Chapter 2 No.2

Through the river, and through the rifts

Of the sundered earth I gaze,

While Thought on dreamy pinion drifts,

Over cerulean bays,

Into the deep ethereal sea

Of her own serene eternity.

Transfigured by my tranced eye,

Wood and meadow, and stream and sky,

Like vistas of a vision lie:

THE WORLD is the River that flickers by.

Its skies are the blue-arched centuries;

And its forms are the transient images

Flung on the flowing film of Time

By the steadfast shores of a fadeless clime.

As yonder wave-side willows grow,

Substance above, and shadow below,

The golden slopes of that upper sphere

Hang their imperfect landscapes here.

Fast by the Tree of Life, which shoots

Duplicate forms from self-same roots,

Under the fringes of Paradise,

The crystal brim of the River lies.

There are banks of Peace, whose lilies pure

Paint on the wave their portraiture;

And many a holy influence,

That climbs to God like the breath of prayer,

Creeps quivering into the glass of sense,

To bless the immortals mirrored there.

Through realms of Poesy, whose white cliffs

Cloud its deeps with their hieroglyphs,

Alpine fantasies heaped and wrought

At will by the frolicsome winds of Thought,-

By shores of Beauty, whose colors pass

Faintly into the misty glass,-

By hills of Truth, whose glories show

Distorted, broken, and dimmed, as we know,-

Kissed by the tremulous long green tress

Of the glistening tree of Happiness,

Which ever our aching grasp eludes

With sweet illusive similitudes,-

All pictured over in shade and gleam,

For ever and ever runs the Stream.

The orb that burns in the rifts of space

Is the adumbration of God's Face.

My Soul leans over the murmuring flow,

And I am the image it sees below.

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THE GROWTH OF CONTINENTS.

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Before entering upon a sketch of the growth of the European Continent from the earliest times until it reached its present dimensions and outlines, I will say something of the growth of continents in general, connecting these remarks with a few words of explanation respecting some geological terms, which, although in constant use, are nevertheless not clearly defined. I will explain, at the outset, the meaning I attach to them and the sense in which I use them, that there may be no misunderstanding between me and my readers on this point. The words Age, Epoch, Period, Formation, may be found on almost every page of any modern work on geology; but if we sift the matter carefully, we shall find that there is a great uncertainty as to the significance of these terms, and that scarcely any two geologists use them in the same sense. Indeed, I shall not be held blameless in this respect myself; for, on looking over preceding articles, I find that I have, from old habit, used somewhat indiscriminately names which should have a perfectly definite and invariable meaning.

As long as zo?logical nomenclature was uncontrolled by any principle, the same vagueness and indecision prevailed here also. The words Genus, Order, Class, as well as those applied to the most comprehensive division of all in the animal kingdom, the primary branches or types, were used indiscriminately, and often allowed to include under one name animals differing essentially in their structural character. It is only since it has been found that all these groups are susceptible of limitation, according to distinct categories of structure, that our nomenclature has assumed a more precise and definite significance. Even now there is still some inconsistency among zo?logists as to the use of special terms, arising from their individual differences in appreciating, structural features; but I believe it to be, nevertheless, true, that general orders, classes, etc., are not merely larger or smaller groups of the same kind, but are really based upon distinct categories of structure. As soon as such a principle is admitted in geology, and investigators recognize certain physical and organic conditions, more or less general in their action, as characteristic of all those chapters in geological history designated as Ages, Epochs, Periods, Formations, etc., all vagueness will vanish from the scientific nomenclature of this department also, and there will be no hesitation as to the use of words for which we shall then have a positive, definite meaning.

Although the fivefold division of Werner, by which he separated the rocks into Primitive, Transition, Secondary, Alluvial, and Volcanic, proved to be based on a partial misapprehension of the nature of the earth-crust, yet it led to their subsequent division into the three great groups now known as the Primary, or Palaeozoic, as they are sometimes called, because here are found the first organic remains, the Secondary, and the Tertiary. I have said in a previous article that the general unity of character prevailing throughout these three divisions, so that, taken from the broadest point of view, each one seems a unit in time, justifies the application to them of that term, Age, by which we distinguish in human history those periods marked throughout by one prevailing tendency;-as we say the age of Egyptian or Greek or Roman civilization,-the age of stone or iron or bronze. I believe that this division of geological history into these great sections or chapters is founded upon a recognition of the general features by which they are characterized.

Passing over the time when the first stratified deposits were accumulated under a universal ocean in which neither animals nor plants existed, there was an age in the physical history of the world when the lands consisted of low islands,-when neither great depths nor lofty heights diversified the surface of the earth,-when both the animal and vegetable creation, however numerous, was inferior to the later ones, and comparatively uniform in character,-when marine Cryptogams were the highest plants, and Fishes were the highest animals. And this broad statement holds good for the whole of that time, even though it was not without its minor changes, its new forms of animal and vegetable life, its variations of level, its upheavals and subsidences; for, nevertheless, through its whole duration, it was the age of low detached lands,-it was the age of Cryptogams,-it was the age of Fishes. From its beginning to its close, no higher type in the animal kingdom, no loftier group in the vegetable world, made its appearance.

There was an age in the physical history of the world when the patches of land already raised above the water became so united as to form large islands; and though the aspect of the earth retained its insular character, yet the size of the islands, their tendency to coalesce by the addition of constantly increasing deposits, and thus to spread into wider expanses of dry land, marked the advance toward the formation of continents. This extension of the dry land was brought about not only by the gradual accumulation of materials, but also by the upheaval of large tracts of stratified deposits; for, though the loftiest mountain-chains did not yet exist, ranges like those of the Alleghanies and the Jura belong to this division of the world's history. During this time, the general character of the animal and vegetable kingdoms was higher than during the previous age. Reptiles, many and various, gigantic in size, curious in form, some of them recalling the structure of fishes, others anticipating birdlike features, gave a new character to the animal world, while in the vegetable world the reign of the aquatic Cryptogams was over, and terrestrial Cryptogams, and, later, Gymnosperms and Monocotyledonous trees, clothed the earth with foliage. Such was the character of this second age from its opening to its close; and though there are indications, that, before it was wholly past, some low, inferior Mammalian types of the Marsupial kind were introduced,2 and also a few Dicotyledonous plants, yet they were not numerous or striking enough to change the general aspect of the organic world. This age was throughout, in its physical formation, the age of large continental islands; while in its organic character it was the age of Reptiles as the highest animal type, and of Gymnosperms and Monocotyledonous plants as the highest vegetable groups.

There was an age in the physical history of the world when great ranges of mountains bound together in everlasting chains the islands which had already grown to continental dimensions,-when wide tracts of land, hitherto insular in character, became soldered into one by the upheaval of Plutonic masses which stretched across them all and riveted them forever with bolts of granite, of porphyry, and of basalt. Thus did the Rocky Mountains and the Andes bind together North and South America; the Pyrenees united Spain to France; the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas bound Europe to Asia. The class of Mammalia were now at the head of the animal kingdom; huge quadrupeds possessed the earth, and dwelt in forests characterized by plants of a higher order than any preceding ones,-the Beeches, Birches, Maples, Oaks, and Poplars of the Tertiaries. But though the continents had assumed their permanent outlines, extensive tracts of land still remained covered with ocean. Inland seas, sheets of water like the Mediterranean, so unique in our world, were then numerous. Physically speaking, this was the age of continents broken by large inland seas; while in the organic world it was the age of Mammalia among animals, and of extensive Dicotyledonous forests among plants. In a certain sense it was the age of completion,-the one which ushered in the crowning work of creation.

There was an age in the physical history of the world (it is in its infancy still) when Man, with the animals and plants that were to accompany him, was introduced upon the globe, which had acquired all its modern characters. At last the continents were redeemed from the water, and all the earth was given to this new being for his home. Among all the types born into the animal kingdom before, there had never been one to which positive limits had not been set by a law of geographical distribution absolutely impassable to all. For Man alone those boundaries were removed. He, with the domestic animals and plants which were to be the companions of all his pilgrimages, could wander over the whole earth and choose his home. Placed at the head of creation, gifted with intellect to make both animals and plants subservient to his destinies, his introduction upon the earth marks the last great division in the history of our planet. To designate these great divisions in time, I would urge, for the reasons above stated, that the term which is indeed often, though not invariably, applied to them, be exclusively adopted,-that of the Ages of Nature.

But these Ages are themselves susceptible of subdivisions, which should also be accurately defined. What is the nature of these subdivisions? They are all connected with sudden physical changes in the earth's surface, more or less limited in their action, these changes being themselves related to important alterations in the organic world. Although I have stated that one general character prevailed during each of the Ages, yet there was nevertheless a constant progressive action running through them all, and at various intervals both the organic and the physical world received a sudden impulse in consequence of marked and violent changes in the earth-crust, bringing up new elevations, while at the same time the existing animal creation was brought to a close, and a new set of beings was introduced. These changes are not yet accurately defined in America, because the age of her mountains is not known with sufficient accuracy; but their limits have been very extensively traced in Europe, and this coincidence of the various upheavals with the introduction of a new population differing entirely from, the preceding one has been demonstrated so clearly that it may be considered as an ascertained law. What name, then, is most appropriate for the divisions thus marked by sudden and violent changes? It seems to me, from their generally accepted meaning, that the word Epoch or Era, both of which have been widely, though indiscriminately, used in geology, is especially applicable here. In their common use, they imply a condition of things determined by some decisive event. In speaking of human affairs, we say, "It was an epoch or an era in history,"-or in a more limited sense, "It was an epoch in the life of such or such a man." It at once conveys the idea of an important change connected with or brought about by some striking occurrence. Such were those divisions in the history of the earth when a violent convulsion in the surface of the globe and a change in its inhabitants ushered in a new aspect of things.

I have said that we owe to élie de Beaumont the discovery of this connection between the successive upheavals and the different sets of animals and plants which have followed each other on the globe. We have seen in the preceding article upon the formation of mountains, that the dislocations thus produced show the interruptions between successive deposits: as, for instance, where certain strata are raised upon the sides of a mountain, while other strata rest unconformably, as it is called, above them at its base,-this term, unconformable, signifying merely that the two sets of strata are placed at an entirely different angle, and must therefore belong to two distinct sets of deposits. But there are two series of geological facts connected with this result which are often confounded, though they arise from very different causes. One is that described above, in which a certain series of beds having been raised out of their natural horizontal position, another series has been deposited upon them, thus resting unconformably above. The other is where, one set of beds having been deposited over any given region, at a later time, in consequence of a recession of the sea-shore, for instance, or of some other gradual disturbance of the surface, the next set of beds accumulated above them cover a somewhat different area, and are therefore not conformable with the first, though parallel with them. This difference, however slight, is sufficient to show that some shifting of the ground on which they were accumulated must have taken place between the two series of deposits.

This distinction must not be confounded with that made by élie de Beaumont: we owe it to D'Orbigny, who first pointed out the importance of distinguishing the dislocations produced by gradual movements of the earth from those caused by mountain-upheavals. The former are much more numerous than the latter, and in every epoch geologists have distinguished a number of such changes in the surface of the earth, accompanied by the introduction of a new set of animals, though the changes in the organic world are not so striking as those which coincide with the mountain-upheavals. Still, to the eye of the geologist they are quite as distinct, though less evident to the ordinary observer. To these divisions it seems to me that the name of Period is rightly applied, because they seem to have been brought about by the steady action of time, and by gradual changes, rather than by any sudden or violent convulsion.

It was my good fortune to be in some degree connected with the investigations respecting the limitation of Periods, for which the geology of Switzerland afforded peculiar facilities. My early home was near the foot of the Jura, where I constantly faced its rounded domes, and the slope by which they gently descend to the plain of Switzerland. I have heard it said that there is something monotonous in the continuous undulations of this range, so different from the opposite one of the Alps. But I think it is only by contrast that it seems wanting in vigor and picturesqueness; and those who live in its neighborhood become very much attached to the more peaceful character of its scenery. Perhaps my readers will pardon the digression, if I interrupt our geological discussion for a moment, to offer them a word of advice, though it be uncalled for. I have often been asked by friends who were intending to go to Europe what is the most favorable time in the day and the best road to enter Switzerland in order to have at once the finest impression of the mountains. My answer is always,-Enter it in the afternoon over the Jura. If you are fortunate, and have one of the bright, soft afternoons that sometimes show the Alps in their full beauty, as you descend the slope of the Jura, from which you command the whole panorama of the opposite range, you may see, as the day dies, the last shadow pass with strange rapidity from peak to peak of the Alpine summits. The passage is so rapid, so sudden, as the shadow vanishes from one height and appears on the next, that it seems like the step of some living spirit of the mountains. Then, as the sun sinks, it sheds a brilliant glow across them, and upon that follows-strangest effect of all-a sudden pallor, an ashy paleness on the mountains, that has a ghastly, chilly look. But this is not their last aspect: after the sun has vanished out of sight, in place of the glory of his departure, and of the corpse-like pallor which succeeded it, there spreads over the mountains a faint blush that dies gradually into the night. These changes-the glory, the death, the soft succeeding life-really seem like something that has a spiritual existence. While, however, I counsel my friends to see the Alps for the first time in the afternoon, if possible, I do not promise them that the hour will bring with it such a scene as I have tried to describe. Perfect sunsets are rare in any land; but, nevertheless, I would advise travellers to choose the latter half of the day and a road over the Jura for their entrance into Switzerland.3

It was from the Jura itself that one of the great epochs in the history of the globe received its name. It was in a deep gorge of the Jura, that, more than half a century ago, Leopold von Buch first perceived the mode of formation of mountains; and it was at the foot of the Jura, in the neighborhood of Neufchatel, that the investigations were made which first led to the recognition of the changes connected with the Periods. As I shall have occasion hereafter to enter into this subject more at length, I will only allude briefly here to the circumstances. In so doing I am anticipating the true geological order, because I must treat of the Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, which are still far in advance of us; but as it was by the study of these deposits that the circumscription of the Periods, as I have defined them above, was first ascertained, I must allude to them in this connection.

Facing the range of the Jura from the Lake of Neufchatel, there seems to be but one uninterrupted slope by which it descends to the shore of the lake. It will, however, be noticed by the most careless observer that this slope is divided by the difference in vegetation into two strongly marked bands of color: the lower and more gradual descent being of a lighter green, while the upper portion is covered by the deeper hue of the forest-trees, the Beeches, Birches, Maples, etc., above which come the Pines. When the vegetation is fully expanded, this marked division along the whole side of the range into two broad bands of green, the lighter below and the darker above, becomes very striking. The lighter band represents the cultivated portion of the slope, the vineyards, the farms, the orchards, covering the gentler, more gradual part of the descent; and the whole of this cultivated tract, stretching a hundred miles east and west, belongs to the Cretaceous epoch. The upper slope of the range, where the forest-growth comes in, is Jurassic. Facing the range, you do not, as I have said, perceive any difference in the angle of inclination; but the border-line between the two bands of green does in fact mark the point at which the Cretaceous beds abut with a gentler slope against the Jurassic strata, which continue their sharper descent, and are lost to view beneath them.

This is one of the instances in which the contact of two epochs is most directly traced. There is no question, from the relation of the deposits, that the Jura in its upheaval carried with it the strata previously accumulated. At its base there was then no lake, but an extensive stretch of ocean; for the whole plain of Switzerland was under water, and many thousand years elapsed before the Alps arose to set a new boundary to the sea and inclose that inland sheet of water, gradually to be filled up by more modern accumulations, and transformed into the fertile plain which now lies between the Jura and the Alps. If the reader will for a moment transport himself in imagination to the time when the southern side of the Jurassic range sloped directly down to the ocean, he will easily understand how this second series of deposits was collected at its base, as materials are collected now along any sea-shore. They must, of course, have been accumulated horizontally, since no loose materials could keep their place even at so moderate an angle as that of the present lower slope of the range; but we shall see hereafter that there were many subsequent perturbations of this region, and that these Cretaceous deposits, after they had become consolidated, were raised by later upheavals from their original position to that which they now occupy on the lower slope of the Jura, resting immediately, but in geological language unconformably, against it. The two adjoining wood-cuts are merely theoretical, showing by lines the past and the present relation of these deposits; but they may assist the reader to understand my meaning.

Figure 1 represents the Jura before the Alps were raised, with the Cretaceous deposits accumulating beneath the sea at its base. The line marked S indicates the ocean-level; the letter c, the Cretaceous deposits; the letter j, the Jurassic strata, lifted on the side of the mountain.

Figure 2 represents the Jura at the present time, when the later upheavals have lifted the Jurassic strata to a sharper inclination with the Cretaceous deposits, now raised and forming the lower slope of the mountain, at the base of which is the Lake of Neufchatel.

Although this change of inclination is hardly perceptible, as one looks up against the face of the Jura range, there is a transverse cut across it which seems intended to give us a diagram of its internal structure. Behind the city of Neufchatel rises the mountain of Chaumont, so called from its bald head, for neither tree nor shrub grows on its summit. Straight through this mountain, from its northern to its southern side, there is a natural road, formed by a split in the mountain from top to bottom. In this transverse cut, which forms one of the most romantic and picturesque gorges leading into the heart of the Jura range, you get a profile view of the change in the inclination of the strata, and can easily distinguish the point of juncture between the two sets of deposits. But even after this dislocation of strata had been perceived, it was not known that it indicated the commencement of a new epoch, and it is here that my own share in the work, such as it is, belongs. Accustomed as a boy to ramble about in the beautiful gorges and valleys of the Jura, and in riper years, as my interest in science increased, to study its formation with closer attention, this difference in the inclination of the slope had not escaped my observation. I was, however, still more attracted by the fossils it contained than by its geological character: and, indeed, there is no better locality for the study of extinct forms of life than the Jura. In all its breaks and ravines, wherever the inner surface of the rock is exposed, it is full of organic remains; and to take a handful of soil from the road-side is often to gather a handful of shells. It is actually built of the remains of animals, and there are no coral reefs in existing seas presenting a better opportunity for study to the naturalist than the coral reefs of the Jura. Being already tolerably familiar with the fossils of the Jura, it occurred to me to compare those of the upper and lower slope; and to my surprise I found that they were everywhere different, and that those of the lower slope were invariably Cretaceous in character, while those of the upper slope were Jurassic. In the course of this investigation I discovered three periods in the Cretaceous and four in the Jurassic epoch, all characterized by different fossils. This led to a more thorough investigation of the different sets of strata, resulting in the establishment by D'Orbigny of a still greater number of periods, marked by the successive deposits of the Jurassic and Cretaceous seas, all of which contained different organic remains. The attention of geologists being once turned in this direction, the other epochs were studied with the same view, and all were found to be susceptible of division into a greater or less number of such periods.

I have dwelt at greater length on the Jurassic and Cretaceous divisions, because I believe that we have in the relation of these two epochs, as well as in that of the Cretaceous epoch with the Tertiary immediately following it, facts which are very important in their bearing on certain questions, now loudly discussed, not only by scientific men, but by all who are interested in the mode of origin of animals. Certainly, in the inland seas of the Cretaceous and subsequent Tertiary times, where we can trace in the same sheet of water not only the different series of deposits belonging to two successive epochs in immediate juxtaposition, but those belonging to all the periods included within these epochs, with the organic remains contained in each,-there, if anywhere, we should be able to trace the transition-types by which one set of animals is said to have been developed out of the preceding. We hear a great deal of the interruption in geological deposits, of long intervals, the record of which has vanished, and which may contain those intermediate links for which we vainly seek. But here there is no such gap in the evidence. In the very same sheets of water, covering limited areas, we have the successive series of deposits containing the remains of animals which continue perfectly unchanged during long intervals, and then, with a more or less violent shifting of the surface,4 traceable by the consequent discordance of the strata, is introduced an entirely new set of animals, differing as much from those immediately preceding them as do those of the present period from the old Creation, (our predecessors, but not our ancestors,) traced by Cuvier in the Tertiary deposits underlying those of our own geological age. I subjoin here a tabular view giving the Epochs in their relation to the Ages, and indicating, at least approximately, the number of Periods contained in each Epoch.

Age of Man

Present.

Tertiary Age:

Age of Mammalia

Pliocene

with at least twelve Periods.

Miocene

Eocene

Secondary Age:

Age of Reptiles

Cretaceous

with at least twenty Periods.

Jurassic

Triassic

with eight or nine Periods.

Permian

Carboniferous

Pal?ozoic or Primary Age:

Age of Fishes

Devonian

with ten or twelve Periods.

Silurian

It will be noticed by those who have any knowledge of geological divisions, that in this diagram I consider the Carboniferous epoch as forming a part of the Secondary age. Some geologists have been inclined, from the marked and peculiar character of its vegetation, to set it apart as forming in itself a distinct geological age, while others have united it with the Pal?ozoic age. For many years I myself adopted the latter of these two views, and associated the Carboniferous epoch with the Pal?ozoic age. But it is the misfortune of progress that one is forced not only to unlearn a great deal, but, if one has been in the habit of communicating his ideas to others, to destroy much of his own work. I now find myself in this predicament; and after teaching my students for years that the Carboniferous epoch belongs to the Pal?ozoic or Primary age, I am convinced-and this conviction grows upon me constantly as I free myself from old prepossessions and bias on the subject-that with the Carboniferous epoch we have the opening of the Secondary age in the history of the world. A more intimate acquaintance with organic remains has shown me that there is a closer relation between the character of the animal and vegetable world of the Carboniferous epoch, as compared with that of the Permian and Triassic epochs, than between that of the Carboniferous epoch and any preceding one. Neither do I see any reason for separating it from the others as a distinct age. The plants as well as the animals of the two subsequent epochs seem to me to show, on the contrary, the same pervading character, indicating that the Carboniferous epoch makes an integral part of that great division which I have characterized as the Secondary age.

Within the Periods there is a still more limited kind of geological division, founded upon the special character of local deposits. These I would call geological Formations, indicating concrete local deposits, having no cosmic character, but circumscribed within comparatively narrow areas, as distinguished from the other terms, Ages, Epochs, Periods, which have a more universal meaning, and are, as it were, cosmopolitan in their application. Let me illustrate my meaning by some formations of the present time. The accumulations along the coast of Florida are composed chiefly of coral sand, mixed of course with the remains of the animals belonging to that locality; those along the coast of the Southern States consist principally of loam, which the rivers bring down from their swamps and low, muddy grounds; those upon the shores of the Middle States are made up of clay from the disintegration of the eastern slopes of the Alleghanies; while those farther north, along our own coast, are mostly formed of sand from the New-England granites. Such deposits are the local work of one period, containing the organic remains belonging to the time and place. From the geological point of view, I would call them Formations; from the naturalist's point of view, I would call them Zo?logical Provinces.

Of course, in urging the application of these names, I do not intend to assume any dictatorship in the matter of geological nomenclature. But I do feel very strongly the confusion arising from an indiscriminate use of terms, and that, whatever names be selected as most appropriate or descriptive for these divisions, geologists should agree to use them in the same sense.

There is one other geological term, bequeathed to us by a great authority, and which cannot be changed for the better: I mean that of Geological Horizon, applied by Humboldt to the whole extent of any one geological division,-as, for instance, the Silurian horizon, including the whole extent of the Silurian epoch. It indicates one level in time, as the horizon which limits our view indicates the farthest extension of the plain on which we stand in space.

