Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 by Various (page 2)

aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the _ignoble vulgus_ to give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But the nickname abides. It has its hold in affection. When the “old boys” come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the “Puds” or “Pores” get together after long absence, it is not to inquire what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke, but it is, “Who knows where Hockey Jones is?” and “Did Dandy Glover really die in India?” and “Let us go and call upon Old Sykes” or “Old Roots” or “Old Conic-Sections,”–thus meaning to designate Professor—-, LL.D., A.A.S., F.R.S., etc. A college president who had no nickname would prove himself, _ipso facto_, unfit for his post. It is only dreadfully affected people who talk of “Tully”; the sensible all cling to the familiar “Chick-Pea” or Cicero, by which the wart-faced orator was distinguished. For it is not the boys only, but all American men, who love nicknames, the idioms of nomenclature. The first thing which is done, after a nominating convention has made its platform and balloted for its candidates, is to discover or invent a nickname: Old Hickory, Tippecanoe, The Little Giant, The Little Magician, The Mill-Boy of the Slashes, Honest John, Harry of the West, Black Dan, Old Buck, Old Rough and Ready. A “good name” is a tower of strength and many votes.

And not only with candidates for office, the spots on whose “white garments” are eagerly sought for and labelled, but in the names of places and classes the principle prevails, the democratic or Saxon tongue gets the advantage. Thus, we have for our states, cities, and ships-of-war the title of fondness which drives out the legal title of ceremony. Are we not “Yankees” to the world, though to the diplomatists “citizens of the United States of America”? We have a Union made up upon the map of Maine, New Hampshire, etc., to California; we have another in the newspapers, composed of the Lumber State, the Granite State, the Green-Mountain State, the Nutmeg State, the Empire State, the Keystone State, the Blue Hen, the Old Dominion, of Hoosiers, Crackers, Suckers, Badgers, Wolverines, the Palmetto State, and Eldorado. We have the Crescent City, the Quaker City, the Empire City, the Forest City, the Monumental City, the City of Magnificent Distances. We hear of Old Ironsides sent to the Mediterranean to relieve the Old Tea-Wagon, ordered home. Everywhere there obtains the Papal principle of taking a new title upon succeeding to any primacy. The Norman imposed his laws upon England; the courts, the parish-registers, the Acts of Parliament were all his; but to this day there are districts of the Saxon Island where the postman and census-taker inquire in vain for Adam Smith and Benjamin Brown, but must perforce seek out Bullhead and Bandyshins. So indomitable is the Saxon.

We have not done yet with our national idioms. In the seaboard towns nautical phrases make tarry the talk of the people. “Where be you a-cruising to?” asks one Nantucket matron of her gossip. “Sniver-dinner, I’m going to Egypt; Seth B. has brought a letter from Turkey-wowner to Old Nancy.” “Dressed-to-death-and-drawers-empty, don’t you see we’re goin’ to have a squall? You had better take in your stu’n’-sails.” The good woman was dressed up, intending, “_as soon as ever_ dinner was over,” to go, not to the land of the Pharaohs, but to the negro-quarter of the town, with a letter which “Seth B.” (her son, thus identified by his middle letter) had brought home from Talcahuana.

For the rural idioms we refer the reader to the late Sylvester Judd’s “Margaret” and “Richard Edney,” and to the Jack Downing Letters.

The town is not behind the country. For, whatever is the current fancy, pugilism, fire-companies, racing, railway-building, or the opera, its idioms invade the talk. The Almighty Dollar of our worship has more synonymes than the Roman Pantheon had divinities. We are not “well-informed,” but “posted” or “posted up.” We are not “hospitably entreated” any more, but “put through.” We do not “meet with misadventure,” but “see the elephant,” which we often do through the Hibernian process of “fighting the tiger.”

Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker. We “panned out,” the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting. We were puzzling over the word “socdollager,” which Bartlett, we think, defines as “Anything very large and striking,”–_Anglice_, a “whopper,”–“also a peculiar fish-hook.” The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr. Cooper’s “Home as Found,” applied to a patriarch among the white bass of Otsego Lake, which could never be captured. We assumed at once that there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon us that it was a rough fisherman’s random-shot at the word “doxology.” This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or “j’ined in,” by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis, both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers. The last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee Walton the crowning hope of his life,–the big bass, after taking which he might put hook-and-line on the shelf. By a slight transposition, natural enough to untrained organs, “doxology” became “socdollager.”

We are not making a dictionary of Americanisms, but merely wandering a little way into our native forests. We refer to the prevalent habit of idiomatic speech as a fact that makes part of our literature. It cannot be ignored, nor do we see how it is to be avoided. It is well, of course, to retain the sterling classic basis of our speech as we received it from abroad, and to this all that is best and purest in our literature past and present will tend. But we hold to no Know-Nothing platform which denies a right of naturalization to the worthy. As Ruskin says of the river, that it does not make its bed, but finds it, seeking out, with infinite pains, its appointed channel, so thought will seek its expression, guided by its inner laws of association and sympathy. If the mind and heart of a nation become barbarized, no classic culture can keep its language from corruption. If its ideas are ignoble, it will turn to the ignoble and vulgar side of every word in its tongue, it will affix the mean sense it desires to utter where it had of old no place. It converts the prince’s palace into a stable or an inn; it pulls down the cathedral and the abbey to use the materials for the roads on which it tramples. It is good to sanctify language by setting some of its portions apart for holy uses,–at least, by preserving intact the high religious association which rests upon it. The same silver may be moulded to the altar-chalice or the Bacchic goblet; but we touch the one with reverent and clean hands, while the other is tossed aside in the madness of the revel. Men clamor for a new version of the Sacred Scriptures, and profess to be shocked at its plain outspokenness, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure, and that to the prurient all things are foul. It was a reverent and a worshipping age that gave us that treasure, and so long as we have the temper of reverence and worship we shall not ask to change it.

And to return once more to our original illustration. We have the two nations also in us, the Norman and the Saxon, the dominant and the aspiring, the patrician and the _proletaire_. The one rules only by right of rule, the other rises only by right of rising. The power of conservatism perishes, when there is no longer anything to keep; the might of radicalism overflows into excess, when the proper check is taken away or degraded. So long as the noble is noble and “_noblesse oblige_,” so long as Church and State are true to their guiding and governing duties, the elevation of the base is the elevation of the whole. If the standards of what is truly aristocratic in our language are standards of nobility of thought, they will endure and draw up to them, on to the episcopal thrones and into the Upper House of letters, all that is most worthy. Whatever makes the nation’s life will make its speech. War was once the career of the Norman, and he set the seal of its language upon poetry. Agriculture was the Saxon’s calling, and he made literature a mirror of the life he led. We in this new land are born to new heritages, and the terms of our new life must be used to tell our story. The Herald’s College gives precedence to the Patent-Office, and the shepherd’s pipe to the steam-whistle. And since all literature which can live stands only upon the national speech, we must look for our hopes of coming epics and immortal dramas to the language of the land, to its idioms, in which its present soul abides and breathes, and not to its classicalities, which are the empty shells upon its barren sea-shore.

MIDSUMMER AND MAY.

[Continued.]

II.

When Miss Kent, the maternal great-aunt of Mr. Raleigh, devised her property, the will might possibly have been set aside as that of a monomaniac, but for the fact that he cared too little about anything to go to law for it, and for the still more important fact that the heirs-at-law were sufficiently numerous to ingulf the whole property and leave no ripple to attest its submerged existence, had he done so; and on deserting it, he was better pleased to enrich the playfellow of his childhood than a host of unknown and unloved individuals. I cannot say that he did not more than once regret what he had lost: he was not of a self-denying nature, as we know; on the contrary, luxurious and accustomed to all those delights of life generally to be procured only through wealth. But, for all that, there had been intervals, ere his thirteen years’ exile ended, in which, so far from regret, he experienced a certain joy at remembrance of this rough and rugged point of time where he had escaped from the chrysalid state to one of action and freedom and real life. He had been happy in reaching India before his uncle’s death, in applying his own clear understanding to the intricate entanglements of the affairs before him, in rescuing his uncle’s commercial good name, and in securing thus for himself a foothold on the ladder of life, although that step had not occurred to him till thrust there by the pressure of circumstances. For the rest, I am not sure that Mr. Raleigh did not find his path suiting him well enough. There was no longer any charm in home; he was forbidden to think of it. That strange summer, that had flashed into his life like the gleam of a carnival-torch into quiet rooms, must be forgotten; the forms that had peopled it, in his determination, should become shadows. Valiant vows! Yet there must have come moments, in that long lapse of days and years, when the whole season gathered up its garments and swept imperiously through his memory: nights, when, under the shadow of the Himmaleh, the old passion rose at spring-tide and flooded his heart and drowned out forgetfulness, and a longing asserted itself, that, if checked as instantly by honor as despair, was none the less insufferable and full of pain,–warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars, great and golden, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights sought vainly to lend him its calm. Days also must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness. What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets? Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of the man’s identity, entirely a selfish one. He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder. But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain sorrow there.

In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim; although not wealthy, years might make him so; his name commanded respect. Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,–the merchants wrapped in snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,–the strange faces, modes, and manners,–the stranger beasts, immense, and alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey, with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell to India.

