"Law, now, there's Miss Brown, she don't know nothin' about it, 'cause
she's got her servants to every turn. I s'pose she thinks it queer to
hear us talkin' about our work. Miss Brown must have her time all to
herself. I was tellin' the Deacon the other day that she was a
privileged woman."

"I'm sure, those that have servants find work enough following 'em
'round," said Mrs. Brown,--who, like all other human beings, resented
the implication of not having as many trials in life as her neighbors.
"As to getting the work done up in the forenoon, that's a thing I never
can teach 'em; they'd rather not. Chloe likes to keep her work 'round,
and do it by snacks, any time, day or night, when the notion takes
her."

"And it was just for that reason I never would have one of those
creatures 'round," said Mrs. Katy. "Mr. Scudder was principled against
buying negroes,--but if he had _not_ been, I should not have wanted any
of _their_ work. I know what's to be done, and most help is no help to
me. I want people to stand out of my way and let me get done. I've
tried keeping a girl once or twice, and I never worked so hard in my
life. When Mary and I do all ourselves, we can calculate everything to
a minute; and we get our time to sew and read and spin and visit, and
live just as we want to."

Here, again, Mrs. Brown looked uneasy. To what use was it that she was
rich and owned servants, when this Mordecai in her gate utterly
despised her prosperity? In her secret heart she thought Mrs. Katy must
be envious, and rather comforted herself on this view of the
subject,--sweetly unconscious of any inconsistency in the feeling with
her views of utter self-abnegation just announced.

Meanwhile the tea-table had been silently gathering on its snowy
plateau the delicate china, the golden butter, the loaf of faultless
cake, a plate of crullers or wonders, as a sort of sweet fried cake was
commonly called,--tea-rusks, light as a puff, and shining on top with a
varnish of egg,--jellies of apple and quince quivering in amber
clearness,--whitest and purest honey in the comb,--in short, everything
that could go to the getting-up of a most faultless tea.

"I don't see," said Mrs. Jones, resuming the gentle paeans of the
occasion, "how Miss Scudder's loaf-cake always comes out jest so. It
don't rise neither to one side nor t'other, but jest even all 'round;
and it a'n't white one side and burnt the other, but jest a good brown
all over; and it don't have no heavy streak in it."

"Jest what Cerinthy Ann was sayin', the other day," said Mrs. Twitchel.
"She says she can't never be sure how hers is a-comin' out. Do what she
can, it will be either too much or too little; but Miss Scudder's is
always jest so. 'Law,' says I, 'Cerinthy Ann, it's _faculty_,--that's
it;--them that has it has it, and them that hasn't--why, they've got to
work hard, and not do half so well, neither.'"

Mrs. Katy took all these praises as matter of course. Since she was
thirteen years old, she had never put her hand to anything that she had
not been held to do better than other folks, and therefore she accepted
her praises with the quiet repose and serenity of assured reputation;
though, of course, she used the usual polite disclaimers of "Oh, it's
nothing, nothing at all; I'm sure I don't know how I do it, and was not
aware it was so good,"--and so on. All which things are proper for
gentlewomen to observe in like cases, in every walk of life.

"Do you think the Deacon will be along soon?" said Mrs. Katy, when
Mary, returning from the kitchen, announced the important fact, that
the tea-kettle was boiling.

"Why, yes," said Mrs. Twitchel. "I'm a-lookin' for him every minute. He
told me, that he and the men should be plantin' up to the eight-acre
lot, but he'd keep the colt up there to come down on; and so I laid him
out a clean shirt, and says, 'Now, Father, you be sure and be there by
five, so that Miss Scudder may know when to put her tea a-drawin'.'
--There he is, I believe," she added, as a horse's tramp was
heard without, and, after a few moments, the desired Deacon entered.

He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, low, sinewy, thin, with black hair
showing lines and patches of silver. His keen, thoughtful, dark eye
marked the nervous and melancholic temperament. A mild and pensive
humility of manner seemed to brood over him, like the shadow of a
cloud. Everything in his dress, air, and motions indicated punctilious
exactness and accuracy, at times rising to the point of nervous
anxiety.

Immediately after the bustle of his entrance had subsided, Mr. Simeon
Brown followed. He was a tall, lank individual, with high cheek-bones,
thin, sharp features, small, keen, hard eyes, and large hands and feet.

Simeon was, as we have before remarked, a keen theologian, and had the
scent of a hound for a metaphysical distinction. True, he was a man of
business, being a thriving trader to the coast of Africa, whence he
imported negroes for the American market; and no man was held to
understand that branch of traffic better,--he having, in his earlier
days, commanded ships in the business, and thus learned it from the
root. In his private life, Simeon was severe and dictatorial. He was
one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant
themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and argue
to prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil. Simeon said he
always had thought so; and his neighbors sometimes supposed that nobody
could enjoy better experimental advantages for understanding the
subject. He was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive to
the Divine will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme
theology of that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel, no
imagination to conceive what endless happiness or suffering is, and who
deal therefore with the great question of the salvation or damnation of
myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked out by their
inevitable _x, y, z_.

But we must not spend too much time with our analysis of character, for
matters at the tea-table are drawing to a crisis. Mrs. Jones has
announced that she does not think "_he_" can come this afternoon, by
which significant mode of expression she conveyed the dutiful idea that
there was for her but one male person in the world. And now Mrs. Katy
says, "Mary, dear, knock at the Doctor's door and tell him that tea is
ready."

The Doctor was sitting in his shady study, in the room on the other
side of the little entry. The windows were dark and fragrant with the
shade and perfume of blossoming lilacs, whose tremulous shadow, mingled
with spots of afternoon sunlight, danced on the scattered papers of a
great writing-table covered with pamphlets and heavily-bound volumes of
theology, where the Doctor was sitting.

A man of gigantic proportions, over six feet in height, and built every
way with an amplitude corresponding to his height, sitting bent over
his writing, so absorbed that he did not hear the gentle sound of
Mary's entrance.

"Doctor," said the maiden, gently, "tea is ready."

No motion, no sound, except the quick racing of the pen over the paper.

"Doctor! Doctor!"--a little louder, and with another step into the
apartment,--"tea is ready."

The Doctor stretched his head forward to a paper which lay before him,
and responded in a low, murmuring voice, as reading something.

"Firstly,--if underived virtue be peculiar to the Deity, can it be the
duty of a creature to have it?"

Here a little waxen hand came with a very gentle tap on his huge
shoulder, and "Doctor, tea is ready," penetrated drowsily to the nerve
of his ear, as a sound heard in sleep. He rose suddenly with a start,
opened a pair of great blue eyes, which shone abstractedly under the
dome of a capacious and lofty forehead, and fixed them on the maiden,
who by this time was looking up rather archly, and yet with an attitude
of the most profound respect, while her venerated friend was assembling
together his earthly faculties.

"Tea is ready, if you please. Mother wished me to call you."

"Oh!--ah!--yes!--indeed!" he said, looking confusedly about, and
starting for the door, in his study-gown.

"If you please, Sir," said Mary, standing in his way, "would you not
like to put on your coat and wig?"

The Doctor gave a hurried glance at his study-gown, put his hand to his
head, which, in place of the ample curls of his full-bottomed wig, was
decked only with a very ordinary cap, and seemed to come at once to a
full comprehension. He smiled a kind of conscious, benignant smile,
which adorned his high cheek-bones and hard features as sunshine adorns
the side of a rock, and said, kindly, "Ah, well, child, I understand
now; I'll be out in a moment."

And Mary, sure that he was now on the right track, went back to the
tearoom with the announcement that the Doctor was coming.

In a few moments he entered, majestic and proper, in all the dignity of
full-bottomed, powdered wig, full, flowing coat, with ample cuffs,
silver knee- and shoe-buckles, as became the gravity and majesty of the
minister of those days.

He saluted all the company with a benignity which had a touch of the
majestic, and also of the rustic in it; for at heart the Doctor was a
bashful man,--that is, he had somewhere in his mental camp that
treacherous fellow whom John Bunyan anathematizes under the name of
Shame. The company rose on his entrance; the men bowed and the women
curtsied, and all remained standing while he addressed to each with
punctilious decorum those inquiries in regard to health and well-being
which preface a social interview. Then, at a dignified sign from Mrs.
Katy, he advanced to the table, and, all following his example, stood,
while, with one hand uplifted, he went through a devotional exercise
which, for length, more resembled a prayer than a grace,--after which
the company were seated.

"Well, Doctor," said Mr. Brown, who, as a householder of substance,
felt a conscious right to be first to open conversation with the
minister, "people are beginning to make a noise about your views. I was
talking with Deacon Timmins the other day down on the wharf, and he
said Dr. Stiles said that it was entirely new doctrine,--entirely
so,--and for his part he wanted the good old ways."

"They say so, do they?" said the Doctor, kindling up from an
abstraction into which he seemed to be gradually subsiding. "Well, let
them. I had rather publish _new_ divinity than any other, and the more
of it the better,--_if it be but true_. I should think it hardly worth
while to write, if I had nothing _new_ to say."

"Well," said Deacon Twitchel,--his meek face flushing with awe of his
minister,--"Doctor, there's all sorts of things said about you. Now the
other day I was at the mill with a load of corn, and while I was
a-waitin', Amariah Wadsworth came along with his'n; and so while we
were waitin', he says to me, 'Why, they say your minister is gettin' to
be an Armenian'; and he went on a-tellin' how old Ma'am Badger told him
that you interpreted some parts of Paul's Epistles clear on the
Armenian side. You know Ma'am Badger's a master-hand at doctrines, and
she's 'most an uncommon Calvinist."

"That does not frighten me at all," said the sturdy Doctor. "Supposing
I do interpret some texts like the Arminians. Can't Arminians have
anything right about them? Who wouldn't rather go with the Arminians
when they are _right_, than with the Calvinists when they are wrong?"

"That's it,--you've hit it, Doctor," said Simeon Brown. "That's what I
always say. I say, 'Don't he _prove_ it? and how are you going to
answer him?' That gravels 'em."

"Well," said Deacon Twitchel, "Brother Seth, you know Brother Seth,--he
says you deny depravity. He's all for imputation of Adam's sin, you
know; and I have long talks with Seth about it every time he comes to
see me; and he says, that, if we did not sin in Adam, it's givin' up
the whole ground altogether; and then he insists you're clean wrong
about the unregenerate doings."

"Not at all,--not in the least," said the Doctor, promptly.

"I wish Seth could talk with you sometime, Doctor. Along in the spring,
he was down helpin' me to lay stone fence,--it was when we was fencin'
off the south pastur' lot,--and we talked pretty nigh all day; and it
re'lly did seem to me that the longer we talked, the sotter Seth grew.
He's a master-hand at readin'; and when he heard that your remarks on
Dr. Mayhew had come out, Seth tackled up o' purpose and come up to
Newport to get them, and spent all his time, last winter, studyin' on
it and makin' his remarks; and I tell you, Sir, he's a tight fellow to
argue with. Why, that day, what with layin' stone wall and what with
arguin' with Seth, I come home quite beat out,--Miss Twitchel will
remember."

