THE POET COMMENCETH TO SING.
The morning dawned. The rorid earth upon,
Old Sol looked down, to do his work siccate,
My sneek I raised to greet the ethe sun,
And sauntering forth passed out my garden gate.
A blithe specht sat on yon declinous tree
Bent on delection to its bark extern;
A merle anear observed (it seemed to me)
The work, in hopes to make owse how to learn.
A drove of kee passed by; I made a stond,
For fast as kee how could my old legs travel?
But—immorigerous brutes!—with feet immund
They seemed to try my broadcloth garb to javel.
The semblance of a mumper then I wore,
Though a faldisdory before I might have graced;
Eftsoons I found, when standing flames before,
The mud to siccate, it was soon erased.
If we should turn our attention studiously to this line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow dips' of parrot-poetry.
A GREAT SOCIAL PROBLEM.
My dear Continental:
When the meteorological question was despatched, ladies have long had a habit of calling upon their servants to furnish them with small talk; high wages, huge appetites, daintiness, laziness, breakage, impertinence, are fruitful topics which they daily treat exhaustively; always arriving at the hopeless conclusion: 'Did you ever hear of anything like it?' and 'I wonder what we are coming to!'
Is it not possible that we may be coming to—no servants at all? To me the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps; hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can, and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue his tastes to suit the whims of the enemigos pagados, as the Spaniards call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly employés (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and Tide—because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic economy that work is inversely as the increase of wages. Nowadays, if a housekeeper visits a prison, he envies the whiteness of the floors and the brightness of the coppers he sees there, and thinks, with a sigh, how well it might be for his subscalaneans, if they could be made to take a course of neatness for a few months in some such an institution.
Vain wish! The future is theirs, and they know it. Their services will become gradually more worthless, until we shall find them only in grand establishments: mere appendages kept for fashion and for show; as useless as the rudimental legs of a snake, which he has apparently only to indicate the distinguished class in animated nature he may claim to belong to. We shall live to say, as Perrault sang:
'J'aperçus l'ombre d'un cocher
Tenant l'ombre d'une brosse
Nettoyant l'ombre d'un carrosse.'
Alas! I fear that even these shadows of servants will one day vanish and disappear from us altogether.
Time was when classes in society were as well defined as races still are. The currents ran side by side, and never intermingled. Some were born to furnish the blessings of life, and others to enjoy them. Some to wait, and others to be waited upon. The producing class accepted their destiny cheerfully, believed in their 'betters,' and were proud to serve them. The last eighty years have pretty much broken down these comfortable boundary lines between men. The feudal retainer, who was ready to give his life for his lord, the clever valet, who took kicks and caning as a matter of course when his master was in liquor or had lost at cards, even the old family servants, are species as extinct as the Siberian elephant, or the cave bear, or the dodo. And now the advance of the Union armies southward has destroyed the last lingering type of the servant post: the faithful black.
In this country there never was much distinction of classes. The unwillingness of New England help to admit of any superiority on the part of their masters has furnished many amusing stories. Later, when the Irish element penetrated into every kitchen, farmyard, and stable, floating off the native born into higher stations, service became limited to immigrants and to negroes. But the immigrant soon learned the popular motto, 'I'm as good as you are,' and only remained a serving man until he could save enough money to set up for himself: not a difficult matter in the United States; and never so easy as at this moment. The demands of the Government for soldiers and for supplies threaten us with a labor famine in spite of the large immigration. In Europe labor is scarce and in demand. Commerce, manufactures, colonization have outrun the supply. Wages have doubled in England and in France within the last twenty years, and are rising. With increase of wages comes always decrease of subordination. The knowledge of reading, now becoming general, and exercised almost exclusively in cheap and worthless newspapers, and the progress of the democratic movement, which for good or for evil is destined to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of the members against the belly.
Gradually has sprung up the feeling that it is degrading to be a servant; a terrible lion in the path of the quiet housekeeper in search of assistants. There may arise some day a purer and a wiser state of society, wherein the relation of master and man will be satisfactory to both. A merchant exercises a much sharper control over his clerk than over any servant in his house, and it is cheerfully submitted to. The soldier, who is worse paid and worse fed than a servant, is a mere puppet in the hands of his officers, obliged to obey the nod of twenty masters, and to do any work he may be ordered to, without the noble privilege of 'giving notice;' and yet there is never any difficulty in obtaining a reasonable supply of soldiers—because clerks and soldiers do not think themselves degraded by their positions, and servants do. It may be a prejudice, but it is one which drives hundreds of women, who might be fat and comfortable, to starve themselves over needlework in hovels; and often to prefer downright vice, if they can hope to conceal it, to virtue and a home in a respectable family. Any logic, you perceive, is quite powerless against a prejudice of this size and strength.
But is it altogether a prejudice? Is it not a sound view of that condition of life?
I confess that it has long been a matter of surprise to me that men should be found willing to hire themselves out for domestic service in a country where bread and meat may so easily be obtained in other ways, and where even independent manual labor is so often considered derogatory to the dignity of the native born. To do our dirty work that it disgusts us to do for ourselves, to stand behind our chairs at table, to obey our whims and caprices, to have never a moment they can call their own, to keep down their temper when we lose ours, to be compelled to ask for permission to go out for a walk, seems to me a sad existence even with good food and wages.
The fact is, my dear Continental, that the relation between master and servant has to be readjusted to suit the times. Indeed it is readjusting itself. We see the signs, although we may not perceive their significance. Our life is a dream. I use this venerable saying in another sense than the one generally intended by it: I mean that we live half our lives, if not more, in the imagination; and that the imagination of every-day people is a dream made up of feelings brought together from the habits, theories, and prejudices of the past of all lands and all nations of men. The reality that was once in them has long since been out of them; yet these vague and shadowy fancies are all-powerful and govern our actions. So that morally we go about like maskers in the carnival, dressed in the old clothes of our ancestors. With this difference, that most of us do not see how shabby and threadbare they are, and how unsuited to our present wants. And the few who do see this have an inbred fondness for the old romantic rags, and wear some of them in spite of their better judgment. Our moneyed class cling in particular to the dream of an aristocracy, and love to look down upon somebody. The man who made his fortune yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a nouveau riche and a parvenu. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than their masters. I have seen an ardent democrat, who had roared equal rights from many a stump, furious with the impertinence of a waiter, whose answer, if it had come from an equal, he would scarcely have noticed. And was not the waiter a man and a fellow voter? What distinction of class have we in this country? It is true that the property qualification we have discarded in our political system we have retained as our test of social position. Indeed, no abstract rights of man can make up the difference between rich and poor. But Fortune is nowhere so blind nor so busy in twirling her wheel; and our two classes are so apt to change places, that frequently the only difference between the master and the footman who stands behind him, is the difference of capital. And Europe is treading the same democratic path as ourselves, limping along after us as fast as her old legs will carry her. The time will come when the class from which we have so long enlisted recruits for our batteries de cuisine will find some other career better suited to their expanded views.
What then? Do you suggest that we may lay a hand upon the colored element, after the example of our honored President? But
'While flares the epaulette like flambeau
On Corporal Cuff and Ensign Sambo,'
can you expect either of these distinguished officers to leave the service of the United States for ours? What with intelligent contrabandism, emancipation, the right of suffrage, and the right to ride in omnibuses, we fear that their domestic usefulness will be sadly impaired.
Oh for machinery! automaton flunkies, requiring only to be wound up and kept oiled! What a housekeeping Utopia! Thomson foreshadowed a home paradise of this kind when he wrote the 'Castle of Indolence:'
'You need but wish, and, instantly obeyed,
Fair ranged the dishes rose and thick the glasses played.'
But as yet invention has furnished no reapers and mowers for within doors. We have only dumb waiters; poor, creaking things, that break and split, like their flesh-and-blood namesakes, and distribute the smell of the kitchen throughout the house. Heine once proposed a society to ameliorate the condition of the rich. He must have meant a model intelligence office. I wish it had been established, for we may all need its aid.
What are we to do when we come to the last of the servants? Darwin says that the Formica rufescens would perish without its slaves; we are almost as dependent as these confederate ants. Our social civilization is based upon servants. Certainly, the refinements of life, as we understand it, could not exist Without them, and it is difficult to see how any business of magnitude could be carried on. Briareus himself could not take care of a large country place, with its stables, barns, horses, cattle, and crops, even if Mrs. B. had the same physical advantages, and was willing to help him. Must we tempt them back by still larger salaries, or increase their social consideration, telling them, as a certain clergyman once said of his order, that 'they are supported, and not hired'?—changing the word help, as we have servant, into household officer or assistant manager, or adopt a Chinese euphemism, such as steward of the table or governor of the kitchen? Fourier does something of this kind; in his system the class names of young scullions are cherubs and seraphs! Or shall we adopt the coöperative plan of Mill and others, and offer John an interest in the family—say, possibly, the position of resident son-in-law after ten years of honesty, sobriety, and industry—with a seat at table in the mean while? Or must all the work be done by women, and a proprietor have to seal his Biddies more sanctorum in Utah? Or might not poor relations, now confessedly nuisances, be made useful in this way? Some marquis asked Sophie Arnould why she did not discharge her stupid porter? 'I have often thought of it,' she answered, 'mais que voulez vous, c'est mon père.'
These resources failing, we must drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or phalanstères à la Fourier, or, worse than either, to mammoth hotels. American tastes incline that way. There we may live in huge gilded pens, as characterless as sheep in the flock, attended upon by waiters, chambermaids, and cooks, who will have a share in the profits, and consequently will be happy to do anything to increase the income of their house.
I see no other remedy, and I offer this great social problem to the serious thoughts of your readers.
Yours ever, G. V.
APHORISMS.—NO. XIII.
It was a frequent exclamation of Herder the Great: 'Oh, my life, that has failed of its ends!' and many of us, no doubt, find ourselves disposed to indulge in the same lament. But it deserves careful attention; no man's life fails of its true end unless through some grievous moral fault of his own.
The true end of life is that we may 'glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.' How this may be attained, as far as outward circumstances or activities are concerned, we can hardly judge for ourselves: but there is one sure test; and that is in the duties of our station. If we honestly perform them, and especially as under the teachings of the gospel of Christ, there can be no real and permanent failure. We shall have done what we were set to do upon the earth; and with this we may well be content.
OUR GREAT AMERICA.
The republican government of the United States, when first originated by the fathers of the commonwealth, was regarded by the old fossil despotisms with secret dread and a strange foreboding; and neither the ridicule which they heaped upon it, nor the professed contempt wherewith its name was bandied from throne to throne, could wholly mask their trepidation. They looked upon it, in the privacy of their chambers, as the challenge of a mighty rebellion of the people against all kingly rule and administration; they saw in it the embodiment of those popular ideas of freedom, equality, and self-government, which for so many centuries had been struggling for adequate utterance in England and France, and they knew that the success of this sublime experiment must eventually break asunder the colossal bones of the European monarchies, and establish the new-born democracy upon their ruins.
That they saw truly and judged wisely in these respects, the history of modern Europe, and the current revolutions of our time, bear ample testimony. There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very despotism which disowns and denounces it.
We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by virtue of their intelligence. It required many centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived, and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it, gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible, and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped civilizations.[B]
It would, however, be by no means difficult, were it in accordance with our present design and purpose, to show that the first germ of republican liberty sprang into life amid the sedges and savage marshes of uncultivated ages, far remote even from the discovery of America, and trace it through successive rebellions, both of a political and religious character, from and before the times of Wycliffe, down to Oliver Cromwell and George Washington; for all through English history it has left a broad red mark behind it, like the auroral pathway of a conqueror. The first man who prayed without book, and denied the authority of the church over the human soul, as the brave Loilards did, was the pioneer of Protestantism and the father of all the births which ushered this mighty epoch upon the stage of the world; Protestantism, which means so much and includes so many vast emprises—establishing for freedom so grand a battle ground, and for philosophy and learning so wide and magnificent a dominion.
The same spirit which made nonconformists of the first seekers and worshippers of God apart from the churches and cathedrals of Rome, in the sublimer cathedrals of nature, when the Roman hierarchy was master of Europe—made republicans also of the first rebels who resisted the tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth the base and dome of popular government.
