INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY MISCELLANY
Of Literature, Art, and Science.

GERMAN CRITICISM ON ENGLISH FEMALE ROMANCE WRITERS.

We translate the following for the International from
a letter dated London, June 15, to the Cologne
Gazette.

“Among the most remarkable writers of romances in England,
three women are entitled to be reckoned in the first rank,
namely, Miss Jewsbury, Miss Bronte, and Mrs. Gaskell. Miss
Jewsbury issued her first work about four years since, a novel,
in three volumes, under the title of ‘Zoe,’ and since then she
has published the ‘Half Sisters.’ Both these works are
excellent in manner as well as ideas, and show that their
author is a woman of profound thought and deep feeling. Both
are drawn from country life and the middle class, a sphere in
which Miss Jewsbury is at home. The tendency of the first is
speculative, and is based on religion; that of the second is
social, relating to the position of woman.

“Miss Jewsbury is still young, for an authoress. She counts
only some thirty years, and many productions may be confidently
expected from her hand, though perhaps none will excel those
already published, for, after gaining a certain climax, no one
excels himself. Her usual residence is Manchester; it is but
seldom that she visits the metropolis; she is now here. She has
lively and pleasing manners, a slight person, fine features, a
beautiful, dreamy, light brown eye. She is attractive without
being beautiful, retiring, altogether without pretensions, and
in conversation is neither brilliant nor very
intellectual,—a still, thoughtful, modest character.

“Miss Bronte was long involved in a mysterious obscurity,
from which she first emerged into the light as an actually
existing being, at her present visit to London. Two years ago
there appeared a romance, ‘Jane Eyre,’ by ‘Currer Bell,’ which
threw all England into astonishment. Everybody was tormenting
himself to discover the real author, for there was no such
person as Currer Bell, and no one could tell whether the book
was written by a man or woman, because the hues of the romance
now indicated a male and now female hand, without any
possibility of supposing that the whole originated with a
single pencil. The public attributed it now to one, now to
another, and the book passed to a second edition without the
solution of the riddle. At last there came out a second
romance, ‘Shirley,’ by the same author, which was devoured with
equal avidity, although it could not be compared to the former
in value; and still the incognito was preserved. Finally, late
in the autumn of last year the report was spread about that the
image of Jane Eyre had been discovered in London in the person
of a pale young lady, with gray eyes, who had been recognized
as the long-sought authoress. Still she remained invisible. And
again, in June 1850, it is said that Currer Bell, Jane Eyre,
Miss Bronte,—for all three names mean the same
person,—is in London, though to all inquiries concerning
the where and how a satisfactory answer is still wanting. She
is now indeed here, but not for the curious public; she will
not serve society as a lioness, will not be gazed and gaped at.
She is a simple child of the country, brought up in the little
parsonage of her father, in the North of England, and must
first accustom her eye to the gleaming diadem with which fame
seeks to deck her brow, before she can feel herself at home in
her own sunshine.

“Our third lady, Mrs. Gaskell, belongs also to the country,
and is the wife of a Unitarian clergyman. In this capacity she
has probably had occasion to know a great deal of the poorer
classes, to her honor be it said. Her book, ‘Mary Barton,’
conducts us into the factory workman’s narrow dwelling, and
depicts his joys and sorrows, his aims and efforts, his wants
and his misery, with a power of truth that irresistibly lays
hold upon the heart. The scene of the story alternates from
there to the city mansion of the factory owner, where, along
with luxury and splendor we find little love and little
happiness, and where sympathy with the condition of the workman
is wanting only because it is not known, and because no one
understands why or how the workman suffers. The book, is at
once very beautiful, very instructive, and written, in a spirit
of conciliation.”

MARGARET FULLER, MARCHESA D’OSSOLI.

Sarah Margaret Fuller, by marriage Marchioness of Ossoli,
was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about the year 1807. Her
father, Mr. Timothy Fuller, was a lawyer, and from 1817 to 1825
he represented the Middlesex district in Congress. At the close
of his last term as a legislator he purchased a farm near
Cambridge, and determined to abandon his profession for the
more congenial one of agriculture; but he died soon after,
leaving a widow and six children, of whom Margaret was the
eldest.

At a very early age she exhibited unusual abilities, and was
particularly distinguished for an extraordinary facility in
acquiring languages. Her father, proud of the displays of her
intelligence, prematurely stimulated it to a degree that was
ultimately injurious to her physical constitution. At eight
years of age he was accustomed to require of her the
composition of a number of Latin verses every day, while her
studies in philosophy, history, general science and current
literature were pressed to the limit of her capacities. When he
first went to Washington he was accustomed to speak of her as
one “better skilled in Greek and Latin than half of the
professors;” and alluding in one of her essays, to her
attachment to foreign literature, she herself observes that in
childhood she had well-nigh forgotten her English while
constantly reading in other tongues.

Soon after the death of her father, she applied herself to
teaching as a vocation, first in Boston, then in Providence,
and afterward in Boston again, while her “Conversations” were
for several seasons attended by classes of women, some of them
married, and many of them of the most eminent positions in
society. These conversations are described by Dr. Orestes A.
Brownson, as “in the highest degree brilliant, instructive, and
inspiring,” and our own recollections of them confirm to us the
justice of the applause with which they are now referred to.
She made her first appearance as an author, in a translation of
Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, published in Boston in
1839. When Mr. Emerson, in the following year, established
The Dial, she became one of the principal contributors
to that remarkable periodical, in which she wrote many of the
most striking papers on literature, art, and society. In the
summer of 1843 she made a journey to the Sault St. Marie, and
in the next spring published in Boston reminiscences of her
tour, under the title of Summer on the Lakes. The Dial
having been discontinued, she came to reside in New York, where
she had charge of the literary department of the New York
Tribune, which acquired a great accession of reputation
from her critical essays. Here in 1845 she published Woman in
the Nineteenth Century; and in 1846, Papers on Literature and
Art, in two volumes, consisting of essays and reviews,
reprinted, with one exception, from periodicals.

In the summer of 1845, she accompanied the family of a
friend to Europe, visiting England, Scotland, and France, and
passing through Italy to Rome, where they spent the ensuing
winter. The next spring she proceeded with her friends to the
north of Italy, and there stopped, spending most of the summer
at Florence, and returning at the approach of winter to Rome,
where she was soon after married to Giovanni, Marquis d’Ossoli,
who made her acquaintance during her first winter in that city.
They resided in the Roman States until the last summer, after
the surrender of Rome to the French army, when they deemed it
expedient to go to Florence, both having taken an active part
in the Republican movement. They left Florence in June, and at
Leghorn embarked in the ship Elizabeth for New York. The
passage commenced auspiciously, but at Gibraltar the master of
the ship died of smallpox, and they were detained at the
quarantine there some time in consequence of this misfortune,
but finally set sail again on the 8th of June, and arrived on
our coast during the terrible storm of the 18th and 19th ult.,
when, in the midst of darkness, rain, and a terrific gale, the
ship was hurled on the breakers of Fire Island, near Long
Island, and in a few hours was broken in pieces. Margaret
Fuller d’Ossoli, the Marquis d’Ossoli, and their son, two years
of age, with an Italian girl, and Mr. Horace Sumner of Boston,
besides several of the crew, lost their lives. We reprint a
sketch of the works and genius of Margaret Fuller, written
several years ago by the late Edgar A. Poe.

“Miss Fuller was at one time editor, or one of the editors
of the ‘The Dial,’ to which she contributed many of the most
forcible and certainly some of the most peculiar papers. She is
known, too, by ‘Summer on the Lakes,’ a remarkable assemblage
of sketches, issued in 1844, by Little & Brown, of Boston.
More lately she published ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century,’ a
work which has occasioned much discussion, having had the good
fortune to be warmly abused and chivalrously defended. For
‘The New York Tribune,’ she has furnished a great
variety of matter, chiefly notices of new books, etc., etc.,
her articles being designated by an asterisk. Two of the best
of them were a review of Professor Longfellow’s late
magnificent edition of his own works, (with a portrait,) and an
appeal to the public in behalf of her friend Harro Harring. The
review did her infinite credit; it was frank, candid,
independent—in even ludicrous contrast to the usual mere
glorifications of the day, giving honor only where honor
was due, yet evincing the most thorough capacity to appreciate
and the most sincere intention to place in the fairest light
the real and idiosyncratic merits of the poet. In my opinion it
is one of the very few reviews of Longfellow’s poems, ever
published in America, of which the critics have not had
abundant reason to be ashamed. Mr. Longfellow is entitled to a
certain and very distinguished rank among the poets of his
country, but that country is disgraced by the evident toadyism
[pg 163] which would award to his
social position and influence, to his fine paper and large
type, to his morocco binding and gilt edges, to his
flattering portrait of himself, and to the illustrations of
his poems by Huntingdon, that amount of indiscriminate
approbation which neither could nor would have been given to
the poems themselves. The defense of Harro Harring, or
rather the philippic against those who were doing him wrong,
was one of the most eloquent and well-put articles I
have ever yet seen in a newspaper.

“‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ is a book which few women
in the country could have written, and no woman in the country
would have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller. In the
way of independence, of unmitigated radicalism, it is one of
the ‘Curiosities of American Literature,’ and Doctor Griswold
should include it in his book. I need scarcely say that the
essay is nervous, forcible, suggestive, brilliant, and to a
certain extent scholar-like—for all that Miss Fuller
produces is entitled to these epithets—but I must say
that the conclusions reached are only in part my own. Not that
they are bold, by any means—too novel, too startling or
too dangerous in their consequences, but that in their
attainment too many premises have been distorted, and too many
analogical inferences left altogether out of sight. I mean to
say that the intention of the Deity as regards sexual
differences—an intention which can be distinctly
comprehended only by throwing the exterior (more sensitive)
portions of the mental retina casually over the wide
field of universal analogy—I mean to say that this
intention has not been sufficiently considered. Miss
Fuller has erred, too, through her own excessive objectiveness.
She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss
Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss
Fullers on the whole face of the earth. Holding these opinions
in regard to ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century,’ I still feel
myself called upon to disavow the silly, condemnatory criticism
of the work which appeared in one of the earlier numbers of
“The Broadway Journal.” That article was not
written by myself, and was written by my associate, Mr.
Briggs.

“The most favorable estimate of Miss Fuller’s genius (for
high genius she unquestionably possesses) is to be obtained,
perhaps, from her contributions to ‘The Dial,’ and from her
‘Summer on the Lakes.’ Many of the descriptions in this
volume are unrivaled for graphicality, (why is there not
such a word?) for the force with which they convey the true by
the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches which
other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the
subject. This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness,
which leads her to paint a scene less by its features than by
its effects.

“Here, for example, is a portion of her account of
Niagara:—

“‘Daily these proportions widened and towered more and
more upon my sight, and I got at last a proper foreground
for these sublime distances. Before coming away, I think I
really saw the full wonder of the scene. After a while it
so drew me into itself as to inspire an undefined dread,
such as I never knew before, such as may be felt when death
is about to usher us into a new existence. The
perpetual trampling of the waters seized my senses. I
felt that no other sound, however near, could be heard, and
would start and look behind me for a foe. I realised
the identity of that mood of nature in which these waters
were poured down with such absorbing force, with that in
which the Indian was shaped on the same soil. For
continually upon my mind came, unsought and unwelcome,
images such as had never haunted it before, of naked
savages stealing behind me with uplifted tomahawks.
Again and again this illusion recurred, and even after I
had thought it over, and tried to shake it off, I could not
help starting and looking behind me. What I liked best
was to sit on Table Rock close to the great fall; there
all power of observing details, all separate consciousness
was quite lost.’

“The truthfulness of the passages italicized will be felt by
all; the feelings described are, perhaps, experienced by every
(imaginative) person who visits the fall; but most persons,
through predominant subjectiveness, would scarcely be conscious
of the feelings, or, at best, would never think of employing
them in an attempt to convey to others an impression of the
scene. Hence so many desperate failures to convey it on the
part of ordinary tourists. Mr. William W. Lord, to be sure, in
his poem ‘Niagara,’ is sufficiently objective; he describes not
the fall, but very properly, the effect of the fall upon
him. He says that it made him think of his own
greatness, of his own superiority, and so forth, and so
forth; and it is only when we come to think that the thought of
Mr. Lord’s greatness is quite idiosyncratic confined
exclusively to Mr. Lord, that we are in condition to understand
how, in spite of his objectiveness he has failed to convey an
idea of anything beyond one Mr. William W. Lord.

“From the essay entitled ‘Philip Van Artevelde, I copy a
paragraph which will serve at once to exemplify Miss Fuller’s
more earnest (declamatory) style, and to show the tenor of her
prospective speculations:—

“‘At Chicago I read again ‘Philip Van Artevelde,’ and
certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated
with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I
used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind
to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the
calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized
well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this
country have such a man? It is what she needs—no thin
Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the
heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his
hands are strong and dexterous in the use of human
instruments. A man, religious, virtuous,
and—sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but
self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion,
though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no
mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn
game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of
eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not
what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives
from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately
avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present,
neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its
many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man
must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift
which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for
America, the thought which urges her on will be
expressed.”

“From what I have quoted, a general conception of the
prose style of the authoress may be gathered. Her manner,
however, is infinitely varied. It is always forcible—but
I am not sure that it is always anything else, unless I say
picturesque. It rather indicates than evinces scholarship.
Perhaps only the scholastic, or, more properly, those
accustomed to look narrowly at the structure of phrases, would
be willing to acquit her of ignorance of grammar—would be
willing to attribute her slovenliness to disregard of the shell
in anxiety for the kernel; or to waywardness, or to
affectation, or to blind reverence to Carlyle—would be
able to detect, in her strange and continual inaccuracies, a
capacity for the accurate.

“‘I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension; the
spectacle is capable to swallow up all such
objects.”

“It is fearful, too, to know, as you look, that whatever
has been swallowed by the cataract, is like to rise
suddenly to light.”

“I took our mutual friends to see
her.”

[pg 164]

“It was always obvious that they had nothing in common
between them.”

“The Indian cannot be looked at truly except by a
poetic eye.”

“McKenny’s Tour to the Lakes gives some facts not to be
met with elsewhere.”

“There is that mixture of culture and rudeness in the
aspect of things as gives a feeling of freedom,”
etc., etc.

“These are merely a few, a very few instances, taken at
random from among a multitude of willful murders
committed by Miss Fuller on the American of President Polk. She
uses, too, the word ‘ignore,’ a vulgarity adopted only of late
days (and to no good purpose, since there is no necessity for
it) from the barbarisms of the law, and makes no scruple of
giving the Yankee interpretation to the verbs ‘witness’ and
‘realize,’ to say nothing of ‘use,’ as in the sentence, ‘I used
to read a short time at night.’ It will not do to say in
defense of such words, that in such senses they may be found in
certain dictionaries—in that of Bolles’, for
instance;—some kind of ‘authority’ may be found
for any kind of vulgarity under the sun.

“In spite of these things, however and of her frequent
unjustifiable Carlyleisms, (such as that of writing sentences
which are no sentences, since, to be parsed, reference must be
had to sentences preceding,) the style of Miss Fuller is one of
the very best with which I am acquainted. In general effect, I
know no style which surpasses it. It is singularly piquant,
vivid, terse, bold, luminous—leaving details out of
sight, it is everything that a style need be.

“I believe that Miss Fuller has written much poetry,
although she has published little. That little is tainted with
the affectation of the transcendentalists, (I used this
term, of course, in the sense which the public of late days
seem resolved to give it,) but is brimful of the poetic
sentiment. Here, for example, is something in
Coleridge’s manner, of which the author of ‘Genevieve’ might
have had no reason to be ashamed:—

“To show the evident carelessness with which this poem was
constructed, I have italicized an identical rhyme (of about the
same force in versification as an identical proposition in
logic) and two grammatical improprieties. To lean is a
neuter verb, and ‘seizing on‘ is not properly to be
called a pleonasm, merely because it is—nothing at all.
The concluding line is difficult of pronunciation through
excess of consonants. I should have preferred, indeed, the
ante-penultimate tristich as the finale of the poem.

“The supposition that the book of an author is a thing apart
from the author’s self, is, I think, ill-founded. The soul is a
cipher, in the sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a
cryptograph is, the more difficulty there is in its
comprehension—at a certain point of brevity it would bid
defiance to an army of Champollions. And thus he who has
written very little, may in that little either conceal his
spirit or convey quite an erroneous idea of it—of his
acquirements, talents, temper, manner, tenor and depth (or
shallowness) of thought—in a word of his character, of
himself. But this is impossible with him who has written much.
Of such a person we get, from his books, not merely a just, but
the most just representation. Bulwer, the individual, personal
man, in a green velvet waistcoat and amber gloves, is not by
any means the veritable Sir Edward Lytton, who is discoverable
only in ‘Ernest Maltravers,’ where his soul is deliberately and
nakedly set forth. And who would ever know Dickens by looking
at him or talking with him, or doing anything with him except
reading his ‘Curiosity Shop?’ What poet, in especial, but must
feel at least the better portion of himself more fairly
represented in even his commonest sonnet, (earnestly written,)
than in his most elaborate or most intimate personalities?

