moulding; he paints them. He belongs to the Venetian school in letters. The attraction of his writings consists not in the outline or general cast of the whole work, nor even in the grandeur or gracefulness of particular scenes or ideas or passages within it, nor yet in the showy elegance of sentences or even of phrases, but in the magical, illuminating effect of a single word, which, chosen from a treasury of gems, and disposed with consummate skill toward every ray of sympathy, blazes with various lustre, and kindles a whole paragraph into pictorial brightness and warmth. The affinity between form and colour, and the extent to which under particular circumstances one is suggested by the other, rank among the mysteries of our mental organization; yet it is certain that the most defined conceptions, and the most distinct impressions of shape may be surprised into the mind by the illusory play of tints,-which communicate with the consciousness by signals that cheat the eye. There is not a more remarkable illustration of this, in literature, than is furnished by Mr. Willis. It is a consequence of these peculiarities that the beauties of his writings are chiefly those of detail. In his narratives, fascinated by the almost excessive loveliness which beams upon us from a thousand points as we pass along, we forget to observe that the story as a whole has little probability, consistency, or dignity. The fabric in which he deals is the finest valenciennes; in which all consideration of the figure or plan is merged and lost in the richness of finish that glitters from every part.

A delicate ideality is the characteristic of his genius a faculty, in him, not impetuous or energetic, but copious and constant. He views his subjects always from the picturesque point, to borrow a term from landscape painting; and if the subject naturally is not susceptible of such a view, he elevates and disposes it in its relations to other objects, so as to create such a point of observation. He looks at all objects through a poetical medium. It is this which lends so unfading a charm to all his productions; and it is this, especially,

which tinges his language with such mysterious lustre. His sensibility to the imaginative impression of a scene in nature, or a situation in society, is exquisite; and his skill in rendering it in words, with precision and distinctness, is singularly felicitous. By such a faculty he has accomplished the description of landscapes with power and splendour so extraordinary. He does not delineate and define the picture, but seizes the sentiments, or ideas, or moral images, which are the mental antitypes, as it were, of the scene, and reproduces them with all the hues of fancy. His portraitures of scenery, therefore, are more vivid than accurate; and the connection between the different parts is according to the truth of the mind rather than the truth of nature.

The life and fertility of the mind of Mr. Willis are very remarkable. His spirits and faculties seem to have been bathed in perpetual freshness. The stream of thought and feeling, in him, is like the bubbling out-spring of a natural fountain, which flows forth with gayety and freedom, if it flows at all. His powers seem never to be lessened by exhaustion. His fancy is never soiled by fatigue. He never copies others, and he never repeats himself; but always prompt, and always vivid, his mind acts with the certainty of a natural prism which turns every ray that reaches it into peculiar beauty.

The triumph of his literary fortunes is his having reconciled and joined the broadest and most pervading popularity with the admiration of the most highly refined. At first sight be might seem to have written for only polished and fastidious tastes,-for a state of society in which an extreme cultivation borders on effeminacy and affectation; yet the strongest response to his genius is from the strenuous and busy world of excitement and action. To the objection which has sometimes been made, that the delicacies of his genius are too subtle, and that his taste is somewhat tinged with quaintness and conceits, his friends make the ready answer, that no writer commands the attention and holds the sympathies of the public with greater power.

THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT.

FROM INKLINGS OF ADVENTURE.

Ar the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a rambling old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town. It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony, to use an expressive Gallicism," gave upon the bay." Long Island sound, the great highway from the northern Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead and silver, (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate is divine,) between the curving lip of the bay and the interminable and sandy shore of the island some six.leagues distant; the procession of ships and steamers stole past with an imperceptible progress; the ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened through the trees from behind, and (the day being one of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun-steeped precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood-red maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light, drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a holyday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage of an American October: but just now, while I remember it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives-if

"our star

Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar"-

it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am remembering and describing-profoundly serene, sunny as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy; the sort of air that the visiting angels might have brought with them to the tent of Abraham-it is on such days, I would record, that my own memory steps back over the dim threshold of life, (so it seems to me,) and on such days only. It is worth the translation of our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land, if it were alone for those immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her pupils, of whom one was a newcomer, and the object of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the one day of the week when morning visiters were admitted, and I was there, in compliance with an unexpected request from my friend, to present him to the agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitué in her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to introduce to me, a week or two before, the newcomer of whom I have spoken above-a departure from the ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny as deeply as I should find agreeable. The newcomer was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name was Nunu.

The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines of America are a subject of much poetical

feeling in the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry of the nation. At present the sentiment takes occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to be educated at the expense of the government, and of several young men of the same high birth to different colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in his history that we did not plough the bones of their fathers into our fields without some feelings of compunction. Nunu had come to the seaboard under the charge of a female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one of the native schools of the west, and was destined, though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to her tribe when she should have mastered some of the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an apt scholar, but her settled melancholy, when away from her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want of interest, and the manner of course, with which St. John had received my animated descriptions of the personal beauty of the Cherokee. "I have hunted with the tribe," was his only answer, "and know their features."