The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here, upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.
It was impossible that American society could hold together with this accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the result be for future generations.
Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and wrath.
Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white population—the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them—are ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest attributes—confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had created under the very ribs of the republic.
We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense. Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North, they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery, and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres—regarding them as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly sacrifices—these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have marshalled themselves into avenging armies to rid the earth of their presence.
That, too, was fated and necessary, and a part of the predestined programme. The nation could not progress with this corrupting monster in its pathway; and the battle between them has not come an hour too soon. The monster must be exterminated, and that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes and the clank of chains.
This obstruction removed, there is, as we said above, no height of greatness which the American people may not reach. Then, and then only, shall we begin to consolidate ourselves into a nation, with a distinct organon of principles, feelings, and loyalties, to which the mighty heart and brain of the people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the great name we bear.
In the meanwhile it is no marvel that we are not a homogeneous people. Our time has not come for that, and may yet lie afar off in the shadowy centuries. Consider how and through what alien sources we have multiplied the original population of the associated colonies as they existed when our fathers raised them to a nationality. There is not a nation in all Europe, to say nothing of Asia and the islands, which is not represented in our blood and does not form a part of our lineage. It is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the plastic form and comeliness of her present unity and proportion. We, who work at high pressure and make haste in our begettings and growth, can scarcely hope to make a national sculpture at all commensurate with the genius of the people and the continent, in one or two or even half a dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything within the range of possible achievement.
We have all the elements within and around us necessary to constitute a great people. We started on our career with a long background of experience to guide and to warn us. We saw what Europe had done for civilization with her long roll of kings and priests, her despotic governments, and her unequal laws—the people in most cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved—with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, in bloody throes of agony.
Our fathers had not the best materials out of which to build up a republic; neither, in all cases, were they themselves sufficiently ripe for the experiment. They had the old leaven of European prejudice largely intermingled in their minds and character. They could not help, it is true, their original make, nor the fashioning which their age, time, and circumstances had put upon them. All this has to be taken into the estimate of any philosophical judgment respecting their performances. But they had learned from the past to trust the present, and to span the future with rainbows of hope. They stood face to face with the people, and each looked into the others' eyes and read there the grounds and sureties of an immortal triumph. Instead, therefore, of resting the supreme power of government in the hands of a person, or a class, making the former a monarch, and creating the other an aristocracy, those grand magistrates and senators of human liberty who framed the Constitution of the new American Nation, made the nation its own sovereign, and clothed it with the authority and majesty of self-government.
A venture so daring, and of an audacity so Titanic and sublime, seemed at that time and long afterward to require the wisdom and omnipotence of gods to guide it over the breakers, and steer it into the calm waters of intelligent government. All the world, except the handful of thinkers and enthusiasts scattered here and there over Europe, was against it, mocked at its bravery and aspirations, and sincerely hoped and believed that some great and sudden calamity would dissolve it like a baleful enchantment. But the hope of the republic was in the people, and they justified the fathers and the institution.
Here, therefore, was opened in all the directions of human inquiry and action a new world of hope and promise. The people were no longer bound by old traditions, nor clogged by any formulas of state religions, nor hampered by the dicta of philosophical authority. Their minds were free to choose or to reject whatever propositions were presented to them from the wide region of speculation and belief. The Constitution was the only instrument which prescribed laws and principles for their unconditional acceptance and guidance; and this was a thing of their own choice, the charter and seal of their liberties, to which they rendered a cheerful and grateful obedience.
With this mighty security for a platform, they pursued their daily avocations in peace, trusting their own souls, and working out the problem of republican society, with a most healthy unconsciousness. Sincere and earnest, they troubled themselves with no social theories, no visions of Utopia, nor dreams of Paradise and El Dorados, leaving the spirit which animated them to build up the architecture of its own cultus, with an unexpressed but perfect faith in the final justice and satisfaction of results.
Religion, therefore, and politics—literature, learning, and art—trade, commerce, manufactures, agriculture—and the amenities of society and manners, were allowed to develop themselves in their own way, without reference to rule and preconcerted dogmas. Hence the peculiarities which mark the institutions of America—their utter freedom from cant and the shows and pageantry of state. Bank, titles, and caste were abolished; and the enormous gulfs which separate the European man from the European lordling were bridged over by Equality with the solid virtues of humanity.
What a stride was here taken over time and space, and the historic records of man, in the fossil formations of the Old World during the ante-American periods! It had come at last, this long-prophesied reign of Apollo and the Muses, of freedom and the rights of man. Afar off, on the summits of imaginative mountains, were beheld, through twilight vistas of night and chaos, the proud ruins of dead monarchies, and the cruel forms of extinct tyrannies and oppressions, crowned and mitred no more; whose mandates had once made the nations tremble, and before whose judgment seats Mercy pleaded in vain, and Justice muffled up her face and sat dumb and weeping in the dust. Over the wolds of their desolation hyenas prowled, snuffing the noisome air as for a living prey; ghouls and vampyres shrieked in hellish chorus, as they tore up forgotten graves; and all manner of hateful and obscure things crawled familiarly in and out of palaces and holy places, as if they were the ghosts of the former inhabitants; and, high above them all, in the bloody light of the setting sun, wheeled kites and choughs and solitary vultures; owls and dismal bats flitting, ever and anon, athwart the shadows of their grim processions.
No matter that this vision was in reality but the symbolism of imagination and poetry, that Europe was not dead, but alive with the struggling vitalities of good and evil, and all those contending forces out of which American freedom was born—the vision itself was not the less true, either as feeling or insight; for Europe was now literally cut adrift from America, and the hopes and aspirations of the young republic were entirely different from hers, and removed altogether from the plane of her orbit and action.
The liberalists and thinkers of the age expected great things from a people thus fortunately conditioned and circumstanced. For the first time in modern history a genuine democratic government was inaugurated and fairly put upon its trial. The horizon of thought was now to be pushed back far beyond the old frontiers into the very regions of the infinite; and a universal liberty was to prevail throughout the length and breadth of the land. No more dead formalities, nor slavish submissions, but new and fuller life, self-reliance, self-development, and the freest individuality. Gladly the people accepted the propositions and principles of their national existence. Not a doubt anywhere of the result; no faltering, no looking back; but brave hearts, everywhere, and bold fronts, and conquering souls. Before them, through the mists of the starry twilight, loomed the mountain peaks and shadowy seas of the unventured and unknown future; and thitherward they pressed with undaunted steps, and with a haughty and sublime defiance of obstructions and dangers; fearing God, doing their best, and leaving the issue in His hands.
We know now, after nearly a hundred years of trial, what that issue in the main is, and whitherward it still tends. During that little breathing time, which, compared with the life of other nations, is but a gasp in the record, what unspeakable triumphs have been accomplished! Nearly a whole continent has been reclaimed from the savage and the wild beasts, and the all-conquering American has paved the wilderness, east, west, north, and south, with high roads—dug canals into its hidden recesses, connected the great Gulf with the far-off West by a vast network of railways and telegraphs—planted cities and villages everywhere, and fashioned the routes of civilization; bound Cape Race to the Crescent City and the Atlantic to the Pacific, sending human thoughts, winged with lightning, across thousands of miles of plains and mountains and rivers, and making neighborly the most distant peoples and the most widely sundered States of the mighty Union. Let any man try to estimate the value of this immense contribution to human history and happiness; let him try to measure the vast extent of empire which it covers, and sum up the mighty expenditure of physical and intellectual labor which has conquered those savage wilds, and converted them into blooming cornfields and orchards; which has built these miraculous cities by the sea, and made their harbors populous with native ships and the marine of every nation under heaven; those busy inland cities, the hives of manufacturing industry and the marts of a commerce which extends over all the regions of civilization, from the rising to the setting sun; those innumerable towns of the great corn-growing districts; those pleasant hamlets and pastoral homes which fringe the forest, and girdle the mountains as with the arms of human affection and the passion of love; those mills on the far-off rivers, whose creaking machinery and revolving wheels are the prelude of a yet unborn, but rapidly approaching civility, and whose music, heard by the right ears, is of the divinest depth and diapason, and in full concord with the immeasurable orchestra of triumph and rejoicing which the nation celebrates in the perpetual marches of her starry progress.
No man can compass this vast dominion, and no intellect can plumb its soundings or prophesy of its upshot. Who could have foretold what has already happened on this continent, had he stood with the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock, that memorable day of the landing? Looking back to that great epoch in American history, we have no dim regions of antiquity to traverse, no mythic periods as of Memnon and the Nile, but a mere modern landscape, so to speak, shut in by less than two centuries. And yet what unspeakable things are included in that brief period! If we have made such vast strides and so rapid a development in those few years of our national life, with the heterogeneous and unmalleable materials with which we had to deal, converting the filth of Europe into grass and flowers for the decoration of the republic, what may we not achieve hereafter, when this dreadful war is over, and the negro question is adjusted, and the sundered States are reunited, and the Western wilderness is clothed with the glory of a perfect cultivation, and the genius of the people, no longer trammelled by Southern despotism, shall have free room to wing its flight over the immeasurable future?
There will be no likeness, in any mirror of the past, to the American civilization that is to be. New manners, customs, thinkings, literature, art, and life, will mark our progress and attest the mission of the nation. We are fast outgrowing the ideas and influences of that brave company of Puritans out of whose loins our beginning proceeded; and already each man goes alone, insular, self-reliant, and self-sustained. We owe the Puritans a large debt, but it is altogether a pretty fiction to call them the founders of American civilization. They helped to lay in the foundation stones of that early society, and kept them together by cementing them with their love of religious truth and liberty, so far as they understood these primal elements of a state; and we are likewise their debtors for the integrity which they put into their laws and government. But it is too high a demand to claim for them that they were the founders of the republic, and the originators of those great ideas which are embodied in our institutions and literature.
They came to this country with no very enlarged notions, either of religion or freedom, although they were perfectly sincere in their professions of regard for both; and it was this very sincerity which gave solidity and permanence to their colonies. We suppose we may repeat what history has made notorious respecting them, that they were, both in belief and civil practice, very narrow and limited in their outlooks—by no means given to intellectual speculations—and with but little faith in the intellect itself—which, indeed, was proscribed as a sort of outlaw when it stood upon its own authority, outside the pale of their church. The religion which they established had its origin in the reign of Elizabeth, and was a sort of revived Lollardism, which last dated as far back as Wycliffe, long before the Reformation. They thought they could worship God in conventicles, and in the great open-air cathedrals of nature, with quite as much purity of motive and heavenly acceptance as in regularly consecrated churches, and that the right of praying and preaching was inalienable, and secured to all godly men by the charter and seal of Calvary.
They had no idea, however, of non-conformity which was not based upon an orthodox creed, upon their creed, as they subscribed it on Plymouth Rock. They fled from persecution themselves, and sought freedom for themselves in the barren regions of our dear and now hospitable New England; and they, in their simplicity and good faith before God, sought to organize a system of civil and religious polity which should incrust all future generations, and harden them into a fossil state of perpetual orthodoxy.
They were a stern, implacable race, these early fathers, in all that related to belief, and the discipline of moral conduct; and we owe many of the granite securities which lie at the bottom of our social life and government to this harsh and unyielding sternness. It held the framework of the colonies together until they were consolidated into the United States, and until the modern culture of the people relaxed it into a universal liberty of thought and worship.
The Puritans, however, had no notion of such a result to their teachings and labors; and would have looked with pious horror upon them if they could have beheld them in some Agrippa's mirror of the future.
The truth—unpalatable as it may be—is simply this about the Puritans: they were narrow-minded, bigoted, and furious at times with the spirit of persecution; sincerely so, it is true, and believing they did God service; but that does not alter the fact. They had no conception of the meaning of liberty—and especially of religious liberty as a development of Protestantism. Their idea of it was liberty for themselves—persecution to all who differed from them; and this, too, for Christ's sake, in order that the lost sheep might be brought back, if possible, to their bleak and comfortless folds. They could not help it; they meant no wrong by it, and the evil which they thus did was good in the making, and sprang from the bleeding heart of an infinite love.
