Chapter XX

FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.

There were not wanting people who accused Dudley Venner of weakness and bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of opinion that the great mistake was in not "breaking her will" when she was a little child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said, but that she had been spoiled by indulgence. If they had had the charge of her, they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand of her father now; but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There are people who think that everything may be done, if the doer, be he educator or physician, be only called "in season." No doubt,—but in season would often be a hundred or two years before the child was born; and people never send so early as that.

The father of Elsie Venner knew his duties and his difficulties too well to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So soon as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life up to following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a stern and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not without force of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for himself and his family-name which belonged to his endowments and his position. Passive endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort of devotees,—persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the egotism they excommunicate in its hardly more odious forms of avarice and self-indulgence. How could he speak with the old physician and the old black woman about a sorrow and a terror which but to name was to strike dumb the lips of Consolation?

In the dawn of his manhood he had found that second consciousness for which young men and young women go about looking into each other's faces, with their sweet, artless aim playing in every feature, and making them beautiful to each other, as to all of us. He had found his other self early, before he had grown weary in the search and wasted his freshness in vain longings: the lot of many, perhaps we may say of most, who infringe the patent of our social order by intruding themselves into a life already upon half-allowance of the necessary luxuries of existence. The life he had led for a brief space was not only beautiful in outward circumstance, as old Sophy had described it to the Reverend Doctor. It was that delicious process of the tuning of two souls to each other, string by string, not without little half-pleasing discords now and then when some chord in one or the other proves to be over-strained or over-lax, but always approaching nearer and nearer to harmony, until they become at last as two instruments with a single voice. Something more than a year of this blissful doubled consciousness had passed over him when he found himself once more alone,—alone, save for the little diamond-eyed child lying in the old woman's arms, with the coral necklace round her throat and the rattle in her hand.

He would not die by his own act. It was not the way in his family. There may have been other, perhaps better reasons, but this was enough; he did not come of suicidal stock. He must live for this child's sake, at any rate; and yet,—oh, yet, who could tell with what thoughts he looked upon her? Sometimes her little features would look placid, and something like a smile would steal over them; then all his tender feelings would rush up into his eyes, and he would put his arms out to take her from the old woman,—but all at once her eyes would narrow and she would throw her head back; and a shudder would seize him as he stooped over his child,—he could not look upon her,—he could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come into his soul such frightful suggestions that he would hurry from the room lest the hinted thought should become a momentary madness and he should lift his hand against the helpless infant which owed him life.

In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward action. He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having no particular care for his life. Sometimes he would go into the accursed district where the venomous reptiles were always to be dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near with a kind of blind fury that was strange in a person of his gentle nature.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon his home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and fissures that looked ominous;—what would happen, if it broke off some time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below? He thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference, in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift and thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out in ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet he loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence. Danger is often the best counter-irritant in cases of mental suffering; he found a solace in careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination on the possibility that it might be the last for him and the home that was his.

Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from his more perilous rambles. He thought less of the danger from the great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had bitten upon for a hundred years. By an infinite effort, her father forced himself to become the companion of this child, for whom he had such a mingled feeling, but whose presence was always a trial to him and often a terror.

At a cost which no human being could estimate, he had done his duty, and in some degree reaped his reward. Elsie grew up with a kind of filial feeling for him, such as her nature was capable of. She never would obey him; that was not to be looked for. Commands, threats, punishments, were out of the question with her; the mere physical effects of crossing her will betrayed themselves in such changes of expression and color that it would have been senseless to attempt to govern her in any such way. Leaving her mainly to herself, she could be to some extent indirectly influenced,—not otherwise. She called her father "Dudley," as if he had been her brother. She ordered everybody and would be ordered by none.

Who could know all these things, except the few people of the household? What wonder, therefore, that ignorant and shallow persons laid the blame on her father of those peculiarities which were freely talked about,—of those darker tendencies which were hinted of in whispers? To all this talk, so far as it reached him, he was supremely indifferent, not only with the indifference which all gentlemen feel to the gossip of their inferiors, but with a charitable calmness which did not wonder or blame. He knew that his position was not simply a difficult, but an impossible one, and schooled himself to bear his destiny as well as he might and report himself only at Headquarters.

He had grown gentle under this discipline. His hair was just beginning to be touched with silver, and his expression was that of habitual sadness and anxiety. He had no counsellor, as we have seen, to turn to, who did not know either too much or too little. He had no heart to rest upon and into which he might unburden himself of the secrets and the sorrows that were aching in his own breast. Yet he had not allowed himself to run to waste in the long time since he was left alone to his trials and fears. He had resisted the seductions which always beset solitary men with restless brains overwrought by depressing agencies. He disguised no misery to himself with the lying delusion of wine. He sought no sleep from narcotics, though he lay with throbbing, wide-open eyeballs through all the weary hours of the night.

It was understood between Dudley Venner and old Doctor Kittredge that Elsie was a subject of occasional medical observation, on account of certain mental peculiarities which might end in a permanent affection of her reason. Beyond this nothing was said, whatever may have been in the mind of either. But Dudley Venner had studied Elsie's case in the light of all the books he could find which might do anything towards explaining it. As in all cases where men meddle with medical science for a special purpose, having no previous acquaintance with it, his imagination found what it wanted in the books he read, and adjusted it to the facts before him. So it was he came to cherish those two fancies before alluded to: that the ominous birthmark she had carried from infancy might fade and become obliterated, and that the age of complete maturity might be signalized by an entire change in her physical and mental state. He held these vague hopes as all of us nurse our only half-believed illusions. Not for the world would he have questioned his sagacious old medical friend as to the probability or possibility of their being true. We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.

In this life of comparative seclusion to which the father had doomed himself for the sake of his child, he had found time for large and varied reading. The learned Judge Thornton confessed himself surprised at the extent of Dudley Venner's information. Doctor Kittredge found that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints about the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance with the classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and calm them down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and periodicals, and gradually gained an interest in the events of the passing time. Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing to see his neighbors, nor ever churlish towards them, but on the other hand not cultivating any intimate relations with them.

He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth, indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an endurable habit.

At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were at twenty, Dudley Venner was stronger in thought and tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he counted but half his present years. He was now on the verge of that decade which marks the decline of men who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength: from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward. At the entrance of this decade his inward nature was richer and deeper than in any earlier period of his life. If he could only be summoned to action, he was capable of noble service. If his sympathies could only find an outlet, he was never so capable of love as now; for his natural affections had been gathering in the course of all these years, and the traces of that ineffaceable calamity of his life were softened and partially hidden by new growths of thought and feeling, as the wreck left by a mountain-slide is covered over by the gentle intrusion of the soft-stemmed herbs which will prepare it for the stronger vegetation that will bring it once more into harmony with the peaceful slopes around it.

