FOOTNOTES:
[103] The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
THE BLUE AND THE GRAY.
"The women of Columbus, Mississippi, animated by nobler sentiments than are many of their sisters, have shown themselves impartial in their offerings made to the memory of the dead. They strewed flowers alike on the graves of the Confederate and of the National soldiers."—New York Tribune.
By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Under the one, the Blue;
Under the other, the Gray.
These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Under the laurel, the Blue;
Under the willow, the Gray.
From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,
Lovingly laden with flowers
Alike for the friend and the foe;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Under the roses, the Blue;
Under the lilies, the Gray.
So with an equal splendor
The morning sun-rays fall,
With a touch, impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all;
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Broidered with gold, the Blue;
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.
So, when the Summer calleth,
On forest and field of grain
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Wet with the rain, the Blue;
Wet with the rain, the Gray.
Sadly, but not with upbraiding,
The generous deed was done;
In the storm of the years that are fading,
No braver battle was won;—
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Under the blossoms, the Blue,
Under the garlands, the Gray.
No more shall the war-cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;—
Love and tears for the Blue.
Tears and love for the Gray.
FUGITIVES FROM LABOR.
Young America in on the anxious-seat. An imploring cry comes up from the hearts of thousands, "What shall we do to be saved—from work?"
In the happy days of the Adamses, as Professor Agassiz has taught us to say, when every vine was a lodging rent-free, and the fig-trees furnished ready-made clothing, life was a pleasant pastime. But this is an age of cash or barter. The old common-law maxim concerning pains and penalties is the rule of modern society: Qui non habet in crumena, luat in corpore,—"He who cannot pay his fare must work his passage." To evade this law, to shirk the forecastle, and to devise some means of climbing into the cabin-windows, is the problem that the youth of this generation are trying to solve.
The United States offer so many unprospected or half-worked placers to sharp eyes, that we must look for a great deal of vagabondry. Gold-miners do not settle themselves down to crushing quartz, so long as there are nuggets to be picked up. Rare chances lie hidden in the by-paths of this broad country, to tempt men to straggle from the ranks of the steady workers and turn foragers and bummers.
And in this generation money has attained an extraordinary value. Since Dr. Johnson announced, in his Tour to the Hebrides, that the feudal system was giving way to wealth, most other social distinctions have yielded to it,—particularly in America, where there were few barriers to break down,—and money has become the chief good. Our standard of position in society is financial worth. Our patents of nobility are railway bonds, stock certificates, and mortgages. The income-return list of the United States Internal Revenue Department is the Libro d'Oro of the American Venice. In this age of scepticism, the excellence of accumulated capital is the one thing no man doubts; and when I take off my hat to a rich man, which I always do when I meet him, I feel that I cannot be mistaken in paying respect to something demonstrable, tangible, real.
Money furnishes all the blessings of life in this Western World,—health, beauty, wisdom, virtue, consideration; and some theologians have held that even the eye of the needle may expand to admit the camel who has dropped enough of his precious burden upon their premises.
If wealth cannot always give health, it can help to preserve it; it is the best of physicians.
There is nothing so becoming as property. "Handsome is who handsome has," is the accepted modern version of the old saw.
If a rich man does not pass for sensible and good, it is his own fault. Wisdom can be bought, generally at low prices; and virtue is always assumed to be an attribute of Fortune except in moral didactic treatises. A cubic ounce of gold can be beaten to cover fourteen hundred and sixty-six square feet; and a skilful capitalist can make it hide quite as large an area of meanness.
What weight an income adds to a man's sayings and doings! Your lucky broker, who has just turned a corner in stocks with a fortune, thinks Two Shillings has no right to an opinion when Half a Dollar is in the room. Although a man with a threadbare coat may say anything now-a-days, in spite of the Roman satirist, he can get no one to listen to him. Even genuine wit, like a good picture, shows better in a gilt frame with the varnish of success upon it.
It is not surprising that young men want money, and much of it, and quickly.
There is another stumbling-block in the path of steady work. Politically our progress in democracy is complete; but socially we hang back. The aristocracies of Europe despised trade; with us trade is an aristocracy that looks down upon manual labor,—an aristocracy with its gradations of rank and of titles, from merchant-prince to pedler. All who buy and sell consider themselves as belonging to the peerage of business. And as the petite noblesse of France liked to take a better title and gayer armorials than belonged to them, so our lesser nobility and gentry are fond of using a brevet business-title considerably above the position they really fill. They are ashamed of the old English words that have designated their callings for centuries. We all know that shops and shopkeepers are not to be found in the United States. Even thread-and-needle establishments and apple-stands are stores. Within sight of where I write, a maker of false calves, and other cotton or sawdust contrivances to supply the padding which careless Nature often forgets to furnish, calls his workshop a studio. If I were to use the word "slops" in a "ready-made clothing depot," the Sir Piercie Shafton who keeps it would summarily expel me for my lack of euphemism. As a general rule, everybody is above his business, and thinks manual labor mean, and only fit for emigrants.
It is said that our mechanics are nearly all foreigners, and that an American apprentice is an extinct species, like the cave bear or the dodo. Farmers' sons prefer any way of getting their bread to working with their hands. The pedler's caste ranks higher than the manly independence of the plough. A country store is an object of ambition, where the only toil is to deal out a glass of wretched tipple to the village sots who haunt those castles of indolence to drink, to smoke, and to twaddle over stale village news. Some young fellows solicit subscriptions for maps or for great American works, or drum for fruit nurseries, patent clothes-wringers, or baby-jumpers. Others aspire to enter the religious mendicant orders of America as paid brethren. They are too proud to work, but not ashamed to beg. Beg is perhaps a hard word; but solicitation is begging when the solicitor personally profits by it.
The sons of trading fathers despise the old tiresome roads to wealth of their class. Ledgers and law-books are too slow. All are in search of the short cut to fortune. They believe in the philosopher's stone as implicitly as the alchemists; they seek for it as earnestly. It is a jewel that will last forever, but its composition varies with each generation.