* * *

We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch, when the central part of the United States was already raised above the water. Let us now give a glance at Europe in those early days, and see how far her physical history has advanced. What European countries loom up for us out of the Azoic sea, corresponding in time and character to the low range of hills which first defined the northern boundary of the United States? what did the Silurian and Devonian epochs add to these earliest tracts of dry land in the Old World? and where do we find the coal basins which show us the sites of her Carboniferous forests? Since the relation between the epochs of comparative tranquillity and the successive upheavals has been so carefully traced in Europe, I will endeavor, while giving a sketch of that early European world, to point out, at the same time, the connection of the different systems of upheaval with the successive stratified deposits, without, however, entering into such details as must necessarily become technical and tedious.

In the European ocean of the Azoic epoch we find five islands of considerable size. The largest of these is at the North. Scandinavia had even then almost her present outlines; for Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Lapland, all of which are chiefly granitic in character, were among the first lands to be raised. Between Sweden and Norway, there is, however, still a large tract of land under water, forming an extensive lake or a large inland sea in the heart of the country. If the reader will take the trouble to look on any geological map of Europe, he will see an extensive patch of Silurian rock in the centre of Sweden and Norway. This represents that sheet of water gradually to be filled by the accumulation of Silurian deposits and afterwards raised by a later disturbance. There is another mass of land far to the southeast of this Scandinavian island, which we may designate as the Bohemian island, for it lies in the region now called Bohemia, though it includes, also, a part of Saxony and Moravia. The northwest corner of France, that promontory which we now call Bretagne, with a part of Normandy adjoining it, formed another island; while to the southeast of it lay the central plateau of France. Great Britain was not forgotten in this early world; for a part of the Scotch hills, some of the Welsh mountains, and a small elevation here and there in Ireland, already formed a little archipelago in that region. By a most careful analysis of the structure of the rocks in these ancient patches of land, tracing all the dislocations of strata, all the indications of any disturbance of the earth-crust whatsoever, élie de Beaumont has detected and classified four systems of upheavals, previous to the Silurian epoch, to which he refers these islands in the Azoic sea. He has named them the systems of La Vendée, of Finistère, of Longmynd, and of Morbihan. These names have, for the present, only a local significance,-being derived, like so many of the geological names, from the places where the investigations of the phenomena were first undertaken,-but in course of time will, no doubt, apply to all the contemporaneous upheavals, wherever they may be traced, just as we now have Silurian, Devonian, Permian, and Jurassic deposits in America as well as in Europe.

The Silurian and Devonian epochs seem to have been instrumental rather in enlarging the tracts of land already raised than in adding new ones; yet to these two epochs is traced the upheaval of a large and important island to the northeast of France. We may call it the Belgian island, since it covered the ground of modern Belgium; but it also extended considerably beyond these limits, and included much of the Northern Rhine region. A portion only of this tract, to which belongs the central mass of the Vosges and the Black Forest, was lifted during the Silurian epoch,-which also enlarged considerably Wales and Scotland, the Bohemian island, the island of Bretagne, and Scandinavia. During this epoch the sheet of water between Norway and Sweden became dry land; a considerable tract was added to their northern extremity on the Arctic shore; while a broad band of Silurian deposits, lying now between Finland and Russia, enlarged that region. The Silurian epoch has been referred by élie de Beaumont to the system of upheaval called by him the system of Westmoreland and Hundsrück,-again merely in reference to the spots at which these upheavals were first studied, the centres, as it were, from which the investigations spread. But in their geological significance they indicate all the oscillations and disturbances of the soil throughout the region over which the Silurian deposits have been traced in Europe. The Devonian epoch added greatly to the outlines of the Belgian island. To it belongs the region of the Ardennes, lying between France and Belgium, the Eifelgebirge, and a new disturbance of the Vosges, by which that region was also extended. The island of Bretagne was greatly increased by the Devonian deposits, and Bohemia also gained in dimensions, while the central plateau of France remained much the same as before. The changes of the Devonian epoch are traced by élie de Beaumont to a system of upheavals called the Ballons of the Vosges and of Normandy,-so called from the rounded, balloon-like domes characteristic of the mountains of that time. To the Carboniferous epoch belong the mountain-systems of Forey, (to the west of Lyons,) of the North of England, and of the Netherlands. These three systems of upheaval have also been traced by élie de Beaumont; and in the depressions formed between their elevations we find the coal-basins of Central France, of England, and of Germany. During all these epochs, in Europe as in America, every such dislocation of the surface was attended by a change in the animal creation.

If we take now a general view of the aspect of Europe at the close of the Carboniferous epoch, we shall see that the large island of Scandinavia is completed, while the islands of Bohemia and Belgium have approached each other by their gradual increase till they are divided only by a comparatively narrow channel. The island of Belgium, that of Bretagne, and that of the central plateau of France, form together a triangle, of which the plateau is the lowest point, while Belgium and Bretagne form the other two corners. Between the plateau and Belgium flows a channel, which we may call the Burgundian channel, since it covers old Burgundy; between the plateau and Bretagne is another channel, which from its position we may call the Bordeaux channel. The space inclosed between these three masses of land is filled by open sea. To trace the gradual closing of these channels and the filling up of the ocean by constantly increasing accumulations, as well as by upheavals, will be the object of the next article.

* * *

THE MUSICIAN.

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He did not move the hills and the rocks with his music, because those days are passed away,-the days when Orpheus had all Nature for his audience, when the audience would not keep its seat. In those days trees and rocks may have held less firm root in the soil: it was nearer the old Chaos-times, and they had not lost the habit of the whirling dance. The trees had not found their "continental" home, and the rocks were not yet wedded to their places: so they could each enjoy one more bachelor-dance before settling into their staid vegetable and mineral domestic happiness.

Our musician had no power, then, to move them from their place of ages: he did not stir them as much as the morning and evening breezes among the leaves, or the streams trickling down among the great rocks and wearing their way over precipices. But he moved men and women, of all natures and feelings. He could translate Bach and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mozart,-all the great poet-musicians that are silent now, and must be listened to through an interpreter. All the great people and all the little people came to hear him. A princess fell in love with him. She would have married him. She did everything but ask him to marry her. Indeed, some of his friends declared she did this; but that cannot be believed.

"You ought to be satisfied," said one of his friends to the musician, one day; "all the world admires you; money drops from the keys of your piano-forte; and a princess is in love with you."

"With me?" answered the musician; "with my music, perhaps. You talk nonsense, when you talk of her falling in love with me, of her marrying a poor musician. What then? To have one instrument more in her palace! Let her marry her piano-forte,-or her violin, if she objects to a quadruped!"

"You are as blind as Homer," said his friend. "Can't you see that her love is purely personal? Would she care to give a title to a pianist, if he were any other than Arnold Wulff? If you had other eyes in your head, or if there were another man inside even that same face of yours, the strains might flow out under your fingers like streams from Paradise, in vain, so far as her heart was concerned. Your voice is quite as persuasive as your music, with her."

"If so, why must she put a title in front of my name, before I am worthy of her?" asked Arnold. "She offers me some square miles of uninhabitable forest, because, as owner of them, I can wear a Von before my name. I can put it on as an actor on the stage wears a chapeau of the Quatorze time. It is one of the properties of the establishment. You may call it a livery of the palace, if you please. I may make love to her on the stage as 'My Lord.' But my own little meagre part of Arnold,-thank you, I prefer it, without my princess."

"And yet, if you have the palace, a princess is necessary. With your love of harmony, you yourself would not be pleased to see a cotton dress hanging across a damask couch, or rude manners interrupt a stately dinner. The sound of the titles clangs well as you are ushered up through the redoubled apartments. If the play is in the Quatorze time, let it be played out. A princess deserves at least a lord for a husband."

"Very well, if the question is of marriage," answered Arnold; "but in love, a woman loves a man, not a title; and if a woman marries as she loves, she marries the man, not the lordship."

"But this is a true princess," said his friend Carl.

"And a true princess," answered Arnold, "feels the peas under ever so many mattresses. She would not fall in love with a false lord, or degrade herself by marrying her scullion. But if she is a true princess, she sees what is lordly in her subject. If she loves him, already he is above her in station,-she looks up to him as her ideal. Whatever we love is above self. We pay unconscious homage to the object of our love. Already it becomes our lord or princess."

"I don't see, then," said Carl, "but that you are putting unnecessary peas in your shoes. It is this princeliness that your princess has discovered in you; and the titles she would give you are the signs of it, that she wishes you to wear before the world."

"And they never will make me lord or prince, since I am not born such," answered Arnold. "If I were born such, I would make the title grand and holy, so that men should see I was indeed prince and lord as well as man. As it is, I feel myself greater than either, and born to rule higher things. It would cramp me to put on a dignity for which I was not created. Already I am cramped by the circumstances out of which I was born. I cannot express strains of music that I hear in my highest dreams, because my powers are weak, and fail me as often the strings of my instrument fail my fingers. To put on any of the conventionalities of life, any of its honors, even the loves of life, would be to put on so many constraints the more."

"That is because you have never loved," said Carl.

"That may be," said Arnold,-"because I have never loved anything but music. Still that does not satisfy me,-it scarcely gives me joy; it gives me only longing, and oftener despair. I listen to it alone, in secret, until I am driven by a strange desire to express it to a great world. Then, for a few moments, the praise and flattery of crowds delight and exalt me,-but only to let me fall back into greater despair, into remorse that I have allowed the glorious art of music to serve me as a cup of self-exaltation."

"You, Arnold, so unmoved by applause?" said Carl.

"It is only an outside coldness," answered Arnold; "the applause heats me, excites me, till a moment when I grow to hate it. The flatteries of a princess and her imitating train turn my head, till an old choral strain, or a clutch that my good angel gives me, a welling-up of my own genius in my heart, comes to draw me back, to cool me, to taunt me as traitor, to rend me with the thought that in self I have utterly forgotten myself, my highest self."

"These are the frenzies with which one has to pay for the gift of genius," said Carl. "A cool temperament balances all that. If one enjoys coolly, one suffers as coolly. Take these fits of despair as the reverse side of your fate. She offers you by way of balance cups of joy and pleasure and success, of which we commonplace mortals scarcely taste a drop. When my peasant-maiden Rosa gives me a smile, I am at the summit of bliss; but my bliss-mountain is not so high that I fear a fall from it. If it were the princess that gladdened me so, I should expect a tumble into the ravine now and then, and would not mind the hard scramble up again, to reach the reward at the top."

"It would not be worth the pains," said Arnold; "a princess's smiles are not worth more than a peasant-girl's. I am tired of it all. I am going to find another world. I am going to England."

"You are foolish," answered Carl. "The world is no different there; there is as little heart in England as in Germany,-no more or less. You are just touching success here; do give it a good grasp."

"I am cloyed with it already," said Arnold.

"It is not that," said Carl. "You are a child crying for the moon. You would have your cake and eat it too. You want some one who shall love you, you alone,-who shall have no other thought but yours, no other dream than of you. Yet you are jealous for your music. If that is not loved as warmly, you begin to suspect your lover. It is the old proverb, 'Love me, love my dog.' But if your dog is petted too much, if we dream in last night's strains of music, forget you a moment in the world you have lifted us into,-why, then your back is turned directly; you upbraid us with following you for the sake of the music,-we have no personal love of you,-you are the violin or the fiddlestick!"

"You are right, old Carl," said Arnold. "I am all out of tune myself. I have not set my inward life into harmony with the world outside. It is true, at times I impress a great audience, make its feelings sway with mine; but, alas! it does not impress me in return. There is a little foolish joy at what you call success; but it lasts such a few minutes! I want to have the world move me; I do not care to move the world!"

"And will England move you more than Germany?" asked Carl; "will the hearts of a new place touch you more than those of home? The closer you draw to a man, the better you can read his heart, and learn that he has a heart. It is not the number of friends that gives us pleasure, but the warmth of the few."

"In music I find my real life," Arnold went on, "because in music I forget myself. Is music, then, an unreal life? In real life must self always be uppermost? It is so with me. In the world, with people, I am self-conscious. It is only in music that I am lifted above myself. When I am not living in that, I need activity, restlessness, change. This is why I must go away. Here I can easily be persuaded to become a conceited fool, a flattered hanger-on of a court."

* * *

We need scarcely tell of the musician's career in England. We are already familiar with London fashionable life. We have had life-histories, three volumes at a time, that have taken us into the very houses, told us of all the domestic quarrels, some already healed, some still pending. It is easy to imagine of whom the world was composed that crowded the concerts of the celebrated musician. The Pendennises were there, and the Newcomes, Jane Rochester with her blind husband, a young Lord St. Orville with one of the Great-Grand-Children of the Abbey, Mr. Thornton and Margaret Thornton, a number of semi-attached couples, Lady Lufton and her son, the De Joinvilles visiting the Osbornes, from France, Miss Dudleigh and Sarona, Alton Locke, on a visit home, Signor and Signora Mancini, sad-eyed Rachel Leslie with her young brother, a stately descendant of Sir Charles Grandison, the Royal Family, and all the nobility. When everybody went,-every one fortunate enough to get a ticket and a seat in the crowded hall,-it would be invidious to mention names. It was the fashion to go; and so everybody went who was in the fashion. Then of course the unfashionables went, that it might not be supposed they were of that class; and with these, all those who truly loved music were obliged to contend for a place. Fashion was on the side of music, till it got the audience fairly into the hall and in their seats; and then music had to struggle with fashion. It had to fix and melt the wandering eyes, to tug at the worldly and the stony heart. And here it was that Arnold's music won the victory. The ravishing bonnet of Madam This or That no longer distracted the attention of its envying admirers, or of its owner; the numerous flirtations that had been thought quite worth the price of the ticket, and of the crushed flounces, died away for a few moments; the dissatisfaction of the many who discovered themselves too late in inconspicuous seats was drowned in the deeper and sadder unrest that the music awakened. For the music spoke separately to each heart, roused up the secrets hidden there, fanned dying hopes or silent longings. It made the light-hearted lighter in heart, the light-minded heavy in soul. Where there was a glimpse of heaven, it opened the heavens wider; where there was already hell, it made the abysses gape deeper. For those few moments each soul communed with itself, and met with a shuddering there, or an exaltation, as the case might be.

After those few moments, outside life resumed its sway. Buzzing talk swept out the memory of the music. One song from an opera brought thought back to its usual level. Men and women looked at each other through their opera-glasses, and, bringing distant outside life close to them, fancied themselves in near communion with it. The intimacy of the opera-glass was warm enough to suit them,-so very near at one moment, comfortably distant at the next. It was an intimacy that could have no return, nor demanded it. One could study the smile on the lip of one of these neighbors, even the tear in her eye, with one's own face unmoved, an answer of sympathy impossible, not required. Nevertheless, the music had stirred, had excited; and the warmth it had awakened was often transferred to the man who had kindled it. The true lovers of music could not express their joy and were silent, while these others surrounded Arnold with their flatteries and adoration.

He was soon wearied of this.

"I am going to America, to a new world," he said to his friend; "there must be some variety there."

"Perhaps so," said Carl,-"something new, something that is neither man nor woman, since they cannot satisfy you. Still I fancy you will find nothing higher than men and women."

"A new land must develop men and women in a new way," answered Arnold.

"If you would only look at things in my microscopic way," said Carl, "and examine into one man or one woman, you would not need all this travelling. But I will go as far as New York with you."

* * *

At New York the name of the musician had already awakened the same excitement as in other places; the concert-room was crowded; there was the same rush for places; the prices paid for the tickets seemed here even more fabulous. Arnold was more of a lion than ever. His life was filled with receptions, dinners, and evening parties, or with parlor and evening concerts. His dreamy, poetic face, his distant, abstracted manner, proved as fascinating as his music.

Carl tired of the whirl, and the adoration, of which he had his share.

"I shall go back to Germany," he said. "I shall go to my Rosa, and leave you your world."

"I am tired of my world. I shall go to the Far West," said Arnold, when Carl left him.

One day he went to a matinée at one of the finest and most fashionable houses in the place. There were beautiful women elegantly dressed, very exquisite men walking up and down the magnificently furnished drawing-rooms. The air was subdued, the voices were low, the wit was quiet, the motion was full of repose, the repose breathed grace. Arnold seated himself at the Steinway, at the half-expressed request of the hostess, and partly from the suggestions of his own mood. He began with dreamy music; it was heavy with odors, at first, drugged with sense, then spiritualizing into strange, delicate fancies. Then came strength with a sonata of Beethoven's; then the strains died back again into a song singing without words.

"You would like some dance-music now," said Arnold to the beautiful Caroline, who stood by his side. "Shall I play some music that will make everybody dance?"

"Like the music in the fairy-tale," said Caroline; "oh, I should like that! I often hear such dance-music, that sets me stirring; it seems as if it ought to move old and young."

"There are no old people here," said Arnold. "I have not seen any."

"It seems to me there are no young," answered Caroline.

"There are neither young nor old," said Arnold; "that is the trouble."

But he began to play a soft, dreamy waltz. It was full of bewitching invitation. No one could resist it. It passed into a wild, stirring polka, into a maddening galop, back again to a dreamy waltz. Now it was dizzying, whirling; now it was languishing, full of repose. Now it was the burst and clangor of a full orchestra; now it was the bewitching appeal of a single voice that invited to dance. Up and down the long room, across the broad room, the dancers moved. The room, that had been so full of quiet, was swaying with motion.

Caroline seized hold of the back of a chair to stay herself.

"It whirls me on; how dizzying it is! And you, would you not like to join in the dance? I would be your partner."

"The piano is my partner," answered Arnold. "Do you not see how it whirls with me?"

"Yes, everything moves," said Caroline. "Are Cupid and Psyche coming to join us? Will my great-grand-aunt come down to the waltz in her brocade? My sober cousin, and Marie, who gave up dancing long ago,-they are all carried away. It seems to me like the strange dance of a Walpurgis night,-as though I saw ghosts, and demons too, whirling over the Brocken, across wild forests. It is no longer our gilded drawing-room, with its tapestries, its bijouterie, its sound and light both muffled: we are out in the wild tempest; there are sighing pines, dashing waterfalls. Do you know that is where your music carries me always? Whether it is grave or gay, it takes me out into whirling winds, and tosses me in tempests. They call society gay here, and dizzying,-dance and music, show, excess, following each other; but it is all sleep, Lethe, in comparison with the mad world into which your music whirls me. Oh, stop a moment, Arnold! will you not stop? It is too wild and maddening!"

The strains crashed into discord, crashed into harmony, and then there was a wonderful silence. The dancers were suddenly stilled,-looked at each other with flushed cheek,-would have greeted each other, as if they had just met in a foreign land; but they recovered themselves in time. Nothing unconventional was said or done.

"Did I dance?" Marie asked herself,-"or was I only looking on?"

One of the dancers scarcely dared to look round, lest it should prove to be the great-grand-aunt's brocade that she heard rustle behind her; while another thanked her partner for a chair, with eyes cast down, lest it might be Cupid that offered it. But the room was the same; there was an elegant calm over everything. Tea-poys, light chairs, fragile vases have been undisturbed by crinoline even.

"Are you quite sure this Chinese joss was on this table, when the music began?" asked Marie's companion of her, whisperingly.

"Oh, hush, you don't think that danced, do you?" said Marie, with a shudder.

"I hardly know. I think the musician was on this side of the room a little while ago, piano and all."

"Don't talk so," replied Marie. "They are all going now. I am glad of it. You will be at the opera to-night? I must say I like opera-music better than this wild German stuff that sets one's brain whirling!"

"Heels, too, I should say," said her companion; and they took their leave with the rest.

The next afternoon Arnold was sitting in his room with the windows open. It was an early spring day, when the outer air was breathing of summer. He was thinking of how the beautiful, cold Caroline had spoken to him the day before,-of that wild, appealing tone with which she had called him Arnold. Before, always, she had given him no more than the greeting of an acquaintance. Now, the tone in which she had spoken took a significance. As he was questioning it, recalling it, he suddenly heard his own name called most earnestly and appealingly. There was a softness, and an agony too, in its piercing tone, as if it came straight from the heart. "Arnold! come, come back!" He hurried to the window, wondering if he were under the influence of some dream. He looked down, and found himself a witness to a scene that he could not interrupt, because he could not help, and a sudden word might create danger. It passed very quickly, though it would take many words to describe it. A piazza led across the windows of the story below, to a projecting part of the building, the sloping roof of which it touched. At the other end of the sloping roof, where it met an alley-way that opened upon a street beyond, there was a little child leaning over to look at some soldiers that were passing through the street across the alley. He was supporting himself, by an iron wire that served as a lightning-rod. Already it was bending beneath his weight; and in his eagerness he was forgetting his slippery footing, and the dizzy height of thirty feet, over which he was hanging. He was a little three year-old fellow, too, and probably never knew anything about danger. His mother had always screamed as loudly when he fell from a footstool as when she had seen him leaning from a three-story window.

The voice came from a girl, who, at the moment Arnold came to the window, was crossing the iron palisade of the piazza. She was on the slippery, sloping leads as she repeated the cry, in a tone earnest and thrilling,-"Dear Arnold, come in, only come, and George shall take you to the soldiers."

The boy only gave another start of pleasure, that seemed to loosen still more his support, crying out, "The drummer! Cousin Laura, come, see the drummer!"

But Laura kept her way along the edge of the roof, reached the child, seized him, and walked back across the perilous slope with the struggling boy in her arms. Arnold the musician had noticed, even in her hurrying, dangerous passage towards the child, the rich sunny folds of her hair, golden like a German girl's. Now, as she returned, he saw the soft lines of her terror-moved face, and the deep blue of her wide-opened eyes. Her voice changed as she reached the piazza, and set the child down in safety.

"Oh, Arnold, darling, how could you, how could you frighten me so?"

The child began to cry, because it was reproved, because its pleasure was stopped, and because Cousin Laura, pale and white, held to the railing of the piazza for support. But the mamma came out, Laura was lifted in, the boy was scolded, the windows were shut, and there was the end.

Arnold sat by the window, thinking. The thrilling tones of the voice still rang in his ear, as though they were calling upon him, "Arnold, come, come back!"

"If any voice would speak to me in that tone!" he thought; "if such a voice would call upon my name with all that heart in its depths!"

And he compared it with the tone in which Caroline had appealed to him the day before. Sometimes her voice assumed the same earnestness, and he felt as if she were showing him in the words all her own heart, betraying love, warmth, ardor. Sometimes, in comparison with that cry, her tones seemed cold and metallic, a selfish appeal of danger, not a cry of love. He found himself examining her more nearly than he had ever done before.

"Was she more than outwardly beautiful? Was there any warmth beneath that cold manner? Could she warm as well as shine?"

He remembered that she had often complained to him of her longing for sympathy; she had spoken to him of the coldness of the world, of the heartlessness of society. She had envied him his genius,-the musical talent that made him independent of the world, of the love of men and women. He could never appreciate what it was to be alone in the world, to find one's higher feelings misunderstood, to be obliged to pass from one gayety to another, to be dissatisfied with the superficiality of life, and yet to find no relief;-all this she had said to him.