We like them, nevertheless; and cannot choose but like them, thinking it generous and loving to invest them with as much poetry as we can command from the wardrobes of the imagination. But we can never forgive them—in critical moods—for their inhuman, although strictly logical persecution of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who represented in his person all the liberal-thoughts-men, both in religion and speculation, then existing on this continent.
This man of capacious intellect and most humane heart was hunted by them out of the associated colonies, as if he had been some ferocious beast of prey, because he differed from them in his religious opinions; and this drove him to found a state in accordance with the most liberal interpretation of Christianity. He had more than once, by his influence with the Indians, saved them from a general massacre; but their theological hate of him was so intense that they would not allow him to pass through their territories on a necessary journey; and once, on his return from England, where he had been negotiating with ministers for their benefit, they capped the climax of their bigoted ingratitude by refusing him permission even to land on their soil, lest his holy feet should pollute it.
It is a little too much, therefore, to say that all our ideas of liberty and religion have sprung from this stout race of persecutors. They were pioneers for us, bu nothing more. Our progress has been the untying of their old cords of mental oppression, and the undoing of many things which they had set up. This was so much rubbish to be moved out of the path of the nation, and by no means aids to its advancement, except as provocatives. What we now are, we have become by our own culture and development, and by the inflowing of those great modern ideas which have affected all the world, and helped to build up its civilization into such stately proportions.
Puritanism, as it then existed in its exclusive power, is, to all intents and purposes, dead upon this continent. The form of it still lingers in our midst, it is true, and in the Protestant parts of Europe its ritual survives, and pious hearts, which would be pious in spite of it, still cling to its dead corpse as if it were alive, and kindle their sacred fires upon the altar of its wellnigh forsaken sanctuaries. We should count it no gain to us, however—the extinction of this old and venerable faith—if we had no high and certain assurance that a nobler and sublimer religion was reserved for our consolation and guidance. We cannot afford, in one sense, to give up even the semblances and shows of religion, and these will survive until the new dayspring from on high shall supersede the necessity of their existence. 'Take care,' said Goethe, in some such words as these, 'lest, in letting the dead forms of religion go, you sacrifice all reverence and worship, and thus lose religion itself!' There is great danger of this in the transition state of human thought and speculation which marks the present crisis of American history. We are not a religious people, and shall not present any development of that sort until the intellectual reaction which has set in among us against the old modes and organons of belief has exhausted the tests of its crucibles, and reduced the dross to a residuum of gold which shall form the basis of a new and sacred currency, acceptable to all men for the highest interchanges.
In the mean while we must work out the problem of this religion of the future in any and all ways which lie open to us—doubting nothing of the final issues. The wildest theories of Millerites, Spiritists, Naturalists, and Supernaturalists, are all genuine products of the time, and of the spirit of man struggling upward to this solution—blindly struggling, it is true, but gradually approaching the light of the far-off truth, as the twilight monsters of geology gradually approached the far-off birth of man, who came at last, and redeemed the savage progressive, the apparent wild unreason of the terrestrial creation.
It is more than probable that this great fratricidal war with which we are now struggling, will prove, in its results, of the very highest service to the nation, and make us all both better and wiser men than we were before. We have already gained by it many notable experiences, and it has put our wisdom, and our foolishness also, to the test. It has both humbled and exalted our pride. It has cut away from the national character all those inane excrescences of vanity and brag which judicious people everywhere, who were friendly to us, could not choose but lament to see us exercise at such large discretion. It has brought us face to face with realities the most terrible the world has ever beheld. It has measured our strength and our weakness, and has developed within us the mightiest intellectual and physical resources. All the wit and virtue which go to make up a great people have been proven in a hundred times and ways during the war, to exist in us. Courage, forethought, endurance, self-sacrifice, magnaminity, and a noble sense of honor, are a few of the virtues which we have cropped from the bloody harvest of the battle field.
It is true that wicked men are among us—for when did a company, godly or otherwise, engage in any work, and Satan did not also fling his wallet over his shoulder and set out with them for evil purposes of his own?—but after all, these are but a small minority, and their efforts to ruin the republic and bring defeat and dishonor upon the Federal arms, have not yet proved to be of a very formidable nature. These, the enemies of America, though her native-born sons, the people can afford to treat with the contempt which they merit. For the rest, this war will make us a nation, and bind us together with bonds as strong as those of the old European nationalities. It will make us great, and loving patriots also; and root out from among us a vast amount of sham and political fraud, to the great bettering of society.
We shall have reason in many ways to bless its coming and its consequences. It was indeed just as necessary to our future national life and happiness as the bursting out of a volcano is to the general safety of the earth. It will destroy slavery for ever, and thus relieve us from the great contention which has so long and so bitterly occupied the lives of our public men and the thoughts of the world. In reality, we have never yet given republicanism a fair trial upon this continent. With that dreadful curse and crime of slavery tearing at its heart and brain, how was it possible for equality and self-government to be anything else but a delusion and a mockery? This cleared out of our pathway, and we have enough virtue, intelligence, and wealth of physical resources in the land to realize the prophecy and the hope of all noble thinkers and believes on the planet, and place America first and foremost among the nations—the richest, the wisest, the best, and the bravest.
LONGING
The corruption of a noble disposition is invariably from some false charm of fancy or imagination which has over-mastered the mind with its powerful magic and carried away the will captive. It is some perverted apprehension or illusory power of the infinite which causes a man who has once fallen a prey to any strong passion to devote all his energies, thoughts, and feelings to one object, or to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some favorite pursuit. For man's natural longing after the infinite, even when showing itself in his passions and feelings, cannot, where genuine, be satisfied with any earthly object or sensual gratification or external possession. When, however, this pursuit, keeping itself free from all delusions of sense, really directs its endeavor toward the infinite, and only to what is truly such, it can never rest or be stationary. Ever advancing, step by step, it ever rises higher and higher. This pure feeling of endless longing, with the dim memories of eternal love ever surging through the soul, are the heavenward—bearing wings which bear it ever on toward God. Longing is man's intuition of enternity!—Schlegel.
THE LESSON OF THE HOUR.
I.
Strong in faith for the future,
Drawing our hope from the past,
Manfully standing to battle,
However may blow the blast:
Onward still pressing undaunted,
Let the foe be strong as he may,
Though the sky be dark as midnight,
Remembering the dawn of day.
II.
Strong in the cause of freedom,
Bold for the sake of right,
Watchful and ready always,
Alert by day and night:
With a sword for the foe of freedom,
From whatever side he come,
The same for the open foeman
And the traitorous friend at home.
III.
Strong with the arm uplifted,
And nerved with God's own might,
In an age of glory living
In a holy cause to fight:
And whilom catching music
Of the future's minstrelsy,
As those who strike for freedom
Blows that can never die.
IV.
Strong, though the world may threaten,
Though thrones may totter down,
And in many an Old World palace,
Uneasy sits the crown:
Not for the present only
Is the war we wage to-day,
But the sound shall echo ever
When we shall have passed away.
V.
Strong—'tis an age of glory,
And worth a thousand years
Of petty, weak disputings,
Of ambitious hopes and fears:
And we, if we learn the lesson
All-glorious and sublime,
Shall go down to future ages
As heroes for all time.
VI.
Strong—not in human boasting,
But with high and holy will,
The means of a mighty Worker
His purpose to fulfil:
O patient warriors, watchers—
A thousandfold your power
If ye read with prayerful purpose
The Lesson of the Hour.
THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE:
ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES.
ARTICLE ONE.
THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH.
The Continental for May contained an article, written by Stephen Pearl Andrews, entitled: A Universal Language: its Possibility, Scientific Necessity, and Appropriate Characteristics. Although then treated hypothetically, or as something not impossible of achievement in the future, a Language constructed upon the method therein briefly and generally explained, is, in fact, substantially completed at the present time. It is one of the developments of a new and vast scientific discovery—comprising the Fundamental Principles of all Thought and Being, and the Law of Analogy—on which Mr. Andrews has bestowed the name of Universology. The public announcement of this discovery, together with a general statement of its character, has been recently made in the columns of a leading literary paper—The Home Journal.
Although the principle involved in the Language discussed in the article referred to is wholly different from that upon which all former attempts at the construction of a common method of lingual communication have been based; and although such merely mechanical inventions were therein distinguished from a Language discovered as existing in the nature of things; several criticisms, emanating from high literary quarters, indicate that there is still much misunderstanding as to the real nature of a Universal Language framed upon the principles of Analogy between Sense and Sound. This misunderstanding seems most prevalent in respect to the two points relating directly to the practical utility of such a Lingual Organ. It is assumed that a Language so constituted must be wholly different in its material and structure from any now existing, and that the latter would have to be abandoned as soon as the former was adopted. It is supposed, therefore, that in order to introduce the Scientific Universal Language, the people must be induced to learn something entirely new, and to forsake for it their old and cherished Mother-tongues. The accomplishment of such an undertaking is naturally regarded as highly improbable, if not impossible.
It is also supposed that every word of the Language is to be determined in accordance with exact scientific formulas;—a process which, if employed, would, as is conceived, give a stiff, inflexible, monotonous, and cramped character to the Language itself; and would be wanting in that profusion of synonymes which gives an artistic and life-like character to the lingual growths of the past.
Both of these objections arise, as we shall hereafter see, from an erroneous impression of the nature of Language based on Analogy, coupled with a misconception of the real character and constituents of existing Languages. It is the purpose of the present papers to correct these false notions. In order to do so—and, what is essential to this, to present a clear exposition of the true character of the Language under consideration, and of its relations to the Lingual Structures of the past and present—it is necessary to give a preliminary examination to the fundamental question of the Origin of Speech. By means of this examination we shall come to understand that the existence and general use of a Universal Language with the elements of which Nature has herself furnished us, would not involve the abrupt or total abandonment of the Tongues now commonly employed; but, on the contrary, while preserving all that is substantially valuable in each, would enable us to acquire a knowledge of them with a facility which Comparative Philology, as now developed, lays no claim to impart.
How, then, did Language originate? In setting out to answer this question, Professor Max Müller says, in his Lectures on the Science of Language:[C]
'If we were asked the riddle how images of the eye and all the sensations of our senses could be represented by sounds, nay, could be so embodied in sounds as to express thought and to excite thought, we should probably give it up as the question of a madman, who, mixing up the most heterogeneous subjects, attempted to change color and sound into thought. Yet this is the riddle we have now to solve.
'It is quite clear that we have no means of solving the problem of the origin of language historically, or of explaining it as a matter of fact which happened once in a certain locality and at a certain time. History does not begin till long after mankind had acquired the power of language, and even the most ancient traditions are silent as to the manner in which man came in possession of his earliest thoughts and words. Nothing, no doubt, would be more interesting than to know from historical documents the exact process by which the first man began to lisp his first words, and thus to be rid forever of all the theories on the origin of speech. But this knowledge is denied us; and, if it had been otherwise, we should probably be quite unable to understand those primitive events in the history of the human mind. We are told that the first man was the son of God, that God created him in His own image, formed him of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. These are simple facts, and to be accepted as such; if we begin to reason on them, the edge of the human understanding glances off. Our mind is so constituted that it cannot apprehend the absolute beginning or the absolute end of anything. If we tried to conceive the first man created as a child, and gradually unfolding his physical and mental powers, we could not understand his living for one day without supernatural aid. If, on the contrary, we tried to conceive the first man created full-grown in body and mind; the conception of an effect without a cause, of a full-grown mind without a previous growth, would equally transcend our reasoning powers. It is the same with the first beginnings of language. Theologians who claim for language a divine origin, ... when they enter into any details as to the manner in which they suppose Deity to have compiled a dictionary and grammar in order to teach them to the first man, as a schoolmaster teaches the deaf and dumb, ... have explained no more than how the first man might have learnt a language, if there was a language ready made for him. How that language was made would remain as great a mystery as ever. Philosophers, on the contrary, who imagine that the first man, though left to himself, would gradually have emerged from a state of mutism and have invented words for every new conception that arose in his mind, forget that man could not, by his own power, have acquired the faculty of speech, which is the distinctive character of mankind, unattained and unattainable by the mute creation. It shows a want of appreciation as to the real bearings of our problem, if philosophers appeal to the fact that children are born without language, and gradually emerge from mutism to the full command of articulate speech.... Children, in learning to speak, do not invent language. Language is there ready made for them. It has been there for thousands of years. They acquire the use of a language, and, as they grow up, they may acquire the use of a second and a third. It is useless to inquire whether infants, left to themselves, would invent a language.... All we know for certain is, that an English child, if left to itself, would never begin to speak English, and that history supplies no instance of any language having thus been invented....
