FEINBERG/WHITMAN LITERARY FILE Prose "The Poetry of the Future" (Feb. 1881 North American Review. Box 33 Folder 28 Printed copies. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits sine qua non at last. The stamp of entire and finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has expressed itself, and put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do. And though no esthetik worthy the present condition or future certainties of the New World seems to have been even outlined in men's minds,* or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that until the United States have just such definite and native expressers in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical, wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing and predominant, will constitute (as I have before likened it) a more and more expanded and well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain. A barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not carried out and established to form their only permanent tie and hold, the first-named would be of little avail. * In 1850, Emerson said earnestly to Miss Bremer, in response to her praises: "No, you must not be too good-natured. We have not yet any poetry which can be said to represent the mind of our world. The poet of America is not yet come. When he comes, he will sing quite differently." 196 The North American Review. With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp, its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all times. I say the hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate itself in the two directions specified, - autochthonic poems and personalities, - born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals. They thought and identity of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, involves the essence and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones and joints, and heart and fluids and nervous system, and vitality, constituting, launching forth in time and space a human being - aye, an immortal soul - in such relations, and no less, stands true poetry to the single personality or to the nation. Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves. The feudalism of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakespeare, and by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson, with all its tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating veins, poems, manners - even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet - strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere - invincible courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakespeare and the others I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America. Politics, literature, and everything else centers at last in the perfect personnel [italic word] (as democracy is to find the same as the rest); and here feudalism is unrivaled - here the rich and highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us - a mass of precious, though foreign, nutriment, which we are to work over, The poetry of the Future. 197 and popular, and enlarge, and present again in Western growths. Still, there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears. Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives. Let us for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system, mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection. As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch, through ranking high, Shakespeare (spanning the arch wide enough) is equaled by several, and excelled by the old Greeks (as Aeschylus [?]). But in portraying the mediaevals [?] lords and barons, the arrogant port and stomach so dear to the inmost human heart (pride ! pride ! dearest, perhaps, of all - touching use, too, of the States closest of all - closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world. From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakespeare, exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy. Jefferson's criticism on the Waverly novels was that they turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, courts, and aristocratic institutions of Europe, with all their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson and his works. Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness - sometimes not, however, but even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower - the verse of elegance and hight-life, and yet preserving amid all its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors 198 The North America Review. and outdoor folk - the old Normal lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Savon fiber from which twain the best current stock of England springs - poetry that revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range - a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed-pervading the books like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the mannerisms, the stately ennui; the yearning of love, like a spinal marrow inside of all; the costumes, old brocade and satin; the old houses and furniture,-solid oak, no mere veneering, - the moldy secrets, everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and naive [?] poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated - even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic ( a shell, a but of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad and lass), the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the Laureate, too, the attache [?] of the throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "To the Queen" at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "These to his Memory" (Prince Albert's), preceding "Idylls of the King." Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these states by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put together. We hear it said, both of Tennyson and the other current leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle, - as of Victor Hugh in France, - that not one of them is personally friendly or admiring toward America; indeed, quite the reverse. N'importe [?]. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far - the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with hits ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied and long continued storm and stress stages The Poetry of the Future. 199 (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith nature, history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the future; - that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires ( and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on scales of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be oblivious of them. The same feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, wars, personalities. However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms, the latter may be no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, here, and to-day, a balance of good out of its reminiscence almost beyond price. Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic should be supplied and nourished by wholesale from foreign and antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly: Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still, and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly tempered by some additional points (perhaps the results of advancing age, or the reflections of invalidism). I see that this world of the West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all as time does - the ever new, yet old, old human race- "the same subject continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, what on earth are we for? The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse, tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloosed individualities, and the rank self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these grace-persuading, recherché [?] influences. 200 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. We first require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such result in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are, and thank they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check their own compelled tendency to democracy, and absorption in it, by marked leanings to the part- by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry. It is perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make reconnaissance a little further still. Not the least part of our lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign experts,* and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry," says the London "Times,"† "is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow, with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland." *A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great poet?" announced as a prize-subject for the competition of some university in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper, and made note of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long season, the matter slipped away, and I have never been able to since get hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion, nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay or discussion, nor can I now remember the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I think it was in 1872. †In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of William Cullen Bryant. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 201 Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: "American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. That is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down in the hortus siccus of an anthology. American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their audience, they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. . . . In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. "Americans themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their culture, read Byron and Tennyson." The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied (perhaps he is jealous) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions. Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is (like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of the technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks with aversion from the sturdy, the universal, and the democratic. 202 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. The poetry of the future (the phrase is open to sharp criticism, and is not satisfactory to me, but is significant, and I will use it)- the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion (which means far, far more than appears at first), and to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all its magnetism; not all the fitting, lasting song of grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and landscape (returning mainly to the antique feeling, real sun and gale, and woods and shores- to the elements themselves- not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above style or polish,- a feature not absent at any time, but now first brought to the fore, -gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same influences: "The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies." Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old works, and always unspeakably precious as studies (for Americans more than any other people), it is too much to say that by the shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period termed classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was governed by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect, - the Aeneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us, the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn." THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 203 The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism and in excess that modern aesthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the beauty disease. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued of truth and with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer." Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service performed, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good-natured persons ("society," in fact, could get not on without them), fully eligible for the certain problems, times and duties, to mix egg-nog, to mend the broken spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall preceded the sherry or the sherry the stewed eels, to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor tableaux with monk, Jew, Turk, lover, Romeo, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to generally contribute and gracefully adapt flexibilities and talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real crises, great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as well have never been born. Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of male odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind spiced ideas, second-hand reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments, in rooms stifling with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a new-published healthy, bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long ago, there were verses in each of three fresh monthlies, from leading authors, and in every one the whole central motif (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness of a marriageable young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor one! Besides its tonic and al fresco physiology, relieving such as this, the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock-tables and superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the new principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world. Liberty, with Law by her side, will one day be paramount- will at any rate be the central idea. Then only- for all the splendor and beauty of what has been, or the polish of what is- then only will the true poets appear, and 204 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of to-day, not glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other - not Milton, not even Shakespeare's plays, grand as they are. Entirely different and hitherto unknown classes of men, being authoritatively called for in imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is hitherto most lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates the future. Democracy has been hurried on through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative worthy of it anywhere upon the earth. Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and genius than to sing worthily the songs these States have already indicated. Their origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of old times, the war of 1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible rapidity of movement and breadth of area - to fuse and compact the South and North, the East and West, to express the native forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to California, and from the Saguenay to the Rio Grande - the working out on such gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of changing light and shade, of the great problems of man and freedom, - how far ahead of the stereotyped plots, or gem-cutting, or tales of love, or wars of mere ambition! Our history is so full of spinal, modern, germinal subjects - one above all. What the ancient siege of Ilium, and the puissance of Hector's and Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic art and literature, and all art and literature since, may prove the war of attempted secession of 1861-5 to the future aesthetics, drama, romance, poems of the United States. Nor could utility itself provide anything more practically serviceable to the hundred millions who, a couple of generations hence, will inhabit within the limits just named, than the permeation of a sane, sweet, autochthonous national poetry - must I say of a kind that does not now exist? but which, I fully believe, will in time be supplied on scales as free as Nature's elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emotional, spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.) THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 205 Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launched forth in the firmament that is, and is to be, America. Lately I have wondered whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty-eight States is not only practical fraternity among themselves - the only real union (much nearer its accomplishment, too, than appears on the surface) - but for fraternity over the whole globe - that dazzling, pensive dream of ages! Indeed, the peculiar glory of our lands, I have come to see, or expect to see, not in their geographical or republican greatness, nor wealth or products, nor military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in similar departments, - but more and more in a vaster, saner, more splendid Comeradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the modern may thus prove to be a signal growth of joyous, more excited bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us, audacious, start it. Let the diplomates, as ever, still deeply plan, seeking advantages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind them, on paper: what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose, new formulas - international poems. I have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both in patriotism and song (even amid their grandest shows past) we have adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold the world. Not only is the human and artificial world we have established in the West a radical departure from anything hitherto known, - not only men and politics, and all that goes with them, - but Nature itself, in the main sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type, of course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For Nature consists not only in itself objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it - faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual - takes, and readily gives again the physiognomy 206 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW of any nation or literature - falls like a great elastic veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue. What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the wanderings of Virgil's AEneas? Then to Shakespeare's characters - Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens? In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the King" - what sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold nature, inimitably described, better than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies - wrathful or peaceful, just the same - Vivien and Merlin in their strange dalliance, or the death-float of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his disgraced Enid and himself through the wood, and the wife all day driving the horses), as in all the great imported art-works, treatises, systems, from Lucretius down, there is a constantly lurking, often pervading something that will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to them, and disproved by them. Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior, but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man. I haven't said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant bards in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the eternal antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die (my opinion is, that after all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class are for, as, to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists, Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of India and the British Druids), - to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America - measureless corruption in politics; what we call religion a mere mask of wax or lace; for ensemble, that most cankerous, offensive of all earth's shows - a vast and varied community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures, - plenty of mere intellectuality too, - and then utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral, and aesthetic health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of the world. Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, West, South, East, THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 207 North, will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet one in soul - nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger prophets - larger than Judea's, and more passionate - to meet and penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness? As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is entered upon, and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the central, spinal reality (or even the idea of it) of such a democratic band of native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, litterateurs, tolerant and receptive of importations, but entirely adjusted to the West, to ourselves, to our own days, purports, combinations, differences, superiorities. Indeed, I am fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and political triumphs of the republic are mainly as bases and preparations for half a dozen first rate future poets, ideal personalities, referring not to a special class, but to the entire people, four or five millions of square miles. Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality. Only to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen.* Democracy, so far attending only to the real, is *Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and politics? And if so - what is it? ... Wise men say there are two sets of wills to nations and to persons - one set that acts and works from explainable motives - from teaching, intelligence, judgement, circumstance, caprice, emulation, greed, etc. - and then another set, perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it were out of abysses, resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to themselves - the poet to his fieriest words - the race to pursue its loftiest ideal.... Indeed, the paradox of a nation's life and career, with all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explained from these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere, combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results. Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is?) this great, unconscious, and abysmic second will also running through the average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid all the dangers and defections of the present, and through all the processes of the conscious will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force, destined to carry on the New World to fulfill its destinies in the future - to resolutely pursue those destinies, age upon age; to build, far, far beyond its past vision, present thought; to from and fashion, and for the general type, men and women more noble, more athletic than the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly 208 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not for the real only, but the grandest ideal - to justify the modern by that, and not only to equal, but to become by that superior to the past. On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and present and hitherto condition of the United States with reference to their future and the indispensable precedents to it, I say I am fully content. My point, below all surfaces, and subsoiling them, is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading nationality are, first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and products on the largest and most varied scale, common education and intercommunication, and, in general, the passing through of just the stages and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United States. Then, perhaps, as the weightiest factor of the whole business, and of the main outgrowths of the future, it remains to be definitely avowed that the native-born middle class population of quite all the United States, - the average of farmers and mechanics everywhere, - the real, though latent and silent bulk of America, city blend, from all the States, with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality - a nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most productive and materialistic the world has yet to known but compacted indissolubly, and out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it, conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise, like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven. Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are but a series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And here is, to my mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity. There is in that sublime process, in the laws of the universe - and, above all, in the moral law - something that would make unsatisfactory, and even vain and contemptible, all the triumphs of war, the gains of peace, and the proudest worldly grandeur of all the nations that have ever existed, or that (ours included) now exist, except that we constantly see, through all their worldly career, however struggling and blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according to their development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and father on, to more and more advanced ideals. The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of science, and solidly based on the past, is to cheerfully range itself, and its politics are henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody them, and carry them out, to serve them.... And as only that individual becomes truly great who understands well that, while complete in himself in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and whose special life and laws are adjusted to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of nature, and especially with the moral law, the deepest and highest of all, and the last vitality of man or State - so those nations, and so the United States, may THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 209 or country, presents a magnificent mass of material, never before equaled on earth. It is this material, quite unexpressed by literature or art, that in every respect insures the future of the republic. During the secession war I was with the armies, and saw the rank and file, North and South, and studied them for four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country in its essential future since. Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than saturate ourselves with, and continue to give imitations, yet a while, of the aesthetic models, supplies, of that past and of those lands we spring from. Those wondrous stores, reminiscences, floods, currents! Let them flow on, flow hither freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, courteous France, profound Germany, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art race, and always the mystic Orient. only become the greatest and the most continuous, by understanding well their harmonious relations with entire humanity and history, and all their laws and progress, and sublimed with the creative thought of Deity, through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will they expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become splendid illustrations and culminating parts of the cosmos, and of civilization. No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents, however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times, I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the growth of our republic - that it is the deliberate culmination and result of all the past - that here, too, as in all departments of the universe, regular laws (slow and sure acting, slow and sure in ripening) have controlled and governed, and will yet control and govern; and that hose laws can no more be baffled or steered clear of, or vitiated, by chance, or any fortune or opposition, than the laws of winter and summer, or darkness and light. The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of 1861-5, and their results - and indeed of the entire hundred years of the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down to the present day (1780-1881) - is, that they all now launch the United States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and humanity, and in main sort the representative of them, leading the van, leading the fleet of the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages of the future. And the real history of the United States - starting from the great convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly concluded, and the South victorious, after all - is only to be written at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence. - From my "Memoranda of the War." 210 The North American Review. Remembering that at present, and doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us. The course through time of highest civilization, does it not wait the first glimpse of our contribution to its cosmic train of poems, bibles, structures, perpetuities---Egypt and Palestine and India---Greece and Rome and medieval Europe---and so onward ? The shadowy procession is not a meager one, and the standard not a low one. All that is mighty or precious in our kind seems to have trod the road. Ah, never may America forget her thanks and reverence for samples, treasures such as these---that other life-blood, inspiration, sunshine, hourly in use to-day, all days. forever, throughout her broad demesne! All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, headwinds, cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her destination. Shakespeare has served, and serves, may be, the best of any. For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in my opinion. continues and stands for the Shakespearean cultus at the present day among all English-writing peoples---of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of these lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted---both poets ! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told ! To run their course---to get their deeds and shapes in lasting pigments---the very pomp and dazzle of the sunset ! Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight---but 'tis the twilight of the dawn. WALT WHITMAN. February 1881 1845 1881 February Date on Offprint. A.MS. (16p. 22 x 14 1/4 cm.) Written in ink at the top of the first page of an offprint of a 16-page article, 'The Poetry of the Future' , by Walt Whitman, North American Review, February 1881, pp. 195-210, 2 words: Feb: '81 7654 [From the North American Review.] Feb. '81 THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. Strange as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits sine qua non at last. The stamp of entire and finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has expressed itself, and put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do. And though no esthetik worthy the present condition or future certainties of the New World seems to have been even outlined in men's minds,* or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that until the United States have just such definite and native expressers in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical, wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing and predominant, will constitute (as I have before likened it) a more and more expanded and well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain. A barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not carried out and established to form their only permanent tie and hold, the first-named would be of little avail. * In 1850, Emerson said earnestly to Miss Bremer, in response to her praises: "No, you must not be too good-natured. We have not yet any poetry which can be said to represent the mind of our world. The poet of America is not yet come. When he comes, he will sing quite differently." 196 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp, its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all times. I say the hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate itself in the two directions specified,--autochthonic poems and personalities,--born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals. The thought and identity of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, involves the essence and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones and joints, and heart and fluids and nervous system, and vitality, constituting, launching forth in time and space a human being-- aye, an immortal soul--in such relation, and no less, stands true poetry to the single personality or to the nation. Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves. The feudalism of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakespeare, and by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson, with all its tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating veins, poems, manners--even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet--strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakespeare and the others I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America. Politics, literature, and everything else centers at last in perfect personnel (as democracy is to find the same as the rest) ; and here feudalism is unrivaled--here the rich and highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us--a mass of precious, though foreign, nutriment, which we are to work over, THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 197 and popularize, and enlarge, and present again in Western growths. Still, there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears. Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives. Let us for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system, mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection. As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch, though ranking high, Shakespeare (spanning the arch wide enough) is equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks as (Æschylus). But in portraying the mediæval lords and barons, the arrogant port and stomach so dear to the inmost human heart (pride ! pride ! dearest, perhaps, of all--touching us, too, of the States closest of all--closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world. From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakespeare, exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy. Jefferson's criticism on the Waverly novels was that they turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, courts, and aristocratic institutes of Europe, with all their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson and his works. Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the verse of elegance and high-life, and yet preserving amid all its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors 198 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. and outdoor folk--the old Norman lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from which twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range--a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed--pervading the books like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the mannerisms, the stately ennui; the yearning of love, like a spinal marrow inside of all; the costumes, old brocade and satin; the old houses and furniture,--solid oak, no mere veneering,--the moldy secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and naïve poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated--even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic (a shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad and lass), the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the Laureate, too, the attaché of the throne, and most excellent, too ; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "To the Queen" at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "These to his Memory" (Prince Albert's), preceding "Idylls of the King." Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put together. We hear it said, both of Tennyson and the other current leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle,--as of Victor Hugo in France,--that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America ; indeed, quite the reverse. N'importe. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless future ; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far--the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied and long continued storm and stress stages THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 199 (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith nature, history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the future ;--that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on scales of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be oblivious of them. The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, wars, personalities. However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms, the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, here and to-day, a balance of good out of its reminiscence almost beyond price. Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic should be supplied and nourished by wholesale from foreign and antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly: Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still, and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly tempered by some additional points (perhaps the results of advancing age, or the reflections of invalidism). I see that this world of the West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all, as time does--the ever new, yet old, old human race--"the same subject continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, what on earth are we for? The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse, tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloosed individualities, and the rank self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these grace-persuading, recherché influences. 200 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. We first require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such result in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check their own compelled tendency to democracy, and absorption in it, by marked leanings to the past--by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry. It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable party, the real object of these preambles, But we must make reconnaissance a little further still. Not the least part of our lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign experts,* and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry," says the London "Times," [+?] "is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is has been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow, with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland." *A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great poet?" announced as prize-subject for the competition of some university in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper, and made note of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long season, the matter slipped away and I have never been able since to get hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion, nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay or discussion, nor can I now remember the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I think it was in 1872. [?+]In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of William Cullen Bryant. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 201 Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: "American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. that is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down in the hurts siccus of an anthology. American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their audience, they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames...In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. "Americans themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their culture, read Byron and Tennyson." The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied (perhaps he is jealous) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions. Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or anything from the Middle Ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the last fifty or eight years, and now at its height, has been and is (like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks with aversion from the sturdy, the universal, and the democratic. 202 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. The poetry of the future (the phrase is open to sharp criticism, and is not satisfactory to me, but is significant, and I will use it)--the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion (which means far, far more than appears at first), and to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and landscape (returning mainly to the antique feeling), real sun and gale, and woods and shores--to the elements themselves--not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above style or polish,--a feature not absent at any time, but now first brought to the fore,--gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same influences: "The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies." Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old works, and always unspeakably precious as studies (for Americans more than any other people), is it too much to say that by the shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period termed classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was governed by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the [AEneid], the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us, the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn." THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 203 The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess that modern aesthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the beauty disease. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice disappear, There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer." Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service performed, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good natured persons ("society," in fact, could not get on without them), fully eligible for certain problems, times, and duties--to mix eggnog, to mend the broken spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall precede the sherry or the sherry the stewed eels, to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor-tableaux with monk, Jew, Turk, lover, Romeo, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to generally contribute and gracefully adapt their flexibilities and talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real crises, great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as well have never been born. Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of male odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas, second-hand reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments, in rooms stifling with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a new-published healthy, bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long ago, there were verses in each of three fresh monthlies, from leading authors, and in every one the whole central motif (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness of a marriageable young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor one! Besides its tonic and al fresco physiology, relieving such as this, the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock-fables and superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the new principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world. Liberty, with Law by her side, will one day be paramount--will at any rate be the central idea. Then only--for all the splendor and beauty of what has been, or the polish of what is--then only will the true poets appear, and VOL. CXXXII.--NO. 291. 14 204 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of to-day, not the glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other--not Milton, not even Shakespeare's plays, grand as they are. Entirely different and hitherto unknown classes of men, being authoritatively called for in imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is hitherto most lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates the future. Democracy has been hurried on through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative worthy of it anywhere upon the earth. Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and genius than to sing worthily the songs these States have already indicated. Their origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of old times, the war of 1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible rapidity of movement and breadth of area--to fuse and compact the South and North, the East and West, to express the native forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to California, and from the Saguenay to the Rio Grande--the working out on such gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of changing light and shade, of the great problems of man and freedom,--how far ahead of the stereotypes plots, or gen-cutting, or tales of love, or wars of mere ambition! Our history is so full of spinal, modern, germinal subjects--one above all. What the ancient siege of Ilium, and the puissance of Hector's and Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic art and literature, and all art and literature since, may prove the war of attempted secession of 1861-5 to the future aesthetics, drama, romance, poems of the United States. Nor could utility itself provide anything more practically serviceable to the hundred millions who, a couple of generations hence, will inhabit within the limits just named, than the permeation of a sane, sweet, autochthonous national poetry-- must I say of a kind that does not now exist? but which, I fully believe, will in time be supplied on scales as free as Nature's elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emotional, spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.) THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 205 Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launched forth in the firmament that is, and is to be, America. Lately I have wondered whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty- eight. States is not only practical fraternity among themselves-- the only real union (much nearer its accomplishment, too, than appears on the surface)--but for fraternity over the whole globe-- that dazzling, pensive dream of ages! Indeed, the peculiar glory of our lands, I have come to see, or expect to see, not in their geographical or republican greatness, nor wealth or products, nor military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in similar departments,--but more and more in a vaster, saner, more splendid Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the modern may thus prove to be a signal growth of joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us, audacious, start it. Let the diplomates, as ever, still deeply plan, seeking advantages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind them, on paper: what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose, new formulas--international poems. I have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both in patriotism and song (even amid their grandest shows past) we have adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold the world. [* Bravo Walt! *] Not only is the human and artificial world we have established in the West a radical departure from anything hitherto known,-- not only men and politics, and all that goes with them,--but Nature itself, in the main sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type, of course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For Nature consists not only in itself objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it--faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual--takes, and readily gives again, the phys- 206 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. iognomy of any nation or literature--falls like a great elastic veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue. What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the wanderings of Virgil's AEneas? Then to Shakespeare's characters--Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens? In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the King"--what sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold nature, inimitably described, better than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies-- wrathful or peaceful, just the same--Vivien and Merlin in their strange dalliance, or the death-float of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his disgraced Enid and himself through the wood, and the wife all day driving the horses), as in all the great imported art-works, treatises, systems, from Lucretius down, there is a constantly lurking, often pervading something that will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to them, and disproved by them. Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior, but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man. I haven't said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant bards in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the eternal antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die (my opinion is, that after all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class poets are for, as, to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists, Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of India and the British Druids),-- to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America--measureless corruption in politics; what we call religion a mere mask of wax or lace; for ensemble, that most cankerous, offensive of all earth's shows--a vast and varied community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures,--plenty of mere intellectuality too,--and then utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral, and aesthetic health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of the world. Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, West, South, East, THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 207 North, will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet one in soul--nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger prophets--larger than Judea's, and more passionate--to meet and penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness? As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is entered upon, and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the central, spinal reality (or even the idea of it) of such a democratic band of native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, litterateurs, tolerant and receptive of importations, but entirely adjusted to the West, to ourselves, to our own days, purports, combinations, differences, superiorities. Indeed, I am fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and political triumphs of the republic are mainly as bases and preparations for half a dozen first-rate future poets, ideal personalities, referring not to a special class, but to the entire people, four or five millions of square miles. Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality. Only to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen. * Democracy, so far attending on to the real, is *Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and politics? And if so--what is it? . . . Wise men say there are two sets of wills to nations and to persons--one set that acts and works from explainable motives--from teaching, intelligence, judgment, circumstance, caprice, emulation, greed, etc.--and then another set, perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it were out of abysses, resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to themselves--the poet to his fieriest words--the race to pursue its loftiest ideal. . . . Indeed, the paradox of a nation's life and career, with all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explained from these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere, combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results. Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is?) this great, unconscious, and abysmic second will also running through the average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid all the dangers and defections of the present, and through all the processes of the conscious will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force, destined to carry on the New World to fulfill its destinies in the future--to resolutely pursue those destinies, age upon age; to build, far, far beyond its past vision, present thought; to form and fashion, and for the general type, men and women more noble, more athletic than the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly 208 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not for the real only, but the grandest ideal--to justify the modern by that, and not only to equal, but to become by that superior to the past. On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and present and hitherto condition of the United States with reference to their future and the indispensable precedents to it, I say I am fully content. My point, below all surfaces, and subsoiling them, is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading nationality are, first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and products on the largest and most varied scale, common education and intercommunication, and, in general, the passing through of just the stages and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United States. Then, perhaps, as weightiest factor of the whole business, and of the main outgrowths of the future, it remains to be definitely avowed that the native-born middle-class population of quite all the United States,--the average of farmers and mechanics everywhere,-- the real, though latent and silent bulk of America, city blend, from all the States, with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality--a nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most productive and materialistic the world has yet known, but compacted indissolubly, and out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it, conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise, like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven. Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are but a series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And here is, to my mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity. There is in that sublime process, in the law of the universe--and, above all, in the moral law-- something that would make unsatisfactory, and even vain and contemptible, all the triumphs of war, the gains of peace, and the proudest worldly grandeur of all the nations that have ever existed, or that (ours included) now exist, except that we constantly see, through all their worldly career, however struggling and blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according to their development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and father on, to more and more advanced ideals. The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be that, emerging in the light of modern and the splendor of science, and solidly based on the past, it is to be cheerfully range itself, and its politics are henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody them, and carry them out, to serve them. . . .And as only that individual becomes truly great who understands well that, while complete in himself in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and whose special life and laws are adjusted to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of nature, and especially with the moral law, the deepest and highest of all, and the last vitality of man or State--so those nations, and so the United States, may THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 209 or country, presents a magnificent mass of material, never before equaled on earth. It is this material, quite unexpressed by literature or art, that in every respect insures the future of the republic. During the secession war I was with the armies, and saw the rank and file, North and South, and studied them for four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country in its essential future since. Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than saturate ourselves with, and continue to give limitations, yet a while, of the aesthetic models, supplies, of that past and of those lands we spring from. Those wondrous stores, reminiscences, floods, currents! Let them flow on, flow hither freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, courteous France, profound Germany, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art race, and always the mystic Orient. only become the greatest and the most continuous, by understanding well their harmonious relations with entire humanity and history, and all their laws and progress, and sublimed with the creative thought of Deity, through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will they expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become splendid illustrations and culminating parts of the cosmos, and of civilization. No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents, however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times, I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the growth of our republic-- that it is the deliberate culmination and result of all the past--that here, too, as in all departments of the universe, regular laws (slow and sure in acting, slow and sure in ripening) have controlled and governed, and will yet control and govern; and that those laws can no more be baffled or steered clear of, or vitiated, by chance, or any fortune or opposition, than the law of winter and summer, or darkness and light. The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of 1861-5, and their results--and indeed of the entire hundred years of the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down to the present day (17-80-1881)--is, that they all now launch the United States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and humanity, and in main sort the representative of them, leading the van, leading the fleet of the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages of the future. And the real history of the United States--starting from that great convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly concluded, and the South victorious, after all--is only to be written at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence.--From my "Memoranda of the War." 210 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Remembering that at present, and doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us. The course through time of highest civilization, does it not wait the glimpse of our contribution to its cosmic train of poems, bibles, structures, perpetuities--Egypt and Palestine and India--Greece and Rome and mediaeval Europe--and so onward? The shadowy procession is not a meager one, and the standard not a low one. All that is mighty or previous in our kind seems to have trod the road. Ah, never may America forget her thanks and reverence for samples, treasures such as these--that other life-blood, inspiration, sunshine, hourly in use to-day, all days, forever, throughout her broad demesne! All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, headwinds, cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her destination. Shakespeare has served, and serves, may be, the best of any. For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in my opinion, continues and stands for the Shakespearean cultus at the present day among all English-writing peoples--of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of these lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted--both poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course--to get their deeds and shapes in lasting pigments--the very pomp and dazzle of the sunset! Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight--but 'tis the twilight of the dawn. WALT WHITMAN. 7249 Whitman, Walt The poetry of the future. In North American Review, February, 1881. p. [195]-210. 22 cm. An offprint. [From the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.] THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. STRANGE as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple of the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits sine qua non at least. The stamp of entire and finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has expressed itself, and put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do. And though no esthetik worth the present condition or future certainties of the New World seems to have been even outlined in men's minds, * or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that until the United States have just such definite and native expressers in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical, wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing and predominant, will constitute (as I have before likened it) a more and more expanded and well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain. A barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not carried out and established to form their only permanent tie and hold, the first-named would be of little avail. *In 1850, Emerson said earnestly to Miss Bremer, in response to her praises: "No, you must not be too good-natured. We have not yet any poetry which can be said to represent the mind of our world. The poet of America is not yet come. When he comes, he will sing quite differently." 196 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp, its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all times. I say the hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate itself in the two directions specified,--autochthonic poems and personalities,--born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I find nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals. The thought and identity of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, involves the essence and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones and joints, and heart and fluids and nervous system, and vitality, constituting, launching forth in time and space a human being-- aye, an immortal soul--in such relation, and no less, stands true poetry to the single personality or to the nation. Here out thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves. The feudalism of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakespeare, and by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson, with all its tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating veins, poems, manners--even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet--strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere--invincible courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakespeare and the others I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America. Politics, literature, and everything else centers at last in perfect personnel (as democracy is to find the same as the rest); and here feudalism is unrivaled--here the rich and highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us--a mass of precious, though foreign, nutriment, which we are to work over, THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 197 and popularize, and enlarge, and present again in Western growths. Still, there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears. Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives. Let us for once briefly examine the just-names authors solely from a Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system, mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection. As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch, though ranking high, Shakespeare (spanning the arch wide enough) is equaled by several, and ecele=led by the best old Greeks (as Æschylus). But in portraying the mediæval lords and barons, the arrogant port and stomach so dear to the inmost human heart (pride! pride! dearest, perhaps, of all--touching us, too, of the States closest of all-closer than love), he stands alone, and I do no wonder he so witches the world. From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakespeare, exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy Jefferson's criticism on the Waverly novels was that they turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, courts, and aristocratic institutes of Europe, with all their measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever I lived, I pass on to Tennyson and his works. Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness--sometimes not, however, but even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower--the verse of elegance and high-life, and yet preserving aid all its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors 198 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. and outdoor folk - the old organ lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from which twain the best current stock of England springs - poetry that revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range - a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed - pervading the books like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the mannerisms, the stately ennui; the yearning of love, like a spinal marrow inside of all; the costumes, old brocade and satin; the old houses and furniture, - solid oak, no mere veneering, - the moldy secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and naïve poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated - even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic (a shell, bit of sedge, the commonest love- passage between a lad and lass), the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the Laureate, too, the attaché of the throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "To the Queen" at the beginning, and other fine dedication , "These to his Memory" (Prince Albert's), preceding "Idylls of the King." Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put together. We hear it said, both of Tennyson and the other current leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle - as of Victor Huge in France, - that not one of them is personally friendly or admiring toward America; indeed, quite the reverse. N'importe. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far - the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights, errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied and long continued storm and stress stages THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE 199 (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith nature, history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the future; - that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on the scales of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers. But we can buy no means afford to be oblivious of them. The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, wars, personalities. However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms, the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, here and to-day, a balance of good out of its reminiscence almost beyond price. Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic should be supplied and nourished by wholesale from foreign and antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly: Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still, and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly tempered by some additional points (perhaps the results of advancing age, or the reflections of invalidism). I see that this world of the West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all, as time does - the ever new, yet old, old human race - "the same subject continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, what on earth are we for? The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse, tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world off lulling, contrasting, even feudalistic, anti-republican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloosed individualities, and the rank self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these grace-persuading, recherché influences. 200 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. We first require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such result in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check their own compelled tendency to democracy, and absorption by it, by marked leanings to the past--by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry. It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make reconnaissance a little further still. Not the least part of our lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign experts,* and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry," says the London "Times," [?] "is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow, with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller's verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland." *A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great poet?" announced as prize-subject for the competition of some university in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper, and made note of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long season, the matter slipped away, and I have never been able since to get hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion, nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay or discussion, nor can I now remember the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I think it was in 1872. [?] In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of William Cullen Bryant. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 201 Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: "American verse, from its earliest stages to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. That is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down in the hortus siccus of an anthology. American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their audience, they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. . . . In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. "Americans themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English literature at the the point at which America has received it, and carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their culture, read Byron and Tennyson." The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied (perhaps he is jealous) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions. Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is (like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits, and yet, to give its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks with aversion from the sturdy, the universal, and the democratic. 202 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. The poetry of the future (the phrase is open to sharp criticism, and is not satisfactory to me, but is significant, and I will use it)---the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion (which means far, far more than appears at first), and to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central identity of everything, the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and landscape (returning mainly to the antique feeling), real sun and gale, and woods and shores---to the elements themselves---not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above style, or polish,---a feature not absent at any time, but now first brought to the fore,---gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same influences: "The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies." Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old works, and always unspeakably precious as studies (for Americans more than any other people), is it too much to say that by the shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period termed classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was governed by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect,--the [Aeneid?], the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us, the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn." THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 203 The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess that modern aesthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the beauty disease. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excesses. In minds imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer." Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service performed, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good- natured persons ("society," in fact, could not get on without them), fully eligible for certain problems, times, and duties---to mix egg- nog, to mend the broken spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall precede the sherry or the sherry the stewed eels, to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor-tableaux with monk, Jew, Turk, lover, Romeo, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to generally contribute and gracefully adapt their flexibilities and talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real crises, great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as well have never been born. Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of male odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas, second-hand reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments, in rooms stifling with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a new-published healthy, bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long ago, there were verses in each of three fresh monthlies, from leading authors, and in every one the whole central motif (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness of a marriageable young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor one! Besides its tonic and al fresco physiology, relieving such as this, the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock- fables and superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the new principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world. Liberty, with Law by her side, will one day be paramount---will at any rate be the central idea. Then only---for all the splendor and beauty of what has been, or the polish of what is---then only with the true poets appear, and VOL. CXXXII.---NO. 291. 14 204 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of to-day, not the glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other---not Milton, not even Shakespeare's plays, grand as they are. Entirely different and hitherto unknown classes of men, being authoritatively called for in imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is hitherto most lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates the future. Democracy has been hurried on through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative worthy of it anywhere upon the earth. Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and genius than to sing worthily the songs these States have already indicated. Their origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of old times, the war of 1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible rapidity of movement and breadth of area---to fuse and compact the South and North, the East and West, to express the native forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to California, and from the Saguenay to the Rio Grande---the working out on such gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of changing light and shade, of the great problems of man and freedom,---how far ahead of the stereotyped plots, or gem-cutting, or tales of love, or wars of mere ambition! Our history is so full of spinal, modern, germinal subjects---one above all. What the ancient siege of Ilium, and the puissance of Hector's and Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic art and literature, and all art and literature since, may prove the war of attempted secession of 1861-5 to the future aesthetics, drama, romance, poems of the United States. Nor could utility itself provide anything more practically serviceable to the hundred millions who, a couple of generations hence, will inhabit within the limits just named, than the permeation of a sane, sweet, autochthonous national poetry--- must I say of a kind that does not now exist? but which, I fully believe, will in time be supplied on scales as free as Nature's elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emotional, spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.) THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 205 Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launched forth in the firmament that is, and is to be, America. lately I have wondered whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty-eight States is not only practical fraternity among themselves--- the only real union (much nearer its accomplishment, too, than appears on the surface)---but for fraternity over the whole globe--- that dazzling, pensive dream of ages! Indeed, the peculiar glory of our lands, I have come to see, or expect to see, not in their geographical or republican greatness, nor wealth or products, nor military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in similar departments,---but more and more in a vaster, saner, more splendid Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the modern may thus prove to be a signal growth of joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us, audacious, start it. Let the diplomates, as ever, still deeply plan, seeking advantages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind them, on paper: what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose, new formulas---international poems. I have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both in patriotism and song (even amid their grandest shows past) we have adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold the world. Not only is the human and artificial world we have established in the West a radical departure from anything hitherto known,--- not only men and politics, and all that goes with them,---but Nature itself, in the main sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type, of course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For Nature consists not only in itself objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it---faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual---takes, and readily gives again, the phys- 206 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. of any nation or literature---falls like a great elastic veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue. What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and eidolons of it, to Homer's heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the wanderings of Virgil's [Aeneas?]? Then to Shakespeare's characters---Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens? In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the Kings"---what sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold nature, inimitably described, better than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies--- wrathful or peaceful, just the same---Vivien and merlin in their strange dalliance, or the death-float of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his disgraced Enid and himself through the wood, and the wife all day driving the horses), as in all the great imported art-works, treatises, systems, from Lucretius down, there is a constantly lurking, often pervading something that will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to them, and disproved by them. Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior, but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man. I haven't said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant bards in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the eternal antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die (my opinion is, that after all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class poets are for, as, to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists, Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of India and the British Druids),--- to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America---measureless corruption in politics; what we call religion a mere mask of wax or lace; for ensemble, that most cankerous, offensive of all earth's shows---a vast and varied community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures,---plenty of mere intellectuality too,---and then utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral, and [aesthetic?] health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of the world. Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, West, South, East, THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 207 North, will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet one in soul---nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger prophets---larger than Judea's, and more passionate---to meet and penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness? As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is entered upon, and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the central, spinal reality (or even the idea of it) of such a democratic band of native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, [litterateurs?], tolerant and receptive of importations, but entirely adjusted to the West, to ourselves, to our own days, purports, combinations, differences, superiorities. Indeed, I am fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and political triumphs of the republic are mainly as bases and preparations for half a dozen first-rate future poets, ideal personalities, referring not to a special class, but to the entire people, four or five millions of square miles. Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality. Only to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen.* Democracy, so far attending only to the real, is *Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and politics? And if so---what is it?. . . Wise men say there are two sets of wills to nations and to persons---one set that acts and works from explainable motives---from teaching, intelligence, judgment, circumstance, caprice, emulation, greed, etc.---and then another set, perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it were out of abysses, resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to themselves---the poet to his fieriest words---the race to pursue its loftiest ideal. . . . Indeed, the paradox of a nation's life and career, with all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explained from these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere, combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results. Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is?) this great, unconscious, and abysmic second will also running through the average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid all the dangers and defections of the present, and through all the processes of the conscious will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force, destined to carry on the New World to fulfill its destinies in the future---to resolutely pursue those destinies, age upon age; to build, far, far beyond its past vision, present thought; to form and fashion, and for the general type, men and women more noble, more athletic than the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly 208 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not for the real only, but the grandest ideal -- to justify the modern by that and not only to equal, but to become by that superior to the past. On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and present and hitherto condition of the United States with reference to their future and the indispensable precedents to it, I say I am fully content. My point, below all surfaces, and subsoiling them, is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading nationality are, first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and products on the largest and most varied scale, common education and intercommunication, and, in general, the passing through of just the stages and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United States. Then, perhaps, as weightiest factor of the whole business, and of the main outgrowths of the future, it remains to be definitely avowed that the native-born middle-class population of quite all the United States, -- the average of farmers and mechanics everywhere, -- the real, though latent and silent bulk of America, city blend from all the States, with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality -- a nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most productive and materialistic the world has yet known, but compacted indissolubly, and out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it, conscience, morals and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise, like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven. Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are but a series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And here is, to my mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity. There is in that sublime process, in the laws of the universe -- and, above all, in the moral law -- something that would make unsatisfactory, and even vain and contemptible, all the triumphs of war, the gains of peace, and the proudest worldly grandeur of all the nations that have ever existed, or that (ours included) now exist, except that we constantly see, through all their worldly career, however struggling and blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according to their development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and farther on, to more and more advanced ideals. The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of science, and solidly based on the past, it is to cheerfully range itself, and its politics are henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody them, and carry them out, to serve them. . . . And as only that individual becomes truly great who understands well that, while complete in himself in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and whose special life and laws are adjusted to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of nature, and especially with the moral law, the deepest and highest of all, and the last vitality of man or State -- so those nations, and so the United States, may THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE 209 or country, presents a magnificent mass of material, never before equaled on earth. It is this material, quite unexpressed by literature on earth. It is this material, quite unexpressed by literature or art, that in every respect insures the future of the republic. During the secession war I was with the armies, and saw the rank and file, North and South, and studied them for four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country in its essential future since. Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than saturate ourselves with, and continue to give imitations, yet a while, of the aesthetic models, supplies, of that past and of those lands we spring from. Those wondrous stores, reminiscences, floods, currents! Let them flow on, flow hither freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, courteous France, profound Germany, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art race, and always the mystic Orient. only become the greatest and the most continuous, by understanding well their harmonious relations with entire humanity and history, and all their laws and progress, and sublimed with the creative thought of Deity, through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will they expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become splendid illustrations and culminating parts of the cosmos, and of civilization. No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents, however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times, I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the growth of our republic -- that it is the deliberate culmination and result of all the past -- that here, too, as in all departments of the universe, regular laws (slow and sure in acting, slow and sure in ripening) have controlled and governed, and will yet control and govern; and that those laws can no more be baffled steered clear of, or vitiated, by chance, or any fortune or opposition, than the laws of winter and summer, or darkness and light. The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of 1861-5, and their results -- and indeed of the entire hundred years of the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down to the present day (1780-1881) -- is, that they all now launch the United States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and humanity, and in main sort the representative of them, leading the van, leading the fleet of the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages of the future. And the real history of the United States-- starting from that great convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly concluded, and the South victorious, after all -- is only to be written at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence. -- From my "Memoranda of War. 210 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Remembering that at present, and doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us. The course through time of highest civilization, does it not wait the first glimpse of our contribution to its cosmic train of poems, bibles, structures, perpetuities––Egypt and Palestine and India––Greece and Rome and mediæval Europe––and so onward? The shadowy procession is not a meager one, and the standard not a low one. All that is mighty or precious in our kind seems to have trod the road. Ah, never may America forget her thanks and reverence for samples, treasures such as these––that other life-blood, inspiration, sunshine, hourly in use to-day, all days, forever, throughout her broad demesne! All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, headwinds, cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her destination. Shakespeare has served, and serves, may be, the best of any. For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in my opinion, continues and stands for the Shakespearean cultus at the present day among all English-writing peoples––of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of these lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are changed––both poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course––to get their deeds and shapes in lasting pigments––the very pomp and dazzle of the sunset! Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight––but 'tis the twilight of the dawn. WALT WHITMAN. Published Monthly. Volume 132. Number 2. SIXTY-SIXTH YEAR. THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. EDITED BY ALLEN THORNDIKE RICE. February, 1881. I. The Nicaragua Canal.......................General U.S. GRANT. II. The Pulpit and the Pew......................OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. III. Aaron's Rod in Politics........................Judge ALBION W. TOURGEE. IV. Did Shakespeare Write Bacon's Works?....JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. V. Partisanship in the Supreme Court............Senator JOHN T. MORGAN. VI. The Ruins of Central America. Part VI.......DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY. VII. The Poetry of the Future.......................WALT WHITMAN. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON. PARIS: THE GALIGNANI LIBRARY. BERLIN: A. ASHER & CO. GENEVA: J. CHERBULIEZ. ROME: LOESCHER & CO. MELBOURNE: W. ROBERTSON. YOKOHAMA AND SHANGHAI: KELLY & WALSH. TERMS.--Five Dollars a year. Single number, Fifty Cents. Entered at the Post-Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails as second-class matter. Volume 131 of the North American Review. NOW READY, COMPLETE. CONTENTS. JULY. Prince Bismarck, as a Friend of America and as a Statesman. Part I. MORITZ BUSCH> Canada and the United States. Professor GOLDWIN SMITH. The Exodus of Israel. President S. C. BARTLETT. The English House of Lords. J. E. THOROLD ROGERS, M. P. The Ethics of Sex. Miss M. A. HARDAKER. The Panama Canal. Count FERDINAND DE LESSEPS. Profligacy in Fiction. A. K. FISKE. AUGUST. Ruined Cities of Central America. THE EDITOR. The Law of Newspaper Libel. JOHN PROFFATT. Nullity of the Emancipation Edict. RICHARD H. DANA. The Census Laws. CHARLES F. JOHNSON. Principles of Taxation. Professor SIMON NEWCOMB. Prince Bismarck, as a Friend of America and as a Statesman. Part II. MORITZ BUSCH. Recent Literature. CHARLES T. CONGDON. SEPTEMBER. The Ruins of Central America. Part I. DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY The Perpetuity of Chinese Institutions. S. WELLS WILLIAMS. The Trial of Mrs. Surratt. JOHN W. CLAMPITT. The Personality of God. Professor W. T. HARRIS. Insincerity in the Pulpit. R. B. FORBES. Recent Works on the Brain and Nerves. Dr. GEORGE M. BEARD. OCTOBER. The Democratic Party judged by its History. EMERY A. STORRS. The Success of the Electric Light. THOMAS A. EDISON. The Ruins of Central America. Part II. DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY. The Observance of the Sabbath. Rev. Dr. LEONARD BACON. The Campaign of 1862. Judge D. THEW WRIGHT. The Taxation of Church Property. Rev. Dr. A. W. PITZER. Recent Progress in Astronomy. Professor E. S. HOLDEN. NOVEMBER The Monarchical Principle in our Constitution. W. B. LAWRENCE. The Advantages of Free Religious Discussion. Bishop W. C. DOANE. The Republican Party as it Was and Is. MONTGOMERY BLAIR. The Ruins of Central America. Part III. DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY. The Nicaragua Route to the Pacific. Rear-Admiral D. AMMEN. The Coming Revision of the Bible. Rev. Dr. HOWARD CROSBY. Recent European Publications. Professor T. F. CRANE. The Political Situation from a Financial Stand-point: An Address. By E. D. MORGAN, J. J. ASTOR, HAMILTON FISH, ROBERT LENOX KENNEDY, J. PIERPONT MORGAN, E. P. FABRI, CHARLES H. RUSSELL, JOHN A. STEWART, J. D. VERMILYE, HENRY F. VAIL, BENJAMIN B. SHERMAN, DAVID DOWS, WILLIAM H. MACY, SAMUEL SLOAN, LEVI P. MORTON, GEORGE BLISS, JESSE SELIGMAN, GEORGE T. ADEE, CYRUS W. FIELD, JOHN W. ELLIS, ISAAC SHERMAN, I. N. PHELPS. DECEMBER. The Future of the Republican Party. GEORGE S. BOUTWELL. Discoveries at Olympia. Professor ERNST CURTIUS. Rational Sunday Observance. Rev. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE, D. D. Southern Statesmen and their Policy. JOHN JAY. The Ruins of Central America. Part IV. DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY. The Distribution of Time. LEONARD WALDO, S. D. The Public-School Failure. RICHARD GRANT WHITE. The Validity of the Emancipation Edict. AARON A. FERRIS. Price, unbound, $2.50; bound in Cloth, $3.50; in half morocco, $4.00. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price. Address THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, New-York. THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. FEBRUARY, 1881. No. 291. Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 1881. COPYRIGHT BY ALLEN THORNDIKE RICE. 1881. Press of Francis Hart & Co. New York. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. FEBRUARY, 1881. ART. PAGE I. THE NICARAGUA CANAL. By General U.S. GRANT. 