Perhaps Dudley Venner had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if he had been more in society and less in his study. The indulgence with which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent. A man more in the habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a person with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy. But he was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an additional motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the routine of Elsie's life.

If Dudley Venner did not know just what he wanted at this period of his life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who thought they did know. He had been a widower long enough,—nigh twenty year, wa'n't it? He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,—there wa'n't anything to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other folks. What was the reason he didn't go abaout to taown-meetin's, 'n' Sahbath-meetin's, 'n' lyceums, 'n' school-'xaminations, 'n' s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals,—and other entertainments where the still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see if any of the mansion-house gentry were present?—Fac' was, he was livin' too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't he make up to the Jedge's daughter? She was genteel enough for him and—let's see, haow old was she? Seven-'n'-twenty,—no, six-'n'-twenty,—Born the same year we buried aour little Anny Marí.

There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But "Portia," as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not happen to awaken the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but with two or three more joints in her frame and two or three soft inflections in her voice which for some absurd reason or other drew him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets and looked into her eyes all that, he could not tell, in less time than it would have taken him to discuss the champion paper of the last Quarterly with the admirable "Portia." Heu, quanta minus! How much more was that lost image to him than all it left on earth!

The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about so much love will be made every year in a given population; but who will rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as it does, and why love is made just as it is, are equally puzzling questions.

The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his daughter than the female children born to him by the common law of life. It is not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves: before her image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has passed through fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral impulses which bandy it about through the mental spaces as a reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors. With this altered image of the woman before him his preëxisting ideal becomes blended. The object of his love is half the offspring of her legal parents and half of her lover's brain. The difference between the real and the ideal objects of love must not exceed a fixed maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite them stereoscopically into a single image, if the divergence passes certain limits. A formidable analogy, much in the nature of a proof, with very serious consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do well to remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a dangerous physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious falls.

Whether Dudley Venner would ever find a breathing image near enough to his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,—some such woman as this, if Heaven should send him such, might call him back to the world of happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again be the young lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago. He could never forget the bride of his youth, whose image, growing phantom-like with the lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream while waking and like a reality in dreams. But if it might be in God's good providence that this desolate life should come under the influence of human affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in store for him! His life had not all been buried under that narrow ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It seemed so for a while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so. His first passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or stain upon it. With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of any word or look he would have wished to forget. All those little differences, such as young married people with any individual flavor in their characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added to the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the whole harmonious movement. It was a deep wound that Fate, had inflicted on him; nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was clean, and its edge was smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in healthy natures, whatever a false sentiment may say, by the wise and beneficent law of our being. The recollection of a deep and true affection, is rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow strong upon than a poison to destroy it.

Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early bereavement. It was partly the result of the long struggle between natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary tendencies these had to overcome, on the other,—between hope and fear, so long in conflict that despair itself would have been like an anodyne, and he would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the heavy sleep of a bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart; but what power could calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose with every morning's sun and watched with every evening star,—what power save alone that of him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and leaving after him only the ashes printed with his footsteps?

* * * * *

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER.

While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new Timoleon in Sicily,—while we have been reckoning, with an interest scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good or evil that will follow from the popular decision in November, we might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a foregone conclusion.

In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office, because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a sense of responsibility,—then for the first time he becomes capable of that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy presupposes something of these results of official position in the individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the moment an integral part of the governing power.

How very far practice is from any likeness to theory a week's experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys' debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are commonly represented less by ideas than by persons, (who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas,) our politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago. If that personage, outraged in all the finer sensibilities of our common nature, by failing to get the contract for supplying the District Court-House at Skreemeropolisville City with revolvers, was led to disparage the union of these States, it is seized on as proof conclusive that the party to which he belongs are so many Cat_a_lines,—for Congress is unanimous only in misspelling the name of that oft-invoked conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms always in advance, so that we seem never to have an actual Chief Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reëlection, and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President goes out of office,—with a policeman to watch every member of the Committee. We are kept normally in that most unprofitable of predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians measure their words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary expediency,—an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.

Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial, and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was a necessary evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave; then that it was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it was a system divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned under the New. With a representation, three-fifths of it based on the assumption that negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists on our acknowledging that they are things. After compelling her Northern allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence (because it stood in the way of enslaving men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared, through the Supreme Court of the United States, that negroes are not men in the ordinary meaning of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but to find that we have eaten more than was necessary may chance to give us an indigestion. The slaveholding interest has gone on step by step, forcing concession after concession, till it needs but little to secure it forever in the political supremacy of the country. Yield to its latest demand,—let it mould the evil destiny of the Territories,—and the thing is done past recall. The next Presidential Election is to say Yes or No.

But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing moral degradation on the part of the Nonslaveholding States,—for Free States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic views of the true value and objects of society and government are professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry, if it cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right; and already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest achievement of human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed the accession of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that history is not without examples of kings who have lost their crowns through the folly and false security of their ministers. It is quite true that there is a large class of reasoners who would weigh all questions of right and wrong in the balance of trade; but—we cannot bring ourselves to believe that it is a wise political economy which makes cotton by unmaking men, or a far-seeing statesmanship which looks on an immediate money-profit as a safe equivalent for a beggared public sentiment. We think Mr. Hammond even a little premature in proclaiming the new Pretender. The election of November may prove a Culloden. Whatever its result, it is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether the American idea is to govern this continent, whether the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future, whether we are to recede from principles which eighteen Christian centuries have been slowly establishing at the cost of so many saintly lives at the stake and so many heroic ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in favor of some fancied assimilation to the household arrangements of Abraham, of which all that can be said with certainty is that they did not add to his domestic happiness.

We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for, although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The supporters of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may be very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn—a question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the other—is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the Constitution. All the other parties equally assert their loyalty to that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion. The removers of all the ancient landmarks of our policy, the violators of thrice-pledged faith, the planners of new treachery to established compromise, all take refuge in the Constitution,—

"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie, Secure against the hue and cry."

In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any logical sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the Constitution, Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our statesmen could be "happy with either, were t'other dear charmer away." Mr. Douglas confides the secret of his passion to the unloquacious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief complaint made against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents is that he is too Constitutional.