“I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss
Fuller affords a marked exception—to this extent, that
her personal character and her printed book are merely one and
the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly
from the one as from the other—no more readily
from this than from that—easily from either. Her acts are
bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her
literary and her conversational manner are identical. Here is a
passage from her ‘Summer on the Lakes:’—

“‘The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected;
they are so swift that they cease to seem
so—you can think only of their beauty. The
fountain beyond the Moss Islands I discovered for myself,
and thought it for some time an accidental beauty
which it would not do to leave, lest I might never
see it again. After I found it permanent, I returned
many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little
waterfall, beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have
made a study for some larger design. She delights in
this—a sketch within a sketch—a dream within
a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great
buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the
waterfall, copied in the flowers that star its
bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the
lineaments become fluent, and we mould the scene in
congenial thought with its genius.’

“Now all this is precisely as Miss Fuller would speak
it. She is perpetually saying just such things in just such
words. To get the conversational woman in the mind’s
eye, all that is needed is to imagine her reciting the
paragraph just quoted: but first let us have the
personal woman. She is of the medium height; nothing
remarkable about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light
hair; eyes a bluish gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the
mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity
for affection, for love—when moved by a slight smile, it
becomes even beautiful in the intensity of this expression; but
the upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary
[pg 165] muscles, habitually uplifts
itself, conveying the impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a
person of this description looking at you one moment
earnestly in the face, at the next seeming to look only
within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously every
now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but
musically, deliberately, (not hurriedly or loudly,) with a
delicious distinctness of enunciation—speaking, I say,
the paragraph in question, and emphasizing the words which I
have italicized, not by impulsion of the breath, (as is
usual) but by drawing them out as long as possible, nearly
closing her eyes, the while—imagine all this, and we
have both the woman and the authoress before us.”

[From the New York Tribune.]

ON THE DEATH OF S. MARGARET FULLER.

BY G.F.R. JAMES

An Illustration of the high prices paid to fortunate artists
in these times may be found in the fact that Alboni, the famous
contralto singer, has been engaged to sing at Madrid, at the
enormous rate of $400 dollars per day, while Roger, the tenor,
who used to sing at the Comic Opera at Paris, and who was
transplanted to the Grand Opera to assist in the production of
Meyerbeer’s “Prophet,” has been engaged to sing with her at the
more moderate salary of $8000 a month. This is almost equal to
the extravagant sum guaranteed to Jenny Lind for performing in
this country. It would be a curious inquiry why singers and
dancers are always paid so much more exorbitantly than
painters, sculptors or musical composers, especially as the
pleasure they confer is of a merely evanescent character, while
the works of the latter remain a perpetual source of delight
and refinement to all generations.

FRASER’S MAGAZINE UPON THE POETS AND POETRY OF
AMERICA.

The last number of Fraser’s Magazine has a long
article upon THE POETS AND POETRY OF AMERICA, in which the
subject is treated with more than the customary civility of
English criticism upon this subject. We are half inclined,
indeed, to believe the article was written “above Bleecker,” or
by an inhabitant of that quarter now in London. Omitting the
illustrative extracts, we copy the greater portion of the
review, in which most of those who are admitted to be poets are
characterized.

“When Halleck said of New York—

he rather understated than exaggerated the fact. Mr.
Griswold, besides the ninety regular poets in his collection,
gives an appendix of about seventy fugitive pieces by as many
authors; and bitter complaints have been made against him in
various quarters for not including some seventy, or a hundred
and seventy more, ‘who,’ it is said, and probably with truth,
‘have as good a right to be there as many of those admitted.’
Still it is possible to pick out a few of general reputation,
whom literati from all parts of the Union would agree in
sustaining as specimens of distinguished American poets, though
they would differ in assigning their relative position. Thus,
if the Republic had to choose a laureate, Boston would probably
deposit a nearly unanimous vote for Longfellow; the suffrages
of New York might he divided between Bryant and Halleck; and
the southern cities would doubtless give a large majority for
Poe. But these gentlemen, and some three or four more, would be
acknowledged by all as occupying the first rank. Perhaps, on
the whole, the preponderance of native authority justifies us
in heading the list with Bryant, who, at any rate, has the
additional title of seniority in authorship, if not in actual
years.

“William Cullen Bryant is, as we learn from Mr. Griswold,
about fifty-five years old, and was born in Massachusetts,
though his literary career is chiefly associated with New York,
of which he is a resident. With a precocity extraordinary, even
in a country where precocity is the rule instead of the
exception, he began to write and publish at the age of
thirteen, and has, therefore, been full forty years before the
American public, and that not in the capacity of poet
alone—having for more than half that period edited the
Evening Post, one of the ablest and most respectable
papers in the United States, and the oldest organ, we believe,
of the Democratic party in New York. He has been called, and
with justice, a poet of nature. The prairie solitude, the
summer evening landscape, the night wind of autumn, the
water-bird flitting homeward through the twilight—such
are the favorite subjects of inspiration.
[pg 166] Thanatopsis, one of
his most admired pieces, was written at the age of
eighteen, and exhibits a finish of style, no less
than a maturity of thought, very remarkable for so youthful
a production. Mr. Bryant’s poems have been for some years
pretty well known on this side the water,—better
known, at any rate, than any other transatlantic verses; on
which account, being somewhat limited for space, we forbear
to make any extracts from them.

“FITZ-GREENE HALLECK is also a New-Englander by birth and a
New Yorker by adoption. He is Bryant’s contemporary and friend,
but the spirit and style of his versification are very
different; and so, it is said, are his political affinities.
While Bryant is a bulwark of the Democracy, Halleck is reported
to be not only an admirer of the obsolete Federalists, but an
avowed Monarchist. To be sure, this is only his private
reputation: no trace of such a feeling is observable in his
writings, which show throughout a sturdy vein of republicanism,
social and political. In truth, the party classification of
American literary men is apt to puzzle the uninitiated. Thus
Washington Irving is said to belong to the Democrats; but it
would be hard to find in his writings anything countenancing
their claim upon him. His sketches of English society are a
panegyric of old institutions; and the fourth book of his
Knickerbocker is throughout a palpable satire on the
administration of Thomas Jefferson, the great apostle of
Democracy. Perhaps, however, he may since have changed his
views. Willis, too, the ‘Free Penciler,’ who has been half his
life prating about lords and ladies, and great people, and has
become a sort of Jenkins to the fashionable life of New York;
he also is one of the Democratic party. Peradventure he may
vote the ‘Locofoco ticket’ in the hope of propitiating the
boys (as the canaille of American cities are
properly called), and saving his printing-office from the fate
of the Italian Opera House in Astor Place. But what shall we
say of Cooper, who, by his anti-democratic opinions, has made
himself one of the most unpopular men in his country, and whose
recent political novels rival the writings of Judge Haliburton
in the virulence as well as the cleverness of their satire upon
Republican institutions? He, too, is a Democrat. To us, who are
not behind the curtain, these things are a mystery incapable of
explanation. To return to our present subject. Halleck made his
début in the poetical world by some satirical pieces
called The Croakers, which created as much sensation at
their appearance as the anonymous Salmagundi which
commenced Irving’s literary career. These were succeeded by
Fanny, a poem in the Don Juan metre. Fanny
has no particular plot or story, but is a satirical review of
all the celebrities, literary, fashionable, and political, of
New York at that day (1821). And the satire was probably very
good at the time and in the place; but, unfortunately for the
extent and permanence of its reputation, most of these
celebrities are utterly unknown, not merely beyond the limits
of the Union, but beyond those of New York. Among all the
personages enumerated we can find but two names that an
European reader would be likely to know anything
about,—Clinton and Van Buren. Nay, more, in the rapid
growth and change of things American, the present generation of
New Yorkers are likely to lose sight of the lions of their
immediate progenitors; and unless some Manhattanese scholiast
should write a commentary on the poem in time, its allusions,
and with them most of its wit, will be in danger of perishing
entirely. What we can judge of in Fanny are one
or two graceful lyrics interspersed in it, though even these
are marred by untimely comicality and local allusions. The
nominal hero, while wandering about at night after the wreck of
his fortunes, hears a band playing outside a public place of
entertainment. It must have been a better band than that which
now, from the Museum opposite the Astor House, drives to frenzy
the hapless stranger…. In Halleck’s subsequent productions
the influence of Campbell is more perceptible than that of
Byron, and with manifest advantage. It may be said of his
compositions, as it can be affirmed of few American verses,
that they have a real innate harmony, something not dependent
on the number of syllables in each line, or capable of being
dissected out into feet, but growing in them, as it were, and
created by the fine ear of the writer. Their sentiments, too,
are exalted and ennobling; eminently genial and honest, they
stamp the author for a good man and true,—Nature’s
aristocracy…. For some unexplained reason Halleck has not
written, or at least not published, anything new for several
years, though continually solicited to do so; for he is a great
favorite with his countrymen, especially with the New Yorkers.
His time, however, has been by no means passed in idleness.
Fashionable as writing is in America, it is not considered
desirable or, indeed, altogether reputable, that the poet
should be only a poet. Halleck has been in business most
of his life; and was lately head-clerk of the wealthy merchant,
John Jacob Astor, who left him a handsome annuity. This was
increased by Mr. Astor’s son and heir, a man of well-known
liberality; so that between the two there is a chance of the
poet’s being enabled to ‘meditate the tuneful Muse’ for the
remainder of his days free from all distractions of
business.

“LONGFELLOW, the pet poet of Boston, is a much younger man
than either Bryant or Halleck, and has made his reputation only
within the last twelve years, during which time he has been one
of the most noted lions of American Athens. The city of Boston,
as every one knows who has been there, or who has met with any
book or man emanating from it, claims to be the literary
metropolis of the United States, and assumes the
slightly-pretending [pg 167] soubriquet just
quoted. The American Athenians have their thinking and
writing done for them by a coterie whose distinctive
characteristics are Socinianism in theology, a
præter-Puritan prudery in ethics, a German tendency in
metaphysics, and throughout all a firm persuasion that
Boston is the fountain-head of art, scholarship, and
literature for the western world, and particularly that New
York is a Nazareth in such things, out of which can come
nothing good. For the Bostonians, who certainly cultivate
literature with more general devotion, if not always with
more individual success than the New Yorkers, can never
forgive their commercial neighbors for possessing by birth
the two most eminent prose-writers of the
country—Irving and Cooper; and by adoption, two of the
leading poets—Bryant and Halleck. Nor are the good
people of the ‘Empire State’ slow to resent these
exhibitions of small jealousy; but, on the contrary, as the
way of the world is, they are apt to retort by greater
absurdities. So shy are they of appearing to be guided by
the dicta of their eastern friends, that to this day there
is scarcely man or woman on Manhattan Island who will
confess a liking for Tennyson, Mrs. Barrett Browning, or
Robert Browning, simply because these poets were taken up
and patronized (metaphorically speaking, of course,) by the
‘Mutual Admiration Society’ of Boston.

“The immediate influences of this camaraderie are
highly flattering and apparently beneficial to the subject of
them, but its ultimate effects are most injurious to the proper
development of his powers. When the merest trifles that a man
throws off are inordinately praised, he soon becomes content
with producing the merest trifles. Longfellow has grown
unaccustomed to do himself justice. Half his volumes are filled
up with translations; graceful and accurate, indeed; but
translations, and often from originals of very moderate merit.
His last original poem, Evangeline, is a sort of
pastoral in hexameters. The resuscitation of this classical
metre had a queer effect upon the American quidnuncs. Some of
the critics evidently believed it to be a bran-new metre
invented for the nonce by the author, a delusion which they of
the ‘Mutual Admiration’ rather winked at; and the parodists who
endeavored to ridicule the new measure were evidently not quite
sure whether seven feet or nine made a hexameter. It is really
to be regretted that Longfellow has been cajoled into playing
these tricks with himself, for his earlier pieces were works of
much promise, and, had they been worthily followed out, might
have entitled him to a high place among the poets of the
language…. Longfellow’s poetry, whenever he really lays
himself out to write poetry, has a definite idea and purpose in
it—no small merit now-a-days. His versification is
generally harmonious, and he displays a fair command of metre.
Sometimes he takes a fancy to an obsolete or out-of-the-way
stanza; one of his longest and best poems, The Skeleton in
Armor, is exactly in the measure of Drayton’s fine ballad
on Agincourt. His chief fault is an over-fondness for simile
and metaphor. He seems to think indispensable the introduction
into everything he writes of a certain (or sometimes a very
uncertain) number of these figures. Accordingly his poems are
crowded with comparisons, sometimes very pretty and pleasing,
at others so far-fetched that the string of tortured images
which lead off Alfred de Musset’s bizarre Ode to the
Moon can hardly equal them. This making figures
(whether from any connection with the calculating habits of the
people or not) is a terrible propensity of American writers,
whether of prose or verse. Their orators are especial sinners
in this respect. We have seen speeches stuck as full of
metaphors (more or less mixed) as Burton’s Anatomy is of
quotations.

“Such persons as know from experience that literary people
are not always in private life what their writings would
betoken, that Miss Bunions do not precisely resemble March
violets, and mourners upon paper may be laughers over
mahogany—such persons will not be surprised to hear that
the Longfellow is a very jolly fellow, a lover of fun and good
dinners, and of an amiability and personal popularity that have
aided not a little the popularity of his writings in verse and
prose—for he writes prose too, prettier, quainter, more
figurative, and more poetic if anything, than his poetry. He is
also a professor at Harvard College, near Boston.

“EDGAR A. POE, like Longfellow and most of the other
American poets, wrote prose as well as poetry, having produced
a number of wild, grotesque, and powerfully-imagined tales;
unlike most of them he was a literary man pur sang. He
depended for support entirely on his writings, and his career
was more like the precarious existence of an author in the time
of Johnson and Savage than the decent life of an author in our
own day. He was a Southerner by birth, acquired a liberal
education, and what the French call ‘expansive’ tastes, was
adopted by a rich relative, quarreled with him, married ‘for
love,’ and lived by editing magazines in Richmond,
Philadelphia, and New York; by delivering lectures (the
never-failing last resort of the American literary adventurer);
by the occasional subscriptions of compassionate acquaintances
or admiring friends—any way he could—for eighteen
or nineteen years: lost his wife, involved himself in endless
difficulties, and finally died in what should have been the
prime of his life, about six months ago. His enemies attributed
his untimely death to intemperance; his writings would rather
lead to the belief that he was an habitual taker of opium. If
it make a man a poet to be

Poe was certainly a poet. Virulently and ceaselessly abused
by his enemies (who included a large portion of the press), he
was worshiped to infatuation by his friends. The severity of
his editorial criticisms, and the erratic course of his life,
fully account for the former circumstance; the latter is
probably to be attributed, in part at least, to pity for his
mishaps.

“If Longfellow’s poetry is best designated as quaint, Poe’s
may most properly be characterized as fantastic. The best of it
reminds one of Tennyson, not by any direct imitation of
particular passages, but by its general air and tone. But he
was very far from possessing Tennyson’s fine ear for melody.
His skill in versification, sometimes striking enough, was
evidently artificial; he overstudied metrical expression and
overrated its value so as sometimes to write, what were little
better than nonsense-verses, for the rhythm. He had an
incurable propensity for refrains, and when he had once caught
a harmonious cadence, appeared to think it could not be too
often repeated. Poe’s name is usually mentioned in connection
with The Raven, a poem which he published about five
years ago. It had an immense run, and gave rise to innumerable
parodies—those tests of notoriety if not of merit. And
certainly it is not without a peculiar and fantastic excellence
in the execution, while the conception is highly striking and
poetic. This much notice seems due to a poem which created such
a sensation in the author’s country. To us it seems by no means
the best of Poe’s productions; we much prefer, for instance,
this touching allegory, which was originally embodied in one of
his wildest tales, The Haunted Palace. In the very same
volume with this are some verses that Poe wrote when a boy, and
some that a boy might be ashamed of writing. Indeed the secret
of rejection seems to be little known to Transatlantic bards.
The rigidness of self-criticism which led Tennyson to ignore
and annihilate, so far as in him lay, full one half of his
earlier productions, would hardly be understood by them. This
is particularly unlucky in the case of Poe, whose rhymes
sometimes run fairly away with him, till no purpose or meaning
is traceable amid a jingle of uncommon and fine-sounding
words….

