me," she said, "exactly as a cat plays with a mouse. He never once committed himself in words during all those four years that he all but lived with us; but he used at times to indulge in tendernesses that sent me into a paradise of happiness, and then at other times he would seem to treat me only as a little child, and pass me over and neglect and desert me completely for a while. Then when my health used to give way, so that I could neither eat nor sleep any more, he would suddenly come again, and cure me all in an instant with a look or a word that sent me on a ray of sunshine back into my poor fool's paradise again. What made it worse was, that at that very time there was a woman there that Madame de Malan whom he did really care about; and I went through tortures of jealousy when I was a mere child, that I can give you no idea of and that were terribly bad for my whole nature and character. It was a dreadful double jealousy that swallowed up my whole existence for a time; for you must know that she had contrived to bewitch my father too my poor father, who was no longer young, and she took him too completely away from me. In my utter desolateness I used to cast myself down before God and pray by turns that my father might be left to me that René might be left to me - that she might take one and leave me the other; but no, nothing short of both would satisfy that inexorable love of admiration." "Was she so very attractive then?" said I. 66 "Oh, she was a wretched twopence of a woman, disant assez bien la romance, with a shivering shred of a voice: a miserable little creature with painted eyes, and as flat as a board!" Here she unconsciously gave a superb glance at herself in the lookingglass, and burst out laughing at her own vehemence, while the tears were still lying in bright drops on her face. My little Venetian maid, who saw all the pains she caused me, and hated her for it, used to say of her:- Mi no vedo sta beiezza. Non gha ne anca la radice di un petto!' In fact, she had no roots of any sort. She was made up of a morbid love of excitement at any price, and a restless vanity, unassuageable and pitiless, that, like the horse leech's daughter, was for ever crying,— Give give-give!' But I, too, am pitiless," she continued, looking at the clock. You have to be up at three, and here am I preventing you from getting a chance of rest. Oh, do go to bed, Bessie!" "But, my dear child," said I," how long ago did all this happen? "And have you never felt any inclination for any one since then? "Never," she said. "I have tried once or twice to get up a sort of something for people who have cared for me; but it was all of no use! I turned sick and weary in the midst of my flirtation, and clapped a sudden extinguisher down upon the miserable farthing rushlight that it was. I'm burnt out, and there's an end of it! Oh, Bessie, get to bed. I am so ashamed of having troubled you with all this! Be sure you wake me up to bid me good-by." She began trying to take the pins out of her hair, and to undress herself, but her hands shook so that she couldn't untie her strings; and so, much against her will, I put the poor child to bed. What an odd nature it was! She said, after she had kissed me, as she turned her head on the pillow," Don't trouble about me, dear Bess! I'm not worth it. I shall go in for ambition now, and marry a great duke. How pleased Lady Blankeney will be with the dear duchess!" She had hardly uttered the words before she was fast asleep. I stayed by her bedside for some minutes, looking at her face, which was as white as the sheet on which she lay, and at the black bar of her eyebrows, and at her long turned-up eyelashes, and then I lay down for an hour. At four I got up, and put on my things, and went once more softly to her bedside. She slept like a baby, and so I would not disturb her, but writing, "God bless you, dearest Ursula," on a slip of paper, left it on her pillow, and crept gently out of the room, and downstairs. “Mademoiselle, la voiture est avancée," says the pasty, sleepy Hyacinthe. I get in, I give a parting glance into the silver vapour that enshrouds the well-known landscape, the door is shut, and down the hill we go through the gate, and thud thud! over the wooden bridge with a sad heart, very unlike the anxious one that crossed the same water only a week ago; then across a bit of plain, starlit and mystical, that made me think of "Jacob's Dream" in the Dulwich Gallery, and then suddenly into the dark night of the forest. My dear French friends, farewell! A gray still passage, heaven dissolving itself in rain, and an arrival in London, dripping, dismal, black; but there on the platform stood William and mother, and dear old aunt Emily, waving a large red-silk pocket-handkerchief as we rolled into the station, and the next minute I was in | Madame Olympe said that she was very glad of their arms. I was a whole week in London without hearing anything of Ursula, and was beginning to be a little afraid that her affection for me was not a real thing, and that she liked me less than she had fancied she did when at last the long-expected missive arrived. Here it is: Hôtel Vouillemont, Rue des Champs MY DEAREST BESSIE,I receive at this very instant of time a letter from my agent at the Holt, informing me of the death of old Mr. Vaughan, the rector of my parish. This living, I rejoice to say, is in my gift, and I hope that Mr. L'Estrange will make me happy by accepting it. The living is worth six hundred a year, and there is a very pretty little house, the agent tells me, exactly opposite one of the Holt gates. Ah, my dear Bess, do you remember the evening when we brushed our hair by the fire at Marny, and you told me about those sad eleven years (now really sad no more), and I could find nothing to say but "good gracious? The sound of my