'Speech is a specific faculty of man. It distinguishes man from all other creatures; and if we wish to acquire more definite ideas as to the real nature of human speech, all we can do is to compare man with those animals that seem to come nearest to him, and thus to try to discover what he shares in common with these animals, and what is peculiar to him, and to him alone. After we have discovered this we may proceed to inquire into the conditions under which speech becomes possible, and we shall then have done all that we can do, considering that the instruments of our knowledge, wonderful as they are, are yet too weak to carry us into all the regions to which we may soar on the wings of our imagination.'
As the result of a comparison of the human with the animal kingdom, Professor Müller remarks that, 'no one can doubt that certain animals possess all the physical acquirements for articulate speech. There is no letter of the alphabet which a parrot will not learn to pronounce. The fact, therefore, that the parrot is without a language of his own, must be explained by a difference between the mental, not between the physical faculties of the animal and man; and it is by a comparison of the mental faculties alone, such as we find them in man and brutes, that we may hope to discover what constitutes the indispensable qualification for language, a qualification to be found in man alone, and in no other creature on earth.'
Of mental faculties, the author whose ideas we are stating, claims a large share for the higher animals. 'These animals have sensation, perception, memory, will, and intellect, only we must restrict intellect to the comparing or interlacing of single perceptions.' But man transcends in his mental powers the barriers of the brute intellect at a point which coincides with the starting-point of language. And in this coincidence Professor Müller endeavors to find a sufficiently fundamental explanation of the problem of the origin of language.
In reference to this point of coincidence, he quotes Locke as saying that, 'the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to,' and then adds:
'If Locke is right in considering the having of general ideas as the distinguishing feature between man and brutes, and, if we ourselves are right in pointing to language as the one palpable distinction between the two, it would seem to follow that language is the outward sign and realization of that inward faculty which is called the faculty of abstraction, but which is better known to us by the homely name of reason.
'Let us now look back to the result of former lectures. It was this: After we had explained everything in the growth of language that can be explained, there remained in the end, as the only inexplicable residuum, what we called roots. These roots formed the constituent elements of all languages.... What, then, are these roots?'
Two theories have been started to solve this problem: the Onomatopoetic, according to which roots are imitations of sounds; and the Interjectional, which regards them as involuntary ejaculations. Having discussed these theories, and taken the position that, although there are roots in every language which are respectively imitations of sounds and involuntary exclamations, it is, nevertheless, impossible to regard any considerable number of roots, and much less, all roots, as originating from these sources, the distinguished Philologist announces as the true theory, that every root 'expresses a general, not an individual, idea;' just the opposite of what he deems would be the case if the Onomatopoetic and Interjectional theories explained the origin of speech.
Some paragraphs are then devoted to the examination of the merits of a controversy which has existed among philosophers as to
'whether language originated in general appellations, or in proper names. It is the question of the primum cognitum, and its consideration will help us perhaps in discovering the true nature of the root, or the primum appellatum. Some philosophers, among whom I may mention Locke, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dr. Brown, and, with some qualification, Dugald Stewart, maintain that all terms, as at first employed, are expressive of individual objects. I quote from Adam Smith. 'The assignation,' he says, 'of particular names to denote particular objects, that is, the institution of nouns substantive, would probably be one of the first steps toward the formation of language.... The particular cave whose covering sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst, would first be denominated by the words cave, tree, fountain, or by whatever other appellations they might think proper, in that primitive jargon, to mark them. Afterward, when the more enlarged experience of these savages had led them to observe, and their necessary occasions obliged them to make mention of, other caves, and other trees, and other fountains, they would naturally bestow upon each of those new objects the same name by which they had been accustomed to express the similar object they were first acquainted with.''
This view of the primitive formation of thought and language, is diametrically opposed to the theory held by Leibnitz, who maintained that 'general terms are necessary for the essential constitution of languages.' 'Children,' he says, 'and those who know but little of the language which they attempt to speak, or little of the subject on which they would employ it, make use of general terms, as thing, plant, animal, instead of using proper names, of which they are destitute. And it is certain that all proper or individual names have been originally appellative or general.'
Notwithstanding the contradictory and seemingly antagonistic nature of these positions, Professor Müller shows that they are not irreconcilable.
'Adam Smith is no doubt right, when he says that the first individual cave which is called cave, gave the name to all other caves; ... and the history of almost every substantive might be cited in support of his view. But Leibnitz is equally right when, in looking beyond the first emergence of such names as cave, town, or palace, he asks how such names could have arisen. Let us take the Latin names of cave. A cave in Latin is called antrum, cavea, spelunca. Now antrum means really the same as internum. Antar, in Sanskrit means between or within. Antrum, therefore, meant originally what is within or inside the earth or anything else. It is clear, therefore, that such a name could not have been given to any individual cave, unless the general idea of being within, or inwardness, had been present in the mind. This general idea once formed, and once expressed by the pronominal root an or antar, the process of naming is clear and intelligible. The place where the savage could live safe from rain and from the sudden attacks of wild beasts, a natural hollow in the rock, he would call his within, his antrum; and afterward similar places, whether dug in the earth or cut in a tree, would be designated by the same name ... Let us take another word for cave, which is cavea or caverna. Here again Adam Smith would be perfectly right in maintaining that this name, when first given, was applied to one particular cave, and was afterward extended to other caves. But Leibnitz would be equally right in maintaining that in order to call even the first hollow cavea, it was necessary that the general idea of hollow should have been formed in the mind, and should have received its vocal expression cav ...
'The first thing really known is the general. It is through it that we know and name afterward individual objects of which any general idea can be predicated, and it is only in the third stage that these individual objects, thus known and named, become again the representatives of whole classes, and their names or proper names are raised into appellatives.'
The italics in the last paragraph are my own.
But the name of a thing, runs the argument, meant originally that by which we know a thing. And how do we know things? Knowing is more than perceiving by our senses, which convey to us information about single things only. 'To know is more than to feel, than to perceive, more than to remember, more than to compare. We know a thing if we are able to bring it, and [or?] any part of it, under more general ideas.' The facts of nature are perceived by our senses; the thoughts of nature, to borrow an expression of Oersted's, can be conceived by our reason only. The first step toward this real knowledge is the 'naming of a thing, or the making a thing knowable;' and it is this step which separates man forever from all other animals. For all naming is classification, bringing the individual under the general; and whatever we know, whether empirically or scientifically, we know it only by means of our general ideas. Other animals have sensation, perception, memory, and, in a certain sense, intellect; but all these, in the animal, are conversant with single objects only. Man has, in addition to these, reason, and it is his reason only that is conversant with general ideas.
'At the very point where man parts company with the brute world, at the first flash of reason as the manifestation of the light within us, there we see the true genius of language. Analyze any word you like, and you will find that it expressed a general idea peculiar to the individual to which the name belongs. What is the meaning of moon?—the measurer. What is the meaning of sun?—the begetter ...
'If the serpent is called in Sanskrit sarpa, it is because it was conceived under the general idea of creeping, an idea expressed by the word srip. But the serpent was also called ahi in Sanskrit, in Greek echis or echidna, in Latin anguis. This name is derived from quite a different root and idea. The root is ah in Sanskrit, or anh, which means to press together, to choke, to throttle. Here the distinguishing mark from which the serpent was named was his throttling, and ahi meant serpent, as expressing the general idea of throttler. It is a curious root this anh, and it still lives in several modern words. In Latin it appears as ango, anxi, anctum, to strangle, in angina, quinsy, in angor, suffocation. But angor meant not only quinsy or compression of the neck; it assumed a moral import, and signifies anguish or anxiety. The two adjectives angustus, narrow, and anxius, uneasy, both come from the same source. In Greek the root retained its natural and material meaning; in eggys, near, and echis, serpent, throttler. But in Sanskrit it was chosen with great truth as the proper name for sin. Evil no doubt presented itself under various aspects to the human mind, and its names are many; but none so expressive as those derived from our root anh, to throttle. Anhas in Sanskrit means sin, but it does so only because it meant originally throttling—the consciousness of sin being like the grasp of the assassin on the throat of his victim ... This anhas is the same word as the Greek agos, sin ... The English anguish is from the French angoisse, the Italian angoscia, a corruption of the Latin angustiæ, a strait ... Mâ in Sanskrit means to measure, from which we had the name of the moon. Man, a derivative root, means to think. From this we have the Sanskrit manu, originally thinker, then man. In the later Sanskrit we find derivatives, such as mânava, mânusha, manushya, all expressing man. In Gothic we find both man and mannisks, the modern German mann and mensch.'
And now we are brought by the author of The Science of Language to the great question to which the foregoing is merely preparatory, to the fundamental consideration of Philological research: 'How can sound express thought? How did roots become the signs of general ideas? How was the abstract idea of measuring expressed by mâ, the idea of thinking by man? How did gâ come to mean going, sthâ standing, sad sitting, dâ giving, mar dying, char walking, kar doing?' Here is his answer:
'The four or five hundred roots which remain as the constituent elements in different families of languages are not interjections, nor are they imitations. They are phonetic types, produced by a power inherent in nature. They exist, as Plato would say, by nature; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of God. There is a law which runs through nearly the whole of nature, that everything which is struck rings. Each substance has its peculiar ring. We can tell the more or less perfect structure of metals by their vibrations, by the answer which they give. Gold rings differently from tin, wood rings differently from stone; and different sounds are produced according to the nature of each percussion. It was the same with man, the most highly organized of nature's works. Man, in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed, like the brute, with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoieia. He possessed likewise the faculty of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind. That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct of the mind as irresistible as any other instinct. So far as language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. His senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they become useless. Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled. The number of these phonetic types must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of natural elimination which we observed in the early history of words, that clusters of roots, more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type.'
Professor Max Müller occupies a commanding position in the foremost rank of the students of Philology. His work on The Science of Language, from which the preceding discussion of the Origin of Speech is taken, is, so far as I am aware, the latest volume treating of the problem in question which has issued from what is commonly regarded as high authority in the department of Language. It is to that volume, therefore, that we are to look for the last word of elucidation which the Comparative Philologist can furnish respecting it. And it is for this reason—in order that we might have before us the results of the latest research of the schools—that the exposition of the Origin of Language given in the work referred to has been so fully stated.
Where, then, does this explanation of the problem leave us? Does it go to the bottom of the matter? Is it sufficiently distinct and satisfactory? In brief, does it give us any clear understanding of the Origin of Speech? Does it not rather leave us at the crucial point of the whole inquiry, with the essence and core of the subject untouched and shrouded in mystery? Some indefinite hundreds of roots, obtained, it is assumed, by means of some indescribable and unknown mental instinct! This is the sober and contented answer of Philology to the investigator who would know of the Sources of Language, and its constituent elements. But of the component parts of these roots—the true and fundamental constituent elements of Speech, without a knowledge of which there can be no basic and conclusive comprehension of the meaning of roots—and of the nature of the method by which these elements become expressive of thoughts or ideas, there is no word. Language, as it now rests in the hands of the Comparative Philologists, is in the same state that Chemistry was when Earth, Air, Fire, and Water were supposed to be the ultimate constituent elements of Matter, ere a single real ultimate element was known as such. But Chemistry, as a science, had no existence prior to the discovery of the simple constituents of Physical creation. In like manner, a Science of Language must be founded on a knowledge of the nature and meaning of the simple elements of Speech. Until this knowledge is in our possession it is only on the outskirts of the subject that we are able to tread. Roots are, it is true, the actual bases of Language, so far as its concrete, working, or synthetical structure is concerned; in the same sense that compound substances are the main constituents found in the Universe as it really and naturally exists. But, although the proportion of simple chemical elements, in the real constitution of things, is small, as compared with that of compound substances; yet it is only by our ability to separate compound substances into these elements that we arrive at an understanding of their true character and place in the realm of Matter. So it is only by our ability to analyze roots—the compound constituents of Language—into the prime elements which have, except rarely, no distinctive and individual embodiment in it, that we can hope to gain a clear comprehension of the nature of Language itself, or of its most primitive concrete or composite foundations.