The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate skill, so that I shall not venture to say in how few days she had weathered the Cape, and, ploughing up the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in Captain Tarbell’s remembrance, although he was not new to shipwreck. If Mr. Raleigh had found no time for reflection in the busy current of affairs, when, ceasing to stand aside, he had mingled in the turmoil and become a part of the generations of men, he could not fail to find it in this voyage, not brief at best, and of which every day’s progress must assure him anew toward what land and what people he was hastening. Moreover, Fate had woven his lot, it seemed, inextricably among those whom he would shun; for Mr. Laudersdale himself was deeply interested in the Osprey’s freight, and it would be incumbent upon him to extend his civilities to Mr. Raleigh. But Mr. Raleigh was not one to be cozened by circumstances more than by men.

The severity of the gale, which they had met some three days since, had entirely abated; the ship was laid to while the slight damage sustained was undergoing repair, and rocked heavily under the gray sky on the long, sullen swell and roll of the grayer waters. Mr. Raleigh had just come upon deck at dawn, where he found every one in unaccountable commotion. “Ship to leeward in distress,” was all the answer his inquiries could obtain, while the man on the topmast was making his observations. Mr. Raleigh could see nothing, but every now and then the boom of a gun came faintly over the distance. The report having been made, it was judged expedient to lower a boat and render her such assistance as was possible. Mr. Raleigh never could tell how it came to pass that he found himself one of the volunteers in this dangerous service.

The disabled vessel proved to be a schooner from the West Indies in a sinking condition. A few moments sufficed to relieve a portion of her passengers, sad wretches who for two days had stared death in the face, and they pulled back toward the Osprey. A second and third journey across the waste, and the remaining men prepared to lower the last woman into the boat, when a stout, but extremely pale individual, who could no longer contain his frenzy of fear, clambered down the chains and dropped in her place. There was no time to be lost, and nothing to do but submit; the woman was withdrawn to wait her turn with the captain and crew, and the laden boat again labored back to the ship. Each trip in the heavy sea and the blinding rain occupied no less than a couple of hours, and it was past noon when, uncertain just before if she might yet be there, they again came within sight of the little schooner, slowly and less slowly settling to her doom. As they approached her at last, Mr. Raleigh could plainly detect the young woman standing at a little distance from the anxious group, leaning against the broken mast with crossed arms, and looking out over the weary stretch with pale, grave face and quiet eyes. At the motion of the captain, she stepped forward, bound the ropes about herself, and was swung over the side to await the motion of the boat, as it slid within reach on the top of the long wave, or receded down its shining, slippery hollow. At length one swell brought it nearer, Mr. Raleigh’s arms snatched the slight form and drew her half-fainting into the boat, a cloak was tossed after, and one by one the remainder followed; they were all safe, and some beggared. The bows of the schooner already plunged deep down in the gaping gulfs, they pulled bravely away, and were tossed along from billow to billow.

“You are very uncomfortable, Mademoiselle Le Blanc?” asked the rescued captain at once of the young woman, as she sat beside him in the stern-sheets.

“_Moi?_” she replied. “_Mais non, Monsieur._”

Mr. Raleigh wrapped the cloak about her, as she spoke. They were equidistant from the two vessels, neither of which was to be seen, the rain fell fast into the hissing brine, their fate still uncertain. There was something strangely captivating and reassuring in this young girl’s equanimity, and he did not cease speculating thereon till they had again reached the Osprey, and she had disappeared below.

By degrees the weather lightened; the Osprey was on the wing again, and a week’s continuance of this fair wind would bring them into port. The next day, toward sunset, as Mr. Raleigh turned about in his regular pacing of the deck, he saw at the opposite extremity of the ship the same slight figure dangerously perched upon the taffrail, leaning over, now watching the closing water, and now eagerly shading her eyes with her hand to observe the ship which they spoke, as they lay head to the wind, and for a better view of which she had climbed to this position. It was not Mr. Raleigh’s custom to interfere; if people chose to drown themselves, he was not the man to gainsay them; but now, as his walk drew him toward her, it was the most natural thing in the world to pause and say,–

“_Il serait facheux, Mademoiselle, lorsqu’ on a failli faire naufrage, de se noyer_”–and, in want of a word, Mr. Raleigh ignominiously descended to his vernacular–“with a lee-lurch.”

The girl, resting on the palm of one hand, and unsupported otherwise, bestowed upon him no reply, and did not turn her head. Mr. Raleigh looked at her a moment, and then continued his walk. Returning, the thing happened as he had predicted, and, with a little quick cry, Mademoiselle Le Blanc was hanging by her hands among the ropes. Reaching her with a spring, “_Viens, petite!_” he said, and with an effort placed her on her feet again before an alarm could have been given.

“_Ah! mais je crus c’en etait fait de moi!_” she exclaimed, drawing in her breath like a sob. In an instant, however, surveying Mr. Raleigh, the slight emotion seemed to yield to one of irritation, that she had been rescued by him; for she murmured quickly, in English, head haughtily thrown back and eyes downcast,–“Monsieur thinks that I owe him much for having saved my life!”

“Mademoiselle best knows its worth,” said he, rather amused, and turning away.

The girl was still looking down; now, however, she threw after him a quick glance.

“_Tenez!_” said she, imperiously, and stepping toward him. “You fancy me very ungrateful,” she continued, lifting her slender hand, and with the back of it brushing away the floating hair at her temples. “Well, I am not, and at some time it may be that I prove it. I do not like to owe debts; but, since I must, I will not try to cancel them with thanks.”

Mr. Raleigh bowed, but said nothing. She seemed to think it necessary to efface any unpleasant impression, and, with a little more animation and a smile, added,–“The Captain Tarbell told me your name, Mr. Raleigh, and that you had not been at home for thirteen years. _Ni moi non plus_,–at least, I suppose it is home where I am going; yet I remember no other than the island and my”–

And here the girl opened her eyes wide, as if determined that they should not fill with tears, and looked out over the blue and sparkling fields around them. There was a piquancy in her accent that made the hearer wish to hear further, and a certain artlessness in her manner not met with recently by him. He moved forward, keeping her beside him.

“Then you are not French,” he said.

“I? Oh, no,–nor Creole. I was born in America; but I have always lived with mamma on the plantation; _et maintenant, il y a six mois qu’elle est morte!_”

Here she looked away again. Mr. Raleigh’s glance followed hers, and, returning, she met it bent kindly and with a certain grave interest upon her. She appeared to feel reassured, somewhat protected by one so much her elder.

“I am going now to my father,” she said, “and to my other mother.”

“A second marriage,” thought Mr. Raleigh, “and before the orphan’s crapes are”–Then, fearful lest she should read his thought, he added,–“And how do you speak such perfect English?”

“Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I have written home twice a week since I was a little child. Mamma, too, spoke as much English as French.”

“I have not been in America for a long time,” said Mr. Raleigh, after a few steps. “But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know.”

“What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks”–

“Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide, possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure.”

“It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one,” said she, dreamily. “_Mais non, je m’y perds_. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New York avenues lined with them.”

“No; the houses there are palaces.”

“I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace,” she answered, with a light tinkling laugh. “That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!”

“Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?” said Mr. Raleigh.

“At home,” she replied, “our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. _Ainsi soit il!_” she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

“You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be obliged to wear the shroud.”

“Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the country, a place with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,–old Ursule. Oh, Sir, she was drowned! I saw the very wave that swept her off!”

“That was your servant?”

“Yes.”

“Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She was tall and large?”

“_Oui_.”

“Her name was Ursule?”

“_Oui! je dis que oui!_”

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness. “She is below, then,” he said,–“not drowned. There is Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, will you take this young lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?”

And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that gentleman’s escort.

The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so much on board ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his acquaintance with the pale young stranger fast ripening into friendliness. It was an agreeable variation from the monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was not unpleasant to her. Indeed, with that childlike simplicity that was her first characteristic, she never saw him without seeking him, and every morning and every evening it became their habit to pace the deck together. Sunrise and twilight began to be the hours with which he associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she did, out of the full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed a creature that had taken life from the fresh, cool, dewy hours, and that must fairly dissolve beneath the sky of noon. She puzzled him, too, and he found singular contradictions in her: to-night, sweetness itself,–to-morrow, petulant as a spoiled child. She had all a child’s curiosity, too; and he amused himself by seeing, at one time, with what novelty his adventures struck her, when, at another, he would have fancied she had always held Taj and Himmaleh in her garden. Now and then, excited, perhaps, by emulation and wonder, her natural joyousness broke through the usually sad and quiet demeanor; and she related to him, with dramatic _abandon_, scenes of her gay and innocent island-life, so that he fancied there was not an emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge, till, all-unaware, he tripped over one reserve and another, that made her, for the moment, as mysterious a being as any of those court-ladies of ancient _regimes_, in whose lives there were strange _lacunae_, and spaces of shadow. And a peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,–as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate,–at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft, thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one, spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he leaned over the ship’s side.

“_Voici ma capote!_” said she, before he was aware of her approach. “_Ciel! qu’il fait frais!_”

“We have changed our skies,” said Mr. Raleigh, looking up.

“It is not necessary that you should tell me that!” she replied. “I shiver all the time. I shall become a little iceberg, for the sake of floating down to melt off Martinique!”

“Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was kindled for the purpose.”

“Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid fact, _une jouissance vraie, Monsieur_, to think that men can paint,–that these shades, which are spontaneous in the heavens, and fleeting, can be rivalled by us and made permanent,–that man is more potent than light.”

“But you are all wrong in your _jouissance_.”

She pouted her lip, and hung over the side in an attitude that it seemed he had seen a hundred times before.

“That sunset, with all its breadth and splendor, is contained in every pencil of light.”

She glanced up and laughed.

“Oh, yes! a part of its possibilities. Which proves?”–

“That color is an attribute of light and an achievement of man.”

“Ca et la,
Toute la journee,
Le vent vain va
En sa tournee,”

hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.

Mr. Raleigh shut up the note-book in which he had been writing, and restored it to his pocket. She turned about and broke off her song.

“There is the moon on the other side,” she said, “floating up like a great bubble of light. She and the sun are the scales of a balance, I think; as one ascends, the other sinks.”

“There is a richness in the atmosphere, when sunset melts into moonrise, that makes one fancy it enveloping the earth like the bloom on a plum.”

“And see how it has powdered the sea! The waters look like the wings of the _papillon bleu_.”

“It seems that you love the sea.”

“Oh, certainly. I have thought that we islanders were like those Chinese who live in great _tanka_-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a gem,–that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen races. Don’t you think so?”

“I think that isolation causes either vivid characteristics or idiocy, seldom strong or healthy ones; and I do not value race.”

“Because you came from America!”–with an air of disgust,–“where there is yet no race, and the population is still too fluctuating for the mould of one.”

“I come from India, where, if anywhere, there is race.”

“But, pshaw! that was not what we were talking about.”

“No, Mademoiselle, we were speaking of an element even more fluctuating than American population.”

“Of course I love the sea; but if the sea loves me, it is the way a cat loves the mouse.”

“It is always putting up a hand to snatch you?”

“I suppose I am sent to Nineveh and persist in shipping for Tarshish. I never enter a boat without an accident. The Belle Voyageuse met shipwreck, and I on board. That was anticipated, though, by all the world; for the night before we set sail,–it was a very murk, hot night, –we were all called out to see the likeness of a large merchantman transfigured in flames upon the sky,–spars and ropes and hull one net and glare of fire.”

“A mirage, probably, from some burning ship at sea.”

“No, I would rather think it supernatural. Oh, it was frightful! Rather superb, though, to think of such a spectral craft rising to warn us with ghostly flames that the old Belle Voyageuse was riddled with rats!”

“Did it burn blue?” asked Mr. Raleigh.

“Oh, if you’re going to make fun of me, I’ll tell you nothing more!”

As she spoke, Capua, who had considered himself, during the many years of wandering, both guiding and folding star to his master, came up, with his eyes rolling fearfully in a lively expansion of countenance, and muttered a few words in Mr. Raleigh’s ear, lifting both hands in comical consternation the while.

“Excuse me a moment,” said Mr. Raleigh, following him, and, meeting Captain Tarbell at the companion-way, the three descended together.

Mr. Raleigh was absent some fifteen minutes, at the end of that time rejoining Mademoiselle Le Blanc.

“I did not mean to make fun of you,” said he, resuming the conversation as if there had been no interruption. “I was watching the foam the Osprey makes in her speed, which certainly burns blue. See the flashing sparks! now that all the red fades from the west, they glow in the moon like broken amethysts.”

“What did you mean, then?” she asked, pettishly.

“Oh, I wished to see if the idea of a burning ship was so terrifying.”

“Terrifying? No; I have no fear; I never was afraid. But it must, in reality, be dreadful. I cannot think of anything else so appalling.”

“Not at all timid?”

“Mamma used to say, those that know nothing fear nothing.”

“Eminently your case. Then you cannot imagine a situation in which you would lose self-possession?”

“Scarcely. Isn’t it people of the finest organization, comprehensive, large-souled, that are capable of the extremes either of courage or fear? Now I am limited, so that, without rash daring or pale panic, I can generally preserve equilibrium.”

“How do you know all this of yourself?” he asked, with an amused air.

“_Il se presentait des occasions_,” she replied, briefly.

“So I presumed,” said he. “Ah? They have thrown out the log. See, we make progress. If this breeze holds!”

“You are impatient, Mr. Raleigh. You have dear friends at home, whom you wish to see, who wish to see you?”

“No,” he replied, with a certain bitterness in his tone. “There is no one to whom I hasten, no one who waits to receive me.”

“No one? But that is terrible! Then why should you wish to hasten? For me, I would always be willing to loiter along, to postpone home indefinitely.”

“That is very generous, Mademoiselle.”

“Mr. Raleigh”–

“Well?”

“I wish–please–you must not say Mademoiselle. Nobody will address me so, shortly. Give me my name,–call me Marguerite. _Je vous en prie_.”

And she looked up with a blush deepening the apple-bloom of her cheek.

“Marguerite? Does it answer for pearl or for daisy with you?”

“Oh, they called me so because I was such a little round white baby. I couldn’t have been very precious, though, or she never would have parted with me. Yes, I wish we might drift on some lazy current for years. I hate to shorten the distance. I stand in awe of my father, and I do not remember my mother.”

“Do not remember?”

“She is so perfect, so superb, so different from me! But she ought to love her own child!”

“Her own child?”

“And then I do not know the customs of this strange land. Shall I be obliged to keep an establishment?”

“Keep an establishment?”

“It is very rude to repeat my words so! You oughtn’t! Yes, keep an establishment!”

“I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle.”

“No, it is I who am rude.”

“Not at all,–but mysterious. I am quite in the dark concerning you.”

“Concerning me?”

“Ah, Miss Marguerite, it is my turn now.”

“Oh! It must be—-This is your mystery, _n’est ce pas?_ Mamma was my grandmamma. My own mother was far too young when mamma gave her in marriage; and, to make amends, mamma adopted me and left me her name and her fortune. So that I am very wealthy. And now shall I keep an establishment?”

“I should think not,” said Mr. Raleigh, with a smile.

“Do you know, you constantly reassure me? Home grows less and less a bugbear when you speak of it. How strange! It seems as if I had known you a year, instead of a week.”

“It would probably take that period of time to make us as well acquainted under other circumstances.”

“I wish you were going to be with us always. Shall you stay in America, Mr. Raleigh?”

“Only till the fall. But I will leave you at your father’s door”—-

And then Mr. Raleigh ceased suddenly, as if he had promised an impossibility.

“How long before we reach New York?” she asked.

“In about nine hours,” he replied,–adding, in unconscious undertone, “if ever.”

“What was that you said to yourself?” she asked, in a light and gayly inquisitive voice, as she looked around and over the ship. “Why, how many there are on deck! It is such a beautiful night, I suppose. Eh, Mr. Raleigh?”

“Are you not tired of your position?” he asked. “Sit down beside me here.” And he took a seat.

“No, I would rather stand. Tell me what you said.”

“Sit, then, to please me, Marguerite, and I will tell you what I said.”

She hesitated a moment, standing before him, the hood of her capote, with its rich purple, dropping from the fluttering yellow hair that the moonlight deepened into gold, and the fire-opal clasp rising and falling with her breath, like an imprisoned flame. He touched her hand, still warm and soft, with his own, which was icy. She withdrew it, turned her eyes, whose fair, faint lustre, the pale forget-me-not blue, was darkened by the antagonistic light to an amethystine shadow, inquiringly upon him.

“There is some danger,” she murmured.

“Yes. When you are not a mark for general observation, you shall hear it.”

“I would rather hear it standing.”

“I told you the condition.”

“Then I shall go and ask Captain Tarbell.”

“And come sobbing back to me for ‘reassurance.'”

“No,” she said, quickly, “I should go down to Ursule.”

“Ursule has a mattress on deck; I assisted her up.”

“There is the captain! Now”—-

He seized her hand and drew her down beside him. For an instant she would have resisted, as the sparkling eyes and flushed cheeks attested,–and then, with the instinctive feminine baseness that compels every woman, when once she has met her master, she submitted.

“I am sorry, if you are offended,” said he. “But the captain cannot attend to you now, and it is necessary to be guarded in movement; for a slight thing on such occasions may produce a panic.”

“You should not have forced me to sit,” said she, in a smothered voice, without heeding him; “you had no right.”

“This right, that I assume the care of you.”

“Monsieur, you see that I am quite competent to the care of myself.”

“Marguerite, I see that you are determined to quarrel.”

She paused a moment, ere replying; then drew a little nearer and turned her face toward him, though without looking up.

“Forgive me, then!” said she. “But I would rather be naughty and froward, it lets me stay a child, and so you can take me in keeping, and I need not think for myself at all. But if I act like a woman grown, then comes all the responsibility, and I must rely on myself, which is such trouble now, though I never felt it so before,–I don’t know why. Don’t you see?” And she glanced at him with her head on one side, and laughing archly.

“You were right,” he replied, after surveying her a moment; “my proffered protection is entirely superfluous.”

She thought he was about to go, and placed her hand on his, as it lay along the side. “Don’t leave me,” she murmured.

“I have no intention of leaving you,” he said.

“You are very good. I have never seen one like you. I love you well.” And, bathed in moonlight, she raised her face and her glowing lips toward him.

