'The party were soon guided by Mrs Smyth to the hospitable abode of a good missionary, whom Christian charity has placed here as a shepherd to the outcast and wandering, who are constantly finding an asylum on this shore.
'Who can speak the blessedness of that first day of freedom? Is not the sense of liberty a higher and finer one than any of the five? To move, speak, and breathe, go out and come in unwatched and free from danger! Who can speak the blessings of that rest which comes down on the free man's pillow, under laws which insure to him the rights that God has given to man? How fair and precious to that mother was that sleeping child's face, endeared by the memory of a thousand dangers! How impossible was it to sleep in the exuberant possession of such blessedness! And yet these two had not one acre of ground, not a roof that they could call their own; they had spent their all, to the last dollar. They had nothing more than the birds of the air, or the flowers of the field; yet they could not sleep for joy. "O ye who take freedom from man, with what words shall ye answer it to God?"'
With this episode, we close for the present, and will go into the history of Uncle Tom in a subsequent paper.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] We understand that Mrs H. B. Stowe has received from her publishers the sum of ten thousand three hundred dollars, as her copyright premium on three months' sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin.-Boston newspaper.
FORTUNES OF A LITERARY GOLD-SEEKER.
The same passion for gold-seeking, which in our day has developed itself in a new form, raged in Europe from the depth of the middle ages till the eighteenth century was far advanced. By the arrival of the latter period, however, a good deal of discredit had been thrown upon the business; awkward revelations had been made; well-authenticated facts had been turned outside in; and, in fine, the world's dread laugh helped not a little to put down the conviction of ages. That conviction did not relate to the existence of natural hoards of the precious metal. Such idle dreams were left to the fanciful and superstitious, whose stores were usually situated in the bosom of mountains, and guarded by gnomes and demons. The others were more rational and practical: they sought to obtain their end by means of legitimate science, based upon virtue and religious faith. This basis is the only thing that since then has been unanimously abandoned; for philosophers are still by no means agreed as to the impossibility of making gold.
Only a few of the gold-seekers of the present day are literary men, for the pickaxe does not very naturally replace the pen; but at the time we speak of, almost the whole tribe were authors. Borel, in 1654, makes the list amount to 4000; but this is an exaggeration; many of his names being imaginary, and some cut into several pieces. We have before us, however, a catalogue by a less zealous compiler, brought between eighty and ninety years further down, containing about 2500 treatises by about 900 authors—a number which we consider not the least remarkable of the facts connected with the hermetic science. All these works, with the exception of a small number, are in Latin; and ten of them are the production of a certain Bernard Trevisanus, to give him his learned name, although he was born at Padua in 1406. We do not, however, particularise this author on account of the value of his books, for we are thankful to say we have never seen his Secret Work of Chemistry, or his Philosophers' Egg, or, in fact, a single line he has written;[3] but we look upon him in his personal character as the very ideal of a gold-seeker; and we are on that account anxious to rescue his name from the obscurity in which it rests.