France would pick out Edgar Poe's drunken vaporings as a veritable presentment of our intellect at its best. Let us beware how we accept it as wholly true that the judgment of foreign nations is the judgment of posterity-nor for that matter, are the critical conclusions of posterity itself always to be accepted as sound.

Well, to begin with, we have a national mind, and an expression of it in literature, even though our foreign critics have not always measured it aright. We are not English, notwithstanding our English and linguistic and literary heritage; nor are we French, German, or Spanish. American literature is a result of the development, under wholly changed surroundings, of a selected part of the English mind. If you read a history of the English colonies in America down to 1765, you have read a prophecy of their subsequent achievement down to 1881-in literature as in everything else. Slowly repeat the names of the colonies and think of those who made them: New Hampshire; Massachusetts, with its twin settlements of Pilgrim Plymouth and Puritan Massachusetts Bay; Rhode Island under Roger Williams; Connecticut; the Dutch and English in New York; New Jersey; the Friends in Pennsylvania; Delaware; Maryland and the Roman Catholics; Virginia, with its good and its bad representatives of Cavalier England, its rough-scuff and its honorable elements; the Carolinas; Georgia.-As you name each colony, there comes into your mind a picture of its then achievement and its then promise-vague indeed and hard to understand in some particulars, but still turning unerringly to the fulfillment of to-day. Into these colonies, with their too widely dissimilar ruling elements, the Puritans north and the Cavaliers south, has poured emigration from all Europe, but still the same spirit dominates and moulds and gives character to all the later accessions. The surroundings are new, the influences complex, the environments, even, changing constantly; but still the Anglo-Saxon mind is dominant; still we are an English people, and our literature an English literature, but one growing from the best and most germinant elements in the parent brain, and taking from our cliffs and woods and lakes and mountains something which Tennyson does not find in the Isle of Wight, nor Wordsworth at Windermere, nor Burns among the Scottish heather.

At first our literature was like our life-concerned almost wholly with problems of grim existence and unknown destiny, theological and philosophical. We wrote pamphlets innumerable, and political and religious discussions without end. The Puritan character showed itself in literature, but in sterner and less poetical lines than those of Milton or Marvel in the mother country. And yet literature grew in excellence of manner as well as matter. Edwards wrote better English than the Mathers; Jefferson's and Franklin's prose surpassed that of the seventeenth century colonists; Freneau's poetry was far in advance of Michael Wigglesworth's; and the finished force of the Federalist would not have been possible here a hundred years before. Only while we ceased for a little to think deeply and rightly and independently did we cease to give sure signs of becoming far more than a mere literary dependency of England-such as Canada and Australia and East India have been. Tom Paine's creeds, and the miserable echo of the French infidelity of the latter half of the eighteenth century, worked a baleful and unsettling influence on our thought, at a time when there was but one professed Christian even in Yale College; but the sky soon cleared, and the good work of intellectual development went on, until in the early years of the nineteenth century, we really began to be able to think and talk of an American literature-one which concerned itself with belles-lettres as well as politics, with poetry as well as theology, and with fiction as well as hard fact.