Mr. Raleigh gazed in the innocent eyes a moment, to seek the extent of her meaning, and felt, that, should he take advantage of her childlike forgetfulness, he would be only reenacting the part he had so much condemned in one man years before. So he merely bent low over the hand that lay in his, raised it, and touched his lips to that. In an instant the color suffused her face, she snatched the hand away, half rose trembling from her seat, then sank into it again.

“_Soit, Monsieur!_” she exclaimed, abruptly. “But you have not told me the danger.”

“It will not alarm you now?” he replied, laughing.

“I have said that I am not a coward.”

“I wonder what you would think of me when I say that without doubt I am.”

“You, Mr. Raleigh?” she cried, astonishment banishing anger.

“Not that I betray myself. But I have felt the true heart-sinking. Once, surprised in the centre of an insurrection, I expected to find my hair white as snow, if I escaped.”

“Your hair is very black. And you escaped?”

“So it would appear.”

“They suffered you to go on account of your terror? You feigned death? You took flight?”

“Hardly, neither.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, imperiously.

Though Mr. Raleigh had exchanged the singular reserve of his youth for a well-bred reticence, he scarcely cared to be his own hero.

“Tell me,” said she. “It will shorten the time; and that is what you are trying to do, you know.”

He laughed.

“It was once when I was obliged to make an unpleasant journey into the interior, and a detachment was placed at my service. We were in a suspected district quite favorable to their designs, and the commanding officer was attacked with illness in the night. Being called to his assistance, I looked abroad and fancied things wore an unusual aspect among the men, and sent Capua to steal down a covered path and see if anything were wrong. Never at fault, he discovered a revolt, with intent to murder my companion and myself, and retreat to the mountains. Of course there was but one thing to do. I put a pistol in my belt and walked down and in among them, singled out the ringleader, fixed him with my eye, and bade him approach. My appearance was so sudden and unsuspected that they forgot defiance.”

“_Bien_, but I thought you were afraid.”

“So I was. I could not have spoken a second word. I experienced intense terror, and that, probably, gave my glance a concentration of which I was unaware and by myself incapable; but I did not suffer it to waver; I could not have moved it, indeed; I kept it on the man while he crept slowly toward me. I shall never forget the horrible sensation. I did not dare permit myself to doubt his conquest; but if I had failed, as I then thought, his approach was like the slow coil of a serpent about me, and it was his glittering eyes that had fixed mine, and not mine his. At my feet, I commanded him, with a gesture, to disarm. He obeyed, and I breathed; and one by one they followed his example. Capua, who was behind me, I sent back with the weapons, and in the morning gave them their choice of returning to town with their hands tied behind their backs, or of going on with me and remaining faithful. They chose the latter, did me good service, and I said nothing about the affair.”

“That was well. But were you really frightened?”

“So I said. I cannot think of it yet without a slight shudder.”

“Yes, and a rehearsal. Your eyes charge bayonets now. I am not a Sepoy.”

“Well, you are still angry with me?”

“How can I be angry with you?”

“How, indeed? So much your senior that you owe me respect, Miss Marguerite. I am quite old enough to be your father.”

“You are, Sir?” she replied, with surprise. “Why, are you fifty-five years old?”

“Is that Mr. Laudersdale’s age?”

“How did you know Mr. Laudersdale Was my father?”

“By an arithmetical process. That is his age?”

“Yes; and yours?”

“Not exactly. I was thirty-seven last August.”

“And will be thirty-eight next?”

“That is the logical deduction.”

“I shall give you a birthday-gift when you are just twice my age.”

“By what courier will you make it reach me?”

“Oh, I forgot. But–Mr. Raleigh?” “What is it?” he replied, turning to look at her,–for his eyes had been wandering over the deck.

“I thought you would ask me to write to you.”

“No, that would not be worth while.”

His face was too grave for her to feel indignation.

“Why?” she demanded.

“It would give me great pleasure, without doubt. But in a week you will have too many other cares and duties to care for such a burden.”

“That shows that you do not know me at all. _Vous en avez use mal avec moi!_”

Though Mr. Raleigh still looked at her, he did not reply. She rose and walked away a few steps, coming back.

“You are always in the right, and I consequently in the wrong,” she said. “How often to-night have I asked pardon? I will not put up with it!”

“We shall part in a few hours,” he replied; “when you lose your temper, I lose my time.”

“In a few hours? Then is the danger which you mentioned past?”

“I scarcely think so.”

“Now I am not going to be diverted again. What is this dreadful danger?”

“Let me tell you, in the first place, that we shall probably make the port before our situation becomes apparently worse,–that we do not take to the boats, because we are twice too many to fill them, owing to the Belle Voyageuse, and because it might excite mutiny, and for several other becauses,–that every one is on deck, Capua consoling Ursule, the captain having told to each, personally, the possibility of escape”—-

“_Allez au hut!_”

“That the lights are closed, the hatches battened down, and by dint of excluding the air we can keep the flames in a smouldering state and sail into harbor a shell of safety over this core of burning coal.”

“Reducing the equation, the ship is on fire?”

“Yes.”

She did not speak for a moment or two, and he saw that she was quite faint. Soon recovering herself,–

“And what do you think of the mirage now?” she asked. “Where is Ursule? I must go to her,” she added suddenly, after a brief silence, starting to her feet.

“Shall I accompany you?”

“Oh, no.”

“She lies on a mattress there, behind that group,”–nodding in the implied direction; “and it would be well, if you could lie beside her and get an hour’s rest.”

“Me? I couldn’t sleep. I shall come back to you,–may I?” And she was gone.

Mr. Raleigh still sat in the position in which she had left him, when, a half-hour afterward, she returned.

“Where is your cloak?” he asked, rising to receive her.

“I spread it over Ursule, she was so chilly.”

“You will not take cold?”

“I? I am on fire myself.”

“Ah, I see; you have the Saturnalian spirit in you.”

“It is like the Revolution, the French, is it not?–drifting on before the wind of Fate, this ship full of fire and all red-hot raging turbulence. Just look up the long sparkling length of these white, full shrouds, swelling and curving like proud swans, in the gale,–and then imagine the devouring monster below in his den!”

“_Don’t_ imagine it. Be quiet and sit beside me. Half the night is gone.”

“I remember reading of some pirates once, who, driving forward to destruction on fearful breakers, drank and sang and died madly. I wish the whole ship’s company would burst out in one mighty chorus now, or that we might rush together with tumultuous impulse and dance,–dance wildly into death and daylight.”

“We have nothing to do with death,” said Mr. Raleigh. “Our foe is simply time. You dance, then?”

“Oh, yes. I dance well,–like those white fluttering butterflies,–as if I were _au gre du vent_.” “That would not be dancing well.”

“It would not be dancing well to _be_ at the will of the wind, but it is perfection to appear so.”

“The dance needs the expression of the dancer’s will. It is breathing sculpture. It is mimic life beyond all other arts.”

“Then well I love to dance. And I do dance well. Wait,–you shall see.”

He detained her.

“Be still, little maid!” he said, and again drew her beside him, though she still continued standing.

At this moment the captain approached.

“What cheer?” asked Mr. Raleigh.

“No cheer,” he answered, gloomily, dinting his finger-nails into his palm. “The planks forward are already hot to the hand. I tremble at every creak of cordage, lest the deck crash in and bury us all.”

“You have made the Sandy Hook light?”

“Yes; too late to run her ashore.”

“You cannot try that at the Highlands?”

“Certain death.”

“The wind scarcely”—-

“Veered a point I am carrying all sail. But if this tooth of fire gnaws below, you will soon see the masts go by the board. And then we are lost, indeed!”

“Courage! she will certainly hold together till you can hail the pilots.”

“I think no one need tremble when he has such an instance of fearlessness before him,” replied the captain, bowing to Marguerite; and turning away, he hid his suspense and pain again under a calm countenance.

Standing all this while beside Mr. Raleigh, she had heard the whole of the conversation, and he felt the hand in his growing colder as it continued. He wondered if it were still the same excitement that sent the alternate flush and pallor up her cheek. She sat down, leaning her head back against the bulwark, as if to look at the stars, and suffering the light, fine hair to blow about her temples before the steady breeze. He bent over to look into her eyes, and found them fixed and lustreless.

“Marguerite!” he exclaimed.

She tried to speak, but the teeth seemed to hinder the escape of her words, and to break them into bits of sound; a shiver shook her from head to foot.

“I wonder if this is fear,” she succeeded in saying. “Oh, if there were somewhere to go, something to hide me! A great horror is upon me! I am afraid! _Seigneur Dieu! Mourir par le feu! Perissons alors au plus vite!_” And she shuddered, audibly.

Mr. Raleigh passed his arm about her and gathered her closer to himself. He saw at once, that, sensitive as she was to every impression, this fear was a contagious one, a mere gregarian affinity, and that she needed the preponderating warmth and strength of a protecting presence, the influence of a fuller vitality. He did not speak, but his touch must in some measure have counteracted the dread that oppressed her. She ceased trembling, but did not move.