own voice saying those words has haunted me ever since. The fact was, that at that very time they had written to tell me that Mr. Vaughan was dangerously ill and eighty years old, and I was turning in my head the probability of his death, and the joy that it would be to me to offer the rectory to your William. But I dared say nothing, dear; for I have observed, as a general rule, that it's always the right people who die, and the wrong people who go recovering and living on for ever, when nobody wants them, and I was so dreadfully afraid the poor old thing might pick up again and disappoint me. I enclose a letter to Mr. L'Estrange, which you must give him from me, in which I make him a formal proffer of the living. Monsieur de Saldes went back to Paris before I came down that morning that you left. Dear it, because he had evidently taken one of his violent antipathies to me, and that there was no fighting against these things. I feel rather glad, on the whole, to think that he will never be able to say of me, This, too, is vanity and vexation of spirit.' ny with Madame Olympe and Jeanne, and only Jacques and I stayed on all Monday at Marcame to Paris on Tuesday. I found Lady Blankeney crying in little showers all the day long. It seems that her dear Faubourg St. Germain countess was furious at having neither Jacques nor myself at her concert, and behaved very rudely, and not at all in the Faubourg St Germain manner, to the poor woman - who in return is behaving as ill as anything so feeble can behave to me and Jacques. And so, dear, I suddenly cut adrift from her, went to an hotel of my own, and am coming over by myself. But as I suppose it wouldn't be quite possible for me to live alone and keep my character in your evil-thinking country, I propose that you should persuade Mrs. Hope to take charge of me, and give me the comfort of her kindness and the countenance of her respectability. I trust to you, dear Bess, to bring this plan to success. Do you think your mother would quite die of Jacques? Both he and Giambattista have promised to come over and pay me a long visit at the Holt in the summer. She must set against that the delight of having you living next door to her. I shall be in London Thursday night. Meanwhile, and ever, I am Your attached friend, URSULA HAMILTON. What more is there to say? My marriage is fixed for the end of next month, and the day after to-morrow we all go down with our dear Portia to her northern Belmont. I have seen her reject the wrong casket-may she choose the right one when the time comes! THE Consul at Jerusalem tells us that 156 Americans from the State of Maine have arrived in Palestine, and taken up their residence near Jaffa (Joppa), led apparently by millennial views. They are mostly labourers, farmers, handicraftsmen, &c., bringing with them their own wooden houses, tools, implements, &c. If the colony survives and multiplies, and many of the same sort have failed, - it will probably not see the Millennium, but will throw a curious and, to most men's minds, a rather anomalous energy into the affairs of Palestine. We shall crowds that have been listening to him in the last years whilst he has been communicating his thoughts to them. He has caught, as it were, some clear eyes in the companies before him which he had not suspected were there, and speaks more as if he felt that something can be practically accomplished in the present, and less as if he were depositing the ova of thoughts for another generation to quicken. In a word he has become more visibly in earnest, and consequently more eloquent, whilst never for a moment lowering his standard of thought. He may be regarded as the founder of the American Lyceum,' and in the last twenty years it has been a medium of perpetual communication between him and the people throughout the Northern States. Much of his English Traits, and all of his Conduct of Life, has been given in the lyceums not only of the cultivated Eastern States, but of the rough backwood settlements in the West. In none of these regions have there been any complaints of not understanding him, such as were frequent in Boston and in England when he first appeared as a lecturer. This is not alone due to the greater degree in which the people have approached his standard; he also has doubtless been somewhat educated by a greater familiarity with his countrymen. IN the School of Arts at Newcastle-uponTyne there is a picture, painted by the late David Scott, representing Ralph Waldo Emerson in the attitude of lecturing. It was painted, I believe, when Emerson visited that city nearly twenty years ago, and is a very successful rendering of the peculiarities of his look and manner, which are physiognomically significant of his thought and spirit. The slight depression at the corners of the mouth, with a touch of sternness, the one arm extended from his side farther and farther as he becomes more animated by his theme, the two or three fingers of the other hand pressed to the palm as if holding tightly some reservation, all these, and other indefinable characteristics that are photographed on the mind of one who has attentively listened to Emerson, are admirably reproduced in this picture by one of his admirers and friends. But there are some traits of him which are but faintly if at all suggested in the picture referred to, that have been developed in the years that have intervened, or which perhaps could not have been even hinted on canvas. In his more recent life Emerson's American hearers have recognised a less literary style and tone, and a stronger desire to have his views adopted. His paradoxes are stated with more determination. He oftener turns aside from the constructive and affirmative method natural to him to strike some false or sordid standard raised on his path; and one now sometimes sees his