Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, July 1850

CHAPTER III. (2)

It was quite dark before Captain Dunbar reached the cottage of Frederick Sabb, and he did so in no good humor. Disappointed of his prey, he now suspected the simple ruse by which he had been deluded, and his first salutation of Frederica Sabb, as he entered the cottage was in no friendly humor.

“There are certain birds,” said he, “Miss Sabb, who fly far from their young ones at the approach of the hunter, yet make such a fuss and outcry, as if the nest were close at hand, and in danger. I see you have learned to practice after their lessons.”

The girl involuntarily replied, “But, indeed, Captain Dunbar, I heard the horse go below.”

“I see you understand me,” was the answer. “I feel assured that you told me only the truth, but you had first put me in the humor not to believe it. Another time I shall know how to understand you.”

Frederica smiled, but did not seek to excuse herself, proceeding all the while to the preparations for supper. This had been got in readiness especially for the arrival of Dunbar and his party. He, with Clymes, his first officer, had become inmates of the dwelling; but his troopers had encamped without, under instructions of particular vigilance. Meanwhile, supper proceeded, Sabb and his vrow being very heedful of all the expressed or conjectured wants of their arbitrary guests. It was while the repast was in progress that Dunbar fancied that he beheld a considerable degree of uneasiness in the manner and countenance of Frederica. She ate nothing, and her mind and eyes seemed equally to wander. He suddenly addressed her, and she started as from a dream, at the sound of her own name, and answered confusedly.

“Something’s going wrong,” said Dunbar, in a whisper to Clymes; “we can put all right, however, if we try.”

A significant look accompanied the whisper, and made the second officer observant. When supper was concluded, the captain of the loyalists showed signs of great weariness. He yawned and stretched himself amazingly, and without much regard to propriety. A like weariness soon after exhibited itself in the second officer. At length Dunbar said to Old Sabb, using a style of address to which the old man was familiar, “Well, Uncle Fred, whenever my bed’s ready, say the word. I’m monstrous like sleep. I’ve ridden a matter of fifty miles to-day. In the saddle since four o’clock—and a hard saddle at that. I’m for sleep after supper.”

The old man, anxious to please his guest, whom he now began rather to fear than favor, gave him soon the intimation which he desired, and he was conducted to the small chamber, in a shed-room adjoining the main hall, which had been assigned him on all previous occasions. Old Sabb himself attended his guest, while Lieutenant Clymes remained, for a while longer, the companion of the old lady and her daughter. Dunbar soon released his host from further attendance by closing the door upon him, after bowing him out with thanks. He had scarcely done so, before he approached one of the two windows in the chamber. He knew the secrets of the room, and his plan of operations had been already determined upon. Concealing his light, so that his shadow might not appear against the window, he quietly unclosed the shutter so as to fix no attention by the sound. A great fig-tree grew near it, the branches in some degree preventing the shutter from going quite back against the wall. This afforded him additional cover to his proceedings, and he cautiously passed through the opening, and lightly descended to the ground. The height was inconsiderable, and he was enabled, with a small stick, to close the window after him. In another moment he passed under the house, which stood on logs four or five feet high, after the manner of the country, and took a crouching attitude immediately behind the steps in the rear of the building. From these steps to the kitchen was an interval of fifteen or eighteen yards, while the barn and other outhouses lay at convenient distances beyond. Shade trees were scattered about, and fruit trees, chiefly peach, rendering the space between something like a covered way. We need not inquire how long our captain of loyalists continued his watch in this unpleasant position. Patience, however, is quite as natural as necessary a quality to a temper at once passionate and vindictive. While he waited here, his lieutenant had left the house, scattered his men privily about the grounds, and had himself stolen to a perch which enabled him to command the front entrance to the cottage. The only two means of egress were thus effectually guarded.

In a little time the household was completely quiet. Dunbar had heard the mutterings, from above, of the family prayers, in which it was no part of his profession to partake; and had heard the footsteps of the old couple as they passed through the passage-way to the chamber opposite the dining hall. A chamber adjoining theirs was occupied by Frederica Sabb; but he listened in vain for her footsteps in that quarter. His watch was one calculated to try his patience, but it was finally rewarded. He heard the movement of a light foot over head, and soon the door opened in the rear of the dwelling, and he distinguished Frederica as she descended, step by step, to the ground. She paused, looked up and around her, and then, darting from tree to tree, she made her way to the kitchen, which opened at her touch. Here, in a whisper, she summoned to her side a negro, an old African, whom we may, at the same time, mention, had been her frequent emissary before, on missions such as she now designed. Brough, as he was called, was a faithful Ebo, who loved his young mistress, and had shown himself particularly friendly to her affaires de coeur. She put a paper into his hands, and her directions employed few words.

“Brough, you must set off for Massa Richard, and give him this. You must creep close, or the soldiers will catch you. I don’t know where they’ve gone, but no doubt they’re scattered in the woods. I have told him, in this paper, not to come, as he promised; but should you lose the paper—”

“I no guine loss ’em,” said Brough, seemingly rather displeased at the doubt, tacitly conveyed, of his carefulness.

“Such a thing might happen, Brough; nay, if you were to see any of the tories, you ought to destroy it. Hide it, tear it up, or swallow it, so that they won’t be able to read it.”

“I yerry, misses.”

“Very good! And now, when you see Massa Richard, tell him not to come. Tell him better go farther off, across the fork, and across the other river; for that Mat Dunbar means to push after him to-morrow, and has sworn to hunt him up before he stops. Tell him, I beg him, for my sake, though he may not be afraid of that bad man, to keep out of his way, at least until he gathers men enough to meet him on his own ground.”

The startling voice of Dunbar himself broke in upon the whispered conference. “Mat Dunbar is exceedingly obliged to you, Miss Sabb.”

“Ah!” shrieked the damsel—“Brough—fly, fly, Brough.” But Brough had no chance for flight.

“His wings are not sufficiently grown,” cried the loyalist, with a brutal yell, as he grappled the old negro by the throat, and hurled him to the ground. In the next moment he possessed himself of the paper, which he read with evident disappointment. By this time the sound of his bugle had summoned his lieutenant, with half a dozen of his followers, and the kitchen was completely surrounded.

“Miss Sabb, you had best retire to the dwelling. I owe you no favors, and will remember your avowed opinion, this night, for Mat Dunbar. You have spoken. It will be for me yet to speak. Lieutenant Clymes, see the young lady home.”

“But, sir, you will not maltreat the negro?”

“Oh! no! I mean only that he shall obey your commands. He shall carry this note to your favorite, just as you designed, with this difference only, that I shall furnish him with an escort.”

“Ah!”

Poor Frederica could say no more. Clymes was about to hurry her away, when a sense of her lover’s danger gave her strength.

“Brough;” she cried to the negro; “you won’t show where Massa Richard keeps?”

“Never show the tories not’ing, missis.”

The close gripe of Dunbar’s finger upon the throat of the negro, stifled his further speech. But Frederica was permitted to see no more. The hand of Clymes was laid upon her arm, and she went forward promptly to save herself from indignity. She little knew the scene that was to follow.

[To be continued.

THE SPIRIT LOVERS

AND THE SPIRIT BRIDAL.

———

BY MISS L. VIRGINIA SMITH.

———

The twilight deepened—and its dusky shades
Crept through the crimson of the sunset clouds,
To nestle darkly where some shining star
Looped up the gorgeous foldings, as they hung
Like Eden-banners, waving far around
The purple arches of a southern sky.
From the deep forest aisles came up the wind,
Low singing in its wand’ring, with the voice
Of softly chanting waves, and whisp’ring leaves.
  The silver moon came floating from the east,
Like a young angel sleeping on the wing,
Whose dream-smile glittered o’er the dewy earth,
And trembling through an open casement, kissed
A brow of maiden beauty slumbering there.
  The velvet drapery of her couch was tossed
In crimson waves around her, and above
Fell snowy veilings, bending like a wreath
Of silvery vapor o’er a rosy sea;
Carelessly graceful in her sweet repose,
She rested like a lily on the stream,
When drooping gently ’neath its own perfume.
The dew of early youth was gleaming yet
Upon her pure heart-blossoms, and the first
Faint blush of love within her spirit, wrought
Rich blazonry upon their mystic leaves.
In slumber, through her softly rounded limbs
A radiant soul in bright expression stole,
Like glimpses of the evening star amid
The pure white veiling of a pearly cloud.
  She watched the sunlight fade upon the hills,
And star-flames kindle in the dusky sky—
But now she rested in the land of dreams,
To wait the coming of her Spirit-Love.
  He came—a vision whose bewildering eyes
Seemed light ineffable in midnight skies—
While plumes of waving frost-work, dashed with flakes
Of golden sunbeams, glittered ’mid the folds
Of woven radiance floating round his form,
Snow-flake and fire-drop wreathing into life,
His gorgeous pinion shadowed o’er his Bride,
His breath upon her cheek—his lightning glance
Stole through the visions of her dreaming soul,
As when the passion of the dying sun
Glows o’er the bosom of a sleeping cloud,
Till love’s wild worship wakes returning flame,
And each in burning blushes dies away!
  As a fair volume, and a golden lyre,
Wreathed by the tendrils of an opening rose,
Her Mind, and Soul, and fresh expanding Heart,
Lay bright before his spirit-searching ken,
As one by one he softly laid aside
The crimson petals of that folded heart,
To drink the honied fragrance of its love,
The rose-bud thrilled and trembled into bloom,
Its breeze his sigh—its sun his burning glance—
Its dew-drop life his kisses wild and warm.
  He lingered o’er the pure, unsullied leaves
Of Mind’s mysterious volume, and there came,
Where’er he breathed upon the virgin page,
Bright gems of glowing fancy, and deep thought,
As magic characters come stealing forth
In loveliness before the breath of flame!
His being brightened with a God-like smile,
As, closely blended with each pictured thought,
His image, flashing into glorious life,
Smiled back upon him from the glowing page
So truthfully—then with the soft excess
Of dreamy rapture ’wildered, fainting bowed,
And blessed the sweet love-mirror, silently.
  Her soul in beauty, an Æolian lyre,
Gleamed forth before him, where the voice of Song
Slept like its spirit in a singing shell.
His light caressing pinion swept its chords,
And Joy’s bird-carol—Hope’s aerial tone—
Pride’s sounding anthem—and the pÆan wild
Of young Ambition rolled in glory forth.
  He breathed upon it—and anon there swelled
(As tears will gush from rapture-laden hearts)
Her pure religion’s diapason deep;—
Sweet under-tones of dreamy melancholy—
And chords of feeling that erewhile had slept
In voiceless music, and o’er all the theme
An ever-changing, ever-sounding tone,
Was deep, immaculate, immortal Love!
THE SPIRIT-BRIDAL.
The Night had closed her eye of softest blue,
And, like a wearied infant, sank to rest
On Nature’s gentle bosom—Silence, pale,
With a white finger on her marble lip,
From which no lightest whisper ever came,
Was bending o’er the dim and murmured death
Of every sound—and even Echo dreamed,
As though a spirit’s wand had charmed her there
To slumber deep as that Creation held
When Night was in the heavens!
  Still as the moonlight quivered through the vines
That overhung the casement, it revealed
The rosy couch, beneath its silvery veil,
As by its side the maiden knelt to pray.
  Oh! if there be on earth one blessing left—
One leaf from out our faded Paradise—
One ray of glory from the heaven we lost—
It is, that we may pray for those we love!
Without it man may live—his nature knows
No soft dependence—panoplied in self,
His haughty heart may burn to dash aside
The hand that formed it—and he may defy
The love that made him what he is—a god!
But woman never—for her ivy soul
Must have an oak to cling to; proud and high
Its crest may be, or ruined, lightning-scathed,
It matters not—and for it she must pray!
Prayer is her nature’s pure necessity,
To calm the sorrow that with lava streams,
Pours its bewildering torrent o’er the soul,
And when she feels it crushing darkly through
A bosom all too soft to stem its tide
Of bitter, burning waters—then, for power
To “suffer and be still,” that bosom prays.
And oh! when human love has taught her heart
To dream of one and Heaven, how pants her soul
To pour that gushing feeling freely forth,
In all its truth and deep intensity, before
The “God of love” who gave it!
                         ’Twas for this
The gentle maiden meekly knelt to God
Till each pure love-beam from her violet eye
Seemed melting into passion’s orison.
Warm feeling folded up its starry plumes
To bow before the altar-shrine of faith,
And holy hopes looked from the golden shades
That lay upon her soul, as angels bend
O’er the bright foldings of the summer clouds,
To woo us to the sky, from whence they come.
Her eye grew dreamy, and her bosom heaved,
As though within its cell some pleasant thought
Were singing, and it rose and fell upon
The waves of that delicious melody.
Her loosened hair swept o’er the sacred page,
And, as her soul went forth in whispers low,
It stirred the shadows with the breath of prayer.
She oped the holy book, and as her lip
Trembled upon the words, they sank within
Her woman’s nature as the snow-flake falls
And melts away into the earth’s warm bosom.
  Time, as he wandered by, had sighed the hour
Of “twelve,” and for a moment midnight’s hush
Grew tremulous, and echo as it fell,
Swept o’er the tension of her listening ear
Softly and thrillingly, and like to Love’s
First breathings o’er an unawakened heart.
Her voice grew fainter, as a music-vow
Stole sweetly in the cadence of her own—
She felt the glory of an angel-wing
Around her waving, and she knew the hour—
Her Spirit-Lover claimed his Spirit-Bride!
  With pinions intertwining, arms enwreathed
And fervid glances bathed in passion’s dream,
They swept along the cloud-land pathway, where
The constellations, from their silver urns,
Poured incense light far down the “Milky-Way,”
And o’er its misty pavement Cynthia flung
A thousand rainbows, like the wreathed bloom
Of bridal blossoms. Still they floated on,
Far through the starry armaments that sweep
In endless circle round the battlements
Of Paradise—an everlasting guard
High flaming round the Infinite;—at length,
Within the presence-chamber of the Blest,
They knelt before the Great Unchangeable,
Whose love and mercy whispered audibly,
“Forever be ye one—as God is One!”

NO. 1.—MASSINGER’S GREAT DUKE OF FLORENCE.

———

BY ENNA DUVAL.

———

“I cannot pretend in these succinct narrations to have rivaled Charles Lamb and his excellent sister in the art of turning drama into narrative. The “Shakspeare Tales” is an unique book, the beauty of which all can perceive who are worth pleasing; but few who have not tried the like, can appreciate the difficulty, the matchless skill of its execution.”

Hartley Coleridge.

Cozimo, duke of Florence, a noble and virtuous prince had the misfortune to lose, by death, his duchess, Clarinda, a lady of such rare and matchless virtues, that, as he said, the whole world could not produce one worthy to be her second. In her grave he buried all thoughts of woman.

His courtiers, and ministers of state, repeatedly urged him to a second marriage, for they feared that after his death, he being childless, distraction might breed in the state, and cause the downfall of his noble house. Residing at the court was a beautiful and wealthy orphan, Fiorinda, duchess of Urbin, the ward of Cozimo, and she was the one that his counsellors desired him to wed. Kindly, but sadly, he always waived aside their counsel, telling them, that the lovely Fiorinda should have a more fitting mate, and that as regarded the welfare of the state, his princely care would provide one worthy to succeed him.

This “worthy successor,” was his nephew Giovanni, his sister’s son, an orphan, dependent on his bounty. This youth he loved for his dear sister’s sake, and he spared no pains or trouble to render him worthy of his future high position. The more to further this, Cozimo placed Giovanni under the sole charge of a noble, and highly educated Florentine gentleman, Carolo Charomonte by name, who lived retired on an estate five hours distance from Florence. This gentleman discharged, to the utmost of his power, the duty the duke committed to him, and by means of his rare experience, using great care, he trained the young Giovanni up in all those arts, peculiar and proper to future greatness; therefore it was no wonder, but rather a necessity, that when this young prince had grown to be a man, he should make good the princely education he had derived from his accomplished tutor.

His uncle had studiously kept him away from court, during the perilous season of youth; but as the young Giovanni approached manhood, he gave such great promise of ability, that Cozimo could no longer withstand his tender desire for his company. Report filled the duke’s ears with stories of his nephew, which, if true, would have made him a miracle—a wonder in arts and arms; and in order to test the verity of this fine account, he sent his secretary, Contarino, to summon Giovanni to his presence.

This secretary came to Charamonte’s house, bearing compliments, and courtly thanks, and promises of munificent reward, from the duke. These the noble Charamonte received with dignified, courteous gratefulness; and although it was a sweet thought to him, that nature had so well aided him in his great duty as to enable him to return to his royal master a phoenix of grace and goodness, in the person of his nephew, this very yielding up of his charge, filled his breast with sadness. The young Giovanni had a disposition so gentle and sweet by nature, that it won on all appointed to attend him, insomuch that it made them rivals, even in the coarsest office, to get precedency to do him service; no wonder then, that his guardian, who had always found him obedient, loving, and reverential as a son, should have unconsciously permitted his affections to twine around him with a parent’s fondness. Nor did Giovanni receive his uncle’s summons with pleasure; as he read the duke’s letter the frequent changes of his countenance, manifested how strongly his unwillingness contended with his duty.

He loved his guardian, regarded him with as much respect and service as would have been due to the one who gave him life; but still more fondly did he love the good Charamonte’s incomparable daughter—the fair Lidia. She had been his companion from childhood; the partner of his studies and his pleasures. The commands of his uncle revealed to him in an instant the nature of his regard for her; but, at the same time, he felt the misery and hopelessness of such a love. His high station he felt would be a barrier to honorable love, and this thought deepened tenfold his anguish. In sweet, tender words he bewailed his sad fate, when he bade farewell to her, describing, in touching language, their future lot had he been born in a more humble state.

“Ah! Lidia,” he exclaimed, “then I might have seen and liked with mine own eyes, and not as now, with others. I might still continue my delights with you, that are alone, in my esteem, the abstract of society. We might walk in solitary groves, or in choice gardens, and in the variety of curious flowers, contemplate nature’s workmanship and wonders; then for change, near to the murmur of some bubbling fountain, I might hear you sing, and from the well tuned accents of your tongue, in my imagination, conceive the melody of Heaven’s harmony; then with chaste discourse we would return imp feathers to the broken wing of time. But all this I must part from—I might after continued innocence of love and service have been your husband—”

Here Lidia checked him, and reminded him that she was, and ever would be his servant; that it was far from her, even in a thought, to cherish such saucy hopes as these. Had she been heir to all the globes and sceptres, that mankind bows to, then, at her best, she might have deserved him; but now, in her humble state, she could only wish that he might find a partner—a princess equal to him, who would make it the study of her life, with all the obedience of a wife, to please him. For her own part, she would be content to live and be their humblest handmaid. So humble and childlike doth love show itself in a pure, gentle nature.

In this sweet sorrowful manner they parted from each other, and Giovanni hastened to do his uncle’s bidding; but first he embraced his good old guardian, saying, farewell, and assured him that should he ever reach his high destination their fortunes should be shared—then joining the secretary, he repaired to the Florentine court.

Duke Cozimo had a favorite, Lodovico Sanazarro by name, and he loved him so dearly that he used to say Sanazarro’s merits were so great that should he divide his dukedom with him, he would still continue his debtor. Princes’ favorites are apt to be undeserving men, notwithstanding they may be set off with all the trim of greatness, state, and power; for princes are men, not gods, and though they can give wealth and titles, they cannot give virtues, that is out of their power. But Duke Cozimo had proved the correctness of his judgment in the choice of his friend. Sanazarro’s nature was like pure, tried gold, and any stamp of grace the duke was pleased to give him, to make him current to the world, did but add honor to the royal bestower. Even the courtiers felt no envy against him, for he was no lazy drone, but an industrious bee. He fought the enemies of the state, and displayed great valor; then, after returning crowned with conquest, he labored in the service of his royal master, sharing in the cares and burthen of the government.

Duke Cozimo’s secret design was to wed this favorite with his wealthy ward, Fiorinda. This noble princess was not averse to this plan, for Lodovico being a handsome and brave gentleman, had quite won her heart and she loved to dwell on his exploits in the field, and abilities displayed in the council. Sanazarro, however, was very modest, and never dared to lift his thoughts so high as to woo so rich and noble a dame as the Princess Fiorinda.

Encouraged by her guardian, Fiorinda endeavored by courteous, but delicate advances, to remove this diffidence. She always received him with distinction, and took occasion repeatedly to send him gifts, which he received with the reverent gratefulness of a subject; expressing more ceremony in his humble thanks, than feeling of the favor—appearing almost willfully ignorant, and blind to the tender feeling which prompted these courteous condescensions. But true love is patient, and forbearing, and as Sanazarro displayed no love for any other lady, she used to comfort herself with the thought, that it was the light of her high estate that made him blind, and taxed her woman’s wit for means to lessen the difference between them. The frequent dangers that he was exposed to, however, in the service of the state, made her unhappy, and after the young Prince Giovanni came to court, she took occasion to interest him in Sanazarro’s favor, begging that he would be suitor to the duke not to expose this brave, noble gentleman to so much peril, but rather to command him, after his great labors, to take rest.

Prince Giovanni received this request with delight, for he also had a boon to ask of the duchess. So great was his love for the fair Lidia Charomonte, that he could no longer bear the separation from her, and after describing her with a lover’s colors to the princess, he begged she would take occasion to ask permission of the duke, to add this matchless virgin to her train of ladies. She promised to effect his desire, right quickly; and they parted from each other with bright hopes.

Soon after Giovanni’s return to court, the secretary who had brought him, while reporting to the duke an account of his journey, gave an enthusiastic description of Charomonte’s daughter, and in doing this, implied that the prince loved her. Straightway, but quietly, the kind duke conceived the design of securing also his dearly loved nephew’s happiness, but fearing that this object of his love might not be worthy of so high a fortune, he resolved to send his trusty favorite, Sanazarro, to Charomonte’s house, to see this paragon of beauty and virtue.

This he did without acquainting Sanazarro with his reasons, and the favorite fulfilled his master’s orders, thinking the duke wished to contract a marriage with this humble maid. But after seeing the fair Lidia he was so struck with her beauty, modesty, and wit, that he forgot his duty to his master and his honor. The recollection of past favors from the duke, even the beautiful, kind, forbearing Duchess Fiorinda, seemed as nothing to him, under the influence of this wild infatuation. He returned to court, resolved to find some means of blinding the duke, and turning him aside from pursuit of the fair Lidia. The secretary he knew he could silence, and the Prince Giovanni, the only one who could disclose his falsehood, he hoped to quiet, by telling him of the duke’s purpose of marriage, which would of course endanger his prospect of succeeding to the dukedom.

How weak and wicked are the best of men when exposed to some trials. Here was this loyal, noble, honorable gentleman, who had withstood the weakening effects of princes’ favor, yielding truth and allegiance at a moment when he should have been most strong—at a moment when he felt most confidence. He forgot the honors and glories by Cozimo’s grace conferred upon him; he deceived his trust and made shipwreck of his loyalty. Did he not deserve ruin?

Prince Giovanni received the news of his uncle’s projected marriage with indifference, answering most nobly, that he had no right, because he had received benefits from his uncle’s hands, to prescribe laws for his pleasure. But when he heard who his uncle purposed to wed, then his own love raised the standard of rebellion in his heart, and he willingly united with the false Sanazarro in decrying the charms of his loved mistress. Both singly and together they spoke disparagingly of this beautiful lady, and Cozimo believed them, although it caused him some surprise, but, as he said, he had never found them false.

But falsehood in weaving its net, always forgets to leave a loop-hole for its own escape. Too late Giovanni remembered the favor he had asked of the Duchess Fiorinda, and he hastened to request her to be silent in the matter. But while he was seeking her fruitlessly, she was already with the duke moving him, with all a woman’s eloquence, to command the presence of Charomonte’s fair daughter at the court, saying, that his nephew had given her such an abstract of perfection in his description of this maiden, that she did not wish to employ her as a servant, but to be by her instructed, and use her as a dear companion.

Duke Cozimo listened with amazement, and then, almost doubting his senses, made the princess repeat all that Giovanni had told her. This she did, using his very words: that she possessed all that could be wished for in a virgin. That she had rare beauty, her discourse was ravishing, she had quickness of apprehension, with choice manners and learning too, not usual with women.