We of the press get scores of letters from young men, who spread out therein what they imagine to be their qualifications and accomplishments,—and plenty of them, for self-satisfaction is really the first law of Nature. Then follow their hopes and wishes and askings for advice, which, stripped of the flimsy rhetorical wrappers they feel obliged to use in deference to the old prejudice in favor of steady industry, come simply to this: "What is the minimum of work on which a clever creature like myself can live? And what kind of work is the least irksome and the most respectable?"
My colleague Tarbox, justly celebrated as a local reporter, belongs to the earnest school, and wishes me to take high ground, and write a sermon on the holiness and dignity of labor. He is always ready with his laborare est orare, and has by heart a passage from a German professor, who, writing of the manners of the Romans in an epoch of their history not unlike this of ours, says: "When a man works merely in order to attain as quickly as possible to enjoyment, it is a mere accident that he does not become a criminal."
But I tell Tarbox that these foreigners never understand the working of our institutions, nor the genius of our people. As to the dignity of labor, I have written a good deal on that text, particularly just before elections. The phrase sounds well in leading articles and on the stump, and may carry some comfort to a hard-working man. But I doubt if he believes it in his heart. I certainly do not. It is not true. There is no dignity in labor. Honesty, wisdom, manliness, there may be in labor, but not dignity. Dignity is in repose; the proverb is as old as Julius Cæsar. I might perhaps serve out some cut-and-dried bits of morality that have been prescribed as specifics for such complaints since the days of the Seven Wise Men. We keep them "set up" and ready for use. The only fault of these excellent old remedies is, that they never cure chronic cases of inefficiency, whether it be constitutional or contracted. They are good for nothing unless as a mild tonic for people who could do well enough without them. Now the cases we have to deal with are generally constitutional. When a young man writes to a stranger to ask upon what career in life he shall enter, he sends a diagnosis of his character in his letter. You know at once to what subdivision of the species he belongs. The hunting British squire recognizes only three orders of animals,—game, vermin, and stock. The human race may be divided in the same way. Game men take care of themselves; the vermin make others take care of them; and the stock, useful, harmless, and insignificant, except as an aggregate, furnish the first class with tools and the second with victims, and hitherto have done most of the drudgery of the world. Our correspondents belong to a sluggish but ambitious variety of the stock, that is seeking for some respectable or semi-respectable method of avoiding the primeval labor curse. Their own ingenuity failing them, they apply for the use of ours. The robust men, who have "the wrestling thews that throw the world," know how to get what they want, and ask no one to teach them. Indeed, to ask advice at any time is an indication of weakness. We feel kindly to those who consult us. It is a compliment that we were chosen, and not another; but I do not think that we respect them the more for it.
It is evident that the heroic remedies recommended by my colleague are likely to do harm rather than good to young persons who have outgrown their moral strength. It would be more humane to prescribe a treatment which, though it cannot cure, may alleviate their most distressing symptoms, and enable them to bear the burden of life without too much suffering. I shall, therefore, exhibit some of the methods by which young fellows of tolerable education and address may get along without undue exertion,—Disce puer fortunam ex me, verumque laborem ex aliis. For a youngster of good nerves and hopeful temperament there is nothing better than speculation,—as gambling without pasteboard and ivory is called. Up to-day and down to-morrow is as pleasant and exciting to men of that mould as seesaws and swings to children with strong stomachs. But let those made of feebler stuff beware. Between the two millstones of winning and losing they will be ground into despair, or into shameless roguery. "Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat."
There is no simpler way of "achieving honorable maintenance" than to marry an heiress. But to seek fortune in matrimony is almost like looking for it in a lottery. By some mysterious law of Providence, rich people draw the high prizes. Money is apt to fall in love with money. The female dollar prefers the attentions of her own kind. Cupid, "once a god," as Tennyson writes, "is now a lawyer's clerk," with sharp eyes wide open; and suits in forma pauperis are as little likely to succeed in courts of love as in courts of law.
Politics being a subject everybody understands by instinct, young men will naturally turn their attention that way. The number of offices with salaries make this country almost that Frenchman's Utopia imagined by Madame de Staël, where every adult male was to be a public officer paid by the state. We have even more than this. When all other hopes break down, there is the custom-house,—that last infirmary of noble minds who have failed in every attempt to cure the aches that empty pockets are heirs to. No doubt the profession of politics is generally remunerative; but where I live, a foreign order of nature's nobility rules us. We Saxons have fought our battle of Hastings at the polls, and have lost it; and no one can hope to hold office here, unless he came over with Murphy the Conqueror. Even should he combine in his person that profitable conjunction of knavery, impudence, and laziness which we call a politician, with the physical requisites described by a philosopher of the last century,—Vox stentoria, sempiterna, cum cerebello vacuo,—it would profit him nothing.
The poet Gray makes Jemmy Twitcher marry Divinity, after being refused by Law and Physic. These two smile only upon serious admirers. They who follow the law—at a distance, as some one remarks, never pick up a living. And in medicine, unless the indolent practitioner can invent a pill or a syrup, and can borrow enough to publish lying certificates from country clergymen, and to hire bill-stickers to dirty the face of Nature with the names of his specifics and the wonders they work, he will never earn his daily bread. But Divinity is more easily pleased. It was usual in the generation now passing away to recommend the Church to young gentlemen of moderate energy without capital. And indeed the path seemed easy, and the prospect pleasant.
A year or two in a seminary, a white cravat, a "call" made audible by a salary, Paley's advice in the matter of sermons,—to make one and to steal three,—all the young women of the parish sitting at his feet, working worsted slippers for them, and swinging their intoxicating little censers of flattery under his nose,—such was the imaginary programme of his career. Certainly a tolerable existence while it lasted. But it seldom did last. The "young probationer and candidate for heaven" married. He selected—destiny always seemed to impel him to it—a "sweet woman," who overstocked his parsonage, and, like the magician's apprentice in the ballad, could not rule the young spirits she had evoked. The salary did not increase with the family, and sweet women are never good housekeepers. The congregation began to criticise the old sermons; a jury of stern matrons, who spoke what minds they had, sat in perpetual session on his doctrines, his wife's dress, and his children's behavior;—and the end of that man was dreary, if he was only a drone in the hive of the Lord. In our day The Church is militant, and needs her ministers in the field. Those who are not able to fight will be sent to garrison some remote post, where there is no danger and little pay.