It is to Washington Irving that we naturally turn when

we think of the first purely American success in literature of the highest order. And yet Irving was only half American; in the other half he was an English product and even an English resident. He wrote in London, he lived there, like a Henry James or Julian Hawthorne to-day; he was a member of the circle of leading English authors; he addressed his books to British readers; and the scenes, method and subjects of much of the "Sketch Book" or "Braceridge Hall," even belonged to the England rather than to the America of the time. In the "Sketch Book," to be sure, are the perennial legends of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle; but the way in which the stories were told was in chief part an English way. The gentleness and finish of Irving's style found their source in the same books and literary methods which produced the essays of Charles Lamb; and the American stories which Irving wrote were about us rather than of us. I think it a mistake to say that Irving was the first purely American author of a high rank. It is more correct to say that he was the first author of high rank who was born here. And yet in "Knickerbocker's History of New York" he gives a book which an Englishman could not have produced; and in “Astoria," "Wolfert's Roost," "Captain Bonneville," and the "Life of Washington," he further elaborated American themes. But the Knickerbocker school in our literature was hardly an indigenous growth. The Dutch influence was not a permanent one in letters or in life, here in America; and I think any one of my hearers, if he or she will candidly express an opinion, will say that Rip Van Winkle, or Ichabod Crane, or Diedrich Knickerbocker does not really arouse any feeling of national kinship; does not seem much more American than Dominie Sampson, or the Bruce, or Thaddeus of Warsaw, to mention a few characters in the foreign literature of the time. Irving's friends and contemporaries, Paulding, Drake, and Halleck, were somewhat more American, especially Drake; but neither in New York nor Boston had the true native element yet fully come to the surface in our best literature. R. H. Dana's "Idle Man" was nothing but a Boston edition of Addison and the eighteenth century essayists, and the North American Review was the London Quarterly transplanted to Massachusetts Bay. But the signs of a new day had already come. There was Drake's "American Flag," and Dana's "Buccaneer," and the scenery of some lines of Bryant's "Thanatopsis," and most of Drake's "Culprit Fay," to show that not only our surroundings but our spirit were creeping into the best poetry. Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris" might indeed have been written in London as well as in New York; but though Dana's "Buccaneer" was closely planned on a foreign model, and "Thanatopsis" was a poem of world-wide applicability, in each of these, and in other poems as well, appeared a willingness to be natural; to see what was at hand, and to feel what was around and about, as well as what was conventional and common. As Bryant grew older he turned more and more to native persons and things-to the water fowl, or green river, or monument mountain, or trees and skies of his native hills. In Longfellow's early work was a new influence that of continental Europe, with whose literature he was unusually familiar; "Outre-mer" was Germanized Addisonian, and "Hyperion" was like a translation from a Bingen romancer; while in Longfellow's poetry was first felt the spirit of the Norsemen's sagas and the breath of Sweden's shores. But to Longfellow, as to Bryant, advancing years brought more and more closely the warm breath of his own fatherland, dear and true as the Germans, and as fruitful at length of literary products. The American literature was almost here, and though some of our best authors, like Motley and Prescott, still continued to look to other shores for their subjects, the influence of the soil was felt too strongly ever again to pass away.

The American influence proper was felt at its strongest in the novels of Cooper. Here was something wholly new, something fresh and unfamiliar to foreign readers, and indeed to readers at home; a little exaggerated and florid in style, to be sure, but no importation. Candidly, I do not think that Cooper, were he living and writing to-day, would attain the place he held and holds; but he was in very truth a pioneer, and deserves a pioneer's honors, whatever his shortcomings in literary art and personal temper. The lesson we needed to learn was the lesson of looking at home instead of abroad, of making our literature, not borrowing it; and this lesson Cooper was admirably qualified to teach with success. Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were well learning the lesson of themselves; indeed it was in the air, and while the young Lowell began in 1838, with poems on the moon, and the sea, and the fountain, and Perdita, and the whole catalogue of sentimental subjects, ten years later he was an older and a wiser man, who could read his countrymen such a lecture as this:

"There are one or two things I should just like to hint,
For you don't often get the truth told you in print;
The most of you (this is what strikes all beholders)
Have a mental and physical stoop in the shoulders;
Though you ought to be free as the winds and the waves,
You 've the gait and the manners of runaway slaves;
Though you brag of your New World you don't half believe in it,
And as much of the Old as is possible weave in it;

Your goddess of freedom, a tight, buxom girl,
With lips like a cherry and teeth like a pearl,

With eyes bold as Here's, and hair floating free,

And full of the sun as the spray of the sea,

Who can sing at a husking or romp at a shearing,
Who can trip through the forests alone without fearing,
Who can drive home the cows with a song through the grass,
Keeps glancing aside into Europe's cracked glass,
Hides her red hands in gloves, pinches up her lithe waist,
And makes herself wretched with transmarine taste;
She loses her fresh country charm when she takes
Any mirror except her own rivers and lakes.