Comparative Philology furnishes us with admirable guidance—so far as it goes. But we do not wish to stop at the terminus which it seems to consider a satisfactory one. The final answer it offers us, we do not regard as final. We gladly accept the analysis of Language down to its Roots. But we wish to analyze Roots also. That the Moon derives its name from being regarded as the Measurer of time; and Man, from the notion of thinking; that an (anh) is a widely-diffused root, signifying pressure; and that gâ denotes going; with similar expositions, is valuable information, and takes us a great way toward the goal of our seeking. But the question of questions relating to Language is not answered by it. Why should the abstract idea of measuring be expressed by mâ; and that of thinking by man? How did an come to signify pressure; and gâ, going? Is there any special relationship between these roots and the ideas which they respectively indicate? Or was it by chance merely that they were adopted in connection with each other? Might dâ just as meet have been taken to denote doing, and kar, giving, as vice versa? Has the root an any distinguishing characteristics peculiarly fitting it to suggest choking or pressure? Or might that notion have been equally well expressed by sthâ?
It is at this fundamental stage of the investigation, whence a true Science of Language must take its departure, that the labors and disclosures of Comparative Philology cease; leaving the problem of the Origin of Language involved in the same state of unintelligibility with which it has always been surrounded. It is just at this point, however, that the Scientific Universal Language previously noticed begins its developments. By means of its assistance we may hope, therefore, to arrive at a satisfactory solution of the problem in question, and, through this solution, at a clear understanding of the more specific objects of our present inquiry. Before approaching this main object—the exposition of the general character of the New Scientific Universal Language and its relations to existing Tongues—and still in aid of that purpose, I must offer some further comments upon the excerpts already made from 'The Science of Language;' and upon a few other points which remain to be extracted from that work.
Of the four or five hundred roots which remain, the insoluble residuum (so thought by Professor Müller) of Language, after eliminating the immense mass of variable and soluble material, he says: 1. That 'they are phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature;' 2. 'Man, in his primitive and perfect state, was not only endowed like the brute with the power of expressing his sensations by interjections, and his perceptions by onomatopoieia [mere imitation of sound]. He possessed likewise the power of giving more articulate expression to the rational conceptions of his mind.' The italics here are, again, my own, introduced for more emphasis and more ready reference to the central thought of the writer. 3. 'That faculty was not of his own making. It was an instinct, an instinct of the mind, as irresistible as any other instinct. So far as language is the production of that instinct, it belongs to the realm of nature. Man loses his instincts as he ceases to want them. His senses become fainter when, as in the case of scent, they become useless. Thus the creative faculty which gave to each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain, a phonetic expression, became extinct when its object was fulfilled.' 4. 'The number of these phonetic types [root-syllables] must have been almost infinite in the beginning, and it was only through the same process of natural elimination which we observed in the early history of words, that clusters of roots more or less synonymous, were gradually reduced to one definite type.'
Professor Müller, in stopping with root-syllables (to the number of four or five hundred), as the least or ultimate elements to which Language can be reduced, has, naturally enough, and along with all Comparative Philologists hitherto, committed the error of insufficient analysis; an error of precisely the same kind which the founders of Syllabic Alphabets have committed, as compared with the work of Cadmus, or any founder of a veritable alphabet. The true and radical analysis carries us back in both cases to the Primitive Individual Sounds, the Vowels and Consonants of which Language is composed.
It is clear enough that the analysis must be carried to the very ultimate in order to reach the true foundation for an effective and sufficient alphabetic Representation of Language. Precisely the same necessity is upon us in order that we may lay a secure and adequate foundation for a True Science of Language. This will explain more fully what was meant in a preceding paragraph, when it was stated that the labors of Mr. Andrews begin, in this department of Language, just where the labors of the whole school of Comparative Philologists have ended. He first completes the analysis of Language, by going down and back to the Phonetic Elements, the ulterior roots, the Vowels and Consonants of Language. Then by putting Nature to the crucial test, so to speak, to compel her to disclose the hidden meaning with which each of these absolute (ultimate) Elements of Speech is inherently laden, he discovers—what might readily be an à priori conception—that these Elements, and not any compound root-syllables whatsoever, are the true 'Phonetic Types,' representative in Nature of 'the Rational Conceptions of the human mind.'
The ultimate Rational Conceptions of the Human Mind are confessedly, among all Philosophers of the Mind, not four or five hundred, but like the Alphabetic Sounds of Language, a mere handful in number. Precisely how many they are and how they are best distributed has not been agreed upon. Aristotle classed them as Ten. Kant tells us there are Twelve only of the Categories of the Understanding. Spencer, while finding the Ultimate of Ultimates in the idea of Force alone, admits its immediate expansion into this handful of Primitive Conceptions, but without attempting their inventory or classification. The discoverer of Universology, first settling and establishing the fact that the Elements of Sound in Speech are the natural Phonetic Types, equal in number to the inventory of the Primitive Rational Conceptions of the Human Mind, is then enabled to work the new discovery backward, and, by the aid of the classifications which Nature herself has clearly introduced among these Sounds (into Vowels, Consonants, Liquids, etc.), to arrive at a classification of all the Primitive Rational Conceptions, which cannot fail to be completely satisfactory and final. The same discovery leads, therefore, to the reconstruction of the Science of Language, on the one hand, and of Ontology, the Science of the highest Metaphysical domain, on the other.
But, again, it is one of the demonstrations of Universology that all careers, that of the development of the Human Mind among others, pass through three Successive Stages correspondential with each other in the different domains of Being. As respects the Mind, these are: 1. Intuitional (or Instinctive); 2. Intellectual (or Reflective); and 3. Composite (or Integral). It is another of these demonstrations that the Intuitional (Unismal) development of Mind, and the Intellectual (Duismal), proceed in opposite courses or directions; so that the highest Intellectual development reaches and investigates in its own way just those questions with which the Intuitional development ('Instinct,' as Professor Müller denominates it) began; and which, in the very earliest times, it disposed of in its appropriate way as if finally.
By this means, the road having been passed over completely in both directions, the way is prepared for the inauguration of the third or Integral Stage, which consists in putting the road intelligently to all its possible uses.
To apply these statements to the instance before us, for the elucidation both of the statements themselves and of the matter to be expounded; it is the test labor of the highest Intellectual development to come back upon precisely those recondite points of knowledge which the nascent Intuition of the race felt or 'smelt' out blindly; and, by the sight of the Mind's eye, to arrive more lucidly at the understanding of the same subject. Not that the nature of the Understanding by any two senses or faculties is ever the same; but that each has its own method of cognizing the same general field of investigation. It is the re-investigation, intellectually, of the Relationship of the (true, not the pseudo) Phonetic Types with the Fundamental Rational Conceptions of the Human Mind, which is the first step taken by Mr. Andrews, in laying the basis for the new and coming stage of the development of the Science of Language.
It is the completion of this Intellectually Analytical process which offers the point of incipency for the new and immense Lingual Structure of the future, and the ultimate virtual unification of Human Speech. It may be quite true, as Professor Müller affirms, that the Instinctual Development of Language—by which we mean the whole Lingual History of the Past, with the exception of our present very imperfect Scientific nomenclatures—has never proved adequate to the introduction of a single new root, since the 'Instinct' exhausted itself, as he says, in the nascent effort. But it is a pure assumption, when he supposes, for that reason, that the informed Human Intellect of the Future will not be competent to constitute thousands of them. It is just as legitimate as would have been the assumption in the infancy of Chemistry, that because Nature never synthetized in her laboratory more than a few simple salts, the modern chemist would never be able to produce any one of the two thousand salts now known to him. This kind of assumption is the common error of the expounders of existing science, as contrasted with the bolder originality of discoverers.
But, again, though it is true that the Intuitional (or Instinctual) faculty of man has, in a manner, declined, as in the case of the sense of Smell, while the Intellect (the Analogue of the Eye) has been developed, still it is assuming too much to say that it utterly fails us even yet. It remains, like the sense of Smell, an important helper even in our present investigations. Professor Müller should not, because he may happen to have a cold, affirm that nobody smells anything any more. To explain what I mean in this respect, the following extract may serve as a text:
'It is curious to observe how apt we are to deceive ourselves when we once adopt this system of Onomatopoieia. Who does not imagine that he hears in the word 'thunder' an imitation of the rolling and rumbling noise which the old Germans ascribed to their god Thor playing at nine-pins? Yet thunder is clearly the same word as the Latin tonitru. The root is tan, to stretch. From this root tan we have in Greek tonos, our tone, tone being produced by the stretching and vibrating of cords. In Sanskrit the sound thunder is expressed by the same root tan; but in the derivatives tanyu, tanyatu, and tanayitnu, thundering, we perceive no trace of the rumbling noise which we imagined we perceived in the Latin tonitru and the English thunder. The very same root tan, to stretch, yields some derivatives which are anything but rough and noisy. The English tender, the French tendre, the Latin tener are derived from it. Like tenuis, the Sanskrit tanu, the English thin, tener meant originally what was extended over a larger surface, then thin, then delicate. The relationship betwixt tender, thin, and thunder would be hard to establish if the original conception of thunder had really been its rumbling noise.
'Who does not imagine that he hears something sweet in the French sucre, sucré? Yet sugar came from India, and it is there called 'sarkhara, which is anything but sweet sounding. This 'sarkhara is the same word as sugar; it was called in Latin saccharum, and we still speak of saccharine juice, which is sugar juice.'
It may appear, on a closer inspection at this point, that it is Professor Müller who is deceived, and not the common verdict, both in respect to the question whether such words as thunder, sucré, etc., really do or do not have some inherent and organic relation in the Human Mind to the ideas of rumbling noise and sweetness respectively; and in respect to the value and significance of the fact. He has, it would seem, confounded two separate and distinct questions. 1st. Is there such a relation between the sound and the sense? and 2d. Were these words introduced into speech because of that resemblance?
In respect to the latter of these questions, Professor Müller's answer, so far as the word thunder is concerned, is rather in favor of an affirmative answer than against it. So far from its being 'hard to establish the relationship betwixt tender, thin, and thunder,' on the hypothesis that 'the original conception of thunder had really been its rumbling noise; 'it is just as easy to establish this relationship as it is to show the connection between the root tan, to stretch, and its derivatives tonos, tone, tendre, tener, thin, and delicate;—an undertaking which Professor Müller finds no difficulty whatever in accomplishing.
The idea of stretching signified by the original root tan has no direct or immediate connection with any of the conceptions expressed by the derivative words. But by stretching an object it is diminished in breadth and depth, while it increases in length; hence it becomes thinner; so that the Mind readily makes the transition from the primitive conception of stretch to that of thinness, indicated by the English word, and by the Sanskrit tanu, and the Latin tener, tenuis. Thinness, again, is allied to slimness, slenderness, fineness, etc.; ideas which are involved in the conception of delicate, and furnish an easy transition to it.
But it is also from the notion of stretching, though in a still less direct manner, that we gain an idea of sound as conveyed by musical tones; 'tone,' as Professor Müller remarks, 'being produced by the stretching and vibrating of cords.' Still further: if we cause a heavy piece of cord to vibrate, or, what is better, the bass string of a violin or guitar, or strike a very low key on the piano, and pronounce the word tone in a full voice at the same time, the remarkable similarity of the two sounds thus produced will be clearly apparent. Thus the root tan, to stretch, becomes also expressive of the idea of sound as seen in the words tonos, tone, tonitru, thunder, etc. But what is especially to be noticed is this: that in those derivatives of tan, to stretch, which are not indicative of ideas of sound (as tenuis, thin, etc.), the sounds of the words do not cause us to imagine that we hear the imitation of noise; while in those derivatives which are expressive of it, we not only imagine that we do hear it, but, in the case of tonos and tone at least, have an instance in which we know that the word employed to convey the idea is a proximately perfect representation of the sound out of which the idea arose. Even in tanyu, tanyatu, tanayitnu, thundering, in which Professor Müller affirms that 'we perceive no trace of the rumbling noise which we imagined we perceived in the Latin tonitru and the English thunder'—although he seems to admit that it is perceptible in the Sanskrit word for thunder expressed by the same root tan—the reason why we cannot trace it may be because of the terminations, which, as it were, absorb the sound that is there, although less obviously, in the tan, or shade it off so that it becomes diluted and hardly traceable.