Meanwhile the only point in which voters are interested is,—What do they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority of a certain exceptional species of property over all others, nay, over man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing it, means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect,—that there is no higher law than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not merely the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have convenient phrases to be juggled with before election, and which mean one thing or another, or neither one thing nor another, as a particular exigency may seem to require; but since both claim the regular Democratic nomination, we have little difficulty in divining what their course would be after the fourth of March, if they should chance to be elected. We know too well what regular Democracy is, to like either of the two faces which each shows by turns under the same hood. Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's story of the Parisian showman, who in 1789 exhibited the royal Bengal tiger under the new character of national, as more in harmony with the changed order of things. Could the animal have lived till 1848, he would probably have found himself offered to the discriminating public as the democratic and social ornament of the jungle. The Pro-slavery party of this country seeks the popular favor under even more frequent and incongruous aliases; it is now national, now conservative, now constitutional; here it represents Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the Territories; but, under whatever name, its nature remains unchanged, and its instincts are none the less predatory and destructive. Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with sufficient precision in the platform adopted by the Chicago Convention; but what are we to make of Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs of the stock in trade of two defunct parties, the Whig and Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them? or are they only like the inconsolable widows of Père la Chaise, who, with an eye to former customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's gravestone to advertise that they still carry on the business at the old stand? Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us only a string of reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and Mr. Bell preserves a silence singularly at variance with his patronymic. The only public demonstration of principle that we have seen is an emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a man to lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as it moves along. Are all the figures in this melancholy procession equally emblematic? If so, which of the two candidates is typified in the unfortunate who leads the horse?—for we believe the only hope of the party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the House of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate should win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading name on the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the hollowness of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr. Lincoln's election, whose changes are so loudly rung,—its noise having once or twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people found out what it really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended to convey, we find in it a similitude that is not without significance as regards the professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who operates upon it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular motion that befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative bells. He does his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with every jolt on the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the sonorous pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed that the Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very much doubt whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the Constitution would practically be nothing else than his interpretation of it) would keep the same measured tones that are so easy on the smooth path of candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State over some of the rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and some of those passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new countries, are rather corduroy in character.

But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that its prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican candidate. To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coalesce, here with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge faction of that very Democratic party of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption, and dangerous limberness of principle they have been the lifelong denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is perfectly plain that we have only two parties in the field: those who favor the extension of slavery, and those who oppose it,—in other words, a Destructive and a Conservative party.

We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr. Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are promoted, not by any unthinking hostility to the rights of property, but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is Privilege, and not Property, that is perplexed with fear of change. The conservative effect of ownership operates with as much force on the man with a hundred dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor with a million in the funds. During the Roman Revolution of '48, the beggars who had funded their gains were among the stanchest reactionaries, and left Rome with the nobility. No question of the abstract right of property has ever entered directly into our politics, or ever will,—the point at issue being, whether a certain exceptional kind of property, already privileged beyond all others, shall be entitled to still further privileges at the expense of every other kind. The extension of slavery over new territory means just this,—that this one kind of property, not recognized as such by the Constitution, or it would never have been allowed to enter into the basis of representation, shall control the foreign and domestic policy of the Republic.

A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a horse or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind of property is,—how shall we say it so as not to violate our Constitutional obligations?—that it is exceptional. When it leaves Virginia, it is a thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man, speaks human language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we all acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left behind,—in short, hath the same organs and dimensions that a Christian hath, and is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians, except, perhaps, by a simpler and more earnest faith. There are people at the North who believe, that, beside meum and tuum, there is also such a thing as suum,—who are old-fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their feelings touched by these things, to think that human nature is older and more sacred than any claim of property whatever, and that it has rights at least as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of our Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes it harder to recover a fugitive chattel; but the existence of human nature in a man here and there is surely one of those accidents to be counted on at least as often as fire, shipwreck, or the cattle-disease; and the man who chooses to put his money into these images of his Maker cut in ebony should be content to take the incident risks along with the advantages. We should be very sorry to deem this risk capable of diminution; for we think that the claims of a common manhood upon us should be at least as strong as those of Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man turns away should find in the larger charity of the law of God and Nature a readier welcome and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to think the negro a man, and on Southern evidence, too, as long as he is counted in the population represented on the floor of Congress,—for three-fifths of perfect manhood would be a high average even among white men; as long as he is hanged or worse, as an example and terror to others,—for we do not punish one animal for the moral improvement of the rest; as long as he is considered capable of religious instruction,—for we fancy the gorillas would make short work with a missionary; as long as there are fears of insurrection,—for we never heard of a combined effort at revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do not see how the particular right of whose infringement we hear so much is to be made safer by the election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or Mr. Douglas,—there being quite as little chance that any of them would abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The same generous instinct that leads some among us to sympathize with the sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others to take part with the rescued man.

But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high time that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States, and of the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to be respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the safety of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice, freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting with the current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow worse?

To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with the fever and ague on him to stop shaking and he will be cured. The discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what? The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of free institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed. The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when the encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The real avalanche to be dreaded, are we to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility of animals and the passions of men, which is one of the fatal necessities of slavery, or from the gradually increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding population of the Slave States of the true cause of their material impoverishment and political inferiority? From one or the other source its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either event it is not the Union that will be imperilled, but the privileged Order who on every occasion of a thwarted whim have menaced its disruption, and who will then find in it their only safety.

We believe that the "irrepressible conflict"—for we accept Mr. Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever meant to give it—is to take place in the South itself; because the Slave-System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower level of property, intelligence, and enterprise,—their increase in numbers adding much to the economical hardship of their position and nothing to their political weight in the community. There is no home-encouragement of varied agriculture,—for the wants of a slave population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland trade, for that is developed only by communities where education induces refinement, where facility of communication stimulates invention and variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's improvement in tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement to all, and bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap university of the people. We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding states may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the true object of all political organizations, and which is essential to the prolonged existence of all those whose life and spirit are derived directly from the people. Every man who has dispassionately endeavored to enlighten himself in the matter cannot but see, that, for the many, the course of things in slaveholding states is substantially what we have described, a downward one, more or less rapid, in civilization and in all those results of material prosperity which in a free country show themselves in the general advancement for the good of all and give a real meaning to the word Commonwealth. No matter how enormous the wealth centred in the hands of a few, it has no longer the conservative force or the beneficent influence which it exerts when equably distributed,—even loses more of both where a system of absenteeism prevails so largely as in the South. In such communities the seeds of an "irrepressible conflict" are purely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness.