"You steal Englishmen's books and think English men's thought,
With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;
Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean;
The cast clothes of Europe your statesmanship tries
And mumbles again the old blarneys and lies;-
Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood,
To which the dull current in hers is but mud;
Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails,
In her voice there's a tremble e'en now while she rails,
And your shore will soon be in the nature of things
Covered thick with gilt driftwood of runaway kings,
Where alone, as it were in a Longfellow's Waif,
Her fugitive pieces will find themselves safe.

O my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he
"Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea;
Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines,
By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,
Be true to yourselves and this new nineteenth age,
As a statue by Powers or a picture by Page,

Plough, sail, forge, build, carve, paint, all things make new,
To your own New-World instincts contrive to be true,
Keep your ears open wide to the Future's first call,

Be whatever you will, but yourselves first of all, Stand fronting the dawn on Toil's heaven-scaling peaks, And become my new race of more practical Greeks." Such good, plain, sensible talk as this soon bore fruit-was already bearing fruit, for it represented the spirit of the times. Soon came แ Evangeline" " and "Hiawatha," of which the latter, although it was published no more than a quarter of a century ago, was a veritable revelation. In reading it we do not feel the sense of strangeness which comes with "Knickerbocker" or "Rip Van Winkle:" we are not Indians ourselves, to be sure, but we know the In

dian's woods and waters and skies, and in reading "Hiawatha" we are taken back to the nature of hundreds of years ago of the mythic period, but still to the nature of America, unspoiled by the fumes of Dutch schnapps, and unclouded by the veils of London fogs. I wish I could spend this whole lecture-hour with you over "Hiawatha" alone, for it would do both you and me a genuine good to re-read it in these woods with which it so seems akin; and reading literature is so much better than hearing about it or talking about it. I hope that some of you will by its aid get near to Nature's heart before you go hence. And if you have Longfellow beside you you may also re-read the "Courtship of Miles Standish," and the "New England Tragedies," to see how the poet turns our history as well as our myths to good account; and then in his shorter poems you may find anew how he enshrines our more than English, because American, love of truth and honor, and purity, and the kindly soul. Let us take a moment, however, to read together one of Longfellow's shorter poems, a brief unrhymed melody which illustrates in no less degree his power of apprehending, and using as poetical material that which is nearest at hand, and which all may perceive and understand in their poetic moods. It is of nothing save the sound of bells heard at a summering place:

THE BELLS OF LYNN, HEARD AT NAHANT.
O curfew of the setting sun! O Bells of Lynn!
O requiem of the dying day! O Bells of Lynn!
From the dark belfries of yon cloud-cathedral wafted,
Your sounds aërial seem to float, O Bells of Lynn!
Borne on the evening wind across the crimson twilight,
O'er land and sea they rise and fall, O Bells of Lynn!
The fisherman in his boat, far out beyond the headland,
Listens, and leisurely rows ashore, O Bells of Lynn!
Over the shining sands the wandering cattle homeward
Follow each other at your call, O Bells of Lynn!

The distant light-house hears, and with his flaming signal,
Answers you, passing the watchword on, O Bells of Lynn !
And down the darkening coast run the tumultuous surges,
And clap their hands, and shout to you, O Bells of Lynn!
Till from the shuddering sea, with your wild incantations,
Ye summon up the spectral moon, O Bells of Lynn!

And startled at the sight, like the weird woman of Endor,
Ye cry aloud, and then are still, O Bells of Lynn!

In the prose works of Holmes, and in his verse, this American element appears with scarcely less clearness. "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," and its two companion volumes, are of the soil, and so are most of the poems of him who has been called the American Pope. But in Whittier it is still more constantly evident. Whittier's "Snow-Bound" is an American classic, which describes scenes and events all our own, with a literary art not less excellent than that of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," or Burns' "Cotter's Saturday Night." Take Whittier for all in all, I am sometimes inclined to consider him the most American of American poets-not so much when, to borrow his own humorous description of himself, he "turns the crank of an opinion-mill," as when he turns to American men and women in their native air-to old Abraham Davenport in the Connecticut Legislature at the time of the dark day; to Barbara Frietchie at Frederic; to Port Royal or the Dismal Swamp; to poor old Skipper Ireson "tarred and feathered and carried in a cart by the women of Marblehead."