But why was it so with her? She had a very substantial father and mother, who seemed to devote themselves to her wishes,-some younger brothers,-he had seen them pushed from the drawing-room the day of the matinée,-a sister near her age, not yet out. Caroline had apologized for her sister's crying while listening to his music. "She was unsophisticated still, and had not forgotten her boarding-school nonsense." Then, if Caroline did not enjoy city-life, there was a house in the country to which she might have gone early in the spring. She had, too, her friend Marie. She imparted to him some of Marie's confidences, her sad history; Marie must be enough of a friend to be trusted in return. In short, Caroline's manner had always been so conventional and unimpulsive, that these complaints of life had seemed to him a part of her society-tone, aa easily taken on and off as her bonnet or her paletot. They suited the enthusiasm that was necessary with music, and would be forgotten in her talk with Mr. Gresham the banker.

But she had called him by his own name: that had moved him. And now that another voice had given the words a tone he had not before detected in them, he began to question their meaning. Could Caroline put as much heart into her voice as this golden-haired Laura had shown? Could Caroline have exposed herself to danger as that girl had done? Perhaps any woman would have done it. Perhaps the princess would have ventured so, to save a child's life. Would he have ventured to do it himself? It could not have been a pleasant thing to walk on a pointed roof, with some half-broken spikes to catch one, in case of missing one's footing, or escaping the fall of thirty feet below. And that little frightened-looking, timid Laura, if he could only see her again!

He questioned whether this were not a possible thing. He had formed a slight acquaintance with Mrs. Ashton, who was occupying the rooms below; he had met her on the stairs, had exchanged some words with her. It struck him it would be a proper thing to offer her some tickets to his next concert. At this moment he was interrupted, was summoned away, and he deferred his intention until the next day.

The next day he presented himself at the door of Mrs. Ashton's parlor. She invited him to come in, cordially, and he was presented to her niece, who sat in the window with her work. Laura scarcely looked up as he entered, and went on with her crochet.

Presently Arnold opened his business.

"Would Mrs. Ashton accept some tickets for his concert that evening?"

Mrs. Ashton looked pleased, thought him very kind.

Arnold took out the tickets for herself, for Mr. Ashton. He offered another.

"Would her niece be pleased to go? would Miss"-

Laura looked up from her work and hesitated.

"She was much obliged, she didn't know, but she had promised her cousin to go to the theatre with him."

Mrs. Ashton, thinking the musician looked displeased, attempted to explain.

"Laura was not very fond of music. She did not like concerts very well. She seldom came to New York, and the theatre was a new thing to her."

"I do not wonder," said Arnold, withdrawing his ticket. "I sympathize with Mademoiselle in her love for the theatre; and concert-music is but poor stuff. If one finds a glimpse there of a higher style, a higher art, it is driven away directly by the recurrence of something trifling and frivolous."

Mrs. Ashton did not agree with the musician. She could not understand why Laura did not like concerts. For herself, she liked the variety: the singing relieved the piano, and one thing helped another.

Arnold looked towards Laura for a contradiction; he wanted to hear her defence of her philosophy, for he was convinced she had some in not liking music. To him every one had expressed a fondness for music; and it was a rarity, an originality, to find some one who confessed she did not like it.

But Laura did not seem inclined to reply; she was counting the stitches in her crochet. In the silence, Arnold took his leave.

He had no sooner reached his own room than he reproached himself for his sudden retreat. Why had he not stayed, and tried to persuade the young lady to change her mind? An engagement for the theatre with a cousin might have been easily postponed. And he would like to have made her listen to some of his music. He would have compelled her to listen. He would have played something that would have stirred all the audience; but for her, it would have been like taking her back to her peril of the day before,-she should have lived over again all its self-exaltation, all its triumph.

Laura meanwhile had laid down her work.

"I was stupid," she said, "not to take that ticket."

"I think you were," said her aunt, "when we know so many people who would give their skins for a ticket."

"It is not that," said Laura; "but I didn't want to go, till I saw the ticket going out of my grasp. I have always had such dreary associations with concerts, since those I went to with Janet, last spring,-long, dreary pieces that I couldn't understand, interrupted by Italian songs that had more scream in them than music, and Janet flirting with her friends all the time."

"I knew you didn't like music," said her aunt; "that was the only way I could get you out of the scrape, for it did seem impolite to refuse the ticket. Of course an engagement to the theatre appeared a mere excuse, as long as Laura Keene plays every night now."

"It was not a mere excuse with me," said Laura; "I did not fancy the exchange. But now I think I should like to know what his music is. I wonder if it is at all like mine."

"The music you make on the little old piano at home?" asked Mrs. Ashton; "that is sweet enough in that room, but I fancy it is different from his music."

"Oh, I don't mean that," said Laura; "it is because the piano seems to say so little that I care so little for it. The music I mean is what I hear, when, in a summer's afternoon, I carry my book out into the barn to read as I lie on a bed of hay. I don't read, but I listen. The cooing of the doves, the clatter even of the fowls in the barn-yard, the quiet noises, with the whisperings of the great elm, and the rustling of the brook in the field beyond,-all this is the music I like to hear. It puts me into delicious dreams, and stirs me, too, into strange longing."

"Well, I doubt if our great musician can do all that. Anyhow, he wouldn't bring in the hens and chickens," laughed Mrs. Ashton.

"But I should like to hear him, if he could show me what real music is," said Laura, dreamily, as her hands fell on her work.

"Well, I am sorry," said Mrs. Ashton, "and you might take my ticket: you can, if you wish. Only one concert is like another, and I dare say you would be disappointed, after all. I told Mrs. Campbell I should certainly go to one of his concerts, and I suppose Mr. Ashton will hardly care for the expense of tickets, now we have had them presented to us. And as I know that Mrs. Campbell is going to-night, she will see that I am there, so I should much prefer going tonight. But then, Laura, if you do care so much about it"-

Oh, no,-Laura did not care; only she was sorry she had been so stupid.

She was very much surprised, when, in the evening, towards the end of the performance at the theatre, the musician came and joined her party, and talked most agreeably with them. Even her cousin George did not resent his intrusion, and on the way home imparted to Laura that he had no doubt the musician's talk was pleasanter than his music.

Laura did not agree with him. She met with the musician frequently now, and his talk only made her more and more desirous to hear his music. He came frequently to her aunt's room; he joined her and her aunt at the Academy of Fine Arts many times. Here he talked to her most charmingly of pictures, as a musician likes to talk about pictures, and as a painter discusses music,-as though he had the whole art at his fingers' ends. It was the opening of a new life to Laura. If he could tell her so much of painting and sculpture, what would she not learn, if he would only speak of music? But he never did, and he never offered to play to them. She was very glad her aunt never suggested it. The piano in the drawingroom must be quite too poor for him to touch. But he never offered her another concert-ticket. She did not wonder that he never did, she had been so ungracious at first. She was quite ashamed that he detected her once in going to the Horse-Opera, he must think her taste so low. She wanted to tell him it was her cousin George's plan; but then she did enjoy it.

Arnold found himself closely studying both Caroline and Laura now. "Carl would be pleased at my microscopic examinations," he thought.

Frequently as he visited Laura, as frequently he saw Caroline. He was constantly invited to her house,-to meet her at other places. Yet the nearer she came to him, the farther he seemed from her. Can we more easily read a form that flees from us than one that approaches us? He talked with her constantly of music. She asked him his interpretation of this or that sonata. She betrayed to him the impression he had made with this or that fantasie. It was astonishing how closely she appreciated the vague changes of tones and words of music.

But with Laura he never ventured to speak of music. Whenever he played now, he played as if for her; and yet he never ventured to ask her to listen.

"It seems to me sometimes," said Caroline to him once, "as though you were playing to some one person. Your music is growing to have a beseeching tone; there is something personal in it."

"It must always be so," replied Arnold, moodily; "can my music answer its own questions?"

The spring days were opening into summer, the vines were coming into full leaf, the magnolias were in blossom, the windows to the conservatories at the street-corners were thrown open, and let out to sight some of the gorgeous display of bright azaleas and gay geraniums.

Arnold sat with Caroline at an Opera Matinée. A seat had been left for him near her. In an interval, she began to speak to him again of her weariness of life; the next week was going on precisely as the last had gone, in the same round of engagements.

"You will envy me my life," said Arnold. "I am going out West. I am going to build my own house."

"You are joking; you would not think of it seriously," said Caroline.

"I planned it long ago," answered Arnold; "it was to be the next act after New York,-the final act, perhaps. Scene I: The Log Cabin."

"How can you think of it?" exclaimed Caroline. "Give up everything? your reputation, fortune, everything?"

"New York, in short," added Arnold.

"Very well, then,-New York, in short; that is the world," said Caroline. "And your music, who is to listen to it?"

"My music?" asked Arnold; "that is of a subjective quality. A composer, even, need not hear his own music."

"I don't understand you," said Caroline; "and I dare say you are insane."

"You do not understand me?" asked Arnold, "yet you could read to me all that fantasie I played to you last night. It was my own composition, and I had not comprehended it in the least."

"Now you are, satirical," said Caroline.

"Because you are inconsistent," pursued Arnold; "you wonder I do not stay here, because my fortune can buy me a handsome house, horses, style and all its elegancies; yet you yourself have found no happiness in them."

"But I never should find happiness out of them," answered Caroline. "It is a pretty amusement for us who have the gold to buy our pleasures with, to abuse it and speak ill of it. But those who have not it,-you do not hear them depreciate it so. I believe they would sell out their home-evenings, those simple enjoyments books speak of and describe so well,-they would sell them as gladly as the author sells his descriptions of them, for our equipages, our grand houses, our toilet."

Arnold looked at his neighbor. Her hands, in their exquisitely fitting lilac gloves, lay carelessly across each other above the folds of the dress with which they harmonized perfectly. A little sweetbrier rose fell out from the white lace about her face, against the soft brown of her hair. Arnold pictured Laura gathering just such a rose from the porch she had described by the door of her country-home.

"Would you not have enjoyed gathering yourself that delicate rose that looks coquettish out of its simplicity?" he asked.

"Thank you, no," Caroline interrupted. "I selected it from Madame's Paris bonnets, because it suited my complexion. If I had picked the rose in the sun, don't you see my complexion would no longer have suited it?"

"I see you would enjoy life merely as a looker-on," said Arnold. "I would prefer to be an actor in it. When I have built my own house, and have digged my own potatoes, I shall know the meaning of house and potatoes. My wife, meanwhile, will be picking the roses for her hair."

"She will be learning the meaning of potatoes in cooking them," replied Caroline. "I would, indeed, rather be above life than in it. I have just enjoyed hearing Lucia sing her last song, and seeing Edgardo kill himself. I should not care to commit either folly myself. I pity people that have no money; I think they would as gladly hurry out of their restraints as Brignoli hurries into his everyday suit, after killing himself nightly as love-sick tenor."

"I would rather kill myself than think so," said Arnold.

This talk, which had been interrupted by the course of the opera, was finished as they left their seats. At the door, Mr. Gresham offered to help Caroline to her carriage. Arnold walked away.

"I would kill myself, if I could fancy that Laura thought so," he said, as he hurried home.

There was a cart at the door of the house, men carrying furniture on the stairs. The doors of Mrs. Ashton's rooms were wide-open; packing-paper and straw were scattered about.

"What is the matter?" he asked of his landlady.

"A gentleman has taken Mrs. Ashton's rooms. This is his grand piano."

"Mrs. Ashton! where is she?" asked Arnold.

"She left this morning. I should have been glad of further notice, but fortunately"-

"Where have they gone?" interrupted Arnold.

"Home. I don't know where. I can't keep the run."

"It is in New England. Is there a directory of New England?"

"A directory of New England! The names of its towns would make a large book!"

Arnold went to his room. If he could only recall the name of the town near which Laura lived! But American names had no significance. In Germany each town had a history. The small places were famous because they were near larger ones. And even in the smallest some drop of blood had been shed that had given it a name, or had made its name noted.

She had gone; and why had she gone without telling him?

If he could only have heard Mrs. Ashton's talk the evening before with her husband, he need not have asked the question.

"Do you know, dear, I think we had better leave New York directly,-tomorrow?"

Mr. Ashton looked inquiries.

"I don't like this intimacy with a foreigner. He really has been very devoted to Laura."

"And, pray, what is the harm?" asked Mr. Ashton.

"How can you ask? A foreigner, and we know nothing about him," answered Mrs. Ashton.

"But that he is the richest man in New York, quiet, inexpensive in his ways."

"If we were sure of all that! But I don't think her father would like it. I had a dream last night of Red Riding-Hood and the Wolf, and I haven't thought all day of anybody but Laura. We can get off early to-morrow. I have sent Laura to pack her things now."

"I'm afraid it is too late for her, poor girl!" said Mr. Ashton.

"She would be miserable, and her father would blame me, and I don't like it," said Mrs. Ashton. "And I am tired of New York."

"There's your dentist," suggested Mr. Ashton.

"I can come again," answered his wife.

Arnold's determination was made. He would visit every town in New England; he would cross every square mile of her territory. Of course he would find Laura. Since he should not stop till he found her, of course he would find her before he stopped.

He began his quest. He gave concerts in all the larger places; he looked anxiously through the large audiences that attended them,-hopelessly,-for how could he expect to find Laura among them? Often he left the railroads, to walk through the villages. It was the summer time, and he enjoyed the zest of climbing hills and wandering through quiet valleys.

He met with pleasant greetings in farm-houses, so far from the world that a stranger was greeted as a friend, where hospitality had not been so long worn upon but that it could offer a fresh cordiality to an unknown face. He wished he were a painter, that he might paint the pretty domestic scenes he saw: the cattle coming home at evening,-the children crowding round the school-mistress, as they walked away with her from the school-door,-the groups of girls sitting at sunset on the door-steps under the elms,-the broad meadows,-the rushing mountain-streams. But again, after the fresh delight of one of these country-walks, he would reproach himself that he had left the more beaten ways and the crowded cars, where he might have met Laura.

In passing in one of these from one of the larger towns to another, he met Caroline, on her bridal tour as Mrs. Gresham.

"You are not gone to Kansas yet?" she asked. "Then you will be able to come and visit us in Newport this summer. I assure you, you will find cottage-life there far more romantic than log-cabin life."

Of course he found success at last. It was just as summer was beginning to wane, but when in September she was putting on some of her last glories and her most fervid heats. He had reached the summit of a hill, then slowly walked down its slope, as he admired the landscape that revealed itself to him. He saw, far away among the hills in the horizon, the town towards which he was bound. The sunset was gathering brilliant colors over the sky; hills and meadows were bathed in a soft light. He stopped in front of a house that was separated from the road by a soft green of clover. By the gate there was a seat, on which he sat down to rest. It was all that was left of a great elm that some Vandal of the last generation had cut away. Nature had meanwhile been doing her best to make amends for the great damage. Soft mosses nestled over the broad, mutilated stump, the rains of years had washed out the freshness of its scar, vines wound themselves around, dandelions stretched their broad yellow shields above, and falling leaves rested there to form a carpet over it.

As Arnold, tired with his day's walk, was resting himself in the repose of the hour, the old master of the house came to talk with him. They spoke of the distance to the town, of the hilly road that led to it, of the meadows in the valley, and their rich crops. At last the old man asked Arnold into his house, and offered him the old-fashioned hospitality of a mug of cider, apologizing as he did so, telling how the times had changed, and what had become of all the cider-mills in the neighborhood. He showed the large stem of the sweetbrier under which they passed as they went into the house, such as Arnold had seen hanging over many a New-England porch, large enough for many initials to be carved upon it. They sat down in the little front-room, and talked on as the mother brought the promised mug of eider.

"Are you fond of music here?" asked Arnold, as he pointed to the old many-legged piano that stood at one side of the room.

"My girls play a little," answered the old man; "they have gone up to town this afternoon to get some tickets to that famous man's concert. They play a little, but they complain that the old piano is out of tune."

"That I could help," said Arnold, as he took his tuning-key out of his pocket.

"Oh, you are one of those tuners," said the old man, relieved; "my girls have been looking out for one."

Arnold seated himself at the piano. The old people went in and out of the room, but presently came back when he began to play. They sat in silent listening. "When Arnold came to a pause, the old man said,-

"That takes me back to the old meeting-house. Do you remember, wife, when I led in Dedham?"

"I," said the mother, "was thinking of that Ordination-ball, and of 'Money Musk' and 'Hull's Victory.'"

"That is strange enough," said the old man, "that it should sound like psalm-tunes and country-dances."

"It takes us back to our youth; that is it," she answered.

And Arnold went on. Soft home-strains came from the piano, and the two old people sank into their chairs in happy musing. The twilight was growing dimmer, the strains grew more soft and subdued, dying through gentle shades into silence. There had been a little rustling sound in the doorway. Arnold turned, when he had done, and saw a white figure standing there, in listening attitude, the head half bent, the hands clasped over a straw hat whose ribbons touched the ground. Behind her was the trellis of the porch, with its sweet-brier hanging over it. It was Laura, in the very frame in which his imagination had pictured her.

"Have the girls got home?" asked the old man, rousing himself, and going towards the door.-"Come in, girls. I half think we have got your great musician here. At any rate, he can work some magic, and has pulled out of the old piano all the music ever your mother and I have listened to all our life long.-My girls could not have hired me," he continued to Arnold, "to go to one of your new-fangled concerts; but whether it is because the little piano is so old, or because you know all that old music, you have brought it all back as though the world were beginning again.-We must not let him go from here to-night," he said to his wife and children. And when he found that Laura had met the musician in New York, his urgencies upon Arnold to stay were peremptory and unanswerable.

As Laura's younger sister, Clara, closed her eyes that night, she said,-

"Mamma and papa think his music sounded of home and old times. How did it sound to you, Laura?"

Laura put her hands over her closed eyes in the dark, and said, dreamily,-"It sounded to me like love-songs, sung by such a tender voice, out in the woods, somewhere, where there were pine-trees and a brook."

"It seemed to me like butterflies," said Clara. She did not explain what she meant.

The next morning, as it had been arranged in sisterly council, Laura was to entertain the stranger while Clara made the preparations for breakfast. Laura found him in the porch, already rejoicing in the morning view. But, after the first greeting, she found talking with him difficult. They fell into a silence; and to escape from it Laura finally ran into the kitchen, blue muslin and all. She pushed Clara away from the fireplace.

"You must let me help," she said, and moved pots, pans, and kettles.

"Another stick of wood would make this water boil," she went on.

"Where shall I find it?" said a voice behind her; and Arnold directly answered his own question with his ready help.

There followed great bustling, laughter, help, and interruption to work. When Mrs. Ashton came down, she found the breakfast-table in its wonted place in the broad kitchen, instead of being laid in the back-parlor, as was the custom when there were guests in the house. It was a very happy breakfast; the door opened wide upon the green behind the house, and the September morning air brought in an appetite for the generously laden table.

After breakfast, Arnold asked the way to the knoll behind the house, covered with pines. Laura went to show him, though it was but a little walk. In the woods, by the pine-trees, near the sound of the brook, Arnold asked Laura, "What had his music said to her?" Whether she answered him in the words she had given her sister the night before I will not say; but late to dinner, out from the woods, two happy lovers walked home in the bright September noon.

* * *

The log-cabin was built. If in its walls there were any broad chinks through which a wind might make its way, there were other draughts to send it back again,-strains of music, that helped to kindle the household hearth,-such strains as made sacred the seed that was laid in the earth, that refined coarse labor, that softened the tone of the new colony rising up around, so that life, even the rudest, was made noble, and the work was not merely for the body, but for the spirit, and a new land was planted under these strains of the musician.

* * *

ENGLISH NAVAL POWER AND ENGLISH COLONIES.

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What are the considerations which properly enter into any just estimate of a people's naval power?

In the first place, this certainly is a vital question: Are the people themselves in any true sense naval in their tastes, habits, and training? Do they love the sea? Is it a home to them? Have they that fertility of resources and expedients which the emergencies of sea-life make so essential, and which can come only from a long and fearless familiarity with old Ocean in all his aspects of beauty and all his aspects of terror? Or are they essentially landsmen,-landsmen just as much on the deck of a frigate as when marshalled on a battle-field? This is a test question. For if a nation has not sailors, men who smack of the salt sea, then vain are proud fleets and strong armaments.

I am satisfied that the ordinary explanation of that naval superiority which England has generally maintained over France is the true explanation. Certainly never were there stouter ships than those which France sent forth to fight her battles at the Nile and Trafalgar. Never braver men trod the deck than there laid down their lives rather than abase their country's flag. Yet they were beaten. The very nation which, on land, fighting against banded Europe, kept the balance for more than a generation at equipoise, on the water was beaten by the ships of one little isle of the sea. In the statement itself you have the explanation. The ships were from an isle of the sea. The men who manned them were born within sight of the ocean. In their childhood they sported with its waves. At twelve they were cabin-boys. At twenty, thorough seamen. Against the skill born of such an experience, of what avail was mere courage, however fiery?

A similar train of remarks may with truth be made about our Northern and Southern States. No doubt, the Rebel Government may send to England and purchase swift steamers like the Alabama, and man them with the reckless outcasts of every nationality, and send them forth to prey like pirates upon defenceless commerce. No doubt, in their hate, the Rebels may build sea-monsters like the Merrimack, or the Arkansas, or those cotton-mailed steamers at Galveston, and make all stand aghast at some temporary disaster. These things are unpleasant, but they are unavoidable. Desperation has its own peculiar resources. But these things do not alter the law. The North is thoroughly maritime, and in the end must possess a solid and permanent supremacy on the sea. The men of Cape Cod, the fishermen of Cape Ann, and the hardy sailors who swarm from the hundred islands and bays of Maine, are not to be driven from their own element by the proud planters of the South. Naval habits and naval strength go hand in hand. And in estimating the resources of any power, the first question is, Has she sailors,-not men of the land, but men of the sea?

* * *

There is a second question, equally important. What is a nation's capacity for naval production? What ship-yards has it? What docks? What machine-shops? What stores of timber, iron, and hemp? And what skilled workmen to make these resources available? A nation is not strong simply because it has a hundred ships complete and armed floating on its waters. "Iron and steel will bend and break," runs the old nursery-tale. And practice shows that iron and steel wrought into ships have no better fortune, and that the stoutest barks will strand and founder, or else decay, and, amid the sharp exigencies of war, with wonderful rapidity. Not what a nation has, then, but how soon it can fill up these gaps of war, how great is its capacity to produce and reproduce, tells the story of its naval power.

