IV.—PERSIA.
In sketching the history of education, I am careful not to limit my consideration to the school. The most important interest to us is a discussion of the new ideas contributed to civilization—the ideas that have come down to our own time, and that have exercised an influence on all the great national movements that have appeared on the surface of history. The true view of history looks upon it as a process by which Divine Providence educates the race. He unfolds something to each people, and does not let that revelation vanish again from earth, but causes its transmission to other nations, often by dark and mysterious providences:
“One accent of the Holy Ghost
This heedless world hath never lost.”
In Persia we have a new religious principle making its appearance, quite different from those we have met in our studies of China and India. It is the distinction between good and evil, both being regarded by the Persian as real and self-existent principles. Hence we have a negative power in the divine; for not good alone is supreme, but the good is limited by evil, and both are eternal, or at least real and actual, in the present world. The Hindu did not acknowledge the reality of evil; it was all “maya,” or illusion—a mere dream of our feverish consciousness. The whole world of nature, as well as the world of human beings, was likewise a dream that exists only in human consciousness. It is the duty of the good Brahmin to get rid of this dream of a world, by means of abstraction and penance and mortification of the flesh. When the devotee has tortured and misused his body until he has benumbed and paralyzed it to a degree that it can not feel or perceive, then he is no longer haunted by the things of the world. They do not any longer flow into his mind through his senses, and he becomes divine, or like Brahm, who has no distinctions whatever, and hence no knowledge of anything, nor consciousness of himself. For consciousness is a distinction of the me into subject and object, the knowing and the known—I and me.
The Hindu will not regard evil as divine, or as a part of the highest principle. He goes farther than this,—he will not admit any distinctions at all as divine. He thinks all distinction is division or limitation. Limitation in God is the distinction of his infinitude. It will not do, therefore, to think God as this or that, or as not this or that, for thus we should limit him. He must be pure unity, without distinction—yes, he must be above unity, above all thought.
The Hindu, therefore, can not permit the ideas of righteousness and goodness to be applied to Brahm any more than he can admit the application of wickedness and evil. Special gods, Indra, Varuna, Vishnu, Brahma, may be righteous, but Brahm is above goodness and above righteousness, as well as above evil.
The Persian, however, does not accept such a doctrine. He believes that there is Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd), the lord of all good, and opposed to him is Ahriman, the lord of all evil. The Persian insists on this dualism. Both principles are real; they are in perpetual conflict. This difference in religious principles causes great differences in character between the two peoples.
The Persian was an active people, making war on surrounding nations and fighting to extend the dominion of Ahura-Mazda and to gain a victory over Ahrimanes. The Hindu, on the other hand, in his education, cultivates abstract contemplation and meditation, and does not believe in wars or conflict. The child must be taught how to attain the blessedness of passivity and repose. No active duties for him—no struggles to overcome nature, to slay wild beasts or exterminate the pests of the earth, but he must be mild, and spare animal life, even in tigers, serpents, scorpions, and vermin. The Persian education fits the youth for a career of active warfare against wild beasts and all unclean animals. Clean animals are such as are in the service of light and truth and purity and cleanliness. The unclean do not serve Ahura-Mazda, but darkness and evil and filth and foulness. Unclean beasts are supposed to be tenanted by evil spirits in the service of Ahriman. Not only the horse and cow, but the hedgehog, who roams about at night when evil spirits are abroad, and the beaver, who kills the evil beings in the water, are clean animals. All scavenger animals—all carrion birds also serve Ahura-Mazda.
This principle of good and evil seems to have been at first the principle of light and darkness only. It would seem that Zoroaster converted what was a principle of nature into a spiritual principle. The religion of the Brahmins was also a religion based chiefly on the same distinction of light and darkness, in the early times before their migration from the high table-lands of Bactria, to the southeast, to the Indus valley. But the Brahmin, given to abstract thinking, ascended to the idea of a supreme unity as the origin and final destiny of his Vedic gods of the sky, while the Persian changed light and darkness to moral principles of good and evil, and made their difference more substantial than their unity.
Persian education, in the family and school, trained the youth to ride on horseback, to shoot with the bow and arrow, and, above all things, to speak the truth. This duty to speak the truth is to the Persian before all other duties, because truth is akin to clearness and light, and hence also to the good and pure—to Ahura-Mazda. Falsehood is the setting up of what is not, and hence inconsistent with reality. Hence the veil of falsehood prevents one from seeing reality, and hence it is akin to darkness. Next to truth-speaking is the practice of justice among the Persians. Like the truth, justice is self-consistent, and hence clear and simple. Justice treats each one according to his deed, returning upon him like for like. What one actually does is treated as the reality of his will, and justice is therefore a sort of respect shown toward personal reality. The thief steals property; justice says, “I respect your will; you wish to destroy the right of property, and your right of property shall be destroyed because it is your will. The people who are not thieves all will to respect the right of property, and therefore their property shall be respected. You, thief, shall lose your property, and also the ownership of your limbs: you shall go into prison, and sit still, and no longer possess the freedom of locomotion.” Injustice would make all human action uncertain and obscure, and the darkness of Ahriman would prevail.
Truth-speaking is the worship of reality. If all things and all events are only a dream, it is of no consequence to pay so much respect to them as to be scrupulous of veracity in regard to them. Hence the Hindu makes monstrous fables about things and events, and lets them become the sport of his imagination. Thus we see how deep-reaching the religious principle is, and how widely different the Persian system of education is from the Hindu.
The Chinese revere the past, and make their education consist in memorizing with superstitious exactness the forms of the past—the maxims of Confucius and Mencius. Even the vehicle of literature, the art of writing, requires prodigious efforts of memory to acquire it. “Do not exercise your spontaneity, but conform to the past. Be contented in repeating the thoughts which were uttered twenty-five hundred years ago. Make no new paths; plan out no new undertakings.” The Persian is not content with the past. He must assist Ahura-Mazda in the great contest with evil and darkness, and hence he must do something new. He must hurry to the front. Along the border-land rages the fight. The man who is content to remain within the domain already conquered is a craven, and does nothing for the extension of the realm of light and goodness, but allows the realm of darkness and evil to hold its own attitude of defiance.
Besides truth-speaking and faithfulness to promises, the Persians prized gymnastics. All boys were trained in throwing the spear and javelin, as well as in shooting the bow and arrow and riding on horse-back. An active life is provided for. This training of the body is for real service in the world. The tortures and mortification of the body in India show a very different object.
The Persian youth were educated at home in the family, chiefly by the mothers, until the seventh year. Then the public education began, under the care of teachers venerable with age and exemplary character. From ten to fifteen years the boys learned prayers and the holy books of Zoroaster, and especially the ceremonies necessary to purification. The belief was that a person became unclean if he touched a corpse of man or of any clean animal. All clean animals became unclean at death, while all unclean animals became clean at death. For death was the symbol of conquest by the opposing power. The Persian who had become unclean must go through a tedious process of purification. It was a process of driving out the evil spirit that had taken possession of him. After various ceremonies of sprinkling himself with earth and water and gomez, he drove the evil demon from his head and body and limbs, and could now approach his fellow men once more and go near sacred fire. The formal ceremony of purification must be undertaken, not only on occasions of touching unclean things, but also at stated periods, in order to counteract unobserved pollution that might have happened. At the age of fifteen the boy put on the sacred girdle, composed of exactly seventy-two threads of camel’s hair or wool, worn day and night for protection from evil spirits. On putting on this girdle, after the ceremony of purification, the youth took a solemn vow to obey the law of Zoroaster.
The school education took place in the public market-place. There were four divisions, one set apart for the boys who had not put on the sacred girdle; another for the youth between fifteen and twenty-five years; another for those between twenty-five and fifty years, and a fourth for the old men, who came when they pleased. The second class, the unmarried youth, passed the night under arms as a police force or a garrison for defense. The boys brought with them their dinner, consisting of bread and water-cresses.
Hunting was practiced by the youth as a proper military training. The youth were compelled to live on such game as they could kill, otherwise they must go hungry. The public education was open to all classes of citizens, but only the boys and not the girls, it seems, received it.
There was special education for the nobility to supplement the public education. It was such education as pages receive by attending court and seeing the fine manners there, observing the looks and behavior of great statesmen and heroes.
The Persian was taught to spread life, plant trees, dig wells, fertilize deserts; especially it was his duty to extend the frontier and carry far and wide the dominion of the great king of Persia, vicegerent of Ormuzd.
The great monarchies of the river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates were subdued and added to the Persian empire. The wonderful cities of Babylon and Nineveh had been the wonders of the world in arts and commerce, and at times the terror of surrounding nations. Cyrus conquered Lydia, and then Babylon. Cambyses conquered Egypt. Darius and Xerxes carried war into Europe, and finally Persia receives its first check from the Greeks, who by-and-by, under Alexander, conquer the whole of the Persian empire.
The Persians were a composite people, no less than twelve tribes or nations being combined by the genius of Cyrus. There seems to have been in the tribe of the Magi a series of degrees indicating progressive culture in wisdom. There are mentioned the herbeds, or apprentices, the moheds, or journeymen, and the destur-moheds, or masters.
The river valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the valley of the Nile are wonderfully rich in historic material. We have learned much by means of excavations in the ruins about the ancient civilizations that prevailed there. There was another river valley farther to the north. The Oxus River, that now flows into the sea of Aral, once flowed with the Aral waters into the Caspian Sea. Great nations lived in that river valley, and terrible struggles went on between the Tartaric hordes that came in from the northeast, and Aryan and Semitic tribes on the south.
Persian influence extended with its conquests until it affected in one way or another all the nations about the Mediterranean Sea. Many are the doctrines and customs which have entered European culture, which indicate that influence. Secret societies point back to a derivation from the Persian Magi. Commonly it is some reaction that we discover. The Christian faith was obliged to defend itself often in its early career against some view of God and the world that had come west from Persia. The heresies of Gnosticism and of Neo-Platonism were chiefly of Persian origin. The endeavor to explain nature and man had led to the adoption of such theories as were hostile to the revealed truth. In the early period of the Roman emperors, the Persian worship of Mithra extended very widely among the Roman people.
What was positive with the Persians is the principle of activity, of active contest against the empire of darkness and evil. This principle has survived, we hope, and will survive, as an essential constituent of the faith of all future peoples. No compromise with evil, but its subjugation by light and truth!
[THE WEARY HEART.]
By Rev. FRANK S. CHILD.
Oh! weary heart, think not
Thou art alone to-night!
Attendant spirits watch,
Unseen by mortal sight.
Oh! weary heart, faint not!
The Master knows thy need:
One word of sincere prayer—
He giveth loving heed.
Oh! weary heart, yield not!
If trials press thee sore:
An arm of might is thine,
The Lord saith, o’er and o’er.
Oh! weary heart, believe!
A faith that brings thee peace
Is nobler far than doubt,
With hope’s dark, dread surcease.
Oh! weary heart, rejoice!
Love never wrought in vain;
Thou too shalt soon abide
Where suns nor wax nor wane.
———
Oh! heart, thy weariness
Long, long e’er this has fled;
Thou liv’st the larger life
Though numbered with the dead.
[ADVANTAGE OF WARM CLOTHING.]
There are men, called chemists, who know a great deal concerning the nature of different kinds of substances, and who, in consequence of this knowledge, are able to bring about very surprising changes and effects. These men have places, termed laboratories, or labor shops, in which they work, and which are divided into distinct chambers, besides being furnished with all sorts of instruments and vessels. Sometimes liquids are put into these chambers and vessels, and there turned into solids. Sometimes both liquids and solids are converted into invisible air. Sometimes beautiful crystals, white and blue, green and red, are brought out of transparent and colorless fluids. Sometimes a few grains of dusty looking powder are made to vanish into smoke with an explosion that shakes the ground for yards; and sometimes waste rubbish is transformed into delicious scents, resembling those which are produced from the violet and the rose. Even dull, black charcoal has been changed into the sparkling and precious diamond. It would require a very large book merely to number the wonderful feats these men of science are able to perform. Chemists, indeed, in the present day can do much more by their knowledge and skill, than magicians pretended they could accomplish in the olden time.
Chemists make use of many very powerful agents in their laboratories, to aid them in carrying out their objects and plans. Among these agents there are two that stand before all the rest both in strength and in general usefulness. These prime assistants of the chemists are fire and water. The water is employed to dissolve substances whose little particles it is desired to bring closely together. When two different liquids thus formed are mixed, all the particles in the two come together and act upon one another. Fire is used to soften substances, and loosen the hold of their little particles upon each other, so that they may afterwards be readily mixed together. Water dissolves bodies; that is, makes them liquid by uniting them with itself. Fire melts bodies; that is, makes them liquid without the aid of water.
Now there is one object which the chemists often have in view, when they put different kinds of substances together, in a dissolved or liquid state, in the chambers and vessels of their laboratories; that is, to get something out of those substances, which was before hidden away in them, in order that they may turn that something to practical use. Thus the chemist mixes together saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal in the right proportions to make gunpowder. Then having rammed a charge of the gunpowder down into the tube of a gun, with a bullet on the top of a charge, he applies a spark to the gunpowder, and makes it change into smoke and vapor. Something which was hidden away in the gunpowder ceases to be concealed when it is changed into smoke and vapor, and becomes active enough to be able to drive the bullet out of the muzzle of the gun with a force that carries it through the air for a mile, and perhaps then buries it deep in the ground, or in a plank of wood. This is an instance of the way in which chemists produce motion, by changing the state and condition of material substance.
I had occasion the other day to watch a still more interesting example of this strange result of the chemist’s skill. In a chemist’s laboratory, prepared for a particular service, I saw several small chambers of metal, half copper and half zinc, into which were poured blue vitriol and water, and an acid, a partition wall of pipe-clay standing between. The dilute acid and the zinc were slowly turning into white vitriol, which remained dissolved away in the water; but out of this new-made white vitriol there flowed a power, which was conveyed along a wire, and which made a needle, hung up on a pivot before me, twitch from side to side, almost as if it had been a living thing. I was told that this power set free in the solution, in consequence of the changes brought about there, would run along the wire to the distance of a hundred, or even of a thousand miles, and would there make another needle work and twitch in the same way. In short, I was looking at the electric telegraph at work, and learning that the agent which made the signal afar was simply a power that had been hidden away in the different substances the chemist put together in the metal chambers, and that was set free and enabled to operate in the production of independent motion, so soon as those substances acted upon one another, and altered the form and state in which each was existing.
Now, my good friend, your living body, and my own, are laboratories, in which changes of precisely the same kind are constantly brought about; your living body, and my own, are made of an enormous quantity of separate chambers and vessels, very small, it is true, but nevertheless such as can be seen quite distinctly when they are looked for with the microscope. In these small chambers and vessels different kinds of substances are thrown together, exactly as the zinc, and acid, and blue vitriol are in the laboratory-chambers of the electric telegraph. The chambers and vessels of the living laboratory lie between meshes of the supply pipes of the body, and it is indeed their minute cavities which are drenched by the circulating streams of the dissolved food (see “Value of Good Food”), and in which that dissolved food gets to be transformed into flesh and fat, gristle and bone, tendons and skin, fibres and nerves. The blood, which is pumped forth with such vigor from the heart, creeps along slowly through the smallest and furthest branches of the supply-pipes, in order that plenty of time may be given for all these changes to be worked out in the chambers of the frame. But the fibres and skin, the flesh and the nerves, when they have been built up, are also changed into waste substance by admixture with yet other ingredients which the blood brings to the little chambers. In the cavities of the living laboratory, as in those of the electric telegraph, these changes of substance lead to the setting free of agents before concealed, which agents then operate in the production of movements and of other living effects. When I now raise my arm up above my head, I am able to do so because some of the flesh of which my arm is composed, is changed into another kind of substance, the moving power being set free during the change. When I feel this hard stone which I take up in my hand, I am able to do so because some of the substance of which my body is made, is changed into another kind of material at the instant that I feel. This, then, is how strength comes out of food. The food is changed into flesh, and the flesh is converted into two distinct parts, waste substance and moving and living power. The power was originally concealed in the food, placed there by the provident hand of the Divine Author of Nature, in order that it might be forthcoming for this useful service when it was required. In simple words, material substance is destroyed in order that power may be extracted from it. Material substance, in living bodies, is turned into power. This is the mechanism by which God works in these, the most wonderful of the productions of his hands.
It will hardly be necessary, after all that has been already said elsewhere, to point out that the prime assistant of the chemist, water, acts in the living laboratory exactly as it does in the artificial ones. It loosens, dissolves, and mingles together the various substances which are to act upon one another. It is in the dissolved food, and the liquid blood, which flow into all the chambers and vessels of the living body, and which build up in them the fibres of living structure, and then transform and destroy those fibres, in order that the power there stored away may be obtained.
But it is still more remarkable that the other prime assistant of the chemist, fire, should also be employed in the living frame, in loosening its particles, and in quickening the operation of the various changes of substance upon which the production of power depends. It has been shown that in the body of a full-grown man there is as much heat produced in a single day, as would serve to make eighty pints of cold water boil, and it has also been stated that this heat is produced in the body exactly in the same way heat is produced in the steam engine; that is, by the burning of fuel. The heat is set free by the change of condition in material substance, precisely as power is procured. When the water employed in a steam engine is made to boil, the heat that causes the boiling issues from the coal, because that substance ceases to be coal, and turns into smoke and vapor. Just so the fuel substance of the body ceases to be fuel substance, starch, sugar, and fat—and turns into vapor, which is steamed away, leaving the heat which was concealed in the substance to warm the frame.
The furnace which is kept burning in the living laboratory, to quicken all the operations which are being carried forward in it, and to furnish its strength, is a slow and gentle one. It never burns quickly enough to cause light and flame, as common fires do. The body is never even raised to the heat of boiling water, which is far less than that of burning coal. It is only made of blood-heat; that is, sixty-eight degrees of the heat-scale warmer than freezing water,—in its warmest parts. Boiling water is one hundred and eighty degrees of the same heat-scale warmer than freezing water. The furnace of the living body sometimes burns a little more quickly than it ought, then the body gets warmed into fever. Occasionally it burns considerably less quickly than it ought, then the body is chilled, and its living actions and powers are slothful and languid. Upon the whole, however, its heat is steadily kept up at pretty much what it ought to be, that is, at one hundred degrees of the scale, which gives thirty-two degrees for frost.
Now this is how the furnace of the living body is kept smouldering on in its gentle and even way. Little blasts of air are constantly puffed in upon the burning fuel. That out-and-in play of your chest as you breathe,—that is the puffing of air blasts into certain chambers of your living laboratory, to keep up its smouldering fires. The more quickly and deeply you breathe, the warmer your body becomes; and the more slowly and softly you breathe, the colder that body remains. The same action which blows a fresh wind through the living frame to clear away its impure vapors, also serves to fan its hidden flames, and keep its fuel burning. When the breathing is stopped the fires of the body go out, just as those in a common furnace do, when their air-blasts are arrested, and the body becomes dead cold.
You will remember that when the fresh air is drawn into your lungs as you breathe, it enters a large quantity of little cavities or chambers, which have, all of them, a fine net-work of the supply-pipes stretched out upon their walls; and that as the blood rushes on in its course through these supply-pipes, it sucks air into itself from the air-cavities, and carries it, in its own streams, to all parts of the living structure. Air goes with the blood to that strong force-pump, the heart, and is then pumped out with the blood to every crevice and fibre of the body. Every part of the body therefore receives, by means of the supply-pipes and in the blood, heat-fanning air, as well as supporting food.
When air reaches the living flesh and nerves, by thus flowing to them in the blood-streams of the supply pipes, it sets up those changes of substance in their structures which lead to the production of movement, and feeling, and other kinds of living power. When it reaches the dissolved fuel, contained in the blood and in the various little furnace-chambers of the laboratory, it sets up those changes in the fuel which lead to the production of warmth. The fuel is slowly burned in the blood and in the chambers of the frame, and there gives out warmth, as a fire does whilst it is burning in a grate. This warmth consequently heats the blood, and the warm blood carries its heat wherever it goes. The entire body thus becomes as warm as the blood, or nearly so.