Vowel Sounds are so fluctuating and evanescent that they go for comparatively little in questions of Etymology. Tan is equivalent to T—n; the place of the dash being filled by any vowel. T is readily replaced by th or d, and n by ng; as is known to every Philological student. The object, which in English we call tin, and its name, are peculiar and important in this connection, as combining the two ideas in question: 1st, that of outstretched surface or thinness; and, 2d, that of a persistent tendency to give forth just that species of sound which we call, by a slight shade of difference in the form of the word, a din. The Latin tintinnabulum, a little bell, and the English tinkle, the sound made by a little bell, are among the words which are readily recognized as having a natural relation to a certain trivial variety of sound. The English ding-dong and ding-dong-bell are well-known imitations of sound; and are, at the same time, etymologically, mere modifications of the root under consideration. As tone and strain or stretch are related in idea, as seen in the case of musical notes or tones, is it not as probable that the original root-word of which tan, ton, thun, tin, din, ding, dong, etc., are mere variations, took its rise from the imitation of sound, as it is that the fact of strain or stretch was the first to be observed and to obtain the name from which, afterward and accidentally, so to speak, were derived words which confessedly have a relation in their own sound to other and external sounds, as in the case of thunder, musical tone, the sheet of tin, and the bell? Is it not, in fact, more probable?
In respect to the question whether sucre and sucré were introduced into Language because of their resemblance to the idea of sweetness, Professor Müller gives a valid negative answer. He shows that the word is derived from the Sanskrit 'sarkhara, 'which,' as he says, 'is anything but sweet sounding.'
The question whether the words under consideration (sucre, sucré) are really sweet-sounding words, Professor Müller decides by implication in the affirmative, and, perhaps, quite unconsciously, by the very act of contrasting them with another word which, as he affirms, is not at all sweet sounding.
But this is by far the more important point than that of the mere historical genesis of the word; and a point which really touches vitally the whole question of the nature and Origin of Language.
How should any word be either sweet-sounding or not sweet-sounding? Sound is a something which has no taste, and sweetness is a something which makes no noise. Now the very gist and crux of this whole question of Language consists in confounding or not confounding a case like this with mere Onomatopoieia, or the direct and simple imitation of one sound by another. All that Professor Müller says against the Origin of Language in this 'bow-wow' way is exceedingly well said; and it is important that it should be said. But unconsciously he is now confounding with the Bow-wow, something else and totally different; and something which is just as vital and profound in regard to the whole question of the origin and true basis of the reconstruction of Language, as the thing with which he confounds it is trivial and superficial.
The point is so important that I beg the reader's best attention to it, in order that he may become fully seized of the idea.
I can imitate very closely the buzz of a bee, by forcing the breath through my nearly-touching teeth. A mimic can imitate the natural sounds of many animals, and other sounds heard in Nature. This mere imitation is what Lingual Scholars have dignified by the high-sounding and rather repulsive technicality, Onomatopoieia. In the early and simple period of Lingual Science much has been made, in striving to account for the Origin of Language, of this faculty of imitation, and of the fact that there are undoubtedly certain words in every language consisting of such imitations. It is against this simple and superficial theory that Professor Müller has argued so well. But in these words sucre, sucré, incautiously included by him as instances of the same thing, we are in the presence of a very different problem. To imitate one sound by another sound is a mere simple, external, and trivial imitation; onomatopoieia, and nothing more than that. But to imitate a sound, by a taste, or to recognize that such an imitation has occurred, is a testimony to the existence of that recondite and all-important echo of likeness through domains of Being themselves the most unlike, which we call Analogy.
That we do recognize such analogy or correspondence of meaning, that Professor Müller himself does so, is admitted when he tells us that another form of the words in question is 'not at all sweet-sounding.' It is not in this perception, therefore, that we deceive ourselves, but only in supposing that these particular words came to mean sugar, because they were sweet-sounding. That there is this perception of the analogy in question is again confessed by the fact that we have the same feeling in respect to the German süsse, sweet; while the English words sugar and sweet, notwithstanding any greater familiarity of association, do not convey the same ideas in the same marked degree. The words mellifluous (honey-flowing) and melody (honey-sound) are themselves standing witnesses in behalf of the existence of the same perception. The fact that we instinctually speak of a sweet voice, is another witness.
If, then, there is an echo of likeness (real analogy) between these two unlike spheres of Thought and Being, Sound and Taste, may there not be precisely a similar echo through other and all spheres; so that there shall be a Something in Number, in Form, in Chemical Constitution, in the Properties of Mind, in Ultimate Rational Conceptions, in fine, that echoes to this idea, which, by a stretch of the powers of Language, we call sweet, both in respect to Sound and Taste? May it not have been precisely this Something and the other handful of primitive Somethings, each with its multitudinous echoes, that the Nascent Intuition of the race laid hold of and availed itself of irreflectively for laying the foundations of Speech? Again, may it not happen that the Reflective Intellect should in turn discover intelligently (or reflectively) just that underlying system of Analogy which the primitive Instinct was competent to appreciate unintelligently; and, by the greater clearness of this intelligent perception, be able to elevate the Science of Language, and found it upon a new and constructive, instead of upon this merely instinctual plane? To all these questions the Universologists return an affirmative answer. They go farther, and aver that this great intellectual undertaking is now fully achieved, and is only awaiting the opportunity for elaborate demonstration and promulgation.
A word further on this subject. To pronounce the words sucre, sucré, süsse, the lips are necessarily pinched or perked up, in a certain exquisite way, as if we were sucking something very gratifying to the taste. This consideration carries us over to the further analogy with shapes or forms, and, hence, with the Organic or Mechanical production of sounds; another grand element, the main one, in fact, of the whole investigation.
Among the infinite contingencies of the origin and successive modifications of words, it is very possible that the word 'sarkhara, although meaning sugar in a particular tongue, may not have primarily related to its property of sweetness; and that, therefore, its phonetic form should not be accordant with that property. It may have meant the cane-plant, for instance, before its sweetness was known. Then it is possible that a derivative and modified form of the same word should happen to drift into that precise phonetic; form which is accordant with that property. But the marvel, and the point of importance is, that so soon as this happens, the 'instinct' of the race, even that of Professor Müller himself, remains good enough to recognize the fact. 'Who does not imagine,' he says, 'that he hears something sweet in the French sucre, sucré?' But why do we all imagine that we hear what does not exist? The uniformity of the imagination proves it to be a real perception. If the universal consciousness of mankind be not valid evidence, where shall we hope to find it?
The consideration of Analogy as existing between the Ultimate Elements of Sound and Ultimate Rational Conceptions will be the subject of the next paper.
FLOWER ODORS.
There is a sheltered nook in a certain garden, where, on a sunny spring morning, the passer-by inhales with startled pleasure the very soul of the 'sweet south,' and, stooping down, far in among brown and crackling leaves, lo the blue hoods of English violets! The fragrance of the violet! What flower scent is like it? Does not the subtle sweetness—half caught, half lost upon the wind—at times sweep over one a vague and thrilling tenderness, an exquisite emotion, partly grief and partly mild delight?
The violet is the poet's darling, perhaps because its frail breath seems to waft from out the delicate blue petals the rare imaginings native to a poet's soul.
May it not be that thus, in the eloquence of perfume, it is but rendering to him who can best respond thereto, a revelation of its inner essences?—showing, to him who can comprehend the sign, a reason why it grows.
Is this too fanciful? Certainly the violet was not made in vain—and in the Eternal Correspondence known to higher intelligences than our own, there surely must exist a grand and beautiful Flower lore, wherein each blossom has an individual word to speak, a lesson to unfold, by form and coloring, and, more than all, by exhaled fragrance.
Doubtless there is a mystery here too deep for us in this gross world to wholly understand; but can we not search after knowledge? Would we not like to grasp an enjoyment less merely of the senses from the geranium's balm and the mayflower's spice?
And notice here how strongly association binds us by the sense of smell—the sense so closely connected with the brain that, through its instrumentality, the mind, it is said, is quickest reached, is soonest moved. So that when perfumes quiver through us, are we oftenest constrained to blush and smile, or shrink and shiver. Perhaps through perfumes also memory knocks the loudest on our heart-doors; until it has come to pass that unto scented handkerchief or withering leaf has been given full power to fire the eye or blanch the cheek; while from secret drawers one starts appalled at flower breaths, stifling, shut up long ago. The sprays themselves might drop unheeded down—dead with the young hopes that laid them there—but the old-time emotion wraps one yet in that undying—ah, how sickening! fragrance.
So in the very nature of the task proposed is couched assistance, since thus to the breath of the flowers does association lend its own interpretation, driving deep the sharpest stings or dropping down the richest consolation through the most humble plants. But is this the end of the matter? Is there not, apart from all that our personal interest may discover, in each flower an unchanging address all its own—an unvaried salutation proffered ever to the world at large? Why is a passion wafted through a nosegay? What purifies the air around a lily? And why are bridal robes rich with orange blooms?
Surely poetry and tradition have but here divined certain truths, omnipotent behind a veil, and recognized their symbols in these chosen blossoms?
But if the flowers are truly types, how should they be interpreted?
There are hints laid in their very structure and outer semblance, hints afforded also by art and romance from time immemorial; and all these, suggestions of the hidden wisdom, must be gathered patiently and wrought out to a fuller clearness, through careful attention to the intuitions of one's own awakened imagination.
But what expression can be found for the soul of a flower—for the evanescent odor that floats upon us only with the dimmest mists of meaning?
In a novel of a few years since, a people dwelling in Mid Africa are described as skilled in the acts of a singular civilization, and especial mention is made of an instrument analogous to an organ, but which evoked perfumes instead of musical sounds. A curious idea, but possibly giving the nearest representation to be made of the effect of odor: by its help, then, by regarding flowers as instruments whose fragrant utterances might be as well conveyed in music, we may be able to translate aright the effluence that stirs beyond the reach of speech.
Let us now try to distinguish, if only for a pleasant pastime, some few favorite strains in those wonderful, unheard melodies with which our gardens ring.
Hear first the roses. The beautiful blush rose, opening fresh and rosy on a dewy June morning, echoes gleefully the birds' 'secret jargoning.'
The saffron tea-rose is an exotic of exotics, and the daintiest of fine ladies bears it in her jewelled fingers to the opera, and there imbues it with the languid ecstasy of an Italian melody. The aroma, floating round those creamy buds, vibrates to the impassioned agony of artistic luxury—to the pleasurable pain that dies away in rippling undulations of the tones.
But the red rose is dyed deep with simpler passion. War notes are hers, but not trumpet tongued, as they pour from out the fiery cactus. No; it is as if a woman's heart thrilled through the red rose to sadden the reveille for country and for God!—an irrepressible undertone of mourning surging over the anguish that must surely come.
Love songs belong, too, to the damask rose, but love still set to martial chords, wrung, as it were, from heroes' wives, in a rapture of patriotic sacrifice.
The white roses are St. Cecilia's, and swell to organ strains; all but that whitest rose, so wan and fragile, which haunts old shady gardens, and never seems to have been there when all things were in their prime, but to have blossomed out of the surrounding decay and fading loveliness. From its bowed head falls drearily upon the ear a low lament over the departed life it would commemorate.
With roses comes the honeysuckle—the real New England one—brimful of nutmeg; and the sweetbriar, piquant with a L'Allegro strain left by Milton. Then the laburnum, which, dripping gold, drips honey likewise, and the locust clusters, and the wistaria, dropping lusciousness.
These are all joy-bells evidently, outbursts of the bliss of nature, but the garb of the wistaria is more sober than her brilliant sisters, whose attire is bright and shining.
There are flowers that seem set to sacred music. Lilies, white and sweet, which, from the Lily of the Annunciation to the lily of the valley, are hallowed by every reverent fancy; for
'In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the sea.'
And the little white verbena, which recalls, in some mystic way, the old Puritan tune, 'Naomi,' whose words of calm submission are so closely interwoven with one's earliest religious faith.