107 II. THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 III. AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. By Judge ALBION W. TOURGEE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 IV. DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? By REV. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE, D. D. . . . . . 163 V. PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. By JOHN T. MORGAN, United States Senator. . . . . . . . 187 VI. THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA. Part VI. By DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY. . . . . . . . . . . . .187 VII. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. By WALT WHITMAN. 195 THE Editor disclaims responsibility for the opinions of contributors, whether their articles are signed or anonymous. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. CCXCI. FEBRUARY, 1881. THE NICARAGUA CANAL. THE construction of a ship-canal across the isthmus which connects North and South America has attracted the attention of governments, engineers, and capitalists, in this country and in Europe, for considerably more than half a century. The allusions to the possibility and importance of such a work made by travelers and scientists, almost from the time when America was discovered down to the day when practical investigations were commenced by the government of the United States, had left a deep impression on the public mind; and the rapid growth of the American Republic in population and wealth, the increasing commerce between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the long, tedious, and dangerous passage from shore to shore around Cape Horn, all tended to strengthen this impression, and to establish the conviction that the interest of the American people in the commerce of the world required a water communication, from sea to sea, across the Isthmus of Darien. It is now more than fifty years since this project first received serious consideration on this continent. Under the administration of Mr. Adams, in 1825, correspondence and negotiations commenced, which have continued up to the present time. Turning from one government to another for aid in carrying out the scheme, the people of Central America soon arrived at the conclusion that they must look to the United States for the completion of the work, and that to them especially, on account of location and institutions, belonged VOL. CXXXII. ---NO. 291. 8 108 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the right to unite with that state through whose territory the canal might run, in its construction and control. In 1830, in 1831, in 1835, in 1837, in 1839, in 1844, in 1846, in 1849, in 1858, plans were proposed to the governments of the United States, England, and France for the commencement of the work, until the breaking out of the civil war in this country presented a more important topic for consideration, and overshadowed all ques- tions relating solely to industrial development and international commerce, and ended in results which have given new and vast interest and importance to every enterprise which can add power to the republic and advance the prosperity of its people. Stepping at once into the front rank among the powerful nations of the earth, the United States has entered, as it were sponta- neously, upon a career of development almost unparalleled in the history of the world. By the growth of States along the Pacific coast, by the erection of trans-continental lines of railway, by the occupation of new lands, by the opening of new mines, by increas- ing mechanical and manufacturing enterprises, by the introduc- tion of her products on an amazing scale into the commerce of the world, by her devotion to a system of finance which requires incessant industry among all classes of the people, and the cheapest possible means of intercourse and transportation, the United States has given new and deeper importance to every method by which industry can be advanced and commerce can be promoted. It is during this short period that the value of even the most expensive highways has been proved, that mountain ranges have been penetrated by costly tunnels, and distant seas have been connected by costly canals, and it has been demon- strated that the most extravagant investments in works of this description are remunerative under the vast commercial ebb and flow which characterizes the present age. Of the necessity for, and advantage of, intercommunication of every description, there- fore, there seems to be no longer a doubt; and it is with this conviction that the United States government is called on to con- sider now once more the value and importance of an interoceanic canal on this continent. Of the advantages of this canal to our industry and com- merce it becomes us, therefore, first to speak. In this connec- tion it should not be forgotten that the states of North and South America lying along the Pacific furnish in large abun- dance those commodities which are constantly supplied with THE NICARAGUA CANAL 109 markets in almost every country of Europe. Of guano and niter the trade is immense. From the ports of Chili nearly 400,000 tons of freight are shipped eastward annually. More than 1,000,000 tons of grain are shipped each year from the Pacific States and Territories. There is no doubt that more than 4,000,000 tons of merchandise find their way from these regions to the East, and require water communication in order that they may be shipped economically and profitably; and this is mer- chandise to which railway transportation across the continent is wholly inapplicable. The great wheat crops of California and Oregon, for instance, find their way to Liverpool around Cape Horn at the freight-rate of fifty cents per bushel--a rate which would not carry it by rail half-way to Boston or New York or Philadelphia, to be there shipped to its European destination. In addition to the commerce of the North and South American ports referred to, there may be estimated also the advantages which would accrue to the trade of Australia and the remote East Indies bound to Great Britain, and which would undoubtedly add 1,000,000 tons to the freight seeking a passage through the canal. When we consider the time and distance saved by the canal for this vast amount of merchandise by avoiding the pas- sage around Cape Horn, and the importance in theses days of rapid transit, and of a ready approach to a destined market, we can readily understand the value of the enterprise to producer and shipper and consumer alike. Leaving out of consideration the dangers and delays of the Cape, we should not forget that by the canal now proposed the distance from New York to Hong Kong is shortened 5,870 miles; from New York to Yokohama, 6,800 miles; from New York to San Francisco, 8,600 miles; from New York to Honolulu, 6,980 miles; from Liverpool to San Fran- cisco, 6,065 miles; and from Liverpool to Callao, 4,374 miles; and we need no longer question the value of an interoceanic canal on the Western continent, as we have long since abandoned all doubt of the value of the Suez Canal to the commerce of the nations of the East. To Europeans the benefits and advantages of the proposed canal are great;--to the Americans they are incalculable. Forming, as a canal properly organized and con- structed would, a part of the coast-line of the United States, it would increase our commercial facilities beyond calculation. Interfering in no way with the interests of those lines of railway which connect the Atlantic States with the Pacific, but tending 110 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. rather to stimulate and increase the activity out of which their traffic grows, it would cheapen all staple transportation and add vastly to the ease and economy of the emigration from the East to the farms and mines of the Pacific slope. That canal will be of great benefit to the commerce of the United States, also, there care be no doubt. Meeting as we do a formidable competition in the carrying-trade to foreign ports, we find in our coastwise navigation an opportunity for profitable use of American bottoms, protected by our own commercial laws. A continuous coast-line, including our eastern and western shores, therefore promises an increase of this navigation sufficient of itself to make a canal a matter of the utmost importance to our people. In view of these advantages, the question naturally arises with regards to the most feasible route for the canal, both as regards economy of construction and convenience in use. On this point it would hardly seem as if there were room for controversy. The difficulties which surround the Panama scheme have not been so frequently and so forcibly set forth, that they need not be elaborated repeatedly here. The floods of this region, caused by sudden and immense rain-fall, have attracted the attention of the most careless traveler, and have perplexed and confounded the scientific engineer in his attempts to provide some method by which to overcome the difficulties which they create. The impassable and unhealthy swamps lying along this route have always been considered unfit for a water-course, and so destructive to human life that labor and death seemed to have joined hands there. The necessity for long and expensive tunnels or open cuts, and for a safe viaduct, has added vastly to the expense of the route when estimated, and to the obstacles to be overcome by engineering. The most careful surveys have always developed a discouraging want of materials for construction. The addition of five hundred miles to the distance between New York and the ports of the west coast of the United States by the Panama route over that of any other feasible route proposed, and the long and tedious calms which prevail in Panama Bay, have never failed to create opposition to this route in the mind of the navigator. The enormous cost of the Panama Canal, moreover, has never been denied. Consider the engineering difficulties attending the diversion of the Charges Rivier, and the necessary construction of an artificial lake to hold its floods, together with the tunneling, or open cuts, to which allusion has already been THE NICARAGUA CANAL 111 made, the cost of this canal cannot be less than $400,000,000, and would probably be much more - including the payment to the Panama Railroad for its concessions. No American capitalist would be likely to look for dividends on an investment like this. Turning from the Panama route, therefore, as one which, when practically considered, has but little to recommend it, either as a commercial convenience or a financial success, we are brought to the consideration of the Nicaragua route, as that to which the attention of the American public is most strongly drawn at this time. The advantages of this route are: the ease and economy with which the canal can be constructed; the admirable approaches to it from the sea, both east and west; the distance saved between Liverpool and the North American ports over that of the Panama route; and the distance saved, also, between New York and other Atlantic cities and the ports of the United States on the Pacific. The cost of the Nicaragua Canal has never been estimated above $100,000,000; indeed, Civil Engineer Menocal, whose judgment and capacity have never been questioned, gives the following as his estimate of the entire cost of the work, after long and critical examination: Western Division - from Port Brito to the Lake. Distance, 16.33 miles; estimated cost............................$21,680,777.000 Middle Division - Lake Nicaragua. Distance, 56.50 miles; estimated cost............................ 715, 658.00 Eastern Division - from Lake to Greytown. Distance, 108.43 miles; estimated costs .......................25,020,914.00 Construction of Greytown Harbor ...................2,822,630.00 " Brito " ..................... 2,337,739.00 Total. Distance, 181.26 miles; cost ...................$52,577,718.00 A subsequent estimate, based on more recent surveys made by Mr.Menocal, has reduced this amount to $41,193,839 - a reduction of $11,383,879; and by abandoning the valley of the San Juan River in favor of a direct route to Greytown, - ascertained to be entirely practicable, - the distance is reduced to 173.57 miles, the total canalization being but 53.17 miles. It is well known that the Suez Canal, and, in fact, almost all great public works, cost far more than the estimates made by engineers. But applying this rule most liberally cannot bring the outlay on the Nicaragua route above $100,000,000. The surveys of this route, made subsequent to those of the other routes 112 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. proposed, have developed extraordinary facilities for the work. Materials needed for construction are abundant throughout the entire line. The harbors of Brito and Greytown, at the western and eastern termini, are capable of being easily made convenient and excellent. The water supply from Lake Nicaragua is free from deposit and is abundant and easily obtained --the lake itself being the summit level of the canal. The rain-fall is not excessive. The climate during the trade winds is delightful. The country is capable of producing all the subsistence that would be required by the laborers employed in the construction of the canal. The local productions are valuable, and such as constitute many of the most important articles of commerce. In the construction, feeders, tunnels, and viaducts are not necessary. Dependent nowhere on streams which in the rainy season are irresistibly destructive, and in the dry season are reduced to mere rivulets, the canal would always be provided with a uniform and easily controlled supply of water. A canal constructed on this route, and at the estimates before us, could not fail to be an economical highway as well as a profitable investment. Estimating the cost of the canal at $75,000,000, a charge of $2.50, for canal tolls and all other charges, would give a gross income of $10,000,000 on the 4,000,000 tons upon which former calculations have been based. Deducting from this $1,500,000 for the expenses of maintaining and operating the canal, we have $8,500,000 as the net earnings of the work. Any reasonable modification of these figures would give an encouraging exhibit. The liberal concessions made by the government of Nicaragua to the Provisional Interoceanic Canal Society indicate a determination on the part of that government to make the burthens of the enterprise as light as possible, and to leave its government entirely in the hands of the American projectors. While in the Panama concession provision is made for the entry and clearance of vessels at the terminal ports, with the delays and annoyances usually attending such requirements, the Nicaragua concession avoids all interference by custom-house officials, except so far as to prevent smuggling and violations of the customs laws. This concession provides: "There shall be a free zone upon each bank of the canal, of one hundred yards in width, measured from the water's edge, it being understood that the lake shores shall never be considered as the margin of the canal. Within this zone no illegal traffic shall be conducted, and the THE NICARAGUA CANAL. 113 customs authorities will watch and prevent smuggling in accordance with the provisions of Article 32 [of the concession]. It is expressly understood that every vessel traversing the canal will, whenever the authorities desire it, receive on board a guard [customs officer] appointed by the government, who will, in case of discovering their violation, exercise his powers in accordance with the law." The articles of the concession also provide that the "two ports to be constructed and to serve for entrances to the canal on each ocean are declared to be free, and will be recognized as such from the beginning of the work to the end of this concession." While the administration and management of the Panama Canal, moreover, are placed in the hands of an independent company, deriving its powers from a foreign government, and organized on the plan adopted in the construction of the Suez Canal, the commerce availing itself of the benefits of the Nicaragua Canal is protected by the government of that country against all extortion. In Article 42, the concession provides that: "It is understood that the company, in the exercise of the powers here conferred, cannot make other regulations than such as are necessary for the administration and management of the canal, and before issuing these regulations will submit them to the government for its approval." In order to protect still further the interests of those using the canal, it is provided that all sums necessary to secure interest on the funded debts, obligations, and shares, not exceeding six percent. for interest, and also a sinking fund, shall be reserved; and that "what remains shall form the net gains, of which at least eighty per cent. shall be divided amongst shareholders, it being understood, after ten years from the time the canal is completed, the company cannot divide amongst the shareholders, either by direct dividends, or indirectly, by issuing additional shares or otherwise, more than fifteen per cent. annually, or in this proportion, for dues collected from the canal; and when it is discovered that the charges in force produce a greater net gain, they will be reduced to the basis of fifteen per cent. per year." These provisions indicate not only the confidence of the projectors in their enterprise, but also the determination of the Nicaraguan government to guard against all possible injustice to the commerce finding a highway there. That there are other advantages contained in the concession of the Nicaraguan government, and in the proposed administration and management of the Nicaragua Canal, there should be no 114 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. doubt in the mind of every American who believes in the power and supremacy of his government on this continent. The concession is made to Americans, the society is made up of Americans, the corporators are Americans, and the act of incorporation is asked of an American Congress. Every step of this project recognizes the right of the United States to guard with jealous care the American continent against the encroachment of foreign powers. To this policy no nation and no cluster of adjacent nations, watchful of their own individual or collective interests, should take exception. It is the foundation of national existence everywhere. An American man-of-war, having on board the greatest naval commander of modern times, pauses for forty-eight hours at the mouth of the Bosphorus to recognize the right of an European power to control the waters of the Dardanelles and the Black Sea. It cannot be supposed for a moment that an American company, incorporated by the American government, organized on American soil, would have been allowed to construct the Suez Canal, even if it had established a branch of its enterprise in France and placed it under the supervision of a distinguished and representative French official. And so it is with us. The policy laid down in the early days of the Republic, and accepted from that time to this by the American mind, by which the colonization of other nationalities on these shores was protested against, should never be forgotten. The violation of this policy has always roused the American people to a firm assertion of their rights, and cost one American statesman, at least, a large share of the laurels he had won by long and honorable service. The application of this principle even now secures safety and protection to a line of railway spanning the Isthmus, and connecting the eastern with the western waters. The assertion of this principle by a treaty made with Nicaragua in 1849 is accepted to-day by all Americans, people and officials, with entire satisfaction. The rejection of that treaty in order to prevent a collision between the United States and Great Britain, and to preserve unharmed the policy of an administration, is regarded as one of the most complicating and compromising acts of American diplomacy. The accepted and acceptable policy of the American government is contained in the doctrine announced more than half a century ago by President Monroe. It is to be found in the attitude assumed by our government in all the long diplomatic discussion which followed the ratification of the THE NICARAGUA CANAL. 115 Clayton-Bulwer treaty;--a discussion in which General Cass, then Secretary of State, declared an analogous treaty as recognizing "principles of foreign intervention repugnant to the policy of the United States";--a discussion in which by negotiation Great Britain was compelled to recognize the "sovereignty of Honduras over the islands composing the so-called British Colony of the Bay Islands";--a discussion in which the President of the United States "denounced the Clayton-Bulwer treaty as one which had been fraught with misunderstanding and mischief from the beginning." "If the Senate," said the President to Lord Napier, "had imagined that the Clayton-Bulwer treaty could obtain the interpretation placed upon it by Great Britain, it would not have passed; and if I had been in the Senate at the time, it never would have passed." It is in obedience to this policy that the United States has protested against the establishment by Great Britain of a protectorate in Central America, either on the Mosquito coast or on the Bay Islands. And it is in accordance with this policy that President Hayes, in his message of March 8th, 1880, declared that: "The policy of this country is a canal under American control. The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or to any combination of European powers. . . . The capital invested by corporations or citizens of other countries in such an enterprise must in a great degree look for protection to one or more of the great powers of the world. No European power can intervene for such protection without adopting measures on this continent which the United States would deem wholly inadmissible. If the protection of the United States is relied upon, the United States must exercise such control as will enable this country to protect its national interests and maintain the rights of those whose private capital is embarked in the work. "An interoceanic canal across the American isthmus will essentially change the geographical relations between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States, and between the United States and the rest of the world. It will be the great ocean thoroughfare between our Atlantic and our Pacific shores, and virtually a part of the coast-line of the United States. Our merely commercial interest in it is greater than that of all other countries, while its relations to our power and prosperity as a nation, to our means of defense, our unity, peace, and safety, are matters of paramount concern to the people of the United States. No other great power would, under similar circumstances, fail to assert a rightful control over a work so closely and vitally affecting its interest and welfare." In accordance with the early and later policy of the government, in obedience to the often-expressed will of the American 116 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. people, with a due regard to our national dignity and power, with a watchful care for the safety and prosperity of our interests and industries on this continent, and with a determination to guard against even the first approach of rival powers, whether friendly or hostile, on these shores, I commend an American canal, on American soil, to the American people, and congratulate myself on the fact that the most careful explorations have demonstrated that the route standing in this attitude before the world is the one which commends itself as a judicious, economical, and prosperous work. I have formed the opinions expressed in this article, not from a hasty consideration of the subject, and not without personal observation. While commanding the army of the United States, my attention was drawn to the importance of the water communication I have here discussed. During my administration of the government, I endeavored to impress upon the country the views I then formed; and I shall feel that I have added one more act of my life to those I have already recorded, if I shall succeed in impressing upon Congress and the people the high value, as a commercial and industrial enterprise, of this great work, which, if not accomplished by Americans, will undoubtedly be accomplished by some one of our rivals in power and influence. U. S. GRANT. THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. THE priest is dead for the Protestant world. Luther's inkstand did not kill the devil, but it killed him, at least for us. He is a loss in many respects to be regretted. He kept alive the spirit of reverence. He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhuman in their nature, and so was competent to be the stay of the weak and their defense against the strong. If one end of religion is to make men happier in this world as well as in the next, mankind lost a great source of happiness when the priest was reduced to the common level of humanity, and became only a minister. Priest, which was presbyter, corresponded to senator, and was a title to respect and honor. Minister is but the diminutive of magister, and implies an obligation to render service. It was promised to the first preachers that in proof of their divine mission they should have the power of casting out devils and talking in strange tongues; that they should handle serpents and drink poisons with impunity; that they should lay hands on the sick and they should recover. The Roman Church claims some of these powers for its clergy and its sacred objects to this day. Miracles, it is professed, are wrought by them, or through them, as in the days of the apostles. Protestantism proclaims that the age of such occurrences as the apostles witnessed is past. What does it know about miracles? It knows a great many records of miracles, but this is a different kind of knowledge. The minister may be revered for his character, followed for his eloquence, admired for his learning, loved for his amiable qualities, but he can never be what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in the Roman Church. Dr. Arnold's definition may be found fault with, but it has a very real meaning. "The essential point in the notion of a priest is this: that he is a person made necessary to our intercourse with God, without being 118 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. necessary or beneficial to us morally,---an unreasonable, unmoral, spiritual necessity." He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not have all the qualities which would recommend him as a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, quite independent of his personal character, which could act, as it were, mechanically; that out of him went a virtue, as from the hem of his Master's raiment, to those with whom his sacred office brought him in contact. It was a great comfort to poor helpless human beings to have a tangible personality of like nature with themselves as a mediator between them and the heavenly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrowing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself speaking directly through human lips, to feel the touch of a hand which is the channel of communication with the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege of those who looked or look up to a priesthood. It has been said, and those who have walked the hospitals or served in the dispensaries can bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the Roman Catholics know how to die. The same thing is less confidently to be said of Protestants. How frequently is the story told of the most exemplary Protestant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the lives of the most exemplary Protestant ministers, that they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last days! The blessing of the viaticum is unknown to them. Man is essentially an idolater, ---that is, in bondage to his imagination,---for there is no more harm in the Greek work eidolon than in the Latin word imago. He wants a visible image to fix his thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata, or the modern symbols which are to our own time what these were to the ancient Egyptians. He wants a vicegerent of the Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him godspeed on his last journey. Who but such an immediate representative of the Divinity would have dared to say to the monarch just laying his head on the block, "Fils de Saint Louis, monte au ciel"? It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly republicanize the American Protestant descendant of the ancient priesthood. The history of the Congregationalists in New England would should us how this change has gone on, until we have seen the church become a hall open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit come down to the level of the rostrum, and the clergyman take on the character of a popular lecturer who deals with every kind of subject, including religion. THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 119 Whatever fault we may find with many of their beliefs, we have a right to be proud of our pilgrim and puritan fathers among the clergy. They were ready to do and to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief which leaves nothing worth being a hero for. Only let us be fair, and not defend the creed of Mohammed because it nurtured brave men and enlightened scholars, or refrain from condemning polygamy in our admiration of the indomitable spirit and perseverance of the pilgrim fathers of Mormonism, or justify an inhuman belief, or a cruel or foolish superstition, because it was once held or acquiesced in by men whose nobility of character we heartily recognize. The New England clergy can look back to a noble record, but the pulpit has sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may sometimes find it worth its while to listen to one even in our own days. From the settlement of the country to the present time, the ministers have furnished the highest type of character to the people among whom they have lived. They have lost to a considerable extent the position of leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked upon as representatives of their congregations, they represent what is best among those of whom they are the speaking organ. We have a right to expect them to be models as well as teachers of all that makes the best citizens for this world and the next, and they have not been, and are not in these later days, unworthy of their high calling. They have worked hard for small earthly compensation. They have been the most learned men the country had to show, when learning was a scarce commodity. Called by their consciences to self- denying labors, living simply, often half-supported by the toil of their own hands, they have let the light, such light as shone for them, into the minds of our communities as the settler's ax let the sunshine into their log-huts and farm-houses. Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a few instances will illustrate. Often, as was just said, they toiled like day-laborers, teasing lean harvests out of their small inclosures of land,---for the New England soil is not one that "laughs when tickled with a hoe," but rather one that sulks when appealed to with that persuasive implement. The father of the eminent Boston physician whose recent loss is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt Clarke, forty-two years pastor of the small fold in the town of Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical 120 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. example of this union of the two callings, and it would be hard to find a story of a more wholesome and useful life, within a limited and isolated circle, than that which the pious care of one of his children commemorated. Sometimes the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward, of Stratford-on-Avon, in old England, joined the practice of medicine to the offices of his holy profession. Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of "The Day of Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of Harvard College, were instances of this twofold service. In politics their influence has always been felt, and in many cases their drums ecclesiastic have beaten the reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it ever sounded in the slumbering camp. Samuel Cooper sat in council with the leaders of the Revolution in Boston. The three Northampton-born brothers, Allen, Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and, when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of liberty. In later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood carried politics into their pulpits as boldly as their antislavery successors have done in times still more recent. The learning, the personal character, the sacredness of their office, tended to give the New England clergy of past generations a kind of aristocratic dignity, a personal grandeur, much more felt in the days when class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than at present. Their costume added to the effect of their bodily presence, as the old portraits illustrate for us, as those of us who remember the last of the "fair, while, curly" wigs, as it graced the imposing figure of the Reverend Dr. marsh, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, can testify. They were not only learned in the history of the past, but they were the interpreters of prophecy, and announced coming events with a confidence equal to that with which the weather-bureau warns us of a coming storm. The numbers of the book of Daniel and the visions of the Revelations were not too hard for them. In the commonplace book of the Reverend Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, made, as it appears, about the year 1773: "Conversing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichrist, after many things had been said upon the subject, the Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this manner: 'Tell your children to tell their children that in the year 1866 something notable will happen in the church; tell them the old man says so.'" THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 121 "The old man" came pretty near hitting the mark, as we shall see if we consider what took place in the decade from 1860 to 1870. In 1864, the Pope issued the "Syllabus of Errors," which "must be considered by Romanists as an infallible official document, and which arrays the papacy in open war against modern civilization and civil and religious freedom." The Vatican Council in 1870 declared the pope to be the bishop of bishops, and immediately after this began, the decisive moment of the party known as the "Old Catholics." In the exact year looked forward to by the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of Rome by the French and the publication of "Ecce Homo" appear to be the most remarkable events having special relation to the religious world. Perhaps the National Council of the Congregationalists, held at Boston in 1865, may be reckoned as one of the occurrences which the oracle just missed. The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted down to a later period. "In half a century," said the venerable Dr. Porter, of Conway, New Hampshire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mohammedans, Unitarians, or Methodists." The half-century has more than elapsed, and the prediction seems to stand in need of an extension, like many other prophetic utterances. The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy-browed old minister of Medford, that he had expressed his belief that not more than one soul in two thousand would be saved. Seeing a knot of his parishioners in debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and was told that they were questioning which of the Medford people was the elected one, the population being just two thousand, and that opinion was divided whether it would be the minister or one of his deacons. The story may or may not be literally true, but it illustrates the popular belief of those days, that the clergyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of the Almighty than his successors would claim the power of doing. The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind the varied accomplishments of some of the New England clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years experience of eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: " Ezrae Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before me was imported, with 122 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. other philosophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince, of Salem, an earlier student of science in the town since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Institute. Jeremy Belknap holds an honored place in that unpretending row of local historians. And in the pages of his "History of New Hampshire" may be found a chapter contributed in part by the most remarkable man, in many respects, among all the older clergymen--- preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in State and national governments, and only not seated on the bench of the supreme court of a territory because he declined the office when Washington offered it to him. The manifold individual was the minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts,---the Reverend Manasseh Cutler. These reminiscences from surrounding objects came up unexpectedly, of themselves, and have a right here, as showing how wide is the range of intelligence in the clerical body thus accidentally represented in a single library making no special pretensions. It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but it may be added that they were often the wits and humorists of their localities. Mather Byles's facetiæ are among the colonial classic reminiscences. But these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in old clergymen and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's "Annals of the American Pulpit" tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences." He has not recorded the following, which is to be found in Miss Larned's excellent and most interesting history of Windham County, Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers. The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. "If unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial associates took offense at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of admonition to the offending clergyman. "Mr. Dwight received these reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and promised THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 123 amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of everlasting salvation.'" It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old ministers in one's veins. An English bishop proclaimed the fact before an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say that he had a son who was a doctor. Very kind that was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience must have felt. Perhaps he was not ashamed of the gospel of Luke, "the beloved physician," or even of the teachings which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter. So a New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a minister. On the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios. What are the names of ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory as illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett, Joseph Stevens Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were all ministers' boys. John Lothrop Motley was the grandson of the clergyman after whom he was named. George Ticknor was next door to such a descent, for his father was a deacon. This is a group which it did not take a long or a wide search to bring together. Men such as the ministers who have been described could not fail to exercise a good deal of authority in the communities to which they belonged. The effect of the Revolution must have been to create a tendency to rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism levels in religion as in everything. It might have been expected, therefore, that soon after civil liberty had been established there would be conflicts between the traditional authority of the minister and the claims of the now free and independent congregation. So it was, in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, for which the reader is indebted to Miss Larned's book, before cited: The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Platform gave rise, in the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in the town of Pomfret, VOL. CXXXII.---NO. 291. 9 124 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Connecticut. Zephaniah Swift, a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham "Herald," in ail the vehemence of partisan phraseology, with all the emphasis of italics and small capitals. Was it not time, he said, for people to look about them and see whether "such despotism was founded in Scripture, in reason, in policy, or on the rights of man! A minister, by his vote, by his single voice, may negative the unanimous vote of the church! Are ministers composed of finer clay than the rest of mankind, that entitles them to this preeminence ? Does a license to preach transform a man into a higher order of beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern? Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to be governed ? Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to such degrading vassalage and abject submission? Reason, common sense, and the Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that they are all bom free and equal; that every member of a church or Christian congregation must be on the same footing in respect of church government, and that the Constitution, which delegates to one the power to negative the vote of all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OP THE NATURAL RIGHT OP MANKIND AND REPUGNANT to the "Word of God." The Reverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer’s attack, pronouncing him to be "destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound judgment, honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat’s-paw, the infamous tool of a party, a partisan, a political weather-cock, and a ragamuffin." No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch. The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within the last two or three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion of their special dignities or privileges. The public is better bred than to carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political brawlers would hardly think admissible. The minister of religion is generally treated with something more than respect; he is allowed to say undisputed what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. Bishop Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject with a friend who was not convinced by his arguments. "Wait till you hear me from the pulpit," he said; "there you cannot answer me." The preacher—if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself to him—has THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 125 his hearer’s head in chancery, and can administer punishment ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to without a word of comment or a look of disapprobation. One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen has ventured to question in these pages whether all his professional brethren invariably gave utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been sharply criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits silent in his pew, has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of questioning that which has been addressed to him from the privileged eminence of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher. It is nearly two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote these words: "l am not ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to be nothing but a mere trick.” So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, burned publicly in the college yard. But the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out earlier and louder, and saved the community from the horror of those judicial murders for witchcraft, the blame of which was so largely attributable to the clergy. Perhaps no laymen have given the clergy more trouble than the doctors. The old reproach against physicians, that where there were three of them together there were two atheists, had a real significance, but not that which was intended by the sharp-tongued ecclesiastic who first uttered it. Undoubtedly there is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the medical profession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition and diseased human imagination which has been installed in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible, or, at least, very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpetual efforts of Nature—whose diary is the book he reads oftenest—to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that can be done under the given conditions,—it is very difficult for him to believe in a world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with its 126 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of torture is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity. On the other hand, the physician has often been renowned for piety as well as for his peculiarly professional virtue of charity,— led upward by what he sees to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before his own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utter- ance to that psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel need not have been ashamed of; and if this "heathen" could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not be surprised to find so many devout Christian worshipers among the crowd of medical "atheists." No two professions should come into such intimate and cor- dial relations as those to which belong the healers of the body and the healers of the mind. There can be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both having in view the welfare of their fellow- creatures. But there is a territory always liable to be differed about between them. There are patients who never tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom of their ailments. He goes through his accustomed routine with them, and thinks he has all the elements needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no deeper into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the heart than the wrist. A wise and experienced clergyman, coming to the patient’s bedside,—not with the professional look on his face which suggests the undertaker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance and a sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, waiting for the right moment,—will surprise the shy spirit into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow, the shame, the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a loving and pitying soul is a more potent anodyne than all the drowsy sirups of the East. And, on the other hand, there are many nervous and over- sensitive natures which have been wrought up by self-torturing spiritual exercises until their best confessor would be a saga- cious and wholesome-minded physician. Suppose a person to have become so excited by religious stimulants that he is subject to what are known to the records of ____________________________________________________________________ THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 127 insanity as hallucinations: that he hears voices whispering blas- phemy in his ears, and sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going to be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose that his mental conflicts, after plunging him into the depths of despondency, at last reduce him to a state of despair, so that he now contemplates taking his own life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit suicide. Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as melancholia? Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least, partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of "Christian" in "Pilgrim’s Progress," and its counterpart has been found in thousands of wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruc- tion, which was so nearly taking place in the hero of the allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this example is taken is, next to the Bible and the Treatise of Thomas a Kempis, the best- known religious work of Christendom. If Bunyan and his con- temporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over the case of "Christian" at the time when he was meditating self-murder, it is very possible that there might have been a difference of judgment. The physician would have one advantage in such a consultation. He would pretty certainly have received a Christian education, while the clergyman would probably know next to nothing of the laws or manifestations of mental or bodily disease. It does not seem as if any theological student was really prepared for his practical duties until he had learned something of the effects of bodily derangements, and, above all, had become familiar with the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an insane asylum. It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physician stands to the divine in the same light as the divine stands to the phy- sician, so far as each may attempt to handle subjects belonging especially to the other’s profession. Many physicians know a great deal more about religious matters than they do about med- icine. They have read the Bible ten times as much as they ever read any medical author. They have heard scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which they have listened. They often hear much better preaching than the average minister, for he hears himself chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of them. They have now and then been distinguished in theology 128 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. as well as in their own profession. The name of Servetus might call up unpleasant recollections, but that of another medical practitioner may be safely mentioned. "It was not till the middle of the last century that the question as to the authorship of the Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discerning criticism. The first attempt was made by a layman, whose studies we might have supposed would scarcely have led him to such an investigation." This layman was "Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to Louis XIV." The quotation is from the article "Pentateuch" in Smith's "Dictionary of the Bible," which, of course, lies on the table of the least instructed clergyman. The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tar-water," and the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman whose sands of life"--but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America. The professions should be cordial allies, but the church-going, Bible-reading physician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be expected to know of medicine. To say, as has been said not long since, that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the latter as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says it. What a set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or trying to teach him, so long! A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not believe, or only half believe, what he preaches. But pews without heads in them are a still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot produce any change on pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as he looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being useful. It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith and of place of worship should be far from infrequent. It is not less natural that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on the other, when such changes occur. It even happens occasionally THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 129 that the regrets become aggravated into reproaches--rarely from the side which receives the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offense. It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouth of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to another. So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to happen a great deal oftener than they do. All the larger bodies of Christians should be constantly exchanging members. All men are born with conservative or aggressive tendencies: they belong naturally with the idol-worshipers or the idol- breakers. Some wear their fathers' old clothes, and some will have a new suit. One class of men must have their faith hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument. Members of one of these classes often find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other. The late Mr. Orestes A. Brownson used to preach at one time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper room, where some of them got from him their first lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing with the books they hold sacred. But after a time Mr. Brownson found he had mistaken his church, and went over to the Roman Catholic establishment, of which he became and remained to his dying day one of the most stalwart champions. Nature is prolific and ambidextrous. While this strong convert was trying to carry us back to the ancient faith, another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was trying just as hard to provide a new church for the future. One was driving the sheep into the ancient fold, while the other was taking down the bars that kept them out of the new pasture. Neither of these powerful men could do the other's work, and each had to find the task for which he was destined. The "old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls it, carries many who would steer by the wake of their vessel. But there are many others who do not trouble themselves to look over the stern, having their eyes fixed on the light-house in the distance 130 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. before them. In less figurative language, there are multitudes of persons who are perfectly contented with the old formulae of the church with which they and their fathers before them have been and are connected, for the simple reason that they fit, like old shoes, because they have been worn so long, and mingled with these, in the most conservative religious body, are here and there those who are restless in the fetters of a confession of faith to which they have pledged themselves without believing in it. This has been true of the Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two centuries more or less, unless the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tenison, stood alone in wishing the church were well rid of it. In fact, it has happened to the present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles summarily disposed of by one of the most zealous members of the American branch of the communion, in a verb of one syllable, more familiar to the ears of the forecastle than to those of the vestry. But, on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to meet with persons among the so-called "liberal" denominations who are uneasy for want of a more definite ritual and a more formal organization than they find in their own body. Now, the rector or the minister must be well aware that there are such cases, and each of them must be aware that there are individuals under his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by argument, and who really belong by all their instincts to another communion. It seems as if a thoroughly honest, straight-collared clergyman would say frankly to his restless parishioner: "You do not believe the central doctrines of the church which you are in the habit of attending. You belong properly to a Brother A's or Brother B's fold, and it will be more manly and probably more profitable for you to go there than to stay with us." And, again, the rolling- collared clergyman might be expected to say to this or that uneasy listener: "You are longing for a church which will settle your beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great extent from the task, to which you seem to be unequal, of working out of your own salvation with fear and trembling. Go over the way to Brother C's or Brother D's; your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a back-board which will keep you straight and make you comfortable." Patients are not the property of their physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers. As for the children of clergymen, the presumption is that they will adhere to the general belief professed by their fathers. But THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 131 they do not lose their birthright or their individuality, and have the world all before them to choose their creed from, like other persons. They are sometimes called to account for attacking the dogmas they are supposed to have heard preached from their childhood. They cannot defend themselves, for various good reasons. If they did, one would have to say he got more preaching than was good for him, and came at last to feel about sermons and their doctrines as confectioners' children do about candy. Another would have to own that he got his religious belief, not from his father, but from his mother. That would account for a great deal, for the milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or, at least, dilutes an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark survives only as the seal of immunity. Another would plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts from his great-grandfather, as some do their complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-cred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from his father, but from somebody else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle cautioned against total abstinence. It is always the right, and may sometimes by the duty, of the layman to call the attention of the clergy to the short-comings and errors, not only of their own time, but also of the preceding generations, of which they are the intellectual and moral product. This is especially true when the authority of great names is fallen back upon as a defense of opinions not in themselves deserving to be upheld. It may be very important to show that the champions of this or that set of dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as beliefs, while other retain their vitality, held certain general notions which vitiated their conclusions. And in proportion to the eminence of such champions, and the frequency with which their names are appealed to as a bulwark of any particular creed or set of doctrines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or extravagances or contradictions of thought they have been betrayed. 132 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. In summing up the religious history of New England, it would be just and proper to show the agency of the Mathers, father and son, in the witchcraft delusion. It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf the common beliefs of their time. It would be an extenuation of their acts that, not many years before, the great and good magistrate, Sir Matthew Hale, had sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witchcraft. To fall back on the errors of the time is very proper when we are trying our predecessors in for [?conscientice]. The houses they dwelt in may have had some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they served for their shelter, at any rate. It is quite another matter when those rotten timbers are used in holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more, if one four ancestors built on an unsafe or an unwholesome foundation, the best thing we can do is to leave it and persuade others to leave it if we can. And if we re- fer to him as a precedent, it must be as a warning and not as a guide. Such was the reason f the present writer's taking up the writings of Jonathan Edwards for examination in a recent essay. The "Edwardsian" theology is still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomination to which he belonged. One or more churches bear his name, and it is thrown into the scale of theo- logical belief as if it added great strength to the party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, more that he was a most acute reasoner who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a paleontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was main- tained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so re- markable a logical recoiled on the premises which pointed his inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. When he pre- sents us a God, in whose sight children, with certain not too frequent exceptions, "are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers"; when he gives the most frightful detailed description of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men and women mad to think of prepared for "the bulk of mankind"; when he cruelly pictures of future in which parents are to sing hallelujah of praise as they see their children driven into the furnace, where they are _________________________________________________________________________ THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 133 to lie "roasting" forever,--we have a right to say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged in such imaginations and expressions, is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism. If these and similar doctrines are so generally discredited as some appear to think, we might expect to see the change showing itself in catechisms and confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to read in the newspapers of ministers rejected or put on trial for heresy because they could not accept the most dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be so or not, it must be owned that the. name of Jonathan Edwards does at this day carry a certain authority with it for many persons, so that anything he believed gains for them some degree of probability from the circum- stance. It would, therefore, be of much interest to know whether he was trustworthy in his theological speculations, and whether he ever changed his belief with reference to any of the great questions above alluded to. Some of our readers may remember a story which got abroad many years ago that certain M. Babinet, a scientific French- man of note, had predicted a serious accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live by the collision with it of a great comet then approaching us, or some such occurrence. There is no doubt that this prediction produced anxiety and alarm in many timid persons. It became a very interesting question with them who this M. Babiney might be. Was he a sound observer, who had made other observations and predic- tions which has proved accurate? Or was he one of those men who are always making blunders for other people to correct? Is he known to have changed his opinion as to the approaching disastrous event? So long as there were any persons made anxious by this pre- diction, so long as there was even one who believed that he, and his family, and his nation, and his race, and the home of man- kind, with all its monuments, were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and instantly shivered into fragments, it was very desirable to find any evidence that this prophet of evil was a man who held many extravagant and even monstrous opinions. 134 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW Still more satisfactory would it be if it could be shown that he had reconsidered his predictions, and declared that he could not abide by his former alarming conclusions. And we should think very ill of any astronomer who would not rejoice for the sake of his fellow-creatures, if not for his own, to find the threatening presage invalidated in either or both of the wats just mentioned, even though he had committed himself to M. Babinet's dire belief. But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wiping out of a planet and its inhabitants to the infinite catastrophe which shall establish a mighty world of eternal despair? And which id it most desirable for mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds of the threat of M. Babinet, or those of the other infinitely more terrible combinations, so far as they rest on the authority of Jonathan Edwards? The writer of this paper had been long engaged in the study of the writings of Edwards, with reference to the essay he had in contemplation, when, on speaking of the subject to a very distinguished orthodox divine, this gentleman mentioned the existence of a manuscript of Edwards which had been held back from the public on account of some opinions or tendencies it contained, or was suspected of containing. "High Arianism" was the exact expression he used with reference to it. On relating this fact to an illustrious man of science, whose name is best known to botanists, but is justly held in great honor by the orthodox body to which he belongs, it appeared that he, too, had heard of such a manuscript, and the questionable doctrine associated with it in his memory was Sabellianism. It was of course proper in the writer of an essay on Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged existence of such a manuscript, with reference to which the same caution seemed to have exercised as that which led the editor of his collected works to suppress the language Edwards has used about children. This mention led to a friendly correspondence between the writer and one of the professors in the theological school, at Andover, and finally to the publication of a brief essay, which, for some reason, had been withheld from publication for more than a century. Its title is "Observations concerning the Scripture Œconomy of the Trinity Covenant of Redemption. By Jonathan Edwards." It contains thirty-six pages and a half, each small page having about two hundred words. The pages before THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 135 the reader will be found to average about four hundred and twenty-five words. An introduction and an appendix by the editor, Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the contents to nearly a hundred pages, but these additions, and the circumstance that the little volume is nothing more than a pamphlet in book's clothing. A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, dealing with the arrangements entered into by the three persons of the Trinity, in as bald and matter-of-fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the author had been handling the adjustment of a limited partnership between three retail tradesmen. But, lest a layman's judgment might be considered insufficient, the treatise was submitted by the writer to one of the most learned of our theological experts,--the same who once informed a church dignitary, who has been attempting to define his theological position, that he was a Eutychian,--a fact which he seems to have been no more aware of than M. Jourdian was conscious that he had been speaking prose all his life. The treatise appeared to this professor anti-trinitarian, not in the direction of Unitarianism, however, but of Tritheism. Its anthropomorphism affected him like blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense of "great disgust," which its whole character might well excite in the unlearned reader. All this is, however, of little importance, for this is not the work of Edwards, referred to by the present writer in his previous essay. The tract recently printed as a volume may be the one referred to by Dr. Brushnell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer never heard until after his own essay was already printed. The manuscript of the "Observations" was received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us in his introduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Reverend William T. Dwight, D. D., to whom it was bequeathed by his brother, the Reverend Dr. Sereno E. Dwight. Byt the reference of the present writer was to another production of the great logician, thus spoken of in a quotation from "the accomplished editor of the Hartford 'Courant,'" to be found in Professor Smyth's introduction: "It has long been a matter of private information that Professor Edwards A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an unpublished manuscript of Edwards of considerable extent, perhaps two-thirds as long as his treatise on 136 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the will. As few have ever seen the manuscript, its contents are only known by vague reports.... It is said that it contains a departure from his published views on the Trinity and a modification of the view of original sin. One account of it says that the manuscript leans toward Sabellianism, and that it even approaches Pelagianism." It was to this "suppressed" manuscript the present writer referred, and not to the slender brochure recently given to the public. It is necessary, therefore, to say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be still in doubt with reference to Edwards's theological views, it would be necessary to submit this manuscript, and all manuscripts of his which have been kept private, to their inspection, in print, if possible, so that all could form their own opinion about it or them. The whole matter may be briefly stated thus: Edwards believed in an eternity of unimaginable horrors for "the bulk of mankind." His authority counts with many in favor of that belief, which affects great numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de Staël: "Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains." This belief is one which it is infinitely desirable to the human race should be shown to be possibly, probably, or certainly erroneous. It is, therefore, desirable in the interest of humanity that any force the argument in its favor may derive from Edwards's authority should be weakened by showing that he was capable of writing most unwisely, and if it should be proved that he changed his opinions, or ran into any "heretical" vagaries, by using these facts against the validity of his judgment. That he was capable of writing most unwisely has been sufficiently shown by the recent publication of his "Observations." Whether he anywhere contradicted what were generally accepted as he theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed into heresies, the public will never rest satisfied until it sees and interprets for itself everything that is open to question which may be contained in his yet unpublished manuscripts. All this is not in the least a personal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his studies of Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from the unimpeachable sources sufficiently indicated, the reports, which it seems must have been familiar to many that there was unpublished matter bearing on the opinions of the author through whose voluminous works he had been toiling. And if he rejoiced even to hope that so wise a man as Edwards has been considered, so good a man as he is recognized to have been, had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased to think of children vipers, and of parents as shouting THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 137 hallelujahs while their lost darling were being driven into the flames, where is the theologian who would not rejoice to hope so with him, or who would be willing to tell his wife or his daughter that he did not? The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists. The Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by a cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised enjoyment of earthly coinforts, and a short confession of faith. His theory of the universe is progress; his idea of God is that he is a Father with all the true paternal attributes, of man that he is destined to come into harmony with the key-note of divine order, of this earth that it is a training-school for a better sphere of existence. The Christian pessimist in his most typical manifestation is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to speak, especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to insist on a more extended list of articles of belief. His theory of the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral ruin; his idea of the Creator is that of a ruler whose pardoning power is subject to the veto of what is called "justice"; his notion of man is that he is born a natural hater of God and goodness, and that his natural destiny is eternal misery. The line dividing these two great classes zigzags its way through the religious community, sometimes following denominational layers and cleavages, sometimes going, like a geological fracture, through many different strata. The natural antagonists of the religious pessimists are the men of science, especially the evolutionists, and the poets. It was but a conditioned prophecy, yet wo cannot doubt what was in Milton’s mind when he sang, in one of the divinest of his strains, that “Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.” And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian’s life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,—kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired plowman, whose songs have done more to humanize the 138 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. hard theology of Scotland than all the rationalistic sermons that were ever preached. Our own Whittier has done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier spirit than Burns, for the inherited beliefs of New England and the country to which New England belongs. Let me sweeten these closing paragraphs of an essay not meaning to hold a word of bitterness with a passage or two from the lay-preacher who is listened to by a larger congregation than any man who speaks from the pulpit. Who will not hear his words with comfort and rejoicing when he speak of "that larger hope which, secretly cherished from the time of Origen and Duns Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, has found its fitting utterance in the noblest poem of the age"? It is Tennyson's "In Memoriam" to which he refers, and from which he quote four verses of, of which this is the last: "Behold! we know not anything: I can but trust that good shall fall At last, -far off, -at last, to all, And every winter change to spring." If some are disposed to think that the progress of civilization and the rapidly growing change of opinion render unnecessary any further effort to humanize "the Gospel of dread tidings"; if any believe the doctrines of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the Westminster divines are so far obsolete as to require no further handling; if there are any who think these subjects have lost their interest for living should ever since they themselves have learned to stay at home on Sundays with their cakes and ale instead of going to meeting, - not such is Mr. Whittier's opinion, as we may infer from his recent beautiful poem, "The Minister's Daughter." It is not science alone that the old Christian pessimism has got to struggle with, but the instincts of childhood, the affections of maternity, the intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the philanthropists,-in short, human nature and the advance of civilization. The pulpit has long helped the world, and is still on elf the chief defenses against the dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now, as it always have been in its best representation, of all love and honor. But many of its professed creed imperatively demand revision, and the pews which call for it must be listened to, or the the preacher will by and by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless echoes. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. _____________________________________________________________________ AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS SIMULTANEOUSLY with the nomination of General Garfield, the Republican party had the good fortune to fall heir to a new idea. Such windfalls are by no means frequent in the political world. As a rule, government is simply an eternal repetend. The problem of yesterday is puzzle over to-day, and comes up for a new solution to-morrow. The life of a nation is, in the main, only an infinite series of attempts to solve the same old problem in some new way. The stock properties of all govern- ments are matters of revenue and administration. Parties are far more frequently divided upon the question of how to do than what to do. With nations as individuals, the chief business of existence is to find the means of living. The struggle for daily bread is the great end of government, as well as of the separate existences whose aggregate composite the nation. When to raise money and when to borrow it; what to tax and what to spare; what to buy and what to sell; how to spend and how to save; -these are the questions as to which government is most frequently concerned, and differences of opinion in regard to which usually distinguish parties. They are questions of method and detail. Right or wrong does not enter into them as a component. Policy, expediency, a question of profit and loss, is their highest element. Now and then there comes a time when the question that is uppermost in all mind is not "How?" but "What?" - when the question of method, the mere economy of administration, sinks into insignificance in the presence of some peril which threatens the very fact of existence, or some crisis when that which has been is cast off like an outgrown garment and that which is to be has not yet assumed form and consistency. Such an occasion was the birth-hour of the Republican party. This who led did not know it, but the subsequent events fully demonstrated that the people of the North had arrived at that Vol. CXXXIL.--No. 291. 10 140 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. point when they determined to use their power to cripple and destroy slavery. How, they knew not; neither did they care very much about the means to be employed. Like the Pentecostan multitude, they all heard and saw the same thing -- all understood that in some way or other the Republican party in its last analysis meant personal liberty. The public mind turned aside from the beaten paths of administration and addressed itself to the higher duty of deciding between a new-born righteousness and an ancient evil. So, too, when armed rebellion stood threatening the nation's life, the struggle between parties instantly became not one concerning the economies of existence, but one existence at all. Again, at the close of the war, questions of method of administration were dwarfed by the overtopping importance of fixing and establishing the terms and conditions of restoration, or, as we blindly though more wisely termed it, reconstruction. Since those questions have been decided, or at least have taken on the form of legislative enactments, there has been an unremitting attempt to steer our political thought back into the old channels. Politicians and political scolds have agreed in reiterating that we must come back to the good old ways, and fight over again and again the ancient battles of banking, tariff, and currency, currency, banking, and tariff, without any disturbing influences from without. To consider the causes of revolution and counter-revolution, to trace the course of prejudice and citizen over against a petty economy, instead of discussing the rate of interest or the system of banking, is to be "a stirrer up of strife," a "waver of the bloody shirt," a "ranter on dead issues," a party of insubordinate, and a pestiferous political nuisance. This is not strange. Politicians do not like to be jostled out of their accustomed ruts. The old issues, the everlasting conundrums, leave the lines of battle undisturbed. They make the conflict of parties as peaceful and regular as a sham battle. The ground is known, the lines are drawn, and the result is -- almost immaterial. No one is out of his bearings or beyond his depth. A few dollars, a little hog-cunning, a convenient slander, and he old battle has been won and lost on the same old ground, and by the same perennial parties. A question of principle instead of method is like a bomb-shell in the midst of holiday warfare. It forces an advance over ground that may be full of AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 141 pitfalls. A leader, by one misstep, may stumble into oblivion. A new political idea, therefore, is rarely adopted by any party until the last day of grace. Then it is that the people get ahead of their leaders. There is an advance along the whole line of a party which has planned only to hold its old works. Ordered to "dress" on some old issue, the people insubordinately "charge" on some new evil. Such times are crises. Old parties must clothe themselves with new ideas, or new ones are sure to arise. Such a time is the present. The Democratic party, ever since the close of the war, has been trying to revivify old issues of form and method. They have sought to draw the veil of absolute forgetfulness over the new departure of 1861, and all that was either causative or resultant of that struggle. They have tried to lash the American people back to the lines of the old "autumn maneuvers," to divert attention from the rights of the citizen and the security of the Republic to matters of trade and discount. Almost by accident, as it would seem, the Republican party gave utterance to a new political thought at Chicago, which is destined, if carried to its logical results, to make the coming quadrenniate of its power no less important and memorable than its first. If neglected, shirked, or trifled with, this administration will simply pass into history as one of those interregnums during which a party held power but did nothing -- when "I dare not" waited on "I would," and politicians schemed for future places unmindful of the common weal. This thought which is destined to compel a new departure in politics, is the relation of the general government--the American nation or the American people--to the illiterate voters of the several States. The Republican platform of 1880, for the first time in our history, pledges a party to the idea of national action in the direction of public education. The resolution in regard to it is not at all striking in its character, except in the fact that it does embrace this idea. It was evidently drawn with fear and trembling, and may be regarded as a not altogether unsuccessful attempt to make language a means of concealing thought rather than expressing it. Its history may almost be traced in its words. It is self-evidently a hesitant yielding to an irresistible demand. It is the language of the skilled politician, compelled to take a forward step in compliance with a popular sentiment which he dare not ignore. Not to go forward is to risk favor; 142 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. an inch too far may be ruin to the party whose plan of campaign he is preparing. For years the popular sentiment has been growing. An unshaped, indefinite conviction has sprung up in the public mind that something of the kind is wise and necessary. Members of Congress belonging to this party have introduced tentative measures, designed to feel the public pulse rather than to effect a specific cure. The president of this very convention, with commendable pertinacity, has more than once brought the subject to the attention of his colleagues. The question is one not without difficulty. The national charter is dumb in regard to it. No party has ever gone before to blaze the way, or show its pitfalls and dangers. Four years before, a like committee quietly sat down upon this feeling evidenced by petitions, and sought to be made the basis of a new Southern policy. The President of the Republic, impressed with the need of doing something which had not been done before, during the first three years of his term had not deemed this question worthy of serious consideration, but within a month preceding the sitting of this convention had voiced the popular sentiment in a public address. One of the leading candidates before the convention, a statesman of unusual strength and subtlety, a politician of great sagacity and long experience, had put it forth as one of the first and strongest points of the coming campaign, in a speech of remarkable power, in which, with commendable frankness, he announced his own candidacy for nomination. It is evident that something must be done. The trend of public thought is unmistakable. The party must say something, but not too much. The draftsman must write as the cautious hunter shot - "so as to hit it if a deer, and miss it if a calf." The demon of State sovereignty rose before him, grim and terrible, stained with the blood of recent warfare, yet potent for defeat. Thus pressed in front and rear, the politician seized his pen, and, with the skill of polished statecraft, wrote: "The work of popular education is one left to the care of the several States, but it is the duty of the national government to aid that to the extent of its constitutional ability. The intelligence of the nation is but the aggregate of the intelligence of the several States; and the destiny of the nation must be guided, not by the genius of any one State, but by the genius of all. " It was well and wisely and skillfully done. The first sentence is one of infinite possibilities. Much or little, anything or nothing, may be the scope of its significance according to the AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 143 stand-point of the reader. The chameleon cannot rival it in unchangeable power for infinite change, It is a messenger which needs no injunction to be everything to all men. The concluding sentence, the biggest half of the resolution, was addressed with deft flattery directly and entirely to the State sovereignty gnome. The writer judged well that the repeated impersonation of the "several States," and the deft appeal to the banded "genius" of these incorporeal existences, would effectually conceal the kernel of truth hidden in his bushel of chaff. Nevertheless, the grain was there, which is bound to grow and blossom and swallow other issues, like the prophet's rod. If vigorously carried into execution by the party in power, it will change the whole face of the Southern question. If haltingly dealt with as heretofore, that party will justly lose the advantage to be gained by the priority of their declaration in its favor. THE DANGER. As a general, abstract principle, it requires no argument to establish the truth of Madison's immortal apothegm that "a popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps to both." It is to be feared, however, that very few have clearly formulated the extent and imminency of the danger arising from popular ignorance, which now confronts us. There is a general belief that ignorance is at the root of some of our national ills, and that sometime and somehow danger is likely to result therefrom. This peril was clearly apparent to the mind of General Grant, when he recommended the desperate expedient of excluding all illiterates from the right of suffrage, by constitutional amendment. Though it evoked no Congressional action, it awakened thought, and the present state of the public mind is largely due to his action. President Hayes has rarely missed an opportunity during the last few months to feel the public pulse upon this subject, and, like many Republican canvassers during the late campaign, universally met with a hearty response from all, irrespective of party. His last message reveals his own conviction of the danger, but contains no practical suggestions on the subject. Several bills now before Congress are the outgrowth of this general feeling of apprehension. The usual form of stating the danger to be apprehended from 144 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. this source by no means discloses the imminency of our national peril. It does not consist alone in the fact that of our population some seventeen per cent. is illiterate; nor even in the fact that twenty per cent. of our voters cannot read their ballots. This proportion, if evenly distributed, would perhaps hardly afford ground for apprehension, certainly not for immediate alarm. The real danger lies in the unequal distribution of this percentage of illiterates. The following table, compiled from the census of 1870, will sufficiently disclose this fact. While the recent census will considerably increase the aggregates, it is not probable that it will materially affect the relative proportions: Voting population of the United States ............................7,623,000 " " " former slave States ............... 2,775,000 Illiterate male adults in United States ............................... 1,580,000 " " " former slave States ............... 1,123,000 Per cent. illiterate voters in United States to entire vote 20 " " " slave States .............................. 45 " " " States not slave ...................... .. 9 " " " South Carolina .............................. 59 Illiterate voters in Southern States (white) .......................... 304,000 " " " " (colored)........................819,000 From this table the following facts will be apparent: 1. The sixteen Southern States contain about one-third of our voting population, and almost three-fourths of our illiteracy. 2. Forty-five per cent. of the voters of the Southern States are unable to read their ballots. 3. The illiteracy of the South, plus six per cent. of its literate voters, can exercise the entire power of those States. 4. If this illiterate vote be neutralized by force or fraud, a majority of the intelligent voters, or twenty-eight per cent. of the entire vote of those States, will exercise their entire national strength, These States have one hundred and thirty-eight electoral votes, or, in other words, they exercise seventy-two per cent. of the power necessary to choose a President or constitute a majority in the House of Representatives, and eighty-four per cent. of a majority in the Senate. By reason of their ignorance, forty-five per cent. of the voters of the South are unable: 1. To know what is their political duty. 2. To be sure that their votes actually represent their wishes. 3. To secure the counting of the ballots which they cast. AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 145 4. To protect themselves in the exercise of their ballotorial privileges. So that the alternative presented is between an honest exercise of power by voters who are too ignorant to have any certain knowledge whether they are right or wrong, and the suppression of their votes by force or fraud. So far as their effects upon the nation are concerned, both are alike dangerous. While this mass of ignorance may be instinctively right in purpose, it is naturally unable to judge of the instrumentalities with which it works. If suppressed, that very act discloses a purpose and intent in itself dangerous. It is simply a choice between the dangers of honest ignorance and dishonest fraud or unlawful violence. The question for the nation to answer is whether it can afford to have three-fourths of the power necessary to control the government exercised by either ignorance, or fraud, or violence. The question is one above partisanship, as the safety of the nation is above party supremacy. The general apprehension of danger to result from either horn of this dilemma is evidenced by the fact that what is termed the "solid South" is universally regarded as a thing to be either dreaded or excused. In the late campaign, each party accused the other of responsibility for its existence, and each asserted, as one of its chief claims to support, that its success would effectually banish this bete noir of our modern politics. Oddly enough, too, the one claimed that the "solid South" would be broken by the election of its candidate, because that action would show an inclination on the part of the North to give to the "solid South" whatever it desired, and thereupon there would result such a struggle over the spoils of victory inside the "solid South" as would permanently destroy all of its solidarity. The argument of the other party was that the success of its candidate would evidence such a determination on the part of the North as would induce the individuals composing the "solid south" to despair of winning national control by means of this solidarity, consequently, it was argued, they would gradually silver off, court alliance with the Republicans, and, by so doing, not only protect the ignorant colored voters in the exercise of their franchise, but also compel the remainder of their present associates to court in like manner the colored vote, and so accomplish the end, by all professedly deemed most desirable, to wit, the breaking up of the "solid South" and of the colored vote of the South at once. 146 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Both of these claims are fallacious, but they show a universal conviction that the "solid South" and the solid ignorant vote of the South are both dangerous things. The trouble is, that, instead of seeking to eradicate the cause, both parties have hitherto sought to "whip the devil around the stump" by shallow artifices, which, even if they were to succeed, would afford but a temporary relief. This mistake results in a great measure from a misapprehension of the relative character of the present parties at the South, and the use of the terms "the South," "South- ern people," and the "solid South," in different senses. Of the white race at the South, some twenty-four per cent. of the voters are illiterate; of the colored race, about ninety per cent. Of the Republican party at the South, about seventy-five per cent. is colored, and the remainder white. The ratio of illit- eracy among the whites of the two parties is probably about the same, for, while the white Republicans will hardly average with their Democratic neighbors in wealth, it takes a certain amount of intelligence to furnish the backbone necessary to make a Southern Republican. There are no colored Democrats, or not enough to constitute an appreciable percentage. This estimate would make something more than seventy or cent. of the present Republican party of the South illiterate and twenty-four per cent. of their opponents. This classification of parties dates back to the period of reconstruction, and was formed solely upon the question of accepting or rejecting rehabilitation under those measures. The lodestone which united the opposition was hostility to the political equality of the negro. All other points of difference were insignificant and trivial, except as they bore upon that one absorbing idea. Since that time there has been no material change in the strength or animus of the respective parties. The party opposed to the reconstruction measures became what is known as the "solid South." The alliance of this faction with the Democratic party of the nation was purely acci- dental. They united with that party simply because of the Repub- licans favored the reconstruction measures. The "solid South" is not solidly Democratic, but solidly "Souther"; or, what is the same thing, solidly opposed to the exercise of political power by the colored man. It did not become solid in the hope of achieving national power, but moved into the Democratic camp in the hope of achieving power by means of its already ________________________________________________________________________ AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 147 established solidarity. The "solid South" has no special affinity for the Democracy any more than for any other party. Its dis- tinctive features are peculiar to itself. No defeat of the Demo- cratic party affects its solidarity, nor is any triumph of the Republican party of any moment to it so long as no step is taken to interfere with or remove the causes of its solidarity. This faction was not made "solid" by the hope of enjoying federal patronage and favor. When it was first organized, there seemed little hope of success for it even in local affairs. Only the most far-seeing sagacity could have predicted that astonishing triumph which it has achieved. Yet, there was no hesitation, no faltering, no desertion. The number of proselytes from it during the years of Republican supremacy was surprisingly small. The most tremendous majorities did not appall or discourage them. As they did not abandon their faction when in majority for the sake of preferment, so they will not now defy its power for the sake of favor. This faction, unquestionably a minority, assume for them- selves the term "Southern," with a sublime disregard of the weak and ignorant majority. This use of the term "Southern" has become so general that its absurdity is almost forgotten. That which is favored by this element is said to be "Southern," and that which is opposed to it, "anti-Southern." A national policy which is thoroughly approved by every member of the actual majority of the people of that section is denounced by this ele- ment as one hostile to "the South." Even as these words are written, the message of the President is spoken of by a lead- ing journal as "meeting with universal execration at the South," while in truth no document he has ever written in regarded by the actual majority there as approaching it in good sense and statesmanship. This assumption by a faction of terms denoting the whole, and the general concurrence in their use, is the cause of endless confusion. In this article, "the South" will be used for the section, and the "solid South" to designate the faction. If such a thing as the disruption of the "solid South," and the distribution of the colored vote between its fragments were possible, it would still be only a temporary remedy for the evil which threatens the nation's future. For a time it would lessen the danger, and the political Micawber might be excused for appealing to an artifice which would give opportunity for an unforeseen something to turn up. When we consider the 148 The North American Review. extreme improbability of any such disruption, and the absence of any stronger issue than the mere bait of official power which can be offered to induce the dissolution of a "solid South," which is based on race-prejudice and the traditions of the past, we may well conclude that the only remedy is to attack the cita- del of ignorance. There are two methods by which the danger may be avoided. The one is that which has been adopted by certain of the States, which is to exclude the illiterate from the ballot. This can never honestly be done, even if desirable, because in more than one-third of the States an honest majority can never be obtained in its favor. Every unlettered man will of course oppose his own exclusion from political power, unless intimidated or deceived, and there will never be found a time, should it be attempted, when there will not be intelligent voters enough who unite with them to give a majority. Who believes that such a measure could be honestly adopted in South Carolina, for instance, where fifty-nine percent. of the voters are illiterate? Such a movement could not consistently be inaugurated or supported by the Republican party, both because of the vast percentage of illiterates in its Southern wind, and also because it would be a virtual confession of folly or insincerity in its reconstructionary legis- lation. Such an admission would be fatal. The only other method of treating this evil is that so cautiously pointed out in the resolution, already quoted, of the Republican platform of 1880 - national education, or national aid to education. So that we face the inquiry, Is this a sufficient and possible remedy? The Power of Congress. The first question to be considered in connection with this inquiry is the power of Congress over the subject-matter. No power to provide for the education of the citizens of the different States, or that vague thing denominated "American citizenship," or to prescribe the course or character of instruc- tion, is provided in the Constitution. At the time of its adoption, such a thing as an organized system of the public schools under State control was unknown. The whole idea of public education is one of later growth. Washington and others of his compatriots were anxious for a national university, but the systematic educa- _______________________________________________________________________ Aaron's Rod in Politics. 