When it is asserted that the colored man is wanting in bravery, and is not endowed with the natural courage to assert and maintain his rights, we are apt to forget that physical bravery is a thing of cultivation. There is not the least evidence that, with military discipline and something to fight for, the colored population of the United States would not prove as brave as the black regiment of the Revolution. With such bravery as that regiment exhibited, the four millions and their prospective increase would require a gigantic force to make profitable slaves of them. Again, there is something beyond the protection from domestic violence that demands consideration, in connection with the military discipline of the colored man. We may reasonably expect that a large colonization in some quarter will soon take place, and be carried forward. Education and military discipline, in addition to knowledge in practical industry, are necessary concomitants to successful colonization. With these qualities, the colored man will cease to feel helpless, and be fitted for enterprise, he will have the confidence to go forward, and the aspirations to impel him. It may be the lot of the colored man to encounter in some foreign land powers and influences quite as barbarous as those he has hitherto encountered in the white man's prejudices. If he is armed for the encounter, he will have little inclination to shrink from it. Every humane consideration clusters to the policy of disenthralling the colored man, and of making him a being of power. Nothing can oppose it but the pro-slavery spirit that seeks to enslave the American mind to barbarism and the colored millions and their increase to perpetual bondage.
[WATCHING THE STAG]
[an unfinished poem, by fitz-james o'brien.]
Hela and I lie watching here,
Above us the sky and below the mere.
long
Through distant gorges the blue moors loom
Till the heath looks blue in the endless gloom.
The eagle screams from the misty cliff,
With a quivering lamb in his taloned griff.
And the echoes leap over hill and hollow,
As the old stag bells to the herd to follow.
The purpled heather is wet with mist,
Till it shines like a drownèd amethyst,
And the old, old rocks with furrowed faces
Start up like ghosts in the lonely places.
With forefeet crossed, stanch Hela lies
Watching my face through her half-closed eyes,usBetween—is—is—stretched deer
While ^ I pillow my head on the stiffening stag
LITERARY NOTICES.
Bayard Taylor's Prose Writing's. Vol. V. A Journey to Central Africa, with a Map and Illustrations by the Author. New-York: G.P. Putnam. Boston: A.K. Loring.
This work deservedly ranks as among the best, if not the best, by Bayard Taylor. The East, as we feel in his poems, was full of the scenes of his widely varied travels, that which most aroused his sympathy and stirred his artistic creative powers, and it is of the East that he speaks most freely and brilliantly. It was in Central Africa that he encountered his most thrilling adventures, and forgot, as we can there only do, the civilization of the Western World. Something we would say of the beautiful typography and paper of this series. If the term mise en scène were as applicable to books as to dramas, it might be truely said of Mr. Putnam's that they appear as well between boards as other works do upon them.
El Dorado. Prose Writings of Bayard Taylor. Vol. IV. New-York: G.P. Putnam. Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.