"That he was!" said his helpmeet. "I 'member, when he came home, says
I, 'Father, you seem clean used up'; and I stirred 'round lively like,
to get him his tea. But he jest went into the bedroom and laid down
afore supper; and I says to Cerinthy Ann, 'That's a thing I ha'n't seen
your father do since he was took with the typhus.' And Cerinthy Ann,
she said she knew 'twa'n't anything but them old doctrines,--that it
was always so when Uncle Seth come down. And after tea Father was
kinder chirked up a little, and he and Seth set by the fire, and was
a-beginnin' it ag'in, and I jest spoke out and said,--'Now, Seth, these
'ere things doesn't hurt you; but the Deacon is weakly, and if he gets
his mind riled after supper, he don't sleep none all night. So,' says
I, 'you'd better jest let matters stop where they be; 'cause,' says I,
''twon't make no difference, for to-night, which on ye's got the right
on't;--reckon the Lord 'll go on his own way without you; and we shall
find out, by'm-by, what that is.'"

"Mr. Scudder used to think a great deal on these points," said Mrs.
Katy, "and the last time he was home he wrote out his views. I haven't
ever shown them to you, Doctor; but I should be pleased to know what
you think of them."

"Mr. Scudder was a good man, with a clear head," said the Doctor; "and
I should be much pleased to see anything that he wrote."

A flush of gratified feeling passed over Mrs. Katy's face;--for one
flower laid on the shrine which we keep in our hearts for the dead is
worth more than any gift to our living selves.

We will not now pursue our party further, lest you, Reader, get more
theological tea than you can drink. We will not recount the numerous
nice points raised by Mr. Simeon Brown and adjusted by the Doctor,--and
how Simeon invariably declared, that that was the way in which he
disposed of them himself, and how he had thought it out ten years ago.

We will not relate, either, too minutely, how Mary changed color and
grew pale and red in quick succession, when Mr. Simeon Brown
incidentally remarked, that the "Monsoon" was going to set sail that
very afternoon, for her three-years' voyage. Nobody noticed it in the
busy amenities,--the sudden welling and ebbing of that one poor little
heart-fountain.

So we go,--so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we
talk! We drop out a common piece of news,--"Mr. So-and-so is
dead,--Miss Such-a-one is married,--such a ship has sailed,"--and lo,
on our right hand or our left, some heart has sunk under the news
silently,--gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble
rising to tell its drowning pang. And this--God help us!--is what we
call living!

CHAPTER V.

THE LETTER.

Mary returned to the quietude of her room. The red of twilight had
faded, and the silver moon, round and fair, was rising behind the thick
boughs of the apple-trees. She sat down in the window, thoughtful and
sad, and listened to the crickets, whose ignorant jollity often sounds
as mournfully to us mortals as ours may to superior beings. There the
little hoarse, black wretches were scraping and creaking, as if life
and death were invented solely for their pleasure, and the world were
created only to give them a good time in it. Now and then a little wind
shivered among the boughs, and brought down a shower of white petals
which shimmered in the slant beams of the moonlight; and now a ray
touched some tall head of grass, and forthwith it blossomed into
silver, and stirred itself with a quiet joy, like a new-born saint just
awaking in paradise. And ever and anon came on the still air the soft
eternal pulsations of the distant sea, sound mournfulest, most
mysterious, of all the harpings of Nature. It was the sea,--the deep,
eternal sea,--the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea; and
_he_ was perhaps at this moment being borne away on it,--away,
away,--to what sorrows, to what temptations, to what dangers, she knew
not. She looked along the old, familiar, beaten path by which he came,
by which he went, and thought, "What if he never should come back?"
There was a little path through the orchard out to a small elevation in
the pasture-lot behind, whence the sea was distinctly visible, and Mary
had often used her low-silled window as a door when she wanted to pass
out thither; so now she stepped out, and, gathering her skirts back
from the dewy grass, walked thoughtfully along the path and gained the
hill. Newport harbor lay stretched out in the distance, with the rising
moon casting a long, wavering track of silver upon it; and vessels,
like silver-winged moths, were turning and shifting slowly to and fro
upon it, and one stately ship in full sail passing fairly out under her
white canvas, graceful as some grand, snowy bird. Mary's beating heart
told her that _there_ was passing away from her one who carried a
portion of her existence with him. She sat down under a lonely tree
that stood there, and, resting her elbow on her knee, followed the ship
with silent prayers, as it passed, like a graceful, cloudy dream, out
of her sight.

Then she thoughtfully retraced her way to her chamber; and as she was
entering, observed in the now clearer moonlight what she had not seen
before,--something white, like a letter, lying on the floor.
Immediately she struck a light, and there, sure enough, it was,--a
letter in James's handsome, dashing hand; and the little puss, before
she knew what she was about, actually kissed it, with a fervor which
would much have astonished the writer, could he at that moment have
been clairvoyant. But Mary felt as one who finds, in the emptiness
after a friend's death, an unexpected message or memento; and all alone
in the white, calm stillness of her little room her heart took sudden
possession of her. She opened the letter with trembling hands, and read
what of course we shall let you read. We got it out of a bundle of old,
smoky, yellow letters, years after all the parties concerned were gone
on the eternal journey beyond earth.

"MY DEAR MARY,--

"I cannot leave you so. I have about two hundred things to say to you,
and it's a shame I could not have had longer to see you; but blessed be
ink and paper! I am writing and seeing to fifty things besides; so you
mustn't wonder if my letter has rather a confused appearance.

"I have been thinking that perhaps I gave you a wrong impression of
myself, this afternoon. I am going to speak to you from my heart, as if
I were confessing on my death-bed. Well, then, I do not confess to
being what is commonly called a bad young man. I should be willing that
men of the world generally, even strict ones, should look my life
through and know all about it. It is only in your presence, Mary, that
I feel that I am bad and low and shallow and mean, because you
represent to me a sphere higher and holier than any in which I have
ever moved, and stir up a sort of sighing and longing in my heart to
come towards it. In all countries, in all temptations, Mary, your image
has stood between me and low, gross vice. When I have been with fellows
roaring drunken, beastly songs,--suddenly I have seemed to see you as
you used to sit beside me in the singing-school, and your voice has
been like an angel's in my ear, and I have got up and gone out sick and
disgusted. Your face has risen up calm and white and still, between the
faces of poor lost creatures who know no better way of life than to
tempt us to sin. And sometimes, Mary, when I have seen girls that, had
they been cared for by good pious mothers, might have been like you, I
have felt as if I could cry for them. Poor women are abused all the
world over; and it's no wonder they turn round and revenge themselves
on us.

"No, I have not been bad, Mary, as the world calls badness. I have been
kept by you. But do you remember you told me once, that, when the snow
first fell and lay so dazzling and pure and soft, all about, you always
felt as if the spreads and window-curtains that seemed white before
were dirty? Well, it's just like that with me. Your presence makes me
feel that I am not pure,--that I am low and unworthy,--not worthy to
touch the hem of your garment. Your good Dr. H. spent a whole half-day,
the other Sunday, trying to tell us about the beauty of holiness; and
he cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us what it wasn't,
and what was _like_ it, and wasn't; and then he built up an exact
definition, and fortified and bricked it up all round; and I thought to
myself that he'd better tell 'em to look at Mary Scudder, and they'd
understand all about it. That was what I was thinking when you talked
to me for looking at you in church instead of looking towards the
pulpit. It really made me laugh in myself to see what a good little
ignorant, unconscious way you had of looking up at the Doctor, as if he
knew more about that than you did.

"And now as to your Doctor that you think so much of, I like him for
certain things, in certain ways. He is a great, grand, large pattern of
a man,--a man who isn't afraid to think, and to speak anything he does
think; but then I do believe, if he would take a voyage round the world
in the forecastle of a whaler, he would know more about what to say to
people than he does now; it would certainly give him several new points
to be considered. Much of his preaching about men is as like live men
as Chinese pictures of trees and rocks and gardens,--no nearer the
reality than that. All I can say is, 'It isn't so; and you'd know it,
Sir, if you knew men.' He has got what they call a _system_--just so
many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow to take in all I
see in my wanderings round this world of ours. Nobody that has a soul,
and goes round the world as I do, can help feeling it at times, and
thinking, as he sees all the races of men and their ways, who made
them, and what they were made for. To doubt the existence of a God
seems to me like a want of common sense. There is a Maker and a Ruler,
doubtless; but then, Mary, all this invisible world of religion is
unreal to me. I can see we must be good, somehow,--that if we are not,
we shall not be happy here or hereafter. As to all the metaphysics of
your good Doctor, you can't tell how they tire me. I'm not the sort of
person that they can touch. I must have real things,--real people;
abstractions are nothing to me. Then I think that he systematically
contradicts on one Sunday what he preaches on another. One Sunday he
tells us that God is the immediate efficient Author of every act of
will; the next he tells us that we are entire free agents. I see no
sense in it, and can't take the trouble to put it together. But then he
and you have something in you that I call religion,--something that
makes you _good_. When I see a man working away on an entirely honest,
unworldly, disinterested pattern, as he does, and when I see you, Mary,
as I said before, I should like at least to _be_ as you are, whether I
could believe as you do or not.

"How could you so care for me, and waste on one so unworthy of you such
love? Oh, Mary, some better man must win you; I never shall and never
can;--but then you must not quite forget me; you must be my friend, my
saint. If, through your prayers, your Bible, your friendship, you can
bring me to your state, I am willing to be brought there,--nay,
desirous. God has put the key of my soul into your hands.

"So, dear Mary, good-bye! Pray still for your naughty, loving

"COUSIN JAMES."

Mary read this letter, and re-read it, with more pain than pleasure. To
feel the immortality of a beloved soul hanging upon us, to feel that
its only communications with Heaven must be through us, is the most
solemn and touching thought that can pervade a mind. It was without one
particle of gratified vanity, with even a throb of pain, that she read
such exalted praises of herself from one blind to the glories of a far
higher loveliness.

Yet was she at that moment, unknown to herself, one of the great
company scattered through earth who are priests unto God,--ministering
between the Divine One, who has unveiled himself unto them, and those
who as yet stand in the outer courts of the great sanctuary of truth
and holiness. Many a heart, wrung, pierced, bleeding with the sins and
sorrows of earth, longing to depart, stands in this mournful and
beautiful ministry, but stands unconscious of the glory of the work in
which it waits and suffers. God's kings and priests are crowned with
thorns, walking the earth with bleeding feet, and comprehending not the
work they are performing.

Mary took from a drawer a small pocket-book, from which dropped a lock
of black hair,--a glossy curl, which seemed to have a sort of wicked,
wilful life in every shining ring, just as she had often seen it shake
naughtily on the owner's head. She felt a strange tenderness towards
the little wilful thing, and, as she leaned over it, made in her heart
a thousand fond apologies for every fault and error.

She was standing thus when Mrs. Scudder entered the room to see if her
daughter had yet retired.

"What are you doing there, Mary?" she said, as her eye fell on the
letter. "What is it you are reading?"

Mary felt herself grow pale; it was the first time in her whole life
that her mother had asked her a question that she was not from the
heart ready to answer. Her loyalty to her only parent had gone on
even-handed with that she gave to her God; she felt, somehow, that the
revelations of that afternoon had opened a gulf between them, and the
consciousness overpowered her.

Mrs. Scudder was astonished at her evident embarrassment, her
trembling, and paleness. She was a woman of prompt, imperative
temperament, and the slightest hesitation in rendering to her a full,
outspoken confidence had never before occurred in their intercourse.
Her child was the core of her heart, the apple of her eye, and intense
love is always near neighbor to anger; there was, therefore, an
involuntary flash from her eye and a heightening of her color, as she
said,--"Mary, are you concealing anything from your mother?"