The westering moon went to bury herself in banks of cloud; the wind increasing piped and whistled in strident threatening through the rigging; the ship vibrated to the concussive voice of the minute-gun. No murmurs but those of wind and water were heard among the throng; they drove forward in awful, pallid silence. Suddenly the shriek of one voice, but from fourscore throats, rent the agonized quiet. A red light was running along the deck, a tongue of flame lapping round the forecastle, a spire shooting aloft. Marguerite hid her face in Mr. Raleigh’s arm; a great sob seemed to go up from all the people. The captain’s voice thundered through the tumult, and instantly the mates sprang forward and the jib went crashing overboard. Mr. Raleigh tore his eyes away from the fascination of this terror, and fixed them by chance on two black specks that danced on the watery horizon. He gazed with intense vision a moment. “The tugs!” he cried. The words thrilled with hope in every dying heart; they no longer saw themselves the waiting prey of pain and death, of flames and sea. Some few leaped into the boat at the stern, lowered and cut it away; others dropped spontaneously into file, and passed the dripping buckets of sea-water, to keep, if possible, the flames in check. Mr. Raleigh and Marguerite crossed over to Ursule.

The sight of her nurse, passive in despair, restored to the girl a portion of her previous spirit. She knelt beside her, talking low and rapidly, now and then laughing, and all the time communicating nerve with her light, firm finger-touches. Except their quick and unintelligible murmurs, and the plash and hiss of water, nothing else broke the torturing hush of expectation. There was a half-hour of breathless watch ere the steam-tugs were alongside. Already the place was full of fervid torment, and they had climbed upon every point to leave below the stings of the blistering deck. None waited on the order of their going, but thronged and sprang precipitately. Ursule was at once deposited in safety. The captain moved to conduct Marguerite across, but she drew back and clung to Mr. Raleigh.

“_J’ai honte_,” she said; “_je ne bougerai pas plus tot que vous._”

The breath of the fierce flames scorched her cheek as she spoke, the wind of their roaring progress swept her hair. He lifted her over without further consultation, and still kept her in his care.

There was a strange atmosphere on board the little vessels, as they labored about and parted from the doomed Osprey. Many were subdued with awe and joy at their deliverance; others broke the tense strain of the last hours in suffocating sobs. Every throb of the panting engines they answered with waiting heart-beats, as it sent them farther from the fearful wonder, now blazing in multiplex lines of fire against the gray horizon. Mr. Raleigh gazed after it as one watches the conflagration of a home. Marguerite left her quiet weeping to gaze with him. An hour silently passed, and as the fiery phantom faded into dawn and distance she sang sweetly the first few lines of an old French hymn. Another voice took up the measure, stronger and clearer; those who knew nothing of the words caught the spirit of the tune; and no choral service ever pealed up temple-vaults with more earnest accord than that in which this chant of grateful, exultant devotion now rose from rough-throated men and weary women in the crisp air and yellowing spring-morning.

As the moment of parting approached, Marguerite stood with folded hands before Mr. Raleigh, looking sadly down the harbor.

“I regret all that,” she said,–“these days that seem years.”

“An equivocal phrase,” he replied, with a smile.

“But you know what I mean. I am going to strangers; I have been with you. I shall find no one so kind to me as you have been, Monsieur.”

“Your strangers can be much kinder to you than I have been.”

“Never! I wish they did not exist! What do I care for them? What do they care for me? They do not know me; I shall shock them. I miss you, I hate them, already. _Non! Personne ne m’aime, et je n’aime personne!_” she exclaimed, with low-toned vehemence.

“Rite,” began Mr. Raleigh.

“Rite! No one but my mother ever called me that. How did you know it?”

“I have met your mother, and I knew you a great many years ago.”

“Mr. Raleigh!” And there was the least possible shade of unconscious regret in the voice before it added,–“And what was I?”

“You were some little wood-spirit, the imp of a fallen cone, mayhap, or the embodiment of birch-tree shadows. You were a soiled and naughty little beauty, not so different from your present self, and who kissed me on the lips.” “And did you refuse to take the kiss?”

He laughed.

“You were a child then,” he said. “And I was not”—-

“Was not?”—-

Here the boat swung round at her moorings, and the shock prevented Mr. Raleigh’s finishing his sentence.

“Ursule is with us, or on the other one?” she asked.

“With us.”

“That is fortunate. She is all I have remaining, by which to prove my identity.”

“As if there could be two such maidens in the world!”

Marguerite left him, a moment, to give Captain Tarbell her address, and returning, they were shortly afterward seated side by side in a coach, Capua and Ursule following in another. As they stopped at the destined door, Mr. Raleigh alighted and extended his hand. She lingered a moment ere taking it,–not to say adieu, nor to offer him cheek or lip again.

“_Que je te remercie!_” she murmured, lifting her eyes to his. “_Que je te trouve bon!_” and sprang before him up the steps.

He heard her father meet her in the hall; Ursule had already joined them; he reentered the coach and rolled rapidly beyond recall.

The burning of the Osprey did not concern Mr. Raleigh’s business-relations. Carrying his papers about him, he had personally lost thereby nothing of consequence. He refreshed himself, and proceeded at once to the transactions awaiting him. In a brief time he found that affairs wore a different aspect from that for which he had been instructed, and letters from the house had already arrived, by the overland route, which required mutual reply and delay before he could take further steps; so that Mr. Raleigh found himself with some months of idleness upon his hands, in a land with not a friend. There lay a little scented billet, among the documents on his table, that had at first escaped his attention; he took it up wonderingly, and broke the seal. It was from his Cousin Kate, and had been a few days before him. Mrs. McLean had heard of his expected arrival, it said, and begged him, if he had any time to spare, to spend it with her in his old home by the lake, whither every summer they had resorted to meditate on the virtues of the departed. There was added, in a different hand, whose delicate and pointed characters seemed singularly familiar,–

“Come o’er the stream, Charlie, dear Charlie, brave Charlie!

“Come o’er the stream, Charlie, and dine wi’ McLean!”

Mr. Raleigh looked at the matter a few moments; he did not think it best to remain long in the city; he would be glad to know if sight of the old scenes could renew a throb. He answered his letters, replenished his wardrobe, and took, that same day, the last train for the North. At noon of the second day thereafter he found Mr. McLean’s coach, with that worthy gentleman in person, awaiting him, and he stepped out, when it paused at the foot of his former garden, with a strange sense of the world as an old story, a twice-told tale, a maze of error.

Mrs. McLean came running down to meet him,–a face less round and rosy than once, as the need of pink cap-ribbons testified, but smiling and bright as youth.

“The same little Kate,” said Mr. Raleigh, after the first greeting, putting his hands on her shoulders and smiling down at her benevolently.

“Not quite the same Roger, though,” said she, shaking her head. “I expected this stain on your skin; but, dear me! your eyes look as if you had not a friend in the world.”

“How can they look so, when you give me such a welcome?”

“Dear old Roger, you _are_ just the same,” said she, bestowing a little caress upon his sleeve. “And if you remember the summer before you went away, you will not find that pleasant company so very much changed either.” “I do not expect to find them at all.”

“Oh, then they will find you; because they are all here,–at least the principals; some with different names, and some, like myself, with duplicates,”–as a shier Kate came down toward them, dragging a brother and sister by the hand, and shaking chestnut curls over rosy blushes.

After making acquaintance with the new cousins, Mr. Raleigh turned again to Mrs. McLean.

“And who are there here?” he asked.

“There is Mrs. Purcell,–you remember Helen Heath? Poor Mrs. Purcell, whom you knew, died, and her slippers fitted Helen. She chaperons Mary, who is single and speechless yet; and Captain, now Colonel, Purcell makes a very good silent partner. He is hunting in the West, on furlough; she is here alone. There is Mrs. Heath,–you never have forgotten her?”

“Not I.”

“There is”——

“And how came you all in the country so early in the season,–anybody with your devotion to company?”

“To be made April fools, John says.”

“Why, the willows are not yet so yellow as they will be.”

“I know it. But we had the most fatiguing winter; and Mrs. Laudersdale and I agreed, that, the moment the snow was off the ground up here, we would fly away and be at rest.”

“Mrs. Laudersdale? Can she come here?”

“Goodness! Why not? The last few summers we have always spent together.”

“She is with you now, then?”

“Oh, yes. She is the least changed of all. I didn’t mean to tell, but keep her as a surprise. Of course, you will be a surprise to everybody.–There, run along, children; we’ll follow.–Yes, won’t it be delightful, Roger? We can all play at youth again.”

“Like skeletons in some Dance of Death!” he exclaimed. “We shall be hideous in each other’s sight.”

“McLean, I am a bride,” said his wife, not heeding the late misanthropy; “Helen is a girl; the ghost of the prior Mrs. Purcell shall be _rediviva_; and Katy there”——

“Wait a bit, Kate,” said her cousin.

“Before you have shuffled off mortality for the whole party, sit down under this hedge,–here is an opportune bench,–and give me accounts from the day of my departure.”

