted with me; and would come into
my room in her idle hours, and look at my pictures
and read. She never disturbed me, because her natural
politeness forbade it; and I pursued my thoughts
or my studies just as if she were not there, till, by-and-by,
I grew fond of her quiet company, and was happier
when she was moving stealthily around, and looking
into a book here and there in her quiet way.

“She had been my companion thus for some time,
when it occurred to me that I might be of use to her
in leading her to cultivate a love for study. I seized
the idea enthusiastically. Now, thought I, I will see
the process of a human mind. I have studied its philosophy
from books, and now I will take a single
original, and compare them, step by step. I have
seen the bud, and the flower full blown, and I am told
that the change was gradual, and effected thus—leaf
after leaf. Now I will watch the expansion, and while
I water it and let in the sunshine to its bosom, detect
the secret springs which move to such beautiful results.
The idea delighted me.

“I was aware that there was great drudgery in the
first steps, and I determined to avoid it, and connect
the idea of my own instruction with all that was delightful
and interesting to her mind. For this purpose
I persuaded her father to send her to a better
school than she had been accustomed to attend, and,
by a little conversation, stimulated her to enter upon
her studies with alacrity.

“She was now grown to a girl, and had begun to
assume the naive, womanly airs which girls do at her
age. Her figure had rounded into a flowing symmetry,
and her face, whether from associating principally
with an older person, or for what other reason I
know not, had assumed a thoughtful cast, and she
was really a girl of most interesting and striking personal
appearance.

“I did not expect much from the first year of my
experiment. I calculated justly on its being irksome
and common-place. Still I was amused and interested.
I could hear her light step on the stair, always at the
same early hour of the evening, and it was a pleasure
to me to say `Come in,' to her timid rap, and set her
a chair by my own, that I might look over her book,
or talk in a low tone to her. I then asked her about
her lessons, and found out what had most attracted her
notice, and I could always find some interesting fact
connected with it, or strike off into some pleasant association,
till she acquired a habit of selection in her
reading, and looked at me earnestly to know what I
would say upon it. You would have smiled to see
her leaning forward, with her soft blue eye fixed on
me, and her lips half parted with attention, waiting for
my ideas upon some bare fact in geography or history;
and it would have convinced you that the natural,
unstimulated mind, takes pleasure in the simplest
addition to its knowledge.

“All this time I kept out of her way everything
that would have a tendency to destroy a taste for mere
knowledge, and had the pleasure to see that she
passed with keen relish from her text books to my observations,
which were as dry as they, though recommended
by kindness of tone and an interested manner.
She acquired gradually, by this process, a habit of
reasoning upon everything which admitted it, which
was afterward of great use in fixing and retaining the
leading features of her attainments.

“I proceeded in this way till she was fifteen. Her
mind had now become inured to regular habits of inquiry,
and she began to ask difficult questions and
wonder at common things. Her thoughts assumed a
graver complexion, and she asked for books upon subjects
of which she felt the want of information. She
was ready to receive and appreciate truth and instruction,
and here was to begin my pleasure.

“She came up one evening with an air of embarrassment
approaching to distress. She took her usual
seat, and told me that she had been thinking all day
that it was useless to study any more. There were so
many mysterious things—so much, even that she could
see, which she could not account for, and, with all her
efforts, she got on so slowly, that she was discouraged.
It was better, she said, to be happy in ignorance, than
to be constantly tormented with the sight of knowledge
to which she could not attain, and which she only knew
enough to value. Poor child! she did not know that
she was making the same complaint with Newton, and
Locke, and Bacon, and that the wisest of men were
only `gatherers of pebbles on the shore of an illimitable
sea!' I began to talk to her of the mind. I spoke
of its grandeur, and its capacities, and its destiny. I
told her instances of high attainment and wonderful
discovery—sketched the sublime philosophies of the
soul—the possibility that this life was but a link in a
chain of existences, and the glorious power, if it were
true, of entering upon another world, with a loftier capacity
than your fellow-beings for the comprehension
of its mysteries. I then touched upon the duty of self-cultivation—the
pride of a high consciousness of improved
time, and the delicious feelings of self-respect
and true appreciation.

“She listened to me in silence, and wept. It was
one of those periods which occur to all delicate minds,
of distrust and fear; and when it passed by, and her
ambition stirred again, she gave vent to her feelings
with a woman's beautiful privilege. I had no more
trouble to urge her on. She began the next day with
the philosophy of the mind, and I was never happier
than while following her from step to step in this delightful
study.

“I have always thought that the most triumphant
intellectual feeling we ever experience, is felt upon the
first opening of philosophy. It is like the interpreta
tion of a dream of a lifetime. Every topic seems to
you like a phantom of your own mind, from which a
mist has suddenly melted. Every feature has a kind
of half-familiarity, and you remember musing upon it
for hours, till you gave it up with an impatient dissatisfaction.
Without a definite shape, this or that very
idea has floated in your mind continually. It was a phenomenon
without a name—a something which you
could not describe to your friend, and which, by-and-by,
you came to believe was peculiar to yourself, and
would never be brought out or unravelled. You read
on, and the blood rushes to your face in a tumultuous
consciousness—you have had feelings in peculiar
situations which you could not define, and here
are their very features—and you know, now, that it was
jealousy, or ambition, or love. There have been moments
when your faculties seemed blinded or reversed.
You could not express yourself at all when you felt
you should be eloquent. You could not fix your
mind upon the subject, of which, before, you had been
passionately fond. You felt an aversion for your very
partialities, or a strange warming in your heart toward
people or pursuits that you had disliked; and when
the beauty of the natural world has burst upon you,
as it sometimes will, with an exceeding glory, you
have turned away from it with a deadly sickness of
heart, and a wish that you might die.

“These are mysteries which are not all soluble even
by philosophy. But you can see enough of the machinery
of thought to know its tendencies, and like
the listener to mysterious music, it is enough to have
seen the instrument, without knowing the cunning
craft of the player.

“I remembered my school-day feelings, and lived
them over again with my beautiful pupil. I entered
with as much enthusiasm as she, into the strength and
sublimity which I had wondered at before; and I believe
that, even as she sat reading by herself, my blood
thrilled, and my pulses quickened, as vividly as her
own, when I saw, by the deepening color of her cheek,
or the marked passages of my book, that she had found
a noble thought or a daring hypothesis.

“She proceeded with her course of philosophy rapidly
and eagerly. Her mind was well prepared for its
relish. She said she felt as if a new sense had been
given her—an inner eye which she could turn in upon
herself, and by which she could, as it were, stand aside
while the process of thought went on. She began to
respect and to rely upon her own mind, and the elevation
of countenance and manner, which so certainly
and so beautifully accompanies inward refinement,
stole over her daily. I began to feel respectful in her
presence, and when, with the peculiar elegance of a
woman's mind, she discovered a delicate shade of
meaning which I had not seen, or traced an association
which could spring only from an unsullied heart,
I experienced a sensation like the consciousness of an
unseen presence—elevating, without alarming me.

“It was probably well that with all this change in
her mind and manner, her person still retained its
childish grace and flexibility. She had not grown
tall, and she wore her hair yet as she used to do—falling
with a luxuriant fulness upon her shoulders.
Hence she was still a child, when, had she been taller
or more womanly, the demands upon her attention,
and the attractiveness of mature society, might have
divided that engrossing interest which is necessary to
successful study.

“I have often wished I was a painter; but never so
much as when looking on this beautiful being as she
sat absorbed in her studies, or turned to gaze up a
moment to my face, with that delicious expression of
inquiry and affection. Every one knows the elevation
given to the countenance of a man by contemplative
habits. Perhaps the natural delicacy of feminine features
has combined with its rarity, to make this expression

less observable in woman; but, to one familiar
with the study of the human face, there is, in the
look of a truly intellectual woman, a keen subtlety of
refinement, a separation from everything gross and
material, which comes up to our highest dream of the
angelic. For myself, I care not to analyze it. I leave
it to philosophy to find out its secret. It is enough
for me that I can see and feel it in every pulse of my
being. It is not a peculiar susceptibility. Every man
who approaches such a woman feels it. He may not
define it; he may be totally unconscious what it is
that awes him; but he feels as if a mysterious and invisible
veil were about her, and every dark thought is
quenched suddenly in his heart, as if he had come
into the atmosphere of a spirit. I would have every
woman know this. I would tell every mother who
prays nightly for the peculiar watchfulness of good
spirits over the purity of her child, that she may weave
round her a defence stronger than steel—that she may
place in her heart a living amulet whose virtue is like
a circle of fire to pollution. I am not `stringing pearls.'
I have seen, and I know, that an empty mind is not a
strong citadel; and in the melancholy chronicle of
female ruin, the instances are rare of victims distinguished
for mental cultivation. I would my pen were
the `point of a diamond,' and I were writing on living
hearts! for when I think how the daughters of a house
are its grace and honor—and when I think how the
father and mother that loved her, and the brother that
made her his pride, and the sister in whose bosom she
slept, are all crushed, utterly, by a daughter's degradation,
I feel, that if every word were a burning coal,
my language could not be extravagant!

“My pupil, had, as yet, read no poetry. I was uncertain
how to enter upon it. Her taste for the beautiful
in prose had become so decided, that I feared for
the first impression of my poetical world. I wished it
to burst upon her brilliantly—like the entrance to an
inner and more magnificent temple of knowledge. I
hoped to dazzle her with a high and unimagined
beauty, which should exceed far the massive but plain
splendors of philosophy. We had often conversed on
the probability of a previous existence, and, one evening,
I opened Wordsworth, and read his sublime
`Ode upon Intimations of Immortality.' She did not
interrupt me, but I looked up at the conclusion, and
she was in tears. I made no remark, but took Byron,
and read some of the finest passages in Childe Harold,
and Manfred, and Cain—and, from that time, poetry
has been her world!

“It would not have been so earlier. It needs the
simple and strong nutriment of truth to fit us to relish
and feel poetry. The mind must have strength and
cultivated taste, and then it is like a language from
Heaven. We are astonished at its power and magnificence.
We have been familiar with knowledge as
with a person of plain garment and a homely presence
—and he comes to us in poetry, with the state of a
king, glorious in purple and gold. We have known
him as an unassuming friend who talked with us by
the wayside, and kept us company on our familiar
paths—and we see him coming with a stately step, and
a glittering diadem on his brow; and we wonder that
we did not see that his plain garment honored him
not, and his bearing were fitter for a king!

“Poetry entered to the very soul of Caroline Grey.
It was touching an unreached string, and she felt as
if the whole compass of her heart were given out. I
used to read to her for hours, and it was beautiful to
see her eye kindle, and her cheek burn with excitement.
The sublimed mysticism and spirituality of
Wordsworth were her delight, and she feasted upon
the deep philosophy and half-hidden tenderness of
Coleridge.

“I had observed, with some satisfaction, that, in the
rapid development of her mental powers, she had not
found time to study nature. She knew little of the
character of the material creation, and I now commenced
walking constantly abroad with her at sunset,
and at all the delicious seasons of moonlight and starlight
and dawn. It came in well with her poetry. I
can not describe the effect. She became, like all who
are, for the first time, made sensible of the glories
around them, a worshipper of the external world.

“There is a time when nature first loses its familiarity,
and seems suddenly to have become beautiful.
This is true even of those who have been taught early
habits of observation. The mind of a child is too
feeble to comprehend, and does not soon learn, the
scale of sublimity and beauty. He would not be surprised
if the sun were brighter, or if the stars were
sown thicker in the sky. He sees that the flower is
beautiful, and he feels admiration at the rainbow; but
he would not wonder if the dyes of the flower were
deeper, or if the sky were laced to the four corners
with the colors of a prism. He grows up with these
splendid phenomena at work about him, till they have
become common, and, in their most wonderful forms,
cease to attract his attention. Then his senses are
suddenly, as by an invisible influence, unsealed, and,
like the proselyte of the Egyptian pyramids, he finds
himself in a magnificent temple, and hears exquisite
music, and is dazzled by surpassing glory. He never
recovers his indifference. The perpetual changes of
nature keep alive his enthusiasm, and if his taste is not
dulled by subsequent debasement, the pleasure he receives
from it flows on like a stream—wearing deeper
and calmer.

“Caroline became now my constant companion.
The changes of the natural world have always been
my chief source of happiness, and I was curious to
know whether my different sensations, under different
circumstances, were peculiar to myself. I left her,
therefore, to lead the conversation, without any expression
of my feelings, and, to my surprise and delight,
she invariably struck their tone, and pursued the
same vein of reflection. It convinced me of what I
had long thought might be true—that there was, in
the varieties of natural beauty, a hidden meaning, and
a delightful purpose of good; and, if I am not deceived,
it is a new and beautiful evidence of the proportion
and extent of God's benevolent wisdom.
Thus, you may remember the peculiar effect of the
early dawn—the deep, unruffled serenity, and the perfect
collectedness of your senses. You may remember
the remarkable purity that pervades the stealing
in of color, and the vanishing of the cold shadows of
gray—the heavenly quiet that seems infused, like a
visible spirit, into the pearly depths of the east, as the
light violet tints become deeper in the upper sky, and
the morning mist rises up like a veil of silvery film,
and softens away its intensity; and then you will remember
how the very beatings of your heart grew
quiet, and you felt an irresistible impulse to pray!
There was no irregular delight, no indefinite sensation,
no ecstacy. It was deep, unbroken repose, and
your pulses were free from the fever of life, and your
reason was lying awake in its chamber.

“There is a hush also at noon; but it is not like
the morning. You have been mingling in the business
of the world, and you turn aside, weary and distracted,
for rest. There is a far depth, in the intense blue of
the sky which takes in the spirit, and you are content
to lie down and sleep in the cool shadow, and forget
even your existence. How different from the cool
wakefulness of the morning, and yet how fitted for the
necessity of the hour!

“The day wears on and comes to the sunsetting.
The strong light passes off from the hills, and the
leaves are mingled in golden masses, and the tips of the
long grass, and the blades of maize, and the luxuriant
grain, are all sleeping in a rich glow, as if the daylight

had melted into gold and descended upon every living
thing like dew. The sun goes down, and there is a
tissue of indescribable glory floating upon the clouds,
and the almost imperceptible blending of the sunset
color with the blue sky, is far up toward the zenith.
Presently the pomp of the early sunset passes away;
and the clouds are all clad in purple, with edges of
metallic lustre; and very far in the west, as if they
were sailing away into another world, are seen spots
of intense brightness, and the tall trees on the hilly
edge of the horizon seem piercing the sky, on fire with
its consuming heat. There is a tumultuous joy in
the contemplation of this hour which is peculiar to
itself. You feel as if you should have had wings; for
there is a strange stirring in your heart to follow on—
and your imagination bursts away into that beautiful
world, and revels among the unsubstantial clouds till
they become cold. It is a triumphant and extravagant
hour. Its joyousness is an intoxication, and its pleasure
dies with the day.

“The night, starry and beautiful, comes on. The
sky has a blue, intense almost to blackness, and the
stars are set in it like gems. They are of different
glory, and there are some that burn, and some that
have a twinkling lustre, and some are just visible and
faint. You know their nature, and their motion; and
there is something awful in so many worlds moving on
through the firmament so silently and in order. You
feel an indescribable awe stealing upon you, and your
imagination trembles as it goes up among them. You
gaze on, and on, and the superstitions of olden time,
and the wild visions of astrology, steal over your memory,
till, by-and-by, you hear the music which they
`give out as they go,' and drink in the mysteries of
their hidden meaning, and believe that your destiny is
woven by their burning spheres. There comes on
you a delirious joy, and a kind of terrible fellowship
with their sublime nature, and you feel as if you could
go up to a starry place and course the heavens in company.
There is a spirituality in this hour, a separation
from material things, which is of a fine order of
happiness. The purity of the morning, and the noontide
quietness, and the rapture of the glorious sunset,
are all human and comprehensible feelings; but this
has the mystery and the lofty energy of a higher world,
and you return to your human nature with a refreshed
spirit and an elevated purpose: see now the wisdom
of God!—the collected intellect for the morning prayer
and our daily duty—the delicious repose for our
noontide weariness—and the rapt fervor to purify us
by night from our worldliness, and keep wakeful the
eye of immortality! They are all suited to our need;
and it is pleasant to think, when we go out at this or
that season, that its peculiar beauty is fitted to our peculiar
wants, and that it is not a chance harmony of our
hearts with nature.

“The world had become to Caroline a new place.
No change in the season was indifferent to her—nothing
was common or familiar. She found beauty in
things you would pass by, and a lesson for her mind or
her heart in the minutest workmanship of nature. Her
character assumed a cheerful dignity, and an elevation
above ordinary amusements or annoyances. She was
equable and calm, because her feelings were never
reached by ordinary irritations; and, if there were no
other benefit in cultivation, this were almost argument
enough to induce it.

“It is now five years since I commenced my tutorship.
I have given you the history of two of them. In
the remaining three there has been much that has interested
my mind—probably little that would interest
yours. We have read together, and, as far as possible,
studied together. She has walked with me, and shared
all my leisure, and known every thought. She is now a
woman of eighteen. Her childish graces are matured,
and her blue eye would send a thrill through you. You
might object to her want of fashionable tournure, and
find fault with her unfashionable impulses. I do not.
She is a high-minded, noble, impassioned being, with
an enthusiasm that is not without reason, and a common
sense that is not a regard to self-interest. Her
motion was not learned at schools, but it is unembarrassed
and free; and her tone has not been educated
to a refined whisper, but it expresses the meaning of
her heart, as if its very pulse had become articulate.
The many might not admire her—I know she would
be idolized by the few.

“Our intercourse is as intimate still; and it could
not change without being less so—for we are constantly
together. There is—to be sure—lately—a slight
degree of embarrassment—and—somehow—we read
more poetry than we used to do—but it is nothing at
all—nothing.”

My friend was married to his pupil a few months
after writing the foregoing. He has written to me
since, and I will show you the letter if you will call,
any time. It will not do to print it, because there are
some domestic details not proper for the general eye;
but, to me, who am a bachelor, bent upon matrimony,
it is interesting to the last degree. He lives the same
quiet, retired life, that he did before he was married.
His room is arranged with the same taste, and with
reference to the same habits as before. The light
comes in as timidly through the half-closed window,
and his pictures look as shadowy and dim, and the
rustle of the turned leaf adds as mysteriously to the
silence. He is the fondest of husbands, but his affection
does not encroach on the habits of his mind. Now
and then he looks up from his book, and, resting his
head upon his hand, lets his eye wander over the pale
cheek and drooping lid of the beautiful being who sits
reading beside him; but he soon returns to his half-forgotten
page, and the smile of affection which had
stolen over his features fades gradually away into the
habitual soberness of thought. There sits his wife,
hour after hour, in the same chair which she occupied
when she first came, a curious loiterer to his room;
and though she does not study so much, because other
cares have a claim upon her now, she still keeps pace
with him in the pleasanter branches of knowledge, and
they talk as often and as earnestly as before on the
thousand topics of a scholar's contemplation. Her
cares may and will multiply; but she understands the
economy of time, and I have no doubt that, with every
attention to her daily duties, she will find ample time
for her mind, and be always as well fitted as now for
the companionship of an intellectual being.

I have, like all bachelors, speculated a great deal
upon matrimony. I have seen young and beautiful
women, the pride of gay circles, married—as the world
said—well! Some have moved into costly houses, and
their friends have all come and looked at their fine
furniture and their splendid arrangements for happiness,
and they have gone away and committed them to
their sunny hopes, cheerfully, and without fear. It is
natural to be sanguine for the young, and, at such
times, I am carried away by similar feelings. I love to
get unobserved into a corner, and watch the bride in
her white attire, and with her smiling face and her soft
eyes moving before me in their pride of life, weave a
waking dream of her future happiness, and persuade
myself that it will be true. I think how they will sit
upon that luxurious sofa as the twilight falls, and build
gay hopes, and murmur in low tones the now unforbidden
tenderness, and how thrillingly the allowed kiss
and the beautiful endearments of wedded life, will
make even their parting joyous, and how gladly they
will come back from the crowd and the empty mirth
of the gay, to each other's quiet company. I picture
to myself that young creature, who blushes, even now,
at his hesitating caress, listening eagerly for his footsteps

as the night steals on, and wishing that he would
come; and when he enters at last, and, with an affection
as undying as his pulse, folds her to his bosom, I
can feel the very tide that goes flowing through his
heart, and gaze with him on her graceful form as
she moves about him for the kind offices of affection,
soothing all his unquiet cares, and making him
forget even himself, in her young and unshadowed
beauty.

I go forward for years, and see her luxuriant hair
put soberly away from her brow, and her girlish graces
ripened into dignity, and her bright loveliness chastened
with the gentle meekness of maternal affection.
Her husband looks on her with a proud eye, and
shows the same fervent love and delicate attention
which first won her, and fair children are growing
up about them, and they go on, full of honor and
untroubled years, and are remembered when they
die!

I say I love to dream thus when I go to give the
young bride joy. It is the natural tendency of feelings
touched by loveliness that fears nothing for itself,
and, if I ever yield to darker feelings, it is because the
light of the picture is changed. I am not fond of
dwelling on such changes, and I will not, minutely,
now. I allude to it only because I trust that my simple
page will be read by some of the young and beautiful
beings who move daily across my path, and I
would whisper to them as they glide by, joyously and
confidingly, the secret of an unclouded future.

The picture I have drawn above is not peculiar. It
is colored like the fancies of the bride; and many—oh
many an hour will she sit, with her rich jewels lying
loose in her fingers, and dream such dreams as these.
She believes them, too—and she goes on, for a while,
undeceived. The evening is not too long while they
talk of their plans for happiness, and the quiet meal is
still pleasant with the delightful novelty of mutual reliance
and attention. There comes soon, however, a
time when personal topics become bare and wearisome,
and slight attentions will not alone keep up the social
excitement. There are long intervals of silence, and
detected symptoms of weariness, and the husband, first
in his impatient manhood, breaks in upon the hours
they were to spend together. I can not follow it circumstantially.
There come long hours of unhappy
listlessness, and terrible misgivings of each other's worth
and affection, till, by-and-by, they can conceal their
uneasiness no longer, and go out separately to seek
relief, and lean upon a hollow world for the support
which one who was their “lover and friend” could not
give them!

Heed this, ye who are winning, by your innocent
beauty, the affections of highminded and thinking
beings! Remember that he will give up the brother
of his heart with whom he has had, ever, a fellowship
of mind—the society of his contemporary runners in
the race of fame, who have held with him a stern
companionship—and frequently, in his passionate love,
he will break away from the arena of his burning ambition,
to come and listen to the “voice of the charmer.”
It will bewilder him at first, but it will not long;
and then, think you that an idle blandishment will
chain the mind that has been used, for years, to an
equal communion? Think you he will give up, for a
weak dalliance, the animating themes of men, and the
search into the fine mysteries of knowledge?—Oh no,
lady!—believe me—no! Trust not your influence to
such light fetters! Credit not the old-fashioned absurdity
that woman's is a secondary lot—ministering
to the necessities of her lord and master! It is a
higher destiny I would award you. If your immortality
is as complete, and your gift of mind as capable
as ours of increase and elevation, I would put no wisdom
of mine against God's evident allotment. I
would charge you to water the undying bud, and give
it healthy culture, and open its beauty to the sun—
and then you may hope, that when your life is bound
up with another, you will go on equally, and in a
fellowship that shall pervade every earthly interest!

3. PART III;
LOITERINGS OF TRAVEL.

LADY RAVELGOLD.

1. CHAPTER I.

Rule a Wife.

It was what is called by people on the continent a
“London day.” A thin, gray mist drizzled down
through the smoke which darkened the long cavern
of Fleet street; the sidewalks were slippery and clammy;
the drays slid from side to side on the greasy
pavement, creating a perpetual clamor among the
lighter carriages with which they came in contact;
the porters wondered that “gemmen” would carry
their umbrellas up when there was no rain, and the
gentlemen wondered that porters should be permitted
on the sidewalks; there were passengers in box-coats,
though it was the first of May, and beggars with bare
breasts, though it was chilly as November; the boys
were looking wistfully into the hosier's windows who
were generally at the pastry-cook's; and there were
persons who wished to know the time, trying in vain
to see the dial of St. Paul's through the gamboge atmosphere.

It was twelve o'clock, and a plain chariot with a
simple crest on the panels, slowly picked its way
through the choked and disputed thoroughfare east
of Temple Bar. The smart glazed hat of the coachman,
the well-fitted drab greatcoat and gaiters of the
footman, and the sort of half-submissive, half-contemptuous
look on both their faces (implying that they
were bound to drive to the devil if it were miladi's orders,
but that the rabble of Fleet street was a leetle too
vulgar for their contact), expressed very plainly that
the lady within was a denizen of a more privileged
quarter, but had chosen a rainy day for some compulsory
visit to “the city.”

At the rate of perhaps a mile an hour, the well-groomed
night-horses (a pair of smart, hardy, twelve-mile
cabs, all bottom, but little style, kept for night-work
and forced journeys) had threaded the tortuous
entrails of London, and had arrived at the arch of a
dark court in Throgmorton street. The coachman
put his wheels snug against the edge of the sidewalk,
to avoid being crushed by the passing drays, and settled
his many-caped benjamin about him; while the
footman spread his umbrella, and making a balustrade
of his arm for his mistress's assistance, a closely-veiled
lady descended and disappeared up the wet and ill-paved
avenue.

The green-baize door of Firkins and Co. opened on
its silent hinges and admitted the mysterious visiter,
who, inquiring of the nearest clerk if the junior partner
were in, was shown to a small inner room containing
a desk, two chairs, a coal fire, and a young gentleman.
The last article of furniture rose on the lady's
entrance, and as she threw off her veil he made a low
bow, with the air of a gentleman, who is neither surprised
nor embarrassed, and pushing aside the door-check,
they were left alone.

There was that forced complaisance in the lady's
manner on her first entrance, which produced the
slightest possible elevation in a very scornful lip owned
by the junior partner, but the lady was only forty-five,
highborn, and very handsome, and as she looked at
the fine specimen of nature's nobility, who met her
with a look as proud and yet as gentle as her own, the
smoke of Fleet street passed away from her memory,
and she became natural and even gracious. The
effect upon the junior partner was simply that of removing
from his breast the shade of her first impression.

“I have brought you,” said his visiter, drawing a
card from her reticule, “an invitation to the dutchess
of Hautaigle's ball. She sent me half a dozen to fill
up for what she calls `ornamentals'—and I am sure I
shall scarce find another who comes so decidedly under
her grace's category.”

The fair speaker had delivered this pretty speech
in the sweetest and best-bred tone of St. James's,
looking the while at the toe of the small brodequin
which she held up to the fire—perhaps thinking only
of drying it. As she concluded her sentence, she
turned to her companion for an answer, and was surprised
at the impassive politeness of his bow of acknowledgment.

“I regret that I shall not be able to avail myself of
your ladyship's kindness,” said the junior partner, in
the same well-enunciated tone of courtesy.

“Then,” replied the lady with a smile, “Lord Augustus
Fitz-Moi, who looks at himself all dinner-time
in a spoon, will be the Apollo of the hour. What a
pity such a handsome creature should be so vain!—
By-the-way, Mr. Firkins, you live without a looking-glass,
I see.”

“Your ladyship reminds me that this is merely a
place of business. May I ask at once what errand
has procured me the honor of a visit on so unpleasant
a day?”

A slight flush brightened the cheek and forehead
of the beautiful woman, as she compressed her lips,
and forced herself to say with affected ease, “The
want of five hundred pounds.”

The junior partner paused an instant, while the lady
tapped with her boot upon the fender in ill-dissembled
anxiety, and then, turning to his desk, he filled up the

check without remark, presented it, and took his hat
to wait on her to her carriage. A gleam of relief and
pleasure shot over her countenance as she closed her
small jewelled hand over it, followed immediately by a
look of embarrassed inquiry into the face of the unquestioning
banker.

“I am in your debt already.”

“Thirty thousand pounds, madam!”

“And for this you think the securities on the estate
of Rockland—”

“Are worth nothing, madam! But it rains. I regret
that your ladyship's carriage can not come to the
door. In the old-fashioned days of sedan-chairs, now,
the dark courts of Lothbury must have been more attractive.
By-the-way, talking of Lothbury, there is
Lady Roseberry's fête champétre next week. If you
should chance to have a spare card—”

“Twenty, if you like—I am too happy—really, Mr.
Firkins—”

“It's on the fifteenth; I shall have the honor of
seeing your ladyship there! Good-morning! Home,
coachman!”

“Does this man love me?” was Lady Ravelgold's
first thought, as she sank back in her returning chariot.
“Yet no! he was even rude in his haste to be
rid of me. And I would willingly have stayed too, for
there is something about him of a mark that I like.
Ay, and he must have seen it—a lighter encouragement
has been interpreted more readily. Five hundred
pounds!—really five hundred pounds! And thirty
thousand at the back of it! What does he mean?
Heavens! if he should be deeper than I thought! If
he should wish to involve me first!”

And spite of the horror with which the thought was
met in the mind of Lavy Ravelgold, the blush over
her forehead died away into a half smile and a brighter
tint in her lips; and as the carriage wound slowly
on through the confused press of Fleet street and the
Strand, the image of the handsome and haughty young
banker shut her eyes from all sounds without, and she
was at her own door in Grosvenor square before she
had changed position or wandered half a moment from
the subject of those busy dreams.

2. CHAPTER II.

The morning of the fifteenth of May seemed to
have been appointed by all the flowers as a jubilee of
perfume and bloom. The birds had been invited, and
sang in the summer with a welcome as full-throated
as a prima donna singing down the tenor in a duet;
the most laggard buds turned out their hearts to the
sunshine, and promised leaves on the morrow; and
that portion of London that had been invited to Lady
Roseberry's fête, thought it a very fine day! That
portion which was not, wondered how people would
go sweltering about in such a glare for a cold dinner!

At about half past two, a very elegant dark-green
cab without a crest, and with a servant in whose slight
figure and plain blue livery there was not a fault,
whirled out at the gate of the Regent's Park, and took
its way up the well-watered road leading to Hampstead.
The gentlemen whom it passed or met turned
to admire the performance of the dark-gray horse, and
the ladies looked after the cab as if they could see the
handsome occupant once more through its leather
back. Whether by conspiracy among the coach-makers,
or by an aristocracy of taste, the degree of
elegance in a turn-out attained by the cab just described,
is usually confined to the acquaintances of
Lady —; that list being understood to enumerate
all “the nice young men” of the West End, beside
the guardsmen. (The ton of the latter, in all matters
that affect the style of the regiment, is looked after by
the club and the colonel.) The junior Firkins seemed
an exception to this exclusive rule. No “nice man”
could come from Lothbury, and he did not visit Lady
—; but his horse was faultless, and when he turned
into the gate of Rose-Eden, the policeman at the
porter's lodge, though he did not know him, thought
it unnecessary to ask for his name. Away he spattered
up the hilly avenue, and giving the reins to his
groom at the end of a green arbor leading to the reception-lawn,
he walked in and made his bow to Lady
Roseberry, who remarked, “How very handsome!
Who can he be?”—and the junior partner walked on
and disappeared down an avenue of laburnums.

Ah! but Rose-Eden looked a paradise that day!
Hundreds had passed across the close-shaven lawn,
with a bow to the lady-mistress of this fair abode. Yet
the grounds were still private enough for Milton's pair,
so lost were they in the green labyrinths of hill and
dale. Some had descended through heavily-shaded
paths to a fancy dairy, built over a fountain in the bottom
of a cool dell; and here, amid her milk-pans of
old and costly china, the prettiest maid in the country
round pattered about upon a floor of Dutch tiles, and
served her visiters with creams and ices—already, as it
were, adapted to fashionable comprehension. Some
had strayed to the ornamental cottages in the skirts
of the flower-garden—poetical abodes, built from a
picturesque drawing, with imitation roughness; thatch,
lattice-window, and low paling, all complete; and inhabited
by superannuated dependants of Lord Roseberry,
whose only duties were to look like patriarchs,
and give tea and new cream-cheese to visiters on fêtedays.
Some had gone to see the silver and gold pheasants
in their wire-houses, stately aristocrats of the game
tribe, who carry their finely-pencilled feathers like
“Marmalet Madarus,” strutting in hoop and farthingale.
Some had gone to the kennels, to see setters
and pointers, hounds and terriers, lodged like gentlemen,
each breed in its own apartment—the puppies, as
elsewhere, treated with most attention. Some were
in the flower-garden, some in the greenhouses, some
in the graperies, aviaries, and grottoes; and at the side
of a bright sparkling fountain, in the recesses of a fir-grove,
with her foot upon its marble lip, and one hand
on the shoulder of a small Cupid who archly made a
drinking-cup of his wing, and caught the bright water
as it fell, stood Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the loveliest
girl of nineteen that prayed night and morning within
the parish of May Fair, listening to very passionate
language from the young banker of Lothbury.

A bugle on the lawn rang a recall. From every
alley, and by every path, poured in the gay multitude,
and the smooth sward looked like a plateau of animated
flowers, waked by magic from a broidery on
green velvet. Ah! the beautiful demi-toilettes!—so
difficult to attain, yet, when attained, the dress most
modest, most captivating, most worthy the divine grace
of woman. Those airy hats, sheltering from the sun,
yet not enviously concealing a feature or a ringlet that
a painter would draw for his exhibition-picture!
Those summery and shapeless robes, covering the
person more to show its outline better, and provoke
more the worship, which, like all worship, is made
more adoring by mystery! Those complexions which
but betray their transparency in the sun; lips in which
the blood is translucent when between you and the
light; cheeks finer-grained than alabaster, yet as cool
in their virgin purity as a tint in the dark corner of a
Ruysdael: the human race was at less perfection in
Athens in the days of Lais—in Egypt in the days of
Cleopatra—than that day on the lawn of Rose-Eden.

Cart-loads of ribands, of every gay color, had been
laced through the trees in all directions; and amid
every variety of foliage, and every shade of green, the
tulip-tints shone vivid and brilliant, like an American
forest after the first frost. From the left edge of the

lawn, the ground suddenly sunk into a dell, shaped
like an amphitheatre, with a level platform at its bottom,
and all around, above and below, thickened a
shady wood. The music of a delicious band stole up
from the recesses of a grove, draped as an orchestra
and green-room on the lower side, and while the
audience disposed themselves in the shade of the upper
grove, a company of players and dancing-girls
commenced their theatricals.—Imogen Ravelgold,
who was separated, by a pine tree only, from the junior
partner, could scarce tell you, when it was finished,
what was the plot of the play.

The recall-bugle sounded again, and the band
wound away from the lawn, playing a gay march.
Followed Lady Roseberry and her suite of gentlemen,
followed dames and their daughters, followed all who
wished to see the flight of my lord's falcons. By a
narrow path and a wicket-gate, the long music-guided
train stole out upon an open hill-side, looking down
on a verdant and spreading meadow. The band played
at a short distance behind the gay groups of spectators,
and it was a pretty picture to look down upon
the splendidly-dressed falconer and his men, holding
their fierce birds upon their wrists, in their hoods and
jesses, a foreground of old chivalry and romance;
while far beyond extended, like a sea over the horizon,
the smoke-clad pinnacles of busy and every-day London.
There are such contrasts of the eyes of the
rich!

The scarlet hood was taken from the trustiest
falcon, and a dove, confined, at first, with a string,
was thrown up, and brought back, to excite his attention.
As he fixed his eye upon him, the frightened
victim was let loose, and the falcon flung off; away
skimmed the dove in a low flight over the meadow,
and up to the very zenith, in circles of amazing swiftness
and power, sped the exulting falcon, apparently
forgetful of his prey, and bound for the eye of the sun
with his strong wings and his liberty. The falconer's
whistle and cry were heard; the dove circled round
the edge of the meadow in his wavy flight; and down,
with the speed of lightning, shot the falcon, striking
his prey dead to the earth before the eye could settle
on his form. As the proud bird stood upon his
victim, looking around with a lifted crest and fierce eye,
Lady Imogen Ravengold heard, in a voice of which
her heart knew the music, “They who soar highest
strike surest; the dove lies in the falcon's bosom.”

3. CHAPTER III.

The afternoon had, meantime, been wearing on,
and at six the “breakfast” was announced. The
tents beneath which the tables were spread were in
different parts of the grounds, and the guests had
made up their own parties. Each sped to his rendezvous,
and as the last loiterers disappeared from
the lawn, a gentleman in a claret coat and a brown
study, found himself stopping to let a lady pass who
had obeying the summons as tardily as himself. In
a white chip hat, Hairbault's last, a few lilies of the
valley laid among her raven curls beneath, a simple
white robe, the chef-d'œuvre of Victotine in style and
tournure, Lady Ravelgold would have been the belle
of the fête, but for her daughter.

“Well emerged from Lothbury!” she said, courtesying,
with a slight flush over her features, but immediately
taking his arm; “I have lost my party, and
meeting you is opportune. Where shall we breakfast?”

There was a small tent standing invitingly open on
the opposite side of the lawn, and by the fainter rattle
of soup-spoons from that quarter, it promised to be
less crowded than the others. The junior partner
would willingly have declined the proffered honor, but
he saw at a glance that there was no escape, and submitted
with a grace.

“You know very few people here,” said his fair
creditor, taking the bread from her napkin.

“Your ladyship and one other.”

“Ah, we shall have dancing by-and-by, and I must
introduce you to my daughter. By the way, have
you no name from your mother's side? `Firkins'
sounds so very odd. Give me some prettier word to
drink in this champagne.”

“What do you think of Tremlet?”

“Too effeminate for your severe style of beauty—
but it will do. Mr. Tremlet, your health! Will you
give me a little of the paté before you? Pray, if it
is not indiscreet, how comes that classic profile, and
more surprising still, that distinguished look of yours,
to have found no gayer destiny than the signing of
`Firkins and Co.' to notes of hand? Though I thought
you became your den in Lothbury, upon my honor you
look more at home here.”

And Lady Ravengold fixed her superb eyes upon
the beautiful features of her companion, wondering
partly why he did not speak, and partly why she had
not observed before that he was incomparably the
handsomest creature she had ever seen.

“I can regret no vocation,” he answered after a
moment, “which procures me an acquaintance with
your ladyship's family.”

“There is an arriére pensée in that formal speech,
Mr. Tremlet. You are insincere. I am the only
one in my family whom you know, and what pleasure
have you taken in my acquaintance? And, now
I think of it, there is a mystery about you, which, but
for the noble truth written so legibly on your features,
I should be afraid to fathom. Why have you suffered
me to over-draw my credit so enormously, and without
a shadow of a protest?”

When Lady Ravelgold had disburdened her heart
of this direct question, she turned half round and
looked her companion in the face with an intense
interest, which produced upon her own features an
expression of earnestness very uncommon upon their
pale and impassive lines. She was one of those persons
of little thought, who care nothing for causes or
consequences, so that the present difficulty is removed,
or the present hour provided with its wings; but the
repeated relief she had received from the young banker,
when total ruin would have been the consequence of
his refusal, and his marked coldness in his manner to
her, had stimulated the utmost curiosity of which she
was capable. Her vanity, founded upon her high rank
and great renown as a beauty, would have agreed that
he might be willing to get her into his power at that
price, had he been less agreeable in his own person,
or more eager in his manner. But she had wanted
money sufficiently to know, that thirty thousand pounds
are not a bagatelle, and her brain was busy till she discovered
the equivalent he sought for it. Meantime
her fear that he would turn out to be a lover, grew
rapidly into a fear that he would not.

Lady Ravelgold had been the wife of a dissolute
earl, who had died, leaving his estate inextricably involved.
With no male heir to the title or property,
and no very near relation, the beautiful widow shut
her eyes to the difficulties by which she was surrounded,
and at the first decent moment after the
death of her lord, she had re-entered the gay society
of which she had been the bright and particular star,
and never dreamed either of diminishing her establishment,
or of calculating her possible income. The
first heavy draft she had made upon the house of
Firkins and Co., her husband's bankers, had been returned
with a statement of the Ravelgold debt and
credit on their books, by which it appeared that Lord
Ravelgold had overdrawn four or five thousand pounds
before his death, and that from some legal difficulties,

nothing could be realized from the securities given
on his estates. This bad news arrived on the morning
of a fête to be given by the Russian ambassador, at
which her only child, Lady Imogen, was to make her
début in society. With the facility of disposition
which was peculiar to her, Lady Ravelgold thrust the
papers into her drawer, and determining to visit her
banker on the following morning, threw the matter
entirely from her mind and made preparations for the
ball. With the Russian government the house of
Firkins and Co. had long carried on very extensive
fiscal transactions, and in obedience to instructions
from the emperor, regular invitations for the embassy
fêtes were sent to the bankers, accepted occasionally
by the junior partner only, who was generally supposed
to be a natural son of old Firkins. Out of the
banking-house he was known as Mr. Tremlet, and it
was by this name, which was presumed to be his
mother's, that he was casually introduced to Lady
Imogen on the night of the fête, while she was separated
from her mother in the dancing-room. The consequence
was a sudden, deep, ineffaceable passion in
the bosom of the young banker, checked and silenced,
but never lessened or chilled by the recollection of
the obstacle of his birth. The impression of his subdued
manner, his worshipping, yet most respectful
tones, and the bright soul that breathed through his
handsome features with his unusual excitement, was,
to say the least, favorable upon Lady Imogen, and they
parted on the night of the fête, mutually aware of each
other's preference.

On the following morning Lady Ravelgold made
her proposed visit to the city; and inquiring for Mr.
Firkins, was shown in as usual to the junior partner,
to whom the colloquial business of the concern had
long been intrusted. To her surprise she found no
difficulty in obtaining the sum of money which had
been refused her on the preceding day—a result which
she attributed to her powers of persuasion, or to some
new turn in the affairs of the estate; and for two years
these visits had been repeated at intervals of three or
four months, with the same success, though not with
the same delusion as to the cause. She had discovered
that the estate was worse than nothing, and the
junior partner cared little to prolong his têtes-à-têtes
with her, and, up to the visit with which this tale
opened, she had looked to every succeeding one with
increased fear and doubt.

During these two years, Tremlet had seen Lady
Imogen occasionally at balls and public places, and
every look they exchanged wove more strongly between
them the subtle threads of love. Once or twice
she had endeavored to interest her mother in conversation
on the subject, with the intention of making
a confidence of her feelings; but Lady Ravengold,
when not anxious, was giddy with her own success,
and the unfamiliar name never rested a moment on her
ear. With this explanation to render the tale intelligible,
“let us,” as the French say, “return to our
muttons.”

Of the conversation between Tremlet and her mother,
Lady Imogen was an unobserved and astonished
witness. The tent which they had entered was large,
with a buffet in the centre, and a circular table waited
on by servants within the ring; and, just concealed
by the drapery around the pole, sat Lady Imogen
with a party of her friends, discussing very seriously
the threatened fashion of tight sleeves. She had half
risen, when her mother entered, to offer her a seat by
her side, but the sight of Tremlet, who immediately
followed, had checked the words upon her lip, and to
her surprise they seated themselves on the side that
was wholly unoccupied, and conversed in a tone inaudible
to all but themselves. Not aware that her
lover knew Lady Ravelgold, she supposed that they
might have been casually introduced, till the earnest
ness of her mother's manner, and a certain ease between
them in the little courtesies of the table, assured
her that this could not be their first interview. Tremlet's
face was turned from her, and she could not
judge whether he was equally interested; but she
had been so accustomed to consider her mother as
irresistible when she chose to please, that she supposed
it of course; and very soon the heightened color of
Lady Ravelgold, and the unwavering look of mingled
admiration and curiosity which she bent upon the
handsome face of her companion, left no doubt in her
mind that her reserved and exclusive lover was in the
dangerous toils of a rival whose power she knew.
From the mortal pangs of a first jealousy, Heaven send
thee deliverance, fair Lady Imogen!

“We shall find our account in the advances on
your ladyship's credit;” said Tremlet, in reply to the
direct question that was put to him. “Meantime
permit me to admire the courage with which you look
so disagreeable a subject in the face.”

“For `disagreeable subject,' read `Mr. Tremlet.'
I show my temerity more in that. Apropos of faces,
yours would become the new fashion of cravat. The
men at Crockford's slip the ends through a ring of
their lady-love's, if they chance to have one—thus!”
and untying the loose knot of his black satin cravat,
Lady Ravelgold slipped over the ends a diamond of
small value, conspicuously set in pearls.

“The men at Crockford's,” said Tremlet, hesitating
to commit the rudeness of removing the ring,
“are not of my school of manners. If I had been so
fortunate as to inspire a lady with a preference for me,
I should not advertise it on my cravat.”

“But suppose the lady were proud of her preference
as dames were of the devotion of their knights in the
days of chivalry—would you not wear her favor as
conspicuously as they?”

A flush of mingled embarrassment and surprise
shot over the forehead of Tremlet, and he was turning
the ring with his fingers, when Lady Imogen, attempting
to pass out of the tent, was stopped by her
mother.

“Imogen, my daughter! this is Mr. Tremlet. Lady
Imogen Ravelgold, Mr. Tremlet!”

The cold and scarce perceptible bow which the
wounded girl gave to her lover, betrayed no previous
acquaintance to the careless Lady Ravelgold. Without
giving a second thought to her daughter, she held
her glass for some champagne to a passing servant,
and as Lady Imogen and her friends crossed the lawn
to the dancing-tent, she resumed the conversation
which they had interrupted; while Tremlet, with his
heart brooding on the altered look he had received,
listened and replied almost unconsciously; yet from
this very circumstance, in a manner which was interpreted
by his companion as the embarrassment of a
timid and long-repressed passion for herself.

While Lady Ravelgold and the junior partner were
thus playing at cross purposes over their champagne
and bons-bons, Grisi and Lablanche were singing a
duet from I Puritani, to a full audience in the saloon;
the drinking young men sat over their wine at the
nearly-deserted tables; Lady Imogen and her friends
waltzed to Collinet's band, and the artisans were busy
below the lawn, erecting the machinery for the fireworks.
Meantime every alley and avenue, grot and
labyrinth, had been dimly illuminated with colored
lamps, showing like vari-colored glow-worms amid
the foliage and shells; and if the bright scenery of
Rose-Eden had been lovely by day, it was fay-land
and witchery by night. Fatal impulse of our nature,
that these approaches to paradise in the “delight of
the eye,” stir only in our bosoms the passions upon
which law and holy writ have put ban and bridle!

“Shall we stroll down this alley of crimson lamps?”
said Lady Ravelgold, crossing the lawn from the tent

where their coffee had been brought to them, and putting
her slender arm far into that of her now pale and
silent companion.

A lady in a white dress stood at the entrance of that
crimson avenue, as Tremlet and his passionate admirer
disappeared beneath the closing lines of the
long perspective, and, remaining a moment gazing
through the unbroken twinkle of the confusing lamps,
she pressed her hand hard upon her forehead, drew
up her form as if struggling with some irrepressible
feeling, and in another moment was whirling in the
waltz with Lord Ernest Fitzantelope, whose mother
wrote a complimentary paragraph about their performance
for the next Saturday's Court Journal.

The bugle sounded, and the band played a march
upon the lawn. From the breakfast tents, from the
coffee-rooms, from the dance, from the card-tables,
poured all who wished to witness the marvels that lie
in saltpetre. Gentlemen who stood in a tender attitude
in the darkness, held themselves ready to lean the
other way when the rockets blazed up, and mammas
who were encouraging flirtations with eligibles, whispered
a caution on the same subject to their less experienced
daughters.

Up sped the missiles, round spun the wheels, fair
burned the pagodas, swift flew the fire-doves off and
back again on their wires, and softly floated down
through the dewy atmosphere of that May night the
lambent and many-colored stars, flung burning from
the exploded rockets. Device followed device, and
Lady Imogen almost forgot, in her child's delight at
the spectacle, that she had taken into her bosom a
green serpent, whose folds were closing like suffocation
about her heart.

The finalè was to consist of a new light, invented
by the pyrotechnist, promised to Lady Roseberry to
be several degrees brighter than the sun—comparatively
with the quantity of matter. Before this last
flourish came a pause; and while all the world were
murmuring love and applause around her, Lady
Imogen, with her eyes fixed on an indefinite point in
the darkness, took advantage of the cessation of light
to feed her serpent with thoughts of passionate and
uncontrollable pain. A French attaché, Phillipiste to
the very tips of his mustache, addressed to her ear,
meantime, the compliments he had found most effective
in the Chaussée d'Antin.

The light burst suddenly from a hundred blazing
points, clear, dazzling, intense—illuminating, as by
the instantaneous burst of day, the farthest corner of
Rose-Eden. And Monsieur Mangepoire, with a
French contempt for English fireworks, took advantage
of the first ray to look into Lady Imogen's eyes.

“Mais, Miladi!” was his immediate exclamation,
after following their direction with a glance, “ce n'est
qu'un tableau vivant, cela! Help, gentlemen! Elle
s'évanôuit. Some salts! Misericorde! Mon Dieu!
Mon Dieu!” And Lady Imogen Ravelgold was carried
fainting to Lady Roseberry's chamber.

In a small opening at the end of a long avenue of
lilacs, extended from the lawn in the direction of
Lady Imogen's fixed and unconscious gaze, was presented,
by the unexpected illumination, the tableau
vivant, seen by her ladyship and Monsieur Mangepoire
at the same instant—a gentleman drawn up to
his fullest height, with his arms folded, and a lady
kneeling on the ground at his feet with her arms
stretched up to his bosom.

4. CHAPTER IV.

A little after two o'clock on the following
Wednesday, Tremlet's cabriolet stopped near the
perron of Willis's rooms in King street, and while he
sent up his card to the lady patronesses for his ticket
to that night's Almack's, he busied himself in looking
into the crowd of carriages about him, and reading on
the faces of their fair occupants the hope and anxiety
to which they were a prey till John the footman
brought them tickets or despair. Drawn up on the
opposite side of the street, stood a family-carriage of
the old style, covered with half the arms of the herald's
office, and containing a fat dowager and three very overdressed
daughters. Watching them, to see the effect
of their application, stood upon the sidewalk three or
four young men from the neighboring club-house, and
at the moment Tremlet was observing these circumstances,
a foreign britsçka, containing a beautiful woman
of a reputation better understood than expressed
in the conclave above stairs, flew round the corner of
St. James's street, and very nearly drove into the open
mouth of the junior partner's cabriolet.

“I will bet you a Ukraine colt against this fine bay
of yours,” said the Russian secretary of legation, advancing
from the group of dandies to Tremlet, “that
miladi, yonder, with all the best blood of England in
her own and her daughters' red faces, gets no tickets
this morning.”

“I'll take a bet upon the lady who has nearly
extinguished me, if you like,” answered Tremlet,
gazing with admiration at the calm, delicate, childlike
looking creature, who sat before him in the
britsçka.

“No!” said the secretary, “for Almack's is a republic
of beauty, and she'll be voted in without either
blood or virtue. Par exémple, Lady Ravelgold's
voucher is good here, though she does study tableaux
in Lothbury—eh, Tremlet?”

Totally unaware of the unlucky discovery by the
fireworks at Lady Roseberry's fête, Tremlet colored
and was inclined to take the insinuation as an affront;
but a laugh from the dandies drew off his companion's
attention, and he observed the dowager's footman
standing at her coach window with his empty hands
held up in most expressive negation, while the three
young ladies within sat aghast, in all the agonies of
disappointed hopes. The lumbering carriage got into
motion—its ineffective blazonry paled by the mortified
blush of its occupants—and, as the junior partner
drove away, philosophizing on the arbitrary opinions
and unprovoked insults of polite society, the britsçka
shot by, showing him, as he leaned forward, a lovely
woman who bent on him the most dangerous eyes in
London, and an Almack's ticket lying on the unoccupied
cushion beside her.

The white relievo upon the pale blue wall of Almack's
showed every crack in its stucco flowers, and
the faded chaperons who had defects of a similar description
to conceal, took warning of the walls, and
retreated to the friendlier dimness of the tea-room.
Collinet was beginning the second set of quadrilles,
and among the fairest of the surpassingly beautiful
women who were moving to his heavenly music, was
Lady Imogen Ravelgold, the lovelier to-night for the
first heavy sadness that had ever dimmed the roses
in her cheek. Her lady-mother divided her thoughts
between what this could mean, and whether Mr.
Tremlet would come to the ball; and when, presently
after, in the dos-a-dos, she forgot to look at her daughter,
on seeing that gentleman enter, she lost a very
good opportunity for a guess at the cause of Lady
Imogen's paleness.

To the pure and true eye that appreciates the
divinity of the form after which woman is made, it
would have been a glorious feast to have seen the perfection
of shape, color, motion, and countenance, shown
that night on the bright floor of Almack's. For the
young and beautiful girls whose envied destiny is to
commence their woman's history in this exclusive

hall, there exists aids to beauty known to no other
class or nation. Perpetual vigilance over every limb
from the cradle up; physical education of a perfection,
discipline, and judgment, pursued only at great
expense and under great responsibility; moral education
of the highest kind, habitual consciousness of
rank, exclusive contact with elegance and luxury, and
a freedom of intellectual culture which breathes a soul
through the face before passion has touched it with a
line or a shade—these are some of the circumstances
which make Almack's the cynosure of the world for
adorable and radiant beauty.

There were three ladies who had come to Almack's
with a definite object that night, each of whom was
destined to be surprised and foiled: Lady Ravelgold,
who feared she had been abrupt with the inexperienced
banker, but trusted to find him softened by a day or
two's reflection; Mrs. St. Leger, the lady of the
britsçka, who had ordered supper for two on her arrival
at home from her morning's drive, and intended
to have the company of the handsome creature she
had nearly run over in King street; and Lady Imogen
Ravelgold as will appear in the sequel.

Tremlet stood in the entrance from the tea-room a
moment, gathering courage to walk alone into such a
dazzling scene, and then, having caught a glimpse of
the glossy lines of Lady Imogen's head at the farthest
end of the room, he was advancing toward her, when he
was addressed by a lady who leaned against one of the
slender columns of the orchestra. After a sweetly-phrased
apology for having nearly knocked out his
brains that morning with her horses' fore feet, Mrs. St.
Leger took his arm, and walking deliberately two or
three times up and down the room, took possession, at
last, of a banquette on the highest range, so far from any
other person, that it would have been a marked rudeness
to have left her alone. Tremlet took his seat by
her with this instinctive feeling, trusting that some of
her acquaintances would soon approach, and give him
a fair excuse to leave her; but he soon became
amused with her piquant style of conversation, and,
not aware of being observed, fell into the attitude of a
pleased and earnest listener.

Lady Ravelgold's feelings during this petit entretien,
were of a very positive description. She had
an instinctive knowledge, and consequently a jealous
dislike of Mrs. St. Leger's character; and, still under
the delusion that the young banker's liberality was
prompted by a secret passion for herself, she saw her
credit in the city and her hold upon the affections of
Tremlet (for whom she had really conceived a violent
affection), melting away in every smile of the dangerous
woman who engrossed him. As she looked around
for a friend, to whose ear she might communicate
some of the suffocating poison in her own heart, Lady
Imogen returned to her from a galopade; and, like a
second dagger into the heart of the pure-minded girl,
went this second proof of her lover's corrupt principle
and conduct. Unwilling to believe even her own eyes
on the night of Lady Roseberry's fête, she had summoned
resolution on the road home to ask an explanation
of her mother. Embarrassed by the abrupt question,
Lady Ravelgold felt obliged to make a partial
confidence of the state of her pecuniary affairs; and
to clear herself, she represented Tremlet as having
taken advantage of her obligations to him, to push a
dishonorable suit. The scene disclosed by the sudden
blaze of the fireworks being thus simply explained,
Lady Imogen determined at once to give up
Tremlet's acquaintance altogether; a resolution which
his open flirtation with a woman of Mrs. St. Leger's
character served to confirm. She had, however, one
errand with him, prompted by her filial feelings and
favored by an accidental circumstance which will appear.

“Do you believe in animal magnetism?” asked
Mrs. St. Leger, “for by the fixedness of Lady Ravelgold's
eyes in this quarter, something is going to happen
to one of us.”

The next moment the Russian secretary approached
and took his seat by Mrs. St. Leger, and with
diplomatic address contrived to convey to Tremlet's
ear that Lady Ravelgold wished to speak with him.
The banker rose, but the quick wit of his companion
comprehended the manœuvre.

“Ah! I see how it is,” she said, “but stay—you'll
sup with me to-night? Promise me—parole d'honneur!”

“Parole!” answered Tremlet, making his way
out between the seats, half pleased and half embarrassed.

“As for you, Monsieur le Secretaire,” said Mrs.
St. Leger, “you have forfeited my favor, and may
sup elsewhere. How dare you conspire against me?”

While the Russian was making his peace, Tremlet
crossed over to Lady Ravelgold; but, astonished
at the change in Lady Imogen, he soon broke in
abruptly upon her mother's conversation, to ask her
to dance. She accepted his hand for a quadrille;
but as they walked down the room in search of a vis-à-vis,
she complained of heat, and asked timidly if he
would take her to the tea-room.

“Mr. Tremlet,” she said, fixing her eyes upon the
cup of tea which he had given her, and which she
found some difficulty in holding, “I have come here
to-night to communicate to you some important information,
to ask a favor, and to break off an acquaintance
which has lasted too long.”

Lady Imogen stopped, for the blood had fled from
her lips, and she was compelled to ask his arm for a
support. She drew herself up to her fullest height
the next moment, looked at Tremlet, who stood in
speechless astonishment, and with a strong effort, commenced
again in a low, firm tone—

“I have been acquainted with you some time, sir,
and have never inquired, nor knew more than your
name, up to this day. I suffered myself to be pleased
too blindly—”

“Dear Lady Imogen!”

“Stay a moment, sir! I will proceed directly to
my business. I received this morning a letter from
the senior partner of a mercantile house in the city,
with which you are connected. It is written on the
supposition that I have some interest in you, and informs
me that you are not, as you yourself suppose,
the son of the gentleman who writes the letter.”

“Madam!”

“That gentleman, sir, as you know, never was
married. He informs me that in the course of many
financial visits to St. Petersburgh, he formed a friendship
with Count Manteuffel, then minister of finance
to the emperor, whose tragical end, in consequence
of his extensive defalcations, is well known. In
brief, sir, you were his child, and were taken by this
English banker, and carefully educated as his own, in
happy ignorance, as he imagined, of your father's misfortunes
and mournful death.”

Tremlet leaned against the wall, unable to reply
to this astounding intelligence, and Lady Imogen
went on.

“Your title and estates have been restored to you
at the request of your kind benefactor, and you are
now the heir to a princely fortune, and a count of
the Russian empire. Here is the letter, sir, which
is of no value to me now. Mr. Tremlet! one word
more, sir.”

Lady Imogen grasped for breath.

“In return, sir, for much interest given you heretofore—in
return, sir, for this information—”

“Speak, dear Lady Imogen!”

“Spare my mother!”

“Mrs. St. Leger's carriage stops the way!” shouted

a servant at that moment, at the top of the stairs;
and as if there were a spell in the sound to nerve her
resolution anew, Lady Imogen Ravelgold shook the
tears from her eyes, bowed coldly to Tremlet, and
passed out into the dressing-room.

“If you please, sir,” said a servant, approaching the
amazed banker, “Mrs. St. Leger waits for you in her
carriage.”

“Will you come home and sup with us?” said
Lady Ravelgold at the same instant, joining him in
the tea-room.

“I shall be only too happy, Lady Ravelgold.”

The bold coachman of Mrs. St. Leger continued
to “stop the way,” spite of policemen and infuriated
footmen, for some fifteen minutes. At the end of
that time Mr. Tremlet appeared, handing down
Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who walked to
their chariot, which was a few steps behind; and
very much to Mrs. St. Leger's astonishment, the
handsome banker sprang past her horses' heads a
minute after, jumped into his cabriolet, which stood
on the opposite side of the street, and drove after
the vanishing chariot as if his life depended on overtaking
it. Still Mrs. St. Leger's carriage “stopped
the way.” But, in a few minutes after, the same
footman who had summoned Tremlet in vain, returned
with the Russian secretary, doomed in blessed
unconsciousness to play the pis aller at her tête-à-tête
supper in Spring Gardens.

5. CHAPTER V.

If Lady Ravelgold showed beautiful by the uncompromising
light and in the ornamented hall of
Almack's, she was radiant as she came through the
mirror door of her own loved-contrived and beauty-breathing
boudoir. Tremlet had been showed into
this recess of luxury and elegance on his arrival, and
Lady Ravelgold and her daughter, who preceded her
by a minute or two, had gone to their chambers, the
first to make some slight changes in her toilet, and
the latter (entirely ignorant of her lover's presence in
the house), to be alone with a heart never before in
such painful need of self-abandonment and solitude.

Tremlet looked about him in the enchanted room
in which he found himself alone, and, spite of the
prepossessed agitation of his feelings, the voluptuous
beauty of every object had the effect to divert and
tranquillize him. The light was profuse, but it came
softened through the thinnest alabaster; and while
every object in the room was distinctly and minutely
visible, the effect of moonlight was not more soft and
dreamy. The general form of the boudoir was an
oval, but within the pilasters of folded silk with their
cornices of gold, lay crypts containing copies exquisitely
done in marble of the most graceful statues of antiquity,
one of which seemed, by the curtain drawn
quite aside and a small antique lamp burning near it,
to be the divinity of the place—the Greek Antinous,
with his drooped head and full, smooth limbs, the
most passionate and life-like representation of voluptuous
beauty that intoxicates the slumberous air of
Italy. Opposite this, another niche contained a few
books, whose retreating shelves swung on a secret
door, and as it stood half open, the nodding head of a
snowy magnolia leaned through, as if pouring from
the lips of its broad chalice the mingled odors of the
unseen conservatory it betrayed. The first sketch in
crayons of a portrait of Lady Ravelgold by young
Lawrence, stood against the wall, with the frame half
buried in a satin ottoman; and, as Tremlet stood before
it, admiring the clear, classic outline of the head
and bust, and wondering in what chamber of his brain
the gifted artist had found the beautiful drapery in
which he had drawn her, the dim light glanced faintly
on the left, and the broad mirror by which he had
entered swung again on its silver hinges, and admitted
the very presentment of what he gazed on. Lady
Ravelgold had removed the jewels from her hair, and
the robe of wrought lace, which she had worn that
night over a boddice of white satin laced loosely below
the bosom. In the place of this she had thrown upon
her shoulders a flowing wrapper of purple velvet,
made open after the Persian fashion, with a short and
large sleeve, and embroidered richly with gold upon
the skirts. Her admirable figure, gracefully defined
by the satin petticoat and boddice, showed against the
gorgeous purple as it flowed back in her advancing
motion, with a relief which would have waked the very
soul of Titian; her complexion was dazzling and
faultless in the flattering light of her own rooms; and
there are those who will read this who know how the
circumstances which surround a woman—luxury,
elegance, taste, or the opposite of these—enhance or
dim, beyond help or calculation, even the highest order
of woman's beauty.

Lady Ravelgold held a bracelet in her hand as she
came in.

“In my own house,” she said, holding the glittering
jewel to Tremlet, “I have a fancy for the style
antique. Tasseline, my maid, has gone to bed, and
you must do the devoir of a knight, or an abigail, and
loop up this Tyrian sleeve. Stay—look first at the
model—that small statue of Cytheris, yonder! Not
the shoulder—for you are to swear mine is prettier—
but the clasp. Fasten it like that. So! Now take
me for a Grecian nymph the rest of the evening.”

“Lady Ravelgold!”

“Hermione or Agläe, if you please! But let us
ring for supper!”

As the bell sounded, a superb South American
trulian darted in from the conservatory, and, spreading
his gorgeous black and gold wings a moment
over the alabaster shoulder of Lady Ravelgold, as if
he took a pleasure in prolonging the first touch as
he alighted, turned his large liquid eye fiercely on
Tremlet.

“Thus it is,” said Lady Ravelgold, “we forget our
old favorites in our new. See how jealous he is!”

“Supper is served, miladi!” said a servant entering.

“A hand to each, then, for the present,” she said,
putting one into Tremlet's, and holding up the trulian
with the other. “He who behaves best shall drink
first with me.”

“I beg your ladyship's pardon,” said Tremlet,
drawing back, and looked at the servant, who immediately
left the room. “Let us understand each
other! Does Lady Imogen sup with us to-night?”

“Lady Imogen has retired,” said her mother, in
some surprise.

“Then, madam, will you be seated one moment and
listen to me?”

Lady Ravelgold sat down on the nearest ottoman,
with the air of a person too high bred to be taken by
surprise, but the color deepened to crimson in the
centre of her cheek, and the bird on her hand betrayed
by one of his gurgling notes that he was held
more tightly than pleased him. With a calm and decisive
tone, Tremlet went through the explanation
given in the previous parts of this narration. He declared
his love for Lady Imogen, his hopes (while he
had doubts of his birth) that Lady Ravelgold's increasing
obligations and embarrassments and his own wealth
might weigh against his disadvantages; and now, his
honorable descent being established, and his rank entitling
him to propose for her hand, he called upon
Lady Ravelgold to redeem her obligations to him by
an immediate explanation to her daughter of his conduct
toward herself, and by lending her whole influence
to the success of his suit.

Five minutes are brief time to change a lover into a
son-in-law; and Lady Ravelgold, as we have seen in
the course of this story, was no philosopher. She
buried her face in her hands, and sat silent for a while
after Tremlet had concluded: but the case was a very
clear one. Ruin and mortification were in one scale,
mortification and prosperity in the other. She rose,
pale but decided, and requesting Monsieur le conte
Manteuffel to await her a few minutes, ascended to
her daughter's chamber.

“If you please, sir,” said a servant, entering in about
half an hour, “miladi and Lady Imogen beg that you
will join them in the supper-room.”

6. CHAPTER VI.

The spirit of beauty, if it haunt in such artificial atmospheres
as Belgrave square, might have been pleased
to sit invisibly on the vacant side of Lady Ravelgold's
table. Tremlet had been shown in by the servant to a
small apartment, built like a belvidere over the garden,
half boudoir in its character, yet intended as a supper-room,
and at the long window (opening forth upon
descending terraces laden with flowers, and just now
flooded with the light of a glorious moon) stood Lady
Imogen, with her glossy head laid against the casement,
and the palm of her left hand pressed close upon
her heart. If those two lights—the moon faintly shed
off from the divine curve of her temple, and the stained
rose-lamp pouring its mellow tint full on the heavenly
shape and whiteness of her shoulder and neck—if those
two lights, I say, could have been skilfully managed,
Mr. Lawrence! what a picture you might have made
of Lady Imogen Ravelgold!

“Imogen, my daughter! Mr. Tremlet!” said her
mother as he entered.

Without changing her position, she gave him the
hand she had been pressing on her heart.

“Mr. Tremlet!” said Lady Ravelgold, evidently
entering into her daughter's embarrassment, “trouble
yourself to come to the table and give me a bit of this
pheasant. Imogen, George waits to give you some
champagne.”

“Can you forgive me?” said the beautiful girl, before
turning to betray her blushing cheek and suffused
eyes to her mother.

Tremlet stopped as if to pluck a leaf from the verbena
at her feet, and passed his lips over the slight fingers
he held.

“Pretty trulian!” murmured Lady Ravelgold to her
bird, as he stood on the edge of her champagne-glass,
and curving his superb neck nearly double, contrived
to drink from the sparkling brim—“pretty trulian!
you will be merry after this! What ancient Sybarite,
think you, Mr. Tremlet, inhabits the body of this
bright bird? Look up, mignon, and tell us if you were
Hylas or Alcibiades! Is the pheasant good, Mr. Tremlet?”

“Too good to come from Hades, miladi. Is it true
that you have your table supplied from Crockford's?”

“Tout bonnement! I make it a principle to avoid all
great anxieties, and I can trust nobody but Ude. He
sends my dinners quite hot, and if there is a particular
dish of game, he drives round at the hour and gives it
the last turn in my own kitchen. I should die, to be
responsible for my dinners. I don't know how people
get on that have no grand artiste. Pray, Mr. Tremlet
(I beg pardon—Monsieur le conte, perhaps I should
say?”)

“No, no, I implore you! `Tremlet' has been spoken
too musically to be so soon forgotten. Tremlet or
Charles, which you will!”

Lady Ravelgold put her hand in his, and looked
from his face to her daughter's with a smile, which as
sured him that she had obtained a victory over herself.
Shrinking immediately, however, from anything like
sentiment (with the nervous dread of pathos so peculiar
to the English), she threw off her trulian, that
made a circle and alighted on the emerald bracelet of
Lady Imogen, and rang the bell for coffee.

“I flatter myself, Mr. Tremlet,” she said, “that I
have made a new application of the homœopathic philosophy.
Hahnemann, they say, cures fevers by aggravating
the disease; and when I can not sleep, I
drink coffee. J'en suis passablement fiére! You did
not know I was a philosopher?”

“No, indeed!”

“Well, take some of this spiced mocha. I got it of
the Turkish ambassador, to whom I made beaux yeux
on purpose. Stop! you shall have it in the little tinsel
cups he sent me. George, bring those filagree
things! Now, Mr. Tremlet, imagine yourself in the
serail du Bosphore—Imogen and I two lovely Circassians,
par exemple! Is it not delicious? Talking of
the Bosphorus, nobody was classical enough to understand
the device in my coiffure to-night.”

“What was it?” asked Tremlet, absently, gazing
while he spoke, with eyes of envy at the trulian, who
was whetting his bill backward and forward on the
clear bright lips of Lady Imogen.

“Do you think my profile Grecian?” asked Lady
Ravelgold.

“Perfectly!”

“And my hair is coiffed à la Grec?”

“Most becomingly.”

“But still you won't see my golden grasshopper!
Do you happen to know, sir, that to wear the golden
grasshopper was the birthright of an Athenian? I saw
it in a book. Well! I had to explain it to everybody.
By-the-way, what did that gambler, George Heriot,
mean, by telling me that its legs should be black?—
`All Greeks have black legs,' said he, yawning in his
stupid way. What did he mean, Mr. Tremlet?”

“`Greeks' and blacklegs are convertible terms. He
thought you were more au fait of the slang dictionary.
Will you permit me to coax my beautiful rival from
your hand, Lady Imogen?”

She smiled, and put forward her wrist, with a bend
of its slender and alabaster lines which would have
drawn a sigh from Praxiteles. The trulian glanced
his fiery eyes from his mistress's face to Tremlet's,
and as the strange hand was put out to take him from
his emerald perch, he flew with the quickness of lightning
into the face of her lover, and buried the sharp
beak in his lip. The blood followed copiously, and
Lady Imogen, startled from her timidity, sprang from
her chair and pressed her hands one after the other
upon the wound, in passionate and girlish abandonment.
Lady Ravelgold hurried to her dressing-room
for something to stanch the wound, and, left alone
with the divine creature who hung over him, Tremlet
drew her to his bosom and pressed his cheek long and
closely to hers, while to his lips, as if to keep in life,
clung her own crimsoned and trembling fingers.

“Imogen!” said Lady Ravelgold, entering, “take
him to the fountain in the garden and wash the wound;
then put on this bit of gold-beater's skin. I will come
to you when I have locked up the trulian. Is it painful,
Mr. Tremlet?”

Tremlet could not trust his voice to answer, but
with his arm still around Lady Imogen, he descended
by the terrace of flowers to the fountain.

They sat upon the edge of the marble basin, and
the moonlight striking through the jet of the fountain,
descended upon them like a rain of silver. Lady Imogen
had recovered from her fright, and buried her face
in her hands, remembering into what her feelings had
betrayed her; and Tremlet, sometimes listening to the
clear bell-like music of the descending water, some
times uttering the broken sentences which are most

eloquent in love, sat out the hours till the stars began
to pale, undisturbed by Lady Ravelgold, who, on the
upper stair of the terrace, read by a small lamp, which,
in the calm of that heavenly summer night, burned
unflickeringly in the open air.

It was broad daylight when Tremlet, on foot, sauntered
slowly past Hyde Park corner on his way to the
Albany. The lamps were still struggling with the
brightening approach to sunrise, the cabmen and their
horses slept on the stand by the Green Park, and with
cheerful faces the laborers went to their work, and with
haggard faces the night-birds of dissipation crept wearily
home. The well-ground dust lay in confused heel-marks
on the sidewalk, a little dampened by the night-dew;
the atmosphere in the street was clear, as it never
is after the stir of day commences; a dandy, stealing
out from Crockford's, crossed Piccadilly, lifting up his
head to draw in long breaths of the cool air, after the
closeness of over-lighted rooms and excitement; and
Tremlet, marking none of these things, was making
his way through a line of carriages slowly drawing up
to take off their wearied masters from a prolonged fête
at Devonshire house, when a rude hand clapped him
on the shoulder.

“Monsieur Tremlet!”

“Ah, Baron! bien bon jour!”

“Bien rencontrè, Monsieur! You have insulted a
lady to-night, who has confided her cause to my hands.
Madam St. Leger, sir, is without a natural protector,
and you have taken advantage of her position to insult
her—grossly, Mr. Tremlet, grossly!”

Tremlet looked at the Russian during this extraordinary
address, and saw that he was evidently highly
excited with wine. He drew him aside into Berkeley
street, and in the calmest manner attempted to explain
what was not very clear to himself. He had totally
forgotten Mrs. St. Leger. The diplomate, though
quite beyond himself with his excitement, had sufficient
perception left to see the weak point of his statement;
and infuriated with the placid manner in which
he attempted to excuse himself, suddenly struck his
glove into his face, and turned upon his heel. They
had been observed by a policeman, and at the moment
that Tremlet, recovering from his astonishment, sprang
forward to resent the blow, the gray-coated guardian
of the place laid his hand upon his collar and detained
him till the baron had disappeared.

More than once on his way to the Albany, Tremlet
surprised himself forgetting both the baron and the insult,
and feeding his heart in delicious abandonment
with the dreams of his new happiness. He reached
his rooms and threw himself on the bed, forcing from
his mind, with a strong effort, the presence of Lady
Imogen, and trying to look calmly on the unpleasant
circumstance before him. A quarrel which, the day
before, he would have looked upon merely as an inconvenience,
or which, under the insult of a blow, he
would have eagerly sought, became now an almost insupportable
evil. When he reflected on the subject
of the dispute—a contention about a woman of doubtful
reputation taking place in the same hour with a
first avowal from the delicate and pure Lady Imogen—
when he remembered the change in his fortunes,
which he had as yet scarcely found time to realize—
on the consequences to her who was so newly dear to
him, and on all he might lose, now that life had become
invaluable—his thoughts were almost too painful
to bear. How seldom do men play with an equal stake
in the game of taking life, and how strange it is that
equality of weapons is the only comparison made necessary
by the laws of honor!

Tremlet was not a man to be long undecided. He
rose, after an hour's reflection, and wrote as follows:—

There was a bridal on the following Monday at St.
George's church, and the Russian secretary stood behind
the bridegroom. Lady Ravelgold had never been
seen so pale, but her face was clear of all painful feeling;
and it was observed by one who knew her well,
that her beauty had acquired, during the brief engagement
of her daughter, a singular and undefinable elevation.
As the carriages with their white favors turned
into Bond street, on their way back to Belgrave square,
the cortége was checked by the press of vehicles, and
the Russian, who accompanied Lady Ravelgold in her
chariot, found himself opposite the open britsçka of a
lady who fixed her glass full upon him without recognising
a feature of his face.

“I am afraid you have affronted Mrs. St. Leger,
baron!” said Lady Ravelgold.

“Or I should not have been here!” said the Russian;
and as they drove up Piccadilly, he had just time
between Bond street and Milton Crescent to tell her
ladyship the foregone chapter of this story.

The trulian, on that day, was fed with wedding-cake,
and the wound on Mr. Tremlet's lip was not cured by
letting alone.

PALETTO'S BRIDE.

1. CHAPTER I.

“My daughter!” said the count Spinola.

The lady so addressed threw off a slight mantle and
turned her fair features inquiringly to her father. Heedless
of the attention he had arrested, the abstracted
count paced up and down the marble pavement of his
hall, and when, a moment after, Francesca came to
him for his good-night kiss, he imprinted it silently
on her forehead, and stepped out on the balcony to
pursue, under the aiding light of the stars, thoughts
that were more imperative than sleep.

There had been a fête of great splendor in the ducal
gardens of the Boboli, and Francesca Spinola had
shown there, as usual, the most radiant and worshipped
daughter of the nobilita of Florence. The melancholy
duke himself (this was in the days of his first
marriage) had seemed even gay in presenting her with
flowers which he had gathered at her side, with the
dew on them (in an alley glittering with the diamonds on
noble bosoms, and dewdrops on roses that would slumber,
though it was the birth-night of a princess), and

marked as was the royal attention to the envied beauty,
it was more easily forgiven her than her usual triumphs—for
it cost no one a lover. True to his conjugal
vows, the sad-featured monarch paid to beauty
only the homage exacted alike by every most admirable
work of nature.

The grand-duke Leopold had not been the only admirer
whose attentions to Francesca Spinola had been
remarked. A stranger, dressed with a magnificence
that seemed more fitted for a masquerade than a court-ball,
and yet of a mien that promised danger to the
too inquisitive, had entered alone, and, marking out the
daughter of the haughty count from the first, had
procured an introduction, no one knew how, and
sought every opportunity which the intervals of the
dance afforded, to place himself at her side. Occupied
with the courtly devoirs of his rank, the count
was, for a while, unaware of what struck almost every
one else, and it was only when the stranger's name
was inquired of him by the duke, that his dark and
jealous eye fell upon a face whose language of kindling
and undisguised admiration a child would have interpreted
aright. It was one of those faces that are of
no degree—that may belong to a barbaric king, or to
a Greek slave—that no refinement would improve, and
no servile habits degrade; faces which take their
changes from an indomitable and powerful soul, and
are beyond the trifling impression of the common usages
of life. Spinola was offended with the daring and
passionate freedom of the stranger's gaze upon his
daughter; but he hesitated to interrupt their conversation
too rudely. He stayed to exchange a compliment
with some fair obstruction in his way across the
crowded saloon, and, in the next moment, Francesca
stood alone.

“Who left you this moment, my Francesca?” asked
the count, with affected unconcern.

“I think, a Venetian,” she answered.

“And his name?”

“I know not, my father!”

The count's face flashed.

“Who presented him to my darling?” he asked,
again forcing himself to composure.

Francesca colored; and, with downcast eyes, answered:—

“No one, my father! He seemed to know me, and
I thought I might have forgotten him.”

Spinola turned on his heel, and, after a few vain inquiries,
and as vain a search for the stranger, ordered
his attendants, and drove silently home.

It was close upon the gray of the morning, and the
count still leaned over the stone-railing of his balcony.
Francesca had been gone an hour to her chamber.
A guitar-string sounded from the street below, and, a
moment after, a manly and mellow voice broke into a
Venetian barcarole, and sang with a skill and tenderness
which a vestal could scarce have listened to unmoved.
Spinola stepped back and laid his hand upon
his sword; but, changing his thought, he took a lamp
from the wall within, and crept noiselessly to his
daughter's chamber. She lay within her silken curtains,
with her hands crossed on her bosom, and from
her parted lips came the low breath of innocent and
untroubled sleep. Reassured, the count closed her
window and extinguished his lamp; and, when the
guitar was no longer heard echoing from the old
palace walls, and the rich voice of the serender had
died away with his footsteps, the lord of the Palazzo
Spinola betook himself to sleep with a heart somewhat
relieved of its burden.

On the following day, the count pleaded the early-coming
heats of summer; and, with slight preparation,
left Florence for his summer-palace in the Apennines.
When Francesca joined him cheerfully, and
even gayly, in his sudden plan, he threw aside the
jealous fears that had haunted his breast, and forgot
the stranger and his barcarole. The old trees of his
maison de plaisance were heavy with the leaves of the
Italian May; the statues stood cool in the shade; the
mountain rivulets forgot their birth in the rocky
brooks, and ran over channels of marble, and played
up through cactus-leaves and sea-shells, and nereids'
horns, all carved by the contemporaries of Donatello.
“And here,” thought the proud noble, “I am á l'ecart
of the designs of adventurers, and the temptations and
dangers of gayety, and the child of my hopes will refresh
her beauty and her innocence, under the watchful
eye, ever present, of my love.

Francesca Spinola was one of those Italian natures
of which it is difficult for the inhabitants of other
climes to conceive. She had no feelings. She had
passions. She could love—but it sprang in an instant
to its fullest power—and maidenly reserve and hesitation
were incompatible with its existence. She had
listened, unmoved, to all the adulation of the duke's
court, and had been amused with the devotion of all
around her—but never touched. The voice of the
stranger at the fête of the Boboli—the daring words
he had addressed to her—had arrested her attention;
and it needed scarce the hour—which flew like a moment
at his side—to send a new sensation, like a tempest,
through her heart. She reasoned upon nothing
—asked nothing; but, while she gave up her soul
wholly to a passion hitherto unfelt, the deep dissimulation
which seems a natural part of the love of that
burning clime, prompted her, by an unquestioned impulse,
to conceal it entirely from her father. She had
counterfeited sleep when nearly surprised in listening
to the barcarole, and she had little need to counterfeit
joy at her departure for the mountains.

The long valley of the Arno lay marked out upon
the landscape by a wreath of vapor, stealing up as if
enamored of the fading color of the clouds; and far
away, like a silver bar on the rim of the horizon, shone
the long line of the Mediterranean. The mountain
sides lay bathed in azure; and, echoing from the
nearest, came the vesper-bells of Vallombrosa. Peace
and purity were stamped upon the hour.

“My child,” said the softened count, drawing Francesca
to his bosom, as they stood looking off upon
this scene from the flowery terrace beneath the portico;
“does my child love me?”

Francesca placed her hands upon his shoulders and
kissed him for reply.

“I feel impelled,” he continued, “to talk to you
while this beautiful hour is around us, of an affection
that resembles it.”

“Resembles the sunset, my father?”

“Yes! Shall I tell you how? By affecting with
its soft influence every object under the bend of the
sky! My Francesca! there are parents who love
their children, and love them well, and yet find feelings
for other attachments, and devotion for every
other interest in life. Not so mine! My love for
my child is a whole existence poured into hers.
Look at me, Francesca! I am not old. I am capable,
perhaps, of other love than a parent's. There are
among the young and beautiful who have looked on
me with favoring eyes. My blood runs warm yet, and
my step is as full of manhood—perhaps my heart as
prompt to be gay—as ever. I mean to say that I am
not too old for a lover. Does my daughter think so?”

“I have been long vain of your beauty, dear father,”
said Francesca, threading her hand in his dark
curls.

“There are other things that might share your
empire in my heart—politics, play, the arts—a hundred
passions which possess themselves of men whose
fortune or position gives them means and leisure.
Now listen, my daughter! You have supplanted all
these! You have filled my heart with yourself.

I am tempted to love—my heart is my daughter's.
I am asked to play—my thoughts are with my child.
I have neither time for politics, nor attention for the
arts—my being breathes through my child. I am
incapable of all else. Do you hear me, Francesca?”

“I do, dear father!”

“Then, one moment more! I can not conceal my
thoughts from you, and you will pardon love like mine
for ungrounded fears. I liked not the stranger at the
duke's palace.”

Francesca stole a quick look at her father, and,
with the rapidity of light, her dark eye resumed its
tranquillity.

“I say I liked him not! No one knew him! He
is gone, no one knows whither! I trust he will never
be seen more in Florence. But I will not disguise
from you that I thought you—pleased with him!”

“Father!”

“Forgive me if I wrong you—but, without pursuing
the subject, let your father implore you, on his
knees, for the confidence of your heart. Will you
tell me your thoughts, Francesca? Will you love
me with but the thousandth part of my adoration, my
devotion, for my child?”

“Father! I will!”

The count rose from the knee on which he had
fallen, gave his daughter a long embrace, and led her
in. And that night she fled over the Tuscan border,
into neighboring Romagna, and, with the stranger at
her side, sped away, under the cover of night, toward
the shores of the Brenta.

Like a city of secrets, sleeps silent Venice. Her
sea-washed foundations are buried under the smooth
glass of the tide. Her palace-entrances are dark caverns,
impenetrable to the eye. Her veiled dames are
unseen in their floating chambers, as they go from
street to street; and mysteriously and silently glide to
and fro those swift gondolas, black as night, yet carrying
sadness and mirth, innocence and guilt, alike
swiftly, mysteriously, and silently. Water, that betrays
no footstep, and covers all with the same mantle
of light, fills her streets. Silence, that is the seal of
secrecy, reigns day and night over her thousand
palaces.

For an hour the smooth mirror of the broad canal
that sweeps under the Rialto, had not been divided by
the steel prow of a gondola. Francesca Spinola stood
at the window of a chamber in a palace of gorgeous
magnificence, watching that still water for the coming
of her husband. The silver lines of the moon stole
back imperceptibly, as her full orb sailed up the
heavens, and the turrets of the old architecture of
Venice, drawn clearly on the unruffled bosom of the
canal, seemed retiring before a consuming sheet of
silver. The silence seemed painful. To the ear of
the beautiful Florentine, the want of the sound of a
footstep, of the echo of some distant wheel, the utter
death of all sound common to even the stillest hour of
a paved city, seemed oppressive and awful. Behind
her burned lamps of alabaster, and perfumes filled the
chamber, and on a cushion of costly velvet lay a mean
and unornamented guitar. Its presence in so costly a
palace was a secret yet withheld. She wished to
touch its strings, if only to disperse the horror of silence.
But she raised her fingers, and again, without
touching it, leaned out and watched the dark arch of
the Rialto.

A gondola, with a single oar, sped swiftly from its
black shadow. It could not be Paletto. He had
gone with his two faithful servants to St. Mark's.
The oar ceased—the bark headed in—the water
splashed on the marble stair—and the gondolier stepped
on shore. Ah, who but Paletto had such a form
as stood there in the moonlight?

“Are we to be married again,” said Francesca, as
her husband entered the chamber, “that you have
once more disguised yourself as a fisherman?”

Paletto turned from the light, and took up the
mysterious guitar. “It is no night to be in-doors, my
Francesca! Come with me to the lagoon, and I will
tell you the story of this despised instrument. Will
you come?” he pursued, as she stood looking at him
in wonder at his strange dress and disturbed look.
“Will you come, my wife?”

“But you have returned without your gondoliers!”
she said, advancing a step to take his hand.

“I have rowed a gondola ere now,” he answered;
and, without further explanation, he led her down the
lofty staircase, and seating her in the stern of the bark
which he had brought with him, stepped upon the
platform, and, with masterly skill and power, drove it
like a shadow under the Rialto.

He who has watched the horn of a quarter-moon
gliding past the towers, pinnacles and palaces of the
drifting clouds, and in his youthful and restless brain,
fancied such must be the smooth delight and changing
vision of a traveller in strange lands—one who has
thus dreamed in his boyhood will scarce shoot though
Venice for the first time in a gondola, without a
sense of familiarity with the scene and motion. The
architecture of the clouds is again drifting past, and
himself seems borne onward by the silver shallop of
the moon.

Francesca sat on the low cushion of the gondola,
watching and wondering. How should her luxurious
Paletto have acquired the exquisite skill with which
he drove the noiseless boat like a lance-fly over the
water. Another gondola approached or was left behind,
the corner of a palace was to be rounded, or the
black arch of a bridge to be shot under, and the
peculiar warning-cry of the gondoliers, giving notice
of their unheard approach, fell from his lips so mechanically,
that the hireling oarsmen of the city, marvelling
at his speed, but never doubting that it was a
comrade of the Piazza, added the “fratello mio” to
their passing salutation. She saw by every broad
beam of light, which, between the palaces, came down
across them, a brow clouded and a mind far from the
oar he turned so skilfully. She looked at the gondola
in which she sat. It was old and mean. In the prow
lay a fisher's net, and the shabby guitar, thrown upon
it, seemed now, at least, not out of place. She looked
up at Paletto once more, and, in his bare throat and
bosom, his loose cap and neglected hair, she could
with difficulty recognise the haughty stranger of the
Boboli. She spoke to him. It was necessary to
break the low-born spell that seemed closing around
her. Paletto started at her voice, and suspending his
oar, while the gondola still kept way as if with its own
irresistible volition, he passed his hand over his eyes,
and seemed waking from some painful dream.

The gondola was now far out in the lagoon.—
Around them floated an almost impalpable vapor,
just making the moonlight visible, and the soft click
of the water beneath the rising and dropping prow was
the only sound between them and the cloudless heaven.
In that silence Paletto strung his guitar and sang to
his bride with a strange energy. She listened and
played with his tangled locks, but there seemed a spell
upon her tongue when she would ask the meaning of
this mystery.

“Francesca!” he said at last, raising his head from
her lap.

“What says my fisherman?” she replied, holding
up his rough cap with a smile.

Paletto started, but recovering his composure, instantly
took the cap from her jewelled fingers and
threw it carelessly upon his head.

“Francesca! who is your husband?”

“Paletto?”

“And who is Paletto?”

“I would have asked sometimes, but your kisses
have interrupted me. Yet I know enough.”

“What know you?”

“That he is a rich and noble seignior of Venice!”

“Do I look one to-night?”

“Nay—for a masquerade, I have never seen a
better! Where learned you to look so like a fisherman
and row so like a gondolier?”

Paletto frowned.

“Francesca!” said he folding his arms across his
bosom, “I am the son of a fisherman, and I was bred
to row the gondola beneath you!”

The sternness of his tone checked the smile upon
her beautiful lip, and when she spoke it was with a
look almost as stern as his own.

“You mock me too gravely, Paletto! But come!
I will question you in your own humor. Who educated
the fisherman's son?”

“The fisherman.”

“And his palace and his wealth—whence came
they, Signor Pescatore?”

The scornful smile of incredulity with which this
question was asked, speedily fled from her lip as Paletto
answered it.

“Listen! Three months since I had never known
other condition than a fisherman of the lagoon, nor
worn other dress than this in which you see me. The
first property I ever possessed beyond my day's earnings,
was this gondola. It was my father's, Giannotto
the fisherman. When it became mine by his death,
I suddenly wearied of my tame life, sold boat and nets,
and with thoughts which you can not understand,
but which have brought you here, took my way to
the Piazza. A night of chance, begun with the whole
of my inheritance staked upon a throw, left me master
of wealth I had never dreamed of. I became a
gay signore. It seemed to me that my soul had gone
out of me, and a new spirit, demoniac if you will, had
taken possession. I no longer recognised myself. I
passed for an equal with the best-born, my language
altered, my gait, my humor. One strong feeling alone
predominated—an insane hatred to the rank in which
you were born, Francesca! It was strange, too, that
I tried to ape its manners. I bought the palace you
have just left, and filled it with costly luxuries. And
then there grew upon me the desire to humiliate that
rank—to pluck down to myself some one of its proud
and cherished daughters—such as you!”

Francesca muttered something between her teeth,
and folded her small arms over her bosom. Paletto
went on.

“I crossed to Florence with this sole intention.
Unknown and uninvited, I entered the palace at the
fête of the Boboli, and looked around for a victim.
You were the proudest and most beautiful. I chose
you and you are here.”

Paletto looked at her with a smile, and never sunbeam
was more unmixed with shadow than the smile
which answered it on the lips of Spinola's daughter.

“My Paletto!” she said, “you have the soul of a
noble, and the look of one, and I am your bride. Let
us return to the palace!”

“I have no palace but this!” he said, striking his
hand like a bar of iron upon the side of the gondola.
“You have not heard out my tale.”

Francesca sat with a face unmoved as marble.

“This night, at play, I lost all. My servants are
dismissed, my palace belongs to another, and with
this bark which I had repurchased, I am once more
Paletto the fisherman!”

A slight heave of the bosom of the fair Florentine
was her only response to this astounding announcement.
Her eyes turned slowly from the face of the
fisherman, and fixing apparently on some point far out
in the Adriatic, she sat silent, motionless, and cold.

“I am a man, Francesca!” said Paletto after a pause
which, in the utter stillness of the lagoon around them,
seemed like a suspension of the breathing of nature,
and “I have not gone through this insane dream without
some turning aside of the heart. Spite of myself,
I loved you, and I could not dishonor you. We
are married, Francesca!”

The small dark brows of the Florentine lowered
till the silken lashes they overhung seemed starting
from beneath her forehead. Her eyes flashed fire
below.

“Bene!” said Paletto, rising to his feet; “one
word more while we have silence around us and are
alone. You are free to leave me, and I will so far repair
the wrong I have done you, as to point out the
way. It will be daylight in an hour. Fly to the
governor's palace, announce your birth, declare that
you were forced from your father by brigands, and
claim his protection. The world will believe you, and
the consequences to myself I will suffer in silence.”

With a sudden, convulsive motion, Francesca thrust
out her arm, and pointed a single finger toward Venice.
Paletto bent to his oar, and quivering in every seam
beneath its blade, the gondola sped on his way. The
steel prow struck fire on the granite steps of the
Piazza, the superb daughter of Spinola stepped over
the trembling side, and with a half-wave of her hand,
strode past the Lion of St. Mark, and approached the
sentinel at the palace-gate. And as her figure was
lost among the arabesque columns shaded from the
moon, Paletto's lonely gondola shot once more silently
and slowly from the shore.

2. CHAPTER II.

The smooth, flat pavement of the Borg'ognisanti
had been covered since morning with earth, and the
windows and balconies on either side were flaunting
with draperies of the most gorgeous colors. The
riderless horse-races, which conclude the carnival in
Florence, were to be honored by the presence of the
court. At the far extremity of the street, close by the
gate of the Cascine, an open veranda, painted in fresco,
stood glittering with the preparations for the royal party,
and near it the costlier hangings of here and there a
window or balustrade, showed the embroidered crests
of the different nobles of Tuscany. It was the people's
place and hour, and beneath the damask and cloth of
gold, the rough stone windows were worn smooth by
the touch of peasant hands, and the smutched occupants,
looking down from the balconies above, upon
the usupers of their week-day habitations, formed, to
the stranger's eye, not the least interesting feature of
the scene.

As evening approached, the balconies began to
show their burden of rank and beauty, and the street
below filled with the press of the gay contadini.
The ducal cortege, in open carriages, drove down
the length of the course to their veranda at the gate,
but no other vehicle was permitted to enter the serried
crowd; and, on foot like the peasant-girl, the
noble's daughter followed the servants of her house,
who slowly opened for her a passage to the balcony
she sought. The sun-light began to grow golden.
The convent-bell across the Arno rang the first peal
of vespers, and the horses were led in.

It was a puzzle to any but an Italian how that race
was to be run. The entire population of Florence
was crowded into a single narrow street—men, women,
and children, struggling only for a foothold. The signal
was about to be given for the start, yet no attempt
was made to clear a passage. Twenty high-spirited
horses fretted behind the rope, each with a dozen
spurs hung to his surcingales, which, at the least motion,

must drive him onward like the steed of Mazeppa.
Gay ribands were braided in their manes, and the
bets ran high. All sounded and looked merry, yet it
would seem as if the loosing of the start-rope must be
like the letting in of destruction upon the crowd.

In a projecting gallery of a house on the side next
the Arno, was a party that attracted attention, somewhat
from their rank and splendid attire, but more
from the remarkable beauty of a female, who seemed
their star and idol. She was something above the
middle height of the women of Italy, and of the style
of face seen in the famous Judith of the Pitti—dark,
and of melancholy so unfathomable as almost to affray
the beholder. She looked a brooding prophetess;
yet through the sad expression of her features
there was a gleam of fierceness, that to the more critical
eye betrayed a more earthly gleam of human passion
and suffering. As if to belie the maturity of years
of which such an expression should be the work, an
ungloved hand and arm of almost childlike softness
and roundness lay on the drapery of the railed gallery;
and stealing from that to her just-perfected form, the
gazer made a new judgment of her years, while he
wondered what strange fires had forced outward the
riper lineaments of her character.

The count Fazelli, the husband of this fair dame,
stood within reach of her hand, for it was pressed on
his arm with no gentle touch, yet his face was turned
from her. He was a slight youth, little older, apparently,
than herself, of an effeminate and yet wilful cast
of countenance, and would have been pronounced by
women (what a man would scarce allow him to be)
eminently handsome. Effeminate coxcomb as he was,
he had power over the stronger nature beside him, and
of such stuff, in courts and cities, are made sometimes
the heroes whose success makes worthier men almost
forswear the worship due to women.

There were two other persons in the balconies of
the Corso, who were actors in the drama of which this
was a scene. The first was the prima donna of the
Cocomero, to whose rather mature charms the capricious
Fazelli had been for a month paying a too open
homage; and the second was a captain in the duke's
guard, whose personal daring in the extermination of
a troop of brigands, had won for him some celebrity
and his present commission. What thread of sympathy
rested between so humble an individual and the
haughty countess Fazelli, will be shown in the sequel.
Enough for the present, that, as he stood leaning
against the pillar of an opposite gallery, looking carelessly
on the preparations for the course, that proud
dame saw and remembered him.

A blast from a bugle drew all eyes to the starting-post,
and in another minute the rope was dropped, and
the fiery horses loosed upon their career. Right into
the crowd, as if the bodies of the good citizens of
Florence were made of air, sprang the goaded troop,
and the impossible thing was done, for the suffocating
throngs divided like waves before the prow, and united
again as scathless and as soon. The spurs played
merrily upon the flanks of the affrighted animals, and
in an instant they had swept through the Borg'ognisanti,
and disappeared into the narrow lane leading to
the Trinita. It was more a scramble than a race, yet
there must be a winner, and all eyes were now occupied
in gazing after the first glimpse of his ribands as
he was led back in triumph.

Uncompelled by danger, the suffocating crowd made
way with more difficulty for the one winning horse
than they had done for the score that had contended
with him. Yet, champing the bit, and tossing his
ribands into the air, he came slowly back, and after
passing in front of the royal veranda, where a small
flag was thrown down to be set into the rosette of his
bridle, he returned a few steps, and was checked by
the groom under the balcony of the prima donna. A
moment after, the winning flag was waving from the
rails above, and as the sign that she was the owner of
the victorious horse was seen by the people, a shout
arose which thrilled the veins of the fair singer more
than all the plaudits of the Cocomero. It is thought
to be pleasant to succeed in that for which we have
most struggled—that for which our ambition and our
efforts are known to the world—to be eminent, in
short, in our metier, our vocation. I am inclined to
think it natural to most men, however, and to all possessors
of genius, to undervalue that for which the
world is most willing to praise them, and to delight
more in excelling in that which seems foreign to their
usual pursuits, even if it be a trifle. It is delightful to
disappoint the world by success in anything. Detraction,
that follows genius to the grave, sometimes admits
its triumph, but never without the “back-water”
that it could do no more. The fine actress had won a
shout from assembled Florence, yet off the scene. She
laid one hand upon her heart, and the other, in the
rash exultation of the moment, ventured to wave a
kiss of gratitude to the count Fazelli.

As that favored signor crossed to offer his congratulations,
his place beside the countess was filled by a
young noble, who gave her the explanatory information—that
the horse was Fazelli's gift. Calmly, almost
without a sign of interest or emotion, she turned her
eyes upon the opposite balcony. A less searching and
interested glance would have discovered, that if the
young count had hitherto shared the favor of the admired
singer with his rivals, he had no rival now.
There was in the demeanor of both an undisguised
tenderness that the young countess had little need to
watch long, and retiring from the balcony, she accepted
the attendance of her communicative companion,
and was soon whirling in her chariot over the Ponte
St. Angelo, on her way to the princely palace that
would soon cease to call her its mistress.

Like square ingots of silver, the moonlight came
through the battlements of the royal abode of the
Medici. It was an hour before day. The heavy heel
of the sentry was the only sound near the walls of the
Pitti, save, when he passed to turn, the ripple of the
Arno beneath the arches of the jeweller's bridge broke
faintly on the ear. The captain of the guard had
strolled from the deep shadow of the palace into the
open moonlight, and leaned against a small stone shrine
of the Virgin set into the opposite wall, watching musingly
the companionable and thought-stirring emperess
of the night.

“Paletto!” suddenly uttered a voice near him.

The guardsman started, but instantly recovered his
position, and stood looking over his epaulet at the
intruder, with folded arms.

“Paletto!” she said again, in a lower and more appealing
tone—“will you listen to me?”

“Say on, Countess Fazelli!”

“Countess Fazelli no longer, but Paletto's wife!”

“Ha! ha!” laughed the guardsman bitterly, “that
story is old, for so false a one.”

“Scorn me not! I am changed.” The dark eyes
of Francesca Cappone lifted up, moist and full, into
the moonlight, and fixing them steadfastly on the soldier's,
she seemed to demand that he should read her
soul in them. For an instant, as he did so, a troubled
emotion was visible in his own features, but a new
thought seemed to succeed the feeling, and turning
away with a cold gesture, he said, “I knew you false,
but till now I thought you pure. Tempt me not to
despise as well as hate you!”

“I have deserved much at your hand,” she answered,
with a deeper tone, “but not this. You are my husband,
Paletto!”

“One of them!” he replied, with a sneer.

Francesca clasped her hands in agony. “I have
come to you,” she said, “trusting the generous nature

which I have proved so well. I can not live unloved.
I deserted you, for I was ignorant of myself. I have
tried splendor and the love of my own rank, but one
is hollow and the last is selfish. Oh, Paletto! what
love is generous like yours?”

The guardsman's bosom heaved, but he did not turn
to her. She laid her hand upon his arm: “I have
come to implore you to take me back, Paletto. False
as I was to you, you have been true to me. I would
be your wife again. I would share your poverty, if
you were once more a fisherman on the lagoon. Are
you inexorable, Paletto?”

Her hand stole up to his shoulder: she crept closer
to him, and buried her head, unrepelled, in his bosom.
Paletto laid his hand upon the mass of raven hair
whose touch had once been to him so familiar, and
while the moon drew their shadows as one on the
shrine of the Virgin, the vows of early love were repeated
with a fervor unknown hitherto to the lips of
Cappone's daughter, and Paletto replied, not like a
courtly noble, but like that which was more eloquent
—his own love-prompted and fiery spirit.

The next day there was a brief but fierce rencontre
between Count Fazelli and the guardsman Paletto, at
the door of the church of Santa Trinita. Francesca
had gone openly with her husband to vespers, attended
by a monk. When attacked by the young count
as the daring abducer of his wife, he had placed her
under that monk's protection till the quarrel should be
over, and, with the same holy man to plead his cause,
he boldly claimed his wife at the duke's hands, and
bore her triumphantly from Florence.

I heard this story in Venice. The gondolier Paletto,
they say, still rows his boat on the lagoon: and
sometimes his wife is with him, and sometimes a daughter,
whose exquisite beauty, though she is still a child,
is the wonder of the Rialto as he passes under. I
never chanced to see him, but many a stranger has
hired the best oar of the Piazza, to pull out toward the
Adriatic in the hope of finding Paletto's boat and getting
a glimpse of his proud and still most beautiful
wife—a wife, it is said, than whom a happier or more
contented one with her lot lives not in the “city of
the sea.”

VIOLANTA CESARINI.

1. CHAPTER I.

It was an eve fit for an angel's birthnight (and we
know angels are born in this loving world), and while
the moon, as if shining only for artists' eyes, drew the
outlines of palace and chapel, stern turret and serenaded
belvidere, with her silver pencil on the street,
two grave seniors, guardians in their own veins of the
blood of two lofty names known long to Roman story,
leaned together over a balcony of fretted stone, jutting
out upon the Corso, and affianced a fair and noble
maid of seventeen summers to a gentleman whose
character you shall learn, if we come safe to the sequel.

“The cardinal has offered me a thousand scudi for
my Giorgione, said the old count Malaspina, at last,
changing his attitude and the subject at the same
time.

“Anima di porco!” exclaimed the other, “what stirs
the curtain? The wind is changing, Malaspina. Let
us in! So, he offers but a thousand! I shall feel my
rheumatism to-morrow with this change. But a thousand!—ha!
ha! Let us in, let us in!”

“Let us out, say I!” murmured two lips that were
never made of cherries, though a bird would have
pecked at them; and stealing from behind the curtain,
whose agitation had persuaded her father that the wind
was rising, Violanta Cesarini, countess in her own right,
and beautiful by Heaven's rare grace, stepped forth
into the moonlight.

She drew a long breath as she looked down into the
Corso. The carriages were creeping up and down at
a foot-pace, and the luxurious dames, thrown back on
their soft cushions, nodded to the passers-by, as they
recognised friends and acquaintances where the moonlight
broke through; crowds of slow promenaders loitered
indolently on, now turning to look at the berry-brown
back of a contadini, with her stride like a tragedy-queen,
and her eyes like wells of jet, and now
leaning against a palace wall, while a wandering harp-girl
sung better for a baiocco than noble ladies for the
praise of a cardinal; at one corner stood an artist with
his tablet, catching some chance effect perhaps in the
drapery of a marble saint, perhaps in the softer drapery
of a sinner; the cafés, far up and dawn, looked
like festas out of doors, with their groups of gayly-dressed
idlers, eating sherbets and buying flowers; a
gray friar passed now with his low-toned benedicite;
and again a black cowl with a face that reddened the
very moonbeam that peeped under; hunchbacks contended
testily for the wall, and tall fellows (by their
long hair and fine symmetry, professed models for
sculptors and painters) yielded to them with a gibe.
And this is Rome when the moon shines well, and on
this care-cheating scene looked down the countess
Violanta, with her heart as full of perplexity as her
silk boddice-lace would bear without breaking.

I dare say you did not observe, if you were in Rome
that night, and strolling, as you would have been in
the Corso (this was three years ago last May, and if
you were in the habit of reading the Diario di Roma,
the story will not be new to you); you did not observe,
I am sure, that a thread ran across from the balcony I
speak of, in the Palazzo Cesarim, to a high window
in an old palace opposite, inhabited, as are many
palaces in Rome, by a decayed family and several artists.
On the two sides of this thread, pressed, while
she mused, the slight fingers of Violanta Cesarini;
and, as if it descended from the stars at every pull
which the light May-breeze gave it in passing, she
turned her soft blue eyes upward, and her face grew
radiant with hope—not such as is fed with star-gazing!

Like a white dove shooting with slant wings downward
a folded slip of paper flew across on this invisible
thread, and, by heaven's unflickering lamp, Violanta
read some characters traced with a rough crayon, but
in most sweet Italian. A look upward, and a nod, as
if she were answering the stars that peeped over her,
and the fair form had gone with its snowy robes from
the balcony, and across the high window from which
the messenger had come, dropped the thick and impenetrable
folds of the gray curtain of an artist.

It was a large upper room, such as is found in the
vast houses of the decayed nobility of Rome, and of
its two windows one was roughly boarded up to exclude
the light, while a coarse gray cloth did nearly
the same service at the other, shutting out all but an
artist's modicum of day. The walls of rough plaster
were covered with grotesque drawings, done apparently
with bits of coal, varied here and there with scraps of
unframed canvass, nailed carelessly up, and covered
with the study of some head, by a famous master. A
large table on one side of the room was burdened with
a confused heap of brushes, paint-bags, and discolored
cloths, surmounted with a clean palette; and not far
off stood an easel, covered with thumb-marks of all

dyes, and supporting a new canvass, on which was
outlined the figure of a nymph, with the head finished
in a style that would have stirred the warm blood of
Raphael himself with emulous admiration. A low
flock bed, and a chair without a bottom, but with a
large cloak hung over its back, a pair of foils and a
rapier, completed so much of the furniture of the
room as belonged to a gay student of Corregio's art,
who wrote himself Biondo Amieri.

By the light of the same antique lamp, hung on a
rusty nail against the wall, you might see a very good
effect on the face of an unfinished group in marble,
of which the model, in plaster, stood a little behind,
representing a youth with a dagger at his heart, arrested
in the act of self-murder by a female whose
softened resemblance to him proclaimed her at the first
glance his sister. A mallet, chisels, and other implements
used in sculpture, lay on the rough base of
the unfinished group, and half-disclosed, half-concealed,
by a screen covered with prints by some curious
female hand, stood a bed with white curtains, and
an oratory of carved oak at its head, supporting a
clasped missal. A chair or two, whose seats of worked
satin had figured one day in more luxurious neighborhood,
a table covered with a few books and several
drawings from the antique, and a carefully-locked
escritoire, served, with other appearances, to distinguish
this side of the room as belonging to a separate
occupant, of gentler taste or nurture.

While the adventurous Violanta is preparing herself
to take advantage of the information received by
her secret telegraph, I shall have time, dear reader,
to put you up to a little of the family history of the
Cesarini, necessary no less to a proper understanding
of the story, than to the heroine's character for discretion.
On the latter point, I would suggest to you,
you may as well suspend your opinion.

It is well known to all the gossips in Rome, that,
for four successive generations, the marquises of
Cesarini have obtained dispensations of the pope for
marrying beautiful peasant-girls from the neighborhood
of their castle, in Romagna. The considerable
sums paid for these dispensations, reconciled the holy
see to such an unprecedented introduction of vulgar
blood into the veins of the nobility, and the remarkable
female beauty of the race (heightened by the addition
of nature's aristocracy to its own), contributed to maintain
good will at a court, devoted above all others to
the cultivation of the fine arts, of which woman is the
Eidolon and the soul. The last marquis, educated
like his fathers, in their wild domain among the mountains,
selected, like them, the fairest wild-flower that
sprung at his feet, and after the birth of one son, applied
for the tardy dispensation. From some unknown
cause (possibly a diminished bribe, as the marquis
was less lavish in his disposition than his predecessors),
the pope sanctioned the marriage, but refused
to legitimatize the son, unless the next born
should be a daughter. The marchioness soon after
retired (from mortification it is supposed) to her home
in the mountains, and after two years of close seclusion,
returned to Rome, bringing with her an infant
daughter, then three months of age, destined to be the
heroine of our story. No other child appearing, the
young Cesarini was legitimatized, and with his infant
sister passed most of his youth at Rome. Some three
or four years before the time when our tale commences,
this youth, who had betrayed always, a coarse
and brutal temper, administered his stiletto to a gentleman
on the Corso, and flying from Rome, became
a brigand in the Abruzzi. His violence and atrocity
in this congenial life, soon put him beyond hope of
pardon, and on his outlawry by the pope, Violanta became
the heiress of the estates of Cesarini.

The marchioness had died when Violanta was between
seven and eight years of age, leaving her, by a
death-bed injunction, in the charge of her own constant
attendant, a faithful servant from Romagno, supposed
to be distant kinswoman to her mistress. With
this tried dependant, the young countess was permitted
to go where she pleased, at all hours when not attended
by her masters, and seeing her tractable and
lovely, the old marquis, whose pride in the beauty of
his family was the passion next to love of money in
his heart, gave himself little trouble, and thought himself
consoled for the loss of his son in the growing attractions
and filial virtues of his daughter.

On a bright morning in early spring, six years before
the date of our tale, the young countess and her attendant
were gathering wild flowers near the fountain
of Egeria (of all spots of earth, that on which the wild
flowers are most profuse and sweetest), when a deformed
youth, who seemed to be no stranger to Donna
Bettina, addressed Violanta in a tone of voice so musical,
and with a look so kindly and winning, that the
frank child took his hand, and led him off in search of
cardinals and blue-bells, with the familiarity of an established
playfellow. After this day, the little countess
never came home pleased from a morning drive and
ramble in which she had not seen her friend Signor
Giulio; and the romantic baths of Caracalla, and the
many delicious haunts among the ruins about Rome,
had borne witness to the growth of a friendship, all
fondness and impulse on the part of Violanta, all tenderness
and delicacy on that of the deformed youth.
By what wonderful instinct they happened always to
meet, the delighted child never found time or thought
to inquire.

Two or three years passed on thus, and the old
marquis had grown to listen with amused familiarity
to his daughter's prattle about the deformed youth,
and no incident had varied the pleasant tenor of their
lives and rambles, except that, Giulio once falling ill,
Bettina had taken the young countess to his home,
where she discovered that, young as he was, he made
some progress in moulding in clay, and was destined for
a sculptor. This visit to the apartment of an obscure
youth, however, the marquis had seen fit to object to;
and though, at his daughter's request, he sent the
young sculptor an order for his first statue, he peremptorily
forbade all further intercourse between him
and Violanta. In the paroxysm of her grief at the
first disgrace she had ever fallen into with her master,
Bettina disclosed to her young mistress, by way of
justification, a secret she had been bound by the
most solemn oaths to conceal, and of which she now
was the sole living depository—that this deformed
youth was born in the castle of the Cesarini, in Romagna,
of no less obscure parentage than the castle's
lord and lady, and being the first child after the dispensation
of marriage, and a son, he was consequently
the rightful heir to the marquisate and estates of Cesarini;
and the elder son, by the terms of that dispensation,
was illegitimate.

This was astounding intelligence to Violanti, who,
nevertheless, child as she was, felt its truth in the
yearnings of her heart to Giulio; but it was with no
little pains and difficulty on Bettina's part, that she was
persuaded to preserve the secret from her father. The
Romagnese knew her master's weakness; and as the
birth of the child had occurred during his long absence
from the castle, and the marchioness, proud of
her eldest-born, had determined from the first that he
alone should enjoy the name and honors of his father,
it was not very probable that upon the simple word of
a domestic, he would believe a deformed hunchback
to be his son and heir.

The intermediate history of Giulio, Bettina knew
little about, simply informing her mistress, that disgusted
with his deformity, the unnatural mother had
sent him to nurse in a far-off village of Romagna, and
that the interest of a small sum which the marquis

supposed had been expended on masses for the souls
of his ancestors, was still paid to his foster-parents for
his use.

From the time of this disclosure, Violanta's life had
been but too happy. Feeling justified in contriving
secret interviews with her brother; and possessing the
efficient connivance of Bettina, who grew, like herself,
almost to worship the pure-minded and the gentle
Giulio, her heart and her time were blissfully crowded
with interest. So far, the love that had welled from
her heart had been all joyous and untroubled.

It was during the absence of the marquis and his
daughter from Rome, and in an unhealthy season,
that Giulio, always delicate in health and liable to excessive
fits of depression, had fallen ill in his solitary
room, and, but for the friendly care of a young artist
whom he had long known, must have died of want
and neglect. As he began to recover, he accepted the
offer of Amieri, his friend, to share with him a lodging
in the more elevated air of the Corso, and, the more
readily, that this room chanced to overlook the palace
of Cesarina. Here Violanta found him on her return,
and though displeased that he was no longer alone,
she still continued, when Amieri was absent, to see
him sometimes in his room, and their old haunts
without the walls were frequented as often as his
health and strength would permit. A chance meeting
of Violanta and Amieri in his own studio, however,
made it necessary that he should be admitted to their
secret, and the consequence of that interview, and
others which Violanta found it impossible to avoid,
was a passion in the heart of the enthusiastic painter,
which consumed, as it well might, every faculty of
his soul.

We are thus brought to an evening of balmy May,
when Giulio found himself alone. Biondo had been
painting all day on the face of his nymph, endeavoring
in vain to give it any other features than those of the
lady of his intense worship, and having gone out to
ramble for fresh air and relaxation in the Corso.
Giulio thought he might venture to throw across his
ball of thread and send a missive to his sister, promising
her an uninterrupted hour of his society.

With these preliminaries, our story will now run
smoothly on.

2. CHAPTER II.

“Come in, carissima!” said the low, silver-toned
voice of the deformed sculptor, as a female figure, in
the hood and cloak of an old woman, crossed the
threshold of his chamber.

“Dear Giulio!” And she leaned slightly over the
diminutive form of her brother, and first kissing his
pale forehead, while she unfastened the clasp of
Bettina's cloak of black silk, threw her arms about
him as the disguise fell off, and multiplied, between
her caresses, the endearing terms in which the language
of that soft clime is so prodigal.

They sat down at the foot of his group in marble,
and each told the little history of the hours they had
spent apart. They grew alike as they conversed;
for theirs was that resemblance of the soul, to which
the features answer only when the soul is breathing
through. Unless seen together, and not only together,
but gazing on each other in complete abandonment
of heart, the friends that knew them best would have
said they were unlike. Yet Amieri's nymph on the
canvass was like both, for Amieri drew from the picture
burnt on his own heart by love, and the soul of Violanta
lay breathing beneath every lineament.

“You have not touched the marble to-day!” said
the countess, taking the lamp from its nail, and shedding
the light aslant on the back of the statue.

“No! I have lifted the hammer twenty times to
break it in pieces.”

“Ah! dearest Giulio! talk not thus! Think it is
my image you would destroy!”

“If it were, and truly done, I would sooner strike
the blessed crucifix. But, Violanta! there is a link
wanting in this deformed frame of mine! The sense
of beauty, or the power to body it forth, wants room in
me. I feel it—I feel it!”

Violanta ran to him and pressed the long curls that
fell over his pallid temples to her bosom. There was
a tone of conviction in his voice that she knew not how
to answer.

He continued, as if he were musing alond:—

“I have tried to stifle this belief in my bosom, and
have never spoken of it till now—but it is true!
Look at that statue! Parts of it are like nature—
but it wants uniformity—it wants grace—it wants
what I want—proportion! I never shall give it that,
because I want the sense, the consciousness, the emotion,
of complete godlike movement. It is only the
well formed who feel this. Sculptors may imitate
gods! for they are made in God's image. But oh,
Violanta! I am not!”

“My poor brother!”

“Our blessed Savior was not more beautiful than
the Apollo,” he passionately continued, “but could I
feel like the Apollo! Can I stand before the clay and
straighten myself to his attitude, and fancy, by the
most delirious effort of imagination, that I realize in
this frame, and could ever have conceived and moulded
his indignant and lofty beauty? No—no—no!”

“Dear—dear Giulio.” He dropped his head again,
and she felt his tears penetrate to her bosom.

“Leave this melancholy theme,” she said, in an
imploring tone, “and let us talk of other things, I have
something to tell you, Giulio!”

“Raphael was beautiful,” he said, raising himself
up, unconscious of the interruption, “and Giorgione,
and Titian, both nobly formed, and Michael Angelo
had the port of an archangel! Yes, the soul inhabits
the whole body, and the sentiment of beauty moves
and quickens through it all. My tenement is cramped!—Violanta!”

“Well, dear brother!”

“Tell me your feelings when you first breathe the
air in a bright morning in spring. Do you feel graceful?
Is there a sensation of beauty? Do you lift
yourself and feel swan-like and lofty, and worthy of
the divine image in which you breathe. Tell me
truly, Violanta.”

“Yes, brother!”

“I knew it! I have a faint dream of such a feeling—a
sensation that is confined to my brain somehow
which I struggle to express in motion—but if I lift
my finger, it is gone. I watch Amieri sometimes,
when he draws. He pierces my very soul by assuming,
always, the attitude on his canvass. Violanta!
how can I stand like a statue that would please the
eye?”

“Giulio! Giulio!”

“Well, I will not burden you with my sadness.
Let us look at Biondo's nymph. Pray the Virgin he
come not in the while—for painting, by lamp-light,
shows less fairly than marble.”

He took the lamp, and while Violanta shook the
tears from her eyes, he drew out the pegs of the easel,
and lowered the picture to the light.

“Are you sure Amieri will not come in, Giulio?”
inquired his sister, looking back timidly at the door
while she advanced.

“I think he will not. The Corso is gay to night,
and his handsome face and frank carriage, win greetings,
as the diamond draws light. Look at his picture,
Violanta! With what triumph be paints! How
different from my hesitating hand! The thought that

is born in his fancy, collects instant fire in his veins
and comes prompt and proportionate to his hand. It
looks like a thing born, not wrought! How beautiful
you are, my Violanta! He has done well—brave
Biondo!”

“It is like me, yet fairer.”

“I wish it were done! There is a look on the lips
that is like a sensation I feel sometimes on my own I
almost feel as if I should straighten and grow fair as it
advances. Would it not be a blessed thing, Violanta?”

“I love you as you are, dear Giulio!”

“But I thirst to be loved like other men! I would
pass in the street and not read pity in all eyes. I
would go out like Biondo, and be greeted in the street
with `Mio bravo!' `Mio bello!' I would be beloved
by some one that is not my sister, Violanta! I would
have my share—only my share—of human joy and regard.
I were better dead than be a hunchback. I
would die, but for you—to-night—yes, to night.”

With a convulsive hand he pulled aside the curtain,
and sent a long, earnest look up to the stars. Violanta
had never before heard him give words to his melancholy
thoughts, and she felt appalled and silenced by
the inexpressible poignancy of his tones, and the feverish,
tearless, broken-heartedness of his whole manner.
As she took his hand, there was a noise in the street
below, and presently after, a hurried step was heard
on the stair, and Amieri rushed in, seized the rapier
which hung over his bed and without observing Violanta,
was flying again from the apartment.

“Biondo!” cried a voice which would have stayed
him were next breath to have been drawn in heaven.

“Contessa Violanta!”

“What is it, Amieri? Where go you now?”
asked Giulio, gliding between him and the door.
Biondo's cheek and brow had flushed when first arrested
by the voice of the countess, but now he stood
silent and with his eyes on the floor, pale as the statue
before him.

“A quarrel, Giulio!” he said at length.

“Biondo!” The countess sprang to his side with
the simple utterance of his name, and laid her small
hand on his arm. “You shall not go! You are dear
to us—dear to Guilio, Signor Amieri! If you love us
—if you care for Giulio—nay, I will say it—if you
care for me, dear Biondo, put not your life in peril.”

“Lady!” said the painter, bowing his head to his
wrist, and kissing lightly the small white fingers that
pressed it, “if I were to lose my life this hour, I should
bless with my dying lips the occasion which had drawn
from you the blessed words I hear. But the more
life is valuable to me by your regard, the more need
you should not delay me. I am waited for. Farewell!”

Disengaging himself from Violanta's grasp, quickly
but gently, Amieri darted through the door, and was
gone.

3. CHAPTER III.

Biondo had readily found a second in the first
artist he met on the Corso, and after a rapid walk
they turned on the lonely and lofty wall of the Palatine,
to look back on the ruins of the Forum.—At a
fountain side, not far beyond, he had agreed to find
his antagonist; but spite of the pressing business of
the hour, the wonderful and solemn beauty of the ruins
that lay steeped in moonlight at his feet, awoke, for
an instant, all of the painter in his soul.

“Is it not glorious, Lenzoni?” he said, pointing with
his rapier to the softened and tall columns that carried
their capitals among the stars.

“We have not come out to sketch, Amieri!” was
the reply.

“True, caro! but my fingers work as if the pencil
was in them, and I forget revenge while I see what I
shall never sketch again!”

Lenzoni struck his hand heavily on Amieri's shoulder,
as if to wake him from a dream, and looked close
into his face.

“If you fight in this spirit, Biondo—”

“I shall fight with heart and soul, Lenzoni; fear
me not! But when I saw, just now, the bel'effetto of
the sharp-drawn shadows under the arch of Constantine,
and felt instinctively for my pencil, something
told me, at my heart's ear—you will never trace line
again, Amieri!”

“Take heart, caro amico!”

My heart is ready, but my thoughts come fast!
What were my blood, I can not but reflect, added to
the ashes of Rome? We fight in the grave of an
empire! But you will not philosophize, dull Lenzoni!
Come on to the fountain!”

The moon shone soft on the greensward rim of the
neglected fountain that once sparkled through the
“gold palace” of Nero. The white edges of half-buried
marble peeped here and there from the grass,
and beneath the shadow of an ivy-covered and tottering
arch, sang a nightingale, the triumphant possessor
of life amid the forgotton ashes of the Cæsars.
Amieri listened to his song.

“You are prompt, signor!” said a gay-voiced gentleman,
turning the corner of the ruined wall, as
Biondo, still listening to the nightingale, fed his heart
with the last sweet words of Violanta.

“`Sempre pronto,' is a good device,” answered Lenzoni,
springing to his feet. “Will you fight, side to
the moon, signors, or shall we pull straws for the
choice of light?”

Amieri's antagonist was a strongly-made man of
thirty, costly in his dress, and of that class of features
eminently handsome, yet eminently displeasing. The
origin of the quarrel was an insulting observation,
coupled with the name of the young countess Cesarini,
which Biondo, who was standing in the shadow
of a wall, watching her window from the Corso, accidentally
overheard. A blow on the mouth was the
first warning the stranger received of a listener's
neighborhood, and after a momentary struggle they
exchanged cards, and separated to meet in an hour,
with swords, at the fountain, on the Palatine.

Amieri was accounted the best foil in the ateliers of
Rome, but his antagonist, the count Lamba Malaspina
had just returned from a long residence in France,
and had the reputation of an accomplished swordsman.
Amieri was slighter in person, but well-made, and
agile as a leopard; but when Lenzoni looked into the
cool eye of Malaspina, the spirit and fire which he
would have relied upon to ensure his friend success in
an ordinary contest, made him tremble now.

Count Lamba bowed, and they crossed swords.
Amieri had read his antagonist's character, like his
friend, and, at the instant their blades parted, he broke
down his guard with the quickness of lightning, and
wounded him in the face. Malaspina smiled as he
crossed his rapier again, and in the next moment
Amieri's sword flew high above his head, and the
count's was at his breast.

“Ask for your life, mio bravo!” he said, as calmly
as if they had met by chance in the Corso.

“A'morte! villain and slanderer!” cried Amieri, and
striking the sword from his bosom, he aimed a blow
at Malaspina, which by a backward movement, was
received on the point of the blade. Transfixed through
the wrist, Amieri struggled in vain against the superior
strength and coolness of his antagonist, and falling
on his knee, waited in silence for his death-blow.
Malaspina drew his sword gently as possible from the
wound, and recommending a tourniquet to Lenzoni
till a surgeon could be procured, washed the blood

from his face in the fountain, and descended into the
Forum, humming the air of a new song.

Faint with loss of blood, and with his left arm
around Lenzoni's neck, Biondo arrived at the surgeon's
door.

“Can you save his hand?” was the first eager question.

Amieri held up his bleeding wrist with difficulty,
and the surgeon shook his head as he laid the helpless
fingers in his palm. The tendon was entirely
parted.

“I may save the hand,” he said, “but he will never
use it more!”

Amieri gave his friend a look full of anguish, and
fell back insensible.

“Poor Biondo!” said Lenzoni, as he raised his
pallid head from the surgeon's pillow. “Death were
less misfortune than the loss of a hand like thine.
The foreboding was too true, alas! that thou never
wouldst use pencil more!”

4. CHAPTER IV.

The frowning battlements of St. Angelo were
brightened with the glare of lamps across the Tiber,
and the dark breast of the river was laced with bars of
gold like the coat of a captain of dragoons. Here and
there lay a boat in mid-stream, and while the drift of
the current was counteracted by an occasional stroke
at the oar, the boatman listened to the heavenly strains
of a waltz, dying and triumphing in alternate cadences
upon the breath of night and the pope's band. A
platform was built out over the river, forming a continuation
of the stage; the pit was floored over, and
all draped like a Persian harem; and thus began a
masquerade at the Teatro della Pergola at Rome,
which stands, if you will take the trouble to remember,
close by the bridge and castle of St. Angelo upon
the bank of the “yellow Tiber.”

The entrance of the crowd to the theatre was like a
procession intended to represent the things of which
we are commanded not to make graven images, nor
to bow down and worship them. There was the likeness
of everything in heaven above and on the earth
beneath, and in the waters under the earth. There
were angels, devils, serpents, birds, beasts, fishes, and
fair women—of which none except the last occasioned
much transgression of the commandment. Oddly
enough, the fishes waltzed—and so did the beasts and
fair women, the serpents and birds—pairing off as they
came within sound of the music, with a defiance of
natural antipathies which would have driven a naturalist
out of his senses.

A chariot drove up with the crest of the Cesarini
on the pannel, and out of it stepped rather a stiff figure
dressed as a wandering palmer, with serge and scallopshells,
followed by a masked hunchback whose costume,
even to the threadbare spot on the ridge of his
deformity, was approved, by the loungers at the door,
in a general “bravissimo.” They entered the dressing-room,
and the cloak-keeper was not surprised
when the lump was withdrawn in the shape of a pad
of wool, and by the aid of a hood and petticoat of
black silk, the deformed was transformed into a slender
domino, undistinguished but for the grace and elasticity
of her movements. The attendant was surprised,
however, when having stepped aside to deposite
the pad given in charge to her, she turned and saw the
domino flitting from the room, but the hunchback
with his threadbare hump still leaning on the palmer's
arm!

“Santissima Vergine!” she exclaimed, pulling out
her cross and holding it between herself and Giulio,
“the fiend—the unholy fiend!”

Donna Bettina laughed under her palmer's cowl,
and drawing Giulio's arm within her own, they mingled
in the masquerade.

The old count Cesarini arrived a few minutes after
in one of the equipages of the Malaspina, accompanied
by a red-cross knight in a magnificent armor, his
sword-hilt sparkling with diamonds, and the bars of
his visor half-drawn, yet showing a beard of jetty and
curling black, and a mouth of the most regular, yet
unpleasant beauty. The upper part of his face was
quite concealed, yet the sneer on his lips promised a
cold and unfeeling eye.

“As a hunchback, did you say, count?”

“It was her whim,” answered Cesarini. “She has
given alms to a poor sculptor with that deformity till
her brain is filled with it. Pray the saints to affect
not your offspring, Lamba!”

Malaspina surveyed himself in the long mirror at
the entrance of the saloon, and smiled back incredulously
with his white teeth.

“I gave Bettina strict orders not to leave her side,”
said Cesarini. “You will find the old donna by her
palmer's dress. The saints speed your suite, Lamba!
I will await you in the card-room when the dance
wearies you!”

It was not for some time after the two old nobles
had affianced their children, that Cesarini had found
a fitting opportunity to break the subject to his daughter.
When he did so, somewhat to his embarrassment,
Violanta listened to it without surprise; and
after hearing all he had to say upon the honorable descent,
large fortune, and courtly accomplishments of
the young count Lamba, she only permitted her father
to entertain any future hope on the subject, upon
the condition, that, till she was of age, her proposed
husband should not even be presented to her. For
this victory over the most cherished ambition of the
old count, Violanta was indebted partly to the holy
see, and partly to some qualities in her own character,
of which her father knew the force. He was aware
with what readiness the cardinal would seize upon the
slightest wish she might express to take the veil and
bring her possessions into the church, and he was
sufficiently acquainted with the qualities of a Cesarini,
not to drive one of their daughters to extremity.

With some embarrassment the old count made a
clean breast to Malaspina and his son, and was exhausting
language in regrets, when he was relieved by
an assurance from Lamba that the difficulty increased
his zest for the match, and that, with Cesarini's permission,
he would find opportunities to encounter her
in her walks as a stranger, and make his way after the
romantic taste which he supposed was alone at the bottom
of her refusal For success in this, Count Lamba
relied on his personal beauty and on that address in
the arts of adventure which is acquired by a residence
in France.

Since his duel, Amieri had been confined to his
bed with a violent fever, dangerously aggravated by
the peculiar nature of his calamity. The love of the
pencil was the breath of his soul, and in all his
thoughts of Violanta, it was only as a rival of the
lofty fame of painters who had made themselves the
companions of kings, that he could imagine himself a
claimant for her love. It seemed to him that his
nerveless hand had shut out heaven's entire light.

Giulio had watched by his friend with the faithful
fondness of a woman, and had gathered from his moments
of delirium, what Biondo had from delicacy to
Violanta never revealed to his second, Lenzoni—the
cause of his quarrel with Malaspina. Touched with
this chivalric tenderness toward his sister, the kind
Giulio hung over him with renewed affection, and
when, in subsequent ravings, the maimed youth betrayed
the real sting of his misfortune—the death of
his hopes of her love—the unambitious brother resolved

in his heart that if he could aid him by service
or sacrifice, by influence with Violanta, or by making
the almost desperate attempt to establish his own
claims to the name and fortunes of Cesarini, he would
devote himself to his service heart and soul.

During the confinement of Amieri to his room, the
young countess had of course been unable to visit her
brother, and as he scarce left the patient's side for a
moment, their intercourse for two or three weeks had
been entirely interrupted. On the first day the convalescent
youth could walk out, she had stolen to the
studio, and heard from Giulio the whole history of
the duel and its consequences. When he had finished
his narrative, Violanta sat, for a few minutes, lost in
thought.

“Giulio!” she said at last, with a gayety of tone
which startled him.

“Violanta!”

“Did you ever remark that our voices are very
much alike?”

“Biondo often says so.”

“And you have a foot almost as small as mine.”

“I have not the proportions of a man, Violanta!”

“Nay, brother, but I mean that—that—we might
pass for each other, if we were masked. Our height
is the same. Stand up, Giulio”'

“You would not mock me!” said the melancholy
youth with a faint smile, as he rose and set his bent
back beside the straight and lithe form of his sister.

“Listen to me, amato-bene!” she replied, sitting
down and drawing him upon her knee, after satisfying
himself that there was no perceptible difference in
their height. “Put your arm about my neck, and
love me while I tell you of my little plot.”

Giulio impressed a kiss upon the clear, alabaster
forehead of the beautiful girl, and looked into her face
inquiringly.

“There is to be a masquerade at La Pergola,” she
said—“a superb masquerade given to some prince!
And I am to go, Giulio mio!”

“Well,” answered the listener, sadly.

“But do you not seem surprised that I am permitted
to go! Shall I tell you the reason why papa gave me
permission?”

“If you will, Violanta!”

“A little bird told me that Malaspina means to be
there!”

“And you will go to meet him?”

“You shall go to meet him, and I —” she hesitated
and cast down the long dark fringes of her eyes;
“I will meet Biondo!”

Giulio clasped her passionately to his heart.

“I see!—I see!” he cried, springing upon his feet,
as he anticipated the remaining circumstances of the
plot. “We shall be two bunchback—they will little
think that we are two Cesarini. Dear, noble Violanta!
you will speak kindly to Biondo. Send Bettina for
the clothes, carina mia! You will get twin masks in
the Corso. And, Violanta?”

“What, Giulio?”

“Tell Bettina to breathe no word of our project to
Amieri! I will persuade him to go but to see you
dance! Poor Amieri! Dear, dear sister! Farewell
now! He will be returning, and you must be gone.
The Holy Virgin guard you, my Violanta!”

5. CHAPTER V.

The reader will long since have been reminded, by
the trouble we have to whip in and flog up the lagging
and straggling members of our story, of a flock of
sheep driven unwillingly to market. Indeed, to stop
at the confessional (as you will see many a shepherd
of the Campagna, on his way to Rome), this tale of
many tails should have been a novel. You have, in
brief, what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed
with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped
with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait
of the author. We are sacrificed to the spirit of the
age. The eighteenth century will be known in
hieroglyphics by a pair of shears. But, “to return to
our muttons.”

The masquerade went merrily on, or, if there were
more than one heavy heart among those light heels,
it was not known, as the newspapers say, “to our reporter.”
One, there certainly was—heavy as Etna on
the breast of Enceladus. Biondo Amieri sat in a corner
of the gallery, with his swathed hand laid before
him, pale as a new statue, and with a melancholy in
his soft dark eyes, which would have touched the executioners
of St. Agatha. Beside him sat Lenzoni,
who was content to forego the waltz for a while, and
keep company for pity with a friend who was too busy
with his own thoughts to give him word or look, but
still keeping sharp watch on the scene below, and
betraying by unconscious ejaculations how great a
penance he had put on himself for love and charity.

“Ah, la bella musica, Biondo!” he exclaimed
drumming on the banquette, while his friend held
up his wounded hand to escape the jar, “listen to that
waltz, that might set fire to the heels of St. Peter.
Corpo di Bacco! look at the dragon!—a dragon
making love to a nun, Amieri! Ah! San Pietro!
what a foot! Wait till I come, sweet goblin! That
a goblin's tail should follow such ankles, Biondo!
Eh! bellissimo! the knight! Look at the red-cross
knight, Amieri! and—what?—il gobbo, by St. Anthony!
and the red-cross takes him for a woman!
It is Giulio, for there never were two hunchbacks so
wondrous like! Ecco, Biondo!”

But there was little need to cry “look” to Amieri,
now. A hunchback, closely masked, and leaning on
a palmer's arm, made his way slowly through the
crowd, and a red-cross knight, a figure gallant enough
to have made a monarch jealous, whispered with courteous
and courtly deference in his ear.

“Cielo! it is she!” said Biondo, with mournful
earnestness, not heeding his companion, and laying
his hand upon his wounded wrist, as if the sight he
looked on gave it a fresher pang.

“She?” answered Lenzoni, with a laugh. “If it
is not he—not gobbo Giulio—I'll eat that cross-hilted
rapier! What `she' should it be, caro Biondo!”

“I tell thee,” said Amieri, “Giulio is asleep at the
foot of his marred statue! I left him but now, he is
too ill with his late vigils to be here—but his clothes,
I may tell thee, are borrowed by one who wears them
as you see. Look at the foot, Lenzoni!”

“A woman, true enough, if the shoe were all!
But I'll have a close look! Stay for me, dear Amieri!
I will return ere you have looked twice at them!”

And happy, with all his kind sympathy, to find a
fair apology to be free, Lenzoni leaped over the
benches and mingled in the crowd below.

Left alone, Biondo devoured with his eyes, every
movement of the group in which he was so deeply
interested, and the wound in his hand seemed burning
with a throb of fire, while he tried in vain to defect,
in the manner of the hunchback, that coyness
which might show, even through a mask, dislike or
indifference. There was even, he thought (and he
delivered his soul over to Apollyon in the usual phrase
for thinking such ill of such an angel); there was
even in her manner a levity and freedom of gesture
for which the mask she wore should be no apology.
He was about to curse Malaspina for having spared
his life at the fountain, when some one jumped lightly
over the seat, and took a place beside him. It was
a female in a black domino, closely masked, and
through the pasteboard mouth protruded the bit of

ivory, commonly held in the teeth by maskers, to disguise
the voice.

“Good evening to you, fair signor!”

“Good even to you, lady!”

“I am come to share your melancholy, signor!”

“I have none to give away unless you will take all;
and just now, my fair one, it is rather anger than sadness.
If it please you, leave me!”

“What if I am more pleased to stay!”

“Briefly, I would be alone. I am not of the festa.
I but look on, here!” And Biondo turned his shoulder
to the mask, and fixed his eyes again on the hunchback,
who having taken the knight's arm, was talking
and promenading most gayly between him and the
palmer.

“You have a wounded hand, signor!” resumed his
importunate neighbor.

“A useless one, lady. Would it were well!”

“Signor Melancholy, repine not against providence.
I that am no witch, tell thee that thou wilt yet bless
Heaven that this hand is disabled.”

Biondo turned and looked at the bold prophetess,
but her disguise was impenetrable.

“You are a masker, lady, and talk at random!”

“No! I will tell you the thought uppermost in your
bosom!”

“What is it?”

“A longing for a pluck at the red-cross, yonder!”

“True, by St. Mary!” said Biondo, starting energetically:
“but you read it in my eyes!”

“I have told you your first thought, signor, and I will
give you a hint of the second Is there a likeness
between a nymph on canvass, and a gobbo in a mask!”

“Giulio!” exclaimed Amieri, turning suddenly
round; but the straight back of the domino met his
eye, and totally bewildered, he resumed his seat, and
slowly perused the stranger from head to foot.

“Talk to me as if my mask were the mirror of your
soul, Amieri,” said the soft but disguised voice.
“You need sympathy in this mood, and I am your
good angel. Is your wrist painful to-night?”

“I can not talk to you,” he said, turning to resume
his observation on the scene below. “If you know
the face beneath the gobbo's mask, you know the
heaven from which I am shut out. But I must gaze
on it still.”

“Is it a woman?”

“No! an angel.”

“And encourages the devil in the shape of Malaspina?
You miscall her, Amieri!”

The answer was interrupted by Lenzoni, who ran
into the gallery, but seeing his friend beset by a mask,
he gave him joy of his good luck, and refusing to interrupt
the tête-à-tête, disappeared with a laugh.

“Brave, kind Lenzoni!” said the stranger.

“Are you his good angel, too?” asked Amieri,
surprised again at the knowledge so mysteriously displayed.

“No! Little as you know of me you would not be
willing to share me with another! Say, Amieri! love
you the gobbo on the knight's arm?”

“You have read me riddles less clear, my fair incognita!
I would die at morn but to say farewell to
her at midnight!”

“Do you despair of her love?”

“Do I despair of excelling Raphael with these
unstrung fingers? I never hoped—but in my dreams,
lady!”

“Then hope, waking! For as there is truth in
heaven, Violanta Cesarini loves you, Biondo!”

Laying his left hand sternly on the arm of the
stranger, Biondo raised his helpless wrist and pointed
toward the hunchback, who, seated by the red-cross
knight, played with the diamond cross of his sword-hilt,
while the palmer turned his back, as if to give
two lovers an opportunity.

With a heart overwhelmed with bitterness, he then
turned to the mocking incognito. Violanta sat beside
him!

Holding her mask between her and the crowd below,
the maiden blush mounted to her temples, and
the long sweeping lashes dropped over her eyes their
veiling and silken fringes. And while the red-cross
knight still made eloquent love to Giulio in the saloon
of the masquerade, Amieri and Violanta, in their unobserved
retreat, exchanged vows, faint and choked
with emotion on his part, but all hope, encouragement,
and assurance, on hers

6. CHAPTER VI.

“Will you waltz?” said a merry-voiced domino
to the red-cross knight, a few minutes after tapping
him smartly on the corslet with her black fan, and
pointing, for the first step, a foot that would have
tempted St. Anthony.

“By the mass!” answered Malaspina, “I should
pay an ill compliment to the sweetest voice that ever
enchanted human ear” (and he bowed low to Guilio),
“did I refuse invitation so sweetly toned. Yet my
Milan armor is not light!”

“I have been refusing his entreaties this hour,”
said Giulio, as the knight whirled away with Violanta,
“for though I can chatter like a woman, I should
dance like myself. He is not unwilling to show his
grace to `his lady-mistress!' Ha! ha! It is worth
while to sham the petticoat for once to see what fools
men are when they would please a woman! But,
close mask! Here comes the count Cesarini!”

“How fares my child?” said the old noble, leaning
over the masked Giulio, and touching with his lips the
glossy curl which concealed his temple. Are you
amused, idolo mio?”

A sudden tremor shot through the frame of poor
Giulio at the first endearment ever addressed to his
ear by the voice of a parent. The tears coursed down
under his mask, and for all answer to the question, he
could only lay his small soft hand in his father's and
return his pressure with irresistible strength and emotion.

“You are not well, my child!” he said, surprised at
not receiving an answer, “this ugly hump oppresses
you! Come to the air! So—lean on me, caro tesoro!
We will remove the hump presently. A Cesarini with
a hump indeed! Straighten yourself, my life, my
child, and you will breathe more freely!”

Thus entered, at one wound, daggers and balm into
the heart of the deformed youth; and while Bettina,
trembling in every limb, grew giddy with fear as they
made their way through the crowd, Giulio, relieved
by his tears, nerved himself with a strong effort and
prepared to play out his difficult part with calmness.

They threaded slowly the crowded maze of waltzers,
and, emerging from the close saloons, stood at last in
the gallery overhanging the river. The moon was
rising, and touched with a pale light the dark face of
the Tiber; the music came faintly out to the night
air, and a fresh west wind, cool and balmy from the
verdant campagna, breathed softly through the lattices.

Refusing a chair, Giulio leaned over the balustrade,
and the count stood by his side and encircled his waist
with his arm.

“I can not bear this deformity, my Violanta!” he
said, “you look so unlike my child with it; I need
this little hand to reassure me.”

“Should you know that was my hand, father?” said
Giulio.

“Should I not! I have told you a thousand times
that the nails of a Cesarini were marked—let me see

you again—by the arch of this rosy line! See, my
little Gobbo! They are like four pink fairy shells of
India laid over rolled leaves of roses. What was the
poet's name who said that of the old countess Giulia
Cesarini—la bella Giulia?”

“Should you have known my voice, father?” asked
Giulio, evading the question.

“Yes, my darling, why ask me?”

“But, father!—if I had been stolen by brigands
from the cradle—or you had not seen me for many,
many years—and I had met you to-night as a gobbo
and had spoken to you—only in sport—and had
called you `father, dear father!' should you have
known my voice? would you have owned me for a
Cesarini?”

“Instantly, my child!”

“But suppose my back had been broken—suppose
I were a gobbo—a deformed hunchback indeed, indeed—but
had still nails with a rosy arch, and the
same voice with which I speak to you now—and
pressed your hand thus—and loved you—would you
disown me, father?”

Giulio had raised himself while he spoke, and taken
his hand from his father's with a feeling that life or
death would be in his answer to that question. Cesarini
was disturbed, and did not reply for a moment.

“My child!” said he at last, “there is that in your
voice that would convince me you are mine, against
all the evidence in the universe. I can not imagine
the dreadful image you have conjured up, for the
Cesarini are beautiful and straight by long inheritance.
But if a monster spoke to me thus, I should love
him! Come to my bosom, my blessed child! and
dispel those wild dreams! Come, Violanta!”

Giulio attempted to raise his arms to his father's
neck, but the strength that had sustained him so well,
began to ebb from him. He uttered some indistinct
words, lifted his hand to his mask as if to remove it
for breath, and sunk slowly to the floor.

“It is your son, my lord!” cried Bettina. “Lift
him, Count Cesarini! Lift your child to the air before
he dies!”

She tore off his mask and disclosed to the thunder-stricken
count the face of the stranger! As he stood
pale and aghast, too much confounded for utterance or
action, the black domino tripped into the gallery, followed
by the red-cross knight, panting under his armor.

“Giulio! my own Giulio!” cried Violanta, throwing
herself on her knees beside her pale and insensible
brother, and covering his forehead and lips with kisses.
“Is he hurt? Is he dead? Water! for the love
of Heaven! Will no one bring water?” And tearing
away her own mask, she lifted him from the
ground, and, totally regardless of the astonished group
who looked on in petrified silence, fanned and caressed
him into life and consciousness.

“Come away, Violanta!” said her father at last, in
a hoarse voice.

“Never, my father! he is our own blood! How
feel you now, Giulio?”

“Better, sweet! where is Biondo?”

“Near by! But you shall go home with me.
Signor Malaspina, as you hope for my favor, lend my
brother an arm. Bettina, call up the chariot. Nay,
father! he goes home with me, or I with him, we
never part more!”

The red-cross knight gave Giulio an arm, and leaning
on him and Violanta, the poor youth made his
way to the carriage. Amieri sat at the door, and received
only a look as she passed, and helping Giulio
tenderly in, she gave the order to drive swiftly home,
and in a few minutes they entered together the palace
of their common inheritance.

It would be superfluous to dwell on the incidents
of the sequel, which were detailed in the Diario di
Roma, and are known to all the world. The hunchback
Count Cesarini has succeeded his father in his
title and estates, and is beloved of all Rome. The
next heir to the title is a son (now two years of age)
of the countess Amieri, who is to take the name of
Cesarini on coming to his majority. They live together
in the old palazzo, and all strangers go to see
their gallery of pictures, of which none are bad, except
some well intended but not very felicitously executed
compositions by one Lenzoni.

Count Lamba Malaspina is at present in exile, having
been convicted of drawing a sword on a disabled gentleman,
on his way from a masquerade at la Pergola.
His seclusion is rendered the more tolerable by the
loss of his teeth, which were rudely thrust down his
throat by this same Lenzoni (fated to have a finger in
every pie) in defence of the attacked party on that occasion.
You will hear Lenzoni's address (should you
wish to purchase a picture of his painting) at the Caffé
del Gioco, opposite the trattoria of La Bella Donna
in the Corso.

PASQUALI, THE TAILOR OF VENICE.

1. CHAPTER I.

Giannino Pasquali was a smart tailor some five
years ago, occupying a cool shop on one of the smaller
canals of Venice. Four pairs of suspenders, a print
of the fashions, and a motley row of the gay-colored
trousers worn by the gondoliers, ornamented the window
looking on the dark alley in the rear, and, attached
to the post of the water-gate on the canal side,
floated a small black gondola, the possession of which
afforded the same proof of prosperity of the Venetian
tailor which is expressed by a horse and buggy at the
door of a snip in London. The place-seeking traveller,
who, nez en l'air, threaded the tangled labyrinth
of alleys and bridges between the Rialto and St.
Mark's, would scarce have observed the humble shop-window
of Pasquali, yet he had a consequence on the
Piazza, and the lagoon had seen his triumphs as an
amateur gondolier. Giannino was some thirty years
of age, and his wife Fiametta, whom he had married
for her zecchini, was on the shady side of fifty.

If the truth must be told, Pasquali had discovered
that, even with a bag of sequins for eye-water, Fiametta
was not always the most lovely woman in
Venice. Just across the canal lived old Donna
Bentoccata, the nurse, whose daughter Turturilla
was like the blonde in Titian's picture of the Marys;
and to the charms of Turturilla, even seen through
the leaden light of poverty, the unhappy Pasquali was
far from insensible.

The festa of San Antonio arrived after a damp week
of November, and though you would suppose the atmosphere
of Venice not liable to any very sensible increase
of moisture, Fiametta, like people who live on
land, and who have the rheumatism as a punishment
for their age and ugliness, was usually confined to her
brazero of hot coals till it was dry enough on the Lido
for the peacocks to walk abroad. On this festa, however,
San Antonio being, as every one knows, the
patron saint of Padua, the Padovese were to come
down the Brenta, as was their custom, and cross over
the sea to Venice to assist in the celebration; and
Fiametta once more thought Pasquali loved her for
herself alone when he swore by his rosary that unless
she accompanied him to the festa in her wedding dress,
he would not turn an oar in the race, nor unfasten his
gondola from the door-post. Alas! Fiametta was

married in the summer solstice, and her dress was
permeable to the wind as a cobweb or gossamer. Is
it possible you could have remembered that, oh, wicked
Pasquali?

It was a day to puzzle a barometer; now bright,
now rainy; now gusty as a corridor in a novel, and
now calm as a lady after a fit of tears. Pasquali was
up early and waked Fiametta with a kiss, and, by way
of unusual tenderness, or by way of ensuring the wedding
dress, he chose to play dressing maid, and arranged
with his own hands her jupon and fezzoletta.
She emerged from her chamber looking like a slice
of orange-peel in a flower-bed, but smiling and nodding,
and vowing the day warm as April, and the sky
without a cloud. The widening circles of an occasional
drop of rain in the canal were nothing but the
bubbles bursting after a passing oar, or perhaps the last
flies of summer. Pasquali swore it was weather to win
down a peri.

As Fiametta stepped into the gondola, she glanced
her eyes over the way and saw Turturilla, with a face
as sorrowful as the first day in Lent, seated at her
window. Her lap was full of work, and it was quite
evident that she had not thought of being at the festa.
Fiametta's heart was already warm, and it melted quite
at the view of the poor girl's loneliness.

“Pasquali mio!” she said, in a deprecating tone,
as if she were uncertain how the proposition would
be received, “I think we could make room for poor
Turturilla!”

A gleam of pleasure, unobserved by the confiding
sposa, tinted faintly the smooth olive cheek of Pasquali.

“Eh! diavolo!” he replied, so loud that the sorrowful
seamstress heard, and hung down her head
still lower; “must you take pity on every cheese-paring
of a regezza who happens to have no lover!
Have reason! have reason! The gondola is narrower
than your brave heart my fine Fiametta!” And away
he pushed from the water-steps.

Turturilla rose from her work and stepped out upon
the rusty gratings of the balcony to see them depart.
Pasquali stopped to grease the notch of his oar, and
between that and some other embarrassments, the
gondola was suffered to float directly under her
window. The compliment to the generous nature
of Fiametta, was, meantime, working, and as she was
compelled to exchange a word or two with Turturilla
while her husband was getting his oar into the socket,
it resulted (as he thought it very probable it would),
in the good wife's renewing her proposition, and making
a point of sending the deserted girl for her holy-day
bonnet. Pasquali swore through all the saints
and angels by the time she had made herself ready,
though she was but five minutes gone from the window,
and telling Fiametta in her ear that she must consider
it as the purest obligation, he backed up to the steps of
old Donna Bentoccata, helped in her daughter with a
better grace than could have been expected, and with
one or two short and deep strokes, put forth into the
grand canal with the velocity of a lance-fly.

A gleam of sunshine lay along the bosom of the
broad silver sheet, and it was beautiful to see the
gondolas with their gay colored freights all hastening
in one direction, and with swift track to the festa.
Far up and down they rippled the smooth water, here
gliding out from below a palace-arch, there from a narrow
and unseen canal, the steel beaks curved and flashing,
the water glancing on the oar-blades, the curtains
moving, and the fair women of Venice leaning out and
touching hands as they neared neighbor or acquaintance
in the close-pressing gondolas. It was a beautiful
sight, indeed, and three of the happiest hearts in
that swift gliding company were in Pasquali's gondola,
though the bliss of Fiametta, I am compelled to say,
was entirely owing to the bandage with which love is
so significantly painted. Ah! poor Fiametta!

From the Lido, from Fusina, from under the Bridge
of Sighs, from all quarters of the lagoon, and from all
points of the floating city of Venice, streamed the flying
gondolas to the Giudecca. The narrow walk
along the edge of the long and close-built island was
thronged with booths and promenaders, and the black
barks by hundreds bumped their steel noses against
the pier as the agitated water rose and fell beneath
them. The gondolas intended for the race pulled
slowly up and down, close to the shore, exhibiting
their fairy-like forms and their sinewy and gayly dressed
gondoliers to the crowds on land and water; the
bands of music, attached to different parties, played
here and there a strain; the criers of holy pictures
and gingerbread made the air vocal with their lisping
and soft Venetian; and all over the scene, as if it was
the light of the sky or some other light as blessed but
less common, shone glowing black eyes, black as
night, and sparkling as the stars on night's darkest
bosom. He who thinks lightly of Italian beauty
should have seen the women of Venice on St. Antonio's
day '32, or on any or at any hour when their
pulses are beating high and their eyes alight—for they
are neither one nor the other always. The women
of that fair clime, to borrow the simile of Moore, are
like lava-streams, only bright when the volcano kindles.
Their long lashes cover lustreless eyes, and their blood
shows dully through the cheek in common and listless
hours. The calm, the passive tranquillity in which
the delicate graces of colder climes find their element
are to them a torpor of the heart when the blood scarce
seems to flow. They are wakeful only to the energetic,
the passionate, the joyous movements of the
soul.

Pasquali stood erect in the prow of his gondola, and
stole furtive glances at Turturilla while he pointed
away with his finger to call off the sharp eyes of Fiametta;
but Fiametta was happy and unsuspicious.
Only when now and then the wind came up chilly
from the Adriatic, the poor wife shivered and sat
closer to Turturilla, who in her plainer but thicker
dress, to say nothing of younger blood, sat more comfortably
on the black cushion and thought less about
the weather. An occasional drop of rain fell on the
nose of poor Fiametta, but if she did not believe it was
the spray from Pasquali's oar, she at least did her best
to believe so; and the perfidious tailor swore by St.
Anthony that the clouds were as dry as her eyelashes.
I never was very certain that Turturilla was not in the
secret of this day's treacheries.

The broad centre of the Giudecca was cleared, and
the boats took their places for the race. Pasquali
ranged his gondola with those of the other spectators,
and telling Fiametta in her ear that he should sit on
the other side of Turturilla as a punishment for their
malapropos invitation, he placed himself on the small
remainder of the deep cushion on the farthest side
from his now penitent spouse, and while he complained
almost rudely of the narrowness of his seat, he
made free to hold on by Turturilla's waist which no
doubt made the poor girl's mind more easy on the
subject of her intrusion.

Who won and who lost the race, what was the
device of each flag, and what bets and bright eyes
changed owners by the result, no personage of this
tale knew or cared, save Fiametta. She looked on
eagerly. Pasquali and Turturilla, as the French say,
trouvaient autress chats á frottér.

After the decision of the grand race, St. Antonio
being the protector, more particularly of the humble
(“patron of pigs” in the saints' calendar), the seignoria
and the grand people generally, pulled away for St.
Mark's, leaving the crowded Giudecca to the people.
Pasquali, as was said before, had some renown as a
gondolier. Something what would be called in other
countries a scrub race, followed the departure of the

winning boat, and several gondolas, holding each one
person only, took their places for the start. The
tailor laid his hand on his bosom, and, with the smile
that had first stirred the heart and the sequins of
Fiametta, begged her to gratify his love by acting as
his make-weight while he turned an oar for the pig of
St. Antonio. The prize roasted to an appetizing
crisp, stood high on a platter in front of one of the
booths on shore, and Fiametta smacked her lips,
overcame her tears with an effort, and told him, in
accents as little as possible like the creak of a dry oar
in the socket, that he might set Turturilla on shore.

A word in her ear, as he handed her over the gunwale,
reconciled Bonna Bentoccata's fair daughter to
this conjugal partiality, and stripping his manly figure
of its upper disguises, Pasquali straightened out his
fine limbs, and drove his bark to the line in a style that
drew applause from even his competitors. As a mark
of their approbation, they offered him an outside place
where his fair dame would be less likely to be spattered
with the contending oars; but he was too generous
to take advantage of this considerate offer, and crying
out as he took the middle, “ben pronto, signori!” gave
Fiametta a confident look and stood like a hound in
the leash.

Off they went at the tap of the drum, poor Fiametta
holding her breath and clinging to the sides of the
gondola, and Pasquali developing skill and muscle—
not for Fiametta's eyes only. It was a short, sharp
race, without jockeying or management, all fair play
and main strength, and the tailor shot past the end of
the Giudecca a boat's length ahead. Much more applauded
than a king at a coronation or a lord-mayor
taking water at London stairs, he slowly made his way
back to Turturilla, and it was only when that demure
damsel rather shrunk from sitting down in two inches
of water, that he discovered how the disturbed element
had quite filled up the hollow of the leather cushion
and made a peninsula of the uncomplaining Fiametta.
She was as well watered, as a favorite plant in a flowergarden.

“Pasquali mio!” she said in an imploring tone,
holding up the skirt of her dress with the tips of her
thumb and finger, “could you just take me home
while I change my dress.”

“One moment, Fiametta cara! they are bringing
the pig!”

The crisp and succulent trophy was solemnly placed
in the prow of the victor's gondola, and preparation
was made to convoy him home with a triumphant
procession. A half hour before it was in order to
move—an hour in first making the circuit of the grand
canal, and an hour more in drinking a glass and exchanging
good wishes at the stairs of the Rialto, and
Donna Fiametta had sat too long by two hours and a
half with scarce a dry thread on her body. What
afterward befell will be seen in the more melancholy
sequel.

2. CHAPTER II.

The hospital of St. Girolamo is attached to the
convent of that name, standing on one of the canals
which put forth on the seaward side of Venice. It is
a long building, with its low windows and latticed
doors opening almost on the level of the sea, and the
wards for the sick are large and well aired; but, except
when the breeze is stirring, impregnated with a
saline dampness from the canal, which, as Pasquali
remarked, was good for the rheumatism. It was not
so good for the patient.

The loving wife Fiametta grew worse and worse
after the fatal festa, and the fit of rheumatism brought
on by the slightness of her dress and the spattering he
had given her in the race, bad increased by the end of
the week, to a rhenmatic fever. Fiametta was old
and tough, however, and struggled manfully (woman
as she was) with the disease, but being one night a
little out of her head, her loving husband took occasion
to shudder at the responsibility of taking care of
her, and jumping into his gondola, he pulled across to
St. Girolamo and bespoke a dry bed and a sister of
charity, and brought back the pious father Gasparo
and a comfortable litter. Fiametta was dozing when
they arrived, and the kind-hearted tailor willing to
spare her the pain of knowing that she was on her way
to the hospital for the poor, set out some meat and
wine for the monk, and sending over for Turturilla
and the nurse to mix the salad, they sat and ate away
the hours till the poor dame's brain should be wandering
again.

Toward night the monk and Dame Bentoccata were
comfortably dozing with each other's support (having
fallen asleep at table), and Pasquali with a kiss from
Turturilla, stole softly up stairs. Fiametta was mutturing
unquietly, and working her fingers in the palms
of her hands, and on feeling her pulse he found the
fever was at its height. She took him, besides, for the
prize pig of the festa, for he knew her wits were fairly
abroad. He crept down stairs, gave the monk a strong
cup of coffee to get him well awake, and, between the
four of them, they got poor Fiametta into the litter,
drew the curtains tenderly around and deposited her
safely in the bottom of the gondola.

Lightly and smoothly the winner of the pig pulled
away with his loving burden, and gliding around the
slimy corners of the palaces, and hushing his voice
as he cried out “right!” or “left!” to guard the
coming gondoliers of his vicinity, he arrived, like a
thought of love to a maid's mind in sleep, at the door
of St. Girolamo. The abbess looked out and said,
“Benedicite!” and the monk stood firm on his brown
sandals to receive the precious burden from the arms
of Pasquali. Believing firmly that it was equivalent
to committing her to the hand of St. Peter, and of
course abandoning all hope of seeing her again in
this world, the soft-hearted tailor wiped his eye as
she was lifted in, and receiving a promise from Father
Gasparo that he would communicate faithfully the
state of her soul in the last agony, he pulled, with
lightened gondola and heart, back to his widower's
home and Turturilla.

For many good reasons, and apparent as good, it is
a rule in the hospital of St. Girolamo, that the sick
under its holy charge shall receive the visit of neither
friend nor relative. If they recover, they return to
their abodes to earn candles for the altar of the restoring
saint. If they die, their clothes are sent to their
surviving friends, and this affecting memorial, besides
communicating the melancholy news, affords all the
particulars and all the consolation they are supposed
to require upon the subject of their loss.

Waiting patiently for Father Gasparo and his bundle,
Pasquali and Turturilla gave themselves up to hopes,
which on the tailor's part (we fear it must be admitted),
augured a quicker recovery from grief than might be
credited to an elastic constitution. The fortune of
poor Fiametta was sufficient to warrant Pasquali in
neglecting his shop to celebrate every festa that the
church acknowledged, and for ten days subsequent to
the committal of his wife to the tender mercies of St.
Girolamo, five days out of seven was the proportion of
merry holydays with his new betrothed.

They were sitting one evening in the open piazza
of St. Mark, in front of the most thronged cafe of
that matchless square. The moon was resting her
silver disk on the point of the Campanile, and the
shadows of thousands of gay Venetians fell on the
immense pavement below, clear and sharply drawn
as a black cartoon. The four extending sides of the

square lay half in shades half in light, with their
innumerable columns and balconies and sculptured
walk, and, frowning down on all, in broken light and
shadow, stood the arabesque structure of St. Mark's
itself dizzying the eyes with its mosaics and confused
devices, and thrusting forth the heads of her four
golden-collared steeds into the moonbeams, till they
looked on that black relief, like the horses of Pluto
issuing from the gates of Hades. In the centre of
the square stood a tall woman, singing, in rich contralto,
an old song of the better days of Venice; and
against one of the pillars, Polichinello had backed
his wooden stage, and beat about his puppets with
an energy worthy of old Dandolo and his helmeted
galley-men. To those who wore not the spectacles
of grief or discontent, the square of St. Mark's that
night was like some cozening tableau. I never saw
anything so gay.

Everybody who has “swam in a gondola,” knows
how the cafés of Venice thrust out their checkered
awnings over a portion of the square, and filled the
shaded space below with chairs and marble tables.
In a corner of the shadow thus afforded, with ice and
coffee on a small round slab between them, and the
flat pavement of the public promenade under their feet,
sat our two lovers. With neither hoof nor wheel to
drown or interrupt their voices (as in cities whose
streets are stones, not water), they murmured their
hopes and wishes in the softest language under the
sun, and with the sotto voce acquired by all the inhabitants
of this noiseless city. Turturilla had taken ice to
cool her and coffee to take off the chill of her ice, and
a bicchiere del perfello amore to reconcile these two
antagonists in her digestion, when the slippers of a
monk glided by, and in a moment the recognised
Father Gasparo made a third in the shadowy corner.
The expected bundle was under his arm, and he was
on his way to Pasquali's dwelling. Having assured
the disconsolate tailor that she had unction and wafer
as became the wife of a citizen of Venice like himself,
he took heart and grew content that she was in heaven.
It was a better place, and Turturilla for so little as a
gold ring, would supply her place in his bosom.

The moon was but a brief week older when Pasquali
and Turturilla stood in the church of our lady
of grief, and Father Gasparo within the palings of the
altar. She was as fair a maid as ever bloomed in the
garden of beauty beloved of Titian, and the tailor was
nearer worth nine men to look at, than the fraction of
a man considered usually the exponent of his profession.
Away mumbled the good father upon the matrimonial
service, thinking of the old wine and rich
pastries that were holding their sweetness under cork
and crust only till he had done his ceremony, and
quicker by some seconds than had ever been achieved
before by priest or bishop, he arrived at the putting on
of the ring. His hand was tremulous, and (oh unlucky
omen!) he dropped it within the gilden fence
of the chancel. The choristers were called, and
Father Gasparo dropped on his knees to look for it—
but if the devil had not spirited it away, there was no
other reason why that search was in vain. Short of
an errand to the goldsmith on the Rialto, it was at
last determined the wedding could not proceed. Father
Gasparo went to hide his impatience within the
restiary, and Turturilla knelt down to pray against the
arts of Sathanas. Before they had settled severally
to their pious occupations, Pasquali was half way to
the Rialto.

Half an hour elapsed, and then instead of the light
grazing of a swift-sped gondola along the church
stairs, the splash of a sullen oar was heard, and Pasquali
stepped on shore. They had hastened to the
door to receive him—monk, choristers and bride—
and to their surprise and bewilderment, he waited to
hand out a woman in a strange dress, who seemed dis
posed, bridegroom as he was, to make him wait her
leisure. Her clothes fitted her ill, and she carried in
her hand a pair of shoes, it was easy to see were never
made for her. She rose at last, and as her face became
visible, down dropped Turturilla and the pious
father, and motionless and aghast stood the simple
Pasquali. Fiametta stepped on shore!

In broken words Pasquali explained. He had
landed at the stairs near the fish market, and with two
leaps reaching the top, sped off past the buttress in
the direction of the goldsmith, when his course was
arrested by encountering at full speed, the person of
an old woman. Hastily raising her up, he recognised
his wife, who, fully recovered, but without a gondola,
was threading the zig-zag alleys on foot, on her way
to her own domicil. After the first astonishment was
over, her dress explained the error of the good father
and the extent of his own misfortune. The clothes
had been hung between the bed of Fiametta and that
of a smaller woman who had been long languishing
of a consumption. She died, and Fiametta's clothes,
brought to the door by mistake, were recognised by
Father Gasparo and taken to Pasquali.

The holy monk, chop-fallen and sad, took his solitary
way to the convent, but with the first step he felt
something slide into the heel of his sandal. He sat
down on the church stairs and absolved the devil from
theft—it was the lost ring, which had fallen upon his
foot and saved Pasquali the tailor from the pains of
bigamy.

THE BANDIT OF AUSTRIA.

—La Bruyere.

Fast and rebukingly rang the matins from the
towers of St. Etienne, and, though unused to wake,
much less to pray, at that sunrise hour, I felt a compunctious
visiting as my postillion cracked his whip
and flew past the sacred threshold, over which tripped,
as if every stroke would be the last, the tardy yet
light-footed mass-goers of Vienna. It was my first
entrance into this Paris of Germany, and I stretched
my head from the window to look back with delight
upon the fretted gothic pile, so cumbered with ornament,
yet so light and airy—so vast in the area it
covered, yet so crusted in every part with delicate device
and sculpture. On sped the merciless postillion,
and the next moment we rattled into the court-yard of
the hotel.

I gave my keys to the most faithful and intelligent
of valets—an English boy of sixteen, promoted from
white top-boots and a cabriolet in London, to a plain
coat and almost his master's friendship upon the continent—and
leaving him to find rooms to my taste,
make them habitable and get breakfast, I retraced my
way to ramble a half hour through the aisles of St.
Etienne.

The lingering bell was still beating its quick and
monotonous call, and just before me, followed closely
by a female domestic, a veiled and slightly-formed lady
stepped over the threshold of the cathedral, and took
her way by the least-frequented aisle to the altar. I
gave a passing glance of admiration at the small ankle
and dainty chaussure betrayed by her hurried step;
but remembering with a slight effort that I had sought

the church with at least some feeble intentions of religious
worship, I crossed the broad nave to the opposite
side, and was soon leaning against a pillar, and
listening to the heavenly-breathed music of the voluntary,
with a confused, but I trust, not altogether unprofitable
feeling of devotion.

The peasants, with their baskets standing beside
them on the tesselated floor, counted their beads upon
their knees; the murmur, low-toned and universal,
rose through the vibrations of the anthem with an accompaniment
upon which I have always thought the
great composers calculated, no less than upon the
echoing arches, and atmosphere thickened with incense;
and the deep-throated priest muttered his
Latin prayer, more edifying to me that it left my
thoughts to their own impulses of worship, undemeaned
by the irresistible littleness of criticism, and
unchecked by the narrow bounds of another's comprehension
of the Divinity. Without being in any
leaning of opinion a son of the church of Rome, I
confess my soul gets nearer to heaven; and my religious
tendencies, dulled and diverted from improvement
by a life of travel and excitement, are more
gratefully ministered to, in the indistinct worship of
the catholics. It seems to me that no man can pray
well through the hesitating lips of another. The
inflated style or rhetorical efforts of many, addressing
Heaven with difficult grammar and embarrassed
logic—and the weary monotony of others, repeating
without interest and apparently without
thought, the most solemn appeals to the mercy of
the Almighty—are imperfect vehicles, at least to
me, for a fresh and apprehensive spirit of worship.
The religious architecture of the catholics favors the
solitary prayer of the heart. The vast floor of the
cathedral, the far receding aisles with their solemn
light, to which penetrate only the indistinct murmur
of priest and penitent, and the affecting wail or triumphant
hallelujah of the choir; the touching attitudes
and utter abandonment of all around to their
unarticulated devotions; the freedom to enter and depart,
unquestioned and unnoticed, and the wonderful
impressiveness of the lofty architecture, clustered
with mementoes of death, and presenting through
every sense, some unobtrusive persuasion to the duties
of the spot—all these, I can not but think, are aids,
not unimportant to devout feeling, nor to the most
careless keeper of his creed and conscience, entirely
without salutary use.

My eye had been resting unconsciously on the
drapery of a statue, upon which the light of a painted
oriel window threw the mingled dyes of a peacock.
It was the figure of an apostle; and curious at last to
see whence the colors came which turned the saintly
garb into a mantle of shot silk, I strayed toward the
eastern window, and was studying the gorgeous dyes
and grotesque drawing of an art lost to the world, when
I discovered that I was in the neighborhood of the
pretty figure that had tripped into church so lightly
before me. She knelt near the altar, a little forward
from one of the heavy gothic pillars, with her maid
beside her, and, close behind knelt a gentleman, who
I observed at a second glance, was paying his devotions
exclusively to the small foot that peeped from
the edge of a snowy peignoir, the dishabille of which
was covered and betrayed by a lace-veil and mantle.
As I stood thinking what a graceful study her figure
would make for a sculptor, and what an irreligious impertinence
was visible in the air of the gentleman behind,
he leaned forward as if to prostrate his face upon
the pavement, and pressed his lips upon the slender
sole of (I have no doubt) the prettiest shoe in Vienna.
The natural aversion which all men have for each
other as strangers, was quickened in my bosom by a
feeling much more vivid, and said to be quite as natural—resentment
at any demonstration by another of
preference for the woman one has admired. If I have
not mistaken human nature, there is a sort of imaginary
property which every man feels in a woman he has
looked upon with even the most transient regard,
which is violated malgré lui, by a similar feeling on
the part of any other individual.

Not sure that the gentleman, who had so suddenly
become my enemy, had any warrant in the lady's connivance
for his attentions, I retreated to the shelter
of the pillar, and was presently satisfied that he was as
much a stranger to her as myself, and was decidedly
annoying her. A slight advance in her position to
escape his contact gave me the opportunity I wished,
and stepping upon the small space between the skirt
of her dress and the outpost of his ebony cane, I began
to study the architecture of the roof with great seriousness.
The gothic order, it is said, sprang from the
first attempts at constructing roofs from the branches
of trees, and is more perfect as it imitates more closely
the natural wilderness with its tall tree-shafts and interlacing
limbs. With my eyes half shut I endeavored
to transport myself to an American forest, and convert
the beams and angles of this vast gothic structure
into a primitive temple of pines, with the sunshine
coming brokingly through; but the delusion, otherwise
easy enough, was destroyed by the cherubs roosting
on the cornices, and the apostles and saints perched
as it were in the branches; and, spite of myself, I
thought it represented best Shylock's “wilderness of
monkeys.”

“S'il vous plait, monsieur!” said the gentleman,
pulling me by the pantaloons as I was losing myself
in these ill-timed speculations.

I looked down.

“Vous me génez, monsiêur!”

“J'en suis bien sure, monsieur!”—and I resumed my
study of the roof, turning gradually round till my heels
were against his knees, and backing peu-à-peu.

It has often occurred to me as a defect in the system
of civil justice, that the time of the day at which a
crime is committed is never taken into account by judge
or jury. The humors of an empty stomach act so energetically
on the judgment and temper of a man, and
the same act appears so differently to him, fasting and
full, that I presume an inquiry into the subject would
prove that few offences against law and human pity
were ever perpetrated by villains who had dined. In
the adventure before us, the best-disposed reader will
condemn my interference in a stranger's gallantries as
impertinent and quixotic. Later in the day, I should
as soon have thought of ordering water-cresses for the
gentleman's dindon aux truffes.

I was calling myself to account something after the
above fashion, the gentleman in question standing near
me, drumming on his boot with his ebony cane, when
the lady rose, threw her rosary over her neck, and
turning to me with a graceful smile, courtesied slightly
and disappeared. I was struck so exceedingly with
the intense melancholy in the expression of the face—
an expression so totally at variance with the elasticity
of the step, and the promise of the slight and riante
figure and air—that I quite forgot I had drawn a
quarrel on myself, and was loitering slowly toward the
door of the church, when the gentleman I had offended
touched me on the arm, and in the politest manner
possible requested my address. We exchanged cards,
and I hastened home to breakfast, musing on the
facility with which the current of our daily life may be
thickened. I fancied I had a new love on my hands,
and I was tolerably sure of a quarrel—yet I had been
in Vienna but fifty-four minutes by Bréguet.

My breakfast was waiting, and Percie had found
time to turn a comb through his brown curls, and get
the dust off his gaiters. He was tall for his age, and
(unaware to himself, poor boy!) every word and action
reflected upon the handsome seamstress in Cranbourne

Alley, whom he called his mother—for he showed
blood. His father was a gentleman, or there is no
truth in thorough-breeding. As I looked at him, a
difficulty vanished from my mind.

“Percie!”

“Sir!”

“Get into your best suit of plain clothes, and if a
foreigner calls on me this morning, come in and forget
that you are a valet. I have occasion to use you for
a gentleman.”

“Yes, sir!”

“My pistols are clean, I presume?”

“Yes, sir!”

I wrote a letter or two, read a volume of “Ni
jamais, ni toujours,” and about noon a captain of
dragoons was announced, bringing me the expected
cartel. Percie came in, treading gingerly in a pair
of tight French boots, but behaving exceedingly like
a gentleman, and after a little conversation, managed on
his part strictly according to my instructions, he took
his cane and walked off with his friend of the steel
scabbard to become acquainted with the ground.

The gray of a heavenly summer morning was
brightening above the chimneys of the fair city of
Vienna as I stepped into a caléche, followed by Percie.
With a special passport (procured by the politeness
of my antagonist) we made our sortie at that early
hour from the gates, and crossing the glacis, took the
road to the banks of the Danube. It was but a mile
from the city, and the mist lay low on the face of the
troubled current of the river, while the towers and
pinnacles of the silent capital cut the sky in clear and
sharp lines—as if tranquillity and purity, those immaculate
hand-maidens of nature, had tired of innocence
and their mistress—and slept in town!

I had taken some coffee and broiled chicken before
starting, and (removed thus from the category of the
savage unbreakfasted) I was in one of those moods of
universal benevolence, said (erroneously) to be produced
only by a clean breast and milk diet. I could
have wept, with Wordsworth, over a violet.

My opponent was there with his dragoon, and Percie,
cool and gentlemanlike, like a man who “had
served,” looked on at the loading of the pistols, and
gave me mine with a very firm hand, but with a moisture
and anxiety in his eye which I have remembered
since. We were to fire any time after the counting
of three, and having no malice against my friend,
whose impertinence to a lady was (really!) no business
of mine, I intended, of course, to throw away my fire.

The first word was given and I looked at my antagonist,
who, I saw at a glance, had no such gentle
intentions. He was taking deliberate aim, and in the
four seconds that elapsed between the remaining two
words, I changed my mind (one thinks so fast when
his leisure is limited!) at least twenty times whether I
should fire at him or no.

“Trois!” pronounced the dragoon, from a throat
like a trombone, and with the last thought, up flew
my hand, and as my pistol discharged in the air, my
friend's shot struck upon a large turquoise which I
wore on my third finger, and drew a slight pencil-line
across my left organ of causality. It was well aimed
for my temple, but the ring had saved me.

Friend of those days, regretted and unforgotten!
days of the deepest sadness and heart-heaviness, yet
somehow dearer in remembrance than all the joys I
can recall—there was a talisman in thy parting gift thou
didst not think would be, one day, my angel!

“You will be able to wear your hair over the scar,
sir!” said Percie, coming up and putting his finger on
the wound.

“Monsieur!” said the dragoon, advancing to Percie
after a short conference with his principal, and
looking twice as fierce as before.

“Monsieur!” said Percie, wheeling short upon him.

“My friend is not satisfied. He presumes that
monsieur l' Anglais wishes to trifle with him.”

“Then let your friend take care of himself,” said I,
roused by the unprovoked murderousness of the feeling.
Load the pistols, Percie! In my country,” I
continued, turning to the dragoon, “a man is disgraced
who fires twice upon an antagonist who has spared
him! Your friend is a ruffian, and the consequences
be on his own hand!”

We took our places and the first word was given,
when a man dashed between us on horseback at top-speed.
The violence with which he drew rein brought
his horse upon his haunches, and he was on his feet in
half a breath.

The idea that he was an officer of the police was
immediately dissipated by his step and air. Of the
finest athletic form I had ever seen, agile, graceful,
and dressed pointedly well, there was still an indefinable
something about him, either above or below
a gentleman—which, it was difficult to say. His
features were slight, fair, and, except a brow too
heavy for them and a lip of singular and (I thought)
habitual defiance, almost feminine. His hair grew
long and had been soigné, probably by more caressing
fingers than his own, and his rather silken mustache
was glossy with some odorent oil. As he
approached me and took my hand, with a clasp like a
smith's vice, I observed these circumstances, and could
have drawn his portrait without ever seeing him again
—so marked a man was he, in every point and feature.

His business was soon explained. He was the
husband of the lady my opponent had insulted, and
that pleasant gentleman could, of course, make no objection
to his taking my place. I officiated as tèmoin,
and, as they took their position, I anticipated for the
dragoon and myself the trouble of carrying them both
off the field. I had a practical assurance of my friend's
pistol, and the stranger was not the looking man to
miss a hair's breadth of his aim.

The word was not fairly off my lips when both
pistols cracked like one discharge, and high into the
air sprang my revengeful opponent, and dropped like
a clod upon the grass. The stranger opened his
waistcoat, thrust his fore-finger into a wound in his
left breast, and slightly closing his teeth, pushed a
bullet through, which had been checked by the bone
and lodged in the flesh near the skin. The surgeon
who had accompanied my unfortunate antagonist, left
the body, which he had found beyond his art, and
readily gave his assistance to stanch the blood of my
preserver; and jumping with the latter into my caleche,
I put Percie upon the stranger's horse, and we drove
back to Vienna.

The market people were crowding in at the gate,
the merry peasant girls glanced at us with their blue,
German eyes, the shopmen laid out their gay wares
to the street, and the tide of life ran on as busily and
as gayly, though a drop had been extracted, within
scarce ten minutes, from its quickest vein. I felt a
revulsion at my heart, and grew faint and sick. Is a
human life—is my life worth anything, even a thought,
to my fellow-creatures? was the bitter question forced
upon my soul. How icily and keenly the unconscious
indifference of the world penetrates to the nerve and
marrow of him who suddenly realizes it.

We dashed through the kohl-market, and driving
into the porte-cochére of a dark-looking house in one
of the cross streets of that quarter, were ushered into
apartments of extraordinary magnificence.

2. CHAPTER II.

“What do you want, Percie?”

He was walking into the room with all the deliberate
politeness of a “gold-stick-in-waiting.”

“I beg pardon, sir, but I was asked to walk up, and
I was not sure whether I was still a gentleman.”

It instantly struck me that it might seem rather
infra dig to the chevalier (my new friend had thus
announced himself) to have had a valet for a second, and
as he immediately after entered the room, having stepped
below to give orders about his horse, I presented
Percie as a gentleman and my friend, and resumed my
observation of the singular apartment in which I found
myself.

The effect on coming first in at the door, was that
of a small and lofty chapel, where the light struggled
in from an unseen aperture above the altar. There
were two windows at the farther extremity, but curtained
so heavily, and set so deeply into the wall, that
I did not at first observe the six richly-carpeted steps
which led up to them, nor the luxuriously cushioned
seats on either side of the casement, within the niche,
for those who would mount thither for fresh air. The
walls were tapestried, but very ragged and dusty, and
the floor, though there were several thicknesses of the
heavy-piled, small, Turkey carpets laid loosely over it,
was irregular and sunken. The corners were heaped
with various articles I could not at first distinguish.
My host fortunately gave me an opportunity to gratify
my curiosity by frequent absences under the housekeeper's
apology (odd I thought for a chevalier) of
expediting breakfast; and with the aid of Percie, I
tumbled his chattels about with all necessary freedom.

“That,” said the chevalier, entering, as I turned out
the face of a fresh colored picture to the light, “is a
capo d'opera of a French artist, who painted it, as you
may say, by the gleam of the dagger.”

“A cool light, as a painter would say!”

“He was a cool fellow, sir, and would have handled
a broadsword better than a pencil.”

Percie stepped up while I was examining the exquisite
finish of the picture, and asked very respectfully
if the chevalier would give him the particulars
of the story. It was a full-length portrait of a young
and excessively beautiful girl, of apparently scarce
fifteen, entirely nude, and lying upon a black velvet
couch, with one foot laid on a broken diadem, and her
right hand pressing a wild rose to her heart.

“It was the fancy, sir,” continued the chevalier,
“of a bold outlaw, who loved the only daughter of a
noble of Hungary.”

“Is this the lady, sir?” asked Percie, in his politest
valet French.

The chevalier hesitated a moment and looked over
his shoulder as if he might be overheard.

“This is she—copied to the minutest shadow of a
hair! He was a bold outlaw, gentlemen, and had
plucked the lady from her father's castle with his
own hand.”

“Against her will?” interrupted Percie, rather
energetically.

“No!” scowled the chevalier, as if his lowering
brows had articulated the word, “by her own will and
connivance; for she loved him.”

Percie drew a long breath, and looked more closely
at the taper limbs and the exquisitely-chiselled
features of the face, which was turned over the
shoulder with a look of timid shame inimitably true
to nature.

“She loved him,” continued our fierce narrator,
who, I almost began to suspect was the outlaw himself,
by the energy with which he enforced the tale,
“and after a moonlight ramble or two with him in the
forest of her father's domain, she fled and became his
wife. You are admiring the hair, sir! It is as
luxuriant and glossy now!”

“If you please, sir, it is the villain himself!” said
Percie in an undertone.

“Bref,” continued the chevalier, either not understanding
English or not heeding the interruption, “an
adventurous painter, one day hunting the picturesque
in the neighborhood of the outlaw's retreat, surprised
this fair creature bathing in one of the loneliest mountain-streams
in Hungary. His art appeared to be his
first passion, for he hid himself in the trees and drew
her as she stood dallying on the margin of the small
pool in which the brook loitered; and so busy was he
with his own work, or so soft was the mountain moss
under its master's tread, that the outlaw looked, unperceived
the while, over his shoulder, and fell in love
anew with the admirable counterfeit. She looked
like a naiad, sir, new-born of a dew-drop and a violet.”

I nodded an assent to Percie.

“The sketch, excellent as it seemed, was still unfinished
when the painter, enamored as he might
well be, of these sweet limbs, glossy with the shining
water, flung down his book and sprang toward her.
The outlaw—”

“Struck him to the heart? Oh Heaven!” said
Percie, covering his eyes as if he could see the
murder.

“No! he was a student of the human soul, and deferred
his vengeance.”

Percie looked up and listened, like a man whose
wits were perfectly abroad.

“He was not unwilling since her person had been
seen irretrievably, to know how his shrinking lminild
(this was her name of melody) would have escaped,
had she been found alone.”

“The painter”—prompted Percie, impatient for
the sequel.

“The painter flew over rock and brake, and sprang
into the pool in which she was half immersed; and
my brave girl —”

He hesitated, for he had betrayed himself.

“Ay—she is mine, gentlemen; and I am Yvain,
the outlaw—my brave wife, I say with a single bound,
leaped to the rock where her dress was concealed,
seized a short spear which she used as a staff in her
climbing rambles, and struck it through his shoulder
as he pursued!”

“Bravely done!” I thought aloud.

“Was it not? I came up the next moment, but the
spear stuck in his shoulder, and I could not fall upon
a wounded man. We carried him to our ruined
castle in the mountains, and while my Iminild cured
her own wound, I sent for his paints, and let him
finish his bold beginning with a difference of my own.
You see the picture.”

“Was the painter's love cured with his wound!”
I asked with a smile.

“No, by St. Stephen! He grew ten times more
enamored as he drew. He was as fierce as a welk
hawk, and as willing to quarrel for his prey. I could
have driven my dagger to his heart a hundred times
for the mutter of his lips and the flash of his dark eyes
as he fed his gaze upon her; but he finished the picture,
and I gave him a fair field. He chose the broadsword,
and hacked away at me like a man.”

“And the result”—I asked.

“I am here!” replied the outlaw significantly.

Percie leaped upon the carpeted steps, and pushed
back the window for fresh air; and, for myself, I scarce
knew how to act under the roof of a man, who, though
he confessed himself an outlaw and almost an assassin,
was bound to me by the ties of our own critical adventure,
and had confided his condition to me with so
ready a reliance on my honor. In the midst of my
dilemma, while I was pretending to occupy myself
with examining a silver mounted and peaked saddle,
which I found behind the picture in the corner, a deep
and unpleasant voice announced breakfast.

“Wolfen is rather a grim chamberlain,” said the
chevalier, bowing with the grace and smile of the
softest courtier, “but he will usher you to breakfast
and I am sure you stand in need of it. For myself,

I could eat worse meat than my grandfather with this
appetite.”

Percie gave me a look of inquiry and uneasiness
when he found we were to follow the rough domestic
through the dark corridors of the old house, and
through his underbred politeness of insisting on following
his host, I could see that he was unwilling to
trust the outlaw with the rear; but a massive and
broad door, flung open at the end of the passage, let
in upon us presently the cool and fresh air from a
northern exposure, and, stepping forward quickly to
the threshold, we beheld a picture which changed the
current and color of our thoughts.

In the bottom of an excavated area, which, as
well as I could judge, must be forty feet below the
level of the court, lay a small and antique garden,
brilliant with the most costly flowers, and cooled by
a fountain gushing from under the foot of a nymph in
marble. The spreading tops of six alleys of lindens
reaching to the level of the street, formed a living
roof to the grot-like depths of the garden, and concealed
it from all view but that of persons descending
like ourselves from the house; while, instead of
walls to shut in this paradise in the heart of a city,
sharply-inclined slopes of green-sward leaned in
under the branches of the lindens, and completed the
fairy-like enclosure of shade and verdure. As we
descended the rose-laden steps and terraces, I observed,
that, of the immense profusion of flowers in
the area below, nearly all were costly exotics, whose
pots were set in the earth, and probably brought
away from the sunshine only when in high bloom;
and as we rounded the spreading basin of the fountain
which broke the perspective of the alley, a table,
which had been concealed by the marble nymph,
and a skilfully-disposed array of rhododendrons lay
just beneath our feet, while a lady, whose features
I could not fail to remember, smiled up from her
couch of crimson cushions and gave us a graceful
welcome.

The same taste for depth which had been shown
in the room sunk below the windows, and the garden
below the street, was continued in the kind of marble
divan in which we were to breakfast. Four steps
descending from the pavement of the alley introduced
us into a circular excavation, whose marble seats,
covered with cushions of crimson silk, surrounded a
table laden with the substantial viands which are
common to a morning meal in Vienna, and smoking
with coffee, whose aroma (Percie agreed with me)
exceeded even the tube roses in grateful sweetness.
Between the cushions at our backs and the pavements
just above the level of our heads, were piled circles
of thickly-flowering geraniums, which enclosed
us in rings of perfume, and, pouring from the cup of
a sculptured flower, held in the hand of the nymph,
a smooth stream like a silver rod supplied a channel
grooved around the centre of the marble table, through
which the bright water, with the impulse of its descent,
made a swift revolution and disappeared.

It was a scene to give memory the lie if it could
have recalled the bloodshed of the morning. The
green light flecked down through the lofty roof upon
the glittering and singing water; a nightingale in a
recess of the garden, gurgled through his wires as if
intoxicated with the congenial twilight of his prison;
the heavy-cupped flowers of the tropics nodded with
the rain of the fountain spray; the distant roll of
wheels in the neighboring streets came with an
assurance of reality to this dream-land, yet softened
by the unreverberating roof and an air crowded with
flowers and trembling with the pulsations of falling
water; the lowering forehead of the outlaw cleared
up like a sky of June after a thunder-shower, and his
voice grew gentle and caressing; and the delicate
mistress of all (by birth, Countess Iminild), a crea
ture as slight as Psyche, and as white as the lotus,
whose flexile stem served her for a bracelet, welcomed
us with her soft voice and humid eyes, and
saddened by the event of the morning, looked on her
husband with a tenderness that would have assoiled
her of her sins against delicacy, I thought even in the
mind of an angel.

“We live, like truth, here, in the bottom of a well,”
said the countess to Percie, as she gave him his coffee;
“how do you like my whimsical abode, sir?”

“I should like any place where you were, Miladi!”
he answered, blushing and stealing his eyes across at
me, either in doubt how far he might presume upon
his new character, or suspecting that I should smile
at his gallantry.

The outlaw glanced his eyes over the curling head
of the boy, with one of those just perceptible smiles
which developed, occasionally, in great beauty, the
gentle spirit in his bosom; and Iminild, pleased with
the compliment or the blush, threw off her pensive
mood, and assumed in an instant, the coquettish air
which had attracted my notice as she stepped before
me into the church of St. Etienne.

“You had hard work,” she said, “to keep up
with your long-legged dragoon yesterday, Monsieur
Percie!”

“Miladi?” he answered, with a look of inquiry.

“Oh, I was behind you, and my legs are not much
longer than yours. How he strided away with his
long spurs, to be sure! Do you remember a smart
young gentleman with a blue cap that walked past
you on the glacis occasionally.”

“Ah, with laced boots, like a Hungarian?”

“I see I am ever to be known by my foot,” said
she, putting it out upon the cushion, and turning it
about with naive admiration; “that poor captain of
the imperial guard paid dearly for kissing it, holy
virgin!” and she crossed herself and was silent for a
moment.

“If I might take the freedom, chevalier,” I said,
“pray how came I indebted to your assistance in this
affair?”

“Iminild has partly explained,” he answered.
“She knew, of course, that a challenge would follow
your interference, and it was very easy to know that
an officer of some sort would take a message in the
course of the morning to Le Prince Charles, the only
hotel frequented by the English d'un certain gens.

I bowed to the compliment.

“Arriving in Vienna late last night, I found Iminild
(who had followed this gentleman and the dragoon
unperceived) in possession of all the circumstances;
and, but for oversleeping myself this morning, I should
have saved your turquoise, mon seigneur!”

“Have you lived here long, Miladi?” asked Percie,
looking up into her eyes with an unconscious
passionateness which made the countess Iminild color
slightly, and bite her lips to retain an expression of
pleasure.

“I have not lived long, anywhere, sir!” she answered
half archly, “but I played in this garden when not
much older than you!”

Percie looked confused and pulled up his cravat.

“This house said the chevalier, willing apparently
to spare the countess a painful narration, “is the
property of the old count Hdefert, my wife's father.
He has long ceased to visit Vienna, and has left it, he
supposes, to a stranger. When Iminild tires of the
forest, she comes here, and I join her if I can flud
time. I must to the saddle to-morrow, by St. Jacques!”

The word had scarce died on his lips when the door
by which we had entered the garden was flung open,
and the measured tread of gens-d'armes resounded in
the corridor. The first man who stood out upon the
upper terrace was the dragoon who had been second
to my opponent.

“Traiter and villain!” muttered the outlaw between
his teeth, “I thought I remembered you! It is that
false comrade Berthold, Iminild!”

Yvain had risen from the table as if but to stretch
his legs; and drawing a pistol from his bosom he
cocked it as he quietly stepped up into the garden.
I saw at a glance that there was no chance for his
escape, and laid my hand on his arm.

“Chevalier!” I said, “surrender and trust to opportunity.
It is madness to resist here.”

“Yvain!” said Iminild, in a low voice, flying to his
side as she comprehended his intention, “leave me
that vengeance, and try the parapet. I'll kill him before
he sleeps! Quick! Ah, Heavens!”

The dragoon had turned at that instant to fly, and
with suddenness of thought the pistol flashed, and
the traitor dropped heavily on the terrace. Springing
like a cat up the slope of green sward, Yvain stood
an instant on the summit of the wall, hesitating where
to jump beyond, and in the next moment rolled heavily
back, stabbed through and through with a bayonet
from the opposite side.

The blood left the lips and cheek of Iminild; but
without a word or a sign of terror, she sprang to the
side of the fallen outlaw and lifted him up against
her knee. The gens-d'armes rushed to the spot, but
the subaltern who commanded them yielded instantly
to my wish that they should retire to the skirts of the
garden; and, sending Percie to the fountain for water,
we bathed the lips and forehead of the dying man and
set him against the sloping parapet. With one hand
grasping the dress of Iminild and the other clasped in
mine, he struggled to speak.

“The cross!” he gasped, “the cross!”

Iminild drew a silver crucifix from her bosom.

“Swear on this,” he said, putting it to my lips and
speaking with terrible energy, “swear that you will
protect her while you live!”

“I swear!”

He shut our hands together convulsively, gasped
slightly as if he would speak again, and, in another
instant sunk, relaxed and lifeless, on the shoulder of
Iminild.

3. CHAPTER III.

The fate and history of Yvain, the outlaw, became,
on the following day, the talk of Vienna. He had
been long known as the daring horse-stealer of Hungary;
and, though it was not doubted that his sway
was exercised over plunderers of every description,
even pirates upon the high seas, his own courage and
address were principally applied to robbery of the well-guarded
steeds of the emperor and his nobles. It was
said that there was not a horse in the dominions of
Austria whose qualities and breeding were not known
to him, nor one he cared to have which was not in his
concealed stables in the forest. The most incredible
stories were told of his horsemanship. He would so
disguise the animal on which he rode, either by forcing
him into new paces or by other arts only known to himself,
that he would make the tour of the Glacis on the
emperor's best horse, newly stolen, unsuspected even
by the royal grooms. The roadsters of his own troop
were the best steeds bred on the banks of the Danube;
but, though always in the highest condition, they
would never have been suspected to be worth a florin
till put upon their mettle. The extraordinary escapes
of his band from the vigilant and well-mounted gens-d'armes
were thus accounted for; and, in most of the
villages in Austria, the people, on some market-day
or other, had seen a body of apparently ill-mounted
peasants suddenly start off with the speed of lightning
at the appearance of gens-d'armes, and, flying over
fence and wall, draw a straight course for the mountains,
distancing their pursuers with the ease of swallows
on the wing.

After the death of Yvain in the garden, I had been
forced with Percie into a carriage, standing in the
court, and accompanied by a guard, driven to my
hotel, where I was given to understand that I was to
remain under arrest till further orders. A sentinel at
the door forbade all ingress or egress except to the
people of the house: a circumstance which was only
distressing to me, as it precluded my inquiries after
the countress Iminild, of whom common rumor, the
servants informed me, made not the slightest mention.

Four days after this, on the relief of the guard at
noon, a subaltern, entered my room and informed me
that I was at liberty. I instantly made preparations to
go out, and was drawing on my boots, when Percie,
who had not yet recovered from the shock of his
arrest, entered in some alarm, and informed me that
one of the royal grooms was in the court with a letter,
which he would deliver only into my own hands. He
had orders beside, he said, not to leave his saddle.
Wondering what new leaf of my destiny was to turn
over, I went below and received a letter, with apparently
the imperial seal, from a well-dressed groom in the
livery of the emperor's brother, the king of Hungary.
He was mounted on a compact, yet fine-limbed horse,
and both horse and rider were as still as if cut in
marble.

I returned to my room and broke the seal. It was
a letter from Iminild, and the bold bearer was an outlaw
disguised! She had heard that I was to be released
that morning, and desired me to ride out on the
road to Gratz. In a postscript she begged I would
request Monsieur Percie to accompany me.

I sent for horses, and, wishing to be left to my own
thoughts, ordered Percie to fall behind, and rode
slowly out of the southern gate. If the countess
Iminild were safe, I had enough of the adventure for
my taste. My oath bound me to protect this wild and
unsexed woman, but farther intercourse with a band
of outlaws, or farther peril of my head for no reason
that either a court of gallantry or of justice would recognise,
was beyond my usual programme of pleasant
events. The road was a gentle ascent, and with the
bridle on the neck of my hack I paced thoughtfully on,
till, at a slight turn, we stood at a fair height above
Vienna.

“It is a beautiful city, sir,” said Percie, riding up.

“How the deuce could she have escaped?” said I,
thinking aloud.

“Has she escaped, sir? Ah, thank Heaven!” exclaimed
the passionate boy, the tears rushing to his
eyes.

“Why, Percie!” I said with a tone of surprise
which called a blush into his face, “have you really
found leisure to fall in love amid all this imbroglio?”

“I beg pardon, my dear master!” he replied in a
confused voice, “I scarce know what it is to fall in
love; but I would die for Miladi Iminild.”

“Not at all an impossible sequel, my poor boy!
But wheel about and touch your hat, for here comes
some one of the royal family!”

A horseman was approaching at an easy canter,
over the broad and unfenced plain of table-land which
overlooks Vienna on the south, attended by six mounted
servants in the white kerseymere frocks, braided
with the two-headed black eagle, which distinguish the
members of the imperial household.

The carriages on the road stopped while he passed,
the foot-passengers touched their caps, and, as he came
near, I perceived that he was slight and young, but
rode with a confidence and a grace not often attained.
His horse had the subdued, half-fiery action of an
Arab, and Percie nearly dropped from his saddle when
the young horseman suddenly drove in his spurs,

and with almost a single vault stood motionless before
us.

“Monsieur!”

“Madame la Contesse!”

I was uncertain how to receive her, and took refuge
in civility. Whether she would be overwhelmed with
the recollection of Yvain's death, or had put away the
thought altogether with her masculine firmness, was
a dilemma for which the eccentric contradictions of
her character left me no probable solution. Motioning
with her hand after saluting me, two of the party
rode back and forward in different directions, as if
patrolling; and giving a look between a tear and a
smile at Percie, she placed her hand in mine, and
shook off her sadness with a strong effort.

“You did not expect so large a suite with your
protégée,” she said, rather gayly, after a moment.

“Do I understand that you come now to put yourself
under my protection?” I asked in reply.

“Soon, but not now, nor here. I have a hundred
men at the foot of Mount Semering, whose future
fate, in some important respects, none can decide but
myself. Yvain was always prepared for this, and
everything is en train. I come now but to appoint a
place of meeting. Quick! my patrole comes in, and
some one approaches whom we must fly. Can you
await me at Gratz?”

“I can and will!”

She put her slight hand to my lips, waved a kiss
at Percie, and away with the speed of wind, flew her
swift Arab over the plain, followed by the six horsemen,
every one of whom seemed part of the animal
that carried him—he rode so admirably.

The slight figure of Iminild in the close fitting dress
of a Hungarian page, her jacket open and her beautiful
limbs perfectly defined, silver fringes at her ankles
and waist, and a row of silver buttons gallonné down
to the instep, her bright, flashing eyes, her short curls
escaping from her cap and tangled over her left temple,
with the gold tassel, dirk and pistol at her belt and
spurs upon her heels—it was an apparition I had
scarce time to realize, but it seemed painted on my
eyes. The cloud of dust which followed their rapid
flight faded away as I watched it, but I saw her still.

“Shall I ride back and order post-horses, sir!”
asked Percie standing up in his stirrups.

“No; but you may order dinner at six. And Percie!”
he was riding away with a gloomy air; “you
may go to the police and get our passports for Venice.”

“By the way of Gratz, sir!”

“Yes, simpleton!”

There is a difference between sixteen and twenty-six,
I thought to myself, as the handsome boy flogged
his horse into a gallop. The time is gone when I
could love without reason. Yet I remember when a
feather, stuck jauntily into a bonnet, would have made
any woman a princess; and in those days, Heaven help
us! I should have loved this woman more for her
galliardize than ten times a prettier one with all the
virtues of Dorcas. For which of my sins am I made
guardian to a robber's wife, I wonder!

The heavy German postillions, with their cocked
hats and yellow coats, got us over the ground after a
manner, and toward the sunset of a summer's evening
the tall castle of Gratz, perched on a pinnacle of rock
in the centre of a vast plain, stood up boldly against
the reddening sky. The rich fields of Styria were
ripening to an early harvest, the people sat at their
doors with the look of household happiness for which
the inhabitants of these “despotic countries” are so
remarkable; and now and then on the road the rattling
of steel scabbards drew my attention from a book or a
revery, and the mounted troops, so perpetually seen
on the broad roads of Austria, lingered slowly past
with their dust and baggage-trains.

It had been a long summer's day, and, contrary to
my usual practice, I had not mounted, even for half a
post, to Percie's side in the rumble. Out of humor
with fate for having drawn me into very embarrassing
circumstances—out of humor with myself for the
quixotic step which had first brought it on me—and a
little of out humor with Percie (perhaps from an unacknowledged
jealousy of Iminild's marked preference
for the varlet), I left him to toast alone in the sun,
while I tried to forget him and myself in “Le Marquis
de Pontangos.” What a very clever book it is, by
the way!

The pompous sergeant of the guard performed his
office upon my passport at the gate—giving me at
least a kreutzer worth of his majesty's black sand in
exchange for my florin and my English curse (I said
before I was out of temper, and he was half an hour
writing his abominable name), and leaving my carriage
and Percie to find their way together to the hotel, I
dismounted at the foot of a steep street and made my
way to the battlements of the castle, in search of scenery
and equanimity.

Ah! what a glorious landscape! The precipitous
rock on which the old fortress is built seems dropped
by the Titans in the midst of a plain, extending miles
in every direction, with scarce another pebble. Close
at its base run the populous streets, coiling about it
like serpents around a pyramid, and away from the
walls of the city spread the broad fields, laden, as far
as the eye can see, with tribute for the emperor! The
tall castle, with its armed crest, looks down among the
reapers.

“You have not lost your friend and lover, yet you
are melancholy!” said a voice behind me, that I was
scarce startled to hear.

“Is it you, Iminild?”

“Scarce the same—for Iminild was never before so
sad. It is something in the sunset. Come away while
the woman keeps down in me, and let us stroll through
the Plaza, where the band is playing. Do you love
military music?”

I looked at the costume and figure of the extraordinary
creature before I ventured with her on a
public promenade. She was dressed like one of the
travelling apprentices of Germany, with cap and bleuzer,
and had assumed the air of the craft with a success
absolutely beyond detection. I gave her my arm and
we sauntered through the crowd, listening to the
thrilling music of one of the finest bands in Germany.
The privileged character and free manners of the
wandering craftsmen whose dress she had adopted,
I was well aware, reconciled, in the eyes of the inhabitants,
the marked contrast between our conditions
in life. They would simply have said, if they had
made a remark at all, that the Englishman was ban
enfant and the craftsman bon camarade.

“You had better look at me, messieurs!” said the
dusty apprentice, as two officers of the regiment passed
and gave me the usual strangers' stare; “I am better
worth your while by exactly five thousand florins.”

“And pray how?” I asked.

“That price is set on my head!”

“Heavens! and you walk here!”

“They kept you longer than usual with your pass
port, I presume?”

“At the gate? yes.”

“I came in with my pack at the time. They have
orders to examine all travellers and passports with
unusual care, these sharp officials! But I shall get
out as easily as I got in!”

“My dear countess!” I said, in a tone of serious
remonstrance, “do not trifle with the vigilance of the
best police in Europe! I am your guardian, and you
owe my advice some respect. Come away from the
square and let us talk of it in earnest.”

“Wise seignior! suffer me to remind you how

deftly I slipped through the fingers of these gentry
after our tragedy in Vienna, and pay my opinion some
respect! It was my vanity that brought me, with
my lackeys, to meet you à la prince royale so near
Vienna; and hence this alarm in the police, for I was
seen and suspected. I have shown myself to you
in my favorite character, however, and have done
with such measures. You shall see me on the road
to-morrow, safe as the heart in your bosom. Where
is Monsieur Percie!”

“At the hotel. But stay! can I trust you with
yourself?”

“Yes, and dull company, too! A revoir!”

And whistling the popular air of the craft she had
assumed, the countess Iminild struck her long staff
on the pavement, and with the gait of a tired and
habitual pedestrian, disappeared by a narrow street
leading under the precipitory battlements of the
castle.

Percie made his appearance with a cup of coffee
the following morning, and, with the intention of posting
a couple of leagues to breakfast, I hurried through
my toilet and was in my carriage an hour after sunrise.
The postillion was in his saddle and only waited
for Percie, who, upon inquiry, was nowhere to be
found. I sat fifteen minutes, and just as I was beginning
to be alarmed he ran into the large court of
the hotel, and, crying out to the postillions that all
was right, jumped into his place with an agility,
it struck me, very unlike his usual gentlemanlike
deliberation. Determining to take advantage of the
first up hill to catechize him upon his matutinal rambles,
I read the signs along the street till we pulled
up at the gate.

Iminild's communication had prepared me for unusual
delay with my passport, and I was not surprised
when the officer, in returning it to me, requested me
as a matter of form, to declare, upon my honor, that
the servant behind my carriage was an Englishman,
and the person mentioned in my passport.

“Foi d'honneur, monsieur,” I said, placing my hand
politely on my heart, and off trotted the postillion,
while the captain of the guard, flattered with my civility,
touched his foraging-cap, and sent me a German
blessing through his mustache.

It was a divine morning, and the fresh and dewy
air took me back many a year, to the days when I
was more familiar with the hour. We had a long
trojet across the plain, and unlooping an antivibration
tablet, for the invention of which my ingenuity took
great credit to itself (suspended on caoutchouc cords
from the roof of the carriage—and deserving of a
patent I trust you will allow!) I let off my poetical
vein in the following beginning to what might have
turned out, but for the interruption, a very edifying
copy of verses:—

A foot thrust into my carriage-window rudely broke
the thread of these delicate musings. The postillion
was on a walk, and before I could get my wits back
from their wool-gathering, the countess Iminild, in
Percie's clothes, sat laughing on the cushion beside
me.

“On what bird's back has your ladyship descended
from the clouds?” I asked with unfeigned astonishment.

“The same bird has brought us both down—c'est
à dire, if you are not still en l'air,” she added, looking
from my scrawled tablets to my perplexed face.

“Are you really and really the countess Iminild?”
I asked with a smile, looking down at the trowsered
feet and loose-fitting boots of the pseudo-valet.

“Yes, indeed! but I leave it to you to swear,
`foi d'honneur,' that a born countess is an English
valet!” And she laughed so long and merrily that
the postillion looked over his yellow epaulets in astonishment.

“Kind, generous Percie!” she said, changing her
tone presently to one of great feeling, “I would scarce
believe him last night when he informed me, as as inducement
to leave him behind, that he was only a servant!
You never told me this. But he is a gentleman,
in every feeling as well as in every feature, and,
by Heavens! he shall be a menial no longer!”

This speech, begun with much tenderness, rose,
toward the close, to the violence of passion; and
folding her arms with an air of defiance, the lady-outlaw
threw herself back in the carriage.

“I have no objection,” I said, after a short silence,
“that Percie should set up for a gentleman. Nature
has certainly done her part to make him one; but till
you can give him means and education, the coat which
you wear, with such a grace, is his safest shell. `Ants
live safely till they have gotten wings,' says the old
proverb.”

The blowing of the postillion's horn interrupted the
argument, and, a moment after, we were rolled up,
with German leisure, to the door of the small inn where
I had designed to breakfast. Thinking it probable
that the people of the house, in so small a village,
would be too simple to make any dangerous comments
upon our appearance, I politely handed the countess
out of the carriage, and ordered plates for two.

“It is scarce worth while,” she said, as she heard
the order, “for I shall remain at the door on the look
out. The eil-waggen, for Trieste, which was to leave
Gratz an hour after us, will be soon here, and (if my
friends have served me well), Percie in it. St. Mary
speed him safely!”

She strode away to a small hillock to look out for the
lumbering diligence, with a gait that was no stranger
to, “doublet and hose.” It soon came on with its
usual tempest of whip-cracking and bugle-blasts, and
nearly overturning a fat burgher, who would have
proffered the assistance of his hand, out jumped a
petticoat, which I saw, at a glance, gave a very embarrassed
motion to gentleman Percie.

“This young lady,” said the countess, dragging
the striding and unwilling damsel into the little parlor
where I was breakfasting “travels under the charge of
a deaf old brazier, who has been requested to protect her
modesty as far as Laybach. Make a courtesy, child!”

“I beg pardon, sir!” began Percie.

“Hush, hush! no English! Walls have ears, and
your voice is rather gruffish, mademoiselle. Show
me your passport? Cunegunda Von Krakenpate,
eighteen years of age, blue eyes, nose and chin middling,
etc! There is the conductor's horn! Allez
vite! We meet at Laybach. Adieu, charmante
femme! Adieu!”

And with the sort of caricatured elegance which
women always assume in their imitations of our sex,
Countess Iminild, in frock-coat and trowsers, helped
into the diligence, in hood and petticoat, my “tiger”
from Cranbourne-alley!

4. CHAPTER IV.

Spite of remonstrance on my part, the imperative
countess, who had asserted her authority more than
once on our way to Laybach, insisted on the company
of Miss Cunegunda Von Krakenpate, in an
evening walk around the town. Fearing that Percie's
masculine stride would betray him, and objecting
to lend myself to a farce with my valet, I opposed
the freak as long as it was courteous—but it was not
the first time I had learned that a spoiled woman
would have her own way, and too vexed to laugh, I
soberly promenaded the broad avenue of the capital
of Styria, with a valet en demoiselle, and a dame en
valet.

It was but a few hours hence to Planina, and Iminild,
who seemed to fear no risk out of a walled city, waited
on Percie to the carriage the following morning, and
in a few hours we drove up to the rural inn of this
small town of Littorale.

I had been too much out of humor to ask the
countess, a second time, what errand she could have
in so rustic a neighborhood. She had made a mystery
of it, merely requiring of me that I should defer all
arrangements for the future, as far as she was concerned,
till we had visited a spot in Littorale, upon which
her fate in many respects depended. After twenty
fruitless conjectures, I abandoned myself to the course
of circumstances, reserving only the determination, if it
should prove a haunt of Yvain's troop, to separate at
once from her company and await her at Trieste.

Our dinner was preparing at the inn, and tired of
the embarrassment Percie exhibited in my presence,
I walked out and seated myself under an immense
linden, that every traveller will remember, standing
in the centre of the motley and indescribable clusters
of buildings, which serve the innkeeper and blacksmith
of Planina for barns, forge, dwelling, and outhouses.
The tree seems the father of the village.
It was a hot afternoon, and I was compelled to dispute
the shade with a congregation of cows and double-jointed
posthorses; but finding a seat high up on the
root, at last I busied myself with gazing down the
road, and conjecturing what a cloud of dust might contain,
which, in an opposite direction from that which
we had come, was slowly creeping onward to the inn.

Four roughly-harnessed horses at length, appeared,
with their traces tied over their backs—one of them
ridden by a man in a farmer's frock. They struck me
at first as fine specimens of the German breed of
draught-horses, with their shaggy fetlocks and long
manes; but while they drank at the trough which
stood in the shade of the linden, the low tone in which
the man checked their greedy thirst, and the instant
obedience of the well-trained animals, awakened at
once my suspicions that we were to become better
acquainted. A more narrow examination convinced
me that, covered with dust and disguised with coarse
harness as they were, they were four horses of such
bone and condition, as were never seen in a farmer's
stables. The rider dismounted at the inn door, and
very much to the embarrassment of my suppositions,
the landlord, a stupid and heavy Boniface, greeted him
with the familiarity of an old acquaintance, and in answer,
apparently to an inquiry, pointed to my carriage,
and led him into the house.

“Monsieur Tyrell,” said Iminild, coming out to
me a moment after, “a servant whom I had expected
has arrived with my horses, and with your consent,
they shall be put to your carriage immediately.”

“To take us where?”

“To our place of destination.”

“Too indefinite, by half, countess! Listen to me!
I have very sufficient reason to faney that, in leaving
the post-road to Trieste, I shall leave the society of
honest men. You and your `minions of the moon'
may be very pleasant, but you are not very safe companions;
and having really a wish to die quietly in
my bed—”

The countess burst into a laugh.

“If you will have the character of the gentleman
you are about to visit from the landlord here—”

“Who is one of your ruffians himself, I'll be sworn!”

“No, on my honor! A more innocent old beer-guzzler
lives not on the road. But I will tell you
thus much, and it ought to content you. Ten miles
to the west of this dwells a country gentleman, who,
the landlord will certify, is as honest a subject of his
gracious majesty as is to be found in Littorale. He
lives freely on his means, and entertains strangers
occasionally from all countries, for he has been a
traveller in his time. You are invited to pass a day
or two with this Mynheer Krakenpate (who, by the
way, has no objection to pass for father of the young
lady you have so kindly brought from Laybach),
and he has sent you his horses, like a generous host,
to bring you to his door. More seriously, this was
a retreat of Yvain's, where he would live quietly and
play bon citoyen, and you have nothing earthly to fear
in accompanying me thither. And now will you wait
and eat the greasy meal you have ordered, or will you
save your appetite for la fortune de pot at Mynheer
Krakenpate's, and get presently on the road!”

I yielded rather to the seducing smile and captivating
beauty of my pleasing ward, than to any confidence
in the honesty of Mynheer Krakenpate; and
Percie being once more ceremoniously handed in, we
left the village at the sober trot becoming the fat steeds
of a landholder. A quarter of a mile of this was quite
sufficient for Iminild, and a word to the postillion
changed, like a metamorphosis, both horse and rider.
From a heavy unelastic figure, he rose into a gallant
and withy horseman, and, with one of his low-spoken
words, away flew the four compact animals, treading
lightly as cats, and, with the greatest apparent ease,
putting us over the ground at the rate of fourteen
miles in the hour.

The dust was distanced, a pleasant breeze was
created by the motion, and when at last we turned
from the main road, and sped off to the right at the
same exhilarating pace, I returned Iminild's arch
look of remonstrance with my best-humored smile
and an affectionate je me fie à vous! Miss Krakenpate,
I observed, echoed the sentiment by a slight pressure
of the countess's arm, looking very innocently out of
the window all the while.

A couple of miles, soon done, brought us round the
face of a craggy precipice, forming the brow of a hill,
and with a continuation of the turn, we drew up at the
gate of a substantial-looking building, something between
a villa and a farm-house, built against the rock,
as if for the purpose of shelter from the north winds.
Two beautiful Angora hounds sprang out at the noise,
and recognised Iminild through all her disguise, and
presently, with a look of forced courtesy, as if not quite
sure whether he might throw off the mask, a stout
man of about fifty, hardly a gentleman, yet above a
common peasant in his manners, stepped forward from
the garden to give Miss Krakenpate his assistance in
alighting.

“Dinner in half an hour!” was Iminild's brief
greeting, and, stepping between her bowing dependant
and Percie, she led the way into the house.

I was shown into a chamber, furnished scarce above
the common style of a German inn, where I made a
hungry man's despatch in my toilet, and descended
at once to the parlor. The doors were all open upon
the ground floor, and, finding myself quite alone, I
sauntered from room to room, wondering at the scantiness
of the furniture and general air of discomfort, and
scarce able to believe that the same mistress presided
over this and the singular paradise in which I had

first found her at Vienna. After visting every corner
of the ground floor with a freedom which I assumed in
my character as guardian, it occurred to me that I
had not yet found the dining-room, and I was making
a new search, when Iminild entered.

I have said she was a beautiful woman. She was
dressed now in the Albanian costume, with the additional
gorgeousness of gold embroidery, which might
distinguish the favorite child of a chief of Suli. It
was the male attire, with a snowy white juktanilla
reaching to the knee, a short jacket of crimson velvet,
and a close-buttoned vest of silver cloth, fitting admirably
to her girlish bust, and leaving her slender and
pearly neck to rise bare and swan-like into the masses
of her clustering hair. Her slight waist was defined
by the girdle of fine linen edged with fringe of gold,
which was tied coquettishly over her left side and fell
to her ankle, and below the embroidered leggin appeared
the fairy foot, which had drawn upon me all this
long train of adventure, thrust into a Turkish slipper
with a sparkling emerald on its instep. A feronière
of the yellowest gold sequins bound her hair back
from her temples, and this was the only confinement
to the dark brown meshes which, in wavy lines and
in the richest profusion, fell almost to her feet. The
only blemish to this vision of loveliness was a flush
about her eyes. The place had recalled Yvain to her
memory.

“I am about to disclose to you secrets,” said she,
laying her hand on my arm, “which have never been
revealed but to the most trusty of Yvain's confederates.
To satisfy those whom you will meet you must swear
to me on the same cross which he pressed to your lips
when dying, that you will never violate, while I live,
the trust we repose in you.”

“I will take no oath,” I said; “for you are leading
me blindfolded. If you are not satisfied with the
assurance that I can betray no confidence which honor
would preserve, hungry as I am, I will yet dine in
Planina.”

“Then I will trust to the faith of an Englishman.
And now I have a favor, not to beg, but to insist upon
—that from this moment you consider Percie as dismissed
from your service, and treat him, while here
at least, as my equal and friend.”

“Willingly!” I said; and as the word left my lips,
enter Percie in the counterpart dress of Iminild, with
a silver-sheathed ataghan at his side, and the bluish
muzzles of a pair of Egg's hair-triggers peeping from
below his girdle. To do the rascal justice, he was as
handsome in his new toggery as his mistress, and carried
it as gallantly. They would have made the prettiest
tableau as Juan and Haidée.

“Is there any chance that these `persuaders' may
be necessary,” I asked, pointing to his pistols which
awoke in my mind a momentary suspicion.

“No—none that I can forsee—but they are loaded.
A favorite, among men whose passions are professionally
wild,” she continued with a meaning glance at
Percie; “should be ready to lay his hand on them,
even if stirred in his sleep!”

I had been so accustomed to surprises of late, that
I scarce started to observe, while Iminild was speaking,
that an old-fashioned clock, which stood in a
niche in the wall, was slowly swinging out upon
hinges. A narrow aperture of sufficient breadth to
admit one person at a time, was disclosed when it
had made its entire revolution, and in it stood, with
a lighted torch, the stout landlord Von Krakenpate.
Iminild looked at me an instant as if to enjoy my
surprise.

“Will you lead me in to dinner, Mr. Tyrell?” she
said at last, with a laugh.

“If we are to follow Mynheer Von Krakenpate,” I
replied, “give me hold of the skirt of your juktanilla,
rather, and let me follow! Do we dine in the cellar?”

I stepped before Percie, who was inclined to take
advantage of my hesitation to precede me, and followed
the countess into the opening, which, from
the position of the house, I saw must lead directly
into the face of the rock. Two or three descending
steps convinced me that it was a natural opening enlarged
by art; and after one or two sharp turns, and
a descent of perhaps fifty feet, we came to a door
which, suddenly flung open by our torch-bearer,
deluged the dark passage with a blaze of light which
the eyesight almost refused to bear. Recovering
from my amazement, I stepped over the threshold
of the door, and stood upon a carpet in a gallery of
sparkling stalactites, the dazzling reflection of innumerable
lamps flooding the air around, and a long
snow-white vista of the same brilliancy and effect
stretching downward before me. Two ridges of
the calcareous strata running almost parallel over
our heads, formed the cornices of the descending
corridor, and from these, with a regularity that
seemed like design, the sparkling pillars, white as
alabaster, and shaped like inverted cones, dropped
nearly to the floor, their transparent points resting on
the peaks of the corresponding stalagmites, which, of
a darker hue and coarser grain, seemed designed as
bases to a new order of architectural columns. The
reflection from the pure crystalline rock gave to this
singular gallery a splendor which only the palace of
Aladdin could have equalled. The lamps were hung
between in irregular but effective ranges, and in our
descent, like Thalaba, who refreshed his dazzled eyes
in the desert of snow by looking on the green wings of
the spirit bird, I was compelled to bend my eyes perpetually
for relief upon the soft, dark masses of hair
which floated upon the lovely shoulders of Iminild.

At the extremity of the gallery we turned short to
the right, and followed an irregular passage, sometimes
so low that we could scarce stand upright, but
all lighted with the same intense brilliancy, and formed
of the same glittering and snow-white substance. We
had been rambling on thus far perhaps ten minutes,
when suddenly the air, which I had felt uncomfortably
chill, grew warm and soft, and the low reverberation
of running water fell delightfully on our ears.
Far ahead we could see two sparry columns standing
close together, and apparently closing up the way.

“Courage! my venerable guardian!” cried Iminild,
laughing over her shoulder; “you will see your dinner
presently. Are you hungry, Percie?”

“Not while you look back, Madame la Comtesse!”
answered the callow gentleman, with an instinctive
tact at his new vocation.

We stood at the two pillars which formed the extremity
of the passage, and looked down upon a scene
of which all description must be faint and imperfect.
A hundred feet below ran a broad subterraneous river,
whose waters sparkling in the blaze of a thousand
torches, sprang into light from the deepest darkness,
crossed with foaming rapidity the bosom of the vast
illuminated cavern, and disappeared again in the same
inscrutable gloom. Whence it came or whither it
fled was a mystery beyond the reach of the eye. The
deep recesses of the cavern seemed darker for the intense
light gathered about the centre.

After the first few minutes of bewilderment, I endeavored
to realize in detail the wondrous scene before
me. The cavern was of an irregular shape, but
all studded above with the same sparry incrustation,
thousands upon thousands of pendent stalactites glittering
on the roof, and showering back light upon the
clusters of blazing torches fastened everywhere upon
the shelvy sides. Here and there vast columns,
alabaster white, with bases of gold color, fell from the
roof to the floor, like pillars left standing in the ruined
aisle of a cathedral, and from corner to corner ran
their curtains of the same brilliant calcareous spars

shaped like the sharp edge of a snow-drift, and almost
white. It was like laying bare the palace of some
king-wizard of the mine to gaze down upon it.

“What think you of Mynheer Krakenpate's taste
in a dining-room, Monsieur Tyrell?” asked the countess,
who stood between Percie and myself, with a
hand on the shoulder of each.

I had scarce found time, as yet, to scrutinize the
artificial portion of the marvellous scene, but, at the
question of Iminild, I bent my gaze on a broad platform,
rising high above the river on its opposite bank,
the rear of which was closed in by perhaps forty irregular
columns, leaving between them and the sharp
precipice on the river-side, an area, in height and extent
of about the capacity of a ball-room. A rude
bridge, of very light construction, rose in a single
arch across the river, forming the only possible access
to the platform from the side where we stood, and,
following the path back with my eye, I observed a
narrow and spiral staircase, partly of wood and partly
cut in the rock, ascending from the bridge to the gallery
we had followed hither. The platform was carpeted
richly, and flooded with intense light, and in its
centre stood a gorgeous array of smoking dishes,
served after the Turkish fashion, with a cloth upon
the floor, and surrounded with cushions and ottomans
of every shape and color. A troop of black slaves,
whose silver anklets, glittered as they moved, were
busy bringing wines and completing the arrangements
for the meal.

“Allons, mignon!” cried Iminild, getting impatient
and seizing Percie's arm, “let us get over the river,
and perhaps Mr. Tyrell will look down upon us with
his grands yeux while we dine. Oh, you will come
with us! Suivez done!”

An iron door, which I had not hitherto observed,
let us out from the gallery upon the staircase, and
Mynheer Von Krakenpate carefully turned the key
behind us. We crept slowly down the narrow staircase
and reached the edge of the river, where the
warm air from the open sunshine came pouring through
the cavern with the current, bringing with it a smell
of green fields and flowers, and removing entirely the
chill of the cavernous and confined atmosphere I had
found so uncomfortable above. We crossed the
bridge, and stepping upon the elastic carpets piled
thickly on the platform, arranged ourselves about the
smoking repast, Mynheer Von Krakenpate sitting down
after permission from Iminild, and Percie by order of
the same imperative dictatress, throwing his graceful
length at her feet.

5. CHAPTER V.

“Take a lesson in flattery from Percie, Mr. Tyrell,
and be satisfied with your bliss in my society without
asking for explanations. I would fain have the use
of my tongue (to swallow) for ten minutes, and I see
you making up your mouth for a question. Try this
pilau! It is made by a Greek cook, who fries, boils,
and stews, in a kitchen with a river for a chimney.”

“Precisely what I was going to ask you. I was
wondering how you cook without smoking your snow-white
roof.”

“Yes, the river is a good slave, and steals wood as
well. We have only to cut it by moonlight and commit
it to the current.”

“The kitchen is down stream, then?”

“Down stream; and down stream lives jolly Perdicaris
the cook, who having lost his nose in a sea-fight,
is reconciled to forswear sunshine and mankind,
and cook rice for pirates.”

“Is it true then that Yvain held command on the
sea?”

“No, not Yvain, but Tranchcœur—his equal in
command over this honest confederacy. By the way,
he is your countryman, Mr. Tyrell, though he fights
under a nom de guerre. You are very likely to see
him, too, for his bark is at Trieste, and he is the only
human being besides myself (and my company here)
who can come and go at will in this robber's paradise.
He is a lover of mine, parbleu! and since Yvain's
death, Heaven knows what fancy he may bring hither
in his hot brain! I have armed Percie for the
hazard?”

The thin nostrils of my friend from Cranbourne-alley
dilated with prophetic dislike of a rival thus
abruptly alluded to, and there was that in his face
which would have proved, against all the nurses'
oaths in Christendom, that the spirit of a gentleman's
blood ran warm through his heart. Signor Tranchcœur
must be gentle in his suit, I said to myself,
or he will find what virtue lies in a hair-trigger!
Percie had forgot to eat since the mention of the
pirate's name, and sat with folded arms and his right
hand on his pistol.

A black slave brought in an omelette souffleé, as
light and delicate as the chef-d'œuvre of an artiste in
the Palais Royal. Iminild spoke to him in Greek, as
he knelt and placed it before her.

“I have a presentiment,” she said, looking at me
as the slave disappeared, “that Tranchcœur will be
here presently. I have ordered another omelette on the
strength of the feeling, for he is fond of it, and may be
soothed by the attention.”

“You fear him, then?”

“Not if I were alone, for he is as gentle as a woman
when he has no rival near him—but I doubt his relish
of Percie. Have you dined?”

“Quite.”

“Then come and look at my garden, and have a
peep at old Perdicaris. Stay here, Percie, and finish
your grapes, mon-mignon! I have a word to say to
Mr. Tyrell.”

We walked across the platform, and passing between
two of the sparry columns forming its boundary,
entered upon a low passage which led to a large
opening, resembling singularly a garden of low shrubs
turned by some magic to sparkling marble.

Two or three hundred of these stalagmite cones,
formed by the dripping of calcareous water from the
roof (as those on the roof were formed by the same
fluid which hardened and pondered), stood about in
the spacious area, every shrub having an answering
cone on the roof, like the reflection of the same marble
garden in a mirror. One side of this singular
apartment was used as a treasury for the spoils of the
band, and on the points of the white cones hung
pitchers and altar lamps of silver, gold drinking-cups,
and chains, and plate and jewellery of every age and
description. Farther on were piled, in unthrifty confusion,
heaps of velvets and silks, fine broadcloths,
French gloves, shoes, and slippers, brocades of Genoa,
pieces of English linen, damask curtains still fastened
to their cornices, a harp and mandolin, cases of
damaged bons-bons, two or three richly-bound books,
and (last and most valuable in my eyes), a miniature
bureau, evidently the plunder of some antiquary's
treasure, containing in its little drawers antique gold
coins of India, carefully dated and arranged, with a
list of its contents half torn from the lid.

“You should hear Tranchcœur's sermons on
these pretty texts,” said the countess, trying to thrust
open a bale of Brusa silk with her Turkish slipper.

“He will beat off the top of a stalagmite with his
sabre-hilt, and sit down and talk over his spoils and the
adventures they recall, till morning dawns.”

“And how is that discovered in this sunless cave?”

“By the perfume. The river brings news of it,
and fills the cavern with the sun's first kisses. Those

violets `kiss and tell,' Mr. Tyrell! Apropos des
bottes, let us look into the kitchen.”

We turned to the right, keeping on the same level,
and a few steps brought us to the brow of a considerable
descent forming the lower edge of the carpeted
platform, but separated from it by a wall of close
stalactites. At the bottom of the descent ran the
river, but just along the brink, forming a considerable
crescent, extended a flat rock, occupied by all the
varied implements of a kitchen, and lighted by the
glare of two or three different fires blazing against
the perpendicular limit of the cave. The smoke of
these followed the inclination of the wall, and was
swept entirely down with the current of the river.
At the nearest fire stood Perdicaris, a fat, long-haired
and sinister-looking rascal, his noseless face glowing
with the heat, and at his side waited, with a silver
dish, the Nubian slave who had been sent for Tranchcœur's
omelette.

“One of the most bloody fights of my friend the
rover,” said Iminild, “was with an armed slaver, from
whom he took these six pages of mine. They have
reason enough to comprehended an order, but too
little to dream of liberty. They are as contented as
tortoises, ici-bas.”

“Is there no egress hence but by the iron door?”

“None that I know of, unless one could swim up
this swift river like a salmon. You may have surmised
by this time, that we monopolize an unexplored
part of the great cave of Adelsberg. Common report
says it extends ten miles under ground, but common
report has never burrowed as far as this, and I doubt
whether there is any communication. Father Krakenpate's
clock conceals an entrance, discovered first by
robbers, and handed down by tradition, Heaven knows
how long. But—hark! Tranchcœur, by Heaven!
my heart foreboded it!”

