I am afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not so common in those whose benevolence takes an active turn as in people of sentiment, who are always ready with their tears and abounding in passionate expressions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a practical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a talent, with a peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, a tact for selecting its agencies, an organizing and arranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a constitution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient of cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists are commonly grave, occasionally grim, and not very rarely morose. Their expansive social force is imprisoned as a working power, to show itself only through its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the boiler, the less it whistles and sings at its work.—Oliver Wendell Holmes.
SLAVONIC MYTHOLOGY.[B]
By ADLEY H. CUMMINGS.
The mythology of various tribes and races has of late attracted much attention, while that of our own ancestors of the North has been studied with the greatest care.
Little attention, however, has been devoted to the religious belief of the ancient Slavonic race, and yet it is replete with interest for all who yield to the fascination of ancient myth.
We unfortunately possess no Slavic Edda, or Veda, to throw illumination upon the ancient creed of the tribes, but a few scattered facts have come down to modern times—principally contained in popular songs—but sufficient to enable us to observe the similarity between Slavonic mythology and that of the other members of the Indo-European stock—all pointing to that immensely ancient time when the ancestors of the combined race could have been gathered within the circuit of the same camp; when they passed the same lives and worshiped the same divinities; wept when the “serpents of the night” strangled the god appointed to preside over the day, and rejoiced together with an exceeding great joy when the day-god, victorious over his foes, gilded the hills again.