When Louis Napoleon completed that triumph of skill and labor, the port of Cherbourg, England trembled more than if he had launched fifty frigates. And well she might. For what is Cherbourg? Nothing less than an immense permanent addition to the French power of naval production. Here, protected from the sea by a breakwater miles in extent, and which might have been the work of the Titans, and girdled by almost impregnable fortifications, is more than a safe harbor for all the fleets of the world. For here are docks for the repairs I dare not say of how many vessels, and ship-houses for the construction of one knows not how many more, and work-shops and arsenals and stores of timber and iron well-nigh inexhaustible. This is to have more than a hundred ships. This is to create productive capacity out of which may come many hundred ships, when they are wanted. The faith men have in the maritime greatness of England rests not simply on the fact that she has afloat a few hundred frail ships, but rather on this more pregnant fact, that England, from Pentland Frith to Land's End, is one gigantic work-shop,-and that, whether she turn her attention to the clothing of the world or the building of navies, there is no outmeasuring her mechanical activity. The world has called us a weak naval power. But the world has been mistaken. We are strong almost as the strongest, if not in fleets, then in the capacity to produce fleets. Three hundred armed vessels, extemporized in eighteen months, and maintaining what, considering the extent of coast to be watched, must be called a most efficient blockade, will stand as an impressive evidence that capacity to produce is one of the best of nautical gifts.

* * *

But passing from these questions, which relate to what may be called a nation's innate character and capacity, we come to a third consideration, of perhaps even more immediate interest. One of the elements which help to make a nation's power is certainly its available strength. An important question, then, is, not only, How many ships can a nation produce? but, How many has it complete and ready for use? In an emergency, what force could it send at a moment's notice to the point of danger? If we apply this consideration to European powers, we shall appreciate better how young we are, and how little of our latent strength has been organized into actual efficiency. In 1857 England had 300 steam ships-of-war, carrying some 7,000 guns, nearly as many more sailing ships, carrying 9,000 guns, an equal number of gun-boats and smaller craft, besides a respectable navy connected with her East Indian colonies: a grand sum-total of more than 900 vessels and not less than 20,000 guns. Here, then, is a fleet, built and ready for service, which is many times stronger than that which we have been able to gather after eighteen months of constant and strenuous effort. And behind this array there is a community essentially mercantile, unsurpassed in mechanic skill and productiveness, and full of sailors of the best stamp. What tremendous elements of naval power are these! One does not wonder that the remark often made is so nearly true,-that, if there is any trouble in the farthest port on the globe, in a few hours you will see a British bull-dog quietly steaming up the harbor, to ask what it is all about, and whether England can make anything out of the transaction.

* * *

There is another consideration which perhaps many would put foremost. Has the nation kept pace with the progress of science and mechanic arts? Once her superior seamanship almost alone enabled England to keep the sea against all comers. But it is not quite so now. Naval warfare has undergone a complete revolution. The increasing weight of artillery, and the precision with which it can be used, make it imperative that the means of defence should approximate at least in effectiveness to the means of offence. The question now is not, How many ships has England? but, How many mail-clad ships? how many that would be likely to resist a hundred-pound ball hurled from an Armstrong or Parrott gun? And if it should turn out that in this race France had outrun England, and had twenty or thirty of these gladiators of the sea, most would begin to doubt whether the old dynasty could maintain its power. The interest and curiosity felt on this subject have almost created a new order of periodical literature. You open your "Atlantic," and the chances are ten to one that you skip over the stories and the dainty bits of poetry and criticism to see what Mr. Derby has to say about iron-clads. You receive your "Harper" and you feel aggrieved, if you do not find a picture of the Passaic, or of Timby's revolving turret, or of something similar which will give you a little more light concerning these monsters which are threatening to turn the world upside down. Now all this intense curiosity shows how general and instinctive is the conviction of the importance of this new element in naval force.

* * *

The considerations to which we have alluded have already received a large share of the public attention. They have been examined and discussed from almost every possible point of view. Probably every one has some ideas, more or less correct, concerning them. But there is a consideration which is equally important, which has received very little attention in this country, which indeed seems to have been entirely overlooked. It is this: The degree to which naval efficiency is dependent upon a wise colonial system.

If the only work of a fleet were to defend one's own harbors, then colonies, whatever might be their commercial importance, as an arm of naval strength, would be of but little value. If all the use England had for her navy were to defend London and Liverpool, she would do well to abandon many of her distant strongholds, which have been won at such cost, and which are kept with such care. If all our ships had to do were to keep the enemy out of Boston harbor and New York bay, it would not matter much, if every friendly port fifty miles from our own borders were closed against us. But the protection of our own ports is not by any means the chief work of fleets. The protection of commerce is as vital a duty. Commerce is the life-blood of a nation. Destroy that, and you destroy what makes and mans your fleets. Destroy that, and you destroy what supports the people and the government which is over the people. But if commerce is to be protected, war-ships must not hug timidly the shore. They must put boldly out to sea, and be wherever commerce is. They must range the stormy Atlantic. They must ply to and fro over that primitive home of commerce, the Mediterranean. Doubling the Cape, they must visit every part of the affluent East and of the broad Pacific. With restless energy they must plough every sea and explore every water where the hope of honest gain may entice the busy merchantman.

See what new and trying conditions are imposed upon naval power. A ship, however stanch, has her points of positive weakness. She can carry only a limited supply either of stores or of ammunition. She is liable, like everything else of human construction, to accidents of too serious a nature to be repaired on ship-board. If, now, from any reason, from disasters of storm or sea, or from deficient provisions, she is disabled, and no friendly port be near,-and in time of war no ports but our own are sure to be friendly,-then her efficiency is gone. And this difficulty increases almost in the ratio that modern science adds to her might. The old galley, which three thousand years ago, propelled by a hundred strong oarsmen, swept the waters of the Great Sea, was a poor thing indeed compared with a modern war-ship, in whose bosom beats a power as resistless as the elements. But its efficiency, such as it was, was not likely to be impaired. It had no furnace to feed, no machinery to watch, only the rude wants of rude men to supply, and rough oars to replace. A sailing ship, dependent upon the uncertain breeze, liable to be driven from her course by storms or to be detained by calms, gives no such impression of power as a steamship, mistress of her own movements, scorning the control of the elements, and keeping straight on to her destination in storm and calm alike. But in some respects the weak is strong. The ship is equal to most of the chances of a sea-experience. If the spar break, it can be replaced. If the storm rend the sails to ribbons, there are skilful hands which can find or make new ones. But the steamer has inexorable limitations. Break her machinery, and, if there be no friendly dock open to receive her, she is reduced at once to a sailing ship, and generally a poor one, too. Nor need you suppose accidents to cause this loss of efficiency. The mode of propulsion implies brevity of power. The galley depended upon the stalwart arms of its crew, and they were as likely to be strong to-morrow as to-day, and next month as to-morrow. The ship puts her trust in her white sails and in the free winds of heaven, which, however fickle they may be, never absolutely fail. But the steamer must carry in her own hold that upon which she feeds. You can reckon in weeks, yes, in days, the time when, unless her stock be renewed, her peculiar power will be lost.

What a tremendous limitation this is! A passenger-boat, whose engines move with the utmost possible economy, having no cargo but the food of her inmates, will carry only coal enough for thirty-three or -four days' consumption. This is the maximum. The majority cannot carry twenty-five days' supply. And when we add the armament and ammunition, and all that goes to make up a well-furnished ship, you cannot depend upon carrying twenty days' supply. Put now, in time of war with a great maritime power, your ship where she would be most wanted, in the East Indies, and close against her the ports of the civilized world, and the sooner she takes out her propeller, and sends up her masts higher, and spreads her wings wider, the better for her. That is, under such circumstances, modern improvements would be worse than useless; a sailing ship would be the best possible ship. Or come nearer home. Here is the Alabama, swift as the wind, the dread of every loyal merchantman. How long would she remain a thing of terror, if she were shut out from all ports but her own, or if our ships were permitted to frequent British and French ports for her destruction, as she is permitted to frequent them for our destruction? Or consider another case equally pertinent. We are told, and no doubt truly, that the loss of Norfolk, at the commencement of the war, was an incalculable injury to us. That is to say, the removal of our place of naval supply and repair only the few hundred miles which divide the Chesapeake from the Hudson was an untold loss. Suppose it were removed as many thousand miles, what then? One single fact, showing what, under the best of circumstances, is the difficulty and expense of modern warfare, is worth a thousand theories. In 1857, then, it took two hundred thousand tons of coal to supply that part of the English fleet which was in the East,-two hundred thousand tons to be brought from somewhere in sailing ships. If ever a contest shall arise among great commercial powers, it will be seen that modern science has made new conditions, and that the first inexorable demand of modern warfare is coal depots, and docks and machine-shops, established in ports easy of access, and protected by natural and artificial strength, and scattered at easy distances all over the commercial world. In short, men will appreciate better than they do now, that the right arm of naval warfare is not mail-clad steamers, but well-chosen colonies.

* * *

The sagacity of England was never more clearly shown than in the foresight with which she has provided against such an emergency. Let war come when it may, it will not find England in this respect unprepared. So thickly are her colonies scattered over the face of the earth, that her war-ships can go to every commercial centre on the globe without spreading so much as a foot of canvas to the breeze.

There is the Mediterranean Sea. A great centre of commerce. It was a great centre as long ago as when the Phoenician traversed it, and, passing through the Straits of Hercules, sped on his way to distant and then savage Britain. It was a great centre when Rome and Carthage wrestled in a death-grapple for its possession. But England is as much at home in the Mediterranean as if it were one of her own lakes. At Gibraltar, at its entrance, she has a magnificent bay, more than five miles in diameter, deep, safe from storms, protected from man's assault by its more than adamantine rock. In the centre, at Malta, she has a harbor, land-locked, curiously indented, sleeping safely beneath the frowning guns of Valetta. But from Southampton to Gibraltar is for a steamship an easy six days' sail; from Gibraltar to Malta not more than five days; and from Malta to the extreme eastern coast of the sea and back again hardly ten days' sail.

Take the grand highway of nations to India. England has her places of refreshment scattered all along it with almost as much regularity as depots on a railroad. From England to Gibraltar is six days' sail; thence to Sierra Leone twelve days; to Ascension six days; to St. Helena three days; to Cape Colony eight days; to Mauritius not more; to Ceylon about the same; and thence to Calcutta three or four days. Going farther east, a few days' sail will bring you to Singapore, and a few more to Hong Kong, and then you are at the gates of Canton. Mark now that in this immense girdle of some twelve or fifteen thousand miles there is no distance which a well-appointed steamer may not easily accomplish with such store of coal as she can carry. She may not, indeed, stop at all these ports. It may be more convenient and economical to use sails a part of the distance, rather than steam. But, if an exigency required it, she could stop and find everywhere a safe harbor.

What is true of the East Indies is true of the West Indies, England has as much power as we have to control the waters of the Western Atlantic and of the Gulf of Mexico. If we have Boston and New York and Pensacola and New Orleans and Key West, she has Halifax and the Bermudas and Balize and Jamaica and Nassau and a score more of island-harbors stretching in an unbroken line from the Florida Reefs to the mouth of the Orinoco. And if our civil war were ended to-day, and we were in peaceable possession of all our ports, she could keep a strong fleet in the Gulf and along our coast quite as easily as we could.

* * *

But it is not simply the number of the British colonies, or the evenness with which they are distributed, that challenges our highest admiration. The positions which these colonies occupy, and their natural military strength, are quite as important facts. There is not a sea or a gulf in the world, which has any real commercial importance, that England has not a stronghold in the throat of it. And wherever the continents trending southward come to points around which the commerce of nations, must sweep, there, upon every one of them, is a British settlement, and the cross of St. George salutes you as you are wafted by. There is hardly a little desolate, rocky island or peninsula, formed apparently by Nature for a fortress, and formed for nothing else, but the British lion has it secure beneath his paw.

This is literal fact. Take, for example, the great overland route from Europe to Asia. Despite its name, its real highway is on the waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It has three gates,-three alone. They are the narrow strait of Gibraltar, fifteen miles wide, that place where the Mediterranean narrows between Sicily and Africa to less than a hundred miles wide, and the strait of Bab-el-mandeb, seventeen miles wide. England holds the keys to every one of these gates. Count them,-Gibraltar, Malta, and at the mouth of the Red Sea, not one, but many keys. There, midway in the narrow strait, is the black, bare rock of Perim, sterile, precipitous, a perfect counterpart of Gibraltar; and on either side, between it and the main-land, are the ship-channels which connect the Red Sea with the great Indian Ocean. This England seized in 1857. A little farther out is the peninsula of Aden, another Gibraltar, as rocky, as sterile, as precipitous, connected with the mainland by a narrow strait, and having at its base a populous little town, a harbor safe in all winds, and a central coal-depot. This England bought, after her fashion of buying, in 1839. And to complete her security, we are now told that she has purchased of some petty Sultan the neighboring islands of Socotra and Kouri, giving, as it were, a retaining-fee, that, though she does not need them herself, no rival power shall ever possess them.

As we sail a little farther on, we come to the Chinese Sea. What a beaten track of commerce is this! What wealth of comfort and luxury is wafted over it by every breeze! The teas of China! The silks of farther India! The spices of the East! What ships of every clime and nation swarm on its waters! The stately barks of England, France, and Holland! Our own swift ships! And mingled with them, in picturesque confusion, the clumsy junk of the Chinaman, the Malay prahu and the slender, darting bangkong of the Sea Dyak! Has England neglected to secure on a permanent basis her mercantile interests in the Chinese Sea? At the lower end of that sea, where it narrows and bends into Malacca Strait, she holds Singapore, a little island, mostly covered with jungles and infested by tigers, which to this day destroy annually from two to three hundred lives,-a spot of no use to her whatever, except as a commercial depot, but of inestimable value for that, and which, under her fostering care, is growing up to take its place among the great emporiums of the world. Half-way up this sea is the island of Labuan, whose chief worth is this, that beneath its surface and that of the neighboring mainland are hidden inexhaustible treasures of coal, which are likely soon to be developed, and to yield wealth and power to the hand that controls them. At the upper end of the sea is Hong Kong, a hot, unhealthy, and disagreeable island, but which gives her what she wants, a depot and a base from which to threaten and control the neighboring waters. Clearly the Chinese Sea, the artery of Oriental commerce, belongs far more to England than to the races which border it.

Even in the broad and as yet comparatively untracked Pacific she is making silent advances toward dominion. The continent of Australia, which she has monopolized, forms its southwestern boundary. And pushed out from this, six hundred miles eastward, like a strong outpost, is New Zealand; itself larger than Great Britain; its shores so scooped and torn by the waves that it must be a very paradise of commodious bays and safe havens for the mariner; and lifted up, as if to relieve it from island tameness, are great mountains and dumb volcanoes, worthy of a continent, and which hide in their bosoms deep, broad lakes. Yet the soil of the lowlands is of extraordinary fertility, and the climate, though humid, deals kindly with the Anglo-Saxon constitution. Nor is this all; for, advanced from it north and south, like picket-stations, are Norfolk isle and the Auckland group, which, if they have no other attractions, certainly have this great one, good harbors. And it requires no prophet's eye to see, that, when England needs posts farther eastward, she will find them among the innumerable green coral islets which stud the Pacific.

Turn now your steps homeward, and pause a moment at the Bermudas, "the still vexed Bermoothes." Beautiful isles, with their fresh verdure, green gems in the ocean, with airs soft and balmy as Eden's were! They have their homely uses too. They furnish arrowroot for the sick, and ample supplies of vegetables earlier than sterner climates will grant. Is this all that can be said? Reflect a little more deeply. Here is a military and naval depot, and here a splendid harbor, land-locked, amply fortified, difficult of access to strangers,-and all this as near to the whole Southern coast as Boston and New York are, all this within three or four days' sail of any one of the Atlantic ports North or South. England keeps this, no doubt, as a sort of halfway house on the road to her West Indian possessions; but should we go to war with her, she would use it none the less as a base of offensive operations, where she might gather and hurl upon any unprotected port all her gigantic naval power.

We have asserted that England holds all the Southern points in which the continents of the world terminate. Examine this statement, and see how much it means. Take your map of the world, and you will find that the land-surface of the globe culminates at the south in five points, no more,-America at Cape Horn,5 Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, Asia in Ceylon and the Malayan peninsula, and Australia in the island of Tasmania. Is it not surprising that these wedges which cut into the steady flowing stream of commerce, these choice points of mercantile and naval advantage, are all in the hands of one single power? Can it be of chance? Or rather, is it not the result of a well-ordered purpose, which, waiting its time, seizing every favorable opportunity, has finally achieved success?

The topic is not exhausted, but the facts already adduced prove clearly enough that somewhere in the English government there has been sagacity to plant colonies, not only at convenient distances, but also in such commanding positions that they do their part to confirm and perpetuate her maritime supremacy. Can any one fail to see how immeasurably this system increases naval force? Of course such strongholds, wherever placed, would be of no use to a power which had not ships. They could not be held by such a power. But, given a fleet as powerful as ever rode the waves, given seamen gallant and skilful as ever furled a sail or guided the helm, and these depots and havens, scattered, but not blindly, over the earth, quadruple the efficiency of the power which they could not create.

* * *

The number of the English colonies, their happy distribution, and, above all, their commanding position, furnish subjects of exceeding interest. But the patience with which England has waited, the skill with which she has seized the proper moment for success, and especially the fixed determination with which she has held her prizes, are topics of equal or greater interest.

The history of the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the earliest of these prizes, supplies a good illustration. This had many owners before it came under British rule. But none of them seemed to know its true value. All held it with a loose grasp. Its surprise and capture by the sailors from Admiral Rooke's fleet, creditable as it was to its captors, who swarmed up the steep cliffs as they would have swarmed up the shrouds and yards of their own frigates, leaping from rock to rock with fearless activity, was equally discreditable to its defenders, who either did not appreciate the worth of their charge or else had not the courage to hold it as such a trust should have been held. But when England closed her strong hand upon it, nothing could open it again, neither motives of profit nor motives of fear. In 1729 Spain offered no less than ten million dollars for its return. A great sum in those times, and to offer to a people who had been impoverished by long wars! But the descendants of those sea-kings, Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, who had carried England's flag and England's renown into every sea, would not part with the brightest jewel in her crown, and for a price. Three times, too, the besieger has appeared before Gibraltar, and vainly. From 1779 to 1782 France and Spain exhausted all their resources in a three-years' siege, which is one of the most remarkable episodes in military history. By sea and by land, by blockade, by bombardment, by assault, was it pressed. But the tenacity of England was more than a match for the fire and pride of France and Spain, and it ended in signal and disastrous failure.

Glance for a moment at the history of the seizure of Malta. For generations the value of this citadel had been known. All the strong nations of Europe had looked with covetous eyes upon it. But it was a difficult thing to find any pretext for its capture. It was held by the Knights of St. John, the decrepit remnant of an order whose heroism had many times been the shield of Christendom against the Turk, and whose praise had once filled the whole earth. They were now as inoffensive as they were incapable. Their helplessness was their true defence,-and the memory of their good deeds. At last, in 1798, Napoleon, on his way to Egypt, partly by force and partly by treaty, obtained possession of it. So strong were its fortresses, that he himself acknowledged that the knights needed only to have shut their gates against him to have baffled him. Two years after, the English, watching their time, by blockade, starved out the French garrison. Its new owners held it with their usual determination. Rather than surrender it,-though they had made treaty-stipulations to that effect,-they deliberately entered upon a ten-years' war with France. The indignation which Napoleon felt, and the language which he used, show that he knew the value of the prize for which he was struggling. "I would rather," said he, "see you in possession of Montmartre than in possession of Malta." "Malta gives the dominion of the Mediterranean; I thus lose the most important sea in the world, and the respect of Europe. Let the English obtain a port to put into; to that I have no objection; but I am determined that they shall not have two Gibraltars in one sea,-one at the entrance, and one in the middle." Nevertheless he was forced to yield to destiny stronger than his own iron will. Eleven years more found him in sad exile, and the British flag still waving over the Valetta.

Nothing better illustrates the firmness with which England holds her purpose than the fate of Aden. This is the halfway station between England and her East Indian possessions. It commands the Red Sea. It is the best spot for a coal-depot in the East. Properly defended, it is almost impregnable. The wide-roving eye of mercantile England had long ago searched out and in fancy possessed it. Hear what one of her own historians has said:-"Eager eyes had long been turned toward this spot." To find an excuse, real or apparent, for its appropriation was the trouble. The Sultan of Lahidge, its owner, was indeed little better than a freebooter. But, though wild, lawless, and of piratical tendencies, he had for a long time the wisdom not to molest British traders. In 1839, however, whether from ignorance of its nationality, or from recklessness, is uncertain, he seized and pillaged a native Madras boat sailing under British colors. The East Indian government at once took advantage of the opportunity thus afforded. An ambassador was sent to demand remuneration, and this remuneration was-Aden. The Sultan was at first disposed to accede to this demand, but soon kindling into rage, he attempted to lay violent hands upon the ambassador. The reply was-a fleet and a military force, which first cannonaded and then stormed the stronghold at the point of the bayonet. So Aden passed into the hands which had been waiting for years to grasp it. It is said by some writers that a compensation has been made to the Sultan; but the sum is not mentioned, nor the authority for so doubtful a statement given.

Hong Kong furnishes another illustration. Most, no doubt, are familiar with the general outlines of the first Chinese War: how England stormed, one after another, the ill-constructed and worse-defended Chinese forts, until the courage and insolence of the Lord of the Central Flowery Kingdom alike failed. Why, now, did not England retain military possession of Canton, or some other important commercial town? That would have given her much trouble and little profit. She chose rather to retain only one sterile island of a few miles in diameter, whose possession would awaken nobody's jealousy, but which would furnish a sufficient base for operations in any future wars.

One more example. Until about the beginning of the present century, Ceylon and Cape Colony were Dutch possessions. This is the history of their loss. Soon after the French Revolution broke out, Holland, with the consent of a portion of her people, was incorporated, if not in name, yet in reality, into the French Empire. During the long wars of Napoleon, she shared the fortunes of her master, and when continual defeats broke the power of both on the sea, her colonies were left defenceless. Ceylon and Cape Colony fell into the hands of the English; but so, too, did Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Essequibo, Berbice, and, indeed, with but little exception, all her colonial possessions, East and West. At the peace of 1814, England restored to Holland the larger portion of this territory, though not without many remonstrances from her own merchants and statesmen. But Ceylon and Cape Colony she did not restore. These were more to her than rich islands. They were links in a grand chain of commercial connection. As Aden is the half-way station on the overland route, so Cape Colony is the half-way station on the ocean route; and Ceylon, while it rounds out and completes the great peninsula of which it may be considered to be a part, furnishes in Point de Galle, at the south, a most needed port of refuge, and on the east, at Trincomalee, one of the finest of naval harbors, with dock-yards, machine-shops, and arsenal complete. Even England could be generous to a fallen foe, whose enmity had been quite as much a matter of necessity as inclination. But by no mistimed clemency could she sacrifice such solid advantages as these.

This steady march toward the control of the commercial waters of the earth, some of whose footsteps we have now traced, reveals the existence of as steady a purpose. This colonial empire, so wide, so consistent, and so well compacted, is not the work of dull men, or the result of a series of fortunate blunders. Back of its history, and creating its history, there must have been a clear, calm, persistent, ambitious policy,-a policy which has usually regarded appearances, but which has also managed to accomplish its cherished purposes. And the end towards which this policy tends is always one and the same: to enlarge England's commercial resources, and to build up side by side with this peaceful strength a naval power which shall keep untarnished her proudest title,-"Mistress and sovereign of the seas."