I sprang after the countess, who, with her last exclamation,
darted between two of the glittering columns
separating us from the platform, and my first glance
convinced me that her fullest anticipations of the
pirate's jealousy were more than realized. Percie
stood with his back to a tall pillar on the farther side,
with his pistol levelled, calm and unmoveable as a
stalactite; and, with his sabre drawn and his eyes
flashing fire, a tall powerfully-built man in a sailor's
press, was arrested by Iminild in the act of rushing on
him. “Stop! or you die, Tranchcœur!” said the
countess, in a tone of trifling command. “He is my
guest!”

“He is my prisoner, madame!” was the answer, as
the pirate changed his position to one of perfect repose
and shot his sabre into his sheath, as if a brief delay
could make little difference.

“We shall see that,” said the countess, once more,
with as soft a voice as was ever heard in a lady's
boudoir; and stepping to the edge of the platform,
she touched with her slipper a suspended gong, which
sent through the cavern a shrill reverberation heard
clearly over the rushing music of the river.

In an instant the click of forty muskets from the
other side fell on our ears; and, at a wave of her
hand, the butts rattled on the rocks, and all was still
again.

“I have not trusted myself within your reach,
Monsieur Tranchcœur,” said Iminild, flinging herself
carelessly on an ottoman, and motioning to Percie to
keep his stand, “without a score or two of my free-riders
from Mount Semering to regulate your conscience.
I am mistress here, sir! You may sit
down!”

Tranchcœur had assumed an air of the most gentlemanly
tranquillity, and motioning to one of the
slaves for his pipe, he politely begged pardon for
smoking in the countess's presence, and filled the
enamelled bowl with Shiraz tobacco.

“You heard of Yvain's death?” she remarked after
a moment passing her hand over her eyes.

“Yes, at Venice.”

“With his dying words, he gave me and mine in
charge to this Englishman. Mr. Tyrell, Monsieur
Tranchcœur.”

The pirate bowed.

“Have you been long from England?” he asked
with an accent and voice that even in that brief
question, savored of the nonchalant English of the
west end.

“Two years!” I answered.

“I should have supposed much longer from your
chivalry in St. Etienue, Mr. Tyrell. My countrymen
generally are less hasty. Your valet there,” he continued,
looking sneeringly at Percie, “seems as quick
on the trigger as his master.”

Percie turned on his heel, and walked to the edge
of the platform as if uneasy at the remark, and Iminild
rose to her feet.

“Look you, Tranchcœur! I'll have none of your
sneers. That youth is as well-born and better bred
than yourself, and with his consent, shall have the
authority of the holy church ere long to protect my
property and me. Will you aid me in this, Mr.
Tyrell?”

“Willingly, countess!”

“Then, Tranchcœur, farewell! I have withdrawn
from the common stock Yvain's gold and jewels, and
I trust to your sense of honor to render me at Venice
whatever else of his private property may be concealed
in the island.”

“Iminild!” cried the pirate, springing to his feet,
“I did not think to show a weakness before this
stranger, but I implore you to delay!”

His bosom heaved with strong emotion as he spoke,
and the color fled from his bronzed features as if he
were struck with a mortal sickness.

“I can not lose you, Iminild! I have loved you
too long. You must—”

She motioned to Percie to pass on.

“By Heaven, you shall!” he cried, in a voice suddenly
become hoarse with passion; and reckless of
consequences, he leaped across the heaps of cushion,
and, seizing Percie by the throat, flung him with
terrible and headlong violence into the river.

A scream from Iminild, and the report of a musket
from the other side, rang at the same instant through
the cavern, and as I rushed forward to seize the pistol
which he had struck from Percie's hand, his half-drawn
sabre slid back powerless into the sheath, and
Tranchcœur dropped heavily on his knee.

“I am peppered, Mr. Tyrell!” he said, waving me
off with difficult effort to smile, “look after the boy,
if you care for him! A curse on her German wolves!”

Percie met me on the bridge, supporting Iminild,
who hung on his neck, smothering him with kisses.

“Where is that dog of a pirate?” she cried, suddenly
snatching her ataghan from the sheath and flying
across the platform. “Tranchcœur!”

Her hand was arrested by the deadly pallor and
helpless attitude of the wounded man, and the weapon
dropped as she stood over him.

“I think it is not mortal,” he said, groaning as he
pressed his hand to his side, “but take your boy out
of my sight! Iminild!”

“Well, Tranchcœur!”

“I have not done well—but you know my nature
—and my love! Forgive me, and farewell! Send
Bertram to stanch this blood—I get faint! A little
wine, Iminild!”

He took the massive flagon from her hand, and
drank a long draught, and then drawing to him a cloak
which lay near, he covered his head and dropped on
his side as if to sleep.

Iminild knelt beside him and tore open the shirt

beneath his jacket, and while she busied herself in
stanching the blood, Perdicaris, apparently well prepared
for such accidents, arrived with a surgeon's
probe, and, on examination of the wound, assured
Iminild that she might safely leave him. Washing
her hands in the flagon of wine, she threw a cloak over
the wet and shivering Percie, and, silent with horror
at the scene behind us, we made our way over the
bridge, and in a short time, to my infinite relief, stood
in the broad moonlight on the portico of Mynheer
Krakenpate.

My carriage was soon loaded with the baggage and
treasure of the countess, and with the same swift
horses that had brought us from Planina, we regained
the post-road, and sped on toward Venice by the
Friuli. We arrived on the following night at the fair
city so beloved of romance, and with what haste I
might, I procured a priest and married the Countess
Iminild to gentleman Percie.

As she possessed now a natural guardian, and a
sufficient means of life, I felt released from my death
vow to Yvain, and bidding farewell to the “happy
couple,” I resumed my quiet habit of travel, and three
days after my arrival at Venice, was on the road to
Padua by the Brenta.

OONDER-HOOFDEN, OR THE UNDERCLIFF.
A TALE OF THE VOYAGE OF HENDRICK HUDSON.

1. CHAPTER I.

“It is but an arm of the sea, as I told thee, skipper,”
said John Fleming, the mate of the “Halve-Mane,”
standing ready to jam down the tiller and bringto,
if his master should agree with him in opinion.

Hudson stood by his steersman, with folded arms,
now looking at the high-water mark on the rocks,
which betrayed a falling tide, now turning his ear
slightly forward to catch the cry of the man who stood
heaving the lead from the larboard bow. The wind
drew lightly across the starboard quarter, and, with a
counter-tide, the little vessel stole on scarce perceptibly,
though her mainsail was kept full—the slowly
passing forest trees on the shore giving the lie to the
merry and gurgling ripple at the prow.

The noble river, or creek, which they had followed
in admiring astonishment for fifty miles, had hitherto
opened fairly and broadly before them, though, once
or twice, its widening and mountain-girt bosom had
deceived the bold navigator into the belief, that he
was entering upon some inland lake. The wind still
blew kindly and steadily from the southeast, and the
sunset of the second day—a spectacle of tumultuous
and gorgeous glory which Hudson attributed justly
to the more violet atmospheric laws of an unsettled
continent—had found them apparently closed in by
impenetrable mountains, and running immediately on
the head shore of an extended arm of the sea.

“She'll strike before she can follow her helm,”
cried the young sailor in an impatient tone, yet still
with habitual obedience keeping her duly on her
course.

“Port a little!” answered the skipper, a moment
after, as if he had not heard the querulous comment
of his mate.

Fleming's attention was withdrawn an instant by
a low guttural sound of satisfaction, which reached
his ear as the head of the vessel went round, and,
casting his eye amidships, he observed the three
Indians who had come off to the Half-Moon in a
canoe, and had been received on board by the master
standing together in the chains, and looking forward
to the rocks they were approaching with countenances
of the most eager interest.

“Master Hendrick!” he vociferated in the tone of
a man who can contain his anger no longer, “will you
look at these grinning red-devils, who are rejoicing to
see you run so blindly ashore?”

The adventurous little bark was by this time within
a biscuit toss of a rocky point that jutted forth into
the river with the grace of a lady's foot dallying with
the water in her bath; and, beyond the sedgy bank
disappeared in an apparent inlet, barely deep enough,
it seemed to the irritated steersman, to shelter a
canoe.

As the Half-Moon obeyed her last order, and headed
a point more to the west, Hudson strode forward to
the bow, and sprang upon the windlass, stretching his
gaze eagerly into the bosom of the hills that were now
darkening with the heavy shadows of twilight, though
the sky was still gorgeously purple overhead.

The crew had by this time gathered with unconscious
apprehension at the halyards, ready to let go
at the slightest gesture of the master, but, in the slow
progress of the little bark, the minute or two which
she took to advance beyond the point on which his
eye was fixed, seemed an age of suspense.

The Half-Moon seemed now almost immoveable,
for the current, which convinced Hudson there was
a passage beyond, set her back from the point with
increasing force, and the wind lulled a little with the
sunset. Inch by inch, however, she crept on, till at
last the silent skipper sprang from the windlass upon
the bowsprit, and running out with the agility of a
boy, gave a single glance ahead, and the next moment
had the tiller in his hand, and cried out with a
voice of thunder, “Stand by the halyards! helm's-a-lee!”

In a moment, as if his words had been lightning,
the blocks rattled, the heavy boom swung round like
a willow spray, and the white canvass, after fluttering
an instant in the wind, filled and drew steadily on the
other tack.

Looks of satisfaction were exchanged between the
crew, who expected the next instant an order to take
in the sail and drop anchor; but the master was at the
helm, and to their utter consternation, he kept her
steadily to the wind, and drove straight on, while a
gorge, that, in the increasing darkness, seemed the
entrance to a cavern, opened its rocky sides as they
advanced.

The apprehensions of the crew were half lost in
their astonishment at the grandeur of the scene. The
cliffs seemed to close up behind them; a mountain,
that reached apparently to the now colorless clouds,
rose up gigantic, in the increasing twilight, over the
prow; on the right, where the water seemed to bend,
a craggy precipice extended its threatening wall; and
in the midst of this round bay, which seemed to them
to be an enclosed lake in the bottom of an abyss, the
wind suddenly took them aback, the Halve-Mane lost
her headway, and threatened to go on the rocks with
the current, and audible curses at his folly reached
the ears of the determined master.

More to divert their attention than with a prognostic
of the direction of the wind, Hudson gave the
order to tack, and, more slowly this time, but still
with sufficient expedition, the movement was executed,
and the flapping sails swung round. The halyards
were not belayed before the breeze, rushing
down a steep valley on the left, struck full on
the larboard quarter, and, running sharp past the face
of the precipice over the starboard bow, Hudson
pointed out, exultingly, to his astonished men, the
broad waters of the mighty river, extending far through
the gorge beyond—the dim purple of the lingering

day, which had been long lost to the cavernous and
overshadowed pass they had penetrated, tinting its far
bosom like the last faint hue of the expiring dolphin.

The exulting glow of triumph suffused the face
of the skipper, and relinquishing the tiller once more
to the mortified Fleming, he walked forward to look
out for an anchorage. The Indians, who still stood
in the chains together, and who had continued to
express their satisfaction as the vessel made her way
through the pass, now pointed eagerly to a little
bay on the left, across which a canoe was shooting
like the reflection of a lance in the air, and, the wind
dying momently away, Hudson gave the order to
round to, and dropped his anchor for the night.

In obedience to the politic orders of Hudson the
men were endeavoring, by presents and signs, to
induce the Indians to leave the vessel, and the master
himself stood on the poop with his mate, gazing
back on the wonderful scene they had passed through.

“This passage,” said Hudson, musingly, “has been
rent open by an earthquake, and the rocks look still as
if they felt the agony of the throe.”

“It is a pity the earthquake did its job so raggedly,
then!” answered his sulky companion, who had not
yet forgiven the mountains for the shame their zig-zag
precipices had put upon his sagacity.

At that instant a sound, like that of a heavy body
sliding into the water, struck the ear of Fleming,
and looking quickly over the stern, he saw one of
the Indians swimming from the vessel with a pillow
in his hand, which he had evidently stolen from the
cabin window. To seize a musket, which lay ready
for attack on the quarter-deck, and fire upon the poor
savage, was the sudden thought and action of a man on
the watch, for a vent to incensed feelings.

The Indian gave a yell which mingled wildly with
the echoes of the report from the reverberating hills,
and springing waist-high out of the water, the gurgling
eddy closed suddenly over his head.

The canoe in which the other savages were already
embarked shot away, like an arrow, to the shore, and
Hudson, grieved and alarmed inexpressibly at the foolhardy
rashness of his mate, ordered all hands to arms,
and established a double watch for the night.

Hour after hour, the master and the non-repentant
Fleming paced fore and aft, each in his own
quarter of the vessel, watching the shore and the
dark face of the water with straining eyes: but no
sound came from the low cliff round which the flying
canoe had vanished, and the stars seemed to
wink almost audibly in the dread stillness of nature.
The men alarmed at the evident agitation of Hudson,
who, in these pent-up waters, anticipated a most effective
and speedy revenge from the surrounding
tribes, drowsed not upon their watch, and the gray
light of the morning began to show faintly over the
mountains before the anxious master withdrew his
aching eyes from the still and star waters.

2. CHAPTER II.

Like a web woven of gold by the lightning, the
sun's rays ran in swift threads from summit to summit
of the dark green mountains, and the soft mist
that slept on the breast of the river began to lift like
the slumberous lid from the eye of woman, when her
dream is broken at dawn. Not so poetically were
these daily glories regarded, however, by the morning
watch of the Half-Moon, who, between the desire to
drop asleep with their heads on the capstan, and the
necessity of keeping sharper watch lest the Indians
should come off through the rising mist, bore the
double pains of Tantalus and Sysiphus—ungratified
desire at their lips and threatening ruin over their heads.

After dividing the watch at the break of day, Hudson,
with the relieved part of his crew, had gone below,
and might have been asleep an hour, when Fleming
suddenly entered the cabin and laid his hand upon
his shoulder. The skipper sprang from his berth
with the habitual readiness of a seaman, and followed
his mate upon deck, where he found his men standing
to their arms, and watching an object that, to his first
glance, seemed like a canoe sailing down upon them
through the air. The rash homicide drew close to
Hendrick as he regarded it, and the chatter of his
teeth betrayed that, during the long and anxious
watches of the night, his conscience had not justified
him for the hasty death he had awarded to a fellow-creature.

“She but looms through the mist!” said the skipper,
after regarding the advancing object for a moment.
“It is a single canoe, and can scarce harm us. Let
her come alongside!”

The natural explanation of the phenomenon at once
satisfied the crew, who had taken their superstitious
fears rather from Fleming's evident alarm than from
their own want of reflection; but the guilty man himself
still gazed on the advancing phantom, and when
a slight stir of the breeze raised the mist like the corner
of a curtain, and dropped the canoe plain upon
the surface of the river, he turned gloomily on his
heel, and muttered in an undertone to Hudson, “It
brings no good, Skipper Hendrick!”

Meanwhile the canoe advanced slowly. The single
paddle which propelled her paused before every turn,
and as the mist lifted quite up and showed a long
green line of shore between its shadowy fringe and
the water, an Indian, highly-painted, and more ornamented
than any they had hitherto seen, appeared
gazing earnestly at the vessel, and evidently approaching
with fear and caution.

The Half-Moon was heading up the river with
the rising tide, and Hudson walked forward to the
bows to look at the savage more closely. By the
eagle and bear, so richly embroidered in the gay-colored
quills of the porcupine on his belt of wampum,
he presumed him to be a chief; and glancing
his eye into the canoe, he saw the pillow which had
occasioned the death of the plunderer the night before,
and on it lay two ears of corn, and two broken arrows.
Pausing a moment as he drew near, the Indian pointed
to these signs of peace, and Hudson, in reply, spread
out his open hands and beckoned him to come on
board. In an instant the slight canoe shot under the
starboard bow, and with a noble confidence which the
skipper remarked upon with admiration, the tall savage
sprang upon the deck and laid the hand of the commander
to his breast.

The noon arrived, hot and sultry, and there was no
likelihood of a wind till sunset. The chief had been
feasted on board, and had shown, in his delight, the
most unequivocal evidence of good feeling; and even
Fleming, at last, who had drank more freely than usual
during the morning, abandoned his suspicion, and
joined in amusing the superb savage who was their
guest. In the course of the forenoon, another canoe
came off, paddled by a single young woman, whom
Fleming, recognised as having accompanied the plunderers
the night before, but in his half-intoxicated
state, it seemed to recall none of his previous bodings,
and to his own surprise, and that of the crew, she
evidently regarded him with particular favor, and by
pertinacious and ingenious signs, endeavored to induce
him to go ashore with her in the canoe. The
particular character of her face and form would have
given the mate a clue to her probable motives, had he
been less reckless from his excitement. She was
taller than is common for females of the savage tribes,
and her polished limbs, as gracefully moulded in their

dark hues as those of the mercury of the fountain,
combined, with their slightness, a nerve and steadiness
of action which betrayed strength and resolution
of heart and frame. Her face was highly beautiful,
but the voluptuous fulness of the lips was contradicted
by a fierce fire in her night-dark eyes, and a quickness
of the brow to descend, which told of angry passions
habitually on the alert. It was remarked by Hans
Christaern, one of the crew, that when Fleming left
her for an instant, she abstracted herself from the
other joyous groups, and, with folded arms and looks
of brooding thoughtfulness, stood looking over the
stern; but immediately on his reappearance, her
snowy teeth became visible between her relaxing lips,
and she resumed her patient gaze upon his countenance,
and her occasional efforts to draw him into the
canoe.

Quite regardless of the presence of the woman, the
chief sat apart with Hudson, communicating his ideas
by intelligent signs, and after a while, the skipper
called his mate, and informed him that, as far as he
could understand, the chief wished to give them a
feast on shore. “Arm yourselves well,” said he,
“though I look for no treachery from this noble pagan;
and if chance should put us in danger, we shall be
more than a match for the whole tribe. Come with
me, Fleming,” he continued, after a pause, “you are
too rash with your firearms to be left in command.
Man the watch, four of you, and the rest get into the
long-boat. We'll while away these sluggish hours,
though danger is in it.”

The men sprang gayly below for their arms, and
were soon equipped and ready, and the chief, with an
expression of delight, put off in his canoe, followed
more slowly by the heavy long-boat, into which Hudson,
having given particular orders to the watch to let
no savages on board during his absence, was the last
to embark. The woman, whom the chief had called
to him before his departure by the name of Kihyalee,
sped off before in her swift canoe to another point of
the shore, and when Fleming cried out from the bow
of the boat, impatiently motioning her to follow, she
smiled in a manner that sent a momentary shudder
through the veins of the skipper who chanced to observe
the action, and by a circular movement of her
arm conveyed to him that she should meet him from
the other side of the hill. As they followed the chief,
they discovered the wigwams of an Indian village behind
the rocky point for which she was making, and
understood that the chief had sent her thither on some
errand connected with his proposed hospitality.

A large square rock, which had the look of having
been hurled with some avalanche from the mountain,
lay in the curve of a small beach of sand, surrounded
by the shallow water, and, on the left of this, the chief
pointed out to the skipper a deeper channel, hollowed
by the entrance of a mountain-torrent into the river,
through which he might bring his boat to land. At
the edge of this torrent's bed, the scene of the first act
of hospitality to our race upon the Hudson, stands at
this day the gate to the most hospitable mansion on
the river, as if the spirit of the spot had consecrated it
to its first association with the white man.

The chief led the way when the crew had disembarked,
by a path skirting the deep-worn bed of the
torrent, and after an ascent of a few minutes, through
a grove of tall firs, a short turn to the left brought
them upon an open table of land, a hundred and fifty
feet above the river, shut in by a circle of forest-trees,
and frowned over on the east by a tall and bald cliff,
which shot up in a perpendicular line to the height
of three hundred feet. From a cleft in the face of
this precipice a natural spring oozed forth, drawing
a darker line down the sun-parched rock, and feeding
a small stream that found its way to the river on the
northern side of the platform just mentioned, creating
between itself and the deeper torrent to the south, a
sort of highland peninsula, now constituting the estate
of the hospitable gentleman above alluded to.

Hudson looked around him with delight and surprise
when he stood on the highest part of the broad
natural table selected by the chief for his entertainment.
The view north showed a cleft through the
hills, with the river coiled like a lake in its widening
bed, while a blue and wavy line of mountains formed
the far horizon at its back; south, the bold eminences,
between which he had found his adventurous
way, closed in like the hollowed sides of a bright-green
vase, with glimpses of the river lying in its
bottom like crystal; below him descended a sharp
and wooded bank, with the river at its foot, and
directly opposite rose a hill in a magnificent cone to
the very sky, sending its shadow down through the
mirrored water, as if it entered to some inner world.
The excessive lavishness of the foliage clothed these
bold natural features with a grace and richness altogether
captivating to the senses, and Hudson long
stood, gazing around him, believing that the tales of
brighter and happier lands were truer than he had
deemed, and that it was his lucky destiny to have been
the discoverer of a future Utopia.

A little later, several groups of Indians were seen
advancing from the village, bearing the materials for
a feast, which they deposited under a large tree, indicated
by the chief. It was soon arranged, and Hudson
with his men surrounded the dishes of shell and
wood, one of which, placed in the centre, contained a
roasted dog, half buried in Indian-corn. While the
chief and several of his warriors sat down in company
with the whites, the young men danced the calumet-dance
to the sound of a rude drum, formed by drawing
a skin tightly over a wooden bowl, and near them, in
groups, stood the women and children of the village,
glancing with looks of curiosity from the feats of the
young men to the unaccustomed faces of the strangers.

Among the women stood Kihyalee, who kept her
large bright eyes fixed almost fiercely upon Fleming,
yet when he looked toward her, she smiled and turned
as if she would beckon him away—a bidding which he
tried in vain to obey, under the vigilant watch of his
master.

The feast went on, and the Indians having produced
gourds, filled with a slight intoxicating liquor made
from the corn, Hudson offered to the chief, some
spirits from a bottle which he had intrusted to one
of the men to wash down the expected roughness of
the savage viands. The bottle passed in turn to the
mate, who was observed to drink freely, and, a few
minutes after, Hudson rising to see more nearly a trial
of skill with the bow and arrow, Fleming found the
desired opportunity, and followed the tempting Kihyalee
into the forest.

The sun began to throw the shadows of the tall
pines in gigantic pinnacles along the ground, and the
youths of the friendly tribe, who had entertained the
great navigator, ceased from their dances and feats
of skill, and clustered around the feast-tree. Intending
to get under weigh with the evening breeze and
proceed still farther up the river, Hudson rose to collect
his men, and bid the chief farewell. Taking the
hand of the majestic savage and putting it to his
breast, to express in his own manner the kind feelings
he entertained for him, he turned toward the path
by which he came, and was glancing round at his men,
when Hans Christaern inquired if he had sent the
mate back to the vessel.

“Der teufel, no!” answered the skipper, missing
him for the first time; “has he been long gone?”

“A full hour!” said one of the men.

Hudson put his hand to his head, and remembered
the deep wrong Fleming had done to the tribe. Retribution,

he feared, had over-taken him—but how was
it done so silently? How had the guilty man been
induced to leave his comrades, and accelerate his
doom by his own voluntary act?

The next instant resolved the question. A distant
and prolonged scream, as of a man in mortal agony,
drew all eyes to the summit of the beetling cliff, which
overhung them. On its extremest verge, outlined
distinctly against the sky, stood the tall figure of Kihyalee,
holding from her, yet poised over the precipice,
the writhing form of her victim, while in the other
hand, flashing in the rays of the sun, glittered the
bright hatchet she had plucked from his girdle. Infuriated
at the sight, and suspecting collision on the
part of the chief, Hudson drew his cutlass and gave
the order to stand to arms, but as he turned, the gigantic
savage had drawn an arrow to its head with incredible
force, and though it fell far short of its mark, there
was that in the action and in his look which, in the
passing of a thought, changed the mind of the skipper.
In another instant, the hesitating arm of the widowed
Kihyalee descended, and loosening her hold upon the
relaxed body of her victim, the doomed mate fell
heavily down the face of the precipice.

The chief turned to Hudson, who stood trembling
and aghast at the awful scene, and plucked the remaining
arrows from his quiver, he broke them and
threw himself on the ground. The tribe gathered
around their chief, Hudson moved his hand to them
in token of forgiveness, and in a melancholy silence
the crew took their way after him to the shore.

THE PICKER AND PILER.

The nature of the strange incident I have to relate
forbids me to record either place or time.

On one of the wildest nights in which I had ever
been abroad, I drove my panting horses through a
snowdrift breast high, to the door of a small tavern in
the western country. The host turned out unwillingly
at the knock of my whip handle on the outer door,
and, wading before the tired animals to the barn, which
was nearly inaccessible from the banks of snow, he
assisted me in getting off their frozen harnesses, and
bestowing them safely for the night.

The “bar-room” fire burnt brightly, and never was
fire more welcome. Room was made for me by four
or five rough men who sat silent around it, and with a
keen comprehension of “pleasure after pain,” I took
off my furs and moccasins, and stretched my cold contracted
limbs to the blaze. When, a few minutes
after, a plate of cold salt beef was brought me, with a
corn cake and a mug of “flip” hissing from the poker,
it certainly would have been hard to convince me that
I would have put on my coats and moccasins again to
have ridden a mile to paradise.

The faces of my new companions, which I had not
found time to inspect very closely while my supper
lasted, were fully revealed by the light of a pitch-pine
knot, thrown on the hearth by the landlord, and their
grim reserve and ferocity put me in mind, for the first
time since I had entered the room, of my errand in
that quarter of the country.

The timber-tracts which lie convenient to the rivers
of the west, offer to the refugee and desperado of every
description, a resource from want and (in their own
opinion) from crime, which is seized upon by all at
least who are willing to labor. The owners of the extensive
forests, destined to become so valuable, are
mostly men of large speculation, living in cities, who,
satisfied with the constant advance in the price of
lumber, consider their pine-trees as liable to nothing
but the laws of nature, and leave them unfenced and
unprotected, to increase in size and value till the land
beneath them is wanted for culture. It is natural
enough that solitary settlers, living in the neighborhood
of miles of apparently unclaimed land, should
think seldom of the owner, and in time grow to the
opinion of the Indian, that the Great Spirit gave the
land, the air, and the water, to all his children, and
they are free to all alike. Furnishing the requisite
teams and implements, therefore, the inhabitants of
these tracts collect a number of the stragglers through
the country, and forming what is called a “bee,” go
into the nearest woods, and for a month or more, work
laboriously at selecting, and felling the tallest and
straightest pines. In their rude shanty at night they
have bread, pork, and whiskey, which hard labor makes
sufficiently palatable, and the time is passed merrily
till the snow is right for sledding. The logs are then
drawn to the water sides, rafts are formed, and the
valuable lumber, for which they paid nothing but their
labor is run to the cities for their common advantage.

The only enemies of this class of men are the agents
who are sometimes sent out in the winter to defect
them in the act of felling or drawing off timber, and
in the dark countenances around the fire, I read this
as the interpretation of my own visit to the woods.
They soon brightened and grew talkative when they
discovered that I was in search of hands to fell and
burn, and make clearing for a farm; and after a talk
of an hour or two, I was told in answer to my inquiries,
that all the “men people” in the country were busy
“lumbering for themselves,” unless it were —
the “Picker and Piler.”

As the words were pronounced, a shrill neigh
outside the door pronounced the arrival of a new-comer.

“Talk of the devil”—said the man in a lower tone,
and without finishing the proverb he rose with a
respect which he had not accorded to me, to make
room for the Picker and Piler.

A man of rather low stature entered, and turned to
drive back his horse, who had followed him nearly in.
I observed that the animal had neither saddle nor bridle.
Shutting the door upon him without violence, he exchanged
nods with one or two of the men, and giving
the landlord a small keg which he had brought, he
pleaded haste for refusing the offered chair, and stood
silent by the fire. His features were blackened with
smoke, but I could see that they were small and regular,
and his voice, though it conveyed in its deliberate
accents an indefinable resolution, was almost femininely
soft and winning.

“That stranger yonder has got a job for you,” said
the landlord, as he gave him back the keg and received
the money.

Turning quickly upon me, he detected me in a very
eager scrutiny of himself, and for a moment I was
thrown too much off my guard to address him.

“Is it you, sir?” he asked, after waiting a moment.

“Yes,—I have some work to be done hereabouts,
but—you seem in a hurry. Could you call here to-morrow.”

“I may not be here again in a week.”

“Do you live far from here?” He smiled.

“I scarce know where I live, but I am burning a
piece of wood a mile or two up the run, and if you
would like a warmer bed than the landlord will give
you—”

That personage decided the question for me by
telling me in so many words that I had better go.
His beds were all taken up, and my horses should be
taken care of till my return. I saw that my presence
had interrupted something, probably the formation of
a “bee,” and more willingly than I would have believed
possible an hour before, I resumed my furs and
wrappers, and declared that I was ready. The Picker

and Piler had inspired me, and I knew not why, with
an involuntary respect and liking.

“It is a rough night, sir,” said he, as he shouldered
a rifle he had left outside, and slung the keg by a
leather strap over the neck of his horse, “but I will
soon show you a better climate. Come, sir, jump on!”

“And you?” I said inquisitively, as he held his
horse by the mane for me to mount. It was a Canadian
pony, scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog.

“I am more used to the road, sir, and will walk.
Come?”

It was no time to stand upon etiquette, even if it
had been possible to resist the strange tone of authority
with which he spoke. So without more ado, I
sprang upon the animal's back, and holding on by the
long tuft upon his withers, suffered him passively to
plunge through the drift after his master.

Wondering at the readiness with which I had entered
upon this equivocal adventure, but never for an
instant losing confidence in my guide, I shut my eyes
to the blinding cold, and accommodated my limbs as
well as I could to the bare back and scrambling paces
of the Canadian. The Picker and Piler strode on
before, the pony following like a spaniel at his heels,
and after a half hour's tramp, during which I had
merely observed that we were rounding the base of a
considerable hill, we turned short to the right, and
were met by a column of smoke, which, lifting, the
moment after, disclosed the two slopes of a considerable
valley enveloped in one sea of fire. A red, lurid
cloud, overhung it at the tops of the tallest trees, and
far and wide, above that, spread a covering of black
smoke, heaving upward in vast and billowy masses, and
rolling away on every side into the darkness.

We approached a pine of gigantic height, on fire
to the very peak, not a branch left on the trunk, and
its pitchy knots distributed like the eyes of the lamprey,
burning pure and steady amid the irregular flame. I
had once or twice, with an instinctive wish to draw
rein, pulled hard upon the tangled tuft in my hand,
but master and horse kept on. This burning tree,
however, was the first of a thousand, and as the pony
turned his eyes away from the intense heat to pass between
it and a bare rock, I glanced into the glowing
labyrinth beyond, and my faith gave way. I jumped
from his back and hailed the Picker and Piler, with a
halloo scarcely audible amid the tumult of the crackling
branches. My voice did not evidently reach his
ear, but the pony, relieved from my weight, galloped
to his side, and rubbed his muzzle against the unoccupied
hand of his master.

He turned back immediately. “I beg pardon,” he
said, “I have that to think of just now which makes
me forgetful. I am not surprised at your hesitation,
but mount again and trust the pony.”

The animal turned rather unwilingly at his master's
bidding, and a little ashamed of having shown
fear, while a horse would follow, I jumped again on
his back.

“If you find the heat inconvenient, cover your face.”
And with this laconic advice, the Picker and Piler
turned on his heel, and once more strode away before
us.

Sheltering the sides of my face by holding up the
corners of my wrapper with both hands, I abandoned
myself to the horse. He overtook his master with a
shuffling canter, and putting his nose as close to the
ground as he could carry it without stumbling, followed
closely at his heels. I observed, by the green
logs lying immediately along our path, that we were
following an avenue of prostrate timber which had been
felled before the wood was fired; but descending
presently to the left, we struck at once into the deep
bed of a brook, and by the lifted head and slower gait
of the pony, as well as my own easier respiration, I
found that the hollow through which it ran, contained
a body of pure air unreached by the swaying curtains
of smoke or the excessive heat of the fiery currents
above. The pony now picked his way leisurely along
the brookside, and while my lungs expanded with the
relief of breathing a more temperate atmosphere, I
raised myself from my stooping posture in a profuse
perspiration, and one by one disembarrassed myself
from my protectives against the cold.

I had lost sight for several minutes of the Picker
and Piler, and presumed by the pony's desultory
movements that he was near the end of his journey,
when, rounding a shelvy point of rock, we stood suddenly
upon the brink of a slight waterfall, where the
brook leaped four or five feet into a shrunken dell, and
after describing a half circle on a rocky platform, resumed
its onward course in the same direction as before.
This curve of the brook and the platform it
enclosed lay lower than the general level of the forest,
and the air around and within it, it seemed to me, was
as clear and genial as the summer noon. Over one
side, from the rocky wall, a rude and temporary roof
of pine slabs drooped upon a barricade of logs, forming
a low hut, and before the entrance of this, at the moment
of my appearance, stood a woman and a showily-dressed
young man, both evidently confused at the
sudden apparition of the Picker and Piler. My eyes
had scarce rested on the latter, when, from standing
at his fullest height with his rifle raised as if to beat
the other to the earth, he suddenly resumed his stooping
and quiet mien, set his rifle against the rock, and
came forward to give me his hand.

“My daughter!” he said, more in the way of explanation
than introduction, and without taking further
notice of the young man whose presence seemed
so unwelcome, he poured me a draught from the keg
he had brought, pointed to the water falling close at
my hand, and threw himself at his length upon the
ground.

The face and general appearance of the young man,
now seated directly opposite me, offered no temptation
for more than a single glance, and my whole attention
was soon absorbed by the daughter of my singular
host, who, crossing from the platform to the hut,
divided her attention between a haunch of venison
roasting before a burning log of hickory, and the arrangement
of a few most primitive implements for our
coming supper. She was slight, like her father, in
form, and as far as I had been able to distinguish his
blackened features, resembled him in the general outline.
But in the place of his thin and determined
mouth, her lips were round and voluptuous, and
though her eye looked as if it might wake, it expressed,
even in the presence of her moody father, a
drowsy and soft indolence, common enough to the
Asiatics, but seldom seen in America. Her dress was
coarse and careless, but she was beautiful with every
possible disadvantage, and, whether married or not,
evidently soon to become a mother.

The venison was placed before us on the rock, and
the young man, uninvited, and with rather an air of
bravado, cut himself a steak from the haunch and
broiled it on the hickory coals, while the daughter kept
as near him as her attention to her father's wants would
permit, but neither joined us in eating, nor encouraged
my attempts at conversation. The Picker and Piler
ate in silence, leaving me to be my own carver, and
finishing his repast by a deep draught from the keg
which had been the means of our acquaintance, he
sprang upon his feet and disappeared.

“The wind has changed,” said the daughter, looking
up at the smoke, “and he has gone to the western
edge to start a new fire. It's a full half mile, and he'll
be gone an hour.”

This was said with a look at me which was anything
but equivocal. I was de trop. I took up the
rifle of the Picker and Piler, forgetting that there was

probably nothing to shoot in a burning wood, and remarking
that I would have a look for a deer, jumped
up the water-fall side, and was immediately hidden by
the rocks.

I had no conception of the scene that lay around
me. The natural cave or hollow of rock in which the
hut lay embosomed, was the centre of an area of perhaps
an acre, which had been felled in the heart of the
wood before it was set on fire. The forest encircled
it with blazing columns, whose capitals were apparently
lost in the sky, and curtains of smoke and
flame, which flew as if lashed into ribands by a whirlwind.
The grandeur, the violence, the intense brightness
of the spectacle, outran all imagination. The
pines, on fire to the peak, and straight as arrows,
seemed to resemble, at one moment the conflagration
of an eastern city, with innumerable minarets abandoned
to the devouring element. At the next moment,
the wind, changing its direction, swept out every
vestige of smoke, and extinguished every tongue of
flame, and the tall trees, in clear and flameless ignition,
standing parallel in thousands, resembled some
blinding temple of the genii, whose columns of
miraculous rubies, sparkling audibly, outshone the
day. By single glances, my eye penetrated into aisles
of blazing pillars, extending far into the forest, and the
next instant, like a tremendous surge alive with serpents
of fire, the smoke and flame swept through it,
and it seemed to me as if some glorious structure had
been consumed in the passing of a thought. For a
minute, again, all would be still except the crackling
of the fibres of the wood, and with the first stir of the
wind, like a shower of flashing gems, the bright coals
rained down through the forest, and for a moment the
earth glowed under the trees as if its whole crust were
alive with one bright ignition.

With the pungency of the smoke and heat, and the
variety and bewilderment of the spectacle, I found my
eyes and brain growing giddy. The brook ran cool
below, and the heat had dried the leaves in the small
clearing, and with the abandonment of a man overcome
with the sultriness of summer, I lay down on the
rivulet's bank, and dipped my head and bathed my
eyes in the running water. Close to its surface there
was not a particle of smoke in the air, and, exceedingly
refreshed with its temperate coolness, I lay for sometime
in luxurious ease, trying in vain to fancy the
winter that howled without. Frost and cold were
never more difficult to realize in midsummer, though
within a hundred rods, probably, a sleeping man would
freeze to death in an hour.

“I have a better bed for you in the shanty,” said the
Picker and Piler, who had approached unheard in the
noise of the fires, and suddenly stood over me.

He took up his rifle, which I had laid against a
prostrate log, and looked anxiously toward the descent
to the hut.

“I am little inclined for sleep,” I answered, “and
perhaps you will give me an hour of conversation here.
The scene is new to me”—

“I have another guest to dispose of,” he answered,
“and we shall be more out of the smoke near the
shanty.”

I was not surprised, as I jumped upon the platform,
to find him angrily separating his daughter and the
stranger. The girl entered the hut, and with a decisive
gesture, he pointed the young man to a “shakedown”
of straw in the remotest corner of the rocky
enclosure.

“With your leave, old gentleman,” said the intruder,
after glancing at his intended place of repose,
“I'll find a crib for myself.” And springing up the
craggy rock opposite the door of the shanty he gathered
a slight heap of brush, and threw it into a hollow
left in the earth by a tree, which, though full grown
and green, had been borne to the earth and partly
uprooted by the falling across it of an overblown and
gigantic pine. The earth and stones had followed the
uptorn mass, forming a solid upright wall, from which,
like struggling fingers, stretching back in agony to
the ground from which they had parted, a few rent
and naked roots pointed into the cavity. The sequel
will show why I am so particular in this description.

“When peace was declared between England and
this country,” said the Picker and Piler (after an
hour's conversation, which had led insensibly to his
own history), I was in command of a privateer. Not
choosing to become a pirate, by continuing the cruise,
I was set ashore in the West Indies by a crew in open
mutiny. My property was all on board, and I was
left a beggar. I had one child, a daughter, whose
mother died in giving her birth.

“Having left a sufficient sum for her education in
the hands of a brother of my own, under whose roof
she had passed the first years of her life, I determined
to retrieve my fortunes before she or my friends should
be made acquainted with my disaster.

“Ten years passed over, and I was still a wanderer
and a beggar.

“I determined to see my child, and came back,
like one from the dead, to my brother's door. He had
forgotten me, and abused his trust. My daughter,
then seventeen, and such as you see her here, was the
drudge in the family of a stranger—ignorant and friendless.
My heart turned against mankind with this last
drop in a bitter cup, and, unfitted for quiet life, I looked
around for some channel of desperate adventure.
But my daughter was the perpetual obstacle. What
to do with her? She had neither the manners nor
the education of a lady, and to leave her a servant was
impossible. I started with her for the west, with the
vague design of joining some tribe of Indians, and
chance and want have thrown me into the only mode
of life on earth that could now be palatable to me.”

“Is it not lonely,” I asked, “after your stirring adventures?”

“Lonely! If you knew the delight with which I
live in the wilderness, with a circle of fire to shut out
the world! The labor is hard it is true, but I need it,
to sleep and forget. There is no way else in which I
could seclude my daughter. Till lately, she has been
contented, too. We live a month together in one
place—the centre like this of a burning wood. I can
bear hardship, but I love a high temperature—the
climate of the tropics—and I have it here. For weeks
I forget that it is winter, tending my fires and living
on the game I have stored up. There is a hollow or
a brook—a bed or a cave, in every wood, where the
cool air, as here, sinks to the bottom, and there I can
put up my shanty, secure from all intrusion—but such
as I bring upon myself.”

The look he gave to the uprooted ash and the
sleeper beneath it, made an apology for this last clause
unnecessary. He thought not of me.

“Some months since,” continued the Picker and
Piler, in a voice husky with suppressed feeling, “I
met the villain who sleeps yonder, accidentally, as I
met you. He is the owner of this land. After
engaging to clear and burn it, I invited him, as I
did yourself, from a momentary fever for company
which sometimes comes over the solitary, to go with
me to the fallow I was clearing. He loitered in the
neighborhood awhile, under pretext of hunting, and
twice on my return from the village, I found that my
daughter had seen him. Time has betrayed the
wrong he inflicted on me.

The voice of the agitated father sank almost to a
whisper as he pronounced the last few words, and,
rising from the rock on which we were sitting, he
paced for a few minutes up and down the platform in
silence.

The reader must fill up from his own imagination

the drama of which this is but the outline, for the
Picker and Piler was not a man to be questioned, and
I can tell but what I saw and heard. In the narration
of his story he seemed but recapitulating the prominent
events for his own self-converse, rather than attempting
to tell a tale to me, and it was hurried over
as brokenly and briefly as I have put it down. I sat in
a listening attitude after he concluded, but he seemed
to have unburthened his bosom sufficiently, and his
lips were closed with stern compression.

“You forget,” he said, after pacing awhile, “that I
offered you a place to sleep. The night wears late.
Stretch yourself on that straw, with your cloak over
you. Good night!”

I lay down and looked up at the smoke rolling
heavily into the sky till I slept.

I awoke, feeling chilled, for the rock sheltered me
from the rays of the fire. I stepped out from the
hollow. The fires were pale with the gray of the
morning, and the sky was visible through the smoke.
I looked around for a place to warm myself. The
hickory log had smouldered out, but a fire had been
kindled under the overblown pine, and its pitchy heart
was now flowing with the steady brilliancy of a torch.
I took up one of its broken branches, cracked it on my
knee, and stirring up the coals below, soon sent up a
merry blaze, which enveloped the whole trunk.

Turning my back to the increasing heat, I started,
for, creeping toward me, with a look of eagerness for
which I was at a loss to account, came the Picker and
Piler.

“Twice doomed!” he muttered between his teeth,
“but not by me!”

He threw down a handful of pitch pine knots, laid
his axe against a burning tree, and with a branch of
hemlock, swept off the flame from the spot where the
fire was eating through, as if to see how nearly it was
divided.

I began to think him insane, for I could get no
answer to my questions, and when he spoke, it was
half audible, and with his eyes turned from me fixedly.
I looked in the same direction, but could see nothing
remarkable. The seducer slept soundly beneath his
matted wall, and the rude door of the shanty was behind
us. Leaving him to see phantoms in the air, as
I thought, I turned my eyes to the drips of the water-fall,
and was absorbed in memories of my own, when
I saw the girl steal from the shanty, and with one
bound overleap the rocky barrier of the platform. I
laid my hand on the shoulder of my host, and pointed
after her, as with stealthy pace looking back occasionally
to the hut, where she evidently thought her
father slept, she crept round toward her lover.

“He dies!” cried the infuriated man; but as he
jumped from me to seize his axe, the girl crouched
out of sight, and my own first thought was to awake
the sleeper. I made two bounds and looked back, for
I heard no footstep.

“Stand clear!” shouted a voice of almost supernatural
shrillness! and as I caught sight of the Picker
and Piler standing enveloped in smoke upon the burning
tree, with his axe high in the air, the truth flashed
on me.

Down came the axe into the very heart of the pitchy
flame, and trembling with the tremendous smoke, the
trunk slowly bent upward from the fire.

The Picker and Piler sprang clear, the overborne
ash creaked and heaved, and with a sick giddiness in
my eyes, I look at the unwarned sleeper.

One half of the dissevered pine fell to the earth,
and the shock startled him from his sleep. A whole
age seemed to me elapsing while the other rose with
the slow lift of the ash. As it slid heavily away, the
vigorous tree righted, like a giant springing to his
feet. I saw the root pin the hand of the seducer to
the earth—a struggle—a contortion and the leafless
and waving top of the recovered and upright tree
rocked with its effort, and a long, sharp cry had gone
out echoing through the woods, and was still. I felt
my brain reel.

Blanched to a livid paleness, the girl moved about
in the sickly daylight, when I recovered; but the
Picker and Piler, with a clearer brow than I had yet
seen him wear, was kindling fires beneath the remnants
of the pine.

KATE CREDIFORD.

I found myself looking with some interest at the
back of a lady's head. The theatre was crowded, and
I had come in late, and the object of my curiosity,
whoever she might be, was listening very attentively to
the play.—She did not move. I had time to build a
life-time romance about her before I had seen a feature
of her face. But her ears were small and of an exquisite
oval, and she had that rarest beauty of woman
—the hair arched and joined to the white neck with
the same finish as on the temples. Nature often
slights this part of her masterpiece.

The curtain dropped, and I stretched eagerly forward
to catch a glimse of the profile.—But no! she
sat next one of the slender pilasters, and with her head
leaned against it, remained immovable.

I left the box, and with some difficulty made my
way into the crowded pit. Elbowing, apologizing,
persevering, I at last gained a point where I knew I
could see my incognita at the most advantage. I
turned—pshaw!—how was it possible I had not recognised
her?

Kate Crediford!

There was no getting out again, for a while at least,
without giving offence to the crowd I had jostled so
unceremoniously. I sat down—vexed—and commenced
a desperate study of the figure of Shakspere on
the drop-curtain.

Of course I had been a lover of Miss Crediford's,
or I could not have turned with indifference from the
handsomest woman in the theatre. She was very
beautiful—there was no disputing. But we love women
a little for what we do know of them, and a great
deal more for what we do not. I had love-read Kate
Crediford to the last leaf. We parted as easily as a
reader and a book. Flirtation is a circulating library,
in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume,
and I gave up Kate to the next reader, feeling no
property even in the marks I had made in her perusal.
A little quarrel sufficed as an excuse for the closing of
the book, and both of us studiously avoided a reconciliation.

As I sat in the pit, I remembered suddenly a mole
on her left cheek, and I turned toward her with the
simple curiosity to knew whether it was visible at that
distance. Kate looked sad. She still leaned immoveable
against the slight column, and her dark eyes, it
struck me, were moist. Her mouth, with this peculiar
expression upon her countenance, was certainly
inexpressibly sweet—the turned-down corners ending
in dimples, which in that particular place, I have always
observed, are like wells of unfathomable melancholy.
Poor Kate! what was the matter with her?

As I turned back to my dull study of the curtain, a
little pettish with myself for the interest with which I
had looked at an old flame, I detected half a sigh
under my white waistcoat; but instantly persuading
myself that it was a disposition to cough, coughed, and
began to hum “suoni la tromba.” The curtain rose
and the play went on.

It was odd that I never had seen Kate in that humor
before. I did not think she could be sad. Kate
Crediford sad! Why, she was the most volatile, lighthearted,
care-for-nothing coquette that ever held up
her fingers to be kissed. I wonder, has any one really
annoyed you, my poor Kate! thought I. Could I,
by chance, be of any service to you—for, after all, I
owe you something! I looked at her again.

Strange that I had ever looked at that face without
emotion! The vigils of an ever-wakeful, ever-passionate,
yet ever-tearful and melancholy spirit, seemed set,
and kept under those heavy and motionless eyelids.
And she, as I saw her now, was the very model and
semblance of the character that I had all my life been
vainly seeking! This was the creature I had sighed
for when turning away from the too mirthful tenderness
of Kate Crediford! There was something new,
or something for the moment miswritten, in that
familiar countenance.

I made my way out of the pit with some difficulty,
and returned to sit near her. After a few minutes, a
gentleman in the next box rose and left the seat vacant
on the other side of the pilaster against which she
leaned. I went around while the orchestra were playing
a loud march, and, without being observed by the
thoughtful beauty, seated myself in the vacant place.

Why did my eyes flush and moisten, as I looked
upon the small white hand lying on the cushioned
barrier between us! I knew every vein of it, like the
strings of my own heart.—I had held it spread out in
my own, and followed its delicate blue traceries with
a rose-stem, for hours and hours, while imploring, and
reproaching, and reasoning over love's lights and
shadows. I knew the feel of every one of those exquisite
fingers—those rolled up rose-leaves, with nails
like pieces cut from the lip of a shell! Oh, the
promises I had kissed into oaths on that little chefd'œuvre
of nature's tinted alabaster! the psalms and
sermons I had sat out holding it, in her father's pew!
the moons I had tired out of the sky, making of it a
bridge for our hearts passing backward and forward!
And how could that little wretch of a hand, that knew
me better than its own other hand (for we had been
more together), lie there, so unconscious of my presence?
How could she—Kate Crediford—sit next to
me as she was doing, with only a stuffed partition between
us, and her head leaning on one side of a pilaster,
and mine on the other, and never start, nor recognise,
nor be at all aware of my neighborhood? She was
not playing a part, it was easy to see. Oh, I knew
those little relaxed fingers too well! Sadness, indolent
and luxurious sadness, was expressed in her countenance,
and her abstraction was unfeigned and contemplative.
Could she have so utterly forgotten me—
magnetically, that is to say?—Could the atmosphere
about her, that would once have trembled betrayingly
at my approach, like the fanning of an angel's invisible
wing, have lost the sense of my presence?

I tried to magnetize her hand. I fixed my eyes on
that little open palm, and with all the intensity I could
summon, kissed it mentally in its rosy centre. I reproached
the ungrateful little thing for its dulness and
forgetfulness, and brought to bear upon it a focus of
old memories of pressures and caresses, to which a
stone would scarce have the heart to be insensible.

But I belie myself in writing this with a smile. I
watched those unmoving fingers with a heart. I could
not see the face, nor read the thought, of the woman
who had once loved me, and who sat near me, now, so
unconsciously—but if a memory had stirred, if a pulse
had quickened its beat, those finely-strung fingers I
well know would have trembled responsively. Had
she forgotten me altogether? Is that possible? Can
a woman close the leaves of her heart over a once-loved
and deeply-written name, like the waves over a vessel's
track—like the air over the division of a bird's flight?

I had intended to speak presently to Miss Crediford,
but every moment the restraint became greater. I felt
no more privileged to speak to her than the stranger
who had left the seat I occupied. I drew back, for
fear of encroaching on her room, or disturbing the
folds of her shawl. I dared not speak to her. And,
while I was arguing the matter to myself, the party
who were with her, apparently tired of the play, arose
and left the theatre, Kate following last, but unspoken
to, and unconscious altogether of having been near
any one whom she knew.

I went home and wrote to her all night, for there was
no sleeping till I had given vent to this new fever at my
heart. And in the morning, I took the leading thoughts
from my heap in incoherent scribblings, and embodied
them more coolly in a letter:—

“You will think, when you look at the signature,
that this is to be the old story. And you will be as
much mistaken as you are in believing that I was ever
your lover, till a few hours ago. I have declared love
to you, it is true. I have been happy with you, and
wretched without you; I have thought of you, dreamed
of you, haunted you, sworn to you, and devoted to
you all and more than you exacted, of time and outward
service and adoration; but I love you now for
the first time in my life. Shall I be so happy as to
make you comprehend this startling contradiction?

“There are many chambers in the heart, Kate; and
the spirits of some of us dwell, most fondly and secretly,
in the chamber of tears—avowedly, however, in the
outer and ever-open chamber of mirth. Over the
sacred threshold, guarded by sadness, much that we
select and smile upon, and follow with adulation in
the common walks of life, never passes. We admire
the gay. They make our melancholy sweeter by contrast,
when we retire within ourselves. We pursue
them. We take them to our hearts—to the outer
vestibules of our hearts—and if they are gay only, they
are content with the unconsecrated tribute which we
pay them there. But the chamber within is, meantime,
lonely. It aches with its desolation. The echo
of the mirthful admiration without jars upon its
mournful silence.—It longs for love, but love toned
with its own sadness—love that can penetrate deeper
than smiles ever came—love that, having once entered,
can be locked in with its key of melancholy, and
brooded over with the long dream of a life-time. But
that deep-hidden and unseen chamber of the heart
may be long untenanted. And, meantime, the spirit
becomes weary of mirth, and impatiently quenches the
fire even upon its outer altar, and in the complete
loneliness of a heart that has no inmate or idol, gay
or tearful, lives mechanically on.

“Do you guess at my meaning, Kate?—Do you
remember the merriment of our first meeting? Do
you remember in what a frolic of thoughtlessness you
first permitted me to raise to my lips those restless
fingers? Do you remember the mock condescension,
the merry haughtiness, the rallying and feigned incredulity,
with which you first received my successive
steps of vowing and love-making—the arch look when
it was begun, the laugh when it was over, the untiring
follies we kept up, after vows plighted, and the future
planned and sworn to? That you were in earnest, as
much as you were capable of being, I fully believe.
You would not else have been so prodigal of the sweet
bestowings of a maiden's tenderness. But how often
have I left you with the feeling, that in the hours I
had passed with you, my spirit had been alone! How
often have I wondered if there were depths in my heart,
which love can never reach! How often mourned
that in the procession of love there was no place allotted
for its sweetest and dearest followers—tears and
silence! Oh, Kate! sweet as was that sun-gleam of
early passion, I did not love you! I tired of your

smiles, waiting in vain for your sadness. I left you,
and thought of you no more?

“But now (and you will be surprised to know that
I have been so near to you unperceived)—I have drank
an intoxication from one glance into your eyes, which
throws open to you every door of my heart, subdues
to your control every nerve and feeling of my existence.
Last night, I sat an hour, tracing again the
transparent and well-remembered veins upon your
hand, and oh! how the language written in those
branching and mystic lines had changed in meaning
and power.—You were sad. I saw you from a distance,
and, with amazement at an expression upon
your face which I had never before seen. I came and
sat near you. It was the look I had longed for when
I knew you, and when tired of your mirth. It was
the look I had searched the world for, combined with
such beauty as yours. It was a look of tender and
passionate melancholy, which revealed to me an unsuspected
chamber in your heart—a chamber of tears.
Ah, why were you never sad before? Why have we
lost—why have I lost the eternity's worth of sweet
hours when you love me with that concealed treasure
in your bosom?—Alas! that angels must walk the
world, unrecognised, till too late! Alas, that I have
held in my arms and pressed to my lips, and loosed
again with trifling and weariness, the creature whom
it was my life's errand, the thirst and passionate longing
of my nature, to find and worship!

“Oh, Heaven! with what new value do I now
number over your adorable graces of person! How
spiritualized is every familiar feature, once so deplorably
misappreciated!—How compulsive of respectful
adoration is that flexible waist, that step of aerial lightness,
that swan-like motion, which I once dared to
praise triflingly and half-mockingly, like the tints of a
flower or the chance beauty of a bird! And those
bright lips! How did I ever look on them, and not
know that within their rosy portal slept voiceless, for
a while, the controlling spell of my destiny—the tearful
spirit followed and called in my dreams, with perpetual
longing? Strange value given to features and
outward loveliness by qualities within! Strange
witchery of sadness in a woman! Oh, there is, in
mirth and folly, dear Kate, no air for love's breathing,
still less of food for constancy, or of holiness to consecrate
and heighten beauty of person.

“What can I say else, except implore to be permitted
to approach you—to offer my life to you—to
begin, thus late, after being known so long, the worship
which till death is your due? Pardon me if I
have written abruptly and wildly. I shall await your
answer in an agony of expectation. I do not willingly
breathe till I see you—till I weep at your feet over my
blindness and forgetfulness. Adieu! but let it not be
for long I pray you!”

I despatched this letter, and it would be difficult to
embody in language the agony I suffered in waiting
for a reply. I walked my room, that endless morning,
with a death-pang in every step—so fearful was I—so
prophetically fearful—that I had forfeited for ever the
heart I had once flung from me.

It was noon when a letter arrived. It was in a hand-writing
new to me. But it was on the subject which
possessed my existence, and it was of final import.
It follows:—

But I never called on Mrs. Samuel Smithers.

FLIRTATION AND FOX-CHASING.

I was moping one day in solitary confinement in
quarantine at Malta, when, in a turn between my stone
window and the back wall I saw the yards of a vessel
suddently cross the light, and heard the next moment
the rattle of a chain let go, and all the bustle of a
merchantman coming to anchor. I had the privilege
of promenading between two ring-bolts on the wharf
below the lazaretto, and with the attraction of a newcomer
to the sleepy company of vessels under the
yellow flag, I lost no time in descending the stone
stairs, and was immediately joined by my vigilant sentinel,
the guardiano, whose business it was to prevent
my contact with the other visiters to the wharf. The
tricolor flew at the peak of the stranger, and we easily
made out that she was a merchantman from Marseilles,
subject therefore to a week's quarantine on account
of the cholera. I had myself come from a
plague port, Smyrna, and was subjected to twenty
days' quarantine, six of which had passed; so that the
Frenchman, though but beginning his imprisonment,
was in a position comparatively enviable.

I had watched for an hour the getting of the vessel
into mooring trim, and was beginning to conclude
that she had come without passengers, when a gentleman
made his appearance on deck, and the jolly-boat
was immediately lowered and manned. A traveller's
baggage was handed over the side, the gentleman took
leave of the captain, and, in obedience to directions
from the quarantine officer on the quarterdeck, the
boat was pulled directly to the wharf on which I stood.
The guardiano gave me a caution to retire a little, as
the stranger was coming to take possession of the next
apartment to my own, and must land at the stairs near
by; but, before I had taken two steps backward, I
began to recognise features familiar to me, and with a
turn of the head as he sprang on the wharf the identity
was established completely. Tom Berryman, by all
that was wonderful! I had not seen him since we
were suspended from college together ten years before.
Forgetting lazaretto and guardiano, and all the salt
water between New Haven and Malta, I rushed up to
Tom with the cordiality of other days (a little sharpened
by abstinence from society), and we still had hold
of hands with a firm grip, when the quarantine master
gravely accosted us, and informed my friend that he
had incurred an additional week by touching me—in
short, that he must partake of the remainder of my
quarantine.

Aghast and chap-fallen as Berryman was at the consequences
of our rencontre (for he had fully calculated
on getting into Malta in time for the carnival), he was
somewhat reconciled to his lot by being permitted to
share my room and table instead of living his week in
solitude; and, by enriching our supplies a little from

town, sleeping much, and chatting through the day in
the rich sunshine of that climate of Paradise, we contrived
to shove off the fortnight without any very intolerable
tedium.

My friend and I had begun our travels differently—
he taken England first, which I proposed visiting last.
It is of course the bonne bouche of travel to everybody,
and I was very curious to know Tom's experiences;
and, as I was soon bound thitherward, anxious to pick
out of his descriptions some chart of the rocks and
shoals in the “British channel” of society.

I should say, before quoting my friend, that he was
a Kentuckian, with the manner (to ladies) of mingled
devotion and nonchalance so popular with the sex,
and a chivalric quality of man altogether. His father's
political influence had obtained for him personal letters
of introduction from the president, and, with this advantage,
and his natural air of fashion, he had found
no obstacle to choosing his society in England;
choosing the first, of course, like a true republican!

We were sitting on the water-steps with our feet
immersed up to the ankles (in January too), and in
reply to some question of mine as to the approachability
of noble ladies by such plebeian lovers as himself,
Tom told me the story which follows. I take the
names at random, of course, but, in all else, I shall try
to “tell the tale as 'twas told to me.”

Why, circumstances, as you know, sometimes put
people in the attitude of lovers whether they will or no;
and it is but civil in such a case, to do what fate expects
of you. I knew too much of the difference between
crockery and porcelain to enter English society
with the remotest idea of making love within the red
book of the peerage, and though I've a story to tell, I
swear I never put a foot forward till I thought it was
knightly devoir; inevitable, though ever so ridiculous.
Still, I must say, with a beautiful and unreserved
woman beside one, very much like other beautiful and
unreserved woman, a republican might be pardoned for
forgetting the invisible wall. “Right honorable” loveliness
has as much attraction about it, let me tell you,
and is quite as difficult to resist, as loveliness that is
honored, right or wrong, and a man must be brought
up to it, as Englishmen are, to see the heraldric dragons
and griffins in the air when a charming girl is talking
to him.

Eh? But to begin with the “Tityre tu patulæ.”

I had been passing a fortnight at the hunting lodge
of that wild devil, Lord—, in the Scotch Highlands,
and what with being freely wet outside every day, and
freely wet inside every night, I had given my principle
of life rather a disgust to its lodgings, and there were
some symptoms of preparation for leave-taking. Unwilling
to be ill in a bachelor's den, with no solace
tenderer than a dandy lord's tiger. I made a twilight
flit to the nearest post-town, and tightening my life-screws
a little with the aid of the village apothecary,
started southward the next morning with four posters.

I expected to be obliged to pull up at Edinboro', but
the doctor's opiates, and abstinence, and quiet did
more for me than I had hoped, and I went on very
comfortably to Carlisle. I arrived at this place after
nightfall, and found the taverns overflowing with the
crowds of a fair, and no bed to be had unless I could
make one in a quartette of snoring graziers. At the
same time there was a great political meeting at
Edinboro', and every leg of a poster had gone north
—those I had brought with me having been trans-hitched
to a return chaise, and gone off while I was
looking for accommodations.

Regularly stranded, I sat down by the tap-room
fire, and was mourning my disaster, when the horn
of the night-coach reached my ear, and in the minute
of its rattling up to the door, I hastily resolved that it
was the least of two evils, and booked myself accordingly.
There was but one vacant place, an outsider!
With hardly time enough to resolve, and none to repent,
I was presently rolling over the dark road, chilled
to the bone in the first five minutes, and wet through
with a “Scotch mist” in the next half hour. Somewhere
about daybreak we rolled into the little town
of—, five miles from the seat of the earl of Tresethen,
to whose hospitalities I stood invited, and I went
to bed in a most comfortable inn and slept till noon.

Before going to bed I had written a note to be despatched
to Tresethen castle, and the earl's carriage
was waiting for me when I awoke. I found myself
better than I had expected, and dressing at once for
dinner, managed to reach the castle just in time to
hand in Lady Tresethen. Of that dinner I but remember
that I was the only guest, and that the earl
regretted his daughter's absence from table, Lady
Caroline having been thrown that morning from her
horse. I fainted somewhere about the second remove,
and recovered my wits some days after, on the safe side
of the crisis of a fever.

I shall never forget that first half hour of conscious
curiosity. An exquisite sense of bodily repose mingled
with a vague notion of recent relief from pain, made
me afraid to speak lest I should awake from a dream,
yet, if not a dream, what a delicious reality! A lady
of most noble presence, in a half-mourning dress, sat
by the side of a cheerful fire, turning her large dark eyes
on me, in the pauses of a conversation with a gray-headed
servant. My bed was of the most sumptuous
luxury; the chamber was hung with pictures and
draped with spotless white; the table covered with
the costliest elegancies of the toilet; and in the gentle
and deferential manner of the old liveried menial, and
the subdued tones of inquiry by the lady, there was a
refinement and tenderness which, with the keen susceptibility
of my senses, “lapt me in Elysium.” I was
long in remembering where I was. The lady glided
from the room, the old servant resumed his seat by
my bedside, other servants in the same livery came
softly in on errands of service, and, at the striking of
the half hour by a clock on the mantelpiece, the lady
returned, and I was raised to receive something from
her hand. As she came nearer, I remembered the
Countess Tresethen.

Three days after this I was permitted to take the
air of a conservatory which opened from the countess's
boudoir. My old attendant assisted me to dress, and,
with another servant, took me down in a fauteuil. I
was in slippers and robe-de-chambre, and presumed
that I should see no one except the kind and noble
Lady Tresethen, but I had scarce taken one turn up
the long alley of flowering plants, when the countess
came toward me from the glass door beyond, and on
her arm a girl leaned for support, whose beauty—

(Here Tom dabbled his feet for some minutes in
the water in silence.)

God bless me! I can never give you an idea of it!
It was a new revelation of woman to me; the opening
of an eighth seal. In the minute occupied by her
approach, my imagination (accelerated, as that faculty
always is, by the clairvoyance of sickness), had gone
through a whole drama of love—fear, adoration, desperation,
and rejection—and so complete was it, that
in after moments when these phases of passion came
round in the proper lapse of days and weeks, it seemed
to me that I had been through with them before; that
it was all familiar; that I had met and loved in some
other world, this same glorious creature, with the
same looks, words, and heart-ache; in the same conservatory
of bright flowers, and faith, myself in the
same pattern of a brocade dressing-gown!

Heavens! what a beautiful girl was that Lady Caroline!
Her eyes were of a light gray, the rim of the

lids perfectly inky with the darkness of the long sweeping
lashes, and in her brown hair there was a gold
lustre that seemed somehow to illuminate the curves
of her small head like a halo. Her mouth had too
much character for a perfectly agreeable first impression.
It was nobility and sweetness educated over
native high spirit and scornfulness—the nature shining
through the transparent blood, like a flaw through
enamel. She would have been, in other circumstances,
a maid of Saragossa or a Gertrude Von Wart;
a heroine; perhaps a devil. But her fascination was
resistless!

“My daughter,” said Lady Tresethen (and in that
beginning was all the introduction she thought necessary),
“is, like yourself, an invalid just escaped from
the doctor; you must congratulate each other. Are
you strong enough to lend her an arm, Mr. Berryman?”

The countess left us, and with the composure of a
sister who had seen me every day of my life, Lady
Caroline took my arm and strolled slowly to and fro,
questioning me of my shooting at the lodge, and talking
to me of her late accident, her eyes sometimes
fixed upon her little embroidered slippers, as they
peeped from her snowy morning dress, and sometimes
indolently raised and brought to bear on my flushed
cheek and trembling lips; her singular serenity operating
on me as anything but a sedative! I was taken
up stairs again, after an hour's conversation, in a fair
way for a relapse, and the doctor put me under embargo
again for another week, which, spite of all the
renewed care and tenderness of Lady Tresethen,
seemed to me an eternity! I'll not bother you with
what I felt and thought all that time!

It was a brilliant autumnal day when I got leave to
make my second exodus, and with the doctor's permission
I prepared for a short walk in the park. I
declined the convoy of the old servant, for I had heard
Lady Caroline's horse gallop away down the avenue,
and I wished to watch her return unobserved. I had
just lost sight of the castle in the first bend of the path,
when I saw her quietly walking her horse under the
trees at a short distance, and the moment after she
observed and came toward me at an easy canter. I
had schooled myself to a little more self-possession,
but I was not prepared for such an apparition of splendid
beauty as that woman on horseback. She rode an
Arabian bay of the finest blood; a lofty, fiery, matchless
creature, with an expression of eye and nostril
which I could not but think a proper pendant to her
own, limbed as I had seldom seen a horse, and his
arched neck, and forehead, altogether, proud as a steed
for Lucifer. She sat on him as if it were a throne
she was born to, and the flow of her riding-dress
seemed as much a part of him as his mane. He appeared
ready to bound into the air, like Pegasus, but
one hand calmly stroked his mane, and her face was
as tranquil as marble.

“Well met!” she said; “I was just wishing for a
cavalier. What sort of a horse would you like, Mr.
Berryman? Ellis!” (speaking to her groom), “is old
Curtal taken up from grass?”

“Yes, miladi!”

“Curtal is our invalid horse, and as you are not
very strong, perhaps his easy pace will be best for you.
Bring him out directly, Ellis. We'll just walk along
the road a little way; for I must show you my Arabian;
and we'll not go back to ask mamma's permission,
for we shouldn't get it! You won't mind riding
a little way, will you?”

Of course I would have bestrided a hippogriff at
her bidding, and when the groom came out, leading
a thorough-bred hunter, with apparently a very elastic
and gentle action, I forgot the doctor and mounted
with great alacrity. We walked our horses slowly
down the avenue and out at the castle gate, followed
by the groom, and after trying a little quicker pace on
the public road, I pronounced old Curtal worthy of
her ladyship's eulogium, and her own Saladin worthy,
if horse could be worthy, of his burthen.

We had ridden perhaps a mile, and Lady Caroline
was giving me a slight history of the wonderful feats
of the old veteran under me, when the sound of a horn
made both horses prick up their ears, and on rising
a little acclivity, we caught sight of a pack of hounds
coming across the fields directly toward us, followed
by some twenty red-coated horsemen. Old Curtal
trembled and showed a disposition to fret, and I observed
that Lady Caroline dexterously lengthened
her own stirrup and loosened the belt of her riding-dress,
and the next minute the hounds were over the
hedge, and the horsemen, leap after leap, after them,
and with every successive jump, my own steed reared
and plunged unmanageably.

“Indeed, I can not stand this!” cried Lady Caroline,
gathering up her reins, “Ellis! see Mr. Berryman
home!” and away went the flying Arabian over
the hedge with a vault that left me breathless with
astonishment. One minute I made the vain effort to
control my own horse and turn his head in the other
direction, but my strength was gone. I had never
leaped a fence in my life on horseback, though a
tolerable rider on the road; but before I could think
how it was to be done, or gather myself together for
the leap, Curtal was over the hedge with me, and
flying across a ploughed field like the wind—Saladin
not far before him. With a glance ahead I saw the
red coats rising into the air and disappearing over
another green hedge, and though the field was crossed
in twenty leaps, I had time to feel my blood run cold
with the prospect of describing another parabola in
the air, and to speculate on the best attitude for a
projectile on horseback. Over went Saladin like a
greyhound, but his mistress's riding-cap caught the
wind at the highest point of the curve, and flew back
into my face as Curtal rose on his haunches, and over
I went again, blinded and giddy, and, with the cap
held flat against my bosom by the pressure of the air,
flew once more at a tremendous pace onward. My
feet were now plunged to the instep in the stirrups,
and my back, too weak to support me erect, let me
down to my horse's mane, and one by one, along the
skirt of a rising woodland, I could see the red coats
dropping slowly behind. Right before me like a
meteor, however, streamed back the loosened tresses
of Lady Caroline, and Curtal kept close on the track
of Saladin, neither losing nor gaining an inch apparently,
and nearer and nearer sounded the baying of the
hounds, and clearer became my view of the steady and
slight waist riding so fearlessly onward. Of my horse
I had neither guidance nor control. He needed none.
The hounds had crossed a morass, and we were rounding
a half-circle on an acclivity to come up with them,
and Curtal went at it too confidently to be in error.
Evenly as a hand-gallop on a green sward his tremendous
pace told off, and if his was the ease of muscular
power, the graceful speed of the beautiful creature
moving before me seemed the aerial buoyancy of a
bird. Obstructions seemed nothing. That flowing
dress and streaming hair sailed over rocks and ditches,
and over them, like their inseparable shadow, glided
I, and, except one horseman who still kept his distance
ahead, we seemed alone in the field. The
clatter of hoofs, and the exclamations of excitement
had ceased behind me, and though I was capable of
no exertion beyond that of keeping my seat, I no
longer feared the leap nor the pace, and began to anticipate
a safe termination to my perilous adventure.
A slight exclamation from Lady Caroline reached my
ear and I looked forward. A small river was before
us, and, from the opposite bank, of steep clay, the
rider who had preceded us was falling back, his horse's

forefeet high in the air, and his arms already in the
water. I tried to pull my reins. I shouted to my
horse in desperation. And with the exertion, my
heart seemed to give way within me. Giddy and faint
I abandoned myself to my fate. I just saw the flying
heels of Saladin planted on the opposite bank and the
streaming hair still flying onward, when, with a bound
that, it seemed to me, must rend every fibre of the
creature beneath me, I saw the water gleam under
my feet, and still I kept on. We flew over a fence
into a stubble field, the hounds just before us, and over
a gate into the public highway, which we followed for
a dozen bounds, and then, with a pace slightly moderated,
we successively cleared a low wall and brought
up, on our horses' haunches, in the midst of an uproar
of dogs, cows, and scattering poultry—the fox having
been run down at last in the enclosure of a barn. I
had just strength to extricate my feet from the stirrups,
take Lady Caroline's cap, which had kept its place
between my elbows and knees, and present it to her
as she sat in her saddle, and my legs gave way under
me. I was taken into the farmhouse, and, at the close
of a temporary ellipse, I was sent back to Tresethen
Castle in a post-chaise, and once more handed over to
the doctor!

Well, my third siege of illness was more tolerable,
for I received daily, now, some message of inquiry or
some token of interest from Lady Caroline, though I
learned from the countess that she was in sad disgrace
for her inveiglement of my trusting innocence. I also
received the cards of the members of the hunt, with
many inquiries complimentary to what they were
pleased to consider American horsemanship, and I
found that my seizure of the flying cap of Lady Caroline
and presentation of it to her ladyship at “the
death,” was thought to be worthy, in chivalry of
Bayard, and in dexterity of Ducrow. Indeed, when
let out again to the convalescent walk in the conservatory,
I found that I was counted a hero even by the
stately earl. There slipped a compliment, too, here
and there, through the matronly disapprobation of
Lady Tresethen—and all this was too pleasant to put
aside with a disclaimer—so I bid truth and modesty
hold their peace, and took the honor the gods chose
to provide!

But now came dangers more perilous than my ride
on Curtal. Lady Caroline was called upon to be kind
to me! Daily as the old servant left me in the alley
of japonicas, she appeared from the glass door of her
mother's boudoir and devoted herself to my comfort—
walking with me, while I could walk, in those fragrant
and balmy avenues of flowers, and then bringing me
into her mother's luxurious apartment, where books,
and music, and conversation as frank and untrammelled
as man in love could ask, wiled away the day. Wiled
it away?—winged it—shod it with velvet and silence,
for I never knew how it passed! Lady Caroline had
a mind of the superiority stamped so consciously on
her lip. She anticipated no consequences from her
kindness, therefore she was playful and unembarrassed.
She sang to me, and I read to her. Her rides were
given up, and Saladin daily went past the window to
his exercise, and with my most zealous scrutiny I
could detect in her face neither impatience of confinement
nor regret at the loss of weather fitter for
pleasures out of doors. Spite of every caution with
which hope could be chained down, I was flattered.

You smile—(Tom said, though he was looking
straight into the water, and had not seen my face for
half an hour)—but, without the remotest hope of
taking Lady Caroline to Kentucky, or of becoming
English on the splendid dowry of the heiress of Tresethen,
I still felt it impossible to escape from my lover's
attitude—impossible to avoid hoarding up symptoms,
encouragements, flatteries, and all the moonshine of amatory
anxiety. I was in love—and who reasons in love?

One morning, after I had become an honorary
patient—an invalid only by sufferance—and was slowly
admitting the unwelcome conviction that it was
time for me to be shaping my adieux—the conversation
took rather a philosophical turn. The starting
point was a quotation in a magazine from Richter:
“Is not a man's universe within his head, whether a
king's diadem or a torn scullcap be without?”—and I
had insisted rather strenuously on the levelling privilege
we enjoyed in the existence of a second world around
us—the world of revery and dream—wherein the tyranny,
and check, and the arbitrary distinctions of the
world of fact, were never felt—and where he, though
he might be a peasant, who had the consciousness in
his soul that he was a worthy object of love to a princess,
could fancy himself beloved and revel in imaginary
possession.

“Why,” said I, turning with a sudden flush of self-confidence
to Lady Caroline, “Why should not the
passions of such a world, the loving and returning of
love in fancy, have the privilege of language? Why
should not matches be made, love confessed, vows exchanged,
and fidelity sworn, valid within the realm of
dream-land only? Why should I not say to you, for
example, I adore you, dear lady, and in my world of
thought you shall, if you so condescend, by my bride
and mistress; and why, if you responded to this and
listened to my vows of fancy, should your bridegroom
of the world of fact feel his rights invaded?”

“In fancy let it be then!” said,Lady Caroline, with
a blush and a covert smile, and she rang the bell for
luncheon.

Well, I still lingered a couple of days, and on the
last day of my stay at Tresethen, I became sufficiently
emboldened to take Lady Caroline's hand behind the
fountain of the conservatory, and to press it to my lips
with a daring wish that its warm pulses belonged to
the world of fancy.

She withdrew it very kindly, and (I thought) sadly,
and begged me to go to the boudoir and bring her a
volume of Byron that lay on her work-table.

I brought it, and she turned over the leaves a moment,
and, with her pencil, marked two lines and gave
me the book, bidding me an abrupt good morning.
I stood a few minutes with my heart beating and my
brain faint, but finally summoned courage to read:—

I left Tresethen the next morning, and —

“Hold on, Tom!” cried I—“there comes the boat
with our dinner from Valletta, and we'll have your
sorrows over our Burgundy.”

“Sorrows!” exclaimed Tom, “I was going to tell
you of the fun I had at her wedding!”

“Lord preserve us!”

“Bigamy—wasn't it?—after our little nuptials in
dream-land! She told her husband all about it at the
wedding breakfast, and his lordship (she married the
Marquis of —) begged to know the extent of my
prerogatives. I was sorry to confess that they did not
interfere very particularly with his!”

THE POET AND THE MANDARIN.

The moon shone like glorified and floating dew on
the bosom of the tranquil Pei-ho, and the heart of the
young poet Le-pih was like a cup running over with
wine. It was no abatement of his exulting fulness
that he was as yet the sole possessor of the secret of
his own genius. Conscious of exquisite susceptibility
to beauty, fragrance and music (the three graces of

the Chinese), he was more intent upon enjoying his
gifts than upon the awakening of envy for their possession—the
latter being the second leaf in the book of
genius, and only turned over by the finger of satiety.
Thoughtless of the acquisition of fame as the youthful
poet may be, however, he is always ready to anticipate
its fruits, and Le-pih committed but the poet's
error, when, having the gem in his bosom which
could buy the favor of the world, he took the favor
for granted without producing the gem.

Kwonfootse had returned a conqueror, from the wars
with the Hwong-kin, and this night, on which the
moon shone so gloriously, was the hour of his triumph,
for the Emperor Tang had condescended to honor
with his presence, a gala given by the victorious general
at his gardens on the Pei-ho. Softened by his
exulting feelings (for though a brave soldier, he was
as haughty as Luykong the thunder-god, or Hwuyloo
the monarch of fire), the warlike mandarin threw open
his gardens on this joyful night, not only to those who
wore in their caps the gold ball significant of patrician
birth, but to all whose dress and mien warranted their
appearance in the presence of the emperor.

Like the realms of the blest shone the gardens of
Kwonfootse. Occupying the whole valley of the
Pei-ho, at a spot where it curved like the twisted
cavity of a shell, the sky seemed to shut in the grounds
like the cover of a vase, and the stars seemed but the
garden-lights overhead. From one edge of the vase
to the other—from hill-top to hill-top—extended a
broad avenue, a pagoda at either extremity glittering
with gold and scarlet, the sides flaming with colored
lamps and flaunting with gay streamers of barbarian
stuffs, and the moonlit river cutting it in the centre, the
whole vista, at the first glance, resembling a girdle of
precious stones with a fastening of opal. Off from
this central division radiated in all directions alleys of
camphor and cinnamon trees, lighted with amorous
dimness, and leading away to bowers upon the hill-side,
and from every quarter resounded music, and in
every nook was seen feasting and merriment.

In disguise, the emperor and imperial family mingled
in the crowd, and no one save the host and his daughters
knew what part of the gardens was honored with
their presence. There was, however, a retreat in the
grounds, sacred to the privileged few, and here, when
fatigued or desirous of refreshment, the royal personages
laid aside disguise and were surrounded with
the deferential honors of the court. It was so contrived
that the access was unobserved by the people,
and there was, therefore, no feeling of exclusion to
qualify the hilarity of the entertainment, Kwonfootse,
with all his pride, looking carefully to his popularity.
At the foot of each descent, upon the matted banks
of the river, floated gilded boats with lamps burning in
their prows, and gayly-dressed boatmen offering conveyance
across to all who required it; but there were
also, unobserved by the crowd, boats unlighted and
undecorated holding off from the shore, which, at a
sign given by the initiated, silently approached a marble
stair without the line of the blazing avenue, and taking
their freight on board, swiftly pulled up the moonlit
river, to a landing concealed by the shoulder of the hill.
No path led from the gardens hither, and from no point
of view could be overlooked the more brilliant scene
of imperial revel.

It was verging toward midnight when the unknown
poet, with brain floating in a celestial giddiness of delight,
stood on the brink of the gleaming river. The boats
plied to and fro with their freights of fair damsels and
gayly-dressed youths, the many-colored lamps throwing
a rainbow profusion of tints on the water, and
many a voice addressed him with merry invitation, for
Le-pih's beauty, so famous now in history, was of no
forbidding stateliness, and his motions, like his countenance,
were as frankly joyous as the gambols of a
young leopard. Not inclined to boisterous gayety at
the moment, Le-pih stepped between the lamp-bearing
trees of the avenue, and folding his arms in his silken
vest, stood gazing in revery on the dancing waters.
After a few moments, one of the dark boats on which
he had unconsciously fixed his gaze drew silently
toward him, and as the cushioned stern was brought
round to the bank, the boatman made a reverence to
his knees and sat waiting the poet's pleasure.

Like all men born to good fortune, Le-pih was
prompt to follow the first beckonings of adventure, and
asking no questions, he quietly embarked, and with a
quick dip of the oars the boat shot from the shore and
took the descending current. Almost in the next instant
she neared again to the curving and willow-fringed
margin of the stream, and lights glimmered through
the branches, and sweet, low music became audible,
and by rapid degrees, a scene burst on his eye, which
the first glimpse into the gate of paradise (a subsequent
agreeable surprise, let us presume) could scarcely have
exceeded.

Without an exchange of a syllable between the
boatman and his freight, the stern was set against a
carpeted stair at the edge of the river, and Le-pih disembarked
with a bound, and stood upon a spacious
area lying in a lap of the hill, the entire surface carpeted
smoothly with Persian stuffs, and dotted here and there
with striped tents piched with poles of silver. Garlands
of flowers hung in festoons against the brilliant-colored
cloths, and in the centre of each tent stood a
low tablet surrounded with couches and laden with
meats and wine. The guests, for whom this portion
of the entertainment was provided, were apparently
assembled at a spot farther on, from which proceeded
the delicious music heard by the poet in approaching;
and, first entering one of the abandoned tents for a
goblet of wine, Le-pih followed to the scene of attraction.

Under a canopy of gold cloth held by six bearers,
stood the imperial chair upon a raised platform—not
occupied, however, the august Tang reclining more at
his ease, a little out of the circle, upon cushions
canopied by the moonlight. Around upon the steps
of the platform and near by, were grouped the noble
ladies of the court and the royal princesses (Tang
living much in the female apartments and his daughters
numbering several score), and all, at the moment
of Le-pih's joining the assemblage, turning to observe
a damsel with a lute, to whose performance the low
sweet music of the band had been a prelude. The
first touch of the strings betrayed a trembling hand,
and the poet's sympathies were stirred, though from
her bent posture and her distant position he had not
yet seen the features of the player. As the tremulous
notes grew firmer, and the lute began to give out a
flowing harmony, Le-pih approached, and at the same
time, the listening groups of ladies began to whisper
and move away, and of those who remained, none
seemed to listen with pleasure except Kwonfootse and
the emperor. The latter, indeed, rivalled the intruding
bard in his interest, rolling over upon the cushions
and resting on the other imperial elbow in close attention.

Gaining confidence evidently from the neglect of
her auditory, or, as is natural to women, less afraid of
the judgment of the other sex, who were her only
listeners, the fair Taya (the youngest daughter of
Kwonfootse), now joined her voice to her instrument,
and sang with a sweetness that dropped like a plummet
to the soul of Le-pih. He fell to his knee upon
a heap of cushions and leaned eagerly forward. As
she became afterward one of his most passionate
themes, we are enabled to reconjure the features that
were presented to his admiring wonder. The envy
of the princesses was sufficient proof that Taya was of
rare beauty; she had that wonderful perfection of

feature to which envy pays its bitterest tribute, which
is apologized for if not found in the poet's ideal, which
we thirst after in pictures and marble, of which loveliness
and expression are but lesser degrees—fainter
shadowings. She was adorably beautiful. The outer
corners of her long almond-shaped eyes, the dipping
crescent of her forehead, the pencil of her eyebrow
and the indented corners of her mouth—all these
turned downward; and this peculiarity which, in faces
of a less elevated character, indicates a temper morose
and repulsive, in Taya's expressed the very soul of
gentle and lofty melancholy. There was something
infantine about her mouth, the teeth were so small
and regular, and their dazzling whiteness, shining between
lips of the brilliant color of a cherry freshly
torn apart, was in startling contrast with the dark
lustre of her eyes. Le-pih's poetry makes constant
allusion to those small and snowy teeth, and the turned-down
corners of the lips and eyes of his incomparable
mistress.

Taya's song was a fragment of that celebrated
Chinese romance from which Moore has borrowed so
largely in his loves of the angels, and it chanced to
be particularly appropriate to her deserted position
(she was alone now with her three listeners), dwelling as
it did upon the loneliness of a disguised Peri, wandering
in exile upon earth. The lute fell from her hands
when she ceased, and while the emperor applauded,
and Kwonfootse looked on her with paternal pride,
Le-pih modestly advanced to the fallen instrument,
and with a low obeisance to the emperor and a hesitating
apology to Taya, struck a prelude in the same
air, and broke forth into an impulsive expression of
his feelings in verse. It would be quite impossible to
give a translation of this famous effusion with its
oriental load of imagery, but in modifying it to the
spirit of our language (giving little more than its thread
of thought), the reader may see glimpses of the material
from which the great Irish lyrist spun his woof
of sweet fable. Fixing his keen eyes upon the bright
lips just closed, Le-pih sang:—

The song over, Le-pih sat with his hands folded
across the instrument and his eyes cast down, and
Taya gazed on him with wondering looks, yet slowly,
and as if unconsciously, she took from her breast a
rose, and with a half-stolen glance at her father, threw
it upon the lute. But frowningly Kwonfootse rose
from his seat and approached the poet.

“Who are you?” he demanded angrily, as the bard
placed the rose reverently in his bosom.

“Le-pih!”

With another obeisance to the emperor, and a deeper
one to the fair Taya, he turned, after this concise answer,
upon his heel, lifting his cap to his head, which,
to the rage of Kwonfootse, bore not even the gold ball
of aristocracy.

“Bind him for the bastinado!” cried the infuriated
mandarin to the bearers of the canopy.

The six soldiers dropped their poles to the ground,
but the emperor's voice arrested them.

“He shall have no violence but from you, fair
Taya,” said the softened monarch; “call to him by
the name he has just pronounced, for I would hear
that lute again!”

“Le-pih! Le-pih!” cried instantly the musical
voice of the fair girl.

The poet turned and listened, incredulous of his
own ears.

“Le-pih! Le-pih!” she repeated, in a soft tone.

Half-hesitating, half-bounding, as if still scarce believing
he had heard aright, Le-pih flew to her feet,
and dropped to one knee upon the cushion before her,
his breast heaving and his eyes flashing with eager
wonder. Taya's courage was at an end, and she sat
with her eyes upon the ground.

“Give him the lute, Kwonfootse!” said the emperor,
swinging himself on the raised chair with an
abandonment of the imperial avoirdupois, which set
ringing violently the hundred bells suspended in the
golden fringes.

“Let not the crow venture again into the nest of
the eagle,” muttered the mandarin between his teeth
as he handed the instrument to the poet.

The sound of the bells brought in the women and
courtiers from every quarter of the privileged area,
and, preluding upon the strings to gather his scattered
scuses, while they were seating themselves around
him, Le-pih at last fixed his gaze upon the lips of
Taya, and commenced his song to an irregular harmony
well adapted to extempore verse. We have tried
in vain to put this celebrated song of compliment into
English stanzas. It commenced with a description
of Taya's beauty, and an enumeration of things she
resembled, dwelling most upon the blue lily, which
seems to have been Le-pih's favorite flower. The
burthen of the conclusion, however, is the new value
everything assumed in her presence. “Of the light
in this garden,” he says, “there is one beam worth all
the glory of the moon, for it sleeps on the eye of Taya.
Of the air about me there is one breath which my soul
drinks like wine—it is from the lips of Taya. Taya
looks on a flower, and that flower seems to me, with
its pure eye, to gaze after her for ever. Taya's jacket
of blue silk is my passion. If angels visit me in my
dreams, let them be dressed like Taya. I love the
broken spangle in her slipper better than the first star
of evening. Bring me, till I die, inner leaves from
the water-lily, since white and fragrant like them are
the teeth of Taya. Call me, should I sleep, when
rises the crescent moon, for the blue sky in its bend
curves like the drooped eye of Taya,” &c., &c.

“By the immortal Fo!” cried the emperor, raising
himself bolt upright in his chair, as the poet ceased,
“you shall be the bard of Tang! Those are my sentiments
better expressed! The lute, in your hands,
is my heart turned inside out! Lend me your gold
chain, Kwonfootse, and, Taya! come hither and put
it on his neck!”

Taya glided to the emperor, but Le-pih rose to his
feet, with a slight flush on his forehead, and stood
erect and motionless.

“Let it please your imperial majesty,” he said,
after a moment's pause, “to bestow upon me some
gift less binding than a chain.”

“Carbuncle of Budha! What would the youth have!”
exclaimed Tang in astonishment. “Is not the gold
chain of a mandarin good enough for his acceptance?”

“My poor song,” replied Le-pih, modestly casting
down his eyes, “is sufficiently repaid by your majesty's
praises. The chain of the mandarin would gall the
neck of the poet. Yet—if I might have a reward
more valuable—”

“In Fo's name what is it?” said the embarrassed
emperor.

Kwonfootse laid his hand on his cimeter, and his
daughter blushed and trembled.

“The broken spangle on the slipper of Taya!” said
Le-pih, turning half indifferently away.

Loud laughed the ladies of the court, and Kwonfootse
walked from the bard with a look of contempt,
but the emperor read more truly the proud and delicate
spirit that dictated the reply; and in that moment
probably commenced the friendship with which, to the
end of his peaceful reign, Tang distinguished the most
gifted poet of his time.

The lovely daughter of the mandarin was not behind
the emperor in her interpretation of the character of
Le-pih, and as she stepped forward to put the detached
spangle into his hand, she bent on him a look full
of earnest curiosity and admiration.

“What others give me,” he murmured in a low
voice, pressing the worthless trifle to his lips, “makes
me their slave; but what Taya gives me is a link that
draws her to my bosom.”

Kwonfootse probably thought that Le-pih's audience
had lasted long enough, for at this moment the
sky seemed bursting into flame with a sudden tumult
of fireworks, and in the confusion that immediately
succeeded, the poet made his way unquestioned to
the bank of the river, and was reconveyed to the spot
of his first embarkation, in the same silent manner with
which he had approached the privileged area.

During the following month, Le-pih seemed much
in request at the imperial palace, but, to the surprise
of his friends, the keeping of “worshipful society”
was not followed by any change in his merry manners,
nor apparently by any improvement in his worldly
condition. His mother still sold mats in the public
market, and Le-pih still rode, every few days, to the
marsh, for his panniers of rushes, and to all comers,
among his old acquaintances, his lute and song were
as ready and gratuitous as ever.

All this time, however, the fair Taya was consuming
with a passionate melancholy which made startling
ravages in her health, and the proud mandarin, whose
affection for his children was equal to his pride, in vain
shut his eyes to the cause, and eat up his heart with
mortification. When the full moon came round again,
reminding him of the scenes the last moon had shone
upon, Kwonfootse seemed suddenly lightened of his
care, and his superb gardens on the Pei-ho were suddenly
alive with preparations for another festival. Kept
in close confinement, poor Taya fed on her sorrow,
indifferent to the rumors of marriage which could
concern only her sisters; and the other demoiselles
Kwonfootse tried in vain, with fluttering hearts, to pry
into their father's secret. A marriage it certainly was
to be, for the lanterns were painted of the color of
peach-blossoms—but whose marriage?

It was an intoxicating summer's morning, and the
sun was busy calling the dew back to heaven, and the
birds wild with entreating it to stay (so Le-pih describes
it), when down the narrow street in which the
poet's mother piled her vocation, there came a gay
procession of mounted servants with a led horse richly
caparisoned, in the centre. The one who rode before
held on his pommel a velvet cushion, and upon it lay
the cap of a noble, with its gold ball shining in the sun.
Out flew the neighbors as the clattering hoofs came
on, and roused by the cries and the barking of dogs,
forth came the mother of Le-pih, followed by the
poet himself, but leading his horse by the bridle, for
he had just thrown on his panniers, and was bound
out of the city to cut his bundle of rushes. The poet
gazed on the pageant with the amused curiosity of
others, wondering what it could mean, abroad at so
early an hour; but, holding back his sorry beast to
let the prancing horsemen have all the room they re
quired, he was startled by a reverential salute from
the bearer of the velvet cushion, who, drawing up his
followers in front of the poet's house, dismounted and
requested to speak with him in private.

Tying his horse to the door-post, Le-pih led the
way into the small room, where sat his mother braiding
her mats to a cheerful song of her son's making,
and here the messenger informed the bard, with much
circumstance and ceremony, that in consequence of
the pressing suit of Kwonfootse, the emperor had been
pleased to grant to the gifted Le-pih, the rank expressed
by the cap borne upon the velvet cushion, and
that as a noble of the celestial empire, he was now a
match for the incomparable Taya. Futhermore the
condescending Kwonfootse had secretly arranged the
ceremonial for the bridal, and Le-pih was commanded
to mount the led horse and come up with his cap and
gold ball to be made forthwith supremely happy.

An indefinable expression stole over the features of
the poet as he took up the cap, and placing it on his
head, stood gayly before his mother. The old dame
looked at him a moment, and the tears started to her
eyes. Instantly Le-pih plucked it off and flung it on
the waste heap at her side, throwing himself on his
knees before her in the same breath, and begging her
forgiveness for his silly jest.

“Take back your bauble to Kwonfootse!” he said,
rising proudly to his feet, “and tell him that the emperor,
to whom I know how to excuse myself, can
easily make a poet into a noble, but he can not make
a noble into a poet. The male bird does not borrow
its brighter plumage from its mate, and she who marries
Le-pih will braid rushes for his mother!”

Astonished, indeed, were the neighbors, who had
learned the errand of the messenger from his attendants
without, to see the crest-fallen man come forth again
with his cap and cushion. Astonished much more
were they, ere the gay cavalcade were well out of sight,
to see Le-pih appear with his merry countenance and
plebeian cap, and, mounting his old horse, trot briskly
away, sickle in hand, to the marshes. The day passed
in wondering and gossip, interrupted by the entrance
of one person to the house while the old dame was
gone with her mats to the market, but she returned
duly before sunset, and went in as usual to prepare
supper for her son.

The last beams of day were on the tops of the
pagodas when Le-pih returned, walking beside his
heavy-laden beast, and singing a merry song. He
threw off his rushes at the door and entered, but his
song was abruptly checked, for a female sat on a low
seat by his mother, stooping over a half-braided mat,
and the next moment, the blushing Taya lifted up her
brimming eyes and gazed at him with silent but pleading
love.

Now, at last, the proud merriment and self respecting
confidence of Le-pih were overcome. His eyes
grew flushed and his lips trembled without utterance.
With both his hands pressed on his beating heart, he
stood gazing on the lovely Taya.

“Ah!” cried the old dame, who sat with folded
hands and smiling face, looking on at a scene she did
not quite understand, though it gave her pleasure,
“Ah! this is a wife for my boy, sent from heaven!
No haughty mandarin's daughter she! no proud minx,
to fall in love with the son and despise the mother!
Let them keep their smart caps and gift-horses for
those who can be bought at such prices! My son is
a noble by the gift of his Maker—better than an emperor's
gold ball! Come to your supper, Le-pib!
Come, my sweet daughter!”

Taya placed her finger on her lip, and Le-pih
agreed that the moment was not yet come to enlighten
his mother as to the quality of her guest. She was
not long in ignorance, however, for before they could
seat themselves at table, there was a loud knocking at

the door, and before the old dame could bless herself,
an officer entered and arrested the daughter of Kwonfootse
by name, and Le-pih and his mother at the
same time, and there was no dismissing the messenger
now. Off they marched, amid the silent consternation
and pity of the neighbors—not toward the palace
of justice, however, but to the palace of the emperor,
where his majesty, to save all chances of mistake,
chose to see the poet wedded, and sit, himself, at the
bridal feast. Tang had a romantic heart, fat and
voluptuous as he was, and the end of his favor to Le-pih
and Taya was the end of his life.

MEENA DIMITY;
OR, WHY MR. BROWN CRASH TOOK THE TOUR.

Fashion is arbitrary, we all know. What it was
that originally gave Sassafras street the right to despise
Pepperidge street, the oldest inhabitant of the
village of Slimford could not positively say. The
courthouse and jail were in Sassafras street; but the
orthodox church and female seminary were in Pepperidge
street. Two directors of the Slimford bank
lived in Sassafras street—two in Pepperidge street.
The Dyaper family lived in Sassafras street—the
Dimity family in Pepperidge street; and the fathers
of the Dyaper girls and the Dimity girls were worth
about the same money, and had both made it in the
lumber line. There was no difference to speak of in
their respective mode of living—none in the education
of the girls—none in the family gravestones or
church-pews. Yet, deny it who liked, the Dyapers
were the aristocracy of Slimford.

It may be a prejudice, but I am inclined to think
there is always something in a nose. (I am about to
mention a trifle, but trifles are the beginning of most
things, and I would account for the pride paramount
of the Dyapers, if it is any way possible.) The most
stylish of the Miss Dyapers—Harriet Dyaper—had a
nose like his grace the Duke of Wellington. Neither
her father nor mother had such a feature; but
there was a foreign umbrella in the family with exactly
the same shaped nose on the ivory handle. Old
Dyaper had once kept a tavern, and he had taken this
umbrella from a stranger for a night's lodging. But
that is neither here nor there. To the nose of Harriet
Dyaper, resistlessly and instinctively, the Dimity
girls had knocked under at school. There was authority
in it; for the American eagle had such a nose,
and the Duke of Wellington had such a nose; and
when, to these two warlike instances, was added the
nose of Harriet Dyaper, the tripod stood firm. Am
I visionary in believing that the authority introduced
into that village by a foreigner's umbrella (so unaccountable
is fate) gave the dynasty to the Dyapers?

I have mentioned but two families—one in each of
the two principal streets of Slimford. Having a little
story to tell. I can not afford to distract my narrative
with unnecessary “asides;” and I must not only
omit all description of the other Sassafrasers and
Pepperidgers, but I must leave to your imagination
several Miss Dyapers and several Miss Dimitys—Harriet
Dyaper and Meena Dimity being the two exclusive
objects of my hero's Sunday and evening attentions.

For eleven months in the year, the loves of the
ladies of Slimford were presided over by indigenous
Cupids. Brown Crash and the other boys of the village
had the Dyapers and the Dimitys for that respective
period to themselves. The remaining month,
when their sun of favor was eclipsed, was during the
falling of the leaf, when the “drummers” came up to
dun. The townish clerks of the drygoods merchants
were too much for the provincials. Brown Crash
knocked under and sulked, owing, as he said, to the
melancholy depression accompanying the fall of the
deciduous vegetation. But I have not yet introduced
you to my hero.

Brown Crash was the Slimford stage-agent. He
was the son of a retired watch-maker, and had been
laughed at in his boyhood for what they called his
“airs.” He loved, even as a lad, to be at the tavern
when the stage came in, and help out the ladies.
With instinctive leisureliness he pulled off his cap
as soon after the “whoa-hup” as was necessary (and
no sooner), and asked the ladies if they would “alight
and take dinner,” with a seductive smile which began,
as the landlord said, “to pay.” Hence his promotion.
At sixteen he was nominated stage-agent, and thenceforward
was the most conspicuous man in the village;
for “man” he was, if speech and gait go for anything.

But we must minister a moment to the reader's
inner sense; for we do not write altogether for Slimford
comprehension. Brown Crash had something
in his composition “above the vulgar.” If men's
qualities were mixed like salads, and I were giving a
“recipe for Brown Crashes,” in Mrs. Glass's style, I
should say his two principal ingredients were a dictionary
and a dunghill cock—for his language was as
ornate as his style of ambulation was deliberate
and imposing. What Brown Crash would have been,
born Right Honorable, I leave (with the smaller Dyapers
and Dimitys) to the reader's fancy. My object
is to show what he was, minus patrician nurture and
valuation. Words, with Brown Crash, were susceptible
of being dirtied by use. He liked a clean towel—he
preferred an unused phrase. But here stopped
his peculiarities. Below the epidermis he was like
other men, subject to like tastes and passions. And
if he expressed his loves and hates with grandiloquent
imagery, they were the honest loves and hates of a
week-day world—no finer nor flimsier for their bedecked
plumage.

To use his own phrase, Brown frequented but two
ladies in Slimford—Miss Harriet Dyaper and Miss
Meena Dimity. The first we have described in
describing her nose, for her remainder was comparatively
inconsiderable. The latter was “a love,” and
of course had nothing peculiar about her. She was
a lamp—nothing till lighted. She was a mantle—
nothing, except as worn by the owner. She was a
mirror—blank and unconscious till something came
to be reflected. She was anything, loved—unloved,
nothing! And this (it is our opinion after half a
life) is the most delicious and adorable variety of
woman that has been spared to us from the museum
of specimen angels. (A remark of Brown Crash's,
by the way, of which he may as well have the credit.)

Now Mr. Crash had an ambitious weakness for the
best society, and he liked to appear intimate with the
Dyapers. But in Meena Dimity there was a secret
charm which made him wish she was an ever-to-behanded-out
lady-stage-passenger. He could have
given her a hand and brought in her umbrella and
bandbox, all day long. In his hours of pride he
thought of the Dyapers—in his hours of affection of
Meena Dimity. But the Dyapers looked down upon
the Dimitys; and to play his card delicately between
Harriet and Meena, took all the diplomacy of Brown
Crash. The unconscious Meena would walk up
Sassafras street when she had his arm, and the scornful
Harriet would be there with her nose over the
front gate to sneer at them. He managed as well as
he could. He went on light evenings to the Dyapers—on
dark evenings to the Dimitys. He took
town-walks with the Dyapers—country-walks with

the Dimitys. But his acquaintance with the Dyapers
hung by the eyelids. Harriet liked him: for he was
the only beau in Slimford whose manners were not
belittled beside her nose. But her acquaintance with
him was a condescension, and he well knew that he
could not “hold her by the nose” if she were offended.
Oh no! Though their respective progenitors
were of no very unequal rank—though a horologist
and a “boss lumberman” might abstractly be equals—
the Dyapers had the power! Yes—they could lift
him to themselves, or dash him down to the Dimitys;
and all Slimford would agree in the latter case that
he was a “slab” and a “small potato!”

But a change came o'er the spirit of Brown Crash's
dream! The drummers were lording it in Slimford,
and Brown, reduced to Meena Dimity (for he was too
proud to play second fiddle to a town dandy), was
walking with her on a dark night past the Dyapers.
The Dyapers were hanging over the gate unluckily,
and their Pearl-street admirers sitting on the top rail
of the fence.

“Who is it?” said a strange voice.

The reply, sent upward from a scornfully prejecting
under lip, rebounded in echoes from the tense
nose of Miss Dyaper.

“A Mr. Crash, and a girl from the back street!”

It was enough. A hot spot on his cheek, a warm
rim round his eyes, a pimply pricking in his skin,
and it was all over! His vow was made. He coldly
bid Meena good night at her father's door, and went
home and counted his money. And from that hour,
without regard to sex, he secretly accepted shillings
from gratified travellers, and “stood treat” no more.

Saratoga was crowded with the dispersed nuclei of
the metropolises. Fashion, wealth, and beauty, were
there. Brown Crash was there, on his return from a
tour to Niagara and the lakes.

“Brown Crash, Esq.,” was one of the notabilities
of Congress Hall. Here and there a dandy “could
not quite make him out;” but there was evidently
something uncommon about him. The ladies thought
him “of the old school of politeness,” and the politicians
thought he had the air of one used to influence
in his county. His language was certainly very
choice and peculiar, and his gait was conscious dignity
itself. He must have been carefully educated;
yet his manners were popular, and he was particularly
courteous on a first introduction. The elegance and
ease with which he helped the ladies out of their
carriages were particularly remarked, and a shrewd
observer said of him, that “that point of high breeding
was only acquired by daily habit. He must have
been brought up where there were carriages and ladies.”
A member of congress, who expected to run
for governor, inquired his county, and took wine
with him. His name was mentioned by the letter-writers
from the springs. Brown Crash was in his
perihelion!

The season leaned to its close, and the following
paragraph appeared in the New York American:—

“Fashionable Intelligence.—The company at the
Springs is breaking up. We understand that the
Vice-President and Brown Crash, Esq., have already
left for their respective residences. The latter gentleman,
it is understood, has formed a matrimonial
engagement with a family of wealth and distinction
from the south. We trust that these interesting
bonds, binding together the leading families of the
far-divided extremities of our country, may tend to
strengthen the tenacity of the great American Union!”

It was not surprising that the class in Slimford who
knew everything—the milliners, to-wit—moralized
somewhat bitterly on Mr. Crash's devotion to the
Dyapers after his return, and his consequent slight to
Meena Dimity. “If that was the effect of fashion
and distinction on the heart, Mr. Crash was welcome
to his honors! Let him marry Miss Dyaper, and
they wished him much joy of her nose; but they
would never believe that he had not ruthlessly broken
the heart of Meena Dimity, and he ought to be
ashamed of himself, if there was any shame in such
a dandy.”

But the milliners, though powerful people in their
way, could little affect the momentum of Brown
Crash's glories. The paragraph from the “American”
had been copied into the “Slimford Advertiser,”
and the eyes of Sassafras street and Pepperidge street
were alike opened. They had undervalued their indigenous
“prophet.” They had misinterpreted and
misread the stamp of his superiority. He had been
obliged to go from them to be recognised. But he
was returned. He was there to have reparation
made—justice done. And now, what office would he
like, from Assessor to Pathmaster, and would he be
good enough to name it before the next town-meeting.
Brown Crash was king of Slimford!

And Harriet Dyaper! The scorn from her lip had
gone, like the blue from a radish! Notes for “B.
Crash,Esq.,” showered from Sassafras street—bouquets
from old Dyaper's front yard glided to him, per black
boy—no end to the endearing attentions, undisguised
and unequivocal. Brown Crash and Harriet Dyaper
were engaged, if having the front parlor entirely given
up to them of an evening meant anything—if his
being expected every night to tea meant anything—
if his devoted (though she thought rather cold) attentions
meant anything.

They did n't mean anything! They all did n't
mean anything! What does the orthodox minister
do, the third Sunday after Brown Crash's return, but
read the banns of matrimony between that faithless
man and Meena Dimity!

But this was not to be endured. Harriet Dyaper
had a cousin who was a “strapper.” He was boss of
a sawmill in the next county, and he must be sent for.

He was sent for.

The fight was over. Boss Dyaper had undertaken
to flog Brown Crash, but it was a drawn battle—for
the combatants had been pulled apart by their coattails.
They stepped into the barroom and stood recovering
their breath. The people of Slimford
crowded in, and wanted to have the matter talked
over. Boss Dyaper bolted out his grievance.

“Gentlemen!” said Brown Crash, with one of his
irresistible come-to-dinner smiles, “I am culpable,
perhaps, in the minutiæ of this business—justifiable,
I trust you will say, in the general scope and tendency.
You, all of you, probably, had mothers, and some of
you have wives and sisters; and your `silver cord'
naturally sympathizes with a worsted woman. But,
gentlemen, you are republicans! You, all of you,
are the rulers of a country very large indeed; and
you are not limited in your views to one woman, nor
to a thousand women—to one mile, nor to a thousand
miles. You generalize! you go for magnificent principles,
gentlemen! You scorn high-and-mightiness,
and supercilious aristocracy!”

“Hurra for Mr. Crash!” cried a stagedriver from
the outside.

“Well, gentleman! In what I have done, I have
deserved well of a republican country! True—it has
been my misfortune to roll my Juggernaut of principle
over the sensibilities of that gentleman's respectable
female relative. But, gentlemen, she offended,
remedilessly and grossly, one of the sovereign
people! She scorned one of earth's fairest daughters,
who lives in a back street! Gentlemen, you know
that pride tripped up Lucifer! Shall a tiptop angel fall
for it, and a young woman who is nothing particular

be left scornfully standing? Shall Miss Dyaper have
more privileges than Lucifer? I appreciate your indignant
negative!

“But, gentlemen, I am free to confess, I had also
my republican private end. You know my early history.
You have witnessed my struggles to be respected
by my honorable contemporaries. If it be my
weakness to be sensitive to the finger of scorn, be it
so. You will know how to pardon me. But I will
be brief. At a particular crisis of my acquaintance
with Miss Dyaper, I found it expedient to transfer my
untrammelled tendernesses to Pepperidge street. My
heart had long been in Pepperidge street. But,
gentlemen, to have done it without removing from
before my eyes the contumelious finger of the scorn
of Sassafras street, was beyond my capabilities of endurance.
In justice to my present `future,' gentlemen,
I felt that I must remove `sour grapes' from my
escutcheon—that I must soar to a point, whence,
swooping proudly to Meena Dimity, I should pass
the Dyapers in descending!

(Cheers and murmurs.)

“Gentlemen and friends! This world is all a fleeting
show. The bell has rung, and I keep you from
your suppers. Briefly. I found the means to travel
and test the ring of my metal among unprejudiced
strangers. I wished to achieve distinction and return
to my birthplace; but for what? Do me justice,
gentlemen. Not to lord it in Sassafras street. Not
to carry off a Dyaper with triumphant elation!
Not to pounce on your aristocratic No. 1, and
link my destiny with the disdainful Dyapers! No!
But to choose where I liked, and have the credit
of liking it! To have Slimford believe that if I
preferred their No. 2, it was because I liked it better
than No. 1. Gentlemen, I am a republican! I
may find my congenial spirit among the wealthy—I
may find it among the humble. But I want the liberty
to choose. And I have achieved it, I trust you
will permit me to say. Having been honored by the
dignitaries of a metropolis—having consorted with a
candidate for gubernatorial distinction—having been
recorded in a public journal as a companion of the
Vice-President of this free and happy country—you
will believe me when I declare that I prefer Pepperidge
street to Sassafras—you will credit my sincerity,
when, having been approved by the Dyapers' betters,
I give them the go-by for the Dimitys! Gentlemen,
I have done.”

The reader will not be surprised to learn that Mr.
Brown Crash is now a prominent member of the
legislature, and an excessive aristocrat—Pepperidge
street and very democratic speeches to the contrary
notwithstanding.

THE POWER OF AN “INJURED LOOK.”

1. CHAPTER I.

I had a sort of candle-light acquaintance with Mr.
Philip McRueit when we were in college. I mean to
say that I had a daylight repugnance to him, and never
walked with him, or talked with him, or rode with
him, or sat with him; and, indeed, seldom saw him—
expect as one of a club oyster-party of six. He was
a short, sharp, satirical man (nicknamed “my cruet,”
by his cronies—rather descriptively!) but as plansible
and as vindictive as Mephistopheles before and after
the ruin of a soul. In some other state of existence
I had probably known and suffered by Phil. McRueit
—for I knew him like the sleeve of an old coat, the
first day I ladi eyes on him; though other people
seemed to have no such instinct. Oh, we were not
new acquaintances—from whatever star he had been
transported, for his sins, to this planet of dirt. I think
he was of the same opinion, himself. He chose between
open warfare and conciliation in the first five
minutes—after seeing me as a stranger—chose the
latter.

Six or seven years after leaving college, I was following
my candle up to bed rather musingly, one night
at the Astor, and on turning a corner, I was obliged to
walk round a short gentleman who stood at the head
of the stairs in an attitude of fixed contemplation. As
I weathered the top of his hat rather closely, I caught
the direction of his eye, and saw that he was regarding,
very fixedly, a pair of rather dusty kid slippers,
which had been set outside the door, probably for
cleaning, by the occupant of the chamber opposite.
As the gentleman did not move, I turned on the half
landing of the next flight of stairs, and looked back,
breaking in, by my sudden pause, upon his fit of abstraction.
It was McRueit, and on recognising me,
he immediately beckoned me to his side.

“Does it strike you,” said he, “that there is anything
peculiar in that pair of shoes?”

“No—except that they certify to two very small
feet on the other side of the door.”

“Not merely `small,' my dear fellow! Do you
see where the pressure has been in those slender shoes,
how straight the inside line, how arched the instep,
how confidingly flat the pressure downward of the
little great toe! It's a woman of sweet and relying
character who wore that shoe to-day, and I must know
her. More, sir, I must marry her! Ah, you laugh
—but I will! There's a magnetism in that pair of
shoes addressed to me only. Beg your pardon—good
night—I'll go down stairs and find out her number—
`74!' I'll be well acquainted with `74' by this time
to-morrow!”

For the unconscious young lady asleep in that room,
I lay awake half the night, troubled with foreboding
pity. I knew the man so well, I was so certain that
he would leave nothing possible undone to carry out
this whimsical purpose! I knew that from that moment
was levelled, point-blank, at the lady, whoever
she might be (if single) a battery of devilish and pertinacious
ingenuity, which would carry most any
small fort of a heart, most any way barricaded and
defended. He was well off; he was well-looking
enough; he was deep and crafty. But if he did win
her, she was gone! gone, I knew, from happiness,
like a stone from a sling. He was a tyrant—subtle
in his cruelties to all people dependant on him—and
her life would be one of refined torture, neglect, betrayal,
and tears.

A fit of intermittent disgust for strangers, to which
all persons living in hotels are more or less liable,
confined my travels, for some days after this rencontre,
to the silence-and-slop thorough-fare of the back
stairs, “Coming to my feed” of society one rainy
morning, I went into the drawing-room after breakfast,
and was not surprised to see McRueit in a posture of
absorbed attention beside a lady. His stick stood on
the floor, and with his left cheek rested on the gold
head, he was gazing into her face, and evidently keeping
her perfectly at her ease as to the wants and gaps
of conversation, as he knew how to do—for he was the
readiest man with his brick and mortar whom I ever
had encountered.

“Who is that lady?” I asked of an omni-acquainted
old bachelor friend of mine.

“Miss Jonthee Twitt—and what can be the secret
of that rather exclusive gentleman's attention to her,
I can not fancy.”

I pulled a newspaper from my pocket, and seating
myself in one of the deep windows, commenced rather
a compassionate study of Miss Twitt—intending fully,
if I should find her interesting, to save her from the
clutches of my detestable classmate.

She was a slight, hollow-chested, consumptive-looking
girl, with a cast of features that any casual
observer would be certain to describe as “interesting.”
With the first two minutes' gaze upon her, my sympathies
were active enough for a crusade against a
whole army of connubial tyrants. I suddenly paused,
however. Something McRueit said made a change
in the lady's countenance. She sat just as still; she
did not move her head from its negligent posture; her
eyebrows did not contract; her lips did not stir; but
the dull, sickly-colored lids descended calmly and
fixedly till they hid from sight the upper edges of the
pupils! and by this slight but infallible sign I knew
—but the story will tell what I knew. Napoleon was
nearly, but not quite right, when he said that there
was no reliance to be placed on peculiarities of feature
or expression.

2. CHAPTER II.

In August of that same year, I followed the world
to Saratoga. In my first reconnoitre of the drawing-room
of Congress Hall, I caught the eye of Mr. McRueit,
and received from him a cordial salutation.
As I put my head right, upon its pivot, after an easy
nod to my familiar aversion, my eyes fell upon Miss
Jonthee Twitt—that was—for I had seen, in the
newspapers of two months before, that the resolve
(born of the dusty slipper outside her door), had been
brought about, and she was now on the irrevocable
side of a honeymoon sixty days old.

Her eyelid was down upon the pupil—motionless,
concentrated, and vigilant as a couched panther—and
from beneath the hem of her dress curved out the
high arched instep of a foot pointed with desperate
tension to the carpet; the little great toe (whose relying
pressure on the soiled slipper Mr. McRueit had
been captivated by), now rigid with as strong a purpose
as spiritual homeopathy could concentrate in so
small a tenement. I thought I would make Mr. and
Mrs. McRueit the subject of quiet study while I remained
at Saratoga.

But I have not mentioned the immediate cause of
Mrs. McRueit's resentment. Her bridegroom was
walking up and down the room with a certain Mrs.
Wanmaker, a widow, who was a better woman than
she looked to be, as I chanced to know, but as nobody
could know without the intimate acquaintance with
Mrs. Wanmaker upon which I base this remark.
With beauty of the most voluptuous cast, and a
passion for admiration which induced her to throw
out every possible lure to men any way worth her
time as victims, Mrs. Wanmaker's blood was as
“cold as the flow of Iser,” and her propriety, in fact,
wholly impregnable. I had been myself “tried on”
by the widow Wanmaker, and twenty caravan-marches
might have been made across the Desert of Sahara,
while the conviction I have just stated was “getting
through my hair.” It was not wonderful, therefore,
that both the bride and her (usually) most penetratious
bridegroom, had sailed over the widow's shallows, unconscious
of soundings. She was a “deep” woman,
too—but in the love line.

I thought McRueit singularly off his guard, if it
were only for “appearances.” He monopolized the
widow effectually, and she thought it worth her while
to let the world think him (a bridegroom and a rising
young politician), mad for her, and, truth to say, they
carried on the war strenuously. Perfectly certain as I
was that “the whirligig of time” would “bring about
the revenges” of Mrs. McRueit, I began to feel a
meantime pity for her, and had myself presented duly
by McRueit the next morning after breakfast.

It was a tepid, flaccid, revery-colored August morning,
and the sole thought of the universe seemed to
be to sit down. The devotees to gayety and mineral
water dawdled out to the porticoes, and some sat on
chairs under the trees, and the dandies lay on the
grass, and the old ladies on the steps and the settees,
and here and there, a man on the balustrade, and, in
the large swing, vis-à-vis, sat McRueit and the widow
Wanmaker, chattering in an undertone quite inaudible.
Mrs. McRueit sat on a bench, with her back
against one of the high-shouldered pine trees in the
court-yard, and I had called McRueit out of his swing
to present me. But he returned immediately to the
widow.

I thought it would be alleviative and good-natured
to give Mrs. McRueit an insight to the harmlessness
of Mrs. Wanmaker, and I had done so very nearly to
my satisfaction, when I discovered that the slighted
wife did not care sixpence about the fact, and that,
unlike Hamlet, she only knew seems. The more I
developed the innocent object of the widow's outlay
of smiles and confidentialities, the more Mrs. McRueit
placed herself in a posture to be remarked by the
loungers in the court-yard and the dawdlers on the
portico, and the more she deepened a certain look—
you must imagine it for the present, dear reader. It
would take a razor's edge of analysis, and a Flemish
paint-pot and patience, to carve that injured look into
language, or paint it truthfully to the eye! Juries
would hang husbands, and recording angels “ruthlessly
overcharge,” upon the unsupported evidence of
such a look. She looked as if her heart must have
suffocated with forbearance long before she began to
look so. She looked as if she had forgiven and wept,
and was ready to forgive and weep again. She looked
as if she would give her life if she could conceal “her
feelings,” and as if she was nerving soul, and heart,
and eyelids, and lachrymatory glands—all to agony—
to prevent bursting into tears with her unutterable
anguish! It was the most unresisting, unresentful,
patient, sweet miserableness! A lamb's willingness
to “furnish forth another meal” of chops and sweet-bread,
was testy to such meek endurance! She was
evidently a martyr, a victim, a crushed flower, a “poor
thing!” But she did, now and then—unseen by anybody
but me—give a glance from that truncated orb
of a pupil of hers, over the top of her handkerchief,
that, if incarnated, would have made a hole in the hide
of a rhinoceros! It was triumph, venom, implacability—such
as I had never before seen expressed in human
glances.

There are many persons with but one idea, and that
a good one. Mrs. McRueit, I presume, was incapable
of appreciating my interest in her. At any rate
she played the same game with me as with other
people, and managed her affairs altogether with perfect
unity. It was in vain that I endeavored to hear
from her tongue what I read in the lowering pupil of
her eye. She spoke of McRueit with evident reluctance,
but always with discretion—never blaming
him, nor leaving any opening that should betray resentment,
or turn the current of sympathy from herself.
The result was immediate. The women in the
house began to look black upon McRueit. The men
“sent him to Coventry” more unwillingly, for he was
amusing and popular—but “to Coventry” he went!
And at last the widow Wanmaker became aware that
she was wasting her time on a man whose attentions
were not wanted elsewhere—and she (the unkindest
cut of all) found reasons for looking another way when
he approached her. He had became aware, during

this process, what was “in the wind,” but he knew
too much to stay in the public eye when it was inflamed.
With his brows lowering, and his face
gloomy with feelings I could easily interpret, he took
the early coach on the third morning after my introduction
to Mrs. McRueit, and departed, probably for
a discipline trip, to some place where sympathy with
his wife would be less dangerous.

3. CHAPTER III.

I think, that within the next two or three years, I
heard McRueit's name mentioned several times, or
saw it in the papers, connected with strong political
movements. I had no very definite idea of where he
was residing, however. Business called me to a
western county, and on the road I fell into the company
of a great political schemer and partisan—one
of those joints (of the feline political body), the next
remove from the “cat's paw.” Finding that I cared
not a straw for politics, and that we were going to the
same town, he undertook the blandishment of an overflow
of confidence upon me, probably with the remote
possibility that he might have occasion to use me. I
gave in to it so far as courteously to receive all his
secrets, and we arrived at our destination excellent
friends.

The town was in a ferment with the coming election
of a member for the legislature, and the hotel being
very crowded, Mr. Develin (my fellow-traveller) and
myself were put into a double-bedded room. Busy
with my own affairs, I saw but little of him, and he
seemed quite too much occupied for conversation, till
the third night after our arrival. Lying in bed with
the moonlight streaming into the room, he began to
give me some account of the campaign, preparing for,
around us, and presently mentioned the name of
McRueit—(the name, by the way, that I had seen
upon the placards, without caring particularly to inquire
whether or not it was “mine ancient” aversion).

“They are not aware,” said Mr. Develin, after
talking on the subject awhile, “that this petty election,
is, in fact, the grain of sand that is to turn the presidential
scale. If McRueit should be elected (as I
am sorry to say there seems every chance he will be),
Van Buren's doom is sealed. I have come a little
too late here. I should have had time to know something
more of this man McRueit—”

“Perhaps I can give you some idea of him,” interrupted
I, “for he has chanced to be more in my way
than I would have bargained for. But what do you
wish to know particularly?” (I spoke, as the reader
will see, in the unsuspecting innocence of my heart.)

“Oh—anything—anything! Tell me all you know
of him!”

Mr. Develin's vividness rather surprised me, for he
raised himself on his elbow in bed—but I went on and
narrated very much what I have put down for the
reader in the two preceding chapters.

“How do you spell Mrs. Wanmaker's name?”
asked my imbedded vis-à-vis, as I stopped and turned
over to go to sleep.

I spelt it for him.

He jumped out of bed, dressed himself and left the
room. Will the reader permit me to follow him, like
Asmodeus, giving with Asmodean brevity the knowledge
I afterward gained of his use of my involuntary
revelation?

Mr. Develin roused the active member of the Van
Buren committee from his slumber, and in an hour
had the printers of their party paper at work upon a
placard. A large meeting was to be held the next
day in the town-hall, during which both candidates, it
was supposed, would address the people. Ladies
were to occupy the galleries. The hour came round.
Mrs. McRueit's carriage drove into the village a few
minutes before eleven, and as she stopped at a shop
for a moment, a letter was handed her by a boy. She
sat still and read it. She was alone. Her face turned
livid with paleness after its first flush, and forgetting
her errand at the shop, she drove on to the town-hall.
She took her seat in a prominent part of the gallery.
The preliminaries were gone through with, and her
husband rose to speak. He was a plausible orator,
an eloquent man. But there was a sentiment circulating
in the audience—something whispered from man
to man—that strangely took off the attention of the
audience. He could not, as he had never before found
difficulty in doing, keep their eyes upon his lips.
Every one was gazing on his wife! And there she
sat—with her INJURED LOOK!—pale, sad, apparently
striving to listen and conceal her mental suffering. It
was as convincing to the audience of the truth of the
insinuation that was passing from mouth to mouth—
as convincing as would have been a revelation from
Heaven. McRueit followed the many upturned eyes
at last, and saw that they were bent on his wife, and
that—once more—after years of conciliation, she wore
THAT INJURED LOOK! His heart failed him. He
evidently comprehended that the spirit that had driven
him from Saratoga, years before—popular sympathy
with women—had overtaken him and was plotting
against him once more. His speech began to lose
its concentration. He talked wide. The increasing
noise overpowered him, and he descended at last from
the platform in the midst of a universal hiss. The
other candidate rose and spoke; and at the close of
his speech the meeting broke up, and as they dispersed,
their eyes were met at every corner with a
large placard, in which “injured wife,” “unfaithful
husband,” “widow W—n—k—r,” were the words in
prominent capitals. The election came on the next
day, and Mr. McRueit being signally defeated, Mr.
Van Buren's election to the Presidency (if Mr. Develin
knew anything) was made certain—brought about by
a woman's INJURED LOOK.

My business in the county was the purchase of land,
and for a year or two afterward, I was a great deal
there. Feeling that I had unintentionally furnished
a weapon to his enemies, I did penance by cultivating
McRueit. I went often to his house. He was at
first a good deal broken up by the sudden check to
his ambition, but he rallied with a change in his
character for which I was not prepared. He gave up
all antagonism toward his wife. He assumed a new
manner to her. She had been skilfully managed before—but
he took her now confidingly behind his
shield. He felt overmastered by the key she had to
popular sympathy, and he determined wisely to make
it turn in his favor. By assiduity, by tenderness,
childlikeness, he succeeded in completely convincing
her that he had but one out-of-doors wish—that of
embellishing her existence by his success. The effort
on her was marvellous. She recovered her health,
gradually changed to a joyous and earnest promoter
of her husband's interests, and they were soon a marked
model in the county for conjugal devotion. The
popular impression soon gained ground that Mr. McRueit
had been shamefully wronged by the previous
prejudice against his character as a husband. The
tide that had already turned, soon swelled to a flood,
and Mr. McRueit now—but Mr. McRueit is too powerful
a person in the present government to follow any
farther. Suffice it to say that he might return to Mrs.
Wanmaker and his old courses if he liked—for his
wife's INJURED LOOK is entirely fattened out of possibility
by her happiness. She weighs two hundred, and
could no more look injured than Sir John Falstaff.

BEWARE OF DOGS AND WALTZING.

The birds that flew over County Surrey on the
twelfth of June, 1835, looked down upon a scene of
which many a “lord of creation,” travelling only by
the roads, might well have envied them the seeing.
For, ever so merry let it be within the lordly parks of
England, the trees that look over the ring fence upon
the world without, keep their countenance—aristocrats
that they are! Round and round Beckton Park you
might have travelled that sunny day, and often within
arrow-shot of its hidden and fairy lawn, and never
suspected, but by the magnetic tremor in your veins,
that beautiful women were dancing near by, and “marvellous
proper men,” more or less enamored, looking
on—every pink and blue girdle a noose for a heart,
of course, and every gay waistcoat a victim venturing
near the trap (though this last is mentioned entirely
on my own responsibility).

But what have we to do with the unhappy exiles
without this pretty paradise! You are an invited
guest, dear reader. Pray walk in!

Did you ask about the Becktons? The Becktons
are people blessed with money and a very charming
acquaintance. That is enough to know about them.
Yet stay! Sir Thomas was knighted for his behavior
at some great crisis in India (for he made his fortune
in India)—and Lady Beckton is no great beauty, but
she has the mania of getting handsome people together,
and making them happier than belongs properly to
handsome people's destiny. And this, I think, must
suffice for a first introduction.

The lawn, as you see, has the long portico of the
house on one side of it, a bend of the river on two
other sides, and a thick shrubbery on the fourth.
The dancing-floor is in the centre, inlaid at the level
of the smooth sward, and it is just now vibrating to
the measured step of the mazurka—beautifully danced,
we must say!

And now let me point out to you the persons most
concerned in this gossip of mine.

First, the ladies.

Miss Blakeney—(and she was never called anything
but Miss Blakeney—never Kate, or Kitty, or Kathleen,
I mean, though her name was Catherine)—Miss
Blakeney is that very stylish, very striking, very
magnificent girl, I think I may say, with the white
chip hat and black feather. Nobody but Miss Blakeney
could venture to wear just the dress she is sporting,
but she must dash, though she is in half-mourning,
and, faith! there is nothing out of keeping, artistically
speaking, after all. A white dress embroidered
with black flowers, dazzling white shoulders turned
over with black lace, white neck and forehead (brilliantly
white), waved over and kissed by luxuriant black
ringlets (brilliantly black). And very white temples
with very black eyes, and very white eyelids with long
black lashes, and, since those dazzling white teeth
were without a contrast, there hung upon her neck a
black cross of ebony—and now we have put her in
black and white, where she will “stay put.” Scripta
verba manent, saith the cautionary proverb.

Here and there, you observe, there is a small Persian
carpet spread on the sward for those who like to
lounge and look at the dancers, and though a score of
people, at least, are availing themselves of this oriental
luxury, no one looks so modestly pretty, half-couched
on the richly-colored woof, as that simply dressed
blonde, with a straw hat in her lap, and her light
auburn curis taking their saucy will of her blue-veined
neck and shoulders. That lady's plain name is Mabel
Brown, and, like yourself, many persons have wished
to change it for her. She is half-married, indeed, to
several persons here present, for there is one consenting
party. Mais l'autre ne veut pas, as a French novelist
laments, it stating a similar dilemma. Meantime, Miss
Brown is the adopted sister of the black and white Miss
Blakeney.

One more exercise of my function of cicerone!

Lying upon the bank of the river, with his shoulder
against that fine oak, and apparently deeply absorbed
in the fate of the acorn-cups which he throws into the
current, you may survey the elegant person of Mr.
Lindsay Maud—a gentleman whom I wish you to take
for rather more than his outer seeming, since he will
show you at the first turn of his head, that he cares
nothing for your opinion, though entitled, as the
diplomatists phrase it, to your “high consideration.”
Mr. Maud is twenty-five, more or less—six feet, or
thereabouts. He has the sanguineous tint, rather
odd for so phlegmatic a person as he seems. His
nose is un petit peu rétroussè, his lips full, and his
smile easy and ready. His eyes are like the surface
of a very deep well. Curling brown hair, broad and
calm forehead, merry chin with a dimple in it, and
mouth expressive of great good humor, and quite
enough of fastidiousness. If this is not your beau
ideal, I am very sorry—but experience went to show
that Lindsay Maud was a very agreeable man, and
pleased generally where he undertook it.

And now, if you please, having done the honors, I
will take up the story en simple conteur.

The sky was beginning to blush about the sun's
going to bed, and the dancers and archers were pairing
off, couple by couple, to stroll and cool in the dim
shrubberies of Beckton Park. It was an hour to
breakfast, so called, for breakfast was to be served in
the darker edge of the twilight. With the aforenamed
oak-tree between him and the gay company,
Mr. Lindsay Maud beguiled his hunger (for hungry
he was), by reading a volume of that very clever novel,
“Le Pere Goriot,” and, chapter by chapter, he
“cocked up his ear,” as the story-books say, hoping
to hear the cheerful bell of the tower announce the
serving of the soup and champagne.

“Well, Sir Knight Faineant!” said Lady Beckton,
stepping in suddenly between his feet and the river
brink, “since when have you turned woman-hater,
and enrolled among the unavailables? Here have you
lain all day in the shade, with scores of nice girls
dancing on the other side of your hermit tree, and not
a sign of life—not a look even to see whether my
party, got up with so much pains, flourished or languished!
I'll cross you out of my little book, recreant!”

Maud was by this time on his feet, and he penitently
and respectfully kissed the fingers threateningly
held up to him—for the unpardonable sin in a single
man is to appear unamused, let alone failing to amuse
others—at a party sworn to be agreeable.

“I have but half an apology,” he said, “that of
knowing that your parties go swimmingly off, whether
I pull an oar or no; but I deserve not the less to be
crossed out of your book. Something ails me. I am
growing old, or my curiosity has burnt out, or I am
touched with some fatal lethargy. Upon my word I
would as lief listen to a Latin sermon as chat for the
next half hour with the prettiest girl at Beckton!
There's no inducement, my dear Lady Beckton!
I'm not a marrying man, you know, and flirtation—
flirtation is such tiresome repetition—endless reading
of prefaces, and never coming to the agreeable first
chapter. But I'll obey orders. Which is the destitute
woman? You shall see how I will redeem my damaged
reputation!”

But Lady Beckton, who seldom refused an offer
from a beau to make himself useful at her parties,
seemed hardly to listen to Maud's justification. She
placed her arm in his, and led him across the bridge
which spanned the river a little above, and they were
presently out of hearing in one of the cool and shaded
avenues of the park.

“A penny for your thought!” said Maud, after
walking at her side a few minutes in silence.

“It is a thought, certainly, in which pennies are
concerned,” replied Lady Beckton, “and that is why
I find any trouble in giving expression to it. It is
difficult enough to talk with gentlemen about love, but
that is easy to talking about money.”

“Yet they make a pretty tandem, money on the
lead!”

“Oh! are you there?” exclaimed Lady Beckton,
with a laugh; “I was beginning too far back, altogether!
My dear Lindsay, see how much better I
thought of you than you deserved! I was turning
over in my mind with great trepidation and embarrassment
how I should venture to talk to you about a money-and-love
match!”

“Indeed! for what happy man?”

“Toi même, mon ami!”

“Heavens! you quite take away my breath! Spare
yourself the overture, my dear Lady Beckton! I
agree! I am quite ready—sold from this hour if you
can produce a purchaser, and possession given immediately!”

“Now you go too fast; for I have not time to banter,
and I wish to see my way in earnest before I leave you.
Listen to me. I was talking you over with Beckton
this morning. I'll not trouble you with the discussion—it
would make you vain, perhaps. But we arrived
at this: Miss Blakeney would be a very good
match for you, and if you are inclined to make a demonstration
that way, why, we will do what we can to
make it plain sailing. Stay with us a week, for instance,
and we will keep the Blakeneys. It's a sweet
month for pairing, and you are an expeditions love-maker,
I know. Is it agreed?”

“You are quite serious!”

“Quite!”

“I'll go back with you to the bridge, kindest of
friends, and return and ramble here till the bell rings,
by myself. I'll find you at table, by-and-by, and express
my gratitude at least. Will that be time enough
for an answer?”

“Yes—but no ceremony with me! Stay and
ponder where you are! Au revoir! I must see after
my breakfast!”

And away tripped the kind-hearted Lady Beckton.

Maud resumed his walk. He was rather taken
aback. He knew Miss Blakeney but as a waltzing
partner, yet that should be but little matter; for he
had long ago made up his mind that, if he did not
marry rich, he could not marry at all.

Maud was poor—that is to say, he had all that an
angel would suppose necessary in this hungry and cold
world—assurance of food and clothing—in other words,
three hundred a year. He had had his unripe time
like other youths, in which he was ready to marry for
love and no money; but his timid advances at that
soft period had not been responsibly met by his first
course of sweethearts, and he had congratulated himself
and put a price on his heart accordingly. Meantime,
he thought, the world is a very entertaining
place, and the belonging to nobody in particular, has
its little advantages.

And very gayly sped on the second epoch of Mr.
Lindsay Maud's history. He lived in a country where,
to shine in a profession, requires the “audace, patience
et volonté de quoi renverser le monde,” and having turned
his ambition well about, like a strange coin that
might perhaps have passed current in other times, he
laid it away with romance and chivalry, and other
things suited only to the cabinets of the curious. He
was well born. He was well bred. He was a fair
candidate for the honors of a “gay man about town”
—that untaxed exempt—that guest by privilege—that
irresponsible denizen of high life, possessed of every
luxury on earth except matrimony and the pleasures
of payment. And, for a year or two, this was very
delightful. He had a half dozen of those charming
female friendships which, like other ephemera in this
changing world, must die or turn into something else
at the close of a season, and, if this makes the feelings
very hard, it makes the manners very soft; and Maud
was content with the compensation. If he felt, now
and then, that he was idling life away, he looked about
him and found countenance at least; for all his friends
were as idle, and there was an analogy to his condition
in nature (if need were to find one), for the butterfly
had his destiny like the bee, and was neither
pitied nor reproached that he was not a honey-maker.

But Maud was now in a third lustrum of his existence,
and it was tinted somewhat differently from the
rose-colored epochs precedent. The twilight of
satisfied curiosity had fallen imperceptibly around
him. The inner veils of society had one by one lifted,
and there could be nothing new for his eye in the
world to which he belonged.

A gay party, which was once to him as full of unattained
objects as the festal mysteries of Eleusinia to
a rustic worshipper of Ceres, was now as readable at
a glance as the stripes of a backgammon-board. He
knew every man's pretensions and chances, every woman's
expectations and defences. Not a damsel whose
defects he had not discovered, whose mind he had not
sounded, whose dowry he did not know. Not a beauty,
married or single, whose nightly game in society he
could not perfectly foretell; not an affection unoccupied
of which he could not put you down the cost of engaging
it in your favor, the chances of constancy, the
dangers of following or abandoning. He had no stake
in society, meantime, yet society itself was all his
world. He had no ambitions to further by its aid.
And until now, he had looked on matrimony as a
closed door—for he had neither property, nor profession
likely to secure it, and circumstances like these,
in the rank in which he moved, are comprehended
among the “any impediments.” To have his own
way, Maud would have accepted no invitations except
to dine with the beaux esprits, and he would have concentrated
the remainder of his leisure and attentions
upon one agreeable woman (at a time)—two selfishnesses
very attractive to a blasé, but not permitted to
any member of society short of a duke or a Crœsus.

And now, with a new leaf turning over in his dull
book of life—a morning of a new day breaking on
his increasing night—Lindsay Maud tightly screwed
his arms across his breast, and paced the darkening
avenue of Beckton Park. The difference between
figuring as a fortune-hunter, and having a fortune
hunted for him by others, he perfectly understood.
In old and aristocratic societies, where wealth is at
the same time so much more coveted and so much
more difficult to win, the eyes of “envy, malice, and
all uncharitableness,” are alike an omnipresent argus,
in their watch over the avenues to its acquisition. No
step, the slightest, the least suspicious, is ever taken
toward the hand of an heiress, or the attainment of
an inheritance, without awakening and counter-working
of these busy monsters; and, for a society-man,
better to be a gambler or seducer, better to have all
the fashionable vices ticketed on his name, than to
stand affiched as a fortune-hunter. If to have a fortune
cleverly put within reach by a powerful friend,
however, be a proportionate beatitude, blessed was
Maud. So thought he, at least, as the merry bell of
Beckton tower sent its summons through the woods,
and his revery gave place to thoughts of something
more substantial.

And thus far, oh adorable reader! (for I see what
unfathomable eyes are looking over my shoulder) thus
far, like an artist making a sketch, of which one part
is to be finished, I have dwelt a little on the touches
of my pencil. But, by those same unfathomable eyes

I know (for in those depths dwell imagination), that
if the remainder be done ever so lightly in outline,
even then there will be more than was needed for the
comprehension of the story. Thy ready and boundless
fancy, sweet lady, would supply it all. Given,
the characters and scene, what fair creature who has
loved, could fail to picture forth the sequel and its
more minute surroundings, with rapidity and truth
daguerreotypical?

Sketchily, then, touch we the unfinished dénouement
of our story.

The long saloon was already in glittering progress
wken Maud entered. The servants in their blue and
white liveries were gliding rapidly about with the terrestrial
nutriment for eyes celestial—to-wit, wines and
oysters.

Half blinded with the glare of the numberless
lights, he stood a moment at the door.

“Lady Beckton's compliments, and she has reserved
a seat for you!” said a footman approaching
him.

He glanced at the head of the table. The vacant
chair was near Lady Beckton and opposite Miss Blakeney.
“Is a vis-a-vis better for love-making than a
seat at the lady's ear?” thought Maud. But Lady
Beckton's tacties were to spare his ear and dazzle his
eye, without reference especially to the corresponding
impressions on the eyes and ear of the lady. And
she had the secondary object of avoiding any betrayal
of her designs till they were too far matured to be defeated
by publicity.

“Can you tell me, Mr. Maud,” said the sweet
voice of Mabel Brown as he drew his chair to the
table, “what is the secret of Lady Beckton's putting
you next me so pertinaciously?”

“A greater regard for my happiness than yours,
probably,” said Maud; “but why `pertinaciously?'
Has there been a skirmish for this particular chair?”

“No skirmish, but three attempts at seizure by
three of my admirers.”

“If they admire you more than I, they are fitter
companions for a tête-à-tête than a crowded party,”
said Maud. “I am as near a lover as I can be, and
be agreeable!”

To this Maud expected the gay retort due to a bagatelle
of gallantry; but the pretty Mabel was silent.
The soup disappeared and the entremets were served.
Maud was hungry, and he had sent a cutlet and a
glass of Johannisberg to the clamorous quarter before
he ventured to look toward his hostess.

He felt her eye upon him. A covert smile stole
through her lips as they exchanged glances.

“Yes?” she asked, with a meaning look.

“Yes!”

And in that dialogue of two monosyllables Lady
Beckton presumed that the hand and five thousand a
year of Miss Catherine Blakeney, were virtually made
over to Mr. Lindsay Maud. And her diplomacy
made play to that end without farther deliberation.

Very unconscious indeed that she was under the
eye of the man who had entered into a conspiracy to
become her husband, Miss Blakeney sat between a
guardsman and a diplomatist, carrying on the war in
her usual trenchant and triumphant fashion. She
looked exceedingly handsome—that Maud could not
but admit. With no intention of becoming responsible
for her manners, he would even have admired,
as he often had done, her skilful coquetries and adroit
displays of the beauty with which nature had endowed
her. She succeeded, Maud thought, in giving
both of her admirers the apparent preference (apparent
to themselves, that is to say), and considering her
vis-a-vis worth a chance shaft at least, she honored
that very attentive gentleman with such occasional
notice, as, under other circumstances, would have
been far from disagreeable. It might have worn a
better grace, however, coming from simple Miss
Blakeney. From the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud, he
could have wished those pretty inveiglements very
much reduced and modified.

At his side, the while, sweet Mabel Brown carried
on with him a conversation, which to the high tone
of merriment opposite, was like the intermitted murmur
of a brook heard in the pauses of merry instruments.
At the same time that nothing brilliant or
gay seemed to escape her notice, she toned her own
voice and flow of thought so winningly below the excitement
around her, that Maud, who was sensible of
every indication of superiority, could not but pay her
a silent tribute of admiration. “If this were but the
heiress!” he ejaculated inwardly. But Mabel Brown
was a dependant.

Coffee was served.

The door at the end of the long saloon was suddenly
thrown open, and as every eye turned to gaze
into the blazing ballroom, a march with the full power
of the band burst upon the ear.

The diplomatist who had been sitting at the side
of Miss Blakeney was a German, and a waltzer comme
il y en a peu. At the bidding of Lady Beckton, he
put his arm around the waist of the heiress, and bore
her away to the delicious music of Strauss, and, by
general consent, the entire floor was left to this pair
for a dozen circles. Miss Blakeney was passionately
fond of waltzing, and built for it, like a Baltimore
clipper for running close to the wind. If she had a
fault that her friends were afraid to jog her memory
about, it was the wearing her dresses a flounce too
short. Her feet and ankles were Fenella's own, while
her figure and breezy motion would have stolen Endymion
from Diana. She waltzed too well for a
lady—all but well enough for a premier danseuse de
l'opera. Lady Beckton was a shrewd woman, but
she made a mistake in crying “encore!” when this
single couple stopped from their admired pas de deux.
She thought Maud was just the man to be captivated
by that display. But the future Mrs. Lindsay Maud
must not have ankles for general admiration. Oh, no!

Maud wished to efface the feeling this exhibition
had caused by sharing in the excitement.

“Miss Brown,” he said, as two or three couples
went off, “permit me the happiness of one turn!”
and, scarce waiting for an answer, he raised his arm
to encircle her waist.

Mabel took his hands, and playfully laid them
across each other on his own breast in an attitude of
resignation.

“I never waltz,” she said. “But don't think me
a prude! I don't consider it wrong in those who
think it right.”

“But with this music tugging at your heels!” said
Maud, who did not care to express how much he admired
the delicacy of her distinction.

“Ah, with a husband or a brother, I should think
one could scarce resist bounding away; but I can
not—”

“Can not what?—can not take me for either?” interrupted
Maud, with an air of affected malice that
covered a very strong desire to ask the question in
earnest.

She turned her eyes suddenly upon him with a rapid
look of inquiry, and, slightly coloring, fixed her attention
silently on the waltzers.

Lady Beckton came, making her way through the
crowd. She touched Maud on the arm.

“`Hold hook and line!'—is it not?” she said, in a
whisper.

After an instant's hesitation, Maud answered,
“Yes!”—but pages, often, would not suffice to express
all that passes through the mind in “an instant's
hesitation.” All Lindsay Maud's prospects and circumstances
were reviewed in that moment; all his

many steps by which he had arrived at the conclusion
that marriage with him must be a matter of convenance
merely; all his put-down impulses and built-up resolutions;
all his regrets, consolations, and offsets; all
his better and worser feelings; all his former loves
(and in that connexion, strangely enough, Mabel
Brown); all his schemes, in short, for smothering his
pain in the sacrifice of his heart, and making the
most of the gain to his pocket, passed before him in
that half minute's review. But he said “Yes!”

The Blakeney carriage was dismissed that night,
with orders to bring certain dressing-maids and certain
sequents of that useful race, on the following
morning to Beckton Park, and the three persons who
composed the Blakeney party, an old aunt, Miss
Blakeney, and Mabel Brown, went quietly to bed under
the hospitable roof of Lady Beckton.

How describe (and what need of it, indeed!) a week
at an English country-house, with all its age of
chances for loving and hating, its eternity of opportunities
for all that hearts can have to regulate in this
shorthand life of ours? Let us come at once to the
closing day of this visit.

Maud lay late abed on the day that the Blakeneys
were to leave Beckton Park. Fixed from morning
till night in the firm resolution at which he had arrived
with so much trouble and self-control, he was
dreaming from night till morning of a felicity in
which Miss Blakeney had little share. He wished
the marriage could be all achieved in the signing of a
bond. He found that he had miscalculated his philosophy
in supposing that he could venture to loose
thought and revery upon the long-forbidden subject
of marriage. In all the scenes eternally being conjured
up to his fancy—scenes of domestic life—the
bringing of Miss Blakeney into the picture was an
after effort. Mabel Brown stole into it, spite of himself—the
sweetest and dearest feature of that enchanting
picture, in its first warm coloring by the heart.
But, day by day, he took the place assigned him by
Lady Beckton at the side of Miss Blakeney, riding,
driving, dining, strolling, with reference to being near
her only, and still scarce an hour could pass in which,
spite of all effort to the contrary, he did not betray
his passionate interest in Mabel Brown.

He arose and breakfasted. Lady Beckton and the
young ladies were bonneted and ready for a stroll in
the park woods, and her ladyship came and whispered
in Maud's ear, as he leaned over his coffee, that he
must join them presently, and that she had prepared
Miss Blakeney for an interview with him, which she
would arrange as they rambled.

“Take no refusal!” were her parting words as she
stepped out upon the verandah.

Maud strolled leisurely toward the rendezvous indicated
by Lady Beckton. He required all the time
he could get to confirm his resolutions and recover
his usual maintien of repose. With his mind made
up at last, and a face in which few would have read
the heart in fetters beneath, he jumped a wicker-fence,
and, by a cross path, brought the ladies in
view. They were walking separately, but as his footsteps
were heard, Lady Beckton slipped her arm into
Miss Brown's, and commenced apparently a very earnest
undertone of conversation. Miss Blakeney
turned. Her face glowed with excercise, and Maud
confessed to himself that he rarely had seen so beautiful
a woman.

“You are come in time, Mr. Maud,” she said, “for
something is going on between my companions from
which I am excluded.”

“En revanche, suppose we have our little exclusive
secret!” said Maud, offering his arm.

Miss Blakeney colored slightly, and consented to
obey the slight resistance of his arm by which they
fell behind. A silence of a few moments followed,
for if the proposed secret were a proposal of marriage,
it had been too bluntly approached. Maud felt
that he must once more return to indifferent topics,
and lead on the delicate subject at his lips with more
tact and preparation.

They rose a slight elevation in the walk which overlooked
the wilder confines of the park. A slight
smoke rose from a clump of trees, indicating an intrusion
of gipsies within, and the next instant, a deepmouthed
bark rang out before them, and the two ladies
came rushing back in violent terror, assailed at
every step of their flight by a powerful and infuriated
mastiff. Maud ran forward immediately, and succeeded
in driving the dog back to the tents; but on his
return he found only the terrified Mabel, who, leaning
against a tree, and partly recovered from her
breathless flight, was quietly awaiting him.

“Here is a change of partners as my heart would
have it!” thought Maud, as he drew her slight arm
within his own. “The transfer looks to me like the
interposition of my good angel, and I accept the
warning!”

And in words that needed no management to bring
them skilfully on—with the eloquence of a heart released
from fetters all but intolerable, and from a
threatened slavery for life—Lindsay Maud poured
out the fervent passion of his heart to Mabel Brown.
The crust of a selfish and artificial life broke up in
the tumult of that declaration, and he found himself
once more natural and true to the instincts and better
impulses of his character. He was met with the
trembling response that such pure love looks for
when it finds utterance, and without a thought of
worldly calculation, or a shadow of a scheme for their
means and manner of life, they exchanged promises
to which the subsequent ceremony of marriage was
but the formal seal.

And at the announcement of this termination to
her matrimonial schemes, Lady Beckton seemed
much more troubled than Miss Blakeney.

But Lady Beckton's disappointment was somewhat
modified when she discovered that Miss Blakeney had
long before secretly endowed her adopted sister Mabel
with the half of her fortune.

THE INLET OF PEACH-BLOSSOMS,

The Emperor Yuentsoong, of the dynasty Chow,
was the most magnificent of the long-descended succession
of Chinese sovereigns. On his first accession
to the throne, his character was so little understood,
that a conspiracy was set on foot among the yellow-caps,
or eunuchs, to put out his eyes, and place upon
the throne the rebel Szema, in whose warlike hands,
they asserted, the empire would more properly maintain
its ancient glory. The gravity and reserve which
these myrmidons of the palace had construed into
stupidity and fear, soon assumed another complexion,
however. The eunuchs silently disappeared; the
mandarins and princes whom they had seduced from
their allegiance, were made loyal subjects by a generous
pardon; and in a few days after the period fixed
upon for the consummation of the plot, Yuentsoong
set forth in complete armor at the head of his troops
to give battle to the rebel in the mountains.

In Chinese annals this first enterprise of the youthful
Yuentsoong is recorded with great pomp and particularity.
Szema was a Tartar prince of uncommon
ability, young like the emperor, and, during the few
last imbecile years of the old sovereign, he had gathered
strength in his rebellion, till now he was at the
head of ninety thousand men, all soldiers of repute

and tried valor. The historian has unfortunately
dimmed the emperor's fame to European eyes, by attributing
his wonderful achievements in this expedition
to his superiority in arts of magic. As this account
of his exploits is only prefatory to our tale, we
will simply give the reader an idea of the style of the
historian, by translating literally a passage or two of
his description of the battle:—

“Szema now took refuge within a cleft of the
mountain, and Yuentsoong, upon his swift steed, outstripping
the body-guard in his ardor, dashed amid
the paralyzed troops with poised spear, his eyes fixed
only on the rebel. There was a silence of an instant,
broken only by the rattling hoofs of the intruder, and
then, with dishevelled hair and waving sword, Szema
uttered a fearful imprecation. In a moment the wind
rushed, the air blackened, and with the suddenness of
a fallen rock, a large cloud enveloped the rebel, and
innumerable men and horses issued out of it. Wings
flapped against the eyes of the emperor's horse, hellish
noises screamed in his ears, and, completely beyond
control, the animal turned and fled back through
the narrow pass, bearing his imperial master safe into
the heart of his army.

“Yuentsoong, that night, commanded some of his
most expert soldiers to scale the beetling heights of
the ravine, bearing upon their backs the blood of
swine, sheep, and dogs, with other impure things, and
these they were ordered to shower upon the combatants
at the sound of the imperial clarion. On the following
morning, Szema came forth again to offer battle,
with flags displayed, drums beating, and shouts
of triumph and defiance. As on the day previous, the
bold emperor divided, in his impatience, rank after
rank of his own soldiery, and, followed closely by his
body-guard, drove the rebel army once more into their
fastness. Szema sat upon his warhorse as before, intrenched
amid his officers and ranks of the tallest Tartar
spearmen, and as the emperor contended hand to
hand with one of the opposing rebels, the magic imprecation
was again uttered, the air again filled with
cloudy horsemen and chariots, and the mountain shaken
with discordant thunder. Backing his willing
steed, the emperor blew a long sharp note upon his
silver clarion, and in an instant the sun broke through
the darkness, and the air seemed filled with paper men,
horses of straw, and phantoms dissolving into smoke.
Yuentsoong and Szema now stood face to face, with
only mortal aid and weapons.”

The historian goes on to record that the two armies
suspended hostilities at the command of their leaders,
and that the emperor and his rebel subject having engaged
in single combat, Yuentsoong was victorious,
and returned to his capital with the formidable enemy,
whose life he had spared, riding beside him like a
brother. The conqueror's career, for several years
after this, seems to have been a series of exploits of
personal valor, and the Tartar prince shared in all his
dangers and pleasures, his inseparable friend. It was
during this period of romantic friendship that the
events occurred which have made Yuentsoong one of
the idols of Chinese poetry.

By the side of a lake in a distant province of the
empire, stood one of the imperial palaces of pleasure,
seldom visited, and almost in ruins. Hither, in one
of his moody periods of repose from war, came the
conqueror Yuentsoong, for the first time in years separated
from his faithful Szema. In disguise, and
with only one or two attendants, he established himself
in the long silent halls of his ancestor Tsinchemong,
and with his boat upon the lake, and his spear
in the forest, seemed to find all the amusement of
which his melancholy was susceptible. On a certain
day in the latter part of April, the emperor had set
his sail to a fragrant south wind, and reclining on the
cushions of his bark, watched the shore as it softly
and silently glided past, and, the lake being entirely
encircled by the imperial forest, he felt immersed in
what he believed to be the solitude of a deserted paradise.
After skirting the fringed sheet of water in
this manner for several hours, he suddenly observed
that he had shot through a streak of peach-blossoms
floating from the shore, and at the same moment he
became conscious that his boat was slightly headed
off by a current setting outward. Putting up his
helm, he returned to the spot, and beneath the drooping
branches of some luxuriant willows, thus early in
leaf, he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which, but
for the floating blossoms it brought to the lake, would
have escaped the notice of the closest observer. The
emperor now lowered his sail, unshipped the slender
mast, and betook him to the oars, and as the current
was gentle, and the inlet wider within the mouth, he
sped rapidly on, through what appeared to be but a
lovely and luxuriant vale of the forest. Still, those
blushing betrayers of some flowering spot beyond,
extended like a rosy clue before him, and with impulse
of muscles swelled and indurated in warlike exercise,
the swift keel divided the besprent mirror winding
temptingly onward, and, for a long hour, the royal
oarsman untiringly threaded this sweet vein of the
wilderness.

Resting a moment on his oars while the slender
bark still kept her way, he turned his head toward
what seemed to be an opening in the forest on the
left, and in the same instant the boat ran, head on, to
the shore, the inlet at this point almost doubling on
its course. Beyond, by the humming of bees, and
the singing of birds, there should be a spot more open
than the tangled wilderness he had passed, and disengaging
his prow from the alders, he shoved the boat
again into the stream, and pulled round a high rock,
by which the inlet seemed to have been compelled to
curve its channel. The edge of a bright green meadow
now stole into the perspective, and, still widening
with his approach, disclosed a slightly rising terrace
clustered with shrubs, and studded here and there
with vases; and farther on, upon the same side of the
stream, a skirting edge of peach-trees, loaded with the
gay blossoms which had guided him hither.

Astonished at these signs of habitation in what was
well understood to be a privileged wilderness, Yuentsoong
kept his boat in mid-stream, and with his eyes
vigilantly on the alert, slowly made headway against
the current. A few strokes with his oars, however,
traced another curve of the inlet, and brought into
view a grove of ancient trees scattered over a gently
ascending lawn, beyond which, hidden by the river
till now by the projecting shoulder of a mound, lay a
small pavilion with gilded pillars, glittering like fairy
work in the sun. The emperor fastened his boat to a
tree leaning over the water, and with his short spear
in his hand, bounded upon the shore, and took his
way toward the shining structure, his heart beating
with a feeling of wonder and interest altogether new.
On a nearer approach, the bases of the pillars seemed
decayed by time, and the gilding weather-stained and
tarnished, but the trellised porticoes on the southern
aspect were laden with flowering shrubs, in vases of
porcelain, and caged birds sang between the pointed
arches, and there were manifest signs of luxurious
taste, elegance, and care.

A moment, with an indefinable timidity, the emperor
paused before stepping from the green sward
upon the marble floor of the pavilion, and in that
moment a curtain was withdrawn from the door, and
a female, with step suddenly arrested by the sight of
the stranger, stood motionless before him. Ravished
with her extraordinary beauty, and awe-struck with
the suddenness of the apparition and the novelty of
the adventure, the emperor's tongue cleaved to his
mouth, and ere he could summon resolution, even

for a gesture of courtesy, the fair creature had fled
within, and the curtain closed the entrance as before.

Wishing to recover his composure, so strangely
troubled, and taking it for granted that some other inmate
of the house would soon appear, Yuentsoong
turned his steps aside to the grove, and with his head
bowed, and his spear in the hollow of his arm, tried
to recall more vividly the features of the vision he
had seen. He had walked but a few paces, when
there came toward him from the upper skirt of the
grove, a man of unusual stature and erectness, with
white hair, unbraided on his shoulders, and every sign
of age except infirmity of step and mien. The emperor's
habitual dignity had now rallied, and on his
first salutation, the countenance of the old man softened,
and he quickened his pace to meet and give him
welcome.

“You are noble?” he said, with confident inquiry.

Yuentsoong colored slightly.

“I am,” he replied, “Lew-melin, a prince of the
empire.”

“And by what accident here?”

Yuentsoong explained the clue of the peach-blossoms,
and represented himself as exiled for a time to
the deserted palace upon the lakes.

“I have a daughter,” said the old man, abruptly,
“who has never looked on human face, save mine.”

“Pardon me!” replied his visiter; “I have thoughtlessly
intruded on her sight, and a face more heavenly
fair—”

The emperor hesitated, but the old man smiled encouragingly.

“It is time,” he said, “that I should provide a
younger defender for my bright Teh-leen, and Heaven
has sent you in the season of peach-blossoms, with
provident kindness.[1] You have frankly revealed to
me your name and rank. Before I offer you the hospitality
of my roof, I must tell you mine. I am
Choo-tseen, the outlaw, once of your own rank, and
the general of the Celestial army.”

The emperor started, remembering that this celebrated
rebel was the terror of his father's throne.

“You have heard my history,” the old man continued.
“I had been, before my rebellion, in charge
of the imperial palace on the lake. Anticipating an
evil day, I secretly prepared this retreat for my family;
and when my soldiers deserted me at the battle of
Ke-chow, and a price was set upon my head, hither I
fled with my women and children; and the last alive
is my beautiful Teh-leen. With this brief outline of
my life, you are at liberty to leave me as you came,
or to enter my house, on the condition that you become
the protector of my child.”

The emperor eagerly turned toward the pavilion,
and, with a step as light as his own, the erect and
stately outlaw hastened to lift the curtain before him.
Leaving his guest for a moment in the outer apartment,
he entered to an inner chamber in search of his
daughter, whom he brought, panting with fear, and
blushing with surprise and delight, to her future lover
and protector. A portion of an historical tale so delicate
as the description of the heroine is not work for
imitators, however, and we must copy strictly the portrait
of the matchless Teh-leen, as drawn by Le-pih,
the Anacreon of Chinese poetry, and the contemporary
and favorite of Yuentsoong.

“Teh-leen was born while the morning star shone
upon the bosom of her mother. Her eye was like
the unblemished blue lily, and its light like the white
gem unfractured. The plum-blossom is most fragrant
when the cold has penetrated its stem, and the
mother of Teh-leen had known sorrow. The head
of her child drooped in thought, like a violet overladen
with dew. Bewildering was Teh-leen. Her
mouth's corners were dimpled, yet pensive. The
arch of her brows was like the vein in the tulip's
heart, and the lashes shaded the blushes on her cheek.
With the delicacy of a pale rose, her complexion put
to shame the floating light of day. Her waist, like a
thread in fineness, seemed ready to break; yet was it
straight and erect, and feared not the fanning breeze;
and her shadowy grace was as difficult to delineate, as
the form of the white bird rising from the ground by
moonlight. The natural gloss of her hair resembled
the uncertain sheen of calm water, yet without the
false aid of unguents. The native intelligence of her
mind seemed to have gained strength by retirement,
and he who beheld her, thought not of her as human.
Of rare beauty, of rarer intellect was Teh-leen, and
her heart responded to the poet's lute.”

We have not space, nor could we, without copying
directly from the admired Le-pih, venture to describe
the bringing of Teh-leen to court, and her surprise at
finding herself the favorite of the emperor. It is a
romantic circumstance, besides, which has had its
parallels in other countries. But the sad sequel to
the loves of poor Teh-leen is but recorded in the cold
page of history; and if the poet, who wound up the
climax of her perfections, with her susceptibility to
his lute, embalmed her sorrows in verse, he was probably
too politic to bring it ever to light. Pass we to
these neglected and unadorned passages of her history.

Yuentsoong's nature was passionately devoted and
confiding; and, like two brothers with one favorite
sister, lived together Teh-leen, Szema, and the emperor.
The Tartar prince, if his heart knew a mistress
before the arrival of Teh-leen at the palace, owned
afterward no other than her; and fearless of check
or suspicion from the noble confidence and generous
friendship of Yuentsoong, he seemed to live but for
her service, and to have neither energies nor ambition
except for the winning of her smiles. Szema was of
great personal beauty, frank when it did not serve him
to be wily, bold in his pleasures, and of manners almost
femininely soft and voluptuous. He was renowned
as a soldier, and, for Teh-leen, he became a
poet and master of the lute; and, like all men formed
for ensnaring the heart of women, he seemed to forget
himself in the absorbing devotion of his idolatry. His
friend, the emperor, was of another mould. Yuentsoong's
heart had three chambers—love, friendship,
and glory. Teh-leen was but a third in his existence,
yet he loved her—the sequel will show how well! In
person he was less beautiful than majestic, of large
stature, and with a brow and lip naturally stern and
lofty. He seldom smiled, even upon Teh-leen, whom
he would watch for hours in pensive and absorbed delight;
but his smile, when it did awake, broke over
his sad countenance like morning. All men loved and
honored Yuentsoong, and all men, except only the
emperor, looked on Szema with antipathy. To such
natures as the former, women give all honor and approbation;
but for such as the latter, they reserve
their weakness!

Wrapt up in his friend and mistress, and reserved
in his intercourse with his counsellors, Yuentsoong
knew not that, throughout the imperial city, Szema
was called “the kieu,” or robber-bird, and his fair
Teh-leen openly charged with dishonor. Going out
alone to hunt as was his custom, and having left his
signet with Szema, to pass and repass through the
private apartments at his pleasure, his horse fell with
him unaccountably in the open field. Somewhat
superstitious, and remembering that good spirits sometimes
“knit the grass,” when other obstacles fail to
bar our way into danger, the emperor drew rein and
returned to his palace. It was an hour after noon,
and having dismissed his attendants at the city gate,
he entered by a postern to the imperial garden, and
bethought himself of the concealed couch in a cool

grot by a fountain (a favorite retreat, sacred to himself
and Teh-leen), where he fancied it would be refreshing
to sleep away the sultriness of the remaining
hours till evening. Sitting down by the side of the
murmuring fount, he bathed his feet, and left his slippers
on the lip of the basin to be unencumbered in
his repose within, and so with unechoing step entered
the resounding grotto. Alas! there slumbered the
faithless friend with the guilty Teh-leen upon his
bosom!

Grief struck through the noble heart of the emperor
like a sword in cold blood. With a word he
could consign to torture and death the robber of his
honor, but there was agony in his bosom deeper than
revenge. He turned silently away, recalled his horse
and huntsmen, and, outstripping all, plunged on
through the forest till night gathered around him.

Yuentsoong had been absent many days from his
capitol, and his subjects were murmuring their fears
for his safety, when a messenger arrived to the counsellors
informing them of the appointment of the
captive Tartar prince to the government of the province
of Szechuen, the second honor of the Celestial
empire. A private order accompanied the announcement,
commanding the immediate departure of Szema
for the scene of his new authority. Inexplicable as
was this riddle to the multitude, there were those who
read it truly by their knowledge of the magnanimous
soul of the emperor; and among these was the crafty
object of his generosity. Losing no time, he set forward
with great pomp for Szechuen, and in their joy
to see him no more in the palace, the slighted princes
of the empire forgave his unmerited advancement.
Yuentsoong returned to his capitol; but to the terror
of his counsellors and people, his hair was blanched
white as the head of an old man! He was pale as
well, but he was cheerful and kind beyond his wont,
and to Teh-leen untiring in pensive and humble attentions.
He pleaded only impaired health and restless
slumbers as an apology for nights of solitude.
Once, Teh-leen penetrated to his lonely chamber, but
by the dim night lamp she saw that the scroll over her
window[2] was changed, and instead of the stimulus to
glory which formerly hung in golden letters before
his eyes, there was a sentence written tremblingly in
black:—

Six months from this period the capitol was thrown
into a tumult with the intelligence that the province
of Szechuen was in rebellion, and Szema at the head
of a numerous army on his way to seize the throne
of Yuentsoong. This last sting betrayed the serpent
even to the forgiving emperor, and tearing the reptile
at last from his heart, he entered with the spirit of
other times into the warlike preparations. The imperial
army was in a few days on its march, and at
Keo-yang the opposing forces met and prepared for
encounter.

With a dread of the popular feeling toward Teh-leen,
Yuentsoong had commanded for her a close
litter, and she was borne after the imperial standard in
the centre of the army. On the eve before the battle,
ere the watch-fires were lit, the emperor came to
her tent, set apart from his own, and with the delicate
care and kind gentleness from which he never varied,
inquired how her wants were supplied, and bade her,
thus early, farewell for the night; his own custom of
typical of the prosperous man arising to wealth and honors.
passing among his soldiers on the evening previous to
an engagement, promising to interfere with what was
usually his last duty before retiring to his couch.
Teh-leen on this occasion seemed moved by some
irrepressible emotion, and as he rose to depart, she fell
forward upon her face, and bathed his feet with her
tears. Attributing it to one of those excesses of feeling
to which all, but especially hearts ill at ease, are
liable, the noble monarch gently raised her, and, with
repeated efforts at reassurance, committed her to the
hands of her women. His own heart beat far from
tranquilly, for, in the excess of his pity for her grief
he had unguardedly called her by one of the sweet
names of their early days of love—strange word now
upon his lip—and it brought back, spite of memory
and truth, happiness that would not be forgotten!

It was past midnight, and the moon was riding high
in heaven, when the emperor, returning between the
lengthening watch-fires, sought the small lamp which,
suspended like a star above his own tent, guided him
back from the irregular mazes of the camp. Paled
by the intense radiance of the moonlight, the small
globe of alabaster at length became apparent to his
weary eye, and with one glance at the peaceful beauty
of the heavens, he parted the curtained door beneath
it, and stood within. The Chinese historian asserts
that a bird, from whose wing Teh-leen had once
plucked an arrow, restoring it to liberty and life, and
in grateful attachment to her destiny, removed the
lamp from the imperial tent, and suspended it over
hers. The emperor stood beside her couch. Startled
at his inadvertent error, he turned to retire; but the
lifted curtain let in a flood of moonlight upon the
sleeping features of Teh-leen, and like dew-drops, the
undried tears glistened in her silken lashes. A lamp
burned faintly in the inner apartment of the tent, and
her attendants slept soundly. His soft heart gave
way. Taking up the lamp, he held it over his beautiful
mistress, and once more gazed passionately and
unrestrainedly on her unparalleled beauty. The
past—the early past—was alone before him. He forgave
her—there, as she slept, unconscious of the
throbbing of his injured, but noble heart, so close
beside her—he forgave her in the long silent abysses
of his soul! Unwilling to wake her from her tranquil
slumber, but promising to himself, from that hour,
such sweets of confiding love as had well nigh been
lost to him for ever, he imprinted one kiss upon the
parted lips of Teh-leen, and sought his couch for
slumber.

Ere daybreak the emperor was aroused by one of
his attendants with news too important for delay.
Szema, the rebel, had been arrested in the imperial
camp, disguised, and on his way back to his own
forces, and like wildfire, the information had spread
among the soldiery, who, in a state of mutinous
excitement, were with difficulty restrained from rushing
upon the tent of Teh-leen. At the door of his
tent, Yuentsoong found messengers from the alarmed
princes and officers of the different commands, imploring
immediate aid and the imperial presence to allay
the excitement, and while the emperor prepared to
mount his horse, the guard arrived with the Tartar
prince, ignominiously tied, and bearing marks of
rough usage from his indignant captors.

“Loose him!” cried the emperor, in a voice of
thunder.

The cords were severed, and with a glance whose
ferocity expressed no thanks, Szema reared himself
up to his fullest height, and looked scornfully around
him. Daylight had now broke, and as the group
stood upon an eminence in sight of the whole army,
shouts began to ascend, and the armed multitude,
breaking through all restraint, rolled in toward the
centre. Attracted by the commotion, Yuentsoong
turned to give some orders to those near him, when

Szema suddenly sprang upon an officer of the guard,
wrenched his drawn sword from his grasp, and in an
instant was lost to sight in the tent of Teh-leen. A
sharp scream, a second of thought, and forth again
rushed the desperate murderer, with his sword flinging
drops of drops of blood, and ere a foot stirred in the
paralyzed group, the avenging cimeter of Yuentsoong
had cleft him to the chin.

A hush, as if the whole army was struck dumb by
a bolt from heaven, followed this rapid tragedy.
Dropping the polluted sword from his hand, the
emperor. with uncertain step, and the pallor of death
upon his countenance, entered the fatal tent.

He came no more forth that day. The army was
marshalled by the princes, and the rebels were routed
with great slaughter; but Yuentsoong never more
wielded sword. “He pined to death,” says the historian,
“with the wane of the same moon that shone
upon the forgiveness of Teh-leen.”

THE BELLE OF THE BELFRY;
OR, THE DARING LOVER.

A grisette is something else beside a “mean girl”
or a “gray gown,” the French dictionary to the contrary
notwithstanding. Bless me! you should see the
griset'es of Rochepot! And if you wished to take a
lesson in political compacts, you should understand
the grisette confederacy of Rochepot! They were
working-girls, it is true—dressmakers, milliners, shoebinders,
tailoresses, flowermakers, embroideresses—
and they never expected to be anything more aristocratic.
And in that content lay their power.

The grisettes of Rochepot were a good fourth of
the female population. They had their jealousies,
and little scandals, and heart-burnings, and plottings,
and counterplottings (for they were women) among
themselves. But they made common cause against
the enemy. They would bear no disparagement.
They knew exactly what was due to them, and what
was due to their superiors, and they paid and gave
credit in the coin of good manners, as can not be done
in countries of “liberty and equality.” Still there
were little shades of difference in the attention shown
them by their employers, and they worked twice as
much in a day when sewing for Madame Durozel,
who took her dinner with them, sans façon in the
work-room, as for old Madame Chiquette, who dined
all alone in her grand saloon, and left them to eat by
themselves among their shreds and scissors. But
these were not slights which they seriously resented.
We only to the incautious dame who dared to scandalize
one of their number, or dispute her dues, or
encroach upon her privileges! They would make
Rochepot as uncomfortable for her, parbleu! as a
kettle to a slow-boiled lobster.

But the prettiest grisette of Rochepot was not often
permitted to join her companions in their self-chaperoned
excursions on the holydays. Old Dame
Pomponney was the sexton's widow, and she had the
care of the great clock of St. Roch, and of one only
daughter; and excellent care she took of both her
charges. They lived all three in the belfry—dame,
clock, and daughter—and it was a bright day for
Thénais when she got out of hearing of that “tick,
tick, tick,” and of the thumping of her mother's
cane on the long staircase, which always kept time
with it.

Not that old Dame Pomponney had any objection
to have her daughter convenably married. She had
been deceived in her youth (or so it was whispered)
by a lover above her condition, and she vowed, by the
cross on her cane, that her daughter should have no
sweetheart above a journeyman mechanic. Now the
romance of the grisettes (parlons bas!) was to have
one charming little flirtation with a gentleman before
they married the leather-apron—just to show that,
had they by chance been born ladies, they could have
played their part to the taste of their lords. But it
was at this game that Dame Pomponney had burnt her
fingers, and she had this one subject for the exercise
of her powers of mortal aversion.

When I have added that, four miles from Rochepot,
stood the château de Brevanne, and that the old
Count de Brevanne was a proud aristocrat of the ancien
régime, with one son, the young Count Felix,
whom he had educated at Paris, I think I have prepared
you tolerably for the little romance I have to
tell you.

It was a fine Sunday morning that a mounted hussar
appeared in the street of Rochepot. The grisettes
were all abroad in their holyday parure, and the gay
soldier soon made an acquaintance with one of them
at the door of the inn, and informed her that he had
been sent on to prepare the old barracks for his troop.
The hussars were to be quartered a month at Rochepot.
Ah! what a joyous bit of news! And six officers
beside the colonel! And the trumpeters were
miracles at playing quadrilles and waltzes! And not
a plain man in the regiment—except always the
speaker. And none, except the old colonel, had ever
been in love in his life. But as this last fact required
to be sworn to, of course he was ready to kiss the
book—or, in the absence of the book, the next most
sacred object of his adoration.

“Finissez donc, Monsieur!” exclaimed his pretty
listener, and away she ran to spread the welcome intelligence
with its delightful particulars.

The next day the troop rode into Rochepot, and
formed in the great square in front of St. Roch; and
by the time the trumpeters had played themselves red
in the face, the hussars were all appropriated, to a
man—for the grisettes knew enough of a marching
regiment to lose no time. They all found leisure to
pity poor Thénais, however, for there she stood in
one of the high windows of the belfry, looking down
on the gay crowd below, and they knew very well
that old Dame Pomponney had declared all soldiers
to be gay deceivers, and forbidden her daughter to
stir into the street while they were quartered at
Rochepot.

Of course the grisettes managed to agree as to each
other's selection of a sweetheart from the troop, and
of course each hussar thankfully accepted the pair of
eyes that fell to him. For, aside from the limited
duration of their stay, soldiers are philosophers, and
know that “life is short,” and it is better to “take the
goods the gods provide.” But “after everybody was
helped,” as they say at a feast, there appeared another
short jacket and foraging cap, very much to the relief
of red-headed Susette, the shoebinder, who had
been left out in the previous allotment. And Susette
made the amiable accordingly, but to no purpose, for
the lad seemed an idiot with but one idea—looking
for ever at St. Roch's clock to know the time of day!
The grisettes laughed and asked their sweethearts his
name, but they significantly pointed to their foreheads
and whispered something about poor Robertin's being
a privileged follower of the regiment and a protegé of
the colonel.

Well, the grisettes flirted, and the old clock of St.
Roch ticked on, and Susette and Thénais, the plainest
and the prettiest girl in the village, seemed the
only two who were left out in the extra dispensation
of lovers. And poor Robertin still persisted in occupying
most of his leisure with watching the time
of day.

It was on the Sunday morning after the arrival of
the troop that old Dame Pomponney went up, as
usual, to do her Sunday's duty in winding up the
clock. She had previously locked the belfry door to
be sure that no one entered below while she was
above; but—the Virgin help us!—on the top stair,
gazing into the machinery of the clock with absorbed
attention, sat one of those devils of hussars! “Thief,”
“vagabond,” and “house-breaker,” were the most
moderate epithets with which Dame Pomponney accompanied
the enraged beating of her stick on the
resounding platform. She was almost beside herself
with rage. And Thénais had been up to dust the
wheels of the clock! And how did she know that
that scélérat of a trooper was not there all the time!

But the intruder, whose face had been concealed
till now, turned suddenly round and began to gibber
and grin like a possessed monkey. He pointed at the
clock, imitated the “tick, tick, tick,” laughed till the
big bell gave out an echo like a groan, and then suddenly
jumped over the old dame's stick and ran down
stairs.

“Eh, Sainte Vierge!” exclaimed the old dame, “it's
a poor idiot after all! And he has stolen up to see
what made the clock tick! Ha! ha! ha! Well!—
well! I can not come up these weary stairs twice a
day, and I must wind up the clock before I go down
to let him out. `Tick, tick, tick!'—poor lad! poor
lad! They must have dressed him up to make fun
of him—those vicious troopers! Well!—well!”

And with pity in her heart, Dame Pomponney hobbled
down, stair after stair, to her chamber in the
square turret of the belfry, and there she found the
poor idiot on his knees before Thénais, and Thénais
was just preparing to put a skein of thread over his
thumbs, for she thought she might make him useful
and amuse him with the winding of it till her mother
came down. But as the thread got vexatiously entangled,
and the poor lad sat as patiently as a wooden
reel, and it was time to go below to mass, the dame
thought she might as well leave him there till she
came back, and down she stumped, locking the door
very safely behind her.

Poor Thénais was very lonely in the belfry, and
Dame Pomponney, who had a tender heart where her
duty was not involved, rather rejoiced when she returned,
to find an unusual glow of delight on her
daughter's cheek; and if Thénais could find so much
pleasure in the society of a poor idiot lad, it was a
sign, too, that her heart was not gone altogether after
those abominable troopers. It was time to send the
innocent youth about his business, however, so she
gave him a holyday cake and led him down stairs and
dismissed him with a pat on his back and a strict injunction
never to venture again up to the “tick, tick,
tick.” But as she had had a lesson as to the accessibility
of her bird's nest, she determined thenceforth
to lock the door invariably and carry the key in her
pocket.

While poor Robertin was occupied with his researches
into the “tick, tick, tick,” never absent a
day from the neighborhood of the tower, the more
fortunate hussars were planning to give the grisettes
a fête champétre. One of the saints' days was coming
round, and, the weather permitting, all the vehicles
of the village were to be levied, and, with the troop-horses
in harness, they were to drive to a small wooded
valley in the neighborhood of the château de
Brevanne, where seclusion and a mossy carpet of
grass were combined in a little paradise for such enjoyment.

The morning of this merry day dawned, at last,
and the grisettes and their admirers were stirring betimes,
for they were to breakfast sur l'herbe, and they
were not the people to turn breakfast into dinner. The
sky was clear, and the dew was not very heavy on the
grass, and merrily the vehicles rattled about the town,
picking up their fair freights from its obscurest corners.
But poor Thénais looked out, a sad prisoner,
from her high window in the belfry.

It was a half hour after sunrise and Dame Pomponney
was creeping up stairs after her matins, thanking
Heaven that she had been firm in her refusals—at
least twenty of the grisettes having gathered about
her, and pleaded for a day's freedom for her imprisoned
daughter. She rested on the last landing but one
to take a little breath—but hark!—a man's voice talking
in the belfry! She listened again, and quietly
slipped her feet out of her high-heeled shoes. The
voice was again audible—yet how could it be! She
knew that no one could have passed up the stair, for
the key had been kept in her pocket more carefully
than usual, and, save by the wings of one of her own
pigeons, the belfry window was inaccessible, she was
sure. Still the voice went on in a kind of pleading
murmur, and the dame stole softly up in her stockings,
and noiselessly opened the door. There stood
Thénais at the window, but she was alone in the room.
At the same instant the voice was heard again, and
sure now that one of those desperate hussars had
climbed the tower, and unable to control her rage at
the audacity of the attempt, Dame Pomponney clutched
her cane and rushed forward to aim a blow at the
military cap now visible at the sill of the window.
But at the same instant the head of the intruder was
thrown back, and the gibbering and idiotic smile of
poor Robertin checked her blow in its descent, and
turned all her anger into pity. Poor, silly lad! he
had contrived to draw up the garden ladder and place
it upon the roof of the stone porch below, to climb
and offer a flower to Thénais! Not unwilling to have
her daughter's mind occupied with some other thought
than the forbidden excursion, the dame offered her
hand to Robertin and drew him gently in at the window.
And as it was now market-time she bid Thénais
be kind to the poor boy, and locking the door
behind her, trudged contentedly off with her stick and
basket.

I am sorry to be obliged to record an act of filial
disobedience in the heroine of my story. An hour
after, Thénais was welcomed with acclamations as she
suddenly appeared with Robertin in the midst of the
merry party of grisettes. With Robertin—not as he
had hitherto been seen, his cap on the back of his
head and his under lip hanging loose like an idiot's—
but with Robertin, gallant, spirited, and gay, the handsomest
of hussars, and the most joyous of companions.
And Thénais, spite of her hasty toilet and the cloud
of conscious disobedience which now and then shaded
her sweet smile, was, by many degrees, the belle of
the hour; and the palm of beauty, for once in the
world at least, was yielded without envy. The grisettes
dearly love a bit of romance, too, and the circumventing
of old Dame Pomponney by his ruse of
idiocy, and the safe extrication of the prettiest girl
of the village from that gloomy old tower, was quite
enough to make Robertin a hero, and his sweetheart
Thénais more interesting than a persecuted princess.

And, seated on the ground while their glittering
cavaliers served them with breakfast, the light-hearted
grisettes of Rochepot were happy enough to be envied
by their betters. But suddenly the sky darkened,
and a slight gust murmuring among the trees, announced
the coming up of a summer storm. Sauve
qui peut! The soldiers were used to emergencies,
and they had packed up and reloaded their cars and
were under way for shelter almost as soon as the
grisettes, and away they all fled toward, the nearest
grange—one of the dependancies of the château de
Brevanne.

But Robertin, now, had suddenly become the director
and ruling spirit of the festivities. The soldiers

treated him with instinctive deference, the old farmer
of the grange hurried out with his keys and unlocked
the great storehouse, and disposed of the horses under
shelter; and by the time the big drops began to
fall, the party were dancing gayly and securely on the
dry and smooth thrashing-floor, and the merry harmony
of the martial trumpets and horns rang out far
and wide through the gathering tempest.

The rain began to come down very heavily, and the
clatter of a horse's feet in a rapid gallop was heard in
one of the pauses in the waltz. Some one seeking
shelter, no doubt. On went the bewitching music
again, and at this moment two or three couples ceased
waltzing, and the floor was left to Robertin and Thénais,
whose graceful motions drew all eyes upon them
in admiration. Smiling in each other's faces, and
wholly unconscious of any other presence than their
own, they whirled blissfully around—but there was
now another spectator. The horseman who had been
heard to approach, had silently joined the party, and
making a courteous gesture to signify that the dancing
was not to be interrupted, he smiled back the
courtesies of the pretty grisettes—for, aristocratic as
he was, he was a polite man to the sex, was the Count
de Brevanne.

“Felix!” he suddenly cried out, in a tone of surprise
and anger.

The music stopped at that imperative call, and
Robertin turned his eyes, astonished, in the direction
from which it came.

The name was repeated from lip to lip among the
grisettes, “Felix!” “Count Felix de Brevanne!”

But without deigning another word, the old man
pointed with his riding-whip to the farm-house. The
disguised count respectfully bowed his head, but held
Thénais by the hand and drew her gently with him.

“Leave her! disobedient boy!” exclaimed the
father.

But as Count Felix tightened his hold upon the
small hand he held, and Thénais tried to shrink back
from the advancing old man, old Dame Pomponney,
streaming with rain, broke in unexpectedly upon the
scene.

“Disgrace not your blood,” said the Count de Brevanne
at that moment.

The offending couple stood alone in the centre of
the floor, and the dame comprehended that her daughter
was disparaged.

“And who is disgraced by dancing with my daughter?”
she screamed with furious gesticulation.

The old noble made no answer, but the grisettes,
in an under tone, murmured the name of Count
Felix!

“Is it he—the changeling! the son of a poor gardener,
that is disgraced by the touch of my daughter?”

A dead silence followed this astounding exclamation.
The old dame had forgotten herself in her rage,
and she looked about with a terrified bewilderment—
but the mischief was done. The old man stood aghast,
Count Felix clung still closer to Thénais, but his
face expressed the most eager inquisitiveness. The
grisettes gathered around Dame Pomponney, and the
old count, left standing and alone, suddenly drew his
cloak about him and stepped forth into the rain; and
in another moment his horse's feet were heard clattering
away in the direction of the château de Brevanne.

We have but to tell the sequel.

The incautious revelation of the old dame turned
out to be true. The dying infant daughter of the
Marchioness de Brevanne had been changed for the
healthy son of the count's gardener, to secure an heir
to the name and estates of the nearly extinct family
of Brevanne. Dame Pomponney had assisted in
this secret, and but for her heart full of rage at the
moment, to which the old count's taunt was but the
last drop, the secret would probably have never been
revealed. Count Felix, who had played truant from
his college at Paris, to come and hunt up some of his
childish playfellows, in disguise, had remembered and
disclosed himself to the little Thénais, who was not
sorry to recognise him, while he played the idiot in
the belfry. But of course there was now no obstacle
to their union, and united they were. The old count
pardoned him, and gave the new couple a portion of
his estate, and they named their first child Robertin,
as was natural enough.

PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL.
KEPT ON A LATE VISIT TO ENGLAND.

Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight,
Evening of June 9th, 1839.

The bullet which preserves the perpendicular of
my cabin-lamp is at last still, I congratulate myself;
and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and
steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatetic
teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling washbasins
and et-ceteras, have returned to a quiet life.
The creaking bulk-heads cry no more. I sit on a
trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and
paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety
and attention. I have no apology for not writing to
you, except want of event since we parted. There is
not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred
miles I have travelled. “Travelled!” said I. I am
as unconscious of having moved from the wave on
which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in
the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and
rolled from my left cheek to my right; but as to any
feeling of having gone onward I am as unconscious
of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a
dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever
well upon it, can find material for thought. But for
one, I will sell, at sixpence a month, all copyhold
upon so much of my life as is destined “to the deep,
the blue, the black” (and whatever else he calls it) of
my friend the song-writer.

Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a
sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory
with a smile. Here and there a thought has come
to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the
elements—here and there a word has been said which
on shore should have been wit or good feeling—here
and there a good morning, responded to with an effort,
has, from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression
which will make to-morrow's parting phrases more
earnest than I had anticipated.—With this green isle
to windward, and the smell of earth and flowers coming
to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an interest
in several who have sailed with me. Humanity,
killed in me invariably by salt water, revives, I think,
with this breath of hawthorn.

The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed
ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel,
and that we have brought with us the first west wind
they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not
know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on
board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable
Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an
abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted
to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amusement
of the passengers he met the steward's usual
demand for a fee with an application for a contribution
to the funds of his society! His expectations

from British sympathy are large, for he is accompanied
by a lay brother “used to keeping accounts,”
whose sole errand is to record the golden results of
his friend's eloquence. But “eight bells” warn me
to bed; so when I have recorded the good qualities
of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her
captain, which are more, I will put out my sea-lamp
for the last time, and get into my premonitory “six
feet by two.”

The George Inn, Portsmouth.—This is a morning
in which (under my circumstances) it would be difficult
not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair
day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of
seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through
rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleasant
day. Determined not to put myself in the way
of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest
hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an
elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to
stand between me and all my annoyances of the
morning. He was to get my baggage through the
customs, submit for me to all the inevitable impositions
of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach,
bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up
his services, all in one short phrase of l. s. d. So
putting my temper into my pocket, and making up
my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one
day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts
of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air
from my stomach, and admire everything that came
in my way. I would recommend to all newly-landed
passengers from the packets to step up and accept of
the sympathy of the oaks of the “king's bastion” in
their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees,
leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their
boughs as usual to the landward, present to the seaward
exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea
and disgust, which is as expressive to the commonest
observer as a sick man's first look at his bolus. I
have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly
that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleasant
to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here
as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive
are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea; but
it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up its
nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively
every oak on the “king's bastion.”

The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one
long alley of ornamented cottages—wood-bine creeping
and roses flowering over them all. If there were
but two between Portsmouth and London—two even
of the meanest we saw—a traveller from any other
land would think it worth his while to describe them
minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less),
they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I became
conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural paradises;
and I record it as the first point in which I find
myself worse for having become a “dweller in the
shade.” I was envious. Formerly, in passing a
tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, “What
a bright lawn! What a trim and fragrant hedge!
What luxuriant creepers! I congratulate their
fortunate owner!” Now it is, “How I wish I had
that hedge at Glenmary! How I envy these people
their shrubs, trellices, and flowers!” I wonder not
a little how the English emigrant can make a home
among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a
forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities.

After the first few miles, I discovered that the two
windows of the coach were very limited frames for
the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye,
and changing places with William, who was on the
top of the coach, I found myself between two tory
politicians, setting forth to each other most eloquently
the mal-administrations of the whigs, and the queen's
mismanagement. As I was two months behind the
English news, I listened with some interest. They
made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was
a silly girl; that she had been caught in a decided
fib about Sir Robert Peel's exactions with respect to
the household; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seemed
to be a sturdy grazier, said that “in 'igh life the
queen-dowager's 'ealth was now received uniwersally
with three times three, while Victoria's was drank in
solemn silence.” Her majesty received no better
treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of
the seat; and as we whirled under the long park fence
of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the
Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian
king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between
whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in
a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered
by the readers of D'Israeli's novels, is the original of
the picture of the luxurious maison de plaisance, drawn
in the young duke.

We got glimpses of the old palace at Esher, of
Hampton court, of Pitt's country seat at Putney, and
of Jane Porter's cottage at Esher, and in the seventh
hour from leaving Portsmouth (seventy-four miles)
we found the vehicles thickening, the omnibuses
passing, the blue-coated policemen occurring at short
intervals, and the roads delightfully watered—symptoms
of suburban London. We skirted the privileged
paling of Hyde Park; and I could see, over the rails,
the flying and gay-colored equipages, the dandy horsemen,
the pedestrian ladies followed by footmen with
their gold sticks, the fashionable throng, in short,
which, separated by an iron barrier from all contact
with unsightliness and vulgarity, struts its hour in this
green cage of aristocracy.

Around the triumphal arch opposite the duke of
Wellington's was assembled a large crowd of carriages
and horsemen. The queen was coming from Buckingham
palace through the Green park, and they
were waiting for a glimpse of her majesty on horseback.
The regulator whirled mercilessly on; but
far down, through the long avenues of trees, I could
see a movement of scarlet liveries, and a party coming
rapidly toward us on horseback. We missed the
queen by a couple of minutes.

It was just the hour when all London is abroad,
and Piccadilly was one long cavalcade of splendid
equipages on their way to the park. I remembered
many a face, and many a crest; but either the faces
had beautified in my memory, or three years had
done time's pitiless work on them all. Near Devonshire
house I saw, fretting behind the slow-moving
press of vehicles, a pair of magnificent and fiery blood
horses, drawing a coach, which, though quite new,
was of a color and picked out with a peculiar stripe
that was familiar to my eye. The next glance convinced
me that the livery was that of Lady B.; but,
for the light chariot in which she used to drive, here
was a stately coach—for the one tall footman, two—
for the plain but elegant harness, a sumptuous and
superb caparison—the whole turn-out on a scale of
splendor unequalled by anything around us. Another
moment decided the doubt—for as we came against
the carriage, following, ourselves, an embarrassed
press of vehicles, her ladyship appeared, leaning back
in the corner with her wrists crossed, the same in the
grace of her attitude and the elegance of her toilet,
but stouter, more energetic, and graver in the expression
of her face, than I ever remembered to have seen
her. From the top of the stage-coach I looked,
unseen, directly down upon her, and probably got, by
chance, a daylight and more correct view of her
countenance than I should obtain in a year of opera
and drawing-room observation.

Tired and dusty, we were turned from hotel to hotel,

all full and overflowing; and finding at last a corner
at Raggett's, in Dover street, we dressed, dined,
and posted to Woolwich. Unexpected and mournful
news closed our first day in England with tears.

I drove up to London the second day after our arrival,
and having a little “Grub-street” business, made
my way to the purlieus of publishers in Paternoster
row. If you could imagine a paper mine, with a very
deep-cut shaft laid open to the surface of the earth,
you might get some idea of Ivy lane. One walks
along through its dim subterranean light, with no idea
of breathing the proper atmosphere of day and open
air. A strong smell of new books in the nostrils, and
one long stripe of blue sky much farther off than usual,
are the predominant impressions.

From the dens of the publishers, I wormed my way
through the crowds of Cheapside and the Strand, toward
that part of London which, as Horace Smith says,
is “open at the top.” Something in the way of a
ship's fender, to save the hips and elbows, would sell
well I should think to pedestrians in London. What
crowds, to be sure! On a Sunday in New York,
when all the churches are pouring forth their congregations
at the same moment, you have seen a faint
image of the Strand. The style of the hack cabriolets
is very much changed since I was in London. The
passenger sits about as high up from the ground as he
would in a common chair—the body of the vehicle
suspended from the axle instead of being placed upon
it, and the wheels very high. The driver's seat would
suit a sailor, for it answers to the ship's tiller, well astern.
He whips over the passenger's head. I saw one or
two private vehicles built on this principle, certainly
one of safety, though they have something the beauty
of a prize hog.

The new National Gallery in Trafalgar square, not
finished when I left England, opened upon me as I
entered Charing Cross, with what I could not but feel
was a very fine effect, though critically, its “pepper-boxity”
is not very creditable to the architect. Fine
old Northumberland house, with its stern lion atop on
one side, the beautiful Club house on the other, St.
Martin's noble church and the Gallery—with such a
fine opening in the very cor cordium of London, could
not fail of producing a noble metropolitan view.

The street in front of the gallery was crowded with
carriages, showing a throng of visiters within; and
mounting the imposing steps (the loftiness of the vestibule
dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance),
I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pillars
ran through the entire length of the building,
offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off
from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries
of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were
crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the
equipages without. You will not care to be bothered
with criticisms on pictures, and mine was a cursory
glance—but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble
lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise
in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh
among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of
Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume, with her pretty
feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickersgill,
are among those I remember. I found a great
many acquaintances in the gallery; and I was sitting upon
a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait
of Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor's wig and robes
—a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts.
Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a person
with his back to me, cutting off my view very provokingly.
“When this dandy gets out of the way with
his eyeglass,” said I, “I shall be able to see the picture.”
My friend smiled. “Who do you take the
dandy to be?” It was a well-formed man, dressed in
the top of the fashion, with a very straight back, curl
ing brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years
of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I
saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself.

I had not seen Taglioni since the first representation
of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris.
Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La
Gitana; and except that her limbs are the least in the
world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely
unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could
then (when opera dancing was new to me), what it is
that gives this divine woman the right to her proud
title of La Déesse de la Danse. It is easy for the
Ellslers, and Augusta, and others, who are said to be
only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even
to produce, by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect
of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without being
indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alone
finishes the step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound
over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly,
as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if,
instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by
it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of
trying herself and a plomb (as is seen in all other dancers,
by their effort to recover composure), it had been
the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed.
The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own
grace, which steals over Taglioni's lips when she closes
a difficult step, seems communicated, in an indefinable
languor, to her limbs. You can not fancy her fatigued
when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she
courtesies to the applause of the enchanted audience,
and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive
that she has undertaken too much. You never detect,
as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred
over adroitly, and movements that, from their anticipating
the music of the ballet, are known by the critical
eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness
or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears
the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace replaces
her companions in the ballet! Whether the
motion seems born of the music, or the music floats
out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might
be almost embarrassed to know.

In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based
upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the
child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and recovered
by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing
over her of a recollection of music she had heard in
her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic acting
I ever saw. But there is one dance, the Cachucha,
introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni
has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done
by herself; for there is a succession of flying movements
expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she
alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet,
with a look over her shoulder of fierté and animation
possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It
was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and
neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of
his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of
swiftness embodied in a look! How can I describe it
to you?

My last eight hours have been spent between Bedlam
and the opera—one of those antipodal contrasts
of which London life affords so many. Thanks to
God, and to the Howards who have arisen in our time,
a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that
it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melancholy
imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the
humane as imprisonment can be made by care and
kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are inmates
of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and
content, some playing at ball in the spacious court-yards,
some lying on the grass, and some working voluntarily

at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water
to their rooms.

On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite
apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came
up two hundred miles from the country to marry the
queen! You will remember the story of his forcing
himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout,
sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps
twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes
on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even
an eyelash while we were there. There was a very
gentlemanlike man working at the waterwheel, or
rather walking round, with his hand on the bar, in a
gait that would have suited the most finished exquisite
of a drawing-room—Mr. Davis, who shot (I think)
at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we
saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the
queen's face when she went to the city—really a most
officer-like and handsome fellow; and in the next
room, poor old Hatfield, who shot at George the Third,
and has been in Bedlam for forty years—quite sane!
He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with
scars got in battle before his crime. He employs himself
with writing poetry on the death of his birds and
cats whom he has outlived in prison—all the society
he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He
received us very courteously, and called our attention
to his favorite canary showed us his poetry, and all
with a sad, mild, subdued resignation, that quite
moved me.

In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, except
one very noble-looking woman who was standing
at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the
Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending
melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for
years under the terrible belief that she has committed
“the unpardonable sin,” and though quiet all the day,
her agony at night becomes horrible. What a comment
on a much-practised mode of preaching the mild
and forgiving religion of our Savior!

As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman
of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very polite
courtesy, and said, “Will you be so kind as to
have me released from this dreadful place?” “I am
afraid I can not,” said I. “Then,” she replied, laying
her hand on my arm, with a most appealing earnestness,
“perhaps you will on Monday—you know
I've nothing to pack!” The matron here interposed,
and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the
door closed. She was confined there for the murder
of her child.

We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c.,
&c.—all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our
names on the visiters' book, quite of the opinion of a
Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had
written under his own name this expressive praise:—
“J'ai visité certains palais moins beaux et moins bien
entretenus que cette maison de la folie.”

Two hours after, I was listening to the overture of
La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance to the opera
of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the
house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does
always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exaltation
of brain and spirit—but how different from that
exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour,
by creatures of the same human family, at the opera!
It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of
allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat
the queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious
singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister standing
behind her chair, and her maids of honor around
—herself the smiling, youthful, and admired sovereign
of the most powerful nation on earth! I thought of
the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring
release.

The queen's face has thinned and grown more oval
since I saw her at a drawing-room, four years ago, as
Princess Victoria. She has been compelled to think
since then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life,
work out the expression of the face. She has now
what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual
countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns
to speak, but, on the whole, quite beautiful enough
for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed
paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less
gayly than many others around her. Her box was at
the left side of the house, undistinguished by any mark
of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected
her presence.

Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possible
for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She
has her sister's look about the forehead and eyes, and
all her sister's soul and passionateness in her style of
singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain
as it is, and young as she is, the opera-going public
prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful
Grisi. The latter long triumphant prima donna is
said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new favorite;
and it is curious enough to hear the hundred
and one faults found in the declining songstress by
those who once would not admit that she could be
transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom
I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi
the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers
in her box last night that she had always said that
Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was
a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune;
but soul or sentiment she never had! Poor Grisi!
Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have
been much admired. “Le monde ne haït rien autant
que ses idoles quand ils sont à terre,” said the wise La
Bruyère.

Some of the most delightful events in one's travels
are those which afford the least matériel for description,
and such is our séjour of a few days at the vicarage
of B—. It was a venerable old house with
pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with
panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand,
low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected
rooms, and creepers outside, trellised and trained to
every corner and angle. Then there was the modern
wing, with library and dining-room, large windows,
marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going
from your bedroom to breakfast, you might fancy
yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth's time to
Queen Victoria's. A high hedge of holly divided the
smoothly-shaven lawn from the churchyard, and in
the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray
old church with four venerable towers, one of the most
picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old English
architecture that I have ever seen. The whole
group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine-covered
and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap
of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were
spread landscapes of the finished and serene character
peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering
hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant
parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the
horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct
than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after
a thunderstorm in America.

Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by
the melody of the bells in the old towers; and with
brief pauses between the tunes, they were played upon
most musically, till the hour for the morning services.
We have little idea in America of the perfection to
which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In
the towers of this small rural church are hung eight
bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them
by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring
hamlet are varied endlessly. I lay and listened to the

simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a
pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was
serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and
jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the curtains
of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned
with the audible worship and palpable incense of nature.
We were told at breakfast that the chimes had
been unusually merry, and were a compliment to ourselves,
the villagers always expressing thus their congratulations
on the arrival of guests at the vicarage.
The compliment was repeated between services, and a
very long peal rang in the twilight—our near relationship
to the vicar's family authorizing a very special
rejoicing.

The interior of the church was very ancient looking
and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the
massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The congregation
was small, perhaps fifty persons, and the
men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet
carters' frocks, and most of them in leather leggins.
The children sat on low benches placed in the centre
of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were
in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod
with iron like horses' hoofs, and their little legs buttoned
up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather.
They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended
to wear but one suit in this world.

I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and
the decorous attention of men, women, and children,
to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of
simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the
name of their farm or place of residence printed on
the back of the pew, with the number of seats to
which they were entitled, probably in proportion to
their tithes. The “living” is worth, if I remember
right, not much over a hundred pounds—an insufficient
sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is
appended to it; but, happily for the people, the vicar
chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his
excellent character the exemplary pastor with the
physician and lord of the manor. I left B— with
the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happiness,
inhabit one spot more than all others in a world
whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the
vicarage in the bosom of that rural upland.

We left B— at twelve in the Brighton “Age”—
the “swell coach” of England. We were to dine
thirty miles nearer London, at — Park, and we did
the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop
of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all
travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road; but
what stage-coach in the United States ever limited
its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American
dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever despatched
so briefly? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of
the better class; and whose who were my fellow-passengers
the day I refer to were particularly well
dressed and gentlemanly—yet all of them achieved a
substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid
their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within
the quarter of an hour. John Bull's blindness to the
beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the fact that
this hasty meal is sometimes called a “lunch!”

The two places beside our own in the inside were
occupied by a lady and her maid and two children—
an interpretation of the number two to which I would
not have agreed if I could have helped it. We can not
always tell at first sight what will be most amusing,
however; and the child of two years, who sprawled
over my rheumatic knees with her mother's permission,
thereby occasioning on my part a most fixed
look out of the window, furnished me after a while
with a curious bit of observation. At one of the
commons we passed, the children running out from a
gipsy encampment flung bunches of heath flowers
into the coach, which the little girl appropriated, and
commenced presenting rather graciously to her mother,
the maid, and Mrs. W., all of whom received them
with smiles and thanks. Having rather a sulky face
of my own when not particularly called on to be
pleased, the child omitted me for a long time in her
distributions. At last, after collecting and re-distributing
the flowers for about an hour, she grew suddenly
grave, laid the heath all out upon her lap, selected the
largest and brightest flowers, and made them into a
nosegay. My attention was attracted by the seriousness
of the child's occupation; and I was watching
her without thinking my notice observed, when she
raised her eyes to me very timidly, turned her new
bouquet over and over, and at last, with a blush,
deeper than I ever saw before upon a child, placed
the flowers in my hand and hid her face in her mother's
bosom. My sulkiness gave way, of course, and the
little coquette's pleasure in her victory was excessive.
For the remainder of the journey, those who had
given her their smiles too readily were entirely neglected,
and all her attentions were showered upon the
only one she had found it difficult to please. I thought
it as pretty a specimen of the ruling passion strong in
baby-hood as I ever saw. It was a piece of finished
coquetry in a child not old enough to speak plain.

The coachman of “the age” was a young man of
perhaps thirty, who is understood to have run through
a considerable fortune, and drives for a living—but he
was not at all the sort of looking person you would
fancy for a “swell whip.” He drove beautifully, and
helped the passengers out and in, lifted their baggage,
&c., very handily, but evidently shunned notice, and
had no desire to chat with the “outsides.” The excessive
difficulty in England of finding any clean way
of making a living after the initiatory age is passed—
a difficulty which reduced gentlemen feel most keenly—probably
forced this person as it has others to
take up a vocation for which the world fortunately
finds an excuse in eccentricity. He touches his hat
for the half crown or shilling, although probably if it
were offered to him when the whip was out of his
hand he would knock the giver down for his impertinence.
I may as well record here, by the way, for
the benefit of those who may wish to know a comparison
between the expense of travelling here and at
home, that for two inside places for thirty miles the
coach fare was two pounds, and the coachman's fee
five shillings, or half-a-crown each inside. To get
from the post town to — Park (two miles) cost me
five-and-sixpence for a “fly,” so that for thirty-two
miles travel I paid 2l. 10s. 6d., a little more than
twelve dollars.

And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful
lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try a beginning
at getting a living in England. I was never
at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and
salt for a young man, till I had occasion lately to endeavor
to better the condition of a servant of my own
—a lad who has been with me four or five years, and
whose singular intelligence, good principles, and high
self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any confidential
trust or place whatever. His own ideas, too
(I thought, not unreasonably), had become somewhat
sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to continue
longer as a servant. He went home to his
mother, a working-woman of London, and I did my
utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all
classes of my friends, advertising, &c., to find him any
possible livelihood above menial service. I was met
everywhere with the same answer: “There are
hundreds of gentlemen's sons wearing out their youth
in looking for the same thing.” I was told daily that
it was quite in vain—that apprenticeships were as
much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to
the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inaccessible.

My boy and his mother at last came to
their senses; and, consenting to apply once more for
a servant's place, he was fortunate enough to engage
as valet to a bachelor, and is now gone with his new
master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter
said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip,
“England is a great place to take the nonsense out of
people.”

When London shall have become the Rome or
Athens of a fallen empire (qu. will it ever?) the termini
of the railways will be among its finest ruins.
That of the Birmingham and Liverpool track is almost
as magnificent as that flower of sumptuousness,
the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples. It is really
an impressive scene simply to embark for “Brummagem;”
and there is that utility in all this showy
expenditure for arch, gateway, and pillar, that no one
is admitted but the passenger, and you are refreshingly
permitted to manage your baggage, &c., without
the assistance of a hundred blackguards at a shilling
each. Then there are “ladies' waiting-rooms,” and
“gentlemen's waiting-rooms,” and attached to them
every possible convenience, studiously clean and orderly.
I wish the president and directors of the Utica
and other American railroads would step over and
take a sumptuary hint.

The cars are divided into stalls, i. e. each passenger
is cushioned off by a stuffed partition from his neighbor's
shoulder, and sleeps without offence or encroachment.
When they are crowded, that is an admirable
arrangement; but I have found it very comfortable in
long journeys in America to take advantage of an
empty car, and stretch myself to sleep along the
vacant seat. Here, full or empty, you can occupy
but your upright place. In every car are suspended
lamps to give light during the long passages through
the subterranean tunnels.

We rolled from under the Brobdignag roof of the
terminus, as the church of Mary-le-bone (Cockney
for Marie-la-bonne, but so carved on the frieze) struck
six. Our speed was increased presently to thirty
miles in the hour; and with the exception of the
slower rate in passing the tunnels, and the slackening
and getting under way at the different stations, this
rate was kept up throughout. We arrived at Liverpool
(205 miles or upward) at three o'clock, our
stoppages having exceeded an hour altogether.

I thought, toward the end, that all this might be
very pleasant with a consignment of buttons, or an
errand to Gretna Green. But for the pleasure of the
thing, I would as lief sit in an arm-chair and see bales
of striped green silk unfolded for eight hours, as travel
the same length of time by the railroad. (I have described
in this simile exactly the appearance of the
fields as you see them in flying past.) The old women
and cabbages gain by it, perhaps, for you can not
tell whether they are not girls and roses. The washerwoman
at her tub follows the lady on the lawn so
quickly that you confound the two irresistibly—the
thatched cottages look like browsing donkeys, and the
browsing donkeys like thatched cottages—you ask the
name of a town, and by the time you get up your
finger, your point at a spot three miles off—in short,
the salmon well packed in straw on the top of the
coach, and called fresh-fish after a journey of 200
miles, sees quite as much of the country as his most
intellectual fellow-passenger. I foresee in all this a
new distinction in phraseology. “Have you travelled
in England?” will soon be a question having no
reference to railroads. The winding turnpike and
cross-roads, the coaches and post-carriages, will be
resumed by all those who consider the sense of sight
as useful in travel, and the bagmen and letter-bags
will have almost undisputed possession of the rail-cars.

The Adelphi is the Astor house of Liverpool, a
very large and showy hotel near the terminus of the
railway. We were shown into rather a magnificent
parlor on our arrival; and very hungry with rail-roading
since six in the morning, we ordered dinner at
their earliest convenience. It came after a full hour,
and we sat down to four superb silver covers, anticipating
a meal corresponding to the stout person and
pompous manners of the fattest waiter I have seen in my
travels. The grand cover was removed with a flourish
and disclosed—divers small bits of second-hand beef-steak,
toasted brown and warped at the corners by a
second fire, and on the removal of the other three
silver pagodas, our eyes were gratified by a dish of
peas that had been once used for green soup, three
similarly toasted and warped mutton chops, and three
potatoes. Quite incredulous of the cook's intentions,
I ventured to suggest to the waiter that he had probably
mistaken the tray and brought us the dinner of
some sportsman's respectable brace of pointers; but
on being assured that there were no dogs in the cellar,
I sent word to the master of the house that we had
rather a preference for a dinner new and hot, and
would wait till he could provide it. Half an hour
more brought up the landlord's apologies and a fresh
and hot beef-steak, followed by a tough-crusted apple-pie,
custard, and cheese—and with a bottle of Moselle,
which was good, we finished our dinner at one of the
most expensive and showy hotels in England. The
manners and fare at the American hotels being always
described as exponents of civilization by English
travellers, I shall be excused for giving a counterpicture
of one of the most boasted of their own.

Regretting exceedingly that the recent mourning
of my two companions must prevent their presence
at the gay festivities of Eglinton, I put them on board
the steamer, bound on a visit to relatives in Dublin,
and returned to the Adelphi to wait en garçon for the
Glasgow steamer of Monday. My chamber is a large
and well-furnished room, with windows looking out
on the area shut in by the wings of the house; and I
must make you still more contented at the Astor, by
describing what is going on below at this moment.
It is half-past eight, and a Sunday morning. All the
bells of the house, it seems to me, are ringing, most
of them very impatiently, and in the area before the
kitchen windows are six or eight idle waiters, and four
or five female scullions, playing, quarrelling, scolding,
and screaming; the language of both men and women
more profane and indecent than anything I have ever
before chanced to hear, and every word audible in
every room in this quarter of the hotel. This has
been going on since six this morning; and I seriously
declare I do not think I ever heard as much indecent
conversation in my life as for three mortal hours must
have “murdered sleep” for every lady and gentleman
lodged on the rear side of the “crack hotel” of Liverpool.

Sick of the scene described above, I went out just
now to take a turn or two in my slippers in the long
entry. Up and down, giving me a most appealing
stare whenever we met, dawdled also the fat waiter
who served up the cold victuals of yesterday. He
evidently had some errand with me, but what I did
not immediately fathom. At last he approached—

“You—a—got your things, sir?”

“What things?”

“The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bed-room,
sir.”

“Yes, thank you,” and I resumed my walk.

The waiter resumed his, and presently approached
again.

“You—a—don't intend to use the parlor again, sir?”

“No; I have explained to the master of the house
that I shall breakfast in the cofee-room.” And again
I walked on.

My friend began again at the next turn.

“You—a—pay for those ladies' dinner yourself,
sir?”

“Yes.” I walked on once more.

Once more approaches my fat incubus, and with a
twirl of the towel in his hand looks as if he would fain
be delivered of something.

“Why the d—l am I badgered in this way?” I
stormed out at last, losing patience at his stammering
hesitation, and making a move to get round the fat
obstruction and pursue my walk.

“Will you—a—remember the waiter, if you please,
sir?”

“Oh! I was not aware that I was to pay the waiter
at every meal. I generally do it when I leave the
house. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to let me
finish my walk, and trust me till to-morrow morning?”

P. S. Evening in the coffee-room.—They say the
best beginning in love is a decided aversion, and badly
as I began at Liverpool, I shall always have a tender
recollection of it for the admirable and unequalled
luxury of its baths. A long and beautiful Grecian
building crests the head of George's pier, built by the
corporation of Liverpool, and devoted exclusively to
salt-water baths. I walked down in the twilight to
enjoy this refreshing luxury, and it being Sunday
evening, I was shown into the ladies' end of the
building. The room where I waited till the bath
was prepared was a lofty and finely proportioned
apartment, elegantly furnished, and lined with superbly
bound books and pictures, the tables covered with
engravings, and the whole thing looked like a central
apartment in a nobleman's residence. A boy showed
me presently into a small drawing-room, to which was
attached a bath closet, the two rooms lined, boudoir
fashion, with chintz, a clock over the bath, a nice
carpet and stove, in short, every luxury possible to
such an establishment. I asked the boy if the gentlemen's
baths were as elegant as these. “Oh yes,” he
said: “there are two splendid pictures of Niagara
Falls and Catskill.” “Who painted them?” “Mr.
Wall.” “And whose are they?” “They belong to
our father, sir!” I made up my mind that “our
father” was a man of taste and a credit to Liverpool.

I have just returned from the dinner given to Macready
at the Freemason's tavern. The hall, so celebrated
for public “feeds,” is a beautiful room of a
very showy style of architecture, with three galleries,
and a raised floor at the end usually occupied by the
cross table. It accommodated on this occasion four
hundred persons.

From the peculiar object of the meeting to do
honor to an actor for his intellectual qualities, and for
his efforts to spiritualise and elevate the stage, there
probably never was collected together in one room so
much talent and accomplishment. Artists, authors,
critics, publishers, and amateurs of the stage—a large
body in London—made up the company. My attention
was called by one of my neighbors to the singularly
superior character of the heads about us, and I
had already observed the striking difference, both in
head and physiognomy, between this and a common
assemblage of men. Most of the persons connected
with the press, it was said, were present; and perhaps
it would have been a worthy service to the world had
some shorn Samson, among the authors, pulled the
temple upon the heads of the Philistines.

The cry of “make way!” introduced the duke of
Sussex, the chairman of the meeting—a stout, mild-looking,
dignified old man, wearing a close black scull-cap
and the star and riband. He was followed by
Lord Conyngham, who, as grand chamberlain, had
done much to promote the interests of the drama; by
Lord Nugent (whom I had last seen sailing a scampavia
in the bay of Corfu), by Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr.
Sheil, Sir Martin Shee, Young, the actor, Mr. Milnes,
the poet, and other distinguished men. I should
have said, by the way Mr. Macready followed next
his royal highness.

The cheering and huzzas, as this procession walked
up the room, were completely deafening. Macready
looked deadly pale and rather overcome; and amid
the waving of handkerchiefs and the stunning uproar
of four hundred “gentlemen and scholars,” the duke
placed the tragedian at his right hand, and took his
seat before the turbot.

The dinner was an uncommonly bad one; but of
this I had been forewarned, and so had taken a provisory
chop at the club. I had leisure, therefore, to
look about me, and truly there was work enough for
the eyes. M—'s head interested me more than
any one's else, for it was the personification of his
lofty, liberal, and poetic genius. His hair, which
was long and profuse, curled in tendrils over the
loftiest forehead; but about the lower part of the face
lay all the characteristics which go to make up a
voluptuous yet generous, an enthusiastic and fiery,
yet self-possessed and well directed character. He was
excessively handsome; yet it was the beauty of
Masaniello, or Salvator Rosa, with more of intellect
than both together. All in all, I never saw a finer
face for an artist; and judging from his looks and
from his works (he is perhaps twenty-four), I would
stake my sagacity on a bold prophecy of his greatness.

On the same side were the L—s, very quiet-looking
men, and S— the portrait-painter, a merry-looking
grenadier, and L— B— the poet, with a
face like a poet. Near me was L—, the painter,
poet, novelist, song and music writer, dramatist, and
good fellow—seven characters of which his friends
scarce know in which he is most excellent—and he
has a round Irish face, with a bright twinkle in his
eye, and a plump little body which carries off all his
gifts as if they were no load at all.—And on my left
was S—, the glorious painter of Venice, of the
battle of Trafalgar, the unequalled painter of the sea
in all its belongings; and you would take him for a
gallant lieutenant of the navy, with the fire of a score
of battles asleep in his eye, and the roughening of a
hundred tempests in his cheek. A franker and more
manly face would not cross your eye in a year's travel.

Mr. J— was just beyond, a tall, sagacious-looking,
good humored person of forty-five. He was a
man of very kind manners, and was treated with great
marks of liking and respect by all about him. But
directly opposite to me sat so exact a picture of Paul
Pry as he is represented on the stage, particularly of
my friend Finn in that character, that it was difficult
not to smile in looking at him. To my surprise, I
heard some one behind me point him out, soon after,
as the well-known original in that character—the
gentleman, whose peculiarities of person, as well as
manners, were copied in the farce of Mr. Poole.—
“That's my name—what's yours?” said he the moment
after he had seated himself, thrusting his card
close to the nose of the gentleman next him. I took
it of course for a piece of fun between two very old
friends, but to my astonishment the gentlemen next
him was as much astonished as I.

The few servants scattered up and down were deaf
to everything but calls for champagne (furnished only
at an extra charge when called for—a very mean
system for a public dinner, by the way), and the
wines on the table seemed selected to drive one to
champagne or the doctor. Each person had four
plates, and when used, they were to be put under the
bench, or on the top of your head, or to be sat upon,
or what you would, except to be taken away, and the
soup and fish, and the roast and boiled and all, having
been put on together, was all removed at one fell
swoop—the entire operation of dinner having lasted

just twenty-five minutes. Keep this fact till we are recorded
by some new English traveller as the most expeditious
eaters in Christendom.

Here end my croakings, however, for the speeches
commenced directly, and admirable they were. To
the undoing of much prejudice got by hearsay, I
listened to Bulwer. He is, beyond all comparison,
the most graceful and effective speaker I ever heard
in England. All the world tells you that he makes
signal failures in oratory—yet he rose, when his health
was drank, and, in self-possessed, graceful, unhesitating
language, playful, yet dignified, warm, yet not
extravagant, he replied to the compliments of his
royal highness, and brought forward his plan (as you
have seen it reported in the papers) for the erection
of a new theatre for the legitimate drama and Macready.
I remember once hearing that Bulwer had a
belief in his future eminence as an orator—and I would
warrant his warmest anticipations in that career of
ambition. He is a better speaker than Sheil, who followed
him, and Sheil is renowned as an orator. Really
there is nothing like one's own eyes and ears in this
world of envy and misrepresentation.

D— sat near Sheil, at the cross table, very silent,
as is his custom and that of most keen observers.
The courtly Sir M— S— was near B—, looking
like some fine old picture of a wit of Charles the
second's time, and he and Y— the actor made two
very opposite and gentlemanlike speeches. I believe
I have told you nearly all that struck me, except what
was reported in the gazettes, and that you have no
need to read over again. I got away at eleven, and
reached the opera in time to hear the last act of the
Puritani, and see the Elsslers dance in the ballet, and
with a look-in at a ball, I concluded one of those exhausting,
exciting, overdone London days, which are
pleasanter to remember than to enjoy, and pleasanter
to read about than either.

One of the most elegant and agreeable persons I
ever saw was Miss P—, and I think her conversation
more delightful to remember than any person's
I ever knew. A distinguished artist told me that he
remembered her when she was his beau-ideal of female
beauty; but in those days she was more “fancy-rapt,”
and gave in less to the current and spirit of society.
Age has made her, if it may be so expressed, less
selfish in her use of thought, and she pours it forth,
like Pactolus—that gold which is sand from others.
She is still what I should call a handsome woman, or,
if that be not allowed, she is the wreck of more than
a common allotment of beauty, and looks it. Her
person is remarkably erect, her eyes and eyelids (in
this latter resembling Scott) very heavily moulded,
and her smile is beautiful. It strikes me that it always
is so—where it ever was. The smile seems to be the
work of the soul.

I have passed months under the same roof with Miss
P—, and nothing gave me more pleasure than to
find the company in that hospitable house dwindled
to a “fit audience though few,” and gathered around
the figure in deep mourning which occupied the
warmest corner of the sofa. In any vein, and à-propos
to the gravest and the gayest subject, her well-stored
mind and memory flowed forth in the same rich current
of mingled story and reflection, and I never saw
an impatient listener beside her. I recollect, one evening
a lady's singing “Auld Robin Gray,” and some
one remarking (rather unsentimentally), at the close,
“By-the-by, what is Lady — (the authoress of the
ballad) doing with so many carpenters. Berkeley
square is quite deafened with their hammering!”
“A-propos of carpenters and Lady —,” said Miss
P—, “this same charming ballad-writer owes something
to the craft. She was better-born than provided
with the gifts of fortune, and in her younger days was
once on a visit to a noble house, when to her dismay
a large and fashionable company arrived, who brought
with them a mania for private theatricals. Her wardrobe
was very slender, barely sufficient for the ordinary
events of a week-day, and her purse contained one
solitary shilling. To leave the house was out of the
question, to feign illness as much so, and to decline
taking a part was impossible, for her talent and sprightliness
were the hope of the theatre. A part was cast
for her, and, in despair, she excused herself from the
gay party bound to the country town to make purchases
of silk and satin, and shut herself up, a prey to
mortified low spirits. The character required a smart
village dress, and it certainly did not seem that it could
come out of a shilling. She sat at her window, biting
her lips, and turning over in her mind whether she
could borrow of some one, when her attention was attracted
to a carpenter, who was employed in the construction
of a stage in the large hall, and who, in the
court below, was turning off from his plane broad and
long shavings of a peculiarly striped wood. It struck
her that it was like riband. The next moment she
was below, and begged of the man to give her half-a-dozen
lengths as smooth as he could shave them. He
performed his task well, and depositing them in her
apartment, she set off alone on horseback to the village,
and with her single shilling succeeded in purchasing
a chip hat of the coarsest fabric. She carried
it home, exultingly, trimmed it with her pine shavings,
and on the evening of the performance appeared with
a white dress, and hat and belt-ribands which were
the envy of the audience. The success of her invention
gave her spirits and assurance, and she played to
admiration. The sequel will justify my first remark.
She made a conquest on that night of one of her titled
auditors, whom she afterward married. You will allow
that Lady — may afford to be tolerant of carpenters.”

An eminent clergyman one evening became the subject
of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that
he had never married. “That wonder,” said Miss
P—, “was once expressed to the reverend gentleman
himself in my hearing, and he told a story in answer
which I will tell you—and perhaps, slight as it
may seem, it is the history of other hearts as sensitive
and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination,
he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in
a small village not twenty miles from London. Among
his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a
young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and
whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him
an object of thought and pleasure. She left the
church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced
that he went on for a year without knowing her name;
but his sermon was never written without many a
thought how she would approve it, nor preached with
satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face.
Gradually he came to think of her at other times than
when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other
days than Sundays; but the weeks slipped on, and
though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he
never brought himself to the resolution either to ask
her name or to seek to speak with her. By these
silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart,
and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaintance
and marry her, if possible, when one day he was
sent for to minister at a funeral. The face of the
corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sunday
after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part
of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform
the service, and another clergyman present officiated;
and after she was buried, her father took him aside and
begged his pardon for giving him pain—but he could
not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter
had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he
was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hurried

her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman
in question, my heart has been dead within me, and I
look forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven.”

London is wonderfully embellished within the last
three years—not so much by new buildings, public or
private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists
among the tradesmen to outshow each other in the expensive
magnificence of their shops. When I was in
England before, there were two or three of these palaces
of columns and plate-glass—a couple of shawl-shops,
and a glass warehouse or two, but now the
west end and the city have each their scores of establishments
of which you would think the plate-glass
alone would ruin anybody but Aladdin. After an absence
of a month from town lately, I gave myself the
always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among
the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neighborhood,
and to my surprise, found four new wonders
of this description—a shawl-house in the upper Regent
Circus, a silk-mercer's in Oxford street, a whip-maker's
in Regent street, and a fancy stationer's in the
Quadrant—either of which establishments fifty years
ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The
first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of
the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford
street with what seems but one window—a series of
glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from
the ground to the roof—window-panes twelve feet high,
and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which
this immense transparency of front gives for the display
of goods is proportionately improved; and in the
mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there
is evidently no small degree of art—so harmonious are
the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that
several more renovations are taking place in different
parts of both “city” and “town;” and London promises,
somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its
emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which
eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed.

If I may judge by my own experience and by what
I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of
doors empties the play-houses—for I would rather
walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine
plays in a hundred; and so think, apparently, multitudes
of people, who stroll up and down the clean and
broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous
succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright
glare of the illumination exchanging nods and smiles
—the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable
evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and delightful.
There are large classes of society, who find
the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient
homes, and who must go somewhere; and while the
streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the
play-house was the only resort where they could beguile
their cares with splendor and amusement, and
in those days theatrieals flourished, as in these days
of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evidently
languish. I will lend a hint to the next essayist
on the “Decline of the Drama.”

The increased attractiveness of London, from thus
disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compensates
in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me
—the distastefulness of the country, from the forbidding
and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden-walls,
impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance
for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but
the road. What should we say in America to travelling
miles between two brick walls, with no prospect
but the branches of overhanging trees from the invisible
park lands on either side, and the alley of cloudy
sky overhead? How tantalizing to pass daily by a
noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its
centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and
some miles of the tops of trees over a paling! All
this to me is oppressive—I feel abridged of breathing-room
and eyesight—deprived of my liberty—robbed
of my horizon Much as I admire high preservation
and cultivation, I would compromise for a “snake-fence”
all over England.

On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the
neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long
walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-gravelled
and secluded path, which commanded what the
proprietor's fence enviously shut from the road—a
noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed
to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in
America without question, as suits their purpose, and
tired of the bricks, hedges and placards of blacking
and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of
great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my imagination
in the beautiful grounds of my friend's opulent
neighbor. The Thames with its innumerable
steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships—a
vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the
soft green meadows of Kent and Essex—formed a delicious
picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which
I gazed upon with great delight for—some ten minutes.
In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B—'s
gardener, who, with a very pokerish-looking stick in
his hand, came running toward me, evidently, by his
pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit of the audacious
intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of
breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick,
what business I had there. I was not very well prepared
with an answer, and short of beating the man
for his impudence (which in several ways might have
been a losing job), I did not see my way very clearly
out of Mr. B—'s grounds. My first intention, to
call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion
while I complained of the man's insolence, was defeated
by the information, evidently correct, that Mr.
B— was not resident at the place, and so I was walked
out of the lodge-gate with a vagabond's warning—
never to let him “catch me there again!” So much
for my liberal translation of a park-fence!

This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more disagreeably
felt where a gentleman's paling chances to
include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as
well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth, is
the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is
interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the
orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let
through a gate by an old man, who received a
douceur; we crossed a newly-reaped field, and came
to another gate; another person opened this, and we
paid another shilling. We walked on toward the
glen, and in the middle of the path, without any object
apparently but the toll, there was another locked
gate, and another porter to pay; and when we made
our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds,
after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a
fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I
remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the
other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan,
who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as
a tribute to his father's memory, or to the beauty of
Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever
ground he pockets it, the mode of assessment is, to say
the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself
to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may
say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very
much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling
the perch—paying the money and taking the look. I
should think no sum lost which was expended in
bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but
it should be levied somewhere else than within sound
of its wild waterfall—somewhere else than midway
between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tinnehinch.

The fish most “out of water” in the world is certainly
a Frenchman in England without acquaintances.
The illness of a friend has lately occasioned
me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being
abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies
of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not
a little with watching the ennui of one of these unfortunate
foreigners, who was evidently there simply to
qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton
in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by myself
at one of the small tables, when, without looking
up, I became aware that some one at the other end of
the room was watching me very steadily. The place
was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the
dinner-hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound
that disturbed the digestion of the eight or ten persons
present, when the unmistakeable call of “Vaitare!”
informed me that if I looked up I should encounter
the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the
call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite
neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an
apologetic tone, “Beg pardon, sir, but the shevaleer
wishes to know if your name is Coopair.” Not very
much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation
in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite
answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and
took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long
sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing
his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a profound
study of the grain of the mahogany.

What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading
half-a-dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till
ten o'clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier,
who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to
the last extremity. One person after another called
for a bed-room candle, and exit finally the Frenchman
himself, making me, however, a most courteous
bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen
left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy,
the other a short portly gentleman of fifty or thereabouts,
both quite bald. They rose together and
came to the fire near which I was sitting.

“That last man who went out calls himself a chevalier,”
said the thin gentleman.

“Yes,” said his stout friend—“he took me for a
Mr. Cooper he had travelled with.”

“The deuce he did,” said the other—“why he
took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very
much alike.”

“I beg pardon, gentlemen,” said I—“he took me
for this Mr. Cooper too.”

The Frenchman's ruse was discovered. It was instead
of a snuff-box—a way he had of making acquaintance.
We had a good laugh at our triple resemblance
(three men more unlike it would be difficult
to find), and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper
good night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up
stairs.

The next morning I came down rather late to brealfast,
and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to
pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the
night before. He rose immediately with a look of
radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elaborate
apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper
(whom I was so like, cependant, that we should be
mistaken for each other by our nearest friends), and
in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had entered
by chance, would have returned the compliment,
and taken me for the chevalier's most intimate friend
and fellow-traveller.

I remained three or four days at Brighton, and
never discovered in that time that the chevalier's ruse
succeeded with any other person. I was his only
successful resemblance to “Monsieur Coopair.” He
always waited breakfast for me in the coffee-room,
and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he
dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London
—and at what hour—and if I would be so obliging as
to take a place for him in the same coach.

It was a remarkably fine day; and with my friend
by my side outside of “the Age,” we sped on toward
London, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer, and the
fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from
the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of
spirits—let alone the ever-depressed bosom of a stranger
in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant
and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and informed
my friend, for the first time, that I was bound
to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce
know how I had escaped telling him of it before, but
his “impossible mon ami!” was said in a tone and
accompanied with a look of the most complete surprise
and despair. I was evidently his only hope in
London.

