III.

Tom and the carryall at length appeared, and Professor Owlsdarck, in a new suit of black clothes, in which the lately folded creases were very perceptible, came forth a sort of musty bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiced as a strong statistician to run his appointed race. Kate and I thought it best to diminish the final bustle of departure by lingering on the piazza just before the open door, where we could easily add our parting good-wishes, when he succeeded in getting out of the house. For there seemed to be some trouble in putting the Professor, with as little "tumbling" as possible, into his narrow overcoat, and then in finding his lecture, which had dropped under the table during the operation, and then in recovering his spectacles from the depths of some obscure pocket. Although Colonel Prowley had wellnigh exhausted the language of jubilant enthusiasm, I managed, while helping Professor Owlsdarck into the carryall, to express a respectful interest in his success. Yet, while the words were on my lips, I could not but remember what Strype had said in the morning, and admit the great likelihood of its truth. And although beginning to feel pretty nervous as the time drew near for my own sacrifice, I congratulated myself upon a preparation in accordance with the modern demands of a lyceum audience. With a pleasant sense of superior sagacity to this far more learned candidate for popular favor, I proposed, instead of returning to the house, to take an hour's stroll by the river, and go thence to the Town Hall at the appointed time.

"The very thing I was going to suggest," said Kate, "for I don't feel like talking. My mind is so full of excitement about your poem that ordinary conversational proprieties are almost impossible."

Our host, with true courtesy, permitted us to do as we pleased, merely saying that he would reserve the seat next him for my wife, so that we need not arrive till it was time to commence the performance.

"But you are going to forget your manuscript!" he pleasantly added. "See, it lies on the entry-table with your gloves and overcoat."

Of course there was no danger of doing anything of the sort, for a memorandum to take good care of _that_ had printed itself in the largest capitals upon the tablets of memory. I did feel disagreeably, however, when my old friend, in handing it to me, looked wistfully at the neat case of polished leather in which it was securely tied. It was, indeed, painful to disappoint both in subject and style of composition the kind interest with which he waited my appearance before an audience of his townsmen. The only antidote to such regrets was the reflection that I had prepared what would be most likely to cause the ultimate satisfaction of all parties; for his mortification at my general unpopularity and consequent defeat would of course have been greater than any personal satisfaction he might have experienced in the dry and antique matter accordant with his peculiar taste. I essayed some cheerful remark, as the shining packet slipped into my breast-pocket, and I buttoned my coat securely across the chest, that I might be continually conscious that the important contents had not dropped out.

"Remember, I shall be on the second settee from the platform; for I would not willingly lose the slightest word," was the farewell exclamation of Colonel Prowley.

"You are too good, Sir," I answered, as we turned from the house; "I may always count upon your kind indulgence, and perhaps more of it will be claimed this evening than your partiality leads you to suspect."

"And now," said I to Kate, when we were fairly out of hearing, "let us dismiss for the last hour this provoking poem, and forget that there are lyceum-lectures, Indian doctors, and General Courts in this beautiful world."

Of course I never suspected that we could do anything of the kind, but I thought an innocent hypocrisy to that effect might beguile the time yet before us. Kate acquiesced; and we walked along a wooded path where every stone and shrub was rich in associations with that first summer in Foxden when our acquaintance began. And soon our petty anxiety was merged in deeper feelings that flowed upon us, as the great event in our mortal existence was seen in the retrospect from the same pleasant places where it once loomed grandly before us. The sweet, fantastic anticipations that pronounced the "All Hail, Hereafter," to the great romance of life again started from familiar objects to breathe a freer atmosphere. The coming fact, which all natural things once called upon us to accept as the final resting-place of the soul, had passed by us, and we could look onward still. We saw that marriage was not the satisfaction of life, but a noble means whereby our selfish infirmities might be purified by divine light. Well for us that this Masque and Triumph of Nature should not always be seen as from the twentieth year! It is too cheap a way to idealize and ennoble self in the noontide sun of one marriage-day. Yet let the gauze and tinsel be removed when they may; for all earnest souls there are realities behind them that shall make the heavens and earth seem accidents. It once seems as if marriage would discolor the world with roseate tint; but it does better: it enlightens it. Thus, in imagination, did we sally backward and forward as the twilight thickened about us. In delicious sympathy of silence we watched quivering shadows in the water, and marked how the patient elms gathered in their strength to endure the storms of winter.

"It is not a lottery," I said, at last, unconsciously thinking aloud.

"No," responded Kate; "it was so christened of old, because our shrewd New-Englanders had not made possible a better simile. It is like one of the great Gift Enterprises of these latter years, where everybody is sure of his money's worth in book or trinket, and is surprised by a present into the bargain. The majority, to be sure, get but their bit of soap or their penny-whistle, while a fortunate few are provided with gold watches and diamond breast-pins."

I thought this a good comparison; but I did not say so, for I was in the mood to rise for my analogy or allegory, instead of swooping to pick it out of Mr. Perham's advertisements.

"Nay, nay, my dear," I rejoined, at length; "let us, who have won genuine jewelry, exalt our gains by some nobler image. A stagnant puddle of water may reflect the blessed sun even better than this river that eddies by our feet, yet it is not there that one likes to look for it."

"Perhaps it is the farthest bound of reaction from transcendentalism, that causes us, when we do think a free thought, to look about for something grimly practical to fasten it upon," argued Kate, smilingly. "Yet I do not quite agree with the reason of my Aunt Patience for devoting herself to the roughest part of gardening. A taste for flowers, she contends, is legitimate only when it has perfected itself out of a taste for earth-worms. There are truly thoughts only to be symbolized by sunset colors and the song of birds, that are better than if mortared with logic and based as firmly as the Pyramids."

The fatal word "Pyramids" sent us flying through the ages till we reached the tombs of the Pharaohs, whence we came bounding back again through Grecian civilization, mediæval darkness, and modern enlightenment, till we naturally stopped at Professor Owlsdarck and the carryall, by this time nearing Wrexford. My own literary performance, so associated with that of the Professor, next occupied our attention, and we realized the fact that it was time to be moving slowly in the direction of the Town Hall.

"Don't let us get there till just the hour for commencing," said I, endeavoring to restrain the quickened step of my companion.

And I quoted the ghastly merriment of the gentleman going to be hung, to the effect that there was sure to be no fun till he arrived.

We said nothing else, but indulged in a very definite sort of wandering by the river's bank,--I nervously looking at my watch, occasionally devouring a troche, and patting my manuscript pocket, or, to make assurance doubly sure, touching the polished surface of the case within.

We timed it to a minute. At exactly half-past seven o'clock, I proceeded up the broad aisle of the Town Hall, put my wife into the place reserved with the Prowley party upon settee number two from the platform, and mounted the steps of that awful elevation amid general applause.

The President of the Young Men's Gelasmiphilous Society, who occupied a chair at the right of the desk, came forward to receive me, and we shook hands with an affectation of the most perfect ease and naturalness. Here, a noisy satisfaction, as of boys in the gallery, accompanied by a much fainter enthusiasm among their elders below.

"You are just in time," whispered the President. "I was afraid you would be too late; we always like to begin punctually."

"I am all ready," said I, faintly; "you may announce me immediately."

I subsided into the orator's chair, and glanced, for the first time, at my audience. The Young Men, somehow or other, did not appear so numerous as I had hoped. On the other hand, Dr. Dastick, and a good many friends of eminently scientific character, loomed up with fearful distinctness. Even the malleable element of youth seemed to harden by the side of that implacable fibre of scholastic maturity which was bound to resist my most delicate manipulation. I withstood, with some effort, the stage-fright that was trying to creep over me, and hastily snatched the manuscript from my pocket. Yes, I must have been confused, indeed; for here is the string round the case tied in a hard knot, and I could have taken my oath that I fastened it in a very loose bow! I picked at it, and pulled at it, and humored it in every possible way, but the plaguy thing was as fast as ever. At last--just as the President was approaching the conclusion of his remarks, and had got as far as, "_I shall now have the pleasure of introducing a gentleman who_," etc., etc.--I bethought myself of a relief quite as near at hand as that key which Faithful held in his bosom during his confinement in Doubting Castle. My penknife was drawn to the rescue, and the string severed, while the President, retiring to his chair, politely waved me to the place he had occupied. Again great applause from the gallery, with tempered applause from below. With as much unconcern as I could conveniently assume, I advanced to the front, took a final survey of the audience, laid my manuscript on the desk, turned back the cover, and fixed my eyes upon the page before me.

How describe the nightmare horror that then broke upon my senses? Upon the first page, in large, writing-master's hand, I had inscribed my title:--"THE WHIMS OF NEW ENGLAND: A POEM." In its place, in still larger hand, in lank and grisly characters, stared this hideous substitute:--

"THE OBSEQUIES OF CHEOPS: A LECTURE."

With that vivid rapidity with which varied and minute scenery is crowded into a moment of despair, I perceived the fatal blunder. Owlsdarck and I had changed manuscripts. Upon that entry-table where lay my poem, the hurry and bustle of departure had for a moment thrown his lecture. The cases being identical in appearance, he had taken up my unfortunate production, which, doubtless, at that very moment, he was opening before parents, trustees, and pupils connected with the Wrexford Academy. I will not deny, that, in the midst of my own perplexity, a ghastly sense of the ridiculous came over me, as I thought of the bewilderment of the Professor. For an instant of time I actually knew a grim enjoyment in the fact that circumstances had perpetrated a much better joke than any in my poem. But my heart stopped beating as an impatient rumble of applause testified that the desires of the audience were awaiting gratification.

I glared upon the expectant faces before me; but they seemed to melt and fuse into one another, or to dance about quite independently of the bodies with which they should have been connected. I strove to murmur an apology; but the words stuck in my throat.

More applause, in which a slight whistling flavor was apparent. A kicking, as of cow-hide boots of juvenile proportions, audible from the gallery. A suspicion of cat-calling in a monad state of development about the door. Of course my prospects were ruined. My knees seemed disposed to deposit their burden upon the floor. Hope was utterly extinguished in my breast. There I stood, weak and contemptible, before the wretched populace whose votes I had come to solicit. Then it was, the resolution, or rather the _rage_, of despair inspired me. I determined to take a terrible vengeance upon my abandoned constituents. Quick as lightning the thought leaped to execution. I seized the insufferable composition before me, and began to fulminate its sentences at the democracy of Foxden.

"Fulminate" is expressive; but words like "roar" and "bellow" must be borrowed to give the reader an idea of the vocal power put into that performance. For it is a habit of our infirm natures to counteract embarrassment by some physical exaggeration, which, by absorbing our chief attention, leaves little to be occupied with the cause of distress. Persons of extreme diffidence are sometimes able to face society by behaving as if they were vulgarly at their ease, and men troubled with a morbid modesty often find relief in acting a character of overweening pride. Thus it was only by absorbing attention in the effort to produce a very sensational order of declamation that I could perform the task undertaken. Owlsdarck's handwriting was luckily large and legible; and I was able to storm and gesticulate without hinderance.

I ploughed through the tough old homily, tossing up the biggest size of words as if they were not worth thinking of. I went at the lamented Cheops with a fearful enthusiasm. The air seemed heavy with a miasma of information. It was not my fault, if every individual in the audience did not feel personally sticky with the glutinous drugs I lavished upon the embalmment. I was as profuse with my myrrh, cassia, and aloes, as if those costly vegetable productions were as cheap as cabbages. I split up a sycamore-tree to make an external shell, as if it were as familiar a wood as birch or hemlock. At last, having got his case painted all over with appropriate emblems, and Cheops himself done up in his final wrapping, I struck a mighty blow upon the desk, which set the lamps ringing and flaring in majestic emphasis.

It was at this point that the presence of an audience was once more recalled to me. Enthusiastic applause, peal after peal, responded to my efforts. I ventured to look out into the hall before me. Dr. Dastick was thumping with energy upon the neighboring settee. The elders of Foxden were leading the approbation, and a wild tattoo was resonant from the gallery. The face of Colonel Prowley was aglow with satisfaction, and the dear old gentleman actually waved his handkerchief as he caught my eye. But my frightened, pale-faced Kate,--my first shudder returned again as I met her gaze. Again I felt the sinking, prickling sensation of being in for it. There was no resource but to charge at the Professor's manuscript as vigorously as ever.

I now went to pyramid-making with the same zeal with which I had acted as undertaker. Locks, parsley, and garlic, to the amount of one thousand and sixty talents, were lavished upon the workmen. Stuffed cats and sacred crocodiles were carried in procession to encourage them. Stones, thirty feet long, were heaved out of quarries, and hieroglyphics chopped into them with wonderful despatch. At last, after an hour and a half of laborious vociferation, I managed to get the pyramid done and Cheops put into it. A sort of dress-parade of authorities was finally called: Herodotus, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, Solinus, and many others, were fired in concluding volleys among the audience. I was conscious of a salvo of clapping, pounding, and stamping that thundered in reply. The last sentence had been uttered. Again the audience blurred and danced before my eyes; I staggered back, and sank confused and breathless into the orator's chair.

"Good, good," whispered the President. "It was a capital idea; ha, ha, very funny! To hear you hammering away at Egyptian antiquities as if you'd never thought of anything else! The elocution and gestures, too, were perfectly tall;--the Young Men of our Society were delighted;--I could see they were."

"Permit me to congratulate you, Sir," said Dr. Dastick, who had elbowed his way to the platform. "I confess myself most agreeably disappointed in your performance. There was in it a solidity of information and a curiosity of important research for which I was totally unprepared. Let me hope that such powers of oratory as we have heard this evening may soon plead the cause of good learning in the legislature of our State."

"A good subject, my dear young friend, and admirably developed," exclaimed Colonel Prowley. "You have already won the palm of victory, if I rightly read the faces of some who were too quick to endow you with the common levity and indiscretion of youth."

"You have had success with young and old," said the Reverend Mr. Clifton, kindly holding out his hand. "We have rarely lecturers who seem to give such universal satisfaction."

After these congratulations, and others to the same purpose, the real state of the case could no longer be hidden. Instead of the mortification and defeat confidently expected, I had unwittingly made a ten-strike upon that erratic set of pins, the Foxden public. The Young Men, who knew me only as the [Greek: gelôtopoios], or laughter-maker, of their merry association, considered the sombre getting up and energetic delivery of the Cheops lecture the very best joke I had ever perpetrated. Some of the most influential citizens, as has been already seen, were personally gratified in the general dustiness of the subject; while others, perchance, were able to doze in the consciousness that the opinions of Cheops upon such disturbing topics as Temperance, Anti-Slavery, and Woman's Rights must necessarily be of a patriarchal and comforting character. But the glory of the unlooked-for triumph seemed strangely lessened by the reflection that I had no just claim to the funereal plumage with which I had so happily decked myself.

"Gentlemen," said I, "I ought to tell you that the address I have delivered this evening is--in fact--is not original."

"That's just why we like it," rejoined Dr. Dastick. "No young man should be original; it is a great impertinence, if he tries to be."

"I do not mean simply to acknowledge an indebtedness to the ancient authorities quoted in the lecture; but--but, the truth is, that the arrangement and composition cannot properly be called my own."

"Not the least consequence," said Colonel Prowler. "You showed a commendable modesty in seeking the aid of any discreet and learned person. You know I offered to give you what assistance was in my power; but you found--unexpectedly, at the last moment, perhaps--some wiser friend."

"Most unexpectedly,--at the very last moment," I murmured.

"As for originality," said the clergyman, pleasantly, "when you have come to my age, you will cease to trouble yourself much about it. No man can accomplish anything important without a large indebtedness to those who have lived, as well as to those who live. We know that the old fathers not only dared to lack originality, but even to consider times and peoples in their selection and treatment of topics. _Non quod sentiunt, sed quod necesse est dicunt_, may be said of them in no disparagement. For, not to mention others, I might quote Cyprian, Minutius, Lactantius, and Hilarius,"----

"Anything hilarious is as much out of place in a lecture as it would be in a sermon," interrupted Dr. Dastick, who had evidently missed the drift of his pastor's remarks. "And I rejoice that the success of our friend who has spoken this evening rebukes those vain and shallow witlings who have sometimes degraded the lyceum. I could send such fellows to make sport in the courts of luxurious princes, for they may well follow after jousts, tourneys, stage-plays, and like sugar-plums of Satan; as, indeed, we need them not in this Puritan commonwealth. But come, all of you, for an hour, to my house; for I am mistaken, if there be not in my cabinet many rare illustrations of the discourse we have just heard. I have several bones by me, which, if they belonged not to Cheops himself, may well be relics of his near relations. And as an offset to their dry and wasted estate, I have some luscious pears which are just now at full maturity."

Colonel Prowley and his party had small inclination to resist the Doctor's invitation, and it was speedily agreed that the lecturer (having, as we have seen, escaped consignment to European monarchs) should have the privilege of mingling in the social life of Foxden for the next hour or so.

"But you forget Professor Owlsdarck," I ventured to whisper to the Colonel. "I must see him the instant he returns. That is--I am very impatient to hear of his success. I cannot let him arrive at your house, if I am not there to meet him."

My host stared a little at this impetuosity of interest, and then informed me that the carryall from Wrexford must necessarily pass Dastick's house, and that he himself would run out and stop it and bring in the Professor.

"No," I exclaimed, with energy; "promise that I may go out and receive Owlsdarck alone, or I cannot go to Dr. Dastick's."

"I doubt if there would be any precedent for this," argued the Colonel, gravely.

"Then we must make one," I asserted. "For surely nothing is more appropriate than that a lecturer, returning from his exercise, whether in triumph or defeat, should be first encountered by some brother of the craft who can have adequate sympathy with his feelings."

After some demur, Colonel Prowley consented to adopt this view of the case; and we passed out of the hot lecture-room into the still, fresh night. Here Kate took my arm and we managed for an instant to lag behind the crowd.

"I am not mad yet," I said, "though when I began that extraordinary lecture you must have thought me so."

"For a few moments," replied my wife, "I was utterly bewildered; but soon, of course, I guessed the explanation. You appeared before the Foxden audience with Professor Owlsdarck's lecture."

"And he appeared with my poem before the audience in Wrexford."

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Kate, "I never thought of that part of it!"

"Yet that is _the_ part of it of which it behooves us to think just at present," I replied. "To my utter amazement, there has been something, either in the Professor's wisdom or in my rendering of it, that has _taken_ with the audience. Not knowing what Owlsdarck has done, or may wish to do, I have not explained the humiliating and ridiculous blunder,--though I have stoutly denied myself any credit for the information or composition of the lecture."