The election in November turns on the single and simple question, Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of it, is the Republican party. We are of those who at first regretted that another candidate was not nominated at Chicago; but we confess that we have ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr. Seward since the result of the Convention was known has been a greater ornament to him and a greater honor to his party than his election to the Presidency would have been. We should have been pleased with Mr. Seward's nomination, for the very reason we have seen assigned for passing him by,—that he represented the most advanced doctrines of his party. He, more than any other man, combined in himself the moralist's oppugnancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resentment of it as a theory, and the statist's distrust of it as a policy,—thus summing up the three efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and concentrated the antagonism of the Free States. Not a brilliant man, he has that best gift of Nature, which brilliant men commonly lack, of being always able to do his best; and the very misrepresentation of his opinions which was resorted to in order to neutralize the effect of his speeches in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony to their power. Safe from the prevailing epidemic of Congressional eloquence as if he had been inoculated for it early in his career, he addresses himself to the reason, and what he says sticks. It was assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest and tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound conviction. It was not called into being by a desire to reform the pecuniary corruptions of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr. Breckinridge would do that, for no one doubts their honor or their honesty. It is not unanimous about the Tariff, about State-Rights, about many other questions of policy. What unites the Republicans is a common faith in the early principles and practice of the Republic, a common persuasion that slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of the one, has been the chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve to resist its encroachments everywhen and everywhere. They see no reason to fear that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant tenacity under the warps and twistings of a forty-years' proslavery pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if bent backward again gently to its original rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human government," says Machiavelli, "have, like men, their natural term, and those only are long-lived which possess in themselves the power of returning to the principles on which they were originally founded." It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies. They believe as everybody believed sixty years ago; and we are sorry to see what appears to be an inclination in some quarters to blink this aspect of the case, lest the party be charged with want of conservatism, or, what is worse, with abolitionism. It is and will be charged with all kinds of dreadful things, whatever it does, and it has nothing to fear from an upright and downright declaration of its faith. One part of the grateful work it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would not be peace, but submission,—from that torpor and imbecility of faith in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism. A question which cuts so deep as the one which now divides the country cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such excitement is healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead formula on men's lips and the dry topic of the annalist. It has been our good fortune that a question has been thrust upon us which has forced us to reconsider the primal principles of government, which has appealed to conscience as well as reason, and, by bringing the theories of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience in our thought and life and action, has realized a tradition of the memory into a conviction of the understanding and the soul. It will not do for the Republicans to confine themselves to the mere political argument, for the matter then becomes one of expediency, with two defensible sides to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of Right and Wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party-platforms,—that those are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which compel the assent both of reason and the common affections of mankind.

No man pretends that under the Constitution there is any possibility of interference with the domestic relations of the individual States; no party has ever remotely hinted at any such interference; but what the Republicans affirm is, that in every contingency where the Constitution can be construed in favor of freedom, it ought to be and shall be so construed. It is idle to talk of sectionalism, abolitionism, and hostility to the laws. The principles of liberty and humanity cannot, by virtue of their very nature, be sectional, any more than light and heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust laws are the only serious enemies that Law ever had. With history before us, it is no treason to question the infallibility of a court; for courts are never wiser or more venerable than the men composing them, and a decision that reverses precedent cannot arrogate to itself any immunity from reversal. Truth is the only unrepealable thing.

We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents' messages, and Congress, for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union. The true danger to popular forms of government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing. If the people are assumed to be incapable of forming a judgment for themselves, the men whose position enables them to guide the public mind ought certainly to make good their want of intelligence. But on this great question, the wise solution of which, we are every day assured, is essential to the permanence of the Union, Mr. Bell has no opinion at all, Mr. Douglas says it is of no consequence which opinion prevails, and Mr. Breckinridge tells us vaguely that "all sections have an equal right in the common Territories." The parties which support these candidates, however, all agree in affirming that the election of its special favorite is the one thing that can give back peace to the distracted country. The distracted country will continue to take care of itself, as it has done hitherto, and the only question that needs an answer is, What policy will secure the most prosperous future to the helpless Territories, which our decision is to make or mar for all coming time? What will save the country from a Senate and Supreme Court where freedom shall be forever at a disadvantage?

There is always a fallacy in the argument of the opponents of the Republican party. They affirm that all the States and all the citizens of the States ought to have equal rights in the Territories. Undoubtedly. But the difficulty is that they cannot. The slaveholder moves into a new Territory with his institution, and from that moment the free white settler is virtually excluded. His institutions he cannot take with him; they refuse to root themselves in soil that is cultivated by slave-labor. Speech is no longer free; the post-office is Austrianized; the mere fact of Northern birth may be enough to hang him. Even now in Texas, settlers from the Free States are being driven out and murdered for pretended complicity in a plot the evidence for the existence of which has been obtained by means without a parallel since the trial of the Salem witches, and the stories about which are as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of Goodwife Corey. Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the experience of Kansas that disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's panacea of "Squatter Sovereignty."

The claim of equal rights in the Territories is a specious fallacy. Concede the demand of the slavery-extensionists, and you give up every inch of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of freedom. For what they ask (however they may disguise it) is simply this,—that their local law be made the law of the land, and coextensive with the limits of the General Government. The Constitution acknowledges no unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another; and the plausible assertion, that "that is property which the law makes property," (confounding a law existing anywhere with the law which is binding everywhere,) can deceive only those who have either never read the Constitution or are ignorant of the opinions and intentions of those who framed it. It is true only of the States where slavery already exists; and it is because the propagandists of slavery are well aware of this, that they are so anxious to establish by positive enactment the seemingly moderate title to a right of existence for their institution in the Territories,—a title which they do not possess, and the possession of which would give them the oyster and the Free States the shells. Laws accordingly are asked for to protect Southern property in the Territories,—that is, to protect the inhabitants from deciding for themselves what their frame of government shall be. Such laws will be passed, and the fairest portion of our national domain irrevocably closed to free labor, if the Non-Slave-holding States fail to do their duty in the present crisis.

But will the election of Mr. Lincoln endanger the Union? It is not a little remarkable, that, as the prospect of his success increases, the menaces of secession grow fainter and less frequent. Mr. W.L. Yancey, to be sure, threatens to secede; but the country can get along without him, and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. But Governor Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury at Washington,—perhaps because Mr. Buchanan has left so little in it. The old Mumbo-Jumbo is occasionally paraded at the North, but, however many old women may be frightened, the pulse of the stock-market remains provokingly calm. General Cushing, infringing the patent-right of the late Mr. James the novelist, has seen a solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon. The exegesis of the vision has been various, some thinking that it means a Military Despot—though in that case the force of cavalry would seem to be inadequate,—and others the Pony Express. If it had been one rider on two horses, the application would have been more general and less obscure. In fact, the old cry of Disunion has lost its terrors, if it ever had any, at the North. The South itself seems to have become alarmed at its own scarecrow, and speakers there are beginning to assure their hearers that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do them no harm. We entirely agree with them, for it will save them from themselves.