In that moment, Mary had grown calm again. The wonted serene, balanced
nature had found its habitual poise, and she looked up innocently,
though with tears in her large, blue eyes, and said,--"No, mother,--I
have nothing that I do not mean to tell you fully. This letter came
from James Marvyn; he came here to see me this afternoon."

"Here?--when? I did not see him."

"After dinner. I was sitting here in the window, and suddenly he came
up behind me through the orchard-path."

Mrs. Katy sat down with a flushed cheek and a discomposed air; but Mary
seemed actually to bear her down by the candid clearness of the large,
blue eye which she turned on her, as she stood perfectly collected,
with her deadly pale face and a brilliant spot burning on each cheek.

"James came to say good-bye. He complained that he had not had a chance
to see me alone since he came home."

"And what should he want to see you alone for?" said Mrs. Scudder, in a
dry, disturbed tone.

"Mother,--everybody has things at times which they would like to say to
some one person alone," said Mary.

"Well, tell me what he said."

"I will try. In the first place, he said that he always had been free,
all his life, to run in and out of our house, and to wait on me like a
brother."

"Hum!" said Mrs. Scudder; "but he isn't your brother, for all that."

"Well, then, he wanted to know why you were so cold to him, and why you
never let him walk with me from meetings or see me alone, as we often
used to. And I told him why,--that we were not children now, and that
you thought it was not best; and then I talked with him about religion,
and tried to persuade him to attend to the concerns of his soul; and I
never felt so much hope for him as I do now."

Aunt Katy looked skeptical, and remarked,--"If he really felt a
disposition for religious instruction, Dr. H. could guide him much
better than you could."

"Yes,--so I told him, and I tried to persuade him to talk with Dr. H.;
but he was very unwilling. He said, I could have more influence over
him than anybody else,--that nobody could do him any good but me."

"Yes, yes,--I understand all that," said Aunt Katy,--"I have heard
young men say _that_ before, and I know just what it amounts to."

"But, mother, I do think James was moved very much, this afternoon. I
never heard him speak so seriously; he seemed really in earnest, and he
asked me to give him my Bible."

"Couldn't he read any Bible but yours?"

"Why, naturally, you know, mother, he would like my Bible better,
because it would put him in mind of me. He promised faithfully to read
it all through."

"And then, it seems, he wrote you a letter."

"Yes, mother."

Mary shrank from showing this letter, from the natural sense of honor
which makes us feel it indelicate to expose to an unsympathizing eye
the confidential outpourings of another heart; and then she felt quite
sure that there was no such intercessor for James in her mother's heart
as in her own. But over all this reluctance rose the determined force
of duty; and she handed the letter in silence to her mother.

Mrs. Scudder took it, laid it deliberately in her lap, and then began
searching in the pocket of her chintz petticoat for her spectacles.
These being found, she wiped them, accurately adjusted them, opened the
letter and spread it on her lap, brushing out its folds and
straightening it, that she might read with the greater ease. After this
she read it carefully and deliberately; and all this while there was
such a stillness, that the sound of the tall varnished clock in the
best room could be heard through the half-opened door.

After reading it with the most tiresome, torturing slowness, she rose,
and laying it on the table under Mary's eye, and pressing down her
finger on two lines in the letter, said, "Mary, have you told James
that you loved him?"

"Yes, mother, always. I always loved him, and he always knew it."

"But, Mary, this that he speaks of is something different. What has
passed between"--

"Why, mother, he was saying that we who were Christians drew to
ourselves and did not care for the salvation of our friends; and then I
told him how I had always prayed for him, and how I should be willing
even to give up my hopes in heaven, if he might be saved."

"Child,--what do you mean?"

"I mean, if only one of us two could go to heaven, I had rather it
should be him than me," said Mary.

"Oh, child! child!" said Mrs. Scudder, with a sort of groan,--"has it
gone with you so far as this? Poor child!--after all my care, you _are_
in love with this boy,--your heart is set on him."

"Mother, I am not. I never expect to see him much,--never expect to
marry him or anybody else;--only he seems to me to have so much more
life and soul and spirit than most people,--I think him so noble and
grand,--that is, that he _could_ be, if he were all he ought to
be,--that, somehow, I never think of myself in thinking of him, and his
salvation seems worth more than mine;--men can do so much more!--they
can live such splendid lives!--oh, a real noble man is so glorious!"

"And you would like to see him well married, would you not?" said Mrs.
Scudder, sending, with a true woman's aim, this keen arrow into the
midst of the cloud of enthusiasm which enveloped her daughter. "I
think," she added, "that Jane Spencer would make him an excellent
wife."

Mary was astonished at a strange, new pain that shot through her at
these words. She drew in her breath and turned herself uneasily, as one
who had literally felt a keen dividing blade piercing between soul and
spirit. Till this moment, she had never been conscious of herself; but
the shaft had torn the veil. She covered her face with her hands; the
hot blood flushed scarlet over neck and brow; at last, with a
beseeching look, she threw herself into her mother's arms.

"Oh, mother, mother, I am selfish, after all!"

Mrs. Scudder folded her silently to her heart, and said, "My daughter,
this is not at all what I wished it to be; I see how it is;--but then
you have been a good child; I don't blame you. We can't always help
ourselves. We don't always really know how we do feel. I didn't know,
for a long while, that I loved your father. I thought I was only
curious about him, because he had a strange way of treating me,
different from other men; but, one day, I remember, Julian Simons told
me that it was reported that his mother was making a match for him with
Susan Emery, and I was astonished to find how I felt. I saw him that
evening, and the moment he looked at me I saw it wasn't true; all at
once I knew something I never knew before,--and that was, that I should
be very unhappy, if he loved any one else better than me. But then, my
child, your father was a different man from James;--he was as much
better than I was as you are than James. I was a foolish, thoughtless
young thing then. I never should have been anything at all, but for
him. Somehow, when I loved him, I grew more serious, and then he always
guided and led me. Mary, your father was a wonderful man; he was one of
the sort that the world knows not of;--sometime I must show you his
letters. I always hoped, my daughter, that you would marry such a man."

"Don't speak of marrying, mother. I never shall marry."

"You certainly should not, unless you can marry in the Lord. Remember
the words, 'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For
what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what
communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with
Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?'"

"Mother, James is not an infidel."

"He certainly is an _unbeliever_, Mary, by his own confession;--but
then God is a Sovereign and hath mercy on whom He will. You do right to
pray for him; but if he does not come out on the Lord's side, you must
not let your heart mislead you. He is going to be gone three years, and
you must try to think as little of him as possible;--put your mind upon
your duties, like a good girl, and God will bless you. Don't believe
too much in your power over him;--young men, when they in love, will
promise anything, and really think they mean it; but nothing is a
saving change, except what is wrought in them by sovereign grace."

"But, mother, does not God use the love we have to each other as a
means of doing us good? Did you not say that it was by your love to
father that you first were led to think seriously?"

"That is true, my child," said Mrs. Scudder, who, like many of the rest
of the world, was surprised to meet her own words walking out on a
track where she had not expected them, but was yet too true of soul to
cut their acquaintance because they were not going the way of her
wishes. "Yes, all that is true; but yet, Mary, when one has but one
little ewe lamb in the world, one is jealous of it. I would give all
the world, if you had never seen James. It is dreadful enough for a
woman to love anybody as you can, but it is more to love a man of
unsettled character and no religion. But then the Lord appoints all our
goings; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps;--I leave
you, my child, in His hands." And, with one solemn and long embrace,
the mother and daughter parted for the night.

It is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for a
thoughtless, shallow-minded person. If we represent things as they are,
their intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and earnestness,
must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as the reverse pole of the
magnet drives off sticks and straws.

In no other country were the soul and the spiritual life ever such
intense realities, and everything contemplated so much (to use a
current New England phrase) "in reference to eternity." Mrs. Scudder
was a strong, clear-headed, practical woman. No one had a clearer
estimate of the material and outward life, or could more minutely
manage its smallest item; but then a tremendous, eternal future had so
weighed down and compacted the fibres of her very soul, that all
earthly things were but as dust in comparison to it. That her child
should be one elected to walk in white, to reign with Christ when earth
was a forgotten dream, was her one absorbing wish; and she looked on
all the events of life only with reference to this. The way of life was
narrow, the chances in favor of any child of Adam infinitely small; the
best, the most seemingly pure and fair, was by nature a child of wrath,
and could be saved only by a sovereign decree, by which it should be
plucked as a brand from the burning. Therefore it was, that, weighing
all things in one balance, there was the sincerity of her whole being
in the dread which she felt at the thought of her daughter's marriage
with an unbeliever.

Mrs. Scudder, after retiring to her room, took her Bible, in
preparation for her habitual nightly exercise of devotion, before going
to rest. She read and reread a chapter, scarce thinking what she was
reading,--aroused herself,--and then sat with the book in her hand in
deep thought. James Marvyn was her cousin's son, and she had a strong
feeling of respect and family attachment for his father. She had, too,
a real kindness for the young man, whom she regarded as a well-meaning,
wilful youngster; but that _he_ should touch her saint, her Mary, that
he should take from her the daughter who was her all, really embittered
her heart towards him.

"After all," she said to herself, "there are three years,--three years
in which there will be no letters, or perhaps only one or two,--and a
great deal may be done in three years, if one is wise";--and she felt
within herself an arousing of all the shrewd womanly and motherly tact
of her nature to meet this new emergency.

[To be continued.]

WHITE'S SHAKSPEARE[1]

(FIRST NOTICE.)

It may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to maintain more
than one truly great poet,--and whether there be more than one period,
and that very short, in the life of a language, when such a phenomenon
as a great poet is possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest
pieces of good-luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was
true of Shakspeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect,
its profoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding should
have been combined in one man, and that he should have arrived at the
full development of his powers at the moment when the material in which
he was to work--that wonderful composite called English, the best
result of the confusion of tongues--was in its freshest perfection. The
English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided
enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar; for, as the mixture of many bloods
seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the
mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the
noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.

Had Shakspeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been
cramped by a book-language, not yet flexible enough for the demands of
rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and
familiar expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical
phrase as to render possible that ideal representation of the great
passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice
and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease
and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years
later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England
absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious
problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that
Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in its functions and
degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his
contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant
pictures, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which seems to
have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious--could draw
its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons of prudence and
magnanimity. In estimating Shakspeare, it should never be forgotten,
that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and artist, and
incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, whose
character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those
of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to
question the right of that society to exist than to criticize the
divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they
were, not with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is
shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not
in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the
first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual
interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the
region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life. It
was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place.
Sir Thomas Browne, our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare, found
breathing-room, for a time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious
speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes
of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been
Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventional
discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic
wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total
shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land
of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues,
with whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his
sympathy. As purely poet, Shakspeare would have come too late, had his
lot fallen in that generation. In mind and temperament too exoteric for
a mystic, his imagination could not have at once illustrated the
influence of his epoch and escaped from it, like that of Browne; the
equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally
removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would
have unfitted him for the pulpit; and his intellectual being was too
sensitive to the wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have
found satisfaction, as Milton's could, (and perhaps only by reason of
his blindness,) in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures. We
might fancy his becoming a great statesman, but he lacked the social
position which could have opened that career to him. What we mean, when
we say Shakspeare, is something inconceivable either during the reign
of Henry the Eighth or the Commonwealth, and which would have been
impossible after the Restoration.