Now, where do you think all the heat originally comes from, that is procured from burning fuel? The heat is stored away in the fuel, as one of the ingredients of its composition, until it is burned. But where was the heat obtained from, which is stored up in the fuel? Of course, when the fuel was made, that heat-store had to be supplied to it, as well as its other ingredients. First let us see when and how the fuel was made, and perhaps we shall then be able more perfectly to understand this matter of its warming qualities and power.
In the case of coal, it is not a very difficult task to trace the stored-up heat to its source. But what a surprising truth it is, which becomes apparent when the task has been performed. The heat is, so to speak, bottled-up sunshine! Coal is dug up from deep mines hollowed out in the earth. But at one time it was wood, growing on the outer surface of the globe, and covered with foliage which was spread out into the genial air. Traces of the leaves and stems from which it has been made, are still discovered in its substance. Long centuries ago, the vast forests containing these trees, were overthrown by some tremendous earthquake, and swept away by strong floods of water, and so the tree-stems were at last deposited in hollow basins, and were there buried up by millions and millions of tons of heavy rock and soil. There, where they were buried, they have remained, turning more and more black and dense through the process of slow decay, until they have been dug up piece-meal to feed the furnaces and fires of the existing generation of men.
Now, you know very well that trees only grow in warm weather, and in sunshine. In winter time their branches stick out stiff and bare, and do not increase in the slightest degree. But in summer time they clothe themselves with beautiful masses of foliage, and suck in from both the air and the soil large quantities of vapor, of liquid food, and of sunshine. All these they combine together into fresh layers of timber. All these therefore were buried in the ground as timber, when those old forests were overthrown which form the coal-beds. Timber cannot be made in cold weather, because heat is one of its necessary ingredients. But as all the warmth of the weather comes from the sun, it is the sun’s warmth which is stored away in the coal, and which is set free and made useful when the coal is burned.
The grand source of all warmth on the earth is that brilliant light which God has placed in the sky to rule over the day. In a summer’s day you sit down in the bright sunshine, and bask in its warmth. In winter time, when the sky is covered with clouds, and ice and snow lie thick over the ground, you place yourself indoors near the glowing fire; but strange to say, it is still the sun’s genial warmth that you experience. If the fire be of coal, it is warmth which was borrowed from the sun centuries ago. Reflect for an instant upon this marvellous arrangement entered upon, for your comfort, ages before you were yourself called into being! When those coal-making forests spread their broad masses of foliage out in the sunshine, there were no human creatures existing upon the earth; and, indeed, not even the flocks and herds, which are so essential to man’s welfare, had been framed. Neither cattle nor sheep could have found pasture on the plains which yielded them support. The great duty of those forests must have been to store up genial warmth for then uncreated generations of beings, who in due season were to appear, and to avail themselves of the provision thus made.
But suppose that you had neither fresh nor stored-up sunshine to fall back upon, and had to depend entirely for your warmth upon that furnace which is carried about in your living laboratory, and kept alight by the puffing of your breath. Still that internal heat comes originally out of the sunshine. Just before the time when man was placed upon the earth, the beautiful family of plants was created, which fills the gardens with roses, and which yields the apple, the pear, the cherry, the plum, the apricot, the peach, the almond, the strawberry, and the raspberry. Just at the very time was planted on the globe, the vegetable tribe which furnishes the different kinds of nourishing grain, and which provides pasture for grazing animals. The fruits, the grasses, and the grain were all commissioned to extract power and warmth from the sunshine, and to store it up in such a form that the influences could conveniently be introduced into the interior of the living body. Living animals which are warmed by the fuel contained in their food, procure their heat from sunshine that was stored up, as it were, but yesterday. When animals live upon flesh, and get their strength out of the lean fibre, and their warmth out of the fat of this food, still it must be remembered that the flesh has been fed on the grass of the field just before. The main office of the plant in creation is thus to store up in a fixed and convenient form supplies of active energies which can be turned to account by animated frames. The plant effects this end by preparing the food upon which animals live;—that food which, besides keeping the body in repair, serves also to furnish it with warmth, and to give it strength and power. How admirable and beneficent is this plan, whereby the genial influence of life-quickening sunshine is economized and preserved for the service of one-half of creation, by the instrumentality of the other half!
In the far distant regions of the north, there are places on the earth to which no daylight or sunshine comes for four long months at a time. During this gloomy period the ground goes on, from hour to hour, scattering more and more of its heat, until it is almost as cold as the chill space in which the great world is poised, and has indeed more than 100 degrees of frost. The land and the water alike get covered up by one broad and thick sheet of never-melting ice and snow. There is not a leaf, or a grass blade, or a vegetable stalk any where in the wide white desolation. But there are animals and human beings, who are born and die, who maintain a prolonged existence in it. Let us just look in upon one of the households in this drear frost land, and see what the odd community is like.
In the midst of a broad snow waste, through which the sharp wind is howling with a fearful sound, there is a small mound nearly covered by the snow-drift. We perceive this mound by faint starlight, the only gleam that comes down from the sky. A few feet away from the mound we discover a small hole blocked up by a lump of snow. We move the lump aside, and stretching ourselves out at full length on the ground, we squeeze into the hole head foremost, and crawl along a narrow passage, burrowed out in the firm snow for about a dozen feet. We then find ourselves in a vault ten feet wide and fifteen feet long, and so low that we can scarcely sit upright within it. This is the inside of the mound. It is the interior of a hut, or dwelling-place, of these people of the drear frost land. The walls of the hut are built of large stones piled together, with a padding of frozen moss covered over them, and with thick ice and snow covered over the moss.
There are twelve living individuals, men, women, and children, huddled together in this close vault. They have no fire to keep them warm. Indeed, there is neither coal nor wood which they could use to light a fire, within many hundred miles. There is in one corner of the hut a broad shoulder-blade of a large quadruped laid flat, and in the hollow of this blade there is some crushed seal’s blubber, and some soft moss, with long cotton-like rootlets. The end of the moss is burning with a small, dull, smoky flame. This is the only artificial source of light and warmth within the hut.
But these people are all of them almost entirely naked; and they are dripping with perspiration, they are so warm. Outside of the hut, in the dim starlight, the air is actually a hundred degrees colder than freezing water. Yet inside, in the nearly as dim lamp light, there are almost as many degrees of warmth. The air is there as hot as the hottest summer day in England! All this heat is produced in the slow furnaces of those twelve individuals’ own living bodies. They have lost the sunshine for months, and everything around them is much colder than ice. They are living upon the flesh and blubber of seals, and sea-horses and white bears, animals which they killed before the sun went away, the meat being kept for them through their long winter by the preserving power of the frost. The sunshine of past away summers has given its heat to plants; the seals and sea-horses have fed on those plants, or upon smaller animals which have done so, and have transferred the heat into their own blubber; and now the benighted savages are getting the heat out of the blubber to keep their own flesh and blood warm and unfrozen. In that close hut, where no sunshine can come for months, the savage inmates have nevertheless abundant stores of the warmth of sunshine, which have been laid up and preserved for their service. Such care Providence takes even of these, the rude and barbarous children, whose lot he has cast in the desolate outskirts of the world!
The rude people who dwell in the cold frost-land of the north, remain warm through their long, severe winter, without the aid of artificial fires, because they economize the warmth which is produced in the slow furnaces of their bodies, and prevent it from being scattered away as quickly as it is generated. If they were to set themselves down in the open air, instead of in their close huts, the warmth produced in their bodies would be thrown off from the outer surfaces of these as fast as it was set free from the fuel. In the close huts, on the other hand, this warmth first heats the air contained within the stone walls, and is then a very long time in getting any further, and so prevents more heat from being rapidly scattered from the internal furnace.
These human inhabitants of the northern ice land have a companion in their desolate haunts, who does not build himself a hut after their fashion, but who has instead a somewhat similar protection against the severe cold of the long northern winter, provided by nature. This creature goes upon four legs, sometimes swimming in the water, and sometimes stalking along upon the ice. He is very powerful and fierce, is armed with sharp claws two inches long, and has teeth which can bite through thick and hard metal. He is able to tear iron and tin to pieces as if they were merely paper or pasteboard, and he feeds upon seals, birds, foxes and deer, which he manages to catch by his cunning and address. This savage creature is often killed by the rude natives, who hunt him with dogs and spears, but in the absence of man he is the fell tyrant of the domain. He prowls about on the snow-wastes, destroying every living body which comes within his reach; and he remains exposed to the severest cold of the long dark winter, lying upon the ice and snow, without having his life-blood frozen by its chill power. The reason of his safety is that he wears a nature-provided great coat of very warm fur. His skin is every where covered by long shaggy hair of a yellowish-white color, which has a thick down-like under-growth closely packed beneath. This coat of soft fur is so long and thick, that it prevents the heat produced in the slow furnace of his body from escaping into the cold air. It answers the same purpose to him, that the snow-covered hut does to his human neighbors.
Men have no warm shaggy coats of this kind furnished for their use by nature, but they are enabled to supply the deficiency through the exertion of their own intelligence and ingenuity. They borrow warm covering from other creatures whenever they stand in need of such aid. Thus the rude human inhabitant of the ice land hunts and kills the bear and then before he feasts upon its flesh, he strips the fur robe from the carcass, and adapts it to his own naked body. So soon as the northern ice-people come out from their huts into the cold air, they put on coats and trousers of bear-skin, with the long sharp claws pointing out as toes to their boots. These odd savages look almost like small bears themselves when their white fur hoods are drawn over their heads, and their limbs are compactly muffled up in the claw-tipped robes which they have taken from the bodies of their prey.
Men in civilized lands do not put the skins of other animals upon their own bodies, but they do what is precisely the same thing in effect. They borrow silk from the worm, or cotton from the grass, or flax from the linen-plant, or wool from the sheep, and by their constructive skill, they spin and weave these substances into cloths, which are much more convenient than raw skins for the fabrication of garments, and which can be made as warm, when this is required. In every case, however, this artificial clothing acts in the same way as natural fur. It is warm, because it prevents the heat, which is produced in the slow furnace within the body from escaping quickly from the little chambers of the living laboratory. Clothing does not really warm the body, it merely keeps it warm; prevents it from being cooled as it would be if this covering were not placed between its surface and the outer air.
Warm bodies constantly grow colder, when situated in spaces which are more chill than themselves, provided always that there be no furnaces, quick or slow, within them, for generating new supplies of heat. They do so, because they give the excess of heat which they contain to the neighboring space, in the attempt to make it as warm as themselves. Warm bodies are always very generous, and disinclined to keep what substances near to them are less freely supplied with. If a metallic pint pot, filled with boiling water, be placed on the ground in air which has only the warmth of a March English day—some fifty degrees of the heat scale,—the water gets colder minute by minute until it remains no warmer than the air and ground which are around it. The rapidity with which warm bodies are cooled depends upon how much colder than themselves the space around them is. If one pint pot of boiling water be placed in out-of-door air that is cold as freezing water, and another be placed at the same time in a room where the air has the warmth of a mild summer day, the former will be deprived of all its excess of heat much sooner than the latter.
Warm bodies lose their excess of heat in two ways. They shoot it off into surrounding space. This is what learned men call “raying” or “radiating” it away. The sun, you know, shoots or rays its heat off to the earth, and so does the fire to your body when you stand before it. But warm bodies also communicate their heat to substances which touch them, provided those substances be colder than themselves. Place your hand upon a cold metal knob, and you will feel that your hand grows colder as it gives portions of its heat to the knob. This is what learned men call “conveying” heat.
[To be concluded.]
[A TOUR ROUND THE WORLD.]
By Mrs. MARY LOW DICKINSON.
[Continued.]
Away from Boulogne-sur-Mer,—away from the treacherous sea, that laughs, as we look back upon it, tossing its white caps mischievously up to the smiling sky; away from thoughts of Thackeray, who has left the wide stretches of coast around Boulogne haunted by Claude Newcombe’s ghost, and on as fast as the “boat-train” can take us to the place where, some one has said, “good Americans go when they die.”
There is nothing interesting in the tame, flat country; nothing novel in the farm houses, and thatched cottages, and sleepy-looking villages along the route, or in the general aspect of the people, except that the bonnet of the English peasant is replaced by the snowy cap, the frock of the English farmer by the Frenchman’s clean blue blouse. The English fog keeps its own side of the channel, and we look up into the blue sky, radiant with sunshine, with a sense of having found an old long-absent friend. Long before we arrive in Paris, even the staunchest Briton of us all marvels why she wanted to stay in London, when here, just over the water, lay this smiling and beautiful France.
And to us, as to most strangers, Paris and France are one. We shall see none of its other cities unless, moving southward, we stop at Lyons, and linger a day at Marseilles. Provincial life will come to us only in the city’s borrowed attire, as we find it in Paris, imported, and making itself at home. Nature and natural scenery can do little to captivate unless, indeed, we enter Italy by the pass of Mont Cenis, when we shall see what it is, even to a frivolous people like the French, to “lift their eyes unto the hills.” Ordinarily, nature seems here at a disadvantage, a pale, flat background for the intense artificiality of France. Her rivers seem to wind—the sluggish Seine with the rest—to show the architectural effect of her bridges, rather than to make the green banks blossom and to refresh the thirsty land. Her forests, even Fontainebleau and Versailles, what are they but the background for palaces? And even her wide, straight, dusty roads stretch on with a dreadful symmetry of commonplaceness that makes one feel as if the land had no lovely nooks, to reach which one must choose a shaded or winding way.
Once in the city, and this impression of the extreme of artificial life deepens. Everything—streets, dwellings, shops, squares, fountains, monuments—has been made as fine as it well could be; but all has been made, nothing has been let to grow; and in the monotony of construction one longs to see something that reveals individuality in its maker or itself. Humanity has the same stamp, and it is only the intense vivacity common to its various national types that gives the pleasing sense of variety. Dress, habit, bearing, manners, are singularly after one style, a better one in some respects, we will admit, than we have as yet found time to cultivate. In minor manners this is most noticeable. The ready “good morning,” and “thank you,” are on the lips of every servant and child, and the prompt “beg pardon” reconciles one to an occasional rudeness or lack of care. It is only fair to say, however, that in a crowd where an American might tread on one’s toes and never say a word, yet be most careful not to repeat the offence, the Frenchman would politely “beg pardon,” and while replacing the lifted hat, tread on the unlucky toes again. Still, there is something flattering to vanity in the easy deference that makes the waiter help you on with your overcoat with an air that thanks you for permitting him the honor, and the wheels of the traveler’s life do run more smoothly for the lubricating of French good manners. How mightily it helps the sales in the inevitable round of shopping that beguiles all womankind in Paris,—except of course, Chautauquans, good and true. American tradesmen might well learn a lesson here, and by practice take to themselves many a reluctant dollar that now stays pocket-safe, because of the gruffness or superciliousness of some airy clerk. But of all places, Paris needs no such addition as courtesy to the attractive seductions which her tasteful displays of beautiful things offer to the foreign purse. Her shop windows alone would draw one’s money up from the depths of the pocket, through the bewitchment of the eye. No matter how small the window, no matter how hideous the name of the shop—and these are of all names, from “Good Angel” to “Good Devil”—the very most and best is made of the goods to charm the eye and cause the passer’s step to halt. Halting, he is sure to enter; entering, he is sure to buy, and lucky the man or woman who escapes with a few lone rattling sous as pour boire for the cabman whom he hails to drive him home.
One never knows what a magnificent creature a poor mortal can become, nor has a realizing sense of his capacity for enjoying “things,” till he has been set loose in the streets of this alluring world’s bazar. Things! He, the traveler—or, possibly she—becomes possessed by a demon for which there is no other name than “things.” Things to eat, things to wear, things to hide away, things to give away, things to take home,—there is no end to it after it is once begun. People go out, meaning to buy nothing, and buy everything, until the playful remark of an American author that “Paris is a great sweating furnace, in which human beings would turn life everlasting into gold, provided it were of negotiable value,” seems not so far from true. Thankful indeed might be the traveler, Chautauquan or other, who, unable to gratify temptation, escapes it, as only it can be escaped, by filling the time so full that there are left no hours for the loitering amid lovely and alluring things. Virtuous, very virtuous, indeed, no doubt, was our quartette in this prudent regard. “Why should they care for shining and insidious vanities of to-day,” asked the student, “with historical Paris, and ecclesiastical Paris, and monumental Paris, and artistic Paris, with Paris, living and dead, past and present, lying about, in unctuous abundance, waiting to be rolled in sweet morsels under their tongues?” “Why, indeed?” echoed the other three, as on the night of arrival they went rattling in a four-seated cab, in which two lolled comfortably back and indulged in exclamations of delight over the brilliant city, blazing with its thousand lights, and gay with moving throngs, and the other two hung on the edge of the narrow shelf called a front seat, and longed for annihilation as to knees that there might be room for big basket, little basket, bundles and bags.
One night only for them in a large hotel in the American quarter, with the Grand Opera House before their windows, and a dozen hotels all crowded with Americans, within a quarter of a mile. Silently the sisters sit in a reception room about as large as a comfortable hall bed-room, while the student adds their names to the very long list of Americans in the register in the office, a little den just large enough for a double desk. Then a porter, once a black-haired, brawny Breton peasant in the ever-lasting blue blouse, swings a trunk upon his shoulder, gathers up in one hand all the umbrellas and bags, which it took four of us to bring, and the concierge, from her own little den at the foot of the staircase, hands forth our keys with a smile that is purely French and means nothing, yet says plainer than words that she has been longing all day for our coming, and is so relieved that we are safely arrived at last. Cheered by its welcome, hollow though we know it to be, we mount the easy stairs behind the Breton and the baggage. Number fifty, one, two and three, calls the clerk to a frisky chambermaid in white apron and cap, and away she goes before with her white cap-strings flying, down the corridor. Why such speed? we question, but not for long. There are four rooms, and each room has from four to six candles—candles on bureau, mantle and table, “candles to right of us, candles to left of us, candles behind us glimmered and sputtered.” With incredible celerity the white-capped maid had lighted them all. Lights are an extra in France, and when we go away to-morrow we shall find them all upon the bill, and for eighteen bougies it will be our duty to pay. Americans have been found, soon after our civil war, when the spirit of strife was not yet quelled, courageous enough to resist the candle swindle, and women prudent enough to take all they paid for, and to bear them away, rolled in bits of Galignani’s Messenger, and tucked in with the best black silk. But the world still waits for the great spirit that shall successfully grapple the bougie fraud. Our quartette, I am ashamed to say, tamely submitted, the sisters unable to get the right proportions of sweetness and light on the subject, and the brethren remarking that some games were not worth the candles, and some candles were not worth the game. Still the rather luminous exhibition of what it would be likely to cost them to dwell in this particular quarter, helped them to see their way out, and before night of the second day they answered the tender parting smile of madame, the concierge, each with a touching franc, and saw their luggage in a pyramid on the top of a two-seated voiture de place, the brethren shrunken as to knees, to the space allotted in front of their little shelf, and away they went to dine in their little cosy sitting room of an apartment far out in the suburb of Passy, beyond the city bounds, where they paid for the parlor and bed-rooms and service less per month than it would cost for one room at any of the grand hotels.