149 tion of all the people, by the state or nation, was hardly dreamed of at that time. Its especial necessity, arising from the influence of ignorance upon political affairs, was not then felt, because of two things, viz. : the restrictions upon the ballot were such that very few men could compass that privilege who were not at least able to read and write. The immigration to our shores (except the pauper and penal immigration to some of the Southern plantations) had chiefly been confined to religious mal-contents, who came to avoid persecution, and persons who voluntarily left their homes to seek advantage from settlement in unbroken wilds. This very fact stamps them as among the most enterprising, far-seeing, and determined of their respective classes. They were really picked men. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest never had a better illustration than in the settlement of the American colonies. This was the main reason why our early settlers, coming as they did chiefly from the middle and lower classes of England, developed so suddenly a capacity for self-government, invented new govern- mental forms, and adapted themselves to untried conditions with such astonishing ease. They neither understood the danger resulting from ignorance, however, nor the proportions to which it would grow in our land. They were too busy securing rights against the power of king and lords to fear any evil to come from the masses. It was one of those things which the Constitution is silent in regard to, simply because its authors had no prevision of the subject-matter. It is, however, one of that numerous class of questions which the inherent necessities of national existence have, from time to time, forced upon our attention. The depart- ment of agriculture, the coast survey, scientific and exploring expeditions, the signal service, the military and naval academies at West Point and Annapolis, and many other branches of administrative work, are beyond the purview of the written Constitution. There is no sense in saying that they are not within a strict construction of that instrument. They cannot be embraced by any construction of its words, because they were not within the range of its authors' thoughts, and could not have been within the intendment of their language. Of these extensions of the governmental powers beyond the pur- view of the written Constitution, by far the greater portion have been accepted and concurred in without controversy. Their need was so apparent, and the logic of their existence so irresist- 150 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. ible, that they have been deemed only necessary corollaries of other unquestioned powers. The incidents of national power--those things which are essential to its existence, development, and perpetuity--have always been held to be within the legitimate scope of both the legislative and executive branches of our national government. Out of our Constitution has grown a nation, and out of the needs of that nation, following the English precedent, has grown the doctrine of intendment, by which our Constitution is kept as flexible, as capacious and receptive as the unwritten constitution of Great Britain. The positive authorizations and inhibitions of the written instrument are, of course, in no case to be disregarded; but the silences which lie between have been peopled with incidental powers until the fabric of a compact and harmonious nationality bids fair to rise by natural and healthy growth out of the imperfect federation which our fathers adopted. The power to provide for the education of the people, to secure the intelligence of its electors and thereby prevent its own disintegration and destruction, is one of these incidents of national existence. The right of self-preservation and defense is as much an essential of national as of individual life. The power to provide for an intelligent exercise of the ballotorial power is a necessary incident of elective government. If we are to be ruled by the ballot, the ballot-box must be kept open, free, and the power to be exercised through it must be the power of intelligence. The rule of the ballot implies supervision; and the power to make all participants in our governmental control, implies the right to make them fir to do so. Manhood suffrage, equality of the right, presupposes, in the power conferring such equality, the power and the right to render the recipient capable of its intelligent exercise. The safety of the republic is the highest law, and the most evident condition of its safety is, that those who rule shall have sufficient intelligence to know what they desire to do, and when they are doing it. The illiterate man who holds a ballot is like the blind man who wields a sword--he knows not whether he wounds friend or foe. The ballot-box, controlled by ignorance, is as much as an instrument of chance as a dice-box. The illiterate has, in the first place, but a limited means of learning how he ought to vote, and no means at all of making sure that he has voted as he wishes. He is the ready victim of fraud. He invites deception, and AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 151 furnishes food at the demagogue. He is more to be feared than the traitor or usurper, because he constitutes the following which makes treason dangerous. The ignorant voter swells the rank and file of the army that follows at the heels of the corrupt politician. Education does not make men honest, but it enables them to detect fraud. It is a safeguard, because the bulk of mankind are honest, and if intelligent enough to distinguish the right, will follow it. The power to educate its own voters then, is, and must be, inherent in any republic, because it is only an incident of the right of national defense. The nation's right of self-defense, the implied power to maintain itself, was not exhausted by the struggle to put down rebellion. It equally exists as to any impending evil. The national board of health, and the proposed action in regard to the cattle plague, are recent instances in which the public mind has approved the exercise of such power. Is the nation to hold its hand, permit disease to ravage a portion of the land and threaten all the rest, simply because the boundary of a State must be crossed to provide a remedy? The peril from ignorance is of precisely the same character. Fortunately it is not, as a fact, contagious, but under our system of government its evils are by no means bounded by the State, or district, in which it prevails. When it furnishes the votes which elect a member of Congress from the city of New York, or by fraud or intimidation permits a member to be chosen by the majority of minority in Mississippi, the conduct of those representatives bears with equal weight, for good or ill, on every citizen in every district of the United States. If the blind man cut only himself he might perhaps be allowed to play with the sword; but when fifty millions more are wounded every time he smites himself, it is not only permissible for them to take measures for their own protection, but incumbent upon them to do so. It is because aggregated ignorance has become dangerous to the continuance and development of the nation, inimical to our form of government and the principles on which it is based, that the nation has the right to begin and carry on a war of extermination against it. It is not the Constitution, but the law of national existence that flows from the Constitution, which gives us this right. A nation has not only the inherent right to exist, to guard and protect its present, but also to secure its future and perpetuate its life. That right our nation is not only entitled to exercise, but it has reached a 152 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. point where further to omit to do so would be hazardous and criminal. While, if it became necessary, the nation might lawfully stamp out ignorance as it did secession, yet it becomes incumbent on the statesman to adopt that method which promises to secure the result aimed at with the least interference with the established harmony of our complex system of government. There are three possible methods of national education: 1. The assumption by the general government of the duty of educating its own citizens, without reference to the State organizations. 2. The distribution of a national fund to the various State organizations, to be by them applied and controlled, without supervision or interference on the part of the general government. 3. The appropriation of a fund in aid of primary schools in the different States, to be administered under the supervision and control of the national government. The first of these needs no consideration, because, as has just been remarked, it is only to be resorted to when all other plans have failed. Neither public sentiment nor the imminency of the peril is such as to justify such a radical departure from the system of coordination which has existed hitherto between our State and national governments. The second, that of placing funds absolutely in the hands of the various States for educational purposes, which is the basis idea of the bills now pending before Congress, is open to the following serious objections: 1. The experience of the nation in regard to such bequests is not encouraging. The results have not generally been at all proportionate to the munificence of the gifts. 2. Such a fund is especially liable to misappropriation. It goes into the absolute control of the various State legislatures, and being a fund not raised by immediate taxation of their own constituents, they are naturally held to a less rigid accountability for its expenditure. "Easy come, easy go" is especially true of such funds. It is almost a moral certainty that its investment or application would soon become a party question in every State, and the result would be a minimum of progress at a maximum of cost. 3. Such a fund is liable to be diverted from its legitimate AARON' ROD IN POLITICS. 153 purpose for the benefit of a class or a sect. Instead of being devoted to the cure of illiteracy, it may be frittered away in costly scientific experiment, or the support of higher education for a few, which, while good enough in itself, does not materially affect the specific evil sought to be remedied. The bill now pending before Congress has not avoided this evil. One-third of the fund it appropriates is to go to the support of colleges. Illiteracy is the present danger. When that is cured, there will be time enough to think about polishing diamonds. The Louisville "Journal" is entirely right when it says, "Let the whole proceeds go to the common schools, and to no schools of higher education." The nation is interested in curing the illiteracy of all classes and both races. A fund given in bulk to the authorities of a State can no longer be controlled by the general government, and may be applied to the benefit of one race or class, without remedy. The fund distributed to the States many years ago was, in not a few cases, invested in Confederate bonds and used to destroy the giver. 4. Instead of being an incentive to exertion on the part of the States and their citizens, it is a bid for carelessness and sloth. Instead of exerting themselves to supplement the nation's bounty with their own best endeavors, the tax-payers of the State would be apt to clamor for a reduction of the State tax for schools on account of this donation, and demagogues would soon seek for votes by promising such relief, thus corrupting their constituents by means of the national funds, and destroying that public sentiment which must underlie every successful system of public instruction. THE REMEDY. We come, then, to consider the third method, and meet at once the inquiry: "Can the general government administer a fund in aid of public education in the various States without assuming the control of the public schools thereof?" We believe it can, by means of any system which shall contain the following elements: 1. The raising of a sufficient national fund for educational purposes. 2. The distribution of this fund on the basis of illiteracy. 3. The payment of the fund directly to the officers or teachers of schools in towns, or districts, according to the number of 154 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. illiterates therein, and on proof that schools, free to all within school age, have actually been kept in operation therein for a certain specified portion of the year. 4. A thorough system of inspection and supervision of the schools thus assisted, and full and accurate reports of all matters necessary to direct future legislation on the subject. 5. Provision that the fund not applied in any particular district for any year shall be forfeited to the general fund for the succeeding year. 6. The sum allowed ought, in no case, to be more than one-third or one-half the amount necessary to maintain the school during the specified time; the balance being required to be provided either by State taxation or private subscription. It is not intended here to discuss the method of raising this fund, nor the amount required, further than to express the belief that is should be a regular part of the national budget, and be provided in like manner with other current expenses. We should not wait for the slow process of a sinking-fund, nor seek to sneak out of responsibility by giving the income of a fancifully invested sum, the existence of which may depend on some doubtful contingency. It should be an honest fund, not raised by indirection nor appropriated by stealth. Its distribution, on the basis of illiteracy, is an idea already incorporated in at least two bills now before Congress, and strongly advocated by Mr. Commissioner Eaton for several years. It has the merit of putting the plaster directly on the sore. The result of this would be to apply more than two-thirds of the fund to primary education at the South, so long as the present ratio of illiteracy existed there. This is not only good policy, but the highest justice. Slavery was the parent of ignorance, not only on the part of the slave, but also of the white race. Through national encouragement it grew, and the amount invested in it yearly increased until the war began. The result of the war not only deprived the South of the proceeds of previous economy by destroying the capital thus invested, by also, by making the freedman a citizen, imposed on some one the task and burden of his instruction. It is an enormous undertaking for either the State or the nation. For those States, it is quite an impossible one. They could, by the utmost reasonable exertion, hardly bring their population to the level of our present Northern intelligence in a hundred years. During that time, the nation AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 155 would be constantly imperiled by this mass of ignorance. Not only is it an almost impossible task for the, but it is one which they ought not in justice to be asked to perform alone. Not only did the nation, by its laws and institutions, encourage slavery, but it shared in its profits and reaped advantage from the prosperity which it helped to bring. The merchants of the North shared the profits of every pound of cotton, tobacco, or sugar which the Southern planter raised. The Northern manufacturer had the advantage of this great market close at hand, and protected from foreign competition by a tariff which made every planter of the South pay tribute to him on almost every article he purchased. The advantages of slavery were, therefore, shared by North and South alike, and in a pretty nearly equal degree. The evils of slavery, and the losses consequent upon emancipation, fell mainly upon the South. It is true that great losses were sustained by the North. The industries of the North so greatly exceed those of the South, and its aggregated wealth is so much more, that the burden of public debt falls chiefly upon it. Yet it is by no means just that the South should be compelled to bear alone the burden of curing the evils which the nation fostered and grew fat upon. If slavery was an evil, the nation should bear a part of the cost of its cure. If it be regarded only as a productive institution, the North should bear a part of the cost of its transformation into self-directing labor, and a co-equal political element, because it shared in the profits of its enslavement. There is still another view of this matter. Although emancipation was a necessary resultant of the war of rebellion, and enfranchisement an unavoidable corollary of emancipation, yet, as political facts, both were of Northern origin, and enforced by Northern or national power. The voice of the South--excluding the colored man's vote--has never ratified either the emancipation of the slave or the enfranchisement of the freedman. By national authority they were made constituent elements, not only of the nation itself, but of the subordinate commonwealths in which they dwelt. The reconstruction acts were in effect as compulsory as if they had been prescribed by the commander-in-chief, with force of arms. The fact that we empowered the colored man to do by his ballot the will of the nation, does not deprive those acts of their compulsory character, so far as the former constituent elements of statal-power in the Southern States were concerned. Their VOL. CXXXIL--NO. 291. 11 156 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. result was to render necessary the education of the illiterate voters of the South, in order to prevent misgovernment or usurpation. Sooner or later, every man in those States will see that their only hope lies in the intelligence of their voters. Thus to compel those States to assume a vast expenditure is a flagrant instance of taxation without representation. It is what the Irishman, during the war, defined a draft to be,--"a nate way of compelling a poor fellow to volunteer." Equity and good conscience, as well as the public safety, demand that the nation should assume a fair share of this burden. The third proposition is intended to afford a simple and effective method of securing the application of the fund to the very purpose for which it was intended. It is the most important element of the plan proposed. Instead of giving the fund in gross into the hands of the States and making them its almoner, the nation itself takes care that its purpose is fulfilled. It secures its bounty to the people, and not to the State. It is, in effect, the plan adopted in the distribution of the Peabody fund,and has there shown itself well calculated both to secure immunity from imposition and to awaken public interest and coöperation in educational work. By this wise method of administration, the trustees have doubled, and perhaps trebled, the value of Peabody's munificent benefaction. Giving to no school enough wholly sustain it; requiring it to be kept open a certain number of months every school year ; to have a certain minimum of enrolled pupils and a certain average attendance during that time, and, above all, paying only when its work has been done, the Peabody fund has done more good by inducing others to give, than by the funds actually distributed. Its working has been altogether harmonious, both with State systems and free schools maintained by private subscription. The same system adopted by the nation would have a like effect. If the authorities of a State should refuse to coöperate with the nation, the people of the separate districts of such State might still share its benefits by a little exertion. It would only be necessary, in order to carry out this provision, to ascertain the number of illiterates in any specified territory of each race, apportion the fund thereto, and before giving money to any school within that town or district, to require proof either that it was open to all races, or, in States where public opinion does not allow of mixed schools, that like opportunity was afforded to the other race by other schools in such district. AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 157 Of course, the details of this would require careful elaboration. No man could to-day draw a bill sufficiently broad and elastic to meet all the needs of such a system. Only care, experience, and the most extended study of the data furnished by full and careful reports could enable one to accomplish such a task. From this very fact arises the necessity of the fourth proposition. Up to this point it is believed that the plan proposed has steered clear of debatable ground. It cannot well be denied that the Congress has a right to appropriate funds for school purposes, since it has not unfrequently done so. It will hardly be questioned that it may distribute that fund itself, and not through the agency of the State governments, provided the plan adopted is not intended to favor one State more than another. In connection with this, it should be remembered that the purpose and object of this work is neither to benefit nor favor any State nor section. Its object is not even to favor the recipients of its bounty. Its sole intent is to protect the nation from an insidious and deadly peril. In this result every State, and every individual in every State, has an equal and direct interest. As it is intended, however, to act in harmony with State systems of public instruction, to assist, promote, and develop primary schools, which are, in part or in whole, supported by taxation under State laws, controlled by State officials, and managed by State authority, it may be urged at once that the States will not submit to national supervision or inspection of such schools. It will be noted that it is not proposed that the government shall exercise any control over such schools, but only to provide that, as a condition precedent to participation in the benefits of the fund, the school shall have been open to the thorough inspection and supervision of an authorized representative of the general government, who shall report upon its methods, grade, and character. It is not proposed that he shall have any authority but merely be the eyes through which the Congress shall watch over its own work, and guide itself in the future exercise of its power. These inspectors are to be merely gatherers of data, acting under prescribed forms. Nothing need be said about their method of appointment or compensation. It is not intended that there should be a numerous force of paid inspectors. On the contrary, it is believed that good men and women can be found in every township in the land who will willingly give the little time required to visit the schools 158 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. in their district, and furnish the reports required, for the sake of securing the benefits of the system and promoting the cause of education. They should be appointed without regard to party or sex. Indeed, it is more than probable that there would be no occasion for partisan feeling in regard to the matter. Each race should be allowed at least a representation in the supervision of its own schools, if desired. It is not believed that any serious opposition could be made to such a system of inspection. If it is, the issue ought to be made up at once. In no State could a party standing on such opposition long succeed in retaining power. It is in the Southern States alone that any opposition to such a plan of national action is to be anticipated. The mistaken ideas of the rank and file of the "solid South," in regard to the true interests of that section, naturally incline them to oppose anything looking toward governmental action in this respect, and many of their leaders would be bitterly hostile to anything which promised to secure the enlightenment of their constituents. Their power depends in great measure on the ignorance of the masses. It is a mistake to suppose that the leaders of the "solid South" are the best men of the organization which they control. They are, to a large extent, the buccaneers, the desperadoes, of their own party; the men who were bold enough and unscrupulous enough to assume its leadership in the days of active kukluxism, and head the revolutionary organizations which gave it power. They are men who gained prominence by their boldness in directing movements which touched the verge of treason, were unlawful and violent. There were many who sympathized with the purposes of such organizations who did not approve of their methods. Few cared to face danger and ostracism to oppose; but many tacitly disapproved. These are the really "best men" of the "solid South." As a rule, they are not extravagantly proud of their present leaders. Many of them—and the number is hourly increasing—are becoming more and more convinced that the education of the voter is the only chance for the permanent prosperity of their section. These would undoubtedly give in their adhesion to such a system. The principle of national supervision, however, is vital to the success of national aid to education, because: 1. It provides a check upon fraud, imposition, or misapplication of the fund. 2. It secures material for future amendment of the law. AARON’S ROD IN POLITICS. 159 3. It enables the Congress to know just what sort of instruction the citizens of the nation are receiving through its bounty. This last point is not one to be neglected. It is a very significant fact, that in nearly every one of the Southern States the text-books prescribed by the authorities openly and ably defend the right of secession; extol the Confederacy and its leaders; assail the national government and its defenders, and, in short, tend directly to diminish the respect due to the government, and justify the action of those who sought its disruption. No man can read the Southern school histories without being assured that their purpose and intent is to instill the extremest doctrines of State sovereignty and secession, both by direct argument, and by subtle depreciation of the federal government and its acts and agencies. This is altogether natural. The "solid South" is, in the main, the successor of the rebellious South, not in its present purpose, but in its underlying spirit, and largely in its personale. To defend rebellion is to them merely the instinct of self-justification. To uphold and justify the leaders of secession without assailing the government which suppressed rebellion is a logical impossibility. If Jeff Davis is to be glorified as a patriot and a martyr, Lincoln must, of necessity, be depreciated. If the rebellion was just and righteous, of course its suppression was a crime. That those who promoted and carried on rebellion should desire to stand in history as patriots and martyrs is altogether natural and reasonable. That they should especially desire their sons and their daughters, to the latest moment of time, to venerate their cause and glorify their efforts is by no means surprising. That their children should be even more devout believers in the righteousness of the "lost cause" than their fathers ever were is but a natural result. Hardly a man of the South has ever admitted that secession or rebellion was wrong. "It was simply a question of power," said one prominent Southerner. "The principles for which Lee fought and Jackson fell" are referred to by another as living facts. "The sword decides nothing" has become a favorite apothegm with them. Not one has expressed penitence, or any conviction of having adhered to an unholy cause, or even admitted that if they were placed in like circumstances again they would do otherwise. Their words to the coming generation are not: "My son, take warning from the errors of thy father; shun that false doctrine which led me to shed blood in an unworthy cause; beware of any pitfall of 160 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. prejudice or dogma that may lead you to take up arms against the government of the United States." On the contrary, their language is: "Our cause was just; we were entirely right; our deeds of heroism were unmatched; our escutcheon was unstained; our enemies were servile and degraded, corrupt, and inhuman; we were never defeated, but were simply 'overpowered' by a hireling and imported soldiery ; we were right enough but not strong enough !" Considering these things, it is not surprising that the books which are prescribed, even for the colored schools of the South, by the State officials, are largely occupied in demonstrating to the children of emancipated parents the righteousness of that confederacy whose corner-stone was slavery, and the unholiness of that government which oppressed, exasperated, and finally "overpowered" the "South." As a matter of sentiment, we cannot refrain from a certain sympathy with this feeling. When we consider it as a political fact, however, we must lay aside sentiment, and inquire of ourselves whether it promises well for the future of the country that one-third of its children are being taught to despise and contemn that government to whose crowning effort the nation owes its existence. No one desires in any manner to reflect upon the individual motives of the Confederate leaders or soldiery. A man may be honestly and earnestly and patriotically wrong. We are willing to admit that the adherents of the Confederacy were so. Indeed, we have always clamorously insisted that such was the fact, and have thrust our forgiveness upon them unsought, by reason of it. Such, however, has never been their position. They have always stoutly insisted, not only that they were sincere, but that they were right. If this be true, then the nation was wrong, and if wrong then is wrong to-day, and always will be wrong until the principles of the Confederacy prevail, and the wrong of its suppression is righted. This is the unavoidable conclusion from the doctrine taught in the public schools of the South to-day. It becomes necessary, therefore, to know the extent and effect of such teaching. It is believed that the general intelligence in this age of free thought, fed with the utterances of an untrammeled press, is in itself a sure cure for false dogma, and the writer confidently expects that such a system of national education will soon modify, and eventually do away both with such instruction and the baser element of the feeling from which it springs. It is, AARON'S ROD IN POLITICS. 161 however, a matter which should not go unnoted, and the government should be fully informed to what extent a system designed to secure its perpetuity is perverted to increase its peril. By no means should funds be given into the hands of State authorities to be used in strengthening such a sentiment. The fifth of the proposed elements of this system is merely designed to prevent any district from allowing its proportion of the fund to accumulate, until it is sufficient to maintain a school for the prescribed period in one year, and then drawing and using it, without any exertion on the part of its own people to supplement and enhance its benefits; and the sixth is intended to make the law a constant incentive to local efforts to promote general primary education. The problem results of such a system are almost too vast for estimate. Some of them, however, are hardly matters of conjecture. Among these are: 1. It would rapidly reduce the number of men who do not know where to register, where to vote, for whom they are voting, what are their rights, or what is necessary to be done to secure them. 2. It would rapidly increase the number of men who would know how they were voting, be able to see to it that their votes were counted, and whose knowledge would enable them intelligently to determine their duty. 3. It would strike at the roots of the "exodus" by enabling the laborer to guard himself from fraud by the terms of his contract, and by securing its honest and intelligent enforcement. 4. It would offer a new issue which would enable men who are not proud of fraud, and are ashamed of violence, to withhold their support from the "solid South," at least upon national questions. 5. It would afford opportunity for re-organizing the Republican party of the South and do away with "rings" designed simply to gather crumbs of patronage, and not inclined to court accessions of such talent and character as might interfere with the distribution of the crumbs. While it is, in no true sense, what the pending "Burnside Bill" has been termed--"a gift from the more educated to the illiterate States," but a measure of self-protection and justice merely, it is still far preferable, as a measure of wise conciliation, to that extensive scheme of internal improvement at the South, which consists chiefly in finding channels for the waters of the West, and water for the channels of the East. 162 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 6. It strikes at the very root of the sentiment in which the doctrine of State rights is grounded. The Southern man has heretofore regarded the nation as a vague penumbra, foreign, and usually hostile to the State, which is the object of his most profound adoration. His universal excuse for rebellion is: "I would go with my State against anything outside of it." This plan of State aid to education presents the national government to the eyes of all the people, constantly and persistently, and in an entirely beneficent light. They will learn to regard it, not as a thing "outside" of the State, but inside of, above, and around, pervading, sustaining, and vivifying the State. 7. By raising the grade of intelligence among the working population of the South, it will tend to promote the growth of manufactures, and so unify the interests and development of the different parts of the nation. Other effects of perhaps even greater significance will occur to the mind which carefully considers the possibilities of such a system. There remains only to discuss the cost. In regard to this it need but be said that no money can compensate for the perils which every quadrenniate brings, by reason of the cloud of ignorance which hangs over the Southern portion of the republic. So far as the foregoing pages are occupied with matters of method, they are of course only tentative: other and better plans may be devised, or these greatly improved; but so far as they pertain to the developments of the present and the past, to the nature of the remedy rather than the details, they are the result of long and careful study, thoughtful and unprejudiced observation, and the most profound conviction. To any one who may be disposed to count the cost, there comes an imperative demand to estimate also the danger, to consider whether the present evil shows any hopeful signs of amendment; whether by any other means the republic is likely to be preserved; whether the results, even aside from all political considerations, will not fully repay the expenditure; whether justice does not especially demand that the nation should educate the freedman it has emancipated; and finally, whether the noble sentiment of Peabody, that "education is a debt which the present owes to future generations," does not include within its scope the nation, as well as its components, the State and the individual. ALBION W. TOURGEE. DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? The greatest of English poets is Shakespeare. The greatest prose writer in English literature is probably Lord Bacon. Each of these writers, alone, is a marvel of intellectual grandeur. It is hard to understand how one man, in a few years, could have written all the masterpieces of Shakespeare,--thirty-six dramas, each a work of genius such as the world will never let die. It is a marvel that from one mind could proceed the tender charm of such poems as "Romeo and Juliet," "As You Like It," or "The Winter's Tale"; the wild romance of "The Tempest," or of "The Midsummer Night's Dream"; the awful tragedies of "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello"; the profound philosophy of "Hamlet"; the perfect fun of "Twelfth Night," and "The Merry Wives of Windsor"; and the reproductions of Roman and English history. It is another marvel that a man like Lord Bacon, immersed nearly all his life in business, a successful lawyer, an ambitious statesman, a courtier cultivating the society of the sovereign and the favorites of the sovereign, should also be the founder of a new system of philosophy, which has been the source of many inventions and new sciences down to the present day; should have critically surveyed the whole domain of knowledge, and become a master of English literary style. Each of these phenomena is a marvel; but put them together, and assume that one man did it all, and you have, not a marvel, but a miracle. Yet, this is the result which the monistic tendency of modern thought has reached. Several critics of our time have attempted to show that Lord Bacon, besides writing all the works usually attributed to him, was also the author of all of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This theory was first publicly maintained by Miss Delia Bacon in 1857. It had been, before, in 1856, asserted by an Englishman, William Henry Smith, but only in a thin volume printed for private circulation. This book made a distinguished convert 164 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. in the person of Lord Palmerston, who openly declared his conviction that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Two papers by Appleton Morgan, written in the same sense, appeared last year in "Appleton's Journal." But far the most elaborate and masterly work in support of this attempt to dethrone Shakespeare, and to give his seat on the summit of Parnassus to Lord Bacon, is the book by Judge Holmes, published in 1866. He has shown much ability, and brought forward every argument which has any plausibility connected with it. Judge Holmes was, of course, obliged to admit the extreme antecedent improbability of his position. Certainly it is very difficult to believe that the author of such immortal works should have been willing, for any reason, permanently to conceal his authorship; or, if he could hide that fact, been willing to give the authorship to another; or, if willing, should have been able so effectually to conceal the substitution as to blind the eyes of all mankind down to the days of Miss Delia Bacon and Judge Holmes. What, then, are the arguments used by Judge Holmes? The proofs he adduces are mainly these: (1st) That there are many coincidences and parallelisms of thought and expression between the works of Bacon and Shakespeare; (2d) that there is an amount of knowledge and learning in the plays, which Lord Bacon possessed, but which Shakespeare could hardly have had. Besides these principal proofs, there are many other reasons given which are of inferior weight--a phrase in a letter of Sir Tobie Matthew; another sentence of Bacon himself, which might be possibly taken as an admission that he was the author of "Richard II."; the fact that some plays which Shakespeare certainly did not write were first published with his name or his initials. But his chief argument is that Shakespeare had neither the learning nor the time to write the plays, both of which Lord Bacon possessed; and that there are curious coincidences between the plays and the prose works. These arguments have all been answered, and the world still believes in Shakespeare as before. But I have thought it might be interesting to show how easily another argument could be made of an exactly opposite kind--how easily all these proofs might be reversed. I am inclined to think that if we are to believe that one man was the author of the plays and the philosophy, it is much more probable that Shakespeare wrote the works DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? 165 of Bacon than that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. For there is no evidence that Bacon was a poet as well as a philosopher; but there is ample evidence that Shakespeare was a philosopher as well as a poet. This, no doubt, assumes that Shakespeare actually wrote the plays; but this we have a right to assume, in the outset of the discussion, in order to stand on an equal ground with our opponents. The Bacon vs. Shakespeare argument runs thus: "Assuming that Lord Bacon wrote the works commonly attributed to him, there is reason to believe that he also wrote the plays and poems commonly attributed to Shakespeare." The counter argument would then be: "Assuming that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems commonly attributed to him, there is reason to believe that he also wrote the works commonly attributed to Bacon." This is clearly the fair basis of the discussion. What is assumed on the one side on behalf of Bacon we have a right to assume on the other on behalf of Shakespeare. But before proceeding on this basis, I must reply to the only argument of Judge Holmes which has much apparent weight. He contends that it was impossible for Shakespeare, with the opportunities he possessed, to acquire the knowledge which we find in the plays. Genius, however great, cannot give the knowledge of medical and legal terms, nor of the ancient languages. Now, it has been shown that the plays afford evidence of a great knowledge of law and medicine; and of works in Latin and Greek, French and Italian. How could such advantages of study except at a country grammar-school, which he left at the age of fourteen, who went to London at twenty-three and became an actor, and who spent most of his life as actor, theatrical proprietor, and man of business? This objection presents difficulties to us, and for our time, when boys sometimes spend years in the study of Latin grammar. We cannot understand the rapidity with which all sorts of knowledge were imbibed in the period of the Renaissance. Then every one studied everything. Then Greek and Latin books were read by prince and peasant, by queens and generals. Then all sciences and arts were learned by men and women, by young and old. Thus speaks Robert Burton--who was forty years old when Shakespeare died: "What a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts and sciences, to the sweet content and 166 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. capacity of the reader! In arithmetic, geometry, perspective, opticks, astronomy, architecture, sculptura, pictura, of which so many and elaborate treatises have lately been written; in mechanics and their mysteries, military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting, great tomes of husbandry, cookery, faulconry, hunting, fishing, fowling; with exquisite pictures of all sports and games . . . What vast tomes are extant in law, physic, and divinity, for profit, pleasure, practice . . Some take an infinite delight to study the very languages in which these books were written: Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Chaldee, Arabick, and the like." This was the fashion of that day, to study all languages, all subjects, all authors. A mind like that of Shakespeare could not have failed to share this universal desire for knowledge. After leaving the grammar- school, he had nine years for such studies before he went to London. As soon as he began to write plays, he had new motives for study; for the subjects of the drama in vogue were often taken from classic story. Bur Shakespeare enjoyed another source of gaining knowledge besides the study of books. When he reached London, five or six [lay-houses were in full activity, and new plays were produced every year in vast numbers. New plays were then in constant demand, just as the new novel and new daily or weekly paper are called for now. The drama was the periodical literature of the time. Dramatic authors wrote with wonderful rapidity, borrowing their subjects from plays already on the stage, and from classic or recent history. Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, Kyd, Lodge, Nash, Chettle, Munday, Wilson, were all dramatic writers before Shakespeare. Philip Henslowe, a manager or proprietor of the theaters, bought two hundred and seventy plays in about ten years. Thomas Heywood wrote a part or the whole of two hundred and twenty plays during his dramatic career. Each acted play furnished material for some other. They were the property of the play-houses, not of the writers. One writer after another has accused Shakespeare of indifference to his reputation, because he did not publish a complete and revised edition of his works during his life. How could he do this, since they did not belong to him, but to the theater? Yet every writer was at full liberty to make use of all he could remember of other plays, as he saw them acted; and Shakespeare was not slow to use this opportunity. No doubt he gained knowledge in DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? 167 this way, which he afterward employed much better than the authors from whom he took it. The first plays printed under Shakespeare's name did not appear till he had been connected with the state eleven years. This gives time enough for him to have acquired all the knowledge to be found in his books. That he had read Latin and Greek books we are told by Ben Jonson; though that great scholar undervalued, as was natural, Shakespeare's attainments in those languages. But Ben Jonson himself furnishes the best reply to those who think that Shakespeare could not have gained much knowledge of science or literature because he did not go to Oxford or Cambridge. What opportunities had Ben Jonson? A bricklayer by trade, called back immediately from his studies to use the trowel; then running away and enlisting as a common soldier; fighting in the Low Countries; coming home at nineteen, and going on the stage; sent to prison for fighting a duel -- what opportunities for study had he? He was of a strong animal nature, combative, in perpetual quarrels, fond of drink, in pecuniary troubles, married at twenty, with a wife and children to support. Yet Jonson was celebrated for his learning. He was master of Greek and Latin literature. He took his characters from Athenaeus, Libanius, Philostratus. Somehow he had found time for all this study. "Greek and Latin thought," says Taine, "were incorporated with his own, and made a part of it. He knew alchemy, and was as familiar with alembics, retorts, crucibles, etc., as if he had passed his life in seeking the philosopher's stone. He seems to have had a specialty in every branch of knowledge. He had all the methods of Latin art -- possessed the brilliant conciseness of Seneca and Lucan." If Ben Jonson -- a brick-layer, a soldier, a fighter, a drinker -- could yet get time to acquire this vast knowledge, is there any reason why Shakespeare, with much more leisure, might not have done the like? He did not possess as much Greek and Latin lore as Ben Jonson, who, probably, had Shakespeare in his mind when he wrote the following passage in his "Poetaster": "His learning savors not the school-like gloss That most consists in echoing words and terms, And soonest wins a ma an empty name; Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance Wrapt in the curious generalties of art -- 168 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. But a direct and analytic sum Of all the worth and first effects of art. And for his poesy, 'tis so rammed with life, That it shall gather strength of life with being, and live hereafter more admired than now." The only other serious proof offered in support of the proposition that Lord Bacon wrote the immortal Shakespearean drama is that certain coincidences of thought and language are found in the works of the two writers. When we examine them, however, they seem very insignificant. Take, as an example, two or three, on which Judge Holmes relies, and which he thinks very striking. Holmes says (page 48) that Bacon quotes Aristotle, who said that "young men were no fit hearers of moral philosophy," and Shakespeare says ("Troilus and Cressida"): "Unlike young men whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy." But since Bacon's remark was published in 1605, and "Troilus and Cressida" did not appear until 1609, Shakespeare might have seen it there, and introduced it into his play from his recollection of the passage in the "Advancement of Learning." Another coincidence mentioned by Holmes is that both writers use the word "thrust": Bacon saying that a ship "thrust into Weymouth"' and Shakespeare, that "Milan was thrust from Milan." He also thinks it cannot be an accident that both frequently use the word "wilderness," though in very different ways. Both also compare Queen Elizabeth to a "star." Bacon makes Atlantis an island in mid ocean; and the island of Prospero is also in mid ocean. Both have a good deal to say about "Mirrors," and "Props," and like phrases. Such reasoning as this has very little weight. You cannot prove two contemporaneous writings to have proceeded from one author by the same words and phrases being found in both; for these are in the vocabulary of the time, and are the common property of all who read and write. My position is that if either of these writers wrote the works attributed to the other, it is much more likely that Shakespeare wrote the philosophical works of Bacon, than that Bacon wrote the poetical works of Shakespeare. Assuming then, as we have a right to do in this argument, that Shakespeare wrote the plays, DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? 169 what reasons are there for believing that he also wrote the philosophy? First. This assumption will explain at once that hitherto insoluble problem of the utter contradiction between Bacon's character and conduct, and his works. How could he have been, at the same time, what Pope calls him -- "The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind"? He was, in his philosophy, the leader of his age, the reformer of old abuses, the friend of progress. In his conduct, he was, as Macaulay has shown, "far behind his age -- far behind Sir Edward Coke; clinging to exploded abuses, withstanding the progress of improvement, struggling to push back the human mind." In his writings, he was calm, dignified, noble. In his life, he was an office-seeker through long years, seeking place by cringing sub- servience to men in power, made wretched to the last degree when office was denied him, addressing servile supplications to noblemen and to the sovereign. To gain and keep office he would desert his friends, attack his benefactors, and make abject apologies for any manly word he might have incautiously uttered. His philosophy rose far above earth and time, and sailed supreme in the air of universal reason. but 'his desires were set on things below. Wealth, precedence, titles, patronage, the mace, the seals, the coronet, large houses, fair gardens, rich manors, massy services of plate, gay hangings," were "objects for which he stooped to everything, and endured everything." These words of Macaulay have been thought too severe. But we defy any admirer of Bacon to read his life, by Spedding, without admitting their essential truth. How was it possible for a man to spend half of his life in the meanest of pursuits, and the other half in the noblest? This great difficulty is removed if we suppose that Bacon, the courtier and lawyer, with his other ambitions, was desirous of the fame of a great philosopher; and that he induced Shakespeare, then in the prime of his powers, to help him write the prose essays and treatises which are his chief works. He has himself admitted that he did actually ask the aid of the dramatists of his time in writing his books. This remarkable fact is stated by Bacon in a letter to Tobie Matthew, written in June, 1623, in which he says that he is devoting himself to making his writings more perfect -- instancing the "Essays" and the "Advancement 170 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. of Learning" -- "by the help of some good pens, which forsake me not." One of these pens was that of Ben Jonson, the other might easily have been that of Shakespeare. Certainly there was no better pen in England at that time than his. When Shakespeare's plays were being produced, Lord Bacon was fully occupied in his law practice, his parliamentary duties, and his office-seeking. The largest part of the Shakespeare drama was put on the stage, as modern research renders probable, in the ten or twelve years beginning with 1590. In 1597, Shakespeare was rich enough to buy the new place at Stratford-on-Avon, and was also lending money. In 1604, he was part owner of the Globe Theater, so that the majority of the plays which gained for him this fortune must have been produced before that time. Now these were just the busiest years of Bacon's life. In 1584, he was elected to Parliament. About the same time, he wrote his famous letter to Queen Elizabeth. In 1585, he was already seeking office from Walsingham and Bureleigh. In 1586, he sat in Parliament for Taunton, and was active in debate and on committees. He became a bencher in the same year, and began to plead in the courts of Westminster. In 1589, he became queen's counsel, and member of Parliament for Liverpool. After this, he continued active, both in Parliament and at the bar. He sought, by the help of Essex, to become Attorney-General. From that period, as crown lawyer, his whole time and thought were required to trace and frustrate the conspiracies with which the kingdom was full. It was evident that during these years he had no time to compose fifteen or twenty of the greatest works in any literature. But how was Shakespeare occupied when Bacon's philosophy appeared? "The Advancement of Learning" was published in 1605, after most of the plays had been written, as we learn from the fact of Shakespeare's purchase of houses and lands. The "Novum Organum" was published in 1620, after Shakespeare's death. But it had been written years before; revised, altered, and copied again and again -- it is said twelve times. Bacon had been engaged upon it during thirty years, and it was at last published incomplete and in fragments. If Shakespeare assisted in the composition of this work, his death in 1616 would account, at once, for its being left unfinished. And Shakespeare would have had ample time to furnish the ideas of the "Organum" in the last years of his life, when he had left the theater. In 1613, he DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? 171 bought a house in Black Friars, where Ben Jonson also lived. Might not this have been that they might more conveniently cooperate in assisting Bacon to write the "Novum Organum"? When we ask whether it would have been easier for the author of the philosophy to have composed the drama, or the dramatic poet to have written the philosophy, the answer will depend on which is the greater work of the two. The greater includes the less, but the less cannot include the greater. Now the universal testimony of modern criticism in England, Germany, and France declares that no larger, deeper, or ampler intellect has ever appeared than that which produced the Shakespeare drama. This "myriad-minded" poet was also philosopher, man of the world, acquainted with practical affairs, one of those who saw the present and foresaw the future. All the ideas of the Baconian philosophy might easily have had their home in this vast intelligence. Great as are the thoughts of the "Novum Organum," they are far inferior to that world of thought which is in the drama. We can easily conceive that Shakespeare, having produced in his prime the wonders and glories of the plays, should in his after leisure have developed the leading ideas of the Baconian philosophy. But it is difficult to imagine that Bacon, while devoting his main strength to politics, to law, and to philosophy, should have, as a mere pastime for his leisure, produced in his idle moments the greatest intellectual work ever done on earth. If the greater includes the less, then the mind of Shakespeare includes that of Bacon, and not the reverse. This will appear more plainly if we consider the quality of intellect displayed respectively in the drama and the philosophy. The one is synthetic, creative; the other analytic, critical. The one puts together, the other takes apart and examines. Now, the genius which can put together can also take apart; but it by no means follows that the power of taking apart implies that of putting together. A watch-maker, who can put a watch together, can easily take it to pieces; but many a child who has taken his watch to pieces has found it impossible to put it together again. When we compare the Shakespeare plays and the Baconian philosophy, it is curious to see how the one is throughout a display of the synthetic intellect, and the other of the analytic. The plays are pure creation, the production of living wholes. They people our thought with a race of beings who are living persons, and VOL. CXXXII. -- No. 291. 12 172 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not pale abstractions. These airy nothings take flesh and form, and have a name and local habitation forever on the earth. Hamlet, Desdemona, Othello, Miranda, are as real people as Queen Elizabeth or Mary of Scotland. But when we turn to the Baconian philosophy, this faculty is wholly absent. We have entered the laboratory of a great chemist, and are surrounded by retorts and crucibles, tests and re-agents, where the work done is a careful analysis of all existing things, to find what are their constituents and their qualities. Poetry creates, philosophy takes to pieces and examines. It is, I think, an historic fact, that while those authors whose primary quality is poetic genius have often been also, on a lower plane, eminent as philosophers, there is, perhaps, not a single instance of one whose primary distinction was philosophic analysis, who has also been, on a lower plane, eminent as a poet. Milton, Petrarch, Goethe, Lucretius, Voltaire, Coleridge, were primarily and eminently poets; but all excelled, too, in a less degree, as logicians, metaphysicians, men of science, and philosophers. But what instance have we of any man like Bacon, chiefly eminent as lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, who was also distinguished, though in a less degree, as a poet? Among great lawyers, is there one eminent also as a dramatic or lyric author? Cicero tried it, but his verses are only doggerel. In Lord Campbell's list of the lord chancellors and chief-justices of England, no such instance appears. If Bacon wrote the Shakespeare drama, he is the one exception to an otherwise universal rule. But if Shakespeare cooperated in the production of the Baconian philosophy, he belongs to a class of poets who have done the same. Coleridge was one of the most imaginative of poets. His "Christabel" and "Ancient Mariner" are pure creations. But in later life he originated a new system of philosophy in England, the influence of which has not ceased to be felt to our day. The case would be exactly similar if we suppose that Shakespeare, having ranged the realm of imaginative poetry in his youth, had in his later days of leisure cooperated with Bacon and Ben Jonson in producing the "Advancement of Learning" and the "Novum Organum." We can easily think of them as meeting, sometimes at the house of Ben Jonson, sometimes at that of Shakespeare in Black Friars, and sometimes guests at that private house built by Lord Bacon for purposes of study, near his splendid palace of Gorhambury. "A most ingeniously contrived DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? 173 house," says Basil Montagu, "where, in the society of his philosophical friends, he devoted himself to study and meditation." Aubrey tells us that he had the aid of Hobbes in writing down his thoughts. Lord Bacon appears to have possessed the happy gift of using other men's faculties in his service. Ben Jonson, who had been a thorough student of chemistry, alchemy, and science in all the forms then known, aided Bacon in his observations of nature. Hobbes aided him in giving clearness to his thoughts and his language. And from Shakespeare he may have derived the radical and central ideas of his philosophy. He used the help of Dr. Playfer to translate his philosophy into Latin. Tobie Matthew gives him the last argument of Galileo for the Copernican system. He sends his works to others, begging them to correct the thoughts and the style. It is evident, then, that he would have been glad of the concurrence of Shakespeare, and that could easily be had, through their common friend, Ben Jonson. If Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare, it is exceedingly difficult to give any satisfactory reason for his concealment of that authorship. He had much pride, not to say vanity, in being known as an author. He had his name attached to all his other works, and sent them as presents to the universities, and to individuals, with letters calling their attention to these books. Would he have been willing permanently to conceal the fact of his being the author of the best poetry of his time? The reasons assigned by Judge Holmes for this are not satisfactory. They are: his desire to rise in the profession of the law, the low reputation of a play-writer, his wish to write more freely under an incognito, and his wish to rest his reputation on his philosophical works. But if he were reluctant to be regarded as the author of "Lear" and a Hamlet, "he was willing to be known as the writer of "Masques," and a play about "Arthur," exhibited by the students of Gray’s Inn. It is an error to say that the reputation of a play-writer was low. Judge Holmes, himself, tells us that there was nothing remarkable in a barrister of the inns of court writing for the stage. Ford and Beaumont were both lawyers as well as eminent play-writers. Lord Backhurst, Lord Brooke, Sir Henry Wotton, all wrote plays. And we find nothing in the Shakespeare dramas which Bacon need have feared to say under his own name. It would have been ruin to Sir Philip Francis to have avowed himself the author of "Junius." 174 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. But the Shakespeare plays satirized no one, and made no enemies. If there were any reasons for concealment, they certainly do not apply to the year 1623, when the first folio appeared, which was after the death of Shakespeare and the fall of Bacon. The acknowledgment of their authorship at that time could no longer interfere with Bacon's rise. And it would be very little to the credit of his intelligence to assume that he was not then aware of the value of such works, or that he did not desire the reputation of being their author. It would have been contrary to his very nature not to have wished for the credit of that authorship. On the other hand, there would be nothing surprising in the face of Shakespeare's laying no claim to credit for having assisted in the composition of the "Advancement of Learning." Shakespeare was by nature as reticent and modest as Bacon was egotistical and ostentatious. What a veil is drawn over the poet's personality in his sonnets! We read in them his inmost sentiments, but they tell us absolutely nothing of the events of his life, or the facts of his position. And it, as we assume, he was one among several who helped Lord Bacon, though he might have done the most, there was no special reason why he should proclaim that fact. Gervinus has shown, in three striking pages, the fundamental harmony between the ideas and mental tendencies of Shakespeare and Bacon. Their philosophy of man and of life was the same. If, then, Bacon needed to be helped in thinking out of his system, there was no one alive who would have given him such stimulus and encouragement as Shakespeare. This also may explain his not mentioning the name of Shakespeare in his works; for that might have called too much attention to the source from which he received this important aid. Nevertheless, I regard the monistic theory as in the last degree improbable. We have two great authors, and not one only. But if we are compelled to accept the view which ascribes a common source to the Shakespeare drama and the Baconian philosophy, I think there are good reasons for preferring Shakespeare to Bacon as the author of both. When the plays appeared, Bacon was absorbed in pursuits and ambitions foreign to such work; his accepted writings show no sign of such creative power; he was the last man in the world not to take the credit of such a success, and had no motive conceal his authorship. On the DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS? 175 other than, there was a period in Shakespeare's life when he had abundant leisure to coöperate in the literary plans of Bacon; his ample intellect was full of the ideas which took form in those works; and he was just the person neither to claim any credit for lending such assistance nor to desire it. There is, certainly, every reason to believe that among his other ambitions, Bacon desired that of striking out a new path of discovery, and initiating a better method in the study of nature. But we know that, in doing this, he sought aid in all quarters, and especially among Shakespeare's friends and companions. It is highly probable, therefore, that he became acquainted with the great dramatist, and that Shakespeare knew of Bacon's designs and became interested in them. And if so, who could offer better suggestions than he; and who would more willingly accept them than the overworked statesman and lawyer, who wished to be also a philosopher? Finally, we may refer those who believe that the shape of the brow and head indicates the quality of mental power, to the portraits of the two men. The head of Shakespeare, according to all the busts and pictures which remain to us, belongs to the type which antiquity has transmitted to us in the portraits of Homer and Plato. In this vast dome of thought there was room for everything. The head of Bacon is also a grand one, but less ample, less complete--less. "Teres, totus atque rotundus." These portraits therefore agree with all we know of the writings, in showing us which, and which only, of the two minds was capable of containing the other. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. MR. WHYTE, of Maryland, has drawn the attention of the country to a subject that has been too long neglected, by a joint resolution, read in the Senate, to amend the Constitution of the United States so as to fix permanently the number of judges of the Supreme Court. The number of the judges of that court is not prescribed in the Constitution. Indeed, no reference is made to the question whether the court is to be composed of one or more judges, except in the sixth section of the third article, in which the "Chief Justice" is required to preside on the trial of an impeachment of the President of the United States. If it had been intended that the Supreme Court might be composed of a single judge, the office of Chief Justice would not have been mentioned es nomine. The framers of the Constitution were very trustful of the patriotism and political integrity of the future generations of the American people. More so, indeed, than their conduct has justified. In leaving this great department to be supplied with such officers as the President should appoint, "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate," there was a most forcible declaration that the officers and department are not representatives of the people, in the common acceptation of the word. The courts do not represent the people as legislators: they judge between them. The life tenure of the judicial office removes them from all direct responsibility to popular will. The only power over the judges that is reserved, in any form, is the power of impeachment, which is conferred by the Constitution upon the House of Representatives, and the jurisdiction to try the impeachment, which is conferred upon the Senate. Two-thirds of the members of the Senate present must concur in a judgment of PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. 177 conviction before the impeached judge can be removed and disqualified from holding office. This is as far as the people have any control of the conduct of the judges, either directly or indirectly, except to provide, through their representatives, laws for the further punishment of their offenses; but these are to be tried by the judiciary. It is needless to argue that the purpose of this strictly guarded sanctity and immunity of the judiciary is to secure its independence of the people. The independence of the judiciary, when coupled with the supremacy of their power, and the inviolability of their decrees in the field of jurisdiction assigned to them, seems almost to lift them to a height of authority that is too autocratic for harmonious companionship with the other departments of a republican government. But these high powers conferred upon the judiciary are of the very essence of free government, because they are necessary to give practical force and effect to the laws which they themselves establish. It behooves a free people that their judges should be above the "influence of fear, favor, affection, reward, or the hope thereof," so that justice shall not be denied to the poor or the humble man, or sold to the rich; and that it be not biased by the hope of favor, or the fear of giving offense to popular sentiment, or political power. Having, of necessity, placed our judicial department on this high plane, and being powerless to control it, as we can control the other departments of the government, by the direct influence of popular will expressed in elections, we have no effectual means of preserving its purity, or of restraining it from the exercise of an arbitrary power within its own limits of jurisdiction. The almost ineffectual power of impeachment is a poor remedy for judicial abuses. In Judge Peck's case, the House of Representatives impeached him of a high misdemeanor in office, without one dissenting voice, but the Senate refused to convict him. Without intimating that either of the Houses was at fault in the matter, this precedent is a very clear proof of the weakness, the nothingness, of the strongest current of popular opinion, when it is directed to the removal of a judge from office. Being compelled to give the judiciary the highest powers, and to retain the least possible control over the judges and the courts, for the sake of having a supreme and independent arbiter of justice in our free system of government, we cannot be too watchful of the moral forces that we may employ in guarding 178 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the purity of the bench, or too jealous of evil influence in the selection of men who are to fill these high offices. Mr. Whyte's proposed amendment of the Constitution goes to the bottom of the subject, or as near to it as we can get, when it proposes to deprive Congress of the power to increase or diminish the number of the judges of the Supreme Court at its pleasure. It would, perhaps, improve the proposed amendment if it was made the duty of Congress, when necessity requires, to increase the number of judges above a fixed basis, in ratable proportion to the increase of our population and the number of States in the Union; but this has nothing to do with the principle involved. Mr. Whyte gives the following brief history of the changes we have made in the numbers of the judges of the Supreme Court: "The instability of the present method of fixing the number of judges is made manifest by a brief review of the course of legislation on the subject since the establishment of the court. "By the original act of 1789, the Supreme Court was to be composed of six judges; in 1801, an act was passed providing that the number should be reduced to five on the first vacancy, but this act was repealed in 1802. "In 1807, an act was passed providing for an additional associate judge. By the act of 1837, the number of associate judges was increased to eight, and by act of 1863 to nine, and that act provided that the Supreme Court of the United States shall hereafter consist of a Chief Justice and nine associate justices. "The act of 1866 reduced the number of the whole court from ten to seven, while the act of 1869 fixed the court as consisting of a Chief Justice and eight associate judges. "With this changing composition of the court, the time may come when the confidence of the people in this great tribunal may be shaken. "In a popular government like ours, care should be taken in every part of the system, not only to do right, but to satisfy the community that right is done." There was scarcely an instance in this curious legislative history relating to the Supreme Court where the reduction or increase of the number of judges was not directly the result of an effort to secure a well-defined and clearly understood purpose of political strategy. In some instances the identical purpose of the change was too obvious for concealment, and the expected decision of the majority of the court followed the change too closely to leave a doubt of the purpose. Within a few years after the organization of the Supreme Court, the rival political parties of the country began to claim it as a right, and to urge it as a party duty, to put judges on the PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. 179 bench who were decided, able, and zealous in their support of party measures and party declarations of political principles. It would be very difficult, in recent times, to cite a single exception to this rule. It has not become as positively established as that the President will select his cabinet from the party that elected him, and there is little hope that this rule will ever be changed. This is a dangerous movement against the independence of the bench, and a fearful temptation to its integrity. When this practice first demanded tolerance from the people, the evils that were to follow were not so apparent as they are at this time. Then the rival political parties more frequently alternated in the control of the government; and the appointments to the bench were more evenly balanced between them. The life term of these offices also prevented the evil of sudden changes in the incumbency, to correspond with the changing fortunes of political parties. But the causes that then reduced the evils of a pernicious principle to a minimum, now operate to increase those evils into a serious danger to the country. The civil war excluded one-half of the country from representation on the bench; the life tenure of the judges makes them permanent in office; the President appoints only such as are fixed and immovable in their party relations; and Congress increases or reduces the numbers whenever it may be necessary to obtain the judicial sanction of such measures as may be desired to perpetuate the power of the party in authority. Congress and the President, acting together for the purpose of building up and confirming the strength of a party, have taken control of the Supreme Court, and will only permit such men to sit upon that bench as will make it their business to keep in line with and sustain all great party movements. It is at this point, and in this way, that the independence of the bench is to be destroyed; and with the loss of its independence, its impartiality must be lost and its purity tarnished. Some very corrupt men have been independent and impartial judges, and some very pure men have been servile slaves on the bench. Whether pure or corrupt in his personal character, the independent and impartial judge is much safer than a cowardly suppliant for party favors. Mr. Whyte has taken the first necessary step in protecting the independence of the bench, by his proposition to cut off the power of Congress to increase the number of judges whenever 180 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. certain men are to be rewarded for party services, or certain questions are to be decided a certain way by a packed court, in order to sustain a party in measures that are designed to give it power and perpetuity in control of the government. He has gone as far, perhaps, as it is possible to go with positive measures in this direction. The rest must be left to the President and the Senate, and to the moral force of the people. The present time is a great epoch in the history of the Supreme Court. Within a period of six months, it is more than probable that four of the judges will have retired from the bench. Two of them are now the oldest and most distinguished men of that great tribunal. One of the vacancies has been filled in strict accordance with the idea that the bench must be occupied by those alone who "belong" to the Republican party. It is not expected that the remaining places will be filled with any other than the ablest, wisest, most faithful, and most zealous members of that party. The President would sadly disappoint four million five hundred thousand people if he should select even one of the judges from the body of the other four million five hundred thousands people who vote the Democratic ticket. Or if the Senate, which is Democratic, and is likely to remain so for four years, or longer, should decline to "advise and consent" to the exclusion of all Democrats from the bench, the men who compose the Republican party will probably consider that it was an act of revolutionary hostility to the government. Assuming, therefore, that the President will nominate only Republicans to the Supreme bench and that the Democrats will consider it their duty to advise and consent to such selection out of mere deference to the President, we will, within six months, have a bench of eight Republicans and one Democrat, and after that we shall be silenced in the Supreme Court, as we will be ignored in the Senate, if, in the providence of God, one of the judges or either of four senators should be removed. However good, or learned, or great these four new judges may be, there is not one of them who will be permitted to feel that his elevation to the bench is due alone to his superior qualifications of integrity, learning, and abilities. They will know that each of the four men is not greater, or better, or wiser than all the men in the Democratic party who are qualified for such places, and they will feel the full weight of the fact that their PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. 181 selection is really owing to their fidelity to the Republican party. Going upon the bench with this conviction, they will be more than men if they maintain perfect independence of thought and impartiality of judgment. It is supposed, or rather it was supposed, that a man who has been raised to the Supreme bench would be free from all temptation to decide questions in the accordance with the expectations of his political associates. This may yet be true in point of fact, but such is not the opinion of the people. In other days, as well as in this day, they have gravely suspected the bench. The Dred Scott decision, the Legal Tender cases, the decisions of the Electoral Commission, and the cases construing the election laws, and the right to punish State judges for obeying constitutional State statutes, have, in their turn, greatly impaired the confidence of many people in the independence of the judges of the Supreme Court. This is a deplorable fact, and it may be discreditable to the people, but the fact would never have been possible if the people had not known that the Supreme bench had been used by politicians as a means of dispensing rewards for political services. It is natural to expect a grateful return for great favors, and there is disappointment when it is withheld. Congresses, and Senates, and Presidents have used the Supreme bench as constituting a part of the political machinery of the great parties of the country, and the people have naturally expected that such a course would lead to the worst possible results. There is no constitutional barrier to the aspirations of the judges to political power. When the judges of the Supreme Court decide questions that affect the prospects or places of political parties, they are at once open to the suspicion that they are influenced by personal consideration, or that they are serving their party on the bench. This is not the fault of the people. It is the fault of a loose system of constitutional provision to control the number of the judges, and of a vicious practice in making appointment that fails to protect them against temptation. The Constitution should provide, and public opinion should earnestly support the provision, that a judge, appointed for life, should be consecrated for life to the service of the country only in a judicial calling. They are not thus consecrated to this high calling, but while on the bench they continue to be politicians, and are frequently drawn 182 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. into political controversies that impair their influence and characters as judges. The service of the judges of the Supreme Court upon the Electoral Commission, without reference to the side on which they aligned themselves, was the most injurious misfortune that ever befell the bench. Since that event, no American citizen has had a doubt that the judges would stand by their party ni every question that would materially affect its success. So long as it is the undeviating practice to appoint judges who are distinguished for their fidelity and activity in party service, rather than for the qualities that enable them to rise above the demands of a party, and to do impartial justice to all men of all parties, it is not to be expected that the decisions of the courts will receive that respect and reverence from the people which are so essential to the peace, honor, and welfare of the country. Such a policy in reference to judicial appointments keeps the judges always in the presence of temptation. The people witness the fact, and naturally attribute to the influence of temptation what may be a pure and disinterested act. They see the whole political power of the country concentrated on the effort to secure a political judiciary that will be under party control, and when it is accomplished, they are ready to regard the bench as merely a part of a great political machine. The dangers of a political judiciary to the liberties and lives of the people are fearful to contemplate. The bloody assizes in England, in the reign of Jame II., were the result of the employment of the judiciary to execute the will of a politician.* Nothing was ever so fierce, cruel, and unrelenting as a judge who sets out to serve a political master. Secured from all personal danger by the sacredness of their offices, and having the power to condemn people to death who are, under our laws, even denied the right of appeal from their decision, judges who are the servants of a political party are more to be dreaded than war, famine, or pestilence in a country. Every patriotic heart must constantly utter the prayer that *"The Chief Justice's campaign in the west," as his cruel master called the bloody progress of Jeffreys, was only a less mild, but not a less political campaign than some judges have prosecuted here, at the behest of a political party. PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. 183 God will deliver our country from such evil, and yet every political agency is constantly at work to produce this evil. In every State, and in the federal government, in all appointments to judicial offices, from a justice of the peace to the Chief Justice of the United States, the political departments claim the right to fill the judicial departments with their henchmen. There is scarcely an exception that can be named. All the other departments are allowed to appoint their own servitors and inferior officers, but the political departments exclude the judiciary from this privilege, except as to the clerks of the courts. They retain the power to appoint and remove at pleasure the district attorneys, and the marshals of the courts, who in turn appoint their deputies and bailiffs. Under such conditions the judges, whether State or federal, must be, and are, the mere dependencies of the political departments, and it is a marvel that they have any remaining sense of their independence, and of the dignity of their offices. Their independence of party control, in questions of political character, is almost destroyed, and it is for this reason that every judgment they render in such cases in censured as a corrupt act by one party, or denounced as treason to party faith by the other. Whether their judgments are just or unjust, the people trace them back to the causes which led to the appointment of the judges, and approve or condemn them accordingly. This appears to be an extremely unjust attitude in which the people are found with reference to the judges, but that it is generally true is quite beyond denial; and a brief allusion to the facts which have forced them into this unhappy conviction will tend strongly to justify the opinions they have formed. With very few exceptions, if indeed there are any exceptions, all the judges who have been appointed to the federal bench since 1965 have been members of the same political party. And so it has been reference to the district attorneys and marshals. The most assiduous care has been taken to keep the entire judicial departments in the control of the Republican party, and it has been the most faithful and efficient agency that party has ever employed to conduct its political movements. It has taken charge of elections, and to carry them has terrorized communities and States, as well as individuals. It has issued decrees to disband legislatures, and to organize others, and has summoned the army and navy execute its orders. 184 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. This rigid policy of excluding Democrats from all places connected with the judicial administration of the laws, shows that it is only the success of the opposing party in holding on to power that is sought to be secured in the appointment of the judges. The settled determination of the political departments is to rule in and over the judiciary with severe and unrelenting control. That great conservative department in every State, and in the federal government, without which, as an independent department, those governments would not be republican even in form, is made the facile subordinate of the political departments, whose history is filled with crime and debauchery. The department which was created for the purpose of expounding the laws and the Constitution; whose jurisdiction is expressly extended "to all cases in law and equity arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made under their authority... to controversies to which the United States shall be a party," and "to controversies between two or more States"; and to which is intrusted the whole "judicial power of the United States," has been brought into such subjection to the political departments that all its officers are expected, and by no means in vain, to follow the politicians in every exposition of the Constitution which they may adopt in their party platforms. That department which is highest in rank and dignity, if one is higher than another, which was created to control and keep in check the other departments whenever they might invade the liberties of the people or the rights of the States, is required to give pledges, which, if they are not formally made, are considered more binding because they are given in silent confidence, that it will receive its construction of the laws and of the Constitution from the party that has elevated its members to the bench. This is the only possible theory on which the demand for a political judiciary can be founded, and in practice this theory is almost uniformly upheld. The Republican lawyer who aspires to the bench presents as the basis of his claim the credentials are approved, his character and abilities are then considered. The district judge or circuit judge who aspires to the position next above him, refers the President and Senate to the records of his courts to prove that he has never made a decision which presumed to question the constitutionality of an act of Congress PARTISANSHIP IN THE SUPREME COURT. 185 enacted by his party as a party measure; that he has seldom failed to convict a Democrat of a political offense, ,and has found little or no reason to inquire whether similar offenses have been committed by Republicans; that he has appointed commissioners by Republicans; that he has appointed commissioners of bail, and kept them in office, who have used their powers for the purposes of advantage to their party, while they have robbed the treasury of vast sums of money in bills of costs and expenses incurred in the abuse of their jurisdiction; that he has selected partisan supervisors of the elections, and has witnessed the most intolerable oppressions of the people at their hands, under color of such appointments, without its having excited the court even to a mild reproof of their conduct; that he has decided civil causes, and then cut off the right of appeal, by arbitrary rulings, to protect his decisions from review; that he has convicted hundreds of men through verdicts of juries which he knew were selected only to convict in every criminal case that related to political offenses, and has inflicted severe punishments under such conditions when the defendants had no right of appeal, and no other means of redress. If such an aspirant can prove that he has acted judicially on the presumption that every man opposed to the party in power, who is accused of a political offense, was guilty, and was accordingly punished, he has a claim to the office which the political departments of the government will be only too willing to recognize. It is not pretended that the same results would not follow if the Democrats were in power for so long a time as to place the entire personnel of the judiciary under their control. The evil which justice so urgently requires to be remedied is in the doctrine, which is so closely followed in practice, that appointments to the bench must be made alone from the party in power in the government. When the district, and circuit, and supreme courts are all filled up with men from either of the great political parties, the foundations are completed upon which absolutism in government will be established forever. There will be no man on the bench who will venture to differ with his colleagues in upholding a partisan construction of the Constitution or laws. The harsh voice of remonstrance, or of dissent, will no longer disturb the quiet but deadly whisperings of absolute power in the temples of justice. The Constitution thus construed will continue to be the supreme law of the land, and none must venture to be so bold as to question the construction. If the party in power in Congress, and in 186 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the executive department, should say that the republic has become "the nation," and the same party in power in the Supreme Court should answer "yea and amen," then the States and the people who cast half of the entire vote of the country will be required to "Accept the situation." If the next step should be that the nation is declared "the empire," it is still the declaration of the supreme law of the land, and the people and the States can only say, "So mote it be." To place the federal judiciary entirely under the control of one political party in the country is an almost irrevocable step in the direction of absolute government. It will be to establish the initial declaration of that movement which looks to the complete centralization of all power in the federal government, that the laws of Congress within its jurisdiction are supreme under the Constitution, and that Congress has the power to declare and to settle by its edict what are the limits of that jurisdiction. The federal judiciary can only be the conservative and balancing power between the other departments of the government, and the States, and the people that it was intended to be, when it is so far the departmental representative of the people of the entire country that it cannot be justly regarded as the representative of only one of the great political parties into which the people are or may be divided. If one-half of the people of the United States are to be denied all recognition in appointments to the bench, not upon the ground that the judiciary is not a representative department, but on the ground that it must only represent the party in power, then we should at an early day amend the Constitution so that Congress should have less power than it now possesses to change the majority of the bench, and thereby to secure such decisions from the Supreme court as it will suit the purpose of the politicians. JOHN T. MORGAN THE MOON AT ITS RISING HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON. THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA. --------- PART VI. THE village of Comalcalco, the next scene of our labors, is in the State of Tabasco, lying thirty-five or forty miles to the northwest of San Juan Bautista, the State capital. We reached this place on the 12th of November, and that same day, in the company of the Gefe Politico and a few of his friends, I paid a visit to the neighboring ruins. Here we found no longer simple pyramids but veritable mountains (cordilleras) of ruins, overgrown with a luxuriant vegetation, through which it is impossible to make your way except with the aid of the machete. The only one of the pyramids which I climbed, for the purpose of making a rapid survey of the ground, is situate about two miles to the east of the village, on the right bank of the Rio Seco. The first ruin that attracted my notice was a square tower, surmounted by a gigantic tree, like the famous tower of Palenque. To the north of this is a great edifice, consisting of two parallel halls. Here again we are reminded of Palenque, but this building is much larger than any in that place; besides, it has three square windows, whereas the buildings at Palenque have none. Farther on we see the remains of some enormously massive walls, consisting of very thin red bricks, with a layer of mortar more than twice their thickness between the courses. So much I was able to note in one half-hour: we were then compelled to return to the village, as it was night-fall. I have received information of other ruins to the west of the village, where are to be seen large sculptured stones. The abundance of ruins is no surprise to me, for I was already aware that the whole State of Tabasco and a part of Chiapas are covered with ruins; and I brought upon myself no little ridicule by asserting as much after my first expedition. I maintained then that Palenque was no such vast city as t was commonly supposed to have been, but rather a VOL. CXXXII.