* * *

With justice England is called the mightiest naval power in the world. And well she may be. She has every element to make her mighty. The waves which beat upon all her coasts train up a race of seamen as hardy, as skilful, as courageous as ever sailed the sea. In her bosom are hidden inexhaustible stores of iron, copper, and coal. Her Highland hills are covered with forests of oak and larch, growing while men sleep. Her borders are crowded with workshops, and her skies are dark with the smoke of their chimneys, and the air rings with the sound of their hammers. Her docks are filled with ships, and her watchful guardians are on every sea. Her eyes are open to profit by every invention. And her strong colonies, overlooking all waters, give new vigor and a better distribution to her naval resources. A mighty naval power she is, and, for good or evil, a mighty naval power she is likely to continue. The great revolutions in warfare, which in our day are proceeding with such wonderful rapidity, may for a time disturb this supremacy; but in the end, the genius of England, essentially maritime, and as clear and strong on the sea as it is apt to be weak and confused upon the land, will enable her to stand on her own element, as she has stood for centuries, with no superior, and with scarcely a rival.

* * *

OUR GENERAL.

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An officer on General Butler's staff, residing constantly, while in New Orleans, under his roof, having had direct personal observation of him during the entire progress of the "Ship-Island Expedition," may perhaps be pardoned for putting on record in this magazine some characteristic traits of the man whom this war has brought so prominently, not only before our own people, but also the people of Europe.

In the execution of this task I shall confine myself to the mention of incidents of his administration at New Orleans, and the relation of the inside history (the history of motive and cause) of many of his public acts which elicited from the European press and the enemies of the Union in our own land the bitterest abuse,-believing that in so doing I offer stronger proof of the injustice of their attacks than I could possibly furnish by any attempt to argue them down. And that the patience of my readers may not be unnecessarily taxed, I shall proceed without further introduction to the consideration of OUR GENERAL in New Orleans.

* * *

One of the first difficulties which General Butler found in the way of the restoration of the national authority in that city was the attitude of the foreign consuls. Under the leadership of Mr. George Coppell, who was acting for the British Government in the absence of the consul, Mr. Muir, they tacitly declared an offensive and defensive war of the guerrilla stamp against every step or order for the promotion of loyal sentiment or the inculcation of a belief in the strength of our Government. Nothing excited greater hostility abroad than the General's treatment of these gentlemen, and in nothing has he been more admired by his loyal countrymen than in his complete discomfiture of them.

I have noticed this little episode in the history of the Rebellion simply with the view of showing, that, while officially he met their combined attacks with "war to the knife," his personal intercourse with them was friendly and pleasant.

After the consuls had apparently abandoned their unsuccessful alliance in despair, Mr. Coppell, who had never yet met the General, expressed, through the commander of Her Britannic Majesty's frigate Rinaldo, a desire for an introduction to him.

The General received Mr. Coppell with marked cordiality, and was, I think, pleased with his appearance; at all events, from that time until we left the city Mr. Coppell was frequently at the office, oftentimes by invitation of the General, and nothing ever occurred to disturb the harmony of their personal relations.

On one occasion they were discussing the French and English statutes prohibiting the subjects of those powers from holding slaves. A large number of French and English subjects were living in open violation of this prohibition in New Orleans, and the General remarked to Mr. Coppell that he had a great mind to heap coals of fire on the heads of his friends across the Atlantic by enforcing their laws. Mr. Coppell with eager enthusiasm applauded the project, and urged the General to carry it into effect.

The Spanish Government was represented in New Orleans by Don Juan Callejon. Early in the summer the strictness of our quarantine of vessels from Cuba produced some ill feeling on his part, which manifested itself in the refusal of a clean bill of health to the steamer Roanoke, about to leave New Orleans for Havana. In response to a request from the General, Don Juan called immediately at the office; but owing to the unfortunate circumstance of his entire ignorance of the English language, and the consequent necessity of conversing through the medium of an interpreter, a serious misunderstanding ensued, and the General, supposing the Consul to be contemptuously setting our Government at defiance, threatened to send him out of the country; but afterwards learning that their difference had arisen purely from misinterpretation, and that Se?or Callejon had proved himself a patriot and hero in his country's service, the General, with the honest admiration which one brave man always feels toward another, took especial pains to render their intercourse, both official and personal, as agreeable as might be. And to show the Spanish consul that in the matter of quarantine he was inspired by no dislike toward his Government, he placed more rigid restrictions, if possible, on American vessels from infected ports than on the vessels of Spain.

To Se?or Ruiz, the acting consul of the Republic of Mexico, who had the singular consular virtue of sympathizing warmly with the free North, the General's attentions were something more sincere than the hackneyed "assurances of distinguished consideration" so necessary to diplomatic correspondence and intercourse.

Indeed, I doubt if any of the foreign commercial agents at New Orleans would claim that they ever had cause to complain against General Butler on account of any personal grievance.

* * *

Probably nothing in the history of General Butler's administration in New Orleans drew from the foes of free government in every land such unmeasured execration as the celebrated "Order No. 28," relating to the conduct of women in the street, and I wish to give the most decided testimony upon this subject. That something was necessary to be done to stop the insults to which we were continually subjected by the other sex, I presume no one who is well informed as to their frequency and humiliating character will for a moment doubt. Upon our arrival in the city I flattered myself that such demonstrations would excite in me no sentiment more serious than pity for the childishness that prompted them; but I confess, that, after a day or two, the sneers and contortions of countenance, the angry withholding of the dress from contact with my person, and the abrupt departure from the sidewalk to the middle of the street to avoid even passing the hated uniform, were too much for my philosophy, and gave me a sense of humiliation more painful than I can express. And yet the insults I received were slight, compared to those offered to many of our officers and men.

This condition of affairs continued about two weeks, until it became positively intolerable.

Young officers, too gallant, and too deeply imbued with the American respect for woman, to resent, by word or deed, the indignity, would come to the General with their cheeks crimson with shame and the effort to repress their just indignation, and beg him to take some measure for the suppression of the evil.

Most men would have seen no other solution of the difficulty than the arrest and punishment of a few of the offenders as a warning to the rest. But General Butler foresaw, what was afterwards proved in the case of Mrs. Larue, that the arrest of women would invariably provoke a street-disturbance, which might lead to bloodshed; he, therefore, remembering an old ordinance of the city of London, republished it in the form of the General Order which has gained so universal a celebrity.

Mr. Monroe, who was mayor of the city at the time of its capture, came in a paroxysm of anger to protest against the order as a libel on every lady in New Orleans.

The General, with perfect good-nature, went over every word of it with him, explaining its origin and its intent, and demonstrating beyond doubt that it simply gave the female population of the city the opportunity to choose in which of the two categories they would be classed,-ladies or "common women,"-and assured the Mayor, that, above all, his idea was to promulgate such an order as would execute itself, and prevent the very thing which the Rebels have since charged upon him,-"a war upon women."

Three times Mr. Monroe left the General with the firm conviction that the act was perfectly proper; but, instigated by crafty and able conspirators, of whom the ruling spirit was Mr. Pierre Soulè, he repeatedly returned with fresh attacks on the General's administration, and especially on this order, until, the General's patience being exhausted, he said to him,-"Mr. Mayor, you have played with me long enough. Your case is settled. The boat leaves for Fort Jackson this afternoon, and you must be ready to take passage on her at four o'clock."

I never witnessed greater forbearance than the General displayed in his treatment of the Mayor; indeed, I was at the time quite indignant that he allowed him such liberty of speech and action.

One word more about "Order No. 28." General Beauregard's fierce anger, and his horrible construction of its provisions, intended for effect on his troops, will be well remembered by my readers. It may not be uninteresting to them to know that Beauregard's sister in New Orleans, when asked her opinion of the order, answered,-"I have no interest in or objection to it; it does not apply to me." Is it difficult to guess to which class she belonged?

Can I say anything stronger in vindication of the propriety of this order, or of the General's sagacity in issuing it, than that the first twenty-four hours after its promulgation witnessed a complete, and, it seemed to us who were there, almost miraculous, change in the deportment of the ladies of the Crescent City? If success is the test of merit, then was it one of the most meritorious acts of the war.

* * *

The severity with which General Butler punished crimes against the Government that he was determined should be respected, or against the poor and oppressed, was of course in the Confederacy and in Europe denounced as the most fiendish cruelty, and he was characterized as a man whose every impulse was prompted by the most brutal passions.

I do not expect the people of the South to believe my statement, that I never met a man of greater generosity and kindness of heart, or one more pleased to do an act of clemency; but I think the loyal reader will find in the following illustrations of these traits evidence of its truth.

Among the Rebel soldiers who were captured at the surrender of Fort Jackson, in April, 1862, were four men who, with the remainder of the garrison, were paroled as prisoners of war, but were soon after discovered in an attempt to organize a company, of which they were elected officers, with the view of crossing our lines by force and rejoining the Rebel army, and upon their own confession were convicted and sentenced to be shot,-the only expiation known to the rules of civilized warfare for so flagrant a violation of the parole.

During the interval between their conviction and the day appointed for their execution, I had occasion to see them frequently, and was strongly impressed with the idea that they had sinned in ignorance of the magnitude of their offence, and that a commutation of the death-penalty would be of more benefit than injury to our cause. As the day of their death rapidly drew near, and I observed their agonized despair of a reprieve, and their earnest, sincere efforts to prepare for a fate they deemed inevitable, I determined to make an urgent appeal to the General for their lives.

On the afternoon previous to the day of their expected execution, I went to the General's room and implored him to relent toward the unhappy men.

The General, in a kind, but apparently decided manner, met my urgent request by referring to the proofs of their guilt, and the necessity of the severest punishment as an example to others.

I was well aware of the futility of attempting to reason with the astute lawyer, who had all the law on his side, and twenty years' experience at the bar in cases where he had met every argument that ingenuity could devise; so, avoiding his reasoning, I appealed directly to his feelings. In this I was most earnestly and efficiently aided by one of his household, whose heart and influence were always on the side of tenderness and mercy.

The earnestness with which I urged the cause of the wretched prisoners excited in me an interest I was not before conscious of feeling, and I suddenly found myself almost unable to speak from the choking emotions which swelled up into my throat.

Beneath the General's argument for abstract justice, I thought, however, I discovered a warm sympathy for my distress, and I gathered encouragement.

In a few minutes an officer who had been in the room during our interview, and from whom the General desired to conceal his benevolent intention toward the men, took his leave. The General turned to me immediately, and, in a voice scarcely audible, said,-"Do not feel so badly, Captain; it shall be all right."

Not daring to trust my voice, I bowed my thanks and left the room, happy in the possession of so agreeable a secret.

The next morning, as I rode out to the spot assigned for the terrible tragedy, and gazed upon the silent, curious crowd that followed, and upon the four men sitting there upon those rough pine coffins, straining their eager eyes for one long last look at the glorious sun whose rising they were never again to see, I doubted if their happiness, when an hour hence they would be returning to the city with joyous anticipations of assured life, would be any more sincere than his,-"the American Haynau's,"-who, in his room at the St. Charles Hotel, rejoiced that he had been able to indulge the inclinations of his heart without detriment to the service.

In justice to others, I ought to add that a strong effort for the pardon of these prisoners was made by a number of the prominent residents of New Orleans.

It was in June of last year, I think, that a German bookseller named Keller was sent by General Butler to Ship Island for two years for exhibiting in his shop-window a human skeleton labelled "Chickahominy," claiming it to be the bones of some gallant soldier of the Union, army who had fallen in one of the disastrous battles in Virginia.

At his examination, Keller protested that he was a Union man, and had been imposed upon by some designing person who had taken advantage of his ignorance to make his shop the medium of displaying contempt and hatred of our cause by the revolting spectacle I have mentioned. It was proved, however, that Keller had said these were the bones of a Yankee. His defence may or may not have been true; but, at all events, he was apparently not an evil-disposed person, and I always believed the General punished the offence rather than the man.

After Keller had been on Ship Island some two or three months, his wife, a very modest, respectable little woman, came to me frequently with a piteous story of the suffering occasioned herself and her children by the prolonged absence of her husband, and begged me to intercede with the General for his pardon. Satisfied that the cause could suffer no injury by the return of the unfortunate man to his home, I promised to do my best to obtain his release. Accordingly, I took advantage of every favorable opportunity to drop a word in the hearing of the General for the benefit of poor Keller, who was pining away in his confinement at a rate that bade fair soon to render him as valuable a subject for anatomical research as the article he had exhibited in his shop-window.

At first my efforts met with very doubtful encouragement; but I was satisfied that the General's obduracy was caused by a conflict between his sense of public duty and his natural tendency toward forgiveness; so, fully assured that a few weeks would produce the desired result, I contented myself with merely recalling the ease to his memory whenever an opportunity offered.

Toward the last of October, being somewhat impatient at my tardy progress, I had just resolved to abandon my previous policy of waiting for time to do its work, and to make a vigorous onslaught upon the General's sympathies, when I learned that he had issued an order for Keller's release; and thus I was confirmed in my opinion that the General's heart was not proof against the claims of the unfortunate erring.

In the case of Mrs. Phillips, who was banished to Ship Island for her ghastly levity over the dead body of the gallant and lamented young De Kay, the General ordered a release after three months of exile, because he learned that her health was suffering in consequence of separation from her friends; and I doubt very much if she would have remained in duress three weeks, if the Rebel newspapers had not taunted the General so much, and threatened an expedition against the island for the purpose of rescuing the fair prisoner.

Mrs. Larue and Mrs. Cowen, the only other women who were imprisoned,-the former for openly distributing treasonable pamphlets in the street, thereby causing a riot, and the latter for publishing in a newspaper a card of defiance against the national authority,-after two weeks of punishment, were pardoned on the first intimation that they were suffering in health or comfort. Indeed, the General never desired the imprisonment of any person a single day beyond the time necessary for his correction, or longer than the requirements of justice demanded. I presume very few persons are aware that one of his last acts in New Orleans was to recommend to General Banks the pardon of all prisoners confined on mere political charges.

* * *

On account of the great and increasing pressure on the General's time by the immense and miscellaneous crowd of visitors, it was found necessary to establish an office outside of his, where every unknown caller should state his business to the officer in charge, who would decide whether or not it was essential for the person to see the General.

For a few weeks I had charge of this office, and nearly all my time was occupied in refusing passes outside of our lines. In a majority of instances, the applicants for the privilege of going into the Confederacy-many of them women-told the most sorrowful tales of destitution that could be relieved only by reaching their friends in the enemy's country; others urged, that a husband, a father, or a brother was enjoined by the physician to seek the country as the sole means of securing a return of health; in short, I was plied with every conceivable story of heart-rending woe and misery, related to induce the granting of passes, which the General, in consequence of the fact that in almost every instance where he had yielded to such importunities his confidence had been abused by the carrying of supplies and information to the Rebel army, had ordered me invariably to refuse. Ordinarily I succeeded in steeling my heart against these urgent entreaties; but occasionally some story, peculiarly harrowing in its details, seemed to demand a special effort in behalf of the applicant, and I would go to the General, and, in the desperation of my cause, exclaim,-

"General, you must see some of these people. I know, if you would only hear their stories, you would give them passes."

"You are entirely correct, Captain," he would reply. "I am sure I should; and that is precisely why I want you to see them for me."

And with this very doubtful satisfaction I would return to my desk, convinced that sensibility in a man who was allowed no discretion in its exercise was an entirely useless attribute, and that in future I would set my face as a flint against every appeal to my feelings.

* * *

Since my return to the North, I have heard a number of gentlemen-former political associates of General Butler-compare his "marvellous conversion" (here they always look, and apparently mean to be, severely sarcastic) on the slavery-question with that of Saul of Tarsus to Christianity.

If the last two years of our history have failed to educate them up to the meaning of this war, I confess that I think them almost incorrigible; yet I cannot believe that even they, if they had had the experience which has placed not only General Butler, but almost every one of the twenty thousand men composing the old "Army of the Gulf," firmly on the side of freedom to all, of whatever complexion, could longer withstand the dictates of God and humanity.

Let me describe one or two of the scenes I witnessed in New Orleans, that opened our eyes to the true nature of human bondage. The following incident is the same so well told by the General himself to the committee of the New-York Chamber of Commerce, at the Fifth-Avenue Hotel, in January last, and which was then reported in full in the New-York "Times." One of my objects in repeating this story is to illustrate my implicit confidence-inspired by my knowledge of his character-in the General's humanity and championship of the weak and down-trodden.

Just previous to the arrival of General Banks in New Orleans I was appointed Deputy-Provost-Marshal of the city, and held the office for some days after he had assumed command. One day, during the last week of our stay in the South, a young woman of about twenty years called upon me to complain that her landlord had ordered her out of her house, because she was unable longer to pay the rent, and she wished me to authorise her to take possession of one of her father's houses that had been confiscated, he being a wealthy Rebel, then in the Confederacy, and actively engaged in the Rebellion.

The girl was a perfect blonde in complexion: her hair was of a very pretty, light shade of brown, and perfectly straight; her eyes a clear, honest gray; and her skin as delicate and fair as a child's. Her manner was modest and ingenuous, and her language indicated much intelligence.

Considering these circumstances, I think I was justified in wheeling around in my chair and indulging in an unequivocal stare of incredulous amazement, when in the course of conversation she dropped a remark about having been born a slave.

"Do you mean to tell me," said I, "that you have negro blood in your veins?" And I was conscious of a feeling of embarrassment at asking a question so apparently preposterous.

"Yes," she replied, and then related the history of her life, which I shall repeat as briefly as possible.

"My father," she commenced, "is Mr. Cox, formerly a judge of one of the courts in this city. He was very rich, and owned a great many houses here. There is one of them over there," she remarked, na?vely, pointing to a handsome residence opposite my office in Canal Street. "My mother was one of his slaves. When I was sufficiently grown, he placed me at school at the Mechanics' Institute Seminary, on Broadway, New York. I remained there until I was about fifteen years of age, when Mr. Cox came on to New York and took me from the school to a hotel, where he obliged me to live with him as his mistress; and to-day, at the age of twenty-one, I am the mother of a boy five years old who is my father's son. After remaining some time in New York, he took me to Cincinnati and other cities at the North, in all of which I continued to live with him as before. During this sojourn in the Free States, I induced him to give me a deed of manumission; but on our return to New Orleans he obtained it from me, and destroyed it. At this time I tried to break off the unnatural connection, whereupon he caused me to be publicly whipped in the streets of the city, and then obliged me to marry a colored man; and now he has run off, leaving me without the least provision against want or actual starvation, and I ask you to give me one of his houses that I may have a home for myself and three little children."

Strange and improbable as this story appeared, I remembered, as it progressed, that I had heard it from Governor Shepley, who, as well as General Butler, had investigated it, and learned that it was not only true in every particular, but was perfectly familiar to the citizens of New Orleans, by whom Judge Cox had been elected to administer JUSTICE.

The clerks of my office, most of whom were old residents of the city, were well informed in the facts of the case, and attested the truth of the girl's story.

I was exceedingly perplexed, and knew not what to do in the matter; but after some thought I answered her thus:-

"This Department has changed rulers, and I know nothing of the policy of the new commander. If General Butler were still in authority, I should not hesitate a moment to grant your request,-for, even if I should commit an error of judgment, I am perfectly certain he would overlook it, and applaud the humane impulse that prompted the act; but General Banks might be less indulgent, and make very serious trouble with me for taking a step he would perhaps regard as unwarrantable."

I still hesitated, undecided how to act, when suddenly a happy thought struck me, and, turning to the girl, I added,-

"To-day is Thursday; next Tuesday I leave this city with General Butler for a land where, thank God! such wrongs as yours cannot exist; and, as General Banks is deeply engrossed in the immediate business at head-quarters, he will hardly hear of my action before the ship leaves,-so I am going to give you the house."

I am sure the kind-hearted reader will find no fault with me that I took particular pains to select one of the largest of her father's houses, (it contained forty rooms,) when she told me that she wanted to let the apartments as a means of support to herself and her children.

My only regret in the case was that Mr. Cox had not been considerate enough to leave a carriage and pair of bays on my hands, that I might have had the satisfaction of enabling his daughter to disport herself about the city in a style corresponding to her importance as a member of so wealthy and respectable a family.

And this story that I have just told reminds me of another, similar in many respects.

One Sunday morning, late last summer, as I came down-stairs to the breakfast-room, I was surprised to find a large number of persons assembled in the library.

When I reached the door, a member of the Staff took me by the arm, and drew me into the room toward a young and delicate mulatto girl who was standing against the opposite wall, with the meek, patient bearing of her race, so expressive of the system of repression to which they have been so long subjected.

Drawing down the border of her dress, my conductor showed me a sight more revolting than I trust ever again to behold.

The poor girl's back was flayed until the quivering flesh resembled a fresh beefsteak scorched on a gridiron. With a cold chill creeping through my veins, I turned away from the sickening spectacle, and for an explanation of the affair scanned the various persons about the room.

In the centre of the group, at his writing-table, sat the General. His head rested on his hand, and he was evidently endeavoring to fix his attention upon the remarks of a tall, swarthy-looking man who stood opposite, and who, I soon discovered, was the owner of the girl, and was attempting a defence of the foul outrage he had committed upon the unresisting and helpless person of his unfortunate victim, who stood smarting, but silent, under the dreadful pain inflicted by the brutal lash.

By the side of the slaveholder stood our Adjutant-General, his face livid with almost irrepressible rage, and his fists tight-clenched, as if to violently restrain himself from visiting the guilty wretch with summary and retributive justice. Disposed about the room, in various attitudes, but all exhibiting in their countenances the same mingling of horror and indignation, were other members of the Staff,-while, near the door, stood three or four house-servants, who were witnesses in the case.

To the charge of having administered the inhuman castigation, Landry (the owner of the girl) pleaded guilty, but urged in extenuation that the girl had dared to make an effort for that freedom which her instincts, drawn from the veins of her abuser, had taught her was the God-given right of all who possess the germ of immortality, no matter what the color of the casket in which it is hidden.

I say "drawn from the veins of her abuser," because she declared she was his daughter,-and every one in the room, looking upon the man and woman confronting each other, confessed that the resemblance justified the assertion.

After the conclusion of all the evidence in the case, the General continued in the same position as before, and remained for some time apparently lost in abstraction. I shall never forget the singular expression on his face.

I had been accustomed to see him in a storm of passion at any instance of oppression or flagrant injustice; but on this occasion he was too deeply affected to obtain relief in the usual way.

His whole air was one of dejection, almost listlessness; his indignation too intense, and his anger too stern, to find expression even in his countenance.

Never have I seen that peculiar look but on three or four occasions similar to the one I am narrating, when I knew he was pondering upon the baleful curse that had cast its withering blight upon all around, until the manhood and humanity were crushed out of the people, and outrages such as the above were looked upon with complacency, and the perpetrators treated as respected and worthy citizens,-and that he was realizing the great truth, that, however man might endeavor to guide this war to the advantage of a favorite idea or sagacious policy, the Almighty was directing it surely and steadily for the purification of our country from this greatest of national sins.

But to return to my story. After sitting in the mood which I have described at such length, the General again turned to the prisoner, and said, in a quiet, subdued tone of voice,-

"Mr. Landry, I dare not trust myself to decide to-day what punishment would be meet for your offence, for I am in that state of mind that I fear I might exceed the strict demands of justice. I shall therefore place you under guard for the present, until I conclude upon your sentence."

A few days after, a number of influential citizens having represented to the General that Mr. Landry was not only a "high-toned gentleman," but a person of unusual "AMIABILITY" of character, and was consequently entitled to no small degree of leniency, he answered, that, in consideration of the prisoner's "high-toned" character, and especially of his "amiability," of which he had seen so remarkable a proof, he had determined to meet their views, and therefore ordered that Landry give a deed of manumission to the girl, and pay a fine of five hundred dollars, to be placed in the hands of a trustee for her benefit.

It is the passing through such scenes as I have described, and the contemplation of the condition to which Slavery has reduced society at the South, combined with a natural inclination to espouse the cause of the oppressed, that has placed General Butler in the front rank of the "Champions of Freedom."

I remember, so long ago as last July, his turning to me, after reading the story of our sad reverses in Virginia, and remarking that he believed God was directing the issues of the war for a great purpose, and that only in so far as we followed His guidance should we be successful. I have heard him repeat this in effect several times since, and have seen the conviction growing within his mind deeper and deeper, as events proved its correctness, down to the present time.

And yet an Episcopal clergyman of New York told me, the other evening, that General Butler was an Atheist.

* * *

General Butler's forbearance and kindness of heart are, I think, well illustrated in the true history of his controversy with General Phelps last summer, in regard to the employment of negroes coming within our lines. His position on that question was at that time somewhat misunderstood. Indeed, a gentleman observed to me only a short time since, referring to General Butler's allowing General Phelps to resign, "General Butler served General Phelps just right."

"So he did," I replied; "but you and I probably differ some in our ideas of right and wrong."

The case, in brief, was this.

General Phelps-as good a man, as honest and whole-souled a patriot, and as brave and thorough a soldier as there is in the service-was in command at Carrolton,-our principal line of defence. The negroes escaping from the plantations had gathered about his camp to the number of many hundreds. General Phelps almost immediately initiated steps toward making them soldiers. The residents, greatly alarmed, or affecting to be, lest they should soon be the victims of an ungovernable armed mob, addressed the most urgent remonstrances to General Butler against General Phelps's proceedings. The General was much perplexed; the Government had not yet indicated any policy on this important subject, and although I am satisfied his sympathies were with General Phelps, (the alacrity with which he soon after organized negro regiments is the best evidence of this,) he did not feel justified in officially approving his course. Determined to avoid anything like a bitter opposition to a measure that his head and heart both told him was intrinsically right, he sought for a means of compromise. Circumstances soon furnished the opportunity.

The enemy was threatening the city with speedy attack, and it was deemed of the highest importance to cut away the thick growth of trees in front of Carrolton for nearly a mile. The General at once ordered General Phelps to set his negro brigade at this work, and in the order was particular to quote General Phelps's own opinion, previously delivered, on the necessity of the project. General Phelps, who was determined that the negroes should be soldiers or nothing, evasively declined obeying the order. General Butler then wrote him a letter presenting fresh arguments, showing how essential it was that the soldiers, who would soon be obliged to defend the city, should be spared as far as possible from unusual fatigue-duty, and inclosed a peremptory order for the performance of the work by the negroes. By the same messenger he also sent a confidential letter, which I wrote at his dictation, in which, in terms of the warmest friendship and honest appreciation of General Phelps's exalted courage, sincere patriotism, and other noble qualities, he begged him not to place himself in an attitude of hostility to his commanding officer. A more delicate, generous, or considerate letter I never read; but it was of no avail. General Phelps persisted in his refusal to obey, and tendered his resignation. What did General Butler do?

He would have been justified in the arrest and court-martial of General Phelps, and few men could resist so good an opportunity to assert their authority; but he knew that General Phelps had been for years the victim of the Slave Power, until his mind had become so absorbed in detestation of the institution that he was conscientiously and inexorably opposed to the slightest step that could even remotely be construed as assisting in its support. Moreover, General Butler's esteem for General Phelps was deep and sincere; and those who know the General well will readily understand how repugnant to his nature is the abrupt change from warm friendship to open hostility.

But to recur to my question,-What did General Butler do? He simply forwarded General Phelps's resignation to Washington, with the earnest request that the Government would proclaim some policy in regard to the contrabands, and shortly after, learning that the story of an intended attack on the city at that time was a canard, allowed the matter to drop. When, a little later, the enrolment of negroes in the United States' service was in order, where were they so promptly enlisted and equipped as in the grand old "Department of the Gulf"?

Reading the other day the retaliatory resolutions of the Rebel Congress recalled to my mind the terrible earnestness with which the General declared in New Orleans, "For every one of my black soldiers who may be murdered by their captors, two Rebel soldiers shall hang." And I know he meant it.

* * *

The London "Times" has said that General Butler is a "monster of cruelty," devoid of every sentiment of benevolence or tenderness, and the cry has been taken up and echoed by the press of Continental Europe. Perhaps he is; but the thirty-four thousand poor people of New Orleans whom he fed every day refuse to believe it. I could wish that some of these libellers of his humanity had been in New Orleans to see the character of the crowd that thronged his office from morning till night. There were persons of almost every condition and color,-the great majority being poor and wretched men and women, who brought their every grief and trouble to lay at the feet of the man whom they believed possessed of the power and the will to redress every wrong and heal every sorrow. Was it surprising? Did it look as though they feared his fierce anger and his cruel wrath? Was it not rather the humble testimony of their instinct that he whose first and every act in their city was for the amelioration of suffering was the one to whom they should apply for relief in every woe? And what patience he exhibited under this great and increasing addition to his official cares! Unless the complaint or request were frivolous or disloyal, he always listened respectfully, and then applied the remedy to the wrong, or carefully explained the means suited to the relief of the distress, and the proper course for obtaining it.

Shortly after our arrival in New Orleans, the Sisters in charge of the Orphan Asylum of St. Elizabeth called upon the General and represented that institution as in a state of literal destitution from lack of provisions and the money with which to procure them. This unfortunate condition of suffering was one of the legitimate consequences of active Secession, and no one could be held responsible for it but the leaders of the Rebellion. But the General did not stop to discuss the question of responsibility; he knew that here were several hundred children who were crying for bread, and with characteristic promptitude gave them an order on the Chief Commissary for a very large amount of stores,-to be charged to his personal account,-adding a sum of five hundred dollars in money from his pocket.

The Convent of the Sacred Heart, near New Orleans, owed its continued existence almost entirely to his individual charities; and the same may be said of all the benevolent institutions in and about the city.

I have rarely seen him more angry than when he discovered that a committee of the City Council, who held, as trustees, the Touro Fund, left by its generous donor for the support of orphans, had outraged their trust by applying a large amount of the legacy to the purchase of munitions of war for the Rebellion. He had them brought under guard to the office, and, unable to restrain his contempt for the dishonor of the act, expressed his opinion in terms that must have scathed them fearfully, unless their sensibilities were utterly callous. He then sent them to Fort Pickens, there to remain until every cent of the money they had so wantonly diverted from its legitimate purpose should be repaid.

* * *

One of the most striking of the General's traits is the quick comprehension which enables him to meet almost any question with a ready and commonly a witty reply.

During the earlier period of our occupation of New Orleans, persons were constantly applying to him to give them an order to search within our lines for runaway negroes; and it is a good illustration of the assurance of our enemies, that in a majority of cases the persons so applying were avowed traitors. The following is a fair sample of the conversation that would follow such an application.

"General, I wish you would give me an order to search for my negro," the visitor would commence.

"Have you lost your horse?" the General would ask, in reply.

"No, Sir."

"Have you lost your mule?" the General would add.

"No, Sir," the applicant for the order would answer, looking exceedingly puzzled at such unusual questions.

"Well, Sir, if you had lost your horse or your mule, would you come and ask me to neglect my duty to the Government for the purpose of assisting you to catch them?"

"Of course not," the visitor would reply, with increasing astonishment.

"Then why should you expect me to employ myself in hunting after any other article of your property?"

And with this comforting and practical application of the Dred-Scott decision, the ex-owner of the fugitive slave would take his departure, a wiser, and, I doubt not, a sadder man.

During an interview between the General and the Reverend Doctor Leacock, (Rector of Grace Church in New Orleans, and one of the three Episcopal clergymen who refused to read the prayer for the President, and were therefore sent North as prisoners, under my charge,) in which the General urged upon the Doctor his views on the injurious influence of disloyalty in the pulpit, sustaining his argument by prolific quotations from Scripture, recited with an accuracy and appositeness that few theologians could exceed, the Doctor replied,-

"But, General, your insisting upon the taking of the oath of allegiance is causing half of my church-members to perjure themselves."

"If that is the case, I am glad I have not had the spiritual charge of your church for the last nine years," (just the term of Dr. Leacock's pastorate,) the General answered, promptly.

After a lengthy conversation, the Doctor finally asked,-

"Well, General, are you going to shut up the churches?"

"No, Sir, I am more likely to shut up the ministers," he replied.

To the casual observer this would appear but a brilliant repartee, while, in fact, it was significant as indicative of a sagacious policy. Closing the churches would have given warrant to the charge of interference with the observances of religion. So careful was the General to avoid anything of this nature, that, in every instance where a clergyman was removed from his church, the very next Sunday found his pulpit occupied by a loyal minister.

As a great many excellent Churchmen have misunderstood the cause of the arrest of clergymen in New Orleans, I think I must add a word of explanation. The ministers so arrested were of the Episcopal denomination, in which the rector is required to read a liturgy prescribed by the General Convention. In this liturgy occurs "a prayer for the President of the United States," and its omission in their reading of the service was clearly an overt act of disloyalty, in that it was by unmistakable implication a declaration that they did not recognize the authority of the President of the United States; and it is a fact not generally known, that this omission in the service was supplied by the minister's regularly announcing, "A few moments will now be spent in silent prayer." Who can doubt the character and burden of this voiceless petition, when it is understood that it was the successor to an audible appeal-which General Butler suppressed-to Heaven for Jefferson Davis and the success of his cause?

* * *

Another of the General's strongest characteristics is his firm faith, his ardent hopefulness. Never have I known him despondent as to the final result of this war. He believes it to be a struggle for principle and right, and therefore his confidence in the ultimate success of our arms never falters. Frequently disheartened myself at our apparent ill-fortune, I have listened to his cheerful predictions and expressions of unflagging trust, and have come away strengthened and confident.

After our return to the North, an ex-mayor of Chicago was introduced to the General at the St. Nicholas Hotel in New York. It was just at a time when our cause looked very gloomy. The Mayor was evidently much depressed by the indications of national misfortune, and in a tone of great despondency asked the General,-

"Do you believe we shall ever get through this war successfully?"

"Yes, Sir," the General answered, very decidedly.

"Well, but how?" asked the Mayor.

"God knows, I don't; but I know He does, so I am satisfied," the General replied.

And in this reply was contained an admirable expression of that earnest faith in the inevitable triumph of good over evil which forms so prominent a part of his nature.

* * *

In this short sketch I have either entirely avoided or merely hinted at the traits which have given General Butler a world-wide distinction. His wonderful energy, his sagacity, his courage, his great executive and administrative ability, and, more than all, the marvellous comprehension, which, at the firing of the first gun at Fort Sumter, enabled him to grasp the subject of this Rebellion in all its magnitude and bearings, and in the means and measures for its suppression, are attributes made familiar to the world as "household words" by his unprecedented administration in New Orleans.

The story of the years of experience crowded into those eight short months of our sojourn in that city is worthy the pen of our country's ablest historian, and would fill volumes.

To relate all the instances of General Butler's kindness and generosity, his forbearance and magnanimity, while in New Orleans, would require more than all the space between the covers of the "Atlantic."

I have undertaken the grateful task of recording some of the more prominent scenes, where he displayed the kindly, genial traits so utterly inconsistent with the indiscriminate charges of cruelty, injustice, and wrong, preferred by his enemies,-traits that have inexpressibly endeared their possessor to every officer and soldier in his late army. Said an officer, but just returned from New Orleans, to me a few days since,-"I have heard of the infatuation of the Army of the Potomac to its earlier leader, but I do not believe their devotion is near so deep and earnest as that of the faithful men who followed General Butler from New England and the Northwest, through the campaign of New Orleans."

Not one of us who have been closely associated with him but watches with intense interest for the opportunity to arrive when he shall prove himself to be (as every one of us believes him to be) among the foremost of those predestined to lead our country through its baptism of blood and fire to a higher and grander destiny and glory than the most ardent dared even to hope for before the war.

Happy then shall I be, if in these few pages I have conveyed to the indulgent readers of this article some idea of the inner life and character of OUR GENERAL.

* * *

THE CLAIMS TO SERVICE OR LABOR.

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Some persons look upon the veneration with which the people of these United States regard the Constitution as savoring of superstition. It is at least a wholesome superstition, which cannot be disturbed without risk.

When a man, in calm moments of deliberate reflection, has settled and adopted the principles of ethics and morality which ought to govern his life, and when, under the pressure of urgent exigency, or in moments of eager excitement, his view of their truth or value undergoes a sudden change, it is not safe to give way to such influence. He would evince wisdom in calling to mind, that, in hours of tranquil judgment, with no passion to blind and no impulse of the moment to urge beyond reason, he had adopted certain principles of action, for guidance and safety.

Doubtless age may correct, and ought to correct, the errors of youth. But when we change a life-rule, it should be from a matured conviction, that, on general principles, the correction is just and proper; not because it would afford relief or satisfaction for the time being, or prove convenient for some special purpose.

So of the Constitution of the United States. Of fallible because human origin, it is imperfect. A rule of political action in a progressive world, it was by its founders properly made subject to amendment. At the first session of the first Congress ten amendments were adopted; two have been added since; and experience has approved this action.

That other amendments may hereafter be necessary and proper it would be presumptuous to deny. But we ought to touch the ark of our political testimony with careful and reverent hand.

All legislative bodies are liable to sudden and wayward impulses. To these the Congress of our young country is more exposed than the Parliaments or Chambers of older nations. It would have been very unsafe to trust a Congressional majority with the power of amending the Constitution.

Difficulties and delays were properly put in the way of exercising such a prerogative. To two-thirds of both houses, or to a convention called by the legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, was granted the power of proposing amendments; while the power to ratify these was not confided to less than to the legislatures, or to the conventions, of three-fourths of the States composing the Union.

To alter the Constitution in any other way-as by the consent of a majority only of the several States-would be a revolutionary act. Doubtless revolutionary acts become a justifiable remedy on rare and great occasions, as in 1776; but they are usually replete with danger. They are never more dangerous than when employed by one section of a confederacy against another, weaker section of the same. To the stability of government, it is necessary that the rights of minorities should be strictly respected. The end does not necessarily justify the means. "No example," says an eminent and philosophical writer, "is more dangerous than that of violence employed for a good purpose by well-meaning men."6

To such considerations has it been, in a measure, due that the people of the United States, with as much unanimity as usually characterizes any national decision, have held back, until now, from following the example of the civilized nations of Europe in emancipating their slaves. Until the Secessionists levied war against the Union, not the Democratic party alone, but the mass of the Republican party also, assented to the declaration in Abraham Lincoln's Inaugural, that they had "no purpose to interfere, directly or indirectly, with the institution of Slavery in the States where it exists." It had never been possible to obtain the votes of three-fourths of the States in favor of emancipation; and a large majority of those who held human servitude to be a moral wrong had looked upon its toleration among our neighbors of the South as an evil of less magnitude than the violation of the Constitution.

Though the wisdom of the ablest statesmen of the Revolution, without distinction of sections, recognized negro slavery as an iniquity and as a political element fraught with inevitable danger in the future, yet the evils and the dangers which are inseparably connected with that element have never been so clearly seen, have never made themselves so terribly apparent, as in the course of this war.

The conviction that Slavery is a standing menace to the integrity of the Union and the one great obstacle to peace gathers strength so rapidly from day to day, that many men are adopting the opinion, that it must needs be extirpated, if even at the cost of a revolutionary act.

It would be a misfortune, if this were the alternative. It is easy to pass the limit of regulated authority, but impossible to estimate the dangers we may encounter when that guardian limit is once transgressed. We may resolve that we will go thus far and no farther. So thought the honest and earnest Girondists of revolutionary France; but the current to which they had first opened a passage swept them away. Though the experiment succeed at last, a long Reign of Terror may overwhelm us ere success is reached.

And thus it is a matter of surpassing interest to determine whether the present stupendous insurrectionary convulsion has brought about a state of things under which, in strict accordance with the Constitution as it is, we may emancipate all negroes throughout the Union who are now held in involuntary servitude. This question I propose to discuss.

* * *

Every one is familiar with the words in which the Constitution, while not naming Slavery, recognizes, under a certain phase, its existence, and aids it, under certain circumstances, to maintain the rights to involuntary labor which, under State laws, it claims; thus:-

"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

The claims to service or labor here referred to may be for years or for life: both are included in the above provision. In point of fact, there were existing, at the time that provision was adopted, (as there still exist,) both classes: the first class, for a term of years, then consisting, in part, of claims against foreign adults who had bound themselves to service for a limited time to repay the expenses of their emigration,-but chiefly, as now, of claims to the service or labor of what were called apprentices, usually white minors; the second, for life, were claims to the service or labor of men, women, and children of all ages, exclusively of African descent, who were called slaves.

The first class of claims were found chiefly in Northern States; the second chiefly in Southern. There was a great disparity between the numbers of the two classes. While the claims to service or labor for years numbered but a few thousands, there were then held to service or labor for life upwards of six hundred thousand persons: and the number has since increased to about four millions.

The constitutional provision is, that persons from whom under State laws service or labor is due shall not be exonerated from the performance of the same by escaping to another State. The apprentice, or the slave, shall, in that case, on demand of the proper claimant, be delivered up.

Such a provision clearly involves the recognition of certain rights of property; but of what kind?

Is the ownership of one human being by another here involved? Is the apprentice, or the slave, recognized in this clause as an article of merchandise?

State laws regulating apprenticeship and slavery may give to the master of the apprentice, or of the slave, the custody of the person and the right of corporal punishment, in order the better to insure the performance of the labor due. These laws may declare that an apprentice, or a slave, who strikes his master, shall suffer death. They may provide that the testimony of an apprentice, or of a slave, shall not be received in any court of justice as evidence against his master. They may make the claims to service or labor, whether for years or for life, transferable by ordinary sale. They may declare such claims to be, under certain circumstances, of the nature of real estate. They may enact that these claims shall be hereditary, both as regards the claimant and the person held to service, so that heirs shall inherit them,-and also so that the children of apprentices, or of slaves, shall, in virtue of their birth, be apprentices or slaves. But State laws or State constitutions, whatever their provisions, cannot modify the Constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court has decided that "the Government of the Union, though limited in its power, is supreme within its sphere of action"; and again, that "the laws of the United States, when made in pursuance of the Constitution, form the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."7

Therefore State laws or constitutions can neither determine the interpretation of the Federal Constitution nor explain its intent. It is to be interpreted by the words, fairly and candidly construed, of its framers.

In the provision under consideration the phraseology is remarkable. The word slave, though then in common use, to designate a negro held to service or labor for life, is not employed. It is impossible to believe that this peculiarity was accidental, or to overlook the inevitable inference from it. This provision does not recognize slavery except as it recognizes apprenticeship. African slavery, according to the expressly selected words, and therefore according to the manifest intent, of the framers of the Constitution, is here recognized as a claim to the service or labor of a negro: nothing more, nothing else.

It avails nothing to allege, even if it were true, that in 1787, when these words were written, a negro was commonly considered property. Chief-Justice Taney, delivering the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, asserts that in the thirteen colonies which formed the Constitution "a negro of the African race was regarded as an article of property." This may or it may not have been true of a majority in those days. True or not, it refers only to the opinions of individual colonists; and these cannot be received as a basis of construction for the words, nor can they rebut the plain intent, of a constitutional provision. It is not what individual colonists believed, but what the framers of the Constitution incorporated in that instrument, that we have to deal with.

They avoided the use of the word slave. They incorporated the words "person held to service or labor." They admitted the claim to service or labor: none other: a claim (regarded in its constitutional aspect) in the nature of what the law calls a chose in action,-or, in other words, a thing to which, though it cannot be strictly said to be in actual possession, one has a right.

In common parlance we employ words, in connection with Slavery, which imply much more than such a claim. We say slave-holder and slave-owner; we speak of the institution of Slavery: but we do not say apprentice-holder or apprentice-owner; nor do we speak of the institution of Apprenticeship. The reason, whether valid or invalid, for such variance of phraseology in speaking of the two classes of claims, is not to be found in any admission, express or implied, in the provision of the Constitution now under consideration. In it the framers of that instrument employed one and the same phrase to designate the master of the apprentice and the master of the slave. Both are termed "the party to whom service or labor may be due."

Is there any other clause in the Constitution in which a distinction is made between the apprentice and the slave? There is one, and only one. In determining the number of inhabitants in each State as a basis of representation and taxation, it is provided that the whole number of apprentices shall be included, while three-fifths only of the slaves are to be taken into account. But the wording of this clause is especially noteworthy. It reads thus:-

"Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons."

To avoid mistakes, it was deemed necessary to include apprentices by express specification. Why this? Every one would have felt it to be absurd, if the words had been, "the whole number of free persons, including farm-laborers." But why absurd? Because persons engaged in free labor are, beyond question, free persons. Not so those "bound to service." While so bound, apprentices may be considered not free; when the "term of years," and with it the bondage to service, expires, they become free, or, as the common phrase is, "their own masters." It was necessary and proper, therefore, to specify whether, in the enumeration of inhabitants, they were to be estimated as free persons or as persons not free.

But would there be any fairness in construing this clause into an admission, by inference or otherwise, that an apprentice, while "bound to service," is a slave? Clearly not. He is a person not free for the time, because another has a legal claim to his service or labor. The Constitution admits this: nothing more.

And so of slaves. "Other persons" they are called, in contradistinction to "free persons"; therefore persons not free: and properly so called, seeing that, like the apprentice before his term expires, they are "bound to service," and that, unlike him, they remain thus bound for life.

But unless we admit that the apprentice, bound to service for a season, is a slave during that season, we cannot justly allege, that, by this provision of the Constitution, the negro, held to service or labor for life, is recognized as a slave.

A mere technical view of a great political question is usually a contracted one, of little practical value, and unbecoming a statesman. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." Yet we must not mistake for technicality a careful interpretation, distinctly warranted by the terms employed, of a public instrument. Every public instrument, by which the governed delegate powers to those who govern, should be strictly construed.

I am not arguing, that the men who framed the Constitution did not regard negroes held to service or labor as slaves. I am not arguing that temporary claims, to the number (let us suppose) of forty or fifty thousand, may, for a moment, compare in importance with life-long claims, to the number of four millions; or that it is safe or proper to legislate in regard to the latter, involving as they do vast industrial interests, with as light consideration as might suffice in enacting regulations for the former. I am not arguing that a political element, which has gradually assumed proportions so gigantic as has American Slavery, can, with any safety or propriety, be dealt with, except after the gravest deliberation and the most sedulous examination, in advance, of every step we propose to take. I allege nothing of all this.