I went up to town a day or two after; and in making
my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on
the opposite side of the strand, with his hands thrust
up to the wrists in the pockets of his “Taglioni,” and
his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the
shop windows without much distinction between the
trunkmaker's and the printsellers—evidently miserable
beyond being amused at anything. I was too
much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office
of escape-valve to his cnnui, and I soon outwalked his
slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he
had to the “chevalier” (and he was decidedly too
deficient in address to belong to the order “d'industrie”),
he had no letter of recommendation in his
personal appearance, and as little the air of even a
Frenchman of “quality” as any man I ever saw in
the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the person
who would first occur to me if I were to see a
paragraph in the times headed “suicide by a foreigner.”

Revenons un peu. Brighton at this season (November)
enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the
heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely
exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of
my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a
feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I
was beginning to forget the very existence, in the
eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland.
I do not wonder at the passion of the English for
Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the
air, both a magnificent city and the most advantageous
ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy,
“winter and rough weather.” The miles of broad
gravel-walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so
hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five
minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are alone no
small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers
and invalids. I was never tired of sauntering along
this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The
beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all
weathers (and what children on earth are half as
beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant
source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and
by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay
throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splendid
shops and all the features of a metropolis, while
midway between the sea and this crowded sidewalk
pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horseback,
and vehicles of every description, all subservient
to exercise and pleasure.

My first visit to Brighton was made in a very cold
day in summer, and I saw it through most unfavorable
spectacles. But I should think that along the cliffs,
where there are no trees or vendure to be seen, there
is very little apparent difference between summer and
winter; and coming here with the additional clothing
of a severer season, the temperature of the elastic and
saline air is not even chilly. The most delicate children

play upon the beach in days when there is no
sunshine; and invalids, wheeled out in these convenient
bath chairs, sit for hours by the seaside, watching
the coming and retreating of the waves, apparently
without any sensation of cold—and this in December.
In America (in the same latitudes with Leghorn and
Venice), an invalid sitting out of doors at this season
would freeze to death in half an hour. Yet it was as
cold in August, in England, as it has been in November,
and it is this temperate evenness of the weather
throughout the year which makes English climate,
on the whole, perhaps the healthiest in the world.

In the few days I was at Brighton, I became very
fond of the perpetual loud beat of the sea upon the
shore. Whether, like the “music of the spheres,”
it becomes at last “too constant to be heard,” I did
not ask—but I never lost the consciousness of it except
when engaged in conversation, and I found it
company to my thoughts when I dined or walked
alone, and a most agreeable lullaby at night. This
majestic monotone is audible all over Brighton, indoors
and out, and nothing overpowers it but the
wind in a storm; it is even then only by fits, and the
alternation of the hissing and moaning of the blast
with the broken and heavy plash of the waters, is so
like the sound of a tempest at sea (the whistling in the
rigging, and the burst of the waves), that those who
have been at Brighton in rough weather have realized
all of a storm at sea but the motion and the sea-sickness—rather
a large but not an undesirable diminution
of experience.

Calling on a friend at Brighton, I was introduced
casually to a Mr. Smith. The name, of course, did
not awaken any immediate curiosity, but a second
look at the gentleman did—for I thought I had never
seen a more intellectual or finer head. A fifteen
minutes' conversation, which touched upon nothing
that could give me a clue to his profession, still satisfied
me that so distinguished an address, and so keen
an eye, could belong to no nameless person, and I was
scarcely surprised when I read upon his card at parting—
Horace Smith. I need not say it was a very
great pleasure to meet him. I was delighted, too,
that the author of books we love as much as “Zillah,”
and “Brambletye-House,” looks unlike other men.
It gratifies somehow a personal feeling—as if those
who had won so much admiration from us should, for
our pride's sake, wear the undeniable stamp of superiority—as
if we had acquired a property in him by
loving him. How natural it is, when we have talked
and thought a great deal about an author, to call him
“ours.” “What Smith? Why our Smith—Horace
Smith”—is as common a dialogue between persons
who never saw him as it is among his personal friends.

These two remarkable brothers, James and Horace
Smith, are both gifted with exteriors such as are not
often possessed with genius—yet only James is so
fortunate as to have stumbled upon a good painter.
Lonsdale's portrait of James Smith, engraved by
Cousens, is both the author and the man—as fine a
picture of him, with his mind seen through his features,
as was ever done. But there is an engraved picture
extant of the author of Zillah, that, though it is no
likeness of the author, is a detestable caricature of the
man. Really this is a point about which distinguished
men, in justice to themselves, should take some
little care. Sir Thomas Lawrence's portraits, and
Sir Joshua Reynolds's, are a sort of biography of the
eminent men they painted. The most enduring
history, it has been said, is written in coins. Certainly
the most effective biography is expressed in portraits.
Long after the book and your impressions of
the character of which it treats have become dim in
your memory your impression of the features and
mien of a hero or a poet, as received from a picture,
remains indelible. How often does the face belie the
biography—making us think better or worse of the
man, after forming an opinion from a portrait in words,
that was either partial or malicious! I am persuaded
the world would think better of Shelley, if there were
a correct and adequate portrait of his face, as it has
been described to me by one or two who knew him.
How much of the Byronic idolatry is born and fed
from the idealized pictures of him treasured in every
portfolio! Sir Thomas Lawrence, Chalon, and Parris,
have composed between them a biography of Lady
Blessington, that have made her quite independent
of the “memoirs” of the next century. And who, I
may safely ask, even in America, has seen the nice,
cheerful, sensible, and motherly face which prefaces
the new edition of “The Manners of the American
Domestics” (I beg pardon for giving the title from my
Kentucky copy), without liking Mrs. Trollope a great
deal better, and at once dismissing all idea of “the
bazar” as a libel on that most lady-like countenance?

I think Lady S— had more talent and distinction
crowded into her pretty rooms, last night, than I ever
before saw in such small compass. It is a bijou of a
house, full of gems of statuary and painting, but all
its capacity for company lies in a small drawing-room,
a smaller reception-room, and a very small, but very
exquisite boudoir—yet to tell you who were there
would read like Colburn's list of authors, added to a
paragraph of noble diners-out from the Morning Post.

The largest lion of the evening certainly was the
new Persian ambassador, a man six feet in his slippers;
a height which, with his peaked calpack, of a foot and
a half, superadded, keeps him very much among the
chandeliers. The principal article of his dress does
not diminish the effect of his eminence—a long white
shawl worn like a cloak, and completely enveloping
him from beard to toe. From the twisted shawl
around his waist glitters a dagger's hilt, lumped with
diamonds—and diamonds, in most dazzling profusion,
almost cover his breast. I never saw so many
together except in a cabinet of regalia. Close behind
this steeple of shawl and gem, keeps, like a short
shadow when the sun is high, his excellency's secretary,
a dwarfishly small man, dressed also in cashmere
and calpack, and of a most ill-favored and bow-stringish
countenance and mien. The master and man seem
chosen for contrast, the countenance of the ambassador
expressing nothing but serene good nature. The
ambassador talks, too, and the secretary is dumb.

T— H— stood bolt upright against a mirror-door,
looking like two T— H—s trying to see
which was taller. The one with his face to me looked
like the incarnation of the John Bull newspaper, for
which expression he was indebted to a very hearty
face, and a very round subject for a buttoned-up coat;
while the H— with his back to me looked like an
author, for which he was indebted to an exclusive view
of his cranium. I dare say Mr. H— would agree
with me that he was seen, on the whole, at a most enviable
advantage. It is so seldom we look, beyond the
man, at the author.

I have rarely seen a greater contrast in person and
expression than between H— and B—, who stood
near him. Both were talking to ladies—one bald,
burly, upright, and with a face of immovable gravity,
the other slight, with a profusion of curling hair, restless
in his movements, and of a countenance which
lights up with a sudden inward illumination. H—'s
partner in the conversation looked into his face with a
ready-prepared smile for what he was going to say,
B—'s listened with an interest complete, but without
effort. H— was suffering from what I think is the
common curse of a reputation for wit—the expectation
of the listener had outrun the performance.

H— B—, whose diplomatic promotion goes on
much faster than can be pleasing to “Lady Cheveley,”

has just received his appointment to Paris—the object
of his first wishes. He stood near his brother, talking
to a very beautiful and celebrated woman, and I
thought, spite of her ladyship's unflattering description,
I had seldom seen a more intellectual face, or a
more gentlemanly and elegant exterior.

Late in the evening came in his royal highness the
duke of C—, and I wondered, as I had done many
times before, when in company with one of these royal
brothers, at the uncomfortable etiquette so laboriously
observed toward them. Wherever he moved in the
crowded rooms, everybody rose and stood silent, and
by giving way much more than for any one else, left
a perpetual circular space around him, in which, of
course, his conversation had the effect of a lecture to
a listening audience. A more embarrassed manner
and a more hesitating mode of speech than the duke's,
I can not conceive. He is evidently gêné to the last
degree with this burdensome deference; and one
would think that in the society of highly-cultivated
and aristocratic persons, such as were present, he
would be delighted to put his highness into his pocket
when the footman leaves him at the door, and hear no
more of it till he goes again to his carriage. There
was great curiosity to know whether the duke would
think it etiquetical to speak to the Persian, as in consequence
of the difference between the shah and the
British envoy the tall minister is not received at the
court of St. James. Lady S— introduced them,
however, and then the duke again must have felt his
rank nothing less than a nuisance. It is awkward
enough, at any time, to converse with a foreigner who
has not forty English words in his vocabulary, but
what with the duke's hesitating and difficult utterance,
the silence and attention of the listening guests, and
the Persian's deference and complete inability to comprehend
a syllable, the scene was quite painful.

There was some of the most exquisite amateur singing
I ever heard after the company thinned off a little,
and the fashionable song of the day was sung by a
most beautiful woman in a way to move half the company
to tears. It is called “Ruth,” and is a kind of
recitative of the passage in Scripture, “Where thou
goest I will go,” &c.

I have driven in the park several days, admiring the
queen on horseback, and observing the changes in the
fashions of driving, equipages, &c., &c. Her majesty
seems to me to ride very securely and fearlessly,
though it is no wonder that in a country where everybody
rides, there should be bolder and better horsewomen.
Miss Quentin, one of the maids of honor,
said to be the best female equestrian in England,
“takes the courage out” of the queen's horse every
morning before the ride—so she is secured against one
class of accidents. I met the royal party yesterday in
full gallop near the centre of Rotten Row, and the two
grooms who ride ahead had brief time to do their work
of making the crowd of carriages give way. On came
the queen upon a dun-colored, highly-groomed horse,
with her prime minister on one side of her and Lord
Byron upon the other, her cortège of maids of honor
and ladies and lords in waiting checking their more
spirited horses, and preserving always a slight distance
between themselves and her majesty. Victoria's round
and plump figure looks extremely well in her dark-green
riding-dress, but I thought the man's hat unbecoming.
Her profile is not sufficiently good for
that trying style, and the cloth riding-cap is so much
prettier, that I wonder she does not remember that
“nice customs courtesy to great queens,” and wear
what suits her. She rode with her mouth open, and
looked exhilarated with the exercise. Lord Melbourne,
it struck me, was the only person in her party whose
face had not the constrained look of consciousness of
observation.

I observe that the “crack men” ride without martingals,
and that the best turnouts are driven without
a check-rein. The outstretched neck which is the
consequence, has a sort of Arab or blood look, probably
the object of the change; but the drooping head
when the horse is walking or standing seems to me
ugly and out of taste. All the new carriages are built
near the ground. The low park-phæton, light as a
child's plaything, and drawn by a pair of ponies, is the
fashionable equipage. I saw the prettiest thing conceivable
of this kind yesterday in the park—a lady
driving a pair of small cream-colored horses of great
beauty, with her two children in the phæton, and two
grooms behind mounted on cream-colored saddle-horses,
all four of the animals of the finest shape and
action. The new street cabs (precisely the old-fashioned
sedan-chair suspended between four wheels, a
foot from the ground) are imitated by private carriages,
and driven with two horses—ugly enough. The cabphæton,
is in great fashion, with either one or two
horses. The race of ponies is greatly improved since
I was in England. They are as well-shaped as the
large horse, with very fine coats and great spirit. The
children of the nobility go scampering through the
park upon them, looking like horsemen and horsewomen
seen through a reversed opera-glass. They
are scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog, but they
patter along with great speed. There is one fine lad
of about eight years, whose parents seem to have very
little care for his neck, and who, upon a fleet, milk-white,
long-tailed pony, is seen daily riding at a rate
of twelve miles an hour through the most crowded
streets, with a servant on a tall horse plying whip and
spur to keep up with him. The whole system has the
droll effect of a mixture of Lilliput and Brobdignag.

We met the king of Oude a few days since at a party,
and were honored by an invitation to dine with his
majesty at his house in the Regent's park. Yesterday
was the appointed day; and with the pleasant anticipation
of an oriental feast, we drove up at seven,
and were received by his turbaned ayahs, who took
shawl and hat with a reverential salaam, and introduced
us to the large drawing-room overlooking the park.
The king was not yet down; but in the corner sat
three parsees or fire-worshippers, guests like ourselves,
who in their long white linen robes, bronze faces, and
high caps, looked like anything but “diners-out” in
London. To our surprise they addressed us in excellent
English, and we were told afterward that they
were all learned men—facts not put down to the credit
of the Ghebirs in Lalla Rookh.

We were called out upon the balcony to look at a
balloon that was hovering over the park, and on stepping
back into the drawing-room, we found the company
all assembled, and our royal host alone wanting.
There were sixteen English ladies present, and five
white gentlemen beside myself. The Orient, however,
was well represented. In a corner, leaning silently
against a table, stood Prince Hussein Mirza, the
king's cousin, and a more romantic and captivating
specimen of Hindoo beauty could scarcely be imagined.
He was slender, tall, and of the clearest olive
complexion, his night-black hair falling over his
shoulders in profusion, and his large antelope eyes
fixed with calm and lustrous surprise upon the half-denuded
forms sitting in a circle before him. We
heard afterward that he has conceived a most uncontrollable
and unhappy passion for a high-born and
beautiful English girl whom he met in society, and
that it is with difficulty he is persuaded to come out
of his room. His dress was of shawls most gracefully
draped about him, and a cap of gold cloth was thrown
carelessly on the side of his head. Altogether he was
like a picture of the imagination.

A middle-aged stout man, ashy black, with Grecian

features, and a most determined and dignified expression
of mouth, sat between Lady — and Miss Porter,
and this was the wakeel or ambassador of the
prince of Sutara, by name Afzul Ali. He is in England
on business for his master, and if he does not succeed
it will be no fault of his under lip. His secretary,
Keeram Ali, stood behind him—the wakeel dressed in
shawls of bright scarlet, with a white cashmere turban,
and the scribe in darker stuffs of the same fashion.
Then there was the king's physician, a short, wiry,
merry-looking, quick-eyed Hindoo, with a sort of quizzical
angle in the pose of his turban: the high-priest,
also a most merry-looking Oriental, and Ali Acbar, a
Persian attaché. I think these were all the Asiatics.

The king entered in a few minutes, and made the
circuit of the room, shaking hands most cordially with
all his guests. He is a very royal-looking person indeed.
Perhaps you might call him too corpulent, if
his fine height (a little over six feet), and very fine
proportions, did not give his large size a character of
majesty. His chest is full and round, and his walk
erect and full of dignity. He has the Italian olive
complexion, with straight hair, and my own remark at
first seeing him was that of many others, “How like
a bronze cast of Napoleon!” The subsequent study
of his features remove this impression, however, for
he is a most “merry monarch,” and is seldom seen
without a smile. His dress was a mixture of oriental
and English fashions—a pair of baggy blue pantaloons,
bound around the waist with a rich shawl, a splendid
scarlet waistcoat buttoned close over his spacious
chest, and a robe of very fine snuff-colored cloth something
like a loose dressing-gown without a collar. A
cap of silver cloth, and a brilliant blue satin cravat
completed his costume, unless in his covering should
be reckoned an enormous turquoise ring, which almost
entirely concealed one of his fingers.

Ekbal-ood-Dowlah, Nawaub of Oude (his name and
title), is at present appealing to the English against
his uncle, who usurps his throne by the aid and countenance
of the East Indian company. The Mohammedan
law, as I understand, empowers a king to choose
his successor from his children without reference
to primogeniture, and the usurper, though an elder
brother, having been imbecile from his youth, Ekbal's
father was selected by the then king of Oude to succeed
him. The question having been referred to
Lord Wellesley, however, then governor of India, he
decided that the English law of primogeniture should
prevail, or in other words (as the king's friends say)
preferred to have for the king of a subject province an
imbecile who would give him no trouble. So slipped
from the Nawaub's hands a pretty kingdom of six
millions of faithful Mohammedans! I believe this is
the “short” of the story. I wonder (we are reproached
so very often by the English for our treatment of
the Indians) whether a counter-chapter of “expedient
wrong” might not be made out from the history of the
Indians under British government in the east?

Dinner was announced with a Hindostance salaam,
and the king gave his arm to Lady —. The rest
of us “stood not upon the order of our going,” and
I found myself seated at table between my wife and a
Polish countess, some half dozen removes from the
Nawaub's right hand. His highness commenced helping
those about him most plentifully from a large
pillau, talking all the while most merrily in broken
English, or resorting to Hindostance and his interpreter
whenever his tongue got into trouble. With
the exception of one or two English joints, all the
dishes were prepared with rice or saffron, and (wine
being forbidden by the Mahommedan law) iced water
was served round from Indian coolers freely. For
one, I would have compounded for a bottle of wine
by taking the sin of the entire party on my soul, for,
what with the exhaustion of a long London day, and
the cloying quality of the Nawaub's rich dishes, I
began to be sorry I had not brought a flask in my
pocket. His majesty's spirits seemed to require no
aid from wine. He talked constantly, and shrewdly,
and well. He impresses every one with a high
estimate of his talents, though a more complete and
undisguised child of nature I never saw. Good sense,
with good humor, frankness, and simplicity, seem to
be his leading qualities.

We were obliged to take our leave early after dinner,
having other engagements for the evening, but
while coffee was serving, the Hindostance cook, a
funny little old man, came in to receive the compliments
of the company upon his dinner, and to play
and dance for his majesty's amusement. He had at
his back a long Indian drum, which he called his
“tum tum,” and playing himself an accompaniment
upon this, he sang two or three comic songs in his
own language to a sort of wild yet merry air, very
much to the delight of all the orientals. Singer,
dancer, musician, and cook, the king certainly has a
jewel of a servant in him.

One moment bowing ourselves out from the presence
of a Hindoo king, and the next beset by an Irishman
with “Heaven bless your honor for the sixpence
you mean to give me!” what contrasts strike the traveller
in this great heart of the world! Paddy lighted
us to our carriage with his lantern, implored the coachman
to “dhrive carefully,” and then stood with his
head bent to catch the sound upon the pavement of
another sixpence for his tenderness. Wherever there
is a party in the fashionable quarters of London, these
Tantaluses flit about with their lanterns—for ever at
the door of pleasure, yet shivering and starving for
ever in their rags. What a life!

One of the most rational and agreeable of the fashionable
resorts in London is Kensington Gardens, on the
days when the royal band plays from five to seven
near the bridge of the Serpentine. Some twenty of
the best instrumental musicians of London station
themselves under the trees in this superb park (for
though called “gardens,” it is but a park with old
trees and greensward), and up and down the fine silky
carpet stroll hundreds of the fashionables of “May
fair and Belgrave square,” listening a little perhaps,
and chattering a great deal certainly. It is a good
opportunity to see what celebrated beauties look like
by daylight; and, truth to say, one comes to the conclusion
there, that candle-light is your true kalydor.
It is very ingeniously contrived by the grand chamberlain
that this public music should be played in a far
away corner of the park, inaccessible except by those
who have carriages. The plebeians, for whose use
and pleasure it seems at first sight graciously contrived,
are pretty well sifted by the two miles walk,
and a very aristocratic and well-dressed assembly indeed
is that of Kensington gardens.

Near the usual stand of the musicians runs a bridle-path
for horsemen, separated from the greensward by
a sunk fence, and as I was standing by the edge of the
ditch yesterday, the queen rode by, pulling up to listen
to the music, and smile right and left to the crowd of
cavaliers drawn up in the road. I pulled off my hat
and stood uncovered instinctively, but looking around
to see how the promenaders received her, I found to
my surprise that with the exception of a bald-headed
nobleman whem I chanced to know, the Yankee stood
alone in his homage to her.

I thought before I left America that I should find
the stamp of the new reign on manners, usages, conversation,
and all the outer form and pressure of society.
One can not fancy England under Elizabeth to
have struck a stranger as did England under James.
We think of Shakspere, Leicester, and Raleigh, and
conclude that under a female sovereign chivalry at

least shines brighter, and poetry should. A good
deal to my disappointment, I have looked in vain for
even a symptom of the queen's influence on anything.
She is as completely isolated in England, as entirely
above and out of the reach of the sympathies and
common thoughts of society, as the gilt grasshopper
on the steeple. At the opera and play, half the
audience do not even know she is there; in the park,
she rides among the throng with scarcely a head
turned to look after her; she is unthought of, and
almost unmentioned at balls, routes, and soirées; in
short, the throne seems to stand on glass—with no one
conductor to connect it with the electric chain of human
hearts and sympathies.

MY ADVENTURES AT THE TOURNAMENT.

That Irish Channel has, as the English say, “a
nasty way with it.” I embarked at noon on the 26th,
in a magnificent steamer, the Royal Sovereign, which
had been engaged by Lord Eglinton (as per advertisement)
to set down at Ardrossan all passengers bound
to the tournament. This was a seventeen hours' job,
including a very cold, blowy, and rough night; and
of the two hundred passengers on board, one half
were so blest as to have berths or settees—the others
were unblest, indeed.

I found on board several Americans; and by the
time I had looked at the shape of the Liverpool harbor,
and seen one or two vessels run in before a slapping
breeze, the premonitory symptom (which had
already sent many to their berths) sent me to mine.
The boat was pitching backward and forward with a
sort of handsaw action that was not endurable. By
foregoing my dinner and preserving a horizontal position,
I escaped all sickness, and landed at Ardrossan
at six the next morning, with a thirty-six hours' fast
upon me, which I trusted my incipient gout would remember
as a per contra to the feast in the promised
“banquet.”

Ardrossan, built chiefly, I believe, by Lord Eglinton's
family, and about eight miles from the castle, is
a small but very clean and thrifty-looking hamlet on
that part of the western coast of Scotland which lies
opposite the Isle of Arran. Ailsa Rock, famous in
song, slumbers like a cloud in the southwestern horizon.
The long breakers of the channel lay their lines
of foam almost upon the street, and the harbor is
formed by a pier jutting out from a little promontory
on the northern extremity of the town. The one
thoroughfare of Ardrossan is kept clean by the broom
of every wind that sweeps the Irish sea. A cleaner or
bleaker spot I never saw.

A Gael, who did not comprehend a syllable of such
English as a Yankee delivers, shoulders my portmanteau
without direction or request, and travelled
away to the inn, where he deposited it and held out
his hand in silence. There was certainly quite enough
said between us; and remembering the boisterons accompaniment
with which the claims of porters are
usually pushed upon one's notice, I could well wish
that Gaelic tide-waiters were more common.

“Any room, landlord?” was the first question.—
“Not a cupboard, sir,” was the answer.—“Can you
give me some breakfast?” asked fifty others in a breath.
—“Breakfast will be put upon all the tables presently,
gentlemen,” said the dismayed Boniface, glancing at
the crowds who were pouring in, and, Scotchmanlike,
making no promises to individuals.—“Landlord!”
vociferated a gentleman from the other side of the
hall—“what the devil does this mean? Here's the
room I engaged a fortnight ago occupied by a dozen
people shaving and dressing!”—“I canna help it, sir!
Ye're welcome to turn 'em a' out—if ye can!” said
the poor man, lifting up his hands in despair, and retreating
to the kitchen. The hint was a good one,
and taking up my own portmanteau, I opened a door
in one of the passages. It led into a small apartment,
which in more roomy times might have been a pantry,
but was now occupied by three beds and a great variety
of baggage. There was a twopenny glass on the
mantel-piece, and a drop or two of water in a pitcher,
and where there were sheets I could make shift for a
towel. I found presently, by the way, that I had had
a narrow escape of surprising some one in bed, for
the sheet which did duty as a napkin was still warm
with the pressure of the newly-fled occupant.

Three or four smart-looking damsels in caps looked
in while I was engaged in my toilet, and this, with one
or two slight observations made in the apartment, convinced
me that I had intruded on the dormitory of the
ladies' maids belonging to the various parties in the
house. A hurried “God bless us!” as they retreated,
however, was all either of reproach or remonstrance
that I was troubled with; and I emerged with a
smooth chin in time for breakfast, very much to the
envy and surprise of my less-enterprising companions.

There was a great scramble for the tea and toast;
but, uniting forces with a distinguished literary man
whose acquaintance I had been fortunate enough to
make on board the steamer, we managed to get places
at one of the tables, and achieved our breakfasts in
tolerable comfort. We were still eight miles from
Eglinton, however, and a lodging was the next matter
of moment. My friend thought he was provided for
nearer the castle, and I went into the street, which I
found crowded with distressed-looking people, flying
from door to door, with ladies on their arms and wheelbarrows
of baggage at their heels, the townspeople
standing at the doors and corners staring at the novel
spectacle in open-mouthed wonder. Quite in a dilemma
whether or not to go on to Irvine (which, being
within two miles of the castle, was probably much
more over-run than Ardrossan), I was standing at the
corner of the street, when a Liverpool gentleman,
whose kindness I must record as well as my pleasure
in his society for the two or three days we were together,
came up and offered me a part of a lodging he
had that moment taken. The bed was what we call
in America a bunk, or a kind of berth sunk into the
wall, and there were two in the same garret, but the
sheets were clean; and there was a large bible on the
table—the latter a warrant for civility, neatness, and
honesty, which, after many years of travel, I have
never found deceptive. I closed immediately with
my friend; and whether it was from a smack of authorship
or no, I must say I took to my garret very
kindly.

It was but nine o'clock, and the day was on my
hands. Just beneath the window ran a railroad, built
to bring coal to the seaside, and extending to within
a mile of the castle; and with some thirty or forty
others, I embarked in a horse-car for Eglinton to see
the preparations for the following day's tournament.
We were landed near the park gate, after an hour's
drive through a flat country blackened with coal-pits;
and it was with no little relief to the eye that I entered
upon a smooth and gravelled avenue, leading by
a mile of shaded windings to the castle. The day was
heavenly; the sun-flecks lay bright as “patines of
gold” on the close-shaven grass beneath the trees;
and I thought that nature had consented for once to
remove her eternal mist-veil from Scotland, and let
pleasure and sunshine have a holyday together. The
sky looked hard and deep; and I had no more apprehension

of rain for the morrow than I should have had
under a July sun in Asia.

Crossing a bright little river (the Lugton, I think
it is called), whose sloping banks, as far as I could see
up and down, were shaven to the rich smoothness of
“velvet of three-pile,” I came in sight of the castle
towers. Another bridge over a winding of the same
river lay to the left, a Gothic structure of the most
rich and airy mould, and from either end of this extended
the enclosed passage for the procession to the
lists. The castle stood high upon a mound beyond. Its
round towers were half concealed by some of the finest
trees I ever saw; and though less antique and of a less
rowning and rude aspect than I had expected, it was
a very perfect specimen of modern castellated architecture.
On ascending to the lawn in front of the
castle, I found that it was built less upon a mound
than upon the brow of a broad plateau of table-land,
turned sharply by the Lugton, close under the castle
walls—a natural sight of singular beauty. Two Saracenic-looking
tents of the gayest colors were pitched
upon the bright-green lawn at a short distance, and
off to the left, by several glimpses through the trees,
I traced along the banks of the river the winding enclosures
for the procession.

The large hall was crowded with servants; but presuming
that a knight who was to do his devoir so conspicuously
on the morrow would not be stirring at so
early an hour, I took merely a glance of the armor
upon the walls in passing, and deferring the honor of
paying my respects, crossed the lawn and passed over
the Lugton by a rustic foot-bridge in search of the
lists. A cross-path (leading by a small temple enclosed
with wire netting, once an aviary, perhaps, but
now hung around in glorious profusion with game,
vension, a boar's head, and other comestibles), brought
me in two or three minutes to a hill-side overlooking
the chivalric arena. It was a beautiful sight of itself
without plume or armor. In the centre of a verdant
plain, shut in by hills of an easy slope, wooded richly,
appeared an oblong enclosure glittering at either end
with a cluster of tents, striped with the gayest colors
of the rainbow. Between them, on the farther side,
stood three galleries, of which the centre was covered
with a Gothic roof highly ornamented, the four front
pillars draped with blue damask, and supporting a canopy
over the throne intended for the queen of beauty.
A strongly-built barrier extended through the lists;
and heaps of lances, gay flags, and the heraldic ornaments,
still to be added to the tents, lay around on
the bright grass in a picture of no little richness. I
was glad afterward that I had seen thus much with
the advantage of an unclouded sun.

In returning, I passed in the rear of the castle, and
looked into the temporary pavilions erected for the
banquet and ball. They were covered exteriorly with
rough board and sails, and communicated by an enclosed
gallery with one of the larger apartments of the
castle. The workmen were still nailing up the drapery,
and arranging lamps and flowers; but with all this disadvantage,
the effect of the two immense halls, lined as
they were with crimson and white in broad alternate
stripes, resembling in shape and fashion two gigantic
tents, was exceedingly imposing. Had the magnificent
design of Lord Eglinton been successfully carried out,
it would have been a scene, with the splendor of the
costumes, the lights, music, and revelry, unsurpassed,
probably, by anything short of enchantment.

PRINCIPAL DAY.

I was awakened at an early hour the morning after
my arrival at Ardrossan by a band of music in the
street. My first feeling was delight at seeing a bit of
blue sky of the size of my garret skylight, and a dazzling
sunshine on the floor. “Skirling” above all the
other instruments of the band, the Highland bagpipe
made the air reel with “A' the blue bonnets are over
the border,” and, hoisting the window above my head,
I strained over the house-leads to get a look at the
performer. A band of a dozen men in kilt and bonnet
were marching up and down, led by a piper, something
in the face like the heathen representations of Boreas;
and on a long line of roughly-constructed rail-cars
were piled, two or three deep, a crowd resembling, at
first sight, a crushed bed of tulips. Bonnets of every
cut and color, from the courtier's green velvet to the
shepherd's homely gray, struggled at the top; and
over the sides hung red legs and yellow legs, crossbarred
stockings and buff boots, bare feet and pilgrim's
sandals. The masqueraders scolded and laughed, the
boys halloed, the quiet people of Ardrossan stared in
grave astonishment, and, with the assistance of some
brawny shoulders, applied to the sides of the overladen
vehicles, the one unhappy horse got his whimsical
load under way for the tournament.

Train followed train, packed with the same motley
array; and at ten o'clock, after a clean and comfortable
Scotch breakfast in our host's little parlor, we sallied
forth to try our luck in the scramble for places.
After a considerable fight we were seated, each with a
man in his lap, when we were ordered down by the
conductor, who informed us that the chief of the
Campbells had taken the car for his party, and that,
with his band in the succeeding one, he was to go in
state (upon a railroad!) to Eglinton. Up swore half-a-dozen
Glasgow people, usurpers like ourselves, that
they would give way for no Campbell in the world;
and finding a stout hand laid on my leg to prevent my
yielding to the order to quit, I gave in to what might
be called as pretty a bit of rebellious republicanism as
you would find on the Mississippi. The conductor
stormed, but the Scotch bodies sat firm; and as Scot
met Scot in the fight, I was content to sit in silence
and take advantage of the victory. I learned afterward
that the Campbell chieftain was a Glasgow manufacturer;
and though he undoubtedly had a right to
gather his clan, and take piper and eagle's plume, there
might, possibly, be some jealous disapprobation at the
bottom of his townsmen's rudeness.

Campbell and his party presently appeared, and a
dozen or twenty very fine looking men they were. One
of the ladies, as well as I could see through the black
lace veil thrown over her cap and plumes, was a remarkably
handsome woman; and I was very glad when
the matter was compromised, and the Campbells were
distributed among our company. We jogged on at a
slow pace toward the tournament, passing thousands
of pedestrians, the men all shod, and the women all
barefoot, with their shoes in their hands, and nearly
every one, in accordance with Lord Eglinton's printed
request, showing some touch of fancy in his dress. A
plaid over the shoulder, or a Glengary bonnet, or, perhaps,
a goose-feather stuck jauntily in the cap, was
enough to show the feeling of the wearer, and quite
enough to give the crowd, all in all, a most festal and
joyous aspect.

The secluded bit of road between the rail-track and
the castle lodge, probably never before disturbed by
more than two vehicles at a time, was thronged with a
press of wheels, as closely jammed as Fleet street at
noon. Countrymen's carts piled with women and
children like loads of market-baskets in Kent; postchaises
with exhausted horses and occupants straining
their eyes forward for a sight of the castle; carriages
of the neighboring gentry with “bodkins” and over-packed
dickeys, all in costume; stout farmers on
horseback, with plaid and bonnet; gingerbread and
ale-carts, pony-carts, and coal-carts; wheelbarrows
with baggage, and porters with carpet-bags and hat-boxes,

were mixed up in merry confusion with the
most motley throng of pedestrians it has ever been my
fortune to join. The vari-colored tide poured in at
the open gate of the castle; and if I had seen no other
procession, the long-extended mass of caps, bonnets,
and plumes, winding through that shaded and beautiful
avenue, would have repaid me for no small proportion
of my subsequent discomfort. I remarked, by the
way, that I did not see a hat in the entire mile between
the porter's lodge and the castle.

The stables, which lay on the left of the approach
(a large square structure with turret and clock, very
like four methodist churches, dos-à-dos), presented
another busy and picturesque scene—horses half-caparisoned,
men-at-arms in buff and steel, and the
gay liveries of the nineteenth century paled by the revived
glories of the servitude of more knightly times.
And this part of the scene, too, had its crowd of laughing
and wondering spectators.

On reaching the Gothic bridge over the Lugton,
we came upon a cordon of police who encircled the
castle, turning the crowd off by the bridge in the direction
of the lists. Sorry to leave my merry and
motley fellow-pedestrians, I presented my card of invitation
and passed on alone to the castle. The sun
was at this time shining with occasional cloudings-over;
and the sward and road, after the two or three
fine days we had had, were in the best condition for
every purpose of the tournament.

Two or three noble trees with their foliage nearly
to the ground stood between me and the front of the
castle, as I ascended the slope above the river; and
the lifting of a stage curtain could scarce be more
sudden, or the scene of a drama more effectively composed,
than the picture disclosed by the last step upon
the terrace. Any just description of it, indeed, must
read like a passage from the “prompter's book.” I
stood for a moment, exactly where you would have
placed an audience. On my left rose a noble castle
with four round towers, the entrance thronged with
men-at-arms, and busy comers and goers in every
variety of costume. On the greensward in front of the
castle lounged three or four gentlemen archers in
suits of green silk and velvet. A cluster of grooms
under an immense tree on the right were fitting two
or three superb horses with their armor and caparisons,
while one beautiful blood palfrey, whose fine limbs
and delicately veined head and neck were alone visible
under his embroidered saddle and gorgeous trappings
of silk, was held by two “tigers” at a short distance.
Still farther on the right, stood a cluster of gayly decorated
tents; and in and out of the looped-up curtain
of the farthest passed constantly the slight forms of
lady archers in caps with snowy plumes, kirtles of
green velvet, and petticoats of white satin, quivers at
their backs and bows in their hands—one tall and
stately girl (an Ayrshire lady of very uncommon
beauty, whose name I took some pains to inquire),
conspicuous by her grace and dignity above all.

The back-ground was equally well composed—the
farther side of the lawn making a sharp descent to the
small river which bends around the castle, the opposite
shore thronged with thousands of spectators watching
the scene I have described; and in the distance behind
them, the winding avenue, railed in for the procession,
hidden and disclosed by turns among the
noble trees of the park, and alive throughout its whole
extent with the multitudes crowding to the lists.
There was a chivalric splendor in the whole scene,
which I thought at the time would repay one for a
long pilgrimage to see it—even should the clouds,
which by this time were coming up very threateningly
from the horizon, put a stop to the tournament altogether.

On entering the castle hall, a lofty room hung
round with arms, trophies of the chase, ancient
shields, and armor of every description, I found myself
in a crowd of a very merry and rather a motley
character—knights half armed, esquires in buff, palmers,
halberdiers, archers, and servants in modern
livery, here and there a lady, and here and there a
spectator like myself, and in a corner by one of the
Gothic windows—what think you?—a minstrel?—a
gray-haired harper?—a jester? Guess again—a reporter
for the Times! With a “walking dictionary”
at his elbow, in the person of the fat butler of the
castle, he was inquiring out the various characters in
the crowd, and the rapidity of his stenographic jottings-down
(with their lucid apparition in print two
days after in London) would, in the times represented
by the costumes about him, have burnt him at the
stake for a wizard with the consent of every knight in
Christendom.

I was received by the knight-marshal of the lists,
who did the honors of hospitality for Lord Eglinton
during his preparation for the “passage of arms;”
and finding an old friend under the gray beard and
scallop shell of a venerable palmer, whose sandal and
bare toes I chanced to stumble over, we passed in
together to the large dining-room of the castle.
“Lunch” was on the long table, and some two hundred
of the earl's out-lodging guests were busy at
knife and fork, while here and there were visible some
of those anachronisms which, to me, made the zest
of the tournament—pilgrims eating Périgord pies,
esquires dressing after the manner of the thirteenth
century diving most scientifically into the richer veins
of pátés de foie-gras, dames in ruff and farthingale discussing
blue blanc-mange, and a knight with an overnight
headache calling out for a cup of tea!

On returning to the hall of the castle, which was
the principal place of assemblage, I saw with no little
regret that ladies were coming from their carriages
under umbrellas. The fair archers tripped in doors
from their crowded tent, the knight of the dragon,
who had been out to look after his charger, was being
wiped dry by a friendly pocket handerckief, and all
countenances had fallen with the barometer. It was
time for the procession to start, however, and the
knights appeared, one by one, armed cap-à-pie, all
save the helmet, till at last the hall was crowded with
steel-clad and chivalric forms; and they waited only
for the advent of the queen of beauty. After admiring
not a little the manly bearing and powerful “thewes
and sinews” displayed by the array of modern English
nobility in the trying costumes and harness of olden
time, I stepped out upon the lawn with some curiosity
to see how so much heavy metal was to be got into a
demipique saddle. After one or two ineffectual attempts,
foiled partly by the restlessness of his horse,
the first knight called ingloriously for a chair. Another
scrambled over with great difficulty; and I fancy,
though Lord Waterford and Lord Eglinton, and one
other whom I noticed, mounted very gallantly and
gracefully, the getting to saddle was possibly the most
difficult feat of the day. The ancient achievement
of leaping on the steed's back from the ground in
complete armor would certainly have broken the
spine of any horse present, and was probably never
done but in story. Once in the saddle, however,
English horsemanship told well; and one of the finest
sights of the day I thought was the breaking away of
a powerful horse from the grooms, before his rider had
gathered up his reins, and a career at furious speed
through the open park, during which the steel-encumbered
horseman rode as safely as a fox-hunter, and
subdued the affrighted animal, and brought him back
in a style worthy of a wreath from the queen of
beauty.

Driven in by the rain, I was standing at the upper
side of the hall, when a movement in the crowd and
an unusual “making-way” announced the coming of

the “cynosure of all eyes.” She entered from the
interior of the castle with her train held up by two
beautiful pages of ten or twelve years of age, and attended
by two fair and very young maids of honor.
Her jacket of ermine, her drapery of violet and blue
velvet, the collars of superb jewels which embraced
her throat and bosom, and her sparkling crown, were
on her (what they seldom are, but should be only)
mere accessaries to her own predominating and radiant
beauty. Lady Seymour's features are as nearly faultless
as is consistent with expression; her figure and
face are rounded to the complete fulness of the mould
for a Juno; her walk is queenly, and peculiarly unstudied
and graceful, yet (I could not but think then
and since) she was not well chosen for the queen of a
tournament. The character of her beauty, uncommon
and perfect as it is, is that of delicacy and loveliness—the
lily rather than the rose—the modest pearl,
not the imperial diamond. The eyes to flash over a
crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance,
to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public
award of honor, should be full of command, dark,
lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and
most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene
heaven of a happy hearth—eyes to love, not wonder
at, to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for.
At the distance at which most of the spectators of the
tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble's
stormy orbs would have shown much finer, and the
forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head
and figure would have been more applauded than the
quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace lost to all but
those immediately round her. I had seen the Queen
of Beauty in a small society, dressed in simple white,
without an ornament, when she was far more becomingly
dressed and more beautiful than here, and I have
never seen, since, the engravings and prints of Lady
Seymour which fill every window in the London
shops, without feeling that it was a profanation of a
style of loveliness that would be
The day wore on, and the knight-marshal of the
lists (Sir Charles Lamb, the stepfather of Lord
Eglinton, by far the most knightly looking person at
the tournament), appeared in his rich surcoat and
embossed armor, and with a despairing look at the increasing
torrents of rain, gave the order to get to
horse. At the first blast of the trumpet, the thick-leaved
trees around the castle gave out each a dozen
or two of gay colored horsemen who had stood almost
unseen under the low-hanging branches—mounted
musicians in silk and gay trappings, mounted men-at-arms
in demi-suits of armor, deputy marshals and
halberdiers; and around the western tower, where
their caparisons had been arranged and their horse-armor
carefully looked to, rode the glittering and
noble company of knights, Lord Eglinton in his armor
of inlaid gold, and Lord Alford, with his athletic
frame and very handsome features, conspicuous above
all. The rain, meantime, spared neither the rich
tabard of the pursuivant, nor the embroidered saddle-cloths
of the queen's impatient palfrey; and after a
half-dozen of dripping detachments had formed and
led on, as the head of the procession, the lady-archers
(who were to go on foot) were called by the marshal
with a smile and a glance upward which might have
been construed into a tacit advice to stay in doors.
Gracefully and majestically, however, with quiver at
her back, and bow in hand, the tall and fair archer of
whose uncommon beauty I have already spoken,
stepped from the castle door; and, regardless of the
rain which fell in drops as large as pearls on her unprotected
forehead and snowy shoulders, she took her
place in the procession with her silken-booted troop
picking their way very gingerly over the pools behind
her. Slight as the circumstance may seem, there
was in the manner of the lady, and her calm disregard
of self in the cause she had undertaken, which would
leave me in no doubt where to look for a heroine
were the days of Wallace (whose compatriot she is)
to come over again. The knight-marshal put spurs
to his horse, and re-ordered the little troop to the
castle; and regretting that I had not the honor of the
lady's acquaintance for my authority, I performed my
only chivalric achievement for the day, the sending a
halberdier whom I had chanced to remember as the
servant of an old friend, on a crusade into the castle
for a lady's maid and a pair of dry stockings! Whether
they were found, and the fair archer wore them, or
where she and her silk-shod company have the tournament
consumption, rheumatism, or cough, at this
hour, I am sorry I can not say.

The judge of peace, Lord Saltoun, with his wand,
and retainers on foot bearing heavy battle-axes, was
one of the best figures in the procession; though, as
he was slightly gray, and his ruby velvet cap and saturated
ruff were poor substitutes for a warm cravat
and hat-brim, I could not but associate his fine horsemanship
with a sore throat, and his retainers and their
battle-axes with relays of nurses and hot flannels. The
flower of the tournament, in the representing and
keeping up of the assumed character, however, was its
king, Lord Londonderry. He, too, is a man, I should
think, on the shady side of fifty, but of just the high
preservation and embonpoint necessary for a royal presence.
His robe of red velvet and ermine swept the
ground as he sat in his saddle; and he managed to
keep its immense folds free of his horse's legs, and
yet to preserve its flow in his prancing motion, with a
grace and ease, I must say, which seemed truly imperial.
His palfrey was like a fiery Arabian, all action,
nerve, and fire; and every step was a rearing
prance, which, but for the tranquil self-possession and
easy control of the king, would have given the spectators
some fears for his royal safety. Lord Londonderry's
whole performance of his part was without a
fault, and chiefly admirable, I thought, from his sustaining
it with that unconsciousness and entire freedom
from mauvaise honte which the English seldom can
command in new or conspicuous situations.

The queen of beauty was called, and her horse led
to the door; but the water ran from the blue saddle-cloth
and housings like rain from a roof, and the storm
seemed to have increased with the sound of her name.
She came to the door, and gave a deprecating look
upward which would have mollified anything but a
Scotch sky, and, by the command of the knight marshal,
retired again to wait for a less chivalric but drier
conveyance. Her example was followed by the other
ladies, and their horses were led riderless in the procession.

The knights were but half called when I accepted
a friend's kind offer of a seat in his carriage to the lists.
The entire park, as we drove along, was one vast expanse
of umbrellas; and it looked from the carriage-window,
like an army of animated and gigantic mushrooms,
shouldering each other in a march. I had no
idea till then of the immense crowd the occasion had
drawn together. The circuitous route railed in for
the procession was lined with spectators six or seven
deep, on either side, throughout its whole extent of a
mile; the most distant recesses of the park were
crowded with men, horses, and vehicles, all pressing
onward; and as we approached the lists we found the
multitude full a quarter of a mile deep, standing on all
the eminences which looked down upon the enclosure,
as closely serried almost as the pit of the opera, and
all eyes bent in one direction, anxiously watching the
guarded entrance. I heard the number of persons
present variously estimated during the day, the estimates

ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand, but
I should think the latter was nearer the mark.

We presented our tickets at the private door, in the
rear of the principal gallery, and found ourselves introduced
to a very dry place among the supports and
rafters of the privileged structure. The look-out was
excellent in front, and here I proposed to remain, declining
the wet honor of a place above stairs. The
gentleman-usher, however, was very urgent for our
promotion; but as we found him afterward chatting
very familiarly with a party who occupied the seats
we had selected, we were compelled to relinquish the
flattering unction that he was actuated by an intuitive
sense of our deservings. On ascending to the covered
gallery, I saw, to my surprise, that some of the best
seats in front were left vacant, and here and there,
along the different tiers of benches, ladies were crowding
excessively close together, while before or behind
them there seemed plenty of unoccupied room. A
second look showed me small streams of water coming
through the roof, and I found that a dry seat was
totally unattainable. The gallery held about a thousand
persons (the number Lord Eglinton had invited
to the banquet and ball), and the greater part of these
were ladies, most of them in fancy dresses, and the remainder
in very slight demi-toilette—everybody having
dressed apparently with a full reliance on the morning's
promise of fair weather. Less fortunate than
the multitude outside, the earl's guests seemed not to
have numbered umbrellas among the necessities of a
tournament; and the demand for this despised invention
was sufficient (if merit were ever rewarded) to
elevate it for ever after to a rank among chivalric appointments.
Substitutes and imitations of it were
made of swords and cashmeres; and the lenders of
veritable umbrellas received smiles which should induce
them, one would think, to carry half-a-dozen to
all future tournaments in Scotland. It was pitiable
to see the wreck going on among the perishable elegancies
of Victorine and Herbault—chip hats of the
most faultless tournure collapsing with the wet;
starched ruffs quite flat; dresses passing helplessly
from “Lesbia's” style to “Nora Creina's;” shawls,
tied by anxious mammas over chapeau and coiffure,
crushing pitilessly the delicate fabric of months of invention;
and, more lamentable still, the fair brows and
shoulders of many a lovely woman proving with rainbow
clearness that the colors of the silk or velvet composing
her head-dress were by no means “fast.” The
Irvine archers, by the way, who, as the queen's body-guard,
were compelled to expose themselves to the
rain on the grand staircase, resembled a troop of New-Zealanders
with their faces tattooed of a delicate
green; though, as their Lincoln bonnets were all
made of the same faithless velvet, they were fortunately
streaked so nearly alike as to preserve their uniform.

After a brief consultation between the rheumatisms
in my different limbs, it was decided (since it was vain
to hope for shelter for the entire person) that my cloth-cap
would be the best recipient for the inevitable wet;
and selecting the best of the vacated places, I seated
myself so as to receive one of the small streams as
nearly as possible on my organ of firmness. Here I
was undisturbed, except that once I was asked (my
seat supposed to be a dry one) to give place to a lady
newly arrived, who, receiving my appropriated rivulet
in her neck, immediately restored it to me with many
acknowledgments, and passed on. In point of position,
my seat, which was very near the pavilion of the
queen of beauty, was one of the best at the tournament;
and diverting my aqueduct, by a little management,
over my left shoulder, I contrived to be more
comfortable, probably, than most of my shivering and
melancholy neighbors.

A great agitation in the crowd, and a dampish sound
of coming trumpets, announced the approach of the
procession. As it came in sight, and wound along the
curved passage to the lists, its long and serpentine line
of helmets and glittering armor, gonfalons, spear-points,
and plumes, just surging above the moving sea
of umbrellas, had the effect of some gorgeous and
bright-scaled dragon swimming in troubled waters.
The leaders of the long cavalcade pranced into the
arena at last, and a tremendous shout from the multitude
announced their admiration of the spectacle. On
they came toward the canopy of the queen of beauty,
men-at-arms, trumpeters, heralds, and halberdiers, and
soon after them the king of the tournament, with his
long scarlet robe flying to the tempest, and his rearing
palfrey straining every nerve to show his pride and
beauty. The first shout from the principal gallery
was given in approbation of this display of horsemanship,
as Lord Londonderry rode past; and considering
the damp state of the enthusiasm which prompted
it, it should have been considered rather flattering.
Lord Eglinton came on presently, distinguished above
all others no less by the magnificence of his appointments
than by the ease and dignity with which he
rode, and his knightly bearing and stature. His
golden armor sat on him as if he had been used to
wear it; and he managed his beautiful charger, and
bowed in reply to the reiterated shouts of the multitude
and his friends, with a grace and chivalric courtesy
which drew murmurs of applause from the spectators
long after the cheering had subsided.

The jester rode into the lists upon a gray steed,
shaking his bells over his head, and dressed in an odd
costume of blue and yellow, with a broad-flapped hat,
asses' ears, &c. His character was not at first understood
by the crowd, but he soon began to excite merriment
by his jokes, and no little admiration by his
capital riding. He was a professional person, I think
it was said, from Astley's, but as he spoke with a most
excellent Scotch “burr,” he easily passed for an indigenous
“fool.” He rode from side to side of the
lists during the whole of the tournament, borrowing
umbrellas, quizzing the knights, &c.

One of the most striking features of the procession
was the turn-out of the knight of the Gael, Lord
Glenlyon, with seventy of his clansmen at his back
in plaid and philibeg, and a finer exhibition of calves
(without a joke) could scarce be desired. They followed
their chieftain on foot, and when the procession
separated, took up their places in line along the
palisade, serving as a guard to the lists.

After the procession had twice made the circuit of
the enclosure, doing obeisance to the queen of beauty,
the jester had possession of the field while the knights
retired to don their helmets (hitherto carried by their
esquires), and to await the challenge to combat. All
eyes were now bent upon the gorgeous clusters of
tents at either extremity of the oblong area; and in a
very few minutes the herald's trumpet sounded, and
the knight of the swan rode forth, having sent his defiance
to the knight of the golden lion. At another
blast of the trumpet they set their lances in rest, selected
opposite sides of the long fence or barrier running
lengthwise through the lists, and rode furiously
past each other, the fence of course preventing any
contact except that of their lances. This part of the
tournament (the essential part, one would think) was,
from the necessity of the case, the least satisfactory of
all. The knights, though they rode admirably, were
so oppressed by the weight of their armor, and so embarrassed
in their motions by the ill-adjusted joints,
that they were like men of wood, unable apparently
even to raise the lance from the thigh on which it
rested. I presume no one of them either saw where
he should strike his opponent, or had any power of
directing the weapon. As they rode close to the
fence, however, and a ten-foot pole sawed nearly off
in two or three places was laid crosswise on the legs

of each, it would be odd if they did not come in contact;
and the least shock of course splintered the lance
—in other words, finished what was begun by the carpenter's
saw. The great difficulty was to ride at all
under such a tremendous weight, and manage a horse
of spirit, totally unused both to the weight and the
clatter of his own and his rider's armor. I am sure
that Lord Eglinton's horse, for one, would have
bothered Ivanhoe himself to “bring to the scratch;”
and Lord Waterford's was the only one that, for all
the fright he showed, might have been selected (as
they all should have been) for the virtue of having
peddled tin-ware. These two knights, by the way, ran
the best career, Lord Eglinton, malgre his bolter,
coming off the victor.

The rain, meantime, had increased to a deluge, the
queen of beauty sat shivering under an umbrella, the
jester's long ears were water-logged, and lay flat on
his shoulders, and everybody in my neighborhood had
expressed a wish for a dry seat and a glass of sherry.
The word “banquet” occurred frequently right and
left; hopes for “mulled wine or something hot before
dinner” stole from the lips of a mamma on the
seat behind; and there seemed to be but one chance
for the salvation of health predominant in the minds
of all, and that was drinking rather more freely than
usual at the approaching banquet. Judge what must
have been the astonishment, vexation, dread, and despair,
of the one thousand wet, shivering, and hungry
candidates for the feast, when Lord Eglinton rode up
to the gallery unhelmeted, and delivered himself as
follows:—

“Ladies and gentlemen, I had hoped to have given
you all a good dinner; but to my extreme mortification
and regret, I am just informed that the rain has
penetrated the banqueting pavilions, and that, in consequence,
I shall only be able to entertain so many of
my friends as can meet around my ordinary table.”

About as uncomfortable a piece of intelligence, to
some nine hundred and sixty of his audience, as they
could have received, short of a sentence for their immediate
execution.

To comprehend fully the disastrous extent of the
disappointment in the principal gallery, it must be
taken into consideration that the domicils, fixed or
temporary, of the rejected sufferers, were from five to
twenty miles distant—a long ride at best, if begun on
the point of famishing, and in very thin and well-saturated
fancy dresses. Grievance the first, however,
was nothing to grievance the second; viz., that from
the tremendous run upon post-horses and horses of all
descriptions, during the three or four previous days,
the getting to the tournament was the utmost that
many parties could achieve. The nearest baiting-place
was several miles off; and in compassion to the
poor beasts, and with the weather promising fair on
their arrival, most persons had consented to take
their chance for the quarter of a mile from the lists to
the castle, and had dismissed their carriages with
orders to return at the close of the banquet and ball
—daylight the next morning! The castle, everybody
knew, was crammed, from “donjon-keep to turret-top,”
with the relatives and intimate friends of the
noble earl, and his private table could accommodate
no more than these. To get home was the inevitable
alternative.

The rain poured in a deluge. The entire park was
trodden into a slough, or standing in pools of water—
carts, carriages, and horsemen, with fifty thousand
flying pedestrians, crowding every road and avenue.
How to get home with a carriage! How the deuce
to get home without one!

A gentleman, who had been sent out on the errand
of Noah's dove by a lady whose carriage and horses
were ordered at four the following morning, came
back with the mud up to his knees, and reported that
there was not a wheel-barrow to be had for love or
money. After threading the crowd in every direction,
he had offered a large sum, in vain, for a one-horse
cart!

Night was coming on, meantime, very fast; but
absorbed by the distresses of the shivering groups
around me, I had scarce remembered that my own invitation
was but to the banquet and ball—and my
dinner, consequently, nine miles off, at Ardrossan.
Thanking Heaven, that, at least, I had no ladies to
share my evening's pilgrimage, I followed the queen
of beauty down the muddy and slippery staircase, and,
when her majesty had stepped into her carriage, I
stepped over ankles in mud and water, and began my
wade toward the castle.

Six hours of rain, and the trampling of such an immense
multitude of men and horses, had converted
the soft and moist sod and soil of the park into a deep
and most adhesive quagmire. Glancing through the
labyrinth of vehicles on every side, and seeing men
and horses with their feet completely sunk below the
surface, I saw that there was no possibility of shying
the matter, and that wade was the word. I thought,
at first, that I had a claim for a little sympathy on the
score of being rather slenderly shod (the impalpable
sole of a pattern leather-boot being all that separated
me from the subsoil of the estate of Eglinton); but
overtaking, presently, a party of four ladies who had
lost several shoes in the mire, and were positively
wading on in silk stockings, I took patience to myself
from my advantage in the comparison, and thanked
fate for the thinnest sole with leather to keep it on.
The ladies I speak of were under the charge of a most
despairing-looking gentleman, but had neither cloak
nor umbrella, and had evidently made no calculations
for a walk. We differed in our choice of the two
sides of a slough, presently, and they were lost in the
crowd; but I could not help smiling, with all my pity
of their woes, to think what a turning up of prunella
shoes there will be, should Lord Eglinton ever plough
the chivalric field of the Tournament.

As I reached the castle, I got upon the Macadamised
road, which had the advantage of a bottom somewhere,
though it was covered with a liquid mud, of which
every passing foot gave you a spatter to the hips. My
exterior was by this time equally divided between
water and dirt, and I trudged on in comfortable fellowship
with farmers, coal-miners, and Scotch lasses—
envying very much the last, for they carried their
shoes in their hands, and held their petticoats, to say
the least, clear of the mud. Many a good joke they
seemed to have among them, but as they spoke in
Gaelic, it was lost on my Sassenach ears.

I had looked forward with a faint hope to a gingerbread
and ale-cart, which I remembered having seen
in the morning established near the terminus of the
railroad, trusting to refresh my strength and patience
with a glass of anything that goes under the generic
appellation of “summat;” but though the cart was
there, the gingerbread shelf was occupied by a row of
Scotch lasses, crouching together under cover from
the rain, and the pedlar assured me that “there wasna
a drap o' speerit to be got within ten mile o' the castle.”
One glance at the railroad, where a car with a single
horse was beset by some thousands of shoving and
fighting applicants, convinced me that I had a walk
of eight miles to finish my “purgation by” tournament;
and as it was getting too dark to trust to any
picking of the way, I took the middle of the rail-track,
and set forward.

Eight miles in a heavy rain, with boots of the consistence
of brown paper, and a road of alternate deep
mud and broken stone, should entitle one to the green

turban. I will make the pilgrimage of a Hadji from
the “farthest inn” with half the endurance.

I found my Liverpool friends over a mutton-chop
in the snug parlor of our host, and with a strong brew
of hot toddy, and many a laugh at the day's adventures
by land and water, we got comfortably to bed “somewhere
in the small hours.” And so ended the great
day of the tournament.

After witnessing the disasters of the first day, the
demolition of costumes, and the perils by water, of
masqueraders and spectators, it was natural to fancy
that the tournament was over. So did not seem to
think several thousands of newly-arrived persons,
pouring from steamer after steamer upon the pier of
Ardrossan, and in every variety of costume, from the
shepherd's mand to the courtier's satin, crowding to
the rail-cars for Eglinton. It appeared from the
chance remarks of one or two who came to our lodgings
to deposite their carpet-bags, that it had rained
very little in the places from which the steamers had
come, and that they had calculated on the second as
the great day of the joust. No dissuasion had the
least effect upon them, and away they went, bedecked
and merry, the sufferers of the day before looking out
upon them, from comfortable hotel and lodging, with
prophetic pity.

At noon the sky brightened; and as the cars were
running by this time with diminished loads, I parted
from my agreeable friends, and bade adieu to my
garret at Ardrossan. I was bound to Ireland, and my
road lay by Eglinton to Irvine and Ayr. Fellow-passengers
with me were twenty or thirty men in
Glengary bonnets, plaids, &c.; and I came in for my
share of the jeers and jokes showered upon them by
the passengers in the return-cars, as men bound on a
fruitless errand. As we neared the castle, the crowds
of people with disconsolate faces waiting for conveyances,
or standing by the reopened gingerbread carts
in listless idleness, convinced my companions, at last,
that there was nothing to be seen, for that day at least,
at Eglinton. I left them sitting in the cars, undecided
whether to go on or return without losing their places;
and seeing a coach marked “Irvine” standing in the
road, I jumped in without question or ceremony. It
belonged to a private party of gentlemen, who were to
visit the castle and tilting-ground on their way to
Irvine; and as they very kindly insisted on my remaining
after I had apologised for the intrusion, I
found myself “booked” for a glimpse of the second
day's attractions.

The avenue to the castle was as crowded as on the
day before; but it was curious to remark how the
general aspect of the multitude was changed by the
substitution of disappointment for expectation. The
lagging gait and surly silence, instead of the elastic
step and merry joke, seemed to have darkened the
scene more than the withdrawal of the sun, and I was
glad to wrap myself in my cloak, and remember that
I was on the wing. The banner flying at the castle
tower was the only sign of motion I could see in its
immediate vicinity; the sail-cloth coverings of the
pavilion were dark with wet; the fine sward was everywhere
disfigured with traces of mud, and the whole
scene was dismal and uncomfortable. We kept on to
the lists, and found them, as one of my companions
expressed it, more like a cattle-pen after a fair than a
scene of pleasure—trodden, wet, miry, and deserted.
The crowd, content to view them from a distance,
were assembled around the large booths on the ascent
of the rising ground toward the castle, where a band
was playing some merry reels, and the gingerbread
and ale venders plied a busy vocation. A look was
enough; and we shaped our course for Irvine, sympathizing
deeply with the disappointment of the high-spirited
and generous lord of the Tourney. I heard
at Irvine, and farther on, that the tilting would be re
newed, and the banquet and ball given on the succeeding
days; but after the wreck of dresses and peril of
health I had witnessed, I was persuaded that the best
that could be done would be but a slender patching
up of the original glories, as well as a halting rally of
the original spirits of the tournament. So I kept on
my way.

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL.

1. CHAPTER I.
LONDON.

There is an inborn and inbred distrust of “foreigners”
in England—continental foreigners, I should say
—which keeps the current of French and Italian society
as distinct amid the sea of London, as the blue
Rhone in Lake Leman. The word “foreigner,” in
England, conveys exclusively the idea of a dark-complexioned
and whiskered individual, in a frogged coat
and distressed circumstances; and to introduce a
smooth-cheeked, plainly-dressed, quiet-looking person
by that name, would strike any circle of ladies and
gentlemen as a palpable misnomer. The violent and
unhappy contrast between the Parisian's mode of life
in London and in Paris, makes it very certain that few
of those bien nés et convenablement riches will live in
London for pleasure; and then the flood of political
émigrés, for the last half century, has monopolised
hair-dressing, &c., &c., to such a degree, that the
word Frenchman is synonymous in English ears with
barber and dancing-master. If a dark gentleman,
wearing either whisker or mustache, chance to offend
John Bull in the street, the first opprobrious language
he hears—the strongest that occurs to the fellow's
mind—is, “Get out, you — Frenchman!”

All this, malgré the rage for foreign lions in London
society. A well-introduced foreigner gets easily into
this, and while he keeps his cabriolet and confines
himself to frequenting soirées and accepting invitations
to dine, he will never suspect that he is not on an
equal footing with any “milor” in London. If he
wishes to be disenchanted, he has only to change his
lodgings from Long's to Great Russell street, or (bitterer
and readier trial) to propose marriage to the
honorable Augusta or Lady Fanny.

Everybody who knows the society of Paris, knows
something of a handsome and very elegant young
baron of the Faubourg St. Germain, who, with small
fortune, very great taste, and greater credit, contrived
to go on very swimmingly as an adorable roué and
vaurien till he was hard upon twenty-five. At the
first crisis in his affairs, the ladies, who hold all the
politics in their laps, got him appointed consul to
Algiers, or minister to Venezuela, and with this pretty
pretext for selling his horses and dressing-gowns, these
cherished articles brought twice their original value,
saved his loyauté, and set him up in fans and monkeys
at his place of exile. A year of this was enough for
the darling of Paris, and not more than a day before
his desolate loves would have ceased to mourn for
him, he galloped into his hotel with a new fashion of
whiskers, a black female slave, and the most delicious
histories of his adventures during the ages he had
been exiled. Down to the earth and their previous
obscurity dropped the rivals who were just beginning
to usurp his glories. A new stud, an indescribable
vehicle, a suite of rooms à l'Africaine, and a mystery,
preserved at some expense, about his negress, kept all
Paris, including his new creditors, in admiring astonishment

for a year. Among the crowd of his worshippers,
not the last or least fervent, were the fair-haired
and glowing beauties who assemble at the levées of
their ambassador in the Rue St. Honoré, and upon
whom le beau Adolphe had looked as pretty savages,
whose frightful toilets and horrid French accent
might be tolerated one evening in the week—vu le
souper!

Eclipses will arrive as calculated by insignificant
astronomers, however, and debts will become due as
presumed by vulgar tradesmen. Le beau Adolphe
began to see another crisis, and betook himself to his
old advisers, who were desolés to the last degree; but
there was a new government, and the blood of the
Faubourg was at a discount. No embassies were to
be had for nothing. With a deep sigh, and a gentle
tone, to spare his feelings as much as possible, his
friend ventures to suggest to him that it will be necessary
to sacrifice himself.

“Ahi! mais comment!”

“Marry one of these bétes Anglaises, who drink
you up with their great blue eyes, and are made of
gold!”

Adolphe buried his face in his gold-fringed oriental
pocket-handkerchief; but when the first agony was
passed, his resolution was taken, and he determined to
go to England. The first beautiful creature he should
see, whose funds were enormous and well-invested,
should bear away from all the love, rank, and poverty
of France, the perfumed hand he looked upon.

A flourishing letter, written in a small, cramped
hand, but with a seal on whose breadth of wax and
slazon all the united heraldry of France was interwoven,
arrived, through the ambassador's despatch
box, to the address of Miladi —, Belgrave square,
announcing, in full, that le beau Adolphe was coming
to London to marry the richest heiress in good society;
and as Paris could not spare him more than a
week, he wished those who had daughters to marry,
answering the description, to be bien prévenus of his
visit and errand. With the letter came a compend of
his genealogy, from the man who spoke French in the
confusion of Babel to le dit Baron Adolphe.

To London came the valet of le beau baron, two
days before his master, bringing his slippers and dressing-gown
to be aired after their sea-voyage across the
channel. To London followed the irresistible youth,
cursing, in the politest French, the necessity which
subtracted a week from a life measured with such
“diamond sparks” as his own in Paris. He sat himself
down in his hotel, sent his man Porphyre with his
card to every noble and rich house, whose barbarian
tenants he had ever seen in the Champs Elysées, and
waited the result. Invitations from fair ladies, who
remembered him as the man the French belles were
mad about, and from literary ladies, who wanted his
whiskers and black eyes to give their soirées the necessary
foreign complexion, flowed in on all sides, and
Monsieur Adolphe selected his most mignon cane and
his happiest design in a stocking, and “rendered himself”
through the rain like a martyr.

No offers of marriage the first evening!

None the second!!

None the third!!!

Le beau Adolphe began to think either that English
papas did not propose their daughters to people as in
France: or, perhaps, that the lady whom he had commissioned
to circulate his wishes had not sufficiently
advertised him. She had, however.

He took advice, and found it would be necessary to
take the first step himself. This was disagreeable,
and he said to himself, “Le jeu ne vaut pas le chandelle;”
but his youth was passing, and his English
fortune was at interest.

He went to Almack's and proposed to the first
authenticated fortune that accepted his hand for a
waltz. The young lady first laughed, and then told
her mother, who told her son, who thought it an insult,
and called out le beau Adolphe, very much to the
astonishment of himself and Porphyre. The thing
was explained, and the baron looked about the next
day for one pas si bête. Found a young lady with
half a million sterling, proposed in a morning call,
and was obliged to ring for assistance, his intended
having gone into convulsions with laughing at him.
The story by this time had got pretty well distributed
through the different strata of London society; and
when le beau Adolphe convinced that he would not
succeed with the noble heiresses of Belgrave square,
condescended, in his extremity, to send his heart by
his valet to a rich little vulgarian, who “never had a
grandfather,” and lived in Harley street, he narrowly
escaped being prosecuted for a nuisance, and, Paris
being now in the possession of the enemy, he buried
his sorrows in Belgium. After a short exile his friends
procured him a vice-consulate in some port in the
north sea, and there probably at this moment he sorrowfully
vegetates.

This is not a story founded upon fact, but literally
true. Many of the circumstances came under my own
observation; and the whole thus affords a laughable
example of the esteem in which what an English fox-hunter
would call a “trashy Frenchman” is held in
England, as well as of the travestie produced by transplanting
the usages of one country to another.

Ridiculous as any intimate mixture of English and
French ideas and persons seems to be in London, the
foreign society of itself in that capital is exceedingly
spiritual and agreeable. The various European embassies
and their attachés, with their distinguished
travellers, from their several countries, accidentally
belonging to each; the French and Italians, married
to English noblemen and gentry, and living in London,
and the English themselves, who have become
cosmopolite by residence in other countries, form a
very large society in which mix, on perfectly equal
terms, the first singers of the opera, and foreign musicians
and artists generally. This last circumstance
gives a peculiar charm to these reunions, though it
imparts a pride and haughty bearing to the prima
donna and her fraternity, which is, at least, sometimes
very inconvenient to themselves. The remark recalls
to my mind a scene I once witnessed in London,
which will illustrate the feeling better than an essay
upon it.

I was at one of those private concerts given at an
enormous expense during the opera season, at which
“assisted” Julia Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini,
and Ivanhoff. Grisi came in the carriage of a foreign
lady of rank, who had dined with her, and she walked
into the room looking like an empress. She was
dressed in the plainest white, with her glossy hair put
smooth from her brow, and a single white japonica
dropped over one of her temples. The lady who
brought her chaperoned her during the evening, as if
she had been her daughter, and under the excitement
of her own table and the kindness of her friends, she
sung with a rapture and a freshet of glory (if one may
borrow a word from the Mississippi) which set all
hearts on fire. She surpassed her most applauded
hour on the stage—for it was worth her while. The
audience was composed, almost exclusively, of those
who are not only cultivated judges, but who sometimes
repay delight with a present of diamonds.

Lablache shook the house to its foundations in his
turn; Rubini ran through his miraculous compass
with the ease, truth, and melody, for which his singing
is unsurpassed; Tamburini poured his rich and even
fulness on the ear, and Russian Ivanhoff, the one
southern singing-bird who has come out of the north,
wire-drew his fine and spiritual notes, till they who had
been flushed, and tearful, and silent, when the others

had sang, drowned his voice in the poorer applause
of exclamation and surprise.

The concert was over by twelve, the gold and silver
paper bills of the performance were turned into fans, and
every one was waiting till supper should be announced
—the prima donna still sitting by her friend, but surrounded
by foreign attachés, and in the highest elation
at her own success. The doors of an inner suite of
rooms were thrown open at last, and Grisi's cordon of
admirers prepared to follow her in and wait on her at
supper. At this moment, one of the powdered menials
of the house stepped up and informed her very respectfully
that supper was prepared in a separate room for
the singers!

Medea, in her most tragic hour, never stood so
absolutely the picture of hate as did Grisi for a single
instant, in the centre of that aristocratic crowd. Her
chest swelled and rose, her lips closed over her snowy
teeth, and compressed till the blood left them, and, for
myself, I looked unconsciously to see where she would
strike. I knew, then, that there was more than fancy
—there was nature and capability of the real—in the
imaginary passions she plays so powerfully. A laugh
of extreme amusement at the scene from the highborn
woman who had accompanied her, suddenly
turned her humor, and she stopped in the midst of a
muttering of Italian, in which I could distinguish
only the terminations, and, with a sort of theatrical
quickness of transition, joined heartily in her mirth.
It was immediately proposed by this lady, however,
that herself and their particular circle should join the
insulted prima donna at the lower table, and they succeeded
by this manœuvre in retaining Rubini and the
others, who were leaving the house in a most unequivocal
Italian fury.

I had been fortunate enough to be included in the
invitation, and, with one or two foreign diplomatic
men, I followed Grisi and her amused friend to a
small room on a lower floor, that seemed to be the
housekeeper's parlor. Here supper was set for six
(including the man who had played the piano), and
on the side-table stood every variety of wine and fruit,
and there was nothing in the supper, at least, to make
us regret the table we had left. With a most imperative
gesture and rather an amusing attempt at
English, Grisi ordered the servants out of the room,
and locked the door, and from that moment the conversation
commenced and continued in their own
musical, passionate, and energetic Italian. My long
residence in that country had made me at home in it;
every one present spoke it fluently; and I had an
opportunity I might never have again, of seeing with
what abandonment these children of the sun throw
aside rank and distinction (yet without forgetting it),
and join with those who are their superiors in every
circumstance of life, in the gayeties of a chance hour.

Out of their own country these singers would probably
acknowledge no higher rank than that of the kind
and gifted lady who was their guest; yet, with the
briefest apology at finding the room too cold after the
heat of the concert, they put on their cloaks and hats
as a safeguard to their lungs (more valuable to them
than to others); and as most of the cloaks were the
worse for travel, and the hats opera-hats with two
corners, the grotesque contrast with the diamonds of
one lady, and the radiant beauty of the other, may
easily be imagined.

Singing should be hungry work, by the knife and
fork they played; and between the excavations of
truffle pies, and the bumpers of champagne and burgundy,
the words were few. Lablache appeared to be
an established droll, and every syllable he found time
to utter was received with the most unbounded laughter.
Rubini could not recover from the slight he conceived
put upon him and his profession by the separate table;
and he continually reminded Grisi, who by this time
had quite recovered her good humor, that, the night
before, supping at Devonshire house, the duke of
Wellington had held her gloves on one side, while his
grace, their host attended to her on the other.

“E vero!” said Ivanhoff, with a look of modest admiration
at the prima donna.

“E vero, e bravo!” cried Tamburini, with his sepulchral-talking
tone, much deeper than his singing.

“Si, si, si, bravo!” echoed all the company; and
the haughty and happy actress nodded all round with
a radiant smile, and repeated, in her silver tones,
“Grazie! cari amici! grazie!”

As the servants had been turned out, the removal
of the first course was managed in pic-nic fashion;
and when the fruit and fresh bottles of wine were set
upon the table by the attachés, and younger gentlemen,
the health of the princess who honored them by
her presence was proposed in that language, which, it
seems to me, is more capable than all others of expressing
affectionate and respectful devotion. All uncovered
and stood up, and Crisi, with tears in her eyes,
kissed the hand of her benefactress and friend, and
drank her health in silence.

It is a polite and common accomplishment in Italy
to improvise in verse, and the lady I speak of is well
known among her immediate friends for a singular
facility in this beautiful art. She reflected a moment
or two with the moisture in her eyes, and then commenced,
low and soft, a poem, of which it would be
difficult, nay impossible, to convey, in English, an
idea of its music and beauty. It took us back to Italy,
to its heavenly climate, its glorious arts, its beauty and
its ruins, and concluded with a line of which I remember
the sentiment to have been, “out of Italy every
land is exile!”

The glasses were raised as she ceased, and every
one repeated after her, “Fuori d'Italia tutto e esilio!”

“Ma!” cried out the fat Lablache, holding up his
glass of champagne, and looking through it with one
eye, “siamo ben esiliati qua!” and, with a word of
drollery, the party recovered its gayer tone, and the
humor and wit flowed on brilliantly as before.

The house had long been still, and the last carriage
belonging to the company above stairs had rolled from
the door, when Grisi suddenly remembered a bird that
she had lately bought, of which she proceeded to give
us a description, that probably penetrated to every
corner of the silent mansion. It was a mocking-bird,
that had been kept two years in the opera-house, and
between rehearsal and performance had learned parts
of everything it had overheard. It was the property
of the woman who took care of the wardrobes. Grisi
had accidentally seen it, and immediately purchased
it for two guineas. How much of embellishment there
was in her imitations of her treasure I do not know;
but certainly the whole power of her wondrous voice,
passion, and knowledge of music, seemed drunk up at
once in the wild, various, difficult, and rapid mixture
of the capricious melody she undertook. First came,
without the passage which it usually terminates, the
long, throat-down, gurgling, water-toned trill, in which
Rubini (but for the bird and its mistress, it seemed to
me) would have been inimitable: then, right upon it,
as if it were the beginning of a bar, and in the most
unbreathing continuity, followed a brilliant passage
from the Barber of Seville, run into the passionate
prayer of Anna Bolena in her madness, and followed
by the air of “Suoni la tromba intrepida,” the tremendous
duet in the Puritani, between Tamburini and
Lablache. Up to the sky, and down to the earth
again—away with a note of the wildest gladness, and
back upon a note of the most touching melancholy—
if the bird but half equals the imitation of his mistress,
he were worth the jewel in a sultan's turban.

“Giulia!” “Giulietta!” “Giuliettina!” cried out
one and another, as she ceased, expressing in their

Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had inspired
by her incomparable execution.

The stillness of the house in the occasional pauses
of conversation reminded the gay party, at last, that it
was wearing late. The door was unlocked, and the
half-dozen sleepy footmen hanging about the hall were
despatched for the cloaks and carriages; the drowsy
porter was roused from his deep leathern dormeuse,
and opened the door—and broad upon the street lay
the cold gray light of a summer's morning. I declined
an offer to be set down by a friend's cab, and strolled
off to Hyde Park to surprise myself with a sunrise;
balancing the silent rebuke in the fresh and healthy
countenances of early laborers going to their toil,
against the effervescence of a champagne hour, which,
since such come so rarely, may come, for me, with
what untimeliness they please.

2. CHAPTER II.
THE STREETS OF LONDON.

It has been said, that “few men know how to take
a walk.” In London it requires some experience to
know where to take a walk. The taste of the perambulator,
the hour of the day, and the season of the
year, would each affect materially the decision of the
question.

If you are up early—I mean early for London—say
ten o'clock—we would start from your hotel in Bond
street, and hastening through Regent street and the
Quadrant (deserts at that hour), strike into the zigzag
of thronged alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry
street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cabstand
in the Haymarket “are at this hour asleep.”
The late supper-eaters at Dubourg's and the Café de
l'Europe were the last infliction upon their galled
withers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find
an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget
gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning.
The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless
of the custom of “them as pays only their fare,” and
quite sure not to get “a gemman to drive” at that unseasonable
hour. The “waterman” (called a “water
man,” as he will tell you, “because he gives hay to
the 'orses”) leans against the gas-lamp at the corner,
looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the
splendid coach with its four blood bays just starting from
the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The sidewalk
of Coventry street, usually radiant with the
flaunting dresses of the fail and vicious, is now sober
with the dull habiliments of the early-stirring and the
poor. The town (for this is town, not city) beats its
more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad.

Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby-genteel
poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal
the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in confined
and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes,
they eat their mutton-chop and potato, unseen of their
gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay officer,
whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife
and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry,
and over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables,
recall, as well as he may in imagination, the gay dinners
at mess, and the companions now grown cold—in
death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out
of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here
comes many a “gay fellow about town,” who will dine
to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of
unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street
at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his
own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here
are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter
—the closely-measured wine, and the more closely
measured attention—the silent and shrinking company,
the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for
the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value
the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embarrassing
recognition and the objectless saunter through
the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that
wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here
with their victims. It is the last step within the
bounds of respectability. They still live “at the West
end,” while they dine in Rupert street. They may
still linger in the park, or stroll in Bond street, till
their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs,
and within a stone's throw of the luxurious tables and
the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to
an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in
silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life
are darker for the light that shines so near them!
How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with
the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative
comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood
like this!

Come through this narrow lane into Leicester
square. You cross here the first limit of the fashionable
quarter. The Sablonière hotel is in this square;
but you may not give it as your address unless you
are a foreigner. This is the home of that most miserable
fish out of water—a Frenchman in London.
A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable
French restaurants, make this spot of the metropolis
the most habitable to the exiled habitué of the Palais
Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, in
any possible degree, is better than the sacré biftek, or
the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato!
Here he comes forth, if the sunshine perchance for
one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the sidewalk,
trying to get the better of his bile and his bad
breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby,
but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for
as much as would support him a month in Paris.
Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird-fanciers,
showmen, and generally for every foreign
novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there
is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, or a
learned pig, you will see one or all in that building, so
radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars.

Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes,
second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and
ladies' articles of ornamental wear generally: cheap
straw-bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery!
Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin
cape! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these
dingy flowers were new—when this fine lace-edging
bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work
on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property
of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or virtuous,
and by what hard necessity came it here? Ten
to one, could it speak, its history would keep us standing
at this shop window, indifferent alike to the curious
glances of these passing damsels and the gentle
eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us
the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improvement
in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn
habiliments he exposes.

I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of
Venice. The half-daylight between the high and
overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and
occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of
hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the
absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the
damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to
those close passages in the rear of the canals between
St. Mark's and the Rialto. Then I like studying a
pawnbroker's window, and I like ferreting in the old
book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in
humility for an author to see what he can be bought
for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who

has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you
for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may
have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the
shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the
terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy
Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity
with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.

The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent
Garden, are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In
crossing St. Martin's lane, life appears to have become
suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent
and dirty women are everywhere visible through the
open windows; the half-naked children at the doors
look already care-worn and incapable of a smile; and
the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and repulsive.
Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast
body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand.

You would think London Strand the main artery
of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on
the face of the earth where the stream of human life
runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other
street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by.
In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid
body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe
nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of
your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages,
wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. Newspaper-hawkers,
pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers,
and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk.
If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window,
you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately
walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend,
who by chance has run his nose against yours rather
than another man's, you impede the way, and are
made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you
would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by
half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once, and after
using all your physical strength and most of your discrimination,
you are most probably embarked in the
wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to
Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A
Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit
mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory
journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any
man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years
of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the
Curaçoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties
with cads and coach-drivers.

3. CHAPTER III.
LONDON.

A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely
any questions you may be rash enough to put to him
about “the city.” Talk to him of “town,” and he
would rather miss seeing St. Peter's, than appear ignorant
of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, concerning
whom or which you might have a curiosity.
It is understood all over the world that the “city” of
London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and
cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England
which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable
country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and
Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of
these lies what is called “the town.” A transit from
one to the other by an inhabitant of either is a matter
of some forethought and provision. If milord, in
Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to
visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders—not the
blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to
drive in the morning—but the crop roadster in the
cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in
plain hat and gaiters. If the banker in Lombard
street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of
his counting-house to make a morning call on the
wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the
Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in
the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor,
but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the
west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last
fashion at Crockford's, a fresh hat from New Bond
street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots
from the Rue St. Honoré. He sits very clear of his
neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing
at Farrance's, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges
in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his
rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irrevocably
if practised a mile to the eastward. The difference
between the two migrations is, simply, that
though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city,
he would not for the world be taken for a citizen;
while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and
Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not
supposed to be a member of the clubs, lounging to a
late breakfast.

There is a “town” manner, too, and a “city” manner,
practised with great nicety by all who frequent
both extremities of London. Nothing could be in
more violent contrast, for example, than the manner
of your banker when you dine with him at his country-house,
and the same person when you meet him
on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you
had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would
wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare-nothing
sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself
to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you
met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you
would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment,
how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave
of mammon could ever, by any license of interpretation,
be called a gentleman. And when you have
seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is
a favorable specimen of his class, you will be astonished
still more to see how completely he will sustain
both characters—giving you the cold shoulder, in a
way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning,
and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants,
completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon.
Two souls inhabit the banker's body, and each is apparently
sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early
coach turns the corner by St. Giles's, on its way to
the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of
the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the
same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentlemanly
inhabitants. Between those hours, look to
Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written
upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no
courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the
junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul's.
With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the
returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tottenham
Court road, the angel of port wine and green
fields passes his finger across Firkins's brow, and
presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long
and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor's
pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he
criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting
past, says some very true things of the architecture of
the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the
end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyouslooking
a fellow as you would meet on that side of
London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and
as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to
dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the stables,
which you are welcome to drive to the devil if
you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or himself;
or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins's
two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger.
Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has

her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she
proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home
to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to
Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at
Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least
twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and
says—“By Jove, it's a bright thought! touch up the
near pony, Mrs. Firkins.” And away you go, Firkins
amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to
Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook
and butler when nobody comes to dine.

There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and
Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day
whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The
situation of that lady with respect to her society is
(she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing.
There are many very worthy persons, she will say,
who represent large sums of money or great interests
in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge,
but who are far from being ornamental to her new
blue satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Firkins
to have them labelled in tens and thousands according
to their fortunes; that if, by any unpleasant
accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he
might respect them like = in algebra, for what they
stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in calculating
on a societé choisie to dine or sup. When
Hook or Smith is just beginning to melt out, or Lady
Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr.
Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and
Co.—“unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run
down without ceremony to call on his respectable correspondent.”

“Isn't it tiresome?”

“Very, my dear madam! But then you have the
happiness of knowing that you promote very essentially
your husband's interests, and when he has made
a plum —”

“Yes, very true; and then, to be sure, Firkins has
had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred
a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and
fit out my youngest brother Bob to India; and when I
think of what he does for my family, why I don't mind
making now and then a sacrifice; but, after all, it's a
great evil not to be able to cultivate one's own class
of society.”

And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest
and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves
the husband she married for his fortune; but as the
prosperity of Haman was nothing while Mordecai sat
at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her father
lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned
off, and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and
pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son, and Co.,
may at any moment break in upon the charade of
Lady Priscilla!

There is a class of business people in London,
mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves
independent of the West End, and live in a style of
their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Exchange,
but with a luxury not exceeded even in the
silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes
meet at the opera a young man of decided style, unexceptionable
in his toilet, and quiet and gentleman-like
in his address, who contents himself with the side
alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beauty
and fashion about him with an indifference it is difficult
to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance,
and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on
the best springs Long Acre can turn out; and while
you are speculating where, in the name of the prince
of darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to,
you are introduced through a small door into saloons,
perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup
with the prima donna, or la première danseuse, but
certainly with the most polished persons of your own
sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a
life in London, you ever met in society before. There
are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of
small circles of society, composed thus of persons
refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence is
unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End,
but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost
as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord
Sefton or the “member for Finsbury.”

4. CHAPTER IV.
LONDON.

You return from your ramble in “the city” by two
o'clock. A bright day “toward,” and the season in
its palmy time. The old veterans are just creeping
out upon the portico of the United Service club, having
crammed “The Times” over their late breakfast,
and thus prepared their politics against surprise for
the day; the broad steps of the Athenæum are as yet
unthronged by the shuffling feet of the literati, whose
morning is longer and more secluded than that of idler
men, but who will be seen in swarms, at four, entering
that superb edifice in company with the employés and
politicians who affect their society. Not a cab stands
yet at the “Travellers,” whose members, noble or
fashionable, are probably at this hour in their dressing-gowns
of brocade or shawl of the orient, smoking
a hookah over Balzac's last romance, or pursuing at
this (to them) desert time of day some adventure which
waited upon their love and leisure. It is early yet for
the park; but the equipages you will see by-and-by
“in the ring” are standing now at Howell and James's,
and while the high-bred horses are fretting at the
door, and the liveried footmen lean on their goldheaded
sticks on the pavement, the fair creature whose
slightest nod these trained minions and their fine-limbed
animals live to obey, sits upon a three-legged
stool within, and in the voice which is a spell upon all
hearts, and with eyes to which rank and genius turn
like Persians to the sun, discusses with a pert clerk
the quality of stockings!

Look at these equipages and their appointments!
Mark the exquisite balance of that claret-bodied chariot
upon its springs—the fine sway of its sumptuous hammer-cloth
in which the un-smiling coachman sits
buried to the middle—the exact fit of the saddles, setting
into the curve of the horses' backs so as not break,
to the most careless eye, the fine lines which exhibit
action and grace! See how they stand together,
alert, fiery, yet obedient to the weight of a silken
thread; and as the coachman sees you studying his
turn-out, observe the imperceptible feel of the reins
and the just-visible motion of his lips, conveying to
the quick ears of his horses the premonitory, and, to
us, inaudible sound, to which, without drawing a
hair's breadth upon the traces, they paw their fine
hoofs, and expand their nostrils impatiently! Come
nearer, and find a speck or a raised hair, if you can,
on these glossy coats! Observe the nice fitness of
the dead-black harness, the modest crest upon the
panel, the delicate picking out of white in the wheels,
and, if you will venture upon a freedom in manners,
look in through the window of rose-teinted glass, and
see the splendid cushions and the costly and perfect
adaptation of the interior. The twinmated footmen
fly to the carriage-door, and the pomatumed clerk who
has enjoyed a tête-à-tête for which a prince-royal might
sigh, and an ambassador negotiate in vain, hands in
his parcel. The small foot presses on the carpeted
step, the airy vehicle yields lightly and recovers from
the slight weight of the descending form, the coachman
inclines his ear for the half-suppressed order

from the footman, and off whirls the admirable structure,
compact, true, steady, but magically free and
fast—as if horses, footmen, and chariot were but the
parts of some complicated centaur—some swift-moving
monster upon legs and wheels!

Walk on a little farther to the Quadrant. Here
commences the most thronged promenade in London.
These crescent colonnades are the haunt of foreigners
on the lookout for amusement, and of strangers in the
metropolis generally. You will seldom find a town-bred
man there, for he prefers haunting his clubs; or,
if he is not a member of them, he avoids lounging
much in the Quadrant, lest he should appear to have
no other resort. You will observe a town dandy
getting fidgety after his second turn in the Quadrant,
while you will meet the same Frenchman there from
noon till dusk, bounding his walk by those columns as
if they were the bars of a cage. The western side
toward Piccadilly is the thoroughfare of the honest
passer-by; but under the long portico opposite, you
will meet vice in every degree, and perhaps more
beauty than on any other pavé in the world. It is
given up to the vicious and their followers by general
consent. To frequent it, or to be seen loitering there
at all, is to make but one impression on the mind of
those who may observe you.

The two sides of Regent street continue to partake
of this distinction to the end. Go up on the left, and
you meet the sober citizen perambulating with his
wife, the lady followed by her footman, the grave and
the respectable of all classes. Go up on the other,
and in color and mien it is the difference between a
grass-walk and a bed of tulips. What proof is here
that beauty is dangerous to its possessor! It is said
commonly of Regent street, that it shows more beauty
in an hour than could be found in all the capitals of
the continent. It is the beauty, however, of brilliant
health—of complexion and freshness, more than of
sentiment or classic correctness. The English features,
at least in the middle and lower ranks, are seldom
good, though the round cheek, the sparkling lip, the
soft blue eyes and hair of dark auburn, common as
health and youth, produce the effect of high and almost
universal beauty on the eye of the stranger. The
rarest thing in these classes is a finely-turned limb,
and to the clumsiness of their feet and ankles must be
attributed the want of grace usually remarked in their
movements.

Regent street has appeared to me the greatest and
most oppressive solitude in the world. In a crowd of
business men, or in the thronged and mixed gardens
of the continent, the pre-occupation of others is less
attractive, or at least, more within our reach, if we
would share in it. Here, it is wealth beyond competition,
exclusiveness and indifference perfectly unapproachable.
In the cold and stern mien of the
practised Londoner, it is difficult for a stranger not to
read distrust, and very difficult for a depressed mind
not to feel a marked repulsion. There is no solitude,
after all, like the solitude of cities.

“O dear, dear London” (says the companion of
Asmodeus on his return from France), “dear even in
October! Regent street, I salute you! Bond street,
my good fellow, how are you? And you, oh, beloved
Oxford street, whom the opium-eater called `stony-hearted,'
and whom I, eating no opium, and speaking
as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and maternal
of all streets—the street of the middle classes—
busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation.
Ah, the pretty ankles that trip along thy pavement!
Ah! the odd country-cousin bonnets that peer into
thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls,
price one pound four shillings, marked in the corner!
Ah! the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quarters
at the back of Holborn! Ah! the quiet old ladies,
living in Duchess street, and visiting thee with their
eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain! Ah, the
bumpkins from Norfolk just disgorged by the Bull and
Mouth—the soldiers—the milliners—the Frenchmen
—the swindlers—the porters with four-post beds on
their backs, who add the excitement of danger to that of
amusement! The various shifting, motley group that
belong to Oxford street, and Oxford street alone! What
thoroughfares equal thee in the variety of human
specimens! in the choice of objects for remark, satire,
admiration! Besides, the other streets seem chalked
out for a sect—narrow-minded and devoted to a coterie.
Thou alone art catholic—all-receiving. Regent street
belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk,
whose characters are above scandal. Bond street belongs
to dandies and picture-dealers. St. James's
street to club loungers and young men in the guards,
with mustaches properly blackened by the cire of
Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford street, what class can
especially claim thee as its own? Thou mockest at
oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders!
Thou art liberal as air—a chartered libertine; accepting
the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of
none. And to call thee `stony-hearted!'—certainly
thou art so to beggars—to people who have not the
WHEREWITHAL. But thou wouldst not be so respectable
if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to
paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all conscience,
to those who have a shilling in their pocket—those
who have not, why do they live at all?”

5. CHAPTER V.
LONDON.

It is near four o'clock, and in Bond street you
might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants—
at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies
and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for
the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood-horses
“marking time,” the coachman watchful for
his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her
silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the
passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the
delay, for she came there on purpose. Between the
swaying bodies of the carriages, hesitating past, she
receives the smiles and recognitions of all her male
acquaintances; while occasionally a female ally (for
allies against the rest of the sex are as necessary in
society to women, as in war to monarchs)—occasionally,
I say, a female ally announced by the crest upon
the blinker of an advancing horse, arrives opposite her
window, and, with only the necessary delay in passing,
they exchange, perhaps, inquiries for health, but, certainly,
programmes, comprehensive though brief, for
the prosecution of each other's loves or hates. Occasionally
a hack cab, seduced into attempting Bond
street by some momentary opening, finds itself closed
in, forty deep, by chariots, butckas, landaus, and family
coaches; and amid the imperturbable and unanswering
whips of the hammercloth, with a passenger
who is losing the coach by the delay, he must wait,
will-he-nill-he, till some “pottering” dowager has
purchased the old lord his winter flannels, or till the
countess of Loiter has said all she has to say to the
guardsman whom she has met accidentally at Pluckrose,
the perfumer's. The three tall fellows, with
gold sticks, would see the entire plebeian population
of London thrice-sodden in vitriol, before they would
advance miladi's carriage a step, or appear to possess
eyes or ears for the infuriated cabman.

Bond street, at this hour, is a study for such observers,
as, having gone through an apprenticeship of
criticism upon all the other races and grades of men
and gentlemen in the world, are now prepared to study

their species in its highest fashionable phase—that of
“nice persons” at the West End. The Oxford-street
“swell,” and the Regent-street dandy, if seen here,
are out of place. The expressive word “quiet” (with
its present London signification), defines the dress,
manner, bow, and even physiognomy, of every true
denizen of St. James's and Bond street. The great
principle among men of the clubs, in all these particulars,
is to subdue—to deprive their coats, hats, and
manners, of everything sufficiently marked to be caricatured
by the satirical or imitated by the vulgar.
The triumph of style seems to be that the lines which
define it shall be imperceptible to the common eye—
that it shall require the difficult education which creates
it to know its form and limit. Hence an almost
universal error with regard to English gentlemen—
that they are repulsive and cold. With a thousand
times the heart and real politeness of the Frenchman,
they meet you with the simple and unaffected address
which would probably be that of shades in Elysium,
between whom (we may suppose) there is no longer
etiquette or concealment. The only exceptions to
this rule in London, are, first and alone, Count —,
whose extraordinary and original style, marked as it
is, is inimitable by any man of less brilliant talents
and less beauty of person, and the king's guardsmen,
who are dandies by prescriptive right, or, as it were,
professionally. All other men who are members of
Brooks's and the Traveller's, and frequent Bond street
in the flush of the afternoon, are what would be called
in America, plain, unornamental, and, perhaps, ill-dressed
individuals, who would strike you more by the
absence than the possession of all the peculiarities
which we generally suppose marks a “picked man of
countries.” In America, particularly, we are liable to
error on this point, as, of the great number of our
travellers for improvement, scarce one in a thousand
remains longer in London than to visit the tower and
the Thames tunnel. The nine hundred and ninety-nine
reside principally, and acquire all they get of foreign
manner and style, at Paris—the very most artificial,
corrupt, and affected school for gentlemen in the
polite world.

Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal
feeling, which common reflection should, and which
enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove.
There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in
almost all countries, but more particularly in ours,
which blinds its entertainers to much that is admirable,
and deprives them of the good drawn from the
best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class
of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds,
and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities,
are barriers which an educated mind may well overlook,
and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best
examples of true civilization and refinement the world
ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we
should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to
the park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May
Fair.

May Fair! what a name for the core of dissipated
and exclusive London! A name that brings with it
only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a
pole wreathed with rose, booths crowded with dancing
peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This—to
express the costly, the courtlike, the so-called “heartless”
precinct of fashion and art, in their most authentic
and envied perfection. Mais, les extrémes se touchent,
and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair
than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge.

We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chesterfield
and Curzon streets to the park gate. What an
aristocratic quiet reigns here! How plain are the exteriors
of these houses: how unexpressive these doors,
without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride
within! At the open window of the hall sit the butler
and footman, reading the morning paper, while they
wait to dispense the “not at home” to callers not disappointed.
The rooks are noisy in the old trees of
Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of
the probably still-slumbering Count —, in his bachelor's
den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour
place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots,
drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther extremity,
announce to you the residence of one whose
morning and evening levées are alike thronged by distinction
and talent—the beautiful Lady —.

This short turn brings us to the park, which is rapidly
filling with vehicles of every fashion and color,
and with pedestrians and horsemen innumerable. No
hackney-coach, street-cab, cart, or pauper, is allowed
to pass the porters at the several gates: the road is
macadamized and watered, and the grass within the
ring is fresh and verdant. The sun here triumphs
partially over the skirt of London smoke, which sways
backward and forward over the chimneys of Park lane,
and, as far as it is possible so near the dingy halo of
the metropolis, the gay occupants of these varied conveyances
“take the air.”

Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what
comes by. This is the field of display for the coachman,
who sits upon his sumptuous hammercloth,
and takes more pride in his horses than their owner,
and considers them, if not like his own honor and
blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate
handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of
his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how
beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily
and well follows the compact carriage! Within (it is
a dark-green calêche, and the liveries are drab, with
red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual
face of a banker's wife, the daughter of a noble race,
who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in “marrying
into the finance,” and who soars up into the sky
of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has escaped
the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny
could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows?
D'Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy,
disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing
his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like
and beautiful prefile, as he passes us, both the thirst
at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of
his “tiger” is neglected, and he drives like a man who
has to choose between running and being run against,
and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for reflection.
Poor D'Israeli! With a kind and generous
heart, talents of the most brilliant order, an ambition
which consumes his soul, and a father who expects
everything from his son; lost for the want of a tact
common to understandings fathoms deep below his
own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years
hence, if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment,
no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times
more melancholy.

An open barouche follows, drawn by a pair of dark
bays, the coachman and footman in suits of plain gray,
and no crest on the panels. A lady, of remarkable
small person, sits, with the fairest foot ever seen, just
peeping from under a cashmere, on the forward cushion,
and from under her peculiarly plain and small
bonnet burn, in liquid fire, the most lambent and
spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the
world. She is a niece of Napoleon, married to an
English nobleman; and beside her sits her father,
who refused the throne of Tuscany, a noble-looking
man, with an expression of calm and tranquil resignation
in his face, unusually plain in his exterior, and
less alive than most of the gay promenaders to the
bright scene passing about him. He will play in the
charade at his daughter's soirée in the evening, however,
and forget his exile and his misfortunes; for he
is a fond father and a true philosopher.

6. CHAPTER VI.
LONDON.

If you dine with all the world at seven, you have
still an hour or more for Hyde Park, and “Rotten
Row;” this half mile between Oxford street and Piccadilly,
to which the fashion of London confines itself,
as if the remainder of the bright green park were forbidden
ground, is now fuller than ever. There is the
advantage in this condensed drive, that you are sure to
see your friends here, earlier or later, in every day—
(for wherever you are to go with horses, the conclusion
of the order to the coachman is, “home by the
park”)—and then if there is anything new in the way
of an arrival, a pretty foreigner, or a fresh face from
the country, some dandy's tiger leaves his master at
the gate, and brings him at his club, over his coffee.
all possible particulars of her name, residence, condition,
and whatever other circumstances fall in his
way. By dropping in at Lady —'s soirèe in the
evening, if you were interested in the face, you may
inform yourself of more than you would have drawn
in a year's acquaintance from the subject of your curiosity.
Malapropos to my remark, here comes a
turn-out, concerning which and its occupant I have
made many inquiries in vain—the pale-colored chariot,
with a pair of grays, dashing toward us from the Seymour
gate. As it comes by you will see, sitting quite
in the corner, and in a very languid and elegant attitude,
a slight woman of perhaps twenty-four, dressed
in the simplest white cottage-bonnet that could be
made, and, with her head down, looking up through
heavy black eyelashes, as if she but waited till she had
passed a particular object, to resume some engrossing
revery. Her features are Italian, and her attitude,
always the same indolent one, has also a redolence of
that land of repose; but there has been an English
taste, and no ordinary one, in the arrangement of that
equipage and its dependants; and by the expression,
never mistaken in London. of the well-appointed menials,
you may be certain that both master and mistress
(if master there be), exact no common deference.
She is always alone, and not often seen in the park;
and whenever I have inquired of those likely to know,
I found that she had been observed, but could get no
satisfactory information. She disappears by the side
toward the Regent's park, and when once out of the
gate, her horses are let off at a speed that distances
all pursuit that would not attract observation. There
is a look of “Who the dence can it be?” in the faces
of all the mounted dandies, wherever she passes, for
it is a face which once seen is not easily thought of
with indifference, or forgotten. Immense as London
is, a woman of anything like extraordinary beauty
would find it difficult to live there incognito a week;
and how this fair incomprehensible has contrived to
elude the curiosity of Hyde-park admiration, for nearly
two years, is rather a marvel. There she goes, however,
and without danger of being arrested for a flying
highwayman you could scarcely follow.

It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the
clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable
comers to the park. Here is a horseman, surrounded
with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of England.
He rides a light bay horse with dark legs,
whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken
threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose
small, animated head seems to express the very essence
of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful
park horse in England; and behind follows a high-bred
milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly-dressed
groom, who sits the spirited and fretting creature
as if he anticipated every movement before the
fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably,
but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of
black curls escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar
hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like
profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as
the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but
for the muscular neck and broad chest from which
the head rises, and the indications of great personal
strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat
would disguise the proportions of a less admirable
figure; but, au reste, his dress is without fold or
wrinkle, and no figurante of the ballet ever showed
finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one
of the most daring in this country of bold riders; but
modifies the stiff English school of equestrianism,
with the ease and grace of that of his own country.
His manner, though he is rather Angtomane, is in
striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his companions;
and between his recognitions, right and left,
to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses
himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a
child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to possess
splendid talents, this “observed of all observers”
is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite—content
to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advantages
of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment.
He seems exempt from all the usual penalties of such
a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him
—care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the disapprobation
of the heavy-handed opinion of the world.
Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any
moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse
an hour, one wonders how and where such an unwonted
meteor will disappear.

But here comes a carriage without hammercloth or
liveries; one of those shabby-genteel conveyances,
hired by the week, containing three or four persons in
the highest spirits, all talking and gesticulating at once.
As the carriage passes the “beau-knot” (as —, and
his inseparable troop are sometimes called), one or
two of the dandies spur up, and resting their hands on
the windows, offer the compliments of the day to the
only lady within, with the most earnest looks of admiration.
The gentlemen in her company become
silent, and answer to the slight bows of the cavaliers
with foreign monosyllables, and presently the coachman
whips up once more, the horsemen drop off, and
the excessive gayety of the party resumes its tone.
You must have been struck, as the carriage passed,
with the brilliant whiteness and regularity of the lady's
teeth, and still more with the remarkable play of her
lips, which move as if the blood in them were imprisoned
lightning. (The figure is strong, but nothing
else conveys to my own mind what I am trying to describe.)
Energy, grace, fire, rapidity, and a capability
of utter abandoment to passion and expression, live
visibly on those lips. Her eyes are magnificent. Her
nose is regular, with nostrils rimmed round with an
expansive nerve, that gives them constantly the kind
of animation visible in the head of a fiery Arab. Her
complexion is one of those which, dark and wanting
in brilliance by day, light up at night with an alabaster
fairness; and when the glossy black hair, which is
now put away so plainly under her simple bonnet,
falls over her shoulders in heavy masses, the contrast
is radiant. The gentlemen in that carriage are Rubini,
Lablache, and a gentleman who passes for the lady's
uncle; and the lady is Julia Grisi.

The smoke over the heart of the city begins to
thicken into darkness, the gas-lamps are shooting up,
bright and star-like, along the Kensington road, and
the last promenaders disappear. And now the world
of London, the rich and gay portion of it at least,
enjoy that which compensates them for the absence
of the bright nights and skies of Italy—a climate
within doors, of comfort and luxury, unknown under
brighter heavens.

7. CHAPTER VII.
ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.

“Instead of parboiling you with a soirée or a dinner,”
said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us
at Ryde, “I shall make a pic-nic to Netley.” And on
a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of
some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of
Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the
swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for Southampton.

Ryde is the most American-looking town I have
seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery
villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the
sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It
is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of
damaged constitutions, with very select society, and
quiet and rather primitive habits. The climate is deliciously
soft, and the sun seems always to shine
there.

As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting
the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful
ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh track,
caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to
start like an apparition from the sea.

“She's a liner, sir!” said the bronzed boatman, suspending
his haul to give her a look of involuntary admiration.

“An American packet, you mean?”

“They're the prettiest ships afloat, sir,” he continued,
“and the smartest handled. They're out to New
York, and back again, before you can look round,
a'most. Ah, I see her flag now—stars and stripes.
Can you see it, sir?”

“Are the captains Englishmen, principally?” I
asked.

“No, sir! all `calkylators;' sharp as a needle!”

“Thank you,” said I; “I am a calculator too!”

The conversation ceased, and I thought from the
boatman's look, that he had more respect than love
for us. The cloud of snowy sail traversed the breadth
of the channel with the speed of a bird, wheeled again
upon her opposite tack, and soon disappeared from
view, taking with her the dove of my imagination to
return with an olive-branch from home. It must be
a cold American heart whose strings are not swept by
that bright flag in a foreign land, like a harp with the
impassioned prelude of the master.

Cowes was soon upon our lee, with her fairy fleet
of yachts lying at anchor—Lord Yarborough's frigate-looking
craft asleep amid its dependant brood, with all
its fine tracery of rigging drawn on a cloudless sky, the
picture of what it is, and what all vessels seem to me
a thing for pleasure only. Darting about like a swallow
on the wing, a small, gayly-painted sloop-yacht,
as graceful and slender as the first bow of the new
moon, played off the roadstead for the sole pleasure
of motion, careless whither; and meantime the low-fringed
shores of the Southampton side grew more
and more distinct, and before we had well settled upon
our cushions, the old tower of the abbey lay sharp
over the bow.

We enjoyed the first ramble through the ruins the
better, that to see them was a secondary object. The
first was to select a grassy spot for our table. Threading
the old unroofed vaults with this errand, the pause
of involuntary homage exacted by a sudden burst upon
an arch or a fretted window, was natural and true; and
for those who are disturbed by the formal and trite
enthusiasm of companions who admire by a prompter,
this stalking-horse of another pursuit was not an indifferent
advantage.

The great roof over the principal nave of the abbey
has fallen in, and lies in rugged and picturesque masses
within the Gothic shell—windows, arches, secret staircases,
and gray walls, all breaking up the blue sky
around, but leaving above, for a smooth and eternal
roof, an oblong and ivy-fringed segment of the blue
plane of heaven. It seems to rest on those crumbling
corners as you stand within.

We selected a rising bank under the shoulder of a
rock, grown over with moss and ivy, and following the
suggestion of a pretty lover of the picturesque, the
shawls and cloaks, with their bright colors, were
thrown over the nearest fragments of the roof, and everybody
unbonneted and assisted in the arrangements. An
old woman who sold apples outside the walls was employed
to build a fire for our teakettle in a niche
where, doubtless, in its holier days, had stood the
effigy of a saint; and at the pedestals of a cluster of
slender columns our attendants displayed upon a table
a show of pasties and bright wines, that, if there be
monkish spirits who walk at Netley, we have added a
poignant regret to their purgatories, that their airy
stomachs can be no more vino ciboque gravati.

We were doing justice to a pretty shoulder of lamb,
with mint sauce, when a slender youth who had been
wandering around with a portfolio, took up an artist's
position in the farther corner of the ruins, and began
to sketch the scene. I mentally felicitated him on the
accident that had brought him to Netley at that particular
moment, for a prettier picture than that before
him an artist could scarce have thrown together. The
inequalities of the floor of the abbey provided a mossy
table for every two or three of the gayly-dressed ladies,
and there they reclined in small and graceful groups,
their white dresses relieved on the luxuriant grass,
and between them, half buried in moss, the sparkling
glasses full of bright wines, and an air of ease and
grace over all, which could belong only to the two
extremes of Arcadian simplicity, or its high-bred imitation.
We amused ourselves with the idea of appearing,
some six months after, in the middle ground
of a landscape, in a picturesque annual; and I am
afraid that I detected, on the first suggestion of the
idea, a little unconscious attitudinizing in some of the
younger members of the party. It was proposed that
the artist should be invited to take wine with us; but
as a rosy-cheeked page donned his gold hat to carry
our compliments, the busy draughtsman was joined
by one or two ladies not quite so attractive-looking as
himself, but evidently of his own party, and our messenger
was recalled. Sequitur—they who would find
adventure should travel alone.

The monastic ruins of England derive a very peculiar
and touching beauty from the bright veil of ivy
which almost buries them from the sun. This constant
and affectionate mourner draws from the moisture
of the climate a vividness and luxuriance which is
found in no other land. Hence the remarkable loveliness
of Netley—a quality which impresses the visiters
to this spot, far more than the melancholy usually
inspired by decay.

Our gayety shocked some of the sentimental people
rambling about the ruins, for it is difficult for those
who have not dined to sympathize with the mirth of
those who have. How often we mistake for sadness
the depression of an empty stomach! How differently
authors and travellers would write, if they commenced
the day, instead of ending it, with meats and wine! I
was led to these reflections by coming suddenly upon
a young lady and her companion (possibly her lover),
in climbing a ruined staircase sheathed within the
wall of the abbey. They were standing at one of the
windows, quite unconscious of my neighborhood, and
looking down upon the gay party of ladies below, who
were still amid the débris of the feast arranging their
bonnets for a walk.

“What a want of soul,” said the lady, “to be eating
and drinking in such a place!”

“Some people have no souls,” responded the gentleman.

After this verdict, I thought the best thing I could
do was to take care of my body, and I very carefully
backed down the old staircase, which is probably more
hazardons now than in the days when it was used to
admit damsels and haunches of venison to the reverend
fathers.

I reached the bottom in safety, and informed my
friends that they had no souls, but they manifested
the usual unconcern on the subject, and strolled away
through the echoing arches, in search of new points
of view and fresh wild-flowers. “Commend me at
least,” I thought, as I followed on, “to those whose
pulses can be quickened even by a cold pie and a glass
of champagne. Sadness and envy are sown thickly
enough by any wayside.”

We were embarked once more by the middle of the
afternoon, and with a head wind, but smooth water and
cool temperature, beat back to Ryde. If the young
lady and her lover have forgiven or forgotten us, and
the ghosts of Netley, frocked or petticoated, have
taken no umbrage, I have not done amiss in marking
the day with a stone of the purest white. How much
more sensible is a party like this, in the open air, and
at healthy hours, than the untimely and ceremonious
civilities usually paid to strangers. If the world would
mend by moralising, however, we should have had a
Utopia long ago.

8. CHAPTEER VIII.
COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OF EUROPE AND
AMERICA.

One of Hazlitt's nail-driving remarks is to the effect
that he should like very well to pass the whole of his life
in travelling, if he could anywhere borrow another life
to spend afterward at home. How far action is necessary
to happiness, and how far repose—how far the
appetite for novelty and adventure will drive, and how
far the attractions of home and domestic comfort will
recall us—in short, what are the precise exactions of
the antagonist principles in our bosoms of curiosity
and sloth, energy and sufferance, hope and memory—
are questions which each one must settle for himself,
and which none can settle but he who has passed his
life in the eternal and fruitless search after the happiest
place, climate, and station.

Contentment depends upon many things within our
own control, but, with a certain education, it depends
partly upon things beyond it. To persons delicately
constituted or delicately brought up, and to all idle
persons, the principal ingredient in the cup of enjoyment
is climate; and Providence, that consults “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has made
the poor and the roughly-nurtured independent of the
changes of the wind. Those who have the misfortune
to be delicate as well as poor—those, particularly, for
whom there is no hope but in a change of clime, but
whom pitiless poverty compels to languish in vain
after the reviving south, are happily few; but they
have thus much more than their share of human calamity.

In throwing together my recollections of the climates
with which I have become acquainted in other
lands, I am aware that there is a greater difference of
opinion on this subject than on most others. A man
who has agreeable society about him in Montreal, but
who was without friends in Florence, would be very
likely to bring the climate in for its share of the difference,
and prefer Canada to Italy; and health and
circumstances of all kinds affect, in no slight degree,
our susceptibility to skies and atmosphere. But it is
sometimes interesting to know the impressions of others,
even though they agree not with our own; and I
will only say of mine on this subject, that they are so
far likely to be fair, as I have been blessed with the
same perfect health in all countries, and have been
happy alike in every latitude and season.

It is almost a matter of course to decry the climate
of England. The English writers themselves talk of
the suicidal months; and it is the only country where
part of the livery of a mounted groom is his master's
great-coat strapped about his waist. It is certainly a
damp climate, and the sun shines less in England than
in most other countries. But to persons of full habit
this moisture in the air is extremely agreeable; and
the high condition of all animals in England, from
man downward, proves its healthfulness. A stranger
who has been accustomed to a brighter sky, will, at
first, find a gloom in the gray light so characteristic of
an English atmosphere; but this soon wears off, and
he finds a compensation, as far as the eye is concerned,
in the exquisite softness of the verdure, and
the deep and enduring brightness of the foliage. The
effect of this moisture on the skin is singularly grateful.
The pores become accustomed to a healthy action,
which is unknown in other countries; and the
bloom by which an English complexion is known all
over the world is the index of an activity in this important
part of the system, which, when first experienced,
is almost like a new sensation. The transition
to a dry climate, such as ours, deteriorates the condition
and quality of the skin, and produces a feeling,
if I may so express it, like that of being glazed. It is
a common remark in England, that an officer's wife
and daughters follow his regiment to Canada at the
expense of their complexions; and it is a well-known
fact that the bloom of female beauty is, in our country,
painfully evanescent.

The climate of America is, in many points, very
different from that of France and Great Britain. In
the middle and northern states, it is a dry, invigorating,
bracing climate, in which a strong man may do
more work than in almost any other, and which makes
continual exercise, or occupation of some sort, absolutely
necessary. With the exception of the “Indian
summer,” and here and there a day scattered through
the spring and the hot months, there is no weather
tempered so finely that one would think of passing
the day in merely enjoying it, and life is passed, by
those who have the misfortune to be idle, in continual
and active dread of the elements. The cold is so
acrid, and the heat so sultry, and the changes from
one to the other are so sudden and violent, that no
enjoyment can be depended upon out-of-doors, and
no system of clothing or protection is good for a day
together. He who has full occupation for head and
hand (as by far the greatest majority of our countrymen
have) may live as long in America as in any portion
of the globe—vide the bills of mortality. He
whose spirits lean upon the temperature of the wind,
or whose nerves require a genial and constant atmosphere,
may find more favorable climes; and the habits
and delicate constitutions of scholars and people
of sedentary pursuits generally, in the United States,
prove the truth of the observation.

The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which
is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely possible
in America. It is said, and said truly, of the
first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may
not ride comfortably on horseback; but with us, the
extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous character
of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a delicate
person, anything like regularity in exercise. The
consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the
high and glowing health so common in England, and
consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of
the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently

rare to excite remark. “Very English-looking,” is a
common phrase, and means very healthy-looking.
Still our people last—and though I should define the
English climate as the one in which the human frame
is in the highest condition, I should say of America,
that it is the one in which you could get the most
work out of it.

Atmosphere, in England and America, is the first
of the necessaries of life. In Italy, it is the first of its
luxuries. We breathe in America, and walk abroad,
without thinking of these common acts but as a means
of arriving at happiness. In Italy, to breathe and to
walk abroad are themselves happiness. Day after day
—week after week—month after month—you wake
with the breath of flowers coming in at your open
window, and a sky of serene and unfathomable blue,
and mornings and evenings of tranquil, assured, heavenly
purity and beauty. The few weeks of the rainy
season are forgotten in these long halcyon months of
sunshine. No one can have lived in Italy a year, who
remembers anything but the sapphire sky and the
kindling and ever-seen stars. You grow insensibly to
associate the sunshine and moonlight only with the
fountain you have lived near, or the columns of the
temple you have seen from your window, for on no
objects in other lands have you seen their light so
constant.

I scarce know how to convey, in language, the effect
of the climate of Italy on mind and body. Sitting
here, indeed, in the latitude of thirty-nine, in the
middle of April, by a warm fire, and with a cold wind
whistling at the window, it is difficult to recall it, even
to the fancy. I do not know whether life is prolonged,
but it is infinitely enriched and brightened, by
the delicious atmosphere of Italy. You rise in the
morning, thanking Heaven for life and liberty to go
abroad. There is a sort of opiate in the air, which
makes idleness, that would be the vulture of Prometheus
in America, the dove of promise in Italy. It is
delicious to do nothing—delicious to stand an hour
looking at a Savoyard and his monkey—delicious to
sit away the long, silent noon, in the shade of a column,
or on the grass of a fountain—delicious to be
with a friend without the interchange of an idea—to
dabble in a book, or look into the cup of a flower.
You do not read, for you wish to enjoy the weather.
You do not visit, for you hate to enter a door while
the weather is so fine. You lie down unwillingly for
your siesta in the hot noon, for you fear you may
oversleep the first coolness of the long shadows of
sunset. The fancy, meantime, is free, and seems liberated
by the same languor that enervates the severer
faculties; and nothing seems fed by the air but
thoughts, which minister to enjoyment.

The climate of Greece is very much that of Italy.
The Mediterranean is all beloved of the sun. Life
has a value there, of which the rheumatic, shivering,
snow-breasting, blue-devilled idler of northern regions
has no shadow, even in a dream. No wonder Dante
mourned and languished for it. No wonder at the
sentiment I once heard from distinguished lips—Fuori
d'Italia tutto e esilio.

This appears like describing a Utopia; but it is
what Italy seemed to me. I have expressed myself
much more to my mind, however, in rhyme, for a
prose essay is, at best, but a cold medium.

9. CHAPTER IX.
STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

“One-p'un'-five outside, sir, two p'un' in.”

It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, promising
nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn,
when I stepped in at the “White Horse Cellar,” in
Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for
Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the
coach, at least by as much as the difference in the
prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest
for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down
for the outside, and deposited my two pounds in the
horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the
box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and
portmanteaus. Supposing my business concluded, I
stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten,
cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to reconcile
his ideas of “retirement from office” with those
of his almost next door neighbor, the hero of Strathfieldsaye.

I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when
a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip
—a technical “reminder,” which probably came easier
to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a
“gemman”—recalled me to the cellar.

“Fifteen shillin', sir,” said he laconically, pointing
with the same expressive exponent of his profession
to the change for my outside place, which I had left
lying on the counter.

“You are at least as honest as the duke,” I soliloquised,
as I pocketed the six bright and substantial
half-crowns.

I was at the “White Horse Cellar” again the following
morning at six, promising myself with great
sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an
English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside
places were all taken, and with twelve fellow-outsides,
I mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw
by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my umbrella,
abandoned my knees with a single effort of
mind to the drippings of the driver's weather-proof
upper Benjamin, and away we sped. I was “due” at
the house of a hospitable catholic baronet, a hundred
and two miles from London, at the dinner-hour of that
day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is
to expect the millennium.

London in the morning—I mean the poor man's
morning, daylight—is to me matter for the most
speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in
the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with
equipages and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank
and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial qualities
of the blood trippingly through the veins. But
Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through
fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who
has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispiriting
and dreary. To remember that behind the barricaded
and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the
hero of Waterloo—that under these crowded and fogwrapped
houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing
of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly-moulded
creatures who preserve for the aristocracy
of England the palm of the world's beauty—to remember
this, and a thousand other associations linked with
the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen,
the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the
deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ballroom,
the loneliness of a frequented promenade in
untimely hours—any scene, in short, of gayety gone
by but remembered—oppresses and dissatisfies the
heart! One would think memory should re-brighten
and re-populate such places.

The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the
Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small
hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick
and monotonous beat on the ear; the silent driver kept
his eye on the traces, and “reminded” now and then
with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler
or leader, and the complicated but compact machine
of which the square foot that I occupied had been so
nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour

with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, and as independent
of clouds and rain.

“Est ce que monsieur parle François?” asked at the
end of the first stage my right-hand neighbor, a little
gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that
he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with
great tenacity.

Having admitted in an evil moment that I had been
in France, I was first distinctly made to understand
that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham
purely for pleasure, and without the most distant object
of business—a point on which he insisted so long,
and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in
persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for
the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons.
After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rashness
of committing one's life to an English stagecoach,
with scarce room enough for the perch of a
parrot, and a velocity so diablement dangereux, I tired
of my Frenchman; and, since I could not have my
own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a
straw-bonnet and shawl on my left—the property, I
soon discovered, of a very smart lady's maid, very indignant
at having been made to change places with
Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress,
were dry and comfortable inside. She “would not
have minded the outside place,” she said, “for there
were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the outside,
very!—but she had been promised to go inside,
and had dressed accordingly; and it was very provoking
to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just
because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that
would damage chose not to ride in the rain.”

“Very provoking, indeed!” I responded, letting in
the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my
umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of
the wind.

“We should have gone down in the carriage, sir,”
she continued, edging a little closer to get the full advantage
of my umbrella; “but John the coachman
has got the hinfluenzy, and my missis wo'n't be driven
by no other coachman; she's as obstinate as a mule,
sir. And that isn't all I could tell, sir; but I scorns
to hurt the character of one of my own sex.” And
the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked
determined not to destroy her mistress's character—
unless particularly requested.

I detest what may be called a proper road-book—
even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on
a country so well conned as England.

I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which
looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen
through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remember
is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and
my knees saturated with rain. All England is lovely
to the wild eye of an American unused to high cultivation;
and though my enthusiasm was somewhat damp,
i arrived at the bridge over the Avon, blessing England
sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed
of its coaches.

The Avon, above and below the bridge, ran brightly
along between low banks, half sward, half meadow;
and on the other side lay the native town of the immortal
wool-comber—a gay cheerful-looking village,
narrowing in the centre to a closely-built street, across
which swung, broad and fair, the sign of the “Red
horse.” More ambitious hotels lay beyond, and
broader streets; but while Washington Irving is remembered
(and that will be while the language lasts),
the quiet inn in which the great Geoffrey thought
and wrote of Shakspere will be the altar of the pilgrim's
devotions.

My baggage was set down, the coachman and guard
tipped their hats for a shilling, and, chilled to the bone,
I raised my hat instinctively to the courtesy of a slender
gentlewoman in black, who, by the keys at her girdle,
should be the landlady. Having expected to see a
rosy little Mrs. Boniface, with a brown pinafore and
worsted mittens, I made up my mind at once that the
inn had changed mistresses. On the right of the old-fashioned
entrance blazed cheerily the kitchen fire,
and with my enthusiasm rather dashed by my disappointment,
I stepped in to make friends with the cook,
and get a little warmth and information.

“So your old mistress is dead, Mrs. Cook,” said I,
rubbing my hands with great satisfaction between the
fire and a well-roasted chicken.

“Lauk, sir, no, she isn't!” answered the rosy lass,
pointing with a dredging-box to the same respectable
lady in black who was just entering to look after me.

“I beg pardon, sir,” she said, dropping a courtesy;
“but are you the gentleman expected by Sir
Charles —?”

“Yes, madam. And can you tell me anything of
your predecessor who had the inn in the days of
Washington Irving?”

She dropped another courtesy, and drew up her
thin person to its full height, while a smile of gratified
vanity stole out at the corners of her mouth.

“The carriage has been waiting some time for you,
sir,” she said, with a softer tone than that in which
she had hitherto addressed me; “and you will hardly
be at C— in time for dinner. You will be coming
over to-morrow or the day after, perhaps, sir; and
then, if you would honor my little room by taking a
cup of tea with me, I should be pleased to tell you all
about it, sir.”

I remembered a promise I had nearly forgotten,
that I would reserve my visit to Stratford till I could
be accompanied by Miss J. P—, whom I was to
have the honor of meeting at my place of destination;
and promising an early acceptance of the kind landlady's
invitation, I hurried on to my appointment over
the fertile hills of Warwickshire.

I was established in one of those old Elizabeth
country-houses, which, with their vast parks, their
self-sufficing resources of subsistence and company,
and the absolute deference shown on all sides to the
lord of the manor, give one the impression rather of a
little kingdom with a castle in its heart, than of an
abode for a gentleman subject. The house itself
(called, like most houses of this size and consequence
in Warwickshire, a “Court,”) was a Gothic, half-castellated
square, with four round towers, and innumerable
embrasures and windows; two wings in
front, probably more modern than the body of the
house, and again two long wings extending to the rear,
at right angles, and enclosing a flowery and formal
parterre. There had been a trench about it, now
filled up, and at a short distance from the house stood
a polyangular and massive structure, well calculated
for defence, and intended as a strong-hold for the retreat
of the family and tenants in more troubled times.
One of these rear wings enclosed a catholic chapel,
for the worship of the baronet and those of his tenants
who professed the same faith; while on the northern
side, between the house and the garden, stood a large
protestant stone church, with a turret and spire, both
chapel and church, with their clergyman and priest,
dependant on the estate, and equally favored by the
liberal and high-minded baronet. The tenantry formed
two considerable congregations, and lived and worshipped
side by side, with the most perfect harmony
—an instance of real Christianity, in my opinion, which
the angels of heaven might come down to see. A
lovely rural graveyard for the lord and tenants, and a
secluded lake below the garden, in which hundreds of
wild ducks swam and screamed unmolested, completed
the outward features of C— court.

There are noble houses in England, with a door
communicating from the dining-room to the stables,
that the master and his friends may see their favorites,

after dinner, without exposure to the weather. In the
place of this rather bizarre luxury, the oak-panelled
and spacious dining-hall of C— is on a level with
the organ loft of the chapel, and when the cloth is removed,
the large door between is thrown open, and
the noble instrument pours the rich and thrilling
music of vespers through the rooms. When the
service is concluded, and the lights on the altar extinguished,
the blind organist (an accomplished musician,
and a tenant on the estate), continues his voluntaries
in the dark until the hall-door informs him of
the retreat of the company to the drawing-room.
There is not only refinement and luxury in this
beautiful arrangement, but food for the soul and
heart.

I chose my room from among the endless vacant
but equally luxurious chambers of the rambling old
house; my preference solely directed by the portrait
of a nun, one of the family in ages gone by—a picture
full of melancholy beauty, which hung opposite the
window. The face was distinguished by all that in
England marks the gentlewoman of ancient and pure
descent; and while it was a woman with the more
tender qualities of her sex breathing through her features,
it was still a lofty and sainted sister, true to her
cross, and sincere in her vows and seclusion. It was
the work of a master, probably Vandyke, and a picture
in which the most solitary man would find company
and communion. On the other walls, and in most of
the other rooms and corridors, were distributed portraits
of the gentlemen and soldiers of the family, most
of them bearing some resemblance to the nun, but
differing, as brothers in those wild times may be supposed
to have differed, from the gentle creatures of the
same blood, nursed in the privacy of peace.

10. CHAPTER X.
VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON—SHAKSPERE.

One of the first visits in the neighborhood was naturally
to Stratford-on-Avon. It lay some ten miles
south of us, and I drove down, with the distinguished
literary friend I have before mentioned, in the carriage
of our kind host, securing, by the presence of
his servants and equipage, a degree of respect and attention
which would not have been accorded to us in
our simple character of travellers. The prim mistress
of the “Red Horse,” in her close black bonnet and
widow's weeds, received us at the door with a deeper
courtesy than usual, and a smile of less wintry formality;
and proposing to dine at the inn, and “suck the
brain” of the hostess more at our leisure, we started
immediately for the house of the wool-comber—the
birthplace of Shakspere.

Stratford should have been forbidden ground to
builders, masons, shopkeepers, and generally to all
people of thrift and whitewash. It is now rather a
smart town, with gay calicoes, shawls of the last pattern,
hardware, and millinery, exhibited in all their
splendor down the widened and newer streets; and
though here and there remains a glorious old gloomy
and inconvenient abode, which looks as if Shakspere
might have taken shelter under its eaves, the gayer
features of the town have the best of it, and flaunt their
gaudy and unrespected newness in the very windows
of that immortal birthplace. I stepped into a shop to
inquire the way to it.

“Shiksper's 'ouse, sir? Yes, sir!” said a dapper
clerk, with his hair astonished into the most impossible
directions by force of brushing; “keep to the
right, sir! Shiksper lived in the wite 'ouse, sir—the
'ouse, you see beyond, with the windy swung up, sir.”

A low, old-fashioned house, with a window sus
pended on a hinge, newly whitewashed and scrubbed,
stood a little up the street. A sign over the door informed
us in an inflated paragraph, that the immortal
Will Shakspere was born under this roof, and that an
old woman within would show it to us for a consideration.
It had been used until very lately, I had been
told, for a butcher's shop.

A “garrulous old lady” met us at the bottom of the
narrow stair leading to the second floor, and began—
not to say anything of Shakespere—but to show us the
names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, &c., written among
thousands of others on the wall! She had worn out
Shakspere! She had told that story till she was tired
of it! or (what, perhaps, is more probable) most
people who go there fall to reading the names of the
visiters so industriously, that she has grown to think
some of Shakspere's pilgrims greater than Shakspere.

“Was this old oaken chest here in the days of
Shakspere, madam?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, and here's the name of Byron—here with
a capital B. Here's a curiosity, sir.”

“And this small wooden box?”

“Made of Shakspere's mulberry, sir. I had sich a
time about that box, sir. Two young gemmen were
here the other day—just run up, while the coach was
changing horses, to see the house. As soon as they
were gone I misses the box. Off scuds my son to the
`Red Horse,' and there they sat on the top looking as
innocent as may be. `Stop the coach,' says my son.
`What do you want?' says the driver. `My mother's
mulberry-box!—Shakspere's mulberry-box!—One of
them 'ere young men's got it in his pocket.' And
true enough, sir, one on 'em had the imperence to
take it out of his pocket, and flings it into my son's
face; and you know the coach never stops a minnit for
nothing, sir, or he'd a' smarted for it.”

Spirit of Shakspere! dost thou not sometimes walk
alone in this humble chamber! Must one's inmost
soul be fretted and frighted always from its devotion
by an abominable old woman? Why should not such
lucrative occupations be given in charity to the deaf
and dumb? The pointing of a finger were enough in
such spots of earth!

I sat down in despair to look over the book of visiters,
trusting that she would tire of my inattention.
As it was of no use to point out names to those who
would not look, however, she commenced a long story
of an American who had lately taken the whim to
sleep in Shakspere's birth-chamber. She had shaken
him down a bed on the floor, and he had passed the
night there. It seemed to bother her to comprehend
why two thirds of her visiters should be Americans—
a circumstance that was abundantly proved by the
books.

It was only when we were fairly in the street that I
began to realize that I had seen one of the most glorious
altars of memory—that deathless Will Shakspere,
the mortal, who was, perhaps (not to speak profanely),
next to his Maker, in the divine faculty of creation,
first saw the light through the low lattice on which
we turned back to look.

The single window of the room in which Scott died
at Abbotsford, and this in the birth-chamber of Shakspere,
have seemed to me almost marked with the
touch of the fire of those great souls—for I think we
have an instinct which tells us on the spot where
mighty spirits have come or gone, that they came and
went with the light of heaven.

We walked down the street to see the house where
Shakspere lived on his return to Stratford. It stands
at the corner of a lane, not far from the church where
he was buried, and is a newish un-Shaksperian looking
place—no doubt, if it be indeed the same house, most
profanely and considerably altered. The present proprietor
or occupant of the house or site took upon
himself some time since the odium of cutting down

the famous mulberry-tree planted by the poet's hand
in the garden.

I forgot to mention in the beginning of these notes
that two or three miles before coming to Stratford we
passed through Shottery, where Anne Hathaway lived.
A nephew of the excellent baronet whose guests we
were occupies the house. I looked up and down the
green lanes about it, and glanced my eye round upon
the hills over which the sun has continued to set and
the moon to ride in her love-inspiring beauty ever
since. There were doubtless outlines in the landscape
which had been followed by the eye of Shakspere
when coming, a trembling lover, to Shottrey—doubtless,
teints in the sky, crops on the fields, smoke-wreaths
from the old homesteads on the high hill-sides,
which are little altered now. How daringly the
imagination plucks back the past in such places!
How boldly we ask of fancy and probability the thousand
questions we would put, if we might, to the magic
mirror of Agrippa? Did that great mortal love timidly,
like ourselves? Was the passionate outpouring
of his heart simple, and suited to the humble condition
of Anne Hathway, or was it the first fiery coinage of
Romeo and Othello? Did she know the immortal
honor and light poured upon woman by the love of
genius? Did she know how this common and oftenest
terrestrial passion becomes fused in the poet's bosom
with celestial fire, and, in its wondrous elevation
and purity, ascends lambently and musically to the
very stars? Did she coy it with him? Was she a
woman to him, as commoner mortals find woman—capricious,
tender, cruel, intoxicating, cold—everything
by changes impossible to calculate or foresee? Did
he walk home to Stratford, sometimes, despairing, in
perfect sick-heartedness, of her affection, and was he
recalled by a message or a lover's instinct to find her
weeping and passionately repentant?

How natural it is by such questions and speculations
to betray our innate desire to bring the lofty
spirits of our common mould to our own inward level—
to seek analogies between our affections, passions, appetites,
and theirs—to wish they might have been no more
exalted, no more fervent, no more worthy of the adorable
love of woman than ourselves! The same temper
that prompts the depreciation, the envy, the hatred,
exercised toward the poet in his lifetime, mingles, not
inconsiderably, in the researches so industriously prosecuted
after his death into his youth and history. To
be admired in this world, and much more to be beloved
for higher qualities than his fellow-men, insures to
genius not only to be persecuted in life, but to be
ferreted out with all his frailties and imperfections
from the grave.

The church in which Shakspere is buried stands
near the banks of the Avon, and is a most picturesque
and proper place of repose for his ashes. An avenue
of small trees and vines, ingeniously overlaced, extends
from the street to the principal door, and the
interior is broken up into that confused and accidental
medley of tombs, pews, cross-lights, and pillars, for
which the old churches of England are remarkable.
The tomb and effigy of the great poet lie in an inner
chapel, and are as described in every traveller's book.
I will not take up room with the repetition.

It gives one an odd feeling to see the tomb of his
wife and daughter beside him. One does not realize
before, that Shakspere had wife, children, kinsmen,
like other men—that there were those who had a right
to lie in the same tomb; to whom he owed the charities
of life; whom he may have benefited or offended;
who may have influenced materially his destiny, or
he theirs; who were the inheritors of his household
goods, his wardrobe, his books—people who looked
on him—on Shakspere—as a landholder, a renter of a
pew, a townsman; a relative, in short, who had claims
upon them, not for the eternal homage due to celestial
inspiration, but for the charity of shelter and bread
had he been poor, for kindness and ministry had he
been sick, for burial and the tears of natural affection
when he died. It is painful and embarrassing to the
mind to go to Stratford—to reconcile the immortality
and the incomprehensible power of genius like Shakspere's,
with the space, tenement, and circumstance
of a man! The poet should be like the sea-bird, seen
only on the wing—his birth, his slumber, and his
death, mysteries alike.

I had stipulated with the hostess that my baggage
should be put into the chamber occupied by Washington
Irving. I was shown into it to dress for dinner
—a small neat room, a perfect specimen, in short, of
an English bedroom, with snow-white curtains, a looking-glass
the size of the face, a well-polished grate
and poker, a well-fitted carpet, and as much light as
heaven permits to the climate.

Our dinner for two was served in a neat parlor on
the same floor—an English inn dinner—simple, neat,
and comfortable, in the sense of that word unknown in
other countries. There was just fire enough in the
grate, just enough for two in the different dishes, a
servant who was just enough in the room, and just
civil enough—in short, it was, like everything else in
that country of adaptation and fitness, just what was
ordered and wanted, and no more.

The evening turned out stormy, and the rain pattered
merrily against the windows. The shutters were
closed, the fire blazed up with new brightness, the
well-fitted wax lights were set on the table; and when
the dishes were removed, we replaced the wine with a
tea-tray, and sent for the hostess to give us her company
and a little gossip over our cups.

Nothing could be more nicely understood and defined
than the manner of English hostesses generally
in such situations, and of Mrs. Gardiner particularly
in this. Respectful without servility, perfectly sure
of the propriety of her own manner and mode of expression,
yet preserving in every look and word the
proper distinction between herself and her guests, she
insured form them that kindness and ease of communication
which would make a long evening of social
conversation pass, not only without embarrassment on
either side, but with mutual pleasure and gratification.

“I have brought up, mem,” she said, producing a
well-polished poker from under her black apron, before
she took the chair set for her at the table—“I
have brought up a relic for you to see, that no money
would buy from me.”

She turned it over in my hand, and I read on one
of the flat sides at the bottom—“GEOFFREY CRAYON'S
SCEPTRE.”

“Do you remember Mr. Irving,” asked my friend,
“or have you supposed, since reading his sketch of
Stratford-on-Avon, that the gentleman in number
three might be the person?”

The hostess drew up her thin figure, and the expression
of a person about to compliment herself stole
into the corners of her mouth.

“Why, you see, mem, I am very much in the habit
of observing my guests, and I think I may say I knows
a superior gentleman when I sees him. If you remember,
mem” (and she took down from the mantle-piece
a much-worn copy of the Sketch-Book), “Geoffrey
Crayon tells the circumstance of my stepping in
when it was getting late, and asking if he had rung.
I knows it by that, and then the gentleman I mean
was an American, and I think, mem, besides” (and she
hesitated a little, as if she was about to advance an
original and rather venturesome opinion)—“I think
I can see that gentleman's likeness all though this
book.”

A truer remark or a more just criticism was perhaps
never made on the Sketch-Book. We smiled,
and Mrs. Gardiner proceeded:—

“I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he
arrived, mem, and I sees directly by his modest ways
and timid look that he was a gentleman, and not fit
company for the other travellers. They were all young
men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem,
ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and after
their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So, I
says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, `That nice
gentleman can't get near the fire, and you go and light
a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it
shan't cost him nothing, for I like the look on him.'
Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after
his tea, he puts his legs up over the grate, and there
he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o'clock.
The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house
was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate
now and then in number three, and every time I heard
it, I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting
very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for
a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still
no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I,
`Go into number three, and upset something, for I am
sure that gentleman has fallen asleep.'—`La, ma'am,'
says Sarah, `I don't dare.'—`Well, then,' says I, `I'll
go.' So I opens the door, and I says, `If you please,
sir, did you ring?'—little thinking that question would
ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem.
He sat with his feet on the fender poking the fire, and
a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was
in his mind. `No, ma'am,' says he, `I did not.' I
shuts the door, and sits down again, for I hadn't the
heart to tell him that it was late, for he was a gentleman
not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past
twelve o'clock, when the bell did ring. `There,' says
I to Sarah, `thank Heaven he has done thinking, and
we can go to bed.' So he walked up stairs with his
light, and the next morning he was up early and off
to the Shakspere house, and he brings me home a box
of the mulberry-tree, and asks me if I thought it was
genuine, and said it was for his mother in America.
And I loved him still more for that, and I'm sure I
prayed she might live to see him return.”

“I believe she did, Mrs. Gardiner; but how soon
after did you set aside the spoker?”

“Why, sir, you see there's a Mr. Vincent that
comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day—
`So, Mrs. Gardiner, you're finely immortalized. Read
that.' So the minnit I read it, I remembered who it
was, and all about it, and I runs and gets the number
three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by-and-by
I sends it to Brummagem, and has his name
engraved on it, and here you see it, sir—and I wouldn't
take no money for it.”

I had never the honor to meet or know Mr. Irving,
and I evidently lost ground with the hostess of the
“Red Horse” for that misfortune. I delighted her,
however, with the account which I had seen in a late
newspaper, of his having shot a buffalo in the prairies
of the west; and she soon courtesied herself out, and
left me to the delightful society of the distinguished
lady who had accompanied me. Among all my many
loiterings in many lands, I remember none more intellectually
pure and gratifying, than this at Stratford-on-Avon.
My sleep, in the little bed consecrated by
the slumbers of the immortal Geoffrey, was sweet and
light; and I write myself his debtor for a large share
of the pleasure which genius like his lavishes on the
world.

11. CHAPTER XI.
CHARLECOTE.

Once more posting through Shottery and Stratford-on-Avon,
on the road to Kenilworth and Warwick, I
felt a pleasure in becoming an habitué in Shakspere's
town—in being recognised by the Stratford post-boys,
known at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the
toll-gates. It is pleasant to be welcomed by name
anywhere; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a recognition
by those whose fathers or predecessors were the
companions of Shakspere's frolics. Every fellow in
a slouched hat—every idler on a tavern bench—every
saunterer with a dog at his heels on the highway—
should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would
almost ask him, “Was Will Shakspere with you last
night?”

The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized
by a varlet poacher who was tried before old Sir
Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an
apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too
free with the family history, under cover of an imaginary
account of the trial. I thought, as we drove
along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park
and majestic trees—very much as it stood in the
days of Sir Thomas, I believe—that most probably
the descendants of the old justice look even now upon
Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws
than as a writer of immortal plays. I venture to say,
it would be bad tact in a visiter to Charlecote to felicitate
the family on the honor of possessing a park in
which Shakspere had stolen deer—to show more interest
in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in
the family portraits.

On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford
to Charlecote) Shakspere had been dragged as a culprit.
What were his feelings before Sir Thomas!
He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire
of genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact
with his fellow-men, that he was too much their superior
to be angry. The humor in which he has drawn
Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more
amused then displeased with his own trial. But was
there no vexation at the moment? A reflection, it
might be, from the estimate of his position in the
minds of those who were about him—who looked on
him simply as a stealer of so much venison. Did he
care for Anne Hathaway's opinion then?

How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the
relation between judge and culprit on that trial! How
little did he dream he was sitting for his picture to the
pestilent varlet at the bar; that the deer-stealer could
better afford to forgive him than he the deer-stealer!
Genius forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in
ignorance of its immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson
made a wilful jest on a line in his new play, it would
have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for
deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample
upon men of genius in the common walk of life; who
cheat them, misrepresent them, take advantage of their
inattention or their generosity in worldly matters, are
sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not themselves,
are forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might
as well have held malice against Roland Græme for
the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of Misrule.

Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph
gone before, it is probably not easy to put conscious
and secret superiority entirely between the mind and
the opinions of those around who think differently.
It is one reason why men of genius love more than
the common share of solitude—to recover self-respect.
In the midst of the amusing travesty he was drawing
in his own mind of the grave scene about him, Shakspere
possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit
as he seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It
is a small penalty to pay for the after worship of the
world! The ragged and proverbially ill-dressed
peasants who are selected from the whole campagna,
as models to the sculptors of Rome, care little what
is thought of their good looks in the Corso. The

disguised proportions beneath their rags will be admired
in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce
deigns their possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust
under his stone scutcheon.

12. CHAPTER XII.
WARWICK CASTLE.

Were it not for the “out-heroded” descriptions in
the guide-books, one might say a great deal of Warwick
castle. It is the quality of overdone or ill-expressed
enthusiasm to silence that which is more
rational and real. Warwick is, perhaps, the best kept
of all the famous old castles of England. It is a superb
and admirably-appointed modern dwelling, in the shell,
and with all the means and appliances preserved, of
an ancient stronghold. It is a curious union, too. My
lady's maid and my lord's valet coquet upon the bartizan,
where old Guy of Warwick stalked in his coat-of-mail.
The London cockney, from his two days'
watering at Leamington, stops his pony-chaise, hired
at half-a-crown the hour, and walks Mrs. Popkins
over the old draw-bridge as peacefully as if it were the
threshold of his shop in the Strand. Scot and Frenchman
saunter through fosse and tower, and no ghost of
the middle ages stalks forth, with closed visor, to
challenge these once natural foes. The powdered
butler yawns through an embrasure, expecting “miladi,”
the countess of this fair domain, who in one day's
posting from London seeks relief in Warwick Castle
from the routs and soirées of town. What would old
Guy say, or the “noble imp” whose effigy is among
the escutcheoned tombs of his fathers, if they could
rise through their marble slabs, and be whirled over the
drawbridge in a post-chaise? How indignantly they
would listen to the reckoning within their own portcullis,
of the rates for chaise and postillion. How
astonished they would be at the butler's bow, and the
proffered officiousness of the valet. “Shall I draw
off your lordship's boots? Which of these new vests
from Staub will your lordship put on for dinner?”

Among the pictures at Warwick, I was interested
by a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (the best of that sovereign
I ever saw); one of Machiavelli, one of Essex,
and one of Sir Philip Sidney. The delightful and
gifted woman whom I had accompanied to the castle
observed of the latter, that the hand alone expressed
all his character. I had often made the remark in
real life, but I had never seen an instance on painting
where the likeness was so true. No one could doubt,
who knew Sir Philip Sidney's character, that it was a
literal portrait of his hand. In our day, if you have
an artist for a friend, he makes use of you while you
call, to “sit for the hand” of the portrait on his easel.
Having a preference for the society of artists myself,
and frequenting their studios habitually, I know of
some hundred and fifty unsuspecting gentlemen on
canvass, who have procured for posterity and their
children portraits of their own heads and dress-coats
to be sure, but of the hands of other persons!

The head of Machiavelli is, as is seen in the marble
in the gallery of Florence, small, slender, and visibly
“made to creep into crevices.” The face is impassive
and calm, and the lips, though slight and almost feminine,
have an indefinable firmness and character. Essex
is the bold, plain, and blunt soldier history makes
him, and Elizabeth not unqueenly, nor (to my thinking)
of an uninteresting countenance; but, with all
the artist's flattery, ugly enough to be the abode of
the murderous envy that brought Mary to the block.

We paid our five shillings for having been walked
through the marble hall of Castle Warwick, and the
dressing-room of its modern lady, and, gratified much
more by our visit than I have expressed in this brief
description, posted on to Kenilworth.

13. CHAPTER XIII.
KENILWORTH.

On the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought
more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and
her proud earls. Edward's gay favorite was tried at
Warwick, and beheaded on Blacklow hill, which we
passed soon after leaving the town. He was executed
in June; and I looked about on the lovely hills and
valleys that surround the place of his last moments,
and figured to myself very vividly his despair at this
hurried leave-taking of this bright world in its brightest
spot and hour. Poor Gaveston! It was not in
his vocation to die! He was neither soldier nor prelate,
hermit nor monk. His political sins, for which
he suffered, were no offence against good-fellowship,
and were ten times more venial than those of the
“black dog of Arden,” who betrayed and helped to
murder him. He was the reckless minion of a king,
but he must have been a merry and pleasant fellow;
and now that the world (on our side the water at least),
is grown so grave, one could go back with Old Mortality,
and freshen the epitaph of a heart that took life
more gayly.

As we approached the castle of the proud Leicester,
I found it easier to people the road with the flying
Amy Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lambourne,
Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop
of mummurs and players, than with the more real
characters of history. To assist the romance, a little
Italian boy, with his organ and monkey, was fording
the brook on his way to the castle, as if its old towers
still held listeners for the wandering minstrel. I
tossed him a shilling from the carriage window, and
while the horses slowly forded the brook, asked him
in his own delicious tongue, where he was from.

“Son' di Firenze, signore!”

“And where are you going?”

“Li! al castello.”

Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth!
Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge,
to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms
like these? I have seen many a beggar in Italy,
whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that delicious
clime I could have found it in my heart to
envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty
and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed
child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon
his back, travelling from one land to another, and loitering
wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without
a friend or a care; and, upon my life, I could have
donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful
heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ,
put my trust in i forestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth.
There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no
profit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement
and toil; no moss ever gathered by the unturned
stone, that repays, by a thousandth part, the loss of
even this poor boy's share of the pleasures of change.
What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to
exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and
furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain
regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits,
and the redeemable, yet not oppressive poverty of this
Florentine regazzo! The irrecoverable gem of youth
is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a
cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon
the lip.

The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon
my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni

beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer
tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington,
makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort; and the
beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your
traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-at-home.
Some dozens of pony-chaises and small, crop
saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us
that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of
Elizabeth's princely gift to her favorite. We passed
into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in
which Edward was confined, now the only habitable
part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to
an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably
stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a
prompter; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves
now for a passport.

Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably disenchant
almost any one of the gorgeous dreams conjured
up by reading Scott's romance. Yet it is one
of the most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce
be complete to a novel-reader, naturally, without a
warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point
and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A
horseman in armor should pace over the draw-bridge,
and a squire be seen polishing his cuiras through
the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should
be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, philandering
with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and
rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenilworth
as I have already described, and stepping out
into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him,
a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud-castle
on the sky; the bright blue plane of the western
heavens shining through window and broken wall,
flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the
crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry
and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the
foundations upon which they were laid, one would
still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling
root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base,
and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree
(sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the
key-stone of the next; and so perish castles and reputations,
the masonry of the human hand, and the
fabrics of human forethought; not by the strength
which they feared, but by the weakness they despised!
Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudely-hewn
blocks were heaved into their seat by his herculean
workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they
would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-tendril
and a sparrow!

Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the
castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed
for the aquatic spots of Kenilworth, stands an antique
and highly ornamental fireplace, which belonged,
doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on
either side looking forth upon the fields below, must
have been those from which Elizabeth and her train
observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all
times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the
castle's first occupation to its last, must have been the
centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its
guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and
between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed
my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I contrived
to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the
personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenilworth,
without the deceptions of fancy, would be as
disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the
subject as from any other scene with which it had no
relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot,
is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the
cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination;
and it is only after the real recollection has taken root
and ripened—after months, it may be—that we can
fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to
inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike
Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern
which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish,
but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its
hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my
brain.

I had wandered away from my companion, Miss
Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall,
rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and
from my elevated position I caught an accidental view
of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic
window, with a background of broken architecture and
foliage—presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fitting
and admirable picture of the authoress of the
Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour
could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and
striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee
to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau
ideal of the female features than any other, and still
possessing the remains of uncommon beauty), is at all
times a person whom it would be difficult to see without
a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing,
as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in
the morning dress, with dark feathers, which she has
worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister,
her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful
eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her
nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and
benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her,
lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she
had held the first great mastery—it was a tableau
vivant which I was sorry to be alone to see.

Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked
the spirits of the ruins she stood among—a mind in
which (by Sir Walter's own concession) she had first
bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely
for the world's delight? Were the visions which
sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity
through the imagination of genius—visions of which
the millionth portion is probably scarce communicated
to the world in a literary lifetime—were Elizabeth's
courtiers, Elizabeth's passions, secret hours, interviews
with Leicester—were the imprisoned king's
nights of loneliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant,
but unheeded thoughts—were all the possible circumstances,
real or imaginary, of which that proud castle
might have been the scene, thronging in those few
moments of revery through her fancy? Or was her
heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the
beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought
of one who was most wont to number with her the
sands of those brighter hours?

Who shall say? The very question would perhaps
startle the thoughts beyond recall—so elusive are even
the most angelic of the mind's unseen visitants?

I have recorded here the speculations of a moment
while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as I
descended by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude
laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and
I could not but speculate on the difference between
the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot.
The distinguished mind that conceives a romance
which enchants the world, comes in the same guise
and is treated but with the same respect as theirs.
The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of
half-a-crown, and the grocer's wife who sucks an
orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and
plain exterior—her only standards—and thinks herself
as well dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the
tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself on a
day's pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other,
and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and
the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspected,
before our very eyes, does genius gather its golden
fruit, and while we walk in a plain and common-place
world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts

and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a
world of their own—a world of which we see distant
glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what
unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered!

14. CHAPTER XIV.
A VISIT TO DUBLIN ABOUT THE TIME OF THE QUEEN'S
MARRIAGE.

The usual directions for costume, in the corner of
the court card of invitation, included, on the occasion
of the queen's marriage, a wedding favor, to be worn
by ladies on the shoulder, and by gentlemen on the
left breast. This trifling addition to the dress of the
individual was a matter of considerable importance to
the milliners, hatters, etc., who, in a sale of ten or
twelve hundred white cockades (price from two dollars
to five) made a very pretty profit. The power of giving
a large ball to the more expensive classes, and ordering
a particular addition to the costume—in other
words, of laying a tax on the rich for the benefit of
the poor, is exercised more frequently in Ireland than
in other countries, and serves the double purpose of
popularity to the lord lieutenant, and benefit to any
particular branch of industry that may be suffering
from the decline of a fashion.

The large quadrangular court-yard of the castle
rattled with the tramp of horses' feet and the clatter of
sabres and spurs, and in the uncertain glare of torches
and lamps, the gay colors and glittering arms of the
mounted guard of lancers had a most warlike appearance.
The procession which the guard was stationed
to regulate and protect, rather detracted from the romantic
effect—the greater proportion of equipages
being the covered hack cars of the city—vehicles of
the most unmitigated and ludicrous vulgarity. A
coffin for two, set on its end, with the driver riding on
the turned-down lid, would be a very near resemblance;
and the rags of the driver, and the translucent leanness
of his beast, make it altogether the most deplorable
of conveyances. Here and there a carriage with
liveries, and here and there a sedan-chair with four
stout Milesian calves in blue stockings trotting under
the poles, rather served as a foil than a mitigation of
the effect, and the hour we passed in the line, edging
slowly toward the castle, was far from unfruitful in
amusement. I learned afterward that even those who
have equipages in Dublin go to court in hack cars as
a matter of economy—one of the many indications of
that feeling of lost pride which has existed in Ireland
since the removal of the parliament.

A hall and staircase lined with files of soldiers is not
quite as festive an entrance to a ball as the more common
one of alleys of flowering shrubs; but with a
waltz by a military band resounding from the lofty
ceiling, I am not sure that it does not temper the blood
as aptly for the spirit of the hour. It was a rainy
night, and the streets were dark, and the effect upon
myself of coming suddenly into so enchanted a scene
—arms glittering on either side, and a procession of
uniforms and plumed dames winding up the spacious
stairs—was thrilling, even with the chivalric scenes of
Eglinton fresh in my remembrance.

At the head of the ascent we entered a long hall,
lined with the private servants of Lord Ebrington, and
the ceremony of presentation having been achieved the
week before, we left the throne-room on the right, and
passed directly to St. Patrick's Hall, the grand scene
of the evening's festivities. This, I have said before,
is the finest ball-room I remember in Europe. Twelve
hundred people, seated, dancing, or promenading,
were within its lofty walls on the night whose festivities
I am describing; and at either end a gallery, sup
ported by columns of marble, contained a band of
music, relieving each other with alternate waltzes and
quadrilles. On the long sides of the hall were raised
tiers of divans, filled with chaperons, veteran officers,
and other lookers-on, and at the upper end was raised
a platform with a throne in the centre, and seats on
either side for the family of the lord lieutenant and the
more distinguished persons of the nobility. Lord
Ebrington was rather in his character of a noble host
than that of viceroy, and I did not observe him once
seated under his canopy of state; but with his aids
and some one of the noble ladies of his family on his
arm, he promenaded the hall conversing with his acquaintances,
and seemingly enjoying in a high degree
the brilliant gayety of the scene. His dress, by the
way, was the simple diplomatic dress of most continental
courts, a blue uniform embroidered with gold,
the various orders on his breast forming its principal
distinction. I seldom have seen a man of a more
calm and noble dignity of presence than the lord lieutenant,
and never a face that expressed more strongly
the benevolence and high purity of character for which
he is distinguished. In person, except that he is
taller, he bears a remarkably close resemblance to the
Duke of Wellington.

We can scarcely conceive, in this country of black
coats, the brilliant effect of a large assembly in which
there is no person out of uniform or court-dress—
every lady's head nodding with plumes, and every
gentleman in military scarlet and gold or lace and
embroidery. I may add, too, that in this country of
care-worn and pale faces, we can as little conceive the
effect of an assembly rosy with universal health,
habitually unacquainted with care, and abandoned with
the apparent child-like simplicity of high breeding, to
the inspiring gayety of the hour. The greater contrast,
however, is between a nation where health is the
first care, and one in which health is never thought
of till lost; and light and shade are not more contrasted
than the mere general effect of countenance
in one and in the other. A stranger travelling in our
country, once remarked to me that a party he had attended
seemed like an entertainment given in the convalescent
ward of a hospital—the ladies were so pale
and fragile, and the men so unjoyous and sallow. And
my own invariable impression, in the assemblies I
have first seen after leaving my own country was a
corresponding one—that the men and women had the
rosy health and untroubled gayety of children round a
May-pole. That this is not the effect of climate, I do
most religiously believe. It is over-much care and over-much
carelessness—the corroding care of an avid temerity
in business, and the carelessness of all the functions
of life till their complaints become too imperative to
be disregarded. But this is a theme out of place.

The ball was managed by the grand chamberlain
(Sir William Leeson), and the aids-de-camp of the
lord lieutenant, and except that now and then you
were reminded by the movement around you that you
stood with your back to the representative of royalty,
there was little to draw your attention from the attractions
of the dance. Waltz, quadrille, and gallop, followed
each other in giddy succession, and “what do
you think of Irish beauty?” had been asked me as
often as “how do you like America?” was ever mumbled
through the trumpet of Miss Martineau, when I
mounted with a friend to one of the upper divans, and
tried, what is always a difficult task, and nowhere so
difficult as in Ireland, to call in the intoxicated fancy,
and anatomize the charm of the hour.

Moore's remark has been often quoted—“there is
nothing like an Irish woman to take a man off his
feet;” but whether this figure of speech was suggested
by the little bard's common soubriquet of “Jump-up-and-kiss-me
[3] Tom Moore,” or simply conveyed his

idea of the bewildering character of Irish beauty, it
contains, to any one who has ever travelled (or waltzed)
in that country, a very just, as well as realizing description.
Physically, Irish women are probably the finest
race in the world—I mean, taller, better limbed and
chested, larger eyed, and with more luxuriant hair,
and freer action, than any other nation I have observed.
The Phœnician and Spanish blood which
has run hundreds of years in their veins, still kindles
its dark fire in their eyes, and with the vivacity of the
northern mind and the bright color of the nor hern
skin, these southern qualities mingle in most admirable
and superb harmony. The idea we form of Italian
and Grecian beauty is never realized in Greece and
Italy, but we find it in Ireland, heightened and exceeded.
Cheeks and lips of the delicacy and bright
teint of carnation, with snowy teeth, and hair and eyebrows
of jet, are what we should look for on the palette
of Appelles, could we recall the painter, and reanimate
his far-famed models; and these varied charms, united,
fall very commonly to the share of the fair Milesian
of the upper classes. In other lands of dark eyes, the
rareness of a fine-grained skin, so necessary to a brunette,
makes beauty as rare—but whether it is the
damp softness of the climate or the infusion of Saxon
blood, a coarse skin is almost never seen in Ireland.
I speak now only of the better-born ranks of society,
for in all my travels in Ireland, I did not chance to
see even one peasant-girl of any pretensions to good
looks. From north to south, they looked, to me,
coarse, ill-formed, and repulsive.

I noticed in St. Patrick's Hall what I had remarked
ever since I had been in the country, that with all
their beauty, the Irish women are very deficient in
what in England is called style. The men, on the
contrary, were particularly comme il faut, and as they
are a magnificent race (corresponding to such mothers
and sisters), I frequently observed I had never seen
so many handsome and elegant men in a day. Whenever
I saw a gentleman and lady together, riding,
driving, or walking, my first impression was, almost
universally, that the man was in attendance upon a
woman of an inferior class to his own. This difference
may be partly accounted for by the reduced circumstances
of the gentry of Ireland, which keeps the
daughters at home, that the sons may travel and improve;
but it works differently in America, where,
spite of travel and every other advantage to the contrary,
the daughters of a family are much oftener
lady-like than the sons are gentleman-like. After
wondering for some time, however, why the quick-witted
women of Ireland should be less apt than those
of other countries in catching the air of high breeding
usually deemed so desirable, I began to like them better
for the deficiency, and to find a reason for it in the
very qualities which make them so attractive. Nothing
could be more captivating and delightful than the
manners of Irish women, and nothing, at the same
time, could be more at war with the first principles of
English high breeding—coldness and reténu. The
frank, almost hilarious “how are you?” of an Irish
girl, her whole-handed and cordial grasp, as often in
the day as you meet her, the perfectly un-missy-ish,
confiding, direct character of her conversation, are all
traits which would stamp her as somewhat rudely bred
in England, and as desperately vulgar in New York
or Philadelphia.

Modest to a proverb, the Irish woman is as unsuspecting
of an impropriety as if it were an impossible
thing, and she is as fearless and joyous as a midshipman,
and sometimes as noisy. In a ball-room she
looks ill-dressed, not because her dress was ill-put-on,
but because she dances, not glides, sits down without
care, pulls her flowers to pieces, and if her head-dress
incommodes her, gives it a pull or a push—acts which
would be perfect insanity at Almack's. If she is of
fended, she asks for an explanation. If she does not
understand you, she confesses her ignorance. If she
wishes to see you the next day, she tells you how and
when. She is the child of nature, and children are
not “stylish.” The niminy-piminy, eye-avoiding,
finger-tipped, drawling, don't-touch-me manner of
some of the fashionable ladies of our country, would
amuse a cold and reserved English woman sufficiently,
but they would drive an Irish girl into hysterics. I
have met one of our fair country-people abroad, whose
“Grecian stoop,” and exquisitely subdued manner,
was invariably taken for a fit of indigestion.

The ball-supper was royally sumptuous, and served
in a long hall thrown open at midnight; and in the
gray of the morning, I left the floor covered with
waltzers, and confessed to an Irish friend, that I never
in my life, not even at Almack's, had seen the half as
much true beauty as had brightened St. Patrick's Hall
at the celebration of the queen's marriage.

15. CHAPTER XV.
CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT WASHINGTON.

The paradox of “the more one does, the more one
can do,” is resolved in life at Washington with more
success than I have seen it elsewhere. The inexorable
bell at the hotel or boarding-house pronounces the
irrevocable and swift transit of breakfast to all sleepers
after eight. The elastic depths of the pillow have
scarcely yielded their last feather to the pressure of
the sleeper's head, before the drowse is rudely shaken
from his eyelids, and with an alacrity which surprises
himself, he finds his toilet achieved, his breakfast over,
and himself abroad to lounge in the sunshine till the
flag waves on the capitol. He would retire to his
chamber to read during these two or three vacant
hours, but the one chair in his pigeon-hole creaks, or
has no back or bottom, or his anthracite fire is out, or
is too hot for the size of the room; or, in short, Washington,
from whatever cause, is a place where none
read except those who stand up to a padlocked newspaper.
The stars and stripes, moving over the two
wings of the capitol at eleven, announce that the two
chambers of legislation are in session, and the hard-working
idler makes his way to the senate or the
house. He lingers in the lobby awhile, amused with
the button-hole seizers plying the unwilling ears of
members with their claims, or enters the library,
where ladies turn over prints, and enfilade, with their
battery of truant eyes, the comers-in at the green
door. He then gropes up the dark staircase to the
senate gallery, and stifles in the pressure of a hot
gallery, forgetting, like listeners at a crowded opera,
that bodily discomfort will unlink the finest harmonies
of song or oratory. Thence he descends to the rotunda
to draw breath and listen to the more practical, but
quite as earnest eloquence of candidates for patents;
and passes, after while, to the crowded gallery of the
house, where, by some acoustic phenomena in the
construction of the building, the voices of the speakers
comes to his ear as articulate as water from a narrow-necked
bottle. “Small blame to them!” he thinks,
however: for behind the brexia columns are grouped
all the fair forms of Washington; and in making his
bow to two hundred despotic lawgivers in feathers and
velvet, he is readily consoled that the duller legislators
who yield to their sway are inaudible and forgotten.
To this upper house drop in, occasionally, the younger
or gayer members of the lower, bringing, if not political
scandal, at least some slight résumer of what Mr.
Somebody is beating his desk about below; and thus,
crammed with the day's trifles or the day's business,
and fatigued from heel to eyelid, our idler goes home

at five to dress for dinner and the night's campaign,
having been up and on his legs for ten mortal hours.

Cold water and a little silence in his own room have
rather refreshed him, and he dines at six with a party
of from fifteen to twenty-five persons. He discusses
the vital interests of fourteen millions of people over
a glass of wine with the man whose vote, possibly,
will decide their destiny, and thence hurries to a ball-room
crammed like a perigord-pie, where he pants,
elbows, eats supper, and waltzes till three in the
morning. How human constitutions stand this, and
stand it daily and nightly, from the beginning to the
end of a session, may well puzzle the philosophy of
those who rise and breakfast in comfortable leisure.

I joined the crowd on the twenty-second of February,
to pay my respects to the president, and see the
cheese. Whatever veneration existed in the minds of
the people toward the former, their curiosity in reference
to the latter predominated, unquestionably.
The circular pavé, extending from the gate to the
White House, was thronged with citizens of all classes,
those coming away having each a small brown paper
parcel and a very strong smell; those advancing manifesting,
by shakings of the head and frequent exclamations,
that there may be too much of a good thing,
and particularly of a cheese. The beautiful portico
was thronged with boys and coach-drivers, and the
odor strengthened with every step. We forced our
way over the threshold, and encountered an atmosphere,
to which the mephitic gas floating over Avernus
must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the
hall hung a rough likeness of the general, emblazoned
with eagle and stars, forming a background to the
huge tub in which the cheese had been packed; and
in the centre of the vestibule stood the “fragrant gift,”
surrounded with a dense crowd, who, without crackers,
or even “malt to their cheese,” had, in two hours,
eaten and purveyed away fourteen hundred pounds!
The small segment reserved for the president's use
counted for nothing in the abstractions.

Glad to compromise for a breath of cheeseless air,
we desisted from the struggle to obtain a sight of the
table, and mingled with the crowd in the east room.
Here were diplomates in their gold coats and officers
in uniform, ladies of secretaries and other ladies,
soldiers on volunteer duty, and Indians in war-dress
and paint. Bonnets, feathers, uniforms, and all—it
was rather a gay assemblage. I remembered the descriptions
in travellers' books, and looked out for
millers and blacksmiths in their working gear, and for
rudeness and vulgarity in all. The offer of a mammoth
cheese to the public was likely to attract to the
presidental mansion more of the lower class than would
throng to a common levee. Great-coats there were,
and not a few of them, for the day was raw, and unless
they were hung on the palings outside, they must remain
on the owners' shoulders; but, with a single exception
(a fellow with his coat torn down his back,
possibly in getting at the cheese), I saw no man in a
dress that was not respectable and clean of its kind,
and abundantly fit for a tradesman out of his shop.
Those who were much pressed by the crowd put their
hats on; but there was a general air of decorum
which would surprise any one who had pinned his
faith on travellers. An intelligent Englishman, very
much inclined to take a disgust to mobocracy, expressed
to me great surprise at the decency and proper
behavior of the people. The same experiment in
England, he thought, would result in as pretty a riot
as a paragraph-monger would desire to see.

The president was down stairs in the oval reception
room, and, though his health would not permit him
to stand, he sat in his chair for two or three hours, and
received his friends with his usual bland and dignified
courtesy. By his side stood the lady of the mansion,
dressed in full court costume, and doing the honors
of her place with a grace and amenity which every one
felt, and which threw a bloom over the hour. General
Jackson retired, after a while, to his chamber, and
the president elect remained to support his relative,
and present to her the still thronging multitude, and
by four o'clock the guests were gone, and the “banquet
hall” was deserted. Not to leave a wrong impression
of the cheese, I dined afterward at a table to
which the president had sent a piece of it, and found
it of excellent quality. It is like many other things,
more agreeable in small quantities.

Some eccentric mechanic has presented the president
with a sulkey, made entirely (except the wheels)
of rough-cut hickory, with the bark on. It looks
rude enough, but has very much the everlasting look
of old Hickory himself; and if he could be seen driving
a high-stepping, bony old iron-gray steed in it,
any passer by would see that there was as much fitness
in the whole thing as in the chariot of Bacchus and
his reeling leopards. Some curiously-twisted and
gnarled branches have been very ingeniously turned
into handles and whip-box, and the vehicle is compact
and strong. The president has left it to Mr. Van
Buren.

In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by,
the elegant phaeton, made of the wood of the old
frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a
driver's box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and
set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are
low, and there are bars for baggage behind; altogether,
for lightness and elegance, it would be a creditable
turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively
beautiful—a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high
degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a coat
of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but
strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capable
of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Constitution,
under full sail, is painted on the panels.

16. CHAPTER XVI.
THE INAUGURATION.

While the votes for president were being counted
in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren,
with courteous significance:—

“It is a cloudy day, sir!”

“The sun will shine on the fourth of March!” was
the confident reply.

True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven
without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air
was cold, but clear and life-giving; and the broad
avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large
for the thronging population. The crowds who had
been pouring in from every direction for several days
before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the
night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks; and
the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin
sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange
faces. The sun shone alike on the friends and opponents
of the new administration, and, as far as one
might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made
cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another
augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended
fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In
a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes
and parties, I heard no remark that the president would
have been unwilling to hear.

I was at the capitol a half hour before the procession
arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for
which I was not at all prepared. The noble staircase
of the east front of the building leaps over three
arches, under one of which carriages pass to the basement
door; and, as you approach from the gate, the

eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken
by a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath.
Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corresponding
projections; and from the upper platform rise
the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of columns
three deep extending back to the pilasters. I
had often admired this front with its many graceful
columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the
finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect
of the assembled population of Rome waiting to receive
the blessing before the front of St. Peter's, however,
the assembled crowd on the steps and at the
base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the grandeur
of the design. They were piled up like the
people on the temples of Babylon in one of Martin's
sublime pictures—every projection covered, and an
inexpressible soul and character given by their presence
to the architecture. Boys climbed about the
bases of the columns, single figures stood on the posts
of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against
the sky; and the whole thing was exactly what Paul
Veronese would have delighted to draw. I stood near
an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one
of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope
he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his
subject.

The republican procession, consisting of the presidents
and their families, escorted by a small volunteer
corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and
Mr. Van Buren were in the constitution phaeton,
drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they
both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage
at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them
through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of
the old chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up
through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity
from all around it.

I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of
the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this
imposing drama, till they returned from the senate
chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and
railed in on the broad stair which supports the portico,
and, for all preparation to one of the most important
and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on
earth—for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a
republic of fifteen millions of freemen—the whole addition
to the open air, and the presence of the people,
was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impressive
simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of
a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and
hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event
in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the
moral sublime was here—that a transaction so important,
and of such extended and weighty import, could
borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that
the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating
the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the
trumpets of a thousand heralds.

The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear
of the columns made way, and the ex-president and
Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A
murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass below,
and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick-chamber,
which his physician had thought it impossible
he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still
uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the
portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a
voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read
his address to the people. The air was elastic, and
the day still; and it is supposed that near twenty thousand
persons heard him from his elevated position distinctly.
I stood myself on the outer limit of the
crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from
the interruption near by, his words came clearly articulated
to my ear.

When the address was closed, the chief justice ad
vanced and administered the oath. As the book
touched the lips of the new president, there arose a
general shout, and expression of feeling common
enough in other countries, but drawn with difficulty
from an American assemblage. The sons, and the
immediate friends of Mr. Van Buren, then closed
about him; the ex-president, the chief justice, and
others, gave him the hand of congratulation, and the
ceremony was over. They descended the steps, the
people gave one more shout as they mounted the constitution
carriage together, and the procession returned
through the avenue, followed by the whole population
of Washington.

Mr. Van Buren held a levee immediately afterward,
but I endeavored in vain to get my foot over the
threshold. The crowd was tremendous. At four,
the diplomatic body had an audience; and in replying
to the address of Don Angel Calderon, the president
astonished the gold coats, by addressing them as the
democratic corps. The representatives of the crowned
heads of Europe stood rather uneasily under the
epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to
say diplomatic.

17. CHAPTER XVII.
WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION.

There is a sagacity acquired by travel on the subject
of forage and quarters, which is useful in all other
cities in the world where one may happen to be a
stranger, but whicch is as inapplicable to the emergencies
of an arrival in Washington as waltzing in a shipwreck.
It is a capital whose peculiarities are as much
sui generis as those of Venice; but as those who have
become wise by a season's experience neither remain
on the spot to give warning, nor have recorded their
experiences in a book, the stranger is worse off in a
coach in Washington than in a gondola in the “city
of silver streets.”

It is well known, I believe, that when the future
city of Washington was about being laid out, there
were two large lot-buyers or land-owners, living two
miles apart, each of whom was interested in having
the public buildings upon the centre of his own domain.
Like children quarrelling for a sugar horse,
the subject of dispute was pulled in two, and one got
the head, the other the tail. The capitol stands on a
rising ground in solitary grandeur, and the president's
house and department buildings two miles off on another.
The city straddles and stretches between,
doing its best to look continuous and compact; but
the stranger soon sees that it is, after all, but a “city
of magnificent distances,” built to please nobody on
earth but a hackney-coachman.

The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will
drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that
nearest the capitol—supposing, of course, that, as
Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the
most central part will naturally be near the scene of
action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby's, and,
at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he
engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that
boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby's, however,
he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and
wonders, for two or three days, why the dence the
hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the
foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might
have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars
a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and
foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and
dinner-giving people shower upon him the “small
rain” of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth
day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses

of his friends (which they never write on their cards,
because, if they did, it would be no guide), and is told
it is impossible to direct him, but the hackney-coachmen
all know! He calls the least ferocious-looking of the
most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has
ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into
his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two
miles away from the capitol. He passes the president's
house, and getting off the smooth road, begins
to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots,
laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of
geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends living
in houses that want nothing of being in the country,
but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had
rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and
each occupant had made a street with reference to his
own front door. The much-shaken and more-astonished
victim consumes his morning and his temper,
and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty
calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and
wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geography.

A fortnight's experience satisfies the stranger that
this same journey is worse at night than at morning;
and that, as he leaves his dinner which he pays for at
home, runs the risk of his neck, passes an hour or
two on the road, and ruins himself in hack-hire, it
must be a very—yes, a very pleasant dinner-party to
compensate him. Consequently, he either sends a
“p. p. c.” to all his acquaintances, and lives incog.,
or, which is a more sensible thing, moves up to the
other settlement, and abandons the capitol.

Those who live on the other side of the president's
house are the secretaries, diplomatists, and a few
wealthy citizens. There is no hotel in this quarter,
but there are one or two boarding-houses, and (what
we have been lucky enough to secure ourselves) furnished
lodgings, in which you have everything but
board. Your dinner is sent you from a French cook's
near by, and your servant gets your breakfast—a plan
which gives you the advantage of dining at your own
hour, choosing your own society, and of having covers
for a friend or two whenever it suits your humor, and
at half an hour's warning. There are very few of
these lodgings (which combine many other advantages
over a boarding-house), but more of them would be a
good speculation to house-owners, and I wish it were
suggested, not only here, but in every city in our
country.

Aside from society, the only amusement in Washington
is frequenting the capitol. If one has a great
deal of patience and nothing better to do, this is very
well; and it is very well at any rate till one becomes
acquainted with the heads of the celebrated men in
both the chambers, with the noble architecture of the
building, and the routine of business. This done, it
is time wearily spent for a spectator. The finer orators
seldom speak, or seldom speak warmly, the floor is
oftenest occupied by prosing and very sensible gentlemen,
whose excellent ideas enter the mind more
agreeably by the eye than the ear, or, in other words,
are better delivered by the newspapers, and there is a
great deal of formula and etiquetical sparring which
is not even entertaining to the members, and which
consumes time “consumedly.” Now and then the
senate adjourns when some one of the great orators
has taken the floor, and you are sure of a great effort
the next morning. If you are there in time, and can
sit, like Atlas with a world on your back, you may enjoy
a front seat and hear oratory, unsurpassed, in my
opinion, in the world.

The society in Washington, take it all in all, is by
many degrees the best in the United States. One is
prepared, though I can not conceive why, for the contrary.
We read in books of travels, and we are told
by everybody, that the society here is promiscuous,
rough, inelegant, and even barbarous. This is an
untrue representation, or it has very much changed.

There is no city, probably no village in America,
where the female society is not refined, cultivated, and
elegant. With or without regular advantages, woman
attains the refinements and the tact necessary to polite
intercourse. No traveller ever ventured to complain
of this part of American society. The great deficiency
is that of agreeable, highly-cultivated men, whose pursuits
have been elevated, and whose minds are pliable
to the grace and changing spirit of conversation.
Every man of talents possesses these qualities naturally,
and hence the great advantage which Washington enjoys
over every other city in our country. None but
a shallow observer, or a malicious book maker, would
ever sneer at the exteriors or talk of the ill-breeding
of such men as form, in great numbers, the agreeable
society of this place—for a man of great talents never
could be vulgar; and there is a superiority about most
of these which raises them above the petty standard
which regulates the outside of a coxcomb. Even
compared with the dress and address of men of similar
positions and pursuits in Europe, however (members
of the house of commons, for example, or of the chamber
of deputies in France), it is positively the fact that
the senators and representatives of the United States
have a decided advantage. It is all very well for Mr.
Hamilton, and other scribblers whose books must be
spiced to go down, to ridicule a Washington soirée for
English readers; but if the observation of one who
has seen assemblies of legislators and diplomatists in
all the countries of Europe may be fairly placed
against his and Mrs. Trollope's, I may assert, upon
my own authority, that they will not find, out of May
Fair in England, so well-dressed and dignified a body
of men. I have seen as yet no specimen of the rough
animal described by them and others as the “western
member;” and if David Crockett (whom I was never
so fortunate as to see) was of that description, the race
must have died with him. It is a thing I have learned
since I have been in Washington, to feel a wish that
foreigners should see congress in session. We are
so humbugged, one way and another, by travellers'
lies.

I have heard the observation once or twice from
strangers since I have been here, and it struck myself
on my first arrival, that I had never seen within the
same limit before, so many of what may be called
“men of mark.” You will scarce meet a gentleman
on the sidewalk in Washington who would not attract
your notice, seen elsewhere, as an individual possessing
in his eye or general features a certain superiority.
Never having seen most of the celebrated speakers of
the senate, I busied myself for the first day or two in
examining the faces that passed me in the street, in
the hope of knowing them by the outward stamp
which, we are apt to suppose, belongs to greatness.
I gave it up at last, simply from the great number I
met who might be (for all that features had to do with
it) the remarkable men I sought.

There is a very simple reason why a congress of the
United States should be, as they certainly are, a much
more marked body of men than the English house of
commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies
in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in
either case, they come by their honors. In England
and France the lords and peers are legislators by hereditary
right, and the members of the commons and
deputies from the possession of extensive property or
family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in
most cases, no great personal talent in the individual.
They are legislators, but they are devoted very often
much more heartily to other pursuits—hunting or
farming, racing, driving, and similar out-of-door passions
common to English gentlemen and lords, or the
corresponding penchants of French peers and deputies.

It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote
themselves to politics exclusively. With us every
one knows it is quite the contrary. An American
politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pursuit.
He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in
subservience to his aim. He can not afford to have
another passion of any kind till he has reached the
point of his ambition—and then it has become a
mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is,
that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our
country, who has not had occasion for more than ordinary
talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of
his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals
leave their marks, and they who have thought, and
watched, and struggled, and contended with the passions
of men as an American politician inevitably
must, can not well escape the traces of such work.
It usually elevates the character of the face—it always
strongly marks it.

A-propos of “men of mark;” the dress circle of the
theatre, at Power's benefit, not long since, was graced
by three Indians in full costume—the chief of the
Foxes, the chief of the Ioways, and a celebrated warrior
of the latter tribe, called the Sioux-killer. The
Fox is an old man of apparently fifty, with a heavy,
aquiline nose, a treacherous eye, sharp as an eagle's,
and a person rather small in proportion to his head
and features. He was dressed in a bright scarlet
blanket, and a crown of feathers, with an eagle's plume,
standing erect on the top of his head, all dyed in the
same deep hue. His face was painted to match, except
his lips, which looked of a most ghastly sallow,
in contrast with his fiery nose, forehead, and cheeks.
His tomahawk lay in the hollow of his arm, decked
with feathers of the same brilliant color with the rest
of his drapery. Next him sat the Sioux-killer, in a
dingy blanket, with a crown made of a great quantity
of the feathers of a pea-hen, which fell over his face,
and concealed his features almost entirely. He is
very small, but is famous for his personal feats, having,
among other things, walked one hundred and thirty
miles in thirty successive hours, and killed three Sioux
(hence his name) in one battle with that nation. He
is but twenty-three, but very compact and wiry-looking,
and his eye glowed through his veil of hen-feathers
like a coal of fire.

Next to the Sioux-killer sat “White Cloud,” the
chief of the Ioways. His face was the least warlike
of the three, and expressed a good nature and freedom
from guile, remarkable in an Indian. He is about
twenty-four, has very large features, and a fine, erect
person, with broad shoulders and chest. He was
painted less than the Fox chief, but of nearly the same
color, and carried, in the hollow of his arm, a small,
glittering tomahawk, ornamented with blue feathers.
His head was encircled by a kind of turban of silver-fringed
cloth, with some metallic pendents for earrings,
and his blanket, not particularly clean or handsome,
was partly open on the breast, and disclosed a calico
shirt, which was probably sold to him by a trader in
the west. They were all very attentive to the play,
but the Fox chief and White Cloud departed from the
traditionary dignity of Indians, and laughed a great
deal at some of Power's fun. The Sioux-killer sat
between them, as motionless and grim as a marble
knight on a tomb-stone.

The next day I had the pleasure of dining with
Mr. Power, who lived at the same hotel with the Indian
delegation; and while at dinner he received a
message from the Ioways, expressing a wish to call on
him. We were sitting over our wine when White
Cloud and the Sioux-killer came in with their interpreter.
There were several gentlemen present, one
of them in the naval undress uniform, whose face the
Sioux-killer scrutinized very sharply. They smiled
in bowing to Power, but made very grave inclinations
to the rest of us. The chief took his seat, assuming
a very erect and dignified attitude, which he preserved
immoveable during the interview; but the Sioux-killer
drew up his legs, resting them on the round of the
chair, and, with his head and body bent forward,
seemed to forget himself, and give his undivided attention
to the study of Power and his naval friend.

Tumblers of champagne were given them, which
they drank with great relish, though the Sioux-killer
provoked a little ridicule from White Cloud, by coughing
as he swallowed it. The interpreter was a halfbreed
between an Indian and a negro, and a most intelligent
fellow. He had been reared in the Ioway
tribe, but had been among the whites a great deal for
the last few years, and had picked up English very
fairly. He told us that White Cloud was the son of
old White Cloud, who died three years since, and
that the young chief had acquired entire command
over the tribe by his mildness and dignity. He had
paid the debts of the Ioways to the traders, very much
against the will of the tribe; but he commenced by
declaring firmly that he would be just, and had carried
his point. He had come to Washington to receive a
great deal of money from the sale of the lands of the
tribe, and the distribution of it lay entirely in his own
power. Only one old warrior had ventured to rise in
council and object to his measures; but when White
Cloud spoke, he had dropped his head on his bosom
and submitted. This information and that which
followed was given in English, of which neither of the
Ioways understood a word.

Mr. Power expressed a surprise that the Sioux-killer
should have known him in his citizen's dress.
The interpreter translated it, and the Indian said in
answer:—

“The dress is very different, but when I see a man's
eye I know him again.”

He then told Power that he wished, in the theatre,
to raise his war-cry and help him fight the three bad-looking
men who were his enemies (referring to the
three bailiffs in the scene in Paddy Carey). Power
asked what part of the play he liked best. He said
that part where he seized the girl in his arms and ran
off the stage with her (at the close of an Irish jig in
the same play).

The interpreter informed us that this was the first
time the Sioux-killer had come among the whites.
He had disliked them always till now, but he said he
had seen enough to keep him telling tales all the rest
of his life. Power offered them cigars, which they
refused. We expressed our surprise; and the Sioux-killer
said that the Indians who smoked gave out
soonest in the chase; and White Cloud added, very
gravely, that the young women of his tribe did not
like the breaths of the smokers. In answer to an inquiry
I made about the comparative size of Indians
and white men, the chief said that the old men of the
whites were larger than old Indians, but the young
whites were not so tall and straight as the youths of
his tribe. We were struck with the smallness of the
chief's hands and feet; but he seemed very much
mortified when the interpreter translated our remark to
him. He turned the little sallow fingers over and over,
and said that old White Cloud, his father, who had
been a great warrior, had small hands like his. The
young chief, we were told by the interpreter, has never
yet been in an engagement, and is always spared from
the heavier fatigues undergone by the rest of the
tribe.

They showed great good nature in allowing us to
look at their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White
Cloud wore a collar of bear's claws, which marked
him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great
cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of
which he explained the use very energetically. It
was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in

the fight, to let the tribe know he had killed him.
After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose
to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand
gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused,
however, with the Sioux-killer's more characteristic
adieu. He looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave
us each a grip of his iron fist, that made the blood
tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward
customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very
much belie him.

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION.

The leaf that is lodged in some sunny dell, after
drifting on the whirlwind—the Indian's canoe, after it
has shot the rapids—the drop of water that has struggled
out from the Phlegethon of Niagara, and sleeps
on the tranquil bosom of Ontario—are faint images
of contrast and repose, compared with a Washingtonian
after the session. I have read somewhere, in an
oriental tale, that a lover, having agreed to share his
life with his dying mistress, took her place in the
grave six months in the year. In Bagdad it might
have been a sacrifice. In Washington I could conceive
such an arrangement to make very little difference.

Nothing is done leisurely in our country; and, by
the haste with which everybody rushes to the railroad
the morning after the rising of congress, you
would fancy that the cars, like Cinderella's coach,
would be changed into pumpkins at the stroke of
twelve. The town was evacuated in a day. On the
fifth of March a placard was sent back by the innkeepers
at Baltimore, declaring that there was not so
much as a garret to be had in that city, and imploring
gentlemen and ladies to remain quietly at Washington
for twenty-four hours. The railroad engine, twice a
day, tugged and puffed away through the hills, drawing
after it, on its sinuous course, a train of brick-colored
cars, that resembled the fabulous red dragon trailing
its slimy length through the valley of Crete. The
gentlemen who sit by the fire in the bar-room at
Gadsby's, like Theodore Hook's secretary, who could
hear his master write “Yours faithfully” in the next
room, learned to distinguish “Received payment”
from “Sundries,” by listening to the ceaseless scratch
of the bookkeeper. The ticket-office at the depot
was a scene of struggle and confusion between those
who wanted places; while, looking their last on these
vanishing paymasters, stood hundreds of tatterdemalions,
white, yellow, and black, with their hands in
their pockets, and (if sincere regret at their departure
could have wrung it forth) a tear in their eye. The
bell rang, and the six hundred departures flocked to
their places—young ladies, with long faces, leaving
the delights of Washington for the dull repose of the
country—their lovers, with longer faces, trying, in vain,
to solve the X quantity expressed by the aforesaid
“Sundries” in their bill—and members of congress
with long faces, too—for not one in twenty has “made
the impression” he expected; and he is moralizing
on the decline of the taste for eloquence, and on the
want of “golden opportunity” for the display of indignant
virtue!

Nothing but an army, or such a concourse of people
as collects to witness an inauguration, could ever make
Washington look populous. But when congress, and
its train of ten thousand casual visiters are gone, and
only the official and indigenous inhabitants remain,
Balbec, or Palmyra, with a dozen Arabs scattered
among its ruins, has less a look of desolation. The
few stragglers in the streets add to its loneliness—pro
ducing exactly the effect sometimes given to a woodland
solitude by the presence of a single bird. The
vast streets seem grown vaster and more disproportionate—the
houses seem straggling to greater distances—the
walk from the president's house to the capitol
seems twice as long—and new faces are seen here and
there, at the doors and windows—for cooks and innkeepers
that had never time to lounge, lounge now,
and their families take quiet possession of the unrented
front parlor. He who would be reminded of his departed
friends should walk down on the avenue. The
carpet, associated with so many pleasant recollections
—which has been pressed by the dainty feet of wits
and beauties—to tread on which was a privilege and
a delight—is displayed on a heap of old furniture, and
while its sacred defects are rudely scanned by the curious,
is knocked down, with all its memories, under the
hammer of the auctioneer. Tables, chairs, ottomans
—all linked with the same glowing recollections—go
for most unworthy prices; and while, humiliated with
the sight, you wonder at the artificial value given to
things by their possessors, you begin to wonder whether
your friends themselves, subjected to the same
searching valuation, would not be depreciated too!
Ten to one, if their characters were displayed like
their carpets, there would come to light defects as unsuspected!

The person to whom this desolation is the “unkindest
cut” is the hackney-coachman. “His vocation”
is emphatically gone! Gone is the dollar made
every successive half hour! Gone is the pleasant sum
in compound addition, done “in the head,” while waiting
at the doors of the public offices! Gone are the
short, but profitable, trips to the theatre! Gone the
four or five families, all taken the same evening to parties,
and each paying the item of “carriage from nine
till twelve!” Gone the absorbed politician, who would
rather give the five-dollar bill than wait for his change!
the lady who sends the driver to be paid at “the bar;”
the uplifted fingers, hither and thither, which embarrass
his choice of a fare—gone, all! The chop-fallen
coachy drives to the stand in the morning and drives
home at noon; he creeps up to Fuller's at a snail-pace,
and, in very mockery of hope, asks the homeward-bound
clerk from the department if he wants a
coach! Night comes on, and his horses begin to believe
in the millenium—and the cobwebs are wove
over his whip-socket.

These changes, however, affect not unpleasantly the
diplomatic and official colony extending westward from
the president's. The inhabitants of this thin-sprinkled
settlement are away from the great thoroughfare, and
do not miss its crowds. The cessation of parties is to
them a relief from night-journeys, colds, card-leavings,
and much wear and tear of carriage-horses. They
live now in dressing-gowns and slippers, read the reviews
and the French papers, get their dinners comfortably
from the restaurateurs, and thank Heaven that
the capitol is locked up. The attachés grow fat, and
the despatches grow thin.

There are several reasons why Washington, till the
month of May, spite of all the drawbacks in the picture
delineated above, is a more agreeable residence
than the northern cities. In the first place, its climate
is at least a month earlier than that of New York, and,
in the spring, is delightful. The trees are at this moment
(the last week in March) bursting into buds;
open carriages are everywhere in use; walking in the
sun is oppressive: and for the last fortnight, this has
been a fair chronicle of the weather. Boston and
New York have been corroded with east winds, meantime,
and even so near as Baltimore, they are still
wrapped in cloaks and shawls. To those who, in
reckoning the comforts of life, agree with me in making
climate stand for nine tenths, this is powerful attraction.

Then the country about Washington, the drives
and rides, are among the most lovely in the world,
the banks of Rock creek are a little wilderness of
beauty. More bright waters, more secluded bridle-paths,
more sunny and sheltered hill-sides, or finer
mingling of rock, hill, and valley, I never rode among.
Within a half hour's gallop, you have a sylvan retreat
of every variety of beauty, and in almost any direction;
and from this you come home (and this is not the
case with most sylvan rides) to an excellent French
dinner and agreeable society, if you like it. You have
all the seclusion of a rural town, and none of its petty
politics and scandal—all the means and appliances of
a large metropolis, and none of its exactions and limitations.
That which makes the charm of a city, and
that for which we seek the country, are equally here,
and the penalties of both are removed.

Until the reflux of population from the Rocky
mountains, I suppose Washington will never be a metropolis
of residence. But if it were an object with
the inhabitants to make it more so, the advantages I
have just enumerated, and a little outlay of capital and
enterprise, would certainly, in some degree, effect it.
People especially who come from Europe, or have
been accustomed to foreign modes of living, would be
glad to live near a society composed of such attractive
materials as the official and diplomatic persons at the
seat of government. That which keeps them away is,
principally, want of accommodation, and, in a less degree,
it is want of comfortable accommodation in the
other cities which drives them back to Europe. In
Washington you must either live at an hotel or a
boarding-house. In either case, the mode of life is
only endurable for the shortest possible period, and
the moment congress rises, every sufferer in these detestable
places is off for relief. The hotels are crowded
to suffocation; there is an utter want of privacy in
the arrangement of the suites of apartments; the service
is ill-ordered, and the prices out of all sense or
reason. You pay for that which you have not, and
you can not get by paying for it that which you want.

The boarding-house system is worse yet. To possess
but one room in privacy, and that opening on a
common passage; to be obliged to come to meals at
certain hours, with chance table companions, and no
place for a friend, and to live entirely in your bedroom
or in a public parlor, may truly be called as abominable
a routine as a gentleman could well suffer. Yet the
great majority of those who come to Washington are
in one or the other of these two categories.

The use of lodgings for strangers or transient residents
in the city does not, after all the descriptions in
books, seem at all understood in our country. This
is what Washington wants, but it is what every city in
the country wants generally. Let us describe it as if
it was never before heard of, and perhaps some enlightened
speculator may advance us half a century in
some of the cities, by creating this luxury.

Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally
consist of the apartments on one floor. The house,
we will suppose, consists of three stories above the
basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom,
and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This
arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger
family occupies two floors.) These three suites of
apartments are neatly furnished; bed-clothes, table-linen,
and plate, if required, are found by the proprietor,
and in the basement story usually lives a man and
his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers;
i. e., bring water, answer the door-bell, take in letters,
keep the rooms in order, make the fires, and, if it is
wished, do any little cookery in case of sickness.
These people are paid by the proprietor, but receive a
fee for extra service, and a small gratuity, at departure,
from the lodger. It should be added to this, that it is
not infra. dig. to live in the second or third story.

In connexion with lodgings, there must be of course
a cook or restaurateur within a quarter of a mile.
The stranger agrees with him for his dinner, to consist
of so many dishes, and to be sent to him at a certain
hour. He gives notice in the morning if he dines out,
buys his own wine of the wine-merchant, and thus
saves two heavy items of overcharge in the hotel or
boarding-house. His own servant makes his tea or
coffee (and for this purpose has access to the fire in
the basement), and does all personal service, such as
brushing clothes, waiting at table, going on errands,
&c., &c. The stranger comes in, in short, at a moment's
warning, brings nothing but his servant and
baggage, and finds himself in five minutes at home,
his apartments private, and every comfort and convenience
as completely about him as if he had lived
there for years.

At from ten to fourteen dollars a week, such apartments
would pay the proprietor handsomely, and afford
a reasonable luxury to the lodger. A cook would
make a good thing of sending in a plain dinner for a
dollar a head (or more if the dinner were more expensive),
and at this rate, a family of two or more persons
might have a hundred times the comfort now enjoyed
at hotels, at certainly half the cost.

We have been seduced into a very unsentimental
chapter of “ways and means,” but we trust the suggestions,
though containing nothing new, may not be
altogether without use. The want of some such thing
as we have recommended is daily and hourly felt and
complained of.

THE FOUR RIVERS.
THE HUDSON—THE MOHAWK—THE CHENANGO—THE
SUSQUEHANNAH.

Some observer of nature offered a considerable reward
for two blades of striped grass exactly similar.
The infinite diversity, of which this is one instance,
exists in a thousand other features of nature, but in
none more strikingly than in the scenery of rivers.
What two in the world are alike! How often does
the attempt fail to compare the Hudson with the Rhine
—the two, perhaps, among celebrated rivers, which
are the nearest to a resemblance? Yet looking at the
first determination of a river's course, and the natural
operation of its search for the sea, one would suppose
that, in a thousand features, their valleys would scarce
be distinguishable.

I think, of all excitements in the world, that of the
first discovery and explanation of a noble river, must
be the most eager and enjoyable. Fancy “the bold
Englishman,” as the Dutch called Hendrich Hudson,
steering his little yacht, the Halve-Mane, for the first
time through the Highlands! Imagine his anxiety
for the channel forgotten as he gazed up at the towering
rocks, and round upon the green shores, and onward,
past point and opening bend, miles away into the
heart of the country; yet with no lessening of the
glorious stream beneath him, and no decrease of
promise in the bold and luxuriant shores! Picture
him lying at anchor below Newburgh, with the dark
pass of the “Wey-Gat” frowning behind him, the
lofty and blue Catskills beyond, and the hill-sides
around covered with the red lords of the soil, exhibiting
only less wonder than friendliness. And how
beautifully was the assurance of welcome expressed,
when the “very kind old man” brought a bunch of
arrows, and broke them before the stranger, to induce
him to partake fearlessly of his hospitality!

The qualities of the Hudson are those most likely
to impress a stranger. It chances felicitously that the
traveller's first entrance beyond the sea-board is usually
made by the steamer to Albany. The grand and imposing
outlines of rock and horizon answer to his anticipations
of the magnificence of a new world; and if
he finds smaller rivers and softer scenery beyond, it
strikes him but as a slighter lineament of a more enlarged
design. To the great majority of tastes, this,
too, is the scenery to live among. The stronger lines
of natural beauty affect most tastes; and there are
few who would select country residence by beauty at
all, who would not sacrifice something to their preference
for the neighborhood of sublime scenery. The
quiet, the merely rural—a thread of a rivulet instead
of a broad river—a small and secluded valley, rather
than a wide extent of view, bounded by bold mountains,
is the choice of but few. The Hudson, therefore,
stands usually foremost in men's aspirations for
escape from the turmoil of cities; but to my taste,
though there are none more desirable to see, there
are sweeter rivers to live upon.

I made one of a party, very lately, bound upon a
rambling excursion up and down some of the river-courses
of New York. We had anticipated empty
boats, and an absence of all the gay company usually
found radiating from the city in June, and had made
up our minds for once to be contented with the study
of inanimate nature. Never were wiseheads more
mistaken. Our kind friend, Captain Dean, of the
Stevens, stood by his plank when we arrived, doing his
best to save the lives of the female portion of the
crowd rushing on board; and never, in the most palmy
days of the prosperity of our country, have we seen a
greater number of people on board a boat, nor a stronger
expression of that busy and thriving haste, which
is thought to be an exponent of national industry.
How those varlets of newsboys contrive to escape in
time, or escape at all, from being crushed or carried
off; how everybody's baggage gets on board, and
everybody's wife and child; how the hawsers are
slipped, and the boat got under way, in such a crowd
and such a crush, are matters understood, I suppose,
by Providence and the captain of the Stevens—but
they are beyond the comprehension of the passenger.

Having got out of hearing of “Here's the Star!”
“Buy the old major's paper, sir?” “Here's the Express!”
“Buy the New-Ery?” “Would you like a
New-Era, sir?” “Take a Sun, miss?” and a hundred
such deafening cries, to which New York has of
late years become subject, we drew breath and comparative
silence off the green shore of Hoboken, thanking
Heaven for even the repose of a steamboat, after
the babel of a metropolis. Stillness, like all other
things, is relative.

The passage of the Hudson is doomed to be be-written,
and we will not again swell its great multitude of
describers. Bound onward, we but gave a glance, in
passing, to romantic Undercliff and Cro'-Nest, hallowed
by the sweetest poetry our country has yet committed
to immortality; gave our malison to the black
smoke of iron-works defacing the green mantle of
nature, and our benison to every dweller on the shore
who has painted his fence white, and smoothed his
lawn to the river; and sooner than we used to do by
some five or six hours (ere railroads had supplanted
the ploughing and crawling coaches to Schenectady),
we fed our eyes on the slumbering and broad valley
of the Mohawk.

How startled must be the Naiad of this lovely river
to find her willowy form embraced between railroad
and canal! one intruder on either side of the bed so
sacredly overshaded! Pity but there were a new
knight of La Mancha to avenge the hamadryads and
water-nymphs of their wrongs from wood-cutters and
contractors! Where sleep Pan and vengeful Oread,
when a Yankee settler hews me down twenty wood-nymphs
of a morning! There lie their bodies, limbless
trunks, on the banks of the Mohawk, yet no Dutchman
stands sprouting into leaves near by, nor woollen
jacket turning into bark, as in the retributive olden
time! We are abandoned of these gods of Aready!
They like not the smoke of steam funnels!

Talking of smoke reminds me of ashes. Is there
no way of frequenting railroads without the loss of
one's eyes. Must one pay for velocity as dearly as
Cacus for his oxen? Really this new invention is a
blessing—to the oculists! Ten thousand small crystals
of carbon cutting right and left among the fine vessels
and delicate membranes of the eye, and all this amid
glorious scenery, where to go bandaged (as needs
must), is to slight the master-work of nature! Either
run your railroads away from the river courses, gentlemen
contractors, or find some other place than your
passengers' eyes to bestow your waste ashes! I have
heard of “lies in smiles,” but there's a lye in tears,
that touches the sensibilities more nearly!

There is a drowsy beauty in these German flats that
seems strangely profaned by a smoky monster whisking
along twenty miles in the hour. The gentle canal-boat
was more homogeneous to the scene. The hills
lay off from the river in easy and sleepy curves, and
the amber Mohawk creeps down over its shallow gravel
with a deliberateness altogether and abominably out
of tune with the iron rails. Perhaps it is the rails out
of tune with the river—but any way there is a discord.
I am content to see the Mohawk, canal, and railroad
inclusive, but once a year.

We reached the head waters of the Chenango river,
by what Miss Martineau celebrates as an “exclusive
extra,” in an afternoon's ride from Utica. The latter
thrifty and hospitable town was as redolent of red
bricks and sunshine as usual; and the streets, to my
regret, had grown no narrower. They who laid out
the future legislative capital of New York, must have
been lovers of winter's wind and summer's sun. They
forgot the troubles of the near-sighted—(it requires
spectacles to read the signs or see the shops from one
side to the other); they forgot the perils of old women
and children in the wide crossings; they forgot the
pleasures of shelter and shade, of neighborly vis-à-vis,
of comfortable-lookingness. I maintain that Utica is
not a comfortable-looking town. It affects me like the
clown in the pantomime, when he sits down without
bending his legs—by mere straddling. I would not
say anything so ungracious if it were not to suggest a
remedy—a shady mall up and down the middle! What
a beautiful town it would be—like an old-fashioned
shirt bosom, with a frill of elms! Your children
would walk safely within the rails, and your country-neighbors
would expose their “sa'ace,” and cool their
tired oxen in the shade. We felt ourselves compensated
for paying nearly double price for our “extra,”
by the remarkable alacrity with which the coach came
to the door after the bargain was concluded, and the
politeness with which the “gentleman who made out
the way-bill,” acceded to our stipulation. He bowed
us off, expressed his happiness to serve us, and away
we went.

The Chenango, one of the largest tributaries to the
Susquehannah, began to show itself, like a small brook,
some fifteen or twenty miles from Utica. Its course
lay directly south—and the new canal kept along its
bank, as deserted, but a thousand times less beautiful
in its loneliness than the river, whose rambling curves
it seemed made to straighten. We were not in the
best humor, for our double-priced “extra” turned out
to be the regular stage; and while we were delivering
and waiting for mails, and taking in passengers, the
troop of idlers at tavern-doors amused themselves with
reading the imaginative production called our “extra
way-bill,” as it was transferred, with a sagacious wink,

from one driver's hat to the other. I thought of
Paddy's sedan-chair, with the bottom out. “If it
were not for the name of the thing,” said he, as he
trotted along with a box over his head.

I say we were not in the best of humors with our
prompt and polite friend at Utica, but even through
these bilious spectacles, the Chenango was beautiful.
Its valley is wide and wild, and the reaches of the
capricious stream through the farms and woods along
which it loiters, were among the prettiest effects of
water scenery I have ever met. There is a strange
loneliness about it; and the small towns which were
sprinkled along the hundred miles of its course, seem
rather the poineers into a western wilderness, than
settlements so near the great thoroughfare to the lakes.
It is a delicious valley to travel through, barring
“corduroy.” Tre-men-dous! exclaims the traveller,
as the coach drops into a pit between two logs, and
surges up again—Heaven only knows how. And, as
my fellow-passenger remarked, it is a wonder the road
does not echo—“tree-mend-us!”

Five miles before reaching the Susquehannah, the
road began to mend, the hills and valleys assumed the
smile of cultivation, and the scenery before us took a
bolder and broader outline. The Chenango came
down full and sunny to her junction, like the bride,
who is most lovely when just losing her virgin name,
and pouring the wealth of her whole existence into
the bosom of another; and, untroubled with his new
burden, the lordly Susquehannah kept on his majestic
way, a type of such vainly-dreaded, but easily-borne
responsibilities.

At Binghamton, we turned our course down the
Susquehannah. This delicious word, in the Indian
tongue, describes its peculiar and constant windings,
and I venture to say that on no river in the world are
the grand and beautiful in scenery so gloriously mixed.
The road to Owego follows the course of the valley
rather than of the river, but the silver curves are constantly
in view; and, from every slight elevation, the
majestic windings are seen—like the wanderings of a
vein, gleaming through green fringes of trees, and
circling the bright islands which occasionally divide
their waters. It is a swift river, and singularly living
and joyous in its expression.

At Owego there is a remarkable combination of bold
scenery and habitable plain. One of those small,
bright rivers, which are called “creeks” in this country,
comes in with its valley at right angles, to the vale
and stream of the Susquehannah, forming a star with
three rays, or a plain with three radiating valleys, or a
city (in the future, perhaps), with three magnificent
exits and entrances. The angle is a round mountain,
some four or five hundred feet in height, which kneels
fairly down at the meeting of the two streams, while
another round mountain, of an easy acclivity, lifts
gracefully from the opposite bank, as if rising from
the same act of homage to Nature. Below the town
and above it, the mountains, for the first time, give in
to the exact shape of the river's short and capricious
course; and the plain on which the town stands, is
enclosed between two amphitheatres of lofty hills,
shaped with the regularity and even edge of a coliseum,
and resembling the two halves of a leaf-lined vase,
struck apart by a twisted wand of silver.

Owego creek should have a prettier name—for its
small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A
meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and sprinkled
with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its swift
windings; and from the edge of this new tempe, on
the southern side, rise three steppes, or natural terraces,
over the highest of which the forest rears its
head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers,
while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the small
streamlets from the mountain-springs, forming each
again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of
Nature.

There are more romantic, wilder places than this
in the world, but none on earth more habitably beautiful.
In these broad valleys, where the grain-fields,
and the meadows, and the sunny farms, are walled in
by glorious mountain sides, not obtrusively near, yet
by their noble and wondrous outlines, giving a perpetual
refreshment, and an hourly-changing feast to
the eye—in these valleys, a man's household gods
yearn for an altar. Here are mountains that, to look
on but once, “become a feeling”—a river at whose
grandeur to marvel—and a hundred streamlets to lace
about the heart. Here are fertile fields, nodding with
grain; “a thousand cattle” grazing on the hills—here
is assembled together, in one wondrous centre, a specimen
of every most loved lineament of Nature. Here
would I have a home! Give me a cottage by one of
these shining streamlets—upon one of these terraces,
that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over
these mountain sides, while my flowers are growing,
and my head silvering in tranquil happiness. He
whose Penates would not root ineradicably here, has
no heart for a home, nor senses for the glory of Nature!

4. PART IV;
EPHEMERA.

FROM SARATOGA.
TO THE JULIA OF SOME YEARS AGO.

August 2, 1843.

I have not written to you in your boy's lifetime—
that fine lad, a shade taller than yourself, whom I
sometimes meet at my tailor's and bootmaker's. I
am not very sure, that after the first month (bitter
month) of your marriage, I have thought of you for
the duration of a revery—fit to be so called. I loved
you—lost you—swore your ruin and forgot you—
which is love's climax when jilted. And I never expected
to think of you again.

Beside the astonishment at hearing from me at all,
you will be surprised at receiving a letter from me at
Saratoga. Here where the stars are, that you swore
by—here, where the springs and colonnades, the
woodwalks and drives, the sofas and swings, are all
coated over with your delicious perjuries, your “protested”
protestations, your incalculable bankruptcy of
sighs, tears, caresses, promises! Oh, Julia—mais,
retiens toi, ma plume!

I assure you I had not the slightest idea of ever
coming here again in the world—not the slightest!
I had a vow in heaven against it, indeed. While I
hated you—before I forgot you, that is to say—I
would not have come for your husband's million—
(your price, Julia!) I had laid Saratoga away with
a great seal, to be reopened in the next star I shall
inhabit, and used as a lighthouse of warning. There
was one bannister at Congress Hall, particularly—
across which we parted nightly—the next object my
hand touched after losing the warm pressure of
yours—the place I leaned over with a heart under my
waistcoat which would have scaled Olympus to be
nearer to you, yet was kept back by that mahogany
and your “no”—and I will believe that devils may
become dolls, and ghosts play around us like the
smoke of a cigar, since over that bannister I have
thrown my leg and sat thinking of the past without
phrensy or emotion! And none have a better right
than we to laugh now at love's passionate eternities!
For we were lovers, Julia—I, as I know, and you, as I
believe—and in that entry, when we parted to dream,
write, contrive for the blissful morrow—anything but
sleep and forget—in that entry and over that bannister
were said words of tenderness and devotion, from as
deep soundings of two hearts as ever plummet of this
world could by possibility fathom. You did love me—
monster of untruth and forgetfulness as you have
since been bought for—you did love me! And that
you can ride in your husband's carriage and grow
fat, and that I can come here and make a mock of it,
are two comments on love worthy of the common-place-book
of Mephistophiles. Fie on us!

I came to Saratoga as I would look at a coat that I
had worn twenty years before—with a sort of vacant
curiosity to see the shell in which I had once figured.
A friend said, “Join me at Saratoga!” and it sounded
like, “Come and see where Julia was adorable.” I
came in a railcar, under a hot sun, and wanted my
dinner, and wished myself where Julia, indeed, sat
fat in her fauteuil—wished it, for the good wine in the
cellar and the French cook in the kitchen. And I
did not go down to “Congress Hall,” the old palais
d'amour—but in the modern and comfortable parlor
of the “United States,” sat down by a pretty woman
of these days, and chatted about the water-lily in her
bosom and the boy she had up stairs—coldly and every-day-ishly.
I had been there six hours, and you
had not entered my thoughts. Please to believe
that, Julia!

But in the evening there was a ball at Congress
Hall. And though the old house is unfashionable
now, and the lies of love are elsewhere told and listened
to, there was a movement among the belles in
its favor, and I appended myself to a lady's arm and
went boldly. I say boldly, for it required an effort.
The twilight had fallen, and with it had come a memory
or two of the Springs in our time. I had seated
myself against a pillar of the colonnade of the “United
States,” and looked down toward Congress Hall—
and you were under the old vineclad portico, as I
should have seen you from the same spot, and with
the same eye of fancy, sundry years ago. So it was
not quite like a passionless antiquary that I set foot
again on that old-time colonnade, and, to say truth,
as the band struck up a waltz, I might have had in
my lip a momentary quiver, and some dimness in my
world-weary eye. But it passed away.

The ball was comme ca, and I found sweet women
(as where are they not—given, candles and music?)
and aired my homage as an old stager may. I danced
without thinking of you uncomfortably, though the
ten years' washing of that white floor has not quite
washed out the memory of your Arab instep with
its embracing and envied sandal, gliding and bounding,
oh how airily! For you had feet, absolute in
their perfection, dear Julia!—had you not?

But I went out for fresh air on the colonnade, in
an evil and forgetful moment. I strolled alone toward
the spring. The lamp burned dim, as it used to
burn, tended by Cupid's minions. And on the end
of the portico, by the last window of the music-room,
under that overhanging ivy, with stars in sight that I
would have sworn to for the very same—sat a lady in
a dress like yours as I saw you last, and black eyes,
like jet lamps framed in velvet, turning indolently toward
me. I held by the railing, for I am superstitious,
and it seemed to me that I had only to ask why you
were there—for, ghostly or bodily, there I saw you!
Back came your beauty on my memory with yesterday's

freshness of recollection. Back came into my
heart the Julia of my long-accursed adoration! I
saw your confiding and bewildering smile, your fine-cut
teeth of pearl, your over-bent brow and arch look
from under, your lily-shoulders, your dimpled hands.
You were there, if my senses were sufficient evidence,
if presence be anything without touch—bodily there!

Of course it was somebody else. I went in and
took a julep. But I write to tell you that for a minute—a
minute of enormous capacity—I have loved
you once more. For one minute, while you probably
were buried deep in your frilled pillow—(snoring, perhaps—who
knows?)—for one minute, fleeting and
blissful, you have been loved again—with heart, brain,
blood, all on fire with truth, tenderness, and passionate
adoration—by a man who could have bought you
(you know I could!) for half the money you sold for!
And I thought you would like to know this, Julia!
And now, hating you as before, in your fleshy forgetfulness,
Yours not at all.

Did it ever strike you how much more French than
English we are in many of the qualities, especially the
superficies and physiognomy, of our national character?
In dressing, dancing, congregating—in chivalry
to women, facility of adaptation to new circumstances,
inflammability of excitement, elasticity of recuperation
from trouble—in complexion and figure even,
how very French! The remark, perhaps, is more
particularly true of New York. Where in the world
is there such a copy of the sweeter features of the
jour de l'an at Paris, as to-day in the bons-bons shops
of Broadway? Here, as there, ingenuity and art are
taxed to their utmost to provide gay and significant
presents of confectionary for children and friends, and
the shops are museums of curiosities. Everybody
has a child or two by the hand; everybody is abroad,
and alive to the spirit and baby-supremacy of the
hour; everybody abandons his monotone of daily life,
to strike into the general diapason, a full octave
higher, for Christmas. But Christmas has not these
superficial features in England. This is the way they
keep Christmas in France; and the French extravagance
of confectionary is one of the outer indices of
the original from which we copy, and points us
directly to Paris.

Were the language of the three countries the same,
we should seem to a traveller's eye, I am inclined to
think, much more like a nation of French origin than
English. Although our communication with England
is much more intimate, we hardly copy anything
English except its literature and religion. Our fashions
in dress, male as well as female, are principally
Parisian. The style of cookery in our hotels, and at
all private tables of any pretension, is French. Our
houses are furnished a la Française; our habits of
society, our balls, private concerts, and places of entertainment
for the idlers about town, are all French.
We have a hundred French bootmakers to one English.
We have a large colony of Americans in Paris
engaged in the business of exporting French fabrics,
elegancies, and conveniences, for this country, and
almost none of the same class in England. In fact,
if England is our mother-country, France is the
foster-nurse from whom we draw the most of our
nourishment, of the tasteful and ornamental order.

In the society of New York I think the predominance
of Gallicism over Anglicism is still more striking.
The French language is heard all over a
crowded drawing-room; and with costume entirely,
and furniture mainly, French, it is difficult sometimes
at a party in this city, not to fancy one's self on the
other side of the Atlantic. Frenchmen are quite at
home in New York, while no Frenchman is at home
in England. And lately the fashion of soirées, beginning
with music and ending with a dance, another
Parisian usage, has followed on the heels of the
matinées which I referred to in a previous letter. We
certainly have not inherited, with our English blood,
the English reluctance to copy even an excellence, if
it be French; and it is a curious mark of the difference
made in such matters by national antipathy, that,
with a separation of only twenty miles from the
French coast, the English assimilate not at all, even to
the acknowledged superiorities of French life, while
we, at a distance of three thousand miles, copy them
with the readiness of a contiguous country.

There was, of course, a period when every work on
the country was English; and it would be a curious
chapter in a historical memoir to trace back our Gallicism
to its incipient point, and give its rise and progress
in detail. And, apropos of suggestions, which
sometimes travel like the seed in the migrating bird,
what an interesting book might be written (and by no
man living so admirably and ably as by your correspondent,
Mr. Walsh) tracing the influences that have
spread from our country eastward; and to what degree
our institutions, opinions, and discoveries, have
affected European countries, and paid back our debt
of literature and refinement!

The snow-storm of Wednesday cleared up at nightfall
with an old-fashioned frosty and sparkling northwester.
While the south wind was disputing his
ground, however, the sun found a chink to creep
through, and quietly took to himself the scanty remainder
of the city's mantle of snow. I chanced to
look down upon the Park while the ground was covered,
and I wished that the common council might
see it with my eyes, for the fountain was playing beautifully
in a basin of spotless white, which, if exactly
imitated in marble, would be better worthy of that
radiant column than the mingled mud and greensward
that commonly surround it. I have been surprised to
notice the complete satiety of public curiosity to this
superb object. A column of water, fifty or sixty feet
high, is continually playing in the most thronged
thoroughfare of the city, and it already attracts as
little attention as the trees in the Park, or the liberty-cap
on Tammany hall. Seldom a passer-by stops to
gaze at it; and I have watched in vain, in my daily
stroll through Broadway, for the turning toward it of
the refined eyes of shoppers and danglers. I understand
there is to be another jet in the Bowling-Green,
and another on the Battery—though this last will be
bringing the rural water-nymph into very close contact
with the uproarious Neptune.

The joy of New York comes to Broadway as color
comes with the same impulse to the cheek. The excitement
of shoving off the old year and helping in
the new, was made visible by a pave as thronged on
Saturday night at twelve, as it commonly is on a holy-day
at noon. Sunday (the superseded first) was pretty
gayly infringed upon by sleighing parties; for even in
Broadway the sleighing was tolerable, and, out of
town, said to be excellent. To-day is “black Monday”
for horse-flesh! Such ringing of sleigh-bells
and plunging of runners through the mud-holes, and
laughing, and whipping, and hurrying by, is enough
to give inexperienced Forty-three a most confused
impression of the world he is called upon to govern.
It is snowing slightly at this moment, and gives promise
of a violent storm by noon.

The temperance people have made a strong effort
to discountenance, this year, the giving of wine and

other stimulants to visiters on New Year's day. But
there is a much more powerful principle at work in
the same cause, or rather in a cause which covers
this—the destroying of the custom of New Year's
visiting altogether—and that principle is omnipotent
fashion. The aristocratic feeling now is against the
receiving on that day; and some of the leading fashionables
have reduced their observance of the custom
to a matter of pasteboard—a servant standing at the
door to take in cards. The truth is, the good feeling
of the day has been abused of late years. The hilarity
amounted to a general saturnalia, in which everybody
went anywhere and everywhere to drink and
shake hands, and exclusiveness was very much offended,
and so, very often were propriety and delicacy—three
very implacable members of society!
Once well understood that fashionable people do not
receive—presto! the custom will vanish like a ghost at
cock-crowing. If this formidable gun could be
brought to bear upon some other things, now?

A score at least of the aristocratic dames in the
upper part of Broadway have adopted the fashion of a
matinée—receiving visits one morning only in the
week. This is rather a usage en prince, but, ambitious
as it seems, it is a novelty which common sense
might father if it had been disowned by fashion. In
the first place, it leaves to those who thus entertain,
six mornings in the week, if they please, of excusable
closed doors—a very available privilege for very many
important uses. In the second place, it saves much
outlay of time consumed in ineffectual attempts to see
people; it times your visit when the ladies are in a
dress-humor to receive! and (last, though perhaps
least important) the class of gregarious idlers, so fast
increasing in our country, are provided with a resource
against ennui, which may profitably take the place of
less innocent amusement. It may be put down as an
accidental advantage, also, that ladies may dress very
gayly with propriety to pass two or three hours in a
reception-room, and, with this compensation, perhaps
our fair countrywomen may be willing to forego that
showiness of street costume which has been so often
objected to. The most becoming toilet (which is
undoubtedly that of out-doors, at least to all women
past seventeen) must have its field of display, and this
necessity has been amply proved by the fashion peculiar
to our country of dressing highly for steamboat-decks
and street promenades—the only opportunities
for showing the hat and its accompaniments. In England,
ladies dress plainly in the street, but they dress
showily for Hyde park and the opera. In default of a
Hyde park and an opera, our persevering countrywomen
have adopted the matinée. Sequitur—Broadway
will be shorn of the genteeler rays of its splendor;
ladies will heighten the style of their visiting
toilets till they can not visit without equipages, and
so the aristocracy of money takes another long stride
toward exclusiveness and empire.

An advertisement of “fifteen Indians and squaws to
be seen at the American Museum in their NATIVE costume,”
drew me into this place of popular resort last
evening. I found a crowd of five or six hundred people
collected in the upper story, and the performances
of a small theatre going on, with the Indians sitting,
in full costume, on the stage; not “native costume,”
certainly, unless they are born in wampum and feathers.
There were only nine Indians upon the stage,
and several of these seemed to have bad coughs; and
I was told that those who were not visible were confined
to their skins with severe colds and fevers. I am
not surprised that these hardy sons of the forest suc
cumb under the delicacies (?) of civilization. They
all sleep in one small room in the museum building,
their buffalo-skins spread around a stove—heated to
an insufferable degree with authracite coal—and they
ascend to the terrace-roof of the house to smoke their
pipes, and are regaled with a daily sleigh-ride,
changing their temperature continually from ninety
to zero. The old chief who “has killed with his own
hand one hundred Osages, three Mohawks, two
Sioux, and one Pawnee,” and “No-chee, or the Man
of Fire,” are the principal victims to the luxury of
anthracite. I saw but one of the squaws, “Do-humme,
or the Productive Pumpkin,” a handsome and
benign looking woman, who was married a few days
ago to Cow-kick-ke, son of the principal chief of the
Iowas. The bride and bridegroom sat together, she
leaning very affectionately upon her husband; but I
observed that the “Productive Pumpkin” modestly
turned her eyes away during the pirouettes of La
Petite Celeste, a savage niaiserie which will, of course,
wear away with civilization. Still, I could wish that
some of the “daughters of the pale faces,” in this
respect, at least, were more like “Productive Pumpkin.”
These Indians, I believe, are well authenticated
as the first people of their important tribes; and
the question arises whether, in becoming a shilling
show at the museum, they have entered civilized society
upon a stratum parallel to their own. Is “Nonos-ee,
the She-Wolf” (a niece of Blackhawk, and,
of course, an Indian princess), on a level, as to rank,
with the dancing and singing girls of a museum? But
this question of comparative rank would lead a great
way, and, as it stands, it makes a very pretty topic of
discussion for your female readers.

You will have seen mentioned in the papers the
death of the young squaw at the museum. She had
been married but six weeks, and was a very beautiful
creature. I saw her, a few days ago, at the Park
theatre, with a circlet of jewels around her head, and
thought her by far the prettiest woman in the house.
She was the survivor of the two females of the party,
the other squaw having died a few weeks since. The
immediate cause of her death was a violent cold,
taken in coming home a night or two before from a
ball at the Tivoli. The omnibus in which they were
returning broke down in Hudson street, and they were
obliged to walk a mile through a light snow falling at
the time. Their thin moccasins were no protection,
and four or five of the Indians were ill the next morning,
the bride worst of all. She died in dreadful
agony, of congestion of the blood, on the third day,
spite of the best medical attendance and every care on
the part of the ladies of the neighborhood. The Indians
were all standing around her, and on being told
that she was dead, they tore the rings from their ears,
and stood for some minutes in silence, with the blood
streaming upon their cheeks. Their grief afterward
became quite uncontrollable. They washed off all the
paint with which they have been so gayly bedecked
while here, and painted the dead bride very gaudily
for burial. She was interred in the Greenwood cemetery.
The most passionate affection existed between
her and her husband. He is a magnificent fellow, the
handsomest Indian we have ever had in the cities, and
a happier marriage was never celebrated. She followed
close at his heels wherever he went, and had
scarce been separated from him five minutes at a time
since her marriage. The poor fellow is an object of
great commiseration now, for he seems completely inconsolable.
His wife was the idol of the party. They
are very impatient to be away since this melancholy
event, and will start westward as soon as the sick
recover.

Public opinion, which is notoriously unkind to the
misdoings of old men, has at last taken up the matter
of—

There are strong symptoms (in everything but the inflexible
thermometer) that the spring is universally
believed to have arrived. A steamboat made its way
on Wednesday as far as Poughkeepsie, ploughing up
the ice where it was at least eighteen inches thick.
People were running out from every side to meet her,
and many climbed up her sides while she was making
way. Some heavily-laden sleighs were obliged to
whip up to get out of her course, and altogether the
skirmish between hot and cold water (both a l'outrance)
is said to have been very daringly fought.

The “town” is “verdant.” The enchanting spring-hats
of the ladies are breezily exposed in the plate-glass
windows of the milliners. The airy, delicate,
daisy-mead patterns for ladies' wear in the transition
month make every shop-window like a landscape of
May in Arcady; the men-tailors “turn out for lining
to the sun” the light woofs of the “demme!” tribe
for the demi-season; the Croton pipers water the
streets; the small wooden signs hang on every leafless
tree in the park, warning you to “keep off the grass;”
people are beginning to discuss the resorts of the sultry
season; and, in fact, everything is here but the month
itself. The table is set, and the hour and the appetite
come, but the dinner is not served.

Apropos of Croton water—there has been a great
overturn lately of “mill-privileges” in some of the
cellars of New York. The authorities have ferreted
out, it is said, an incredible quantity of usurped water-power,
applied to almost every branch of mechanism,
and drawn very quietly from the main “race” down
Broadway. One scratches one's head and wonders
he never thought of it before, the adaptation seems
so simple; but as the Common Council will hear no
argument about “natural privileges” and “backwater,”
the interloping wheels will easily be stopped turning.

As I presume you are interested in the one portion
of New York made classic by a foreign pen, let me
jot you down a mem. or two from my first visit to
Dicken's Hole at the Five Points, made one evening
last week with a distinguished party under the charge
of the Boz officer.

I had had an idea that this celebrated spot was on
the eastern limit of the city, at the end of one of the
omnibus-routes, and was surprised to find that it was
not more than three minutes' walk from Broadway,
and in full view from one of the fashionable corners.
It lies, indeed, in a lap between Broadway and the
Bowery, in what was once a secluded valley of the
island of Manhattan, though to believe it ever to have
been green or clean, requires a powerful effort of imagination.
We turned into Anthony street at half-past
ten, passed “the Tombs,” and took the downward
road, as did Orpheus and Dickens before us. It
was a cold night, but women stood at every door with
bare heads and shoulders, most of them with something
to say, and, by their attitudes, showing a complete
insensibility to cold. In everything they said,
they contrived to bring in the word “shilling.” There
were very few men to be seen, and those whom we
met skulked past as if avoiding observation—possibly
ashamed to be there, possibly shrinking from any further
acquaintance with officer Stevens, though neither
of these feelings seemed to be shared by the females
of the community. A little turn to the left brought
us up against what looked to me a blind, tumble-down
board fence; but the officer pulled a latch and opened
a door, and a flight of steps was disclosed. He went
down first and threw open a door at the bottom, letting
up a blaze of light, and we followed into the
grand subterranean Almack's of the Five Points.
And really it looked very clean and cheerful. It was
a spacious room with a low ceiling, excessively whitewashed,
nicely sanded, and well lit, and the black proprietor
and his “ministering spirits” (literally fulfilling
their vocation behind a very tidy bar) were well-dressed
and well-mannered people, and received Mr. Stevens
and his friends with the politeness of grand
chamberlains. We were a little early for the fashionable
hour, the “ladies not having arrived from the
theatres;” and, proposing to look in again after making
the round of the other resorts, we crept up again to
the street.

Our next dive was into a cellar crowded with negroes,
eating, drinking, and dancing, one very well
made mulatto-girl playing the castinets, and imitating
Elssler in what she called the cracoveragain. In their
way, these people seemed cheerful, dirty, and comfortable.
We looked in afterward at several drinking-places,
thronged with creatures who looked over their
shoulders very significantly at the officer; found one
or two barrooms kept by women who had preserved
the one virtue of neatness (though in every clean
place the hostess seemed a terrible virago), and it was
then proposed that we should see some of the dormitories
of this Alsatia. And at this point must end
all the cheerfulness of my description. This is called
“murdering alley,” said our guide. We entered between
two high brick walls, with barely room to pass,
and by the police-lantern made our way up a broken
and filthy staircase, to the first floor of a large building.
Under its one roof the officer thought there usually
slept a thousand of these wretched outcasts. He
knocked at a door on the left. It was opened unwillingly
by a woman who held a dirty horse-blanket
over her breast, but at the sight of the police-lantern
she stepped back and let us pass in. The floor was
covered with human beings asleep in their rags; and
when called by the officer to look in at a low closet
beyond, we could hardly put our feet to the ground,
they lay so closely together, black and white, men,
women, and children. The doorless apartment beyond,
of the size of a kennel, was occupied by a woman
and her daughter, and the daughter's child, lying
together on the floor, and covered by rags and cloths
of no distinguishable color, the rubbish of bones and
dirt only displaced by their emaciated limbs. The
sight was too sickening to endure, but there was no
egress without following close to the lantern. Another
door was opened to the right. It disclosed a low
and gloomy apartment, perhaps eight feet square.
Six or seven black women lay together in a heap, all
sleeping except the one who opened the door. Something
stirred in a heap of rags, and one of the party
removing a dirty piece of carpet with his cane, discovered
a newborn child. It belonged to one of the
sleepers in the rags, and had had an hour's experience
of the tender mercies of this world! But these details
are disguisting, and have gone far enough when
they have shown those who have the common comforts
of life how inestimably, by comparison, they are
blessed! For one, I had never before any adequate
idea of poverty in cities. I did not dream that human
beings, within reach of human aid, could be
abandoned to the wretchedness which I there saw—
and I have not described the half of it, for the delicacy
of your readers would not bear it, even in description.
And all these horrors of want and abandonment
lie almost within sound of your voice, as

you pass Broadway! The officers sometimes make a
descent, and carry off swarms to Blackwell's Island—
for all the inhabitants of the Five Points are supposed
to be criminal and vicious—but still thousands are
there, subjects for tears and pity, starving, like rats
and dogs, with the sensibilities of human beings!

As we returned we heard screams and fighting on
every side, and the officers of the watch were carrying
off a party to the lock-up-house. We descended
once more to the grand ballroom, and found the dance
going on very merrily. Several very handsome mulatto
women were in the crowd, and a few “young
men about town,” mixed up with the blacks; and altogether
it was a picture of “amalgamation,” such
as I had never before seen. I was very glad to get
out of the neighborhood, leaving behind me, I am
free to confess, all discontent with my earthly allotment.
One gentleman who was with us left behind
him something of more value, having been robbed at
Almack's of his keys, pencilcase, and a few dollars,
the contents of two or three pockets. I wind up my
“notes” with the hope that the true picture I have
drawn may touch some moving-spring of benevolence
in private societies, or in the Common Council, and
that something may be soon done to alleviate the horrors
of the Five Points.