To believe any organized attempt by the Republican party to disturb the existing internal policy of the Southern States possible presupposes a manifest absurdity. Before anything of the kind could take place, the country must be in a state of forcible revolution. But there is no premonitory symptom of any such convulsion, unless we except Mr. Yancey, and that gentleman's throwing a solitary somerset will hardly turn the continent head over heels. The administration of Mr. Lincoln will be conservative, because no government is ever intentionally otherwise, and because power never knowingly undermines the foundation on which it rests. All that the Free States demand is that influence in the councils of the nation to which they are justly entitled by their population, wealth, and intelligence. That these elements of prosperity have increased more rapidly among them than in communities otherwise organized, with greater advantages of soil, climate, and mineral productions, is certainly no argument that they are incapable of the duties of efficient and prudent administration, however strong a one it may be for their endeavoring to secure for the Territories the single superiority that has made them what they are. The object of the Republican party is not the abolition of African slavery, but the utter extirpation of dogmas which are the logical sequence of the attempts to establish its righteousness and wisdom, and which would serve equally well to justify the enslavement of every white man unable to protect himself. They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present limits.

We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician. That he has not had more will be no objection to him in the eyes of those who have seen the administration of the experienced public functionary whose term of office is just drawing to a close. He represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party, because they are the only one based on an enduring principle, the only one that is not willing to pawn tomorrow for the means to gamble with today. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces them.

The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it. "All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing."

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

History of Flemish Literature. By OCTAVE DELEPIERRE, LL. D. 8vo. London. John Murray. 1860.

"When I write in Danish," says Oehlenschläger, "I write for only six hundred persons." And so, in view of this somewhat exaggerated statement, he himself translated his best works into the more favored and more widely spread Germanic idiom. It requires a certain amount of courage in an author to write in his own native tongue only, when he knows that he thereby limits the number of his readers. We see in our own days, among the Sclavonic races, men whose writings breathe the most ardent patriotism, whose labors and researches are all concentrated within the sphere of their nationality, publishing, not in their own Polish, Czechish, or Serbian, but in German or French.

The history of language shows us a two-fold tendency,—one of divergence from some common stem, followed by one of concentration, of unity, in the literature. Thus, in France, the Langue d'Oïl superseded the richer and more melodious Provençal; in Spain the Castilian predominated; while for several centuries it has been the steady tendency of the High-German to become the language of letters and of the upper classes among the various Teutonic races. Since the Bible-translation of Luther, this central dialect has not only become the medium in which poet and philosopher, historian and critic address the nation, but it may be said to have entirely superseded the Northern and Southern forms. Whatever local or linguistic interest may be manifested for the works of Groth in the Ditmarsch Platt-Deutsch, or for the sweet Alemannic songs of Hebel, the centralizing tongue is that in which Schiller and Goethe wrote.

The allied Danish and Dutch have escaped this ingulfing process. The former, instead of retreating, seeks in the present to enlarge its circuit; and great are the complaints in Schleswig-Holstein of the arbitrary and despotic imposition of Danish on a State of the German Confederation. The present government of Holland has not remained inactive. Much has been done to encourage men of letters and counteract the Gallic influences which prevailed in the early part of the century.

But the Flemings speaking nearly the same language as their Protestant neighbors, where is their literature now? The language itself, in which are handed down to us some of the masterpieces of the Middle Ages, as "Reynard the Fox" and "Gudrun," is disregarded, even discountenanced, by Government. It is with a feeling of sadness that we read the annals of a literature which met so many obstacles to its progress. Despised by foreign rulers, thrust back by the Spanish policy of the Duke of Alva, its authors exiled and seeking refuge in other lands, its very existence has been a constant battling against the inroads of more powerful neighbors.

Surely, "if words be made of breath, and breath of life," there is nothing a nation can hold more dear than its own tongue. Its laws, its rulers, may change, its privileges and charters be wrenched from it, but that remains as an heirloom, the first gift to the child, the last and dearest treasure of the man. Perhaps nowhere more than in Flanders do we meet with a systematic oppression of a vernacular idiom. From the days of the contests with France, through the long Spanish troubles and dominion, the military occupation of the country by the troops of Louis XIV., the Austrian rule, the levelling tendency of the French Revolution, and the present aping of French manners by the higher powers of the land,—through all this there has been but one long, continuous struggle, and the ultimate result is now too plain.

We find the Flemish spoken by nearly two-thirds of the inhabitants of Belgium, divided from the Walloon or Rouchi-Fran ais by a line of demarcation running from the Meuse through Liege and Waterloo, and ending in France, between Calais and Dunkirk. It differs in no material points from the Dutch, being essentially the same, if we except slight differences in spelling, as ae for aa, ue for uu, y for ij. Both should bear but one common name, the Netherlandish. That differences should be sought can be accounted for only by the petty feeling of jealousy that exists between the neighboring states, their literary productions varying in grammatical construction scarcely more than the writings of English and American authors.

Mr. Octave Delepierre, who since 1830 has published some ten or twelve monographs relating to the antiquities and history of Flanders, has presented the English public during the course of the present year with a history of Flemish literature. With an evident predilection for authors south of the Meuse, Mr. Delepierre has nevertheless given us the first clear and connected account we possess of the history of letters in the Netherlands. Without careful or minute critical research, he has shown little that is new, nor has he sought to clear one point that was obscure. His work is pleasant reading, interspersed with occasional translations, though scarcely answering the requisites of literary history in the nineteenth century. Having followed the older work of Snellaert [Histoire de la Littérature Flamande. Bruxelles. 1654.], in the latter half of the volume, page for page, he has not even mentioned by name the authors of the last quarter of a century.

Let us glance at that portion of literature more particularly belonging to Flanders and Brabant.

The first expressions of the Germanic mind, the song of "Hildebrand," "Gudrun," the "Nibelungen," have been handed down to us in a form which shows their origin to have been Netherlandish. The first part of "Gudrun" is evidently so; and we find, as well in many of the older poems of chivalry, as "Charles and Elegast," "Floris and Blanchefloer," as in the national epos, intrinsic proofs that the unknown authors were from the regions of the Lower Rhine. These elder remnants, however, can scarcely be claimed by any one of the Teutonic races, as they are the common property of all; for we find the hero Siegfried in the Scandinavian Saga, as well as in the more southern tradition. Mr. Delepierre has translated the following song, almost Homeric in its form, which belongs to this early period, when Christianity had not obliterated the memories of barbarous days:—

"The Lord Halewyn knew a song: all those who heard it were attracted towards him.

"It was once heard by the daughter of the King, who was so beloved by her parents.

"She stood before her father: 'O father, may I go to the Lord Halewyn?'

"'Oh, no, my child, no! They who go to him never come back again.'

"She stood before her mother: 'O mother, may I go to the Lord Halewyn?'

"'Oh, no, my child, no! They who go to him never come back again.'

"She stood before her sister: 'O sister, may I go to the Lord Halewyn?'

"'Oh, no, sister, no! They who go to him never come back again.'