What I assert is, that neither the number of slaves nor the magnitude of the interests involved can properly influence the judgment in determining the just construction of a clause in the Constitution, or properly set aside a fair deduction from the wording of that clause as to its true spirit and intent. What I assert is, that the framers of the Constitution, in studiously avoiding the employment of the word slave, undeniably abstained from admitting into that instrument anything which the use of that word might have implied. Therefore the Constitution does not recognize the ownership of one human being by another. In it we seek in vain any foundation for the doctrine declared by Chief-Justice Taney, that persons held to service or labor for life are articles of property or merchandise.

In one restricted sense, and only in one, is slavery recognized by the Constitution of the United States: as a system under which one man may have a legal claim to the involuntary labor of another.

Therefore the question, whether Congress has the constitutional right to emancipate slaves, resolves itself into this:-Can Congress constitutionally take private property for public use and destroy it, making just compensation therefor? And is there anything in the nature of the claim which a master has to the service or labor of an apprentice, or of a slave, which legally exempts that species of property from the general rule, if important considerations of public utility demand that such claims should be appropriated and cancelled by the Government?

This is the sole issue. Let us not complicate it by mixing it up with others. When we are discussing the expediency of emancipation and of measures proposed to effect it, it is proper to take into account not only State constitutions and State legislation, but also the popular conception of slavery under the loose phraseology of the day, and public sentiment, South as well as North, in connection with it. But when we are examining the purely legal question, whether, under the Constitution as it is and under the state of public affairs now existing, Congress has the power to enact emancipation, we must dismiss popular fallacies and prejudices, and confine ourselves to one task: namely, to decide, without reference to subordinate constitutions or legislative action, what the supreme law of the land-the Constitution of the United States-permits or forbids in the premises.

It will be admitted that Congress has the right (Amendments to Constitution, Article 5) to take private property, with just compensation made, for public use. And it will not be argued that a claim of one inhabitant of the United States to the service of another, whether for a term of years or for life, is property which has been constitutionally exempted from such appropriation. It is evident, that, if a claim to the service of a slave cannot constitutionally be so taken and cancelled, neither can the claim to the service of an apprentice.

On the other hand, it is to be conceded, as a feature of the utmost importance in this case, that, when property of any kind to a vast amount is thus appropriated, the considerations which influence its appropriation should correspond in magnitude to the extent of the interests at stake. When the taking and cancelling of certain claims practically involves the social condition of four millions of the inhabitants of the United States and the industrial and financial interests of six millions more, it is desirable that the considerations to justify so radical and far-reaching a change should be in the nature of imperative official duty rather than of speculative opinion or philosophical choice.

Let us proceed a step farther, and inquire if there be circumstances, and if so, what circumstances, under which it becomes the right and the duty of Congress to take and cancel the claims in question.

The controlling circumstances which bear upon this case may be thus briefly stated.

The Constitution (section 8) confers on Congress certain essential powers: as, to collect taxes, without which no government can be supported.

The Constitution (same section) authorizes Congress to "make all laws that shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" these powers.

If Congress fail to carry into execution these powers, the Government is set at nought, and anarchy ensues.

An insurrection, extending over eleven of the States comprising the Union, now prevails.

Because of that insurrection, the essential powers granted to Congress by the Constitution cannot be carried into execution in these eleven States.

Because of the resistance offered by these insurrectionary States to constitutional powers, it becomes the duty of Congress to pass all laws that are necessary and proper to enforce these powers.

All this will be conceded; but a question remains. Who is to judge what laws are necessary and proper to carry into execution the powers, expressly granted by the Constitution, which are thus obstructed and defeated?

This question has been determined by the highest legal tribunal of the United States, speaking by the mouth of one who will be acknowledged to have been her most distinguished presiding officer.

In the well-known case of McCulloch against the State of Maryland,8 Chief-Justice Marshall delivered the decision of the Supreme Court; and by that decision the following principles were established:-

The construction of the words "necessary and proper" in the above connection. The Chief-Justice says,-

"The term 'necessary' does not import an absolute physical necessity, so strong that one thing to which another may be termed necessary cannot exist without that other."

As to the degree of the necessity which renders constitutional a law framed to carry a constitutional power into execution, the rule by this decision is,-

"If a certain means to carry into effect any of the powers expressly given by the Constitution to the Government of the Union be an appropriate measure, not prohibited by the Constitution, the degree of its necessity is a question of legislative discretion, not of judicial cognizance."

But still more explicitly is the question answered, who is to be the judge of the appropriateness and necessity of the means to be employed, thus:-

"The Government which has a right to do an act, and has imposed upon it the duty of performing that act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means."

Thus, then, the matter stands. The powers to lay and collect taxes, to exercise authority over forts and arsenals of the United States, to suppress insurrection, and various others equally essential, are expressly given by the Constitution to Congress. It is the right and duty of Congress to carry these powers into effect. In case of obstruction or defeat of existing laws framed to that intent, it is the right and duty of Congress to select such means and pass such additional laws as may be necessary and proper to overcome such obstruction and enforce obedience to such laws. In the selection of the means to effect this constitutional object, Congress is the sole judge of their propriety or necessity. These means must not be prohibited by the Constitution; but whether they are the most prudent or the most effectual means, or in what degree they are necessary, are matters over which the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction. As Chief-Justice Marshall has elsewhere in this decision expressed it, for the Supreme Court to undertake to inquire into the degree of their necessity "would be to pass the line which circumscribes the judicial department and to tread on legislative ground."

There must, of course, be congruity or relevancy between the power to be enforced and the means proposed to enforce it. While Congress is to judge the degree of necessity or propriety of these means, they must not be such as to be devoid of obvious connection with the object to be attained.

In this case, the object to be attained is the enforcement, in the insurrectionary States, of laws without which no government can exist, and the suppression in these States of an insurrection of which the object is the dismemberment of the Union.

But these laws are resisted, and this insurrection prevails, in those States, and in those States only, in which the life-long claims to the service or labor of persons of African descent are held under State laws. In States where slaves are comparatively few, as in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, disaffection only prevails; while in States where the number of slaves approaches or exceeds that of whites, as in South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, insurrection against lawful authority is flagrant and outspoken: the insurrectionary acts of these States being avowedly based on the allegation that Slavery is not safe under the present constitutionally elected President, and that its permanent preservation can be insured by the disruption of the national unity alone.9

All this is matter of history. And there would be as much propriety in denying the connection between the sun and the light of day, as that between Slavery and the Rebellion.

There is a question upon which men differ: namely, whether emancipation is the most prudent or the most effectual means to enforce violated law and suppress the insurrectionary movement.

It is my opinion that a majority of the people of the loyal States believe, at this moment, that emancipation is the necessary and proper means to effect the above objects. But whether this opinion be well founded or not is immaterial to the present question. According to Chief-Justice Marshall's decision, when it is the right and duty of the Government to perform an act, (as here to enforce law and suppress insurrection,) it "must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means." If Congress believes, that, in order to enforce law and suppress insurrection, it is necessary and proper to take and cancel all claims to life-long service or labor held in the Slave States, and if claims to service or labor, whether for years or for life, held by one inhabitant of the United States against another, be a species of property not specially exempted by the Constitution from seizure for public use, then an Act of Emancipation is strictly constitutional.

Congress is to be allowed to select the means; Congress is to be the judge of the necessity and propriety of these means: Congress, not the Supreme Court; not even the People in their primary meetings; but the People constitutionally represented in their National Legislature; the People, speaking by the voice of those whom their votes have elected to that Legislature, there to act for them.

If Congress believes that Emancipation is no longer a question of sectional interference, but of national preservation, it has the right to judge, and the constitutional right to act upon that judgment. And if Congress can properly allege, as motive for taking and cancelling a multitude of life-long claims to service, the preservation of the national existence, can a consideration of greater magnitude be imagined for any legislative act?

In proceeding, however, to consummate such a measure, it is evidently most fitting and proper, that, in the preamble to an Act of Emancipation, there should be set forth, lucidly and succinctly, the causes and considerations which impelled to so solemn and momentous an act.

As to the just compensation provided by the Constitution to be paid, when private property is taken for public use, it is here to be remarked,-

If, when a minor is drafted, a father or an apprentice-master has no claim against the Government for service lost, it may be argued with some plausibility, that, under similar circumstances of public exigency, a slave-owner has no claim when his slave is freed. But the argument fairly applies only in cases in which a slave is drafted for military service, and returned to slavery when that service terminates. In case of wholesale taking and cancelling of life-long claims to service, a fair construction of the Constitution may be held to require, as a general rule, that just compensation should be made to the claimants.

But to Congress, by the Constitution, is expressly given the power to declare the punishment of treason, without any limitation as to the confiscation of personal property, including, of course, claims in the nature of choses in action. Congress may, therefore, take and cancel claims to service owned by Rebel slave-owners without any compensation whatever. Under the feudal law, a serf, owing service to a noble guilty of treason, became, because of his master's guilt, released from such service.

If, because of the present insurrection, set on foot by claimants of service or labor, such claims, from precariousness of tenure or otherwise, have diminished in market-value, that diminution may be properly taken into account in estimating just compensation.

These various considerations converge to this,-that a Preamble and Act of Emancipation, somewhat in the terms following, may be constitutionally enacted.

A Bill to emancipate Persons of African Descent held to Service or Labor in certain of the United States.

Whereas there is now flagrant, in certain of the United States, an insurrection of proportions so gigantic that there has been required, to hold it in check, an increase of the army and navy of the United States to an extent seldom paralleled in the history of the world;

And whereas, because of the said insurrection, the execution of the laws for collecting taxes, and of various other laws of the United States, heretofore enacted by the Congress in the just exercise of their constitutional powers, has been, for more than two years past, and still is, obstructed and defeated throughout the insurrectionary States;

And whereas it is the right and duty of the Congress to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the said constitutional powers;

And whereas the said insurrectionary portions of the Union consist exclusively of States wherein persons of African descent are held in large numbers to involuntary service or labor,-the white inhabitants thereof basing their insurrectionary acts upon the assumption that the security and perpetuation of such involuntary servitude require the disruption of the national unity, and the establishment, on a portion of the domain of the United States, of a separate and independent government;

And whereas a large portion of the said persons of African descent, so held in servitude, contribute greatly, so long as such involuntary services are thus exacted from them, to the aid and comfort of the said insurrectionists, laboring for their behoof on their fortifications, and for the supply of their commissariat, and otherwise giving strength and support to various insurrectionary acts;

And whereas, in an emergency so urgent as that which is now patent to the world, it is the duty of the Congress to place at the disposal of the Executive branch of the Government, for the common defence, the utmost power, civil and military, of the country, and to employ every means not forbidden by the usages of civilized warfare, and not in violation of the Constitution, that is placed within their reach, in order to repress and to bring to a speedy termination the present protracted and desolating insurrection;

And whereas it appears from the above recitals, that the existence, throughout certain of the United States, of a labor-system which recognizes the claims of one race of men to the involuntary services of another race (always a moral wrong) has now shown itself to be destructive of the supremacy of the laws, and a constant menace to the Government, and that the continuance of such labor-system imminently jeopardizes the integrity of the Union, and has become incompatible with the domestic tranquillity of the country;

And whereas it has thus become evident that claims to the involuntary service or labor of persons of African descent ought not to be possessed by any inhabitant of the United States, but should, in the just exercise of the power which inheres in every independent government to protect itself from destruction by seizing and destroying any private property of its citizens or subjects which imperils its own existence, be taken, as for public use, from their present possessors, and abrogated and annulled,-just compensation being made to so many of the said possessors of such claims as may demand it, and as may by their loyalty be entitled thereto, for the claims so abrogated and annulled; therefore,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled, that from and after the ---- day of ---- next all claims to the services or labor of persons of African descent, who shall then be held to involuntary service or labor in any of the States of the Union under the laws thereof, be and the same are hereby taken by the Government of the United States. And the said claims are hereby abrogated and annulled. And all persons of African descent within the United States, who shall, on the said ---- day of ---- next, be held to involuntary service or labor, except for crime of which the party shall have been legally convicted, shall be released and emancipated from such claims in as full and complete a manner as if the same had never existed; the said release and emancipation to take effect from and after the said ---- day of ----, thenceforth and forevermore.

And be it further enacted, that the faith of the United States be and the same is hereby pledged for the payment of just compensation to all persons who shall, on the said ---- day of ----, hold such claims to service or labor; provided, that such persons shall make application for such compensation in the form and manner hereinafter prescribed, and provided further, that said persons shall have been, throughout the present insurrection, and shall continue to the close of the same, true and loyal to the Government of the United States, and shall not, directly or indirectly, have incited to insurrectionary acts, or given aid or comfort to any persons engaged in the insurrection aforesaid.

[Here should follow provisions in regard to the manner of application, the mode and rate of compensation, etc.]

It will probably be found that the number of slaves for the remuneration of whose lost services applications will be made by loyal claimants, under such an act, will scarcely reach the number emancipated in 1834 by Great Britain, which was about seven hundred and seventy thousand; and that the sum paid by England to colonial slave-owners, namely about a hundred millions of dollars, (the probable cost of eight weeks war,) will suffice as just compensation for all the services due to loyal claimants thus taken and cancelled.10

An act couched in the terms here proposed could not be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, without a shameless encroachment on legislative ground, nor without a reckless reversal of principles as well established, and of as high authority, as any which form the basis of constitutional law.

Those who demur to the passage of an act which meets the great difficulty before us broadly, effectually, honestly, and in accordance with the dictates of Christianity and civilization, would do well to consider whether, in the progress of this insurrectionary upheaval, we have not reached a point at which there is no prudent alternative left. By the President's Proclamation some three millions of slaves have been already declared free. Sundry laws of Congress have emancipated several hundred thousands more. There remain legally enslaved probably less than three quarters of a million,-chiefly scattered along a narrow border-strip that is coterminous, North and South, with Freedom or Emancipation,-partly dotted in isolated parishes or counties, surrounded by enfranchised slaves. Can we maintain in perpetuity so anomalous a condition of things? Clearly not. At every step embarrassments innumerable obstruct our progress. No industry, no human sagacity, would suffice to determine the ten thousand conflicting questions that must arise out of such a chaos. Must the history of each negro be followed back, so as to determine his status, whether slave or free? If negroes emancipated in insurrectionary States are sold as slaves into Border States, or into excepted parishes or counties, can we expect to trace the transaction? If slaves owned in Border States, or in excepted parishes or counties, are sold to loyal men in insurrectionary States, are they still slaves? or do they become free? Are we to admit, or to deny, the constitutionality of Border-State laws, which arrest, and imprison as vagrants, and sell into slavery to pay expenses of arrest and imprisonment, free negro emigrants from insurrectionary States?11 But why multiply instances? The longer this twilight of groping transition lasts, it will be only confusion the worse confounded.

We cannot stand still. Shall we recede? We break faith solemnly plighted; we submit, before the world, to base humiliation; we bow down to a system which the voice of all Christendom condemns; we abandon the struggle for nationality, and consent, for ages, perhaps, to a dismembered country. Shall we advance? There is but one path-the plain, truth-lighted, onward path-to victory and to peace.

* * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Substance and Shadow: or, Morality and Religion in their Relation to Life. An Essay on the Physics of Creation. By HENRY JAMES. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

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Any one tolerably conversant with either the religion or the philosophy of the last twenty-five years, as displayed in the current literature, must have been convinced that both had left their ancient moorings, never again to find them, and were floating about perilously in quest of a new anchorage. We read the "Essays and Reviews" and "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua critically Examined," and the replications long-drawn-out from High Church and Low, with a decided impression that the combatants are skirmishing on an immense ice-field, which is drifting them all together into other and unknown seas. What cares any man profoundly conscious of the wants both of the intellect and the heart whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or not, and if so, whether he was as accomplished a geologist as Professors Buckland and Lyell? Admit that the whole letter of Scripture comes from God, even to the vowel-points, by what laws and methods shall we expound it so as to put an end to the internecine war between Faith and Reason, between Religion and Philosophy?

We say without reserve, that this book of Mr. James's, if we except a small and unpretending treatise by the same author, published a few years since, on the "Nature of Evil," is the first we have met with, in the range of modern religious controversy, which goes to the heart and marrow of the subject.

To see into what straits we had been brought, call to mind the essentials of the Kantian and Scotch philosophies, which have dominated the German and English mind, and partially the French mind, for the last quarter of a century. Kant resolves all our knowledge into the science of phenomena. Our faculties give us nothing but the phenomena of consciousness; and the phenomena of consciousness are not noumenal existence, or existence in se. Nor have we any right to reason from phenomena to noumena, or to say that the former authenticate the latter. We know only the Ego. The Non-Ego lies on the other side of a yawning chasm,-if, indeed, there is anything on the other side, which is doubtful. The Ego becomes the centre of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral instinct. Sir William Hamilton, following Reid, asserts a natural Realism, or noumenal existence within the phenomenal; but he utterly denies that either of these authenticates the Infinite and Absolute. He and his disciple, Dr. Mansel, labor immensely to prove that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of the Infinite, and that to attempt such a philosophy leads us into inextricable confusion and self-contradiction.

In thus degrading Philosophy, unchurching her ignominiously, as fit only to deal with the Finite,-in other words, making her the lackey of mere Science,-they fancy they are doing famous service to Revelation. Very well,-we are ready to say,-having scourged Philosophy out of the temple, will you please, Gentlemen, to conduct us yourselves towards its hallowed shrine? If Philosophy cannot yield us a knowledge of the Infinite, we take it that Revelation, as you apprehend it, can. We, poor prodigals, have been feeding long enough upon husks that the swine do eat, and crave a little nourishing food.-The answer we get is, that Revelation does not propose to give us any such fare. Not any more than Philosophy does Revelation disclose to us the Infinite. It only gives us finite conceptions and formulas about the Infinite. The gulf between us and God yawns wide as ever, and is eternal. We must worship still an unknown God, as the heathen did. But we have this consolation,-that we have creed-articles which we can get by heart, though ignorant of what they mean, and under what these philosophers call a "regulative" religion repeat our paternosters to the end of time.

"These be thy gods, O Philosophy!" exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in place of Christianity. "These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!" the Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats or ever can beat.

Mr. James's whole argument, as he deals with the German and Scotch philosophies, is profound and masterly. He uses two sets of weapons, both of them with admirable skill. One set is awfully destructive. He clears off the rubbish of the pseudo-metaphysics with a logic so remorseless that we are tempted sometimes to cry for mercy. But, on the whole, Mr. James is right here. If men pretending to add to the stock of human knowledge treacherously knock away its foundations, and bring down the whole structure into a heap of rubbish, leaving us, if not killed outright, unhoused in a limbo of Atheism,-or if men pretending to hold the keys of knowledge will not go in themselves, and shut the doors in our faces when we seek to enter, no matter how sharply their treachery and charlatanry are exposed, however famous are the names they bear.

But Mr. James is quite as much constructive as destructive. He shows not only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is its high office and glory. Sense deals only with facts,-science deals with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, or mistake the centre for the circumference. This is the glaring fault both of the German and the Scotch metaphysicians, that they swamp philosophy in mere science; and hence they grovel in the Finite, and muddle everything they touch even there. Revelation, on the other hand, does unfold to us a true philosophy of the Infinite. It shows how the Infinite is contained in the Finite, the Absolute in the Relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body. Mr. James demonstrates the supreme absurdity of the notion of noumenal existence, or of any created existence which has life in se. God alone has life in Himself. All things else are only forms and receptacles of life, sheerly phenomenal, except so far forth as He is their substance. The notion of Creation as something made out of nothing, having life afterwards in se, and so holding an external relation to Deity, falsifies all the theologies, and degrades them into mere natural religions." It is the mother-fallacy," says Mr. James, "which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular understanding." Those familiar with Dr. Mansel's argument will see that he has not the remotest conception of Creation, except as an exploit of God in time and space, or of the Infinite, except as an unbounded aggregation of finites. That God reposed alone through all the past eternities, but roused some day and sent forth a shout, or six successive shouts, and spoke things out of nothing into "noumenal" existence, were absurd enough, to use Mr. James's nervous English, "to nourish a standing army of Tom Paines into annual fatness." The utter childishness of the theological quarrels over the first chapter of Genesis is obvious enough, so long as both parties swamp the spirit in the letter, or deny that the Finite can reveal the Infinite.

Following out his favorite postulate, that God alone has life in Himself, and all things else are only phenomena of life, Mr. James evolves the doctrine of Creation, of Man and Nature, and of Redemption, steering clear alike of the shoals of Atheism and the devouring jaws of Pantheism. In his constructive argument he draws upon the vast wealth of Swedenborg, and herein, as we conceive, he has done a rare service to our literature. Both the popular and ecclesiastical conception of Swedenborg would be ludicrously, if they were not shamefully inadequate. He has been known but little, except as a ghost-seer, or as a Samson grinding painfully in sectarian mills. Mr. James has done something like justice to his broad humanity, and his incomparably profound and exhaustive philosophy. It was Kant who first called him a ghost-seer; but while Kant was doing his best to turn all realities into the ghastliest of spectres, and remove all the underpinning of faith, till the heavens themselves should tumble through, Swedenborg was laying the foundation of all knowledge on the solid floors of Nature, subordinating sense to science, science to philosophy, philosophy to revelation, each serving as the impregnable support of its superior, and all filled and quickened with the life of God, and lighted up with those divine illuminations in whose illustrious morning the first and faintest cock-crowing would scare the ghosts of the Kantian philosophy out of the universe.

We have regarded Mr. James for some time as among the first of American essayists. There are few writers whose thought is more worthy to be spoken, or whose grand and nervous English displays it in finer shades and nobler proportions. The present volume is his crowning work, and he has coined his life-blood into it. But as honest critics we have some grounds of quarrel with him. A man has no right to be obscure who can make words so flexible and luminous as he can. In the present volume, his readers who here make his first acquaintance will inevitably misconstrue him, simply because he alters the fundamental nomenclature of religion and chiefly Ritualism, and we find only by the most wide-awake searching that he means anything else. Morality means the Selfhood, not social justice, not that which binds the individual in his relations to society and to humanity. Very true, religion has operated mainly with precatory rites for the purpose of deflecting God's wrath, or, as Mr. James would say, with some sneaking design upon His bounty. And morality has been the starched buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to his neighbor, not assumed as decorations of the selfhood, but with all divine charities flowing through them. So Swedenborg uses the word morality. See his noble chapter on Charity in the "True Christian Religion." And for ourselves, we have not the least idea of abandoning these honored words either to superstitious formalists or handsome scoundrels.

We have no such respect for the Devil as Mr. James has expressed for him, even when transformed into the gentleman and utilized for beneficent purposes. Nor do we see how the gap in Mr. James's argument is to be closed up, while he avows his belief in the eternity of the hells, and yet holds that we are ab intra the unqualified creations of God. Again, we should take exception to his favorite position, or, rather, the batteries he opens from it, that saints and scoundrels are not different in the sight of God, allowing the sense which alone, of course, he intends, different in se.