And here they lived as nearly as possible the life of the French home. Abandoning soon the hearty American breakfast, the student learned that the brain worked well during the morning hours on its cup of coffee and its share,—a yard if you like, for bread can be bought by the yard—of bread. And away out here in Passy they found their servant, the good old woman who owned the house, yet waited upon them with her own hands, had not yet learned the trick of the hotels and cafés frequented by foreigners, but still gave them coffee such as we read about as found in Paris in “ye olden time.” In common with nearly all French families, she frequented every morning the coffee-shops scattered at convenient distances throughout the whole city, and selected her coffee in just the quantity required for the day, from the freshly-roasted mass, and saw it ground and mixed before her eyes. The custom is to combine three kinds of coffee—one for strength, and two for flavor, for the morning use. Then it is neither smoked, drenched nor boiled until the result is an injurious decoction, but, placed in its perforated cup, just boiling water enough is poured upon it to swell every grain and force it to yield up its delicious first aroma; then again and again is the bath repeated, until a half a teacupful will be all the coffee prepared for a household. Now, to a tablespoonful or two of this beverage she adds a cup of milk, heated almost to a boiling point, and the liquid is fit for a king. Quite another affair is the café noir, made usually by boiling the residue of the breakfast coffee, and religiously let alone by the occupants of many French homes. Out of doors, after coffee, for two or three good hours of work in museums, and galleries, and palaces, and churches, and streets, wherever the city offered anything to be enjoyed or learned, and then back to breakfast at twelve o’clock in the day, a meal of meats and vegetables, salads and sweets,—a dinner really in all but soup and a name. Dinner at six, cooked by the owner of the rooms, served by her daughter, a black-eyed, tidy girl of seventeen, comprised the menu of the home. This was varied by an occasional raid upon the American gingerbread at the bakery of the Boulevard Malesherbes, or a visit to restaurants, where, at any price from thirty cents to a dollar and a half, according to location and appointments, one can be sure of a dinner, appetizing, clean, well-served, abundant, and so, whether one sits under the arches of the old historic Palais Royale, and takes history with his soup, and blends the gay kaleidoscopic throng before his eyes with the throngs that have filled the court in other days, or chooses his seat under the gilt and crystal of the glittering Boulevard des Italians, or boards at a pension at ten francs a day, and finds himself in a mitigated American boarding-house, where he puts a sou in the charity plate as a forfeit for every word of English spoken, or runs around in the Rue Neuve de Petit Champs, and consoles his patriotism by fish-balls and buckwheat cakes, or lets some kind, shrewd old woman buy and cook his chop, piously pilfering regularly her two sous a pound, there is no need to go hungry in Paris. Alas, that so much can not be said for the poorer classes of Parisians themselves, the laborers under whose lack of bread wrongs long suffered have so often ripened to revolutions. Let no one suppose the stimulating coffee, daintily prepared, is the drink of the laboring man of France. Happy is he who gets it once a week, and the common food on which the laborer works is soup, in which the meat is ordinarily scant enough, and the bread,—of which he can not always take as much as he would like and leave a portion of the loaf for the little ones at home;—a piece of bread with a bit of sausage, when he can afford it, makes the meal that marks the noonday pause in labor, and gives the more fortunate his dejeuner a la fourchette. In no city in the world is there more destitution than in Paris among the unfortunate and the deserving poor. The surface of its social life is kept so whitened that one forgets that it is like the sepulcher of Holy Writ. Only now and then, on some grand holiday, when misery may seem only a farce, only a fantastic spectacle in a pageant, is squalor’s want and beggary allowed to see the light. At all other times, the beggar’s hand must hold something to sell, and the reality of want be treated as if it were sham, and crime be made to feel ashamed of nothing but the day. With the slow-coming change in public opinion, on all questions of philanthropy and morals, with the slow-coming emancipation of education, with the slow-coming freedom from priestcraft and the growth of true religious sentiment in France, there must dawn a brighter day for the masses, those enormous majorities who make the under strata of the nation’s life. That it is volcanic strata, with a heart of fire that now and then heaves with its gigantic throbs the upper world, and sends forth the low rumble of suppressed lava-floods and the dull smoke of threatening revolution, is no marvel to any student of the past history and present social and moral and political conditions of France.
But it is not in these undercurrents that control national destiny that we can afford to drift our little tourist bark. What ought to be done, one can but vaguely feel; of what is being done, one may have a faint glimpse who will follow the history of the Protestant movement, and make himself acquainted with the missions in the city of Paris alone. I doubt if it would do to take our quartette too near the heart of this work, since some of them, at least, would never be willing to come away. And we can never let them leave Paris without a sight of the wonders that everybody sees. From Passy they make daily their entree into the city by the Avenue de la Grande Armee, and pass under the great Arc de Triomphe, that stands, the largest triumphal arch in the world, in the center of the beautiful Place de l’Etoile, from which branch like the points to a star the new beautiful avenues cut by Napoleon III in every direction, straight through miles of the most populous portions of the city. Climb the arch, a massive pile of stone larger than our largest churches, and let the eye run down the star-points. Here on the right is the most beautiful of all, the Avenue de l’Imperatrice, over three hundred feet wide, and extending to the Bois de Boulogne, the Central Park of Paris. Down this drive on any Saturday morning one may see many a cab containing a groom and bride of humble station, she in her white dress and orange wreath, going out to spend the wedding day walking and talking, and feasting at one of the many restaurants in the beautiful wood. A little earlier in the day, in the Madelaine, one might see the marriage ceremony performed. Our travelers chanced on one sunny morning to find a bride and groom before one altar, a coffin in the aisle, while at the font a priest was baptising a little child. Down this avenue to the Bois, all the finest equipages of the pleasure-lovers of Paris drift every day, and especially every Sunday. On Sunday occur the races and the military reviews. In the mornings the churches are thinly peopled with worshippers, principally women; in the afternoon the city is alive with pleasure seekers of every class. Yet let no one imagine Paris given to pleasure to be what New York or Chicago under the same conditions might be—noisy, uproarious, or rude. Everybody on the brilliant, crowded boulevards, in the Bois, all down the whole length of the Champs Elysees, is decorous, moderate, well dressed and well behaved. The whirligigs laden with little children whirl softly; even Punch and Judy, never-failing delight of childhood, are not too noisy in their quarrels. The cabmen drowse on their boxes, the horses go at a slow and steady jog. On the sidewalks the people sip their ices or their soda. There is animation, vivacity, but no rush or scramble or haste such as marks not only our work-a-day; but our holiday life. It is on the boulevards and the Champs Elysees that French leisure and pleasure may be seen at their best.
This wonderful Champs Elysees lies before one who stands at the Place de l’Etoile, in its whole length of more than two miles from the Arc de Triomphe to the beautiful Tuilleries gardens. In the daytime it is all foliage and sunshine and brightness; at night the gas-lights glitter in unbroken chains from tree to tree. From one end we can see the fountains play at the other, as they sparkle all day in the square by the old Egyptian obelisk, that marks the place of the guillotine, the memory of which changes all the brightness to gloom in the space of a single thought. Beyond, the half-ruined piles of the Tuilleries palace stand up gray and grim, as if they had not yet recovered from the astonishment and shock of their blows. Further still rise the palace and gallery of the Louvre, which some one has aptly called “the first and last fascination of Paris.” We would make the fascinations plural, and include the Luxembourg gallery, which, though smaller, holds no second place in the Parisian world of art. Let no one fancy our tourists saw the Louvre in a day, or can write of it in a paragraph. What one finds there depends on what one carries in of technical knowledge, in intelligent apprehension, in sympathetic insight and appreciation. Words are not the medium for the description of pictures, or for the transmission of the sense of beauty. One should go to the Louvre once, at least, thinking of the building only. Remember that if it and the adjoining Tuilleries palace were extended their full length along the Seine, we should walk a mile to pass them. Once within, and relieved of our umbrellas, lest we forget ourselves and inadvertently “poke” some antique marble warrior, or try the point upon some crumbling mummy, we climb innumerable stairs and walk over acres of slippery, polished floors, and through rooms heavy with gilded decoration, burdened with every adornment that wealth or taste could devise. The lower floors are devoted to libraries, to Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek museums, and the upper to room after room of paintings, where one wanders at first aimless and bewildered, like a child whose Christmas riches leave it unknowing what first to enjoy. One or two sauntering visits like this, and the great pictures begin to come out from the mass, and we know which are those which belong to us by some subtle power of entering into their significance which we feel, but can not define. Then one by one they begin to lay a touch upon us, and draw us back again and again, for just one other look. How, after a little, our eyes let go, as our souls do also, of nine-tenths of the pictures, those with which we have been able to establish no line of communication, which may be, and are, doubtless, fine, only they are not for us. Then how we yield ourselves to the touch of those that have reached us through their greatness, that could not be resisted. Then we feel the pathos of Triosa’s “Burial,” and the passion of despair in the writhing forms and agonized faces of his “Deluge.” Then we feel the strength in the masterpieces of David, and the exquisite delicacy and suffering and resolve in the “Ecce Homo” of Guido. Here Raphael’s genius shines upon us in the seraphic sweetness of the “Holy Family,” and Veronese’s “Marriage of Cana,” with its beauty of form and richness of color, and marvelous vigor of conception. And here is the mysterious, half-triumphant, half-timid, grace and beauty of “The Conception,” by Murillo. The longer one lingers, the more one dreads to hear the voice of the guard who calls out the time to close, and when the spell is fairly on one who loves art, he will pass from Louvre to Luxembourg, and back again from Luxembourg to Louvre, unheeding the great, gay, bustling world that is surging up and down between. At the smaller gallery, modern art and living artists are better represented than at the Louvre. Look here for De la Roche and Rosa Bonheur, and if the horrors of the French Revolution are not already coming up too often, as you pass about the city, dwell upon the anguished faces of the prisoners in the picture called “The Night Before Execution,” and I can promise you an afternight of troubled sleep. How gladly one turns from its horrors to the calm, sad strength in the face of the Christ in Ary Scheffer’s “Temptation,” rejoicing in the grand expression the artist has given to the power before which ultimately shall shrink back all the pain of the world, all the horrors and shames of sin. Between the thick walls of her silent galleries, and in the hushed air of her churches, one who had time could find a wealth of association, historical and other, that would enrich weeks spent in their examination alone.
But we cannot see all, and we can linger in but very few. We must go to the Hotel des Invalides, under whose dome lie in solemn splendor the remains of Napoleon I. We must stand for a moment, at least, in the spots made interesting by associations with history that can never be forgotten. Who would not go out of his way, for example, to hear for a few strokes the bell of St. Germain L’Auxerrois, when he remembers that it gave the midnight signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew? Who would not seek his opportunities to sit for a while under the towers of Notre Dame, or behind the porches of the Madelaine, or to rest in the rustic chapel behind the high altar of St. Roche? Here, as they should be everywhere, the churches are open all day long. The busy mother of a family on her way to market, may come in and, dropping her basket on the floor, kneel and pray for patience and strength for her round of common care. The world-weary soul may creep into the shadow of some high column, or kneel at some dim altar, and find the rest he craves. It is, at least, a spot to escape for a while into blessed stillness from the wearing turmoil of the world, and forgetting the papal altars, and the tinsel, and the gaudy images of the Virgin, and caricatures of angels, and remembering the great sea of human sin and sorrow surging forever beyond, the stranger can but be glad that the gates stand open wide.
Little time have we to linger in the most interesting, but we must surely go out to the church of St. Denis and see where, for thirteen hundred years, France has laid her royal dead. It is a drive of only five miles, and that is only a fair walk for some of our number, who would enjoy walking it every step alone, and calling up out of the past a procession of priests and courtiers bearing a dead king to his rest. Alas, that so many of them blessed France on the day they were borne to St. Denis more than in all their long, luxurious lives.
And to St. Denis is not the only little excursion that must be made from Paris. We cannot turn our faces southward without having visited Fontainebleau, and having had at least a long bright day in the palace of Versailles.
For the former excursion, only thirty-five miles from Paris, a day may be taken, though a charming little hotel outside the wood will tempt one to linger for a night, and thus secure an uninterrupted day for visiting the palace, strolling about the grounds, or driving in the charming roads through the forest.
The entire nine hundred apartments of the palace are not open for inspection, but at twelve o’clock daily a guide gathers up the waiting visitors and drives them like a flock of sheep through the apartments, many of them beautiful and sumptuous in adornment, and some neglected and forlorn. We entered by the Court of the White Horse, or the Court of Adieux, as it has been called since the time when Napoleon I there bade farewell to the remnant of his old guard before his departure for Elba. His bed-room, said to be in the same state as when he left it, and the table on which he signed his abdication, naturally claim the attention of all strollers through these halls. Within there is the jargon of the chattering people, who feel of the draperies as they pass warily over the slippery floors, the autocratic twang of the guide who means to hold us to his story until he gets us safely through and out at the door with our francs snugly stored away in his pocket. Outside there are lovely gardens and grounds, but cabmen beset us to drive in the forest, and once there, produce a new waterfall, or a high rock, or a rustic bridge, anything, everything, that a sixty-mile forest can afford for which a pour boire can be extracted. On the whole, we are ready on the second afternoon to return to Paris, and equally ready on the very next day to take the train for Versailles. It is only a little journey; we are there almost before we seem started, and in company with many other strangers, a few French families out for a day’s holiday, and many earnest talking deputies en route to the Assembly, we go up in the omnibus through the town, which now fairly hugs the palace gates, to the entrance of the great court, and before us lies the enormous but not imposing pile of the Palace of Versailles. Everybody who has never seen it knows it through pictures. We need not even quote the guide-books, and say that the great palace is over a quarter of a mile long, and cost France in money two hundred millions of dollars, to say nothing of what it cost in after-suffering to the nation and to the descendants of the king who built it as a magnificent monument to his vanity and ambition. We all know what part the Revolution played in it, and also that no government since the Revolution could take the enormous expense of using it as a royal residence. Hence, in the time of Louis Phillipe it became a grand museum, and to-day the visitor, after exhausting himself in the effort to traverse some of the miles of walks to see the grounds, traverses miles of corridors and apartments lined with pictures, principally of French battles, and dedicated to all the glories of France. To Marie Antoinette the place of most tragic interest, to Louis Phillipe and Louis Napoleon it was simply a museum, and to France it has come to be, after the humiliation of seeing the German emperor encamped here, the seat of her new government and the stronghold of the power of the Republic.
The place of meeting of the National Assembly is in the former theater of the palace, and if one is so fortunate as to have a friend among the deputies, there is no difficulty in securing admission to any session. Ordinarily, guests are shown to boxes, from which they can look down upon the seven hundred representative men of France. The President’s seat is at one end of the hall, with before him a tribune, or platform, from which the deputies speak. On the right of the speaker are the Royalists, including Legitimists, Orleanists, and Imperialists, and on the left the Republicans. Besides these two grand divisions, there are the minor divisions of the Right and Left Center, the former wishing a constitutional monarchy, and the latter a conservative republic. One should visit the Assembly more than once to bring away anything beyond a confused sense of much animated gesticulation, violent discussion, often rising into a frenzy of speech and movement only equalled by the excitement of the Bourse. Calm talk grows to an apparent tempest of speech, for which there is no control, until it subsides of itself. Those familiar with emotional French manner will tell us that it all means nothing serious; that, notwithstanding this turmoil, all important questions are calmly discussed in party councils before they are submitted to public debate, and that the excitement is only the natural outlet of irrepressible human nature as it exists in sunny France. And it matters little with what petty bluster or serious throes she does it, if, out of her agitations, the nation comes, as she seems to be slowly doing, into larger light and truer liberty, into the grand freedom of self-control. Once there, revolutions will cease to be chronic, and regeneration, begun in the governmental center, may permeate the spiritual and intellectual, and ultimately reach even the corruption of the social life. Any influence that tends toward this, however convulsive in its action, must be welcomed by the thinking world. In her transformed palaces and half deserted churches one can but think on these things, forgetting that our business is for the present to observe and not to think. There is small time now for processes of thought, and none for opinions or conclusions. Three-quarters of the globe is before us, and even bewildering, bewitching France must be left behind.
[To be continued.]
[“WE MUST NOT FORGET OUR DEAD.”]
By MARY R. D. DINGWALL.
“So many of our students are in middle and after middle life; the death rate is, therefore, unusually large.”
“I will have them be with me where I am,”
Says Christ of his sainted ones;
And we give them up with sorrowing hearts,
When the Master’s summons comes.
Fold we the hands, though tasks at which they wrought
May be but half completed;
And we press the lips with a solemn thought
Of the last words they repeated.
“I will have them be with me where I am,”
Says he who o’er Lazarus wept;
And with tears we lay our loved ones away,
To sleep as Lazarus slept.
And we take up the tasks they left undone,
Sing songs they would be singing,
While we run with patience the race they run,
Bring sheaves as they were bringing.
[TALES FROM SHAKSPERE.]
By CHARLES LAMB.
[KING LEAR.]
Lear, King of Britain, had three daughters; Gonerill, wife to the Duke of Albany; Regan, wife to the Duke of Cornwall; and Cordelia, a young maid, for whose love the King of France and Duke of Burgundy were joint suitors, and were at this time making stay for that purpose in the court of Lear.
The old king, worn out with age and the fatigues of government, he being more than fourscore years old, determined to take no further part in state affairs, but to leave the management to younger strengths, that he might have time to prepare for death, which must at no long period ensue. With this intent he called his three daughters to him, to know from their own lips which of them loved him best, that he might part his kingdom among them in such proportions as their affection for him should seem to deserve.
Gonerill, the eldest, declared that she loved her father more than words could give out, that he was dearer to her than the light of her own eyes, dearer than life and liberty, with a deal of such professing stuff, which is easy to counterfeit where there is no real love, only a few fine words delivered with confidence being wanted in that case. The king, delighted to hear from her own mouth this assurance of her love, and thinking truly that her heart went with it, in a fit of fatherly fondness bestowed upon her and her husband one third of his ample kingdom.
Then calling to him his second daughter, he demanded what she had to say. Regan, who was made of the same hollow metal as her sister, was not a whit behind in her professions; but rather declared that what her sister had spoken came short of the love which she professed to bear for his highness; insomuch that she found all other joys dead, in comparison with the pleasure which she took in the love of her dear king and father. Lear blest himself in having such loving children, as he thought; and could do no less, after the handsome assurances which Regan had made, than bestow a third of his kingdom upon her and her husband, equal in size to that which he had already given away to Gonerill.
Then turning to his youngest daughter Cordelia, whom he called his joy, he asked what she had to say; thinking no doubt that she would glad his ears with the same loving speeches which her sisters had uttered, or rather that her expressions would be so much stronger than theirs, as she had always been his darling, and favored by him above either of them. But Cordelia, disgusted with the flattery of her sisters, whose hearts she knew were far from their lips, and seeing that all their coaxing speeches were only intended to wheedle the old king out of his dominions, that they and their husbands might reign in his life-time, made no other reply but this, that she loved his majesty according to her duty, neither more nor less. The king, shocked with this appearance of ingratitude in his favorite child, desired her to consider her words, and to mend her speech, lest it should mar her fortunes. Cordelia then told her father, that he was her father, that he had given her breeding, and loved her, that she returned those duties back as was most fit, and did obey him, love him, and most honor him. But that she could not frame her mouth to such large speeches as her sisters had done, or promise to love nothing else in the world. Why had her sisters husbands, if (as they said) they had no love for anything but their father? If she should ever wed, she was sure the lord to whom she gave her hand would want half her love, half of her care and duty: she should never marry like her sisters, to love her father all.
Cordelia, who in earnest loved her old father, even almost as extravagantly as her sisters pretended to do, would have plainly told him so at any other time, in more daughter-like and loving terms, and without these qualifications, which did indeed sound a little ungracious: but after the crafty flattering speeches of her sisters, which drew such extravagant rewards, she thought the handsomest thing she could do was to love and be silent. This put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and showed that she loved, but not for gain: and that her professions, the less ostentatious they were, had so much the more of truth and sincerity than her sisters’.
This plainness of speech, which Lear called pride, so enraged the old monarch—who in his best of times always showed much of spleen and rashness, and in whom the dotage incident to old age had so clouded over his reason, that he could not discern truth from flattery, nor a gay painted speech from words that came from the heart—that in a fury of resentment he retracted the third part of his kingdom which he had reserved for Cordelia, and gave it away from her, sharing it equally between her two sisters, and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; whom he now called to him, and in presence of all his courtiers, bestowing a coronet between them, invested them jointly with all the power, revenue, and execution of government, only retaining to himself the name of king; all the rest of royalty he resigned: with this reservation, that himself, with a hundred knights for his attendants, was to be maintained by monthly course in each of his daughters’ palaces in turn.