This account was so unlike the report given by Giovanni and Sanazarro to him, that the duke saw with anger he had been deceived. This wounded him deeply, for he could not bear the thought of insincerity and falsehood in his nephew and bosom friend. He felt that he had been trifled with, and resolved to examine into the matter himself, then, if he found they had played him false, he would punish them with rigor. But he smothered his wrath, meaning to act quietly without their knowledge. He told the duchess her suit was granted; that the fair Lidia should come to her; but in return he would ask her to go with him the following morning on a short journey to the country. As he made this request, Giovanni and Sanazarro entered just in time to hear it. The duke greeted them coldly and left them. Joyfully the duchess hastened to communicate to Prince Giovanni her success. He dissembled his confusion awkwardly, and essayed to thank her for her kindness. She courteously received his thanks, and then with sweet condescension greeted Sanazarro, begging him to accept of a diamond from her, and wear it for her sake. Saying this, she bade them both adieu, and hastened to be in readiness for the duke’s journey.

The young prince and Sanazarro gazed at each other in consternation. Something must be done, however, and that right quickly, for they both felt certain that it was the duke’s intention to see Lidia with his own eyes, and that the journey of the following day was to Charomonte’s house. Hastily Giovanni decided upon sending his serving man that night with a letter to Lidia. In this letter he told her that the duke, his uncle, had heard of her, and her beauty, and was about to seek her he feared, with unlawful love. “If he see you, as you are, fair Lidia,” he concluded, “my hoped-for happiness will be changed into an everlasting night. Let your goodness find some means to prevent my uncle seeing you, and thus you will save two lives, your own and the honorer of your virtues, Giovanni.”

Giovanni’s messenger found the young Lidia in the midst of her father’s household, who with the kind, old Charomonte, were devising all manner of merry-makings, in order to divert the sadness which had hung over her since the departure of the young prince. She received the letter with joy, and retired to read it in secret, that no one might witness her emotion. So soon as she read his request, the very means of accomplishing it flashed quickly into her mind. As the duke had never seen her, she resolved upon presenting to him another in her place. Her maid, Petronilla, was the person decided upon. This girl was ill-favored, coarse and rude. The only difficulty she had to surmount, would be her father’s opposition, but she thought she would contrive with the servants’ aid, to have Petronilla presented to the duke when her father was not present. This difficulty the duke unconsciously relieved her from, for he came to Charomonte’s mansion in anger; and so soon as he arrived he dismissed his train, desiring to see Charomonte alone. Then he upbraided him with treason—for he suspected the old man of dishonor. He feared that Giovanni had become entangled with this Lidia, and not knowing Sanazarro’s suspicions, he attributed Giovanni’s double dealings, to a dishonorable illicit connection with this girl, connived at by her father.

Poor old Charomonte listened to his royal master’s reproaches with angry amazement. So soon as the duke had ended, he replied with words that proved how his loyalty and outraged feelings contended for mastery. In speaking of his daughter, the light of his eyes, the comfort of his feeble age, he described her so lovingly and tenderly that the duke commanded she should be shown to him.

“But,” said he, “you shall not prepare her to answer these charges. We will see her immediately, and to prevent all intercourse, we do confine thee close prisoner to thy chamber, till all doubts are cleared.”

Lidia was summoned, and in her place came Petronilla, escorted by Giovanni and Sanazarro, followed by the servants, bearing a sumptuous banquet. At the sight of her coarse appearance the duke felt that the manners of her mind must be transcendent to defend so rough an outside. She received him boisterously, and at the banquet, behaved rudely and indelicately, and drank so freely of the wine, that she had to be carried away from the duke’s presence. The imposture, however, was so gross, that the duke began to suspect some cunning deceit or trick had been played upon him; but he dissembled this suspicion, and sent out Giovanni and Sanazarro with his train, saying he would soon join them; that he wished first to see the Signor Charomonte in private, that he might, with a few kind words of comfort, take leave of the poor old man.

It appeared to him unlikely that both Charomonte and Contarino, his old secretary, could be so blinded. “It may be,” he said to himself, “that the daughter, for some ends unknown, has personated this rude behaviour, which seems so ridiculous and impossible. Whatever be the riddle, however, I will resolve it, if possible.”

Charomonte, on being summoned, came to him; but when he heard the duke’s pitying description of the pretended Lidia, he instantly went to his daughter’s chamber, where she was feigning illness, and forced her into the presence of Cozimo. The beautiful Lidia trembling, and in tears, knelt before him and besought his mercy.

“Ah,” exclaimed the duke, “this is the peerless form I expected to see;” then turning to Charomonte, he commanded that Sanazarro and his nephew, Giovanni, should straightway be imprisoned in separate chambers, guarded, until he should pronounce sentence against them as traitors.

In tender, touching language, Lidia pleaded for the prince, and asked that whatever punishment he deserved, to inflict it on her, as she was the sad cause of his offence.

“I know,” she said, “that the prince is so far above me that my wishes even cannot reach him, and to restore him to your wonted grace and favor, I’ll abjure his sight forever, and betake myself to a religious life, where, in my prayers, I may remember him, but no man will I ever see but my ghostly father. Be not, O sire, like the eagle that in her angry mood destroys her hopeful young for suffering a wren to perch too near them.”

Cozimo listened with admiration, and raising her tenderly put her suit off with courteous compliments, telling her that if she would cheer her drooping spirits, bring back the bloom of health to her pale cheek, and let him see the diamond of her beauty in its perfect lustre, there could be no crime that he would not look with eyes of mercy upon if she advocated it.

Already in his mind had he thought of a fitting punishment for his nephew. He resolved to make them all believe that he intended himself to wed the fair Lidia, and acted accordingly.

Poor Sanazarro, in the solitude of his prison, awakened too late to a sense of his wicked, disloyal treachery. He remembered the duke’s kindness and love, in making him almost his second self. The influence of Lidia’s charms faded away, and he recalled the loving favors he had received so carelessly from the beautiful Duchess Fiorinda. Now, he stood without friends, and no one dared or even cared to make intercession to the duke for him. As he thought of the Duchess Fiorinda’s love and past kindness, he resolved to appeal to her, and sent a message to her, begging her mediation in his favor, although he acknowledged himself most unworthy.

But true love forgetteth and forgiveth all injuries, and so soon as the lovely Fiorinda heard his sad plight, she repaired to the duke and entreated of him to be merciful and gracious to his poor servant, Sanazarro. Cozimo reminded her of his infidelity to him, his kind master; and then, to move her still more to anger, he recalled how coldly Sanazarro had always received her courtesies, and how easily he had yielded to the charms of another, and that other beneath her in rank.

The poor lady for a moment struggled with her pride, which whispered to her that, to endure a rival, and one also who was an inferior, betokened poverty of spirit, but her noble heart obtained the mastery, and she replied,

“True love must not know degrees or distances. Lidia may be as far above me in her form as she is in her birth beneath me; and what I liked in Sanazarro he may have loved in her. Vouchsafe to hear his defense.”

The duke consented, and said that both Sanazarro and the young prince should have a speedy trial, in which he would not only be judge, but accuser; and then expressed himself in such courteous, gallant words about the fair Lidia, that Charomonte and the courtiers stared in amazement. They could scarcely credit what he wished to make them believe—that he, the faithful, mourning widower, who had remained constant so many years, purposed a second marriage with this young maiden, so unfit for him in station and age.

The trial commenced, and the prisoners, almost hopeless of mercy, presented themselves, with their lovely advocates, the duchess and Lidia, before the duke. Cozimo, at the sight of Lidia, professed to forget every thing in the rapture her beauty caused him; and after exhausting love’s sweet language in describing her charms, he turned, with looks of rage, to the prince and Sanazarro, and told them they knelt too late for mercy. But Lidia and the duchess reminded him he had promised a gracious hearing to his prisoners, before passing sentence.

Duke Cozimo descended from the chair of state, and placing the two ladies in his seat, told them they should be his deputies; but they must listen to his accusation which would justify the sentence he was about to pronounce on these traitorous heads. First, he reminded Sanazarro of his cold indifference to Fiorinda’s condescending love, and his unfaithfulness to her; but the duchess interrupted him, and told him that charge was naught; she had already heard the count’s confession, and had freely pardoned him.

The duke courteously bowed, but continued and upbraided Sanazarro with his treachery to him, his indulgent master. Then he turned to Giovanni and reminded him of how careful of his interests he had always been; how he had remained unwedded, to secure to a thankless nephew a throne. “We made you both,” continued the duke, “the keys that opened our heart’s secrets, and what you spoke we believed as oracles. But you, in recompense of this, to us, who gave you all, to whom you owed your being, with treacherous lies endeavored to conceal this peerless jewel from our knowledge. Look on her,” he said, pointing to the blushing Lidia, “is that a beauty fit for any subject? Can any tire become that forehead but a diadem? Even should we grant pardon for your falsehood to us, your treachery to her, in seeking to deprive her of that greatness she was born to, can ne’er find pardon.”

As the duke finished, the ladies quickly descended from the chair of state, and kneeling, with the prince and Count Sanazarro before him, besought his mercy, which Charomonte reminded him, was more becoming in a prince than wreaths of conquest. The courtiers and old councillors united their entreaties, but the duke remained inflexible. Turning to Charomonte, he said,

“You, Carolo, remember with what impatiency of grief we bore our Duchess Clarinda’s death, and how we vowed—not hoping to see her equal—never to make a second choice. We did not know that nature had framed one that did almost excel her, and with oaths, mixed with tears, we swore our eyes should never again be tempted. Charomonte, thou heardest us sware—are those vows, thinkest thou, registered against us in heaven?”

Charomonte told him that if he were to wed a woman who possessed all woman’s beauties and virtues united, he had already sworn so deeply, that the weight of his perjury would sink him.

“This is strong truth, Carolo,” replied the duke, “but yet it does not free them from treason.”

“But,” answered the good old Charomonte, who began to suspect the duke’s design, “the prince, your nephew, was so earnest to have you keep your vows to heaven, that he vouchsafed to love my daughter.”

The duke turned to Lidia, as if for assurance of this, who blushingly replied, “He told me so, indeed, sire.”

“And the count has averred as much to me,” said the Duchess Fiorinda, with a playful air and a merry laugh, for she saw by the duke’s manner that he had only been feigning this stern severity as a punishment to the young men.

“Ah,” said Duke Cozimo, smiling, “you all conspire to force our mercy from us.”

Then he placed the gentle, lovely Lidia’s hand in Giovanni’s, and as he pronounced the pardon of the prince and count, he told them they must merit their forgiveness by service and love to their mistresses, the duchess and the beautiful Lidia.

Thus ends this story, courteous reader, and

“May the passage prove,

Of what’s presented, worthy of your love

And favor, as was aimed, and we have all

That can in compass of our wishes fall.”

LINES

WRITTEN AT NIGHT IN CAVE HILL CEMETERY.

———

BY GEO. D. PRENTICE.

———

One evening, dear Virginia, in thy life,
When thou and I were straying side by side
Beneath the holy moonlight, and our thoughts
Seemed taking a deep hue of mournfulness
From the sweet, solemn hour, I said if thou,
Whose young years scarcely numbered half my own,
Should’st pass before me to the spirit-land,
I would, on some mild eve beneath the moon,
Shining in heaven as it was shining then,
Go forth alone to lay me by thy grave,
And render to thy cherished memory
The last sad tribute of a stricken heart.
Thine answer was a sigh, a tear, a sob,
A gentle pressure of the hand, and thus
My earnest vow was hallowed. A thin cloud,
Like a pole winding-sheet, that moment passed
Across the moon, and as its shadow fell,
Like a mysterious omen of the tomb,
Upon our kindred spirits, thou didst turn
Thine eye to that wan spectre of the skies,
And, gazing on the solemn portent, weep
As if thy head were waters.
                            Weary years
Since then have planted furrows on my brow,
And sorrows in my heart, and the pale moon,
That shone around us on that lovely eve,
Is shining now upon thy swarded grave,
And I have come, a pilgrim of the night,
To bow at memory’s holy shrine and keep
My unforgotten vow.
                      Dear, parted one,
Friend of my better years, dark months have passed
With all their awful shadows o’er the earth,
Since this green turf was laid above thy rest,
’Mid sighs and streaming tears and stifled groans,
But oh! thy gentle memory is not dim
In the deep hearts that loved thee. We have set
This sweet young rose-tree o’er thy hallowed grave,
And may the skies shed their serenest dews
Around it, may the summer clouds distil
Their gentlest rains upon it, may the fresh
Warm zephyrs fan it with their softest breath,
And daily may the bright and holy beams
Of morning greet it with their sweetest smile,
That it may wave its roses o’er thy dust,
Dear emblems of the flowers that thou so oft
In life didst fling upon our happy hearts
From thy own spirit’s Eden. Yet we know
’Tis but an humble offering to thee,
Who dwellest where the fadeless roses bloom,
In heaven’s eternal sunshine.
                              To our eyes
Thy beauty has not faded from the earth;
We see it in the flowers that lift their lids
To greet the early spring-time—in the bow
The magic pencil of the sunshine paints
Upon the flying rain-clouds—in the stars
That glitter from the blue abyss of night—
And in the strange mysterious loveliness
Of every holy sunset. To our ears
The music of thy loved tones is not lost;
We hear it in the low, sweet cadences
Of wave and stream and fountain, in the notes
Of birds that from the sky and forest hail
The sunrise with their songs, and in the wild
And soul-like breathings of the evening wind
O’er all the thousand sweet Eolian lyres
Of grove and forest. Yet no sight or sound
In all the world of nature is as sweet,
Dear, lost Virginia, as when thou wast here
To gaze and listen with us. The young flowers
And the pure stars seem pale and cold and dim,
As if they looked through blinding tears—alas!
The tears are in our eyes. The melodies
Of wave and stream and bird and forest-harp,
Borne on the soft wings of the evening gale,
Seem blended with a deep wail for the dead—
Alas! the wail is in our hearts.
                                Lost one!
We miss thee in our sadness and our joy!
When at the solemn eventide we stray,
’Mid the still gathering of the twilight shades,
To muse upon the dear and hallowed past
With its deep, mournful memories, a voice
Comes from the still recesses of our hearts
“She is not here!” In the gay, festive hour,
When music peals upon the perfumed air,
And wit and mirth are ringing in our ears,
And light forms floating round us in the dance,
And jewels flashing through luxuriant curls,
And deep tones breathing vows of tenderness
And truth to listening beauty, even then,
Amid the wild enchantments of the hour,
To many a heart the past comes back again,
And, as the fountain of its tears is stirred,
A voice comes sounding from its holiest depths,
“Alas! she is not here!” The spring-time now
Is forth upon the fresh green earth, the vales
Are one bright wilderness of blooms, the woods,
With all their wealth of rainbow tints, repose,
Like fairy clouds upon the vernal sky,
And every gale is burdened with the gush
Of music, free, wild music, yet, lost one,
Through all these wildering melodies, that voice
As from the very heart of nature comes,
“Alas! she is not here!” But list! oh, list!
From the eternal depths of yonder sky,
From where the flash of sun and star is dim
In uncreated light, an angel strain,
As sweet as that in which the morning stars
Together sang o’er the creation’s birth,
Comes floating downward through the ravished air,
“Joy! joy! she’s here! she’s here!”
                                ’Tis midnight deep,
And a pale cloud, like that whose shadow fell
Upon our souls on that remembered eve,
Is passing o’er the moon, but now the shade
Falls on one heart alone. I am alone,
My dear and long-lost friend. Oh! wheresoe’er
In the vast universe of God thou art,
I pray thee stoop at this mysterious hour
To the dark earth from thy all radiant home,
And hold communion with thy weeping friend
As in the hours departed.
                            Ah, I feel,
Sweet spirit, thou hast heard and blessed my prayer!
I hear the rustling of thy angel-plumes
About me and around—the very air
Is glowing with a thousand seraph thoughts,
Bright as the sparkles of a shooting star—
A hand from which the electric fire of heaven
Seems flashing through my frame is clasped in mine—
Thy blessed voice, with its remembered tones
Softened to more than mortal melody,
Is thrilling through my heart, as ’twere the voice
Of the lost Pleiad calling from its place
In the eternal void—and our two souls
Blend once again as erst they used to blend—
The heavenly with the earthly!
                                Fare thee well!
Sweet spirit, fare thee well! the blessed words
That thou, this night, hast whispered to me here,
Above the mound that hides thy mortal form,
Will purify my soul, and strengthen me
To bear the ills and agonies of life,
And point me to an immortality
With thee in God’s own holy Paradise.

A SONG FOR A DOWN-TRODDEN LAND.

———

BY WILLIAM P. MULCHINOCK.

———

Air—“Some love to roam o’er the dark sea-foam.”

Fill high to-night, in our halls of light,
  The toast on our lips shall be
“The sinewy hand, the glittering brand,
  Our homes and our altars free.”
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.
Though the coward pale, like a girl may wail,
  And sleep in his chains for years,
The sound of our mirth shall pass over earth
  With balm for a nation’s tears.
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.
A curse for the cold, a cup for the bold,
  A smile for the girls we love;
And for him who’d bleed, in his country’s need,
  A home in the skies above.
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.
We have asked the page of a nobler age
  For a hope secure and bright,
And the spell it gave to the stricken slave
  Was in one strong word—“Unite.”
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.
Though the wind howl free o’er a single tree
  Till it bends beneath its frown—
For many a day it will howl away
  Ere a forest be stricken down.
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.
By the martyred dead, who for Freedom bled,
  By all that man deems divine,
Our patriot band, for our own dear land,
  Like brothers shall all combine.
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.
Then fill to-night, in our halls of light,
  The toast on our lips shall be—
“The sinewy hand, the glittering brand,
  Our homes and our altars free.”
                          Ho! ho! ho! etc.

LUCY LEYTON.

———

BY MRS. CAROLINE H. BUTLER.

———

I have been induced to a brief series of heart-histories by a remark of Longfellow, in Kavanagh. In speaking of the ever sanguine yet irresolute schoolmaster, who was “forced to teach grammar when he would fain have written poems,” he says, “Mr. Churchill never knew that while he was exploring the Past for records of obscure and unknown martyrs, in his own village, ——, the romance he was longing to find and record, had really occurred in his neighborhood, among his own friends.” Again, Emerson says, “Every roof is agreeable to the eye until it is lifted, and then we find tragedy, and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe.”

There is truth in this. Beneath every roof-tree some romance is at work—some heart-history compiling. The evening lights twinkle from cottages sleeping peacefully upon the hill-sides and valleys—music and mirth break on the air from brilliantly illuminated dwellings—then the night wears on—the cottage-lights no longer gleam—silence wraps the abode of wealth—and from out the majesty of the heavens encircling all, the gentle moon and bright, flashing stars look down alike on sheltered cot or marble dome. Yet, “lift the roof,” lay bare the heart which pulsates in every bosom, and we shall find each has its own tale of romance woven from life’s mingled threads of grief, of love, of happiness—perhaps of shame.

Let me, then, from out the “simple annals” of a quiet country town, sketch, with a faithful pen, these heart-histories—these romances from real life.

The little village to which they may be traced, I must forbear to name. That it does not exist merely in the imagination, let it suffice the incredulous reader. There are bright, dancing rills spangling its broad meadows—the “sweet south wind” plays over innumerable fields of billowy grain, and the tinkle of the cow-bell is heard within the sweet-scented pine forests which crown the summit of each rising hill. The roots, some of which I am about to “lift,” cover no costly edifices. They are for the most part humble and unpretending, yet so embosomed among fruit and forest-trees as to render each cottage of itself a coup d’oeil of beauty. There are, to be sure, two or three exceptions; the large, three-story brick house of Judge Porter, for instance, with its long, winding avenues, and, as Mrs. Malaprop would say, its “statutes” placed in awful frigidity about the grounds, frightening the children of the neighborhood as so many sheeted ghosts. The beautiful villa, too, of Dr. Bartine, (these names are, of course, fictitious,) which stands on a gentle eminence somewhat remote from the village. It was built by a gentleman of wealth and cultivated taste, who lived only to see it completed. It was then knocked down under the hammer of Tom Pepper, the village auctioneer, to the highest bidder, a worthy farmer, with as many children as barn-door fowl. For six months, droning spinning-wheels, and rattling looms, made music in the classic rooms—squashes and red-peppers hung on the frescoed walls, while the conservatory, with its marble fount, served admirably for the dairy of the notable Mrs. Grimes—pots of butter, and round, yellow cheeses, taking the place of rhododendrons and fragrant jessamines. Fortunately for the preservation of this tasteful dwelling, at the end of six months, it was purchased by young Doctor Bartine, who, after putting it in complete repair, and removing the unseemly pig-stye and other excrescences from the face of the beautiful lawn, brought hither his pretty young bride. There is the parsonage sequestered from the street by elms a century old; and the venerable church, from whose well-worn portals a narrow foot-path conducts to that peaceful spot where, “when life’s fitful fever ended,” the villagers come one by one and lie down to their dreamless rest. There all is hushed. The wind, as it softly sweeps the pliant willow, seems to whisper a requiem for the peaceful dead; a few birds flit noiselessly about, but no song of gladness trills from their little throats, their notes are low and plaintive, as if they mourned for the hand which once fed them, but will never feed them more.

Such are the prominent local features of the little village, into whose quiet precincts I have wandered. And there are many such primitive towns nestling among our hills and valleys, some even less pretending; and there are lone cottages scattered by the road-side, and huts of squalid poverty, and the thrifty homestead of the farmer, all of which have their heart-histories.

Love’s autocrasy must form the theme of my first romance from the real; and, indeed, if the truth was known, there are but few heart-histories in whose compilation that troublesome little sprite has not more or less interfered.

Lucy Leyton, with that bright, roguish eye of hers, and her sunny smile shall attest the truth of my words.

The proprietor of the great Leyton farm which covers more than a hundred acres of the richest land in New England, is a true specimen of her stalwort sons, her independent, industrious farmers—a noble race, uniting integrity, sound sense, and a high standard of moral worth, under manners the most plain and unpretending—keenly sensitive for the public weal, hospitable, kind, and thrifty—not over generous, not over prodigal of their means, yet far removed from that selfish avarice which would refuse a helping hand to those who would rise in the world if they had the means to start with, (and how many such there are,) or close their doors upon the weary wayfarer, vagrant though he might be. Of this class is Andrew Leyton.

A few words upon the domestic economy of Leyton farm. Mr. Leyton is a widower, and my little heroine, Lucy, his only child. People wondered, as people always will, why such a young-looking, hale, hearty man as Andrew Leyton, did not take a second wife; but when asked about it, he always had two answers ready—first, he was too much hurried about his farm-work to spend time in courting and marrying; second, old Dinah, who had lived with his father before him, though she was old, was a first-rate manager; and Heaven forbid he should unloose her tongue by talking about bringing a second Mrs. Leyton into the house. And so year after year old Dinah stood her ground, holding undisputed sway in kitchen and hall, doing pretty much as she pleased with her master, looking, in fact, upon the strong, athletic, six-foot Andrew Leyton as a mere child, “the boy,” as she termed him, when speaking to her cronies; and as for Lucy, she would have held her in leading-strings to this day probably, if Mr. Leyton had not sent her from home to acquire more advantages of education than the village-school could offer.

Lucy was a bright, darling little child, saying and doing a thousand witty things; and Mr. Leyton made up his mind that she was a perfect prodigy even at four years old—parents are pretty apt to imagine just such things—so he determined, from the time she could first lisp her letters, that she should have the very best education his means would afford; and when in process of time she came to know more than the schoolmaster, (in farmer Leyton’s opinion,) he resolved to part with his darling for a little while, that she might have the benefit of a fashionable boarding-school. In selecting the establishment of Mrs. Tracy, situated some thirty miles from Leyton farm, he proved himself more fortunate than many who send forth their children to gather “apples of wisdom,” but who return with thistles.

At the end of two years Lucy was pronounced “finished,” and returned home. If Mr. Leyton had thought her a prodigy at four years old, what must he have considered her at seventeen, for she had contrived to store away a goodly amount of knowledge in her little head, even if she was at times a little flighty. Yes, and notwithstanding she must have been so hurried at Mrs. Tracy’s with her algebra, and her French, and her philosophy, and her history, she had somehow managed to commence a little heart-history of her own; but then she did not let any one read it, not she. Farmer Leyton himself never knew a word about this unbargained for accomplishment.

One day when Lucy had been at home about a week, Mr. Leyton had occasion to go down into the village with a load of his renowned potatoes for Judge Porter.

“Dear father, will you please see if there is not a letter in the post-office for me?” cried Lucy, running out to the gate.

“Ha! ha!—a letter for you! that’s a new idea! Yes, but come and kiss me.”

And poising one little foot upon the hub of the cart-wheel, Lucy sprang lightly to the side of her father, gave him a hearty smack upon each sunburned cheek, and then alighted again like a bird upon the soft, green turf.

Now the farmer was no great scribe. Unless to announce a marriage or a death, it was a rare thing for him either to indite or receive a letter. The post-office revenue of Uncle Sam was but little benefitted by Andrew Leyton. He was somewhat pleased, therefore, that his Lu should expect a letter; so, after unloading, he brought his team to a stand-still in front of the tavern, which, beside offering entertainment for man and beast, served also for the post-office. Sure enough, there was a letter—a very thick one too—for “Miss Lucy Leyton,” directed in an elegant flowing hand—a gentleman’s hand.

“Hum!—What does this mean!” thought Farmer Leyton, turning the letter over and over, and looking at the seal,—“L’Amour,” “FidelitÉ.”

Lucy was watching for his return; and as soon as she saw the well-known team rise the hill, she flew swiftly along the road to meet it. Her father held up the letter. Ah! what a bright, happy face was hers, as she caught it from his hand; and seating herself under a shady tree by the road-side, she eagerly tore off the envelope, and pressed the insensible chirography to her lips.

“Hum!—what does this mean!” again thought the farmer, eyeing Lucy keenly. “Gee-haw, Darby—Gee-up, Dick!” he cried, sweeping his cart-whip above the sleek hides of his oxen, yet all the time noting uneasily the bright blush, the happy smile of Lucy, all absorbed as she was in the contents of her letter.

In less than a week there came another.

“Hum!” said Mr. Leyton, putting it in his pocket, “I must see what this means.”

He went home, foddered the cattle, and then walked into the house.

“Come here Lu, sit down by me.”

Lucy laid aside her work, and drawing a low foot-stool to the side of her father, folded her dimpled hands upon his knees, and looked up smiling into his face.

“Well, Lu, you had a nice time, didn’t you, at Mrs. Tracy’s?” said Mr. Leyton, smoothing back the long, golden curls from her white upturned brow.

“Indeed I did, my dear father. I am sure, although I was so anxious to see you, I was sorry to come away.”

“Hum! Mrs. Tracy used to keep you pretty strict, I suppose—never let you go out, did she?”

“O yes, we walked every day—an hour in the morning, and an hour after school at night; it was very pleasant, sometimes Mrs. Tracy would go with us, and sometimes—O, it was so pleasant!” and Lucy heaved a sigh as she concluded.

“I take it for granted you never saw any boys there, Lu, did you?”

Lucy blushed, and wondered what in the world possessed her father to talk so; at last she answered, very demurely:

“Why, father, it was a school for girls you know; it would have been very strange, I am sure, to have seen a set of rude boys in our pleasant school-room.”

“That is not what I mean, you little puss you—did any young men ever visit at Mrs. Tracy’s?”

“Mercy, no, Mrs. Tracy would not even let Edward invite—”

“Edward—who is Edward?”

“Mrs. Tracy’s nephew, father,” replied Lucy, stooping to tie her little slipper, which just at that particular moment it seemed necessary for her to attend to.

“Hum—and I suppose Edward walked with you, didn’t he?” said Mr. Leyton.

“Yes, father, when Mrs. Tracy could not go.”

“I thought so. Who is he? What is he? What is his name—this Edward?”

Poor Lucy, how she tried not to blush, and yet what a glow instantly suffused the tell-tale countenance she averted from the scrutinizing glance of her father.

“His name is Bartine—Edward Bartine—he is a very fine young man, father—every body loves him.”

“Hum!”

“All the girls loved him, just like a brother.”

“And you loved him just like a brother, I suppose.”

“Sir.”

“Hum—well go on—what was this very fine young man doing at a young ladies’ boarding-school?”

“He only came up from New Haven to pass a few months with Mrs. Tracy, and to pursue his studies with Dr. Heber—he is going back to college very soon, I suppose.”

“Going back to college! Ah, I understand, I understand—some wild scapegoat, I’ll be bound, suspended for misdemeanor—never will be worth a straw—never will be good for any thing, not he—wasting the money which his father has toiled hard to earn, I’ll warrant you!”

“No, indeed, father, Edward Bartine is no such person, indeed he is not!” eagerly interposed Lucy.

“How do you know? I tell you he is. See here Lu—who is this from?” and putting his hand in his ample coat-pocket Mr. Leyton drew forth the letter, holding it up, however, at arm’s length.

“O, dear, dear father, please give it to me, please do—that’s a dear father!” cried Lucy, springing up, her face radiant with joy, and extending her hand for the precious missive.

“Not so fast, little Miss Lucy Leyton—sit down again—there is your letter—now open it and read it to me,” said Mr. Leyton, passing his arm around her waist to prevent her flight.

“O, father, please let me go—indeed I cannot read it to you!” urged Lucy, the tears trembling like dew-drops on her long fringed eye-lids.

“Well, then, I’ll read it myself—it must be very fine; I should like to read a letter from such a nice young man,” said Mr. Leyton, attempting to take it.

“Father, please don’t, it is only about—about—”

“Never mind, I will see what it is about. Lucy, you must either give me the letter or read me the contents—I must know them!” and this time Mr. Leyton spoke sternly.

The poor girl dared not disobey. With a trembling hand she broke the seal, and, in a voice scarcely audible, read:

“My dearest, sweet Lucy.”

“Hum—puppy! go on.”

“My dearest, sweet Lucy—To-morrow—to-morrow I leave for—for—” Lucy could proceed no further, but covered with blushes hid her face in her father’s bosom.

“Well, well Lu, don’t cry; I don’t want to hear any more of such silly stuff. There give me the letter, it will serve nicely to light my pipe,” said Mr. Leyton, twisting it in his fingers.

“Father, wont you let me have the letter—wont you, father?” pleaded Lucy.

“No, Lucy. Now go and get pen, ink, and paper; this must be answered.”

Quite pale and frightened, Lucy brought her little desk and placed it on the table.

“Are you ready?” said Mr. Leyton, “well then, begin, Mr. Edward—what’s his name—Bartine—”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are a base designing young man—”

“Must I say so, father? indeed, he is no such thing!” interrupted Lucy, looking up all in tears.

“I say he is—go on—‘you are a base designing young man, so, although I am but a farmer’s daughter, never presume to address another letter to me.’ Have you wrote that—very well, now add, ‘My father desires his compliments, and would like to try the strength of his new raw-hide upon your shoulders.’”

Lucy sobbed aloud.

“Now, say, ‘Respectfully, very, Lucy Leyton.’”

Mr. Leyton took up the blotted page, read it, sealed and directed it, and put it in his pocket. Then taking Lucy in his arms and kissing her, he said:

“My darling, I would not grieve you for the world; what I am doing is for your good, my child, though I know you think me very cruel, but you will thank me one of these days. There—now go to your chamber and lie down awhile; kiss me, dear Lu.”

Lucy pressed her lips to his with a loud sob, and then hastening to her little chamber, she bolted the door, and throwing herself upon the bed, gave way to her affliction—for the first time a tear had blotted her heart-history!

“What the mischief ails the girl I wonder? she don’t eat—she don’t sleep, and half the time there are tears in her pretty eyes; her rosy cheeks are all gone, and every now and then she sighs enough to break one’s heart! Hang me if I can stand it! she thinks I don’t see it—when I am by she tries to smile and sing as she used to—she thinks I haven’t any eyes—but I have. Confound that fellow—I wish I had kept her at home—well, well, poor Lu—something must be done, or else she’ll die!”

Thus soliloquized Andrew Leyton, a few weeks after the scene just related. Now, Mr. Leyton was neither a severe nor an obstinate man—there was never a more tender father, nor a kinder master. He was little connusant of the great world, it is true, but enough so to render him keenly apprehensive for his daughter. He knew there were unprincipled young men enough, who solely from vanity, and for self-gratulation would not scruple to win the affections of a young, artless girl like Lucy, and his jealous fears imputed the same unworthy motive to the professions of young Edward Bartine. Thus it was his love for his only child, amounting almost to idolatry, which had caused him to take the perhaps somewhat hasty step he had done—he was a father, and who can blame him? Yet it cut him to the heart when he saw how deeply poor Lucy suffered from his well meant kindness.

“Something must be done!” again exclaimed Mr. Leyton, slowly pacing to and fro the little porch, and watching, with a sad, perplexed countenance, the slight figure of Lucy strolling pensively through the garden, and at length the “something” took upon itself a shape which mightily pleased his fancy.

Mr. Leyton had one sister who, in his boyhood, had emigrated, together with almost every member of the Leyton family, to the far west. She had married there, but had been early left a widow, with one son. Andrew had several times offered her a home in his house; but the distance was great—new friends and associations had been formed to supplant earlier ties, and the widow, though grateful for her brother’s kindness, preferred the banks of the Ohio to the fertile vale of the Connecticut. Now, Mr. Leyton had no son, and a vague idea had now and then seized him to unite Lucy to his sister’s child. Thus the great Leyton farm would be continued in the family, when he was dead and gone. True, he had never seen him—but what of that—he was certain he must be a fine fellow, a good honest lad, for all the Leytons were so from the beginning.

“Yes, I will write this very night!” said Mr. Leyton, stopping suddenly in his walk, as this bright thought suggested itself. “I’ll just invite Reuben to come on and see the old homestead, where his grandfather, and his great grandfather lived and died, and then if he only takes a fancy to Lu, which of course he cannot fail of doing, I shall be happy as a lord—he will soon drive this college scape-grace from her mind!”

“Lu, how do you like your Cousin Reuben?” said Mr. Leyton, knocking the ashes from his third evening pipe.

Lucy looked up from her work and smiled faintly, as she replied:

“My dear father, you know I have never seen him.”

“True, true, neither have I, but I tell you what, Lu, I am going to write out to Reuben to come on and make us a visit, and bring his mother too, if she will; how should you like it?”

“Very much, indeed, I shall be delighted to see Aunt Richards, whom you have so often talked to me about.”

“And Cousin Reuben too?”

“Yes, of course I should.”

“Well, Lu, I hope you will like Reuben, for do you know I have quite set my heart upon having him for a son-in-law—what say you?” said Mr. Leyton, abruptly.

Lucy at once burst into tears, and went on to protest, in the most earnest manner, that she should never marry—she would not marry for the world, she could never love anybody—she wished her father would not talk so—she was very happy as she was—O, very happy, indeed!

However, Mr. Leyton wrote the letter, and it took him three good hours to do so. Then in the morning, as he was very busy, for it was haying time, he told Lucy he wished she would walk down into the village and put it in the post-office.

What could have put it into Lucy’s little head to do as she did, I am sure I don’t know. I will not pretend to exculpate such a piece of mischief, not I, I will only state facts.

“Dear Mr. Edward Bartine,—I have thought of you a great many times since I wrote those few lines to you, which you must have considered very strange. My father made me write them, for he does not know you, or I am sure he would never have done so. You will forgive him, wont you? If you would like to come here during the vacation, as you said you should, I shall be very happy to see you, and I dare say my dear father will like you very much; I don’t see how he can help it. If you have a wish to come, please take a hint from the enclosed letter to my Cousin Reuben Richards.

“Lucy Leyton.”

“P. S. If you have no use for the enclosed, please forward it to the address.”

Just think, now, of Lucy Leyton writing such a letter—but she did! And then she neatly folded it, and enclosing the one designed for Mr. Reuben Richards, with a glowing cheek, and palpitating bosom, she directed it to Mr. Edward Bartine, Yale College, New Haven, and putting on her bonnet and shawl, tripped fleetly to the office and deposited it.

“Ah, she’ll come round—all right yet!” said Mr. Leyton, a few days after, as he overheard Lucy caroling one of her lively songs.

In due time, allowing for the speed of steam-boats, rail-cars, and stages all the way from the Ohio, a young man, with a ponderous leather trunk, alighted at Mr. Leyton’s gate. It was after dinner, and the farmer was enjoying his afternoon pipe, while Lucy, sitting very quietly by his side, was reading the village news. But all of a sudden, as she saw the young man approaching, she sprung up in the strangest confusion and ran into the house. Mr. Leyton rose up, put down his pipe, and hastily advanced to meet the youth.

“This must be my dear nephew, Reuben!” he said, extending his hand; “I know the true Leyton look. I am glad to see you, my lad!”

“Thank you, Uncle Leyton, how are you—how is Lucy?” replied the stranger, warmly shaking hands.

“She is well, Reuben, and will be very glad to see you; come into the house—you must be weary after such a long journey. Lucy! Lucy! why where has she flown to? Lucy! O, here she comes. Well Lu, we have got him at last—this is your Cousin Reuben—give her a kiss—that’s right.”

Lucy turned very pale when she first cast her eyes upon her cousin, who, with very red hair and a somewhat limping gait, advanced to salute her, then a rosy blush, and an arch smile, but half suppressed, stole over her pretty face. But she blushed still deeper, and drew back timidly from the tender embrace her young relative would fain have bestowed upon her.

“My own, dear Lucy!” was softly whispered in her ear.

“So your mother wouldn’t venture with you,” said Mr. Leyton, “well, I am sorry, for it is many a long year since we met; I hope she is strong and healthy, Reuben.”

“Not very, she is greatly troubled with the rheumatism.”

“That’s bad. And how are all the rest of the folks—how is Uncle Bill, and Deacon Gracie?”

“Dead.”

“Bless me, dead! you don’t say your poor Uncle Bill is dead!” exclaimed Mr. Leyton, aghast at such news of an only brother.

“N—not exactly dead—half killed with the rheumatism, I mean, and the deacon, O, the deacon has gone to California.”

“What! Deacon Gracie gone to California—well that beats all! I’ll warrant old Mr. Stubbs is living!”

“Dead, a year ago.”

“Dead, is he? what killed him? I should like to know, for I thought him good for a hundred years.”

“Rheumatism, uncle.”

“Rheumatism again! what in the world do you live in such a climate for? Well, Reuben, how do you like your Cousin Lucy’s looks? I think she is some like your mother, who resembled the Darlings more than the Leytons.”

“I think Lucy is a decided Darling!” replied Cousin Reuben, with a mischievous glance at the fair object in question.

“But you look more like the Leytons, all but your hair; none of the Leytons ever had red hair!” continued the farmer, “and, excuse me, but I must say I could never abide it; however, I guess you will reconcile me to it. What makes you limp so, nephew, nothing serious I hope.”

“O, no, nothing but rheumatism, Uncle Andrew.”

“Good gracious, rheumatism again! Now make yourself at home, will you, for I must go and look after my men. Lucy take good care of your cousin, I will soon be back.”

“Don’t hurry, uncle, I am quite at home!” and as Mr. Leyton closed the door, Cousin Reuben sprung to the side of Lucy, and stealing his arm around her waist, imprinted a kiss upon her blushing cheek.

“I say, nephew, we must bathe your rheumatics in beef-brine,” said Mr. Leyton, re-opening the door. Then hastily closing it again, he snapped his fingers, exclaiming, “Ah, it will do! it will do! he is a fine young fellow, I see, only that confounded red hair—he got that from the Richards.”

A week and more passed on. Lucy and her cousin agreed wonderfully, and Mr. Leyton was in perfect ecstasy at the recovered bloom and spirits of his daughter.

“Ah, Lu,” said he one day, slyly pinching her cheek, “what do you think of Cousin Reuben now; a’nt he worth a dozen of your college fellows?” and Lucy protested she really liked Reuben just as well as she had ever done Mrs. Tracy’s nephew.

Cousin Reuben, who was now perfectly domesticated, made himself not only very agreeable, but useful to his Uncle Leyton in various ways, and the farmer regretted more and more every day that he had not known him before. Reuben was a geologist, and he explained to Mr. Leyton how some portions of his farm, which he had thought the most unproductive, might be made to yield good crops; he was an architect, and he drew the plan of the new house which Mr. Leyton designed to erect in the spring. He was a botanist, a geometrician, an astromer,

“And Latin was no more difficile,

Than for a blackbird ’tis to whistle.”

“Why, how in the world did you pick up so much learning out West? I should think you had been to college by the way you talk!” said Mr. Leyton, one evening, addressing his nephew, who had just been expounding some knotty point.

“Yes, uncle, and I have just taken my degree,” replied Reuben, looking at Lucy.

“You, the deuce you have. Why where did your mother raise the money to send you to college?”

“My education was provided for by my grandfather’s will.”

“It was, eh! well, I am glad of it, and so the Richards family were a good stock after all. I am sure I never dreamed you had been to college, though I thought from the first you knew considerable for your years.”

“Thank you, Uncle Andrew.”

“And what are you going to do now?”

“My dear uncle, I shall soon receive my diploma for the practice of medicine; then, if you will give me dear Lucy for a wife, I will buy that pretty cottage at the foot of the hill, and commence business.”

“You buy it! No, no, I am able to buy it myself, and give it to Lucy on her wedding-day. I am sorry you don’t like the farm better, for I had set my heart upon seeing you settled upon the old family estate, but no matter. Come here Lu, will you marry your Cousin Reuben? Ah, I see you will; here take her nephew she is yours—God bless you!”

Lucy burst into tears, and for a moment her lover also appeared much agitated. He then took Mr. Leyton’s hand:

“Then you really like me, uncle?”

“First rate, lad.”

“And you don’t know of any one else whom you would prefer for a son-in-law!”

“Always had my eye upon you, Reuben.”

“But suppose you have been imposed upon; suppose that I am not your nephew after all!”

“Ho, ho! imposed upon—not my nephew! don’t talk to me—imposed upon, pooh, don’t I know the Leyton look—all but the red hair—I wonder where you got that from!”

“I bought it of Frizeur and Frizette, French barbers, Broadway, New York, it is a capital wig, don’t you think so?” replied the young man, coolly taking it off, and handing it for the inspection of Mr. Leyton.

“Hey! why, what’s all this—who are you—what does this mean?” exclaimed Mr. Leyton, starting up in astonishment, wig in hand, and staring at the fine looking youth with dark-brown locks, who was now bending so tenderly over Lucy.

“Mr. Leyton, why should I hesitate to confess who I am,” was the answer, “since you have already assured me of your affection, and of your willingness to bestow upon me this dear hand. My name is Edward Bartine.”

“Bartine—Bartine—why, that is the same fellow—”

“That you was going to try your new raw-hide upon, my dear sir!”

“Hum, and if I had it here I would try it now!”

“O, no, you wouldn’t, father!” interposed Lucy.

“Grant me your patience a moment, Mr. Leyton,” resumed Edward, “with your prejudice against me, I was very certain you would never allow me to visit Lucy. You must believe me, when I assure you that the imposition I have practiced upon you has been most repugnant to me, and nothing but the hope of gaining your favor, under the guise of your nephew, could have tempted me to act the part I have.”

“My nephew! but how did you know any thing about my nephew? Lucy, did you—”

“Yes, sir.”

“Say, Mr. Leyton, will you forgive me, will you still confer upon me your dear Lucy, may I, as Edward Bartine, again receive the priceless gift you but now bestowed upon ‘Cousin Reuben?’”

“You have deceived me, young man,” replied Mr. Leyton, “although I acknowledge I was wrong to harbor such prejudice against a stranger. Would there was not so much depravity in the world as to warrant my suspicions—but so it is, and upright, noble-minded young men must sometimes suffer for the unprincipled libertinisms of those who best serve the devil by beguiling the purest and fairest of God’s creatures! But I forgive the deception. You were no less a stranger to me as Edward Bartine than as Reuben Richards, and I have learned to love you. Yes, you shall have Lucy, and the pretty white cottage to boot. Once more I give her to you, and again I say, God bless you and make you both happy, my dear children!”

In a few moments Lucy raised her head from her father’s shoulder, and looking archly in his face, said:

“Dear father, here is that letter for Cousin Reuben, shall we send it?”

“Ah, you little jade, now I understand! send it, yes, and we will have them all here to the wedding; if—the rheumatism will permit! ha, ha, what a lame concern you made of them, eh!”

“Yes, my dear sir, but the plot has not proved a lame one!” replied Edward, laughing.

Dr. Bartine and the charming Lucy, reside in the beautiful villa noticed in the commencement of this sketch, which, however, Edward insisted upon purchasing himself.

Mrs. Richards, and her son Reuben, accepted the invitation of Andrew Leyton, and now reside altogether at the farm. Reuben is a great favorite with his uncle, who, however, acknowledges that Edward pleases him best for a son-in-law. It is said Reuben will soon be married to a pretty girl in the neighbourhood, and will, without doubt, succeed to the Leyton farm.

TO JENNY LIND:

ON SEEING HER PORTRAIT FOR GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

———

BY J. R. FRY.

———

World-worshiped Jenny! if this counterfeit
  Of woman be not only Art’s ideal;
If when in ecstasy we gaze on it
  We know that all its loveliness is real—
That in this face, by guileless rapture lit,
  We see the reflex of thy living features;
And if thy voice this seraph-face befit,
  No marvel ’tis that over genial natures
Thy power is felt as more than of the earth—
  A gift, among the myriads of God’s creatures,
To prove how much may spring from human birth
  Of attributes, which faith or fancy blendeth
With visions only of celestial worth!
  Not impiously then the warm heart bendeth
In homage at the altar of thy fame,
  Where Virtue jealous of thy smile attendeth,
To watch the burning of its vestal flame
And share with Art the honors of thy name!

EDITOR OF GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE
Geo. R. Graham
Engraved by W.G. Armstrong from a painting by T.B. Read

GEORGE R. GRAHAM

[WITH A PORTRAIT.]

———

BY CHARLES J. PETERSON.

———

When a man, left a friendless orphan in boyhood, overcomes every obstacle of fortune, and rises to wealth and station, we justly conclude that he is possessed of no common abilities. But when the same individual, beggared by unforeseen events, retains still the confidence of his fellow men, and finally conquers fate a second time, and resumes his lost position, we do not exaggerate if we call him an extraordinary man. Yet such, unless the partiality of friendship deceives us, is George R. Graham.

The father of Mr. Graham was a gentleman of education and fortune, resident in Philadelphia, where he was known, about thirty years ago, as an enterprising shipping merchant. At one period he was a partner of the late Robert Fleming, then carrying on an active trade between Charleston and Ireland. Subsequently he entered largely into commerce on his own account, but disastrous times approaching, he shared in the general ruin, and ultimately, not only his fortune, but his life sunk under the blow. He left two children, of whom the eldest, the subject of our memoir, was born on the 18th of January, 1813. The early death of the father materially affected the interests of the son. Mr. Graham had been designed for the bar, and all his studies were directed to that end; the preliminary arrangements had even been made for him in the office of the Hon. Charles Jared Ingersoll; but the reverses and death of the parent frustrated the scheme, and the young orphan, who had been born apparently to a life of comparative ease, was left penniless and almost friendless, to carve his way to distinction alone.

But, even at this early age, he did not despair. Of a sanguine temperament and determined will, he resolved to re-construct the shattered fortunes of his family. He had been placed, on his father’s death, and when only fifteen years of age, with his maternal uncle, Mr. George Rex, an opulent farmer of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, after whom he had been named; and with this gentleman, and in the country he remained until he was nineteen. The time, however, was not lost. On the contrary, it was to this period of his life he is indebted for that robust constitution which afterward enabled him to endure the severe application to which he addressed himself. During these four years he omitted no opportunity to improve his mind. He read every thing that came in his way. But books, fortunately, were not so abundant then as now, so that what he read he digested, and thus acquired habits of correct thought, so rare among the hasty students of the day.

In 1832, Mr. Graham returned to the city, and commenced to learn the trade of a cabinet-maker. But he had already resolved that he would yet be a lawyer, as his father had intended; and accordingly, to effect this object, he now addressed himself with that untiring energy which has ever characterised him. His first object was to discipline his mind, to improve his tastes, and to enlarge his stores of knowledge. For this purpose he began a course of literary study, and, for three years, prosecuted it with undiminished ardor, exhibiting, during the entire period, a perseverance amid difficulties which entitles him to a high place among self-taught men. His trade requiring his attention for ten or twelve hours daily, he had but a short interval to spare for recreation and sleep, but having resolved to devote six hours out of the twenty-four to literary pursuits, he rigidly adhered to his plan, gaining the time, when necessary, by rising before dawn.

At the age of twenty-two he made the acquaintance of a son of the late Judge Armstrong, of Philadelphia, and by him was introduced to the judge, who at once arranged to receive him as a student. For the three years, during which he studied law, he continued laboring at the bench, devoting the early morning hours and the evening to Coke and Blackstone. By the regulations of the Pennsylvania courts, the last year of a student’s course has to be spent in the office of some practicing attorney; and this he was enabled to effect by rising at four o’clock in the morning, laboring until nine, then visiting the office, and often returning to the bench in the evening. The writer of this happened to be a student with the same preceptor at this period, and writes of facts to which he was an admiring eye-witness.

The natural bent of the mind, in all well-balanced natures, triumphs in the end over the plans of parents and the exigencies of circumstances alike. Under the influence of a commendable pride, Mr. Graham had resolved notwithstanding his early misfortunes, to fulfill his father’s wish, and become a member of the bar; but now, he discovered that his tastes led him toward a literary life. He accordingly began to contribute a series of papers to the Philadelphia press, which, at once attracted attention by the vigor of their thought, not less than the freshness of their style. He persisted, however, in his intention of entering the bar, and, in 1839, was admitted to practice.

His inclination for literature continuing instead of diminishing, he resolved to abandon the active pursuits of his profession, and embark in avocations more suitable to his tastes. Accordingly, in the same year he became editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a well-known weekly journal, at that time published by Samuel C. Atkinson. In the following year, he became joint proprietor as well as editor. He continued, in connection with his partners, to publish this journal for several years, but finally, in 1846, parted with his entire interest in it.

It is as a magazine editor and publisher, however, that Mr. Graham has made himself especially famous. In 1839, at the time he became editor of the Post, he purchased of Mr. Atkinson the Casket, a monthly magazine of respectable ability and circulation. This periodical he continued to publish, under its old name, until December, 1840, when he bought the list of the Gentleman’s Magazine, and united the two monthlies as Graham’s Magazine, issuing the first number in January, 1841. The success of this new enterprise was unprecedented. Having spared no expense to procure able writers and elegant embellishments, the result was that he produced a periodical of unexampled merit and beauty; and, at once, thousands were added to his list. A new spirit was infused into magazines. Before this period, the monthlies had been filled with second-hand English stories, or indifferently written original tales; while their poetry, except what was taken from well-known authors, was such as “both gods and men abhor.” The illustrations were few and indifferent.

The freshness, beauty, and ability of Graham’s Magazine at once placed it before all others in the popular favor, and though its rivals hastened to imitate the example it had set, it continued to maintain, and maintains to this day, the supremacy.

The success of Mr. Graham’s Magazine was such, that, by January, 1842, it had attained a circulation of more than thirty thousand. Meantime no expense was spared to increase its excellence, both literary and pictorial. Mr. Sartain, the celebrated engraver, was kept busily employed in furnishing mezzotints for it: and some of the engravings then executed by that artist, and by Smillie, Rawdon and Tucker, have certainly never been since surpassed. The most eminent authors in the United States were, at the same time, sought for its pages. At first, these writers were incredulous that any American magazine could afford them adequate remuneration; but the success which had already attended Mr. Graham’s improvements convinced him that the public would sustain him in his effort to raise the character of our periodical literature, and accordingly he persevered in his design. No sooner were Longfellow, Bryant, Cooper, and others of our leading authors, discovered to be permanent contributors to Graham’s Magazine, than thousands, who had heretofore looked with contempt on an American monthly, hastened with their subscriptions, to encourage the enterprising publisher. The benefit thus done to popular literature cannot be calculated. But it was such that it will be long, perhaps, before any one man will have it in his power to do again as much.

The demand of a large business, and the watchfulness necessary to keep the lead, left Mr. Graham but little time for literary composition. He had, however, increased his own reputation as a writer, of occasional articles contributed to his newspaper and magazine, but principally to the latter. Thoroughly read in Bolingbroke, Addison, Burke, and others of the classic authors of the language, his style was distinguished by a finish, yet an idiomatic force such as is rarely found among the careless writers of the day. A clear, sound thinker; with a fervid imagination; possessing a keen sense of the ridiculous; and having a great command over the resources of language, he always wrote to the point, in a racy, nervous style, mingling eloquence and satire by turns, and never, as hackneyed writers so often do, drowning the idea with “excess of words.” His choice of terms was singularly felicitous. He wrote the language as the translators of the Bible wrote it, with a large mixture of Saxon derivations, yet with purity. In invective, as in sarcasm, he was especially powerful. A series of editorial articles contributed to the newspaper under his management, and still remembered, are instances of the former: his letters to Jeremy Short, are examples of the latter. In a word, as a terse, and even eloquent writer, Mr. Graham holds a high rank. As a critic his judgment is always generous, but just.

In 1846, Mr. Graham purchased the North American, a daily newspaper of standing and influence in Philadelphia. He had no sooner embarked in this new enterprise than it exhibited proofs of his energy and tact: and, in a very short while, the ability with which the journal was conducted made it a name throughout the entire Union. In 1847, he still further extended the influence and reputation of his newspaper, by purchasing, in connection with his partners, the United States Gazette, and consolidating it with the North American. But he had now attained, at least for awhile, the summit of his successes. Having been induced to engage in certain stock speculations, he entered into them with all the ardor of his character, and though for a time successful, eventually impaired his fortune to such a degree that he was forced to part temporarily with the Magazine and North American. This misfortune happened in July, 1848. A man of his energy, however, could not be kept down: fortune might depart, but failed to overcome him. He continued to edit his Magazine, even after parting with the proprietorship of it, until March, 1850, when circumstances having induced the retirement of Samuel D. Patterson, he succeeded in regaining his interest in his favorite periodical; and from that period has added the duties of publisher to those of editor. This restoration to his old position is the result of indomitable energy, which he possesses in a degree that is as rare as it is praiseworthy. With men of his stamp nothing is impossible.

As a man Mr. Graham inspires general affection. The warmth of his heart, and the frankness of his manners make for him friends wherever he goes. Generous to a fault, forgetful of injuries, conciliating in his deportment, he is one to be alike popular with the many and loved by the few. His faults, where he has them, are those of a noble nature. His sense of honor is keen. He could do no man wrong intentionally. In all his actions, even to the most trivial, the energy of his character, and the kindness of his heart are equally discernible.

THE GENIUS OF BURNS.

———

BY HENRY GILES.

———

In a cottage on the banks of Doon, near the town of Ayr, in Scotland, in 1759, Robert Burns, one of the world’s sweetest poets, first saw the light of life. The peasant-child soon learned to know existence in toil and sorrow; torn at an early age from study to labor, grief went hand in hand with glory through his remaining years. We find him amidst the wild eccentricities of an irregular youth, without any settled aim, as he himself declares, but with some stirrings of ambition, that were only as the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops around the walls of his cave. With characteristic ardor, and with more zeal than wisdom, he mingled in the theological and political squabbles of the times, and by the destructive boldness of his satire, and the shafted power of his ridicule, he created many enemies whom it was easier to provoke than to propitiate. Nor must we hold him blameless. In the prodigality of wit, and the wildness of laughter; in the madness of merriment, and the pride of genius, he treated opinions and persons with an unsparing levity which a more thoughtful experience would have taught him to regard with reverence or forbearance. That his genius went too frequently in company with his passions, and that the glory of the one was sometimes wrecked in the delirium of the other, it is not allowed us to deny; but these follies had their penalties; and if it were possible, they were better now forgotten in the ashes of his early grave. Burns was a man that sinned, and one that suffered; but he was not a man that sinned callously, or that suffered meanly; and it is not for the living to write in marble errors which the departed repented in tears.

Incidents of romance and anguish checker the opening of his poetic fame with sadness as well as sunshine. His “Highland Mary,” the love of his youth, and the dream of his life is wrenched from his heart by death. Then comes the melancholy episode of his attachment to Jean Armor, with its heavy retribution of wretchedness. His name has begun to gather honor among his native hills; the small provincial edition of his poems is hailed with proud enthusiasm; but yet, with poverty and a bleeding spirit, he looks across the ocean to foreign exile. Suddenly his purpose is turned aside, and we behold him in Edinburgh among the exclusives and magnates of the land. There, as at the plough, we find him still the true and sturdy man. In the throng of Highland chieftains and border barons, in the full blaze of pride and beauty, he felt within him a humanity beyond the claim of titles; genius had given him a superscription more impressive than device of heraldry; the patent of nobility was written with fire in his heart, and the proud ones of earth became poor before the aristocrat of heaven. In that day of classic propriety, a poet from the plough, full of passionate earnestness, must have been in Edinburgh a startling phenomenon. But nature made herself heard in the very citadel of art; cavil was silent, and admiration offered willing homage. The wealthy marveled at the inspired peasant; and wherever the eloquent ploughman appeared, there were the nobles collected together. Dukes gave him their silken hands; duchesses received him with sweetest smiles; earls pledged him in the wine-cup; and for the moment, the haughty and the high-born recognized the presence of a greatness superior to their own. But Burns was not a man to hold popularity long in circles such as these. He was too stoutly individual for the apathy of elegant mediocrity, and he was too sternly independent for the sensibility of patronizing grandees: he saw nothing to venerate in a title when it was but the nickname of a fool; and he was undazzled by a star when it glittered on the breast of a ruffian or a dunce. But though Burns escaped the danger of aristocratic delusion, he did not escape the danger of aristocratic feasts. These were the times of night-long carousals, and pottle-deep potations. Burns had neither the firmness to resist such dissipation, nor the constitution to endure it; and he carried from it impaired health and impaired habits—an irritable discontent with his condition, and an instability of purpose fatal to a life of labor. Having placed a tomb over the neglected remains of poor Ferguson, the poet, he retired to the country, shared his success with his brother Gilbert, met his mother steeped in tears of honest joy, married his Jean, and gave peace to a wounded spirit.

From this era of light in his course; from this day, bright with fame and conscious virtue, we trace him along a path devious and clouded. We follow him through the toil of a profitless farm, to the struggles of a country gauger, and from these to a destitute death-bed. In all his follies and his sufferings, we behold him true to a manly nature, loyal to noble principles; and however seamed and deformed may have been the surface of his life, virtue remained unshaken in the centre of his soul. With a large family, and only seventy pounds a year, he had an open hand for the poor, and a hospitable roof for stranger and for friend; and although he died owing no man any thing, yet he has been stigmatized as a prodigal and a spendthrift. He gave the world his immortal songs without money and without price; and with the generosity of benignant genius, he sympathized with every effort of the humble men around him for a nobler life, he ministered to their intellectual wants, and he aided their intellectual struggles. Accordingly, we observe him at a time when he was harassed with cares and overcome with toil on a barren farm, establishing a book club in his neighborhood, forming its rules, and directing its operations. To estimate this in the true spirit, we must remember that it was sixty years ago, when as yet there had been no “Mechanics’ Institutions” in the land, and when Lyceums were not; when cheap editions of standard works had not arisen even on a printer’s dream, and “Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” were enfolded, as the poets say, in the mighty womb of futurity. Dr. Currie, of Liverpool, a genial and eloquent (though patronizing) biographer of Burns, in narrating this portion of his life, questions the utility of literary studies for the great masses of the people. Strange questioning this, in a life of Burns—the cottage-boy, whom the little knowledge of a rustic school awakened for eternity; raised from the clods of the valley to a place among the stars, a burning and imperishable light; and who, but for that little knowledge, might have been as nameless clay as any that nurtures the grass of a village church-yard.

The ideas of Currie have almost vanished with his times; still even yet we occasionally hear some small-souled cynic, some snail-shell philosopher, who thinks himself of those sages with whom wisdom is to perish, sneer scornfully at popular knowledge. Popular knowledge, it is true, is not the wisdom of Solomon; it has not the depth of Bacon, or the sublimity of Newton; still, so far as it goes, it is a good, and though the pedant may deride, the philanthropist will rejoice. And what, after all, is the ground of Mr. Pedant Wiseacre’s pride? Perhaps some learned investigation on the contraction of the Greek kai, or the tail of the Greek gamma. Seriously, the critic and the scholar, when true to their noble office, deserve our admiration and our gratitude; but those who grub merely for withered roots, which never produce either fruits or flowers; and, then, with insect vanity, give themselves airs of scorn, are themselves saved from contempt, only because all creatures have their uses. It is well for society that there should always be men of great and solid learning; and evil would be the day when slight acquirement should be a substitute for laborious thought; but it is also desirable that these accumulated treasures should be widely and bountifully distributed. It is good to have deep fountains in our munitions of rocks, but it is not good that these fountains should waste themselves in darkness; it is not good that they should merely feed the gorgeous river, and the mighty cataract, they should also steal along in the sunny streamlet, and give beauty to the secluded nook. Let there be rich men, and let them rejoice in their riches; let there be great men, and let them exult in their greatness; let there be men of strong intellect, but let them in their strength be merciful; it is not, however, the great, the noble, or the strong, that are ever of destructive nature; it was the lean kine of Egypt that became the devourers—and yet were as skinny as before; so there are poor, lean, hungry animals of the critic species—unproductive as they are voracious, that are naturally the most unsparing and the most ferocious.

When Burns went first to Edinburgh he was the rage, and homage to him became the cant of certain circles. But it is seldom that such homage survives a season. Poor Burns lived not long; but he lived long enough to understand in bitterness the hollowness of drawing-room applause. On a second visit to the Scottish metropolis, the enthusiasts of the first had disappeared. It is ridiculous enough now to us to think of any lord or lady of bedizened mediocrity supposing they could do honor by their notice to such a man as Robert Burns; but ridicule deepens to contempt, when we read of paltry provincials in Dumfries looking ascant at their mighty townsman, our indignation chokes our laughter at the record of treatment which small fashionables could offer to a great poet. Mr. Lockhart gives an anecdote from a gentleman who told him that he was seldom more grieved than when riding into Dumfries, one fine summer’s evening, to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night—not one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said, “Nay, nay, my young friend, that’s all over now,” and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzle Baillie’s pathetic ballad.

Burns, amidst poverty and sorrow, when needful comforts had almost failed him in his sickness, and his children nearly wanted bread, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, quitted a world that was not soon to look upon his like again. Burns, the gladdener of so many hearts, was at last outwrestled, and the mighty fell—Burns, who had so deeply felt the rapture of genius, and the misery of life.

The retribution with which the errors of Burns chastised him, holds out impressive warning to all who are capable of drawing wisdom from example. If happiness could have found a resting-place in one of the most honest hearts that ever struck against a manly bosom; if happiness had been with noble poetry, with an eloquence that never failed, with an imagination rich as the breast of nature, and bright as the stars in heaven; if happiness could have been brought down from the sky by lofty and aspiring sentiments, or fixed upon earth by generous and gentle affections; then happiness would have been the lot of Burns. But Burns had contracted habits to which peace soon becomes a stranger; and he who has such habits, be he bard, or be he beggar, has already entered on the evil day; he may say in all the bitterness of his soul, “Farewell the tranquil mind.” It would seem as if Burns pictured by anticipation his own sad fate when he wrote the Bard’s Epitaph. “Whom did the poet intend?” asks Wordsworth, as quoted by Allan Cunningham, “who but himself—himself anticipating the too probable termination of his own course. Here is a sincere and solemn avowal—a public declaration from his own will—a confession at once devout, poetical and human—a history in the shape of a prophesy!” What more was required of the biographer than to have put his seal to the writing, testifying that the foreboding had been realized, and the record was authentic.

Is there a whim-inspired fool,

Owre fast for thought, or hot to rule,

Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool,

Let him draw near;

And owre this grassy heap sing dool,

And drap a tear.

Is there a bard of rustic song,

Who, noteless, steals, the crowds among,

That weekly this area throng,

O, pass not by,

But with a frater-feeling strong,

Here heave a sigh.

Is there a man whose judgment clear,

Can others teach the course to steer,

Yet runs himself life’s mad career,

Wild as the wave;

Here pause, and through the starting tear,

Survey this grave.

The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn, and wise to know,

And keenly felt the friendly glow,

And softer flame,

But thoughtless follies laid him low,

And stained his name.

Reader, attend, whether thy soul

Soars fancy’s flights beyond the pole,

Or darkly grubs this earthly hole,

In low pursuit,

Know prudent, cautious, self-control

Is wisdom’s root.

Thus much I thought I might venture on our poet’s life; I shall now proceed to offer some remarks upon his genius.

Burns was a true child of nature; thence his growing power, and thence the promise of his lasting fame. But though the child of nature, he was not the offspring of mere rude or uncultivated nature. The Scottish peasantry were a class of men among whom such a mind as that of Burns could perhaps receive its most fitting development. Without the refinement which tends to repress spontaneous expression, they had sufficient of moral and intellectual education to give that expression variety and strength. Their country, their history, and their religion, were all such as to train a serious and reflective imagination. Therefore it is that no peasantry have furnished so much to national literature as the Scottish, and especially to national poetry. Within a period by no means extensive in their annals, they have given to the world such writers as Ferguson, simple and full of music; Allan Ramsay, in his “Gentle Shepherd,” the very genius of pastoral poetry; Tannahill, a lowly spirit of melody and pathos, a sweet voice of truth and tenderness; Hogg, the glorious wizard of the mountains, coming down from his shepherd’s wilderness, his memory peopled with all olden legends, and his fancy teeming with all fairy dreams. Burns, then, though mightiest, is but one of an honorable family; though greatest and grandest among them, they are his kindred; of some he is the heir, of others, he is the progenitor.

Burns is a poet true, as I have said, to nature, and therefore true to art. Burns is not mechanically artificial, but he is patiently artistical. He had none of that indolent vanity which shrinks from careful preparation, which trusts all to sudden excitement, and undigested emotions. He looked, as every man of genius does, to the ideal; he knew it was not to be comprehended in a passing glance, or reached in a rapid bound, or embodied in a single effort; and he knew that in the endeavor to unfold it, no execution could be too thoughtful, and no labor too great. It is not the consciousness of power, but the conceit of vanity, which relies presumptuously upon momentary impulse, which mistakes the contortions of a delirious imbecility for the movements of celestial agitation. The very creation of God, which required but the will and word of Omnipotence for instant and perfect existence, has been gradually constructed—the earth on which we stand, so fair to look upon, so robed with beauty, so radiant with life and light, has been evolved from chaos through innumerable formations and even the thunder so astounding in its crash, and the lightning so sudden in its stroke, have long been generating in the womb of heaven. The man of genius, the man of creative power, is at once inspired and industrious; at once a man of passion and a man of patience; at once a constructor and analyser, a man of enthusiasm, but also a man of wisdom. Genius is not intoxication, and it is even more than rapture; it is capacity subject to the law of truth and beauty; the intense action of the soul, exalted, harmonious, and illuminated. The dash of noble thoughts may come suddenly on the brain; the torrent of enkindled feeling may rush upon the heart, but the spirit of order and of art must move over the face of this brilliant chaos, ere it is shaped into that perfection which the world does not willingly let die. All mighty souls know this; the rustic Burns knew it, not less than the godlike Milton.

The genius of Burns is now, by that instinctive appreciation which forms the supreme tribunal, placed in the highest order. Whence is this? All he has written may be contained in a moderately sized volume. If quantity of production therefore were needed to exalt a writer, which it is not, Burns should remain in the region of mediocrity. Neither has he composed as critics would seem to require, a work of elaborate and faultless excellence; for he has not even attempted a tragedy or an epic poem. But critics cannot decide this point, and that common heart which decides for all has decided for Burns. The depth and extent of his humanity has gained him his distinction, and it is that humanity which gains distinction for any who outlive their age. It is this spirit of love and sympathy which evinces the kindred that all men recognize; it is this spirit that reaches the truth of nature below all changes, custom and convention; below all colors which climates paint upon the skin; it is this which outlives all facts and fashions, and abides forever in the immortal heart. Whoever has this spirit must live; whoever has it not must die; whoever has this spirit must live, defiled though he may be with many evils; whoever has it not must die, no matter how excellent he may be besides; no matter what his brilliancy, his sagacity, his talent, the generations will outlast them all; will give them to as deep oblivion as they do the tongues of Babel. The world cherishes Boccacio, notwithstanding the offences of his tales; so it likewise preserves Chaucer; Rabelais and old Montaigne continue in literature despite of their impurities; and to think of Shakspeare dying would be to conceive the extinction of letters or our race. All these men are deathless brothers, and Burns is amongst them. His poetry is thoroughly human; a poetry which reproduces as we read it all the feelings of our wayward nature; which shows how man was made to be merry, and how he was made to mourn; which enters the soul on its sunny or its gloomy side, expands the heart with laughter or chastens it with melancholy.

In knowledge of man, Burns strikes us with wonder unspeakable, when we consider the narrow circle in which he lived, and the early age at which he died. A single song is like a compressed drama; and within the circle of these songs we have impulses from every stage of life, from the perturbations of youth to the chill of age. To every shade of sentiment and affection; to every change and turn of inward experience, to every oddity and comicality of feeling, he has given a voice of musical and energetic utterance.

Man, and man directly—man in the play of all his passions, is, with Burns, the great object of interest. The descriptive and the picturesque for their own sake have therefore no place in his writings. A picture with him is never more than the drapery of a passion. The chivalric past has none of his veneration; and the past, in any form, only kindles him when he associates it with the movements of humanity or the struggles of liberty. The conflicts of feudalism, the rivalry of dynasties, the gorgeous falsehoods of departed ages, had no enchantment to warm his fancy or to rule his pen. In this respect, the writings of Scott and those of Burns are as opposite as are their characters. The brilliancy of descriptive narrative glows over the poems of Scott—the strong life of passion throbs in those of Burns. Even in the record of a tour this contrast is observable. Scott has the eye of an antiquarian and a map-maker united. Burns glances along as if space were a tiresome obstruction to his fiery nature: Scott surveys every baronial castle, and notes all its chronicles. Burns raves with inspired fury on the field where the invader was struck down, where “tyrants fell in every blow.” Scott imagined that genius owed homage to rank; Burns gave the obligation another version, and conceived that rank should do reverence to genius. Peasant-born, he was too proud in his humanity to covet titles: almost morbidly jealous of individual independence, hereditary aristocracy was not to him poetically impressive; its outward glare provoked his scorn, and its deeper abuses sickened his imagination.

Two most human qualities in all poets are pre-eminent in Burns—I mean pathos and humor.

His pathos is profound but kindly. No writer is less gloomy than Burns, and yet none for the extent of his compositions has more pathos. No writer within the same compass has grander thoughts or deeper beauty; and, by some magic of the heart, grand thoughts and deep beauty are always allied to melancholy. The canopy of the blue heavens, when not a cloud swims in its brightness, makes our rapture sad: so it does when the stars stud it with ten thousand lights: the mountain’s majesty and the ocean’s vastness subdue our souls to thought, and in this world of ours thought has ever something of the hue of grief. It would seem as if a mysterious connection existed between great objects and pensive feelings, between lofty sentiments and deep regrets, a kind of struggle in our higher nature against the limits of its condition: a disappointment at the long interval that separates our aspirations from the ideal, tinges with sorrow all our sensations of the beautiful. Pathos such as this imbues all the graver poetry of Burns. Scarcely is there a wo which wrings the bosom between the cradle and the grave which has not an expression in the solemn music of his verse, from the gentlest whisper of feeling to the frenzies of every pain and the agonies of every passion. But though deep, his melancholy is not morbid. It is the melancholy of great capacities and of real suffering; of error reacting on itself a just infliction; or glorious desires yearning for their congenial objects. The muse of Burns was a rustic maiden; a maiden healthful and hardy. Fits of vapors she might occasionally have, but the heather of her native mountains soon restored the elasticity of her step, and the breeze of her pleasant valleys quickly recalled the bloom to her cheek and the lustre to her eye. At times she sought the solitudes; but she returned ere long to human homes, and sang her wild and simple songs to the friendly circle. She loved, it is true, to meditate under the green shadow of the forest, and to look up in raptured spirit to the lurid and darkened heavens; but she loved no less the blessed sunshine on the harvest hill, and the cottage smoke that floated in the evening sky. If occasionally she wept amidst the graves of her heroes, she came from the places of the dead, more boldly to proclaim liberty in the places of the living.

This pathos is neither maudlin nor misanthropic. It does not make the head giddy with paradox; nor whirl the heart upon a wild and chaotic tempest of doubt and selfishness; it does not dissect out the evils of human nature, and gloat over them with a diseased voluptuousness; it does not lead you to sit at the feast of despair, with the spectres and skeletons around you of unsocial horrors. It is no mawkish pretence of sentiment. Burns is true to what he feels; and, right or wrong, he speaks it as it is. He maintains this course in his good and his evil. It saved him from groveling and bombast; it saved him from intellectual cant, and from literary quackery. No language is so eloquent as honest language. Truth goes direct to its purpose, while affectation is crawling around its petty circumlocutions; and, as the straight line is the shortest, the most sincere words are the most resistless. As the poet had honesty in himself, he had faith in others. His appeal was weakened by no skepticism in the capacity of humble men to appreciate the noble and the beautiful. He spoke to them as beings whose hearts were of the same substance as his own; he spoke confident of the result, and he was not disappointed. The first auditors of his verses were the obscure dwellers among Scottish hills and hamlets, and to his words he received as true a response as poetic enthusiasm could have desired. The sons and daughters of toil proved to him, that he had not trusted them in vain. He gave them his faith, and they paid back the trust with a priceless love.

I have said that the pathos of Burns is not morbid—and I have said truly. In its lowest depths, it is not dark—in the uttermost sadness, it is not despairing. He grieves, but he never whines; and when he utters forth tones the most plaintive, they are yet so vigorous and so full, that, by the strong sound of them, you feel that they come out from the stalwort struggle of a manly bosom. He has pathos, too, of every variety. He has the pathos of sympathy—and this sympathy is often so intense, as to amount to a passionate indignation. As thus, in the poem—“Man was made to Mourn:”—

Many and sharp, the numerous ills—

Interwoven with our frame!

More pointed still we make ourselves,

Regret, remorse, and shame.

And Man, whose heaven-created face,

The smiles of love adorn,

Man’s inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn.

This is a large and noble eloquence, condensed into a soul-fraught poetry; yet is it but one out of the many stanzas of which the whole consists, of equal power. So, likewise, he has the pathos of pity, of tenderness, in their finest modulations. The chords of his own heart were most delicately attuned to “the soft, sad music of humanity;” and the breathings of its sorrow were of that genuine humanity, to which other hearts cannot but respond. How much of such pitiful gentleness have we constantly in his poetry, often coming near to gusts of anger—like the song of a mourner in a stormy midnight—or, the moan of the tempest after its rush. But sometimes we have low and melancholy plaints, without one tone of harshness, in such exquisite verses, as those on “The Mouse,” and “The Mountain Daisy”—in “Poor Mailie’s Elegy”—and “The Farmer’s Address to the Old Mare on New Year’s Day.” Illustrations of this point are in all his writings, prose as well as poetry; but I will only mention one other—his “Lines on a Wounded Hare.” Burns has, in an eminent degree, the pathos which springs from contemplation of our mortal life; and not less, that which comes from those solemn questionings of the spirit, to which experience and the Past, give only accusing answers. A man of genius may do wrong; he may lose himself in the mazes of the passions; he may forget himself in the excitement and turbulence of the senses—but all this is at a deadlier cost than it is to any other man. Let no puny-copyist of genius only in its errors and its wanderings, doubly deceive himself—first, by supposing that he has genius, and then, more fatally, deceive himself by inferring that genius has impunity. True, it is, that genius, like charity, covereth a multitude of sins—and for the delight and the beauty which a great soul showers upon the world, the world does abundantly forgive. But, genius does not forgive itself. A strong moral sensibility—though, it may be, not strong moral principle—is mostly a concomitant—if not an essential element—in the nature of a man of genius, and, therefore, when such a man does violence to his higher sentiments, his very genius becomes his punishment. The grandeur of his ideal—the innate love that he must have to the good and to the beautiful—the extent of his moral associations—the tenacity of his moral memories—the vitality of his imagination, calling back again, and back again, the thoughts which had only disappeared, but were not dead—all conspire to chastise him, and to chastise him by the faculties which enchant and move the world. The depth and the compass of his sympathies afflict him; and, as the fountains of thought and feeling are full within him, so much the greater are the agitations that shake him. These remarks concern mainly those men of genius whose nature is that of a comprehensive humanity. Men there have been, and are, that might be adduced to contradict the position I have ventured here to take: for they were capable of much that was unworthy—and yet they did not suffer or repent. Some were deniers, and some were sensualists—the deniers had fine art, and the sensualists had fine sentiments—and all were men of genius. I have no reply to make, except that, in such men, their genius, as their humanity, was of partial, though intense development; and that such was a class to which Burns did not belong. He was neither a denier nor a sentimentalist. He was a man—take him for all in all—and he was a poet in the whole compass of the man. The man spoke through the poet, not in gladness only, but, also, in every note of sorrow and compunction. What sombre power in his Ode to Despondency.

Oppressed with grief, oppressed with care,

A burden more than I can bear,

I sit me down and sigh:

O life! thou art a galling load,

Along a rough, a weary road,

To wretches such as I!

Dim, backward, as I cast my view,

What sick’ning scenes appear!—

What sorrows yet may pierce me through,

Too justly, I may fear!

Still caring, despairing,

Must be my bitter doom;

My woes here, shall close ne’er,

But with the closing tomb.

See this again, in the affection with which he loved the sombre phases of external nature, and the force with which he painted them. Thus he meditates in Winter:

The sweeping blast—the sky o’ercast—

The joyless winter-day,

Let others fear, to me more dear

Than all the pride of May:

The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,

My griefs it seems to join;

The leafless trees my fancy please—

Their fate resembles mine.

Then passing from this low-breathing despondency, we have lyric tragedy shouting down despair in a kind of reckless ecstacy. Bold and brave is this “Song of Death:”

Farewell, thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies,

Now gay with the bright setting sun;

Farewell, loves and friendships, ye dear tender ties,

Our race of existence is run.

Thou grim King of Terrors—thou life’s gloomy foe—

Go, frighten the coward and slave;

Go, teach them to tremble, fell tyrant! but know,

No terrors hast thou to the brave!

In the pathos of love Burns has no superior. What poet in ancient or modern times, short of Shakspeare, has sung with more varied inspiration than Burns, the agitations with which love convulses the heart of man, and breaks the heart of woman? In a few compressed, but simple-meaning lines, he reveals the passion in all its regrets and agony. And here also, we can see the force, the simplicity—the vehement sincerity of his poetry: and we can see exactly the same characteristics in his life. Allan Cunningham, in his biography of Burns, tells a very affecting anecdote, which I may here fairly adduce in illustration. Jean Armor was lying ill in the house of her parents. Burns had arranged to quit the country for ever, but wanted, once before he left, to see his Jean. Burns attempted to go into the house, but her father stood in the door to exclude him. Burns, maddened by his grief, pushed the old man aside, rushed up to his daughter’s chamber, and throwing himself across the bed, wept as if his heart would burst. And, with regard to his verses to “Mary in Heaven,” if any thing could be more pathetic, than the verses themselves, it was the circumstances in which he composed them. It is now familiar to all who read the least of literary history, that this sublimely pathetic ode, was composed on the anniversary of the maiden’s death, while the poet lay abroad in the field during a bright harvest night, recalling the images of past affections, and out from this dream of the wakeful and troubled heart came that dirge of music which the noblest humanity inspired, and which the rudest humanity must love. It is so familiar to every one, that I will not dare to profane it, by repetition. But here are a few lines of a song, lyrical with all the melody of sadness.

Ae fond kiss and then we sever!

Ae farewell—alas, forever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee—

Wailing sighs and groans I’ll wage thee—

Who shall say that fortune grieves him—

While the star of hope she leaves him?

Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me;

Dark despair around benights me.

.....

Had we never loved sae kindly,

Had we never lovÉd blindly,

Never met—or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

The humor of Burns, too, is full of humanity. It is affluent with all the rich and laughing juices of the heart, and has only just so much of acid as adds pungency to sweetness. Burns has the humor most characteristic of his country; but beyond that, he has a humor belonging to himself—a humor which, while it distinguishes the individual, endears him to his kind. In common with his countrymen, he has the cautious innuendo—the sly allusion—the insinuated sarcasm—the shrewd but mocking suggestion—the implied irony—the dextrously concealed and quiet fun—the sober joke—but he goes beyond all this—and has a humor—which can make men of every nation shake their sides—a humor that often unites the broadness of Rabelais with the sentiment of Sterne. Such a humor demands not only extraordinary wealth of imagination, but also, extraordinary force of intellect—a very uncommon fancy and a very strong common sense. And, it was the union of these in Burns which so well enabled him to be at once comic and satirical—which enabled him so happily to combine the sarcastic and the ludicrous—and he does this in such a way, that while his victims writhe before us, we discern no malignity in their torturer. But, it is in jocund, queer, joyous humor—humor reckless in its gladness, that Burns the most excels. In this species of humor he has scarcely an equal. Few of the greatest masters in humor come near him; and in what we may call the comic-lyric, he stands almost alone. The humor that makes richest melody in the heart; that sings for very joy; that by every note in which laughter can sing out its ecstacy—swells the choruses of mirth and merriment—the humor that is a jubilee in the bosom, that gives widest liberty to fancy—a saturnalia, in which no thought of care or labor, dares intrude—a carnival, in which all kindly oddities of conception play their parts—a humor that combines imagination and feeling into numberless bright varieties, to exhilarate our life—of this humor, Burns in his laughing moods is the potent wizard—of this enlivening magic his gayer songs are the resistless spells.

This humor, too, is generously and jovially human, and although Burns’ ridicule is often coarse, it is rarely cruel. He strikes, but it is with the arm of a man, and not with the blasting of a fiend. Gall he does sometimes mingle with the cup of satire, but never the deadly night-shade; the barb he sharpens keenly, but he does not steep it in poison. He painted, it is true, with a breadth and richness of coloring that made men hold their sides and set the table in a roar, the fooleries and absurdities of individuals; the pretensions of sects, and the bitterness of factions; the vanities of professions; the motley trivialities of presumptuous and stolid nonsense; but in the very storm of his sarcasm, he spares our common nature. There is a ridicule which properly may be called diabolical; which desecrates every thing endeared and noble; which laughs not in festivity of spirit, but in bitterness of heart; which like the witches in Macbeth, around the midnight cauldron, shrieks in the irony of satanic mirth over the degradation of humanity. This temper is realized in the writings of Swift, and affected in those of Byron; but we discover no trace of it in the compositions of Burns. Burns would give even to Satan himself the grace of repentance, and a chance of heaven. Burns, like Byron, can pass rapidly from the grave to the grotesque, but altogether in a different spirit. In the one it is the prodigality of fun; in the other it is willfulness of scorn; in the one, it is sport; in the other it is derision; the one as friend to friend mocks humanity pleasantly; the other makes it a Sancho Panza, tosses it in a blanket, and laughs the louder, the more it is humiliated. I believe the spirit of Byron was naturally a fine one; but it was spoiled, if not utterly ruined, as to all its higher capacities and sympathies. I say not that his moral humanity was extinguished, because that would be uncandid; but I do say, that he became fantastic and capricious to such a degree as to fail in the charities which not only soften life, but dignify literature.

Attributing humor to Burns, I do not estimate it as the slight matter which many seem to think it. If we trust some persons, we should conceive that length of face was length of wisdom, gravity of look, the veil of oracles; thickness of skull the safeguard of knowledge; and rigidity of muscle, the solemn surface of an unfathomable philosophy. But humor in its higher form is the quality, not only of a liberal, but of a cultivated spirit. It requires that the mental powers be vigorous as well as genial. It requires imagination and intellect, as well as a heart in the right place, and the juices of the body in a good condition. Humor as well as pathos is the result of sympathy—of sympathy that embraces man in the most brotherly cordiality—weeps with those who weep, and rejoices with those who do rejoice. This is the humor of Shakspeare; it is the humor of Hogarth; it is the humor of Burns. And many a noble use has this honest faculty—often is it more effective than sermons, to make life lambent, to clear the sky, that was becoming too heavy around us, to warm social intercourse, to nurture our socialities, to dissipate evil passions, and by its pleasant mockeries, to shame us out of nonsensical miseries.

Time would now fail me to refer to the poetry of Burns with any special detail; but for pages so well known, a few brief reminiscences will be sufficient. How full of beauty is “The Vision,” the poem in which, with a self-conscious greatness, almost Miltonic, he celebrates his own consecration to the glory of his country; we read it in delight, in wonder, and with sorrow, and with joy; we verily admit, that, “the light which led astray was light from heaven.” With what solemn pleasure we recall the “Cottar’s Saturday Night.” No other poem in the language shows how much the eye of a poet can see, how much the heart of a poet can feel, where another heart is dull, and another eye is blind. To the prosaic nothing familiar is exciting, but to the inspired all existence is full of glory. Here upon a cottage floor we have placed before us, the most pure, and the most noble virtues; the piety that looks to heaven; the patriotism that dignifies earth; here we have the father returned from his toil, with his “wee things” circling his knees, his clean hearth stone; his “thrifty wifie’s” smile; his soul made glad with Sabbath hopes and with holy thoughts; here are brothers and sisters gathered from the work-day world around the parents that shielded, and that blessed their infancy; here are the pleasant face, and the heart’s own smile; here the homely feast with a joy which luxury refuses, and a gratitude which no luxury inspires; here is first love with maiden blushes, shames and fears; here are all the sublimities of the affections, all in the shades of unnoticed life. How noble is that father and that peasant-priest, as he bares his “haffit locks,” and “let us worship God he says with solemn air;”

Then kneeling down to Heaven’s eternal King—

The saint, the father, and the husband prays—

Hope “springs exultant on triumphant wings,”

That thus they all shall meet in future days:

Thus ever bask in uncreated rays—,

No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear,

Together hymning their Creator’s praise,

In such society, yet still more dear;

While circling time moves round in on eternal sphere.

Compared with this, how poor! religion’s pride

In all the pomp of method and of art,

When men display to congregations wide,

Devotion’s every grace, except the heart!

The Power incensed, the pageant will desert,

The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole;

But haply, in some Cottage, far apart,

May hear well pleased the language of the soul,

And in his Book of life the inmates poor enroll!

And how exalted that love of country which utters this fine supplication:

O Scotia, my dear, my native soil,

For whom my warmest wish to heaven is sent,

Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil

Be blest with health, and pence, and sweet content.

And O, may heaven their simple lives prevent

From luxury’s contagion weak and vile,

Then, howe’er crowns end coronets be rent,

A virtuous populace will rise the while,

And stand a wall of fire round their much loved isle.

The spirit of hilarity has never been so admirably blended with the gloomy and the tender, as in the tale of “Tam O’Shanter.” Heroic and immortal Tam will stand his ground while the name of witch or warlock has a place in language. This marvelous mixture of fun and fancy; this chronicle of midnight revelry; this record of wit and waggery, of good fellowship and ghosts, has now a lodgment in every mind that relishes drollery and genius. Here we have the sublime with the ludicrous; images most delicate with images most homely; subtle analogies with grotesque incongruities; touches of sorrow with strokes of glee; all coming in such rapid succession, that, while the broad grin is on the lip, the tear is starting to the eye. “The Jolly Beggars” gives us the very saturnalia of low life; jovial poverty frolics away in the full abandonment of extravagance, dashed over, however, here and there, with those shadings of regret which obtrude the sadness of life, when men try to forget it most. The “Halloween,” pictures the poor man’s carnival, such as it used to be in Scotland, with all its superstitions and its sports. “The twa Dogs,” is a genial exposition of the poor man’s philosophy. The dog of wealth, laying aside his master’s pride in his master’s absence, meets the peasant dog with very kindly courtesy; and both sitting tranquilly on their haunches, with nose to nose, and most sagacious phizzes, discuss the comparative merits of riches and poverty, pity the folly of their two-legged fellow creatures, congratulate each other on their canine superiority, and bless their stars for being dogs instead of men. CÆsar, the dog of high life, with an air of peculiar respectability and most complacent compassion, wonders how poor folks can live at all. Luath, his humble friend, knows that poor folks not only live, but live with very many pleasures; and this Luath was a dog of sympathy; he shared the cottage sorrow; he shared also the cottage joy; he rattled away among the dancers; wagged his tail in the highest glee of his honest heart, and gave his chorus to the merry sound. When adversity was on the hearth, his face grew long; when better times returned, it was broad again.

My heart hae been sae fain to see them

That I for joy hae barkit wi them.

The whole of this poem is fraught with the noblest and the most endearing humanity—a humanity most varied and most musical in its tones—running quickly along all the chords of sadness and of merriment, throwing forth a harmony of charity and heart-breathing kindness, in which grave sounds and gay mingle together, but not one vibration ungenial or discordant. That Burns should give to dogs sentiments thus characteristic of a sweet and generous temper, corresponds entirely to the feelings with which he regarded that animal, as illustrated in a passage which I have lately found, taken from a newspaper.

The following original anecdote of Burns is in a work entitled the “Philosophy of the Seasons,” by Rev. Henry Duncan:

“I well remember with what delight I listened to an interesting conversation which, while yet a school-boy, I enjoyed an opportunity of hearing in my father’s manse, between the poet Burns and another poet, my near relation, the amiable Blacklock. The subject was the fidelity of the dog. Burns took up the question with all the ardor and kindly feeling with which the conversation of that extraordinary man was so remarkably embued. It was a subject well suited to call forth his powers, and when handled, by such a man, not less suited to interest the youthful fancy. The anecdotes by which it was illustrated have long escaped my memory; but there was one sentiment expressed by Burns with his characteristic enthusiasm which, as it threw a light into my mind, I shall never forget. “Man,” said he, “is the God of the dog. He knows no other; he can understand no other; and see how he worships him! With what reverence he couches at his feet; with what love he fawns upon him, with what dependence he looks up to him, and with what cheerful alacrity he obeys him. His whole soul is wrapped up in his God; and the powers and faculties of his nature are devoted to his service; and these powers and faculties are exalted by the intercourse. It ought just to be so with the Christian: but the dogs put the Christians to shame.”

It is thus, that the spirit of human love, the truest element of poetic beauty, can ennoble and consecrate all it touches; it is thus that Burns elevates the most lowly objects; the farmer’s mare, proud in her age and services; the little cowering mouse, houseless and frightened; the dying ewe; the wounded hare; the simple daisy; rustic sweethearts and rustic beggars; all were endeared to his generous imagination, and over them, while words have meaning, there will be laughing eyes, and serious faces.

Burns has been great in whatever poetry he attempted, but in lyric poetry, he is greatest of all. The songs of Burns, in every point of view, are truly wonderful compositions. We are at a loss which most to admire, their number and variety, or their individual perfection. The lyre of Burns incessantly changes its tone, and in every change it throws forth a flood of new inspiration. Great indeed is the task to give poetic and condensed expression to those thousand impulses that ever heave within us, and are evanescent as the ocean wave; to furnish fitting words for the ideal and fervid longings which millions feel, but cannot utter for themselves; to embody in lasting form, innumerable and undefined desires; to touch chord after chord of memory and emotion, and to awaken the divine music that slumbers in the soul; in a word, to give melody and speech to the complicated heart of man: great is the task, but Burns has accomplished it.

Burns—great in sadness and great in humor; so human in his melancholy, so loving in his laughter. When we hear the pleasant peal of his hearty mirth, our bosoms dilate, until we could embrace our species in affection. When, changing his tone, we feel the breath of his indignation or listen to his cry against oppression, our pulse beats quicker and our blood flows faster. Burns, bard of the brave and fervent soul, destined to move humanity as long as language shall endure; as long as the love of liberty, of independence, of fearless honesty, or patriotic courage, shall have a refuge in our world.

Burns is a nobleman of nature;—a man for the toilsmen of earth to look upon and hope. In humble, rustic life, under the thatched roof, which gave the peasant his shelter; in the field where the heir of labor in the sweat of his brow fulfilled the original destiny of man, Burns fed inspired thoughts, and laid the foundation of a deathless fame. True, his life was short in years; but how passing long was it in emotions, in capacious and crowded fancies. His spirit was goaded, no doubt, with the vulgar cares of poverty, and the worse results of passion; but it was glorified also with conscious genius; he could retreat from the vexations of the world to the sanctuary of his enriched imagination, and there, amidst all the evils of his outward condition, he could find in poetry its own exceeding great reward. Through all the sorrows that overspread his short but rapid course; amidst all the clouds that hung heavily over his path, glimpses of joy were ever and anon bursting on his enraptured eye, which it is given only to the favored ones to behold. And who would not, if he could, have a soul so adorned with the beautiful, rather than without it, be overburdened with the load of external fortune? Had Burns been merely a man of title, he had been forgotten as all titled dust since the days of Nimrod; as unknown as the dukes of Edom; a pompous funeral and a lying epitaph would have given him to oblivion. As it is, the recollection of him is garnered in the choicest corners of the heart, and his name is linked forever to the music of sweetest sounds.

I am now at the close of my task. I have gone through it lovingly, and with reverence; sensible along the way of much goodness in my subject, and not forgetful, either, of some evil also. That many faults are in the compositions of Burns, I apprehend most clearly; and that sad irregularities were in his life, it requires small trial of candor to confess; but to have spread them out in ostentatious commentary would have served no purpose of this article, and gratified no desire of the reader. I am not blind to those errors; I propose no excuse; I deprecate no just condemnation, and I have been forbearing from no moral indifference, no moral insensibility. But dealing with the memory of genius, I reflected that the man was before his God, and the poet had met the sentence of the world. For wisdom, or for warning, the events of his life are sufficiently familiar—he that runs may read, their moral meaning let him read and ponder—let him learn, and let him be better. But I have no sympathy with that vampire-like spirit which disentombs the faults of the illustrious dead to feed the nauseous appetites of itself or others; I tread upon the grave with caution and compassion; and while I do not regard genius as repealing the law of virtue, neither do I regard it as beyond the law of mercy. We need, all of us, great tenderness from those who surround us; we need much, too, from those who survive us. If we require charity from men, who give them nothing, let us grant it to those who have enriched us, and enriched the ages. In the noble and eloquent verses of Halleck, we, too, say of Burns:

His is the language of the heart,

In which the answering heart would speak;

Thought, word, that bids the warm tear start,

Or the smile light the cheek.

And his, the music, to whose tone

The common pulse of man keeps time,

In cot or castle’s mirth or moan,

In cold or sunny clime.

......

Praise to the bard, his words are driven,

Like flower seed by the far wind sown,

Where’er beneath the sky of heaven

The birds of fame have flown.

Praise to the man! a nation stood

Beside his coffin with wet eyes,

Her brave, her beautiful, her good,

As when a loved one dies.

And still, as on his funeral day,

Men stand his cold earth-couch around,

With the mute homage that we pay

To consecrated ground.

And consecrated ground it is

The last, the hallowed home of one,

Who lives upon all memories,

Though with the buried gone.

Such graves as his, are pilgrim shrines,

Shrines to no creed or sect confined,

The Delphian vales, the Palestines,

The Meccas of the mind.

THE GAMBLER’S DAUGHTER.

———

BY HENRY C. MOORHEAD.

———

If the reader has ever passed along the banks of the Susquehanna, or floated down its waters, he has not failed to admire the beautiful coves which are here and there formed by the bending hills on either side. With a mountain border sweeping round in the shape of a half moon, and the river flowing in a straight line in front, these terrestrial crescents form a series of most charming landscapes. In one of the most charming of them all lived an old gentleman whom we shall call Richard Parkett.

Many years before the period of the following incidents, the wife of Mr. Parkett had died, committing to his care with her dying words, an infant daughter. They called her, after her mother, Lucy; she grew up like a wild flower in her sequestered home, and, at the time we speak of, was just budding into womanhood. And surely no opening rose could be more lovely. The bloom of health was on her cheek; her step was free and elastic as that of the fawn on the neighboring mountain, and her spirits as bounding and joyous as those of the birds which “warbled their native wood-notes wild” around her dwelling.

“My child,” said Mr. Parkett, to her one day, “there is to be an arbitration in the neighborhood to-morrow, to settle some matters in dispute between myself and a neighbor, and we will need you for a witness.”

“For a witness—what does that mean?”

“Why they will make you swear a terrible oath to tell the truth,” said the old gentleman, smiling affectionately; “and then two or three lawyers will endeavor to puzzle you so as to prevent your doing it.”

“And who are these puzzling lawyers?”

“One of them, whose particular business it will be to puzzle you if he can, is a young man named Burton.”

“Burton?—Sidney Burton? He is the young gentleman who called here last winter to see you on business, is he not?”

“Really, you seem to have an excellent memory for young gentlemen’s names.”

Lucy blushed slightly, but made no answer. However, she was much more sober and thoughtful than usual all that day.

The arbitration came on, and Lucy was sworn as a witness. Her story was short and simple, and referred merely to a conversation which she had heard, and about which the parties could not now agree. As Burton was counsel on the other side, he then proceeded to cross-examine her. It was of great importance to his cause that he should shake her confidence in what she had said; and he therefore proceeded (with great delicacy, however) to ply her with an infinite variety of perplexing questions.