"But the Professor couldn't have read your poem at Wrexford?"

"Two hours ago I should have thought it so impossible, that only one thing in the world would have seemed to me more so, and that was that I should have read his lecture in Foxden. But, luckily, I have permission to stop the carryall on its way back, and so meet Owlsdarck before he comes into the house. Let us keep the secret for the present, and wait further developments."

As others of the party had begun to look back, and to linger for us to come up, there was no opportunity for further conference. And so we made an effort, and talked of everything but what we were thinking of, till we reached Dr. Dastick's house.

I was conscious of a sweet memory, while passing along the broad, low-roofed piazza where I first met my wife. And I marvelled that fate had so arranged matters, that, again in the moonlight, near that very spot, I was to have an important interview with another person with whom my destiny had become strangely entangled.

One sense was painfully acute while the relics and pears were being passed about during the remainder of the evening. At any period I could have heard the creak of the venerable carryall above the swarm of information which buzzed about the Doctor's parlor. I responded to the waggish raillery of the young men, talked _bones_ with their seniors, disclaimed all originality in my lecture, thanked people for what they said about my spirited declamation, and--through it all--listened intently for the solemn rumble upon the Wrexford road. Time really seemed to stop and go backward, as if in compliment to the ancient fragments of gums, wrappages, and scarabæi that were produced for our inspection. The carryall, I thought, must have broken down; Wrexford had, perchance, been suddenly destroyed, like the Cities of the Plain; the Professor had been tarred and feathered by the enraged inhabitants, or, perhaps, had been murdered upon the road;--there was no limit to the doleful hypotheses which suggested themselves.

And, in fact, it was now getting late to everybody. The last pear had vanished, and people began to look at the clock. Colonel Frowley was audibly wondering what could have detained the Professor, and Dr. Dastick was expressing his regret at not having the pleasure of seeing him, when,--no,--yes, a jerking trundle was heard in the distance,--it was not the wind this time! I seized my hat, rushed from the house, and paused not till I had stopped the carryall with the emphasis of a highwayman.

"I have come to ask you to get out, Professor Owlsdarck," I exclaimed. "Tom can drive the horse home; we're all at Dr. Dastick's, and they've sent me to beg you to come in."

The occupant of the vehicle, upon hearing my voice, made haste to alight. Tom gave an expressive "Hud up," and rolled away into the moonlight.

"My dear Sir," said I, "no apology,--no allusion to how it happened; we have both suffered quite enough. Only tell me what you managed to do with my poem, and what the people of Wrexford have done to you."

"What did I do with your poem?" echoed the Professor,--there was an undertone of humorous satisfaction in his words that I had never before remarked,--"why, what could I do with it but read it to my audience? They thought it was capital, and----Well, _I_ thought so, too. And if you want to know what the trustees did to me, you will find it in print in a day or two. The fact is, they called a meeting, after I finished, and unanimously elected me Principal of their Academy."

I managed to get a few more particulars before entering the house, and these, with other circumstances afterwards ascertained, made the Professor's adventure to unravel itself thus: Owlsdarck had discovered the change of manuscript about five minutes before he was expected to speak. The audience had assembled, and (in view of the respect which should appertain to the office for which he was an aspirant) he saw the humiliation of disappointing the academic flock by a confession of his absurd position. He glanced at the first page of my verses, and, seeing that they commenced in a grave and solemn strain, determined to run for luck, and make the best of them. Accordingly he began by saying, that, instead of the usual literary address, he should read a new American poem, which he trusted would prove popular and to the purpose. It turned out to be very much to the purpose. The dismal Professor Owlsdarck. giving utterance to the Yankee quips and waggery which I had provided, took his audience by storm with amazement and delight. For the truth was, as Strype had intimated in the morning, a formidable opposition had arrayed itself against the Professor, which (while acknowledging the claims of his profound learning) contended that he lacked sympathy with the merry hearts of youth, a fatal defect in the character of a teacher. Of course the entertainment of the evening filled all such cavillers with shame and confusion. There was nothing to do but to own their mistake, and to support the many-sided Owlsdarck with all enthusiasm. Hence his unanimous election, and hence my infinite relief upon reëntering the Doctor's house.

We determined to keep our own counsel, and thereupon ratified our unintentional exchange of productions. I presented my poem to Professor Owlsdarck, and he resigned in my favor all right, title, and interest in Cheops and his Obsequies. We both felt easier after this had been done, and walked arm-in-arm into Dr. Dastick's parlor, conscious of a plethoric satisfaction strange to experience.

I need hardly allude to the indignation of the Foxden electors, when the "Regulator" appeared the next morning with a bitter _critique_ of my performance in the Town Hall. There is notoriously a good deal of license allowed to opposition editors upon election-day. But to ridicule a serious and erudite lecture as "a flimsy and buffooning poem,"--there was, really, in this, a blindness of passion, a display of impotent malice, an utter contempt for the common sense of subscribers, to which the history of editorial vagaries seemed to furnish no parallel. Of course, a libel so gross and atrocious not only failed of its object, but drove off in disgust all decent remnants of the opposing party which the lecture of the previous evening had failed to conciliate.

And now I think it has been explained why I was chosen to represent Foxden, and how my vote came to be so nearly unanimous. Whether I made a good use of the lesson of that fifth of November it does not become me to say. But of the success of the Principal of the Wrexford Academy in the useful sphere of labor upon which he then entered I possess undoubted evidence.

"Old Owlsdarck's a pretty stiff man. in school," exclaimed a chubby little fellow in whom I have some interest, when he lately returned from Wrexford to pass the summer vacation,--"Old Owlsdarck's a pretty stiff man in school; but when he comes into the play-ground, you ought to hear him laugh and carry on with the boys!"

A few seasons ago the Professor consented to repeat his famous poem upon "The Whims of New England," and made the tour of the river-towns, and several hundred dollars. He wrote me that he had received tempting overtures for a Western excursion, which his numerous lyceum-engagements at home compelled him to decline.

I have since faced many audiences, and long conquered the maiden bashfulness of a first appearance. It is necessary to confess that my topics of discourse have generally been of too radical a character to maintain the unprecedented popularity of my first attempt. I don't mind mentioning, however, that the manuscript wherewith I delighted the people of Foxden is yet in my possession. And should there be among my readers members of the Inviting Committee of any neighboring Association, League, or Lyceum, they will please notice that I am open to offers for the repetition of a highly instructive _Lecture: Subject, The Obsequies of Cheops_.

MOUNTAINS AND THEIR ORIGIN.

A chapter on mountains will not be an inappropriate introduction to that part of the world's history on which we are now entering, when the great inequalities of the earth's surface began to make their appearance; and before giving any special account of the geological succession in Europe, I will say something of the formation of mountains in general, and of the men whose investigations first gave us the clue to the intricacies of their structure. It has been the work of the nineteenth century to decipher the history of the mountains, to smooth out these wrinkles in the crust of the earth, to show that there was a time when they did not exist, to decide at least comparatively upon their age, and to detect the forces which have produced them.

But while I speak of the reconstructive labors of the geologist with so much confidence, because to my mind they reveal an intelligible coherence in the whole physical history of the world, yet I am well aware that there are many and wide gaps in our knowledge to be filled up. All the attempts to represent the appearance of the earth in past periods by means of geological maps are, of course, but approximations of the truth, and will compare with those of future times, when the phenomena are better understood, much as our present geographical maps, the result of repeated surveys and of the most accurate measurements, compare with those of the ancients.

Homer's world was a flat expanse, surrounded by ocean, of which Greece was the centre. Asia Minor, the Ægean Islands, Egypt, part of Italy and Sicily, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea filled out and completed his map.

Hecatæus, the Greek historian and geographer, who lived more than five hundred years before Christ, had not enlarged it much. He was, to be sure, a voyager on the Mediterranean, and had an idea of the extent of Italy. Acquaintance with Phoenician merchants also had enlarged his knowledge of the world; Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain were known to him; he was familiar with the Black and Red Seas; and though an indentation on his map in the neighborhood of the Caspian would seem to indicate that he was aware of the existence of this sea also, it is not otherwise marked.

Herodotus makes a considerable advance beyond his predecessors: the Caspian Sea has a place on his map; Asia is sketched out, including the Persian Gulf with the large rivers pouring into it; and the course of the Ganges is traced, though he makes it flow east and empty into the Pacific, instead of turning southward and emptying into the Indian Ocean.

Eratosthenes, two centuries before Christ, is the first geographer who makes some attempt to determine the trend of the land and water, presenting a suggestion that the earth is broader in one direction than in the other. In his map, he adds also the geographical results derived from the expeditions of Alexander the Great.

Ptolemy, who flourished in Alexandria in the reign of Hadrian, is the next geographer of eminence, and he shows us something of Africa; for, in his time, the Phoenicians, in their commercial expeditions, had sailed far to the south, had reached the termination of Africa, with ocean lying all around it, and had seen the sun to the north of them. This last assertion, however, Ptolemy does not credit, and he is as skeptical of the open ocean surrounding the extremity of Africa as modern geographers and explorers have been of the existence of Kane's open Arctic Sea. He believes that what the Phoenician traders took to be the broad ocean must be part of an inland sea, corresponding to the Mediterranean, with which he was so familiar. His map includes also England, Ireland, and Scotland; and his Ultima Thule is, no doubt, the Hebrides of our days.

Our present notions of the past periods of the world's history probably bear about the same relation to the truth that these ancient geographical maps bear to the modern ones. But this should not discourage us, for, after all, those maps were in the main true as far as they went; and as the ancient geographers were laying the foundation for all our modern knowledge of the present conformation of the globe, so are the geologists of the nineteenth century preparing the ground for future investigators, whose work will be as far in advance of theirs as are the delineations of Carl Ritter, the great master of physical geography in our age, in advance of the map drawn by the old Alexandrian geographer. We shall have our geological explorers and discoverers in the lands and seas of past times, as we have had in the present,--our Columbuses, our Captain Cooks, our Livingstones in geology, as we have had in geography. There are undiscovered continents and rivers and inland seas in the past world to exercise the ingenuity, courage, and perseverance of men, after they shall have solved all the problems, sounded all the depths, and scaled all the heights of the present surface of the earth.

What has been done thus far is chiefly to classify the inequalities of the earth's surface, and to detect the different causes which have produced them. Foldings of the earth's crust, low hills, extensive plains, mountain-chains and narrow valleys, broad table-lands and wide valleys, local chimneys or volcanoes, river-beds, lake-basins, inland seas,--such are some of the phenomena which, disconnected as they seem at first glance, have nevertheless been brought under certain principles, and explained according to definite physical laws.

Formerly, men looked upon the earth as a unit in time, as the result of one creative act, with all its outlines established from the beginning. It has been the work of modern science to show that its inequalities are not contemporaneous or simultaneous, but successive, including a law of growth,--that heat and cold, and the consequent expansion and contraction of its crust, have produced wrinkles and folds upon the surface, while constant oscillations, changes of level which are even now going on, have modified its conformation, and moulded its general outline through successive ages.

In thinking of the formation of the globe, we must at once free ourselves from the erroneous impression that the crust of the earth is a solid, steadfast foundation. So far from being immovable, it has been constantly heaving and falling; and if we are not impressed by its oscillations, it is because they are not so regular or so evident to our senses as the rise and fall of the sea. The disturbances of the ocean, and the periodical advance and retreat of its tides, are known to our daily experience; we have seen it tossed into great billows by storms, or placid as a lake when undisturbed. But the crust of the earth also has had its storms, to which the tempests of the sea are as nothing,--which have thrown up mountain waves twenty thousand feet high, and fixed them where they stand, perpetual memorials of the convulsions that upheaved them. Conceive an ocean wave that should roll up for twenty thousand feet, and be petrified at its greatest height: the mountains are but the gigantic waves raised on the surface of the land by the geological tempests of past times. Besides these sudden storms of the earth's surface, there have been its gradual upheavals and depressions, going on now as steadily as ever, and which may be compared to the regular action of the tides. These, also, have had their share in determining the outlines of the continents, the height of the lands, and the depth of the seas.

Leaving aside the more general phenomena, let us look now at the formation of mountains especially. I have stated in a previous article that the relative position of the stratified and unstratified rocks gives us the key to their comparative age. To explain this I must enter into some details respecting the arrangement of stratified deposits on mountain-slopes and in mountain-chains, taking merely theoretical cases, however, to illustrate phenomena which we shall meet with repeatedly in actual facts, when studying special geological formations.

[Illustration: Fig. 1.]

We have, for instance, in Figure 1, a central granite mountain, with a succession of stratified beds sloping against its sides, while at its base are deposited a number of horizontal beds which have evidently never been disturbed from the position in which they were originally accumulated. The reader will at once perceive the method by which the geologist decides upon the age of such a mountain. He finds the strata upon its slopes in regular superposition, the uppermost belonging, we will suppose, to the Triassic period; at its base he finds undisturbed horizontal deposits, also in regular superposition, belonging to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Therefore, he argues, this mountain must have been uplifted after the Triassic and all preceding deposits were formed, since it has broken its way through them, and forced them out of their natural position; and it must have been previous to the Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, since they have been accumulated peacefully at its base, and have undergone no such perturbations.

The task of the geologist would be an easy one, if all the problems he has to deal with were as simple as the case I have presented here; but the most cursory glance at the intricacies of mountain-structure will show us how difficult it is to trace the connection between the phenomena. We must not form an idea of ancient mountain-upheavals from existing active volcanoes, although the causes which produced them were, in a modified and limited sense, the same. Our present volcanic mountains are only chimneys, or narrow tunnels, as it were, pierced in the thickness of the earth's surface, through which the molten lava pours out, flowing over the edges and down the sides and hardening upon the slopes, so as to form conical elevations. The mountain-ranges upheaved by ancient eruptions, on the contrary, are folds of the earth's surface, produced by the cooling of a comparatively thin crust upon a hot mass. The first effect of this cooling process would be to cause contractions; the next, to produce corresponding protrusions,--for, wherever such a shrinking and subsidence of the crust occurred, the consequent pressure upon the melted materials beneath must displace them and force them upward. While the crust continued so thin that these results could go on without very violent dislocations,--the materials within easily finding an outlet, if displaced, or merely lifting the surface without breaking through it,--the effect would be moderate elevations divided by corresponding depressions. We have seen this kind of action, during the earlier geological epochs, in the upheaval of the low hills in the United States, leading to the formation of the coal-basins.

On our return to the study of the American continent, we shall find in the Alleghany chain, occurring at a later period, between the Carboniferous and Triassic epochs, a good illustration of the same kind of phenomena, though the action of the Plutonic agents was then much more powerful, owing to the greater thickness of the crust and the consequent increase of resistance. The folds forced upward in this chain by the subsidence of the surface are higher than any preceding elevations; but they are nevertheless a succession of parallel folds divided by corresponding depressions, nor does it seem that the displacement of the materials within the crust was so violent as to fracture it extensively.

Even so late as the formation of the Jura mountains, between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the character of the upheaval is the same, though there are more cracks at right angles with the general trend of the chain, and here and there the masses below have broken through. But the chain, as a whole consists of a succession of parallel folds, forming long domes or arches, divided by longitudinal valleys. The valleys represent the subsidences of the crust; the domes are the corresponding protrusions resulting from these subsidences. The lines of gentle undulation in this chain, so striking in contrast to the rugged and abrupt character of the Alps immediately opposite, are the result of this mode of formation.

After the crust of the earth had grown so thick, as it was, for instance, in the later Tertiary periods, when the Alps were uplifted, such an eruption could take place only by means of an immense force, and the extent of the fracture would be in proportion to the resistance opposed. It is hardly to be doubted, from the geological evidence already collected, that the whole mountain-range from Western Europe through the continent of Asia, including the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, was raised at the same time. A convulsion that thus made a gigantic rent across two continents, giving egress to three such mountain-ranges, must have been accompanied by a thousand fractures and breaks in contrary directions. Such a pressure along so extensive a tract could not be equal everywhere; the various thicknesses of the crust, the greater or less flexibility of the deposits, the direction of the pressure, would give rise to an infinite variety in the results; accordingly, instead of the long, even arches, such as characterize the earlier upheavals of the Alleghanies and the Jura, there are violent dislocations of the surface, cracks, rents, and fissures in all directions, transverse to the general trend of the upheaval, as well as parallel with it.

Leaving aside for the moment the more baffling and intricate problems of the later mountain-formations, I will first endeavor to explain the simpler phenomena of the earlier upheavals.

[Illustration: Fig. 2.]

[Illustration: Fig. 3.]

Suppose that the melted materials within the earth are forced up against a mass of stratified deposits, the direction of the pressure being perfectly vertical, as represented in Figure 2. Such a pressure, if not too violent, would simply lift the strata out of their horizontal position into an arch or dome, (as in Figure 3,) and if continued or repeated in immediate sequence, it would produce a number of such domes, like long billows following each other, such as we have in the Jura. But though this is the prevailing character of the range, there are many instances even here where an unequal pressure has caused a rent at right angles with the general direction of the upheaval; and one may trace the

## action of this unequal pressure, from the unbroken arch, where it has

simply lifted the surface into a dome, to the granite crest, where the melted rock has forced its way out and crystallized between the broken beds that rest against its slopes.

[Illustration: Fig. 4.]

[Illustration: Fig. 5.]

In other instances, the upper beds alone may have been cracked, while the continuity of the lower ones remains unbroken. In this case we have a longitudinal valley on the top of a mountain-range, lying between the two sides of the broken arch (as in Figure 4). Suppose, now, that there are also transverse cracks across such a longitudinal split, we have then a longitudinal valley with transverse valleys opening into it. There are many instances of this in the Alleghanies and in the Jura. Sometimes such transverse valleys are cut straight across, so that their openings face each other; but often the cracks have taken place at different points on the opposite sides, so that, in travelling through such a transverse valley, you turn to the right or left, as the case may be, where it enters the longitudinal valley, and follow that till you come to another transverse valley opening into it from the opposite side, through which you make your way out, thus crossing the chain in a zigzag course (as in Figure 5). Such valleys are often much narrower at some points than at others. There are even places in the Jura where a rent in the chain begins with a mere crack,--a slit but just wide enough to admit the blade of a knife; follow it for a while, and you may find it spreading gradually into a wider chasm, and finally expanding into a valley perhaps half a mile wide, or even wider.

By means of such cracks, rivers often pass through lofty mountain-chains, and when we come to the investigation of the glacial phenomena connected with the course of the Rhone, we shall find that river following the longitudinal valley which separates the northern and southern parts of the chain of the Alps till it comes to Martigny, where it takes a sharp turn to the right through a transverse crack, flowing northward between walls fourteen thousand feet high, till it enters the Lake of Geneva, through which it passes, issuing at the other end, where it takes a southern direction. For a long time mountains were supposed to be the limitations of rivers, and old maps represent them always as flowing along the valleys without ever passing through the mountain-chains that divide them; but geology is fast correcting the errors of geography, and a map which represents merely the external features of a country, without reference to their structural relations, is no longer of any scientific value.

It is not, however, by rents in mountain-chains alone, or by depressions between them, that valleys are produced; they are often due to the unequal hardness of the beds raised, and to their greater or less liability to be worn away and disintegrated by the action of the rains. This inequality in the hardness of the rocks forming a mountain-range not only adds very much to the picturesqueness of outline, but also renders the landscape more varied through the greater or less fertility of the soil. On the hard rocks, where little soil can gather, there are only pines, or a low, dwarfed growth; but on the rocks of softer materials, more easily acted upon by the rain, a richer soil gathers, and there, in the midst of mountain-scenery, may be found the most fertile growth, the richest pasturage, the brightest flowers. Where such a patch of arable soil has a southern exposure on a mountain-side, we may have a most fertile vegetation at a great height and surrounded by the dark pine-forests. Many of the pastures on the Alps, to which from height to height the shepherds ascend with their flocks in the summer,--seeking the higher ones as the lower become dry and exhausted,--are due to such alternations in the character of the rocks.

In consequence of the influence of time, weather, atmospheric action of all kinds, the apparent relation of beds has often become so completely reversed that it is exceedingly difficult to trace their original relation. Take, for instance, the following case. An eruption has upheaved the strata over a given surface in such a manner as to lift them into a mountain, cracking open the upper beds, but leaving the lower ones unbroken. We have then a valley on a mountain-summit between two crests resembling the one already shown in Figure 4. Such a narrow passage between two crests may be changed in the course of time to a wide expansive valley by the action of the rains, frosts, and other disintegrating agents, and the relative position of the strata forming its walls may seem to be entirely changed.

[Illustration: Fig. 6.]

Suppose, for example, that the two upper layers of the strata rent apart by the upheaval of the mountain are limestone and sandstone, while the third is clay and the fourth again limestone (as in Figure 6). Clay is soft, and yields very readily to the action of rain. In such a valley the edges of the strata forming its walls are of course exposed, and the clay formation will be the first to give way under the action of external influences. Gradually the rains wear away its substance till it is completely hollowed out. By the disintegration of the bed beneath them, the lime and sandstone layers above lose their support and crumble down, and this process goes on, the clay constantly wearing away, and the lime and sand above consequently falling in, till the upper beds have receded to a great distance, the valley has opened to a wide expanse instead of being inclosed between two walls, and the lowest limestone bed now occupies the highest position on the mountain. Figure 7 represents one of the crests shown in Figure 6, after such a levelling process has changed its outline.

[Illustration: Fig. 7.]

But the phenomena of eruptions in mountain-chains are far more difficult to trace than the effects thus gradually produced. Plutonic action has, indeed, played the most fantastic tricks with the crust of the earth, which seems as plastic in the grasp of the fiery power hidden within it as does clay in the hands of the sculptor.

We have seen that an equal vertical pressure from below produces a regular dome,--or that, if the dome be broken through, a granite crest is formed, with stratified materials resting against its slopes. But the pressure has often been oblique instead of vertical, and then the slope of the mountain is uneven, with a gradual ascent on one side and an abrupt wall on the other; or in some instances the pressure has been so lateral that the mountain is overturned and lies upon its side, and there are still other cases where one mountain has been tilted over and has fallen upon an adjoining one.

Sometimes, when beds have been torn asunder, one side of them has been forced up above the other; and there are even instances where one side of a mountain has been forced under the surface of the earth, while the other has remained above. Stratified beds of rock are even found which have been so completely capsized, that the layers, which were of course deposited horizontally, now stand on end, side by side, in vertical rows. I remember, after a lecture on some of these extravagances in mountain-formations, a friend said to me, not inaptly,--"One can hardly help thinking of these extraordinary contortions as a succession of frantic frolics: the mountains seem like a troop of rollicking boys, hunting one another in and out and up and down in a gigantic game of hide-and-seek."

The width of the arch of a mountain depends in a great degree on the thickness and flexibility of the beds of which it is composed. There is not only a great difference in the consistency of stratified material, but every variety in the thickness of the layers, from an inch, and even less, to those measuring from ten or twenty to one hundred feet and more in depth, without marked separation of the successive beds. This is accounted for by the frequent alternations of subsidence and upheaval; the continents having tilted sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, so that in certain localities there has been much water and large deposits, while elsewhere the water was shallow and the deposits consequently less. Thin and flexible strata have been readily lifted into a sharp, abrupt arch with narrow base, while the thick and rigid beds have been forced up more slowly in a wider arch with broader base.

Table-lands are only long unbroken folds of the earth's surface, raised uniformly and in one direction. It is the same pressure from below, which, when acting with more intense force in one direction, makes a narrow and more abrupt fold, forming a mountain-ridge, but, when acting over a wider surface with equal force, produces an extensive uniform elevation. If the pressure be strong enough, it will cause cracks and dislocations at the edges of such a gigantic fold, and then we have table-lands between two mountain-chains, like the Gobi in Asia between the Altai Mountains and the Himalayas, or the table-land inclosed between the Rocky Mountains and the coast-range on the Pacific shore.

We do not think of table-lands as mountainous elevations, because their broad, flat surfaces remind us of the level tracts of the earth; but some of the table-lands are nevertheless higher than many mountain-chains, as, for instance, the Gobi, which is higher than the Alleghanies, or the Jura, or the Scandinavian Alps. One of Humboldt's masterly generalizations was his estimate of the average thickness of the different continents, supposing their heights to be levelled and their depressions filled up, and he found that upon such an estimate Asia would be much higher than America, notwithstanding the great mountain-chains of the latter. The extensive table-land of Asia, with the mountains adjoining it, outweighed the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, the Coast-Chain, and the Andes.

* * * * *

When we compare the present state of our knowledge of geological phenomena with that which prevailed fifty years ago, it seems difficult to believe that so great and important a change can have been brought about in so short a time. It was on German soil and by German students that the foundation was laid for the modern science of systematic geology.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, extensive mining operations in Saxony gave rise to an elaborate investigation of the soil for practical purposes. It was found that the rocks consisted of a succession of materials following each other in regular sequence, some of which were utterly worthless for industrial purposes, while others were exceedingly valuable. The _Muschel-Kalk_ formation, so called from its innumerable remains of shells, and a number of strata underlying it, must be penetrated before the miners reached the rich veins of _Kupferschiefer_ (copper slate), and below this came what was termed the _Todtliegende_ (dead weight), so called because it contained no serviceable materials for the useful arts, and had to be removed before the valuable beds of coal lying beneath it, and making the base of the series, could be reached. But while the workmen wrought at these successive layers of rock to see what they would yield for practical purposes, a man was watching their operations who considered the crust of the earth from quite another point of view.

Abraham Gottlob Werner was born more than a century ago in Upper Lusatia. His very infancy seemed to shadow forth his future studies, for his playthings were the minerals he found in his father's forge. At a suitable age he was placed at the mining school of Freiberg in Saxony, and having, when only twenty-four years of age, attracted attention in the scientific world by the publication of an "Essay on the Characters of Minerals," he was soon after appointed to the professorship of mineralogy in Freiberg. His lot in life could not have fallen in a spot more advantageous for his special studies, and the enthusiasm with which he taught communicated itself to his pupils, many of whom became his devoted disciples, disseminating his views in their turn with a zeal which rivalled the master's ardor.

Werner took advantage of the mining operations going on in his neighborhood, the blasting, sinking of shafts, etc., to examine critically the composition of the rocks thus laid open, and the result of his analysis was the establishment of the Neptunic school of geology alluded to in a previous article, and so influential in science at the close of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth century. From the general character of these rocks, as well as the number of marine shells contained in them, he convinced himself that the whole series, including the Coal, the _Todtliegende_, the _Kupferschiefer_, the _Zechstein_, the Red Sandstone, and the _Muschel-Kalk_, had been deposited under the agency of water, and were the work of the ocean.

Thus far he was right, with the exception that he did not include the local action of fresh water in depositing materials, afterwards traced by Cuvier and Brogniart in the Tertiary deposits about Paris. But from these data he went a step too far, and assumed that all rocks, except the modern lavas, must have been accumulated by the sea,--believing even the granites, porphyries, and basalts to have been deposited in the ocean and crystallized from the substances it contained in solution.

But, in the mean time, James Hutton, a Scotch geologist, was looking at phenomena of a like character from a very different point of view. In the neighborhood of Edinburgh, where he lived, was an extensive region of trap-rock,--that is, of igneous rock, which had forced itself through the stratified deposits, sometimes spreading in a continuous sheet over large tracts, or splitting them open and tilling all the interstices and cracks so formed. Thus he saw igneous rocks not only covering or underlying stratified deposits, but penetrating deep into their structure, forming dikes at right angles with them, and presenting, in short, all the phenomena belonging to volcanic rocks in contact with stratified materials. He again pushed his theory too far, and, inferring from the phenomena immediately about him that heat had been the chief agent in the formation of the earth's crust, he was inclined to believe that the stratified materials also were in part at least due to this cause. I have alluded in a former number to the hot disputes and long-contested battles of geologists upon this point. It was a pupil of Werner's who at last set at rest this much vexed question.

At the age of sixteen, in the year 1790, Leopold von Buch was placed under Werner's care at the mining school of Freiberg. Werner found him a pupil after his own heart. Warmly adopting his teacher's theory, he pursued his geological studies with the greatest ardor, and continued for some time under the immediate influence and guidance of the Freiberg professor. His university-studies over, however, he began to pursue his investigations independently, and his geological excursions led him into Italy, where his confidence in the truth of Werner's theory began to be shaken. A subsequent visit to the region of extinct volcanoes in Auvergne, in the South of France, convinced him that the aqueous theory was at least partially wrong, and that fire had been an active agent in the rock-formations of past times. This result did not change the convictions of his master, Werner, who was too old or too prejudiced to accept the later views, which were nevertheless the result of the stimulus he himself had given to geological investigations.

But Von Buch was indefatigable. For years he lived the life of an itinerant geologist. With a shirt and a pair of stockings in his pocket and a geological hammer in his hand he travelled all over Europe on foot. The results of his foot-journey to Scandinavia were among his most important contributions to geology. He went also to the Canary Islands; and it is in his extensive work on the geological formations of these islands that he showed conclusively not only the Plutonic character of all unstratified rocks, but also that to their action upon the stratified deposits the inequalities of the earth's surface are chiefly due. He first demonstrated that the melted masses within the earth had upheaved the materials deposited in layers upon its surface, and had thus formed the mountains.

No geologist has ever collected a larger amount of facts than Von Buch, and to him we owe a great reform not only in geological principles, but in methods of study also. An amusing anecdote is told of him, as illustrating his untiring devotion to his scientific pursuits. In studying the rocks, he had become engaged also in the investigation of the fossils contained in them. He was at one time especially interested in the _Terebratulæ_ (fossil shells), and one evening in Berlin, where he was engaged in the study of these remains, he came across a notice in a Swedish work of a particular species of that family which he could not readily identify without seeing the original specimens. The next morning Von Buch was missing, and as he had invited guests to dine with him, some anxiety was felt on account of his non-appearance. On inquiry, it was found that he was already far on his way to Sweden: he had started by daylight on a pilgrimage after the new, or rather the old, _Terebratula_. I tell the story as I heard it from one of the disappointed guests.

All great natural phenomena impressed him deeply. On one occasion it was my good fortune to make one of a party from the "Helvetic Association for the Advancement of Science" on an excursion to the eastern extremity of the Lake of Geneva. I well remember the expressive gesture of Von Buch, as he faced the deep gorge through which the Rhone issues from the interior of the Alps. While others were chatting and laughing about him, he stood for a moment absorbed in silent contemplation of the grandeur of the scene, then lifted his hat and bowed reverently before the mountains.

Next to Von Buch, no man has done more for modern geology than Elie de Beaumont, the great French geologist. Perhaps the most important of his generalizations is that by which he has given us the clue to the limitation of the different epochs in past times by connecting them with the great revolutions in the world's history. He has shown us that the great changes in the aspect of the globe, as well as in its successive sets of animals, coincide with the mountain-upheavals.

I might add a long list of names, American as well as European, which will be forever honored in the history of science for their contributions to geology in the last half-century. But I have intended only to close this chapter on mountains with a few words respecting the men who first investigated their intimate structural organization, and established methods of study in reference to them now generally adopted throughout the scientific world. In my next article I shall proceed to give some account of special geological formations in Europe, and the gradual growth of that continent.

CAMILLA'S CONCERT.

I, who labor under the suspicion of not knowing the difference between "Old Hundred" and "Old Dan Tucker,"--I, whose every attempt at music, though only the humming of a simple household melody, has, from my earliest childhood, been regarded as a premonitory symptom of epilepsy, or, at the very least, hysterics, to be treated with cold water, the bellows, and an unmerciful beating between my shoulders,--_I_, who can but with much difficulty and many a retrogression make my way among the olden mazes of tenor, alto, treble, bass, and who stand "clean daft" in the resounding confusion of andante, soprano, falsetto, palmetto, pianissimo, akimbo, l'allegro, and il penseroso,--_I_ was bidden to Camilla's concert, and, like a sheep to the slaughter, I went.

He bears a great loss and sorrow who has "no ear for music." Into one great garden of delights he may not go. There needs no flaming sword to bar the way, since for him there is no gate called Beautiful which he should seek to enter. Blunted and stolid he stumps through life for whom its harp-strings vainly quiver. Yet, on the other hand, what does he not gain? He loses the concord of sweet sounds, but he is spared the discord of harsh noises. For the surges of bewildering harmony and the depths of dissonant disgust, he stands on the levels of perpetual peace. You are distressed, because in yonder well-trained orchestra a single voice is pitched one-sixteenth of a note too high. For me, I lean out of my window on summer nights enraptured over the organ-man who turns poor lost Lilian Dale round and round with his inexorable crank. It does not disturb me that his organ wheezes and sputters and grunts. Indeed, there is for me absolutely no wheeze, no sputter, no grunt. I only see dark eyes of Italy, her olive face, and her gemmed and lustrous hair. You mutter maledictions on the infernal noise and caterwauling. I hear no caterwauling, but the river-god of Arno ripples sort songs in the summer-tide to the lilies that bend above him. It is the guitar of the cantatrice that murmurs through the scented, dewy air,--the cantatrice with the laurel yet green on her brow, gliding over the molten moonlit water-ways of Venice, and dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with the plash of the oars of the gondolier. It is the chant of the flower-girl with large eyes shining under the palm-branches in the market-place of Milan; and with the distant echoing notes come the sweet breath of her violets and the unquenchable odors of her crushed geraniums borne on many a white sail from the glorified Adriatic. Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my window, I shall by-and-by-throw you a paltry nickel cent for your tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales? Will you sleep to-night between the colonnades under the golden moon of Napoli? Go back, O child of the Midland Sea! Go out from this cold shore, that yields but crabbed harvests for your threefold vintages of Italy. Go, suck the sunshine from Seville oranges under the elms of Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of this frigid Norseland.

But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves are silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason why, if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my window, Giuseppe; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not sleep in the shadows of broken temples.

Yet I love music: not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence, discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid rocks loved it, when they came rolling heavily to his feet to listen; in a great, coarse, clumsy, ichthyosaurian way, as the rivers loved sad Orpheus's wailing tones, stopping in their mighty courses, and the thick-hided hippopotamus dragged himself up from the unheeded pause of the waves, dimly thrilled with a vague ecstasy. The confession is sad, yet only in such beastly fashion come sweetest voices to me,--not in the fulness of all their vibrations, but sounding dimly through many an earthy layer. Music I do not so much hear as feel. All the exquisite nerves that bear to your soul these tidings of heaven in me lie torpid or dead. No beatitude travels to my heart over that road. But as sometimes an invalid, unable through mortal sickness to swallow his needed nutriment, is yet kept alive many days by being immersed in a bath of wine and milk, which somehow, through unwonted courses, penetrates to the sources of vitality,--so I, though the natural avenues of sweet sounds have been hermetically sealed, do yet receive the fine flow of the musical ether. I feel the flood of harmony pouring around me. An inward, palpable, measured tremulousness of the subtile, secret essence of life attests the presence of some sweet disturbing cause, and, borne on unseen wings, I mount to loftier heights and diviner airs.

So I was comforted for my waxed ears and Camilla's concert.

There is one other advantage in being possessed with a deaf-and-dumb devil, which, now that I am on the subject of compensation, I may as well mention. You are left out of the arena of fierce discussion and debate. You do not enter upon the lists wherefrom you would be sure to come off discomfited. Of all reputations, a musical reputation seems to me the most shifting and uncertain; and of all rivalries, musical rivalries are the most prolific of heart-burnings and discomfort. Now, if I should sing or play, I should wish to sing and play well. But what is well? Nancie in the village "singing-seats" stands head and shoulders above the rest, and wears her honors tranquilly, an authority at all rehearsals and serenades. But Anabella comes up from the town to spend Thanksgiving, and, without the least mitigation or remorse of voice, absolutely drowns out poor Nancie, who goes under, giving many signs. Yet she dies not unavenged, for Harriette sweeps down from the city, and immediately suspends the victorious Anabella from her aduncate nose, and carries all before her. Mysterious is the arrangement of the world. The last round of the ladder is not yet reached. To Madame Morlot, Harriette is a savage, _une bête_, without cultivation. "Oh, the dismal little fright! a thousand years of study would be useless; go, scour the floors; she has positively no voice." No voice, Madame Morlot? Harriette, no voice,--who burst every ear-drum in the room last night with her howling and hooting, and made the stoutest heart tremble with fearful forebodings of what might come next? But Madame Morlot is not infallible, for Herr Driesbach sits shivering at the dreadful noises which Madame Morlot extorts from his sensitive and suffering piano, and at the necessity which lies upon him to go and congratulate her upon her performance. Ah! if his tortured conscience might but congratulate her and himself upon its close! And so the scale ascends. Hills on hills and Alps on Alps arise, and who shall mount the ultimate peak till all the world shall say, "Here reigns the Excellence"? I listen with pleasure to untutored Nancie till Anabella takes all the wind from her sails. I think the force of music can no farther go than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out her underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and be _à la mode_?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the agonies of the _dramatis personæ_? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for their _spretæ injuria formæ_? What can repay the hapless performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by terrible, indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted Cremona is but a very second fiddle?