All favorable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his nativity.
The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and
its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse
and exhilaration; there were signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive
stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism.
Old forms of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching
to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted: the light of
skeptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes
still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of
Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing
letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past
contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could
read in inspiring contact with the select souls of all the centuries. A
new world was thus opened to intellectual adventure at the very time
when the keel of Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of
discovery in that unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth
with a beckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed by
rivers that flowed down out of primeval silences, and which still
washed the shores of Dreamland. Under a wise, cultivated, and
firm-handed monarch also, the national feeling of England grew rapidly
more homogeneous and intense, the rather as the womanhood of the
sovereign stimulated a more chivalric loyalty,--while the new religion,
of which she was the defender, helped to make England morally, as it
was geographically, insular to the continent of Europe.

If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here were all
the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, and the lucky
moment of projection was clearly come. If a great national poet could
ever avail himself of circumstances, this was the occasion,--and,
fortunately, Shakspeare was equal to it. Above all, we esteem it lucky
that he found words ready to his use, original and untarnished,--types
of thought whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In
reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are almost startled now and then to find
that even common sailors could not tell the story of their wanderings
without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, and habitually used a
diction that we should be glad to buy back from desuetude at any cost.
Those who look upon language only as anatomists of its structure, or
who regard it as only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to
mind, as if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the
fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not
mean what is technically called a living language,--the contrivance,
hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathing and moving bipeds,
even now, sailing o'er life's solemn main, are enabled to hail each
other and make known their mutual shortness of mental stores,--but one
that is still hot from the hearts and brains of a people, not hardened
yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in
the moulds of new thought. So soon as a language has become literary,
so soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of life,
the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost as dead as
Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in itself essentially
original becomes in the use of such a medium of utterance unconsciously
reminiscential and reflective, lunar and not solar, in expression and
even in thought. For words and thoughts have a much more intimate and
genetic relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of;
and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us,
and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary. "Ye know
not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for
Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the
Heart." _Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_ is the Italian proverb; and
that of poets should be, _The tongue of the people in the mouth of the
scholar_. We intend here no assent to the early theory, or, at any
rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought
with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by
absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of any poet of his
century.

Shakspeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and Norman by the
mother, he was a representative Englishman. A country-boy, he learned
first the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to
make nice verbs and adjectives curtsy to their needs. Going up to
London, he acquired the _lingua aulica_ precisely at the happiest
moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word,
_modern_,--just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from
the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new
ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were
fast making cosmopolitan, words which, in proportion to their novelty,
and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet
wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of
their meaning.[2] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage,
that a thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly
elements of English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, in his "Arte
of English Poesy," declares that the practice of the capital and the
country within sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction,
the _jus et norma loquendi_. Already Spenser had almost recreated
English poetry,--and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he
was, the archaic words which he was at first over-fond of introducing
are often provincialisms of purely English original. Already Marlowe
had brought the English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto
justified but half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to
a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has never been
surpassed. Shakspeare, then, found a language already to a certain
extent _established_, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary- and
grammar-mongers,--a versification harmonized, but which had not yet
exhausted all its modulations, or been set in the stocks by critics who
deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures
of which their judges are insensible. That the language was established
is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who
wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon
Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words
to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good
measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had
been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what
was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the
establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in
the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they
forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the
sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was
debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he
snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in
making a king speak as his country-nurse might have taught him.[3] It
was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone
comported with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakspeare, the
living tongue resembled that tree which Father Hue saw in Tartary,
whose leaves were languaged,--and every hidden root of thought, every
subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of
expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human
nature.

The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for
anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of
this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly
possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image,
becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it.
Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot
in the manuscripts they received from Shakspeare; and this is the
natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as
unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which
it embodied itself.[4] We believe that Shakspeare, like all other great
poets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and that
his words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than
followed necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of
passion they were called on to support. He needed not to mask familiar
thoughts in the weeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was
in his mind could transfuse the language of every day with an
intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery purpose,
and at each new reading a new creation. He could say with Dante, that
"no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had
forced many a word to say what _it_ would not,"--but only in the sense,
that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its
uttermost secret of power or pathos. He himself says, in one of his
sonnets,--

  "Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
  So far from alteration and quick change?
  Why, with the time, do I not glance aside
  To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
  Why write I still all one, ever the same,
  And keep invention in a noted weed
  That every word doth almost tell my name?"

When we say that Shakspeare used the current language of his day, we
mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally
comprehensible,--that he was not run away with by the hobby of any
theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for
expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a
choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in
ours is evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on
Drayton, and by the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose
poetic style is as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless
absurdities about the comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French,
vented by persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the
other, were as yet unheard of. The influence of the Normans in
Romanizing our language has been vastly overrated. We find a principle
of _caste_ established in certain cases by the relation of producer and
consumer,--in others by the superior social standing of the conquering
race. Thus, _ox_, _sheep_, _calf_, _swine_, indicate the thing
produced; _beef_, _mutton_, _veal_, _pork_, the thing consumed.[5] It
is the same with the names of the various grains, and the product of
the cheaper kinds when ground,--as _oat-meal_, _barley-meal_,
_rye-meal_; while the generic term for the crop becomes _grain_, and
the meal of the variety used by the higher classes is turned into
_flour_. To _bury_ remains Saxon, because both high and low must be
hidden under ground at last; but as only the rich and noble could
afford any pomp in that sad office, we get the word _funeral_ from the
Norman. So also the serf went into a Saxon _grave_, the lord into a
Norman _tomb_. All the parts of armor are naturally named from the
French; the weapons of the people, as _sword_, _bow_, and the like,
continued Saxon. So _feather_ is Saxon; but as soon as it changes into
a _plume_ for the knight, it turns Norman,--and Latin when it is cut
into a _pen_ for the _clerk_. _Book_ is Saxon; but a number of books
collected together, as could be done only by the rich, makes a
_library_. _Darling_ would be murmured over many a _cradle_ in Saxon
_huts_; but _minion_ came into the language down the back stairs of the
Norman _palace_. In the same way, terms of law are Norman, and of the
Church, Latin. These are familiar examples. But hasty generalizers are
apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great
extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in
the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex
ideas derived from them. The author of "Piers Ploughman" wrote for the
people, Chaucer for the court. We open at random and count the Latin[6]
words in ten verses of the "Vision" and ten of Chaucer's "Romaunt of
the Rose," (a translation from the French,) and find the proportion to
be seven in the former and five in the latter.

The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in
learning languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we
have Indian ones, and we believe that more French and Latin was
introduced through the pen and the eye than through the tongue and the
ear. For obvious reasons, the question is one that must be settled by
reference to prose-writers, and not poets; and it is, we think, pretty
well settled that more words of Latin original were brought into the
language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the whole period
before or since,--and for the simple reason, that they were absolutely
needful to express new modes and combinations of thought.[7] The
language has gained immensely by the infusion, in richness of synonyme
and in the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but
more than all in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the
music of verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar
Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in
_sweat_ and _perspiration_; but there are vastly more in which the
Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question between the old
English _again-rising_ and _resurrection_; but there can be no doubt
that _conscience_ is better than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than
_again-bite_. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's famous ode,
"Intimations of Immortality," into "Hints of Deathlessness," it would
hiss like an angry gander. If, instead of Shakspeare's

               "Age cannot wither her,
  Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"

we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer
in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the
high Roman fashion of such togated words as

   "The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--

where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the
speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean
more vividly than the famous phrase of AEschylus does its rippling
sunshine? Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell
felt, when he wrote,

  "Ye mariners of England,"

and Coleridge, when he preferred

  "It was an ancient mariner"

to

  "It was an elderly seaman";

for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain
remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only
that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also
their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic
variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be
rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid
was _buxom_, but we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its
original sense of _bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[8]

But the secret of force in writing lies not in the pedigree of nouns
and adjectives and verbs, but in having something that you believe in
to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is
when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious
necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It
is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example,
does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry.
Because Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded
thunder-stone" in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up
Wilton's Virgilian "fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English
conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of
riving and shattering. In the experiments made for casting the great
bell for the Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition
which attributed the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain
old bells to the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no
foundation in fact. It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary
metals were balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and
the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is
precisely so with the language of poetry. The genius of the poet will
tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?);
and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or
whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds
satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through
all its parts with a silvery unison,--in other words, a poem.

We think the component parts of English were in the latter years of
Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. Yet Bacon had
no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame
was to rest into what he called "the universal language," and affirming
that "English would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of
it, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in
prose the same commendation which he gave Shakspeare in verse, saying,
that he "performed that in our tongue which may be compared or
preferred either to _insolent Greece or haughty Rome_"; and he adds
this pregnant sentence:--"In short, within his view and about his time
were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study. Now
things daily fall: wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben
had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of science,
of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of
literary genius. An attack of immortality in a family might have been
looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and
Cervantes were born within the same fourteen years; and in England,
while Spenser was still delving over the _propria que maribus_, and
Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby
hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral, had
discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter. It almost
takes one's breath away to think that "Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon"
were at the risk of teething and measles at the same time. But Ben was
right also in thinking that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived
long enough to see the language of verse become in a measure
traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the
necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and intense
expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and
exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to
Shakspeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among
modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says, "Optimis
conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non
possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est;... et sic non omnibus
versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et
ingenio versificantur."[9]

Shakspeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of
English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in
its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the
men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to
get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his homebred
speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims,--

  "Not marble nor the gilded monuments
  Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great
trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as embodier and
perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he
would do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of
immediate effect on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear
thinking makes clear writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently
capable of it in one case is not to be supposed to abdicate
intentionally in others. The difficult passages in the plays, then, are
to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the
natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at
a clearer theory and better understanding of it.

While we believe that our language had two periods of culmination in
poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads,
which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of Art, (or Nature
as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately
amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the
greater dramatists,--and that Shakspeare made use of the latter as he
found it, we by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or
that any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great
poet's inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural expansion and
exhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a
genius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel
its life in every limb. He enriched it through that exquisite sense of
music, (never approached but by Marlowe,) to which it seemed to be
eagerly obedient, as if every word said to him,

  "_Bid me_ discourse, I will enchant thine ear,"--

as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to
Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden, crying,
"Here am I, Lord! do with me what thou wilt!" That he used language
with that intimate possession of its meaning possible only to the most
vivid thought is doubtless true; but that he wantonly strained it from
its ordinary sense, that he found it too poor for his necessities, and
accordingly coined new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he
violated any of its received proprieties, we do not believe. We have
said that it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our
language was at its best; but it was fortunate also for us, because our
costliest poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming
precipitate in which it united itself with his thought.

We do not, therefore, agree with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the
extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our
modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it
only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language
the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not
find the extravagances in Shakspeare himself. We never saw a line in
any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert
that it is only poets of the second class that find successful
imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The genius of
the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and finds it
at last in style, which is the establishment of a perfect mutual
understanding between the worker and his material.[10] The secondary
intellect, on the other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and
stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of
self, as style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first
class has ever left a school, because his imagination is
incommunicable; while, just as surely as the thermometer tells of the
neighborhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a genius of
the second class in any generation by the influence of his mannerism,
for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of reproduction. Dante,
Shakspeare, Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their
expression; while Milton, Sterne, and Wordsworth left behind them whole
regiments uniformed with all their external characteristics. We do not
mean that great poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought,
(though we think it would be difficult to show how Shakspeare had done
so, directly and wilfully,) but that they have not infected
contemporaries or followers with mannerism.

