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This is in itself no slight recommendation of The scene of Kavanagh is a New England vilworks of fiction. The Spanish character of the lage in the process of becoming a railway town. writings of Cervantes, the English of De Foe's, The principal characters are the schoolmaster, with constitute not the least of their charms. Mr. Long- his wife and children; an old clergyman, uncerfellow's are also imbued with higher than merely emoniously cashiered by his parishioners; his suclocal qualities. To a quick perception of the beau-cessor, Kavanagh himself; the district judge and tiful, graceful, and tender, he unites a true imagi- his daughter; the butcher, the mercer, the birdnation, a familiarity with the literature of many fancier, and other notables of the village. Individlanguages, and a soundness of judgment which cor- ual peculiarities are happily hit off. The old rects and applies these qualities with admirable clergyman, whose delight it is to expatiate on the taste. He has patiently and sedulously cultivated Zumzummims, and go at large into the bloodiest all his talents. He is a ripe scholar and a careful campaigns of the ancient Hebrews; and the butcher, observer of nature. Like many of his countrymen whose office it is to supply the village with fresh he has studied with profit in the school of Germany, provisions, and weigh all the babies, who rejoices yet without impairing his nationality. His turn of in a fresh, rosy complexion and an exceedingly mind is original, while yet we can trace in it the white frock every Monday morning, and who has suggestive influence of the great intellects of Ger- lately married a milliner in the "Dunstable and many. In Kavanagh Mr. Longfellow observes and eleven-braid" line, and made his marriage jaunt delineates the every day life of New England in a to a neighboring town to see a man hanged for spirit akin to that of Jean Paul Richter. In Evan-murdering his wife; are placed very visibly before geline we have a purely American idyl not undeserving to take its place beside the Dorothea of Göthe.

Kavanagh is essentially Richterish, yet with a difference. The sharpness of touch, the incessant revelations of stoical character which break through the fantastic waywardness of Richter, are not here. On the other hand, it has nothing of the conscious effort which sometimes characterizes Richter's wit; nothing of the indulgence in sheer dirt which he mingles so harshly with passages of dreaming, ethereal purity.

us. Nor less distinct is the truculent son of the latter worthy dismissed from school for playing truant, who, when his mother would frighten him into good behavior by telling him that the boys who know the dead languages will throw stones at him in the street, imperturbably replies, "he should like to see them try it." Equally vivid is our vision of Miss Sally Manchester, excellent chambermaid and bad cook, with a temper like "a pleasant saw," and her large pink bow on the congregation side" of her Sunday bonnet. The monotonous progress of this well-regulated society Perhaps the marking features of a generally edu- is skilfully indicated, while its somewhat dull cated society cannot be adequately portrayed but by ground is pleasantly relieved by the reveries and that constant antithesis of poetical imagination and aspirations of the educated and refined characters, grotesque commonplace in which Richter and Long- and by the beauty of the physical nature which fellow so delight to revel. The imaginative and surrounds them, seen through their animated perthe practical parts of our nature, so inextricably in- ceptions of it. Mr. Churchill, whom nature meant tertwined in the men of former generations, have for a poet, but destiny made a schoolmaster, with been disentangled in the men of the present. Every his projected romance, which at the end as at the educated man (or woman) lives now-a-days alter-beginning of the book has still to be begun, is as nately in two entirely dissimilar worlds. There is the monotonous, uneventful real world, in which he discharges family and social duties, and pursues an industrial calling, under the ægis of the police; and there is the ideal world of books and art, in which his higher faculties find the nutriment denied them in actual life. This temporary divorce of the real and the imaginative marks a stage in human progress; but they are severed only to be reunited when a greater advance has been made. The present stage is an unsatisfactory one, both in the comfort of the individual and the capabilities of society, as a subject for artistical treatment. Actual life, with the element of romance expelled, is dull and depressing; imagination, harshly separated from the real world, is apt to become feeble and fantastic. But since it is so, we must be content; and the poet, whom, as it has been said of the poor, "we shall have always with us," must make the most of the materials offered to him in the best way he In these facts we trace the origin, and find the vindication, of that class of prose fictions of which Richter's and Longfellow's are examples.