"She stood before her brother: 'O brother, may I go to the Lord Halewyn?'

"'Little care I where thou goest, provided thou preservest thine honor and thy crown.

"She goes up into her chamber; she clothes herself in her best garments.

"What does she put on first? A shift finer than silk.

"What does she gird round her lovely waist? Strong bands of gold.

"What does she put upon her scarlet petticoat? On every seam a golden button.

"What does she set on her beautiful fair hair? A massive golden crown.

"What does she put upon her kirtle? On every seam a pearl.

"She goes into her father's stable, and takes out his best charger. She mounts him proudly, and so, laughing and singing, rides through the forest. When she reaches the middle of the forest, she meets the Lord Halewyn.

"'Hail!' said he, approaching her, 'hail, beautiful virgin, with eyes so black and brilliant!'

"They proceed together, chatting as they go.

"They arrive at a field in which stands a gallows. The bodies of several women hang from it.

"The Lord Halewyn says to her: 'As you are the loveliest of all virgins, say, how will you die? The time is come.'

"'It is well: as I may choose, I choose the sword.

"'But, first of all, take off your tunic; for the blood of a virgin gushes out so far, that it might reach you, and I should be sorry.'

"But before he had divested himself of his tunic, his head rolled off and lay at his feet: his lips still murmured these words:

"'Go down there into that corn-field, and blow the horn, so that my friends may hear it.'

"'Into that corn-field I shall not go, neither shall I blow the horn. I do not follow the counsel of a murderer.'

"'Go, then, down under the gallows, and gather the balm which you shall find there, and spread it over my bloody throat.'

"'Under the gallows I shall not go; on your bloody throat I shall spread no balm. I do not follow the counsel of a murderer.'

"She took up the head by the hair, and washed it at a clear fountain.

"She mounted her charger proudly, and, laughing and singing, she rode through the forest.

"When she reached the middle of the forest, she met the mother of Halewyn. 'Beautiful virgin, have you not seen my son?'

"'Your son, the Lord Halewyn, is gone hunting: you will never see him again.

"'Your son, the Lord Halewyn, is dead. I have his head in my apron, which is red with his blood.'

"And when she arrived at her father's gate, she blew the horn like a man.

"And when her father saw her, he rejoiced at her return.

"He celebrated it by a feast, and the head of Halewyn was placed on the table."

Flemish writers claim as entirely their own that epic of the people, "Reynard the Fox." Their right to it was long contested; nor has anything been done since the labors of Willems, who, in opposition to the opinion of William Grimm, settles the authorship of the "Reinaert de Vos" on Utenhove, a priest of Aerdenburg. It seems natural to suppose that this most popular of Middle-Age productions should have originated in the very region which later gave to the world a school of painting that incarnated on canvas the phases of animal life, taking its delight and best inspirations in the burlesque side of human passions.

In its first period, Flemish literature found some encouragement from its princes. John I. of Brabant fostered it, and even took, himself, the title of Flemish Troubadour. Under Guy of Dampierre, who neither in heart nor mind was sympathetic with the people he ruled, we find Maerlant, still revered by his country; his name is ever coupled with the epithet of Father of Flemish Poets. Didactic rather than poetical, his influence was great in breaking down the barriers which separated the people from the higher classes, by adapting to their own home-idiom the best productions of the age. About this period we find prevalent those Northern singers corresponding to the Trouvères, Troubadours, and Jongleurs. They are in Flanders the Spreker, Segger, and Vinder, who, when travelling through the country, took the name of Gezel, received in town or village, court or hamlet, as the wandering minstrel of the South. The golden age when sovereigns doffed their royal robes to lay them on the shoulders of some sweet-singing poet, as the old chronicles tell us, was of short duration in the North, if ever the Sproken or erotic poems may be said to have brought their authors into such favor. On the other hand, we find some of the wanderers arrested for theft and other crimes.

Little light has been thrown on their first ante-historical attempts. Until the late labors of German philologers, little had been done to clear up the confusion resting on this period of literary history. As yet the field has scarcely been explored beyond the regions not immediately connected with the literature of Germany. We have long historical poems of little interest, arranged without order,—interminable productions of thousands and ten thousands of lines of uncertain date, didactic and encyclopedia-like, besides unmistakable remnants of a Netherlandish theatre.

The battle of Roosebeke, where the second Artevelde and his companions succumbed to superior numbers, was the last great enterprise of the Flemings against the French. Half a century earlier, a strong league had been formed against these powerful neighbors. In the interior, the country was divided into factions,—the partisans and enemies of France. Prominent were the Clauwaerts and the Leliarts, from the lion's claw and the fleur-de-lis which they respectively wore on their badges. The country, which has ever been one of the battle-fields of Europe, was abandoned to all the horrors of civil war. The Duke of Brabant was childless. The Count of Flanders gave his daughter, his only legitimate child, in marriage to the Duke of Burgundy; and the provinces soon came into the hands of those ambitious and restless enemies of the Court of France. It may easily be imagined that these events were not without their influence on a language deteriorated on the one hand by constant contact with a Romanic idiom, and in Holland by the transmission of the sovereign crown to the House of Avesnes.

The "Chambers of Rhetoric," an institution peculiar to the Low Countries, reached their highest point of prosperity under the Burgundian rule. The wandering life of poets and authors had nearly ceased. The Gezellen, settled in towns, and moved by the prevalent spirit which prompted men of one calling to unite into bodies, naturally fell into corporations analogous to the Guilds. Without attaching any very definite or clear idea to the term Rhetoric which they employed, these associations exerted great influence upon the whole literature of the Netherlands. Many would date their origin as far back as the early part of the twelfth century. In Alost, the Catherinists claimed to have existed as early as 1107, on the mere strength of their motto, AMOR VINCIT. At any rate, we are left entirely to conjecture with regard to the first beginnings of these literary guilds, which seem in many respects an imitation of the poetical societies of Provence. Every poet of note was a participant in them. In Flanders there was scarcely a town or village that did not possess its Chamber. Brabant, Holland, Zealand soon followed in the movement. One of the principal, the Fountain of Ghent, seems to have exercised a certain supremacy over the other confraternities of art.

The proceedings of these companies, protected at first by princes, were carried on with great magnificence. They were in constant communication with each other throughout the country. Their facteurs or poets composed songs and theatrical pieces, which were performed by the members. They had a long array of officers, with princely names; and none was complete without a jester. Their larger assemblies were accompanied with long festivities, the solemn entry into a town or village being styled Landjuweel (Landjewel). The nobility mingled in them, incited by the example of Henry IV. of Brabant or Philippe-le-Bel. The wealth of the Netherlands was displayed on these solemnities, and the citizens rivalled their monarchs in magnificence. The burghers of Ghent and Bruges and Antwerp shone, on these occasions, in the gaudy pomp of princely patricians. All were invited to take part and dispute the prizes awarded by fair hands.