I took a stroll or two while in Boston, and was
struck with the contrast of its physiognomy to that
of New York. There is a look of staid respectability
and thrift in everything that strikes the eye in Boston.
The drays, carts, omnibuses, and public vehicles,
are well horsed and appointed, and driven by respectable-looking
men. The people are all clad very
warmly and very inelegantly. The face of every pedestrian
in the street has a marked errand in it—gentlemen
holding their nerves to the screw till they
have achieved the object of being out of doors, and
ladies undergoing a “constitutional” to carry out a
system. There are no individuals in Boston—they
are all classes. It is a cohesive and gregarious town,
and half a dozen portraits would give you the entire
population. Every eye in Boston seems to move in
its socket with a check—a fear of meeting something
that may offend it—and all heads are carried in a posture
of worthy gravity, singularly contagious. It
struck me the very loaves in the bakers' windows had
a look of virtuous exaction, to be eaten gravely, if at
all.

New York seems to me to differ from all this, as a
dish of rice, boiled to let every grain fall apart, differs
from a pot of mush. Every man you meet with in
our city walks with his countenance free of any sense
of observation or any dread of his neighbor. He has
evidently dressed to please himself, and he looks about
with an eye wholly at ease. He is an integer in the
throng, untroubled with any influence beyond the
risks of personal accident. There is neither restraint
nor curiosity in his look, and he neither expects to be
noticed by the passers-by, nor to see anything worthy
of more than half a glance in the persons he meets.
The moving sights of the city have all the same integral
and stand-alone character. The drays, instead
of belonging to a company, are each the property of
the man who drives it; the hacks and cabs are under
no corporate discipline, every ragged whip doing as
he likes with his own vehicle; and all the smaller
trades seem followed by individual impulse, responsible
to nothing but police-law. Boston has the advantage
in many things, but a man who has any taste
for cosmopolitism would very much prefer New York.

Wednesday was a long warm summer's day, with
no treachery in it to the close; and the rivulet of
Croton, which ripples round the sidewalk of the park,
and goes down the great throat of the drain, seemed
giving the dry city to drink. The pavement of
Broadway burst into flower. Birds were hung out at
the windows; hyacinths were put out to breathe;
and open casements and doors, lounging footsteps and
cheerful voices in the street, all gave sweet token of
summer. Thursday was a fine day, too, with a little
soupcon of east wind in its blandishments, and the
evening set in with a gentle summer rain, welcome as
most things are after their opposites, for the dust was
a nuisance; and to-day, Friday, it rains mildly and
steadily.

March made an expiring effort to give us a spring-day
yesterday. The morning dawned mild and bright,
and there was a voluptuous contralto in the cries of
the milkmen and the sweeps, which satisfied me, before
I was out of bed, that there was an arrival of a
south wind. The Chinese proverb says, “when thou
hast a day to be idle, be idle for a day;” but for that
very elusive “time when,” I irresistibly substitute the
day the wind sweetens after a sour northeaster. Oh,
the luxury (or cursc, as the case may be!) of breakfasting
leisurely with an idle day before one!

I strolled up Broadway between nine and ten, and
encountered the morning tide down; and if you never
have studied the physiognomy of this great thoroughfare
in its various fluxes and refluxes, the differences
would amuse you. The clerks and workies have
passed down an hour before the nine o'clock tide, and
the sidewalk is filled at this time with bankers, brokers,
and speculators, bound to Wall street; old merchants
and junior partners, bound to Pearl and Water; and
lawyers, young and old, bound for Nassau and Pine.
Ah, the faces of care! The day's operations are
working out in their eyes; their hats are pitched forward
at the angle of a stagecoach with all the load on
the driver's seat, their shoulders are raised with the
shrug of anxiety, their steps are hurried and short,
and mortal face and gait could scarcely express a
heavier burden of solicitude than every man seems to
bear. They nod to you without a smile, and with a
kind of unconscious recognition; and, if you are unaccustomed
to walk out at that hour, you might fancy
that, if there were not some great public calamity,
your friends, at least, had done smiling on you.
Walk as far as Niblo's, stop at the greenhouse there,
and breathe an hour in the delicious atmosphere of
flowering plants, and then return. There is no longer
any particular current in Broadway. Foreigners coming
out from the cafès, after their late breakfast, and
idling up and down, for fresh air; country-people
shopping early; ladies going to their dress-makers in
close veils and demi-toilets; errand-boys, news-boys,
duns, and doctors, make up the throng. Toward
twelve o'clock there is a sprinkling of mechanics going
to dinner—a merry, short-jacketed, independent-looking
troop, glancing gayly at the women as they
pass, and disappearing around corners and up alleys,
and an hour later Broadway begins to brighten. The
omnibuses go along empty, and at a slow pace, for
people would rather walk than ride. The side-streets
are tributaries of silks and velvets, flowers and feathers,
to the great thoroughfare; and ladies, whose
proper mates (judging by the dress alone) should be
lords and princes, and dandies, shoppers, and loungers
of every description, take crowded possession of the
pavé. At nine o'clock you look into the troubled
faces of men going to their business, and ask yourself
“to what end is all this burden of care?” and at
two, you gaze on the universal prodigality of exterior,
and wonder what fills the multitude of pockets that
pay for it! The faces are beautiful, the shops are
thronged, the sidewalks crowded for an hour, and

then the full tide turns, and sets upward. The most
of those who are out at three are bound to the upper
part of the city to dine; and the merchants and lawyers,
excited by collision and contest above the depression
of care, join, smiling, in the throng. The
physiognomy of the crowd is at its brightest. Dinner
is the smile of the day to most people, and the
hour approaches. Whatever has happened in stocks
or politics, whoever is dead, whoever ruined since
morning, Broadway is thronged with cheerful faces
and good appetites at three! The world will probably
dine with pleasure up to the last day—perhaps
breakfast with worldly care for the future on dooms-day
morning! And here I must break off my Daguerreotype
of yesterday's idling, for the wind came
round easterly and raw at three o'clock, and I was
driven in-doors to try industry as an opiate.

The first day of freedom from medical embargo is
equivalent, in most men's memories, to a new first impression
of existence. Dame Nature, like a provident
housewife, seems to take the opportunity of a sick
man's absence to whitewash and freshen the world he
occupies. Certainly, I never saw the bay of New
York look so beautiful as on Sunday noon; and you
may attribute as much as you please of this impression
to the “Claude Lorraine spectacles” of convalescence,
and as much more as pleases you to the
fact that it was an intoxicating and dissolving day of
spring.

The Battery on Sunday is the Champs-Elysées of
foreigners. I heard nothing spoken around me but
French and German. Wrapped in my cloak and
seated on a bench, I watched the children and the
poodle-dogs at their gambols, and it seemed to me as
if I were in some public resort over the water. They
bring such happiness to a day of idleness—these foreigners—laughing,
talking nonsense, totally unconscious
of observation, and delighted as much with the
passing of a rowboat, or a steamer, as an American
with the arrival of his own “argosy” from sea. They
are not the better class of foreigners who frequent the
Battery on Sunday. They are the newly-arrived, the
artisans, the German toymakers and the French boot-makers—people
who still wear the spacious-hipped
trousers and scant coats, the gold rings in the ears,
and the ruffled shirts of the lands of undandyfied
poverty. They are there by hundreds. They hang
over the railing and look off upon the sea. They sit
and smoke on the long benches. They run hither
and thither with their children, and behave as they
would in their own garden, using and enjoying it just
as if it were their own. And an enviable power they
have of it!

There had been a heavy fog on the water all the
morning, and quite a fleet of the river-craft had drifted
with the tide close on to the Battery. The soft
south wind was lifting the mist in undulating sweeps,
and covering and disclosing the spars and sails with a
phantom effect quite melo-dramatic. By two o'clock
the breeze was steady and the bay clear, and the horizon
was completely concealed with the spread of canvass.
The grass in the Battery plots seemed to be
growing visibly meantime, and to this animated sea-picture
gave a foreground of tender and sparkling
green; the trees look feathery with the opening buds;
the children rolled on the grass, and the summer
seemed come. Much as Nature loves the country,
she opens her green lap first in the cities. The valleys
are asleep under the snow, and will be for weeks.

I think I may safely announce to you the opening of
a new channel for literature. Mr. Stetson, mine host
of the Astor, as you are aware, is a man of genius, whose
advent, like Napoleon's, was the answer to a demand
in the national character. The peculiarly American
passion for life in hotels, and the mammoth size to which
these luxurious caravansaries have grown, demanded
some mind capable of systematizing and generalizing,
and of bringing these Napoleonic qualities to bear upon
the confused details of comfort and comestibles. I
need not enlarge upon the well-known military discipline
of the Johns and Thomases at the Astor, as most
of your readers have witnessed their matutinal drill,
and seen the simultaneous apparition of the smoking
joints, when the hundred and ten covers have been
whisked off by the word of command, like the heads
of so many Paynim knights decapitated in their helmets.
It has been reserved for this epoch to take and
digest beef and pudding by platoon, in martinet obedience
to a controlling spirit in white apron and carving-knife;
but, as I said before, it was the exigency
of the era, and the historian who records the national
trait will emblazon the name of Stetson as its interpreter
and moulding genius. I am wandering a little
from my design, however, which was simply to make
an admiring comment on the tact and adaptation of
Mr. Stetson, and to show how such minds open the
doors to important changes and innovations. Mr.
Stetson's observing eye had long since detected, that,
if there was any point in which his table d'hote suffered
by comparison with private and princely banquets,
it was in the poverty of conversation and the
absence of general hilarity. This, of course, was owing
partly to the temperance reform, but more particularly
to the want of topics common to the guests,
the persons meeting there being but slightly acquainted.
Music would have furnished a good diapason for
harmonizing the animal spirits of the company, but
this was too expensive; and the first tentative to the
present experiment was the introduction of a very facetious
wine list on the back of the carte. When
people no longer smiled at “Wedding Wine,” “Wanton
Madeira, exceedingly delicate,” &c., the French
carte was suddenly turned into English (explaining
many a sphinx riddle to faithful believers in the cook),
and a postscript was added, containing a list of the times
of arrival and departure of the mails, and information
relative to steamboats and railroads. And with the
spring, I understand, this is to be extended into a
“Daily Prandial Gazette,” and a copy to be furnished
to each guest with the soup, containing the arrivals
of the day at the hotel, the range of the thermometer,
the prospect of rain, “burstings-up” in Wall street,
and general advice as to the use of the castors—the
whole adapted to the meridian of a table d'hote, and
the ascertained demand of subjects for conversation.

In this improvement your prophetic eye will see,
probably, a new field for the ambition of authors (the
addition of one poem per diem, for example, coming
quite within the capacity of such a gazette), and, if I
might venture to saddle Mr. Stetson with advice, I
should recommend that it be confined as long as possible
to the debuts of young poets, the genial criticism
with which they would be read at such time and place
being an “aching void” in their present destiny.

The City Hotel re-opens to-morrow under the care
of the omni-recognisant Willard and his partner of
the olden time. The building has been entirely refreshed,
refitted, and refurnished, and I am told that
in comfort and luxury it far exceeds any hotel in this
country. The advances in the commodiousness and
elegance of these public houses, their economy compared
with housekeeping, and the difficulty of obtaining
tolerable servants, combine to make an inroad
upon the Lares and Penates of the metropolis, which

may have an influence upon national character at
least worth the nothing. Hundreds of persons who, up
to these disastrous times, have nursed their domestic
virtues in the privacy of their own firesides, are now
living at these gregarious palaces, passing their evenings
in such society as chance brings together, and
subjecting their children to such influences of body
and mind as belong more properly to a community of
Owen. Other more obvious objections aside, these
collections of families are not the most harmonious
communities in the world, and the histories of the
conflicting dignities and jostling interests of these
huddled masses will yet furnish most amusing material
to some future Pickwickian writer. The ladies
of the Carlton have lately sent in a remonstrance
against the admission of errandless bachelors into their
privileged drawing-room, and the brawls of the Guelphs
and Ghibellines are but a faint type of the contentions
in the ladies' wing of the Astor for places at
table, &c., &c. I should like to have the opinion of
some such generalizing mind as Dr. Channing's or
Mr. Adams's as to whether the peculiar gregariousness
of Americans is a crudity of national character
which will refine away, or is only a kind of bolder
crystallization characteristic of the freer nuclei of our
institutions. Channing long ago fastened the reproach
upon us of having weaker domestic ties than
the nations of Europe, though he did not see in it a
possible adaptation of Providence to the wants of a
wide country waiting for emigrants from families
easily dismembered; and it would not require much
ingenuity, perhaps, to find a special Providence in the
fact commented on above. But this is getting to be
a sermon.

Since commencing this letter, I have taken a stroll
up Broadway, and looked in at the City hotel. Willard
was in his place behind the bar, a little fatter than of
old, and somewhat gray with cabbage-growing, but his
wonderful memory of names and faces seemed in full
vigor; and, what with the tone of voice, the dexterity
of furnishing drinks, the off-hand welcome to every
comer-in, and the mechanical answering of questions
and calling to servants, he seemed to have begun precisely
where he left off, and his little episode of farming
must seem to him scarcely better than a dream.
A servant showed us over the house. A new gentlemen's
dining-room, lighted from the roof, has been
built in the area behind, and the old dining-room is
cut up into a reading-room and private parlors. The
famous assembly-room in the second story is also divided
up into parlors and ladies' dining-room; but the
garnishing and furnishing of the public and private
parlors are quite beyond anything I know of short of
the houses of nobility and royal palaces. The carpets
are of the finest Wilton and Brussels; the paper
upon the walls of the latest Parisian pattern; a new
piano in every parlor; and the beds and their belongings
of the most enticing freshness and comfortability.
The proprietors have not seen fit, however, to adopt
the fashion of “prices to suit the times,” but have
begun, plump and bold, at two dollars a day, and a
shilling a drink. Until the fine edge of all this novelty
wears off, they may reap a harvest which will repay
them for their outlay in paint and garnish. One
remark might be dropped into Willard's ear to some
advantage—that while he has been resting on his oars
at Dorchester, the people “on the town” have become
over-epicurean in their exactions of luxuries at hotels,
and it will take some “sharp practice” to beat the
“United States” at Philadelphia, and the Astor here.
People, at first, who have been accustomed to live at
the latter place, will find a certain relief at not being
helped to fish and pudding by fire of platoon, but in
the long run the systematic service of the Astor
achieves comfort. The Atlantic hotel, opposite the
Bowling Green, is also in progress of rifacimento; and
its old landlord, Anderson, who made a fortune in it
once, and kept one of the best houses in the country,
opens with it again on the 1st of May.

I am happy to announce to you that the leaves of
the trees in Trinity churchyard have fairly come to
light. The foliage in this enclosure is always a week
in advance of all others in the city, possibly from cadaverous
stimulus (“to such base uses may we come
at last”), and perhaps accelerated particularly, this
year, by the heat of the steam-engine, which, with
remorseless travestie, perpetually saws stone for the
new building over the “requiescal in pace!” I read
the names on desecrated tombstones every day in passing,
and associate them in my mind with the people aggrieved
(of whom one always has a list, longer or shorter).
Poor ghosts! as if there was no other place for a
steam-engine and a stonecutter's saw than a-top of the
sod which (if hymn and prayer go for anything) is expected
to “lie lightly on the dead man's breast!”
There is many a once wealthy aristocrat, powdered
over with the pumice of that abominable saw, who, if
he could rise and step down into Wall street, would
make sharp reckoning with heirs and executors for
suffering his small remainder of this world's room and
remembrance to be so robbed of its poetry and respect!
Meantime, this exquisitely-conceived piece
of architecture (Trinity church) is rising with admirable
effect, and, when completed, it will doubtless be
the first Gothic structure in America.

We had rather a novel turn-out of a four-in-hand
yesterday in Broadway—a vehicle drawn by four elephants.
There was some grandeur in the spectacle,
and some drollery. These enormous specimens of
the animal, most like us in intellect and least like us
in frame, are part of a menagerie; and they drew, in
the wagon to which they were attached, a band of music
belonging to the concern. They were, all four,
en chemise—covered with white cotton cloths to the
knees—but, Elssler-like, making great display of their
legs and ivory. The ropes were fastened to their
tusks, and they were urged by simple pounding on
the rear—which was very like flogging the side of a
hill, for they were up to the second stories of the
houses. To walk round one of these animals in a
tight fit of a booth is a very different thing from seeing
him paraded under the suitable ceiling of the sky.
I had no idea they could go over the ground so swimmingly.
They glided along with the ease of scows
going down with the tide, and, with their trunks playing
about close to the pavement, seemed to be walking
Broadway like some other loafers—looking for
something green!

The Battery, or, as it has been called in England,
the “Marine Parade,” is never lovelier than in the
early freshness of the morning. The air is yet unimpaired
by the myriad fires of the city—the dew is untrodden,
and the velvet sheen sparkles in the sunshine—
the walks are all neatly swept; and, treading pleasantly
upon the elastic earth, invigorated by the fresh
breeze from the sea, we cast our eyes over a scene of
beauty and enchantment unsurpassed in the world.
The correspondent of the Intelligencer says: I have
been out on the Battery this morning enjoying life,
and everything I saw was in the same humor—trees,
children, ladies, and ships-of-war. The very port-holes
of the Warspite seemed pleased to have their
eyelids up. The Battery is a good deal thronged
before breakfast, and really I do not remember a promenade
in Europe which contains so much that is
beautiful. Just now we have three men-of-war lying

on the stream—the majestic North Carolina and the
Independence having come round to their summer
moorings. Jersey shore looks fringed with willows,
and the islands and Brooklyn heights are bright and
verdant. The Croton river is bubbling up in a superb
fountain in Castle Garden. The craft in the bay
always seem doing a melo-drama—they cross and
mingle so picturesquely; and the trees are always
there; and the grass grows better for the children's
playing on it. Many thanks to fashion for having
taken the rich up-town and left their palaces and the
Battery to those who “board.”

I have spent an afternoon, since I wrote to you, in
the “animal kingdom” of Herr Driesbach. Four elephants
together were rather an uncommon sight, to
say nothing of the melo-drama performed by the lion-tamer.
There was another accidental feature of interest,
too—the presence of one or two hundred deaf
and dumb children, whose gestures and looks of astonishment
quite divided my curiosity with the show.
Spite of the repulsiveness of the thought, it was
impossible not to reflect how much of the difference
between us and some of the brute animals lies merely
in the gift of speech, and how nearly some human
beings, by losing this gift, would be brought to their
level. I was struck with the predominating animal-
look in the faces of the boys of the school, though
there were some female children with countenances of
a very delicate and intellectual cast.

I was an hour too early for the “performances,”
and I climbed into the big saddle worn by “Siam,”
and made a leisurely study of the four elephants and
their keepers and visiters. I had not noticed before
that the eyes of these huge animals were so small.
Those of “Hannibal,” the nearest elephant to me, resembled
the eyes of Sir Walter Scott; and I thought,
too, that the forehead was not unlike Sir Walter's.
And, as if this was not resemblance enough, there was
a copious issue from a bump between his forehead and
his ear! (What might we not expect if elephants
had “eaten paper and drunk ink?”) The resemblance
ceased with the legs, it is but respectful to Sir Walter
to say; for Hannibal is a dandy, and wears the fashionable
gaiter-trowser, with a difference—the gaiter
fitted neatly to every toe! The warlike name of this
elephant should be given to Siam, for the latter is the
great warrior of the party, and in a fight of six hours
with “Napoleon,” some three months since, broke off
both his tusks. He looks like a most determined
bruise. “Virginius” (the showman told me) killed
his keeper, and made an escapade into the marshes of
Carolina, not long ago; and, after an absence of six
weeks, was subdued and brought back by a former
keeper, of whose discipline he had a terrific recollection.
There are certainly different degrees of amiability
in their countenances. I looked in vain for
some of the wrinkles of age, in the one they said was
much the oldest. Unlike us, their skins grow smoother
with time—the enviable rascals! I noticed, by-the-way,
that though the proboscis of each of the others
was as smooth as dressed leather, that of Siam resembled,
in texture, a scrubbing-brush, or the third day of
a stiff beard. Why he should travel with a “hair-trunk,”
and the others not, I could not get out of the
showman. The expense of training and importing
these animals is enormous, and they are considered
worth a great deal of money. The four together consume
about two hundred weight of hay and six bushels
of oats per diem. Fortunately they do their own
land transportation, and carry their own trunks.

At four o'clock Siam knelt down, and four or five
men lifted his omnibus of a saddle upon his back.
The band then struck up a march, and he made the
circuit of the immeuse tent; but the effect of an elephant
in motion, with only his legs and trunk visible
(his body quite covered with the trappings), was
singularly droll. It looked like an avenue taking a
walk, preceded by a huge caterpillar. I could not
resist laughing heartily. After one round, Siam
stopped, and knelt again to receive passengers. The
wooden steps were laid against his eyebrow, and
thence the children stepped to the top of his head,
though here and there a scrambler shortened the step
by putting his foot into the ear of the patient animal.
The saddle was at last loaded with twelve girls; and
with this “fearful responsibility” on his back, the elephant
rose and made his rounds, kneeling and renewing
his load of “innocence” at every circuit.

The lion-tamer presently appeared, and astonished
the crowd rather more than the elephant. A prologue
was pronounced, setting forth that a slave was to be
delivered up to wild beasts, etc., etc. A green cloth
was spread before the cages in the open tent (“parlous
work,” I thought, among such tender meat as two
hundred children), and out sprung suddenly a full-grown
tiger, who seized the gentleman in flesh-colored
tights by the throat. A struggle ensues, in which
they roll over and over on the ground, and finally, the
victim gets the upper hand, and drags out his devourer
by the nape of his neck. I was inclined to think once
or twice that the tiger was doing more than was set
down for him in the play; but as the Newfoundland
dog of the establishment looked on very quietly, I
reserved my criticism.

The Herr next appeared in the long cage with all
his animals—lions, tigers, leopards, etc. He pulled
them about, put his hands in their mouths, and took
as many liberties with his stock of peltry as if it was
already made into muffs and tippets. They growled
and showed their teeth, but came when they were
called, and did as they were bid, very much to my
astonishment. He made a bed of them, among other
things—putting the tiger across the lion for a pillow,
stretching himself on the lion and another tiger, and
then pulling the leopard over his breast for a “comforter!”
He then sat down, and played nursery. The
tiger was as much as he could lift, but he seated him
upright on his knees, dandled and caressed him, and
finally rocked him apparently asleep in his arms! He
closed with an imitation of Fanny Elssler's pirouette,
with a tiger standing on his back. I was very glad, for
one, when I saw him go out and shut the door.

A man then brought out a young anaconda, and
twisted him round his neck (a devil of a boa it looked),
and, after enveloping himself completely in other
snakes, took them off again like cravats, and vanished.
And so ended the show. Herr Driesbach stood at the
door to bow us out, and a fine, handsome, determined-looking
fellow he is.

Pardon us, ladies—those riding-hats let the sun
look in upon your alabaster foreheads—ay, and even
cross the bridge of your delicate noses! Take advice!
Wear your hats with a pitch forward rather,
like the dames in Charles the Second's time. You
look very charmingly on Roulstone's well-broken and
well-trained horses, but take not your pleasure at the
expense of the bright complexions which we admire.
“Sun-burnt,” in old English, was an epithet of contumely,
and

let alone the sun.

We have been paid for letting the world know a
great many things that were of no consequence to the
world whatever—and, among other nothings, a certain
metropoliphobia of our own, on which we have expended
a great deal of choice grammar and punctuation.
We trust the world believes, by this, that, capable
as we are of loving our entire species (one at a

time), we hate a city collectively. Having a little
moan to make, with a little moral at the close, we put
this private prejudice once more into type, trusting to
your indulgence, good reader.

This is June—and “where are you going this summer?”
though a pertinent question enough, and seasonable,
and just what anybody says to everybody he
meets, has to our ear a little offence in it. If it were
asked for information—a la bonne heure!—we are
willing to tell any friend where we are going—this side
the Styx. But though the question (asked with
most affectionate earnestness by your friend) is merely
a preface to enlightening you as to his own “watering-place,”
there must still be an answer! And suppose
that answer, though not a whit attended to, touches
upon your secret sorrow—your deucedest bore! Suppose—but
you see our drift! You understand, that
we are to sweat out the summer solstice within the
“bills of mortality!” You see that we are to comfort
our bucolic nostrils as we best may, with municipal
grass—picking here and there a clover-top or an aggravating
dandelion 'twixt postoffice and city-hall.
Heaven help us!

True, New York is “open at the top.” We are
prepared to be thankful for what comes down to us—
air, light, and dew. But alas! Earth is our mother!—
Earth, who sends all her blessings upward—Earth,
who, in the city, is stoned over and hammered down,
paved, flagged, suffocated—her natural breath quite
cut off, or driven to escape by drain and gas-pipe—her
flowers and herbs prevented—her springs shut down
from gushing! This arid pavement, this hot smell of
dust, this brick-color and paint—what are they to the
fragrant lap of our overlaid mother, with her drapery
of bright colors and tender green? Answer, oh
omnibus-horse! Answer, oh worky-editor!

But there be alleviations! It is to these that hangs
“the moral of our tale.” We presume most men
think themselves more worthy than “sparrows” of the
attention of Providence, and of course most men beheve
in a special Providence for themselves. We do.
We believe that we shall not “fall to the ground without”
(a) “notice.” (But this, let us hope, is anticipating.)
We wish to speak now of the succedaneum
thrown in our path for our pastoral deprivations—for
the lost brook whose babbling current turned the
wheel of our idleness. Sweet brook, that never
robbed the pebbles of a ray of light in running over
them! It became a type to us—that brook. Our
thoughts ran brook-wise. Bright water, braiding its
ripples as its ran, became our vehicle of fancy. We
lagged, we dragged, we were “gravelled for lack of
matter” without it. And now mark!—Providence has
supplied it—(through his honor the mayor). A
brook—a clear brook—not pellucid, merely, but transparent—a
brook with a song, tripping as musically
(when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook
now sequestered to the Philistines—trips daily before
us! Our daily walk is along its border—for (say) a
rod and a half. Meet us there if you will, oh congenial
spirit! As we go to the postoffice, we span its
fair current at the broadest, and take a fillip in our
fancy for the day. Would you know its geography
more definitely? Stand on the steps of the Astor,
and gaze over to the sign of “P. Pussedu, wig-maker,
from Italy.” Drop then the diving-rod to the left,
and a much frequented pump will become apparent,
perched over a projecting curb-stone, around which
the dancing and bright water trips with sparkling feet,
and a murmur audible at least to itself. It is the
outlet of the fountain in the Park, and, as Wordsworth
says,

as an order is first necessary from the corporation.
Oh! (if it were not for being taken to the watch-house)
we could sit by this brook in the moonlight,
and pour forth our melancholy moan! But the cabmen
wash their wheels in it now, and the echo would
be. “Want a cab, sir?” Metropolises, avaunt!

Lady Sale's Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan
impresses us somewhat with the idea that her ladyship
was a Tartar; and she was, perhaps, as “well bestowed”
in the army as anywhere else, in a world so generally
peaceful. It is a roughly-written book, too, in
point of style. Indeed she avows: “I do not attempt
to shine in rounded periods, but give everything that
occurs as it comes to my knowledge.” It appears,
however, that some injustice to officers, committed, as
she acknowledges, “in the heat of temper,” have
awakened a little censure in England, and have been
apologized for by her ladyship. This allowed, there
is much to admire—her manly modesty, among other
things. Toward the close of her journal, she remarks:
“Nothing can exceed the folly I have seen in
the papers regarding my wonderful self—how I headed
the troops, &c. Certainly I have headed the troops,
for the chiefs told me to come on with them for safety
sake; and thus I certainly did go far in advance of the
column; but it was no proof of valor, though one of
prudence.” We can readily believe that the qualities
which gained her ladyship such general admiration,
were not of a showy order. As a “soldier's wife,”
the title she gives herself, she esteemed it her duty to
take her part in danger, hardship, and captivity, without
complaint—to oppose a brave resistance to the foe
when others thought only of base submission, and to
set an example of invincible fortitude to the host of
meaner spirits in the camp. In the extremity of peril
and suffering she never murmurs, except when the
weakness of the commanders wrings from her some
expression of disgust and contempt. Of all the persons
attached to the army, she had the most real cause
of alarm, yet manifested the least. Unlike the other
ladies, she was separated from her husband, and heard
continually of his battles, his exposure, his wounds.
Her son-in-law dies in her arms, and she is left with
her widowed daughter in the hands of a band of merciless
savages, without one male relative to support
her. She is harassed by continual marches in the
depth of winter among mountain passes, where the
path is so thickly strewn with the mangled corpses of
her countrymen, that the hoofs of her horse tread
them into the earth; yet these multiplied ills fail to
quell her spirits or conquer her presence of mind. A
bullet pierces her arm; but when the ball is extracted,
she treats the wound as a scratch. This kind of fortitude
is the only courage which appears estimable or
becoming in a woman, and shines with as much lustre
in the conduct of Lady Sale throughout those trying
transactions, as in any character of which history
makes mention. It is scarcely necessary to add, that
few books published of late years have such strong
claims upon the attention of the public as the present.
The author evidently does not desire display; but her
courage and magnanimity will secure, in the annals of
heroic women, a foremost place for the name of Florentine
Sale.

Porcelain and crockery, champagne and cider, sunshine
and candlelight, silver cup and tin dipper, are
not of more different quality to our apprehension, than
people beautiful and people plain. We do not believe
they are to have the same destiny. We believe
that the plain and the beautiful are to be reproduced
in their own likeness in another world, and that
beauty must be paramount alike among men and angels.

We believe everything should be given to
beauty that beauty wants—everything forgiven if
beauty err. We have no limit to our service of
beauty—no imaginable bound to our devotion. We
are secondary—subject—born thrall to beauty. And
in this faith we shall die.

But beauty in America is a very differently prized
commodity from beauty in England. Let us keep
clear of making an essay of this, and show what we
mean by parallel examples. Take two beautiful girls,
of the same comparative station—Miss Smith, of London,
daughter of a master-in-chancery, and Miss
Brown, of New York, daughter of a master-carpenter:
—for the former gentleman is about as far below an
earl as the latter is below any aristocrat of New York,
supposed or acknowledged.

Miss Brown, of the Bowery, is a lovely creature.
She excites curiosity in Broadway. She hinders devotion,
right and left, when she turns round in church.
In the best society of New York there is not a prettier
girl, and nature has made her elegant in her manners,
and education has done as much for her as was
at all necessary. Her father delights in her beauty,
and her mother is very proud of her, and she carries
her heart in her bosom to do what she pleases with it
—but neither Mr. Brown, nor Mrs. Brown, nor Miss
Brown, ever dream that her beauty will advance their
condition in life one peg. They love her for it—she
controls the family by it—she exercises influence as
a belle in their own circle of acquaintance—but that
is all. She lives a very gay and pleasant life, hears
of balls in more fashionable parts of the town without
dreaming that, for her beauty, she should be there,
and continues a Bowery belle till she marries a Bowery
beau. And beauty, once married, in that class
of our country, is like a pair of shoes once sold—
never inquired for again.

Miss Smith, of London, is a superb girl. Her father
was of dark complexion and her mother a blonde;
and jet and pearl have done their daintiest in her dark
eyes and radiant skin. At twelve she is considered a
beauty past accident. Her sisters, who were either
“all father” or “all mother,” grimy dark, or parsnip
blonde, are married off to such husbands as would undertake
them. But for the youngest there is a different
destiny—for she is a beauty. The father wishes
for advancement and a title. The mother wishes to
figure in high life before she dies. And Miss Smith,
young as she is, is taught the difference between a
plain young lord in a cab and a handsome lawyer's
clerk with a green bag. Beauty, well managed, may
be made to open every door in England. Masters—
the best of masters for Miss Smith! More money
is spent in “finishing” her than was given to all her
sisters for dowries. She is permitted to form few
acquaintances of her own sex, none of the other.
And when Miss Smith is sixteen, Mrs. Smith makes
her first strong push at Lady Frippery (for Mr. Smith
has put Lord Frippery under obligations, which make
it inevitable that the first favor asked should be granted),
and out comes Miss Smith, chaperoned by Lady
Frippery at a mixed subscription ball. It is for the benefit
of the Poles, and the liberal nobility are all there;
and all the beaux of St. James's street, of course, for they
like to see what novelty will turn up in such places.
One hour after the ball opens, Miss Smith's beauty has
been pronounced upon by half the noble eyes of London,
and Lady Frippery is assailed for introductions.
The beauty turns out high-bred. Lord George and
Lord Frederick torment their Right Honorable mammas
into calling on Mrs. Smith, and having the
beauty at their next ball; and so climbs Miss Smith
to a stratum of society unattainable by her father's
law or her mother's wealth, or anything in the world
but beauty. She is carefully watched, keeps herself
chary, and by-and-by chooses between Lord Freder
ick and Lord George, and clevates her whole family
by an alliance with the peerage—for in England there
is no mésalliance if the lady descended to be of great
beauty, as well as virtuous, modest, and well educated.

But—as we would show by these examples—personal
beauty is undervalued in America. At least, it
is less valued than in England and older countries.
An eminent English artist, recently returned home,
expressed his surprise that he had so few beauties
among his sitters. “The motive to have a miniature
done,” said he, “seems, in America, to be affection.
In England it is pride. Most of my sitters” (and he
had a great many at a very high price) “have been
old people or invalids, or persons going away; and
though they wished their pictures made as good-looking
as possible, their claim to good looks was no part
of the reason for sitting. It was only to perpetuate
that which was loved and would soon be lost.”

Pray take notice, madam, that we give no opinion
as to the desirableness of the English value of beauty.
Whether beauty and worldly profit should be kept
separate, like church and state—whether it is desecrated
by aiding the uses of ambition—whether it should
be the loadstar of affection or pride—we leave with
you as an open question.

We know nothing of a more restless tendency than
a fine, old-fashioned June day—one that begins with
a morning damp with a fresh south wind, and gradually
clears away in a thin white mist, till the sun
shines through at last, genial and luxurious, but not
sultry, and everything looks clear and bright in the
transparent atmosphere. We know nothing which so
seduces the very eye and spirit of a man, and stirs in
him that gipsy longing, which, spite of disgrace and
punishment, made him a truant in his boyhood.
There is an expansive rarity in the air of such a day
—a something that lifts up the lungs, and plays in the
nostrils with a delicious sensation of freshness and
elasticity. The close room grows sadly dull under it.
The half-open blind, with its tempting glimpse of the
sky, and branch of idle leaves flickering in the sun,
has a strange witchery. The poor pursuits of this
drossy world grow passing insignificant; and the
scrawled and blotted manuscripts of an editor's table
—pleasant anodyne as they are when the wind is in
the east—are, at these seasons, but the “Diary of an
Ennuyee”—the notched calendar of confinement and
unrest. The commendatory sentence stands half-completed;
the fate of the author under review, with
his two volumes, is altogether of less importance than
five minutes of the life of that tame pigeon that sits
on the eaves washing his white breast in the spout;
and the public good-will, and the cause of literature,
and our own precarious livelihood, all fade into dim
shadow, and leave us listening dreamily to the creeping
of the sweet south upon the vine, or the far-off
rattle of the hourly, with its freight of happy bowlers
and gentlemen of suburban idleness.

What is it to us, when the sun is shining, and the
winds bland and balmy, and the moist roads with their
fresh smell of earth tempting us away to the hills—
what is it, then, to us, whether a poor-devil-author
has a flaw in his style, or our own leading article a
“local habitation and a name?” Are we to thrust
down our heart like a reptile into its cage, and close
our shutter to the cheerful light, and our ear to all
sounds of out-door happiness? Are we to smother
our uneasy impulses, and chain ourselves down to a
poor, dry thought, that has neither light, nor music,
nor any spell in it, save the poor necessity of occupation?
Shall we forget the turn in the green lane
where we are wont to loiter in our drive, and the cool

claret of our friend at the Hermitage, and the glorious
golden summer sunset in which we bowl away to the
city—musing and refreshed? Alas—yes! the heart
must be closed, and the green lane and the friend that
is happier than we (for he is idle) must be forgotten,
and the dry thought must be dragged up like a wilful
steer and yoked to its fellow, and the magnificent sunset,
with all its glorious dreams and forgetful happiness,
must be seen in the pauses of articles, and
the “bleared een” of painful attention—and all this
in June—prodigal June—when the very worm is all
day out in the sun, and the birds scarce stop their
singing from the gray light to the dewfall!

What an insufferable state of the thermometer!
We knock under to Heraclitus, that fire is the first
principle of all things. Fahrenheit at one hundred
degrees in the shade! Our curtain in the attic
unstirred! Our japonica drooping its great white
flowers lower and lower. It is a fair scene, indeed!
not a ripple from the pier to the castle, and the surface
of the water, as Shelley says, “like a plane of
glass spread out between two heavens”—and there is
a solitary sloop, with the light and shade flickering on
its loose sail, positively hung in the air—and a gull, it
is refreshing to see him, keeping down with his white
wings close to the water, as if to meet his own snowy
and perfect shadow. Was ever such intense, unmitigated
sunshine? There is nothing on the hard,
opaque sky, but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief
on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the
shadow of that tall chimney is as definite as a hair,
and the young elm that leans over the fence is copied
in perfect and motionless leaves like a very painting
on the broad sidewalk. How delightful the night
will be after such a deluge of light! How beautiful
the modest rays of the starlight, and the cool dark
blue of the heavens will seem after the dazzling clearness
of this sultry noon! It reminds one of that exquisite
passage in Thalaba, where the spirit-bird
comes, when his eyes are blinded with the intense
brightness of the snow, and spreads her green wings
before him!

I went to the Opera last night for the first time.
The theatre was filled half an hour before the rising
of the curtain, and with a very fashionable audience.
The ladies had not quite made up their minds whether
it was a full-dress affair, but the pit and boxes had a
very paré look. The neighborhood of the orchestra,
particularly, looked very Parisian and dressy, as the
French beaux (whose heads are distinguishable from
Yankee heads by their soigne trimness and polish)
crystallize to the beau-nucleus of foreign theatres—
the stalles between stage and pit! One of the drop-curtains
was a view of Paris; and the principal curtain,
though representing, I believe, the Croton reservoirs,
had a foreground of figures such as are never
to be seen on this side of the Atlantic.

The opera was “L'Ambassadrice, by Auber,” and
the orchestra played the overture with a spirit and finish
of execution which was quite enchanting. It
was much the highest treat in music which I have
yet had in this country. The story of the opera has
been the rounds of the papers—an actress marrying
an ambassador, trying the mortifications and vexations
of sudden elevation to high-life, and returning to her
profession. As a play, it was very indifferently performed,
with the exception only of the part of the
duenna by Madame Mathieu. As an actress of comedy
(if I may judge after seeing her once) we have no
one in our theatres at all comparable to this lady.
Madame Lecourt was next best, and the rest, as players,
were not worth criticising. As an opera, the music
rested entirely on the orchestra and the prima donna,
the tenor being good for nothing, and the rest
mere stopgaps. The great attraction put forward in
the advertisements was Mademoiselle Calvé, the prima
donna, and, seeing and hearing her over such very
large capitals, I was somewhat disappointed. Mademoiselle
Calvé has had a very narrow escape of being
a remarkably pretty person. Indeed, filled out to
her model—plump as Nature intended her to be—she
would be very handsome; and to be what every young
Frenchwoman is, is far on the road to beauty—grace
and manner, which are common to them all, having
so much to do with the effect of the celestial gift.
But though she trips charmingly across the stage,
gives charming glances, dresses charmingly, and would
probably be a very charming acquaintance, she is an
inanimate and inexpressive actress. When, for example,
she discovers suddenly that her old lover is in
her presence (she becomes a dutchess and he still in
his profession as first tenor), she exclaims, “Benedict!”
as quietly as if she were calling her brother to
bring her a chair. There is no interest in her acting
—far less any enthusiasm or passion. She sings,
however, with great sweetness and correctness, and,
if she were not over-advertised, she would probably
surprise most persons agreeably. After all, she is a
great acquisition to the amusements of the city, and
I hope, for one, that she and the “troop” may find it
worth their while to do pendulum regularly between
this and New Orleans.

Niblo's Garden opened last week for the season,
and to compare it to “a scene of enchantment” would
be doing great injustice to its things to drink. I specify
this becuase public gardens are commonly very
slipslop in what they term their “refreshments,” and
(as it was a very exhausting night for the bodily
juices) we had an opportunity of testing the quality
of ices and “coblers.” This aside, there is a great
deal about Niblo's, probably, that is very like enchantment.
The ticket (price fifty cents) admits you to a
brilliantly-illuminated hall, opening on one side to a
delicious conservatory full of the rarest plants, and on
the other to a labyrinthine garden glittering with
lights and flowers; large mirrors at either end of the
hall make it look interminable, and the walks are so
ingeniously twisted around fountains and shrubberies,
as to seem interminable too; and in the immense hall
of refreshment there is a bifrons bar, which effectually
embarrasses you as to the geography of your julep—all
very mystical and stimulative. Thus far,
however, it is only tributary to the French theatre,
which is completely open on one side to the garden,
with half the audience out of doors, and the lobby as
cool and summery as a garden-alley. Between the
acts the audience go out and air and ice themselves,
and a resounding gong gives notice to the stragglers
in the labyrinths that the curtain is rising. I have
seen no public place so well appointed as this—waiters
badged and numbered—seats commodious, and service
prompt—and, above all, a very strict watch at the
door for the exclusion of miscellany.

The play was “Le Vicomte de Peturieres”—a kind
of Frenchification of Don Juan. The young vaurien
was played by Madame Lecourt, and played with a
charm of talent and vivacity for which her personification
of Charlotte, in “L'Ambassadrice,” had not
prepared me. She is the very soul of witching espiegleric,
and made love and did mischief in her hose
and doublet to the perfect delight of the audience.
The other members of the French company have
very much improved on the public liking since their
first appearance, and, with more or less excellence,
they all belong to a good school of acting. The prima
donna, Mademoiselle Calvé, is too ill to appear.

One likes to see every best thing of its kind in the
world, and never having been present

Fashion's races, I took a cold ride to Long Island
to see her gallop over the course. On the way I
picked up some of the statistics of milk, from a communicative
fellow-passenger “who knew,” and it
may or may not surprise you to know that there are
three qualities in this supposed innocent simple of nature.
There is milk—milk once watered, and milk
twice watered; and sold as such, with three prices, by
the owners of the dairies, to the venders in the city.
A friend of my companion is a dairyman, he told me,
and supplies the American hotel with milk No. 1, at
a high price; so that in the milk line, at least, we
may certify that Mr. Cozzens cozens us not. Unluckily
for the Long Island cowmongers, the long arm
of the Erie railroad has taken to milking Orange
county for the New York market, and the profits of
milk and water have very much diminished with the
competition.

It was the great day of the Union races, but the
course presented a very dreary sight. There were
just people enough to make solitude visible, and the
“timer” in the stand looked as bleak as a bell-ringer
setting the clock on a cold day in a country belfry.
Here and there one of the jockey-club walked about
with his blue badge forlorn in his buttonhole, and
here and there an unhappy-looking pie-seller set down
his full baskets to blow his fingers; and there were a
few sporting trotters in sulkies, and two turnouts such
as are common at races, and a wight or two like myself
wondering who enjoyed the “sport” except the
riders. All of a sudden a single horse was discovered
half round the course, and before I could find out
what it was, Fashion had made one of her two-hundred-dollar
rounds. To take the eight hundred (uncontested
sweepstakes), she was obliged to go around
four times, and I had a good opportunity to see her
movement. She is smaller than I expected, and runs
less like a horse and more like a greyhound than any
racer I have seen. Sorrel is a color I dislike in beard
or horsehair, and her complexion suited me not; but,
in make, action, and particularly in expression of face,
Fashion is an admirable creature. Of course it takes
a sporting-eye to admire the tension of muscle in
high training, and the queen of the course would be
a better model for a sculptor after a month's grass;
but she is a beautiful sight, and even with the little I
have seen of her, I should know her again among a
thousand horses—so marked is superiority, in horse or
man.

The other races were nothing very extraordinary.
I started for home, cold and sorry. On the road our
jarvey stopped to “water horses and liquor passengers,”
and I got sight of a dance calculated to soften
my next criticism of the Park ballet. A ferret-eyed
fiddler struck up a tune, and an old farmer with gray
hairs and one “hermit tooth,” jumped into the middle
of the barroom and commenced a jig. As the
spring of his instep had gone with his teeth, he did
the work on his unmitigated heels, and a more sturdy
performance I never saw. He danced in greatcoat
and hat, with whip in hand, and, after ending his
dance by jumping up into a chair and dropping down
from it like a pavior's beetle, he paid for amusing the
spectators (and this was not à la Fanny the “divine”)
by giving the fiddler half a dollar. With a look
round at the company, and an inquiry whether anybody
would like “something wet,” he took his drink
and got into his wagon. This is one man's taste in a
flare-up.

There is a great change in the “surface of society”
within the last two days—straw and white hats having
become nearly universal. As we are a nation of black


aspect of the city. Summer came upon us with a
jump out of a raw easterly fog, and what with the
lack of premonition, and the natural incredulity of
flannel waistcoats, people went about yesterday clad
for cold weather and looking uncomfortably hot. Today
the surprised clouds are gathering for a thunder-storm.

I see by the papers that the snow prophesied for
June by Lorenzo Dow, has fallen in several parts of
the country. The other two horns of his triple
prophesy for June, 1843, have also come true, for
there is “no king in England,” and “no president
over the United States”—strictly speaking.

I quite longed yesterday for a magnetic eye, to
look into the heads of two or three Chinese who
were let loose in the vestibule of the Astor, newly
landed from a Canton trader. Their “first impressions”
of New York, fully daguerreotyped, would be
amusing. I understand they have come over in the
suite of the Rev. Mr. Boone, missionary from Ku-lang-sa
(wherever that is).

During the summer solstice, the guests at the gentleman's
ordinary at the Astor are to be furnished
with linen jackets to dine in—one on the back of every
chair, “without respect of (the size of) persons.”
I am told privately that half the expense of these airy
furnishings is borne by the venders of fancy suspenders,
as it is presumed that no gentleman will be willing
to “shift himself” before company who is not daintily
provided in this line.

Fond, as we are reproached with being, of foreigners
in the ornamental walks of society, I observe, by
the general tenor of advertisements, that we prefer the
indigenous worky. “Wanted,” says an advertiser in
the True Sun, “a smart American woman who can go
right through with the work of a small religious family.”
Vague as this specification would seem to an
English eye, the advertiser's want is most definitely
expressed to an American.

You will have seen with regret the accounts of the
sudden death of Mr. Abbott—one of the few remaining
actors of the Kemble school. He was, in private
life, one of the most agreeable and cultivated of men,
and is deeply regretted. I understand that his widow
is entitled to a pension from the Theatrical Fund of
London, of about seven hundred dollars per annum.
She was married to him a few months since—a Miss
Buloid of the Park theatre. Abbott is said to have
been, in his youth, one of the gay associates of the
Prince of Wales.

The Broughams have returned from Boston, and
commenced an engagement at the Park Theatre.
We are likely to have no more theatrical importations
for some time, I think, the late declension of the
drama having somewhat damped the repute in London
of American starring. Actors coming out, now,
require an advance, and an insurance of a certain degree
of success, and this our managers are not in a
condition to pay. The sufferers by theatrical depression
in this country are the actors, who do not get
their money unless they draw it. In England the
manager must pay his company, by the law of rigorous
usage, and he is the sufferer till his theatre closes.

Booth has been playing wonderfully well at the
Park of late, and I understand that the pretty Mrs.
Hunt has been cast in one or two new characters,
which have drawn out her abilities, very much to the
pleasure and surprise of the theatre-goers.

Broadway has a very holyday aspect now from the
competition in the splendor of omnibuses. Several
new ones of mammoth size have been turned out,
drawn by four and six horses, and painted in the gayest
colors. The handsomest one I have seen is called
“The Edwin Forrest.”

The Scotch, who have formed themselves into a
military company, and dress in the uniform of the

highland regiments of the British army, came out
yesterday in philebig and tartan, making a most imposing
and gallant appearance. The bare legs looked
rather cool in Broadway, but nature suits the animal
to his native climate, and Scotch legs are very comfortably
hairy. I observed that a physician, with no
distinctive dress except a plaid scarf over his shoulder,
walked with the lieutenant—ready for ministering
to any member of the corps who might find the
exposure unsalutary. He should be skilled in curing
rheumatism, I should say. Apropos of adaptations of
the physiological features to climate, it is said, I know
not with how much truth, that there are islands north
of Great Britain where the females are web-footed.
Hence, perhaps, Grace Darling's heroic self-confidence
on the water.

New York is all alive with a new musical prodigy—
Mr. Wallace. There is no doubt that he is so far the
best pianist we have ever heard in this country, as to
dwarf all others in comparison. The musical people
all allow this with enthusiasm. As a violinist, those
who should know say he is equal to Paganini. I have
not heard him, but I understand he is a most unconscious
man of genius, very eccentric, and is on his
way back to Ireland, after having traversed South and
North America on foot. His pedestrian and musical
passions are strangely compounded. He has set to a
magnificent air a national anthem, which has been
sung by the class under the direction of Mr. George
Loder, of this city, with immense effect. In this anthem
Mr. Wallace has made a remarkable contribution
to the musical stores of this country.

Editors have a very sublime way of lumping Europe,
Asia, Africa, and America, and under the diminished
monosyllable of the “world,” spanning it with
their reflections as they would shade an ant-hill with
an umbrella. We tell you with becoming coolness
what the “gay world” is about, viz.: that a few families
up-town have taken to giving matinées. By the
“pious world,” we convey the Broadway Tabernacle—
by the “mercantile world,” Wall street or Pearl. The
English have become tired of the phrase, and call the
world “Mrs. Grundy.” What will be said about anything,
anywhere between the antipodes, is, “what will
Mrs. Grundy say?” And we like this—(as we like
anything which aggrandizes the editorial individual)—
only there is the little inconvenience, that when we
wish to speak of the world, as defined in the dictionary,
we are subjected to a periphrasis which cumbers
our style, or we have to explain that we really mean
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.

The world is getting on—wrote we at the head of
this article, and scratched it out again till we had made
a comment on the phrase. We were going into a
little disquisition on the evident approach of a new
order of things under the sun, as shown by wonderful
changes and discoveries all over the world—apropos,
however, of a very interesting book which has just
fallen into our hands, and of which we wish to give the
essence to the reader, in brief. We will omit the disquisition
on the approach of the millenium (to write
which, to say the truth, we sat down this morning),
for the weather is too hot, on second thoughts, to do
more than allude to a subject connected with a general
conflagration. Let us come at once to the book
in question.

Elevation by hemp has been considered a sovereign
remedy for low spirits, and indeed for most of the intolerable
evils of life—subject, however, to the drawback
that the remedy could be used but once. Will our
readers believe that this drawback is entirely removed
by a late discovery?

Intoxication has been long known to be a state of very
considerable happiness, subject to a “tariff which
amounts to a prohibition,” viz.: complete destruction
of the physical man by the residuum. Will the
reader believe that, by this same discovery, the residuous
penalty is removed?

By the same discovery, the hydrophobia is changed
to a death of physical pleasure—acute and chronic
rheumatism are first modified into ecstasy, then
cured—a “persuasion of high rank” is engendered in
the bosom of the humblest, a “feeling as if flying” is
communicated to the dullest and most plethoric. And
all this with no penalty, no subsequent physical prostration,
none of the long train of evils which, till now,
have been the inseparable pursuers of intoxication.

In telling our readers thus much, we have given
them the butt-end of one of the most curious subjects
we have for a long time been called upon to handle.
What we have said is far from a joke. A drug has
been discovered by the English in India, which has
these wonderful properties; and the mode in which it
is gathered, which we will tell with the same butt-endity,
is as novel as the drug. “Men clad in leathern
dresses run through the fields, brushing through the
plant with all possible violence; the soft resin adheres
to the leather, and is subsequently scraped off, and
kneaded into balls. In Nipal the leathern attire is
dispensed with, and the resin is gathered on the skins
of naked natives.”

The plant from which this extraordinary drug is extracted,
is Indian hemp; differing from the hemp of
this and other northern countries only by the presence
of this narcotic stimulant. There are several preparations
of it—one for smoking, one for sweetmeats, and
others for beverages and medical compounds—but the
effects are, with slight variations, the same. “From
the beverage, intoxication ensues in half an hour.
The inebriation is of the most cheerful kind, causing
the person to sing and dance, to eat food with great
relish. The intoxication lasts about three hours,
when sleep supervenes. No nausea or sickness of the
stomach succeeds, nor are the bowels at all affected.”

The preparation for smoking is called gunjah, the
confection is called majoon, and the resin is called
churrus. Gunjah is used for smoking only. One
hundred and eighty grains, and a little dried tobacco,
are rubbed in the palm of the hand, with a few drops
of water. This suffices for three persons. A little
tobacco is placed in the pipe first, then a layer of the
prepared gunjah, then more tobacco, and the fire
above all.

Four or five persons usually join in this debauch.
The hookah is passed round, and each person takes a
single draught. Intoxication ensues almost instantly;
and from one draught to the unaccustomed, within
half an hour; and after four or five inspirations to
those more practised in the vice. The effects differ
from those occasioned by the sidhce. Heaviness, laziness,
and agreeable reveries, ensue; but the person
can be readily roused, and is able to discharge routine
occupations, such as pulling the punkah, waiting at
table, &c. We add the following passages from the
treatise:—

“The fourth case of trial was an old muscular
cooley, a rheumatic malingerer, and to him half a
grain of hemp resin was given in a little spirit. The
first day's report will suffice for all: In two hours the
old gentleman became talkative and musical, told several
stories, and sang songs to a circle of highly-delighted
auditors, ate the dinners of two persons subscribed
for him in the ward, sought also for other luxuries
we can scarcely venture to allude to, and finally
fell soundly asleep, and so continued till the following
morning. On the noonday visit, he expressed himself
free from headache or any other unpleasant sequel,
and begged hard for a repetition of the medicine, in

which he was indulged for a few days and then discharged.

“While the preceding case was under treatment,
and exciting the utmost interest in the school, several
pupils commenced experiments on themselves to ascertain
the effects of the drug. In all, the state of the
pulse was noted before taking a dose, and subsequently
the effects were observed by two pupils of much intelligence.
The result of several trials was, that in as
small doses as a quarter of a grain the pulse was
increased in fulness and frequency; the surface of
the body glowed; the appetite became extraordinary;
vivid ideas crowded the mind; unusual loquacity occurred;
and, with scarcely any exception, great aphrodisia
was experienced.

“In one pupil, Dinonath Dhur, a retiring lad of
excellent habits, ten drops of the tincture, equal to a
quarter of a grain of the resin, induced in twenty
minutes the most amusing effects I ever witnessed. A
shout of laughter ushered in the symptoms, and a
transitory state of cataleptic rigidity occurred for two
or three minutes. Summoned to witness the effects,
we found him enacting the part of a rajah giving orders
to his courtiers. He could recognise none of his
fellow-students or acquaintances; all, to his mind,
seemed as altered as his own condition. He spoke
of many years having passed since his student's days;
described his teachers and friends with a piquancy
which a dramatist would envy; detailed the adventures
of an imaginary series of years, his travels, his attainment
of wealth and power. He entered on discussions
on religious, scientific, and political topics, with
astonishing eloquence, and disclosed an extent of
knowledge, reading, and a ready, apposite wit, which
those who knew him best were altogether unprepared
for. For three hours, and upward, he maintained the
character he at first assumed, and with a degree of
ease and dignity perfectly becoming his high situation.
A scene more interesting, it would be difficult to imagine.
It terminated nearly as suddenly as it commenced,
and no headache, sickness, or other unpleasant
symptom, followed the innocent excess.”

The treatise on this subject, from which we have
made the foregoing extracts, is a reprint from the
Transactions of the Medical Society of Calcutta, and
written by a surgeon in the Bengal army, Mr.
O'Shaughnessy, now in this country. It is, as our
readers will have seen by the extracts, a very able
treatise; and the experiments, of which we had only
room to quote here and there an exponent passage,
are described with most lucid clearness. We may
refer to this interesting topic again.

On the day the president arrived, the be-windowed
houses of New York seemed to have none too many
windows, and if all the men on the tiles had been Tyler
men, the president's party might for once have
been declared formidably uppermost. We know several
things since Mr. Tyler's visit: how many people
roofs will hold; how many heads can look out of one
window; for how little ladies will wave their pocket-handkerchiefs;
“what swells the soldier's warlike
breast” (or, rather, what becomes of all the cotton);
how much extra horse hair it takes to make a dragoon;
how unanimous a prayer may be put up by
four hundred thousand people, for the cutting of the
hair of a “prince royal;” how the devils may be cast
out of a harouche and four, commonly used to take
frailty to the races, and how a chief magistrate and his
suite may innocently enter in; how gayly a city may
be dressed with flags, partly for the president of fifteen
millions of freemen, and partly for the “fat girl”
of the museum; what endurance of horses' hoofs lies
in the toes of female “freemen;” and how long and
far, at a “sink-a-pace,” will last the smile of Mr.
Tyler.

I presume the entire sanitary and locomotive population
of New York turned out to the show, and a very
fine show it was altogether. The military companies
would alone have made a sight worth coming far to see,
for (by the measurement on Broadway) their brilliant
uniforms cover a mile and a half—an expanse of tailoring
(with the exception of the trouserless Highlanders)
that should make politicians deal kindly with
“cross-legs.” I remarked, by the way, that, though
all the officers of the companies are not fat men, all
the fat men among them are officers—a tribute to
avoirdupois which should delight the ghost of Sir
John Falstaff, spite of his “give me the spare men,
and spare me the great ones.” I saw one of the
plethoric captains rubbing the calf of his leg, after his
march of five or six miles over the round stones, and
I presume he might have said to the “prince royal,”
as Sir John did at Gadshill, “S'blood! I'll not bear
mine own flesh as far afoot again, for all the coin in
thy father's exchequer.”

Some English friends who were with me, expressed
continual wonder at the total absence of raggedness or
poverty in the dress of the populace. We can hardly
realize how striking is this feature of our country to
the eye of a European. They were a good deal
amused, too, with the republican license given to a
fellow on horseback, either drunk or saucy, who chose
to ride in the staff of one of the generals with his coat
off, and with the good-nature and forbearance manifested
by the crowd in their occasional resistings of the
encroachments of mounted constables.

I was told that not only the president, but his
friends and suite, were exceedingly surprised at the
reception given him. It was certainly, in every way,
calculated to show the honor paid by the people to
the office of the chief magistrate; and Mr. Tyler can
not but feel, that while hedged in with the dignity of
his office, he is an object of interest and attention
with which mere politics could have but little to do.

The president having got through with the weather
of New York, it was at liberty to rain next day, and it
rained. The clouds parenthesised his visit, laying the
dust the night before he arrived, and holding up till the
night after his departure. I presume it did not rain in
Boston next morning—King Lucky having occasion for
a dry day. I have heard of but one partial exception
to the accurate culmination of the Tyler star. The
officer in command on the Battery, finding that he
could not see through the walls of Castle Garden, requested
to have a flag raised, or some other sign given,
to make the movement for the salute, when the
president should land. “Oh!” said the marshal,
“you needn't bother about that. You'll know by
the cheers.” The cheers not being audible, however,
the artillery rather “hung fire,” letting off their congratulatory
welcome as the president landed—from
the high flight of his oration. He had been landed
from the steamboat some time before! Perhaps the
congratulation was well timed, and so, very likely,
his star (which must be a planet) intended to plan it.
A man should be felicitated when he touches terra
firma once more, after most public speeches.

There seems to be a finger pointing the way, even
in the picking of flowers by the wayside, for his happy
“Accidency.” Some pleasurable surprise has been
expressed at the careful zeal with which the president
kissed the ladies twice round on several occasions,
where a limited number had been introduced to him.
I was at a loss to know how a man, bred in a state
distinguished for the deferential proprieties, should
have jumped, ready-armed, to such an act of popularity,
when a visit to the presidential parlor at Howard's
explained the “starry influence.” A French
painting, with figures of the size of life, representing

Don Juan giving Haidee a most realizing kiss, had
been introduced into the apartment by the sumptuary
committee! There it stood, a silent indication to
thought during his hours of revery, and as the mystic
intimation occupied, frame and all, one entire
wall of the room, the lesson was inevitable. Sequitur
—the above-mentioned liberal dispensation of kisses.

I am told that a game of chess is child's play to the
diplomacy at work, during the president's visit, for the
control of his movements. Office-seekers and officeholders,
“authorities,” private friends, Spartans, repealers,
whigs, and locofocos, tugged at his ear and
button continually. I trust, if he is fond of contrast,
that his ex-excellency will try a second first impression
of New York a year or two hence.

The president's departure was most felicitous as to
weather—the loveliness of the sunset, and the beauty
of the bay, making up for him the finest of back-ground
effects. Some hundreds of people were on
the Battery, and the steamboat-wharf was crowded
with spectators. As the boat started, the crews of the
men-of-war ran up the rigging like disturbed ants, and
saluted her as she passed with three cheers. He went
out of the harbor with relays of “Hail Columbia,”
the band on board the boat beginning with it, and the
two ships taking it up as he went along. So Columbia
is decidedly hailed—if it will do it any good!

I saw an amusing resurrection of a horse yesterday.
One of the military companies were marching gayly
down the street on their way to embark for Boston,
when a blind horse in a swill-cart, whose calamity was
forgotten for the instant by his occupied master,
walked deliberately into one of the Croton excavations.
The harness was just strong enough to break
his fall, the cart was left above ground, and he stood
on the bottom, as comfortably out of the way as
“truth in a well.” The driver was a man for an
emergency, and, indeed, acted so much as if it was
“part of the play,” that a Chinese traveller would
probably have recorded it as a melo-dramatic accompaniment
to the show. He took off his coat very quietly,
picked up one of the shovels of the absent workmen,
and commenced filling up the ditch. The loose
dirt went in very fast, and the horse, with an instinct
against being buried alive, rose with the surface.
From being some inches below the pavement,
his head was getting above ground when I left him;
and as the old man was still piling on very industriously,
I presume he soon had him once more at the
level of cock-crowing.

There have been various definitions of “a gentleman,”
but the prettiest and most poetic is that given
by a young lady of this city the other day: “A gentleman,”
said she, “is a human being, combining a
woman's tenderness with a man's courage.”

“Cheap literature” is shaking in its shoes. I understand
the publishers “see the expediency” of making
their editions more costly, and accommodating
them to the smaller sales. The great American maw
is surfeited with “new novels” at last. I trust that
booksellers and authors will now become slightly acquainted.

What shall it be? If we understand you rightly,
you would prefer on this last page, some well-contrived
nonsense—to wind off trippingly, as it were.
Wisdom is respectable. Pictures, poetry, prose, pathos,
and puffery, are all very well—but after being
instructed, you wish to be let out of school. Is
that it?

Something about “town,” of course. Folly lives
here, all the year round. Fashion is exclusively urban.
And when we have mentioned these two, we
have named the persons in our acquaintance about
whom there is, by much, the liveliest curiosity. What
Folly is doing in town, and what is the last antic of
Fashion, are departments of news that are read before
the deaths and marriages—“as nobody can deny.”
Fashion be our theme, then, “for the nonce.” We
would devote this page to it eternally, if we dared.
That we should please you by so doing, we very well
know. But the owl is the king of types, and wisdom
has, of print, a chartered monopoly—hang her!

Well, madam, the fashions. Let us begin at the
small end of the horn, and touch first upon the crockery
sex—winding off with the china and porcelain.

The gentlemen, who had been previously let up,
have been lately let down. Straps were abandoned by
the cognoscenti last autumn—with the first “slosh.”
Suspenders were abandoned with the first intimation
of the present summer solstice. There is at present
no unnatural restraint upon trousers. They are prevented
from coming up by their natural gravity—from
coming down by being “caught on the hip.” Shoulders
are emancipated from the caprices of genuflection.
The hollow of the foot suffers no longer from
the shrug of incredulity. The nether man, in short,
is free, sovereign, and independent.

Among the advantages of this revolution is the
cleanly circumstance that the boot, in its nightly exit,
is no longer compelled to make a thoroughfare of the
leg of the pantaloon. This is an “inexpressible” relief.
Buttons, also, are subjected no longer to the
severe trials of stooping. Boots, unhappily, can no
longer conceal their “often infirmities”—high polish
and indifference to surprise and exposure being indispensable
accompaniments to their present loose associations.
As an offset to the expensiveness of this,
the pantaloons themselves will not be so frequently
in-kneed.

Frock-coats are going out of fashion, and Newmarket
cut-aways are worn for the morning. Very well
for those who have small hips, as the latter are rather
spready. This exacts also great tidiness in the cut of
the “continuations.” Waistcoats are made longer,
and with drooping wings, to conceal any little vagaries
in the newly emancipated trousers. But this, too,
exaggerates unbecomingly the apparent size of the
hips. “The pyramid inverted” is our model, by the
laws of art, as the “pyramid proper” is that of the
ladies. Gaiters are the mode—but they require a
neat pastern. Your greyhound breed of man looks
well in them. They should be made separate from
the shoe, for they require washing, and your unscrupulous
dingy shoe is an abomination. Patent leather,
of course, till death.

Hats are a delicate subject. There should be as
many fashions of them as there are varieties of human
faces. Indeed, hats should be destined and allotted
to men, as irrevocably as noses and hair—suitable by
infallible harmonies of physiognomy. We should be
born in hats—hats that would grow without materially
altering in shape or expression. We would as soon
let a barber choose us a nose as a hatter a hat. And
as to a fashion in hats—one fashion for all men—
where is thy rebuke, oh Nature, tortured and travestied!
But still, fashions there be! John Bull is at
present wearing his hat very small—the Frenchman is
wearing his very large. The Yankee wears his very
peaked—the German wears his very flat. We scorn
to give the encouragement of print to any one of
these. Suit yourself—since Nature has left you unfinished.
Take counsel of an artist or of a woman.
Buy no hat rashly.

As to the ladies, we would not, like

but we must be permitted to record our little private
distress and apprehension at the utter cessation of all
novelty in their fashions. The one new stuff of
“Balzarine,” unless we are in a most benighted state
of ignorance, comprises the entire variety of the season.
We meet our few sins of idolatry in the very
bonnets, the very boddices, the very namelessnesses
of last year's product and admiration! Are the brains
of milliners subject to drought? Is invention dried up
—fancy, imagination, quite squeezed dry? Are we to
be subjected to sameness in angels—one eternal and
unchanging exterior? Forbid it, while the world
continues sinful, oh sumptuary powers! We could
not bear, in our present state of mind, the angelic livery
of one eternal gown (wings, if you like to call it
so), with no new hat, no ravishing garniture for the
shoulders! Oh no! Immolate the milliners for their
dull brains! Turn your genius into this seemingly
exhausted channel, oh, unemployed painters! Show
us woman—like the opal or the cloud—dressed in
new colors whenever she comes into the sun! Adorably
sweet as she is, she is sweeter for the outer spice
of variety!

If to lack classes of society which another nation
possesses, be a falling behind that nation in refinement
(query, whether!), we are behind England, at
least, in this degree, that we possess no class of table-talkers.
Dinner-parties in this country are gatherings-together
of friends, chiefly to eat, and to chat,
as it may happen. The host has been at great pains
to procure a haunch of venison, but he has not
thought of “the wit” for dinner. He has neither
overlooked the olives nor the currant-jelly—but, alas!
the attic salt is forgotten! The tomatoes will flank
the roast, and the celery-sauce the boiled—but who
is to listen to Doctor Gabble, or draw out Alderman
Mumchance? There will be two misses and no “eligible,”
or two eligibles and no miss. The dinner is
arranged with studied selection, but the guests are invited
by the alphabet. The eating will be zealous and
satisfactory, but the “entertainment” as the god of
dulness pleases.

So provides not his dinner, this gentleman's foreign
correspondent (we take one of the same class), in
Russell square. Mr. Mordaunt Figgins (large trader
and small banker, of Throgmorton street) wishes, we
will say for example, to give a very smart and impressive
dinner to Mr. Washington, Wall street, just arrived
with a travelling credit from New York. The
butler sees to the dinner—ca va sans dire. Who
shall be asked? Smith, of course. His jokes will be
all new to the Yankee, and it will look spirituelle to
have an author. He will be sure to come—for Figgins
discounts his bills. Put down Smith. Who
next? We must have a lord. Smith won't show off
without a lord, and the American will all but go into
fits to meet one at dinner. Let's see! There's old
Lord Fumble, always wanting to borrow ten pounds.
Put down Lord Fumble. So—a lord and a wit. Now,
two good listeners. They must be ladies, of course.
We shall have too many black-coats. What, ladies
listen, Mrs. Figgins? The Pimpkinsons. Well—they
are poor and stylish-looking, and the Yankee knows
nothing of the blue-book. Say the Pimpkinsons.
Now for a dandy or two, and one handsome woman
that flirts, in case Jonathan is a gay man. And, I
say, Mrs. Figgins, there'll be a spare seat, and you
may ask your mother—only she must dress well and
say nothing of “the shop.” And duly at eight
o'clock Mr. Figgins's guests arrive—Smith wishing
bills could be discounted without black-mail interest—
my Lord Fumble turning up his (inward) nose, but
relieved to meet Smith—the dandies hungry and supercilious—the
Misses P. delighted and frisky—and
the Yankee excessively well-dressed and dumbfounded
to meet Smith and a live lord. Smith talks to the
lord and at the Yankee, the rest play their parts “as
cast in the bill,” and everybody goes off delighted.
The dinner was a hit, and Smith was “never so bril
liant”—if Mrs. Figgins and Mr. Washington, Wall
street, can be relied on.

Let us glance at another phase of the “life of the
diner-out.” Mr. Smith has accepted one of his most
agreeable invitations—a west-end dinner, with a nobleman
for his host. Mr. Smith is the son of a music-master,
and of course was born with an indisputable
claim to the supreme contempt of his noble convives.
By his talents, and more particularly by his agreeable
powers, however, he has uncurled the lip of scorn,
and moves in aristocratic society, a privileged intruder.
In the drawing-room, before dinner, Mr. Smith
is ceremoniously polite—he is the one man in the company
who dare not venture to be at his ease. Dinner
is announced. The ladies are handed down by those
who are born his betters, and he follows, silent and
alone. He takes the seat that is left, wherever it be,
and feels that he must be agreeable to his neighbor,
whoever it be—at least till the conversation becomes
general, when he is expected to shine. Meantime
his brain is busier than his stomach, for he is watching
for an opening to a pun, and studying the guests
around him to arm his wit and lay traps for his stories.
If, by chance, he is moody or ill at ease, he
has not the noble privilege of reserve or silence.
Not to talk—Smith not to be funny—were outrageous!
“What was the man asked for?” would have been
the first exclamation after his departure. Oh, no! he
must be brilliant, coute qu'il coute; and as he is expected
to extemporize verses at the piano after dinner,
he must be cudgelling his invention at the same time
to get together the material, and weave in the current
news of the day, and the current scandal of the hour,
with, of course, the proper seasoning of compliment
to lords and ladies present. Hic, labor, hic opus est!
The dishes are removed and the desert is set on the
table, and Mr. Smith, who has hitherto kept up a
small fire of not very old puns on the meats and their
concomitants, becomes the object of general, but impassive
and supercilious expectation. His listeners
are waiting to be amused, without feeling the slightest
obligation to draw out his wit by their own, and after
this wet blanket has made his efforts hang fire for
some time, the master of the house calls for “that
very droll story”—the same song and story having
been not only told often before, but expanded and embellished
in the New Monthly or the John Bull.
Wishing lords would tell stories of their own (which
they never do), and dreading lest the company are already
familiar with his story, Smith affects to select
one listener to whom it is quite new, and to tell it for
his individual amusement. In the midst of his narration,
he discovers by some maladroit interruption that
this person knows the story by heart, and, obliged to
finish it without the zest of novelty, he makes a
failure, and concludes amid a general silence. We
have seen this happen once, and, from the nature of
things, it must happen often. Who would wear such
laurels? Who would wish this state of society introduced—this
yet unforged link added to the social
chain of America?

It is the common argument with the advocates of a
monarchical form of government, that the arts and
literature would be better fostered—that the wealth
of which patronage is a growth, is only accumulated
by primogeniture and entail. Heaven defend us from
such fostering, say we! Heaven defend us from such
patronage! No, no! Genius is proud! Genius is
humbled and cowed, damped and degraded by patronage—“patronage”
so called, we mean. The man
gifted by his God with superiority to his fellows, does
not, without an anguish of shame, yield precedence
to the nobility of a king's patent. He is self-humbled
when he does it. He loses the sense of superiority,
without which he is no more noble in genius than the
knight is noble in the field when his spurs are hacked

off by the herald. There is no equality, felt or understood,
between lord and author in England. It
pleases authors so to represent it in books, but they
never felt it. We have seen the favorites of the day
in their hour of favor, and heard enough said of them
to show us how much more would be said to ears
more confidential. Through all the abandon, through
all the familiarity of festive moments, when there is
nothing which could be named which marks a distinction
between noble and simple, there is an invisible
arm for ever extended, with reversed hand, which the
patronized author feels on his breast like a bar of iron.
He never puts it aside. He never loses the remembrance
of his inferiority. He is always a parasite—
always a belier of God's mark of greatness, the nobility
of mind.

If we are remarkable for anything worth putting
your finger on, it is for a kind of divining-rod faculty
that we have—useful to everybody but ourself. We
can point to hidden treasure with a dip infallible—if
it be for another man's benefit. In our own case, and
for our own profit, we are, like all enchanted rods
when dropped from the hand of the enchanter—a
manifest and incapable stick. In the exercise of this
vicarious faculty, we are about to take a walk up
Broadway (on paper), and by pointing to undiscovered
values, show to several persons how they can make
their fortunes.

Here we are at the Battery—the most popular resort
in town, and the most beautiful promenade in the
known world. Within three minutes' walk of this
lovely spot reside at least two or three thousand foreigners,
the lower part of Broadway being their chosen
and favorite quarter, and the “marine walk” their
constant lounge. Bachelors innumerable of our own
nation herd hereabout. The great baths of the city
are near by, and any additional inducement would be
the last drop in the bucket of attraction, and would
double the number of Battery-frequenters. Where
in the world beside, is there—unoccupied—such a
place for a café?

Dispossess yourself, dear reader, of all impressions
of cafés as you see them now, and of all idea of coffee
and other friandises such as are commonly served
to you in places so called. We speak of a Parisian
café—a palace of cushions, gilding and mirrors, sumptuous
as a thing rubbed out of the lamp of Aladdin,
and presided over by a queen of the counter in the
shape of a lady only less pretty than respectable.
We speak of a luxurious and fashionable saloon,
where, in the neighborhood of a lovely promenade,
gentlemen and their dames and daughters can find
faultless coffee, and faultless ices and fruits—a place
to resort to in the slow hours, to rest in after a walk, to
find refreshment after a bath, to meet friends and acquaintances.
Why, in any city of Europe there
would be dozens of cafés around a spot so enchanting.
And we are fast overtaking Europe in the taste for
these approved luxuries, and, in our opinion, the public
is quite ready for this! In the month of April
just gone by, there were placards “to let” upon the
doors of the two houses facing the Battery between
Greenwich street and Broadway. What an opportunity
lost! What safer investment of capital could
there be than to have expended a few thousand dollars
upon the lower story and basement of this block,
making of it a grand café? What in Europe could exceed
the beauty of the prospect from its windows and
doors, the freshness of its unpolluted air, the shade
upon its sidewalk from the magnificent trees in front,
and the charms of scenery and promenade immediately
adjoining? We only wonder that to such a
“call” of opportunity, a café did not spring through the
ground like a mushroom, ready furnished with coffee
and curaçoa, silver spoons and a lady at the counter!

Since we are not a Frenchman, nor a German, nor
an “adult alien” of any description, we are sorry to
say that these ultra-marine dwellers among us have
more taste than we for fine scenery, elegant resorts,
and fresh air. Foreigners monopolize the bright spot
of Manhattan. The Battery is their nucleus. Fashion,
indigenous fashion, has gone up town—an “uptown”
hedged off from the rivers on either side by
streets unfootworthy, and neighborhoods never penetrated
to the water-side on any errand but business
—leaving to foreigners the only spot in this vast
island-city where the view and fresh air of the sea are
decently accessible. On this string we have harped
before, and we leave it now with a little suggestion
that we can not so well bestow elsewhere—that while
this café project is in process of incubation, the authorities
would oblige us and the remainder of the
public by giving us a comfortable seat or two with
backs to them in the shady avenues of the Battery.

And now, to come up Broadway a little. In all
countries but this, rooms commanding advantages of
view have a proportionate high value as lodgings, and
are furnished and let accordingly. Without stopping
at the buildings whose value as residences are so much
increased by the oppositeness of the superb structure
and its leafy surroundings in Trinity churchyard, let
us come at once to the Park. From the corner of
the American Museum to the church in Beekman
street extends a line of buildings, the advantages of
which as to neighborhood and prospect would command
the highest price, as lodgings, in any other city
in the world. The superb fountain—the trees and
grass of the enclosure—the views of the magnificent
church and hotels, and the thronged pavement of
Broadway opposite, are all visible from those desirable
chambers. The large company of single gentlemen
who occupy rooms similarly situated in other cities—
gentlemen who want lodging-rooms and breakfast, and
dine wherever they like—are compelled to dive into
the dark side-streets, and either live in pent-up quarters
quite away from this centre of attraction, or undertake
the life of hotels which has, for many of
them, serios objections. Luxuriously fitted and
furnished, with a housekeeper and the usual appliances
of English lodging-houses, this line of buildings
would be unequalled in attractions to bachelors.
Everything they desire in a residence would be there
attained—centrality, comfort, and accessibility. We
recommend to the landlords who now let rooms, commanding
such advantages, for cheap lodgings, barber's
shops, and lumber-rooms, to turn their attention
forthwith to this obviously better account, and at the
same time embellish and improve the most conspicuous
part of the city.

We were going into various other details of the unimproved
capabilities of New York, but verbum sap.
Our drift is visible, and it is only necessary in reference
to such subjects to set the wide-awake to thinking.

The extreme heats of the last week or two have
depopulated country-seats, and driven thousands from
the open glare and thin roofs of rural resorts, to the
shady sidewalks and stone walls of the more temperate
city. The dim and cool vestibules of the large hotels
are thronged with these driven-in strangers; and in
the refreshing atmosphere of the manifold iced drinks
and their varied odors of mint and pine-apple, they
bless Heaven for the cooling luxuries of cities, pitying
all those whose destiny or poverty confines them to
the unmitigated country. Enjoying, as we do, the
blessings of metropolitan protection in July, we feel
called upon to express our deep sympathy with those

unfortunate beings, who, in places of public resort, or
in private cottages, are fulfilling their sad destiny of
sultry exposure. The once porous hill-sides and valleys,
baked by the sun to the induration of a paved
street, lack the delicious sprinklings of Croton water-pipes.
The warm milestones, few and far between,
do but remind the scorched passer-by of the gushing
hydrants of Broadway. The tepid spruce-beer and
chalky soda-water of the country-inns only deepen the
agony of absence from “juleps” and “cobblers.”
What would not these poor sufferers give for a brick
block between them and the sun! How would they
not bless Heaven for the sight of the cold sweat on a
wall of unheated and impermeable granite! What
celestial bliss would it not be, to see, on a country
road, at every few yards' distance, black boys, unpaid
and unthanked, directing, like benign angels, streams
of the pellucid element across their sultry way! Ah!
the luxury, in the summer-heats, of city-walls and
city refrigerations!

It has been unreflectingly thought that there were
two classes of human beings overworked and uncared
for. It has been said that there was no Providence
for housemaids and editors. The predecessors of
these laborious animals, it was supposed, had, in some
previous metempsychosis, committed sins which
doomed their posterity to perpetual toil. It is true,
theirs is a destiny of crash, in a world, for others, of
comparative diaper and dimity. But, mark the alleviations!
The first of July comes round, and Heaven
inflicts upon the task-masters and mistresses of these
oppressed maids, a locomotive insanity. With toil
and sweat they pack up their voluminous traps, and
embarking in a seething boat they depart, panting and
red-faced, on their demented travels. They go from
place to place, packing and unpacking, fretting and
sweating from day to day, and arriving at last at the
grand fool-dom of Saratoga, they take up their lodging
for a month in chambers of pill-box dimensions,
pitiably persuaded that the smell of pine partitions,
and the pitchy closeness of shingled roofs reeking in
the sun, are the fragrance of the fields, and a blessed
relief from the close air of the city! So, for weeks,
they absent themselves, deluded. The housemaid,
meantime, has possession of the cool and spacious
dwellings deserted for her use. The dragged muscles
relax over her collar-bone and shoulders, for she has
now no water to carry up-stairs and down. She recovers
the elasticity in the small of her back, and the
natural distribution of red and white in her flushed
and overheated complexion. The well-contrived blinds,
closed in the freshness of the morning-hours, keep the
house cool and dim for her noontide repose. The spacious
drawing-rooms are hers, in which to wander at
will, barefoot if she likes, on the luxurious carpets.
The bath-rooms are near her bed, and the ice-man
comes daily to the door, and unless she choose to step
out upon the sidewalk at noon, she scarce need know
it is summer. Ah, the still coolness of thick brick
walls and ample rooms within! Her worn-out frame
recovers its powers, and in the goodness of her heart
she can afford to send pitying thoughts after the exiled
and infatuated sufferers at Saratoga!

Negatively blessed is her fellow-sufferer, the editor,
meantime—liable as he is to this same locomotive lunacy,
and kept within reach of enjoyable and health-preserving
luxuries by the un-let-up-able nature of his
vocation. Nor this alone. He has his minor reliefs.
Omni-acquainted as he necessarily is, and mostly with
the unhappy class self-exiled to the inclement country,
his weary arm now lies supine in delicious indolence
at his side. The habitual five hundred visits,
per diem, of his right hand to the rim of his hat, are
no more exacted. The two hundred and fifty suggestions,
per diem, as to the conduct of his paper, the
course of his politics, and his private morals, are no
longer to be thankfully received. The city is full, but
full of strangers, charmingly unconscious of his extreme
need of counsel. He walks to and fro at
ease, looking blandly at the hydrants, blandly at the
strange faces, blandly at the deliciously unfamiliar
contents of the omnibuses. He dwells in a crowd, in
heavenly solitude. He is like a magnetized finger on
the body of a man with a toothache—apart from the
common pulse, sequestered from the common pain—
yet in his habitual place and subject to no separation.
He has no engagements to meet gentlemen or committees,
for the better manufacture of public opinion.
He can shilling it to Staten Island for sea-air, or sixpence
it to Harlem for an evening sight of the blood-warm
grass, in blessed silence! And so fly the summer
months, like three leaves of the book of paradise
turned back by chance; and, refreshed with new courage,
the doomed editor renews, in September, the
multitudinous extras of his vocation. Oh kindly
Providence, even for housemaids and editors!

A true leaf from the thoughts of a woman of genius
on the subject of woman's love, is stuff to dwell upon
in the reading. We totally differ from one of the
sweetest writers of the time, Mrs. Seba Smith, on the
following disparaging passage touching the love of a
gentle and confiding woman as contrasted with that
of a proud one. Let our readers judge. The passage
occurs, by-the-way, in a story which is the gem
of the whole year of monthlies, called “The Proud
Ladye”—in Godey's Lady's Book. “The love of a
gentle and confiding woman, with its perpetual appeals
to tenderness and protection, must be dear, very
dear to a manly heart; but then it too often lacketh
that exclusive and earnest devotion which imparts a
last touch of value, its sympathies are too readily excited,
and the images of others, faint and shadowy it
may be, yet still images, too often sit, side by side, with
the beloved. But the love of a proud woman, with
its depths of untold tenderness, rarely stirred, yet,
when once awakened, welling up a perpetual fountain
of freshness and beauty, its concentred and earnest
faith, its unmingled sympathies, its pure shrine, raised
to the beloved, burning no incense upon strange altars,
and admitting no strange oblations, the love of such a
one should invest manhood with tenfold dignity—
should make him feel as a priest in the very presence
of the divinity.”

“Things lost in air” are not always unproductive,
Signora Castellan having received, last night, about
two thousand dollars for singing four songs. Signor
Giampietro, her husband, may well say that “a sweet
voice is a most excellent thing in woman.” I made
one of the twenty-five hundred who composed the
audience of this successful cantatrice last evening, and
having missed her introductory concert, this was the
first time I had seen her. I should take Madame
Castellan to be about twenty-three. She is a plump
little Jewess, with an advantage not common to plumptitude—a
very uppish and thoroughbred neck, charmingly
set on. A portrait of her dimpled shoulders
and the back of her head would be a fit subject for
Titian. Her countenance expresses an indolent sweetness,
with none of the wide-awakity so common to her
tribe—and, indeed, the description of the Persian
beauty by Hafiz occurred to me in looking at her:—

A most amiable person I am sure she is—but, unless
I am much mistaken, there is none of Malibran's
intellectual volcano in the “crayther,” and the molten
lava is what is wanting to make her equal or comparable
to that wonderful woman. I certainly do not
think we have heard a voice in this country, not even
Malibran's, of more astonishing compass than Madame
Castellan's. There is not a chamber in her
throat where a cobweb could remain unswept for a
moment. Her contralto notes are far beyond the plummet
of ordinary “soundings,” and as rich and effortless
as the gurgle of a ringdove, while her soprano
tones go up with the buoyancy of a lark, and raise on
tiptoe all the audience who are not fortunate enough
to obtain seats. Still, in ascending and descending on
this angel's ladder, she misses a round now and then.
There are transitions which catch, somehow. She
wants fusion. In her trills more particularly, the balance
is one-sided, and there is a nerve in the listener's
besoin which is not reached by the warble. Give her
more practice, however, more passionateness or brandy
and water, and she would melt over these trifling
flaws, without a doubt. So near perfection as she is,
it seems almost impertinent to criticise her.

New York has some radii to its outer periphery
which are well worth the stranger's following in the
way of excursions. The promontory which makes
the jumping-off place at the seaward end of the Narrows,
is one of these, and upon it (next door to the
fishing-huts of Galway), stands one of the most luxurious
hotels in this country. A friend gave me a
delightful drive to it the other day, via a little flourish
among the knolls of Long Island, and, as it chanced
to be the hottest day of the season, I can speak advisedly
of the ocean air of Fort Hamilton. To be
handed over from the Battery to such a cool place, in
half an hour, by the long arm of a steamer, is one of
the possibilities that make New York very habitable.

The marvel of New York just now is “the Adhamra”—an
ice-cream resort lately opened a little
below Niblo's. The depth of the building on Broadway
is pierced for a corridor entrance, and this is lined
with counters tended by the prettiest Hebes of their
class. Traversing this alley of temptation, you descend
to a marble-paved circular court, tented with
gayly-striped awnings and gorgeous colors of barbaric
architecture. The seats are around a fountain, and a
statue of a water-nymph stands in the centre, holding
above her head a horn, from which issues the water,
in a jet resembling a glass umberlla. The basin is
rimmed with flowers, the falling water makes the constant
murmur which is needful for a téte-à-téte, the sky
looks in through the lacings of the blue and white awning,
and “the ices are made of pure cream.” The
whole scene is more oriental than Spanish, and would
have been better named a serail or a kiosk than the
Alhamra, but it is a “fairy-spot” (as well as a man
can judge who has not seen fairy-land), and, for the
price of an ice-cream, it gives the untravelled a new
idea of luxury.

Great as the difference is between the scents of
moist earth and splashed dust, the latter, faute de
mieux, comes up to your nostrils very agreeably, as
you sit at your summer morning's work in a city window.
It is a day to be thankful for “wet” in almost
any shape. Yet it shows of what accommodating
stuff we are made, when, instead of the gentle ministry
of the exhaling dews, we feel prepared to bless a
fat negro with a leathern pipe, dispensing, as it were,
the city branch of nature's distribution of moisture.
The sable vicegerent of the Croton, whom I have in
my eye (hight Jackson)—now brushing the boots of
Mr. Stopintown, the poor scribbler, now directing at
will the prodigal outgush of water that comes forty
miles to do his bidding—stands, as well he may, petrified
with astonishment at the zealous activity with
which the obedient element follows the turn of his
finger. Negro amazement is evidently taken in at the
mouth. My friendly moistener airs his trachea very
fixedly from the beginning to the end of his easy
function. Thanks to his influence, the thermometer
beside me, I observe, has sunk two degrees with the
tepid abatement of the morning air.

Whatever else may be left unfinished at the end of
the world, we are quite sure that there has been
enough written! The “bow of promise” was no security
against a deluge of books—and it has come!

the waves of this great flood receding, and nothing
visible but the “unwritten” mud! We would fain
have books “done away.” We would begin again
with “two of every kind,” and wait with patience for
a posthumous work by Ham, Shem, or Japhet!
which, we believe are Shelley's “sentiments better
expressed.”

And, by-the-way, it is a marvel where all these
books go to. We do not mean, of course, the type
and paper. We mean the spirit, black, or white, or
gray, that on this bridge of print passes from the author's
heart into the reader's and there abides—more
difficult to cast out than the devils exiled into pork
three thousand years ago, and still guarded against by
the abhorrent synagogue. Fifteen millions of people,
all ductile, imitative, and plastic—all, at some
moment or other, waiting for a type upon which to
mould their characters—and all supplied, helter-skelter,
at a shilling the pair, with heroes and heroines
made to sell—the creatures God has first created in
his own image, taken soft from his hand, and shaped,
moulded, and finished by De Kock and Bulwer! Who
is there, high or low, that is not reached by these possessing
and enchanting spirits? We are sure we do
not overrate their power. In our own case, a novel of
Bulwer's, read in a day, possesses us exclusively and
irresistibly for a week, and lingers in our brain for
many a day after. Like or dislike the character he
draws—we can not resist the fascination. Yet you
would think the reading of a book, by an editor, would
be like sweeping out the water from a brook. What
must it be to the farmer who reads it by his pine-knot
fire in the country, and thinks of it all day over his
plough—to the apprentice who reads it on Sunday and
ponders on it for a week over his bench. We are only
looking at them as infusions into the fountains of
opinion and impulse; and, if we had time, we should
like to trace them till they appeared in classes of
events, or in features of national character. To do
this in detail would require the space of a lecture or
an essay. But, at a glance—to what do we owe the
fact, that, throughout all the middle and lower classes
of American life, everything except toil and daily
bread is looked at through the most sentimental and
romantic medium? In their notions, affections, and
views of life, the Americans are really the most romantic
people on earth. We do not get this from our
English forefathers—the English are as much the
contrary as is possible. We do not get it from
our pursuits—what can be more unromantic than the
daily cares of an American? We do not get it from
our climate—it is a wonder how romance, fled from
the soft skies of Spain and Italy, can stay among us.
We get it from books—from the hoisting of the floodgates
of copyright—from the inundation of works of
fiction. There are few, we venture to say—few below
the more intellectual classes, whose views of life are
not shaped and modelled, and whose ambitions are not
aimed by characters and impulses found in the attractive

pages of “cheap literature.” We do not condemn
this, we repeat—we do not know that we would
stop it if we could. At any rate, we prefer it to the
inoculation of English low life—the brutality of the
Jack Sheppard school of novels; and we vastly prefer
it to the voluptuousness of the literature most popular
in France. Thieves are not heroes among us, and
woman is enshrined in respect and honor; and with
these respective differences from England and France,
we can almost rest content under the influences that
make us what we are.

Sit back in your chair, and let me babble! I like
just to pull the spiggot out of my discretion, and let
myself run. No criticisms if you please, and don't
stare! Eyelids down, and stand ready for slip-slop.

I was sitting last night by the lady with the horn
and the glass umbrella, at the Alhamra—I drinking a
julep, she (my companion) eating an ice. The water
dribbled, and the moon looked through the slits in the
awning, and we chatted about Saratoga. My companion
has a very generalizing mind, situated just in
the rear of a very particularly fine pair of black velvet
eyes, and her opinions usually come out by a little
ivory gate with a pink portico—charming gate, charming
portico, charming opinions. I must say I think
more of intellect when it is well lodged.

I am literally at a dead loss to know whether she
said it, or I said it—what my mind runs on at this moment.
It's all one, for if I said it, it was with the velvet
approbation of her ineffable eyes, and before such
eyes I absorb and give back, like the mirror that I am.
These, then, are her reflections about Saratoga.

Why, in mamma's time, it was a different affair.
There was a cabinet of fashion in those days, and the
question was settled with closed doors. Giants have
done being born, and so have super-beautiful women—
such women as used to lay down hearts like blocks in
the wooden pavement, and walk on nothing else.
There were about three in each city—three belles of
whom every baptized person in the country knew the
name, style, and probable number of victims. Their
history should have been written while they lasted—for
of course the gods loved them, and “whom the gods
love die first,” and they are dead, and have left no
manuscripts nor models. Well, these belles were
leagued, and kept up their dynasty by correspondence.
New York was the seat of government, and the next
strongest branch was at Albany (where the women at
one time were lovelier than at any known place and
period since the memory of woman). In New York
alone, however, were married ladies admitted to the
councils. Here and there a renowned bean was kept
in the antechamber for advice. April came, and then
commenced a vigorous exchange of couriers. “The
Springs,” of course, but which? Saratoga, or Lebanon,
or Ballston? What carried it, or who decided it,
was enshrined in the most eternal mystery—but it was
decided and known to a few beaux and the proprietors
of the hotels by the middle of May. Wine and
Johnson's band were provided accordingly. The summer
was more punctual in those days, and July particularly
was seldom belated. After the fourth, the
cabinet started, and then commenced a longitudinal
radiation from north to south—after what, and to follow
whom, was only a secret to the uninitiated. And
such times—for then the people had fortunes, and the
ladies drank champagne! La! how'ma talks about it!

But now!—Eheu fugaces! (Latin for “bless my
soul”)—change has drank all the spirit of our dream.
There is so much aristocracy in New York that there
is none at all. Beauty has been scrambled for, and
everybody has picked up a little. There must be
valleys to make mountains—ugly people before there
can be belles—but everybody being rather pretty, who
can be divine? Idem, gentility! Who knows who
isn't “genteel” in New York? There are fifty circles
as like as peas—and not even an argument as to the
perihelion. Live where you please, know whom you
please, wear what you please, and ride freely in the
omnibuses, and nobody makes a remark! Social
anarchy!

Why, what a state of things it is when it is as much
trouble to find out where the prettiest people have
gone to pass the summer as it is to inquire out
“good”ness in Wall street! No cherishing, either,
of belle or beau descent! The daughters of the
charming tyrants of ten or twenty years ago, the boys
of the beaux of that time, walk about unpointed at
and degenerate. The “good society” of twenty years
ago is most indifferent society now.

goes for a crockery pipkin.

A great pity they don't have coffee at the Alhamra!
And no curaçoa—and what is ice-cream without a
drop of curaçoa! It's a pretty place—a very pretty
place! And there should be nobody to wait on you
here but dainty and dapper slaves—such as the Moors
had, with golden rings on their ankles, in the veritable
Alhambra. That tall, crooked blackamoor hurts my
eye.

So there was no “Mr. Hicks,” and no “legacy to
Washington Irving.” More's the pity! I wish a
Mr. Hicks might be created impromptu, on purpose.
And more Mr. Hickeses for more authors. Birds that
sing should be provided with cages and full cups.
What could be done better with spare moneys than to
take the footworn pilgrim of genius and send him
softly down from the temple of fame shod with velvet!
In every rich man's will there should be at least one
line illuminated with a bequest to genius. Heaven
give us a million that we may set the glorious example!

And now, lady, who are you that in this gossiping
dream has held converse with me! I have murmured
to the black cross, suspended by its braid of hair upon
your throat of ivory, without asking your name—content
that you listened. But now (if spiritual visiters
have arms)—put your arm in mine and come out
under a better-devised ceiling! The night is fragrant.
Heaven is sifting love upon us through the
sieve of the firmament—starlight, you took it for!
And as much falls in Broadway as elsewhere. And
the stars are as sweet, seen from this sidewalk, as they
are from the fountain of Egeria. I have sighed in
both places, and know. “Allons! faites moi l'amour—
car je suis dans mon humeur des Dimanches.”

We are making a study of this big book of a city
we live in. We mean, in good time, to peruse it all—
its blotted passages no less than the lines of it which
fall in pleasant places. And we'll tell you what we
think of it as we go along. Not with shovel and
pickaxe. Order is a law of industry, and industry, as
the child of sin, we virtuously abhor. We shall read
this great book, as we do everything else—in the style
of the antelapsarians—idly and paradise-wise. The
ant and the “little busy bee” were unknown to Adam
and Eve, it may be safely conjectured; and we scorn
to take them for models, as enjoined in the primer.
Butterflies for ever! We shall flit from flower to
flower, and tilt upon any stem that we fancy will support
us—as do these full-dress and faineant gentlemen
of no care. Pray expect nothing in particular!
Stand ready to hop off. Any perfume that comes
down the wind may tempt us to follow its invisible
track back—for so butterflies detect the self-betraying

flowers of Paradise. (Though, for this zigzagery in
our courses it is, that we butterflies are called volatile
and capricious—as if we had no right, in our own
way, to follow our more spiritual and finer noses!
And to be blamed, too, for imitating, as far as in us
lies, the innocent nothing-to-do-ity of angels!)

But, the animated book of Manhattan. Turn we
to a plain passage, on which we were just now pondering.

There seems to us a poor economy of the animal
spirits in the mode of life of the New-Yorkers. Let
us take a single example, for the convenience of our
over-worked adjectives and pronouns.

Mr. Splitfig, the eminent wholesale grocer, is at the
age of virtue—thirty-five. He rises in the morning
at half-past seven, makes so much of his toilet as appears
above the tablecloth, and makes his breakfast of
the morning paper, a nibble at a roll, and coffee at
discretion. He is too newly up to eat—too recently
arrived from the spiritual land of dreams, as my adorable
friend Lyra would express it. He is grave and
quiet. The sobriety of a fifteen hours' fast is upon
him—for he has not eaten meat since yesterday at
three. Refreshed by sleep, however, and cheerful
after his coffee, he draws on his walking seldom-alluded-tos,
and goes out to be gone till dinner. At eleven,
or thereabout, his spirits begin to flag. He would
rather not see a friend, except on business, for he
hates the trouble of talking. Debts and peccadilloes
lie at the bottom of the stomach, and his heart drops
down to them for want of a betweenity of beefsteak.
He begins to be faintish, but he is principled against
lunching or drinking before dinner, and by one o'clock
his animal spirits have sunk into his boots, and, from
that time till three, he is a dispirited fag, going through
with his habitual routine of business, but, of a civil
word or a smile as incapable as Caliban. It is while
the chambers of his head are thus unlighted and untenanted,
however, that the most of his friends and
acquaintances see him and judge of his capacity for
entertainment. He speaks to fifty people in the
course of those two exhausted hours, and speaks sullenly
and coldly, and, of these fifty, not one considers
that

lies over a floating bridge of comestibles which has
sunk with an unnatural ebbtide. What says Menenius,
the rough and wise?—

But, at three, Mr. Splitfig dines—and as he gives
them something to stand on, his spirits jump up and
look out of his eyes. His tongue feels the moisture
at its root, and grows flowery, and the one man who
sits opposite to the unctuous grocer at table thinks
him the best of fellows.

Splitfig keeps a trotter, and, after dinner, happy and
agreeable, he jumps into his wagon, and distributes,
along the milestones and hedges of the Bloomingdale
road, smiles and good-natured glances, that were much
more wisely got up four hours earlier in the day, and
sown among his friends for a crop of popularity. To
change the similitude, Splitfig makes his day's voyage
with a cold boiler, and gets up the steam on arriving
at the wharf!

Not so Monsieur Toutavous, the French importer.
Toutavous takes a cup of coffee at waking, and on
the strength of it, dresses, reads the papers, and writes
the two or three business-letters which require the
coolest head. He keeps for his own society exclu
sively the melancholy hour or two of every day, during
which “the stomach is apprehensive that the
throat is cut”—the communication is so interrupted.
Yet as these unsmiling hours are excellent for
thought and calculation, he so shapes his business
that he can pass them, alone, without inconvenience.
He has taken his coffee, observe, but he has not breakfasted.
At eleven he goes to Delmonico's on his way
to the “shop.” A beefsteak and a pint of claret dress
his countenance in smiles, and invigorate his fingers
for the friendly clasp exacted by courtesy. He gets to
his counting-house a little before twelve, enters upon
the hard work of the day with a system alert and lively,
and impresses everybody whom he sees with the idea
that he is born to good fortune, and has the look of
it, and is a good fellow, with no distrust of his credit
nor of himself. Sensible of Toutavous—is it not?

Pity, we say again, that the personal, physical economies
are so little regarded among us. The ladies
lack also a little “fernseed in their ears,” but we
would not put them off with the tail of a paragraph.
We have, for them, a chapter in lavender; not of our
own devising altogether! A superb female Machiavel
whom we once knew, who came always to a ball
at three in the morning, fresh as a rosebud after a
night's sleep, entrancing you with her dewy coolness
when everybody else was hot and weary—she, capable
of this brilliant absurdity, once discoursed to us
on the economies of heart-breaking. We will show
you the trick some day. Meantime, salaam!

The first visiter to the bay of New York, and the
writer of the first description on record, was John
de Verrazzano, a Florentine, in the service of Francis
the First. This bold navigator had been for some
time in command of four ships, cruising against the
Spaniards. But his little fleet being separated in a
storm, Verrazzano determined, with one of them, the
Dauphin, to take a voyage in search of new countries.
He arrived on the American coast, somewhere near
North Carolina, and first proceeded south as far as
“the region of palm-trees,” probably Florida. He
then turned, and proceeded north till he entered a
harbor, which he describes thus, in a passage of a letter
addressed by him to his royal master:—

“This land is situated in the paralele of Rome, in
forty-one degrees and two terces; but somewhat more
colde by accidentall causes. The mouth of the haven
lieth open to the south, half a league broad; and
being entred within it, between the east and the north,
it stretcheth twelve leagues, where it wareth broader
and broader, and maketh a gulfe about twenty leagues
in compass, wherein are five small islands, very fruitfull
and pleasant, full of hie and broad trees, among
the which islands any great navie may ride without
any feare of tempest or other danger.”

In this harbor Verrazzano appears to have remained
about fifteen days. He and his men frequently went
on shore to obtain supplies and see the country. He
says, in another part of his letter: “Sometimes our
men stayed two or three daies on a little island neere
the ship for divers necessaries. We were oftentimes
within the land five or six leagues, which we found as
pleasant as is possible to declare, very apt for any
kind of husbandry, of corne, wine, and ayle. We
entered afterward into the woods, which we found so
thicke that any army, were it never so great, might
have hid itself therein; the trees whereof are okes,
cypress-trees, and other sorts unknown in Europe.”

These were probably the first European feet that
ever trod on any part of the territory now included in
the state of New York. Verrazzano and his crew

seem to have had considerable intercourse with the
natives, and generally to have been treated well,
though by his own account he did not always deserve
it. Speaking of an excursion made by his men somewhere
on the coast, he says: “They saw only one
old woman, with a young maid of eighteen or twenty
yeeres old, which, seeing our companie, hid themselves
in the grasse for feare. The old woman carried
two infants on her shoulders, and the young
woman was laden with as many. As soon as they
saw us, to quiet them and win their favors, our men
gave them victuals to eate, which the old woman received
thankfully, but the young woman threw them
disdainfully on the ground. They took a child from
the old woman to bring into France; and going about
to take the young woman, which was very beautiful,
and of tall stature, they could not possibly, for the
great outcries that she made, bring her to the sea;
and especially having great woods to pass thorow, and
being far from the ship, we proposed to leave her behind,
bearing away the child only.”

In a subsequent part of this narrative, Verrazzano
presents a very favorable picture, not only of the amenity,
but of the discretion of the aborigines: “They
came in great companies of their small boats unto the
ship, with their faces all bepainted with divers colors,
and bringing their wives with them, whereof they
were very jealous; they themselves entering aboard
the ship, and staying there a good space, but causing
their wives to stay in their boats; and for all the entreatie
that we could make, offering to give them divers
things, we could never obtaine that they would
suffer them to come aboard the ship. And oftentimes
one of the two kings coming with his queene, and
many gentlemen for their pleasure to see us, they all
stayed on shore, two hundred paces from us, sending
us a small boat to give us intelligence of their coming;
and as soon as they had answere from us they
came immediately, and wondered at hearing the cries
and noyses of the mariners. The queene and her
maids stayed in a very light boat at an island a quarter
of a league off, while the king abode a long space in
our ship, uttering divers conceits with gestures, viewing
with great admiration the furniture of the shippe.
And sometimes our men staying one or two days on
a little island near the ship, he returned with seven or
eight of his gentlemen to see what we did; then the
king drawing his bow, and running up and down with
his gentlemen, made much sport to gratify our men.”

The sail-studded bay of New York at this day presents
another scene; and one of these same “gentlemen”
is now almost as great a curiosity here as was
John de Verrazzano, only three centuries ago, to the
rightful lords of this fair land and water.

If we are not “qualifying” for the doom of Sodom
and Gomorrah, we must look elsewhere for the causes
of the accelerated pace at which goes on our national
demoralization. How many pegs down we have
dropped within three or four years, in political principle,
how many in mercantile honor and credit, how
many in the demand and consequent quality of literature,
and how many in the dignity of the periodical
press, are four very pregnant texts for sermons, as
well as questions for political economy. But more
striking than any of these changes for the worse,
seems to us the demoralization of private life—the
increase of scenes of bloodshed, of shocking immorralities,
of violence toward the unprotected, of calumnies,
revenges, sabbath-breakings, and all the abominations
common to more corrupt and older countries.
When is this unnaturally rapid tide to ebb, and to
what is it tending?

In the comparative idleness of Americans at present—the
stagnation of business and the food for bad
passions, which always lies under misfortune and desperation—we
may doubtless find the immediate causes
of these evil changes, and in this there lies a hope,
that, with the country's reviving prosperity and industry,
its morals, public and private, will mend. But
there are other and more permanent principles of evil
at work among us, which will grow with our growth
and strengthen with our strength—as they have grown
and strengthened with the progress and prosperity of
every country under the sun. In a most philosophical
and able letter on the condition of the different
countries of Europe, which appeared lately in the
National Intelligencer, the writer (President Durbin)
remarks upon the gradual diminution of the middle
classes in England, and the “widening separation between
the rich, who are becoming richer, and the
poor, who are becoming poorer.” This middle class
—which is the population without its extremes of aristocracy
and beggary—constitutes the body and
strength of England, and when its wealth has been
drawn to the aristocracy, and its wants to the beggary
of that country, she will be ready for the next stages
of national history—revolution and downfall. America,
however, has as yet neither extreme to any considerable
extent. Our population are almost entirely
persons of such means and pursuits as would place
them within the pale of the middle class in England.
There is no well-defined aristocracy—no inevitable
and irremediable beggary. But the tendency is toward
these extremes, and in that tendency—irritated
and strengthened just now by the peculiar prostration
of “the times”—we see the causes of no small portion
of the evils we have alluded to. The first step
taken toward the formation of an aristocracy is the
adoption of its vices, as the first result of inevitable
or impending beggary is the contemplation of crime.
The refined pursuits of a man born to a certainty of
wealth and station, can not be adopted in a moment,
nor can suffice for the desires of a man suddenly
grown rich. Nor are the higher pleasures of taste
and intellect at all satisfying, except after a youth of
high culture and ennobled association. The result is,
that the corrupted or vacant mind of the fortunate
possessor of wealth turns to the pursuit of pleasure,
and pleasure in such minds soon degenerates into vice.
A virtuous aristocracy, if it ever exist at all, is the
slow creation of pride of ancestry, and a well-instilled
conviction of the true path of distinction and honor—
but meantime the beginners at luxury and power are
established as a class of ostentatious and unprincipled
members of society, and the license and indulgence
they exact is yielded them with exasperation on the
part of those they displace and injure. Seduction
and intrigue, hushed up, winked at, paid for with
money, in European countries, is here resented with
the murder of the offender. Public opinion, which,
in Europe, under such circumstances, would forgive
the offence, and sympathise only with the seducer,
takes, in this country, as yet, the other side. To be
idle, which was formerly a reproach, is becoming a
merit here, as it is in countries where none are gentlemen
but the idle. But gambling by night for the
means of extravagant idleness takes the place of industry
by day, and the heart-burnings, jealousies, and
unemployed passions of this class, lead almost certainly
to scenes of violence and bloodshed. The
presence in our community of a large body of idlers
(such as exists in all the countries of Europe), whose
whole occupation in life is profligacy, is an evil very
fast coming upon this country, and one which should
at least be guarded against by a total change in the
education and guardianship of women.

If you have never been on the Beacon course at
Hoboken, you have never seen the opening lips of
the Hudson river to advantage. As if nature was of

the same opinion, the long city, with the dot of Governor's
island below it, looks like a note of admiration
jotted down on the other side. This high table
of land in so near neighborhood to New York is a superb
natural esplanade, and I marvel much that such
unequalled sites for villas can be monopolized by a
racecourse. I will spare you the “fine writing” with
which the view inspired me while there. It cools too
rosy for prose.

I went over in the suite of a choice “Spirit of the
Times,” to see the great match between saddle and
wheels—the Oneida Chief, a pacer in harness, against
Lady Suffolk and Beppo, two trotters, under jockeys
in stirrups. It was rather a new mode of racing—
new to me, at least—and I expected a great crowd,
but the spectators were in scores instead of thousands.
On the way, and in the stand, I was amused with the
physiognomy and phraseology of the persons drawn
from the city by the sporting nucleus. There was a
sprinkling of nobodies, like myself, of course, and
some strangers from the hotels; but the remainder
had a peculiarity which marked them as a class, and
at which I can only fling a conjecture in the way of a
definition. Every sense and faculty about them
seemed abandoned to jollity, except the eye. The
eye looked cool and unsympathetic. In the heartiest
laugh, the lids did not relax. The sharp scrutinizing
wrinkle and the brow pressed down, remained immovable
while the sides were shaking. I am not sure
that the whole expression lay in this; but there was
an expression, very decided, about them of a reservation
from fun somewhere, and, with all their frolic and
nonsense, they looked as cool and ready as a slate
and pencil. Sharp boys, I should take them to be,
seen singly anywhere.

The horses were breathed a little before the race,
and as they went to and fro before the stand, I had a
fair look at them. Lady Suffolk has all the showiness
of the trio, and she looks more like a narrow escape
of beauty than beauty itself. She is a large dappled
gray mare, with a tail fit for a pacha's standard,
legs not particularly blood-like, stiff walking gait, and
falls off behind and slopes under the hamstrings like a
corn-crib built to shed rain. Cover her head up
(which looks knowing enough for a Wall street broker's),
and she would not sell, standing still at a country
market, for a hundred dollars. A little study of
her structure, however, shows you that she is made
for something or other very extraordinary, and when
she starts from you with a rider on her back, she goes
off like something entirely different from any velocity
of leg that you are acquainted with. The speed of
two passing steamers going at twenty miles an hour—
you on one and a horse on the deck of the other—
would give you the same sensation of unnatural go-away-ness.
Seen coming, from a little distance, she
rocks like a pendulum swinging from the rider's head,
and when she goes by at full speed, a more pokerish,
awkward, and supernatual gait could scarce be
got out of a cross between a steam-paddle and an
ostrich. Every time her haunches draw up, she
shoots ahead as if she was hit behind with an invisible
beetle. Nothing in the way of legs seems to
explain it.

The Oneida Chief is not half so fine an animal
to look at as his driver, Hiram Woodruff, the great
whip of the turf. He is as fine a specimen of the
open-air man, born for a field open to all comers, as I
have met with in my life. He has a fine frank countenance,
a step like a leopard, a bold eye, and a most
compact, symmetrical, and elastic frame, fit for a
gladiator. In his sulky, he looked as all riders in
those ugly contrivances do, like an animal with an
axletree through him, and wheels to his hips, but he
drove so beautifully as to abate the usual ridicule of
the vehicle. The Oneida Chief is a sorrel, and a
wonderful pacer, but, as he was beaten, I will say no
more about him.

Beppo, the second best horse, is the most comical
little animal I have ever seen. His color is like a
shabby brown plush, and he looks, at a first glance, as
if he might have been a cab-horse, or a baker's horse,
or in some other much-abused line, but retaining,
withal, a sort of cocked-pistol expression of eye and
limb, and a most catgut extension of muscle. His
loins are like a greyhound, and every hair on him seems
laid in the most economical way to go, and when he
does go there is no outlay for any other purpose. A
more mere piece of straightforward work than Beppo's
action I could never imagine. Whatever balk there
was in starting, he was just at the mark, and he neither
broke nor bothered, but did it all in round honest
trotting, coming up on the last quarter stretch like a
whipped-up arrow. As he only lost the first heat by
a head, he of course did his mile, as Lady Suffolk
did, in two minutes twenty-six seconds—the fastest
trotting on record.

“How d'ye do!—how d'ye do!” as greetings, have
passed away. Those two never-answered interrogatories
have yielded to the equally meaning salutations,
“Eh, back!” “Where?” In your autumn trip to
the city remember to salute your friends and acquaintances.
For some three weeks this has been the
vogue, and (grown a gravity with use) people now
shake hands over “Eh back!” “Where?” with all
the sober earnestness which attended the habitual
“how d'ye do?” “how d'ye do?” I give it you by
way of early report of the prevailing fashion.

Since I wrote to you I have aired my magnetic
circle with a trip into the solitude of the Highlands.
“Retiring from the crowd” is an impoverished phrase
for the withdrawal of one's ten thousand spiritual feelers
from the interlaced contact and influence of four
hundred thousand neighbors. We can get used to
anything—thanks to the adaptability of our natures—
and my four hundred thousandth part of the space,
light, air, and locomotion of the island of Manhattan,
had grown by habit to be a comfortable allowance;
but it was no less a relief to send up my breath to the
sky without mixture, and to look about without tangling
my retina with the optic nerves of other people.
The ordinary accompaniments of departure from
town give the fullest effect to the contrast. The pellet
of potato, crowded into the quill of a boy's popgun,
does not escape with a more sudden relief than
the passenger departing by the North river steamer.
The crowd grows closer and tighter as you get to the
wharf, and the last five minutes before casting off are
as close a pressure of flesh, blood, and personal atmosphere,
as can well be endured with any prospect of
recovered elasticity. Suddenly there is a rush ashore,
and you shoot out into the calm and open bay, and
dropping into a chair, instantly commence the perusal
of a rural shore, gliding stilly athwart your eye like
the lines of a pastoral poem:—no people between you
and it, no eyes looking at you from the Palisades, no
hats on the trees, no bows from the ripples as you pass,
no jostle in the fresh air, no greeting, no beggar, no
bore. As a sudden release of mind and body from a
tight place, I know nothing (short of death at the
Five Points) to exceed it.

I was on board “the Swallow,” the stillest skimmer
of the waters in which I have yet travelled, and I trust
the green trees, and indented bays, nooks, and knolls
of Hoboken and Westchester, were sensible of the
fresh intensity of my admiration, as we glided, dream-like
and un-steamer-like, by. I made one or two
mundane and gregarious observations, by-the-by, on
the voyage, and the principal one was the watchful
and delicate attention of the captain of the boat to the

comfort of the ladies and children on board, and,
apropos of that, the superiority of this class in our
country over those of every other. I could wish the
foreign travellers among us might take our steamboat
captains on the Hudson as specimens of our habits
and manners, and, for the three whom I have the
pleasure to know (the captains of the Troy, Swallow,
and Empire), I am quite sure that no gentleman could
desire, for wife or daughter, more courteous and well-bred
care than they habitually bestow on the passengers
who embark with them. As an instance (which
I noticed and think worth recording), Captain McLean
chanced to discover, at the moment a lady was going
ashore with a child and a nurse at nine o'clock at
night, that her destination was on the other side of the
river, near a landing where the boats do not regularly
touch. As it looked like rain, and she was to cross in
a row-boat, he stopped the baggage on the plank,
begged her to be seated for a few minutes, and ran
“The Swallow” across, landing her almost at her
own door, very much to her delight and relief. It
should be set down in his honor, and long may devotion
to women be, as it certainly is now, a national
and peculiar feature of the Americans.

When I stated to you that Mr. Morse would probably
be the biographer of Allston, I had for the moment
forgotten that the great artist married a sister of
Richard Dana, who, by every claim and qualification,
is, of course, the proper person to undertake it. I
trust it will not be a “cold abstraction.” It is true,
the personal and familiar character of all men of genius
will not bear posthumous unveiling—but Allston's
will. He was, in the phraseology of the old
dramatists, “a sweet gentleman.” God never wove
the woof and warp of taste, feeling, and intellect, under
a more clear and transparent surface than in the
“Paint King” of our country. You read his mind
first, in seeing him. His frame was but the net that
held it in. Everybody loved him. Everybody did
homage to him—as a man no less than as an artist.
Mr. Dana would write for his family circle the kind of
memoir we want for the world. He lives in an atmosphere
of cold, un-cosmopolite, provincial observance,
in Boston, and I am afraid his book will smack of the
place and climate. I wish he would go to Florence
and write it—off, among the artists, at a proper perspective
distance, and with his blood warmed up with
the climate and his kinsman's far-off praises. The
biography of Allston should embrace the history of
the first cycle of American art—from the beginning
to Allston's death. It is truly a rare chance for a
model biography, and Dana has it in him—minus
fusion. But he will think “the schoolmaster is
abroad,” and I will say no more.

If you are not particularly acquainted with us, dear
reader, pray consider this last page in the light of a
private letter—inviolable if not addressed simply to
yourself. We have tried to convey this for some
weeks past by caption—as “More Particularly,”
“Confidentially,” “Just you and I,” etc., etc.—but
with no apparent success. We are evidently read.
Our private slip-slop, twaddled under the secrecy
of this page en dishabille, comes back to us, commented
on with full-dress criticism by the pastoral
editors. Now (courage, while we administer a
slice of the dictionary!) our idiosyncracy is a passion
for individual proximity. We would fain be familiar—with
one at a time. We write and compile
fifteen mortal pages, addressed to the universe. We
know by education that it is proper to do so. The
snail comes out occasionally from his suitable house,
and walks in the open globe. But we are a-cold out
of our privacy. We want something between us and
the promiscuous points of compass. We yearn to be
personal and particular—tête-à-tête. And on this sixteenth
page we indulge our little weakness. If you
do not love us—you that have turned over this leaf
—pardon us, but you intrude!

If there be a time for all things, there is a time to
cease to be gregarious. To measure age by years is
to weigh gems against paving-stones—but there is a
point in middle age—(from thirty to fifty, as you wear)
—when the card-case should be burnt in solemn holocaust.
For acquaintances you have no more time.
The remainder of life is little enough for friends, and,
between friends, pasteboard is superfluous. We have
ripened to that point—we! In our pyramid of life
the base was broad and sympathetic. We spread
ourselves as far as we could reach—but with the rise
of the pyramid of years the outer edges have dropped
away, and the planes have lessened. We are limited
to friends, now. Our mind runs friendship-wise. We
tu-toi, as the French say. We like to chat familiarly
—with the world shut out—indulged and slip-shod.

We have knocked our head against this corner of
speculation, while making threescore or more bows of
acknowledgment to editors kind and complimentary.
Somebody loves us, there is no doubt. We are
wished well in our vocation. And that is much in
a world where it is so difficult to butter the dry crust
of industry. But, with no design to annoy or rebuke
us, there is a leaning, in these friendly notices, to find
fault with our frivolity. We are too frisky for breakfast
reading. “The spirits of the wise sit in the
clouds and mock us.” And for this we are sorry.

That the following (from the New Bedford Bulletin)
was written by a man who loves us, nobody will
doubt—yet see the word we have underlined!—

Now, what is “puppyism?” That it is “odorous,”
we may venture to take upon our friend's authority.
But, if “sparkling as a fountain playing rose-water,”
Heaven bless the puppy-most, still say we! Would
you have us graver? Is there not gravity enough in
the world that you can forego our little contribution?
Have you no funerals, no false friends, no leaden politics,
and no notes to pay—that you must come for our
gravity to eke you out? Or do you find fault with
our dabble in the superfineries? Is that it? Mustn't
we mention “patent leather” and “velvet eyes?”
Can't we call the mouth of a charming woman a
“pink portico with an ivory door”—without offending
you? Come, come, you are not quite the anchorite
you would label yourself, and, while flowers will
bloom, hortus siccus be hanged—say you not so? Let
us talk about the things we like. Life is too short for
hypocrisy. Try the trick yourself. Write a paragraph
or two in our flummery way, and see how trippingly
it comes off, and what an uncoiling from your
heart it is of the dull serpent of care!

Put this French proverb in your pipe and smoke it
—“Ne pouvoir tolerer les faiblesses d'autrui, voila la
faiblesse.” If you never thought of that, thank us
for a new precept, and slip a copy of it under your
friendships. It keeps out moths like camphor.

Not quite one hundred years after Verrazzano's discovery
of the bay of New York, during all which
period we have no account of its having been visited
by a European vessel, Hudson made the capes of
Virginia on his third cruise in search of the northwest

passage. Standing still on a northward course, he
arrived in sight of the Narrows, distinguishing from a
great distance the highlands of Neversink, which his
mate, Robert Juet, described in the journal he kept as
a “very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to
see.”

The most interesting peculiarity of our country to
a European observer, is the freshness of its early history,
and the strong contrast it presents of most of the
features of a highly-civilized land, with the youth and
recent adventures of a newly-discovered one. The
details of these first discoveries are becoming every
day more interesting; and that part of the journal of
the great navigator which relates to his first view of
them is very interesting. The following extracts describe
the Narrows as they were two hundred years ago:

“At three of the clock in the afternoone we came
to three great rivers. So we stood along to the northernmost,
thinking to have gone into it, but we found
it to have a very shoald barre before it, for we had but
ten foot water. Then we cast about to the southward,
and found two fathoms, three fathoms, and three and
a quarter, till we came to the souther side of them,
then we had five or six fathoms, and anchored. So we
sent in our boat to sound, and they found no less water
than foure, five, six, and seven fathoms, and returned
in an hour and a halfe. So we weighed and went in,
and rode in five fathoms, ose ground, and saw many
salmons, and mullets, and rayes, very great.

“The fourth, in the morning, as soone as the day
was light, we saw that it was good riding farther up.
So we sent our boate to sound, and found that it was a
very good harbour; then we weighed and went in with
our ship. Then our boat went on land with our net
to fish, and caught ten great mullets, of a foot and a
half long apeece, and a ray as great as foure men could
hale into the ship. So we trimmed our boat, and
rode still all day. At night the wind blew hard at the
northwest and our anchor came home, and we drove
on shore, but took no hurt, thanked bee God, for the
ground is soft sand and ose. This day the people of
the country came aboard of us, seeming very glad of
our comming, and brought greene tobacco, and gave
us of it for knives and beads. They go in deere
skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper.
They desire cloathes, and are very civill. They have
great store of maise, or Indian wheate, whereof they
make good bread. The country is full of great and
tall oaks.

“The fifth, in the morning, as soone as the day was
light, the wind ceased; so we sent our boate in to
sound the bay. Our men went on land there and saw
great store of men, women, and children, who gave
them tobacco at their coming on land. So they went
up into the woods, and saw great store of very goodly
oakes, and some currants.

“The sixth, in the morning, was faire weather, and
our master sent John Colman with foure other men in
our boat over to the north side, to sound the other
river” (the Narrows). “They found very good riding
for ships, and a narrow river to the westward” (probably
what is now called the Kills, or the passage between
Bergen Neck and Staten Island), “between two
islands. The lands, they told us, were as pleasant,
with grasse and flowers, and goodly trees, as they ever
had seen, and very sweet smells came from them. So
they went in two leagues and saw an open sea, and
returned; and as they came backe they were set upon
by two canoes, the one having twelve, the other fourteen
men. The night came on, and it began to raine,
so that their match went out; and they had one man
slain in the fight, which was an Englishman, named
John Colman, with an arrow shot into his throat, and
two more hurt. It grew so dark that they could not
find the shippe that night, but laboured to and fro on
their oares.

“The seventh was fair, and they returned aboard
the ship, and brought our dead man with them, whom
we carried on land and buried.”

On the eighth, Hudson lay still, to be more sure of
the disposition of the natives before venturing farther
in. Several came on board, but no disturbance occurred,
and on the ninth he got under weigh, passed
the Narrows, and proceeded by slow degrees up the
river destined to bear his name.

The current of life seems to be too rapid in America
to allow time for reflection upon anything which
can possibly be deferred. The monuments are left
unfinished on our battle-field; the tombs of great men
become indistinguishable before marked with a stone;
and the sacred places where patriotism has dwelt, are
rated by the value of their material, and left to decay.
It is difficult to visit Mount Vernon, and feel, from
any mark of care or respect visible about it, that
America owes anything to the sacred ashes it entombs.

The family tomb at Mount Vernon has once been
robbed by a sacrilegious ruffian, whose ignorance
alone preserved for us the remains of Washington. It
has been proposed to Congress to buy Mount Vernon,
and establish a guard over relics so hallowed. Why
should not this be done, and a sufficient sum be appropriated
to enclose and keep in order the whole
estate, improve the execrable road leading to it from
Alexandria, and employ persons to conduct strangers
over the place?

The vault in which the ashes of Washington repose,
is at the distance of, perhaps, thirty rods from
the house, immediately upon the bank of the river.
A more romantic and picturesque site for a tomb can
scarcely be imagined. Between it and the Potomac
is a curtain of forest-trees, covering the steep declivity
to the water's edge, breaking the glare of the prospect,
and yet affording glimpses, of the river, where
the foliage is thickest. The tomb is surrounded by
several large native oaks, which are venerable by their
years, and which annually strew the sepulchre with
autumnal leaves, furnishing the most appropriate drapery
for the place, and giving a still deeper impression
to the memento mori. Interspersed among the oaks,
and overhanging the tomb, is a copse of red cedar,
whose evergreen boughs present a fine contrast to the
hoary and leafless branches of the oak; and while the
deciduous foliage of the latter indicates the decay of
the body, the eternal verdure of the former furnishes
a fitting emblem of the immortal spirit. The sacred
and symbolic cassia was familiar to Washington, and,
perhaps, led to the selection of a spot where the evergreen
flourished.

One of the most interesting associations with the
tomb of Washington, is Lafayette's visit to it, as
related by Levasseur:—

“After a voyage of two hours, the guns of Fort
Washington announced that we were approaching the
last abode of the father of his country. At this
solemn signal, to which the military band accompanying
us responded by plaintive strains, we went on
deck, and the venerable soil of Mount Vernon was before
us. At this view an involuntary and spontaneous
movement made us kneel. We landed in boats, and
trod upon the ground so often trod by the feet of
Washington. A carriage received General Lafayette;
and the other visiters silently ascended the precipitous
path which conducted to the solitary habitation of
Mount Vernon. In re-entering beneath this hospitable
roof, which had sheltered him when the reign of
terror tore him violently from his country and family,
George Lafayette felt his heart sink within him, at no
more finding him whose paternal care had softened his
misfortunes; while his father sought with emotion for
everything which reminded him of the companion of
his glorious toils.

“Three nephews of General Washington took Lafayette,

his son, and myself, to conduct us to the tomb
of their uncle; our numerous companions remained
in the house. In a few minutes the canon, thundering
anew, announced that Lafayette rendered homage
to the ashes of Washington. Simple and modest as
he was during life, the tomb of the citizen hero is
scarcely perceived among the sombre cypresses by
which it is surrounded. A vault, slightly elevated and
dotted over—a wooden door without inscriptions—
some withered and green garlands, indicate to the traveller
who visits the spot where rest in peace the puissant
arms which broke the chains of his country. As
we approached, the door was opened. Lafayette descended
alone into the vault, and a few minutes after
reappeared, with his eyes overflowing with tears. He
took his son and me by the hand, and led us into the
tomb, where, by a sign, he indicated the coffin. We
knelt reverentially, and rising, threw ourselves into
the arms of Lafayette, and mingled our tears with
his.”

There are manifest signs that the summer is here.
The ladies who are on their travels, and the ladies who
are not, wear alike the toilet of transit—dust-proof
dresses and green veils. “Bound for the Springs” is
palpably intended to be expressed by every apparition
of beauty in Broadway. The gentlemen, in the absence
of the more approved targets at which their
irresistiblenesses are aimed, go about in calico coats,
ungloved, unwaistcoated, unstrapped, and uncravatted.
Hot corn is cried at midnight. Raspberries are
treacherous. Green apples and pears grace the tables
of the hucksters. The daily papers show signs of the
rustication of the leading editors. Hotels crammed,
and a pervading odor of the fruity drinks extending a
hundred yards from them in every direction. The
summer has arrived, I believe—but I feel called upon
to admit that count D'Orsay and Lady Blessington
have not. Colonel Stone's virtuous horrification at
the mention of such improper people by your correspondent
has probably driven them into an incognitude
which has cost the count his whiskers, at least. Without
them, Niagara itself would not recognise him—
brother wonder as he is—and, if in the land of Bozworship
at all, they probably pass for a big Kentuckian
and his handsome mother. Keep a look out as
you travel, however, amis voyageurs!

Kissing has no longer the drawback of wear and
tear. I see that Dr. Ellsworth of Hartford has succeeded
in restoring a lost upper lip. The paper
which describes it says: “Upon the red facing may
possibly be detected the point of connexion between
the two halves. The lip is really a handsome
one—quite equal to the best cures of hare-lip. No
one would for a moment suspect that it had travelled
from the cheeks to its present location, which it
graces as well as the original, except that it has not
quite as free and easy a motion, although enough for
all common purposes.”

Passengers up the Hudson who wish to take the
early trains west, embark at present on the forward
deck of the “Empire.” Those who are not in a
hurry take passage in the after cabin, and on the
mooring of the boat at Albany, pay their respects to
the ex-president at Kinderhook, from the stern taffrail.
She is commanded by Captain Roe, who, in the extent
of his jurisdiction, ranks with the governor of Rhode
Island, and is a potentate to be propitiated in politics.
Seriously, this noble steamer is a very great curiosity.
The saloon on her promenade deck is nearly three
hundred feet long, and, with four or five hundred people
on board, she seems to have few passengers. The
sight of her engine at work is an imposing affair.
Some of the state-rooms above are small drawing-rooms
to accommodate parties, and she is furnished
and managed with a luxury and tact worth making a
trip to see.

I understand it has lately occurred to some gentlemen
with open eyes, that anchorage is cheaper than
ground-rent—that a ship-of-war is but a spacious
hotel upside-down, and that the most desirable site for
a summer residence, as to pure air, neighborhood,
novelty, and economy, is now occupied by the “Independence”
and “North Carolina,” the men-of-war
just off the Battery. The latter ship being unsea-worthy,
it is proposed to purchase her of the government
for the experiment. It is estimated that she can
accommodate comfortably three hundred persons. The
immense upper-deck is to be covered with a weather-proof
awning, blue and white, in the style of the Alhamra,
and given up entirely to dining, dancing,
lounging, and the other uses of hotel drawing-rooms.
A more magnificent promenade than this immense
deck, cleared of guns and lumber fore-and-aft, and
surrounded entirely by luxurious sofas, could scarcely
be imagined. The kitchens and offices are to occupy
the forward part of the second deck, or, if the vessel
is crowded, to be transferred to a small tender alongside.
The port-holes are to be enlarged to spacious
windows, and the two decks below, which are above
the water-line, will be entirely occupied by splendid
rooms, open to the entire breadth of the bay, and furnished
in the oriental and cushioned style, suitable to
the luxurious wants of hot weather. Minute-barges
will ply to and from the shore, connected with the
Waverley line of omnibuses; bath-houses will be
anchored just astern; a café and ice-cream shop will
be established in the main and mizen-tops (to be
reached by a covered staircase); and sofas, for the
accommodation of smokers, will be put under a pent-house
roof, outside the vessel, in the main-chains.
The cockpit and hold will of course unite the uses of
a hotel-garret and cellar. It will have the advantage
of other hotels, in swinging round with the tide, so
that the lodgers on both sides of the ship will see, by
turns, from the windows, the entire panorama of the bay.
When lightened of her guns, and her upper spars and
rigging, it is thought she will float so much higher as
to bear piercing for another line of port-hole windows,
affording some bachelor's rooms at the water-line, corresponding
in price and convenience with the sky-chambers
of the Astor. An eccentric individual, I
am told, has bargained for a private parlor, to be suspended
under the bowsprit, in imitation of the nest of
the hanging-bird. Altogether, the scheme seems
charming and feasible. The name of the hotel, by-the-way,
is to be “Saratoga Afloat;” the waiters are
to be dressed in the becoming toggery of tars; and
the keeper of the house is to wear a folded napkin,
epaulet fashion, on either shoulder, and to be called
invariably “commodore.”

This seems to be the age of invention. Several
houses in the city are being made rather higher, by
raising them ten feet on screws, and building a story
under them—a great economy of the loins of hod-carriers.

As a metropolis of wealth and fashion, New York
has one great deficiency—that of a driving park.
Rome has its Pincian Hill, Florence its Cascine,
Paris its Bois de Bologne, and London its Hyde Park;
and most other capitals have places of resort-on-wheels,
where fresh air and congenial society may
be met in the afternoon hours. Such a place is
only not considered indispensable in New York, because
it has never been enjoyed. It is, for the rich,
the highest of luxuries. The Cascine of Florence,

for example, is a park of two miles square, laid out in
wooded avenues; and to its winding roads and forest
glades resort, every afternoon, the entire equipaged
population of the court and city. At sunset, the carriages
meet in an open square in the centre, and the
“lords and ladies” pass the two hours of the delicious
twilight in visiting from vehicle to vehicle, forming
parties for the evening, flirting, making acquaintances,
talking scandal, and other dainty diversions—breaking
up in time to go to the opera or dress for a ball. There
is enough room for such a park in the neighborhood
of Union square, or on the East or North river; and
the importance of such spaces, left open for lungs to
a crowded city, has been long inculcated by physicians.
I think it possible such an exclusive resort might be at
first a little unpopular (remembering that some three
years ago a millionaire was stoned for riding through
Broadway with a mounted servant in livery behind
him), but, as one of the hand-to-mouth class, I do
not care how soon the rich get richer and the poor
poorer—leaving a comfortable middle class, in which
ambition might stop to breathe.

I notice the introduction of the Italian verandah
curtains to New York—the sort of striped demi-umbrella,
put out from the top of the window with falling
side folds, which are so common in Venice and Naples.
Two or three shops in Broadway have them,
and Cozzens has lately fitted them on to the windows
of his ladies' dining-room—and most showy and picturesque
luxuries they are.

Howard has chosen, for the decoy of his hotel, an
intermittent relay of governors. The immense flag
which sweeps the top of the omnibuses in Broadway
on the arrival of such functionaries, seems to have no
sinecure of it, and his house is, in consequence, continually
overrun. He keeps a table suitable to a court
hotel, and seems to be the only one of his class who
is independent of “travelling seasons.”

I observe that the paviors are at work in the upper
part of Broadway, removing the wooden pavement,
and substituting the broad, flat stones, such as are laid
in the streets of Florence. The wooden blocks were
certainly in a deplorable condition, but I do not think
they have had fair play as an experiment. They were
badly laid, and were left to annoy the public long after
they should have been repaired.

A periodical journal in Boston gives the name and
true history of Tom Thumb, the dwarf now at the
Museum. He was christened Charles Stratton. His
parents were of the usual size, and he has two sisters
of the usual proportions. General Thumb has not
grown since he was six months old, and he is now
eleven, and twenty-two inches tall. He is perfectly
formed, very athletic for his size, and in perfect health
and spirits. In mind he remains childish and unchanged,
as in body.

You may have noticed in the New York papers,
ately, a great abundance of essays upon bathing.
Since the Croton facilities, public attention has been
turned a good deal that way, and the prices of baths
have been universally diminished, while new bathing
establishments have been advertised in various parts of
the city. The new one lately opened by Stoppani in
Broadway, near the Apollo rooms, exceeds in splendor
anything we have yet seen in this line. A sumptuous
refectory is part of it; and the long, arched passages
of bathing-rooms remind one of the Roman establishments
in the way of baths. These were, anciently,
the centres around which luxuries of every description
were clustered; and Stoppani seems to have built this
with a view to sumptuous idling and enjoyment.

The most comprehensive view of Niagara is, no
doubt, that from the galleries of Clifton house;
but it is, at the same time, for a first view, one of the
most unfavorable. Clifton house stands nearly opposite
the centre of the irregular crescent formed by
the Falls; but it is so far back from the line of the
are, that the height and grandeur of the two cataracts,
to an eye unacquainted with the scene, are deceptively
diminished. After once making the tour of the points
of view, however, the distance and elevation of the
hotel are allowed for by the eye, and the situation
seems most advantageous. This is the only house at
Niagara where a traveller, on his second visit, would
be content to live.

Clifton house is kept in the best style of hotels in
this country; but the usual routine of such places,
going on in the very eye of Niagara, weaves in very
whimsically with the eternal presence and power of
the cataract. We must eat, drink, and sleep, it is
true, at Niagara, as elsewhere; and indeed, what with
the exhaustion of mind and fatigue of body, we require
at the Falls perhaps more than usual of these
three “blessed inventions.” The leaf that is caught
away by the rapids, however, is not more entirely possessed
by this wonder of nature, than is the mind and
imagination of the traveller; and the arrest of that
leaf by the touch of the overhanging tree, or the
point of a rock amid the breakers, is scarce more momentary
than the interruption to the traveller's enchantment
by the circumstances of daily life. He
falls asleep with its surging thunders in his ear, and
wakes—to wonder, for an instant, if his yesterday's
astonishment was a dream. With the succeeding
thought, his mind refills, like a mountain channel,
whose torrent has been suspended by the frost, and he
is overwhelmed with sensations that are almost painful,
from the suddenness of their return. He rises
and throws up his window, and there it flashes, and
thunders, and agonizes—the same almighty miracle
of grandeur for ever going on; and he turns and wonders—what
the deuce can have become of his stockings!
He slips on his dressing-gown and commences
his toilet. The glass stands in the window, and with
his beard half achieved, he gets a glimpse of the foamcloud
rising majestically over the top of the mahogany
frame. Almost persuaded, like Queen Christina
at the fountains of St. Peter's, that a spectacle of
such splendor is not intended to last, he drops his
razor, and with the soap drying unheeded on his chin,
he leans on his elbows, and watches the yesty writhe
in the abysm, and the solemn pillars of crystal eternally
falling, like the fragments of some palace-crested
star, descending through interminable space. The
white field of the iris forms over the brow of the cataract,
exhibits its radiant bow, and sails away in a vanishing
cloud of vapor upon the wind; the tortured
and convulsed surface of the caldron below shoots out
its frothy and seething circles in perpetual torment;
the thunders are heaped upon each other, the earth
trembles, and—the bell rings for breakfast! A vision
of cold rolls, clammy omelets, and tepid tea, succeeds
these sublime images, and the traveller completes his
toilet. Breakfast over, he resorts to the colonnade,
to contemplate untiringly the scene before him, and
in the midst of a calculation of the progress of the
fall toward Lake Erie—with the perspiration standing
on his forehead, while he struggles to conceive the
junction of its waters with Lake Ontario—the rocks
rent, the hills swept away, forests prostrated, and the
islands uprooted in the mighty conflux—some one's
child escapes from its nurse, and seizing him by the
legs, cries out, “Da-da.”

The ennui attendant upon public houses can never
be felt at Clifton house. The most common mind
finds the spectacle from is balconies a sufficient and
untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited
parlors, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the
dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and barrooms

filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of
travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half-hour
to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that
sickening yearning for society, which sometimes
comes upon a stranger in a strage land, like the calenture
of a fever—the eternal marvel going on without
is more engrossing than friend or conversation,
more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in
carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch
the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified
freight of adventurers, one moment gliding swiftly
down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next,
lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up
from the scoop of a giant's hand beneath the water;
to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract,
to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the
shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and
endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of
the tremendous waters—is amusement and occupation
enough to draw the mind from anything—to cure
madness or create it.

I met Weir, the painter, at West Point, and he
was kind enough to give me a look at his just-finished
picture for the Rotundo at Washington. It was but
a glimpse of five minutes, while I was waiting for the
boat, but I have remembered every line of the picture
so distinctly since, that I can speak confidently,
at least, of its effect and power of possessing the
spectator. Let me transcribe for you the historical
passage taken for illustration:—

“And the time being come that they must depart,
they were accompanied with most of their brethren
out of the city to a town called Delft-Haven, where
the ship lay ready to receive them. The next day
the wind being fair, they went on board, and their
friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight
of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs
and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them, what
tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches
pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch
strangers that stood on the key as spectators could
not refrain from tears; yet comfortable and sweet it
was to see such lively and true expressions of dear
and unfeigned love. But the tide, which stays for no
man, calling them away that were thus loath to depart,
their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and
they all with him, with watery cheeks commended
them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and his
blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many
tears, they took their leave one of another, which
proved to be the last leave to many of them. Thus
hoisting sail, with a prosperous gale of wind, they
came in a short time to Southampton, where they
found the bigger ship come from London.”

It would be a curious subject of thought to a man
unfamiliar with the wardrobe of the imagination, if
he would keep this plain and simple passage of history
in his mind while he looks at the gorgeous investiture
in which it is clad by the genius of the painter—
to compare the picture in his mind while he read it
with the picture made of it on this canvass. I will
not attempt here—indeed I could not attempt, without
seeing it again—anything like a criticism on this
painting—but may say what I feel while it deepens in
my memory, that I have seen no such glorious work
of art in this country, and I have not been more filled
and wrought upon by any of the great chefs d'æuvre
of the masters in Europe. The effect on the mind
is that of expanding the capacity to embrace it.
Weir has drawn his figures on a scale larger than
life, and the immense canvass is filled with groups of
the most exquisite naturalness of posture and relation
to each other, but at the same time finished with
a breadth and strength of effect that looks done with
a hand accustomed to minister only to power without
limit. The coloring in the two wings of the picture
is exceedingly gorgeous, but the centre, around the
kneeling pastor, is admirably subdued in middle teints
appropriate to the objects they envelope, and the pastor
himself, in face, attitude, and costume, is the most
masterly embodiment of hallowed piety and devotion
which it is possible for poet to conceive. The presence,
on board of the vessel, of Mr. and Mrs. Winslow
(the new-married people of fortune, who, while
travelling for pleasure, fell in with and joined the emigrants
for conscience sake), gives the artist the necessary
liberty to enrich the costume of his picture, and
there are two or three other female figures very splendidly
drawn and colored—among them the wife of
Miles Standish, whose soldierly form in the foreground
is one of the most conspicuous objects. Of the
twenty-odd figures in this grand picture, there is not
one about which a great deal might not be written,
even with my transiently impressed memory of it, but
I reserve it for a more detailed description after another
visit. Weir has flung his soul upon this work with
the complete abandonment of inspiration, and he has
wrought out of it, for his country as well as himself,
honor imperishable.

I think it is some thirty miles from Albany to Saratoga,
and we did it at the respectable leisure of five
hours—rather more time than it took formerly on
wheels. True, we did not “devour the way” as we
used to do, and it was a comfort to arrive without a
lining of dust in one's mouth, but I missed the blowing
of the horn, the chirrup and crack of the whip
with which we used to dash through the sandy hollow
of Congress Spring and pull up at Congress Hall,
and I missed the group in the portico, and the greetings
and the green vines, and I missed—alas, for all
the misses of the past! The cars stop in the rear of
the “United States,” and the outstretched arms of
that new caravansary, in the shape of two yellow
wings extending to the depot, embrace you as you
come to the ground. My friends were all there, and
Congress Hall was down hill, in fact and in figure of
speech, and casting poetry and the past behind me, I
rattled to the rising sun and took lodgings with the
Marvins. The ex-president was there, with the thirty
or forty pounds of flesh that would not be recognised
by the presidential chair, and from five to six
hundred of his former subjects sat down with him to
dine. Mr. Van Buren has stuck to the “United
States,” till fashion has gone over to him, for he frequented
the house when the belles were on the other
side of the street. Whether in the dance of politics,
the democracy “chassez across,” and leave him on
the fashionable side, remains to be seen.

I had not been at “The Springs” for some years,
and between the changes in the place and the changes
in myself, I was, for a while (as the French charmingly
express it) desorienté. In the times that were, a gentleman,
on arriving at Saratoga, made his submission
to one or two ladies in whom was vested the gynocracy
of the season—the mother of a belle, or a ex-belle
well preserved, or some marvellous old maid,
witty and kindly. Through this door, and this only,
could the society of the place be reached, and to this
authority the last appeal was made in all cases of doubt
and difficulty. The beaux and belles conformed and
submitted, exchanged hearts and promised hands, and
drove and danced, fished and picnicked, in obedience
to this administration—Coventry the dreadful alternative.
There were fashionable old-bachelor beaux
in those days who were the masters of ceremony, and
there were belles, upon whom, individually, was concentrated
the beauty now distributed in small parcels
over the female population of a state. Every girl is
tolerably pretty now. Everybody is, to the extent of

his natural capacity, a beau. There is no authority
higher than every young lady's mamma. Sent to
Coventry by one party, you may stay “at court” with
another. Flirts are let flirt without snaffle or martingal.
Fortunes are guarded only by the parental
dragon. Nabobs and aristocrats are received upon
their natural advantages without prestige or favor, and
everybody knows everybody, particularly if not from
the same city. Having been happiest myself under
the old régime, this agrarian anarchy somewhat offended
me; and the more, perhaps, that among the
company at the “United States,” naturally secluding
herself somewhat from the crowd, is one of the concentrations
of the beauty of ten years ago—a most
magnificent woman whom that lustrum of time has
passed over as lightly as a night's sleep.

Still, there is beauty at Saratoga—enough, indeed,
for all purposes of dreaming or waking. The ball at
the “United States” on Friday evening was exceedingly
brilliant, and at the concert of Castellan on Saturday,
when the more serious beauties of Union Hall
were added to the assembly, the large saloon was
thought to be very thickly spangled with loveliness.
At this last-named hotel, by the way, they have introduced
family prayers at nine o'clock, and at another
less-frequented house they give tea with the dinner—
little differences which seem to classify the patronage
very effectively. This is the great season of Saratoga,
more persons being now at its different hotels than
were ever recorded in any previous season. I must
not omit to mention the charming improvements by
Mr. Clark in the gem of a valley above Congress
spring (by walks, shrubbery, etc.), nor the elegance
of Marvin's grounds and embellishments at the United
States—a superb hotel indeed, in all its appointments.

This is “hop-night” at the Astor, and among the
crowd of ladies in the house are a few on their return
from Saratoga. The beaux tire of “The Springs”
sooner than the belles, and in Broadway yesterday I
saw a thick sprinkling of the desirables. Indeed, the
weather has been temperate enough to make the city
agreeable, and the southerners prefer enjoying Niblo's
and the comfortable hotels, when the thermometer
ranges below ninety. The boats down the river are
very full just now. I came down from West Point in
the Empire on Thursday, and found her crowded
with presentable company; and with the elegance of
the saloons and decks, looking very drawing-rooms-ical
and gay. There is a great deal of gammon in the
reasons given for going and for not going to the Springs;
and it is the fashion now for those who are not there
to ascribe their absence to a horror of the letter-writers,
as if any would be mentioned at all by those immortality-bestowing
gentry who did not, by flirting
and display, show an appetite for notoriety, and in a
crowd, too, quite as promiscuous as the reading public!
It would surprise a believing Judeus, after listening
to the indignation current in the saloon of Saratoga
in the evening, on the subject of the penny papers,
to see with what eagerness they are read the
next morning, and with what manifest pleasure each
lady mentioned shows to her admirers the paragraph
peccant. That such letters as I refer to are a very
great evil no man who respects the delicacy of private
life can doubt; but one half of the mischief, at least,
lies in the unwomanly passion for notoriety to which
they minister.

Those who linger longest at Saratoga are the families
of resident New-Yorkers, their return to town being
the return to the solitude of a house to themselves.
For “mineral waters” read “society in large doses;”
and the real object of attraction is as easily found at
the “Astor” or the “American” as at Saratoga. The
sea air of Rockaway may stand for a tenth of its attractions,
and the other nine parts lie in the necessity
of some excusable resort in the neighborhood of the
city, which shall supply to the New-Yorkers what the
hotels (as a sequel to the Springs) are to travelling
strangers. From about the twentieth of this month
to the first cool weather, Rockaway will be thronged
with excellent society, mostly from this city; and
there is a nucleus of half a dozen of the most delightful
women in any country, summering there regularly;
three admirably lively and accomplished ladies of one
family the leading constellation. It is a part of the
commonplacery of fashionable chat to fret at the
crowd, and wish for more suitable privacy; but it is
amusing to observe what a difference of opinion there
seems to be between the feet and tongue of the fair
exclusive. The belle at Saratoga rises at six and
walks to Congress spring. The ostensible object is
to drink the waters, which she might have in quite as
salutary a state by ringing the bell of her apartment.
The platform around the spring is crowded with fashionables;
and, elbowed and stared at rather freely, and
complaining of both very feelingly, she remains in the
crowd till breakfast—solitary walks of the most shaded
coolness though there be, hard by and accessible.
She breakfasts with five hundred persons, and from
the table comes to the drawing-room, where she
promenades, and is elbowed as before, till eleven. At
that hour she goes with a party to the bowling-alleys,
where she amuses herself till the dressing-bell for dinner.
And after dinner she mingles in the full-dress crowd
once more till tea-time (with perhaps the parenthesis
of a drive with a party to the lake), and from tea-time
till midnight she is in the same crowd, and goes to
bed late to get up again early, and so, burning her
candle at both ends, finds Saratoga enchanting. But
it is not the less “dreadfully crowded,” and “horridly
mixed.”

The music at Saratoga was one of its pleasures to
me. The band plays at the spring from six to eight
in the morning, and the morning hours (anacreontics
to the contrary notwithstanding) are the part
of the day when the senses are most acutely sensitive
to pleasure. If I am to see a fine picture with the
clearest eye, or read a page of poetry with the subtlest
appreciation, or listen to the sweet divisions of music
with the nicest and most interpreting ear, or hear a
deep-found thought of love, friendship, or philosophy,
give it me in the early morning of midsummer. The
perturbed blood flows evenly, and the perceptions
have settled over-night like a roiled well; and (if in
temperate health) the heart is softer and more susceptible.
To express a plain fact poetically—the marble
lid is lifted from the fountain of tears at that hour,
and though the waters do not “well forth,” they are
open to the dropping in of those pearls of attendant
angels—love, beauty, and music. Yet, “before
breakfast” is said commonly to be the prose of the day.

One hour of music after dinner is made tributary to
the smokers. The ladies and the tobacco eschewers
are out of its reach in the drawing-room, but the papas
and the inveterates bring their chairs out to the
grassy area of the “United States,” and smoke under
the shade, listening to the German band contentedly
and contemplatively. And that is a very pleasant
hour; and taken advantage of by those who, like myself,
find comfort in the ellipses of conversation.

As to living at Saratoga, no reasonable person would
expect a comfortable dinner, sitting down with five or
six hundred persons. The meats get cold in the
spreading. But, to those who are drinking the waters,
any check upon the appetite is not unsalutary,
and, for the gourmet, the Lake House, and one or two
other resorts in the neighborhood, offer game and fish
dinners in compensatory perfection. I went over to
Barhydt's dark lake, the scene of the loves of the lustrum
gone by, and found it looking neglected and forsaken.
The old Dutchman is dead, and his quiet
successors look out with repelling surprise upon the

gay and intruding visiters. It has ceased to be frequented.

I saw at the engraver's yesterday a portrait of
Halleck, engraved for Graham's Magazine, which exceeds
anything I have before seen, as a worthy and
truthful representation of a poet. It is to be published
in the September number, I believe, and is one of the
well-conceived series of portraits in progress of publication
in that magazine. The keen, joyous, analytical
gusto which give such a “sauce Robert” to Halleck's
poetry is admirably conveyed in this picture,
and a more faithful likeness was never drawn. The
original is by Inman.

Broadway in August is like a pocket-full of change
with the gold and silver picked out of it; and like the
disrespectful finger thrust by its owner into its scarce
diminished bulk, Mr. Stopintown, the lounger, contemptuously
threads the crowd, of which he knows
the less precious and residual quality. But let us try
again—for this beginning is too Jeremy-Taylor-ous.

Have you ever started at Niblo's, dear reader, and,
with your eyes particularly open, walked down the
“shilling side” of Broadway to the Park? You
must have done this, and with speculation in your
eyes too, before you can detect, on the fashionable
side of Broadway in August, a certain class of promenaders
visible there in no other month, by gas or daylight.
Now it occurs to us, that, in the spiritual geography
of this shop-and-show land, we can very possibly
give you a lesson.

Few people live more in the eye of the world than
than those who are in transition from poverty to riches,
bound upward. None are so invisible as those
who are going over the same road, downward. The
eye, in the city, acquires a habit of selecting what it
shall see. Glimpse, the porter (to put it figuratively),
sits in the outer vestibule of sight, and passes his
judgment on all comers before they are admitted
to the presence of consciousness. Prosperity has a
color of its own, and a coat with a needy pocket in its
skirt is as invisible as the sick heart it is buttoned
over. You walk Broadway from the Battery to Bond
street (on the golden side), and you remark every flippery-flirt
and boy-beau, and could recal upon oath
their respective riband and waistcoat; yet a man of
genius has gone by, with a thought in his brain new
from God, but under a hat set distrustfully on, and
you would swear in a witness-box that he never
crossed your eye. Visible is an arbitrary word in
large cities.

But it is a devilish truth that in proportion as the
poverty-stricken become invisible, their consciousness
of being seen becomes painfully sensitive. They feel
pointed at with the finger when they are as totally unobserved
as the driver of an omnibus. The prosperous
and gay, too—the very persons who are blindest
to their presence—seem to them their most vigilant
and insulting observers. And as there is a side of the
street proper to the rich and the happy, the poor and
wretched walk on the other. The great haunt of the
distressed—the Alsatia of poverty and crime—the lair
of the outcast of hope and pity—borders Broadway
on the east. In their recoil from the abyss they hang
over—turning back in terror from the fiendish abandonment
of the Five Points, the last platform between
despair and death—the unhappy come to that limit of
Broadway and look across. And up and down, between
Prince street and Chamber, they walk, with a
shunning gait, and shoulders shrinking at your look
as from a blow, and watch the happy on the other
side—wretched men of all degrees of desperation,
from the first downward step to the last.

Oh, you should walk there, now and then! You
will walk there—perhaps you have, with unconscious
selection, already—when in want of money. With
the same clothes you wore when you had enough—
with a cravat as saucily expensive—gloved and booted
comme il faut—you will instinctively take the other
side of the street if out of pocket—if a five-dollar bill,
that is to say—unconsidered rag not long before—covers
now as much void as the zodiac! Oh, most comparative
five-dollar bill!

But the faces on the “shilling side” of Broadway!
If you want a heart-ache, to be succeeded by content
with your lot and a prayer to God, cross over and look
at one or two. The eyelid unrelaxed—the mouth
shut up within, and the lips bloodless with the compression
of the tongue matted to the teeth—the livid
pits beneath the eyes, and the veins blood-shot round
the pupil—the rigid neck—the jaw set up with desperate
endurance—the contracted nostril, and the complexion
set and dead. And this is the countenance
of only poverty—only the agony of one man wanting
a little of what another has too much of—of
which the church, building for the God of mercy at
the head of Wall street, has millions more than it can
spend without ingenuity of extravagance! Are you
and I parts of a world like this, dear reader!

But in August the gay and prosperous go off, and
the golden-side of Broadway is left to the mechanical
and the stranger. Of these the shabby and unhappy
have no dread, and they come over and walk, with
only their despair, in the haunts they once frequented.
You will see them in Broadway now—your attention
once directed to them—and if it be on Saturday, preach
who will on Sunday, you will have profited the day
before by a better sermon.

In looking down on the valley of Wyoming, made
memorable by savage barbarity and famous by the
poet's wand of enchantment, it is natural to indulge
in resentful feeling toward the sanguinary race whose
atrocities make up its page in story. It is a pity, however,
that they, too, had not a poet and a partial chronicler.
Leaving entirely out of view the ten thousand
wrongs done by the white man to the Indian, in the
corruption, robbery, and rapid extinction of his race,
there are personal atrocities, on our own records exercised
toward that ill-fated people, which, in impartial
history hereafter, will redeem them from all charge
except that of irresistible retaliation. The brief story
of the famous Cornstalk, sachem of the Shawanees,
and king of the northern confederacy, is sermon
enough on this text.

The northwestern corner of Virginia, and that part
of Pennsylvania contiguous, on the south, was the
scene of some of the bloodiest events of Indian warfare.
Distinguished over all other red men of this
this region, was Cornstalk. He was equally a terror
to the men of his own tribe (whom he did not hesitate
to hew down with his tomahawk if they showed any
cowardice in fight), and a formidable opponent to our
troops, from his military talents and personal daring.
He was, at the same time, more than all the other
chiefs of the confederacy, a friend to the whites; and,
energetic as he was when once engaged in battle,
never took up arms willingly against them. After the
bloody contest at Point Pleasant, in which Cornstalk
had displayed his generalship and bravery, to the admiration
of his foes, he came in to the camp of Lord
Dunmore, to make negotiations for peace. Colonel
Wilson, one of the staff, thus describes his oratory:
“When he arose, he was nowise confused or daunted,
but spoke in a distinct and audible voice, without
stammering or repetition, and with peculiar emphasis.
His looks, while addressing Dunmore, were truly
grand and majestic, yet graceful and attractive. I have

heard many celebrated orators, but never one whose
powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on
this occasion.”

In the spring of 1777, it was known that an extensive
coalition was forming among the tribes, and that
it only waited the consent and powerful aid of the
Shawanees, to commence war upon the whites. At
this critical time, Cornstalk, accompanied by Red
Hawk, came on a friendly visit to the fort at Point
Pleasant, communicated the intentions of the tribes,
and expressed his sorrow that the tide set so strongly
against the colonists, that he must go with it in spite
of all his endeavors.

Upon receiving this information, given by the noble
savage in the spirit of a generous enemy, the commander
of the garrison seized upon Cornstalk and his
companion as hostages for the peaceful conduct of his
nation, and set about availing himself of the advantage
he had gained by his suggestions. During his
captivity, Cornstalk held frequent conversations with
the officers, and took pleasure in describing to them
the geography of the west, then little known. One
afternoon, while he was engaged in drawing on the
floor a map of the Missouri territory, its water-courses
and mountains, a halloo was heard from the forest,
which he recognised as the voice of his son Ellinipsico,
a young warrior, whose courage and address
were almost as celebrated as his own. Ellinipsico entered
the fort, and embraced his father most affectionately,
having been uneasy at his long absence, and
come hither in search of him.

The day after his arrival, a soldier went out from
the fort on a hunting excursion, and was shot by Indians.
His infuriated companions instantly resolved
to sacrifice Cornstalk and his son. They charged
upon Ellinipsico that the offenders were in his company,
but he declared that he had come alone, and
with the sole object of seeking his father. When the
soldiers came within hearing, the young warrior appeared
agitated. Cornstalk encouraged him to meet
his fate composedly, and said to him, “My son, the
Great Spirit has sent you here that we may die together!”
He turned to meet his murderers the next
instant, and receiving seven bullets in his body,
expired without a groan.

When Cornstalk had fallen, Ellinipsico continued
still and passive, not even raising himself from his
seat. He met death in that position with the utmost
calmness. “The other Indian,” says the chronicle,
“was murdered piecemeal, and with all those circumstances
of cruelty with which the savage wreaks his
vengeance on his enemy.”

The day before his death, Cornstalk had been present
at a council of the officers, and had spoken to
them on the subject of the war, with his own peculiar
eloquence. In the course of his remarks, he expressed
something like a presentiment of his fate. “When
I was young,” he said, “and went out to war, I often
thought each would be my last adventure, and I
should return no more. I still lived. Now I am in
the midst of you, and, if you choose, you may kill
me. I can die but once. It is alike to me whether
now or hereafter!”

His atrocious murder was dearly expiated. The
Shawanees, the most warlike tribe of the west, became
thenceforward the most deadly and implacable foes to
the white man.

Nine o'clock—an August morning—and every breath
out of doors like a bird's life pressed into a minute!
The breast of the earth naked to the sun—the air in
a trance—the river breathless with the beauty of the
sky it mirrors—and at such an hour to see the ghost
of a mended pen and a stubborn resolution! Out
upon the art of writing! Is there no honest wood
chopper, no dog, no squirrel, no anything out of
doors, that will change lives with me! Down, school-boy
heart! and come hither, since thou must, pen,
ink, and paper!—stationary, indeed!

Close the shutters now, and bring candles! If I am
to sit at this table till noon, I will have it night. Slippers,
Thomas! And then shut the stable-door; my
horse neighs; lock up the saddle and lose the key!
And, Thomas! lend old Peter my boat, and break the
fishing-rod, and scare away the birds from the window.
Has a skylark possessed my soul or no—
that I so hate the roof over my head this radiant
morning.

Play to me ere I begin! Music is creative! What
a benefactor to the world is John Chickering! How
exquisitely balanced are those octaves, and how gloriously
(with that touch) the rich instrument revels
through the music! The builder of these caves of
harmony has a poet's vocation. What is poetry but
the vehicle of man's enthusiasm—the element in
which float fancy and feeling—the suggestive awakener
of intellect—the soother of care and pain! He who
writes a poem that is read and loved by a thousand
hearths, links himself with an angel's round of delight
and sympathy and the builder of a thousand harmonious
instruments follows in the same bright orbit of
influence. It has been said that “he who can not find
happiness can not find an easy-chair.” For easy-chair
I read one of the evenly-balanced, rich, true, round-toned
and incomparable instruments of John Chickering.
I have erected mine into a household god!

Play me those “Hope Waltzes” again. They
come off like Ariel's spiriting. But to bewitch the
heels and stir the brain the “Flower Waltzes” against
the world! I have made out their language by daily
listening to them, and if I can not divine the composer's
thought when they were born, I can tell what
they express, as I can what all music expresses that I
love and hear often. It is the difference between good
and bad music, that one is an articulate thought, and
the other mere jingle and gibberish. Among the
“coming events” that “cast their shadows before,” is,
I think, a musical era, in which the intellectual qualities
of harmony in sounds will be studied and understood.
For one of the most powerful levers on the
human heart, singly or in mass, music has been
strangely undervalued, and its professors and masters
have been as strangely stigmatized as an idle and unintellectual
class of people. A revolution has begun in
church music, and in Boston (by the efforts of one
educated and enthusiastic man, Mr. Mason) the
church choirs have become as effective and eloquent
as the sermon. The perfection to which Chickering
has brought the structure of that universal instrument,
the piano; this musical reform in Boston; the
introduction of singing into the systems of education
for children, and last (not least surprising), the adoption
of music as a political engine, and its powerful
operation, are “signs of the times” which would warrant
a musical man of genius in creating a new liberal
profession—the adaptation of expression to sound,
and the marriage of emotion to music. Moore understands
this mystery, and when in Spain (I once heard
him say) wrote several of his most pathetic songs to
the gayest airs of the peasantry. We have tried rewording
old songs with some effect, and it is like
bringing notes to their right mind and making them
talk sense. There is a delicious thing by Topliff—
“Consider the lilies how they grow”—which makes
one feel as if the whole Bible should be chanted; and
the “Six Songs from Scripture,” by Moore, are very
beautiful. But admirably as Moore's words are always
married to his music, there is one song of his
set to an air of Bellini's, which seems to me the masterpiece
of sense linked to corresponding harmony. I
can not at this moment name the opera from which

the air is taken, nor the volume of Moore which contains
the poetry. It commences
and is published in a book called “Kingsley's Choir.”
It is a song to “lap you in Elysium.”

From Memnon to Helicon is but to “jump Jim
Crow.” Who is writing poetry? Nobody in England,
I think, but Mrs. Norton, and out of her sorrows
this beautiful woman is beginning to weave herself an
immortality. The allusion to her mother in one of
her late fugitive pieces, and the frequent mention of
her children, are touched in the very deepest truth of
nature as well as in the finest skill of the poet. It was
necessary for the world that this fine genius should be
“tried by fire.” With her remarkable beauty, naturally
gay spirits, and unequalled powers of fascination,
Mrs. Norton, had the course of her life and love run
smooth, would never have sounded those sorrowful
depths of her heart from which wells out the bitterness
so sweet in song. Happy—we should have
heard but of her beauty. Wronged, persecuted, and
robbed of her children and her good name—we
build her an altar in our hearts as the most gifted poetess
of her time, and posterity will perpetuate the worship.
Is this compensation or no?

By that blast upon the farmer's dinner-horn, twelve
o'clock! Avaunt, quill! “sweat of my brow!” In
how many shapes comes the curse of the fall upon us!
This horn, which calls in my farmer to repose from
his curse in his chair, releases me from mine to let me
amuse myself with his labor. My curse is worked
out indoors—his in the field. The literal “sweat of
the brow” is my greatest happiness, and his heavy fulfilment
of the anathema. Light sits his curse, however,
to my thinking, who bears it out of doors! The
yearning for physical action, impatience of confinement,
dislike of the cobweb niceties of life, seem to
me feelings which grow into passions with increasing
years. Will no one invent a daguerreotype for the
mind, that our thoughts may record themselves—letting
us walk where we list? The pencil is to be done
away with—why not the pen?

Weir, the painter, is moving his glorious picture to
Boston, for exhibition. It will be opened to visiters
there by the first of September. It is to be exhibited,
afterward, at the National Academy in New York—the
first home of the pilgrims having, very properly, the
honor of the first sight of it. Weir will steep himself
in his countrymen's hearts, as his picture shows them
how honestly, as well as with what splendor of genius,
he has executed their commission. I understand that
Vanderlyn's picture is very fine. There are several
persons employed in filling up his design, but Mr.
Vanderlyn's own pencil is to harmonize and finish it.
Mr. Morse has given up his palette and brushes, to
devote himself to his electro-galvanic telegraph, which
is now being laid down. The visit of Inman, the
painter, to England, is partly an errand for the study
of costume and data required for his picture for the
rotunda.

There seems to be a lull in literature, which I hope
is the precursor of a storm on the subject of copyright.
No new books of any description since the
“Last of the Barons.” The “Change for American
Notes” is not by Miss Sedgwick, and I presume that
the editor of the Enquirer, who must be acquainted,
as well as anybody, with her propriety “thrice bolted
o'er,” had not looked into the free-and-easy pages of
the book when he pronounced her the authoress.
There is some dispute over julep-straws about the
authorship of “Philip in Search of a Wife.” It is
“by a Gentleman Butterfly,” and is a sequel to “Kate
in Search of a Husband,” by Lady Chrysalis. But
public rumor, which was foiled in striving to identify
the lady chrysalis with the brightest of the callow
divinities of Broadway, has covered the wings of the
gentleman butterfly with the same attractive petticoat.
Having no eyesight to spare, I wait for an Appleton
edition before reading the book. I think that the two
or three tricks practised upon title-pages not long ago,
have materially hurt the credit of those respectable
old truth-tellers, and at the same time have dampened
the interest in new publications.

The above curious letter was left in the dressing-table
drawer of No. —, United States Hotel. It
was not generally known that the young lady who had
occupied the room before a certain respectable spinster
(who handed us the letter, taking the responsibility
of its publication as a warning), eloped after the
third day of her belleship—as was to be expected.
The result of such pestilent advice is its own proper
moral.

Next to eating, drinking, loving, and money-making,
the greatest desire of human beings seems to be to
discover the lining of each other's brains; and the
great difference between authors and other people
seems mainly to consist in the faculty of turning out
this lining to the view. But in this same lining there
are many plaits, wrinkles, and corners, which even authors
scarce think it worth their while to expand, but
which, if accidentally developed, create an interest,
either by their correspondence with other people's
wrinkles, or by their intrinsic peculiarity.

Let us see if we can give a sketchy idea of the rise
and progress of literary celebrity in London; or, in
other words, the climbing into society, and obtaining
of notice by men who have a calling to literature.
Sterne's method of generalizing, by taking a single
instance, is a very good one, and we will touch here
and there upon the history of an individual whom we
know, and who, after achieving several rounds of the
ladder of society, is still, we believe, slowly making
his way upward—or downward. Let us call him
Snooks, if you please, for we can not give his real
name, and still speak as freely as we wish to do of his
difficulties in mounting. Snooks was a Manchester
boy of good birth, brought up to business—his position
at home about equal to that of a merchant's son
in New York. He began writing verses for the country
papers, and at last succeeded in getting an article
into the London New Monthly, and with this encouragement
came up to town to follow literature for a
livelihood. With a moderate stipend from his father,
he lived a very quiet life for a couple of years, finding
it rather difficult to give away his productions, and
quite impossible to sell them. There was no opening
at the same time through which he could even
make an attempt to get a footing in desirable society.
In the third year he became proof-reader to one of
the publishers, and being called upon to write anticipatory
puffs of works he had examined in manuscript,
he came under the notice of the proprietor of one of
the weeklies, and by a lucky chance was soon after
employed as sub-editor. This was his first available
foothold. It was his business, of course, to review
new books, and, as a “teller” in the bank of fame, he
was a personage of some delegated importance. His
first agreeable surprise was the receipt of a parcel in
scented paper, containing the virgin effusions of a
right honorable lady, who, in a little note, with her
compliments to Mr. Snooks (for she had inquired the
name of her probable critic through a literary friend),
begged a notice of her little book, and a call from
Mr. Snooks when he should have committed his criticisms
to paper. Snooks was a man of very indifferent
personables, his hair of an unmitigated red, and
his voice of a very hair-splitting treble; but he had a

violent taste for dress, and a born passion for countesses;
and he wrote most unexceptionable poetry,
that would pass for anybody's in the world, it was so
utterly free from any peculiarity. This last quality
made him an excellent verse-tinker, and he was the
man of all others best suited to solder over the cracks
and chasms of right honorable poetry. He wrote a
most commendatory criticism of her ladyship's book,
quoting some passages, with here and there an emendation
of his own, and called at the noble mansion
with the critique in his pocket. By this bridge of
well-born vanity, paying the humiliating toll of insincere
praise, he crossed the repelling barrier of aristocratic
life, and entered it as the necessary incumbrance
in her ladyship's literary fame. Her ladyship was “at
home” on Thursday evenings, and Snooks became
the invariable first comer and last goer-away; but his
happiness on these Thursday evenings could only be
called happiness when it was reconnoitred from the
distance of Manchester. He went always in an irreproachable
waistcoat, fresh gloves, and varnished shoes,
but his social performances for the evening consisted
in his first bow to her ladyship, and her ladyship's
“How d'ye do, Mr. Snooks?” After this exciting
conversation, he became immediately interested in
some of the bijoux upon the table, striding off from
that to look at a picture in the corner, or to procure
the shelter of a bust upon a pedestal, behind which
he could securely observe the people, so remarkably
unconscious of his presence. Possibly, toward the
latter part of the evening, a dandy would level his
glass at him and wonder how the devil he amused
himself, or some purblind dowager would mistake him
for the footman, and ask him for a glass of water;
but these were his nearest approaches to an intimacy
with the set in which he visited. After a couple of
years of intercourse with the nobility on this footing,
he becomes acquainted with one or two other noble
authors at the same price, frequents their parties in
the same way, and having unequivocal evidence (in
notes of invitation) that he visits at the West End, he
now finds a downward door open to society in Russell
square. By dint of talking authentically of my lady
this, and my lord the other, he obtains a vogue at the
East End which he could only get by having come
down from a higher sphere, and through this vestibule
of aristocratic contempt he descends to the highest
society in which he can ever be familiar. Mr.
Snooks has written a novel in three volumes, and considers
himself fully established as one of the notabilities
of London; but a fish out of water is happy in
comparison with Snooks when in the society of the
friends he talks most about, and if he were to die tomorrow,
these very “friends” would with difficulty remember
anything but his red head, and the exemplary
patience with which he submitted to his own society.

The fact is, that the position of a mere literary
man in England, in any circle above that to which he
is born, is that of a jackall. He is invited for what
he contributes to the entertainment of the aristocratic
lions and lionesses who feed him. He has neither
power nor privilege in their sphere. He dare not introduce
a friend, except as another jackall, and it
would be for very extraordinary reasons that he would
ever name at the tables where he is most intimate, his
father or mother, wife, sister, or brother. The footman,
who sometimes comes to him with a note or
book, knows the difference between him and the other
guests of his master, and by an unpunishable difference
of manner, makes the distinction in his service.
The abandon which they feel in his presence, he never
feels in theirs; and we doubt whether Thomas Moore
himself, the pet of the English aristocracy for forty
years, ever forgot, in their company, that he was in
the presence of his superiors, and an object of condescension.

Now we have many people in this country, Americans
born, who are monarchists, and who make no
scruple in private conversation of wishing for a defined
aristocracy, and other infrangible distinctions between
the different classes of society. In the picture
they draw, however, they themselves figure as the
aristocrats; and we must take the liberty, for the moment,
of putting them “below the salt,” and setting
forth a few of their annoyances. Take the best-received
Americans in London—yourself, for example,
Mr. Reader! You have no fixed rank, and therefore
you have nothing to keep you down, and can rise to
any position in the gift of your noble entertainer. As
a foreigner, you circulate freely (as many well-introduced
Americans do) through all the porcelain penetralia
of the West End. You are invited to dine, we
will say, with his grace, the Duke of Devonshire.
There are ten or twelve guests, all noble except yourself;
and when you look round upon the five other
gentlemen, it is possible that, without vanity, you may
come to the conclusion, that in dress, address, spirit,
and natural gifts, you are at least the equal of those
around you. Dinner is late in being announced, and
meantime, as you know all the ladies, and are particularly
acquainted with the youngest and prettiest, you
sit down by the latter, and promise yourself the pleasure
of giving her an arm when the doors are thrown
open, and sitting by her at dinner. The butler makes
his appearance at last, and the lady willingly takes
your arm—when in steps my Lord Flummery, who
is a terrible “spoon,” but undoubtedly “my lord”
takes the lady from you, and makes his way to the
dinner-table. Your first thought is to follow and secure
a place on the other side of her, but still another
couple or two are to take precedence, and you are left
at last to walk in alone, and take the seat that is left—
perhaps between two men who have a lady on the
other side. Pleasant—isn't it?

Again. You are strolling in Regent street or the
park with an Englishman, whose acquaintance you
made on your travels. He is a man of fortune, and
as independent in his character as any man in England.
On the continent he struck you as particularly
high-minded and free from prejudice. You are chatting
with him very intimately, when a young nobleman,
not remarkable for anything but his nobility,
slips his arm into your friend's and joins the promenade.
From that moment your friend gives you
about as much of his attention as he does to his walking-stick,
lets your questions go unanswered, let them
be never so clever, and enjoys with the highest zest
the most remote spoonyosities of my lord. You,
perhaps, as a stranger, visit in my lord's circle of society,
and your friend does not; but he would as soon
think of picking my lord's pocket as of introducing
you to him, and, if you begin to think you are Monsieur
de Trop, and say “good morning,” your friend,
who never parted from you before without making an
engagement to see you again, gives you a nod without
turning his head from his lordship, and very dryly
echoes your “good morning.” And this, we repeat,
the most independent man in England will do, for he
is brought up to fear God and honor a lord, and it is
bred in his bone and brain.

We could give a thousand similar instances, but
the reader can easily imagine them. The life of a
commoner in England is one of inevitable and daily
eclipse and mortification—nothing but the force of
early habits and education making it tolerable to the
Englishman himself, and nothing at all making it in
any way endurable to a republican of any pride or
spirit. You naturally say, “Why not associate with
the middle classes, and let the aristocracy go to the
devil?” but individually sending people to the devil
is of no use, and the middle classes value yourself
and each other only as your introduction to them is

aristocratic, or as their friends are approvable by an
aristocratic eye. There is no class free from this humiliating
weakness. The notice of a lord will at any
time take the wind out of your sails when a lady is in
the case; your tailor will leave you half-measured to
run to my lord's cab in the street; your doctor will
neglect your fever for my lord's cold; your friend will
breakfast with my lord, though engaged particularly
to you; and the out-goings and in-comings, the sayings
and doings, the stupidities, impudencies, manners,
greetings, and condescensions of lords and ladies,
usurp the conversation in all places, and to the
interruption or exclusion of the most grave or personal
topics.

Understand us, we grudge no respect to dignities or
authorities. Even to wealth as power, we are willing to
yield the wall. But we say again, that a republican
spirit must rebel against homage to anything human with
which it never can compete, and in this lies the only
distinction (we fervently hope) which will ever hedge
in An American aristocracy. Let who will get to
windward of us by superior sailing—the richer, the
handsomer, the cleverer, the stronger, the more beloved
and gifted—there was fair play at the start, and
we will pay deference and duty with the promptest.
But no lords and ladies, Mr. President, if you
love us.

I am very sorry to record a good piece of news for
the coachmakers:—that the ladies are beginning to
get superfine about riding in omnibuses. The omnibus
convenience has been upon an excellent footing
for the last few years, used, indeed, with a freedom
and propriety peculiar to this country, and somewhat
characteristic of its deference to the sex. From the
longitudinal shape of New York, it is easy to go anywhere
by omnibus, at any moment, and even if a carriage
could be kept for a shilling a day, the trouble
and delay attending a private equipage, would induce
many to give them up, and spend their shilling in the
“Broadway lines.” The gentility of the custom, too,
has induced the proprietors to embellish and enlarge
their vehicles, and for sixpence you may ride two or
three miles in a very elegant conveyance, and mostly
with very elegant people. Of late, however, it has
become a habit with an improper class of persons to
ride backward and forward, instead of walking Broadway,
and propriety has very naturally taken a fright.
I am very much afraid, from the symptoms, that omnibuses
will become in New York, what they are in
England and Paris—useful only to the un-ornamental
classes of society. If so, it will be another step
(among many I have noticed lately) toward separating
the rich from the middle classes by barriers of expense.
With an errand, or an acquaintance two
miles off, a lady must ride, at some cost, as a habit, if
omnibuses are tabooed.

I understand, by inquiry, that there are one hundred
and fifty omnibuses plying in New York city.
The receipts amount to about eight dollars per diem
for each one, and the expense wear and tear, &c.,
substract five from this sum, leaving a profit of three
dollars a day on each vehicle. Yet some of them go
a course of three miles for the invariable sixpence.
There are certain parts of the day when it is difficult
to get a place in an omnibus—wishing to ride up
Broadway, for instance, at the dinner hour or at dusk.
There are several drawn by four horses, which contain
twenty odd persons. One named for Forrest, the
tragedian, with “Edwin Forrest” splendidly emblazoned
on the body, is particularly magnificent. I saw
one last night for the first time on three wheels—with
two rows of seats, like two omnibuses put lengthwise
together. The change from hackney-coaches to cabs
is very unsatisfactory to passenger as well as horse.
The old New York jarveys were the best in the
world, with the offset of the most abominable imposition
in the known world, in the charges of drivers.
Cabs were introduced to remedy this; and now one
horse draws the load of two, and reduces the owner's
expenses one half, while the imposition is in no way
lessened. There are laws, but as ninety-nine persons
in a hundred would rather be fleeced than prosecute
or bully, the extortion goes on very swimmingly.

I was honored yesterday by being called in to a private
view of the fall fashion of hats, lying at present
perdu in tissue paper, and not to be visible to the promiscuous
eye till the first of September. I ventured
modestly to suggest an improvement, but was told,
with the solemnity of conviction, that the hatters had
decided upon the fashion, and the blocks were cut,
and the hats made, and there was no appeal. It is
rather a lower crown than has been worn—slightly
bell, brim a thought wider, and very much arched underneath.
The English hat that comes over now is
very small, and narrow brimmed, and the Parisian is
shaped like an inverted cone, truncated at the base.
Of course we have a right to a fashion of our own, but
a hat is, more than any article of dress, a matter of
whimsey, and any inexorable style, without reference
to particular physiognomy, seems to me somewhat in
the line of the bed of Procrustes. I recollect hearing
the remark made abroad, that Americans could always
be known by their unmitigated newness of hat. Certain
it is, that the hatters in this country are a richer
class, and many pegs higher in tradesman dignity,
than those of France or England—tant mieux, of
course. Apropos—in some slight research yesterday
for material to refresh the thread bareness of my outer
man, I looked in at one or two of the crack shops, and
was quite taken by surprise with the splendor and variety
of masculine toggeries. The waistcoat patterns,
the scarfs, the pantaloon stuffs, and dressing-gowns,
are sumptuous beyond all modern precedent. A man
must have a gentleman's means, now, to allow carte
blanche to his tailor. I was about to turn aside some
rich stuffs, as being, I was sorry to say, quite beyond
my style and condition, when the tailor forestalled me,
by the assurance that by the next packet, he should
receive something much more splendid and worthy
my attention! As I have remarked once or twice before,
those who live on literary profits will soon find
themselves stranded on the middle class—the rich ebbing
from their reach in one direction, and the poor
in the other. I have an aversion to the clerk's salt-and-pepper,
but I should be content with any other
outward mark of my means and belongings.

We had a very melo-dramatic out-of-doors exhibition
the other evening, in the illumination of the Bowling
Green fountain. An illuminated waterfall is a
very phantom-like affair, and the eight ghostly gas-burners,
set round the rim of the basin in green hoods,
looked as much like demons, popping their heads
above water to gaze at the white spirit, as would have
been at all necessary for diabolical pantomime. The
fountain grows upon the public liking, I think, and
certainly, when lighted by red and blue fires (which is
part of the Friday evening show) it is a magnificent
object. The private fountains in the court-yards of
the hotels are very handsome. Bunker, in the rear
of his well-kept and most comfortable mansion, has
a fine jet under the noble old trees; and Cozzens
has opened an ornamental fountain in the rear of
the American—great luxuries, both, to the respective

hotels. I am told, by the way, that the Croton water
does not keep at sea.

The literary arena is now unoccupied, and it could
be wished that some of our own knights out of practice
would don their armor for a tilt—that Wetmore
would come away from his crockery, and Halleck
from his leger, Bryant from his scissors and politics,
and Sprague from his cerberus post at the Hades of
Discount—and give us some poetry. Another sea or
forest novel by Cooper would be most welcome now,
or a volume of prose by Longfellow, and these two, I
think, as the only American authors not regularly harnessed
in the car of Mammon, should have store laid
away for such exigencies of famine. Kendall's Recollections
of the chain round his neck in Mexico, and
Brantz Myer's, of his gold coat and court experience
at the same place and time, will come out pretty
nearly in the same week, and be excellent sauce to
each other. Epes Sargent is somewhere in the high
grass, rusticating and writing a book, and I hope, if it
is not a tragedy for Forrest, it is a novel of good society—either
of which would come out from under his
raven locks with little trouble, and of most excellent
quality. Placide, who has a scribli-phobia on his own
account, has offered his “Life and Times” to a friend,
to be delivered verbally over woodcock and sherry,
and several of the first chapters are uncorked and digested.
Mr. Richard Willis, younger brother of one
of the editors of the New Mirror, is residing at Frankfort,
in Germany, and preparing a book on the land of
beer and the domestic virtues. Mrs. Ellet's masculine
pen is nearly idle. Simms, the novelist, is in
New York, residing with his literary friend Lawson,
but not coquetting with the publishers to our knowledge.
Morris will not “die and leave the world no
copy,” as he has half a dozen songs about being married
to music—the banns shortly to be published. I
do not hear that Hoffman is doing anything except
the looking after his bread and butter. Mrs. Embury
is editing “The Ladies' Companion,” and the authoress
of “The Sinless Child” editing “The Rover,”
and Mrs. Stephens editing “The Ladies' World;”
and these are three ladies worthy the binding and
gilding of less ephemeral volumes. Neal and Snow
edit “The Brother Jonathan,” Neal living at Portland,
and snow being “on the ground.” Witty and
racy “Mrs. Mary Clavers” is about returning to “the
settlements” from her seclusion in Michigan—an event
to be rejoiced over like the return of the Lost Pleiad.
She is an accomplished linguist, and with her pure,
classic, and flowing style, she might occupy, here, the
position of Mary Howitt or Mrs. Austin in England—
gaining all the honors of authorship by eminence in
translation.

I understand a great enthusiasm is about to make
itself manifest on the subject of the State Monument
to Washington. The association is now incorporated
by the legislature, and the design, as it
stands formed at present, is one of unequalled magnificence,
worthy (and no more than worthy) of the subject.
Four hundred and twenty-five feet is the proposed
height; and this, one of the New York papers
states, will make it the highest building in the world
—not quite correctly, as the pyramid of Cheops is six
hundred feet high. To realize this prodigious elevation,
however, one must remember that the steeple of
the new Trinity church, which is to be the tallest in
this country, will only reach to two hundred and seventy-five
feet. It is not to be merely a monument,
but an immense public building, containing halls,
libraries, and other appropriate apartments. The
shape is to be a pentagon, and the style a florid Gothic.
Union square is named as the site; but the immense
size of the base, I should suppose, would require
an area of much greater extent—and it would
be a pity, besides, to break up the salutary fountain
and open park, already ornamental enough, in that
part of the city. The placing of this noble monument
on the central elevation now occupied by the
Tabernacle, and the opening of a new square, extending
back to the Bowery and the Five Points, would, in
the first place, turn that festering sink into lungs for
this crowded metropolis, and in the next place centralize,
in the neighborhood of the City Hall, the
prominent public buildings. This great monument
is to be built by subscriptions of one dollar each.
Fifty thousand dollars were collected some time since,
and are now at interest; and there is a sum of one
hundred thousand dollars in the treasury at Washington,
which it is hoped will be given to this. The object
is one which every American must feel interested
in; and there is no citizen, I presume, who would not
give his dollar toward it. Let it be, if Mr. Dickens
chooses so to call it, a “dollar” monument to Washington—showing
that, devoted to dollars as we are
(and yet not more than Englishmen to pounds, shillings,
and pence), our dollar-patriotism can raise to the
first patriot of history, the grandest monument of
modern times.

The respectable and zealous spinster who sent us
for publication, as a salutary warning, the very worldly
and trappy epistle, addressed to Miss Violet Maby, at
Saratoga, and published on a previous page, has laid
her fingers on another specimen of the same gentleman's
correspondence, which we give, without comment
or correction, as follows:—

Well—how does Moore write a song?

In the twilight of a September evening he strolls
through the park to dine with the marquis. As he
draws on his white gloves, he sees the evening star
looking at him steadily through the long vista of the
avenue, and he construes its punctual dispensation of
light into a reproach for having, himself a star, passed
a day of poetic idleness. “Damme,” soliloquizes the
little fat planet, “this will never do! Here have I
hammered the whole morning at a worthless idea,
that, with the mere prospect of a dinner, shows as
trumpery as a `penny fairing.' Labor wasted! And
at my time of life, too! Faith!—it's dining at home
these two days with nobody to drink with me! It's
eyewater I want! Don't trouble yourself to sit up
for me, brother Hesper! I shall see clearer when I
come back!

as my friend Barry sings. Poetry? hum! Claret?
Prithee, call it claret!”

And Moore is mistaken! He draws his inspiration,
it is true, with the stem of a glass between his thumb
and finger, but the wine is the least stimulus to his
brain. He talks and is listened to admiringly, and
that is his Castaly. He sits next to Lady Fanny at
dinner, who thinks him “an adorable little love,” and
he employs the first two courses in making her in
love with herself, i. e., blowing everything she says up
to the red heat of poetry. Moore can do this, for the
most stupid things on earth are, after all, the beginnings
of ideas, and every fool is susceptible of the
flattery of seeing the words go straight from his lips
to the “highest heaven of invention.” And Lady
Fanny is not a fool, but a quick and appreciative woman,
and to almost everything she says, the poet's
trump is a germ of poetry. “Ah!” says Lady Fanny
with a sigh, “this will be a memorable dinner—not
to you, but to me; for you see pretty women every
day, but I seldom see Tom Moore!” The poet looks
into Lady Fanny's eyes and makes no immediate answer.
Presently she asks, with a delicious look of
simplicity, “Are you as agreeable to everybody, Mr.
Moore?”—“There is but one Lady Fanny,” replies
the poet; “or, to use your own beautiful simile, `The
moon sees many brooks, but the brook sees but one
moon!”' (Mem. jot that down.) And so is treasured
up one idea for the morrow, and when the marchioness
rises, and the ladies follow her to the drawingroom,
Moore finds himself sandwiched between a
couple of whig lords, and opposite a past or future
premier—an audience of cultivation, talent, scholarship,
and appreciation; and as the fresh pitcher of
claret is passed round, all regards radiate to the Anacreon
of the world, and with that suction of expectation,
let alone Tom Moore. Even our “Secretary
of the Navy and National Songster” would “turn out
his lining”—such as it is. And Moore is delightful,
and with his “As you say, my lord!” he gives birth
to a constellation of bright things, no one of which is
dismissed with the claret. Every one at the table,
except Moore, is subject to the hour—to its enthusiasm,
its enjoyment—but the hour is to Moore a precious
slave. So is the wine. It works for him! It
brings him money from Longman! It plays his trumpet
in the reviews! It is his filter among the ladies!
Well may he sing its praises! Of all the poets,
Moore is probably the only one who is thus master of
his wine. The glorious abandon with which we fancy
him, a brimming glass in his hand, singing “Fly not
yet!” exists only in the fancy. He keeps a cool head
and coins his conviviality; and to revert to my former
figure, they who wish to know what Moore's electricity
amounts to without the convivial friction, may
read his History of Ireland. Not a sparkle in it, from
the landing of the Phenicians to the battle of Vinegar
Hill! He wrote that as other people write—with
nothing left from the day before but the habit of labor—and
the the travel of a collapsed balloon on a
man's back, is not more unlike the same thing, inflated
and soaring, than Tom Moore, historian, and Tom
Moore, bard!

Somewhere in the small hours the poet walks
home, and sitting down soberly in his little library, he
puts on paper the half-score scintillations that collision,
in one shape or another, has struck into the
tinder of his fancy. If read from this paper, the
world would probably think little of their prospect of
ever becoming poetry. But the mysterious part is done
—the life is breathed into the chrysalis—and the clothing
of these naked fancies with winged words, Mr.
Moore knows very well can be done in very uninspired
moods by patient industry. Most people have very
little idea what that industry is—how deeply language
is ransacked, how often turned over, how untiringly
rejected and recalled with some new combination,
how resolutely sacrificed when only tolerable enough to
pass, how left untouched day after day in the hope of a
fresh impulse after repose. The vexation of a Chinese
puzzle is slight, probably, to that which Moore has
expended on some of his most natural and flowing
single verses. The exquisite nicety of his ear, though

it eventually gives his poetry its honeyed fluidity,
gives him no quicker choice of words, nor does more,
in any way, than pass inexorable judgment on what
his industry brings forward. Those who think a song
dashed off like an invitation to dinner, would be edified
by the progressive phases of a “Moore's Melody.”
Taken with all its re-writings, emendations, &c.,
I doubt whether, in his most industrious seclusion,
Moore averages a couplet a day. Yet this persevering,
resolute, unconquerable patience of labor is the secret
of his fame. Take the best thing he ever wrote,
and translate its sentiment and similitudes into plain
prose, and do the thing by a song of any second-rate
imitator of Moore, one abstract would read as well as
the other. Yet Moore's song is immortal, and the
other ephemeral as a paragraph in a newspaper, and
the difference consists in a patient elaboration of language
and harmony, and in that only. And even
thus short, seems the space between the ephemeron and
the immortal. But it is wider than they think, oh,
glorious Tom Moore!

And how does Barry Cornwall write?

I answer, from the efflux of his soul! Poetry is
not labor to him. He works at law—he plays, relaxes,
luxuriates in poetry. Mr. Proctor has at no
moment of his life, probably, after finishing a poetic
effusion, designed ever to write another line. No
more than the sedate man, who, walking on the edge
of a playground, sees a ball coming directly toward
him, and seized suddenly with a boyish impulse, jumps
aside and sends it whizzing back, as he has not done
for twenty years, with his cane—no more than that
unconscious schoolboy of fourscore (thank God there
are many such live coals under the ashes) thinks he
shall play again at ball. Proctor is a prosperous barrister,
drawing a large income from his profession.
He married the daughter of Basil Montague (well
known as the accomplished scholar, and the friend of
Coleridge, Lamb, and that bright constellation of
spirits), and with a family of children of whom, the
world knows, he is passionately fond, he leads a more
domestic life, or, rather, a life more within himself and
his own, than any author, present or past, with whose
habits I am conversant. He has drawn his own portrait,
however, in outline, and as far as it goes, nothing
could be truer. In an epistle to his friend Charles
Lamb, he says:—

Proctor slights the world's love for his wife and
books, and, as might be expected, the world only plies
him the more with its caresses. He is now and then
seen in the choicest circles of London, where, though
love and attention mark most flatteringly the rare
pleasure of his presence, he plays a retired and silent
part, and steals early away. His library is his Paradise.
His enjoyment of literature should be mentioned
as often in his biography as the “feeding among
the lilies” in the Songs of Solomon. He forgets himself,
he forgets the world in his favorite authors, and
that, I fancy, was the golden link in his friendship
with Lamb. Surrounded by exquisite specimens of
art (he has a fine taste, and is much beloved by artists),
a choice book in his hand, his wife beside him,
and the world shut out, Barry is in the meridian of
his true orbit. Oh, then, a more loving and refined
spirit is not breathing beneath the stars! He reads
and muses; and as something in the page stirs some
distant association, suggests some brighter image than
its own, he half leans over to the table, and scrawls it
in unstudied but inspired verse. He thinks no more
of it. You might have it to light your cigar. But
there sits by his side one who knows its value, and it
is treasured. Here, for instance, in the volume I have
spoken of before, are some forty pages of “fragments”
—thrown in to eke out the volume of his songs. I
am sure, that when he was making up his book, perhaps
expressing a fear that there would not be pages
enough for the publisher's design, these fragments
were produced from their secret hiding-place to his
great surprise. The quotations I have made were all
from this portion of his volume, and, as I said before,
they are worthy of Shakspere. There is no mark of
labor in them. I do not believe there was an erasure
in the entire manuscript. They bear all the marks
of a sudden, unstudied impulse, immediately and unhesitatingly
expressed. Here are several fragments.
How evident it is that they were suggested directly
by his reading:—

The lighthouse near Caldwell's Landing is seen to
great effect by the passenger in the evening boat from
New York to Newburgh. Leaving the city at five in
the summer afternoon, she makes the intervening forty
miles between that hour and twilight; and while the
last tints of the sunset are still in the sky, the stars
just beginning to twinkle through the glow of the
west, the bright light of this lofty beacon rises up
over the prow of the boat, shining apparently on the
very face of the new-starred heaven. As he approaches,
across the smooth and still purpled mirror
of the silent river is drawn a long and slender line of
light, broken at the foot of the beacon by the wild
shrubbery of the rock on which it stands; and as he
rounds the point, and passes it, the light brightens
and looks clearer against the darker sky of the east,

while the same cheering line of reflection follows him
on his way, and is lost to sight as he disappears
among the mountains.

The waters of the river at this point were the scene
of the brief and tragic drama enacted so fatally to
poor André. Four or five miles below stands Smith's
house, where he had his principal interview with
Arnold, and where the latter communicated to him
his plans for the delivery of West Point into the hands
of the English, and gave him the fatal papers which
proved his ruin.

At Smith's house Mrs. Arnold passed a night on
her way to join her husband at West Point, soon after
he had taken command. The sufferings of this lady
have excited the sympathy of the world, as the first
paroxysms of her distress moved the kind but firm
heart of Washington. There seems to have arisen a
doubt, however, whether her long and well-known
correspondence with André had not so far undermined
her patriotism, that she was rather inclined to further
than impede the treason of Arnold; and consequently
could have suffered but little after Washington generously
made every arrangement for her to follow him.
In the “Life of Aaron Burr,” lately published, are
some statements which seem authentic on the subject.
It is well known that Washington found Mrs. Arnold
apparently frantic with distress at the communication
her husband had made to her the moment before his
flight. Lafayette, and the other officers in the suite
of the commander-in-chief, were alive with the most
poignant sympathy; and a passport was given her by
Washington, with which she immediately left West
Point to join Arnold in New York. On her way she
stopped at the house of Mrs. Prevost, the wife of a
British officer, who subsequently married Colonel
Burr. Here “the frantic scenes of West Point were
renewed,” says the narrative of Burr's biographer,
“and continued so long as strangers were present. As
soon as she and Mrs. Prevost were left alone, however,
Mrs. Arnold became tranquillized, and assured Mrs.
Prevost that she was heartily sick of the theatrics she
was exhibiting. She stated that she had corresponded
with the British commander; that she was disgusted
with the American cause, and those who had the management
of public affairs; and that, through great
persuasion and unceasing perseverance, she had ultimately
brought the general into an arrangement to
surrender West Point to the British. Mrs. Arnold
was a gay, accomplished, artful, and extravagant woman.
There is no doubt, therefore, that, for the purpose
of acquiring the means of gratifying her vanity,
she contributed greatly to the utter ruin of her husband,
and thus doomed to everlasting infamy and disgrace
all the fame he had acquired as a gallant soldier,
at the sacrifice of his blood.”

It is not easy to pass and repass the now peaceful
and beautiful waters of this part of the Hudson, without
recalling to mind the scenes and actors in the
great drama of the Revolution, which they not long
ago bore on their bosom. The busy mind fancies the
armed guard-boats, slowly pulling along the shore;
the light pinnace of the Vulture plying to and fro on
its errands of conspiracy; and not the least vivid picture
to the imagination, is the boat containing the
accomplished, the gallant André, and his guard, on
his way to his death. It is probable that he first admitted
to his own mind the possibility of a fatal result,
while passing this very spot. A late biographer of
Arnold gives the particulars of a conversation between
André and Major Tallmadge, the officer who had him
in custody, and who brought him from West Point
down the river to Tappan, the place of his subsequent
execution.

“Before we reached the Clove” (a landing just below
the beacon), “Major Andre became very inquisitive
to know my opinion as to the result of his capture.
When I could no longer evade his importunity, I remarked
to him as follows; `I had a much-loved class-mate
in Yale college, by the name of Hale, who entered
the army in 1775. Immediately after the battle
of Long Island, Washington wanted information
respecting the strength of the enemy. Hale tendered
his services, went over to Brooklyn, and was taken,
just as he was passing the outpost of the enemy on
his return.' Said I, with emphasis, `Do you remember
the sequel of this story?'—`Yes,' said André, `he
was hanged as a spy. But you surely do not consider
his case and mine alike?' I replied, `Yes, precisely
similar; and similar will be your fate.' He endeavored
to answer my remarks, but it was manifest he
was more troubled in spirit than I had ever seen him
before.”

Sconcia's “Preceptor for the Pianoforte,” just published
by Christman, of this city, is a curious and valuable
work. Mr. Sconcia is a thorough musician,
and he has compiled the edition before us with much
labor and a clear understanding of the beautiful science
of which it treats. Mr. S. is also the author of
a valuable scientific work, entitled “An Introduction
to the Art of Singing,” which is universally popular
among the profession.

The Messrs. Appleton have sent us a volume of
delicious poetry, entitled the “Wife of Leon” and
other metrical effusions, by two sisters of the west.
We know nothing of these delightful authors beyond
their writings; but that they are gifted, true-hearted,
and accomplished girls, is apparent in every line of
their beautiful productions. The west has cause to
be proud of these sweet “sisters,” and so has the
country, to whose literary stores the volume before us
is a graceful and valuable contribution. If this is the
authors' first appearance in print, it is the most favorable
one we have ever witnessed in our whole editorial
career, and we shall place the book in our library,
on the same shelf with the works of Mrs. Hemans, to
be referred to frequently in hours stolen from severer
duties. The Messrs. Appleton—ever

deserve the thanks of the public for the elegant edition
of the poems before us.

I saw two very distinguished gentlemen sitting vis-à-vis
at the Astor house table a day or two since—
striking exceptions, both, to the physique of the climates
from which they severally come. The Hon.
Mr. Choate, of Massachusetts, was one, with his pale
but intellectual countenance, and Judge Wayne was
the other, as glowing a specimen of rosy health and
vigor as ever came from the more florescent nurture
of the north. It is painful to see the precious accumulation
of a great mind's treasure intrusted to so
fragile a casket as ill-health, and the contrary is proportionably
agreeable. Judge Wayne is at present at
West Point.

It is a pretty literal fulfilment of the penalty of
Adam's transgression to do more than breathe to-day,
and I have chopped down and chopped up many a
tree of twice my age with half the “sweat of the
brow” brought out by the harnessing of this first sentence
to grammar. A gentleman is walking up Broadway,
fanning himself, as I look out of the window.
The omnibus horses drip. What an Eden would
come about again (for me, at least) if this penitential
sweat would trickle itself into these inky traceries
without the medium of brain and finger-work! One

would be almost content to become a black man to
facilitate the miracle.

Three successive boys have gone under my window,
whistling, “Dance, boatman, dance!” The air is one
that sticks in the popular memory, and, like some
other of these negro melodies, it is probably susceptible
of transmutation into a gem of music. I have
recorded somewhere else a remark Moore once made
in my presence, that one of the most pathetic of his
songs stole its air from a merry ballad of Spain, representing
a girl complaining of the wind's blowing her
petticoats about, and the change in its character was
effected by only playing it slower. No song was ever
more popular in this country than “On the lake where
drooped the willow,” which was a transfer of the negro
song “As I was a gwyin down Shinbone alley.”
Horn, who adapted it to a pathetic song by Morris,
took his hint from the pathos with which a black boy
at Natchez sang one of the songs peculiar to his race
and region. “The Northern Refrain,” another very
popular song by Morris and Horn, is based upon the
carol of the sweeps in New York city. Mr. Horn
says that “God save the King” was taken from an air
sung about the streets of London, and that “Di tanti
palpiti” was suggested to Rossini by hearing a fish-woman
sing it in the market while attending her stall.
“The Marseillaise” had an origin equally obscure.
The first attempt to dislocate these airs from their
ludicrous words creates a smile, of course, but it is
surprising how quickly the better clothing of music
throws its long-worn beggar-rag into forgetfulness.
Horn relates in one of his prefaces, that when Mrs.
Horn commenced singing before an audience, “Long
time ago,” with a serious air, there was a general
smile; but when the song was ended she left her auditors
with tears in their eyes. There is no end to
tracing back to their origin airs that are afloat among
a people, and if Moore's melodies are built upon
“Irish airs,” without going back to Milesian imagination,
these negro melodies may be called American,
without giving credit to Guinea or Timbuctoo. I
should think it worth a composer's while to travel leisurely
in the south, and bring away all the melodies
that inhabit the banjo of the slave, and better still
worth Morris's while to devote his singular tact and
delicacy of taste and ear to the clothing them with
appropriate poetry. He has been so successful in the
attempts he has already made, that the warrant is
good.

A German gentleman, residing at the Astor house,
has translated for me an account of a visit to Frederika
Bremer, by the Countess Von Hahn-Hahn, and a few
of its more personal particulars will not be uninteresting.
The countess is a celebrated person in the fashionable
world, and has just published her travels in
Sweden. She found Miss Bremer at a small country
estate near Stockholm, where she resides with her
mother and a younger sister. She says: “I had
formed some idea about her person from her books. I
figured to myself a quiet, serious person, with some
humoristic touches. I found her indeed thus in
reality, with an addition of an extraordinary degree
of sweetness in all her bearing.”—“I was offered a
promenade. I preferred to remain in the house,
though passionately fond of nature, open air, walking.
All the attraction for me was within—everything so
pleasant, so comfortable! I could comprehend how
`Home' here could be made so attractive. I desired
Miss Frederika to show me her own room. It was
arranged with the greatest simplicity—almost a cell.
It would not do for me at all. Besides, it was a corner-room,
with windows on two sides, consequently a
double supply of light. There were three square
tables, covered with books, papers, and writing-mate
rials; a sofa in a severe style (I mean one that coolly
and merely invites you to sit down without lolling,
which is my favorite position). On the walls there
were several pictures. `This is a genuine Teniers,
but I know you will not like it,' she said, laughing,
pointing to a beautiful little picture of a countryman
filling his pipe. I answered honestly, `no!' and in
general I found that I said `no' when she said `yes.'
Such a difference of opinion is only disagreeable when
you have a dislike to a person. I tried to persuade
her to make a voyage to Italy. We would go together.
But she would not. She does not like travelling.
She thinks that one may soon become overpowered,
carried away, get confused—and what to do
with all these foreign impressions! I said, `You will
soon conquer them—that is just the pleasantest thing,
I think.' She still took a lively interest in all I told
her of foreign countries, what I had seen, and what I
had written about them. I was naturally well-pleased
at this. Our conversation was carried on in French
and German. She expressed herself with great simplicity
and decision. She has beautiful, thinking
eyes; a clear, firm, I may almost say, a solid forehead,
under which the strongly-delineated eyebrows move
very much when she speaks. This becomes her very
much, particularly when an idea labors to shape itself
into words. She has a light and small figure, and was
dressed in black silk. In the parlor there were two
large bookcases. Miss Bremer paints beautifully in
miniature, and she has a collection of heads, done by
herself, to which was added mine. I generally get
sleepy when sitting to artists; therefore I do not like
to have my picture taken, as it hurts my vanity that
all my portraits look so immensely sheepish! This
time, however, the sitting went better off, for the
Countess Rosen was singing the whole time, with her
fine voice, some beautiful Swedish songs.”

By this extract the Countess Hahn-Hahn herself
seems a nice, natural creature enough.

I have been pleased to find that I rather under than
over-colored my slight description of Mr. Weir's picture
for the rotunda. The Bostonians have received
it with a full measure of enthusiasm; and Mr. Weir
has himself returned to West Point, laden not merely
with bountiful commendations, but with employment
for years in commissions for pictures. He will, probably,
realize a small fortune from the exhibition, alone,
of his great painting in the different cities; and altogether,
this is the best exemplification that has
occurred in my time of the policy (to say no more)
of a faithful discharge of a commission, which,
because intrusted literally to conscience and honor,
may be slighted with impunity. Mr. Weir, I understand,
has not yet drawn the price of his picture from
the treasury, intending to lay it by as an investment
for his children, unconscious, probably, how much
they will value the father's glory invested in the picture.
On it the painter has flung his soul prostrate;
and there is a circumstance connected with its working
upon his mind while painting it, which we do not
feel quite at liberty to mention here, but which will be
a thread of the purest gold to weave into the mingled
woof of his posthumous biography. By the first of
October, I understand, we are to have a view of the
“Embarkation” in New York.

I was among the liquesced victims of the buffalohunt
at Hoboken, and gathered little to compensate
me for “larding the lean earth” of the Messrs.
Stevens, except a strong impression of the peculiar
good-nature of a republican crowd. As our downladen

ferry-boat reached the shore, another one, heavily
overfreighted, was starting to return. Some one
on our wheelhouse inquired in a stentorian voice,
“How did you like it?” and was answered by the five
hundred disappointed and roasted dupes with a general
shout of good-natured laughter. The Courier estimates
the crowd at twenty or thirty thousand, and certainly
the whole Jersey side was black with people, all
feeling humbugged and laughing merrily. I thought
I would ride up to the ground to see the embroidery
of so many moving figures on the green meadows, and
this was a fine sight. The lasso-rider, in a fantastical
costume, was galloping hard after his shadow, and
tossing his long rope into the air; and one of the buffaloes
was quietly munching a hollyhock in the small
enclosure of an Irish cabin on the roadside. The rest
of the herd, I was told, had made their escape to the
woods, offering the proprietor a real hunt for a sham.
The morning papers give accounts of some serious
accidents during the day.

The copyright club is organized with a most active
and efficient secretary in Mr. Mathews, and there has
been a general summoning of aid and counsel. Bryant,
the high-priest of American poetry, is very properly
chosen president. In addition to the fact which
I mentioned in my last as one that should be “kept
before the people,” viz., that the increase of price on
new publications would be very trifling and go to the
author—in addition to this, I say, another should be
mentioned. The worthless edition that is bought for
a shilling, and read with straining eyes from its bad
print, is perused and thrown away. Would it not be
as well to subscribe to a reading-club, and get the
book well-printed for less money, and return it at the
end of the week? The hint is worth considering—
and this is the way that reading is managed cheaply
in England.

Macready is to be here in October, and will be accompanied
by Miss Phillips (formerly of the National),
and Mr. Ryder—a unicorn team of his own breaking.
They both know the leader's paces. Conti Damoreau
follows later—but there is nothing very spicy on record
with regard to this prima donna; and the popular
telescope of expectation is fixed exclusively on the
charming Mrs. Nesbitt. Before I have had time to
be bribed by my share of the spell of this enchantress,
I may as well give you an honest inventory of her
attractions and professional merits. She is, imprimis,
a widow; that is to say, if she be not married within
a year or two, as is said, to the famous Mr. Feargus
O'Conner, keeping her previous name for theatrical
eclat. Mr. Nesbitt was a dashing guardsman (son of
Lady Nesbitt, well known in the gay world), who
broke his neck driving tandem, and left his widow the
idol of the dandies. She is rather above the middle
size, with blue eyes, meant to pass for black, black
hair, Greek nose, upper lip half scornful, half playful,
and a mouth made by none of the Graces' journeymen.
This last article is indeed delicious, as seen
from any part of the theatre, though, like Madame
George Sands, the owner smokes! But her charm lies
mainly in “the way she has with her.” Nobody that
sees her cares whether she plays well or ill. She
ministers at another door. Hang your head—she
plays to your heart! And it is one of her ways to
play very unevenly; and when she thinks you have
pouted long enough at her carelessness, to burst suddenly
upon you with a bewitching rally, and “bring the
house down,” as they alarmingly phrase it. A great
actress she probably is not—an enchanting woman she
certainly is. It is to be hoped that she will bring over
the pieces that have been written expressly for her, as
her every peculiarity of look, tone, and gesture, has
been most accurately measured and fitted by the dramatic
tailors of London.

The world looks disagreeable to us to-day. We are
“under the weather;” and, for to-day at least (and it
is odd how rare the wish is), we may say, we wish
ourselves fairly above the weather—that is, in heaven;
in heaven, where there are no Saturdays, and of
course, no expectations of New Mirrors.

For you forgive the dinner's not forthcoming, if the
cook be ill. And your washerwoman has her little
indulgences—hand scalded, or child sick. And you
forego your drive if your horse be ailing or off his
feed. What have we done, we should be pleased to
know, to be treated less kindly than the other three of
your quadruple necessities? We should like very
much to drop our head into our hand, and mope. But
you wouldn't like it.

No—you want us to chatter. You say as the child
says, when the story is done: “Tell us some more.”
And if we must, we must! But we're sick and savage,
and we'll rake up something that we can gnaw as
we tell it—some old resentment or other—and if we
don't feel better after it, we'll go to bed.

One of the morning papers, a week ago or more,
told a fib about us. In an article on American authors,
it is said that we (one of “we”) made more money by
our writings than any other American author, and
were fast growing rich! And out of that, a Boston
paper picks the reason that we “write so jauntily!”
As if a man were not always gayer as his pockets were
lighter, and as if our good humor were drawn with a
check—bankable!

Now we are not willing to submit to the odium of
prosperity. That we have made some thousands of
unnameables by two or three weeks' work, as this
writer asserts, we freely own—but it was not in this
country. We have sold, for a large price, in England,
books for which we tried in vain to find a publisher in
America. We can not now find a publisher in America
who will give us anything for a work, though we
have been looking for one these three years; and we
never found but one publisher who would give us, for
half-a-dozen works in a lump, money worth shutting
thumb and finger upon; and he gave it in notes, payable
by ourself—after the little privilege of a discount.
We don't complain of this—oh no! The worth of a
thing is, no doubt, what it will bring. But we are not
going to be lifted between human envy and the sun,
and be hated for throwing a shadow when we have no
substance! Not “we!”

That three meals a day come punctually round to
us, we consider no more a marvel than the arrangements
for the keeping in motion of any other “heavenly
body.” For that much we have safely trusted
hitherto, and we shall trust hereafter the crank, whatever
it may be, that turns our mortal orrery. We are
fed, and we don't care who envies us for it—for we
think we do work enough to earn it—but the possession,
at any time, for any considerable portion of an
hour, of one unbespoken dollar, we indignantly deny!
We are poor enough (either of us “we”) to please
the most fastidious, on the contrary. And so, fellow-paupers,
take us back to your affections!

But we have hopes (as who has not?) of living to
be “rich and envied!” We shall be less loved. That
is the tariff, and we are busy laying up love to pay it.
But we should like to know how it feels to be rich, and
whether for more love, one ever sighs to be poor
again! Please Heaven, we will know, some day—if
the Mirror keep prospering.

Two Sisters of the West.—I have done, almost
unawares, within the last twenty-four hours, what I
would not willingly have undertaken to do, viz., the
reading of two hundred and fifty pages of new poetry.
It was a book which came to my hand in the livery
of a début—cream-colored binding, most daintily lettered—and
when I opened it my anticipations extended
very little beyond the pleasure of rubbing my
thumb and finger on the seductive smoothness of the
cover. It is entitled, “The Wife of Leon, and other
Poems, by Two Sisters of the West,” written, as the
preface states, to “while away time and gratify a taste
for poetry,” and published “to gratify a parent to
whom they could refuse nothing.” With much of
the book I think you would be delighted. It seems
to me a careless exercise of very uncommon powers
—a kind of loitering into dream-land with no particular
errand, and here and there plucking a phantom
forth to the light as would be done by a concentrated
mind gone thither with disciplined determination for
the purpose. I speak, of course, now only of the
purely imaginative parts of the book. The affections
are, with women, no phantoms, and can scarcely be
written upon, except well, by any woman of talent;
and in this book the touches of feeling are exquisitely
true and well expressed. But in verse, which is here
and there very incompact and wordy, you will find
some bold conceptions, partially done justice to, which
show in these sisters a very unusual walk of fancy.
A piece called the “Death of the Master Spirit,”
seems to me particularly strong and unsuggested.
And in some lines beginning—

there is a most refreshing novelty and meaningness.
On the whole, I look upon this as rather a memorable
advent in poetry-world, and I hope we shall soon find
out who the “Sisters” are.

Percival has put forth a new volume, after a very
long silence as a poet. If poetry were nothing but an
exercise of imagination, Percival would doubtless be
the first of American poets. In the art of poetry,
probably he is—the art, I mean, as exemplified in this
very volume, in which there are no less than “one
hundred and fifty modifications of stanza.” But Percival's
poetry is singularly deficient in the very mundane
quality flesh and blood. His veins seem filled
with ether, and his Pegasus uses his wings always,
his legs never. I mention it less as a fault than a peculiarity,
for there may be a school of this quality
of poetry, and perfect in its way—but it is a peculiarity
which accounts fully for the inadequate effect
it has produced. Nothing of Percival's is popularly
known, except one or two pieces, which will
live for ever by the very flesh and blood pathos which
he has touched by chance, and which he probably
thinks beneath him. The poem beginning,

the mournful plaint of a deserted wife, is one of these,
and a most exquisite effusion of feeling. But here is
his idea of the harness with which a poet must go into
the arena, in a passage of his preface to his new
book:—

—“An art [poetry] which requires the mastery of
the riches and niceties of a language; a full knowledge
of the science of versification, not only in its own
peculiar principles of rhythm and melody, but in its
relations to elocution and music, with that delicate
natural perception and that facile execution which
render the composition of verse hardly less easy than
that of prose; a deep and quick insight into the na
ture of man, in all his varied faculties, intellectual and
emotive; a clear and full perception of the power and
beauty of nature, and of all its various harmonies with
our own thoughts and feelings; and, to gain a high
rank in the present age, wide and exact attainments
in literature and art in general. Nor is the possession
of such faculties and attainments all that is necessary;
but such a sustained and self-collected state of
mind as gives one the mastery of his genius, and at
the same time presents to him the ideal as an immediate
reality, not as a remote conception.”

Now, acknowledged, as Percival must be, to possess
these high requirements, I have no doubt that
the book I have spoken of above will be more read
than his own—though, probably, the alarm with which
“The Two Sisters” would have looked on this formidable
statement of requisites for poetry, presented
to them before they had so unconsciously achieved
the task, would have quite equalled the surprise of
the gentleman who found that he had all his life been
talking grammar without learning it. Percival's is a
great mind, however, wonderfully stored with learning,
and his poetry is a rich treat to the scholar and
the purely imaginative reader.

The Public Fountains.—The largest audiences
we see in the city, assemble on the advertised nights
of the illumination of the Bowling Green fountain.
The lower part of the city is rendered completely impassable
by the packed assemblages. With the aid
of the many-colored fires burned around it, it is certainly
a splendid fountain; but it would be beautiful
by day, and alone, as well as much more beautiful by
night, if the same volume of water sprang from some
ornamental structure instead of a huge heap of rocks.
In all countries but this, an artist would have been
employed to make a design for so costly and public a
fountain—a man whom peculiar genius and study had
qualified for the task. But the designer of this is an
engineer, and the designer of the Park fountain, if it
had one, was probably a well-digger or a mason. By
the way, as the Park is the most frequented part of
the city, and much used by persons wishing to get out
of the street for a moment's conversation, the plan of
the fountain of Lerna, at Corinth, would be a good
one. It was encircled by a beautiful portico, under
which were seats for the public to sit upon during
the extreme heats of summer, to enjoy the cool air
from the falling waters. The Park jet would be superb
seen between the marble columns of a portico
like this, and the seats would be certainly a great luxury,
situated as the Park is. For want of an original
idea of our own for a smaller fountain, Michael Angelo's
conception were a good one to copy—a sturdy
woman wringing a bundle of clothes, whence the
water issues that supplies the basin.

First Night of the Season.—The all-a-gogery
of the city on the reopening of the Park theatre,
drew me in from the country, contrary to my Monday's
wont, and as I am bound to ride to your eye on
the top wave of the morning talk, I must jot you down
the memorabilia of the first night. The wooden
Shakspere, by the way, has been hoisted to its niche
in the façade of the house, and shows well among the
very composite order of the new architectural embellishments.
A traveller, aiming simply at the graphic,
would probably describe our principal theatre as one
long shed put on top of another, with a figure of
Shakspere standing in the door of the uppermost.
The new paint makes it all right, however. I can not
think Mr. Simpson farmed out Mr. Wallack to the

best advantage, for the first night of the new embellishments
would have filled the house without Wallack.
And very sufficient attraction it were too—for
the interior is most tasteful and elegant; except that
the seats in the boxes are calculated for dwarfs and
children, and the grown-up people sit between the
knees of the person behind. I see no objection that
can be made to the interior of the house. The new
drop curtain is admirably painted, and represents
Shakspere and two or three of the muses, tributary to
the glory of Macready, who sits with a volume in his
hand, the most dignified and conspicuous figure of
the group. The design, I understand, is taken from
a piece of plate presented to the actor in England, and
the use it is put to in the Park fairly out-Barnums
Barnum. The house was crammed, and the band
opened with “Hail Columbia”—(immense applause)
—followed by “Yankee Doodle”—(immense applause).
The gas was let on—(immense applause)—
the curtain was drawn up, and discovered Mrs. Sloman
(disinterred after many years of respected histrionic
sepulture) in the character of Elvira—(immense
applause). Sombody came on as Valverde—(immense
applause). Mr. Barry came on as Pizarro—
(immense applause). Mrs. Hunt came on looking
very handsome—(immense applause). The curtain
dropped on the first act and rose again—(two immense
applauses). Mr. Wallack came on as Rolla
—(immense applause). The high-priest of the Sun
sung his hymn—(immense applause)—and so the play
went on, and, wherever the actors left pauses, there
were immense applauses. And all the actors and supernumeraries
got as much applause as Mr. Wallack.
All charmingly levelling and republican. It was quite
evident, indeed, that the pleasure and interest in the
new lining and reopening of the house was, by much,
the predominant sentiment of the evening, and, as I said
before, Simpson might well have shelved Wallack till
he was more wanted. There were quite enough of
his special admirers present to have “brought the
house down,” it is true; but it was “down” all the
time, and nothing but an outbreak of pipes and French
horns could have emphasized the acclamations any
where in the course of the play. And if Wallack's
attraction depended at all on opportuneness, the majority
of his fashionable friends are out of the city. So
that, altogether, we shall hardly have a fair test of
his success till his second engagement, after Macready.
Meantime, he is barred from all the parts in which
the latter is to appear (“Benedict,” among others, in
which Wallack is far better than Macready), and
driven into the melodrame and farce, in which his
versatility makes him almost as “good a card.” His
“Rolla” was superbly played, and in “Dick Dashall”
it is well known he is unsurpassed. A plan was struck
out by a clever friend of mine, in conversation, of
combining the management of a New York and London
theatre, and of transferring the “gettings-up” in
the way of dresses and the more extensive stage properties.
The splendors of costume and scenery with
which Macready has represented plays within the last
year or two in England, could never be produced here
except by some such transfer, and the communication
by steam is now so rapid and punctual, that it might
be done with economy and convenience. By some
such combination we may stand a chance of renewing
the splendors of theatres in Rome in Nero's time,
though, I fear, the perfuming of the lobbies with
“Sicilian saffron,” and the leading of wine and water
all over the house, by pipes concealed within the
walls, are luxuries gone irrevocably over Lethe's
wharf.

We wish some of our friends knew how much
easier it is to go to the ship-chandler for a cable than
to find a new cobweb in a much-swept upper-story.
“Waste time upon trifles,” quotha! We do waste
time upon them, indeed, if they are not more acceptable
to our readers than twice the bulk of disinterred
“information.” We thought this was settled long
ago, and that the “cap and bells” in which we industriously
labor at folly were considered a part of our
working livery—the least enviable and the most meritorious.
Few things are easier or more stupid than
to be wise—on paper. Nothing is easier, and few
tasks sooner done, than to cram, on any subject, and
astonish the world with “reading”—astonish without
delighting it, that is to say. Give us nothing to do
but to be wise, oh, “approved good masters,” and we
have leisure enough at once for some additional vocation—clerk
in a bank, or principal in a female seminary—(the
two trustworthy offices, we beg leave to
record, which have been thought suitable to our abilities).
Why, there is information enough on any conceivable
subject, and all within ten minutes walk of
where we sit and write, to stupify Minerva; and it is
as easy to unshelf, pick out, and embroider it upon
an editorial, as it is to buy grapes at Bininger's. It is
a very great mistake to suppose that anybody but a
donkey makes a packhorse of his memory, carrying
about the rubbish intended only for a storehouse of
reference. Let who likes

we do not believe he would sell to the newsboys—
which is our noble ambition. So, if you please (or if
you don't please), most worthy critic, we shall go on
“wasting our time upon trifles.” And, by way of a
Parthian fling, let us toss under your nose what Addison
says on this subject: “Notwithstanding pedants
of a pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the
writings of a polite author as flash and froth, they all
of them show, upon occasion, that they would spare
no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they
seem to despise.” And (Parthian arrow No. 2) what
that esteemed model Lord Foppington says: “To
mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self
with the forced product of another man's brain. Now
I think a man of quality and breeding may be much
amused with the natural sprouts of his own.” And if
that is not a brace of quotations pungent and apt, we
know as little about quoting as our rebukers aver.

But we have been more specifically snubbed by a
morning paper, and we must say a word specifically
in reply—for the notice, done by no means in an
unfriendly spirit, was wind in our sail, for which
we are grateful, now and always. The writer objects
to our mentioning the nearest thing to woman—
apropos, as the allusion was, of a late change in the
fashion of it. He calls this frivolous! We are not
prepared to go the philosopher's length, that “there
is no such thing as a trifle in the world”—but we put
it point blank to issue, in any man's judgment, if this
be a trifle! Now we are called an unread ignoramus,
but we have read Ovid and Juvenal, and we well remember
blushing over the epithet “linen-wearing,”
applied frequently to the high-priests in the Egyptian
ceremonies—no poor precedent for the like of us, let
us modestly say, and the worthier the precedent the
more you disparage us. Sacred from the earliest
ages was held “cloth of flax,” and sacred in any deferential
mind is, to this day, the mention of linen.
But, history and precedent apart, how have we become
so consecrated, that anything, the least, which appertains
to woman, is too “frivolous” to be wrapt up in
our rhetoric? The particular aim of the peceant allusion
was to diffuse the knowledge of a new embellishment

for the sex—to give our poor aid to a worthier
clothing of beauty, which, after religion, is quite
the divinest vouchsafe from our Maker. If this be a
trifle, show us your importances! It is no trifle to
devote half a column of a newspaper to a new dahlia
—no trifle to bring to bear a fine-art criticism on a
satin skirt in a painting—no trifle to write for months
about the jet of a fountain. Yet what are these and
a thousand similar topics—what in worthiness and elevation—even
to the outlined shadow of a woman, if
(as it can not) that sweet shadow could be improved?
No! no!—We are not to be driven from our many-years'
worship by such unconsidered taking of exceptions.
We write not, besides, to please any critic—
(male). The New Mirror shall be masculine enough,
but all-tributary to the ladies—God bless them! We
are their slave—bound to bring to their use and knowledge
all that can please, and especially all that can
embellish them. We are here
and “if any man take exception, let him turn the
buckle of his girdle.”

Saunders, the excellent miniature-painter, went
home in the Great Western. He was in this country
about three years, and, though his prices were
much higher than any of our own painters, he had full
occupation from first to last. His delicious miniatures
(some of which you will have seen at Washington)
are scattered through our principal cities, and the
“fleeting show” of some beauty and much worth and
talent is preserved in them. He is a very observing
man, and he made a remark that interested me. He
said that the motive for sitting for a picture in this
country was almost always affection—in England it
was almost always pride. Though among his sitters
were a few of the loveliest women he had ever seen,
the majority were invalids, or old persons who might
soon die, or persons about going on far journeys—
those, in short, who were loved and might soon be
lost. In England, the subject of a miniature is usually
good-looking. It is a young girl the year she
comes out, or a beautiful child before his curls are
shorn to send him to a public school, or a young man,
in his first uniform after entering the army. Pride
appears somewhere in the reason for the doing of the
picture. And Mr. Saunders's remark confirms a previous
impression of my own—that personal beauty is
vastly more valued in countries over the water.

Some years since, Mr. Saunders was appointed
miniature-painter to the king of Hanover, and resided
some time at the royal palace, painting the different
members of the family. I met him subsequently in
Italy (ten years ago), where several noble ladies of
England were sitting to him. His success in this
country should be a stimulus to our own artists, for
he has proved that, spite of the depression of the
times, there is patronage enough for the high degrees
of art. He thought very highly, by-the-way, of Mr.
Hite, the miniature-painter, of this city, who is doubtless
the legitimate heir to his mantle.

Apropos of high prices for the arts, Mr. Catherwood
has opened a subscription, which appeals only
to the rich and liberal; and he is very likely to succeed
in his enterprise, I think. His splendid drawings
in seppia of the ruins of Central America are to
be engraved of the size of the originals, and the price
of one copy is to be a hundred dollars. I saw one
subscription-paper with several names upon it. But
a book of drawings by Catherwood at a hundred dollars,
and a novel of Bulwer's at a shilling, and both
successful, leave at least a wide field of betweenity.
Catherwood is an unsurpassed artist in his line, and I
trust we shall show our appreciation of his genius
while he honors us by residing among us.

The city is somewhat closer packed by the addition
to its contents of Thomas Thumb, jun., Esq., who
has returned from the south in time to escape the
“fell moscheto.” He occupies the American Museum
as before. Mr. Barnum, who is unsurpassed for
felicity of trap, has hit upon an amusing mode of
drawing attention to Mr. Thumb, and giving a “realizing
sense” of his diminutive proportions. On a
pole outside the Museum is placed a well-appointed
mansion, two feet square, with “T. Thumb, jun.” on
the brass-plate of the door. A pair of leather breeches,
about the size of a double opera-glass, hang outside
to dry; a pair of white-topboots of the same proportions
on another nail, and Mr. T.'s hat and coat on
another. The fun lies in all these articles being well-worn.
They are a little shabby indeed; and, in the
boots, the leather is represented as worn a little red
by the straps of his trousers! Whoever got them up
is an artist. Fit as Tommy is to be a “tiger” to
Queen Mab, his boots and breeches would require
stretching.

There is no end to the rivalry of hotels. Cozzens,
of the “American,” is making the attractive show of
Broadway tributary to his house. The former smoking-room
and reading-room on the corner of the second
story are being converted into a superb ladies'
parlor, with a charming look-out over the park and
the new fountain; while the ground floor, formerly a
tailor's shop, is to be devoted to the loungers who
wish to sit in their chairs and see Broadway without
the trouble of walking. As a hotel, from which to
see what is going on to the best advantage, the “American”
will now be the best in the city; and, as mine
host is famous for his table, he may soon gather his
“plum.”

I see by the report of a late trial that an editor, in
the eyes of a counsellor-at-law, is considered “a mechanic
who carries on a newspaper”—the plea being
that a man in this condition of life should be taxed
with but small alimony for a divorced wife. It would
be convenient to some of the tribe to come down to
this classification, though most editors will probably
resist it, as ambitious boys sometimes object to being
let into a show for half-price. I wish the counsellor
had defined the luxuries proper to gentlemen that are
not proper for “mechanics.”

The races between the “Empire” and the other
boats on the Hudson occupy the city talk. I trust
they will have done their uttermost before anybody I
am very fond of has occasion to embark in them—for
I presume it is like the proving of guns. If the
boilers stand this, they will stand anything. The Empire
beats, but not by so much as was anticipated.
She is unmatched for comfort and beauty, however,
and a trip to Albany in her, a month hence, will be a
treat worth looking forward to. She runs as a day-boat
hereafter.

One of the papers announces Count D'Orsay as
already arrived in New York. It is a mistake; and

so, I believe, is the announcement that he is coming
at all. He resisted strong inducements to come out
in the suite of his intimate friend, Lord Durham
(late governor of Canada), and if he had ever contemplated
a visit to America, he would have availed
himself of that opportunity.