So preposterous a disposal of his kingdom, so little guided by reason, and so much by passion, filled all his courtiers with astonishment and sorrow; but none of them had the courage to interpose between this incensed king and his wrath, except the Earl of Kent, who was beginning to speak a good word for Cordelia, when the passionate Lear on pain of death commanded him to desist; but the good Kent was not so to be repelled. He had been ever loyal to Lear, whom he had honored as a king, loved as a father, followed as a master; and had never esteemed his life further than as a pawn to wage against his royal master’s enemies, nor feared to lose it when Lear’s safety was the motive; nor now that Lear was most his own enemy did this faithful servant of the king forget his old principles, but manfully opposed Lear, to do Lear good; and was unmannerly only because Lear was mad. He had been a most faithful counselor in times past to the king, and he besought him now, that he would see with his eyes (as he had done in many weighty matters), and go by his advice still, and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness; for he would answer with his life, his judgment, that Lear’s youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honor was bound to plainness. For Lear’s threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service, that should not hinder duty from speaking?
The honest freedom of this good Earl of Kent only stirred up the king’s wrath the more, and like a frantic patient who kills his physician, and loves his mortal disease, he banished his true servant, and allotted him but five days to make his preparations for departure; but if on the sixth his hated person was found within the realm of Britain, that moment was to be his death. And Kent bade farewell to the king, and said, that since he chose to show himself in such a fashion, it was but banishment to stay there; and before he went he recommended Cordelia to the protection of the gods, the maid who had so rightly thought, and so discreetly spoken; and only wished that her sisters’ large speeches might be answered with deeds of love; and then he went, as he said, to shape his old course to a new country.
The King of France and Duke of Burgundy were now called in to hear the determination of Lear about his youngest daughter, and to know whether they would persist in their courtship to Cordelia, now that she was under her father’s displeasure, and had no fortune but her own person to recommend her. The Duke of Burgundy declined the match, and would not take her to wife upon such conditions; but the King of France, understanding what the nature of the fault had been which had lost her the love of her father, that it was only a tardiness of speech, and the not being able to frame her tongue to flattery like her sisters, took this young maid by the hand, and saying that her virtues were a dowry above a kingdom, bade Cordelia to take farewell of her sisters, and of her father, though he had been unkind, and she should go with him, and be queen of him and of fair France, and reign over fairer possessions than her sisters: and he called the Duke of Burgundy in contempt a waterish duke, because his love for this young maid had in a moment run all away like water.
Then Cordelia, with weeping eyes, took leave of her sisters and besought them to love their father well, and make good their professions; and they sullenly told her not to prescribe to them for they knew their duty, but to strive to content her husband, who had taken her (as they tauntingly expressed it) as Fortune’s alms. And Cordelia with a heavy heart departed, for she knew the cunning of her sisters, and she wished her father in better hands than she was about to leave him in.
Cordelia was no sooner gone than the devilish dispositions of her sisters began to show themselves in their true colors. Even before the expiration of the first month, which Lear was to spend by agreement with his eldest daughter, Gonerill, the old king began to find out the difference between promises and performances. This wretch, having got from her father all that he had to bestow, even to the giving away of the crown from off his head, began to grudge even those small remnants of royalty which the old man had reserved to himself, to please his fancy with the idea of being still a king. She could not bear to see him and his hundred knights. Every time she met her father, she put on a frowning countenance; and when the old man wanted to speak with her, she would feign sickness, or anything to be rid of the sight of him; for it was plain that she esteemed his old age a useless burden, and his attendants an unnecessary expense. Not only she herself slackened in her expressions of duty to the king, but by her example, and (it is to be feared) not without her private instructions, her very servants treated him with neglect, and would refuse to obey his orders, or still more contemptuously pretend not to hear them. Lear could not but perceive this alteration in the behavior of his daughter, but he shut his eyes against it as long as he could, as people commonly are unwilling to believe the unpleasant consequences which their own mistakes and obstinacy have brought upon them.
True love and fidelity are no more to be estranged by ill, than falsehood and hollow-heartedness can be conciliated by good usage. This eminently appears in the instance of the good Earl of Kent, who, though banished by Lear, and his life made forfeit if he were found in Britain, choose to stay and abide all consequences, as long as there was a chance of his being useful to the king, his master. See to what mean shifts and disguises poor loyalty is forced to submit sometimes; yet it counts nothing base or unworthy, so as it can but do service where it owes an obligation. In the disguise of a serving-man, all his greatness and pomp laid aside, this good earl proffered his services to the king, who not knowing him to be Kent in that disguise, but pleased with a certain plainness, or rather bluntness in his answers which the earl put on, (so different from that smooth oily flattery which he had so much reason to be sick of, having found the effects not answerable in his daughter), a bargain was quickly struck, and Lear took Kent into his service by the name of Caius, as he called himself, never suspecting him to be his once great favorite, the high and mighty Earl of Kent. This Caius quickly found means to show his fidelity and love to his royal master; for Gonerill’s steward that same day behaving in a disrespectful manner to Lear, and giving him saucy looks and language, as no doubt he was secretly encouraged to do by his mistress, Caius not enduring to hear so open an affront put upon majesty, made no more ado, but presently tripped up his heels, and laid the unmannerly slave in the kennel, for which friendly service Lear became more and more attached to him.
Nor was Kent the only friend Lear had. In his degree, and so far as so insignificant a personage could show his love, the poor fool, or jester, that had been of his palace while Lear had a palace, as it was the custom of kings and great personages at that time to keep a fool (as he was called) to make them sport after serious business. This poor fool clung to Lear after he had given away his crown, and by his witty sayings would keep up his good humor, though he could not refrain sometimes from jeering at his master for his imprudence, in uncrowning himself and giving all away to his daughters, at which time, as he rhymingly expressed it, these daughters
For sudden joy did weep,
And he for sorrow sung,
That such a king should play bo-peep,
And go the fools among.
And in such wild sayings and scraps of songs, of which he had plenty, this pleasant, honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Gonerill herself, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick; such as comparing the king to the hedge-sparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains. And saying that the ass may know when the cart draws the horse (meaning that Lear’s daughters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father); and that Lear was no longer Lear, but the shadow of Lear; for which free speeches he was once or twice threatened to be whipped.
The coolness and falling off of respect which Lear had begun to perceive, were not all which this foolish-fond father was to suffer from his unworthy daughter. She now plainly told him that his staying in her palace was inconvenient so long as he insisted upon keeping up an establishment of a hundred knights; that this establishment was useless and expensive, and only served to fill her court with riot and feasting; and she prayed him that he would lessen their number, and keep none but old men about him, such as himself, and fitting his age.
Lear at first could not believe his eyes or ears, nor that it was his daughter who spoke so unkindly. He could not believe that she who had received a crown from him should seek to cut off his train, and grudge him the respect due to his old age. But she persisting in her undutiful demand, the old man’s rage was so excited, that he called her a detested kite, and said that she spoke an untruth. And so indeed she did, for the hundred knights were all men of choice behavior and sobriety of manners, skilled in all particulars of duty, and not given to rioting and feasting as she said. And he bid his horses to be prepared, for he would go to his other daughter, Regan, he and his hundred knights. And he spoke of ingratitude, and said it was a marble-hearted devil, and showed more hideous in a child than the sea-monster. And he cursed his eldest daughter Gonerill so as was terrible to hear, praying that she might never have a child, or if she had, that it might live to return that scorn and contempt upon her, which she had shown to him; that she might feel how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have a thankless child. And Gonerill’s husband, the Duke of Albany, beginning to excuse himself for any share which Lear might suppose he had in the unkindness, Lear would not hear him out, but in rage ordered his horses to be saddled, and set out with his followers for the abode of Regan, his other daughter. And Lear thought to himself, how small the fault of Cordelia (if it was a fault) now appeared, in comparison with her sister’s, and he wept. And then he was ashamed that such a creature as Gonerill should have so much power over his manhood as to make him weep.
Regan and her husband were keeping their court in great pomp and state at their palace; and Lear despatched his servant Caius with letters to his daughter, that she might be prepared for his reception, while he and his train followed after. But it seems that Gonerill had been beforehand with him, sending letters also to Regan, accusing her father of waywardness and ill humors, and advising her not to receive so great a train as he was bringing with him. This messenger arrived at the same time with Caius, and Caius and he met. And who should it be but Caius’ old enemy, the steward, whom he had formerly tripped up by the heels for his saucy behavior to Lear. Caius not liking the fellow’s look, and suspecting what he came for, began to revile him, and challenged him to fight, which the fellow refusing, Caius, in a fit of honest passion, beat him soundly, as such a mischief-maker and carrier of wicked messages deserved; which coming to the ears of Regan and her husband, they ordered Caius to be put in the stocks, though he was a messenger from the king her father, and in that character demanded the highest respect, so that the first thing the king saw when he entered the castle, was his faithful servant Caius sitting in that disgraceful situation.
This was but a bad omen of the reception which he was to expect; but a worse followed, when upon inquiry for his daughter and her husband, he was told they were weary with traveling all night, and could not see him: and when lastly, upon his insisting in a positive and angry manner to see them, they came to greet him, whom should he see in their company but the hated Gonerill, who had come to tell her own story, and set her sister against the king her father!
This sight much moved the old man, and still more to see Regan take her by the hand: and he asked Gonerill if she was not ashamed to look upon his white beard? And Regan advised him to go home again with Gonerill and live with her peaceably, dismissing half of his attendants, and to ask her forgiveness; for he was old and wanted discretion, and must be ruled and led by persons that had more discretion than himself. And Lear showed how preposterous that would sound, if he were to go down on his knees, and beg of his own daughter for food and raiment, and he argued against such an unnatural dependence; declaring his resolution never to return with her, but to stay where he was with Regan, he and his hundred knights: for he said that she had not forgot the half of the kingdom which he had endowed her with, and that her eyes were not fierce like Gonerill’s, but mild and kind. And he said that rather than return to Gonerill, with half his train cut off, he would go over to France, and beg a wretched pension of the king there, who had married his youngest daughter without a portion.
But he was mistaken in expecting kinder treatment of Regan than he had experienced from her sister Gonerill. As if willing to outdo her sister in unfilial behavior, she declared that she thought fifty knights too many to wait upon him; that five-and-twenty were enough. Then Lear, nigh heart-broken, turned to Gonerill, and said that he would go back with her, for her fifty doubled five-and-twenty, and so her love was twice as much as Regan’s. But Gonerill excused herself and said, “What need of so many as five-and-twenty? or even ten? or five? when he might be waited upon by her servants or her sister’s servants?” So these two wicked daughters, as if they strove to exceed each other in cruelty to their old father who had been so good to them, by little and little would have abated him of all his train, all respect (little enough for him that once commanded a kingdom), which was left him to show that he had once been a king! Not that a splendid train is essential to happiness, but from a king to a beggar is a hard change, from commanding millions to be without one attendant: and it was the ingratitude in his daughters denying it, more than what he would suffer by the want of it, which pierced this poor king to the heart: insomuch that with this double ill-usage, and vexation for having so foolishly given away a kingdom, his wits began to be unsettled, and while he said he knew not what, he vowed revenge against those unnatural hags, and to make examples of them that should be a terror to the earth!
While he was thus idly threatening what his weak arm could never execute, night came on, and a loud storm of thunder and lightning with rain; and his daughters still persisting in their resolution not to admit his followers, he called for his horses, and chose rather to encounter the utmost fury of the storm abroad, than to stay under the same roof with these ungrateful daughters; and they, saying that the injuries which willful men procure to themselves are their just punishment, suffered him to go in that condition, and shut their doors upon him.
The winds were high and the rain and storm increased when the old man sallied forth to combat with the elements, less sharp than his daughters’ unkindness. For many miles about there was scarce a bush: and there upon a heath, exposed to the fury of the storm in a dark night, did King Lear wander out, and defy the winds and the thunder; and he bid the winds to blow the earth into the sea, or swell the waves of the sea till they drowned the earth, that no token might remain of any such ungrateful animal as man. The old king was now left with no companion but the poor fool, who still abided with him, with his merry conceits striving to out-jest misfortune, saying, it was but a naughty night to swim in, and truly the king had better go in and ask his daughter’s blessing:
But he that has a little tiny wit,
With heigh ho, the wind and rain!
Must make content with his fortune fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day:
and swearing it was a brave night to cool a lady’s pride.
Thus poorly accompanied this once great monarch was found by his ever faithful servant, the good Earl of Kent, now transformed to Caius, who ever followed close at his side, though the king did not know him to be the earl; and he said, “Alas! sir, are you here? creatures that love night love not such nights as these. This dreadful storm has driven the beasts to their hiding places. Man’s nature can not endure the affliction or the fear.” And Lear rebuked him, and said, these lesser evils were not felt, where a greater malady was fixed. When the mind is at ease, the body has leisure to be delicate; but the tempest in his mind did take all feelings else from his senses, but of that which beat at his heart. And he spoke of filial ingratitude, and said it was all one as if the mouth should tear the hand for lifting food to it; for parents were hands and food and everything to children.
But the good Cauis, still persisting in his entreaties that the king would not stay out in the open air, at last persuaded him to enter a little wretched hovel which stood upon the heath, where the fool first entering, suddenly ran back terrified, saying he had seen a spirit. But upon examination this spirit proved to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the fool, one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the better to extort charity from the compassionate country people; who go about the country calling themselves poor Tom and poor Turleygood, saying, “Who gives anything to poor Tom?” sticking pins and nails and sprigs of rosemary into their arms to make them bleed; with such horrible actions, partly by prayers, and partly with lunatic curses, they move or terrify the ignorant country folks into giving them alms. This poor fellow was such a one; and the king seeing him in so wretched a plight, with nothing but a blanket about his loins to cover his nakedness, could not be persuaded but that the fellow was some father who had given all away to his daughters, and brought himself to that pass; for nothing he thought could bring a man to such wretchedness but the having unkind daughters.
And from this and many such wild speeches which he uttered, the good Caius plainly perceived that he was not in his perfect mind, but that his daughters´ ill-usage had really made him go mad. And now the loyalty of this worthy Earl of Kent showed itself in more essential services than he had hitherto found opportunity to perform. For with the assistance of some of the king’s attendants who remained loyal, he had the person of his royal master removed at daybreak to the castle of Dover, where his own friends and influence, as Earl of Kent, chiefly lay; and himself embarking for France, hastened to the court of Cordelia, and did there in such moving terms represent the pitiful condition of her royal father, and set out in such lively colors the inhumanity of her sisters, that this good and loving child with many tears besought the king, her husband, that he would give her leave to embark for England with a sufficient power to subdue these cruel daughters and their husbands, and restore the old king, her father, to his throne; which being granted, she set forth, and with a royal army she landed at Dover.
Lear having by some chance escaped from the guardian which the good Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia’s train, wandering about in the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, though earnestly desirous of seeing her father, was prevailed upon to put off the meeting, till by sleep and the operation of herbs which they gave him, he should be restored to greater composure. By the aid of these skillful physicians, to whom Cordelia promised all her gold and jewels for the recovery of the old king, Lear was soon in a condition to see his daughter.
A tender sight it was to see the meeting between this father and daughter; to see the struggles between the joy of this poor old king at beholding again his once darling child, and the shame at receiving such filial kindness from her whom he had cast off for so small a fault in his displeasure; both these passions struggling with the remains of his malady, which, in his half-crazed brain, sometimes made him that he scarce remembered where he was, or who it was that so kindly kissed him and spoke to him: and then he would beg the standers-by not to laugh at him, if he were mistaken in thinking this lady to be his daughter Cordelia! And then to see him fall on his knees to beg pardon of his child; and she, good lady, kneeling all the while to ask a blessing of him, and telling him that it did not become him to kneel, but it was her duty, for she was his child, his true and very child Cordelia. And she kissed him (as she said) to kiss away all her sisters’ unkindness, and said that they might be ashamed of themselves, to turn their old kind father with his white beard out into the cold air, when her enemy’s dog, though it had bit her (as she prettily expressed it), should have stayed by her fire such a night as that, and warmed himself. And she told her father how she had come from France with purpose to bring him assistance; and he said that she must forget and forgive, for he was old and foolish, and did not know what he did; but that to be sure she had great cause not to love him, but her sisters had none. And Cordelia said that she had no cause, no more than they had. So we will leave this old king in the protection of this dutiful and loving child, where, by the help of sleep and medicine, she and her physicians at length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shaken. Let us return to say a word or two about those cruel daughters.
These monsters of ingratitude, who had been so false to their old father, could not be expected to prove more faithful to their own husbands. They soon grew tired of paying even the appearance of duty and affection, and in an open way showed they had fixed their loves upon another. It happened that the object of their guilty loves was the same. It was Edmund, a natural son of the late Earl of Gloucester, who, by his treacheries, had succeeded in disinheriting his brother Edgar, the lawful heir, from his earldom, and by his wicked practices was now earl himself: a wicked man, and a fit object for the love of such wicked creatures as Gonerill and Regan. It falling out about this time that the Duke of Cornwall, Regan’s husband, died, Regan immediately declared her intention of wedding this Earl of Gloucester, which rousing the jealousy of her sister, to whom as well as to Regan, this wicked earl had at sundry times professed love, Gonerill found means to make away with her sister by poison; but being detected in her practices, and imprisoned by her husband, the Duke of Albany, for this deed, and for her guilty passion for the earl which had come to his ears, she, in a fit of disappointed love and rage, shortly put an end to her own life. Thus the justice of heaven at last overtook these wicked daughters.
While the eyes of all men were upon this event, admiring the justice displayed in their deserved deaths, the same eyes were suddenly taken off from this sight to admire at the mysterious ways of the same power in the melancholy fate of the young and virtuous daughter, the Lady Cordelia, whose good deeds did seem to deserve a more fortunate conclusion. But it is an awful truth, that innocence and piety are not always successful in this world. The forces which Gonerill and Regan had sent out under the command of the bad Earl of Gloucester were victorious, and Cordelia, by the practices of this wicked earl, who did not like that any should stand between him and the throne, ended her life in prison. Thus heaven took this innocent lady to itself in her young years, after showing to the world an illustrious example of filial duty. Lear did not long survive this kind child.
Before he died, the good Earl of Kent, who had still attended his old master’s steps from the first of his daughter’s ill-usage to this sad period of his decay, tried to make him understand that it was he who had followed him under the name of Caius; but Lear’s care-crazed brain at that time could not comprehend how that could be, or how Kent and Caius could be the same person. So Kent thought it needless to trouble him with explanations at such a time; and Lear soon after expiring, this faithful servant to the king, between age and grief for his old master’s vexations, soon followed him to the grave.
How the judgment of heaven overtook the bad Earl of Gloucester, whose treasons were discovered, and himself slain in single combat with his brother, the lawful earl; and how Gonerill’s husband, the Duke of Albany, who was innocent of the death of Cordelia, and had never encouraged his lady in her wicked proceedings against her father, ascended the throne of Britain after the death of Lear, is needless here to narrate, Lear and his three daughters being dead, whose adventures alone concern our story.
[HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK.]
Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, becoming a widow by the sudden death of King Hamlet, in less than two months after his death married his brother Claudius, which was noted by all people at the time for a strange act of indiscretion, or unfeelingness, or worse; for this Claudius did no ways resemble her late husband in the qualities of his person or his mind, but was as contemptible of outward appearance as he was base and unworthy of disposition. And suspicions did not fail to arise in the minds of some, that he had privately made away with his brother, the late king, with the view of marrying his widow, and ascending the throne of Denmark, to the exclusion of young Hamlet, the son of the buried king, and lawful successor to the throne.