It can scarcely be expected that these guilds, composed in many cases of mechanics, should give rise to works of the highest order of merit. Their dramatic representations were rather gorgeous than tasteful, their attempts at wit little better than buffoonery, their humor mere personal vituperation. Yet even in matters of taste they are not much inferior to the then more pretentious academies of other lands. It was an age of long religious dramas, of tortured rhymes and impossible metres, when strange and new versification imported from France found favor among a people whose silks and linens and rich tapestries were destined to reach a wider circulation than all the poetical effusions of their guilds, the "Lily," the "Violet," and the "Jesus with the Balsam Flower."

It was Philip the Fair who, wishing to centralize the scattered efforts of these societies, established at Malines, in 1493, a sovereign chamber, of which he appointed his chaplain, Pierre Aelters, sovereign prince. With an admixture of religion, in accordance with the spirit of the Middle Ages, the sacred number was fifteen. There were fifteen members. Fifteen young girls were to form part of it, in honor of the fifteen joys of Mary. Fifteen youths were instructed in the art of rhetoric, and the assemblies were held fifteen times a year. Charles V. was the last chief of this assembly, which had previously been removed to Ghent. In 1577 it greeted the arrival of the Prince of Orange, but this was its last sign of vitality.

The Chambers of Rhetoric reached their climax in a time of fermentation. The impatience, the feeling of uneasiness and restraint, is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control of the Chambers. The stage, that "mirror of the times," is often the first manifestation of the unquiet heaving and subsequent up-bubbling in the fluid compost of the mass that constitutes a nation. When freely developed, it is the pulse-beat of the people. And so, throughout the Netherlands, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, we find the allegorical drama giving way to more definite and direct personations. Those cold representations of vices and virtues, of vice in its nakedness, such as to render the reading, when not absolutely tedious, distasteful, to say the least, to our modern ideas,—all such aimless productions were giving way to the conscious expression of satire. Diatribes against prevalent abuses, personal invectives scarcely veiled, were fast becoming the order of the day. It is no wonder, then, that the guilds, which had found favor formerly, should gradually be crushed, in proportion as the rulers sought to check the spirit of reform. Among the authors of this period may be mentioned Everaert and Machet. The refrain was much cultivated, and not, like the drama, for the expression of dissatisfaction. Anna Byns, an oracle with the Catholic party, wrote when the language was in its most degenerate state, under Margaret of Austria. She was styled the Sappho of Brabant, though her poems are all religious. They were translated into Latin, and were read as masterpieces till the middle of the last century.

A taste for religious writing prevailed in the Netherlands throughout the sixteenth century. William van Zuylen van Nyevelt first published a collection of the Psalms of David. These, in imitation of the French Calvinists, were sung to the most popular melodies. Zuylen found many imitators. The Catholic party composed songs in opposition to the Reformers; and we have psalms and songs by Utenhove, the painters Luc de Heere and Van Mander, by Van Haecht and Fruytiers. A long list of obscure names, if we except those of Marnix and Houwaert, is mentioned as belonging to this period,—their works mostly didactic or controversial. Houwaert, a Catholic, one of the avowed friends and partisans of the Prince of Orange, courted the Muses in the hottest days of civil strife. He published a poem, in sixteen cantos, entitled "The Gardens of the Virgins," tending to show the dangers to which the fair sex is exposed, and condemning as unreal all love not centred in God. With a remarkable fertility of composition he possesses an uncommon smoothness of versification, combined with a power, so successful in his age, of illustration from history or romance, from the sacred writings or the legendary lore of the people. The work was received in those days of trouble with unbounded enthusiasm. Brabant was thought to have given birth to a new Homer. His praises resounded in verse and song, and the young girls of Brussels crowned him with laurel.

The government of the Duke of Alva, and the succeeding years of revolution, were a period of desolation for Flanders. The Guilds of Rhetoric were dispersed; town after town was depopulated; Ghent, the loved city of Charles V., lost six thousand families; Leyden, Amsterdam, Haerlem, Gouda, afforded refuge to the emigrants. The golden age of literary activity is about to dawn in the Dutch republic. In the other provinces the national language is more and more neglected. It gives umbrage to the foreign chiefs who act as sovereigns. With it they identify all the opposition that has prevailed against them. Archduke Albert carries his condescension no farther than to address in High-German such of his subjects as can speak only Flemish. His Walloons he treats with no more civility, answering them but in Spanish or Latin. Ymmeloot, lord of Steenbrugge, a native of Ypres, endeavors in 1614 to stem the current of opposition and reawaken a love for letters. He suggests many reforms in the versification, and gives the example. He is followed by many, and Ypres becomes for a time a centre of versifiers. But the spirit of originality has flown, and the literature of Holland is enriched with the name of many a Fleming who preferred exile to the new rule.

In 1618, the General Synod of Dordrecht decreed that a new translation of the Bible should be undertaken. Two Flemings, Baudaert and Walaeus, and two Dutchmen, Bogerman and Hommius, completed it. Like the work of Luther, this tended in a great measure to fix the language, preventing the preponderance of one dialect over the other.

Foreign imitation begins to prevail in Flanders. Frederic de Conincq constructs dramas on the models of Lope de Vega, with the necessary quota of nocturnal visits, abductions, dagger-thrusts, and bravado. An action entirely Spanish is conducted in the veriest patois of Antwerp. Ogier follows in his footsteps, introducing upon the stage the coarsest language. He represents vice in its most revolting forms. His theory, as he himself explains it, is, that "it is necessary to represent vice on the stage, as the Romans formerly on certain days intoxicated their slaves and showed them to their children, in order that they might at an early age become inspired with a disgust for debauchery." Yet his comedies enjoyed the highest favor, and have been pronounced by native critics among the most remarkable and meritorious productions of the epoch. They are ever distinguished by vivacity, truth, and fidelity, in depicting the many-sided life of the people. He seems to have been a literary Ostade or Teniers, with less of ingenuousness and good-nature in the portraiture.

In the mean time the French language continues to gain ground every day. In Brussels, native authors seek in vain to oppose the encroachments of the "Fransquillon," as Godin first styles them; but, save the feeble productions of Van der Borcht, the Jesuit Poirtiers, and the Dominican Vloers, we find but translations and imitations. Moons versifies some hundreds of fables. A half-sentimental, sickly style, consisting only of praises, of self-abnegation, of pious ejaculations, prevails. It is the worst of reactions;—the country, after its first outburst, had sunk into quietude, the lethargy of inaction.