But the merits of the book, as one of the noblest and profoundest contributions to philosophy which have been produced, are undeniable. Mr. James possesses two qualities in very rare combination, the power of subtile metaphysical analysis and the power of picturesque representation, so that, while he tasks the thinking faculty of his readers to the utmost, he chains their attention by the fascination of his rhetoric. His sturdy honesty is everywhere apparent, and his success the most complete which we have yet witnessed in rescuing Philosophy from her degrading bondage to Sense, and restoring her to the divine service of Revelation.

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The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. By SIR CHARLES LYELL, F.R.S., Author of "The Principles of Geology," "Elements of Geology," etc., etc. Illustrated by Wood-Cuts. 8vo. Philadelphia: George W. Childs.

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Human bones from time to time have been discovered associated with those of extinct hyenas and cavern-bears, and specimens of them were in the Museum of the Garden of Plants in Paris as long ago as 1829; but there was then a doubt among geologists as to the human bones being coeval with the bones with which they were associated, it being supposed that they might have been washed into crevices of the rocks in which the bone-breccias are found, and there, being incrusted with carbonate of lime, had the false appearance of being as ancient as the fossil bones of extinct animals.

The indefatigable labors of Prestwich, in the basin of the Somme and among the gravel-beds of Picardy, first called the attention of geologists to the fact that works of men's hands were also found in undisturbed alluvial deposits of high antiquity, and he had the honor of bringing to light proofs of the existence of man in Europe in more remote times than had been previously admitted, and of demonstrating the stone age of France. Goss, Hébert, and Lartet followed in the same track, and added many valuable facts, and a host of other laborers in the same field have since appeared. So extensive have been the discoveries of the works of man buried with the bones of the Elephas primigenius and of cavern-bears and extinct hyenas, that we are forced to recognize the fact of the coexistence of man with those ancient animals, for the occurrence of deposits containing the bones of the two cannot any longer be regarded as doubtful; and certainly stone tools fashioned by man have been found so widely spread in the ancient alluviums and deposits of the post-Pliocene age, as to remove all doubt of the fact, and to destroy the objection that they might be local accidents of an equivocal character.

More recently,-namely, within four or five years,-the discovery of the habitations of lost races of men on the borders of the Swiss lakes, and of remains of various articles which those people once used,-tools, weapons, ornaments, bones of animals they fed upon, seeds of plants they cultivated and consumed,-has given a new impetus to these researches into the antiquity of the human race. Borings into the alluvial deposits of the Nile have proved the existence of man in that valley more than thirty thousand years ago, as estimated by the known rate of deposit of the alluvium of the Nile. Considerations as to the origin and spread of languages also seem to require a much greater antiquity for the human race than has been popularly allowed; and geologists have always claimed myriads of years as required for the sedimentary formations of the globe. Sir Charles Lyell, ever an active collector of geological facts, and an excellent writer on the science of Geology, has engaged with his usual zeal in verifying the researches of the French, Swiss, and German geologists, and has written a very readable book on these new revelations concerning the ancient history of the human race. It is the best English presentation of the subject, and is written in a style that every one can read and understand.

We regret, however, that he has abandoned his former views as to the persistency of species, and has adopted Darwin's theory of transmutation and development by variation and natural relation, and must say, after carefully reading his book, that he has not given any geological proofs of the correctness of Darwin's opinions, but, like that distinguished writer, he is obliged to take refuge behind the deficiency of the geological record, and to suppose facts and proofs may hereafter be discovered, when few are now known to favor the new hypothesis. We can see no more reason why a giraffe should have had a long neck, because he wished to crop the leaves of tall trees, than that mankind should have become winged, because in all times both children and men have wished to fly. Nor do we think Mr. Wallace's opinion any better founded, that, owing to a dearth of leaves on the lower branches of trees, all the short-necked giraffes died out, and left the long-necked ones to continue the species. This theory reminds us of the "astronomical expirimint" proposed by Father Tom to his "Howliness" the Pope, of the goose and the turkey-cock picking the stars from the sky. As to the ape-like skull of Engis Cave, and the human skeleton found near Dusseldorf in a cavern, we think it would not be difficult to find full as bad skulls on living shoulders, and equally bad forms in skeletons now walking about. To us they are no evidence that the first man was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, nor does his or Darwin's argument convince us that all vertebrates were once fishes. This question, however, is still mooted; and we have no objections that people should amuse themselves in thus tracing back their ancestry.

To this class of inquirers Sir Charles Lyell's book will furnish food for reflection; and they will see that even so enthusiastic a writer as this new convert to the Darwinian doctrine can furnish but very slender support to it from his geologic lore.

There is much interesting matter in the book besides the generalizations we object to, and enough to render it welcome to the library of any one interested in the study of Geology and of the antiquity of the animal creation.

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Spurgeon's Sermons. Preached and revised by the Rev. C.H. SPURGEON. Seventh Series. New York: Sheldon and Co.

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Spurgeon is emphatically of the earth, earthy. This we say, not as anything against him intellectually or spiritually, but simply as indicating the material ballast, which in this man is grosser and heavier than in most men, pulling forever against his sails, and absolutely forbidding that freer movement of the imagination which usually belongs to minds of a power equal in degree to his. Not that this freedom flows necessarily out of a great degree of mental power, or by any organic law is associated with what we term genius. Every one would admit that Luther was a man of genius; yet Luther was in this respect no better off than Spurgeon,-he was as totally destitute of wings, of the possibility of a?rial flight. His power we consider to be far higher than that of Spurgeon; but this we argue from the fact, that, although equally with Spurgeon he was excluded from the sovereignty of the air, although he was equally denied both the faculty to create and the capacity to receive subtile speculation, he had what Spurgeon has not, an almighty, irresistible impetus in his movements,-movements which, though centripetal, forever seeking the earth, and forever trailing their mountain-weight of glory along the line of and through the midst of flesh-and-blood realities, yet never found any impediment in all their course, but swept the ground like a whirlwind. This distinction between Spurgeon and Luther in the matter of strength is an important one; and it is, moreover, a distinction which may easily be derived-even if no other source lay open to us-from a palpable difference between their faces. But the resemblance between these two men as to tendencies and modes of operation is still more important, and especially as helping us to draw the line between two distinct orders of human genius. Upon this resemblance we desire to dwell at some length.

Luther and Spurgeon are both grossly realistic. They are both groundlings. In their art, they build after the simple, but grand style of the Cyclops; they have no upward reach; with no delicate steppings do they haunt the clouds; because they will not soar, they draw the sky down low about them, and, wrapping themselves about with its thunders and its sunlights, play with these mysteries as with magnificent toys. In them there is no subtilizing of human affections, of human fears, or of human faith. All these maintain their alliance magnetically, by channels seen or unseen, but forever felt, with the earth, and, Ant?us-like, from the earth they derive all their peculiar strength as sentiments of the human heart.

How widely different are these men from Bacon, Kant, or Fichte,-or, to compare them more directly with the artists of literature, by what chasms of space are they removed from Milton, Shakspeare, and even from Homer, who, although he was a realist, yet had eagles' wings, and was at home on the earth and in the clouds, amongst heroes, amongst the light-footed nymphs, and amongst the Olympian gods! In these latter the movement of imagination is centrifugal, it sustains itself in the loftiest altitudes, and in the most evanescent and fleecy shapes of thought it finds the materials from which it wreathes its climbing, "cloud-capped" citadels. The opposite order of genius is, as we have previously called it, centripetal, gravitating earthward.

Both orders are to be found among those celebrated as pulpit orators,-all, indeed, who have ranked as powers in this department of human effort belonging eminently, nay, we may almost say exclusively, to one or the other. If we take Spurgeon, Whitefield, Bunyan, and Luther as representatives of one order, we shall have also representatives of the other in such orators as Jeremy Taylor,-the Shakspeare of the pulpit,-and, though in a very different sort, Henry Ward Beecher. That in which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their movements,-the one hardly lifted above the earth's surface or above the level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere of the ideal and impalpable. In the latter class there are vast differences, but uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love are exhalant, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought and imagination. In Beecher this ideality is of a philosophic sort. Thought in him is forever dividing and illustrating truth; and that which is his great peculiarity is that he is at the same time so strictly philosophical, even to a metaphysical nicety, and so very popular. We have heard him, in a single discourse, give utterance to so much philosophic truth relating to theology, as, if it were spread out over a dozen sermons by doctors in divinity whom we have also heard, would be capital sufficient to secure a professor's chair in any theological seminary in the country. Yet he is never abundant in analytic statements of truth: these in any one of his sermons are "few"-as they should be-"and far between": the greater portion of his time and the most mighty efforts of his dramatic power being devoted to the irradiation and illustration of these truths. This is the fertility of his genius, that, out of the roots which philosophy furnishes, it can, through its mysterious broodings, bring forth into the breathing warmth of life organisms so delicate and perfect. Here is the secret of his popularity. Jeremy Taylor, without being at all metaphysical, without ever diving down to examine the beginnings of things in Nature or in men's hearts, had an infinitely more fertile imagination, and the result was therefore more various and multiplex; it reached a higher point in the graduated scale of ideality, it was the afflatus of a diviner inspiration, and was more akin to the effects of the most exalted poetry: yet it was of far less value as something which was to operate on men's minds than the result of Beecher's more pointed, more scintillating discourse of reason. The fact is, that both Henry Ward Beecher and Jeremy Taylor must of necessity depend, for any beneficial effects which they may seek to bring about in the lives of their hearers, upon certain intellectual qualities already existing in their audience. Even in order to be appreciated, they must have at least partially educated audiences. Give either of them Whitefield's auditory, and these effects become impossible. Here we come upon the inert masses, which cannot by any possibility be induced to ascend one single stair in any upward movement, but must be swayed this way or that way upon a thoroughly dead level.

It is just here that the realistic preaching of the Spurgeon school is available, and nothing else is. Here things must be taken just as they are found,-must be taken and presented in their natural coloring, in their roughest shape. Polish the thought here, or let it be anything save the strictest rescript from Nature, and you make it useless for your purposes. Here it is not the crystal that is wanted, but the unshapely boulder. And provided you wield your weapons after a masterly fashion, it matters very little what your manner or style may be as regards the graces of composition; if only a giant, you may be the most unseemly and awkward one of all J?tunheim.

Now these elements of success Spurgeon has in an eminent degree. He deals not simply with realities of the grossest sort, but with those which are forever present to common humanity; he seeks to move men to religious feelings through precisely the same means that they are daily moved by, the same things which daily excite whatever of thought is transacted in their cramped-up world of mind. This is particularly evident in the material structure upon which his sermons proceed.

Preaching from the text, "But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you," he causes the whole matter to be indelibly impressed on their minds by the very mechanical comparison of Perfection, Establishment, Strengthening, and Settling to four sparkling jewels set in the jet-black foil of past suffering. This is just that kind of illustration which his audience craves. It matters not whether he meets this audience through a vague or a transparent medium, provided the vagueness or the transparency be common both to the speaker and his hearers. Nothing, for instance, could have better accomplished the end designed, yet nothing could be more vague, than such an appeal as the following:-"Have ye never on your bed dreamed a dream, when your thoughts roamed at large and a bit was taken from your imagination, when, stretching all your wings, your soul floated through the Infinite, grouping strange and marvellous things together, so that the dream rolled on in something like supernatural splendor? But, on a sudden, you were awakened, and you have regretted hours afterwards that the dream was never concluded. And what is a Christian, if he does not arrive at perfection, but an unfinished dream?" Now there is nothing more universal among the most unintellectual of the children of earth than just this sort of mystical reverie, thus grand and thus inconclusive, where the mind, moved, perhaps, to this enthusiastic rapture by that infusion of animal force which comes from a hearty dinner, remaining always just in the same place, seems to wheel away, it knows not whither, but seemingly, and as it flatters itself, into the regions of the Infinite. Really there is no mental movement at all,-nothing but an outgoing through the myriad channels of animal sensibility; yet there is always associated, in such minds, with reveries like these a spiritual elevation approaching to inspiration. "Oh," think they, "if the dream might only be completed, that would be the consummation of a divinely spiritual being!" On this association Spurgeon founds a comparison, which, though utterly false when analyzed, is yet no less effective as illustrating the particular idea which he wishes to convey. Such associations, where he cannot correct them, it is the business of the popular preacher to inherit as if they were his own, and to build upon as if they were gospel truths.

Spurgeon, again, is continually indulging in the most startling suppositions, and just those which are most commonly entertained by vulgar minds,-as, for instance, the supposition of some one, himself or some unfortunate hearer, dropping down dead in his chamber. And, in general, he makes abundant use of that apprehension of death, which is far stronger in the uneducated than in the more refined, as a source from which he may gather thunderbolt after thunderbolt with which to startle the indifferent and hardened heart. What matter though the sentiment to which he appeals be a perverted sentiment? what matter how severely wrenched out of its normal channel? if through this tortuous channel something of the divine truth reaches the awakened conscience, then is there hope, that, through divine grace entering with the truth, all these perversions and anomalies of sinful nature may be set right, and the soul again arrive at celestial harmony with the universe.

The method of such preaching is as organic, considering the circumstances, as that of Beecher's preaching. The only difference is, that the latter finds an audience that through intellectual facility is able to follow him in any path; while Spurgeon, on the other hand, finds his audience destitute of any such facilities, yet finds them facile in every direction where he can bring into alliance with his power their emotions or their peculiar modes of mental action.

Nor do the grosser realities of the world, as present ever with the hearer, and as present ever with the preacher, at all disturb the efficiency of human faith: indeed, they form the most beautiful relief upon which faith is ever to be discovered, for thus is that which in its supernatural alliance is entirely heavenly seen shining through the lowest bases of our nature, which in their alliance are everlastingly associated with earth.

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A Treatise on the American Law of Easements and Servitudes. By EMORY WASHBURN, LL.D. Philadelphia: George W. Childs. pp. 640.

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"Easements" is no easy subject for a law-writer. In its development he will be thrown, to a great extent, upon his own resources in collating and unfolding the topics, for the literature upon the subject existing in our own language is so meagre that the form of its presentation has not been cast in any conventional mould. We have heretofore had no American treatise whatever upon the general subject, and the English bar has furnished us only with that of Gale and Whately, which almost wholly ignores the American cases. It is evident, therefore, that it required an original and fresh intellectual effort to gather together the hundreds of adjudications scattered through our various State reports, classify them, compare them, study them, and construct a homogeneous and extensive analysis of their doctrine. This sort of distillation, if we may so speak, from the crude mass, has been most thoroughly performed by the author of the work before us; and the result is, that, instead of merely making a book, he has indeed written one. In reading it, we recall the great authoritative treatises of the profession, such as Abbott on Shipping, or Sugden on Vendors, and we are also the more disgusted with the hotchpots of the "United States Digest," called law-books.

Professor Washburn is fairly before the public as the author of the "Treatise on the American Law of Real Property," and his merits as a writer have thus become so well known as to render any new commendation superfluous. His style is plain, clear, and compact. He addresses himself directly to the subject of which he is treating, spinning no curious refinements, and admitting no irrelevant digressions. Nor does he keep the reader oscillating between text and notes, in a state of dizzying, unstable equilibrium which would task an acrobate. There be books we have seen printed, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, in which the text was so shingled over with layers of notes, or the notes were so underpinned by a slight propping of text, that it was difficult to say, in the language of Easements, which was the servient and which the dominant tenement. Our author's volume, we are happy to say, is not thus bifurcated. His law is in his text, and his sources are in his notes.

There is another feature which we dare not overlook, and that is, the hearty conscientiousness with which the writer does his work. He takes nothing at secondhand, but goes straightway to the authorities. It begets confidence in a writer, when he is enabled to say for himself, as the Professor apologetically does in his Preface, "It has been my aim to examine for myself every reported case which bore sufficiently upon the topic under consideration to warrant a reference to it as an authority"; and when we are further told that "the cases thus examined considerably exceed a thousand in number," we may form some conception of the great industry as well as the rare literary honesty of the writer.

The arrangement of the book is admirable. At the commencement of each chapter we have the titles of the various sections, and each successive section is introduced by a statement of the contents of each clause. This facilitates search, though it necessitates the cumbrous mode of reference adopted in the foot-notes to chapter, section, and placitum.

It would be easy for us to prolong this notice, but we must content ourselves with an earnest commendation of the work to the profession. It is literally indispensable to the general practitioner, not merely because it is the only book which contains the collected law on the subject as administered in this country, but also because, if it had a dozen competitors, its intrinsic value would be all the more fully developed by the comparison.

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The Astronomy of the Bible. By O.M. MITCHELL, LL.D. 12mo. New York Blakeman & Mason.

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This work contains seven Lectures, in which the distinguished and lamented author has undertaken to prove not only that the science of Astronomy does not discredit the inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures, but that it affords many clear evidences that they are a Divine Revelation. The first demonstrates, against the Atheist, the being of God. The second adduces evidence that the God of the universe is the Jehovah of the Bible. The third considers the cosmogony revealed by the present state of astronomy; and the fourth compares the Mosaic account of creation with the theory advanced in the preceding lecture. The fifth is devoted to the ancient and venerable Book of Job with reference to the astronomical allusions it contains. The sixth is on the astronomical miracles of the Bible; and the seventh is on the language of the Bible with reference to astronomy.

This brief statement of the subjects discussed is sufficient to show that the work is one of no ordinary character. The interest the publication of these lectures will awaken will be intensified by the considerations, that they contain the matured views of one of the first astronomers of the age, on a subject of transcendent importance,-and that they are the last contributions to the cause of science and religion from his gifted pen. They were delivered within the last few years, in our principal cities, to very large and deeply interested audiences; and their appearance in print just now is most timely. The question respecting the relations of Christianity and Science to each other is now exciting a very general and intense interest. The Bible was written during a period in the history of the world when true science was almost unknown. The writers of the several books which compose the sacred volume, with scarcely an exception, made no pretensions to scientific investigation; and they did not so much reason out as announce great truths and principles intimately related to almost every department of human knowledge. These venerable writings have been and now are subjected to a test which no other professed revelation has been able to bear. If, then, it shall be found that their direct teachings and their numerous references to the works of Nature harmonize with the averments of science in this age of its greatest achievements-still more, if it shall appear that the different sciences, unknown when they were written, strongly corroborate their teachings, direct and indirect,-it will be difficult for candid minds to resist the conviction that their origin is Divine.

No one of the sciences was less understood, in those remote ages, than Astronomy; and yet to no part of the works of Nature does the Bible make more frequent references than to the heavenly bodies. In this department, therefore, if anywhere, we might expect to find discrepancy between the teachings of science and revelation. But the impartial reader will rise from the perusal of this volume, not only with his faith in the inspiration of the Scriptures confirmed, but with the conviction that the sublime science of Astronomy affords a far more just conception of the pregnant meaning of the eloquent language of Job, David, and Isaiah, than without it we could attain.

These lectures will be regarded as the more valuable, because they are the voluntary contribution of a Christian layman, as well as of a man of eminent scientific attainments, to the great argument on which depends the religious faith of mankind. Possessing a mind of extraordinary powers, trained under the promptings of an intense thirst for knowledge to patient and thorough investigation, he made for himself a reputation which secures the strongest confidence in his ability to treat the momentous and difficult questions he undertook to discuss in these lectures; whilst the remarkable clearness of his views, his brilliant imagination, and an extraordinary affluence of language and felicity of expression, both enlighten the understanding and gratify the most cultivated taste. Professor Mitchell did more than any other man to popularize the science of Astronomy; and the use he has made of it in defence of Christianity seems a fitting termination of his noble labors.

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Footnotes

The following is the record of this early visit to Port Royal, taken from Ribaut's report to Coliguy, translated and printed in London in 1563:-

"And when wee had sounded the entrie of the Chanell (thanked be God), wee entered safely therein with our shippes, against the opinion of many, finding the same one of the fayrest, and greatest Hauens of the worlde. Howe be it, it must be remembred, least men approaching neare it within seven leagues of the lande, bee abashed and afraide on the East side, drawing toward the Southeast, the grounde to be flatte, for neuerthelesse at a full sea, there is eurey where foure fathome water keeping the right Chanel."

Ribaut thinks that the Broad River of Port Royal is the Jordan of the Spanish navigator Vasquez de Ayllon, who was here in 1520, and gave the name St. Helena to a neighboring cape (La Vega, Florida del Inca). The adjacent district, now called St. Helena, is the Chicora of the old Spanish maps.

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I say nothing of the traces of Birds in the Secondary deposits, because the so-called bird-tracks seem to me of very doubtful character; and it is also my opinion that the remains of a feathered animal recently found in the Solenhofen lithographic limestone, and believed to be a bird by some naturalists, do not belong to a genuine bird, but to one of those synthetic types before alluded to, in which reptilian structure is combined with certain birdlike features.

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The two most imposing views of the Alps from the Jura are those of Latourne, on the road from Pontarlier to Neufchatel, and of St. Cergues, on the road from Lons le Saulnier to Nyon; the next best is to be had above Boujean, on the road from Basle to Bienne. Very extensive views may be obtained from any of the summits in the southern range of the Jura; among which the Weissenstein above Soleure, the Chasseral above Bienne, the Chanmont above Neufchatel, the Chasseron above Gran?on, the Suchet above Orbe, the Mont Tendre or the Noirmont above Morges, and the D?le above Nyon, are the most frequented. Of all these pointe Chaumont is unquestionably to be preferred, as it commands at the same time an equally extensive view of the Bernese Alps and the Mont Blanc range.

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I use surface often in its geological significance, meaning earth-crust, and applied to sea-bottom as well as to dry land.

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It is not absolutely true that England holds Cape Horn; for the region is unfit for the residence of civilized man. And were it not so, the perpetual storms leave no secure anchorage. But Great Britain does hold the nearest habitable land, the Falkland Islands,-and notwithstanding the rudeness of the climate, Stanley, the principal settlement, does a considerable business in refitting and repairing ships bound round the Cape.

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"Il n'y a pas de plus dangereux exemple que celui de la violence exercée pour le bien et par les gens de bien."-"L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution," par Alexis de Tocqueville, Paris, 1856, p. 310.

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"McCulloch against the State of Maryland." 4 Wheaton, Rep., p. 316.

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February term, 1819. 4 "Wheaton's Rep., 316. Unwilling here to multiply words, I pray reference to the decision itself.

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The Secession Ordinance passed the Convention of South Carolina December 20, 1860. The next day, December 21, the Convention adopted the "Declaration of Causes" which led to that Secession. This document declares, as to the non-slaveholding States, that they have "denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery"; that they have "united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to Slavery," and who declares that "the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction." And it winds up with this assertion:-"All hope of remedy is rendered vain by the fact that the public opinion of the North has invested a great political error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief."

These, first put forth by South Carolina, afterwards indorsed by each seceding State, are the causes officially declared to have produced, and which are held to justify, the present insurrection.

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The exact number of slaves emancipated in the British colonies was 770,390; and the total amount of indemnity was ￡19,950,066 sterling.

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If, hereafter, Attorney-General Bates's decision, that a free negro is a citizen, be sustained by the Supreme Court, then, should the question come up before it, the State laws above referred to will be declared unconstitutional. But meanwhile they have not been so declared, and are in force.

The negro-excluding laws of Indiana and Illinois are in the same category.

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