And in the Middle States, the West, and the South, the same success is following fidelity to souls and scenes of the place. It comes a little later, to be sure, but no less surely. Not by the Poes, not by the Henry James, Jrs., with AngloAmerican heroes and heroines, but by the Bayard Taylors,

or Paul H. Haynes, or Margaret J. Prestons, and John J. Piatts, and Bret Hartes-for I would not have you for a moment suppose that I rank Harte as a literary man with Whitman and Miller; at his best he is very good, and what he has written will live, for it is true and original-by such as these, and by all who are both good artists and good children of their own country, who are true to it and to themselves, will be wrought the literature which shall truly deserve the name of American, and shall longest live. Not every author who is American is great, but every great author whom we shall raise will be an American author. "Until an American," says a recent essayist, "writes a book about subjects which are perfectly familiar to him, he can not hope to achieve distinction. Shakspeare was a thorough Englishman. He knew little and cared less for foreigners, except so far as he took the plots of his plays from foreign tales. His thoughts and his characters were English to the core. Scott won immortality by writing of the people among whom he lived, whose ways and thoughts and peculiarities he knew by instinct, and by describing the scenery which to him was the loveliest on earth. If Raphael wanted a Madonna he found one on the streets of Rome. Titian painted Venetians; Velasquez, Spaniards; while Rembrandt aped neither one nor the other, but painted plain Dutch burgomasters, like the honest man he was. The American who lives in Paris until he is a mongrel Frenchman can never paint a great picture; neither can an American, by lounging in all the capitals of Europe, write a good novel about foreigners, simply because the work of such men does not ring true. They must write and paint as they speak the language-like mongrels, as they are. Art or literature, to be successful, must be the natural fruit of the soil from whence it springs; and if American novelists can not write something worth reading about the only people they can possibly understand, they can not write anything worth reading at all."

Let us take two further illustrations of the literary advantage of voicing one's own thoughts, and of describing the scenes and feelings familiar to him. The first example shall be from the placid life of Quaker Pennsylvania, as known and described by Bayard Taylor; and the second from blackened and desolated Richmond just after the war. I have selected these two widely separated examples for the purpose of showing how faithfulness to one's convictions and experiences helps literary achievements. First let us read

THE QUAKER WIDOW.

Thee finds me in the garden Hannah-come in! 'tis kind of thee
To wait until the friends were gone, who came to comfort me.
The still and quiet company a peace may give, indeed,
But blessed is the single heart that comes to us at need.
Come, sit thee down! Here is the bench where Benjamin would
sit

On First-day afternoons in spring, and watch the swallows flit:
He loved to smell the sprouting box, and hear the pleasant bees
Go humming round the lilacs, and through the apple-trees.

I think he loved the spring: not that he cared for flowers; most

men

Think such things foolishness,-but we were first acquainted then,
One spring: the next he spoke his mind; the third I was his wife,
And in the spring (it happened so) our children entered life.

He was but seventy-five: I did not think to lay him yet
In Kennett Graveyard, where at monthly meeting first we met.
The Father's mercy shows in this: 'tis better I should be
Picked out to bear the heavy cross-alone in age--than he.
We've lived together fifty years: it seems but one long day,
One quiet Sabbath of the heart, till he was called away;
And as we bring from meeting-time a sweet contentment home,
So, Hannah, I have store of peace for all the days to come.
I mind (for I can tell thee now) how hard it was to know

If I had heard the Spirit right, that told me I should go;
For father had a deep concern upon his mind that day,
But mother spoke for Benjamin,-she knew what best to say.
Then she was still: they sat awhile; at last she spoke again,
"The Lord incline thee to the right!" and "Thou shalt have him,
Jane!"

My father said. I cried. Indeed, 'twas not the least of shocks,
For Benjamin was Hicksite, and father Orthodox.