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full of fancies, edifying and delectable, as the melancholy Jacques. The more energetic will of Kavanagh imparts a more substantial character to the imaginative portion of his life.

Let us add that Mr. Longfellow, while following out pretty closely the objects of his fiction, has not confined himself to tracing the characters of men whose sober judgment teaches them instinctively to acquiesce in the present separation of man's life into two imperfect lives. In the brief glimpse afforded us of the Millerites and their camp meetings, we have a powerful picture of the fatal precipitateness with which fiery and uninstructed spirits seek to hasten that reünion of the imaginative and actual which must be left to come in the good time of Providence. We are also forcibly reminded by the beautiful picture of Alice Archer, that the throes of passion are as tumultuous and death-fraught beneath the imperturbable surface of orderly society, as when they were freely given to view in times of less self-constraint. The most terrible of tragedies, after all, is when men, aware of their impending fate, are hurried helplessly to

destruction in a ship over which they have no gov-| if not in England, assuredly on the north of the ernance, and where there is nothing for them but Tweed, we could find kindred spirits to Hester to await death in resignation or despair.

The theme of Evangeline neither calls for nor admits the play of fancy which the contrast between the meditative and active existence of men in actual society forces upon Mr. Longfellow in Kavanagh. It is a tale of simple earnestness, very graceful, and amid its unexaggerated truthfulness animated by a tranquil and lofty spirit of endurance. The story is of a betrothed and her bridegroom, separated on the eve of their marriage, only to be reünited in extreme old age at the death-bed of the bridegroom. The story was suggested by the expulsion of the neutral French from the province of Acadia by the British government at the close of the war of succession. The transference of the

exiles to other regions was effected with such reckless precipitance that many families were scattered, never to meet again. On this hint Mr. Longfellow's imagination has bodied forth the bride and bridegroom wasting their lives in mutual searches after each other. The story is told in unrhymed

hexameters, a style of versification happily adapted to a narrative in which suspense and expectation are the predominant emotions. The opening sketch of the tranquil and happy lives of the French Acadians on the gulf of Minas is truly idyllic. The death of the stout old farmer in the arms of his bereaved daughter, on the eve of embarkation, and in the presence of the burning village, is strikingly tragic. The interest in Evangeline, throughout her devious, life-prolonged search, is kept up without intermission; and what is painful in the theme is relieved by beautiful sketches of the scenery of the south-western waters, and the busy lives of their inhabitants. But still more is it relieved by the atmosphere of patient resignation, and religious reliance, which pervades all places through which the tender vision of Evangeline passes. And the end of the much-enduring woman, as of her more tempest-tossed lover, is peace. The happy and varied imagery of the poem is throughout instinct with that higher spirit which can impart a sad pleasure even to the deepest tragedy.

One reflection we must add, upon the strong resemblances in New England life and society, to that which is found in Old England. The differences are many, but they are accidental and superficial. At bottom the men of New England are Englishmen still. In every English village (as Miss Mitford could tell) we might find counterparts to the prominent characters of Fairfield. Their daily avocations, their occasional pleasures, are in the main the same. Their morals, their weaknesses, are akin. English parishioners cannot so unceremoniously rid themselves of a dull clergyman; but with this difference, they have their ecclesiastical bickerings all the same as at Fairfield. The pleasant picnic party at Roaring Brook" is not without as pleasant counterparts here. Both in New and Old England the divided lives of the same men, in an ideal and real world, form one of the characteristics of the age. And

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Green's minister, who asked her, the day after the ball, "if she did not feel the fire of a certain place growing hot under her feet while she was dancing?" The reader will thank us for the extracts we sub

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Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin.

Dreamlike and indistinct, and strange were all things around them;

And o'er their spirits there came a feeling of wonder and sadness

Strange forebodings of ill, unseen and that cannot be compassed.

As, at the tramp of a horse's hoof on the turf of the prairies,

Far in advance are closed the leaves of the shrinking mimosa,

So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil,

Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.