--NO, 291. 13 188 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. great religious center. I had at hand the proofs of this assertion, but I discreetly withheld them at that time. To-day, facts are confirming me, and I am in hopes of yet finding something more notable even than Comalcalco, which itself was a more considerable place than palenque, albeit the ruined condition of its structures will prevent it from attracting so much attention as the latter place. November 15th.--During the past night the wind was from the north, and, as usual in this latitude, brought in its train a heavy rain-fall. No work can be done for the three days that the storm is expected to continue. I was misinformed before I came here about the dry and wet seasons of Tabasco. The rainy season proper extends only from June to the end of October, but then come the northers, lasting for one, or three, sometimes for fifteen days, and invariably attended by heavy rains. I spend this time of enforced inaction in conversing with the natives and leaning their traditions. One landed proprietor informed me that on his estate he had counted more than three hundred pyramids, all of them covered with ruins! This region must at one time have contained a very large population. At Blasillo, fifty or sixty miles to the west, are some architectural remains in a better state of preservation than those of Comalcalco. When the Spaniards skirted the coast of Tabasco on their first expedition to Yucatan, they saw on the shore and far in the interior a multitude of structures whose white and polished walls glittered in the sun: their crumbling remains are to-day found everywhere throughout this region, from the coast up to the mountains of the interior. In architecture and in decoration they are allied to the edifices of Yucatan, or, rather, the latter are allied to them, for I hold the Tobasco monuments to be the older of the two. The materials employed are different,--here bricks, there stone,--but we recognize in both regions the same civilizing force, the same directing genius, acting upon distinct races, amid different environments. Now this civilizing force, this directing genius, must have come from the Toltecs. If this is so, then we have a date fixed in the history of these Tabasco monuments. It is certain that the Toltecs quit the elevated plains of Mexico in the eleventh century--in 1032 according to Clavigero, a little later according to Veytia. They migrated southwards by two routes, one on the Pacific side, the other along the shore of the Gulf. The Pacific division reached Guatemala by the way Oaxaca THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA. 189 and Tehuantepec; the Gulf division occupied Yucatan, passing through Tabasco. The envoys of Xolotl, king of the Chichimecs, who were the successors of the Toltecs on the Mexican plateau, found them settled and prosperous in Guatemala and Yucatan in 1120. That pacific race which, according to Landa and Cogoludo, invaded Yucatan from the north and the west, civilizing without arms, and persuading without terror, can have been no other than the Toltec; in Java we see a like pacific conquest achieved by the Buddhists. It was with the assistance of the conquered populations,--populations that must have numbered many millions,--that they erected the monuments which are now engaging our attention. But whence came those earlier populations? Had not America its genesis like the Old World, and the same genesis, too? And are there not theories in abundance to account for this multitudinous population? Besides the autochthonic race, there may have been accessions from other races, emigrations from the north, vessels carried hither by storms, shipwrecks, etc. I hope yet to be able to prove that in Central America various influences have met, especially those of Japanese and Polynesian origin, for we find here the architectural styles and the decorative motifs of both. The Toltec knew how to group all these elements,-- here adopting the language of the country, there modifying his own architecture, but everywhere leaving his literature, his religion, his astronomy, and many of his customs. To sum up, we assert that these monuments are Toltec, that they are modern, and that the most ancient of them are not more than eight centuries old. We might add-though this is not history, but simply hypothesis--that the Toltecs may have been preceded here by the Olmecs and the Otomies, other branches of the same family; in that case, the Toltecs would find the field ready for them. But, aside from this not improbable hypothesis, it is no matter of astonishment that a people possessed of such gifts should have succeeded in establishing in Guatemala, Yucatan, and Tabasco the civilization of which we are now discovering the remains. Had they not in the space of three centuries covered the whole plateau of Anahuac with their cities and their monuments? Was it not easy for them, then, with more abundant means and with a more numerous population, to erect like monuments and to establish a higher grade of civilization in a new country which 190 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. they occupied for upward of four centuries - in fact, we might say down to the conquest? November 16th. - The rain ceased only at noon to-day. The twenty-five Indian laborers went out to the ruins in the morning, but when we arrived they had only cleared away the rubbish from the base of the pyramid, and done but little work on the platform. Hence it was impossible to take any exact measurements of the ruined buildings. I entered the lower story of the tower already mentioned. I also discovered another tower. The lower story of each is under-ground, and I entered both. The four walls come nearer to one another as they rise, forming a sort of vault by their gradual approximation. Bricks of larger size cover the summit of the vault. November 17th. - We are here in a singular country, where laborers take life easy. I have at work to-day twenty-five men, to whom I pay thrice as much as I did to the Indians of the high plateaus, yet these do not one-fourth as much work. There is no help for it, for the simplest remark pronounced with the air of authority would provoke a mutiny. There are all blood relations of one another, or at least related by affinity, and if you discharge one you discharge all. The boss, who is supposed to control them, never speaks to them except with the utmost deference. On calling his attention to the fact that in the force of twenty-five laborers there are some mere boys, who, of course, cannot do the work of men, I was requested to tell them myself, for he did not dare to undertake so delicate a commission. To-day I visited a group of three pyramids to the north of the great pyramid already mentioned. The larger one of this group is thirty-five to forty feet high, and the smaller ones from twenty to twenty-five feet. I had heard these pyramids spoken of frequently, but on none of them did I find anything but shapeless ruins. As for the bricks used in constructing the buildings, they are of all sizes, from 5.9 to 9.8 inches in length. The largest bricks, designed for use in corners, and for other purposes, measure some 16.5 inches long, 12.59 inches wide, and 1.18 inches thick; others 23.62 inches long, 15.75 wide, and 1.77 thick. On the large pyramid I found two bricks, one bearing the profile of a man with feather ornaments on his head, the other a number of concentric circles. The laborers have now cleared a portion of the platform of the great pyramid. In doing this, they had to cut away a dense THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA. 191 growth of brush-wood and to fell a number of large trees. This pyramid is 115 feet high at its highest point. The buildings upon it are, an immense palace, some 250 feet long, with perfect orientation, the front looking eastward, and the two ends toward the north and south; a rectangular tower to the south of the palace, and another tower of the same shape to the west. They both stood on platforms. This palace forcibly reminds me of the Governor's palace at Uxmal; it is not quite so long, but very nearly as high; and though it is built entirely of bricks and mortar, it must have been covered with ornaments in stucco. This decoration must have been very effective if we are to judge by the scattered pieces of it I have found, and more especially by the fragments of inscriptions, which remind me of those of Yucatan. Only two chambers remain standing, but these suffice to show a striking resemblance to the buildings at Palenque; and we possess indicia enough to enable us to construct the general plan of the edifice. That these monuments are of Toltec origin we have the best grounds for believing, although they differ entirely from the buildings on the high plateaus. As was remarked when we were considering the ruins of Tula, the Toltecs were eclectic, and used the materials that happened to be accessible - stone, mortar, bricks, clay, wood. Hence they were prepared for every transformation, and their genius could adapt itself to every mode of construction. We see them employing stone at Mitla; among the Zapotecs, mud mixed with stones, with a facing of bricks forming arabesques; while at Mt. Alban they inaugurated the construction of the boveda, that bastard vault of which we have examples here and elsewhere. We see them, on the coast, constructing, their pyramids and their edifices of shells, with a few bricks. As they penetrated into the interior, they employed bricks and mortar; but at Palenque, where stone is abundant, they adopt that material, and covered their monuments as well as their streets with the famous cement the secret of which they possessed. In Yucatan, where limestone is very plentiful, they gave up the use of cement for ornamentation, and we have edifices such as are seen at Chichen, Uxmal, etc. Here at Comalcalco I find, in the path leading to the ruins, pieces of cement, the remains of the original pavement. November 18th and 19th. - Two days of heavy rain; no work done. My papier maché casts of sundry ornaments and inscrip 192 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. tions I have placed under shelter, and will have them dried there by artificial heat. November 20th.--Though the weather is not fair, still work might be done to-day, but the men are unwilling. Fortunately, the ruins are not such as to involve any very extensive excavations, for what with the laziness of these Indians and the difficulty of engaging their services, nothing of importance could have been done. November 21st.--Though it is Sunday, I have done a fair day's work to-day. I have made four photographs of the ruins, viz.: one of the portion of the palace which is still standing, two of the tower to the south of that edifice, and one of the fragment of an inscription. Further, I found amid the rubbish at the tower which lies to the west of the palace a fine bass-relief, badly damaged, it is true, yet presenting a superb figure of a man,--the trunk, one thigh, and a portion of the arms and of the head. This bass-relief will bear comparison with the bass-reliefs of the Palenque. The palace, like the Casa del Gobernador at Uxmal, consists of a double row of chambers, and its length is 234¾ feet. The walls were 10.9 feet high, and supported a very prominent cornice, like those at Palenque. The roof rose obliquely, and here, too, we have Palenque repeated. The walls, so far as we can learn from the ruins, were covered with a smooth coat of cement; and I am of the opinion that many pieces of cement molded into ornamental forms which we have found belonged to the cornice. As at Palenque, the steep roof was covered with ornament, of which only shapeless fragments remain. The width of the edifice, the walls included, is 24.7 feet; the width of each chamber is 7½ feet, and the thickness of the walls 3.6 feet. The total height of the middle wall is 23.9 feet. The section of the double row of chambers which is still standing is only 24 feet in length. Soon this great monument will all be reduced to a heap of shapeless ruins. As I have already remarked, all the buildings at Comalcalco were constructed of bricks and mortar,--bricks of all sizes, separated by layers of mortar of greater thickness than themselves. The central wall, which sustains almost the entire weight of the roof, begins to widen after it reaches the height of the cornice, till it attains the sloping roof at its widest point. It is enormously massive, occupying precisely one-half of the building's total width. THE RUINS OF CENTRAL AMERICA. 193 This palace had windows, though nowhere else among these American ruins have I seen any of these openings. There is one window in that portion of the building which still stands: in form it is a parallelogram, and its height is 5.9 feet. In a portion of the wall, toward the center of the façade, there are three other windows near together, of the same shape and size. Judging from what I have seen of similar monuments at Palenque and in Yucatan, I should say that the chambers must have been not more than 30 feet in length, and thus there would be seven double compartments communicating by interior door-ways. As at Uxmal, the only chambers that had openings to admit the outer air and light were those in the front, facing the east. The end wall on the south has fallen; of the north wall a part is standing. Furthermore, this latter wall is still covered with the reddish-yellow paint with which it was decorated. At the distance of 36 feet to the south-east of the palace is tower No. 1, standing on a platform of cement. It measures 26½ feet on the north side by about 30 feet southward, but the latter measurement is only an approximation, for on the south side both platform and walls are in ruin. This oblong tower had three stories. There is no sign of a stair-way. But the dimensions of the portions which remain, namely, the second story, and the first, which is now underground, show that there must have been a platform at the height of the second story, and that the three stories formed a square tower in four compartments, the dimensions of which for the parts which remain are as follows: Walls of the tower, 2.29 feet thick. First interior chamber 5.57 feet square. Second chamber, forming a sort of veranda, with pillars instead of walls on the west side, 5.41 feet square. The pillars were 37.4 inches square; only one of them remains. Beneath the second story, completely covered with rubbish, but accessible through the narrow opening, is a chamber, 7.87 feet long by 4.92 feet wide. The boveda roof is very steep, while the roof of chamber No. 1, in the story above, is more vault-like. The ornamentation of this tower must have been very elaborate, to judge from the fragments which I have found. Tower No. 2 stands at the distance of 33 feet to the west of the palace. Its dimensions were the same as those of No. 1. It 194 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. was in an under-ground chamber of this tower that I found the bass-relief already described. This figure, modeled in cement, is less rich in ornamentation than the bass-reliefs of a like character found at Palenque. The body is naked, save that it has a rich belt, an ornament around the leg, and a necklace. It is larger than life-size. November 22d.--We are still exploring the summit of the great pyramid, and have discovered there other heaps of ruins, but absolutely shapeless and covered with vegetable mold. I am daily receiving information about the ruins scattered all over the State of Tabasco, hidden in the forests. Places like Comalcalco are numerous--great centers of population in former times. The imagination fails to realize the vast amount of labor it would involve to explore even a tithe of these ancient sites. These Cordilleras of Comalcalco--these mountains of ruins--extend over twelve miles. We still see the hollows in the ground whence the soil was taken for the construction of these pyramids. But they did not consist merely of clay; bricks, too, entered into their construction, and there were strengthening walls to make them firmer. These structures are more wonderful than the pyramids and the other works at Teotihuacan, and they far surpass the pyramids of Egypt. We can easily believe the assertion of Cortez, that three days after his arrival in this region he had opposed to him an army of more than 80,000 men. DÉSIRÉ CHARNAY. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. STRANGE as it may seem, the topmost proof of a race is its own born poetry. The presence of that, or the absence, each tells its story. As the flowering rose or lily, as the ripened fruit to a tree, the apple or the peach, no matter how fine the trunk, or copious or rich the branches and foliage, here waits sine qua non at last. The stamp of entire and finished greatness to any nation, to the American Republic among the rest, must be sternly withheld till it has expressed itself, and put what it stands for in the blossom of original, first-class poems. No imitations will do. And though no esthetik worthy the present condition or future certainties of the New World seems to have been even outlined in men's minds,* or has been generally called for, or thought needed, I am clear that until the United States have just such definite and native expressers in the highest artistic fields, their mere political, geographical, wealth-forming, and even intellectual eminence, however astonishing and predominant, will constitute (as I have before likened it) a more and more expanded and well-appointed body, and perhaps brain, with little or no soul. Sugar-coat the grim truth as we may, and ward off with outward plausible words, denials, explanations, to the mental inward perception of the land this blank is plain. A barren void exists. For the meanings and maturer purposes of these States are not the constructing of a new world of politics merely, and physical comforts for the million, but even more determinedly, in range with science and the modern, of a new world of democratic sociology and imaginative literature. If the latter were not carried out and established to form their only permanent tie and hold, the first-named would be of little avail. * In 1850, Emerson said earnestly to Miss Bremer, in response to her praises: "No, you must not be too good-natured. We have not yet any poetry which can be said to represent the mind of our world. The poet of America is not yet come. When he comes, he will sing quite differently." 196 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. With the poems of a first-class land are twined, as weft with warp, its types of personal character, of individuality, peculiar, native, its own physiognomy, man's and woman's, its own shapes, forms, and manners, fully justified under the eternal laws of all forms, all manners, all times. I say the hour has come for democracy in America to inaugurate itself in the two directions specified,—autochthonic poems and personalities,—born expressers of itself, its spirit alone, to radiate in subtle ways, not only in art, but the practical and familiar, in the transactions between employers and employed persons, in business and wages, and sternly in the army and navy, and revolutionizing them. I find it nowhere a scope profound enough, and radical and objective enough, either for aggregates or individuals. The thought and identity of a poetry in America to fill, and worthily fill, the great void, and enhance these aims, involves the essence and integral facts, real and spiritual, of the whole land, the whole body. What the great sympathetic is to the congeries of bones and joints, and heart and fluids and nervous system, and vitality, constituting, launching forth in time and space a human being— aye, an immortal soul—in such relation, and no less, stands true poetry to the single personality or to the nation. Here our thirty-eight States stand to-day, the children of past precedents, and, young as they are, heirs of a very old estate. One or two points we will consider, out of the myriads presenting themselves. The feudalism of the British Islands, illustrated by Shakespeare, and by his legitimate followers, Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson, with all its tyrannies, superstitions, evils, had most superb and heroic permeating veins, poems, manners—even its errors fascinating. It almost seems as if only that feudalism in Europe, like slavery in our own South, could outcrop types of tallest, noblest personal character yet—strength and devotion and love better than elsewhere—invincible courage, generosity, aspiration, the spines of all. Here is where Shakespeare and the others I have named perform a service incalculably precious to our America. Politics, literature, and everything else centers at last in perfect personnel (as democracy is to find the same as the rest); and here feudalism is unrivaled—here the rich and highest-rising lessons it bequeaths us—a mass of precious, though foreign, nutriment, which we are to work over, THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 197 and popularize, and enlarge, and present again in Western growths. Still, there are pretty grave and anxious drawbacks, jeopardies, fears. Let us give some reflections on the subject, a little fluctuating, but starting from one central thought, and returning there again. Two or three curious results may plow up. As in the astronomical laws, the very power that would seem most deadly and destructive turns out to be latently conservative of longest, vastest future births and lives. Let us for once briefly examine the just-named authors solely from a Western point of view. It may be, indeed, that we shall use the sun of English literature, and the brightest current stars of his system, mainly as pegs to hang some cogitations on, for home inspection. As depicter and dramatist of the passions at their stormiest outstretch, though ranking high, Shakespeare (spanning the arch wide enough) is equaled by several, and excelled by the best old Greeks (as Æschylus). But in portraying the mediæval lords and barons, the arrogant port and stomach so dear to the inmost human heart (pride! pride! dearest, perhaps, of all—touching us, too, of the States closest of all—closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world. From first to last, also, Walter Scott and Tennyson, like Shakespeare, exhale that principle of caste which we Americans have come on earth to destroy. Jefferson's criticism on the Waverly novels was that they turned and condensed brilliant but entirely false lights and glamours over the lords, ladies, courts, and aristocratic institutes of Europe, with all the measureless infamies, and then left the bulk of the suffering, down-trodden people contemptuously in the shade. Without stopping to answer this hornet-stinging criticism, or to repay any part of the debt of thanks I owe, in common with every American, to the noblest, healthiest, cheeriest romancer that ever lived, I pass on to Tennyson and his works. Poetry here of a very high (perhaps the highest) order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure, and almost always perfumed, like the tuberose, to an extreme of sweetness—sometimes not, however, but even then a camellia of the hot-house, never a common flower—the verse of elegance and high-life, and yet preserving amid all its super-delicatesse a smack of outdoors 198 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. and outdoor folk--the old Norman lordhood quality here, too, crossed with that Saxon fiber from which twain the best current stock of England springs--poetry that revels above all things in traditions of knights and chivalry, and deeds of derring-do. The odor of English social life in its highest range--a melancholy, affectionate, very manly, but dainty breed--pervading the books like an invisible scent; the idleness, the traditions, the mannerisms, the stately ennui; the yearning of love, like a spinal marrow inside of all; the costumes, old brocade and satin; the old houses and furniture,—solid oak, no mere veneering,—the moldy secrets everywhere; the verdure, the ivy on the walls, the moat, the English landscape outside, the buzzing fly in the sun inside the window pane. Never one democratic page; nay, not a line, not a word; never free and naive poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated—even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic (a shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad and lass), the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the Laureate, too, the attache of the throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "To the Queen" at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "These to his Memory" (Prince Albert’s), preceding "Idylls of the King." Such for an off-hand summary of the mighty three that now, by the women, men, and young folk of the fifty millions given these States by their late census, have been and are more read than all others put together. We hear it said, both of Tennyson and the other current leading literary illustrator of Great Britain, Carlyle,—as of Victor Hugo in France,—that not one of them is personally friendly or admirant toward America; indeed, quite the reverse. N’importe. That they (and more good minds than theirs) cannot span the vast revolutionary arch thrown by the United States over the centuries, fixed in the present, launched to the endless future; that they cannot stomach the high-life-below-stairs coloring all our poetic and genteel social status so far—the measureless viciousness of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those fearful and varied and long continued storm and stress stages THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 199 (so offensive to the well-regulated college-bred mind) wherewith nature, history, and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past, and to upturn it and press on to the future;--that they cannot understand and fathom all this, I say, is it to be wondered at? Fortunately, the gestation of our thirty-eight empires (and plenty more to come) proceeds on its course, on scales of area and velocity immense and absolute as the globe, and, like the globe itself, quite oblivious even of great poets and thinkers. But we can by no means afford to be oblivious of them. The same of feudalism, its castles, courts, etiquettes, wars, personalities. However they, or the spirits of them hovering in the air, might scowl and glower at such removes as current Kansas or Kentucky life and forms, the latter may by no means repudiate or leave out the former. Allowing all the evil that it did, we get, here and to-day, a balance of good out of its reminiscence almost beyond price. Am I content, then, that the general interior chyle of our republic should be supplied and nourished by wholesale from foreign and antagonistic sources such as these? Let me answer that question briefly: Years ago I thought Americans ought to strike out separate, and have expressions of their own in highest literature. I think so still, and more decidedly than ever. But those convictions are now strongly tempered by some additional points (perhaps the results of advancing age, or the reflections of invalidism). I see that this world of the West, as part of all, fuses inseparably with the East, and with all, as time does—the ever new, yet old, old human race—"the same subject continued," as the novels of our grandfathers had it for chapter-heads. If we are not to hospitably receive and complete the inaugurations of the old civilizations, and change their small scale to the largest, broadest scale, what on earth are we for? The currents of practical business in America, the rude, coarse, tussling facts of our lives, and all their daily experiences, need just the precipitation and tincture of this entirely different fancy world of lulling, contrasting, even feudalists, anti-republican poetry and romance. On the enormous outgrowth of our unloosed individualities, and the rank self-assertion of humanity here, may well fall these grace-persuading, recherche influences. 200 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. We first require that individuals and communities shall be free; then surely comes a time when it is requisite that they shall not be too free. Although to such result in the future I look mainly for a great poetry native to us, these importations till then will have to be accepted, such as they are, and thankful they are no worse. The inmost spiritual currents of the present time curiously revenge and check their own compelled tendency to democracy, and absorption in it, by marked leanings to the past—by reminiscences in poems, plots, operas, novels, to a far-off, contrary, deceased world, as if they dreaded the great vulgar gulf tides of to-day. Then what has been fifty centuries growing, working in, and accepted as crowns and apices for our kind, is not going to be pulled down and discarded in a hurry. It is, perhaps, time we paid our respects directly to the honorable party, the real object of these preambles. But we must make reconnaissance a little further still. Not the least part of our lesson were to realize the curiosity and interest of friendly foreign experts,* and how our situation looks to them. "American poetry," says the London "Times,"† "is the poetry of apt pupils, but it is afflicted from first to last with a fatal want of raciness. Bryant has been long passed as a poet by Professor Longfellow; but in Longfellow, with all his scholarly grace and tender feeling, the defect is more apparent than it was in Bryant. Mr. Lowell can overflow with American humor when politics inspire his muse; but in the realm of pure poetry he is no more American than a Newdigate prize-man. Joaquin Miller’s verse has fluency and movement and harmony, but as for the thought, his songs of the sierras might as well have been written in Holland." * A few years ago I saw the question, "Has America produced any great poet?" announced as prize-subject for the competition of some university in Northern Europe. I saw the item in a foreign paper, and made note of it; but being taken down with paralysis, and prostrated for a long season, the matter slipped away, and I have never been able since to get hold of any essay presented for the prize, or report of the discussion, nor to learn for certain whether there was any essay or discussion, nor can I now remember the place. It may have been Upsala, or possibly Heidelberg. Perhaps some German or Scandinavian can give particulars. I think it was in 1872. † In a long and prominent editorial, at the time, on the death of William Cullen Bryant. THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 201 Unless in a certain very slight contingency, the "Times" says: “American verse, from its earliest to its latest stages, seems an exotic, with an exuberance of gorgeous blossom, but no principle of reproduction. That is the very note and test of its inherent want. Great poets are tortured and massacred by having their flowers of fancy gathered and gummed down in the hortus siccus of an anthology. American poets show better in an anthology than in the collected volumes of their works. Like their audience, they have been unable to resist the attraction of the vast orbit of English literature. They may talk of the primeval forest, but it would generally be very hard from internal evidence to detect that they were writing on the banks of the Hudson rather than on those of the Thames. . . . In fact, they have caught the English tone and air and mood only too faithfully, and are accepted by the superficially cultivated English intelligence as readily as if they were English born. “ Americans themselves confess to a certain disappointment that a literary curiosity and intelligence so diffused [as in the United States] have not taken up English literature at the point at which America has received it, and carried it forward and developed it with an independent energy. But like reader like poet. Both show the effects of having come into an estate they have not earned. A nation of readers has required of its poets a diction and symmetry of form equal to that of an old literature like that of Great Britain, which is also theirs. No ruggedness, however racy, would be tolerated by circles which, however superficial their culture, read Byron and Tennyson." The English critic, though a gentleman and a scholar, and friendly withal, is evidently not altogether satisfied (perhaps he is jealous) and winds up by saying: "For the English language to have been enriched with a national poetry which was not English but American, would have been a treasure beyond price." With which, as whet and foil, we shall proceed to ventilate more definitely certain no doubt willful opinions. Leaving unnoticed at present the great masterpieces of the antique, or anything from the middle ages, the prevailing flow of poetry for the last fifty or eighty years, and now at its height, has been and is (like the music) an expression of mere surface melody, within narrow limits, and yet, to give it its due, perfectly satisfying to the demands of the ear, of wondrous charm, of smooth and easy delivery, and the triumph of technical art. Above all things it is fractional and select. It shrinks with aversion from the sturdy, the universal, and the democratic. 202 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. The poetry of the future (the phrase is open to sharp criticism, and is not satisfactory to me, but is significant, and I will use it)- the poetry of the future aims at the free expression of emotion (which means far, far more that appears at first), and to arouse and initiate more than to define or finish. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to the reader, to you or me, to the central identity of everything, to the mighty Ego. (Byron's was a vehement dash, with plenty of impatient democracy, but lurid and introverted amid all its magnetism; not at all the fitting, lasting song of a grand, secure, free, sunny race.) It is more akin, likewise, to outside life and landscape (returning mainly to the antique feeling), real sun and gale, and woods and shores - to the elements themselves - not sitting at ease in parlor or library listening to a good tale of them, told in good rhyme. Character, a feature far above style or polish, - a feature not absent at any time, but now first brought to the fore, - gives predominant stamp to advancing poetry. Its born sister, music, already responds to the same influences: "The music of the present, Wagner's, Gounod's, even the later Verdi's, all tends toward this free expression of poetic emotion, and demands a vocalism totally unlike that required for Rossini's splendid roulades, or Bellini's suave melodies." Is there not even now, indeed, an evolution, a departure from the masters? Venerable and unsurpassable after their kind as are the old works, and always unspeakably precious as studies (for American's more than any other people), is it too much to say that by the shifted combinations of the modern mind the whole underlying theory of first-class verse has changed? "Formerly, during the period termed classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was governed by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect, Æneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted. For us, the greatest poet is he who in his works most stimulates the reader's imagination and reflection, who excites him the most himself to poetize. The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study, much to complete in your turn." THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 203 The fatal defects our American singers labor under are subordination of spirit, an absence of the concrete and of real patriotism, and in excess that modern æsthetic contagion a queer friend of mine calls the beauty disease. "The immoderate taste for beauty and art," says Charles Baudelaire, "leads men into monstrous excess. In minds imbued with a frantic greed for the beautiful, all the balances of truth and justice disappear. There is a lust, a disease of the art faculties, which eats up the moral like a cancer." Of course, by our plentiful verse-writers there is plenty of service performed, of a kind. Nor need we go far for a tally. We see, in every polite circle, a class of accomplished, good-natured persons ("society," in fact, could not get on without them), fully eligible for certain problems, times, and duties - to mix eggnog, to mend the broken spectacles, to decide whether the stewed eels shall precede the sherry or the sherry the stewed eels , to eke out Mrs. A. B.'s parlor-tableaux with monk, Jew, Turk, lover, Romeo, Puck, Prospero, Caliban, or what not, and to generally contribute and gracefully adapt their flexibilities and talents, in those ranges, to the world's service. But for real crises, great needs and pulls, moral or physical, they might as well have never been born. Or the accepted notion of a poet would appear to be a sort of male odalisque, singing or piano-playing a kind of spiced ideas, second-hand reminiscences, or toying late hours at entertainments, in rooms stifling with fashionable scent. I think I haven't seen a new-published healthy, bracing, simple lyric in ten years. Not long ago, there were verses in each of three fresh monthlies, from leading authors, and in every one the whole central motif (perfectly serious) was the melancholiness of a marriageable young woman who didn't get a rich husband, but a poor one! Besides its tonic and al fresco physiology, relieving such as this, the poetry of the future will take on character in a more important respect. Science, having extirpated the old stock-fables and superstitions, is clearing a field for verse, for all the arts, and even for romance, a hundred-fold ampler and more wonderful, with the new principles behind. Republicanism advances over the whole world. Liberty, with Law by her side, will one day be paramount - will at any rate be the central idea. Then only - for all the splendor and beauty of what has been, or the polish of what is - then only will the true poets appear, and VOL. CXXXII.-NO. 291. 14 204 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. the true poems. Not the satin and patchouly of to-day, not the glorification of the butcheries and wars of the past, nor any fight between Deity on one side and somebody else on the other--not Milton, not even Shakespeare's plays, grand as they are. Entirely different and hitherto unknown classes of men, being authoritatively called for in imaginative literature, will certainly appear. What is hitherto most lacking, perhaps most absolutely indicates the future. Democracy has been hurried on the through time by measureless tides and winds, resistless as the revolution of the globe, and as far-reaching and rapid. But in the highest walks of art it has not yet had a single representative worthy of it anywhere upon the earth. Never had real bard a task more fit for sublime ardor and genius than to sing worthily the songs these States have already indicated. Their origin, Washington, '76, the picturesqueness of old times, the war of 1812 and the sea-fights; the incredible rapidity of movement and breadth of area--to fuse and compact the South and North, the East and West, to express the native forms, situations, scenes, from Montauk to California, and from the Saguenay to the Rio Grande--the working out on such gigantic scales, and with such a swift and mighty play of changing light and shade, of the greatest problems of man and freedom,--how far ahead of the stereotyped plots, or gem-cutting, or tales of love, or wars of mere ambition! Our history is so full of spinal, modern, germinal subjects--one above all. What the ancient siege of Ilium, and the puissance of Hector's and Agamemnon's warriors proved to Hellenic art and literature, and all art and literature since, may prove the war of attempted secession of 1861-5 to the future æsthetics, drama, romance, poems of the United States. Nor could the utility itself provide anything more practically serviceable to the hundred millions who, a couple of generations hence, will inhabit within the limits just named, than the permeation of a sane, sweet, autochthonous national poetry--must I say of a kind that does not now exist? but which, I fully believe, will in time be supplied on scales as free as Nature's elements. (It is acknowledged that we of the States are the most materialistic and money-making people ever known. My own theory, while fully accepting this, is that we are the most emotional, spiritualistic, and poetry-loving people also.) THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 205 Infinite are the new and orbic traits waiting to be launched forth in the firmament that is, and is to be, America. Lately I have wondered whether the last meaning of this cluster of thirty-eight States is not only practical fraternity among themselves--the only real union (much nearer its accomplishment, too, than appears on the surface)--but for fraternity over the whole globe--that dazzling, pensive dream of ages! Indeed, the peculiar glory of our lads, I have come to see, or expect to see, not in their geographical or republican greatness, nor wealth or products, nor military or naval power, nor special, eminent names in any department, to shine with, or outshine, foreign special names in similar departments,--but more and more in a vaster, saner, more splendid Comradeship, uniting closer and closer not only the American States, but all nations, and all humanity. That, O poets! is not that a theme worth chanting, striving for? Why not fix your verses henceforth to the gauge of the round globe? the whole race? Perhaps the most illustrious culmination of the modern may thus prove to be a signal growth of joyous, more exalted bards of adhesiveness, identically one in soul, but contributed by every nation, each after its distinctive kind. Let us, audacious, start it. Let the diplomats, as ever, still deeply plan, seeking advantages, proposing treaties between governments, and to bind them, on paper: what I seek is different, simpler. I would inaugurate from America, for this purpose, new formulas--international poems. I have thought that the invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in, and dearest to, humanity grows, is Friendship. I have thought that both in patriotism and song (even amid their grandest shows past) we have adhered too long to petty limits, and that the time has come to enfold the world. Not only is the human and artificial world we have established in the West a radical departure from anything hitherto known,--not only men and politics, and all that goes with them,--but Nature itself, in the main sense, its construction, is different. The same old font of type, of course, but set up to a text never composed or issued before. For Nature consists not only in itself objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it--faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual--takes, and readily gives again, the phys- 206 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. iognomy of any nation or literature—falls like a great elastic veil on a face, or like the molding plaster on a statue. What is Nature? What were the elements, the invisible backgrounds and eidolons of it, to Homer’s heroes, voyagers, gods? What all through the wanderings of Virgil’s iEneas? Then to Shakespeare’s characters—Hamlet, Lear, the English-Norman kings, the Romans? What was nature to Rousseau, to Voltaire, to the German Goethe in his little classical court gardens? In those presentments in Tennyson (see the "Idylls of the King"—what sumptuous, perfumed, arras-and-gold nature, inimitably described, better than any, fit for princes and knights and peerless ladies— wrathful or peaceful, just the same—Vivien and Merlin in their strange dalliance, or the death-float of Elaine, or Geraint and the long journey of his disgraced Enid and himself through the wood, and the wife all day driving the horses), as in all the great imported art-works, treatises, systems, from Lucretius down, there is a constantly lurking, often pervading something that will have to be eliminated, as not only unsuited to modern democracy and science in America, but insulting to them, and disproved by them. Still, the rule and demesne of poetry will always be not the exterior, but interior; not the macrocosm, but microcosm; not Nature, but Man. I haven’t said anything about the imperative need of a race of giant bards in the future, to hold up high to eyes of land and race the eternal antiseptic models, and to dauntlessly confront greed, injustice, and all forms of that wiliness and tyranny whose roots never die (my opinion is, that after all the rest is advanced, that is what first-class poets are for, as, to their days and occasions, the Hebrew lyrists, Roman Juvenal, and doubtless the old singers of India and the British Druids),— to counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America—measureless corruption in politics; what we (tall religion a mere mask of wax or lace; for ensemble, that most cankerous, offensive of all earth’s shows—a vast and varied community, prosperous and fat with wealth of money and products and business ventures,—plenty of mere intellectuality too,—and then utterly without the sound, prevailing, moral, and aesthetic health-action beyond all the money and mere intellect of the world. Is it a dream of mine that, in times to come, West, South, East, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. 