That the propositions we have endeavored to establish have a direct
bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of whoever undertakes
to edit the works of Shakspeare will, we think, be apparent to those
who consider the matter. The hold which Shakspeare has acquired and
maintained upon minds so many and so various, in so many vital respects
utterly unsympathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is
one of the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. That
he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own Falstaff
was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of the foolishness
that was in other men, (as where Malone ventured to discourse upon his
metres, and Dr. Johnson on his imagination,) must be apparent to every
one,--and also that his genius and its manifestations are so various,
that there is no commentator but has been able to illustrate him from
his own peculiar point of view or from the results of his own favorite
studies. But to show that he was a good common-lawyer, that he
understood the theory of colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a
master of the science of medicine, especially in its relation to mental
disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight
in politics,--all these, while they may very well form the staple of
separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his
learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent
or later parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.

That Shakspeare did not edit his own works must be attributed, we
suspect, to his premature death. That he should not have intended it is
inconceivable. That the "Tempest" was his latest work we have no doubt;
and perhaps it is not considering too nicely to conjecture a profound
personal meaning in it. Is it over-fanciful to think that in the master
Prospero we have the type of Imagination? in Ariel, of the
wonder-working and winged Fantasy? in Caliban, of the half-animal but
serviceable Understanding, tormented by Fancy and the unwilling slave
of Imagination? and that there is something of self-consciousness in
the breaking of Prospero's wand and burying his book,--a sort of sad
prophecy, based on self-knowledge of the nature of that man who, after
such thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for years,
only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, lending money on
mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat and bandy quips with
neighbors? His thought had entered into every phase of human life and
thought, had embodied all of them in living creations;--had he found
all empty, and come at last to the belief that genius and its works
were as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the
rumor of the pit? However this may be, his works have come down to us
in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some portions,
while in others there is an obscurity which may be attributed either to
an idiosyncratic use of words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of
intuition for a proper coalescence with which ordinary language is
inadequate, to a concentration of passion in a focus that consumes the
lighter links which bind together the clauses of a sentence or of a
process of reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which
mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding them. We
should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough
glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare;
second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to
enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a
conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his
thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so
much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to understand that
Shakspeare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in
degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books;
and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so great a
familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in general, and
of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakspeare, as will prevent
his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable him to
understand folly that the Gothic Shakspeare often superimposed upon the
slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but does
not,--like the quaint shafts in cloisters,--a weight of meaning which
the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly unjustifiable
by correct principle.

It would be unreasonable to expect a union of all these qualifications
in a single man, but we think that Mr. White combines them in larger
proportion than any editor with whose labors we are acquainted. He has
an acuteness in tracing the finer fibres of thought worthy of the
keenest lawyer on the scent of a devious trail of circumstantial
evidence; he has a sincere desire to illustrate his author rather than
himself; he is a man of the world, as well as a scholar; he comprehends
the mastery of imagination, and that it is the essential element as
well of poetry as of profound thinking; a critic of music, he
appreciates the importance of rhythm as the higher mystery of
versification. The sum of his qualifications is large, and his work is
honorable to American letters.

Though our own studies have led us to somewhat intimate acquaintance
with Elizabethan literature, it is with some diffidence that we bring
the criticism of _dilettanti_ to bear upon the labors of five years of
serious investigation. We fortify ourselves, however, with Dr.
Johnson's dictum on the subject of Criticism:--"Why, no, Sir; this is
not just reasoning. You _may_ abuse a tragedy, though you cannot make
one. You may scold a carpenter who has made a bad table, though _you_
cannot make a table; it is not your trade to make tables." Not that we
intend to abuse Mr. White's edition of Shakspeare, but we shall speak
of what seem to us its merits and defects with the frankness which
alone justifies criticism.

We have spoken of Mr. White's remarkable qualifications. We shall now
state shortly what seem to us his faults. We think his very acumen
sometimes misleads him into fancying a meaning where none exists, or at
least none answerable to the clarity and precision of Shakspeare's
intellect; that he is too hasty in his conclusions as to the
pronunciation of words and the accuracy of rhymes in Shakspeare's day,
and that he has been seduced into them by what we cannot help thinking
a mistaken theory as to certain words, as _moth_ and _nothing_, for
example; that he shows, here and there, a glimpse of Americanism,
especially misplaced in an edition of the poet whose works do more than
anything else, perhaps, to maintain the sympathy of the English race;
and that his prejudice against the famous corrected folio of 1632 leads
him to speak slightingly of Mr. Colier, to whom all lovers of our early
literature are indebted, and who alone, in the controversy excited in
England by the publication of his anonymous corrector's emendations,
showed, under the most shameful provocation, the temper of a gentleman
and the self-respect of a scholar. But after all these deductions, we
remain of the opinion that Mr. White has given us the best edition
hitherto published, and we do not like him the less for an occasional
crotchet. For though Shakspeare himself seemed to think with regret
that the dirge of the hobby-horse had been sung, yet, as we ourselves
have given evidence, it is impossible for any one to write on this
subject without taking an occasional airing on one or more of those
imaginary steeds that stand at livery with no risk of eating off their
own heads. We shall take up the subject again in our next number, and
by extracts justify both our commendation and our criticisms of Mr.
White.

[Footnote 1: _The Works of William Shakspeare_. Edited, etc., by
RICHARD GRANT WHITE. Vols. II., III., IV, and V. Boston: Little, Brown,
& Co. 1858.]

[Footnote 2: As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--"Men may securely
sin, but safely never."]

[Footnote 3: "Vulgarem locutionem appellamus eam quâ infantes
adsuefiunt ab adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt:
vel, quod brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine
omni regulâ, nutricem imitantes, accepimus_." Dante, _de Vulg.
Eloquio_, Lib. I. cap. i.]

[Footnote 4: Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that
"nothing was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a
reason, "We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakspeare
had not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited
in proof of it the verse

  "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."

The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and
Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of
Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we suspect that the pen
that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague.
The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of
the general who had just accomplished a successful _coup d'état_, the
condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every
honest man he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly
palliating.]

[Footnote 5: Scott, in _Ivanhoe_.]

[Footnote 6: We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived
either mediately or immediately from that language.]

[Footnote 7: The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory
(translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of
Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's _Shepherd's
Calendar_ (1579) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about
equal proportions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch
is not to be forgotten.]

[Footnote 8: We believe that for the last two centuries the Latin
radicals of English have been more familiar and homelike to those who
use them than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor
Craik, in his _English of Shakspeare_, derives _head_, through the
German _haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! We trust that its genealogy is
nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum tueri_, rather than with the
Greek [Greek: kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of
that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that
_quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he
fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _böse_, though
_wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A.S. _wacan_, (German
_weichen_,) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to
temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_, meaning
_to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In the _London
Literary Gazette_ for Nov. 13, 1858, we find an extract from Miss
Millington's _Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance_, in which,
speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,--_De par Houmout ich
diene_,--she says, "The precise meaning of the former word [_Houmout_]
has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly the German
_Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus) Hochmuth ich
diene_,--"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon
meaning of the word _knave_, (A.S. _cnava_, German _knabe_,) that the
name _nauvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has been transmogrified
into _navigator_. We believe that more people could tell why the month
of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for
our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French
words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.]

[Footnote 9: _De Vulgari Eloquio_, Lib. II. cap. i. _ad finem_. We
quote this treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly
his; though we believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by
some transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes
substitutes his own language for that of the original.]

[Footnote 10: Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an
inspired thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless
sweep a grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_A History of Philip the Second, King of Spain_. By WILLIAM H.
PRESCOTT. Vol. III. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.

A cordial welcome from many quarters will greet this third instalment
of a work which promises, when completed, to be the most valuable
contribution to European history ever made by an American scholar. This
will in part be owing to the importance of the subject, which, though
professing to be the history of a single country and a single reign, is
in fact the great program of the politics of Christendom, and of more
than Christendom, during a period when the struggles of rival powers
and of hostile principles and creeds kept the world in agitation and
prolonged suspense,--when Romanism and Reform, the Crescent and the
Cross, despotic power and constitutional freedom, were contending for
mastery, and no government or nation could stand wholly aloof from a
contest in which the fate, not of empires alone, but of civilization,
was involved. Spain, during that period, was the bulwark of the Church
against the attacks of the Reformers, and the bulwark of Christendom
against the attacks of the Moslem. The power of Spain towered high
above that of every other monarchy; and this power was wielded with
absolute authority by the king. The Spanish nation was united and
animated by an intense, unwavering devotion to the ancient faith, which
was entwined with all the roots of the national life,--which was
Spanish, in fact, far more than it was Italian; and of this spirit
Philip the Second was the fitting representative, not merely from his
position, but from his education, his intellect, and his character.
Therefore it is that the historian of this single country and this
single reign, standing upon a central eminence, must survey and depict
the whole vast field of which we have spoken.

The materials for such a survey are abundant. But down to a very recent
period, the most valuable and authentic portion of them--letters of the
actors, records, written not from hearsay, but from personal knowledge,
documents of various kinds, private and official, that fill up the
hiatuses, correct the conjectures, establish the credibility, and give
a fresh meaning to the relations of the earlier writers--were neglected
or concealed, inaccessible, unexplored, all but unknown. Now these
hidden sources have been revealed. A flood of light streams back upon
that bygone age, filling every obscure nook, making legible and plain
what before could neither be read nor understood. Or rather, the effect
is such as when distant objects, seen dimly and confusedly with the
naked eye, are brought within the range of a powerful telescope, which
dissolves the seeming masses, and enables us to scrutinize each
separate form.

Glance for a moment through this instrument, so adjusted as to bear
upon a figure not undeserving of a closer study. Night has fallen on
the bleak and sombre scenery of the Sierra Guadarrama. The gray
outlines of the Escorial are scarcely distinguishable from those of the
dusky hills amid which it stands. No light is thrown forth from its
eleven thousand windows, save in this retreating angle formed by the
junction of the palace with the convent, or--to speak according to the
architect's symbolical design--of the "handle" with the "gridiron." The
apartment from which this feeble ray emerges is of small size,--not
more than sixteen feet square,--but having on two sides arched recesses
that somewhat increase its capacity. One of these alcoves contains a
bed, and a door opening into an adjoining oratory, which has immediate
communication with the chancel of the great church, so that an occupant
of the bed might, if supported in a sitting posture, have a view of the
high altar and witness the elevation of the host. This alcove is decked
with many little images of saints, which, with a few small pictures, of
rare beauty,--the subjects all of a religious character,--and two
cabinets of a curious, agate-colored marble, a product of the New
World,--are the only ornaments that relieve the extreme simplicity of
the apartment, with its plain white walls and floor of brick. The other
alcove is occupied by a writing-table, where sits, intent on the
employment that consumes by far the greater portion of his time, the
potent monarch of Spain, the "most pious and most prudent" Philip the
Second. A drowsy secretary, who waits for the completion of the
document which he is to copy, is his only attendant.