I thought of this ten years ago, when daughter Ruth we lost:
Her husband's of the world, and yet I could not see her crossed.
She wears, thee knows, the gayest gowns, she hears a hireling
priest-

Ah, dear! the cross was ours: her life's a happy one, at least.
Perhaps she'll wear a plainer dress when she's as old as I,-
Would thee believe it, Hannah? once I felt temptation nigh!
My wedding-gown was ashen silk, too simple for my taste:
I wanted lace around the neck, and a ribbon at the waist.
How strange it seemed to sit with him upon the women's side!
I did not dare to lift my eyes: I felt more fear than pride,
Till, "in the presence of the Lord," he said, and then there came
A holy strength upon my heart, and I could say the same.

I used to blush when he came near, but then I showed no sign;
With all the meeting looking on, 1 held his hand in mine.
It seemed my bashfulness was gone, now I was his for life:
Thee knows the feeling, Hannah,-thee, too, has been a wife.
As home we rode, I saw no fields look half so green as ours;
The woods were coming into leaf, the meadows full of flowers;
The neighbors met us in the lane, and every face was kind,—
'Tis strange how lively everything comes back upon my mind.
I see, as plain as thee sits there, the wedding-dinner spread:
At our own table we were guests, with father at the head,
And Dinah Passmore helped us both,-'twas she stood up with me,
And Abner Jones with Benjamin, -and now they're gone, all three!
It is not right to wish for death; the Lord disposes best.
His spirit comes to quiet hearts, and fits them for his rest;
And that he halved our little flock was merciful, I see:
For Benjamin has two in heaven, and two are left with me.
Eusebius never cared to farm,-'twas not his call, in truth,
And I must rent the dear old place, and go to daughter Ruth.
Thee 'll say her ways are not like mine,-young people nowadays
Have fallen sadly off, I think, from all the good old ways.
But Ruth is still a Friend at heart; she keeps the simple tongue,
The cheerful, kindly nature we loved when she was young;
And it was brought upon my mind, remembering her, of late,
That we on dress and outward things perhaps lay too much weight.
I once heard Jesse Kersey say, a spirit clothed with grace,
And pure, almost, as angels are, may have a homely face.
And dress may be of less account: the Lord will look within:
The soul it is that testifies of righteousness or sin.

Thee must n't be too hard on Ruth: she's anxious I should go, And she will do her duty as a daughter should, I know. "Tis hard to change so late in life, but we must be resigned: The Lord looks down contentedly upon a willing mind. Now turn with me from the North to the South, and hear how a defeated rebel wrote of "The Confederate Flag." I think you will find in this unfamiliar poem one touch of nature which makes the whole world kin, which may for the moment enable us to look at it not as we are wont to,-but consider it simply as literature, not as politics. For in the republic of letters here on the western shore of the Atlantic, there is no North, South, East, West, but only America. [Applause.]

THE CONFEDERATE FLAG.

Take that banner down, 'tis weary;
Round its staff 'tis drooping dreary;
Furl it, fold it, let it rest;
For there's not a man to wave it,
For there's not a sword to save it,

In the blood that heroes gave it;
And its foes now scorn and brave it:
Furl it, hide it, let it rest.

Take that banner down, 'tis tattered,

Broken is its shaft and shattered;
And the valiant hosts are scattered,

Over whom it floated high.
Oh! 'tis hard for us to fold it!

Hard to think there's none to hold it;
Hard, for those who once unrolled it,
Now must furl it with a sigh.

Furl that banner, furl it sadly;
Once six millions hailed it gladly,
And ten thousand wildly, madly

Swore it should forever wave:
Swore that foeman's sword should never
Hearts like theirs entwined dissever;
And that flag should float forever

O'er their freedom or their grave.
Furl it, for the hands that grasped it,
And the hearts that fondly clasped it,
Cold and dead are lying low;
And that banner, it is trailing,
While around it sounds the wailing
Of its people in their woe.
For, though conquered, they adore it,
Love the cold, dead hands that bore it;
Weep for those who fell before it;
Pardon those who trail and tore it:
Oh, how wildly they deplore it,
Now to furl and fold it so!