Brough, the vocalist, had a concert recently of
renaissance, well-attended and rapturously applauded.
He sung better than ever. Mr. Frank Brown assisted
him—a very promising young singer, who is about
trying his musical fortune in Italy. He has a handsome
person and good talents, as well as an excellent
quality of voice, and will be heard of favorably hereafter,
I have little doubt.

Previous to the last six months, New York has
only been to me a place of transit, and for the benefit
of transitory travellers, it is perhaps worth while to
mention what I have missed till I became a resident.
Like the new Sunday-school pupil who was surprised
with the sight of “A,” of which he had often heard,
though he had never seen it before, I am quite full of
raptures about Hoboken—new to me till a day or two
since. Its extent, beauty, and particularly its nearness
to Broadway, were all surprises. With the exception
of the ferry, it lies at the foot of Barclay
street, which you know runs down from the Astor,
and if the proprietors of that hotel chose to advertise
the proximity of the “Elysian fields” as an attraction
to their establishment, the only objection would lie in
the dread of alarming the apoplectic. The stile over
which you step into these grounds is at the ferry-landing,
and you are immediately under the shade of
avenues leading to covert and winding walks, and to
a park which covers the beautiful promontory of Hoboken,
and which can not be surpassed in the world
for union of glade and distant view. Who keeps
these walks so smooth and trim, who laid them out
and gave them to the public, and who lives in the enviable
residence adjoining them, I do not know. But
the New-Yorkers may be satisfied that they have at
their service, and close at hand, grounds which equal
those of any nobleman in England. On week-days
they seem little frequented, too; though on Sundays,
I am told, the avenues are thronged.

I observed a new fashion in ladies' boots, which
would take, I should think, among the Orientals. The
Arabs, as you know, judge of aristocracy by the test
of a hollow under the instep—that if water will run
under the naked foot when standing on marble, the
ancestors of the owner could not have borne burdens.
Mr. Dick, ladies' bootmaker in Broadway, inserts a
steel spring into the sole to keep it snug under the
instep, supporting the foot very comfortably in walking,
and adding very much to its beauty. The amalgamationists
will probably oppose the fashion, as the
negro foot is entirely excluded from its advantages.

I think there was what is commonly called “an
opening” for a fashionable summer-theatre up town.
Gayety in private circles ceases very much by the first of
May; strangers, travelling for pleasure, and inclined to
bestow themselves for the evenings in the resorts of “silk
attire,” begin to arrive; few leave the city for touring
till August, and the great majority of the better classes
do not leave it at all except for country-seats in
the neighborhood, or for short periods; the other theatres
are shut; and the patrician complexion given to
a place by inducements like the foregoing, is the best
trap for what the manager would call “miscellaneous
patronage;” or, to express it by a maxim of theatrical
economy, white gloves in the first circle will insure
dirty hands in the third.

Mr. Niblo has cleverly stepped into this opening.
His pretty theatre is newly done up in gilding and
blue maroon[1] (an ill-omened stuff for theatrical lining);
it is brilliantly lighted; the scenery is peculiar and
new, and he begins with addressing his entertainment
solely to those who have either aired their manners
with travel, or “fed of the dainties that are bred in a
book.” The French company might as well deliver
themselves in pantomime as sing in French to most
of the ordinary frequenters of our theatres, but the
boxes understand; and it is worth the gallery's time
and money to have a three hours' perusal of the unbonneted
attractions of the boxes—the opera aside.

An “Admirable Crichton” of music, equally wonderful
on the piano-forte and the violin, has appeared
among us, in the person of Mr. Wm. Vincent Wallace,
Director of the Dublin Anacreontic Society.
Those who have heard Paganini and Thalberg, pronounce
decidedly that he is unsurpassed even by those
hitherto unequalled maestros! He performs upon the
piano a grand introduction and variations on the theme
of the Cracovienne, composed by himself. The instrument
becomes a full orchestra, under his hands,
which seems multiplied into a dozen; while, in the
rapid passages, his fingers are invisible as the spokes
of a locomotive-wheel in full career. He has no left
hand, but two right ones, equally independent of each
other. The brilliancy and power of his execution
set off admirably the delicate morceaux of melody interspersed,
and all unite to produce an effect before
unknown to us. But his performance on the violin
surpasses, if possible, that upon the piano. He executes
on this the Carnival of Venice, and the Witches'
Dance of Benevento, and several other difficult compositions,
as originally performed by Paganini, and never
before heard in this country; and the effect is most
startling and thrilling. In his hands, the violin does
more than speak—it sings, shrieks, supplicates, reproaches,
dies, revives, and realizes the fancy of Balzac,
that a soul is imprisoned within it. With his
bow he scatters a bright shower of melody through
the air, and rasps diamond-sparkles from the strings.
Our language may seem extravagant, but it falls far
short of the reality. Musicians are in raptures with
the fulness and purity of his tones, the decision and
accuracy of his stopping, his left-handed pizzicato.
and his double notes on the fourth string. We rejoice
that such an artist bears an English name, and
proves that wonderful musical genius is not confined
to foreign nations.

At the London Opera, no gentleman is admitted
who is not in full dress. Ladies go there jewelled,
decolletées, and unbonneted of course. It is a dress-place.

Ladies must have a place to “dress.”

The New York ladies have ceased to dress gayly
in the street.

Private parties are not a sufficient vent for the passion
of dress among ladies.

Now, Mr. Niblo, do you see your way?

The above is a literal copy of a memorandum we
made for an article, while sitting out the expectant
half hour before the rising of the curtain, a night or
two ago, at the French Opera. We pitch it at you
head foremost, dear reader, because you are sometimes
willing to take us in the lump, or seriatim, as it
is convenient for us to deliver ourselves—but more
particularly because the printer is clamorous for copy,
and, hurried or not hurried, copied we like to be.

But, to our text. A dress-opera is happily entailed
upon us by the change of the sumptuary character
of Broadway. Ladies now (and very likely we are

telling our country-friends a bit of news) are under
the necessity of having two bonnets. There must be
a plain straw with a green veil, to soften down and
properize any appearance in the street, on foot and
unattended. There must be a dress-bonnet for morning
calls, matinées, breakfast-parties, wedding-visits,
and, generally, for all daylight departures from home,
on errands of ceremony or pleasure. This dress-bonnet
requires other concomitants in keeping—lace,
feathers, flowers—whatever is required for a full parure.
And a full parure requires a carriage, of course.
And a carriage requires a fortune. And as all this is
the fashion, nobody can be fashionable who is not
rich. And so comes in the dynasty of the aristocracy
of money!

Now we like all this—offensive as it seems, at the
first blush, to a republican eye. Part the extremes—
widen the distance between wealth and poverty—and
you make room for a middle class, which is not yet
recognised in our country—everybody who is not
absolutely poor, striving to seem absolutely rich. Of
this middle class, literary men are a natural part and
parcel. So are many of the worthiest and most intelligent
people of this country—people who are now
occupying a station in life like Mohammed's coffin,
neither on the earth of poverty nor in the heaven of
riches, and in sad lack of a resting-place between.
Once recognise that station in society—once make it
respectable to set aside certain extravagances in dress
and living as not proper for a condition in life which
is still far above poverty—and you set at ease thousands
of families that are now subjected to endless
uncertainties and mortifications. It requires, now,
both judgment and vigilance for many ladies not to
dress far above their condition in life—yet what more
distasteful than to have seen the husband in his place
of business, careworn and distressed, and the next
minute to meet his wife in Broadway, dressed out of all
keeping with his gains, and of course with no sympathy
for his troubles! We believe that, in fact, the ladies
are of our way of thinking in this matter. It is uncomfortable
for pride to be always “treading water,”
as the swimmers say. Better sink, and sink, and
sink, till you come to your true level—anybody will
say.

Of course we follow nature, however, and of course
we except beauty from all homely precepts and economies.
The peacock and the butterfly pay no penalty
that we know of for their extra-furnishings from
the shop of Rainbow & Co. Their business on earth
is to delight the eye; and that, we religiously believe,
is the errand of human beauty as well. No! Let
there be no “condition in life” for beautiful women!
Nature's princesses they are by the instinctive consent
of human nature; and the homage we can not but pay,
let us be bold enough to acknowledge. As to beauty's
being, “when unadorned, adorned the most,” it
is true of nothing but a statue. In real life, we think
flowers and gems are the natural belongings and ornaments
of personal loveliness. All beauty should be
so furnished—even if ugliness be compelled to “service
dure” to procure them.

But to return to the opera. Ladies should be reminded
that nothing adds more to the cheerfulness of
the scene, and its consequent attraction, than light
and bright colors. A dark dress has no business at
the opera, though indeed the dress itself may be
anything, so that the bust and head, which are alone
seen, are dressed gayly. No bonnets, and least of all,
veils! Let us have a dress place of amusement. Let
there be a resort in the long and vacant hours after
business, where we can seem to enter a brighter chamber
of this dingy world, and be compelled (we men)
to dress ourselves, and feel in a more holyday and liberal
atmosphere.

In the window of a Broadway shop we noticed, the
other day, a China dinner-set, otherwise magnificent,
but deformed by a representation on each plate
“The great fire in New York.” Thus, on every festive
occasion, the guests would have their gayety
dampened by the suggestion of that scene of loss,
danger, and suffering. Such bad taste is too frequent.
It would be equally easy to impress devices calculated
to arouse cheerful and enlivening association
but, as a people, we are too careless of such matters.
Trifles in themselves they may be; but such little
items of enjoyment—such grains of pleasure—make
up in time quite a mountain of happiness.

Theodore Hook.—Good dinners will not make
man immortal. The prince of diners-out is dead. It
would seem as if “good living” meant long living
too—for who ever thought Theodore Hook could
die!—“a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent
fancy.” “Where be your gibes now? your gambols?
your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont
to set the table in a roar? Not one now, to mock
your own grinning!” We have carried out the quotation
somewhat with a feeling of bitterness—not
against the dead, but for him. We could have begun
the passage with Hamlet—“Alas, poor Yorick!—
knew him, Horatio!” Everybody knew Theodore
Hook, who has been “summered and wintered” in
London, and we knew him as others did, with the
far-reaching and half-pitying admiration which is
given to a wit of all work—a joker never out of harness—a
“funny man” by profession, as the children
thought Mathews. We have seen Theodore Hook
make excellent hits, and we have seen him make desperate
failures—many failures to one hit, indeed. But
so it must be, as every one knows who has thought
twice on wit as a “good continuer.”

Hook was the editor of the “John Bull” newspaper,
and his portrait would have served for its imprint.
He was the personification of John Bull, as the French
fancy him, and as he is represented on the stage.
Above the middle height, he looked short, from being
corpulent and short-necked. His person was “stocky
altogether—thick legs, high chest, short arms, and
bluff, rubicund, and rather defying features. We have
not heard of what he died; but, we presume, of apoplexy,
for he looked of that habit, and lived in a way
to produce and feed it. Over his brows, however,
there seemed to be a region, like the sun above clouds
on a mountain-side, brighter than that below. His
forehead was ample and white, his head smoothly bald,
and, if the observer had seen but that portion of Theodore
Hook, he would have formed of him a far higher
opinion than in following him downward. To the
tablet of intellect his works of imagination, we believe,
never did justice. His novels are third-rate,
while his native powers were first-rate, and against
those two unattained steps on the ladder of immortality,
Hook's poor offset was his very mortal celebrity
a table-wit—the diner-out, par excellence, of his day.

We believe in omens. In the days of Charlemagne
large possessions were transferred, not with wax and
paper, but with a ring. A ring has been given us by
a well-wishing stranger, and we here signify our belief
that, in it is transferred to us the prosperity
the former proprietor—dead two thousand years at
at the very least, but undeniably a most prosperous
gentleman. Let us look a little at the evidence.

It is generally supposed, we believe, that the mummies
preserved to this day are, in all human probability,

from two to three thousand years old. Some time
before the advent of our Savior, Egypt had become a
Roman province, and the more costly usages of the
Egyptians had been done away—the embalming of
the bodies of the rich and great being among the
most costly. Those which have defied time and corruption,
through two thousand years, of course were
such as were embalmed with the most cost and care,
and the poor, the antiquarians tell us, were merely
dried by salt and laid away in the catacombs. The
rings and other ornaments of the mummied great
were wrapped up with them.

The ring that was given us three days ago is of
silver, holding a stone covered with Arabic characters,
and was taken from the finger of a mummy,
bought at a great price for exhibition, and partly
opened. It is of rude work, and if Egypt's jewellers
did their best upon it, we can but say that our friend
Tenney, of Broadway, was only born too late to astonish
the Pharaohs. We have not yet found an Arabic
scholar to decipher it, but, if we had not known it to
be Arabic (or Coptic), we should have said it was a
device of three stars, a wrench, and two streaks of lightning—very
properly expressive of our three selves
(the editors and publisher), our manner of work, and
the way the Mirror is to go. And, on the whole, we
shall let it rest at that—without further translation.

We are not sure that, if the former proprietor of
this silver ring could wake, he would think his finger-ornament
handed down in the same line of life. The
classifications of society under the Ptolemies would
have put us down low (priests, soldiers, shepherds,
swineherds, mechanics, interpreters, and fishermen—
the literary profession being the last but one), yet,
after all, there is a resemblance between us, and I am
happy to say (no offence to the mummy) that it is not
in our personal appearance! It was necessary, to
embalm this gentleman, that his brains should first be
extracted through his nostrils. We trust to be embalmed
by letting ours ooze from our fingers' ends—
and, on the whole, we may say, we prefer our way of
doing it. But that is all. We see no other resemblance.
The Egyptian was circumcised. He was
gloomy and superstitious. He increased his poultry
by artificially hatching eggs. The husband had the
charge of the domestic concerns; the wife of buying
and selling, and all affairs that were not of a domestic
character. He hated songs and dances. He
was a stranger to gayety, and he drank nothing
stronger than barley-beer. We trust that it is no
vanity on our part to congratulate his ring on conversance
for the future with a more pleasant state of
things—aristocratic comparisons apart.

Prosperous the Mirror is to be—thanks to the liberal
giver of the ring that foreshadows it! But (to
“out with a secret”) we should feel easier if the envious
would begin to manifest their displeasure. We
have a dread of “the primrose way to the everlasting
bonfire,” and should feel safer in a thornier path than
we tread now. This pushing all of one side makes
us fancy we topple. We would try our friends at opposition.
Feathers that go down with one wind
mount with a counter-current. We “cotton” to old
King Osymandyas, who caused to be graven on his
Colossus: “I am King Osymandyas—if any man will
know my greatness let him destroy one of my works.”
And of that jolly old monarch, the first owner of our
ring was possibly a subject—conjunctive omen of our
road to prosperity.

Beards in New York.—It is odd, how a fashion
creeps from one country to another, unaware. Has
it occurred to you what a bearded nation we have become
within the last year or two—imitating La Jeune
France in that and other accompanying particulars?
My attention was called to it yesterday by a friend just
returned from a long residence in Europe. He was
expressing very emphatically his annoyance at the
loss of his mustache. On coming in sight of land
he had gone below and sacrificed it, as a thing “most
tolerable and not to be endured,” among the sober
friends to whom he was returning; when lo! on landing—every
second man in a full suit of beard! His
mustache and imperial chanced to be very becoming
to him, and his mortification, at being compelled to
put them again into nascent stubble, was unbounded.

Two schools of dress have prevailed in France for
the last six or seven years—the classic and the romantic;
the former with the Brutus head, short hair
and apparel of severe simplicity, and the other with
flowing locks, fanciful beard, and great sumptuousness
of cravat and waistcoat. The “romantic” is the
only one which has “come over,” and it prevails at
present in New York, with (to use the popular phrase)
“a perfect looseness.” Almost every man below forty
has tried his beard on, and most of the young men
about town show their fancy in something beyond the
mere toothbrush-whisker of the military. The latter,
by-the-way, is the only beard “let out” by the London
men whom the packets bring over, and in England
the synonyme is rigorous between “mustache”
and “adventurer.” It seems to me, however, that the
principles of taste which should affect the fashion of
a beard are but little regarded among us, and I rather
wonder that some ambitious barber has not set himself
up as an authority—to decide their shape by private
consultation, according to feature and complexion.
Perhaps I may feed a want of the era by putting
down what I have gathered on the subject of
beards by reading and travel.

In a country where all the hair which nature has
planted on the face is permitted to grow, a shaved
man certainly looks very silly. After a short passage
from Asia Minor to Malta, the clean-shaved English
officers struck me as a very denuded and inexpressive-looking
race, though much more athletic and handsome
than the Orientals I had left. The beards of
old men, particularly, are great embellishments, covering
as they do, the mouth, which most shows age
and weakness, by loss of teeth and feebleness of
muscle. When the mouth is covered, the whole expression
of the face is concentrated in the eyes, and
it is surprising how much the eyes gain in character
and brilliancy by a full mustache. A luxuriant and
silky beard on a young and clear skin is certainly very
beautiful, though, according to medical observation,
the faculties are much better matured when the beard
comes late. In bearded countries, the character is
very much judged of by the beard. There is an old
Irish proverb which says:—

In irritable persons, the beard grows thin and dry.
In those of milder temper it is thick and slightly
curling. The beard is affected very sensibly by the
nature of a man's nourishment; and this explains
why they know an aristocrat in the East by the luxuriance
of this appendage—poor food deteriorating its
quality. Diplomatists should always wear the mustache,
as it is much easier to control the expression
of the eye than of the mouth—useful to card-players
and stock-brokers, for the same reason. Shaving
among the ancients was a mark of mourning—though
at the era when beards were out of fashion, they were
let grow, by those who had lost friends. When a
man's mouth is beautiful and expressive, the beard
which covers it is a disadvantage, and we may guess
that Scipio Africanus (the first Roman who shaved
every day) wore on his lips the tenderness and magnanimity
which he displayed toward the bride of the
captive Allucius. The first shaving barber was one
Ticinius Mænas, who came from Sicily to Rome
about three hundred years before Christ, and then
commenced an era of smooth chins, interrupted, for a
short while only, by the emperor Adrian, who wore his
beard to conceal warts on his chin. With most nations
the beard has been considered an ornament. Moses
commanded the Jews not to shave, and the ancient
Germans, and the Asiatics of a later day, have considered
no insult so mortal as the cutting off of one man's
beard by another. In France, shaving came into
fashion during the reigns of Louis XIII, and XIV.,
both of these monarchs having ascended the throne
when beardless, and their subjects imitating them, of
course. And as France gave the law of fashion to all
Europe, the sacrifice of part of the beard grew to be
common, though it is only since the beginning of the
last century that the shaving of the whole beard became
universal.

I have noticed, in New York, that men, who had formerly
no pretensions to good looks, have become very
handsome by the wearing of mustache and imperial,
and I have seen handsome men disfigured by adopting
the same fashion. The effect of a mustache and full
beard is to make the face more masculine, graver, and
coarser, and this is, of course, an improvement to one
whose features are over-delicate, or whose expression
is too frivolous. On a dapper man, it is quite out of
place, and he should wear a clipped whisker, if any
beard at all. The beard, I think, gives a middle-aged
look, and makes a man of twenty look older, and a
man of forty younger. The ladies like a beard—naturally
thinking faces effeminate which are as smooth
as their own, and not objecting to the distinctions
which nature has made between the sexes. When
the beard is but partially worn, some artistical knowledge
should be called in, as a short face may be made
longer, and a broad face narrower, a gay face graver,
and an undecided chin put in domino. But of all
abominations in this way, I think, the goat's beard,
growing under the chin only, is the most brutal and
disgusting, though just now, in New York, rather the
prevailing fashion. The mistake in taste is very common,
of continuing to wear a high shirt collar and
cravat, with a beard on the cheek and throat—the
beauty of a curling beard depending very much on its
freedom and natural adaptation to the mould of the
face. There are more people than Beatrice, of course,
who are willing to let a man's beard be “of the color
that God pleases,” but there are others who have
aversions to red beards and yellow, and there is great
trade in cirages and gums for the improvement of color
and texture. Most of the beards you meet in Broadway
glitter in the sun like steel filings. Altogether, I
think the fashion of wearing the beard a desirable one,
and I particularly wish it would prevail among old
men. A bearded senate would make a wiser and more
reverend show in congress, and anything which conceals
the decrepitude of age and moves respect (as
beards certainly do, both), is most desirable.

Macready's first Night.—Macready had a full,
not an overflowing house, to witness his debut last
night, and there were more of his own profession
among the audience than I ever before saw together
—(partly, perhaps, from curiosity to hear the “readings”
of Shakspere which the drop curtain represents
Macready as giving to the Muses). The play was
Macbeth, and Mr. Ryder, who accompanies Mr. Macready,
came on first as Macduff, and was very warmly
received—applauded, indeed, throughout the play, as
his playing deserved. He is a very correct actor, and
a “fine figure of a man.” Macready's appearance
brought the house “down” of course. He went at his
interview with the witches most artistically, and the
witches did their bedevilments more artistically than
we have seen them done before, and so of all the trick
and machinery of the play—for Macready is master
of “stage business,” and the scenery and supernumeraries
had been effectually cleared of cobwebs. The
play went on—with a beautiful procession of effects,
particularly by Macready in his exits and entrances,
his salutations and surprises—and to the theatre-going
people present it was an exhibition of drama-panorama
curiously managed, and all as clean and neat as
machinery—and just as moving. The attention was
close, but the applause grew less and less. I never
saw so cold a house. The most stormy and passionate
outbreaks of Macbeth's mingled ambition and remorse
were received like the catastrophes in a puppet-show—with
an unexcited smile of surprise. Each
“point” the actor made was looked at like the wheel
of a clock shown piecemeal. There was no passion
in the audience, no illusion, no general interest in the
progress of the story of the play—in short, no feeling.

My own sensations during the evening were those
of pain and annoyance. Mr. Macready is so accomplished
an artificer in his profession—everything he
does is so admirably “studied up”—

that a cold reception of so much pains seems most
ungracious. When he came in and knelt to the king
—when he entered Duncan's chamber to murder him
—when he received the first suggestions of crime from
Lady Macbeth—I could have shouted myself hoarse
with admiration of the artist—it was all done so differently
from another man, and so skilfully in a high
and finished conception of the character. Every step
he took on the stage was a separate study. Every
look, gesture, movement, was consummate. As pantomime
it would have been absolutely faultless. Yet,
strange to say, he walks the stage like a transparent
man—showing all his anatomy. He wants clothing
with natural flesh and blood. His voice wants nature.
It sounds like the breaking of crockery in a dry well.
He feels no passion and he moves none. What a pity
that scholarship, study, labor, patience, and taste,
should fall short, in their result, of the most unlabored
off-throwing of genius!

Italian Opera.—I saw only the first act of “Lucia
de Lammermoor,” and found little to admire except
the performance of the orchestra. Signor Antognini
certainly did not come up to his reputation as
a tenor, and he is the great star of the company. He
is a curious-looking man to play the lover. The muscles
of his face pull, every one, upon his nostrils, like
“taut halliards,” and with eyebrows pointing fiercely
at the bridge of his nose, and the mouth like an angry
dash of a pen under an emphasized word, he looks as
Mephistophilish as one of Retzch's drawings. Madame
Majocchi, the prima donna, is a fat woman with
a fat voice. She has a good contralto footing in her
throat, but her soprano notes are painfully tiptoe, and
you are glad when she is comfortably at the bottom
of her cadenza. The company appears pretty well
drilled, but they want a prima donna, and if they could
find a prima donna in want of them (Castellan, for instance)
we might have good opera. They say that
Antognini's voice is only grass-grown from neglect,
and that he would do brilliantly after a little practice.
Considering the certain fortune that waits upon a fine
tenor, it is surprising that there should continue to be
so few aspirants for the honors of the Rubini; for it
can not be that there are only half a dozen (if so
many) of human voices possessing his capabilities of
tone and cultivation. There is probably “full many

a” postillion of Lonjumeau “born to” “waste his
sweetness on the desert air,” and it would be a good
speculation to look them up and buy a life-interest in
their thoracic capabilities.

Dr. Howe.—It will be a curious piece of news to
you that our countryman, Dr. Howe (lately married
and gone abroad) has been stopped on the borders of
Prussia by a cabinet order, and of course is shut out
from so much of the Rhine as lies (if my geography
serves me) between Coblentz and Cologne. This
special edict on the part of a king with a standing
army of two hundred thousand men is no small compliment
to Dr. Howe's consequence; but perhaps it
would interest you to be made acquainted with the
cetera intus.

About ten years ago I had the honor (and as such
I shall always treasure the memory) of sharing Dr.
Howe's lodgings at Paris for some months. He was
then employed in learning that system of instruction
for the blind upon which he has since grafted improvements
that have made him a separate fame
among philanthropists. Philanthropy seems to be
his engrossing and only mission in life, however; for,
though giving the most of his day to the objects of
his special errand, he found time to make himself the
most serviceable man in France to the cause of Poland.
The disasters of Warsaw had filled Paris with
destitute refugees, and distinguished men who had
shared in that desperate battle were literally houseless
in the streets. Our common breakfast-room was
thronged with these unfortunate patriots, and, with
noble liberality, Dr. Howe kept open table for all who
came to him—many of them, to my knowledge, getting
no food elsewhere, and, among others, Lelewel,
the distinguished poet and patriot, coming in one
morning to ask a breakfast, as I well recollect, after
having slept out a winter's night in the street. Lafayette
was at that time at the head of the Polish
committee, and Fenimore Cooper (whose generosity
to the Poles should be chronicled, as well as the devotion
of his time and talents to the cause) shared
with Dr. Howe the counsel and most efficient agency
of the benevolent old man. At this time a sum of
money was raised to be sent, with some important and
secret despatches, to the Poles who had fled into
Prussia, and Dr. Howe offered to be the bearer. I
went with him to the Mesagerie and saw him off in
the diligence, very little suspecting the dangerous
character of his errand. He arrived at Berlin, and,
after passing the evening abroad, returned to his
hotel, and found a couple of gens-d'armes in his
room. They informed him that he must accompany
them to the police. The doctor understood his position
in a moment. By a sudden effort he succeeded
in pitching both the soldiers out of the room and closing
the door, for it was all-important that he should
gain time to destroy papers that he had about him.
The gens-d'armes commenced a parley with him
through the bolted door, which resulted in a compact
that he should be let alone till morning, on condition
of his agreeing to go with them peaceably at daylight—they
keeping sentry outside. He had no light,
but he passed the night in tearing into the smallest
possible fragments the important papers, and soaking
them in water. Among his papers, however, were
two or three letters from Lafayette to himself which
he wished to preserve, and after examining the room
he secreted these in the hollow of a plaster cast of the
king which chanced to be there, and so saved them;
for, though the minute fragments were picked out
and put together again (as he subsequently discovered),
he wrote to a friend at Berlin, six months after, who
went to the hotel and found the secreted letters safe
in the plaster king's keeping!

At dawn Dr. Howe opened his door, and was
marched immediately to prison. By chance, on the
evening of his arrival, he had met an American in the
entry of the hotel, who had recognised him, and the
next day came to call. From the mysterious manner
in which the people of the house denied all knowledge
of what had become of him, this gentleman suspected
an arrest, and wrote to Mr. Rives, our then minister
to France, stating his suspicion. Mr. Rives immediately
demanded him of the Prussian government, and
was assured, in reply, that they knew nothing of the
person in question. Mr. Rives applied a second time.
Dr. Howe had now been six weeks in solitary confinement,
and at the end of this period he was taken
out in silence and put into a carriage with closed windows.
They drove off, and it was his own terrible
belief for the first day that he was on his way to Siberia.
By the light through the covering of the carriage,
however, he discovered that he was going westward.

The sudden transition from close confinement to
the raw air, threw him into a fever, and on the third
day of his silent journey he begged to be allowed to
stop and consult a physician. They refused. On
the next morning, while changing horses, a physician
was brought to the carriage-door, who, after seeing
the prisoner, wrote a certificate that he was able to
proceed, and they again drove on. That day they
crossed a corner of the Hanoverian dominions, and,
while stopping for a moment in a village, Dr. Howe
saw the red coats of some officers, and by a bold attempt
escaped from his guards and threw himself on
their protection. They quietly restored him to the
Prussians, and the carriage drove on once more—his
guard finally setting him down at Metz, on the borders
of Prussia, with orders never to enter again the
Prussian dominions. At present he is at Baden-Baden,
and Mr. Everett is engaged in a negotiation,
through the Prussian minister at London (Chevalier
Bunsen), for the revocation of the cabinet order, and
permission for a simple citizen of the United States
to show his bride the Rhine! Mr. Greene, our consul
at Rome, who is now in New York, informs me
that Dr. Howe is also on the black list of the king
of Naples—of course as a general champion of liberty.

Dr. Howe's first reputation, as is well known, was
made as a Philhellene in the Greek revolution. He
left this country entirely without means, having just
completed his studies in surgery, and worked his passage
to Greece. He entered the service as surgeon,
and soon gained the highest promotion—serving part
of the time on board the armed steamer commanded
by Hastings—the only fault found with him being (as
a Hanoverian comrade of his told me at Paris) that he
would be in the fight, and was only a surgeon when
the battle was over. His whole career in Greece was
one of gallant acts of bravery, generosity, and self-sacrifice,
as represented by his companions there—and
if he could ever be made to overcome the unwillingness
with which he speaks of himself, his history of
personal adventure would, without doubt, be one of
the most curiously-interesting naratives in the world.
Dr. Howe's slight person, delicate and beautiful features,
and soft voice, would give one the impression
that he was more at home in his patient labor of winding
light through the labyrinth of the sense-imprisoned
Laura Bridgman; but a more fiery spirit, and one
more reluctant to submit to the details of quiet life,
does not exist, and the most trying service he has ever
done in the cause of philanthropy, I sincerely believe,
is this discipline of his tumultuous energies to the
patient teaching of the blind. He is still a young
man—not yet forty, I believe. I could not trust my
admiration and affection to say more of his character
than the giving of this simple statement of facts.

The New York American, after quoting from what
the editor calls “the agreeably gossiping New York correspondent
of the National Intelligencer,” remarks that
“this correspondence is not, to be sure, very reliable for
matters of fact”—which is very like disparaging a hasty
pudding for not being a rump-steak. This style of
criticising things by telling what they are not, suits the
“American” in the two respects, that it is both easy
and oracular. But I should prefer to be tried rather
by what I undertake to do, which is certainly not to
send you simply “matters of fact.” To wait for the
winnowing of error and exaggeration from truth, would
be to send you a correspondence as stale as some of
the columns in which I am found fault with. I profess
nothing of the kind. I send you the novelty and
gossip of the hour, and you, and all others (except
those who are “nothing if not critical,” and must find
a fault) take it as they take what they hear in their
day's walk—as material for conversation and speculation,
which may be mere rumor, may be truth. I am
happy to amuse a New York editor, but I do not write
for one so near my sources of information. I write
with only such of your subscribers in my eye as are
not resident in New York—who want a gay daguerreotype
of the floating news and chit-chat of the hour,
such as they would have gathered by observation and
conversation, if they had passed in New York the day
on which I write. Loose as is all this ministry to the
love of news, however, I will lay any bet which I could
have the conscience to take from that editor, that,
comparing paragraph by paragraph with his own paper,
for twenty columns, I will find more misstatements
in his than in my own—though you would
think by his criticism that he never committed an
error in his life.

And apropos of my sins of correspondence, I find
that propriety begins to require that all words signifying
exhilarating drinks must henceforth be decently
disembowelled—that cobblers must be written c—s,
and julaps j—s, slings s—s, and punches p—s.
I have had three letters and one poetic appeal addressed
to me, remonstrative against my shameless
mention of these iniquitous beverages in so exemplary
a paper as the Intelligencer. I consider this an exponent
of the leading enthusiasm of the era, and willingly
give way. One of my rebukers attacked me
more particularly for what he considered a slighting
allusion to the coming of Father Mathew to America.
To this, in intention at least, I plead not guilty. I
revere the character of that great reformer, and I consider
his mission sacred and salutary. My submission
shall be more emphatic, if necessary.

Macready draws well, and the town is fully occupied
in discussing why he only astonishes and never moves
the feelings of his audience. He is a most accomplished
player, and in these days, when theatrical
criticism can neither help nor harm an actor, he can
pursue the even tenor of his style with little interruption.

Longfellow, a poet who combines genius and workmanlike
finish, is in New York, under the care of
Elliot, the oculist. I trust he will keep an undamaged
pair of eyes, though the loss of sight would turn a
great deal of new light inward upon his mind—as it
did upon Milton's—and be a gain to the glory of his
country.

I am ministered to while writing to-day by the most
deliciously-tempered autumn air that ever intoxicated
the heart of a ripening grape. I only lament that the
distinct pleasure I feel in every pore and fibre will not
be channelled into the nib of my pen and flow to you
in rhetoric. The wind is a little northerly, however,
and it may bring you a sample.

To the Ladies.—We have nothing to write about
this morning, ladies!—quite nothing. We presume
you know that the crocus yellow and the blue of your
own eyes are the fashionable colors; that Middleton
cuts his slippers low behind for such ladies as know
what is becoming to the foot; that the late strain after
economy is yielding to a rebound of extravagance
(consequently, this winter you can wear nothing too
gorgeously sumptuous); that ruinous bracelets are utterly
indispensable to wrists with a swan's neck in them,
and that the New Mirror (pardon us!) is of the fashionable
crocus teint without, and as “blue” within as is
bearable by the copyrighted and intoxicating benightedness
of beauty. If you had sent for us to your
boudoir and ordered our memory spread out upon a
silk cushion, we could tell you no more.

If you are interested at all in us—we are having,
this morning, our little private mope, with no possible
flight of fancy beyond the ends of our fingers. We
have been sitting here two hours making caryatides to
hold up some spilt ink on our blotting-paper—(rather
nicely drawn, one of them, and looks like a Greek girl
we saw at Egina). Then we have had a revery on political
economy—musing, that is to say, whether we
should wear a ring on our right hand (which belongs
to the working-classes) or on the left, which is purely
an ornamental idler, born but to be gloved and kept
gentlemanly. Now, what do you think on that subject?
Here is this most virtuous and attached right
hand of ours, an exemplary and indefatigable provider
for himself and the other members of our family, who
has never failed to bring bread to our mouths since we
placed our dependence on him, and why should he
not be ornamented and made trim and respectable,
first and foremost. He is not defiled by his work. He
is clean when he is washed. He is made on the same
model as the idle dangler opposite, and though he
could do very well without that same Mr. Sinister
Digits, there would be no “living” for Mr. Sinister
Digits without him! Most meritorious worky! Put
the ring on his forefinger!

Um! it does not look so well on that hand! There
is a dingy groove on the inside of the second finger
(which you would not remark, perhaps, but for the
conspicuousness of the jewel)—a nasty soil of an
ill-effaced ink-spot, made by a quill. Faith! it calls
attention to “the shop,” and would do so in good
company! He must work in gloves if he is to be observed!
And the ring is not so becomingly carried as
by that other plumper and more taper gentleman,
whose joints, with less dexterity, look supple, and,
truth to own, more suitable!

No—no! “Take back the ring!” The bee works
hard enough to have his pick of wings, but he would
only be cumbered with the butterfly's. Indulgence
for ever to the ornamentals! Money to the ladies
whether you have it or no! Credit to the dandies!
And, befitting brown bread and plain blessings for the
labor-stained right hands of society—our own among
the worky-most and least complaining!

We have been ring-mad since the mummy's ring
(mentioned on a previous page) was slipped upon our
finger, and we have pulled out from our store of relics
a huge emerald (in whose light is locked up a history)
and it was of the wearing of it that we mused in this
morning's mope of idleness. The world is set in a
solid emerald, says the Mohammedan—“the emerald
stone Sakhral, the agitations of whose light cause
earthquakes.” We would make a pilgrimage (if our

“travels” would sell) to see the great “mother of emeralds”
worshipped by the Peruvians in the valley of
Manta—big as a gourd and luminous at murk midnight
(or so they say). Excuse us, when we meet
you, if we proffer our left hand for courtesy, for, on
the forefinger of that sits our agitated emerald—the
right hand kept, unrewarded by your touch, to serve
you only. Adieu—till they are dead who are to die
(one a minute) ere another Saturday—for, at the close
of our overflowings into your cup, this sad thought
runs over! And if, in the midst of our trifling, Providence
ministers such thoughts to us, they can scarce
be unseasonable, passed on, in the same company, to
you.

Mrs. Flimson.—Few women had more gifts than
Mrs. Flimson. She was born of clever parents, and
was ladylike and good-looking. Her education was
that of a female Crichton, careful and universal; and
while she had more than a smattering of most languages
and sciences, she was up to any flight of fashion,
and down to every secret of notable housewifery.
She piqued herself, indeed, most upon her plain accomplishments
(thinking, perhaps, that her more uncommon
ones would speak for themselves); and it
was a greater triumph, to her apprehension, that she
could direct the country butcher to the sweet-bread
in slaughtering his veal, and show a country-girl how
to send it to table with the proper complexion of a riz
de veau, than that she could entertain any manner of
foreigner in his own language, and see order in the
stars and diamonds in backlogs. Like most female
prodigies, whose friends expect them to be matched
as well as praised, Mrs. Flimson lost the pick of the
market, and married a man very much her inferior.
The pis aller, Mr. Flimson, was a person of excellent
family (after the fashion of a hill of potatoes—
the best part of it under ground), and possessed of a
moderate income. Near the meridian sun of a metropolis,
so small a star would of course be extinguished;
and as it was necessary to Mrs. Flimson's
existence that she should be the cynosure of something,
she induced her husband to remove to the
sparser field of a distant country-town, where, with
her diplomatic abilities, she hoped to build him up
into a member of congress. And here shone forth
the genius of Mrs. Flimson. To make herself perfectly
au fait of country habits, usages, prejudices,
and opinions, was but the work of a month or two of
stealthy observation. At the end of this short period,
she had mastered a manner of rustic frankness (to be
put on at will); she had learned the secret of all rural
economies; she had found out what degree of gentility
would inspire respect without offending, or exciting
envy, and she had made a near estimate of the
influence, consequence, and worth-trouble-ness of
every family within visiting distance.

With this ammunition, Mrs. Flimson opened the
campaign. She joined all the sewing-circles of the
village, refusing steadily the invidious honor of manager,
pattern-cutter, and treasurer; she selected one
or two talkative objects for her charity, and was studiously
secret in her manner of conveying her benefactions.
She talked with farmers, quoting Mr. Flimson
for her facts. She discoursed with the parson,
quoting Mr. Flimson for her theology. She was
intelligent and witty, and distributed plentiful scraps
of information, always quoting Mr. Flimson. She
managed the farm and the household, and kept all the
accounts—Mr. Flimson was so overwhelmed with
other business! She talked politics, admitting that
she was less of a republican than Mr. Flimson. She
produced excellent plans for charitable associations,
town improvements, and the education of children—
all the result of Mr. Flimson's hours of relaxation.
She was—and was only—Mr. Flimson's humble vicegerent
and poor representative. And everything would
seem so much better devised if he could have expressed
it in person!

But Mr. Flimson was never nominated for congress,
and Mrs. Flimson was very well understood
from the first by her country neighbors. There was
a flaw in the high polish of her education—an error
inseparable from too much consciousness of porcelain
in this crockery world. To raise themselves sufficiently
above the common level, the family of Mrs.
Flimson habitually underrated vulgar human nature,
and the accomplished daughter, good at everything
else, never knew where to find it. She thinks herself
in a cloud, floating far out of the reach of those
around her, when they are reading her at arm's length
like a book. She calculates her condescension for
“forty fathom deep,” when the object of it sits beside
her. She comes down graciously to people's capacity,
and her simplicity is set down for trap. And still
wondering that Mr. Flimson is allowed by his country
to remain in obscurity, and that stupid rustics will not
fuse and be moulded by her well-studied congenialities,
she begins to turn her attention to things more
on her own level, and on Sundays looks like a saint
distressed to be out of heaven. But for that one
thread of contempt woven into the woof of her education.
Mrs. Flimson might have shone as a star in
the world where she glimmers like a taper.

I think that a walk in New York to-day, if you had
been absent a year, would impress you very strongly
with the outbreak of showiness in costume. Whatever
spirit it is that presides over the fashions we take
so implicitly from France, he (this spirit of woof and
color) has well suited the last and newest invoice to a
moment of reaction from economy. Or (what may
better define the present era, perhaps) the moment
after prosperity has almost universally changed hands.
The stuffs in the shop-windows of Broadway are of a
splendor that would scarce be ventured upon (in the
street at least) by the severity of last year's aristocratic
taste; but the eruption has spread from the shop-windows
over the sidewalk, and the ladies are verily rainbow
clad! The prevailing colors are yellow and blue;
the most of the dresses put all the prismatic colors
under contribution, and the wearers would make Chinese
figures for Gobelin tapestry. It would be a fine
speculation in upholstery, indeed, to buy the cast-off
dresses of this period, and lay them up to sell for
window-curtains to the next generation. But the
ladies have it by no means to themselves. They are
only bolder and more consistent in their “bravery of
suits.” The waistcoats and cravats have taken a long
stride into splendor, leaving the coats and trousers in
their accustomed sobriety of hue. Jennings's great
emporium, opposite the Park, might furnish the
knights and courtiers for a new “field of cloth of
gold,” so effulgent are the velvets and satins; though
the bold youths who have ventured to put forth into
Broadway with their glittering waistcoats look like
butterflies half-born, the dull broadcloth worm still
adhering, For one, I should like the age of gauds
and such matters to come round again, for I do not
see why the lords of nature should leave all the ornament
to the birds and flowers, and servants in livery;
but let it be consistent, and entire, and when it is that,
it will be time to compound a gentleman of “a man,
a sword, and an equipage,” and to settle the sixty degrees
of precedence which are established in the
court of England. But as this will not all be in my
time, I think I shall not venture on the more luminous
stratum, to say the least, of Jennings's waistcoats.
The Americanism of the matter is the much more

violent array of these gorgeous stuffs in Chatham
street and the Bowery. The small tailors' shops in
these Alsatian quarters are quite in a glow with the
display of cravats and waistcoats, and their catering
for the taste of their customers is, of course, careful
and well-considered. The age is, perhaps, for ever gone
by, when a privileged class could monopolize finery of
garb; and, of all the civilized nations, it were least possible
in ours. I have seen already a dozen at least of
cheap-booted apprentices wearing velvet waistcoats
which, a few years ago, would have delighted D'Orsay.
This last lustrum of our history, by-the-way, corresponds
somewhat, as to sumptuary matters, with the
year 1759, and after, of French history. The nine
months' ministry of Silhouette (whose immortality
rests on the accident of giving his name to profiles)
was a temporary suspension of French extravagance,
somewhat similar to ours of the last year or two,
during which coats were worn without folds, snuff-boxes
made of plain wood, and painting portraits were
discarded for outlines in profile; every fashion, in
short, giving way to extreme parsimony. This period
was succeeded, as our economical days seem promising
to be, by a powerful reflux of the suspended extravagance.
The parallel must end here, thank
Heaven!

Brooklyn is as much a part of New York, for all
purposes of residence and communication, as “the
Borough” is of London. The steam ferry-boats cross
the half-mile between it and New York every five
minutes: and in less time than it usually takes to
thread the press of vehicles on London Bridge, the
elegant equipages of the wealthy cross to Long Island
for the afternoon drive; morning visits are interchanged
between the residents in both places—and, indeed, the
East river is now hardly more of a separation than the
same distance in a street. Brooklyn is the shire-town
of King's county, and is second in population only to
New York. It has become the fashion for business-men
of New York to build and live on the fine and
healthy heights above the river, where they are nearer
their business, and much better situated than in the
outskirts of this city itself. Brooklyn is built on the
summit and sides of an elevation springing directly
from the bank of the river, and commanding some of
the finest views in America. The prospect embraces
a large part of East river, crowded with shipping, and
tracked by an endless variety of steamers, flying
through the channel in quick succession; of the city
of New York, extending, as far as the eye can see, in
closely-piled masses of architecture; of the Hudson,
and the shore of Jersey, beyond; of the bay and its
bright islands; and of a considerable part of Long
and Staten islands, and the Highlands of Neversink.

This is “sodgering week,” ladies, and the general
has gone to the wars. Provided there be no Banquo
to sit in his leather-bottomed chair, I am quite alone,
and of course, immeasurably more than usual at your
service. Walk in, and make no ceremony—that is to
say, draw your foot under you, and sit on your heel.
Leave the general's chair unoccupied, if you please.
It will remind us that “WE” are out, and that I am at
home. Sit on that ream of paper, and let's be private
and personal.

A little scandal would be appetizing, this cloudy
morning. Suppose we put the general on the gridiron
and “do him brown!” Poets are so much better
for toasting!—(reason why: the first lyre was made
by the toasting of the sun—the tortoise-shell, found
by Hermes on the Nile, drawn tight by the contracted
tendous—or “so they say”). His health in a glass of
Elsinore cherry! And now, general, come over the
coals!

What has he to do (a poor various author, tucked
away in the “appendix” of the “Poetry of America”)—
I say, what has he to do with a lodging in the brain
and memory of every man, and in the heart and music-making
of every woman in the country! What has a
“various author” to do with as much popularity as a
baker's dozen of the big-bugs with their biographies.
What business has a “various author” to get his own
price for every scrap of a song, and be the only poet-father
in the country whose poetical daughters are run
after to be married to music! There is more of him
abroad “by heart,” than of anybody else! He is more
quoted, more sung, more trolled, more parodied, more
plucked at on his pedestal, than anybody else! He
uses his brevet as if he were full poet! If it weren't
for the “damnable iteration” of a cockatoo critic or
two, the world would never suspect—never—that
Morris is not a song-writer—the song-writer—and the
most sung and the best one of all the “Poets and
Poetry of America.” And, la!—to be sure!—what
a mistaken world we live in—that never knows what it
likes till it is told in a book!

It is something to be universal, as a poet—something
to get that far—it must be confessed. The
worth of a thing is (partly, at least) what it will bring—
particularly in the way of a long-winded popularity.
There is some bedevilment or other about Morris's
poetry that makes it stick in people's minds, and
answer people's want, in the way of an expression of
their poetical feelings—something that music jumps
to, and women remember and love him for—something
that satisfies the nine hundred and ninety-nine,
and displeases the nil admirari thousandth.

Let's try this varlet of a popularity-thief—you judge
and jury, and I the aggrieved plaintiff—one of the
robbed. Hand me up that big book, on the floor by
you, and let's see the law. He's a lyric poet if there's
any truth in the definition of that commodity:—

“Lyric poetry is that species of poetry by which
the poet directly expresses his emotions. It is necessary
that the feeling represented should be itself poetical,
and not only worthy to be preserved, but accompanied
by a variety of ideas, beauty of imagery, and a
musical flow of language. One distinct feeling should
predominate, giving tone to the whole; the feeling
must be worthy of the subject which caused it, corresponding
to the same both in degree and kind, and
must be so exhibited as to give a living picture of the
poet's mind; while at the same time, what is merely
individual and accidental must be excluded, so that
the poet shall be truly the representative of his race,
and awaken the sympathy of all. But this requires
genius of a high order.”

Quash the suit and turn the plaintiff out of court!—
there never was a more literal inventory of goods than
this of the peculiarities of Morris's poetry! Lyrist he
is, if that describe lyric poetry, and he has come honestly
by his popularity, and the world is right, that
said so before the trial. Court's adjourned.

We have sat down once or twice to criticise Weir's
picture of the Embarkation—but a criticism of it
would be but a recapitulation of its beauties, and as
these are quite apparent, and everybody will see the
picture, we think it not worth while. We have already
described the feeling with which it is seen for the first
time, and as we have seen it a dozen times with the
same glow, and as that description has been quoted, as
just, by many of the critics who have since seen the
picture, we can well stop where we are—recording
only the present thronging to the exhibition-room in
New York, and the universal delight the picture gives

to the public. Weir may well be a proud and happy
man.

We should be very happy to polish “M.'s” verses,
but as we have seldom seen a penknife that was sharp
after it was sharpened, so we never saw verses that
were good after being bettered—by anybody but the
original maker. Beside, it is not our vocation to
mend poets—though we might make one—Heaven
help us!

A “friend who knew us when a boy” (as if anything
but the crust of us be adult-erated), wishes us
to “write something for posterity.” Tut!—posterity
is welcome to all we write—though, if posterity will
pay us, or if anybody will “down with the dust,” as
posterity's “paying-teller,” we will write something
which posterity can publish as “entirely original.”
For the present we do not hold with the Apotactitæ,
that “property, wine, meat, and matrimony, are
things to be renounced”—and though the three last
seem to be the only ones to which our destiny has a
free copyhold, we are digging away at prose and poetry,
and would peddle pins or pottery to compass the
other.

One of the most curious and amusing resorts for a
man of taste, idle in New York, is the ANTIQUARIAN
BOOK-SHOP[2] of Bartlett & Welford, under the Astor.
The catalogue of rare and valuable books for sale at
this repository, numbers nearly four thousand, and
most of these are such works as are found only in
choice libraries, or in the possession of scholars.
Far from being interesting to antiquarians exclusively,
the curiosities of this choice shop would amuse the
most general reader, and a lounge at the well-stocked
counter of B. & W. is no indifferent relief to the
fatiguing idleness of a man stranded on the beach of
a hotel between the far-apart tides of breakfast and
dinner. Most courteous bibliopoles are these two
gentlemen, by-the-way, and happy to gratify the curiosity
of visiters.

Villanous editions, villanous cheap, are the fruits
of our present law of copyright, and if we had an
American language all to ourselves, we should have
no such thing as beauty in a book. Fortunately,
England has the same brick from Babel, and we can
corrupt, mutilate, defile, and misprint works of genius,
and still import, from our more liberal and appreciative
fatherland, a purer and worthier copy. Still it seems
to me surprising, that, of the publishers who have
grown rich with pirating in this country, no one has
felt inclined to distinguish himself by a school of fine
editions.[3] One would think that the example of Aldus,
who made himself as famous as the authors he
printed, would be stuff for emulation; and there are
some men, probably, even among publishers, who
agree with Charles Edwards, that “it is the devil to
be growing old as a person of no peculiarity.” Aldus's
press lasted eminent for near a hundred years,
and it is recorded in history that his ink was excellent,
his types beautiful, his paper invariably strong and
white, and above all, that his press was next to infallible
for correctness. Celebrity among BOOKBINDERS
probably sprung from this renown of a printer, and in
England there were famous names in this trade also.
Roger Payne received from twenty to thirty guineas
for binding a single volume, and he is much better remembered
than any lord-mayor of his time. There
has been a mania in bookbinding, however, and the
world is too poetical for such matters now. Jeffrey,
a London bookseller, had Fox's History bound in fox-
skin; and an eccentric bibliomaniast named (descriptively)
Askew, had a book bound in a human skin!
In the library at Konigsberg there are twenty books
bound in silver. Very far short of all this, however,
there is in this country an unreached point of excellence
in binding, and great opening for an ambitious
bookbinder to distinguish himself. Sat Verbum sapienti.

Rarity in books is such a difficult thing to define,
that a taste for it easily degenerates into absurdity.
The mania is very common, but there is a mania for
books according to their rare value to read, and a
mania for books valuable by accidental circumstances
—such as coming from a particular press, being made
of singular materials, having once belonged to a celebrated
library, or being the only ones of their kind.
In Italy they used to print valuable books on blue paper;
in France on rose-colored paper, and in Germany
on yellow or green; and copies of these are much
sought after now. Bibliomaniacs value those printed
on large paper with wide margin. In the advertisement
of rare books, you often see the phrase, “a tall
copy.” Longman had a single copy printed of
“Strutt's Dictionary of Engravers,” illustrated and
embellished at the cost of ten thousand dollars! The
copy sold, I do not know to what book-madman—but
his name should be linked in history to that of the
priest in Spain, who murdered three men to get possession
of their libraries!

By a turn of fortune not worth describing, Mr.
Goggins, a shipchandler, became suddenly a millionaire.
His half-score of grown-up children spread
themselves at once to their new dimensions, and after
a preliminary flourish at home, the whole family embarked
for foreign travel. They remained but a fortnight
in England—none in that land walking often invisible.
Germany seemed to the shipchandler a
“rubbishy” country, and Italy “very small beer,” and,
after a short residence in Paris, that gay capital was
pronounced the Paradise of money's worth, and there
the Gogginses took up their abode. To the apprehension
of most of their acquaintance, Mr. Goggins
was now in a speedy and fair way to return to his
blocks and oakum, poorer for his fortune. No stint
seemed put upon the extravagance of sons or daughters,
and in dress and equipage their separate displays
and establishments became the marvel of Paris. In
Goggins himself there was for awhile no great change
of exterior. His constitutional hardness of character
seemed in no way disturbed or embellished by the
splendors he controlled. He gave way to usages and
etiquette with patient facility, bowed through the receptions
at his first parties with imperturbable propriety,
and was voted stolid and wooden by the gay
world flaunting at his expense.

In the second year of his Parisian life, however,
Goggins took the reins gradually into his own hands.
He dismissed his sharp French butler, who had made
hitherto all the household bargains, and, promoting
to the servile part of his office an inferior domestic,
dull and zealous, he took the accounts into his own
hands, and exacted, of all the tradespeople he patronized,
schedules of their wares in English, and their
bills made equally comprehensible. Pocketing thus
the butler's perquisite, he reduced the charges of that
department one half, beside considerably improving
the quality of the articles purchased. Rejecting,

then, the intermediate offices of lease-agents and
hommes d'affaires, he advertised in Galignani, in good
plain English, for the most luxurious house in a certain
fashionable quarter, conducted the bargain by a
correspondence in English, and finally procured it at
a large abatement, at least, from prices paid by millionaires.
He advertised in the same way for proposals
to furnish his house on the most sumptuous
scale, and in the prevailing fashion, and by dint of sitting
quietly in his office and compelling everything to
reach him through the medium of English manuscript,
he created a palace fit for an emperor, by fair
competition among the tradesmen and upholsterers,
and at a cost by no means ruinous. He advertised in
the same way for a competent man of taste to oversee
the embellishments in progress, and, when complete,
the “Hotel Goggins” was quite the best thing of its
kind in Paris, and was looked upon as the “folly” of
the ruined lessee. With this groundwork for display,
Mr. Goggins turned his attention to the ways and
means of balls and dinners, concerts and breakfast,
and having acquired a name for large expenditure, he
profited considerably by the emulation of cooks and
purveyors for the material, and privately made use of
the saroir faire of a reduced count or two who, for a
“trifling consideration,” willingly undertook the manner
of the entertainments. He applied the same sagacious
system of commissariat to the supplying of
the multifarious wants of his children, economizing
at the same time that he enhanced the luxury of their
indulgences, and the Gogginses soon began to excite
other feelings than contempt. Their equipages (the
production of the united taste of ruined spendthrifts)
outshone the most sumptuous of the embassies; their
balls were of unexceptionable magnificence, their dinners
more recherché than profuse. How they should
come by their elegance was a mystery that did not lessen
their consequence, and so the Gogginses mounted
to the difficult eminence of Parisian fashion—the
plain business-tact of a shipchandler their mysterious
stepping-stone.

Perhaps we should give more credit to this faculty
in Goggins. It is possibly not far removed from the
genius of a great financier or eminent state-treasurer.
It is the power of coming directly at values and ridding
them of their “riders”—of getting for less, what
others, from want of penetration, get for more. I am
inclined to think Goggins would have been quite as
successful in any other field of calculation, and one
instance of a very different application of his reasoning
powers would go to favor the belief.

While in Italy, he employed a celebrated but improvident
artist to paint a picture, the subject of
which was a certain event of rather an humble character,
in which he had been an actor. The picture
was to be finished at a certain time, and at the urgent
plea of the artist, the money was advanced. The
time expired and the picture was not sent home, and
the forfeited bond of the artist was accordingly put in
suit. The delinquent, who had not thought twice of
the subject, addressed one or two notes of remonstrance
to his summary employer, and receiving no
reply, and the law crowding very closely upon his
heels, he called upon Goggins and appealed, among
other arguments, to the difference in their circumstances,
and the indulgent pity due from rich to poor.

“Where do you dine to day?” asked Goggins.

“To-day—let me see—Monday—I dine with Lady
—.”

(The artist, as Goggins knew, was a favorite in the
best society in Florence.)

“And where did you dine yesterday?”

“Yesterday—hum—yesterday I dined with Sir
George —. No! I breakfasted with Sir George,
and dined with the grand chamberlain. Excuse me!
I have so many engagements—”

“Ah!—and you are never at a loss for a dinner or
a breakfast!”

The artist smiled. “No!”

“Are you well lodged?”

“Yes—on the Arno.”

“And well clad, I see.”

(The painter was rather a dandy, withal.)

“Well, sir!” said Goggins, folding up his arms, and
looking sterner than before, “you have, as far as I
can understand it, every luxury and comfort which a
fortune could procure you, and none of the care and
trouble of a fortune, and you enjoy these advantages
by a claim which is not liable to bankruptcy, nor to
be squandered, nor burnt—without the slightest anxiety,
in short.”

The artist assented.

“So far, there is no important difference in our
worldly condition, except that I have this anxiety and
trouble, and am liable to these very casualties.”

Goggins paused, and the painter nodded again.

“And now, sir, over and above this, what would
you take to exchange with me the esteem in which
we are severally held—you to become the rich, uneducated,
and plain Simon Goggins, and I to possess
your genius, your elevated tastes, and the praise and
fame which these procure you?”

The artist turned uneasily on his heels.

“No, sir!” continued Goggins, “you are not a man
to be pitied, and least of all by me. And I don't pity
you, sir. And what's more, you shall paint that picture,
sir, or go to prison. Good morning, sir!”

And the result was a painting, finished in three
days, and one of the master-pieces of that accomplished
painter, for he embodied, in the figure and
face of Goggins, the character which he had struck
out so unexpectedly—retaining the millionaire's friendship
and patronage, though never again venturing to
trifle with his engagements.

Music seems to be the passion of the hour in New-York.
Wallack had a house that would hardly pay
expenses last night—even the Ravels have somewhat
fallen off as they were going off—while Damoreau,
Wallace, and the “Hutchinson family,” draw well.
The latter are four children of a New Hampshire
patriarch—(four out of fifteen, as they say in an autobiographical
medley which they sing)—and having
been born with a singular natural talent for music,
they are turning it to account in a musical tour.
There are three brothers under twenty years of age,
and a very young sister. Their voices are good (particularly
the girl's, who is about fourteen), and they
confine themselves to simple melody, such as would
suit the least practised ear, while it can not fail, from
the truth and expression with which they sing, to
please the most fastidious. Their concerts are exceedingly
enjoyable.

Mrs. Sutton, well known everywhere as a most
charming singer, is about to perform a short engagement
as a prima donna to the Italian company at Niblo's.
I wish the success of the experiment might
bring Castellan and Cinti Damoreau upon the stage.
The latter, by the way, is the daughter of a French
door-porter, and might easily have been “the grave
of her deserving,” but for her perseverance and ambition.
Maroncelli is preparing a memoir of her, under
her own direction.

There is a particular season of the year (this is it)
when, as most people know, the law forbids the killing
and vending of certain game—the zest of illegality, of
course, giving great flavor to the birds, and, of course,
more than nullifying the law. Not the least in connexion

with this remark—I was very much astonished
a day or two since, dining with a friend at a neighboring
hotel, to find fairly printed in the bill of fare,
“Second Course—Roast Owls.” On the succeeding
day, at another table, I was startled with the enrolment
of a dish called “Just Try Me”—which, on experiment,
I found to be a bird—(with an egg-shaped
breast, and a very long bill thrust through it)—decently
laid on its back, and covered with a pork apron! The
latter name seemed very much to the point, and explained
the bird's errand. The former I was puzzled
with—but knowing the landlord of that hotel to be
very much ultra crepidam, I was induced to look into
ornithology for his meaning. I find that the peculiarity
of the owl is “an external toe which can be turned
behind at pleasure”—symbolical of the perverted beak
of the woodcock (as well as the making of false tracks
to evade the law), and serving in the same manner to
prepare an orifice for the sauce of lemon-juice and
cayenne. When this man cozens, you see, he cozens
with edifying knowledge and discretion.

Appleton is publishing a very neat and handsome
edition of valuable religious books. Among them is
the Disce Vivere of Sutton, prebend of Westminster,
in 1626—one of the choicest specimens of rich and
pregnant English that I have lately seen. Two sentences
from his preface will give you an idea of his
style, in which every word seems to drive a nail:—

“If to live were for no other but to draw in and to
breathe out the soft air, as the wise man speaketh, a
needless labor were it, good Christian reader, to lay
down any instructions to the world of `learning to
live;' for this is done naturally, both of men and
beasts, without any teaching or learning.

“If to live were no other but to cast about for
the favor and riches of the world, as some men are
wont to call it, the way to live, then would it soon follow,
the greater Machiavellians, the better livers.
Somewhat more than is required to live Christianly
than so, and that all shall one day find, than either
drawing in and breathing out the soft air, or the plotting
to compass the pleasures and profits of the world.”

A cold-water procession is going under my window
at this moment, in a very propitious shower of rain.
From my elevated look-out, the long line of umbrellas,
two and two, gives the street the dress look of a
fashionable Taglioni coat, with two rows of big buttons
down the middle. I noticed yesterday, by the
way, a most stalwart and gallant-looking company of
firemen, in an undress military uniform, marching out
for exercise at the target. Everything about them
was all right, except that their guests of honor were
placed before instead of behind—making of it a prisoner's
guard instead of a military escort.

I see criticised, in one or two papers, a poem which
was sent to me some time since as “printed, not published,”
called “Donna Florida,” by Mr. Simms, the
author of Southern Passages, &c. It is in the stanza,
and intended as an imitation of “Don Juan.” The
author says, in his preface, that he fancied “he might
imitate the grace and exceeding felicity of expression
in that unhappy performance—its playfulness, and
possibly its wit—without falling into its licentiousness
of utterance and malignity of mood. How he
has succeded in this object, it would not be becoming
in him to inquire.” One of the easiest things fancied
possible, and one of the most difficult to do, is an
imitation of the qualities of that same poem of Don
Juan—and Mr. Simms, who has talent enough when
he stumbles on his right vein, has made a woful mistake
as to his capabilities for this. Two extracts will
show his idea of the slap-dash-ery vein:—

And, speaking of woman again:—

We should have disclaimed, in giving the portrait
of the most ornate man of modern times, all approbation
of dandyism—(as yet)—on this side the water.
Dandyism, in the abstract, we delight in, glorify, and
rejoice over. But it has its scenery and its appertainages.
A dandy, in place, is the foreground to a picture—the
forward star of a troop untelescoped by the
vulgar—the embroidered flower on the veil before a
life of mystery. His superior elegance is like the
gold edge of a cloud unfathomable; or (to come to
earth) like the soldier's uniform—tinsel but for its
association with force and glory. What were the
dandies of the firmament, for example—(comets)—
without those uninterpretable tails!

But—to alight in Broadway.

A dandy indigenous to New York has no back-ground—no
untelescoped associations or connexions
—no power and glory—and no uninterpretable tail.
He is like a docked comet. He is like Tom Fool in
a uniform bought at the pawnbroker's. He is a label
on an empty bottle. Count D'Orsay drives by you in
the park, and a long ancestry of titled soldiers and
courtiers, and a present life of impenetrable scenery
and luxury untold, arise up for background to his cab
and tiger. Mr. James Jessamy drives by you in
Broadway, and you know at what trade his glory was
manufactured, and you know “what he does of an
evening,” and you know his “mechanical rogues” of
relations, the tailor who made him, the hatter who
thatched him, and the baker who sold him gingerbread
when a boy. You admire, or envy, D'Orsay, as you
happen to be constituted—but you laugh, you scarce
know why, at Mr. Jessamy. The latter, perhaps, has
the better right to his toggery and turn-out; but still
you laugh!

Very far short of dandyism, however, lies the point
of dressing judiciously—dressing, that is to say, so as
to make the most of your personal advantages. The
favor of women is of course the first of lifetime ambitions,
and the dear tyrants have a weakness for the exterior.
“Tu as du remarquer,” says Balzac; “si
toutefois tu es capable d'observer un fait moral, que la
femme aime le fat. Sais tu pourquoi la femme aime le
fat? Mon ami! les fats sont les seuls hommes qui
aient soin d'eux mêmes!” And there are ladies, even
on this plain side of the water, who adore a dandy, and
of course there are cases where the dread laugh (mentioned
at the close of the preceding paragraph) must
be braved to aid a particular magnetism. If your
dandy be a sensible man, and past the moulting age,
depend upon it he is ticketed for some two eyes only,
and can afford, for a consideration he has, to let “the
spirits of the wise sit in the clouds,” &c. Had Count
D'Orsay been born in Common-Council-dom and
gone home, sometimes by the Waverley line, sometimes
by the Knickerbocker, he never would have
been a dandy—(except, at least, for a motive paramount

to ridicule)—though, with his superb person,
he could hardly have dressed cleanly without being
called a fop by the shallow. D'Orsay is a man of
sense, and knows too much to open the public oyster
with his private razor. So don't come to America,
dear D'Orsay! Stay among your belongings—your

Stay where

Yet, if you should take the whim to come over the
water, count, I need scarce suggest to your good
sense that you had best come with a consignment of
buttons from Brummagem!

A gentleman in Saco has taken upon himself some
pains and postage to ask “our” two portraits served
up in two plates. We don't think the public would
stand it. That bold man, Mr. Graham, is to show an
outline of one of us in his February number, and then
anybody can have us, tale and all, for two shillings—a
cheap article, we must say! But we are surprised to
get this petition from Saco! We “come from” close-by-there,
and it strikes us our likeness would go east
with the welcome of coals to Newcastle. Doubtless
there are more like us in the same soil. We remember
hanging over a bridge in Saco half one moonlight
night (somewhere in our fourteenth year), and if rivers
have any memory or gratitude for admiration, our
likeness will be found in the water where we left it.

We wish our contributors would do us the favor
to baptize their own bantlings. Their delegation of
godfathership costs us sometimes a five minutes'
thought over a proofsheet while the press is waiting,
and time is “tin.” But, by the way, be particular in
naming your articles! Old Burton, in his Anatomy
of Melancholy, gives, by way of satire, what we think
an excellent rule (“experto crede Roberto”), and we
will lend it you for your uses: “It is a kind of policy
in these days to prefix a fantastical title to a book
which is to be sold; for, as larks come down to a day-net,
many vain readers will stand gazing like silly passengers
at an antic picture in a painter's shop, that will
not look at a judicious piece.”

I observe, looking from my window, that the Park
theatre hangs out a large American flag with a tri-color
banner appended to each of the two lower corners
(looking altogether very much like a pair of oriental
trousers), symbolical, probably, of the two arrivals
from France which made yesterday memorable.
The more interesting of these twin events, of course,
was General Bertrand's advent by the Boston boat at
seven; but the one which excited the more interest was
the opening of the winter fashions at “Madame Law
son's, in Park place,” at eight. The latter ceremonial
had been duly heralded for some days previous
by notes addressed to the leaders of fashion, and (as
far as can be known) the secrets of the Graces' unopened
cases had been impartially and unexceptionably
kept. Having “a friend at court,” I had been for
some days invited to witness the effulguration, but
was privately advised that there would be a rush, and
that six in the morning would not be too early to take
a stand upon the steps of the grand milliner in Park
place. Some unfinished business in dream-land obliged
me to waive to the sun the privilege of rising first,
however, and to my misfortune I did not arrive at Park
place till the premices de la mode had been ravished by
the most intrepid first-comers. The street was lined
with carriages, and the house was thronged. On the
staircase we met two or three ladies descending, flushed
with excitement, and murmuring millinery; and on
arriving at the landing on the second floor, the sharp
soprano of the hum within betrayed how even the
sweetest instruments may outrun modulation, played
on with a crescendo troppo furioso. The two saloons of
the second floor were crowded with the ladies of fashion,
and the walls lined all around with a single shelf
covered with snowy damask, on which stood the white
rods supporting the (as yet) brainless, though already
fashionable bonnets. And (begging pardon of Greenwich
and William streets) they were unapproachably
exquisite! There were some forced marriages of
colors among them — some juxtapositions Heaven
would not have ventured upon in bird-millinery—but
the results were happy. The bonnets are small, and
would probably divide, for the nose, a perpendicular
rain-drop; and the shape of the front edge would be
defined by the shadow on the wall of an egg truncated
at the smaller end—the choice of colors riotously
uncontrollable. Feathers, ruinous feathers, are absolutely
indispensable. No fashion this winter in a bonnet
without feathers—dyed feathers harmonious with
the satin. The plush bonnets were the first seized
on. Drab satin with very gay fineries, was the color
most complimented. The prices varied from twenty-two
dollars to fifty. It was very charming to see so
many pretty women trying on so many pretty bonnets,
and I feared that the two or three venturesome gentlemen
present might be seized upon as intruders
upon vestal mysteries; but, thanks to the “vestalis
maxima,” Miss Lawson, we escaped with credit.

I have seen General Bertrand several times. He is
of a very noble presence, though, like Napoleon, below
the middle height. His features express honesty,
firmness, and rapid intelligence—the latter expression
aided by eyes of unusual brilliancy. His hair is
quite white. He is a man of few words, very collected,
but withal very courteous. These, at least, are
my impressions of him.

It is curious to remark, how the burning of our fingers
with Dickens makes us hold back from the fire
of enthusiastic receptions. If the general had been
ante instead of post-Dickens, he would have been
overwhelmed with popular acclamation. As it is, the
dues of honor are only paid à rigeur. One or two
brigades of artillery are ordered out to-morrow to escort
the general on his rounds to visit the objects of
curiosity, and the different staffs accompany him to
the theatre in the evening. This morning he is visiting
the fair of the Institute. The beautiful company
of the Life Guards made him a guest of honor at
their dinner last evening. Mr. Stetson, of the Astor
(who gave the dinner on his appointment as an officer
in the corps), complimented General Bertrand very
felicitously in his speech, and the applause was rapturous.
Stetson is naturally an “orator, as Brutus

is,” and has acquitted himself on several such occasions
with great credit.

I visited, the other evening, the beautiful rooms of
the Mercantile Library Association, and was exceedingly
interested in the history of its foundation and
progress. An advertisement expressing “a call for a
meeting of clerks” was the first germ. The paper
containing this was preserved and presented to the association
by William Wood, of Canandaigua, a very
zealous benefactor of the institute. It has at present
a library of nearly twenty thousand volumes, and it
has four thousand members. The late report of the
librarian shows that eight times the number of volumes
is annually taken from the library—an activity of use
for a library almost unparalleled. It is, without doubt,
one of the most useful institutions of the country, and
donations to it of books or money would be admirably
well bestowed.

Dr. Lardner has grown very much on the public
esteem in his last visit to New York. His clear, simple,
graphic talent, making abstruse science easy and
comprehensible, has never been equalled by another
lecturer.

Much honor and glory to the Boston publishers for
the beauty of their editions, and the credit (not small)
which that brings to this country. The most exquisite
edition of the exquisite songs of inspired Barry
Cornwall, published by Ticknor, should be between
every four walls where resides the relish for poetry or
taste in a book. It is a gem of poetry set in a gem
of printing, and most fit for a loving man's gift to a
sensible woman.

I find that “doctors differ” about Macready; and
the graphic and gay correspondent of the Providence
Journal, more particularly, gives as his great excellence,
that you forget the man in the character he
plays—just what I do not think. Heaven, it seems to
me, has done so little, and Macready so much, in
making himself the actor he is, that he deserves infinite
credit, and, as a piece of mechanism, his playing
is a fine thing to me, though more curious than overcoming.
Young Wheatley has turned over quite a
golden leaf of opinion with his personation of Ulric,
a very fine part in Byron's play of Werner.

I saw yesterday, among the daguerreotypes of
Chilton & Edwards, a most perfect one of Dr. Linn,
whose death was mentioned in a late paper. The value
of these things struck me forcibly—for to any one
who had ever seen the fine countenance of Dr. Linn,
this is a perfect remembrancer. They color them
skilfully now, and the gentlemen I speak of particularly
(Chilton & Edwards, who are to have a room in
the Capitol this winter), are daily making improvements
in the art. Some witty man corrupts the word
into derogatory-types, but they are derogatory no
longer.

We are likely to know something of Mexico between
the three authors who are about publishing
books on the subject, and the charming book of Madame
Calderon. Mr. Prescott's Mexico will of course
be a classic. Brantz Mayer and Kendall are up to
their elbows in proofsheets—both producing works
on Mexico, and both excellent writers.

I never saw, in New York, an audience of better
quality, for so large a quantity, than was assembled to
welcome the perfected Cinti. I presume there were
few “ears polite” anywhere else. At a dollar the
pair (long and short alike), Madame must have de
lighted these fastidious organs to the amount of five
thousand francs, to be diminished only by the expense
of room-light and accompaniment—a transmutation
of “evening wind,” that throws Bryant's coinage of
that commodity quite into the shade.

Mr. Timm (as is wise and usual) played the audience
into tune with an overture, and then the screen
gave up its prima donna—Madame Cinti Damoreau
in pink satin—three large roses on her breast—the
dress, air, and graces of 'teens, the composure, plentitude,
and, alas! the parenthesized smile of 'ties.
Madame Cinti has been a good animal resemblance
of the beautiful Mrs. Norton. The general mould
of the face, and the low forehead, the dark hair, and
the unfathomable dark eyes, are like in each to the
other.

With a trepidation which lasted only through the
first bar, she commenced the aria of “Fatal Goffredo”
(from Donisette's opera of Torquato Tasso), and
sang it to the breathless delight of the audience. No
such finished music has ever been breathed before
upon American air, I am persuaded. With not a
fourth of the power and volume of Castellan, and
none of the passion-lava of Malibran, she reaches a
finer fibre of the ear than either. The quality of her
voice is exceedingly sweet, and the mingled liquidness
and truth of her chromatics could never have
been exceeded. The ladder of harmony seemed
built a round or two nearer to heaven by her delicious
music.

Madame Damoreau, in the beginning of her career,
was hissed from the French stage for singing false—a
lesson in study and perseverance which I wish could
be laid softly into the memory of Castellan. The latter
wonderfully-organized creature, with anything like
the same skill, would be the world's queen of song.
The New Orleans people, by-the-way, who are Parisians
in their nice appreciation of operatic talent,
consider Castellan a remarkable actress; and so great
was the enthusiasm for her there, that the necessary
sum to engage her was made up by private subscription.
It is several thousand pities, at least, that, in
the first capital of the country, there is not operatic
enthusiasm enough to bring this dormant genius upon
the stage.

Monsieur Artot, who accompanies Madame Damoreau
in her tour, alternated performances with her.
He is a very gentlemanly-looking young man, with a
figure that would make a very good case for his own
violin—a very long neck and a very small waist—and
he plays with execution enough for all practical purposes,
but with taste unsurpassed. Wallace knows
several heavens of the violin to which Monsieur Artot
has not yet ascended, but the latter knows enough to
give all the pleasure which that instrument can give
to ordinary listeners. The audience applauded Monsieur
Artot very long and loudly. I think, by-the-way,
that a series of musical contentions between
Wallace and Castellan “on the first part,” and Artot
and Cinti “on the second,” would be a most charming
and exciting tournament.

Madame Damoreau had the good sense not to desire
a musical contention with a performance on the
paving-stones by cabs and omnibuses, and the street
in front of Washington Hall was coated with tan.

There seems to be a kind of appendix-dawn of literature
in Italy. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella
is about being published at Florence in the Italian
translation. Sparks's Life of Washington, translated
by a young Neapolitan, is also nearly ready. A society
has been formed at Florence, called Societa Editrice
Florentina, for the publication of translations of
the best foreign works, including those of American

literature. The Marquis Gino Capponi, one of the
most prominent names in Florentine history, has put
our country under obligation by his enthusiasm for
our literature, and his aid to the publication of the
works I have just mentioned. He is himself a remarkable
scholar. Our consul at Rome, Mr. George
Greene, has had a large agency in the same cause.
Mr. Greene, by-the-way, has devoted a labor of some
years to a history of Italy, which is still in progress.
He, as is known very well, is a credit to the talent
and scholarship of our country. The Marquis Capponi
has furnished Mr. Prescott with materials for
his history of Philip II.

Weir's picture of the “Embarcation” is now exhibiting
to throngs of admirers at the Society Library.
Its wonderful ingenuity and beauty of grouping,
and the variety and individuality of the faces of the
pilgrim company, are the excellences most dwelt upon.
I really must venture to record an opinion expressed
of this picture by Inman—who (as the artist of a rival-panel
in the Rotunda, and hindered in his work
by ill-health and other obstacles) is in a position to
speak invidiously, if he were capable of envy. Inman
was asked what he thought of it. “It is a glorious
picture,” he replied, “and its faults, if it has
them, are comparatively so trifling, that it would be
ungenerous to mention them.” And if that speech
did not come from a noble heart, I have read of such
things with slender profit to my judgment.

Mr. “Newbegin” must excuse us. We like grammar
even in a pun. His night-ride in the omnibus is
pretty fair, but it wont do to jolt pronouns out of
place. That

would shock our friend Wright into a new edition of
“Exercises.”

There is but one good couplet in “Tiskins's” communication:—

but his rhythm grounds at the overslaugh. He must
throw over his ballast of consonants, before his metrecraft
will swim buoyant enough to pass.

One of the Sunday critics (we hope he “got to
press” soon enough to have leisure for confession)
sneers at “one of us” for “quoting nothing” of Morris's
in our critique of his songs. As if it were necessary
in a periodical where Morris makes, of everything
he writes, a Corinthian capital for a column!
Truly the public are not likely to die in ignorance of
songs which stand on every piano-rack in the country,
and are sung in every concert-room and theatre, and
are being endlessly copied. Besides, we believe we
can tell “what manner of thing is your crocodile,”
without bringing the monster bodily in. How the
folks find fault with us! We shall really have to proclaim
ourselves an “object,” and

or, better still, we shall be driven to get up a crusade
against the whip-poor-willises, and “bring up those
that shall try what mettle there is in orange-tawny.”

To the kind old lady who “knit us a pair of stockings
after reading some poetry” of ours, but “was
afraid to send them, and gave them to a beggar,” we
must say, in the words of the old ballad,

So, thanks for the good will, dear madam, and pray
knit us a pair of mittens against we make our fortune
and turn farmer.

“Aunt Charity” wishes us to write an article on
the “love of the intellect, and the possibility of a tender
affection for the old.” We will tell you a little
story out of an old book: “It is reported of Magdalen,
queen of France, that walking forth, an evening,
with her ladies, she spied Monsieur Alanus, one of
the king's chaplains, an old hard-favored man, fast
asleep in a bower, and kissed him sweetly. When
the ladies laughed at her for it, she replied that it was
not his person she did embrace, but, with a Platonic
love, the divine beauty of his soul.”

The up-town door-plates and bell-handles are shining
once more, and open shutters, clean windows,
and parted curtains, acknowledge, at last, the reluctant
truth, that the fashionables have returned from
travel, and are open to pasteboard and personal call.
The ice has been broken with a “jam,” echoed by
one musical soirée, and now—vogue la galêre till the
ice melts again! There is a talk that this is to be
more an intellectual winter than the last—more recitations,
more tableaux vivants, more conversaziones,
more finding and producing of new lions in the lamb-kingdom
of poetry. There is also a murmur—a
“shadow cast before”—of the “coming out” of a
very extraordinary beauty, whose name and educational
cocoon are wrapt in profound mystery. As the
rumor started about a week since, and as “pretty
moths” are but twenty days in their chrysalis, we may
expect the emergence of her bright wings to light in
about a fortnight. She is said to be moulded after
the (supposed) lost type of the seven belles of Philadelphia,
whose culmination occurred under the autocracy
of Jackson—eyes furnished by Juno, mouth
by Hebe, and teeth and feet by the smaller fairies.
No corresponding Hyperion that I can hear of.

There is great fluttering and dismay among the
Bowery girls and the less alert followers of the fashions.
The remarkable splendor of the “spring goods,”
and the really beautiful and becoming style of the
new fabrics, left no doubt in most minds that these
were to be “the mode.” The autumn pin-moneys
of all the moderately “established” ladies and their
daughters “went the way of all” earnings accordingly,
and Broadway grew as splendid as a tulip-bed, bright
as the bazar of Smyrna. The exclusives were at
their invisible period meanwhile, but, from their carriages,
they probably saw “what was worn.” Down
dropped the mercury of the mode-ometer to extreme
simplicity! The few ladies who appeared, crossing
the pavement from their equipages to the shops, were
dressed in quiet silks, costly and neat, and the nameless
and the “unnamed,” at the same moment, seemed
to flaunt by in the choicest and gayest of the new
patterns. Studied simplicity, out of doors at least, is
high fashion now, and those who can not afford to
convert their new purchases into chair-covers and
bed-curtains, are left stranded, as it were, on a petrified
rainbow.

Ten thousand copies of the “Mysteries of Paris”
have been poured into our caldron of morals by a
single press in this city, and probably fifty thousand
will be circulated altogether. It is a very exciting
book, and at this moment making a great noise. The
translators are busily at work on other saleables of
French literature, and there will soon be little left unknown
of the arcana of vice. Eugene Sue, the author
of the “Mysteries of Paris,” is a connoisseur of
pleasure; and when I saw him, ten years ago, was an
elegant voluptuary of the first water. He was just
then creeping through the crust of the Chaussée
d'Antin into the more exclusive sphere of the Fau
bourg St. Germain—fat, good-looking, and thirty-two.
He is, by this time, “sloped” from his meridian, and
apparently turning his experiences into commodity.
I observe that he borrows my name for a wicked Florida
planter, who misuses a lady of color—a reproach
which I trust will not stick to “us.”

The publishers hang back from American fictions
now-a-days, possibly finding the attention of the reading-public
occupied with the more highly-spiced productions
of the class just alluded to, and it is impossible
to induce them to give anything for—hardly, indeed
to look at—an indigenous manuscript. Accident
threw into my hands, a few days ago, a novel
which had lain for some time unread in a publisher's
drawer, and after reading a few chapters I became
convinced that it was far above the average of modern
English novels, and every way worthy of publication.
It was entitled “The Domine's Daughter,” by Adam
Mundiver, Esq., and would have lain forgotten and
unexamined till doomsday, but for a friendly Orpheus
who made it his Eurydice and went to Lethe after it.
Such a book should surely represent money in a
country where literature is acknowledged.

I very seldom can find it in my backbone to sit out
a five-act play, but I saw Macready's “Richelieu,”
and I have seen Forrest's, throughout. Forrest began
rather ineffectively, probably disturbed by the defence
he was obliged to make against an aspersion,
before the play commenced. He soon warmed into it,
however, and, to my thinking, played the character
far better than Macready. The details—the imitation
of decrepitude—the posturing and walking the
stage—were better done by Macready; but the passion
of the play, the expression, the transfusion of
actor to character, the illusion, the effect—these were
all vastly better achieved by Forrest. A line drawn
across the tops of Macready's “points” would leave
Forrest below in all matters of detail, but it would
only cut the base of the latter's pyramids of passion.
Forrest runs sometimes into the melo-dramatic, seduced
by the “way it takes,” but he has fine genius,
and if he played only to audiences of “good discretion,”
he would (or could) satisfy the most fastidious.

Wallack's friends, myself among the number, have
been annoyed at the many contretemps which have
conspired to make his latter engagement at the Park
so unsatisfactory. In genteel comedy, of which he
is the master-player now on the stage, he was unable
to do anything, from the lack of materials in that
stock-company for a cast; and, indeed, he played always
at the disadvantage of the one free horse in a
slow team. Mr. and Mrs. Brougham (both first-rate
players of high comedy, and the latter a very beautiful
and effective woman, into the bargain) might have
been engaged at the Park for the winter with great
ease, and then we might have seen (what is the most
agreeable kind of theatricals) comedies well cast and
played. I hope there will be some combination
among the actors to give us a “go,” with a wheel
with more than one spoke in it, and then we might
have Wallack as he should be—a dramatic gem in
proper setting.

I am not sure that I shall be able to make out a letter
this morning, or, if I do, it will be in spite of an
accompaniment of military music. My friend General
Morris has his battalions in arms for review, and
my pen “marks time,” as if its forked nib were under
the General's orders—(and as, perhaps, it should be,
coming from a very military bird, whose father's feathers
have seen service under him).

Apropos of procession, by-the-way, I have had a

moderate laugh at the effect of a typographical blunder
in Dr. Julius's German edition of his travels in
this country. The doctor is giving an account of an
abolition procession in Cincinnati, and he records in
English the inscriptions on the banners. One, he
says, had the reproachful and pathetic sentiment:
“Although our shins are black our souls are white.”
For “shins” read skins.

The sultan of the Comoro islands has addressed a
letter to a gentleman in Wall street, a translation of
which by a very accomplished and self-taught linguist
(Mr. Cotheal), may be amusing to your readers.
The Comoro isles, as you know, lie in the Indian
ocean, off the north end of Madagascar, and are inhabited
by a very friendly race of Mohammedan
Arabs. The king resides in Johanna, the largest of
the islands, and (in London slang) he is a slap-up old
trader, getting ivory and gold-dust from Madagascar,
and swapping these and his cows, pigs, and poultry,
for Lowell factory-stuffs, or any other freight of
American vessels. He writes a very worshipful letter:—

“To the American city of New York: For the beloved
sheikh Aaron H. Palmer, No. 49 Wall street.
May Allah be his guide! Amen! Badooh!

“By the grace of the Most High:

“To the dearest, the most glorious, the most genererous
sheikh Aaron H. Palmer, the honored, the exalted,
the magnificent, the contented. May Allah,
the Most High, be his guide! Amen!

“Now, after offering thee honor and protection from
the Henzooanee city (Johanna) and its inhabitants,
this is what I tell thee. Thy noble letter arrived and
we read it. Thy friend understood its contents. May
Allah reward thee well! Thou sayest in thy letter
that thou desirest selling and buying in our land, and
that thou wishest friendship with us. Thou art welcome.
We thank thee, and accept thy offer. Thou
didst tell us that we should advise thee of anything that
we should need from thee. Again we thank thee,
and inform thee that thou mayest send to us a person
on thy part that shall dwell in the Henzooanee country.
In order that thy business may be complete, a
shop of the merchants, and everything that there is
in the country, shall be made ready, on our part, if it
please God. Whatever shall be wanted in these regions
shall be paid for on delivery.

“I and all my Henzooanee tribes request that thou
unite us with the American tribes in friendship and
good-fellowship, like as we are united with the English,
and we will serve you all as we serve them.
Now, we have conceived here a great desire for the
American tribes. Tell them to send us their letters,
or a man-of-war-ship[1] on their part, and we will bind
ourselves by a binding treaty. Now, the thing we
need and want from thee are sealed letters of advice
for our assurance; and in order that thou mayest
know that this letter is from us, we stamp it with our
seal. We request that thou send us all kinds of linen
goods and cottons, both white, and brown, and fine
stripes, and all kinds of woollen cloths; and ten bedsteads
and sixty chairs; all kinds of glass; lamps,
large and small, and some for placing on the table;
and fine silk handkerchiefs. This is what we tell
thee. Now salutation and prosperity be with thee for
ever!

“Dated the 10th of the month of Dool Heggeh,
1252 (corresponding to about the 16th of March,
1837).

“From thy friend the sooltan the sublime, son of
the sooltan, Abd-Allah the sublime, Shirazy.”

As a long lesson of civilization, I have advised my
friend Palmer, “the magnificent, the contented,” to
send out to his friend, the sultan of the Comoros, a
youth accomplished in compounding the following
drinks (copied from the bill of fare of a new restaurant
in Boston):—

“Plain mint-julep, fancy do., mixed do., peach do.,
orange do., pineapple do., claret do., capped do.,
strawberry do., arrack do., racehorse do. Sherry-cobbler,
rochelle do., arrack do., peach do., claret do.,
Tip-and-Ty, fiscal agent, veto, I. O. U., Tippe-Na-Pecco,
moral suasion, vox-populi, ne-plus-ultra,
Shambro, pig-and-whistle, citronella jam, egg-nog,
Sargent, silver-top, poor-man's punch, arrack-punch,
iced punch, spiced punch, epicure's punch, milk-punch,
peach-punch, Jewett's fancy, deacon, exchange,
stone-wall, Virginia fancy, Knickerbocker,
smasher, floater, sifter, soda-punch, soda, mead, mulled
wines of all descriptions.”

After this array of compounds, I think the vexed
question of the ingredients of Falstaff's sack must
sink into insignificance. I understand that a shop is
opened in the Strand, London, for the sale of these
potations—one instance, at least, of a vice of civilization
going eastward. We must wear it for our feather—since
our drinks are the only feature of our country
for which Dickens gives us unqualified praise.

The “life-preserving coffin,” lately exhibited at the
fair of the Institute, is so constructed as to fly open
with the least stir of the occupant, and made as comfortable
within as if intended for a temporary lodging.
The proprietor recommends (which, indeed, it would
be useless without) a corresponding facility of exit
from the vault, and arrangements for privacy, light,
and fresh air—in short, all that would be agreeable to
the revenant on first waking. Not being, myself, a
person wholly incapable of changing my mind, I felt,
for the first time in my life, some little alarm as to the
frequency of trance or suspended animation, and seeing
a coffin-shop near Niblo's, I ventured to call on
the proprietor (Mr. D—, a most respectable undertaker)
and make a few inquiries. Mr. D. buries from
one to three persons a day, averaging from six to eight
hundred annually. He has never been called upon to
inter the same gentleman twice, in a professional
practice of many years. He has seen a great number
of coffins reopened, and never a sign of the person's
having moved, except by sliding in bringing down
stairs. I mentioned to him an instance that came to
my own knowledge, of a young lady, who was found
turned upon her face—disinterred the day after her
burial, to be shown to a relative. But even this, he
thought, was the result of rude handling of the coffin.
Mr. D. seemed incredulous as to any modern instance
of burial alive. He had spent much time and money,
however, in experiments to keep people dead. He
thought that in an exhausted receiver, made of an iron
cylinder, to resist the pressure of the air, the body
could be kept unchanged for fifty years, and that, immersed
in spirits and enclosed in lead, the face would
be recognisable after twenty years. (The process
seems both undesirable and contradictory, by-the-way,
for the posthumous drowning of a man makes his
death sure, and he is kept in spirits to prevent his vegetating—as
he would naturally after decay.)

Incidentally, Mr. D. informed me that a respectable
funeral in New York costs from two hundred to eight
hundred dollars, being rather more expensively done
in New York and Boston than in any other city except
New Orleans (where they say a man may afford to live
who can not afford to die). In Philadelphia they
make the coffin with a sloping roof, which, he remarked,
is inconvenient for packing in vaults, though

it seems accommodated to the one epitaph of the
Romans—sit illi terra levis. They line their coffins
more expensively in Philadelphia than elsewhere—
with satin or velvet instead of flannel—and bury the
dead in silk stockings and white gloves. We have
not yet arrived at the ceremony of hired mourners, as
in England, nor of plumes to the hearse and horses.

Notwithstanding the incredulity of my friend the
undertaker, however, asphyxia, or a suspension of life,
with all the appearance of death, is certified to in
many instances, and carefully provided for in some
countries. In Frankfort, Germany, the dead man is
laid in a well-aired room, and his hand fastened for
three days to a bell-pull. The Romans cut off one
of the fingers before burning the corpse, or otherwise
bestowing it out of sight. The Egyptians made sure
by embalming, and other nations by frequent washing
and anointing. Medical books say we should wait at
least three days in winter and two in summer, before
interring the dead. It has been suggested that there
should be a public officer who should carefully examine
the body and give a certificate, without which
the burial should be illegal.

The embellishment of burial-grounds is one of the
most beautiful and commendable features of our time
and country. There always seemed to me far too
much horror connected with the common idea of
death and burial. The Moravians make flower-gardens
of their graveyards, and inscribe upon the stone
at the head of the buried man the “day he came
hither and the day he went home”—his birthday and
time of death. This is clothing with the proper aspect
an event which is only an unlinking of a chain,
no part of which can decay—the spirit to return to its
fountain and the body to be reproduced in other
forms of life—and it is a curious thing that most
Christians represent death as a frightful skeleton,
while the Greeks, who had no happiness in their hereafter,
painted him as a sleeping child or a beautiful
youth. Death in the East was formerly attributed to
the attachment of a particular deity, who took his
favorite to a better world; to the love of Aurora, if
the death happened in the morning; of Selene, if it
happened at night; of the water-nymphs, if drowned;
of Jupiter, if killed by lightning. The caverns where
the martyrs were laid were called “chambers of repose.”
And this, surely, is the better impression to
give of death to those whose minds are forming.
Query—whether a society for the purpose of embellishing
cemeteries and brightening all the common
surroundings of death and burial would not be worthy
the attention of some philanthropic enthusiast? The
solemnities connected with a future life need not make
the gate to it always so dreadful; and, for one, I
should be content to put the separation of soul and
body on a level with the unlinking of a friendship or
a change of opinion—erecting a cenotaph for either
of the three changes, as the Pythagoreans did to the
memory of those who left their sect. But this is
more an essay than an epistle.

A beautiful printed copy of a “Translation of ten
cantos of Dante's Inferno,” has been sent me. The
translator is Mr. Parsons, of Boston. It is done with
a great deal of scholarship and labor, and an uncommon
felicity of language—all of which, expended on an
original poem, might, with his talent, have produced
something as good as his translation, though not as
good as Dante's Inferno. It strikes me that any
transfer of a work of genius from one language to another—professing
more than a simple rendering of the
meaning and yet giving a deteriorated copy—is a loss
of time and an injury to the original author. Mr.
Parsons has done his translation in double rhyme,
depriving Dante of the beauty of the terza rima, and
at the same time weakening the literalness of the
translation by the fetters of rhyme, and this seems to
me ill-advised. There is no medium, I think, between
a translation of absolute fidelity, and a refusion and
recasting of the subject-matter by a genius almost
equal to the original author; and, after the comparative
failure of Byron at this, Mr. Parsons might hesitate.
I hope he will try something of his own.

A gentleman in New Jersey has sent us some
“Lines on the death of a young lady,” and they express
very natural feelings; but with neither novelty
nor force enough to entitle them to print. He should
be aware, that while grief is new, the most common-place
expression of it seems forcible to the sufferer.
The ear to which

has the gladness in itself, as the wounded heart has in
its wound the eloquence of an old monotone of grief.
If he is disposed to sooth his sorrow by an exercise of
the imagination, however, he should brood upon such
pictures as Shelley draws in the Witch of Atlas:—

“T.,” a Virginian, has one good touch in his “Reminiscence,”

that is to say, if he meant to express the beauty of a
bright eye set in a dusky eyelid—a thing we exceedingly
admire. But the remainder is of a quality
inferior to what he sent us before, and we “put on the
break,” rather than let him go down hill.

“A friend” wishes us to “do our part” toward putting
down the abuses and perversions of criticism.
La! man! you can't reform the age! Besides, criticism
has killed itself by overdoing the matter. Who
judges of a book by a criticism upon it! The best
way is to keep overdoing it—to knock down the bull
the way he is going, not to keep him on his legs by
ineffectual opposition. Nobody is hurt by criticism
now—nobody mended. And what Utopia could
make it better? Coleridge was over-sensitive on the
subject, though he laments the degradation of authors
very eloquently. “In times of old,” he says, “books
were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they
next became venerable preceptors; they then descended
to the rank of instructive friends; and, as
their numbers increased, they sunk still lower to that
of entertaining companions; and, at present, they
seem degraded into culprits, who hold up their hands
at the bar of every self-elected judge who chooses to
write from humor or interest, enmity or arrogance.”

That our leaf

we have long known and often lamented. There was
a good horse-jockey spoiled, in the making a poet of
us, and we took to the swing of an axe like a tadpole
to swimming. But we were not aware that we were
appreciated. Some man, who sees through our poetic
visor, writes thus to the “Ohio Statesman”:—

“The Rev. Mr. Maffit is in town, exhorting sinners
to repentance. N. P. Willis has taken up his quarters
at the Astor house for the winter, I suppose. I think
Willis would do better in the backwoods than at the
Astor, for he is a stout, ablebodied man, and could
mall his hundred rails a day like a knife. I have no
notion of these overgrown, lazy fellows, laying around
the flash hotels, idling away their precious time.”

First correcting this gentleman's facts and cacology
(as we do not “lay” either eggs or wagers, and
are not “overgrown,” being six feet high to a hair)—
we entirely agree with him as to our original destination.
We are a crack chopster, and for several winters
have fulfilled our destiny with delight—chopping
an avenue through some woods that we thought
belonged to us (which avenue we finished, for somebody
else, before we discovered our mistake), and
never so happy as when up to the knees in snow, and
letting it into the hickories with a woodman's emphasis
and discretion! No steam-boiler ever rejoiced in
its escape-valve, no hawser in the captain's “let go!”
as we have done in swinging our heart round and banging
it into a tree—for the axe was but a vicar and a
vent! “Woodman, spare that tree!” was the bitterest
veto ever laid upon our pleasures.

But we didn't make money at it. We saved almost
three shillings a day (as to a “penny saved” being
“equal to a penny got,” we scorn the improbability),
and the principal profit was the willingness it gave us
to sit still in our chair and scribble. No! we loved
our axe with a passion. We feared it might somehow
turn out to be a sinful indulgence, it was so tempting
and pleasurable—but alas! we make more with a quill—

and while that is the case, the “correspondent of the
Ohio Statesman” must pity, not blame, our exile from
the woods to the Astor. Set us up—give us a clean
deed of Glenmary and its woods, a horse and saddle,
and our old axe—and never boy watched the darkening
of his beard with the delight with which we shall see
thicken again the vanished calluses in our palm! Fie
on a life with neither resistance nor antagonism—with
close air, pent lungs, arms aching, and muscles manacled
and numb! Horses to break and trees to chop
down are Paradise to it—we chance to know—but our
axe is rusty and our quill is busy. Invicem cedunt
dolor et voluptas.

Drums are beating in the Park, and the time and
finery of the industrial classes, who form the industrious
“forces” of New York, are under contribution
to glorify the killer of Tecumseh. Of those who see
the show, probably few will turn over a thought which
the ghost of the old warrior would not consider complimentary
to himself, and so perhaps it is one of those
cases in which two birds are killed with one stone—as
the drum, covered with Zisca's skin, both incited to
battle and commemorated Zisca. Tecumseh, though
a brigadier-general in the British service, should figure
as an honored American ghost, and doubtless will be
so appropriated in poetry, especially should there be
written a poem on moral courage, of which his running
away in his first fight, and being indomitable ever
after, shows, I think, a very natural and striking example.
There is another poetical feature in his history—his
being persuaded, against his will, to marry a
beautiful girl, after mature age, and making so good a
husband. Altogether he is a fine hero for an epic,
and a great deal more glorious for not surviving to engage
in a political campaign.

One of the most approvable novelties that I have seen
of late is a library of six volumes, upon Needlework.
It is a set of miniature hand-books for the use of
schools and families, most neatly printed and illustrated,
and letting the reader into all the mysteries of
“baby-linen, plain and fancy needlework, embroidery,
knitting, netting, and tatting, millinery, and dressmaking,”
and all very cheap and portable. Redfield,
of Clinton Hall, is the publisher, and the admirers of
the notable in woman-worth should be the purchasers.

Mr. Riker has issued the first of his series of annuals
called “The Opal,” of which Mr. Willis is to be
the editor. The present volume, which contains some
fine gems of literature, and is beautifully illustrated by
Chapman, was prepared by Mr. Griswold, though contributed
to and prefaced by the editor subsequently
employed for the series. The character of the work
is religious, and the preface states truly, that “the
mirth and the playful elegancies of poetry and descriptive
writing are as truly within the paths of religious
reading as anything else which shows the fulness and
variety of the provision made for our happiness when at
peace with ourselves. Nothing gay, if innocent (the
preface continues), is out of place in an annual intended
to be used as a tribute of affection by the good;
and in this annual, hereafter, that view will be kept
before the eye. Its contents will be opal-hued—reflecting
all the bright lights and colors which the prodigality
of God's open hand has poured upon the pathway
of life.”

Edward S. Gould, one of the most distinguished of
the merchant-author class so honorable to our country,
has put forth an abridgment of “Alison's History of
Europe.” In a terse and strongly-written preface, he
gives a résumer of the whole work, with a pungent
criticism on its faults and injustices, showing that he
(Gould) has not done his work “like a horse in a barkmill,”
but with a proper spirit and with a clear insight.
Of Alison's chapter on the American war he says, very
justly, that “it is destined to a most unenviable notoriety
as a tissue of misrepresentation. As it has no
legitimate connexion with the history of Europe, it
is a gratuitous libel on the people and institutions of
the United States, and as it could not be admitted into
an American book without alterations contradictory to
the title-page of this volume, it has been wholly
omitted.” Mr. Gould is the son of the eminent jurist,
Judge Gould, of Connecticut, and is happy in having
the energy (in addition to his business pursuits) to
turn to account his fine natural powers and good education.
He is one of the best of our translators, also,
and the author of the new and humorous work, “The
Sleep-Rider in the omnibus.”

A great deal of fun, and as much genius and private
worth, have just left the city in the person of
Harry Placide, bound to New Orleans for a winter
engagement. The people of the cis-Atlantic Paris
are to be congratulated with all emphasis thereupon.
It is equal to a day's allowance of sunshine to see him
play at night. He knows humor, from elegant high
comedy to irresistible farce—from a hair-line delineation
of the ridiculous to a charcoal sketch—and fails
in nothing he undertakes. With the exception of
Farren, who is only his equal, Placide is unrivalled on
the English or American stage. I wish him well, and
well back again. God bless him!

I see copied into the “Literary Gazette and Quarterly
Advertiser” an article on “Macauley's Miscellanies,”
which appeared some time since in a Boston

periodical, and struck me at the time as somewhat remarkable.
A lecture on the habits and characters of
literary men, which was quoted from in the Boston
papers, has also attracted great attention by its brilliancy
and originality of view, and both these are by a
very young business-man in Boston, Mr. E. P. Whipple.
His mind is of the cast and calibre of the writers
for the English magazines of ten years ago, and I
consider him a mine to be worked with great profit by
the proprietors of the reviews. His kind is rare.

I see that Jules Janin “fobs off” another annual
upon us under the name of “The American in Paris.”
It is written in his sparkling vein, and translated, as
sparkle always is translated, with a loss. The truth
is, that an American gentleman of New York fell into
Janin's company in Paris, and showed him some notes
he had made of his Parisian amusements; that the
idea struck the great feuilletoniste of making this small
diary the cover for a more detailed description of Paris
than would otherwise seem “knowing,” and the first
having taken and sold, the second of a series has now
appeared. Between Eugene Sue's real “Mysteries
of Paris,” and Janin's presentable drawing-room pictures
of it, we may get a very fair idea of the gay
capital. Janin's preface is written with the intention
of being believed. He says: “Our American appears
before you once more. Last year, at the same period,
he described to you, in the best way he could, Parisian
life during the brilliant months of winter. He had
then arrived at the great city at the very moment when
the closing days of autumn were disappearing beneath
the yellow leaves. A traveller without affectation, he
asked nothing more than to take his part in the sweet
joys, lively emotions, and noisy pleasures of this world
of the powerful and the rich; he endured as well as
he could the intoxications and the delirium of the
masked ball—the thousand cross-fires of Parisian conversation—the
paradoxes, the slanders, and even the
innocent calumnies that he saw around him—he entered
into all; he wished to see everything, and he
fulfilled his wish. Not that he advanced very far into
the mysteries of the good city; but he stood, as one
may say, on the edge of the wood, and thence he
threw his curious and attentive look upon those gay
and quickly-changing lights and shades. For a fellow-countryman
of Franklin, our Yankee is certainly
somewhat of an acute observer. What he did not see
he guessed; not sometimes without a certain discrimination
and pertinence. That which we specially admire
in him, and which will not displease the reader,
is a great fund of benevolence, a happy good-humor
which has nothing affected about it, and an indiscribable
entraîn and rapture, which the greater part of
the time keeps the reader awake. This is all that we
can say in his favor, for we are not of the number of
those tiresome editors who are always saying, `Come
and see a masterpiece; come and salute a great man;
the great man and the masterpiece were both invented
by me.' We hope never to fall into this enthusiasm,
which is very unbecoming in him who is its object.
All our duty as editor we have faithfully fulfilled, and
now it is for the book to defend itself. If by chance
it is a good book, depend upon it the public will receive
it with favor. All our ambition is, that after
having thoroughly admired the embellishments of
Lami, you will read a few of those pages in which the
translator has endeavored to reproduce somewhat of
the grace, the vivacity, and the interest of the original
book.” I have made a long extract from the preface,
but I thought it would amuse you to see how the celebrated
critic can talk about himself, with a transparent
mask over his face.

A club bowling-alley has been established in Broadway,
near Franklin street, most luxurious in all its appointments—carpets,
ottomans, dressing-rooms, &c.
The families subscribing are of the most fashionable
cliques, and no male foot is suffered to enter this gynesian
gymnasium—the pins being set up by girls, and
the attendance exclusively feminine. The luxuries
remaining to our sex, up to the present time, are
fencing and boxing—the usurpation of which is
probably under consideration. The fashion, you
would suppose, would scarcely gain by masculinifying,
but the ladies are wearing broadcloth cloaks—for
a beginning. There is another article of male attire
which they have long been said to wear occasionally,
but I am incredulous. Seeing would be believing.

Mr. Kendall, the popular and adventurous editor of
the Picayune, has been “Lucy-Long”-ing it somewhat
over his eagerly-expected book on Mexico, but
has lately discovered that his celebrity would stand
any halt in the trumpeting. He purchased recently a
copy of Captain Marryat's new book, “Monsieur Violet,”
to go to bed with of a rainy afternoon, and had
the pleasure of lying on his back and reading his own
adventures amplified in the best style by the author
of Peter Simple. Kendall's letters in the Picayune
were, of course, the basis of the extended and illustrated
work he has in press, and this basis, Captain
Marryat (who is a subscriber to the Picayune) has taken
bodily, and thereupon built his romance with but
a small outlay of his own clapboards and shingles. An
action of replevin for half the price of the captain's
copyright would “lie,” I should think—at least in the
court of equity. Mr. Kendall, I had nearly forgotten
to say, is spoken ill of in one portion of the captain's
book, and his rejoinder has appeared in the Courier.

I have been looking through the new publication
called “Etiquette, by Count D'Orsay.” That D'Orsay
revised the book and lent it his name “for a consideration,”
I think very possible, but there is, to my
thinking, internal evidence in its style that he did
not write it. There is an acquaintance with vulgarity,
and a facility of “hitting it on the raw,” which could
only have been acquired by a conversance of fellowship
with vulgar people, and D'Orsay knows as much of
such matters as the thistle-down while afloat knows
of the mud it floats over. Besides, the vulgarities are
dwelt upon with a kind of unction totally foreign to
D'Orsay's nature. He is a most kindly, as well as
delicate and fastidious man, and his mind would instinctively
avoid the knowledge of such matters, let
alone the qualifying himself to describe them graphically.
From one or two little anecdotes told in the
book, I trace its authority to a Mr. Abraham Hayward,
a frequenter of many different strata of London
society, and probably the best judge in England of
what is “genteel,” by knowing better than anybody
in England what is vulgar. It is undoubtedly an invaluable
book, and circulated in one of these mammoth
editions at the shilling price, it will prepare
Americans of all classes, if they sin against good manners
at all, to sin with knowledge—taking away at
least the ridicule of the matter.

Dear pastoral-minded, centrifugally-bent, and moderately-well-off
Reader, I address you “with all the
honors,” to be quite sure that my letter be not misapplied.
We, the parties in this correspondence, are
neither rich nor poor—as they express it elegantly in

the mother-country, “neither nob nor snob.” I would
the critics had not the trick of calling the having one's
own way “affectation;” else would I (simple though
I am), coin for my own use, since the language is deficient
in them, some of those epithets, descriptive of
a class, which are at the same time so crisp, definite,
and expressive. For instance: were I to address a
letter to a young man of a certain style (a very prevalent
style indeed), and wish to convey from the first
word my appreciation of the character at which I
aimed, I should be compelled to use the following circumlocution:
My dear universally-benevolent—i. e.—
spending-all-the-money-you-can-get-and-making-love--to-all-the-women-you-see,
young man. Now, the French
have a gracious and modest dissyllable for all this.
The word expansif expresses it all. How much
briefer, and more courteous, in the case just supposed,
could I commence in English with, My dear expansive!
Again: in English we should say, Oh, you-all-things-to-all-men—who-say-you-have-no-prejudices—
but-but-are-understood-by-your-friends-to-mean-no-principles">!
but
in German they phrase it, quite short, Oh, many-sided!
Understand me not as leaning at all to Carlyle's system
of personification and word-linking. Two and
three are five is better than Two and Three died when
Five was born, though this is but a moderate illustration
of Carlylism. I would introduce no new epithet
that is not the essence of a phrase, no new-linked
words that are not the chord of a circumlocutory arc.

Touching my trade:—

In the matter of pen-craft, I confess to a miserly
disposition, yearly increasing. It is natural, I suppose,
to tuck up close the skirts of those habits in
which we run for our lives (or livings), and it is not inconsistent,
I would fain hope, with prodigality of other
belongings. In my college days, ere I discovered that
a bore in my brains would produce any better metal
than brass (bored since for “tin”), I had a most
spendthrift passion for correspondence. Now—paid
duly for my blotted sheet—I think with penitential
avarice of the words I have run through!

People are apt to fancy it is a natural amusement—
laborum dulce lenimen—for an author to write letters,
epitaphs, &c. But there are two animals at least, who
might differ from that opinion—the author, and the
baker's horse, out on a Sunday's excursion, in the baker's
pleasure-wagon. The truth is, that the tax on
authors, in this particular, is a disease in the literary
system, and since it is not likely to be cured while the
human race want autographs, epitaphs, epithalamia,
and opinions on MSS., the solace seems to lie in the
expediency of fat Jack—we should “turn the disease
into commodity.” If every third epitaph in the graveyards
of this country be not by the author of —,
&c., &c., all I can say is, there must be a very considerable
number of gravestones; and I am only sorry
that I did not take out copyrights from the start, and
serve injunctions on plagiarizing stonecutters. Here
is a letter now from a gentleman in Arkansas (whose
grammar, by the way, is not very pellucid), informing
me that his wife is dead, and giving me an inventory of
her virtues; and I am requested to write the lady's
epitaph, and send it on in time for the expectant marble.
Of course I am extremely sorry the lady is dead,
and since she was “such a pagoda of perfection,” as
Mrs. Ramsbottom would say, very sorry I had not the
pleasure of her acquaintance; but my “head” is not
“waters” (nor am I teetotaller enough to wish it
were), and I can not weep for all the nice women who
die, though grieved to think this particular style of
person should diminish. Ours is a most romantic
nation, for it would seem that there are few who do
not think their private sorrows worthy of poetry, and
the distinction between meum and tuum (as to authors)
having long ago been broken down by our copyright
robberies, the time and brains of poets are considered
common property. People, accustomed to call for
poetry when they want it, look upon the poet, quoad
hoc, as they do upon the town-pump, and would be as
much surprised at a charge for poetry as for water.
Possibly it is one of the features of a new country. I
have lived in a neighborhood where the stopping of a
man who should be taking what fruit he wanted from
your garden, or what fuel he wanted from your
woods, would surprise him as much as stopping his
nostrils with corks, till he was off your premises;
and with fruit and fuel, perhaps, time and brains may
assume a value. At present (it may as well be recorded
among the statistics of the country), poets,
lumber, and watermelons, are among the “inalienable
rights of freemen.”

One of the lesser evils of this appetite for sympathy
in rhyme, is the very natural forgetfulness of a
man absorbed in grief, touching the trifle of postage.
Reading a death in the newspaper affects me, now,
like seeing myself charged with eighteen and three
quarters cents at the grocer's. If I were writing from
the “palace of truth,” to one of my “bereaved husbands,”
I should still stoutly assure him of my sympathy,
having lost one and sixpence by the same melancholy
event. My bill of mortality (postage, they
call it) would frank me for boiled oysters at Florence's,
the year round, and, begging pardon of the
survivors (not the oyster-shells), I should like it in
that shape quite as well.

Hereafter, I shall make an effort to transfer the cipher
to the other side of the unit. If called upon to
mourn (in black and white) for people I never before
heard of, I propose to send my effusion as “commodity,”
to the first “enterprising publisher” who pays.
Honor bright as to by-gones—let them be by-gones!
Indeed, they are mostly too personal to interest the
public, one of the most felicitous of my elegies turning
(by request) on the deceased's “fascinating and
love-inspiring lisps.” But in all composed, after this
date, I shall contrive so to generalize on the virtues
and accomplishments commemorated, that the eulogy
will apply promiscuously to all overrated relatives—
of course, forming, for a literary magazine, an attraction
which comes home to everybody's business and
bosom. I may premise, by the way, that my advertisement
to this effect would be addressed only to
mourners of my own sex, and that ladies, as is hardly
necessary to mention, are supplied with epitaphs on
their husbands, without publicity or charge; though
it is a curious fact that my customers, in the epitaph
line, have hitherto been widowers only! Whether
widows choose usually some other vehicle for the
expression of their grief, preferring that it should be
recorded on tablets less durable than marble (pardon
me! more durable!) I have no data for deciding. I
merely contribute this fact also to statistics.

“Pray, how does that face deserve framing and glazing?”
asked a visiter, to-day. The question had
been asked before. It is a copy from a head in some
old picture—one of a series of studies from the ancient
masters, lithographed in France. It represents a peasant
of the campagna, and certainly, in Broadway, she
would pass for a coarse woman, and not beautiful for
a coarse one. I have been brought to think the head
coarse and plain, however, by being often called on to
defend it. I did not think so when I bought it in a
print-shop in London. I do not now, unless under
catechism.

To me, the whole climate of Italy is expressed in
the face of that Contadina. It is a large, cubical-edged,
massy style of feature, which, born in Scotland,
would have been singularly harsh and inflexible.
There is no refinement in it now, and, to be sure, little

mobility or thought—but it is a face in which there
is no resistance. That is its peculiarity. The heavy
eyelid droops in indolent animal repose. The lips are
drowsily sweet. The nostrils seem never to have
been distended nor contracted. The muscles of the
lips and cheeks have never tingled nor parched. It is
a face on which a harsh wind never blew. If the
woman be forty, those features have been forty years
sleeping in balm—enjoying only—resisting, enduring,
never. No one could look on it and fancy it had ever
suffered or been uncomfortable, or dreaded wind or
sun, summer or winter. A picture of St. Peter's—a
mosaic of Pæstum—a print of Vesuvius or the Campanile—none
of the common souvenirs of travel would
be to me half so redolent of Italy.

By special favor I got a sight, while in Boston, of
Crawford's statue of Orpheus, not yet open for public
exhibition. As I stated in a former letter, the Athenæum
has, most appreciatively, erected a new building
expressly for this work of art, and nothing remains to
be done but the finishing of the walls of the interior.
It is a lofty room, and the statue is placed on a pedestal
of masonry (rather oddly I thought) in the corner.
It was, unfortunately, badly packed at Florence, and
when taken from the box, in Boston, the legs were
found to be both broken off. Mr. Dexter, a young
sculptor of singular mechanical dexterity, as well as
promising genius (the author of the admirable bust of
Dickens), was employed to restore it, and has done it
wonderfully. It requires close examination to perceive
the fracture, and the discoloration might easily
be taken, even then, for stains in the marble, so evidently
are the statuary lines preserved as the artist
designed them.

The statue is of the size of life—nude, with the
exception of a short mantle, and sandals upon the
feet. Orpheus is represented as just emerging from
hell, and passing Cerberus, whom he has put to sleep
with his music. The three-headed dog is “nid, nid,
nodding” with his three heads, and either has two
tails (which was not down in my mythology) or his
unicaud is carefully combed away, madonna-wise, into
two parts. The figure is bent over, like a man emerging
from a cavern, and the right hand is held over
the eyes as if to protect them from the sudden blaze
of daylight, while the mantle is lifted from the back
by the current of air rushing in, leaving the body and
limbs, by this natural and poetical contrivance, nude
for sculpture. The face of Orpheus, like the action
and feeling of the limbs, expresses intent, but soft and
subdued earnestness. It is an exquisitely beautiful
youth, on the verge of manhood—slight, graceful, and
bloomingly filled out; and I thought the body one of
the most life-like and perfect representations of nature
I had ever seen in marble. I presume the artist
intended to represent Orpheus at the moment before
he sends his wife back to hell by looking prematurely
after her. (Query—moral?) He holds the lyre, with
which he has just charmed the infernals, upon his left
hip, and the eager action, expressing the instant preceding
the completion of a desperate undertaking, is
finely conceived, and breathed into sculpture. The
only objection I could make to the statue was one
that is simply a difference of conception, and, to his
own, the artist is quite entitled. I expected a less
effeminate person and countenance. Orpheus was an
“old married man,” and a reformer and lawgiver before
Eurydice's fatal flirtation with Aristæus; and his character,
both in fact and fable, in tradition and in Virgil's
verse, was one of the most masculine and self-denying
energy. He was a Grahamite, too (the only man of
that age who would not eat flesh and eggs), and was
finally torn in pieces by the women because he was an
incorrigible widower—both which evince rather harsh
qualities, and are not expressed in the Cupidon figure
of Crawford's Orpheus. I am glad I have such trouble
to find a fault, however, and I rejoice in the work altogether,
as a most triumphant effort of American
genius.

I saw another fine piece of art in Boston—Harding's
full-length portrait of Governor Seward. It carries
conviction, at a first glance, that it is true to the life,
and, indeed, a finer piece of work than the head can
not be found in the portrait-painting of this country.
It is breathing with character and individuality, and an
absolute likeness, besides being faultless in color. The
figure is correctly done, no doubt, but Jupiter himself
in black coat and trousers would be unpicturesque,
and Harding has done his possible, redeeming the horrors
of modern costume a little by an ingenious and
graceful disposition of the cloak. Beside this picture
stood the most capital portrait of the country, I
think—Harding's Allston. This “other self” of the
departed poet-artist is about to be engraved in the best
style of the art, I am happy to hear.

Speaking of Allston, I was told in Boston that his
funeral was by torch-light, after nine in the evening,
and one of the most impressive and befitting ceremonies
ever witnessed. He was laid on the bier, simply
wrapt in his shroud and covered with a pall, and was
borne on men's shoulders to the tomb, and there coffined.
These differences from ordinary burial were of
his own directing some time before death. The wish
to be excepted from the commonplace horrors of
burial would be very natural to a mind like Allston's.

The lecturing system, which the Evening Post
thinks is dying by surfeit in New York, is in full vigor
in Boston, and it was thought that Macready would
have made more money at it than by theatricals. I
think myself that lecturers should be rather differently
chosen, and that the object should be rather to
come amusingly at the anatomy of society, than to
hear the preaching-and-water of which the lectures
are now delivered. Why not specify the subjects and
choose the lecturer accordingly. If Sprague the
cashier would lecture on the pathos of discount and
the anxieties of investment; if the head-clerk in a
retail dry-goods shop would unfold the inveiglements
used for cheapening and getting credit (life across the
counter, that is to say); if a fireman would give us the
pros and cons of excitement and combination, esprit
de corps, and what stimulant there would be in putting
out fires for charity were other stimulants to fail; if
any intelligent business-man or mechanic would lecture
simply on the threads of society and common life
which he lives by pulling—why, then, it seems to me,
lectures would be entertaining, and in no danger of
being thinly attended. The greatest mysteries of life
are the common linings of common brains, and since
people are tired of the “turning out to the sun” of
the satin and velvet of refinement and education, it
would be well to come to the plainer stuffs without
ceremony. A lecturer hired to pick each trade and
profession of its mysteries, by diligent inquiry, and to
embody these mysteries in presentable elocution,
might do a thriving business.

I was talking of pictures just now. A Boston merchant
told me that he had made a considerable speculation
lately by sending fifty “copies of the old masters”
(imported Italian pictures) to California! He
chanced to be passing a shop where they were to be
put up at auction, and bought the lot, fifty paintings,
at ten dollars each, frame and all. They sold to the

Californikers at a great profit. But the original faith
in the speculation is the miracle of the business.

The influenza is raging in Boston, everybody talking
thick through the nose. I never saw such universality
of grippe. The air in New York is as pitiless and
penetrating as a search-warrant, but it seems to have
the wholesomeness of the “Etesian breezes,” and a
bad cold I started with from Boston left me somewhere
in the Sound, for I arrived without it. Perhaps, like
Eurydice, it turned back at Hellgate.

The pulse of Broadway is accelerated to fever-beat.
There is good sleighing in the white margins of that
long page of black-letter, and the astonished coal and
smoke at weathercock level is doubtless agitated violently
with the change from the contralto monotone of
wheels to the “frightful tintamarre” of bell-metal.
Sidewalks wet and slippery.

A very short absence from a great city unhinges
one's metropolitan habitude, and on returning, one
looks at the placards on the walls as one does at the
features of a long-absent friend, doubtful of what degree
of change these superficial lines may be the exponents.
None but your diurnal cit reads playbills
with indifference and incredulity! The writing on
the walls just now is, more than usual, flowery in its
promises of amusement, and though “promising is the
very air o' the time,” and “performance is ever the duller
for his act,” I wanted last night a Mephistophilian
ubiquity—the temptations were so many. Niblo's
equestrian pageants are glowingly advertised, and said
to be very splendid. New dancing-girls at the Chatham—new
fun at Mitchell's Olympic—concerts in all
directions—lectures more than plenty—fortune-tellers
and jugglers, dwarfs and fat children, new oyster palaces,
and all manner of balls, bewilder the eye of the
street passenger with their rhetoric of placard.

Macready was playing Werner at the Park last
night, and I looked in for a few moments. The house
was about half full. As I entered he was commencing
the long passage of reproach to Ulric, which he utters
throughout at the tip-toe agony scream. A smart
friction of the tympanum of the ear with a nutmeggrater
would be an emollient in comparison. Why
should this accomplished actor aggravate his defects
so painfully! That pipe of his would have been a
disqualification for any viva-voce vocation to the mind
of a less persevering man, but it seems to me that its
dissonance might be abated by the degree of discipline
he is willing to practise on other capabilities. He
was well supported, by the way, by Miss Cushman.
Mrs. Sloman has given place to this lady and returned
to the shades of the past generation. Her Orpheus,
Mr. Simpson, will not go after her again, it is to be
hoped.

A sudden impulse, as I came out of the theatre, led
me to the discovery of a new milliners'-land in New
York, the existence of which, “minion of the lamps”
as I have been, I had not suspected. I jumped into
an omnibus that was passing, with a mere curiosity to
see how far into the orient the brilliant shops of East
Broadway extended. We passed by the terra cognita
of Catharine street and Chatham, and their picturesque
sellers of chestnuts by torch-light, and kept up
the well-lighted avenue of the Bowery, when (to my
momentary disappointment) the omnibus turned
suddenly to the right, down Grand street. As the
brilliancy of the lamps and shop-windows did not
diminish, however, I kept my seat, and, to my sur
prise, rode on through a new Broadway which seemed
to me interminable. I got out at last to walk back
and look at it more leisurely. The shops on the
south side were nearly all those of milliners and fancyarticle
dealers, differing from those of Greenwich
street, on the other side of the city, in being smaller,
brighter-colored in the array of goods (as if ministering
to a gaudier taste), and more in the style of street
stalls, such as are common in small Italian towns.
There was another primitive peculiarity in the apparent
custom in that region, for the whole family to
wait behind the counter. In one very crowded and
low-raftered shop, the sign of which was “Cheap
Jemmy,” the mother and half a dozen stout daughters
were all busy waiting on customers, while a child
in arms was dandled by a little girl sitting by the stove.
Everything about the shop was of the strictest school
of the thrifty primitive. Seeing a pretty and intelligent-looking
milliner with her hands crossed over the glass
case on her counter, a few doors from “Cheap Jemmy,”
I went in and bought a pair of gloves, for the
sake of asking a question or two. She said rents
were much cheaper in Grand street than in the other
shopping streets of the city, and goods proportionably
cheaper. The colored people do their shopping principally
there. She was not acquainted at all in Grand
street. When she wanted to go out she got into an
omnibus and went down town. Altogether, the Grand
street shops are unlike the other parts of the city—
gayer and more picturesque—and life seems to be
centralized and crowded together there, as if it were a
suburb across a river. I must give you some notion
of the geography of this quarter. Imagine Manhattan
to be a man-with-a-hat-on (Union square the hat),
lying on his back, with Castle Garden for a bunnion
on his great toe, Broadway would be his spine and
intestinal canal, Chelsea and Greenwich his right arm,
Grand street his outstretched left arm, the Tabernacle
and Tombs, City Hall and Park, his rotund corporation,
spleen, liver, &c. In ancient times the resemblance
would have been seized upon at once for a
deification.

A chef d'œuvre of daguerreotype is in preparation.
The senate-chamber is to be engraved after photographs
in the best style of Apollo, Chilton, and
Edwards! These gentlemen (the god of light not the
least enterprising and efficient of the three) have in
preparation a magnificent engraving of the senators in
appropriate positions, after the manner of some of the
finest English prints. This is a bold and beautiful
undertaking, and from the known skill and enterprise
of these gentlemen, will doubtless be successfully
accomplished. Whether an adequate recompense
can be realized in this country remains to be seen.
Most of the miniatures for this engraving were obtained
at the daguerreotype gallery of these gentlemen,
and theirs is an art particularly suited to the
transfer of the strong lineaments of senatorial faces.
The engraving will be a curiosity. A celebrated
artist is to be employed for the grouping.

Late last night, the Norwegian, Olé Bull (pronounced
Olay Bull), did the magnanimous, and yielded
the use of one of the world's entire evenings to
his rival, Vieux-temps, whose concert comes off, therefore,
as announced, this evening. I shall go to hear
him, and will tell you all I can fathom in what I hear.

I do not believe that the leaven of cognoscenti,
which “leavens the whole lump” into rapture with
these performers, amounts to more than three people
in an audience of three thousand, and I think that
even those three would be puzzled to distinguish between

Wallace, Olé Bull, and Vieux-temps, if they
played the same pieces behind a screen. (I do not
mention Artot, because he plays to the heart exclusively.)

Nobody with nerves can sit out a concert, it is true,
without having the keys of tears occasionally swept
over, as a child, thrumming a piano, will occasionally
produce a sweet or mournful combination of sounds
by accident. But because our eyes are once or twice
moistened, and because we occasionally feel that the
corner of the veil is twitched which separates us from
the chainless articulation we ache after, it is no sign
that we at all comprehend the drift of the player's
meaning, or see into the world of complex harmony
whither he gropes but confusedly himself. I have
not heard the violin of Olé Bull, but I have talked with
him for an hour or two, and I think he is one of the
most inspired creatures (and I should have thought
so if I had met him as a savage in the woods) whose
conversation I have ever listened to. He talks a
braided language of French, Italian, and English,
plucking expression to himself with a clutch; and
though he moulds every idea with a powerful originality,
he evidently does not give birth to more than a
fraction of what is writhing in his brain. If there
were a volcano missing in Norway, I should fancy we
had encountered it on its travels—the crater not provided
for in its human metempsychosis. Probably
Olé Bull finds his violin a much more copious vent
than language, for his imprisoned lava—but to coin
that lava into language as he pours it out in tangled
chromatics, would be to comprehend his music, and
that, I say again, is not done by more than three in
three thousand, if done at ALL! I told him I should
like to hear him play a l'improvista, after he had seen
Niagara, and upon that he gave me a description of
wild Norwegian scenery, describing how he had tried
to utter in music the effect it had produced upon
him—gave it me with a “fine phrensy,” that pulled
hard (and I should like to know the philosophy of
that) upon the roots of my hair. There is something
weird and supernatural about the man.

Mechanical dexterity on the violin has as much to
do with music, I believe, as drawing a bank-check has
to do with credit at the bank—a very necessary part
of the matter, but owing its value entirely to what
has gone before. Music is mind expressed in one of
the half-dozen languages we possess—and as capable
of logic and transfer into words, as painting or poetry,
or expression of feature and gesture. Olé Bull, when
playing, has (or ought to have) an explainable argument
in his mind, and the bridge wanting between
him and his audience is a translation of his musical
argument into language—given before or after the
performance. This he could easily do. At present,
it is, to the audience, like a most eloquent oration in
an unknown tongue—comprehensible only to the orator.

I have elsewhere mentioned, that while at Vienna,
I saw a self-educated philosopher at the institute,
who was discovering the link between music and geometry.
He took a pane of glass and covered it
sparsely with dry sand, and then, by drawing a particular
note upon the edge with a fiddle-bow, he
drove the sand by the vibration into a well-defined
circle, or triangle, or square—whichever we chose of
half-a-dozen geometrical figures. I have looked ever
since, to hear of an advancement in this phase of daguerreotype.
Once reduced to a grammar, music
would be as articulate as oratory, and we should be
able to distinguish its sense from its gibberish.

In person, Olé Bull is massive, gladiator-like
creature, rather uncouth, passionately impulsive in
his manners, and with a confused face, which only
becomes legible with extreme animation. Wide-awake,
he is often handsome—fast-asleep, he is doubt
less as plain as a Norwegian boulder-stone. If he
ever work his musical logic up to his musical impulse
and execution, he will hang the first lamp in the darkest
chamber of human comprehension.

I have two more steps to announce to you in the
advance of the gynocracy. There is a gymnasium
in the upper part of Broadway, where the LADIES don
the Turkish costume, and ARE TAUGHT SPARRING and
CLIMBING in jackets and loose trousers. Greatcoats
with a snug fit to the back are superseding cloaks for
ladies' out-of-door wear. “Merciful heavings!” as
Dick Swiveller would say.

I have been looking over a file of English papers,
published at Canton, China, in which I find that the
interpreter to the French consulate has obtained a
copy of the famous Chinese dictionary, which is an
encyclopedia of the history, sciences, arts, habits, and
usages of the Chinese, composed at the commencement
of the eighteenth century by order of the emperor
Ram-hi. A very small number of these was
printed, for the emperor and principal functionaries
of the empire only. It is to be reprinted immediately,
with a French and English translation. Mr. Cushing
goes there in a good time for finding the material he
will want for researches, literary and political.

It is curious how much may be born of “a scrape”
between catgut and horsehair! We have had two
nights of violin-phrensy, and applause, for a trick
with a fiddle-bow, that would have embalmed the
heart of Demosthenes within him. The beau monde
has given a fair hearing to the rival elbows, and, by acclamation,
at least, Olé Bull has it. As it is the rage,
and, as even sages take interest in rages, perhaps I
had better “make a clean breast,” and tell you all I
know about it—albeit, like barley-water, if the fever
were cured, it would be unpalatable slop.

The conversation of the town, of course, is largely
embroidered with the concernings of these fiddle-monsters,
and news, as you know, is stripped, like
corn, of much of its picturesque outer husk and silken
lining before it is ground into paragraph-cakes sent
to be devoured at a distance. Olé Bull is not simply
Olé Bull, but a star with four satellites—his grim
keeper, his handsome secretary, his messenger, and
his lacquey. The door of his parlor at the Astor is
beset, antechamber-fashion, from morning till night,
with orchestra-people, people from the music-shops,
and all the tribe who get fat upon the droppings of
enthusiasm. What he says is made into anecdotes,
and wherever he goes follows the digito monstrari.
There is an aristocracy of catgut, however, and Artot
and Vieux-temps look upon Olé Bull as the house
of lords look upon O'Connell, and greet him as the
rocks do the rising tide. Artot has been a king's
page, and Vieux-temps is, I believe, a chevalier decoré,
and both of them have the porcelain air. The French
population of New York make a “white-and-red-rose”
business of it; and it was remarked last night
that there was not a Frenchman to be seen at Olé
Bull's concert. Artot is quite a minion of popularity
with the fashionables—his expressive eyes and sentimental
elegance probably the raison pourquoi.

Vieux-temps's first concert on Monday night was a
very stylish jam. He is a small, pony-built man, with
gold rings in his ears, and a face of genteel ugliness,
but touchingly lugubrious in its expression. With
his violin at his shoulder, he has the air of a husband
undergoing the nocturnal penance of walking the
room with “the child”—and performing it, too, with
unaffected pity. He plays with the purest and cold

est perfection of art, and is doubtless more learned on
the violin than either of the rival performers, but
there is a vitreous clearness and precision in his notes
that would make them more germaine to the humor
of before breakfast than to the warm abandon of vesper-tide.
His sister travels with him (a pretty blonde,
very unlike him), and accompanies him on the piano.

Olé Bull's concert was deferred till last evening,
and the immense capacity of the Tabernacle was filled
to suffocation. He appeared after the usual appetiser
of an overture, and was received with a tumult. Verily,
he is made for a “tribune of the people!” The
angel who “makes men politic” never moulded a
creature more native to the central plane of popularity.
A splendid animal—herculean and graceful—a
faculty of looking, at the same time, overpowered and
self-possessed—an unlimited suavity full of reserve—
calm lips and wild eyes—cool dexterity and desperate
abandonment to his theme—he would have done as
well at anything else as at music. He is what Mrs.
Ramsbottom would call a “natural pagoda.”

It is presumptuous in a layman of the religion of
music to attempt a critical distinction between these
two or three first violinists of the world. Anybody
can see differences in their playing, but only a musician
can define the degrees in which they differ.
Olé Bull's violin seems to have been made where
horses and cats were of a wilder breed. He gets out
of it a peculiar quality of note, not at first quite satisfactory
to the ear, but approaching articulate language
as it departs from the glassy melody drawn from the
instrument by others. I have no doubt that, to himself,
the instrument is as good as articulate. He expects
it to talk intelligibly to others; and it would,
possibly, to those who knew music and heard him
often. I proposed to him in conversation, what I
think would test the expression of his music very
fairly—the transfer of Collins's Ode on the Passions
to the violin. The audience could then follow him,
as they do an opera by a translated libretto.

Wallace is about to enter the field against the violinists,
many of the musical people here being quite
persuaded that he plays as well as any of them. He
is certainly the greatest pianist we ever had in America,
and he is really embarrassed between the two instruments—the
very highest degree of excellence requiring
complete devotion to one only. He and Olé
Bull met one evening at the duke of Devonshire's in
London, but without hearing each other play, and
they have run together, here, like drops of water—
similar in quality and degree of genius, as well as in
impulsive and poetical disposition. They met in
Bull's room an evening or two since and played duets
on the piano and violin, solos, &c., till morning.
Wallace likes New York so well that he has determined
to make it his residence, publishing his exquisite
musical compositions here, &c. He is a great accession
to the musical world, as he is a large essential
drop added to the soul resident in this great mass
of human life. I offer him one man's welcome.

I understand the piano rage is the next thing to
come off, and that Lizst and Thalberg are positively
coming over. Taking musical accomplishment in
such large slices as we do, our vast country is likely
to become the main body-corporate of the music of
the world. It pays better than any other field of musical
enterprise now.

Happy New-year!—Shake hands! Exchange
congratulations! Be merry! Be happy! Another
year is gone! It is poetry to regret the past—only
poetry. Rejoice that the incumbrance of another
year is thrust behind—that another gate onward is
flung open—that though this youth is passing or past,
you are by so much nearer to a new youth beyond—
and better and brighter, as well as beyond. There is
no instinct of regret for the past. Spite of Death
brought nearer, and the shroud unfolded to receive
us—spite of Decrepitude and Neglect and Pain rising
up like phantoms in the way—we are happy to grow
old. The soul rejoices. New-year! New-year!
Death closer, but something the soul yearns after
coming at his heels! Who, upon impulse, would retard
time! Who would—instinct only consulted—
go back! Eternal progress is the thirst of life, as it
is of the whole eternity of which life is a part. The
world says so by acclamation. The old year's death
is the festival of universal instinct. Visit your friends!
Brighten the links between you! Forgive slights,
neglects, injuries! Go laughing through the gate of
the new year!

The Hebrew Benevolent Society had a very brilliant
dinner on Thursday, I understand, and drew a
large contribution for its excellent objects from the
present possessors of the “divining-rod”—the violinists.
Olé Bull, whose heart is as prodigal as his genius,
and who gives money to street-beggars by the
handful, gave a hundred dollars, and Vieux-temps and
Wallace agreed to combine in a charity-concert. The
other contributions, I understand, were correspondingly
liberal.

One of the essays, the most ad rem that I have
lately seen, is an address on the “Prevention of Pauperism,”
by a relative of the late Dr. Channing. The
preface has a certain bold resignation about it which
is very idiosyncratic. Mr. Channing says that he
was desired to read a discourse before a society for
the prevention of pauperism, and agreed to try to do
so—but he did not know to what he had pledged himself.
He then defines very philosophically what he
found, upon reflection, was to be his task, and goes on
to say:—

“I went to work. That which might, in the reading,
be endured forty minutes, grew to twice that allotted
time, or more; and when the day came for the
anniversary, I found I could not read the half I had
set down. The auditory was very small; and the
few, at first, were less before the forty minutes were
up. The contribution-boxes came to the church-altar
with little weight of metal, and few bills—say
about twenty-seven dollars and twenty-three cents, all
told. Thus was my work accounted little and paid
harmoniously. But some, a very few, have asked me
to print my writing. From so small a company a
large request could hardly come. I have done what
those few friends have asked me to.”

The address is very philosophic, though tinctured
with peculiar views of the social system. The leading
propositions, which are very eloquently illustrated,
are worthy the room they will take in these columns,
if it were only as a skeleton map of the subject
carefully laid out, and available for the guidance
of inquirers:—

“1st. That every social institution, or custom,
which separates man from man—which produces distinct
classes in the community, having distinct privileges—which
is daily occupied to build higher and
stronger the partition-walls between men—such institution,
or custom, I say, produces and continues poverty.

“2d. That the political institutions of society, or
their administration, frequently become causes of the
extremest and widest national poverty.

“3d. That the spirit of party, so widely and deeply
cherished as it is by society, does, by its exclusiveness,

its selfishness, and its intolerance, minister directly to
the production and continuance of poverty.

“4th. That such employment of capital by society,
as in its products ministers only to the most debasing
habits, does directly produce and continue crime and
poverty.

“5th. The sudden reduction of wages, extended
to large numbers, is not only directly injurious to
wide interests, but produces pauperism.

“6th. That in a country like ours, in which the
law of entail does not exist to make property a permanent
possession in families, a system of education
which has regard only to simple mental culture, and
which leaves the physical powers uncultivated—in
which manual labor, a practical knowledge of farming,
or the mechanic arts, forms no part—I say that
such a system of early education favors the production
of pauperism.”

Apropos of beggars—the system of ingenious beggary,
so curiously described in Grant's “Great Metropolis,”
is beginning to be tried on in New York.
There is one young lady (of very correct habits, I
believe, in point of fact) who maks a living by means
that wear a somewhat questionable complexion, out of
“distinguished strangers.” A member of congress,
or a diplomatist in transit, for example, receives a
note, the day after his arrival is advertised, in a hand-writing
of singular beauty. In the most graceful language,
and with the daintiest use of French phrases,
he is informed that a young lady who has long watched
his career with the deepest interest—who has a
feeling for him which is a mystery to herself—who
met him accidentally in a place she will recall to his
memory, should she be so fortunate as to see him
again—who is an unhappy creature of impulse, all too
fondly tender for this harsh world and its constructions—would
like to see him on a certain sidewalk
between eight and nine. By holding his hand across
his left breast, he will be accosted at that time and
place. The ladylikeness and good taste of the note,
so different from the usual tentatives of that description,
breed a second thought of curiosity, and the
victim is punctual. After a turn or two on the appointed
sidewalk, he encounters a tall young lady,
deeply veiled, who addresses him by name, takes his
arm, and discourses to him at first on his own ambitious
history, contriving to say the true and flattering
thing, for which she has duly informed herself.
She skilfully evades his attempts to make her talk of
things more particular, and regretting feelingly that
she can only see him on the sidewalk, appeals to his
“well-known generosity” for ten dollars to keep her
and her dear mother from being turned out of doors.
She takes it with tremulous pathos, demands of his
honor that he will not follow her, and slips round the
corner to meet another “distinguished stranger” with
whom she has appointed an interview fifteen minutes
later in the next street! I was in a company of strangers
at a hotel not long ago, when one of these dainty
notes was produced, and it so happened that every
man present had one in his pocket from the same
hand! Among the party there were four appointments
proposed by the same lady, to come off on the
four sides of a certain square, for that evening! She
is probably doing a good business.

There has been a certain most eligible shop, with a
most impracticable rent (3 Astor house, rent $1,000),
for a long time vacant, Yesterday the broad doors
were thrown open, and an effulgent placard announced
it as the depot of the Columbian Magazine. The
new periodical lay upon the counter in a most Chapman-esque
cover, lettered gorgeously in vermillion
and azure, with a device of Columbus on his pedestal,
John Inman, editor, in the blue of the scroll, and Israel
Post, publisher, in the vermilion of the supporting
tablet. (This arrangement is wrong, if there be any
meaning in colors, for the ingredients of vermilion are
sulphur and quicksilver—stuff of better prophecy for
an editor than a publisher.) I understand that the
foundations of this new magazine are thirty thousand
dollars deep, and as there is great store of experience
in both publisher and editor, it is likely to crowd Graham
and Godey—though it will require almost an
“avatar of Vishnu” to crush those giants of monthly
literature. We are to see whether magazine-popularity
is like the oil from the glass tomb of Belus—
which, once exhausted, never could be refilled.

The history of the monthlies, for the last few years,
forms a chapter by itself of American progress. It is
but a very short time since the “dollar-a-page” of the
North American Review was magnificent pay, and
considered quite sufficient for articles by Edward Everett!
The old New York Mirror paid five hundred
dollars a year for the original “Pencillings by the
Way”—the republication of which has paid the author
five thousand. Nathaniel Greene, of the Boston
Statesman, was the only man I could hear of, in 1827,
who paid regularly for poetry, and I have heard that
Percival was kept from starving in New York by selling
his splendid poem on the plague for five dollars!
I lost some of the intermediate steps of literary valuation,
but I think the burst on author-land of Graham's
and Godey's liberal prices was like a sunrise
without a dawn. They commenced at once paying
their principal contributors at the rate of twelve dollars
a page—nearly three times the amount paid by
English magazines to the best writers, and paying it,
too, on the receipt of the manuscript, and not, as in
London, on the publication of the article. We owe
to these two gentlemen the bringing out of a host of
periodical talent, which, but for their generous and
prompt pay, would have remained dormant, or empolyed
in other channels; and they should be recorded
as the true and liberal pioneers of progress in this
branch of literature. They have done very much the
same thing with regard to engraving and the encouragement
of the arts, and I believe the effect they have
produced on the refinement of the country has been
worthy of note—their beautiful books having been
sent into its remotest corners by their unprecedented
circulation.

The prices paid now to acceptable magazine-writers
are very high, though the number of writers has
increased so much that there are thousands who can
get no article accepted. There are so many people,
too, who, like the Ancient Mariner, are under the dire
compulsion to tell their tale—paid or not paid—that
any periodical, with a good furbisher and mender,
may fill its pages, for nothing, with very excellent
reading. A well-known editor once told me that he
could make a very good living by the sums people
were willing to pay to see themselves in print. The
cacoethes scribendi would doubtless support—does
doubtless support—a good many periodicals.

Olé Bull played to another crammed audience at
the Park last night, but the angel or demon imprisoned
in this violin was not tractable. If it had been
his first appearance, he would have made a losing trip
to America. There was a tone in the applause which
showed very clearly that his music was turned back
at the inner vestibule of the ear. He will probably
redeem himself to-night at the Tabernacle—his closing
concert.

I hear great complaints that the canvass-back ducks
are not of as good flavor as usual this year. Will

you tell us the pourquoi—or whether it is that the
wild-celery is not in perfection this season? My own
experience goes the other way—for such delicious
ducks, so deliciously dressed, I never saw, as lately at
“Guy's Monument house,” in Baltimore. He is a
fit cook for Apicius, it is true, and perhaps his sauce
deceived me. But the canvass-back is part of our
national honor, and the causes of falling off should
be looked after.

I am delighted to see that our great comedian,
Harry Placide, is up to the lips in success and popularity
in New Orleans. God bless those southern
people—they know a good thing when they see it!
The theatres there are a kind of last appeal—confirming
just appreciation, and reversing very often the cold
injustice of the north. Wallack is gone there now,
and he will come away with warm pockets. Burton,
the comedian, is also in migration—a man of genius
with his pen, and a most attractive actor. I wish we
could have a good rollicking season of good acting at
the Park, and go in deep for old-fashioned close criticism.

I sent you a paragraph yesterday which I am anxious
to overtake with another—though the paragraph-chase,
especially if the pursuer be a correction of an
error, is much more desperate than the shadow's hope
of overtaking the substance. Olé Bull, to my thinking
(corroborated since by the opinions of some musical
people), played without his inspiration the last
night he played at the Park, and so I stated. At the
Tabernacle on Tuesday night, his violin-fiend (or angel)
was at home, and so completely did he search
every chamber of my sense of musical delight, and so
triumphantly drive out all unbelief, and fill me with
passionate admiration and wonder at his skill and
power, that I feel a certain compunctious reproach
for ever having qualified my homage. One of his
themes was a rhapsody of religious music, composed
by himself, and, without irreverence, it seemed to me
that St. John, in the Apocalyptic vision, could scarcely
have been within the compass of music more rapt and
unearthly. More than four thousand people held
their breath in ravished ecstacy with this performance,
and the only drawback to my own rapture was the
conviction that, transparent and articulate as was the
meaning of every note, to translate it into language
the poet must first be himself translated—to the sphere
and capabilities of an angel. You will think that I,
too, am “bit by the dipsas”—but I, at least, gave up
my soul to this Olé Bull madness with some reluctance.
Genius-like, the Norse magician is journalier,
as the French say; but I pray that when he shall play
at Washington he may “give a rise” to the embodied
intellect of the capital which will show them a heaven
above politics.

The Hibernia has brought me a gossiping letter
or two from England; and, by way of letting you
down softly from the balloon-flight of the paragraph
foregoing, I will quote you a passage from the clever
hand of our friend S—, the artist, now resident in
London, and fully employed in transferring aristocratic
beauty to ivory. Buckwheat and molasses, it
should be premised, are undiscovered luxuries to the
Londoners, and it is pleasant and apposite, at this particular
season, when these friandises are in conjunctive
culmination, to see how they loom in the traveller's
memory. Says our friend:—

“So you have taken up your abode at the Astor.
You have done well. There are many good things
at the Astor; above all, the buckwheats; and I can
fancy you at this moment, while I am breaking my
fast upon a flabby `French roll' (so called because no
bread of the kind was ever seen in France), with a
pile of them smoking before you, and pouring over
them, with a liberal hand, copious libations of that
exquisite, delicate, transparent molasses which the Astor
alone provides, and which has always reminded me
of the wine of the veiled prophet—

A letter from a literary friend in London informs
me that Lady Blessington is suffering from a lethargy
from which she finds it next to impossible to arouse
herself for literary labor. The society she lives in
draws very exhaustingly upon her powers of attention,
and she has been all her life one of those who
“crowd a year's life into a day.” My friend adds:—

“You had some expectation of seeing D'Orsay in
America, but he never had any intention of going out.
He has been a prisoner for the last two years in Lady
Blessington's house, at Kensington. There is an
acre or two of garden, as you know, in the rear, shut
in with a wall high enough to keep out creditors, and
here D'Orsay takes his exercise on horseback. He
devotes himself entirely to painting, making portraits
of his friends and receiving money for them—in short,
making a profession of it. Every Saturday night, at
twelve o'clock, precisely, his cab is at the door, and
he drives to his club, and on Sundays he is to be seen
in the park, driving with Lady Blessington and her
two exquisitely beautiful nieces (the Misses Power)—
taking care to be home again, like Cinderella, before
twelve o'clock at night. Not long ago, a meeting of
his friends took place, and an effort was made to relieve
him. They subscribed twenty thousand pounds,
which would have given his creditors four shillings in
the pound. The proposal was made, and the creditors
refused to accept. The subscription was consequently
abandoned.”

There is an article afloat upon the raft of fugitive
literature (“a stick of timber among the flood (—)
trash,” as they say on the Susquehannah) which is
worth hauling ashore and preserving—Parke Godwin's
Essay on Shelley, in the Democratic Review. It
comes from a mind of the finest powers of analysis
and the warmest glow of poetical appreciation, and if
we had in our country the class of well-patronized
sober magazines which they have in England, this
writer's pen and Whipple's would be the two best
worth paying in the country, for that kind of article.

Ticknor & Co. have republished a volume of devotional
poetry by Dr. Bowring, called Matins and Vespers.
It is pure, even, moderately-inspired, and scholar-like
poetry—of the best quality for family reading.
The doctor's pursuits are all on a lofty level—philanthropy,
patriotism, emancipation, and religion—and if
his other faculties (all of which are of more than respectable
calibre) were as largely developed as his
veneration, he would be the moral Washington of his
era. The last time I saw him he was in a great rage
with a certain Yankee, who, upon very cool acquaintance,
had drawn at sight upon his hospitality, by having
himself and his baggage set down in the doctor's
entry, and sending in the servant to borrow money to
pay his coach-fare from Liverpool! With the exception

of this private-life “repudiator,” however, he
is a great admirer of America and Americans.

The Langleys have got up a most presentable and
elegant edition of the poems of Eliza Cook—the most
fireside and home-like of modern poets. There is a
great deal in this volume that will touch the “business
and bosoms” of the many. Mrs. Osgood (herself
a poetess of the affections, and wanting nothing
but a little earth in her mixture) gives a sketch of
Miss Cook in the preface, which is as good as a personal
introduction.

When the “last page” morning arrives, dear reader,
we, for the first time in the week, pull the “stop
politic” in our many-keyed organ of livelihood-making,
and muse a little on expediency while the ink
dries upon our pen. This morning—this particular
morning—we chance to have “belayed,” as the sailors
say, “a loose halliard” in our rigging, and in casting
an eye “a-low and aloft,” to see how it draws
upon the canvass, we have determined to alter a little
our trim and ballast. You are our passenger, dear
reader, and our object is to make the voyage agreeable
to you, and the query is, therefore, how much you
would be interested in these same details of trim, ballast,
and rigging. Our coffee stands untasted (for we
write and breakfast, as an idle man breakfasts and
dawdles, all along through the up-hill of the morning),
and our omelet must cool while we amputate one
horn of this dilemma.

We have never explained (have we?) that as an artist
needs a “lay-figure” whereon to adjust drapery
and prepare effects, an editor in the fancy line (our
line) requires a personification, from the mouth of
which he may speak with the definite identity of an
individual. There are a thousand little whims and
scraps of opinion kicking about the floor of common-place,
which, like bits of cloth and riband, might be
pinned on to a drapery with effect, though worthless
if simply presented to you in a bundle. A periodical
needs to be an individual—with a physiognomy that
is called up to the mind of the subscriber, and imagined
as speaking, while he reads. An apple given
to you by a friend at table is not like an apple taken
from the shelf of a huckster. An article on the leading
topic of the day, in a paper you are not accustomed
to, is not read as the same article would be in your
favorite periodical. The friend's choice alters the
taste and value of the apple, as the individual editor's
selection or approbation gives weight and value to the
article. The more you are acquainted with your
editor—even though, in that acquaintance, you find
out his faults—the more interest you feel in his
weekly visit, and the more curiosity you feel in what
he offers you to read. What made the fortune of
Blackwood but “Christopher North's” splendid egotism!
A magazine without a distinct physiognomy
visible through the type of every page, has no more
hold on its circulation than an orchard on the eaters
of apple-tarts. And if the making of this physiognomy
visible be egotism, then is egotism in an apothecary's
sign, or in the maker's name in your boot-leg.

There is, of course, a nice line to be drawn between
the saying that of editorial self which every reader
would like to know, and the incurring the deserved
charge of egotism; and it was by that line exactly
that we were trying to navigate in the dilemma with
which we started. Should we—or should we not—
bother the reader's brain with what was bothering ourselves?
To a limited and bearable degree, then, we will.

We determined to live by periodical literature, and
we came to New York prepared, of course, to unship
the wings of our Pegasus and let him trot—if trotting
is “the go”—quite sure that if he is worth keeping,
his legs are as sound as his feathers. It is one thing
to be “willing to come to the scratch,” however, and
another thing to find out definitely where the scratch
is. We were prepared to turn owl and armadillo—to
be indefatigable in our cage, and abroad only by night
—to live on one meal a day—to be editor, proof-reader,
foreman, and publisher, and as many other things as
we could get out of life, limb, and twenty-four hours
—prepared for any toil and self-denial—in short, to
quash debt and keep up the Mirror. Excellent virtue
entirely thrown away! The Mirror rose as easy
as the moon, went on its way rejoicing, and is now out
of the reach of kites, rockets, and steeples! Which way
lay—then—the dragons to vanquish? This brings us
to the head and front of our dilemma. Personal slander
is the only obstacle in American literature.

So be it! We do not complain of it. We have
not the presumption to be above our country. America
demands of her literary children that they should
submit to calumny—demands it in the most emphatic
of all voices, by her support of the presses which inflict
it. We agree. We can not make shoes, though
to that trade there is no such penalty. We should
throw away our apprenticeship, if we attempted to
live, now, by any but the one trade whose household
gods are outlawed. We honor our country. We will
live by American literature, with its American drawback.
We can suffer as much as another man. We
are no coward. We will step into the arena, and let
the country, that looks on, decide upon the weapons
and terms of combat. Yet still there is a dilemma.

We have tried for fifteen years the silent system—
the living down slanders, as the watchman wakes
down the stars that rise again in twelve hours. The
only exception to our rule occurred in England,
where an English pen assumed a few American misstatements—and
being “among the Romans,” we did
as they do in such cases—got the necessary retraction
through the “law of honor.” Lately, as perhaps the
reader knows, we have taken a fancy to see whether
there was any difference between public opinion and
the law, as to the protection of literary men against
slander. The author of a particular set of slanders
we chanced to light upon for the experiment, is, we
understand, a clergyman and an abolitionist, and,
though we have literally proved that he published
seven or eight direct lies against our private character,
we are condemned by many of the press for
what they call “Coopering an editor,” and one paper
in Philadelphia attacks our defence of our own character
as a shallow piece of ostentation, got up for
effect! We humbly ask which is most agreeable to
the public? Do they like it submitted to silently, or
do they prefer it defended, by dragging our private
life with all its details into the street? We will accommodate
them—for we must live in the country we
were born in, and live by literature!

One of the most beautiful sights I have lately seen
was the SPREAD for the New England dinner in the
large dining-room of the Astor. It would have given,
even to a “picked man of countries,” a heightened
standard of sumptuousness in banquet—in fact (and
republicans may as well know it), royal entertainments
in Europe beat it by nothing but the intrinsic value of
the table service. Galleries were erected for ladies
behind the columns at either end of the hall, and “all
went merry as a marriage bell.”

It struck me that the “old Plymouth rock” was a
little too much hammered upon, and, indeed, I thought,
during the dinner, that the fragment of it (which was
set upon the table) had better be used for the weight
and countenance it could give to objects worthy of
the pilgrim spirit, than as an anvil for self-glorification.

There are interests constantly arising of a philanthropic
character general enough for all parties to
partake in, and to the sluggish movement of which
the steam of local patriotism might worthily be applied.
Without the bugbear of a contribution at the
time, a fine orator and philanthropist like Horace
Mann might have been invited by the committee to
delight and instruct the picked audience with eloquence
on one of his apostolic schemes of benevolence.
As it was, the predominance of one political party
made it a whig dinner instead of a New England dinner.
Admiring Mr. Webster as I do, and willing as I
am to do more to see the other remaining Titan of
our country (Mr. Clay) in the presidential chair than
for any other object not personal to myself, I wished
that he had replied to the “common-school” toast
instead of the one he selected, and kept to the spirit
of New England exclusively in the determination of
his “thunder.” Mr. Bellows took up this just-mentioned
topic, and compared the red school-houses
(more graphically than felicitously) to an eruption on
the face of New England!) He is a great pulpit orator,
but a man who is accustomed to steer by the sober
rudder of a pen runs adrift in trusting himself to extemporaneous
impulse. The best-judged and most
nicely-turned speech of the evening, I thought, was
by Mr. Colden—and quite the most applauded.

The overflow of the city's fountain of curiosity
pours just now into the fancy-stores and curiosity-shops—the
stockings of Santaclaus gaping wide for
“gratifications.” The new bazar, with the negroes
in cocked hats for “sticks in waiting,” is thronged
like a levee, and, truly, the variety of new nonsenses
is marvellous and bewildering. Tiffany's carries the
palm, and you would think, to walk around that museum
of elegancies, that the fine arts had turned their
whole force and ingenuity into the invention of trifles.
It would be curious to trace back the genius that invents
these things to its home and condition in life.

One of the new books that will most interest you
and the members of congress is “Simcoe's Military
Journal; a history of the operations of a partisan corps
called the Queen's Rangers, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel
Simcoe, during the war of the Revolution,
illustrated by engraved plans of action,” &c. Bartlett
& Welford, the great bibliologists of New York, found
a copy of the work in their researches in foreign libraries,
and Mr. Bartlett, who is a scholar, thus prefaces
the American republication:—

“The military journal of Lieutenant-Colonel Simcoe,
now first published, was privately printed by the author
in 1787 for distribution among a few of his personal
friends. The production has hitherto, it would seem,
entirely escaped the attention of those who are curious in
the history of our revolutionary war. As a record of
some interesting particulars and local occurrences of
that memorable struggle, and as a well-written documentary
illustration of the times and the circumstances
of the American rebellion, it deserves circulation
and favor. The fortunate procurement of a copy of
the work in London enables the publishers to present
it in an edition securing its preservation, and facilitating
a general knowledge of its contents. A memoir
of so much of the author's life as is not exhibited in
his journal, it is thought, will interest the reader and
increase the permanent value of the volume. Accordingly,
such a memoir has been prepared from available
and authentic materials, and, by the way of introduction,
may serve to fill out the history of the commander
of the Queen's Rangers, presenting also a few facts
concerning the corps, not otherwise appearing. Not
to extend that portion of the publication too far, however,
various relevant quotations from different sources,
interesting essentially and expletive in their character,
are thrown into the appendix, in addition to what the
journalist has given in that form himself.”

There is a very well-conducted paper in New York
called the “Mirror of Fashion,” the avowed object
of which is to furnish plates and descriptions of gentlemen's
fashions in dress—this feature taking the place,
in a sheet of general interest, which politics or religion
take in others. One sentence of the advertisement
runs thus:—

“I shall strive my utmost to make the Mirror of
Fashion reflect all the important changes in styles of
dress, whether in cut, color, or make, that may from
month to month be adopted in this metropolis, always
eschewing the freaks and follies of foreign fancy. I
shall, as I ever have done, recommend only that
which is strictly consonant with American feelings
and predilections.”

The motto of the paper, very properly, is taken from
Carlyle's, “Sartor Resartus.” Thus, in the one pregnant
subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included
all that men have thought, dreamed, done, or been;
the whole external universe, and what it holds, is but
clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the
philosophy of clothes. There is evidently a man of
reading and talent at the head of this paper, and the
subject touches men's “business and bosom” so closely
and widely that it may well be considered a quatrième
etat, and have its organ to represent it.

If May be the season for “the raging calenture of
love,” this is the calenture of the social affections—
the fever-crisis of the year, when the heat that is in
the system comes to the surface. Most quiet men
go to a ball or two in the holydays—dance a quadrille
or two to show the old year that they are not of its
party in going out—pay a compliment or two more
flowery than their wont; in short, put on the outer
seeming which would befit them in a Utopia. I have
tried on, like others, for the last week or two, this holy-day
humor; and, though I shall be accused of “keeping
a sharp eye to business,” I must jot down for you
a thought or two that has occurred to me, critical and
comparative, or the present condition of New York
society.

It strikes me that there is no provision in the gay
society of New York for people of middle age. A
man between thirty-five and forty is invited to a large
party. He goes too early if he arrives before eleven.
He finds the two principal rooms stripped of carpets
and of most of the sitting-down furniture, and the reception-room
entirely lined with the mammas and
chaperons of the young ladies on the floor. However
he might be a “dancing man” in Europe, where
people dance till their knees fail them, he knows that
in this haste-to-grow-old country it would be commented
harshly upon, especially if he has a wife, for
whom it is expected his overflow of spirits should be
reserved. As he don't dance, he would like to converse.
The old ladies talk of nothing but their daughters,
and the daughters, if not dancing, think it would
repel a probable partner to seem much occupied in
conversation. He looks around for a sofa and a lady
who don't dance. Sofa there is none, and in a chair
in the corner perhaps there is one lady who is neither
young nor old—rara aris! He approaches her, and,
well nigh jammed against the wall, undertakes a conversation
not audible (he standing and she sitting) unless

kept up at a scream. After a half hour of this,
the lady, if she be discreet, remembers that “it looks
particular” to be engrossed more than half an hour by
one gentleman, and looks or says so. The middle-aged
man slides along the wall, gets back into the
crowded reception-room, talks a little to the chaperons,
comes back and looks on at the waltz, and so passes
the three hours till supper—on his legs. The ladies
take an hour to sup, and, about three o'clock, he gets
a corner for some oysters and champagne, and between
that and four o'clock gets home to bed. He is a business
man and rises at eight, and by three o'clock the
next day he looks and feels as a man naturally would
who had burnt his candle at both ends—for nothing!

It is not wonderful that there are no conveniences
for conversation in society, for there really is no conversation
to provide for. The want would create the
supply. It is one of the most peculiar of our country's
features that conversation is not cultivated as a pleasure.
When American women leave off dancing they think
they have done with society till they reappear to bring
out their daughters. All the agreeableness of their
middle life—the most attractive and delightful portion
of like too, perhaps—is expended on an appreciative
husband who wants and uses it all! Not at all as a
disparagement to this state of things, perhaps you will
allow me to mention a case, that may be somewhat parallel,
which has turned up in my zoological reading:
“These little insects (the coccus, of the family galinsecta)
are remarkable for many peculiarities in their
habits and conformation. The males have long large
wings! The females have no wings, but at a certain
period of their life attach themselves to the plant or
tree which they inhabit, and remain thereon immoveable
during the rest of their existence. As soon as
the eggs are produced, they pass immediately under
the female parent, whose body becomes their stationary
covering and guard. By degrees her body dries up
and flattens, and forms a sort of a shell, and, when life
is quite extinct, the young insects leave their hiding-place.”
Whether society has not some claim on them
—whether their minds would not be kept from narrowing
by conversation with agreeable men—whether the
one exclusive errand of the loveliest portion of humanity
is to rear children, are questions which in this
country must be handled very gingerly—at least in
print. I may be permitted to go on and say “how
they do in Spain,” however.

A middle-aged man in London may or may not be
a dancer. There is no comment either way—but he
must be something—dancer or good conversationist, or
he is dropped as “lumbering up the party.” Few
men can afford to be seen by the mistress of the house
to be unamused and unamusing. A cultivated man,
then, who don't dance, gets an hour or two of pleasant
society in the early part of the evening at the
opera. If there is a small party afterward he prefers
it to a ball; but if he goes to the ball he finds that the
pleasantest people there are the married women.
They do not sit together without room for a gentleman
between them, but every lady is bodily approachable,
and with a little management he can get a comfortable
seat beside any one whom he may know and
prefer. If he find her interesting, and talk to her the
whole evening, there is no scandal, unless there are
other corroborating circumstances; indeed, the openness
of the attention would rather discredit any unfavorable
comment. If there is a new lion present, or
any attraction peculiar to one person, a small circle is
formed in a corner, or a group stand around and let
the conversation be managed by the persons most
interested, like listening to music. You could seldom
go to a party in London without hearing something
worth telling to a person not there, and society (not the
newspapers) has the first use and enjoyment of all
news and novelties of every description. Newspapers
are stale to a man actively conversant in the best
society of London. People collect news, and see
sights, and invent theories, and study and think—to
have material for being brilliant in society, and for no
other purpose. A habitué of the best houses grows
well-informed by absorption only—if he keep his ears
open. And this entire stage of society is wanting in
New York.

An intelligent gentleman remarked lately upon the
absurdity of copying English hours for gayety, without
copying the compensating English hours for repose.
It is the aim of aristocracy to have such habits as to
distinguish aristocrats from the working-classes, and
lords and ladies please themselves with going home to
sleep when the clowns are getting up to toil. Until
we can afford to lie abed like a lord, till noon, we are
fools to lose the clown's slumber, and a fashionable
lady would deserve well of her country who would
tacitly acknowledge her husband to be a man of business,
by giving her party at hours when he and his
merchant-friends could attend without loss of needful
sleep. Who would not be glad to go to a ball at seven
instead of eleven? This change, and the introduction
of comforts and accommodations for conversible wall-flowers,
would, in my opinion, improve even the
charming circles of grown-up children who now constitute
New York society.

I see no very marked differences in the dress or
usages of the ball-room. Rather more waltzing and
less quadrilling, if anything—but still “marvellous
few” tolerable waltzers. Could most of the waltzing
men in New York “see themselves as others see
them.” they would practise the difficult ease of this
accomplishment elsewhere for a while. The lower
classes of Germans have balls in their peculiar haunts
which it would be good practice to attend.

How to make a paradise in the country.—
The back of the winter is broke, dear reader, and it is
down-hill to spring. Those who have not our brick
and mortar destiny, are chatting, over their evening
table, of gardens and fruit-trees, crops and embellishments,
and longing the snow off their lawns and fields,
and the frost out of their furrows. We have been
passing a leisure (not an idle) hour in reading our
friend Downing's elegant and tempting book on rural
architecture—a book which, with others by the same
scholarlike and tasteful pen, we commend to your possession—and
it brings to our mind a long letter we
wrote during our last year's residence on the Susquehannah,
on the subject of economical and comeatable
paradise-making in the country. For a change—let
us turn over for you this leaf of our common-sense
book. Thus runs the body of it:—

Landscape-gardening is a pleasant subject to expand
into an imaginative article, and I am not surprised that
men, sitting amid hot editorials in a city (the month
of July), find a certain facility in creating woods and
walks, planting hedges and building conservatories.
So may the brain be refreshed, I well know, even with
the smell of printing-ink in the nostrils. But landscape-gardening,
as within the reach of the small
farmer people, is quite another thing, and to be managed
(as brain-gardening need not be, to be sure) with
economy and moderation. Tell us in the quarterlies,
if you will, what a man may do with a thousand acres
and plenty of money; but we will endeavor to show
what may be done with fifty acres and a spare hour in
the evening—by the tasteful farmer, or the tradesman
retired on small means. These own their fifty acres
(more or less), up to the sky and down to the bottom
of their “diggings,” and as nature lets the tree grow
and the flower expand for a man, without reference to
his account at the bank, they have it in their power to

embellish, and most commonly, they have also the
inclination. Beginners, however, at this as at most
other things, are at the mercy of injudicious counsel,
and few books can be more expensively misapplied
than the treatises on landscape-gardening.

The most intense and sincere lovers of the country
are citizens who have fled to rural life in middle age,
and old travellers who are weary, heart and foot, and
long for shelter and rest. Both these classes of men
are ornamental in their tastes—the first because the
country is his passion, heightened by abstinence; and
the latter because he remembers the secluded and
sweet spots he has crossed in travel, and yearns for
something that resembles them, of his own. To begin
at the beginning, I will suppose such a man as either
of these in search of land to purchase and build upon.
His means are moderate.

Leaving the climate and productiveness of soil
out of the question, the main things to find united are
shade, water, and inequality of surface. With these
three features given by nature, any spot may be made
beautiful, and at very little cost; and, fortunately for
purchasers in this country, most land is valued and
sold with little or no reference to these or other capabilities
for embellishment. Water, in a country so
laced with rivers, is easily found. Yet there are hints
worth giving, perhaps, obvious as they seem, even in the
selection of water. A small and rapid river is preferable
to a large river or lake. The Hudson, for instance,
is too broad to bridge, and beautiful as the
sites are upon its banks, the residents have but one
egress and one drive—the country behind them. If
they could cross to the other side, and radiate in every
direction in their evening drives, the villas on that
noble river would be trebled in value. One soon tires
of riding up and down one bank of a river, and without
a taste for boating, the beautiful expanse of water
soon becomes an irksome barrier. Very much the
same remark is true of the borders of lakes, with the
additional objection, that there is no variety to the
view. A small, bright stream, such as hundreds of
nameless ones in these beautiful northern states,
spanned by bridges, at every half mile, followed always
by the roads which naturally seek the level, and winding
into picturesque surprises, appearing and disappearing,
continually, is, in itself, an ever-renewing
poem, crowded with changeable pictures, and every
day tempting you to follow or trace back its bright
current. Small rivers, again, insure to a degree the
other two requisites—shade and inequality of surface—
the interval being proportionately narrow, and backed
by slopes and alluvial soil, usually producing the
various nut and maple trees, which, for their fruit and
sap, have been spared by the inexorable axes of the
first settlers. If there is any land in the country, the
price of which is raised from the supposed desirableness
of the site, it is upon the lakes and larger rivers,
leaving the smaller rivers, fortunately, still within the
scale of the people's means.

One more word as to the selection of a spot. The
rivers in the United States, more than those of older
countries, are variable in their quantity of water. The
banks of many of the most picturesque, present, at
the season of the year when we most wish it otherwise
(in the sultry heats of August and September),
bared rocks or beds of ooze, while the stream runs
sluggishly and uninvitingly between. Those which
are fed principally by springs, however, are less liable
to the effects of drought than those which are the
outlets of large bodies of water; and indeed, there is
great difference in rivers in this respect, depending on
the degree in which their courses are shaded, and
other causes. It will be safest, consequently, to select
a site in August, when the water is at the lowest, preferring,
of course, a bold and high bank as a protection
against freshets and flood-wood. The remotest
chance of a war with water, damming against wash
and flood, fills an old settler with economical alarm.

It was doubtless a “small chore” for the deluge to
heave up a mound or slope a bank, but with one spade
at a dollar a day, the moving of earth is a discouraging
job, and in selecting a place to live it is well to
be apprized what diggings may become necessary, and
how your hay and water, wood, visiters, and lumber
generally, are to come and go. A man's first fancy
is commonly to build on a hill; but as he lives on,
year after year, he would like his house lower and
lower, till, if the fairies had done it for him at each
succeeding wish, he would trouble them at last to dig
his cellar at the bottom. It is hard mounting a hill
daily, with tired horses, and it is dangerous driving
down with full-bellied ones from the stable-door, and
your friends deduct from the pleasure of seeing you,
the inconvenience of ascending and descending. The
view, for which you build high, you soon discover is
not daily bread, but an occasional treat, more worth, as
well as better liked for the walk to get it, and (you
have selected your site, of course, with a southern
exposure) a good stiff hill at your back, nine months
in the year, saves several degrees of the thermometer,
and sundry chimney-tops, barn-roofs, and other furniture
peripatetic in a tempest. Then your hill-road
washes with the rains, and needs continual mending,
and the dweller on the hill needs one more horse and
two more oxen than the dweller in the valley. One
thing more. There rises a night-mist (never unwholesome
from running water), which protects fruit-trees
from frost to a certain level above the river, at
certain critical seasons, and so end the reasons for
building low.

I am supposing all along, dear reader, that you have
had no experience of country-life, but that, sick of a
number in a brick block, or (if a traveller) weary of
“the perpetual flow of people,” you want a patch of
the globe's surface to yourself, and room enough to
scream, let off champagne-corks, or throw stones,
without disturbance to your neighbor. The intense
yearning for this degree of liberty has led some seekers
after the pastoral rather farther into the wilderness
than was necessary; and while writing on the subject
of a selection of rural sites, it is worth while, perhaps,
to specify the desirable degree of neighborhood.

In your own person, probably, you do not combine
blacksmith, carpenter, tinman, grocer, apothecary,
wet-nurse, dry-nurse, washerwoman, and doctor.
Shoes and clothes can wait your convenience for
mending; but the little necessities supplied by the
above list of vocations are rather imperative, and they
can only be ministered to in any degree of comfortable
perfection, by a village of at least a thousand inhabitants.
Two or three miles is far enough to send your
horse to be shod, and far enough to send for doctor or
washerwoman, and half the distance would be better,
if there were no prospect of the extension of the village
limits. But the common diameter of idle boys'
rambles is a mile out of the village, and to be just
beyond that is very necessary, if you care for your
plums and apples. The church-bell should be within
hearing, and it is mellowed deliciously by a mile or
two of hill and dale, and your wife will probably
belong to a “sewing-circle,” to which it is very much
for her health to walk, especially if the horse is wanted
for ploughing. This suggests to me another point
which I had nearly overlooked.

The farmer pretends to no “gentility;” I may be
permitted to say, therefore, that neighbors are a luxury,
both expensive and inconvenient. The necessity
you feel for society, of course, will modify very much
the just-stated considerations on the subject of vicinage.
He who has lived only in towns, or passed his
life (as travellers do) only as a receiver of hospitality,
is little aware of the difference between a country and

city call, or between receiving a visit and paying one.
In town, “not at home,” in any of its shapes, is a
great preserver of personal liberty, and gives no
offence. In the country you are “at home,” will-you,
nill-you. As a stranger paying a visit, you choose the
time most convenient to yourself, and abridge the call
at pleasure. In your own house, the visiter may find
you at a very inconvenient hour, stay a very inconvenient
time, and as you have no liberty to deny yourself
at your country door, it may (or may not, I say,
according to your taste) be a considerable evil. This
point should be well settled, however, before you determine
your distance from a closely-settled neighborhood,
for many a man would rather send his horse
two miles farther to be shod than live within the convenience
of “sociable neighbors.” A resident in a
city, by-the-way (and it is a point which should be
kept in mind by the retiring metropolitan) has, properly
speaking, no neighbors. He has friends, chosen
or made by similarity of pursuit, congeniality of taste,
or accident, which might have been left unimproved.
His literal neighbors he knows by name—if they keep
a brass plate, but they are contented to know as little
of him, and the acquaintance ends, without offence,
in the perusal of the name and number on the door.
In the city you pick your friends. In the country
you “take them in the lump.”

True, country neighbors are almost always desirable
acquaintances—simple in their habits, and pure in
their morals and conversation. But this letter is addressed
to men retiring from the world, who look forward
to the undisturbed enjoyment of trees and fields,
who expect life to be filled up with the enjoyment of
dew at morn, shade at noon, and the glory of sunset
and starlight, and who consider the complete repose
of the articulating organs, and release from oppressive
and unmeaning social observances, as the fruition of
Paradise. To men who have experience or philosophy
enough to have reduced life to this, I should recommend
a distance of five miles from any village or any
family with grown-up daughters. In my character of
dollar, I may be forgiven for remarking, also, that this
degree of seclusion doubles an income (by enabling a
man to live on half of it), and so, freeing the mind
from the care of pelf, removes the very gravest of the
obstacles to happiness. I refer to no saving which infringes
on comfort. The housekeeper who caters for
her own family in an unvisited seclusion, and the
housekeeper who provides for her family with an eye
to the possible or probable interruption of acquaintances
not friends, live at very different rates; and the
latter adds one dish to the bounty of the table, perhaps,
but two to its vanity. Still more in the comfort
and expensiveness of dress. The natural and most
blissful costume of man in summer, all told, is shirt,
slippers, and pantaloons. The compulsory articles of
coat, suspenders, waistcoat, and cravat (gloves would
be ridiculous), are a tribute paid to the chance of visiters,
as is also, probably, some dollars' difference in
the quality of the hat.

I say nothing of the comfort of a bad hat (one you
can sit upon, or water your horse from, or bide the
storm in, without remorse), nor of the luxury of having
half a dozen, which you do when they are cheap,
and so saving the mental burthen of retaining the
geography of an article so easily mislaid. A man is
a slave to anything on his person he is afraid to spoil
—a slave (if he is not rich, as we are not, dear reader!)
to any costly habiliment whatever. The trees nod no
less graciously (it is a pleasure to be able to say), because
one's trousers are of a rational volume over the
portion most tried by a sedentary man, nor because
one's hat is of an equivocal shape—having served as
a non-conductor between a wet log and its proprietor;
but ladies do—especially country ladies; and even if
they did not, there is enough of the leaven of youth,
even in philosophers, to make them unwilling to appear
to positive disadvantage, and unless you are quite
at your ease as to even the ridiculous shabbiness of
your outer man, there is no liberty—no economical
liberty, I mean—in rural life. Do not mislead yourself,
dear reader! I am perfectly aware that a Spanish
sombrero, a pair of large French trousers plaited
over the hips, a well made English shoe, and a handsome
checked shirt, form as easy a costume for the
country as philosopher could desire. But I write for
men who must attain the same comfort in a shirt of a
perfectly independent description, trousers, oftenest,
that have seen service as tights, and show a fresher
dye in the seams, a hat, price twenty-five cents (by the
dozen), and shoes of a remediless capriciousness of
outline.

I acknowledge that such a costume is a liberty with
daylight, which should only be taken within one's own
fence, and that it is a misfortune to be surprised in it
by a stranger, even there. But I wish to impress upon
those to whom this letter is addressed, the obligations
of country neighborhood as to dress and table, and the
expediency of securing the degree of liberty which
may be desired, by a barrier of distance. Sociable
country neighbors, as I said before, are a luxury, but
they are certainly an expensive one. Judging by data
within my reach, I should say that a man who could
live for fifteen hundred dollars a year, within a mile of
a sociable village, could have the same personal comforts
at ten miles distance for half the money. He
numbers, say fifteen families, in his acquaintance, and
of course pays at the rate of fifty dollars a family for
their gratification. Now it is a question whether you
would not rather have the money in board fence or
Berkshire hogs. You may like society, and yet not
like it at such a high price. Or (but this would lead
me to another subject) you may prefer society in a
lump; and with a house full of friends in the months
of June and July, live in contemplative and economical
solitude the remainder of the year. And this latter
plan I take the liberty to recommend more particularly,
to students and authors.

Touching “grounds.” The first impulses of taste
are dangerous to follow, no less from their blindness to
unforeseen combinations, than from their expensiveness.
In placing your house as far from the public
road as possible (and a considerable distance from dust
and intrusion, seems at first a sine qua non) you entail
upon yourself a very costly appendage in the shape of
a private road, which of course must be nicely gravelled
and nicely kept. A walk or drive, within your
gate, which is not hard and free from weeds, is as
objectionable as an untidy white dress upon a lady,
and as she would be better clad in russet, your road
were better covered with grass. I may as well say
that a hundred yards of gravel-walk, properly “scored,”
weeded, and rolled, will cost five dollars a month—a
man's labor reckoned at the present usage. Now no
person for whom this letter is written can afford to
keep more than one man servant for “chores.” A
hundred yards of gravel-walk, therefore, employing
half his time, you can easily calculate the distribution
of the remainder, upon the flower-garden, kitchen-garden,
wood-shed, stable, and piggery. (The female
“help” should milk, if I died for it!) My own opinion
is, that fifty yards from the road is far enough, and
twenty a more prudent distance, though, in the latter
case, an impervious screen of shrubbery along your
outer fence is indispensable.

The matter of gravel-walks embraces several points
of rural comfort, and, to do without them, you must
have no young ladies in your acquaintance, and,
especially, no young gentlemen from the cities. It
may not have occurred to you in your sidewalk life,
that the dew falls in the country with tolerable regularity;
and that, from sundown to ten in the forenoon,

you are as much insulated in a cottage surrounded
with high grass, as on a rock surrounded with forty
fathom water—shod a la mode, I mean. People talk
of being “pent up in a city” with perhaps twenty
miles of flagged sidewalk extending from their door-stone!
They are apt to draw a contrast, favorable to
the liberty of cities, however, if they come thinly shod
to the country, and must either wade in the grass or
stumble through the ruts of a dusty road. If you
wish to see bodies acted on by an “exhausted receiver”
(giving out their “airs” of course), shut up your
young city friends in a country cottage, by the compulsion
of wet grass and muddy highways. Better
gravel your whole farm, you say. But having reduced
you to this point of horror, you are prepared to listen
without contempt, while I suggest two humble succedanea.

First: On receiving intimation of a probable visit
from a city friend, write by return of post for the size
of her foot (or his). Provide immediately a pair of
India-rubber shoes of the corresponding number, and
on the morning after your friend's arrival, be ready
with them at the first horrified withdrawal of the damp
foot from the grass. Your shoes may cost you a
dollar a pair, but if your visiters are not more than
ten or twelve in the season, it is a saving of fifty per
cent., at least in gravelling and weeding.

Or, Second: Enclose the two or three acres immediately
about your house with a ring fence, and pasture
within it a small flock of sheep. They are clean and
picturesque (your dog should be taught to keep them
from the doors and porticoes), and by feeding down the
grass to a continual greensward, they give the dew a
chance to dry off early and enlarge your cottage
“liberties” to the extent of their browsings.

I may as well add, by the way, that a walk with the
sod simply taken off, is, in this climate, dry enough,
except for an hour or two after a heavy rain; and besides
the original saving in gravel, it is kept clean with
a quarter of the trouble. A weed imbedded in stones
is a much more obstinate customer than a score of
them sliced from the smooth ground. At any rate,
out with them! A neglected walk indicates that
worst of country diseases, a mind grown slovenly and
slip-slop! Your house may go unpainted, and your
dress (with one exception) submit to the course of
events—but be scrupulous in the whiteness of your
linen, tenacious of the neatness of your gravel-walks;
and, while these points hold, you are at a redeemable
remove from the lapse (fatally prone and easy), into
barbarianism and misanthropy.

Before I enter upon the cultivation of grounds, let
me lay before the reader my favorite idea of a cottage
—not a cottage ornée but a cottage insoucieuse, if I may
coin a phrase. In the valley of Sweet Waters, on the
banks of the Barbyses, there stands a small pleasure
palace of the sultan, which looks as if it was dropped
into the green lap of nature, like a jewel-case on a
birth-day, with neither preparation on the part of the
bestower, nor disturbance on the part of the receiver.
From the balcony's foot on every side extends an unbroken
sod to the horizon. Gigantic trees shadow
the grass here and there, and an enormous marble
vase, carved in imitation of a sea-shell, turns the silver
Barbyses in a curious cascade over its lip; but else,
it is all Nature's lap, with its bauble resting in velvet
—no gardens, no fences, no walls, no shrubberies—a
beautiful valley with the sky resting on its rim, and
nothing in it save one fairy palace. The simplicity
of the thing enchanted me, and, in all my yearnings
after rural seclusion, this vision of old travel has, more
or less, colored my fancy. You see what I mean,
with half an eye. Gardens are beautiful, shrubberies
ornamental, summer-houses and alleys, and gravelled
paths, all delightful—but they are, each and all, taxes
—heavy taxes on mind, time, and “dollar.” Perhaps
you like them. Perhaps you want the occupation.
But some men, of small means, like a contemplative
idleness in the country. Some men's time never
hangs heavily under a tree. Some men like to lock
their doors (or to be at liberty to do so), and be gone
for a month, without dread of gardens plundered,
flowers trod down, shrubs browsed off by cattle. Some
men like nothing out of doors but that which can take
care of itself—the side of a house or a forest-tree, or
an old horse in a pasture. These men, too, like that
which is beautiful, and for such I draw this picture
of the cottage insoucieuse. What more simply elegant
than a pretty structure in the lap of a green dell!
What more convenient! What so economical!
Sheep (we may “return to muttons”) are cheaper
“help” than men, and if they do not keep your green-sward
so brightly mown, they crop it faithfully and
turn the crop to better account. The only rule of
perfect independence in the country is to make no
“improvement” which requires more attention than
the making. So—you are at liberty to take your wife
to the springs. So—you can join a coterie at Niagara
at a letter's warning. So—you can spend a winter in
Italy without leaving half your income to servants who
keep house at home. So—you can sleep without
dread of hail-storms on your graperies or green-houses,
without blunderbuss for depredators of fruit, without
distress at slugs, cut-worms, drought, or breachy cattle.
Nature is prodigal of flowers, grapes are cheaper bought
than raised, fruit idem, butter idem (though you mayn't
think so), and as for amusement—the man who can
not find it between driving, fishing, shooting, strolling,
and reading (to say nothing of less selfish pleasures),
has no business in the country. He should go back
to town.

We have a pleasant and welcome correspondent
who signs himself “R. H. D.,” and we have a treasured
and admired friend known to the world as Richard H.
Dana—and they are two different persons. We must
beg our friend of the three disembodied initials to give
way to the embodied three of the poet, though, as we
well know, the three first letters of a man's name may
be as momentous to him as the three legs to the
“moving tripods” seen in the Indian temples by Apollonius.
His miracle may be in them! We ourself
have been un-phœnixed of late (we thought there was
but one of our kind!) by the discovery that there was
another N. P. Willis—(not a quill-pincher, we are
pleased to understand).

“Florian” wishes us to “draw the portrait of a man
fitted by nature to be an editor.” A model editor
would be very difficult to describe, but among other
things, he should answer to the description given in
the sporting books of the dunghill cock: “The best
cocks should be close hitters, deadly heelers, steady
fighters, good mouthers, and come to every point.”

The poem sent us without a signature, “on a lady
with a sweet breath,” implies rather too close quarters
for print. Poetry for these days must be at arms' length.
The new epithet “pimento breath” ought not to be
lost, however—quite the spiciest new word that has
lately been rolled under our tongue. It never occurred
to us before that there was one word to express
cinnamon, nutmegs, and cloves. We wish we could
manufacture more of these single triplicates. Does
our nameless correspondent know, by the way, that
bad breath in Prussia is good ground for divorce?
We recommend him to write a parody on “Knowst
thou the land,” &c.

The Boston papers are glorifying (as was to be expected)
the new volume of poems by Russell Lowell.
We wish for a sight of it, for we are his self-elected
trumpeter, and haste to know the key for a new blast.
By the way, we have taken the liberty (as the immortality
he is bound for is a long race) to drop the encumbrance
of James from his musical name, and hereafter
we shall economize breath, type, and harmony,
by calling him Russell Lowell.

An editor is not supposed (as the world and subscribers
to newspapers know) to require or possess the
luxury of sleep. We sleep with one eye open—we
scorn to deny. We see all that is going on about us,
daylight or dark, and Washington being the fountain
of law, order, and information, we duly give the alarm
—like the geese who saved the capitol. Our readers
have, from week to week, read our lucubrations in
this wise, and here are are some more of them. We
send them forth as daguerreotypes of the present—
sent as records of matters as they fly. We think
they are worth preserving bodily—and we so preserve
them.

The first day of '44 came in like a specimen number
of a magazine, and the open doors of New York
had at least one unexpected visiter in a veritable October
sun. The day was mild enough to make overcoats
uncomfortable in walking—the pavement was dry
and summery—and all the male world seemed abroad.
The household gods of Manhattan were probably unanimous
in their happiness—as all the ladies were “at
home,” and all the ladies' lords were bound to be
“out.” This morning the weather is still softer—
October, possibly, like other popular persons, not finding
one day to suffice for its visits.

I have a headache on the top of my pen, and can
not venture any further description of new-year's day
than the above facts, though yesterday I thought I
could make you a tip-top gossipy letter out of the
day's hilarities. The hosts of the Astor wound up the
excitement for their guests by a superb dinner at candlelight,
with champagne and sweetmeats “à discretion,”
and altogether, I think January one must be
marked with a white stone.

You have read, of course, and loved (much more,
of course) Leigh Hunt's poem of The Rimini. Ticknor
& Co., of Boston, have republished it in one of
their beautiful boudoir editions, and along with it, in
the same neat volume, the half dozen other poems,
most famed, of Hunt's prolific pen. The story (of the
lady who married one brother and loved the other) is
told with a sort of entire new-ness of style and language,
as if it were the one admirable work of a natural
but unpractised poet, and it sticks to the memory
after it is read like Moore's rose-scent to the vase.
Leigh Hunt is a born poet, but one of the most unhappy
citizens of the world that the world holds.
With all the mental capabilities (the wit, the delicacy,
the imagination, and the desire) to be the carpet-poet
of aristocracy that Moore is, he has a most wo-begone
person, and a most marvellous lack of tact and reliability.
He never can stay acquainted with the only
people who, by refinement and talent, are alone capable
of making friendship comfortable to him; and he
has quarrelled with most other of his great contemporaries,
as he did with Byron. And, by the way, he is
dead—by epigram! Moore's felicitously-witty verses
on Hunt's Life of Byron killed him quite out of contemporary
respect. The ludicrous image of the puppy-dog
desecrating the body of the dead lion follows
him into every drawing-room and walks behind him
in every street. He will never recover from that epigram.
Indeed, he has never been like himself since
it was written. It is the most signal extinction of a
great genius by ridicule that I know of on record—
more enduring, from the fact that the English, among
their other conservative peculiarities, have none of our
marvellous alacrity at public forgetting. Had Leigh
Hunt been born with a little thicker skin, somewhat
a cooler head, and the inestimable power of catching
the snowballs of ridicule in his bosom, and keeping
them there till they could be thrown back hardened
into ice, he might have been something between Fonblanque
and Moore, Thiers and Janin, and equal at
least to either of these powerful “penditti.” As it is,
he is uncomfortably poor, and more uncomfortably
un-complacent. With two lines, very Leigh-Huntish,
I cut my paragraph short. He is describing
Apollo's revery while resolving upon the Feast of the
Poets:—

A very superb book of drawings is being subscribed
for in New York—“Forty Atmospheric Views of
American Scenery,” from water-color drawings by
George Harvey. The engravings ere to be in aqua-tint,
and to be beautifuly and artistically colored, so as
closely to resemble the original designs. The views
consist of different atmospheric effects at different
times of day, beginning at daybreak and ending at
midnight—each view a complete landscape, and the
subjects emblematic of the progress of civilization,
from the log-cabin to the highest achievement in architecture.
Mr. Harvey is one of the leading artists
of the new water-color school, and this will probably
be the most superb work of its kind ever published.
A letter from Washington Allston to Mr. Harvey
says:—

“I am unwilling that you should leave Boston without
knowing how much I have been gratified by your
beautiful drawings of American scenery. To me it
appears that you have not only been successful in giving
the character of our scenery, but remarkably
happy in clothing it with an American atmosphere,
which you have expressed with great truth and variety.”

By the thermometer, the winter has commenced
this day, the 5th of January. People pass under my
window with their backs shrugged up to their bump
of philoprogenitiveness, and even the coats of the hard-working
omnibus horses “stare”—as the jockeys say.
I wish the physiologists would explain why horses'
coats do not lie closer when it is cold, and why men,
with the same sensation, raise their arms instinctively
from their sides. Cats and dogs seem to economize
their bodily heat better—lying down when cold in
such an attitude as to expose as little surface to the
air as possible.

Our thoughts are entirely occupied this morning
with two poets. It must be a pleasant book that we
take for company the first hour after waking, and today,
with his new volume of poems open on our dressing-table,
we dressed and read Lowell. Thence he
went with us to a téte-à-tête breakfast (for we chanced,
else, to be breakfasting alone), and we were reading
him with a cup of coffee in one hand and his book in
the other, when the letters came in from the post—
and one letter was from a poet new-plumaged, of
whom we had never heard, and who had probably
never heard of himself (as a poet), but still indubitably

a poet—albeit “an apprentice-boy in a printing
office,” in a small village in Pennsylvania. We read
his timid letter and two sweet pieces of poetry enclosed
within it, marked the poetry “good” for the Mirror,
and then reverted to our breakfast and book. But,
so early in the morning, a little reading is enough for
a brainful of thought, and from pondering on Lowell's
“Shepherd King of Admetus,” we fell to thinking
over the probable position and destiny of these two
poets.

Lowell is the best-launched poet of his time, and
the defect of his poetry is an advantage to his go-along-ery.
He is stern and strong enough to “take
the wall” of Envy and Misfortune, but not yielding
and soft enough to bend to the unconscious and impulsive
abandonments of love. Love with him is sound
sense, not beautiful madness. He is too bold and abstract
for the

and, if he knows, he has a contempt for, the

The way Lowell handles the word love makes one
start like seeing Rolla pick up Cora's baby with one
hand. The fact is, he is a strong-minded, tough-sinewed,
defying poet, fit to be a martyr to opinion or a
partisan soldier, and if his love be not an excellent
lamp not yet lighted (which is possible), he has never
experienced its first timidity, nor is he likely to know
its ultimate phrensy and prodigality. He has drawn
his own portrait, however, in a “Sonnet written on
his Twenty-fourth Birthday,” and let us read his
character from it:—

What should you think would naturally follow this
“if,” dear reader? He is twenty-four—in the full
tide of blood and youth, and “Love's sun has filled
his soul with splendor.” In building up a climax of
his feelings at this impetuous and passionate age,
what should you fancy would rush up to crown it like
flame to a volcano? What would his “heart break”
for at passionate twenty-four?
In another poem on “Love,” he describes “true
love” as
This is a cold description of “true love,” and it is
not half so warm as the “love” which Lowell exhibits
in his preface, for his friend William Page. Compare
the above description, in poetry, of true love for
a woman, with the following confession, in prose, of
love for a man:—

“My dear friend: The love between us, which can
now look back upon happy years of still enlarging confidence,
and forward with a sure trust in its own prophecy
of yet deeper and tenderer sympathies, as long as
life shall remain to us, stands in no need. I am well
aware, of so poor a voucher as an Epistle Dedicatory.
True, it is one of love's chiefest charms that it must
still take special pains to be superfluous in seeking
out ways to declare itself—but for these it demands no
publicity and wishes no acknowledgment. But the
admiration which one soul feels for another loses
half its worth, if it slip any opportunity of making
itself heard and felt,” etc.

Lowell is one kind of poet, and it is the worst manner
of criticism to tell what a poet is not, except more
clearly to define what he is. Though his sexual heart
never swims in his inkstand, he is warm enough in his
enthusiasm for all generous sentiments, and both daring
and delicate enough in his powers of imagination.
Truth, good sense, and fancy, were seldem more
evenly braided together than in his poem of “The
Heritage,” and Rosaline (though it never could have
been conceived by a man who had passionately loved)
is the very finest cobweb of fancy. Nobody could
help loving the truth, honesty, fearlessness, and energy,
stamped on all his poetry, and, as we said before,
he has the “vim” to carve out for himself any destiny
he pleases. He has determined to live by literature,
but we do not believe he will long remain a poet only.
He will wish to take the world by the heard in some
closer clutch than poetry gives room for, and his good
judgment as to the weight of heavy English words,
will try itself before long on more serious matter than
sonnets. At least, that is what we think while admiring
him over our breakfast.

As to the other poet, Bayard Taylor, we had a
great deal to say to him—sympathy, encouragement,
promise of watchfulness over his fame, etc., etc. But
he will need no special kindness yet awhile. Love is
plenty for new-found poets. Many people love little
chickens who are insensible to the merits of cocks
and hens, and we reserve our friendship till he is matured
and envied. Meantime, if he wants our opinion
that he is a poet, and can be, with toil and study—immortal—he
has it. His poetry is already worthy of
long preserving—apprentice-boy though he be.

I had quite a summery trip to Philadelphia on the
second day of the new year, sitting at the open window
of the railcar and snuffing the fragrance of the
soft, sun-warmed fields with as good comfort as I ever
found in April. But for the rudeness and incivility
of all the underlings employed upon the line (and I
am too old a traveller, and was in too sunny a humor,
to find fault unnecessarily). I should have given the
clerk of happiness credit for five hours “bankable”
satisfaction. It tells ill for the manners of the “Directors
of the Philadelphia and New York Railroad Line,”
that their servants are habitually insolent and profane—
servants being usually what their masters look on
without reproof.

Philadelphia makes an impression of great order,
comfort, and elegance, upon a stranger, and there is
no city in the country where I like better to “loiter
by the way.” Not feeling very “gregarious” the day
I was there, and having heard much mention of Sanderson's
restaurant—(moreover, having found a new
book at Lea & Blanchard's, a look into which promised
excellent dinner-company)—I left my hotel and
dined à la Francaise—I and my new book. I never
had a more capital dinner in France than this impromptu
one at Sanderson's, and I wish the book had

been American as well as the dinner—for the glory it
is to the country that produced it. It was to me
much more enchanting and captivating than a novel,
yet the subject was, “The Education of Mothers, or
the Civilization of Mankind”—a subject you would
naturally expect to find treated with somewhat trite
morality. This work, however (which gained the
prize offered by the French Academy), is written with
complete novelty and freshness, and—to define it in a
way that every thinking man will comprehend—it is a
most delightfully suggestive book—full of thoughts
and sentences that make you stop and close the volume
till you have fed awhile on what they convey to
you. If this book were properly presented to the appreciation
of the public, it would circulate widely on
the two levels of amusement and instruction, and be
as delightful in one field as it would be eminently useful
in the other. I commend it to every one who is
in want of enjoyable reading. The motto, by-the-way,
is that true sentiment from Rousseau: “Les
hommes seront toujours ce qu'il plaira aux femmes. Si
vous voulez qu'ils deviennent grands et vertueux, apprenez
aux femmes ce que c'est que grandeur et vertu.”

The New Mirror has published No. 3 of what a
morning paper calls “aristocratic shilling literature,”
an extra containing “The Lady Jane, and other Humorous
Poems,” by N. P. Willis. The Lady Jane
is a daguerreotype sketch of the London literary society
in which Moore, Bulwer, D'Israeli, Proctor, and
others of that class habitually live, and it is, at least,
done with the utmost labor limœ of the author. Byron,
in a manner, monopolized the Don Juan stanza
(in which this poem is written), and no one could now
attempt the stanza, however different the story and
style of thought, without being criticised inevitably
as an imitator. Still, it is the only stanza susceptible,
to any high degree, of mingled pathos and humor,
philosophy and fun, and it is likely to be used for such
purposes until the monopoly is lost sight of—a hundred
years hence. There is a great deal in “The
Lady Jane” which is truer and newer than most
sketches of society published in books of travel—a
great deal that could only be told in such a poem, or
in the rattle of familiar gossip.

I met just now, in the corridor of the Astor, Captain
Chadwick, of the London packet-ship Wellington,
just arrived in twenty-two days from England.
At this season of the year, and up-hill (as the sailors
call it, westerly winds always predominating on the
Atlantic), this is a remarkable passage, and could only
have been made by a fine ship, well sailed. I have
made two remarkably short passages across the water
with Captain Chadwick, and a more agreeable companion,
or a better “skipper,” I believe, never tightened
a halliard. He is one of those happy men famous
for “good luck,” which commonly means, “taking
good care.” This is the ship on board of which
the duke of Wellington made a speech (at a breakfast
given to him by the captain) very complimentary
to America and Americans.

There is a considerable outbreak lately in the way
of equipages in New York. Several four-horse vehicles
have made their appearance, driven by the
young men who own them. I have noticed also a
new curricle in beautiful taste (driven with a steel bar
over the horses' backs), and a tilbury with two servants
in livery, one on the seat with his master, and
another on horseback, following as an outrider. We
are to have a masked ball this evening, and a steeple-chase
is to come off on the twentieth (Viscount Bertrand
one of the riders, and each competitor entering
a thousand-dollar stake for the winner). I shall be at
the ball, not at the steeple-chase—for a horse must
have iron legs to run over frozen ploughed fields, and
a man must have less use for his life than I, who
would risk a fall upon a surface like broken stones.
The viscount has won several steeple-chases in England,
and has had some rough riding after the Arabs
in Algiers—so I would bet on him, unless there happened
to be a fox-hunting Irishman among the competitors.
There are six riders, I understand, and one
of them will win six thousand dollars, of course, and
probably six horses will be ruined, and one or two
necks broken. Fortunately, there is a superfluity of
horses and young men.

The story goes that “there is a skeleton in every
man's closet,” and there is, of course (in a country
as independent as ours is of les prestiges), a phantom
following every man who is conspicuous, and pointing
at his drawback. The drawback to any elaborate
novelty of luxury is at once read legibly in Broadway.
Seeing a new and very costly equipage in England,
you merely know that the owner had money enough
to buy it. The contrivance of it, the fitting of the
harness, the matching and breaking in of the horses,
are matters attended to by those who make these details
their profession. The turn-out is brought perfect
to the owner's door, and he pays, simply, money
for it. In this country, on the contrary, the purchaser
and driver of such a vehicle pays for it money, contrivance,
constant thought, and almost his entire attention.
The classes are yet wanting who purvey for luxuries
out of the ordinary course. There is no head-groom
whose business it is to save his master from all
thought and trouble as to his turn-out. The New
York “Glaucus” must go every day for a month to
the coachmaker's, to superintend the finishing of his
new “drag.” He must hurry his breakfast to go to
the stable to look aftr his irresponsible grooms. He
spends hours at the harness-maker's. He racks his
thought to contrive compact working-room for his
wheelers, and get the right pull on his leaders. He
becomes learned in harness-blacking and wheel-grease,
horse-shoes and horse-physic, and, in short, entirely
occupies what philosophers are pleased to call “an immortal
mind” in the one matter of a vehicle to drive.
(He could be conveyed, of course, the same distance
each day in an omnibus for sixpence—but he does not
believe the old satire of “aliquis in omnibus, nihil in
singulis.” Quite the contrary!) A man who is not
content, in this country, to be provided for with the
masses, and like the masses, becomes his own provider
—like a man who, to have a coat different from other
people, should make it himself, and, of course, be little
except an amateur tailor. We shall have these
supplementary links of society in time. There will
be, doubtless, the class of thought-savers. But, until
then, the same amount of thought that would serve a
constituency in Congress, will be employed in keeping
a “slap-up turn-out,” and rich young men will
at least have the credit of choosing between stable
knowledge and legislative ambition.

I had thought that the revenue which foreign theatres
derive from selling to young men, at large prices,
keys for the season to the behind-scenes, and the society
of the goddesses of the ballet while off the
stage, was not yet discovered in this country. The
following paragraph, from the True Sun, would seem
to show that the coulisses are visited for their society,
at least, and might be made “to pay:”—

“Among the cases which are set down for trial next
term, is one which will lift the curtain which conceals
the affairs of a certain cheap theatre in this city, and
give the public a bird's-eye view of what has been recently
going on behind the scenes. The developments,
if not prevented by an amicable arrangement,
will be rich and rare—showing the procedure by
which a luminary of the law has run out of his orbit,
displacing, in his new and erratic course, a luminary
of literature!”

The fine writing of this paragraph, by-the-way, is
rather piquant.

The belle of the Olympic, pretty Miss Taylor,
could scarce have a better advertisement for attraction
than a paragraph which announces that she “has
been robbed of six hundred dollars worth of jewelry,”
and that “MANY heavy articles of plate, rich dresses,
&c., were LEFT UNDISTURBED!” I am inclined to
think that this is a covert puff from Mitchell's genius—for
he is a genius, and quite capable of knowing
that everybody will go to have a look at an actress
who had “six hundred dollars' worth of jewelry and
many heavy articles of plate left undisturbed!” People,
like pictures, are made to “stand out” by a
well-contrived background! Ah, you bright fellow,
Mitchell!

The event ahead which has the most rose-colored
promise, just now, is the Annual Ball of the City
Guard—to be given at Niblo's on the twenty-fourth.
Niblo's finely-proportioned hall has been, for some
time, undergoing a transformation into a model of the
ancient Alhambra for the purpose, and Smith, the excellent
scene-painter of the Park, and a troop of decoraters
and upholsterers under his direction, are doing
all that taste and money can do to conjure up a
scene of enchantment “for one night only.” The
supper is to make the gods hungry and envious on
Olympus—so sumptuous, they say, are the preparations.
The City Guard, as you may know, is what
the English army-men call the “crack corps” of New
York. The probability is, that its members represent
more spirit, style, and character, than belong to
any other combination of young men in the state.
They have a great deal of fashion, as well as esprit du
corps, and, what with their superb uniform, uppish
carriage, superior discipline, and high-spirited union
of purpose, they constitute a power of no little weight
and consideration. Their ball will probably be the
most showy festivity of the season.

The masked ball which comes off to-night is, I am
told, got up by a party of literary ladies, to promote
case in conversation! I can hardly fancy anything
more easy than the “freedoms of the press,” and, I
am told, most of the gentlemen of the press are invited,
myself among the number. A man is a block,
of course, who is not open to improvement.

I went to the masked ball without any very clear
idea of who were its purposers, or what were its
purposes. I found to my surprise that it was the
celebration of the opening of the Ladies' Club in
the upper part of Broadway. A fine house has been
taken and furnished, and the reading-room goes immediately
into operation, I understand. Like the
frolic they gave (in some country of which I have
read and desire to know more) to the nuns before
taking the irrevocable veil, the carpets were taken up
and music and men introduced to make the gynocrastic
seclusion hereafter more marked and positive.
Being “an early man,” I stayed but an hour, listening
to the band and looking on; but I saw beauty
there which might make one almost envy the newspapers
that are to be perused by a “club” of such,
and a general air enjoué more lovely than literary.
The masks were few, and the fun of them was quite
destroyed by the fact that every one seemed to know
who they were. Indeed, the pleasure of reputable
masking lies in the momentary breaking down of barriers
that in this country do not exist—in giving low
degree and high degree a chance to converse freely,
that is to say—and till we have unapproachable lords
and princes, and ladies weary of the thin upper air of
exclusiveness, masquerading will be dull work to us.
At present the mask makes rather than removes an obstacle
to intercourse. Anybody who is there in a
mask, would be just as glad to see you tête-à-tête by
daylight, the next morning in her parlor, as to chat
with you through pasteboard and black crape. Most
of the ladies at this literary ball were in fancy dresses,
however, and doubtless with their pastoral attractions
displayed to the best advantage; and this part of it
was commendable. If women knew what was attractive,
I think they would make every ball a “fancy
ball.” “Medora” jackets and “Sultana” trousers are
choses entrainantes.

I think you would agree with me, after reading it,
that Brantz Mayer's work on Mexico, recently
published, is as agreeably spiced with wit, humor, and
other pleasant metal pimento, as any book of travels
written within new-book memory. I have run through
it within a day or two with some suspense, as well as
great amusement—for so racy and sketchy a power
of description should be in the corps of professed,
not amateur authors. His descriptions of the outer
features of Mexican life, of Mexican character, Mexican
women, beggars, priests, and gamblers, are admirably
spirited and entertaining. There is also a
good deal of statistical matter industriously and carefully
got together, and the publisher has done justice
to it all in the printing and getting up. There will
be elaborate reviews of it elsewhere; but meantime I
express my pleasurable surprise and admiration in a
paragraph—commending it for the purchase of readers.

The fourth extra of the New Mirror has appeared,
embodying Morris's popular songs and melodies,
which have heretofore only been published with music,
or in a very expensive embellished edition of his
works. The hundred thousand lovers of married poetry
(music the wife, or husband, I don't know which)
will be glad to get these “winged words” in a lump
for a shilling. Morris's popularity will send this extra
to every corner of the land.

The betting upon the riders in the proposed hurdle-race
(not steeple-chase, as I mentioned before) goes
on vigorously. I rather doubt, however, whether it
will ultimately come off. There was a steeple-chase
got up on Long Island, last year, in which an Irishman
and an Englishman, whose fames had followed
them, as great hunters, were the competitors, and
after getting over two fences by pushing them down
with their horses' breasts, they got imprisoned in a
clover-lot, from which they were extricated with great
difficulty by the owner's letting down the bars and
leading the horses over! There is a compact, jockey-built
American among the competitors, who has great
skill as a horseman, and should there be snow on the
ground, his light weight and superior practice will

win the race for him without a doubt. The Viscount
Bertrand, though doubtless the boldest of riders, is
over six feet high, and a heavy man.

The Statistics of Puffing.—We have been induced
lately to look a little into the meum and tuum
of puffing—partly from having been untruly (qu. prematurely?)
accused of “receiving consideration for
the same,” but more to see whether the consideration
were worth the having, in case conscience (“John Tetzel,
vender of indulgences,” being dead) could be
brought to countenance it. We pique ourselves on
looking things in the face, and having and allowing
as few concealments as possible—so, first, for a clean
breast on the subject—say up to January 1, 1844.

We are not particular, as “Mrs. Grundy” knows,
as to the subject we write upon, nor the harness in
which we are put to work, nor the style, rhythm, or
rhyme, we are called upon to write in. We go altogether
for metallic magnetism. It is our duty (on
our way to Heaven) to try for a “plum”—in other
words, to be “diligent in business.” We write what
in our judgment is best calculated to sell. But, in
the course of this policy, it falls in our way to speak
of things to eat, and things to wear—very capable
topics, both, as to piquancy and interest. We have
had occasion to describe glowingly Florence's crustaceous
cave, and the ice-cream Alhamra, and to
pronounce Carpenter the ne plus ultra of coat-builders,
and Jennings's the emporium of “bang-up”
toggery, and for these and similar serviceable “first-rate
notices,” we have, in no shape,[2] received “con-sid-e-ra-tion.”
The gentlemen who have said so
(“the hawks” who would “pick out hawks' een”)
will please make an early meal of their little fictions.

As to literary puffs, we would as soon sell our tears
for lemon-drops, as to defile one of God's truthful
adjectives with a price for the using it. We never
asked for a literary puff in our life, nor made interest
for it in any shape, nor would we sell one for the
great emerald Sakhral. But if we love a man (as we
do many, thank God, whom we are called upon to
criticise), we pick out the gold that is inlaid in his
book, and leave to his enemies to find the brass and
tinsel. And if that's not fair, we don't very much care
—for we scorn to be impartial.

But let us hop off this high horse, and come down
to the trade part of it once more.

In England, all influences that aid business are
priced and paid. The puffs of new books in the
newspapers are invariably sent, ready-written, by the
publishers, and paid for at a much higher price than
avowed advertisements. The continued effect of this
abuse of the public ear is based upon the phlegmatic
dulness of perception in the English public, and their
consequent chronic humbuggability. It could never
“answer” in our country after being once fairly exposed.
It is, to a certain degree, practised, however
—as is pay for concert-puffing, music-puffing, theatrical-puffing,
etc.

Having confessed that we are willing to admit an
entering wedge of iniquity in this line—in other
words, that we are willing to know whether it be honest
to serve a man and contemplate his thanks in
lucre—let us “run the line,” as the surveyors say,
and see how our new territory of tribute may be virtuously
bounded.

Authors have “the freedom” of us, of course.
They are welcome to all we can do for them—if they
publish on their own account. Actors, singers, and
painters, are “chartered libertines” for whom we have
a weakness; and, besides, we can not feed on the
wages of pleasure-makers. All other pursuits, trades,
professions, we are half inclined to admit, will be at
liberty to make us such acknowledgments as they
choose for any furtherance to their merchandise (in
bales or brains) which may come legitimately in our
way. We shall, in any case, preserve the value of
our commendation by keeping it honest, and we shall
never commend any farther than is entertaining and
readable—but there is a choice between subjects to
write about, and a preference as to giving attention to
things about town, and it is for this choice and preference
that we may make up our mind to be susceptible
of corruption. We write this in the cool of the
morning. We don't know what we shall think in the
more impulsive hours. Meantime—send it to the
printer, and see what the governor says of it in the
proof-sheet.

A few gentlemen (Mr. Philip Hone apparently the
mover of the project) have combined to raise a subscription
for the purchase of Clevenger's statue of a
North American Indian. The circular addresses the
business-men of the city, and the statue, if purchased,
will be presented to the Mercantile Library Association.
Three thousand dollars is the sum fixed upon,
five hundred of which are to be appropriated to the
immediate relief of Mrs. Clevenger and her children.
It would strike, perhaps, even some of the subscribers
to this fund with surprise to tell them that the statue
they are to purchase is possibly still lying unquarried
in the mountains of Carrara. Clevenger is dead, but
his genius stands pointing its finger to a rude block of
marble, in which lies, unseen, a complete and immortal
statue, waiting only for the chisel of mechanical
workmen to remove the rough stone that encumbers
it. That finger is seen and obeyed three thousand
miles away (by the committee with Mr. Philip Hone
at its head), and the reluctant money will be forthcoming
and on its way to Italy in a month, and the
statue will be found and finished, imported, and exhibited
at Clinton Hall! (Plain matter-of-fact, all
this, and yet it sounds very like poetry!) I was told
by Thorwalsden, when at Rome, that there were several
of his statues he had never seen. They were finished,
as far as he was concerned, when they were
moulded in clay. They were then cast in plaster by
the mechanics who make a trade of it, and the plaster
models were sent to Carrara, where there is a large
village of copyists in marble living near the marble
quarries. From Carrara the statues were sent, when
finished, to Copenhagen, their ultimate destination,
and Thorwalsden, on his subsequent visit to his native
country, saw them for the first time. The cost of delivering
Clevenger's statue from the womb of the
mountain impregnated by his genius will be about one
thousand dollars—a round fee for the accouchement of
the stony mother of “a North American Indian!”

Burns's Letters to Clarinda have disappointed many
people, who expected, naturally, to find a poet's love-letters
better written than another man's. I think the
contrary would naturally be true. Fine writing is an
arm's-length dexterity, and the heart works only at
close quarters. I should suspect the sincerity of a
poet's love-letter if it were not far within his habitual
tact and grace. Besides, in strong emotion, the heart
flies from the much-used channels of language, and
tries for something newer to its own ear, and, while an
ordinary man would find this novelty in poetical language,
a poet would seek to roughen, and simplify,

and break up the habitual art and melody of his periods.
By-the-way, the name of Burns reminds me
of a little anecdote I heard told with some humor by
Campbell, at a dinner-party in London. Count
D'Orsay and Barry Cornwall were present, and they
were drawing out the veteran bard as to his recollections
of the great men who were setting stars when he
was rising. “I was dining one day with Burns,” said
Campbell, “who, like Dr. Johnson and other celebrities,
had his Bozzy worshipper, a friend who was
always in his company. I have forgotten his name.
Burns left the room for a moment, and passing the
bottle to his friend, I proposed to drink the health
of Mr. Burns. He gave me a look of annihilation.
`Sir,' said he, `you will always be known as Mr.
Campbell, but posterity will talk of Burns!” Such
an anecdote makes one look around in alarm, to see if
there are not some unrecognised mononoms in our time,
whom we are profaning, unaware, with our Mister-y.

It rains in Broadway—as it has often done before, it
is true; but it seems to me a particularly wet rain, for
there is an old black beggar standing in front of St.
Paul's, holding out his hat for what must be, at any
rate, a diluted charity. At a fair calculation (and I
have watched him while writing, for the last two
hours), every tenth passenger put something into his
hat. His gray wool must hold more water than his
leaky hat, and, at least, it acts like a sponge—on the
passers-by. Begging, as yet, is a good trade in
America, and I think that New York, particularly, is
a place where money has little adhesiveness—easily
made and readily given away.

I have noticed in history and real life that reformers,
great enthusiasts, and great philosophers, produce
effects quite commensurate with their ambitions, but
seldom by success in the exact line they had marked
out. Providence does not allow “steam” to be wasted.
In the search after the “elixir of life,” and the “philosopher's
stone,” for example, the alchymists have
stumbled over some of the most important discoveries
of chymistry. This is rather an essayish beginning to
a hasty-pudding letter, but I have been looking over
Brisbane's book on Fourierism, while eating my breakfast,
and it struck me how poorly the direct objects of
“socialism” succeeded, while combination, to produce
great and small results, seems to me to be the most
prominent novelty in the features of the time. Mercantile
houses are establishing partners in all the principal
capitals—new publications are circulated almost
wholly by a lately-arranged system of combined agencies—information,
formerly got by individual reading,
is now fed out to large societies; and the rumor just
now is, of a grand experiment of combining all the qualities
of half a dozen newspapers in one—establishing
something like the London Times, for instance, in
which the subscriber would be sure to find “everything
that is going.”

I went on Wednesday evening to the temperance
tea-party, at Washington Hall, given in honor of the
birthday of Franklin. Here was combination again—
tea-party, prayer-meeting, lecture, concert, promenade,
and tableau vivant (a printing-press worked in the
room), all given in one entertainment. There were
seven or eight long tables, with alleys between, and from
a thousand to twelve hundred ladies and gentlemen
seated “at tea,” and listening to the singing, praying,
instrumental music, and speech-making, with a great
appearance of comfort. I did not stay for the “promenade
all round,” but I am told that it was very
agreeable, and that the party did not separate till two
in the morning! The temperance combination has
been a great lesson as to the power of numbers united
for one end; though I fear the action of it has been
somewhat like the momentary sweeping dry of a
river's channel by a whirlwind, so strikingly seems
intemperance, of late, to have resumed its prevalence
in the streets.

I find that, by my hasty observations on New York
society in a late letter, I have given voice to a feeling
that has been for some time in petto publico, and I
have heard since a great deal of discussion of the
quality of New York gayety. It seems to be the
opinion of good observers, that the best elements of
society are not organized. The intellect and refinement
of the population (of which there is quite
enough for a fair proportion) lies “around in spots,”
it is thought, waiting only for some female Napoleon
to concentrate and combine them. Exclusively literary
parties would be as unattractive as exclusively
dancing or juvenile parties, and indeed variety is the
spice of agreeable social intercourse. In London,
beauty is, with great pains, dug out from the mine of
unfashionable regions, and made to shine in an aristocratic
setting; and talent of all kinds, colloquial, literary,
artistical, theatrical, is sought out, and mingled
with rank, wealth, and elegance, in the most perfect
society of Durope. Any sudden attempt to discredit
fashionable parties, and run an opposition with a
“blue” line, would be covered with ridicule. But I
think enough has been said, in a community as mercurial
and sympathetic of news as is the population of
New York, to induce the Amphytrions of gayety to
look a little into their social mixtures, and supply the
sweets or acids that are wanting. At the most fashionable
party lately given, Madame Castellan was the
guest of honor, and not called upon to sing—and this
is somewhat more Londonish than usual. It is one
of the newnesses of our country that we have no
grades in our admiration, and can only see the merits
of extreme lions. Second, third, and fourth-rate celebrities,
for whom in Europe there is attention justly
measured, pass wholly unnoticed through our cities.
It must be a full-blooded nobleman, or the first singer
or danseuse of the world, or the most popular author,
or the very first actor, or the miraculous musician, if
there is to be any degree whatever of appreciation or
enthusiasm. This lack of a scale of tribute to merit is
one reason why we so ridiculously overdo our welcomes
to great comets, as in the case of Dickens—
leaving very respectable stars, like Emerson, Longfellow,
Cooper, Sully, and all our own and some foreign
men of genius, to pass through the city, or remain
here for weeks, unsought by party-givers, and unwelcomed
except by their personal friends. To point
this out, fortunately, is almost to correct it, so ready
are we to learn; but I think, by the shadow cast
before, that the avatar of some goddess of fashion may
be soon looked for, who will shut her doors upon stupidity
and inelegance, rich or poor, and create a gayety
that will be enjoyable, not barely endurable.

I am very sorry to see by the English papers that
Dickens has been “within the rules of the Queen's
bench”—realizing the prophecy of pecuniary ruin
which has, for some time, been whispered about for
him. His splendid genius did not need the melancholy
proof of improvidence, and he has had wealth
so completely within his grasp that there seems a particular
and unhappy needlessness in his ruin. The
most of his misfortune is, he has lived so closely at
the edge of his flood-tide of prosperity, that the ebb
leaves him at high-water mark, and not in the contented

ooze of supplied necessity where it first took
him up. And by-the-way, it was in that same low-water
period of his life—just before he became celebrated—that
I first saw Dickens; and I will record
this phase of his chrysalis (“the tomb of the caterpillar
and the cradle of the butterfly,” as Linnæus
calls it), upon the chance of its being as interesting to
future ages as such a picture would now be of the
ante-butterflivity of Shakspere. I was following a
favorite amusement of mine one rainy day, in the
Strand, London—strolling toward the more crowded
thoroughfares with cloak and umbrella, and looking at
people and shop-windows. I heard my name called
from a passenger in a street-cab. From out the
smoke of the wet straw peered the head of my publisher,
Mr. Macrone (a most liberal and noble-hearted
fellow, since dead). After a little catechism as to my
damp destiny for that morning, he informed me that
he was going to visit Newgate, and asked me to join
him. I willingly agreed, never having seen this famous
prison, and after I was seated in the cab, he said he
was going to pick up, on the way, a young paragraphist
for the Morning Chronicle, who wished to write a
description of it. In the most crowded part of Holborn,
within a door or two of the “Bull and Mouth”
inn (the great starting and stopping-place of the stage-coaches),
we pulled up at the entrance of a large
building used for lawyers' chambers. Not to leave
me sitting in the rain, Macrone asked me to dismount
with him. I followed by long flights of stairs to an
upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted
and bleak-looking room, with a deal table and two
or three chairs and a few books, a small boy and
Mr. Dickens—for the contents. I was only struck at
first with one thing (and I made a memorandum of it
that evening, as the strongest instance I had seen of
English obsequiousness to employers)—the degree to
which the poor author was overpowered with the
honor of his publisher's visit! I remember saying to
myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair, “My good
fellow, if you were in America, with that fine face and
your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended
to by a publisher!” Dickens was dressed
very much as he has since described “Dick Swiveller”—
minus the “swell” look. His hair was cropped
close to his head, his clothes scant, though jauntily
cut, and after changing a ragged office-coat for a
shabby blue, he stood by the door, collarless and buttoned
up, the very personification, I thought, of a
close sailer to the wind. We went down and crowded
into the cab (one passenger more than the law allowed,
and Dickens partly in my lap and partly in Macrone's)
and drove on to Newgate. In his works, if you remember,
there is a description of the prison, drawn
from this day's observation. We were there an hour
or two, and were shown some of the celebrated murderers
confined for life, and one young soldier waiting
for execution; and in one of the passages we chanced
to meet Mrs. Fry, on her usual errand of benevolence.
Though interested in Dickens's face, I forgot him
naturally enough after we entered the prison, and I do
not think I heard him speak during the two hours. I
parted from him at the door of the prison, and continued
my stroll into the city.

Not long after this, Macrone sent me the “sheets
of Sketches by Boz,” with a note saying that they
were by the gentleman who went with us to Newgate.
I read the book with amazement at the genius displayed
in it, and in my note of reply assured Macrone that
I thought his fortune was made as a publisher if he
could monopolize the author.

Two or three years afterward, I was in London, and
present at the complimentary dinner given to Macready.
Samuel Lover, who sat next me, pointed out
Dickens. I looked up and down the table, but was
wholly unable to single him out without getting my
friend to number the people who sat above him. He
was no more like the same man I had seen than a tree
in June is like the same tree in February. He sat
leaning his head on his hand while Bulwer was speaking,
and with his very long hair, his very flash waistcoat,
his chains and rings, and withal a much paler
face than of old, he was totally unrecognisable. The
comparison was very interesting to me, and I looked
at him a long time. He was then in his culmination
of popularity, and seemed jaded to stupefaction. Remembering
the glorious works he had written since I
had seen him, I longed to pay him my homage, but
had no opportunity, and I did not see him again till
he came over to reap his harvest and upset his hay-cart
in America. When all the ephemera of his imprudences
and improvidences shall have passed away
—say twenty years hence—I should like to see him
again, renowned as he will be for the most original and
remarkable works of his time.

A friend lent me yesterday a late file of “The
Straits Messenger,” an English newspaper published
at Singapore. The leader of one number commences
with, “We have always had a hatred for republicanism,
and holding it to be the fosterer of every rascality
in public life, and every roguery in private, we are not
at all surprised when instances turn up to prove our
theory true.” This is apropos of some news of
“repudiation.” The advertisements in this paper
amused me somewhat, and this consist principally of
dissolutions of native partnership. Here are three of
them:—

“Notice. The interest and responsibility of Kim
Joo Ho in our firm ceased from the 8th January.
(Signed) Yep Hun Ho.”

“Notice. The interest and responsibility of the
undersigned in the firm of Chop Tyho ceased from
this date. (Signed) Chee Ong Seang, Chee Jin
Seo.”

“Notice. The interest and responsibility of Mr.
See Eng San in our firm ceased from the 5th January.
(Signed Boonteeong & Co.”

In the old English of Gower's “Confessio Amantis”
there is wrapped up a little germ of wisdom which
you would hardly look for in the metaphysics of love,
but which contains the hand-over-hand, boiling-pot
principle of most of the make-money-ries of our
country:—

In England nobody gets ahead but by shoving on
all those who are before him, but a hundred instances
will occur to you of leap-frog experiment in our country,
by which all kinds of success in business is superseded.
The most signal and successful jump that I
have noticed lately is that of the periodical agents, over
the heads of the old publishers—(the trick, indeed,
which has hocus-pocused the old pirates into changing
their views on the subject of copyright!) Three
years ago the great apparatus for the circulation of
books, was entirely a secret in the hands of the trade,
and a man might as well have attempted to run a rail-car
across the fields by hand as an author to have attempted
to circulate his own book without the consent
of publishers. The names and terms of bookselling
correspondents, the means of transportation of
books, and the amount of profits on them, were matters
of inaccessible knowledge. The publisher kept the

gate of the public eye, and demanded his own toll—
two thirds of the commodity, if not all! The first
“little pin” that “bored through this castle wall,”
was the establishment of the mammoth newspaper, by
Day and Wilson, and the publication of entire novels
in one sheet; and, upon their agencies for the circulation
of these, is now built a scheme of periodical
agency totally separate from publishers, and comparing
with these as the expresses of Hale and Harnden and
Pomeroy do with the general post-office—cheaper,
more expeditious and open to competition.

It is, perhaps, not generally known, that any author,
now, can publish his own book, and get all the profits!
Any printer will tell him how to get it printed and
bound in paper covers—for which he pays simply what
publishers do. Stored up in his own room or a warehouse,
he has only to furnish it to the periodical agents,
who will take of him, at their wholesale price, all that
will sell—(bringing the risk directly on the proper
shoulders, those of the author)—and returning to him
very promptly the money or the unsaleable copies.
There are no “six months publishers' notes” in the
business; no cringing or making interest. The author
is on a blessed level with the gingerbread bakers and
blacking sellers he has often envied—salesman of his
own commodity, if saleable it be, and made aware, to
a certainty, in a very brief time, whether he has mistaken
his vocation. Let but congress give us a law
which shall prevent English books from coming, not
into the market, but into the publishers' hands, for
nothing, and the only remaining obstacle to a worldwide
competition will be gloriously removed. And,
books will be no dearer than at present—as the memorials
to congress sufficiently show.

There are some delicious works of art now exhibiting
opposite the hospital, in Broadway—Harvey's
Atmospheric Effects of American Scenery. Those
who have not been observers in other countries are
scarcely aware how peculiar our country is in its atmospheric
phenomena—how much bolder, brighter,
and more picturesque. There is scarce a scene pictured
in this beautiful gallery which could be at all true
of any other country; but to the American eye they
are enchantingly faithful and beautiful. The artist
gives in his prospectus for engraving these works the
following interesting bit of autobiography:—

“In 1827 I entered upon the line of portrait-painting
in miniature; I pursued it for nine years with an
assiduity that impaired my health. Country air and
exercise being recommended me, I purchased a tract
of land on the majestic Hudson; built a cottage after
my own plan; amused myself by laying out grounds,
and gained health and strength by the employment.
These exercises in the open air led me more and more
to notice and study the ever-varying atmospheric effects
of this beautiful climate. I undertook to illustrate
them by my pencil, and thus almost accidentally,
commenced a set of atmospheric landscapes. The
number had reached twenty-two, and as yet I had no
thought of publication when business called me to
Europe. I carried them with me, and, while in London,
occasionally attended the Conversazione of Artists.
At one of these I accidentally heard a gentleman, on
leaving a little knot of connoisseurs assembled round
my portfolio, pass a most flattering eulogium on its
contents. I felt the more elated by his praise on
learning that he was Professor Farrady, the able successor
of Sir Humphrey Davy. At Paris, while partaking
of the courteous hospitality of the American
minister, Governor Cass, my portfolio was sent for and
received the approbation of that gentleman and his
guests. Governor Cass retained my drawings for a
week; on returning them to me he recommended
that I should have them engraved, and suggested that
it might be done at once, while I was in Paris. I was
too diffident, however, of their popular merit, to risk
so extensive an undertaking. On my return to New
York my personal friends encouraged me in the project,
and at last I made up my mind to lay the original
drawings before the Boston public; conceiving that I
owed it to that city, where I had received liberal encouragement
in my previous pursuits to give to them
the opportunity of originating the work of publication.”

Mr. Harvey went afterward to London to find print-colorists
who could execute the work to his satisfaction,
and, while there, Mr. Murray, who was formerly
in this country, and is now attached to her majesty's
household, showed to the queen the first number.
The royal subscription was immediately given to the
work at a munificent price. It is worth every one's
while to see this delicious work of art, and every person
of easy means should subscribe for a copy of the
engravings.

The SLEIGHS flying very briskly up and down Broadway
this morning remind me that Miss Howitt, in her
late preface to one of Miss Bremer's works, mentions,
among other phrases, our use of the words “sleighs,
sleds, and sleighing, for sledges and sledging,”—calling
them “Americanisms which all well-educated persons
will be careful not to introduce into their families.”
Miss Howitt might allow, to a continent of the size
of ours, the privilege of coining a word without the
tariff of her contempt; but she forgets that sled is a
good English word, and derived from the very language
of the book she has translated—from the Swedish
word slæda. Thomson says in his Seasons:—

And Fletcher says, in a fine passage of his Eclogue:—

The cold weather of the last week has justified
another Americanism, for it has been literally “a cold
spell”—dimming parlor lights, and arresting the flow
of thought. The gas-lights burn dim because water
freezes in the gasometers, and “whole stacks of new
publications” (as a periodical agent told me yesterday)
are “books and stationary,” from the interrupted navigation.

Palmo's new opera has been voted fashionable,
nem. con. (as I have been fashionably assured), and
the long ellipse of other theatricals will give it a flowing
launch. It is a small and beautiful edifice, and is
to be brilliantly lighted, and made every way conformable
to the exactions of white kid and cashmere. Its
situation is admirable—far enough up Chamber street
to be away from the noises of Broadway, and accessible
easily from all parts of the city. This evening
comes off the preparatory rehearsal, to which the
connoisseurs and gentlemen of the press are invited as
guests. The printed invitation by the way, makes
Mr. Palmo out to be (very properly) a fellow-citizen
of the Muses, and is altogether an amusing production.
A copy of it, filled up with the name of a friend of
ours, lies by me, running thus: “The honor of the
company of N. P. W—, Grand Scribe, are respectfully
invited to attend the first public rehearsal of the
Italian Opera, on Friday evening. The house will
be brilliantly illuminated, and the connoisseur in music

will have an opportunity of beholding an edifice erected
and dedicated to the Muses, by their fellow-citizen,
F. Palmo.”