Art offers many more inducements to our young friends. If they have a knack for sketching and a "feeling for color," as the slang goes, they need not waste much time in preparatory study. Let them devote themselves to landscape. It is easy to draw a tree that will not shock the eye of an ordinary observer. Little outlay is needed to hire a room; none whatever to call it a studio. This magical word furnishes it at once, and covers every deficiency in chairs, tables, and carpet. Studio, Artist,—excellent, well-sounding names! In them is often the secret of the whole business.
An artist has this advantage over other men,—he may indulge in whatever amusements his means can afford him, and no one will find fault. Every class has its own standard of manners and conduct. The measure and rule for artists have come over the sea, condensed from French feuilletons and Vies de Bohéme. They are supposed to belong, by right of profession, to a reckless, witty, singing, and carousing guild. It is almost needless to say that the real life of the hard-working men who have earned fame by the brush is as unlike all this as possible. But these vague, ultramarine notions of fun and revelry have taken possession of the American mind, just opening to art, and established the standard for artists here. It exists in fact only in the imagination; for, excepting a few ebullitions in the way of hair, beards, and black sombreros, our artists are as saturnine as the rest of us, and not as good company around the mahogany as a judicious combination of clergymen and lawyers. Nevertheless, so powerful is the conventional, when it has once taken root in the imagination, that some of our younger artists believe themselves to be wild, rollicking fellows, who despise the humdrum existence of the rest of us, although they are sober and economical, pay their bills weekly, and talk their morning paper like other people. Young correspondents! you will perceive what a chance is here for you. If a kind public, in its youthful enthusiasm for art, invests these steady-going citizens with such delightful romantic qualities, it will of course wink at any irregularities of conduct on your part, as in strict keeping with the character.
In addition, you will always find us of the press your trusty friends. Although behind the scenes myself, the peculiar connection that exists between items-men and artists is as inexplicable to me as the partnership of the owl and the prairie-dog in their dwellings on the plains. Why, when we make every other calling pay roundly for a notice, we puff the artists gratis in the most conspicuous columns of the paper, is a puzzle to me. But the fact exists. Hire your studio, nail up your name on the door, and we will make a pet of you at once, and pat you encouragingly on the back. You shall have little paragraphs of this kind: "Salvator Smith is studying atmospheric effects in the Brooklyn Mountains"; or, "Smith, our own Salvator, is making studies from nature near Roxbury"; or, "He has a grand classical picture on his easel in Green Street, representing a celebrated American in the character of the infant Hercules, strangling the British lion with one hand and the Gallic cock with the other." Few of our readers may have heard of Smith, but they read these iterated notices, and soon believe Smith to be somebody. And he has the sweet sensation of seeing his name in print at no expense to himself, and the rare luck of fame before it is earned. In the circle he adorns he will be looked upon as a judge in all matters æsthetical. It is only necessary to have painted a poor picture in order to be an authority in architecture, music, poetry, dress, decoration, furniture, private theatricals, and fancy balls.
At this moment the fashionable world is an oyster, which with his spatula an artist may open. A picture mania rages. Good works bring enormous prices, and any discoloration of canvas in a gilt frame finds a ready purchaser, if signed by a known name. We are a commercial people, and are satisfied with a first-rate indorsement. The patron of art can soon educate himself for the position. The pet little phrases—"chalky," "sketchy," "tone," "repose," "opaque coloring," and all the rest of the technical vocabulary—are soon learned; and then if Lorenzo is able and willing to give ten thousand dollars for a picture, he may hold a court of artists and be sure of having a number of pleasant fellows about him. They, too, will be sure of champagne and oysters. All the schools, however different their theories of art may be, agree, I believe, that both of these compositions are excellent.
Lastly, I should like to say a few words in favor of my own noble profession, newspaper editing. Mr. Carlyle may spitefully call it "the California of the spiritually vagabond," but there is a proud pleasure in knowing that we gentlemen of the press furnish the great American people with their ideas and their phrases ready made, just as Brooks Brothers and Oak Hall provide them with their clothes. All very much alike, it is true,—"our spring style,"—and often ill-fitting and graceless; but we seem to fill a national want. Our names may be unknown outside of our offices, but the great planets are perceptibly influenced in their courses by little asteroids invisible to the naked eye, and many a celebrity who appears daily in large type is moved by the strings we pull, and knows it not. My comrade Tarbox says: "The oracles that became dumb in the year of our Lord were really a necessity to mankind, and consequently were made vocal again by the agency of Renaudot, who invented newspapers. The Delphis and Dodonas of the nineteenth century are newspaper offices." This may explain why young men in search of a profitable career write to us instead of applying to rich merchants or to dashing brokers. How fortunate that those who consult us never see the shrine or the priests! No gold or silver glitters in the modern adytum, or editor's room, and the tripod from which we distribute our afflatus to the compositors is a wooden three-legged stool, unpainted and uncushioned. That great oracle, Tarbox himself, was not long ago a noble savage who ran wild in the woods near some country college. Caught and caged in that institution, he devoted three years to pipes, and one to belles lettres, and receiving from a good-natured Faculty some sort of a degree, probably that of tobacco-laureate, came thence to town; where, inspired by a salary of ten dollars a week, he enlightens the public on finance and politics, art and literature, manners and taste, and writes those brilliant articles the world willingly lets die. When the California gold mines were first discovered, a clever fellow said that he knew of no opening for a young man like the Southwest Pass. That is still true for rough, coarse, self-asserting characters; but for delicate, refined, stay-at-home natures, who have wishes without wills, there are many ways of getting their porridge without selling their birthright of doing as little as possible. If they cannot float buoyantly on the surface, at least they need not sink far beneath it, but may enjoy a quiet, water-logged kind of existence, not devoid of comfort.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
May-Day and other Pieces. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
We wonder whether those who take up Mr. Emerson's poem now, amid the glories of the fading summer, are not giving the poet a fairer audience than those who hurried to hear his song in the presence of the May he celebrates. As long as spring was here, he had a rival in every reader; for then we all felt ourselves finer poets than ever sang of the season, and did not know that our virtue was but an effect of Spring herself,—an impression, not an expression of her loveliness, which must pass with her. Now, when the early autumn is in every sense, and those days when the year first awoke to consciousness have grown so far away, we must perceive that no one has yet been allowed to speak so well for the spring of our New World as this poet. The very irregularity of Mr. Emerson's poem seems to be part of its verisimilitude, and it appears as if all the pauses and impulses and mysterious caprices of the season—which fill the trees with birds before blossoms, and create the soul of sweetness and beauty in the May-flowers under the dead leaves of the woodlands, while the meadows are still bare and brown—had so entered into this song, that it could not emulate the deliberation and consequence of art. The "May-Day" is to the critical faculty a succession of odes on Spring, celebrating now one aspect and now another, and united only by their title; yet since an entire idea of spring is evolved from them, and they awaken the same emotions that the youth of the year stirs in us, we must accept the result as something undeniably great and good. Of course, we can complain of the way in which it is brought about, just as we can upbraid the New England climate, though its uncertain and desultory April and May give us at last the most beautiful June weather in the world.