But upon no one did this unadvised action of the queen make such impression as upon this young prince, who loved and venerated the memory of his dead father almost to idolatry, and being of a nice sense of honor, and a most exquisite practiser of propriety himself, did sorely take to heart this unworthy conduct of his mother Gertrude; insomuch that, between grief for his father’s death, and shame for his mother’s marriage, this young prince was over-clouded with a deep melancholy, and lost all his mirth and all his good looks. All his customary pleasure in books forsook him, his princely exercises and sports, proper to his youth, were no longer acceptable; he grew weary of the world, which seemed to him an unweeded garden, where all the wholesome flowers were choked up, and nothing but weeds could thrive. Not that the prospect of exclusion from the throne, his lawful inheritance, weighed so much upon his spirits, though that to a young and high-minded prince was a bitter wound and a sore indignity; but what so galled him, and took away all his cheerful spirits, was that his mother had shown herself so forgetful to his father’s memory. And such a father! who had been to her so loving and so gentle a husband! and then she always appeared as loving and obedient a wife to him, and would hang upon him as if her affection grew to him: and now within two months, or, as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two months, she had married again, married his uncle, her dead husband’s brother, in itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made much more so by the indecent haste with which it was concluded, and the unkindly character of the man whom she had chosen. This it was, which, more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed the spirits, and brought a cloud over the mind of this honorable young prince.
In vain was all that his mother Gertrude or the king could do or contrive to divert him; he still appeared in court in a suit of deep black, as mourning for the king his father’s death, which mode of dress he never laid aside, not even in compliment to his mother upon the day she was married, nor could he be brought to join in any of the festivities or rejoicings at that (as it appeared to him) disgraceful day.
What mostly troubled him was an uncertainty about the manner of his father’s death. It was given out by Claudius that a serpent had stung him; but young Hamlet had shrewd suspicions that Claudius himself was the serpent; in plain English that he had murdered him for his crown, and that the serpent who stung his father did now sit on his throne.
How far he was right in this conjecture, and what he ought to think of his mother, how far she was privy to this murder, and whether by her consent or knowledge, or without, it came to pass, were the doubts which continually harassed and distracted him.
A rumor had reached the ear of young Hamlet, that an apparition, exactly resembling the dead king his father, had been seen by the soldiers upon watch, on the platform before the palace at midnight, for two or three nights successively. The figure came constantly clad in the same suit of armor, from head to foot, which the dead king was known to have worn: and they who saw it (Hamlet’s bosom friend was one) agreed in their testimony as to the time and manner of its appearance: that it came just as the clock struck twelve: that it looked pale, with a face more of sorrow than of anger; that its beard was grisly; and the color a sable silvered, as they had seen it in his life-time; that it made no answer when they spoke to it, yet once they thought it lifted up its head, and addressed itself to motion as if it were about to speak; but in that moment the morning cock crew, and it shrunk in haste away, and vanished out of their sight.
The young prince, strangely amazed at their relation, which was too consistent and agreeing with itself to disbelieve, concluded that it was his father’s ghost they had seen, and determined to take his watch with the soldiers that night, that he might have a chance of seeing it: for he reasoned with himself that such an appearance did not come for nothing, but that the ghost had something to impart; and though it had been silent hitherto, yet it would speak to him. And he waited with impatience for the coming of night. When night came he took his stand with Horatio, and Marcellus, one of the guard, upon the platform, where this apparition was accustomed to walk: and it being a cold night, and the air unusually raw and nipping, Hamlet and Horatio and their companion fell into some talk about the coldness of the night, which was broken off by Horatio announcing that the ghost was coming.
At the sight of his father’s spirit Hamlet was struck with a sudden surprise and fear. He at first called upon the angels and heavenly ministers to defend them, for he knew not whether it were a good spirit or bad; whether it came for good or for evil. But he gradually assumed more courage; and his father (as it seemed to him) looked upon him so piteously, and as it were desiring to have conversation with him, and did in all respects appear so like himself as he was when he lived, that Hamlet could not help addressing him: he called him by his name, Hamlet, King, Father! and conjured him that he would tell the reason why he had left his grave, where they had seen him quietly bestowed, to come again and visit the earth and the moonlight; and besought him that he would let them know if there was anything which they could do to give peace to his spirit. And the ghost beckoned to Hamlet, that he should go with him to some more removed place where they might be alone: and Horatio and Marcellus would have dissuaded the young prince from following it, for they feared lest it should be some evil spirit, who would tempt him to the neighboring sea, or to the top of some dreadful cliff, and there put on some horrible shape which might deprive the prince of his reason. But their counsels and entreaties could not alter Hamlet’s determination, who cared too little about life to fear the losing of it; and as to his soul, he said, what could the spirit do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? and he felt as hardy as a lion, and bursting from them who did all they could to hold him, he followed whithersoever the spirit led him.
And when they were alone together, the spirit broke silence, and told him that he was the ghost of Hamlet, his father, who had been cruelly murdered, and he told the manner of it; that it was done by his own brother Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, as Hamlet had already but too much suspected, for the hope of succeeding him. That as he was sleeping in his garden, his custom always in the afternoon, this treacherous brother stole upon him in his sleep, and poured the juice of poisonous henbane into his ears, which has such antipathy to the life of man, that swift as quicksilver it courses through all the veins of the body, baking up the blood, and spreading a crust-like leprosy all over the skin; thus sleeping, by a brother’s hand, he was cut off at once from his crown, his queen, and his life: and he adjured Hamlet, if he did ever his dear father love, that he would revenge his foul murder. And the ghost lamented to his son, that his mother should so fall off from virtue, as to prove false to the wedded love of her first husband, and to marry his murderer; and he cautioned Hamlet, howsoever he proceeded in his revenge against his wicked uncle, by no means to act any violence against the person of his mother, but to leave her to heaven, and to the stings and thorns of conscience. Hamlet promised to observe the ghost’s directions in all things, and the ghost vanished.
And when Hamlet was left alone, he took up a solemn resolution, that all he had in his memory, all that he had ever learned by books or observation, should be instantly forgotten by him, and nothing live in his brain but the memory of what the ghost had told him, and enjoined him to do. Hamlet related the particulars of the conversation which had passed to none but his dear friend Horatio; and he enjoined both to him and Marcellus the strictest secrecy as to what they had seen that night.
The terror which the sight of the ghost had left upon the senses of Hamlet, he being weak and dispirited before, almost unhinged his mind, and drove him beside his reason. And he, fearing that it would continue to have this effect, which might subject him to observation, and set his uncle upon his guard, if he suspected that he was meditating any thing against him, or that Hamlet really knew more of his father’s death than he professed, took up a strange resolution from that time to counterfeit as if he were really and truly mad; thinking that he would be less an object of suspicion when his uncle should believe him incapable of any serious project, and that his real perturbation of mind would be best covered and pass concealed under a guise of pretended lunacy.
From this time Hamlet affected a certain wildness and strangeness in his apparel, his speech and behavior, and did so excellently counterfeit the madman, that the king and queen were both deceived, and not thinking his grief for his father’s death a sufficient cause to produce such a distemper, for they knew not of the appearance of the ghost, they concluded that his malady was love, and they thought they had found out the object.
Before Hamlet fell into the melancholy way which has been related, he had dearly loved a fair maid called Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius, the king’s chief counselor in affairs of state. He had sent her letters and rings, and made many tenders of his affection to her, and importuned her with love in honorable fashion: and she had given belief to his vows and importunities. But the melancholy which he fell into latterly had made him neglect her, and from the time he conceived the project of counterfeiting madness, he affected to treat her with unkindness, and a sort of rudeness; but she, good lady, rather than reproach him with being false to her, persuaded herself that it was nothing but the disease in his mind, and no settled unkindness, which made him less observant of her than formerly; and she compared the faculties or his once noble mind and excellent understanding, impaired as they were with the deep melancholy that oppressed him, to sweet bells which in themselves are capable of most exquisite music, but when jangled out of tune, or rudely handled, produce only a harsh and unpleasing sound.
Though the rough business which Hamlet had in hand, the revenging of his father’s death upon his murderer, did not suit with the playful state of courtship, or admit of the society of so idle a passion as love now seemed to him, yet it could not hinder but that soft thoughts of his Ophelia would come between, and in one of these moments, when he thought that his treatment of this gentle lady had been unreasonably harsh, he wrote her a letter full of wild starts of passion, and in extravagant terms, such as agreed with his supposed madness, but mixed with some gentle touches of affection, which could not but show to his honored lady that a deep love for her yet lay at the bottom of his heart. He bade her to doubt the stars were fire, and to doubt that the sun did move, to doubt truth to be a liar, but never to doubt that he loved; with more of such extravagant phrases. This letter Ophelia dutifully showed to her father, and the old man thought himself bound to communicate it to the king and queen, who from that time supposed the true cause of Hamlet’s madness was love. And the queen wished that the good beauties of Ophelia might be the happy cause of his wildness, for so she hoped that her virtues might happily restore him to his accustomed way again, to both their honors.
But Hamlet’s malady lay deeper than she supposed, or than could be so cured. His father’s ghost, which he had seen, still haunted his imagination, and the sacred injunction to revenge his murder gave him no rest till it was accomplished. Every hour of delay seemed to him a sin, and a violation of his father’s commands. Yet how to compass the death of the king, surrounded as he constantly was with his guards, was no easy matter. Or if it had been, the presence of the queen, Hamlet’s mother, who was generally with the king, was a restraint upon his purpose, which he could not break through. Besides, the very circumstance that the usurper was his mother’s husband filled him with some remorse, and still blunted the edge of his purpose. The mere act of putting a fellow-creature to death was in itself odious and terrible to a disposition naturally so gentle as Hamlet’s was. His very melancholy, and the dejection of spirits he had so long been in, produced an irresoluteness and wavering of purpose, which kept him from proceeding to extremities. Moreover, he could not help having some scruples upon his mind, whether the spirit which he had seen was indeed his father, or whether it might not be the devil, who he had heard has power to take any form he pleases, and who might have assumed his father’s shape only to take advantage of his weakness and his melancholy, to drive him to the doing of so desperate an act as murder. And he determined that he would have more certain grounds to go upon than a vision, or apparition, which might be a delusion.
While he was in this irresolute mind there came to the court certain players, in whom Hamlet formerly used to take delight, and particularly to hear one of them speak a tragical speech, describing the death of old Priam, King of Troy, with the grief of Hecuba, his queen. Hamlet welcomed his old friends, the players, and remembering how that speech had formerly given him pleasure, requested the player to repeat it, which he did in so lively a manner, setting forth the cruel murder of the feeble king, with the destruction of his people and city by fire, and the mad grief of the old queen, running barefoot up and down the palace, with a poor clout upon that head where a crown had been, and with nothing but a blanket upon her loins, snatched up in haste, where she had worn a royal robe; that not only it drew tears from all that stood by, who thought they saw the real scene, so lively was it represented, but even the player himself delivered it with a broken voice and real tears. This put Hamlet upon thinking, if that player could so work himself up to passion by a mere fictitious speech, to weep for one that he had never seen, for Hecuba, that had been dead so many hundred years, how dull was he, who having a real motive and cue for passion, a real king and a dear father murdered, was yet so little moved that his revenge all this while had seemed to have slept in dull and muddy forgetfulness! And while he meditated on actors and acting, and the powerful effects which a good play, represented to the life, has upon the spectator, he remembered the instance of some murderer, who, seeing a murder on the stage, was by the mere force of the scene and resemblance of circumstances so affected, that on the spot he confessed the crime which he had committed. And he determined that these players should play something like the murder of his father before his uncle, and he would watch narrowly what effect it might have upon him, and from his looks he would be able to gather with more certainty if he were the murderer or not. To this effect he ordered a play to be prepared, to the representation of which he invited the king and queen.
The story of the play was of a murder done in Vienna upon a duke. The duke’s name was Gonzago, his wife Baptista. The play showed how one Lucianus, a near relation to the duke, poisoned him in his garden for his estate, and how the murderer in a short time after got the love of Gonzago’s wife.
At the representation of this play the king, who did not know the trap which was laid for him, was present, with his queen and the whole court; Hamlet sitting attentively near him to observe his looks. The play began with a conversation between Gonzago and his wife, in which the lady made many protestations of love, and of never marrying a second husband, if she should outlive Gonzago; wishing she might be accursed if ever she took a second husband, and adding that no woman ever did so but those wicked women who kill their first husbands. Hamlet observed the king, his uncle, change color at this expression, and that it was as bad as wormwood both to him and to the queen. But when Lucianus, according to the story, came to poison Gonzago sleeping in the garden, the strong resemblance which it bore to his own wicked act upon the late king, his brother, whom he had poisoned in his garden, so struck upon the conscience of this usurper, that he was unable to sit out the rest of the play, but on a sudden calling for lights to his chamber, and affecting or partly feeling a sudden sickness, he abruptly left the theatre. The king being departed, the play was given over. Now Hamlet had seen enough to be satisfied that the words of the ghost were true, and no illusion; and in a fit of gaiety, like that which comes over a man who suddenly has some great doubt or scruple resolved, he swore to Horatio that he would take the ghost’s word for a thousand pounds. But before he could make up his resolution as to what measure of revenge he should take, now he was certainly informed that his uncle was his father’s murderer, he was sent for by the queen, his mother, to a private conference in her closet.
It was by desire of the king that the queen sent for Hamlet, that she might signify to her son how much his late behavior had displeased them both; and the king, wishing to know all that passed at that conference, and thinking that the too partial report of a mother might let slip some part of Hamlet’s words, which it might much import the king to know, Polonius, the old counselor of state, was ordered to plant himself behind the hangings in the queen’s closet, where he might, unseen, hear all that passed. This artifice was particularly adapted to the disposition of Polonius, who was a man grown old in crooked maxims and policies of state, and delighted to get at the knowledge of matters in an indirect and cunning way.
Hamlet being come to his mother, she began to tax him in the roundest way with his actions and behavior, and she told him that he had given great offence to his father, meaning the king, his uncle, whom, because he had married her, she called Hamlet’s father. Hamlet, sorely indignant that she would give so dear and honored a name as father seemed to him, to a wretch who was indeed no better than the murderer of his true father, with some sharpness replied, “Mother, you have much offended my father.” The queen said that was but an idle answer. “As good as the question deserved,” said Hamlet. The queen asked him if he had forgotten who it was he was speaking to. “Alas!” replied Hamlet, “I wish I could forget. You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife; and you are my mother: I wish you were not what you are.” “Nay, then,” said the queen, “if you show me so little respect, I will set those to you that can speak,” and was going to send the king or Polonius to him. But Hamlet would not let her go, now he had her alone, till he had tried if his words could not bring her to some sense of her wicked life; and, taking her by the wrist, he held her fast, and made her sit down. She, affrighted at his earnest manner, and fearful lest in his lunacy he should do her a mischief, cried out: and a voice was heard from behind the hangings, “Help, help the queen;” which Hamlet hearing, and verily thinking that it was the king himself there concealed, he drew his sword, and stabbed at the place where the voice came from, as he would have stabbed a rat that ran there, till the voice ceasing, he concluded the person to be dead. But when he dragged forth the body, it was not the king, but Polonius, the old officious counselor, that had planted himself as a spy behind the hangings. “Oh me!” exclaimed the queen, “what a rash and bloody deed have you done!” “A bloody deed, mother,” replied Hamlet, “but not so bad as yours, who killed a king and married his brother.” Hamlet had gone too far to leave off here. He was now in the humor to speak plainly to his mother, and he pursued it. And though the faults of parents are to be tenderly treated by their children, yet in the case of great crimes the son may have leave to speak even to his own mother with some harshness, so as that harshness is meant for her good, and to turn her from her wicked ways, and not done for the purpose of upbraiding. And now this virtuous prince did in moving terms represent to the queen the heinousness of her offense, in being so forgetful of the dead king, his father, as in so short a space of time to marry with his brother and reputed murderer: such an act as, after the vows which she had sworn to her first husband, was enough to make all vows of women suspected, and all virtue to be accounted hypocrisy, wedding contracts to be less than gamester’s oaths, and religion to be a mockery and a mere form of words. He said she had done such a deed, that the heavens blushed at it, and the earth was sick of her because of it. And he showed her two pictures, the one of the late king, her first husband, and the other of the present king, her second husband, and he bade her mark the difference: what a grace was on the brow of his father, how like a god he looked! the curls of Apollo, the forehead of Jupiter, the eye of Mars, and a posture like to Mercury newly alighted on some heaven-kissing hill! this man, he said, had been her husband. And then he showed her whom she had got in his stead: how like a blight or a mildew he looked, for so he had blasted his wholesome brother. And the queen was sore ashamed that he should so turn her eyes inward upon her soul, which she now saw so black and deformed. And he asked her how she could continue to live with this man and be a wife to him, who had murdered her first husband, and got the crown by as false means as a thief; and just as he spoke, the ghost of his father, such as he was in his life-time, and such as he had lately seen it, entered the room, and Hamlet, in great terror, asked what it would have; and the ghost said that it came to remind him of the revenge he had promised, which Hamlet seemed to have forgot; and the ghost bade him speak to his mother, for the grief and terror she was in would else kill her. It then vanished, and was seen by none but Hamlet, neither could he by pointing to where it stood, or by any description, make his mother perceive it, who was terribly frightened all this while to hear him conversing, as it seemed to her, with nothing, and she imputed it to the disorder of his mind. But Hamlet begged her not to flatter her wicked soul in such a manner as to think it was his madness, and not her own offences, which had brought his father’s spirit again on the earth. And he bade her feel his pulse, how temperately it beat, not like a madman’s. And he begged of her with tears to confess herself to heaven for what was past, and for the future to avoid the company of the king, and be no more as a wife to him; and when she should show herself a mother to him, by respecting his father’s memory, he would ask a blessing of her as a son. And she promising to observe his directions, the conference ended.
And now Hamlet was at leisure to consider who it was, that in his unfortunate rashness he had killed. And when he came to see that it was Polonius, the father of the Lady Ophelia, whom he so dearly loved, he drew apart the dead body, and, his spirits being now a little quieter, he wept for what he had done.
This unfortunate death of Polonius gave the king a pretense for sending Hamlet out of the kingdom. He would willingly have put him to death, fearing him as dangerous; but he dreaded the people, who loved Hamlet; and the queen, who, with all her faults, doated upon the prince, her son. So this subtle king, under pretence of providing for Hamlet’s safety, that he might not be called to account for Polonius’ death, caused him to be conveyed on board a ship bound for England, under the care of two courtiers, by whom he despatched letters to the English court, which at that time was in subjection and paid tribute to Denmark, requiring for special reasons there pretended, that Hamlet should be put to death as soon as he landed on English ground. Hamlet, suspecting some treachery, in the night-time secretly got at the letters, and skilfully erasing his own name, he, in the stead of it, put in the names of those two courtiers, who had the charge of him to be put to death; then sealing up the letters, he put them in their place again. Soon after the ship was attacked by pirates, and a sea-fight commenced, in the course of which Hamlet, desirous to show his valor, with sword in hand, singly boarded the enemy’s vessel, while his own ship, in a cowardly manner, bore away, and leaving him to his fate, the two courtiers made the best of their way to England, charged with those letters, the sense of which Hamlet had altered to their own deserved destruction.
The pirates, who had the prince in their power, showed themselves gentle enemies, and knowing whom they had got prisoner, in the hope that the prince might do them a good turn at court in recompense for any favor they might show him, they set Hamlet on shore at the nearest port in Denmark. From that place Hamlet wrote to the king, acquainting him with the strange chance which had brought him back to his own country, and saying that on the next day he should present himself before his majesty. When he got home, a sad spectacle offered itself the first thing to his eyes. This was the funeral of the young and beautiful Ophelia, his once dear mistress. The wits of this young lady had begun to turn ever since her poor father’s death. That he should die a violent death, and by the hands of the prince whom she loved, so affected this tender young maid that in a little time she grew perfectly distracted, and would go about giving flowers away to the ladies of the court, and saying that they were for her father’s burial, singing songs about love and about death, and sometimes such as had no meaning at all, as if she had no memory of what had happened to her. There was a willow which grew slanting over a brook, and reflected its leaves in the stream. To this brook she came one day when she was unwatched, with garlands she had been making, mixed up of daisies and nettles, flowers and weeds together, and clambering up to hang her garland upon the boughs of the willow, a bough broke and precipitated this fair young maid, garland and all that she had gathered, into the water, where her clothes bore her up for awhile, during which she chanted scraps of old tunes, like one insensible to her own distress, or as if she were a creature natural to that element; but it was not long before her garments, heavy with the wet, pulled her in from her melodious singing to a muddy and miserable death.