Furl that banner! True, 'tis gory;
But 'tis wreathed around with glory,
And 't will live in song and story,
Though its folds are in the dust;
For its fame on brightest pages,
Penned by poets and by sages,
Shall go sounding down the ages:
Furl its folds, for now we must.
Furl that banner softly, slowly;
Furl it gently,-it is holy, -

For it droops above the dead:
Touch it not,-unfurl it never,-
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people's hopes are dead.

Thus far I have made little mention of novelists, and I have done so in order to save for the last this one word, that a veritable incarnation of what I have said concerning one's self and surroundings is to be found in Nathaniel Hawthorne, the greatest of all our authors, and as Lowell has said, in some respects the greatest imaginative genius since Shakspere. To consider his mind and its expression would demand a whole lecture, nay, many lectures. I therefore merely point to him as an ever-living proof of the advantage gained by unswerving devotion to the spirit and history of one's own abode. In his mind and work he is the very embodiment of the region in which he | lived, with all its characteristics. And now let me finish with a quotation which may well give us a sober idea of our duty and responsibility in this matter of our national growth with which literature goes hand in hand--a quotation, not from a Fourth-of-July panegyric on all things American, but from the very last number of a leading English review, which came to me just as I was preparing this lecture:

"It is a relief to turn from the bickering of the jealous nations of the Old World to the spectacle which is presented to us across the Atlantic. The Future is there, and as we contemplate the majestic proportions of the Great Western Republic, with its population of fifty millions rapidly swelling to double that total, we feel that here we have the factor that is destined to revolutionize the world. The influence of the United States upon Europe was by no means insignificant even in the first French Revolution, but it was small compared with that which it is exercising to-day, but was as nothing compared with the power which it will wield to-morrow. We feel

the subtle but direct influence of America in almost every European State. The most significant sight afforded us this year, although one of the least noticed, is the enormous exodus which goes on unceasingly from the Old World to the New. In numerical proportions the exodus of the children of Israel to the Promised Land was a mere bagatelle compared with the vast and fertilizing stream of human life which is being emptied upon the prairies of the West. The rate of immigration into New York will this year exceed two thousand a day. Altogether the United States has received an overflow of the surplus population of Europe exceeding ten million persons in the last fifty years. Hitherto America has been but as the safety-valve of the older world. The outcasts, the proscribed, the oppressed, and the hunger-smitten of Europe, have found in the American Republic a safe shelter and a well-spread table. "The Providence that ordains all things," said an American recently, "has bestowed upon America land enough to give every European peasant a farm. It seems now as if every peasant is about to claim his guerdon." The rush across the Atlantic is unprecedented. One-fortieth of the entire population of Sweden has booked passages to New York. "If this goes on unchecked,” said a German, "in a few years all Germany will be found in America." Already Ireland beyond the seas counts more sons of Irish descent than the Green Isle itself. Even from little Switzerland last year went seven thousand emigrants to the Republics of the West. More than fifty per cent. of the emigrants are able-bodied men under forty years of age. The emigrants are the cream of the population of the countries which they desert. The "freckless loon" stays at home. It is the man of intelligence, enterprise, and energy, who emigrates. It is obvious that so vast a disturbance of the balance of population must in the long run produce corresponding changes in the political and economical situation. The reflex action of the New World upon the Old, already great, is daily increasing. Everywhere American competition, American emigration, or American ideas are at work disintegrating the fabric of European society, and perplexing the statesmen of the older world with thoughts of change. The constant drain of his best fighting men to the New World is one of the greatest grievances which Prince Bismarck cherishes against Providence, and his perplexity is more or less shared by the masters of many legions all over Europe. In Ireland we are face to face with a movement which owes its origin to the Irish Americans, who supply it with its organ, its funds, and its leaders. The same phenomenon may yet be witnessed in Germany. It is already being witnessed in the latest agitation against Austrian rule in the Bocche di Cattaro, where the mountaineers are said to be incited to revolt by returned emigrants from America, who have brought with them the democratic ideas of the West. American influence moulded the Bulgarian constitution, and although that has proved no great success, being too much in advance of the condition of the population, it is a significant hint of the things which are to come. So far from allowing the Europeans who are settling in millions within their borders to Europeanize the States, the States bid fair to Americanize Europe"

CATCHING A TARTAR.—Arvine's Cyclopædia states that in a battle between the Russians and the Tartars a Russian soldier called to his captain, saying, he had caught a Tartar. “Bring him along then," was the captain's reply. "Ay, but he won't let me," replied the soldier. It then came out that the Tartar had caught him. "So," says Arvine, “when a man thinks to take another in, and gets himself bit, they say, 'he's caught a Tartar.'"

