All these things did Hiawatha
Show unto his wondering people,
And interpreted their meaning,
And he said: "Behold, your grave-posts
Have no mark, no sign, nor symbol.
Go and paint them all with figures;
Each one with its household symbol,
With its own ancestral Totem;
So that those who follow after
May distinguish them and know them."
And they painted on the grave-posts
Of the graves yet unforgotten,
Each his own ancestral Totem,
Each the symbol of his household;
Figures of the Bear and Reindeer,
Of the Turtle, Crane, and Beaver,
Each inverted as a token

That the owner was departed,
That the chief who bore the symbol
Lay beneath in dust and ashes

Thus it was that Hiawatha,
In his wisdom, taught the people
All the mysteries of painting,
All the art of Picture Writing,

On the smooth bark of the birch tree,
On the white skin of the reindeer,

On the grave-posts of the village.

H. W. LONGFellow.

CCXVII.-WARWICK CASTLE.

ORDERING dinner at six o'clock, I start for the castle, without the remotest idea of what I shall see. Walking along a high park wall which forms one part of the town, or rather which stops the town from extending further in that direction-the top covered with ivy, that garment of English walls and buildings-I come to the gateway of the approach. A porter opens its huge leaf. Cut through a solid rock, the road, some twenty feet wide, winds for a long way in the most solemn beauty. The sides, in solid rock, vary from five to twenty feet in height at least so it seemed to my imagination-the only faculty that I allowed to conduct me. It was covered on both hands with ivy, growing down from above, and hanging in beautiful

reaches. Solemn trees on the bank, on either side, met overhead, and cast a delicious twilight down upon my way, and made it yet softer by a murmuring of their leaves; while multitudes of little birds flew about and sang merrily. Winding in graceful curves, it at last brings you to the first view of the castle, at a distance of some hundred rods before you. It opens on the sight with grandeur! On either corner is a huge tower, apparently one hundred and fifty feet high; in the centre is a square tower, called properly a gateway; and a huge wall connects this central access with the two corner towers.

I stood for a little, and let the vision pierce me through. Who can tell what he feels in such a place! How, especially, can I tell youwho have never seen, or felt, such a view any more than I had before this time! Primeval forests, the ocean, prairies, Niagara, I had seen and felt. But never had I seen any pile around which were historic associations, blended not only with heroic men and deeds, but savoring of my own childhood. And now, too, am I to see, and understand by inspection, the things which Scott had made so familiar to all as mere words-moats, portcullises, battlements, keeps, or mounds, arrow-slit windows, watch towers. They had a strange effect upon me; they were perfectly new, and yet familiar old friends. I had never seen them, yet the moment I did behold, all was instantly plain; I knew name and use, and seemed in a moment to have known them always. My mind was so highly excited as to be perfectly calm, and apparently it perceived by an intuition. I seemed to spread myself over all that was around or before me, while in the court and on the walls, or rather to draw everything within me. I fear that I seem crazy to you. It was, however, the calmness of intense excitement.

I came up to the moat, now dry, and lined with beautiful shrubs and trees, crossed the bridge, and entered the outer gateway or arched door, through a solid square tower. The portcullis was drawn up, but I could see the projecting end. Another similar gateway, a few steps further on, showed the care with which the defence was managed. This passed, a large court opened, surrounded on every side with towers, walls, and vast ranges of buildings. Here I beheld the pictures which I had seen on paper, magnified into gigantic reality. Drawings of many-faced, irregular, gothic mansions, measuring an inch or two, with which my childhood was familiar, here stood before me measuring hundreds and hundreds of feet. It was the first sight of a real baronial castle! It was a historic dream breaking forth into a waking reality.

It is of very little use to tell you how large the court is, by feet and rods; or that Guy's Tower is a hundred and twenty-eight feet high, and Cæsar's Tower a hundred and forty-seven. But it may touch your imagination, and wheel it suddenly backward with long

flight and wide vision, to say that Caesar's Tower has stood for eight hundred years, being coeval with the Norman conquest. I stood upon its mute stones and imagined the ring of the hammer upon them when the mason was laying them to their bed of ages. What were the thoughts, the fancies, the conversations of these rude fellows, at that age of the world! I was wafted backward and backward, until I stood on the foundations upon which old England herself was builded, when as yet there was none of her. There, far back of all literature, before the English tongue itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence, and than all modern civilization, I stood, in imagination, and, reversing my vision, looked down into a far future to search for the men and deeds which had been, as if they were yet to be; thus making a prophecy of history; and changing memory into a dreamy foresight.