The poem is not one that invites analysis, though it would be easy enough to instance striking merits and defects. Mr. Emerson, perhaps, more than any other modern poet, gives the notion of inspiration; so that one doubts, in reading him, how much to praise or blame. The most exquisite effects seem not to have been invited, but to have sought production from his unconsciousness; graces alike of thought and of touch seem the unsolicited gifts of the gods. Even the doubtful quality of occasional lines confirms this impression of unconsciousness. One cannot believe that the poet would wittingly write,
"Boils the world in tepid lakes,"
for this statement has, for all that the reader can see to the contrary, the same value with him as that preceding verse, telling how the waxing heat
"Lends the reed and lily length,"
wherein the very spirit of summer seems to sway and droop. Yet it is probable that no utterance is more considered than this poet's, and that no one is more immediately responsible than he. We must attribute to the most subtile and profound consciousness the power that can trace with such tenderness and beauty the alliance he has shown between earth and humanity in the exultation of spring, and which can make matter of intellectual perception the mute sympathies that seemed to perish with childhood:—
"The pebble loosened from the frost
Asks of the urchin to be tost.
In flint and marble beats a heart,
The kind Earth takes her children's part,
The green lane is the school-boy's friend,
Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,
The fresh ground loves his top and ball,
The air ring's jocund to his call,
The brimming brook invites a leap,
He dives the hollow, climbs the steep."
Throughout the poem these recognitions of our kindred with external nature occur, and a voice is given to the blindly rejoicing sense within us when the poet says,
"The feet that slid so long on sleet
Are glad to feel the ground"
and thus celebrates with one potent and satisfying touch the instinctive rapture of the escape from winter. Indeed, we find our greatest pleasure in some of these studies of pure feeling, while we are aware of the value of the didactic passages of the poem, and enjoy perfectly the high beauty of the pictorial parts of it. We do not know where we should match that strain beginning,
"Why chidest thou the tardy spring?"
Or that,
"Where shall we keep the holiday,
And duly greet the entering May?"
Or this most delicate and exquisite bit of description, which seems painted a tempera,—in colors mixed with the transparent blood of snowdrops and Alpine harebells:—
"See, every patriot oak-leaf throws
His elfin length upon the snows,
Not idle, since the leaf all day
Draws to the spot the solar ray,
Ere sunset quarrying inches down,
And half-way to the mosses brown:
While the grass beneath the rime
Has hints of the propitious time,
And upward pries and perforates
Through the cold slab a hundred gates,
Till green lances, piercing through,
Bend happy in the welkin blue."
There is not great range of sentiment in "May-Day," and through all the incoherence of the poem there is a constant recurrence to the master-theme. This recurrence has at times something of a perfunctory air, and the close of the poem does not seal the whole with any strong impression. There is a rise—or a lapse, as the reader pleases to think—toward a moral at the close; but the motion is evidently willed of the poet rather than the subject. It seems to us that, if the work have any climax, it is in those lines near the end in which the poet draws his reader nearest his own personality, and of which the delicately guarded and peculiar pathos scarcely needs comment:—
"There is no bard in all the choir,
Not Homer's self, the poet sire,
Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,
Or Shakespeare, whom no mind can measure,
Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
Scott, the delight of generous boys,
Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,—
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse,
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring,
When pacing through the oaks he heard
Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
The heavy grouse's sudden whir,
The rattle of the kingfisher;
Saw bonfires of the harlot flies
In the lowland, when day dies;
Or marked, benighted and forlorn,
The first far signal-fire of morn.
These syllables that Nature spoke,
And the thoughts that in him woke,
Can adequately utter none
Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
And best can teach its Delphian chord
How Nature to the soul is moored,
If once again that silent string,
As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.
"Not long ago, at eventide,
It seemed, so listening, at my side
A window rose, and, to say sooth,
I looked forth on the fields of youth:
I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,
I knew their forms in fancy weeds,
Long, long concealed by sundering fates,
Mates of my youth,—yet not my mates,
Stronger and bolder far than I,
With grace, with genius, well attired,
And then as now from far admired,
Followed with love
They knew not of,
With passion cold and shy.
O joy, for what recoveries rare!
Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,
See youth's glad mates in earliest bloom,—
Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!
Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoil
Of life resurgent from the soil
Wherein was dropped the mortal spoil."
Among the other poems in this volume, it appears to us that "The Romany Girl," "Voluntaries," and "The Boston Hymn" are in their widely different ways the best. The last expresses, with a sublime colloquiality in which the commonest words of every-day parlance seem cut anew; and are made to shine with a fresh and novel lustre, the idea and destiny of America. In "Voluntaries" our former great peril and delusion—the mortal Union which lived by slavery—is at first the theme, with the strong pulse of prophecy, however, in the mournful music. Few motions of rhyme so win and touch as those opening lines,—
"Low and mournful be the strain,
Haughty thought be far from me;
Tones of penitence and pain,
Moanings of the tropic sea,"—
in which the poet, with a hardly articulate sorrow, regards the past; and Mr. Emerson's peculiarly exalted and hopeful genius has nowhere risen in clearer and loftier tones than in those stops which open full upon us after the pathetic pleasing of his regrets:—
"In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right,
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom's fight,—
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay,
And quit proud homes and youthful dames,
For famine, toil, and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.
* * * *
"Blooms the laurel which belongs
To the valiant chief who fights;
I see the wreath, I hear the songs
Lauding the Eternal Rights,
Victors over daily wrongs:
Awful victors, they misguide
Whom they will destroy,
And their coming triumph hide
In our downfall, or our joy:
They reach no term, they never sleep,
In equal strength through space abide;
Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,
The strong they slay, the swift outstride:
Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,
And rankly on the castled steep,—
Speak it firmly, these are gods,
All are ghosts beside."
It is, of course, a somewhat Emersonian Gypsy that speaks in "The Romany Girl," but still she speaks with the passionate, sudden energy of a woman, and flashes upon the mind with intense vividness the conception of a wild nature's gleeful consciousness of freedom, and exultant scorn of restraint and convention. All sense of sylvan health and beauty is uttered when this Gypsy says,—
"The wild air bloweth in our lungs,
The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,
The birds gave us our wily tongues,
The panther in our dances flies."
"Terminus" has a wonderful didactic charm, and must be valued as one of the noblest introspective poems in the language. The poet touches his reader by his acceptance of fate and age, and his serene trust of the future, and yet is not moved by his own pathos.
We do not regard the poem "The Adirondacks" as of great absolute or relative value. It is one of the prosiest in the book, and for a professedly out-of-doors poem has too much of the study in it. Let us confess also that we have not yet found pleasure in "The Elements," and that we do not expect to live long enough to enjoy some of them. "Quatrains" have much the same forbidding qualities, and have chiefly interested us in the comparison they suggest with the translations from the Persian: it is curious to find cold Concord and warm Ispahan in the same latitude. Others of the briefer poems have delighted us. "Rubies," for instance, is full of exquisite lights and hues, thoughts and feelings; and "The Test" is from the heart of the severe wisdom without which art is not. Everywhere the poet's felicity of expression appears; a fortunate touch transfuses some dark enigma with color; the riddles are made to shine when most impenetrable; the puzzles are all constructed of gold and ivory and precious stones.
Mr. Emerson's intellectual characteristics and methods are so known that it is scarcely necessary to hint that this is not a book for instant absorption into any reader's mind. It shall happen with many, we fancy, that they find themselves ready for only two or three things in it, and that they must come to it in widely varying moods for all it has to give. No greater wrong could be done to the poet than to go through his book running, and he would be apt to revenge himself upon the impatient reader by leaving him all the labor involved in such a course, and no reward at the end for his pains.
But the case is not a probable one. People either read Mr. Emerson patiently and earnestly, or they do not read him at all. In this earnest nation he enjoys a far greater popularity than criticism would have augured for one so unflattering to the impulses that have heretofore and elsewhere made readers of poetry; and it is not hard to believe, if we believe in ourselves for the future, that he is destined to an ever-growing regard and fame. He makes appeal, however mystically, only to what is fine and deep and true and noble in men, and no doubt those who have always loved his poetry have reason to be proud of their pleasure in it. Let us of the present be wise enough to accept thankfully what genius gives us in its double character of bard and prophet, saying, when we enjoy the song, "Ah, this is the poet that now sings!" and when the meaning is dark, "Now we have the seer again!"
An Historical Sketch of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church. By Henry C. Lea. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1867.
This exhaustive treatise of Mr. Lea upon ecclesiastical celibacy we take to possess, like his excellent work upon "Superstition and Force," all the capital requisites of an historical monograph,—an immense body of information and of reference on the subject in hand, a sufficiently cool and dispassionate manner of presenting facts, and a severe adherence to the central question. The amount of research and indeed of scholarship involved in the preparation of this volume is such as to command the warmest recognition. In these days of "picturesque" histories, of hasty criticism, and of precipitate generalizations, it is very gratifying to encounter a writer who construes his obligations with such austerity as Mr. Lea. He is content to marshal his facts and his data into such an order that under a close inspection no one of them conceals the half-genuine look of its neighbor. He lets them tell their own story for good or for evil, and is never guilty, through the wish to be vivid and effective, of spreading his colors outside of the lines drawn by his authorities. Within these lines even his tints are sober and discreet, and careful not to depart too widely from those somewhat neutral hues which, wherever man's knowledge of the past rests upon accidentally preserved documents and monuments, must continue to be the colors of history. Nevertheless, with all the various merits of a well-executed monograph, Mr. Lea's work has certain of the corresponding defects. Perhaps, indeed, it were more just to say that these defects correspond to the limitations of the general reader's knowledge, rather than to any imperfection in the author's programme. In the course of a special history executed on such a scale as the present one, and with all its soberness of style, so little mechanical in spirit, and so free from chronological dryness, it is almost inevitable that the reader's impressions should become somewhat overbalanced. He is likely to forget that he is taking a partial view of a great subject, and that he must hold his opinions liable to correction when he has surveyed the whole field. A dishonest writer, we conceive, may readily take advantage of this perfectly logical error. He has accumulated an immense mass of material bearing on a particular point, extracted and expressed, by long labor, from a field in which it has lain interfused with material of a very different, and even of a directly opposite significance. There are a hundred literary arts by which a writer may put forward his fractional gleaning as a representation of the whole. In this matter of ecclesiastical celibacy, for instance, the result of Mr. Lea's researches is that practically the thing has never existed in the Christian Church. That is to say, the regulations enforcing it have at all times been more violated and eluded than obeyed. With the Reformation a large section of the Church ceased to admit its needfulness, and the field of its enforcement was very much curtailed. But the Catholic Church continued to cling to it as almost the central principle of its being, and continued likewise to connive at an inveterate system of escape from its harsh conditions. Mr. Lea's volume is a long record of reiterated legislation and exhortation against unchastity, formal and actual, and of a series of equally uninterrupted disclosures of the futility of such legislation. And, nevertheless, there is no doubt that, during all the long ages of its history, the Church was the abode and the refuge of a vast deal of purity and continence, to say nothing of the various other virtues by which its members have been distinguished. But the reader sees only the obverse of the medal: he sees a custom of prodigious bearings, if duly carried out, honored chiefly in the breach; and he will be very apt to close the book with an impression that the Church has been through all time a sink of incurable corruption. It is superfluous to say that this impression will be quite as erroneous as it would be to assert that, on the other hand, its practice has kept pace with its high pretensions. Neither view of the case is just. If there is one thing that strikes us more than another, in reading Mr. Lea's work, it is that, on the whole, the Church must have been at any moment a tolerably faithful reflection of the manners and feelings of the time. Its empire was practicable only by means of a constant renewal of the exquisite and everlasting compromise between man's transient interests and his external destiny. Taken as a whole, it never pretended to ride rough-shod over his natural passions and instincts. It pretended to convert them to its own service and aggrandizement. It respected them, it handled them gently. And as these passions and instincts have never been exclusively evil or exclusively good, so the Church has never been wholly corrupt or wholly pure. It has been animated by the average moral enlightenment of the time, and it has grown with men's moral growth. Reared, as it was, upon the primitive needs of men's nature, it is difficult to see how the result should have been different. And if the Catholic Church has lost that firmness of grasp upon human affection which it once possessed, it is not that laymen have become more virtuous than priests; it is that they have become more intelligent. The intellectual growth of the Church has lagged behind its moral growth. Secular humanity is perfectly willing to admit that its sacerdotal counterpart observes the Decalogue equally well with itself; but it contests the right of an institution, of whose long spiritual efforts this insignificant accomplishment is the only surviving result, to impose itself further upon men's respect and obedience. The reader has only to remember, then, that Mr. Lea's volume is not a history of the Church at large, but only a history of a single province, and he will find it full of profit and edification.
It is no exaggeration to repeat, as we have said, that the Church never achieved anything like complete celibacy. A rapid survey of the ground under Mr. Lea's guidance will confirm and explain this statement. During the first three centuries there is no evidence that celibacy was deemed essential to the clerical character, or even that it was thought especially desirable. It was natural that during the early years of the Church, and under the stress of persecution, it should not multiply the restrictions placed upon the freedom of its adherents. Up to the period of the Council of Nicæa, therefore, the virtues of chastity were maintained only by isolated groups of ascetics, animated by that spirit of Puritanism which seems to have existed in every faith in every stage of its history. When men are looking about them for means to mortify the flesh and to stifle the heart, a prohibition of marriage is the first expedient that suggests itself. Until this is done away with, further severities are impossible. Marriage, however, was not condemned at a single blow. The first step was to forbid second marriages. A bachelor in holy orders might marry with impunity; a widower did so at his peril. Having effected this concession, the ascetic spirit found means to increase its influence. It received a strong impulse at the close of the second century, as Mr. Lea affirms, by the rise of the Neoplatonic philosophy, with all its mystical and stoical tendencies, and by the introduction into Europe and the rapid spread of the great Manichæan heresy. In the view of this doctrine, man's body was the work of the Devil, and condemned as such to ceaseless abuse and mortification by his soul. Among the ascetic excesses which were the logical consequences of such a dogma, inveterate chastity was, of course, not the last to be enjoined. Manichæism was an object of violent detestation to the Church; but as the latter could not afford to let itself be outdone in austerity by a vulgar heresy, it began to adopt a similar uncompromising attitude towards marriage. The Council of Nicæa was held in 325. This body, however, was chiefly occupied with debates upon Arianism, and is responsible but for a single enactment bearing on the subject in hand. The bearing of this enactment is, moreover, indirect, inasmuch as Mr. Lea conclusively proves that it refers not to lawful wives, (as in later ages of the Church it became needful to assume that it did refer,) but to female companions of the unlicensed sort. For more than half a century after the Nicæan Council, the movement of the celibatarian spirit is lost sight of in the all-absorbing disputes on the Arian heresy. A strong reaction, however, is signalized by the issue, under Pope Damasus, in the year 385, of the first definite command imposing perpetual celibacy as an absolute rule of discipline on the ministers of the altar. This was very well as an injunction, but it was nothing without enforcement. More than half a century again elapsed before the new discipline was substantially acknowledged. By the mass of the servants of the Church—among which several names stand apart as those of its more eminent opponents—it was received with bitter resentment and incompliance. But it had the popular favor for it on one side, and on the other the passionate energies of the three great Latin fathers,—Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome. The people had not yet reached that state of mind when it clamored imperiously either for priestly marriage, or, in simple self-defence, for an organized substitute. Mr. Lea at this point devotes a chapter to the Eastern Church, of which it is sufficient for us to say, that in this establishment the question of celibacy was less violently agitated than among its neighbors, and that a final decision was more speedily reached. Early in the sixth century, Justinian published an edict which still forms the basis of its celibatarian discipline. Marriage in orders is forbidden, and men who have been twice married are inadmissible. Monks are of course bound to chastity, but the lower grades of the secular clergy are free to marry.
The rise of the monastic orders in the West dates from the close of the fifth century, when St. Benedict founded in the Latian Apennines the community which subsequently became famous as the Convent of Monte Cassino. With this enterprise begins the real growth of the Church, which, of course, we do not propose to trace. With each succeeding century its area expanded, its power increased, and its responsibilities multiplied. It was called to preside at the organization of a new Europe, to witness and to accelerate the extinction of the Roman Empire and the foundation of the new nationalities, to save whatever was worth saving from the wreck of the old society, to stand firm against the Barbarians, to prosecute constant and wholesale conversions, and to preserve in the midst of these various cares the integrity of the idea of sacerdotal chastity. The idea, we say; for we may be sure that the practice was left to take care of itself. We are told that the Barbarian invaders were inexpressibly shocked by the licentiousness and immorality of the Latin civilization; and if this were so, it promised well for a thorough purgation of the Church in proportion as the new-comers were admitted into its fold. But as we continue to read, we see that, although upon society at large their arrival may have produced in certain directions a healthful and renovating effect, they speedily became converted to the general tolerance of ecclesiastical laxity. Italy and France, up to the domination of Charlemagne, were the only important countries in Europe. The history of France from Clovis to Charlemagne is a long record of disorder and iniquity, in which, if the Church plays no worse part than the state, it at least plays no better. In Italy religion and politics are involved in an inextricable tangle of convulsions and dissensions. During this time there is no better proof of the practical neglect into which the canon of celibacy had fallen, than the continual iteration to which it is subjected by councils and synods. Gregory the Great, in his conscientious efforts in the seventh century to enforce sacerdotal chastity at least,—or rather to check the flagrant violation of it,—in default of celibacy, had to contend, where France was concerned, with the powerless imbecility of the Merovingian monarchs.