This making “fellow-citizens” of the Muses reminds
me of a police report in the “True Sun,”
announcing that a namesake of the great Roman
emperor who was “Amor et deliciœ generis humani”
—a Mr. Titus—was “arrested and committed for
stealing a door-mat!” How a man with so great a
name could steal so little, is a psychological marvel.

In looking over a western paper, a day or two since,
my eye fell on an advertisement in very comical verse.
Here are a couple of stanzas—to the tune of “the
cork leg:”—

I think there should be a committee sent out to invite
Mr. Kibbe to become a poet.

“The Rococo” is the quaint, but, in fact, most
descriptive name of one of the “extras of the New
Mirror.” Those of our readers who have been lately
in France will be familiar with the word. The etymology
of rococo has been matter of no little fruitless
inquiry. It came into use about four or five years ago,
when it was the rage to look up costly and old-fashioned
articles of jewelry and furniture. A valuable stone,
for example, in a beautiful but antique setting, was
rococo. A beauty, who had the kind of face oftenest
painted in the old pictures, was rococo. A chair, or a
table, of carved wood, costly once, but unfashionable
for many a day, was rococo. Articles of vertu were
looked up and offered for sale with a view to the prevailing
taste for rococo. Highly carved picture-frames,
old but elaborately-made trinkets, rich brocades, etc.,
etc.—things intrinsically beautiful and valuable, in
short, but unmeritedly obsolete, were rococo. The
extra published by the proprietors of the New Mirror
answers this description exactly. It comprises the
three most exquisite and absolute creations of pure
imagination (in my opinion) that have been produced
since Shakspere: “Lillian” by Praed, “The Culprit
Fay” by Drake, and “St. Agnes' Eve” by Keats—all
three of which have been overlaid and in a measure
lost sight of in the torrent of new literature—but all
three now to be had altogether in fair type, price one
shilling! The man who could read these poems
without feeling the chamber of his brain filled with
incense—without feeling his heart warm, his blood
moved, and his inmost craving of novelty and melody
deliciously ministered to, does not love poetry enough
to “possess a rose-teint for his russet cares.” I declare
I think it is worth the outlay of a fever to get
(by seclusion and depletion) the delicacy of nerve and
perception to devour and relish with intellectual nicety,
these three subtly-compounded feasts of the imagination.

We are indebted for many beautiful things not so
much to accident as to the quickness of genius to appreciate
and appropriate accident. I was pleased with
an instance that came to my knowledge last night.
Wallace (the omni-dexterous) was playing the piano
in my room, and, among others of his own inimitable
waltzes, he played one called the Midnight Waltz, in
which twelve strokes of the clock recur constantly
with the aria. In answer to an inquiry of mine, he
told me he was playing, one night, to some ladies in
Lima, when a loud silvery-toned clock in the room
struck twelve. He insensibly stopped, and beat the
twelve strokes on an accordant note on the piano,
and in repeating the passage, stopped at the same
place and beat twelve again. The effect was particularly
impressive and sweet, and he afterward composed
a waltz expressly to introduce it—one of the most
charming compositions I ever heard. Wallace is the
most prodigal of geniuses, and most prodigally endowed.
He has lived a life of adventure in the East Indies,
South America, New South Wales, and Europe,
that would fill satisfactorily the life-cups of a dozen
men, and how he has found time to be what he probably
is, as great a violinist and as great a pianist as the
greatest masters on those instruments, is certainly a
wonder. But this is not all. He was rehearsing for
a concert not long since in New York, when the clarionet-player,
in reply to some correction, said that
“if Mr. Wallace wished it played better he might
play it himself.” Wallace took the clarionet from
the hand of the refractory musician, and played the
passage so exquisitely as quite to electrify the orchestra.
He is the most modest of men, and how many
more instruments he is master of (beside the human
voice, which he plays on in conversation very attractively),
it would be wild to guess.[3] By the way, it
would be worth the while of a music-publisher to
send for the music he has literally sown the world with
—for he has written over three hundred waltzes, of
most of which he has no copy, though they have been
published and left in the cities he has visited. He
composes many hours every day. I think Wallace
one of the most remarkable men I ever knew.

On Saturday night I was at the opening of the new
opera—the beginning, as I think, of a regular supply
of a great luxury. The bright, festal look of Palmo's
exquisite little theatre struck every one with surprise
on entering, and the cozy, sympathy-sized construction,
and pleasant arrangement of seats, etc., seemed
to leave nothing to be wished for. With a kindly fostering
for a while, on the part of the press and the
public, Palmo's theatre may become the most enjoyable
and refined resort of the city.

The new prima donna made a brilliant hit. New
York is, at this moment, in love with Signorina Borghese.
She dresses a-merveille, has a very intellectual
and attractive want of beauty, is graceful, vivid, a capital
actress, and sings with a bird-like abandon, that
enchants you even with her defects. Nature has given
her quite her share of attractiveness, and she uses
it all.

The opera was “I puritani”—Bellini's last, and
the one that was playing, for only the third time, the
night he died—(at the age of twenty-seven). It was
well selected for the opening opera—being full of intelligible
and expressive melody, and not compelling
the musically uninitiated to get on tiptoe to comprehend
it. These same uninitiateds, however, are the
class to cater for, in any country, and especially in
ours. It is a great mistake to fancy that, in the appreciation
of an opera, criticism goes before. On the
contrary, feeling goes before and criticism follows
very slowly. The commonest lover of music feels,
for instance, that Bellini's operas are marked by simplicity
and sameness—but, after having felt that, the

the critic comes in and follows up the idea like an
ink-fish, expressing that plain fact in cloudy technicalities
this-wise: “Bellini rather multiplies the repetitions
of the chord than gives distinct business to
the several components of the score!” Who cares
to know, when in tears at Rossini's exquisite harmony,
that it is produced by a “profuse use of the diminished
seventh,” or that one of his most electrical effects
is done by “an harmonic atrocity of consecutive
fifths.” To have one's tear shed on a piece of paper,
and thus analyzed, may be curious, once, but not very
necessary always, and I wish, with all my heart, that
the humbug of technicalities in this, as in many other
things, might be exposed. It would be a capital subject
for a popular lecture. I lend the suggestion to
Mr. Emerson—the man best capable of using it.

Supper is a natural sequence to music, and I must
mention a pair of canvass-backs that were sent me by
a Baltimore friend, and feasted on last night after “I
Puritani”—for the sake of giving you and “your public”
some valuable and toothsome directions for the
cooking of these birds, contained in a passage of my
friend's letter: “I have some anxiety,” he says, “about
the cooking of these ducks. Pray don't put them in
the power of a Frenchman! Get hold of a good English
or American cook, knowing in roasts. Let this
cook erect a strong, blazing fire, before which he (or
she) must tend the birds for about twenty-five or
thirty minutes. To determine if they are done, have
them held up by the feet, and if the gravy runs out of
the necks, of a proper color, they don't require another
turn. Serve them up with their own gravy. 'Tis
safer than a chafing-dish and made gravy. Eat them
with hommony patties, between which and the ducks
there is a delicate affinity. Beware, I conjure you
once more, of a Frenchman—except in the shape of
a glass of Chablis. May they prove luscious as those
we ate together at Guy's.”

Here is an epigram on the turning of Grenough's
Washington out of the capitol:—

Young Poets.—An old man with no friend but
his money—a fair child holding the hand of a Magdalen—a
delicate bride given over to a coarse-minded
bridegroom—were sights to be troubled at seeing. We
should bleed at heart to see either of them. But
there is something even more touching to us than
these—something, too, which is the subject of heartless
and habitual mockery by critics—the first timid
offerings to fame of the youthful and sanguine poet.
We declare that we never open a letter from one of
this class, never read a preface to the first book of one
of them, never arrest our critical eye upon a blemish
in the immature page, without having the sensation of
a tear coined in our heart—never without a passionate
though inarticulate “God help you!” We know
so well the rasping world in which they are to jostle,
with their “fibre of sarcenet!” We know so well the
injustices, the rebuffs, the sneers, the insensibilities,
from without, the impatiences, the resentments, the
choked impulses and smothered heart-boundings within.
And yet it is not these outward penances, and
inward scorpions, that cause us the most regret in the
fate of the poet. Out of these is born the inspired expression
of his anguish—like the plaint of the singing
bird from the hearted needle which blinds him. We
mourn more over his fatuous imperviousness to counsel
—over his haste to print, his slowness to correct—over
his belief that the airy bridges he builds over the
chasms in his logic and rhythm are passable, by avoirdupois
on foot, as well as by Poesy on Pegasus. That
the world is not as much enchanted—(that we ourselves
are not as much touched and delighted)—with
the halting flights of new poets as with the broken
and short venturings in air of new-fledged birds—
proves over again that the world we live in were a
good enough Eden if human nature were as loveable
as the rest. We wish it were not so. We wish it
were natural to admire anything human-made, that
has not cost pain and trial. But, since we do not, and
can not, it is a pity, we say again, that beginners in
poetry are offended with kind counsel. Of the great
many books and manuscript poems we receive, there
is never one from a young poet, which we do not
long, in all kindness, to send back to him to be restudied,
rewritten, and made, in finish, more worthy
of the conception. To praise it in print only puts
his industry to sleep, and makes him dream he has
achieved what is yet far beyond him. We ask the young
poets who read this, where would be the kindness in
such a case?

A young lady in Brooklyn who signs herself “Short
and Sweet,” writes to us to say that she is very tired
of her name, and seeing no prospect of getting another
(with an owner to it), wishes to know whether
she may lawfully abandon the unsentimental prenomen
inflicted on her at baptism, and adopt one of her
own more tasteful selection. By an understanding
with all the people likely to put her name in their
wills, we should think she might. Names are a modern
luxury, and if she chose to be rococo, she might
do without one, or be known as the ancients were, by
some word descriptive of her personal peculiarities.
(So came into use the names of Brown, Long, Broadhead,
etc.) “Short and Sweet” would not be a bad
name. Or—if the lady chooses to follow the Arabian
custom, she (supposing her father's name to be a
well-sounding one—say Tiskins) would be called
“Tiskins's Short and Sweet daughter”—people in
Arabia being only designated as brown or fair, short
or tall, children of such and such parents. There
was a Roman fashion, too, that might help her out—
that of adding to the name any quality or exploit for
which the bearer was remarkable—Miss Short and
Sweet Heartbreaker, for example, or Miss “Noli-me-Tangere,”
or (after the favorite flower of the Irish),
Miss “Jump-up-and-kiss me.” (The Irish designate
Tom Moore by this pretty prenomen.) Our compliments
to the lady, and we are sorry she should want
a name—sorry she has a want we can not supply. It
happens to be the one thing we are out of.

The opera gets more crowded, more dressy, and
more fashionable, nightly. Some malicious person
started a rumor that the building was unsafe, and
many stayed away till it was tested. There are many,
too, who wait for the stamp of other people's approbation
before they venture upon even a new amusement.
The doubtfuls have now gone over, however,
and the opera is “in the full tide,” etc., etc. Some
of the first families have taken season-tickets in the
opera-boxes (there are but two private boxes, and
those very inconvenient and undesirable), and the best
seats in the pit are sold out, like the stalls at the
Italian opera in London, to bachelors in the market.
The prima donna, Borghese, improves with every
repetition, and what with dressing, singing, and acting—all
exceedingly well—she is a very enjoyable
rechauffée of Grisi, whose style she follows.

This is a day of such sunshine and air that those

must be in love with the sunny sidewalk of Broadway.
And this recalls to my mind a little book of poems,
better described by their title than any book whose
name I ever knew—“Droppings from the Heart,” by
Thomas Mackellar, lately published in Philadelphia.
Everybody must love the man who reads his book,
though its simplicity would sometimes make you
smile. He thus apostrophizes the city of New York:—

The credulity of this stanza is not weak-mindedness,
by any means—as the strength of expression and
beauty of poetry in the other parts of the book sufficiently
prove. The writer's only vent seems to be the
expression of affection. He loves everything. He
believes good of everything and everybody. I do not
know that, in my life, I ever saw a more complete picture
than this book of a heart overrunning with tenderness.
The lines to his “Sleeping Wife,” are as
beautiful as anything of Barry Cornwall's. The piece
called “The Heart-Longings,” too, is finely expressed.
A little infusion of distrust, bitterness, and contempt,
would make Mackellar a poet of the kind most admired
by critics, and most read and sympathized with
by the world. He is, I understand, a printer in Philadelphia,
and enjoys the kindly friendship of Mr.
Chandler, of the United States Gazette, to whom is
addressed one of the sonnets in his book. For family
reading, among people of simple lives and pure tastes,
the “Droppings from the Heart” is the best-adapted
book of poetry I have lately seen.

One of the most charming resuscitations from the
trance of oblivion that have come about lately, is the
republication (in the “Mirror Library”) of Pinckney's
Poems. Mr. Pinckney, your readers will perhaps
know, was the son of the Hon. William Pinckney, our
minister in 1802 at the court of St. James, and was
born in London during the diplomatic residence there
of his father. He was partly educated at college,
entered the navy, gave it up for the law, and, after
much disappointment and suffering, died at twenty-five.
With discipline and study, he might, I think,
have written as well as Moore. What poetry would
be in a world where Toil were not the Siamesed twin
of Excellence (in other words, where man had not
fallen), “is a curious question, coz!” The wild horse
runs very well in the prairie, but we give a preference
of admiration to the “good-continuer” by toilsome
training. Whether the fainéant angels who “sit in the
clouds,” admire more the objectless careerings of the
wild steed, or the “wind and bottom” of the winner
of the sweepstakes—whether fragmentary poetry,
dashed off while the inspiration is on, and thrown
aside ill-finished, when the whim evaporates, be more
celestial than the smooth and complete product of
painful toil and disciplined concentration—I have had
my luxurious doubts. Pinckney's genius, as evidenced
on paper, has all the impulsive abandonment which
marks his biography. He was a born poet—with all
needful imagination, discrimination, perception, and
sensibility: and he had, besides, the flesh-and-blood-fulness
necessary to keep poetry on terra-firma. Sev
eral of his productions have become common air—
known and enjoyed by everybody, but without a name.
The song beginning—

—this, and two or three others of Pinckney's “entire
and perfect chrysolites,” should be regraven with his
name, for the world owes his memory a debt for them.
The small volume of his poetry from which the Mirror
Library edition is copied, was printed in 1825, and
has been long lost sight of. It contains—not the stuff
for a classic—but a delicious bundle of heart-reaching
passages, fresh and peculiar, and invaluable especially
to lovers, whose sweetest and best interpreter Pinckney
was. Every man or woman who has occasion to embroider
a love-letter with the very essence-flowers of
passionate verse, should pay a shilling for Pinckney's
poems.

The chair and pen of an editor should be assumed
with as binding vows and as solemn ceremony as were
the sword and war-horse of knighthood—for the editor,
like the armed and mounted knight, is an aggregation
of more power than nature properly allots to the
individual. Indeed, it is because the power has not
been well considered by law and by public opinion,
that the penalties of maleficent pen and ink are not
more formidable than those of fist and dagger. Take
the consideration of this thought for a wile-time in
your next omnibus-ride, dear reader, and if you
chance to be young and have a lust for POWER, write
down EDITORSHIP for your second choice—the
CHURCH, of course, number one, and POLITICS, possibly,
number three.

The temptation to the abuse of pen-power is greater
as the mind of the editor is more little. It is so easy
to do brilliant tilting in the editorial lists, by slashing
alike at the offending and unoffending! Abuse is the
easiest, as courtesy is the most difficult kind of writing
to make readable, and as it is a relief for the
smooth-faced card-player to vent, before he sleeps, his
pent-up malice upon his wife, so a heart naturally
ill-willed makes a purulent bile-spigot of a pen—
relieved, so the venom is spent, no matter upon what.
There is so seldom good cause to be ill-natured in
print, that it would be safe, always, when reading an
ill-natured criticism, to “smell the rat” of a bad heart
near by.

If perversion of pen and ink be very blameable, forbearance
should be laudable, and we claim credit for
much pains-taking in this latter way. The reputations,
ready-spitted, that are sent us for roasting,
would alone (did we publish them) sell our paper to
the ten thousand malicious, who may be counted on
as a separate stratum of patronage to periodicals.
This is some temptation. Then we are often attacked,
and we could demolish the assailant very amusingly,
and we resist this temptation, though, if his pin be not
winced at, puny impunity will prick again. There is
much that is ludicrous, much that is pervertible to
sport, in new books and new candidates to fame; and
by fault-finding only, or by abusing the author instead
of his book (easy and savory), the review is made readable
without labor in writing—and this tempts both
malice and idleness. No man can live, elbow to
elbow, with competitors in love, life, and literature,
without his piques and his resentments, and to
“turn” these pleasantly “to commodity,” with a laugh
that outstabs a dagger, is very tempting—very—to
those who can do it dexterously.

Now that you have read the three foregoing paragraphs,
dear reader, you are prepared to know the
value of your acquittal, if you acquit the Mirror of
ill-nature, of which it has been accused. We do not

remember that, in its pages, we have ever, intentionally,
wounded feelings or trenched upon delicacy.

The Rococo No. 1, is ready for your shilling, dear
reader—one shilling for the three purest gems ever
crystallized into poetry—three narrative fairy-tales in
verse, exquisitely full of genius. The book, too, is
beautifully printed, as are all the works of the Mirror
Library—suitable for company at a lavender-fingured
breakfast, or for the drawing-room table of your lady
fair.

Rococo No. 2, is also ready, containing Pinckney's
long-neglected and delicious poems, and you should
pay a shilling if it were only to know what the country
has to be proud of among its poetical dead. The
author of

had a smoothness in his touch of a thought like the
glide of a cloud-edge just under a star. For quaint
and sweet couplets of love-makery there are few books
like it. Witness this verse:—

The following Bryant-like, finished, and high-thoughted
poetry was written by a young lady of
seventeen, and her first published production. She is
the daughter of one of our oldest and best families,
resident on the Hudson. If the noon be like the
promise of the dawn of this pure intellect, we have
here the beginning of a brilliant fame:—

February 14.—This is the day, says the calendar,
“for choosing special loving friends”—as if there
were room for choice in a world where

The Lupercalian custom of keeping Valentine's
day (putting the names of all the marriageable girls
in the community into a box, and making the bachelors
draw lots for wives) would make a droll imbroglio
of “New York society.” By-the-way, if you know
a working poet out of employ, recommend to his no
tice the literature of valentines. Never till this year
have the copies of amatory verses, for sale in the fancy
shops, been comparably so well embellished, and the
prices of single valentines have ranged from two shillings
to two dollars—fine prices to build a trade upon!
The shops, for two or three evenings last past, have
been crowded with young men purchasing these, and
probably a little better poetry would turn the choice
in favor of any particular manufacture of such lovers'
wares. The favorite device seems to be stolen from
Mercury's detention of Mars and Venus—a paper net,
which, when raised, discloses a tableau of avowal.

Editorial skirmishing strikes a light into the people's
tinder sometimes, and there is a paragraph this morning
which explains the difference between paid puffs
and literary notices. The True Sun says: “The
man who edits the Hagerstown News can not, it
seems, distinguish between an editorial article and an
advertisement. He mistakes the long advertisement
of Verplanck's Shakspere, which appears in our
paper, for the production of the editors of the True
Sun, and declines inserting it in the News for less
than forty-five dollars. What does the man mean?
It is only surprising than an editor should be ignorant
that puffs paid are set in minion type, and puffs of volition
are set in brevier—a distinction not `plain' (as
yet) `to the commonest understanding.”' The London
papers print the word “advertisement” over all
their puffs paid for, and, by using different type, the
True Sun has taken one step toward making the volunteer
distinguishable.

Mr. Verplanck's project, by-the-way, is a very noticeable
one. We have never had (to my knowledge)
an American annotator upon Shakspere, and Shakspere
is as much ours as England's. Very many of
the Shaksperian words are obsolete in England, but in
use here, and put down as Americanisms by travellers.
I do not know whether Mr. Verplanck promises to
show any new readings of Shakspere, but he is a man
of much higher education, and more cultivated and
scholarlike pursuits than Mr. Knight (whose edition
of Shakspere has lately been so popular in England),
beside being a man of productive original genius,
which Mr. Knight has no claim to be. The commentaries
upon works of genius by different men of genius
can never be repetitions, and are always interesting—
so I look with some interest for Mr. Verplanck's preface
and first number. As he is a man of large fortune
and entire leisure, there is no obstacle to his
doing it well.

The discovery of a gem in a dark mine is a poetical
matter, but (to my present thinking) it is even
a prosaic similitude for the sudden finding out of
a work of genius progressing in one of the houses of
a brick block. I had often passed Durand's house
in one of the retired close-built streets of New York,
without suspecting that it contained anything but the
domestic problem of felicity and three meals a day;
but a chance errand lately led me to knock at his
door. My business over, he placed upon the easel (in
a charming studio built in the rear of his house) a
large landscape to which he had just given the finishing
touch. I sat down before it, and (to use a good
word that is staled and blunted from overusing) it
absorbed me. My soul went into it. I was, it is true,
in good pictorial appetite. It was my studious time
of day, and I had seen no pictures out of my own
rooms for a week; but it seemed to me as if that landscape
alone would be a retreat, a seclusion, a world by
itself to retreat into from care or sad thoughts—so
mellow and deep was the distance, so true to nature

the coloring and drawing, so sweetly poetical the composition,
and so single-thoughted the conception of
the effect. The roofs of a comfortable farmhouse and
outbuildings were the subordinate life of the picture,
seen over a knoll on the right. The centre of the
foreground, and the brightest spot in the picture, was a
high grass-bank on which glanced a golden beam of
the setting sun. On it was a group of cattle in well-fed
repose, and over it stood the finest oak-tree I ever
saw painted. Twenty miles of landscape lay below,
enveloped in the veil of coming twilight, and a river
wound gracefully away from the eye and was lost in
the distance. It was indeed a glorious picture, and I
stake my judgment upon the opinion that no living
artist could surpass it. Durand, as you probably
know, has turned painter, after having long been the
first engraver of our country. He is patient of labor,
and has approached landscape-painting by a peculiar
education of hand and eye, and the probability is, that
if he live twenty years, he will have no equal in this
department of the arts. If you remember, I mentioned
my great surprise at the excellence of two of
his landscapes in the last exhibition of the academy
here. To see pictures with an appetite in the eye, one
should see them singly, however, and but two or three,
at farthest, in a day. Artists who would be deliberately
appreciated, should make their houses morning-resorts,
as they are, and very fashionable ones, in
France and Italy. There are people (and those, too,
who can afford to buy pictures) who yawn for some
such round of occupation during the summer mornings
of the travelling season.

The want of an excuse to put on bonnet, and go
out somewhere in the evening with father, husband,
brother, or lover, is doubtless the secret of most audiences,
whether in church or lecture-room. I arrived
at this conclusion sitting and watching the coming
in of an audience at a popular lecture a night or
two ago. The subject was of a character that would
only draw listeners (one would think) from the more
intellectual and cultivated classes—dry and of remote
interest—and one, too, that could be “read up,” to
perfect mental satisfaction, by sending a shilling to a
library, or buying a bit of the cheap literature of the
day. It was a cold, raw night, the lecturer was no
orator, and the benches of the lecture-room had no
cushions. With these premises, you would look to
see anything but a pleasure-loving and youthful audience.
Yet this was just the quality of the comers-in
till the room was crowded. There was scarce an unappropriated-looking
damsel among them, and not one
bald head or “adust” visage. That the young men
would have been there without the ladies, I do not
believe—nor that the ladies came there with any special
desire to know more of the subject of the lecture.

On this necessity for ladies to go somewhere of an
evening is based, of course, most of the popular enthusiasms
of the day—for they are never got up by
individual reading, and would fail entirely, but for the
opportunity to give, in one moment, one thought to
many people. This fact seems to me to indicate in
what way the inducements should be heightened
when audiences fall off; and, instead of cheapening
tickets, or spending more money in placards, I think
it would be better to treat the ladies to an interlude
of coffee and conversation, or to minister in some way
directly to the tastes of those in whom resides the
primum mobile of attendance.

I presume there are thousands of families in New
York that are not linked with any particular round of
acquaintance—very worthy and knowledge-loving people,
who can afford only a few friends, and shun acquaintances
as expensive. People in this rank are too
moderate-minded to be theatre-goers; but the wife
and daughters of the family must go somewhere of an
evening. Parties are costly, public balls both costly
and unadvisable, and there are eight months in the
year when it is too cold for icecream-gardens and
walks on the Battery. Lecture-tickets for a family
are cheap, the company there is good, the room is
warm, and so well lighted as to show comeliness or
dress to advantage, and the apparent object of being
there is creditable and reputable. I say again, that to
add to the social inducements of this attraction, would
be to make of the lecture system a great gate to the
public heart. I add this gratuitous mite of speculation
to the unused data that have been long waiting
for a compiler of the statistics of metropolitan momenta.

We have had a week of spring-weather, and the
upper part of New York (all above the pavements, ca
va dire) has been truly enjoyable. Most persons who
do not wear their beards for a protection to the glands
of the throat, have got the mumps—on dit. Writing
in a warm room with the throat pressed down upon a
thick cravat, and going into the open air with the
head raised and the throat of course suddenly left exposed—is
one of those provoking risks that “stand to
reason.” By the elaborate inventions to keep the
feet dry, there seems to be a “realizing sense” of the
danger of wet feet also.[4] Mr. Lorin Brooks's invention
for expeditiously throwing an iron bridge over
every small puddle—(that is to say, of making boots
with a curved metallic shank under the hollow of the
foot)—has the advantage of adding to the beauty as
well as the protection of the exposed extremities.

Signor Palmo continues to pay his way and his
prima donna, and not much more—for the upper gallery
is so constructed that, though you can see the
stage from every part of it, you can only see the dress-circle
from the front row; and people go to plays a
little to see and hear, and a great deal to be seen and
heard of. The price of places being the same all over
the house, few will take tickets except for the lower
tier. The best evidence that the opera is growing on
the public liking is the degree to which the piques
and tracasseries of the company are talked about in
society. Quite a Guelph and Ghibelline excitement
was raised, a few nights ago, by the basso's undertaking
indignantly to sing as the critics advised him—
with more moderation. Signor Valtellina is a great
favorite, and has a famous voice, ben martellato. He
is a very impassioned singer, and when excited, loses
his flessibilita, and grows harsh and indistinct—(as
he himself does not think). By way of pleasing the
carpers for once, he sang one of the warmest passages
of the opera with a moping lamentivole that brought
out a hiss from the knowing ones. His friends, who
were in the secret, applauded. Valtellina laid his
hand on his heart and retired—but came back, as the
millers say, “with a head on,” and sang once more
passionately and triumphantly. Excuse the fop's alley
slang with which I have told this momentous
matter—quite equal in importance as a subject of
conversation) to any couple of events eligible by
Niles's Register.

Our Library Parish.—Our heart is more spread
and fed than our pocket, dear reader, with the new

possession of this magic long arm by which we are
handling you, one after another, the books we have
long cherished. Almost the first manifestation of the
poet's love, is the sending of his favorite books to his
mistress, and no commerce of tenderness is more like
the conversance of angels (probably), than the sympathies
exchanged through the loopholes of starry
thoughts—(so like windows twixt soul and soul are
the love-expressing conceptions of poetry!) The
difference between an hour passed with friends and an
hour passed with strangers, will be some guide to you
in forming an estimate of the difference between writing
for our readers without, and writing for them with
the sympathy of books in common. The Mirror becomes,
in a manner, our literary parish—we the indulged
literary vicar, with whose tastes out of the
pulpit you are as familiar as with his sermons of criticism
when in; and you, dear reader, become our
loved parishioner, for whom we cater, at fountains of
knowledge and fancy to which you have not our facility
of access, and whose face, turned to us on Saturday,
inspires us like the countenance of a familiar
friend. This charming literary parish (now rising of
eleven thousand) we would not exchange for a bishopric,
nor for the constituency of a congress-member;
and we hold our responsibility to be as great as the
bishop's, and our chair better worth having than “a
seat” in the Capitol. Few things gratify us more
than the calls we occasionally get from subscribers
who have a wish to see us after reading our paper for
a while—and this feeling of friendly and personal acquaintance
is what we most aim at producing between
ourselves and our readers. We shall seldom be more
pleased hereafter than in taking one of our parish by
the hand—relying more upon the sympathy between
us, by common thoughts, than upon any possible ceremony
of introduction.

Let us beg our readers to have the different numbers
of the Rococo bound with blank letter-paper between
the leaves, and to read always with a pencil in
hand. There are such chambers within chambers of
comprehension and relish in repeated readings of such
sweet creations, and the thoughts they suggest are so
noteworthy and so delightful to recal! We have sent
a poem to the printer this morning (to be published
in the same shilling number with The Rimini), which
we do not believe ten of our readers ever saw—(a poem
never reprinted in this country, and apparently
quite lost sight of in England)—but which exercised
upon our imagination, when in college, an influence
tincturing years of feeling and revery. An English
copy was given us by an old man curious in books,
and it was soon so covered with pencil-marks that we
were obliged to rebind it with alternate leaves of white
paper, and we carried it with us for a travelling companion
through Europe, and re-read it (once again,
we well remember) sitting on the ruins of the church
of Sardis in Asia. It is a narrative-poem of inexpressible
richness and melody, and of the loftiest walk
of inventive imagination. It is so sweet a story, too,
that it would entertain a child like a fairy-tale. We
could go on writing about it for hours—for it brings
back to us days spent with it in the woods, green
banks where we have lain and mused over it, lovely
listeners who have held their breaths to hear it, and
oh, a long, long chain of associations steeped in love,
indolence, and sunshine! And this it is to have a favorite
author—to have a choice and small library of
favorite authors. It makes a wreath wherein to weave
for memory the chance flowers of a lifetime! It gives
Memory a sweet companion. It enables you to withdraw
yourself at any time from the world, or from
care, and recover the dreams built over these books
in the rare hours dream-visited. More valuable
still, it gives you—when you begin to love, and want
the words and thoughts that have fled affrighted away
—a thread to draw back the truants, and an instant
and eloquent language to a heart otherwise dumb.

“Sybilla” wants a poetical color given to the “transition
state” from the “uncertain age” to the “sad
certainty of youth gone by.” We can only give her
a verse from a piece of poetry written to a delightful
and fascinating old maid whom we once had a passion
for:—

Spring is close behind us, dear reader. What think
you of this bit of poetry, touching spring flowers?—

A country subscriber writes to know who “Mrs.
Grundy” is. She is the lady who lives next door,
madam—the lady at whose funeral there will be but
one mourner—the last man! We are not sorry that
we know her, but very sorry that she must needs know
us, and have her “say” about us.

February should be called the month of hope, for it
is invariably more enjoyable than the first nominal
fruition—more spring-like than the first month of
spring. This is a morning that makes the hand open
and the fingers spread—a morning that should be consecrated
to sacred idleness. I should like to exchange
work with any out-of-doors man—even with a driver
of an omnibus—specially with the farmer tinkering
his fences. Cities are convenient places of refuge
from winter and had weather, but one longs to get out
into the country, like a sheep from a shed, with the
first warm gleam of sunshine.

I see that Moore has virtually turned to come down
from his long ladder of fame—his publishers, Longmans,
having made a final collection of his works
in an elaborate edition, and prefixed thereto a picture
of an old man—Tom Moore as he is! It is melancholy
to see this portrait. The sparse hair, made-the-most-of—the
muscles of the face retreating from the
habitual expression—the lamp within still unconscious
of losing brightness, yet the glass over it stained
and cracked. Moore should never have been painted
after thirty. This picture is like a decrepit cupid—
wholly out of character. His poetry is all youth, its
very faults requiring youthful feeling for an apology;
and to know that he has grown old—that he is bald

wrinkled, venerable—is like some unnatural hocus-pocus—some
hideous metamorphosis we would rather
not have seen even in melodrame. Moore has not
sobered away, twilight-wise, as he might have done.
His wit and song have kept admiration so warm around
him, that he has forgotten his sun was setting—that
it was time the shadows of his face grew longer—time
that his pen leaned toward life's downward horizon.
The expression on this face of frisky sixty, is of a
flogged-up hilarity that is afraid to relax. Moore will
look facetious and dining-out-ish in his coffin.

I see that Wallack has added lecturing, as a new
branch, to his profession, and is very successful. Mr.
Barry, the stage-manager of the Park, is to try on the
same experiment to-night at the Society Library.
“Two strings to your bow” is a good economy in any
profession, and there are sundry professions, the duties
of which do not interfere, for instance, with authorship.
A man who should read two hours before
going to bed, and write for the first two hours after
sunrise, would give time and attention enough to any
literary pursuit, while the business part of the day,
and a good part of the evening, would be still left unoccupied.
Actors particularly (so capricious is fortune
with them) should have a brace of vocations,
and a poet, with an honest trade besides, is more likely
to have his “lines fall in pleasant places.”

It appears by the English papers that Madame Catalani
indignantly denies being dead! She is still living,
and capable of enjoying “good living,” at her
villa, near Florence. The American story, which
went the rounds of the papers some time since, of a
man whose capacious throat had “swallowed a plantation
and fifty negroes,” finds its counterpart in the
villa and its dependants, which have come out of the
throat of Madame Catalani. I was fortunate enough
to enjoy much of her hospitality when in Italy, and
there are few establishments that I have seen where
the honors were done with a more princely liberality
and good taste. She was then, as she is probably
still, a well-preserved and handsome woman, of majestic
mien, and most affable manners, and at her own
little parties she sang, whenever asked, as well as ever
she had done in public. She seemed to me never to
have been intoxicated with her brilliant successes, and
to have had no besoin of applause left like a thirst in
her ears—as is the case with popular favorites too often.
Her husband, M. Valabreque, was a courteous
man and a fond husband, and their children were on
an equal footing of social position with the young nobility
of Florence. Most strangers who see anything
of the society of that delightful city, come away with
charming remembrances of Madame Catalani.

Washington's Birthday is growing into a temperance
anniversary, probably much to the pleasure,
and a little to the surprise of the distinguished ghost.
There was a grand temperance celebration at the Tabernacle
last evening, at which the eloquent author of
the Airs of Palestine, Rev. John Pierpont, delivered
an address. By-the-way, it is an overlooked feather
in the cap of temperance, that we owe to it the pleasant
invention of KISSING. In the course of my reading
I have fallen in with the historical fact, that, when
wine was prohibited by law to the women of ancient
Rome, male relatives had the right of ascertaining,
by tasting the lips of their sisters and cousins, whether
the forbidden liquor had passed in. The investi
gations of this lip-police, it is said, were pushed with
a rigor and vigilance highly creditable to the zeal
of the republic, and for a time intemperance was
fairly kissed away. Subsequently, female intoxication
became fashionable again (temperance kisses notwithstanding),
and Seneca (in his Epistolæ) is thus
severe upon the Roman ladies: “Their manners have
altogether changed, though their faces are as captivating
as ever. They make a boast of their exploits
in drinking.[5] They will sit through the night
with the glass in their hands, challenging the men,
and often outdoing them.” Now, by restoring the
much-abused and perverted KISS to its original mission,
and making of it the sacred apostle of inquiry
that it was originally designed for, it strikes me that
the temperance-committees would have many more
“active members,” and the cause would assuredly
grow on public favor. I submit the hint to that admirable
enthusiast, Mrs. Child.

There are two establishments in the city of New
York which should be visited by those who require
stretchers to their comprehension of luxury--Meeks's
furniture-warehouse, behind the Astor, and Tiffany's
bijou-shop, at the corner of Warren street and Broadway.
In a search I have lately made for a bookcase
of a particular fancy, I have made the round of furniture-warehouses,
and, as a grand epitome of all of
them—a seven-story building, crammed with furniture
on every floor—I should recommend the mere
idle sight-seer to spend a morning at Meeks's for his
amusement. Upon the simple act of sitting down
has been expended as much thought (in quantity) as
would produce another Paradise Lost. Some of the
chairs, indeed, are poems—the beautiful conception
and finish of them, taken into the mind with the same
sensation, at least, and the same glow of luxury.
The fancies of every age and country are represented,
those of the Elizabethan era and the ornate fashion
of Louis XIV, predominant, though tables and sofas
on Egyptian models are more sumptuous. At so
much cost, they ought to put the mind at ease as well
as the body. And, by-the-way, the combining of
couch and chair in one (now so fashionable) would
have pleased the Roman dames, whose husbands kept
chairs for women and mourners—a man's sitting upon
a chair (in preference to a couch) being considered a
received sign of deep mourning or poverty. Few
people can trust their taste to go into such an immense
warehouse as Meeks's and select (in one style,
and that style suitable to their house, condition, and
manner of living) the furniture for an establishment.
It would be a good vocation for a reduced gentleman
to keep taste to let, holding himself ready to take orders,
and execute them at discretion, according to the
suitabilities of the employer.

Tiffany's is a fashionable pleasure-lounge already,
his broad glass doors and tempting windows being at
one of the most thronged corners of Broadway. It
is better than a museum, in being quite as well stocked
with surprises, and these all ministering to present
and fashionable wants. Where resides the prodigious
ingenuity expended on these superb elegances and
costly trifles, it would be hard to discover. And the
seductive part of it is, that there are articles for all
prices, and you may spend a dollar, or five hundred,
in the same dainty line of commodity!

The times are “easy,” if we can judge by the articles
that find plenty of buyers. I heard yesterday

that a shopkeeper in Broadway had imported several
ladies' dresses, priced at one thousand dollars each,
and had no difficulty in selling them. Mr. Meeks informed
me that, of a certain kind of very costly chair,
he could not keep one unsold. It was certainly a superb
article, made of carved rosewood and purple velvet;
price (for a single chair) one hundred and fifty
dollars! We have not yet adopted, in this country,
the French custom of ornamenting dinner-tables very
expensively with silver vases and artificial flowers, nor
has the old Roman custom ever been resumed, I
think, of placing the “household gods” upon the table.
The aspect of a supper-table in Cicero's time,
indeed, must have been beyond the show even of
Bourbon sybarites; the guests in white and scarlet
robes, with chaplets of roses, myrtle, or ivy on their
heads, lying by threes on couches covered with purple
or embroidered with gold and silver—a crowd of
slaves, chosen for their beauty, waiting within the
square formed by the tables, and dressed in tunics of
the brightest colors—over all a canopy of purple cloth,
giving the room the appearance of a superb tent—
the courses brought in with a regular procession
marching to music—last (not least heightening to the
effect), the custom, borrowed of the Egyptians, of
bringing in a skeleton, in the midst of the feast, to
furnish a foil to the enjoyment. All these were common
features of Roman luxury at the time when
Rome had the treasures of the earth at her disposal,
and probably will never be reproduced in the same
splendor, unless we rebarbarize and make war upon
Europe under a military chieftain.

The February rehearsal of spring is over—the popular
play of April having been well represented by
the reigning stars and that pleasant company of players,
the Breezes. The drop-curtain has fallen, representing
a winter-scene, principally clouds and snow,
and the beauties of the dress-circle have retired (from
Broadway) discontented only with the beauty of the
piece. By-the-way, the acting was so true to nature,
that several trees in Broadway were affected to—budding!

So says Leigh Hunt.

The Land of Intermezzo.—If spring be cognate
to one poetical subject more than all others, it is to
the single dreamy fable upon which are founded three
immortal poems—one by Thomas Moore, one by
Lord Byron, and the third (quite as beautiful as either)
by the Rev. George Croly. The last—“The Angel
of the World,” by Croly, and the first, “The
Loves of the Angels,” by Moore, are issued in extras
of the Mirror. The other, Byron's “Heaven
and Earth” (so universal are the works of the noble
bard), we took for granted was already within the
reach of every reader. Apart from the excessive
beauty of these poems, it is curious to peruse them
with a view to comparison—to read first the short and
simple story of “Haruth and Maruth,” and then study
the different shapes into which it is cast by the kaleidoscope
imaginations of three of the master-minstrels
of the time.

[Stay—do you live in the country, dear reader?
Have you a nook near by—(natural)—or can you go
to one in imagination, or will you come to ours—
where our spirit is likely to be—that is to say, while
scribbling this page, this glorious morning? For
spring makes a madhouse of a city's brick walls, and
we must think in the country to-day—live, bodily,
where we will.]

Here we are, then, in a deep down dell—the apparent
horizon scarce forty feet from us—nothing visible
that has been altered since God made it—and a column
of clear space upward, topped by the zenith,
like a cover to a well—this dell the bottom of it.
(The zenith off, we should see heaven, of course!)
In my pocket are the three poems abovementioned, and
a few editorial memoranda—but we will bind ourselves
to nothing—not even to talk about these poems unless
we like, nor to remember the memoranda. Idleness
was part of Paradise, and with the weather of
Paradise it comes over us, irresistibly.

To bring heaven and earth together—to make heaven
half earth, and earth half heaven—is the doomed
labor and thirst of poetry; and of these three poems,
the desire for this pleasant intermezzo is the exclusive
under-tow, the unexpressed, yet predominating stimulus.
To Byron (with his earthly mind unmodified),
complete heaven would doubtless have been as unpalatable
as were evidently the mere realities of earth.
He, and Moore, and Croly, have seized upon the eastern
fable, of angels made half human and mortals
half divine, to give voice to the dumb ache of their
imaginations—an ache as native to the bosoms of the
“Mirror parish,” as to these three immortal subjects
of mortal Victoria. (She ought, by-the-way, to wear
a separate crown for her loyal immortals—the undying
men of genius who are her subjects exclusively,
and whose fame is, at least, usque-millenial and a
thousand years over.) Each of these has pulled
down angels to the love of flesh and blood—(the happiness
each would least like to lose, probably, in becoming
an angel)—but there are differences in the
other particulars of their half-and-half Paradise, most
characteristic of the qualities of the different poets,
and pleasant stuff for your idle hour's unravelling, oh
reader, rich in leisure!

But this land of Intermezzo—this kingdom of Middlings—this
beatitic, and poet-loved half and half!
Let us talk of it some more!

We are inclined to think that HALF WAY, in most
things, is where happiness dwells. We say so timidly,
for we live in a country famous for extremes. It must
be Heaven “No. 1,” to tempt the Yankee! Paradise,
which lies between earth and heaven, would be poor
stock in Wall street! The best—only the best and
most exciting, in the way of pleasure, for this market
—Rags, or the best broadcloth, the only wear:—Sullen
privation or sudden luxury, the only living:—Stars,
or no actors:—Millions, or hand-to-mouth:—Perfectly
obscure, or highly fashionable! Medium—intermezzo—there
is (quasi) none in America!

In this sweet land of Intermezzo we find ourself,
of latter years, laying up treasure. Quiet lives there.
Revery is native there. Content dwells nowhere else.
Modesty retires there when she would escape envy,
for there envy never sets foot. St. Paul saw that land
when he said—“Give me neither poverty nor riches.”
“Something I must like and love,” sayd old Feltham,
“but nothing so violently as to undo myself with
wanting it.” Travel where you will, up to middle
age (says a certain Truth-angel, who sometimes stoops
to our ear), but abide, ever after, in the land of Intermezzo!

But, in the land of Intermezzo does not live FAME!
It is a land with an atmosphere of sober gray, and
fame is the shadow of one living in the sun. If we
may preach to the poets among our flock of parishioners,
we should say, forego this shadow! Think of it
as it is—only a shadow. Value it as you do the
shadow of your friend—nothing, but for the substance
that goes before. Live in the land of Intermezzo,

and let fame find you—taking for it no more care than
for your shadow when you walk abroad. Write—for
the voice the soul wants—the utterance without which
the heart seems over-full—but be not eager for the
world's listening! Fame is sweet when it comes unbeckoned.
The world gives, more willingly than it
pays on demand. In the quiet fields of Intermezzo,
pluck flowers, to dry unseen in your bosom, and if,
by chance, years after, they are unloaded in the sun,
they will be thrice fragrant for their shaded keeping.
Amen!

When books were scarcer and scholars given to
longer incubation, a pocket companion called a GoWITH-ME,
was the fashion—(Vade-mecum, it you like
it better in Latin). It was commonly a favorite author,
sometimes a volume of maxims, oftener yet a book of
devotion. The monks profess to entertain themselves
in all odd hours and quiet places with their pocket
BREVIARY—the concentrated and vital essence of
missal and prayer-book. We liked better, in our
youth (Heaven assoil us!) a self-compiled breviary
of beloved poetry—a book half scrap, half manuscript,
picked from newspapers and copied from readings—
and, in a protracted youth (enriched with a most
plentiful lack of anything-to-do), we struck together,
with pin and paste, sundry consecutive volumes which
had their consecutive day. Various were their uses!
There have occurred deserts, in our travels though
most of our loves and friendships, which could only
be pleasantly crossed in the company of such caravans
of poetry. There have been thoughts born without
words to them, aptly fitted to a vehicle by this varied
repository. We have been fed through many a famine
of hope, supplied through many a drought of tears
and memory, by these timely resources. We have
them yet. The longer poems we are giving to our
friends in the numbers of the Rococo. The shorter
ones we purpose giving in the Mirror, or possibly in a
sort of mosaic extra—imparting thus, piece-meal, the
whole of our Breviary of Idleness. Here and
there, it is possible, we may give something you have
seen before, but that will not happen often—for we
have frequented most the least known shelves of
libraries, and loved most the least-famed authors.
Here is a stray passage upon roses;—(but we don't
give you the best first!)

What we like about that is the well-contrived entanglements
compelling you to stop and re-read it,
and so find a new beauty—like the wheel of your carriage
coming off amid scenery you are travelling
through too rapidly.

The Vesuvius of new books has naturally its Pompeii,
in which merit, among other things, is buried
quietly under the cinders and remains long trodden
over and forgotten. Upon the excavations and disnterments
in this city of literary oblivion is founded, in a
great measure, the New Mirror project of a library
of favorite authors, and perhaps the most interesting
of its restorations to light, as yet, is the delicious
poem by Croly, “The Angel of the World.”
I hardly think there are ten people in the United
States who know this sweet book, though it is founded
on the same eastern fable as Moore's “Loves of the
Angels,” and, to my thinking, a finer expansion of
that splendid story. Byron's “Heaven and Earth,”
and the two poems just named are all founded on this
same tradition, and it is curious to read them with a
view to comparison, and see of what varieties of combination
the kaleidoscope of genius is capable. Byron
makes his the vehicle of his audacious defiance toward
sacred things, while Moore's is all love and
flowers, perfume and gems. Croly's is more a poem
of strong human passion and character, and comes
home more to the human “business and bosom.” It
is written (the latter) with wonderful splendor of diction
and imagery. Few poetical works will be more
popular in this country, I think—profoundly as it has
slept in Lethe for the last twenty years. Croly is a
clergyman (the Rev. George), and, having a fat living
from the church of England, his Pegasus has never
been in hack harness, and, I think, shows the ease of
pasture-gambol in his verse.

Tammany Hall is graced to-day with a showy transparency
representing a huge owl sitting in a Gothic
window, and a Latin motto beneath, declaring that
“the countenance is the index of the mind.” I can
not see, by the morning papers, any explanation of
the object of the club whose celebration comes off
under these ominous auspices; but if it be a physiognomical
society, as the motto would purport, they have
chosen well. It were a good symbol also for a club
of “minions of the moon,” if they were less fond of a
lark—better still for a society of poets, if poets were
ever (which is doubtful) fond of poetical society. It
is the poet's cue to look wise and say little, to get his
victual by night, to differ altogether in his habit, as
owls do, from birds of other feather. Virgil, indeed,
makes the owl a poet:—

Professor Bronson, whose lectures are “going on”
and still “come off,” draws a very attractive picture
in his advertised prospectus. “The lectures,” he
says, “will be comparatively free, an admission of
twenty-five cents only being required.” For this,
among many other things, he promises that “a key
shall be given to the connexion of natural and spiritual
things by which all mysteries may be explained!”
“The true source of our ideas on the sublime and
beautiful will be explained, together with the true
principles of taste and criticism.”—“The French
baquet, or grand mesmeric reservoir, will be exhibited,
and minerals, vegetables, animals, and several persons
at a time magnetized; the German rotary magnetic
machine for similar purposes; also three of four hundred
engravings pertaining to physiology, &c., and
each auditor furnished with them gratuitously, with the
evening programme; also several hundred paintings
(many expressly imported from London), to illustrate
the subjects of mineralogy, botany, natural history,
and astronomy. A common rose will be shown, as
developing from the bud to full bloom, appearing four
or five feet high, in all its glory; a butterfly in the
same manner several feet square, passing through its
three stages of development; and all the phenomena
of the natural heavens, to wit, the sun, moon, and
stars.” As a list of articles to be had for twenty-five
cents, I think you will allow the professor's advertisement
to be worthy of statistical preservation.

The girdle put around the earth by the English is,
to my mind, less powerfully figured forth in their
drum-beat (so finally alluded to by Webster) than
in the small colonial-looking newspaper—the same
article, whether it come from the pagodas of India or
the snows of Canada, the sheep-hills of New South
Wales, or the plantations of the Bermudas. By the
kindness of my friend Aaron Palmer, Esq. (who
does business with arms as long as the world's axis,
and has correspondences and exchanges newspapers
with every corner of the globe), I have by me, at this
moment a file of English papers published at the seat
of the Great Mogul, Delhi, and another published at
Bermuda. You would think them all edited by the
same man and supplied by the same contributors.
They are filled principally, of course, with old English
news, but the Delhi paper (only ninety days from the
heart of Hindostan!) has some strictures on Lady
Sale and her book, which show she is not to be a
heroine without the usual penalty of envy and malice.
An officer-contributor to the Gazette says:—

“We were nearly as much on the tiptoe of expectation
for Lady Sale's book as the good folks of England,
though the secret of its origin was here better
known. It would be amusing to print, in parallel
columns, the opinions on her production given by the
press of India and England; c'est a dire, of those who
know what they are writing about and those who do
not. I am safe in asserting that, for every eulogium
her ladyship has received in England, she has got at
least one set down in India.”

The same writer says, in another part of his letter:—

“We look forward to the notice of our Scinde
doings in England. Let not the profit of the acquisition
blind you to the iniquity. Our late dealings with
that country commenced in perfidy, and went on in
blood and rapine. May they not end in retribution!”

We have commonly two sweet hours of idleness in
the afternoon—two hours that are the juice of our
much-squeezed twenty-four hours—two hours that
(to borrow a simile from the more homely and toothsome
days of authorship) are “as sweet as a pot of
lambative electuary with a stick of licorice.” At
four o'clock,

we button our coat over our resignation (synonym for
dinner), and with some pleasant errand that has been
laid aside for such opportunity, stroll forth. It is
sometimes to an artist's room, sometimes to a print-shop,
sometimes to an unexplored street, sometimes
to look off upon the bay, or take a ride in an omnibus
—now and then to refresh our covetous desires at
Tiffany's. We have lately been the subject of a passion
for pawnbrokery, and taken the precaution to
leave our little pocket-money at home, we have tampered
with exploring and price-asking in these melancholy
museums of heart-ache.

“Twiddling” our pen, this morning (as Leigh
Hunt represents Apollo doing with a sunbeam), we
fell to speculating on what it was that made us think,
whether we would or no, of the pyramids! This is
last-page-day, and we had forty things to write about,
but there!—there! (“in my mind's eye, Horatio!”)
stands the “wedge sublime” of a pyramid! Doubtless
the ghost of some word, deed, or similitude of the
day before—but why such pertinacity of apparition?
We did, nor noted, nothing pyramidal yesterday. We
watched the general; hanging up, in his new-garnished
office, Dick's fine print of Sir Walter's monument,
and that, it is true, is a pyramid in Cothic. We
bought yesterday, in our pawnbroking researches, a
bust of a man of genius whom we admired because he
found leisure to be a gentleman—the accomplished
victim of circumstances, just dead at Andalusia—and
a pyramid, truncated by a thunderbolt near the summit,
were an emblem of his career that may well have
occurred to us. We were talking and thinking much
yesterday of Moore's confessed completion of his literary
lifetime; and what is his toil, just finished, but
the building of an imperishable pyramid for the memory
of his finished thoughts.

Stay!—an anecdote of Moore occurs to us. He is
dead, “by brevet,” having seen to (and got the money
for), his own “last words;” and when, by the sythe
of the relentless mower, Tom Moore shall be no more,
to know more of his more personal qualities (what an
echo there is to the man's name!) will add spices to
his embalming. An old lady in Dublin, who was one
of Moore's indigenous friends (he was only aristocratic
as an exotic, perhaps you know), told us the story.
It is not likely to get into print except by our telling,
for it records a virtue; and Moore is a man to have
selected his biographer with a special caveat against
all contributions to his “life” from its grocery source
—his respectable father, the Dublin grocer, probably
caring little for his “brilliant successes,” and only
cherishing in his brown-paper memory the small
parcel of his virtues. But—to the story—(which
Moore told the old lady, by the way, on one of his
reluctant Irish visits).

Moore had just returned from his government-office
in the West Indies, a defaulter for eight thousand
pounds. Great sympathy was felt for him among his
friends, and three propositions were made to him to
cancel the debt. Lord Lansdowne offered simply to
pay it. Longman and Murray offered to advance it
on his future works, and the noblemen at White's
offered the sum to him in a subscription. This was
at the time subscriptions were on foot for getting
Sheridan out of his troubles; and while Moore was
considering the three propositions just named, he
chanced to be walking down St. James street with two
noblemen when they met Sheridan. Sheridan bowed
to them with a familiar “how are you?”—“D—n the
fellow,” said one of the noblemen, “he might have
touched his hat! I subscribed a hundred pounds for
him last night!”—“Thank God! you dare make no
such criticism on a bow from me!” said Moore to
himself. The lesson sank deep. He rejected all the
offers made to relieve him—went to Passy, and lived
in complete obscurity, in that little suburb of Paris,
till he had written himself out of debt. Under the
spur of that chance remark were written some of the
works by which Moore will be best known to posterity.

This reminds us (and if we don't nab it now, it may
never again be nabable), of a laugh at Moore's expense
in a company of very celebrated authors. They were
talking him over, and one of the company quoted
Leigh Hunt's simile for him—“a young Bacchus
snuffing up the vine.” “Bah!” said another, “don't
quite deify the little worldling! He is more like a
cross between a toad and a cupid!”

We have got hold of a string and we may as well
pull away to see what will come of it. We had long
forgotten two or three trifles tied together, of which this
last paragraph is one, and we remember now, another
anecdote told by the caustic person whose comparison
we have just quoted. He said that Byron would never
have gone to Greece but for a tailor in Genoa. The
noble bard, he went on to say, was very economical,
as was well known, in small matters. He had hired a
villa at Genoa and furnished it, with the intention of
making it a permanent residence. Lord and Lady
Blessington and a large society of English people of
good style were residing there at the time. In the
fullest enjoyment of his house and his mode of life.
Byron wanted a new coat; and, having some English
cloth, he left it with his measure in the hands of a

Genoese tailor, with no particular instructions as to
the making. The tailor, overcome with the honor of
making a coat for an Eccelenza Inglese, embroidered
it from collar to tail, and sent it home with a bill as
thickly embroidered as the coat! Byron kept the
coat for fear of its being sold, as his, to an actor of
English parts on the stage, but resolutely refused to
pay for more than the making of a plain and plebeian
garment. The tailor threatened an attachment, and
Byron assigned over his furniture to his banker, and
finally quitted Genoa in disgust—ready of course, as
he would not otherwise have been, for a new project.
From indignation at an embroidered coat-tail the
transition to “liberty or death,” “wo to the Moslem!”
or any other vent for his accumulated bile, was easy
and natural! He embarked in the Greek cause soon
after, and the embroidered coat was not (as it should
have been) “flung to the breeze at Salamis”—the
banner of inspired heroism!

So was the tale told. So tell we it to you, dear
reader. It is no damage to the gods or demigods to
unpedestal them sometimes. The old Saturnalia,
when masters and slaves changed places for a while,
was founded on the principle in nature that all high-strung-itudes
are better for occasional relaxing.

We have not done what we sat down to do—which
was to run a pretty parallel between a fame and a
pyramid—apropos of some trifles bought of a pear-shaped
pawnbroker. Pity that ideas once touched are
like uncorked claret—good for one draught only!
We shall never dare to take up the figure again, so
we may as well hand you the gold thread we meant to
have woven into it—a little figurative consolation to
the unappreciated poet. To him who is building a
pyramid of poetical fame, a premature celebrity is like
the top-stone laid on his back and carried till he has
built up to it. We wish those of our contributors
whom we neither publish nor praise, would apply this
“parmeceti” to their “inward bruise.”

We take the vital centre of New York to be a certain
lamp-post from which radiate five crossings—one
pointing to the Astor, one to the American Museum,
one up Broadway, one up the Bowery, and the fifth
(dead east) to the office of the New Mirror—the
which office is clearly visible from the palm of the
spread hand upholding this medio-metropolitan lamppost.
Having conceived—(you have—have you not,
dear reader?)—the laudable purpose of subscribing
for the Mirror's second year (now on the eve of commencing),
your first inquiry is the geography of
“Ann street,”—upon which money-welcoming spot
shines nightly this central lamp of the municipality.
You arrive safely at the Astor. You glide past its
substratum of apothecaries, perfumers, goldsmiths,
and hatters, and arrest your footsteps at the triple corner
studded with three of the notable structures of
Manhattan—the imperial Astor, the goodly St Paul's,
and the marvellous museum with the “fifty thousand
curiosities.” You now face due southward. Helm
down (coat-skirt down Vesey street, that is to say),
and you head east southeast, laying your course exactly.
Before you lies a crossing of flags by which
you may safely reach the islanded palm of the spread
hand (holding two granite posts guarding a lamp-post),
and, once there, you luff a little to the right, and
follow the pointed forefinger of that same hand to
the opening lips of Ann street. Cross over, keep
down a few doors to the right, and “there you are”—
(there we are!)—walk in!

And now, dear sir! (besides your receipt and the
benign smile of the Brigadier) what will you have?
Our visibilities to the naked eye are small, but there
be caves and storehouses of our primrose-colored
wares, and if we affect the Turkish fashion of a specimen
shop, with room only for one purchaser at a
time, it is for another reason besides saving the rent.
Philosophic, like us, is the French Amphytrion, who
does not show to his delicate guest the pieces de resistance.
The roasted joints stand upon a side-table,
removed from view, and if slices are handed you over
your shoulder, it is with an apposite commendation
which the sight of the whole dish would fatally
smother. Small as the shop is, however (parva, sed
apta mihi!) the welcome is spacious! All who come
there, come with a parishioner's regard, self-chosen
to our literary flock, and none turn the latch without
unlocking our heart with the same door-handle.
(“Qualis rex, talis grex!” Having found comfort in
loving ourselves, we venture the more easily to love
those who are like us.)

Touching this shop (of which we have now given
you the pictorial chart), we shall have more to say
hereafter. It has its history. Our landlord is a
“picked man of countries,” and has written his pleasant
book. Around us “volcanoes belch their fires”
of prodigal literature, and opposite us there is a deep-door
by which the modest wits about town descend to
Windust's, for news and things more succulent.
There sometimes dives the brigadier, to lunch with
needful celerity on the busy Saturday, and thence
emerge daily and shiny-ly (after their pot of ale) refreshed,
the manufacturers of public opinion. Oh, from
our modest window, we see sights! But, enough for
now!

I had a half-hour's interview with the TALKING
MACHINE this morning, and found him a more entertaining
android than most of my wooden acquaintances—(the
man who thinks for him being a very superior
person). I must first give you a tableau of the
room. A German woman takes your half dollar at
the door, and points you to a semi-boxed-up Turk
(query: Why are all automata dressed in turbans?)
—a Turk seated in a kind of low pulpit, with a green
shirt, a good complexion, a very fine beard, and a
pearl breastpin. Out from under his shoulder issues
a bunch of wooden sticks, arranged like a gamut of
pump-handles, and behind this, ready to play on his
Turk, sits Mr. Faber, the contriver. (I immediately
suggested to Mr. F., by the way, that the costume
and figure had better have been female, as the bustle
would have given a well-placed and ample concealment
for all the machinery now disenchantingly
placed outside—the performer sitting down naturally
behind, and playing on her like a piano.[7] ) The
Turk was talking to several ladies and gentlemen
when I entered, and my name being mentioned by
one of the party, he said, “How do you do, Mr.
—?” with perfect distinctness. There was a small
musical organ in the room, and one of the visiters
played “Hail Columbia!” the automaton singing the
words “like a man.” There was no slighting or
slurring of diphthong or vowel, sybillate or aspirate.
Duty was done by every letter with a legitimate claim
to be sounded—the only fault being a strong German
accent (which of course will wear off with travel), and
a few German peculiarities, such as pronouncing v's
like w's, gargling the gutturals, &c., &c.

I understood Mr. Faber to say that he was seven
years contriving the utterance of the vowel e. Mr. F.
has a head and countenance fit for a speech-maker
(maker of the gift of speech, I mean)—a head of the

finest model, and a mouth strongly marked with intelligence
and feeling. He is simple, naif, and enthusiastic
in his manners. The rude musical organ in the
room was his own handiwork, and at the request of
one of the ladies he sat down to it and played a beautiful
waltz of his own composing. He may well be
completely absorbed, as he seems to be, in his androides.
It says anything, in any language. It can
not cough—not being liable to bronchitis; nor laugh
—being a Turk. But it can sing, and has a sweet
breath and well-governed tongue. In short, it is what
would pass in the world for “a very fine man.” Besides
those whom God has made (Boyle, the philosopher,
calls the world “an automaton of God's making”),
I know of but one or two attempts before this
to make a talking-machine—the famous one by Von
Kempelen, and the celebrated brazen head constructed
by Friar Bacon. What could be uttered by this unthinking
brass has not come down to us. The statue
of Memnon could utter musical sounds, and Maelzel's
chess-player could say “echec.” A much more useful
automation than any of these, Mr. Faber's included,
was one invented by one of the brothers Droz—
“a child, sitting at a desk, who dipped his pen in the
ink and wrote in French whatever was dictated to
him” (the inventor, of course, somewhere concealed).
It struck me as a great pity, indeed, that the admirable
ingenuity and perseverance of Mr. Faber
should have been wasted on a superfluity—(for there
is more talking than enough). Albertus Magnus invented,
with thirty years' labor, an automaton servant,
who would open the door when any one knocked, and
salute the visiter—capable, of course, of being able to
say “not at home,” and so saving the conscience of
the domestic; and this was, perhaps, worth the labor.
Less meritorious, again, was the automaton fly made
of iron by Regiomontanus, in the 14th century, which
would make the circuit of the room with a buz, and
return to its master. Something in the Pygmalion
line has been attempted within a few years by a Swiss
mechanician, Maillardet, who constructed a female
with a “bosom that would heave for an hour,” once
wound up. She would also play forty tunes on the
piano with her fingers, and look languishingly by casting
her eyes down—almost enough for one woman to
do! I think these are facts enough for a very speculative
essay on the value of such offices as may be
performed by the body without the aid of brains.

I have been prevented, of late, from going about as
much as my wont, and have hardly seen or heard
more of the city doings than the country readers of
your paper. This will account, if not apologize, for
some lack of variety in my letters. I broke through
my fireside habits last night, and went to the Methodist
chapel in Madison street, to hear the Rev. Mr.
Maffit's diatribe against “Boz”—admittance twenty-five
cents. My surprise on being called on for money
at the door was pleasurable, for I rejoice in an injustice
turned by its victims “to commodity.” Two
hundred people were well amused, and religion (per
one of its ministers) was profited fifty dollars in pocket.
Except in this light, however, I should call the
using of “Boz” for a pulpit text a decided case of le
jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle. (The church gas-lights
seemed to be of that opinion, for they suddenly paled
their fires ten minutes before the conclusion of the
lecture!)

While I think of it—Dickens has contradicted the
report, published in the London papers, touching his
durance for debt. I am glad it was not true. Mistakes
of positive assertion and of this personal character
are so rare in the respectable English papers, that
I mentioned it in my letter to you with no suspicion
of its being an error—the assertion supported, moreovery,
by the rumors, rife to the same purport, when I
was last in London. The reports, doubtless, were
born of the coupling of two well-known facts—the decrease
of the prices paid for his books by publishers,
and the increase of his “pledges,” with no corresponding
reductions apparent in his style of living.
The statement having once appeared in the papers of
his own country, an expression of sympathy (as far
off as the other shoulder of the world) was but complimentary
to Mr. Dickens.

Mr. Maffit's discourse was more of an event to me
than to most of his audience, probably; for his eloquence
made a great impression upon me when I was
a boy between ten and twelve years of age, and I had
not seen him since. He preached at that time in the
Bromfield chapel, Boston (in the next street to the
one in which I lived), and was then a “new light” in
the methodist church, and drew crowds after him. I
left my play eagerly to hear him, and I have often
since wished for an opportunity to analyze the peculiar
delight he gave me—for it was all pleasure, without
the slightest effect in the way of religious impression.
I could fill my letter with what came to me
upon the turned-back leaf of seeing Mr. Maffit in the
pulpit again, but the comparison between the effects
of oratory upon tastes mature and immature, though
interesting elsewhere, would be out of place here.
He was not so much changed as I anticipated. Macready
has always reminded me of him, and they are
still alike. Mr. Maffit did not use to shave his temples,
and from this peculiar tonsure, his forehead looks
higher and his hair less Hyperian and more oratorical
than formerly.

He commenced with some general remarks as to
the charm of variety in customs and manners, and the
common English weakness of condemning pitilessly
every departure from the cockney standards and peculiarities,
trying, by this test only, every country under
the sun. This part of the oration was written in lambent
and oily-hinged periods, and delivered—really, in
music absolute! I felt the spell over again. It is in
the voice and accent of Mr. Maffit that the philtre
lies hid. So sweet a tone no other man has, in my
knowledge. His inflexions, so long as he remains
unexcited, are managed with the skill of the subtlest
rhetorician. He hides the meaning of his sentences
under the velvet words that are sweetest to linger
upon, and to press with emphasis, and in this department
of oratory he seems to me unsurpassed. He
soon broke the spell, however. As he left generalizing,
and got from poetry to analysis, he began to
show bad taste and clumsy discrimination, and fell
into a kind of grimalkin sputter of sarcasm, that let
down his dignity sadly. The audience began to applaud,
and, with their applause, he grew inflated, both
in matter and manner, and for the last half hour of his
discourse was entirely off his feet—trashy, inconsequent,
and absurd—most applauded, however, when
most incomprehensible. (And this ill-bestowed applause
may easily have been the reverend orator's Delilah.)
I remember little of what he said after the
first fifteen minutes. There was a good deal of illustration
to show that the “Yankees could whip the
British,” and much more of such clap-trap, and Dickens
and Mrs. Trollope were each served out with as
much pulpit-pounding and bitter epithet as is commonly
given the devil, at a dose. One comparative
testimony given by the orator is valuable, as he speaks
on both sides with authority. He assured us that the
society in every part of this country, “from the
Aroostook to the Sabine,” is as refined and delightful
as any society whatever, except that of heaven. He
did not mention how long he had resided in the latter
country, but he had been a travelling guest of American
families for the twenty years since he left Ireland,

and had been treated everywhere as a son and brother,
and spoke advisedly. I could wish this Irish and
celestial evidence in our favor might be put (for smoking)
into the pipe of the London Quarterly.

I have discovered lately that the household-gods
have a vocabulary of their own. Search after a trifling
invention led me to Windle's furnishing-shop in
Maiden lane, and after spending an hour in marvelling
at the mind that has been expended upon the invention
of household conveniences, I asked for a catalogue
of the shop's wares. A pamphlet of twenty-one
pages was handed me, and I give you, for your
despair, a few of the names of the necessary utensils
by which your comfort is ministered to: “Pope's
heads and eyes,” “Shakers' swifts,” “beefsteak pounders,”
“faucets and bungstarts,” “bootjacks and leg-resters,”
“salt and spit-boxes,” “Chinese swings,”
“Chinese punk in boxes,” “sillabub-sticks,” “oven-peels,”
“allblaze-pans,” “ice-cream pagodas,” “paste-jaggers
and cutters,” “crimping and goffering machines,”
“sugar-nippers and larding-pins,” “bread-rasps
and sausage-stuffers,” etc., etc., etc. This is vernacular,
of course, to the ladies, but Greek to us.

Apropos of words—there should be a replevin (by
poetry upon vulgar usage) to restore the word diaper
to its original meaning. Ford says in one of his plays
(The Sun's Darling):—

Diaper means literally, to embroider with raised
work—after a stuff which was formerly called d'Ipre,
from the town of Ipre in Flanders, where it was manufactured.
There is such a load of descriptiveness
in the word that it is a shame it should be lost to
poetry.

Moore's carefully revised and corrected edition of
his works is republished in this country at the price
of three dollars and a half. Half of it, at least, is
uninteresting to the general reader, consisting of his
satires (with names left in unexplained blanks), local
poetry, translations from the classics, and a mass of
labored notes. The popular portions, consisting of
“The Loves of the Angels,” “The Irish Melodies
and Sacred Songs,” and the “National Airs, Ballads,
and Miscellaneous Poems,” have been published in
three extras of the Mirror—five shillings for all of
them. This will form as beautiful an edition of the
enjoyable part of Moore's poetry as could be wished,
and as cheap as beautiful.

Charles Dibdin, “The Bard of Poor Jack,” as
he is commonly called, is one of those authors less
known than his works, particularly in this country,
where his songs are familiar to every lip, and his name
hardly recognised. General Morris has made a collection
of all the songs of Dibdin that are universal
in their popularity, and has added others which from
their bold and graphic excellence have been commonly
attributed to him. This shilling extra of the
Mirror will become, I think, the sailor's classic, embodying,
as it does, all their most remarkable songs.

Montgomery's “World before the Flood,” one of
the sweetest poems in the English language, is also in
press for the “Mirror Library.” On looking over the
biography of this good man and true poet, I find, by-the-way,
the following passage, referring, I believe, to
the father of one of the editors of the Intelligencer:
“Mr. Montgomery removed to Sheffield (England) in
1792, and engaged himself with Mr. Gales, the publisher
of a very popular newspaper, at that time known
by the title of the Sheffield Register. Mr. Mont
gomery became a useful correspondent to this paper,
and gained so far the good opinion and affection of
Mr. Gales and his family, that they vied with each
other in demonstrating their respect and regard for
him. In 1794, when Mr. Gales left England to avoid
a political prosecution, Montgomery, with the assistance
of another gentleman, became the editor of the
Register.” Critics have unanimously agreed that
“The World before the Flood” is the best production
of Montgomery's muse, and it certainly is a noble and
pure structure of elevated imagination. Among the
sacred classics, Montgomery, I think, will rank first.

Sorrow's Reluctant Gate.—This last-turned
leaf, dear reader, seems to us always like a door shut
behind us, with the world outside. We have expressed
this thought before, when it was a prelude to
being gayer than in the preceding pages. With the
closed door, now, we would throw off restraint, but it
is to be sadder than before. It is so with yourself,
doubtless. You sometimes break into singing on entering
your chamber and finding yourself alone—
sometimes you burst into tears.

There is nothing for which the similitudes of poetry
seem to us so false and poor, as for affliction by the
death of those we love. The news of such a calamity
is not “a blow.” It is not like “a thunderbolt,”
or “a piercing arrow;” it does not “crush and overwhelm”
us. We hear it, at first, with a kind of mournful
incredulity, and the second feeling is, perhaps, a
wonder at ourselves—that we are so little moved.
The pulse beats on as tranquilly—the momentary tear
dries from the eye. We go on, about the errand in
which we were interrupted. We eat, sleep, at our
usual time, and are nourished and refreshed; and if a
friend meet us and provoke a smile, we easily and forgetfully
smile. Nature does not seem to be conscious
of the event, or she does not recognise it as a calamity.

But little of what is taken away by death is taken
from the happiness of one hour, or one day. We
live, absent from beloved relatives, without pain. Days
pass without our seeing them—months—years. They
would be no more absent in body if they were dead.
But, suddenly, in the midst of our common occupations,
we hear that they are one remove farther from
us—in the grave. The mind acknowledges it true.
The imagination makes a brief and painful visit to the
scene of the last agony, the death-chamber, the
burial—and returns weary and dispirited, to repose.
For that hour perhaps we should not have thought of
the departed, if they were living—nor for the next.
The routine we had relied upon to fill up those hours
comes round. We give it our cheerful attention.
The beloved dead are displaced from our memory, and
perhaps we start suddenly, with a kind of reproachful
surprise, that we can have been so forgetful—that the
world, with its wheels of minutes and trifles, can thus
untroubled go round, and that dear friend gone
from it.

But the day glides on, and night comes. We lie
down, and unconsciously, as we turn upon our pillow,
commence a recapitulation that was once a habit of
prayer—silently naming over the friends whom we
should commend to God—did we pray—as those most
dear to us. Suddenly the heart stops—the breath
hushes—the tears spring hot to the eyelids. We miss
the dead! From that chain of sweet thoughts a link
is broken, and for the first time we feel that we are
bereaved. It was in the casket of that last hour before
sleeping—embalmed in the tranquillity of that hour's
unnamed and unreckoned happiness—that the memory
of the dead lay hid. For that friend, now, we
can no longer pray! Among the living—among our
blessings—among our hopes—that sweet friend is

nameable no more! We realize it now. The list of
those who love us—whom we love—is made briefer.
With face turned upon our pillow—with anguish and
fears—we blot out the beloved name, and begin the
slow and nightly task of unlearning the oft-told syllables
from our lips.

And this is the slow-opening gate by which sorrow
enters in! We wake on the morrow and remember
our tears of the past night; and as the cheerful sunshine
streams in at our window, we think of the kind
face and embracing arms, the soft eyes and beloved
lips, lying dark and cold, in a place—oh how pitiless
in its coldness and darkness! We choke with a suffused
sob, we heave the heavy thought from our bosom
with a painful sigh, and hasten abroad—for relief in
forgetfulness!

But we had not anticipated that this dear friend
would die, and we have marked out years to come
with hopes in which the dead was to have been a
sharer. Thoughts, and promises, and meetings, and
gifts, and pleasures, of which hers was the brighter
half, are wound like a wreath of flowers around the
chain of the future, and as we come to them—to the
places where these looked-for flowers lie in ashes upon
the inevitable link—oh, God! with what agonizing
vividness they suddenly return!—with what grief, made
intenser by realizing, made more aching by prolonged
absence, we call up those features beloved, and remember
where they lie, uncaressed and unvisited!
Years must pass—and other affections must “sweep,
and garnish, and enter in” to the void chambers of the
heart—and consolation and natural forgetfulness must
do their slow work of erasure—and meantime grief
visits us, in unexpected times and places, its paroxysms
imperceptibly lessening in poignancy and tenacity,
but life in its main current, flowing, from the
death to the forgetting of it, unchanged on!

And now, what is like to this, in nature (for even the
slight sympathy in dumb similitudes is sweet)? It is
not like the rose's perishing—for that robs only the
hour in which it dies. It were more like the removal
from earth of that whole race of flowers, for we should
not miss the first day's roses, hardly the first season's,
and should mourn most when the impoverished spring
came one more round without them. It were like
stilling the music of a brook for ever, or making all
singing-birds dumb, or hushing the wind-murmur in
the trees, or drawing out from nature any one of her
threads of priceless repetition. We should not mourn
for the first day's silence in the brook, or in the trees—
nor for the first morning's hush after the birds were
made voiceless. The recurrent dawns, or twilights, or
summer noons, robbed of their accustomed music,
would bring the sense of its loss—the value of what
was taken away increasing with its recurrent season.
But these are weak similitudes—as they must needs
be, drawn from a world in which death—the lot alike
of all living creatures that inhabit it—is only a calamity
to man!

Spring is here, and, with its earliest sunshine,
Broadway puts out its first flowers in bright colors
and gay drapery. It is a lounge we should love were
we idle. We do not write for Autolycus, nor for
Timon. (Thieves and misanthropes do not commonly
take the papers.) And as all other classes of mankind
yield to the gregarious instincts of our race, we
feel free to discourse of Broadway as a place beloved.
Beloved it is—by the philanthropist, interested in the
peceant varieties of his fellow-creatures; by the old,
who love to look upon the young; and by the young,
who love to look upon each other; (ah! the celestial
quality of youth!)—by the serious, for whom there
would seem to be resorts less thronged with sinners
(if need were), and by sinners, who are at least spared
the sin of hypocrisy, for, with little disguise, they
“love one another.” Now, if beautiful women are
not laudable objects of contemplation and curiosity,
as St. Anthony avers (and he is welcome to let them
alone), we are not warned against beautiful children,
nor beautiful horses, nor the bright sunshine, nor the
gay product of the silkworm, nor the “stuffs from
Colchis and Trebizond.”

Very handsome—isn't she? And apparently in a
very great hurry, and apparently very much disgusted
at being seen in the street at all! You would think,
now, that that lady's coachman was ill and that she
was, for this once in her life, walking alone to her
mother's. But she is more amused at this moment
than she will be again to-day—and to-morrow she will
take the same walk to be happy again. She has a
husband, however, and a beautiful house, and not a
wish (that money can gratify) ungratified. And her
drawing-rooms are full of exquisite objects of art.
She might stay contentedly at home, you think? No!
She was a belle, pampered with admiration when she
married, and she married a cynical and cold-blooded
parsnip, who sits like a snarling ogre among his statues
and pictures—a spot on his own ottoman—a blemish
in the elegance of his own house. She married him
for an establishment, but forgot he was a part of it—
dazzled with the frame, she overlooked the hideousness
of the picture. And he knows this—and likes
her, with his statues, as his property—and is pleased
to have her seen as his wife—though she is the wife
to but one part of him, his vanity! She finds it hard
to feel beautiful at breakfast, with her husband on the
other side of the table, and he finds it hard to be very
bland with a wife who looks at his acrid physiognomy
with a shudder.

A superb house with him in it, is like a fine tulip
with an adder in it. But she is a woman, and whether
she has a heart or no, she has a well-cultivated vanity,
and unluckily, the parents who taught her to secure
luxury in wedlock, taught her no foresight as to her
more needful supply of admiration. Love, she would
like very well—but admired she must be! And too
cold and wordly to be imprudent, and too proud to be
willing to seem pleased with the gaze of Broadway
idlers, she still thirsts after this very stare which is
given to her beauty by the passers-by, and has very
little happiness beyond her daily hurried walk on the
crowded pavé. She'll make a match of sentiment if
she gets another chance, or, at any rate, will marry
for some love and less money.

Heaven help her through with her present chrysalis!

“How are you?”

“How are you?”

What would a new-dropped angel think of these
two unanswered questions? Indeed, what would an
angel think of that smiling fellow who exchanged this
nonsense with me. He is one of a thousand in the
city who, “like the prodigal, squeezed through a
horn,” are happy from having got through the tightest
place of this mortal life. Though his dimensions are
immeasurably smaller than they were not long ago, they
are so much easier than they grew to be after, that
he feels as if, like Uncle Toby's fly, there was room
enough in the world for him now. He is easy with the
rebound after being broke with overstraining. He was
a merchant, reputed to have made money enough.
Sensitive and punctilious in all the relations of life,
he was particularly soignè of his commercial honor.
Never a breath sullied that clear escutcheon! For
this he was supposed to be over-careful—for this he
was inflexible where his heart would have prompted
him to be indulgent—for this, it was soberly believed,
he would sacrifice his life. His wife was (and has
since proved herself by trial) an admirable woman,
and with fine children and good looks of his own, he
was one of those fallacious contradictions of the equal

distribution of mortal happiness. Well—his star began
to descend from its apogee, and he courageously
lugged out his philosophy and retrenched his expenditure.
And then began an agony of mind which
could be increased, even hereafter, by the increased
capacity of the mind—for, short of reason overturned,
he could suffer no more. A thousand years of a common
tenor of life would seem shorter than those six
terrible months of sinking into bankruptcy. But now
comes the curious part of it! He suddenly took the
benefit of the bankrupt law. And instead of lying
still prostrate upon the ground, crushed and humiliated
—instead of hiding his head, as he longed to do while
he still promised to pay, degraded, spiritless, lost, to
the enjoyment of life—instead of still seeming an object
of pity to the most ruthless sufferer by his fall—
up, like a snapped spring, he bounds to the empyrean!
He could not be gayer with his debts paid and his
fortune in his hands again! He walks the street,
smiling, and with a light step. He is a little smarter
than he used to be in this dress. He eats well, and
the wrinkles have retreated, and his eyes have thrown
open their windows, and (as you saw when he passed)
there is not a merrier or more fortunate-looking idler
in this merry Broadway! Now, quere?—Is there a
provision in nature for honor to cast its skin? Becomes
it new, scarless and white, after a certain wear,
tear, and suffering? Does a man remember, till, with
the anguish of remembering, he forgets? Has God,
in our construction, provided a recuperative, to guard
us against over self infliction? Can we use up our
sense of shame with over-working it, and do we come
then to a stratum of self-approval and self-glorification?
Enfin—is this inward whitewashing confined
only to money-spots, and is nature hereby provided
with a corrective check to our implacabilities of
pocket?

It occurred to me in an omnibus to-day, that it
would be curious to know with what eyes angles watch
us. My opinion as to the importance of “every hair
of our head” had been somewhat modified within the
previous half-hour by a look at one or two of my own
(hairs) through a solar microscope, and the thought
naturally suggested itself, that if the eyes of our spiritual
guardians were microscopic (as they may easily
be), there was no so great marvel in the care they
take of us. It was a warm, pleasant morning, and I
was letting myself ramble and look into windows. An
exhibition of a solar microscope came in my way, and I
went in. The wall of a large room was apparently
swarming with rats and mud-turtles when I opened
the door, and this was some of the dust from a fig,
held on the point of a pin, and magnified five million
times. I had seen many of these experiments in college,
of course, but one hears so many wonderful
things, when one is growing, that I do not remember
being much astonished in those days. It was different
now, for I really never was more amused and
amazed then at the snakes in the drop of vinegar, and
the formidable apparatus of a certain un-nameable little
customer, whose like I had occasion to slay in
great numbers in the poetical Orient. To bring the
thing home to my own business and bosom, however
(the microscope, not the pediculus!) I begged the
exhibitor to show me, magnified, one or two of my
own hairs. I plucked one from my bump of imagination
and another from my bump of acquisitiveness,
and gave them both to him, with some curiosity
to know if the roots would show the difference in the
soil. Somewhat to my surprise there was a difference.
He placed them carefully on his instrument,
and the root of the imaginative hair was shaped like a
claret bottle (and about its size), while that of the acquisitive
hair was like a short fat porter bottle—the
hairs themselves being, to the roots, in about the proportions
of the necks to the bottles. I must say I was
truly delighted at the discovery of this analogy, and
seldom have bought so good a fact for twelve and a
half cents. As I said before, “the hairs of our heads”
being “all numbered,” my guardian angel knows how
many dozen I have remaining of my imaginative claret,
and how my acquisitive porter improves by age, and
he looks after it all like one of Bininger's clerks, letting
none “fall to the ground” without careful putting
down. The exhibitor asked me to try another, but a
man thinks twice of plucking out a hair, impressed with
the idea that it will leave a hole in his head as big as
a claret-bottle! I declined.

But if every hair of my head be as big (to a microscopic
eye) as a bottle of porter with a neck a mile
long, and my body in proportion, at what a very moderate
charge (thought I, as I rode down) am I carried
a mile in the unmagnified omnibus! What would have
become of us if God had inflicted upon us a Babel of
the eye instead of the ear, making different men see
things through different lenses, diminishing and microscopic!
What work for the lawyers! I was beginning
to turn my mind to the quantity of magnified
body that one unmagnified soul could properly inhabit
(as a house may easily be expanded till one tenant
is an absurdity), when the omnibus stopped. It is
a very good subject for an extravaganza in Thomas
Hood's vein.

There is a certain curiosity to know “how the thing
went off,” even though the show in question was a
bore to the spectator. Perked up people think that
only such curiosity as would sit well upon George
Washington should be catered for in print, but I incline
to think that almost any matter which would be
talked about by any two people together would be entertaining
to one man reading by himself. So I think
I may put down what I saw at a show that was advertised
as an “Exhibition of Laughing Gas.”

My younger readers may perhaps require to be
told that nitrate of ammonia, like himself, has a soul
that fire will burn out of it. When the lamp over
which it is held gets too hot “to be stood” any longer,
up rises a little whitish cloud which has most of
the properties of common air, but which has a sweet
taste and an agreeable odor, and will pass into any human
soul's body upon very slight invitation. Once
in, however, it abuses the hospitality extended to it,
by immediately usurping all the functions of the body,
and behaves, in short, extremely like another more
notorious enemy, who, “when admitted into your
mouth steals away your brains.” The stimulus of
this intoxicating gas to the nervous system is very surprising.
Sir Humphrey Davy administered it to
Southey the poet, whose feelings are thus described:
“He could not distinguish between the first effects
and a certain apprehension, of which he was unable
to divest himself. His first definite sensations were a
fulness and dizziness in the head, such as to induce
the fear of falling. This was succeeded by a laugh
which was involuntary, but highly pleasurable, accompanied
by a perculiar thrilling in the extremities—
a sensation perfectly new and delightful. For many
hours after this experiment, he imagined that his
taste and smell were more acute, and is certain that
he felt unusually strong and cheerful. In a second
experiment he felt pleasure still superior, and has
since poetically remarked, that he supposes the atmosphere
of the highest of all possible heavens to be composed
of this gas!”

There were between three and four thousand people
assembled in the Tabernacle. A platform in the
centre was hemmed in with benches, and it was advertised
that “twelve strong men” would be there to prevent
injury to the spectators. It was mentioned in the
advertisement, also, that the gallery would be reserved
for ladies, though I thought that the inviting of ladies
to be present at the removal of all restraint from
men's tongues and actions, was a strong mark of confidence
in the uppermost qualities of our sex. After
some impatience on the part of the audience, the professor
appeared with his specimen of “the highest
possible heaven” in an India-rubber bag. The candidates
for a taste of it were many and urgent, crowding
up from below like the applicants to St. Peter,
and the professor seemed somewhat embarrassed as to
a selection. A thick-necked and bony youth got possession
of the bag, however, and applied his mouth to
the stopper. After inhaling its contents for a minute
or two, he squared away and commenced pummelling
the professor in the most approved butcher-boy style
—which was possibly his idea of the “highest possible
heaven.” The “twelve strong men” rushed
to the rescue, the audience applauded vociferously,
and the lad returned to his senses, having been
out of them perhaps three minutes. A dozen others
took their turn, and were variously affected. I was
only very much delighted with one young man, who
coolly undertook a promenade over the the close-packed
heads of the audience. The impertinence of
the idea seemed to me in the highest degree brilliant

and delightful. There was one corsair-looking man
who rushed up and down the stage, believing himself
on the deck of some vessel in pursuit of another, and
that was perhaps the best bit of acting. One silly
youth went to and fro, smirking and bowing, and another
did a scene in “Richard the Third,” and a tall,
good-looking young man laughed heartily, and suddenly
stopped and demanded of the audience, in indignant
rage, what they were laughing at! There
was nothing else worth even putting down among trifles,
and I was glad when it was over. The only imaginable
entertainment in such an exhibition would
be to watch the effect of self-abandonment on those
whose characters we know when under restraint.
Among acquaintances it would be charming—particularly
if the subjects were ladies. I should recommend
to the professor to advertise himself as open to
invitations to administer his “highest possible heaven”
to small and select parties. It would be better
than a masquerade and not so unlawful.

The etymology of April lies in dispute between
aperire, the Latin word for open (because at this time
the earth is preparing to open and enrich us with its
gifts), and Aphrodite, one of the names of the goddess
of love, to whom the month is especially
consecrated. By either derivation, it is the month
of promise, and like the trees, we feel the juices
lovingly ascending to our top, and we can venture to
enter upon that “promising” which is the very “air
o' the time,” without fearing that “performance” will
be “the duller for the act.” And, by-the-way, while
we think of it, we have been beset by a friendly letter
to cut short the present year, and commence a
new volume with January 1, 1845. We must be excused
for preferring, altogether, a commencement in
April, accident and convenience quite aside. There
is a fitness in commencing (putting out our first
leaves) with nature. After nature's example, we may
venture, with our first issue, to promise a prodigal
summer of flowers and a harvest of fruits, though
there we trust the parallel will stop, for we do not propose
with nature to “take our leaves” in October and
fall presently to decay! No, sir! Let us commence
our primrose-colored series in primrose-time.
Our hopes are April-ish, as looks our cover. We
hope to swell, not dwindle, from April into May—to
give out our products more lavishly in June, and
have a “harvest home” of prosperity in August.
What says old Drayton of the order of such matters?—

—a fair picture of the art we mean to make manifest
in our medley of literary flowers. There are some
productions whose “luscious smell” requires the “allaying”
of common sense; and, now and then, a lily
of plain truth and simplicity, “pricked in” between
high-wrought prose and gorgeous poetry, makes
charming harmony. The periodical-writers of all
times have practised this trick of diversity. “If a
magaziner be dull” (says Goldsmith) “upon the Spanish
war, he soon has us up again with the ghost in
Cock-lane.”

A writer

complains of us for taking liberties with the queen's
English. He does not specify his instances. Mr.
King, of the American (we were not aware before
that he was the proprietor of the “King's English!”)
makes an outcry like Milton's stall-reader,[1] at the
title of the “Rococo.” If Mr. King will give us one
of his newspaper-words that conveys, like the single
word Rococo, the entire periphrasis of “intrinsically
valuable and beautiful, but accidentally and unjustly
obsolete,” we will send the offensive word back to
France, where we got it. Meantime, as Costard said
of his new word “remuneration,” we “will not buy
nor sell out of it.” But, withal, we confess to great
responsibility, in the adoption of new words and the
restoration of old, and we do not spare, upon every
instance, careful consideration. It is due to the literature
of our country, that those who write for popular
prints should sanction no corruptions of the country's
language; but it is also due to the dignity of
America, since she has come of age, that her popular
writers should claim her share of improving and embellishing
her inherited language, and even the right
of departing from the usage of the old country, if the
inevitable changes, which there creep in, should not
be conformable to American taste, customs, climate,
or scenery. We would not further, but we certainly
would not hinder, the having a language of our own,
for we think one language little enough for a republic
of fifteen or twenty millions. But, dependance
upon England apart, the language of a country is a
garden that requires looking after, and it needs grafting
and transplanting as much as weeding and pruning.
Who is to be the gardener? One man? One
Mr. King of the American? No—but fifty men, if
there be fifty popular writers. There are no trustees
of the language appointed by congress. There is no
penalty for the launching of words new and infreight-worthy.
Professors of colleges (unless accidentally
men of genius like Longfellow) have no power over
the uses or abuses of language. With whom lies the
responsibility? we ask again—for, upon its language,
much of the repute and credit of the commonwealth
is inevitably adrift. And we say again, with American
popular writers lies the burden of it. Mr. Irving's
administration of his trust in the country's language
is worth to us any two common years of Washington
legislation, and will tell with more favorable weight
upon our history than any two sessions of our late
congresses. We claim to have our small share of
this same responsibility, and our small privilege of
suggestion and appropriation. The language has
owed much to exotic introduction in other days, and
it may still be lawfully enriched by the same process;
and if we, in our reading, or in our travel, have stumbled
on more compact vehicles for meaning, and can
bring them effectively into common use at home, we
shall venture to claim praise for it. Indeed, we have
long had half a mind to devote a corner of the Mirror
to a record of the births and disinterments of the
words new and prematurely buried. Whom would
that horrify, besides Mr. King? Why, for example,
should not the beautiful old English word summer-sunstead
(descriptive of the season of the sun's stay
or stead in summer) be restored to poetry—its relapse
into Latin by the word summer-solstice being wholly
unavailable from its technical inelegance? This is
rather a forced instance, no other occurring to us at
the moment; but our readers will remember pausing
with regret, as we have, over the sweet passages
which are the graves of lost words.

To the invariable question of “What's the news?”
the invariable answer is, “Nothing at all!”—yet he
who answers delivers his budget in the same breath—
a death and a marriage perhaps the least of his

announcements. I (the diarist) have no news—none!
I could “swear the gods into agues” that I have none!
Yet to entertain a visiter—to divert a country-cousin
—to bridge over an awful pause—what would one naturally
say? I ask for information.

The Park theatre is open—(very open—being nearly
empty!)—Mitchell's, on the contrary, is very close
—being nightly full. But I do not know that any one
cares about theatricals—to have them written or
talked about, that is to say. Critics, both of the
drama and of literature, I think, have, of late, been
shoved aside. The public are tired of interpreters to
their taste, and express their opinions, now, by acclamation,
not by one man's pen. Who cares now (as
the Aurora said a day or two ago) for a column of
criticism on a personation of Hamlet? If there is to
be a play, or a concert, it is pretty fairly understood,
in the Bowery as in Broadway, in Hyperborean Chelsea
as in the tropics of the Battery, what will be the
quality of the goer's money's-worth. And three lines
in the morning-paper, when it is over, is all that
is needful or advisable to be written on the performance.
So, God speed the decline of criticism! Apropos,
Miss Turnbull, the danseuse, has now become
one of the regular Povey-dom of the Park—engaged
“since the memory of the oldest inhabitant.”

The cutaneous epidemic of the season has attacked
the museum with great violence—a breaking out of
its inside humors covering at present the entire surface.
In plainer phrase, Mr. Barnum has completely
covered the prominent and spacious fronts of the
American museum with oval paintings of the beasts,
birds, fishes, and Indians “on show” within, and a
more holyday-looking castle of curiosity could scarcely
be invented. The “Kentucky Minstrels” are the
allure just now, and the pictures of the four ebon
bards, large as life, over the balcony, and the remainder
of the be-windowed and be-pictured building,
with its indefatigable flags, its lantern steeple-high,
and its lofty windmill of Punch and Judy, must all
fall very gayly, to say the least, on the sober eye of
a Johnny Newcome.

The funny little hat, small as Mercury's, which was
laughed at upon the bagmen's heads six months ago,
has fairly prevailed, and is the mode, nem. con. Truly,
“every time serves for the matter (of hat) that is born
in it.” The eye can be argued with, and convinced.
It was stoutly maintained, three months ago, by one
who is well known as “the complete varnish of a
man,” that this fashion of hat was but a porringer
thing, and would never thrive in Broadway. And
now nothing but that scant porringer looks tip-top and
jaunty! Orlando Fish (who, as tiler number one, is a
man of more potent function, for my politics, than
Tyler the first) is making money out of the blocks
which my facetious dandy friend recommended him
rather to make tops of than tops on. Well—fashion
goes by “jerks of invention,” and as Holofernes says,
“the gift is good in those in whom it is acute.”

Reception is raging up town. All ladies may be
said to be “in a parlous state,” who have not a specified
morning to “receive.” Six months ago, the six
profane mornings of the week were the property of
six privileged ladies by right of first seizure. Such
pretenders to “society” as did not visit the week
through in this established succession were as “damned”
as Touchstone's friend, the uncourtly shepherd.
This was a vexatious invention, for, in the stereotyped
innumerableness of fashionable houses, a man might
blissfully visit nowhere, and yet go undetected for a
culprit “not in society.” Heaven be praised, however,
for the “safety in numbers,” and especially for
the imitative gregariousness of our country. There
are now five hundred families who “receive!” Not
quite, as yet, in inextricable confusion, however. A
man of a generalizing mind may still comprehend his
morning's work, and with fast horses and invariable
French leave, may still refresh all necessary memories
as to its existence. There is the Monday set,
and the Tuesday set, and the Wednesday set, and so
on through the week—crystallized according to neighborhood,
with one or two supercilious and recusant
exceptions. The engravers are in full cry, however,
and every week brings out new cards, “at home on
Monday,” “at home on Tuesday,” etc., etc., and we
shall soon be

by a general acknowledgment of the fact that nobody
is more intensely at home than before, and everybody
who has a house is simply “at home” whenever those
who wish to see them can find leisure to ring the bell.

I don't know, by-the-way, that the compliment has
been paid our country by foreign naturalists, of ranking
us with the more virtuous wild-fowl, esteemed for
their gregariousness. The Rev. Sydney Smith shows
his lack of zoological learning in not modifying his
abuse of us by remembering that “no birds of prey
are gregarious.”—“Of wild-fowl,” says Grew, “those
which are the most useful fly not singly as other
birds, but are commonly gregarious.”—“Then for
birds of prey and rapacious animals,” says Ray, “it
is remarkable what Aristotle observes, that they are
solitary and go not in flocks.” Long live our multitudinous
hotels, our animated extinguishment of distinction
by imitation, our altogetherness of lordship
and ladyship! The danger is in the stiffening of this
fluidity of rank and condition before the scoria are
recognised, and before the mould of aristocracy can be
dexterously handled. We shall have lords and ladies
or their catamounts tantamounts (bother! which is
the word?) a few days, at least, before the millenium.
This big orchard of green fruit is too large not to be
destined to ripe and rot, reasonably and seasonably.

Apropos—I observe a spot advertised for sale that I
have always looked upon as the most beautiful and
aristocratic property in this country—an island cradled
by the Niagara, and in itself the best cradle nature
could possibly form for the family of a luxurious
exclusive. It is about eleven miles above the falls,
an arrow-shot from the American shore (with Grand
island between it and the Canadas), and contains a
hundred acres of land, charmingly wooded and varied,
which have been turned into a paradise by one
of the most refined gentlemen of this country. A
beautiful villa crowns it, and baths, hot-houses, and
all appliances to luxury, are there, and all fenced in
by the bright water about to rush over Niagara. The
island is called Tonawanda—a delicious word for the
name of a home. One sighs to think that a little
money could buy such a paradise for one's own.

I observe a new fashion of cap, which gives the ladies
an air

a cap that would fit a child's double-fist, worn perched
upon the summit of the organ of self-esteem, looking
like an apple-blossom on the top-knot of a French
chicken. It is one of those fashions whose worth depends
upon the wearer—very telling upon a pretty
coquette, and very ludicrous, topping dignity or sentiment.

Original literature in the lump is sadly at a discount
in this country. Miss Sedgwick, in the plenitude of
her intellectual power, has taken to school-keeping.
Another authoress, very superior to Miss Sedgwick in
the qualities necessary to saleable writing, Mrs. Mary
Clavers, is employed in the same ill-suited drudgery.
Cooper, I understand, makes nothing by his American
editions, and thinks of publishing only in England
and importing a few copies at English prices. American
literature has nearly ceased, or it is scattered in
such small rills of periodical-writing that it will make
no mark upon the time. Prescott is an exception,
it is true, but Prescott is a man of fortune, and writes
for fame, not bread and butter. Why should not a
subscription be raised by the patriotic to give fair play
and studious leisure to the original and poetic genius
of Mrs. Child—wasted now on ephemera for newspapers!
Money left for such uses, or given by the
living, would better embalm the memory of the giver
than many a common charity. What is to be the
effect on the national character of the present hiatus
of original American literature, and how long is it to
last? For how long are we to take our mental wardrobe
second-hand from England, and read to the
world as all wearers of unfitting garments seem—out of
harmony with our shape and model from nature?

It is stated in the Boston Daily Advertiser (in an
article headed “The greatest American author”),
that, in a work of no small authority and importance
in Germany, a continuation of Frederick Schlegel's
“History of Literature,” a writer by the name of
Sealsfield is put at the head of American literature,
and defined as “the great national painter of the characteristics
of his native land, who has unfolded the
poetry of American life and its various relations yet
better than Cooper and Irving.” The editor of the
Advertiser remarks that the critical opinion of this
work will be taken implicitly on this subject by half
Europe, and no American authority, at least, will be
able to gainsay it. He continues: “We have, therefore,
taking shame to ourselves for past ignorance,
made all reasonable inquiries in this matter. We have
applied at the principal bookstores and libraries in the
neighborhood, but to our surprise neither books or
author have as yet been heard of. The Athenæum,
Burnham, Little and Brown, and Redding and Co.,
are all in ignorance. We have applied to all literary
circles to which the humble conductors of diurnal
publications have the entrée, but a hearty laugh has
been the only answer to our anxious queries.

“We are yet unwilling to let this sin of ingratitude
rest upon American readers. We call upon the public
to assist us and solve the question, `Where is
Sealsfield?' and absolve our country from the shame
of ignoring an author, who has been crowned with
the laurels of trans-Atlantic criticism. We trust the
subject may seem as important to the public as to ourselves,
and that if, as seems probable, some publisher
who lives by stealing the brains of foreign authors,
has added to his crimes by incarcerating in the dungeons
of Cliff street, or Ann street, or Water street,
this hero of our literature, let that public, or the
`American copyright club' have him disinterred immediately.”

The probability is that better information than I can
give will be brought out by this “call upon the public,”
but meantime I will record, that this great American
author, Sealsfield, is a German, who has resided
in this country for some years, returned to Germany a
few years since, and could probably be heard of in
the neighborhood of his intrepid reviewer and nomenclator.
He probably “furnished the facts” for the
review himself. He is (“to give the devil his due”)
a good writer, and while in this country contributed
some excellent articles to the old Mirror.

Leaving to other people my share of curiosity as to
the source of the Niger, I should like to know the
author of now and then a joke that goes the round of
the newspapers. Genius is the most promiscuous of
animals, and is found in all sorts of disreputable places,
dress, and company—in quack advertisements and
negro wit, as often as in patented inventions and publications
of gilt-edge. There is a kind of unlabelled
genius, which is wholly incapable of being turned to
any profit, but which how and then starts out from an
unsuspected quarter and takes probability by the beard
with a delicious intrepidity. This morning's paper
has an instance—a three-line story of a Yankee who
bought a bushel of shoe-pegs, and finding they were
made of rotten wood, sharpened the other ends and
sold them for oats! Quite aside from the fun of that,
it is worth analyzing as an absurdity of the most brilliant
audacity of invention. Will the respectable
author oblige me with his autograph?

Confab in the Cloister.—Not a small part of
our brain-twisting, dear reader, is the exercise of an
office that, at Roman feasts, was delegated to a particular
servant called the NOMENCLATOR. His business
was to inform the guests of the names and ingredients
of the dishes set before them. Simple as it seems when
well done, there are few things more difficult to do
well. It is to describe a book, or a series of books, in
the compass of a phrase, and that phrase attractive to
eye and ear, piquant, novel, and provocative of curiosity!
Try your hand at expressing the contents of a
charcoal-cart in the compass of a diamond!

It would amuse the reader to be present sometimes
when No. 4, Ann street, is resolved into a committee
of two for the finding of a good name. (Witlings,
avaunt!) The firm is called together by a significant
motion of the forefinger of the brigadier founder of
the concern—called into THE CLOISTER, that is to say,
a room of the proportions of a lady's shoe, extending
to our (No. 4's) immediate rear. The door being
closed, and the window-curtain dropped to exclude
the uninspiring view of the clothes-lines of No. 4,
up-stairs—the one chair having become occupied by
his Serenity, and the remainder of the committee
being seated upon the upright end of a ream of paper,
the business in hand is forthwith put. Let no one
imagine, because he may have assisted at naming a
friend's child, that he has any, the most vague, idea of
the embarrassments that ensue! We have a passably
fertile invention. We have whiled away the dull
transit of what is commonly called “a liberal education”
by a diligent search after such knowledge as was
above being “turned to account.” We have been a
profligate of verbal intemperance, we mean to say, and
are likely to know the bin where lies in cobweb your
old word, toothsome and tasteable. But for all this, it
is no easier. Like the search after happiness, ten to
one the thing sought lies near home—overstepped at
starting! But let us particularize.

The Brigadier.—My dear boy (a facetious way he
has of addressing the rest of the committee!)—my
dear boy, stop looking out of that back window, and
give your mind to business! Cast your eye over
these four incomparable tales! Irving's “Wife”—

Committee.—You don't say he's married, general!

Brigadier.—Tales, my dear boy, I speak of tales—
a new series of tales that want a good name! Come,
think of it, now!

Committee.—Describe me the article, brigadier!
What is the purpose, plot, character? Is it one book
or a series? “Open up,” as Bulwer says, and let us
know definitively what is wanted!

Brigadier.—You know how many men of genius
there are who are only capable of brief inspirations—

Committee.—Inspired to the length of a short tale.
Well!

Brigadier.—You know that long tales are now out
of fashion. People are tired of them.

Committee.—Indeed? Well!

Brigadier.—You know that such men as Brougham,
Canning. Macauley—statesmen who are scholars and
men of genius, and might have been authors—have
occasionally given vent to their pent-up imaginations
by a tale for the magazines.

Committee.—I do—witness Brougham's magnificent
story of the “man in the bell.” Well!

Brigadier.—We know what is good, that goes by
with the flood, don't we?

Committee.—We are professed tasters. Yes.

Brigadier.—For experiment, then, I have put together,
in one number, four tales that delighted me—
in more than one enchanted perusal. You shall select
the next. It will go, my dear boy!—people will give
their couple of shillings, if it were only for the rescue
we make, for them, of things they remember and have
lost sight of. There are g—l—o—rious things hit off,
here and there, at a heat, by periodical writers—one
hit in a thousand failures, it is true, but still enough
of them for a brilliant collection—and these we want
to gather into our beautiful library, and embalm
from perishing. See here! “Judith, or the Opera
Box, by Eugene Scribe”—(great, my boy, great!)—
“The Beggar-Girl of the Pont des Arts,” by a
German man, Hauff (ah! what a rich bit to read over
and over!)—“The Picnic Party,” by Horace Smith
(you know all about that?)—and “The Wife,” by
Irving—a worthy companion for them; and now, what
shall we call the series?

Committee.—Hm—m—m. How do you like “fannoms
and fopperies?”

Brigadier.—Bah!

Committee.—“Diapasms?”

Brigadier.—Poh!

Committee.—The “pomander-chain?”

Brigadier.—My dear boy, let it be English and
honest! You distress me with these affectations!
What have cataplasms and pomatum-chains to do
with a course of light reading? Don't waste time!

Committee.—A diapasm, my charming brigadier,
was a bunch of aromatic herbs made into a ball with
sweet water, and, in Ben Johnson's time, worn in a
lady's pocket. Gallants wore these scented balls strung
in a necklace under the shirt, and so worn, it was
called a pomander-chain. Pardon me, but these
would be good names, for want of better!

Brigadier.—Mr. King would be down upon us, and
the definition would never get through his hair! No,
my dear boy! We must be ostriches, and feel the
ground while we fly. Keep out of the clouds till
you're “sent for!” I like

and so does my regiment—I mean the public. Imagine
a good name, now, that would suit a plain man!

Committee.—Faith, it takes imagination to come at
that, sure enough! Hark! I have it!

Brigadier.—Come to my arms! What is it? Speak
quick, or it'll die in delivery!

Committee.—Did you ever hear of a river in Asia
called Pactolus?

Brigadier.—To be sure. An ass dipped his head
into it to be able to stop making money.

Committee.—That's the fable. And ever since there
have been gold sands in the river—“or so they say.”

Brigadier.—And that you think is like fugitive
literature?

Committee.—I do. I was there ten years ago, and
the gold sands were as scarce as good things in the
magazines.

Brigadier.—You'll swear to that?

Committee.—With a reservation, I will. I went to
the Pactolus one moonlight night, and filled my pockets
with sand to look at in the morning. I was travelling
with a caravan, and we were off before day, but
there was no gold in my pocket, come daylight—sifted
out, most likely!

Brigadier.—Shouldn't be surprised! “Sands of
Gold,” then, you think would be a good name.

Committee.—Sands of Gold, sifted from the flood
of fugitive literature.

Brigadier.—Good! passable good! Let the committee
rise.

You see how it is done, dear reader, and you will the
better comprehend, from this specimen, how we came
upon another—a name for a series of sacred poetry, of
which we are about to issue the first number. We
have called this series “The Sacred Rosary”—a
musical word that, in old English, meant a plantation
of roses, but which was afterward used to define the
verses of a church-psalter, strung together with heads
for an aid to memory. In either signification, it
figures forth what we enrol beneath it—for a more
beautiful collection of hallowed verse was never collected
than this we have to offer. We have always
especially loved poetry on sacred themes, and have
garnered up specimens of it, and let us assure the
reader that in this field of poetry there is a rich harvest
ungathered. Let him look at this first number
for a specimen of the mind and taste scattered abroad
in these stray leaves of poetry.

It will cut up for a fact, when you have done using
it as a pun, that “the first sign of spring in the city is
the prevalence of spring-carts.” (I borrow this of
the author, and lend him, in return, an analogy of my
own discovering—between sidewalks and green pastures—the
simultaneous outbreak of dandy-lions with
the first warm weather.) Oh, the moving! But it
should be remembered by those who groan over the
universal exposure of household gods and shabby furniture
on May-day, that when it ceases, our now mobile
republic will harden into a monarchy. The
“moss” of aristocracy is not “gathered” by the “rolling
stone.” People must live long in one place to
establish superiority for themselves or to allow it in
others. Mrs. Splitfig, the grocer's wife, is but just
beginning to submit patiently to the airs of Mrs. Ingulphus,
the banker's wife, when May-day comes
round, and away she goes with her tin and crockery
on a spring-cart, to start fair again with some other
pretender, in some other neighborhood. “Old families”
are of little use without old neighbors to keep
the record. The subduing of neighborhoods is (at
present) the battle of pretension with a hydra—one
set of heads sliced off, a new set is ready to come on.
So, long live our acquaintance with the shabby sides
of easy-chairs, and the humilities of bedding and
crockery. Some fifty May-days hence, we shall be
ready to stop shaking the sugar-bowl, satisfied that the
big lumps are all at the top.

The most courted value in New York at the present
time is unquestionably the “nimble sixpence.”
The new omnibuses that have been put upon the different
lines within a week or two, are of a costliness
and splendor that would have done for a sovereign's

carriage in the golden age. Claret bodies, silver-plated
hubs, and yellow wheels, cut-velvet linings and
cushions, and all to tempt the once-unconsidered SIXPENCE
to get up and ride! (Query—as to the superiority
of the “mirror held up to nature,” over the
New Mirror held up to sixpence?)

The racing of omnibuses seems to be agreeable to
inside passengers, since it might always be prevented
by pulling the checkstring—but to those who have
the temerity or the dangerous necessity to cross
Broadway, it is become a frightful evil. King Sixpence
could regulate it very easily, if he had his wits
about him. As was said before, the checkstring is
always obeyed. Terrified ladies, who chance to have
no fancy for riding races in Broadway, should be
reminded of this leather preservative.

Those who have the bold wish to tamper with their
standard of human nature can now be gratified, as
there are giants at one museum and a dwarf at the
other. Mr. and Mrs. Anak, at the American museum,
are certainly two very tall people—more tall than
comely. The flat-chested and gaunt lady looks as if
she had been lengthened with a rolling-pin—her length
entirely at the expense of her intermediate belongings.
Not so the husband, who is a thick-lipped, big-eyed,
double-fisted, knoll-backed, and thick-tongued overgrowth.
For one, I do not like to have my notions
of human stature unsettled, and I abhor giants. Six
feet stature is undervalued by familiarity with seven—
as diamonds would be ruined by the discovery of a
few as large as potatoes. I am happy to console the
eclipsed six-footers and under, by the information that
this large vessel of human nature does not seem
intended to hold more soul. He looks like as “regular
a spoon” as could be wished by those who are compelled
to look up to him—his wife, apparently, of the
same utensil capacity.

The dwarf at Peale's museum, Rado Scauf (that he
should ever have been thought worth baptizing!) is a
sweet-faced minion, with feet in boots looking like
two cockroaches with heels to them. A two-fingered
lady's glove would make him an ample pair of trousers,
and his walking-stick is a sizeable toothpick. He
has fine eyes, and would look like a nice lad, through
a magnifying-glass. If such bijous were plenty,
ladies would carry them in their pockets—portable
garter-claspers and glove-buttoners. Fancy the luxury!
It were worth a Yankee's while to send a venture
to Lilliput, to import them.

The Cloister.—Four o'clock and the Pomeridian
of an April day. The brigadier's audiences are suspended
to make room for a session of the committee,
and the door is closed—printers, poets, engravers,
stitchers and folders (these female), advertisers, carriers,
agents, stereotypers, ruthlessly excluded. Truly,
as Shakspere says, “every man hath business and desire”
(for the brigadier's society), “such as it is.”
Long last his “suaviter in modo,” his “fortiter in re!”

Brigadier.—To business, my boy! What lies in
that fourth pucker of your eyelid? Smile and let it
drop away easy!

Committee.—Thirteen letters by to-day's mail, containing
propositions to publish immortal works by
living and mortal American authors, most of them
never before heard of—postage nine and sixpence, of
which please make a memorandum in my favor.

Brigadier.—Fifty-nine cents each to the cause of
unbaptized literature! Are we not involuntary martyrs,
my boy! Why the mischief don't you last-page the
fact that we publish exclusively for the trans-Atlantics
and the trans-Styxians!—never for those who can
cross the water to “settle!”

Committee.—It shall be done, but there is one applicant
who deserves a hearing. One of the most
gifted women now living has employed her leisure in
compiling a book to be used as a round game played
with forfeits, or as a parlor fortune-teller. The book
is to be called “Oracles from the Poets.” Questions
are proposed, and by the choice of a number the
inquirer is referred to an answer, in a passage selected
from the poets. The selections are made with great
taste, so as not only to convey apposite answers, but
to make the reader familiar with the most beautiful
passages of poetry. What say to that?

Brigadier.—Worth lots of money to Riker or Appleton,
my boy, but we are in the rapid line, and that
sort of work takes time. Besides (and here the
Brigadier looked modestly at his nails), we couldn't
bring our minds to make money out of the sex, my
boy! Fancy a lovely woman calling on us to fork out,
as her publisher! Odious word, “publisher!” It has
been too long a synonym for “pirate,” and “Philistine.”
A few of us immortal bards have washed and donned
the gaberdine of late, but we must let it air, my boy,
we must let it air, before wearing it abroad—at least
into a lady's presence! Think of the maid's asking
you to “step into the back room,” if you called on a
lady and sent up your name as her “publisher!”

Committee.—Ah! my illustrious friend and song-builder,
dignity is a Minerva that needs no nurse. It
jumps out of your head and walks alone. I would not
only publish, but peddle from two tin boxes, if my
wants would not bear diminishing, and if only this
would supply them! We're earthy ants, not chartered
butterflies!

Brigadier.—Ha! ha! my boy! my dear boy!

Who else wants to gild a gold leaf in the Mirror
Library?

Committee.—Seven and two are nine—seven poetesses
and two he bardlings—pleading for print! We are

—will you write the declinatures, dear brigadier?

Brigadier.—Make a regret-circular, my boy! Say
that we are are a partnership of posterity. They must
die, to qualify. The “Home Library,” and the “Parlor
Library,” and the “Drawing-Room Library,” and
the “Knickerbocker Library,” and many more—(for
whose names, see puffs and advertisements)—these
publish for the equivocal immortals now living. We
publish only for the immortal dead, or for the buried
alive, disinterred with our own pick and shovel. Write
that out, and I'll have it lithographed to save time.
What next?

Committee.—We want a new head.

Brigadier.—Speak for yourself, my boy!

Committee.—A new caption, then (if you will be
critical) in the Mirror. Where can I praise things,
now? There's Headley's new book on Italy, worth
the best laurel-sprig of my picking. There's “Amelia,”
of the Lousiville Journal, who has written some
poetry about hearing a sermon, that traverses your
back-bone like electricity, and where to praise that!
George Flagg has painted a delicious sketch of my
Glenmary-born Imogen, and I will praise him! I want
a place to praise—

Brigadier.—Hire a pew!

Committee.—Will you give me a column?

Brigadier.—To your memory, I will.

Committee.—Well, my memory wants a column, to
record the good things I should not forget to praise.

Brigadier.—Take it—take it—but for Heaven's
sake be pert and pithy, crisp and critical! Nothing

so dull as praise to everybody but the praisee. Anything
more?

Committee.—Yes—

as I to inform you of the approaching delivery, from
the press, of “Pencillings by the Way.” My travels
have seemed interminable.

Brigadier.—Well, as I assisted at their birth once
before, I can certify now to their being “born again.”
Is that what you want?

Committee.—No—for, half the book was never a
book before, not having been published except in the
old Mirror. I want you to make it trip

that I may hurry into “calf” all I have written up to
last year, and start fresh from my meridian with
“Dashes at Life,” and gossips in the cloister. For,
as says old Wotton in the “Reliquiæ,” “Though I
am a cloistered man in the condition of my present
life, yet, having spent so much of mine age among
noise abroad, there still doth hang upon me, I know
not how, a certain concupiscence of novelty.”

Brigadier.—Verbum sap. sat. Shall the committee
rise—by getting down off the table?

Committee.—Yes!—one minute! Have you read
the proof-sheets of that glorious—GLORIOUS—say
“glorious!”—

Brigadier.—Glorious.

Committee.—Hood's “Midsummer Fairies”—the
most delicious “Rococo” conceivable? Yes? Be off!

From the window in which I spin my cobweb, I
look directly on the most frequented portion in Broadway—the
sidewalk in front of St. Paul's. You walk
over it every day. Familiarity with most things alters
their aspect, however. Let me, after a long acquaintance
with this bit of sidewalk, sketch how it looks to
me at the various hours of the day. I may jot down,
also, one or two trifles I have observed while looking
into the street in the intervals of writing.

Eight in the morning.—The sidewalk is comparatively
deserted. The early clerks have gone by, and
the bookkeepers and younger partners not being abroad,
the current sets no particular way. A vigorous female
exerciser or two may be seen returning from a smart
walk to the Battery, and the orange-women are getting
their tables ready at the corners. There is to be a
funeral in the course of the day in St. Paul's churchyard,
and one or two boys are on the coping of the
iron fence, watching the grave-digger. Seamstresses
and schoolmistresses, with veils down, in impenetrable
incognito, hurry by with a step which says unmistakeably,
“don't look at me in this dress!” The return
omnibuses come from Wall street empty, on a
walk.

Nine and after.—A rapid throng of well-dressed
men, all walking smartly, and all bound Mammonward.
Glanced at vaguely, the sidewalk seems like a
floor with a swarm of black beetles running races
across it. The single pedestrians who are struggling
up stream, keep close to the curbstone or get rudely
jostled. The omnibuses all stop opposite St. Paul's
at this hour, letting out passengers, who invariably
start on a trot down Ann street or Fulton. The
museum people are on the top of the building drawing
their flags across Broadway and Ann by pulleys fastened
to trees and chimneys. Burgess and Stringer hanging
out their literary placards with a listless delibera
tion, as if nobody was abroad yet who had leisure to
read them. The “brigadier” dismounting from an
up-town 'bus with a roll of manuscripts sticking from
his pocket, and hands and handkerchiefs waved to him
from the omnibus windows.

Twelve and after.—Discount-seekers crowding into
the Chemical Bank with hats over their eyes. Flower-merchants
setting their pots of roses and geraniums
along the iron fence. The blind beggar arrived, and
set with his back against the church gate by an old
woman. And now the streaks, drawn across my side
vision by the passers under, glide at a more leisurely
pace, and are of gayer hues. The street full of sunshine.
Omnibuses going slowly, both ways. Female
exclusives gliding to and fro in studiously plain dresses
and with very occupied air—(never in Broadway without
“the carriage” of course, except to shop). Strangers
sprinkled in couples, exhausting their strength
and spirits by promenading before the show hour.
The grave dug in St. Paul's, and the grave-digger
gone home to dinner. Woman run over at the Fulton
crossing. Boys out of school. Tombs' bell ringing
fire in the third district.

One and after.—The ornamentals are abroad. A
crowd on St. Paul's sidewalk watching the accomplished
canary-bird whose cage hangs on the fence.
He draws his seed and water up an inclined plane in
a rail-car, and does his complicated feeding to the
great approbation of his audience. The price is high
—his value being in proportion (aristocracy-wise) to
his wants! It is the smoothest and broadest sidewalk
in Broadway—the frontage of St. Paul's—and the
ladies and dandies walk most at their ease just here,
loitering a little, perhaps, to glance at the flowers for
sale. My window, commanding this paré, is a particularly
good place, therefore, to study street habits,
and I have noted a trifle or so, that, if not new, may
be newly put down. I observe that a very well-dressed
woman is noticed by none so much as by the women
themselves. This is the week for the first spring
dresses, and, to-day, there is a specimen or two of
Miss Lawson's April avatar, taking its first sun on the
promenade. A lady passed, just now, with a charming
straw hat and primrose shawl—not a very pretty
woman, but, dress and all, a fresh and sweet object to
look at—like a new-blown cowslip, that stops you in
your walk though it is not a violet. Not a male eye
observed her, from curb-stone in Vesey to curb-stone
in Fulton, but every woman turned to look after her!
Query, is this the notice of envy or admiration, and,
if the former, is it desirable or worth the pains and
money of toilet? Query, again—the men's notice
being admiration (not envy) what will attract it, and
is that (whatever it is) worth while? I query what I
should, myself, like to know.

Half past three.—The sidewalk is in shade. The
orange-man sits on a lemon-box, with his legs and
arms all crossed together in his lap, listening to the
band who have just commenced playing in the museum
balcony. The principal listeners, who have
stopped for nothing but to listen, are three negro-boys
(one sitting on the Croton hydrant, and the other two
leaning on his back), and to them this gratuitous music
seems a charming dispensation. (Tune, “Ole
Dan Tucker.”) The omnibus-horses prick up their
ears in going under the trumpets, but evidently feel
that to show fright would be a luxury beyond their
means. Saddle-horse, tied at the bank, breaks bridle
and runs away. Three is universal dinner-time for
bosses—(what other word expresses the head men of
all trades and professions?)—and probably not a single
portly man will pass under my window in this
hour.

Four to five.—Sidewalk more crowded. Hotel
boarders lounging along with toothpicks. Stout men
going down toward Wall street with coats unbuttoned.

Hearse stopped at St. Paul's, and the museum band
playing “Take your time, Miss Lucy,” while the
mourners are getting out. A gentleman, separated
from two ladies by the passing of the coffin across the
sidewalk, rejoins them, apparently with some funny
remark. Bell tolls. No one in the crowd is interested
to inquire the age or sex of the person breaking
the current of Broadway to pass to the grave. Hearse
drives off on a trot.

Five and after.—Broadway one gay procession.
Few ladies accompanied by gentlemen—fewer than
in the promenades of any other country. Men in
couples and women in couples. Dandies strolling
and stealing an occasional look at their loose demisaison
pantaloons, and gaiter-shoes, newly sported with
the sudden advent of warm weather. No private carriage
passing except those bound to the ferries for a
drive into the country. The crowd is unlike the
morning crowd. There is as much or more beauty,
but the fashionable ladies are not out. You would
be puzzled to discover who these lovely women are.
Their toilets are unexceptionable, their style is a very
near approach to comme il faut. They look perfectly
satisfied with their position and with themselves, and
they do (what fashionable women do not)—meet the
eye of the promenader with a coquettish confidence he
will misinterpret—if he be green or a puppy. Among
these ladies are accidents of feature, form, and manner—charms
of which the possessor is unconscious—
that, if transplanted into a high-bred sphere of society
abroad, would be bowed to as the stamp of lovely aristocracy.
Possibly—probably, indeed—the very woman
who is a marked instance of this is not called pretty
by her friends. She is only spoken to by those whose
taste is common-place and unrefined. She walks
Broadway, and has a vague suspicion that the men of
fashion look at her more admiringly than could be
accounted for by any credit she has for beauty at
home. Yet she is not likely to be enlightened as to
the secret of it. When tired of her promenade, she
disappears by some side street leading away from the
great thoroughfares, and there is no clue to her unless
by inquiries that would be properly resented as
impertinence. I see at least twenty pass daily under
my window who would be ornaments of any society,
yet who, I know (by the men I see occasionally with
them), are unacknowledgable by the aristocrats up
town. What a field for a Columbus! How charming
to go on a voyage of discovery and search for these unprized
pearls among the unconscious pebbles! How
delightful to see these rare plants without hedges
about them—exquisite women without fashionable
affectations, fashionable hinderances, penalties, exactions,
pretensions, and all the wearying nonsenses
that embarrass and stupefy the society of most of our
female pretenders to exclusiveness!

Half-past six and after.—The flower-seller loading
up his pots into a fragrant wagon-load. Twilight's
rosy mist falling into the street. Gas-lamps alight
here and there. The museum band increased by two
instruments, to play more noisily for the night-custom.
The magic wheel lit up, and ground rather
capriciously by the tired boy inside. The gaudy
transparencies one by one illuminated. Great difference
now in the paces at which people walk. Business-men
bound home, apprentices and shop-boys carrying
parcels, ladies belated—are among the hurrying
ones. Gentlemen strolling for amusement take it
very leisurely, and with a careless gait that is more
graceful and becoming than their mien of circumspect
daylight. And now thicken the flaunting dresses of
the unfortunate outlaws of charity and pity. Some
among them (not many) have a remainder of ladylikeness
in their gait, as if, but for the need there is to
attract attention, they could seem modest—but the
most of them are promoted to fine dress from sculle
ries and low life, and show their shameless vulgarity
through silk and feathers. They are not at all to be
pitied. The gentleman cit passes them by like the rails
in St. Paul's fence—wholly unnoticed. If he is vicious,
it is not those in the street who could attract him.
The “loafers” return their bold looks, and the boys
pull their dresses as they go along, and now and then
a greenish youth, well-dressed, shows signs of being
attracted. Sailors, rowdies, country-people, and
strangers who have dined freely, are those whose steps
are arrested by them. It is dark now. The omnibuses,
that were heavily-laden through the twilight,
now go more noisily because lighter. Carriages make
their way toward the Park theatre. My window shows
but the two lines of lamps and the glittering shops,
and all else vaguely.

I have repeatedly taken five minutes, at a time, to
pick out a well-dressed man, and see if he would walk
from Fulton street to Vesey without getting a look at
his boots. You might safely bet against it. If he is
an idle man, and out only for a walk, two to one he
would glance downward to his feet three or four times
in that distance. Men betray their subterfuges of
toilet—women never. Once in the street, women
are armed at all points against undesirable observation—men
have an ostrich's obtusity, being wholly
unconscious even of that battery of critics, a passing
omnibus! How many substitutes and secrets of dress
a woman carries about her, the angels know!—but
she looks defiance to suspicion on that subject. Sit
in my window, on the contrary, and you can pick out
every false shirt-bosom that passes, and every pair of
false wristbands, and the dandy's economical half-boots,
gaiter-cut trousers notwithstanding.

Indeed, while it is always difficult, sometimes impossible,
to distinguish female genuine from the imitation,
nothing is easier than to know at sight the
“glossed (male) worsted from the patrician sarsnet.”
The “fashion” of women, above a certain guide, can
seldom be guessed at in the street street except by the
men who are with them.

You should sit in a window like mine, to know how
few men walk with even passable grace. Nothing
so corrupts the gait as business—(a fact that would be
offensive to mention in a purely business country, if it
were not that the “unmannerly haste” of parcel-bearing
and money-seeking, may be laid aside with low-heeled
boots and sample cards.) The bent-kneed celerity,
learned in dodging clerks and jumping over
boxes in Cedar and Pearl, betrays its trick in the
gait, as the face shows the pucker of calculation and
the suavity of sale. I observe that the man used
to hurry, relies principally on his heel, and keeps his
foot at right angles. The ornamental man drops his
toe slightly downward in taking a step, and uses, for
elasticity, the spring of his instep. Nature has provided
muscles of grace which are only incorporated
into the gait by habitually walking with leisure. All
women walk with comparative grace who are not
cramped with tight shoes, but there are many degrees
of gracefulness in women, and oh, what a charm is
the highest degree of it! How pleasurable even to
see from my window a woman walking like a queen!

The magnetic threads of Saratoga begin to pull upon
the calculating bumps of foreseeing papas, and many a
hair whitens in these spring months that would have taken
another lease of youth but for the trip to Saratoga.
Ah, the contrivance! Ah, the calculation! Ah, the saving,
upon things undreamed of!—for extravagance is
like the lengthening of the Indian's blanket—the piece

cut from one end that is sewed on to the other! But,
out on monotony, and hey for Saratoga! If there be
an approach to a gayety-paradise on earth—if there be
a place where the mortifications of neighborhood are
forgotten, and “people's natural advantages” are prominent
and undisputed—if there be, this side Heaven,
a place where it is worth while to dress, worth while
to be pretty, worth while to walk, talk, and particularly
and generally outdo
it is sandy Saratoga—Marvin's United States Hotel!
Take your papa there, “for his health,” my dear
belle! “And tell him, too,” that it was the well-expressed
opinion of the philosopher Bacon, that
“money, like manure, is offensive if not spread.”
Tell your mamma to tell him how pale he is when he
wakes in the morning! Tell the doctor to prescribe
Congress water without the taste of the cork! Tell
him, if he does not, and you are not let go with a
chaperon, you will do something you shudder to
think of—bolt, slope, elope, with the first base
to which you are the heiress! For it is credibly and
currently reported “in high circles,” that the coming
season at Saratoga is to be of a crowded uncomfortableness
of splendor that was reserved for the making
fashionable, by Mr. Van Buren, of the “United
States” and its dependant colonies.

Among the alleviations to passing a summer in
town (misericordia pro nobis!) is the completion of
Mr. Stevens's Gothic cottage at the lip of the Elysian
Hoboken, where are to be had many good things, of
course, but where (I venture to suggest) it would be a
bliss incffable to be able to get a good breakfast! What
a pleasure to cross the ferry, and, after a morning
ramble in that delicious park, to sit down in the fresh
air volant through the galleries of that sweet cottage,
and eat (if nothing more) a nice roll with a good cup
of French coffee! A restaurateur there would make
a fortune, I do think. Bring it about, Mr. “Person
Concerned,” and you shall lack neither our company
nor a zealous trumpeter.

THE CLOISTER.

Committee—(solus).—Oh, most beset of brigadiers!
Most civil of military men! (for half a firm, the most
yielding partner of my acquaintance!) when, oh responsible
general, will you get through with your particular
callers and come to confab? True, I have
dined, and can wait! True, there are joint letters to
answer! True, I can listen, and look out into the
back yard! Hark! Syphax, my black boy, loquitur.

Syphax—(to the general).—Shall I cut out them
favorable notices from the exchanges, sir?

Brigadier.—Those favorable notices, Syphax!

Heavens! what an unfeeling man! For the love
of pity, corrupt not the innocent grammar of the lad,
my dear brigadier! Out of seven black boys sent me
for trial by the keeper of an intelligence-office, six, to
my disgust, spoke with the painful accuracy of Doctor
Pangloss. The last, my inestimable Syphax,
whom that finished brigadier would fain bring to his
own level of heartless good grammar—was ignorant
(virtuous youth!) even of the sexes of pronouns! He
came to me innocent; and, I need not say to any
writer—to any slave of the rule-tied pen—to any man
cabined, cribbed, confined, as are public scribblers
to case and number, gender and conjugation, participle
present, and participle past—I need not say, to such
a victim, what an oasis in the desert of perfection was
the green spot of a black boy's cacology! Oh, to
the attenuated ear of the grammar-ridden!—to the
tense mood of unerring mood and tense—what a luxury
is an erring pronoun—what a blessed relief from
monotony is a too-yielding verb, seduced, from its singular
antecedent, by a contiguity of plural! Out on
perfectionists! Out on you, you flaw-less brigadier!
Correct your own people, however! Inveigle not my
Syphax into rhetoric! Ravish not from my use the
one variation, long-sought and chance-found, from the
maddening monotone of good grammar!

And this brings to my mind (if I get time to jot it
down before the brigadier comes to cloister) a long-settled
conviction of my own, that the corrections in
American manners brought about by the criticisms of
Trollope and others, have been among the worst influences
ever exercised upon the country. Gracious
heaven! are we to have our national features rasped
off by every manner-tinker who chooses to take up a
file! See how it affects the English to laugh at their
bloat of belly and conceit, their cockney ignorance
and their besotted servility to rank. Do they brag
less, and drink less beer? Do they modify their Bowbell
dialect one hair, or whip off their hats with less
magical celerity when spoken to by a lord? Not a
bit! They will be English till they are smothered
with Russians—English ghosts (those who die before
England is conquered by Russia), with English manners,
at doomsday. They are not so soft as to be
moulded into American pottery, or German pottery,
or French pottery, because an American, or a German,
or a Frenchman, does not find them like his own
country's more common utensils! Where do national
features exist? Not among well-bred people! Not
where peas are eaten with a fork and soup-plates left
untilted by the hungry! All well-bred people are
monotonously alike—whatever their nation and whatever
the government they have lived under. Differences
of manners are found below this level, and the
mistake—the lamentable mistake—lies in submitting
to correct this low level by the standard of coxcombs!
What a picture would be without shade—what music
would be without discords—what life would be without
something to smile at—what anything would be
without contrast—that are we becoming by our sensitiveness
to criticism. Long live our (Bull-judice)
“abominations.” Long live some who spit and whittle,
some who eat eggs out of wine-glasses and sit on
four chairs, some who wear long naps to their hats,
some who eat peas with a knife, some who pour out
their tea into saucers, and some who are civil to unprotected
ladies in stage-coaches! Preserve something
that is not English, oh, my countrymen!

[Enter the brigadier.]

Brigadier.—Forgive me, my dear boy—what is that
I see written on your paper about Russia?

So says old Tuberville, the traveller—and now to business.
Jot!

Committee.—What?

Brigadier.—Jot—that we are glad to offer to the
patrons of the “Mirror Library” a book they will
thank us for, at every line—“The Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies,” and other admirable poems, pregnant
with originality and richness, by Thomas Hood.
His poetry is the very attar, the aroma, the subtlest
extract of sweet imagination. “Eugene Aram” is
one of those included in this volume.

Committee.—What else are you glad of?

Brigadier.—Glad to be sorry that Parke Godwin's
fine analytical mind and bold foundry of cast-iron
English are not freighted with a more popular subject
than Fourierism—worthy though the theme be
of the regard of angels whose approbation don't pay.
Politics should be at a lift to deserve the best energies
of such a writer—but they are not, and so he
turns to philosophy.

Committee.—But he should play Quintus Curtius,
and write up politics to his level, man! The need is
more immediate than the need of Fourierism.

Brigadier.—My dear boy, give away nothing but
what is saleable. Gifts, that would not otherwise have
been money in your purse, are not appreciated—particularly
advice. We love Godwin—let us love his
waste of ammunition, if it please him to waste it.

Committee.—

if his brains be not coinable to gold. I would make
a merchant of genius! The world has need of brains
like Godwin's, and need makes the supply into commodity,
and commodity is priceable. That's the logic
by which even my poor modicum is made to thrive.
Apropos—what do you think of these lines on “bells,”
by Duganne? A poet, I should say:—

Brigadier.—Kernel-ish and quaint. But, my dear
boy,

is beginning to blur the distinctness of the cheeks on
that apron drying upon the line in the back yard.
Shall we go to tea?

The opening of the exhibition at the National Academy
is like taking a mask from one of the city's most
agreeable features. And it is only those who live in
the city habitually, and who live as fast as the city does,
who are qualified to enjoy it with the best appreciation.
Did you ever notice, dear reader, how behind
the tide you feel, on arriving in town, even after an
absence of a week—how whirling and giddy your sensations
are—how many exciting things there seem for
you to do—how “knowing” and “ahead-of-you” seem
all the takers-coolly whom you meet—how incapable
you are of any of the tranquil pleasures of the metropolis,
and with what impatient disgust you pass any
exhibition which would subtract you, mind and body,
from the crowd. It is not for strangers, then, that the
exhibition is the highest pleasure. It is for those who
have laid behind them the bulk of the city excitements
in a used-up heap—to whom balls are nuisances,
theatres satiety, concerts a bore, Broadway stale,
giants, dwarfs, and six-legged cows, “familiar as your
hand.” It is only such who have the cool eye to look
critically and enjoyingly at pictures. It is for such
that Durand has laid into his landscape the touch that
was preceded by despair—for such that Ingham elaborates,
and Page strains invention, and Sully woos the
coy shade of expression. And, truth to say, it is not
one of the least of the gratuitous riches of existence,
that while we are sifting away the other minutes of
the year in commonplace business or pleasure, forgetful
of art and artists, these gifted minds are at work,
producing beautiful pictures to pamper our eyes with
in spring! If you never chanced to think of that
before, dear reader, you are richer than you thought!
Please enclose us the surplus in bankable funds!
Ehem!

There are more portraits in the exhibition than will
please the dilettanti—but hang the displeased! We
would submit to a thousand indifferent portraits, for the
accident of possessing a likeness of one friend unexpectedly
lost. For Heaven's sake, let everybody be
painted, that, if perchance there is a loved face
marked, unsuspected by us, for heaven, we may have
its semblance safe before it is beyond recall! How
bitter the regret, the self-reproach, when the beautiful
joy of a household has been suddenly struck into the
grave, that we might have had a bright image of her
on canvass—that we might have removed, by holding
converse with her perpetuated smile, the dreadful
image of decay that in sad moments crowds too closely
upon us! For the sake of love and friendship, let
that branch of the art, now in danger of being disparaged
by short-sighted criticism—let it be ennobled, for
the sacred offices it performs! Is an art degrading to
its follower which does so much—which prolongs the
presence of the dead, which embellishes family ties,
which brightens the memory of the absent, which
quickens friendship, and shows the loved, as they were
before ravage by sadness or sickness? There should
rather be a priesthood of the affections, and portrait-painters
its brotherhood—holy for their ministering
pencils.

We have a customer in Andover, to whose attention
particularly we commend the truly delicious poetry of
“The Sacred Rosary,” as some atonement for having
inveigled him into the purchase of the “Songs of the
Bard of Poor Jack.” That mis-spent shilling troubled
our friend, and he wrote us a letter and paid eighteen
pence postage to complain of it!—but non omnia possum-us
omnes (we can't play 'possum with all our subscribers),
and we humbly beg our kind friend (who
lives where we learned our Latin) to refresh his piety
with the “Rosary,” and forgive the Dibdin. The
apology over, however, we must make bold to say that
of all the publications of the “Mirror Library,” this
collection of Dibdin's songs has sold the best. It has
been indeed what our Andover friend scornfully calls
“a catch-penny affair,” and we wish there were (what
there never will be) another catch-penny like it. No—
by Castaly! such a book will never again be written!
If ever there was honest, hearty, natural, manly feeling
spliced to rhyme, it is in these magnificent songs.
England's naval glory—her esprit-de-man-o'-war—her
empire of the sea—lies spell-bound in that glorious
song-book! She owes more to Dibdin than to Chatham
or Burke—as much as to Howard or Wilberforce!
Ah, dear Anonym of Andover, you have
never hung your taste out to salt over the gunwale!
You don't know poor Jack. Find out when your
lease of life is likely to run out—go first to sea—read
Dibdin understandingly, e poi mori!”

The proprietor of the “Connecticut pie depot”
(corner of Beekman and Nassau), writes us that he
will be happy to have us “call and taste his pies when
we are sharp-set,” and that he hails from Boston and
takes a pride in us. So we do in him, though, for a

puff, our pen against his rolling-pin for a thousand
pound! He evidently thinks us “the cheese,” for he
says he wishes to be noticed in our “dairy of town
trifles.” Well, sir, we don't “fill our belly with the
east wind,” nor eat pies, since we left Boston, but we
rejoice in your pie-ous enterprise, and agree, with you,
to consider ourselves mutually the flour of the city we
come from. Apropos—we can do our friend a service
which we hope he will reciprocate by opening a subscription-book
in his pie-magazine, and procuring us
five hundred subscribers (payments invariably in advance).
A young lady has written to us, imploring
the Mirror's aid in reforming the prog at fashionable
boarding-schools. There are symptoms of a “strike”
for something better to eat in these coops of chicken-angels,
and the establishment of a “Connecticut pie
depot” seems (seems, madam, nay, it is!) beautifully
providential! We can not trace our anonymous note
to any particular school, but we hereby recommend
to the young ladies in every “establishment,” “nunnery,”
and “seminary,” to “hang their aprons on the
outer wall,” and hoist in our friend's pastry, on trial.
The French pockets will be filled the first day gratis,
we undertake to promise. The second day and after,
of course, the bill will be presented to tante or the
music-master.

There are poems which the world “does not willingly
let die,” but which this same go-to-bed world,
tired of watching, covers quietly up with the ashes of
neglect, and leaves to grow as black as the poker and
tongs of criticism that stand unused beside them.
Stop the first twenty men (gentlemen, even) whom you
see in the street, and probably not one can tell you
even the argument of Goldsmith's great poem! And
the “pourquoy Sir Knight” is simply that “The
English Poets,” in six formidable volumes, are too
much for cursory readers to encounter! The poems
and passages they would “thumb,” if they could light
readily on them, are buried up in loads of uninteresting
miscellany. They want the often-quoted, undeniable,
pure fire, raked out of this heap of embers.
Our last number of the Mirror Library begins a supply
of this want, under the title of “Live Coals,
raked from the Embers of English Poetry.”

The following advertisement is cut from “The
Sun:”—

“Notice—To the gentleman that pushed the man
over the curbstone in Broadway, at the corner of Lispenard
street, with his dinner-kettle in his hand, from
this time forth never to lay his hand on David Brown
again.”

Now, what other country than America would do
for David Brown? God bless the land where a man
can pour his sorrows into the sympathizing bosom of
a newspaper! Query—does not this seventy-five cent
vent supersede altogether the use of that dangerous
domestic utensil, a friend! Add to this the invention
of an unexpressive substitute for gunpowder, and the
world will be comparatively a safe place.

Point of fact—we delight in all manner of old things
made young again, particularly in all kinds of venerable
and solemn humbug “showing green.” If ever
there was a monster, grown out of sight of its natural
and original intention—a bloated, diseased, wen-covered,
abate-worthy nuisance of a monster, it is the
newspaper. The first newspaper ever published in
France was issued by a physician to amuse his patients.
“To this complexion” would we reduce it
once more. Fill them with trifles, or with important
news (the same thing as to amusement), and throw a
wet blanket, and keep it wet, over congressional twaddle,
polemical fubbery, tiresome essays, political cobwebberies—yes,
especially politics! People sometimes
cease to talk when there are no listeners, and it
might be hoped, with God's blessing and help (“Ave
Maria! ora pro nobis!”) that congress members would
cease to put us to shame as well as to bore us to extinction,
if there were no newspapers to fan their
indignant eloquence. It is a query worth sticking a
pin in—how many nuisances would die (beside congress)
if newspapers were restored to their original
use and purpose? Any symptom of this regeneration
inexpressibly refreshes us. Hence our delight at
the advertisement of David Brown. Who would not
rather know that a man had run against David Brown
at the corner of Lispenard street, with a dinner-kettle
in his hand (and had better not do it again), than to
read the next any ten speeches to be delivered on the
rowdy floor of congress! We have said enough to
give you a thinking-bulb, dear reader, and now to our
next—but

Apropos—we wish our friend Russell Jarvis, or any
analytically-minded and strong writer half as good,
would prepare us a speculative essay on the query
which is the natural inference of the late Washington
doings, viz.: how curious must be the process
of mind by which a gentleman (there are one or
two in congress) could be brought to consent to
stay there—hail from there—frank from there—have
his letters addressed there—in any way or shape take
upon himself a member's share of this lustrum's obloquy
and abomination? Not but what we think it
wholesome—we do! You can not cure festers without
bringing them to a head. The wonder is, how
gentlemen are willing to be parts of a congress that is
only the nation's pustule—the offensive head and vent
of all the purulent secretions of the body politic!
Thank God, they are coming to a head—to this head,
if need be (it is rather conspicuous, it is true—like
a pimple on a lady's nose, which might be better situated)—to
have the worst issue of our national shame
on the floor of Congress; but better so than pent
up—better so than an inward mortification precursory
of dissolution! For our own part (though we are no
politician, except when stung upon our fifteen millionth
of national feeling), we think we could do very
well without a congress. We believe the supreme
court capable of doing all the legislative grinding necessary
for the country, or, if that would not do, we
think a congress convened only for the first three
months of every administration, in which speaking
was prohibited, would answer all wise ends. We are
over-governed. The reign of grave outrages and
solemn atrocities is at its height, and Heaven overturn
it, and send us, next after, a dynasty of laws “left to
settle,” and trifles paramount. Amen.

We are not of the envious and discontented nature
of a mutton candle, blackest at the wick—that is to
say, we do not think every spot brighter than the one
we live in. We seek means to glorify New York—
since we live here. Pat to our bosom and business,
therefore, comes a letter “from a gentleman to his
sister,” apotheosistic (we will have our long word if we
like) of this same pleasant municipality. Our friend
and anonymous correspondent does not go quite
enough into detail, and we cut off his long peroration,
in which he compares himself very felicitously to “a
bottle of soda-water, struggling for vent.”—“Now
then,” he continues, “to uncork (off hat) and let my
exuberant contents be made manifest:—

“Once more in New York—dear, delightful New
York! the spot of all spots and the place of all places!
the whereabout which the poet dreamed of when he

spoke of `the first flower of the earth and first gem of
the sea;' and once more here, too, not to look upon
it for a moment, and then depart, but to stay, lo live,
to be, to exist, and to enjoy. You do not know the
love I bear New York; it is, beyond all others, the
place where existence is; where time passes, not like
a summer's dream, but as time should pass, in a succession
(constant) of employments and enjoyments.

“I love the city, as I love everything loveable, with
a full and abiding joyousness. There is nothing passing,
or in still life, but goes to make up the sum. The
very odor of the atmosphere, which might shock your
delicate, country-bred olfactories, is more to me than
all the fragrance of all the green fields that were ever
babbled of.

“The country is all very well, in its way. I love
that also—at a distance, or in moderate quantities.
Homeopathetically, as it were—as, for instance, the
Battery. I love to walk there, to inhale the sea-breeze,
and enjoy the sweet smell of the growing
grass and the budding trees; and to look over to Long
Island or New Jersey, and see the country blooming
(afar off) under the loving smiles of spring. Yes, the
country is, no doubt, very desirable—for a few days in
the summer—for a change, or to come back from with
a new relish for the real life that awaits one on his
return.

“I love to stand on the docks, of a still evening, and
hear the tide rush past. The very rime of the sea
drifts in music to my ear. The rushing of the free
and ever-changing waters, the glad dancing of its
waves, the glowing reflex of the stars in their bosom,
the rifting foam, and the swift gushing sound, like a
continuous echo, stir up the dormant poetry of one's
soul, and send him, with a glowing heart, back to his
lonely home, happier for the sweet communion.

“All the time, too, is thought-filled: there is no
standing still here. Business is part of life, perhaps
life itself, and it is constantly going on around and
with us. If I choose a walk, Broadway is full of
life—never-ending, never-tiring. So all over the city.
One can not stroll anywhere but he meets with something
new, something strange, something interesting;
some chapter opens, which has till then been to him
as a dead letter.

“Somebody, who wanted to express in strong language
that nature might be improved by art, has said
that `God made the country, man made the town.'
How true it is! And, beyond that, here are congregated
hundreds of thousands of `featherless bipeds'
(men and women), of whom, perhaps, you know not
a dozen, but every one of whom, in your walks, is to
you a study.

“Then, again, the very situation—the form, structure,
and appliances—of New York, are delightful
and fascinating beyond compare. Such a beautiful
promontory, swelling up from two magnificent rivers,
rising from either, gently, to the palace-lined thoroughfare
on its crown: and crossbarred with a thousand
avenues to both rivers—inlets for pure air, ever
fresh rising from the sea, blowing over and into every
habitation, and freighted with health, like the gales
of Araby the blest.

“Nature has been wonderfully prodigal of her bestowments
on this spot, and the hand of man has not
been niggardly in completing what the fair dame commenced,
by putting a worthy superstructure on her
noble foundation. I have often thought of the remark
made by some one, that the man who first stood on
Manhattan island, and looked around him with an eye
and a mind that could comprehend and appreciate its
wonderful beauties and advantages, must have `held
his very breath' in wonder and admiration.

“And then more of its present beauties to the
dwellers therein. Should one, in hot and dusty
weather, choose to change the scene, how joyous a
trip to Sandy Hook! Often have I stood on the
heights, and looked off on old Ocean, holding in my
gaze one of the most glowing scenes that this world
shows. The wide and boundless view—the noble
Hudson and the city above, the green beauties of
Long island before, and the heaven ocean below, spread
out in its grand sublimity; the sails of all nations
flashing on its breast and blending in its glory,

“Oh who, with such a prospect before him, feels
not his soul elevated and his thoughts sublimated!
Thoughts, indeed, too wild for utterance, are born,
not for others, but to sink deep in the heart and leave
him a wiser if not a better man.

“This, you will say is the country—ah, but it is the
country of New York, close by, and part of city life
itself. Then there is another country (yours is only
one) over the other shoulder, where the moderate
sum of sixpence will waft us to the delightful walks,
the green lawns, the shady groves, and cool zephyrs
of dear, charming Hoboken. Doubly dear to a New-Yorker.
Fresh smelling and fragrant in the spring,
cool and breezy in the hot days of summer; and, with
the rustling leaf of autumn, dear in its remembered
beauties, its fading foliage, and the ever-sounding surges
that beat with melancholy moan at the foot of its
beetling crags and sloping lawns. Ah, lovely Hoboken,

“Mr. Stevens, we owe you much; and we can afford
to owe; but we pay you a large annual interest
in gratitude and praise. `'Tis all we have, we can no
more.”'

We also cut off the irrelevant tail of our friend's
letter (tipped with a “G.”), and beg another from him
with a finer nib to his pen—going more into the individualities.
If you would like a subject suggested (exempli
gratia) give us the hopes, trials, temptations, and
aspirations of a Broadway shop-tender. They seem
fine youths, those silk-and-suavity venders. Who
knows what is their pay and prospects? How can
they afford such good manners and fine waistcoats?
What is the degree of friendly acquaintance bred between
them and the ladies in the course of a bargain?
Have they legs (below the counter)?—Do they marry?—Have
they combinations, and esprit de corps?—
Which are the honorablest goods to sell?—As to the
“beating down” of grass-cloth and stockings—is it
interesting, or more so than the cheapening of calico?
When do they eat? Do handsomer ones get higher
wages? May their “cousins” come to see them?
How do they look with hats on? What is the duration
of their chrysalis—the time of metamorphosis
from boy to “boss”—and what are their several stages
of mental discipline? The most saleable book in
the world would be the autobiography of a Broadway
clerk—(dry goods, retail). Let this “verbum” be
“sat” to a sapienti.

We have undertaken to make ourselves acquainted
with the island on which we live. We mean to give
our readers, bit by bit, the results of our observations
upon the customs, manners, geography, and morals
of the island of New York, as noted down in our rambles.
We do not take our walks in chapters, however,
and we shall, therefore, be equally miscellaneous
and disorderly in our arrangement of topics. It is a
curious island, and some of the inhabitants are curious
islanders. Those who only walk up the city's
backbone (Broadway) know very little of its bowels
and extremities. Little by little, we hope to make

out its truthful anatomy—veins, pulses, functions, and
arteries.

We should like to know, among other things, why
the broadest, most accessible, most convenient street
in New York, the noble avenue of West Broadway,
is entirely given up to negroes? The rage is to move
up town—but there are people who are not rajahs,
who are willing to pay high rents—people who don't
care where the fashionable people go to (while they
live), and who simply desire to reside in broad streets
for air and light, and above all, to be near, if possible,
to their business. Now the narrowest part of this be-streeted
island is of course the most wholesome, as the
air from the two rivers comes over fewer chimneys
and gutters. The broader the street the better, both
for health and show. The access to a street should
be good, and West Broadway, in its whole length, is
parallel to Broadway, and approachable by Chambers
street, Murray, Warren, and all the best short avenues
of the city. It has, besides, near by, the beautiful
“lungs” of St. John's park, the hospital grounds,
and College Green, and is crossed at its upper end by
the broad ventilator of Canal street. Where, on the
island, is there a street more calculated to be wholesome—dirty
as it now is from the character of its occupants?
It would require, it is true, an entire renovation,
before any one person, desirous of good neighborhood,
could live there—but that renovation (we
prophesy it) will be done. Some speculator will buy
lots in it, and call a meeting of proprietors to suggest
a general turn-out and improvement, or some one of
the Wall street Astor-hood will buy the street, from
lamp-post to lamp-post, and fill it with fashionable
dwelling-houses. The up-town tide will partly ebb,
the natural advantages of the Battery and Lower
Broadway will regain their ascendency, and the sandalled
foot of the island will again wear jewels on its
instep.

Pearl street (if Manhattan lie on his back) would be
the main artery of his left leg, and Franklin square,
which occupies a natural knoll, would be his kneepan.
This gives you some idea of its geography,
though, probably, dear reader, if you are not in the
dry-goods line, you have never visited it. It is a curious
place historically, and was once the aristocratic
centre of the city. There are still two famous houses
in it—one the old Walton mansion, and the other a
building that was once the headquarters of Washington.
In the yard of the latter house is a pear-tree of
Washington's planting. And, by the way, our companion
(in a first visit which we made to Franklin
square a day or two since) told us a story that may be
new or old, touching an attempt made to poison
Washington. A dish of some vegetables from a forcing-bed
was put upon the table for dinner, and the
general, remarking that growths so much earlier than
was natural were not wholesome, threw them out of
the window. Some pigs in the yard were poisoned
by eating them. Colonel Stone can tell us if the
story be true—always presuming it is not in some
veritable history of New York.[2] The Walton house
is still a noble-looking mansion, with its English mouldings
in good preservation, and is now occupied as a
lodging-house. The headquarters of Washington are
tenanted by a pianoforte builder, and all around looks
trafficky and dull.

One of the favorite spring amusements of the people
of New York—(of course of the silly people, of
whom there are at least several)—is to attend the auction
sales at private houses. We heard of one silly
but honest woman (they are often honest) who, on being
rallied a day or two since at having so passed the
last fortnight, said, “La! it's so amusing to see how
people live!” And, truly enough, you may find out
by this process how every class “furnishes,” which is
a considerable feature in living, and it is wonderful
with how little ceremony and reluctance the household
gods are stripped to the skin and exposed to the
gaze of a public invited in by the red flag of an auction!
It is possibly a very natural feature of a new
country to have no respect for furniture; but to our
notion it comes close after “honor thy father and
mother” to honor the chairs and tables at which they
have eaten and prayed, counselled and blessed. And
even this were easier got over—the selling of the mere
mahogony and damask—if the articles were removed
to a shop and disassociated from the places where
they had become hallowed. But to throw open
sacred boudoirs, more sacred bedrooms, breakfast-rooms,
bath-rooms, in which (as has been the case
once or twice lately) lovely and cherished women
have lived, and loved, and been petted, and secluded,
and caressed—to let in vulgar and prying curiosity to
sit on the damask seats and lounge on the silken sofas,
and breathe the air impregnated with perfume
that could betray the holiest secrets if it had a tongue
—and then to stand by while an auctioneer chaffers,
and describes, and tempts the vulgar appetite to buy!
Why, it seems to us scarce less flagrant and atrocious
than the ride of Lady Godiva—descrating to those
who sell out, and a profanity and license in those who
go to see!

It is a famous time, now, to buy cheap second-hand
furniture, by the way—for the fashion of French furniture
has come in lately, with a rush, and the nabobs
are selling out from sideboard to broom, and furnishing
anew à la Française, from skylight to basement.
By a year from this time there will be more houses in
New York above a certain cost and up to a marquis's
taste and wants, than either in Paris or London.
(And this estimate is not extravagant, for only “the
few” abroad spend money as “the many” do here.)
There is a drygoods retailer in Broadway, who has a
house furnished as sumptuously, and in as good taste,
as the most extravagant nobleman's house in London.
The thing is done very simply. The dimensions of
the house, and an accurate description of the way it is
lighted and arranged, are sent out to the first upholsterers
of Paris—men who are artists in their way,
and who have furnished for royalty and rank all over
Europe. Carte blanche as to expense, and out comes
your “interior,” complete, lustrous, and as good as
his majesty's—wanting only (really only) the society
suitable to enjoy it—which is like (something like) a
very fine play without a symptom of an audience.

So marked is this change of taste, and the new
school of furnishing, that the oldest and most wealthy
of the cabinet warehouse-men in this city has completely
abandoned the making of English furniture.
He has sold out an immense stock of high-priced articles
at auction, and sent to France for models and
workmen to start new with the popular taste. It is a
great chance, by the way, to establish the European
fashion of hotels garnis for strangers—giving them the
temporary hire of houses ready furnished, by the
week or month—their meals sent to them from a restaurateur.
Such investments bring large profits; and
the convenience of the custom, to families coming
from the south or west, and wishing for greater privacy
and more room than they can get at a hotel, is very
great. So may good come out of an extravagant folly.

The Antique Cabinet.—Whether it is a perverse
pleasure in seeing costly things out of place, or an
aversion we have to new things (except new thoughts,

new toothpicks, and new ladies' gear), or the natural
love for miscellany common to all mankind—whether
it is for one of these reasons, or for a little of each—
we are in the habit of bestowing the loose ends of our
idleness upon the warehouses of second-hand furniture.
Nothing grows upon a man like a habit of choice
between such entertainment and any society merely
tolerable—the preference given, of course, to the
shabby but more suggestive damask and mahogany.
Ah, the variety of things people sell to get money!
What curious places shops are, where they will buy
anything that is “sacrificed!” How entertaining to
mousle about among old portraits, broken ornaments,
miniatures soiled by wearing in the bosom, unstrung
harps, battered statuary, and furniture that has kept
proud company! How curious-minded must become
at last these dealers in nothing with a glose on! How
exactly they must know the duration and value of
fashionable newness! How well they must understand
the pitiless transit from ornament to lumber—
how well the sudden chill of the money-test to articles
valued, till then, only by affection! But we can
not afford a digression here.

Resting our umbrella on the steps to a high bed
the other day, and our chin on our umbrella (a
posture taken for the leisurely perusal of a crowded
corner of an old furniture shop), we began to pick out
from the mass, an outline of an old cabinet secretary.
Now we have been that degree of vagabond, that we
have to confess having fairly topped our meridian without
the knowledge of more luxury in writing-tools than
any table, any pen, and any conceivable vagary of inkholder.
It is true, that while travelling we got accustomed
to fastening the other end of our thought-string
to an old black trunk—a companion to our
hithering and thithering for seven long years—and, by
dint of habit in many a far country, we could ill write,
at last, where that old portmanteau was not ready to
receive our eyes as they came off the paper. But, in
reforming our baggage for matrimony, the old trunk
was degraded to a packing-box, and at present it
peacefully reposes, smelling of quinces, and holding
the modest Sunday-clothes of our farmer's dame at
Glenmary. Save and since this, our travelled and
“picked pen of countries” has been without appanage
or equipage, wearing all its honors upon its bare
plume of service, and, like a brave and uncomplaining
soldier, scorning to claim the dignities which should
have been plucked down by its deservings. Well—
well! “the whirligig of time!” “Pen!” we mentally
ejaculated, as we made out the odd corners and
queer angles of the antique cabinet—“thy proper
honors are in flower! Thou shalt do thy work in
luxury after this! What pigeon-holes can do to
make thee comfortable—what drawers, what slits,
what niches and nooks—is as good as done! Rise
to-morrow rich and glorious!”

We had the advantage to be favorably known to the
furniture-dealer. He was a man who rejoiced in our
promotions. We bought the old secretary without
chaffer, “at the lowest figure,” and requested that it
might be dug out from its unsold neighbors, and sent
home, not too vigorously dusted. Here it is. We
are writing upon its broad let-down leaf, and our pen
struts like a knight wearing for the first hour his well-earned
spurs. It is an old chamberer—the secretary
—brown-black mahogany, inlaid with sandal-wood—
and has held money, and seen frowns and smiles. In
its experience (for which we would give a trifle) we
ourself are but a circumstance. The hand that first
wrote at it is cold; and, for the hands that are to
write at it hereafter, nature may not yet have sorted
out the nails. Our own hand will give over its cunning
and turn to ashes, meantime. One man's life
and using are but of the duration of a coat of varnish,
to this old cabinet's apprehension. Ah “we!”

“By the pricking of our thumbs,” the brigadier is
mounting the stairs. Since the possession of our
first operative luxury, we have taken a disgust to the
cloister—conceiting that the smell of soap, from the
lavendering in the back yard, gave a stain to such
flowers of imagination as were born there. The brigadier
says we grow superfine. Soit! It is time—
after “taking it as it comes” for so many years. Besides,
we must have something to set off against his
epaulettes! Glory in your staff, dear brigadier, but
leave us our cabinet!

Brigadier—(entering out of breath).—Paff! paff!
How the breath of life flutters with this vicinity to
heaven! Paff! paff!—prophetic nature! How are
you, my dear upster?

Committee.—You see the ink wet in my pen—I was
just about to dash into a critique. That straw-colored
volume of poems, by Mrs. Lewis, shows feathers
from Pegasus; though, as usual with lady-poems,
without any parings from the hoof—any trace of that
part of the old steed that touches earth. It takes
wrongs and sufferings—like those of Mrs Norton,
L. E. L., and Mrs. Hemans—to compound a poetess
of any reality and strength. Soil, that, if torn up with
a ploughshare, may yield the heavy grain of anguish,
will yield nothing but daisies and white clover, lying
undisturbed in the sunshine. Yet this same white
clover is very sweet grazing, and Mrs. Lewis's is a very
sweet book. May she never write a better one—by
having suffered enough to “qualify!”

Brigadier.—Amen! I say, my boy, what a clever
thing Inman is making of his magazine! The May
number is beautiful. What a good pick he has
among the magazine-writers!

Committee.—Excellent—but he uses himself up
with making his correspondents work, and sets too
little value on his own writings. He wants a sub. for
drudgery. He could, with his strong fabric of good
sense (which is genius), and his excellent critical powers,
make all the rest of the “Columbian” subservient
to his own articles.

Brigadier.—Tell him so.

Committee.—Will he stand it—as your firm ally?

Brigadier.—Bless your soul, he has told you many
a plainer thing in print.

Committee.—Has he? Here goes, then:—

But now we think of it, you are bound to be particularly
good-natured, my dear brigadier. With what
enthusiasm they received your song the other night
at the Tabernacle—“The Pastor's Daughter!”
That, and “Boatman haste,” and “Cheerly o'er the
mountains,” are three songs, that, skilfully built, as
they are, upon three of our most exquisite national
melodies, and intrinsically beautiful in words and music,
will be classics. Atwill has published them charmingly,
too. What lots of money you ought to make
out of these universalities!

Brigadier.—My dear boy, stop praising me at a judicious
place—for praise, like “heat, hath three degrees:
first, it indurateth or maketh strong; next,
it maketh fragile; and lastly, it doth encinerate or
calcinate, or crumble to pieces.”

Committee.—Subtle tactician! How you have corrupted
my rural simplicity! Mff—mff—mff! I
think I sniff mint! The wind sets this way from
Windust's. How it exhausts the juices to talk pleasantly
with a friend; and, by-the-way, soft crabs are in
the market. What say to a dish of water-cresses,
and such other things as may suggest themselves—
we two—over the way! We are in too good humor
to dine in public to-day. We should seem to lack
modesty, with this look of exultation on our faces.

Brigadier.—To dinner, with all my heart—for the

Mirror has an appetite—the philosopher's tranquil
appetite—idem contemptui et admirationi habitus.

Committee.—I go to shave off this working face,
my dear general! Please amuse yourself with my
warm pen. Our correspondents, “Y.” and “E. K.”
—two “treasures trove,” if such periodical ever had—
should be gracefully and gratefully thanked. Do it
while I am gone, with your usual suaviter.

[Brigadier writes.]

I gave in to a friend's proposition to “poke about,”
lately, one afternoon, and, by dint of turning every
corner that we had never turned before, we zig-zagged
ourselves into a somewhat better acquaintance with
the Valley of Poverty lying between Broadway and
the Bowery. On our descent we stopped at the Tombs,
making, however (as many do), rather an unsatisfactory
visit. We lacked an Old Mortality to decipher the
names and quality of the tenants. It is a gloomy access
to Justice, up the dark flight of steps frowned over
by these Egyptian pillars; and the resolute-looking
constables, and the anxious-looking witnesses and
prisoners' friends who lean and group at the bases of
the columns, or pace up and down the stony pavement,
show, with gloomy certainty, that this is not the
dwelling of “Hope, with eyes so fair.” We turned
out of the dark portico into the police court—a dingy
apartment with the dust on the floor—not like other
unswept apartments, but ground into circles of fine
powder by hurried and twisting footprints. No culprit
was before the court, and the judge's terrors were laid
on the desk with his spectacles. We looked about in
vain for anything note-worthy. Even the dignity of
“the presence” was unrecognised by us, for (not being
in the habit of uncovering where there is neither
carpet, lady, nor sign of holy cross) we were obliged
to be notified by the “hats off, gentlemen,” of the one
other person in the room—apparently a constable on
duty.

A side door led us downward to the watch-house,
which occupies the basement of the Egyptian structure.
It is on a level with the street, and hither are
brought newly-caught culprits, disturbers of the peace,
and, indeed (so easy is disgrace), anybody accused by
anybody! It is not an uncommon shape of malice
(so the officer told us in answer to my query) for the
aggressor in a quarrel to give the sufferer in charge
to the watchman and have him locked up! The
prisoner is discharged, of course, the next morning,
the complainant not appearing, to prosecute; but
passing a night in a cell, even on false accusation, is
an infliction which might fall with some weight on an
honest man, and the power to inflict it should not be
quite so accessible—“thinks I to myself.” (I made
a mental promise to get better information on the subject
of arrests, and generally on the subject of the drawing
of the first line between “ourselves” and the
guilty. With Miss Lucy Long's privilege, I shall
duly produce what I can gather.)

On application at the door of the prisons, we were
informed nonchalantly (and figuratively, I presume)
that it was “all open,” and so indeed it seemed, for
there was no unlocking, though probably the hinges
would have somehow proved reluctant had a prisoner
tried the swing of them. We walked in to the prison-yard
unattended, and came first to the kitchens. A
very handsome woman, indeed, was singing and washing
at a tub, and up and down, on either side of the large
boilers, promenaded a half-dozen men in couples—
sailors and loafers, “in for a month,” as we were afterward
informed. They looked as happy as such men
do elsewhere, I thought, and wearing no prison-dress,
they seemed very little like prisoners. It is considered
quite a privilege, by the way, to be employed in
the kitchen.

The inner prison-door looked more like one's idea
of a “Tolbooth,” and by it we gained the interior of
the Tombs. Gadsby's Hotel at Washington is a very
correct model of it, on a somewhat large scale. The
cells all open upon a quadrangle, and around each of
the four stories runs a light gallery. In the place of
Gadsby's fountain is a stove and the turnkey's desk,
and, just as we entered, one of the prisoners was cooking
his mess at the fire with quite an air of comfort
and satisfaction. It chanced to be the time of day
when the cell-doors are thrown open, and the tenants
were mostly outside, hanging over the railings, smoking,
chatting with each other and the keepers, and
apparently not at all disturbed at being looked at.
Saunders, the absconding clerk, whose forgery made
so much noise not long ago, was pointed out to us,
and a more innocent-looking fair-haired mother's boy
you could scarce pick out of a freshman class. He
has grown fat in the Tombs. His accomplice, Raget,
the Frenchman, is not much older, but he looked
rather more capable of a clever bad trick, and Frenchman-like,
he preserved, even in prison, the dandy air,
and wore his velvet dressing-cap with as jaunty an air
of assurance as if just risen to an honest man's breakfast.
He is handsome, and his wife still voluntarily
shares his cell. A very worthy-looking old gentleman
leaned at his cell-door, a celebrated passer of
counterfeit money; and a most sanctimonious and
theological-student-looking young man was pacing
one of the galleries, and he had been rather a successful
swindler. Truly “looks is nuffin,” as Sam. Weller
was shrewd enough to discover.

We looked into one or two of the cells. To a man
who has ever suited his wants to the size of a ship's
state-room, they are very comfortable lodgings, and
probably a sailor would think quarters in the Tombs
altogether luxurious. Punishment of this kind must
be very unequal, until it is meted out by what a man
has been used to. (Till then, at least, it is better not
to steal!) Two or three of the cells were carpeted
and decked with pictures, and the walls of one I looked
into were covered with drawings. Friends are
permitted, of course, to bring to prisoners any luxuries
except liberty; and on the small shelf of another cell
we saw a pyramid of gingerbread—the occupant, probably,
still a youth.

We passed over to the female prison. The cell-doors
were all open as in the other wards. But here
were strong symptoms that, however “it is not good
for man to be alone,” it is much more unpalatable to
woman. A poor girl who had just been brought in,
and was about to be locked up, was pleading piteously
with the keeper not to be shut up alone. Seven others
who had just been sentenced and were “waiting for
their carriage” to go to Sing-Sing, sat around the
stove in the passage, and a villanous-looking set they
were. It is a pity women ever sin. They look so
much worse than we—(probably from falling so much
farther)—and degradation in dress is so markedly unbecoming!
Most of the female cells were double-bedded,
I observed; and in one, which was very nicely
furnished, stood a tall and well-dressed, but ill-favored
woman, who gave back our look of curiosity
with a ferocious scowl. It struck me as curious, that,
out of nineteen or twenty women whom we saw in the
Tombs, two thirds had scratched faces!

One of the police-officers joined us in the latter part
of our rounds, but too late for the thorough inquiries
I wished to make; and promising myself another visit
to the Tombs, accompanied by some one in authority,
I made my envied and unobstructed exit.

It was a sunny spring afternoon, the kind of weather
in which, before all other blessings, to thank God for

liberty. With a simultaneous expression of this
feeling as we cleared the prison steps, my friend and
I crossed the rail-track which forms the limit of the
New York Alsatia, and were presently in the heart
of the Five Points—very much in the same “circle”
of society as we had just left, the difference probably
consisting in scarce more than cleanly restraint without
want, and dirty liberty with it. Luckily for the
wretched, the open air is very nearly as pleasant for
half the year as the inside of a millionaire's palace, and
the sunshine is kept bright and the sky clear, and the
wind kept in motion—alike for the pauper setting on
his wooden door-step and the rich man on the silk
ottoman in his window. Possibly, too, there is not
much difference in the linings of their content, and if
so, the nominal value of the distinctions between rich
and poor should be somewhat modified. At the Five
Points, to all appearance, nobody goes in doors except
to eat and sleep. The streets swarm with men, women,
and children, sitting down. The negro-girls with
their bandanna turbans, the vicious with their gay-colored
allures, the sailors tired of pleasures ashore,
the various “minions of the moon” drowsing the day
away—they are all out in the sun, idling, jesting,
quarrelling, everything but weeping, or sighing, or
complaining. The street is dirty, but no offence to
their nostrils! The police officers are at the watch-house
door, always on the alert, but (probably from
possessing little imagination) the culprits of to-morrow
have no apprehension till apprehended. A viler place
than the Five Points by daylight you could not find,
yet to the superficial eye, it is the merriest quarter of
New York. I am inclined to think Care is a gentleman,
and frequents good society chiefly. There is
no print of his crow's-foot about the eyes of these outcasts.
Who knows how much happiness there is in
nothing to dread—the downfall well over?

We strolled slowly around the triangular area which
is the lungs of the Five Points, and, spoken to by
some one in every group we passed, escaped without
anything like a rudeness offered to us. The lower
story of every second house is a bar-room, and every
bench in them had a sleeper upon it. There are
some houses in this quarter that have been pretentious
in their day, large brick buildings with expensive cornice
and mouldings—one particularly at the corner of
the famous “Murdering Alley,” which would bring
a six-hundred-dollar rent, “borne like Loretto's
chapel through the air” to a more reputable neighborhood.

We wound our way into the German quarter, which
occupies the acclivity between the Five Points and
the Bowery; but as I wish to connect, with a description
of this, some notices of the habits and resorts of
foreigners generally in New York, I shall drop the
reader at the corner.

It is right and wholesome that a new country should
be the paradise of the working-classes, and that ours is
so may be seen very readily. A wealthy merchant,
whose family is about leaving the city, sold out his
household furniture last week, and among other very
expensive articles, a magnificent piano. It was bid
off at a very fair price, and the purchaser turned out
to be the carman usually employed at the merchant's
warehouse! He bought it for his daughters. The
profits of this industrious man's horse and cart were
stated by this gentleman to approach three thousand
dollars a year!

A drygoods palace is now going up in Broadway,
which will probably exceed in splendor even the cele
brated shops which are the prominent features of
London and Paris. “Stuart” is the projecter, and
when it is completed, he will leave the low-browed
and dingy long-room in which he has amassed a
fortune, and start fresh in this magnificent “bezestein.”
Extending back to a great depth, the new
structure is to open by a right angle on another
street, giving the facility of two entrances. “Shopping”
is to be invested with architectural glories—
as if its Circean cup was not already sufficiently
seductive!

Even this chrysalis-burst of Stuart's, however, is a
less forcible exponent of the warrant for the importation
of luxuries, than the brilliant CURIOSITY SHOP of
Tiffany and Young. No need to go to Paris now
for any indulgence of taste, any vagary of fancy. It
is as well worth an artist's while as a purchaser's,
however, to make the round of this museum of luxuries.
The models of most of these fancy articles have
been the perfected work approached with slow degrees,
even by genius. Those faultless vases, in which not
a hair line is astray from just proportion, are not the
chance work of a potter! Those intricate bronzes
were high achievements of art! Those mignon gems
of statuary are copies of the most inspired dreams and
revelations of human beauty! The arts are all there
—their best triumphs mocked in luxurious trifles.
Poetry is there, in the quaint and lovely conception
of keepsakes and ornaments. Even refinements upon
rural simplicity are there, in the simple and elegant
basket furniture of Germany. The mechanic arts are
still more tributary in the exquisite enamel of portfolios,
the contrivance of marvellous trinkets, the fine
carving and high finish of the smithery of precious
metals. And then, nowhere such trim shape and
dainty color in gloves—nowhere such choice dandy
appointments in the way of chains and canes—nowhere
such mollifiers of the hearts of sweethearts in the way
of presents of innumerable qualities, kinds, values, and
devices. I think that shop at the corner of Broadway
and Warren is the most curious and visit-worthy spot
in New York—money in your pocket or no money.
And—(left out of our enumeration)—these enterprising
luxurifers have lately opened a second story, where
they show such chairs and work-tables as are last invented—things
in their way gorgeous and unsurpassable.
If the gods have any design of making me rich,
I wish it might be done before Tiffany and Young
get too old to be my caterers.

The theatrical astronomers have been much interested
in the birth of a new star—lovely Mrs. Hunt of
the Park—who has suddenly found her sphere and
commenced shining brilliantly in a range of characters
seemingly written for the express purpose of developing
her talent. Her arch, half-saucy, and yet natural
and earnest personation of Fortunio has “taken the
town.” She had made the success also of a very indifferent
piece—a poor transfer of the celebrated
Gamin de Paris—in which she played the character
of a young rascal with a very good heart. The increasing
applause with which Mrs. Hunt is nightly
greeted, after having had her light so long “hidden
under the bushel” of a stock actress, must be a high
gratification to “Strong-back,” her husband. Indeed,
his undisguised enjoyment of her clever acting (as he
plays with her in Fortunio), is as “good as a play”
and much more edifying. Success to her, pray I!

The Cabinet.—With difficult and analytical deliberation,
we have, at last, duly distributed, to the
slits, pigeon-holes, drawers, and cavities of our antique

cabinet, their several and appropriate offices and
functions. It was a discipline of our talent at strategy,
was this job of office-giving—for, to confess a weakness,
we have become superstitious touching this venerable
piece of furniture. It seems to us haunted!
We have harbored it, now, some three weeks, and
have attempted with it, in that time, certain liberties
of arrangement which have been mysteriously cross-purposed.
Nothing about it would stay arranged.
We put our approved contributions into one pigeon-hole,
and our doubtfuls into another, our to-be-noticed
into the upright slits, and our damned into the horizontal.
We had a topic-drawer, and a drawer for
memoranda—an oblivion-hole and a cave of ridicule.
We committed the proper documents to each, and
thanking Heaven for a tried secretary, commenced our
tranquil reign. A week had not glided by, before all
was in confusion. Every hole seemed to have kicked
out its tenant. The “approved” had scrambled in
with the “doubtfuls,” and the “damned” into the
“noticed-hole,” and “things to be written about,”
“things to be laughed at,” and “things to be forgotten,”
had changed places with marvellous and decisive
celerity! We tried to restore order, but the confusion
increased. Nothing would stay put. It was
manifestly a Tyler cabinet—the doomed victim of disarrangement.

How order has been restored—by what spirit-fingers
our labels have been changed—what intimations
as to the occupancy of each particular pigeon-hole
we have been compelled to regard—is more than a
cabinet secret. We have had (to make a confession)
enough of telling ghost-stories. We have been called
on by all manner of men and women for our facts as
to the only glimpse into the spirit-world which we
ever described. It has cost us any quantity of brass
(in the wear of our knocker) to satisfy curiosity on
that subject. Enough that our pigeon-holes are labelled
with supernatural certainty. Our contributors,
now, will go to their appointed niche by a selective
destiny of which the responsibility is not ours. The
rejecteds will be kind enough to note this, and curse
the cabinet—not us! If their manuscripts lodge in
the upright slits of the “damned,” it is because the
“accepted” would not hold, keep, or harbor them.
We wash our hands.

Our first three pulls from the topic-drawers are letters
of complaint against postmasters for the postage
on the Mirror. According to the interpretation of the
law by some village postmasters, the government may
charge more for carrying the light weight of the Mirror
than we for editing, printing, embellishing, and
wrapping it! The dunce in the Charlestown post-office
has compelled our subscribers to have their papers
sent to Boston, the nearest office presided over
by a gentleman. Another pig's head has control of
the Dedham office, and by-the-way, we clipped from
a Dedham paper, the following results of his readings
of the postage law:—

Tweedledum.—The postage at the Dedham office
for the New World newspaper of 32 pages, is “one
and 4-8ths of a cent.”

Tweedledee.—The postage for the New Mirror
newspaper of 16 pages, smaller in size, with a plate, is
“3 and 12-16ths, or twenty-four thirty-twoths of a
cent!.”

Tweedledum second.—The postage of a New Mirror
extra, of 32 pages of smaller size, is five cents!

There are one or two offices in the interior of this
state where the postage on a single copy of the Mirror
has been charged fifteen cents—of course leaving
it unredeemed in the office for the postmaster's use—
as he expected!

Now, pray (we ask of our friend the town-pump),
what is the use of the much-vaunted blessing of
“cheap literature,” if the government, or its petty
officials, are to stand between the publishers and the
people, making it dear by charging as much as its
whole value for carrying it! Ought the government
to favor the circulation of intelligence or not? Is it
proper to put the most oppressive, or the least oppressive
construction, on all cases which affect the spread
of art and literature? It is a fact, that revenue sufficient
has been received at the port of New York in
the last two months to pay the whole expenses of the
government of the United States for one year. (So
we were authentically informed yesterday.) But, if
government must have more revenue, should not literature
(we scarce have patience to ask it) be the last
thing taxed? Should not luxuries, vanities, goods
and chattels, be levied upon, to the crack of endurance,
for the support of authority, before one ray of light is
stopped on its way to the public mind—stopped to be
converted into a perquisite for the pocket of a petty
despot? Of the postmasters in the larger cities there
is no complaint. They are generally enlightened
men. Mr. Graham here—Mr. Green in Boston—
throw no obstacles in the way of literature. On the
contrary, they do all in their power to promote and to
facilitate it. It is the petty, ignorant, peppercorn postmaster
of a small village, who, clothed with a little
brief authority, and knowing that his oppressions
leaves the disputed article in his hands, reads the law
perversely, and at last shuts his whole neighborhood
against everything but newspapers!

It is rather a reproach to a country whose boast and
whose reliance for the perpetuity of its free institutions
is the superior intelligence of its population, that
monarchical countries (England and France) should
be before us in the reduction of taxes on the conveyance
of intelligence. It has struck us as extraordinary,
too, that in the revising of postage laws, the increase
of facilities for carrying the mails should not
have suggested a reduction of postage! But at any
rate—leaving the laws as oppressive as they are—we
call upon on enlightened statesman like Mr. Wickliffe
to insist upon the most lenient and most favorable
interpretation of them—instead of having his administration
of the department distinguished, as it has
been and is, for more postoffice oppressions than were
ever known before. The postage on the Mirror, for
one instance—never before charged higher than the
newspapers which it scarce equals in weight—now
varies (in some of the country postoffices) from five
to fifteen cents—a gross “sliding-scale” of oppression
which must put a stop to our enterprise, if persevered
in, or cause us to give up cover and embellishment,
and circulate only the newspaper sheet, suited to the
petty letter of the law! The great majority of postmasters,
however, we are happy to add, charge mere
newspaper postage for the Mirror, “as the law” (properly
understood) “directs.”

Our favorite adversary of the American finds palatable
fault with us for not appending Leigh Hunt's
name to such good things as we have copied from him.
Why should we? We do not claim them as original,
nor are they leaded, as original contributions are
wont to be. The original object of giving the author's
name is lost (we conceive) at the distance of this
country from England. Leigh Hunt collects and
publishes in volumes all he writes, and his good things
are well labelled and guarded in his own country.
Neither his fame, his profit, nor his consequence (the
three ends he aims at), could be affected by adding his
name to what we occasionally take from him. Besides—
tit-for-tat-ically considered—the English steal
our articles by the dozen, and not only leave out our
name but appropriate them, by other initials, as their
own. They have at this moment a cheap edition of
our poems in the press without our leave or license,
and we have helped swell most of the collections of
English poetry, with no clue left for posterity to discover

that the author had also the honor of the
“American's” frequent notice. Besides again, there
is a precedent in nature. The rice-birds of the south
are the bobolinks of the north—losing their name and
copyright altogether by emigration. But now, having
defended our castle, we would fain express our pleasure
at the tone and quality of the “American's”
fault-findings, invariably done in good taste, and confined
always within legitimate critical bounds. This,
which in a Utopia, would be like praising water for
running down hill, is great praise in an unmitigated
republic. Fault found with our writings, without a
smutch on ourself, is “a thing to thank God on”—as
things go. In the same breath let us laud the Boston
Atlas, who says of us, with something between a
pickle and a sweetmeat, that “he has one fault—he
caters for his readers as for himself, and novelty or
eccentricity of expression sometimes usurps the place
which should only be accorded to thoughts of real
value.” We kiss the rod.

(Enter the Brigadier.)

Brigadier.—My dear boy, what could have possessed
you to get up so early? Ten o'clock, and the
last page all written, and not a subject touched, I'll
wager a julep, out of forty that were indispensable!
Have you said no word of the “Mirror Library?”

Cabinet.—Supererogatory, brigadier! Why add
perfume to the violet! Our selections for the Library
are appreciated—they sell! They advertise themselves.
They breathe sweetness.

Brigadier.—Like the lady's breath, which made all
men exclaim, “Hereof be scent-bags made!” Eh,
my boy?

Cabinet.—The “Rubric of Love”—that bundle of all
the delicious things ever written on the exciting subject
of love—what but its very name and purpose is
wanting to make that universal? Everybody, whose
lease of love is not quite run out, must have a copy
of it!

Brigadier.—They must! they must! It is a book,
charming and cheap at any price. But—

Cabinet.—I'll stave off your “but” with a passage
from Milton's Comus, for I'll talk of work no more.
Did you know that the julep was to Milton what gin
was to Byron? Listen!—

Let us to this “Nepenthé”—for we thirst with
Milton.

It would probably flabbergast most barn-door fowl
to be asked the meaning of eccalobeon, though, call it
the hatching of eggs, and they would laugh at being
acquainted with anything else. This big word has
mystified the posts and corners for a fortnight, and
yesterday my curiosity came to a head. I looked at
the bottom of the placard to see where the Eccalobeon
was to be exhibited, and soon found myself at a small
boy, keeping door opposite Washington Hall. (The
lad was so small and pale, by the way, that I thought
it warrantable to inquire whether he was produced by
eccalobeon. It appeared that he was not. He had a
regular mother, who “knew he was out.”)

The chirruping of chickens saluted our ears as we
opened the door, and we observed that a corner of the
room was picketed off, where a dozen or two of these
pseudo-orphans (who had lost their mother by not
having been suffered to have one), were pecking at
gravel and evidently doing well. Very good manners,
for chickens, though, as the man in the menagerie
says, “where they got them 'mity knows.” It began
to look very much as if mothers were a superfluity.

The centre of the room was occupied by the artificial
mother—a square brick structure, containing
ovens in which lay the eggs in different stages of progress.
Pieces of carpet were suspended before the
openings, and, on raising them and putting in the
hand, the temperature within seemed to be at about
blood-heat. The keeper took out an egg that was
about to enter upon its new destiny of skewer and
gravy. The chicken had been twenty days on the
road from spoon-victual land, and its little beak was
just hardened sufficiently to prick a hole into the
world in which it was to be eaten. It lay in a heap,
rather confusedly packed, its thigh bone close at its
beak (apparently ready to be used as a fulcrum in prying
the crack open), and its downy feathers, wet and
forlorn, just lifted by respiration. This premature
removal of the shell, however, the man said, would be
fatal. The destiny of that little well-contrived heart,
as far as this world was concerned, was to furnish
material for this sigh and paragraph!

In dishes upon the table were eggs, without shells,
in all the different stages of formation. In some the
veins were just reddening, and the vessels filling around
the heart, and in one, just opened, the newly-formed
heart, a red globule of the size of a pin's head, was
playing backward and forward, like a shuttle in a
miniature loom. With a glass, every phase of the
process of chicken-making could be distinctly seen.
The yolk, I was surprised to learn, does not contribute
to the material of the body—the most valuable portion
of its existence, as an egg, being, therefore, of no value
to it in its after-life of chicken! The provision is
certainly a wise one by which winged creatures, that
could not well fly if gravid like other animals, are
provided with a removable womb in the shape of an
egg, so that their parturition can be carried on outside
the body, and their buoyancy of locomotion is not interfered
with. The comparison between the incubation
of fowls and human gestation immediately suggests
itself, and the superior convenience of the former to
the shape-destroying, beauty-marring, and painful maternity
of our race, seems a blessing to be envied, at
least by the beautiful. How long might women continue
ornamental, and to what age would their personal
loveliness be undiminished, if the care and suffering
of maternity could be delegated to a brick oven!

I am inclined to think it is not peculiar to myself
to have a sabbath taste for the water-side. There is
an affinity, felt I think by man and boy, between the
stillness of the day and the audible hush of boundaries
to water. Premising that it was at first with the turned-up
nose of conscious travestie, I have to confess
the finding of a sabbath ramble, to my mind, along
the river-side in New York—the first mile toward
Albany on the bank of the Hudson. Indeed, if quiet
be the object, the nearer the water the less jostled the
walk on Sunday. You would think, to cross the city
anywhere from river to river, that there was a general
hydrophobia—the entire population crowding to the
high ridge of Broadway, and hardly a soul to be seen
on either the East river or the Hudson. But, with a
little thoughtful frequenting, those deserted river-sides
become contemplative and pleasant rambling-places,
and, if some whim of fashion do not make the bank
of the Hudson like the Marina of Smyrna, a fashionable
resort, I have my Sunday afternoons provided for,
during the pigritude of city durance.

Yesterday (Sunday) it blew one of those unfolding
west winds, chartered expressly to pull the kinks out
of the belated leaves—a breeze it was delightful to set
the face to—strong, genial, and inspiriting, and smelling

(in New York) of the snubbed twigs of Hoboken.
The Battery looked very delightful, with the grass
laying its cheek to the ground, and the trees all astir
and trinkling, but on Sunday this lovely resort is full
of smokers of bad cigars—unpleasant gentlemen to
take the wind of. I turned the corner with a look
through the fence, and was in comparative solitude
the next moment.

The monarch of our deep water-streams, the gigantic
“Massachusetts,” lay at her wharf, washed by the
waving hands of the waters taking leave of the Hudson.
The river ends under the prow—or, as we might say
with a poetic license, joins on, at this point, to Stonington—so
easy is the transit from wharf to wharf in
that magnificent conveyance. From this point up,
extends a line of ships, rubbing against the pier the
fearless noses that have nudged the poles and the
tropics, and been breathed on by spice-islands and icebergs—an
array of nobly-built merchantmen, that,
with the association of their triumphant and richly-freighted
comings and goings, grows upon my eye
with a certain majesty. It is a broad street here, of
made land, and the sidewalks in front of the new stores
are lumbered with pitch and molasses, flour and red
ochre, bales, bags, and barrels, in unsightly confusion
—but the wharf-side, with its long line of carved figureheads,
and bowsprits projecting over the street, is an
unobstructed walk—on Sundays at least—and more
suggestive than many a gallery of marble statues.
The vessels that trade to the North sea harbor here,
unloading their hemp and iron; and the superb French
packet-ships, with their gilded prows; and, leaning
over the gangways and tafferails, the Swedish and
Norwegian sailors jabber away their Sunday's idle
time; and the negro-cooks lie and look into the puddles,
and altogether it is a strangely-mixed picture—
Power reposing and Fret and Business gone from the
six-days' whip and chain. I sat down on a short
hawser-post, and conjured the spirits of ships around
me. They were as communicative as would naturally
be expected in a tête-á-tête when quite at leisure.
Things they had seen and got wind of in the Indian
seas, strange fishes that had tried the metal of their
copper bottoms, porpoises they had run over asleep,
wrecks and skeletons they had thrown a shadow across
when under prosperous headway—these and particulars
of the fortunes they had brought home, and the
passengers coming to look through one more country
to find happiness, and the terrors and dangers, heartaches
and dreams, that had come and gone with each
bill of lading—the talkative old bowsprits told me all.
I sat and watched the sun setting between two outlandish-looking
vessels, and, at twilight, turned to go
home, leaving the spars and lines drawn in clear tracery
on a sky as rosy and fading as a poet's prospects
at seventeen.

Postoffice Abuses.—“It will none otherwise be,”
says Sir Thomas More, “but that some stumblinge
blockes will always bee, by malicious folk, laid in good
people's way.” Upon this text we propose to preach
a little sermon.

We have given in to the rage of the day, which is
the cheapening of brain-work, not very willingly at
first, but heartily when our mind was made up to it.
The author is depreciated, and that is, perhaps, not
well—but the public is benefited, and that is, very
certainly, good. Millions are touched by the lengthened
wand of literature, who were beyond its reach
till it was eked out by cheapness.

The old Mirror, at five dollars per annum, occasionally
embellished by a plate, was considered, by the
successive postmasters-general for twenty years, as a
popular good, which it was well worth their while to
favor and foster. It throve accordingly. Had Mr.
Wickliffe been postmaster-general when it was started,
it would not have lived a year! With or without its
plate, with or without its cover, it went rigorously to
all parts of the country, at newspaper postage. No
village postmaster would have ventured to charge
more upon it; and if one had been pragmatical enough
to twist the law into a new reading for that purpose,
the very first complaint would have set it right, or removed
him. The editors had no trouble on the subject,
and they went on, pioneering the way into the
fields of art and elegant literature, and setting an example
which has been followed by the large troop of
tasteful periodicals now in existence, to the no small
diffusion of taste and intelligence.

Literature began to cheapen. It was proposed to
bring refinement, delicate sentiment, the ennobling
love of poetry, and an acquaintance with heroic models
through song and story, within reach of the humbler
classes. New periodicals were started on this
basis. The old Mirror was superseded by cheaper
works—works which, for three dollars, gave as much
or more matter, but without embellishment, and of
very inferior typography and paper. That rage had
its day. The circulation of light literature was very
much enlarged, and the people, of all classes, became
interested in the current writing of the eventful present
hour. This sudden spread of taste (we may say
in passing) was an ingredient thrown into the national
character which no doubt powerfully furthered—what
it seems Mr. Wickliffe's sole mission to retard—the
refinement and growing intelligence of the American
people.

But there was one more effort to be made. Complaints
began to be heard that these cheap publications
were inelegant; that, sent forth damp, unpressed
and unembellished, they became smutched and grew
unsightly and hurtful to the eyes; and that more
careful workmanship and better type and paper were
desirable. The founder of the old Mirror took the
subject into examination and study. He made the
closest calculations of the cost of fair print and embellishment,
and after much thought and inquiry, aided
by twenty years of experience and success, he matured
the plan of the present “New Mirror.” It
was the plan of a periodical to be suited to the now
refined taste of the “greatest number,” as well as
adapted to the means of the greatest number, and the
uniting of these two desirable extremes brought its
price within a hair's breadth of its cost, and left the
feasibility of the project dependant wholly on the
chance of sailing at once, and smoothly, into an enormous
circulation. The item of postage was not overlooked—but
as the New Mirror, cover and plate included,
would scarce weigh half as much as the Albion,
Spirit of the Times, and other weekly papers
which went for newspaper-postage, and it was no
heavier than the old Mirror, which went for the same
postage, the subject was not thought worth a doubt.

Well—the New Mirror made its appearance. A
type worthy of the choicest library, a cover convenient
and elegant, a beautiful steel plate, and sixteen
pages of matter edited with careful experience and
labor, were offered to the public for this same manageable
price of “three dollars a year!” The poorest
citizen need not now be without his fair share of
knowledge of the arts and literature. Nothing seemed
to stand in the way. The manifest high order of
style and spirit in the design of the work, combined
with its accessibility by cheapness, sent it abroad like
day-rising. Its circulation became, as it well needed
to be, enormous. And now, you ask, what is the
matter? And we will tell you, and we wish Mr.
Wickliffe to listen.

A gentleman called at our office a week or two
since, and bought a copy or two of the “Mirror Library,”
expressing his regret that it was not convenient

for him to take the Mirror. He lived in Vernon,
Oneida county, New York, and the postage
charged him by Mr. J. W. Jenkins, the postmaster
of that place, was FOURTEEN CENTS on each copy—
bringing the cost of the Mirror up to ten dollars twenty-eight
cents a year! We immediately addressed a
letter to Mr. J. W. Jenkins, inquiring respectfully
into the reason of this exorbitant charge, and that
letter Mr. J. W. Jenkins has never answered. The
gentleman assured us that several persons of his acquaintance
in Vernon had been deterred from subscribing
to the Mirror by Mr. J. W. Jenkins's overcharge
of postage. Again: we have discovered, in many instances,
that our subscribers, after paying their subscriptions,
have let their papers lie in the postoffice
rather than submit to the extortionate charge of postage,
and the postmasters have never notified us of the
fact. Again: the Mirrors miscarry, to a degree that
shows more than neglect on the part of the postmasters
or their subordinates. The complaints and stoppages
for this last reason are out of all precedent and
proportion. Again: the postage charged on the New
Mirror varies, as we have said before, from one cent
to fifteen, in some of the country postoffices, more or
less, according to the whim or tyranny of the dull official.
The postmaster of Great Barrington is one
of those pigheaded dunces, charging postage on the
Mirror sent to the “Berkshire Courier”—in direct violation
of the law which exempts papers from postage
on exchanges.

What is the remedy for these abuses? We have
complained to Mr. Wickliffe of the irregularity and
extortion in regard to the postage on the Mirror, and
have received in turn a letter of sesquipedalian flummery,
the compounding of which required the education
of a Virginia politician; and, our letter once
answered, the abuse was probably never thought of
in the department. Yet it was a matter serious
enough to be worth Mr. Wickliffe's attention. These
petty tyrants with their “little brief authority,” stand
between the public and the supply for public refinement
and intelligence. They change the cost of the cheapest
and most elegant publication of the day from
$3.52 (postage and all) to $10.28! They strangle
literary enterprise in the cradle. And for whose advantage?
Not the government's—for subscribers will
rather leave their Mirrors in the office than pay the extortionate
charge. For the benefit of the postmasters
themselves—who, by this indirect fraud, obtain a nice
handful of periodicals weekly, to dispose of as one of
the perquisites of their office! This is surely a matter
worth Mr. Wickliffe's while to look after.

To the majority of postmasters we owe thanks rather
than reproaches. They have rightly judged that the
spirit of the law did not intend a difference of two
cents between a paper slitched and a paper not slitched
—(a difference made by some of the Dogberry postmasters).
They feel justly that if there is a question
as to the intention of a postage-law, the cause of intelligence
and literature is to have the benefit of the
most favorable interpretation. No law can exactly
describe every periodical likely to be started. No
senate, in making a law, intends to charge more for
carrying three printed pieces that weigh one ounce,
than one printed piece that weighs two or three ounces
—yet so, again, do these petty Dogberrys interpret
the law.

There is another point about which we would inquire
of the committee now engaged on the revised
postage-laws. Why should literary papers of the same
weight be more taxed than newspapers? Is the circulation
of moral and refining influences twice as taxable
as the circulation of scandal and politics, rapes
and murders, amusements and advertisements? Surely
the intelligence that enlightens the community is
as much contained in the weeklies and monthlies as in
the daily papers. Yet in the bill now before the
house, the former are taxed at twice the price of the
latter! This, we suppose, is some of Mr. Wickliffe's
handiwork.

We give up the postmaster-general—leave him to
be bewildered with the technicalities of his office—
careful of the husks while the grain sifts away from
him. We make an appeal to the fountain of his official
power—public opinion! Let this matter be understood,
and let every petty postmaster who plays
the tyrant, or misuses his authority, be memorialized
out of office. The government ought not to be one
penny richer for carrying the mails. No revenue
should be derivable to the treasury from the carrying
of intelligence. The cheapest postage-rate possible
should be set by law, and the law should be bent to
suit circumstances in all cases where the cost of carrying
is not thereby made greater. Public opinion
should so instruct the public servant. The postmaster-general,
and the lesser postmasters who obey his
dictum, should be made to feel that the least pretence
for extortion or oppression on their part, or any want
of accommodation and liberal conduct, would be
promptly punished. We write freely on this subject,
for our enterprise is at stake, and we speak somewhat,
too, for other interests than our own. To offer a periodical
for three dollars a year, that is made to cost
ten by the oppression of postmasters, is to advertise a
misnomer. Let the Wickliffe dynasty prevail, and
we shall be obliged to leave off cover, plate, and
stitching, and change the Mirror to a simple printed
sheet, without protection from wear and tear, and
without embellishment or capability of binding and
preservation.

We have always felt great sympathy for the blind.
We have felt also great curiosity to know exactly how
much of human knowledge is forbidden to go in at
the ear—and how much that is turned aside, as inadmissible
at that one portal, can be smuggled in afterward
under the cloak of explanation and description.
The accounts of Laura Bridgman interested us proportionably
more from her greater deprivations. It
is putting this curiosity in a much more spicy vein of
gratification, however, to know that a poet is imprisoned
in one of these windowless temples, and to discover
how he lives without light and color—as well
as how much he is the purer and better from escaping
all that offends the eye, which, by-the-way, is not a
little. The poems of Miss Frances Jane Crosby,
a pupil of the New York Institution for the Blind,
lie before us, and we have read them with great modification
of our pity for the blind. Eyes could scarce
do more.

No one in reading the miscellaneous poems by
Miss Crosby would suspect that she was blind. She
seems to forget it herself. She talks of “crimson
teints” and “purple west” and “stars of mildest hue,”
with quite the familiarity of those who see. But it
is evident that her ear has more than a common share
of nicety and susceptibility to measure, for in no early
poems that we remember is there such smooth elegance
of rhythm.

The volume is composed principally of poems of
the affections, and well-expressed, musical, and creditable
to the authoress, are all the pieces. The price
of such a volume should be nominal merely, and the
kindly-disposed should give for it what their benevolence
prompts. We would suggest to the publishers
to send it round by agents with this view.

There are things in the world better than poetry,
and things written without genius that more stir the

soul of a man than would some things ticketed for
immortality. Now we do not make sure that we are
not “weak” on the subject of young children. We
always thought them quite eligible to any possible
choir of cherubim. But we will venture to unmask
our foible, if foible it be, by declaring that we have
read the following downright, homely, truthful, and
funny verses—(sent to us by some charming mother)
—read them with delight. It is good honest poetry,
with a foothold to it, and we should like to see the
baby, since reading it:—

We are fortunate in a troop of admirable contributors
who write for love, not money—love being the
only commodity in which we can freely acknowledge
ourselves rich. We receive, however, all manner of
tempting propositions from those who wish to write
for the other thing—money—and it pains us grievously
to say “No,” though, truth to say, love gets
for us as good things as money would buy—our readers
will cheerfully agree. But, yesterday, on opening
at the office a most dainty epistle, and reading it
fairly through, we confess our pocket stirred within
us! More at first than afterward—for, upon reflection,
we became doubtful whether the writer were not
old and “blue”—it was so exceedingly well done!
We have half a suspicion, now, that it is some sharp
old maid in spectacles—some regular contributor to
Godey and Graham, who has tried to inveigle us
through our weak point—possibly some varlet of a
man-scribbler. But no! it is undeniably feminine.
Let us show you the letter—the latter part of it, at
least, as it opens rather too honeyedly for print:—

“You know that the shops in Broadway are very
tempting this spring. Such beautiful things! Well,
you know (no, you don't know that, but you can guess)
what a delightful thing it would be to appear in one
of those charming, head-adorning, complexion-softening,
hard-feature-subduing Neapolitans; with a little
gossamer veil dropping daintily on the shoulder of one
of those exquisite balzarines, to be seen any day at
Stewart's and elsewhere. Well, you know (this you
must know) that shopkeepers have the impertinence
to demand a trifling exchange for these things, even
of a lady; and also that some people have a remarkably
small purse, and a remarkably small portion of
the yellow `root' in that. And now, to bring the matter
home, I am one of that class. I have the most
beautiful little purse in the world, but it is only kept
for show: I even find myself under the necessity of
counterfeiting—that is, filling the void with tissue-paper
in lieu of bank-notes, preparatory to a shopping
expedition!

“Well, now to the point. As 'Bel' and I snuggled
down on the sofa this morning, to read the New Mirror
(by-the-way, cousin 'Bel' is never obliged to put
tissue-paper in her purse), it struck us that you would
be a friend in need, and give good counsel in this
emergency. 'Bel', however, insisted on my not telling
what I wanted the money for; she even thought
that I had better intimate orphanage, extreme suffering
from the burdens of some speculating bubble, illness,
etc., etc.; but did not I know you better! Have
I read the New Mirror so much (to say nothing of the
graceful things coined `under a bridge,' and a thousand
other pages flung from the inner heart), and not
learned who has an eye for everything pretty? Not
so stupid, Cousin 'Bel'—no, no!

“However, this is not quite the point, after all; but
here it is. I have a pen—not a gold one (I don't
think I could write with that), but a nice little feather-tipped
pen, that rests in the curve of my fore-finger
as contentedly as on its former pillow of down.
(Shocking! how that line did run down hill! and this
almost as crooked! dear me!) Then I have little
messengers racing `like mad' through the galleries of
my head, spinning long yarns, and weaving fabrics
rich and soft as the balzarine which I so much covet,
until I shut my eyes and stop my ears and whisk away
with the `wonderful lamp' safely hidden in my own
brown braids. Then I have Dr. Johnson's dictionary—capital
London edition, etc., etc.; and, after I
use up all the words in that, I will supply myself with
Webster's wondrous quarto, appendix and all. Thus
prepared, think you not I should be able to put something
in the shops of the literary caterers—something
that, for once in my life, would give me a real errand
into Broadway? Maybe you of the New Mirror pay
for acceptable articles—maybe not. Comprenez-vous!

“O I do hope that beautiful balzarine like 'Bel's
will not be gone before another Saturday! You will
not forget to answer me in the next Mirror; but pray,
my dear editor, let it be done very cautiously, for
'Bel' would pout all day if she should know what I
have written. Till Saturday, your anxiously-waiting
friend, “Fanny.”

Well—we give in! On condition that you are under
twenty-five, and that you will wear a rose (recognisably)
in your boddice the first day you appear in
Broadway with the hat and “balzarine,” we will pay
the bills. Write us thereafter a sketch of “'Bel”' and
yourself as cleverly done as this letter, and you may
“snuggle down” on the sofa and consider us paid and
the public charmed with you.

In the days when we were “possessed” with horses,
and horse-racing, we were sadly well-acquainted with
a jockey who lost his wits in the excitement of losing
a race. He hung about race-courses for some years
after becoming an idiot, and by dint of always denying
a horse's good qualities in the stable, and of never
speaking well of one except at the winning moment,
he contrived to preserve, through all his idiocy, some
influence in the judgment of horseflesh. We have
been reminded of our old friend Spavin (call him
Spavin—“nil mortuis”) by certain of our critical
brother editors, and their very kindly-intended (possibly)
critiques on the Mirror. Come a week (as such
weeks will come) when our health is queasy, and when
our spirits are gathering violets in dells where a paving-stone
would be stoned to death as a monster (and
there are dells incapable of a paving-stone)—come
such a week, we say, and let the Mirror go forth,
without such quantity of our own work as strains our

extremest fibre to the crack, and down comes this
vigilant critic upon us with a cry of “no go,” “falling
off,” “idle,” and “better formerly”—disparagements
that would take the conceit out of a church steeple!
And why does he do this? Why should we not be
better at some times than at others, without being
criticised like a steam-engine—a thing incapable of
mood, humor, and caprice? Simply because this
sort of critique is easy to write, and so favors, in the
writer, the very idleness he criticises in us. But, good
heavens! are we not entitled to our worser, as well as
our better moments! Shall we always be at tiptop
speed, and never have freedom from disparagement
except when winning a race?

We boldly lay claim to more industry than rightly
falls to us as our share of the curse! Supposing, for
the moment, that our writings are better for the Mirror
than what takes their place occasionally (a flattering
inference from our critic's critique), we do more in
quantity, in the course of the year, than one editor in
a hundred. There is more copied from the Mirror
(we have often had occasion to observe) than from any
two periodicals in the country. The truth is, we are
too famous for comfort!

You see what troubles us, dear reader!

The flowering into glory of such a century-plant
of excellence as our worthy friend and fellow-publisher,
James Harper, has in it, with all our willing acclamation,
some occasional provocation to a smile.
The sudden call for “his picture”—the eager lithograph
of his fun-bestridden nose and money-making
spectacles—the stir he has made among the abuses,
with his Cliff-street way of doing business, and the
salutary feel we get of the wand of power in his
clutch, while we still see him in his accustomed
haunts, busy and unpedestaled as before—there is
something in the contrast which makes us say, with
Prince Hal, “Ned, come out of that fat room and
give us thy hand to laugh a little,” though, with all
our heart, we rejoice in his authority. The Courier,
speaking of the likeness just published of Mr. Harper,
says: “The new mayor's pleasant, shrewd, and
half-quizzical countenance is cleverly hit off, and he
is peering through the official eye-glasses in a manner
that portends trouble to all municipal delinquents.
Let them look to their ways, and let all subordinate
official functionaries look to the streets; for this portrait
would convince us, even if we were not acquainted
with the original, that the chief magistrate has an
eye upon them.”

This bit of speculation as a preface to our laudamus
of Mayor Harper's administration, as felt particularly
in two or three abated nuisances. The hackmen
are no longer permitted to devour passengers on
their arrival in steamboats, nor to make a chevaux-de-frise
of their whips at the landing-piers, but must sit
quietly on their coach-boxes till called for. The
omnibus-racing is to be put a stop to, we understand,
and that should really be celebrated in an appropriate
“northern refrain.” There are two refrains more
that we would suggest to our city Harper—that hose-boys
should be made to refrain from flooding the
sidewalks under the thin shoes of ladies, and that gentlemen
who must smoke in the street should refrain
from the windward side of ladies, particularly those
who prefer air that has not been used.

And apropos—(it will be seen that we were born to
make a world)—we wish to suggest to enterprise another
abatement of the nuisances of Broadway. It
is desirable to reduce the number of omnibuses in
this great thoroughfare, for many very cogent reasons—but
as long as they pay—that is to say, as long
as the public require them—they must even go on—
deafening promenaders, and endangering private carriages
and the lives of people crossing the street. But
who that is down town in a summer's day, and wishes
to go anywhere to the western side of the city, would
not prefer to take a ferry-boat (if there were one)
from the foot of Maiden lane round the Battery to
Chelsea? How preferable the fresh air, and beautiful
scenery of the rivers and bay, to a crowded omnibus
in hot weather! How much more desirable would be
a residence in Chelsea, if there were such a convenience!
The boats might touch at the foot of Cortland
street and the Battery, and, indeed, extend their
course up the East river to the foot of Pike street—
plying, say, every ten minutes, from Pike street to
Chelsea, and back—rounding the Battery, and touching
wherever it was convenient. Who would not prefer
this to omnibussing? Let this line communicate
with Stevens's upper ferry to Hoboken, and the line
would be continuous from that beautiful spot, all
round the city. Quite aside from its utility, this
would be one of the prettiest pleasure trips that could
be invented. Pensez-y, Messrs. Stevens.

If any charitable person has an old man or woman
whom he would like to set up in an easy and profitable
business, we have a plan to suggest. Give them
half a dozen light chairs, and send them to the Battery
or the Park. In all public promenades in France
there are chairs to be hired for two cents an hour, and
besides being a good trade for the lame and old, this
convenience is wanted.

By the way, where are the good things, clever
couplets, and flings of wit, that used to fly about at
the municipal elections? Squibs grow dull. Where
is that witty conservative whig who, when “Forest
and Liberty” was placarded by the democrats, put up
a rival bill of “Povey and the Constitution?” Wit
and poetry (we might have remembered) seem to
have gone into advertisements. When people have
done with “Who is Seatsfield?” we shall start a new
query—“Who is the bard of Stoppani?” Moore's
oriental flow of melting stanza and balmy imagery is
quite paled in its glory by Stoppani's advertisement:—

Mellifluously musical! Who is the distinguished author?

The advertisement of a hatter plausibly sets forth
that the Miller prophecy being exploded, and the
world really not coming to an end (at least within a
hat's-wear of time), the prospects of the globe's continuance
justifies the venture of a new hat! We
think we see a hat bought on that hypothesis!

We are happy to see that our imported word, rococo,
is coming into general use. A critic in the Herald,

noticing the opera, says: “This concert-piece has
been rococo for some time, and, like an old maid, is
getting, every year, two years older.” This is a clever
critic, by the way, though in the sentence we have
quoted he reminds us of a bit of dialogue in an old
play:—

“Manes.—Didst thou not find that I did quip thee?

Psy.—No, verily. What is a quip?

Manes.—A short saying of a sharp wit, with a bitter
sense in a sweet word.”

The True Sun quotes, with a clincher, from the
Buffalo Commercial, “The common use of the word
lady, instead of the definite honored term wife, is
an atrocious vulgarism that should be universally
scouted.” We think the ladies should be informed
of the etymological meaning of the two words, and
take their choice after. Wife is derived from the Anglo-Saxon
word signifying to weave, and means the
person who weaves for the family. Lady originally
meant a woman raised to the rank of her husband—
from the Saxon word signifying elevated. The propriety
of calling a man's better half his lady, depends,
of course, on the fact whether she was made more
respectable by the match; and the propriety of calling
her his wife, hangs upon her expertness and industry
at the loom. Which will the fair sex prefer?

New Literary Epoch.—We have been, for the
last year, not only working among, but watching, “the
signs of the times” in the way of literature. We have
been trying, not only to make out a living, but to
make out head and tail to our epoch—to see what
way the transition was tending, and when there was
likely to be any reliable shape and form to American
literature; or (to change the figure) whether the literary
boatmen, who stand with their barques hauled
ashore, uncertain of the current, and employing themselves
meantime in other vocations, could be called
upon to launch and dip their oars, sure at last of tide
and channel.

International copyright has died a natural death.
There was not a statesman in the country who had the
courage to take the chance of making or marring his
political fortunes by espousing the question. At the
same time—palpably just, honorable, and expedient,
as would be the giving of copyright to English authors—there
was some excuse for shying the subject,
in the violent abuse that was indiscreetly showered
upon us by Dickens and the Reviews, at the very
moment when general public attention had been
called to the subject, and when there was every
prospect of its turning the crisis favorably. It would
have taken the statesmanship and eloquence of Clay
or Webster to have made the discussion at all endurable
to congress, and we are quite sure that it will be
ten years before the public irritation against English
travellers and critics will have sufficiently abated to
tolerate any measure in their favor. Dickens, and his
friend, the critic of the Foreign Quarterly, therefore,
have sanded their own bread and butte in throwing
dirt at us.

But the great end of international copyright is coming
about without the aid of legislation. The abuse
has been that American authors were thrown out of
the market by English works that were to be had for
nothing—(justice to the English author, of course, a
secondary consideration). But this abuse is losing
strength by surfeit. The publishers and periodical
agents are aghast, at this very moment, of the falling
off of interest in the most attractive publications. The
zest for novelty has been so pampered, that only the
first number or two, of anything new, sells well. And
not from any falling off in their character. The English
pictorial papers (for one example) have rather improved
in merit, but a publisher informed us a day or
two since that they do not now sell ten where they
sold a hundred a month or two ago. Such enterprises
used to begin small, and grow into favor gradually.
Now, the cornucopia of their prosperity is reversed—the
small end turned from the publisher.
Copyrighted American books, and American periodicals,
though dearer than reprints, sell much better,
and in our opinion the American public, in three
months more, will give a preference so decided to
home literature, and home periodicals, that, as far as
protection to our native authors is concerned, the international
copyright will be useless. The truth is,
that literature, to be permanently popular, must be
produced under the meridian of the country it is to
supply. Who will pretend that any periodical in this
country is edited with half the ability of the London
magazines and reviews? The leading intellects of
the age—men who in this country would be eminent
lawyers and politicians, devote themselves to magazine-writing
abroad, and, besides, they are a trained
class of professed authors, such as we have no idea of
in America. Our contributors are men who dash off
an article as by-play, and make no investment of
thought or money in it—and of course it can not compare
to the carefully-written and well-considered articles
of English weeklies and monthlies. But look at
the difference of circulation. See how periodicals
languish that are made up of the cream of these London
magazines, and see how Graham and Godey, Inman
of the Columbian, and ourselves, quadruple them
in vogue and prosperity! It was to be expected—it
is the most natural thing in the world—that America
should grow American, at last! What more natural
than that we should tire of having our thinking done
in London, our imaginations fed only with food that
is Londonish, and our matters of feeling illustrated
and described only by London associations, tropes,
and similitudes? This weariness of going to so distant
a well for better water, we do say, is to be relied
upon as a sign of the literary times. The country is
tired of being be-Britished. It wants its own indigenous
literature, and we think we should be safe tomorrow
in issuing a replevin upon law, politics, and
commerce, for the men of genius draughted for their
employ, during the want of a literary market. Give
up the blood horses harnessed into your dull drays,
oh, Wall street and Pearl! Unite your fetters of red
tape, and let loose your enslaved poets and novelties,
oh, Nassau and Pine! Discharge Halleck, oh, Astor;
and give up Wetmore, oh, crates of crockery! Lead
off with a new novel, Mr. Cooper, and let the public
give us a five years' benefit of their present disgust
with imported literature, to recover from the numbness
of inaction and discouragement. Give us five
years of the home tide of sympathy that is now setting
westward, and we will have an American literature
that will for ever prevent the public taste and patronage
from ebbing back again to England.

Things as they come.—We know of a matter we
mean to write about, somewhere between this and the
bottom of the next column—somewhere within this
half-cent's-worth, that is to say—(this page costs you
not quite half a cent, dear reader!)—but we must first
haul out two or three things that lie a-top of it in our
fact-drawer; facts being, as everybody knows, obstinate
as nails in a keg, when you want a particular one from
underneath.

We have whims (this lies a-top), about the face of
newspaper type. There are some most worthy and
able periodicals that we could not read our own obituary

in, without an effort—the type is so unexplainably
anti-pathetic. Every editor who turns over exchange
papers will know precisely what we mean. There is
no necessity for naming those which we should never
open if we had them in our pocket “forty days in the
wilderness,” but we can, without offence, name an opposite
example—the Picayune—which, from the
mere witchery of type, a man would like to take out
of the postoffice on his way to execution. The Boston
Transcript is another—(fact No. 2)—which we
fatuitously read, and should read, even if it were edited
by that broken mustard-spoon, the Portland Thersites.
The type is captivating—a kind of insinuating, piquant,
well-bred brevier, that catches the eye like a coquette
in a ball-room. And this, be it noted, spite of the
“burnt child's” prejudice, for the fair editress does
not always put on her gloves, before taking a tweak at
our immortality! And, apropos—there is an editor
“down south” who sympathises with this typical
weakness of ours—declaring in a late paper that the
reputation of our letters to the Intelligencer “was
entirely owing to the large type in which they were
printed.” And this we not only believe, but if we
ever get rich, we will “fork over the swindle” to our
deluded employers.

The reader will see that we are trying to apologise
for our dissipation in reading—newspapers being such
very loose mental company, and we, as news-writer,
having, no more business with the luxury of news
written, than a shoemaker with wearing the patent
leathers he makes for his gentlemen customers. But
we have read an article in the seductive type of the
Transcript which led us to philosophise a little touching
a point of contrast between Boston and New
York: and as we grew up in Boston, but were dug
up, and trimmed, and watered into flowering, in New
York, we claim to know both places well enough to
run a parallel with fairish fidelity.

The article we speak of was a letter, containing,
among other things, a touch-up of the Astor house;
but the Astor is so much the best hotel in the world,
that fault-finding, merited as it may be, will send nobody
from its door in search of a better. Without
alluding farther to the letter, let us jot down the speculation
it suggested.

New York is far more vicious than Boston, without
a doubt. But it is not much more vicious than it was,
when it was of Boston's size. We have often wished
to preach a sermon to the Bostonians from I Corinthians
iv. 7: “For who maketh thee to differ from
another? And what hast thou, that thou didst not
receive?” Up to the present time, the Puritan obedience
to authority, and the “power paramount” of
good principles, have never been sapped or shaken in
Boston. It is but one community, with one class of
leading prejudices, and worked by one familiar set of
moral, social, and political wires. The inhabitants
are nearly all Americans, all church-goers of some
sect or other, implicitly subject to general and time-honored
principles, and as controllable by mayor and
aldermen as an omnibus by passengers and driver.
Indeed, the municipal history of Boston for the last
twenty years, is a Utopian beau-ideal of efficiency and
order, which will never be repeated. The authoritative
break-up of the first formidable symptom of mobocracy
two years ago, for example—when bold mayor
Elliott quietly took the fire-engines from their turbulent
companies, and put them into the hands of a paid
fire-police—could never have been done in any other
city of this country; and ten years hence (Boston
continuing to increase and vitiate), a similar pluck at
the beard of mob license would be a dangerous experiment.

But look at New York in comparison. There are
at least a hundred thousand Irish in this city, twenty
thousand French, sixty thousand Germans, and a
miscellany of other nations, that probably leaves scarce
one fourth of the population (say a hundred thousand),
for indigenous and home-spirited New-Yorkers. One
quarter too, of the general population, is in a condition
that is scarce known in Boston—that of desperate extremity
of livelihood, and readiness to do anything for
the moment's relief, vicious, turbulent, or conspirative.
The municipal government of New York is, unfortunately,
in some measure, a political tool, and compelled
to shape its administration somewhat with a
view to politics. Harsh measures, used in Boston
upon the first germ or symptom of license, are reserved
in New York for such signal instances as are melodramatically
flagrant—such as can not be perverted,
by the party out of power, into a counter-current of
sympathy and resentment. What there is now remaining
of the Knickerbocker influence in New York, is the
degree in which New York can compare with Boston
—and this small remainder of the old Dutch character
is, as to power and check, about equal to what will be
left of Puritan character in Boston, when Boston, by
aid of railroads and inducements for foreign residence,
shall have four hundred thousand inhabitants. Look
at the difference in the observance of Sunday in the
two places! At least twenty thousand people cross
to Hoboken alone, to pass the sabbath in the fields—
foreigners, mostly, who have been in the habit of
making it a holyday at home. The Bostonians would
suppress the ferry, without the slightest hesitation!
There are four or five Sunday newspapers in New
York, and Boston will not support one. There are
German balls in various places in this city, on Sunday
evening; and oyster-shops, and bar-rooms, and the
drinking-places, in all directions in the suburbs, have
overflowing custom on that day. The government
of the city is, of course, in some degree, a reflex of
this large proportion of the sovereign voters, and when
public opinion countenances a degree of license, it is
next to impossible to bring in a city government that
can control it. We have not room to follow out this
comparison in detail—but we wished to outline it, as
a reply to the condemnations of New York (for the
sale of vicious publications, etc., etc.), made from
time to time, by our more virtuous brethren in the
north. We shall take another opportunity to enlarge
upon it.

We have received several truly delightful and gratifying
letters from eminent clergymen of different persuasions,
thanking us for the Sacred Numbers of the
Mirror Library, and sending us the choice poems
which they had severally laid aside, to add to another
collection. We had no idea there was so much beautiful
religious poetry in existence! This rich vein of
literature has been unworked and overlooked, and we
assure the religious world, confidently, that we are
doing a most important work in the collection of these
gems of piety and poetry in a cheap and accessible
form. “Songs for the Sabbath,” falls behind
none of them in interest, and will be a classic in religious
books, as long as religious literature exists.

We do not know whether we were particularly in a
mood to be pleased on the night of Simpson's benefit
at the Park, but several things pleased us more than
they seemed to please other people—the dancing, for
example, both of Korponay, and of Desjardins.
(Of the acting we do not speak, and by-the-way, we
may as well say, here, that the stage is so much better
kept in hand by the theatrical critic of the Albion
than we could possibly do it, that we generally shie
that part of criticism, from a sort of consciousness
that it will be done for the public by abler hands. We

love good criticism, and we love “honor to whom
honor is due.”) We did not see Korpony at his
début at Palmo's—but a friend pronounced his dancing
a failure. As an attempt at anything in Vestris's
line, it certainly was a failure. But that is not the
dish to which the well-made Pole invites us. He is,
among dancers, what olives are at a feast—“bad
pickles” to the vulgar, but artful appetisers to the
refined. Korponay seemed to us like a symmetrical
and dashing nobleman, doing gracefully a difficult and
grotesque dance for the amusement and admiration of
a court—leaning as far away as possible from the airs
of a professed dancer, and intent only on showing the
superb proportion of his figure and the subtle command
over his limbs. His face expressed exactly this
role of performance. It was full of mock solemnity
and high-bred assurance. He seemed to us exactly
the sort of noble masquer that, at a Venetian festival
of old time, would have “topped the jaunty part,” and
carried away the flower, the ladies' favor.

But the untrumpeted deservings of Monsieur Korponay
are less surprising than the want of appreciation
of Mademoiselle Desjardins. We never saw her
before, though she has been dancing in town for some
time, and, considering how easily most any hook and
line of public amusement catches us, it is very plain
that the bait has not been skilfully angled. In the
first place, as to qualifications, we never have seen, in
all our travels from Niagara to the Black sea (the two
poles of our “inky orbit”), so well-bridged an instep,
and so Dianesque a pair of serviceable ankles. She
should have stood to John of Bologna for his poised
Mercury! There is not a woman's heart better
mounted, we venture to say, between Ontario and the
Euxine. And she uses these communicators with
earth deftly and Ariel-wise! We only saw her in the
Polacca, which is a kind of attitudinizing dance, and
possibly, better suited to her abilities than a more difficult
pas. But she walked and acted it with spirit
and grace enough to be charming, and though she is
not to be named with Ellsler, she is enough of a danseuse,
in Ellsler's absence, to give one's eyes their
night's rations very satisfactorily. Underrated she is!

We see, by one of the careful and elaborate reports
of the Republic, that the Mercantile Library Association
have had a report from a despair-committee, on
the subject of the decline of lectures. Eloquence
don't pay for the candle, it seems. This excellent
association, however, shrinks the wrong way from the
plague they have had with it. The taste for eloquence
is no more dead or torpid in New York than the love
of war or the relish for lions. While people have
brains and hearts they will love a true orator. But
they are tired (and reasonably enough) of the bald and
ungarnished style in which oratory is served up to
them. To go moping into the dark and silent Tabernacle—the
gas economized till the rise of the orator,
and a deathly and gloomy silence maintained for an
hour (more or less) before the commencement of the
lecture—to have the orator's first opening addressed
to chilled, oppressed, and unelevated minds, and all
this in a house of such structure, that unless seated
clear of the pent-house galleries, the hearer loses
everything but the emphatic words in a sentence—to
sit an hour amid these disadvantages, and then hear a
chance speaker, for whom they are not prepared by
any previous information except the name of his subject—this,
we say, is indeed “lenten entertainment.”
It is making of eloquence what the ascetic makes of
religion—a dry crust instead of a relishing loaf. No,
no! Religion should be adorned with its proper and
consistent graces, as woman should be beautifully
attired; and eloquence has its natural ornaments and
accompaniments as well. See how eloquence was
made a pleasure in the gardens of the academy of
Athens! Instead of treating our orators as we do the
fountain in the Park (giving them a broad margin of
bare ground), we should surround their oratory with
tributary ornament. The audiences now, at lectures,
are that passionless and abstract portion of the community
that can stand anything in the shape of an intellectual
bore—the Grahamites of amusement. But
give us orators on popular subjects, at Palmo's, with
dress-circle, bright lights, opera-music, scenery, and
interludes for conversation and change of place, and
eloquence, from being a jewel dulled with the dirt of a
mine, will be a gem in the fit setting of a sparkling
tiara. This would be, beside, a kind of premium
upon eloquence, that would foster it into a national
excellence. There are men at the bar, in the press,
and in business, who have the “volcano of burning
words” within them, and would make eloquence a
study, were it a source of renown and profit. What
say to a new niche for oratory, oh, amiable public!
Let us get a new screw upon public feeling, to use
with effect when we have patriotism to arouse, or
abuses to overthrow—passions to awake for good purposes.
Let us have a power at the public ear that will
be a check-balance to newspapers, that have a monopoly
of the public eye. Let music, oratory, and painting,
combine in a tripod to support each other—a fine
orchestra, a glowing oration, and beautiful scenery—
and we shall have public amusement in which the
serious classes will join with the gay, and in which
instruction shall be dressed, as it always may be, and
should be, with captivating flowers.

And while we have this thread in our loom, let us
express the delight with which we listened, not long
since, to oratory in a silk gown—an oration on CONTEMPT,
that was linked naturally enough to a text and
a pulpit, but which would have been a noble piece of
intellectual oratory in a public hall or theatre. The
orator was Rev. Henry Giles, and the sermon was
delivered in a place that is used to eloquence—the
pulpit of Mr. Dewey. There were passages in this
discourse that were worked up, both in fervor of language
and concentrated fire of delivery, to a pitch
that we should call truly Demosthenian. Mr. Giles
is a natural orator—a man of expanded generalizing
powers. It is a treat to hear him, such as would not
be second in interest to any dramatic entertainment,
and properly combined with other things as agreeable
to the taste, there would be an attraction in such oratory
that would draw better than a play. We really
wish that some “manager” would undertake the getting
up of the scenery and musical accessories to oratory,
and let secular eloquence take leave of the pulpit
where it does not properly belong, and come into
a field more natural to its aims and uses.

We had a June May, and a May June, and the brick
world of Manhattan has not, as yet, become too hot to
hold us. This is to be our first experiment at passing
the entire summer in the city, and we had laid up
a few alleviations which have as yet kept the shelf,
with our white hat, uncalled for by any great rise in
the thermometer. There is no knowing, however,
when we shall hear from Texas and the warm “girdle
round the earth” (the equator—no reference to
English dominion), and our advice to the stayers in
town may be called for by a south wind before it is
fairly printed. First—our substitute for a private yacht.
Not having twenty thousand dollars to defray our
aquatic tendencies—having, on the contrary, an occasional
spare shilling—we take our moonlight trip on
the river—dividing the cool breezes, twixt shore and
shore—in the Jersey ferry-boat. Smile those who have

private yachts! We know no pleasanter trip, after
the dusk of the evening, than to stroll down to the
ferry, haul a bench to the bow of the ferry-boat,
and “open up” the evening breeze for two miles and
back, for a shilling! After eight o'clock, there are,
on an average, ten people in the boat, and you have
the cool shoulder under the railing as nearly as possible
to yourself. The long line of lamps on either
shore makes a gold flounce to the “starry skirt of
heaven”—the air is as pure as the rich man has it in
his grounds, and all the money in the world could not
mend the outside of your head, as far as the horizon.
(And the horizon, at such place and hour, becomes a
substitute for the small hoop you have stepped out of.)
No man is richer than we, or could be better off—till
we reach the Jersey shore—and we are as rich going
back. Try this, of a hot evening, all who prefer
coolness and have a mind that is good company.

Then, there is our substitute for an airing. There
is a succession of coaches, lined with red velvet, that,
in the slope of the afternoon, ply, nearly empty, the
whole length of Broadway—two or three miles, at an
easy pace, for sixpence. We have had vehicles, or
friends who had vehicles, in most times and places
that we remember, and we crave our ride after dinner.
We need to get away from walls and ceiling stuck
over with cares and brain-work, and to be amused
without effort—particularly without the effort of walking
or talking. So—

we step out from our side street to the brink of Broadway,
and presto, like magic, up drives an empty coach
with two horses, red velvet lining, and windows open;
and by an adroit slackening of the tendons of his left
leg, the driver opens the door to us. With the leisurely
pace suited to the hour and its besoin, our carriage
rolls up Broadway, giving us a sliding panorama
of such charms as are peculiar to the afternoon of the
great thoroughfare (quite the best part of the day, for
a spectator merely). Every bonnet we see wipes off a
care from our mental slate, and every nudge to our
curiosity shoves up our spirits a peg. Easily and
uncrowded, we are set down for our sixpence at
“Fourteenth street,” and turning our face once more
toward Texas, we take the next velvet-lined vehicle
bound down. The main difference betwixt us and
the rich man, for that hour, is, that he rides in a
green lane, and we in Broadway—he sees green leaves
and we pretty women—he pays much and we pay
little. The question of envy, therefore, depends upon
which of these categories you honestly prefer. While
Providence furnishes the spare shilling, we, at any
rate, will not complain. Such of our friends as are
prepared to condole with us for our summer among
the bricks, will please credit us with the two foregoing
alleviations.

