[31] When the insurgents evacuated a fort near Port-au-Prince, upon the advance of the English, a negro was left in the powder-magazine with a lighted match, to wait till the place was occupied. Here he remained all night; but when the English came later than was expected, his match had burned out. Was that insensibility to all ideas, or devotion to one?
[32] Praloto was a distinguished Italian in the French artillery service. His battery of twenty field-pieces at Port-au-Prince held the whole neighborhood in check, till at length a young negro named Hyacinthe roused the slaves to attack it. In the next fight, they rushed upon this battery, insensible to its fire, embraced the guns and were bayoneted, still returned to them, stuffed the arms of their dead comrades into the muzzles, swarmed over them, and extinguished the fire. This was done against a supporting fire of French infantry. The blacks lost a thousand men, but captured the cannon, and drove the whole force into the city.
[33] Think twice before you try me: the name of a morne of extraordinary difficulty, which had to be surmounted by one of the French columns.
[34] Negro authorities say 750.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Sunshine in Thought. By Charles Godfrey Leland, Author of "Meister Karl's Sketch-Book," and Translator of "Heine's Pictures of Travel." New York: Charles T. Evans. 16mo.
We do not exactly know how to characterize this jubilant volume. The author, not content to denounce generally the poets of sentimentality and the prophets of despair, has evidently a science of Joy latent in his mind, of which his rich, discursive, and somewhat rollicking sentences give but an imperfect exposition. He is in search of an ideal law of Cheerfulness, which neither history nor literature fully illustrates, but which he still seeks with an undoubting faith. Every transient glimpse of his law he eagerly seizes, whether indicated in events or in persons. And it must be admitted that he is not ignorant either of the great annalists or the great writers of the world. He knows Herodotus as well as he knows Hume, Thucydides as intimately as Gibbon. Xenophon and Plutarch are as familiar to him as Michelet, Thiers, and Guizot. He has studied Aristænetus and Lucian as closely as Horace Walpole and Thackeray,—is as ready to quote from Plato as from Rabelais,—and throws the results of his wide study, with an occasional riotous disregard of prim literary proprieties, into a fierce defiance of everything which makes against his favorite theory, that there is nothing in pure theology, sound ethics, and healthy literature, nothing in the historic records of human life, which can justify the discontent of the sentimentalist or the scorn of the misanthrope.
Engaged thus in an almost Quixotic assault on the palpable miseries of human existence,—miseries which are as much acknowledged by Homer as by Euripides, by Ariosto as by Dante, by Shakspeare as by Milton, by Goethe as by Lamartine,—he has a difficult work to perform. Still he does not bate a jot of heart and hope. He discriminates, with the art of a true critic, between objective representations of human life and subjective protests against human limitations, errors, miseries, and sins. As far as either representation embodies the human principle of Joy,—whether Greek or Roman, ancient or modern, Christian or Pagan,—he is content with the evidence. The moment a writer of either school insinuates a principle or sentiment of Despair, whether he be a dramatist or a sentimentalist, the author enters his earnest protest. Classical and Romantic poets, romancers and historians, when they slip into misery-mongers, are equally the objects of his denunciations. Keats and Tennyson fare nearly as ill as Byron and Heine. Mr. Leland feels assured that the human race is entitled to joy, and there is something almost comical in his passionate assault on the morbid genius of the world. He seems to say, "Why do you not accept the conditions of happiness? The conditions are simple, and nothing but your pestilent wilfulness prevents your compliance with them."