But she is not like them," I replied, with a tone of some impatience; "she is the beau ideal of a red skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and has no higher check-bones than the plaster Venus in your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra. I tell you she is divine."

St. John called to his dog, and we turned along the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story.

In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael, steeped as their colours seem to have been in the divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I have scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different models and so perfect, as were assembled during my sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington. They went about in their evening walks, graceful and angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they poured the light of their loveliness on the vegetating oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those days of the scale of beauty, their features are enamelled in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by that standard (and found wanting) of every court in Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born. Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of sunshine and passion! Pale and transparent princess-pearl of the court of Florence-than whom the creations on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline our eye for the shapes of heaven! Gipsy of the Pactolus! Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis! Bright and gifted cynosure

of the aristocracy of England!-ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wandering over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to remember and admire--a constellation, I almost believe, that has absorbed all the intensest light of the beauty of a hemisphere-yet, with your pictures coloured to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm, I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile if you will!) they were as lovely, and stately, and as worthy of the worship of the world.

I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they came in. Having never seen him, except in the presence of men, I was little curious to know whether his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very slender experience. My attention was distracted for the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little Georgian, (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the south,) by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had been left in the hall; and as the door opened, and the slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight of a recognition.

In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Georgian.

"I must apologize for my dog," said St. John, bowing gracefully to the mistress of the house; "he was bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee reminded him of happier days-as it did his master."

Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but immediately resumed her apparent deep study of the abstruse figures in the Kidderminster carpet.

"You are well arrived, young gentlemen," said Mrs. Ilfrington; "we press you into our service for a botanical ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you, Mr. St. John?"

St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for their bonnets-Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was scarcely closed when Nunu reappeared and checking herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under very powerful emotion.

Nunu!" he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly, and holding out his hand with the air of one who forgives an offence.

She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endearing epithets of her native tongue, in words that I only understood by their passionate and thrilling accent. The language of the heart is universal.

The fair scholars came in one after another, and we were soon on our way through the green fields to the flowery mountain-side of East Rock; Mrs. Ilfrington's arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and St. John rambling at large with the

rest of the party, but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian charity had no bowels for broken hearts.

The most sociable individuals of the party for a while were Nunu and Lash; the dog's recollection of the past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreeable than the present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs. Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic which she had never displayed be fore-sometimes fairly outrunning the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude creature overpowered her with his caresses. The scene gave origin to a grave discussion between that well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular force of childish association-the extraordinary intimacy between the Indian and the trapper's dog being explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that attractive principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she might have added a material corollary to her proposition. If the dog and the chief's daughter were not old friends, the chief's daughter and St. John certainly were.

As well as I could judge by the motions of two people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast in the favour and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian. Her southern indolence was probably an apology in Mrs. Ilfrington's eyes for leaning heavily on her companion's arm; but in a momentary halt, the capricious beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully around his waist. This was rather strong on a first acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opinion.

"Miss Temple!" said she, advancing to whisper a reproof to the beauty's ear.

Before she had taken a second step, Nonu bounded over the low hedge, followed by the dog, with whom she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scarf into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet on the silken fragments.

"Madam!" said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfrington, after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise and displeasure, "I should have told you before that your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may have over her will be in accordance with your own wishes exclusively."

His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips and frowning eyes.

66

Have you seen her before since her arrival?" asked Mrs. Ilfrington.

"My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence that she was here: he returned from his morning ramble with a string of wampum about his neck which had the mark of the tribe. was her gift," he added, patting the head of the dog, and looking with a softened expression at

He

Nunu, who dropped her head upon her bosom, and walked on in tears.

The chain of the Green mountains, after a gallop of some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut, suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long Island sound, and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees, three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold precipice, you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer perpendicular below you; and, spreading away from the broken masses at its feet lies an emerald meadow, inlaid with a crystal and rambling river, across which, at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the university, from what else were a thick-serried wilderness of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serves as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of pine tassels overhung.

Antiquity in America extends no further back than the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary ground with us-for there harboured the regicides Whalley and Goffe, and many a breathhushing tale is told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Connecticut. Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say that this cavernous path to the mountain-top was the resort in the holyday summer afternoons of most of the poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen sophomores, and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Ilfrington and her seven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm, and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flowers had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded upward.

The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of pine-tassels; and emerging from the brown shadow of the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage of sighing trees overhead, a fairies' velvet beneath you, and a view below that you may as well (if you would not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the water to see.

We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink of the precipice, and gazing off over the waters of the sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom. We recovered our breath in silence, I alone, perhaps, of that considerable company gazing with admiration at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and motionless with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow, her small hand buried and clinched in the moss, and her left foot

and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, escaped carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense control of emotion.