lip quiver, his eye flash, and even a certain wrath expressed in the dilation of his nostril where Winkelmann saw expressed the anger of Apollo of the Vatican toward the slain Python. An eminent lawyer of Boston, Rufus Choate, in defending Slavery, once spoke of the Declaration of Independence, popularly held to be inconsistent with that institution, as a series of glittering generalities. In a lecture given afterward, Emerson quoted some of the phrases as those declaring 'all men are born equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights'—and said, ' These have been called glittering generalities: they are blazing ubiquities. And as he spoke his whole frame trembled, and the intensity of his voice kindled his audience far more than the mere words could have done. The impression has been gaining among his countrymen that Emerson has been receiving something from the largering: Nor have the great events that have occurred in America in the latter years passed over. without leaving important traces upon him.'" In his time he has seen the people of America steadily advancing the cause of justice, not only without great leaders but over the fallen forms of their strongest but faithless captains, and a confidence in them rarely expressed in his earlier, is a main feature of his later works. His catholic intelligence has assimilated the genuine peculiarities of his country, and he has found in it and its people a quarry from which he can derive the material for the statues and pillars he would raise. His method too has become somewhat more practical; and indeed it might be expected that any philosophic mind would after a full theoretical utterance gradually incline to criticism and the application of abstract principles to men and institutions. This has given his later style a more popular and, so to speak, iconographic character; and it has also developed his humour-witty he always was. I find in my note-book some sentences taken down, as nearly as possible with exactness as to phraseology, from his recent and unpublished lectures, which may illustrate the criticisms I have been mak The finest inspiration of the poet is in the most exact harmony with perfect laws. The vine which intoxicates the world is the most mathematical of plants. The poetic insight is more general among the people than we imagine. They may not like this or the other favourite of the critics; but they like Æsop. There is no great man who has not left his testimony for liberty and justice. A right and true man would be felt to the centre of the solar system. Our steamships like enormous shuttles are weaving continents into the woof of Humanity. If mere power of work or endurance were enough, how will a man compare with the mule? Serena is asked by her teacher whether Fabius was victorious or defeated in a certain battle. She replies that he was defeated. Fabius was victorious; but of what importance is his victory compared with Serena's feelings? Fabius, if he had a particle of the gentleman about him, would consent to be defeated a hundred times rather than have Serena's feelings hurt. What complaint is this that we have not time for this or that thing? When some one complained in the presence of an Indian that he had so little time, the Indian said, 'You have all there is.' Life is unnecessarily long. What is a day? To a stone so much chemistry; to a wise man a day is a splendour of opportunity. Nothing is more painful than to see parent, preacher, teacher, each trying as swiftly as possible to inoculate the child with their own mediocrity. Get off that child, you vampyre; you are trying to make that man another you - one is enough! To hew and hack, slay and eat, this is the sum of many an individual relation to Nature. Humboldt asked an Indian chief if he had known anything of a certain officer who had died in the war of 1816. 'I ate a piece of him,' was the reply. Who knows not the beautiful group of babe and mother, sacred in nature, now sacred also in the religious associations of half the globe? Welcome to the parents is the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. The small despot asks so little that all nature and reason are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurns, and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him. Out of blocks, thread-spools, cards, and chequers, he will build his pyramid with the gravity of Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus of whistle and rattle he explores the laws of sound. But chiefly, like his senior countrymen, the young American studies new and speedier modes of transportation. Mistrusting the cun ning of his small legs, he wishes to ride on the necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter nothing can withstand, -no seniority of age, no gravity of character; uncles, aunts, cousins, grandsires, grandames, - all fall an easy prey: he conforms to nobody, all conform to him; all caper and make mouths, and babble and chirrup to him. On the strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair of laurelled heads. Does the consecration of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire week? Does the consecration of the Church confess the profanation of the house? Let us read the incantation backward. Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional. And the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household. I warn you that no dream of the future is so fair as the scenes and skies, weaving their unheeded enchantment about you today, shall appear when you shall look back upon them. In the new rat-hole revelation, received by people fumbling about tables, it is to be observed that whatever spirit is called up Swedenborg always answers. All the milk comes from that cow. Minds are of two kinds-oviparous and viviparous. -- the In a remarkably brilliant lecture on the French, whose character he had the opportunity of studying in Paris, during the how completely Emerson fell into the crisp, events of 1848, it was wonderful to observe clear, incisive style of the best French writers on this particular occasion. There was in this lecture a sharp contrast drawn between the French and the English, former he held to be more generally agreeable because their life could be drawn into something like harmony with aims not too high; they had not the haunting, harrying interior ideal of the Anglo-Saxon with its This at least is the attendant diseases. impression left upon my mind by the lecture. In it occurred some characteristic stories and epigrammatic felicities. . An Englishman and a Frenchman fought a duel in the dark. The Englishman not wishing to harm his antagonist crept around until he found the fireplace; he fired his pistol up the chimney and brought down the Frenchman. The Frenchman invented the dickey: the Englishman added the shirt. . . The French would have things theatrical; God will have things real. . . . The strength of the camel is said to reside in its many stomachs. In our World-Behemoth each nation is a stomach, and each holds an additional strength for man. A human society were impossible without the French element, and it is not without a purpose that Nature seems, wherever one goes, to insist | rot and are forgotten with their double tongue saying all that is sordid for the corruption of on Frenchmen. man. - Emerson has always been too steadfast When Theodore Parker died there sprang and loyal to his own task to devote himself to any particular reform or cause,' although up on the spot where he had so long and to him, with Wendell Phillips, it is to a nobly laboured something that seemed a lea pulpit great extent to be ascribed that all educa- gitimate sheaf from his sowing,ted men in the United States gave their to which every man with ability and a conadhesion to the anti-slavery movement which viction was welcomed, whatever his creed. originated with earnest but ignorant men. To this pulpit the puritan faith that nothing To the machinery of that movement in its is secular in any sense that defines it from earlier days the philosopher could and did what is sacred, had survived in an ethical give freely of his money but not of his time. treatment of all living themes and interests; He had a great respect, almost a reverence, and so from Sunday to Sunday Emerson, for Theodore Parker, who, with all the Phillips, and others, taught and applied the This is, tastes of a scholar, threw his heart so fully lessons of religion and philosophy. into the costly task of liberating the slave I believe, still the habit with the Parkerite which New England was reluctantly recog- Fraternity' of Boston, believed by many to nising as her own. None of the vast throng be the representative Church of New Engthat attended the obsequies of that repre- land. Emerson often preached there, and sentative New England preacher can ever with a warmth which had hardly been beforget the thrilling strain in which Emerson spoke extemporaneously of him. Standing in the hall where Parker had so long uttered his discourses, he said: fore associated with him. I should say that the most impressive utterance that I ever heard from him was a discourse delivered in that music hall about six years ago. There was not one but many themes and texts, but all related. He began by 'Tis plain to me that he has achieved an calling attention to the tendency to simplihistoric immortality here; that he has so woven himself in these few years into the history of fication. The inventor knows that a maBoston, that he can never be left out of your chine is new and improvable when it has a annals. It will not be in the acts of City great many parts. The chemists already Councils; nor of obsequious Mayors; nor in find the infinite variety of things contained the State House, the proclamations of Gov- in sixty-six elements, and physicists promise ernors with their failing virtue-failing them that this number shall be reduced to twenat critical moments, that the coming genera- ty, ten, five. Faraday declares his belief tions will study what really befell; but in the that all things will in the end be reduced to plain lessons of Theodore Parker in this Music Hall, in Faneuil Hall, or in Legislative Com- one element with two polarities. Religious mittee-rooms, the true temper and authentic progress has similarly been in the direction record of these days will be read. The next of simplification. Every great religion has generation will care little for the chances of in its ultimate development told its whole election that govern governors now; it will secret, concentrated its force, in some simcare little for fine gentlemen who behaved shab-ple maxims. In our youth we talk of the bily, but it will read very intelligently in his rough story, fortified with exact anecdotes, precise with names and dates, what part was taken by each actor; who threw himself into the cause of Humanity and who came to the rescue of civilization at a hard pinch, and who blocked its Ah, my brave brother! it seems as if, in a frivolous age, our loss were immense, and your place cannot be supplied. But you will already be consoled in the transfer of your genius, knowing well that the nature of the world will affirm to all men, in all times that which for twenty-five years you valiantly spoke; that the winds of Italy murmur the same truth over your grave, the winds of America over these be reaved streets; that the sea which bore your mourners home affirms it, the stars in their courses, the inspirations of youth; whilst the polished and pleasant traitors to human rights, with perverted learning and disgraced graves, course.... various virtues, the many dangers and trials ་ |