207 North, will silently, surely arise a race of such poets, varied, yet one in soul—nor only poets, and of the best, but newer, larger prophets—larger than Judea’s, and more passionate—to meet and penetrate those woes, as shafts of light the darkness ? As I write, the last fifth of the nineteenth century is entered upon, and will soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the central, spinal reality (or even the idea of it) of such a democratic band of native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, litterateurs, tolerant and receptive of importations, but entirely adjusted to the West, to ourselves, to our own days, purports, combinations, differences, superiorities. Indeed, I am fond of thinking that the whole series of concrete and political triumphs of the republic are mainly as bases and preparations for half a dozen first-rate future poets, ideal personalities, referring not to a special class, but to the entire people, four or five millions of square miles. Long, long are the processes of the development of a nationality. Only to the rapt vision does the seen become the prophecy of the unseen.* Democracy, so far attending only to the real, is * Is there not such a thing as the philosophy of American history and politics? And if so—what is it? . . . Wise men say there are two sets of wills to nations and to persons—one set that acts and works from explainable motives—from teaching, intelligence, judgment, circumstance, caprice, emulation, greed, etc.—and then another set, perhaps deep, hidden, unsuspected, yet often more potent than the first, refusing to be argued with, rising as it were out of abysses, resistlessly urging on speakers, doers, communities, unwitting to themselves—the poet to his fieriest words—the race to pursue its loftiest ideal. . . . Indeed, the paradox of a nation’s life and career, with all its wondrous contradictions, can probably only be explained from these two wills, sometimes conflicting, each operating in its sphere, combining in races or in persons, and producing strangest results. Let us hope there is (indeed, can there be any doubt there is ?) this great, unconscious, and abysmic second will also running through the average nationality and career of America. Let us hope that, amid all the dangers and defections of the present, and through all the processes of the conscious will, it alone is the permanent and sovereign force, destined to carry on the New World to fulfill its destinies in the future—to resolutely pursue those destinies, age upon age; to build, far, far beyond its past vision, present thought; to form and fashion, and for the general type, men and women more noble, more athletic than the world has yet seen; to gradually, firmly 208 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. not for the real only, but the grandest ideal--to justify the modern by that, and not only to equal, but to become by that superior to the past. On a comprehensive summing up of the processes and present and hitherto condition of the United States with reference to their future and the indispensable precedents to it, I say I am fully content. My point, below all surfaces, and subsoiling them, is, that the bases and prerequisites of a leading nationality are, first, at all hazards, freedom, worldly wealth and products on the largest and most varied scale, common education and intercommunication, and, in general, the passing through of just the stages and crudities we have passed or are passing through in the United States. Then, perhaps, as weightiest factor of the whole business, and of the main outgrowth of the future, it remains to be definitely avowed that the native-born middle-class population of quite all the United States,--the average of farmers and mechanics everywhere, --the real, though latent and silent bulk of America, city blend, from all the States, with all varieties, a friendly, happy, free, religious nationality--a nationality not only the richest, most inventive, most productive and materialistic the world has yet known, but compacted indissolubly, and out of whose ample and solid bulk, and giving purpose and finish to it, conscience, morals, and all the spiritual attributes, shall surely rise, like spires above some group of edifices, firm-footed on the earth, yet scaling space and heaven. Great as they are, and greater far to be, the United States, too, are but a series of steps in the eternal process of creative thought. And here is, to my mind, their final justification, and certain perpetuity. There is in that sublime process, in the laws of the universe--and, above all, in the moral law --something that would make unsatisfactory, and even vain and contemptible, all the triumphs of war, the gains of peace, and the proudest worldly grandeur of all the nations that have ever existed, or that (ours included) now exist, except that we constantly see, through all their worldly career, however struggling and blind and lame, attempts, by all ages, all peoples, according to their development, to reach, to press, to progress on, and farther on, to more and more advanced ideals. The glory of the republic of the United States, in my opinion, is to be that, emerging in the light of the modern and the splendor of science, and solidly based on the past, it is to cheerfully range itself, and its politics are henceforth to come, under those universal laws, and embody them, and carry them out, to serve them. . . . And as only that individual becomes truly great who understands well that, while complete in himself in a certain sense, he is but a part of the divine, eternal scheme, and whose special life and laws are adjusted to move in harmonious relations with the general laws of nature, and especially with the moral law, the deepest and highest of all, and the last vitality of man or State--so those nations, and so the United States, may THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 209 or country, presents a magnificent mass of material, never before equaled on earth. It is this material, quite unexpressed by literature or art, that in every respect insures the future of the republic. During the secession war I was with the armies, and saw the rank and file, North and South, and studied them for four years. I have never had the least doubt about the country in its essential future since. Meantime, we can (perhaps) do no better than saturate ourselves with, and continue to give limitations, yet a while, of the aesthetic models, supplies, of that past and of those lands we spring from. Those wondrous stores, reminiscences, floods, currents! Let them flow on, flow hither freely. And let the sources be enlarged, to include not only the works of British origin, as now, but stately and devout Spain, courteous France, profound Germany, the manly Scandinavian lands, Italy's art race, and always the mystic Orient. only become the greatest and most continuous, by understanding well their harmonious relations with entire humanity and history, and all their laws and progress, and sublimed with the creative thought of Deity, through all time, past, present, and future. Thus will they expand to the amplitude of their destiny, and become splendid illustrations and culminating parts of the cosmos, and of civilization. No more considering the States as an incident, or series of incidents, however vast, coming accidentally along the path of time, and shaped by casual emergencies as they happen to arise, and the mere result of modern improvements, vulgar and lucky, ahead of other nations and times, I would finally plant, as seeds, these thoughts or speculations in the growth of our republic-- that it is the deliberate culmination and result of all the past--that here, too, as in all departments of the universe, regular laws (slow and sure in acting, slow and sure in ripening) have controlled and governed, and will yet control and govern; and that those laws can no more be baffled or steered clear of, or vitiated, by chance, or any fortune or opposition, than the laws of winter and summer, or darkness and light. The summing up of the tremendous moral and military perturbations of 1861-5, and their results--and indeed of the entire hundred years of the past of our national experiment, from its inchoate movement down to the present day (1780-1881)--is, that they all now launch the United States fairly forth, consistently with the entirety of civilization and humanity, and in main sort the representative of them, leading the van, leading the fleet of the modern and democratic, on the seas and voyages of the future. And the real history of the United States--starting from that great convulsive struggle for unity, the secession war, triumphantly concluded, and the South victorious, after all--is only to be written at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence.--From my "Memoranda of the War." 210 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Remembering that at present, and doubtless long ahead, a certain humility would well become us. The course through time of highest civilization, does it not wait the first glimpse of our contribution to its cosmic train of poems, bibles, structures, perpetuities - Egypt and Palestine and India - Greece and Rome and mediaeval Europe - and so onward? The shadowy procession is not a meager one, and the standard not a low one. All that is mighty or precious in our kind seems to have trod the road. Ah, never may America forget her thanks and reverence for samples, treasures such as these - that other life-blood, inspiration, sunshine, hourly in use to-day, all days, forever, throughout her broad demesne! All serves our New World progress, even the bafflers, headwinds, cross-tides. Through many perturbations and squalls, and much backing and filling, the ship, upon the whole, makes unmistakably for her destination. Shakespeare has served, and serves, may be, the best of any. For conclusion, a passing thought, a contrast, of him who, in my opinion, continues and stands for the Shakespearean cultus at the present day among all English-writing peoples - of Tennyson, his poetry. I find it impossible, as I taste the sweetness of those lines, to escape the flavor, the conviction, the lush-ripening culmination, and last honey of decay (I dare not call it rottenness) of that feudalism which the mighty English dramatist painted in all the splendors of its noon and afternoon. And how they are chanted - both poets! Happy those kings and nobles to be so sung, so told! To run their course - to get their deeds and shapes in lasting pigments - the very pomp and dazzle of the sunset! Meanwhile, democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in twilight - but 'tis the twilight of the dawn. WALT WHITMAN. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. 1 BRAIN AND NERVE FOOD. VITALIZED PHOS-PHITES Composed of the Nerve-giving Principles of the Ox-Brain and Wheat-Germ. 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"To be read with profound interest for its luminous exposition of historical facts, as well as to be admired for its masterly power of picturesque and pathetic description." - New-York Tribune. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW. 521 pp. With Frontispiece. Cloth, $1.50. "A work of wonderful interest and wonderful power. It is a field of its own which the author's previous writing has not left barren of fruit for his pen. It will be read with absorbing attention, and recognized as one of the most effective of those books written 'for a purpose.'" - Boston Gazette. "The delicacy and keenness of its satire are equal to anything within the range of my knowledge." -Pres. Anderson, Rochester University. "Such books as those those of Judge Tourgee are calculated to help on the solution of the problem the difficulties of which they set forth so vividly, and they ought to be widely read and inwardly digested in both sections of the country." -New-York Times. FIGS AND THISTLES; .538 pp. With Frontispiece. Cloth, $1.50. "The readers and admirers of 'A Fool's Errand' who take up this book expecting to be instructed and entertained will not be disappointed." - Rochester Express. "A capital American story. Its characters are not from foreign courts or the pestilential dens of foreign cities. They are fresh from the real life of the forest and prairie of the West." - Chicago Inter-Ocean. "Crowded with incident, populous with strong characters, rich in humor, and from the beginning to the end alive with absorbing interest." -Boston Commonwealth. ***For sale by all book-sellers, or mailed post-paid by FORDS, HOWARD & HULBERT, Publishers, 27 PARK PLACE, NEW-YORK. BROWN BROTHERS & CO. 59 Wall Street, New-York, Buy and Sell Bills of Exchange ON GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, BELGIUM, AND HOLLAND. Issue Commercial and Travelers' Credits in Sterling, AVAILABLE IN ANY PART OF THE WORLD, AND IN FRANCS, FOR USE IN MARTINIQUE AND GUADALOUPE. MAKE TELEGRAPHIC TRANSFERS OF MONEY, Between this and other countries, through London and Paris. THE EASY WAY. Seated in a luxurious palace car whirling us with lightning speed toward the Pacific coast, we were fast relapsing into that dreamy condition of mind which the monotony of continuous travel induces. Nearly all our fellow passengers were similarly influenced, except a small group who were assiduous in their attention to a seemingly healthy and robust young man. The young man attracted our attention by what seemed either his indifference or helplessness, and we were resolved to "see the whole thing through." By this time we were drawing near to an express and refreshment station, and our indifferent young friend gave some sign which caused a gentleman attendant to leave the car and procure for him some fruit. On his way back toward the invalid we allowed our curiosity full liberty, and inquired concerning his charge. With rare politeness he explained that the young man was the victim of an agonizing type of rheumatism, which was always worse in the Spring and Fall, and that they were removing the patient to the Pacific coast for the benefit of climatic influence, as medicine had ceased to affect his case at all. We thanked him and fell into an easy conversation with a new-comer who had boarded the train at the station, and was for a time our compagnon de voyage. This companion of the trip, we reasoned, must be either a very good or very wicked man, as our eyes for the first time fell upon his heavy porte-manteau, bearing the mystical name “Sr. Jacobs.” We inquired diplomatically about his destination, etc., etc.. and soon we learned that the affable stranger was a public benefactor in the role of representative of the Sr. Jacobs Oil interest. At the next station our invalid traveler and the Sr. Jacobs Oil representative were transferred to a compartment of the car for an interchange of views and experiences; and we think something cheering must have been heard and felt by our invalid, for before we reached our destination—San Francisco—this same invalid was as pleasant and cheerful as any one aboard the train, free from pain and as voluble concerning the merits of that wonderful remedy for Rheumatism, Sr. Jacobs Oil, as a school-girl on commencement day.—Western Exchange. In this connection it may not be inappropriate to present the following statements relative to the efficacy of the Old German Remedy: SAVED FROM THE POORHOUSE. For many years David Allingsworth suffered with Rheumatism, and notwithstanding the best medical attendance, could not find relief. He came to the Sciota County Poorhouse, and had to be carried into and out of bed, on account of his helpless condition. After the failure of all the remedies which had been applied, tho Directors of the Poorhouse resolved to use the celebrated German Remedy, St. Jacobs Oil, and this was a fortunate resolution; for, with the trial of one bottle, the patient was already much better, and when four bottles had been used upon him, he could again walk about without the use of a cane. The facts, as above stated, will be vouched for by tho editor of the Portsmouth (Ohio) Correspondent. Amos James, Esq., proprietor Huron House, Port Huron, Mich., writes: I suffered with Rheumatism so badly that I was unable to use my arm for three months. Nothing gave relief, and I was in despair, when some one recommended St. Jacobs Oil. I tried it, and, to my astonishment, found relief. Continuing its use, five bottles cured me entirely. I heartily recommend it to all afflicted with Rheumatism. One of the great manufacturing Interests of Boston Is the Emerson Piano Company, whoso pianos are used with high appreciation and satisfaction throughout the world. In a recent conversation with Mr. Jos. Gramer, one of the proprietors, that gentleman remarked: I have used that valuable remedy, St. Jacobs Oil, in my family, and found it to be so beneficial that I will never be without It. It has cured me of a severe case of Rheumatism after other remedies had failed. Rev. A. A. Allen, who is well known In Michigan, and more particularly in Oakland county where he is familiarly addressed or spoken of as “Father Allen,” thus speaks: My wife, who has not rested well, and who has been troubled with chronic Rheumatism for the past six years, hearing of the wonderful cures made by St. Jacobs Oil, bought a bottle at Carroll's Drug Store, one day last month, and with one application, rested well for the night, free from all pain, the first time in six years. She used one bottle, and was entirely cured of all Rheumatism and pains. We always keep it at our home. My neighbors, hearing of the permanent cure, also provided themselves with St. Jacobs Oil. Mr. Gilbert Henfield, 1026 Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, Ill., says: This is to certify, that, after suffering the most excruciating pain for two years from chronic Rheumatism, and using immense quantities of liniments, oils and physicians’ recipes, I used St. Jacobs Oil (recommended to me by a friend) for a few weeks, and have not suffered with Rheumatism from that time to the present -- nearly six months. I now consider myself entirely cured. thanks to St. Jacobs Oil. A REMINISCENCE of the GREAT FIRE. At the residence of Mr. John O’Donnell, No. 106 Sigel street, Chicago, our reporter found Mrs. O'Donnell, who said that eight years ago, just after the fire, she contracted Rheumatism in the feet, and that after trying all kinds of remedies— some of which cost as much as two dollars a bottle—she had recently heard of St. Jacobs Oil, and had given it a trial, the result being that a few applications changed her from a bed-ridden cripple to a strong woman, able to dance about the floor as in her youthful days.— Chicago Tribune. J. Jackson Smith, Esq., Councilman, Cleveland, Ohio, recently recommended St. Jacobs Oil to a prominent politician in that city, who was a martyr to rheumatic aches and pains. His shoulder was so badly afflicted that it was impossible for him to use a pen. He assured me, Mr. Smith said, that he was materially benefitted after the first rubbing, and that by constant use since, he has succeeded in entirely ridding himself of the complaint. I have introduced the Oil into my family, believing that it is an exceedingly good thing to have within reach. My son has used it for headache with good success. The truth is, by the amount of talk one hears dally about St. Jacobs Oil, it seems as though it was destined to occupy a most important position in every household. Undoubtedly it is a remarkable medicine, says Stacey Hill, Esq..of the Mt. Auburn Inclined Plane Railway, Cincinnati. I was limping about, hardly able to move, with Rheumatism in the hip, or Sciatica. Hearing of St. Jacobs Oil, I procured a bottle of it, and with the third application was able to go about with perfect ease and comfort. The La Fayette (Ind.) Daily Courier lately remarked: We cheerfully give our readers the benefit of the following, imparted to us by Mr. John Wendling of this city: I had been confined to bed for five weeks with Rheumatism, during which time my left leg was powerless. I procured a bottle of St. Jacobs Oil, and after using it for five or six days, I was on my feet again and perfectly cured. We congratulate our friend on his recovery, and the public on the fact that a reliable cure for one of the most painful ailments has at last been found. Mr. J. Dawson, of the firm of J. Dawson and Son, Druggists, Rochester, Ind., was attached with Sciatic Rheumatism about December 10th last, and for four weeks succeeding February 10th could scarcely leave his room. He used St. Jacobs Oil and is now able to be at his place of business, feeling not much the worse for his recent affliction. The inference is convincing. The run which St. Jacobs Oil is having is, these gentlemen say, unprecedented, and the article is rapidly displacing all other rheumatic remedies as fast as its virtues become known. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. 3 Welcome to 1881.—Now ready, Style No. 8,000. (A new Parlor Organ.) The very best cabinet or parlor organ for the money to be found in this country. I challenge its equal. It contains 17 beautiful Solo Stops, 5 full sets Golden Tongue Reeds, Sub Bass, Octave Coupler, also, the famous Vox Celeste (which is the sweetest stop ever placed in an organ) and Vox Humana. Besides all this it contains an entirely new and original stop named “Celestina or French Horn." This beautiful solo stop is connected with a distinct set of powerful reeds which is so tuned and voiced as to produce an exact imitation of a french horn. It has the grand organ right and left, (2 Knee Swells,) 5 Octaves, fine walnut case, beautiful french veneer- ing, handsomely carved,handles each end,fine lamp stands, pocket for music, extra large fancy top. Beattys new patent Stop Action, the finest action ever placed in an organ. Height, 50 in. Depth, 24 in. Length, 49 in. Its weight when boxed will be over 400 lbs. It has a sliding lid. Its pedals are covered with metal instead of carpet. Taking all things in consideration, it is the finest organ for the money ever built. Agents (Mononpolist price) for such an instrument is all the way from $150 to $400. I will box and deliver the above organ on board cars here. Pack with it a fine stool, book & music for only $85 NOTICE. My Holiday offers.—On account of the enormous increase in the sales of my Pianos and Organs, because of my special Holiday offers, and that all may have an opportunity to avail themselves of them, I hereby extend the offer until the 30 day of April,1881. Please write your letters briefly and to the point. I shall be very busy up to April 30th, 1881, at which time my holiday offers expire. A very large assortment of new and beautiful styles of Pianosand Organs were manufactured for the Holiday season. Prices of Organs from $30 to $1,000, 2 to 32 Stops. Small Organs as low as $15. Beautiful new style Pianos from $125 to $1600. The demand for the new style No. 5000 "the London" at $65, is without a parallel. It is by far the finest organ ever placed in the market, as thousand will testify. I am obliged to work my men overtime tin order to fill the demand. I predict a still greater sale of the new style No. 8,000 at $85. Latest Illustrated Catalogue with beautiful Steel plate Engraving, sent free. Those desiring to purchase are requested to visit my factory here and select the instrument in person. Address or call on DANIEL F. BEATTY, Washington, New Jersey. Thayer Academy, Braintree, Mass. Designed to furnish instruction of the highest order in English, Modern Languages, and the Classics; fitting boys for the best colleges, and girls for the Harvard examinations and colleges for women. Address J. B. Sewall, Head-Master, South Braintree Mass. THE ORTHOËPIST, A Pronouncing Manual, containing about THREE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED WORDS. Including a considerable number of the Names of Foreign Authors, Artists, etc., that are often mispronounced. By ALFRED AYRES. “ The book is likely to do more for the cause of good speech than any work with which we are acquainted.” “Invaluable to all who would speak English without blundering." "No one who takes any pride in having his English as chaste and elegant as possible should be without a copy." "The author of THE ORTHOËPIST is a well-known teacher of elocution in New-York, who has given his best attention during many years to the subjects with which his book deals.” One vol. 18mo; cloth. Price, $1.00. For sale by all book-sellers; or, sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price. D. APPLETON & CO. Publishers, 1, 3, & 5 Bond St. New-York. 4 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. HANDEL'S MESSIAH, 50 Cents. Many other Oratorios at 50 cents PIRATES OF PENZANCE, $1. A Larger number of Operas at $1, words and music complete. 1000 Volumes of CLASSICAL and POPULAR Music Very Cheap, Send for Catalogue. WM. A POND & CO. 25 Union Square, New-York. GET RICH selling our Rubber Stamps and Music. Samples Free. COOK & BISSELL, Cleveland, O. Printing Presses 75 cents to $175. Circulars free. Book of Tyne, 10 cents. 40 kinds of cards. 10 cts. Printers' Instruction Book, 15 cts. JOSEPH WATSON. 19 Murray Street, New York. SEEDS Illustrated Garden Guide of the best Flowers and Vegetables, with prices of Seeds, and how to grow them. FREE TO ALL. It will pay to send for it. COLE & BROTHER, Seedsmen, PELLA, Iowa. PLAYS, RECITATIONS, DIALOGUES - Temperance, Sentimental, Comic - 15 cents. Amusements of all kinds, Books, Music, &c. Catalogues free. HAPPY HOURS BAZAR, 5 Beekman St., N.Y. SEEDS! Highest Quality. Lowest Prices! BULBS! liberal club terms. Splendid Flower Seeds, fresh, prize strains. Dahlias and Gladiolus. Send for new catalogue. E. WYMAN, Jr. Rockford, Ill. VICK'S ILLUSTRATED FLORAL GUIDE. 1881. Is an Elegant Book of 120 Pages, One Colored Flower Plate, and 600 Illustrations, with Descriptions of the best Flowers and Vegetables, and Directions for growing. Only 10 cents. In English or German. If you afterwards order seeds, deduct the 10 cents. VICK'S SEEDS are the best in the world. The FLORAL GUIDE will tell how to get and grow them. Vick's Flower and Vegetable Garden, 175 Pages, 6 Colored Plates, 500 Engravings. For 50 cents in paper covers; $1.00 in elegant cloth. In German or English. Vick's Illustrated Monthly Magazine - 32 pages, a Colored Plate in every number and many fine Engravings. Price $1.25 a year; Five Copies for $5.00. Specimen Numbers sent for 10 cents; 3 trial copies for 25 cents. Address, JAMES VICK, ROCHESTER, N.Y. Appletons' General Guide TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA. An entirely new work. With a Railroad Map of the United States and Canada, and Thirteen Sectional Maps, including "The Adirondacks," "Yosemite Valley," and "Yellow-stone Park"; and Plans (with references) of Fourteen of the Principal Cities - especially prepared for the work. Illustrated. This work is compiled on the plan of the famous BAEDEKER HAND-BOOKS of Europe. COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. 500 pages, 16mo, pocket form, bound in roan; price, $2.50; or separately: THE NEW ENGLAND AND MIDDLE STATES AND CANADA. One vol. 264 pages, 16mo, bound in cloth, $1.25. THE WESTERN AND SOUTHERN STATES. One vol. 234 pages, bound in cloth, $1.25. HOPE FOR THE DEAF Garmore's Artificial Ear Drums PERFECTLY RESTORE THE HEARING and perform the work of the Natural Drum. Always in position, but invisible to others. All Conversation and even whispers heard distinctly. We refer to those using them. Send for descriptive circular. GARMORE & CO., 117 Nassau St., New York, or S.W. Corner 5th & Race Sts., Cincinnati, O. KIDNEY-WORK THE ONLY MEDICINE IN EITHER LIQUID OR DRY FORM That Acts at the Same Time on The Liver, The Bowels, and the Kidneys. These great organs are the natural cleansers of the system. If they work well, health will be perfect. if they become clogged dreadful diseases are sure to follow with TERRIBLE SUFFERING. Biliousness, Headache, Dyspepsia, Jaundice, Constipation, Piles, Kidney Complaints, Gravel, Diabetes, Rheumatic Pains or Aches. are developed because the blood is poisoned with the humors that should be expelled naturally. KIDNEY-WORT WILL RESTORE the healthy action and all these destroying evils will be banished. neglect them and you will but to suffer. Thousands have been cured. Try it and you will add one more to the number. Take it and health will once more gladden your heart. Why bear such distress from Constipation and Piles? KIDNEY-WORT will cure you. Try it at once and be satisfied. Your druggist has it. Price $1.00. It is put up in Dry Vegetable Form, in tin cans one package of which makes six quarts of medicine. Also in Liquid Form, very Concentrated for the convenience of those who cannot readily prepare it. It acts with equal efficiency in either form. WELLS, RICHARDSON & CO., Prop's, (Will send the dry post-paid.) BURLINGTON, VT. ENDYMION. Lord Beaconsfield's New Novel. Authorized edition, in large type, and handsome style. 12mo, cloth, price $1.50; cheap edition, 12mo, cloth, $1.00. Sent post-paid to any address on receipt of price. D. APPLETON & CO. Publishers, I, 3, & 5 BOND STREET, NEW-YORK. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. JUST READY. SCOTCH SERMONS, 1880. This volume originated in the wish to gather together a few specimens of a style of teaching which increasingly prevails among the clergy of the Scottish Chruch. By Principal CAIRD - Rev. J. CUNNINGHAM, D, D., Rev. D. J. FERGUSON, B. D., Professor WM. KNIGHT, LL. D., Rev. T. NICOLL, Rev. T. RAIN, M. A., Rev. A. SEMPLE, B.D., Rev. J. STEVENSON, Rev. PATRICK STEVENSON, Rev. R. H. STORY, D.D From the Contemporary Review " Scotch Sermons" is the title of a book designed to do for Scotland what “Essay and Reviews” attempted for England twenty years ago, but with more clearness of statement more positive Christian teaching, and more unity of purpose. Twelve minsters have joined to “gather together a few specimens of a style of teaching which increasingly prevails among the clergy of the Scottish Church.” The great name of Dr. Caird stands at their head, a guarantee both of boldness and of moderation; but he is well supported. All the sermons are excellent in style and tone. Their general object may perhaps best be gathered from the sermons of Mr. M’Farlan on “Authority,” and on “Things which can not be Shaken.” In the first of these, the authority of scripture is shown to be that of a quickening revelation to the conscience, in contrast with the wooden notion of a formal rule of faith and conduct. In the second, the whole theology of sin and salvation derived from this wooden theory is traversed, comprehending (1) the descent of mankind from Adam;(2)the fall of Adam;(3)the imputation of his guilt;(4)the consequent death of all men in sin;(5)the redemption of an elect few; version(6) the quickening of the elect, whether by baptism or conversion; (7)eternal punishment. Over against these are set the positive conviction that righteousness is blessedness, the belief in the Fatherhood of God, and in immortality as revealed through Christ, and the hope of universal restitution. The rest of the volume expands these statements. To show what Christian righteousness is; to give to miracles their true subordinate value; to show how union with God must sanctify the whole life, domestic, social, politcal ; to expand chruch-life into the life of nations and humanity; to emancipate religion from the secondary influnece of theology and ecclesiasticism; and, finally, to connect and idenitfy eternal life with the higher life of man here, both individual and corporate- these are, in outline, the purpose of the sermons. The book can hardly fail to have great influence and to mark an epoch in Scottish theology. What its reception may be it is perhaps too soon to esitmate. We obsereve that an attack upon the authors has been made in the Presbytery of Glasgow. But the liberaltheological movement in Scotland has this claim on the confidence of the Chruch and nation, that it has had at its fountain-head men of the unquestioned and simple piety of Erskine and M'Leod Campbell, of Story and Norman M'Leod, and Bishop Ewing ________________________________ One vol. 12mo, Price, $1.25. _________________________________ For sale by all book-sellers; or sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price. D. APPLETON & CO. Publishers, 1,3 and 5 BOND STREET,NEW-YORK 6 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. For Magazines and Newspapers, AMERICAN AND FOREIGN, SEND FOR OUR CATALOGUE, 1881, NOW READY FOR DISTRIBUTION, IT GIVES CLUB-RATES for all the prominent publications, American and English. We make the import of Foreign Periodicals, by mail or otherwise, a specialty. The following are samples of our prices per year: FOREIGN. Academy..........................................................$4.15 Athenaeum........................................................4.30 Agricultural Gazette.......................................5.50 Architect.............................................................6.00 Boy's Own Paper.............................................2.00 Building News..................................................6.50 British Architect...............................................5.75 Chambers' Journal..........................................2.50 Chemical News.................................................4.75 Engineering........................................................8.80 English Mechanic.............................................3.25 Graphic.................................................................8.75 Illustrated News................................................8.75 London Times (weekly)..................................3.25 Nature...................................................................5.75 Notes and Queries...........................................5.00 Pall Mall Budget................................................7.40 Punch.....................................................................3.75 Queen....................................................................9.25 Saturday Review................................................7.40 Spectator..............................................................7.40 Art Journal............................................................8.50 Cornhill..................................................................3.60 Etcher...................................................................11.00 Fraser......................................................................8.00 Hamerton's Portfolio........................................8.50 London Society...................................................3.60 Contemporary Review......................................7.25 Nineteenth Century...........................................7.25 Fortnightly.............................................................6.50 Revue des Deux Mondes...............................14.25 AMERICAN. Harper's Magazine...........................................$3.45 " Bazar......................................................................3.45 " Weekly..................................................................1.35 " Young People.....................................................1.35 American Architect..............................................5.50 Agriculturist............................................................1.25 American Journal of Science and Art...........5.00 Blackwood...............................................................3.45 Californian...............................................................3.45 Contemporary Review (reprint).......................2.15 Gardener's Monthly.............................................1.80 Household...................................................................90 Literary World.........................................................1.80 Musical Herald........................................................ Penn Monthly..........................................................2.50 Lippincott's Magazine..........................................2.65 Popular Science Monthly....................................4.35 Appleton's Journal.................................................2.65 Sunday Magazine...................................................2.65 American Law Review...........................................4.35 Edinburgh Review..................................................3.45 British Quarterly......................................................3.45 New Englander........................................................3.87 London Quarterly...................................................3.45 Westminster Review..............................................3.45 Mind............................................................................3.50 Brain.............................................................................3.50 Braithewaite..............................................................2.25 Princeton Review....................................................2.00 Librarians and Managers of BOOK CLUBS and READING ASSOCIATIONS are especially requested to notice this. TIME, LABOR, and MONEY are saved by ordering through our agency. Send for our Catalogue, giving prices of nearly Two Thousand Periodicals, AMERICAN ENGLISH, FRENCH, and GERMAN, at club-rates. Free to any address upon request. ALBERT H. ROFFE & CO. 11 Bromfield Street, Boston, Mass. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. 7 THE GREATEST LIVING AUTHORS, such as Professor Max Muller, Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, James Anthony Froude, Professor Huxley, Richard A. Proctor, Edward A. Freeman, Professor Tyndall, Dr. W. B. Carpenter, Frances Power Cobbe, Professor Goldwin Smith, the Duke of Argyll, William Black, Miss Thackeray, Mrs. Mulock-Craik, George MacDonald, Mrs. Oliphant, R. D. Blackmore, Jean Ingelow, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Henry Kingsley, W. H. Mallock, W. W. Story, Turguenief, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and many others, are represented in the pages of LITTELL'S LIVING AGE. In 1881 THE LIVING AGE enters upon its thirty-eighth year, admittedly unrivaled and continuously successful. During the year it will furnish to its readers the productions of the most eminent authors, above-named and many others: embracing the choicest Serial and Short Stories by the Leading Foreign Novelists, and an account. Unapproached by any other Periodical in the world, of the most valuable Literary and Scientific matter of the day, from the pens of the foremost Essayists, Scientists, Critics, Discoverers, and Editors, representing every department of Knowledge and Progress. THE LIVING AGE is a weekly magazine, giving more than Three and a Quarter Thousand doable-column octavo pages of reading-matter yearly. It presents in an inexpensive form, considering its great amount on matter, with freshness, owing to its weekly issue, and with a satisfactory completeness attempted by no other publication, the best Essays, Reviews, Criticisms, Tales Sketches of Travel and Discovery, Poetry, Scientific, Biographical, Historical, and Political Information, from the entire body of Foreign Periodical Literature. It is therefore invaluable to every American reader, as the only satisfactorily fresh and COMPLETE compilation of an indispensable current literature--indispensible because it embraces the productions of the ABLEST LIVING WRITERS. "In no other form can so much thoroughly good reading be got for so little money; in no other form can so much instruction and entertainment be got in so small a space."--Phila. Times. "There is no other publication like it. It is known and read by all who desire to keep abreast with the cultivated thought of the English-speaking world."--Episcopal Register, Philadelphia. "It reproduces so fully the choicest articles from the foreign magazines, that one who takes it does not feel the need to anything else in the way of foreign periodical literature."--The Advance, Chicago. "Gives the best of all at the price of one."--New York Independent. "Teems with the choicest literature of the day." New York Tribune. "It is, by all odds, the best eclectic published."--Southern Churchman. "It enables the reader, at trifling expense, considering the quantity and quality of the reading furnished to keep pace with the best thought and literary work of our time."--Christian Union, New York. "One cannot read everything.... No man will be behind the literature of the times who reads THE LIVING AGE."--Zion's Herald, Boston. "We know of no investment of eight dollars, in the world of literature, that will yield equal returns."--The Presbyterian, Philadelphia. "It has no rival."--New York Evening Post. Published WEEKLY at $8.00 a year, free of postage. Club-Prices for the best Home and Foreign Literature. ["Possessed of THE LIVING AGE and one or other of our vivacious American monthlies, a subscriber will find himself in command of the whole situation."--Phila. Evening Bulletin.] For $10.50 THE LIVING AGE and anyone of the American $4.00 Monthlies (or Harper's Weekly or Bazar) will be sent for a year, post-paid; or, for $9.50 THE LIVING AGE and the St. Nicholas, or Apple-tons' Journal, or Lippincott's Monthly. Address LITTELL & CO. Boston. 8 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW ADVERTISER. Under the form of a jelly called Vaseline, petroleum is given to medicine and pharmacy in an absolutely pure, highly concentrated, and unobjectionable shape. All acids, odors, taste, color, and other impurities, which have hitherto prevented the use of petroleum in medicine, are entirely eliminated, and the Vaseline is as harmless and delightful to use as cream. The most valuable family remedy known for the treatment of wounds, burns, sores, cuts, skin-diseases, rheumatism, chilblains, catarrh, hæmorrhoids, etc. Also for coughs, colds, sore-throat, croup, and diphtheria, etc. It has received the unanimous endorsement of the Medical Press and Profession, Scientists and Journals of all characters throughout the world, as being the Best Remedy known. FOUR SIZES: IN BOTTLES, 15, 25, and 50 cents; in 1 lb. Tins, $ 1 As an emollient, Vaseline is superior to any other substance yet discovered. Its marvelous healing and restoring qualities excel everything else, and it is rapidly taking the place on the toilet-table, to the exclusion of the various complexion-powders, pomades, cosmetics, and other compounds. It will keep the skin clearer, softer, and smoother than any cosmetic ever invented, and will preserve the youthful beauty and freshness of the healthy complexion. POMADE VASELINE-- WILL CURE DANDRUFF AND MAKE THE HAIR GROW WHEN NOTHING ELSE WILL. 25, 50 CENTS, AND $1.00. VASELINE COLD CREAM..--FOR IRRITATIONS OF THE SKIN, CHAFING OF INFANTS, FOR THE COMPLEXION, CHAPPED HANDS, Etc., Etc., Etc. 25 AND 50 CENTS. VASELINE CAMPHOR ICE.--FOR PIMPLES, BLOTCHES, Etc. 25 CENTS. VASELINE TOILET SOAP.--EMOLLIENT, BLAND, ANTISEPTIC (EXCELS ALL TOILET SOAPS). Pamphlets, with Medical Editorials and Recommendations, Post Free. BEWARE of IMITATIONS and Adulterations trading upon the Popularity of VASELINE. Colgate & Co. will supply these articles, if you can not obtain them of your Druggist, None genuine except in original packages. Grand Medals at Philadelphia and Paris Expositions. Medal of Progress by American Institute. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMPOUND | A NEW TREATMENT for Consumption, Asthma, NOT A DRUG | Bronchitis, Catarrh, Dyspepsia, OXYGEN |Headache, Debility, Neuralgia, Rheumatism, -----------------------and all Chronic and Nervous Disorders. ACTS DIRECTLY upon the great nervous and organic centres, and cures by a natural process of revitalization. HAS EFFECTED REMARKABLE CURES, which are attracting wide attention. HAS BEEN USED BY R. Rev. John J. Kean, Bishop of Richmond, Va., Hon. Wm. D. Kelley, E.S. Arthur, and others who have been largely benefited, and to whom we refer by permission. IS STRONGLY ENDORSED: "We have the most unequivocal testimony to its curative power from many persons of high character and intelligence." -- Lutheran Observer. "The cures which have been obtained by this new treatment seem more like miracles than cases of natural healing." -- Arthur's Home Magazine. "There is no doubt as to the genuineness and positive results of this treatment." -- Boston Journal of Commerce. THE OXYGEN HOME TREATMENT contains two months' supply, with inhaling apparatus and full directions for use. SENT FREE: a Treatise on Compound Oxygen, giving the history of this new discovery and a large record of most remarkable cures. Write for it. Address Drs. Starkey & Palen, 1109 and 1111 Girard St., Philadelphia, Pa. ADMINISTERED BY INHALATION. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS' NEW PUBLICATIONS. THE MEMOIRS OF PRINCE METTERNICH. Volumes III. and IV., 1815-48. Containing particulars of the Congresses of Laybach, Aix la Chapelle, and Verona; the Eastern War of 1829, and the Revolutionary period of 1848, etc. Edited by his son, Prince Richard Metternich. Translated by Robina Napier. 2 vols., 8vo. (Nearly ready.) $5.00. CHRISTIAN INSTITUTIONS: Essays on Ecclesiastical Subjects. By A.P. Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster. (Nearly ready.) THE CAT. In Introduction to the Study of Back-boned Animals, especially Mammals. By St. George Mivart. Very fully illustrated. (Nearly ready.) THE CHALDEAN ACCOUNT OF GENESIS. By the late George Smith. New Edition, Edited, Revised, and Corrected by Professor A.H. Sayce. With illustrations. (Nearly ready.) SIR WILLIAM HERSCHEL; HIS LIFE AND WORKS. By Edward S. Holden, Professor in the U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington. With a Steel Portrait. 1 vol., 12mo. $1.50. SERMONS TO STUDENTS AND THOUGHTFUL PERSONS. By Llewelyn D. Beven, D.D., LL. D. 1 vol., 12mo. $1.25. ILKA ON THE HILL-TOP, AND OTHER STORIES. By Professor Hjalmar J. Boyesen. 1 vol., 16mo. $1.00. THE DEMON OF CAWNPORE. Being Part First of The Steam House. By Jules Verne. Translated by W.H.G. Kingston. 1 vol,. 12mo. Profusely illustrated. $1.50. RELIGION AND CHEMISTRY. By Prof. Josiah P. Cooks, of Harvard University. A New Edition, with additions. 1 vol., 12 mo. $1.50. GLEANINGS FROM A LITERARY LIFE. By Prof. Francis Bowen, of Harvard University. 1 vol., 8vo. $3.00. TROY: Its Legend, History, and Literature, with a sketch of the Topography of the Troad in the light of Recent Investigation. By S.G.W. Benjamin. 1 vol., 16mo, with a Map (Epochs of Ancient History Series). $1.00. ARMY LIFE IN RUSSIA. By F.V. Greene, Lieutenant of Engineers, U.S.A., late Military Attaché to the United States Legation in St. Petersburg. 1 vol., 12mo. $1.50. THE GRANDISSIMES; A STORY OF CREOLE LIFE. By George W. Cable, author of "Old Creole Days." 1 vol. 12mo. $1.50. These books are for sale by all book-sellers, or will be sent, prepaid, upon receipt of price, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Nos. 743 & 745 Broadway, New-York. DECKER BROTHERS' PIANOS Have shown themselves to be so far superior to all others in Excellence of Workmanship, Elasticity of Touch, Beauty of Tone, and great Durability, that they are now earnestly sought for by all persons desiring THE VERY BEST PIANO. LOW PRICES. EASY TERMS. CAUTION.--All genuine Decker Pianos have the following name (precisely as here shown) on the pianos above the keys. Decker Brothers. New York. SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE. No. 33 Union Square, NEW-YORK. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.