Holland, on the other hand, is active and doing. Its poets and historians are at work, the precursors of Bilderdyk and Tollens, the poet of the people. Bruges, in the eighteenth century, produces two writers of merit,—Smidts and Labare. In French Flanders, De Swaen adapts from Corneille, and publishes original dramas. Many songs are composed both in the northern and southern provinces, mostly of a religious character. Philologers seek to revive the neglected idiom with little success. But the century is blank of great names. The Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, established at Brussels by Maria Theresa, was composed of members totally unacquainted with the Flemish. It took no notice of the language beyond publishing a few prize-memoirs in its annals. The German barons who ruled cared little for their own tongue: how should they have manifested interest in that of their Belgian subjects? The subsequent French domination was no improvement. On the 13th of June, 1803, it was decreed by the Republic,—"In a year, reckoning from the publication of this present ordinance, the public acts, in the departments once called Belgium, … in those on the left bank of the Rhine, … where the custom of drawing up acts in the language of those countries may have been preserved, are henceforth to be written in French." The Bonaparte rule was not of a nature to restore former privileges. In spite of the feeble remonstrances that were urged against such arbitrary measures, an imperial decree of 1812 enjoined that all Flemish papers should appear with a French translation.

Under the rule of King William, vigorous measures were employed to reinstate the native idiom. At first warmly seconded, Government soon met with an unaccountable opposition even from its subjects. The Dutch was combated by those connected with education. It was ridiculed by the Walloon population. Since the independence of Belgium, the mouvement flamand has been felt more than once by the would-be French rulers. In 1841, a Congress was held in Ghent, where all the members of the Government spoke in Flemish; energetic protests were addressed to the Chamber of Representatives, all with little avail. At present, though the language is nominally on a par with French, it meets with little encouragement. The philological labors of Willems entitle him to a place among the greatest of the present century; he was until his death the leader of the intellectual movement of his country.

Of later authors, we may mention the laureate Ledeganck, Henri Conscience, whose works have now been translated into English, French, German, Danish, and Swedish, Renier Snieders, Van Duyse, Dantzenberg. Modern literature seems to have taken a new flight; it is animated by the purest love of country, by an ardent desire in its authors to revive the use of their native tongue. The tendency is rather Germanic. At the Singers' Festival, held in Ghent a short time ago, the songs sung breathed a spirit of union and love for the sister languages. As a fair sample, we may quote the following:—

"Welaen, Germaen en Belg tezaem ten stryd Voor vryheid, tael en vaderland! De vaen van't duïtsch en vlaemsche zangverbond Prael op't gentsch eeregoud! Wy willen vry zyn, als de adelaer Die stout op eigen wieken dryft, Voor wien er slechts een koestring is, de zon. Alom waer der Germanen tael Zich heft en bloeid en't volk, Daer is ons vaderland!"

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The Glaciers of the Alps. Being a Narrative of Excursions and Ascents, an Account of the Origin and Phenomena of Glaciers, and an Exposition of the Physical Principles to which they are related. By JOHN TYNDALL, F.R.S., etc., etc. With Illustrations. London: John Murray. 1860. pp. xx., 444.

Our readers are probably aware that the question of the causes of glacier formation and motion, cool as the subject may seem in itself, has demonstrated the existence of a great deal of latent heat among scientific men. In England, the so-called viscous theory of Professor J.D. Forbes held for a long while undisputed possession of the field. According to him, "a glacier is an imperfect fluid, or viscous body, which is urged down slopes of a certain inclination by the mutual pressure of its parts." With that impartial superciliousness to all foreign achievement which not seldom characterizes the British mind, the credit of all the results of observation and experiment on the glaciers was attributed to Professor Forbes, who seems to have accepted it with delightful complacency. But presently doubt, then unbelief, and at last downright opposition began to show themselves. The leader of the revolt was Professor Tyndall, whose book is now before us. The controversy has begotten no little bitterness of feeling; but none is shown in Mr. Tyndall's volume, which is throughout written in the truest spirit of science,—with the earnest frankness that becomes a seeker of truth, and the dignity that befits a lover of it.

Not content with any theoretic antagonism to the Forbes explanation of the phenomena, Mr. Tyndall devoted all the leisure of several years to an examination of them on the spot. At the risk of his life, he verified the previous observations of others and made new ones himself. At home, he made experiments upon the nature of ice, especially upon its capacity for regulation and the effect of pressure upon it. He satisfied himself that snow may be changed to ice by pressure, that crumbled ice may in like manner be restored to its original condition, and that solid ice may be forced to take any form desired. Under proper conditions, lamination may be produced by the same means. The result of his investigations is, that the glacier is a solid body, and that pressure answers all the requirements of the glacier-problem, and is the only thing that will.

The book is one of uncommon interest, and discusses many topics beside the glaciers, though nothing that is not in some way related to them. Mr. Tyndall does justice to former investigators,—especially to M. Rendu, who, though imperfectly supplied with demonstrated facts, theorized the phenomena with the happiest inspiration,—and to Agassiz, of whose important observations, establishing for the first time the fact of more rapid motion in the middle of the glacier, Professor Forbes had appropriated the credit. The style is remarkably agreeable, in description vivid, and in its scientific parts clear. Indeed, we do not know whether we have enjoyed the narrative or the science the most. Professor Tyndall has the uncommon gift of being able to write science so that the unscientific can understand it, without descending to the low level of science made easy. The Royal Institution may well congratulate itself on having in him a man every way qualified to succeed Faraday, whenever (and may it be long first!) his chair is vacant.

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ART.

MR. JARVES'S COLLECTION.

It seems an odd turn in the kaleidoscope of Fortune that associates a Prime Minister of the Sandwich Islands—where the only pictorial Art is a kind of illumination laboriously executed by the natives on each other's skins, thus forming a free peripatetic gallery—with a collection of pictures by early Italian masters. It is certainly a striking illustration of American multifariousness. From the dawning civilization of Hawaii Mr. Jarves withdraws to Italy, where culture has passed far beyond its noon, and finds himself equally at home in both. From Italy he has returned to America with by far the most important contribution to historical Art that has ever reached us. It is not easy to overestimate its value, whether intrinsically, or as an aid to intelligent and refining study. We can hardly expect, it is true, ever to form such collections of Art in this country as would save our students the necessity of visiting Europe. This, indeed, would be hardly desirable; since a great deal of the refining and enlightening influence of foreign travel and observation is not received directly from the special objects that may have drawn us abroad, but incidentally and unexpectedly, by being brought into contact with strange systems of government and new forms of thought. But what we might have is such a collection as would enable those of us who cannot travel to enjoy some of the highest aesthetic advantages of travel, and would send our students to the galleries of the Old World already in a condition to appreciate and profit by them. Mr. Jarves's pictures afford the opportunity for an excellent beginning in such an undertaking.