calls upon him to urge him to go thither, offering him a hundred thousand francs for concerts during six months, and, on his declining, the enthusiastic Yankee has a colossal bust of him made in bronze, to be carried to New York. The citizens, especially of his own country, are still belaboring him; but though he relishes the fight as heartily as ever Murat did a charge in battle, he longs for rest. He has married and buried a second wife; his son is away, on the seas, a naval officer; his mother has been dead some years; his old father has gone, also, and he projects a visit to Côte Saint-André to comfort his sis ters, dreaming meanwhile of Estelle, and of romantic wanderings among the scenes of his first love. "My arteries beat faster," he says, "at this thought." He has recorded the poetic visit with the ardor of a young man. Every scene in the old localities overpowers him. "Thirty-three years," he writes, "have passed since I last visited them. I am as a man who has en dead since that period, but who comes to life again; and I find myself, in this resuscitation of all the sentiments of my anterior life, as young and as passionate as ever." He inquired of old peasants about Estelle; they remembered her as the maiden "so beautiful that every body stopped at the church door, on Sunday, to see her pass;" but none knew what had become of her; they only knew that her aunt still lived at Grenoble. "My palpitations redoubled," he says, as he wandered over the picturesque scenes so dear to his memory. At one of them a cry escaped him, "a cry which no language could translate; the past is present; I am a child again, twelve years old-life, beauty, first love, the infinite poem! I cast myself on my knees and exclaimed, Estelle, Estelle, Estelle!' An indescribable access of isolation came over me, and my heart bled." This was passion, the passion of a true poet, and few but poets can appreciate it. It is the old cry for sympathy and affection which suffering humanity has ever, and will forever, utter in this world of illusions. In this case it will, perhaps, be pronounced excessively juvenile; but is not genius forever young, young in heart however old in head? And did not Coleridge characterize it as childhood continued into manhood? Such a passion would have befitted Rousseau; and Berlioz was the Rousseau of music. He left these scenes, arresting himself "often with anguish" on the way, and ex

claiming, "Adieu, mounts and valleys! adieu, my romantic childhood, last reflections of a pure love. The flood of time bears me away. Adieu, Estelle, Estelle!" But the next day he went to Grenoble to inquire further about her, and learned that she was now a widow, and lived in a distant town. He wrote her a pathetic letter, but received no response.

The old dream could not be dispelled. When more than sixty years of age he wrote: "My career is finished; I compose no more music; I direct no more concerts; I have ceased to be a journalistic critic; I do nothing but read and suffer." Yet he goes again to seek Estelle, and the old scenes at Meylen were revisited with the old emotions. Reclining on the earth with the beautiful valley extending before him, he murmured: "Estelle, Estelle! The past, the past! Never, never again!" But he learned, later in the day, that she still lived, and on the same evening he arrived at Lyons and discovered her home there. After a sleepless night he wrote her a letter, alluding to his early affection and his repeated visits to Meylen, and beseeching her to allow him to call on her. "I shall control my feelings," he assured her; "fear not the emotions of a heart which has experienced the pitiless realities of life. Accord me a few minutes; allow me to see you again, I conjure you.' Apprehending an unfavorable answer, he carried the letter himself to her door. His card accompanied it, and before reading the letter she admitted him. He beheld again, after about half a century, his idol. Her hair was gray, and she was otherwise much changed, "but, on seeing her, my soul," he says, "flew toward her, as if she were yet in the splendor of her beauty." In a long conversation she treated him with "sweet," matronly dignity, but with womanly tenderness. She had never forgotten him, but had read accounts of his remarkable career, and had received" details of it" from one of his friends. Her life, she said, "had been very simple and very sad," for she had early lost children and her husband; she was "deeply affected and grateful" for the sentiments that Berlioz had so long maintained for her. With a "melting heart" and "trembling" frame he kissed her hand, and begged her to allow him to write her from time to time, and to visit her at least once a year. He saw her again the same day for a moment, but on the next she had departed for the country.

43-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. I.

On his return to Paris he began a correspondence with her, which, with occasional visits, consoled the remainder of his life. He published some of its letters-his full of passion, hers full of good sense and sympathy. Their renewed friendship ameliorated his heart after the irritations of his long warfare, and he closes the record of it with the words: "Stella, Stella, I can now die without bitterness and without wrath." "Which of the two powers," he asks at another time, "can most elevate man to the sublimest heights-love or music? It is a problem; nevertheless we may say that love can give no idea of music, but music can give one of love. Wherefore, then, separate them? They are the two wings of the soul." Had it been possible for Estelle to have controlled, more intimately, his life, it might have been a better one. He lacked balance; he had no moral symmetry; no moral self-support; no repose, like that which the classic ancients attributed to high character, and classic art impressed upon the statues and busts of great men. Like most intellectual Frenchmen he abandoned the faith of his childhood, and knew no substitute for it; his views of life were cynical, and the agitations of his career, and especially the hostility of his critics, had impaired his health, and in his last years he suffered from chronic neuralgia, which "tortured him night and day" and exasperated his temper. But with all his faults, in both life and art, he was a genuine hero, a genuine poet, and, as the world now admits, a genuine musician-a "grand master of vast conceptions," as Gounod has pronounced him.