The postoffice irregularities of which we have so
often complained, have drawn from one of our good-natured
subscribers, a lament in poetry. We wish all
our friends would take it as kindly, but give voice to
it as expressively:—

We very seldom buy a volume of new poetry, but
the portrait on the first leaf of Mrs. Butler's book, a
portrait by the admirable and spiritualizing pencil of
Sully, and engraved by the as admirable and spiritualizing
burin of Cheney, was worth quite the price of the
volume. We have since read the poetry. The picture
bears a slight resemblance to the poetess, Mrs.
Norton, and the poetry is very like Mrs. Norton's in
its intention. But both in features and verse, Mrs.
Butler is very far that glorious woman's inferior. We
have been vexed to see how narrow an escape Mrs.
Butler has had, of being a fine poetess, however—how
easily with a little consistent labor, and some little
unity of sentiment and purpose, she might have filled
out the penumbra which provokingly shows what she
might have been—but for the eclipse of caprice or
carelessness. We have struck a word in this last
sentence which seems to us to be the master-chord
of all her poetry—caprice! She begins nobly and
goes evenly and beautifully half through her strain,
and then falters and winds weakly or inconsequently
off. We could quote passages from this book as fine
as anything of Mrs. Norton's, but there is no one finished
poem in it worth reprinting. In all this, we
are looking at it with the world's eye. To a poet,
who judges of a fragment, as the connoisseur knows
the statue of Hercules, by the foot, this volume is full
of genius. There is a massy fulness in the use of
epithets and figures that shows a Sapphic prodigality
of fervor and impulse, and there is, moreover, a masculine
strength of passionateness in the moulding and
flinging off of emotion, that, well carried out, would
have swept the public heart like a whirlwind. We had
marked many passages of Mrs. Butler's book for extract,
but on looking at them again, we find the best
and most creditable blemished with flaws, and, with
strong admiration for what the authoress might have
been, we lay the book aside.

Our readers will remember a very clever letter,
written to us by an anonymous lady who wished to
conjure a new bonnet and dress out of her inkstand.
The inveiglement upon ourselves (to induce us to be
her banker), was so adroit and fanciful that we suspected
the writer of being no novice at rhetorical trap
—one, indeed, of the numerous sisterhood who, denied
the concentrated developments of maternity, scatter
their burthensome ammunition of contrivance and resource
upon periodical literature. We “gave in,”
however—walking willingly into the lady's noose—on
a condition, that she should wear a rose recognisably
in Broadway the day she first sported the balzarine
and Neapolitan, and afterward send us a sketch of
herself and her cousin. The “sketch” we have received,
and when we have seen the rose we shall not
hesitate to acknowledge the debt. In the following
parts of the letter which accompanied the sketch, the
reader will see that the authoress feels (or feigns marvellously
well) some resentment at our suspicions as
to her age and quality:—

“Have you never heard, my de—(pardon! I fear it
is a habit of mine to write too `honeyedly')—but have
you not heard that `suspicion is a heavy armor, which,
with its own weight impedes more than it protects.'
Suspicion is most assuredly a beggarly virtue. It

may, now and then, prevent you from being `taken in,'
but it nips you in the costs most numercifully. Oh!
sharpsightedness is the most extravagantly dear whistle
that poor humans ever purchased! That you should
suspect me too, when I was opening my heart away
down to the core. How could you? `Inveigle!' no
inveigling about it! I want a bonnet and dress, and
said so, frankly and honestly. And I never wrote a
line for Graham in my life, no! nor for Godey either.
As for le couleur des bas, your keen-eyed hawk pounced
on less than a phantom there. From the day that I
stood two mortal hours with my finger poked into my
eye, and a fool's-cap on my head, because I persisted
in spelling `b-a-g, baker,' to the notable morning of
christening my cousin by her profession, I have been
voted innocent of all leaning toward the uncelestial.
Indeed it is more than suspected by my friend (cousin
`Bel' excepted) that I affect dame Nature's carpet,
rather than her canopy. Maybe I am `some varlet
of a man scribbler'—Oh! you are such a Yankee at
guessing! `Old!' ah, that is the unkindest cut of all!
You an editor, and the son of an editor, and not know
that `old maids' are a class extinct at the present day,
save in the sewing societies, etc., of some western village,
subject only to the exploring expeditions of the indefatigable
`Mary Clavers!' Have you never heard
of five-and-twenty's being a turning point, and ken ye
not its meaning? Why, faire maydens then reverse
the hour-glass of old gray-beard; and, one by one,
drop back the golden sands that he has scattered, till,
in five years, they are twenty again. Of course, then,
I must be `under twenty-five;' but, as a punishment
for your lack of gallantry, you shall not know whether
the sands are dropping in or out of my glass. One
thing, however, is indisputable: I am not `sharp,' my
face has not a single sharp feature, nor my temper (it
is I, who know, that say it), a sharp corner, nor my
voice a sharp tone. So much in self-justification, and
now to the little package which you hold in the other
hand.

“I send my sketch in advance, because I am afraid
cousin 'Bel' and I might not interest you and the public
so much as we do ourselves; and then how are we
to `consider you paid.' In truth, I can not write
clever things. 'Bel' might, but she never tries. Sometimes
she plans for me; but, somehow, I never can
find the right words for her thoughts. They come into
my head like fixed-up visiters, and `play tea-party'
with their baby neighbors, until I am almost as much
puzzled by their strange performances as the old
woman of the nursery rhyme, who was obliged to call
on her `little dog at home' to establish her identity.
No, no! I can not write clever things, and particularly
on the subject to which I am restricted; but if it is
the true sketch that you would have for the sake of
the information, why here it is. You will perceive
that I have been very particular to tell you all.

“Pray, do you allow us carte blanche as far as the hat
and dress are concerned? You had better not, for
'Bel' never limits herself. How soon may we have
them? The summer is advancing rapidly, and my
old muslin and straw are unco' shabby. Yours with
all due gratitude, “Fanny Forester.”

Whoever our fair correspondent may be, old or
young, naive or crafty, we can tell her that talent like
hers need never want a market. We commend her,
thus in print, to those princes of literary paymasters,
Graham and Godey, with our assurance that no more
entertaining pen strides a vowel in this country. The
sketch of “The Counsins,” which we shall give hereafter,
has a twixt-tear-and-smile-fulness which shows
the writer's heart to be as young as a school-girl's
satchel, whatever kind of wig she wears, and whatever
the number of her spectacles. And she will be as
young forty years hence—for genius will be a child,
eternity through, in Heaven. If, by chance, the lady
is a sub-twenty-fivity, she is a star rising, and we should
like to visit her before she culminates.

The rest of what we have to say.—There is a
circulation that beats newspapers—beats them particularly
in this—the Tuesday's paper overtakes the Monday's,
but the lie of Monday is never overtaken by the
truth of Tuesday. Some time since a sketch appeared
in the Mirror, written by a correspondent, which was
seized upon immediately by some of the busy-bodies of
society, as an intentional attack upon one of the first
families in this city. A week or two after its publication,
a friend informed us of the rumor, and we read the
sketch over again to see what was objectionable in it.
With the exception of a correction made by the proof-reader,
and one accidental circumstance, invented by
the writer to round a sentence, there was nothing in
it that could possibly apply to the family in question,
and we were amazed at the interpretation put upon it.
Subsequent knowledge of the writer and her object
has completely removed from our mind, and that of
the family alluded to, all shadow of suspicion that any
particular person or persons were in her mind while
writing it. The story has again come round to us,
however, and in so bold a shape that we think it worth
while to nail it again with a denial. There never has
been in the Mirror, and there never will be, any offensive
allusion to individuals in private life. Descriptive
writers constantly describe classes, and, if they describe
them well, they will apply as the essays in the Spectator
do, to hundreds of persons. The amiable Miss
Sedgwick, utterly incapable of an intentional wound
to the feelings of any one, has lived in constant hot
water, from the offence taken at the supposed personalities
of her descriptions. It is very easy for a malicious
person to take any sketch of character, and find
for it a most plausible original. But there should be a
watch kept for those who first name these discoveries—
the first finders of the key to a mischievous allusion.
The first time you hear a malicious story, MARK THE
TELLER OF IT—for ten to one, in that person, male or
female, lies the whole malice of the invention and application.
Such people do not work in the dark,
however. Mischief-making is a most unprofitable
trade, and we trust that, in the future school of American
morals, the certain infamy of being the first teller
of a malicious tale, will be a predominant feature. It
can easily be made so, by “keeping the subject before
the people.”

One of the most curious features of New York is
the gradual formation of a Paternoster Row—or
the making of Ann street to correspond with that
famous book-mine and fame-quarry of London. Our
enterprising and thirfty friends and neighbors, Burgess,
Stringer, & Co., are the “Longmans” of this
publishing Row, and truly, the activity of their sales,
and the crowds leaning continually over their counter,
give a new aspect to the hitherto contemplative current
of merchandise in literature. Their central and spacious
shop on the corner of Broadway, is a thronged
book-market, as vigorously tended and customered as
the sales of pork and grain. They have lately added
to their establishment two stores intervening between
them and us, and, with the office of our friends of the
“New World” farther down the street, and several
intermediate publishing and forwarding offices, we of
the Mirror are in the midst of a formidable literary
mart, that seems destined to concentrate the book-trade,
and make, of Ann street, as we said just now, a
Paternoster Row. The Turks (who, by the way,
have many other sensible notion, besides washing
themselves instead of their shirts), devote each differ

ent lane of their grand bazar to a single commodity
—no shoemakers to be found out of Shoemaker-lane,
and no books out of Book-alley. The convenience
of this arrangement, to the public, is very great, and
it would be, in this city, a prodigious saving of labor,
in cartage and traffic, to the booksellers themselves.
We have a faint hope of seducing over, to our Row,
the agreeable clique of our friend Porter of the
“Spirit,” and we hope Inman of the Columbian will
follow after (to save rent), and in this way, we shall
have a morning lounge in Ann street for the beaux
esprits, that will enable us to combine into a literary
social order and have some fun and more weight.
Nothing like combination, oh, fellow-pensmen! Why
shou'd we not have a head, and wag it, like the chamber
of commerce and the powerful presbytery? For
a class that keeps the key of the city's to-morrow, the
press in New York is as strangely unorganized and
segregate a body as anarchy of public opinion could
possibly desire. But we are trenching here on something
we have in petto, to write upon more gravely
hereafter.

We seldom read a novel. We can not afford the
sympathy, even when we have the time. But, somewhat
liquefied on a warm afternoon of last week, our
resolution would not hold, and we took up “The
Rose of Thistle Island,” a Swedish novel by Emilie
Carlen, just published by Winchester. The story
took hold of us immediately, and we read the book
through before going to bed, charmed with its earnest
and graphic truth of narration and character, and particularly
with the entire fusion of the style, betraying
no thumb-spot from the dictionary-cover, and no
smack of haste or clumsiness in the transfer. It reads
like a book original in English, and that, to our professional
superfinery of noun and pronoun, is no small
difference from ordinary translations.

The Remainder.—One of the greatest pleasures
of living in our free country, is the unceasing satisfaction
one feels at not having died last week—fortunately
surviving to put down one more lie that, if you
had been dead, would be as durable as your tomb-stone.
Another peculiarity of our country—good or
bad as you chance to feel about it—is the necessity to
talk a great deal about yourself, if you would keep
up a lively popularity. With these two patriotic
promptings, let us say a word of a trip we made lately
to Albany.

It is not perhaps generally known that Albany was
our birthplace. We were born once before, it is true,
in Portland, somewhere about half a life ago—a
“man-child.” But in Albany, in 1827, we first opened
our eyes, as an adult lion. Up to that period we
had been under tutors, and had known only boy-friends.
By a fortunate chance we suddenly acquired
the friendship of a man of great talent and accomplishment,
and on a visit to this, our first man-friend
at Albany, we stood, for the first time, clear of the
imprisoning chalk-lines of boyhood. Those who have
“hived the honey” of their summers of the heart,
know well how intoxicatingly sweet was the first garden
of life in which they walked as men. Still a child
at home, and still a college-boy at New Haven, we
were, at Albany, a man who had written a book, and as
the companion and guest of our fashionable and popular
friend,[3] we saw beauty enough, and received kind
ness enough, to have whipped a less leathery brain into
syllabub. The loveliness of the belles of Albany at
that time, and the brilliancy of its society, are perpetnated
in a remembrance that will become a tradition;
and we have never since seen, in any country or society
of the world, an equal proportion of elegant men
and beautiful and accomplished women. It was so
acknowledged over the whole country. The regency
of fashion, male and female, was confessedly at Albany.
New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore,
were provinces to this castle of belle-dom! We have
an object in showing what Albany was, at the time
we were in the habit of visiting it, and how inevitably,
from a combination of circumstances, it became and
has remained, to us, a paradise of enchanting associations.
There is no spot in this country which we remember
with equal pleasure. It was the first leaf
turned over in our book of manhood.

We went to Albany with these memories upon us,
a week or more ago, to lecture. We spent the morning
in finding old friends and reviving old associations,
and in the evening we had an audience much larger
than we looked for, and as brilliant as hope born of
such memories could have prefigured it; and we returned
to the city the morning after, gratified and delighted.
But (and here comes the matter in hand)
there seems to have been a gentleman in Albany who
was unwilling we should be delighted. We have not
seen the article he wrote, but, as condensed in another
paper, it goes to show that the reasons why we were
unsuccessful at Albany were, first, that we have been
in the habit of abusing its Dutch aristocracy, and
second, that two years ago we “insulted a lady there
and refused a challenge from her friend!” Now here
are four items of absolute news to us: 1, that we did
not succeed—2, that we ever insulted a lady anywhere—3,
that we ever declined any fight that was
ever proposed to us—4, that we ever abused the
Dutch at Albany.

On the fourth count of the indictment, alone, a
friend has thrown a little light. We did once, inadvertently,
use an adjective, in a way which has been
remembered fifteen years! We said of the swine in
the streets of Albany (in some trifling article for a
newspaper), that they were a nuisance “more Dutch
than decent.” The alliteration seduced us somewhat,
but there was provocation as well—for, the night

before writing it, strolling home from a party in Albany,
we had been brought from the seventh heaven
to the sidewalk, tripped up by a pig! Now, to us,
the pig was Dutch. We had lived only in New England,
where this animal, from some prejudice against
his habits, has not the freedom of the city. Visiting
two Dutch cities, New York and Albany, we found
the pig master of the pavé, and the offending adjective,
lubricated by our disaster, slipped into its place
with inevitable facility. We have heard from time to
time, of this perversion of the word Dutch, as a thing
remembered against us. We had hoped that the
great fire in Wall street, the death of Harrison, the
Miller-prophecy, and the other events of the last fifteen
years, would have wiped that small adjective out.
We do not know why it should outlive the poets who
have written and been forgotten in that time—the
steamboats that have been built and used up—the
politicians who have flourished and fallen—the comets
that have glittered and gone—the newspapers that
have started and stopped. The secret of that little
adjective's imperishableness is worth analyzing—
especially by poets and the patentees of “asbestos
safes.” We wish we could stumble upon as long-lived
a conjunction!

Seriously, we are annoyed and hurt at the discovery
of a hostility that could make itself heard, in a
place we owe so much to for past happiness. We
beg the Albanians to forgive us for the unintentional
offence, and to take us and our Mirror into that favor
of which we have always been ambitious.

The spot where all the winds of heaven turn the
corner—the coolest and most enjoyable spot in the
hottest and least enjoyable summer's day—is the outside
bastion of Castle Garden. We made our way
there a few days ago, when the streets were fairly in
a swoon with the breathless heat, and it was as cool
and breezy, outside the round castle, as a hill-top on
a May morning. For children—for happy idlers with
a book—for strangers who wish to study the delicious
panorama of the bay—there is no place comparable
to the embrasures, parapets, and terraces of Castle
Garden.

Two or three little matters.—There is no
struggling against it—we have a need to pass the summer
in some place that God made. We have argued
the instinct down—every morning since May-day—
while shaving. It is as cool in the city as in the
country, we believe. We see as many trees, from
our window (living opposite St. Paul's churchyard), and as much grass, as we could take in at a glance.
The air we breathe, outside the embrasures of Castle
Garden, every afternoon, and on board the Hoboken
and Jersey boats, every warm evening, are entire recompenses
to the lungs for the day's dust and stony
heat. And then God intends that somebody shall live
in the city in summer-time, and why not we? By
the time this argument is over, our chin and our rebellious
spirit are both smoothed down. Breakfast is
ready—as cool fruit, as delicious butter under the ice,
and as charming a vis-à-vis over the white cloth and
coffee-tray as we should have in the country. We
go to work after breakfast with passable content. The
city cries, and the city wheels, the clang of the charcoal
cart and the importunities of printer's imp—all
blend in the passages of our outer ear as unconsciously
and fitly as brook-noises and breeze-doings. We are
well enough till two. An hour to dinner—passed in
varnished boots and out-doors-inesses—somewhat a
weary hour, we must say, with a subdued longing for
some earth to walk upon. Dinner—pretty well!
Discontent and sorrow dwell in a man's throat, and go
abroad while it is watered and swept. The hour after
dinner has its little resignations also—coffee, music,
and the “angel-visit” from the nursery. Five o'clock
comes round, and with it nature's demand for a pair
of horses. (Alas! why are we not centaurs, to have
a pair of horses when we marry?) We get into an
omnibus, and as we get toward the porcelain end of
the city, our porcelain friends pass us in their carriages,
bound out where the earth breathes and the
grass grows. An irresistible discontent overwhelms
us! The paved hand of the city spreads out beneath
us, holding down the grass and shutting off the salutary
earth-pores, and we pine for balm and moisture!
The over-worked mind offers no asylum of thought.
It is the out-door time of day. Nature calls us to
her bared bosom, and there is a floor of impenetrable
stone between us and her! At the end of the omnibus-line
we turn and go back, and resume our paved
and walled-up existence, and all the logic of philosophy,
aided by icecreams and bands of music, would
fail to convince us, that night, that we are not victims
and wretches. For Heaven's sake, some kind old
man give us an acre off the pavement, and money
enough to go and lie on the outside of it of summer
afternoons!

Let us out of this great stone oven! The city is
intolerable! Oh, from these heated bricks and stones,
what moistureless, what wilted, what fainting air comes
to the nostrils! The two river-breezes doing their best
to meet across the island, swoon in Broadway. The
pores gasp, the muscles droop, the mind is blank and
nerveless. Let us out somewhere!

We had such a fever upon us as is expressed above,
when a friend offered to drive us to Rockaway. With
a mental repetition of the affecting prayer of the poor
woman in the ballad,

we crept into his wagon, and bowled away silently on
the road to Jamaica. It was a hot evening, but the
smell of the earth, and the woods, and the dairy-farms,
roused our drooping petals a little. Jamaica lies
somewhat in the island's lap, however, and it was not
till we began to sniff the salt of the open Atlantic, that
we were once more “capable creatures.” But what
a revivification as we approached Rockaway! The
sea-breeze nudged up our drooping eyebrows, gave a
pull to the loose halliards of our let-go smiles, crisped
our pores, and restored everything to its use and its activity—the
irrevocable starch in our shirt-collars alone
incapable of rally. Rockaway (we write only for
those who know nothing of it) is part of the snowy
edge of the Atlantic—St. George's hotel, at Portsmouth,
England, being all but next door to the Rockaway
pavilion. Of course there is nothing to take the
saline coolness out of the breeze (unless by chance
it has come across St. Helena or the Azores), and the
difference between the “entire quadruped” in the
way of a sea-breeze, and the mixtures they get in
some other sea-side places, is worth taking pains for.
But let us tell, in plain language, what sort of place
Rockaway is—for the benefit of those who are choosing
a month's resort for health or pleasure.

The pavilion of Rockaway is an immense hotel,
whose majestic portico forms the centre of a curving
beach of two or three miles in the bend, on the southern
shore of Long Island. From this portico, and
from the windows of the hotel, the delightful sight
and sound of the beating surf are visible and audible
—eternal company to eye and ear. The beach extends
for miles either way—a broad floor as smooth as
marble, and so hard that a carriage wheel scarce

leaves a print, and this, as a drive, we presume to be
the most delightful and enjoyable in the world. The
noiseless tread of the horse, and the unheard progress
of the wheels, the snowy surf along the edge of which
you keep your way, and the high exhilaration given
to the spirits by the sea-breeze, and the enlivening
beat of the waves upon the sand at your feet, form,
altogether, an enchantment to which, in the way of
out-door pleasure, we scarce know a parallel. And,
as a walk, the pure hard floor of that interminable
beach is, of course, equally delightful.

The arrangements for bathing are very well managed.
There are some twenty bathing-houses on the
beach, near the house, and, between the hours of ten
and twelve in the forenoon, the ocean-side is guarded
and kept exclusive to the ladies and their attendants.
An omnibus constantly plies between the bathing-houses
and the hotel, and to ladies and children, to
old men and young, the hour spent in the invigorating
surf is the pleasure of the day. All, alike, come back
elated and animated, and the society of the place
shows very markedly the fillip given by the sea-bathing
to health and spirits. Children, more especially,
who have drooped in the city, pluck up appetite and
vigor immediately at Rockaway.

As the favorite and regular resort of many of the
best families of the city, the society of the pavilion has
always been acknowledged to be of a more refined
quality and on a more agreeable footing than that of
any other watering-place. It is equally removed from
useless ceremony and undesirable freedom. Those
who wish to combine gayety with the pursuit of
health and the enjoyment of luxury, have facilities for
all these at Rockaway, in a degree as desirable as it is
unusual. The table is not surpassed by that of any
hotel even in the city, and this, in a watering-place, is
a peculiarity! Mr. Cranston, the keeper of the house,
thoroughly understands his business.

As to facilities for getting to Rockaway, the railroad
from Brooklyn ferry takes you to Jamaica in half an
hour; from Jamica, on the arrival of the cars, starts
regularly a mammoth omnibus with six horses, and
other roomy conveyances are supplied if necessary,
which bring you to Rockaway in an hour. All delays
included, it is about two hours from the city.

Certain coolness and certainly-improved health thrown
into the scale, the desirableness of Rockaway, as a
summer resort, far outweighs that of every other watering-place
in the country.

A late number of the Southern Literary Messenger
contains two poems of uncommon merit for the drift
of a periodical. One is by Mr. Gilmore Simms
(whose much-worked mine has now and then a very
golden streak of poetry), and the other is by H. B.
Hirst—a poem of fifty-seven stanzas on the subject of
Endymion. This latter is after Keats. It is very
highly studied, very carefully finished, and very airily
and spiritually conceived. Its faults are its conceits,
which are not always defensible—for instance, the one
in italics, in the following beautiful description of Diana
as she descended to Endymion:—

Now we know as well as anybody what the “round of
a period” is, and we have seen, here and there, a god
dess's knee, and we declare there is no manner or
shape of likeness that justifies the comparison! With
the exception of two or three of these lapses away
from nature, however, it is a beautiful poem—this
“Endymion”—and will read well in a volume. By
the way, let us wonder whether the sweet poetess by
the same name is a sister of Mr. Hirst.

We consider Nibbo's garden one of the chief
“broideries” upon our woof of probation in this dirty
planet, and if there are to be offsets for good things
enjoyed this side of Cocytus, we expect to pay for
Mitchell. Oh, thou pleasant Mitchell! And he to
grow fat under the exercise of such a wand of industrious
enchantment! What is the man made of, besides
brains!

We sat through the “Revolt of the Harem,” a
night or two ago, and saw all its funny sights, seriatim.
The ballet, as intended to be seen, was excellent—for
the time and material, indeed, quite wonderful. But
we had our little pleasures (not down in the bill), and
one of them was to see pretty Miss Taylor, the clever
opera-singer, figuring as an Odalisque danseuse! If
that pretty actress be not abducted, and sold to the
sultan within a year, we shall think less of the enterprise
of Salem privateers! She only wants to forget
that she is Miss Taylor, indeed, to dance uncommonly
well—the consciousness of her silk stockings being at
present something of a damper to the necessary abandon.
But, modesty and all, she is very charming in
this ballet, and one wonders what Mitchell will make
of her next! Korponay, too—the elegant Korponay
—figuring as an Abyssinian eunuch! That, truth to
say, had for us a dash of displeasure! He entered
into it with all his might, it is true, and played the
nigger with Jim Crow facility; but the part, for him,
was out of character, and we shall not be content till
he is dis-niggered by appearing once more in the role
of a gentleman. The bath-scene was well arranged,
though the prettiest girls were not in the water—(pray
why, Master Mitchell?) And the military evolutions
of the revolted ladies were very well done, and will be
better done—with a little more practice, and the mending
of that corporal's stocking with a hole in it. The
town seemed pleased, we thought.

We have not yet mentioned the premiére danseuse,
Mademoiselle Desjardins, who did very well in the
way of her vocation, but from whose feet have departed,
with the boots she wore, the exquisite symmetry
we admired at Simpson's benefit. Ah, ladies, you
should wear boots! Here were two feet in tightly-sandalled
shoes, looking like two tied-up parcels from
Beck's, which, a night or two before, in brodequins
bien faits, looked models of Arabian instep! Can
boots do that? We hereby excommunicate, from the
church of true love, all husbands, fathers, and guardians,
who shall rebel against the preference, by wife,
ward, or daughter, of Nunn's boots at $3 50, over
Middleton's slippers at ten shillings. The embellishment
is worth the difference!

We have received a very testy letter from some old
gentleman, requesting us to reform the gait of the
New York ladies. He manages to convey what peculiarity
it is that offends his eye, but he is mistaken as
to the stoop. The lady within stands straight enough!
If he knows this, and means covertly to attack the artificial
portion of the outline, we can tell him that he
rashly invades, not merely a caprice of fashion (which
in itself were formidable enough), but the most jealous
symbol and citadel of female domination! There are
thousands of ladies who would resign carriages and

satin without a sigh, but who would die by fire and
fagot rather than yield the right to mount on horseback
in the masculine riding habit! “Wearing the
breeches” is a worn-out figure of speech, but does
anybody in his senses believe that the usurpation has
not taken refuge in a new shape? Need we open our
correspondent's eyes any further? What bird is the
most pronounced and unequivocal type of martial and
masculine bravery? What bird is the farthest remove,
in shape, air, and habits, from his female partner?
What bird lives up systematically to woman's
ideal of a hero—a life of fighting and making love?
Draw the outline from the comb of a fighting-cock to
the feather-tip of his bustle, and you have the eidolon
of male carriage—and the dressmaker's ne plus ultra!
We warn off our correspondent!

The time will come, perhaps, when we shall be a
connoisseur in snuff-boxes, insects, or autographs—
but, meantime, we are curious in the cultivation of
the rarer kinds of friendship. The ingenious idea occurred
to us, some ten years ago, of turning the waste
overflow of our heart into some such special and
available irrigation, and the result we shall leave to be
published posthumously, under the title of Amiculture,
or a Treatise on Love-Waste. Our proper
channels of affection being first supplied to the point
of overflow, we have felt free to venture upon very
bold experiments with the remainder, and some of our
specimens, of course, are simply curiosities; but we
have them (friends) of every quality, form, and condition,
male and female, preserved with studious care
and industry—guardedly confining ourselves to only
one of a kind. Some of the humbler specimens are
of great beauty, but will show better preserved and
pressed in a posthumous amibarium. We can only
venture, in our lifetime, to give specimens of the
more ornamental varieties; and our object now is to
introduce a leaf of the species “callow dandy”—in
other words, to give you a letter from a very elegant
lad with a nascent mustache, a prized friend of ours,
now, for the first time, at Saratoga. He writes about
trifles, but in hot weather we (for one) like trifles best;
and as he writes, after all, with a dash of philosophy,
we have not thought it worth while to omit or alter.
Here is his letter, written in the vanishing legibility of
a once good school-hand:—

THE CABINET.

(“The Committee” trimming pencil in the Eastern-most
bathing-house on Rockaway beach. Enter the brigadier
with nostrils inflated.)

Brig.—Fmff! fmff! God bless the Atlantic ocean!
Fmff! “Salt sea” indeed! I never smelt a breeze
fresher. Fmff! fmff! fmff! You got the start of
me, my dear boy! (pulls his last high heel out of the
deep sand and sits down on the threshold.) What say
to a strip and dip before we come to business?

Com.—Fie!—general, fie! Look through your
fingers at the other end of the beach! It is the hour
of oceanic beatitude—the ladies bathing! The murmuring
waters will be purer for the interview. Bathe
we in the first wave after!

Brig.—How can you

Did you bring a towel, mi-boy?

Com.—Tut!—would you offend the south wind, that
proffers the same office so wooingly? Walk on the
beach, man, and let the sun peruse you, while you dry!

Brig.—So should I be more red, with a vengeance!
But I don't like this dry-salting, mi-boy! It's too
sticky! Ye gods! look at the foam upon that wave!
What is that like, my poet?

Com.—Like the unrolling of a bale of lace on a
broad counter! The “tenth wave” is the head clerk,
and the clams and soft crabs are the ladies shopping!
How I love the affinities of Art and Nature!

Brig.—Poh! Where's Nature's twine and brown
paper? Don't be transcendental!

Com.—How ignorant you are, not to know eel-grass
and devil's apron—Nature's twine and brown paper!
My dear general, were you ever introduced to the
Atlantic? Is this your first visit? Stand up in the
doorway!

(Brigadier rises and the surf bows to the ground.)

General Morris! the Atlantic ocean. Atlantic
ocean! General Morris. I am happy to bring two
such distinguished “swells” together. Though (apropos,
Mr. “Heaving Main!”) the general is a gay man!
Look out for your “pale Cynthia!” The moon is
not famed for her constancy!

Brig.—What are you mumbling there, mi-boy!
I wish, under the tender influence of these suggesting
waters, to express a wish that you would write some
poetry, or give us a new tale, or dash us off a play, or—

Com.—Or, in some other way make rubbish for
posterity! No, sir! There are no pack-horses in
Posthumousland, and, as much as will ride in a ghost's
knapsack, with his bread and cheese, is as much, in
quantity, as any man should write who has pity for his
pedestrian soul on its way to dooms-day! Why,
general, the TALES which I am about to publish (including
“Inklings,” “Loiterings” etc., etc.), will
make, of themselves, a most adult-looking octavo.
My POEMS and PLAYS have tonnage enough to carry,
at least, all the bulk necessary to a fame; my MISCELLANIES,
yet to be collected, will make a most sizeable
volume of slip-slop; PENCILLINGS is no pamphlet; and
Letters from under a Bridge, and other epistolary
production—do you see how beautifully the sand
immortalizes the industrious waves that write successively
their sparkling lines on the beach!

Brig.—Don't malign your “eternal fame, mi-boy!”

Com.—More eternal, I believe, than the love of the
impertinent Lothario in the sonnet:—

but how much more eternal it would be, if they would
make the genesis of a man's works like that of the
patriarchs—dateable from the first satisfactory off-shoot
of his manhood! Do you remember the expressive
genealogy of Shem?

12. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years and begat
Salah:

13. And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred
and three years and begat sons and daughters.

14. And Eber lived four and thirty years and begat Peleg:

15. And Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and
thirty years, and begat sons and daughters.

And so on, up to Abraham, whose father was seventy
years old when he was born. But don't you suppose
these boys did anything before they were thirty-odd?
Their history begins with their first creditable
production! Eber was nothing till he begat Peleg,
though, very likely, the critics of that time “preferred
very much his earlier productions.”

Brig.—And you think you could begin, now, with
your first Peleg and Salah?

Com.—You have said it. But, as I hinted before,
my posthumous knapsack is already full of rubbish,
and—a thought strikes me!

Brig.—“Call it out!”

Com.—I'll change my style and start a new reputation,
incog!

Brig.—Famous!

Com.—And sell some man the glory of it for an
annuity!

Brig.—Good!

Com.—(Thoughtfully)—The old countess of Desmond
shed her teeth three times.

Brig.—A precedent in nature.

Com.—(Firmly)—Soit! Done! So be it! Hang
me if I don't! You'll hear of a new author before
long—one that beats me hollow! Look me up a
purchaser, my dear brigadier! Literary fame furnished
at—say, three thousand dollars per annum!

Brig.—Mi-boy, the ladies have left the beach—I
wonder if the sea would condescend to us, now!

Com.—Peltry after roses and ivory!—I don't know!

Brig.—Talking of Esau—he should have lived in
cravat-time. Well-drest, your hirsute customers looks
not amiss! (No pun, you villain!) Stand back, my
unclad-boy! Here comes a wagon load of women!

Com.—Chambermaids and nurses; who, by the
way they flock to the beach in the male hours, must
either have eyes with a nictitating membrane, or a
modesty that is confined to what they hear. I wish to
heaven that all females were patricians—undesecrated
by low taste and servitude! It's like classifying owls
with angels because they are both feathered, to call
these rude creatures women! What's that scar on
your breast, brigadier?

Brig.—Slide down your “nictitating membrane,”
mi-boy, and don't be too observing! Here goes!
Hup! (The brigadier rushes into the surf, takes a
stitch through three frills of the island's shirt, and rises
like a curly-headed sun from the ocean.)

Com. (solus).—There he swims! God bless him
for a buoyant brigadier! How the waves tumble over
his plump shoulders, delighted to feel the place where
ride his epaulets and his popularity! Look out for
sharks, my dear general! They snuff a poet afar off!

Natural victims we are to them—on land or water!
Hear him laugh as he shakes the brine out of his
whiskers! Was ever such a laugh! His heart gives
that “ha! ha!” a fillip as it sets out! I must swim
off to him! Clear the beach, soft crab and sand-bird!
Morris and Willis must swim together!

Brig. (Sitting down to dry.)—This salting freshens
a man, and this wetting makes him dry. Oh for a
drink and the asp of Cleopatra—a cobbler and a viper!
Shake yourself, mi-boy!

Com.—Suppose we roll in the sand and take a
wrestle, like the athletæ of old—eh? How do you
propose to get the sand and gravel out from your
doigts du pied, general?

Brig.—“Gravelled,” we are, mi-boy, but not “for
lack of matter!” Let's dress first, and then go down
and rinse our feet with the aid of the moon's lover—
lacking a servant to bring a pail! Are you dry?

Com.—Inner and outer man—very! What's this—
dropped out of your pocket!

Brig.—A song[1] that I wrote for Brown to set to
music. Shall I read it to you?

(Brigadier reads with his hand on his breast.)

Com.—True and smooth as a locomotive on a “T”
rail! Is it sold and set?

Brig.—Beautifully set to music by Brown, and sold
to Atwill, who will publish it immediately.

Com.—It's a delicious song, my happy troubadour,
and destined to tumble over bright lips enough to make
a sunset. That we should so envy the things we
make! My kingdom for a comb! I shall never get
the salt out of my hair—I'm

If you want a curl to keep, now's your time!

Brig.—Willis?

Com.—My lord?

Brig.—I hear you were voted in to the “Light
Guard” last week.

Com.—Yes, sir, an honorary private! I feel the
compliment, for they are a set of tip-top capables, joyous
and gentlemanly—but, my dear martinet, what the
devil do they want of a man's dura mater?

Brig.—A man's what?

Com.—The weary membrane of an author's brain.

Brig.—They want it, you say?

Com.—With the official announcement came an
order to equip myself according to directions, and
“deposite my fatigue-jacket” in the armory of the
corps! What fatigue-jacket have I, but the jacket of
my brain?

Brig.—True! Pick up your boots and come
along?

(Exit the brigadier barefoot, and the cabinet adjourns.)

Half an hour later—room No. 300, Rockaway Pavilion.
Two sherry cobblers on the table, with two
straws, erect in the ice.)

Brig.—How like this great structure on the sand
must be, to a palace amid the ruins of Persepolis!

Com.—The palace of Chilminar with forty columns
and stairs for ten horses to go up abreast!—very like
indeed—especially the sand! Somewhat like, in
another respect, by the way—that the palaces of
Persepolis were the tombs of her kings, and Rockaway
is the place of summer repose for the indignant
aristocracy of Manhattan.

Brig.—True, as to the aristocracy, but why “indignant?”

Com.—That there can be fashion without them at
Saratoga (which there could not be once), and that
“aristocratic” and “fashionable” are two separate
estates, not at all necessary to be combined in one
individual. Rockaway is full, now, of the purest
porcelain—porcelain fathers, porcelain mothers, porcelain
daughters!

Brig.—Then why is not the society perfect at Rockaway?

Com.—Because the beaux go after the crockery at
Saratoga. The rush, the rowdydow, the flirtations,
and game suppers, are all at Saratoga! Aristocracy
likes to have the power of complaining of these things
as nuisances inseparable from its own attraction. Aristocracy
builds high walls, but it likes to have them
pertinaciously overleaped. The being let alone within
their high walls, as they are now at their exclusive
watering-places, was not set down in the plans of aristocratic
campaigns!

Brig.—But they are charming people here, mi-boy?

Com.—The best-bred and most agreeable people in
the world, but the others give a beau more for his
money. In all countries, but ours, people make acquaintances
for life. But the hinderances and obstacles
which are not minded at the beginning of a lifetime
acquaintance, are intolerable in an acquaintance for a
week (the length of most summer acquaintances with
us), and the floating beaux from the south, the west,
the Canadas, and the West Indies, go where they can
begin at the second chapter—omitting the tedious
preface and genealogical introduction.

Brig.—Rockaway is stupid, then.

Com.—Quiet, not stupid. The lack of beaux and
giddy times is only felt by the marriageable girls, and
there are a great many people in the world besides
marriageable girls. And upon this same “many
people,” will depend the prosperity of the Pavilion.
When it is known that it is a delightful place for
everything but flirting, it will be a centre for sober
people to radiate to, and a paradise for penserosos like
you and me, general—eh? I suppose Cranston would
as lief (liefer, indeed) that his rooms should be filled
with tame people as wild.

Brig.—How's your cobbler?

Com.—Fit to immortalize the straw that passes it!

Brig.—What birds are those, my Willis?

Com.—Shore birds that build in the sedge and feed
on molluscous animals—death on the soft crabs!
And, general, do you know that the male of this bird
(called the phalarope), is a most virtuous example to
our sex? What do you think he does?

Brig.—Feeds the little-uns?

Com.—Hatches them, half and half, with the she-bird,
and helps bring them up!

Brig.—Is the gender shown in the plumage?

Com.—No.

Brig.—So I thought. Your handsome peacock,
now, leaves it all to the hen. The domestic virtues
are their own reward—remarkably so! Is that the
dinner-bell?

Com.—Yes, it is that music!

I'll meet you below, my dear general! Adieu!

(Cabinet adjourns for the day.)

THE CABINET.

(Rockaway beach, Sunday evening. The brigadier and
committee seated on their boot-legs, after walking two
miles, barefoot, on the hard sand.)

Brig.—Boots are durance vile, mi-boy! How much
we lose in not keeping our feet open to female assiduities!
Fancy one of those apostolic washings—a
sweet woman kneeling before you, and, with her hair
breathing perfumes over your ankles, performing it as
an office of tenderness and hospitality! Can patent
leather be weighed against desuetude so melancholy!

Com.—I am satisfied that the tender pink in your
toe-nails was intended by nature to be admired, my
dear brigadier! And there is nature's remonstrance—
eloquent in a corn—against the airless confinement of
boot and stocking! Why is a poet like a sandal?

Brig.—Philosophize, my dear boy, don't quibble!

Com.—Because he's a soul kept under with a thong!

Brig.—Willis, I love the sea!

Com.—So sung Barry Cornwall, “the open sea.”
As if Pharaoh had not yet passed over! To me the
sea seems, on the contrary, for ever slamming down
trap-doors of surf, and carefully covering the “treasures
of the deep” with cold water. I never saw anything
less “open!”

Brig.—There goes the sun down! as red as—what
shall I compare it to?

Com.—A wafer, sealing up this 17th of August for
the doomsday postoffice. Happy they who have not
forgotten the P. S. of repentance!

Brig.—Ah, mi-boy! that pious infancy of yours!
It oozes through the after-crust of your manhood in
drops of poetry! Pity you are less of a saint than
you were at seventeen!

Com.—Less of a saint I am not, though more of a
sinner I am! All I had seen at seventeen was beauty
and goodness, and with an innate sense of beauty and
goodness, I worshipped the Maker, my youth through,
with a poet's adoration! The heart melts and drops
upon its knees within a man, at any sudden revelation
of unusual loveliness; and I have worshipped God,
and loved one of his angelic creatures, with the white
quivering lip of the same rush of blood inward. If to
look often and adoringly “through nature up to nature's
God” be devotion, I am still devout. No sunset,
no morning's beauty, no rich and sudden sight of
loveliness in scenery, goes by without the renewal of
that worship in my heart that was once religion. I
praise God daily. Worldling as I am, and hardly as I
dare claim any virtue as a Christian, there is that
within me which sin and folly never reached or tainted.
The unprompted and irresistible thoughts, upsprings
in my mind in any scene of beauty, would seem
prayers, and pure ones, to many an humble Christian.
Pardon me for reading to you this inner leaf, my dear
brigadier!

Brig.—Thank you, on the contrary, for its philosophy,
my dear boy! Saints and worldlings have more
feelings in common than the pulpit admits. That I
believe.

Com.—The chasm between them in this world
should be narrowed, for they have many sympathies.
The bigot makes the separation unnaturally wide.
Who is the one man mentioned in Scripture as
“loved” by the Savior? The “young ruler” who
could not give up his “great possessions” “to inherit
eternal life!” Is not this tender interest in one “out
of the fold,” a lesson—a most unheeded lesson, to the
strict sect? I talk feelingly of this, for I have an admiration
of goodness and purity that has never separated
itself from my love of beauty. I love a simple
and unobtrusive piety, and am drawn irresistibly
toward the possessor. Yet this better part of my
nature is excluded with the rest, when I am denied
Christian sympathy. Come out of dream-land,
brigadier, and observe the tender violet in that upper
cloud!

Brig.—I was thinking whether the wave that falls
upon the beach is to be congratulated or pitied—comparing
its arrival, that is to say, with its “swell” time
upon the sea.

Com.—Congratulated, I should say. The hoary
locks with which it approaches the beach, though
they are breakers ahead when seen from the sea, are
beautiful when seen from the shore—as the head,
whitened with the dreaded troubles of life, grows
more beautiful in the eyes of angels, as it is more
whitened and troubled, approaching heaven! But
what hypocrites these shore-birds are, with their
whitest plumes turned earthward! See that dark-backed
snipe on the beach, with his white breast and
belly!

Brig.—Rather what knowledge of mankind they
have—preferring to keep their darker side for the
more forgiving eye of Heaven!

Com.—True—the better reading! Do you like
snipe?

Brig.—With a pork shirt they are fairish—that is,
if you can't get woodcock. But, mi-boy, it isn't you
that need ever eat snipe!

Com.—As how?

Brig.—(Pulling out the Sunday Mercury and reading)—“Willis,
it is said, has profited $5,000 by the
sale of the last edition of `Pencillings by the Way.”'

Com.—The mischief he has!—for “has” read would
be pleased to. Perhaps the editor of the Mercury
will be kind enough to fork over the difference between
fact and fiction! By-the-way, I have read the
book, myself, for the first time in eight years, and I
have been both amazed and amused with the difference
between what I saw then, and what I know now! And
I am going to give the public the same amazement
and amusement, by writing for the Mirror a review of
“Pencillings” with my new eyes—showing the interesting
difference between first impressions and after
familiarity.

Brig.—They'll want to read “Pencillings” over
again, mi-boy!

Com.—For a hasty pudding it has held out surprisingly
already. The fifth edition, embellished with
engravings, is still selling well in England, and in the
most stagnant literary month of the year we have sold
two editions, as you know. I am inclined to fear that
I shall be less known by my careful writings than by
this unrevised book—written between fatigue and
sleep, by roadsides and in most unstudylike places,
and republished, in the Mirror edition, exactly as first
written! There is a daguerreotypity in literal first
impressions, my dear general, and a man would write
an interesting letter, the first moment after seeing the
Colosseum for the first time, though a description from
memory, a month after, would be very stupid. Did
you ever feel posthumous, brigadier?

Brig.—No. I never was dead.

Com.—Nor I, except “in trespasses and sins”—but
a letter I received to-day has given me a most posthumous
sensation. It was sent me to publish, by a
lady who has lived several years abroad, and has lately
revisited Saratoga. It will “rub my brass” as the
maids say, to publish the passage about myself (quoted
from the letter of a German baron), but it may make
somebodies buy “Pencillings” to know that it has
passed abroad into a vade-mecum for travellers. So,
down modesty and swell pocket! Who knows but
that the “Sunday Mercury,” that “lighted on the
heaven-kissing hill” of $5,000, may be a better
prophet than historian! Set your heels comfortably
into the sand, general, and listen to this letter. There
are some sweet lines at the close, written by the same
lady after visiting the home of the young poetess Davidson,
whose precocious genius and premature death
have been so feelingly written upon:—

“When you and I, my dear sir, met so pleasantly
some weeks since at Saratoga, I forgot to give you an
extract from a letter which I had received from Germany.
No one can be insensible to deserved praise
from a far land, and I know you will read with gratification
these few lines from a distinguished friend of
mine: `I remember with pleasure our visit to your
splendid frigate, the United States, in the bay of Naples.
We met Mr. N. P. Willis on board, and after
his cruise I met him again at Lady Darley's. He will
not remember me, but if you ever see him, tell him
that a person who has visited almost all the spots
described in his “Pencillings by the Way,” feels the
greatest pleasure in reading his book at least twice a
year. It accompanies him regularly from Dresden to
his estates in the spring, and back to the city in the
autumn.'

“Not having seen Saratoga for many years, I was
curious to perceive what changes time had made. Of
course, its outward condition is greatly improved, and
the remarkable change of all is the transition of the
fashion and gayety from Congress hall to the United
States hotel. It would be unwise to compare this
latter establishment with any other that we have seen
in Europe, inasmuch as the whole order of arrangement
is entirely different; but this must be conceded,
that for a fortnight, no place in the world offers more
amusement. One may remain months at Carlsbad,
Baden-Baden, &c., without fatigue, in consequence
of the entirely independent manner of living; but
Saratoga must be taken, to be enjoyed, in homeopathic
doses of the beforementioned fourteen days. It is
really extraordinary how well-ordered and conducted
is the United States hotel, when we remember the
crowds that dwell within its four walls and its colonies;
and assuredly the brothers[2] who bring about
this state of things, deserve great commendation.
Having been repeatedly told, since my return from a
long absence, that Saratoga had deteriorated, I confess
to having seen nothing of the sort. I had the
good fortune to meet some of the most remarkable
men of my country, and many of the fairest of its
daughters, and to enjoy their society. I hold that
Saratoga must be visited upon broad American principles—
no cliques (like will come to like)—but a gracious
word for all. At Carlsbad, and all other continental
watering-places, the government provides a
master of ceremonies, who introduces, regulates the
balls, &c. The voice of the people gives this position,
at the United States hotel, to a citizen of Baltimore,
and allow me to say, that those who look upon
him as a mere manager of balls, totally mistake his
character; for a kinder and better heart never beat
within a human breast than he possesses. Indeed, Baltimore
seems to have been singularly well represented
this year—the incomparable beauty of its women
eclipsing all, and the wit alone of one finished gentleman
of that town being sufficient to leaven a `mass
meeting.'

“I think the visits of clergymen to watering-places
a signal benefit, when they resemble the Rev. Dr.
Bethune, engaging in pleasing conversation with
young and old, whom he enlivened by his eloquence.
He never lost sight of the great aim of his existence—
their improvement. Ever surrounded by eager listeners,
he left them better, wiser. On the whole, I think
we must consider Saratoga as a great public good—a
neutral ground, where the south discovers that the
north is not a Mont Blanc, and the north perceives
that the south is not a Vesuvius!

“My last visit at Saratoga was to the late home of the
gifted Davidsons. Their brother kindly accompanied
me, and presented me to his bereaved father. It
seemed, as I lingered amidst their remains, a very home
of shadows[3] —a wondrous contrast to the surrounding
scenes. I considered myself quite fortunate in having
paid this visit, as Dr. Davidson leaves Saratoga
shortly, and the establishment will thereby be entirely
dismembered.

Brig.—Charming verses, and she must be a fresh
hearted and impressible woman who wrote them. Do
you remember the first thought of “Pencillings,”
mi-boy—the oysters at Sandy Welsh's, over which I
offered to send you abroad?

Com.—Theodore Fay, you, and I, supping together!

Brig.—You have a way of knowing opportunity
when you see it! I little dreamed of so long a lease
of you! Dear Theodore! how I should like to eat
that supper over again!

Com.—I am very glad it agreed with you (presuming
it is me and Theodore you want over again—not the
oysters!) They say Fay has grown fat, handsome
and diplomatic. When shall we have that sweet fellow
back among us?

Brig.—When they want the place for a green secretary,
who knows nothing of the court or court language.
As soon as a man has been long enough
attached to a legation to be presentable and useful,
they recall him! What is that other letter I brought
you?

Com.—From a lady at Fishkill, who is dazzled with
the upshoot of “Fanny Forester.” She thinks Fanny's
offhand piquancy is easy to do, and the letter
shows how much she is mistaken. I would fain say
an encouraging word, however, for she seems to have
the best of motives for wishing to be literary. Now,
is it kinder to discourage such beginners at once, or to
encourage them good-naturedly into a delusion?

Brig.—Always discourage, mi-boy, for if they have
genius, they will prosper

and if they have none, they are better stopped where
they are. How many heart-aching authoresses do we
know at this moment, who can write just well enough
to be wofully distressed with the reluctance of the
market! The only style saleable is the spicy but difficult
vein of bright Fanny Forester, and yet, to a
neophyte, that very woof seems the easiest woven!
A woman who is more intelligent than the people
around her, is very apt to believe that she might be
famous, and make money with her pen; and unless
she endeavors in this way to compensate herself for
the lack of belleship. Better raise flowers and sell
bouquets, dear Rosalie Beverly!

Com.—The gray lace of twilight's star-broidered
veil has fallen over the sea, brigadier. Let us paddle
back through the surf-edge to the bathing-houses, boot,
and reappear to a world (I don't think) disconsolate
without us.

THE CABINET.

(Shop-door, Ann street. The Brigadier and Committee
standing, sphinx-wise, outside.)

Brig.—The “devil” was here just now for “copy,”
my dear boy!

Com.—The devil here and no Fanny Forester!
We have given our readers a taste of this charming
incognito, brigadier, and now they'll not feast without
her! I wonder whether she's pretty?

Brig.—So would she be over-endowed. No, mi-boy!
I warrant that, with all her cleverness, she has
envied, many a time, the doll of the village!

Com.—A woman is, sometimes, wholly unadmired,
who would become enchanting by a change of her
surroundings. That playful wit of Fanny Forester's,
what-like shell soever it inhabits, would make her the
idol of a circle of appreciators—for its work is in her
face, somewhere! Do you remember George Sand's
description of one of her heroines? “Elle était jolie
par juxta-position. Heureuse, elle eût été ravissante.
Le bonheur est la poésie des femmes, comme la toilette
en est le fard. Si la joi d'un bal eût reflété ses
teints rosées sur ce visage pâle, si les douceurs d'une
vie élégante eussent rempli, eussent vermillioné ses
joues dejà légèrement creusées, si l'amour eût ranimé
ses yeux tristes, elle aurait pu lutter avec les plus
belles jeunes filles. Il lui manquait ce qui crée une
seconde fois la femmc:—les chiffons et les billet-dour!”

Brig.—(who had gone in to escape the French quotation,
and returned as the last word lingered on the
committee's lips).—Write a “billetdoux” to the next
unrisen star, mi-boy, and ask her—(him, it, or her)—
to shine first, like Fanny Forester, in the columns of
the Mirror. I love the baptism of genius, and (modestly
speaking) I have been the St. John in the wilderness
of new writers.

Com.—Apostolic brigadier! You do know a star,
even “at the breast”—though, from sucking poets deliver
me mostly, oh, kind Heaven! They exact a
faith in their call and mission that precludes everything
but the blindest and most acquiescent admiration.
I remember my own difficult submissions to
the corrections of the kind, but truthful and consistent
critic of my youth, Buckingham of the Boston
Courier. He was always right, but it is hard, when
your feathers are once smoothed down, to pluck out
and re-stick them in your poetical peacockery! Ah,
juvenilities! We build bridges over chasms of meaning,
but they drop away behind us, as we pass over!
In Heaven, where there will be no grammar and dictionary,
we shall have a new standard of excellence—
thought. Here, it is thought's harness—language!
What makes these people throw their potato-parings
into the gutter, my dear general?

Brig.—Ann street, mi-boy, calls for the attention
of Mayor Harper. The Mirror has a dainty nostril
or two, and there are flower-pots in the windows opposite,
and Burgess & Stringer keep the choicest of
literary conservatories, yet we reside upon a rivulet
of swill! The simple enforcement of the law would
sweeten things, but there is no police except for criminals
in this land of liberty. Look at that brace of
turtle-doves coming up-street! What loving friendships
women have, at an age when boys are perfect
Ishmaelites.

Com.—Pardon me, my dear general, if I correct
your cacology. The sportsmen call two turtles a
dule of turtles, not a brace. Though, by-the-way, I
have not long been in possession of my learning upon
that point. Let me read you a chapter on the nomenclature
of such matters from this book in my hand.
Will you listen? The book is “Goodman's Social
History of Great Britain”—a gem of delightful reading:—

“The stags which ran wild in the king's forests
were named as early (if not earlier) as Edward III.
(1307), from their antlers; thus the first year the male
is called a calf, second year a brocket, third year a
spayer, fourth year a stag, fifth year a great stag, sixth
year a hart of the first head.

“In the notes of Sir Walter Scott's `Lady of the
Lake,' is a curious account of the brytling, breaking
up, or quartering of the stag. `The forester had his
portion, the hounds theirs, and there is a little gristle,
called the raven's bone, which was cut from the brisket,
and frequently an old raven was seen perched
upon a neighboring tree waiting for it.

“The fallow-deer, which are kept in the English
parks, have also names, but not exactly the same as
for stags. The males and the females the first year
are called fawns, second year the females are called
does, which name she always retains; but the male
is called a prickett; third year he is called a shard;
fourth year, a sword; fifth year, a sword-ell, or sorrell;
sixth year, a buck of first head; seventh year,
a buck; eighth year, a full buck; he is then fit for
killing, and not before: and in the summer is very fat,
which he loses in winter. Buck-venison is not fit to
eat in winter, and ought not to be killed.

“When beasts went together in companies, there
was said to be a pride of lions, a lepe of leopards, a
herd of harts, of bucks, and all sorts of deer; a bevy
of roes, a sloth of bears, a singular of boars, a sowndes
of swine, a dryfte of tame swine, a route of wolves, a
harass of horses, a rag of colts, a stud of mares, a
pace of asses, a barren of mules, a team of oxen, a
drove of kine, a flock of sheep, a tribe of goats, a
sculk of foxes, a cete of badgers, a richess of martins,
a fessynes of ferrets, a huske or a down of hares,
a nest of rabbits, a clowder of cats, a kendel of young
cats, a shrewdness of apes, and a labor of moles.

“When animals are retired to rest, a hart was said
to be harbored; a buck lodged; a roebuck bedded; a
fox kennelled; a badger earthed; a hare formed; and
a rabbit seated.

“Dogs which run in packs are enumerated by
couples. If a pack of fox-hounds consists of thirty-six,
which is an average number, it would be said to
contain eighteen couples.

“Dogs used for the gun, or for coursing, two of
them are called a brace, three a leash; but two spaniels,
or harriers, are called a couple. They also say
a mute of hounds, for a number; a kennel of raches,
a cowardice of curs, and a litter of whelps.

“`The seasons for alle sortes of venery' were regulated
in the olden time as follows: The `time of
grace' begins at midsummer, and lasteth to holy-rood:

the fox may be hunted from the nativity to the annunciation
of our lady; the roebuck from Easter to
Michaelmas; the roe from Michaelmas to Candlemas;
the hare from Michaelmas to midsummer; the wolf,
as the fox and the boar, from the nativity to the purification
of our lady.

“So for birds there is a vocabulary; and first, for
aquatic birds: a herd of swans, of cranes, and of
curlews, a dropping of sheldrakes, a spring of teals,
a serges of herons and bitterns, a covert of cootes, gaggles
of geese, sutes of mallards, baddylynges of ducks.
Now for meadow and upland birds: a congregation
of plovers, a walk of snipes, a fall of woodcoks, a
muster of peacocks, a nye of pheasants, a dule of
turtles, a brood of hens, a building of rooks, a numeration
of starlings, a flight of swallows, a watch of
nightingales, a charm of goldfinches, flights of doves
and wood-pigeons, coveys of partridges, bevies of
quails, and exaltations of larks.

“When a sportsman inquires of a friend what he
has killed, the vocabulary is still varied; he does not
use the word pair—but a brace of partridges, or
pheasants, a couple of woodcocks; if he has three
of any sort, he says a leash.

“If a London poulterer was to be asked for a pair
of chickens, or a pair of ducks, by a female, he
would suppose he was talking to some fine finicking
lady's maid, who had so puckered up her mouth into
small plaits before she started, that she could not open
it wide enough to say couple.

“As the objects sportsmen pursue are so various,
and as the English language is so copious, various
terms have been brought into use: so that the everlasting
term pair, this pairing of anything (except in
the breeding-season) sounds so rude, uninstructive,
and unmusical, upon the ears of a sportsman, that he
would as soon be doomed to sit for life by the side of
a seat-ridden cribbage-player as to hear it.

“It is the want of this knowledge which makes the
writings of Howitt and Willis, when they write upon
this ever-interesting national subject, appear so tame;
the sportsman peruses their pages with no more zest
than he listens to the babble of a half-bred hound, or
`a ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees—
leaving his game.”'

Mr. Goodman adds, in a note, the explanation of
my blunders in dog-nomenclature:—

“Mr. Willis, in vol. iii., p. 203, `Pencillings by the
Way,' gives the following information, speaking of
the duke's greyhounds (at Gordon Castle): “`Dinna
tak' pains to caress them, sir,” said the huntsman,
“they'll only be hanged for it.” I asked for an explanation.
He then told me that a hound was hung the
moment he betrayed attachment to any one, or in any
way showed superior sagacity. In coursing the hare,
if the dog abandoned the scent, to cut across or intercept
the animal, he was considered as spoiling the
sport. If greyhounds leave the track of the hare,
either by their own sagacity, or to follow the master
in intercepting it, they spoil the pack, and are hung
without mercy.' Perhaps Mr. Willis will excuse me
if I show how unsportsman-like this is. In the first
place, there are no packs of greyhounds; in the next
place, those who attend on them are not called huntsmen;
in the next place, they never run by scent: if
they did, they ought to be destroyed. As to the caressing,
no dog ought ever to be caressed without he
had first performed some extraordinary feat, and then
it should be done instantly. The everlasting petting
or patting a dog, spoils it in its nature, its disposition,
its temper, and its habits. It becomes worthless, except
as a lapdog, and that is the most contemptible
and worthless thing in all God's creation.

“Many years' close observation has convinced me,
that where the dog is once admitted into the house,
and petted, the dogs rule the children, and the chil
dren rule the rest; bringing in its train all the usual
concomitants of turbulence, filth, and frowsiness; and
turning the room into a dog-kennel.

The correction is very right—thanks to Mr. Goodman.
My attention was called to the blunder, by the
duke of Gordon himself, soon after the publication
of the book in England; and I should have corrected
it in this new edition, but for determining not to read
the proofs, that the letters might be published literally
from the first copy. But what beautifully descriptive
words are those in the nomenclature of birds, my
dear general: “A watch of nightingales!—a charm of
goldfinches!—a numeration of starlings, and exaltations
of larks!” How pretty it would be, instead of
“Here come two pretty women!” to say, “Here
comes a charm of women!” Instead of, “There
stand Morris and Willis!” to have the shoemaker opposite
say, “Look at that pride of lions,” or that
“exaltation of editors!”

Brig.—A “muster of peacocks” his my fancy—descriptive,
say, of two loungers in uniform! Aha!
mi-boy!—fine!

Com.—Most brigadierish of brigadiers! You
would rather be the sodger men have made you than
the poet God made you! So would not I!

Brig.—you rejoice in a destiny fulfilled, then?

Com.—Quite the contrary. I mean to say that God
made me a natural idler and trifler, and want made me
a poet and a worky; and unlike you, I would rather
be what God made me. By-the-way, do you know
the trouble there was in the first composing of a
horse? This same amusing book quotes from Fitzherbert's
old book on agriculture: “A horse has fifty-four
properties, viz.: two of a man, two of a badger,
four of a lion, nine of an ox, nine of a hare, nine
of a fox, nine of an ass, and ten of a woman. This
description has been somewhat altered, but perhaps
not improved upon, viz.: three qualities of a woman,
a broad breast, round hips, and a long mane; three
of a lion, countenance, courage, and fire; three of a
bullock, the eye, the nostrils, and joints; three of a
sheep, the nose, gentleness, and patience; three of a
mule, strength, constancy, and good feet; three of a
deer, head, legs, and short hair; three of a wolf,
throat, neck, and hearing; three of a fox, ear, tail,
and throat; three of a serpent, memory, sight, and
cunning; and three of a hare or cat, cunning, walking,
and suppleness.”

THE CABINET.

(Committee's private study. Brigadier lounging in a
fauteuil.)

Com.—My dear general, what do you think, abstractly,
of industry? Does no shuddering consciousness
of awful platitude creep over you, in this
dreadfully exemplary career that we are pursuing? I
feel as if the very nose on my face were endeavoring
to “dress,” as you military men say—striving to come
down to the dull, cheek-bone level of tedious uniformity!
I declare I should be pleased to “hear
tell” of something out of the “way of business”—
sentiment of some sort!

Brig.—Listen to a song that I have just written.
There is a background of truth to it—the true sadness
of a lovely living woman—that would supply your
need of a sensation, if your imagination could picture
her.

Com.—It shall! Read away, my friend!

(Brigadier reads.)

Com.—That is a peculiarly musical and engaging
measure, and you have hung it upon hinges of honey.
It smacks of the days when poets wrote a song a
year, finishing, to the last vanishing point of perfection.
What do the women say to you for translating
their prose into angel-talk?

Brig.—They love poetry, mi-boy! The more poetical
you can make their life, the more they love life
and you! They would rather suffer than live monotonously.
So, beware the “even tenor!”

Com.—Even of prosperity, eh? I'll beware when
I see it coming!

Brig.—Ah, mi-boy, you have no idea of the intense
abstraction of mind necessary to bring a poetical imagination
down to habits of business.

Com.—Do you really wish to know what is to be
the new rage in society this winter?

Brig.—What?

Com.—Married belles! The 'teens dynasty is passing
away! The talk, this summer, at all the watering-places,
has been of beautiful women, who (if, perchance,
they have loved out their love) have not shone
out their shine! Heavens!—how many there are
completely shelved in American society, who have
never had more than two winters of vogue in the
world, and who are compelled to believe that, out of
thirty years of loveliness, only two are to be rescued
from the nursery—only two to intervene between the
nursery filial and the nursery maternal! What a
utensil woman is, in this way! For what did Heaven
give them their other powers? Heaven did not put
the smile of woman under her arm! No! it was
placed where it could not be covered without suffocation,
and, doubtless, with a purpose:—that the lips
and their outgoing shold be kept open to society!
Till those lips fade—till the mind that speaks through
them loses its playfulness and attraction, woman can
not be monopolized without a manifest waste of the
gifts of nature—making that bloom for two years only,
that was constructed to bloom for forty! Besides—
these very charms are withdrawn from the world before
ripening—flowers permitted only to bud! There
never was a belle who was not more agreeable after
marriage than before. An unripe mind is far less
agreeable than a ripe one. The elegant repose of
lovely married women is far more enchanting than the
hoydenish romping or inexperienced sentiment of
girls. Speak up, brigadier! What say?

Brig.—It is highly natural, mi-boy, that this change
should be coming about, now! But it was both natural
and necessary that, hitherto—in the unornamental
foundation of American society, woman should
be reduced to her simple primitive mission—shining,
like the glow-worm, only long enough to attract the
male. When married, she passed into the condition
of an operative in a nation-factory—a working mother,
a working educatress, a working patriot-maker. Her
whole time was then needed for offices that are now
performed—(all but the first)—by schools, moral teachers,
surrounding example, and national routine. Lubricate
the child now with money, and it will slide on
to manhood over an inevitable railroad of education
and good influences. Of course, the mother is now
at liberty to shine as long as nature feeds the lamp;
and, indeed, it is in this way, only, that she can fulfil
her destiny—dispensing elsewhere the sweet influences
no longer needed exclusively by her children.

Com.—Statesmanlike and pellucid! Well, sir, this
great national metamorphosis is now coming about!
It has been secretly resolved, among the young married
men of New York, that there shall exist, this
winter, a post-connubial belle-ocracy: and that married
belles shall, accordingly, have the pas, in waltz,
quadrille, promenade, and conversation. How delicious!—isn't
it? It enlarges the field so! I believe,
general, that I, for one, shall “cast my slough,” and
try my youth on again!

and who knows? I may be agreeable in the reformed
baby-house of society!

Brig.—“Hope on—hope ever!”

THE CABINET.

(Committee and Brigadier in confidential session.)

Com.—My dear general, it won't do! Read these
two letters!

Brig.—I won't waste my eyes with them! It must
do! who says it won't do?

Com.—One Noggs.

Brig.—Who's Noggs?

Com.—By Jove, he writes a capital letter! Hear
this, my incensed brigadier!—(reads.)

“Dear Willis: You frightened me to-day, terribly,
in the hint you threw out in the course of conversation
with the `brigadier,' to wit: `Shall we
make it into a monthly?'

“Make the Weekly New Mirror into a monthly!
God forbid! I forbid, anyhow. `Who are you?' I
am a live Yankee, at your service, who lives in the
land of soles and codfish, whig pow-wows and democratic
clam-bakes—one who has not been so `decorously
brought up,' perhaps as some of your readers,
but `a man for a' that'—a constant reader of the Mirror,
at any rate—proof of my manhood, eh?

Well, sir, I, Newman Noggs, Esq., of Lynn, county
of Essex, etc., etc., do hereby seriously and ardently
protest against any such nonsense as is implied
in the above question. Excuse me, sir, but I couldn't
help it. I feel so worked up at the bare idea of the
visits of the Mirror coming only monthly, that I can
hardly stick to decency. Why, sir, I shouldn't be in
trim for my sabbath-day meeting—albeit a pious man
am I—were it not for the `preparatory' study in the
Mirror, Saturday nights. Not that you are so dreadfully
religious, but there is always sure to be something
in you that makes me feel better, and when I
feel `better' I want to go to church, of course, to let
myself and the world know that I'm getting kind o'
good. As for the literary merits of the Mirror, it
don't become the like o' me to be offering an opinion.
All I've got to say is, that I `individually' like it first-rate.
There's sort of racy, spicy, off-hand, unstudied
wittiness about it that takes my eye amazingly. So,
for God's sake, or more particularly for my sake, dear
Willis, don't ye change it. Suppose it does cost
some folks a little more for postage than it would for
something else—what o' that? Who's afraid of a
cent or two? I'm a poor man 'long side o' some folk,
and yet I rather pay letter-postage than have it stop.
So, Willis dear, just tell your postage friends to economize
in some other department, or, if they can't do
that, tell 'em I'll make it up to 'em.

“No, no, friend of my early youth, don't think of
any such thing, that is, if ye love me—for I could
better spare—something better, than the piquant dish
of conversation which weekly (oh, let it be ever weekly)
occurs between `mi-boy' and our dearly-beloved
general, the `brigadier.'

“Mrs. Noggs, too—a strong woman, by the way—
is, nevertheless, weekly on this point, very. She says
she'll never forgive you if you change the fair form
of the Mirror. Think o' that! Though not a vain
woman, she has a passion for looking into the Mirror

that is very affecting. On the other hand, she says
if you'll give up the horrid notion of changing the
form of the Mirror, she'll fry you `a nipper' as
brown as a nut, with her own fair hands, when next
you come Bostonward, and will visit our humble
cottage near the sea. I have ye now! For my well-tried
friends, Gentleman Charles (him of the Astor
house, I mean) and his handsome partner, tell me
you are a gallant youth and well affected toward the
ladies.

“We shall look anxiously in the next Mirror to find
our anxious hopes confirmed, and, if not disappointed,
shall henceforth, as in duty bound, ever pray for your
everlasting welfare, world without end.

“Yours till then, “Noggs.”

Com.—I have had twenty letters the last week
(none as good as that, but) all to the same purpose!
I am inclined to think, general, that Heaven's first periodical
(Sunday) was arranged in accordance with
some revolution of our mental nature, and that once
in seven days, as it is good to rest, so it is good to
read, or grieve, or go love-making. Friends dine together
once a week, making friendship a weekly periodical.
Lovers of nature in cities ride to the country
once a week. We eat a boiled dinner once a
week. Everybody in New England needs beans once
a week. The weather comes round once a week—
fair Sundays and wet Sundays coming in successive
dozens. There is nothing agreeable in nature that is
monthly, except the moon, and the very sight of that
periodical puts people to sleep!

Brig.—There is the monthly rose, mi-boy!

Com.—The poorest rose that blows!

Brig.—But here is a point I should like to make
clear to the public. With an enormous subscription
every day increasing, we are every day making less
money.

Com.—How, oh, business man?

Brig.—Thus: For Mirrors that we sell through
agents in cities, we get but four cents each. For
Mirrors that we send to subscribers by mail, we get the
full price—sixpence each. The irregular and exorbitant
postage has nearly killed our mail subscription,
on which we chiefly depended, while in cities, where
our patrons get them from the agents without postage,
we have a sale growing daily more enormous. The
deuse of it is, that the Mirror at sixpence is as cheap
as it can possibly be sold with anything like profit, and
selling it to agents literally at cost, the increase of the
agency circulation does us no manner of good!

Com.—Why sell to agents at cost?

Brig.—It was a necessary evil in the beginning—lacking capital to hire the doing of what agents do.

Com.—And we must go on as we begun?

Brig.—Short of a six months' paralysis, which we
could not afford, there is no help for it! But the
postage is the great block in our way! Most people
would subscribe and have it sent to their houses by
mail, if the postage were not more than the subscription.

Com.—How would that be helped in the monthly
form.

Brig.—Ah! now you come to the matter. The
monthly Mirror goes for seven cents postage, and most
of our mail subscribers who remain, have the Mirror
sent in the monthly form, by mail—and I wish all who
value the Mirror, or care for us, would do the same. To
take it weekly from an agent, does not bring back to
you a single leaf of Glenmary, my dear boy!

Com.—Ah, my dear friend—Glenmary! Some
villain—some wanton and unfeeling villain—has destroyed
a vine I planted, which had completely embowered
that sweet cottage. In an Ithaca paper, sent
to me yesterday, I find a letter—here it is—from some
Owego gentleman to the editor. Let me read you
part of it:—

“The cottage you know, like a bird's nest, is almost
hid in the foliage. On one side is the road passing
over `the bridge,' and all around a sweet lawn,
sloping away to `Owego creek.' The bridge was
once white, and neat in its outward appearance. But
how Willis, even in the `summer months,' made his
`bridge-gipsying delicious,' is now a mystery. The
`groundwork' is flood-wood, and reptiles crawl where
`swallows peeped out from their nests against the
sleepers,' while every five minutes a baptism of dust
comes down from above, as a benediction from the
passing traveller. But the pruning hand of a man of
taste has been wanting to all this rural spot for two
years past, which may account for the blemishes we
find in the picture so beautifully drawn in `A l'Abri.
Some Caligula among shrubbery has cut the root of a
luxuriant vine, which spread itself over the cottage
front, making a delightful arbor of the piazza; and
its leaves and tendrils, already changed in hue, are
folding themselves to die. As through it the night-breeze
rustled, it seemed to breathe of the desolation
that had stolen upon this garden, sacred to the memory
of a lovely exotic which made it a paradise, and
the fadeless light of genius.”

That is written by some kind man, who understood
how a heartstring might be cut through with a vine
one had planted and cherished. Whoever may be
the perpetrator of that needless outrage, I commend
him to the notice of my friendly neighbors, adding a
petition from me, which may thus reach them, that
only Time's hand may be suffered to ravage my lost
paradise.

Brig.—The subject troubles me, mi-boy! Let us
change it. I've a funny communication here, from a
Rip Van Winkle, who dates fifty years hence, and—

Com.—Keep it till next week, general, and let us
get into the fresh air. I'm manuscript sick. Allons!
Stay—while I mend my outer man a little, read this
funny letter, sent me by the lady to whom it was
written. She thinks her friend, young “Cinna Beverley,”
is a genius.

(Brigadier reads, with an occasional laugh.)

“Fanny Forester.”—We have been accused, face
to face, several times, and by letter once or twice, of
being, ourself, that bewitching masquerader. We have
conjured some variety out of our workyday quill, it is
true, and have an unfulfilled and recorded vow of a
new alias—but in “Fanny Forester” there resides a
dimpled youthfulness and elasticity that is not found
so many miles on the road as our present sojourn!
Oh no, sweet Fanny! they slander you and do too
much credit to our industry and versatility! Those
who wish to know more of Fanny Forester, may hear
of her, now, among the high-priced contributors of
Graham and Godey.

Dr. Lardner's Lecture.—We did not chance to
hear Dr. Lardner's excellent and amusing lecture on
the “London literati,” etc., but the report of it in the
“Republic” has scraped the moss from one corner of
our memory, and we may, perhaps, aid in the true
portraiture of one or two distinguished men by showing
a shade or two in which our observation of them
differed from that of the doctor. We may remark
here, that Dr. Lardner has been conversant with all
the wits and scholars of England for the last two or
three lustrums, and we would suggest to him that,
with the freedom given him by withdrawal from their
sphere, he might give us a book of anecdotical biography
that would have a prosperous sale and be both
instructive and amusing. We shall not poach upon
the doctor's manor, by the way, if we give our impression
of one of these literati—himself—as he appeared
to us, once in very distinguished company, in
England. We were in a ball in the height of the
season, at Brighton. Somewhere about the later
hours, we chanced to be in attendance upon a noble
lady, in company with two celebrated men. Mr.
Ricardo and Horace Smith (the author of Brambletye
House, and Rejected Addresses), Lady Stepney,
authoress of the “New Road to Ruin,” approached
our charming centre of attraction with a proposition
to present to her the celebrated Dr. Lardner. “Yes,
my dear! I should like to know him of all things!”
was the reply, and the doctor was conjured forthwith
into the magic circle. He bowed “with spectacles
on nose,” but no other extraneous mark of philosopher
or scholar. We shall not offend the doctor by stating
that, on this evening, he was a very different looking
person from his present practical exterior. With
showy waistcoat, black rights, fancy stockings and
small patent-leather shoes, he appeared to us an elegant
of very bright water, smacking not at all, in manner
no more than in dress, of the smutch and toil of
the laboratory. We looked at and listened to him,
we remember, with great interest and curiosity. He
left us to dance a quadrille, and finding ourself accidentally
in the same set, we looked at his ornamental
and lover-like acquiltal of himself with a kind of wonder
at what Minerva would say! This was just before the
doctor left England. We may add our expression of
pleasure that the Protean facility of our accomplished
and learned friend has served him in this country—
making of him the best lecturer on all subjects, and
the carver out of prosperity under a wholly new
meridian.

But, to revert to the report of the lecture:—

“The doctor gave some very amusing descriptions
of the personal peculiarities of Bulwer and D'Israeli,
the author of `Coningsby,' observing that those who
have read the works of the former, would naturally
conclude him to be very fascinating in private society.
Such, however, was not the case. He had not a
particle of conversational facility, and could not utter
twelve sentences free from hesitation and embarrassment.
In fact, Bulwer was only Bulwer when his
pen was in his hand and his meerschaum in his mouth.
He is intimate with Count D'Orsay, one of the handsomest
men of the day, and in his excessive admiration
of that gentleman has adopted his style of dress,
which is adapted admirably to the figure of the second
Beau Brummell, but sits strangely on the feeble, rickety
and skeleton form, of the man of genius.”

Now it struck us, on the contrary, that there was no
more playful, animated, facile creature in London
society than Bulwer. He seemed to have a horror
of stilted topics, it is true, and never mingled in general
conversation unless merrily. But at Lady Blessington's,
where there was but one woman present
(herself), and where, consequently, there could be no
têtes-á-têtes, Bulwer's entrance was the certain precursor
of fun. He was a brilliant rattle, and as to any
“hesitation and embarrassment,” we never saw a
symptom of it. At evening parties in other houses,
Bulwer's powers of conversation could scarce be fairly
judged, for his system of attention is very concentrative,
and he was generally deep in conversation with
some one beautiful woman whom he could engross.
We differ from the doctor, too, as to his style of dandyism.
Spready upper works, trousers closely fitting to
the leg, a broad-brimmed hat, and cornucopial whiskers,
distinguished D'Orsay, while Bulwer wore always
the loose French pantaloon, a measurable hat-brim,
and whiskers carefully limited to the cheek. We
pronounce the doctor's astrology (as to these stars)
based upon an error in “observation.”

The reporter adds:—

“D'Israeli he described as an affected coxcomb,
with a restless desire to appear witty; yet he never
remembered him to have said a good thing in his life
except one, and that was generally repeated with the
preface, `D'Israeli has said a good thing at last.”'

That D'Israeli is not a “bon-mot” man, is doubtless
true. It never struck us that he manifested a “desire
to appear witty.” He is very silent in the general
melée of conversation, but we have never yet seen him
leave a room before he had made an impression by
some burst in the way of monologue—eitheran eloquent
description or a dashing new absurdity, an anecdote
or a criticism. He sits indolently with his head on
his breast, taking sight through his eyebrows till he
finds his cue to break in, and as far as our observation
goes, nobody was ever willing to interrupt him. The
doctor calls him an “affected coxcomb,” but it is only
of his dress that this is any way true. No schoolboy
is more frank in his manners. This is true, even since
D'Israeli's “gobble up” of the million with a widow.
When we were first in London, he was the immortal
tenant of one room and a recess, and with manners
indolently pensive. Three years after, returning to
England, we found him master of a lordly establishment
on Hyde Park, and, except that he looked of a
less lively melancholy, his manners were as untroubled
with affection as before. We do not in the least
doubt the sincerity of the doctor's report, but it shows
how even acute observers (we two are that, doctor!)
will see the same thing with different eyes. This
article is too long.

New York has an unsupplied want—no less a thing
than a FASHIONABLE PROMENADE. Broadway, that

used to be the parade of all that was feminine, fashionable
and fair, has been, for some time, only a walk of
plain-dress-necessity to the noli-me-tangeries, and it
will soon be left entirely to the deaf and the humble
—so intolerable is the Bedlam racket of its abominable
omnibuses! (To get an audible answer to the “How
do you do?” one has need to take one's friend into a
store.)

Our ladies have done like the English, in giving up
shopping and walking the street in full dress, and now,
where is to be the English or French substitute—
our Hyde park or our Bois de Boulogne? Ladies,
in London, are supposed to be so incapable of walking
at all in the street, that, if they do so, it is rather
well-bred not to recognise them in passing. But
after shopping in disguise in Regent street (their
Broadway) they go home and “dress for the carriage,”
and drive out to meet all the world in the “Rotten
row” of the park. Up and down this half mile they
follow in slow procession, meeting as slow a procession
going the other way, and bowing at every carriage
length, and, no public hack being admitted into the
park, those who have no carriages have no promenade!

Don't let us improve with our eyes shut! We have
taken off our foot of fashion from one round of the
ladder. How long is it to be suspended in the air—
for, a driving park is the next inevitable step upward?

Odd Enough.—The best view of Trinity steeple and
almost the only view of Trinity church, is across some
old one-story wooden groceries in Greenwich street,
the spectator standing upon the opposite sidewalk!
“We never know to whom we look best,” said we to
the steeple, when we discovered it! To Broadway-gazers,
Trinity steeple is a Gothic column. The body
of the church is wholly lost as to effect, and it was a
great mistake not to set it sidewise upon the street.
But, let us suggest something to the enormously
wealthy vestry of that church. There is not a valuable
building, nor scarce a lot unoccupied by a nuisance,
between this splendid fabric and Greenwich street.
How easy to buy this advantageous slope, and make
of it an ascending foreground, unequalled except by
the ascent to the capitol at Washington! Besides
the addition to the beauty of the city, it would give
another “lungs” to the neighborhood of Wall street,
and grace, fitly and with additional beauty, the resting-place
of the gallant and lamented Lawrence.

Change in New York Habits.—The great peculiarity
of America—our gregariousness, as shown in
our populous hotels—has taken a large stride on its
way to the exclusivism of Europe. The office of the
lessee of the new hotel up-town has been overrun with
applicants, and most of them, we understand, with a
view of availing themselves of its privileges as a hotel
garni—or furnished house where the meals are discretionary,
as to place, time, and price. Let us look
a little into this.

A gentleman arrives at a London hotel. He alights
at the door of what resembles a private house. He is
shown to a small parlor and bed-room, and left alone
with his baggage and the peculiarly neat and unsociable
chairs and table. He orders his dinner and tea,
and it is served to him alone. He is as much alone
the remainder of the day and evening, and from that
time to doomsday, if he stay so long; and there is no
place about the house where he can vary this loneliness,
except the coffee-room, where the parlor class
of lodgers have no errand and rarely go. His engagement
with the landlord is to pay so much, by the day,
for his rooms, and for whatever else he chooses to order.
What with the absence of books, and all the comforts
and trifles that give a look of home, and, on the other
hand, the lack of the American compensations, such
as reading-room, ladies' drawing-room, sitting-rooms,
and thronged halls and entries, the solitude and gloom
of a hotel in the heart of London could scarce be
exceeded.

But, admirably suited as is the American system of
hotel to the relief and pleasure of the stranger and
traveller, there is a class of hotel-lodgers who would
be more comfortable in New York were there a hotel
after the European fashion—and it is with a view to
this class, mainly, that the new hotel up-town has
been designed. We refer to the class who wish a
luxurious home, but can not afford time, trouble, or
money, to be housekeepers. There are many families
of this description—families who pass the summer in
the country, but in the winter reside in town, and,
dreading the trouble and expense of a town house,
would still prefer a private table and drawing-room.
For such, a hotel garni, with elegant suites of apartments
and a restaurant on the floor before, is the well-adapted
provision, and this class is sufficiently large
to more than warrant the enterprise of the hotel uptown.

The great mass, however, even of families (and
certainly of bachelors), prefer the gregarious hotel,
where two or three hundred people form almost one
family, where eating and dancing and social pleasures
are all enjoyed in common, and where business and
amusement are closely, and without foresight or
trouble, closely intermingled. This style of living
best suits the great mass of a business community, and
it will not be till we have a ruling proportion of aristocratic
idlers, that the gregarious hotel will go out of
fashion. That may be fifty years hence, or our “gregariousness”
may become a national peculiarity, and
the Astor “stay put” for a century.

We speak the Tuscan, and lively Mr. Palmo is
betrayed by his soft c to be a Piedmontese or a Venetian—else
we should venture to give him the ideas
here-below embodied, in his own lingua de belleza.
We beg his worthy and eloquent legal counsellor,
however (whom we have the pleasure to know), to
translate to him, through some medium more pellucid
than the last, the nicer shades of our meaning. We
put up our prayer for its happy voyage to the manager's
harbor of comprehension.

An OPERA, like a woman, is never to be taken literally.
It is not, exclusively or mainly, a place wherein
to hear good music. If the music be the best that
can be procured (though it were only the best in
Ethiopia), the uncrowned but very executive King
Public is content. “Our” ear is merciful! But the
opera is a place for the advancing of two ends more—
human tenderness and human vanity. Ten go thither
to flirt, and forty to be seen, where one goes to pamper
his auricular nerve upon a cadenza. We don't see
that this requires enlarging upon.

We wish to enlighten those who have hitherto been
proudly content with their own country (haven't travelled,
and that's the reason), as to the true uses of the
opera abroad—the way it is truly used, that is to say,
where sing Rubini and his starry troupe. First, as to
construction. The London opera-house (like the
Parisian) is composed of a hundred or more private
boxes, and a pit. The private boxes are used by their
lady-proprietors to receive company during the evening,
and the pit is used to reconnoitre the boxes, to lounge,
to chat, and to be visible in white gloves and opera-glass
(this last a most necessary demonstration by
those who would not otherwise be considered “men
about town”). We have not yet mentioned the listening

to the opera. This very subordinate part of the
evening's entertainment commences at the signal
“sh!” “sh!” from the connoisseurs, indicating that
some favorite aria is commencing which is worth listening
to, or a duett or quartette, or fine point of
action, coming off, and, till this is past, the audience,
above and below, is breathlessly still and attentive. At
all other times during the performance of the opera,
it is rather green than otherwise to pay attention to
the stage, and anybody who should request that his
neighbors would not converse during the recitativo
secco, would be smiled at as “capital fun!” The
opera, in short, is considered as a help, an accompaniment
(or, if you like, a stop-gap) to conversation, and
the consequence is that nowhere are people so much at
their ease, and nowhere are so many bright and merry
things said as at the opera! We'll mend our pen,
dear reader, while you compare this with the quaker-meeting
attention so tediously given at Palmo's.

But this is to be mended (the practice, we mean—
the pen does pretty well), and the first thing we wish
to suggest to Mr. Palmo is an improvement in the
“fop's alley” part of it. To go round behind the
boxes, as the house is constructed now, is formidably
conspicuous, unless one has a direct errand to the lady
next the stage; yet this, with the exception of having
a seat in the pit, and sitting in it, is the only way to
get a look at the house and “see who is there.” Let
Mr. Palmo drop a staircase, passing under the stage-box
to the front of the pit, and there would be an excusable
lounge of observation all round the house—a
prodigious difference in the attraction for the dandies,
let us assure you, signor! You need the dandies!
You wish to make it among the necessities of
a “man about town,” that he should have a season-ticket
to the opera. But it is no pleasure to sit
cramped and silent in one seat, and no pleasure to
come in and stand behind the audience for the whole
evening, or for an hour. It would be a pleasure to
see the audience from the front, and that can not be
done now, without a pretty “cool” walk to the orchestra
and back. Now could it?

We have two or three other propositions to make
for the improvement of the social opportunities of
the opera, but this will do for to-day. Addio, signore!

We cordially approve of the reason for, and the
feeling which prompted the following paragraph.
We have the pleasure of knowing the three gentlemen
mentioned in it. particularly the urbane captain,
and we wish the Howards a happy retirement, and
Captain Roe a-bounding prosperity—but this done,
we wish to note a nationality as it passes; and first,
to quote a paragraph:—

“It has been announced in various quarters that
the Messrs. Howard, who have established the hotel
so extensively and favorably known as Howard's Hotel,
have disposed of that establishment to Captain
Roe, of the “Empire” steamboat. * * *
As for the Howards, we are glad that they have done
so well. We presume that, being relieved now from
the labor of keeping such a large establishment, they
will retire to some of those beautiful retreats with
which their native state, Vermont, abounds.”

It will be seen at once that a traveller who should
measure this trio by the European scale of condition
in life—(rank these gentlemen, that is to say, with
“mine host” in any other part of the world)—would
make a blunder. The difference between an American
hotel-proprietor, and a London Boniface, is not
merely that our hotels are six times as large. It is
not merely that he is six times as great a “proprietor.”
The vocation is almost wholly different—and
the difference is a result of the totally different hab
its of the two countries. In London, you may, by
chance, see the “land-lady,” daily, but you may be
months in the house without seeing the “land-lord.”
(Two terrible misnomers, by-the-way, for the hostess,
though she has no land, is not a lady but as a land
lady, and mine host is far enough from a lord with
land, though he is no lord except as a land-lord!)
The English host, therefore, is never an acquaintance
of his guest, and the guest knows his hostess only in
the quality of an upper servant. The reader will
have recognised the difference we wish to point to.
The American hotel-keeper has charge, not of twenty
or thirty people living wholly in their own private
rooms, but of two or three hundred, whose habits are
all gregarious, and to almost every one of them he (the
landlord) is a personal and familiar friend. The extent
of this friendly intercourse with persons mostly
of the better class, gives to the hotel-proprietor a
mass of influence, direct and indirect, which makes
him a very important person in the community. He
is continually appealed to for knowledge on popular
subjects, such as is got only by great facilities of hearsay.
He is often made a reference in disputes, from
his necessary habit of impartiality. He is intrusted
with deposites of great value by his guests, and is the
confidant-general of the secrets and difficulties of
strangers, and of travelling lovers and mourners.
Ladies and families are committed to his charge.
Public entertainments are given by his advice and direction:
and, in short, he has so much harm, and so
much good influence, in his power, that he is, necessarily,
a person of high moral character, superior
judgment, discretion, and information—without all
which public opinion would not tolerate him in his
place—and, with which, while in the full exercise of
his vocation, he naturally holds a high station of republican
social rank. It is in tacit obedience to this
scale of valuation, that the change of masters in a
public hotel is made the subject of newspaper announcement
and comment—a notice of the fact which
would seem to a London editor wholly beyond its consequence
and value.

We are aware that it is rather Utopian to give nominal
rank to people according to their actual worth
and influence; but let us have our little bit of fancy
now and then! We should be afraid to call public
attention to the rank of editors—measuring it by their
power!

Ole Bull and his missing “spot.”—As we predicted,
this great luminary took the light of the
world to himself on Saturday night, and became visible
above the horizon of the footlights precisely at
eight,

Mrs. Child (the moon who reflects the masculine
gold of his music in the feminine silver of languages
sat in the stage-box, somewhat obscured in the penumbra
of a shocking cap. (We rely upon Miss
Dorsey to invent a “silver cloud,” or, at any rate,
some headdress more becoming for the waxing glory
of this charming reflector.) The Memnonian music
awoke, of course, with the appearance of Ole-Apollo,
and the crammed world of fashion sat breathless.
By the time the first piece was played, however, it
was felt that there was something wrong. The audience
was irresponsive. The ivory inside edge of the
moon's disk (disclosed by the tranquil smile at first),
became less and less visible, and disappeared. The
applause was mechanical. Madame Burkhardt arose
like a morning vapor, and clouded the horizon with
an abominable song. Ole Bull broke out again, and
though the shadows had shortened somewhat before
he finished his second piece, there was still a lack—
still but a dull acknowledgment of his glory.

We presently discovered the cause. A heavy forelock
of hair, which used to drop over the forehead
of the inspired Norwegian, descending “with the
linked sweetness long drawn out” of a cadenza, and
then tossed back like an absorbed comet with the revulsive
sweep of a return to the flon-flon of the air—
this expressive forelock, with the steeped sweetness
of the Niagara it had overheard, and the dreams of
melody it had stirred to, was gone to “—and scissors.”
The “sun was (the day before) shorn of his
beams”—by Cristadoro! Mingled with the hair of
the uninspired, that magic lock had been swept into
Broadway from the floor of the undiscriminating barber,
and, fallen from the heaven of harmony, is now
sticking to the wheels of omnibuses in a purgatory
of Sysiphus. Those in other cities who remember
the toss back of that wild lock of hair in the convulsive
transitions of Ole Bull's music, will understand
that there must have been, emphatically, a spot missing
on his luminous face.

Spite of politics and attractions elsewhere, the
house was crammed; and in spite of the missing
lock, Ole Bull recovered his power over the audience.
The last piece he played was electric, and the
curtain fell amid unlimited plaudits.

The pay for Periodical-Writing.—What a
butcher would think of veal, as a marketable article,
if everybody had an ambition to raise calves to give
away, is very near the conclusion that a merely business-man
would arrive at, on inquiring into the saleableness
of fugitive literature. It is as pleasant for
people not backneyed in authorship to see their
thoughts transferred to print, as it is for beauties to
see their faces transferred to canvass; and, if customary,
most contributors to periodicals would pay the
publisher as willingly as women pay the portrait-painter.
Another thing. Females are naturally facile
writers, and the attention paid to the mental culture
of women in our day, has set their thoughts
a-flow upon paper, as the letting in of sunshine upon
the dark floor of the forest draws to the surface new
springs of water. These facts to begin with, the
reader will easily understand the pourquoi of the unpromising
literary market we have to “open up” to
him.

There are several of the magazines that pay for
articles, but no one of them, we believe, pays for all
its contents. Graham and Godey (two men of noble
liberality to authors) pay prices to some of their contributors
that would far outbid the highest rates of
magazine-payment in England. Their prose-writers
receive from two to twelve dollars a page, and their
poets from five to fifty dollars an article. The Columbian
and the Ladies' Magazine also pay well.
The North American Review used to think it liberal
enough to pay Edward Everett a dollar a page. All
the paying magazines and reviews, however, reject
fifty articles to one that they accept, and they pay
nobody whose “name” would not enrich their table
of contents. In point of fact, but for the necessity of
a brag, and the misfortune that a writer, once made
famous, esteems pay a desirable manner of compliment
(whether he wants the money or not), the literary
periodicals in this country might do well, relying
only on the editor's pen and the epidemic “cacoethes.”
The Mirror did so—and was as cleverly contributed
to, we think, as any periodical in the country. The
rejected articles (offered to us, of course, as a gratuity)
would have filled, at least, a barrel a month!

Newspapers pay for reporting and editing, but seldom
or never for “articles.” The favor, on the con
trary, of giving room and circulation to another man's
ideas, is growing into a saleable commodity—the editor
(on the ground that he risks the popularity of
his paper by relinquishing the chance of a better article)
charging rent for his columns instead of hiring
a tenant. To every scheme of public interest—to
every society—to everything which newspapers can
hinder or further—there is attached some person who
is both desirous and able to present the subject
forcibly on paper; and, quite as readily and zealously,
if there be an objectionable side to it, springs up a
pen-and-ink caviller in opposition. Between them,
and with the desire to figure in print which besets
very many able men, newspaper-editors need pay for
little aid except eyewater and scissors, and they get
credit for a world of zeal in good causes by articles
they neither write nor pay for. We have got to the
footboard of our Procrustes bed.

Authors' Pay in America.—We have hot coals
smouldering in the ashes of “things put off,” which
we poke reluctantly to the surface just now—reluctantly
only because we wish to light beacons for an
author's crusade, and we have no leisure to be more
than its Peter the Hermit. We solemnly summon
Edgar A. Poe to do the devoir of Cœur de Lion—
no man's weapon half so trenchant! And now let
us turn the subject round, small end foremost.

These are days when gentlemen paint their own
boots, and we have latterly been our own publisher.
We have thereby mastered one or two statistics which,
we know not well why, never looked us in the face
before, and which we proceed to hold up by the nape
of the neck for the encouragement of the less stuffy
or less inquiring. Authors who can not find publishers,
and authors who, having found them, have been
as much respected by them as pig-iron by the razor-maker,
are invited to “lend us their ears”—on interest.

What proportion should an author have of the net
profits of a book? This seems a shallow question
enough, but there is a deep hole in it. Remember,
in the first place, that the author wrote the book—
that God gave him the monopoly of the vein from
which it is worked—that he has been at the expense
and toil of an education, and to other expenses and
toils—(as in travel)—that his mind's lease is far shorter
than his lease of life—and that thoughtsmiths should
be better paid than blacksmiths or goldsmiths (that is
to say, if the credit the work does to the country goes
for anything in the valuation). The question of the
division of profit is between author and publisher, and
the publisher gives his uneducated mental attention
to the sale, a brief use of his credit for the printing
and binding, and runs a most partial risk as to the result—for
he need not purchase the book except in
obedience to his own judgment and his readers', and
the cost is paid, of course, before there are any “net
receipts.” (There is great capital made of this
“risk,” but ninety-nine books in a hundred more than
clear expenses!) Now, taking a stereotyped dollar-book
for example, the plates, worth four or five hundred
dollars, are paid for, with a moderate sale, in the
first month. Suppose it to be three months. The
use of the publisher's credit for $500 for ninety days
has been his only outlay of consequence; but the
author has had his outlay of brain-work, time, genius,
and years of education. The printing and getting
up, after the plates are paid for, cost about one
fifth of the retail price—twenty cents on a dollar. To
charge ten cents more on each copy for the absolute
expense of selling and circulating, is more than liberal;
and now, how shall the remaining seventy cents—
the net profit—be divided between author and publisher?

We should like to have a watchmaker's answer to
that question. How much ought the jeweller to have
for buying it from the maker, warranting it “to go”
after examining it, for advertising it, and for selling it
across a counter? Suppose the watch to sell for a
hundred dollars, and seventy dollars to be the net
profit above cost of material. What would you say,
if the maker got but ten or twenty dollars, and the
retailer fifty or sixty? Yet that is the proportion at
which author and bookseller are paid for literary production—the
seller of the book being paid from twice
to five times as much as the author of it!

Certainly, the readiest-minded man we ever knew,
as well as one of the most brilliant and highly cultivated
conversationists, is Major Davezac, the subject
of the anecdote below. Never was a man more out
of place as a stump-orator and agitator, well as he
acquits himself in these turbulent vocations. It is
none of our business to discuss that point, however.
We were only about to roll the anecdotical snow-ball
a little larger, by recording a bon mot of the major's,
at the birth of which we chanced to be present.
Davezac was chargé at Naples in eighteen hundred
and some time ago, and French being the language
he was born in, his wit of course played freely in the
court vernacular. He was quite the idol of the diplomatic
corps, and an “indispensable” at all dances and
masquerades. We were dining one evening in his
company during the carnival. The major sat opposite
to us, next to a very pretty German countess.
During the procession and the pelting of sugar-plums
which had occupied the early part of the day, the
countess had received a slight bruise upon her cheek.
Davezac wore court-plaster on his lip—a hit also from
the sugared ammunition. They were both complaining.
“Eh, Monsieur Davezac,” said the countess,
mournfully, “il faut reunir nos douleurs!”—“Oui,
madam, et nos blessures!” replied the major instantly,
placing his lip upon the cheek of the surprised sufferer.

Cosmopolite Attraction in Broadway.—Within
a few doors, in the neighborhood of Prince street,
are collected accidentally, at present, four most vivid
representations of four very distant and different
countries—Spain, India, Paris, and Constantinople—
the “Alhamra,” the “Panorama of Madras,” the
“Panorama of Paris,” and the new shop of “Turkish
curiosities.” He who wishes to realize what balloons
are to do for us in 55, can astonish and confuse
his geographical impressions to his entire satisfaction,
by a visit to all these in one morning.

The Turkish shop has articles for sale that could
seldom before be obtained except by a voyage to the
Orient. We brought some curiosities from Constantinople,
but we have a thousand times regretted, since,
that we had not quadrupled our purchases in the bazars
and bezestein—so much were the articles admired.
and so impossible was it, even in the curiosity-shops
of Europe, to find specimens of them. No person
who is luxurious in personal habits would willingly
be, for example, without the Turkish shirts—having
once seen them. They are the poetry of negligé
costume—the idealized romance of the drapery of
dishabille. Those who have time to make a luxury
of dressing-room or boudoir—the beautiful and idle
of either sex—should take a look at the gossamer
shirts from Constantinople. But there are all manner
of things in this shop beside. There are beautiful
gold-embroidered slippers, small carpets and ottoman-cloths,
attars in gold bottles, gold-embroidered
handkerchiefs and gilded pastilles—everything, in
short, that one buys of old Mustapha, near the Hippodrome
in Stamboul, confectionary included. We
inquired after old Mustapha yesterday, and the Greek
who keeps the shop (who was himself a confectioner
in Constantinople) delighted us with talking of him,
as if he had seen him yesterday! Picturesque and
jolly old turbaned Mustapha!—what fun it was to
have the curtain lifted by his grinning Abyssinian in
anklets and wristlets, and step into the back shop to
take coffee and try his essences! It quite came over
us like a dream yesterday—the chat with this Broadway
Constantinopolitan. If you have any curiosity,
dear reader, call and taste the confectionary at this
shop, and look at the translucent shirts, and see the
Persian inkstands, and handle the graceful cimeters,
and look at the Brusa silks and seraglio slippers—in
short, see Constantinople—for that is a palpable slice
of it!

Jumping the Pew.—We were once in the gallery
of a country church when an address was to be delivered
to a Sunday school. The body of the house
was reserved for the adult audience, and the boys were
confined to one of the side aisles. There was evidently
an understanding, however, that if not otherwise
wanted, the well-cushioned seat facing the chancel
was to be given up to as many lads as could occupy it.
It would hold, perhaps, twenty, and a hundred of
them were packed in the aisle like figs, waiting till the
class leader at the head should “open up.” Looking
on with some amusement, we found our eye arrested
by the bright face of a lad, half way down, who bore
the keeping back very impatiently. His struggles to
pass the other boys were vehement, but of no use.
He was slight, and his neighbors were bold and sturdy.
Presently he bit his lips, entered a pew, jumped the
partition into the central aisle, and walked round to
the front. There was a murmur of indignation among
the boys, and a general smile among the spectators,
but he secured his pick of seats. The clergyman, in
the course of his address, thought proper to get up
an impromptu colloquy, and, to the evident annoyance
of the other boys, selected the pew-jumper, who sat
just before him, for the honor. The lad arose, when
questioned, and surprised the whole audience with
the clearness of his replies. He sat down amid general
applause, and (whatever reproof he got in private
for his daring) he was the envied hero of the day. We
have often since had the successful boldness of this
lad recalled to our memory by the class of things it
illustrates, and our mental reply, after reading a letter
to which this was the preface, was—“Better jump
the pew!”

Our correspondent can not get a hearing from the
public! Few things are more difficult. We have
not read his book, but it may be excellent snuff to
keep a fame going, and yet not the stuff to start one.
Genius is expected “never to go into the water till it
knows how to swim”—never to expect to be read but
for having been read before! With any degree of
ability, more or less, it is easy to be almost hopelessly
overlaid. We, ourself, are a very humble example.
We “jumped the pew” unconsciously, in England,
with our furiously abused “Pencillings,” and immediately
sold, for the highest price, an edition of “Inklings
of Adventure”—a series of tales that had fallen
still-born into the lap of Boston, and for the first printing
of which we paid more than a thousand dollars on
our return to their birth-place. Instances of “jumping
the pew” will occur to every observer of men—
every reader of biography. It is the shabby door to
many a path of glory. Almost every profession begins
with a dilemma—hope deferred, or a pew to jump!
The starving lawyer in the west, who flogged his
neighbor to have a case to plead, jumped the pew!

The veteran Buckingham, one of the most judicious,
able and respected editors in the country, was starving
in Boston, when he “jumped the pew” with the abusive
“Galaxy”—making himself read from terror till
he was famous enough to be read for merit. The
game is dangerous, however, and the principle lies
in most questionable neighborhood. For one who
would succeed in it there are ninety-nine who would
fail, and failure is hopeless extinction! The pew can
be jumped but once. The attention of the public can
be but once summoned by a rude pluck at its beard;
and, to keep attention long enough to have the rudeness
forgotten, there must be merit that the public
would regret overlooking—merit, indeed, of which the
neglect was injury enough to justify violent extrication.

The Mirror Steam-Press.—It would be curious
not to lose sight of the Latin word, dropped for translation
into the scholar's ear, till it re-appears in English
on his tongue, but a half-hour's watching of the steam-press
on which the Mirror is printed would be hardly
a less instructive spectacle of contrivance. To complete
the assimilation of the second process to the
first, it would have been necessary, till lately, to employ
a boy to pull the word off the scholar's tongue;
but, by the ingenuity of R. Hoe & Co., the great
organ of public opinion is endowed with a happy delivery
of its own—laying off the sheet that was printed
and ready for utterance, that is to say, and drawing in
its iron tongue, unaided, to be laden with the meantime
coinage of another.

The improvements in printing-presses within the
last ten or fifteen years are probably far less remarkable
than some other progresses of mechanic invention,
yet they are wonderful enough to use up quite
as much curiosity as it is comfortable to find epithets
for, in a day. The difference between the old Ramage
press, and the steam-miracle in our present office, is
peculiarly impressive to ourself. There is a small
bar of iron in this press which fulfils precisely the
same destiny to which we were at one time devoted.
We were considered in an exemplary line of life while
performing exactly its office—that of inking the type
—during a long year of disgust with Latin—(when a
sensible papa took us at our word, and allowed us to
prefer a trade to a satchel!)

The ink was in those days kept in a wooden box,
and, with two stuffed leather balls, a boy or man, beside
the press, distributed it over the face of the type,
while the pressman was fixing the sheet for the impression.
We remember balling an edition of “Watts's
Psalms and Hymns,” which it took weeks to print,
and, by the same token, there are lines in that good
book of which we caught glimpses on the “frisket,”
that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the
ink-balls while conning them over! Reviving ambition
sent us back to school, however, and invention
soon after superseded the ink-boy's elbows (encumbered
with a stomach), by a bit of machinery that
neither required to be fed, nor committed verses to
memory while inking the type! This getting rid of
the boy was the peculiarity of the Smith press, and
then followed the Napier press, which dispensed with
the man, and needed only the tending of two girls or
boys; and now (thanks to Mr. Hoe), we have a steam-press,
which puts up three iron fingers for a sheet of
white paper, pulls it down into its bosom, gives it a
squeeze that makes an impression, and then lays it into
the palm of an iron hand which deposites it evenly on a
heap—at the rate of two thousand an hour! We often
stop with curiosity to look at the little arrangement
which does the work our elbows have ached with, and
we think the Mirror press altogether is a sight worth
your coming to see, dear reader!

The First Day of the World's New Lease
was clasped upon the last yesterday of the completed
series, by as glorious a retiring moon, and as brilliant
a rising sun, as were ever coveted by the “old graybeard,”
at whose funeral they are to be the expiring
candles. A finer night than last night—a finer day
than to-day—never relieved watch upon the “tented
heavens.” We stood looking up a steeple from our
bed-room window at midnight (having first finished
an article for to-day's paper, upon the venture of its
being wanted), and we stood shaving at the same
window when the gold smile of the unexpected sunrise
called upon the surprised weather-cock to look
about him as usual! We, therefore, certify to the
world's coming honestly by its “situation.” Go about
your business, oh, mankind!

Coming down the front steps of the Astor, at half-past
six, we naturally enough took a look up Broadway,
to see if, perchance, some blessed change in the
pavement might not give the first sign of a new Jerusalem.
But if the sapphire paviors had called upon
Mayor Harper, he had struck at something in the
contract. The old holes were there, with stones of
the accustomed complexion—(chafed “trap,” mineralogically
speaking)—and the mud evidently unaware
of a miracle. But, hey! now! WHAT! a rainbow
across Broadway?? Could we believe our eyes?—
a many-colored arch completely spanning the street,
hung with flowers, and men walking over it!!! Was
an advent forthcoming, after all?

While we write, that Advent is in progress! It is
the Advent of Youth—Juvenocracy in the ascendant!
A flowery arch spans the breadth of
Broadway, and under it winds, at this moment, the
procession in honor of first maturity—manhood in
youth! It scarce needed, it is true, that the world
should be born again before its new monarch should
make formal entry. It was, ten years ago, discovered
in France—two years ago in England—last year in
America—that the gray head was only the wisest while
there were no books but experience! That which men
once waited to know till the hair was silvered, is now
taught the child at school—conned in the ambitious
dream of the youth in his puberty. The world has
“hung fire” in other ages, from the damp of burnt-out
enthusiasm spread like a blanket over its brain-powder.
Improvement has gone upon crutches.
Action waited for enterprise to cough. Courage
stayed to fumble for spectacles. The forenoon
shadows of the sun of human intellect were of untrustworthy
measure, and the dial to begin to work by
was shadowed till post-meridian!

Without touching upon the political articulation in
“the roar of the Young Lion,” we MARK THE EPOCH
—the epoch of “Young France,” “Young England,”
“Young America!” We could show, had we time,
how strikingly the peculiar habits of our land have
more prepared us than other countries, for the sovereignty
of Youth! We have no time now. We must
go forth with the crowd and see the bright cheek and
curling beard of the Young Monarch in his hour of
triumph. The cannon are pealing! The drums
shake upon the prophetic sunshine in the air!

12 o'clock.—We have been to Broadway. The
procession is soon to form. The mounted marshals
of the day are galloping to and fro with their ribanded
insignia—the pictorial outside of the Museum is perfectly
embroidered with petticoats (a charming relief!)
—the windows on both sides of Broadway are crammed
with gayly-dressed spectators—the 500 Boston
young men (fine, wholesome-looking fellows, who
certainly do credit to their “parsley bed”), are assembled
with their badges in front of the Astor—the town
is full of what the ladies would call “handsome young

strangers”—the omnibuses carry flags—the whole
street, from the triumphal arch to the pinnacles of
Trinity, looks impassable with the glittering crowd.
We never saw comparable preparation for a festal
march. It will be a day to be remembered—mocked
at, perhaps, as the first after a millenial crisis, but
glorified as the first in the great era of Youthfulhood!

Mass Meeting of Newsboys.—We may be permitted,
perhaps, to please our friends with the announcement
that we at least stand well upon the sidewalk!
The exhaustion of our large edition at four
o'clock, yesterday afternoon, and a general return of
the newsboys from their routes with eager demands
for more, occasioned a multitudinous holding of
counsel among those piping potentates, and to the astonishment
of our corner and the neighborhood, the
assembled varlets actually gave the Evening Mirror
three cheers! We bow to the tattered vox populi, and
own the soft impeachment. Gentlemen newsboys!
give us your hand (with a newspaper between!) and
permit us to offer you a business suggestion. Astonish
one of your insinuating number with a white shirt,
and try the new trick of selling us with a smile to the
ladies! Call him the ladies' boy, and treat him delicately
when he is dressed and can't afford the results
of your familiarity! Your powerful body amounts at
present to some three or four hundred, and your
profits will soon tempt the competition of older gentlemen,
unless you find more worlds to conquer.
Hurrah for the ladies, gentlemen (waving whatever
you have to represent a pocket-handkerchief)—and
now, if you will graciously withdraw your attention,
we would speak to those over whom you have the advantage
of youth.

We have to thank the press all over the country for
the most flattering mention and the kindest encouragement.
Our own craft seem to love us. We thought
of quoting some of their felicitous notices, but our
grateful pride would thus fall into a shape used for
puffing, and we shrink from the medium. Thanks to
our friends—simply but fervently.

Gold Inkstand to the Authoress of the Scottish
Chiefs.—The works of Jane Porter have
probably brought more money into the hands of
booksellers than those of any writer except, perhaps,
Scott, and at this moment steam-presses are
employed in printing large editions of her delightful
novels. An enthusiastic man, a great admirer
of Miss Porter, has, for the second time, started a
subscription among the booksellers of this city to present
her with a gold inkstand, and the Harpers, Appletons,
Langleys, and others, have subscribed with
enthusiastic liberality. Perhaps a description of Jane
Porter with a little of her hitherto unwritten history may
not be unacceptable.

Miss Porter was the daughter of a gallant English
officer, who died, leaving a widow, and three children,
then very young, but all destined to remarkable fame
Sir Robert Ker Porter, Jane Porter, and Anna
Maria Porter. Sir Robert, as is well known, was
the celebrated historical painter, traveller in Persia,
soldier, diplomatist, and author, lately deceased. He
went to Russia with one of his great pictures when
very young, married a wealthy Russian princess, and
passed his subsequent years between the camp and
diplomacy, honored and admired in every station and
relation of his life. The two girls were playmates
and neighbors of Walter Scott. Jane published her
“Scottish Chiefs” at the age of eighteen, and became
immediately the great literary wonder of her time.
Her widowed mother, however, withdrew her immediately
from society to the seclusion of a country
town, and she was little seen in the gay world of London
before several of her works had become classics.
Anna Maria, the second sister, commenced her admirable
series of novels soon after the first celebrity of
Jane's works, and they wrote and passed the brightest
years of their life together in a cottage retreat. The
two sisters were singularly beautiful. Sir Thomas
Lawrence was an unsuccessful suitor to Anna Maria,
and Jane (said by Sir Martin Shee to have been the
handsomest woman he ever saw) was engaged to a
young soldier who was killed in the Peninsula. She
is a woman to have but one love in a lifetime. Her
betrothed was killed when she was twenty years of
age, and she has ever since worn mourning, and remained
true to his memory. Jane is now the only
survivor of her family, her admirable mother and her
sister having died some twelve or fourteen years ago,
and Sir Robert having died lately, while revisiting
England after many years' diplomatic residence in
Venezuela.

Miss Porter is now near sixty. She has suffered
within the last two or three years from ill-health, but
she is still erect, graceful, and majestic in person, and
still possessed of admirable beauty of countenance.
Her large dark eyes have a striking lambency of lustre,
her smile inspires love in all who see her, and her
habit of mind, up to the time we last saw her (three
or four years ago), was that of reflecting the mood of
others in conversation, thinking never of herself, and
endeavoring only to make others shine, and all this
with a tact, a playfulness and simplicity, an occasional
unconscious brilliancy and penetration, which have
made her, up to sixty years of age, a most interesting,
engaging, and lovely woman. We have had
the good fortune to pass several months, at different
times, under different hospitable roofs, with Jane
Porter, and, considering the extent of her charm,
over old and young, titled and humble, masters and
servants, we sincerely think we never have seen a
woman so beloved and so fascinating. She is the
idol of many different circles of very high rank, and
passes her time in yielding, month after month, to
pressing invitations from the friends who love her.
The dowager queen Adelaide is one of her warmest
friends, the highest families of nobility contend for
her as a resident guest, distinguished and noble foreigners
pay court to her invariably on arriving in
England, she has been ennobled by a decree of the
king of Prussia, and with all this weight of honor on
her head, you might pass weeks with her (ignorant of
her history) without suspecting her to be more than
the loveliest of women past their prime, and born but
to grace a contented mediocrity of station.

This is an impartial and truthful sketch of the celebrated
person for whom the above-mentioned compliment
is intended. We trust it may find her alive, and
with her accustomed bright smile upon her lips—God
guard and preserve her!

Rocking-Chair vice Inkstand resigned. We gave,
“by authority,” an account of a subscription paper,
the purpose of which was to present to Jane Porter
an inkstand of gold. Our publisher-mayor Mr. Harper,
headed the list with $40. We wrote a paragraph
on the subject, and the same evening were called to
see a rocking-chair into which the inkstand had been
suddenly converted by a rub against the Aladdin's lamp
of propriety. We went into Meeks's museum of
sumptuous furniture, and the chair was disrobed, for
us, of a beautiful chintz cover presented to Miss Porter
by Messrs. Meeks, the makers. The chair is a
bijou. The model is appropriately Elizabethan—(a

chair for the virgin queen of English romance, made
in the style of the virgin queen of English history)—
the carving in rosewood relief, and the lining of crimson
velvet. The exact model of the chair was sent
to Queen Victoria not long since, as a specimen of
American furniture, by a club of English gentlemen.
The cadeau goes out consigned by the mayor of New
York to the lord-mayor of London, for his worshipful
presentation, Mr. Griswold, the packet owner, giving
it an honorary passage. The following letter, written
on parchment and sealed with the city arms, accompanies
it:—

We have still another light to throw upon this famous
chair. The Wood, without which it might not
have been built, did not come from the West Indies
in planks of amyris balsamifera (rosewood), but from
Canandaigua, in the shape of a gentleman whose
heart distils a better balsam—of courtesy! We first
heard of Mr. Wood and the proposed presentation of
an inkstand, from Miss Porter herself. She inquired
whether we knew Mr. Wood, and gave us the history
of his project to compliment her, apropos of promising
us a sight of barrels of presents which had showered
upon her from all parts of the world. She expressed
a most simple-hearted delight in the extent
of her American reputation, and wished to see a copy
of one of the American editions.

On our return to this country we found a small
copy of the “Scottish Chiefs,” almost illegible with
grease and thumbing, in the kitchen of a remote tavern
in Pennsylvania. We sent it to her with a little
water added unintentionally to its romance—having
fallen overboard with it in our pocket while ferrying a
skiff across the Susquehannah. By the way, let us
here record an act of liberality in an English publisher,
which is apropos of this present from the
American bibliopoles. We were one day requested
by Mr. George Virtue, the enterprising publisher of
the American Scenery, to be the bearer of a message
to Miss Porter. He wished to publish her Scottish
Chiefs in a beautifully-embellished edition. The copyright,
by English law limiting duration, had long since
expired—but Mr. Virtue wished to give Miss Porter
£200—one thousand dollars—FOR HER FORMAL CONSENT.
The check was sent the next day, and the
edition, one of the most superb specimens of embellished
edition in the language, is since completed.

The old proverb says of a burn,

and we had a burn at our fingers' end as to the real
mover's getting his share of the credit of this compliment
to Miss Porter. There is little enough enthusiasm
for others' glory in the world—little enough to
prevent all fear of surfeit by mention. We have recorded,
therefore, against his express orders, the disinterested
zeal of William Wood in this matter.

The Overcoat Dilemma.—We have received a
note from a dismayed tailor in a thriving inland town
of Massachusetts, begging us, “for charity's sake,”
to inform him “what is the fashion for overcoats.”
He protests that the models sent him from the city
are inelegant and unbecoming—and he begs us to inquire
of some dandy, regnant or ci-devant, as to the
existence, among knowing men, of some outer habiliment
more becoming than the prevailing type. This
is our summing up of his wishes as expressed in a letter
of three pages.

Before venturing to tamper with so ticklish a subject,
let us fortify the ground by an extract from a
very grave and well-considered lecture on the “Changes
of the Fashions,” lately delivered before a lyceum in
Portsmouth:—

Although the inventors of new fashions and the
leaders in them are highly culpable for the injury
they do society—yet nine tenths of those whom we
see in fashionable attire are persons on whom no imputation
can be cast: neither is there one in a hundred
of their dressmakers or tailors, hatters or cord-wainers,
who are deserving a breath of censure for doing
their work in a fashionable style. So powerful
an impetus has been moving the fashionable world,
that no individual can with safety hold up a resisting
hand. Nothing but a combined strength can overcome
it.

Common sense asks—why is it that a coat of a few
years' standing, with a broad back and long waist,
which the prudent man has kept for his holyday
wear, is not as really valuable as one in which the
seams are more nearly allied, or the buttons placed in
a different position?

Public opinion replies—the man is not in fashion.
The observers point him out among the multitude—
“There is a sample of old times”—“There goes a
miser who can't afford a new coat:” and a soft voice
whispers as he passes—“I wonder who would have
that old-fashioned man!” How frequently is the
public sympathy excited for an adroit rogue in fashionable
attire, who has received the just sentence of
the law—while the poorly-clad culprit by his side,
not more guilty, passes almost unpitied to the gallows.

Thus to be out of fashion a man is generally regarded
as wanting in spirit or purse; and it becomes
a matter of necessity for a modest man, who wishes
to elude the notice of the world, to follow along in
the wake of fashion. However much a person in
common life may be disgusted with its fluctuations,
he must bear the imputation of vanity, and in some
degree lose his influence in society, if he either has a
new dress made in an old style, or for convenience
appears in any new clothing which is made more

with a view to general utility than in subservience to
fashion.

With this warrant for giving a grave opinion on the
subject, we proceed to huddle together our kerseymere
ideas as follows:—

The sack-coat belongs to the climate of England,
and is wholly desorienté in this country. It was invented
as a kind of body-umbrella in which elegant
men could pass unwet from club to cab, in that climate
of eternal moisture, and was never meant to be
used but as a garment of transit. A dandy bien pointu
in his kid and varnish extremities, may certainly walk
the street safely in a sack-coat as his quality would be
known by his gloves and boots only, were he otherwise
parenthesized in a barrel. But, unless redeemable
by the point of his boot or a finger of his glove, no
man is “dressed” in a sack. By universally making
sack-coats of coarse cloth in England, they class them
very definitely with hackney-coaches and umbrellas—
temporary conveniences of which the material is by
no means a point of honor.

In England, however, dandies dress to drive, and in
this country they dress to walk, and, of course, it is
more important here that the street coat should be becoming
to the shape than is thought necessary in England.
The paletot (for a description of which see
“Scott's” authentic “Mirror of Fashion”) is becoming
to men of fine carriage, and the “Taglioni,” when
cut into the back adroitly, is becoming to slender figures.
In the present anarchy of overcoat, however,
every man can choose for himself, and our pastoral
querist of the shears, we venture to assure him, is
perfectly safe in first suiting his customers, and then
swearing it to be the fashion. We would just hint,
in conclusion, that there is a mixture of cloak and
overcoat that we have seen on a “slap-up” man lately
from Paris, and this chanced to hit our weakness.
Any man who has genius in his shears will require no
broader hint of what the combination looks like!

Young Men's Procession.—The procession of
yesterday, was less remarkable for its numbers (estimated
at 3,000) than for the unusual interest taken in
it by the spectators—the enthusiasm of the ladies and
more quiet lookers-on, and the boundless heartiness
of the cheers by the people in the streets. The quality
of the general feeling, to our thinking, was more
nearly up to the warmth of the Lafayette Ovation,
than any procession that has taken place since. We
remarked, also, that in the escorts and cavalcade, there
was a large mixture of fashionable young men, which
is a new feature in the public processions of this city.
There were also more clergymen, who had errands in
town and about the streets, than usual—the white
cravat in rather uncommon proportion. Altogether,
we think the bed of this new party has a longer and
broader blanket—covering higher toward the fastidious
public head, and falling more kindly upon the serviceable
public feet—than any new-party blanket spread
without our recollection. Youth is beloved. Its hopes
are contagious. Its opinions are supposed free from
selfishness. Its ardor is credited with inspiration.
The party of youth, whenever it is combined for one
object, must triumph, it seems to us—for it carries
with it an outside atmosphere of electric sympathies
exclusively its own, while, within, it has the energy
of enthusiastic first manhood, and confidence unsubdued
by experience.

Opening of the Railroad to White Plains.—
The first rush of blood through the heart of Pygmalion's
statue, and the first rush of a rail-car, on Saturday,
through the bosom of the Bronx valley, would
seem to us a well-matched fable and fact, were not the
fact, both as a surprise and a change, more electric
than the fable. To realize it, one must get at the way
it is looked at by the rustic dwellers in the plains beyond.
They were called upon to believe that a city
which has, all their lives, been four hours distant,
“good driving,” would, after the forthcoming celebration,
be slid up to within one hour, “easy going.”
Their potatoes are to glide to market, and coal and
groceries to glide back, with magical facility—their
women-folks are to go to town, stop and get home between
dinner and supper—the morning newspapers
are to arrive from New York a little after breakfast—
the citizens are to come out by hundreds for an afternoon
walk—New York, in short, is four times as near
as it used to be, only the land is not knocked away between!
A gentleman told us, just before the cars
started on their return, from White Plains, that the
country-people, around, were not only incredulous as
to the completion of the road, up to the time of the
arrival of the cars, but that they still (6 o'clock
P. M.) looked upon the whole affair—celebration,
train, music and guns—as a humbug that could never
hold out—got up for some Millerite or political hocus-pocus,
and to end only in the ruin of their credulous
neighbors!

To start fair, however. We were invited to join
the worshipful society of aldermen, bank-directors,
stockholders, and judiciary, who, on Saturday afternoon,
were to invade, for the first time, by public railroad,
the virgin seclusion of the White Plains. The
access, through the valley of the Bronx, promised something
attractive in the way of landscape, and there
was a pull out of town in the soft air of the morning.
We were at the cars punctually at one, found a friend
inside, and a band of music a-top, and rolled away
from the City Hall with a double momentum—steam
to draw the cars, and the gentlemen in the cars who
are drawn on for the steam! We went on our musical
way through Centre street, embellishing it (by the
beauty attracted to the chamber-windows) as the moon
brightens the clouds in passing through, and with a
momentary chill from the deserted propriety of streets
up-town, were soon in the fields—fields by the way,
which are secured to Nature and shorn of their chief
value (nearness to town) by the railroad which makes
fields beyond quite as come-at-able.

We gave Harlem an outbreak of music in passing
through, stopped a moment at Williams' bridge, where
the road has hitherto terminated, and then proceeded
upon the new track through the Bronx valley.[1] The
scenery for the next twelve miles was as primitive and
fresh as if a three-days' journey lay between it and a
great city—the most unconscious looking old watermills
on the stream, the woods and hill-sides with a
look most innocent of snob and suburb, and a universal
gape of amazement on the faces of cottagers and
their cows. The seclusion and thorough country of
the whole twelve miles were enchanting, and we promised
ourselves a ramble to twenty successive nooks
that we saw (and twenty successive times of course
had occasion to remember that we had become a
utensil of daily use, labelled “never to be taken out
of the kitchen!” We are sorry to say the grass will
probably do pretty well without us, now, till we disturb
it to ask leave to pass under.)

The hill-sides suddenly fell back and we glided into
an open plain, where two or three hundred rustic-looking
people were assembled—six or seven of them

busy on a knoll near by, ramming a welcome up a gun.
The report rang as the engine stopped, and—White
Plains was cosmopolized! Out jumped Wall street
and City Hall. An old negro and his very old wife
commenced furiously opening oysters at a bench near
by. The cars stood in the middle of a corn-field.
The country people gathered around and looked hard
at the boots of the company. Two or three barrels
of crackers were rolled over the corn-hills to a new
stable building in the field. Everybody from the city
seemed exclusively occupied with smelling the ploughed
ground. Horses were tied to the fences all about.
The landscape (breasted with fine, fertile hills, and
having the White Plains for its lap), was slumbering
in a soft haze, with just sunshine enough to content
a man who would be contented without it, and altogether
the scene was simple and fresh near by, and
the distance more picturesque than the name of
“White Plains” had suggested.

On the floor of the new barn, half boarded and
nearly shingled, were spread four long tables, laden
with a very profuse and substantial repast, and, in
fifteen minutes after arrival, the president was in his
place, and the stockholders and their guests seated
and “in a fair way” to be enthusiastic. After a round
or two of champagne, the president's health was drank
and his report called for—but we will give the statistics
in another paragraph.

Pretty sure of hearing the report and reading the
speeches “in the way of business,” we accepted the
invitation of Mr. Lyon, and drove to his beautiful
residence, near by—a Gothic cottage of most absolute
taste, a sketch of which we had seen in the new edition
of “Downing's Rural Architecture.” It is
enough to make one doubt all the ills of life to see
such a place to pass it in. The table-land of the
White Plains lies behind the house, and a valley—
folded slope over slope, and sunk, knoll below knoll—
drops away from the lawn in front, showing miles of
wild-wood and fertile fields, with a shady glen leading
away to the left—the whole combination, for an inland
view, unsurpassed in variety and beauty. The cottage
is in the Tudor style, faultless within and without.
We wish we had time and space to say more of it and
its surroundings. We should add that Mr. Lyon has
been the zealous apostle of the road, and that a procession
was formed after the collation to make him a
complimentary visit. They went to his house, preceded
by the band, but were unfortunately missed by
Mr. Lyon, who was conducting his friends back by a
shorter path across the fields.

The White Plains moon rose to see us off, and, as
we got under way with music and cheers, she added
another full face to the gazing rustics, and, when last
seen, was apparently climbing up on a barrel to look
over the spectators' shoulders. As she was in town
when we arrived at half past nine, and as there were
no ladies invited by the directors, she must have got
a ride somehow behind, and whatever the conductor
may say (for we know her well!) the paying her passage
was probably “all moonshine.”

Labor and Brains.—We hear much about “protection
for labor,” and very little about protection for
brains—(except in the way of a hat). The working
men, those who use their hands skilfully and industriously,
have many advocates of their claims. The
politicians and the law-makers and the newspaper
press, take up their cause loudly and sincerely, but
those who “can not dig,” who are “ashamed to beg”
and have nothing but their brains—their intellect, to
depend upon—are whistled down the wind, “the prey
to fortune.”

One class of these luckless personages, is that of
editors and assistant editors, and their remuneration is
not only inadequate, generally speaking, to their support,
but far below their real merit. What would the
newspaper press of this city be but for these men?
Nothing! They are the indirect means of giving a
livelihood to thousands, and are never thanked for it.
For example. We know of a newspaper in this city
which owes its success to a small corps of editors,
whose whole pay is about two thousand dollars per
annum. If they should withdraw their aid, the paper
would stop beyond a question.

Let us see what their brains do for others. The
paper-makers receive from the establishment, $18,000
a year. The compositors receive about $10,000 more
—the reporters and clerks about $3,000 more. The
type-makers and ink-manufacturers about $2,000 more.
And this expenditure goes on from year to year. It
would be utterly impossible for this $32,000 to be received
and expended in this way, but for the talent and
tact of two or three persons connected with the paper.
A large number of persons is actually supported by
their brains, and yet there is not one among the number
thus supported, who does not think his own personal
labor and toil, far more important and praiseworthy
than that of the men who actually furnish them with
employment! This is the justice of the world! This
is the result of the ridiculous notions prevailing, that
the lifting of the sledge-hammer is more deserving of
reward than the skill which guides its blows. Mechanical
labor of all kinds is better paid than literary
labor, and it is time that just impressions prevailed on
this subject. Let us honor the working men, but
when they are aided by talent and literary industry,
they should honor them in return.

The editorial corps are making the fortunes of many
newspaper and magazine establishments in this country,
and yet many men of talent are starving under the
effort.

Portrait of Wordsworth by Henry Inman.—
Without wishing to compare our great painter to a
worm—except as having used up one system (of artistic
ideas) and being fairly on wing in a new one—we
think the worm in chrysalis and its emergent new
creature very fair types of the Inman that was, in
America, and the Inman that is, in England. Before
this time we think he would have gone abroad prematurely.
Genius requires to complete its first identity
—to ripen fully—to acquire the perfection of command
over, and familiarity with, its in-born peculiarities—before
trusting itself in a sphere which is both
removed from habit and aids to concentration, and
bewildering with the glitter and supremacy of other
models. No matter what the pursuit, there is a
natural mental chrysalis—a time after completed manhood,
when a change of scene, change of habits,
change of influences, external and internal, renew the
life of both mind and body, open chambers in the soul
hitherto unseen, and incredibly beautify and enrich
the whole existence. How many painters have we
seen confirmed into tame copyists—crushed by the
weight of the masters above them—by going abroad
with a new-born style just struggling into shape and
seeming of its own! In a minor way, how many
characters are smothered by being forced into a too
trying element of society before completing their
natural idiosyncrasy!

Power went abroad at the right stage of his existence
as a sculptor—Grenough, perhaps, too early.
Inman might, possibly, have gone earlier, with equal
advantage. He has been, for some time, gaining little
in his art. The easily-given and ill-weighed praise
of our country had long ago satiated him. He had
little stimulus beyond the profit of his pencil. But
the mind that lies fallow under such torpor, ripens and

collects richness under the surface, and ploughed
again, before it is mastered by weeds and tangle, it
shows wondrous fertility and vigor.

We have put down, now, what passed through our
mind while looking yesterday at a head of Wordsworth,
which is just received from Inman. It is a
masterly piece of work, though but a sketch. The
truth to nature convinces you that it is an infallible
portrait, without your ever having seen the original.
It is Wordsworth. It is the shell of the meat in his
books. His feeblenesses and his philosophic simplicities
are there. You see how he came to write
what we have read. He has done his own portrait—
a faithful copy, in poetry, of the same as this on canvass.
Majestic and weak, wise and silly, far-sighted
and credulous old man! He looks like his poetry,
and to a man who could read characters as some do,
there would be nothing new in his books after seeing
Inman's picture, nor any surprise in Inman's picture,
after seeing his books.

What will Broadway be like, with omnibuses excluded,
and two lines of railcars plying its entire length?
Where will the tracks be?—both in the middle,
or one on each side? If the latter, how will carriages
stand by the sidewalk with safety? If the
former, will there be room left for two carriages to
pass each other on either side? Will not the frequent
taking-up and setting-down of passengers, and
the consequent hinderance of cars behind, make the
passage up and down tediously slow? These are
questions that, with sundry others on the same subject,
will furnish table-talk to the city for the ensuing
week—the announcement of the corporation's intention
to have a railroad there being yesterday made
public. Let us mumble about it a little. The slowness
of the motion would justify a very narrow track.
By placing the seats lengthwise, and back to back,
the cars themselves might be made very narrow, and
with a roof overhead, and no sides (or sides removable
in fair weather), passengers might easily jump on
and off, and be sufficiently protected. They will
probably stop for passengers at the crossings only.
The fare will be taken by a boy inside, as soon as the
passenger is seated, to prevent delay. We shall have
the comfort (sitting back to back) of not becoming so
compulsively acquainted with anybody's face, breath,
knees, and umbrella. Our chances of being the subject
of a coroner's inquest will be diminished 100 per
cent.—the present rate and manner of omnibus-driving
having (we presume) nearly doubled the cost of life-insurance
to those who live in the upper part of the city.
There will probably be fast lines established in the
streets nearly parallel to Broadway, and the great tide
of human life, now concentrated in one thoroughfare,
will be divided into three. McNair & Scarpa, and
other sellers of “acoustic oil,” will languish under
the suspended deafening of Broadway, and that charming
lounge will be once more susceptible of enjoyment
by walk and talk. The danger of prying off a
wheel upon the railtrack, or coming in contact with
the cars, will deter the timid from taking their carriages
into Broadway, and we shall meet all the pretty
shopperesses on foot (the greatest Amelia-ration)!
The “Kipp & Brown” 'buses will be obliged to come
down Church street, and have their terminus at the
corner of Fulton street and Broadway—or (query?)
will the lower part of Broadway, between the Park
and Bowling-green, be necessarily left open to the
converging lines from east and west?

“Taglioni is coming to this country.” So say the
papers; and if it prove true, we shall see the differ
ence between the apparent efforts of a football and a
balloon—between common and rarefied air (in manner
as well as in motion)—between a smile which, beautifully
dissected from the muscles that might else move
it, is left stereotyped upon the face, and a smile timid,
natural, and impulsive—in short, the difference between
the “divine Fanny” and the womanly Taglioni.
(We prefer a woman to “a divinity” any day!) Like
all women permitted to be desirably famous, Taglioni
paid the inexorable penalty of being undesirably
mated. She has amassed a fortune or two from the
“gold dust” at the toe of her white slipper—dissipated,
they say, without pity, by her husband, and she
has at last cut him (in toto), and goes entirely upon
her own legs. We hope they and the Cunard paddles
will, indeed, bring her to this country. In seeing
any other stage-exhibition, one is conscious of
the seat he sits on and the trouble of holding his hat.
To see Taglioni is to be in a trance, during which
one might almost be content with the seat of St.
Lawrence—on a gridiron. We shall remember (talking
of seats), “while memory holds her seat” (and
has any pleasure in sitting on it), the first performance
of La Sylphide at Paris—by far the most entrancing
and intoxicating spectacle we ever witnessed. We
venture to refer the reader to our description of it in
“Pencillings.” We wonder whether Taglioni will
come! Echo—“come!”

Major Noah and his Apology for the Crucifixion.—Our
friend, the lecturer on the Restoration,
has written us a letter, phrased with great forbearance
and kindness, but finding grievous fault with our yesterday's
notice of his discourse at the Tabernacle.
His letter is too long to publish, as he requests, but
we will give its substance, and leave out only his expressions
of good will. He says he “understood
from a friend that we were fast asleep before the lecture
commenced, and slept throughout the whole of
it.” With his letter, the major sent us a copy of
the Mirror with the objectionable passages of our report
underlined. Here they are:—

“Major Noah arose and commenced with an apology
for the Jews as to the crucifixion of our Savior.”

“With the exception of his very adroit disparagement
of the Savior,” &c., &c.

Some extracts from the lecture, copied from his
MS. into the Express, were also sent us by the major,
and we extract the page which, in the delivery,
impressed us as represented in our objectionable sentences.

“The Jews were amazed, perplexed, and bewildered
at all they saw and heard. They knew Jesus
from his birth: he was their neighbor; they knew his
father Joseph, and Mary his mother, his brothers,
James and Judas; he was in constant intercourse
with his brethren in their domestic relations, and surrounded
by their household gods; they remembered
him a boy, disputing, as was the custom, most learnedly
with the doctors in the temple; as a man pursuing
to the age of thrity, the modest and laborious
calling of his profession; and yet he proclaimed himself
the Son of God, and performed most wonderful
miracles, was surrounded by a number of disciples,
poor, but extraordinary gifted men, who sustained his
doctrines, and had an abiding faith in his mission;
he gathered strength and followers as he progressed;
he denounced the whole nation, and prophecied
its destruction, with their altars and temples;
he preached against whole cities, and proscribed
their leaders with a force which, even at this day,
would shake our social systems. The Jews became
alarmed at his increasing power and influence, and
the Sanhedrim resolved to become his accuser, and

bring him to trial under the law as laid down in the
13th of Deuteronomy.

“In reflecting deeply on all the circumstances of
this, the most remarkable trial and judgment in history,
I am convinced, from the whole tenor of the
proceedings, that the arrest, trial, and condemnation
of Jesus of Nazareth, was conceived and executed under
a decided panic.”

Now it seemed to us, and it scems to us (for we are
wide awake now), that to represent the Son of God,
while on a mission from Jehovah for the salvation of
a world, made the victim of a “decided panic”—the
“earth quaking, the rocks rent, the sun darkened, the
graves opened, and the veil of the temple rent in
twain,” as the consequence of a “decided panic,” under
the influence of which the Jews had crucified one
whom they “knew as a boy,” and as an industrious
laborer—this does seem to us a “disparagement of the
Savior,” and of the dignity of his mission, and it
does seem to us as intended to “apologise for the
Jews.” What other aim or relevancy has this very
new and original reason for the crucifixion, but to
apologise for the act?

As this is the “first time for centuries” that the
Jews have had an apologist, our readers will be interested
to know more particularly how the crucifixion
is defended. We therefore yield to our own wish,
and give the following more extended extract from
Major Noah's lecture, underlining those passages
which we offendingly described as “adroit disparagement,”
and “apology for the Jews:”—

“The title of God was a title of power and dominion,
and frequently was conferred by the Almighty
himself on earthly rulers. `See, I have made thee a
God to Pharaoh,' as God supreme said to Moses.
Son of God was a title frequently conferred on those of
distinguished piety and learning, and on those possessing
the emanations of the divinity, and this title the
apostles themselves carry ont in their writings.

“`The Son,' `My Son,' not the Father; the humanity,
not the divinity, the image of the invisible
God, not the invisible God himself; and as Paul said,
there is one God and one mediator between God and
man. Could the Almighty delegate a mediatorial
character to any one on earth? Who can doubt it?
God said to Moses, `Behold, I send an angel before
thee to keep thee in the way; provoke him not, for he
will not pardon your transgressions, for my name is
in him; my spirit is in him.' It was not therefore altogether
on the charge of Jesus having called himself
Son of God, that the Sanhedrim accused and condemned
him; political considerations mingled themselves,
and in a measure controlled the decision of the
council, and this is demonstrable from the declaration
of Caiaphas himself, as stated in the Gospel: `Better
that one man should die than that the nation should
be destroyed.'

“It was the sedition, and not altogether the blasphemy,
the terror and apprehension of political overthrow,
which led to conviction, and this political and national
characteristic was maintained throughout; it was that
consideration which induced the Jews to urge upon Pilate
a confirmation of the sentence. It was the charge
of assuming the prerogatives of Cesar, not the name
of the Divinity, which overcame the well-founded objections
of the Roman governor, and crucifixion itself
was a Roman and not a Jewish punishment. The
opprobrious insults heaped upon the master came
from the Roman soldiers, and that mixed rabble,
which, even in our day, desecrate all that is held sacred.

“I place these most absorbing events before you,
my countrymen, not to contrast things sacred with
those which are profane, but that you should understand
the exact position of the Jews at that time;
their painful situation, their prostrate condition, their
timidity, their hesitation, without even a ray of hope;
a people so venerable for their antiquity, so beloved
and protected for their fidelity, on the very threshold
of political destruction.

“It is not my duty to condemn the course of our ancestors,
nor yet to justify the measures they adopted
in that dire extremity; but if there are mitigating circumstances,
I am bound by the highest considerations
which a love of truth and justice dictates, to spread
them before you, at the same time to protest against
any entailing upon us, the responsibility of acts committed
eighteen hundred years ago by our fathers, and
thus transmit to untold generations the anger and hatred
of a faith, erroneously taught to believe us the
aggressors.

“The Jews, my friends, were but the instruments
of a higher power, and in rejecting Jesus of Nazareth, we
have a great and overwhelming evidence of the infinite
wisdom of the Almighty. Had they acknowledged him
as their Messiah at that fearful crisis, the whole nation
would have gradually sunk under the Roman
yoke, and we should have had at this day paganism
and idolatry, with all their train of terrible evils, and
darkness and desolation would have spread over the
earth. But the death of Jesus was the birth of
Christianity; the Gentile church sprang from the ruins
which surrounded its primitive existence; its
march was onward, beset with darkness and difficulties,
with oppression and persecution, until the Sun
of Reformation rose upon it, dissipating the clouds
of darkness which had obscured its beauties, and it
shone forth with a liberal and tolerant brightness,
such as the Great Master had originally designed it.
Had not that event occurred, how would you have been
saved from your sins? The Jews in this did nothing
but what God himself ordained, for you will find it
written in the Acts of the Apostles, `And now, brethren,
I know that through ignorance ye did it, as did
also your rulers!”

We leave it to any Gentile (saved by the “decided
political panic” of the Jews under Caiaphas), whether
it was not reasonable enough—at least for a man
“fast asleep”—to fancy he could detect in the above
argument, an “apology for the Jews,” and a “disparagement
of the Savior.” We were quite too fast
asleep to detect anything else!

No, dear major, we were not “asleep” when this
was delivered! Our head was down—for you had
two unshaded lamps, looking like blazing earrings, on
either side of your benevolent head, and our eyes are
as weak as your heartstrings—but we went to the
Tabernacle, not only with the interest of friendship
for yourself, but with high excitement in the unparallcled
background of your theme! We could not tell
you, without a seeming rhapsody—we could not trust
ourself to record, out of blank verse—the scope your
subject seemed to possess, the tragic sublimity of
your position, the climax of events you wished to be
instrumental in bringing to a close, and the interest
that might be awakened in the Christian world by an
eloquent, life-devoted, fervent apostle of the restoration!
There is no theme for eloquence with a thousandth
part of the pathos, depth, splendor, and present
convergency of this! Heavens! what a theme!
The key of the whole Christian era! The winding
up of a cycle of two thousand years numbered from
the crucifixion! The close of the one expiation
which is the theme of scripture-prophecy, and with
the closing of which comes in the millenial glory,
and the renewal of Paradise on earth! This theme,
on the lips of genius, one would think—genius accursed
eighteen hundred years ago, and to be one of
the forgiven at the second coming of the Messiah—
might burn like the fire upon the lips of Paul, and
turn all eyes toward waiting Jerusalem. This was
the view of the subject with which we went to the

Tabernacle, dear major!—almost envying you your
qualification by birth for the using of it. We meant
no disrespect in our notice. We were only a little
disappointed and annoyed that you did not kindle into
a crusader, or try on Peter the Hermit, till we gazed
at you, spite of your earrings!

And now—(“to step our of the carriage and see
ourselves go by”)—you are wrong if you are right,
major, and right if you are wrong! If your Jewish
creed be right, you are wrong to deny its manifest deduction.
If your Jewish creed be wrong, you are
right in wishing to explain it away. But you can
not have your cake and eat it, too. You can not reconcile
the church with the synagogue, nor can you
lecture palatably and frankly from the synagogue to
Christians. The time, at least, is not come. “At
the end of the world” (says a commentator on the Bible),
“Christ will unite the church with the synagogue,
the Jew with the Christian, the Christian with
the Gentile; then all things will be restored to a perfect
union, and there will be but one shepherd and
one flock.”

Prices of Women—cold and warm.—A lovely
female slave, warm from the mountains of Circassia,
and warranted not to be second-hand, may be bought
at Constantinople for three hundred dollars. A lovely
female statue, cold from the marble mountains of Carrara
(and spotless as the snow, without a doubt), was
lately sold by Mr. Power to the Hon. William Preston,
for three thousand dollars. Something would
seem to be wrong here—the “clay-tariff”—or the Ottoman
“protection”—or something! Various questions
arise. Is an original woman a favorite article?
Is the imitation by Power of the fabrics of Nature & Co.
an improvement upon the model? Is the presence of
the faculty of speech in the cheaper article any special
indication of a preference that can be relied upon in
the buyer? Perhaps some extensive dealer in both
articles will oblige us with a solution of this mercantile
problem.

We had a bonne bouche of opera last night at Niblo's
which made us long for the whole feast—a hint of a
ballet which provoked great desire for more—and just
such a sprinking of judicious white gloves as satisfied
the cognoscents that there was something in the bill
that had a pull upon the town's fashion. Then, as
if it were to be nothing but an appetizer, Madame
Pico appeared in a private box, and the audience saw,
that, whatever the warble might be, the throat it would
come from was of the most capable fulness of beauty.
We have had our suspicions, from the quietness with
which she “bides her time,” that Madame Pico is a
star conscious of the swing for a large orbit, and very
sure of “putting a circle round the” town, whenever
she rises. It is a considerable spoke in the wheel of
this same orbit that she is a very superb woman. She
has the adorable low Greek forehead, like Mrs. Norton's
(the poetess), and a certain maintien of bust and
neck which shows the kind of passionate uppishness
the old gods used to be fond of. (Vide the gods'
old pictures.) We were not surprised last night to
overhear a foreigner telling one of his countrymen
that Madame Pico would make more impression in
New York than any prima donna since Malibran.
What say, Corbyni! Light up your dress-circle with
a little more gas, and give us ballet and opera with
Borghese and Pico on alternate nights!

In every civilized country but this, the government
backs up the opera, as an important public refinement.
The royal treasurer is always half a stage manager.
With us, the people are the sovereign, but Chancellor
Bibb, not having, as far as we know, offered terms to
Madame Pico, we, as one of the royal pores, do our
part of the insensible perspiration, and express the
warm desire of the public, that Madame Pico should
appear. It is manifest dulness of enterprise, to have
no opera now. There are no parties, the autumn
weather is moderate, the strangers hang about town,
till after the Indian summer, and there is no room for
doubt that the thing would be supported.

There was a demonstration of enthusiasm, last night,
which appeared to be quite a l'improvista, at the performance
of the Polka, by “Master Wood and la
Petite Carline.” These two little miniatures—of
the size of children six years old—danced, to our
thinking, quite wonderfully. We are likely to have
no grown-up dancers, this year at least, who, reduced
to the same size by an inverted opera-glass, would do
the Polka any better. The necessary air of galliardise,
the precision, combined with abandon, the look
and gesture, were all capitally well done. They are
charming little people, and a good deal of a “good
card” for any theatre. Query, for Corbyn—Would
not a ballet, by these Lilliputians, got up for children,
to commence at four o'clock in the afternoon, and last
about one hour, be a paying enterprise?

One hint more: Is there not the making of a fine
actress and singer in Miss Rosina Shaw? She has
beauty, remarkable voice, grace and confidence—four
“pretty wells.” Keep an eye on her, Mr. Manager!

The Day after the Ballot.—The contention
for the favors of Mrs. Vox Populi is over. The difficult
dame has made her election. The future president
is in the ballot-box, and that womb of authority
is now silently waited upon by the paternal majority.
God bless whatever is to be brought forth!

Thank Heaven the town is stiller! There is more
noise upon the blacksmith's anvil and the shoemaker's
lap-stone—more clatter upon the tinman's vice and
the coppersmith's rivet—but the town's heart beats
less audibly, to-day, and the town's pulse less feverishly
and wildly. The political bully is looking around
unwillingly but peacefully for work. The club
wrangler's vocation is gone. The working-man will
give less of his evening to the bar-room and caucus.
Wives rejoice. Children are glad.

Considering only individuals, the immediate tumult
and recoil of politics seem only evil and violence.
The pore and the pediculus will complain of bloodletting
and blister. We believe the country at large
is benefited by the bringing of these bad humors to
the surface, however. We are sure at least that we
see all there is, in our body popular, that is dangerous.
There is evil disposition, antagonism, discontent, craving
for excitement, love of combination, dormant
energy, and ambition—qualities everywhere distributed,
and hungering, every one, for a field of action.
Where better would they break out, than in politics?
How, easier, should we know our neighbor's length
of conscience-string and proneness to trick and unfairness,
than by watching him when his passions are
roused and his cautiousness forgotten? What man
in a political committee knows too little of his fellows
for future living with them?

But, thank God, the tumult once over, the city returns
to peace, industry, and prosperity. Injury and
calumny stand no more behind the editor's chair—
literature and commerce, instead, look promptingly
over his shoulder. The merchant is relieved from
anxiety, and knows how to shape his venture. The
mechanic “hangs” politics for a plague and a bother.
The republic has set up its master, and is content to
be governed while it toils and prospers.

There is one feature of the late contest, however,
for which we can find no philosophical offset. We

refer to the unparallelled and insane extent to which
betting has been carried. Of any good this practice
does we do not see even a shadowing. Of its intolerable
evils we hear mournful accounts at every turn.
It seems to have infected, with a gambling mania,
those who never before hazarded money on a question
of chance or uncertainty. We have heard several
really most lamentable instances of fatuity and disaster
in this new demon-shape of party-spirit. Families
are ruined, creditors robbed, children deprived of education
and bread—by men who would as soon cut off
their hands as throw a stake at a gaming-table! Is
there no power in the law to put a stop to this new
evil of politics? We ask this question to provoke, if
possible, an answer.

And now—as politics walk out from the public mind,
and there is room for something else to walk in—let
us mention a great evil in this country of ours, and
tell some news that has an example by which to
mend it.

We toil too much!

Ladies' Dictionary—the word Alpaca. The Alpaca
is a South American animal, much used as a
beast of burden by the Indians, with long hair, principally
black, but slightly grizzled. It is an excessively
irritable animal, and indomitable till soothed. The
importance of this animal has already been considered
by the English, in their hat, woollen, and stuff trade,
and an essay on the subject has been published by
Dr. Hamilton of London. The wool is so remarkable,
being a jet black, glossy, silk-like hair, that it is fitted
for the production of texile fabrics differing from all
others, occupying a medium position between the
wool and the silk. It is now mingled with other materials
in such a singular manner, that while a particular
dye will affect those, it will leave the Alpaca
wool with its original black color, thus giving rise to
great diversity.

Who wants a Dress-Opera?—There is a large
class in every metropolis who are fond of gayety,
dress, and “a place to go to,” but who do not like
private parties for three or more reasons: 1st, the
lateness of the hours; 2d, the trouble of making the
agreeable; 3d, the card-and-visit nuisance, the management
and ceremony, necessary to keep up fashionable
vogue. The part of the evening between eight
and eleven is, to this class, the time of the twenty-four
hours in which they wish to be abroad, to be admired,
to be amused. The less trouble with it the better;
and they would rather give a dollar and think no more
about it, than leave a card at an expense of memory,
time, equipage, and politic calculation. They want a
place where everybody dresses; where it is light;
where they will see beauty, and be seen themselves
by appreciative eyes; where there is music to hear
and a show to look at if they like to be silent, or
friends in a box near by if they wish to converse—a
place where they can hear the gossip, have singers
to criticise, and “see the world”—in short, An Opera.

To the great majority of ball-goers—particularly to
the men—the time from eight to eleven hangs heavily.
They would gladly dress early and go first to the
opera, if it were habitually a dress-resort.

There are many well-off people to whom a dress-opera
is the only tolerable amusement—lame people;
ladies who only look well sitting, or look best in shawls
and opera-dress; foreigners who do not speak the
language; timid persons, who wish to see the gay
world without encountering it; and the many families
who have a competency to live and can afford
amusement, but want a handle to the door of society.

The first object of strangers in town (of whom there
are always several thousands), is to go where they can
see the well-dressed and fashionable people. Most
strangers, in a large city, would rather see the exclusives
in an opera-box, than the Croton reservoirs, or
the monsters in a menagerie.

People in ceremonious mourning find a great relief
in seeing the gay world from an opera-box.

Last (not least, unless you please!) some people
would frequent the opera, the season through, for the
music. It “soothes” our “savage breast”—for one,
and we think the “hang” of opera-music in the town
hum and whistle is a desirable and refining variety.

Now, with all this desirableness and frequentability,
is it not wonderful that no larger capitalist than Signor
Palmo (pocket edition), should have ventured to embark
in a scheme for an opera-house! It is not a
scheme to prosper—done by halves. It must be a splendid
affair, or a failure. There must be comfort in the
seats, breadth in the alleys, boundless prodigality in
the lights, luxury in the saloons and entrances, and
Alhambrian excellence in the refreshments. The
manager should be a mixture of Cæsar, Talleyrand,
and Bluebeard—awful, politic, punctual in pay, and
relentless to the caprices of primadonnas. Two slashing
critics should be employed to annihilate each other
daily, in opposing preferences for the performers.
The exaction of full dress for all comers should be
rigidly enforced. The names of the belles at every
last night's opera should be disembowelled and paragraphed
every morning. Prestige, celebrity, show,
humbug, and ceremony, should be added to the most
indefatigable real merit in the management, and then
the shareholders would make money.

Then, too, we should have a DRESS-RESORT—what
no theatre now is or ever has been in New York, but
what, of all refinements and resources, is the most
delightful and indispensable. We could write a
column about the blessing of beauty seen in public,
the chastening and refining influences of music, the
restraining proprieties of dress and observance, etc.,
etc., etc.—but we confine ourself to tangibilities. One
more fact—the existence of such an opera-house, so
conducted, would link New York in the operatic chain
of star-travel; and Grisi, Lablache, and the rest, would
as certainly come here from London and Paris, as go
to Vienna and St. Petersburgh, Berlin and Naples.
Our readers in Wall street will please consider this
as a “money article.”

ETIQUETTE OF WEDDING-CARDS.

Messrs. Editors: My friend John Smith is to be
married to Lucy Jones. She issues a card of invitation
like this:—

MR. AND MRS. JOHN SMITH
AT HOME,
No. 59 B— street, Tuesday Evening,
November 14th.

John Smith,
Lucy Jones,

Now he intends to use this for inviting to the ceremony;
but I tell him it is wrong, and can only be used
to invite to the party after the ceremony. He contends
that this is the usual form—so the engraver
tells him, etc.

Please give us the law in these matters (we can appeal
to no higher authority in matters of etiquette
and fashion); let us have the two customary forms,
for wedding and party, for the enlightenment of inexperienced
candidates who wish to follow the fashions,
and much oblige, Custom.

P. S.—We wait for your infallible decision.

Wednesday morning.

Unmarried People four times as liable to insanity
as Married People.—The “Concord Freeman,” in
a statistical article made up from hospital reports,
shows, that if a man is, perhaps, oftener out of pocket
when married, he is not so often out of his head. The
editor says: Few people are aware how much more
insanity prevails among bachelors and unmarried ladies
than among the married of both sexes. We
learn from the examination of very many reports, that
of every five of all lunatics sent to American hospitals,
three are unmarried, and only two are married, and
that almost all of them are over twenty-one years old.
On the other hand, it is pretty certain that in all the
community over twenty-one years of age, there are
more than three times as many in as out of wedlock.
If this be the case, then the unmarried are more than
four times as liable to become insane as married
people.

The Herald seems to think we have bought the
“Republic.” We are sorry that a republic is a marketable
commodity, but at any rate we have bought
nothing of that name of description. Our ambition,
somehow, does not seem to stumble upon things republican.
In this world we desire a farm, on which
we can be “monarch of all we survey,” and in the
next, we pray for a citizenship in the kingdom of
heaven.

“Up-Town” and “Down-Town.”—We see that
these names of the different halves of the city are becoming
the common language of advertisements, etc.
A person advertises in one of the papers a “Down-town
singing school,” and another a “Down-town
dancing academy.” We think our friend Billings
would better stick to “Up-town Hotel” as the better
designation of the new brick khan.

The new Sequel to Theatrical Intelligence.
—Since the bishops and deacons have taken to indicting
each other for fallings-away of which the public
like to read the Scan. Mag., we observe that the
particular column of newspapers which is devoted to
spicy news, theatricals, police incidents, etc., has
silently become the locality for brief paragraphs announcing
where distinguished preachers are to hold
forth. In the salad column of one of the papers there
is one announcement of a play followed by six announcements
of sermons! And in another paper
there are very nearly two columns of sketches of sermons,
from a specific “reporter!!”

We saw yesterday, for the first time in this country,
an equipage of full ceremonial splendor, faultless
in taste, and evidently not at all modified by any
dread of democratic prejudices. We admired the
“bravery” of the turn-out, and the courage of using
it. The ice broken, there will soon be conjured others
from the vaults in Wall street—but meantime, let
us look a little at the necessity for a promenade drive
in New York, and its probable locality.

In or near every capital of Europe there is a spot
which serves, for those who have carriages, the same
purpose which Broadway serves for promenaders on
foot. In London it is the Mayfair side of Hyde park;
in Paris it is the Champs Elisées and Bois de Boulogne;
in Florence it is the Cascine; in Rome the
Pincian hill; in Naples the Strada Nuova. In all of
these capitals the titled and wealthy avoid driving in
the crowded streets except upon errands of necessity,
and in London it is the custom to keep a plainer vehicle
with cob-horses expressly for use at night and
errands in the city. Ladies who have occasion to go
out in the morning, do so on foot and in the plainest
dress, followed invariably by a servant. They return
to lunch at one or two, and immediately after dress for
the show part of the day's out-door occupation. The
carriage comes round in full livery at the specified
hour, and, the shopping and business-errands having
been despatched in the forenoon, the equipage starts
upon the afternoon destination of ceremony or pleasure.

An hour before sunset or the dinner hour, the
principal drive is over, and the scattered equipages
meet, as upon a fashionable exchange, for a promenade
of display. This conventional assembling is relied
upon for recognition of acquaintance, for arrangements
as to the evening, for keeping advised of the
fashions, for seeing strangers, and for contests of style
in equipage and personal attire. The dandies must
be seen there, in cab or mounted; the women of “position”
must refresh there the memories of forgetful
tributaries; the new candidate for fashion must there
display that taste in “belongings” which can only be
guessed at in a ball-room; there are seen all whose
means make them eligible to expensive circles of society,
and who (by something that will and does tell,
in the equipage, or the mode of dressing for, and appearing
in, it) there make claim to fitness for, at least,
a ceremonious conversance with the haute voléc.

Of course, there is a postern of society in all cities,
through which are admitted certain classes, who keep
no equipages—those who are to amuse, instruct, or
embellish the gay world—poets, parsons, and pretty
women; but the promenade on wheels is, to all others,
the inexorable vestibule, and, as far at least as this
gate, the ordinary seekers of the heaven beyond must
come with horses. Cowper only mentioned the barest
essentials when he said,

In New York, however undesirable to the mass, this
formidable gulf is about to be sunk, between wealth
and competency. At present there is no distinction
among the upper ten thousand of the city. There is
no place where equipages are exclusively looked for.
There are five or ten thousand young men who dress
as well as the millionare's son; five or ten thousand
ladies for whom milliners and mantua-makers do their
best; ten or twenty thousand who can show as well
on foot, and walk as well without heart-burnings, in
Broadway—one as another. New York is (at this
critical moment, before the shoot of the centripetal
particles to a new nucleus) the largest republic of
“first quality” people that the world ever saw.

There is one spot which has been talked of as a
promenade drive, and we believe some endeavor has
been made to purchase it for the purpose—the beautiful
wood on the right of the Third avenue. That
charming spot would stand to New York very much
as the Cascine to Florence. We doubt, however,
whether, yet awhile at least, the object would warrant
the purchase.

The first probable promenade drive, we should say,
would be the Fifth avenue, from Washington
square to the Croton reservoir. The splendor of the
houses on this broad highway is far beyond that of
any other portion of the city; it is no thoroughfare
for omnibuses; it leads from the wealthiest neighborhood
to a prominent public work; it is on the return
route from the loveliest drives on the island; and,
should the summit of the rising ground on which the
reservoir stands be fixed upon, as proposed, for the
Washington monument, and planted and decorated,
that limit would be a convenient turning-place, and a
charming and airy spot for a sunset soirée en voiture.

A Story for your Son, Sir.—The present king
of France, one very cold evening, was riding from
Boston to Salem on the outside of the stage. He
was entirely without money to pay for a lodging that
night, and he began to make friends with the driver to
get part of his bed. After a while the driver's compassion
was aroused. “You are not a very clean
looking chap,” said he to the poor Frenchman, “but
my bed is in the harness-room, where there's a stove,
and if you'll keep your trowsers on, and sleep outside,
I don't mind!”

The Republic of Broadway.—Eyes were contrived
at some trouble; the great sun shows only the

outside of things; the present and visible (Carlyleically
speaking) is the world God adapted our senses
to; and though some people like to live the life of a
sundial under ground, we prefer to throw to-day's
shadow from whatever we do—writing about what we
see, and thinking most about what jostles our elbow.
This explained.

We have a loose slip-slop or two for the young men
about town—not as to their invisible minds and morals,
but as to their visible walking and dressing. Having
“bought our doublet in Italy, our round hose in
France, our bonnet in Germany, and our behavior
everywhere,” we may perhaps excusably scale a pedestal
to give our opinion; though the credit we take
to ourselves may be granted in the spirit of Falstaff's
to Doll Tearsheet, “We catch of you, Doll, we catch
of you!”

There is nothing so republican as a dressy population.
We are no “leveller,” but we like to see things
level themselves; and the declaration of independence
is impotent in comparison with the tailor's goose. A
young man about town slips his miniature into five
thousand eyes per diem. Fifty of the five thousand
who see him know whether his father is a mechanic
or a rich man; and it depends wholly upon his dress
and mien whether the remaining four thousand nine
hundred and fifty take him to be a rich man's son or
a mechanic's son. It is reasonable, of course, to let
the fifty who know think what pleases them, and to
dress for the very large majority who don't know.
This is apparently the tacit philosophy of the young
men of New York. There is no telling, by any difference
in dress, whether the youth going by has,
probably, a sister who is an heiress, or a sister who is
a sempstress. There is no telling the merchant from
his bookkeeper—no guessing which is the diner on
eighteen pence, and which the gourmet of Delmonico's—no
judging whether the man in the omnibus,
whom you vaguely remember to have seen somewhere,
was the tailor who tried on your coat, or your vis-à-vis last night at a ball.

As we said above, this is a true republic. A young
man whose appearance is four-story-housy, can very
well afford to let a few people know that he sleeps
over the shop. If he is more elegant than a rich
man's son, he gets as nearly the full value of the difference
as ordinary vanity would require. Every
young man finds means to dress to his liking, and of
course every young man starts fair, each morning,
with all of his age, for the day's competition in bright
eyes.

We shall be understood, now, in our republican effort
to add still another levelling to this of the tailor's
goose—to bring the attractions of plain men up to
those of the “aristocracy of nature.” The hints we
have to throw out will be slighted by the good-looking;
taken advantage of by the plain—thus levelling,
in another respect, upward.

The rarest thing seen in Broadway is a young man
who walks well. A stoop in the back is almost national;
and an upright, graceful, gentlemanlike gait
is as rare as it is singularly striking. If you can afford
the time to walk slowly, high-heeled boots are a
great improvement. With time enough, you drop
the foot insensibly from a high heel, like an actor
walking down the slope of the stage. Beside, it
makes the instep look high, which implies that your
father did not carry a hod.

Avoid a broadcloth shirt, in the shape of a shapeless
garment with sleeves (one of the new fashions).
It looks collicty, with the wind bellying it out in all
directions as you walk along.

Leave long cloaks to the clergy. The broad velvet
collar, turning over, diminishes your apparent breadth
of shoulders, and it should be worn with careful dramatic
propriety, not to be very awkward and inelegant.

If you are about to have an overcoat made, get a
fat friend to go and be measured for it. At any rate,
let not your diaphragm be so imprisoned, that the
first heroic sentiment will tear off a button. One of
Jenning's cutters is the apostle of a reform in this
matter—measuring you (if you request it) by a magnifying-glass,
from the waist upward.

These are not King Canute's days, when “none
under the rank of gentlemen dare presume to have a
greyhound to follow him.” The outward symbols,
once peculiar to elegance, are pretty well levelled up
to, as we said before—but, by careful observation,
you will now and then see a something that nice men
do, or do not do, which has not yet got through the
hair of the promiscuous. As an example, and in the
hope that it will not be generally understood, we will
mention, that very particular men, for the last year,
have walked the street invariably with a kind of
grieved look—very expressive and distinguishing.

We will resume this republican theme.

The Designation of the Lady Presidentess.—
If it had not been for a certain ante-expiatory “white
horse,” we should have prayed for the miraculous return
to this world of “John Tetzel, Vender of Indulgences.”
The editor of the Morning News did justice
to his Irish blood a day or two ago, by giving
back, to the loser's wife, a saddle-horse he had won
in a bet: but how, in the name of all the gallant proprieties,
can he justify himself to the ladies of the democracy
for making no distinction between their queen
and the (of course) less glorious queen of any country
on earth? The promiscuousness of two “Mrs.
P's!”

“White-House.—Among other consequences of
the election of Mr. Polk, it is said, will be to locate
in the White-house at Washington the handsomest
and perhaps the most accomplished lady that ever
presided in its stately halls. Mrs. P. has, for some
years, been remarkable not only for personal beauty,
but for that greater charm, graceful manners, and a
highly-cultivated mind.”

If, in this democratic country, one may venture to
say a word for the other “Mrs. P.,” we think that
Louis Philippe's having slept with a stagedriver in
this country (vide a late anecdote) might have procured
for his wife the easy privilege of at least one
distinguishing initial. It surely would not seriously
invade the simplicity of our court circular to add a
“J.” to the single-letter title of the lady presidentess
of fifteen millions and Texas! Be generous, gentlemen
people! Let us have some distinction in the
Queen “P.'s” of the two countries. The editor of
the Morning News will be some day minister to
France. Fancy his being called on to present “Mrs.
American P.” to “Mrs. French P.”

Overhaul of Sailing Orders.—The sails draw
—the freight sits trim in the hold—the ship minds
her helm, and the wind strengthens on the quarter
with a freshness that strains rope and spar. It is perhaps
the best moment that will occur, in the long
voyage before us, to overhaul our signals and sailing-papers,
and understand how we are to communicate
with the fleet, and go straightest and most prosperously
to our destined haven.

(Whoa, Pegasus! We have been as poetical as
will have been expected of us at one day's notice.
Drop to the ground and let us go off on a plain trot!)

We have always looked upon the gentlemen of the
daily press as among the enviably unlabelled potentates
of this country of King Everybody-nobody—

enviably as having enormous power and little responsibility
as to the using of it. The power will doubtless
remain as large and the responsibility as small. “A
free press” is the lesser of two evils. In the perpetuation
of this state of things, however, lies our future
vocation, and—while we have it yet in our power to
“make a clean breast,” and avow what we have objected
to in the exercise, by others, of the spells by
which we are to conjure—let us name at least the one
blot which most smirches the forward face of the profession.

It were of little use for one editor to declare that he
would make war freely upon opinions—never upon
persons. And the disadvantage is not merely that of
throwing away the dagger in battle, because the sword
is more gentlemanly—not merely a lessening of one's
formidableness to an opponent. The evil is in the
greater curiosity to watch the stabber, felt by the lookers-on.
The temptation to be personally abusive lies
in the diseased appetite of the crowd that will follow
the abuser—leaving the scrupulous man alone with
his decency. Living as editors do, by the favor of
the crowd, if many are willing to minister to this diseased
appetite, decency in the few is a kind of slow,
business-suicide.

It would almost require a Utopian fancy to picture
the beauty of a press from which personalities and
illwilled abuse were wholly excluded. No personalities
in literature, and none in politics—the author,
editor, and statesman, alike intrenched in

—how completely the envy of malignant mediocrity
would be deprived of its now easy sting, and how
completely ruffianism and brutality would be confined
to the bully-club and dram-shop! Scholars would
wait on public opinion, at the editor's table, busied
only with embellishing, and not engrossed with defending
their fair fame; and gentlemen of sensitive
honor, who are now appalled at the calumnious gauntlet
of politics, would come forward to serve their
country at the small posts occupied now only by men
senseless to defamation.

To the coming about of this paradise of letters,
editorial consent is alone wanting. No one man could
live long, the only calumniator of the press. No one
man would dare to hold the only pen deficient in
courtesy and gentlemanlike regard to private character.
Complete silence from the rest of the press
toward the one offender, after a unanimous publication
of his disgrace—refusal, without exception, to
exchange papers with him from that time forward—
any combination, in short, which should make the ostracism
of such an individual, by his brethren of the
press, universally known—would suffice to purge the
press of him. One year of such united self-censorship
would so purify the public habit of news-reading,
that an offence against propriety would at least
startle and alarm the public sense; and, arrived at that
point, a very moderate apostleship might complete the
reform.

We do not anticipate this. Oh, no! We are

but, at the risk of being the “grave of our deserving,”
we shall do the leaning of one to the better side.
We shall have harder work for it. Nothing is easier
than to be popular by habitual ill will. Trashy minds
write most readable satire, and, with the mood on or
off—the industry willing or reluctant—fault-finding is
fecund production. But if good nature can be spiced
—if courteous treatment of our brother editors,
brother authors, and all nameable men, can be made
palatable to the public—if a paper wholly incapable
of an unkindness, but capable of all things pleasurable
else, can be fairly tested—we trust to do without the
price of giving pain, and we trust that the money so
turned out of our hand will not be like the lost oil of
the tomb of Belus—irreplaceable.

The Cost of Fashion.—From a pamphlet sent us,
we learn that five hundred millions of dollars are spent
annually in the United States for such articles of
dress as are subject to the fluctuations of fashion.
Of this sum, it is computed that sixteen millions are
spent for hats, probably about twenty millions for caps
and bonnets, and for other articles of dress not less
than four hundred millions!

So that not far from a million and a half dollars are
spent daily for clothing; of which, if the calls of
fashion claim but ten per cent. (but probably she receives
double that sum), one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars are sacrificed daily at the footstool of the
fickle goddess, by the enlightened citizens of the
United States!

Is it not time that some standard of national dress
was established? We certainly have had sufficient
experience to know what kinds of clothing are the
most convenient, and one good reason can not be produced
for the unmeaning changes which are every
day taking place.

It is not to be expected that in a free country, where
it is proverbial that “every man is at liberty to wear
shoes or go without,” an association to fix upon
a general standard of dress would lead all to adopt it.
No—there would be those still found who, lacking
other points to recommend them to public notice,
would act the cameleon still. But no small portion
of the community would recommend that course
which would most evidently be for the public good.

The number, if large and respectable, would exert
a sufficient influence by their example to prevent the
standard fashion from ever appearing out of date.
The ladies' bonnets would then be new at the end of
three years, instead of being old-fashioned at the end
of one. The gentlemen's hats would be fashionable
until worn out; and the wedding coat, which is saved
for holyday occasions, might descend from father to
son, a fashionable garment.

A HUMBUG FAME.

Thomas Carlyle.—We have nowhere seen a juster
view of this much-talked-of writer than is given in
the October number of the Biblical Repository, a
journal conducted with great ability by an association
of divines. The writer (Prof. J. T. Smith, of Newton
Theological Institute, Mass.) allows Carlyle to be
a “most vigorous, unique, and original thinker and
writer,” and that his “Past and Present” is “certainly
worth reading.” He allows further, that that work
contains many noble and truthful sentiments, uttered
with commanding energy. This, however, is the extent
of his commendation. “We must, on the whole,”
says the writer, “characterize it as a book, in style,
barbarous; in politics, incendiary; in philosophy, dubious;
and in theology, execrable.” This opinion
the reviewer supports by an analysis of the work, and
by a specification of particulars.

The barbarity of the style no one doubts, and no
one, except a few very warm admirers, defends. This
very barbarity seems to us only another manifestation
of that arrogance which characterizes all Carlyle's

attempts. A man who condemns everybody must
needs be an inventor.

The work is said to “breathe an overweening, morbid
admiration of the past.” Nothing of the present
satisfies Mr. Carlyle; nothing of the past but elicits
his commendation, and among other things, Scandinavian
savagery, Mohammedanism, twelfth century
catholicism, the fighting barons of feudal times, Popes
Gregory and Hildebrand, and other personages of like
stamp, each and all present to him some phase worthy
of special notice and admiration. The religion and
the systems of government of the present day, have
very hard fare at his hands, since the former is all
cant, hypocrisy, and quackery, and the latter nothing
better, to say the least. We are, in truth, recommended
to go back to the twelfth century for models
of religion and government. The HERO must be found
by some means—or he must find himself. A fighting
aristocracy like that of the twelfth century is no longer
possible; but a working aristocracy must take its
place, and the system of villanage be restored. Indeed,
American slavery seems essentially the system
recommended by this practical preacher.

The sum and substance of our own view of the
whole matter is, that while we sympathize to some extent
with Mr. Carlyle in his dissatisfaction with the
present state of things, the remedies he proposes in
his deep-mouthed and most oracular tone, are absolutely
naught—the mere dreams of a mind well-intentioned
enough, but half-crazed with overweening self-estimation.

He insists much on the necessity of a “French
revolution” in England. “There will be two, if
needed; there will be twenty, if needed... —The
laws of nature will have themselves fulfilled,” and
much more to the same purpose. Yet this inevitable
fulfilment of the laws of nature which is to work all
good, seems, according to the seer's estimate, as yet
to have wrought nothing but ill. His final hope is a
hero-king: “Yes, friends: hero-kings and a whole
world not unheroic—there lies the port and happy
haven,” &c. In fine, if Carlyle's words mean anything
(which, the more we read the more we doubt),
the whole people are to be roused to violent revolt,
and plunged into all sorts of horrors, as a preparation
for a better state of things!

Carlyle speaks of the last two centuries as godless
centuries—and that in contrast with the long ages
that went before them. What is this but to shock
the common sense of history? And his remedy is
HERO-HOOD. What is this but inane twaddle? Monstrous,
unblushing egotism, is one of Carlyle's striking
characteristics. Great and learned men, astronomers,
philosophers, and others, are “poor scientific
babblers;” he alone, it would seem, discerns the reality
of things, and has the key to the mysteries of
nature. “Insight” has been granted to no other.

One of the wonders of the age to us is, that such a
monstrosity as Carlyle should have attained so high a
place in its estimation. His merits are so overloaded
by the most shocking and unbounded affectation and
egotism, that we rise from the perusal of much that
he has written with no other sensations than those of
weariness and disgust.

The poems of the Kentucky Sappho, Amelia, have
been published in a very elegant gift-book volume, by
Tompkins, of Boston. We have expressed our almost
unqualified admiration of this lady's poems, as they
separately appeared. She has a mind fed equally
from a full heart and a prodigal imagination.

It was once remarked to us, by a critic as candid as
he is discerning, that there is a great development of
the poetic sentiment in this country; that many of our
collections, which, in their brief existence, resemble
the flowers that seem to be born only to die, like those
delicate, odorous, and lovely objects in nature, have
often a character of sweetness, purity, and freshness,
grateful to refined taste and a feeling heart. The
pieces contained in this volume are worthy of such
praise. A loving heart, and a soul in harmony with
the beauty of the world and the divine spirit which
informs it, dictated these poems.

We might make many beautiful selections from this
handsome volume; but we must content ourselves,
for the present, with naming one, “The Little Stepson,”
which, in its earnest simplicity, and its ringing
music, reminds us of that favorite translation, “My
ear-rings! my ear-rings! they've dropped into the
well!” Not merely that the measure is the same, but
that the whole tone seems the echo of far off and
primitive manners—the voice of untutored affection.

Miff between John Bull and Brother Jonathan.—The
offensive club exclusion by which English
aristocrats have undertaken to make Americans
pay their debts, does, unquestionably, put the
screw upon a national weakness. We are not sorry
for it—but there could have been nothing in worse
taste or showing a more ignorant lack of discrimination—setting
aside the fact of its being done by a class
of men, who are themselves, notoriously had paymasters.
We do not believe, however, all that is in the
papers on the subject. The “Reform-Club,” in
which it originated, is a new combination of ill-ballasted
politicians, and the movement will be disclaimed
in some authoritative shape, before a month is over.
Trifling as the matter abstractly is, it would act very
pungently on any question of war-making which should
arise among us within a year.

Perhaps some of our readers would like to know
how far an exclusion from the clubs affects Americans
in England. The fact of not having the honorary
privilege of admission to the two principal clubs, was
(before this national exclusion) sufficient evidence
that a gentleman had not come well introduced. One
of the first and most natural questions addressed to a
stranger in London is, “What club are you in?”—
the intention being to ask you to a tête-à-téte club
dinner, if you turn out agreeable. This is almost the
only courtesy that a literary man in England has it in
his power to show you. He can give you a dinner
for a few shillings at his club (if you are a member of
it and not otherwise), which in point of style and comfort
is equal to a nobleman's entertainment. Or
(which is more common) he can say, “I dine at the
Athenæum to-day at six. If you have no better engagement,
we'll put our chairs together”—each man
in this case paying his own bill. An invitation to
club privilege is only got up by high interest, however.
It requires some person of consequence to play the
applicant, and the number of strangers in each club,
at one time, is seldom more than twenty or thirty.
The following are the formulas of invitation to the
two principal clubs:—

It is rather important to a man making his way in
London society, that he should be seen at the clubs.
The formidable “Who is he?” is always satisfactorily
answered by, “Don't know, but I saw him at the club.”
It influences all manner of introductions, breaking
down scores of invisible walls between the new-comer
and desirable things and people. A call at the clubs
is an invariable part of the routine of a fashionable
man's morning. He goes there to meet friends, to
hear the news, to bet, to smoke, to make engagements
—to prepare for the out-door part of the day, in short.
All notes, requiring a very private delivery, are addressed
to a man at his club. Men who have no libraries
of their own, do the most of their reading
there. It is the place to see great men, fashionable
men, famous men; and to see them without their
masks—for the security, as to the proper introduction
of all present, throws an atmosphere of marked laisseraller
around sensitive greatness.

We sat down, however, to comment upon the ignorance
as to our country, shown by the late narrow-viewed
movement of club-exclusion—the evident ignorance
of any distinction between state responsibility
and national responsibility. To mention it is enough,
however; and we turn to that which will show the
out-lying proof of English ignorance of us.

One of the dullest, most arrogant, and unscrupulous
of travellers is commended in the last foreign quarterly,
by one of the most unfair and ignorant of critics.
If all travellers and critics were like this well-matched
pair, the subject of British tourists and reviewers, and
their opinions and statements concerning us would not
be worth a thought. Of the capacity and information
of the reviewer, take one or two specimens. “The
unanimity of whigs, tories, and radicals, upon the one
topic of American society (i. e., in condemnation) is a
thing to wonder at and reflect upon.” Two of the
most readable works of this class within the last ten
years are decidedly favorable—those of Miss Martineau,
and the Hon. Charles Augustus Murray. A more
striking instance still of the reviewer's utter ignorance
or most shameful falsification is his representing the
internal traffic in slaves as publicly repudiated, and
founding on that a charge of duplicity, since “men—
are ready to swear there is no such thing from one end
of America to the other as a trade in slaves.” A very
suitable person this to write comments on American
travels! With such endorsements Mr. Featherstonhaugh's
statements can not but pass current! We
did not suppose there was, in the obscurest corner of
Europe, one dabbler in ink so profoundly and inexcusably
ignorant as not to know that slaves were
openly bought and sold in the slave states of this
country. That such Cimmerian darkness (to make
the most charitable supposition) should envelope the
brain of a British reviewer is a marvel indeed!

It was not, however, to expose such ignorance that
we took up the pen, nor to draw the very natural conclusion
of the amount of information, which Mr. F.'s
book conveyed to his countrymen at large, since, notwithstanding
the title “slave states,” his reviewer concluded
there was no acknowledged slavery—for without
purchase and sale the system is of course knocked
on the head.

But such are not all British tourists, nor such all
British reviewers; and it is worth while to inquire why
it is, that, placing out of the account writers of this
class, there is still so large a proportion of our well-informed
and sensible visitants, who get an unfavorable
impression of our institutions and of our state of
society.

We ought to give up the idea of a prevalent ill-feeling
toward us in the fatherland of our ancestors,
or a wish to put us down, because we are on the wrong
side of the water. Few Englishmen like us the less
because we are Americans, and not French or German
or Russians. Thousands of us when abroad have experienced
the contrary.

Nor ought we to suppose that envy, jealousy, or
ancient grudges, are at the bottom of the hard measure
meted out to us by tourists. True, we have met in
war as enemies, and in peace as commercial rivals,
and have in both held our own; but meanness and spite
form no part of the character of John Bull. He has
tremendous faults, but he keeps tolerably clear of
pettinesses.

One fault shows itself with the English abroad,
wherever they are. Though the greatest travellers,
they are the least cosmopolitan. The island mania
attends them everywhere, except at home. Like
some mistresses to some lovers, old England seems
the dearer the farther they get away from her. Goldsmith's
Traveller's lengthening chain is no fiction.
Across the ocean it is often insupportable. Sometimes,
also, this distance has, at the outset of the
voyage, “lent enchantment to the view,” which, when
dispelled, leads to a bitter, though unreasonable disappointment.

The very resemblance which we bear to the English—and
must bear, from our origin, our language,
our literature, and our continued intercourse ever
since the ocean rolled between us—is unfavorable to a
just, and still more to a partial judgment of us, on
the part of those honestly disposed to do us justice.
To other people the British traveller can apply, in
some measure, the true standard—i. e., to each its
own; but for us, he can have only the home standard.
Weighed by this, we are, of course, found wanting.
He find us nine tenths English, and scolds that the
other tenth is not English too.

It is needless to discuss the point, whether that
tenth is better or worse—the English blood renforcés
(as some Frenchman has pronounced, justly we—
hope) or not—it is enough that it is not English for
the genuine John Bull to pronounce it ridiculous or
insufferable; to laugh or rail at it according to his
humor. The general resemblance he can not deny,
but he unreasonably demands an exact likeness. In
the points where this is not perceptible, he of course
considers us shockingly degenerate, altered altogether
for the worse. Now there are various points which
we should not expect him to appreciate justly, for we
know he is a creature full of prejudices and contradictions,
and he must see with his own eyes or not see
at all.

Another real difficulty is, that no mere passing
traveller can realize the crowning glory of our country
and of our institutions—the general diffusion of comfort
and intelligence. A traveller is looking out for
the salient points—something striking or marvellous
—something that will tell in his book and his memory.
A thousand comfortable or even elegant private dwellings
that he might pass, would not make upon him
so vivid an impression as one splendid palace—while
the former would indicate a thousand families living
in comfort and abundance, and the latter that there
was one family of over-grown wealth with a presumption
against its possessing the average worth of the
former, or even enjoying their average happiness.

We contribute to the severity of the judgments
against us by our own fault. Our sensitiveness lays
us peculiarly open to attack, and none reply to such
attacks with more violence. The foreigner who

knows this and who can not perhaps conscientiously
grant us all we ask, sharpens his weapons beforehand
for the encounter, and deals harder blows in anticipation
of those which he knows he is about to bring
down upon himself.

To this must be added our national vanity—a
characteristic which the candid among us own. From
demanding too indiscriminate praise, we do not get
that which we really deserve, as the trader, who praises
his wares extravagantly, is sure to have them undervalued.
If our claims were more moderate, they
would be oftener acknowledged. If we exacted less,
more would be voluntarily given. If we did not rise
up against deserved reproof, we should be oftener
spared that which we did not deserve.

When we claim the eloquence of a Chatham for
every stump orator, and then apply the same phrases
to our really great and eloquent men, the latter are
sufferers. If we claim for our every-day life or even
for our soirées recherchées the grace and polish of a
court, where they have nothing to do but to kill time
agreeably, the assertion is simply ridiculous. Some
traveller (Dickens we believe) says of the factory-girls
of Lowell, that they have the port and bearing (or
something to that effect) of well-bred ladies. Pretty
complimentary we should think! But an annotator
somewhere (but where we know not), is not satisfied.
He adds, that if Mr. Dickens should meet these persons
in private circles, he would find they had the
corresponding elegance and manners. As if any good
factory-girl at Lowell would pass muster at Queen
Victoria's drawing-room!

The new Prima Donna.—The haste with which
it is the fashion to write about prima-donnas, giving
them a cornucopial criticism, on their debut, and dropping
directly after into very brief notices, reminds us
of a lady's reproach to her lover, in the old play of the
Spanish friar: “You men are like watches, wound
up for striking twelve immediately; but after you are
satisfied, the very next that follows is the solitary
sound of single one.” We should like very much to
defer expressing an opinion of Madame Pico, till she
had a little recovered from the embarrassment of a
first performance, and (more important still in criticising)
till we had steeped our tympanum a little longer
in the honey the bees of Italy have shed upon her
lips; but—

The audience at Palmo's, last night, was, probably,
the best ever assembled since Malibran's time, as to
the capability of judging of a cantatrice by taste and
comparison. Madame Pico, even in Italy, would
scarce have dropped her golden cadences into more
judicious ears. Fortunately, too, the unripeness of
an entirely new opera was corrected by the predominance
of natural melody in the composer's style—making
it all come to the ear with the impromptu welcome
sometimes refused to the best music. By the
way—without knowing whether this opera will grow
upon us, and allowing, at once, that it has none of
Beethoven's under-song, nor any of the supernatural
combinations of Mozart—we must express our almost
passionate delight in its main burthen and character.
We write, it is true, by a past-time-to-go-to-bed candle,
and with the graciles-que sensus still reeling under the
intoxication of the cup of bewitched sound; but if
this gets to press (and we shall look it over before
breakfast, to-morrow morning), we congratulate the
every-day-ear of the city we live in, upon a opera that
is natural as a bird's song, and that can be enjoyed
with as simple a taste for music—at the same time,
no more to be disparaged, for its simplicity, than the
bird's throat for not having the harp-stop of a piano.
But let us go on, story-fashion.

The curtain drew up, and after the appearance of
the usual precedent foil of chorus-singers, Sanquirico,
the ben amato of the company, came on as a postillion.
After making a bow, with the good-will of a waterfall,
in acknowledgment of the applause with which he
was met, he went on playing his part, and (to dismiss
him with this brief notice) most admirably to the
last. The make-way motions of the guard and the
aspettando impatience of the music, now prepared us
for the prima-donna. She was to represent a young
girl, under the protection of the prince and princess,
whose escape from ruin by a villain is the story of the
opera. “Chiara!” trilled the “cue” and in glided
Chiara!

Madame Pico has a look in her face as if “Sorrow
had passed that way.” She has had a narrow escape
of being superbly handsome, and, as it is, she could
personate, with small call upon the imagination, the
part of “Mrs. Helpless Ingulfus,” on the stage or off
it. Tho' not near so beautiful, she is a strong likeness
of Mrs. Norton—the same low, concentrative forehead,
the same something-or-other in the sweep of the dark
hair, the same caressing inwardness in the white round
of the shoulder. There is rather too much of a cadenza
in her bust, and her under lip does not always come
up with the alacrity we like in a woman, but we may
change our opinion. She was very much frightened,
and these matters are

The welcome of applause ceased, and the expected
voice trembled on the silence. It was listened to with
pricked ears, nodded to by the cognoscenti at the first
pause—approved, applauded. It was a rich, clouded
contralto, its depths hidden by a soprano part, like a
dark well impoverished by a slant beam of sunshine.
As she went on, gathering a little more control, her voice
sank to the inner sound-chamber where the heart sits
to listen, and the audience, instead of louder applauding,
began to murmur their admiration. Evident as
it was that the delicious home of her voice was never
reached, or borrowed from, by the notes of that soprano
part, there was a kind of full forth-shadowing of reserved
power which made, even what she did sing, satisfy
the ear. And then, occasionally, where the lower
notes approached her treasury of un-used power, she
flung out a contralto cadence upon the air with an effect
the audience waited impatiently to hear repeated.
We feel bespoken to be enchanted with a fair development
of that full throat's capabilities. Artistic comparison
apart, we have a passion for a contralto—nothing
that can pass the portal of an ear touching with
half the delicacy our levia affectuum vestigia. those
who take our criticisms will, if they like, make allowance
for this weakness.

Borghese was in one of the avant-scene boxes, lending
her captive town to her rival with the best grace
imaginable. She well may—for a smiling rivalry between
her and Pico will give each new attraction,
particularly since their voices are of totally opposite
quality. The little soprano comme-il-faut has her
advantages, and Madame Pico has hers. Neither of
them is quite the “horn of Astolpho, at the sound
of which the hearer went mad,” but while hearing
either, as Esdras says, “a man remembereth neither
sorrow nor debt.” May they pull together “like
Juno's swans, coupled and inseparable!”

The FOOTRACE we have seen this afternoon “carried
the town” more completely than any excitement
we have yet been abroad in—politics not excepted.
We were late, but a thousand people were on the
road with us, and when we arrived, the first race was

just over, Jackson the winner. The weather was
Indian summer, in its most bracing smile—good
omen, a punster would say, for the red-skinned competitor!
The roads had been dried pretty well
by the sharp wind of yesterday, the grass looked
glossy, and King Pluribus was in unusual good humor—as
he generally is on the first bright day after
bad weather.

The stands looked like stacks of noses and hats,
and after a vain attempt to find room in the principal
ones, we descended to the course to take our chance
with the great company of the jostled. As it was an
object to get a near view of the runners at the end of
the first quarter of a mile, we crossed the area of the
field to the less thronged side of the course, and
awaited their coming. Several loads of undisguised
sinners were near us, one of whom, a professed matron,
apparently, coolly sat with a pair of pistols, waiting
some expected attack from a crowd of ruffians
who had surrounded them. She looked quite capable
of a tragedy; but the striking of the bell at the
stand drew off the rowdies to the ring-fence, and the
pistols in the gloved hands gave place to a bouquet.
We had been thinking that there should be a competitrix
in the race to inherit the honors of Atalanta,
and a female, by a pull of the forefinger, might easily
have taken the day's notoriety from the competitors
in the race.

A stroke of the bell—a shout from twenty thousand
throats—a sudden radiation, to one point, of all
the loose vagrants in the field—and around came the
horse-fence, that in single file kept pace with the runners,
hemming them in from the crowd. The grotesque-looking
pedestrians hugged the wooden railing
very closely as they came along, Barlow ahead, the
Indian close on his heels, and Gildersleeve, the victor
of the last race, quietly consenting to be number
three. The foremost man was simply “diapered,” as
the nurses say, exhibiting his white Saxon skin in
strong contrast to the smoked hams of the Indian behind
him, and if the race had depended on muscle
merely, a good anatomist might have picked out the
winner, by points fairly displayed, as easily as a horse's
capabilities are seen by the jockey.

They ran very differently. A plumbline, dropped
from the forehead of each, would have fallen a foot in
advance of Barlow's body, and eighteen inches in advance
of the Indian's, while it would have lain close
to the breast of the erect little Gildersleeve. Barlow
never took his eyes from the ground, and kept his
lower jaw relaxed in a kind of shame-faced smile.
We observed that his make was in exceeding good
distribution, and though he was slightly knock-kneed,
he made play as straight ahead as a pendulum, losing
nothing by sideling. Gildersleeve's natural ballast,
on the contrary, rounded him to, slightly, at every
step, and his shoulders were partly employed in counteracting
the swing. McCabe, who was compact all
over, trotted along like a stiff little pig, giving nowhere,
and the Indian, a long, stringy six-footer,
seemed to follow his head like a kite's bobs—the nearest
way for a wave. Gildersleeve, it struck us, was
lividly pale, the Indian ready to cry with anxiety,
McCabe spunky, and Barlow slyly confident of success.

We crossed over to the stands, where, we presume,
upon four acres of ground, there were twenty-five
thousand men. It was a peculiar-looking crowd—
sprinklings excepted, very game-y. We presume no
pick of New York city could have brought out of it,
so completely, the stuff it holds for an army. The
betting was going on vigorously—Barlow and Steeprock
the favorites, but every man talking up his countryman.
The Irish swore up McCabe as he came
along, the English applauded Barlow, the New-Yorkers
encouraged Gildersleeve and the Indian. Mean
time, the horse-fence-men rode open the crowd with
striking and shouting; betting-books were whipped
out at every completed mile; boys cried cigars; rowdies
broke down barriers and climbed into the stands;
the men on the roofs pointed after the runners, and
hallooed the gainings and losings; and every third
minute the naked white shoulders came round ahead,
and it was manifest that Barlow gained constantly,
and, unless the little Yankee or the Indian could overhaul
him by a miraculous push, he was sure to win.

They came along for the tenth mile, and the crowd
were almost still with anxiety. The overtaking rush,
by which Gildersleeve won in the last race, was now
expected of him by his backers. Barlow passed, a
hundred feet ahead; Steeprock strained after, with a
sponge at his lips, and his knees tottering; Gildersleeve
came third, a spectacle of pallor and exhaustion;
Greenhalgh, another Englishman, was evidently
making more speed—and that was the last we saw of
them in motion.

With the thousands rushing in from all sides we
were swept toward the judges' stand. The horsemen
came on, in the midst of a sea of heads keeping pace
with them, whips going, shouts pealing, boys and bullies
screaming, swearing, and crowding. “Barlow!”
“Barlow!” “Barlow!” arose from hundreds of wild
voices, and the tumult of inquiry as to the others
grew deafening. We backed out a little to hear the
victor called off by the judges. A moment's stillness
was procured, and the competitors were named from
the stand in the order in which they had come in:
Barlow, Steeprock, Greenhalgh, Gildersleeve. The
time made by the winner was ten miles in fifty-four
minutes twenty-one seconds.

As we turned away, Gildersleeve was brought along
by two men, with his eyes half closed and his tongue
loose in his lips; and he seemed just able to place his
feet, one after the other, mechanically, as he was
lifted over the ground. A sicker-looking man we
never saw. A minute after, Barlow appeared above
the crowd, on a man's shoulders, waving his hand and
smiling quite composedly, and the shouts, apparently
from every voice, hailed him victor.

P. S. We had nearly forgotten a good conundrum
the race gave birth to:—

Question.—Why did Barlow run so like a locomotive
yesterday?

Answer.—Because he had behind him an Indian-near.

New Trial of Culprit Poets.—Mrs. Gilman
has invented a new kind of book (“Oracles from the
Poets,” of which we gave a notice a few days ago),
and the opening preface, very charmingly written,
tries the poets by new standards altogether. She had
occasion to ransack all the popular authors for answers
to the fate-questions of her Fortune-Teller, and
of course she discovered where lay the most thought
and feeling of a peculiar character. She begins by
finding out that poets are benevolent. She had great
difficulty in finding sixty answers to the question,
“To what have you a distaste or aversion?” while
“What gratifies your taste or affections?” was stuff as
common as clover. She says that in Shakspere there
is a singular lack of mention of places of residence, and
there seems not to be even a fair proportion of passages
descriptive of musical sounds, hours, seasons,
and (except in the Winter's Tale) of flowers. In
Wordsworth, scarcely a flower or musical sound is described.
They are alluded to, but not painted out.
The poetry of Crabbe, though abounding in numerous
characters, could furnish almost nothing for her
purpose, on account of their being woven into the
general strain of his narrations. Shelley, Landon,
and Howitt, are eminently the poets of flowers, while

Darwin, with a whole “Botanic Garden” before him,
and Mason, in his “English Garden,” gave none
fairly entitled to selection. Few passages of any sort,
except those hackneyed into adages, could be gained
from Milton, on account of the abstract, lofty, and
continuous flow of his diction. Coleridge has corresponding
peculiarities. Keats and Shelley are the
poets of the heavens. Byron, with faint exceptions,
does not describe a flower, or musical sound, or place
of residence. The American poets, in contradistinction
to their elder and superior brethren of the
fatherland, display a more marked devotion to nature,
with which a continued glow of religious sentiment
aptly harmonizes.

Apropos—as the living American poets are in process
of `broidery, would it not be well to know where
their worsteds are deficient, that they may shop up
their lacking threads in the Broadway of contemplation?
Will not some of our several sleeping female
geniuses (intellectual dolce-far-nientes, of whom we
know at least a capable dozen) take up the American
poets and go through them with a discriminating bodkin,
showing what colors lack replenishing? It would
serve the poetry of Bryant-dom—the present passing
age in which this faultless poet is the flower in most
palpable relief. Come, ladies! tell us what Lowell
(whose fame is being worked just now) had better
thread his inspired needle with! Tell us what Longfellow
is out of. Tell us whether Halleck has done
enough to cover the pattern, and whether some others
hadn't better unravel and work it all over again!
At any rate, turn up their frames of immortality and
show us the wrong side! Let them mend, if they
like,

The Upper Ten Thousand of New York City.—
The first three of the following paragraphs are from
the True Sun of November 22, and the last is from
the same paper of a day or two previous:—

“Politically, we are all republicans—socially, we
are divided into classes on the `European plan.'
There is a certain class, for instance, that takes exercise
only on one side of Broadway—the west side.
The `canaille,' to-be-sure, may walk there too, because,
fortunately, our aristocracy, with all its pride
and vanity, has no power; but what perfumed and
ringleted exquisite would ever think of sporting his
white kids, mustaches, and goatee, on the east side
of our great thoroughfare? That would be literally
wasting his sweetness on the desert air. We understand,
by-the-by, that Stewart is severely censured
for choosing the site of Washington Hall as the location
of his new temple of taste and fashion, merely
because it is situated on the east side of Broadway.
However, if the pavement in front is sprinkled thrice
a day with eau de Cologne, and Mr. Stewart doubles
the price of his goods, in order to give ton to the location,
it may do away with the fashionable prejudice
against the promenade of the nobodies, and thereby
equalize the value of the property on the two sides
of the street. At present there is a very material
difference in the price of the brick and mortar which
borders the two pavements.”

“The Opera.—That this is a refined and elegant
amusement, no one can doubt; but to exaggerate its
consequence, to make it a grand controlling feature
in our society, is, in our judgment, giving it undue
importance. With regard to its being a very `aristocratic'
affair in New York, we can only say, that a
complete refutation of such an idea may be easily had
at any time by a glance at the dress-circle habitues.”

“The Aristocracy.—We must confess we do not
think that wealth is the only essential necessary to
place one in `good society.' We can imagine many
refined, intellectual, and charming people, who do
not drive equipages lined with silk, and who have neither
coachman nor footman bedizened with lace.
What would be thought of the elegance of a leader
of the ton, who could take a peculiarly-dressed partridge
from a dinner-table, and place it in his hat, in
order to carry it home with him? We do not imagine
that such an attempt (for it was unsuccessful) marks
any very superior degree of refinement!”

“There are some, again, who study a profound reserve,
or rather adopt an appearance of hauteur.
They are stiff, quiet, and unapproachable. These
are the dandies of the cities, who adopt the Horatian
sentiment of

You must not come `between the wind and their nobility.'
They wear the last productions of Watson,
or Jennings, or Carpenter, and display a clean pair of
kid gloves, with the last fashion of wrist-buttons.
You might, if uninitiated, suppose them some distinguished
foreigners on their travels. In nine cases
out of ten they belong to the parvenu order of the
aristocracy. Whiskey or codfish has taken a rise,
and their honored father has made a fortune. The
family-mansion in a back lane has been abandoned for
some fashionable quarter, and visits—on one side—
have been paid throughout the neighborhood. If
they choose, they could astonish, but they would not
condescend. The railroad-car does not shake down
their consequence. They regret this progress of one
art, which makes so many other arts useless. They
are delighted when they escape from the crowd and
seek the hotel, where the extravagant charges prevent
the danger of further collision.”

We received yesterday an anonymous letter, reproving
us, in sober bad English, for ministering to
the vanity of the rich, by an article in the Mirror on
the selection of “a promenade drive.” This, the reproof
also given us a day or two since by a political
paper for an article on the prima-donna, and the foregoing
paragraphs from a neutral paper, aimed principally
at popularity with the working classes, are sufficient
indications, we think, that some bitter weed,
passing for an aristocracy-nettle, is rolled up in the
present cud of the reposing people.

We commence taking exceptions to the tone of
these articles, by stating what seems to us a fact of
general notoriety—that the ten thousand people uppermost
in this city—(aristocrats, if wealth and position
make them so)—are the most moral and scrupulous
ten thousand in the four hundred thousand of
the population. There is probably about this number—ten
thousand—who are rich enough, if they
choose, to keep a carriage. Two thirds of them, we
presume, were poor men a few years ago, and the
children of three fourths of them will be obliged to
work for a living (a flying-fish aristocracy, who are
hardly long enough out of the water, one would
think, to give offence by their brief airs to those left in
the element below them). There is a smaller class—
perhaps two thousand families—who have been respectable
and well off for two or more generations. There is
a third class, still—perhaps one or two hundred—whose
display is offensive, from no one's knowing where
their money comes from, or from their being supposed
to live dishonestly above their means, or from
being notoriously vicious.

Of these three classes—an “aristocracy” of ten
thousand—one half, at least, are religious, and the
remainder seek refined pleasures, and attend theatres
and operas; but, with the exception of the third
and smallest class last named, we venture to repeat,
that the upper ten thousand are by much the most

exacting of moral character in their friends, the most
rigid in the support of moral opinions and charities,
and the most exemplary in their individual private
life. This is true of the upper ten thousand of no other
country in the world. It would sound Utopian in England
to assert this to be true of the upper classes of
any city on the face of the earth. Look at the difference
of the standards in ordinary matters. To
make a good match, here, it is necessary that a young
man should be moral; and if he be of high character
in this respect (and the lady willing), public opinion
will not suffer his pretensions to be slighted by the
richest man! In every other country the lover's morality
is altogether a secondary consideration—family
and fortune far before it. Morality is a young man's
best card in New York; whether his object be influence,
matrimony, good business-connexion, appointments
from societies, or general position in the best
circles. This truth needed only to be put in print to
make people wonder it had not been said before!

It is a wretched trick caught from English papers
and English plays, to talk of the rich as certainly
vicious, and of the poor as necessarily virtuous. We
live in a country where the sovereignty (that part of
society which vice commonly noses and follows close
after) resides at the opposite end from the sovereignty
of England. The more virtuous class, here as there, is
comparatively powerless at the polls. The rowdy
drunkard and the gambler do as much toward president-making
and the selection of lawgivers, as the
thrifty merchant, and the rich father of a family of
virtuous daughters; and, as there are a hundred husbands,
of either of the first-named classes, to one of
either of the others, virtue and order keep company
with sovereignty—in this country as little as in Europe!
Power is at the surface of a country, and the
scum rises to it. We are quite aware, that the pen
and inkstand with which we write these sentiments
will not be, to all readers, “a pot of lambative electuary
with a stick of licorice.”

Rivalry at the Opera.—The musical tilt, to decide
which was the more prime of the prima-donnas,
came off last night, to the very great entertainment
of the town's ornamentals. It reminded us very
strongly of the contention between the lute and the
nightingale, in the old play of the “Lover's Melancholy.”
Borghese drops dead in the last act, very
soon after a glorious and triumphant outbreak by
Pico; and we will quote a passage to show how this
resembles the poetic story—premising, by-the-way,
that a musician, playing in the woods, is overheard by
a bird, who mocks him till the lute-player gets angry
at the excellence of the rivalry:—

But, to tell the other story—“after the manner of
men.”

The opera was “Lucrezia Borgin.” Signorina
Borghese represents (as well as we could understand
the story) a bad mother, who, in poisoning a large
party of youths, half rakes, half conspirators, for having
insulted her sign over the door, poisons one too
many—her son. Madame Pico represents the leader
of the set, and does the noise and the jollification.
She descends upon the stage the first thing after the
rising of the curtain, dressed in a very modest suit of
male attire, and figures about as a Roman Captain
Rynders, bandying dialogue here and there, but with
no chance of display in the three or four first acts.
Borghese, we began to think, was to have the best of
it all the way through. She was exquisitely dressed,
sang with as little of the split-straw in her soprano as
we ever heard her sing with, and acted to her singing
(as she always does) with what the Greeks called onomatopeia—movement
linked with sound indivisibly.
The applause was pretty well, but not overpowering.

The fourth act represented the youths at the fatal
supper, Pico the principal customer. After a little
hobnobbing on the other side of the table, she glides
round, upon her plumptitudinous locomotives, and
dashes into a song, rich, rollicking, and risvegliato!
Down went the bucket for the first time into her well
of contralto, and up came the liquid and golden music,
of a round, true fulness, that made the ear's thirst
a luxury. It was a passage full of involutions, abrupt,
startling, and bacchanal; but her skill in flinging her
voice from point to point, with the capricious surprises
of the music, was wonderfully subtle. The audience
was, for the first time in the evening, fairly
lifted clear of the ground. On the part of the stage-company,
no encore was looked for at this point of the
opera. The closing of Pico's song is the signal for a
death-bell and the disclosing of a hearse a-piece for
the jolly junketers. The audience were not ready,
however. The applause kept on till the hearses
backed out, and the song was sung over again. Oh,
how deliciously it was sung! No voice, however
large its compass, was ever sweeter, rounder, mellower
in its quality, than Madame Pico's. The audience
murmured, and leaned forward, and ejaculated, and
with one unhesitating accord, it seemed to us, gave
over the palm to the contralto. The chorus-singers
seemed surprised—she herself forgot her male attire,
and courtesied (the first time we ever saw how it was
done, by-the-by), a tributary bouquet flew over the
footlights, and Lucrezia Borgia rose up once more,
like an apparition amid the hearses in waiting.

The last act, like the first three, was all Borghese's.
It is deep tragedy, and she played it well. The young
man, poisoned by mistake, held his stomach till he
was done for, and his letting go was the signal for
Borghese to give her “C sharp,” and go after him.
The curtain dropped, and the applause rose immediately.
Borghese came out and was cheered till she
courtesied out, but still the applause continued. No
reply. The canes began to rap, and the audience
seemed not beginning to go. “Pico!” shouted somebody.
“Pico!” shouted everybody. Still no answer.
The deafening uproar at last lifted the curtain,
and there was Borghese! led forward by Perozzi,
and courtesying again! And presently, all alone,
with her hair down her back, her mustache gone, and
a loose dressing-gown about her, the real queen by
acclamation took the honors there was no longer any
denying her. The will of the audience, and the will
of the Italian corps, were two entirely different matters.

We really do not see why these fine-throated people
can not consent to do their best, and let the public
like which they please. The two singers are both
admirable, each unrivalled in her way: and, because
we admire the new-comer, it is no reason why we
should not still appreciate our former favorite. But
see how unlike musical people in prose are to musical
people in poetry. We will quote the conclusion of
the pretty story we began our criticism with, for a
lesson of magnanimity, after the bird dropped, broken-hearted,
upon the lute.

Another night we trust to see Borghese submitting
resignedly, like the bird, to be beaten; though if the
conquering Pico undertakes, in consequence, to “pash
herself against a tree,” we trust the manager will
“suddenly step in.”

The Historical Society Dinner.—We went to
the dinner of the Historical Society last evening, with
a mood in our mental pocket, which was as useless to
us as the wrong mask for a night of carnival. We
went to indulge in relaxation and gratify curiosity.
We decided in the midst of confusing avocations, that
it would be delightful to see Mr. Adams and Mr. Gallatin,
pleasant to listen to the voices whose words we
should read in the next morning's papers, and curious
to see the first menu of the opening hotel up-town.
We presumed there would be some dull talking,
which the dinner and the friends around would keep
off with the by-play of conviviality, and that we
should, at any rate, hear wit, get our cares jostled
from astride us, and store up, for illustration to future
thought and reading, two pictures of men who are
soon to pass over to history.

But—(the two great statesmen who were to be
present set aside for the moment)—it is not easy to
come at all into the presence of a large number of
men of superior intellect, without feeling the dormant
thunder of the cloud about us. This is partly a moral
magnetism, we presume, but there is a physiognomy
in crowds; and, to the eye accustomed to see men
“as they come,” the look of an assemblage of master-intellects
is the laying of a spirit-hand upon the beholder.
There were present the leading minds of
this great metropolis—able divines, merchant princes,
formidable politicians, brilliant lawyers, scheming capitalists,
influential citizens, philanthropists, scholars,
poets, and journalists—none of them common men,
and none without the sympathy-read print upon the
forehead—distinction's philactery of pain.[1] Seated at
table, we looked about upon the men we knew, and
followed back into their bosoms the visible thread of
which we knew the knot at the heart-strings. We
have no time here—(our hasty thoughts going from
us, sentence by sentence, into irrevocable print, as we
record them)—no time to separate and describe the
crowding influences that changed our careless preparatory
mood into an overshadowed and attentive
silence. We passed an evening of resistless revery—
much of it homage, much of it quickening to ambition,
and in part a coveting of fellowship and sympathy.
But we can not go on with this misplaced record
of emotions.

There are weighty and wide influences exercised
by an historical society, which, again, we can only
hint at, far too hastily. Historical record is the
paymaster of the immortality toiled for by greatness;
and it is vital to the existence of great motives, that
this treasurer's trust should be faithfully discharged,
and his accounts chronicled in blazon. Affecting
mention was drawn from Mr. Adams of his coming
reward from history—the reward of justificatory triumph—for
having passed through the fire of calumny.
It was over these heated plough-shares that he has
walked to the luminous door by which he is about to
pass from the world; and if he could be sure of no
brother-spirits left behind, to see the truth written in
characters legible to the world, he would have done
his great services to his country, by sufferings, indeed,
mournfully thankless. In a republic, especially in an
age of free-thinking and irreverence for usage, like
ours—the influence of a society which brightens and
keeps manifest the coolly-proved wisdom of the past,
is more especially all-needful. History forgotten, the
present is a ship without chart or compass, trusting to
the stars alone in the clouded storm-nights of politics.
Ambition, with that watchful dragon asleep—no record
to be dreaded beyond the memory of the living—
would be a fiend loosed upon the world. History is
our citadel of safety.

New kind of Hotel up-town.—We have thought
that it would, perhaps, interest our readers to go into
a detail of the differences between the popular hotel
(like the Astor, the American, Howard's, &c.) and
what is understood in Europe as the hotel-garni—of
which the up-town hotel is the new example in this
country.

The hotel-garni is a furnished house, in which the
lodging is the only charge not variable at the option
of the guest. A certain price is charged for the
rooms occupied, and the other expenses are according
to what is ordered. A popular bachelor, for example,
makes a great economy of this. He pays for
his rooms and his breakfast; and, if invited out to
dine five times in the week, saves the corresponding
items in his bill—five dinners and five bottles of wine.
This, in Europe, is considered a fair offset against
patent blacking, white gloves, and hack-hire; and
puts society on a level with health, sunshine, reputation,
and other plain matters-of-course. A common
table and a restaurant are not necessary parts of a hotel-garni,
but they serve to increase its eligibility.
There is a certain price for a dinner at the table d'hote,
charged separately every day; but in Europe few
dine at the common table except strangers in town.
A fashionable man avoids it as an implied confession,
1st, that he has not been invited out that day, and, 2d,
that he can content himself with everybody's dinner
and company. For families, particularly if there are
unmarried daughters, it is irreconcilable with position,
if not with propriety, to live at the public table. The
rooms in these hotels are arranged so as to unite a drawing-room
with each bedroom, and every person, or family,
respectably lodged, has a private parlor for meals and
reception of visits. There is no large common drawing-room,
of course. The meals are furnished by express
order, given each day, to the restaurant below,
and sent up with tablecloth, silver, glass, &c.—all
at the appointed hour, and all removed together when
dinner is over—giving the lodger no trouble, except
to wait on himself while dining, or provide a servant
to do so. As each dish is for one person only, however
(or one family), the expense of such a dinner is
much greater than where the dishes are cooked in
larger quantities for a hundred people. To dine in
private on as many dishes as you may taste for fifty
cents at a public table, would cost, probably, from two
to five dollars.

The ordinary hotel is, of course, described by
specifying the peculiarities of the other. It will
be seen at once that the hotel-garni must prevail
with the increase of exclusiveism in this country. It
is only in new countries that families can do without
household gods; and it is only where the whole male
society of a country is only unharnessed for sleep
from the eternal drag of money-making, that the domestic
virtues can be left safely without private altars

and locked doors, single roof-trees, and four-walled
simplicity. Twenty years hence, we venture to say,
the Astor's splendid drawing-room will be occupied
by some nabob of a lodger—needed no longer as a
common parlor—and its long galleries will be but
suites of apartments, every third bedroom converted
into a cosy saloon, and the occupants seeing as little
of each other as neighbors in a “block.”

There are some very republican advantages in our
present system of hotels, which the country is not
yet ready to forego. Tell a country lady in these
times that when she comes to New York she must
eat and pass the evening in a room by herself, and she
would rather stay at home. The going to the Astor,
and dining with two hundred well-dressed people, and
sitting in full dress in a splendid drawing-room with
plenty of company—is the charm of going to the city!
The theatres are nothing to that! Broadway, the
shopping, and the sights, are all subordinate—poor
accessories to the main object of the visit. A large
company as cheap as none at all—a hundred dishes
as cheap as one—a regal drawing-room at her service,
with superb couches, piano, and drapery, and costing
no more than if she stayed in her bedroom—plenty of
eyes to dress for if not to become acquainted with,
and very likely a “hop” and a band of music—bless
my soul, says the country lady, I hope they'll never
think of improving away all that!

And, there lies the pinch! The senator now on his
way to congress, dines with his family at the public
table. The gentleman who does not choose to keep
house, invites his friends to dine with him at the public
table. The man who prefers to dine in a private
parlor is satirically made welcome to his own society
—if he prefers it! The distinguished, the fashionaable,
the dressy, and handsome, may all dine, without
peril of style, at the public table. But—since so may
the opposites of all these, and anybody else who is
tolerably dressed and well-behaved—the public table
is the tangible republic—the only thing palpable and
agreeable that we have to show, in common life, as
republican. And when the exclusivism of the hotel-garni
draws its dividing line through this promiscuous
community of habits, the cords will be cut which
will let some people UP, out of reach, and drop some
people DOWN, out of all satisfactory supposible contact
with society.

Growth of Western Literature.—We are
happy to notice that seven out of the seventeen articles
with the names of the authors, in the last two
numbers of the Biblical Repository, are from persons
connected with literary institutions west of the mountains.
Among the subjects of the western writers are,
The Writings of Martin Luther; Evidences from
Nature for the Immortality of the Soul; and the
Natural History of Man in his Spiritual Relations.
Another article contains an able defence of presbyterianism.
So far as we can judge from a hasty view,
these subjects, some of which are the greatest that
can employ the pen anywhere, are treated with tact
and ability, and give us a favorable opinion of the condition
of our western seminaries of learning. The
remaining contributions are from New England, with
the exception of one from Virginia. New York does
not appear in the list of contributors' names.

The Opera.—The “stars” of the opera are just
through their night's work and the stars of heaven are
half way through theirs. We have not the pleasure
of a personal acquaintance with a single individual in
either company—knowing neither Venus nor Pico,
Lyra nor Borghese, “off the stage.” We are about
to announce an ASTROLOGICAL CONJUNCTION, however,
and, as “many an inhumane thought hath arisen from
a man's sitting uncomfortably in his chamber,” we
have sent for an emollient to our arm chair, in the
shape of cold duck and champagne—expecting thereby
to achieve our nearest perihelion to the calm clear-sightedness
of Copernicus.

Up-town New York, a week ago, was in the situation
the starry firmament was in, about two hundred
years before the Christian era. Pythagoras recorded
his conviction at that time that there were two stars
wanting to complete the harmony of a certain portion
of the heavens, and, in the very spots named by the
great philosopher, Mars and Jupiter did soon after
make their first appearance. In like manner a Daily
Pythagoras, of this city (we think it was Mr. King of
the American), darkly hinted in a late evening paper,
that there were two stars necessary—contralto and
soprano—to complete harmony of the Palmospheric
constellation; and, in that very troop, Pico and Borghese
did soon after take their places in similarly harmorious
conjunction. We trust history will do us
justice for linking together these two marked foreshadowings
of stars' “doing something for their families.”

[Your health, dear reader, in a glass of Cordonbleu—m—m—mplck!—delicious!]

And now we have to beg the discreet portion of
the public to step with us behind the curtain—not
that (representing the rosy dawn) which drops before
Mars and Jupiter, but that (representing Jupiter feeling
the pulse of Minerva) which drops before Borghese
and Pico. There has been a terrible rowdydow
in the operatic green-room. Borghese has been
hitherto queen of the zodiac, and her orbit was only
intersected by nebulæ of nameless supernumeraries.
The breaking of Pico upon the gaze of the impartial
star-worshippers, however, and their undeniable preference,
of the star at fifty dollars a night to the star at
double the money, sent Borghese sick to her bed;
and she is said to have vowed (with the spunk of the
Lost Pleiad, who died for jealousy of her six brighter
sisters) that she would never rise again—if papa
would excuse her.

[Our astronomy is used up, dear reader, but the
champagne still holds out. A glass to Borghese's
better resignation, and let us go on, in terrestrial
phraseology.—M-m-mplck!]

Borghese commenced making position, a year or
more ago, and has pursued it very skilfully, and,
therefore, very creditably to herself. For a winter,
or more, before showing herself as an admirable actress,
she revolved in the japonica circles up-town,
as a singer at parties, and made acquaintances and
friendships exclusively among the forced-plant customers
of Hogg and Thorburn. Her manners were
of that well-studied, eager unconsciousness, which
is the modesty of nature in a hot-house school; and
her tact, elegance, and musical science, were leaved
like a rose-bud tied up with a string—showing what
the prima-donna might be, if the young lady were
loosed and expanded. As the parent-stem required
to be relieved of her, she prepared to throw herself
on the public; and when she did, she was, of course,
plucked from neglect, and cherished in the protecting
bosom of the society that had secluded her. She
has been worn in triumph, as the first flower of the
opera, for a couple of seasons—as you know, dear
public!

But nature exacts an equilibrium; and where there
is more public harmony, there will be more private
discord. The children of the “boot on the map,”
kick against authorities, and every tuneful rhearsal
had its offset in a quarrel. Signor Borghese (the
star-father), not being of the sect of the Apotactitæ,
who renounce property, took advantage of a tight

place in the treasury, and bought in, “for a song,”
the theatrical weapons and wardrobe. Of course,
whatever solvent might separate the other parts of the
company, they crystallized, again, around their only
possible nucleus—the prima-donna who had the toggery!
And, at this stage of the Borghese monocracy
—came Pico!

Months passed away. The story of Pico's errand
—her husband a political prisoner at Venice, and her
voice the only probable conjurer of the gold key to
release or relieve him—was told and apparently forgotten.
We heard it, and reserved our republican
sympathy till she should appear. The Mirror suggested
a concert—knowing nothing of her powers—but
her friends thought she had better bide her time with
the opera. She has done so. At half the pay of
Borghese, she played to-night for the second time, in
the opera of Lucrezia Borgia.

We have come home from hearing her—“possessed”
(as this undevoured cold duck is our witness)—
our capacity for delight plummeted—our cistern of
unshed tears strangely and pleasurably troubled—our
pen as gushing with welcome to Pico as the miraculous
oil-spring of old Rome that welcomed home the conquering
Augustus.

[Her health in this last glass of champagne—God
bless her!]

The house was crowded. Borghese sang beautifully,
and played as no other female in America can
play. She was heartily applauded—but—as on the
last opera night—the tumult of the house was reserved
for the drinking song of Pico. It is her first chance
to unchain soul and voice after nearly a whole opera
of subservient by-play. Oh how the first swooping
away into those clear silver caverns of her throat—
dropping through unfathomable love-depths with her
fearless down-cadences, and turning with an easy up
lift again toward the summit-perch of the careless
altissimo—how like an eagle's swoop it careered!
overtaking the dew falling, and the perfume rising
into the sky, and, with all its fierce swiftness, robbing
the cleft air of nothing but fragrance and softness.

[We are getting poetical—but champagne after
Pico, is, as the Venetians say, tanto amorevole! We'll
go to bed and sum up in the morning.]

Thursday Morning.—Our friend of the “Morning
News,” expresses, in his paper of to-day, a regret that
“a feeling of rivalry is encouraged between Borghese
and Pico.” We are surprised at this discouragement,
on his knowing part, of the great secret of good opera
and good everything else. When are they ever so
likely to sing so well, and to draw so well, as when

He adds, that “Pico fairly out-Pico'd Pico,” and we
should say the same of Borghese, if the name would
come as pat.

No! no! let them be rivals! What could be prettier?—more
gracefully done, and more touchingly
enlisting to the feelings—than Borghese's picking up
the wreath again, last night, and giving it generously
to Pico? We broke a new malacca stick in applauding
that action alone. Viva Borghese! Viva Pico!
You are two halves of a scissors, dear ladies, and
rivalry is your rivet. Divide the public—since both
halves are your own, after they are divided!

Pico and Borghese.—These two ladies are certainly
most poculent commodities, and the town drinks
their delicious music with unquestionable intoxication.
The crammed opera-house was as breathless
with absorbed attention last night as if Pico's rosylipped
cup ministered to every heart's measure of ful
ness—one palate common to all. For ourself, we confess
immeasurable delight in Pico. Her voice has a
road to the heart upon which criticism takes no toll
—the gate-opening facility of music going home. One
listens to it as Shelley seems to have listened to the
witch of Atlas—

—the very inmost tenant of your bosom, somehow,
seeming to have “expected it, all along.”

Borghese is a treasure to a town—an uncommon
creature—such an actress and artist as we shall not
see again until we deserve a benefit from the gods—
but Pico! oh, Pico is of quite another invoice of goods
from paradise. Borghese is the most ingenious harmony-pump
that, for many a year, has offered patronage
a handle—the other is a natural-well spring of
passionate and careless music, that would flow as
bountifully, for a bird to drink, as for an emperor to
stoop to. Pico's voice would cut up like a polypus
—not a fragment without the making of a woman in
it. She neither sings, nor moves, nor smiles, as if
she remembered ever doing it before; and if she has
not the great “art of concealing art” (of which we
have had our half a suspicion), she is one of those
helpless irresistibles that could as soon become invisible
as not bewitch.

The drinking song (Pico's only good chance in the
whole opera), was stunningly applauded last night,
and, at the close, a wreath was thrown to her from a
very select company in a private box, and thrown with
a pretty good aim—for she caught it upon her bosom.
Out of it—(or the place where she caught it—we
could not tell which)—dropped a sealed note, which
we trust contained a check payable in favor of the imprisoned
husband at Venice.

If we had a moderate thought during the opera of
last night, it was that there could be no question of
a keen taste for music in New York—for here was a
crowded audience, attentive, appreciative, measuring
its applause most judiciously, and leaving the house
delighted. We are sure a large opera-house would do
—with more inducements to foreign subordinates,
more enterprise to procure visits from the Parisian
and London operatics, better regulations for private
boxes, etc., etc. We think, for one, that there is no
greater pleasure, away from a man's hearth, than a
good opera.

Envy of the Rich, or, the Flying-fish Aristocracy,
and the No. 1 Passenger left behind.
—In the hurry of composition, yesterday, we stumbled
upon a similitude (a “flying-fish aristocracy”)
which, we think, expresses that transitory duration of
American “up-in-the-world,” which should make the
greater number of rich people looked upon with indulgent
affection by those left temporarily below. Of
such short-lease wings as most American “first families”
fly with, there need be little envy, one would
think—in the democratic element they drip with till
they drop again. There are families, however—a
small number—who hold their own for three or four
generations; and, in the “measureless content” of
these with their position, the democrats find offence;
but one of the most curious social problems we know
of, is the manner in which the old families of New
York are let alone, and tacitly eclipsed by the more
newly prosperous; and we must offer to our readers
a descriptive similitude for this also. (Our object, it
will be seen, is to take away the offence of aristocracy,
if possible, and induce King Public to let us cater for
them, as for all other classes, with level editorial republicanism!)

A half hour before the starting of the Oxford night
mail, a fat gentleman was discovered fast asleep in the
coach, which was still under the shed. He occupied
the back seat, and his enormous bulk filled it so completely
that there was no room for the usual fourth
inside passenger. But four seats were taken and paid
for, and the last man booked insisted on his right to a
place—fat man, or no fat man! The stout gentleman
was waked, and requested to come out till the other
three were seated.

and having mentioned his name, and inquired whether
it was not first on the book, settled his chin into his
cravat, and speedily snored again! “Is this Oxford?
—bless me, how I have slept!” said the fat man, rubbing
his eyes, when the coach door was opened the
next morning—in the same place where it stood when
he went to sleep! The driver had hitched his team to
another coach, and the three unprivileged customers
last booked were probably breakfasting in Oxford!

It strikes us that the people who are last booked, in
this community, may very well monopolize the envy
—(success in arriving at their destination of conspicuousness
being, of course, the chief matter of envy)—
and the fat sleepers, upon the usurped seats, once left
out of the proscription, the charity for “flying-fish”
easily forgives the remainder.

If the above does not please our friend “Cheap
Jemmy,” we will never do a good-natured thing again
as long as we live. If he knew Latin, we should
send him in a bill for a diaphoretic.

AFTER THE OPERA.

(Supper in 184's room at the Astor—the brigadier here
“on business”—a poulet pique, and a bottle of champagne
in silver tissue paper, also here “on business”—Eleven
O'clock, Esq., just parting from the
bell of St. Paul's, with a promise to be “round in the
morning.”)

Brig. (nodding, and taking up his glass).—Mi-boy!

184 (laying his hand on the general's arm).—Not in
such profane haste, my prompt sodger! That glass
of wine is the contemporary of bliss—sent to us to be
drank to the health of a bride, now three hours past
the irrevocable gate.

Brig. Married at eight? Do you say that? God
bless her, in a bumper! (gazes abstractedly into the
bottom of the glass, and speaks musingly.)—Ten minutes
past eleven!—Well, who's the lady, and who the
happy man?

184. One of our parish, who, though he does not
personally know us, wishes us to be made aware of
his happiness. We have written ourselves into his
bosom. God bless him for the loving door in his
eye—isn't so, my tree-sparer! So may all men take
us in! Try a bit of chicken now, general, or that
tear in your eye will fall back on an empty stomach!

Brig. And what a difference it makes—what it falls
back upon, mi-boy! The salt in a tear is not natural,
depend on it, or the in'ards would take to it more
kindly. What an etiquette of mercy it would be,
now, to make pathos and bad news matters of full-dress—never
to be alluded to in good society, till a
man has ceased, as Menenius says, “to pout upon the
morning!” What's your to-morrow's leader?

184. Not coming to business at the second glass, I
hope? Fie on you for a disrespect to the bride.
(The brigadier blushes, and covers his confusion by
reading the label on the bottle.) How enchantingly
old Belisario and his captive sung their vows of friendship
to-night! Ah, music and lights!—things are so
much finer for embellishing! Our small friendship
now, general—brought forward to the prompter's cupboard
and foot-lights—do you think it would be encored,
like that?

Brig. As you don't ask for information, mi-boy,
let's proceed to business. Can you give me an idea
of your to-morrow's editorial?

184. No!

Brig. And the boy is to come for it at seven!

184 (seizing a pen). What shall it be?

Brig. Why, there's the mud in the streets—and
the Bohemian Girl—and the wretched weather—and
the menagerie—and Vandenhoff—and Stuart's candy-shop—and
Mrs. Coles—

184. By—the—by!—a discovery!—Tryon ought
to head his play-bills with the Marsellois war-cry—
“to arms!—to arms!” I never saw a pair in my life
more exquisitely moulded and polished than Mrs.
Coles's, of the Bowery circus—as shown after her
third undoing on horseback! It takes a symmetrical
woman, of course, to stand tiptoe upon a flying horse,
and strip, from a jacketed Cracovienne to a short
sleeved evening dress—but ladies of this vocation, well
made in all other respects, are usually thin from the
elbow to the shoulder. Shall I make a “leader” of
Mrs. Coles?

Brig. Certainly not, mi-boy! nor a follower either!
Just indicate, as it were—call attention mysteriously
—hint somehow—that there is a part of the equestrian
performance that reminds you of things you saw in
Italy—statuary or something—delicately, mi-boy—
very delicately! What else have you got down there
in your memorandum-book?

184. Half a dozen topics. Here's a note that
smells of “above Bleecker,” requesting us to implore
of Japonica-dom not to give parties on opera-nights!
Really, they should not! The opera is a rare luxury,
without which a metropolis is like a saloon without a
mirror, and there should be a little combination,
among refined people—if not to give it extra support,
at least to throw no hinderance in its way. They do
this in London—(where, by the way, there are but
two operas a week, and it would be quite enough here)
—Lady Blessington, for one, never “at home” on
opera-nights, and dinner-parties are given at an earlier
hour to release people in time. The quality of the
opera depends, of course, on its enthusiastic support,
and those who can appreciate it can do no less, I
think, than to go in full dress, and go habitually. It
is far pleasanter than a party, is over at bearable bedtime,
and, just now, the company at Palmo's is too
good to be slighted. And, by the way, have you
thought how gloriously Pico has beggared the loud
trumpet we blew for her on her first appearance!
“Ants,” says the old proverb, “live safely till they
have gotten wings, and juniper is not thrown away till
it hath gotten a high top.” She is neither your ant
nor your juniper-blossom—is she general?

Brig. (who has been dozing). Not my aunt, mi-boy,
whoever you're talking of. I never had one—
hope I never shall!

184. What's that note falling out of your pocket,
meantime?

Brig. Well thought of—I brought it to you for a
paragraph. What do you think it is? A complaint
from the ladies that the young men waylay them on
the staircases!

184. Heavens and Sabines! wait till I dip my pen
in the thunder-stand! Who? How? When? How
many?

Brig. At parties—at parties—my dear boy—don't
be violent! This lady declares (brigadier opens the
note) that it is a “perfect nuisance, the mere descent
from the dressing-room to the ball-room”—“a pretty
girl has to come down a perfect ladder of boys—every
stair an engagement to dance”—“no chance for a

pick”—“her mind fatigued with the effort to remember
her partners”—“no hope of dancing with a grown-up
man from Christmas to April”—“green talk altogether”—“dreadful
sense of unripeness”—“no subject
but Pico and Polka”—“begs we will write the
boys off the staircase,” etc., etc. You see your subject.

184. Shall I tell you why that was not written by a
woman? Don't you see that if this system of long
lists of engagements were done away, a lady would
have no escape from a disagreeable partner—no plea
of too many engagements—no chance for a lie whiter
than many a truth? Don't you see, that (now duelling
is laughed at) a lady can leave out an early partner
on the list, or slip a tardy one in, with perfect
ease and comfort—distressing nobody's mamma with
fears of Hoboken! Leave the ladies alone for putting
down troublesome usages! Your letter was
written by some old coxcomb going out of fashion,
who can get nobody to dance with him, and lays it to
the boys on the staircase! Tut!

Brig. Twelve o'clock, and where's your leader?
Oh, mi-boy, think of to-morrow's paper!

184. Hang the leader! Let's go without it—once
in a way!

Brig. Gracious! no! What will the public say?
There goes one o'clock! Bed-time (for me—not for
you)—and nothing from you for the boy in the morning!
Oh, mi-boy, sit up! Go and wash your face,
and feel fresh! Write a paragraph requesting the
Mirror brides to send their champagne, hereafter, exclusively
to the talking partner! Where's my hat?
Get inspired, mi-boy, get inspired! Good night!

184. Stay—stay—stay! Listen to this! (184 reads
the foregoing dialogue to the brigadier, whose face
gradually reassumes its usual serenc placidity. He
lays down his hat and picks another wing of the
chicken.)

Brig. And you have been writing this down, all the
time, with your hand deep in that old cabinet! Bless
me, what a boy you are for expedients! I thought
you was scratching autographs, or writing “Pico,”
or sketching Glenmary, or something! But you
haven't mentioned the weekly?

184. Poh! it doesn't want mentioning.

Brig. Not more than the sun and moon, and other
periodicals—but you trust the world's memory too
much, my worky! They'd forget the sun shone if it
wasn't down in the almanac! Say something!