THE SCHOOLMASTER LET LOOSE.

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream!

Some such thought as this was floating vaguely through the brain of Mr. Churchill, as he closed his school-house door behind him; and if in any degree he applied it to himself, it may perhaps be pardoned in a dreamy, poetic man like him; for we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. And moreover, his wife considered him equal to great things. To the people in the village he was the schoolmaster, and nothing more. They beheld in his form and countenance no outward sign of the divinity within. They saw him daily moiling and delving in the common path, like a beetle, and little thought that underneath that hard and cold exterior, lay folded delicate golden wings, wherewith, when the heat of day was over, he soared and revelled in the pleasant evening air. To-day he was soaring and revelling before the sun had set; for it was Saturday. With a feeling of infinite relief he left behind him the empty school-house, into which the hot sun of a Septeniber afternoon was pouring. All the bright young faces were gone; all the impatient little hearts were gone; all the fresh voices, shrill, but musical with the melody of childhood, were gone; and the lately busy realm was given up to silence, and the dusty sunshine, and the old gray flies that buzzed and bumped their heads against the window-panes. The sound of the outer door, creaking on his hebdomadal hinges, was like a sentinel's challenge, to which the key growled responsive in the lock; and the master, casting a furtive glance at the last caricature of himself in red chalk on the wooden fence close by, entered with a light step the solemn avenue of pines that led to the margin of the river.

PROSE EPIGRAMS.

Morality, without religion, is only a kind of dead-reckoning-an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies. Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings-as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.

The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic idols may be worshipped for a while; but at length they are overturned by the continual and silent progress of truth, as the grim statues of Copan have been pushed from their pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined walls.

The every-day cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration, and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon the wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move, the clock stands still.

IRISH TEMPERANCE HYMN.

THE following verses, under the title of “Curtain the Lamp," appeared in the last number of the Nation.

Curtain the lamp, and bury the bowl,
The ban is on drinking;

Reason shall reign the Queen of the Soul
When the spirits are sinking.
Chained lies the demon that smote with blight,
Men's morals and barrels ;

Then hail to health, and a long good night
To old wine and new quarrels!

Nights shall descend, and no taverns ring
To the roar of our revels;
Mornings shall dawn, but none of them bring
White lips and blue devils.
Riot and frenzy sleep with remorse
In the obsolete potion,

And mind grows calm as a ship on her course
O'er the level of ocean.

So should it be! for man's world of romance
Is fast disappearing,

And shadows of changes are seen in advance,
Whose epochs are nearing.

And the days are at hand when the best shall require

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From Tait's Magazine.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN.

BY JAMES AUGUSTUS ST. JOHN,
Author of "History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient

Greece," "Margaret Ravenscroft," " Egypt and

Mohammed Ali," &c. &c.

CHAPTER 1.-THE DEPARTURE.

Geneva and Chamberi, and Madame de Warrens and Claude Anet, became engraven ineffaceably on my mind; and with the whole, the dust, sunshine, green meadows, shady groves, sparkling streams, and melting heat of July, were inextricably associated.

From that time to the present, Rousseau and I

THERE AND BACK AGAIN! Will you accom-have been on good terms. The objections company me, reader? If you do, we shall converse by monly made to him by others have little weight the way on many subjects besides the picturesque. with me. Perhaps, indeed, the facts which proThe journey altogether was a strange one for me, voke their anathemas constitute the principal because, not having been a great traveller, I had reason of my preference, namely, that he was the not, and, indeed, have not yet, learned to view great apostle and father of the revolution, that he men and countries as commonplace because many wrote the "Contrat Sociale," and disturbed the other persons before me had beheld them. In mov-political creed of all noble and imaginative minds ing about the world, it is not always what we see, throughout Europe. Let those persons who are but what we feel, that is productive of most delight really wise take all due credit for it. I make no both to ourselves and others. Nature supplies the canvas, but we must bring along with us the colors, if we would call into being an original or even a true picture-true, I mean, for all those who have the same organization and sympathies with us.

pretensions of that sort. I came to Switzerland, as I have said, out of partiality for Jean Jacques Rousseau, fully expecting to find at Vevay and Clarens the representatives, in feature and figure at least, of Julie and Claire.