So, standing on the high ground of certain immunity from criticism and hostile judgment, I do not so much console myself as I do not stand in need of consolation. I rather give thanks for my mute and necessarily unoffending lips, and I shall go in great good-humor to Camilla's concert.

There are many different ways of going to a concert. You can be one of a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime, an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud, they condemn, they criticise with perfect _au-faitism_. (No one need say there is no such word. I know there was not yesterday, and perhaps will not be to-morrow; but that there is such a one to-day, you have but to open your eyes and see.) Into such company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always fretting itself wedged in where it has no business to be, have chanced to be thrown. This is torture. My cue is to turn into the Irishman's echo, which always returned for his "How d' ye do?" a "Pretty well, thank you." I cling to the skirts of that member of the party who is agreed to have the best taste and echo his responses an octave higher. If he sighs at the end of a song, I bring out my pocket-handkerchief. If he says "charming," I murmur "delicious." If he thinks it "exquisite," I pronounce it "enchanting." Where he is rapt in admiration, I go into a trance, and so shamble through the performances, miserable impostor that I am, and ten to one nobody finds out that I am a dunce, fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils. It is a great strain upon the mental powers, but it is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished and what skill may be attained by long practice.

It is not ingenuous? I am afraid not quite. The guilt rest with those who make me incur it! You cannot even read a book with any degree of pleasure, if you know an opinion is expected of you at the finis. You leave the popular novel till people have forgotten to ask, "How do you like it?" How can you enjoy anything, if you are not at liberty to give yourself wholly to it, but must be all the while making up a speech to deliver when it is over? Nothing is better than to be a passive listener, but nothing is worse than to be obliged to turn yourself into a sounding-board: and must I have both the suffering and the guilt?

Also one may go to a concert as a conductor with a single musical friend. By conductor I do not mean escort, but a magnetic conductor, rapture conductor, a fit medium through which to convey away his delight, so that he shall not become surcharged and explode. He does not take you for your pleasure, nor for his own, but for use. He desires some one to whom he can from time to time express his opinions and his enthusiasms, sure of an attentive listener,--since nothing is so pleasant as to see one's views welcomed. Now you cannot pretend that in such a case your listening is thoroughly honest. You are receptive of theories, criticisms, and reminiscences; but you would not like to be obliged to pass an examination on them afterwards. You do, it must be confessed, sometimes, in the midst of eloquent dissertations, strike out into little flowery by-paths of your own, quite foreign to the grand paved-ways along which your friend supposes he is so kind as to be leading you. But however digressive your mind may be, do not suffer your eyes to digress. Whatever may be the intensity of your _ennui_, endeavor to preserve an animated expression, and your success is complete. This is all that is necessary. You will never be called upon for notes or comments. Your little escapades will never be detected. It is not your opinions that were sought, nor your education that was to be furthered. You were only an escape-pipe, and your mission ceased when the soul of song fled and the gas was turned off. This, too, is all that can justly be demanded. Minister, lecturer, singer, no one has any right to ask of his audience anything more than opportunity,--the externals of attention. All the rest is his own look-out. If you prepossess your mind with a theme, you do not give him an even chance. You must offer him in the beginning a _tabula rasa_,--a fair field,--and then it is his business to go in and win your attention; and if he cannot, let him pay the costs, for the fault is his own.

This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one.

There is yet another way. You may go with one or many who believe and practise the doctrine of _laissez-faireity_. Do not now proceed to dash your brains out against that word. I have just done it myself, and one such head as mine is ample sacrifice for any verbal crime. They go to the concert for love of music,--negatively for its rest and refreshment, positively for its embodied delights. They take you for your enjoyment, which they permit you to compass after your own fashion. They force from you no comment. They demand no criticism. They do not require censure as your certificate of taste. They do not trouble themselves with your demeanor. If you choose to talk in the pauses, they are receptive and cordial. If you choose to be silent, it is just as well. If you go to sleep, they will not mind,--unless, under the spell of the genius of the place, your sleep becomes vocal, and you involuntarily join the concert in the undesirable _rôle_ of De Trop. If you go into raptures, it is all the same; you are not watched and made a note of. They leave you at the top of your bent. Whether you shall be amused, delighted, or disgusted, they respect your decisions and allow you to remain free.

How did I go to my concert? Can I tell for the eyes that made "a sunshine in the shady place"? Was I not veiled with the beautiful hair, and blinded with the lily's white splendor? So went I with the Fairy Queen in her golden coach drawn by six white mice, and, behold, I was in Camilla's concert-room.

It is to be a fiddle affair. Now I am free to say, if there is anything I hate, it is a fiddle. Hide it away under as many Italian coatings as you choose,--viol, violin, viola, violone, violoncello, violoncellettissimo, at bottom it is all one, a fiddle; in its best estate, a diddle, diddle, frivolous, rattling, Yankee-Doodle, country-tavern-ball whirligig, without dignity, sentiment, or power; and at worst a rubbing, rasping, squeaking, woolleny, noisy nuisance, that it sets my teeth on edge to think of. I shudder at the mere memory of the reluctant bow dragging its slow length across the whining strings. And here I am, in my sober senses, come to hear a fiddle!

But it is Camilla's. Do you remember--I don't, but I should, if I had known it--a little girl who, a few years ago, became famous for her wonderful performance on the violin? At six years of age she went to a great concert, and of all the fine instruments there, the unseen spirit within her made choice, "Papa, I should like to learn the violin." So she learned it and loved it, and when ten years old delighted foreign and American audiences with her marvellous genius. It was the little Camilla who now, after ten years of silence, tuned her beloved instrument once more.

As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment. I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian water-courses, the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and crystallized,--of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh, me! it is, after all, the very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee!

But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do, but walks in like a good Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the prelude. There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress and think how ugly are hoops. The skirt is white silk,--a brocade, I believe,--at any rate, stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the seamstress, who must compress it within prescribed limits about the waist, looks scanty and straight, because, like all other skirts in the world at this present writing, it is stretched over a barrel. Why could she not, she who comes before us to-night, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,--why could she not discard the mode, and assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I remember, that, though _sa robe était blanche, et son costume était très pittoresque_, it was _sans s'écarter cependant assez des usages reçus pour que l'on pût y trouver de l'affectation_; and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "_on_" would very readily "_y trouver de l'affectation_." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things into the account, as good as any, and, if not more graceful, a thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable than Helen's, still it does seem, that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?

But I lift my eyes from Camilla's unpliant drapery to the red red rose in her hair, and thence, naturally, to her silent face, and in that instant ugly dress and red red rose fade out of my sight. What is it that I see, with tearful tenderness and a nameless pain at the heart? A young face deepened and drawn with suffering; dark, large eyes, whose natural laughing light has been quenched in tears, yet shining still with a distant gleam caught from the eternal fires. O still, pathetic face! A sterner form than Time has passed and left his vestige there. Happy little girl, playing among the flickering shadows of the Rhine-land, who could not foresee the darker shadows that should settle and never lift nor flicker from her heavy heart! Large, lambent eyes, that might have been sweet, but now are only steadfast,--that may yet be sweet, when they look to-night into a baby's cradle, but gazing now upon a waiting audience, are only steadfast. Ah! so it is. Life has such hard conditions, that every dear and precious gift, every rare virtue, every pleasant facility, every genial endowment, love, hope, joy, wit, sprightliness, benevolence, must sometimes be cast into the crucible to distil the one elixir, patience. Large, lambent eyes, in which days and nights of tears are petrified, steadfast eyes that are neither mournful nor hopeful nor anxious, but with such unvoiced sadness in their depths that the hot tears well up in my heart, what do you see in the waiting audience? Not censure, nor pity, nor forgiveness, for you do not need them,--but surely a warm human sympathy, since heart can speak to heart, though the thin, fixed lips have sealed their secret well. Sad mother, whose rose of life was crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be brimmed for life's sweet spring-time, your crumbling fanes and broken arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. Be comforted of that. They bear witness of a more pitiless Destroyer, and by this token I know there shall dawn a brighter day. The God of the fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed and fatherless, the Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with you, and shield and shelter and bless!

But the overture wavers to its close, and her soul hears far off the voice of the coming Spirit. A deeper light shines in the strangely introverted eyes,--the look as of one listening intently to a distant melody which no one else can hear,--the look of one to whom the room and the people and the presence are but a dream, and past and future centre on the far-off song. Slowly she raises her instrument. I almost shudder to see the tawny wood touching her white shoulder; yet that cannot be common or unclean which she so loves and carries with almost a caress. Still intent, she raises the bow with a slow sweep, as if it were a wand of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly voice, pouring around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it breaks upon our ears,--softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from that other sphere, but deepening, strengthening, conquering,--now rising on the swells of a controlling passion, now sinking into the depths with its low wail of pain; exultant, scornful, furious, in the glad outburst of opening joy and the fierce onslaught of strength; crowned, sceptred, glorious in garland and singing-robes, throned in the high realms of its inheritance, a kingdom of boundless scope and ever new delights: then sweeping down through the lower world with diminishing rapture, rapture lessening into astonishment, astonishment dying into despair, it gathers up the passion and the pain, the blight and woe and agony; all garnered joys are scattered. Evil supplants the good. Hope dies, love pales, and faith is faint and wan. But every death has its moaning ghost, pale spectre of vanished loves. Oh, fearful revenge of the outraged soul! The mysterious, uncomprehended, incomprehensible soul! The irrepressible, unquenchable, immortal soul, whose every mark is everlasting! Every secret sin committed against it cries out from the housetops. Cunning may strive to conceal, will may determine to smother, love may fondly whisper, "It does not hurt"; but the soul will not _be_ outraged. Somewhere, somehow, when and where you least expect, unconscious, perhaps, to its owner, unrecognized by the many, visible only to the clear vision, somewhere, somehow, the soul bursts asunder its bonds. It is but a little song, a tripping of the fingers over the keys, a drawing of the bow across the strings,--only that? Only that! It is the protest of the wronged and ignored soul. It is the outburst of the pent and prisoned soul. All the ache and agony, all the secret wrong and silent endurance, all the rejected love and wounded trust and slighted truth, all the riches wasted, all the youth poisoned, all the hope trampled, all the light darkened,--all meet and mingle in a mad whirl of waters. They surge and lash and rage, a wild storm of harmony. Barriers are broken. Circumstance is not. The soul! the soul! the soul! the wronged and fettered soul! the freed and royal soul! It alone is king. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in! Tremble, O Tyrant, in your mountain-fastness! Tremble, Deceiver, in your cavern under the sea! Your victim is your accuser. Your sin has found you out. Your crime cries to Heaven. You have condemned and killed the just. You have murdered the innocent in secret places, and in the noonday sun the voice of their blood crieth unto God from the ground. There is no speech nor language. There is no will nor design. The seal of silence is unbroken. But unconscious, entranced, inspired, the god has lashed his Sibyl on. The vital instinct of the soul, its heaven-born, up-springing life, flings back the silver veil, and reveals the hidden things to him who hath eyes to see.

The storm sobs and soothes itself to silence. There is a hush, and then an enthusiasm of delight. The small head slightly bows, the still face scarcely smiles, the slight form disappears,--and after all, it was only a fiddle.

"When Music, heavenly maid, was young," begins the ode; but Music, heavenly maid, seems to me still so young, so very young, as scarcely to have made her power felt. Her language is as yet unlearned. When a baby of a month is hungry or in pain, he contrives to make the fact understood. If he is at peace with himself and his surroundings, he leaves no doubt on the subject. To precisely this degree of intelligibility has the Heavenly Maid attained among us. When Beethoven sat down to the composition of one of his grand harmonies, there was undoubtedly in his mind as distinct a conception of that which he wished to express, of that within him which clamored for expression, as ever rises before a painter's eye or sings in a poet's brain. Thought, emotion, passion, hope, fear, joy, sorrow, each had its life and law. The painter paints you this. This the poet sings you. You stand before a picture, and to your loving, searching gaze its truths unfold. You read the poem with the understanding, and catch its concealed meanings. But what do you know of what was in Beethoven's soul? Who grasps his conception? Who faithfully renders, who even thoroughly knows his idea? Here and there to some patient night-watcher the lofty gates are unbarred, "on golden hinges turning." But, for the greater part, the musician who would tell so much speaks to unheeding ears. We comprehend him but infinitesimally. It is the Battle of Prague. Adrianus sits down to the piano, and Dion stands by his side, music-sheet in hand, acting as showman. "The Cannon," says Dion, at the proper place, and you imagine you recognize reverberation. "Charge," continues Dion, and with a violent effort you fancy the ground trembles. "Groans of the wounded," and you are partly horror-struck and partly incredulous. But what lame representation is this! As if one should tie a paper around the ankle of the Belvedere Apollo, with the inscription, "This is the ankle." A collar declares, "This is the neck." A bandeau locates his "forehead." A bracelet indicates the "arm." Is the sculpture thus significant? Hardly more does our music yet signify to us. You hear an unfamiliar air. You like it or dislike it, or are indifferent. You can tell that it is slow and plaintive, or brisk and lively, or perhaps even that it is defiant or stirring; but how insensible you are to the delicate shades of its meaning! How hidden is the song in the heart of the composer till he gives you the key! You hear as though you heard not. You hear the thunder, and the cataract, and the crash of the avalanche; but the song of the nightingale, the chirp of the katydid, the murmur of the waterfall never reach you. This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must hold in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his its corresponding susceptibilities. Music is language, and language implies a people who employ and understand it. But music, even by its professor, is as yet faintly understood. Its meanings go on crutches. They must be helped out by words. What does this piece say to you? Interpret it. You cannot. You must be taught much before you can know all. It must be translated from music into speech before you can entirely assimilate it. Musicians do not trust alone to notes for moods. Their light shines only through a glass darkly. But in some other sphere, in some happier time, in a world where gross wants shall have disappeared, and therefore the grossness of words shall be no longer necessary, where hunger and thirst and cold and care and passion have no more admittance, and only love and faith and hope and admiration and aspiration shall crave utterance, in that blessed unseen world, shall not music be the every-day speech, conveying meaning not only with a sweetness, but with an accuracy, delicacy, and distinctness, of which we have now but a faint conception? Here words are not only rough, but ambiguous. There harmonies shall be minutely intelligible. Speak with what directness we can, be as explanatory, repetitious, illustrative as we may, there are mistakes, misunderstandings, many and grievous, and consequent missteps, calamities, and catastrophes. But in that other world language shall be exactly coexistent with life; music shall be precisely adequate to meaning. There shall be no hidden corners, no bungling incompatibilities, but the searching sound penetrates into the secret sources of the soul, all-pervading. Not a nook, not a crevice, no maze so intricate, but the sound floats in to gather up the fragrant aroma, to bear it yonder to another waiting soul, and deposit it as deftly by unerring magnetisms in the corresponding clefts.

Toot away, then, fifer-fellow! Turn your slow crank, inexorable Italian! Thrum your thrums, Miss Laura, for Signor Bernadotti! You are a long way off, but your foot-prints point the right way. With many a yawn and sigh subjective, with, I greatly fear me, many a malediction objective, you are "learning the language of another world." To us, huddled together in our little ant-hill, one is "_une bête_," and one is "_mon ange_"; but from that fixed star we are all so far as to have no parallax.

But I come down from the golden stars, for the white-robed one has raised her wand again, and we float away through the glowing gates of the sunrise, over the purple waves, over the vine-lands of sunny France, in among the shadows of the storied Pyrenees. Sorrow and sighing have fled away. Tragedy no longer "in sceptred pall comes sweeping by"; but young lambs leap in wild frolic, silken-fleeced sheep lie on the slopes of the hills, and shepherd calls to shepherd from his mountain-peak. Peaceful hamlets lie far down the valley, and every gentle height blooms with a happy home. Dark-eyed Basque girls dance through the fruitful orchards. I see the gleam of their scarlet scarfs wound in with their bold black hair. I hear their rich voices trilling the lays of their land, and ringing with happy laughter. But I mount higher and yet higher, till gleam and voice are lost. Here the freshening air sweeps down, and the low gurgle of living water purling out from cool, dark chasms mingles with the shepherd's flute. Here the young shepherd himself climbs, leaping from rock to rock, lithe, supple, strong, brave, and free as the soul of his race,--the same iron in his sinews, and the same fire in his blood that dealt the "dolorous rout" to Charlemagne a thousand years ago. Sweetly across the path of Roncesvalles blow the evening gales, wafting tender messages to the listening girls below. Green grows the grass and gay the flowers that spring from the blood of princely paladins, the flower of chivalry. No bugle-blast can bring old Roland back, though it wind long and loud through the echoing woods. Lads and lasses, worthy scions of valiant stems, may sit on happy evenings in the shadow of the vines, or group themselves on the greensward in the pauses of the dance, and sing their songs of battle and victory,--the olden legends of their heroic sires; but the strain that floats down from the darkening slopes into their heart of hearts, the song that reddens in their glowing cheeks, and throbs in their throbbing breasts, and shines in their dewy eyes, is not the shock of deadly onset, glorious though it be. It is the sweet old song,--old, yet ever new,--whose burden is,

"Come live with me and be my love,"--

old, yet always new,--sweet and tender, and not to be gainsaid, whether it be piped to a shepherdess in Arcadia, or whether a princess hears it from princely lips in her palace on the sea.