ONE STEP FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS.This saying is generally attributed to Napoleon. It is however, to be found in the works of the notorious Tom Paine, before Napoleon's time. Paine says: "The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again."

NIAGARA. This name is a compound of two Indian words, Niag hera, "hark to the thunder!"

LAVENGRO.

A DREAM OR DRAMA; OR, A SCHOLAR, A GYPSY, A PRIEST.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

"Young gentleman," said the huge fat landlord, "you are come at the right time; dinner will be taken up in a few minutes, and such a dinner," he continued, rubbing his hands, "as you will not see every day in these times."

"I am hot and dusty," said I, "and should wish to cool my hands and face."

"Jenny!" said the huge landlord, with the utmost gravity, "show the gentleman into number seven that he may wash his hands and face."

"By no means," said I, "I am a person of primitive habits, and there is nothing like the pump in weather like this."

“Jenny!" said the landlord, with the same gravity as before, "go with the young gentleman to the pump in the back kitchen, and take a clean towel along with you."

Thereupon the rosy-faced, clean-looking damsel went to a drawer, and producing a large, thick, but snowy-white towel, she nodded to me to follow her; whereupon I followed Jenny through a long passage into the back kitchen.

At the end of the back kitchen there stood a pump; and going to it I placed my hands beneath the spout, and said, "Pump, Jenny;" and Jenny incontinently, without laying down the towel, pumped with one hand, and I washed and cooled my heated hands.

And, when my hands were washed and cooled, I took off my neckcloth, and unbuttoning my shirt collar, I placed my hand beneath the spout of the pump, and said unto Jenny, "Now, Jenny, lay down the towel, and pump for your life."

Thereupon Jenny, placing the towel on a linen-horse, took the handle of the pump with both hands and pumped over my head as handmaid had never pumped before; so that the water poured in torrents from my head, my face, and my hair down upon the brick floor.

And after the lapse of somewhat more than a minute, I called out with a half-strangled voice, "Hold, Jenny!" and Jenny desisted. I stood for a few moments to recover my breath, then taking the towel which Jenny proffered, I dried composedly my hands and head, my face and hair; then, returning the towel to Jenny, I gave a deep sigh and said, "Surely this is one of the pleasant moments of life."

Then, having set my dress to rights, and combed my hair with a pocket-comb, I followed Jenny, who conducted me back through the long passage, and showed me into a neat sanded parlor on the ground floor.

I sat down by a window which looked out upon the dusty street; presently in came the handmaid, and commenced laying the tablecloth. "Shall I spread the table for one, sir," said she, "or do you expect anybody to dine with you?"

"I can't say that I expect anybody," said I, laughing inwardly to myself; "however, if you please you can lay for two, so that if any acquaintance of mine should chance to step in, he may find a knife and fork ready for him."

So I sat by the window, sometimes looking out upon the dusty street, and now glancing at certain old-fashioned prints which adorned the wall over against me. I fell into a kind of doze, from which I was almost instantly awakened by the opening of the door. Dinner, thought I; and I sat upright in my chair. No; a man of the middle age, and rather above the middle height, dressed in a plain suit of black, made his appearance, and sat down in a chair at some distance from me, but near to the table, and appeared to be lost in thought.

"The weather is very warm, sir," said I.

"Very," said the stranger laconically, looking at me for the first time.

"Would you like to see the newspaper?" said I, taking up one which lay upon the window seat.

"I never read newspapers," said the stranger, "nor, indeedWhatever it might be that he had intended to say he left unfinished. Suddenly he walked to the mantel-piece at the farther end of the room, before which he placed himself with his back toward me. There he remained motionless for some time; at length, raising his hand, he touched the corner of the mantel-piece with his finger, advanced toward the chair which he had left, and again seated him. self.

"Have you come far?" said he, suddenly looking toward me, and

speaking in a frank and open manner, which denoted a wish to enter into conversation. "You do not seem to be of this place."

"I come from some distance," said I; "indeed I am walking for exercise, which I find as necessary to the mind as the body. I believe that by exercise people would escape much mental misery."

Scarcely had I uttered these words when the stranger laid his hand, with seeming carelessness, upon the table, near one of the glasses; after a moment or two he touched the glass as if inadvertantly, then, glancing furtively at me, he withdrew his hand and looked toward the window.

"Are you from these parts?" said I at last, with apparent careless

ness.

"From this vicinity," replied the stranger. "You think, then, that it is as easy to walk off the bad humors of the mind as of the body?" "I, at least, am walking in that hope," said I.

"I wish you may be successful," said the stranger; and here he touched one of the forks which lay on the table near him.

Here the door, which was slightly ajar, was suddenly pushed open with some fracas, and in came the stout landlord, supporting with some difficulty an immense dish, in which was a mighty round mass of smoking meat garnished all round with vegetables; so high was the mass that it probably obstructed his view, for it was not until he had placed it upon the table that he appeared to observe the stranger; he almost started, and quite out of breath exclaimed: "God bless me, your honor; is your honor the acquaintance that the young gentleman was expecting?"

"Is the young gentleman expecting an acquaintance?" said the stranger.

There is nothing like putting a good face upon these matters, thought I to myself; and, getting up, I bowed to the unknown. "Sir," said I, "when I told Jenny that she might lay the table-cloth for two, so that in the event of any acquaintance dropping in he might find a knife and fork ready for him, I was merely jocular, being an entire stranger in these parts, and expecting no one. Fortune, however, it would seem, has been unexpectedly kind to me; I flatter myself, sir, that since you have been in this room I have had the honor of making your acquaintance; and in the strength of that hope I humbly entreat you to honor me with your company to dinner, provided you have not already dined."

The stranger laughed outright.

"Sir," I continued, "the round of beef is a noble one, and seems exceedingly well boiled, and the landlord was just right when he said I should have such a dinner as is not seen every day. A round of beef, at any rate such a round of beef as this, is seldom seen smoking upon the table in these degenerate times. Allow me, sir," said I, observing that the stranger was about to speak, "allow me another remark. I think I saw you just now touch the fork, I venture to hail it as an omen that you will presently seize it, and apply it to its proper purpose, and its companion the knife also." The stranger changed color, and gazed upon me in silence. "Do, sir," here put in the landlord; "do, sir, accept the young gentleman's invitation. Your honor has of late been looking poorly, and the young gentleman is a funny young gentleman, and a clever young gentleman; and I think it will do your honor good to have a dinner's chat with the young gentleman."

"It is not my dinner hour," said the stranger; "I dine considerably later; taking anything now would only discompose me; I shall, however, be most happy to sit down with the young gentleman; reach me that paper, and, when the young gentleman has satisfied his appetite, we may perhaps have a little chat together."

The landlord handed the stranger the newspaper, and, bowing, retired with his maid Jenny. I helped myself to a portion of the smoking round, and commenced eating with no little appetite. The stranger appeared to be soon engrossed with the newspaper. We continued thus a considerable time-the one reading and the other dining. Chancing suddenly to cast my eyes upon the stranger, I saw his brow contract; he gave a slight stamp with his foot, and flung the newspaper to the ground, then stooping down he picked it up, first moving his forefinger along the floor, seemingly slightly scratching it with his nail.

"Do you hope, sir," said I, "by that ceremony with the finger to preserve yourself from the evil chance?"

The stranger started; then, after looking at me for some time in silence, he said, "Is it possible that you -?"

"Ay, ay," said I, helping myself to some more of the round, "I have touched myself in my younger days, both for the evil chance and the good. Can't say, though, that I ever trusted much in the ceremony."