Ever since our passage of the Jura, I had been visited by the suspicion that we had got among an inferior race of human beings. France, heaven

We used my wife and I-to discuss these Every man has his own peculiar motives for matters seriously, because it was a rule with us travelling, and, therefore, of course, I had mine; never to remain long in any place where the though you will probably become incredulous women were other than handsome, or at least when I endeavor to explain what they were. It tolerably pretty. This may be set down to our was not to behold lakes, glaciers, and mountains love for the picturesque; for, after all, there is no whose heads touch heaven, that I had come into combination of earth, wood, and water, which can Switzerland; it was not in search of poetical or claim to be regarded as half so beautiful as a other inspiration; neither, being perfectly well, beautiful woman. Lakes are very magnificent, was it with any view of improving my health, or and so are forests and mountains; but if, with acquiring animal spirits, with which, at the time, Milton, we were deprived of the power of beholdI was literally overflowing. I had come purely ing external things, it is the human face divine out of love for the memory of Jean Jacques Rous-that we should most earnestly desire to look upon seau, and that I might stroll about at my ease again. Neither sun, nor moon, nor day, nor night, over the scene of the Nouvelle Heloise. But would awaken within us regrets so poignant as the why was the memory of Rousseau dear to me? faces of dear friends now for us blotted out forever Probably some one had breathed it into my ears from the aspect of nature. before the dawn of memory, and rendered it familiar to me in that period of life when to be familiar is always to be loved. The day on which I first became acquainted with his writings I re-knows, is not remarkable for female beauty, and member most distinctly. It was in the midst of yet one does occasionally in that country see lovely summer, when July had covered all the roads, and faces and bright eyes flitting by one, especially in sprinkled all the bushes in their vicinity, with Normandy, and certain provinces of the south. dust. A cousin, who lived some five or six miles But in Switzerland, the imagination immedioff, had just written to me, to say that he had got ately begins to flag for lack of excitement. a copy of the "Confessions," which, if I would Rocks, and snow, and forests you have, no doubt, fetch them, he would lend to me. I started early, in abundance; and, if you can be satisfied with with one of my sisters as a companion, all the these, you may fancy yourself in Paradise. way amusing myself with imagining what man- Nothing is wanting but a finely and delicately ner of things those "Confessions" could be. We organized humanity. It seems, however, to be walked through shady lanes, over meadows a general law, that, wherever nature puts on strewed with wild flowers, crossing many a brook gigantic dimensions, man is intellectually dwarfed, by the aid of a plank or small rustic bridge, and for mountainous regions have seldom or never at length reached the house in which the treasure given birth to great minds, or stamped a poetical lay. All else connected with this circumstance character on their inhabitants. A seaport town, has faded from my memory but the book and my embosomed in low hills, and a flat wool-combing sister, and the way in which I read as we returned place, on a sluggish river, have produced the two home. I sat on stiles, I reclined on green banks, greatest poets that ever lived; and if we traverse beneath the chequered shade of oaks and elms; the whole earth in search of beauty, we shall I devoured the "Confessions." The names of find it chiefly on plains, or in modest hills and

valleys, like those of Great Britain, Italy, and | Seine. But an invisible link of brotherhood binds Greece.

It was night when we arrived at Vevay, and, therefore, we were compelled to defer till morning our search for the Julies and the Claires. Then, however, it being market-day, on which economical habits bring out nearly the whole female population, we went forth early, in the hope of realizing Rousseau's delightful vision. But let me not dwell upon the sequel. Goitres and cretins, swollen necks and hideous idiotic faces-some from Savoy, who had crossed the lake in boats, others from the surrounding villages of the Pays de Vaud-met our eyes on all sides, with here and there a woman of passable aspect, but nothing like beauty, delicacy, or grace. were disgusted with Vevay at once; nevertheless, in consideration of the exquisite scenery, the walks up the slopes of Mount Chardonn, the views from the chalet at the summit, the meadows along the banks of the Veveyse, the stroll to the Chateau de Blonay, the rocks of Meillerie, the Dent de Jaman, and the vast amphitheatrical sweep of grandeur from Clarens to St. Gingoulph, we prolonged our visit to a month, after which we returned to Lausanne, where the Swiss seemed more tolerable in appearance.