On the 6th of March, 1869, his hard-fought "battle of life" ended in a tranquil death. The leading journal of Paris ("Journal des Debats") reminded France that "one of her great sons" had departed, one whose "work had been immense," whose "name posterity will inscribe among the names of the greatest masters, the Beethoven of France." He rests in the cemetery of Mont Martre, amidst the tombs of Ary Scheffer, Gautier, Halévy, Offenbach, Heine, and the many other illustrious men who sleep there in peace after the storms of life.

ART. III. THE HINDU PANTHEON.

On the other side of the earth, upon a vast plain two thousand miles long and nineteen hundred miles wide, live one hundred and sixty-three millions of our relations, from whom our fathers parted thousands of years ago, to "go west" and seek their fortune. More favored than the stay-at-homes, the emigrants have in some respects succeeded better, and so, not unmindful of our common origin, or the rapidly being fulfilled prophecy, "I will enlarge the borders of Japheth," we of the Occident go back now to tell our kindred how we have gotten on in the world, and to give a reason for the hope that is within us. And while we try to enlist their interest in ourselves, and especially in our religion and Redeemer, it behooves us to learn something of their thoughts concerning God and religion, in order that we may the better know how to induce them to come to a knowledge of the truth," and accept that which has proved so beneficial to us in our western home.

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But in order to gain correct knowledge of the wonderful faith of the Hindus we must go back to its source. To the Hindu mind the classic Vedas are the fountain of all knowledge. They are certainly among the most ancient religious, if not the oldest literary, productions in the world, some of them having been composed one thousand four hundred years before the True Incarnation. Before the exodus from Egypt, and while Job was sojourning upon the plains of Arabia, five hundred years before Homer, and a thousand years before Confucius and Solon, devout Aryans chanted their sacred mantras, and their untutored minds saw God in clouds and heard him in the wind. The very name of their most ancient records suggests our kinship, as seen in Veda, oida, videre, wit, wisdom, while the root of the word, that is, vid, means "to know," and the word itself "knowledge," and that, too, given orally. These books are considered the direct communication of the Supreme Being with man, and so sacred that as early as seven hundred years before Christ it was deemed a grave offense for a single word of the Vedas to be heard, much less read, by a person of low caste. There are four of these sacred books, namely, the Rig-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, and

.the Atharva-Veda. The Rig-Veda is the oldest, and derives its name from the style of the composition and the manner of its recitation, Rich meaning praise, and the work is in meter, and designed to be chanted in a loud voice. Each Veda is divided into two parts: a Sanhita, or collection of mantras, or hymns; and a Brahmana, or ritualistic precept and illustration. Attached to each Bráhmana is a Upanishad, containing mystical doctrine. The first two are for all men, but the latter two for only the more philosophical. These four Vedas mark the first stage in the development of Hindu mythology.

But these are but a small part of the sacred books of that wonderful people. There are other books which have more to do with the present belief of the people than the Rig-Veda, and furnish nearly all the gods of the present Hindu pantheon. There are six philosophical books called Shasters, two great epics-the Rámáyana and the Mahábhárata-and eighteen Puránas, or "old traditional stories." The two epics were originally written about five hundred years before Christ, but were frequently revised afterward. The first of these, the Rámáyana, relates the story of Rám Chandra, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, in his conquest of Lanka, or Ceylon, and overthrow of the tyrant Rávan. It is believed to have been written by the human but inspired author Válmíki, and consists of twenty, four thousand stanzas arranged in seven books. The Mahábhá rata is the largest epic poem ever written, consisting of two hundred and twenty thousand lines, divided into eighteen sections. It is a sacred history, or rather an encyclopedia of traditions, legends, ethics, and philosophy. The Hindus say of both these books that "he who reads and repeats them is liberated from all sins, and exalted, with all his posterity, to the highest heaven." The Puránas, eighteen in number, while the last written, being composed not earlier than the sixth century after Christ, are for us the most important, as they give an account of the Hindu pantheon as it exists to-day. These books were written for the purpose of exalting one or another of the numerous manifestations of Brahma. They consist of no less than one million six hundred thousand lines. The whole of these sacred books combined-the four Vedas, the six Shasters, the Rámáyana, the Mahábhárata, and the eighteen Puránas-form no small body of divinity. It is safe to say