I. THE SURPRISE.

II. THE PEST HOUSE.

III. THE VISION.

PART SECOND.

1. "CHILD'S PLAY."

2. "FORTUNE'S PRANKS."

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXXVII.      November, 1850.      No. 5.

Table of Contents

Fiction, Literature and Articles

Poetry, Music, and Fashion

Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.

“The true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world;” “the grace that hath appeared unto all men;” and “the invisible things of the Creator, clearly seen and understood by the things which are made,” are propositions which have the formal warrant of our sacred books to back the authority of logical demonstration. Moreover, it is pleasant and profitable to believe that “He hath not left himself without a witness” among any of the tribes of men. The human brotherhood is so involved in the divine fatherhood, that the individual’s hold on the infinite and eternal must stand or fall with the universality of His regards and providence. If Canaan had been without a “Prophet of the Most High,” if Chaldea had been left without soothsayer and seer, and classic Greece and Rome destitute of oracles and Sibylline revelations, the Jewish theology and the Christian apocalypse would stand unsupported by “the analogy of faith,” and our highest hopes would be shifted from the broad basis of an impartial benevolence, to a narrow caprice of the “Father of all Men.” But, happily, the sympathies of nature, the deductions of reason, and the teachings of the Book, are harmonious on this point, for we find Melchisedec, who could claim no legal or lineal relation to the Levitical priesthood, the chosen type of the perpetual “High Priest of our profession;” and Balaam, notwithstanding his heathen birth, and ministry among the Canaanites when their cup of iniquity was full; and the eastern Magi, who brought their gifts from afar among the Gentiles, to the new-born “King of the Jews,” all alike guided by the same light, and partakers and fellow-laborers in the same faith, with the regular hierarchy of Mount Zion. So, the Star of Jacob is the “desire of nations,” and the heart and hope of the wide world turneth ever toward the same essential truth, and strive after it by the same instinct through a thousand forms, “if haply they may find it.”

The religious system of the Jews and Chaldeans agreed, with wonderful exactness, in the doctrine of angelic beings and their interposition in the affairs of men. The superintendence of the destinies of nations and individuals, and the allotment of provinces, kingdoms and families among these ministering spirits, are as distinctly taught in the book of Daniel of the old testament, and in the gospel of St. Matthew of the new, as in the popular beliefs of the Arabians and Persians; indeed, the Bible sanction is general, particular, and ample, for the doctrine of angelic ministry as it has been held in all ages and throughout the world.

The order and organization of these celestial beings, among whom the infinite multiplicity of providential offices is thus distributed, falling within the domain of marvelousness and ideality, of course, took the thousand hues and shapes which these prismatic faculties would bestow; and in the various accommodations and special applications of the doctrine, it naturally grew complicated, obscure, and sometimes even incoherent; but in all the confusion of a hundred tongues, kindreds and climates, a substantial conformity to a common standard is apparent enough to prove the identity of origin and the fundamental truth common to them all.

It is to introduce one of these remarkable correspondences that these reflections are employed.

Fairy tales, it is said by encyclopedists, were brought from Arabia into France in the twelfth century, but this can only mean that that was the epoch of the exotic legends. In England, if they were not indigenous, they certainly were naturalized centuries before Chaucer flourished; and they were as familiar as the catechism, and almost as orthodox, when Spencer, wrote his Fairy Queen, and Shakspeare employed their agency in his most exquisite dramas. But their date is, in fact, coeval with tradition, and earlier than all written records, and their origin is without any necessary locality, for they spring spontaneously from faith in the supernatural. They are inseparable from poetry. The priesthood of nature, which enters for us the presence of the invisible and converses familiarly with the omnipresent life of the creation, recognizes the administration of an ethereal hierarchy in all the phenomena of existence; they serve to impersonate the spiritual forces, which are felt in all heroic action, and they graduate the responsive sympathies of Heaven to all the supernatural necessities of humanity. The live soul can make nothing dead; it can take no relation to insensate matter; it invests the universe with a conscious life, answering to its own; and an infinite multitude of intermediate spirits stand to its conceptions for the springs of the universal movement. Rank upon rank, in spiral ascent, the varied ministry towers from earth to heaven, answering to every need, supporting every hope, and environing the whole life of the individual and the race with an adjusted providence, complete and adequate. In the great scale, place and office are assigned for spirits celestial, ethereal and terrestrial, in almost infinite gradation. The highest religious sentiments, the noblest styles of intellect and imagination, and the lower and coarser apprehensions of the invisible orders of being, are all met and indulged by the accommodating facility of the system.

The race of Peris of Persia, and Fairies of western Europe, hold a very near and familiar relation to the every day life of humanity, by their large intermixture of human characteristics and the close resemblance and alliance of their probationary existence and ultimate destiny to the life and fortunes of men. A commonplace connection with ordinary affairs and household interests constitutes the largest part of the popular notion of them; and their interferences among the vulgar are almost absurd and ludicrous enough to impeach the earnestness of the superstition; but our best poets have shown them capable of very noble and beneficent functions in heroic story. Like our own various nature, they are a marvellous mixture of the mighty and the mean, the magnanimous, the malignant and the mirthful; they stand, in a word, as our own correspondents in a subtler sphere, and serve to illustrate, by exaggerating, all that is true and possible in us, but more probable of them—our own shadows lengthened, and our own light brightened into a higher life. In some countries the legends are obscure, in others clear; but they all agree well enough in ascribing their origin to the intermarriage of angels with “the daughters of men,” and that they are put under penance and probation for the recovery of their paradise. So, like our own race, they have fallen from a higher estate; their natures are half human, and their general fortunes are freighted on the same tide.

The nursery tale of the Sleeping Beauty will serve capitally to illustrate our theme. Handed down from age to age, and passed from nation to nation, through the agency of oral tradition chiefly, it has of course taken as many shapes as the popular fancy could impart to it; but the essential points, seen through all the existing forms, are substantially these:

A grand coronation festival of a young queen abruptly opens the story. The state room of the palace is furnished with Oriental magnificence. The representatives of every order, interest and class in the kingdom—constructively the whole community—are present to witness and grace the scene. The fairies who preside over the various departments of nature, and the functions and interests of society, are assembled by special invitation to invoke the blessings and pledge the favors of their several jurisdictions to the opening reign. The ceremony proceeds; the young queen is crowned; the priest pronounces the benediction, and the generous sprites bestow beauty and goodness, and every means of life and luxury, until nothing is left for imagination to conceive or heart to wish. But an unexpected and unwelcome guest arrives—an old Elf, of jealous and malignant character, whose intrusion cannot be prevented, and whose power, unhappily, is so great, that the whole tribe of amicable spirits cannot unbind her spells. Neither can she directly revoke their beneficences; for such is the constitution of fairy-land that the good and evil can neither annihilate each other’s powers nor check each other’s actions, and their active antagonism can have place and play only in issues and effects. The good commanded and dispensed cannot be utterly annulled, the profusion of blessings prepared and pledged cannot be hindered in their source or interrupted in their flow, but the recipients are the debatable ground; they are, within certain limits, subject to the control of the demon, and the end is as well attained by striking them incapable of the intended good. The queen and her household are cast into a magic slumber until (for the Evil will be ultimately destroyed by the Good) an age shall elapse and bring a Deliverer, who, through virtue and courage, shall dissolve the infernal charm. The blight fell upon the paradise in its full bloom, and it remained only for the youngest fairy present, who had withheld her benefactions to the last, to mitigate the doom she could not avert, by bestowing pleasant dreams upon the long and heavy sleepers. A century rolls round. The Knight of the Lion undertakes the enterprise; encounters the horrible troops of monsters and foul fiends which guard the palace; overcomes them; enters the enchanted hall, and wakens the whole company to life, liberty and joy again. The knight is, of course, rewarded with the love he so well deserves and the hand he has so richly earned.

This is obviously the story of the apostacy and redemption of the human family, in the form of a fairy legend. It conforms closely to the necessary incidents of such a catastrophe, and answers well and truly to the intuitive prophecy of man’s final recovery. In substance and method the correspondence is obvious. Every notion of “the fall,” whether revealed or fictitious, assumes the agency of “the wicked one;” and the final recovery, universally expected, involves the sympathies and employs the services of the “ministering spirits,” as important instruments in the happy consummation.

This tale was presented as a dramatic spectacle last winter at the Boston Museum. The play is a minutely faithful expositor of the legend; and it is by the aid of this fine scenic exhibition that I am able to adjust the details, of which the primitive story is so legitimately capable, to the answering points in the great epic of human history “as it is most surely believed among us.” The parallel presented does not seem to me fanciful, but the circumstantial exactness of resemblance may, I think, be accounted for without supposing a designed imitation.

Before tracing the specialties and their allusions, let us notice the general parallelism found between the pivotal points of the fabulous and authentic representations.

The Bible Eden is introduced at the same stage of the story’s action and in the same attitude to the principal characters of the narrative; it stands on the coronation day of its monarch, perfect in all its appointments; the realms of air, earth and ocean in auspicious relation, every element harmoniously obedient, and the garden still glows with the smile which accompanied the approving declaration, “it is very good.” Dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the face of the earth, is conferred, and the heavens add their felicities to the inaugural rejoicings—“the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” The gifts are without measure or stint, and the Divine beneficence cannot be tainted in its source nor impeded in its efflux, but the intended recipients, by “the wiles of the enemy,” are rendered incapable of the enjoyment. The sin-blunted sense and passion blinded soul of the fallen race, are plunged into a spiritual stupor, which sleep—the sister and semblance of death—strikingly illustrates; and through the long age of moral incapacity which follows, the highest mode of life is but dimly recognized and feebly felt in the dreams of a paradise lost and the visions of a millenium to come; till, “in the fullness of time,” when a complete psychical age shall be past. The Deliverer, having first overcome the wicked one, shall lead captivity captive, and by the “marriage of the Lamb” with “the bride which is the Church,” perfect the redemption and bring in the new heavens and new earth.

But to the fable, the dramatic representation and the interpretation thereof.

The scene opens upon a rustic society, a hamlet, in the infancy of civilization, such as, upon ballad authority, was “merrie England” before the age of her conquests in arts, sciences and arms, and before the crimes and cares of her age of glory replaced the days of her innocence and contentment. Simplicity of manners, modest abundance, moderate labor, aspirations limited to the range of things easy of attainment, and opinions comfortably at rest on questions of policy and religion, describe the rural life upon Monsieur Bonvive’s domain. The master, in bachelor ease, superintends the simple affairs of his village; Madam Babillard, the house-keeper, has the necessary excitement without the anxiety of her post—just the amount of trouble that is interesting with the pigs, poultry and pets of the homestead. The girls, indeed, are too hasty in ripening into womanhood, and the beaux are over-bold in their gallantries; but then, these are things of great consequence to her, and she is, through them, a matter of great consequence to the community, and the exercise of authority amply repays all its troubles and responsibilities. The affairs of the commonwealth take good enough care of themselves generally; the people are happy in the enjoyment of what they have, and equally happy in the unconsciousness of what they have not; the holydays come at least once a-week, and there is space and place for work and play every hour of every day. Good consciences, light hearts, and natural living, carry them along very happily, and they have enough of the little risks and changes of fortune to keep the life within them well alive. The wilderness upon which their village borders is known to be infested with hobgoblins and demons, and there is a current belief that in the centre of the forest there is a princely family bound in a spell for a hundred years, but they have never penetrated the mystery nor clearly ascertained the facts.

Among these simple people there is an ancient dame, who was old when the oldest villager first knew her, and she has lived through all the known generations of men. Her whole life has been a continual exercise of the best offices among the people; she has been nurse and doctress, friend and counselor, by turns, to the whole community, and they repay her with the love and veneration which her goodness and wisdom command. She is now apparently in the decrepitude of extreme age, but the frame only assumes the marks of age—the mind is as young and the affections as fresh as they were “a hundred years ago.” She is the “Fairy of the Oak,”—the youngest at the coronation scene, and the tutelary spirit of the enchanted family. Ever since the hour of their evil fortunes she has inhabited a human form, performing the charitable offices of ordinary life and mitigating its incident evils; but, especially she has been cultivating whatever of virtuous enterprise and aspiration appeared among the youth from generation to generation, directing it into the best service and endeavoring by it the deliverance of the imprisoned spirits under her charge. Patiently and lovingly she has striven, earnestly and anxiously she has watched, every promise of a deliverance that the race from age to age produced. Patriarch, prophet, apostle and philanthropist, has each in his degree done his own good work, and the world has been the better that they lived; each has added another assurance of the ultimate success, but themselves “have died without the sight.” Her own powers, and those of her auxiliaries, are vast and supernatural, indeed, but the champion age of human redemption must be human, and she can but inspire, direct, sustain and guard the mighty effort.

Now, a young Christian Knight “the Knight of the Lion,” famous for deeds of valor in Holy Land, gives promise of the great achievement to the quick perception of the Guardian Spirit. She has aroused his enthusiasm and sustained his zeal, disciplining him by trial after trial, and training him from triumph to triumph, for still greater deeds, which take continually more definite shape and more attractive forms in the dreams and reveries which she inspires, until he has grown familiar with the vision and conscious of its supernatural suggestion, and she is able at last to intimate the duty and the trial which invite him by songs in the air addressed to his waking ear.

Drawn westward by her art toward the scene of the great enterprise, he reaches the village on the border of the wilderness, and from the legend current among the rustics inferring more definitely the character of his mission, he accepts it in the true chivalric spirit of faith, love and hope. His squire, or man-at-arms, who has followed him heretofore with an unquestioning fidelity, consents to incur the risks, though he has a very imperfect apprehension of the heroic undertaking; but the devotion of a faithful follower answers instead of knowledge in his rank of service. He would rather encounter a dozen flesh and blood swordsmen than one ghostly foe; nevertheless, where his master leads he will follow, whatever the character of the fight. The knight comprehends the nature of the conflict fully; it is not with flesh and blood, but with “spiritual wickedness in high places” that he “has his warfare.” To him the great battle is not in the outward and actual, but is transferred to the inward and spiritual sphere—into the real life—whence the ultimate facts of existence derive all their currents and ends. So felt the hero who said, in the great faith, “we have our conversation in heaven”—“we sit in heavenly places;” and so felt and thought the reformer who deliberately threw his ink-stand at the devils’ head. The region of the ideal is the fields of the highest heroism, and every life given to the world in noble service and generous sacrifice is living in the spirit sphere in familiar sympathy with the good, and constant strife with evil angels. This faith is the main impulse in all chivalric action; even a heroic poem cannot be created without it. It cannot be false, for it differs nothing in the constancy and efficiency of its presence from the most palpable facts, and is proved true by the test of harmonizing with all other truth.

The knight personates the highest ideal of philanthropy; the squire stands for the lower, more palpable modes of practical benevolence and reform. They are distinguished as widely as general and special providence, as the thorough emancipation of the soul and the charity which relieves the body, or the whole difference between the apostleship of spiritual and that of civil liberty. They correspond respectively to the Prophet Elisha, who saw the mountain tops filled with horses and chariots of fire, outnumbering and overwhelming the hosts of the Syrian king; and his servant, who saw but two men, his master and himself, opposed to a numerous and well appointed army. Such is the difference between the seer and the servant in any labor or conflict of faith—in any enterprise which involves the spiritual forces that rule the movements of the world. Throughout the whole action of the drama the agency and deportment of the knight and his follower are marked by this distinction. But the scene shifts, and the sympathetic and corroborative movements in Fairy-land, are revealed. The Fairy of the Oak appears and summons the spirits of the Air, Earth, Water and Fire. The elements, disordered by the fall, and thenceforth at war with the poor fugitive from Paradise, must render their aid in his restoration, that when the last enemy is put under his feet the material creation, cursed for his sin, may be renewed with his recovery, and the harmonies of matter answer to the sanctities of spirit. The spirits of the material forces obey the invocation, and cordially promise sympathy and service:

The actors, human and ethereal, thus adjusted to their several offices, the knight and his squire enter the haunted wood—the squire to struggle with the grosser forms of evil, some as ludicrous as sad, others as horrible as atrocious, and all odious, coarse and palpable; the knight to be tempted of the devil, and do battle with him for the redemption of the enchanted family from his dominion.

On the open front of the stage, darkened with smoke and foul with offensive odors of noxious gases, the squire is hotly engaged with the great dragon, in close rencontre, and at the same time assailed above, around, in flank and rear, by harpies, fiery serpents, and other forms of terror—the battle of life translated into coarse diablerie. The sentiment and significance of the play in this take great liberties with the regular charities and practical reforms of our social system. The sorts of evil which these monsters so uncouthly represent are such as physical suffering, drunkenness, violence, fraud, and the thousand shapes of slavery, personal and political, and of all castes and colors. They are represented as greedy and ugly, and full of mocking and malignity, but with little intrinsic capability of mischief, for they are really unattractive in temptation and extremely awkward in battle, and much more remarkable for thick-skinned insensibility to assault than for any adroitness in the combat. The squire bravely deals his blows upon the great dragon. Horror, fear and hatred of the monster, earnest devotion to the “great cause,” with the courage of full commitment, and, perhaps, some regard for his reputation as a hard-hitter, put life and metal in his veins, and right lustily he mauls away. The earliest effects of his prowess are remarkable. The dragon, defending his own ground as confidently and angrily as if the empire of evil were really a rightful one wherever sanctioned by antiquity of possession, dashes his ponderous jaws at the reckless agitator, opened wide enough to swallow him, with all his weapons and armor at a gulp; but he manages to elude the clumsy wrath, and, nothing daunted and nothing doubting, deals his blows with energy in the ratio of the rage they rouse. Curiously, but conformably enough, at every stroke another ring of the monster’s tail unrolls. At first he was an unwieldy, but not an utterly misshapen brute; now he has become a serpent and a scarecrow; the head and tail are as incongruous as the pretended righteousness of his cause and his villainous method of defending it. The strife goes on, and grows only the worse and wickeder for its continuance, till it is plain that the beast is not to be mastered with hard blows, and if he yields it is because his huge, unwieldy bulk is exhausted with the protracted effort of defense, and he subsides at last rather than submits. So ends the battle, and then comes the triumph. The valorous victor, claiming all the honors he has won, mounts his sometime foe in the new character of hobby, and rides him grandly off the stage in a blaze of gaseous glory, cheered most vociferously by the boys and affording not a little merriment, mixed with admiration, to the old folks. What a figure that procession made! and how exact a figure, too, of many another that the world witnesses admiringly. The squire is, however, none the less a hero that his principles are rugged, his method rude, his ideas a little vulgar, and his aims tinged but not tainted with his egotism. The dragons, serpents and hobgoblins must be routed, and he is the man for the emergency.

All the while this palpable warfare is proceeding in open view, the knight is engaged with the subtler fiends in the dim and doubtful darkness of the background. Quite behind the scenes the severest strife is maintained, but enough is seen and intimated upon the stage to reveal the real character of the conflict. The fidelity of illustration in the conduct of the allegory here was really admirable. At one time we descried him through the gloom by the flashing of his sword, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a host of fiends, rushing upon the foe with true chivalric enthusiasm; at another, hard pressed and well-nigh exhausted, sternly enduring the blows he could not parry or repay—exhibiting, in turn, every mood of courage to do and fortitude to endure the varied fortunes of the field. But anon, with equal truthfulness of portraiture, he is discovered trembling in sudden and strange panics, which show the temporary failure of his faith, and seem to threaten his utter desertion of the field. In the open presence of the foe his courage never fails, but the stratagem of darkness and desertion successfully evades the sword-thrust and the shield’s defense, and gives him up to doubt and desperation. The powers of darkness take hold upon him, and in his agonies of fear and suffering he would, if it were possible, that the cup might pass from him. In these moments of anguish and depression the Fairy of the Oak instantly appeared to strengthen him. With a touch and a word she reassures him, and the divine virtue again shines out, exposing visibly the demon of the doubt, and the good sword again flashes in the gloom, and the fiends, forced into open fight, are finally overthrown.

Bulwer strikes the same profound fact of experience in heroic enterprise, in his “Terror of the Threshold.” The reformer, however, confident in virtue and assured of the goodness of his undertaking, naturally trembles at critical stages of revolution in opinions and institutions long established and interwoven with the existing order of society, for the risk of introducing new truths may well check the current of a wise man’s zeal. If I pull down, he will say, this temple whose ceremonial, though barbarous and blinding, yet supports the morals of the worshiper and the present order of the social system, will the liberty and light bestowed avail for the designed improvement, or will they only unsettle the securities of law and prove occasions of disorder and licentiousness? The brave bigot and fiery enthusiast know nothing of this indecision. The cautious hesitation which springs from solicitude for the best ends and most expedient means, never troubles their stubborn bluntness of purpose nor abates their boasted consistency of action. But the regular procedure of Providence is marked by regard for the influence of conditions and the established law of progress. In these things the highest benevolence meets impediments and suffers modifications and even submits to postponement to avoid defeat; and the agents and instruments of the world’s regeneration have their Gethsemanes as well as their triumphs and transfigurations.

Nothing in language, scenery or costume irreverently asserted the allusions which I am exposing. I do not know that either playwright, performer or spectator was concerned about or even conscious of the significant symbolism of the fable and its circumstantial exposition in the play. It was produced as a beautiful dramatic spectacle. Apart from any mystical meanings, it was a perfect luxury of scenic entertainment. It was so regarded by the visiters, and probably was designed for nothing more; but to me the analogy was a surprise and a delight, growing at every step of the development. It struck me first when I saw the knight and his brave squire standing on the threshold of the enchanted hall, after their victory in the wilderness. With equal zeal, truthfulness and devotion they had battled with the formidable foe, but with very different aims and apprehensions. The difference was most manifest when they stood in the presence of the enchanted family. The knight, breathless with awe and melting with compassion, showed how tenderly and reverently he felt the moral and mental bondage which struck his opened vision; but the squire, though so faithful and loyal as a follower, and efficient as a servant, had yet not the penetration of a seer; and the preposterous spectacle of princes, counselors, knights, esquires, priests, soldiers, pages, artisans, musicians, dancers, slaves, retainers—every class and calling among men—all arrested in mid-action, and slumbering for a century amid the luxury and pageantry of a gorgeous festival, with the viands untasted and the cup undrained before them, struck him with a comic wonder and pleasant sportiveness which he cared not to suppress. Approaching the venerable prime minister of the realm, who sat with the goblet near his lip, immovable as death, the thirsty soldier familiarly proposed to drink his health, and only made mouths at the cup when he found it “as dry as dust.” The cheek of the dancing girl, who stood pivoted for her century upon one toe, he found “as cold as a stone;” and the apples offered by an African slave to a guest, whose hand hung arrested midway in the reach, proved to his disappointed taste a petrified humbug. The whole scene of deprivation and incapacity before him he pronounced an epidemic sleeping fever, and he wondered if it was catching, and where and how he should get his dinner!

All this has its parallel and exposition in the boys that mock a drunkard reeling through the street, and the contrasted sadness which a soul alive to the moral ruin feels at the same sight; or it may be witnessed again in the conduct of an insensible boor and that of a person of refinement in the presence of the insane; and in general, in the sentiments of those who have, and those who have not, learned that “the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment.”

These reflections present themselves in the pause while the champion stands, riveted with emotions of wonder and pity at the mingled gloom and glory of the scene.

But the action proceeds again. A strain of melody spontaneously waking from the silence of an age, fitly preludes and prophesies the harmonies of the new era, and there wants only the taliha-cumi of the Deliverer to awaken the princess and her household into the activities of full life. At the bidding of the minstrel he advances to her pavilion. Answering to his word and touch, she rises. One by one the women first resume their proper consciousness, and the revival of the men follows in proper order, till the spell is broken and the last shadow of the long night gives place to the perfect day. The renovated realm every where receives its primal beauty, the flowers of Eden bloom again, and the fruits regain their flavor, the wine is new in the new kingdom, and all the material ministries of life without, respond to the renewed faculties within.

The fable has not yet exhausted the facts. Obeying the poetical necessities of the epic story, and conforming also to the apocalyptic vision of the world’s fortunes, which are to follow the first victory over the dragon and the binding of the adversary for a thousand years, we have the peace and happiness of the disenchanted household once more disturbed. The prince of the powers of darkness, that great magician who is the author of all the mischief from the beginning, is “loosed out of his prison,” and gathering all his forces for a final battle, he surrounds the castle. The queen’s army, led by the knight, go out to meet the grand enemy in battle, and he is utterly overthrown and his power broken for ever. The conquerors return in triumph to the castle, and in the midst of their rejoicings a herald from the outer wall, who has witnessed the scene, announces the total annihilation of the enemy. The elements, marshaled by their ruling spirits, have overwhelmed him; a tempest of hail and fire bursts upon his castle, and the earth opening has swallowed up the last vestige of his kingdom and power.

The battle of Gog and Magog (20th Rev.) in which the deceived of the four quarters of the earth are gathered together, and compass the camp of the saints about, is the very prototype of this incident in our story, and “the fire which came down from heaven,” and the “casting of the devil which deceived them into the lake of fire and brimstone,” is only a different expression of the same final deliverance of the human family from the last enemy.

The marriage rites close and crown the grand achievement, and a magnificent tableau illustrates the consummation. The spirits of the elements arise, and array themselves in a vertical arch upon the stage. The centre and summit is occupied by a new figure, now first introduced, costumed appropriately in pure white, representing Truth in augurated or universal harmony; the Spirit of Earth at the base on one side, and of Water at the other, while impersonations of Air and Fire occupy the intermediate positions. This bow of beauty and promise, emblematically dressed and decorated, stood a happy symbol of the restored order of the material creation. The household, artistically arranged and displayed, represented the divine order of society, where government and liberty, refinement and efficiency, luxury and industry, are reconciled, and man with his fellow man is organized in the harmonies of the creative scheme. And, that the joy may be full to the utmost limits of communion and sympathy, the Fairy of the Oak is seen ascending, to take possession, in behalf of her race, of their recovered heaven—the guerdon of their services to the redeemed family of Adam. So, the last scene in the drama mingles the new Heavens with the new Earth, and all the worlds in our universe triumph together in the general resurrection, as they rejoiced on the birth-day of the creation.

I do not know the history of the fairy tale, its age or origin. I know nothing of the design with which it was prepared for theatrical representation, nor do I see why it should be inferred, because the idea and method are so strikingly significant, that the manager, after the fashion of the ancient “Mysteries,” intended to restore sacred subjects to the stage in allegorical disguise. I suppose that the fable is simply fancy’s method of the great fact, and that its doctrinals are the natural intuitives and inevitable theory of the human mind concerning the mystery of life, the great epochal experiences of the human family, their final fortunes, and the interests and sympathies of other worlds included; for such conceptions as these are general and common among all men. The question of special revelation is not affected by its concurrence with universally received ideas. The correspondence pervading all systems proves the truth and unity of origin of the essential points in all, but in no wise touches the method of their revealment, discovery or propagation.

The points and particulars of the play are none of them manufactured to supply the running parallel we have given, nor are they nearly exhausted. Moreover, it will readily occur that the plan of the play illustrates the whole philosophy of world-mending by its merely human hero. The actual and eventual progress of civilization, religion and liberty can be laid down upon its scheme in the exactest detail of principles, which facts must follow and fulfill. The supernatural agencies introduced also answer this aspect and rendering of the myth. They well represent the material and immaterial forces concerned in all societary movements, and if they may not serve for the religion of the great process, they may do duty as philosophical abstractions, or as a beautiful system of poetical symbolism—for in the mystical correspondence of all these systems of ideas there is such fundamental unity of use.

W.

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BY BAYARD TAYLOR.

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BY H. HASTINGS WELD.

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