But, although she was artless as a child, her quick apprehension, and her clear, ready answers filled him with admiration; which was not at all diminished by an occasional volley of mischievous satire which raised a smile at his expense. He even continued the examination for some time after he saw that it was useless, for the pleasure it afforded him. At length, all parties being satisfied, the dispute was amicably settled, and Mr. Parkett invited the company to his house.

Nothing could have pleased Burton better than such an invitation; he wished to see more of this charming witness, and to present himself before her under more favorable circumstances than in a cross-examination. Lucy, on her part, was equally pleased with this arrangement, for Burton’s image had never ceased to haunt her imagination since the day she had first casually seen him at her father’s house some months before. She could not explain the mystery to herself, but she felt an indefinable interest in every thing that concerned him, and her heart beat warm and quick at the sound of his voice.

On the following morning Burton was urged to stay a day longer, and join a fishing excursion which had been projected. He readily consented; the necessary “tacklings” were soon collected; the party embarked in two canoes, and Burton found himself in one of these small and crazy vessels with Lucy, a young gentleman, her cousin, being in one end to direct its course. Some distance above was one of those “falls” which in so many places obstruct the navigation of that beautiful river, but which furnish among their rocks the most excellent of fishing grounds. Hugging the shore until they had passed above the rapids, they proceeded to drop their boats down upon those rocks which were known to furnish the finest eddies. The current was rapid, and the young man who was steering the boat in which we are chiefly interested, in attempting suddenly to change its course, lost his balance, and fell headlong into the water. The boat swung rapidly round, and, being borne sideways among the breakers, soon capsized. Lucy and Burton both disappeared beneath the foaming torrent; but our hero quickly rose, and, being an expert swimmer, watched eagerly for the appearance of Lucy; then grasping her dress, he buffeted the waves with a strong arm, and succeeded in landing her safely on a rock which projected above the water. To his inexpressible alarm, she seemed to be entirely helpless and inanimate. He commenced chafing her forehead, when in a few minutes she opened her eyes, and the crimson tide of life bounded into her face, neck, and bosom. She stood up and looked anxiously round for her father. In a few minutes the other canoe approached, (having first picked up the young man who had occasioned the accident,) and the whole party immediately returned home.

What more could be wanting to bring these two young hearts together. This romantic little incident sealed their fate; and although their tongues were yet silent, their eyes spoke eloquently of love. On the following morning Burton departed, but he soon returned; and at length the good people of the neighborhood began to wonder whether it was arbitrations that brought the young lawyer so often amongst them.

In a village some miles from Mr. Parkett’s residence, lived a young man of great wealth and little principle, named Lander, who had been fascinated by Lucy’s beauty, and exasperated on finding that her affections were bestowed upon another; Mr. Parkett had been much in the habit of visiting this village of late, for the purpose of indulging an unfortunate passion for gambling, which had almost ruined him in his youth, but which for many years he had entirely restrained. This passion, however, had been lulled, not extinguished; a slight indulgence was sufficient to rekindle it, and it soon raged more fiercely than ever; and he became an easy prey to a brace of gamblers who were the intimate associates of Lander.

“How now,” said Lander, to one of these gamblers, one morning, “what success had you last night.”

“Better than ever. The old man is completely infatuated, and grows more desperate every day. If his daughter is as easily won as her father’s money, your siege will be a short one—she will soon surrender.”

“She will not surrender while she can help it,” said Lander; “but go on as you have begun, and I will have her yet. I will have her, or I will crush the whole family to the earth; they shall learn that the hand of Charles Lander is not to be spurned with impunity. But how do his accounts stand now?”

“We have won all the money he could raise, and he has commenced giving us his notes.”

“Good! bring me the notes and I will cash them for you. But have you followed my instructions, and let him win occasionally, to keep up his courage? Remember, you have no claim on me until you have brought him to the brink of ruin.”

“We have taken care of that, and he has the most unbounded confidence in his own skill. He attributes all his losses to ill-luck, when the silly old fool could not win a dollar if we chose to prevent him.”

Thus was this unfortunate man led on from one stage of ruin to another, by the constant hope of retrieving his past losses until his obligations to pay were no longer worth receiving. Lander, in the meantime, had been lifting these notes, and so disposing of them that he could use them for the accomplishment of his purposes. Without appearing as a party himself, he caused Mr. Parkett to be urgently pressed for payment. Harassed and threatened with exposure, the old man endeavored to borrow money to pay off the most urgent of these claimants; but rumors had got abroad of secret embarrassments and doubtful titles, which made it impossible for him to obtain a loan on any terms.

During all this time Lander had been assiduous in his attentions to Lucy, and employed every artifice to make a favorable impression upon her and upon her father. But Mr. Parkett was far from admiring his character, and above all he knew that Lucy’s heart was wholly devoted to Burton. Having brought affairs to this crisis, Lander one day said to Mr. Parkett, in a tone of great delicacy,

“I understand, sir, that you have been endeavoring to negotiate a loan; and I have been sorry to learn that you were not successful. Now, sir, I have means under my control which are entirely at your disposal.”

“You are very kind, sir,” said Mr. Parkett; “but you must excuse me for saying that it would not be proper for me to accept of such a favor at your hands.”

“I hope, sir,” said Lander, biting his lip, “that you do not consider me unworthy of the privilege of doing you a kindness.”

“It is painful for me to explain,” replied Mr. Parkett, “but after what has passed between you and my daughter, although we shall both always take pleasure in treating you as a friend, common delicacy forbids that we allow you to place us under any obligation.”

“But there is now a weight of obligation on the other side; and you must allow me to make some return for the many acts of kindness I have received under your roof. You have heretofore treated me as a friend; treat me so still, and allow me to serve you.”

Mr. Parkett felt that in honor he could not accept this offer; but ruin stared him full in the face, and he saw no other means of escaping the exposure which he dreaded—for when his bankruptcy became known, the cause could not be long concealed. He therefore no longer absolutely refused, but took time to consider. This Lander felt confident would lead to acceptance; and he returned home triumphing in the successful progress of his plot, and sanguine of final success. But Burton came again to mar his prospects. He, too, had heard of Mr. Parkett’s difficulties, and tendered his services. It was finally agreed that he should raise several thousand dollars, to be secured by mortgage; and that in the following autumn, when he and Lucy were to be married, the establishment should be delivered over to them. Burton, by turning his means (which were not great) into cash, and borrowing on the credit of his future prospects, succeeded in raising the necessary sum, and placed it in Mr. Parkett’s hands. Lander’s offer was, of course, declined.

With this money in his possession the old gentleman went to the village to make arrangements for the payment of the most importunate of his creditors. As he walked along the street, he came in front of the house which had been the scene of his ruinous losses. An irresistible temptation seized him to make one more effort to retrieve his fortunes. He would try his luck; if fortune smiled, all would yet be well; if she frowned, after losing a small sum, he would abandon the gambling-table forever. With this resolution, he entered, and was soon wholly absorbed in the chances of the game. Fortune did smile, and, with unwonted success, he became bold and desperate. The stakes grew heavy, and he fearlessly increased them. His wily competitor marked his time, and made them still higher; Parkett again increased them. His competitor doubled them. Parkett, now mad with excitement, threw down all that he had brought, and all that he had won. There was a breathless pause. The result was announced—and he had lost! For several minutes he stared vacantly around him, then, pulling his hat over his brows, he rushed from the house.

His ruin was now complete; but what explanation could he give to Burton? and, what would become of his darling child? He returned home, and going directly to his private room, sent for Burton, who, observing his extraordinary emotion, remained a wondering and anxious listener.

“You asked me for my daughter’s hand,” said he, “and I gave it to you, because I thought you worthy of her. You then supposed me to be an honest man, and the owner of valuable possessions. It is my duty now to inform you, that I am a villain and a beggar.”

“I beg you will compose yourself,” said Burton, believing that his mind had become disordered; “you allow your pecuniary difficulties to affect you too deeply. However they may result, they cannot affect either your honor, or my affection for your daughter. She has given me her heart, and I ask nothing from you but her hand.”

“My honor, it is true, is beyond the reach of circumstances,” said Parkett, bitterly. “You this morning loaned me five thousand dollars, to pay the most pressing claims against my property. That money is gone—no matter how—and the claims are not staid. I have not only brought ruin upon myself, but upon you also. My property will be sacrificed, and your money lost; What say you now? Am I not a villain?”

“I must again entreat you to compose yourself,” replied Burton; “and, I repeat, that I love your daughter for herself alone; and, if all that you have said were true, I would not the less claim her for my wife.”

“Young man,” said Parkett, seizing Burton eagerly by the hand, “she is yours; and may God Almighty bless your union. The dread of bringing sorrow and wretchedness upon my innocent lamb wrung my heart most of all. You have relieved me from that care, and the grave will soon hide my shame.”

To prevent the property from being sacrificed, it was thought best to advertise it for private sale. Lander came forward and became the purchaser, at a price which, after paying off the prior claims, left a very small balance to reimburse Burton; who, however, soon became rich in the possession of Lucy. Mr. Parkett lived to see his daughter married, and soon after went down to a peaceful but melancholy grave.

“This is an humble dwelling, Lucy,” said Burton, when they had moved into their new home, “but, it is said, that happiness is oftener found in the cottage than in the palace. So philosophers teach, but I believe women generally think differently.”

“You shall represent the philosopher, and I the woman,” said Lucy, “and we’ll see.”

“In spite of philosophy,” continued Burton, “I confess that I would prefer a somewhat larger house, and furniture of a better quality than this.”

“And I confess,” said Lucy, “that in spite of your opinion of women, I shall be happier as it is.”

“Alas! my sweet wife,” said Burton, “you have never known what care or trouble was; you have lived all your life amongst happy friends, and been the gayest of them all; every wish of your heart has been gratified as soon as formed. Heaven grant it may be as you now think!”

“But you doubt it. Really, for a philosopher, you know but little of woman’s heart. To have all her frivolous wishes gratified, to live in the midst of gayety and idleness, and be free from care, and, I suppose, from all reflection, seems to be your opinion of her highest state. But you do her injustice; her heart throbs with ambition as well as man’s, though its object may be different.”

“Ambition is not formed of such habitations as this,” said Burton, sadly.

“Woman’s ambition may be,” said Lucy. “Suppose she were able to make this humble cottage a more delightful dwelling than the most luxurious mansion, to smooth her husband’s brow, and cause him to forget poverty and toil? Would not this be an object worthy of ambition?”

“It is,” said Burton, kissing her affectionately, “and you have gained that object already. When I spoke of women, I should not have included all women, and you shall prove that there are exceptions.”

At this moment there was a knock at the door, one of the sheriff’s officers entered and handed Burton a paper. The latter read it, then calmly folded it, and put it in his pocket. But his wife’s eye had been on him, and when the officer had withdrawn, she said:

“This is some new calamity; do not conceal it from me, Sydney; your cheek grew pale as you read that paper—let them take all we have, for whilst you are spared I shall be happy.”

“My matchless wife,” said Burton, “you have borne our past trials so bravely, that I am not afraid of your sinking under this new misfortune: but summon up all your fortitude, for you will need it. Our persecutor, Lander, has not exhausted his arts yet, but is determined to humble us still more. He has power over us now, and employs it to gratify his cowardly malice. But let him beware! That power may one day change hands, and then, so help me Heaven! I will bruise his serpent head beneath this heel;” and he stamped his foot fiercely on the floor.

“Now you distress me, indeed,” said Lucy; “but, oh, Sydney! you will not forget your promise, that there shall be no violence between you and that wicked man.”

“Forgive me,” said Burton, “I forgot myself; that promise is sacred, and never will I grieve your gentle heart by breaking it. But see what this villain has done! He has managed, by some artifice, to get possession of claims against me, which I never dreamed would be pressed, until I should be able to pay them without inconvenience. He has brought suit, and we must prepare to surrender up even the poor remnants that are left us.”

“I understand it all,” said Lucy. “Oh, my poor father!”

“Let him rest in peace,” said Burton; “if he acted unwisely he paid the penalty of a broken heart: let us not disturb his ashes.”

Lucy threw her arms around her husband’s neck, and wept like a child.

“You forgive him then,” she said, “for the sake of his daughter’s love and duty. Oh, Heaven will bless you for your generosity.”

“Heaven has blessed me,” said he, fondly embracing her; “and I would not give one throb of this loving heart for all the gold Lander ever owned.”

But the sad reality at length came, and their relentless creditor advertised the poor furniture of their cottage for sale. Burton found, as is usual under such circumstances, that his friends had grown remarkably polite and formal; but they kept at a distance, and no one offered him assistance; nor could he ask it, as the claims were much greater than he could possibly pay, and his income from his profession little more than afforded him a subsistence. He was, therefore, “sold out,” all but the scanty articles which the law allows the poor.

But although the world had grown cold, his own fire-side was still as bright as ever; and when he thought of Lucy, as he had first seen her—a gay, mischievous girl, raised in the lap of luxury, and then looked upon her as his wife—serene and cheerful in the midst of poverty and worldly disgrace, he admired and reverenced the depths of woman’s affection. And this deep, pure fountain of love flowed only for him! Well might he prize it above rivers of gold!

Some time after, Burton was one day searching among the old records in one of the public offices, when his eye fell upon a time-worn, mutilated will, which bore the name of Thomas Parkett inscribed on the back. Knowing that Lucy’s grandfather had borne that name, his curiosity led him to open the paper, and examine its contents. After reading on for some time, deciphering the words with great difficulty, he suddenly started back, as if he had seen the ghost of his wife’s ancestor. Then returning to the paper, he eagerly read it over again, pausing and reflecting long upon each sentence. Then carefully making a copy of it, he returned the papers to their place, and went directly home with a rapid step and a beating heart.

Whilst Burton was reading the paper which produced so strange an effect on him, there sat near him one of those wretched men who disgrace an honorable profession by hanging upon its outskirts, gaining an infamous livelihood by stirring up litigation, and practising schemes of fraud and villany. Dissipated and unprincipled, Witherman was equally reckless in his means of getting money, and prodigal in spending it. He was consequently at times reduced almost to starvation, and ready for any desperate enterprise. Happening to look up at the moment, he observed Burton’s emotion, and watched his subsequent movements until he left the room. Then taking down the same bundle of papers, he began to look through them to see if he could find what had so much interested Burton. The name of Parkett soon attracted his attention, for he knew that that had been the name of Burton’s father-in-law. Opening the will, therefore, he read on until he came to the part which had startled Burton:

“Aha!” he exclaimed to himself, “I see the game now, and I’ll find some means to have a hand in it. So much for reading men’s looks and motives; I shall make a good day’s work of this.”

“Lucy, my dear,” said Burton, after he reached home, “how would you like to become mistress again of the old homestead?”

“Ah, Sydney, why do you ask me such a question? you know that I am reconciled to living here, but then I don’t like to think of my old home.”

“It is certainly a delightful place, especially at this season of the year, with its green fields and blooming orchards. Suppose we go and spend the summer there?”

“I have no wish ever to see it again.”

“Suppose you could call it your own, would it have none of its former attraction?”

“As that can never be, it is hardly worth while to answer your question. But what is the matter with you? You seem to be strangely excited; tell me what it is, I can bear it.”

“Prepare yourself then, for startling news; you are the mistress and owner of the old homestead.”

“Oh, why do you mock me with such a tale,” said Lucy, tears starting into her eyes; “do let me forget that ever I lived there.”

“I should be sorry to trifle with you on so tender a subject,” said Burton, “but I mean what I say. You have borne adversity like a heroine; let us now see what effect prosperity will have. Here is copy of your grandfather’s will, which I have just seen for the first time. By it his property is entailed, as lawyers call it; that is, it is settled upon your father and his immediate descendants, to pass from one generation to another, according to the English rule of primogeniture. Your father could not sell it in the way he did, (of which he was no doubt ignorant,) and you, being his only child, have a full and perfect right to it under the will.”

“But if it was sold and paid for, would it be right for me to claim it from the purchaser?”

“It will be right, at all events, to defend yourself from persecution. The property is yours by the law of the land, and if Lander obtained it, as we have good reason to believe he did, he ought not to be allowed to keep it. I will advise you to nothing that is not becoming in a dutiful child. Better this poverty than the consciousness of having acted unjustly: but we will consult with some discreet friend, and then do what we may conclude to be right.”

Lucy was grave and thoughtful; she had long been accustomed to suppress her feelings of vanity and pride, and had become entirely reconciled to her humble fortunes; but her heart fluttered at the thought of being the owner of ample possessions, and of those scenes, too, from which she had never been able entirely to wean her affections. But then came other reflections. Was it possible that her father had practiced a fraud for her benefit? And, if so, would it be right for her to take advantage of it? The law might give her the property, but would truth and justice allow her to take it?

After careful inquiry, it was deemed proper that suit should be brought; and Burton, remembering the maxim that “the lawyer who pleads his own cause has a fool for his client,” employed counsel to conduct it for him.

No sooner had this suit been brought, than Witherman hastened to Lander:

“I see, sir,” said he, “that Burton has brought suit in the name of his wife for the recovery of the property you purchased from her father.”

“He has; and what can it mean? The claims which I had against him were notes given at the gambling table, but they had been put in circulation, and I understood you, that he couldn’t dispute them in my hands. Or has he discovered that I knew for what they were given?”

“He has made a worse discovery than that.”

“What! do you really think he has the means of supporting his claim?”

“I am sure of it, unless you choose to employ my skill to baffle him. If you had entrusted the investigation of the title and the papers to me, I might have saved you from this difficulty; but you preferred a bungler, who gave you a title that expired with Parkett himself. For this want of confidence you must now either lose the property or pay me my own price for saving it.”

“You know that I never scrupled to pay you well when an emergency required your services; but what is the defect in this title?”

“By the will of Parkett’s father, which Burton has recently discovered among the old papers in the office—for it has never been recorded—and which I have seen, it appears that Parkett himself merely held the property as tenant in tail. A particular kind of deed was therefore necessary, under our laws, to convey a complete title. Your deed is in the common form, and conveyed only a life interest; and the instant Parkett died the property became vested in his daughter.”

“In his daughter! Oh, miserable blunderers! then all my schemes of vengeance recoil on my own head. But stay; you say that your skill can provide a remedy; if you can save me from the humiliation of this defeat, you shall have your own price. What is your plan?”

“Among the modes of barring an entail is a deed of warranty with assets; that is, if Parkett gave you a deed warranting the title for himself and his heirs, and on his death left to his daughter other property equal in value to that which he sold you, then her claim cannot be sustained, but your title is good.”

“This is excellent consolation! He gave me a deed of warranty, it is true, but you know that he left his daughter and her husband only the privilege of paying some thousands of dollars which Burton had borrowed for him a few months before.”

“I know all that; and if he had left them the necessary property you would not need my services to enable you to baffle them.” Then taking up a pen, and writing a few lines, Witherman continued: “There, sign that, and I pledge myself to make your title good.”

“When I promised that you should have your own price,” said Lander, “I did not expect such a demand as this; but I will stand to what I have said, and see that you keep your pledge;” and he signed a note for an exorbitant sum.

The day of trial at length came; and Burton repaired to the Court with the confidence of a man who knows that his cause is good, and his evidence conclusive. The law was well settled, and the fact, a matter of record. His cause was, therefore, quickly and triumphantly made out, by simply reading the will in evidence. Nothing could be more satisfactory: the court, the jury, the by-standers, all saw at a glance that the question was settled; and nothing was now wanting but the formality of a verdict.

“Gentlemen,” said the judge to Lander’s counsel, “I suppose it is hardly necessary to pursue this matter any further.”

“I beg your honor’s pardon,” said one of the leading members of the bar, whose services Witherman had secured, and who acted under his instructions, and in perfect good faith; “our defense shall be brief, but I hope decisive.”

He then proceeded, to Burton’s utter amazement, to declare that he was prepared to prove, that Mr. Parkett, on his daughter’s marriage, had settled property on her far exceeding in value that which was now in controversy. That the settlement had been drawn by a member of the bar, now dead, and was recently found among his papers, duly signed, sealed and witnessed; that Mr. Parkett had been reputed a man of wealth, and yet, to the surprise of every body, died poor. Here, then, was the explanation of this great wonder. He and the present plaintiff alone knew that the property now in controversy was entailed. He might, therefore, sell it for its full value, and yet, on his death, it would pass by descent to his daughter. It was necessary, however, that he should leave no property behind him; for if his daughter should receive other property of equal value from him, it would bar her claim to this. His other property was, therefore, clandestinely conveyed to her, and he died apparently without possessing any.

Fully believing this statement, as he did, the learned counsel followed it up with a stream of burning invective. Turning upon Burton, he scourged him with a whip of scorpions. He represented him as the contriver and adviser of the infamous project, and the recipient of all the benefits, if it should be successfully accomplished. Being perfectly honest and sincere, he believed that in covering Burton with infamy, he was only vindicating the honor of his profession. The evidence which Witherman had put into his hands was then produced. The hand-writings of Parkett and of the subscribing witness, were satisfactorily proved by several unexceptionable witnesses, who, as is usual in such cases, were as positive as if they had seen the names written. The manner in which the paper had been found, and many other circumstances, so strongly corroborated this view of the subject, that the opinions of all present were soon reversed; and Burton, whom they had lately considered a wronged and persecuted man, now stood before them a sordid villain, baffled and unmasked. The judge indulged in some sharp reflections on the iniquity of the plaintiff’s claim, and the jury promptly and indignantly rejected it. Witherman had kept his promise, and Lander was again triumphant.

Burton was almost stupefied by this new and unexpected blow, and sat for some time gazing vacantly at the clerk who announced the verdict; then, quietly leaving the court house, and avoiding all observation, with a heavy heart and a gloomy brow he hastened homewards. His wife had been impatiently awaiting his arrival, and hastened to receive him and congratulate him on his victory—for she never had dreamed of any other result. But a single glance of his eye was enough to fill her heart with dismay, and cause her to turn from him in tears. She read there the emotions of a soul in torture, and knew that his strong mind and regulated passions could not be thus moved by any thing else than what he deemed a signal calamity. Burton silently threw himself into a chair, and struggled hard to recover his usual serenity of mind and countenance. But all in vain. The anguish of his spirit was insupportable. At length he groaned out,

“Lucy, I am a ruined man.”

“Alas! Sydney, why do you speak thus? Why do you look thus? If your hopes of wealth are defeated, surely there are other sources of happiness left to us, far more precious than this. Have we not been happy in this little cottage? and if we lose it, we shall be happy in one that is humbler still. If they have robbed us of our property, they cannot at least deprive us of our good name. Whilst you continue to be loved and respected by the whole community you are more than rich. Your talents and known integrity will soon bring you riches and honors. Oh,” continued she, unconscious that her words went like poisoned arrows to his heart, “if you could have heard the language of praise that has so often made my heart beat high with pride, you would feel that a reputation for truth, honor, and a high and noble spirit, does not need the ornament of wealth to make it honorable.”

Burton covered his face with his hands, as Lucy continued her loving but torturing exhortation:

“Suppose,” said she, “that instead of a paltry loss of money, your reputation had been stained, your character blackened, your name dishonored; how trifling would then have seemed such a loss as that you have now suffered? Think, then, of what you still possess, rather than of what you have lost or failed to gain; and let us be grateful to a kind Providence for having spared you at least an unsullied reputation.”

“Ay,” said he, mechanically pursuing her train of reflection, “you are right. Reputation, reputation, reputation! all the rest is dross compared with that. I would not have exchanged the good opinion of one honest man for all the property I have been contending for; I would not have forfeited the esteem of the community in which I live, for millions of acres. Disappointment has been my portion from childhood; I have often groaned and wept in sorrow; to-day, for the first time, I have blushed and hung my head in shame. Reputation! it has been the balm of my wounded spirit; the light of my life, the star of my hope. This morning it was mine by the agreement of all the world; but where is it now?”

At this moment an officer of the court entered and handed him a slip of paper. He glanced at it for a moment, and then handed it to his wife, repeating, “Ay, where is my reputation now?” It was an order of court, directing him to appear and show cause why his name should not be stricken from the roll of attorneys for dishonorable and fraudulent conduct. Lucy had no sooner read it, than, with a sharp cry, she sunk insensible on the floor. Burton flew to her assistance, reproaching himself with want of consideration in subjecting her to so sudden a shock, and feeling a new sense of desolation come over him at the prospect of losing his dearest, best, only remaining friend. He began to fear, too, that his conduct had caused even her to conceive suspicions of his integrity; and this reflection was the bitterest drop in all the cup. She presently revived, and he hastened to assure her of his innocence. He explained to her all that had happened. The signature which had been produced in court as her father’s, was so much like it that, under other circumstances, he would himself have sworn to it without hesitation. He could not tell how it was, but he was entangled in a net from which he saw no hope of escape. Every thing was against him; the testimony of respectable witnesses, all appearances, and all opinions.