Does it not seem strange that ambassadors and nuncios should become
confused and lose all recollection of the addresses they had committed
to memory, in the presence of a prince whose exterior so ill accords
with the grandeur of his titles and the vastness of his power? His form
is below the middle height and very slender, the limbs having even an
attenuated look. The whole appearance is that of a man of delicate and
even feeble organization. The blonde complexion, the pale blue eyes,
and the light sandy hue--save where they are prematurely touched with
gray--of the hair, moustache, and short, pointed beard, all indicate
the Flemish origin of one who would fain be regarded as "wholly a
Spaniard." The protruding under-jaw is another proof of his descent
from the Burgundian rulers of the Netherlands. The expression of the
countenance, as we find on a closer inspection, is not so easy to
define. There is no variable play of light and shade upon the features,
no settled look of joy or sorrow, no trace of anger or of weariness. Is
it because the subject with which his pen is busied is too unimportant
to call forth any emotion in the writer? It may be a mere matter of
routine, connected with the regular business of his household or the
ordinary affairs of state. But if it be an answer to the dispatch from
Flanders giving information of the outburst of iconoclasm and
rebellion, or a subtly-conceived plan for the secret execution of
Montigny or the assassination of Escovedo, or an order for the
imprisonment--or the death--of the heir-apparent to the throne, you
shall perceive nothing in that face, unruffled as a mask, by which to
conjecture the sentiment or purpose of the mind. As little will he in
the presence of others exhibit any signs of agitation on the reception
of extraordinary news, or the occurrence of some great event. The fleet
which he sent out under his brother, John of Austria, in conjunction
with the Papal and Venetian armaments, to decide by a single blow the
long struggle with the Infidel,--all Europe awaiting the issue with
trembling anxiety and suspense,--has won a memorable and unexpected
victory, and destroyed forever the _prestige_ of the Moslem power. An
official, bursting with the intelligence, carries it to the king, who
is hearing a service in his private chapel. Without the slightest
change of countenance, Philip desires the priest, whose ear the
thrilling whisper has reached, and who stands open-mouthed, prepared to
burst forth at once into the _Te Deum_, to proceed with the service;
that ended, he orders appropriate thanks to be offered up.

As in triumph, so in disaster. The _armada_, which had been baptized
"Invincible," is destroyed. The great navy collected from many states,
equipped at the cost of an enormous treasure, manned with the choicest
troops of Spain and her subject dominions, lies scattered and wrecked
along the English shores, which it was sent forth to conquer. Again the
sympathies of Europe are excited to the highest pitch. Protestantism
triumphs; Catholicism despairs. He who had most at stake alone
preserves his calmness, on hearing that all is lost. He neither frowns
upon his unfortunate generals nor murmurs against Providence. Again he
orders thanks to be offered up, for those who have been rescued from
the general ruin,--for those, also, who in this holy enterprise have
lost their lives and joined eternal glory.

Neither does any private grief--the death of children, of a parent, or
of a wife--move him either to real or simulated agitation.[1] Nor will
intense physical suffering overpower this habitual stoicism. He has
seen unmoved the agony of many victims. He will himself endure the like
without any outward manifestation of pain. In yonder bed he will one
day suffer tortures surpassing those to which he has so often consigned
the heretic and the apostate Morisco; there he will expire amid horrors
that scarce ever before encompassed a death-bed;--but no groan will
reveal the weakness of the flesh; the soul, triumphant over nature,
will bear aloft her colors to the last, and plant them on the breach
through which she passes into the unknown eternity.

But while we have been thus discoursing, the king has finished his long
dispatch, and now hands it to the secretary. The latter, having vainly
struggled with his sleepiness, has at length begun to nod. Hearing his
name pronounced, he starts to his feet, takes the document, which is
not yet dry, to sand it, and, desirous to show by his alertness that he
has been all the time wide awake, empties over it--the contents of the
inkstand! Awkward individual!--there he stands, dumfounded and aghast.
His master quietly resumes his seat, procures fresh materials, and,
though it is long past midnight, begins his task anew with that
incomparable patience which is "his virtue."

The perfect equanimity on all occasions, which was the trait in
Philip's character that most impressed such of his contemporaries as
were neither his adherents nor his enemies,--for example, the Venetian
envoys at his court,--was not produced by a single stroke of Nature's
pencil, but had a three-fold origin. In the education which, from his
earliest years, had prepared him for the business of reigning, the
_alpha_, and the _omega_ of every lesson had been the word
"dissimulation." _Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare_. By this
maxim it was not intended--at least, openly or cynically--to impress on
youthful royalty the duty and propriety of lying. All it professed to
inculcate was the necessity of wearing an habitual veil before the
mind, through which no thought or feeling should ever be discernible.
Every politician, in the sixteenth century, had learned that lesson.
William of Orange, the best and purest statesman of the age, was the
greatest of all masters in the art of dissimulation. In vain might
Granvelle strive to pry into that bosom, to learn whether its designs
were friendly or hostile to the plans of tyranny. Not till it was
extorted by events could the secret be discovered.

In the second place, Philip, as a Spaniard, and one whose manners were
to furnish a model for the Spanish court, had, of course, been trained
to that demeanor which was regarded in Spain as the distinctive mark of
high breeding. "All the nobles of this court," writes an Italian
contemporary, "though amazingly ignorant and unlettered, maintain a
certain haughty tranquillity of manner which they term _sosiego_."
Foreigners found it difficult to define a quality which differed as
much from the composure and self-possession everywhere characteristic
of the gentleman as Spartan endurance or Stoical apathy from ordinary
fortitude or self-control. It was a glacier-like repose, incrusting a
mountain of pride. The beams, that gilded, might not thaw it; the storm
did but harden and extend it. It yielded only to the inner fires of
arrogance and passion, bursting through, at times, with irrepressible
fury.

These occasional outbreaks were never witnessed in Philip.[2] He was
exempted from them by the third element which we proposed to notice,
and which, as nature takes precedence of habit, ought perhaps to have
been the first. A Spaniard by birth and education, a Spaniard in his
sympathies and in his tastes, he had inherited, nevertheless, some of
the peculiarities, intellectual as well as moral, of the other race to
which by his origin, and, as we have already said, by his physical
characteristics, he belonged. He had none of the more pleasing
qualities of the Netherlander; but he had the sluggish temper, the slow
but laborious mind. "He is phlegmatic as well from natural disposition
as from will," remarks an Italian contemporary. "This king," says
another Venetian minister, "is absolutely free from every kind of
passion." The word "passion" is here used in a strict, if not the most
correct sense. Philip could, perhaps, love; that he could hate is what
no one has ever ventured to dispute; but never did either feeling,
strong, persistent, indestructible, though it might be, rise in
turbulent waves around his soul. In religion he was a bigot,--not a
fanatic. "The tranquillity of my dominions and the security of my
crown," he said, "rest on an unqualified submission in all essential
points to the authority of the Holy See." In the same deliberate and
impressive style, not in that of a wild and reckless frenzy, is his
famous saying, "Better not to reign at all than to reign over
heretics." His course in all matters of government was in conformity
with the only chart by which he had been taught to steer. He boasted
that he was no innovator,--that he did but tread in the footsteps of
his father. Nor, though he ever kept his object steadily in view, did
he press towards it with undue haste. He was content that time should
smooth away the difficulties in his path. "Time and myself against any
other two" was not the maxim of a man who looked to effect great
changes or who felt himself in danger of being driven from his course
by the gusts of passion.

To a person of this character it mattered little, as far as the
essentials of existence were concerned, whether his life were passed
upon a throne or at an attorney's desk. In the latter situation, his
fondness for using the pen would well have qualified him for the
drudgery, his admirable patience would have been sufficiently
exercised, and the mischief he was able to do would have been on a more
contracted scale. On the throne, his labors, as his admirers tell us,
were those of "a poor clerk earning his bread," while his recreations
were those of a Jeronymite monk. His intercourse with mankind was
limited to the narrowest range of which his position would allow. Even
with his ministers he preferred to communicate in writing. When he went
abroad, it was in a carriage so constructed as to screen him entirely
from view, and to shut out the world from his observation. He always
entered Madrid after nightfall, and reached his palace by streets that
were the least frequented. He had an equally strong aversion to bodily
exercise. Such was his love of quiet and seclusion, that it was
commonly believed he waited only for a favorable opportunity to follow
the example of his father, resign his power and withdraw to a
convent.[3]

In the volume before us are two chapters devoted to the character and
personal habits of Philip, a picture of his court, his method of
transacting business, his chief advisers, the machinery of his
government, and his relations with his subjects. As usually happens, it
is in details of a personal and biographical kind that the author's
investigations have been the most productive of new discoveries. It is
a question with some minds, whether such details are properly admitted
into history. The new luminary of moral and political science, the
Verulam of the nineteenth century, Mr. Henry Buckle, tells us that
biography forms no part of history, that individual character has
little or no effect in determining the course of the world's affairs,
and that the historian's proper business is to exhibit those general
laws, discoverable, by a strictly scientific process of investigation,
which act with controlling power upon human conduct and govern the
destinies of our race. We readily admit that the discovery of such laws
would exceed in importance every other having relation to man's present
sphere of existence; and we heartily wish that Mr. Buckle had made as
near an approach to the discovery as he confidently believes himself to
have done. But even had he, instead of crude theories, unwarranted
assumptions, and a most lively but fallacious train of reasoning,
presented us with a grand and solid philosophical work, a true _Novum
Organon_, he would still have left the department of literature which
he has so violently assailed in full possession of its present field.
Our curiosity in regard to the character and habits of the men who have
played conspicuous parts on the stage of history would have been not a
whit diminished. The interest which men feel in the study of human
character is, perhaps, the most common feeling that induces them to
read at all. It is to gratify that feeling that the great majority of
books are written. The mutual influences of mind upon mind--not the
influences of climate, food, the "aspects of Nature," thunder-storms,
earthquakes, and statistics--form, and will ever form, the great staple
of literature. Mr. Buckle's own book would not have been half so
entertaining as it is, if he had not, with the most natural
inconsistency, plentifully besprinkled his pages with biographical
details, some of which are not incorrect. Lord Macaulay, whom Mr.
Buckle is unable to eulogize with sufficient vehemence without a
ludicrous as well as irreverent application of Scriptural language, is
of all writers the most profuse in the description of individual
peculiarities, neatly doing up each separate man in a separate parcel
with an appropriate label, and dismissing half his personages, like
"ticket-of-leave men," with a "character," and nothing more.

In truth, while the office of the speculative philosopher is to explore
the principles that have the widest operation in the revolutions of
society, the office of the historian is to represent society as it
actually exists at any given period in all its various phenomena. The
_science_ of history has been first invented--at least, he tells us
so--by Mr. Buckle. The _art_ of history is older than Herodotus, older
than Moses, older than printed language. It is based, like every other
art, on certain truths, general and special, principles and facts; its
process, like that of every other art, is the Imagination, the creative
principle of genius, using these truths as its rules and its materials,
working by them and upon them, applying and idealizing them. That there
is such a thing as historical art has also, we know, been disputed. It
is one of the exceedingly strong convictions--he will not allow us to
call them opinions--entertained by the distinguished author of "Modern
Painters," and expressed by him in a lecture delivered at Edinburgh,
that past ages are to be studied only in the records which they have
themselves left,--letters, contemporary memoirs, and the like sources.
Works built upon these he calls "restorations," weak and servile
copies, from which the spirit of the original has fled. He accordingly
advises every one who would make himself really acquainted with the
manners and events of a former period to go at once to the
fountain-head and learn what that period said for itself in its own
dialect and style. It might be sufficient mildly to warn any person who
thinks of adopting this advice, that, unless the field of his intended
researches be very limited, or the amount of time which he proposes to
devote to the study very great, the result can scarcely be of a
satisfactory nature. But there is another answer to Mr. Ruskin, which
has more force when addressed to one so renowned as a critic and
exponent of Art. The eye of Genius seizes what escapes ordinary
observation. The province of Art is to _reveal_ Nature, to elucidate
her obscurities, to present her, not otherwise than as she _is_, but
more truthfully and more completely than she _appears_ to the common
eye. Of what use were landscape-painting, if it did not teach us how to
look for beauty in the real landscape? Who has not seen in a good
portrait an expression which he then for the first time recognized as
that which best represented the character of the original? When we
applaud the personations of a great actor, we exclaim, as the highest
praise, "How true to Nature!" We must, therefore, have seen before the
look and gesture, and heard the tone, which we thus acknowledge as
appropriate to the passion and the scene. And yet they had never
stamped themselves upon our minds, when witnessed in actual life, from
which the actor himself had copied them, with half that force and
vividness which they receive from his delineation. In like manner, the
historian--one to whom history is a genuine vocation--applies to the
facts with which he has to deal, to the evidence which he has to sift,
to the relations which he has to peruse, a faculty which shall detect a
meaning where the common reader would find none,--which shall conceive
a whole picture, a complete view, where another would see but
fragments,--which shall combine and reproduce in one distinct and
living image the relics of a past age, which lie broken, scattered, and
buried beneath the mounds of time. Such a work has Niebuhr performed
for early Roman history, and Michelet for the confused epochs of
mediaeval France. The spirit, instead of escaping in the process, was
for the first time made visible. The historian did not merely anatomize
the body of the Past, but with magic power summoned up its ghost.