“Though Poe was a Southerner, his poetry has nothing in it
suggestive of his peculiar locality. It is somewhat remarkable
that the slave-holding, which has tried almost all other means
of excusing or justifying itself before the world, did not
think of ‘keeping a poet,’ and engaging the destitute author
from its own territory to sing the praises of ‘the patriarchal
institution.’ And it would have been a fair provocation that
the Abolitionists had their poet already. Indeed several of the
northern poets have touched upon this subject; Longfellow, in
particular, has published a series of spirited and touching
anti-slavery poems; but the man who has made it his
specialité is JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, a Quaker,
literary editor of the National Era, an Abolition and
ultra-Radical paper, which, in manful despite of Judge Lynch,
is published at Washington, between the slave-pens and the
capitol. His verses are certainly obnoxious to the jurisdiction
of that notorious popular potentate, being unquestionably
‘inflammatory, incendiary, and insurrectionary,’ as the
Southern formula goes, in a very high degree. He makes
passionate appeals to the Puritan spirit of New England, and
calls on her sons to utter their voice,

“and protest against the shocking anomaly of slavery in a
free country. At times, when deploring the death of some fellow
laborer in the cause, he falls into a somewhat subdued strain,
though even then there is more of spirit and fire in his verses
than one naturally expects from a follower of George Fox; but
on such occasions he displays a more careful and harmonious
versification than is his wont. There is no scarcity of these
elegies in his little volume, the Abolitionists, even
when they escape the attentions of the high legal functionary
already alluded to, not being apparently a long-lived
class.

“Toujours perdrix palls in poetry as in cookery; we
grow tired after awhile of invectives against governors of
slave-states and mercenary persons, and dirges for untimely
perished Abolitionists. The wish suggests itself that Whittier
would not always

‘Give up to a party what is meant for mankind,’

but sometimes turn his powers in another direction.
Accordingly, it is a great relief to find him occasionally
trying his hand on the early legends of New England and Canada,
which do not suffer such ballads as St. John….

“Whittier is less known than several other Western bards to
the English reader, and we think him entitled to stand higher
on the American Parnassus than most of his countrymen would
place him. His faults—harshness and want of
polish—are evident; but there is more life, and spirit,
and soul in his verses, than in those of eight-ninths of Mr.
Griswold’s immortal ninety.

“From political verse (for the anti-slavery agitation must
be considered quite as much a political as a moral warfare) the
transition is natural to satire and humorous poetry. Here we
find no lack of matter, but a grievous short-coming in quality.
The Americans are no contemptible humorists in prose, but their
[pg 169] fun cannot be set to verse.
They are very fond of writing parodies, yet we have scarcely
ever seen a good parody of American origin. And their satire
is generally more distinguished for personality and
buffoonery than wit. Halleck’s Fanny looks as if it
might be good, did we only know something of the people
satirized in it. The reputed comic poet of the country at
present is OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, a physician. Whether it
was owing to the disappointment caused by hearing too much
in his praise beforehand we will not pretend to say, but it
certainly did seem to us that Dr. Holmes’ efforts in this
line must originally have been intended to act upon his
patients emetically. After a conscientious perusal of the
doctor, the most readable, and about the only presentable
thing we can find in him, is the bit of seriocomic entitled
The Last Leaf.

“But within the last three years there has arisen in the
United States a satirist of genuine excellence, who, however,
besides being but moderately appreciated by his countrymen,
seems himself in a great measure to have mistaken his real
forte. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, one of the Boston coterie, has for
some time been publishing verses, which are by the coterie duly
glorified, but which are in no respect distinguishable from the
ordinary level of American poetry, except that they combine an
extraordinary pretension to originality, with a more than
usually palpable imitation of English models. Indeed, the
failure was so manifest, that the American literati seem, in
this one case, to have rebelled against Boston dictation, and
there is sufficient internal evidence that such of them as do
duty for critics handled Mr. Lowell pretty severely. Violently
piqued at this, and simultaneously conceiving a disgust for the
Mexican war, he was impelled by both feelings to take the field
as a satirist: to the former we owe the Fable for
Critics; to the latter, the Biglow Papers. It was a
happy move, for he has the rare faculty of writing clever
doggerel. Take out the best of Ingoldsby, Campbell’s
rare piece of fun The Friars of Dijon, and perhaps a
little of Walsh’s Aristophanes, and there is no
contemporary verse of the class with which Lowell’s may not
fearlessly stand a comparison; for, observe, we are not
speaking of mock heroics like Bon Gaultier’s, which are only a
species of parody, but of real doggerel, the Rabelaisque of
poetry. The Fable is somewhat on the Ingoldsby
model,—that is to say, a good part of its fun consists in
queer rhymes, double, treble, or poly-syllabic; and it has even
Barham’s fault—an occasional over-consciousness of
effort, and calling on the reader to admire, as if the tour
de force could not speak for itself. But Ingoldsby’s
rhymes will not give us a just idea of the Fable until
we superadd Hook’s puns; for the fabulist has a pleasant knack
of making puns—outrageous and unhesitating
ones—exactly of the kind to set off the general style of
his verse. The sternest critic could hardly help relaxing over
such a bundle of them as are contained in Apollo’s lament over
the ‘treeification’ of his Daphne…. The Fable is a
sort of review in verse of American poets. Much of the Boston
leaven runs through it; the wise men of the East are all
glorified intensely, while Bryant and Halleck are studiously
depreciated. But though thus freely exercising his own critical
powers in verse, the author is most bitter against all critics
in prose, and gives us a ludicrous picture of one—

And this gentleman is finely shown up for his condemnatory
predilections and inability to discern or appreciate beauties.
The cream of the joke against him is, that being sent by Apollo
to choose a lily in a flower-garden, he brings back a thistle
as all he could find. The picture is a humorous one, but we are
at a loss to conjecture who can have sat for it in America,
where the tendency is all the other way, reviewers being apt to
apply the butter of adulation with the knife of profusion to
every man, woman, or child who rushes into print. Some of his
complaints, too, against the critic sound very odd; as, for
instance, that

Surely the very meaning of learning is that it is
something which a man learns—acquires from other
sources—does not originate in himself. But it is a
favorite practice with Mr. Lowell’s set to rail against dry
learning and pedants, while at the same time there are no men
more fond of showing off cheap learning than themselves: Lowell
himself never loses an opportunity of bringing in a bit of
Greek or Latin. Our readers must have known such
persons—for, unfortunately, the United States has no
monopoly of them—men who delight in quoting Latin before
ladies, talking Penny-Magazine science in the hearing of
clodhoppers, and preaching of high art to youths who have never
had the chance of seeing any art at all. Then you will
hear them say nothing about pedantry. But let a man be present
who knows more Greek than they do, or who has a higher standard
of poetry or painting or music, and wo be to him! Him they will
persecute to the uttermost. What is to be done with such men
but to treat them à la Shandon, ‘Give them Burton’s
Anatomy, and leave them to their own abominable
devices?’

“The Biglow Papers are imaginary epistles from a New
England farmer, and contain some of the best specimens extant
of the ‘Yankee,’ or New England dialect,—better than
Haliburton’s, for Sam Slick sometimes mixes Southern, Western,
and even English vulgarities with his Yankee. Mr. Biglow’s
remarks treat chiefly of the Mexican war, and subjects
immediately connected with it, such as slavery, truckling of
Northerners to the south, &c. The theme is treated in
various ways with uniform bitterness. Now
[pg 170] he sketches a ‘Pious
Editors Creed,’ almost too daring in its Scriptural
allusions, but terribly severe upon the venal fraternity. At
another time he sets one of Calhoun’s pro-slavery speeches
to music. The remarks of the great Nullifier form the air of
the song, and the incidental remarks of honorable senators
on the same side make up a rich chorus, their names
supplying happy tags to the rhymes. But best of all are the
letters of his friend the returned volunteer, Mr.
Birdofredom Sawin, who draws a sad picture of the private
soldier’s life in Mexico. He had gone out with hopes of
making his fortune. But he was sadly disappointed and
equally so in his expectations of glory, which ‘never got so
low down as the privates.’

“But it is time to bring this notice to a close not,
however, that we have by any means exhausted the subject. For
have we not already stated that there are, at the lowest
calculation, ninety American poets, spreading all over the
alphabet, from Allston, who is unfortunately dead, to Willis,
who is fortunately living, and writing Court Journals
for the ‘Upper Ten Thousand,’ as he has named the
quasi-aristocracy of New York? And the lady-poets—the
poetesses, what shall we say of them? Truly it would be
ungallant to say anything ill of them, and invidious to single
out a few among so many; therefore, it will be best for us to
say—nothing at all about any of them.”

Original Poetry.

A RETROSPECT.

BY HERMANN.

THE AUTHOR OF “ION.”

“Mr. Talfourd is now a Justice, and we find in the London
journals an account of a visit to his residence by a deputation
from his native town, to present to him a silver candelabrum,
subscribed for by a large number of the inhabitants of the
borough, of all parties. The base of the candelabrum is a
tripod, on which stands a group of three female figures;
representing Law, Justice, and Poetry, the two former modeled
from Flaxman’s sculpture on Lord Mansfield’s monument in
Westminster Abbey, the latter from a drawing of the Greek
Antique, bearing a scroll inscribed with the word “Ion” in
Greek characters. The arms of Mr. Talfourd and of the borough
of Reading are engraved on the base. The testimonial was
presented to the Justice in the presence of his family,
including the venerable Mrs. Talfourd, his mother, and a large
circle of private friends. In answer to the gentleman who
presented the testimonial, Mr. Talfourd replied:

“If I felt that the circumstances of this hour, and the
eloquent kindness which has enriched it, appealed for a
response only to personal qualities, I should be too conscious
of the poverty of such materials for an answer to attempt one;
but the associations they suggest expand into wider circles
than self impels, and while they teach me that this occasion is
not for the indulgence of vanity, but for the cultivation of
humble thankfulness, they impart a nobler significance to your
splendid gift and to your delightful praise. They remind me
that my intellectual being has, from its first development,
been nurtured by the partiality of those whom, living and dead,
you virtually represent to-day; they concentrate the
wide-spread instances of that peculiar felicity in my lot
whereby I have been privileged to find aid, comfort,
inspiration, and allowance in that local community amidst which
my life began; and they invite me, from that position which
once bounded my furthest horizon of personal hope, to live
along the line of past existence; to recognize the same
influence everywhere pervading it: and to perceive how its
struggles have been assisted; its errors softened down or
vailed, and its successes enhanced, by the constant presence of
home-born regards. Embracing in a rapid glance the events of
many years, I call to mind how at an early age—earlier
than is generally safe or happy for youths—the incidents
of life, supplying an unusual stimulus to ordinary powers, gave
vividness to those dreams of human excellence and progress
which, at some time, visit all; how by the weakness which
precluded them from assuming those independent shapes which
require the plastic force of higher powers, they became
associated with the scenes among which they were cherished, and
clove to them with earnest grasp; and how the fervid
expressions which that combination prompted, were accepted by
generous friends as indicating faculties ‘beyond the reaches of
my soul,’ and [pg 171] induced them to encourage
me by genial prophecies which, with unwearied purpose, they
endeavored to fulfill. I renew that golden season when such
vague aspirations were at once cherished and directed by the
Christian wisdom of the venerated master of Reading
School—who, during his fifty years of authority, made
the name of our town a household word to successive
generations of scholars, who honored him in all parts of the
world, and all departments of society—whose long life
was one embodied charity—and who gave steadiness and
object to those impulses in me which else might have ended,
as they began, in dreams. I remember, when pausing on the
slippery threshold of active life, and looking abroad on the
desolate future, how the earnestness of my friends gave me
courage, and emboldened me, with no patrons but themselves,
to enter the profession of my choice by its most dim and
laborious avenue, and to brace myself for four years of
arduous pupilage; how they crowded with pleasures the
intervals of holiday I annually enjoyed among them during
that period, and another of equal length passed in a special
pleader’s anxieties and toils; how they greeted with praise,
sweeter than the applause of multitudes to him who wins it,
the slender literary effusions by which I supplied the
deficiency of professional income; and how, when I dared the
hazard of the bar, they provided for me opportunities such
as riper scholars and other advocates wait long for, by
confiding important matters to my untried hands; how they
encircled my first tremulous efforts by an atmosphere of
affectionate interest, roused my faint heart to exertion,
absorbed the fever that hung upon its beatings, and
strengthened my first perceptions of capacity to make my
thoughts and impressions intelligible, on the instant, to
the minds of courts and juries. The impulse thus given to my
professional success at Reading, and in the sessions of
Berkshire during twelve years, gradually extended its
influence through my circuit, until it raised me to a
position among its members beyond my deserts and equal to my
wishes. Another opening of fortune soon dawned on me; in the
maturity of life I aspired to a seat in
parliament—rather let me say, to that seat
which only I coveted—and then, almost without
solicitation, from many surviving patrons of my childhood,
and from the sons of others who inherited the kindness of
their fathers, I received an honor more precious to me as
the token of concentrated regards than as the means of
advancement; yet greatly heightened in practical importance
by the testimony it implied from the best of all witnesses.
That honor, three times renewed, was attended by passages of
excitement which look dizzy even in the distance—with
much on my part requiring allowance, and much allowance
rendered by those to whom my utmost services were due; with
the painful consciousness of wide difference of opinion
between some of my oldest friends and myself, and with
painful contests which those differences rendered
inevitable, yet cheered by attachments which the vivid
lights struck out in the conflict of contending passions
exhibited in scatheless strength, until I received that
appointment which dissolved the parliamentary connection,
and with it annihilated all the opposition of feeling which
had sometimes saddened it, and invested the close of my life
with the old regard, as unclouded by controversy as when it
illumined its opening. And now the expressions of your
sympathy await me, when, by the gracious providence of God,
I have been permitted to enter on a course of less fervid
action, of serener thought, of plainer duty. For me
political animosities are forever hushed and absorbed in one
desire, which I share with you all, for the happiness and
honor of our country, and the peaceful advancement of our
species; and all the feverish excitements and perils of
advocacy, its ardent partisanship with various interests,
anxieties, and passions, are displaced by the office of
seeking to discover truth and to maintain justice. I am no
longer incited to aspire to public favor, even under your
auspices: my course is marked right onward—to be
steadily trodden, whether its duties may accord with the
prevalent feeling of the hour, or may oppose the temporary
injustice of its generous errors: but it is not forbidden me
to prize the esteem of those who have known me longest and
best, and to indulge the hope that I may retain it to the
last. To encourage me in the aim still to deserve that
esteem, I shall look on this gift of those numbers of my
townsmen whose regards have just found such cordial
expression. I shall cherish it as a memorial of earliest
hopes that gleam out from the depth of years; as a memorial
of a thousand incentives to virtuous endeavor, of sacred
trusts, of delighted solaces; as a memorial of affections
which have invested a being, frail, sensitive, and weak,
with strength not its own, and under God, have insured for
it an honorable destiny; as a memorial of this hour, when,
in the presence of those who are nearest and dearest to me
on earth, my course has been pictured in the light of those
friendships which have gladdened it—an hour of which
the memory and the influence will not pass away, but, I
fondly trust, will incite those who will bear my name after
me, and to whose charge this gift will be confided when I
shall cease to behold it, better to deserve, though they
cannot more dearly appreciate, such a succession of
kindnesses as that to which the crowning grace is now added,
and for which, with my whole heart, I thank you.”

Cultivate and exercise a serene faith, and you shall acquire
wonderful power and insight; its results are sure and
illimitable, moulding and moving to its purposes equally
spirit, mind, and matter. It is the power-endowing essential of
all action.

Recent Deaths.

Under this head we have rarely to present so many articles
as are demanded by the foreign journals received during the
week, and by the melancholy disaster which caused the death of
the MARCHESA D’OSSOLI, with her husband, and Mr. SUMNER. Of
MARGARET FULLER D’OSSOLI a sketch is given in the preceding
pages, and we reserve for our next number an article upon the
history of Sir ROBERT PEEL. The death of this illustrious
person has caused a profound sensation not only in Great
Britain, but throughout Europe. In the House of Lords, most
eloquent and impressive speeches upon the exalted character of
the deceased, and the irreparable loss of the country, were
delivered by the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Stanley, Lord
Brougham, the Duke of Wellington, and the Duke of Cleveland,
and in the House of Commons, by Lord John Russell, and Messrs.
Hume, Gladstone, Goulburn, Herries, Napier, Inglis and
Somervile. The House, in testimony of its grief, adjourned
without business, an act without precedent, except in case of
death in the royal family. A noble tribute of respect was also
paid by the French Assembly to the memory of Sir Robert Peel.
The President, M. Dupin, pronounced an affecting eulogy upon
the deceased, which was received with the liveliest sympathy by
the Chamber, and was ordered to be recorded in its journal. A
compliment like this is totally unprecedented in France, and
the death of no other foreigner in the world could have
elicited it.

BOYER, EX-PRESIDENT OF HAYTI.