But the mountain shadows stretch down the valleys and wrap the meadows in twilight. Farther and farther the notes recede as the flutesman gathers his quiet flock along the winding paths. Smooth and far in the tranquil evening-air fall the receding notes, a clear, silvery sweetness; farther and farther in the hushed evening-air, lessening and lowering, as you bend to listen, till the vanishing strain just cleaves, a single thread of pearl-pure melody, finer, finer, finer, through the dewy twilight, and--you hear only your own heart-beats. It is not dead, but risen. It never ceased. It knew no pause. It has gone up the heights to mingle with the songs of the angels. You rouse yourself with a start, and gaze at your neighbor half bewildered. What is it? Where are we? Oh, my remorseful heart! There is no shepherd, no mountain, no girl with scarlet ribbon and black braids bound on her beautiful temples. It was only a fiddle on a platform!

Now you need not tell me that. I know better. I have lived among fiddles all my life,--embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from cornstalks, that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers waving in the sunshine of long ago,--sympathetic fiddles that did me yeomen's service once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and broke my head, and the frightened fiddles, not knowing what else to do, came and fiddled to me lying on the settee, with such boundless, extravagant flourish that nobody heard the doctor's gig rolling by, and so _sinciput_ and _occiput_ were left overnight to compose their own quarrels, whereby I was naturally all right before the doctor had a chance at me, suffering only the slight disadvantage of going broken-headed through life. What I might have been with a whole skull, I don't know; but I will say, that, even in fragments, my head is the best part of me.

Yes, I think I may dare affirm that whatever there is to know about a fiddle I know, and I can give my affidavit that it is no fiddle that takes you up on its broad wings, outstripping the "wondrous horse of brass," which required

"the space of a day natural, This is to sayn, four and twenty houres, Wher so you list, in drought or elles showres, To beren your body into every place To which your herte willeth for to pace, Withouten wemme of you, thurgh foule or faire,"--

since it bears you, "withouten" even so much as your "herte's" will, in a moment's time, over the seas and above the stars.

A fiddle, is it? Do not for one moment believe it.--A poet walked through Southern woods, and the Dryads opened their hearts to him. They unfolded the secrets that dwell in the depths of forests. They sang to him under the starlight the songs of their green, rustling land. They whispered the loves of the trees sentient to poets:--

"The sayling pine; the cedar, proud and tall; The vine-propt elme; the poplar, never dry; The builder oake, sole king of forrests all; The aspine, good for staves; the cypresse funerall; The lawrell, meed of mightie conquerours And poets sage; the firre, that weepeth stille; The willow, worne of forlorne paramours; The eugh, obedient to the benders will; The birch, for shaftes; the sallow, for the mill; The mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wounde; The warlike beech; the ash, for nothing ill; The fruitful olive; and the platane round; The carver holme; the maple, seldom inward sound."

They sang to him with their lutes. They danced before him with sunny, subtile grace, wreathing him with strange loveliness. They brought him honey and wine in the white cups of lilies, till his brain was drunk with delight; and they kept watch by his moss pillow, while he slept.

In the dew of the morning, he arose and felled the kindly tree that had sheltered him, not knowing it was the home of Arborine, fairest of the wood-nymphs. But he did it not for cruelty, but tenderness, to carve a memorial of his most memorable night, and so pulled down no thunders on his head. For Arborine loved him, and, like her sister Undine in the North, found her soul in loving him. Unseen, the beautiful nymph guided his hand as he fashioned the sounding viol, not knowing he was fashioning a palace for a soul new-born. He wrought skilfully, strung the intense chords, and smote them with the sympathetic bow. What burst of music flooded the still air! What new song trembled among the mermaiden tresses of the oaks! What new presence quivered in every listening harebell and every fearful wind-flower? The forest felt a change, for tricksy nymph had proved a mortal love, and put off her fairy phantasms for the deep consciousness of humanity. The wood heard, bewildered. A shudder as of sorrow thrilled through it. A breeze that was almost sad swept down the shady aisles as the Poet passed out into the sunshine and the world.

But Nature knows no pain, though Arborines appear never more. A balm springs up in every wound. Over the hills, and far away beyond their utmost purple rim, and deep into the dying day the happy love-born one followed her love, happy to exchange her sylvan immortality for the spasm of mortal life,--happy, in her human self-abnegation, to lie close on his heart and whisper close in his ear, though he knew only the loving voice and never the loving lips. Through the world they passed, the Poet and his mystic viol. It gathered to itself the melodies that fluttered over sea and land,--songs of the mountains, and songs of the valleys,--murmurs of love, and the trumpet-tones of war,--bugle-blast of huntsman on the track of the chamois, and mother's lullaby to the baby at her breast. All that earth had of sweetness the nymph drew into her viol-home, and poured it forth anew in strains of more than mortal harmony. The fire and fervor of human hearts, the quiet ripple of inland waters, the anthem of the stormy sea, the voices of the flowers and the birds lent their melody to the song of her who knew them all.

The Poet died. Died, too, sweet Arborine, swooning away in the fierce grasp of this stranger Sorrow, to enter by the black gate of death into the full presence and recognition of him by loving whom she had learned to be.

The viol passed into strange hands and wandered down the centuries, but its olden echoes linger still. Fragrance of Southern woods, coolness of shaded waters, inspiration of mountain-breezes, all the secret forces of Nature that the wood-nymph knew, and the joy, the passion, and the pain that throb only in a woman's heart, lie still, silent under the silent strings, but wakening into life at the touch of a royal hand.

Do you not believe my story? But I have seen the viol and the royal hand!

SPRING AT THE CAPITAL.

The poplar drops beside the way Its tasselled plumes of silver-gray; The chestnut pouts its great brown buds, impatient for the laggard May.

The honeysuckles lace the wall; The hyacinths grow fair and tall; And mellow sun and pleasant wind and odorous bees are over all.

Down-looking in this snow-white bud, How distant seems the war's red flood! How far remote the streaming wounds, the sickening scent of human blood!

For Nature does not recognize This strife that rends the earth and skies; No war-dreams vex the winter sleep of clover-heads and daisy-eyes.

She holds her even way the same, Though navies sink or cities flame; A snow-drop is a snow-drop still, despite the nation's joy or shame.

When blood her grassy altar wets, She sends the pitying violets To heal the outrage with their bloom, and cover it with soft regrets.

O crocuses with rain-wet eyes, O tender-lipped anemones, What do ye know of agony and death and blood-won victories?

No shudder breaks your sunshine-trance, Though near you rolls, with slow advance, Clouding your shining leaves with dust, the anguish-laden ambulance.

Yonder a white encampment hums; The clash of martial music comes; And now your startled stems are all a-tremble with the jar of drums.

Whether it lessen or increase, Or whether trumpets shout or cease, Still deep within your tranquil hearts the happy bees are murmuring, "Peace!"

O flowers! the soul that faints or grieves New comfort from your lips receives; Sweet confidence and patient faith are hidden in your healing leaves.

Help us to trust, still on and on, That this dark night will soon be gone, And that these battle-stains are but the blood-red trouble of the dawn,--

Dawn of a broader, whiter day Than ever blessed us with its ray,-- A dawn beneath whose purer light all guilt and wrong shall fade away.

Then shall our nation break its bands, And, silencing the envious lands, Stand in the searching light unshamed, with spotless robe, and clean, white hands.

THE HORRORS OF SAN DOMINGO.[25]

[Concluding Chapter.]

The subject which I hoped to present intelligibly in three or four articles has continually threatened to step out of the columns of a magazine and the patience of its readers. The material which is at hand for the service of the great points of the story, such as the Commercial Difficulty, the Mulatto Question, the State of Colonial Parties, the Effect of the French Revolution, the Imbroglio of Races, the Character of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the Present Condition of Hayti, and a Bibliography of the whole subject, is now detached for perhaps a more deliberate publication; and two or three points of immediate interest, such as the French Cruelties, Emancipation and the Slave Insurrection, and the Negroes as Soldiers, are grouped together for the purpose of this closing article.

PLANTATION CRUELTIES.

The social condition of the slaves cannot be fully understood without some reference to the revolting facts connected with plantation management. It is well to know what base and ingenious cruelties could be tolerated by public opinion, and endured by the slaves without exciting continual insurrections. Wonder at this sustained patience of the blacks passes into rage and indignation long before the student of this epoch reaches the eventual outbreaks of 1791: it seems as if a just instinct of manhood should have more promptly doomed these houses of iniquity, and handed them over to a midnight vengeance. And there results a kind of disappointment from the discovery, that, when the blacks finally began to burn and slaughter, they were not impelled by the desire of liberty or the recollection of great crimes, but were blind agents of a complicated situation. It is only in the remote historical sense that Slavery provoked Insurrection. The first great night of horror in San Domingo rose from circumstances that were not explicitly chargeable to the absence of freedom or to the outrages of the slaveholder. But if these things had not fuelled the lighted torches and whetted the blades when grasped, it would have been strange and monstrous indeed. Stranger still would it have been, if the flames of that first night had not kindled in the nobler breasts among that unchained multitude a determination never to endure plantation ferocity again. The legitimate cause for rebelling then took the helm and guided the rest of the story into dignity.

The frequency of enfranchisement might mislead us into expecting that the colonial system of slavery was tempered with humanity. It was rather like that monarchy which the wit described as being "tempered by assassination." The mulatto was by no means a proof that mercy and justice regulated the plantation life. His enfranchisement reacted cruelly upon the negro. It seemed as if the recognition of one domestic sentiment hurt the master's feelings; the damage to his organization broke out against the lower race in anger. The connections between black and white offered no protection to the former, nor amelioration of her lot. Indeed, the overseer, who desired always to be on good terms with the agent or the proprietor of a plantation, was more severe towards the unhappy object of his passion than to the other women, for fear of incurring reproach or suspicion. When he became the owner of slaves, his emancipating humor was no guaranty that they would receive a salutary and benignant treatment.

When a Frenchman undertakes to be cruel, he acts with great _esprit_. There is spectacular ingenuity in the atrocities which he invents, and even his ungovernable bursts of rage instinctively aim a _coup de théâtre_ at his victim. The negro is sometimes bloodthirsty, and when he is excited he will quaff at the opened vein; but he never saves up a man for deliberate enjoyment of his sufferings. When the wild orgy becomes sated, and the cause of it has been once liquidated, there is no further danger from this disposition. But a French colonist, whether smiling or sombre, was always disposed to be tormenting. The ownership of slaves unmasked this tendency of a race which at home, in the streets of Paris and the court-yard of the Abbaye and La Force, proved its ferocity and simple thirst for blood. The story of the Princess Lamballe's death and disfiguration shows the broad Gallic fancy which the sight of blood can pique into action. But the every-day life of many plantations surpassed, in minuteness and striking refinement of tormenting, all that the _sans-culotte_ ever dared or the savage ever dreamed.

Let a few cases be found sufficient to enlighten the reader upon this point. They are specimens from a list of horrors which eye-witnesses, inhabitants of the island, have preserved; and many of them, being found in more than one authority, French as well as colored, are to be regarded as current and unquestionable facts.

The ordinary brutalities of slaveholding were rendered more acute by this Creole temper. Whippings were carried to the point of death, for the slave-vessel was always at the wharf to furnish short lives upon long credit; starving was a common cure for obstinacy, brine and red-pepper were liberally sprinkled upon quivering backs. Economy was never a virtue of this profuse island. Lives were _sauce piquante_ to luxury.

The incarceration of slaves who had marooned, stolen vegetables, or refused to work, had some features novel to the Bastille and the Inquisition. A man would be let down into a stone case or cylinder just large enough to receive his body: potted in this way, he remained till the overseer considered that he had improved. Sometimes he was left too long, and was found spoiled; for this mode of punishment soon ended a man, because he could not move a limb or change his attitude. Dungeons were constructed with iron rings so disposed along the wall that a man was held in a sitting posture with nothing to sit upon but sharpened stick: he was soon obliged to try it, and so oscillated between the two tortures. Other cells were furnished with cases, of the size of a man, that could be hermetically sealed: these were for suffocation. The floors of some were kept submerged with a foot or two of water: the negroes who came out of them were frequently crippled for life by the dampness and cold. Iron cages, collars, and iron masks, clogs, fetters, and thumb-screws were found upon numerous plantations, among the ruins of the dungeons.

The _quatre piquet_ was a favorite style of flogging. Each limb of the victim was stretched to the stake of a frame which was capable of more or less distention; around the middle went an iron circle which prevented every motion. In this position he received his modicum of lashes, every muscle swollen and distended, till the blood dripped from the machine. After he was untied, the overseer dressed the wounds, according to fancy, with pickled pimento, pepper, hot coals, boiling oil or lard, sealing-wax, or gunpowder. Sometimes hot irons stanched the flow of blood.

M. Frossard[26] is authority for the story of a planter who administered a hundred lashes to a negro who had broken a hoe-handle, then strewing gunpowder in the furrows of the flesh, amused himself with setting the trains on fire.

M. de Crévecoeur put a negro who had killed an inhuman overseer into an iron cage, so confined that the birds could have free access to him. They fed daily upon the unfortunate man; his eyes were carried off, his jaws laid bare, his arms torn to pieces, clouds of insects covered the lacerated body and regaled upon his blood.

Another planter, attests M. Frossard, after having lived several years with a negress, deserted her for another, and wished to force her to become the slave of her rival. Not being able to endure this humiliation, she besought him to sell her. But the irritated Frenchman, after inflicting various preparatory punishments, buried her alive, with her head above ground, which he kept wet with _eau sucrée_ till the insects had destroyed her.

How piteous is the reflection that the slaves made a point of honor of preserving their backs free from scars,--so that the lash inflicted a double wound at every stroke!

There was a planter who kept an iron box pierced with holes, into which the slaves were put for trivial offences, and moved towards a hot fire, till the torment threatened to destroy life. He considered this punishment preferable to whipping, because it did not suspend the slave's labors for so long a time.

"What rascally sugar!" said Caradeux to his foreman; "the next time you turn out the like, I will have you buried alive;--you know me." The occasion came soon after, and the black was thrown into a dungeon. Caradeux, says Malenfant, did not really wish to lose his black, yet wished to preserve his character for severity. He invited a dozen ladies to dinner, and during the repast informed them that he meant to execute his foreman, and they should see the thing done. This was not an unusual sight for ladies to witness: the Roman women never were more eager for the agonies of the Coliseum. But on this occasion they demurred, and asked pardon for the black. "Very well," said Caradeux; "remain at table, and when you see me take out my handkerchief; run and solicit his life." After the dessert, Caradeux repaired to the court, where the negro had been obliged to dig his own grave and to get into it, which he did with singing. The earth was thrown around him till the head only appeared. Caradeux pulls out his handkerchief; the ladies run, throw themselves at his feet; after much feigned reluctance, he exclaims,--

"I pardon you at the solicitation of these ladies."

The negro answered,--

"You will not be Caradeux, if you pardon me."

"What do you say?" cried the master, in a rage.

"If you do not kill me, I swear by my god-mother that I will kill you."

At this, Caradeux seized a huge stone, and hurled it at his head, and the other blacks hastened to put an end to his suffering.

Burning the negro alive was an occasional occurrence. Burying him alive was more frequent. A favorite pastime was to bury him up to his neck, and let the boys bowl at his head. Sometimes the head was covered with molasses, and left to the insects. Pitying comrades were found to stone the sufferer to death. One or two instances were known of planters who rolled the bodies of slaves, raw and bloody from a whipping, among the ant-hills. If a cattle-tender let a mule or ox come to harm, the animal was sometimes killed and the man sewed up in the carcass. This was done a few times in cases where the mule died of some epizoötic malady.

Hamstringing negroes had always been practised against marooning, theft, and other petty offences: an overseer seldom failed to bring down his negro with a well-aimed hatchet. _Coupe-jarret_ was a phrase applied during the revolutionary intrigues to those who were hampering a movement which appeared to advance.

Cutting off the ears was a very common punishment. But M. Jouanneau, who lived at Grande-Riviére, nailed one of his slaves to the wall by the ears, then released him by cutting them off with a razor, and closed the entertainment with compelling him to grill and eat them. There was one overseer who never went out without a hammer and nails in his pocket, for nailing negroes by the ear to a tree or post when the humor struck him.

Half a dozen cases of flaying women alive, inspired by jealousy, are upon record; also some cases of throwing negroes into the furnaces with the _bagasse_ or waste of the sugar-cane. Pistol-practice at negroes' heads was very common; singeing them upon cassava plates, grinding them slowly through the sugar-mill, pitching them into the boiler, was an occasional pastime.

If a woman was fortunate enough to lose her babe, she was often thrown into a cell till she chose to have another. Madame Bailly had a wooden child made, which she fastened around the necks of her negresses, if their children died, until they chose to replace them. These punishments were devised to check infanticide, which was the natural relief of the slave-mother.

Venault de Charmilly, a planter of distinction, afterwards the accomplished agent of the emigrant-interest at the court of St. James, used to carry pincers in his pocket, to tear the ears or tongues of his unfortunate slaves, if they did not hear him call, or if their replies were unsatisfactory. He pulled teeth with the same instrument. This man threw his postilion to the horses, literally tying him in their stall till he was beaten by their hoofs to shreds. He was an able advocate of slavery, and did much to poison the English mind, and to create a party with the object of annexing San Domingo and restoring the colonial system.

Cocherel, a planter of Gonaïves, had a slave who played upon the violin. After terrible floggings, he would compel this man to play, as a punishment for having danced without music. He found it piquant to watch the contest of pain and sorrow with the native love of melody. The cases where French planters watched curiously the characteristics of their various expedients for torture are so common that they furnish us with a trait of French Creolism. A poor cook, for instance, was one day thrown into an oven with a crackling heap of _bagasse_, because some article of food reached the table underdone. As the lips curled and shrivelled away from the teeth, his master, who was observing the effects of heat, exclaimed,--"The rascal laughs!"

But the most symbolical action, expressive of the colony's whole life, was performed by one Corbierre, who punished his slaves by blood-letting, and gave a humorous refinement to the sugar which he manufactured by using this blood to assist in clarifying it.

Let these instances suffice. The pen will not penetrate into the sorrows which befell the slave concubine and mother. The form of woman was never so mutilated and dishonored, the decencies of fetichism and savageism were never so outraged, as by these slaveholding idolaters of the Virgin and the Mother of God.

The special cruelties, together with the names of the perpetrators, which have been remembered and recorded, would form an appalling catalogue for the largest slaveholding community in the world. But this recorded cruelty, justly representative of similar acts which never came to the ears of men, was committed by only forty thousand whites of both sexes and all ages upon an area little larger than the State of Maine. There was agony enough racking the bosoms of that half-million of slaves to sate a hemisphere of slaveholding tyrants. But the public opinion of the little coterie of villains was never startled. It is literally true that not a single person was ever condemned to the penalties of the _Code Noir_ for the commission of one of the crimes above mentioned. One would think that the close recurrence, in time and space, of these acts of crime would have beaten through even this Creole temperament into some soft spot that belonged to the mother-country of God, if not of France. Occasionally a tender heart went back to Paris to record its sense of the necessity of some amelioration of these colonial ferocities; but the words of humanity were still spoken in the interest of slavery. It was for the sake of economy, and to secure a natural local increase of the slave population, that these vague reports of cruelty were suggested to the government. The planting interest procured the suppression of one of the mildest and most judicious of the books thus written, and had the author cast into prison. When the crack of the planter's lash sounded in the purlieus of the Tuileries itself, humanity had to wait till the Revolution had cleared out the Palace, the Church, and the Courts, before its clear protest could reverberate against the system of the colony. Then Grégoire, Lameth, Condorcet, Brissot, Lafayette, and others, assailed the planting interest, and uttered the bold generalization that either the colonies or the crimes must be abandoned; for the restraining provisions of the _Code Noir_ were too feeble for the sugar exigency, and had long ago become obsolete. There was no police except for slaves, no inspectors of cultivation above the agents and the overseers. He was considered a _bon blanc_, and a person of benignity, whose slaves were seldom whipped to death. There could be neither opinion nor economy to check these things, when "_La côte d'Afrique est une bonne mère_" was the planter's daily consolation at the loss of an expensive negro.

Such slavery could not be improved; it might be abolished by law or drowned in blood. There is a crowd of pamphlets that have come down to us shrieking with the ineptitude of this period. It was popular to accuse the society of the _Amis des Noirs_ of having ruined the colony by inspiring among the slaves a vague restlessness which blossomed into a desire for vengeance and liberty. But it is a sad fact that neither of those great impulses was stirring in those black forms, monoliths of scars and slave-brands. Not till their eyes had grown red at the sight of blood shed at other suggestions, and their ears had devoured the crackling of the canes and country-seats of their masters, did the guiding spirit of Liberty emerge from the havoc, and respond with Toussaint to the call of French humanity, by fighting for the Republic and the Rights of Man. Suicide was the only insurrection that ever seemed to the slave to promise liberty; for during the space of a hundred years nothing more formidable than the two risings of Padre Jean and Makandal had thrilled the consciences of the planters. If the latter had preserved the unity of sentiment that belonged to the atrocious unity of their interest, and had waived their pride for their safety, they might have proclaimed decrees of emancipation with every morning's peal of the plantation-bell, and the negroes would have replied every morning, "_Vous maître_."

There is but one other folly to match the accusation that the sentiment of French Abolitionism excited the slaves to rise: that is, the sentiment that a slave ought not to be excited to rise against such "Horrors of San Domingo" as we have just recorded. The men who are guilty of that sentimentality, while they smugly enjoy personal immunity and the dear delights of home, deserve to be sold to a Caradeux or a Legree. Let them be stretched upon the _quatre-piquet_ of a great people in a war-humor, whose fathers once rose against the enemies that would have bled only their purses, and hamstrung only their material growth.

In the two decades between 1840 and 1860 the American Union was seldom saved by a Northern statesman without the help of San Domingo. People in cities, with a balance at the bank, stocks floating in the market, little children going to primary schools, a well-filled wood-shed, and a house that is not fire-proof, shudder when they hear that a great moral principle has devastated properties and sent peaceful homes up in the smoke of arson. Certainly the Union shall be preserved; at all events, the wood-shed must be. Nothing shall be the midnight assassin of the country until slavery itself is ready for the job. So the Northern merchant kept his gold at par through dread of anti-slavery, and saved the Union just long enough to pay seventy-five per cent, for the luxury of the "Horrors." Did it ever once occur to him that his eminent Northern statesman was pretending something that the South itself knew to be false and never hypocritically urged against the anti-slavery men? Southern men of intelligence had the best of reasons for understanding the phenomena of San Domingo, and while the "Friends of the Black" were dripping with innocent French blood in Northern speeches, the embryo Secessionists at Nashville and Savannah strengthened their convictions with the proper rendering of the same history. Take, as a specimen of their tranquil frame of mind, the following view, which was intended to correct a vague popular dread that in all probability was inspired by Northern statesmen. It is from a wonderfully calm and judicious speech delivered before the Nashville Convention, a dozen years ago, by General Felix Huston of Mississippi.

"This insurrection [of San Domingo] having occurred so near to us, and being within the recollection of many persons living, who heard the exaggerated accounts of the day, has fastened itself on the public imagination, until it has become a subject of frequent reference, and even Southern twaddlers declaim about the Southern States being reduced to the condition of St. Domingo, and Abolitionists triumphantly point to it as a case where the negro race have asserted and maintained their freedom.

"Properly speaking, this was not a slave insurrection, although it assumed that form after the island was thrown into a revolutionary state.

"The island of St. Domingo, in 1791, contained about seven hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, about fifty thousand of whom were whites, more than double that number of mulattoes and of mixed blood, and the balance were negroes.

"The French and Spanish planters had introduced a general system of concubinage, and the consequence was a numerous progeny of mulattoes, many of whom associated with the whites nearly on terms of equality, were educated at home or sent to Europe to be educated, and many of them were wealthy, having been freed by their parents and their property left to them. These things had lowered, the character of the white proprietors, gradually bringing them down to the level of the mulattoes, and lessening the distance between them and the blacks; and in addition to this, there were a number of the white population who were poor and enervated, and rendered vicious by the low state of social morals and influence of the climate.

"In this state of affairs, when the French Revolution broke out, the wild spirit of liberty caught to the island and infected the mulattoes and the lower class of white population, and they sought to equalize themselves with the large proprietors. The foundations of society were broken up by this intermediate class, and in the course of the struggle they called in the blacks, and the two united, exceeding the whites in the proportion of twelve to one, expelled them from the island. Since that time a continual struggle has been going on between the mulattoes and the negroes, the latter having numbers and brute force, and the former sustaining themselves by superior intelligence.

"There never has been a formidable slave insurrection, considered purely as such; and a comparison of our situation with slavery as it has existed elsewhere ought to relieve the minds of the most timid from any apprehension of danger from our negroes, under any circumstances, in peace or war."

This generally truthful statement, which needs but little modification, shows that San Domingo was helping to destroy the Union at the South while it was trying to save it at the North. The words of the Secessionist were prophetic, and Slavery will continue to be the great unimpaired war power of Southern institutions, till some color-bearer, white or black, in the name of law and order, shakes the stars of America over her inland fields.

AUGUST 22, 1791.

When the French vessels, bringing news of the developing Revolution, touched the wharves of Cap Français, a spark seemed to leap forth into the colony, to run through all ranks and classes of men, setting the Creole hearts afire, till it fell dead against the _gros peau_ and the _peau fin_[27] of the black man. Three colonial parties vibrated with expectations that were radically discordant when the cannon of the people thundered against the Bastille. First in rank and assumption were the old planters and proprietors, two-thirds of whom were at the time absentees in France. They were, excepting a small minority, devoted royalists, but desired colonial independence in order to enjoy a perfect slaveholding authority. They were embittered by commercial restrictions, and longed to be set free from the mother-country, that San Domingo might be erected into a feudal kingdom with a court and gradation of nobility, whose parchments, indeed, would have been black and engrossed all over with despotism. They wanted the freedom of the seas and all the ports of the world, not from a generous motive, nor from a policy that looked beyond the single object of nourishing slavery at the cheapest rates, to carry its products to the best markets in exchange for flour, cloths, salted provisions, and all the necessaries of a plantation. The revolutionary spirit of Prance was hailed by them, because it seemed to give an opportunity to establish a government without a custom of Paris, to check enfranchisements and crush out the dangerous familiarity of the mulatto, to block with sugar-hogsheads the formidable movements in France and England against the slave-trade. These men sometimes spoke as republicans from their desire to act as despots; they succeeded in getting their delegates admitted to seats in the National Assembly to mix their intrigues with the current of events. Their "_Club Massiac_" in Paris, so named from the proprietor at whose residence its meetings were held, was composed of wealthy, adroit, and unscrupulous men, who often showed what a subtle style of diplomacy a single interest will create. It must be hard for bugs of a cosmopolitan mind to circumvent the _formica leo_, whose sole object in lying still at the bottom of its slippery tunnel is to catch its daily meal.

If this great party of slave-owners had preserved unity upon all the questions which the Revolution excited, their descendants might to-day be the most troublesome enemies of our blockade. But history will not admit an If. The unity which is natural to the slaveholding American was impossible in San Domingo, owing to the existence of the mulattoes and the little whites.

A few intelligent proprietors had foreseen, many years previous to the Revolution, that the continuance of their privileges depended upon the good-will of the mulattoes and the restriction of enfranchisement. The class of mixed blood was becoming large and formidable: of mulattoes and free negroes there were nearly forty thousand. They were nominally free, and had all the rights of property. A number of them were wealthy owners of slaves. But they still bore upon their brows the shadow cast by servitude, from which many of the mixed blood had not yet emerged. The whites of all classes despised these men who reminded them of the color and condition of their mothers. If a mulatto struck or insulted a white man, he was subjected to severe penalties; no offices were open to him, no doors of society, no career except that of trade or agriculture. This was not well endured by a class which had inherited the fire and vanity of their French fathers, with intellectual qualities that caught passion and mobility from the drops of negro blood. Great numbers of them had been carefully educated in France, whither they sent their own children, if they could afford it, to catch the port and habits of free citizens. They were very proud, high-strung, and restless, sombre in the presence of contempt, lowering with some expectation. Frequent attempts had been made by them to extend the area of their rights, but they met with nothing but arrogant repulse. The guilty problem of the island was not destined to be relieved or modified by common sense. The planters should have lifted this social and political ostracism from the mulatto, who loved to make money and to own slaves, and whose passion for livid mistresses was as great as any Frenchman's. They were the natural allies of the proprietors, and should have been erected into an intermediate class, bound to the whites by intelligence and selfish interest, and drawn upon the mother's side to soften the condition of the slave. This policy was often pressed by French writers, and discussed with every essential detail; but the descendants of the buccaneers were bent upon playing out the island's tragedy.

The mulattoes were generally selfish, and did not care to have slavery disturbed. When their deputies went to Paris, to offer the Republic a splendid money-tribute of six million livres, and to plead their cause, one of their number, Vincent Ogé, dined with Clarkson at Lafayette's, and succeeded in convincing the great Abolitionist that he believed in emancipation. "The slave-trade," they said, "was the parent of all the miseries in St. Domingo, not only on account of the cruel treatment it occasioned to the slaves, but on account of the discord which it constantly kept up between the whites and people of color, in consequence of the hateful distinctions it introduced. These distinctions could never be obliterated while it lasted. They had it in their instructions, in case they should obtain a seat in the Assembly, to propose an immediate abolition of the slave-trade, and an immediate amelioration of the state of slavery also, with a view to its abolition in fifteen years."[28]

There is reason to doubt the entire sincerity of these representations, but they were sufficient to convert every proprietor into a bitter foe of mulatto recognition. The deputies were soon after admitted to the bar of the National Assembly, whose president told them that their claims were worthy of consideration. They said to Clarkson that this speech of the president "had roused all the white colonists in Paris. Some of these had openly insulted them. They had held also a meeting on the subject of this speech; at which they had worked themselves up so as to become quite furious. Nothing but intrigue was now going forward among them to put off the consideration of the claims of the free people of color." The deputies at length left Paris in despair. Ogé exclaimed, "If we are once forced to desperate measures, it will be in vain that thousands will be sent across the Atlantic to bring us back to our former state." Clarkson counselled patience; but he found "that there was a spirit of dissatisfaction in them, which nothing but a redress of their grievances could subdue,--and that, if the planters should persevere in their intrigues, and the National Assembly in delay, a fire would be lighted up in St. Domingo which could not easily be extinguished."--This was the position of the Mulatto party.

The third class, of Little Whites, comprised the mechanics and artisans of every description, but also included all whites whose number of slaves did not exceed twenty-four. This party likewise hailed the Revolution, because it hated the pride and privileges of the great proprietors. But it also hated the mulattoes so much that the obvious policy of making common cause with them never seemed to be suggested to it. Among the Little Whites were a goodly number of debtors, who hoped by separation from the mother-country to cancel the burdens incurred for slaves and plantation-necessaries; but the majority did not favor colonial independence. Thus the name of Liberty was invoked by hostile cliques for selfish objects, and the whole colony trembled with the passion of its own elements. Beneath it all lay stretched the huge Enceladus, unconscious of the power which by a single movement might have forestalled eruption by ruin. But he gave no sign.

Several mulattoes had been already hung for various acts of sympathy with their class, when Ogé appeared upon the scene at the head of a handful of armed slaves and mulattoes, and attacked the National Guard of Cap Français. He was routed, after bravely fighting with partial success, fled into the Spanish quarter, whence he was reclaimed in the name of the king, and surrendered by the governor. Thirteen of his followers were condemned to the galleys, twenty-two were hung, and Ogé with his friend Chavannes was broken upon the wheel. A distinction of color was made at the moment of their death: the scaffold upon which they suffered was not allowed to be erected upon the same spot devoted to the execution of whites.

Now the National Guard in all the chief towns was divided into adherents of the mother-country and sympathizers with colonial independence. In a bloody street-fight which took place at Port-au-Prince, the latter were defeated. Then both factions sought to gain a momentary preponderance by allying themselves with the mulattoes: the latter joined the metropolitan party, which in this moment of extremity still thought of color, and served out to the volunteers _yellow pom-pons_, instead of the white ones which distinguished themselves. The mulattoes instantly broke up their ranks, and preserved neutrality.

It would be tedious to relate the disturbances, popular executions, and ferocious acts which took place in every quarter of the island. Murder was inaugurated by the colonists themselves: the provincial faction avenged their previous defeat, and were temporarily masters of the colony. On the 15th of May, 1791, the National Assembly had passed a decree, admitting, by a precise designation, all enfranchised of all colors who were born of free parents to the right of suffrage. When this reached the island, the whites were violently agitated, and many outrages were committed against the people of color. The decree was formally rejected, the mulattoes again flew to arms, and began to put themselves into a condition to demand the rights which had been solemnly conceded to them. In that decree not a word is said of the slaves: the _Amis des Noirs_, and the debates of the National Assembly, stretched out no hand towards that inarticulate and suffering mass. The colonists themselves had been for months shaking a scarlet rag, as if they deliberately meant to excite the first blind plunge of the brute from its harness.

The mulattoes now brought their slaves into headquarters at Croix-des-Bouquets, and armed them. The whites followed this example, and began to drill a body of slaves in Port-au-Prince. Amid this passionate preoccupation of all minds, the ordinary discipline of the plantations was relaxed, the labor languished, the negroes were ill-fed and began to escape to the _mornes_, the subtle earth-currents carried vague disquiet into the most solitary quarters. Then the negroes began to assemble at midnight to subject themselves to the frenzy of their priestesses, and to conduct the serpent-orgies. But it is not likely that the extensive revolt in the Plaine du Cap would have taken place, if an English negro, called Buckman, had not appeared upon the scene, to give a direction to all these restless hearts, and to pour his own clear indignation into them. No one can satisfactorily explain where he came from. One writer will prove to you that he was an emissary of the planting interest in Jamaica, which was willing to set the fatal example of insurrection for the sake of destroying a rival colony. Another pen is equally fertile with assurances that he was bought with the gold of Pitt to be a political instrument of perfidious Albion. It is shown to be more probable that he was the agent of the Spanish governor, whose object was to effect a diversion in the interest of royalism. According to another statement, he belonged to the Cudjoe band of Jamaica maroons, which had forced a declaration of its independence from the governor of that island. Buckman was acquainted with Creole French, and was in full sympathy with the superstitious rites of his countrymen in San Domingo. Putting aside the conjectures of the times, one thing is certain beyond a doubt, that he was born of the moment, and sprang from the festering history which white neglect and criminality had spread, as naturally as the poisoned sting flutters from the swamps of summer. And he filled the night of vengeance, which was accorded to him by laws that cannot be repealed without making the whole life of the planet one sustained expression of the wrath of God.

A furious storm raged during the night of August 22: the blackness was rent by the lightning that is known only to the hurricane-regions of the earth. The negroes gathered upon the Morne Rouge, sacrificed a black heifer with frantic dances which the elements seemed to electrify, thunder emphasized the declaration of the priestess that the entrails were satisfactory, and the quarters were thrown into a huge brazier to be burned. At that moment a bird fell from the overhanging branch of a tree directly into the cooking spell, and terrible shouts of encouragement hailed the omen. Is it an old Pelasgic or a Thracian forest grown mænadic over some forgotten vengeance of the early days? It is the unalterable human nature, masked in the deeper colors of more fervid skies, gathering a mighty breath into its lacerated bosom for a rending of outrage and a lion's leap in the dark against its foe.

"Listen!" cried Buckman. "The good God conceals himself in a cloud, He mutters in the tempest. By the whites He commands crime, by us He commands benefits. But God, who is good, ordains for us vengeance. Tear down the figure of the white man's God which brings the tears to your eyes. Hear! It is Liberty! It speaks to the hearts of us all."

The morning broke clear, but the tempest had dropped from the skies to earth. The costly habitations, whose cornerstones were dungeons, in whose courts the gay guests of the planter used to season their dessert with the punishments he had saved up for them, were carried off by exulting flames. The great fields of cane, which pumped the earth's sap and the negro's blood up for the slaveholder's caldron, went crackling away with the houses which they furnished. Rich garments, dainty upholstery, and the last fashions of Paris went parading on the negroes' backs, and hid the marks of the floggings which earned them. The dead women and children lay in the thickets where they had vainly implored mercy. There are long careers of guiltiness whose devilish nature becomes apparent only when innocence suffers with it. Then the cry of a babe upon a negro's pike is the voice of God's judgment against a century.

Will it be credited that the whites who witnessed the smoking plain from the roofs of Cap Français broke into the houses of the mulattoes, and murdered all they could find,--the paralytic old man in his bed, the daughters in the same room, the men in the street,--murdered and ravished during one long day? In this crisis of the colony, suspicion and prejudice of color were stronger than personal alarm. Every action of the whites was piqued by pride of color and the intoxication of caste. These vulgar mulatto-making pale-faces would hazard their safety sooner than grasp the hand of their own half-breeds and arm it with the weapon of unity. Color-blindness was at length the weakness through which violated laws revenged themselves: the French could not perceive which heart was black and which was white.

If Northern statesmen and glib editors of Tory sheets would derive a lesson from San Domingo for the guidance of the people, let them find it in the horrors wrought by the white man's prejudice. It is the key to the history of the island. And it is by means of the black man that God perceives whether the Christianity of Church and State is skin-deep or not. Beneath those oxidated surfaces He has hidden metal for the tools and swords of a republic, and into our hands He puts the needle of the text, "God has made of one blood all nations," to agitate and attract us to our true safety and glory. The black man is the test of the white man's ability to be the citizen of a long-lived republic. It is as if God lighted His lamp and decked His altar behind those bronze doors, and waited for the incense and chant of Liberty to open them and enter His choir, instead of passing by. So long as America hates and degrades the black man, so long will she be deprived of four millions' worth of God. In so much of God a great deal of retribution must be slumbering, if the story of San Domingo was a fact, and not a hideous dream.

NEGRO SOLDIERS.[29]

The native tribes of Africa differ as much in combative propensity and ability for warlike enterprises as in their other traits. The people of Wadai are distinguished for bravery above all their neighbors. The men of Ashantee are great fighters, and have such a contempt for death that they will continue their attacks upon a European intrenchment in spite of appalling losses. A band that is overpowered will fight to the last man; for it is the custom of the kingdom to punish cowardice with death. They are almost the only negroes who will deliver battle in the open field, in regular bodies with closed ranks. In Dahomey war is a passion of the ruler and the people, and the year is divided between fighting and feasting. The king's body-guard of five thousand unmarried women preserves the tradition of bravery, as European regiments preserve their flags. The mild Mandingos become obstinate in fight; they have minstrels who accompany armies to war, and recite the deeds of former heroes; but they are not capable of discipline. On the contrary, the negroes of Fernando Po march and exercise with a great regard to order. In Ashantee and upon the Gold Coast the negroes make use of horn signals in war to transmit orders to a distance; and on the White Nile and in Kaffa drummers are stationed in trees to telegraph commands. Great circumspection is not universal; but the Veis maintain posts, and when they are threatened, a watch is kept night and day. The negroes of Akkra know the value of a ditched intrenchment.

The English praise the negro soldiers whom they have in Sierra Leone for good behavior, temperance, and discipline; and their Jolofs at the Gambia execute complicated manoeuvres in a striking way. West-Indian troops have performed many distinguished services, and English officers say that they are as brave as Europeans; but in the heat of a fight they are apt to grow intractable and to behave wildly. The troops which Napoleon used in Calabria, drawn from the French Colonies, emulated the French soldiers, and arrived at great distinction.

D'Escayrac says that the native negro has eminent qualities for the making of a good soldier,--dependence upon a superior, unquestioning confidence in his sagacity, an enthusiastic courage which mounts to great audacity, passiveness, and capacity for waiting.

From this the Congos must be excepted. Large numbers of them deserted General Dessalines in San Domingo, and fled to the mountains, frightened at the daring of the French. Here, if brave, they might have been armed and officered by Spaniards to effect dangerous movements in his rear. But he knew their timidity, and gave himself no trouble about them. There is a genealogy which derives Toussaint from a Congo grandfather, a native prince of renown; but it was probably manufactured for him at the suggestion of his own achievements. The sullen-looking Congo is really gay, rollicking, disposed to idleness, careless and sensual, fatigued by the smallest act of reflection; Toussaint was grave, reticent, forecasting, tenacious, secretive, full of endurance and concentration, rapid and brave in war.[30] What a confident and noble aspect he had, when he left his guard and walked alone to the head of a column of old troops of his who had deserted to Desfourneaux, and were about to deliver their fire! "My children, will you fire upon your father?"--and down went four regiments upon their knees. The white officers tried to bring them under the fire of cannon, but it was too late. Here was a greater risk than Napoleon ran, after landing at Fréjus, on his march upon Paris.

Contempt for death is a universal trait of the native African.[31] The slaveholder says it is in consequence of his affinity to the brute, which does not know how to estimate a danger, and whose nervous organization is too dull to be thrilled and daunted in its presence. It is really in consequence of his single-mindedness: the big necks lift the blood, which is two degrees warmer than a white man's, and drench the brain with an ecstasy of daring. If he can clearly see the probable manner of his death, the blood is up and not down at the sight.[32] The negro's nerves are very susceptible; in cool blood he is easily alarmed at anything unexpected or threatening. His fancy is peopled with odd fears; he shrinks at the prospect of a punishment more grotesque or refined than usual. And when he becomes a Creole negro, his fancy is always shooting timid glances beneath the yoke of Slavery. The negroes and mulattoes at San Domingo looked impassively at hanging, breaking upon the wheel, and quartering; but when the first guillotine was imported and set in action, they and the Creole whites shrank appalled to see the head disappear in the basket. It was too deft and sudden for their taste, and this mode of execution was abandoned for the more hearty and lacerating methods.

When a negro has a motive, his nerves grow firm, his imagination escapes before the rising passion, his contempt for death is not stolidity, but inspiration. In the smouldering surface lies an ember capable of white heat. That makes the negro soldier difficult to hold in hand or to call off. He has no fancy for grim sitting, like the Indian, to die by inches, though he can endure torture with tranquillity. He is too tropical for that; and after the exultation of a fight, in which he has been as savage as he can be, the process of torturing his foes seems tame, and he seldom does it, except by way of close reprisals to prevent the practice in his enemy. The French were invariably more cruel than the negroes.

Southern gentlemen think that the negro is incurably afraid of fire-arms, and too clumsy to use them with effect. It is a great mistake. White men who never touched a gun are equally clumsy and nervous. When the slavers began to furnish the native tribes with condemned muskets in exchange for slaves, many ludicrous scenes occurred. The Senegambians considered that the object was to get as much noise as possible out of the weapon. The people of Akkra planted the stock against their hips, shut both eyes and fired; they would not take aim, because it was their opinion that it brought certain death to see a falling enemy. Other tribes thought a musket was possessed, and at the moment of firing threw it violently away from them. When we consider the quality of the weapons furnished, this action will appear laudable. But as these superstitions disappeared, especially upon the Gold Coast and in Ashantee, negroes have learned to use the musket properly. Among the Gold-Coast negroes are good smiths, who have sometimes even made guns. In the West Indies, the Creole negro has become a sharp-shooter, very formidable on the skirts of woods and in the defiles of the _mornes_. He learned to deliver volleys with precision, and to use the bayonet with great valor. The old soldiers of Le Clerc and Rochambeau, veterans of the Rhine and Italy, were never known to presume upon negro incapacity to use a musket. The number of their dead and wounded taught them what men who are determined to be free can do with the white man's weapons.

Rainsford, who was an English captain of a West-Indian regiment, describes a review of fifty thousand soldiers of Toussaint on the Plaine du Cap. "Of the grandeur of the scene I had not the smallest conception. Each general officer had a demi-brigade, which went through the manual exercise with a degree of expertness seldom witnessed, and performed equally well several manoeuvres applicable to their method of fighting. At a whistle a whole brigade ran three or four hundred yards, then, separating, threw themselves flat on the ground, changing to their backs or sides, keeping up a strong fire the whole of the time, till they were recalled; they then formed again, in an instant, into their wonted regularity. This single manoeuvre was executed with such facility and precision as totally to prevent cavalry from charging them in bushy and hilly countries. Such complete subordination, such promptitude and dexterity, prevailed the whole time, as would have astonished any European soldier."

These were the men whose previous lives had been spent at the hoe-handle, and in feeding canes to the cylinders of the sugar-mill.

Rainsford gives this general view of the operations of Toussaint's forces:--"Though formed into regular divisions, the soldiers of the one were trained to the duties of the other, and all understood the management of artillery with the greatest accuracy. Their chief dexterity, however, was in the use of the bayonet. With that dreadful weapon fixed on muskets of extraordinary length in their hands, neither cavalry nor artillery could subdue infantry, although of unequal proportion; but when they were attacked in their defiles, no power could overcome them. Infinitely more skillful than the Maroons of Jamaica in their cock-pits, though not more favored by Nature, they found means to place whole lines in ambush, continuing sometimes from one post to another, and sometimes stretching from their camps in the form of a horse-shoe. With these lines artillery was not used, to prevent their being burdened or the chance of loss; but the surrounding heights of every camp were well fortified, according to the experience and judgment of different European engineers, with ordnance of the best kind, in proper directions. The protection afforded by these outworks encouraged the blacks to every exertion of skill or courage; while the alertness constantly displayed embarrassed the enemy; who, frequently irritated, or worn out with fatigue, flew in disorder to the attack, or retreated with difficulty. Sometimes a regular battle or skirmish ensued, to seduce the enemy to a confidence in their own superiority, when in a moment reinforcements arose from an ambush in the vicinity, and turned the fortune of the day. If black troops in the pay of the enemy were despatched to reconnoitre when an ambush was probable, and were discovered, not a man returned, from the hatred which their perfidy had inspired; nor could an officer venture beyond the lines with impunity."

The temporary successes enjoyed by the French General Le Clerc, which led to the surrender of Toussaint and his subsequent deportation to France, were owing to the defection of several black officers in command of important posts, who delivered up all their troops and munitions to the enemy. The whole of Toussaint's first line, protecting the Artibonite and the mountains, was thus unexpectedly forced by the French, who plied the blacks with suave proclamations, depreciating the idea of a return to slavery. Money and promises of personal promotion were also freely used. The negro is vain and very fond of pomp. This is his weakest point. The Creole negro loved to make great expenditures, and to imitate the lavish style of the slaveholders. So did many of the mulattoes. Toussaint's officers were not all black, and the men of color proved accessible to French cajolery.

Take a single case to show how this change of sentiment was produced without bribery. When the French expedition under Le Clere arrived, the mulatto General Maurepas commanded at Port-de-Paix. He had not yet learned whether Toussaint intended to rely upon the proclamation of Bonaparte and to deliver up the military posts. General Humbert was sent against him with a strong column, and demanded the surrender of the fort. Said Maurapas,--"I am under the orders of Toussaint, who is my chief; I cannot deliver the forts to you without his orders. Wait till I receive his instructions; it will be only a matter of four-and-twenty hours." Humbert, who knew that Toussaint was in full revolt, replied,--"I have orders to attack."

"Very well. I cannot surrender without an order from General Toussaint. If you attack me, I shall be obliged to defend myself."

"I also have my orders; I am forced to obey them."

Maurepas retired, and took his station alone upon a rampart of the works. Humbert's troops, numbering four thousand, opened fire. Maurepas remains awhile in the storm of bullets to reconnoitre, then coolly descends and opens his own fire. He had but seven hundred blacks and sixty whites. The French attacked four times and were four times repulsed, with the loss of fifteen hundred men. Humbert was obliged to retreat, before the reinforcement which had been despatched under General Debelle could reach him. Maurepas's orders were not to attack, but to defend. So he instantly hastened to another post, which intercepted the route by which General Debelle was coming, met him, and fought him there, repulsed him, and took seven cannon.

This was not an encouraging commencement for these children of the French Revolution, who had beaten Suwarrow in Switzerland and blasted the Mameluke cavalry with rolling fire, who had debouched from the St. Bernard upon the plains of Piedmont in time to gather Austrian flags at Marengo, and who added the name of Hohenlinden to the glory of Moreau. Humbert himself, at the head of four thousand grenadiers, had restored the day which preceded the surrender of the Russians at Zürich.

Le Clerc was obliged to say that the First Consul never had the intention of restoring slavery. Humbert himself carried this proclamation to Maurepas, and with it gained admittance to the intrenchments which he could not storm. This single defection placed four thousand admirable troops, and the harbor of Port-de-Paix, in the hands of the French, and exposed Toussaint's flank at Gonaïves; and its moral effect was so great upon the blacks as to encourage Le Clerc to persist in his enterprise.

In the brief period of pacification which preceded this attempt of Bonaparte to reconquer the island, Toussaint was mainly occupied with the organization of agriculture. His army then consisted of only fifteen demi-brigades, numbering in all 22,500, a guard of honor of one thousand infantry, a regiment of cavalry, and an artillery corps. But the military department was in perfect order. There was an État-Major, consisting of a general of division with two aides-de-camp, a company of guides, one of dragoons, and two secretaries,--ten brigadier-generals with ten secretaries, ten aides-de-camp, and an escort,--and a board of health, composed of one chief inspector, six physicians, and six surgeons-general. The commissary and engineering departments were also thoroughly organized. The pay of the 22,500 men amounted to 7,838,400 francs; rations, 6,366,195; musicians, 239,112; uniforming, 1,887,682; officers' uniforms, 208,837. The pay of a non-commissioned officer and private was 55 centimes per day.

In this army there were one thousand mulattoes, and five or six hundred whites, recruited from the various artillery regiments which had been in the colony during the last ten years. Every cultivator was a member of the great reserve of this army, its spy and outpost and partisan.

The chief interest of the campaign against Le Clerc turns upon the obstinate defence of Crête-à-Pierrot. Here the best qualities of black troops were manifested. This was a simple oblong redoubt, thrown up by the English during their brief occupation of the western coast, and strengthened by the negroes. The Artibonite, which is the most important river of the colony, threading its way from the mountains of the interior through the _mornes_, which are not many miles from the sea, passed under this redoubt, which was placed to command the principal defile into the inaccessible region beyond. The rich central plains, the river, and the mountains belonged to whoever held this post. The Mirbalais quarter could raise potatoes enough to nourish sixty thousand men accustomed to that kind of food.

When Toussaint's plan was spoiled by defection and defeat, he transferred immense munitions to the mountains, and decided to concentrate, for the double purpose of holding the place, if possible, and of getting the French away from their supplies. It was a simple breastwork of Campeachy-wood faced with earth, and had a ditch fifteen feet deep. At a little distance was a small redoubt upon an eminence which overlooked the larger work. To the east the great scarped rocks forbade an approach, and dense spinous undergrowth filled the surrounding forest. The defence of this place was given to Dessalines, a most audacious and able fighter. Toussaint intended to harass the investing columns from the north, and Charles Belair was posted to the south, beyond and near the Artibonite. Toussaint would then be between the fortress and the French corps of observation which was left in the north,--a position which he turned to brilliant advantage. Four French columns, of more than twelve thousand men, commenced, from as many different directions, a slow and difficult movement upon this work. The first column which came within sight of it found a body of negroes drawn up, as if ready to give battle on the outside. It was the surplus of one or two thousand troops which the intrenchment would not hold. The French, expecting to rout them and enter the redoubt with them, charged with the bayonet; the blacks fled, and the French reached the glacis. Suddenly the blacks threw themselves into the ditch, thus exposing the French troops to a terrible fire, which was opened from the redoubt. General Debelle was severely wounded, and three or four hundred men were stretched upon the field.

The advance in another quarter was checked by a small redoubt that opened an unexpected fire. It was necessary to take it, and cannon had to be employed. When the balls began to reach them, the blacks danced and sang, and soon, issuing suddenly, with, cries, "_En avant! Canons à nous_," attempted to take the pieces with the bayonet. But the supporting fire was too strong, they were thrown into disorder, and the redoubt was entered by the French.

Early one morning the camp of the blacks was surprised by one of the columns, which had surmounted all the difficulties in its way. Notwithstanding the previous experience, the French thought this time to enter, and advanced precipitately. Many blacks entered the redoubt, the rest jumped into the ditch, and the same terrible fire vomited forth. Another column advanced to support the attack; but the first one was already crushed and in full retreat. The blacks swarmed to the parapets, threw planks across the ditch, and attacked both columns with drums beating the charge. The French turned, and met just resistance enough to bring them again within range, the same fire broke forth, and the columns gave way, with a loss to the first of four hundred and eighty men, and two or three hundred to the latter.

Upon this retreat, the cultivators of the neighborhood exchanged shots with the flanking parties, and displayed great boldness.

It was plain to the French that this open redoubt would have to be invested; but before this was done, Dessalines had left the place with all the troops which could not be fed there, and cut his way across a column with the loss of a hundred men. The defence was committed to a quarteroon named Lamartinière.

While the French were completing the investment, the morning music of the black band floated the old strains of the Marseillaise within their lines. La Croix declares that it produced a painful sensation. The soldiers looked at each other, and recalled the great marches which carried victory to that music against the tyrants of Europe. "What!" they said, "are our barbarous enemies in the right? Are we no longer the soldiers of the Republic? Have we become the servile instruments of _la politique_?" No doubt of that; these children of the Marseillaise and adorers of Moreau had become _de trop_ in the Old World, and had been sent to leave their bones in the defiles of _Pensez-y-bien_.[33]

The investment of Crête-à-Pierrot was regularly made, by Bacheiu, an engineer who had distinguished himself in Egypt. Batteries were established before the head of each division, a single mortar was got into position, and a battery of seven pieces played upon the little redoubt above. This is getting to be vastly more troublesome than the fort of Bard, which held in check these very officers and men upon their road to Marengo.

Rochambeau thought he had extinguished the fire of the little redoubt, and would fain storm it. The blacks had protected it by an abatis ten feet deep and three in height, in which our gallant ally of the Revolution entangled himself, and was held there till he had lost three hundred men, and gained nothing.

"Thus the Crête-à-Pierrot, in which (and in the small redoubt) there were hardly twelve hundred men,[34] had already cost us more than fifteen hundred in sheer loss. So we fell back upon the method which we should have tried in the beginning, a vigorous blockade and a sustained cannonade."

The fire was kept up night and day for three days without cessation. Descourtilz, a French naturalist, who had been forced to act as surgeon, was in the redoubt, and he describes the scenes of the interior. The enfilading fire shattered the timber-work, and the bombs set fire to the tents made of macaw-tree foliage, which the negroes threw flaming into the ditch. A cannoneer sees a bomb falls close to a sick friend of his who is asleep; considering that sleep is very needful for him, he seizes the bomb, and cuts off the fuse with a knife. In a corner nods a grenadier overcome with fatigue; a bomb falls at his side; he wakes simultaneously with the explosion, to be blown to sleep again. The soldiers stand and watch the bright parabola, in dead silence; then comes the cry, "_Gare à la bombe!_" Hungry and thirsty men chew leaden balls for relief. Five hundred men have fallen. Some of the officers come for the surgeon's opium. They will not be taken alive. But the excitement of the scene is so great that opium fails of its wonted effect, and they complain of the tardiness of the dose. Other officers make their wills with _sang froid_, as if expecting a tranquil administration of their estates.

During the last night the little garrison evacuates the upper redoubt, and is seen coming towards the work. Down goes the drawbridge, the blacks issue to meet them, taking them for a storming party of the French. There is a mutual mistake, both parties of blacks deliver their fire, the sortie party retreats, and the garrison enters the redoubt with them. Here they discover the mistake, but their rage is so great that they exhaust their cartridges upon each other at four paces. Descourtilz takes advantage of the confusion to throw himself into the ditch, and escapes under a volley.

The place is no longer tenable, and must be evacuated. A scout apprises Toussaint of the necessity, and it is arranged that he shall attack from the north, while Lamartinière issues from the redoubt. During Toussaint's feint, the black garrison cut their way through the left of Rochambeau's division.

General Le Clerc cannot withhold his admiration. "The retreat which the commandant of Crête-à-Pierrot dared to conceive and execute is a remarkable feat of arms. We surrounded his post to the number of more than twelve thousand men; he saved himself, did not lose half his garrison, and left us only his dead and wounded. We found the baggage of Dessalines, a few white cannoneers, the music of the guard of honor, a magazine of powder, a number of muskets, and fifteen cannon of great calibre."

Toussaint turned immediately towards the north, raised the cultivators, attacked the corps of observation, drove it into Cap Français, ravaged the plain, turned and defeated Hardy's division, which attempted to keep open the communications with Le Clerc, and would have taken the city, if fresh reinforcements from France had not at the same time arrived in the harbor.

After the arrest of Toussaint, Dessalines reorganized the resistance of the blacks, and attacked Rochambeau in the open field, driving him into the city, where Le Clerc had just died: in that infected atmosphere he kept the best troops of France besieged. "_Ah! ce gaillard_," the French called the epidemic which came to complete the work of the blacks. Twenty thousand men reinforced Rochambeau, but he capitulated, after a terrible assault which Dessalines made with twenty-seven thousand men, on the 28th November, 1803.

One more touch of negro soldiery must suffice. There was an intrenchment, called Verdière, occupied by the French, upon a hill overlooking the city. Dessalines sent a negro general, Capoix, with three demi-brigades to take it. "They recoiled," says Schoelcher, "horribly mutilated by the fire from the intrenchment. He rallied them: the grape tore them in pieces, and hurled them again to the bottom of the hill. Boiling with rage, Capoix goes to seek fresh troops, mounts a fiery horse, and rushes forward for the third time; but the thousand deaths which the fort delivers repulse his soldiers. He foams with anger, exhorts them, pricks them on, and leads them up a fourth time. A ball kills his horse, and he rolls over, but, soon extricating himself, he runs to the head of the troops. '_En avant! En avant!_' he repeats, with enthusiasm; at the same instant his plumed chapeau is swept from his head by a grape-shot, but he still throws himself forward to the assault. '_En avant! En avant!_'

"Then great shouts went up along the ramparts of the city: '_Bravo! bravo! vivat! vivat!_' cried Rochambeau and his staff, who were watching the assault. A drum-roll is heard, the fire of Verdière pauses, an officer issues from the city, gallops to the very front of the surprised blacks, and saluting, says,--'The Captain-General Rochambeau and the French army send their admiration to the general officer who has just covered himself with glory.' This magnificent message delivered, he turned his horse, reëntered the city, and the assault is renewed. Imagine if Capoix and his soldiers did new prodigies of valor. But the besieged were also electrified, would not be overcome, and Dessalines sent the order to retire. The next day a groom led a richly caparisoned horse to the quarter-general of the blacks, which Rochambeau offered as a mark of his admiration, and to replace that which he regretted had been killed."

The valor and fighting qualities of the blacks in San Domingo were nourished by the wars which sprang from their own necessities. They were the native growths of the soil which had been long enriched by their innocent blood; more blood must be invested in it, if they would own it. Learning to fight was equivalent to learning to live. Their cause was neither represented nor championed by a single power on earth, and nothing but the hope of making enormous profits out of their despair led Anglo-American schooners to run English and French blockades, to land arms and powder in the little coves of the island. Will the negro fight as well, if the motive and the exigency are inferior?

We make a present to the Southern negro of an excellent chance for fighting, with our compliments. Some of us do it with our curses. The war does not spring for them out of enthusiasm and despair which seize their hearts at once, as they view a degradation from which they flee and a liberty to which they are all hurrying. They are asked to fight for us as well as for themselves, and this asking is, like emancipation, a military necessity. The motive lacks the perfect form and incandescence, like that of a star leaping from a molten sun, which lighted battle-ardors in the poor slaves of San Domingo. And we even hedge about this invitation to bleed for us with conditions which are evidently dictated by a suspicion that the motive is not great enough to make the negro depend upon himself. If the war does not entirely sweep away these poor beginnings and thrust white and black together into the arms of thrilling danger, we need not expect great fighting from him. He may not disgrace himself, but he will not ennoble the republic till his heart's core is the war's core, and the colors of two races run into one.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] See Numbers LVI., LVIII., LIX., and LXV. of this magazine.

[26] _La Cause des Esclaves Nègres et des Habitans de la Guinée, portée au Tribunal de la Justice, de la Religion, de la Politique_: I. 335; II. 66.

[27] _Gros peau_, thick skin, was the French equivalent to _Bozal_: _peau fin_ was the Creole negro.

[28] Clarkson's _History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade_, Vol. II. p. 134.

[29] _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, von Dr. Theodor Waitz. Zweiter Theil: die Negervölker und ihre Verwandten. Leipzig, 1860. Very full, minute, and humane in tone, though telling all the facts about the manners and habits of native Africans.

_Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de la Révolution de Saint Dominique._ Par le Lieutenant-Général Baron Pamphile de La Croix. 2 Tom. Generally very fair to the negro soldier: himself a distinguished soldier.

_Le Système Colonial dévoilé._ Par le Baron de Vastey, mulatto. Terrible account of the plantation cruelties.

_Mémoires pour servir a l'Histoire d'Hayti._ Par l'Adjutant-Général Boisrond-Tonnerre. Written to explain the defection of Dessalines from Toussaint, and the military movements of the former. The author was a mulatto.

_Des Colonies, et particulièrement de celle de Saint-Domingue; Mémoire Historique et Politique._ Par le Colonel Malenfant, Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, etc. A pretty impartial book, by a pro-slavery man.

_L. F. Sonthonax à Bourdon de l'Oise._ Pamphlet. The vindication of Sonthonax for declaring emancipation.

_Colonies Étrangères et Haïti._ Par Victor Schoelcher. 2 Tom. Valuable, but leaning too much towards the negro against the mulatto.

_Histoire des Désastres de Saint-Domingue._ Paris, 1795. Journalistic, with the coloring of the day.

_Campagnes des Français à Saint-Domingue, et Réfutation des Reproches faits au Capitaine-Général Rochambeau._ Par Ph. Albert de Lattre, Propriétaire, etc., 1805. Shows that Rochambeau could not help himself.

_Voyages d'un Naturaliste._ 3 Tom. Par Descourtilz. Pro-slavery, but filled with curious information.

_Expédition à St. Domingue._ Par A. Metral. Useful.

_The Empire of Hayti._ By Marcus Rainsford, Captain in West-Indian Regiment. Occasionally valuable.

[30] The independent Congos in the interior are more active and courageous, expert and quarrelsome than those upon the coast, who have been subjected by the Portuguese.

[31] When the insurgents evacuated a fort near Port-au-Prince, upon the advance of the English, a negro was left in the powder-magazine with a lighted match, to wait till the place was occupied. Here he remained all night; but when the English came later than was expected, his match had burned out. Was that insensibility to all ideas, or devotion to one?

[32] Praloto was a distinguished Italian in the French artillery service. His battery of twenty field-pieces at Port-au-Prince held the whole neighborhood in check, till at length a young negro named Hyacinthe roused the slaves to attack it. In the next fight, they rushed upon this battery, insensible to its fire, embraced the guns and were bayoneted, still returned to them, stuffed the arms of their dead comrades into the muzzles, swarmed over them, and extinguished the fire. This was done against a supporting fire of French infantry. The blacks lost a thousand men, but captured the cannon, and drove the whole force into the city.

[33] _Think twice before you try me_: the name of a _morne_ of extraordinary difficulty, which had to be surmounted by one of the French columns.

[34] Negro authorities say 750.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Sunshine in Thought._ By CHARLES GODFREY LELAND, Author of "Meister Karl's Sketch-Book," and Translator of "Heine's Pictures of Travel." New York: Charles T. Evans. 16mo.

We do not exactly know how to characterize this jubilant volume. The author, not content to denounce generally the poets of sentimentality and the prophets of despair, has evidently a science of Joy latent in his mind, of which his rich, discursive, and somewhat rollicking sentences give but an imperfect exposition. He is in search of an ideal law of Cheerfulness, which neither history nor literature fully illustrates, but which he still seeks with an undoubting faith. Every transient glimpse of his law he eagerly seizes, whether indicated in events or in persons. And it must be admitted that he is not ignorant either of the great annalists or the great writers of the world. He knows Herodotus as well as he knows Hume, Thucydides as intimately as Gibbon. Xenophon and Plutarch are as familiar to him as Michelet, Thiers, and Guizot. He has studied Aristænetus and Lucian as closely as Horace Walpole and Thackeray,--is as ready to quote from Plato as from Rabelais,--and throws the results of his wide study, with an occasional riotous disregard of prim literary proprieties, into a fierce defiance of everything which makes against his favorite theory, that there is nothing in pure theology, sound ethics, and healthy literature, nothing in the historic records of human life, which can justify the discontent of the sentimentalist or the scorn of the misanthrope.

Engaged thus in an almost Quixotic assault on the palpable miseries of human existence,--miseries which are as much acknowledged by Homer as by Euripides, by Ariosto as by Dante, by Shakspeare as by Milton, by Goethe as by Lamartine,--he has a difficult work to perform. Still he does not bate a jot of heart and hope. He discriminates, with the art of a true critic, between objective representations of human life and subjective protests against human limitations, errors, miseries, and sins. As far as either representation embodies the human principle of Joy,--whether Greek or Roman, ancient or modern, Christian or Pagan,--he is content with the evidence. The moment a writer of either school insinuates a principle or sentiment of Despair, whether he be a dramatist or a sentimentalist, the author enters his earnest protest. Classical and Romantic poets, romancers and historians, when they slip into misery-mongers, are equally the objects of his denunciations. Keats and Tennyson fare nearly as ill as Byron and Heine. Mr. Leland feels assured that the human race is entitled to joy, and there is something almost comical in his passionate assault on the morbid genius of the world. He seems to say, "Why do you not accept the conditions of happiness? The conditions are simple, and nothing but your pestilent wilfulness prevents your compliance with them."

This "pestilent wilfulness" is really the key to the whole position. All objective as well as subjective writers have been impotent to provide the way by which the seeker after perfect and permanent content can attain and embody it. It has been sought through wit, humor, fancy, imagination, reason; but it has been sought in vain. Our author, who, after nearly exhausting all the concrete representatives of the philosophy of Joy, admits that nobody embodies his ideal of happiness, surrenders his ideal, as far as it has been practically expressed in life or thought. Rabelais dissatisfies him; Scarron dissatisfies him; Molière, Swift, Sterne, not to mention others, dissatisfy him. Every ally he brings forward to sustain his position is reduced by analysis into a partial enemy of his creed. But while we cannot concur in Mr. Leland's theory in his exclusive statement of it, and confess to a strong liking for many writers whom he considers effeminate, we cordially agree with him in his plea for "Sunshine in Thought," and sympathize in his vigorous and valorous assault on the morbid elements of our modern literature. We think that poets should be as cheerful as possible; whereas some of them seem to think it is their duty to be as fretful as possible, and to make misery an invariable accompaniment of genius. The primary object of all good literature is to invigorate and to cheer, not to weaken and depress; it should communicate mental and moral life, as well as convey sentiments and ideas,--should brace and strengthen the mind, as well as fill it; and when it whimpers and wails, when it teaches despair as philosophy, especially when it uses the enchantments of imagination to weaken the active powers, its effect is mischievous. Woe, considered as a luxury, is the most expensive of all luxuries; and there is danger to the mental and moral health even in the pensive sadness which, to some readers, sheds such a charm over the meditations of that kind of genius which is rather thoughtful than full of thought. For the melodious miseries which mediocrity mimics, for the wretchedness which some fifth-rate rhymers assume in order to make themselves interesting, there can, of course, be no toleration. Mr. Leland pounds them as with the hammer of Thor, and would certainly beat out their brains, had not Nature fortunately neglected to put such perilous matter into craniums exposed to such ponderous blows.

Apart from the general theory and purpose of the book, there is a great deal of talent and learning exhibited in the illustrations of the subject. The remarks on Aristophanes, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Heine,--half analysis, half picture,--are very striking; and there are, throughout the volume, continual flashes of suggestive thought and vivid portraiture, which both delight and detain the reader. The style is that of animated conversation,--the conversation of a man whose veins are as full of blood as his mind is of ideas, who is hilarious from abounding health, and whose occasional boisterousness of manner proceeds from the robustness of his make and the cheer of his soul. The whole volume tends to create in thought that "sunshine" which it so joyously recommends and celebrates. The reader is warmed by the ardor and earnestness with which propositions he may distrust are urged upon his attention, and closes the volume with that feeling of pleased excitement which always comes from contact with a fresh and original mind.

_The Gentleman._ By GEORGE H. CALVERT. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

Paradoxical as it may appear, we believe there never was a time when the true and pure standard of gentlemanhood could be more impressively raised and upheld in this republic than now. The vast and keen civil conflict which so deeply agitates our political life has laid bare the groundwork and brought to the surface the latent elements of our social life, so that a new, an obvious, and a searching test is instinctively applied to character; as in all times of profound moral excitement, _shams_ grow fantastic and contemptible, and _principles_ of action and being rise to superlative worth. The question, What constitutes the Gentleman? suggested at first by the preposterous and exclusive claims thereto arrogantly put forth by a little community, in justification of profane and destructive violence to a nation's welfare, has come to be regarded as embracing all the obligations, responsibilities, and humanities that make up and certify Christian manhood and genuine patriotism; the wide and deep significance of a word too often confounded with mere manners is thus practically found to indicate the most vital elements of personal worth and social well-being. Accordingly, a comprehensive, philosophical definition and illustration of the Gentleman, in the ideal grace and greatness and in the real authority and use of that so much misunderstood and seldom achieved character, is doubly welcome at this hour, the strife and discussion whereof bring out in such strong relief the true _animus_ and equipment of statesmen, soldiers, citizens, men and women, and force us to realize the poverty of soul, the inherent baseness, or the magnanimity and rectitude of our fellow-creatures, with a vividness never before experienced. How indispensable to the welfare of the State is a society based on higher motives than those of material ambition, and how impossible is the existence of such a society, except through individual probity and disinterestedness, is a lesson written in blood and tears before our eyes to-day; and thrice welcome, we repeat, is the clear and emphatic exposition of the Gentleman, as an incarnation of the justice, love, and honor, whereon, in the last analysis, rest the hopes and welfare of the nation. No ethical or æsthetical treatise could be more seasonable than this of Mr. Calvert's. We regard it as the best lay-sermon thus far evoked by the moral exigencies of the hour; however appropriate it may also be and is to any and all times and readers of taste and thought, a superficial, merely dilettante essay on such a subject and at such a time would repel instead of alluring.

The charming little volume before us, while made genially attractive by occasional playfulness and anecdote, is yet pervaded by an earnestness born of strong conviction and deep sympathies. It analyzes the springs of character, traces conduct to its elemental source, and follows it to its ultimate influence. To a concise style it unites an expansive spirit; with a tone of rich and high culture it blends the vivacity and grace of the most genial colloquy. From the etymology of the word to the humanity of the character, a full, forcible, frank, and fervent discussion of the Gentleman is given, as he figures in history, in society, in domestic life, and in literature,--and as he lives, a grand and gracious ideal, in the consciousness of the author. Beginning with the meaning, origin, and use of the word Gentleman, Mr. Calvert gives a critical analysis of its historical personation. As a chevalier type, in such men as Sidney and Bayard. Its ethical and æsthetical meaning is finely exemplified in the contrast between Charles Lamb and George IV., Leicester and Hampden, Washington and Napoleon. The Gentleman in St. Paul is well illustrated. The relation of this character to antiquity is defined with a scholar's zest: whatever of its force and flavor is discernible in Socrates and Brutus is gracefully indicated; the deficiency of Homer's heroes, excepting Hector, therein, is ably demonstrated. These and like illustrations of so prolific a theme inevitably suggest episodes of argument, incidental, yet essential to the main question; and the just and benign remarks on the Duel, the Position of Women in Ancient and Modern Society, and the Influence of Christianity upon Manners, are striking in their scope and style, and breathe the lofty and tender spirit of that Faith which inculcates _disinterestedness_ as the latent and lasting inspiration of the Gentleman. Perhaps the most delectable illustrations, which give both form and beauty to this essay, are those drawn from modern literature: they are choice specimens of criticism, and full of subtile discrimination in tracing the relation of literature to life. We would instance especially the chapters on Shakspeare's Gentleman; the recognition of the Gentleman in Sir Roger de Coverley, Uncle Toby, and Don Quixote; and the admirable distinction pointed out between the characters of Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. There is no part of the volume more worthy attention than the remarks of a "high-bred tone in writing." The hollowness of Chesterfield's code is keenly exposed; Honor and Vulgarity are freshly and ably defined; Fashion, Pride, and Vanity, the conventional elements of the Gentleman, are treated with philosophical justice; the favorite characters of fiction, and the most renowned poets and heroes, beaux and braves, pass before us, and are subjected to the test of that Christian ideal of the Gentleman so clearly defined and firmly applied by the intrepid author; and many a disguised coxcomb is stripped of his borrowed plumes, imperial _parvenus_ exposed as charlatans in manners as well as morals, and heroic, but modest souls, of whom the world's court-calendar gives no hint, stand forth exemplars of the highest, because the most soulful breeding.