It cannot be said that the claims of history have ever been disallowed
by the reading public. There is, indeed, no class of literature so
secure of receiving the attention which it demands. While the novelist
modestly confines himself to a brace of spare duodecimos, and, if his
story be somewhat extended, endeavors to conceal its length in the
smallness of the print, the historian unblushingly presents himself
with three, six, a dozen, nay, if he be a Frenchman or a German, with
forty huge tomes, and is more often taken to task for his omissions
than censured for the fulness of his narrative. It is respectable to
buy his volumes, and respectable to read them. We don't put them away
in corners, but give them the most conspicuous places on our shelves.
Strange to say, that kind of reading to which we were once driven as to
a task, which our fathers thought must be useful because it was so
dull, has of late outstripped every other branch in its attractiveness
to the mass. Nobody yawns over Carlyle; people set upon Macaulay as if
quite unconscious that they were about to be led into the labyrinths of
Whig and Tory politics; and gentlemen whirled along in railway-cars
bend over the pages of Prescott, and pronounce them as fascinating as
any romance. Stranger still, these modern historians excel their
predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic
power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and
picturesqueness of style. Compare the meagre array of references in the
foot-notes of Watson's "History of Philip the Second" with the
multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott. It may be doubted,
whether any printed book, however rare or little known, which could
throw the least glimmer of light upon his subject, has been overlooked
or neglected by the last-mentioned author; while thousands of
manuscript pages, gathered from libraries and collections in almost
every part of Europe, have furnished him with some of his most curious
particulars and enabled him to clear up the mystery that shrouded many
portions of the subject.

We shall not attempt to determine the exact place that ought to be
assigned in an illustrious brotherhood to our American historian. The
country is justly proud of him, as one whose name is a household word
in many lands,--who has done more, perhaps, than any other of her
living writers, with the exception of Washington Irving, to obtain for
a still youthful literature the regard and attention of the world,--who
has helped to accomplish the prediction of Horace Walpole, that there
would one day be "a Thucydides at Boston and a Xenophon at New York"; a
prediction which seemed so fanciful, at the time it was made, (less
than two years before the declaration of Independence,) that the
prophet was fain to link its fulfilment with the contemporaneous visit
of a South American traveller to the deserted ruins of London.[4] His
writings have won favor with hosts of readers, and they have received
the homage of learned and profound inquirers, like Humboldt and Guizot.
They have merits that are recognizable at a glance, and they have also
merits that will bear the closest examination. They occupy a field in
which they have no compeers. They are the products of a fertile soil
and of laborious cultivation. The mere literary critic, accustomed to
dwell with even more attention on the form than on the substance of a
work, commends above all the admirable skill shown in the selection and
grouping of the incidents, the facile hand with which an obscure and
entangled theme is divested of its embarrassments, the frequent
brilliancy and picturesqueness of the narrative, the judicious mixture
of anecdote and reflection, and the harmony and clearness of the style.
These are the qualities which make Mr. Prescott's histories, with all
their solid learning and minute research, as pleasant reading as the
airiest of novels. And yet not these alone. A charm is felt in many a
sentence that has a deeper origin than in the intellect. No egotism
obtrudes itself upon our notice; but the subtile outflow of a generous
and candid spirit, of a genial and singularly healthy nature, wins for
the author a secure place in the affections of his readers.

The third volume of the "History of Philip the Second" is, we think,
superior to its predecessors. It contains, perhaps, no single scene
equal in elaborate and careful painting to the death of Count Egmont.
It has no chapter devoted to the elucidation of the darker passages in
Philip's personal history, like that which in a former volume traced to
a still doubtful end the unhappy career of Don Carlos, or such as will
doubtless, in a future volume, shed new light on that of Antonio Perez.
But there is a more continuous interest, arising from a greater unity
of subject. With the exception of the two chapters already referred to,
the narrative is taken up with the contest waged by the Spaniards
against those Moslem foes whom they hated with the hereditary hate of
centuries, the mingled hate that had grown out of diversity of
religion, an alien blood, and long arrears of vengeance. When that
contest was waged upon the sea or on a foreign soil, it was at least
mitigated by the ordinary rules of warfare. But on Spanish soil it knew
no restraint, no limitation but the complete effacement of the Moorish
population. The story of the Morisco Rebellion, which we remember to
have first read with absorbed attention in Dunham's meagre sketch, is
here related with a fulness of detail that exhausts the subject, and
leaves the mind informed both of causes and results. Yet the march of
the narrative is rapid and unchecked, from the first outbreak of the
revolt, when Aben-Farax, with a handful of followers, facing the
darkness of night and the blinding snow, penetrated into the streets of
Granada, shouting the cry so long unheard in air that had once been so
familiar with its sound, "There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is the
prophet of God!"--through all the strange and terrible vicissitudes of
the deadly struggle that ensued, the frightful massacres, the wild
_guerrilla_ battles, the fiery onslaughts of the Spanish chivalry, the
stealthy surprises of the Moorish mountaineers,--down to the complete
suppression of the insurrection, the removal of the defeated race, the
overthrow and death of Aben-Aboo, "the little king of the Alpujarras,"
and the ghastly triumph in which his dead body, clothed in the robes of
royalty and supported upright on a horse, was led into the capital
where his ancestors had once reigned in peaceful splendor, after which
the head was cut off and set up in a cage above the wall, "the face
turned towards his native hills, which he had loved so well."

On such a theme, and in such localities, Mr. Prescott is more at home
than any other writer, American or European. His imagination, kindled
by long familiar associations, burns with a steady flame. The
characters are portrayed with a free and vigorous pencil, the contrast
between the Orientalism of the Spanish Arab and the sterner features of
the Spanish Goth being always strongly marked. The scenery, painted
with as much fidelity as truth, is sometimes brought before the eye by
minute description, and sometimes, with still happier effect, by
incidental touches,--an epithet or a simile, as appropriate as it is
suggestive. As we follow the route of Mundejar's army, the "frosty
peaks" of the Sierra Nevada are seen "glistening in the sun like
palisades of silver"; while terraces, scooped out along the rocky
mountain-side, are covered with "bright patches of variegated culture,
that hang like a garland round the gaunt Sierra." At their removal from
Granada, the remnant of what had once been a race of conquerors bid a
last farewell to their ancient homes just as "the morning light has
broken on the _red_ towers of the Alhambra"; and scattered over the
country in small and isolated masses, the presence of the exiles is
"sure to be revealed by the minute and elaborate culture of the
soil,--as the secret course of the mountain-stream is betrayed by the
brighter green of the meadow."

We had marked for quotation an admirable passage, in which our author
passes judgment on the policy of the Spanish government, its cruelty
and its mistakes. But want of space compels us here to take leave of a
book which we have not pretended to analyze, but to which we have
rendered sincere, though inadequate, praise.

[Footnote 1: "Sempre apparisce d'un volto e d'una temperatura medesima;
la qual cosa a chi, considerato gli accidenti che gli sono occorsi
delle morti dei figliuoli e delle mogli, ha fatto credere che fusse
crudele." _Relaz. Anon._ (1588.)]

[Footnote 2: None of the anecdotes in which Philip is represented as
giving way to violent bursts of anger will bear examination. Take, for
example, the story of his pent-up wrath having exploded against the
Prince of Orange, when he was quitting the Netherlands in 1559. The
Prince, it is said, who had accompanied him to the ship, endeavored to
convince him that the opposition to his measures, of which he
complained, had sprung from the Estates; on which the king, seizing
William's sleeve, and shaking it vehemently, exclaimed, "No, not the
Estates, but you,--you,--you!"--_No los Estados, ma vos,--vos,
--vos!_--using, say the original relator and the repeaters of
the story, a form of address, the second person plural, which in the
Spanish language is expressive of contempt. Now it is true that _vos_,
applied to an equal, would have been a solecism; but it is also true
that it was the _invariable_ form employed by the sovereign, even when
addressing a grandee or a prince of the Church. (See the _Papiers
d'État de Granvelle, passim_.) Moreover, the correspondence of the time
shows clearly that neither Philip nor Granvelle had as yet conceived
any deep suspicion of the Prince of Orange, much less had any of the
parties been so imprudent as to throw off the usual mask. The story is
first told by Aubéri, a writer of the seventeenth century, who had it
from his father, to whom it had been told by an anonymous eye-witness!]

[Footnote 3: _Relazione di Pigafetta._]

[Footnote 4: Walpole to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774.]

_The Courtship of Miles Standish_. By HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.
Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1858.

The introduction and acclimatization of the _hexameter_ upon English
soil has been an affair of more than two centuries. The attempt was
first systematically made during the reign of Elizabeth, but the metre
remained a feeble exotic that scarcely burgeoned under glass. Gabriel
Harvey,--a kind of Don Adriano de Armado,--whose chief claim to
remembrance is, that he was the friend of Spenser, boasts that he was
the first to whom the notion of transplantation occurred. In his "Foure
Letters," (1592,) he says, "If I never deserve anye better
remembraunce, let mee rather be Epitaphed, the Inventour of the English
Hexameter, whome learned M. Stanihurst imitated in his Virgill, and
excellent Sir Phillip Sidney disdained not to follow in his Arcadia and
elsewhere." This claim of invention, however, seems to have been an
afterthought with Harvey, for, in the letters which passed between him
and Spenser in 1579, he speaks of himself more modestly as only a
collaborator with Sidney and others in the good work. The Earl of
Surrey is said to have been the first who wrote thus in English. The
most successful person, however, was William Webb, who translated two
of Virgil's Eclogues with a good deal of spirit and harmony. Ascham, in
his "Schoolmaster," (1570,) had already suggested the adoption of the
ancient hexameter by English poets; but Ascham (as afterwards Puttenham
in his "Art of Poesie") thought the number of monosyllabic words in
English an insuperable objection to verses in which there was a large
proportion of dactyles, and recommended, therefore, that a trial should
be made with iambics. Spenser, at Harvey's instance, seems to have
tried his hand at the new kind of verse. He says,--"I like your late
Englishe Hexameters so exceedingly well, that I also enure my penne
sometimes in that kinde.... For the onely or chiefest hardnesse, whych
seemeth, is in the Accente, which sometime gapeth, and, as it were,
yawneth ilfauouredly, coming shorte of that it should, and sometime
exceeding the measure of the Number, as in _Carpenter_; the middle
sillable being vsed shorte in Speache, when it shall be read long in
Verse, seemeth like a lame Gosling that draweth one legge after hir:
and _Heaven_, being used shorte as one sillable, when it is in Verse
stretched out with a _Diastole_, is like a lame dogge that holdes up
one legge. But it is to be wonne with Custome, and rough words must be
subdued with Vse. For why a God's name may not we, as else the Greekes,
have the kingdome of our owne Language, and measure our Accentes by the
Sounde, reserving the Quantitie to the Verse?" The amiable Edmonde
seems to be smiling in his sleeve as he writes this sentence. He
instinctively saw the absurdity of attempting to subdue English to
misunderstood laws of Latin quantities, which would, for example, make
the vowel in _debt_ long, in the teeth of use and wont.

