LUCIFER MATUTINUS.
From a heart of infinite longing the youth
Looks out on the world;
"Where, spirit of candor—where, spirit of truth,
Are thy banners unfurled?
"O chivalrous chastity! lovely as morn.
The dew on thy helmet, I hail thee afar;
Like Lucifer, beautiful angel of dawn,
I wear thy deep azure, I follow thy star.
"Not mammon, not lucre; though white as sea-gulls
The broad sails I watch studding ocean's blue deep,
To droop their gay pennons where dreamily lulls
The tropical breeze, and the lotus-flower sleeps.
"But glory! but honor! the joy of a name
Not written on sand; which for ages will stir
All hearts that are noble, or kindle the flame
Of devotion consuming the rapt worshipper."
Thus from heart of infinite longing the youth.
Looking out on the world,
Cries ever, "Woo wisdom, woo beauty, woo truth:"—
The sordid world, jaded with care, answers: "Ruth
Waits on thy wild dreamings, O turbulent youth!"
And with laughter uncouth
Mocks life's fairest banners in brightness unfurled.
O heart of the ostrich! above its own graves
Of innocent hopes the world every day raves,
And moans, with a pitiful droon of despair,
O'er candor and honor, once blooming so fair;
Yet treads, with a wanton, unpitying scorn.
To earth every sweet aspiration of morn,
True mark of a soul to infinity born;
Or leaves, to the chance of the desert, the good
Which God, at creating, charged angels to brood,
And martyrs have guarded with rivers of blood.
Original
TRAVELLERS' TALES.
The world has been so thoroughly explored now, at feast in all but its most savage and inhospitable recesses, that it seems not unnatural to suppose that travelers abroad find it hard to get listeners to their tails of sight-seeing and adventure; and that wanderers into foreign lands should no longer deem it a part of their duty, as soon as their peregrinations are over, to come home and write a book about them. We can't expect any more Marco Polo or Mendez Pintos, unless some adventurous spirits have a mind to travel beyond the regions of the Albert and Victoria Nyanzas, and risk their lives among the dirty tribes of Central Africa, whom even Mr. and Mrs. Baker were unable to reach; and with all its little differences of manners and customs, there is after all so much sameness in the untamed negro life that we doubt whether anybody will think such a journey worth his trouble. Now that the source of Nile has been found and the costly and useless problem of the north-west passage has been solved, there really seems to be nothing very new or startling which can be added to geographical science. But for all that there is, and undoubtedly their long will be, a certain fascination in every well-told narrative of life in a distant country, even though the main features of the story were familiar to us before. We know that a second Columbus can never come home to us from across the ocean sees, with news of unsuspected continents; that old ocean has loosed all the bonds which once shut us in, and disclosed long ago all the new worlds which he wants concealed; but we like to travel again and again over the lands we have already passed, to take a few repeated peeps at the inner life of distant peoples, even though their domestic interiors were long ago laid open to our inquisitive eyes. Now and then, moreover, it does happen that a traveller has something new to tell us, or at least something which has not been told often enough to be familiar to all the world. For example, in the spirited Sketches of Russian Life [Footnote 24] which we have lately received from an anonymous hand in England, there is, if nothing very new or surprising, at least a liveliness and an air of novelty which are almost as good. The writer is an Englishman who spent fifteen years in Russia, engaged in business pursuits of various kinds, which brought him into contact with persons of all ranks and conditions, and led him long journeys back and forth across the empire—now in the lumbering diligence, now in the luxurious railway train, and many a time and for long distances in rude sledges across trackless wastes and through fearful snows. In some parts of Russia there are seasons when the mere act of travelling is a perilous adventure. In March, 1860, our author, in company with a Russian gentleman, made a dangerous journey of two hundred miles in an open sledge, through a snow-storm of memorable severity. They had been struggling for some miles through drifts and hidden pits, when the driver alarmed them with the cry of "Volka! volka!"—"Wolves! wolves!" Six gaunt-looking animals [{112}] sat staring at them in the road, about one hundred yards in advance of them. The horses huddled themselves together, trembling in every limb, and refused to move. The Russian, who is known in the book only by the name of Fat-Sides, seized a handful of hay from the bottom of the vehicle, rolled it into a ball, and handed it to our author, saying "Match." The Englishman understood the direction, and as soon as the horses, by dint of awful lashing and shouting, were forced near the motionless wolves, he set fire to the ball and threw it among the pack. Instantly the animals separated and skulked away with their tails dragging, but only to meet again behind the sledge, and after a short pause to set out in full pursuit. The tired horses were whipped to their utmost speed, but in forcing their way through a drift they had to come to a walk, and the wolves were soon beside them. The first of the pack fell dead with a ball through his brain from the Englishman's revolver, and another shot broke the leg of a second. At that critical instant the pistol fell into the sledge as, with a sudden jolt the horses floundered up to their bellies in in deep drift: then they came to a dead stop, and there was a wolf at each side of the sledge, trying to get in. The Englishman fortunately had a heavy blackthorn bludgeon, and raising it high he brought it down with the desperate force of a man in mortal extremity, crash through the skull of the animal on his side of the vehicle; while Fat-Sides coolly stuffed the sleeve of his sheepskin coat down the mouth of the savage beast on the other, and with his disengaged hand cut its throat with a large bear knife. The pistol was now recovered just in time to kill a fifth wolf which had fastened upon neck of one of the horses. The sixth, together with the one that had been shot in the leg, ran away.
[Footnote 24: Sketches of Russian Life before and during the Emancipation of the Serfs. Edited by Henry Morley, Professor of English Literature in University College, London. 16mo, pp. 298. London: Chapman and Hall. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co.]
After a day's detention at Jaroslav, where some irritating business about passports had to be transacted, our travellers resumed their journey in a "kibitka," or diligence-sledge—a rather more comfortable conveyance than the one they had left, because it had a canvas cover. There were no more encounters with wolves, but perils enough awaited them in the snow. The first day three of their horses died, and in sixteen hours, with three separate teams, they accomplished only twenty-seven miles. All along the road they passed wrecks of sledges, horses struggling in the drifts and men digging them out, and vehicles overturned and abandoned until spring. Opposite a hut in which they found shelter one night a cottage had been entirely buried, and the family were not rescued until after four days. They were none the worse for their long imprisonment; but the diggers had come upon a sledge with its horse, driver, and two women frozen to death and buried in the drift. Three months after this, when the snows disappeared from two hundred to three hundred corpses were found, all of whom had met their death in this fearful storm upon the Moscow road alone.
The wretchedness of the inns added a great deal to the sufferings of our travellers. A Russian hotel in the interior is the most filthy of all filthy places. As the floors are never washed, the mud and filth accumulate to an inch and a half in thickness; the walls are black and fetid; horrible large brown beetles, called tarakans, crawl in myriads over everything, invading even the dishes out of which the traveller eats and drinks; and the dirty deal tables are further defiled with a dirty linen cloth. The public rooms are constantly filled with the offensive odor of the native tobacco. The waiters are all men, dressed in print trowsers and shirts; the trousers stuffed into long boots, and the shirts hanging outside the trowsers; the particolored band or scarf round the waist completing the costume. Their hair, like that of all the peasants, is worn long, cut straight round the neck, and parted in front like a woman's, while the beard is [{113}] neither cut nor trimmed. We are not surprised that our author preferred to lodge with the horses and cows in the stable.