“Sydney,” said Lucy, at length smiling through her tears, “there are two great subjects on which I have often heard you discourse with more enthusiasm than on any other—the one was faith, and the other moral courage. In such moments I sometimes thought that your eye pierced through the mists of time, and realized the glories of eternal truth and justice; and I believed, (for such was your language,) that your heart would never quail before the presence of men, so long as you possessed an approving conscience. Have you forgotten these principles, or were they mere flights of imagination?”

“They were great truths; but, alas! the clouds of adversity have darkened even my moral perceptions.”

“Oh, Sydney,” she continued, “I have heard you maintain, that adversity was the chief agent in developing the human soul; that virtue was not worthy of the name, until it had been tried in the furnace of affliction; and how often have I heard you say, that the highest and truest courage, was that which calmly and firmly sustains itself against the current of popular opinion.”

“Very true! very true!” said Burton, his countenance almost relaxing into a smile.

“Why,” continued Lucy, “there have been times when I almost wished to see you under such circumstances, that I might apply your glorious pictures to yourself; that I might behold in you the hero, the philosopher, the man whose faith never wavered, though friends betrayed; whose heart never failed, though all the world opposed him. I dreamed that you were all these; and, oh! how my heart swelled with love and admiration. Nay, it was not a dream; you were, you are all these, my own brave and true-hearted Sydney.”

Burton’s eye recovered its wonted fire, and, as he paced the room with a firm and energetic step, he felt his spirit return unto him.

“Sweet monitor,” he said, “you have recalled me to myself. Alas! that I should have forgotten my philosophy, the moment an opportunity occurred for putting it in practice. This is my first practical lesson. It is a stern one; but, (thanks to your cheering voice,) I am now prepared to receive it and to profit by it. Whilst all continues right here, (laying his hand upon his heart,) I am prepared for any extremity of fortune. When the sky is curtained with clouds, men say that the stars have gone out, because they can no longer see them; but, in truth, they shine on with the same calm, steady light, whether seen or unseen by mortal eyes. And so it is with virtue; though calumny may render it invisible from without, it never ceases to warm and illuminate the heart in which it dwells.”

When the time came for Burton to appear before the court and answer the charge of fraudulent and dishonorable conduct, he found himself wholly unable to combat the array of arguments that were brought against him. It was manifest, too, that every body looked on him as a fallen and ruined man. His former friends saluted him with cold civility; as he passed along the way closed before him; wherever he went he found himself alone. He had nothing to oppose to the charge but his own solemn declaration; and that, of course, in a case so clear, could avail him nothing. The forms proper to the occasion were gone through with as an appointed ceremony; and the judge proceeded to pronounce the sentence, which he had written out beforehand. After dwelling on the importance of the legal profession; on the necessity of unsullied integrity in those who practice it; on the infamous character of Burton’s offence, and the indisputable certainty of his guilt, he was about to pronounce sentence of expulsion from the Bar, when he was interrupted by the confusion created by some one forcing his way in great haste through the crowd. It proved to be the venerable clergyman of the village, who begged that the judge, before proceeding further, would allow him to say a few words.

“I come,” said he, “from the death-bed of a member of this bar, Mr. Witherman, and I bring to your honor a message of grave importance. Though fearfully tortured with the pangs of a guilty conscience, I believe that he was perfectly sane; and with his dying voice he implored me to hasten hither and assure your honor, on the word of a dying penitent, that the charge you are this morning trying against Sydney Burton is wholly false; that being skillful in the imitation of hand-writing, he had himself forged the papers which bore the name of Richard Parkett, and contrived all the other circumstances which seemed so conclusive of Burton’s guilt. He then bade me hand your honor this paper, which he said would enable you to unravel the whole conspiracy; and these were his last words. I have thus discharged my mission; and I hope its urgency will excuse my unceremonious interruption of your proceedings.”

The cause was immediately adjourned for further consideration.

“I have just been thinking of it, Lucy,” said Burton, one bright spring morning, as they walked together in the garden at the old homestead, “to-morrow is the anniversary of our first fishing excursion. It is an epoch in our lives worth commemorating. Let us, therefore, get up another, as much like it as possible; except, indeed, the upsetting of the canoe—which answered a very good purpose, then, but there would be no occasion for it now. With a little stretch of imagination we can easily go back some years and fancy it to be the same day and the same occasion. You are again the mistress of this beautiful home; troops of friends will again come at our bidding; nature is clad in the same green mantle; the birds sing the same songs; and the waters murmur the same tunes. A kind Providence has also turned our darkness into light. One short hour ago, and yonder mountain was robed in mist to its very base; see, now, how it sparkles in the sunshine! But, Lucy, why are you plucking all those beautiful flowers?” Lucy pointed in silence to a distant enclosure, which contained her father’s grave. A feeling of sadness passed like a shadow over their hearts, reminding them that life is a checkered scene of joy and sorrow. And here we shall leave them, to the indulgence of those contending emotions of regret, gratitude, and bright anticipation.

———

BY HELEN IRVING.

———

I hear the sea-waves dashing
  And roaring on the shore
But a voice is in their chorus
  That I never heard before;
A voice whose sound hath power to fill
  My listening soul with dread—
A voice that moans unceasingly,
  A wail above my dead.
Moans of a summer midnight
  Beneath a foreign sky,
When in the hush of murmuring winds,
  Was heard a last, low sigh—
And a noble soul—a soul I loved,
  Took flight for the starlit heaven,
And a noble form—a form I loved,
  To the starlit deep was given.
Cold is the sea, but colder yet
  Is the brow that its waters lave,
And the tide is still in the breast that heaves
  To the rock of the restless wave:
The bloom is gone from his glowing cheek
  And the love from his pleasant eye,
And none there heed on his pallid lips
  The smile that could never die.
Oh, I pine, beloved, to hear once more
  Thy cheerful loving tone,
And I pine to feel thy living heart
  Throb once against mine own!
I pine for all thy brother-love,
  The noble, fond and true—
And my soul is weary for the rest
  That in thy heart it knew.
Ah! “nevermore and nevermore”
  I hear the sea-waves moan,
And evermore, oh, evermore,
  My heart repeats the tone—
And sorrow’s surges rise and fall,
  And ebb to flow again,
And each returning billow sounds
  Anew the wild refrain.
Oh, Thou, who wept at Bethany,
  And in that anguished hour,
Drew near to heal the broken heart
  With thy celestial power;
Above the moaning waves of wo
  Let me not list in vain,
To hear Thy voice of love divine,
  Say “He shall rise again!”

WOODCOCK AND WOODCOCK SHOOTING.

———

BY FRANK FORESTER.

———

The American Woodcock, Scolopax minor, or, as it has been subdistinguished by some naturalists, from the peculiar form of its short, rounded wing, the fourth and fifth quills of which are the longest, Microptera Americana, is, as the latter title indicates, exclusively confined to this hemisphere and continent. It is much smaller than its European namesake, being very rarely killed exceeding eight or nine ounces in weight, and sixteen inches in extent from tip to tip of the expanded wings; whereas the European cock averages full twelve ounces, being often found up to fifteen, and measures twenty-five or twenty-six inches.

In general appearance and color they bear a considerable affinity each to the other; the upper plumage of both being beautifully variegated, like the finest tortoise-shell, with wavy black lines on a rich brown ground, mottled in places with bright fawn color and ash-gray; but the breast and belly of the American bird are of a deep fulvous yellow, darkest on upper part and fading to a yellowish white at the vent, while its European congener has all the lower parts of a dull cream color, barred with faint dusky waved lines, like the breast feathers of some of the falcons.

It has generally been believed that the large cock of the Eastern continent is never found in America; and all analogy would go to strengthen that belief, for neither of the birds range on their respective continents very far to the northward, whereas it is those species only which extend into the Arctic regions, and by no means all of them, that are common to the two hemispheres. Some circumstances have, however, come recently to my knowledge which lead me to doubt whether the large woodcock of the Eastern hemisphere does not occasionally find its way to this continent, although it is difficult to conceive how it should do so, since it must necessarily wing its way across the whole width of the Atlantic, from the shores of Ireland or the Azores, which are, so far as is ascertained, its extreme western limit.

A very good English sportsman resident in Philadelphia, who is perfectly familiar with both the species and their distinctions, assures me that during the past winter a friend brought for his inspection an undoubted English woodcock, which he had purchased in the market; it weighed twelve ounces, measured twenty-five inches from wing to wing, and had the cream-colored barred breast which I have described. The keeper of the stall at which this bird was purchased did not know where it had been killed, but averred that several birds had previously been in his possession, precisely similar to this in every respect. It is not a little remarkable that the same gentleman who saw this bird, and unhesitatingly pronounced it an European cock, was informed by a sporting friend that he had seen in Susquehanna county a cock, which he was satisfied must have measured twenty-five inches in extent, but which he unfortunately missed. There is likewise, at this time, in the city a skull and bill of a woodcock of very unusual dimensions, of which I am promised a sight, and which, from the description, I am well nigh convinced is of the European species.

It is possible that these birds may have been brought over and kept in confinement, and subsequently escaped, and so become naturalized in America; and yet it is difficult to conceive that persons should have taken the trouble of preserving so stupid and uninteresting a bird as the woodcock in a cage, unless for the purpose of transporting them from one country to another in order to the introduction of new species.

This might be done very easily with regard to some species, and with undoubted success; and it has greatly surprised me that it has never been attempted with regard to our American woodcock, which might unquestionably be naturalized in England with the greatest facility; where it would, I have no doubt, multiply extraordinarily, and become one of the most numerous and valuable species of game, as the mildness of the winters in ordinary seasons would permit the bird to remain perennially in the island, without resorting to migration in order to obtain food.

The woodcock and snipe can both be very readily domesticated, and can be easily induced to feed on bread and milk reduced to the consistency of pulp, of which they ultimately become extremely fond. This is done at first by throwing a few small red worms into the bread and milk, for which the birds bore and bill, as if it were in their natural muddy soil.

In all countries in which any species of the woodcock is found, it is a bird essentially of moderate climates, abhorring and shunning all extremes of temperature, whether of heat or of cold.

With us, it winters in the Southern States from Virginia, in parts of which, I believe, it is found at all seasons of the year, through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida to Louisiana and Mississippi, in the almost impenetrable cane-brakes and deep morasses of which it finds a secure retreat and abundance of its favorite food, during the inclement season, which binds up every stream and boggy swamp of the Middle and New England States in icy fetters.

So soon, however, as the first indications of spring commence, in those regions of almost tropical heat, the woodcock wings its way with the unerring certainty of instinct which guides him back, as surely as the magnet points to the pole, to the very wood and the very brake of the wood in which he was hatched, and commences the duties of nidification.

I am inclined to believe that the woodcock are already paired when they come on to the northward; if not, they do so without the slightest delay, for they unquestionably begin to lay within a week or two after their arrival, sometimes even before the snow has melted from the upland. Sometimes they have been known to lay so early as February, but March and the beginning of April are their more general season. Their nest is very inartificially made of dry leaves and stalks of grass. The female lays from four to five eggs, about an inch and a half long, by an inch in diameter, of a dull clay color, marked with a few blotches of dark brown interspersed with splashes of faint purple. It is a little doubtful whether the woodcock does or does not rear a second brood of young, unless the first hatching is destroyed, as is very frequently the case, by spring floods, which are very fatal to them. In this case, they do unquestionably breed a second time, for I have myself found the young birds, skulking about like young mice in the long grass, unable to fly, and covered with short blackish down, the most uncouth and comical-looking little wretches imaginable, during early July shooting; but it is on the whole my opinion that, at least on early seasons, they generally raise two broods; and this, among others, is one cause of my very strong desire to see summer woodcock shooting entirely abolished.

Unless this is done, I am convinced beyond doubt, that before twenty years have elapsed the woodcock will be as rare an animal as a wolf between the great lakes and the Atlantic sea-board, so ruthlessly are they persecuted and hunted down by pot-hunters and poachers, for the benefit of restaurateurs and of the lazy, greedy cockneys who support them. There is, however, I fear little hope of any legislative enactment toward this highly desirable end; for too many even of those who call themselves, and who ought to be, true sportsmen, are selfish and obstinate on this point, and the name of the pot-hunters is veritably legion. Moreover, it is to be doubted whether, even if such a statute were added to our game-laws, it could be enforced; so vehemently opposed do all the rural classes, who ought to be the best friends of the game, show themselves on all occasions to any attempt toward preserving them, partly from a mistaken idea that game-laws are of feudal origin and of aristocratic tendency; and so averse are they to enforce the penalties of the law on offenders, from a servile apprehension of giving offense to their neighbors.

At present, in almost all the States of which the woodcock is a summer visitant, either by law or by prescription July is the month appropriated to the commencement of their slaughter; in New York the first is the day, in New Jersey the fifth, and in all the Middle States, with the single exception of Delaware, where it is deferred until August, some day of the same month is fixed as the termination of close time. Even in Delaware the exception is rendered nugatory, by a provision permitting every person to shoot on his own grounds, whether in or out of season, in consequence of which the birds are all killed off early in June.

It may now be set down almost as a rule, that in all the Atlantic seaboard counties, and, indeed, every where in the vicinity of the large cities and great thoroughfares, the whole of the summer hatching is killed off before the end of July, with the exception of a few scattered stragglers, which have escaped pursuit in some impenetrable brake or oozy quagmire which defies the foot of the sportsman; that few survive to moult, and that the diminished numbers, which we now find on our autumn shooting-grounds, are supplied exclusively by the northern and Canadian broods, which keep successively flying before the advancing cold of winter, and sojourning among us for a longer or a shorter period, ere they wing their way to the rice-fields of the Savannah, or the cane-brakes of the Mississippi.

If my method could be generally adopted, of letting the fifteenth day of September, after the moulting season is passed, and when the birds are beginning again to congregate on their favorite feeding-grounds, be the commencement of every sort of upland shooting, without any exception, the sport would be enormous; the birds at that season are in full vigor, in complete plumage, in the perfection of condition for the table, and are so strong on the wing, so active and so swift, that no one could for a moment imagine them to be the same with the miserable, puny, half-fledged younglings, which any bungling boy can butcher as he pleases, with the most miserable apparatus, and without almost as well as with a dog, during the dog-days of July.

The weather is, moreover, cool and pleasant, and in every way well-suited to the sport at this season; dogs have a chance to do their work handsomely and well, and the sportsman can do his work, too, as he ought to do it, like a man, walking at his proper rate, unmolested by mosquitoes, and without feeling the salt perspiration streaming into his eyes, until he can hardly brook the pain.

But no such hope existing as that state legislatures, dependent, not on rational but on brute opinion, should condescend to hear or listen to common sense, on matters such as game laws, are we, or are we not, to abandon our plan, to sacrifice our knowledge and enlightened views on this subject to obstinate ignorance; or shall we not take the better part, and decide, according to Minerva’s lesson in Tennyson’s magnificent Ænone,

... For that right is right to follow right

Where wisdom is the scorn of consequence.

We shall resist and persist; at least I shall—I, Frank Forester, who never in my life have killed a bird out of season intentionally, and who never will—who am compelled by sham sportsmen, cockney and pot-gunners to shoot woodcock in July; who have been invited, times out and over again, to shoot cock on men’s own ground, and therefore within the letter of the law, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, before the season; who have ever refused to take the advantages, which every one takes over me; and who still intend to persist, though not to hope, that there may be sense enough, if not integrity, among the legislatures of the free states, to prevent the destruction of all game within their several jurisdictions.

As the thing stands—and by the thing I mean the law—woodcock are to be shot on or about the first day of July; and if, dear reader, you try to shoot any where within fifty miles of New York, or twenty-five of Philadelphia, much later than the tenth of June, I am inclined to think that you will find wonderfully little sport; before the season, do not fire a shot, if you will take my advice, if poachers will violate the law, and the law will not enforce itself against poachers, abstain from becoming a poacher yourself, and do not shoot before the season fairly commences.

At this period of the year woodcock are almost invariably found in the lowlands; sometimes, as, for instance, at Salem, in New Jersey, and many other similar localities along the low and level shores of the Delaware, in the wide, open meadows, where there is not a bush or brake to be seen for miles; but more generally in low, swampy woods, particularly in maple woods, which have an undergrowth of alder; along the margin of oozy streamlets, creeping through moist meadows, among willow thickets; and in wet pastures trampled by cattle, and set here and there with little brakes, which afford them shade and shelter during the heat of the day.

Of the latter description is the ground, once so famous for its summer cock-shooting, known as “the drowned lands,” in Orange County, New York, extending for miles and miles along the margins of the Wallkill and its tributaries, the Black Creek, the Quaker Creek, and the beautiful Wawayanda. Many a day of glorious sport have I had on those sweet level meadows, enjoyed with friends long since dispersed and scattered, some dead, untimely, some in far distant lands, some false, and some forgetful, and thou, true-hearted, honest, merry, brave, Tom Draw; thou whilom king of hosts and emperor of sportsmen, thou, saddest fate of all, smitten, or ere thy prime was passed away, by the most fearful visitation that awaits mankind—the awful doom of blindness! never again shall I draw trigger on those once loved levels—the rail-road now thunders and whistles close beside them, and every man and boy and fool, now sports his fowling-piece; and not a woodcock on the meadows but, after running the gauntlet of a hundred shots, a hundred volleys, is consigned to the care of some conductor, by him to be delivered to Delmonico or Florence, for the benefit of fat, greasy merchant-princes; and if it were not so, if birds, swarmed as of yore in every reedy slank, by every alder-brake, in every willow tuft, the ground is haunted by too many recollections, rife with too many thick-succeeding memories to render it a fitting place, to me at least, for pleasurable or gay pursuits.

But, as I have said before, summer cock-shooting on the Drowned Lands of Orange County, is among the things that have been—one of the stars that has set, never to be relumed, in the nineteenth century; and the glory of “the Warwick Woodlands” has departed.

In Connecticut, in some parts, there is very good summer cock-shooting yet; and also in many places in the neighborhood of Philadelphia, in the rich alluvial levels around the Delaware, the Schuylkill, and their tributary rivers; but the sportsman, who really thirsts for fine shooting—shooting such as it does the heart good to hear of—must mount the iron-horse, whose breath is the hissing steam, and away, fleeter even than the wings of the morning, for Michigan and Illinois and Indiana, for the willow-brakes of Alganac, and the rice-marshes of Lake St. Clair; and there he may shoot cock till his gun-barrels are red-hot, and his heart is satiate of bird-slaughter.

It is usual at this season to shoot cock over pointers or setters, according to individual preference of this or that race of dogs; for myself, of the two, I prefer the setter, as in cock-shooting there is always abundance of water to be had, and this rough-coated, high-strung dog can face brakes and penetrate coverts, which play the mischief with the smooth satiny skin of the high-blooded pointer.

In truth, however, neither of these, but the short-legged, bony, red and white cocking-spaniel, is the true dog over which to shoot summer woodcock; and no one, I will answer for it, who has ever hunted a good cry of these, will ever again resort either to setter or pointer for this, to them, inappropriate service.

The true place for these dogs is the open plain, the golden stubble, the wide-stretching prairie, the highland moor, where they can find full scope for their heady courage, their wonderful fleetness, their unwearied industry, and display their miracles of staunchness, steadiness, and nose.

In order to hunt these dogs on cock, you must unteach them some of their noblest faculties, you must tame down their spirits, shackle their fiery speed, reduce them, in fact, to the functions of the spaniel, which is much what it would be to train a battle-charger to bear a pack-saddle, or manage an Eclipse into a lady’s ambling palfrey.

The cocking-spaniel, on the contrary, is here in his very vocation. Ever industrious, ever busy, never ranging above twenty paces from his master, bustling round every stump, prying into every fern-bush, worming his long, stout body, propped on its short, bony legs, into the densest and most matted cover, no cock can escape him.

See! one of them has struck a trail; how he flourishes his stump of a tail. Now he snuffs the tainted ground; what a rapture fills his dark, expressive eye. Now he is certain; he pauses for a moment, looks back to see if his master is at hand; “Yaff! yaff!” the brakes ring with his merry clamor, his comrade rushes to his aid like lightning, yet pauses ever, obedient to the whistle, nor presses the game too rashly, so that it rise out of distance. Up steps the master, with his thumb upon the dexter hammer, and his fore-finger on the trigger-guard. Now they are close upon the quarry; “yaff! yaff! yaff! yaff!” Flip flap! up springs the cock, with a shrill whistle, on a soaring wing. Flip flap! again—there are a couple. Deliberately prompt, up goes the fatal tube—even as the butt presses the shoulder, trigger is drawn after trigger. Bang! bang! the eye of faith and the finger of instinct have done their work, duly, truly. The thud of one bird, as he strikes the moist soil, tells that he has fallen; the long stream of feathers floating in the still air through yonder open glade, announces the fate of the second; and, before the butt of the gun, dropped to load, has touched the ground, without a word or question, down charged at the report, the busy little babblers are couched silent in the soft, succulent young grass. Loaded once more, “Hie! fetch!” and what a race of emulation—mouthing their birds gently, yet rapturously, to inhale best the delicate aroma, not biting them, each cocker has brought in his bird, and they and you, gentle reader, if you be the happy sportsman who possesses such a brace of beauties, are rewarded adequately and enough.

For the rest, a short, wide-bored, double-barrel, an ounce of No. 8 shot, and an equal measure of Brough’s diamond-grain, will do the business of friend microptera, as effectually, at this season, as a huge, long, old fashioned nine-pounder, with its two ounce charge; and it will give you this advantage, that it shall weigh less by three pounds, and enable you to dispense with a superfluous weight of shot, which, on a hot July day, especially if you be at all inclined to what our friend Willis calls pinguitude, will of a necessity produce much exudation, and some lassitude.

By the time these lucubrations shall be in thy hands, kind and gentle sportsman, the dog-days will be, and July cock-shooting; and that, where thou shootest soever, thou mayest find the woodcock lying as thick and as lazy as in the cut above, is the worst wish in thy behalf, of thy friend and servant at command,

Frank Forester.

THE SHARK.

A NEW PAGE OF NATURAL HISTORY.

———

BY L. A. WILMER.

———

Of all marine animals (except midshipmen and second-lieutenants in the navy) the shark is, perhaps, one of the most unpopular. In general, it is difficult to give reason for the unpopularity or popularity of any thing, but with reference to the shark, there is much reason to suppose that he has, by cruel misrepresentation, been exposed to unmerited dislike. Had he been altogether bad, it is most likely that he would have found a zealous advocate long ago; whereas, we are the first, we believe, who ever undertook to say a word in his defense. As a shark is thought to have many counterparts among the human species, we must be extremely careful how we launch our invectives at him, lest by direct implication we should abuse some of our most respectable fellow-citizens. But, without affectation, we have always felt a high degree of respect for this inhabitant of the deep, to whom we may justly ascribe some very estimable and admirable qualities. In the first place, he is the great controversialist of the watery world. “If he cannot always convince,” as some one said of a renowned American orator, “he never failed to silence his opponent;” and this, in the tactics of disputation, is almost as grand an achievement as convincing itself. We read that Tycho Brahe had his nose bitten off in a controversy with another distinguished mathematician. But, although the shark—provided as he is with a jaw as effective as a broad-axe—is well qualified to “chop logic,” we doubt if he would be satisfied with such a paltry exploit as that which has been accredited to Tycho’s snappish adversary; and, indeed, we see no use in mincing the matter when it becomes necessary to “use up” an opponent. The best advice we can give in such a case is to “go the whole hog” at once. But it is not with the controversial abilities of the shark that we have to deal at present. It was the chief design of this sketch to speak chiefly of his business habits—on which we intend to found a certain comparison that we have in our eye—and so (as Bottom, the weaver, says) “to grow to a conclusion.”

The shark is a great speculator in his way. He follows in the wake of the ship for days and weeks together, looking out for “a good chance.” His industry and perseverance are rewarded at last, if a poor Jack Tar happen to fall overboard; but if disappointed in his expectations of such an auspicious event, he is obliged to console himself with Jacob Faithful’s excellent maxim, “better luck next time.” If, in pursuit of his object, instead of catching a jolly fat sailor, he should be hooked or harpooned himself, he philosophically considers it as a fair business transaction; for, in every speculation, somebody must suffer—the great object of all speculating skill being to decide who is to be victimized. Speculation, therefore, is pretty much the same thing in substance, whether it be terrene or aquatic.