Jean Pierre Boyer, a mulatto, distinguished in affairs, and
for his abilities and justice, was born at Port-au-Prince, on
the 6th of February, 1776. His father, by some said to have
been of mixed blood, was a tailor and shopkeeper, of fair
reputation and some property, and his mother a negress from
Congo in Africa, who had been a slave in the neighborhood. He
joined the French Commissioners, Santhonax and Polverel, in
whose company, after the arrival of the English, he withdrew to
Jacqemel. Here he attached himself to Rigaud, set out with him
to France, and was captured on his passage by the Americans,
during the war between France and the United States. Being
released at the end of the war, he proceeded to Paris, where he
remained until the organization of Le Clerc’s expedition
against St. Domingo. This expedition he with many other persons
of color joined; but on the death of Le Clerc he attached
himself to the party of Petion, with whom he acted during the
remainder of that chieftain’s life, which terminated on the
29th of March, 1818. Under Petion he rose from the post of
aid-de-camp and private secretary to be general of the
arrondissement of Port-au-Prince; and Petion named him for the
succession in the Presidency, to which he was inducted without
opposition. When the revolution broke out in the northern part
of the island, in 1820, Boyer was invited by the insurgents to
place himself at their head; and on the death of Christophe,
the northern and southern parts of the island were united under
his administration into one government, under the style of the
Republic of Hayti. In the following year the Spanish
inhabitants of the eastern part of the island voluntarily
placed themselves under the government of Boyer, who thus
became, chiefly by the force of character, without much
positive effort, the undisputed master of all St. Domingo.

It is not questionable that the productions and general
prosperity of the island decreased under Boyer’s
administration. The blacks needed the stringent policy of some
such tyrant as Christophe. And the popularity of Boyer was
greatly lessened by his approval or direct negotiation of a
treaty with France, by which he agreed to pay to that country
an indemnity of 150,000,000 of francs, in five annual
instalments. The French Government recognized the independence
of Hayti, but it was impossible for Boyer to meet his
engagements. He however conducted the administration with
industry, discretion, and repose, for fifteen years, when a
long-slumbering opposition, for his presumed preference of the
mulatto to the black population in the dispensations of
government favor, began to exhibit itself openly. When this
feeling was manifested in the second chamber of the
Legislature, in 1843, the promptness and decision with which he
attempted to suppress it, induced an insurrection among the
troops, and he was compelled to fly, with about thirty
followers, to Jamaica. He afterward proceeded to London, and
finally to Paris, where he lived quietly in the Rue de
Madeline, enjoying the respect of many eminent men, and
surrounded by attached followers who shared his exile, until
the 10th of July. On the 12th he was buried with appropriate
funeral honors.

THE DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE.

The death of the Duke of Cambridge, brother of the late
William IV., occurred the 8th of July, and was quite sudden. He
was the seventh son of George III., was born in 1774, received
his earliest education at Kew, and finished his studies at
Gottingen. He entered the army, and experiencing much active
service, was promoted, until in 1813 he attained the
distinction of Field Marshal. He soon afterward became
Governor-General of Hanover, and continued to fill that post
until the accession of the Duke of Cumberland, in 1839. His
subsequent life presented few features of much interest. His
name was to be found as a patron and a contributor to many most
valuable institutions, and he took delight in presiding at
benevolent festivals and anniversary dinners, when, though
without the slightest pretension to
[pg 173] eloquence, the frankness
and bonhommie of his manners, and his simple
straight-forward earnestness of speech, used to make him an
universal favorite. He took but little part in the active
strife of parties. He died in his seventy-seventh year,
leaving one son, Prince George of Cambridge, and two
daughters.

GEORGE W. ERVING.

This distinguished public man died in New York, on the 22d
ult. A correspondent of the Evening Post gives the
following account of his history:

“The journals furnish us with a brief notice of the death of
the venerable George W. Erving, who was for so many years,
dating from the foundation of our government, connected with
the diplomatic history of the country, as an able, successful
and distinguished negotiator. The career of this gentleman has
been so marked, and is so instructive, that it becomes not less
a labor of love than an act of public duty, with the press, to
make it the occasion of comment. At the breaking out of our
revolution, the father of the subject of this imperfect sketch
was an eminent loyalist of Massachusetts, residing in Boston,
connected by affinity with the Shirleys, the Winslows, the
Bowdons, and Winthrops of that State. Like many other men of
wealth, at that day, he joined the royal cause, forsook his
country and went to England. There his son, George William, who
had always been a sickly delicate child, reared with
difficulty, was educated, and finally graduated at Oxford,
where he was a classmate of Copley, now Lord Lyndhurst.
Following this, on the attainment of his majority, and during
the lifetime of his father, notwithstanding the most powerful
and seductive efforts to attach him to the side of Great
Britain, the more persevering from the great wealth, and the
intellectual attainments of the young
American—notwithstanding the importunities of misjudging
friends and relatives, the incitements found in ties of
consanguinity with some, and his intimate personal associations
with many of the young nobility at that aristocratic seat of
learning, and notwithstanding the blandishments of fashionable
society—the love of country and the holy inspirations of
patriotism, triumphed over all the arts that power could
control, and those allurements usually so potent where youth is
endowed with great wealth. The young patriot promptly,
cheerfully, sacrificed all, for his country—turned his
back upon the unnatural stepmother, and came back, to share the
good or evil fortunes of his native land.

“Such facts as these should not be lost sight of at the
present day—such an example it is well to refer to now,
in the day of our prosperity. And we would ask—in no
ill-natured or censorious spirit, but rather that the lessons
of history should not be forgotten—how many young men of
these days under like circumstances, would make a similar
sacrifice upon the altar of their country? The solemn and
impressive event which has produced this notice seems to render
this question not entirely inappropriate; for years should not
dim in the minds of the rising generation the memory of those
pure and strong men, who, in the early trials of their country,
rose equal to the occasion. When, at a later period, political
parties began to develop themselves, Mr. Erving, then a
resident of Boston, identified himself with the great
republican party, and became actively instrumental in securing
the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency. From that
time forward until the day of his death, he never faltered in
his political faith.

“Few men have been, for so long a period, so intimately
connected with the diplomatic history of our country. He
received his first public appointment, as Consul and
Commissioner of Claims at London, nearly half a century since.
This appointment was conferred upon him without his
solicitation, and was at first declined. Subsequent reflection,
however, induced him to waive all private and personal
considerations, and he accepted the post assigned to him. The
manner in which he discharged the duties of that trust,
impressed the government with the expediency of securing his
services in more important negotiations, and he was sent as
Commissioner and Charge d’Affaires to Denmark. His mission to
the court of that country was, at that period, a highly
important one. The negotiations he had to conduct there,
required great tact and ability.

“While at Copenhagen, he secured, in an eminent degree, the
esteem and confidence of the Danish authorities, and brought to
a successful solution the questions then arising out of the
interests committed to him. In consequence, the government was
enabled to avail itself of his experience at the Court of
Berlin, where events seemed to require the exercise of great
diplomatic ability. He was afterward appointed to Madrid,
where, by his highly honorable personal character, and
captivating manners, he obtained great influence, even at that
most proud and distrustful court, and conducted, with
consummate skill and marked success, the important and delicate
negotiations then pending between the United States and Spain.
He remained at Madrid for many years, where he attained the
reputation of being one of the most able and accomplished
diplomatists that the United States had ever sent abroad. Upon
his final retirement from this post, and, in fact, from all
public employment, the administration of General Jackson sought
to secure his services in the mission to Constantinople, but
the proffered appointment was declined.

“There are many interesting incidents in his public and
diplomatic career, which a more extended notice would enable us
to detail. Indeed, we hope that so instructive a life as that
of Mr. Erving may hereafter find a fit historian. That
historian may not have to chronicle victories won upon the
battle [pg 174] field, but the civic
achievement he will have to record, if not so dazzling as
the former, will, at least, be as replete with evidences of
public usefulness.

“The latter years of his life were passed in Europe, chiefly
in Paris. The public agitations consequent upon the last French
revolution, need of quiet at his advanced age, and the
presentiment of approaching dissolution, induced him to return
home. Indeed it was meet that he should close his mortal career
in that country which he had so long and faithfully served, and
whose welfare and happiness had been the constant object of his
every earthly aspiration.”

DR. JOHN BURNS.

Among those who perished in the wreck of the Orion,
was Dr. John Burns, Professor of Surgery in the University of
Glasgow, aged about eighty years. Dr. Burns held a
distinguished place in the medical world, for at least half a
century, as an author and a teacher. He was a son of the Rev.
Dr. John Burns, for more than sixty years minister of the
Barony parish of Glasgow, who died about fourteen years ago, at
the age of ninety. He was originally intended to be a
manufacturer, and in his time the necessary training for this
business included a practical application to the loom. A
disease of the knee-joint unfitted him for becoming a weaver,
and he turned his attention to the medical profession, winch
the neighboring university afforded him easy and ample means of
studying. He early entered into business as a general
practitioner, but his ambition led him very soon to be an
instructor. In 1800, he published Dissertations on
Inflammation, which raised his name to a high position in
the literature of his profession. In 1807, he published a
kindred volume on Hemorrhage. In the mean time he had turned
his attention to lecturing, and he continued to give, for many
years, lectures on midwifery. His observations and experience
on this subject he offered to the world in The Principles of
Midwifery, a work which has run through twelve editions,
and been translated into several of the continental languages.
It is very elaborate and valuable, and as each succeeding
edition presented the result of the author’s increasing
experience, it became a standard in every medical library. Its
chief defect is a want of clearness in the arrangement, and
sometimes in the language. In 1815, the crown instituted a
Professorship of Surgery in the Glasgow University, and the
Duke of Montrose, its chancellor, appointed to it Mr. Burns, a
choice which the voice of the profession generally approved.
The value of the professorship might average 500l.
yearly.

As a professor, Dr. Burns was highly popular. He had a
cheerful and attractive manner, and was fond of bringing in
anecdotes more or less applicable, but always enlivening. His
language was plain and clear, but not always correct or
elegant. In personal appearance, he was of the middle size, of
an anxious and careworn, but gentlemanly and intelligent,
expression of countenance. In 1830, he published Principles
of Surgery, first volume, which was followed by another.
This work is confused, both in style and arrangement, and has
been very little read, but it did credit to his zeal and
industry, for he had now acquired fame and fortune, and had
long had at his command the most extensive practice in the west
of Scotland. John Burns, the younger, had written and published
a work on the evidences and principles of Christianity, which
was extensively read, and went through many editions. His name
was not at first on the title-page, but that it was the
production of a medical man was obvious. He gave a copy to his
father, who shortly after said, “Ah, John, I wish you
could have written such a book!” Dr. Burns has many friends in
the United States, who were once his pupils. One of the most
eminent of them is Professor Pattison of the Medical Department
of the New York University, in this city.

HORACE SUMNER.

This gentleman, one of the victims of the lamentable wreck
of the Elizabeth, was the youngest son of the late Charles P.
Sumner, of Boston, for many years Sheriff of Suffolk county,
and the brother of George Sumner, Esq., of Boston, who is well
known for his legal and literary eminence throughout the
country. He was about twenty-four years of ago, and has been
abroad for nearly a year, traveling in the south of Europe for
the benefit of his health. The past winter was spent by him
chiefly in Florence, where he was on terms of familiar intimacy
with the Marquis and Marchioness d’Ossoli, and was induced to
take passage in the same vessel with them for his return to his
native land. He was a young man of singular modesty of
deportment, of an original turn of mind, and greatly endeared
to his friends by the sweetness of his disposition and the
purity of his character.—Tribune.

The Fine Arts.

POWERS’S STATUE OF CALHOUN.—An unfortunate fatality
appears to wait upon the works of Hiram Powers. It is but a few
weeks since his “Eve” was lost on the coast of Spain, and it is
still uncertain here whether that exquisite statue is preserved
without such injury as materially to affect its value. And his
masterpiece in history—perhaps his masterpiece in all
departments—the statue of Calhoun, which has been so
anxiously looked-for ever since the death of the great senator,
was buried under the waves in which Madame d’Ossoli and Horace
Sumner were lost, on the morning of the 19th, near Fire Island.
At the time this sheet is sent to press we are uncertain as to
the recovery of [pg 175] the statue, but we hope for
the sake of art and for the satisfaction of all the parties
interested, that it will still reach its destination. It is
insured in Charleston, and Mr. Kellogg, the friend and agent
of Mr. Powers, has been at the scene of the misfortune, with
all necessary means for its preservation, if that be
possible.

HORACE VERNET, the great painter, has returned to Paris from
St. Petersburgh. Offensive reports were current respecting his
journey: he had been paid, it was alleged, in most princely
style by the Emperor, for his masterly efforts in translating
to canvas the principal incidents of the Hungarian and Polish
wars. He came back, it was declared, loaded and content, with a
hundred thousand dollars and a kiss—an actual
kiss—from his Imperial Majesty. M. Vernet has deemed it
necessary to publish a letter, correcting what was erroneous in
these reports. He says:—”In repairing to Russia I was
actuated by only one desire, and had but a single object, and
that was, to thank His Majesty, the Emperor, for the honors
with which he had already loaded me, and for the proofs of his
munificence which I had previously received. I intended to
bring back, and in fact have brought back from the journey,
nothing but the satisfaction of having performed an entirely
disinterested duty of respectful gratitude.” It is true,
however, that he lent his powers to illustrate the triumph of
despotism, and if he brought back no gold the matter is not all
helped by that fact.

Authors and Books.

THE REV. JAMES H. PERKINS, of Cincinnati, whose suicide
during a fit of madness, several months ago, will be generally
recollected for the many expressions of profound regret which
it occasioned, we are pleased to learn, is to be the subject of
a biography by the Rev. W.H. Channing. Mr. Perkins was a man of
the finest capacities, and of large and genial scholarship. He
wrote much, in several departments, and almost always well. His
historical works, relating chiefly to the western States, have
been little read in this part of the Union; but his
contributions to the North American Review and the Christian
Examiner, and his tales, sketches, essays, and poems, printed
under various signatures, have entitled him to a desirable
reputation as a man of letters. These are all to be collected
and edited by Mr. Channing.

Mrs. ESLING, better known as Miss Catherine H. Waterman,
under which name she wrote the popular and beautiful lyric,
“Brother, Come Home!” has in press a collection of her
writings, under the title of The Broken Bracelet and other
Poems, to be published by Lindsay & Blackiston of
Philadelphia.

M. ROSSEEUW ST. HILAIRE, of Paris, is proceeding with his
great work on the History of Spain with all the rapidity
consistent with the nature of the subject and the elaborate
studies it requires. The work was commenced ten years ago, and
has since been the main occupation of its author. The fifth
volume has just been published, and receives the applause of
the most competent critics. It includes the time from 1336 to
1492, which comes down to the very eve of the great discovery
of Columbus, and includes that most brilliant period, in
respect of which the history of Prescott has hitherto stood
alone, namely, the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. M. St.
Hilaire has had access to many sources of information not
accessible to any former writer, and is said to have availed
himself of them with all the success that could be anticipated
from his rare faculty of historical analysis and the beautiful
transparency of his style.

THE REV. ROBERT ARMITAGE, a rector in Shropshire, is the
author of “Dr. Hookwell,” and “Dr. Johnson, his Religious Life
and his Death.” In this last work, the Quarterly Review
observes, “Johnson’s name is made the peg on which to hang
up—or rather the line on which to hang out—much
hackneyed sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an
awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole.” The
writer concludes his reviewal: “We are sorry to have had to
make such an exposure of a man, who, apart from the morbid
excess of vanity which has evidently led him into this scrape,
may be, for aught we know, worthy and amiable. His exposure,
however, is on his own head: he has ostentatiously and
pertinaciously forced his ignorance, conceit, and effrontery on
public notice.” We quite agree with the Quarterly.

JOHN MILLS—”John St. Hugh Mills,” it was written
then—was familiarly known in the printing offices of Ann
street in this city a dozen years ago; he assisted General
Morris in editing the Mirror, and wrote paragraphs of foreign
gossip for other journals. A good-natured aunt died in England,
leaving him a few thousand a year, and he returned to spend his
income upon a stud and pack and printing office, sending from
the latter two or three volumes of pleasant-enough mediocrity
every season. His last work, with the imprint of Colburn, is
called “Our Country.”

Mr. PRESCOTT, the historian, who is now in England, has
received the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from the University
of Oxford. Two or three years ago he was elected into the
Institute of France.

DR. MAGINN’s “Homeric Ballads,” which gave so much
attraction during several years to Fraser’s Magazine,
have been collected and republished in a small octavo.