When these stones were placed, it was yet to be two hundred years before Gower and Chaucer should be born. Indeed, since this mortar was wetted, and cemented these stones, the original people, the Normans, the Danes, the Saxons, have been mixed together into one people. When this stone, on which I lean, took its place, there was not then a printed book in England. Printing was invented hundreds of years after these foundations went down. When the rude workmen put their shoulders to these stones, the very English language lay unborn in the loins of its parent tongues. The men that laughed and jested as they wrought, and had their pride of skill; the architect, and the lord for whose praise he fashioned these stones; the villagers that wondered as they looked upon the growing pile; why, they are now no more to men's memories than the grass they trod on, or the leaves which they cast down in felling the oak!

Against these stones on which I lay my hand, have rung the sounds of battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men that stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. All this ground has fed on blood.

I walked across to Guy's Tower, up its long stone stairway, into some of its old soldiers' rooms. The pavements were worn, though of stone, with the heavy grinding feet of men at arms. I heard them laugh between their cups, I saw them devouring their gross food, I heard them recite their feats, or tell the last news of some knightly outrage, or cruel oppression of the despised laborer. I stood by the window out which the archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings through which scalding water or molten lead was poured upon the head of assailants, and heard the hoarse shriek of the wretched fellows from below as they got the shocking baptism. I ascended to the roof of the tower, and looked over the wide glory of the scene, still haunted with the same imaginations of the olden time. How many thoughts had flown hence beside mine!-here

where warriors looked out, or ladies watched for their knight's return. How did I long to stand for one hour, really, in their position and in their consciousness, who lived in those days; and then to come back, with the new experience, to my modern life!

I walked, in a dream, along the line of the westward wall, surveyed the towers begun, but, for some reason, left unfinished; climbed up the moat and keep, steep enough, and densely covered with trees and underbrush, to the very top.

Grand and glorious were the trees that waved in the grounds about the castle; but, though some of them had seen centuries, they were juvenile sprouts in comparison of these old walls and towers, on which William the Conqueror had walked, without thinking a word about me, I'll warrant-in which matter I have the advantage of him-following in his footsteps along the top of the broad walls, ten times more lofty in my transcendent excitement than ever was he, in his royal excursion.

Already the sun was drooping far down the west, and sending its golden glows sideways through the trees; and the glades in the park were gathering twilight as I turned to give a last look at these strange scenes. I walked slowly through the gateway, crossed the bridge over the moat, turned and looked back upon the old towers, whose tops reddened yet in the sun, though I was deep in shadow. Then, walking backward, looking still, till I came to the woods, I took my farewell of Warwick Castle. REV. H. W. °BEECHER.

CCXVIII.-A WORLD WITHOUT WATER.

Yesternight I prayed aloud,

In anguish and in agony;

Upstarting from the fiendish crowd

Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me.-"COLERIDGE

I HAD a dream in the dead of night,
A dream of agony;

I thought the world stood in affright,
Beneath the hot and parching light
Of an unclouded sky;

I thought there had fallen no cooling rain
For months upon the feverish plain,

And that all the springs were dry.

And I was standing on a hill,
And looking all around:

I know not how it was; but still

Strength in my limbs was found;

As if with a spell of threefold life,
My destinies were bound.

Beneath me was a far spread heath,
Where once had risen a spring,
Looking as bright as a silver wreath
In its graceful wandering:

But now the sultry glance of the sun,

And the glare of the dark blue sky,
Had checked its course,-no more to run
In light waves wandering by.

And farther on was a stately wood,
With its tall trees rising high;

But now like autumn wrecks they stood
Beneath a summer sky:

And every leaf, though dead, did keep
Its station in mockery;

For there was not one breath to sweep
The leaves from each perishing tree;
And there they hung, dead, motionless;
They hung there day by day;

As though Death were too busy with other things
To sweep their corpses away.

Oh, terrible it was to think

Of human creatures then!

How they did sink in vain to drink
In every vale and glen;

And how the scorchèd foot did shrink
As it touched the slippery plain :

And some had gathered beneath the trees

In hope of finding shade;

But alas! there was not a single breeze

Astir in any glade.

The cities were forsaken,

For their marble wells were spent ;

And their walls gave back the scorching glare
Of that hot firmament:

But the corses of those who died were strewn
In the street, as dead leaves lay,

And dry they withered-and withered alone,
They felt no foul decay!

Night came. The fiery sun sank down,

And the people's hope grew strong: