accoutred myself with such precision, why I polished my scabbard till it was as bright as Emilie's eyes, and so carefully spunged my saddle and sword-belt. I was very certain that Von Teschchenschech would not regard me with a sparing eye after last night's adventure, and I was determined that he might look for ever without being able to discover a fault about me on which to hang a homily, an extra drill, or a twenty-four hours' arrest. It was soon announced to me that breakfast was ready, and I proceeded to the house with some misgivings as to the reception I might meet with. At the door I encountered a gentleman wrapped in a morning-gown and the clouds of smoke which he raised from a boaconstrictor-like meerschaum, and whose voice did not seem wholly strange to my ears, and who, with a most unmistakably significant air, wished the Baron von Stein a very good morning; which the baron, glad to hear nothing more sarcastical, returned with most condescending urbanity.

After a very good breakfast, which was laid out for me in Baron von Stein's apartment, and which could not have been better had the validity of my title remained undisputed, I left my proper card with my compliments to Herr von Querfurth, an apology for the assumption of a title which did not belong to me, and thanks for the comfortable quarters that had been provided for me. Having thus made a virtue of necessity, and secured to myself the honour of unmasking myself, I set off to join the general rendezvous.

On my way thither I had to pass the house of last night's adventure. As I approached, I was somewhat discomposed to see the colonel's horses standing by the door, and still more so when the colonel himself issued forth as I was close upon the door.

"Hoho! you bombardier there, halt! Wait a minute; I want you." Thus commanded, I pulled round my charger with most inconvenient rapidity, and, dismounting with as much alacrity as if my saddle had been a chevaux-de-frise, stood, with my sword to the salute, to await my chief's behests. With a curious grin upon his countenance he walked round me and my animal, to make an accurate survey of our condition, but to my great felicity not a fault was to be found.

"Had good quarters last night, and a good stable, eh?"

"At your command, colonel, very good."

"Early at home, Mr. Bombardier? or were you roving about with the rest of your clan ?"

"At your command, colonel, I was in very early," I replied, without moving a muscle, and without any misstatement of facts, for it was nearly one o'clock before I was housed.

"Yes, yes," laughed the colonel; "at my command, that might very well be; but I have accidentally become acquainted with some very curious circumstances. Mr. Baron von Stein-ha, ha! Very good. Yes, yes, Herr Baron, I know all. But you need not be afraid; only I hope you have foraged your horse out of the barony last night. Now mount and march."

This cool speech, which, if it had been unlooked for, would probably have paralysed me with amazement, and made me wish to sink down to the very antipodes for a hiding-place, now fell upon my expectant ear with little or no effect; and I stood there with such calmness, and

listened with such stoical indifference to the colonel's words, though with all due deference to his dignity, that he was evidently surprised, and did not seem displeased at my great self-possession.

We then proceeded to the windmill, where all the brigade was assembled, and, after a few preliminaries, the trumpeter blew "Frisch auf, Kameraden, auf's Pferd!" (Quick, comrades, to horse!) and we all defiled before the colonel, and through Machenheim, in the direction of Wilhelmstadt. This day's journey was the very counterpart of its predecessor. A broiling sun and a dusty road, fringed on either side by monotonous rows of aspiring Lombardy poplars, like regiments of Brobdignagians, or King William the First's Grenadiers, drawn up in single file to do honour to our march, soon produced the same exacerbation of temper that had been so prevalent the day before, and we welcomed

Wie ein Gebild aus Himmels-höhen,*

the staff-quartermaster, who, about three o'clock, came pricking along the high-road from Wilhelmstadt on his knowing little nag. The brigade was then portioned out and distributed through the little villages in the vicinity of Wilhelmstadt and its heath, most of them so small that they could not afford accommodation for more than one, or perhaps two, guns. The one which had the honour of receiving Dose and Co. was called Fettenweiden (Anglicè, Fat-meadows), a name which pleased the sergeant uncommonly, and made him hope that it would justify its claim to the appellation by the quarters which it afforded us.