Mr. KENDALL, of the Picayune, has sailed once more
for Paris, to superintend there the completion of his great
work on the late war in Mexico upon which he has been engaged
for the last two years. The highest talent has been employed in
the embellishment of this book, and the care and expense
incurred may be estimated from the fact that sixty men,
coloring and preparing the plates, can finish only one hundred
and twenty copies in a month. The original sketches were taken
by a German, Carl Nebel, who accompanied Mr. Kendall in Mexico,
and drew his battle scenes at the very time of their
occurrence. He has engaged in the prosecution of the whole
enterprise with as much zeal and interest as Mr. Kendall
himself, and has spared no pains to procure the assistance of
the most skillful operatives. The book is folio in size, and
will be published early in the fall. The letter press has long
been finished, and only waiting for the completion of the
plates. These are twelve, and their subjects are Palo Alto, the
Capture of Monterey, Buena Vista: the Landing at Vera Cruz,
Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Cherubusco, Molino del Rey, two views
of the Storming of Chapultepec, and Gen. Scott’s entrance into
the city of Mexico. The lithographs are said to be unsurpassed
in felicity of design, perfection of coloring, and in the
animation and expression of all the figures and groups. No such
finished specimens of colored lithography were ever exhibited
in this country. The plates will have unusual value, not only
on account of their intrinsic superiority, but because of their
rare historical merit, since they are exact delineations of the
topography of the scenes they represent and faithful
representations in every particular of the military positions
and movements at the moment chosen for illustration.

MRS. TROLLOPPE is as busy as she has ever been since the
failure of her shop at Cincinnati—trading in fiction,
with the capital won by her first adventure in this way, “The
Domestic Manners of the Americans.” Her last novel, which is
just out, has in its title the odor of her customary vulgarity;
it is called “Petticoat Government.” Her son, Mr. A. Trolloppe,
his just given the world a new book also, “La Vendee” a
historical romance which is well spoken of.

THE REV. DR. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, it will gratify the
friends of literature and religion to learn, has consented to
give to the press several works upon which he has for some time
been engaged. They will be published by Gould, Kendall &
Lincoln, of Boston. In the next number of The
International we shall write more largely of this
subject.

Dr. BUCKLAND, the Dean of Westminster—the eloquent and
the learned writer of the remarkable “Bridgewater Treatise” is
bereft of reason, and is now an inmate of an asylum near
Oxford.

Dr. WAYLAND’s “Tractate on Education,” in which he proposes
a thorough reform in the modes of college instruction, has, we
are glad to see, had its desired effect. The Providence
Journal states that the entire subscription to the fund
of Brown University has reached $110,000, which is within
$15,000 of the sum originally proposed. The subscription having
advanced so far, and with good assurances of further aid, the
committee have reported to the President, that the success of
the plan, so far as the money is concerned, may be regarded as
assured, and that consequently it will be safe to go on with
the new organization as rapidly as may he deemed advisable. Of
the sum raised, about $96,000 have come from Providence. A
meeting of the Corporation of the University will soon be
called, when the entire plan will be decided upon, and carried
into effect as rapidly as so important a change can be made
with prudence.

SIR JAMES EMERSON TENNANT has in the press of Mr. Murray a
work which will probably be read with much interest in this
country, upon Christianity in Ceylon, its introduction and
progress under the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, and the
American missions, with a Historical View of the Brahminical
and Buddhist superstitions.

CHARLES EAMES, formerly one of the editors of the Washington
Union, and more recently United States Commissioner to
the Sandwich Islands, is to be the orator of the societies of
Columbia College, at the commencement, on the evening of the
6th of October. Bayard Taylor will be the poet for the same
occasion.

CHATEAUBRIAND’S MEMOIRS.—The eleventh and last volume
has just been published at Paris in the book form, and will
soon be completed in the feuilletons. An additional
volume is however to be brought out, under the title of
“Supplement to the Memoirs.”

THE THIRD AND FOURTH SERIES of Southey’s Common-Place Book
are in preparation, and they will be reprinted by the Harpers.
The third contains Analytical Readings, and the fourth,
Original Memoranda.

WASHINGTON IRVING’s Life of General Washington, in one
octavo volume, is announced by Murray. It will appear
simultaneously from the press of Putnam.

MRS. JAMESON has in press Legends of the Monastic Orders, as
illustrated in art.

Dr. ACHILLI is the subject of an article in the July number
of the Dublin Review—the leading Roman Catholic
journal in the English language. Of course the history of the
missionary is not presented in very flattering colors.

[From Household Words.]

THE SERF OF POBEREZE.

The materials for the following tale were furnished to the
writer while traveling last year near the spot on which the
events it narrates took place. It is intended to convey a
notion of some of the phases of Polish, or rather Russian
serfdom (for, as truly explained by one of the characters in a
succeeding page, it is Russian), and of the catastrophes it has
occasioned, not only in Catherine’s time, but occasionally at
the present. The Polish nobles—themselves in
slavery—earnestly desire the emancipation of their serfs,
which Russian domination forbids.

The small town of Pobereze stands at the foot of a stony
mountain, watered by numerous springs in the district of
Podolia, in Poland. It consists of a mass of miserable Cabins,
with a Catholic chapel and two Greek churches in the midst, the
latter distinguished by their gilded towers. On one side of the
market-place stands the only inn, and on the opposite side are
several shops, from whose doors and windows look out several
dirtily dressed Jews. At a little distance, on a hill covered
with vines and fruit-trees, stands the Palace, which does not,
perhaps, exactly merit such an appellation, but who would dare
to call otherwise the dwelling of the lord of the domain?

On the morning when our tale opens, there had issued from
this palace the common enough command to the superintendent of
the estate, to furnish the master with a couple of strong boys,
for service in the stables, and a young girl to be employed in
the wardrobe. Accordingly, a number of the best-looking young
peasants of Olgogrod assembled in the avenue leading to the
palace. Some were accompanied by their sorrowful and weeping
parents, in all of whose hearts, however, rose the faint
whispered hope, “Perhaps it will not be my child they
will choose!”

Being brought into the court-yard of the palace, the Count
Roszynski, with the several members of his family, had come out
to pass in review his growing subjects. He was a small and
insignificant-looking man, about fifty years of age, with
deep-set eyes and overhanging brows. His wife, who was nearly
of the same age, was immensely stout, with a vulgar face and a
loud, disagreeable voice. She made herself ridiculous in
endeavoring to imitate the manners and bearing of the
aristocracy, into whose sphere she and her husband were
determined to force themselves, in spite of the humbleness of
their origin. The father of the “Right-Honorable” Count
Roszynski was a valet, who, having been a great favorite with
his master, amassed sufficient money to enable his son, who
inherited it, to purchase the extensive estate of Olgogrod, and
with it the sole proprietorship of 1600 human beings. Over them
he had complete control; and, when maddened by oppression, if
they dared resent, woe unto them! They could be thrust into a
noisome dungeon, and chained by one hand from the light of day
for years, until their very existence was forgotten by all
except the jailor who brought daily their pitcher of water and
morsel of dry bread.

Some of the old peasants say that Sava, father of the young
peasant girl, who stands by the side of an old woman, at the
head of her companions in the court-yard, is immured in one of
these subterranean jails. Sava was always about the Count, who,
it was said, had brought him from some distant land, with his
little motherless child. Sava placed her under the care of an
old man and woman, who had the charge of the bees in a forest
near the palace, where he came occasionally to visit her. But
once, six long months passed, and he did not come! In vain
Anielka wept, in vain she cried, “Where is my father?” No
father appeared. At last it was said that Sava had been sent to
a long distance with a large sum of money, and had been killed
by robbers. In the ninth year of one’s life the most poignant
grief is quickly effaced, and after six months Anielka ceased
to grieve. The old people were very kind to her, and loved her
as if sue were their own child. That Anielka might be chosen to
serve in the palace never entered their head, for who would be
so barbarous as to take the child away from an old woman of
seventy and her aged husband?

To-day was the first time in her life that she had been so
far from home. She looked curiously on all she
saw,—particularly on a young lady about her own age,
beautifully dressed, and a youth of eighteen, who had
apparently just returned from a ride on horse-back, as he held
a whip in his hand, whilst walking up and down examining the
boys who were placed in a row before him. He chose two amongst
them, and the boys were led away to the stables.

“And I choose this young girl,” said Constantia Roszynski,
indicating Anielka; “she is the prettiest of them all. I do not
like ugly faces about me.”

When Constantia returned to the drawing-room, she gave
orders for Anielka to be taken to her apartments, and placed
under the tutelage of Mademoiselle Dufour, a French maid,
recently arrived from the first milliner’s shop in Odessa. Poor
girl! when they separated her from her adopted mother, and
began leading her toward the palace, she rushed, with a shriek
of agony, from them, and grasped her old protectress tightly in
her arms! They were torn violently asunder, and the Count
Roszynski quietly asked, “Is it her daughter, or her
grand-daughter?”

“Neither, my lord,—only an adopted, child.”

“But who will lead the old woman home, as she is blind?”

“I will, my lord,” replied one of his servants, bowing to
the ground; “I will let her, walk by the side of my horse, and
when she [pg 178] is in her cabin she will
have her old husband,—they must take care of each
other.”

So saying, he moved away with the rest of the peasants and
domestics. But the poor old woman had to be dragged along by
two men; for in the midst of her shrieks and tears she had
fallen to the ground, almost without life.

And Anielka? They did not allow her to weep long. She had
now to sit all day in the corner of a room to sew. She was
expected to do everything well from the first; and if she did
not, she was kept without food or cruelly punished. Morning and
evening she had to help Mdlle. Dufour to dress and undress her
mistress. But Constantia, although she looked with hauteur on
everybody beneath her, and expected to be slavishly obeyed, was
tolerably kind to the poor orphan. Her true torment began,
when, on laving her young lady’s room, she had to assist Mdlle.
Dufour. Notwithstanding that she tried sincerely to do her
best, she was never able to satisfy her, or to draw from her
naught but harsh reproaches.

Thus two months passed.

One day Mdlle. Dufour went very early to confession, and
Anielka was seized with an eager longing to gaze once more in
peace and freedom on the beautiful blue sky and green trees, as
she used to do when the first rays of the rising sun streamed
in at the window of the little forest cabin. She ran into the
garden. Enchanted by the sight of so many beautiful flowers,
she went farther and farther along the smooth and winding
walks. till she entered the forest. She who had been, so long
away from her beloved trees, roamed where they were thickest.
Here she gazes boldly around. She sees no one! She is alone! A
little farther on she meets with a rivulet which flows through
the forest. Here she remembers that she has not yet prayed. She
kneels down, and with hands clasped and eyes upturned she
begins to sing in a sweet voice the Hymn to the virgin.

As she went on she sang louder and with increased fervor.
Her breast heaved with emotion, her eyes shone with unusual
brilliancy; but when the hymn was finished she lowered her
head, tears began to fall over her cheeks, until at last she
sobbed aloud. She might have remained long in this condition,
had not some one come behind her, saying, “Do not cry, my poor
girl; it is better to sing than to weep.” The intruder raised
her head, wiped her eyes with his handkerchief, and kissed her
on the forehead.

It was the Count’s son, Leon!

“You must not cry,” he continued; “be calm, and when the
filipony (peddlers) come, buy yourself a pretty handkerchief.”
He then gave her a ruble and walked away. Anielka, after
concealing the coin in her corset, ran quickly back to the
palace.

Fortunately, Mdlle. Dufour had not yet returned, and Anielka
seated herself in her accustomed corner. She often took out the
ruble to, gaze fondly upon it, and set to work to make a little
purse, which, having fastened to a ribbon, she hung round her
neck. She did not dream of spending it, for it would have
deeply grieved her to part with the gift of the only person in
the whole house who had looked kindly on her.

From this time Anielka remained always in her young
mistress’s room; she was better dressed, and Mdlle. Dufour
ceased to persecute her. To what did she owe this sudden
change? Perhaps to a remonstrance from Leon. Constantia ordered
Anielka to sit beside her whilst taking her lessons from her
music masters, and on her going to the drawing-room, she was
left in her apartments alone. Being thus more kindly treated.
Anielka lost by degrees her timidity; and when her young
mistress, whilst occupied over some embroidery, would tell her
to sing, she did so boldly and with a steady voice. A greater
favor awaited her. Constantia, when unoccupied, began teaching
Anielka to read in Polish; and Mdlle. Dufour thought it politic
to follow the example of her mistress, and began to teach her
French.

Meanwhile, a new kind of torment commenced. Having easily
learnt the two languages, Anielka acquired an irresistible
passion for reading. Books had for her the charm of the
forbidden fruit, for she could only read by stealth at night,
or when her mistress went visiting in the neighborhood. The
kindness hitherto shown her for a time, began to relax. Leon
had set off on a tour, accompanied by his old tutor, and a
bosom friend, as young, as gay, and as thoughtless as
himself.

So passed the two years of Leon’s absence. When he returned,
Anielka was seventeen, and had become tall and handsome. No one
who had not seen her during this time, would have recognized
her. Of this number was Leon. In the midst of perpetual gayety
and change, it was not possible he could have remembered a poor
peasant girl; but in Anielka’s memory he had remained as a
superior being, as her benefactor, as the only one who had
spoken kindly to her, when poor, neglected, forlorn! When in
some French romance she met with a young man of twenty, of a
noble character and handsome appearance, she bestowed on him
the name of Leon. The recollection of the kiss be had given her
ever brought a burning blush to her cheek, and made her sigh
deeply.

One day Leon came to his sister’s room. Anielka was there,
seated in a corner at work. Leon himself had considerably
changed; from a boy he had grown into a man. “I suppose,
Constantia,” he said, “you have been told what a, good boy I
am, and with what docility I shall submit myself to the
matrimonial yoke, which the Count and Countess have provided
for me?” and he began whistling, and danced some steps of the
Mazurka.

“Perhaps you will be refused,” said Constantia
coldly.

“Refused! Oh, no. The old Prince has already given his
consent, and as for his daughter, she is desperately in love
with me. Look at these moustachios; could anything be more
irresistible?” and he glanced in the glass and twirled them
round his fingers; then continuing in a graver tone, he said,
“To tell the sober truth, I cannot say that I reciprocate. My
intended is not at all to my taste. She is nearly thirty, and
so thin, that whenever I look at her, I am reminded of my old
tutor’s anatomical sketches. But, thanks to her Parisian
dress-maker, she makes up a tolerably good figure, and looks
well in a Cachemere. Of all things, you know, I wished for a
wife with an imposing appearance, and I don’t care about love.
I find it’s not fashionable, and only exists in the exalted
imagination of poets.”

“Surely people are in love with one another sometimes,” said
the sister.

“Sometimes,” repeated Anielka, inaudibly. The dialogue had
painfully affected her, and she knew not why. Her heart beat
quickly, and her face was flushed, and made her look more
lovely than ever.

“Perhaps. Of course we profess to adore every pretty woman,”
Leon added abruptly. “But, my dear sister, what a charming
ladies’ maid you have!” He approached the corner, where Anielka
sat, and bent on her a coarse familiar smile. Anielka, although
a serf, was displeased, and returned it with a glance full of
dignity. But when her eyes rested on the youth’s handsome face,
a feeling, which had been gradually and silently growing in her
young and inexperienced heart, predominated over her pride and
displeasure. She wished ardently to recall herself to Leon’s
memory, and half unconsciously raised her hand to the little
purse which always hung round her neck. She took from it the
rouble he had given her.

“See!” shouted Leon, “what a droll girl; how proud she is of
her riches! Why, girl, you are a woman of fortune, mistress of
a whole rouble!”

“I hope she came by it honestly,” said the old Countess, who
at this moment entered.

At this insinuation, shame and indignation kept Anielka, for
a time, silent. She replaced the money quickly in its purse,
with the bitter thought that the few happy moments which had
been so indelibly stamped upon her memory, had been utterly
forgotten by Leon. To clear herself, she at last stammered out,
seeing they all looked at her inquiringly, “Do you not
remember, M. Leon, that you gave me this coin two years ago in
the garden”?”

“How odd!” exclaimed Leon, laughing, “do you expect me to
remember all the pretty girls to whom I have given money? But I
suppose you are right, or you would not have treasured up this
unfortunate rouble as if it were a holy relic. You should not
be a miser, child; money is made to be spent.”

“Pray put an end to these jokes,” said Constantia
impatiently; “I like this girl, and I will not have her teased.
She understands my ways better than any one, and often puts me
in a good humor with her beautiful voice.”

“Sing something for me pretty damsel,” said Leon, “and I
will give you another rouble, a new and shining one.”

“Sing instantly,” said Constantia imperiously.

At this command Anielka could no longer stifle her grief;
she covered her face with her hands, and wept violently.

“Why do you cry?” asked her mistress impatiently; “I cannot
bear it; I desire you to do as you are bid.”

It might have been from the constant habit of slavish
obedience, or a strong feeling of pride, but Anielka instantly
ceased weeping. There was a moment’s pause, during which the
old Countess went grumbling out of the room. Anielka chose the
Hymn to the Virgin she had warbled in the garden, and as she
sung, she prayed fervently;—she prayed for peace, for
deliverance from the acute emotions which had been aroused
within her. Her earnestness gave an intensity of expression to
the melody, which affected her listeners. They were silent for
some moments after its conclusion. Leon walked up and down with
his arms folded on his breast. Was it agitated with pity for
the accomplished young slave? or by any other tender emotion?
What followed will show.

“My dear Constantia,” he said, suddenly stopping before his
sister and kissing her hand, “will you do me a favor?”

Constantia looked inquiringly in her brother’s face without
speaking.

“Give me this girl”

“Impossible!”

“I am quite in earnest,” continued Leon, “I wish to offer
her to my future wife. In the Prince her father’s private
chapel they are much in want of a solo soprano.”

“I shall not give her to you,” said Constantia.”

“Not as a free gift, but in exchange. I will give you
instead a charming young negro—so black. The women in St.
Petersburgh and in Paris raved about him: but I was inexorable:
I half refused him to my princess.”

“No, no,” replied Constantia; “I shall be lonely without
this girl, I am so used to her.”

“Nonsense! you can get peasant girls by the dozen; but a
black page, with teeth whiter than ivory, and purer than
pearls; a perfect original in his way; you surely cannot
withstand. You will kill half the province with envy. A negro
servant is the most fashionable thing going, and yours will be
the first imported into the province.”

This argument was irresistible. “Well,” replied Constantia,
“when do you think of taking her?”

“Immediately; to-day at five o’clock,” said
[pg 180] Leon; and he went merrily
out of the room.

This then was the result of his cogitation—of
Anielka’s Hymn to the Virgin. Constantia ordered Anielka to
prepare herself for the journey, with as little emotion as if
she had exchanged away a lap-dog, or parted with parrot.

She obeyed in silence. Her heart was full. She went into the
garden that she might relieve herself by weeping unseen. With
one hand supporting her burning head, and the other pressed
tightly against her heart, to stifle her sobs, she wandered on
mechanically till she found herself by the side of the river.
She felt quickly for her purse, intending to throw the rouble
into the water, but as quickly thrust it back again, for she
could not bear to part with the treasure. She felt as if
without it she would be still more an orphan. Weeping bitterly,
she leaned against the tree which had once before witnessed her
tears.

By degrees the stormy passion within her gave place to calm
reflection. This day she was to go away; she was to dwell
beneath another roof, to serve another mistress. Humiliation!
always humiliation! But at least it would be some change in her
life. As she thought of this, she returned hastily to the
palace that she might not, on the last day of her servitude,
incur the anger of her young mistress.

Scarcely was Anielka attired in her prettiest dress, when
Constantia came to her with a little box, from which she took
several gay-colored ribbons, and decked her in them herself,
that the serf might do her credit in the new family. And when
Anielka, bending down to her feet, thanked her, Constantia,
with marvelous condescension, kissed her on her forehead. Even
Leon cast an admiring glance upon her. His servant soon after
came to conduct her to the carriage, and showing her where to
seat herself, they rolled off quickly toward Radapol.

For the first time in her life Anielka rode in a carriage.
Her head turned quite giddy, she could not look at the trees
and fields as they flew past her; but by degrees she became
more accustomed to it, and the fresh air enlivening her
spirits, she performed the rest of the journey in a tolerably
happy state of mind. At last they arrived in the spacious
court-yard before the Palace of Radapol, the dwelling of a once
rich and powerful Polish family, now partly in ruin. It was
evident, even to Anielka, that the marriage was one for money
on the one side, and for rank on the other.

Among other renovations at the castle, occasioned by the
approaching marriage, the owner of it, Prince Pelazia, had
obtained singers for the chapel, and had engaged Signer
Justiniani, an Italian, as chapel-master. Immediately on Leon’s
arrival, Anielka was presented to him. He made her sing a
scale, and pronounced her voice to be excellent.

Anielka found that, in Radapol, she was treated with a
little more consideration than at Olgogrod, although she had
often to submit to the caprices of her new mistress, and she
found less time to read. But to console herself, she gave all
her attention to singing, which she practiced several hours a
day. Her naturally great capacity, under the guidance of the
Italian, began to develop itself steadily. Besides sacred, he
taught her operatic music. On one occasion Anielka sung an aria
in so impassioned and masterly style, that the enraptured
Justiniani clapped his hands for joy, skipped about the room,
and not finding words enough to praise her, exclaimed several
times, “Prima Donna! Prima Donna!”

But the lessons were interrupted. The Princess’s wedding-day
was fixed upon, after which event she and Leon were to go to
Florence, and Anielka was to accompany them. Alas! feelings
which gave her poignant misery still clung to her. She despised
herself for her weakness; but she loved Leon. The sentiment was
too deeply implanted in her bosom to be eradicated; too strong
to be resisted. It was the first love of a young and guileless
heart, and had grown in silence and despair.

Anielka was most anxious to know something of her adopted
parents. Once, after the old prince had heard her singing, he
asked her with great kindness about her home. She replied, that
she was an orphan, and had been taken by force from those who
had so kindly supplied the place of parents, Her apparent
attachment to the old bee-keeper and his wife so pleased the
prince, that he said, “You are a good child. Anielka, and
to-morrow I will send you to visit them. You shall take them
some presents.”

Anielka, overpowered with gratitude, threw herself at the
feet of the prince. She dreamed all night of the happiness that
was in store for her, and the joy of the poor, forsaken, old
people; and when the next morning she set off, she could
scarcely restrain her impatience. At last they approached the
cabin; she saw the forest, with its tall trees, and the meadows
covered with flowers. She leaped from the carriage, that she
might be nearer these trees and flowers, every one of which she
seemed to recognize. The weather was beautiful. She breathed
with avidity the pure air which, in imagination, brought to her
the kisses and caresses of her poor father! Her foster-father
was, doubtless, occupied with his bees; but his wife?

Anielka opened the door of the cabin; all was silent and
deserted. The arm-chair on which the poor old woman used to
sit, was overturned in a corner. Anielka was chilled by a
fearful presentiment. She went with a slow step toward the
bee-hives; there she saw a little boy tending the bees, whilst
the old man was stretched on the ground beside him. The rays of
the sun, falling on his pale and sickly face, showed that he
was very ill. Anielka stooped down over him, and said, “It is
I, it is Anielka, your own Anielka, who always loves
you.”

The old man raised his head, gazed upon her with a ghastly
smile, and took off his cap.

“And my good old mother, where is she?” Anielka asked.

“She is dead!” answered the old man, and falling back he
began laughing idiotically. Anielka wept. She gazed earnestly
on the worn frame, the pale and wrinkled cheeks, it which
scarcely a sign of life could be perceived; it seemed to her
that he had suddenly fallen asleep, and not wishing to disturb
him, she went to the carriage for the presents. When she
returned, she took his hand. It was cold. The poor old
bee-keeper had breathed his last!

Anielka was carried almost senseless back to the carriage,
which quickly returned with her to the castle. There she
revived a little; but the recollection that she was now quite
alone in the world, almost drove her to despair.

Her master’s wedding and the journey to Florence were a
dream to her. Though the strange sights of a strange city
slowly restored her perceptions, they did not her cheerfulness.
She felt as if she could no longer endure the misery of her
life; she prayed to die.

“Why are you so unhappy?” said the Count Leon kindly to her,
one day.

To have explained the cause of her wretchedness would have
been death indeed.

“I am going to give you a treat,” continued Leon. “A
celebrated singer is to appear to-night in the theater. I will
send you to hear her, and afterward you shall sing to me what
you remember of her performances.”

Anielka went. It was a new era in her existence. Herself, by
this time, an artist, she could forget her griefs, and enter
with her whole soul into the beauties of the art she now heard
practiced in perfection for the first time. To music a chord
responded in her breast which vibrated powerfully. During the
performances she was at one moment pale and trembling, tears
rushing into her eyes; at another, she was ready to throw
herself at the feet of the cantatrice, in an ecstacy of
admiration. “Prima donna,”—by that name the public called
on her to receive their applause, and it was the same, thought
Anielka, that Justiniani had bestowed upon her. Could she also
be a prima donna? What a glorious destiny! To be able to
communicate one’s own emotions to masses of entranced
listeners; to awaken in them, by the power of the voice, grief,
love, terror.

Strange thoughts continued to haunt her on her return home.
She was unable to sleep. She formed desperate plans. At last
she resolved to throw off the yoke of servitude, and the still
more painful slavery of feelings which her pride disdained.
Having learnt the address of the prima donna, she went early
one morning to her house.

On entering she said, in French, almost incoherently, so
great was her agitation—”Madam, I am a poor serf
belonging to a Polish family who have lately arrived in
Florence. I have escaped from them; protect, shelter me. They
say I can sing.”

The Signora Teresina, a warm-hearted, passionate Italian,
was interested by her artless earnestness. She said, “Poor
child! you must have suffered much,”—she took Anielka’s
hand in hers. “You say you can sing; let me hear you.” Anielka
seated herself on an ottoman. She clasped her hands over her
knees, and tears fell into her lap. With plaintive pathos, and
perfect truth of intonation, she prayed in song. The Hymn to
the Virgin seemed to Teresina to be offered up by
inspiration.

The Signora was astonished. “Where,” she asked, in wonder,
“were you taught?”

Anielka narrated her history, and when she had finished, the
prima donna spoke so kindly to her that she felt as if she had
known her for years. Anielka was Teresina’s guest that day and
the next. After the Opera, on the third day, the prima donna
made her sit beside her, and said:—

“I think you are a very good girl, and you shall stay with
me always.”

The girl was almost beside herself with joy.

“We will never part. Do you consent, Anielka?”

“Do not call me Anielka. Give me instead some Italian
name.”

“Well, then, be Giovanna. The dearest friend I ever had but
whom I have lost—was named Giovanna,” said the prima
donna.

“Then, I will be another Giovanna to you.”

Teresina then said, “I hesitated to receive you at first,
for your sake as well as mine; it you are safe now. I learn
that your master and mistress, after searching vainly for you,
have returned to Poland.”

From this time Anielka commenced an entirely new life. She
took lessons in singing every day from the Signora. and got an
engagement to appear in inferior characters at the theater. She
had now her own income, and her own servant—she, who till
then had been obliged to serve herself. She acquired the
Italian language rapidly, and soon passed for a native of the
country.

So passed three years. New and varied impressions failed,
however, to blot out the old ones. Anielka arrived at great
perfection in her singing, and even began to surpass the prima
donna, who was losing her voice from weakness of the chest.
This sad discovery changed the cheerful temper of Teresina. She
ceased to sing in public; for she could not endure to excite
pity, where she had formerly commanded admiration.

She determined to retire. “You,” she said to Anielka, “shall
now assert your claim to the first rank in the vocal art. You
will maintain it. You surpass me. Often, on hearing you sing, I
have scarcely been able to stifle a feeling of jealousy.”

Anielka placed her hand on Teresina’s shoulder, and kissed
her.

“Yes,” continued Teresina, regardless of everything but the
bright future she was [pg 182] shaping for her friend. “We
will go to Vienna—there you will be understood and
appreciated. You shall sing at the Italian Opera, and I will
be by your side—unknown, no longer sought,
worshiped—but will glory in your triumphs. They will
be a repetition of my own; for have I not taught you? Will
they not be the result of my work!”

Though Anielka’s ambition was fired, her heart was softened,
and she wept violently.

Five months had scarcely elapsed, when a furore was
created in Vienna by the first appearance, at the Italian
Opera, of the Signora Giovanna. Her enormous salary at once
afforded her the means of even extravagant expenditure. Her
haughty treatment of male admirers only attracted new ones; but
in the midst of her triumphs she thought often of the time when
the poor orphan of Pobereze was cared for by nobody. This
remembrance made her receive the flatteries of the crowd with
an ironical smile; their fine speeches fell coldly on her ear,
their eloquent looks made no impression on her heart:
that, no change could alter, no temptation win.

In the flood of unexpected success a new misfortune
overwhelmed her. Since their arrival at Vienna, Teresina’s
health rapidly declined, and in the sixth month of Anielka’s
operatic reign she expired, leaving all her wealth, which was
considerable, to her friend.

Once more Anielka was alone in the world. Despite all the
honors and blandishments of her position, the old feeling of
desolateness came upon her. The new shock destroyed her health.
She was unable to appear on the stage. To sing was a painful
effort; she grew indifferent to what passed around her. Her
greatest consolation was in succoring the poor and friendless,
and her generosity was most conspicuous to all young orphan
girls without fortune. She had never ceased to love her native
land, and seldom appeared in society, unless it was to meet her
countrymen. If ever she sang, it was in Polish.

A year had elapsed since the death of the Signora Teresina,
when the Count Selka, a rich noble of Volkynia, at that time in
Vienna, solicited her presence at a party. It was impossible to
refuse the Count and his lady, from whom she had received great
kindness. She went. When in their saloons, filled with all the
fashion and aristocracy in Vienna, the name of Giovanna was
announced, a general murmur was heard. She entered, pale and
languid, and proceeded between the two rows made for her by the
admiring assembly, to the seat of honor beside the mistress of
the house.

Shortly after, the Count Selka led her to the piano. She sat
down before it, and thinking what she should sing, glanced
round upon the assembly. She could not help feeling that the
admiration which beamed from the faces around her was the work
of her own merit, for had she neglected the great gift of
nature—her voice, she could not have excited it. With a
blushing cheek, and eyes sparkling with honest pride, she
struck the piano with a firm hand, and from her seemingly weak
and delicate chest poured forth a touching Polish melody, with
a voice pure, sonorous, and plaintive. Tears were in many eyes,
and the beating of every heart was quickened.

The song was finished, but the wondering silence was
unbroken. Giovanna leaned exhausted on the arm of the chair,
and cast down her eyes. On again raising them, she perceived a
gentleman who gazed fixedly at her, as if he still listened to
echoes which had not yet died within him. The master of the
house, to dissipate his thoughtfulness, led him toward
Giovanna. “Let me present to you, Signora,” he said, “a
countryman, the Count Leon Roszynski.”

The lady trembled; she silently bowed, fixed her eyes on the
ground, and dared not raise them. Pleading indisposition, which
was fully justified by her pallid features, she soon after
withdrew.

When on the following day Giovanna’a servant announced the
Counts Selka and Roszynski, a peculiar smile played on her
lips, and when they entered, she received the latter with the
cold and formal politeness of a stranger. Controlling the
feelings of her heart, she schooled her features to an
expression of indifference. It was manifest from Leon’s manner,
that without the remotest recognition, an indefinable
presentiment regarding her possessed him. The Counts had called
to know if Giovanna had recovered from her indisposition. Leon
begged to be permitted to call again.

Where was his wife? why did he never mention her? Giovanna
continually asked herself these questions when they had
departed.

A few nights after, the Count Leon arrived sad and
thoughtful. He prevailed on Giovanna to sing one of her Polish
melodies; which she told him had been taught, when a child, by
her muse. Roszynski, unable to restrain the expression of an
intense admiration he had long felt, frantically seized her
hand, and exclaimed, “I love you!”

She withdrew it from his grasp, remained silent for a few
minutes, and then said slowly, distinctly, and ironically, “But
I do not love you, Count Roszynski.”

Leon rose from his seat. He pressed his hands to his brow,
and was silent. Giovanna remained calm and tranquil. “It is a
penalty from Heaven,” continued Leon, as if speaking to
himself, “for not having fulfilled my duty as a husband toward
one whom I chose voluntarily, but without reflection. I wronged
her, and am punished.”

Giovanna turned her eyes upon him. Leon continued, “Young,
and with a heart untouched, I married a princess about ten
years older than myself, of eccentric habits and bad temper.
She treated me as an inferior. She dissipated the fortune
hoarded up with so much care by my parents, and yet was
[pg 183] ashamed on account of my
origin to be called by my name. Happily for me, she was fond
of visiting and amusements. Otherwise, to escape from her, I
might have become a gambler, or worse; but, to avoid meeting
her, I remained at home—for there she seldom was. At
first from ennui, but afterward from real delight in the
occupation, I gave myself up to study. Reading formed my
mind and heart. I became a changed being. Some months ago my
father died, my sister went to Lithuania, whilst my mother,
in her old age, and with her ideas, was quite incapable of
understanding my sorrow. So when my wife went to the baths
for the benefit of her ruined health, I came here in the
hope of meeting with some of my former friends—I saw
you—”

Giovanna blushed like one detected; but speedily recovering
herself, asked with calm pleasantry, “Surely you do not number
me among your former friends?”

“I know not. I have been bewildered. It is strange; but from
the moment that I saw you at Count Selka’s, a powerful instinct
of love overcame me; not a new feeling; but as if some latent,
long-hid, undeveloped sentiment had suddenly burst forth into
an uncontrollable passion. I love, I adore you. I—”

The Prima Donna interrupted him—not with speech, but
with a look which awed, which chilled him. Pride, scorn, irony
sat in her smile. Satire darted from her eyes. After a pause,
she repeated slowly and pointedly, “Love me, Count
Roszynski?”

“Such is my destiny,” he replied. “Nor, despite your scorn,
will I struggle against it. I feel it is my fate ever to love
you; I fear it is my fate never to be loved by you. It is
dreadful.”