But in contrast to this meek northern saint of a flower, there is a southern flush of oleander bloom, that pours out hymns of mystical devotion, overflowing with the exuberant vitality, glowing with the intense fervor, of the Tropics.
There are flowers, also, the burden of whose odorous airs is sensibly of this world only, earthy, sensuous. Such are the cape jessamine and the narcissus, alike glistening in satin raiment, and alike distilling aromatic essence. Something akin to the waltzes of Strauss, one might fancy, is the music suited to their mood.
And the night-blooming cercus—that uncanny white witch of a creature, with its petals moulded in wax or ivory, its golden-brown leaf-sheathings, and its unequalled emerald (is it a tint, or is it but a shadow?) far down within the lovely cup, with that overpowering voluptuous odor, burdening the atmosphere, permeating the innermost fibres of sensation, steeping the soul in lethargy! What more fit exponent can there be for this weird plant's expression than the song of the serpent-charmer, the singing which can root the feet unto the ground and stay the flowing of the impetuous blood?
But carnations have a wide-awake aspect, which brings one back to every-day life again. Their pleasant pungency is like a bugle note. They seem glad to start the nerves of human beings.
The tulips have taken the sun home to them. Deep down in their hearts you smell it, while you listen to a cheery carol welling up from the comfort warm within.
The pond lilies likewise breathe forth the inspiration of the sun. And they chant in their pure home thanksgivings therefore, happy songs of chaste praise.
These are flowers which look their fragrance; but there are those that startle by the contrast between their outer being and their inner spirit.
What an intoxicating draught the obscure heliotrope offers! One thinks of Heloise in the garments of a nun. The arbutus, also, and the dear daphne-cups, plain, unnoticeable little things, remind one of the nightingales, so insignificant in their appearance, so peerless in their gushes of delicious breath.
The demure Quaker is like the peculiar fragrance of the mignonette. It is hard to believe so many people really like mignonette as profess to do so, it has such a caviare-to-the-general odor. The popular taste here would seem really guided by a fashion of fastidiousness. But the lemon verbena—which, if not a flower, is so high-bred an herb that it deserves to be considered one—one can easily see why that is valued. What a refined, spirituelle smell it has? Hypatia might have worn it, or Lady Jane Grey—or better still, Mrs. Browning's Lady Geraldine might have plucked it in the pauses of the 'woodland singing' the poet tells of.
Nature is very liberal in all things; and we have coarse and disagreeable flower odors, supplied by peonies, marigolds, the gay bouvardia, and a still more odious greenhouse flower—a yellowish, toadlike thing, which those who have once known will never forget, and for which perhaps they can supply a name. If odor be the flower's expression of its soul, what rude and evil tenants must dwell within those luckless mansions!
But if a flower's soul speaks through odor, what of scentless blossoms? Are they dumb or dead? Some may be too young to speak—as the infantile anemones, daisies, and innocents.
Perhaps some are thus most meet for symbols of the dead; the stately, frozen calla, which seems a fit trophy, bound with laurel leaves, to lay upon a soldier's bier; and the snow-cold camelia, whose stony sculpturing is the very emblem for those white features whence God has drained away the life.
But, camelias warmed with color, fuchsias, abutilons, the cultivated azalia (the wild one has a scent), asters, and a host of other loved and lovely flowers—why are they deprived of language?
Perhaps they have a fragrance, felt by subtler senses than we mortals own. But, at least, if they must now appear as mute, we may yet hope that in a more spiritual existence we shall behold their very doubles, gifted with a novel charm, a captivating perfume, we cannot conceive of here. For in the vast harmony of the universe one cannot believe there can be any floral instruments whose strings are never to be awakened.
It has been but the pastime of a half hour that we have given to the flower odors, when an ever-widening field for speculation lies before us. But imagination droops exhausted, baffled by the innumerable enchanting riddles still to solve. And this must now suffice.
If it serve to excite any dormant thought in the more ingenious mind of another—if it be able to call out the learned conceits of some scholar, or the delicate symbolisms of some dreamer, it has done its work.
The hand that has thus far guided the pen, to dally with a subject all the dearer because so generally disregarded, will now gladly yield it to the control of a fresher fancy, a truer observation.
LOCOMOTION.
The utilitarian spirit of the age is strikingly exhibited in the intense desire to diminish the quantity of time necessary to pass from one spot of the earth's surface to another, and to communicate almost instantaneously with a remote distance. The great triumphs of genius, within the last half century, have been accomplished within the domain of commerce. And in contemplating the progress which has ensued, it is a cause of humiliation that, as in the case of other great discoveries, so many centuries have elapsed, during which the powers of steam, an element almost constantly within the observation of man, were, although perceived, unemployed. But reflection upon the nature of man, and his slow advancement in the great path of fact and science, will at once hush the expression of our wondering regret over the past, while a nobler occupation for the mind offers itself in speculation upon the future. The plank road, the canal, the steamboat, and the railway, are all the productions of the last few years. At the close of the last century, with the exception of a few military roads inherited from the Romans, and the roads of the same description constructed by Napoleon, the means of communication between distant parts was almost entirely confined to inland seas and the larger rivers. It is for this reason that the maritime cities and provinces attained such disproportionate wealth.
The invention of chariots, and the manner of harnessing horses to draw them, is ascribed to Ericthonius of Athens, B.C. 1486. The chariots of the ancients were like our phaetons, and drawn by one horse. The invention of the chaise, or calash, is ascribed to Augustus Cæsar, about A.D. 7. Postchaises were introduced by Trajan about A.D. 100. Carriages were known in France in the reign of Henry II., A.D. 1547; there were but three in Paris in 1550; they were of rude construction. Henry IV. had one, but it was without straps or springs. A strong cob-horse (haquenée) was let for short journeys; latterly these were harnessed to a plain vehicle, called coche-a-haquenée: hence the name, hackney coach. They were first let for hire in Paris, in 1650, at the Hotel Fiacre. They were known in England in 1555, but not the art of making them. When first manufactured in England, during the reign of Elizabeth, they were called whirlicotes. The duke of Buckingham, in 1619, drove six horses, and the duke of Northumberland, in rivalry, drove eight. Cabs are also of Parisian origin, where the driver sat in the inside; but the aristocratic tastes of the English suggested the propriety of compelling the driver to be seated outside. Omnibuses also originated in Paris, and were introduced into London in 1827, by an enterprising coach proprietor named Shillaber. They were introduced into New York, in 1828, by Kipp & Brown. Horse railroads were introduced into New York, in 1851, upon the Sixth Avenue.
In 1660 there were but six stage coaches in England; two days were occupied in passing from London to Oxford, fifty-four miles. In 1669, it was announced that a vehicle, described as the flying coach, would perform the whole journey between sunrise and sunset. It excited as much interest as the opening of a new railway in our time. The Newcastle Courant, of October 11th, 1812, advertises 'that all that desire to pass from Edinborough to London, or from London to Edinborough, or any place on that road, let them repair to Mr. John Baillie's, at the Coach and Horses, at the head of Cannongate, Edinborough, every other Saturday; or to the Black Swan, in Holborn, every other Monday; at both of which places they may be received in a stage coach, which performs the whole journey in thirteen days, without any stoppage (if God permit), having eighty able horses to perform the whole stage—each passenger paying £4 10s. for the whole journey. The coach sets out at six in the morning.' And it was not until 1825 that a daily line of stage coaches was established between the two cities, accomplishing the distance in forty-six hours. And even so late as 1835 there were only seven coaches which ran daily.
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin, postmaster of Philadelphia, in an advertisement, dated April 14th, announces 'that the northern post will set out for New York on Thursdays, at three o'clock in the afternoon, till Christmas. The southern post sets out next Monday for Annapolis, and continues going every fortnight during the summer season.' In 1773, Josiah Quincy, father and grandfather of the mayors of that name, of Boston, spent thirty-three days upon a journey from Georgetown, South Carolina, to Philadelphia. In 1775, General Washington was eleven days going from Philadelphia to Boston; upon his arrival at Watertown the citizens turned out and congratulated him upon the speed of his journey! Fifty years ago the regular mail time, between New York and Albany, was eight days. Even as late as 1824, the United States mail was thirty-two days in passing from Portland to New Orleans. The news of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, at St. Helena, May 5th, 1821, reached New York on the fifteenth day of August.
Canals were known to the ancients, and have been used, in a small way, by all nations, particularly the Dutch. But the world did not awake to their importance until 1817, when the State of New York entered upon the Erie Canal project, which was completed in 1825. The introduction of steamboats for river navigation, and of locomotives upon railways, have superseded canals, and invested them with an air of antiquity. It was not until 1807 that Robert Fulton put his first vessel in operation on the Hudson River.
To the American steamship Savannah, built by Croker & Fickett, at Corlear's Hook, New York, is universally conceded the honor of being the first steam-propelled vessel that ever crossed the Atlantic ocean. She was three hundred and eighty tons burden, ship-rigged, and was equipped with a horizontal engine, placed between decks, with boilers in the hold. She was built through the agency of Captain Moses Rogers, by a company of gentlemen, with a view of selling her to the emperor of Russia. She sailed from New York in 1819, and went first to Savannah; thence she proceeded direct to Liverpool, where she arrived after a passage of eighteen days, during seven of which she was under steam. As it was nearly or quite impossible to carry sufficient fuel for the voyage, during pleasant weather the wheels were removed, and canvas substituted. At Liverpool she was visited by many persons of distinction, and afterward departed for Elsinore, on her way to St. Petersburg. She was not, however, sold as expected, and next touched at Copenhagen, where Captain Rogers was offered one hundred thousand dollars for her by the king of Sweden; but the offer was declined. She then sailed for home, putting into Elsington, on the coast of Norway. From the latter place she was twenty-two days in reaching Savannah. On account of the high price of fuel, she carried no steam on the return passage, and the wheels were taken off. Upon the completion of the voyage, she was purchased by Captain Nathaniel Holdredge, divested of her steam apparatus, and run as a packet between Savannah and New York. She subsequently went ashore on Long Island, and broke up. Sixty thousand dollars were sunk in the transaction. Captain Rogers died a few years ago on the Pee Dee river, North Carolina. He is believed to be the first man that ran a steamboat to Philadelphia or Baltimore. The mate was named Stephen Rogers, and was living a few years ago at New London, Connecticut.
The first railway in England was between Stockton and Darlington; and the first locomotive built in the world was used upon that road, and is still in existence, being preserved at Darlington depot, upon a platform erected for the purpose; the date 1825 is engraved upon its plate. The first railway charter in the United States was granted March 4th, 1826, to Thomas H. Perkins and others, 'to convey granite from the ledges in Quincy to tidewater in that town.' The first railway in the United States upon which passengers were conveyed, was the Baltimore and Ohio, which was opened December 28, 1829, to Ellicott's Mills, thirteen miles from Baltimore. A single horse was attached to two of Winan's carriages, containing forty-one persons, which were drawn, with ease, eleven miles per hour. The South Carolina Railway, from Charleston to Hamburg, was the first constructed in the United States with a view to use steam instead of animal power. The first locomotive constructed in the United States was built for this road. It was named the Best Friend, and afterward changed to Phœnix. It was built at the West Point foundery by the Messrs. Kemble, under the direction of E.L. Miller, Esq. Its performance was tested on the 9th December, 1830, and exceeded expectations. To Mr. Miller, therefore, belongs the honor of planning and constructing the first locomotive operated in the United States. This road was the first to carry the United States mail, and, when completed, October 2d, 1833, one hundred and thirty-seven miles in length, was the longest railway in the world. The number of miles of railway in operation in the United States, at the present time, is thirty-two thousand; and the number of passengers conveyed upon them in 1863 was one hundred millions. Railways did not cross the Mississippi river until 1851. The number of miles of railway in the world is seventy-two thousand; and the amount of steamboat tonnage is five millions of tons.
Yet more astonishing than the railway is the magnetic telegraph, whose exploits are literally miraculous, annihilating space and time. The extremities of the globe are brought into immediate contact; the merchant, the friend, or the lover converses with whom he wishes, though thousands of miles apart, as if they occupied the same parlor; and the speech uttered in Washington to-day may be read in San Francisco three hours before it is delivered. Could the wires be extended around the globe, we should be able to hear the news one day before it occurred.