184. Well, let's see! It's our diary of the world's
goings-on and what we think of it—published every
seventh day. It is a week's corn, ground, sifted, and
bagged, for those who can't go to mill every day. It
is a newspaper without the advertisements and other
trumpery—at half price, in consequence of lumber
left out and one postage instead of seven. It is edited
every day, and other weeklies are edited once a week.
It gives the news, the fashions, the fun, the accidents,
the operas, and our all-spice to make it keep, in a
handsome, preservable shape—bindable for reference
and re-reading—“the time” as it were, “boned and
potted.” Shall I say any more?

Brig. Three dollars a year—

184. Mum, man! Never mention money after
midnight! What will the angels say! Go to bed!
go to bed! (Exit brigadier, after a silent embrace.)

AFTER THE OPERA.
A FEW GRAVE REMARKS WHILE SUPPER IS COMING.

The Cinderella-tude of Madame Pico's own situation,
in the operatic corps, and her still disputed claim
to the “glass slipper” of preference, sent us to Palmo's,
to-night, with somewhat of an owl upon our
shoulder. We dreaded Prince Public's final choice
between her and the favorite daughter of Don Magnifico—for
the real-life opera had come to its last act,
and, as she should or should not, make the most of
the opportunity (of which we had done our best to
be the “Pilgrim Alidoro”), she would, or would not,
wear to-morrow the crown of Palmo-dom. The curtain
is down, and—

ENTER SUPPER FOR NO. 184.

Before we grow too enthusiastic for the nice distinctions
of criticism, let us say a word of the general
performance of the opera. Why the frisky Signor
Antognini, whose conceit,

was cast in a part that the unemployed Perozzi would
have done so much better, and so much more agreeably
to the public, we have no Italian spectacles to
see. And—apropos—if it is the object of the company
to please and draw, why did not Borghese (except
that silver is less tractile than gold) take the second
role in this opera, as Pico did in Lucrezia Borgia?
The part sustained by Miss Moss has rather
more scope in it than that of Orsini, and how vastly
more attractive the opera, so cast, would be to the
public! Signor Tomasi showed the vertebræ in his
voice, to-night, more than he did in Belisario—probably
from stooping with difficulty to the comic; but
Sanquirico—what shall we say of his admirable personable
of Don Magnifico? We'll drink his health
by way of answer. (A lei, Sanquirico!) And so
ends our fault-finding.

SECOND GLASS.

This glass of purple Tinta, steeped in the latitude
of Italy, tastes, of course, of the climate of Pico's
voice; and we are glad to vary, with this redolent
bumper, the avenue to our heart—so breaking up the
ear's monopoly of toll. Health to Cinderella triumphant!
Her voice has a flavor—(if this wine be
like it—and it is the sun's fault if it is not like it—for
the same cupful of his mellow light fed the grape
from which gushed the wine and the lip from which
poured the melody)—worthy of the immortality of
Falernian. (For this discovery of homogeneousness
of pulp we beg a medal from the Institute.)

We were afraid, as we said before, that Pico, “like
a careless farrier, would lame her well-shod glory
with the last nail,” but she sang throughout with unblemished
deliciousness, and the “piu mestar,” at the
close, fairly took the town! Nothing has been heard
like it, in this city, since Malibran, either in voice or
execution. We have made up our mind about Pico.
Her abandon is like the apparent carelessness of all
kinds of genius—fearless trust after finished study.
Of that desperate and intoxicating let-go, Borghese
has none. She is artistic and careful in the most passionate
extremity, dying, even, “with her wits all
about her.” Pico fastens each link of the composer's
melody in her brain, with workmanlike fidelity; but
when she comes out from her music-smithy, she
brings with her no memory of the clink of hammer
and rivet. In that relying forgetfulness lies the mystery
of her charm. It is recognised, by the instinct
men have that this is the quality of those who do
best—statesmen or soldiers, poets or lovers—the most
successful, in all enterprises, throwing themselves on
what they have once made up their minds to, as a
bird launches from the cliff. Nature prodigally seconds
the unhesitating trust of Pico's execution. Her
voice follows her concerted thought with the certainty
of a shadow and the fulness of a floodtide. The
plentitude of every shade and semi-tone, insures,
in the first five minutes of hearing her, an absence
of all dread of flaw or falling off—an assurance,

that whatever height or depth she stoops her neck to
swoop for, it will bring, for the listener,

WE DRINK TO THE JACOB'S LADDER OF MUSIC.

A new light breaks upon us as to the uses of the
opera. As (to the wicked) common speech is a convenience
and swearing a luxury, so poetry is a convenience
to passion, and music its luxury. An unharmonized
shout—a succession of cries—may mean
anything; but a chorus, or a concerted transition of
cries, has a meaning to convey floodtides out of the
soul. Poetry may fall cold upon the eye, but music
must melt in the ear. These premises allowed, the
opera becomes (does it not?) a healthful vent to the
passions of a metropolis—a chance (for those who
long to swear and do violence), by a more innocent
“giving way,”

How common the feeling “to want a spree!” and
who that for three hours has choked back tears in his
throat, and been enraptured with a contralto across
the footlights, is not ready to go to bed like a gentleman?
An opera is a blessed succedaneum to the
many. To the few it is the loan of a dictionary from
Heaven! Thoughts otherwise mute—feelings whose
dumbness is the inner man buried alive, leap to free-breathing
utterance with music. It is for this reason
that an unknown language is the best vehicle for an
opera. We wish to hear the harmony, and let our
souls furnish the articulation. Don't you see, now,
my dear “Bohemian Girl!” the plain reason of the
platitude of English opera! Italian music has words
to it, and so has a dancing-girl a carotid artery—but
you wish to feel your own heart beat delightfully, and
not to count the quickening pulses of Taglioni's—
you wish to embark your own thoughts in music's enchanted
boat, and not see how it was first laden with
other people's. A man's soul can have nothing in it
unsaid, when he wants a libretto to help him listen
understandingly to Pico!

And now, having translated into grammatical English,
the inarticulate contents of a chicken's breast,
and a pint-bottle of Tinta (for the benefit of a public
to whom these eloquent midnight companions would
otherwise have spoken in vain), let us to bed—apropos-imously
remarking, that, in the paragraph precedent
to this, there is a hint as to the uses of an opera,
worthy the attention of the society of moral reform.
As the clergy are, probably, asleep at this hour (3
o'clock), we say no more.

(Exit “184,” with a candle.)

The Mirror held up to the Times.—It is a
trick of ours to begin at the other end, when the subject
would otherwise open dry—bespeaking attention,
as it were, by first naming the inducement. As we
have lately been pulled up for not giving credit, we
may as well mention, that we took this peculiarity of
style from Mother Goose's politic inducement to the
five reluctant patrons of the milkpail:—

Silk gown:—we are about to show how we have
arrived at the conclusion, that, in the state of the
country now “opening up,” it will be necessary for
every gentleman to be a pugilist.

We beg to premise, that the state of things we are
about to show forth is by no means a sign of republican
retrogression. We are about to record no dis
paragement to the outline of the republic. It is a
pyramid, in fair progression, but refinement sits within
it like an hourglass. Half-way up the ascent of
political perfection, the social diagram within is at its
inevitable “tight place;” and while we remember on
what a breadth of polite foundation public opinion
built up society at the Revolution, and while we believe
that, half a century hence, we shall have as refined
standards as any country on earth, we believe
that, now, there is a squeeze upon good-breeding in
this country (less protection for private rights and
feelings than there was once, and will be again), and it
is as well that those who are to suffer by the tight
place should be prepared to stand it.

To protect that upon which the proprictor has a right
to put a value, is the object of law and civilization.
Five dollars, paid back, will satisfy a man who has
been robbed of five dollars; but the thief goes to
prison besides. A wound given to a man is soon
healed and forgotten, but the assailant is condemned
for a felon. A newspaper-attack upon a man, for peculiarities
with which the public have no business,
may be a deeper offence to him than the loss of half
his fortune, yet the attempt at remedy by law is worse
than bearing it in silence. The damages given are
trifling and nominal, and the prosecution propagates
the evil.

The above is a skeleton statement, to which the
memory of every newspaper-reader will supply the
flesh-and-blood illustrations. A late decision in Massachusetts,
justifying an unnecessary libel on the
ground of its truth, threw off, to our thinking, the last
skin of the metamorphosis. There is left, now, no
protection, by law or public opinion, to anything but
the pocket and the person of the citizen. His private
feelings, his domestic peace, his hard-won respect
from other men, his consciousness of respectability
abroad—commodities of more value to him than
money—are outlawed, and, if wronged, left to his individual
avenging.

Few republicans need to be told that the law casts
no formidable shadow unless shone upon by public
opinion. The law of libel is powerless, because the
license of the press is agreeable to the public. If it
were not so, the libeller would not find himself, after
conviction, still on the sunny side of public favor—
nor would judges charge juries with the little emphasis
they do—nor would juries give, as they do, damages
that turn the plaintiff into ridicule!

There is another thing that republicans need not be
told: that where a just remedy is denied by the law,
the individual takes the penalty into his own hands—
the same public that left him to administer it, kindly
warding off the law when he is tried for the retributive
assault and battery. A case of this sort lately
occurred in the tabernacle city. A family of the
most liberal habits and highest private worth—just
risen to wealth by two generations of honest industry
—chose to marry a daughter with entertainments proportionate
to their fortune. A malicious editor, avowedly
“to make his paper sell,” and for no other reason,
came out with a foul-mouthed ridicule of the
festivities, that completely destroyed the happiness of
the brightest domestic event of their lives. One hundred
thousand dollars would have been no inducement
to the family to suffer the pain and mortification that
were, and will be for years, the consequences of that
unprovoked outrage. But where lay the remedy?
The law would perpetuate the ridicule, without giving
damages that would outweigh the additional sale
of the paper. It chanced, in this case, that the injured
man was of athletic habits and proportions, and
the editor was small and puny. The plaintiff (that
would have been, had there been public opinion to
give power to the law) called on the defendant (that
would have been) and whipped him severely; and

when tried for the assault and battery, was punished
with a fine next to nothing. The public opinion of
the city of “broad philacteries” virtually justified
both outrages. But where would have been the remedy,
if the physical superiority had been on the other
side, or if the popular blight-monger had been an
unassailable cripple?

Another case of legal justification of club-law lately
occurred in this city. It is so marked an instance,
also, of the social impunity of printed injuries (the inflictor,
Mr. Gliddon, being still a popular lecturer,
and glorified daily by the model family-newspaper of
Boston), that we venture to quote three or four passages
from the libel. Mr. Cooley, the flogger, had
described, with humorous ridicule, some people he
saw in Egypt, and Mr. Gliddon takes it for granted
(though it is denied by Mr. Cooley) that the ridicule
was aimed at himself and his father. A pamphlet of
thirty or forty pages of abuse of Cooley is the retort
to this supposed allusion, and from a notice of the
pamphlet in a daily paper, we copy three or four of
its quoted sentences:—

“If, since the publication of `The American in
Egypt,' it be a work of supererogation on his part
(Gliddon's) to place upon public record the petulant
vagaries of an upstart, to recall the petty shifts of an
itinerant miser, to unmask the insidious insipidities of
a would-be author, or to refute the falsehoods of a
literary abortion, it will be allowed that the deed is
none of his seeking, but has been fastened on him, as
the only course within the letter of American laws
whereby a poltroon can receive chastisement from
those who would have gladly vindicated their honor
by means to them far more satisfactory.”

“Again Mr. Gliddon says: `I grieved that, not having
been gifted with prophetic vision. I neglected to
apply it [the corbash] in the Thebaid to Mr. Cooley
himself, for I may never have such an eligible chance
again.”'

“Had he been in Cairo at the time [of my departure
from that city], he should have laid aside all official
character, even at the risk of eventual censure,
and Mr. Cooley should not have perpetrated his pasquinade
in `Arabia Petrea and Palestine,' before he
[Giddon] had hung a `cowskin on those recreant
limbs!”'

“If he [Gliddon] do not now apply a horsewhip to
Mr. Cooley's shoulders, it is solely because, in a community
among which both are residing, the satisfaction
he should derive from a physical expression of
his obligations to Mr. Cooley, might prove more expensive
than the pleasure is worth.”

“Our relative positions have been, and, so far as
may depend on him, will remain perfectly distinct;
for possible affluence will never raise Mr. Cooley to
the social standing of a gentleman.”

“Mr. Cooley's fractiousness is confined to paper
pellets. Innate cowardice is a guaranty for his never
resorting to a different manifestation of his vicious,
though innocuous waspishness.”

The first time Mr. Cooley saw Mr. Gliddon after
these expressions of restrained warlike impatience, he
gave him a beating. Mr. Gliddon prosecuted him for
assault and battery, recovered “five dollars damages,”
and went on lecturing with high popular favor. What
was Mr. Cooley's remedy for being published as “no
gentlemen,” a “miser,” and a “coward,” who had
three times escaped personal chastisement? Mr.
Cooley is not the “loafer” these epithets would seem
to make him. He is a man of fortune, and a most
excellent citizen, with highly-respectable connexions,
and a hearth blessed with the presence of beauty and
refinement. A duel would have brought upon him
a ridicule more formidable than personal danger—the
law on the subject is a cipher—and, to remove the
pointed finger from waiting on him at his very table,
he was obliged to chastise the man who stigmatized
him.

One more proof of the same new state of things,
though in a different line. A highly-educated young
lawyer in this city, in canvassing for the whigs, during
the late political contest, was severely whipped by
three members of the leading democratic club. He
lay a-bed a week, recovering from his bruises, and, at
the end of that time, walked into a meeting of the
club referred to and demanded a hearing. Order was
called, and he stated his case, and demanded of the
president of the club that a ring should be formed,
and his antagonists turned in to him—one after the
other. It was enthusiastically agreed to, and the
three bullies being present, were handed over to him
and handsomely flogged, one after the other. Of
course this is not all we are to hear of such a man;
but who will deny, that when he comes to stand for
congress, he will not have counterbalanced, by this
act, the disadvantage of belonging to one of the most
aristocratic families of the city?

We are expressing no discontent with our country.
We are playing the Mirror only—showing the public
its face, that it may not forget “what manner of man”
it is. We have shown by facts, that there is no more
remedy among us, for the deepest injuries that can
be inflicted, than there is among wild beasts in the
forest. Duelling is as good as abolished, we rejoice
with all our hearts—but it owes its abolition to the
country's having sunk below the chivalric level at
which that weed could alone find nourishment. We
leave to others to draw conclusions and suggest remedies.
We are not reformers. We submit. But we
should think a man as improvident, not forthwith to be
rubbing up his sparring, as a gentleman would have
been in Charles the Second's time, to have walked
abroad without his sword. They have a saying in
the Mediterranean (from the custom of yoking a hog
with a donkey together for draught), “You must
plough with a hog if you stay in Minorca!”

Rev. Sidney Smith's description of himself from a
letter to a correspondent of the New York American.—
“I am seventy-four years old; and being a canon of
St. Paul's, in London, and rector of a parish in the
country, my time is equally divided between town and
country. I am living amidst the best society in the
metropolis, am at ease in my circumstances, in tolerable
health, a mild whig, a tolerating churchman, and
much given to talking, laughing, and noise. I dine
with the rich in London, and physic the poor in the
country—passing from the sauces of Dives to the sores
of Lazarus. I am, upon the whole, a happy man,
have found the world an entertaining world, and am
heartily thankful to Providence for the part allotted to
me in it.”

We can add a touch or two to the auto-sketch of
the witty prebend, who, we think, is one of the men
most thought about just now. He is a fat man,
weighing probably between two and three hundred
pounds, with a head and stomach very church-man-like
—(that is to say in the proportion of a large church
with a small belfry)—a most benevolent yet humorous
face, and manners of most un-English boisterousness
and cordiality. At a party he is followed about, like
a shepherd by his sheep, and we remember, once, at
his own house, seeing Lord Byron's sister, the Hon.
Mrs. Leigh, one of the laughing flock browsing upon
the wit that sprung up around him. One would
think, to see him and know his circumstances, that
the gods had done their best to make one of the Mr.
Smiths perfectly happy.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

(In reply to our respected private correspondent, and the
editor with his puddle against every man, and every man's
inkstand against him.)

When is a statesman beyond accusation? Not while
he is still armed in the arena!—NOT while he has
neither dismounted from the car of ambition, nor,
even once, made sign to the world, that he would fain
stop and turn his face to his Maker!

We are understood as referring to Mr. Adams.
We consider this present active member of congress
as, beyond competition, the most potent spirit in
America. “Venerable” he is—and “his hand trembles”—but
his venerableness is a cavern of power, and
his uplifted forefinger

We know there is a level on the mountain of life,
where the air is pure and cold—a height at which impurity
can scarce come, more, between the climber
and his God—but, it is above where the lightning comes
from—it is above the dark cloud where sleeps the
thunder, collected from below, and charged with inseparable
good and harm. This incorrupt level is, at
least, one step above the cloud in which Mr. Adams
has pertinaciously lingered; and if his friends insist
that he has been long enough lost to common scrutiny
to have reached the upper side of the cloud of dangerous
power, we must be excused for pointing our conductor
till he is done stirring in the thunder.

Persuade us that Mr. Adams is so “venerable” as
to have outlived all liability to the license described
by the poet:—

Persuade us that a vindictive man may be safely bowed
before, for an angel, with his hand, for the first time,
fetterlessly clutched on this world's thunderbolts!
Persuade us that Mr. Adams could not stoop his
statesmanship to resent, and that he is not one of those
dreaders of political extinction, who feel that “not to
be at all is worse than to be in the miserablest condition
of something.” Persuade us, in short, that no
provocation in argument, no lull of responsibility, no
oracular unanswerableness, no appetite for the exercise
of power, no
could tempt Mr. Adams, with his present undiminished
mental vigor, to swerve a hair line from good—by
weight thrown upon public measure, or by influence
wrongfully exercised over the fair fame of the dead
and the private feelings of the living—persuade us
of all this, and we will allow that he is beyond—
“venerably” beyond—the remindings of human censure!

But now—having arms-lengthed it, in reply to a
very formal letter we received last evening condemning
the admission into our columns of a communication
accusatory of Mr. Adams—let us come closer to the
reader with a little of our accustomed familiarity.

We were called upon a day or two since, by one
of the first scholars and most intelligent of business-men
among us—this communication in his hand.
He left us to read it at our leisure. We, at first,
were unpleasantly affected by it, and slipped it upon
our refusal hook—sorry that so great a man as Mr.
Adams should have an unbeliever (and so weighty an
unbeliever), in greatness so ready for its closing seal.
We should have stopped at this regret, probably, and
only thought of the subject again when returning the
manuscript, but that we had been previously impressed
with our friend's courage in historical justice—on a
wholly different subject. This brought about the
sober second thought, and we turned it over somewhat
as follows:—

Of the allowed Upper Triumvirate of this country
—Clay, Jackson, and Adams—the peaceful good
name of the first is, just now, closed for history, by
his willing relinquishment of public action. The
world owes him the glorified repose for which he has
signified his desire. The second has also retired;
and, though he sometimes has sent his invincible
banner to wave again in the political field, it would
be a harsh pen that would transmute, and make readable
by judicious eyes, the silly abuses syringed at
the venerable old chieftain by the Bedouin squirt of
the “Express.”

The third—Mr. Adams—we could not but feel, at
once, was off the pedestal where the world had willingly
placed him, and had come down, once more

(We shall be pardoned, by the way, for quoting what
is recalled by this chance-sprung quotation—a comparison
which seems to us singularly to picture Mr.
Clay and Mr. Adams as to loftiness of public life and
motive.) Dante says:—

We felt, at once, that this latter character—this
aliquis in omnibus, nihil in singulis—was, as displayed
in Mr. Adams's career, rather the mettle of invincible
obstinacy and unrest acting upon strong talent, than
the ring of the clear metal of human greatness. There
was nothing in Mr. Adam's life of toil that had not
fed his innate passion for antagonism. He was a born
ascetic, in whose nostrils the fiery perils of other men
were but offensive smoke—who had no temptation to
softer pleasure than a pasquinade against a political
rival—who had made the most of the morality which
came natural to him, and which, in this land, covers
more sins than charity. He was not, like Clay and
Jackson, great in spite of the impassioned nature for
which we (so inconsistently), love the man and disclaim
his greatness. He has been the terror of his
time for wounds worse than murder—yet gave no
stab that could be “stopped with parsley.” He
needed no shirt of penance to make him remember
that

He has profited by men's not remembering that (in
the zoology of the pleasures), the sin of the sloth
were a merit in the armadillo—one hating to move,
and the other hating to be still, and both tested by
their activity of motion. In short, Mr. Adams—
though he has unquestionably walked to the topmost
stone of the temple of statesmanship, and is now the
third greatest man in the country that shakes under
him—has exclusively pampered his own desires, topmost
and undermost, by the practice of the virtues
that have shielded him. The toils that have advanced
him were begun in the pastime of an aristocratic
youth; and position, up to quite the end of that
“second heat” of his ambition-race, was an inheritance
perseveringly thrust on him. Can such a man, while
our destiny is still hourly hanging on his lips, be
“venerable” beyond the possibility of censure?

With this unwilling mental review of the “boiled
peas” of Mr. Adams's pilgrimage to greatness—unwillingly,
as it was irresistibly and truthfully disparaging—we
reverted to our first picture of his present
position. We had been truly, and even tearfully, affected,
on seeing the old man, at the late festival of
the Historical Society—doubtless very near his grave,
but fighting his way determinately backward through
the gate of death—and we expressed ourself in terms
of high respect and honor, when we wrote of it the
morning after. It is a recompensing ordinance of
Nature, that the glory and virtues of a great man accompany
his person and his sins lie where they first
fall—in the furrow of history. It is hard to look upon
any man's face, and remember ill of him; and there
is many a great man, who has a halo where he comes,
and none where he is heard of.

We remembered nothing disparaging to Mr. Adams
that evening. But in our office, with a shade drawn
over our eyes, to compel a disagreeable decision of
duty, we saw that the age and decrepitude, which
apparently exacted submission to his will, had left no
joint open in his harness, looseued no finger upon his
weapons of attack. He can defend himself—he has
hundreds to defend him, should he be silent. His
much talked-of “diary” lacks no evidence that truth
can furnish; and if the charges against him are “mere
cobwebs in a church bell,” the best of prayers is, that
he may burst them with one stroke of living triumph,
and not leave even that slight violence to be done by
the knell of his departure.

The last thought that came to us, and the only one
we thought necessary for a preface to the communication,
was, that now would probably be the time chosen
by Mr. Adams himself for denying (and they MUST
BE DENIED!) these indictments against his greatness.
The five years' silence that will follow his death, had
better harden over no ulcer—to be re-opened and
cleansed, to the world's offence, hereafter. We took
some credit to ourself, for simply saying this, without
recording what we have been compelled to record now
—the reasons of our thinking gravely of the communication.
We would have taken the other side
and entered into the defence quite as willingly—but
the writer, as well as Mr. Adams, is a man not to be
denied a hearing. We may perhaps be permitted to
close this article—written in a most unwonted vein,
for us—with a little editorial comfort from Shakspere:—

“Money Article” on the Opera.—We were delighted
to hear it whispered about at the opera, last
night, that there is a movement among the people of
taste and influence to “set up,” by a liberal subscription,
the present excellent, but impoverished and
struggling operatic company. The first thought that
occurs to any one hearing of this, would, probably, be
a surprise that, with such full houses as have graced
the opera, they have not been thriving to the fullest
extent of reasonable expectation. We understand,
however, that it is quite the contrary. When the
present company commenced their engagement, there
was an arrearage of gas expenses to be paid up, the
license was to be renewed, at $500; and the house,
even when full, gives but a slender dividend over the
expenses of the orchestra, scenery, lights, stage properties,
and dresses. At the only “division of the
spoils” that has yet been made, Madame Pico received
but sixty dollars—so insufficient a sum being
all that this admirable singer has received for several
months' waiting, and one month's playing and singing!
Her dresses alone cost her twice the sum! Borghese
received twice this amount, but the other performers,
of course, much less even than Pico.

In the history of the first introduction of Italian
music into England, in 1692, it is stated that the singers
(an “Italian lady,” a basso, and a soprano) were
taken up by two spirited women of fashion, wives of
noblemen, who arranged benefit concerts at their own
houses, for the “charming foreigners,” and inviting
their friends as if to a ball—demanding five guineas
for each invitation! The rage for these expensive
concerts is recorded as a curious event of the time,
and it was a grievous mark of unfashionableness not
to be honored with a ticket.

The American public is a hard master to these
children of the sun. They take no comfort among
us, if they lay up no money. Our climate is both
dangerous and disagreeable! Our usages, and prejudices,
and manner of life, all at variance with theirs!
Their hearts are bleak here, and their pockets at
least should have a warm lining! And (by the way)
see what a difference there is, even between our country
and chilly England, in the way society treats
them! We chance to possess an autograph letter of
Julia Grisi's, given us by the lady to whom it was
addressed—a daughter of Lucien Bonaparte married
to an English nobleman. Look at the position this
little chance record reveals of a prima donna in England:—

“Aimable et tres chere Princesse!—

“Je suis vraiment desolée de ne pouvoir aller ce soir chez
Lady Morgan. Je dine chez le Prince Esterhazy ou je dois
passer la soirée. Demain au soir, j'ai un concert pour M. Laporte,
le reste de la semaine je suis libre et tout à vos ordres.
Si vous croyez de combiner quelque-choze avec Lady Morgan,
comptez sur moi! Demain je passerai chez Lady Morgan
pour faire mes excuses en personne.

“Que dirai-je de ce magnifique voile! Que la generosité e
l'amabilité sont innées dans la grande famille.

“Croyez tonjours, madame la princesse, à tout le devouement
de votre servante, Julia Grisi.

“Milady D— S—.”

We chance to have another dramatic autograph, a
note of Leontine Fay's, given us by the same noble
lady (and we may say here, apropos, that we should
be very happy to show these, and others, to persons
curious in autographs)—showing the same necessary
reliance on special patronage:—

“Theatre Francais.

“M'lle Leontine Fay a l'honneur de presenter ses humble
respects a Lady D—, et de solliciter sa puissante protection
pour la soirée qui aura lieu a son benefice Vendredi, 10 Juliet.
Le choix des pieces et les noms des artistes qui veulent bien
contribuer a son succès lin font esperer que miladi, qui aime
à encouragér les arts, daignera l'honorer de sa presence.”

This is dated from the French theatre in London,
but we treasured up the autograph with no little avarice,
for Leontine Fay was in the height of her glory,
in Paris, when we first went abroad, and, to us, she
seemed a new revelation of things adorable. She
was made for the stage by nature—as scenery is
adapted by coarse lines for distant perspective. Her
eyes were dark, luminous, and of a size that gave
room for the whole audience to “repose on velvet” in
them.—But we wander! We resume our subject,
after saying that we never envied prince or king, till
we heard, at that time, that Leontine Fay passionately
loved the prince royal—the young duke of Orleans.
He is dead, she is grown ugly, and we are left
to admire Pico. “Much after this fashion,” etc., etc.

Grave people (though by no means all grave people)
are inclined to bid the opera “stand aside” as a
thing unholy. We think this is a mistake. We believe

music to be medicinal to body and soul. With
entire reverence, we take leave to remind the religious
objector of the cure of Saul, and to quote the passage:—

The medicinal value attached to music by the ancients
is also shown in the education of Moses at the
court of Pharaoh. Clemens Alexandrinus has recorded
that “Moses was instructed by the Egyptians
in arithmetic, geometry, rhythm, harmony, but, above
all, in medicine and music.” Miriam sang and danced
in costume, and David “in his linen ephod,” and the
only reproach made by Laban to Jacob, for carrying
off his two daughters, was, that he did not give him
the opportunity to send him away “with mirth and with
songs, with tabret and with harp.” We refer to these
historic proofs, to remind the objecting portion of the
community that scenic musical representation was a
vent for domestic and religious feeling among the ancients,
and that, in an opera—particularly one unaccompanied
by modern ballet—there is no offence to
moral feeling, but, on the contrary, authorized good.

To revert to our purpose, in this article—(chronologically,
somewhat spready!)—We do not know
what shape the aroused liberality of the wealthy classes
of New York will take, but we should think that
Madame Pico—(as she has given us the most pleasure,
at the greatest expense to herself, and is an unprotected
and exemplary woman, alone among us)—
should have a special benefit by subscription concert,
or some other means as exclusive to herself. We
suggest it—but we presume we are not the first it has
occurred to. Will the wealthy gentlemen who are
nightly seen in the dress-circles, delighted with her
exquisite music, turn the subject over at their luxurious
firesides?

To and about our Correspondents.—We wish
to “define our position” with regard to our correspondents
and their opinions.

Were an editor to profess an agreement of opinion
with every writer for his paper, he would either claim
a superhuman power of decision on all possible subjects,
at first sight, or he would exclude communications
on all subjects, except his own mental hobbies
and matters of personal study and acquaintance. To
avoid both horns of this fool's dilemma, he opens a
correspondence column, in which anything (short of an
invasion of a cardinal virtue, or violation of a palpable
truth) may very properly and irresponsibly appear.
The only questions the editor asks himself are, whether
it will interest his readers, and whether it is worth its
space in the paper.

But there are people for whom it is necessary that
we should go back to the very catechism of political
economy, and show upon what principle is founded
the expediency of a FREE PRESS—a press untrammelled
by a king in a kingdom, and by the sovereign republicans
in a republic.

Opinions have been well likened to steam—powerless
when diffused abroad, resistless when shut in and
denied expansion. The unconscious apostleship of
Mr. Adams—procuring an explosion in favor of abolition,
by his obstinacy in provoking an undue suppression
of the subject—is a striking illustration of this.
Nothing makes less impression on the mind than ab
stract principles to which there is no opposition—
nothing is dearer to the heart than opinions for which
we have been called on to contend and suffer. A
free press, therefore, keeping open gate for all subjects
not prohibited by law and morals, is far safer
than a press over-guarded in its admissions to the
public eye.

Having thus repeated, as it were, a page of the
very spelling-book of freedom, let us bespeak, of our
subscribers, a let-off, as far as we personally are concerned,
for any decent opinions expressed under the
head of “correspondence.” We throw open that part
of our paper. It is interesting to know what people
think who do not agree with us. We court variety.
We would not (in anything but love) be called a bigot.
New opinions, even the truest, are reluctantly
received, and, we think, very often culpably distrusted.
As far, therefore, as the yea or nay may go, on any
proper subject, we care not a fig which side writes
first to us, and we hereby disclaim responsibility for
all articles under “our correspondence,” except on the
score of morals and readableness.

The Opera.—The Puritani is one of those operas
with which musical criticism has little or nothing
to do. If only tolerably sung, the feeling of the audience
goes on before—making no stay with fault-finding.
The applause last night, after a most limping
and ill-paced duett between Tomasi and Valtellina,
was tempestuous; and Antognini, in one passage, ran
off his voice, and was gone for several notes in some
unknown region, and yet, on spreading out his hands
immediately after, there was great approbation by the
audience! Great effort was made by the audience to
encore “Suoni la tromba,” but the two bases thought
more basely of their bases than the audience, and did
not repeat it. Is there no way to implore Valtellina
to abate a little of his overreaching of voice, in that
superb invocation? He overdoes it terribly.

We are not writing in very good humor, we are
afraid—but the enthusiasm of a crammed house needs
no propping. We would not find fault if they needed
our praise. Borghese did well—but will do better at
the next representation. She would sing with fuller
tone for a little egg beat up with brandy. We longed
to unreef her voice—in some way crowd a little more
abandon into it. She acted as she always does—to a
charm.

Pico was in one of the proscenium boxes, looking
very charming, and evidently enjoying the whole opera
with un-envious enthusiasm. She went with a
bouquet for Borghese—so said a bird in our ear.

OLE BULL'S NIAGARA.
(AN HOUR BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE.)

Saddle, as, of course, we are, under any very striking
event, we find ourselves bestridden, now and then,
with a much wider occupancy than the plumb-line
of a newspaper column. Ole Bull possesses us over
our tea-table; he will possess us over our supper-table—his
performance of Niagara equi-distant between
the two. We must think of him and his violin for
this coming hour. Let us take pen and ink into our
confidence.

The “origin of the harp” has been satisfactorily
recorded. We shall not pretend to put forward a
credible story of the origin of the violin; but we wish
to name a circumstance in natural history. The
house-cricket that chirps upon our hearth, is well
known as belonging to the genus Pneumora. Its insect
size consists almost entirely of a pellucid abdomen,

crossed with a number of transverse ridges. This
when inflated, resembles a bladder, and upon its tightened
ridges the insect plays like a fiddler, by drawing
its thin legs over them. The cricket is, in fact, a
living violin; and as a fiddler is “scarce himself”
without his violin, we may call the cricket a stray
portion of a fiddler.

Ole Bull “is himself” with his violin before him—
but without it, the commonest eye must remark that
he is of the invariable build of the restless searchers
after something lost—the build of enthusiasts—that is
to say, chest enormous, and stomatch, if anything,
rather wanting! The great musician of Scripture, it
will be remembered, expressed his mere mental affliction
by calling out “My bowels! my bowels!” and,
after various experiments on twisted silk, smeared
with the white of eggs, and on single threads of the
silk-worm, passed through heated oil, the animal fibre
of cat-gut has proved to be the only string that answers
to the want of the musician. Without trying to reduce
these natural phenomena to a theory (except by
suggesting that Ole Bull may very properly take the
cricket as an emblem of his instinctive pursuit), we
must yield to an ominous foreboding for this evening.
The objection to cat-gut as a musical string is its
sensibility to moisture; and in a damp atmosphere it
is next to impossible to keep it in tune. The string
comes honestly enough by its sensitiveness (as any
one will allow who has seen a cat cross a street after
a shower)—but, if the cat of Ole Bull's violin had the
least particle of imagination in her, can what is left of
her be expected to discourse lovingly of her natural
antipathy—a water-fall?

But—before we draw on our gloves to go over to
Palmo's—a serious word as to what is to be attempted
to-night.

Old Bull is a great creature. He is fitted, if ever
mortal man was, to represent the attendant spirit in
Milton, who

but it seems to us that, without a printed programme,
showing what he intends to express besides the mere
sound of waters, he is trusting far too rashly to the
comprehension of his audience and their power of
musical interpretation. He is to tell a story by music!
Will it be understood?

We remember being very much astonished, a year
or two ago, at finding ourself able to read the thoughts
of a lady of this city, as she expressed them in an admirable
improvisation upon the piano. The delight
we experienced in this surprise induced us to look
into the extent to which musical meaning had been
perfected in Europe. We found it recorded that a
Mons. Sudre, a violinist of Paris, had once brought
the expression of his instrument to so nice a point
that he “could convey information to a stranger in
another room,” and it is added that, upon the evidence
thus given of the capability of music, it was proposed
to the French government to educate military bands
in the expression of orders and heroic encouragements
in battle! Hayden is criticised by a writer on music
as having failed in attempting (in his great composition
“The Seasons”) to express “the dawn of day,”
“the husbandman's satisfaction,” “the rustling of
leaves,” “the running of a brook,” “the coming on
of winter,” “thick fogs,” etc., etc. The same writer
laughs at a commentator on Mozart, who, by a “second
violin quartette in D minor,” imagines himself
informed how a loving female felt on being abandoned,
and thought the music fully expressed that it was
Dido! Beethoven undertook to convey distinct pictures
in his famous Pastoral Symphony, but it was
thought at the time that no one would have distinguished
between his musical sensations on visiting
the country and his musical sensations while sitting
beside a river—unless previously told what was coming!

Still, Ole Bull is of a primary order of genius, and
he is not to wait upon precedent. He has come to
our country, an inspired wanderer from a far away
shore, and our greatest scenic feature has called on
him for an expression of its wonders in music. He
may be inspired, however, and we, who listen, still
be disappointed. He may not have felt Niagara as we
did. He may have been subdued where a meaner
spirit would be aroused—as

(Seven o'clock, and time to go.)

(AFTER THE PERFORMANCE.)

We believe that we have heard a transfusion into
music—not of “Niagara,” which the audience seemed
bona-fide to expect, but—of the pulses of the human
heart AT Niagara. We had a prophetic boding of the
result of calling the piece vaguely “Niagara”—the
listener furnished with no “argument,” as a guide
through the wilderness of “treatment” to which the
subject was open. This mistake allowed, however,
it must be said that Ole Bull has, genius-like, refused
to mis-interpret the voice within him—refused to play
the charlatan, and “bring the house down”—as he
might well have done by any kind of “uttermost,” from
the drums and trumpets of the orchestra.

The emotion at Niagara is all but mute. It is a
“small, still voice” that replies within us to the thunder
of waters. The musical mission of the Norwegian
was to represent the insensate element as it was to
him—to a human soul, stirred in its seldom-reached
depths by the call of power. It was the answer to
Niagara that he endeavored to render in music—not
the call! We defer attempting to read further, or
rightly, this musical composition till we have heard
it again. It was received by a crowded audience, in
breathless silence, but with no applause.

Miss Julia Northall's first appearance as a public
singer was very triumphant. If her heart had not
kept beating just under her music-maker, she would
have made much better music, however. When we
tell the lovely debutante, that persons in besieged
fortresses can detect the direction of the enemy's approach
under ground, by placing sanded drums on
the surface, which betray the strokes of the mining
pickaxes by the vibrations of the particles, she will
understand how the beating of her heart may disturb
the timbre of her voice—to say nothing of the disturbance
in the air by the accelerated beating of the
anxious hearts of her admirers! She has great advantages—a
rich voice deep down with an upper
chamber in it (what the musicians call a contralto
sfogato), and a kind of personal beauty susceptible of
great stage embellishments. “Modest assurance”
(with a preponderance of assurance if anything), is her
great lack.

Sanquirco sang admirably—but his black coat
spoiled it for all but the cognoscenti.

We came out of the opera-house amid a shower of
expressions of disappointment, and we beg pardon of
“the town” for remembering what Antigenides of
Athens said to a musical pupil who was once too little
applauded. “The next time you play,” said Antigenides,
“shall be to me and the Muses.”

The two new Fashions, White Cravats and
Ladies' Tarpaulins.—Here and there a country
reader will, perhaps, require to be informed that no
man is stylish, now, “out” in the evening, without a

white cravat. To those who frequent the opera this
will be no news, of course; as no eye could have
failed to track the “milky way,” around the semicircle,
from stage-box to stage-box. The fact thus
recorded, however, we proceed to the diagnosis of the
fashion (and of another fashion, of which we shall
presently speak)—premising only that we are driven
to the discussion of these comparatively serious
themes, by the frivolous character of other news, and
the temporary public surfeit of polities, scandal, and
murder.

The white cravat was adopted two years since, in
London, as the mark of a party—“Young England.”
Our readers know, of course, that for ten years, they
have been worn only by servants in that country, and
that a black coat and white cravat were the unmistakable
uniform of a family butler. The cravat having
been first worn as the distinction of a certain reforming
club, in Cromwell's parliament, however, the
author of Vivian Grey adopted it as the insignium of
the new political party, of which he is the acknowledged
leader; and, as the king of the while cravats, he
has set a fashion for America. The compliment we
pay him is the greater, by the way, that we do not
often copy the tight-legged nation in our wearables.

It was established in Brummell's time that a white
cravat could not be successfully tied, except upon the
critical turn preceding the reaction of a glass of champagne
and a cup of green tea. A felicitous dash of
inspired dexterity is the only thing to be trusted, and
failure is melancholy! As to dressiness, a white cravat
is an intensifier—making style more stylish, and the
lack of it more observable; but artistically it is only
becoming to light complexious—by its superior whiteness,
producing an effect of warmth on a fair skin,
but impoverishing the brilliancy of a dark one. As a
sign of the times, the reappearance of the white cravat
is the forerunner of a return to old-fashioned
showiness in evening dress, and, as the wheel comes
round again, we shall revive tights, buckles, and shoes
—expelling the levelling costume of black cravat and
boots, and making it both expensive and troublesome
to look like a gentleman after candlelight. So tilts
the plank in republics—aristocratic luxury going up
as aristocratic polities are going down!

But what shall we say of trains and tarpaulins for
ladies wear! Jack's hat, copied exactly in white satin,
is the rage for a head-dress, now—(worn upon the
side of the head with a ruinous feather)—and a velvet
train is about becoming indispensable to a chaperon!
It will be a bold poor man that will dare to marry a
lady ere long—what with feathers and trains and
pages' wages! We rejoice that we had our fling in
the era of indifferent pocket. Keep the aristocracy
unemployed on politics for another administration or
two, and we shall drive matrimony to the extremities
of society—none but the very rich, or very poor, able
to afford the luxury!

Merry Christmas.—Our paper of this evening—
(Christmas eve)—is to be read by the light of the
“YULE LOG,”—or whatever else represents the bright
centre around which, dear reader! your family does
its Christmas assembling. We shall perhaps amuse
you by suggesting a comparison between the elegant
lamp, which diffuses its light over your apartment,
and the expedient resorted to by your English ancestors
to brighten the hall for their Christmas evening.
“I myself,” says an old historian, “have seen tablecloths,
napkins, and towels, which being taken foul
from the table, have been cast into the fire, and there
they burned before our faces upon the hearth.” This,
of course, was by way of illustrating the greasy habits
of our ancestors at table, and gives an amusing piquan
cy to the injunction of wisdom that we should cherish
the “lights of the past.”

There are two points of freedom in which we envy
the condition of slaves at the south—FREEDOM from
responsibility at all times, and FREEDOM from all manner
of work from Christmas to New Year. “The
negroes” (says a writer on the festivals, games, and
amusements, in the southern states), “enjoy a week's
recreation every winter, including Christmas and New
Year's; during which they prosecute their plays and
sports in a very ludicrous and extravagant manner,
dressing and masking in the most grotesque style, and
having, in fact, a complete carnival.” We confess
this let-up from the pressure of toil is enviable. The
distinction between horse and man, in the latter's requiring
mental as well as bodily rest, should be legislated
upon—all business barred with penalties, except
for the necessaries of life, during the Christmas holydays
and during another week somewhere in June.
We are a monotonous people in this country. The
festivals of the Jews occupied a quarter of the year,
and eighty days were given to festivals among the
ancient Greeks! We do not fairly keep more than
one in New York—New Year's day—the only day,
except Sundays, when newspapers are not issued and
shops are all shut.

We are sorry we can not paragraph America into
more feeling for holydays, but we may perhaps prevent
a gradual desuetude of even keeping Christmas, by
heaping up our regrets when it comes round. We
shall join the procession of visiters to the toy-shops
and confectioners to-night, and we think, by the way,
that these rounds to the gift-venders, might be made
exceedingly agreeable. “Guion,” “Sands,” “Thompson,”
“Tiffany & Young,” “Stuart's Candy
Palace,” “Bonfanti's,” and “the Alhamra,” are
beautiful places for a range of soirees in hat and bonnet,
and we went this round last Christmas eve with
great amusement. Happy children are beautiful
sights, and we can still see bons-bons with their eyes.

Reader! a merry Christmas! and let us repeat
once more to you the old stanza (tho' old Trinity is
no longer what it was when this was written):—

The other side of Broadway.—It is time that
the decline of the era of shopping a-foot was fairly announced
as at its fall—an epoch gone over to history.
Washington Hall has been purchased as a property
no longer objectionable from its being the other side
of mud, and is to be speedily converted into the most
magnificent “ladies store” within the limits of silk
and calico. We are credibly assured that this last
assertion is fully borne out by the plans of Mr. Stuart,
the projector. No shop in London or Paris is to
surpass it. But the best part of it remains to be told:
—The building is to have a court for carriages in the
centre, so that shoppers will thunder in at a porte
cochére, like visiters to the grand duke of Tuscany!
There will of course be a spacious door on the street,
for those who can cross Broadway without a carriage
—(poor zealous things!)—but the building is contrived
for those to whom the crowded side of the street
is rather an objection, and who wish their hammer-cloths
to stand out of the spatter of omnibuses while
they shop!! There is a comment on “the times”
in this plan of Mr. Stuart's which we commend to the
notice of some other parish.

Farther down-town, however (156) the shilling side
of Broadway has been embellished by a new store, intended
for all comers and customers, and certainly an
ornament to the town—occupied by Beebe & Costar,
hatters. No more showy and sumptuous saloon
could possibly be contrived than this “hatter's shop;”
and it is very well that they keep one article of ladies'
wear—(riding-hats)—for it is altogether too pretty a
place for a monastery. The specimen hats stand on
rows of marble tables, and the room is lined with mirrors
and white panels—the effect very much that of a
brilliant French café. As to the article of merchandise,
Beebe & Costar have made tributary the “lines
of beauty” to a degree which gives their hats a most
peculiar elegance of shape, and it is worth the while
of those who are nice in their tegmen, to “look in.”

Apropos:—The only god who employed a hatter
was Mercury—why is not that “English clever”
deity, with his winged hat, installed as a hatter's
crest? The propriety of it must have occurred to the
hatters. Possibly we are so mercurial a nation, that
it was thought impolitic—no man wanting any more
mercury in his hat—at least when it is on. We see
that the annual hatters' ball comes off on the 26th.
May we venture to suggest as topics of discussion in
the quadrilles—1st, Mercury's claims to the arms of
the assembly, and, 2d, what peltry was probably used
by the hatter of Olympus, and 3d, whether (as it was
a winged hat) it must not have been made of the only
quadruped that flies fur, the flying squirrel? “Curious
questions, coz!”

France versus England, or the Black Cravat
versus the White.—We have received, in a very
London-club-y handwriting, a warlike reply to the
note we published lately from a French gentleman on
the subject of the white cravat. The two nations
seem to have separated into hostile array on the subject.
Our English correspondent certainly brings
cogent arguments in favor of the white, and indeed
of English costume generally. After asking very
naturally what our French correspondent's phrase,
“perfidious Albion,” had to do with it, and suggesting
that “black cravat” had better “reflect on the late
conduct of the French in the Pacific,” he goes on
with the matter in question:—

“The English fashion for gentlemen's dress is never
to sacrifice comfort to appearance, which the French
fashion invariably does; the clothes of the English
are loosely made, so that every limb of the body is
free. You see nothing in the dress that can be called
effeminate; they appear to eschew everything that
approaches the `Miss Nancy school;' no man with
them is considered well-dressed, however costly his
attire, if he be not manly in his appearance. Now, a
Frenchman's clothes are made to fit so tight, that it
is impossible for him to look at his ease. A Frenchman
dressed looks as if he had just come out of a
band-box; he looks like a pretty doll which you see
in the shop windows in Paris. To hand a lady a
chair, he runs the danger of bursting his coat, or
cracking his waist-band; he can not stoop to pick up
a lady's fan, without danger to his inexpressibles.
The Frenchman dressed is no longer the easy, pliant,
laughing man, that we know him to be when in dishabille—but
he is stiff, unnatural, and effeminate.

“The English fashion abhors display; the French,
on the contrary, invites it. With the Frenchman
dress is a great affair, for he intends to make a sensation.
With the Englishman it is but secondary, for
he does not believe that mere dress can have any influence.
You may form an idea of the sentiments
of both nations from this national character—the
English (and Americans) are proud, but not vain;
the French are very vain, but have little pride.

“Again: we like the Englishman's fondness for
white linen, and in this we can not imitate him too
closely. It is not only in the evening, as with the
Frenchman, that he puts on his fine linen, but at
rising he must have it.—Though he may wear a
shaggy morning coat, his under garments must be
spotless. You may know him when travelling on the
continent, by the unrivalled whiteness of his linen.
The same cleanliness makes the white cravat preferable.
It has its recommendation in being a clean
fashion—for no gentleman can wear it more than
once; whereas, the black satin cravat, which your
correspondent so much extols, is an exceedingly dirty
fashion—for, after dancing, the perspiration settles in
the satin; and with the dust in the room, &c., it becomes
unfit to wear more than twice, whereas the
French wear their cravats until they are worn out.”

The sun “kept Christmas” yesterday, by appearing
“in his best.” We never saw a more joyous, kindly,
holyday quality of sunshine. All who had hearts to
go abroad with, went abroad, and a-Broadway was a
long aisle of beauty in nature's roofless cathedral.
God help all who were not happy yesterday! We
picked up a bit of real-life poetry (by-the-way) in a
very unexpected place yesterday—a confectioner's
shop! The circumstance is at such a distance from
poetry, that the flash comes before the report—a
laugh before the eye is moistened. At Thompson's,
the best confectioner of the city, we saw a large pound-cake,
with a figure of a nun standing on it, dressed in
white, and we were told that a cake had just gone to
the sisters of the Barclay-street convent, with this little
figure in mourning instead of white—sent by a
young catholic lady who had just lost her mother.
As a conveyance of a thought, intended to be entirely
between the mourner and the sympathising sisters,
we think this was very beautiful. Perhaps we
spoil it by giving the coarse-minded a chance to ridicule
it.

We wish to introduce to the reader the word tonality.
Let us show its availableness at once by using
it to express the secret of Pico's overwhelming effect
upon the audience on Saturday evening. As musical
people know, melody is the natural “concord of sweet
sounds,” and harmony may be tolerably defined as the
artificial creation of surprises to vary melody. Malibran
saw, for instance, that one of her rustic audiences
could feel melody, but was incapable of appreciating
harmony, when they tumultuously encored her in
“Home, Sweet Home,” and let her “Di tanti palpiti”
go by without applause! It takes more than
one hearing, for persons not learned in music, to appreciate
the harmony of an opera, though if there be
in it an air of simple melody, a child will listen to
it, for the first time, with delight. But there are operas,
much cried up, where the melody and harmony
are not in TONE; and though people may be made to
like them against nature (as they like olives), the majority
of the audience will feel incredulous as to its
being “good music.” (We were two or three years
opera-going before these unwritten distinctions got
through our dura mater, dear reader; and if you are
not in a hurry, perhaps you will pay us the compliment
of reading them over again, while we mend our
pen for a new paragraph.)

Pico sang a part in the opera of Saturday night,
which, in our opinion, owed its electric power to three
tonalities: tone No. 1, between the harmony and melody
of the music—tone No. 2, between the music

and her own impression on the public as a woman—
and tone No. 3, between the opera and the mood of
the public for that evening.

Tone No. 1 is already explained. Tone No. 3 was,
perhaps, a combination of pleasurable accidents—
both the donnas in one piece, the house crammed
with fashion, and graced with more beauty than usual,
and (last, not least) the change in the weather. A sudden
south wind in December, makes even fashion affectionate,
and, with such influences in the air, music
that is “the food of love,” may “play on”—with
entire confidence as to its reception. Of tone No. 2
(the part in Donizetti's opera) we wish to speak more
at large, but we can not trust ourself afloat with it in
a paragraph already under headway.

Donizetti is commonly rated as a trite and not very
vigorous composer. As a musical convoy, he never
drops the slowest sailor below the horizon. But, that
he lets his heart steer the music whenever he can persuade
science to give up the helm, everybody must
have felt who has embarked a thought in one of his
operas. The music written down for Orsini (Pico's
part) expresses the character that Shakspere's words
give to Mercutio—the prince of thoughtless good
fellows, careless, loveable, and amusing. Between
this and Pico's personal qualities (as made legible
across the footlights), there is a tonality the town has
felt—a joyous recognition, by the audience, of a complete
correspondence between the good-fellow music
she sings and the good fellow nature has made her.
There is a class of such women—some of them the
most captivating of their sex, and every one of them
the acknowledged “best creature in the world” of the
circle she lives in. Here and there a person will understand
better what we mean if we mention that
Pico sat in the proscenium-box on the night of Ole
Bull's concert, and, with a full house looking at her
with eager curiosity, sat and munched her under-lip
most unbecomingly, in perfect unconsciousness of
any need of forbearing to do in public what she would
have done if she were alone! We must say we like
women that forget themselves!

We heard twenty judicious persons comment on
the opera of Saturday, and with but one expression
of never, in any country, having enjoyed opera more.
The universal tonality, to which we have tried to play
the interpreter, is partly a matter of coincidence, and
may not happen again; but we assure the two donnas
and our friend Signor Sacchi, that with the remembrance
of it, and with them both in the glorious opera
of Semiramide, next week, they will want a larger
house than Palmo's.

And, by-the-way, this amiable “Quintius Curtius”
of the opera, who has procured us the luxury of a
temple of music by jumping into the gulf with his
$47,000—excellent Signor Palmo—claims of the public
a slight return; no more than that they should acknowledge
the fact of his disaster! It has been doubted
that he has lost money, and some of the world's
cruelty has been dealt out to him in the shape of a
sneer at his sincerity. We copy (literally) the explanation
sent us on the subject, and bespeak for him
present public regard, and some future more tangible
demonstration:—

“Being attracted by a statement made in the Mirror
in reference to the Italian company at Palmo's
opera-house, showing the receipts and disbursements
for twelve nights, leaving but a small amount to be
divided by the company, after having as good and better
houses than when under the auspices of Signor
Palmo, whose honesty has been imputed to have made
money, and made the public and his creditors believe
the contrary, now the mystery is solved, and the public
should be satisfied of Signor Palmo's integrity,
who is ready to show by bills paid, and his books, that
he has lost $47,000 the last four years.”

SUPPER AFTER THE OPERA.

Private room over the Mirror office, corner of Ann and
Nassau—Supper on the round table, and brigadier
miring summat and water—Flagg, the artist, fatiguing
the salad with a paper-folder—Devil in waiting—Quarter
past ten, and enter “Yours Truly”
from the opera.

Brig.—Here he comes, like a cloud dropping from
Olympus—charged with Pico-tricity! Boy (to the
“devil”), stick a steel pen in my hat for a conductor!
Now—let him rain!

Flagg.—Echo—let him reign!

Yours Truly—(looking at the salad-dish).—Less
gamboge for me, if you please, my dear artist! Be
merciful of mustard when you mix for public opinion!
But, nay! brigadier!

Brig.—Thank you for not calling on me to bray,
mi-boy! What shall I neigh at?

Yours Truly.—How indelicate of you to call on
an artist to exercise his profession on a party of pleasure!

Brig.—How?

Yours Truly—Setting him to grind colors in a salad-dish!
What are you tasting with that wooden
ladle, my periodical sodger?

Brig.—Two of “illicit” to one of Croton—potheen
from a private still in the mountains of Killarny!
Knowles sent it to me! You have no idea what a
flavor of Kate Kearney there is about it!—(fmff! fmff!)

Flagg—(absently).—I smell the color of the heath-flowers
in it—crocus-yellow on a brown turf!

Brig.—Stick a pin there, mi-boy!—a new avenue
to the brain for things beautiful! Down with privileged
roads in a republic! Why should the colors
mixed for a limitless sense of beauty go in only at the
eye?

Flagg.—No reason why. I wish we could hear
colors!

Brig.—So you can, my inspired simplicity! and
taste them, too! You can hear things that are read,
and you can taste the brown in a turkey! (Turning
to Yours Truly)—Was that well said, my dear boy?

Yours Truly.—Pardon me if I suggest still an improvement
in the aristocracy of the senses! The
eye has a double door of fringed lids, and the mouth
an inner door of fastidious ivory; and, with the power
to admit or exclude at will, these are the exclusive organs!
The republicans are the nose and ear—open
to all comers, and forced to make the best of them!

Flagg.—A new light, by Jupiter! Let us pamper
the aristocracy! An oyster for my ivory gate, if you
please, general, and let us spite the ear's monopoly
of Pico by drinking her in silence! (—)

Brig.—(—)

Yours Truly.—(—)

Brig.—Touching Pico—is she, or isn't she?—you
know what I want to know, my boy! Disembowel
your mental oyster! What ails Borghese? What
is a “contralto?” Is it anything wrong—or what?

Yours Truly.—A contralto, my particular general,
is a voice that touches bottom—rubs your heart with
its keel, as it were, while floating through you—comparing
with a soprano, as the air on a mountain-top
compares with a breeze from lower down.

Brig.—Best possible description of yourself, mi-boy!
Go on, my contralto!

Flagg.—Yes—go on about Borghese—what is the
philosophy of Borghese's salary being the double of
Pico's?

Yours Truly.—Ah! now you touch the weight
that keeps Borghese down! The public, like yourself,
ask why the prima-donna who gives them the
more pleasure is the poorer paid! Borghese—but
first let me tell you what I think of her, comparison

apart. (Boy, light a cigar, and keep it going with the
bellows, a la pastille! I like the smoke, but to talk
with a cigar in the mouth spoils the delicacy of discrimination.)

Brig.—Spare us the scientific, mi-boy!

Yours Truly.—Why, what do you mean? I am as
ignorant of music, my dear sodger, as an Indian is of
botany—but he knows a weed from a flower, and I
talk of music as the audience judge of it—by what I
hear, “mark, and inwardly digest.”

Brig.—But the big words, my dear contralto!

Yours Truly.—“Foreign slip-slops,” I grant you—
but nothing more!—I lived three years in Italy, and,
of course, heard Italian audiences express themselves,
and here and there a phrase sticks to me—but if I
know “B sharp” from “B flat” (which is more than
some musical critics know), it is the extent of my
knowledge. No, general! there is no sillier criticism
of music than technical criticism. You might as well
paint cannon-balls piebald and then judge of their
effect by remembering which color showed through
the touch-hole before priming! Notes go to the ear;
effects shower the nerves. A musician who is a critic,
judges of a prima-donna by the accuracy with which
she imitates what he (the musician) has played on
an instrument—like a tight-rope dancer criticising his
brother of the slack-rope, because he don't swing over
the pit! Analyze the applause at an opera! There
are, perhaps, ten persons in a Palmo audience who are
scientific musicians. These ten admire most what
they can most exclusively admire—rapid and difficult
passages (what the Italians call fiorituri, or “flourishes”)
executed with the most skilful muscular effort
of the vocal organs. These ten, however, pass over,
as very pleasant accidents of the opera, the part which
pleases the rest of the audience—the messa di voce—
the tender expression of slower notes which try the
sweetness of the voice—the absoluteness of the “art
concealing art,” and which, more than all, betrays the
personal sensibility and quality of the actress's mind.
My dear brigadier, true criticism travels a circle, and
ends where it began—with nature. But as the art of
the prima-donna brings her to the same point, the unscientific
audience are most with the most skilful prima-donna—nearer
to a just appreciation of her than
musicians are.

Brig.—Now I see the reason I am so enchanted
with Pico, mi-boy! I was afraid I had no business to
like her—as I didn't know Italian music! What a
way you have of making me feel pleasant!

Yours Truly.—Pico has enchanted the town, brigadier!
and I have endeavored to put the flesh and
blood of language to the ghost of each night's enchantment.
That ghost of remembrance sticks by us
through the next day, and I thought it would be
agreeable to the Mirror readers to have the impression
of the music recalled by our description of it.
Have I done it scientifically? Taste forbid!—even if
I knew how! I interpret for “the million”—not for
“the ten.”

Flagg.—But about Borghese!

Yours Truly.—Well—I have a great deal to say
about Borghese—I have a great deal of the “flesh
and blood” I just spoke of, in reserve for Borghese;
but I shall follow a strong public feeling, and not
clothe her enchantments with language, till she slacks
her hold upon the purse-strings, and shares equally,
at least, with the donna whom the public prefer.
There goes the brigadier—fast asleep! Good night,
gentlemen! (Exit “Yours Truly.”)

Ole Bull's Concert.—We longed last night for
one of “Curtis's acoustic chairs,” by which all the
sound that approaches a man is inveigled into his ear
and made the most of, for we heard Niagara attentively
through, and at every change in the music
wished it louder. We thought even the “dying fall”
too expiring. It occurred to us, by the way, that if
the text of this discoursed music had been one of the
psalms instead of God's less interpretable voice in the
cataract, the room for enthusiasm, as well as the
preparation for it, on the part of the audience, would
have been vastly greater. In a mixed assembly (of
the quality of that at Palmo's last night) no chamber
of imagination is furnished or tenanted except that of
religion, and the very name of a bible psalm on the violin
would have clothed any music of Ole Bull's performing
with the aggrandizing wardrobe of association
kept exclusively for “powerful sermons” and
“searching prayers.” We rather wonder that this
ready access to the excitability of the mass has not
been taken advantage of by the violinists.

We confess to a little surprise in Ole Bull's organization.
With the

a superb build for a gladiator or an athlete—his violin
is a woman! The music he draws from it is all delicacy,
sentiment, pathos, and variable tenderness—
never powerful, masculine, or imposing. “The
Mother's Prayer,” and the “Solitude of a Prairie,”
are more effective than “Niagara,” for that reason.
The audience are prepared for a different sex in a
cataract. We know very well that the accordatura of
a violin is of all compass, and that Paganini “played
the devil” on it, as well as the angel, and we repeat
our surprise, that, even in a piece whose name suggests
nothing but masculine power, the burthen should
be wholly feminine! Fact, as this unquestionably is,
we leave it to our readers to reconcile with another fact
—that the applause at one of Ole Bull's concerts bears
no proportion to the enthusiasm, as the ladies, without
exception, are enchanted with him, and the men (who
do the applauding) are, almost without exception, dissatisfied
with him.

Even at the high price of tickets, nobody draws
like the Norwegian. A very sensible correspondent
of ours proposed to him (through the Mirror) to lower
his price, and allow those who could not afford the
dollar to have an opportunity of hearing him. He is
the soul of kindness and charity, and we should suppose
this would strike him as a felicitous hint.

Battle of the Cravats.—The front row of the
opera resembles a pianoforte with its white and black
keys—the alternation of black and white cravats is so
evenly distributed. The Frenchmen are all in black
cravats of course, and the English and Americans in
white, and a man might stop his ears and turn his
back to the orchestra (when the two donnas are on
the stage together) and tell who is singing, Pico or
Borghese, by the agitation of the black cravats or the
white. It is a strong argument in favor of the white
cravats, apropos, that the Americans, whose sympathy
is with the French in almost everything, should
have joined the English in this division of opinion.
We have received two or three most bellicose letters
on each side of this weighty argument, and would
publish them if we had a spare page.

The Opera.—Madame Pico was evidently struggling,
last evening, against the effects of her late illness;
but she delighted the audience as usual, with
her impassioned and effective singing. The opera

is a very trying one, and, to us, not the most agreeable
in its general character—particularly in the lachrymose
tone, throughout, of the part allotted to Pico.
Sanquirico was a relief to this ennui, and he so
charmed one lady in the house, that she threw him a
bouquet! He played capitally well—barring one little
touch of false taste in using two English words by
way of being funny. It let him down like the falling
out of the bottom of a sedan.

Several of our French friends, by the way, have requested
us to contradict the on dit we mentioned in
the Mirror, touching a “cabal to keep Pico subservient
to Borghese.” A regularly-formed one there
doubtless is not—but the French are zealous allies,
and every one of them does as much for Borghese as
he can, and, of course, as much as he could do in a
cabal. On the contrary, there seems to be no one individual
taking any pains about Pico—the general enthusiasm
at the opera excepted. Let us state a fact:
We have received many visits and more than a dozen
letters, to request even our trifling critical preference
for Borghese; and no sign has been given, either by
Pico or her friends, that our critical preference was
wished for, or otherwise than tacitly acknowledged.
This being true of a mere newspaper, what must be
probably the difference of appeal to more direct sources
of patronage? One or two persons have talked
feelingly of pity for Borghese's mortification! We
are watching to see when her mortification will be so
insupportable that she will slacken her grasp upon
Pico's just share of the profits! We are not only the
true exponent of public opinion in reference to the
merits of these ladies, but, if we are not personally
impartial, it is because (though we have no acquaintance
with either of the two ladies) we chance to know
most of Borghese's friends. Pico is evidently a kindhearted
person, indolently careless of her pecuniary
interests, and it is impossible to see the shadows of
mental suffering in her face and not wish to aid her—
but we should not sacrifice critical taste to do even
that, and we have not written a syllable that her effect
on the public has not more that justified. At the
same time we have never said a syllable to disparage
Borghese, and have only forborne to say as much of
her merits as we should otherwise have done, because
she was overpaid and strongly hedged in with supporters.

Servants in Livery, Equipages, etc.—There is
a stage of civilization at which a country will not—and
a subsequent stage at which a country will—tolerate
liveried servants. In a savage nation, an able-bodied
man who should put on a badge of hopeless and submissive
servitude for the mere certainty of food and
clothing, would be considered a disgrace to his tribe.
The further step of making that badge ornamental to
the servile wearer, would probably be resented as an
affront to the pre-eminence of display which is the
rightful prerogative of chiefs and warriors.

In a crowded and highly-civilized country, it is
found convenient for patricians to secure the tacit
giving-way of plebeian encounter in thronged places—
convenient for them to distinguish their own servants
from other people's in a crowd at night—and, more
particularly, in large and corrupt cities, it is convenient
to have such attendants for ladies as may secure
them from insult in public—the livery upon the follower
showing that the person he follows is not only respectable,
but of too much consequence to be annoyed
with impunity. The ostentation of servants in livery
is scarce worth a comment, as, unless newly assumed,
it is seldom thought of by the owner of the equipage,
nor is it offensive to the passer-by, except in a country
where it is not yet common.

The question whether a country is ready for liveries
—that is to say, whether it has arrived at that stage
where the want they imply is felt, and where the distinctions
they imply are acknowledged—is the true
point at issue. It is a curious point, too, for, in every
other nation, liveries may be excused as traditional
—as being only modifications of the dresses of fendal
retainers—while Americans, without this apology,
must defend the abrupt adoption of liveries on the
mere grounds of propriety and convenience.

We certainly have not yet arrived at that point of
civilization where liveries are needed—as in England
—to protect a lady from insult in the street. A female
may still walk the crowded thoroughfares of
New York by daylight—as she dare not do in London—unattended,
either by a gentleman or a servant
in livery. (We live in hope of overtaking the civilization
of the mother-country!) Neither has a liveried
equipage, as yet, the tacit consequence, in America,
which secures to it in London the convenient concessions
of the highway. We are republican enough,
thus far, to allow no privileges to be taken for granted;
and he who wishes to ride in a vehicle wholly invisible
to omnibus-drivers, and at the same time to
have his lineage looked into and perpetuated without
the expense of heraldic parchment, has only to appear
in Broadway with liveried equipage!

We differ from some of our luxurious friends, by
thinking, that, as long as the spending of over five
thousand dollars a year makes a gentleman odious in
the community, liveries are a little premature. It
is a pity to be both virtuous and unpopular. The
moving about in a cloud of reminded lordship is a
luxury very consistent with high morality, but it
comes coldly between republicans and the sun—
whatever fire of heaven the offending cloud may embosom.
We wonder, indeed, at the remaining in this
country, of any persons ambitious of distinctions in
the use of which we are thus manifestly “behind the
age.” It is so easy to leave the lagging American
anno domini of aristocracy, and sail for the next century—by
the Havre packet!

That Heaven does not disdain such love of each
other as is quickened by personal admiration, is
proved by the injunctions to the children of Israel to
appear in cheerful and becoming dresses on festal days
—those days occupying rather more than a quarter of
a year. The Jews also ornamented their houses on
holydays, not as we do with evergreens (a custom we
have taken from the Druid “mistletoe, cut with the
golden knife”), but with such ornaments as would
best embellish them for the reception of friends. The
French nation is to be admired for supremacy, in this
age, in the exhibition of the kindly feelings and the
brightening of the links of relationship and friendship.
It has been stated (among statistics) that for bons-bons
alone, in Paris, on new year's day, were expended
one hundred thousand dollars! We copy the French
with great facility in this country, and (until the proposed
“annexation of Paris”) we rejoice in the prosperity
of Stuart's candy quarry in New York, and
the myriad cobwebs of affection that stick, each by
one thread, to the corner of Chambers and Greenwich
streets! If not quite a “pilgrimage to Jerusalem,”
it is a pilgrimage to our best signs and emblems of
Jerusalem usages, to go the rounds of the gift-shops
during the holydays; and no kindly Christian parent,
who wishes to throw out an anchor for his children
against the storm of political ruffianism, should neglect
to bind friendship and family by a new tie in the
holydays! We see a use in the skill at temptation
shown by such admirable taste-mongers as Tiffany

& Young, Woodworth, Guion, and others,
which is beyond the gratification of vanity, and far
from provocatives to “waste of money.” But this is
no head under which to write a sermon.

We have (ourselves) a preference among the half
dozen curiosity-shops of the city—a preference which
may, perhaps, be called professional—springing from
love for the memory of a departed poet. The son of
Woodworth, the warm-hearted author of the “Old
Oaken Bucket” and other immortal embodiments of
the affections, in verse, is the present proprietor of the
establishment known as Bonfanti's—(by our just mentioned
theory of the holy ministration of gifts, employed
on somewhat the same errand in life as the bard who
went before). It may not be improper to mention
here, that the last few painful years of the poet's life
were soothed with a degree of filial devotion and tenderness
which makes the Woodworths cherished
among their friends, and this is a country, thank God,
where such virtues bring prosperity in business!

BREAKFAST ON NEW YEAR'S DAY.

Astor house, No. 184—nine o'clock in the morning—
breakfast for two on the table—enter the brigadier.

Brig.(Embracing “us”).—Mi-boy! GOD BLESS
YOU!!!

“We.” (With his hand to his forehead.)—With
what a sculptured and block-y solidity you hew out
your benedictions, my dear general! You fairly
knock a man over with blessing him! Sit down and
wipe your eyes with that table-napkin!

Brig.—Well—how are you?

“We.”—Hungry! I'll take a wing of the chicken
before you—killed probably last year. How many
“friends, countrymen, and lovers,” are you going to
call on to day?

Brig.—I wish I knew how many I shall not call on!
What is a—(pass the butter if you please)—what is
a pat of butter, like me, spread over all the daily bread
of my acquaintance?

“We.”—

I'll tell you what I have done, general. Here is a list
of all my circle of pasteboard. It begins with those
I love, and ends with those with whom I am ceremonious.
Those whom I neither love nor am ceremonious
with, form a large betweenity of indifference;
and though you may come to love those with whom
you are ceremonious, you never can love those you
are wholly indifferent to. I have crossed out this betweenity.
Life is too short to play even a game of
acquaintance in which there is no possible stake.

Brig.—How short life is, to be sure!

“We.”—Shorter this side the water than the other!
In Europe a man is not bowed out till he is ready to
go! Here, he is expected to have repented and made
his will at thirty-seven! I shall pass my “second
childhood” in France, where it will pass for a continuation
of the first!

Brig.—My dear boy, don't get angry! Eat your
breakfast and talk about New Year's. What did the
Greeks used to do for cookies?

“We.”—Well thought of—they made presents of
dates covered with gold leaf! Who ever gilds a date
in this country? No! no! general! You will see
dozens of married women to-day who have quietly
settled down into upper servants with high-necked
dresses—lovely women still—who would be belles for
ten years to come, in France! Be a missionary,
brigadier! Preach against the unbelievers in mulie
brity! It's New Year and time to begin something!
Implore your friends to let themselves be beautiful
once more! (Breast-bone of that chicken, if you
please!) I should be content never to see another
woman under thirty—their loveable common-sense
comes so long after their other maturities!

Brig.—What common-place things you do say, to
be sure! Well, mi-boy, we are going to begin another
year!

“We.”—Yes—prosperously, thank God! And,
oh, after the first in-haul of rent from these well-tenanted
columns, what a change we shall make in
our paper! Let us but be able to afford the outlay
of laborious aid, which other editors pay for, and see
how the Mirror will shine all over! I have a system
in my brain for a daily paper—the fruit of practical
study for the last three months—which I shall begin
upon before this month has made all its icicles; and
you shall say that I never before found my true vocation!
The most industriously edited paper in the
country is but the iron in the razor; and though it is
not easy to work that into shape, anybody can hire it
done, or do it with industry. The steel edge, we shall
find time to put on, when we are not, as now, employed
in tinkering the iron!

Brig.—Black-and-white-smiths—you and I!

“We.”—No matter for the name, my dear general!
—one has to be everything honesty will permit, to
get over the gulf we have put behind us. Civilized
life is full of the most unbridged abysses. Transitions
from an old business to a new, or from pleasure to
business, or from amusing mankind to taking care of
yourself, would be supposed, by a “green” angel, to
be good intentions, easy enough carried out, in a
world of reciprocal charities. But let them send
down the most popular angel of the house of Gabriel
& Co., to borrow money for the most brilliant project,
without bankable security! And the best of it is, that
though your friends pronounce the crossing of a business-gulf,
on your proposed bridge of brains, impossible
and chimerical, they look upon it as a matter of
course when it is done! You and I are poets—if the
money and fuss we have made will pass for evidence
—yet nobody thinks it surprising that we have taken
off our wings, and rolled up our shirt-sleeves to carry
the hod! Not to die without having experienced all
kinds of sensations, I wish to be rich—though it will
come to me like butter when the bread is gone to
spread it on. Heigho!

Brig.—How you keep drawing similitudes from
what you see before your eyes! Let me eat my
breakfast without turning it into poetry! It will sour
on my stomach, my dear boy!

“We.”—So you are ordered out to smash the Helderbergers,
general!

Brig.—Ordered to hold myself in readiness—that's
all at present. I wish they'd observe the seasons, and
rebel in pleasant weather! Think of the summit of
a saddle with the thermometer at zero! Besides, if
there is any fighting to do one likes an enemy. This
campaign to help the constable, necessary as it is, goes
against my stomach.

“We.”—Fortify it, poor thing! What say to a
drop of curacoa before you begin your New Year's
round? (Pouring for the general and himself.) Burke
states, in his “Vindication of Natural Society,” that
your predecessor, Julius Cesar, was the means of
killing two millions one hundred thousand men! How
populous is Helderberg—women and all?

Brig.—Twelve o'clock, my dear boy, and time to
be shaking hands and wishing. Take the first wish
off the top of my heart—a happy New Year to you,
and—

“We.”—Gently with that heavy benediction!

Brig.—God bless you, mi-boy!

(Exit the brigadier, affected.)

Themes for the Table.—Among the “upper
ten thousand,” there are, of course, many persons, not
only of really refined taste, but of practical common
sense, and to them we wish to proffer a hint or two,
touching the usages just now in plastic and manageable
transition among the better classes. The following
note, received a day or two since, suggests one of
the improvements that we had marked down for comment:—

There is another very burthensome matter, the
annoyance of which might be transferred to the penny-post—
card leaving! When men are busy and ladies
ill (the business and the illness equally unlikely to be
heard of by way of apology) it would often be a most
essential relief to commit to envelopes a dozen cards,
and, with an initial letter or two in the corner,[1] expressive
of good-will but inability to call in person,
make and return visits without moving from counting
house or easy-chair. This, in a country where few
keep carriages, and where every man worth knowing
has some business or profession, should be an easy
matter to bring about; and, if established into a usage
that gave no offence, would serve two purposes—relieving
the ill or busy, and compelling those, who
really wish to keep up an acquaintance, at least to
send cards once in a while, as reminders.

We wish that common sense could be made fashionable
among us—vigorously applied, we mean, to the
fashions of the best style of people. Why should not
the insufferable nuisance of late parties be put down
in this country by a plot between a hundred of our
sensible and distinguished families? In England they
are at the dinner-table between six and ten; but why
should we, who seldom dine later than three or four,
yawn through a long unoccupied evening before going
out, merely because they go to parties at eleven in
London? Why should it not be American, to revise,
correct, and adapt to differences of national character,
the usages we copy from other countries? The subject
of late parties is constantly talked over, however,
and as all are agreed as to the absurdity of the fashion,
a hint at it, here, is enough.

There are other usages which require remodelling
by this standard, but while we defer the mention of
them at present, we wish to allude to another argument
(in favor of common sense applied to fashion)
remoter and perhaps weightier than mere convenience.
It is simply, that, if an aristocracy is to be formed in
this country, the access to its resorts must be kept
convenient for men of sense, or society will be left exclusively
to fools. Believers in the eternity of de
mocracy might wish fashion kept inconvenient, for this
very purpose; but our belief is, that there is no place
like a republic for a positive and even violent aristocracy,
and, if inevitable, it is as well to compound it
of good elements in the beginning. Simply, then, no
intellectual man, past absolute juvenility, would consent
to enfeeble his mind by fashionable habits injurious
to health. Late hours and late suppers (in a
country where we can not well sleep till noon as they
do in Europe) are mental suicide. Hours and usages,
therefore, which are not accommodated to the convenience
of the best minds of the country, will drive
those minds from the class to which they form the
objection, and the result is easily pictured. We
shall resume the topic.

Liveries and Opera-Glasses.—There is really no
way of foreseeing what the Americans will stand and
what they will not. An aristocratic family or two,
unwilling to compete with the working-classes in personal
attire, choose to transfer the splendors of their condition
to the backs of their servants. They dress plainly
themselves and set up a liveried equipage—as they
have an absolute and (one would think) an unoffending
right to do. This, however, the American public
will not bear—and the persons so doing are insulted
by half the presses in the country.

But what they will bear is much more remarkable.
In the immense theatres of Europe, where the upper
classes are all in private boxes, with blinds and curtains
to shut out observation if they please, the use of opera-glasses
has gradually become sanctioned. It is found
convenient for those classes to diminish the distance
across the house, since they have the choice of seclusion
behind curtains—which those in the pit have not.
Abstractly, of course, the giving to a vulgarian the
power to draw a lady's face close to him for a half-hour's
examination, would be permitting a gross license.
This being the custom in Europe, however,
it is adopted with no kind of comparisons of reasons
why, in New York. We build an opera-house, scarce
larger than a drawing-room, and light it so well, and
so arrange the seats, that people are as visible to each
other as they would be in a drawing-room; and in
this cosy place, allow people to coolly adjust their
opera-glasses and turn them full into the faces of those
they wish to scrutinize. So near as the glass is, too,
it is utterly impossible not to be conscious of being
looked at, and the embarrassment it occasions to very
young ladies is easy enough shown. We have used
this impertinence ourself (because in Rome we do as
Romans do), but we never yet have levelled a glass
upon a face without seeing that the scrutiny was at
once detected. Since we have preached on the subject,
however, we shall “go and sin no more.”

“We ask for information:”—is the difference of
reception, for these two European customs, explainable
on the ground that opera-glasses are a luxury
within the reach of most persons, and liveries are not?
Do republicans only object to exclusive impertinences?

Opera last night.—We presume we are safe in
saying that no four inhabitants in New York gave as
much pleasure last night as Pico, Borghese, Perozzi,
and Valtellina. We certainly would not
have missed our share for any emotion set down
among the pleasures of Wall street—well as we know
the let-up of an opportune discount! That emperor
of Rome who poisoned Britannicus because he was
a better tenor than himself, and slept in his imperial
bed with a plate of lead on his stomach to improve
his voice, knew where music went to, and of what

recesses, within his empire, he was not monarch without
it. (We suggest a meeting of gentlemen up-town
to erect a monument to Nero, now for the first time
appreciated!)

Let us tell the story of Semiramide—and we must
take the liberty, for clearness' sake, to use the names
of the performers without the Siamese-ry of the names
of the characters.

Borghese is queen of Babylon. She and Valtellina,
who is an old lover of hers, have killed her former
husband, a descendant of Belus by whom she had a
child. This child is Pico, rightful heir to the throne.
At the time the curtain rises, Borghese and Valtellina
suppose that Pico also is killed, and the throne
vacant for a new husband to Borghese. Valtellina
wishes to be that husband; but Borghese, partly from
dislike of him, and partly from having had enough of
matrimony, takes advantage of a thunder-storm to put
off her expected decision. Meantime Pico arrives
(acquainted only with Mr. Meyer, apparently, who is
a high-priest of Belus), and Queen Borghese, not
knowing that it is her own child, falls in love with
him! There is a Miss Phillips who is a descendant
of this same Belus, and who is to have the throne if
Borghese does not marry Valtellina. Pico loves Miss
Phillips for some reason only hinted at, and has come
to Babylon to see her. Mr. Meyer, who is the only
one aware that Pico is the prince supposed to be lost,
takes him down into the tomb of the dead king, tells
him who he is, gives him his father's “things” in a
box, and leaves him there to have a conversation with
his mother who happens to drop in. It is all cleared
up between them, and they sing a duet together, and
go out for a little fresh air. Valtellina, mousing about
after the queen, comes afterward to the tomb and
meets the high-priest there; and one after another
drops in, till the tomb is full, and the ghost of the old
king takes the opportunity to get up and mention
what he died of. Great confusion of course; and,
soon after, Pico, feeling called upon to kill the murderer
of the sleepless old gentleman, stabs at somebody
in the dark and kills his mother! Valtellina is
led off by the police, Pico faints in the arms of Mr.
Meyer, the satraps and Babylonians rush in, and the
curtain falls—leaving Pico to marry Miss Phillips and
succeed to the throne. All this of course took place
in a city built two generations after Ham (brother of
Shem and Japhet) but what with the look of the
“tombs,” and the way people were stabbed and poisoned,
it was impossible not to wonder what Justice
Matsell would have done in the premises.

We shall hear Semiramide again to-night, and speak
more advisedly of the music on Monday. At present,
we can not convince ourself that Grisi and Persiani
sang any better when we heard them in London. We
can never hope for—and we need not wish—a better
opera. Borghese is a most accomplished creature,
with (among other things) an intoxicating way of
crushing her eyes up to express passion (in a way that
none but people of genius do) and she does nothing
indifferently. Pico, with her wonderful at-home-ative-ness
anywhere between the lowest note and the highest,
faultless in her science, and personally of the kind
of women most loveable, is enough, of herself, to keep
a town together. Perozzi, with his sweet, pure
voice, and gentlemanly taste (he was king of Egypt
last night, by the way, and a candidate for Borghese's
hand), is worthy to be a third star in any such Orion's
belt, and the fourth may well be Valtellina, whose
thorough base, we have no doubt, first suggested the
idea of the forty-horse excavator lately patented by
congress.

But what shall we say of the scenery? We were
taken completely by surprise, with the taste as well as
splendor of it, and we think Stanfield himself, the
great artist who produces occasionally such marvels
in the spectacles of Drury Lane, would have taken a
pride in claiming it. Certainly no comparable scenery
has been exhibited, to our knowledge, in this
country. The costumes were also admirable.

Abstaining as we do, for to-day, from musical
criticism, we can not help alluding to the electric effect,
upon the audience, of the duet between Pico
and Borghese—the well-known Giorno d'orrore.”
The house was uncomfortably crammed, but a pin
might have been heard to drop, at any moment during
the singing of it. It was a case of complete musical
intoxication. The applause was boundless, but
unluckily the encore (which we trust will not be foiled
again to-night) was defeated by an evident fear on the
part of the audience of interrupting a part of the duet
not yet completed. If you love your public, dear
Semiramide, nod, to-night, to the orchestra, after the
bouquets have descended!

BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Editor's room, toward midnight—Enter the brigadier,
as the printers go down stairs—The day over, and
the shop shut up under—A pen (too tired to be
wiped) drying in peace on the editor's table—News-boys
done (thank God!)—Brigadier collapsed into
a chair.

Brig.—Oh, mi-boy! To think of the trouble of
“getting along,” and the very small place in which
we sleep, when we get there! I wonder whether a
man would be much behind the time at his own funeral
if he stopped working! I'm tired, Willis! I'll
send my ticket for the afterpiece, and “go home,” as
the Moravians say.

“We.”—You forget! Editors are on the “free
list” in the theatre of life, and “not entitled to a
check.”

Brig.—Talk plain to me, my dear boy, and save
your heliotropes for the paper! The work I have
done this week! Is it you that say somewhere,
“there's no poetry in a steamboat?” Think of the
blessed cry of “stop her!”

“We.”—And so you are fairly fagged, my “martial
Pyrrhus!”

Brig.—Fagged and dispirited! Moving the printing
office—getting all the advertisements set up in
new type—little indispensable nothings plaguing my
life out—new arrangements in every corner, and the
daily paper going on besides—

“We.”—I don't wonder you're dead!

Brig.—That is the least of my trouble, I was going
to say—(though, to be sure, what we have done this
last week, changing office, and renewing type, without
stopping the daily, is very much like shoeing
your horse without slacking his trot) — but the “benefit,”
my dear boy, the benefit.

“We.”—So long since you have had any money to
lend—is that what you mean? You are afraid you
have lost the art of making yourself out poorer
than the man who comes to borrow. Why, my poor
general!

Brig.—Doesn't it strike you as a dreadful mortification,
my dear Willis?

“We.”—The whole business?

Brig.—The whole business.

“We.”—Inasmuch as for genius to be rich, after
being poor, would make a god of the man so enriched
(by the intensity of his enjoyment, and his natural
inoculation against catching the canker from his
money)—it is wisely ordained by Providence that we
shall not receive it in sums larger than $3, city bill,
without mental agony. We should else be in heaven

before our time, my dear general—purgatory omitted!

Brig.—But isn't your pride wounded for me, my
dear boy?

“We.”—As Cassio says (who, by the way, loved
general Othello very much as I do you),

I have no tear to shed on the subject. I have
thought it all over, and would have stood in your
place and received the painful thousands myself, if I
had thought it more than you could bear—but let me
tell you how I look at it.

Brig.—Do, mi-boy, and don't joke more than you
can help!

“We.”—Editors are the pump-handles of charity,
always helping people to water, and never thought to
be thirsty themselves!

Brig.—You funny Willis!—so we are!

“We.”—You, particularly, have not only been
bolted to the public cistern for every benefit of the
last twenty years, the fag and worky of every possible
charitable committee, but your paper has been called
upon (and that people think nothing of) to blow wind
into the sail of every scheme of benevolence, every
device for the good of individuals or the public. People
see your face on every printed note that comes to
them. You are the other-folks-beggar of the town.
When you die—

Brig.—No painful allusions now, mi-boy!

“We.”—I was only going to say, my dear general,
that they will wish they had unmuzzled the ox that
trod out the corn!

Brig. (swallowing something apparently). But I have
had so many misgivings about this benefit concert, my
dear Willis!

“We.”—The pump-handle changing places with
the pail! Well—it will be a shower-bath at first, but
you'll be full when it's over!

Brig.—There you go again!

“We.”—I was letting that simile trickle off my
lips while I fished up, from my practical under-current,
another good reason for your benefit. Suffer
me to be tedious a moment!

Brig.—Be so, mi-boy—be so! I love you best
when you're tedious!

“We.”—Well, then! Political economy differs
from the common estimates of things, by taking into
consideration not only their apparent value at the
time of sale, but what it has cost, directly or indirectly,
to attain that value. Do you understand me?

Brig.—No.

“We.”—For example, then!—a leg of mountain
mutton may weigh no more than a leg of lowland
mutton—but as the fibre of the meat is finer from being
fed on highland grass, it is reasonable to estimate
it by something besides its weight—i. e., the shepherd's
risk of losing it by wild beasts, and the trouble
of driving it up and down the mountain.

Brig.—True.

“We.”—Thus, a lawyer charges you fifty dollars
for an opinion which it takes him but ten minutes to
dictate to his clerk. A savage would laugh at the
price, and offer to talk twice the time for half the
money—but a civilized man pays it, allowing for the
education, study, and talent, which it cost to give the
opinion value.

Brig.—True again. Now for our “mutton.”

“We.”—You and I, my dear general, are brain-mongers—which
is an exceedingly ticklish trade. We
start with our goods in supposition, like the capital
of a western bank—locked up in a safe, that is to say
(the skull), to which the “teller” alone has the key.
We are never sure, in point of fact, that the specie is
there, and we are likely at any moment to be “broke”
by the critics “making a run upon the bank.”

Brig.—Now that's what I call clear!—

“We.”—Don't interrupt me! The risks of success
in literature, the outlay for education, the delay
in turning it to profit, the endurance of the gauntlets
of criticism, and the rarity of the gift of genius from
God, should be added to the usually fragile shop in
which its wares are embarked for vending. The poet,
by constitution least able to endure rude usage, is the
common target of coarseness and malice. Here and
there, to be sure, a man is born, like me—with brains
enough, but more liver than brains—and such men
sell thoughts as they would potatoes, and don't break
their hearts if customers find specks in them; but the
literary profession, generally, is of another make, and
“political economy” should compensate proportionally.
They do it for clergymen! What clergyman
feels it an indignity to be sent abroad by subscription,
if his health fails? He considers that he is inadequately
paid unless his parish take the risks of his
health! And you!—besides the reason you have,
wholly apart from our joint business, for needing this
benefit—here you are, after passing your life in serving
people, with a pair of eyes you can scarce sign
your name by, and a prospect of a most purblind view
of the City Hall when they make you mayor.

Brig.—Mi-boy! oh!

“We.”—There's but one pair of well-endorsed eyes
between us, and suppose somebody leaves me money
enough to unharness me from this omnibus, and turn
me out to grass at Glenmary! What will become of
you?

Brig.—Heaven indissolubly Siamese us, my dear
boy!

“We.”—And I have not even named, yet, the ostensible
ground for this concert—the songs you have
loaded the women's lips with, and never received
even a kiss for your trouble!

Brig.—What a fellow you are for reasons, Willis!

“We.”—My dear friend, I am going to state all
this to the committee for your benefit! By the way
—did you ever hear of Ismenias, the D'Orsay of ancient
Corinth?

Brig.—Never.

“We.”—Ismenias commissioned a friend to buy a
jewel for him. The friend succeeded in purchasing
it at a sum below its value. “Fool!” said Ismenias,
“you have disgraced the gem!” Did you suppose,
general, that I was going to give the public the pleasure
of paying you this tribute without taxing their
admiration as well as their pockets! No! (Hear
him!) No! I trust every woman who has sung, or
heard sung, a song of yours, will be there to wave a
handkerchief for you! I hope every man who loves
literature, and has a corner in his heart for the poet
who has pleased him, will be there to applaud you!
I hope David Hale will give us gas enough to see
you on the platform. I hope—God bless me, twelve
o'clock!

Operatic Party.—As our readers are aware, a
private sparkle from the stars of an operatic constellation,
is one of the luxuries rated as princely in Europe
—a proper fitness in the other circumstances of the
entertainment requiring a spaciousness of saloons and
a magnificence of menu which only the very wealthiest
have to offer. The private dwelling-houses of
this city, till within a few years, have been much too
small for the introduction of this advanced phase of
pleasure. Last night, however, a sumptuous residence,
that might compare to advantage with any interior
in Europe, was thrown open, and its “wilderness
of beauty” delighted with private performances
by the operatic company now in such admirable combination.

As being the head of a new chapter of national
refinement, it would, perhaps, be posthumously
worth while to depict the scene—not only as to its
sumptuary splendors and costumes, but with a description
of the “beauty that bewitched the light”—
but however posterity might thank us for such an inky
Arethusa, we have too much to do with what is above
ground, just now, to bury charms for the future.

Madame Pico remarked, before the commencement
of the performance, that it was almost as trying for
singers used to a theatre to adapt the voice, impromptu,
to a saloon, as for an amateur to calculate, at once,
the volume of voice necessary to fill a theatre. The
first two or three pieces were, notwithstanding this
judicious apprehension, a little too loud. Signor
Valtellina must have the credit of having been the
first to reduce the “fill of the empyrean” to the capacity
of a saloon, and, after the measure was taken,
the music was exquisitely enjoyable. After tea
(served in an adjoining apartment at the close of the
first part) the artists assumed, to a charm, the necessary
abandon, and the singing between tea and supper
was, to our ear, faultless. The pianist only, M.
Etienne seemed lacking in the magnetism to quicken
the movement with the acceleration of Pico's climax,
and we wished a younger or more sympathetic hand
in the accompaniment; but this charming cantatrice
has too infallible an ear to outrun the instrument, and
the effect was sufficiently enchanting. She and Signorina
Borghese were rapturously encorded, and a
laughing terzetto between Borghese, Sanquirico, and
Perozzi, was called for, a second time, with boundless
delight and enthusiam.

We had never before seen Madame Pico off the
stage. Care has left no foot-print on the threshold
of the gate of music, and her mouth is infantine in
texture and expression; but her eyes have that indefinable
look which betrays

Her person shows to more advantage in a drawing-room
than on the stage, and her manners, like those of
all gifted Italians, are of a natural sculpture beyond
the need of artificial chiseling. Borghese, too, has
charming manners, and we were pleased with the cordial
accueil given to the prima-donnas by the ladies
of the party. Altogether, the absolute good taste of
the entertainment, and the unusually choice mixture
of elements, social, sumptuous, and professional, made
the evening one of high enchantment.

Opera Singers.—At the benefit of Mademoiselle
Borghese, lately, the centre of the ceiling suddenly
gave birth (at the close of the first act) to a shower of
billets-doux, which, being immediately followed by the
descent of the drop-scene, representing Jupiter feeling
the pulse of Juno, was understood by the audience
“as well as could be expected.” The delivery was
rather a relief to the feeling of the house, for the
crowd and pressure had been very uncomfortable,
and some critical event was needed to relieve the endurance.

We have been pleased at the example, set by the
good authority of the party of Monday evening, of
giving a cordial, social welcome to distinguished musical
strangers. America profits by having two nations
marching immediately before her in civilization—
each unwilling to imitate the other, but both open to
study, by us, with no impediment as to our selection
of points for imitation or rejection. The French and
English are wholly at variance on the point we have
just alluded to—the social position given to celebrated
musicians. In the high circles of France, when a
party is given at which the operatic singers perform a
concert, the reception for the musicians consults only
their personal comfort.—Chairs are placed for them,
which they rarely leave to mix with the party, and
their supper is always separate from that of the guests.

There is no intention shown, of treating them like
equals. In England, on the contrary, the operatic
company are the pets of society. Pasta, Catalani,
Persiani, Grisi, and the male singers, Lablache,
Rubini, Ivanhoff, and others, were free of all exclusion
on the score of rank, and “dined and têted”
familiarly like noble strangers from other countries.
We have seen the duke of Wellington holding the
gloves of Grisi, while she pulled to pieces a bunch of
grapes at the supper table of Devonshire house; and
we have a collection of autographs of public singers
(two of which we published the other day), addressed
to persons of high rank, and expressed in terms of
the most confessed feeling of ease as to relative position.

We repeat that we rejoice in the power to select
footsteps to follow in civilization (from those of two
nations gone on before), and we take pride, that, in
this latest instance, we have copied the more liberal
and kindly-hearted usage. These children of a passionate
clime are not justly measured by our severe
standards; and we should receive them like airs from
a southern sky, without cooling them first by a chymical
analysis. They are, commonly, ornaments to
society—joyous, genial, free from the “finikin” super-fineries
of some of those inclined to abase them—and
the difference of the pleasure they give, when their hearts
are in it, is offset enough for any sacrifice made in excusing
the “low breeding” of their genius!

Borghese, whose benefit came off so triumphantly
last night, is a woman of very superior mind, of manners
faultlessly distinguished, and (essential praise to
a woman) a model of toilet-ability. She is, besides, a
remarkable actress, and a very accomplished musician.
This is a pretty good description of an agreeable acquaintance;
and, if we were to sketch Madame Pico,
it would be in terms still more warmly eulogistic.
We leave to the ladies who throw bouquets to Sanquirico,
to laud the men of the opera, and wind up
this essay of political economy, by drawing an instructive
example, of the effect of what we preach, from
the manufacture of a prima-donna into a queen and
goddess, in the days of venerable antiquity.

“Among the female performers of antiquity, Lamia
is certainly the most celebrated; how much her fame
may have been aided by her beauty we can not determine.
She was everywhere received with honor, and
according to Plutarch, equally admired for her wit,
beauty, and musical performance. She was a native
of Athens, but travelled into Egypt to hear the celebrated
flute-players of that country. During her residence
at the court of Alexandria, Ptolemy Soter was
defeated in a naval engagement by Demetrius, and all
his wives and domestics fell into the hands of the
conqueror. Lamia was among the number; but
Demetrius was so attracted by her beauty and skill,
that he raised her to the highest rank, and from her
solicitations, conferred such benefits on the Athenians,
that they gave him divine honors and dedicated a temple
to `Venus Lamia.”'

Madame Pico's Benefit.—We should be happy
if Europe would inform us why this remarkable cantatrice
comes to us “new as a tooth-pick,” as to fame,
and whether (the same lack of previous trumpeting
having given us a surprise in Malibran), we are to
have the credit also of the eccalobeion of Pico! Even
without the “deep-sea plummet” of her contralto
(which certainly does touch bottom for which most

voices lack fathoms of line) she has a compass as a
mezzo soprano, which would alone serve for remarkable
success in her profession. She is a most correct
musician too—(the only false note we have heard
from her, having been occasioned by her striking her
chest too violently while singing defiance to Valtellina)
—and, withal, a most gifted and charming woman,
every way formed to be an idol for the public. We
have written a great deal about Madame Pico, and,
her benefit being the last occasion we shall find, to do
more than chronicle her movements, we shall send
this quill to our friend Kendall of the Picayune (as
the Highlanders send the lighted brand), enveloped
in a stanza addressed by an Italian poet to Lady
Coventry:—
We leave the rest to the Picayune's prophetic divination.

Adieu, Pico, Vin-cantatrice! A clear throat and a
plethoric pocket to you!

Madame Arnoult's Concert.—It looked very
queer (and a little wicked withal) to see opera-glasses
and ladies with their heads uncovered, in the pews of
the Tabernacle; and we are not sure that our “way
we should go” did not twitch us for a “departure,”
when we found ourselves applauding with kid gloves
in the neighborhood of the altar! We were applanding
Pico; and the next thought that came to us was,
a regret that such voices should not be consecrated to
church choirs; for (granting the opera to be a profane
amusement, as is thought by the worshippers at the
Tabernacle), “it is a pity.” as a celebrated divine once
said, “that the devil should have all the good music.”
And, apropos—was not this capital remark—(attributed,
we believe, to Wesley)—suggested by one, recorded
of the pope Gregory of the fifth century? Britain
at that time was, to Rome, what Africa is now to us
—a savage country they brought slaves from; and
the introduction of Christianity into that heathen land
is said to have been prompted by the pope's admiration
of the beauty of two or three young John Bulls
who were for sale in the market-place of Rome. On
inquiring of the merchant if they were Christians,
and being informed they were pagans, he exclaimed,
“Alas, what a pity that the author of darkness should
be in possession of men of such fair countenances!” He
commissioned Pelagius forthwith to send missionaries
to the handsome British pagans, and hence the church
of England—probably the only church, the members
of which owe their salvation to their personal beauty!
(Pardon this historical digression, dear readers!)

Madame Arnoult took New York by surprise—
she is so much better a singer than was supposed.
With less effort, and in a smaller room than the nave
of the Tabernacle, she would, however, appear to much
more advantage. Her voice, to our ear, lacked fledging,
or lining, or something to make it warmer or
more downy—but it is a clear and most cultivable
soprano, and she manages it with wonderful skill for a
beginner at public singing. We predict great popularity
for her. Madame Pico sang, with her, the
duet from Semiramide, and it was enough to steep
even the pulpit cushion in a this world's trance of
music.

Armlets.—We have observed that there is a late
fashionable promotion of the jewels of the arm to the
more lovely round above the elbow, where, it must
be confessed, a bracelet sits much more enviably imbedded.
We rather think this renewal of the fashion
of armlets is a clean jump from the rape of Helen to
1845, for the latest mention we can find of it is in the
account of the Trojan nymphs, who laid aside their
armlets to dance in the choirs on Mount Ida. It
takes an arm, plump and not too plump, to wear this
clasp with a grace, but where the arm is really beautiful,
no ornament could be more fitly and captivatingly
located. We were very much struck with the effect
upon the dazzling arm on which we lately noticed it.

Views of Morris's Concert.—There are few
buttons on the motley coat of human dependance, to
which the button-hole is not serviceably correspondent
—the button (conferring the favor) commonly drawing
the same garment closer by aid of the button-hole
(receiving the favor). There is one very striking instance
however, of constant services unreciprocated, in
what editors do for singers and actors. Our attention
has been called to this by a series of paragraphs—
(part silly, part malicious)—expressing surprise that
Ole Bull and others, who had never been in any way
benefited by Gen. Morris, should have been asked to
contribute their services gratuitously to his benefit
concert.

It is needful, of course, in a newspaper, to make
some mention and some critical estimate of all public
performers. It may be done favorably or unfavorably;
and there is a way of being abundantly paid for
either. “Black mail” is willingly paid where commendation
is sold in shambles, but the editor is better
paid, still, if, with skilful roasting and dissection of
the faults of public performers, he cruelly enriches
his paper (like a paté de foic gras with the liver of the
goose roasted alive), and so sends it, palatably spiced,
to the uninquiring appetite of the public. He who
has a hair of his head left undamned, to creep with
shame at the “black mail” sale of his approbation—
and he who has common human kindness to prevent
his murdering the hopes of strangers to make his
paper readable—both these are of classes that go unpaid,
and commonly unthanked, for services most
essential to others, and forbearance most costly to
themselves.

The editor's business is to make his paper readable.
The most difficult task he has to do is to be readably
good-natured. The easiest writing in the world is
criticism amusingly severe. If any one doubts, for
example, that with the same pains we have taken,
glowingly to interpret between Ole Bull and the public,
we could have ridiculed him into a comparative
failure—sending a laugh before him through the
country that would have armed every listener with an
impenetrable incredulity—if any one doubts our power
to have done this, as easily as we have ushered him
into hearts we made ready for a believing reception
of his music, he does not know either the press or the
public—neither the arbitrary license of the press, nor
the public's weak memory for everything but ridicule.
Where Ole Bull now stands, the press is comparatively
powerless. He is stamped with success. But,
when he stood on the threshold of this country's favor
—a musician, whose peculiarities at first seemed tricks,
and whom few heard for the first time with a confident
appreciation—if, then, ridicule had met him, boldly
and unsparingly, even though this one paper had alone
opened the cry, he would have had us to thank, we
believe, for the tide turned back on which he now rides
triumphantly onward. Certain as it is that we could
not, all alone, have made his present good fortune, it
is quite as certain that we could, all alone, have marred
it—and that, too, to the profitable spicing of our somewhat
praise-ridden columns. We need not stop to

tell the reader that we are describing the fiend Siamesed
to Liberty—an Irresponsible Press which can not
be chained without chaining Liberty too—but we wish
to show that there is some merit in not harnessing
this fiend to our own slow vehicle of fortune. There
never was an opportunity so ready as Ole Bull's advent
for amusing ridicule—but we were the first, or
among the first, to call for faith in him, and aid in his
appreciation. We did it from love of the man and
belief in his genius, and would as soon have been
marked on the brow with a hot iron as bargain for a
syllable of it. But—the unforeseen opportunity presenting
itself, when, apparently, he might return our
paper's service by a favor to our associate—he was
invited without scruple to do so. Suppose he had
played ten minutes on the violin for the benefit of the
proprietor of a paper devoted, for a year, invariably to
his interests? Would it have been the “act of charity”
for which a paragraphist says that “Ole Bull was
unreasonably called upon?” The high-spirited Norwegian
placed his regret, that he could not be here to
comply, upon no such footing.

While we are calling things by their real names,
we may as well change the label of another matter—
the motive of the benefit to Gen. Morris. As the
public know, our estimable associate, by twenty years
of literary labor, amassed a moderate fortune, which,
in the disasters of an era of bankruptey, he suddenly
lost. A part of his property was invested in the
beautiful country-seat of Undercliff on the Hudson—
the residence of his family for several years. His
friends—with a provident hope, looking beyond the
clouds that enveloped him—fastened, to the transfer
of this lovely spot, a condition by which he might,
if able, repurchase it at a certain time, and at its then
reduced valuation. He has since been suffered to
tenant it for a trifling rent. He has improved it, embellished
it, increased its value. His children have
grown up in it. But, meantime, the limit came around
—(now only a short time off)—when the purchase
must be made or the home lost. His old friends came
to inquire into the probable result of their forethought
for him. We need not give the particulars of our
business—General Morris was partly prepared to redeem
the property. The lack was a sum that might
be covered by a benefit concert—so suggested by one
of the parties. It was urged upon him and declined.
He was told that Beranger had three subscriptions
(one of twenty thousand dollars)—that Campbell
had several—that Scott's children were relieved of
his debts by a posthumous subscription of two hundred
thousand dollars—and that private subscriptions
for literary men were of common occurrence in
England.

The public know the sequel. He refused, till the
concert was agreed upon by his friends without him.
The Italians, whom our paper had more especially
served, sprang, generously and with acclamation, to
reciprocate our constant advocacy of their company's
attraction. The musicians resident here were all
friends of General Morris, for he alone, more than all
other men in New York taken together, had served the
dramatic and musical profession. They, too, joyously
sprang to the chance of benefiting him. Never
was service more eagerly rendered than that by the
performers last night at the Tabernacle—never came
good purpose before the public, so lamely and disparagingly
construed.

In making up our mind to allow the public to be
intimate with us, we expect now and then to expose
the lining of our gaberdine. We conform to the exigences
of the latitude we live in—but upon dishabille explanations,
we hope for dishabille constructions. What
we have written here, between five o'clock. A. M., and
breakfast (wholly without the knowledge of General
Morris), goes to press with the ink undried, and we
have no security against errors but that of writing as
we would talk to our confessor. If the time should
ever arise when really good intentions may be trusted
to stand, in public opinion:—

we may cease to explain “why our stocking is ungartered.”
Meantime, we expect to die.

The Opera Bereavement.—What is to become
of this widower of a town when it has lost its fairly-espoused
Pico, we must leave to the survivor's obituary
to record. We may as well have our ears boxed and
stowed away!—Their vocation is as good as gone!
No more Pico? Faith, it will go hard for the first
week or two! But—by the way—as those “lost from
us” are invariably supposed to be crowned in the next
place they go to, and as, of course, Pico will be
crowned in the presence of St. Charles and the brunet
angels of New Orleans, we must take upon ourselves,
as her New York “gold stick in waiting,” to summon
one at least, of her liege subjects to his duty. (We
happen, fortunately, to possess an autograph of
George the Fourth, signed to the necessary formula.)

Star returning to its Meridian.—Pico has
changed her mind! Jubilate! She has declined to
go to New Orleans with the Borgheses, and will remain
here to be the nucleus for a new operatic crystalization.
We beg New York and Boston to shake
hands in felicitation! And now that it is settled (as
we understand it was, yesterday, by a decisive letter
to Signor Borghese), let us splinter a ray or two of
light upon the diamond that has so wisely refused resetting.
New Orleans is a French city, with a French
opera; and Mademoiselle Borghese is a French woman,
with lost laurels to win back from the Italian
Pico. This new arena, little likely to have been an
impartial one, is a great way off, the journey dangerous
and tedious, and, to go there, Madame Pico must
abruptly leave a wave of fortune, which she is now
riding “at the flood.” and give up three admiring cities
for one that might be dubious! A new opera-house
is about to be built here, of which she will be the first
predominant star; her concerts, in the meantime, in
the different cities, will profitably employ her; and,
as to the company, there is a substitute lying perdu
for Borghese, and a tenor might soon be found to replace
Perozzi. Out of these facts, the public can
pick the good reasons Madame Pico has for abandoning
her journey to New Orleans. Let us do our best
to show her that she has not made a mistake in preferring
us

Taking the White Veil.—The Undine of the
Bowling-green (Miss Undine W—g, if named after

the gentleman to whose liberality she owes her existence)
was shown last evening, with her radiant beauty
enveloped in glittering white, to the assembled
friends of the author of her being. To alight from
the poetry of the matter:—Mr. W—g invited, yesterday,
a party of his friends to see an illumination of the
superb fountain with which he has embellished that
part of the city. The rocky structure through which
it leaps, is completely encrusted with ice, and it looked
like—like more things than we have room to mention.
The colored light covered the fountain first
with a suffused blush of the tenderest pink, and this
deepened to crimson, and the glow upon ice and water
was really superb beyond any effect of the kind we
have ever witnessed. It made even a Dry Dock omnibus
(which chanced to be passing at the moment),
look rosily picturesque and fairy-like. The black sky
overhead; the delicate tracery of the naked branches
of the trees; the enclosure of architecture with lights
in the windows (which seemed completely to shut it
in like the court of an illuminated palace), were all
striking additions to the effect. We would inquire,
by the way, whether this couleur de rose could not be
adapted to the brightening of the ice with which the
fountains of the mind are sometimes crusted over.
Phlogistic chymists will please explain.

Improvements on the American Language.—
The making an improvement in one's mother's property
is, of course, a praiseworthy filial service, and we
find that we have succeeded in enriching our “mother
language” by successfully breaking, to new and valuable
service, a pair of almost useless and refractory
terminations. “-Dom” and “-tricity” may now be
hitched by a single hyphen to any popular word, name,
or phrase, and, without the cumbrous harness of a
periphrasis, may turn it out in the full equipage of a
collective noun! Our first experiment in this economy
of parts of speech was the describing a charming
class of society by the single word Japonica-dom.
This musical substantive could hardly be displaced by
a shorter sentence than “the class up town who usually
wear in their hair the expensive exotic commonly
called a japonica.” The second experiment was the
word Pico-tricity—a condensation of “the power,
brilliancy, and electric effect of the singing of Madame
Rosina Pico.” We see by the papers that these
expediting inventions (for which we liberally refrained
from taking out a patent) are freely used already by
our brother administrators of the mother language,
and we have only respectfully to suggest a proper
economy and fitness in their application.

Early-hours-dom.—We scarcely need explain, we
presume, that we have undertaken the wholesome
mission of giving interest, as far as in us lies, to the
more refined occupancy of that portion of the day comprised
between twilight and go-to-bed time—becoming,
so to speak, the apostle of fashionable early-hours-dom.
Of course we are entirely too practical to dream
of “reforming out,” by mere force of argument, the
four-hours' unprofitable yawn and the night's restitution-less
robbery of sleep. Every one knows that the
reasons for the late hours of European fashion are
wholly wanting in this country—but every one consents
to follow the fashion without the reasons. The only
way to diminish the attraction of late amusements
is to anticipate them by more attractive early amusements.
It will be remembered that we commenced
our vigorous support of the opera with this view of
the use of it. It was a well-put though unsuspected
blow to the habit of late hours, for many gave up par
ties they would otherwise have gone to, from having
been sufficiently amused at the opera; and others
found out, practically, that to dress and go to the opera
from seven till ten, gave all the relaxation they required,
and their natural night's sleep into the bargain!
It is with this ultimate view of making a fashionable
Kate

giving us a substitute that shall make late hours more
easily dispensed with—that we look upon the plan of
this new opera-house as a national benefit. If built
luxuriously, lavishly lighted, made to serve all the purposes
of a sumptuous festal saloon, and give exquisite
music besides, it will be a preferable resort to a ballroom;
and we believe that it is only from the lack of
a preferable resort in evening dress, that late parties
are any way endurable. Early parties on the off
nights of the opera, would soon follow, we think—the
habit of early hours of gayety, once relished—and so
would creep out this servile and senseless imitation of
foreign fashion.

Untilled Field of Literature in New York.
—The one country we have lived in, without loving
a native, is the country that, on the whole, gave us
the most to admire—France. We embroidered a
year and a half of our memory with the grace and wit
of the world's capital of taste, and we have left a heart
(travellers' pattern) in every other country between
Twenty-second street and the Black sea; but, that
we do not even suspect the color of a French heartache
we solemnly vow—and marvel. We admire the
French quite enough, however (perhaps there lies the
philosophy of it!) to leave no fuel for sentiment to
mourn over as wastage, and now—(apropos des bottes)
—why have we no vehicle for French wit in New
York—no battery for the friction and sparkle of French
electricity? How can the French live without a
“Charivari?” Twenty thousand French inhabitants
and no savor in the town, as if the gods had “dined
below stairs!” Ten thousand French women (probably),
and either no celebrity, of wit or beauty, among
them, or no needful newspaper-cloud in which the
thunder and lightning of such pervading electricities
could be collected!

We wonder whether the “Courrier des Etats Unis”
(the Anchises French paper which we read, as the
pious æneas carried his father on his back, to have
something to cherish, out of the city left behind—
something French, that is to say)—we wonder whether,
on their alternate days, the editors of that sober
tri-weekly paper could not give us something spiced
à la Parisienne—and whether such a vehicle, for the
French wit that must be here, benumbed or hidden,
would not be a profitable speculation! The “Courrier”
is the best of useful and grave papers, and entirely
fulfils its destiny, but it is small pleasure to the
ten thousand people in New York, who relish French
literature, to re-peruse the matter of the daily papers,
rechauffé in a foreign language. If the lack of Parisian
material, here, were an apparent objection, what a
delightful luxury it would be to have a paper made up,
at first, entirely, with the condensed essence of the
gay papers of Paris? A feature of New York charivari-ty
might be gradually worked in—but, meantime,
a well-selected bouquet of the prodigal wit and fun of
the capital (made comprehensible by a correspondence
kept up with Paris, which should explain allusions,
etc.) would be, we should really suppose, most
attractive to the better classes of our society, and, to
the French of New Orleans and other more remote
cities, an indispensable luxury.

There is a natural homeopathy for everything French
in this city—much stronger than for the same things

a l'Anglaise. We would wish, too, that the barrier
of a different language were gradually broken down,
so that some of the delightful peculiarities of Paris
might ooze into our city manners through a conduit
of periodical literature. Heigho!—to think of the
brilliant intellectual lamps blazing like noonday in
France, while, with the material for the same brightness
about us, we sit by the glimmer of fire-light!
Oh, Jules Janin! “American in Paris!”—come over
with your prodigal brain and be a Parisian in America!
Ordain yourself as a missionary of wit, and Janin-ify
a continent by a year's exile beyond the Boulevards!
You'll laugh at us when you return, but
streams chafe the channels they refresh, and we will
take you with your murmur!

It would hardly be inferred—but we really sat
down to write the following paragraph, and not the
foregoing one:—

The Prima-donnas at Fault.—The “Courrier
des Etats Unis” has now and then an ebullition of national
spirituality, in the shape of a half column of
theatrical gossip, and we have had on our table, for
several days, a cut-out paragraph, very well hit off,
touching one or two of the town's pleasure-makers.
The editor is, of course, behind the curtain, as the
natural centre of the foreign circle of New York, and
he writes with knowledge. He gives as a fact that
Borghese cleared $550 by her benefit, but he disparages
the performance of that evening, and hauls the
ladies seriously over the coals for having exhausted
themselves at a private party the night before! He
detects an anachronism in Semiramide, and calls Pico
to account for appearing before the queen (as Arsace)
with his mother's crown on, when the good lady had
as yet only promised it to him! The first thing in the
succeeding duet, says the “Courrier,” should have
been a remark from Semiramide (who has promised
him the crown as a lover, not knowing it is her son)
to this effect: “Vous étes un peu pressé, mon bel
amoureux!” ou bien, “De quel droit portez-vous
cette couronne, que je n'ai fait que vous offrir?” The
crown given him by the high-priest, out of the paternal
box, was, of course, only symbolic, as the queen
was still on the throne.

Korponay's Fall, from a Faux Pas.—Another
matter touched in the same paragraph is the nonrising
of the new ballet-star promised for that evening.
The leader of the constellation chanced to be taken
ill (below the horizon) at Philadelphia, but the Courrier
states that the illness was owing to a fall, from a
faux pas, and that the faux pas was an engagement
by the tumbler (Korponay) to go to Philadelphia
once a week for twenty-four dollars, when his expenses,
wife and all, were twenty-six! The Courrier does
not state, what we think highly probable, that Korponay's
blood has come through too many generations
of gentlemen to be good at a dancing-master's bargains.

The new Danseuse.—A third topic of this same
pregnant paragraph is the contention between two
dancing-masters, Charruaud and Mons. Korponay, for
the honor of having given the finishing grace to the
“light fantastic toe” of Miss Brooks, the new wonder.
Monsieur Charruaud (Frenchman-like) declares
that she is not only his pupil, but by no means the best
of his pupils! Monsieur Korponay simply advertises
her as his; and the star, and the star's mamma, confess
to her Korponay-tivity. But—

What blood does the public think is running in the
veins of this same “fantastic toe?”—James Brooks—
the “Florio,” who, ten years ago, was the poetical
passion of this country—was the father of this dancing
girl! What would that sensitive poet have written
(prophetically) on the first appearance of his daughter
in a pas seul!

Longfellow's Waif.—A friend, who is a very fine
critic, gave us, not long since, a review of this delightful
new book. Perfectly sure that anything from that
source was a treasure for our paper, we looked up
from a half-read proof to run our eye hastily over it,
and gave it to the printer—not, however, without
mentally differing from the writer as to the drift of
the last sentence, as follows:—

“We conclude our notes on the `Waif' with the
observation that, although full of beauties, it is infected
with a moral taint—or is this a mere freak of
our own fancy? We shall be pleased if it be so—but
there does appear, in this exquisite little volume, a
very careful avoidance of all American poets who may
be supposed especially to interfere with the claims of
Mr. Longfellow. These men Mr Longfellow can
continuously imitate (is that the word?) and yet never
even incidentally commend.”

Notwithstanding the haste with which it passed
through our attention (for we did not see it in proof), the
question of admission was submitted to a principle in
our mind; and, in admitting it, we did by Longfellow as
we would have him do by us. It was a literary charge,
by a pen that never records an opinion without some
supposed good reason, and only injurious to Longfellow
(to our belief) while circulating, un-replied-to,
in conversation-dom. In the second while we reasoned
upon it, we went to Cambridge and saw the poet's
face, frank and scholar-like, glowing among the busts
and pictures in his beautiful library, and (with, perhaps
a little mischief in remembering how we have
always been the football and he the nosegay of our contemporaries)
we returned to our printing-office arguing
thus: Our critical friend believes this, though we do
not; Longfellow is asleep on velvet; it will do him
good to rouse him; his friends will come out and
fight his battle; the charge (which to us would be a
comparative pat on the back) will be openly disproved,
and the acquittal of course leaves his fame brighter
than before—the injurious whisper in conversation-dom
killed into the bargain!

That day's Mirror commenced its

We expected the return mails from Boston to bring
us a calmly indignant “Daily Advertiser,” a coquettishly
reproachful “Transcript,” a paternally severe
“Courier,” and an Olympically-denunciatory “Atlas.”
A week has elapsed, and we are still expecting. Thunder
is sometimes “out to pasture.” But, meantime,
a friend who thinks it the driver's lookout if stones
are thrown at a hackney-coach, but interferes when it
is a private carriage—(has loved us these ten years,
that is to say, and never objected to our being a target,
but thinks a fling at Longfellow is a very different
matter)—this friend writes us a letter. He thinks as
we do, exactly, and we shall, perhaps, disarm the
above-named body-guard of the accused poet by quoting
the summing-up of his defence:—

“It has been asked, perhaps, why Lowell was neglected
in this collection? Might it not as well be
asked why Bryant, Dana, and Halleck, were neglected?
The answer is obvious to any one who candidly

considers the character of the collection. It professed
to be, according to the proem, from the humbler poets;
and it was intended to embrace pieces that were anonymous,
or which were not easily accessible to the general
reader—the waifs and estrays of literature. To
put anything of Lowell's, for example, into a collection
of waifs, would be a peculiar liberty with pieces
which are all collected and christened.”

It can easily be seen how Longfellow, and his
friends for him, should have a very different estimate
from ourself as to the value of an eruption, in print, of
the secret humors of appreciation. The transient
disfiguring of the skin seems to us better than disease
concealed to aggravation. But, apart from the intrinsic
policy of bringing all accusations to the light,
where they can be encountered, we think that the peculiar
temper of the country requires it. Our national
character is utterly destitute of veneration.
There is a hostility to all privileges, except property
in money—to all hedges about honors—to all reserves
of character and reputation—to all accumulations of
value not bankable. There is but one field considered
fairly open—money-making. Fame-making, character-making,
position-making, power-making, are privileged
arenas in which the “republican many” have
no share.

The distrust with which all distinction, except
wealth, is regarded, makes a whispered doubt more
dangerous to reputation than a confessed defect. The
dislike to inheritors of anything—birthrights of anything—family
names or individual genius—metamorphoses
the first suspicion greedily into a belief. A
clearing-up of a disparaging doubt about a man is a
public disappointment. “That fellow is all right
again, hang him!” is the mental ejaculation of ninety-nine
in a hundred of the readers of a good defence or
a justification.

P. S. We are not recording this view of things by
way of assuming to be, ourself, above this every-day
level of the public mind—too superfine to be a part
of such a public. Not a bit of it. We can not afford
superfinery of any kind. We are trying to make a
living by being foremost in riding on a coming turn of
the tide in these matters. The country is at the lowest
ebb of democracy consistent with its intelligence.
The taste for refinements, for distinctions, for aristocratic
entrenchments, is moving with the additional
momentum of a recoil. We minister to this, in the
way of business, as the milliner makes a crown-shaped
head-dress for Mrs. President Tyler. It has its penalty,
but that was reckoned at starting. We knew,
of course, that we could not sell fashionable opinions
at our counter without being assailed as assuming to
be the representative of fashion[1] —just as if we could
not even name a tribute of libertinism to virtue without
being sillily called a libertine by the Courier,
Commercial, and Express. However, there is some
hope, by dint of lifetime fault-culture, that, in the sod
over a man's grave, there will be no slander-seed left
to flower posthumously undetected.

Popularity of Madame Pico.—During the past
week we received a letter from a serious writer (a lady),
confessing to her own great delight in Madame Pico,
but wishing us to impress upon our religious readers,
by arguments more at length, the sacredness of good
music, even by an operatic singer. We remember a
passage in Burnet's Records, which shows that even
these operatic singers, if enlisted to sing in the choirs
of churches, would become the special subjects of
prayer. “Also ye shall pray for them that find any
light in this church, or give any behests, book, bell,
chalice or vestment, surplices, water-cloth or towel,
lands, rents, lamp or light, or other aid or service,
whereby God's worship is better served, sustained and
maintained in reading and SINGING.” It has long been
our opinion that to heighten the character of church
music would be aiding and giving interest and consequence
to religious service, and the inviting of professed
singers to the choirs, for the sabbaths they pass
in the city, would make them particulariy (according
to Burnet) special subjects of prayer.

The four-feet precipice between the carriage wheel
and the side walk, and the back slope to the range of
racing omnibuses and drunken sleigh-riders, prevent
ladies from embarking in carriages at present, and this
is one thing that reconciles us to the opera people's
having chosen to

Madame Pico has found a rich oasis in Boston appreciation,
and we trust the snow will have melted away
before the Tabernacle so that it will not be an inaccessible
desert when she returns. Her concert there will
be like a dawn after a month's night of music.

Two or three new Fashions in France.—In a
French pamphlet handed in to our office a few days
ago, purporting to be Monsieur Grousset's justification
for having been shot down in Broadway by Monsieur
Emeric, Mr. Grousset describes a previous affair with
the same gentleman, lately, in France. On that occasion,
he states, Mr. Emeric went to the field attended
by nine persons, one of whom was a lady!

We find, also, by a private letter from a friend in
Paris, that the now common FEMALE practice of SMOKING
CIGARS is considered (by connoisseurs in knowing-dom)
as a most engaging addition to the attractions
of some particular styles of beauty! “The play of the
mouth upon the cigar, the reddening of the lips by the
irritation of the tobacco, and the insouciant air, altogether,
which it gives to the smoker, adds to the
peculiar quality of a dashing and coquettish woman, as
much as it would detract from that of a retiring and
timid one.” The eyes (he adds) gleam with a peculiar
softness, through the smoke. Our correspondent had
just returned from a call on a charming American
lady, whom he found with a cigar in her rosy mouth!

Wellington boots have been sported during the
late bad weather for walking, by some of the fashionable
ladies of Paris. They are made of patent leather,
reaching to the knee, with a small tassel in front (at
least so exhibited in shop-windows) and the leg of the
boot rounded and shaped in firm leather, like the
fashion of boots twenty years ago. The high heel
(keeping the sole of the foot from the wet pavement),
is “raved about,” in Paris—the ladies wondering how
such a sensible thing as a heel should have been so
long disused by the sex most in need of its protection.
The relief of the ankles from contact with the cold or
wet edge of the dress in wet weather is dwelt upon in
the description, as is also the increased beauty of the
foot from the heightening of the arch of the instep by
the high heel.

Fashions for country belles.—The following
appeal to our gallantry pulls very hard:—

We have omitted the bulk of Miss Kate's letter,
giving rather too long an account of two or three expensive
disasters from being misguided by magazines
as to the fashions—but it is easily to be seen that it is
a matter that concerns outlay which “comes home to
business and bosom.” We shall take it into consideration.
Our present impression is, that we shall
set apart half a column, weekly, bi-weekly, or tri-weekly,
devoted to “the fashions by an eye-witness.”
This, however, immediately suggests a dilemma:
There are two schools of taste among the ladies!
Some women dress for men's eyes, and this style is
both striking and economical. Other women (most
women indeed), dress for ladies' approval only, and
this style is studiously expensive, sacrifices becomingness
to novelty, and is altogether beyond male appreciation.—
Which style should we shape our report for?

Canadian Gossip.—The chief of the Scotch clan,
McNab, has lately emigrated to Canada with a hundred
clansman. On arriving at Toronto, he called on
his newly illustrious namesake, Sir Allan, and left his
card as “The McNab.” Sir Allan returned his visit,
leaving as his card, “The other McNab.” The unusual
relish of this accidental bit of fun, has elevated
the definite article into a kind of provincial title, and,
in common conversation, the leading individual of a
family name is regularly the-ified. Among the officers
at Montreal there was lately a son of the late celebrated
“Jack Mytton,” the most game-y sportsman
in England. Meeting Sir Allan McNab at a mess-dinner,
young Mytton sent wine to him with the message:
“The Mytton” would be happy to take wine
with “The Other McNab.” We should not wonder
if this funny use of the definite article became the
germ of the first American title. The Tyler! The
Mrs. Tyler!

This same young Mytton, by the way, inherited his
father's adventurous temper, and though the first
favorite of Montreal society, he alone, of all the officers,
could find no lady willing to sleigh-ride with him.
They openly declared their fear of his pranks of driving.
One fine day, however, when all the town was on runners,
Mytton was seen with a dashing turn-out, and a
lady deeply veiled, sitting beside him, to whose comfort
he was continually ministering, and to whom he
was talking with the most merry glee. It was, to all
appearance, a charming and charmed auditor, at least.
The next day, there was great inquiry as to who was
driving with Mr. Mytton. The mystery was not
solved for a week. It came out at last, that in a
certain milliner's shop in Montreal had stood a wooden
“lay figure” for the exhibition of caps and articles
of dress. The despairing youth had bought this, had
it expensively and fashionably dressed, and still keeps
it at his lodgings (under the name of “Ma'm'selle
Pis-Aller”) for his companion in sleigh-riding!

WHO ARE THE UPPER TEN THOUSAND?

(In reply to a question of Fanny Forester's.)

Your postscript, asking “Enlightenment as
to the upper ten thousand” can not be answered with
a candle-end of attention. From the “sixes and
sevens” of our brain, we must draw a whole “dip,”
new and expensive, to throw light on that matter—
expensive, inasmuch as the same length of editorial
candle would light us through a paragraph. If adorable
“Cousin 'Bel” chance to be leaning over your
chair, therefore, beg her to lift the curtain of her
auburn tress-aract from your shoulder, and allow the
American public to look over while you read.

The upper ten thousand, all told, would probably
number one hundred thousand, or more: Not in England,
where the upperdom is a matter of ascertained
certainty, but in a republic, where every man has his
own idea of what kind are uppermost, and where, of
course, there are as many “ten thousands” as there
are different claims to position. Probably few things
would be funnier than for an angel suddenly to request
the upper ten thousand of New York to walk up
the let-down steps of a cloud, and record their names
and residences, for the convenience of the up-town
ministering spirits! A hundred thousand, we are sure,
would be the least number of autographs left in the
heavenly directory!

But, till we arrive at the “red-book” degree of definite
aristocracy, a newspaper addressed to the “upper
ten thousand” embraces a sufficient bailiwick for the
most ambitious circulation. There are all manner of
standards for “the best people.” The ten thousand
who live in the biggest houses would define New York
upperdom with satisfactory clearness, to some. The
ten thousand “safest” men would satisfy others. The
educated ten thousand—the religious ten thousand—
the ten thousand who had grandfathers—the ten
thousand who go to Saratoga and Newport—the
liberal ten thousand—the ten thousand who ride in
carriages—the ten thousand who spend over a certain
sum—the ten thousand “above Bleecker”—the ten
thousand “ever heard of”—are aristocracies as others
estimate them. And till the really upper ten thousand
are indubitably defined, there are ninety thousand,
more or less, who are in the enjoyment of a most desirable
illusion.

No! no!—republican benevolence—the “greatest
happiness of the greatest number”—would stop the
march of civilization as to aristocracy, where it is.
Its progress is through a reversed cornucopia, and the

extreme end is too small for the comfort of the “nation.”
Meantime, however, the standard of good
manners is rather loosely kept, and though the ten
“ten-thousands” are all seen to be tolerable, there is
a small class who go wholly unappreciated—those
who are unconscious of their own degree from nature,
and are only recognisable by the highest standards.
We speak of those who have “no manner”—simply
because they would be less refined if they had. There
are enchanting women in New York—we ourself
know a half-dozen—who are wholly unaware themselves,
wholly unsuspected by others, of carrying a
mark from nature that in Europe would supersede all
questions of origin and circumstances.—English aristocratic
society is sprinkled throughout with these
sealed packets of nobility from God—one of whom I
remember inquiring out with great interest, a single
lady of thirty-six apparently, but looking like a distilled
drop of the “blood of all the Howards,” simple
as a tulip on the stem, and said, though obscurely connected,
to have refused a score of the best matches
of England. These “no manners” that are better
than “good manners” walk a republic quite undetected
as aristocracy; but, as the persons so born are always
beloved (losing only the admiration that is due to
them) their benighted state scarce calls for a missionary!

We should not be surprised if there were a pair
from this Nature's Upper-dom—

—in your own village, dear Fanny Forester!

THE WEST IN A PETTICOAT.

(By way of declining a communication in hope of a
better one.)

We have been for years looking at the western
horizon of American literature, for a star to rise that
should smack of the big rivers, steamboats, alligators,
and western manners. We have the DOWN EAST—
embodied in Jack Downing and his imitators. There
was wanting a literary embodiment of the OUT WEST
—not, a mind shining at it, by ridiculing it from a
distance, but a mind shining from it, by showing its
peculiar qualities unconsciously. The rough-hewn
physiognomy of the west, though showing as yet but
in rude and unattractive outline, is the profile of a fine
giant, and will chisel down to noble features hereafter;
but, meantime, there will be a literary foreshadowing
of its maturity—abrupt, confiding, dashing writers,
regardless of all trammels and fearless of ridicule—
and we think we have heard from one of them.

The letter from which we shall quote presently, is
entirely in earnest, and signed with the lady's real
name. We at first threw the accompanying communication
aside, as very original and amusing, but
unfit for print—except with comments which we had
no time to make. Taking it up again this morning,
we think we see a way to compass the lady-writer's
object, and we commence by giving her a fictitious
name to make famous (instead of her own), and by interesting
our readers in her with showing her character
of mind as her letter shows her to us. She is
quick, energetic, confident of herself, full of humor,
and a good observer, and the “half-horse half-alligator”
impulses with which she writes so unconsciously,
may be trimmed into an admirable and entirely
original style by care and labor.

Miss “Kate Juniper,”[1] (so we name her), thus
dashes, western-fashion, in what she has to say
to us:—

“I hate formal introductions. I would speak to you
now, and I will see you, when I may, in the Palace
of Truth. I am in Godey's Lady's Book with decent
compensation, but I want to be published faster than
they can do it. I want to write for the Mirror without
pay, for the sake of `getting my name up.' I shall
ultimately `put money in my purse' by this course.
I have now three manuscript volumes, which good
judges tell me are equal to Miss Bremer's. I send you
a specimen. I have a series of these sketches, entitled
`The Spirits of the Room.' I can sell them to
Godey, but he will be for ever bringing them out. I
propose to give them to you, if you like them, in the
true spirit of bargain and sale, though not in the letter.
I will give you as many as will serve my purpose
of getting my name known; and then, if success
comes, you will hold me by the chain of gratitude, as
you now do by that of reverence and affection.

“Will you write me immediately and tell me your
thoughts of this thing? Truly your friend.”

We can only give a taste of her literary quality by
an extract from her communication, the remainder
wanting finish, and this portion sufficing to introduce
her to our readers. We give it precisely as written
and punctuated. She is describing an interview with
a travelling lecturer on magnetism, and gives her own
experience in neurological sight-seeing:—

“Mark the sequel. I had, on going into the room,
lost my handkerchief. A gentleman famed for his
wisdom, his powder of seeing as far into the future
without the gift of second sight, as others can with it,
lent me his, protem. I heard the wonderful statements
of the `New School in Psychology' relative to sympathy
established by means of magnetized or neurologized
handkerchiefs, letters, etc. I determined to
keep the handkerchief and see if there were enough
of the soul aura of my wise-acre friend imprisoned in
it, to affect me. I did so; I returned to my home in
the hotel—to my lonely room; evening shut in; the
waiter did not bring me a light; my anthracite burned
blue and dimly enough; I bound the magic handkerchief
about my brow and invoked the sight of my
friend to aid my own. What I saw shall be told in
the next chapter.

1. CHAPTER I.

“I gazed into the dimness and vacancy that surrounded
me—I conjured the guardian spirit of the
room to come before me, and communicate some of
the secrets of his wards. How many hearts, thought
I, have beat with joy and sorrow, with hope, and with
anguish unutterable in this room. But no guardian
spirit appeared, and I began to think that the tee-total
pledge of this hotel had really banished all sorts of
spirits, neurology to the contrary notwithstanding. I
closed my eyes, laid my hand on the bewitching
point in my forehead, and lo! my eyes were opened,
not literally but neurologically. At first a figure was
revealed dimly and indistinctly—gradually its outlines
grew more defined, and a graceful young man stood
before me. He was enveloped in the folds of an ample
cloak, a jewelled hand held it in front, and he
stood as if waiting to be known and noted. While
gazing on him I found myself endowed with new and
marvellous powers—every line of his face had its
language, and told me a broad history. His attitude,
his hand, the manner in which the folds of his cloak
fell about him, constituted a library that I was skilled
to read, if I would. Here was the signatura rerum.
I looked and looked—it was like looking into a library
and determining what you shall read, and what you
shall leave unread. Some one has said that `the
half is greater than the whole.' This may be a physical,
yet not a metaphysical paradox. Here I saw the

last occupant of my room standing before me. I
said I will first look at one week of his life. In a
moment I beheld him pacing fitfully the room—
his thoughts came before me—they were such as
these,” &c., &c.

Miss Juniper goes on with an account of half a
dozen different characters, who (by a very natural
vein of revery) she imagines may have occupied the
room before her. The specimen we have given simply
shows the free dash of her pen, and we think we
see in it the capability of better things.

Female Stock Brokers, Etc.—A letter from
Paris to the London Times describes the stock exchange
of Paris (the Bourse) as thronged by female
speculators—not less than a hundred in attendance on
any one day. To do this, too, they are obliged to
stand in the open square in front of the building, as
they have been excluded from the interior by a special
regulation! Every five minutes during the sale
of stocks, two or three bareheaded agents rush down
the steps of the Bourse to announce to the fair speculators
the state of the market; and they buy and sell
accordingly.

Fancy a few of the customs of the “most polite nation”
introduced into New York! What would “Mrs.
Grundy” say of a hundred ladies standing about on
the sidewalk in Wall street, speculating in stocks, and
excluded by a vote of the stock-brokers from the floor
of the Exchange! When will the New York ladies
begin to smoke in their carriages, as they do in Paris?
When will they wear Wellington boots with
high heels? When will they frequent the billiard-rooms
and public eating-houses? When will those who
are not rich enough to keep house, use “home” only
as birds do their nests, to sleep in—breakfasting, dining,
and amusing themselves, at all other hours, out
of doors, or in cafes and restaurants? When will the
more fashionable ladies receive morning calls in the
prettiest room in the house—their bed-room—themselves
in bed, with coquettish caps and the most soignée
demi-toilet any way contrivable? Funny place,
France! Yet in no country that we were ever in,
seemed woman so insincerely worshipped—so mocked
with the shadow of power over men. We should
think it as great a curiosity to see a well-bred Frenchman
love-sick (when he supposed himself alone) as to
see an angel tipsy, or a marble bust in tears. This
condition of the “love of the country,” and the dissipation
of female habits, are mutual consequences—so
to speak. Men are constituted by nature to love
women, and in proportion as women become man-ified
they feel toward them as men do to each other—selfish
and unimpressible. We remember once asking a
French nobleman who was very fond of London, what
was the most marked point of difference which he (as
a professed love-maker) found between French and
English women. The reply was an unfeeling one,
but it will be a guide to an estimate of the effect of
the different national manners on female character.
“The expense of a love affair,” said he, “falls on the
man in France, and on the woman in England. English
women make you uncomfortable by the quantity
of presents they give you, and French women quite
as uncomfortable by the quantity they exact from
you.” We only quote this remark as made by a very
great beau and a very keen observer—the fact that a
high-bred man weighed women at all in such abominable
scales being a good argument (at least) against inviting
the ladies to Wall street and the billiard-rooms!

And now let us say a word of what made the letter
in the Times more suggestive than it otherwise would
have been—Miss Fuller's book on “Woman in the
Nineteenth Century.”

This book begins with an emblematic device resembling,
at first view, the knightly decoration called
by our English neighbors a star. On further examination,
a garter seems to be included in the figure;
but upon still closer view, we discover, within the
rays which form the outer border, first an eternal
serpent—then the deeper mystery of two triangles—
one of light, the other of darkness and shadow. We
should not have been thus particular in describing a
new decoration, but we conceive that the figure is
very significant of the tone and design of the book.
It belongs to what is called the transcendental school
—a school which we believe to have mixed up much
of what is noble and true with much of what is merely
imaginary and fantastic. Truth, freedom, love, light
—these are high and holy objects; and thought they
may be sought, sometimes, by modes which we may
think susceptible of improvement, we honor those
who propose to themselves such objects, according to
their aims and not according to their ability of accomplishment.
The character and rights of woman
form naturally the principal subject of Miss Fuller's
book; and we hope it may have an influence in convincing,
if not “man,” at least some men, that woman
was born for better things than to “cook him something
good.”

The English Premier.—We see a text for the
least-taste-in-life of a sermon, in the following touch-up
of Sir Robert Peel by the London Examiner:—

“Wanted, a Premier's Assistant.—Our friend
Punch, who has written some excellent lessons for
ministers, `suited to the meanest capacity,' in words
from one syllable to three, by easy upward ascent,
should take Sir Robert Peel's education in hand, and
teach him how to write a decent note.

“Notwithstanding the proverb to the contrary, a man
may do a handsome thing in a very awkward way.

“It was quite becoming and right to give a pension
of £20 a year to Miss Brown, but what a note about
it is this, with its parenthetical dislocations, and its
atrocious style as stiff as buckram:—

“If Punch had been over Sir Robert Peel when he
wrote this, he would have hit him several sharp raps
on the knuckles with his baton, we are quite certain.
The model of the note may be in Dilworth, very
probably, or even in the Complete Letter-Writer, by
the retired butler; but, nevertheless, it is not a true
standard of taste.

“Not to mention the clumsy parenthetical clauses
so much better omitted, or the long-tailed words so
out of place in a note about a matter of £20 a year.
Sir Robert Peel has to learn that none but he-milliners
and haberdashers talk of their “ladies.” Sir Robert
Peel, as a gentleman and a prime minister, needs
not be ashamed of writing of his wife. He may rest
quite assured that the world will know that his wife is
a lady without his studiously telling it so.

“Foreigners will ask what is the distinction between
a gentleman's lady and his wife; whether they are
convertible terms; whether there are minister's wives
who are not ladies; or whether there are ladies who

are not wives; and why the equivocal word is preferred
to the distinct one; and why the wife is treated if
it were the less honorable.

“Formerly men used to have wives, not ladies; but
in the announcement of births it has seemed finer to
Mr. Spruggins and Mr. Wiggins to say that his lady
has been delivered than his wife, the latter sounding
homely and low.

“But Sir Robert Peel should not be led away by
these examples. He is of importance enough in the
world to afford to mention his wife in plain, honest,
homely old English.

“Any one who is disposed to give lessons in letter-writing
can not do better than collect Sir Robert
Peel's notes as warning examples. From the Velveteens
to Miss Brown's £20 a year, they have all the
same atrocious offences of style and taste. It is another
variety of the Yellow Plush school.

“It distresses us to see it. We should like to see
Miss Brown's £20 a year rendered into plain, gentlemanly
English.

“As prizes are the fashion, perhaps some one will
give a prize for the best translation of Sir Robert
Peel's notes into the language of ease, simplicity, and
with them, good taste.”

Sir Robert's crockery note proves, not that his premiership
still shows the lint of the spinning jenny, but
that he employed one of his clerks (suitably impressed
with his duty to Lady Peel) to write the letter. We
wish to call attention, however, to the superior simplicity
of the taste contended for by the critic, and to
the evidence it gives that extremes meet in the usages
of good breeding as in other things—the highest refinement
fairly lapping over upon what nature started
with. The application of this is almost universal, but
perhaps we had better particularize at once, and confess
to as much annoyance as we have a right to express
(in “a free country”) at the affected use of the
word lady in the United States, and the superfine
shrinking from the honest words wife and woman.
Those who say “this is my lady, sir!” instead of
“this is my wife, sir!” or those who say “she is a
very pretty lady,” instead of “she is a very pretty
woman,” should at least know what the words mean,
and what they convey to others.

In common usage, to speak of one's wife as one's
lady, smacks of low-breeding, because it expresses a
kind of announcement of her rank, as if her rank
would not otherwise be understood. It is sometimes
used from a dread of plain-spoken-ness, by men who
doubt their own manners—but, as it always betrays
the doubt, it is in bad taste. The etymology of the
plainer words is a better argument in their favor, however.
In the Saxon language from which they are
derived, wœepman signifies that one of the conjugal
pair who employed the weapons necessary for the defence
of the family, and wif-man signified the one
who was employed at the woof, clothing the family by
her industry. (The terms of endearment, of course,
were “my fighter,” and “my weaver!”) instead of
this honestly derived word (wife), meaning the one
who has the care of the family, the word lady is used,
which (also by derivation from the Saxon) signifies
one who is raised to the rank of her conjugal mate!
But, in this country, where the males invariably burrow
in trade, while the females as invariably soar out
of their reach in the sunshine of cultivation, few women
are raised to the rank of their husbands. It is an
injustice to almost any American woman to say as
much—by calling her a lady.

It is one part, though ever so small a part, of patriotism,
to toil for improving the manners of the country.
If we can avoid the long round of affectations,
and make a short cut to good taste by at once submitting
every question of manners to the three ultimate
standards of high-breeding—simplicity, disinterestedness,
and modesty, it might save us the century
or two of bad taste through which older countries
have found their way to refinement. Amen!

ARGUMENT FOR SEDAN CHAIRS.

“Mr. Editor: You stand accredited as the ready
friend of luxurious elegance, the happy mingler of
those foreign ingredients, the utile with the dulci.
My dear sir, why have you never said a word in favor
of the Sedan-Chairs? The very name carries one
back to the days of Pope and Addison; to the routs,

and masquerades and Ranelagh of London, in the
`reign of wits.' Even Cowper celebrates it:—

“It is an Italian seggietta; and thus defined by an
old writer: `a kind of chaire used in Italy to carrie
men and women up and downe.' It seems to have
emigrated to London from Sedan, the birthplace of
Turenne. Dryden used it for the lectica of the Romans:—

“Were you ever in one? Then you will agree that
it is as necessary in Broadway as a gondola in Venice.
Think of Pope's `two pages and a chair.' Our
thousand and one idlers, who are too ragged to beg,
and too poor to keep a cab, might flourish their poles
to some purpose in front of St. Paul's—a better class
of chairmen than some we wot of.—They need not
have so heavy a load, nor so great a peril, as those
who, according to Swift, helped in the Trojan horse:—

“The new police would defend the glass from any
roystering blood, who, as Prior sings:—

Opposition may be expected: there was such at the
cab-epocha. But who can even name a cab, without
ignominy. Think of a trundling box—a packing-case
on wheels—surmounted by a top-heavy Milesian,
enthroned on a remnant of Chatham-street-great-coat,
forcing you along sidewise by a series of thumps, and
then, with a paroxysm that tries every ball and socket,
dumping you on the trottoir! Our semi-tropical
climate demands a protection from the sun: something
emulating the oriental palanquin; a parasol
which shall preclude fatigue and dust, as well as sunlight—which
shall transport the delicate woman with
the gentlest conceivable carriage, and into the very
hall of the stately mansion. What, prithee, can
answer these conditions but the sedan-chair? I already
see you in one, peering through the sky-blue
curtain, as you swim through your evening survey.
The corporation will at once adjust a bill of rates;
the thing is done. “Lunarius.”

We have been but in one city where sedans were
in use—Dublin. What struck us, in using them (and
that is what the reader cares most to know, we presume)
was the being shut up where it was warm and
dry, and let out where it was warm and dry. The
sedan is a small close carriage—an easy chair enclosed
by windows—carried on poles by two men.
They come into your drawing-room if you wish, shut
you up in a carriage by the fireside, and carry you,
without the slightest jar or contact with out-of-doors,
into the house where you are to dine or dance—no
wet sidewalk and no gust of cold wind, snow, or rain!
They are cheaper than carriages because men are
easier kept than horses, and as a sedan-chairman can
also follow some other trade in the daytime, we
should think it would be good economy to introduce
them to New York. Many a delicate woman might
then go to parties or theatres with a quarter of the
present risk—to lungs or head-dress!

Prince's Gardens.—We have received an immense
catalogue of the fruit-trees, plants, flowers,
vines, and berries, comprised in this ark of vegetation
at Flushing, and we should think from the account
of Prince's gardens, and the prodigal variety of this
catalogue, that the establishment would be better
worth visiting than any object of curiosity in the
neighborhood. It is now in the hands of the third
generation of descendants from the original founder—
no slight marvel of constancy of pursuit in this
country!

But we have found a singular pleasure in this catalogue—no
less than a perfect feast upon the names and
descriptions of the fruits and flowers! It reads like a
directory of some city of fairies, with a description of
the fairy-citizens written out against their names.
We can fancy a delightful visiting-list of people answering
to these descriptions of fruits and flowers.
Here are a few of the characters:—

Different APPLES are described as—“flesh stained
with red, perfumed;” “snow-white flesh, musky
sweet;” “fair, beautiful, pleasant flavor, sprightly;”
“tender, juicy, keeps well;” “remains juicy till
late;” “red flesh, a curiosity,” etc., etc. Different
pears are described as—“rich, sugary, delicious
aroma;” “most splendid, extra delicious, none more
estimable, grows vigorously, bears soon;” “beautiful,
aromatic, bears young, greatly esteemed;” “rich,
musky;” “excellent, slow to yield fruit;” “thin skin,
sweet, very good;” “new native variety, estimable,
handsome;” “very large, skin shining, flesh crisp,
agreeable flavor, excellent,” &c. Different peaches
are described as—“oval, splendid, luscious;” “estimable,
foliage curled, peculiar;” “waxen appearance,
globular, delicious flavor,” &c. Different grapes are
described as—“large, estimable, vigorous;” “sweet,
firm, thick skin, hangs long, monstrous clusters;”
“monstrous fox variety;” “Willis's large black;” (?)
“sprightly, pure for wine,” etc. Different roses are
called by name and described—“formidable red;”
“glory of the reds;” “insurmountable beauty;”
“new Dutch virgin's blush;” “sombre agreeable;”
“Watson's blush;” “red prolific;” “pale rose, deep
centre;” “deep rose, very robust;” “bluish violet,
superb, singular;” “bright pink, flaked with scarlet;”
“pubescent yellow flowering;” “white quilled;”
“extra magnificent;” “splendid, full, double-shaded
blush, monstrous size,” etc., etc.

Such names and definitions, of anything, were
enough to bring one to Flushing, and Mr. Prince
may look out for us very early in May, catalogue in
hand, to see beauties he has described so glowingly!
We trust the list of adjectives we have put so venturesomely
close together in our cool columns will not
explode in type, with spontaneous combustion!

Letters of Introduction.—The following query
may be answered briefly enough by quoting only European
usage, but the propriety of an American variation
occurs to us, and we will write a line on the subject—first
giving the suggestive note:—

“Sir: My friend N., usually a well-informed,
though rather an obstinate individual, is about to
travel, and asked me for a letter of introduction to a
friend abroad. The letter is written, and is submitted
to his perusal, after which he hands it back to be
sealed, insisting that the rule is inflexible that all letters
should be sealed. I refuse to affix the wax,
holding that a letter of introduction should be open.

“We leave the question to your decision. As my
friend N. can not sail until the question is decided, an
early decision will oblige him and your humble servant,
“B.”

With very ceremonious people, and ceremonious
notes of introduction, it is usual to affix a seal upon
the outside of the letter, leaving it to be read and

fastened by the bearer, before delivery. If the letter
extends beyond the mere stating of who the
bearer is, and the desire that he should be kindly received,
or if it treats of other matters, it is given
sealed. Either mode is perfectly allowable, for if the
bearer objects to a sealed letter, he can ask the contents
when he receives it. It is more common, however,
to give it unsealed.

Briefly, now, to the point we are coming to: letters
of introduction, in this country, should be addressed
to the women and not to the men, and should
go more into details of what the bearer is and what is
his errand of travel, and therefore should be sealed.
We have long been aware of a prevailing impression
that Americans treat letters of introduction with a
very uncivilized inattention, and so they do—because the
etiquetical and hospitable cares of American families
are in charge of the wife, and the husband is very likely
to stick the letter into a pigeon-hole of his desk, and
forget all about it. The wife in America does all the
ornamental. To see a rich man come down the steps
of his own house (almost anywhere “up town”) you
would take him to be a tradesman who had been in to
collect a bill. To see the wife follow, you would at
once acknowledge that she looked as though she lived
in the house, and fancy that she was probably annoyed
to see that man pass out by the front door!
From making himself a slave to keep his wife a goddess,
the American loses all idea of the propriety of
looking like a mate for his wife, and he unconsciously
ceases to take any care of the civilities to which his
own manners give so little value, and neglects all
persons who have not had the tact to be presented
first to the ornamental moiety. It should be an
American usage, therefore, growing out of the inferiority
of the husband's breeding to the wife's, that letters
of introduction should be addressed to the woman.

Of course, as she has no opportunity to inquire
into the bearer's position or habits, these should be
more minutely set down, and the letter should be
sealed.

“Findings.”—We see advertised continually certain
commodities called “findings,” which we understand
are what hatters and shoemakers require besides
peltry and leather. There are findings for
newspapers, too — what the editors require besides
leaders and news—and it may gratify our subscribers
to know, that out of the weary slip-slop which we
commonly scribble after making up the Mirror's leaders
and news, our contemporaries supply themselves
with the greater part of their ornamental “findings.”
Like every other editor, we are in the habit of giving
a line or two occasionally, in the body of our paper,
to the wares of our most liberal advertisers, and it appears
that even this wastage of business notices is
considered spice enough for other papers to be seasoned
with. The Boston Transcript spices its little
sheet very often with these parings of our daily apple.
Here is part of a letter which contains a touch:—

“The leading articles in the Mirror and Commercial
Advertiser for the last day or two have been devoted
to the all-engrossing topic, the spring style of
hats. After admitting that `knowingness could no
further go' than Beebe & Costar went, Willis winds
up thus: `For ourself and ten thousand other workies
whom we could name, the sadder model of Orlando
Fish—timid, proper, and thoughtful—is perhaps more
appropriate.' This passage has produced a great
sensation in dandy-dom. The Fish party are in raptures,
and could hug Willis to their very bosoms;
`the opposition' is in a fury. Nobody can tell what
the result may be. Willis dare not venture out, it is
thought without a body-guard of Fishites. There
are, moreover, many surmises with regard to the
character of the `ten thousand other workies' whom
Mr. Willis `could name.' Some think that he
means to be witty, and alludes ironically to the “upper
ten.” This is a great mystery.

“The constituent elements of `japonica-dom' and
`dandy-dom' may be seen daily in Broadway, between
the hours of twelve and three. All the beauty above
Bleecker street wanders at that time down as far as
the Park, hazarding even the contamination of the
vulgar crowd, in the hope of securing an appetite for
dinner. The liveried lacqueys, who oscillate upon a
black board behind the carriages of our republican
nabobs, sport their gayest trappings; I had the pleasure
of seeing one yesterday in a drab `cut-away' with
gold lace and yellow facings, and white silk stockings
with purple velvet smalls! What is this great country
coming to? We Gothamites do sometimes make
ourselves ridiculous, by aping what as a people we
profess to despise. It is rumored that a deputation
of English `small-potato' baronets may be expected
in this city next summer; and that the object of their
transatlantic mission is, to establish an aristocratic
nucleus among our `upper ten thousand.' A `herald's
college' has already been set on foot; and I have
heard that it enjoys considerable patronage. It is
proposed to build wings on either side of `the up-town
opera-house'—the one to be assigned to this `herald's
college,' and the other to the `university of fashion,'
of which Mr. Willis is to be president. Some say
that Colonel Webb has applied for the vice-presidency,
but I can not vouch for this.

“The chief feature of the Broadway Journal is a
defence by Mr. Poe of his attack upon Longfellow,
&c. It is as stupid as might be expected from a man
who used to `do up' such very small prosodial criticisms
for Graham's Magazine. Mr. Poe comes down
rather severely on Willis—he therefore has probably
discontinued his services at the Mirror office.”

One mistake in the above: Mr. Poe left us some
time before writing in the Broadway Journal, and to
edit that journal; and he never offended us by a criticism,
nor could he, except by personalities, in which
he never indulges.

Schiller and Goethe.—Mr. Calvert of Baltimore
has given us, as translator, a most agreeable
collection of gossippy letters—the undress of two
great minds, of the age just closed behind us. What
we most wish to comment on, however (the book
speaks for itself), is Mr. Calvert's own—the preface,
in which he indignantly and most properly rebukes
the last orator of the “Phi Beta Kappa Society,” for
a short-sighted and illiberal attack on the memory of
Goethe. We found it difficult, at the time, to restrain
an outbreak of disgust, but the oration was not published
for some time, and we were unwilling to take
ground upon a newspaper report of it. Meantime,
our natural alacrity at forgetting disagreeable things
dropped it out of memory. We are not sorry that a
condemnation of it is now recorded in a book that
must live.

Mr. Calvert puts the truth thus forcibly: “How
little outward testimony survives about Shakspere;
but whoso can read his poetry, may get a knowledge
of the man surer and more absolute than could have
been gotten even from the fullest contemporancous opinions.
As the tree is known by its fruit, we know that
the parent of the Shaksperian progeny must have
been a man in whom, in close alliance with a kingly
intellect, dwelt, as well the virtues that ennoble, as
the graces that beautify and the affections that sweeten
life. Into whatever errors an ardent temperament
may have drawn him, they dim not the lucent image
of him, fixed in our minds by study of his works;
nay, we presume not to wish them uncommitted, lest

an attempt to better such a bounteous gift from God,
should mar, but by a tittle, the original proportions of
one, the sum of whose life has been to the world an unmeasurable
benefaction. When a bad man's brain
shall give birth to an Iphiginea, a Clara, a Mignon,
you may pluck pomegranates from Plymouth rock,
and reap corn on the sands of Sahara.

“On a formal public occasion (the Phi Beta Kappa
oration at Cambridge in 1844), a blind and
most rude assault has been made on one of the
mightiest of the dead, whose soul lives on earth, and
will for ages live in the exaltation of the loftiest
minds. Out of stale German gossip, out of shallow
wailings of prosaic critics, shallower clamors of pseudopatriots,
uncharitable magnification of common failings,
were compounded calumny against one of the foremost
men of the world, and the most honored man of
a people rich in virtue and genius.”

Quite aside from the defence of Goethe, we think
there is an obvious presentment here of the continual
manner of treating all kinds of eminence and celebrity,
here, in our own country, and at this present hour.
As the proverb says:—

Stewart's Stable Economy.—We covet three
things in the Arab's condition—his loose trousers, his
country without fences, and his freedom to live with
his horse. That we have once had the centaur variety
in the human race, men-quadrupeds, and have once
known horseflesh as “flesh of our flesh,” the natural
longing to prance, when we first get into the open air
after long confinement, is but one of many evidences.
In a mere notice of a book, however, we have no
leisure to trace back a problem of physiology. We
merely wish to convey to such of our enviable readers
as can resume the centaur (by loving and living with a
horse in the country), the treasure they have in a book
which shows them how to make their life (the horse
half of it) a luxury instead of an endurance, and to give
our own five years enjoyment in breaking, petting, and
improving horses, by aid of this same book, as experienced
commendation. We had the English edition
of Stewart's books on horses, but the Appletons have
republished the “Stable Economy,” with “notes
adapting it to American food and climate,” by Mr.
Allen, the able editor of the Agriculturist, and it is
now an invaluable vade-mecum, for all men who have
the luxury of a stable.

We can not help repeating that a visitable stable,
with friends in it in the shape of horses—with horses
in it one has himself broken and trained—a stable to
which the ladies like to go after breakfast, and where
a gentleman can throw on his own saddle and bridle,
and gallop off, without needing first to find his groom—
that this is the next best luxury our country affords,
after ladies' society. (Horses, that is to say, before
politics or stocks, under male discussion.)

The stable at Gordon castle (approachable by a
covered passage from the principal hall) was a frequent
resort for the ladies after breakfast; and we
have seen women, the highest in rank at the English
court, going in and out of the stalls, patting the favorites
they were to ride later in the day, and discussing
their beauty with the simplicity and frankness of
Arabs in the desert. While we are building country-houses
and forming habits in America, it is well to
know all the luxury we can enjoy in rural life, and no
one should build stable, or own horse, without consulting
the excellent directions for stabling and using
the horse, in this book of Stewart's.

Grund's Letters from Europe.—In Godey's
Lady's Book for April we find one of these best
epistles of the day, and (to tell the truth) we read
them with very little satisfaction, for they leave us
with a want to go where they are written. The April
number of Godey is principally the work of unwedded
quills (no less than ten misses numbered among the
contributors!), but we have read it with great satisfaction,
and felicitate our old friend upon the brilliancy
of his maiden troop. Godey is the pioneer of
magazines, and he has a tact at collection and selection,
which has put him where he is—safe at high-water
mark in enduring prosperity. Success to him.

By-the-way—though we have no room to expatiate
on the several papers in this number—the “Sketch of
Joseph Bonaparte” is capital. Is that by a “miss”
too?

And apropos, Godey! What a vile word “miss”
is, to express the sweetest thing in nature! Why
should the idol of mankind be called a “miss?”
Why should the charming word heifer be degraded to
the use of kine? We say “degraded,” for it once
served ladies as a synonym for the proudest of virgin
sweethearts. Ben Jonson, in his play of the “Silent
Woman,” thus writes a speech for his hero:—

“But heare me, faire lady, I do also love her whom
I shall choose for my heifer, to be the first and principal
in all fashions.”

The derivation of the word heifer is so complimentary!
It comes from two Anglo-Saxon words, which
signify “to step superbly,” as a young creature who
has borne no burthens. With this explanation, we
trust our friend Godey will no longer hesitate to advertise
his fair contributors as the bright lights of
HEIFFRDOM—disusing henceforth, for ever, the disparaging
epithet of misses.

An Idea for Tattersall's.—There are luxuries
which rich men forego, not for the money but for the
mind they cost. Hundreds of people in this city, for
instance, could very well afford a carriage, but they
can not afford the trouble of buying horses, the care
of looking after grooms, nor the anxieties inseparable
from horse-owning in this country of perpetual new
servants. In England this want is provided for by the
system the livery-stable keepers call jobbing. Lady
Blessington's two or three different equipages for instance,
are allowed to be the prettiest and best appointed
in London. Yet she owns neither carriages,
horses, nor harness. She pays a certain sum per
annum to be provided with what she wants in the
way of equipages, and keeps only her own coachman

and footmen. A new carriage is furnished whenever
wanted, and of whatever style is wanted (the jobber
finding no trouble probably in disposing of the one
given up) and a sick or lame horse is replaced immediately
from a stable where the first blood and shape
are alone kept. Her ladyship thus knows precisely
what her driving is to cost her for the year, and
transfers to the jobber all the risk, anxiety, and
trouble.

A wealthy New-Yorker, a day or two since, made
a very handsome offer to a livery-stable keeper to
furnish him a carriage on this same plan, and the offer
was refused. But, though a single customer of
this kind might be troublesome, combination (that great
secret of luxurious economies) might “make it answer.”
Twenty nice carriages, let out to private
gentlemen at $1,000, or $1,500 a year each, might be
looked after by one jobber well versed in horseflesh,
and his taste and experience would turn out better
equipages than could be got up by private individuals.
The twenty stables now kept up would be combined
in one (this in itself, no small saving) and the rich
man might be driven in better style, for less money
than it now costs him, and—better than all—without
the vexatious care, vigilance and anxiety of keeping a
private carriage.

P. S. We can safely say that we are entirely disinterested
in the proposed arrangement!

Graham for April.—The equinox brought us
such detestable weather, that instead of our usual two
hours' airing of brains under a hat, we lay on our
back yesterday afternoon and read “Graham.” How
does the man get so many good things! Grund,
Fanny Forester, Mrs. C. H. Butler, Win. Lander,
Mrs. Embury, Mrs. Osgood, Mr. Peterson—all have
written their best for this number. Our friend Fanny's
story of “Nickie Ben” seems to us particularly fresh,
bright, and original. Mr. Grund's letter from Paris
is full of intelligence, and among other things, he thus
speaks of Eugene Sue and his two tasters:—

“He lives now, by the product of his industry, in
princely style; but his enjoyments are troubled by
the constant fear of being poisoned by his political
and religious adversaries. He has, therefore, contracted
an intimate friendship with two large, beautiful
Newfoundland dogs, who are his constant dinner and
breakfast companions, and who always eat first of every
dish that is brought on the table. If these judges of
gastronomy pronounce in favor of it, by first eating a
large quantity, with apparent relish, the author of
“The Mysteries” and “The Wandering Jew” himself
partakes of it without farther scruple. He believes
dogs much more faithful than men, and the
sagacious instincts of a regular Newfoundlander superior
to the science of chymists and physicians.”

Poor dogs! Considering that they would doubtless
have been wagging their tails in Paradise, but for
Adam's transgression, it seems hard to make them
die, for a human master, besides!

But, to turn to the first leaf—lo! the brigadier! There
he stands, looking as amiable as if he had just nabbed
a flying thought for a song, his smile a little more
rigid, however, and his phiz a little thinner than his
accommodating wont. The picture is enough like
him, notwithstanding, for all “business purposes.”
We think him better looking than the artist has
“done” him, and this we request the ladies (who sing
his songs) to allow for. The magazine opens with a
critical biography, exceedingly well done, and (the
brigadier below stairs playing salesman) we see nothing
to prevent our quoting a note of our own to the
writer:—

We get, from literary fledglings, at least one letter
per diem requesting detailed advice on the quo modo
of a first flight in prose or poesy. We really suppose
we have, or are to have, an end to our life, and we like
to economise time. So we publish a letter, which we
once had occasion to write, and which must serve as
a circular—a letter which we recorded in our diary
when it was written—recorded with the following
preface:—

There lies before me now, upon my table, a letter
of three tolerably compact pages, addressed to a
young gentleman of — college, who is “bit by the
dipsas” of authorship. His mother, a sensible, plain,
farmer's widow, chanced to be my companion for a
couple of days, in a stage-coach, and while creeping
over the mountains between the Hudson and the Susquehannah,
she paid my common sense the compliment

of unburthening a very stout heart to me.
Since her husband's death, she has herself managed
the farm, and by active, personal oversight, has contrived
“to make both ends so far lap” (to use her own
expression), as to keep her only boy at college. By
her description, he is a slenderish lad in his constitution,
fond of poetry, and bent on trying his fortune
with his pen, as soon as he has closed his thumb and
finger on his degree. The good dame wished for the
best advice I could give him on the subject, leaving it
to me (after producing a piece of his poetry from her
pocket, published in one of the city papers) to encourage
or dissuade. I apprehended a troublesome
job of it, but after a very genial conversation (on the
subject of raising turkeys, in which she quite agreed
with me, that they were cheaper bought than raised,
when corn was fifty cents a bushel—greedy gobblers!),
I reverted to the topic of poetry, and promised to
write the inspired sophomore my views as to his prospects.
Need I record it?—that long letter affects me
like an unsigned bank-note—like something which
might so easily have been money—like a leak in the
beer-barrel—like a hole in the meal-bag! It irks me
to lose them—three fair pages—a league's drift to leeward—a
mortal morning's work, and no odor lucri
thence arising! I can not stand it, Mrs. —, and
Mr. Sophomore —! You are welcome to the
autograph copy, but faith! I must print it. There is
a superfluity of adjectives (intended, as it was, for
private perusal), but I will leave them out in the copy.

Thus runs the letter:—

Dear Sir: You will probably not recognise the
handwriting in which you are addressed, but by casting
your eye to the conclusion of the letter, you will
see that it comes from an old stager in periodical literature;
and of that, as a profession, I am requested
by your mother to give you, as she phrases it, “the
cost and yield.” You will allow what right you please
to my opinions, and it is only with the authority of
having lived by the pen, that I pretend to offer any
hints on the subject for your guidance. As “the
farm” can afford you nothing beyond your education,
you will excuse me for presuming that you need information
mainly as to the livelihood to be got from
literature.

Your mother thinks it is a poor market for potatoes,
where potatoes are to be had for nothing, and
that is simply the condition of American literature (as
protected by law). The contributors to the numerous
periodicals of England, are the picked men of
thousands—the accepted of hosts rejected—the flower
of a highly-educated and refined people—soldiers,
sailors, lords, ladies, and lawyers—all at leisure, all
anxious to turn a penny, all ambitious of print and
profit; and this great army, in addition to the hundreds
urged by need and pure literary zeal—this great
army, I say, are before you in the market, offering
their wares to your natural customer, at a price for
which you can not afford to sell—nothing! It is true
that by this state of the literary market, you have
fewer competitors among your countrymen—the best
talent of the country being driven, by necessity, into
less congenial and more profitable pursuits; but even
with this advantage (none but doomed authors in the
field) you would probably find it difficult, within five
years after you graduated, to convert your best piece
of poetry into a genuine dollar. I allow you, at the
same time, full credit for your undoubted genius.

You naturally inquire how American authors live.
I answer, by being English authors. There is no
American author who lives by his pen, for whom London
is not the chief market. Those whose books sell
only in this country, make scarce the wages of a day-laborer—always
excepting religious writers, and the
authors of school-books, and such works as owe their
popularity to extrinsic causes. To begin on leaving
college, with legitimate book-making—writing novels,
tales, volumes of poetry, &c., you must have at least
five years support from some other source, for until
you get a name, nothing you could write would pay
“board and lodging;” and “getting a name” in
America, implies having first got a name in England.
Then we have almost no professed, mere authors.
They have vocations of some other character, also.
Men like Dana, Bryant, Sprague, Halleck, Kennedy,
Wetmore, though, no doubt, it is the first wish of
their hearts to devote all their time to literature, are
kept, by our atrocious laws of copyright, in paths less
honorable to their country, but more profitable to
themselves, and by far the greatest number of discouraged
authors are “broken on the wheel” of the public
press. Gales, Walsh, Chandler, Buckingham, and
other editors of that stamp, are men driven aside from
authorship, their proper vocation.

Periodical writing seems the natural novitiate to
literary fame in our country, and I understand from
your mother that through this lies your chosen way.
I must try to give you as clear an idea as possible of
the length and breadth of it, and perhaps I can best
do so by contrasting it with another carcer, which (if
advice were not always useless) I should sooner
advise.

Your mother's farm, then, consisting of near a hundred
acres, gives a net produce of about five hundred
dollars a year—hands paid, I mean, and seed, wear and
tear of tools, team, &c., first subtracted. She has
lived as comfortable as usual for the last three or four
years, and still contrived to lay by the two hundred
and fifty dollars expended annually on your education.
Were you at home, your own labor and oversight
would add rather more than two hundred dollars
to the income, and with good luck you might call
yourself a farmer with five hundred dollars, as the
Irish say, “to the fore.” Your vocation, at the same
time, is dignified, and such as would reflect favorably
on your reputation, should you hereafter become in
any way eminent. During six months in the year,
you would scarce find more than an hour or two in
the twenty-four to spare from sleep or labor; but in
the winter months, with every necessary attention to
your affairs out of doors, still find as much leisure for
study and composition as most literary men devote to
those purposes. I say nothing of the pabulum of
rural influences on your mind, but will just hint at
another incidental advantage you may not have
thought of, viz.: that the public show much more
alacrity in crowning an author, if he does not make
bread and butter of the laurels! In other words, if
you are a farmer, you are supposed (by a world not
very brilliant in its conclusions) to expend the most of
your mental energies (as they do) in making your
living; and your literature goes for an “aside”—
waste-water, as the millers phrase it—a very material
premise in both criticism and public estimation.

At your age, the above picture would have been
thrown away on myself, and I presume (inviting as it
seems to my world-weary eyes) it is thrown away now
upon you. I shall therefore try to present to you the
lights and shadows of the picture which seem to you
more attractive.

Your first step will be to select New York as the
city which is to be illustrated by your residence, and
to commence a search after some literary occupation.
You have a volume of poetry which has been returned
to you by your “literary agent,” with a heavy charge
for procuring the refusal of every publisher to undertake
it, and with your pride quite taken out of you,
you are willing to devote your Latin and Greek, your
acquaintance with prosody and punctuation, and a very
middling proficiency in chicography (no offence—
your mother showed me your autograph list of bills
for the winter term)—all this store of accomplishment

you offer to employ for a trifle besides meat, lodging,
and apparel. These, you say, are surely moderate
expectations for an educated man, and such wares, so
cheap, must find a ready market. Of such stuff, you
know that editors are made, and in the hope of finding
a vacant editorial chair, you pocket your MSS., and
commence inquiry. At the end of the month, you
begin to think yourself the one person on earth for
whom there seems no room. There is no editor
wanted, no sub-editor wanted, no reporter, no proof-reader,
no poet! There are passable paragraphists by
scores—educated young men, of every kind, of promising
talent, who, for twenty dollars a month, would
joyfully do twice what you propose—give twice as
much time, and furnish twice as much “copy.” But
as you design, of course, to “go into society,” and
gather your laurels as they blossom, you can not
see your way very clearly with less than a hay-maker's
wages. You proceed with your inquiries,
however, and are, at last, quite convinced that few
things are more difficult than to coin uncelebrated
brains into current money—that the avenues for the
employment of the head, only, are emulously crowded—that
there are many more than you had supposed
who have the same object as yourself, and that, whatever
fame may be in its meridian and close, its morning
is mortification and starvation.

The “small end of the horn” has a hole in it, however,
and the bitter stage of experience I have just
described, might be omitted in your history, if, by any
other means, you could be made small enough to go
in. The most considerable diminution of size, perhaps,
is the getting rid, for the time, of all idea of
“living like a gentleman” (according to the common
acceptation of the phrase). To be willing to satisfy
hunger in any clean and honest way, to sleep in any
clean and honest place, and to wear anything clean and
honestly paid for, are phases of the crescent moon of
fame, not very prominently laid down in our imaginary
chart; but they are, nevertheless, the first indication
of that moon's waxing. I see by the advertisements,
that there are facilities now for cheap living, which did
not exist “when George the Third was king.” A
dinner (of beef, bread, and potatoes, with a bottle of
wine) is offered, by an advertiser, of the savory name
of G— for a shilling, and a breakfast, most invitingly
described, is offered for sixpence. I have no
doubt a lodging might be procured at the same modest
rate of charge. “Society” does not move on this
plane, it is true, but society is not worth seeking at
any great cost, while you are obscure, and if you'll
wait till the first moment when it would be agreeable
(the moment when it thinks it worth while to caress
you), it will come to you, like Mohammed to the mountain.
And like the mountain's moving to Mohammed,
you will find any premature ambition on the subject.

Giving up the expectation of finding employment
suited to your taste, you will, of course, be “open to
offers,” and I should counsel you to take any that
would pay, which did not positively shut the door
upon literature. At the same wages you had better
direct covers in a newspaper office, than contribute
original matter which costs you thought, yet is not
appreciated; and in fact, as I said before with reference
to farming, a subsistence not directly obtained
by brain-work, is a material advantage to an author.
Eight hours of mere mechanical copying, and two
hours of leisurely composition, will tire you less, and
produce more for your reputation than twelve hours
of intellectual drudgery. The publishers and booksellers
have a good deal of work for educated men—
proof-reading, compiling, corresponding, &c., and this
is a good step to higher occupation. As you moderate
your wants, of course you enlarge your chances
for employment.

Getting up in the world is like walking through a
mist—your way opens as you get on. I should say,
that with tolerable good fortune, you might make by
your pen, two hundred dollars the first year, and increase
your income a hundred dollars annually, for
five years. This, as a literary “operative.” After
that period, you would either remain stationary, a
mere “workey,” or your genius would discover “by
the dip of the divining rod,” where, in the well-searched
bowels of literature, lay an unworked vein
of ore. In the latter case, you would draw that one
prize in a thousand blanks of which the other competitors
in the lottery of fame feel as sure as yourself.

As a “stock” or “starring” player upon the literary
stage, of course you desire a crowded audience,
and it is worth your while, perhaps, to inquire (more
curiously than is laid down in most advices to authors)
what is the number and influence of the judicious,
and what nuts it is politic to throw to the groundlings.
Abuse is, in criticism, what shade is in a picture, discord
in harmony, acid in punch, salt in seasoning.
Unqualified praise is the death of Tarpeia, and to be
neither praised nor abused is more than death—it is
inanition. Query—how to procure yourself to be
abused? In your chymical course next year, you will
probably give a morning's attention to the analysis of
the pearl, among other precious substances, and you
will be told by the professor, that it is the consequence
of an excess of carbonate of lime in the flesh of the
oyster—in other words, the disease of the sub-aqueous
animal who produces it. Now, to copy this politic
invalid—to learn wisdom of an oyster—find out
what is the most pungent disease of your style, and
hug it 'till it becomes a pearl. A fault carefully
studied is the germ of a peculiarity, and a peculiarity
is a pearl of great price to an author. The critics
begin very justly by hammering at it as a fault, and
after it is polished into a peculiarity, they still hammer
at it as a fault, and the noise they make attracts
attention to the pearl, and up you come from the deep
sea of obscurity, not the less intoxicated with the sunshine,
because, but for your disease, you would never
have seen it.

With one more very plain piece of counsel, I have
done. Never take the note of any man connected
with literature, if he will cash it for fifty per cent.

Breakfasts and the Quarterly.—Mr. Lockhart
cna never do harm except indirectly. His assertions
and his criticisms are taken with more than the
“grain of salt.” Mr. Cooper may have a private
quarrel with him for some of his ungentlemanly
phraseology, but for the literary part of the criticism
on “England,” it will stand in the place of a good advertisement
to the book, and there ends all its good
and evil. In the following passage, however, a blow
(most unwise and most injurious) is struck at one of
the pleasantest usages of English hospitality:—

“We suspect that Mr. Cooper will not think Mr.
Rogers's breakfasts quite so admirable, nor the other
twenty so transcendantly agreeable, when he learns
that it is by no means usual to invite strangers to
breakfast in London, and that such breakfasts are
generally given when the guest is one about whose
manners, character, or social position, there is some
uncertainty—a breakfast is a kind of mezzo-termine,
between a mere visit and the more intimate hospitality
of a dinner. It is, as it were, a state of probation.”—
Quarterly Review for October.

As the great organ of the tory party in England,
the Quarterly might fairly be taken by a foreigner as
an authority upon a point of English manners. The
consequence follows, that he can not be invited to breakfast
without fair ground to presume it an insult. Shots
have been exchanged upon slighter ground. At the

best, a suspicion is thrown upon this mode of hospitality
which deprives it entirely of its easy and confidential
character; and that it is an injury to society
which could only be corrected by the publication of
a correct portrait of Mr. Lockhart. No one after
seeing it would credit any assertion he might make
upon a subject involving a knowledge of good-fellowship.

The editor of the Quarterly looks his vocation better
than any man it has been my fortune to see. In
his gait and voice there is a feline resemblance which
is remarkable. It is impossible for a human being to
be more like a cat. To aid the likeness, he is slightly
parry-toed, and when you see him creeping along
Pall Mall on his way to the club, you can not avoid
the impression that he is mousing. In his person he
is extremely thin, and, but for his mouth, Lockhart
would look like a gentleman. In that feature lies a
whole epitome of the man. The lips are short, and
of barely the thickness of the skin, and habitually
drawn in close against the teeth. To this feature,
which resembles somewhat the mouth of a small
purse, all the countenance seems subordinate. The
contraction pulls upon every muscle of his face, and
upon every muscle is stamped the malice of which
his mouth is the living and most legible type.

This description of the man is very apropos of his
opinions of breakfast. I presume he was never asked
to an unceremonious breakfast in his life. Would
any one in his senses begin his day by sitting down
opposite to such a face for a couple of hours? Not
willingly, I should think.

I presume every Englishman except the editor of
the Quarterly will agree that to ask a stranger to
breakfast is much more flattering than to invite him
to dinner. Engagements to breakfast, indeed, are
almost always made at dinner. The reply to a letter
of introduction is usually a card and an invitation to
dine. If your host is pleased with you, nothing is
more common than for him to say at parting, “You
have been so engrossed that I have scarce spoken to
you—come and breakfast with me to-morrow at nine.”
You accept, and you improve on acquaintance into a
friend. In a snug library, all ceremony put off, the
mind tranquil and sincere, you enter upon a different
class of subjects, more familiar, more confidential.
The attention of your host is more undivided, and
your conversation leads you to make engagements for
the day, or the evening; and thus a man with whom
you might have discussed the corn-laws or the new
opera, forty times, across the glare of a dinner-table,
and only known at last as a talker of commonplaces,
becomes a pleasant friend, perhaps an intimate companion.

I have not the Quarterly Review by me at this moment,
but, if I do not mistake, the breakfasts with the
poet Rogers, described by Mr. Cooper, furnish the
text for Mr. Lockhart's “new light” upon this subject.
I am happy to have it in my power to set our
countrymen right upon the estimation in which
Cooper is held by that polished and venerable amphytrion.
It was kindly and complimentarily done of
Mr. Rogers to talk a great deal of a compatriot,
of whose talents he justly supposed every American
should be proud. I was enjoying (according to
Mr. Lockhart) the equivocal honor of breakfasting
with him—an honor which, questionable or not,
I shared with one of the most distinguished foreigners
then in England. This latter gentleman professed
the highest enthusiasm for the works of Cooper,
and took pains to draw out the venerable poet on the
subject of his personal manners, conversation, &c. A
handsomer eulogium of an absent author I never
heard. Mr. Rogers admired the bold independence
of his cast of mind, and spoke in the highest terms of
him as a gentleman and a friend. I can not, if it
were proper, quote the exact words he used; but,
subtract from this praise all you please to fancy might
have been said in kindness or compliment to a compatriot,
there was still enough left to gratify the self-love
of the most exacting.

If Mr. Lockhart had ever been similarly honored,
he would have excused Mr. Cooper for dwelling complacently
on the “breakfasts in St. James's Place.”
Rogers has lived in the very core of all that is precious
or memorable of two ages of English wit, literature,
and politics, himself oftenest the bright centre
around which it gathered. His manners are amenity
itself, his wit is celebrated, his powers, of narration
delightful. With all this he seems to forget his own
fame and himself, and never to have known envy or
ill-will. As he sits at that small breakfast-table, his
head silvery white, the bland smile of intellectual enjoyment
upon his lips, talking or listening with equal
pleasure, and with the greatest tact and delicacy, alternately
drawing out the resources of his guests, and
exhibiting modestly his own, he is a picture of tranquil,
dignified, and green old age, which it were a pity
to have travelled far and not seen. I felicitate Mr.
Cooper on the possession of his esteem and friendship.
I please myself with remembering that I have
seen him. I pity Mr. Lockhart that the class of entertainments
of which this is one, is reserved for those
whose faces will not “spoil the cream.”

Between butchering for Fraser and dissecting for
the Quarterly, Mr. Lockhart may have derived a sufficient
revenue to “give dinners;” but he forgets that
more amiable literature is not so salcable, and that his
brother authors are compelled to entertain strangers at
breakfast. Taboo that meal, and, good heavens!
what becomes of the “great army of writers” in London,
who, over “tea and toast,” in their quiet lodgings,
give the admiring pilgrim of literature a feast of
reason—one alone worth all the dinners of May fair?

What becomes of younger sons, and callow orators,
and lawyers in the temple, who, over red herrings and
coffee, let the amused guest into the secrets of their
menus-plaisirs, and trenching a half-crown, at the
most, upon their slender pockets, send him away delighted
with their gay hospitality. Breakfasts! What
would you know of authors and artists without
breakfasts? You see but half the man in his works.
Would you rather breakfast with Chantrey in his studio,
and hear him criticise his own marble, or dine
with him at Lord Lansdowne's, and listen to his bavardage
upon fly-fishing? Would you rather see gentle
Barry Cornwall, smothered and silent, among wits and
lordlings at “miladi's,” or breakfast with him in his
crammed library in St. John's Wood, and hear him
read one of his unpublished songs, with the tears in
his eyes, and the children at his knee, breathless with
listening? Would you rather meet Moore, over a
cup of tea, in the shop-parlor at Longman's, in Paternoster
row, or see him at one of the show-dinners
of this publishing Mecenas, at his villa in Hampstead?
Out upon the malicious hand that would sow
distrust and suspicion in these delightful by-paths of
hospitality!

An author is always a double existence, and it is
astonishing how different may be the intellectual man
from his everyday representative. Lockhart, the author
of Valerius, Adam Blair, and the Life of Sir
Walter Scott, is a splendid and delightful intellect—
no one can deny it. Mr. Lockhart, the gentleman
who looks as if he had a perpetual inclination to
whistle, and who does the bourreau for the Quarterly,
is an individual I should rather meet anywhere than—
at breakfast. Heaven send him a relaxation of his
facial muscles, and a little charity to leave the world
with.

A Spring Day in Winter.—A spring day sometimes
bursts upon us in December. One scarcely
knows whether the constant warmth of the fire, or the
fresh sunny breathings from the open window, are the
most welcome. At such a time, the curtains swing
lazily to the mild wind as it enters, and the light green
leaves of the sheltered flowers stir and erect themselves
with an out-of-door vigor, and the shuffled steps
and continued voices of the children in the street,
have the loitering and summer-like sound of June. I
do not know whether it is not a cockney feeling, but
with all my love for the country, fixed as it is by the
recollections of a life mostly spent in the “green
fields” I sometimes “babble of,” there is something in
a summer morning in the city, which the wet, warm
woods, and the solitary, though lonely haunts of the
country do not, after all the poetry that has been
“spilt upon them” (as Neal would say), at all equal.
Whether it is that we find so much sympathy in the
many faces that we meet, made happy by the same
sweet influences, or whatever else may be the reason,
certes, I never take my morning walk on such a day,
without a leaping in my heart, which, from all I can
gather by dream or revelation, has a touch in it of
Paradise. I returned once, on such a day, from an
hour's ramble after breakfast. The air rushed past
my temples with the grateful softness of spring, and
every face that passed had the open, inhaling expression
which is given by the simple joy of existence.
The sky had the deep clearness of noon. The clouds
were winnowed in light parallel curves, looking like
white shells inlaid on the arched heavens; the smooth,
glassy bay was like a transparent abyss opening to the
earth's centre, and edging away underneath, with a
slope of hills, and spires, and leafless woods, copied
minutely and perfectly from the upper landscape, and
the naked elms seemed almost clothed as the teeming
eye looked on them, and the brown hills took a teint
of green—so freshly did the summer fancies crowd
into the brain with the summer softness of the sunshine
and air. The mood is rare in which the sight
of human faces does not give us pleasure. It is a
curious occupation to look on them as they pass,
and study their look and meaning, and wonder at the
providence of God, which can provide, in this crowded
world, an object and an interest for all. With what
a singular harmony the great machine of society goes
on! So many thousand minds, and each with its
peculiar cast and its positive difference from its fellow,
and yet no dangerous interference, and no discord
audible above the hum of its daily revolution. I
could not help feeling a religious thrill, as I passed
face after face, with this thought in my mind, and saw
each one earnest and cheerful, each one pressing on
with its own object, without waiting or caring for the
equally engrossing object of the other. The man of
business went on with an absorbed look, caring only
to thread his way rapidly along the street. The student
strided by with the step of exercise, his lips
parted to admit the pleasant air to his refreshed lungs,
and his eye wandering with bewildered pleasure from
object to object. The schoolboy looked wistfully up
and down the street, and lingered till the last stroke
of the bell summoned him tardily in. The womanish
school-girl, with her veil coquettishly drawn, still
flirted with her boyish admirer, though it was “after
nine,” and the child, with its soiled satchel and shining
face, loitered seriously along the sidewalk, making
acquaintance with every dog, and picking up every
stone on its unwilling way. The spell of the atmosphere
was universal, and yet all kept on their several
courses, and the busy harmony of employment went
steadily and unbrokenly on. How rarely we turn
upon ourselves, and remember how wonderfully we
are made and governed!

Evanescent Impressions.—I have very often, in
the fine passages of society—such as occur sometimes
in the end of an evening, or when a dinner-party
has dwindled to an unbroken circle of choice
and congenial spirits, or at any of those times when
conversation, stripped of all reserve or check, is
poured out in the glowing and unfettered enthusiasm
to which convivial excitement alone gives the confidence
necessary to its flow—I have often wished, at
such times, that the voice and manner of the chance
and fleeting eloquence about us could be arrested and
written down for others beside ourselves to see and
admire. In a chance conversation at a party, in the
bagatelle rattle of a dance, in a gay hour over coffee
and sandwiches en famille, wherever you meet those
whom you love or value, there will occur pieces of
dialogue, jeux d'esprit, passages of feeling or fun—
trifles, it is true, but still such trifles as make eras in
the calendar of happiness—which you would give the
world to rescue from their ephemeral destiny. They
are, perhaps, the soundings of a spirit too deep for
ordinary life to fathom, or the gracefulness of a fancy
linked with too feminine a nature to bear the eye of
the world, or the melting of a frost of reserve from
the diffident genius—they are traces of that which is
fleeting, or struck out like phosphorus from the sea
by irregular chance—and you want something quicker
and rarer than formal description to arrest it warm
and natural, and detain it in its place till it can be
looked upon.

The First Feeling of Winter.—How delightfully
the first feeling of winter comes on the mind!
What a throng of tranquillizing and affectionate
thoughts accompany its first bright fires, and the
sound, out of doors, of its first chilling winds. Oh,
when the leaves are driven in troops through the
streets, at nightfall, and the figures of the passers-by
hurry on, cloaked and stooping with the cold, is there
a pleasanter feeling in the world than to enter the
closed and carpeted room, with its shaded lamps, and
its genial warmth, and its cheerful faces about the
evening table! I hope that I speak your own sentiment,
dear reader, when I prefer to every place and
time, in the whole calendar of pleasure, a winter
evening at home—the “sweet, sweet home” of childhood,
with its unreserved love and its unchanged and
unmeasured endearments. We need not love gayety
the less. The light and music and beauty of the
dance will always breed a floating delight in the brain
that has not grown dull to life's finer influences; yet
the pleasures of home, though serener are deeper,
and I am sure that the world may be searched over in
vain for a sense of joy so even and unmingled. It is
a beautiful trait of Providence that the balance is
kept so truly between our many and different blessings.
It were a melancholy thing to see the summer
depart with its superb beauty, if the heart did not
freshen as it turned in from its decay to brood upon
its own treasures. The affections wander under the
enticement of all the outward loveliness of nature,
and it is necessary to unwind the spell, that their rich
kindness may not become scattered and visionary. I
have a passion for these simple theories, which I trust
will be forgiven. I indulge in them as people pun.
They are too shadowy for logic, it is true—like the
wings of the glendoveer, in Kehama, gauze-like and
filmy, but flying high withal. You may not grow
learned, but you surely will grow poetical upon them.
I would as lief be praised by a blockhead as be asked
the reason.

The Poet Shelley.—Shelley has a private nook
in my affections. He is so unlike all other poets that

I can not mate him. He is like his own “skylark”
among birds. He does not keep ever up in the thin
air with Byron, like the eagle, nor sing with Keats
low and sweetly like the thrush, nor, like the dove
sitting always upon her nest, brood with Wordsworth
over the affections. He begins to sing when the
morning wakes him, and as he grows wild with his
own song, he mounts upward,
and it is wonderful how he loses himself, like the
delirious bird in the sky, and with a verse which may
be well compared for its fine delicacy with her little
wings, penetrates its far depths fearlessly and full of
joy. There is something very new in this mingled
trait of fineness and sublimity. Milton and Byron
seem made for the sky. Their broad wings always
strike the air with the same solemn majesty. But
Shelley, near the ground, is a very “bird in a bower,”
running through his merry compass as if he never
dreamed of the upward and invisible heavens. Withal,
Shelley's genius is too fiery to be moody. He was a
melancholy man, but it was because he was crossed
in the daily walk of life, and such anxieties did not
touch his imagination. It was above—far, far above
them. His poetry was not, like that of other poets,
linked with his common interests; and if it “unbound
the serpent of care from his heart,” as doubtless
it did, it was by making him forget that it was
there. He conceived and wrote in a wizard circle.
The illiberal world was the last thing remembered,
and its annoying prejudices, gall him as they might in
the exercise of his social duties, never followed over
the fiery limit of his fancy. Never have we seen
such pure abstraction from earthliness as in the temper
of his poetry. It is the clear, intellectual lymph,
unalloyed and unpolluted.

An Author's Judgment of his own Works.—
It is a false notion that the writer is no judge of his
own book. Verses in manuscript and verses in print,
in the first place, are very different things, and the
mood of writing and the mood of reading what one
has written, are very different moods. We do not
know how it is with others, but we open our own
volume with the same impression of strangeness and
novelty that we do another's. The faults strike us at
once, and so do the beauties, if there are any, and we
read coolly in a new garb, the same things which
upon paper recalled the fever of composition, and
rendered us incapable of judgment. As far as I can
discover by others' experience and my own, no writer
understands the phenomena of composition. It is
impossible to realize, in reading, that which is to him
impassioned, the state of feeling which produced it.
His own mind is to himself a mystery and a wonder.
The thought stands before him, visible to his outward
eye, which he does not remember has ever haunted
him. The illustration from nature is often one which
he does not remember to have noticed—the trait of
character, or the peculiar pencilling of a line in beauty
altogether new and startling. He is affected to tears
or mirth, his taste is gratified or shocked, his fancy
amused or his cares beguiled, as if he had never before
seen it. It is his own mind, but he does not recognise
it. He is like the peasant-child taken and
dressed richly; he does not know himself in his new
adornments. There is a wonderful metamorphosis in
print. The author has written under strong excitement,
and with a development and reach of his own
powers which would amuse him were he conscious
of the process. There are dim and far chambers in
the mind which are never explored by reason. Imagination
in her rapt phrensy wanders blindly there
sometimes, and brings out their treasures to the light
—ignorant of their value, and almost believing that
the dreams when they glitter are admired. There
are phantoms which haunt the perpetual twilight of
the inner mind, which are arrested only by the daring
hand of an overwrought fancy, and like a need done
in a dream, the difficult steps are afterward but faintly
remembered. It is wonderful how the mind accumulates
by unconscious observation—how the teint of a
cloud, or the expression of an eye, or the betrayal of
character by a word, will lie for years forgotten in the
memory till it is brought out by some searching
thought to its owner's wonder.

Frost.—It is winter—veritable winter—with bona-fide
frost, and cramping cold, and a sun as clear and
powerless as moonlight. The windows glitter with
the most fantastic frost-work. Cities, with their
spires and turrets, ranks of spears, files of horsemen
—every gorgeous and brilliant array told of in romance
or song, start out of that mass of silvery tracery,
like the processions of a magic mirror. What a
miraculous beauty there is in frost! What fine work
in its radiant crystals! What mystery in its exact
proportions and its maniform varieties! The feathery
snow-flake, the delicate rime, the transparent and
sheeted ice, the magnificent ice-berg moving down
the sea like a mountain of light—how beautiful are
they all, and how wonderful is it, that, break and
scatter them as you will, you find under every form
the same faultless angles, the same crystalline and
sparkling radiation. It sometimes grows suddenly
cold at noon. There has been a heavy mist all the
morning, and as the north wind comes sharply in, the
air clears and leaves it frozen upon everything, with
the thinness of palpable air. The trees are clothed
with a fine white vapor, as if a cloud had been arrested
and fixed motionless in the branches. They look, in
the twilight, like gigantic spirits, standing in broad
ranks, and clothed in drapery of supernatural whiteness
and texture. On close examination, the crystals
are as fine as needles, and standing in perfect parallelism,
pointing in the direction of the wind. They are
like fringes of the most minute threads, edging every
twig and filament of the tree, so that the branches are
thickened by them, and have a shadowy and mysterious
look, as if a spirit foliage had started out from the
naked limbs. It is not so brilliant as the common
rime seen upon the trees after a frozen rain, but it is
infinitely more delicate and spiritual, and to me seems
a phenomenon of exquisite novelty and beauty.

The Closing Year.—It is a melancholy task to
reckon with the departed year. To trace back the
curious threads of affection through its many-colored
woof, and knot anew its broken places—to number
the missing objects of interest, the dead and the neglected—to
sum up the broken resolutions, the deferred
hopes, the dissolved phantoms of anticipation, and
the many wanderings from the leading star of duty
—this is indeed a melancholy task, but, withal, a
profitable, and, it may sometimes be, a pleasant and a
soothing one. It is wonderful in what short courses
the objects of this world move. They are like arrows
feebly shot. A year—a brief year, is full of things
dwindled and finished and forgotten. Nothing keeps
evenly on. What is there in the running calendar
of the year that has departed, which has kept its place
and its magnitude? Here and there an aspirant for
fame still stretches after his eluding shadow—here and
there an enthusiast still clings to his golden dream—
here and there (and alas! how rarely) a friend keeps

his truth, and a lover his fervor—but how many more,
that were as ambitious, as enthusiastic, as loving as
these, when this year began, are now sluggish, and
cold, and false? You may keep a record of life, and
as surely as it is human, it will be a fragmented and
disjointed history, crowded with unaccountableness
and change. There is nothing constant. The links
of life are for ever breaking, but we rush on still. A
fellow-traveller drops from our side into the grave—a
guiding star of hope vanishes from the sky—a creature
of our affections, a child or an idol, is snatched from
us—perhaps nothing with which we began the race is
left to us, and yet we do not halt. “Onward—still
onward” is the eternal cry, and as the past recedes,
the broken ties are forgotten, and the present and future
occupy us alone.

There are bright chapters in the past, however. If
our lot is capricious and broken, it is also new and
various. One friend has grown cool, but we have
won another. One chance was less fortunate than
we expected, but another was better. We have encountered
one man's prejudices, but, in so doing, we
have unexpectedly flattered the partialities of his
neighbor. We have neglected a recorded duty, but a
deed of charity done upon impulse, has brought up
the balance. In an equable temper of mind, memory,
to a man of ordinary goodness of heart, is pleasant
company. A careless rhymer, whose heart is better
than his head, says —

It was a good thought suggested by an ingenious
friend of mine, to make one's will annually, and remember
all whom we love in it in the degree of their
deservings. I have acted upon the hint since, and
truly it is keeping a calendar of one's life. I have
little to bequeath, indeed—a manuscript or two, some
half dozen pictures, and a score or two of much-thumbed
and choice authors—but, slight as these
poor mementoes are, it is pleasant to rate their difference,
and write against them the names of our friends,
as we should wish them left if we knew we were presently
to die. It would be a satisfying thought in sickness,
that one's friends would have a memorial to
suggest us when we were gone—that they would
know we wished to be remembered by them, and remembered
them among the first. And it is pleasant,
too, while alive, to change the order of appropriation
with the ever-varying evidences of affection. It is a
relief to vexation and mortified pride to erase the
name of one unworthy or false, and it is delightful,
as another gets nearer to your heart, with the gradual
and sure test of intimacy, to prefer him in your secret
register.

If I should live to be old, I doubt not it will be a
pleasant thing to look over these little testaments.
It is difficult, now, with their kind offices and pleasant
faces ever about one, to realize the changes of feeling
between the first and the last—more difficult still to
imagine, against any of those familiar names, the
significant asterisk which marks the dead—yet if the
common chances of human truth, and the still more
desperate changes of human life, continue—it is
melancholy to think what a miracle it would be if
even half this list, brief and youthful as it is, should
be, twenty years hence, living and unchanged.

The festivities of this part of the year always seemed
to me mistimed and revolting. I know not what
color the reflections of others take, but to me it is
simply the feeling of escape—the released breath of
fear after a period of suspense and danger. Accident,
misery, death, have been about us in their invisible
shapes, and while one is tortured with pain, and
another reduced to wretchedness, and another struck
into the grave beside us, we know not why or how, we are
still living and prosperous. It is next to a miracle that
we are so. We have been on the edge of chasms continually.
Our feet have tottered, our bosoms have
been grazed by the thick shafts of disease—had our
eyes been spirit-keen we should have been dumb with
fear at our peril. If every tenth sunbeam were a
deadly arrow—if the earth were full of invisible abysses
—if poisons were sown thickly in the air, life would
hardly be more insecure. We can stand upon our
threshold and see it. The vigorous are stricken down
by an invisible hand—the active and busy suddenly
disappear—death is caught in the breath of the night
wind, in the dropping of the dew. There is no place
or moment in which that horrible phantom is not
gliding among us. It is natural at each period of
escape to rejoice fervently and from the heart; but I
know not, if others look upon death with the same
irrepressible horror that I do, how their joy can be so
thoughtlessly trifling. It seems to me, matter for
deep, and almost fearful congratulation. It should
be expressed in religious places and with the solemn
voice of worship; and when the period has thus been
marked, it should be speedily forgotten lest its cloud
become depressing. I am an advocate for all the
gayety that the spirits will bear. I would reserve no
particle of the treasure of happiness. The world is
dull enough at the best. But do not mistake its
temper. Do not press into the service of gay pleasure
the thrilling solemnities of life. I think anything
which reminds me of death, solemn; any time, when
our escape from it is thrust irresistibly upon the mind,
a solemn time; and such is the season of the new
year. It should be occupied by serious thoughts.
It is the time to reckon with one's heart—to renew
and form resolutions—to forgive and reconcile and
redeem.

Midnight.—The bell struck as the word was written!
Twelve—and how many-toned in the human
ear are the measured strokes that have proclaimed it.
The well and contemplative, the sick and restless, the
reveller hailing it as the empress of the hours, and the
patient and solemn watcher by the dead, counting it
on his vigil, and shuddering at the dreadful silence it
makes audible—sleepless ambition starting from its
waking dream, and sleeping guilt blessedly aroused
from its nightmare of detection—with what a different
voice and meaning do the tremulous and lengthened
cadences of that same bell fall upon the different ears
that listen to them! Yet it is so with everything
about us—and the boldest and best lesson of philosophy
is that which teaches us that outward circumstances
have no color of their own—that the universe
is within us—that the eye sees no light or shadow,
and the ear hears no music or jar, and the senses receive
no impression of pain or pleasure, but as the
inward eye is light or shaded, the inward ear attuned
or discordant, and the inward sense painful or pleasurable.
It is a glorious creed—for by it, he who
governs his own soul holds the key of the universe.
Its colors are put on at his bidding, its music wakes
at his desire, and its magnificent changes, arbitrary
and omnipotent as they seem, take form and pressure
from the small, still thought in his bosom! Yet how
difficult it is! How true, that “he who ruleth his
own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city.”
To put down at will the maniform spectres of
thought—to suppress fear and discouragement, and
sadness that comes up uncalled—to lay a finger on
the lip of complaint, and seal up a tear in its cell, and
press down, with a stern fetter, the ungovernable
nerve of unrest—to “lay commandment” on a throbbing

pulse, and break the wings of a too earnest imagination,
and smother, in their first rising, the thousand
impatient feelings that come out of time and
season—this it is that the anchorite in his cell, and
the master spirit in his career, and the student, wasting
over his lamp, may pray, and wrestle, and search
into many mysteries for—in vain!

In my days of idleness (a habit, by-the-by, which
should be put down as a nervous complaint in the
books) I occupied, for some nine hours in the day, a
window opposite a city-clock. It was a tolerable
amusement, between breakfast and recitation, to watch
the passing of the hours, “hand over hand.” I thought
then, as I think now, that the great deficiency in the construction
of the human mind, is the want of something
on the principle of the stop-watch, to suspend its operations
at will—but it is no slight relief, since I must
think, to have a dial-plate, or a nail in the wall, or any
object that it is no trouble to see, to serve as a nucleus
to thought. By-and-by, with the force of habit,
the dial became necessary. I could not think
tranquilly without it. My pulses beat sixty in the
minute. My imagination built by the hour—nine—
ten—twelve castles a day, as the lectures interfered
more or less with my repose.

In the course of time, I fell into the habit of musing
on the circumstances dependant on the arrival of
the hours, and as my mood happened to be gay or
gloomy, I pondered, with the strong sympathy of unoccupied
feelings, on the happiness or misery they
brought. If it was a bright sunny forenoon in May,
and the eggs had been well boiled at breakfast, the
striking of the clock—say twelve—stirred a thousand
images of pleasure. The boys just leaping out of
school, the laborer released from his toil, the belle
stepping forth for a promenade, the patient in the interval
of his fever—all came up in my imagination,
and their several feelings, with all the heightening of
imagination, became my own. If the weather was
hot, on the contrary, or the professor had bored me
at lecture, or if my claret was pricked at dinner, I
suffered the miseries of an hospital. There goes the
clock—say four! Some poor fellow now, at this very
moment, is baring his limb to the surgeon—the afternoon
is at the hottest, and the sick are getting restless
and weary—some hectic consumptive, fallen, perhaps,
into a chance sleep, is waked, by the troublesome
punctuality of his nurse, to take his potion—it
is the hour the dying man is told he can not survive.
Every misery imaginable under the sun rose in phantoms
around me, and I suffered and groaned under
the concentrated horrors of them all. It serves to
show how the mind is its own slave or its own master.
And so, having arrived at the moral, with your leave,
dear reader, for it is “past one,” I will to bed. Good
night!

Snow.—The black, unsightly pavement, every
stone of which you know with as cursed a particularity
as the chinks in the back of your fireplace, covered
with white. The heavy-wheeled carts, which
the day before shook the ground under you, and split
your ears with their merciless noise, replaced by sleds
with musical bells, driven swiftly and skilfully past.
The smoked houses, with their provokingly-regular
windows and mean doors, that have disturbed the sentiment
of grace in your fancy every walk you have
taken for months, all laden, and tipped, and frosted
into lines and surfaces of beauty; faultless icicles
hanging from the eaves of the shutters, and sparkling
crystals of snow edging every projecting stone—
magic could not exceed it! If the horn of Astolpho
had been blown from the cupola of the statehouse,
and the whole city had run mad, things could
not have looked more strangely new and delightful.
And the sleighing—other people like it, and for their
sake I blessed Providence for another item. I like it
myself—for the first mile. But with the loss of sensation
in our feet and hands, I have a trick of growing
very unhappy. I am content, after one ride, with
seeing a sleigh through a parlor-window.

Eight o'clock—how merrily the sleigh-bells ring
to-night! One comes into hearing as another is lost,
and the loud, laughing, and merry voices of the gay
riders come up to my retired room in the veriest contrast
to my own quiet occupation. How more than
solitude it separates one from humanity, to live in the
midst of the gay world and take no part in its enjoyments!
An eremite in the crowd is the only contented
solitary. In the midst of the heaviest sadness
the heart feels in this wretched world, the form of
distant pleasure is beautiful. We must live near that
treacherous dame to know how sorrows lurk in her
shadow. Break down the imagination as you will, and
bind it by the most relentless memories to your sick
heart, it will steal away to scenes you had thought
forgotten, and come back fired with their false beauty,
to tempt you to try their winning flatteries once
more. It is only by knowing that you can call gayety
at any moment to your side, that you can quite
forget it; and the studious tenant of a garret, to
whose solitude the mingled murmur of a city comes
constantly up—who can abandon his books whenever
the fancy takes him, for the crowd, and enter and
throng on with it after its fleeting lure—is the only
man who, with youth and the common gifts of Providence,
can heartily despise it.

And he—if contrast is (as who will deny that has
followed after the impossible spirit of contentment, till
hope is dead within him)—if contrast is, I say, the
only bliss in life—then does he, the scholar in the
crowd, live with a most excellent wisdom. He is
roused from communion with a spirit whose immortal
greatness has outlived twenty generations, by the
passing mirth of a fool whose best deed will not live
in the world's memory an hour. He sits and pores
upon an eternal truth, or fires his fancy with heavenly
poetry, or winds about him the enchantments of truth-woven
fiction, or searches the depths of his own sufficient
heart for the sublime wisdom of human nature,
and from the very midst he is plucked back to this
every-day world, and compelled to the use of faculties
in which a brute animal equals or surpasses him!
One moment following the employment of an angel,
the next contending with meanness and cunning for
his daily bread—now kindled to rapture with some
new form of beauty, and now disgusted to loathing
with some new-developed and unredeemable baseness
in his fellow-men. What contrast is there like this?
Who knows so well as a scholar the true sweetness
of surprise? the delightful and only spice of this otherwise
contemptible life—novel sensation?

Change.—How natural it is, like the host in the
rhyme, to

How true a similitude it is of every change, not only
of time and season, but of feeling and fancy. I have
just walked from the window where I stood looking
upon the two elms that have refreshed my eye with
their lively verdure the summer long, and the adventurous
vine, overtopping our neighbor's chimneys, that
was covered but a week ago with masses of splendid
crimson and scarlet, and with the irresistible regret I feel
always at the decay of nature powerful within me, I have
seated myself at the fire, with a gladness in the supplanting
pleasures of winter, that brings with it, not
only a consolation for the loss, but an immediate forgetfulness
of the past. “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is
more delightful than to feel a new passion rising when
the flame that burned before is not quite extinguished,
as, when the sun sets, we turn with pleasure
to the rising moon.” Who would give a fig for
friendship! Who would waste golden hours in winning
regard! Who, with this lesson before him,
would do aught but look well to his reckoning with
heaven, and turn in upon his own soul what time and
talents are left to him after! It is a bitter philosophy
to learn. The outward world is my first love, and,
with all my disappointment, it is difficult at first to
set up a new altar for the inner. I would not be ascetic;
neither would I be so happy that, like Polycrates,
I must throw my ring into the sea that I may
have something to lament; but I believe he has the
true savoir vivre, who, believing fully in the world's
unprofitableness, is willing to be amused by it, and
who, conversant with its paths and people, has better
places and friends (solitude and his books) to which
he can enter and shut the door to be at peace.

Winter Trip to Nahant.—The old chronicler,
Time, strides on over the holyday seasons as if nothing
could make him loiter. It may be a hallucination,
but a winter's day, spite of the calendar, is as
long to me as two summer ones. I do not feel the
scene pass. There is no measure kept on my senses
by its evenly-told pulse. The damp morning, and the
silent noon, and the golden twilight, come and go;
and if I breathe the freshness of the one, and sleep
under the repose of the other, and gaze upon the
beauties of the third, why, the end of existence seems
answered. Labor is not in harmony with it. The
thought that disturbs a nerve is an intrusion. Life's
rapid torrent loiters in a pool, and its bubbles all break
and are forgotten. Indolence is the mother of philosophy,
and I “let the world slide.” I think with
Rousseau, that “the best book does but little good to
the world, and much harm to the author.” I remember
Colton's three difficulties of authorship, and Pelham's
flattering unction to idleness, that “learning is
the bane of a poet.” The “mossy cell of peace,”
with its

is a very Eden; and, of all the flowers of the field,
that which has the most meaning is your lily that
“toils not, neither does it spin;” and of all the herbs
of the valley, the
has the most medicinal balm. I am of the school of
Epicurus. I no longer think the “judicious voluptuousness”
of Godwin dangerous. Like the witch of
Atlas, I could “pitch my tent upon the plain of the
calm Mere,” and rise and fall for ever to its indolent
swell. And speaking of idleness (I admire Mochingo's
talent for digression—“Now thou speakest of
immortality, how is thy wife, Andrew”)—one of the
pleasantest ways of indulging that cardinal virtue
used to be by an excursion to Nahant. Establishing
myself unostentariously upon the windward quarter
of the boat, to avoid the vile volatile oils from the
machinery—Shelley in one hand, perhaps, or Elia, or
quaint Burton—(English editions, redolent in Russia,
and printed as with types of silver)—with one of these,
I say, to refresh the eye and keep the philosophic
vein breathing freely, the panorama of the bay passes
silently before my eye—island after island, sail after
sail, like the conjurations of a magic mirror. And
this is all quiet, let me tell you—all in harmony with
the Socratic humor—for the reputable steamer Ousatonic
(it distresses me daily that it was not spelt with
an H) is none of your fifteen-milers—none of your
high-pressure cut-waters, driving you through the
air, breathless with its unbecoming velocity, and with
the fear of the boiler before your eyes—but with a
dignified moderation, consistent with a rational doubt
of the integrity of a copper-kettle, and a natural abhorrence
of hot water, she glides safely and softly
over her half-dozen miles an hour, and lands you,
cool and good-humored, upon the rocky peninsula,
for a consideration too trifling to be mentioned in a
well-bred period. And then if the fates will me an
agreeable companion (I wish we had time to describe
my beau-ideal), how delightful, as Apple island is
neared, with its sweep of green banks and its magnificent
elms—every foot of its tiny territory green and
beautiful—how delightful to speculate upon the character
of its eccentric occupant, and repeat the thousand
stories told of him, and peer about his solitary
cottage to catch a glimpse of his erect figure, and
draw fanciful portraits of his daughter, who, the world
says, for the sixteen years of her sweet life, has had
only the range of those limited lawns, which she may
ramble over in an hour—and, as the boat glides by, to
watch the fairy isle sleeping, if the bay is calm, with
its definite shadow, and looking like a sphere, floating
past in the air, covered with luxuriant verdure. It is
but a brief twelve miles from Boston to Nahant, and
the last four stretch out beyond the chain of islands,
upon the open sea. To a city-bred eye and fancy
there is a refreshing novelty, added to the expanding
influence of so broad a scene, which has in it a vigorous
and delightful stimulus. The mind gets out of
its old track. The back-ground of the mental picture
is changed, and it affects the whole. The illimitable
sky and water draw out the imagination to its remotest
link, and the far apart and shining sails, each covering
its little and peculiar world, and sped with the
thousand hopes of those for whom its lonely adventurers
are tracking the uncertain sea, win on the mind
to follow them upon their perilous way, and breathe
for them the “God speed” of unconscious interest.
It is a beautiful and magic sight to see them gliding
past each other on their different courses, impelled
by the same invisible wind, now dark with shadow,
and now turning full to the light, and specking the
horizon, like the white birds careering along the edge
of its definite line. The sea grows upon you as you
see it more. The disappointment felt at first in its
extent wears away, as you remember its vast stretch
under those blue depths, which your eye can not
search; and the waste of its “untrampled floor,” and
the different depths at which the different spoils of
the sunk ships have balanced and hung, and the innumerable
tribes who range their own various regions
of pressure, from the darkest caverns to the thin and
lighted chambers at its surface, all come step by step
upon the mind, and crowd it with a world of wondering
speculation. It is delightful to sit with the
agreeable companion spoken of, and with the green
waves heaving about us, to indulge in these wayward
and unprofitable imaginations. It is a splendid range
for a wild-winged thought—that measureless sea! I
love to talk of its strange mysteries. I love to go
down with one who will not check me with cold objections,
and number and shape out its inhabitants.
With such a fellow-wanderer, I have found palaces
that surpass Aladdin's, and beings to whom the upper
and uncondensed water has a suffocating thinness.
But these are idle speculations to the world's eye,
gentle reader, and should be reserved for your private
ear. We will go, some summer afternoon, and talk
them over together on the deck of that same deliberate
steamer. You have no idea how many things
are untold of the deep sea—how many dreams of it
an idler man than yourself will weave out of its green
depths in his after-dinner musings.

Sir Philip Sidney.—“Gentle Sir Philip Sidney,”
says Tom Nash, in two sweetly-flowing sentences
of his Pierce Penniless, “thou knewest what belonged
to a scholar; thou knewest what pains, what
toil, what travel, conduct to perfection; well couldst
thou give every virtue his encouragement, every art
his due, every writer his desert, 'cause none more
virtuous, witty, or learned, than thyself. But thou
art dead in thy grave, and hast left too few successors
of thy glory; too few to cherish the sons of the muses,
or water those budding hopes with their plenty,
which thy bounty erst planted.”—“He was not only
of an excellent wit,” relates, in his own confused and
rambling way, the eminent antiquarian John Aubrey,
who was born not more than forty years after Sidney's
decease, “but extremely beautiful; he much resembled
his sister, but his hair was not red, but a little inclining,
viz., a dark amber color. If I were to find fault
in it, methinks it is not masculine enough; yet he
was a person of great courage.”[1] “He was, if ever
there was one,” says another writer, “a gentleman
finished and complete, in whom mildness was associated
with courage, erudition mollified by refinement,
and courtliness dignified by truth. England will ever
place him among the noblest of her sons; and the
light of chivalry, which was his guide and beacon,
will ever lend its radiance to illume his memory. He
died at the age of thirty-two, and if the lives of Milton
and Dryden had not been prolonged beyond that
period, where would have been their renown?”

Glorious Sidney! It stirs the blood warmly about
one's heart to think of him. It is somewhat late in
the day, I know, to eulogize him; but his bright
honor and his beautiful career, are among my earliest
historical recollections, and I have remembered it
since with the passionate interest that in every one's
mind burns in, with an enamel of love, some one of
the bright images presented in boyhood. You have
some such idol of fancy, I dare answer for it, reader
of mine—some young (for young he must be, or affection
stiffens into respect)—some young and famous,
and withal courtly, and perhaps “beautiful,” winner
of a name. It is Gaston de Foix, perhaps, with his
fierce thirst for glory (the pictures of him by the old
masters are models of manly beauty), or the fourth
Henry, with his temper of romance (the handsomest
man in his kingdom), or (if you loved your classics)
Alcibiades (you forget, of course, that he was a voluptuary),
or the generous Antony (“Shakspere's” rather
than the historian's), or Hylas, or Endymion, or
Phæton (he cleared the first few planets in fine style),
or some other formosus puer adored and sung by the
glorious old bards upon the shores of Tiber or Ilissus.
He rises to your mind as I mention it—a figure of
graceful youth, the slight and elegant proportions of
the boy, just ripening into the muscular fulness of
manhood—his neck rising with a free majesty from
his shoulders, and his eye kindling with some passing
thought of glory, answered by the proud and deliberate
curving of his lip, and the animated expansion of
his nostril. You see him with your mind's eye—the
classic model and classic dream of your scholar-days,
when the sound of the leaves in the tree over you had
the swell of an hexameter in your ear, and your
thoughts came in Latin, and a line of Homer sprung
to your lips in your involuntary soliloquies. Ah!
those were days for dreams! Who would not let
slip the straining grasp of manhood—be it at wealth,
fame, power—anything for which he is flinging his
youth and gladness, and all his best treasures, behind
him—to be once more the careless dreamer that he
was—to lie once more upon a hill-side, and forget
everything in the unquestioned and unshadowed blessedness
of a boy!

Death-Love and Warning.—It was getting toward
midnight when a party of young noblemen came
out from one of the clubs of St. James street. The
servant of each, as he stepped upon the pavement,
threw up the wooden apron of the cabriolet, and
sprung to the head of the horse; but, as to the destination
of the equipages for the evening, there seemed
to be some dissensions among the noble masters.
Between the line of coroneted vehicles, stood a
hackney-coach, and a person in an attitude of expectancy
pressed as near the exhilarated group as he could
without exciting immediate attention.

“Whiich way?” said he whose vehicle was nearest,
standing with his foot on the step.

“All together, of course,” said another. “Let's
make a night of it.”

“Pardon me,” said the clear and sweet voice of
the last out from the club; “I secede for one. Go
your ways, gentlemen!”

“Now, what the deuse is afoot?” said the foremost,
again stepping back on the sidewalk. “Don't
let him off, Fitz! Is your cab here, Byron, or will
you let me drive you? By Jove, you sha'n't leave us!”

“But you shall leave me, and so you are not forsworn,
my friend! In plain phrase, I won't go with
you! And I don't know where I shall go; so spare
your curiosity the trouble of asking. I have a presentiment
that I am wanted—by devil or angel—

“And a very pretty hand it is, I dare swear,” said
the former speaker, jumping into his cab and starting
off with a spring of his blood horse, followed by all
the vehicles at the club-door, save one.

Byron stood looking after them a moment, and
raised his hat and pressed his hand hard on his forehead.
The unknown person who had been lurking
near, seemed willing to leave him for a moment to his
thoughts, or was embarrassed at approaching a stranger.
As Byron turned with his halting step to descend
the steps, however, he came suddenly to his side.

“My lord!” he said, and was silent, as if waiting
for permission to go on.

“Well,” replied Byron, turning to him without the
least surprise, and lookingly closely into his face by
the light of the street-lamp.

“I come to you with an errand which perhaps—”

“A strange one, I am sure; but I am prepared for
it—I have been forewarned of it. What do you require
of me? for I am ready!”

“This is strange!” exclaimed the man.—“Has
another messenger, then—”

“None except a spirit—for my heart alone told me
I should be wanted at this hour. Speak at once.”

“My lord, a dying girl has sent for you!”

“Do I know her?”

“She has never seen you. Will you come at once
—and on the way I will explain to you what I can of
this singular errand; though, indeed, when it is told
you, you know all that I comprehend.”

They were at the door of the hackney-coach, and
Byron entered it without further remark.

“Back again!” said the stranger, as the coachman
closed the door, “and drive for dear life, for we shall
scarce be in time, I fear!”

The heavy tongue of St. Paul's church struck
twelve as the rolling vehicle hurried on through the
now lonely street, and though so far from the place
whence they started, neither of the two occupants

had spoken. Byron sat with bare head and folded
arms in the corner of the coach; and the stranger,
with his hat crowded over his eyes, seemed repressing
some violet emotion; and it was only when they
stopped before a low door in a street close upon the
river, that the latter found utterance.

“Is she alive?” he hurriedly asked of a woman
who came out at the sound of the carriage-wheels.

“She was—a moment since—but be quick!”

Byron followed quickly on the heels of his companion,
and passing through a dimly lighted entry to
the door of a back-room, they entered. A lamp,
shaded by a curtain of spotless purity, threw a faint
light upon a bed, upon which lay a girl, watched by
a physician and a nurse. The physician had just removed
a small mirror from her lips, and holding it to
the light, he whispered that she still breathed. As
Byron passed the edge of the curtain, however, the
dying girl moved the fingers of the hand lying on the
coverlet, and slowly opened on him her languid eyes
—eyes of inexpressible depth and lustre. No one had
spoken.

“Here he is,” she murmured. “Raise me, mother,
while I have time to speak to him.”

Byron looked around the small chamber, trying in
vain to break the spell of awe which the scene threw
over him. An apparition from the other world could
not have checked more fearfully and completely the
worldly and scornful under-current of his nature.
He stood with his heart beating almost audibly, and
his knees trembled beneath him, awaiting what he
prophetically felt to be a warning from the very gate
of heaven.

Propped with pillows, and left by her attendants,
the dying girl turned her head toward the proud,
noble poet, standing by her bedside, and a slight blush
overspread her features, while a smile of angelic
beauty stole through her lips. In that smile the
face reawakened to its former loveliness, and seldom
had he who now gazed breathlessly upon her, looked
on such spiritual and incomparable beauty. The
spacious forehead and noble contour, still visible, of
the emaciated lips, bespoke genius impressed upon a
tablet all feminine in its language; and in the motion
of her hand, and even in the slight movement of her
graceful neck, there was something that still breathed
of surpassing elegance. It was the shadowy wreck
of no ordinary mortal passing away—humble as were
the surroundings, and strange as had been his summons
to her bedside.

“And this is Byron?” she said at last, in a voice
bewilderingly sweet even through its weakness.
“My lord! I could not die without seeing you—
without relieving my soul of a mission with which it
has long been burthened. Come nearer—for I have
no time left for ceremony, and I must say what I
have to say—and die! Beautiful,” she said, “beautiful
as the dream of him which has so long haunted
me! the intellect and the person of a spirit of light!
Pardon me, my lord, that, at a moment so important to
yourself, the remembrance of an earthly feeling has
been betrayed into expression.”

She paused a moment, and the bright color that had
shot through her cheek and brow faded, and her
countenance resumed its heavenly serenity.

“I am near enough to death,” she resumed—
“near enough to point you almost to heaven from
where I am; and it is on my heart like the one errand
of my life—like the bidding of God—to implore you
to prepare for judgment. Oh, my lord! with your
glorious powers, with your wondrous gifts, be not
lost! Do not, for the poor pleasures of a world like
this, lose an eternity in which your great mind will
outstrip the intelligence of angels. Measure this
thought—scan the worth of angelic bliss with the
intellect which has ranged so gloriously through the
universe; do not, on this one momentous subject
of human interest—on this alone be not short-sighted!”

“What shall I do?” suddenly burst from Byron's
lips in a tone of agony. But with an effort, as if
struggling with a death-pang, he again drew up his
form and resumed the marble calmness of his countenance.

The dying girl, meantime, seemed to have lost
herself in prayer. With her wasted hands clasped
on her bosom, and her eyes turned upward, the slight
motion of her lips betrayed to those around her that
she was pleading at the throne of mercy. The physician
crept close to her bedside, but with his hand in
his breast, and his head bowed, he seemed but watching
for the moment when the soul should take its
flight.

She suddenly raised herself on the pillow. Her
long brown tresses fell over her shoulders, and a
brightness unnatural and almost fearful kindled in her
eyes. She seemed endeavoring to speak, and gazed
steadfastly at Byron. Slowly, then, and tranquilly
she sank back again upon her pillow, and as her hands
fell apart, and her eyelids dropped, she murmured,
“Come to Heaven!” and the stillness of death was in
the room. The spirit had fled.

The breaking of the silver cord is the first tone from
the life-strings of genius, which is answered only in
vibrations of affection. This truth, indeed, is touchingly
shadowed forth in the accompaniments of death.
The dark colors in the drapery of life, are dropped in
the weaving of the shroud. The discords of music
are rejected in the melody of the dirge. The praise
upon the marble is the first tribute written without
disparagement, and the first suffered without dissent.
It is this new relation of the public to a great name—
this completed and lucent phase of a light in literature—which
seems to make a posthumous recast of
criticism one of the legitimate departments of a review.
Like the public feeling, the condition and powers of
criticism toward an author's fame, are essentially
changed by his death. His personal character, and
the events of his life—the foreground, so to speak, in
the picture of his mind, are, till this event, wanting
to the critical perspective; and when the hand to correct
is cold, and the ear to be caressed and wounded
is sealed, some of the uses of censure, and all reserve
in comparison and final estimate, are done way.

It is time for the reviews to take up, on this ground,
the character and writings of Hillhouse. The author
of Hadad, the most finished and lofty poem of its
time, should have been followed, within a year after
his death, by a new and reverential appreciation, and
living, as he did, in a learned and literary circle of
friends, a biography at least, was looked for, out of
which criticism might shape a fresh monument to his
genius. Such men as Hillhouse are not common,
even in these days of universal authorship. In accomplishment
of mind and person, he was probably
second to no man. His poems show the first. They
are fully conceived, nicely balanced, exquisitely finished—works
for the highest taste to relish, and for the
severest student in dramatic style to erect into a model.
Hadad was published in 1825, during my second year in
college, and to me it was the opening of a new heaven
of imagination. The leading characters possessed me
for months, and the bright, clear, harmonious language
was, for a long time, constantly in my ears.
The author was pointed out to me, soon after, and
for once, I saw a poet whose mind was well imaged
in his person. In no part of the world have I seen a
man of more distinguished mien, or of a more inborn
dignity and elegance of address. His person was very

finely proportioned, his carriage chivalric and high-bred,
and his countenance purely and brightly intellectual.
Add to this a sweet voice, a stamp of high
courtesy on everything he uttered, and singular simplicity
and taste in dress, and you have the portrait
of one who, in other days, would have been the mirror
of chivalry, and the flower of nobles and troubadors.
Hillhouse was no less distinguished in oratory.
There was still remembered, at the time of the publication
of Hadad, an oration pronounced by him at
the taking of his second degree—an oration upon
“the Education of a Poet,” gloriously written, and
most eloquently delivered. His poem of “the Judgement,”
delivered before the “Phi Beta Kappa Society,”
added in the same way to his renown, as did a
subsequent noble effort of eloquence, to which I listened
myself, with irresistible enchantment.

Hillhouse had fallen upon days of thrift, and many
years of his life which he should have passed either
in his study, or in the councils of the nation, were
enslaved to the drudgery of business. His constitution
seemed to promise him a vigorous manhood,
however, and an old age of undiminished fire, and
when he left his mercantile pursuits, and retired to
the beautiful and poetic home of “Sachem's Wood,”
his friends looked upon it as the commencement of a
ripe and long enduring career of literature. In harmony
with such a life were all his surroundings—
scenery, society, domestic refinement, and companionship—and
never looked promise fairer for the realization
of a dream of glory. That he had laid out something
of such a field in the future, I chance to know,
for, though my acquaintance with him was slight, he
confided to me in a casual conversation, the plan of a
series of dramas, different from all he had attempted,
upon which he designed to work with the first mood
and leisure he could command. And with his high
scholarship, knowledge of life, taste and genius, what
might not have been expected from its fulfilment?
But his hand is cold, and his lips still, and his light,
just rising to its meridian, is lost now to the world.
Love and honor to the memory of such a man.

BACHELOR BOB'S DISCOVERIES.

“Come!” said Bachelor Bob, as he hitched his
chair closer to the table, “quite alone, half past
twelve, and two tumblers of toddy for heart-openers,
what say you to a little friendly inquisition into your
mortal felicity? You were the gayest man of my
acquaintance ten years ago; you are the gravest
now! Yet you swear by your Lares and Penates,
that (up to the lips as you are in care and trouble)
you never were so happy as in these latter days. Do
you swear this to me from a `way you have' of hanging
out trap for the world, or are you under a little innocent
delusion?”

Bob's hobby is the theory of happiness. Riches
and poverty, matrimony and celibacy, youth and age,
are subjects of contemplation to Bob, solely with reference
to their comparative capacity for bliss. He
speculates and talks about little else, indeed, and his
intercourse with his friends seems to have no other
end or aim than to collect evidence as to their happiness
and its causes. On this occasion he was addressing
a friend of mine, Smith, who had been a gay man
in his youth (a merry man, truth to say, for he was
in a perpetual breeze of high spirits), but who had
married, and fallen behindhand in his worldly affairs,
and so grown careworn and thoughtful. Smith was
rather a poet in a quiet way, though he only used poetry
as a sort of longer plummet when his heart got
off soundings. I am indebted to Bob for the specimens
of his verse-making which I am about to give,
as well as for the conversation which brought them
to light.

“Why,” said Smith, “you have stated a dilemma
with two such inevitable horns that argument would
scarcely help me out of it. Let me see, what proof
can I give you that I am a happier man than I used
to be, spite of my chapfallen visage?”

Smith mused a moment, and reaching over to a
desk near his elbow, drew from its private drawer a
book with locked covers. It was a well-filled manuscript
volume, and seemed a collection of prose and
verse intermixed. The last page was still covered
with blotting-paper, and seemed recently written.

“I am no poet,” said Smith, coloring slightly,
“but it has been a habit of mine, ever since my callow
days, to record in verse all feelings that were too
warm for prose; sometimes in the fashion of a soliloquy
(scripta verba), sometimes in verses to the dame
or damsel to whom I was indebted for my ignition.
Let me see, Bob! we met in Florence, I think?”

“For the first time abroad, yes!”

“Well, perhaps that was my gayest time; certainly
I do not remember to have been anywhere more gay
or reckless. Florence, 1832, um—here are some lines
written that summer: do you remember the beautiful
Irish widow you saw at one of the casino balls? addressed
to her, flirt that she was! But she began all
her flirtations with talking of her sorrows, and, if she
tried you on, at all—”

“She didn't!” interrupted Bob.

“Well, if she had you would have been humbugged
with her tender melancholy, as I was. Here are
the verses, and if ever I `turned out my lining to the
moon,' they are true to my inner soul in those days
of frolic. Read these, and then turn to the last page
and you will find as true a daguerreotype of the inner
light of my moping days, written only yesterday.”

“What a precious hypocrite you were for the merriest
dog in Florence!” exclaimed Bob, as he laid the
book open on its back, after reading these lines.
“You feel that way! credal Judæus! But there are
some other poetical lies here—what do you mean by
`we met but yesterday, and we part to-morrow,'
when I know you dangled after that widow a whole
season at the baths?”

“Why,” said Smith, with one of his old laughs,
“there was a supplement to such an outpouring, of
course. The reply to my verses was an invitation to
join their party the next morning in a pilgrimage to
Vallambrosa, and once attached to that lady's suite—
va pour toujours! or as long as she chose to keep you.
Turn to the next page. Before coming to the verses
of my more sober days, you may like to read one
more flourish like the last. Those were addressed to
the same belle dame, and under a continuance of the
same hallucination.”

Bob gravely read:—

“What had that flirting widow to do with the gentle
name of Mary?” exclaimed Bob, after laughing
very heartily at the point blank take-in confessed in
these very solemn verses. “Enough of love-melancholy,
however, my dear Smith! Let's have a look
now at the poetical side of care and trouble. What
do you call it?”—

Bob paused a moment after reading these lines.

“They seem in earnest,” he said, “and I will
sooner believe you were happy when you wrote
these, than that you were sad when you wrote the
others. But one thing I remark,” added Bob, “the
devout feeling in these lines written when you are
happiest; for it is commonly thought that tribulation
and sadness give the first religious tinge to the imagination.
Yours is but the happiness of Christian
resignation, after all.”

“On the contrary,” said Smith, “nothing makes
me so wicked as care and trouble. I always had,
from childhood, a disposition to fall down on my
knees and thank God for everything which made me
happy, while sorrows of all descriptions stir up my
antagonism, and make me feel rather like a devil than
a Christian.”

“In that case,” said Bob, taking up his hat, “good
night, and God prosper you! And as to your happiness?”

“Well, what is the secret of my happiness, think
you?”

“Matrimony,” replied Bob.