We

This place we for some time made our home, and I selected it to be the home of my family during my absence in the east. If you have been at Lausanne, you will remember, a little way out of the town, on the road to Berne, a fine house on the right hand, called Johinont, standing in the midst of a beautiful shrubbery and gardens. There it was we lived; and there, in the evening, as I watched my children playing upon the terrace, or appearing and disappearing among the trees and plantations below, I used to enjoy the prospect of the Alps, terminating with the summit of Mont Blanc, relieved like a pale spectral cloud against the blue sky.

them together still; and, doubtless, there are moments when, from the most distant parts of the world, the minds of all revert to that beautiful spot where, in days of unmingled happiness, they laughed and sported before me in the shadow, as it were, of Mont Blanc.

It is an exclamation of Byron, "O that I could wreak my thoughts upon expression!"

I have a thousand times uttered a similar wish; not that my ideas are too big for language, but that I have never yet had the courage to turn them out of the spiritual into the visible world. Many and many are the thoughts that crowd and nestle about our hearts, and exist only for ourselves. Perhaps we love them the more, because they are exclusively ours, and would seem to lose their maiden purity and beauty, if exposed in indifferent drapery to the public. I wish, however, to be somewhat frank in this place, and to reveal a little of what passed in my mind when about to quit Europe for Africa. Nothing can be further from me than the desire to impart undue importance to a journey which many had performed before, and some without encountering any very formidable obstacles or dangers. But the question was one of prudence or imprudence. All my fortunes were mysteriously bound up in my gray goose quill, which, to the seven urchins before me, stood altogether in the place of Aladdin's lamp. Heaven, for aught they knew, rained cakes and bread and butter upon them from the sky, and would continue to do so, whether I happened to be on the shores of the Leman lake, or in the Mountains of the Moon. But my faith was not quite so boundless, and therefore my almost irrepressible buoyancy of spirit sometimes flagged a little when I reflected that the poke of an Arab spear, or Moggrebin dagger, might turn the world into a wilderness for those joyous little ones, and leave my bones bleaching among those of camels in the Libyan or Arabian Desert.

lowed, if I may so express myself, by early associations of history, poetry, or romance. My imagination's land of promise, divided into two parts, lay on the banks of the Ilissus and the Nile, where great nations had flourished and

Poets talk freely, and without offence, of their children, wives, and mistresses; and why may However, in the sphere of parentship there not prose writers take the same liberty? Mothers are two human providences; and, therefore, it at least will forgive me if I become a little more was not without great confidence that I deterfamiliar and communicative than is usual in a mined on my expedition. Most persons endowed formal tête-à-tête with the public. But I am with fancy have, probably, from childhood, nourfond of children, of my own especially; and hav-ished a longing to visit some distant spot, haling just then seven of them, all full of health and animal spirits, big and little, it will readily be believed that they formed the most pleasant part of the landscape, notwithstanding that Mont Blanc, and the other Alps of Savoy, constituted the background. What added greatly to the interest faded-where great men had speculated on life was the consciousness that I was about to leave and death, and toiled unceasingly to unveil the them-perhaps forever. They were of all ages, mystery of this vast universe. I by no means from nine or ten years to six months; and when resembled that honest man who hoped to become their mother, with the baby on her lap, formed possessed of Epictetus' wisdom, after his death, the centre of the group, they used to circulate by purchasing his lamp. I hoped for no philoaround her in wild and never-ending gyrations of sophical or religious inspiration by visiting the delight. In my mind's eye, I see them now, birthplaces of philosophy and theology. But I though time and circumstances have distributed knew, at all events, that I could not fail to and located them far apart, from the extremities increase my experience and knowledge of manof Insular Asia to the banks of the Nile and the kind, by taking a view, however cursory, of Italy,

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