Shakspeare, with his customary acuteness of observation, declares that there are “both land-rats and water-rats.” Some other immortal genius has made the startling discovery that there are both water-sharks and land-sharks; and we find that in each of these generic divisions there is more specific arrangement than we have leisure or inclination to discuss. The engraver has supplied us with a specimen of one variety of the land-shark, which may be distinguished at a glance by the globular symbols at the end of the tail—the use or meaning of which has never been clearly explained, though the world has been favored with many ingenious hypotheses in relation to the subject. The common opinion is that the three balls are significative of the fact, that should the animal get possession of any of your property, it is two to one that you will never recover it. Others say that as balls have a remarkable facility in going down hill, they significantly point out the route you are likely to take should you venture to have any dealings with this formidable creature.

The least observation of the picture will convince you that there is speculation in the eye of this land-shark. Mark the eager expression! so much like that you may have observed in the glance of his maritime brother, as he ogled you from his billowy alcove. See the open mouth, and teeth displayed, as if prepared for a “bite.” Judging from the “valence” (as Hamlet calls it,) at the bottom of the visage, we opine that this animal does not shave himself—though he is said to shave his victims rather closely. The beard, by the way, is regarded as a hereditary characteristic of this devouring race—the origin of which is traced to Lombardy. The ancient inhabitants of that country were called Longobardi, which name some etymologists derive from Latin words, signifying long-beards. Among these unshaven gentry, it appears, pawn-broking, the most remorseless kind of shaving, was first established. From this seminary of shavers, the whole world was supplied with professors—fellows remarkable for great latitude of conscience as well as longitude of beard; benevolent fellows, too, always ready to accommodate the needy with a loan, “on the most agreeable terms”—as some of them promise to do, per advertisement, at the present day; the phrase, “most agreeable terms,” being understood to signify one hundred and fifty per cent. per annum! This moderate rate of interest is continued down to our own times, showing that the pawn-broker is piously attached to the usages of his ancestors, while others, in the race for improvement, are constantly trampling, with profane feet, on the ashes of the venerable dead.

“My Uncle,” as the pawn-broker is affectionately called by his customers, honors the assumed relationship by loaning out his dollars to every applicant who can comply with his stipulations. In this particular, some gay, frolicksome nephew would propose him as a model for uncles in general; especially because he never requires an exact account of how the cash loaned is to be expended, nor does he seem to take it for granted that you are on the direct road to ruin because you happen to stand in need of pecuniary assistance. On the contrary, he speaks of money-borrowing as one of the finest strokes of policy, and professes his willingness to lend any imaginable sum—if you are prepared to deposit some “collateral” worth about four times the amount. This being done, your generous creditor never harasses you for repayment, you may abscond, if you choose, and proceed to California, or any other remote region celebrated for gold, or brimstone—assuring yourself that your kind “uncle” will not interfere with your departure or inquire after you when you are gone.

With all this liberality and generous forbearance, the pawn-broker is regarded as one of the most voracious of predatory animals; but be it understood that there are land-sharks compared with which he is a mere minnow, inasmuch as his operations are all on a small scale, and the figure he makes among the speculating leviathans of the day is comparatively insignificant.

REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son, Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, M. A. To be completed in Six Parts. New York. Harper & Brothers.

The Harpers are printing this entertaining work as fast as the volumes are received from England. The English price is about three dollars and a half a volume; the American twenty-five cents. As a record of Southey’s life, character, and opinions, and as conducting us into the workshop of the greatest of book-makers, the work has great value, apart from its attractive qualities of literary and personal gossip. The impression it leaves of Southey is, on the whole, a favorable one. It makes him appear as an honest, just, active, persistent, independent man,—one who can “toil terribly,”—a staunch friend, a direct and open opponent,—with a good deal of bigotry but no deviltry,—and altogether a person with few of the vices which most commonly beset writers by profession. His letters are admirable, both in themselves and as true specimens of epistolary composition. They show Southey just as he was, quick in forming opinions, confident in expressing them, thoroughly convinced that he had no intellectual superior in England, freed from envy by self-esteem, and ready to settle every question that is started, by a few dogmatic sentences, which sparkle “like salt in fire.” The singular perfection of his character, considered in respect to its capacity for active intellectual labor, came from his almost miraculous confidence in his faculties and content with himself. He has so high an opinion of Robert Southey as to be unconcerned about any thing which lies beyond the grasp of his powers, and, accordingly, however much we may find reason to doubt or deny many of his statements, they ever have a joyous raciness which tingles pleasantly on our perceptions.

The present work commences with a delightful autobiography, which Southey carried down to the age of fifteen. His son then takes up the narrative. This, however, is little more than arranging the correspondence, and explaining allusions in it. The great charm of Southey’s style is its stimulating simplicity; and this is felt throughout the present “Life.” We have marked, in reading the work, a number of passages, which seem to us especially characteristic, and cannot refrain from quoting a few of them. He tells us, in his autobiography, that his elder brother was very beautiful; “so much so, that, when I made my appearance on the 12th of August, 1774, I was sadly disparaged by comparison with him. My mother, asking if it was a boy, was answered by her nurse, in a tone as little favorable to me as it was flattering, ‘Ay, a great ugly boy!’ and she added, when she told me this, ‘God forgive me! when I saw what a great red creature it was, covered with rolls of fat, I thought I should never be able to love him.’” This is the most perfectly dramatic statement of the most important event which can happen to a person, ever given in a biography; and it conciliates the reader at once.

The record of his early life is given with much amusing details. His parents were rather illiterate, and he depended on chance to gratify his thirst for books, with nobody to select what were proper to his age. He read Beaumont and Fletcher through before he was eight years old,—a most curious book for a child, when we consider the obscenity, licentiousness, and slang which mingle with the romantic beauty of those dramatists. He says they did him no harm, for the reason that he was so young. In Mrs. Rowe’s Letters he read her version of the stories of Olendo and Sophronia, and the Enchanted Forest, from Tasso, and despaired at the time of ever reading more of the poem until he was man, “from a whimsical notion that, as the subject related to Jerusalem, the original must be in Hebrew;” and there was not learning enough in his father’s house to set him right on the point.

Perhaps the most interesting peculiarity of books like the present, is their expression of the private opinions which their subjects entertained of contemporary men and events. This certainly is the raciest element in the Correspondence of Southey, and his letters are next in attractiveness to a cosy chat with himself. Of Bentham, he remarks—“It has pleased the metaphysico-critico-politico-patriotico-phoolo-philosopher Jeremy Bentham, to designate me, in one of his opaque works, by the appellation of St. Southey, for which I humbly thank his Jeremy Benthamship, and have in part requited him.” His hatred of Jeffrey, and contempt of Reviews, provoke many a sardonic remark, replete with his peculiar humor. “Turner,” he writes to Rickman, “complained heavily of Scotch criticism, which he seems to feel too much. Such things only provoke me to interject Fool! and Booby! seasoned with the participle damnatory; but as for being vexed at a review—I should as soon be fevered by a flea-bite! ... I look upon the invention of reviews to be the worst injury which literature has received since its revival.” Of Coleridge he says—“His mind is in a perfect St. Vitus’s dance—eternal activity without action.” Jeffrey, according to Southey, is a bad politician, a worse moralist, and a critic, in matters of taste, equally incompetent and unjust. It is unfortunate that his criticism on himself and on others, in these letters, is not of a kind to entitle him to condemn the editor of the Edinburgh Review. “Cowper,” he asserts, “owed his popularity to his piety, not to his poetry, and that piety was craziness.” His opinion was altered, of course, when he afterward edited an edition of Cowper’s works. Of Walter Savage Lander’s poem of Gebir, he says—“I look upon Gebir, as I do upon Dante’s long poem in the Italian, not as a good poem, but as containing the finest poetry in the language.” His power of appreciating Wordsworth may be estimated by his remark, in a letter to Scott, on the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Childhood.” “The Ode on Pre-existence,” he says, “is a dark subject darkly handled. Coleridge is the only man who could make such a subject luminous. The Leech Gatherer is one of my favorites.” We might quote many other critical judgments, “equally incompetent and unjust,” but if the last does not satisfy the reader, it is impossible to quote any thing that will.

The following passage, from a letter written in 1812, gives so vivid an impression of Shelley in his enthusiastic youth, that we cannot refrain from extracting it. The style is very characteristic of Southey’s manner throughout the letters.

“Here is a man in Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham, with £6000 a year entailed upon him, and as much more in his father’s power to cut off. Beginning with romances of ghosts and murder, and with poetry at Eton, he passed, at Oxford, into metaphysics; printed half-a-dozen pages, which he entitled “The Necessity of Atheism;” sent one anonymously to Coplestone, in expectation, I suppose, of converting him; was expelled in consequence; married a girl of seventeen, after being turned out of doors by his father; and here they both are, in lodgings, living upon £200 a year, which her father allows them. He is come to the fittest physician in the world. At present he has got to the Pantheistic stage of philosophy, and, in the course of a week, I expect he will be a Berkleyan, for I have put him upon a course of Berkley. It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen and I am thirty-seven; and I dare say it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher, and do a great deal of good with £6000 a year; the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me. God help us! the world wants mending, though he did not set about it exactly in the right way.”

This Life of Southey promises to be an important addition to the biographical treasures of English literature, and we look with great expectation for the remaining volumes, which will record his quarrels with Byron, his coldness to Coleridge, and the publication of his most important works.

Historic View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic Nations: with a Sketch of their Popular Poetry. By Taloi. With a Preface by Edward Robinson, D. D., LL.D. 1 vol. 12mo.

This work is a real addition to English literature, containing a succinct view of a subject which has heretofore been treated by those English scholars, who have treated of it at all, in a fragmentary and unsatisfactory manner. The Slavic nations contain a population of seventy millions, and it is strange that a work like the present has not been produced before, the subject being rich in matter both to interest and instruct the better class of readers.

“Taloi,” as we presume is well known, is the name assumed by Mrs. Robinson, the learned wife of the learned gentleman who prefaces the present history. Few living women can be said to excel her in the rare combination of erudition with heartiness. This volume owes much of its attractiveness to the feminine qualities which sometimes guide and sometimes relieve her erudite researches. Her selection of anecdotes, illustrative of national character, is very happy. In speaking of the submission with which the Slavic Nations received Christianity, the people readily following their superiors, she remarks, that “Vladimir the Great, to whom the Gospel and the Koran were offered at the same time, was long undecided which to choose; and was at last induced to embrace the former, because ‘his Russians could not live without the pleasure of drinking.’”

There are many poetical translations in the volume of much excellence, some of them having such a marked peculiarity that, without knowing the originals, a critic might pronounce them to be true versions. Two or three poems, relating to the desolate condition of motherless orphans, are introduced by a reference to a Danish ballad, which we trust that Longfellow will search after and translate. “The Danes,” says Taloi, “have a beautiful ballad, in which the ghost of a mother is roused by the wailings and sufferings of her deserted offspring, to break with supernatural power the gravestone, and to re-enter, in the stillness of the night, the neglected nursery, in order to cheer, to nurse, to comb and wash the dear little ones whom God once entrusted to her care.” The following translation of a ballad, written in the Upper Lusatian language, we extract:

THE ORPHAN’S LAMENT.

Far more unhappy in the world am I,

Than on the meadow the bird that doth fly.

Little bird merrily flits to and fro,

Sings its sweet carol upon the green bough.

I, alas, wander wherever I will,

Everywhere I am desolate still!

No one befriends me wherever I go,

But my own heart full of sorrow and wo!

Cease thy grief, oh my heart, full of grief,

Soon will a time come that giveth thee relief.

Never misfortune has struck me so hard,

But I, ere long, again better have fared.

God of all else in the world has enough;

Why not then widows and orphans enough?

The naÏvetÉ of this is similar to a little quotation which the author gives from a Servian elegy. A poor girl sings: “Our Lord has of every thing his fill; but of poor people he seems to have greater plenty than of anything else!”

The following description, from a Servian lyric, we commend to contributors to Albums. It will keep them in comparisons for a life-time:

Never since the world had a beginning,

Never did a lovelier flow’ret blossom,

Than the flow’ret in our own days blooming;

Haikuna, the lovely maiden flower.

She was lovely, nothing e’er was lovelier!

She was tall and slender as the pine-tree;

White her cheeks, but tinged with rosy blushes,

As if morning’s beam had shone upon them,

Till that beam had reached its high meridian.

And her eyes, they were two precious jewels,

And her eyebrows, leeches from the ocean,

And her eyelids, they were wings of swallows;

And her flaxen braids were silken tassels;

And her sweet mouth was a sugar casket,

And her teeth were pearls arrayed in order;

White her bosom, like two snowy dovelets,

And her voice was like the dovelet’s cooing;

And her smiles were like the glowing sunshine;

And her fame, the story of her beauty,

Spread through Bosnia, and through Herz’govina.

The simplicity of the ballads which Mrs. Robinson has so copiously translated, will win many readers who take but little interest in intellectual history. But it is as a history of literature that the book is deserving of most attention, and as a historian the author displays great learning, gracefully managed. The criticism is conducted on enlarged principles of taste, and the diction is uniformly clear, condensed, and elegant. The publisher has done his part towards making the volume attractive, by printing it in large type on good paper.

Indiana. By George Sand. Translated by one of the Best French Scholars in this Country, a member of the Philadelphia Bar. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson. 1 vol. 12mo.

We cannot divine the publisher’s object in engaging the services of “one of the best French Scholars in this Country,” and moreover “a member of the Philadelphia Bar,” to translate this miserable trash into bad English. Some of the later works of George Sand, undoubtedly evince genius, but the novel under consideration, one of the first products of her unregulated passions and speculative profligacy, has nothing in plot, character, incident, or style, to give piquancy to its coarseness. It is licentious, but then it is so stupid, that its perusal would be a penance to a rouÉ. Its immorality and falsehood might have a charm to some minds, but the raciness of these qualities is spoiled by the detestable and yawn-provoking sentimentality by which they are pervaded. The publication of such books is an offence equally to taste and morals, and tends to corrupt the intellect as well as the conscience of such readers as are foolish enough to buy them, and bad enough to read them. One of the worst signs of the times is the systematic degradation of literature into a mere handmaid of profligacy, as exhibited in the numberless manufactories of cheap damnation spread all over the land—manufactories which send out an incessant stream of ugly looking pamphlet novels, whose leading claim to notice is their brazen brainlessness and stupid indecency. We have been informed that these things are read, but on what principles of human nature the assertion is made is a mystery to us. They are so absolutely unreadable, according to the worse view ever taken of the human mind by misanthrope or metaphysician, that we must be allowed to doubt the fact, and to congratulate the philanthropist that the devil, in this case, has underrated the taste even of our blackguards and flats. We do hope for the credit of the species, that if the popular heart and conscience are doomed to be corrupted by a cheap literature, it will not be done by such wretched stuff as forms the staple of George Sand’s “Indiana.”

Women in America: her Work and her Reward. By Maria J. McIntosh. Author of “To Seem and To be,” etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1 vol. 12mo.

The author of this volume has already distinguished herself as the writer of two popular novels, in which a distinct moral purpose is connected with well drawn characters and interesting events. In the present work she makes woman the reformer of social evils, and views her as she appears at the North, the South, and the West. There are many opinions expressed for which Miss McIntosh can only give what logicians call “the lady’s reason,” but, as a whole, the book is calculated to do good, and can be safely commended to the attention of “Women in America.”

JENNY LIND’S AMERICAN POLKA.

COMPOSED BY

N. STEENCKEN,

AND RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED TO

MRS. A. WATSON.

Presented by Lee & Walker, 162 Chestnut Street.

DETAILS OF THE NEW FASHIONS IN SACQUES AND MANTELETS.

NO. 1.—ESMERALDA.

^[6]Pardessus of silk fitting closely to the shape, open before, trimmed with lace, which is held by a trimming of the sleeve and skirt.

NO. 2.—RIMINI.

Little Spring Cloak of taffetas trimmed with a double ruche of the same.

NO 3.—FORNARINA.

Tight fitting pardessus, bordered with gimp, and trimmed with a thin, loose fringe, twisted at the end. The sleeve is formed by the stuff folded on itself; but it is not separate from the body.

NO. 4.—FALIERO.

Spring Cloak, half open, trimmed with galloon and twisted fringe.

NO. 5.—OPHELIA.

Mantelet of taffetas, with ruches of quilled ribbon separated in the middle by a little puffing. Trimmed with white blonde.

NO. 6.—HERMIONE.

Shawl-shaped Mantelet of taffetas with fringe.

NO. 7.—MIRANDELLA.

Mantelet of taffetas, trimmed with black lace and figured ribbon.

NO. 8.—STELLA.

Pardessus for the house, of taffetas trimmed with ruches and pinked or scalloped trimmings.

[6]	Pardessus—a sort of sacque or little silk coat.

LE FOLLET

AnaÏs Toudouze

LE FOLLET
Paris, Boulevart St. Martin, 69.
Coiffures de Ferdinand Hamelin—Robes Camille—Lingeries Schreiber
Style of Goods at Stewart's New York and L.J. Levy & Co. Philadelphia
Graham’s Magazine
134 Chestnut Street

EDITOR’S TABLE.

Cruising in the Last War. By Charles J. Peterson, Author of the Reefer of ’76, etc. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson.

Many thousands of the readers of Graham’s Magazine, will be glad to welcome in this form this admirable sea novel, which was published in this Magazine in 1840. It was one of the most popular articles that ever appeared in this country, and now that the author avows himself, he will justly be placed among the foremost writers of the age for directness and energy of style, graphic force of description and skillful delineation of character. Cooper, in his palmiest days, never excelled the splendor of some of the descriptive passages of this writer. Many of the incidents we learn, for the first time, are taken from events that occurred during the war, and the whole story is drawn from the original log-book of a privateer of 1812, now in the possession of the author.

It is refreshing to turn to the natural, patriotic tone of this work, after wading through the sea of indifferent books, which now-a-days make up the marketable cheap literature; and we thank Mr. Peterson, on this account, for allowing the Cruisings to appear. It will find a welcome and a response in the hearts of all pure men; and purchasers wherever a spark of patriotism lingers. It is sold at the cheap rate of twenty-five cents, and by the hundred at a still lower price.

Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.—We had hoped to be able to notice the Spring Exhibition of this Society, but cannot do justice to the splendid array of home and foreign talent on the walls of its Galleries, in the present number; our comments must, therefore, be delayed until next month. A large number of paintings have been received from Europe, in competition for the prizes offered by the Academy. Among these, we may enumerate the following: “Ahasuerus, King of the Medea and Persians, exalting Mordecai,” by P. Van Schendel, of Brussels; “Wrecking and Succour,” and “The Schelde in a fresh gale,” by P. T. Schotel, of Mendembled, Holland; “The Auspicious Moment,” and “The Recovery,” by Carl Hubner, of Dusseldorf; “An Auction Scene,” by A. W. Wedeking, of Bremen; two “Views in the High Alps,” by G. F. Diday, of Bremen; “Amphitrite and Diana,” after Moreto’s Spanish comedy, “El desden con el desden,” by J. Schoppe, of Berlin; “Ruins of Castle Teck on the Suabian Alps,” by H. Herdtle, of Stuttgard; “Judith and Holofernes,” by E. Jacobs, of Gotha; “The Marseillaise first song by Rouget de Lisle,” by Godefri Gaffens, of Antwerp; “A Lake Scene,” by Ildephonse Stoequart, of Antwerp; “Abraham receiving the Divine Promise,” by J. A. Kruseman; “Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife,” by FranÇois Vinck, of Anvers, Belgium; “Tobias Receiving his Wife,” and an “Italian Peasant Girl,” by Edward Ihlee, of Cassel; “The Judgment of Solomon,” by Jh. Van Severdonck, of Brussels; three panels, “Adam and Eve finding the dead body of Abel,” “Abel carried to Heaven by an Angel,” and “Cain in the power of Satan,” by Edward du Jardin, of Antwerp; “The Penny of CÆsar,” by Joseph Belleman, of Antwerp; “A Roman Aqueduct at Alcala-la-Real in Spain, with a Caravan of Muleteers,” by F. Bossuet, of Brussels; and several others. The productions of our own artists are numerous, and will challenge a favorable comparison with these. Rothermel’s latest work will add greatly to his reputation.

Chromo Xylography.—The very beautiful title-page, for the July volume, which we furnish our readers in this number, is the work of Mr. Devereux, an accomplished artist of this city. This style of art is known as “Chromo Xylography,” and Mr. Devereux has certainly, thus far excelled all other artists in the beauty and delicacy of his pictures. The Lake of Como—the central design of our picture—is printed in eight different tints; and the blending of colors has all the purity of painting. When it is considered that this effect is produced by printing from eight different blocks, we may consider this picture an achievement, and highly creditable to its designer.

True Paris Fashions.—We resume with this number, our Paris Fashions, which our subscribers will at once see are far superior in beauty of design and coloring to any that have appeared in Graham for a long time. The order for this plate we sent to Paris the moment we ascertained that we should again become the exclusive conductor of “Graham,” and our agent is instructed to forward one each month, from the best houses there, to appear simultaneously with the same designs in Paris. We thus furnish our colored plate—one month in advance of even wood-cut fashion plates—and at least two months earlier than those which are re-engraved and colored in this country. This single feature of “Graham” renders it superior to any work in this country, in regard to embellishments.

OURSELF.

If blushes were transferable, our face in the magazine for this month, should, we suppose, be like a maiden’s before the ardor of her first lover—but steel is as unsusceptible as brass, we find; so, with a very unconscious air, we shall brave the battery of bright eyes, impervious to a frown.

As to our Memoir, by Mr. Peterson—the veritable Jeremy Short—it is done in his most amiable vein; and though not exactly the history of the Wandering Jew—being rather that of Barnaby Rudge’s Raven, crying continually, “Never say die”—our readers may take it with the grains of allowance which should be given to a vigorous writer with a fine imagination, who is determined to make a hero.

We had written a long article, commemorative of other days, but have since thought it better to let by-gones be by-gones. That we feel proud of our reinstation in this Magazine—the child of our happier days—we shall not deny. The gold that bought it for us—if estimated by the happiness it has diffused—must have dropped from heaven, baptized for good. The dark shadows—the regrets and heart-burnings of the past are over. A bright future is before us, high hopes and determined resolves are ours now—light leaps over the mountain-tops, and the “good time” so long a coming, rushes joyfully to meet us—is here.

“Graham.”

HOur thanks are due to our brethren of the quill throughout the entire Union, for the very general, and very generous welcome we have received on coming back to the profession. While we shall never forget their kindness, and have small hopes of ever being able to repay a tythe of it, we shall endeavor so to act as not to dishonor their endorsement, or to forfeit their good opinion.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Archaic spellings and hyphenation have been retained as well as some spellings peculiar to Graham’s. Punctuation has been corrected without note. Other errors have been corrected as noted below. For illustrations, some caption text may be missing or incomplete due to condition of the originals used for preparation of the ebook.

page iii, Strength. Hy Mrs. ==> Strength. By Mrs.
page 4, as the real savan ==> as the real savant
page 5, mere experimentors, surprised ==> mere experimenters, surprised
page 8, up. You hav n’t ==> up. You haven’t
page 8, of the the lads did ==> of the lads did
page 13, weather-side of the bark ==> weather-side of the barque
page 17, singers was diposed ==> singers was disposed
page 19, symphonies of Beethooven ==> symphonies of Beethoven
page 24, same instincts leads her ==> same instincts lead her
page 27, services, Captain Dundas ==> services, Captain Dunbar
page 33, these succint narrations ==> these succinct narrations
page 38, whisper a requium ==> whisper a requiem
page 45, a country guager ==> a country gauger
page 45, was harrassed with cares ==> was harassed with cares
page 46, no more deficile, ==> no more difficile,
Page 50, the cautious inuendo ==> the cautious innuendo
page 52, the amiable Blocklock ==> the amiable Blacklock
page 55, payment. Harrassed and ==> payment. Harassed and
page 56, to smoothe her ==> to smooth her
page 58, an exhorbitant sum ==> an exorbitant sum
page 65, ready to accomodate ==> ready to accommodate
page 67, The naÏvete of ==> The naÏvetÉ of
page 67, Than the flowret ==> Than the flow’ret
page 67, degradation of literarature ==> degradation of literature
page 72, Herdtle, of Suttgard ==> Herdtle, of Stuttgard

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