“Dear me, Roger, as if that were possible! The ocean in a tea-cup? Let me see,–you had a flirtation with Helen that summer, didn’t you? Well, she spent the next winter at the Fort with the Purcells. It was odd to miss both her and Mrs. Laudersdale from society at once. Mrs. Laudersdale was ill; I don’t know exactly what the trouble was. You know she had been in such an unusual state of exhilaration all that summer; and as soon as she left New Hampshire and began the old city-life, she became oppressed with a speechless melancholy, I believe, so that the doctors foreboded insanity. She expressed great disinclination to follow their advice, and her husband finally banished them all. It was a great care to him; he altered much. McLean surmised that she didn’t like to see him, while she was in this state; for, though he used to surround her with every luxury, and was always hunting out new appliances, and raising the heavens for a trifle, he kept himself carefully out of her sight during the greater part of the winter. I don’t know whether she became insufferably lonely, or whether the melancholy wore off, or she conquered it, and decided that it was not right to go crazy for nothing, or what happened. But one cold March evening he set out for his home, dreary, as usual, he thought; and he found the fire blazing and reddening the ceiling and curtains, the room all aglow with rich shadows, and his wife awaiting him, in full toilet, just as superb as you will see her tonight, just as sweet and cold and impassible and impenetrable. At least,” continued Mrs. McLean, taking breath, “I have manufactured this little romance out of odds and ends that McLean has now and then reported from his conversation. I dare say there isn’t a bit of it true, for Mr. Laudersdale isn’t a man to publish his affairs; but _I_ believe it. One thing is certain: Mrs. Laudersdale withdrew from society one autumn and returned one spring, and has queened it ever since.”

“Is Mr. Laudersdale with you?”

“No. But he will come with their daughter shortly.”

“And with what do you all occupy yourselves, pray?”

“Oh, with trifles and tea, as you would suppose us to do. Mrs. Purcell gossips and lounges, as if she were playing with the world for spectator. Mrs. Laudersdale lounges, and attacks things with her finger-ends, as if she were longing to remould them. Mrs. McLean gossips and scolds, as if it depended on her to keep the world in order.”

“Are you going to keep me under the hedge all night?”

“This is pretty well! Hush! Who is that?”

As Mrs. McLean spoke, a figure issued from the tall larches on the left, and crossed the grass in front of them,–a woman, something less tall than a gypsy queen might be, the round outlines of her form rich and regular, with a certain firm luxuriance, still wrapped in a morning-robe of palm-spread cashmere. In her hand she carried various vines and lichens that had maintained their orange-tawny stains under the winter’s snow, and the black hair that was folded closely over forehead and temple was crowned with bent sprays of the scarlet maple-blossom. As vivid a hue dyed her cheek through warm walking, and with a smile of unconscious content she passed quickly up the slope and disappeared within the doorway. She impressed the senses of the beholder like some ripe and luscious fruit, a growth of sunshine and summer.

“Well,” said Mrs. McLean, drawing breath again, “who is it?”

“Really, I cannot tell,” replied Mr. Raleigh.

“Nor guess?”

“And that I dare not.”

“Must I tell you?”

“Was it Mrs. Laudersdale?”

“And shouldn’t you have known her?”

“Scarcely.”

“Mercy! Then how did you know me? She is unaltered.”

“If that is Mrs. Purcell, at the window, she does not recognize me, you see; neither did —–. Both she and yourself are nearly the same; one could not fail to know either of you; but of the Mrs. Laudersdale of thirteen years ago there remains hardly a vestige.”

If Mrs. McLean, at this testimony, indulged in that little inward satisfaction which the most generous woman may feel, when told that her color wears better than the color of her dearest friend, it must have been quickly quenched by the succeeding sentence.

“Yes, she is certainly more beautiful than I ever dreamed of a woman’s being. If she continues, I do not know what perfect thing she will become. She is too exquisite for common use. I wonder her husband is not jealous of every mote in the air, of rain and wind, of every day that passes over her head,–since each must now bear some charm from her in its flight.”

Mr. Raleigh was talking to Mrs. McLean as one frequently reposes confidence in a person when quite sure that he will not understand a word you say.

An hour afterward, Mrs. Purcell joined Mrs. McLean.

“So that is Mr. Raleigh, is it?” she said. “He looks as if he had made the acquaintance of Siva the Destroyer. There’s nothing left of him. Is he taller, or thinner, or graver, or darker, or what? My dear Kate, your cousin, that promised to be such a hero, has become a mere man-of-business. Did you ever burn firecrackers? You have probably found some that just fizzed out, then.” And Mrs. Purcell took an attitude.

“Roger is a much finer man than he was, I think,–so far as I could judge in the short time we have seen each other,” replied Mrs. McLean, with spirit.

“Do you know,” continued Mrs. Purcell, “what makes the Laudersdale so gay? No? She has a letter from her lord, and he brings you that little Rite next week. I must send for the Colonel to see such patterns of conjugal felicity as you and she. Ah, there is the tea-bell!”

Mr. Raleigh was standing with one hand on the back of his chair, when Mrs. Laudersdale entered. The cheek had resumed its usual pallor, and she was in her customary colors of black and gold. She carried a curiously cut crystal glass, which she placed on the sideboard, and then moved toward her chair. Her eye rested casually for a moment on Mr. Raleigh, as she crossed the threshold, and then returned with a species of calm curiosity.

“Mrs. Laudersdale has forgotten me?” he asked, with a bow. His voice, not susceptible of change in its tone of Southern sweetness, identified him.

“Not at all,” she replied, moving toward him, and offering him her hand quietly. “I am happy at meeting Mr. Raleigh again.” And she took her seat.

There was something in her grasp that relieved him. It was neither studiedly cold, nor absurdly brief, nor traitorously tremulous. It was simply and forgetfully indifferent. Mr. Raleigh surveyed her with interest during the light table-talk. He had been possessed with a restless wish to see her once more, to ascertain if she had yet any fraction of her old power over him; he had all the more determinedly banished himself from the city,–to find her in the country. Now he sought for some trace of what had formerly aroused his heart. He rose from table convinced that the woman whom he once loved with the whole fervor of youth and strength and buoyant life was no more, that she did not exist, and that Mr. Raleigh might experience a new passion, but his old one was as dead as the ashes that cover the Five Cities of the Plain. He wondered how it might be with her. For a moment he cursed his inconstancy; then he feared lest she were of larger heart and firmer resolve than he,–lest her love had been less light than his; he could scarcely feel himself secure of freedom,–he must watch. And then stole in a deeper sense of loneliness than exile and foreign tongues had taught him,–the knowledge of being single and solitary in the world, not only for life, but for eternity.

The evening was passed in the recitation of affairs by himself and his cousins alone together, and until a week completed its tale of dawns and sunsets there was the same diurnal recurrence of question and answer. One day, as the afternoon was paling, Rite came.

Mr. Raleigh had fallen asleep on the vine-hidden seat outside the bay-window, and was awakened, certainly not by Mrs. Laudersdale’s velvets trailing over the drawing-room carpet. She was just entering, slow-paced, though in haste. She held out both of her beautiful arms. A little form of airy lightness, a very snow-wreath, blew into them.

“_O ma maman! Est ce que c’est toi_,” it cried. “_O comme tu es douce! Si belle, si molle, si chere!_” And the fair head was lying beneath the dark one, the face hidden in the bent and stately neck.

Mr. Raleigh left his seat, unseen, and betook himself to another abode. As he passed the drawing-room door, on his return, he saw the mother lying on a lounge, with the slight form nestled beside her, playing with it as some tame leopardess might play with her silky whelp. It was almost the only portion of the maternal nature developed within her.

It seemed as if the tea-hour were a fated one. Mr. Raleigh had been out on the water and was late. As he entered, Rite sprang up, half-overturning her chair, and ran to clasp his hand.

“I did not know that you and Mr. Raleigh were acquainted,” said Mrs. McLean.

“Oh, Madam, Mr. Raleigh and I had the pleasure of being shipwrecked together,” was the reply; and except that Mrs. Laudersdale required another napkin where her cup had spilled, all went on smoothly.

Mrs. Laudersdale took Marguerite entirely to herself for a while. She seemed, at first, to be like some one suddenly possessed of a new sense, and who did not know in the least what to do with it; but custom and familiarity destroyed this sentiment. She did not appear to entertain a doubt of her child’s natural affection, but she had care to fortify it by the exertion of every charm she possessed. From the presence of dangerous rivals in the house, an element of determination blended with her manner, and she moved with a certain conscious power, as if wonderful energies were but half-latent with her, as if there were kingdoms to conquer and crowns to win, and she the destined instrument You would have selected her, at this time of her lavish devotion to Marguerite, as the one woman of complete capability, of practical effective force, and have declared that there was nothing beyond her strength. The relation between herself and her child was certainly as peculiar as anything else about them; the disparity of age seemed so slight that they appeared like sisters, full of mutual trust, the younger leaning on the elder for support in the most trivial affairs. They walked through the woods together, learned again its glades and coverts, searched its early treasure of blossoms; they went out on the lake and spent long April afternoons together, floating about cove and inlet of island-shores; they returned with innocent gayety to that house which once the mother, in her moment of passion, had fancied to be a possible heaven of delight, and which, since, she had found to be a very indifferent limbo. For, after all, we derive as much happiness from human beings as from Nature, and it was a tie of placid affection that bound her to the McLeans, not of sympathetic union, and her husband was careful never to oppress her with too much of his society. Whether this woman, who had lived a life of such wordless emotion, who had never bestowed a confidence, suddenly blossomed like a rose and took the little new-comer into the gold-dust and fragrance of her heart, or whether there was always between them the thin impalpable division that estranged the past from the present, there was nothing to tell; it seemed, nevertheless, as if they could have no closer bond, had they read each other’s thoughts from birth.