The game of the coquettish Georgian was well played. With a true woman's pique, she had redoubled her attentions to my friend from the moment that she found it gave pain to another of her sex; and St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that taint of opaque and patrician white which is found oftenest in Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed toward the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine through the thick white petal of a magnolia; her eyes were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or melancholy; her teeth were like strips from the lily's heart; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, romantic-looking, superior, and, just now, the only victim in the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella unamiable; and yielded himself, as all men will, a satisfied prey to enchantments of which he knew the springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantress. How singular it is that the highest and best qualities of the female heart are those with which men are the least captivated!

A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself and her tamed lion; her lap full of flowers, which he had found time to gather on the way, and her white hands employed in arranging a bouquet of which the destiny was yet a secret. Next to their own loves, ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring the loves of others; and while the violets and already-dropping wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or rejected by those slender fingers, the sun might have swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those sevenand-twenty misses would have watched their lovely schoolfellow the same. Nunu turned her head slowly around at last, and silently looked on. St. John lay at the feet of the Georgian, glancing from the flowers to her face, and from her face to the flowers, with an admiration not at all equivocal. Mrs. Ilfrington sat apart, absorbed in finishing a sketch of New Haven; and I, interested painfully in watching the emotions of the Cherokee, sat with my back to the trunk of a hemlock-the only spectator who comprehended the whole extent of the drama.

A wild rose was set in the heart of the bouquet at last, a spear of riband-grass added to give it grace and point, and nothing was wanting but a string. Reticules were searched, pockets turned inside out, and never a bit of riband to be found. The beauty was in despair.

Will a string of wampum do?" he asked, feeling under the long hair on the dog's neck, and untying a fine and variegated thread of manycoloured beads, worked exquisitely.

The dog growled, and Nunu sprang into the middle of the circle with the fling of an adder, and seizing the wampum as he handed it to her rival, called the dog, and fastened it once more around his neck.

The ladies rose in alarm; the belle turned palc, and clung to St. John's arm; the dog, with his hair bristling upon his back, stood close to her feet in an attitude of defiance; and the superb Indian, the peculiar genius of her beauty developed by her indignation, her nostrils expanded, and her eyes almost showering fire in their flashes, stood before them like a young Pythoness, ready to strike them dead with regard.

St. John recovered from his astonishment after a moment, and leaving the arm of Miss Temple, advanced a step, and called to his dog.

The Cherokee patted the animal on his back, and spoke to him in her own language; and, as St. John still advanced, Nunu drew herself to her fullest height, placed herself before the dog, who slunk growling from his master, and said to him, as she folded her arms. "The wampum is mine."

St. John coloured to the temples with shame. "Lash!" he cried, stamping with his feet, and endeavouring to fright him from his protectress.

The dog howled and crept away, half-crouching with fear, toward the precipice; and St. John shooting suddenly past Nunu, seized him on the brink, and held him down by the throat.

The next instant, a scream of horror from Mrs. Ilfrington, followed by a terrific echo from every female present, started the rude Kentuckian to his feet.

Clear over the abyss, hanging with one hand by an ashen sapling, the point of her tiny foot just poising on a projecting ledge of rock, swung the desperate Cherokee, sustaining herself with perfect ease, but with all the determination of her iron race collected in calm concentration on her lips.

"Restore the wampum to his neck," she cried, with a voice that thrilled the very marrow with its subdued fierceness, "or my blood rest on your soul!"

St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his hands in silent horror.

The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The subdued student sprang to her side; but with scorn on her lip, and the flush of exertion already vanished from her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid strides took her way alone down the mountain.

Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the sheltered river of boyhood-had encountered the storms of a first entrance into life-had trimmed my boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to

others from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John, who had shaken hands with me at the university gate, leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in doubt as to his real character and history as the first day we met. I had never heard him speak of either father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, received a letter from the day of his matriculation. He passed his vacations at the university; he had studied well, yet refused one of the highest college honours offered him with his degree; he had shown many good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults; and, all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of superiority; and my knowledge went no farther. The coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off; and, after four years' constant association, I had not an idea where he was going, or to what he was destined. The driver blew his horn.

66

God bless you, Slingsby !"

"God bless you, St. John!"

And so we parted.

It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgotten there was such a being in the world. Late in the month of October, in 1829, I was on my way westward, giving myself a vacation from the law. I embarked, on a clear and delicious day, in the small steamer which plies up and down the Cayuga lake, looking forward to a calin feast of scenery, and caring little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we got out of the little harbour of Cayuga, I walked astern for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight of a group of Indians standing motionless by the wheel. They were chiefs returning from a diplomatic visit to Washington.

I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding through. The first severe frost had come, and the miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which is known only in America. The blood-red sugar maple, with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian lip, stood here and there in the forest like the Sultan's standard in a host-the solitary and far-seen aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spiritlike and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer, turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fan-like catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun, spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about him to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward in the dying forest, burdening every breeze with its complainings; the hickory paled through its enduring green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation, stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating light of noonday