After a long harangue from the colonel, which was merely a dilatation of his favourite aphorism, "Order must be maintained at any price," we were dismissed, and Dose conducted his men to Fettenweiden, which we found to be a tiny hamlet of five or six houses, perched on the bank of a brawling brook, and protected by the overhanging boughs of a forest of lordly oaks, over the tops of which peered the chimneys of a large and handsome building, the country-house of a Count Lieginditsch, where the major of our division was quartered. Dose, who was somewhat disappointed at the unpromising looks of the village, took courage and revived at the prospect of the forest, the brook, and the palace in the background, and took the opportunity to assure me, in a confidential whisper, that he had a great taste for poetry. Seeing me smile with incredulous surprise, he promised to astonish me one of these days with some of his poetical effusions, and rhapsodised, whilst we marched our horses past a filthy puddle, on evening promenades in forest-glades, full-throated nightingales, murmuring fountains; and closed his speech with this peroration, uttered in a very lack-a-daisical tone, Ah! there is nothing more poetical than

to make verses.'

66

* Like seraph from celestial heights.—SCHILLER.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

With a keen eye and overflowing heart...
He pours out truth in works by thoughtful love
Inspired-works potent over smiles and tears.

WORDSWORTH.

ALTHOUGH an author of some years' standing, and of considerable repute in his own country, Mr. Hawthorne has been, until quite recently, all but unknown among ourselves. Only a few practised littérateurs recognised him, as a writer who could rifle "Twice-told Tales" of their proverbial tedium, and could distil spirit and life from the "Mosses of an Old Manse." What would lately have been deemed an "impossible quantity" of his writings, is now circulated up and down these islands, wherever railways and shilling libraries are on the qui vive. He is now fairly seated on the same eminence with Cooper and Washington Irving; and we trust that the sympathy with his singular but fascinating works, at length evoked among the old Britishers, will encourage him to strains in a yet higher mood, for he would seem to be one of those self-distrustful and diffident authors to whom the "inward witness" of genius is naught, unless confirmed by the "external evidence" of third and fourth editions. Sooth to say, we know of few living tale-tellers who even approach him in the art of investing with an appropriate halo of visionary awe those subjects which relate to the supernatural-those legendary themes whose province is the dim borderland of fancy. His is the golden mean between the Fee-faw-fum terrors of spectre-factors extraordinary, and that chill rationalism which protests there are not more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of-pshaw, it never dreams!-say, rather, seen and handled, weighed and analysed to the minutest globule-in its philosophy. He is far enough, on the one hand, from the red-and-blue-light catastrophes of Monk Lewis; and, on the other, he steers clear of the irony of scepticism, and narrates his traditions with a grave simplicity and cordial interest, the character of which is, as it should be, highly contagious. Of this "unfathomable world" of ours he can say,

I have watched

Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,

And my heart ever gazes on the depth

Of thy deep mysteries ;*

and he has pondered much on what Wordsworth calls

That superior mystery

Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,

And the dread soul within.

He throws deep and scrutinising glances on those realities which cluster around man's heart of hearts. He loves to give way to dreamy yet serious speculations, -to the wayward, undulating motion of thoughts that wander through eternity. He is one of the subtlest of psychologists, (while reporting the results of his study without any affectation of scholastic jargon. His still waters run deep how clearly they reflect the "human face divine" of man, woman, and child, let those testify who

*Shelley.

frequent the green pastures through which they stray, and who have gazed idly or otherwise into the placid stream-finding therein, some at least, a magic mirror, from which they have departed in self-introspective mood, saying, "We have seen strange things to-day!"

There can be little question that the most powerful-if also the least pleasing of Mr. Hawthorne's fictions, is "The Scarlet Letter," a work remarkable for pathos in the tale, and art in the telling. Even those who are most inclined (and with reason) to demur to the plot, are con- + strained to own themselves enthralled, and their profoundest sensibilities excited by

The book along whose burning leaves

His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves.

The invention of the story is painful. Like the "Adam Blair" of Mr. Lockhart, it is a tale of "trouble, and rebuke, and blasphemy:" the trouble of a guilty soul, the rebuke of public stigma, and the occasion thereby given to the enemy to blaspheme. For, of the two fallen and suffering creatures whose anguish is here traced out, little by little, and line upon line, with such harrowing fidelity, one, and the guiltiest of the twain, is, like Adam Blair, a venerated presbyter, a pillar of the faith; the very burden of remorse which crushes his soul increases the effect of his ministrations, giving him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind-keeping him down on a level with the lowest,him, the man of etherial attributes, whose voice the angels might have listened to and answered: and thus his heart vibrates in unison with that of the fallen, and receives their pain into itself, and sends its own throb of pain through a thousand other breasts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.