We give a specimen of the hexameters which satisfied so entirely the
ear of Master Gabriel Harvey,--an ear that must have been long by
position, in virtue of its place on his head.

  "Not the like _Discourser_, for Tongue and head: to be fóund out;
  Not the like _resolute Man_, for great and serious áffayres;
  Not the like _Lynx_, to spie out secretes and priuities óf States;
  _Eyed_ like to _Argus, Earde_ like to _Mídas, Nosd_ like to _Naso_,
  Wingd like to _Mercury_, fitist of a Thousand for to be émployed."

And here are a few from "worthy M. Stanyhurst's" translation of the
"AEneid."

  "Laocoon storming from Princelis Castel is hastning,
  And a far of beloing: What fond phantastical harebraine
  Madnesse hath enchaunted your wits, you townsmen unhappie?
  Weene you (blind hodipecks) the Greekish nauie returned,
  Or that their presents want craft? is subtil Vlissis
  So soone forgotten? My life for an haulf-pennie (Trojans)," etc.

Mr. Abraham Fraunce translates two verses of Heliodorus thus:--

  "Now had fyery Phlegon his dayes reuolution ended,
  And his snoring snowt with salt waues all to bee washed."

Witty Tom Nash was right enough when he called this kind of stuff,
"that drunken, staggering kinde of verse which is all vp hill and downe
hill, like the waye betwixt Stamford and Becchfeeld, and goes like a
horse plunging through the myre in the deep of winter, now soust up to
the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It will be noticed that
his prose falls into a kind of tipsy hexameter. The attempt in England
at that time failed, but the controversy to which it gave rise was so
far useful that it called forth Samuel Daniel's "Defence of Ryme,"
(1603,) one of the noblest pieces of prose in the language. Hall also,
in his "Satires," condemned the heresy in some verses remarkable for
their grave beauty and strength.

The revival of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich
Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to
the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer.
His "Odyssey," (1783,) his "Iliad," (1791,) and his "Luise," (1795,)
were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann
and Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in
modern hexameters. From Germany, Southey imported that and other
classic metres into England, and we should be grateful to him, at
least, for having given the model for Canning's "Knifegrinder." The
exotic, however, again refused to take root, and for many years after
we have no example of English hexameters. It was universally conceded
that the temper of our language was unfriendly to them.

It remained for a man of true poetic genius to make them not only
tolerated, but popular. Longfellow's translation of "The Children of
the Lord's Supper" may have softened prejudice somewhat, but
"Evangeline," (1847,) though incumbered with too many descriptive
irrelevancies, was so full of beauty, pathos, and melody, that it made
converts by thousands to the hitherto ridiculed measure. More than
this, it made Longfellow at once the most popular of contemporary
English poets, Clough's "Bothie"--a poem whose singular merit has
hitherto failed of the wide appreciation it deserves--followed not long
after; and Kingsley's "Andromeda" is yet damp from the press.

While we acknowledge that the victory thus won by "Evangeline" is a
striking proof of the genius of the author, we confess that we have
never been able to overcome the feeling that the new metre is a
dangerous and deceitful one. It is too easy to write, and too uniform
for true pleasure in reading. Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow
into prose,--as in the verse

  "Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon,"--

and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his
style in other metres, as where he says

  "Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_,"--

using a word as essentially unpoetic as _surtout_ or _pea-jacket_. We
think one great danger of the hexameter is, that it gradually accustoms
the poet to be content with a certain regular recurrence of accented
sounds, to the neglect of the poetic value of language and intensity of
phrase.

But while we frankly avow our infidelity as regards the metre, we as
frankly confess our admiration of the high qualities of "Miles
Standish." In construction we think it superior to "Evangeline"; the
narrative is more straightforward, and the characters are defined with
a firmer touch. It is a poem of wonderful picturesqueness, tenderness,
and simplicity, and the situations are all conceived with the truest
artistic feeling. Nothing can be better, to our thinking, than the
picture of Standish and Alden in the opening scene, tinged as it is
with a delicate humor, which the contrast between the thoughts and
characters of the two heightens almost to pathos. The pictures of
Priscilla spinning, and the bridal procession, are also masterly. We
feel charmed to see such exquisite imaginations conjured out of the
little old familiar anecdote of John Alden's vicarious wooing. We are
astonished, like the fisherman in the Arabian tale, that so much genius
could be contained in so small and leaden a casket. Those who cannot
associate sentiment with the fair Priscilla's maiden name of Mullins
may be consoled by hearing that it is only a corruption of the Huguenot
Desmoulins,--as Barnum is of the Norman Vernon.

Indifferent poets comfort themselves with the notion that contemporary
popularity is no test of merit, and that true poetry must always wait
for a new generation to do it justice. The theory is not true in any
general sense. With hardly an exception, the poetry that was ever to
receive a wide appreciation has received it at once. Popularity in
itself is no test of permanent literary fame, but the kind of it is and
always has been a very decided one. Mr. Longfellow has been greatly
popular because he so greatly deserved it. He has the secret of all the
great poets,--the power of expressing universal sentiments simply and
naturally. A false standard of criticism has obtained of late, which
brings a brick as a sample of the house, a line or two of condensed
expression as a gauge of the poem. But it is only the whole poem that
is a proof of the poem, and there are twenty fragmentary poets, for one
who is capable of simple and sustained beauty. Of this quality Mr.
Longfellow has given repeated and striking examples, and those critics
are strangely mistaken who think that what he does is easy to be done,
because he has the power to make it seem so. We think his chief fault
is a too great tendency to moralize, or rather, a distrust of his
readers, which leads him to point out the moral which he wishes to be
drawn from any special poem. We wish, for example, that the last two
stanzas could be cut off from "The Two Angels," a poem which, without
them, is as perfect as anything in the language.

Many of the pieces in this volume having already shone as captain
jewels in Mana's carcanet, need no comment from us; and we should,
perhaps, have avoided the delicate responsibility of criticizing one of
our most precious contributors, had it not been that we have seen some
very unfair attempts to depreciate Mr. Longfellow, and that, as it
seemed to us, for qualities which stamp him as a true and original
poet. The writer who appeals to more peculiar moods of mind, to more
complex or more esoteric motives of emotion, may be a greater favorite
with the few; but he whose verse is in sympathy with moods that are
human and not personal, with emotions that do not belong to periods in
the development of individual minds, but to all men in all years, wins
the gratitude and love of whoever can read the language which he makes
musical with solace and aspiration. The present volume, while it will
confirm Mr. Longfellow's claim to the high rank he has won among lyric
poets, deserves attention also as proving him to possess that faculty
of epic narration which is rarer than all others in the nineteenth
century. In our love of stimulants, and our numbness of taste, which
craves the red pepper of a biting vocabulary, we of the present
generation are apt to overlook this almost obsolete and unobtrusive
quality; but we doubt if, since Chaucer, we have had an example of more
purely objective narrative than in "The Courtship of Miles Standish."
Apart from its intrinsic beauty, this gives the poem a claim to higher
and more thoughtful consideration; and we feel sure that posterity will
confirm the verdict of the present in regard to a poet whose reputation
is due to no fleeting fancy, but to an instinctive recognition by the
public of that which charms now and charms always,--true power and
originality, without grimace and distortion; for Apollo, and not Milo,
is the artistic type of strength.

_Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus of Nazareth_. By W.H.
FURNESS, Minister of the First Congregational Unitarian Church in
Philadelphia. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1859.

Here is a book, written, not for "orthodox believers," but for those
whom the orthodox creeds have wholly repelled from its subject. It is
quite distinct from three other books on the same general theme, by the
same author. It has, indeed, some objects in view, at which neither of
those books directly aimed.

It will overwhelm with horror such readers as may stumble upon it, who
do not know, till they meet it, that there is any view of Jesus Christ
but that which is presented in the widely circulated issues of the
Tract Society and similar institutions. Our attention has already been
called to one very absurd and unjust attack upon it, in a Philadelphia
paper, intended to catch the prejudices of such persons. But the views
by which we found this attack accompanied, in the same journal, led us
to suspect that some political prejudice against the author's
anti-slavery had more to do with the onslaught than any deeply seated
love of Orthodox Christianity. To another class of readers, who have
been wholly repelled from any interest in Jesus Christ, by whatever
misfortune of temperament or training, the careful study of these
"Thoughts" would be of incalculable value. We suppose this class of
readers, through the whole extent of our country, to be quite as large
as the first class we have named. To a third class, which is probably
as large as both the others put together, who are neither repelled nor
attracted by the received ecclesiastical statements regarding the
Saviour, but are willing to pass, without any real inquiry or any firm
opinion, his presence in the world, and his influence at this moment on
every event in modern life, the book might also have an immense value,
if it could be conceived that any thunder-clap could wake them from
that selfish and comfortable indifference as to the central point of
all the history, philosophy, life, and religion, in which they live.

We have no intention of entering into a discussion of the remarkable
and very clear views presented in this volume. We have only to say that
the author does not do himself justice when he asserts that there is no
system in its arrangement. It is a systematic work, leading carefully
along from point to point in the demonstration attempted. One may read
it through in an afternoon, and he will then have a very clear idea of
what the author thinks, which does not always happen when one has read
a book through. If he be one of the class of readers for whom it was
written, he will have, at the very least, a deeper interest in the
study of the life of Jesus of Nazareth than he had when he began. He
will have read a reply to Dr. Strauss, Mr. Parker, Dr. Feuerbach, and
Mr. Hittel, which, he will confess, is written in an appreciative and
candid spirit, quite different from that of some of the _ex-cathedra_
works of controversy, which have failed to annihilate these writers,
although they have taken so arrogant a tone. As we have said, we do not
attempt to analyze the argument or the statement of which we thus
speak. We have only to say that it is positive, and not
negative,--constructive, and not destructive,--reverent, and not
flippant,--courteous to opponents, and never denunciatory. These are
characteristics of a work of theology of which those can judge who do
not affect to be technical theologians. Had we to give our own views of
the matters presented in so interesting a form, we should not, of
course, attempt to condense our assent or our dissent with the author
into these columns; but where we differed or where we agreed, we should
gladly recognize his eagerness to be understood, his earnest hope to
find the truth, and his sympathy with all persons seeking
it,--qualities which we have not always found in our study of
theologians by profession.

In making the suggestion, however, that these "Thoughts" would be of
special value to those who have fallen into the habit of disbelieving
the Gospels, they hardly know why, we know that there is no more
probability that they will read a book with this title than there is
that young men should read "Letters to Young Men," or young women
should read "Letters to Young Women." We suppose that the unconverted