That this assumption of Marguerite could not continue exclusive Mr. Raleigh found, when now and then joined in his walks by an airy figure flitting forward at his side: now and then; since Mrs. Laudersdale, without knowing how to prevent, had manifested an uneasiness at every such rencontre;–and that it could not endure forever, another gentleman, without so much reason, congratulated himself,–Mr. Frederic Heath, the confidential clerk of Day, Knight, and Company,–a rather supercilious specimen, quite faultlessly got up, who had accompanied her from New York at her father’s request, and who already betrayed every symptom of the suitor. Meanwhile, Mrs. McLean’s little women clamorously demanded and obtained a share of her attention,–although Capua and Ursule, with their dark skins, brilliant dyes, and equivocal dialects, were creatures of a more absorbing interest.

One afternoon, Marguerite came into the drawing-room by one door, as Mr. Raleigh entered by another; her mother was sitting near the window, and other members of the family were in the vicinity, having clustered preparatory to the tea-bell.

Marguerite had twisted tassels of the willow-catkins in her hair, drooping things, in character with her wavy grace, and that sprinkled her with their fragrant yellow powder, the very breath of spring; and in one hand she had imprisoned a premature lace-winged fly, a fairy little savage, in its sheaths of cobweb and emerald, and with its jewel eyes.

“Dear!” said Mrs. Purcell, gathering her array more closely about her. “How do you dare touch such a venomous sprite?”

“As if you had an insect at the North with a sting!” replied Marguerite, suffering it, a little maliciously, to escape in the lady’s face, and following the flight with a laugh of childlike glee.

“Here are your snowflakes on stems, mamma,” she continued, dropping anemones over her mother’s hands, one by one;–“that is what Mr. Raleigh calls them. When may I see the snow? You shall wrap me in eider, that I may be like all the boughs and branches. How buoyant the earth must be, when every twig becomes a feather!” And she moved toward Mr. Raleigh, singing, “Oh, would I had wings like a dove!”

“And here are those which, if not daffodils, yet

“‘Come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty,'”

he said, giving her a basket of hepaticas and winter-green.

Marguerite danced away with the purple trophy, and, emptying a carafe into a dish of moss that stood near, took them to Mrs. Laudersdale, and, sitting on the footstool, began to rearrange them. It was curious to see, that, while Mrs. Laudersdale lifted each blossom and let the stem lie across her hand, she suffered it to fall into the place designated for it by Marguerite’s fingers, that sparkled in the mosaic till double wreaths of gold-threaded purple rose from the bed of vivid moss and melted into a fringe of the starry spires of winter-green.

“Is it not sweet?” said she then, bending over it.

“They have no scent,” said her mother.

“Oh, yes, indeed! the very finest, the most delicate, a kind of aerial perfume; they must of course alchemize the air into which they waste their fibres with some sweetness.”

“A smell of earth fresh from ‘wholesome drench of April rains,'” said Mr. Raleigh, taking the dish of white porcelain between his brown, slender hands. “An immature scent, just such an innocent breath as should precede the epigea, that spicy, exhaustive wealth of savor, that complete maturity of odor, marriage of daphne and linnaea. The charm of these first bidders for the year’s favor is neither in the ethereal texture, the depth or delicacy of tint, nor the large-lobed, blood-stained, ancient leaves. This imponderable soul gives them such a helpless air of babyhood.”

“Is fragrance the flower’s soul?” asked Marguerite. “Then anemones are not divinely gifted. And yet you said, the other day, that to paint my portrait would be to paint an anemone.”

“A satisfactory specimen in the family-gallery,” said Mrs. Purcell.

“A flaw in the indictment!” replied Mr. Raleigh. “I am not one of those who paint the lily.”

“Though you’ve certainly added a perfume to the violet,” remarked Mr. Frederic Heath, with that sweetly lingering accent familiarly called the drawl, as he looked at the hepaticas.

“I don’t think it very complimentary, at any rate,” continued Marguerite. “They are not lovely after bloom,–only the little pink-streaked, budded bells, that hang so demurely. _Oui, da!_ I have exchanged great queen magnolias for rues; what will you give me for pomegranates and oleanders?”

“Are the old oleanders in the garden yet?” asked Mrs. Laudersdale.

“Not the very same. The hurricane destroyed those, years ago; these are others, grand and rosy as sunrise sometimes.”

“It was my Aunt Susanne who planted those, I have heard.”

“And it was your daughter Rite who planted these.”

“She buried a little box of old keepsakes at its foot, after her brother had examined them,–a ring or two, a coin from which she broke and kept one half”——

“Oh, yes! we found the little box, found it when Mr. Heath was in Martinique, all rusted and moulded and falling apart, and he wears that half of the coin on his watch-chain. See!”

Mrs. Laudersdale glanced up indifferently, but Mrs. Purcell sprang from her elegant lounging and bent to look at her brother’s chain.

“How odd that I never noticed it, Fred!” she exclaimed. “And how odd that I should wear the same!” And, shaking her _chatelaine_, she detached a similar affair.

They were placed side by side in Mr. Raleigh’s hand; they matched entirely, and, so united, they formed a singular French coin of value and antiquity, the missing figures on one segment supplied by the other, the embossed profile continued and lost on each, the scroll begun by this and ended by that; they were plainly severed portions of the same piece.

“And this was buried by your Aunt Susanne Le Blanc?” asked Mrs. Purcell, turning to Mrs. Laudersdale again, with a flush on her cheek.

“So I presume.”

“Strange! And this was given to mamma by her mother, whose maiden name was Susan White. There’s some _diablerie_ about it.”

“Oh, that is a part of the ceremony of money-hiding,” said Mr. Raleigh. “Kidd always buried a little imp with his pots of gold, you know, to work deceitful charms on the finder.”

“Did he?” said Marguerite, earnestly.

They all laughed thereat, and went in to tea.

[To be continued.]

EPITHALAMIA.

I.

THE WEDDING.

O Love! the flowers are blowing in park and field, With love their bursting hearts are all revealed. So come to me, and all thy fragrance yield!

O Love! the sun is sinking in the west, And sequent stars all sentinel his rest. So sleep, while angels watch, upon my breast!

O Love! the flooded moon is at its height, And trances sea and land with tranquil light. So shine, and gild with beauty all my night!

O Love! the ocean floods the crooked shore, Till sighing beaches give their moaning o’er. So, Love, o’erflow me, till I sigh no more!

II.

THE GOLDEN WEDDING.

O wife! the fragrant Mayflower now appears, Fresh as the Pilgrims saw it through their tears. So blows our love through all these changing years.

O wife! the sun is rising in the east, Nor tires to shine, while ages have increased. So shines our love, and fills my happy breast

O wife! on yonder beach the ocean sings, As when it bore the Mayflower’s drooping wings. So in my heart our early love-song rings.

O wife! the moon and stars slide down the west To make in fresher skies their happy quest. So, Love, once more we’ll wed among the blest!

ARTHUR HALLAM.

We were standing in the old English church at Clevedon on a summer afternoon. And here, said my companion, pausing in the chancel, sleeps Arthur Hallam, the friend of Alfred Tennyson, and the subject of “In Memoriam.”

“‘Tis well, ’tis something, we may stand Where he in English earth is laid.”

His burial-place is on a hill overhanging the Bristol Channel, a spot selected by his father as a fit resting-place for his beloved boy. And so

“They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave.”

Dying at twenty-two, the hope and pride of all who knew him, “remarkable for the early splendor of his genius,” the career of this young man concentres the interest of more than his native country. Tennyson has laid upon his early grave a poem which will never let his ashes be forgotten, or his memory fade like that of common clay. What Southey so felicitously says of Kirke White applies most eloquently to young Hallam:–“Just at that age when the painter would have wished to fix his likeness and the lover of poetry would delight to contemplate him, in the fair morning of his virtues, the full spring-blossom of his hopes,– just at that age hath death set the seal of eternity upon him, and the beautiful hath been made permanent.”

Arthur Henry Hallam was born in Bedford Place, London, on the 1st of February, 1811. The eldest son of Henry Hallam, the eminent historian and critic, his earliest years had every advantage which culture and moral excellence could bring to his education. His father has feelingly commemorated his boyish virtues and talents by recording his “peculiar clearness of perception, his facility of acquiring knowledge, and, above all, an undeviating sweetness of disposition, and adherence to his sense of what was right and becoming.” From that tearful record, not publicly circulated, our recital is partly gathered. Companions of his childhood have often told us well-remembered incidents of his life, and this is the too brief story of his earthly career.

When about eight years of age, Arthur resided some time in Germany and Switzerland, with his father and mother. He had already become familiar with the French language, and a year later he read Latin with some facility. Although the father judiciously studied to repress his son’s marked precocity of talent, Arthur wrote about this time several plays in prose and in rhyme,–compositions which were never exhibited, however, beyond the family-circle.