LITERARY NOTICES.
Naomi Torrente: The History of a Woman. By Gertrude F. de Vingut. 'Every dream of love argues a reality in the world of supreme beauty. Believe all that thy heart prompts, for everything that it seeks, exists.'—Plato. New York: John Bradburn (late M. Doolady), publisher, 49 Walker street.
Who could look on the fair high face, facing our title page, and have the heart to criticize the revelations of its soul? Naomi is a book of feeling, passion, and considerable, if not yet mature, power. It is dedicated to Sr. Dn. Juan Clemente Zenea, editor of La Charanga, Havana. Our authoress says in her dedication: 'It is to you, therefore; and those who like you have deeply felt, that the history of a woman's soul-life will prove more interesting than the mere narrative of the chances and occurrences that make up the every-day natural existence.' Naomi is a woman of artistic genius and passionate character, becalmed in the stagnation of conventional life, who, throwing off the fetters of an uncongenial and inconsiderate marriage, attempts to find happiness and independence in the cultivation of her own powers. She is eminently successful as prima donna, is brilliant and self-sustained—but fails to attain the imagined happiness, the Love-Eden so fervently sought.
Margaret and Her Bridesmaids. By the Author of 'The Queen of the Country,' 'The Challenge,' etc. 'Queen Rose of the Rosebud garden of girls.'—Tennyson. Loring, publisher, 314 Washington street, Boston. 1864.
A novel of domestic life, in which the plot, apparently simple, is yet artistic and skilfully managed. The thread of life of the bridesmaids is held with that of the bride, the development of character, distinctly marked in each, progresses through a series of natural events, until the young people reach the point of life when impulse settles into principle, amiability into virtue, generosity into self-abnegation, and we feel that each may now be safely left to life as it is, that circumstance can no longer mould character, and are willing to leave them, certain they will henceforth remain true to themselves, and to those whose happiness may depend upon them, whatever else may betide. The bride is a pure, sweet, generous woman, but the character of the book is decidedly Lotty. Childish, petite, and indulged, she is yet magnanimous, brave, and self-sacrificing; fiery, fearless, and frank, she is still patient, forbearing, and reticent; we love her as child, while we soon learn to venerate her as woman. She and her docile bloodhound, Bear, form pictures full of magic contrast, groups of which we never tire. The cordiality and heartiness of her admiring relatives, the Beauvilliers, are contagious; we live for the time in their life, and grow stronger as we read. The book is charming. Its moral is unexceptionable, its characters well drawn, its plot and incidents simple and natural, and its interest sustained from beginning to end.
Enoch Arden, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1864.
Tennyson has so many devoted admirers, that this volume cannot fail to receive due attention. The principal poem therein, Enoch Arden, is one of touching pathos and simplicity. Three children, Enoch Arden, Philip Ray, and Annie Lee, grew up together on the British coast a hundred years ago. Both youths loved Annie: she loved and married Enoch. They live happily together until three children are born to the house: then poverty threatens, and Arden leaves home to provide for the loved ones. He is cast away on an island, is not heard, from for ten years, and Annie reluctantly consents to marry Philip, who has been a father to her children during their long orphanage. Arden returns at last to his native village, so old, gray, and broken, that no one recognizes him. He hears how true his wife had been to him until all hope had died away, and how Philip cared for her peace, and cherished his children. The wretched man resolves to bear his grief in silence, and never to bring agony and shame to a peaceful home by disclosing his return. He does this in a spirit of Christian self-abnegation, lives near the unconscious darlings of his heart, earns his frugal living, watching round, but never entering the lost Paradise of his youth. He dies, and only at the hour of death, reveals to Annie how he had lived and loved. The theme of this tale has often been taken before. It has been elaborated with passion and power in the 'Homeward Bound' of Adelaide Procter, a poetess too little known among us.
There is great purity of delineation and conception in Enoch Arden. The characters stand out real and palpable in their statuesque simplicity. There is agony enough, but neither impatience nor sin. The epithets are well chosen; but the usual wildering sensuousness of Tennyson's glowing imagery is subdued and tender throughout the progress of this melancholy tale.
'Aylmer's Field,' about the same length, is a poem of more stormy mould. It hurls fierce rebukes at family pride, and just censures at tyrannical parents.
The volume contains many shorter poems, some of which are already familiar to our readers.
Azarian: An Episode. By Harriet Elizabeth Prescott, Author of 'The Amber Gods,' etc. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
We like 'Azarian' better than any work we have yet seen from Miss Prescott. Ruth Yetton, the heroine, is so truly feminine, she might serve as a type of half our innocent maidens from sixteen to twenty. Azarian is real and drawn to the life, a hero who has his counterpart in every civilized city; a man of savoir-vivre, glittering and attractive, but selfish, inconsequent, frivolous, and deadly to the peace of those who love him. Miss Prescott's style is elaborate and florid, frequently of rare beauty, always giving evidence of culture and scholarship. Do we find fault with the hundred-leaved rose? Her fancy is luxuriant, of more power than her imagination. Her descriptions of flowers in the volume before us are accurate and tenderly beautiful. She knows them all, and evidently loves them well. Nor are the fragile blossoms of the trees less dear to her. She reads their secrets, and treasures them in her heart. She paints them with her glowing words, and placing our old darlings before us again, exultingly points out their hidden charms.
The Forest Arcadia of Northern New York: Embracing a View of its Mineral, Agricultural, and Timber Resources. Boston: Published by T.O.H.P. Burnham. New York: Oliver S. Felt. 1864.
The author of this pleasant, unpretending little book visited the 'great wilderness of Northern New York, which lies in St. Lawrence county, on the western slope of the Adirondack Mountains. It forms part of an extensive plateau, embracing an area of many thousand square miles, and is elevated from fifteen to eighteen hundred feet above the sea. The mineral resources of the plateau are of great value, immense ranges of magnetic iron traverse the country, and there are indications of more valuable minerals in a few localities. Of its agricultural importance too much cannot be said. The soil is rich and strong, peculiarly adapted to the grazing of cattle. The climate is that of the hill country of New England.'
The reader will see from this extract of what the book treats. The volume is pleasantly and simply written, imparts considerable information with respect to the region which it describes, is redolent of spicy forest breath, and brings before us Indian, deer, and beaver.
Rhode Island in the Rebellion. By Edwin W. Stone, of the First Regiment Rhode Island Light Artillery. Providence: George H. Whitney. 1864.
'These Letters were written amid camp scenes and on the march,' says our author, 'under circumstances unfavorable to literary composition, and were intended for private perusal alone. Portions of them appeared in the Providence Journal, and were received with a favor alike unexpected and gratifying. Numerous requests having been made that they should be gathered up as a Rhode Island contribution to the history of the War of the Rebellion, the author, with unaffected distrust of himself, has yielded to the judgment of others. While the aim has been to show the honorable position of the State in an unhappy war, it has also been the design to present a comprehensive view of the consecutive campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, with the fortunes of which several of the Rhode Island regiments and most of the batteries have, for longer or shorter periods, been identified.'
It is a noble record for Rhode Island, and a valuable contribution to the history of the war. It deals with facts, not polities or prejudices. We think every loyal State should prepare such a volume. A simple and reliable statement of what she has herself done, a sketch of her heroes of all ranks and parties, of her batteries, regiments, and companies, of her commandants and the battles in which her troops bore part, should be therein contained. This would lead to noble emulation among the States struggling for a common cause, and would be of great value both to State and general history. We look upon this book as a beginning in the right way. Such national records of nobly borne suffering and deeds of glory would be truly Books of Honor.
Robinson's Mathematical Series: Arithmetical Examples; or, Test Exercises for the Use of Advanced Classes. New York: Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman & Co., 48 & 50 Walker street. Chicago: S.C. Griggs & Co., 39 & 41 Lake street. 1864.
This book was issued to meet the demand in advanced schools for a larger number of carefully prepared and practical examples for review and drill exercises than are furnished from ordinary text books, and may be used in connection with any other books on this subject. 'The examples are designed to test the pupil's judgment; to bring into use his knowledge of the theory and applications of numbers; to cultivate habits of patient investigation and self-reliance; to test the truth and accuracy of his own processes by proof—the only test he will have to depend on in the real business transactions of afterlife; in a word, to make him independent of all text books, of written rules and analyses.'
A Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges. By Albert Harkness, Ph. D., Professor in Brown University, Author of 'A First Latin Book,' 'A Second Latin Book,' 'A First Greek Book,' etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 443 & 445 Broadway.
Prof. Harkness's Grammar will be welcomed both by teacher and student. Our author is a man of great experience in the subjects of which he treats, and we doubt not he has supplied a general want in the work before us, and furnished a true grammar of the Latin tongue, worthy of adoption in all our educational institutions.
Rita: An Autobiography. By Hamilton Aide, Author of 'Confidences,' 'Carr of Carrlyon,' 'Mr. and Mrs. Faulconbridge,' etc. Boston: Published by T.O.P. Burnham. New York: Oliver S. Felt.
This novel is the autobiography of a young English girl, thrown by her father, a man of high birth, but worthless character, into the vicious influences of corrupt English and French society. The story is one of a constant struggle between these base examples on the one hand, and a strong sense of right and justice on the other. The plot is original and quite elaborate, and the interest well sustained. The character of the unprincipled, heartless, gambling father is well drawn, as well as that of the weak but self-sacrificing mother. Some of the scenes evince considerable power.
EDITOR'S TABLE
Readers of The Continental, your servant and faithful caterer has been a sad idler and vagrant for the last month, thinking more of his own pleasures than of your needs and requirements. Forgive him, he is again a working bee and seeking honey for your hives. Have patience, irate correspondents; we have absconded with no manuscripts, and are again at our desk to give bland answers to curt missives.
We have been among the Adirondacks; congratulate us right heartily thereon! We have traversed pathless primeval forests of larches, balsams, white pines, and sugar maples; we have floated upon lakes lovely enough to have mirrored Paradise; we have clambered down waterfalls whose broken drops turned into diamonds as they fell; have scaled mountains and seen earth in its glory, and looked clear up into the infinite blue of the eye of God.
We have seen the gleaming trout, changeful as a prisoned rainbow, lured from his cool stream; and the poor deer chased from his forest home by savage dogs and cruel men, driven into crystal lakes, lassoed there with ropes, throats cut with dull knives, and backs broken with flying balls. Immortal Shakspeare! had thy lines no power to awaken pity for frightened fawn and flying doe? Did they not see
'The wretched animal heave forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting; while the big round tears
Coursed one another down his innocent nose
In Piteous chase?'
Alas, 'poor hairy fool!' why should they seek thee in thy mountain homes?
We have sat by the side of fair fragile country girls, and heard the experiences of the stout pioneers of civilization. We have tried to keep step with city maidens, shorn of ridiculous hoops and trailing trains. We nave known them trip up the great sides of Tahawus, press through the trunked and bouldered horrors of Indian Pass, float over Lake Placid, and scale the long steep slide up the crest of White Face. Lovely as dreams and light as clouds, no toil stayed them, no danger appalled; panther, wolf, and bear stories were told in vain by lazy brothers and reluctant lovers; on they went in their restless search for beauty, their Turkish dress and scarlet tunics gleaming through the trees, to the delight of the old mountain guides, who chuckled over their Camilla-like exploits, and laughed, as they plucked the fragrant boughs for their spicy couch, over the ignorance and awkwardness of their lazy city beaux. These fair Dians shoot no deer, nor lure the springing trout. We blessed them as they went their thymy way.
We have sat in the hut of the farmer, the skiff of the oarsman, the parlor of the host of the inn; tried wagons, stages, and buck-board conveyances; we have disputed no bill, been subjected to no extortion, and, save the death of the 'hairy fools,' known no sorrow. We have sat by the grave of old John Brown, seen the glorious view from his simple home, heard his strange generosity extolled by his political enemies, and think we understand better than of old the sublime madness of his fanaticism. We have returned to our labor with a new love of country, a deeper sense of responsibility, of the worth of our institutions, and of the glory yet to be in 'Our Great America.' What a land to live and die for! Every drop of martyr blood poured upon it but makes it dearer to the heart.