Giovanna witnessed the Count’s emotion with sadness. “To
have,” she said mournfully, “one’s first, pure, ardent,
passionate affection unrequited, scorned, made a jest of, is
indeed a bitterness, almost equal to that of death.”

She made a strong effort to conceal her emotion. Indeed she
controlled it so well as to speak the rest with a sort of
gayety.

“You have at least been candid, Count Roszynski; I will
imitate you by telling a little history that occurred in your
country. There was a poor girl born and bred a serf to her
wealthy lord and master. When scarcely fifteen years old, she
was torn from a state of happy rustic freedom—the freedom
of humility and content—to be one of the courtly slaves
of the Palace. Those who did not laugh at her, scolded her. One
kind word was vouchsafed to her, and that came from the lord’s
son. She nursed it and treasured it; till, from long concealing
and restraining her feelings, she at last found that gratitude
had changed into a sincere affection. But what does a man of
the world care for the love of a serf? It does not even flatter
his vanity. The young nobleman did not understand the source of
her tears and her grief, and he made a present of her, as he
would have done of some animal, to his betrothed.”

Leon, agitated and somewhat enlightened, would have
interrupted her; but Giovanna said, “Allow me to finish my
tale. Providence did not abandon this poor orphan, but
permitted her to rise to distinction by the talent with which
she was endowed by nature. The wretched serf of Pobereze became
a celebrated Italian cantatrice. Then her former lord
meeting her in society, and seeing her admired and courted by
all the world, without knowing who she really was, was
afflicted, as if by the dictates of Heaven, with a love for
this same girl,—with a guilty love”—

And Giovanna rose, as she said this, to remove herself
further from her admirer.

“No, no!” he replied earnestly; “with a pure and holy
passion.”

“Impossible!” returned Giovanna. “Are you not married?”

Roszynski vehemently tore a letter from his vest, and handed
it to Giovanna. It was sealed with black, for it announced the
death of his wife at the baths. It had only arrived that
morning.

“You have lost no time,” said the cantatrice, endeavoring to
conceal her feelings under an iron mask of reproach.

There was a pause. Each dared not speak. The Count
knew—but without actually and practically believing what
seemed incredible—that Anielka and Giovanna were the same
person—his slave. That terrible relationship
checked him. Anielka, too, had played her part to the end of
endurance. The long cherished tenderness, the faithful love of
her life could not longer be wholly mastered. Hitherto they had
spoken in Italian. She now said, in Polish,

“You have a right, my Lord Roszynski, to that poor Anielka
who escaped from the service of your wife in Florence; you can
force her back to your palace, to its meanest work;
but”—

“Have mercy on me!” cried Leon.

“But,” continued the serf of Pobereze, firmly, “you cannot
force me to love you.”

“Do not mock—do not torture me more; you are
sufficiently revenged. I will not offend you by importunity.
You must indeed hate me! But remember that we Poles wished to
give freedom to our serfs; and for that very reason our country
was invaded and dismembered by despotic powers. We must
therefore continue to suffer slavery as it exists in Russia;
but, soul and body, we are averse to it; and when our country
once more becomes free, be assured no shadow of slavery will
remain in the land. Curse then our enemies, and pity us that we
stand in such a desperate position between Russian bayonets and
Siberia, and the hatred of our serfs.”

So saying, and without waiting for a reply, Leon rushed from
the room. The door was closed. Giovanna listened to the sounds
of [pg 184] his rapid footsteps till
they died in the street. She would have followed, but dared
not. She ran to the window. Roszynski’s carriage was rolling
rapidly away, and she exclaimed vainly, “I love you, Leon; I
loved you always!”

Her tortures were unendurable. To relieve them she hastened
to her desk, and wrote these words:

“Dearest Leon, forgive me; let the past be forever
forgotten. Return to your Anielka. She always has been, ever
will be, yours!”

She dispatched the missive. Was it too late, or would it
bring him back? In the latter hope she retired to her chamber,
to execute a little project.

Leon was in despair. He saw he had been premature in so soon
declaring his passion after the news of his wife’s death, and
vowed he would not see Anielka again for several months. To
calm his agitation, he had ridden some miles into the country.
When he returned to his hotel after some hours, he found her
note. With the wild delight it had darted into his soul, he
flew back to her.

On regaining her saloon a new and terrible vicissitude
seemed to sport with his passion—she was nowhere to be
seen. Had the Italian cantatrice fled? Again he was in
despair-stupefied with disappointment. As he stood uncertain
how to act, in the midst of the floor, he heard, as from a
distance, an Ave Maria poured forth in tones he half
recognized. The sounds brought back to him a host of
recollections: a weeping serf—the garden of his own
palace. In a state of new rapture he followed the voice. He
traced it to an inner chamber, and he there beheld the lovely
singer kneeling in the costume of a Polish serf. She rose,
greeted Leon with a touching smile, and stepped forward with
serious bashfulness. Leon extended his arms; she sank into
them; and in that fond embrace all past wrongs and sorrows were
forgotten! Anielka drew from her bosom a little purse, and took
from it a piece of silver, It was the rouble. Now, Leon did not
smile at it. He comprehended the sacredness of this little
gift, and some tears of repentance fell on Anielka’s hand.

A few months after, Leon wrote to the steward of Olgogrod to
prepare everything splendidly for the reception of his second
wife. He concluded his letter with these words:

“I understand that in the dungeon beneath my palace there
are some unfortunate men, who were imprisoned during my
father’s lifetime. Let them be instantly liberated. This is my
first act of gratitude to God, who has so infinitely blessed
me!”

Anielka longed ardently to behold her native land. They left
Vienna immediately after the wedding, although it was in the
middle of January.

It was already quite dark when the carriage, with its four
horses, stopped in front of the portico of the palace of
Olgogrod. Whilst the footman was opening the door on one side,
a beggar soliciting alms appeared at the other, where Anielka
was seated. Happy to perform a good action as she crossed the
threshold of her new home, she gave him some money; but the
man, instead of thanking her, returned her bounty with a savage
laugh, at the same time scowling at her in the fiercest manner
from beneath his thick and shaggy brows. The strangeness of
this circumstance sensibly affected Anielka, and clouded her
happiness. Leon soothed and reassured her. In the arms of her
beloved husband she forgot all but the happiness of being the
idol of his affections.

Fatigue and excitement made the night most welcome. All was
dark and silent around the palace, and some hours of the night
had passed, when suddenly flames burst forth from several parts
of the building at once. The palace was enveloped in fire; it
raged furiously. The flames mounted higher and higher; the
windows cracked with a fearful sound, and the smoke penetrated
into the most remote apartments.

A single figure of a man was seen stealing over the snow,
which lay like a winding-sheet on the solitary waste; his
cautious steps were heard on the frozen snow as it crisped
beneath his tread. It was the beggar who had accosted Anielka.
On a rising ground he turned to gaze on the terrible scene.

“No more unfortunate creatures will now be doomed to pass
their lives in your dungeons,” he exclaimed. “What was
my crime? Reminding my master of the lowness of his
birth. For this they tore me from my only child—my
darling little Anielka; they had no pity even for her orphan
state; let them perish all!”

Suddenly a young and beautiful creature rushes wildly to one
of the principal windows: she makes a violent effort to escape.
For a moment her lovely form, clothed in white, shines in
terrible relief against the background of blazing curtains and
walls of fire, and as instantly sinks back into the blazing
element. Behind her is another figure, vainly endeavoring to
aid her—he perishes also: neither of them are ever seen
again!

This appalling tragedy horrified even the perpetrator of the
crime. He rushed from the place, and as he heard the crash of
the falling walls, he closed his ears with his hands, and
darted on faster and faster.

The next day some peasants discovered the body of a man
frozen to death, lying on a heap of snow—it was that of
the wretched incendiary. Providence, mindful of his long, of
his cruel imprisonment and sufferings, spared him the anguish
of knowing that the mistress of the palace he had destroyed,
and who perished in the flames, was his own beloved
daughter—the Serf of Pobereze!

A TRUE POET never takes a “poetic license.”

From the Dublin University Magazine.

THE MYSTERIOUS COMPACT.

IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.

In the latter years of the last century, two youths,
Ferdinand Von Hallberg and Edward Von Wensleben were receiving
their education in the military academy of Mariensheim. Among
their schoolfellows they were called Orestes and Pylades, or
Damon and Pythias, on account of their tender friendship, which
constantly recalled to their schoolfellows’ minds the history
of these ancient worthies. Both were sons of officers who had
long served the state with honor, both were destined for their
father’s profession, both accomplished and endowed by nature
with no mean talents. But fortune had not been so impartial in
the distribution of her favors—Hallberg’s father lived on
a small pension, by means of which he defrayed the expenses of
his son’s schooling at the cost of the government; while
Wensleben’s parents willingly paid the handsomest salary in
order to insure to their only child the best education which
the establishment afforded. This disparity in circumstances at
first produced a species of proud reserve, amounting to
coldness, in Ferdinand’s deportment, which yielded by degrees
to the cordial affection that Edward manifested toward him on
every occasion. Two years older than Edward, of a thoughtful
and almost melancholy turn of mind, Ferdinand soon gained a
considerable influence over his weaker friend, who clung to him
with almost girlish dependence.

Their companionship had now lasted with satisfaction and
happiness to both, for several years, and the youths had formed
for themselves the most delightful plans—how they were
never to separate, how they were to enter the service in the
same regiment, and if a war broke out, how they were to fight
side by side, and conquer or die together. But destiny, or
rather Providence—whose plans are usually opposed to the
designs of mortals—had ordained otherwise.

Earlier than was expected, Hallberg’s father found an
opportunity to have his son appointed to an infantry regiment,
and he was ordered immediately to join the staff in a small
provincial town, in an out-of-the-way mountainous district.
This announcement fell like a thunderbolt on the two friends;
but Ferdinand considered himself by far the more unhappy, since
it was ordained that he should be the one to sever the happy
bond that bound them, and to inflict a deep wound on his loved
companion. His schoolfellows vainly endeavored to console him
by calling his attention to his new commission, and the
preference which had been shown him above so many others. He
only thought of the approaching separation; he only saw his
friend’s grief, and passed the few remaining days that were
allowed him at the academy by Edward’s side, who husbanded
every moment of his Ferdinand’s society with jealous care, and
could not bear to lose sight of him for an instant. In one of
their most melancholy hours, excited by sorrow and youthful
enthusiasm, they bound themselves by a mysterious vow, namely,
that the one whom God should think fit to call first from this
world, should bind himself (if conformable to the Divine will)
to give some sign of his remembrance and affection to the
survivor.

The place where this vow was made was a solitary spot in the
garden, by a monument of gray marble, overshadowed by dark
firs, which the former director of the institution had caused
to be erected to the memory of his son, whose premature death
was recorded on the stone.

Here the friends met at night, and by the fitful light of
the moon they pledged themselves to the rash and fanciful
contract, and confirmed and consecrated it the next morning by
a religious ceremony. After this they were able to look the
approaching separation in the face more manfully, and Edward
strove hard to quell the melancholy feeling which had lately
arisen in his mind on account of the constant foreboding that
Ferdinand expressed of his own early death. “No,” thought
Edward, “his pensive turn of mind and his wild imagination
cause him to reproach himself without a cause for my sorrow and
his own departure. Oh, no, Ferdinand will not die
early—he will not die before me. Providence will not
leave me alone in the world.”

The lonely Edward strove hard to console himself, for after
Ferdinand’s departure, the house, the world itself, seemed a
desert; and absorbed by his own memories, he now recalled to
mind many a dark speech which had fallen from his absent
friend, particularly in the latter days of their intercourse,
and which betokened but too plainly a presentiment of early
death. But time and youth exercised, even over these sorrows,
their irresistible influence. Edward’s spirits gradually
recovered their tone, and as the traveler always has the
advantage over the one who remains behind, in respect of new
objects to occupy his mind, so was Ferdinand even sooner calmed
and cheered, and by degrees he became engrossed by his new
duties and new acquaintances, not to the exclusion, indeed, of
his friend’s memory, but greatly to the alienation of his own
sorrow. It was natural, in such circumstances, that the young
officer should console himself sooner than poor Edward. The
country in which Hallberg found himself was wild and
mountainous, but possessed all the charms and peculiarities of
“far off” districts—simple, hospitable manners,
old-fashioned customs, many tales and legends which arise from
the credulity of the mountaineers, who invariably lean toward
the marvelous, and love to people the wild solitudes with
invisible beings.

Ferdinand had soon, without seeking for
[pg 186] it, made acquaintance with
several respectable families in the town; and as it
generally happens in such cases, he had become quite
domesticated in the best country-houses in the neighborhood;
and the well-mannered, handsome, and agreeable youth was
welcomed everywhere. The simple, patriarchal life in these
old mansions and castles—the cordiality of the people,
the wild, picturesque scenery, nay, the very legends
themselves, were entirely to Hallberg’s taste. He adapted
himself easily to his new mode of life, but his heart
remained tranquil. This could not last. Before half a year
had passed, the battalion to which he belonged was ordered
to another station, and he had to part with many friends.
The first letter which he wrote after this change bore the
impression of impatience at the breaking up of a happy time.
Edward found this natural enough; but he was surprised in
the following letters to detect signs of a disturbed and
desultory state of mind, wholly foreign to his friend’s
nature. The riddle was soon solved. Ferdinand’s heart was
touched for the first time, and perhaps because the
impression had been made late, it was all the deeper.
Unfavorable circumstances opposed themselves to his hopes:
the young lady was of an ancient family, rich, and betrothed
since her childhood to a relation, who was expected shortly
to arrive in order to claim her promised hand.
Notwithstanding this engagement, Ferdinand and the young
girl had become sincerely attached to each other, and had
both resolved to dare everything with the hope of being
united. They pledged their troth in secret; the darkest
mystery enveloped not only their plans, but their
affections; and as secrecy was necessary to the advancement
of their projects, Ferdinand entreated his friend to forgive
him if he did not intrust his whole secret to a sheet of
paper that had at least sixty miles to travel, and which
must pass through so many hands. It was impossible from his
letter to guess the name of the person or the place in
question. “You know that I love,” he wrote, “therefore you
know that the object of my secret passion is worthy of any
sacrifice; for you know your friend too well to believe him
capable of any blind infatuation, and this must suffice for
the present. No one must suspect what we are to each other;
no one here or round the neighborhood must have the
slightest clew to our plans. An awful personage will soon
make his appearance among us. His violent temper, his
inveterate obstinacy, (according to all that one hears of
him,) are well calculated to confirm in her a
well-founded aversion. But family arrangements and legal
contracts exist, the fulfillment of which the opposing party
are bent on enforcing. The struggle will be
hard—perhaps unsuccessful; notwithstanding, I will
strain every nerve. Should I fail, you must console
yourself, my dear Edward, with the thought, that it will be
no misfortune to your friend to be deprived of an existence
rendered miserable by the failure of his dearest hopes, and
separation from his dearest friend. Then may all the
happiness which Heaven has denied me be vouchsafed to you
and her, so that my spirit may look down contentedly from
the realms of light, and bless and protect you both.”

Such was the usual tenor of the letters which Edward
received during that period, His heart was full of
anxiety—he read danger and distress in the mysterious
communications of Ferdinand; and every argument that affection
and good sense could suggest did he make use of, in his
replies, to turn his friend from this path of peril which
threatened to end in a deep abyss. He tried persuasion, and
urged him to desist for the sake of their long-tried
affection—but when did passion ever listen to the
expostulations of friendship?

Ferdinand only saw one aim in life—the possession of
the beloved one. All else faded from before his eyes, and even
his correspondence slackened, for his time was much taken up in
secret excursions, arrangements of all kinds, and
communications with all manner of persons; in fact every action
of his present life tended to the furtherance of his plan.

All of a sudden his letters ceased. Many posts passed
without a sign of life. Edward was a prey to the greatest
anxiety; he thought his friend had staked and lost. He imagined
an elopement, a clandestine marriage, a duel with a rival, and
all these casualties were the more painful to conjecture, since
his entire ignorance of the real state of things gave his fancy
full range to conjure up all sorts of misfortunes. At length,
after many more posts had come in without a line to pacify
Edward’s fears, without a word in reply to his earnest
entreaties for some news, he determined on taking a step which
he had meditated before, and only relinquished out of
consideration for his friend’s wishes. He wrote to the officer
commanding the regiment, and made inquiries respecting the
health and abode of Lieutenant Von Hallberg, whose friends in
the capital had remained for nearly two months without news of
him, he who had hitherto proved a regular and frequent
correspondent.

Another fortnight dragged heavily on, and at length the
announcement came in an official form. Lieutenant Von Hallberg
had been invited to the castle of a nobleman whom he was in the
custom of visiting, in order to be present at the wedding of a
lady; that he was indisposed at the time, that he grew worse,
and on the third morning had been found dead in his bed, having
expired during the night from an attack of apoplexy.