His successors found more effectual assistance in the first strong-handed Carlovingians. Pope Zachary, in concert with Carloman, and St. Boniface, the great apostle of the Saxons, for the first time attached the penalties of deposition, degradation, and penance to proved impurity of life. This was the beginning of a series of reforms, of which Boniface was the leading spirit, and Pepin and Charlemagne the rigid guardians. But, although sacerdotal marriage became really the exception rather than the rule, in consequence of these enactments, it is doubtful whether morality was improved. It was a licentious age, and the clergy as well as the laity belonged to their age. In the tenth century clerical marriage began again to prevail, and again the strong hands of Gregory VII., and of the Popes who reigned under his direction, were needed to restore some degree of discipline. But vigorous as were their measures, and persevering their efforts, it was restored chiefly in name. Gregory's dissensions with the Empire offer Mr. Lea an occasion to exhibit the condition of morality in the German Church. We are unable to see that at this moment, as for some time to come, it differed materially in any of the countries of Europe. In many outlying provinces—in Wales, in Bohemia, in Sweden—lawful marriage took the place of simple cohabitation; but in the great central states the vices of the laity were still those of the clergy. If there was one spot indeed where these vices were more flourishing than elsewhere, all through the Middle Ages and into recent times, that spot was the very head-quarters of sanctity,—Rome itself. But this circumstance admits doubtless of a sufficiently logical explanation. Rome was the spiritual head of Christendom, but she was also a great temporal power, and to a great extent the social metropolis of the world. This character necessarily involved a vast deal of magnificent corruption.
In the course of the Middle Ages it is apparent that the clergy not only continued to possess their share of the general unchastity, but to carry it to excesses by which they alone were distinguished. The amount of legislation bearing on this subject, recorded by Mr. Lea with immense patience and care, is such as to defy memory and imagination, and almost to challenge belief. There can be assuredly no better proof of the very imperfect observation of the canons than this unceasing repetition of them. By the time the Middle Ages had passed away, and the masses had emerged into the comparatively brilliant light of the Renaissance, sacerdotal unchastity had grown into an enormous evil. The disparity between the theory of the priestly character and its actual form had become too flagrant to be endured. Popular protests accordingly became frequent. The abuse of those intimate relations into which the priest is brought with the life of families, and that of the confessional more especially, acquires horrible proportions. And as the question grows more complex on the side of the people, so it grows more complex with regard to the general government of the Church. This government had long since made up its mind, with a firmness destined to be proof against even the most formidable remonstrance, that, whatever might be the manners of its servants, they were to remain inviolably single. The mere ascetic and sentimental reason for celibacy had long been supplanted by good logical and material reasons. A wife and children were speedily found to be incompatible with the exclusive service of the Church. To it alone, if the ambition of its great rulers was to be fulfilled, its ministers were to be devoted. When, with the development of the feudal system, the transmission of property and of functions from father to sons became the groundwork of social order, ecclesiastical benefices were disposed of in the same way as manors and baronies, to the utter prejudice of the temporality of the Church. With this tendency the Church waged a long and violent contest, in which she was finally victorious. But she purchased her victory only at the price of the most scandalous concessions; and by the system of immorality reared upon these concessions she found her hands almost fatally entangled at the Reformation. Dispensation to unchastity in her ministers had become a prominent feature among those various indulgences against which the consciences of the early Reformers rose in wrath. In every country in Europe the people had grown weary of crying out for the abolition of these dispensations, and the reintroduction of marriage. In Germany, accordingly, the marriage of apostate monks and priests was among the foremost measures of the more ardent Reformers. Luther, whose discretion was as great as his courage, was content to wait; but he, too, finally gave in, and united himself with a nun. It is characteristic of the English people, that the monarchs under whose guidance they embraced the Reformation should have shown in this particular more than the hesitation of Luther. Henry VIII. broke short off with Rome, overturned the monasteries, and filled the land with the beggared servants of the old ecclesiastical order, but he would not hear of the marriage of the Reformed clergy. It was certainly not from a general disapproval of the institution. Under Edward, the old restrictions on this matter were done away; but under Mary they were of course restored with a high hand. With Elizabeth they were eventually removed forever; but it is known that the measure had very little sympathy from the queen, and that her assent was grudgingly bestowed.
The Council of Trent was expected to do great things toward the pacification of the Reformers and the healing of the great schism, and among others to pave the way for the gradual abolition of clerical celibacy. The measure had the approval of Charles the Fifth, and of Ferdinand and Maximilian, his successors. The Council of Trent did very little that was expected of it, however, and least of all did it accomplish this. It contented itself with a reenactment of certain obsolete and threadbare canons in favor of chastity, and launched an anathema against all those who affirmed the validity of such marriages as had been made or should yet be made by the apostate clergy. This was the last word of the Catholic Church for some time to come upon this important subject. Animated with a new vitality by the great Jesuit reaction, she had no apprehension that her hour had come, and that she was brought so low as to be compelled to belie the sagacity of her great founders and lawgivers. For the past three hundred years she has firmly adhered to the principle of celibacy, and assuredly with incontestable wisdom. With the universal elevation of the moral tone throughout Europe, she has been less frequently mortified by having to look with indulgence upon the licentious manners of her priests.
It seems to us that this rapid survey of the immense subject treated by Mr. Lea is calculated to confirm rather than to enfeeble an unprejudiced reader's sense of the marvellous achievements of the Church. The enumeration, made in the volume before us, of its enactments with regard to celibacy and chastity, constitutes a chapter in its internal history. This is, to our perception, the worst that can be said of them and of the state of things which they reveal. If the Catholic Church is to be pronounced an institution of the past, a mockery, a delusion, and a snare, it is not on these grounds alone, or on any exclusive grounds, but from a broadly comprehensive point of view. Every human institution has a private history which is very different from its public one. In some respects the former is the more, in others the less, admirable of the two. In the present case, the element in the picture which appeals to our admiration is the heroic patience and perseverance, the fortitude, the tact, and the courage with which the Church applied herself to the healing of her internal wounds when they were curable, and to the enduring of them when they were not, in order that, at any cost, she might produce upon the world the impression of unity, sanity, and strength.