It has been objected to works of this class that they attract more persons than they warn by their excitement. Others have replied " What is the real moral of any tale? is it not its permanent expression-the last burning trace it leaves upon the soul? and who ever read 'Adam Blair' -we are citing the words of a critic of that book—" without rising from the perusal saddened, solemnised, smit with a profound horror at the sin which wrought such hasty havoc in a character so pure and a nature so noble? This effect produced, surely the tale has not been told in vain." However this may be, we find reviewers who moot the above objection to such fictions in general, avowing, with reference to the "Scarlet Letter" in particular, that if sin and sorrow in their most fearful forms are to be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than here. What so many romancists would have turned into a fruitful hotbed of prurient description and adulterated sentiment, is treated with consummate delicacy and moral restraint by Mr. Hawthorne. As Miss Mitford observes, "With all the passionate truth that he has thrown into the long agony of the seducer, we never, in our pity for the sufferer, lose our abhorrence of the sin." How powerfully is depicted the mental strife, so tumultuous and incessant in its agitation, of the young clergyman, Arthur Dimmesdale-whom his congregation deem a miracle of holiness-the mouthpiece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love-the very ground he treads being sanctified in their eyes-the maidens growing pale before him-the aged members of his flock, beholding his frame so feeble (for he is dying daily of that within

which passeth show), while they themselves are rugged in their decay, believe that he will go heavenward before them, and command their children to lay their old bones close to their young pastor's holy grave; and all this time, perchance, when he is thinking of his grave, he questions with himself whether the grass will ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried. Irresistibly affecting is the climax, when he stands in the pulpit preaching the election sermon (so envied a privilege!), exalted to the very proudest eminence of superiority to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and whitest sanctity could exalt a New England priest in those early days, -and meanwhile his much-enduring partner-in-guilt, Hester Prynne, is standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breaststill burning into it! There remains but for him to mount that scaffoldin haste, as one in articulo mortis, to take his shame upon him-and to lay open the awful secret, "though it be red like scarlet," before venerable elders, and holy fellow-pastors, and the people at large, whose great heart is appalled, yet overflowing with tearful sympathy. The injured husband, again, is presented with memorable intensity of colouring. He quietly pitches his tent beside the dissembler, who knows him not; and then proceeds-festinat lentè-with the finesse of a Machiavel, and the fiendish glee of a Mephistophiles, to unwind the nexus of the tragedy only to involve his victim inextricably in its toils. One feels how fitting it is that, when he has gained his purpose, old Roger Chillingworth should droop and his whole nature collapse-that all his strength and energy, all his vital and intellectual force, should seem at once to desert him, so that he withers up, shrivels away, and almost vanishes from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies welting in the sun-such being the self-generated retribution of one who has made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge. His it is to drain the dregs of the bitter truth, that

To be wroth with one we love

Doth work like madness in the brain.

And what shall we say of Hester Prynne, his ill-mated, ill-fated bride? Gazing at so mournful a wreck, we are reminded of the pathos and significance in the words of One of old time, of One who spake as never man spake: "Seest thou this woman?" The distinguishing characteristic of Christian ethics has been said to lie in the recognition of the fact, that the poor benighted pariah of social life will often, in the simple utterance of a cheerful hope in his behalf, see a window opening in heaven, and faces radiant with promise looking out upon him.* [Mr. Hawthorne's "searching of dark bosoms" has taught him a humane pyschology? He will not judge by the mere hearing of the ear or seeing of the eye; he can quite appreciate and illustrate by history-if history be philosophy teaching by example-the pregnant paradox of poor discrowned Lear, ending with "And then, handy-dandy, which is the justice, and which is the thief?” Not that he palliates the sin, or acts as counsel for the defendant; on the contrary, few have so explicitly surrounded the sin with ineffaceable deformities, or the criminal with agonising woes. But he forgets not that

* Thomas de Quincey.