It was the funeral of this fair maid which her brother Laertes was celebrating, the king and queen and whole court being present, when Hamlet arrived. He knew not what all this show imported, but stood on one side, not inclining to interrupt the ceremony. He saw the flowers strewed upon her grave, as the custom was in maiden burials, which the queen herself threw in; and as she threw them, she said, “Sweets to the sweet! I thought to have decked thy bride-bed, sweet maid, not to have strewed thy grave. Thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife.” And he heard her brother wish that violets might spring from her grave; and he saw him leap into the grave all frantic with grief, and bid the attendants pile mountains of earth upon him, that he might be buried with her. And Hamlet’s love for this fair maid came back to him, and he could not bear that a brother should show so much transport of grief; for he thought that he loved Ophelia better than forty thousand brothers. Then discovering himself, he leaped into the grave where Laertes was, all as frantic or more frantic than he, and Laertes, knowing him to be Hamlet, who had been the cause of his father’s and his sister’s death, grappled him by the throat as an enemy, till the attendants parted them; and Hamlet, after the funeral, excused his hasty act in throwing himself into the grave as if to brave Laertes; but he said he could not bear that any one should seem to outgo him in grief for the death of the fair Ophelia. And for the time these two noble youths seemed reconciled.
But out of the grief and anger of Laertes for the death of his father and Ophelia, the king, Hamlet’s wicked uncle, contrived destruction for Hamlet. He set on Laertes, under cover of peace and reconciliation, to challenge Hamlet to a friendly trial of skill at fencing, which Hamlet accepting, a day was appointed to try the match. At this match all the court was present, and Laertes, by direction of the king, prepared a poisoned weapon. Upon this match great wagers were laid by the courtiers, as both Hamlet and Laertes were known to excel at this sword-play; and Hamlet, taking up the foils, chose one, not at all suspecting the treachery of Laertes, or being careful to examine Laertes’ weapon, who, instead of a foil or blunted sword, which the laws of fencing require, made use of one with a point, and poisoned. At first Laertes did but play with Hamlet, and suffered him to gain some advantage, which the dissembling king magnified and extolled beyond measure, drinking to Hamlet’s success, and wagering rich bets upon the issue; but after a few passes, Laertes, growing warm, made a deadly thrust at Hamlet with his poisoned weapon, and gave him a mortal blow. Hamlet incensed, but not knowing the whole of the treachery, in the scuffle exchanged his own innocent weapon for Laertes’ deadly one, and with a thrust of Laertes’ own sword repaid Laertes home, who was thus justly caught in his own treachery.
In this instant the queen shrieked that she was poisoned. She had inadvertently drunk out of a bowl which the king had prepared for Hamlet, in case that being warm in fencing he should call for drink. Into this the treacherous king had infused a deadly poison, to make sure of Hamlet, if Laertes had failed. He had forgotten to warn the queen of the bowl, which she drank off and immediately died, exclaiming with her last breath that she was poisoned.
Hamlet suspecting some treachery, ordered the doors to be shut, while he sought it out. Laertes told him to seek no further, for he was the traitor; and feeling his life go away with the wound which Hamlet had given him, he made confession of the treachery he had used, and how he had fallen a victim to it. And he told Hamlet of the envenomed point, and said that Hamlet had not half an hour to live, for no medicine could cure him; and, begging forgiveness of Hamlet, he died, with his last words accusing the king of being the contriver of the mischief.
When Hamlet saw his end draw near, there being yet some venom left upon the sword, he suddenly turned upon his false uncle, and thrust the point of it to his heart, fulfilling the promise which he had made to his father’s spirit, whose injunction was now accomplished, and his foul murder revenged upon the murderer. Then Hamlet, feeling his breath fail and life departing, turned to his dear friend Horatio, who had been spectator of this fatal tragedy, and with his dying breath requested him that he would live to tell his story to the world (for Horatio had made a motion as if he would slay himself to accompany the prince in death), and Horatio promised that he would make a true report as one that was privy to all the circumstances.
And, thus satisfied, the noble heart of Hamlet cracked. And Horatio and the bystanders with many tears commended the spirit of their sweet prince to the guardianship of angels. For Hamlet was a loving and a gentle prince, and greatly beloved for his many noble and prince-like qualities, and if he had lived, would no doubt have proved a most royal and complete king to Denmark.
[THE SUN-WORSHIPPERS.]
By HATTIE A. COOLEY.
The great, warm, yellow western sky,
Glows down on their eager faces;
Horizon tints of rose float nigh
Above the landscape’s graces.
The sun-god’s light has power to thrill
The priest with his victim gory;
The golden waves of sunset fill
Each soul with their mystic glory.
But in the twilight, gray and dim,
Both Faith and Hope are sleeping,
And not a thought goes up to Him
Who holds the sun in keeping.
At last, on priests who sacrifice,
On souls and altars burning,
A silent, double darkness lies,
And hides them past discerning.
Uncounted years since then have fled,
And buried deep the story
Of the silent nation lying dead
Amid these ruins hoary.
The sun still shines as bright to-day,
And glows as warm and tender
On stone-heaps gray, and dust and clay,
As once on the temple’s splendor.
And looking back we strain to see,
Upon these crumbling pages,
A glimpse of what the world would be
Shut out from God for ages.
[C. L. S. C. WORK.]
By J. H. VINCENT, D.D., Superintendent of Instruction, C. L. S. C.
The studies for February comprise Astronomy, English, Russian, Scandinavian, Biblical, and General Religious Literature.
The best authority for the pronunciation of names of distinguished persons is “Lippincott’s Biographical Dictionary,” by Thomas.
Prof. J. H. Worman writes us that the oe in Goethe is pronounced like ea in heard; th is sounded like t. In Mülbach the ü is like the French u.
Another explanation: The White Seal lists on page 43 of the October Chautauquan are for graduates of 1882 who have two white seals, but who did not read the “White Seal Course” for 1880 and 1881, or for 1881 and 1882. On page 55 the White Seal Course indicated is for persons who have not yet graduated, and who wish to add a white seal for the current year to their diplomas. The white crystal seal is for graduates of 1882, whether they have won the white seals of 1880-82 or not. It is the design of the white crystal seal to keep the graduates in line and in sympathy with the current course of study. A student who did not take the two white seals of 1880-82, may take them, and also take the white crystal seal for 1882, or he may omit them, and take the white crystal seal for 1882. Does this throw any light?
A member of the C. L. S. C. writes: “I am so happy in reading ‘Packard’s Geology.’ I have not the diagrams, nor access to them, and so I am selfish enough to wish they had been in miniature and scattered through the book. Anyway, the one picture on page 41, of the Oblong Geyser, Yellowstone Park, gave me great pleasure, for here in my cabinet I have one of these same ball-like deposits from those very hot springs, Yellowstone Park, besides two other deposits in different states of compactness, also petrified and agatized wood, and obsidian, and at our limestone quarries in Chicago I have found the fossil coral as pictured on page 63.”
In reference to the use of the character “k” instead of “c” in the word Perikles, and other words, Prof. T. T. Timayenis, author of the “History of Greece,” says: “It is the custom of all scholars of the present day to reproduce as nearly as possible the sound of the Greek names as pronounced by the Greeks. To this end all Greek names beginning with ‘k’ retain that letter when translated into English, as the sound of the Greek ‘k’ is more faithfully reproduced by its equivalent ‘k.’ The idea of distorting the sound of the Greek name to such an extent as to assume to reproduce the character ‘k’ by the English ‘c’ is old, antiquated, and has been long abandoned by scholars. The rule to-day followed by scholars is as follows: Reproduce (that is to say, translate,) all Greek names into English by retaining as nearly as possible the sound of the word. This custom has always existed among the Germans. But I think it is only within the last five or six years that it has been generally accepted by scholars in England and America. I believe that the publishers of Webster’s Dictionary ought to be up with the times.” This statement of the case, may seem very bold on the part of Prof. Timayenis, but we give him the chance to express himself on the subject.
To A. B.—Yes; read the best authors in fiction when you read fiction at all.... George Ebers is recent, but stands well in his chosen field, that of old Egyptian life.... Read Scott rather than Dickens. The latter is a master in caricature and in his description of English, and especially of London, low life.... The second volume of Timayenis’s Greek will be taken up in ’83.
A correspondent writes from Newton, Iowa, or Missouri, or somewhere else; the postmark is so indistinct it is impossible to tell where. No name is signed, no date given; and how can I answer the question?
Some one suggests a topic (an old one) for conversation, and gives the names of what he regards as the ten greatest characters of history: Moses, David, (Confucius or Alexander the Great), Julius Cæsar, Zoroaster, Paul, Mohammed, Luther, Wesley, Napoleon.
In reply to a criticism on Prof. A. S. Packard’s book on “Geology,” the Professor says: “The person who writes you is mistaken. I nowhere say that the center of the earth is a burning mass. I do say, page 26, ‘The occurrence of volcanoes, and the wide-spread agency of heat or fire in former times, indicate the existence of large areas of melted rock or lava in the earth.’ I mean by this that under volcanic regions are lakes or reservoirs of melted rock. The globe in general is a solid sphere, solid at the center. This is a moderate and modern view. What your correspondent attributes to me is an old-fashioned and obsolete view. Let him refer to Dana’s ‘Geology’ for the latest views, or to Leconte’s ‘Geology’ for all fuller details than my humble attempt to excite an interest in the subject.”
I am anxious to purchase a copy of the Chautauqua Assembly Herald for March, 1879, Vol. 3, No. 25, and for October, 1879, Vol. 4, No. 21, also for May, 1880, Vol. 4, No. 28. Who can help me?
In response to my suggestion about reading for intellectual discipline, a correspondent says: “In the December number of The Chautauquan I noticed your item in ‘C. L. S. C. Work’ in regard to reading and re-reading certain books in the year’s course for mental discipline. I think the plan a good one, but would like to make a suggestion. I think it would be a good plan to recommend Alden’s ‘Self-Education’ to those who are taking up the studies of the first year. I got a copy of it before I joined the C. L. S. C., and, although it was one of the smallest books I ever read, yet I got more good out of it than of any other. As you advise, I read it, and re-read, and read it again, and for weeks and nearly months it was my constant companion, to be picked up in spare moments. The reason I recommend it is because there are so many members of the C. L. S. C. who have never had many educational advantages when young. To them this book is invaluable, and may be the means of helping them in their studies as it did me. To the College graduate, of course, this would be unnecessary, but to the majority of the others I think it would be of great use. I think there are too many who look upon education as knowing—accumulating knowledge—especially in this day of many books and miscellaneous reading. I think this book, if read and pondered, as you recommend, would do a vast amount of good to those who are seeking intellectual improvement.” The book referred to is Chautauqua Text-book No. 25, price 10 cents. Title, “Self-Education: What to Do and How to Do It.”
Why shall not our afflicted and faithful fellow student have a hearing in The Chautauquan? Here is what she wrote last August: “If you have time, will you say for me to the members of the C. L. S. C. that a few of the women of Hot Springs, Arkansas, are trying to establish there a Woman’s Christian National Library Association? We use the word ‘National’ because it is a place of resort for the people of the entire country, because the town is in part owned by the government, and because we seek assistance from good people everywhere. The work is in no sense a local one. Probably no town exists in the country having greater need in this direction. Men visit the place by thousands annually, and find almost nothing to uplift—but saloons and gambling-dens by the score. Our ladies feel that something must be done to make things better. Our organization has been in existence eighteen months. We have about nine hundred dollars in the treasury, and one hundred volumes of books. Better than all, on July 1st Congress passed a special act allowing us to purchase a lot on the government reservation for a merely nominal sum, so that we now have one hundred feet front on the main avenue, for which we paid one hundred dollars. Upon this we propose to put up a brick building worth ten thousand dollars, to be used for a public library, reading-room, and a hall in which to give entertainments, lectures, etc. We are working hard to accomplish this result. Any help from Chautauquans, either in donations of money, however small, or in books, will be most gratefully received. Books can be sent by mail to my address, or by freight at my expense. One book from one of our class may save some young man from an hour of temptation. May I not plead for a little help in trying to bring ‘life and light’ even to Arkansas. I enclose circular.
“Yours very truly,
Hattie N. Young, President Library Association.”
A member writes: “My horizon is very dark just now, but there is a quotation that I believe, ‘He is weak who can not weave the tangled threads of his existence, however strained, or however torn or twisted, into the great cable of purpose which moors us to our life of action.’”
Members of the C. L. S. C. who desire to send geological, and mineralogical and other specimens, weighing not more than ten pounds, should send to the “Museum, Chautauqua, N. Y., care of A. K. Warren, Esq.”
Members of the class of 1882, who paid all fees but did not graduate, can, by simply completing the unfinished work of their four years’ course, and reporting to the office at Plainfield, graduate with the class of 1883 or any later one. No additional fee will be required.
Encourage your neighbors to take up some of the reading of the C. L. S. C. Ask them to try the book for the current month; or the Bryant or the Shakspere Course.
The following are the addresses of manufacturers of badges for the C. L. S. C.: Mrs. Jay W. Speelman, Wooster, Ohio, and Henry Hart, Lockport, N. Y.
A student of the C. L. S. C. writes: “I have commenced the study of Greek history, but not having a good memory I find the dates hard to retain in my mind. Will you please give a plan by which our study in this line may be made easier.” It does not make much difference whether you can remember dates or not. Link men who did great things in their proper chronological order. Know that one man who did this, followed by a few years or centuries another man who did that other great thing. Use the little Chautauqua Text-book of Greek History, No. 5. Repeat its outlines, then repeat and repeat again. Get a few facts; tell them to somebody; tell them to somebody else. Talk about them; then talk more about them. The true way to memorize is to commit to memory.
When a choice volume falls into my hands I feel like calling attention of the members of the C. L. S. C. to it. Here comes a beautiful little book, with an introduction by Lyman Abbott, published by Putnam’s Sons, New York, on “How to Succeed”—in public life, as a minister, as a physician, as an engineer, as an artist, in mercantile life, as a farmer, as an inventor, and in literature. The several chapters are so many essays written by Senators Bayard and Edmunds, Drs. John Hall, Willard Parker, and Leopold Damrosch, General William Sooy Smith, W. Hamilton Gibson, Lawson Valentine, Commissioner George B. Loring, Thomas Edison, E. P. Roe, and Dr. Lyman Abbott. It is an invaluable book, and our readers will make no mistake in reading it. Price, 50 cents.
When reading a book mark on the margin every word of the pronunciation of which you are not sure, and every allusion and statement you do not fully understand. Take all such words, allusions, and statements to the local circle and ask for light, or if you have no local circle send them to “Drawer 75, New Haven, Conn.,” and I will try to get light for you from stars of one magnitude or another that shine in the heavens of the C. L. S. C.
Collect engravings and prints of every kind, from book-stalls, old books, illustrated papers and magazines, relating in any way to the reading of the C. L. S. C. in art, biography, history, natural science, etc. A picture scrap-book of this kind, filled with notes in your own handwriting, would grow in value with the years.
Probe people on the subjects in which you are interested. Get all out of them you can; and you can always get something out of everybody.
Gilbert M. Tucker, in The North American Review for January, speaks of “American English” in this way: “It will hardly be denied in any quarter that the speech of the United States is quite unlike that of Great Britain, in the important particular that here we have no dialects. Trifling variations in pronunciation, and in the use of a few particular words, certainly exist. The Yankee ‘expects’ or ‘calculates,’ while the Virginian ‘reckons;’ the illiterate Northerner ‘claims,’ and the Southerner of similar class, by a very curious reversal of the blunder, ‘allows,’ what better educated people merely assert. The pails and pans of the world at large become ‘buckets’ when taken to Kentucky. It is ‘evening’ in Richmond, while afternoon still lingers a hundred miles due north at Washington. Vessels go into ‘docks’ on their arrival at Philadelphia, but into ‘slips’ at Mobile; they are tied up at ‘wharves’ at Boston, but to ‘piers’ at Chicago. Distances are measured by ‘squares’ in Baltimore, by ‘blocks’ in Providence. The ‘shilling’ of New York is the ‘levy’ of Pennsylvania, the ‘bit’ of San Francisco, the ‘ninepence’ of Old New England, and the ‘escalan’ of New Orleans. But put all these variations together, with such others as more careful examination might reveal, and how far short they fall of representing anything like the real dialectic differences of speech that obtain, and always have obtained, not only between the three kingdoms, but even between contiguous sections of England itself!”
[LOCAL CIRCLES.]
[We request the president or secretary of every local circle to send us reports of their work, of lectures, concerts, entertainments, etc. Editor of The Chautauquan, Meadville, Pa.]
“Days come and go much more pleasantly when our time is fully occupied.”—Gessner.
“The pleasantest society is that where the members feel a warm respect for each other.”—Goethe.
“It is a beautiful thought, that however far one shore may be from another, the wave that ripples over my foot will in a short time be on the opposite strand.”—Humboldt.
Maine (Auburn).—We have here in Auburn, a thriving town on the banks of the Androscoggin, a band of twenty-five enthusiastic Chautauquans. We organized November 3, 1882. We meet once in two weeks, at the houses of members, and recite fifty questions upon previous reading, as published in The Chautauquan. The questions for further study have been taken up, and will receive attention at our next meeting. The game of “Grecian History” has been tried once, with so much pleasure and profit that we shall probably have it again. Bryant’s and Milton’s Day have been pleasantly observed, and we also voted to observe the birthday of our own beloved Longfellow, who is peculiarly dear to New Englanders. Our circle is composed of people professional and unprofessional, denominational and literary, but all are working together with much unanimity of feeling and interest.
Massachusetts (Westfield).—Our circle is composed of three members, all graduates of class of 1882, but taking the White Crystal Seal course. Our meetings are very informal, reading either required or supplemental articles. This is a small village and we do not have lectures or concerts.
Massachusetts (Conway).—A local circle was organized in this town September 26, 1882, with twenty-five members. A few others who do not join the circle have taken up the readings. The Baptist and Congregationalist ministers are among our members. We have a board of counselors to act with the president in making meetings interesting. We are up with the required readings, and enjoy our meetings exceedingly. We meet Friday evenings at the homes of members of the Circle. We used Pansy’s book, “The Hall in the Grove,” to work up our interest, and some of us went to South Framingham last August, to get some new ideas; hence our success in a small hill town of Massachusetts.
Rhode Island (Providence).—A local Circle was formed in Providence in October last, and is called the Hope Circle. Starting with a membership of nineteen, we have since increased the number to thirty-three. Every four weeks we appoint a committee to conduct the exercises for the next month. We have had several lectures on geology, and propose having from time to time lectures on subjects that will interest the circle.
Connecticut (Hockanum).—A feature of the four years’ reading course of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, is the observance of certain memorial days. These are made the happy occasions of literary and social festivity among the fraternity and their friends. December 9th occurred John Milton’s day. It was observed by the C. L. S. C. of Hockanum, numbering about thirty members in both circles, Monday evening the 11th, in the vestry of the Congregational church. In response to an invitation from the Hockanum local circle to the local circle of the M. E. Church in Hockanum, it became the pleasant occasion of union memorial exercises. After a few well-chosen words of greeting to the sister circle by C. B. Treat, the Rev. W. P. Stoddard, president of the M. E. circle, read Job 28th and was followed by the Rev. Mr. Macy in prayer. Mr. Treat then gave a scholarly address on the “Times of Milton;” Miss Adela Risley an interesting sketch of the “Life of Milton,” and Miss Ellen M. Brewer an excellent paper on the “Works of the Poet.” A gem was an essay on “Comus” by Mr. Stoddard. The argument and a choice and well-rendered selection from each of the books of Paradise Lost were given by the different members of the Hockanum circle. The closing exercises consisted of extracts of pleasing continuity from “Samson Agonistes,” Milton’s last poetical work, given with much point by Messrs. Stoddard, Forbes, Brewer and Arnusius, Mrs. C. Hollister, and Misses Alexander and Hollister of the M. E. circle. The program closed with singing a part of the inspiring class song, entitled “A Song of To-day:”
“Sing pæans over the past!