Ten Months in Brazil; with Incidents of Voyages and Travels, Descriptions of Scenery and Character, Notices of Commerce and Productions, etc. By John Codman. Boston: Lee and Shepard.
The title of this book leaves its reviewer little to say in explanation of its purposes. It is a lively enough book, and a book well enough written, with a good deal of dash and piquancy in the style; and yet, like the blameless dinner to which Doctor Johnson objected that it was not a dinner to ask a man to, it is not a book to advise one to read. It does not appear to us, after reading it, that we are wiser concerning Brazil than before; even the facts in it we greeted, in many cases, with the warmth due to old statistical acquaintances. The philosophy of the author seems to be that the Brazilians are a bad set, and that they have become so mainly by mingling their blood with that of their negroes,—a race never so useful and happy as when in the discipline of slavery. Mr. Codman contrasts their hopeless state on the lands of a good-hearted Scotchman in Brazil, who intends to let them earn their freedom by working for him, with their condition on the neighboring estate of a sharp, slave-driving Yankee, who acquiesces unmurmuringly in the purposes of Providence; "his theory being, that, as labor is their condition, the greatest amount of work compatible with their health and fair endurance is to be got from them. With this end in view, there is a judicious distribution of rewards and punishments." Mr. Codman finds the charm of novelty in these just and simple ideas, but we think we have in past years met with the same ingenious reasoning in Southern speeches and newspapers; and we suspect the system was one commonly adopted in our slave States, where the occasional omission of punishments was economically made to represent the judicious distribution of rewards.
In fact, Mr. Codman seems to have travelled and written too late to benefit his generation. Six or seven happy years ago, an enlightened public sentiment would have received his views of slavery with acclaim; but we doubt if they would now sell a copy of his book even in Charleston.
A Story of Doom, and other Poems. By Jean Ingelow. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
People who remember things written as long ago as five years have a certain stiffness in their tastes which disqualifies them for the enjoyment of much contemporaneous achievement; and it is fortunate for the poets that it is the young who make reputations. Miss Ingelow's first volume, indeed, had something in it that could please not only the inexperience of youth, for which nothing like it existed, but even the knowledge of those arrived at the interrogation-point in life, who felt that here there was a movement toward originality in much familiar mannerism and uncertain purpose. If there was not a vast deal for enjoyment, there was a reason for hope. It was plain that the author's gift was not a great one, but it was also clear that she had a gift. She was a little tedious and diffuse; she was often too long in reaching a point, and sometimes she never reached it at all. But then she wrote "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire," and the "Songs of Seven," and "Divided,"—none of them perfect poems, yet all very good and fresh,—and showed a true feeling for nature, and some knowledge of humanity as women see it. In this second volume, however, she abandons her maturer admirers to their fate, and seeks the favor of the young ladies and gentlemen who have begun to like verses since Mr. Tennyson's latest poems were written, and the old balladists and modern poetical archaists ceased to be read. In fact, it is amazing to see how this author, who had a talent of her own, has contentedly buried it, and gone to counterfeiting the talents of others. The "Story of Doom" here given is an unusually dreary copy of the unrealism of Mr. Tennyson's "Idyls of the King," and makes the history of Noah more than ever improbable; while "Laurance," mimicking all the well-known effects and smallest airs and movements of the laureate's poems of rustic life, is scarcely to be read without laughter. "Winstanley" presents an incident that, if told in simple contemporary English, would have made a thrilling ballad; but what with its quoth-he's, brave skippers, good master mayors, ladies gay, and red suns, it is factitious, and of the library only,—it came from Percy's "Reliques" and "The Ancient Mariner," not from the poet's heart. It seems worthy of the sentimental purpose with which it was written; but we doubt if any child in the National School in Dorsetshire learned it by heart as his forefathers did the old ballads.
In pleasant contrast with its affectations is the beautiful little song entitled "Apprenticed," which the author tells us is in the old English manner, but which we find full of a young feeling and tenderness belonging to all time, expressed in diction quite of our own. This, and that one of the Songs with Preludes entitled "Wedlock," seem to us the best, if not the only, poems in the book. Miss Ingelow's forte is not in single lines and detachable passages, and her efforts are apt to be altogether successful or unsuccessful. In the long rhyme called "Dreams that came True," there is but one inspired line, and that is merely descriptive,—
"In eddying rings the silence seemed to flow"
round him that waked suddenly from an awful dream. There is an inglorious ease in the sarcasm, but we must express our regret that Miss Ingelow did not leave this story in the prose which she says first received it.
We suppose we need scarcely call the reader's attention to the fact that certain faults of Miss Ingelow's first book are exaggerated in this. The rush of half-draped figures, and the pushing and crowding of weak and unruly fancies, are too obviously unpleasant for comment. Perhaps they are most unpleasant in the Song with a Prelude which opens with the bewildering statement that
"Yon mooréd mackerel fleet
Hangs thick as a swarm of bees,
Or a clustering village street
Foundationless built on the seas."
Critical and Social Essays. Reprinted from the New York "Nation." New York: Leypoldt and Holt.
These brief papers very fairly represent the quality of the excellent journal from which they are taken, and treat subjects suggested by literary events and social characteristics with a bright intelligence and an artistic feeling only too uncommon in our journalism. All the essays are good, and several are of quite unique merit. The first in the volume, entitled "The Glut in the Fiction Market," is full of a felicitous badinage and an exquisite power of travesty, which we should not know how to match elsewhere. The author of this admirable paper wrote also, as we imagine, the essays on "Some of our Social Philosophers," "Critics and Criticism," and "Voyages and Travels," which are the best of the humorous articles in the volume. The graver essays are almost as good in their way as these, and we especially like "Why we have no Saturday Reviewers," "Popularizing Science," "Something about Monuments," and "American Ministers abroad." The paper on "The European and American Order of Thought" considers the subject with an originality and penetration which we would willingly have had applied in a more extended study of it.
In fine, we like all these articles from "The Nation," for the reasons that we like "The Nation" itself, which has been, in a degree singular among newspapers, conscientious and candid in literary matters; while in affairs of social and political interest it has shown itself friendly to everything that could advance civilization, and notably indifferent to the claims of persons and parties.