At ten years of age he became a pupil at a school in Putney, under the tuition of an excellent clergyman, where he continued two years. He then took a short tour on the Continent, and, returning, went to Eton, where he studied nearly five years. While at Eton, he was reckoned, according to the usual test at that place, not a first-rate Latin student, for his mind had a predominant bias toward English literature, and there he lingered among the exhaustless fountains of the earlier poetry of his native tongue. One who knew him well in those years has described him to us as a sweet-voiced lad, moving about the pleasant playing-fields of Eton with a thoughtful eye and a most kindly expression. Afterwards, as Tennyson, singing to the witch-elms and the towering sycamore, paints him, he mixed in all the simple sports, and loved to gather a happy group about him, as he lay on the grass and discussed grave questions of state. And again,–

“Thy converse drew us with delight, The men of rathe and riper years:
The feeble soul, a haunt of fears, Forgot his weakness in thy sight.”

His taste for philosophical poetry increased with his years, and Wordsworth and Shelley became his prime favorites. His contributions to the “Eton Miscellany” were various, sometimes in prose and now and then in verse. A poet by nature, he could not resist the Muse’s influence, and he expressed a genuine emotion, oftentimes elegantly, and never without a meaning.

In the summer of 1827 he left Eton, and travelled with his parents eight months in Italy. And now began that life of thought and feeling so conspicuous to the end of his too brief career. Among the Alps his whole soul took the impress of those early introductions to what is most glorious and beautiful in Nature. After passing the mountains, Italian literature claimed his attention, and he entered upon its study with all the ardor of a young and earnest student. An Abbate who recognized his genius encouraged him with his assistance in the difficult art of Italian versification, and, after a very brief stay in Italy, at the age of seventeen, he wrote several sonnets which attracted considerable attention among scholars. Very soon after acquiring the Italian language, the great Florentine poet opened to him his mystic visions. Dante became his worship, and his own spirit responded to that of the author of the “Divina Commedia.”

His growing taste led him to admire deeply all that is noble in Art, and he soon prized with enthusiasm the great pictures of the Venetian, the Tuscan, and the Roman schools. “His eyes,” says his father, “were fixed on the best pictures with silent, intense delight.” One can imagine him at this period wandering with all the ardor of youthful passion through the great galleries, not with the stolid stony gaze of a coldblooded critic, but with that unmixed enthusiasm which so well becomes the unwearied traveller in his buoyant days of experience among the unveiled glories of genius now first revealed to his astonished vision.

He returned home in 1828, and went to reside at Cambridge, having been entered, before his departure for the Continent, at Trinity College. It is said that he cared little for academical reputation, and in the severe scrutiny of examination he did not appear as a competitor for accurate mathematical demonstrations. He knew better than those about him where his treasures lay,–and to some he may have seemed a dreamer, to others an indifferent student, perhaps. His aims were higher than the tutor’s black-board, and his life-thoughts ran counter to the usual college-routine. Disordered health soon began to appear, and a too rapid determination of blood to the brain often deprived him of the power of much mental labor. At Florence he had been seized with a slight attack of the same nature, and there was always a tendency to derangement of the vital functions. Irregularity of circulation occasioned sometimes a morbid depression of spirits, and his friends anxiously watched for symptoms of returning health. In his third Cambridge year he grew better, and all who knew and loved him rejoiced in his apparent recovery.

About this time, some of his poetical pieces were printed, but withheld from publication. It was the original intention for the two friends, Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, to publish together; but the idea was abandoned. Such lines as these the young poet addressed to the man who was afterwards to lend interest and immortality to the story of his early loss:–

“Alfred, I would that you beheld me now, Sitting beneath a mossy, ivied wall
On a quaint bench, which to that structure old Winds an accordant curve. Above my head Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves, Seeming received into the blue expanse That vaults this summer noon. Before me lies A lawn of English verdure, smooth, and bright, Mottled with fainter hues of early hay, Whose fragrance, blended with the rose-perfume From that white flowering bush, invites my sense To a delicious madness,–and faint thoughts Of childish years are borne into my brain By unforgotten ardors waking now.
Beyond, a gentle slope leads into shade Of mighty trees, to bend whose eminent crown Is the prime labor of the pettish winds, That now in lighter mood are twirling leaves Over my feet, or hurrying butterflies, And the gay humming things that summer loves, Through the warm air, or altering the bound Where yon elm-shadows in majestic line Divide dominion with the abundant light.”

And this fine descriptive passage was also written at this period of his life:–

“The garden trees are busy with the shower That fell ere sunset: now methinks they talk, Lowly and sweetly, as befits the hour, One to another down the grassy walk. Hark! the laburnum from his opening flower This cheery creeper greets in whisper light, While the grim fir, rejoicing in the night, Hoarse mutters to the murmuring sycamore. What shall I deem their converse? Would they hail The wild gray light that fronts yon massive cloud, Or the half-bow rising like pillared fire? Or are they sighing faintly for desire That with May dawn their leaves may be o’erflowed, And dews about their feet may never fail?”

The first college prize for English declamation was awarded to him this year; and his exercise, “The Conduct of the Independent Party during the Civil War,” greatly improved his standing at the University. Other honors quickly followed his successful essay, and he was chosen to deliver an oration in the College Chapel just before the Christmas vacation. This was in the year 1831. He selected as his subject the one eminently congenial to his thought; and his theme, “The Influence of Italian upon English Literature,” was admirably treated. The oration is before us as we write, and we turn the pages with a fond and loving eye. We remember, as we read, his brief sojourn,–that he died “in the sweet hour of prime,”–and we are astonished at the eloquent wisdom displayed by a lad of twenty summers. “I cannot help considering,” he says, “the sonnets of Shakspeare as a sort of homage to the Genius of Christian Europe, necessarily exacted, although voluntarily paid, before he was allowed to take in hand the sceptre of his endless dominion.” And he ends his charming disquisition in these words;–“An English mind that has drunk deep at the sources of Southern inspiration, and especially that is imbued with the spirit of the mighty Florentine, will be conscious of a perpetual freshness and quiet beauty resting on his imagination and spreading gently over his affections, until, by the blessing of Heaven, it may be absorbed without loss in the pure inner light of which that voice has spoken, as no other can,–

“‘Light intellectual, yet full of love, Love of true beauty, therefore full of joy, Joy, every other sweetness far above.'”

It was young Hallam’s privilege to be among Coleridge’s favorites, and in one of his poems Arthur alludes to him as a man in whose face “every line wore the pale cast of thought.” His conversations with “the old man eloquent” gave him intense delight, and he often alluded to the wonderful talks he had enjoyed with the great dreamer, whose magical richness of illustration took him captive for the time being.

At Abbotsford he became known to Sir Walter Scott, and Lockhart thus chronicles his visit:–

“Among a few other friends from a distance, Sir Walter received this summer [1829] a short visit from Mr. Hallam, and made in his company several of the little excursions which had in former days been of constant recurrence. Mr. Hallam had with him his son, Arthur, a young gentleman of extraordinary abilities, and as modest as able, who not long afterwards was cut off in the very bloom of opening life and genius. His beautiful verses, ‘On Melrose seen in Company with Scott,’ have since been often printed.”

“I lived an hour in fair Melrose:
It was not when ‘the pale moonlight’ Its magnifying charm bestows;
Yet deem I that I ‘viewed it right.’ The wind-swept shadows fast careered, Like living things that joyed or feared, Adown the sunny Eildon Hill,
And the sweet winding Tweed the distance crowned well.

“I inly laughed to see that scene
Wear such a countenance of youth, Though many an age those hills were green, And yonder river glided smooth,
Ere in these now disjointed walls The Mother Church held festivals,
And full-voiced anthemings the while Swelled from the choir, and lingered down the echoing aisle.

“I coveted that Abbey’s doom:
For if, I thought, the early flowers Of our affection may not bloom,
Like those green hills, through countless hours, Grant me at least a tardy waning
Some pleasure still in age’s paining; Though lines and forms must fade away, Still may old Beauty share the empire of Decay!

“But looking toward the grassy mound Where calm the Douglas chieftains lie, Who, living, quiet never found,
I straightway learnt a lesson high: And well I knew that thoughtful mien
Of him whose early lyre had thrown Over these mouldering walls the magic of its tone.

“Then ceased I from my envying state, And knew that aweless intellect
Hath power upon the ways of Fate, And works through time and space uncheck’d. That minstrel of old Chivalry
In the cold grave must come to be; But his transmitted thoughts have part In the collective mind, and never shall depart.

“It was a comfort, too, to see
Those dogs that from him ne’er would rove, And always eyed him reverently,
With glances of depending love. They know not of that eminence
Which marks him to my reasoning sense; They know but that he is a man,
And still to them is kind, and glads them all he can.

“And hence their quiet looks confiding, Hence grateful instincts seated deep, By whose strong bond, were ill betiding, They’d risk their own his life to keep. What joy to watch in lower creature
Such dawning of a moral nature,
And how (the rule all things obey) They look to a higher mind to be their law and stay!”

At the University he lived a sweet and gracious life. No man had truer or fonder friends, or was more admired for his excellent accomplishments. Earnest in whatever he attempted, his enthusiasm for all that was high and holy in literature stamped his career at Trinity as one of remarkable superiority. “I have known many young men, both at Oxford and elsewhere, of whose abilities I think highly, but I never met with one whom I considered worthy of being put into competition with Arthur for a moment,” writes his early and intimate friend. “I can scarcely hope to describe the feelings with which I regarded him, much less the daily beauty of his existence, out of which they grew,” writes another of his companions. Politics, literature, philosophy he discussed with a metaphysical subtilty marvellous in one so young. The highest comprehension seemed native to his mind, so that all who came within the