We bury the dead years tenderly,
To find them again in eternity,
All safe in its circle vast.
Sing pæans over the past!
Arise and conquer the land!
Not one shall fail in the march of life;
Not one shall fall in the hour of strife
Who trusts in the Lord’s right hand,
Arise and conquer the land!”
Immediately after a bountiful collation was served in a style most creditable to the committee in charge, and seldom has there been more genuine sociality. During the sociable, Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Cornish furnished sweet music. The room was aglow with light and color, and draping and ornamentation were suggestive of sentiment, study and religion. Upon entering, the eye was instantly arrested by a superb representation of the Chautauquan’s alma mater, “The Hall in the Grove,” mounted on an evergreen wreathed easel. It was executed in charcoal, especially for the occasion, by the Rev. H. Macy, a senior at Hosmer Hall, and acting pastor of the Congregational Church. Upon being called upon he made some felicitous remarks on the “Hall in the Grove,” which elicited applause. The circle and guests, numbering about sixty, felt that the event had been truly a success.
Connecticut (Portland).—This is the first year of the local circle in Portland, Connecticut, and it numbers at the present time seven members, of three different denominations. Our circle was organized on the fifth day of December, 1882. Our officers are president, vice-president, and secretary. We have met thus far every Saturday evening. We endeavor to bring in something on all the subjects taken up in the required work, making a specialty of the questions and answers printed in The Chautauquan. The president either asks the questions, or appoints some one of the members as leader pro tem. All are requested to criticise freely. After the program is concluded, all are at liberty to ask any questions they wish in connection with the subjects taken up in the evening’s work. Before adjournment, a short time is given to general conversation, on the most interesting topics in the evening’s lesson. As yet we have had no essays, but these are to come in the future. Last year there was only one member (myself) of the C. L. S. C. in the town of Portland. This year Portland boasts of a local circle consisting of seven members, and already the influence of those seven is being felt throughout the town, and we fondly hope and expect that before 1883 dawns our circle will have increased to almost double its present size. The students of the Portland C. L. S. C. anticipate many pleasant hours of work and social intercourse in the weeks and years to come.
New York (Prattsburg).—Our local circle is one of great interest. Our members number nine. We meet weekly, at the homes of different members. The meetings open with prayer, followed by roll-call, minutes of the last meeting, and then the lesson. The lessons are conducted by one appointed at a previous meeting, so each one takes a part in conducting some lesson. In geology we had many beautiful specimens of coral, trilobites, and brachiopods, which were very interesting, and helped so much to explain the lesson. We observe memorial days. For Milton’s Day we had, in answer to roll-call, favorite selections from Milton, an essay by our vice-president on his life, and one on his life and work by our president. We vary the work, and try to make it interesting to all. What would we do without The Chautauquan and our Chautauqua circle!
New York (Troy).—Here is the program for one evening in a local circle in Troy, the Rev. H. C. Farrar, president. It is printed on a postal card: “(1) Greek Civilization—Lewis K. Moore; (2) Greek Home Life—Miss Hattie E. Dean; (3) Greek Art—Mrs. H. C. Farrar; (4) Round-Table, Questions, Words, Sentences, etc.; (5) John Milton—a conversazione. Our circle organizes promptly at 7:30 o’clock. Make unessential things give way to our monthly gatherings. Our program is largely Greek. So is our month’s reading. Greece has mightily influenced all nations and ages. Let us make a specialty of Greek this and next month. Master thoroughly the questions and answers on pages 164-66 in the December Chautauquan. Mr. Mulford will ask most of them. Bring written questions, words, anything and everything for our Round-Table that will prove of interest.”
New York (Panama).—A local circle was formed in Panama, New York, in October, 1878, through the efforts of a few residents of our village who were present at Chautauqua and became members of the organization at its inception in August of the same year. Weekly meetings of the circle were regularly kept up during the four years succeeding, and in August last twelve members were gratified to receive at the hand of Dr. Vincent, the beautiful Chautauqua diplomas. In October of this year another circle was formed, consisting of most of the members of the old circle, who could not bear to abandon so profitable and pleasurable a course of reading, and several new members, and we are now holding weekly meetings, as in the years past. The officers constitute the executive board, who arrange the program for each meeting, selecting leaders. Our work is done thoroughly, and we have the satisfaction of feeling the inspiration that comes from work accomplished. The memorial days are occasionally observed by special meetings of the circle, at which time a special program, prepared for the occasion, is carried out. We extend to every sister circle the hand of fellowship and of hearty greeting, with the wish that, as the years go by, we may all learn more of the word and the works of God.
Pennsylvania (Sugar Grove).—This is the fifth year of the local circle in Sugar Grove, Warren County, Pa., and it numbers fifteen members, ten of whom are graduates of the Class of ’82. For the first four years our meetings were held weekly, but the past year a normal class, under the auspices of the C. L. S. C. has been organized, which meets once in two weeks, our circle meeting each alternate week. The manner of reviewing the lessons varies. The conductor usually asks questions, which are discussed by any member. This is followed by essays, question drawer, report of critic, conversazione, Chautauqua games, or any exercise conducive to our mutual improvement. During the study of geology our meetings have been made interesting by the use of Packard’s Geological Charts, and by examining cabinets of rocks and shells, and also collecting various specimens, thereby forming a nucleus for greater research. The observance of a memorial day falls on the regular circle evening nearest memorial date.
Pennsylvania (Shamokin).—This is the first year of our local circle in Shamokin. We have held four regular meetings since the 1st of November and now have eight members. We have but two officers, a president and secretary, and meet every Tuesday evening at the homes of the different members. Thus far the president has conducted the meetings, asking questions on the lesson, when the topics are freely discussed by all. By not starting at the required time we find ourselves behind in our studies, almost two months; but by taking our regular weekly lessons, and as much of the back reading as we can conveniently, we expect to catch up by the first of March.
Pennsylvania (Carlisle).—Our methods have been very informal, and my report must of necessity be of a similar nature. We are not a circle—only a triangle. Since October of last year “we three” have quietly read and studied the prescribed course, meeting usually once a week and comparing progress. Frequently one of our number asked the questions as published in The Chautauquan, and in answering them we enlarged upon the subjects suggested thereby. At other times we discussed the matter read. We observed each memorial day and enjoyed them, as indeed we have enjoyed our year’s work. We have worked together without being “officered,” for it would badly thin the ranks to take even one from the “privates.” We feel the need of an energetic, enthusiastic leader, who could help us in our work, and enlist others; but failing to find one, we enter upon our second year’s work even more deeply interested than we were a year ago, determined to finish the course, unless prevented by insurmountable obstacles.
New Jersey (Freehold).—We organized a circle of twelve young ladies here last year, and we are still pursuing the course laid out for the C. L. S. C. We are all living at home, and are what some call “ladies of leisure.” The course is taken more as a line of profitable reading than of hard study. We meet at each other’s houses every Tuesday afternoon, and one of our number acts as teacher, or rather questioner. She asks the questions laid down in The Chautauquan, and after they have been answered, we read the article in the required readings for the week, taking turns around, a paragraph each, and after each paragraph has been read the others informally criticise the pronunciation of the reader, (good naturedly, of course), and so, with the aid of Webster, we arrive at the correct pronunciation of words in common use. Any knotty questions which come up are laid over until the next meeting; in the meantime we find out the answers if we can. By the way, a large Shakspere club of ladies and gentlemen has grown from a movement made by one of our number, and taken up by us as a class, and already one question on art has been given us to answer from outside. You see we are beginning to make ourselves felt in the community. We find the course doing us good, and advise others to take it up as we have, as a pleasant way to refresh their memories on what they have already learned in school, if they do not care to devote their time to study.
District of Columbia (Washington).—Ours is one of several Chautauqua circles in Washington, D. C. We have named it the “Parker” C. L. S. C., in honor of Rev. Dr. J. W. Parker. We organized September 15, 1882, with a membership of ten; we now number twenty-five and are still increasing. We meet at the houses of the members, twice a month; open with prayer. The readings are reviewed by questions from The Chautauquan. Our reading in geology was supplemented by explanations, with the use of the Packard plates. Great interest is manifested by the members, who feel that they are being benefited. The meetings close with general questions and talks upon scientific subjects.
West Virginia (Wheeling).—Our circle has now entered its third year and numbers twenty-seven members. The meetings are held every week in one of the small rooms in the United Presbyterian Church and are well attended. The method hitherto pursued has been to assign lessons out of The Chautauquan, and then proceed very much as at school. Subjects pertinent to the lessons are fully and freely discussed as they are suggested, consequently during the past two years the circle has ranged over a vast territory. At each meeting during the present year a paper—usually on some historical personage connected with the lesson—has been read, and this has proved very interesting. The general drift of sentiment has been rather against public entertainments, though several successful ones have been given. Visitors are always welcome. The Wheeling circle has been unusually fortunate in enjoying the leadership of a gentleman who is at once a business man, an enthusiastic scholar and a teacher, with a genius for the art. Under his able tuition, interest in the various studies has never faltered. Comparatively few of the members have visited Chautauqua; those who have done so have returned very enthusiastic in C. L. S. C. work.
Kentucky (Louisville).—Being more and more interested in the French Circle, I would like very much to have in your magazine a few lines about it, viz: all the information about the French Circle by correspondence can be obtained by addressing Prof. A. Lalande, 1014 Second street, Louisville, Ky. Back numbers of circular will be sent to anyone desiring to join that circle.
Tennessee (Memphis).—A local circle was organized October 23, in Chelsea, the northern suburb of Memphis. It consists of a few members of the classes of ’82, ’83, and ’84, who once belonged to the Memphis local circle, and a larger number of members who have only last fall joined the C. L. S. C. The Memphis circle had become too large to be well handled for effective work, so we left, and organized a circle in our own immediate neighborhood of twenty-five members. We are to meet twice a month, and expect to do good work, as we are enthusiastic Chautauquans.
Texas (Palestine).—We have a local circle in our town, twenty strong, that will compare in average intelligence of its members with any other club in the United States. The Chautauqua Idea is growing grandly in Texas. Our State will be fairly represented in all future commencements of the C. L. S. C. Clubs are forming in all points of the Lone Star.
Indiana (Fort Wayne).—The C. L. S. C. met in October in the lecture-room of the Berry Street Church, to organize for work during the ensuing year. The attendance was unexpectedly large, and the meeting was spirited. It was decided to divide up into small circles for work, yet continue the general organization, and to that end officers were elected. It is expected that members of the circle will connect themselves with some one of the smaller circles that may be organized, and continue the readings. The smaller circles were organized at once, and work for the year is going on.
Illinois (Pana).—Our local circle was organized in October, 1879. The class now numbers fourteen ladies, meeting at each other’s homes weekly. Three are post-graduates, and two or three others of the Class of ’82, who intend sending in their papers soon. We are not, as a class, this year taking the full course, but using The Chautauquan. We find the work very pleasant and instructive, and enjoy it too much to give it up. We have had no entertainments except social teas among ourselves.
Michigan (Flint).—A local circle has been organized here for reading and study. There are only eight members, but several others in the city who have commenced the work, and will probably continue it, meet with us occasionally and seem to enjoy doing so. Being scattered over the city, it is impossible for them to attend the meetings regularly. For this reason they prefer not to join the circle. There are, I think, twenty, or nearly that number, reading the Chautauqua course in our city. Our meetings are held once in two weeks at the homes of different members of the circle. The president conducts the review at each meeting and plans the work for the next meeting with the concurrence of the other officers. Our reading and study is done mainly at home, the time of the meeting being taken up with a thorough review of the subjects studied, varied by biographical sketches of the historical characters, and expression of opinion upon the subjects in hand. The interest in the work increases with each meeting; we enjoy it so much more and remember it better than we possibly could reading and studying alone.
Michigan (Little Prairie Ronde).—The character of the material of which a local circle is formed, and with which it has to do, in a measure determines the manner of conducting its meetings. In glancing over the reports of various circles I see none whose meetings are conducted quite the same as ours. Living in the country, and our members having from two to four miles to drive, we strive to use all the time in earnest work, directly connected with the subjects being studied; hence our roll call responses are biographical sketches of men whose names are found in the history; the history of cities, etc., and on a memorial day selected extracts from the writings of the author whose birth we commemorate. Besides essays, readings and conversations on subjects in the course, we have introduced “current items,” not only because outsiders not fully informed intimated that we study ancient history too exclusively, but, also, as it is an excellent means of interesting our local members and casual visitors who are not pursuing the prescribed course of reading. The items comprise recent newspaper intelligences, and never fail to elicit much enthusiasm and profit.
Missouri (Osborn).—Our circle, called the “Amphictyonic Local Circle, of Osborn,” consists of eight members, including four officers, president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. We meet on every Tuesday afternoon, at the home of one of the members, our hours being from 7 p. m. to 9:45 p. m. We have a constitution and by-laws, and adhere strictly to the rules of order laid down in Roberts’ Manual. The program is as follows: After the minutes of the previous meeting are read and discussed, Greek history is taken up and reviewed in detail. The required reading in The Chautauquan follows, after which our president gives us an interesting lecture on some important subject. Twenty minutes are devoted to the reading of short essays, and whatever time remains we spend in discussing the chief topics of interest in The Chautauquan.
Missouri (Kansas City).—Our circle organized the 21st of October, with the circle of last year, consisting of five or six members, as a nucleus. We have now a membership of over forty-five, which will soon be largely increased. Ten new members joined at the last meeting. A good deal of interest and enthusiasm is manifested. Our officers are a board of three directors, a corresponding secretary, and treasurer. The board of directors have a general oversight of all the interests of the circle. They arrange for all lectures, special meetings, memorial day exercises, and appoint a committee of three to arrange a program of exercises for the regular meetings of the month, which are presided over by the chairman of this monthly committee. The circle meets every Tuesday evening at the residence of one of the members centrally located, who has very kindly thrown open his house for the use of the circle. We open our meeting at 7:30 p. m., promptly, with singing and prayer, followed by roll call and reading of the minutes. The members are then ready for the general exercises of the evening, consisting of answers to the questions for the week in The Chautauquan, of answers to written questions given out at the previous meeting, of essays and talks on themes relating to our readings, of exercises on the geological charts, music, critic’s report, social conversation, and adjournment.
Minnesota (Crookston).—We can not claim the dignity of a local circle yet. Our class consists of two members, the wife of the editor of the Crookston Chronicle and the writer, who is one of the teachers of the graded school in Crookston. We are delighted with the course, studied faithfully and well last year, and have commenced this year with renewed pleasure and zeal. We met for reading, recitation and conversation weekly last year and will pursue the same course this year unless our class should become a circle. We have the promise of several members.
Iowa (Muscatine).—The editor of a local paper characterizes an entertainment of the local circles in this way: “Seldom has an occasion been appropriated to a more pleasant or profitable purpose than that which attracted a large number of our more cultivated people to the cheery apartments of Mr. A. K. Raff one evening of last month. It was the two hundred and seventy-fourth anniversary of the birth of John Milton, and the two Chautauqua clubs in the city had united to memorialize the event in some appropriate way. A splendid program of exercises, consisting of dissertation and essay, interspersed with the finest of music, both vocal and instrumental, had been arranged for the occasion, furnishing to those who were fortunate enough to be present a fund of interest, and a feast of intellectual enjoyment as rare as it was acceptable. We can imagine no entertainment more pleasant or elevating in its character than these Chautauqua reunions.”
Iowa (Oskaloosa).—The circle of Oskaloosa consists of fifteen ladies—ten regular members and five local ones. We meet every Wednesday afternoon and a leader is appointed by the president for each week. We have thorough schoolroom recitations and discussions of the lesson as assigned in The Chautauquan, and the questions for further study.
Kansas (Stockton).—The most satisfactory method we have found of conducting our circle is this: Let each member prepare two plain questions, not puzzles, on the reading of the week. Let these questions be handed to the president, who asks them, the author of the questions answering if no one else can, and no one but the chairman needs to know who hands in any question. This review helps to fix many points in memory. Besides, we had nearly every time one or more essays from persons having time and inclination to prepare them.
Kansas (Wichita).—For more than six months we have had a literary and philosophical society, with objects somewhat similar to those of the C. L. S. C., with a working membership of twenty or more. At our last meeting the merits of the C. L. S. C. were discussed at length, and we concluded to change our organization into the C. L. S. C., and the preliminary steps were taken in accordance therewith. Will you please send us by return mail two dozen blank applications for membership, and whatever other documents and instructions are necessary for organization and work.
Nebraska (Seward).—We meet every Monday evening; the regular order as laid down in The Chautauquan is carried through; we keep up in the different branches from month to month, and enjoy the work.
California (Sacramento).—Our method of conducting the work, after disposing of the general order of business, is as follows: The committee of instruction, numbering three, and appointed once in three months, prepare one week in advance questions on each lesson. These questions are drawn promiscuously by each member—questions being, sent to absentees. Answers to these questions, with the questions attached thereto, are given in writing at the following meeting, to some one appointed by the president to read, after which they are placed in the hands of two members, who are also appointed by the president, from which they are to compile papers, adding all such other information appertaining to the subject that can be obtained. This involves close research, and we hear from at least five members in an evening, who are followed in the same manner by five others at the succeeding meeting. From the papers, questions, and answers, arise profitable discussions, if time permits. A committee on entertainment, appointed annually, supervise all lectures, concerts, social entertainments, etc., which—if practicable—are arranged for once in three months. We number twenty-four active members. Eight other names are upon our roll, of whom three are irregular. We launch out this (the third) year with much enthusiasm and general interest, hoping to far exceed in profit to ourselves and in influence in favor of our grand Chautauqua work either of the preceding years.
Canada (Pictou, Ontario).—About twenty members of the C. L. S. C. met at the residence of G. C. Curry, Esq., recently, to compare notes and talk over matters connected with their daily readings. Considerable enthusiasm was manifested by the several members respecting the subjects on the program for the present year, which began on the 1st of October last. Some, however, have only just joined, and it is not too late yet for new ones to join and take up the work for the current year. At the next meeting of the circle notes will be read on the month’s reading and difficulties met with brought forward for explanation.
[Not Required.]
[QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.]
ONE HUNDRED QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON “RECREATIONS IN ASTRONOMY,” CHAPTERS I TO VII, BOTH INCLUSIVE—CREATIVE PROCESSES, CREATIVE PROGRESS, ASTRONOMICAL INSTRUMENTS, CELESTIAL MEASUREMENTS; THE SUN; THE PLANETS, AS SEEN FROM SPACE; SHOOTING-STARS, METEORS, AND COMETS.
By ALBERT M. MARTIN, General Secretary C. L. S. C.
1. Q. What are the two laws of the attraction of gravitation? A. (1) Gravity is proportioned to the quantity of matter, and (2) the force of gravity varies as the square of the distance from the center of the attracting body.
2. Q. What is the original form of matter? A. Gas.
3. Q. What is inertia? A. If a body is at rest, inertia is that quality by which it will forever remain so, unless acted upon by some force from without; and if a body is in motion, it will continue on at the same speed, in a straight line, forever, unless it is quickened, retarded, or turned from its path by some other force.
4. Q. What is the result of the action of attraction and inertia upon two revolving bodies? A. They circle about each other as long as these forces endure.
5. Q. What would be the solution of the problem of a simple revolution of one world about another in a circular orbit? A. It would always be at the same distance from its center, and going with the same velocity.
6. Q. In the case of the moon, how many causes are there that interfere with such a simple orbit? A. Over sixty.
7. Q. What is heat? A. A mode of motion.
8. Q. Through what do all the light and heat of the sun that appear upon our earth come? A. Through space that is two hundred degrees below zero, and through utter darkness.
9. Q. At what velocity does light travel? A. One hundred and eighty-five thousand miles per second.
10. Q. What is the highest velocity we can give a rifle ball? A. Two thousand feet a second.
11. Q. How long does it take light to travel from the sun to the earth? A. About eight minutes.
12. Q. What is light? A. The result of undulations in ether.
13. Q. What are the different effects we call color? A. They are simply various velocities of vibration.
14. Q. How does sunlight melt ice? A. In the middle, bottom, and top at once.
15. Q. What is the effect of dark heat on ice? A. It only melts the surface.
16. Q. What can you say of the passage of the heat of the sun and the heat of a furnace or stove through glass? A. Nearly all the heat of the sun goes through glass without hindrance; only a small portion of the heat of a furnace or stove goes through the same substance.
17. Q. If our air were as pervious to the heat of the earth as it is to the heat of the sun, how cold would the temperature of the earth become every night? A. Two hundred degrees below zero.
18. Q. What is said of worlds so distant as to receive from the sun only a thousandth part of the heat we enjoy? A. They may have atmospheres that retain it all.
19. Q. What is probable as to the temperature of Mars? A. It is probable that Mars, that receives but one-quarter as much heat as the earth, has a temperature as high as ours.
20. Q. What two radically different kinds of telescopes are made? A. The refracting telescope, and the reflecting telescope.
21. Q. Why is the refracting telescope so called? A. Because it is dependent on the refraction of light through glass lenses.
22. Q. Why is the reflecting telescope so called? A. Because it acts by reflecting the light from a concave mirror.
23. Q. What is the loss of light in the use of each kind of telescope? A. In passing through glass lenses it is about two-tenths. By reflection it is often one-half.
24. Q. In view of this peculiarity, among others, what is held as to the comparative quality of the two kinds of telescopes? A. That a twenty-six inch refractor is fully equal to any six-foot reflector.
25. Q. What is the weight of the Lord Rosse reflecting telescope? A. It has a metallic mirror weighing six tons, and a tube forty feet long, which, with its appurtenances, weighs seven tons more.
26. Q. What is a spectrum? A. A collection of the colors which are dispersed by a prism from any given light.
27. Q. If the light is sunlight what is the spectrum called? A. A solar spectrum.
28. Q. What is a spectroscope? A. An instrument to see these spectra.
29. Q. What are some of the amazing discoveries made by the spectroscope within a few years? A. In chemistry it reveals substances never known before. It tells the chemical constitution of the sun, the movements taking place, the nature of comets, and nebulæ.
30. Q. By the spectroscope what do we know of the atmospheres of some of the other planets? A. We know that the atmospheres of Venus and Mars are like our own, and that those of Jupiter and Saturn are very unlike.
31. Q. From what are all our standards of time taken? A. From the stars.
32. Q. From what are the positions of the stars reckoned? A. As so many degrees, minutes and seconds from each other, from the zenith, or from a given meridian, or from the equator.
33. Q. How far apart are the stars called the Pointers in the Great Bear? A. Five degrees.
34. Q. To mistake the breadth of a hair, seen at a distance of one hundred and twenty-five feet, would cause how much of an error in the measurement of the distance of the sun from the earth? A. Three millions of miles.
35. Q. By means of a microscope how many lines ruled on a glass plate are we able to count within an inch? A. One hundred and twelve thousand.
36. Q. What angle does the smallest object that can be seen by a keen eye make? A. An angle of forty seconds.
37. Q. By putting six microscopes on the scale of the telescope on a mural circle, what degree of exactness are we able to reach? A. An exactness of one-tenth of a second, or one-thirty-six hundredth of an inch.
38. Q. In astronomical work how small measurements of time are made? A. To the minute fractional parts of a second.
39. Q. What is the personal equation of an observer? A. The time that it takes him to observe a thing and record it, which is substracted from all his observations in order to get at the true time.
40. Q. What is the parallax of a body? A. The angle that would be made by two lines coming from that body to the two ends of any conventional base, as the semi-diameter of the earth.
41. Q. What is the parallax of the moon, and also of the sun, with the semi-equatorial diameter of the earth for a base? A. That of the moon 57 seconds, and that of the nun 8.85 seconds.
42. Q. Taking the diameter of the earth’s orbit, 184 millions of miles, as a base, what can you say of the parallax of the stars? A. They have no apparent parallax on so short a base.
43. Q. What does Prof. Airy say of the orbit of the earth as seen from the nearest star? A. It would be the same as a circle six-tenths of an inch in diameter, seen at the distance of a mile.
44. Q. In what way has the approximate distance of a few of the stars been determined? A. By comparisons of the near and far stars one with another.
45. Q. Which is the nearest star? A. The brightest star in Centaur, never visible in our northern latitudes, which has a parallax of about one second.
46. Q. Which is the next nearest star? A. No. 61 in the Swan, or 61 Cygni, having a parallax of thirty-four one-hundredths of a second.
47. Q. On how many stars have approximate measurements been made? A. About eighteen in all.
48. Q. How long does it take light, traveling at the rate of 185,000 miles a second, to come from the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, to the earth? A. Three and one-fourth years.
49. Q. How long does it take light to come from the Pole Star to the earth? A. Forty-five years.
50. Q. In naming these enormous distances what astronomical unit is used? A. The distance of the earth from the sun, ninety-two and a half millions of miles.
51. Q. In measuring the distance from Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, how many times would this unit be used? A. Two hundred and twenty-six thousand times.
52. Q. What is said of the stars being near or far according to their brightness? A. They are not near or far according to their brightness. 61 Cygni is a telescopic star, while Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, is twice as far away from us.
53. Q. What is the zodiacal light? A. It is a dim, soft light, somewhat like the milky-way, seen on clear moonless nights in March or April, in the western sky soon after sunset, often reaching, well defined, to the Pleiades.
54. Q. What are the indications as to the cause of this light? A. That it is caused by a ring of small masses of meteoric matter surrounding the sun, revolving with it and reflecting its light, and extending beyond the earth’s orbit.
55. Q. As we approach nearer the sun what is the first material substance with which we meet? A. The corona.
56. Q. Describe the corona. A. It rises from one to three hundred thousand miles from the surface, and the appearance consists of reflected light sent to us from dust particles or meteoroids about the sun.
57. Q. What is the region of discontinuous flame below the corona called? A. The cromosphere.
58. Q. What are some of the materials composing the cromosphere? A. Hydrogen is the principal material of its upper part; iron, magnesium, and other metals, some of them as yet unknown on earth, in the denser parts below.
59. Q. When only are the corona and cromosphere visible? A. Only during total eclipses, or by the aid of the spectroscope.
60. Q. What is all that we ordinarily see with the eye or telescope of the sun? A. The shining surface called the photosphere on which the cromosphere rests.
61. Q. What is the diameter of the photosphere, or the visible and measurable part of the sun? A. Eight hundred and sixty thousand miles.
62. Q. How many globes like the earth would it require to measure the sun’s diameter? A. One hundred and eight.
63. Q. What is the volume of the sun as compared with that of the earth? A. It is 1,245,000 times greater.
64. Q. What is the density of the sun as compared with that of the earth? A. It is only one-fourth as great.
65. Q. What is the mass of the sun as compared with that of all the planets, asteroids, and satellites of the solar system put together? A. It is seven hundred times as great.
66. Q. What are some of the opinions as to the surface of the sun? A. That it is hot beyond all estimate is indubitable. Whether it is solid or gaseous we are not sure.
67. Q. What on the surface of the sun have been objects of earnest and almost hourly study on the part of eminent astronomers for years? A. The spots.
68. Q. To what must the speed of the orbital revolution of the planets be proportioned? A. To the distance from the sun.
69. Q. What is the orbital speed of Mercury, and what that of Neptune? A. That of Mercury is about twenty-nine and a half miles in a second, and that of Neptune about three and one-third miles a second, or nearly nine times as slow.
70. Q. How do the periods of the axial revolution, which determine the length of the day, vary with the four planets nearest the sun? A. They vary only half an hour from that of the earth.
71. Q. In what time do Jupiter and Saturn revolve? A. In ten and ten and a quarter hours respectively.
72. Q. What is the density of Jupiter and Saturn as compared with the earth? A. That of Jupiter is about one-fourth and that of Saturn is about one-eighth that of the earth.
73. Q. How much less is the polar diameter of Jupiter than the equatorial? A. Five thousand miles.
74. Q. If we represent the sun by a globe two feet in diameter, how could we represent the comparative size of the five planets nearest the sun? A. Vulcan and Mercury by mustard seeds, Venus and Earth by peas, and Mars by one half the size.
75. Q. How could the comparative size of the other planets be represented? A. Asteroids, by the motes in a sunbeam; Jupiter, by a small-sized orange; Saturn, by a smaller one; Uranus, by a cherry; and Neptune, by one a little larger.
76. Q. Applying the principle that attraction is in proportion to the mass, what would a man weighing one hundred and fifty pounds on the earth weigh on Jupiter, and what on Mars? A. On Jupiter he would weigh three hundred and ninety-six pounds, and on Mars only fifty-eight pounds.
77. Q. How are the seasons of the planets caused? A. By the inclination of its axis to the plane of its orbit.
78. Q. What is said of the day and night of Jupiter? A. The sun is always nearly over the equator of Jupiter, and every place has nearly its five hours day and five hours night.
79. Q. How do the seasons of Earth, Mars and Saturn compare? A. They are much alike, except in length.
80. Q. How long are Saturn’s seasons? A. Each is seven and a half years long. The alternate darkness and light at the poles is fifteen years long.
81. Q. In what form are the orbits of the planets? A. Not in the form of exact circles, but a little flattened into an ellipse, with the sun always in one of the foci.
82. Q. What is that point called where a planet is nearest the sun, and what where it is farthest from it? A. The point nearest the sun is called the perihelion, and the farthest point the aphelion.
83. Q. What is the plane of the ecliptic? A. It is the plane of the earth’s orbit extended to the stars.
84. Q. What is said of the densities, sizes, and relations of the collections of matter smaller than the planets, scattered through space in the solar system? A. They are of various densities, from a cloudlet of rarest gas to solid rock; of various sizes, from a grain’s weight to little worlds; of various relations to each other, from independent individuality to related streams millions of miles long.
85. Q. By what names are they known when they become visible? A. Shooting-stars, meteors, and comets.
86. Q. How far above the surface of the earth do shooting-stars appear and disappear? A. They appear about seventy-three miles above the earth, and disappear about twenty miles nearer the surface.
87. Q. What is their velocity? A. Their average velocity is thirty-five miles a second, and it sometimes rises to one hundred miles a second.
88. Q. What does Prof. Peirce state as the result of his investigation in regard to meteors? A. That the heat which the earth receives directly from meteors is the same in amount which it receives from the sun by radiation, and that the sun receives five-sixths of its heat from the meteors that fall upon it.
89. Q. When the bodies are large enough to bear the heat, and the unconsumed center comes to the earth, what are they called? A. Aerolites or air-stones.
90. Q. What is said of the distribution of these bodies through space? A. They are not evenly distributed through space. In some places they are gathered into systems which circle round the sun in orbits as certain as those of the planets.
91. Q. How many such systems of meteoric bodies has it been demonstrated that the earth encounters in a single year? A. More than one hundred.
92. Q. What are comets? A. They are clouds of gas or meteoric matter, or both, darting into the solar system from every side, at every plane of the ecliptic, becoming luminous with reflected light, passing the sun, and returning again to outer darkness.
93. Q. What appendage do comets usually have? A. A tail, which follows the comet to perihelion, and precedes it afterwards.
94. Q. What is the character of the orbits of some comets? A. Very enormously elongated. One end may lie inside the earth’s orbit, and the other end be as far beyond Neptune as that is from the sun.
95. Q. How many comets have been visible to the naked eye since the Christian era? A. Five hundred.
96. Q. How many have been seen by telescopes since their invention? A. Two hundred.
97. Q. How is the number of comets belonging to our solar system estimated by some authorities? A. By millions.
98. Q. What is the comet last seen in 1852, previously separated into two parts, called? A. Biela’s lost comet.
99. Q. How near did the great comet of 1843 pass to the sun? A. It passed nearer than any other known body. It almost grazed the sun.
100. Q. What was one of the most magnificent comets of modern times? A. Donati’s comet of 1858.
[OUTLINE OF C. L. S. C. STUDIES FOR FEBRUARY.]
The required C. L. S. C. reading for the month of February comprises the first part of Bishop Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy, to page 134; the corresponding parts of Chautauqua Text-Book No. 2, Studies of the Stars; and readings in Astronomy, English, Russian, Scandinavian, and Religious History and Literature, and Bible History and Literature. Bishop Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy, and Chautauqua Text-Book No. 2, Studies of the Stars, are in book form; the remainder of the required reading for the month is published in The Chautauquan for February. The following division is made according to weeks:
First Week—1. Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy, chapters I and II—Creative Processes, Creative Progress—to page 40.
2. Chautauqua Text-Book No. 2, Studies of the Stars—the Morning Star, pages 3 and 4; Gravitation, from page 11 to page 15, both inclusive.
3. History of Russia, in The Chautauquan.
4. Readings in Religious and Bible History and Literature; Sunday Readings, in The Chautauquan, selections for February 4.
Second Week—1. Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy, chapters III and IV—Astronomical Instruments, Celestial Measurements—from page 41 to page 74, inclusive.
2. Chautauqua Text-Book No. 2, Studies of the Stars—Light—pages 8, 9, and 10.
3. History and Literature of Scandinavia, in The Chautauquan.
4. Readings in Religious and Bible History and Literature; Sunday Readings in The Chautauquan, selections for February 11.
Third Week—1. Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy, chapter V—The Sun—from page 75 to page 96, inclusive.
2. Chautauqua Text-Book No. 2, Studies of the Stars—The Sun—pages 5, 6, and 7.
3. Pictures from English History, in The Chautauquan.
4. Readings in Religious and Bible History and Literature; Sunday Readings in The Chautauquan, selections for February 18.
Fourth Week—1. Warren’s Recreations in Astronomy, chapters VI and VII—The Planets as Seen from Space; Shooting Stars, Meteors, and Comets—from page 97 to page 134, inclusive.
2. Chautauqua Text-Book No. 2, Studies of the Stars—Comets, Meteoric Systems—from page 37 to page 41, inclusive.
3. Readings in Religious and Bible History and Literature; Sunday Readings in The Chautauquan, selections for February 25.
[ANSWERS]
——
TO QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY IN THE DECEMBER NUMBER OF “THE CHAUTAUQUAN.”
By ALBERT M. MARTIN, General Secretary C. L. S. C.
1. The County of Westchester, in the State of New York, which is about half the size of Attica, contains about five hundred square miles.
2. The Romans gave the name “Greeks” to the Hellenes probably for the reason that they gained their first knowledge of the country from a tribe in the northwest of Greece called Græci, and they accordingly gave the name of that tribe to the whole country, calling it Græcia.
3. The following are two examples of Spartan laconisms: “Either this, or on this.” [Either bring this, or be brought on this. Attributed to Gorgo on presenting a shield to her son.] “Let Xerxes come and take them.” The reply of Leonidas when summoned by Xerxes to surrender his arms.
4. Among the literary tidings from modern Greece that seem to foretoken close at hand a signal renaissance of Greek literature, are the following: With the establishment of the kingdom in the present century, education is spread over every corner of free Greece. In education the Greek child does not learn the grammar of the modern language, but of the ancient. Perhaps no nation now produces so much literature in proportion to its numbers. The Greeks seem restless in their desire to give expression to their thoughts. Many rich Greeks have published books at their own expense. Very frequently scholars produce their best works for periodicals, or even newspapers. Almost every literary man of eminence makes efforts in every literary direction. An American classical school has recently been opened in Athens by Prof. Goodwin, of Cambridge, Mass., on the site of an old school of philosophy. The University of Athens is assuming special prominence as a literary institution.
5. Homer was Blind Melesigenes. He was so called because he was supposed to have been born on the borders of the river Meles.
6. The Delphic Oracle pronounced Socrates “the wisest of mankind.”
7. The monk Planudes is apparently relieved of the imputation concerning the authorship of the biography of Æsop ascribed to him, by the discovery at Florence of a manuscript of this life that was in existence a century before Planudes’s time.
8. Some of the reasons for supposing that this biography is a falsifying one are as follows: His being represented as a monster of ugliness and deformity, was doubtless intended to heighten his wit by contrast. In Plutarch’s Convivium Æsop is a guest, and there are many jests on his original servile condition, but none on his appearance, and a delicacy on such points does not usually restrain ancient writers. The Athenians erected a noble statue in honor of Æsop, which they doubtless would not have done had he been deformed. Pliny states that Æsop was the Contubernalis of Rhodopis, his fellow slave, whose extraordinary beauty passed into a proverb.
9. The hecatomb was strictly the sacrifice of a hundred oxen. All hecatombs were sacred. This sacrifice is said to have been particularly observed by the Lacedæmonians when they possessed a hundred cities. The sacrifices were subsequently reduced in number, and goats and lambs substituted for oxen.
10. The ceremony of taking a prisoner by the girdle in token that he is to suffer death was, ancient writers state, a custom among the Persians. After the trial was over, instead of formally pronouncing sentence upon the accused, all the members of the tribunal arose from their seats and, turning their heads away from the prisoner, took hold of his girdle, the highest in command taking hold first. Even the relatives, if any were in the tribunal, went through the same ceremony. Those in rank below the accused continued to bow before him, notwithstanding his condemnation.
11. The scythed chariots of the Persians had two wheels with knives fastened to each axle, extending obliquely outward. They were ordinary wooden chariots, with a platform large enough for two to stand on, resting on the axles without springs. Each chariot was drawn by four horses abreast. Later, long spikes were placed in the ends of the poles, and the back parts of the chariot were armed with several rows of sharp knives. The horses were driven by a charioteer, whose duty it was to manage his steeds, and with a shield ward off the missiles of the enemy, while his chief stood behind and with his sword endeavored to hew down those who escaped the scythes.
12. The quotation, “When Greek joined Greek, then was the tug of war,” is from the play of Alexander the Great, written by Nathaniel Lee, an English dramatic writer of the latter part of the seventeenth century.
13. The Persian slingers were a part of the light-armed soldiers. Their armor consisted of a shield, a sling, and stones, or other missiles. The stone or missile was placed upon a leather disk, held by two strings, and then rapidly whirled, and just at the right time one string was dropped and the missile projected with great force through the air. Some of the missiles thus thrown weighed no less than an Attic pound, and Seneca reports that the motion was so vehement that the leaden bullets were frequently melted. These slingers were enabled to use either hand, and it is stated that they obliged their sons to strike their food from a pole before eating it.
14. The now familiar expression, “War even to the knife,” was the reply of the Spanish patriot Palafox, the governor of Saragoza, to the summons of the French to surrender, at the siege of that city in 1808. Lord Byron uses the same expression in the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
15. The singular effect upon the men of the eating of honeycombs, as described by Xenophon, was occasioned by the peculiar properties given to the honey, owing to its being extracted by the bees from narcotic plants. The honey of Trebizond, at the present day, when eaten, causes headache and vomiting, and possesses poisonous qualities, supposed to be derived from the rhododendron, azalea pontica.
Correct replies to all the questions for further study in the December number of The Chautauquan have been received from the Niles, Mich., circle, through the secretary, Mrs. J. S. Tuttle; Mrs. S. D. Lloyd, president, Mrs. Marion McKinney, secretary, Mrs. J. P. Henry and Mrs. F. R. Snyder, of the Arcola, Ill., circle; Rev. R. H. and Mrs. M. A. Howard, Saxonville, Mass.; Miss Maggie V. Wilcox, 605 North Thirty-fifth street, West Philadelphia, Pa.; Mrs. Nellie M. Rumsey, president of the Albert Lea, Minn., local circle; Miss Mary D. Eshleman, 821 Chestnut street, Philadelphia, Pa., and A. U. Lombard, Columbus, O.