Edward could not finish the letter—it fell from his
trembling hand. To see his worst fears realized so suddenly,
overwhelmed him at first. His youth withstood the bodily
illness [pg 187] which would have assailed a
weaker constitution, and perhaps mitigated the anguish of
his grief. He was not dangerously ill, but they feared many
days for his reason; and it required all the kind solicitude
of the director of the college, combined with the most
skillful medical aid, to stem the torrent of his sorrow, and
to turn it gradually into a calmer channel, until by degrees
the mourner recovered both health and reason. His youthful
spirits, however, had received a blow from which they never
rebounded, and one thought lay heavy on his mind, which he
was unwilling to share with any other person, and which, on
that account, grew more and more painful. It was the memory
of that holy promise which had been mutually contracted,
that the survivor was to receive some token of his friend’s
remembrance of him after death. Now two months had already
passed since Ferdinand’s earthly career had been arrested,
his spirit was free, why no sign? In the moment of death
Edward had had no intimation, no message from the passing
spirit, and this apparent neglect, so to speak, was another
deep wound in Edward’s breast. Do the affections cease with
life? Was it contrary to the will of the Almighty that the
mourner should taste this consolation? Did individuality
lose itself in death, and with it memory? Or did one stroke
destroy spirit and body? These anxious doubts, which have
before now agitated many who reflect on such subjects,
exercised their power over Edward’s mind with an intensity
that none can imagine save one whose position is in any
degree similar.

Time gradually deadened the intensity of his affliction. The
violent paroxysms of grief subsided into a deep but calm
regret. It was as if a mist had spread itself over every object
which presented itself before him, robbing them indeed of half
their charms, yet leaving them visible, and in their real
relation to himself. During this mental change the autumn
arrived, and with it the long-expected commission. It did not
indeed occasion the joy which it might have done in former
days, when it would have led to a meeting with Ferdinand, or at
all events to a better chance of meeting, but it released him
from the thraldom of college, and it opened to him a welcome
sphere of activity. Now it so happened that his appointment led
him accidentally into the very neighborhood where Ferdinand had
formerly resided, only with this difference, that Edward’s
squadron was quartered in the lowlands, about a short day’s
journey from the town and woodland environs in question.

He proceeded to his quarters, and found an agreeable
occupation in the exercise of his new duties.

He had no wish to make acquaintances, yet he did not refuse
the invitations that were pressed upon him, lest he should he
accused of eccentricity and rudeness; and so be found himself
soon entangled in all sorts of engagements with the neighboring
gentry and nobility. If these so-called gayeties gave him no
particular pleasure, at least for the time they diverted his
thoughts; and with this view he accepted an invitation (for the
new-year and carnival were near at hand) to a great
shooting-match which was to be held in the mountains—a
spot which it was possible to reach in one day, with favorable
weather and the roads in good state. The day was appointed, the
air tolerably clear; a mild frost had made the roads safe and
even, and Edward had every expectation of being able to reach
Blumenberg in his sledge before night, as on the following
morning the match was to take place. But as soon as he got near
the mountains, where the sun retires so early to rest,
snow-clouds drove from all quarters, a cutting wind came
roaring through the ravines, and a heavy fall of snow began.
Twice the driver lost his way, and daylight was gone before he
had well recovered it; darkness came on sooner than in other
places, walled in as they were by dark mountains, with dark
clouds above their heads. It was out of the question to dream
of reaching Blumenberg that night; but in this hospitable land,
where every householder welcomes the passing traveler, Edward
was under no anxiety as to shelter. He only wished, before the
night quite set in, to reach some country-house or castle; and
now that the storm had abated in some degree, that the heavens
were a little clearer, and that a few stars peeped out, a large
valley opened before them, whose bold outline Edward could
distinguish, even in the uncertain light. The well-defined
roofs of a neat village were perceptible, and behind these,
half-way up the mountain that crowned the plain, Edward thought
he could discern a large building which glimmered with more
than one light. The road led straight into the village. Edward
stopped and inquired.

That building was indeed a castle: the village belonged to
it, and both were the property of the Baron Friedenberg.
“Friedenberg!” repeated Edward: the name sounded familiar to
him, yet he could not call to mind when and where he had heard
it. He inquired if the family were at home, hired a guide, and
arrived at length by a rugged path which wound itself round
steep rocks, to the summit of them, and finally to the castle,
which was perched there like an eagle’s nest. The tinkling of
the bells on Edward’s sledge attracted the attention of the
inmates; the door was opened with prompt hospitality; servants
appeared with torches; Edward was assisted to emerge from under
the frozen apron of his carriage, out of his heavy pelisse,
stiff with hoar-frost, and up a comfortable staircase into a
long saloon of simple construction, where a genial warmth
appeared to welcome him from a huge stove in the corner. The
servants here placed two large burning candles in massive
silver sconces, and went out to announce the
stranger.

The fitting-up of the room, or rather saloon, was perfectly
simple. Family portraits, in heavy frames, hung round the
walls, diversified by some maps. Magnificent stags’ horns were
arranged between; and the taste of the master of the house was
easily detected in the hunting-knives, powder-flasks, carbines,
smoking-bags, and sportsmen’s pouches, which were arranged, not
without taste, as trophies of the chase. The ceiling was
supported by large beams, dingy with smoke and age; and on the
sides of the room were long benches, covered and padded with
dark cloth, and studded with large brass nails; while round the
dinner-table were placed several arm-chairs, also of ancient
date. All bore the aspect of the good old times, of a simple,
patriarchal life with affluence. Edward felt as if there were a
kind welcome in the inanimate objects which surrounded him,
when the inner-door opened, and the master of the house
entered, preceded by a servant, and welcomed his guest with
courteous cordiality.

Some apologies which Edward offered on account of his
intrusion, were silenced in a moment.

“Come, now, Lieutenant,” said the Baron, “I must introduce
you to my family. You are not such a stranger to us, as you
fancy.”

With these words he took Edward by the arm, and, lighted by
the servant, they passed through several lofty rooms, which
were very handsomely furnished, although in an old-fashioned
style, with faded Flemish carpets, large chandeliers, and
high-backed chairs: everything in keeping with what the youth
had already seen in the castle. Here were the ladies of the
house. At the other end of the room, by the side of an immense
stove, ornamented with a large shield of the family arms,
richly emblazoned, and crowned by a gigantic Turk, in a most
comfortable attitude of repose sat the lady of the house, an
elderly matron of tolerable circumference, in a gown of dark
red satin, with a black mantle and a snow-white cap. She
appeared to be playing cards with the chaplain, who sat
opposite to her at the table, and the Baron Friedenberg to have
made the third hand at ombre, till he was called away to
welcome his guest. On the other side of the room were two young
ladies, an elder person, who might be a governess, and a couple
of children, very much engrossed by a game at lotto.

As Edward entered, the ladies rose to greet him, a chair was
placed for him near the mistress of the house, and very soon a
cup of chocolate and a bottle of tokay were served on a rich
silver salver, to restore the traveler after the cold and
discomfort of his drive: in fact it was easy for him to feel
that these “far away” people were by no means displeased at his
arrival. An agreeable conversation soon began among all
parties. His travels, the shooting-match, the neighborhood,
agriculture, all afforded subjects, and in a quarter of an hour
Edward felt as if he had long been domesticated with these
simple but truly well-informed people.

Two hours flew swiftly by, and then a bell sounded for
supper; the servants returned with lights, announced that the
supper was on the table, and lighted the company into the
dining-room—the same into which Edward had first been
ushered. Here, in the background, some other characters
appeared on the scene—the agent, a couple of his
subalterns, and the physician. The guests ranged themselves
round the table. Edward’s place was between the Baron and his
wife. The chaplain said a short grace, when the Baroness, with
an uneasy look, glanced at her husband over Edward’s shoulder,
and said, in a low whisper—

“My love, we are thirteen—that will never do.”

The Baron smiled, beckoned to the youngest of the clerks,
and whispered to him. The youth bowed, and withdrew. The
servant took the cover away, and served his supper in the next
room.

“My wife,” said Friedenberg, “is superstitious, as all
mountaineers are. She thinks it unlucky to dine thirteen. It
certainly has happened twice (whether from chance or not who
can tell?) that we have had to mourn the death of an
acquaintance who had, a short time before, made the thirteenth
at our table.”

“This idea is not confined to the mountains. I know many
people in the capital who think with the Baroness,” said
Edward. “Although in a town such ideas, which belong more
especially to the olden time, are more likely to be lost in the
whirl and bustle which usually silences everything that is not
essentially matter of fact.”

“Ah, yes, Lieutenant,” replied the Baron, smiling
good-humoredly, “we keep up old customs better in the
mountains. You see that by our furniture. People in the capital
would call this sadly old-fashioned.”

“That which is really good and beautiful can never appear
out of date,” rejoined Edward courteously; “and here, if I
mistake not, presides a spirit that is ever striving after
both. I must confess, Baron, that when I first entered your
house, it was this very aspect of the olden time that enchanted
me beyond measure.”

“That is always the effect which simplicity has on every
unspoiled mind,” answered Friedenberg: “but townspeople have
seldom a taste for such things.”

“I was partly educated on my father’s estate,” said Edward,
“which was situated in the Highlands; and it appears to me as
if, when I entered your house, I were visiting a neighbor of my
father’s, for the general aspect is quite the same here as with
us.”

“Yes,” said the chaplain, “mountainous districts have all a
family likeness: the same necessities, the same struggles with
nature, the same seclusion, all produce the same way of life
among mountaineers.”

“On that account the prejudice against the number thirteen
was especially familiar to me,” replied Edward. “We also
dislike it; and we retain a consideration for many
supernatural, or at least inexplicable things, which I have met
with again in this neighborhood.”

“Yes, here, almost more than anywhere else,” continued the
chaplain, “I think we excel all other mountaineers in the
number and variety of our legends and ghost stories. I assure
you that there is not a cave or a church, or, above all, a
castle, for miles round about, of which we could not relate
something supernatural.”

The Baroness, who perceived the turn which the conversation
was likely to take, thought it better to send the children to
bed; and when they were gone, the priest continued, “Even here,
in this castle—”

“Here!” inquired Edward, “in this very castle?”

“Yes, yes! Lieutenant,” interposed the Baron, “this house
has the reputation of being haunted; and the most extraordinary
thing is, that the matter cannot be denied by the skeptical, or
accounted for by the reasonable.”

“And yet,” said Edward, “the castle looks so cheerful, so
habitable.”

“Yes, this part which we live in,” answered the Baron; “but
it consists of only a few apartments sufficient for my family
and these gentlemen; the other portion of the building is half
in ruins, and dates from the period when men established
themselves on the mountains for greater safety.”

“There are some who maintain,” said the physician, “that a
part of the walls of the stern tower itself are of Roman
origin; but that would surely be difficult to prove.”

“But, gentlemen,” observed the Baroness, “you are losing
yourselves in learned descriptions as to the erection of the
castle, and our guest is kept in ignorance of what he is
anxious to hear.”

“Indeed, madam,” replied the chaplain, “this is not entirely
foreign to the subject, since in the most ancient part of the
building lies the chamber in question.”

“Where apparitions have been seen?” inquired Edward,
eagerly.

“Not exactly,” replied the Baroness; “there is nothing
fearful to be seen.”

“Come, let us tell him at once,” interrupted the Baron. “The
fact is, that every guest who sleeps for the first time in this
room (and it has fallen to the lot of many, in turn, to do so,)
is visited by some important, significant dream or vision, or
whatever I ought to call it, in which some future event is
prefigured to him, or some past mystery cleared up, which he
had vainly striven to comprehend before.”

“Then,” interposed Edward, “it must be something like what
is known in the Highlands, under the name of second sight, a
privilege, as some consider it, which several persons and
several families enjoy.”

“Just so,” said the physician, “the cases are very similar;
yet the most mysterious part of this affair is, that it does
not appear to originate with the individual, or his
organization, or his sympathy with beings of the invisible
world; no, the individual has nothing to say to it—the
locality does it all. Every one who sleeps there has his
mysterious dream, and the result proves its truth.”

“At least, in most instances,” continued the Baron, “when we
have had an opportunity of hearing the cases confirmed. I
remember once, in particular. You may recollect, Lieutenant,
that when you first came in, I had the honor of telling you you
were not quite a stranger to me.”

“Certainly, Baron; and I have been wishing for a long time
to ask an explanation of these words.”

“We have often heard your name mentioned by a particular
friend of yours—one who could never pronounce it without
emotion.”

“Ah!” cried Edward, who now saw clearly why the Baron’s name
had sounded familiar to him also—”ah! you speak of my
friend Hallberg; truly do you say, we were indeed dear to each
other.”

“Were!” echoed the Baron, in a faltering tone, as he
observed the sudden change in Edward’s voice and countenance;
“can the blooming, vigorous youth be—”

“Dead!” exclaimed Edward; and the Baron deeply regretted
that he had touched so tender a chord, as he saw the young
officer’s eyes fill with tears, and a dark cloud pass over his
animated features.

“Forgive me,” he continued, while he leaned forward and
pressed his companion’s hand; “I grieve that a thoughtless word
should have awakened such deep sorrow. I had no idea of his
death; we all loved the handsome young man, and by his
description of you were already much interested in you before
we had ever seen you.”

The conversation now turned entirely on Hallberg. Edward
related the particulars of his death. Every one present had
something to say in his praise; and although this sudden
allusion to his dearest friend had agitated Edward in no slight
degree, yet it was a consolation to him to listen to the
tribute these worthy people paid to the memory of Ferdinand,
and to see how genuine was their regret at the tidings of his
early death. The time passed swiftly away in conversation of
much interest, and the whole company were surprised to hear ten
o’clock strike, an unusually late hour for this quiet, regular
family. The chaplain read prayers, in which Edward devoutly
joined, and then he kissed the matron’s hand, and felt almost
as if he were in his father’s house. The Baron offered to show
his guest to his room, and the servant preceded them with
lights. The way led past the staircase, and then on one side
into a long gallery, which communicated with another wing of
the castle.

The high-vaulted ceilings, the curious carving on the
ponderous doorways, the pointed gothic windows, through many
broken panes of which a sharp nightwind whistled, proved to
Edward that he was in the old part of the castle, and that the
famous chamber could not be far off.

“Would it be possible for me to be quartered there,” he
began, rather timidly; “I should like it of all things.”

“Really!” inquired the Baron, rather surprised; “have not
our ghost stories alarmed you?”

“On the contrary,” was the reply, “they have excited the
most earnest wish—”

“Then, if that be the case,” said the Baron, “we will
return. The room was already prepared for you, being the most
comfortable and the best in the whole wing; only I fancied,
after our conversation—”

“Oh, certainly not,” exclaimed Edward; “I could only long
for such dreams.”

During this discourse they had arrived at the door of the
famous room. They went in. They found themselves in a lofty and
spacious apartment, so large that the two candles which the
servant carried only shed a glimmering twilight over it, which
did not penetrate to the furthest corner. A high-canopied bed,
hung with costly but old-fashioned damask, of dark green, in
which were swelling pillows of snowy whiteness, tied with green
bows, and a silk coverlet of the same color, looked very
inviting to the tired traveler. Sofa and chairs of faded
needlework, a carved oak commode and table, a looking-glass in
heavy framework, a prie-dieu and crucifix above it, constituted
the furniture of the room, where, above all things, cleanliness
and comfort preponderated, while a good deal of silver plate
was spread out on the toilet-table.

Edward looked round. “A beautiful room!” he said. “Answer me
one question, Baron, if you please. Did he ever sleep
here?”

“Certainly,” replied Friedenberg; “it was his usual room
when he was here, and he had a most curious dream in that bed,
which, as he assured us, made a great impression on him.”

“And what was it?” inquired Edward.

“He never told us, for, as you well know, he was reserved by
nature; but we gathered from some words that he let slip, that
an early and sudden death was foretold. Alas! your narrative
has confirmed the truth of the prediction.”

“Wonderful! He always had a similar foreboding, and many a
time has he grieved me by alluding to it,” said Edward; “yet it
never made him gloomy or discontented. He went on his way
firmly and calmly, and looked forward with joy, I might almost
say, to another life.”

“He was a superior man,” answered the Baron. “whose memory
will ever be dear to us. But now I will detain you no longer.
Good night. Here is the bell”—he showed him the cord in
between the curtains—”and your servant sleeps in the next
room.”

“Oh, you are too careful of me,” said Edward, smiling; “I am
used to sleep by myself.”

“Still,” replied the Baron, “every precaution should be
taken. Now once more good night.”

He shook him by the hand, and, followed by the servant, left
the room.

Thus Edward found himself alone, in the large,
mysterious-looking, haunted room, where his deceased friend had
so often reposed; where he also was expected to see a vision.
The awe which the place itself inspired, combined with the sad
and yet tender recollection of the departed Ferdinand, produced
a state of mental excitement which was not favorable to his
night’s rest. He had already undressed with the aid of his
servant (whom he had then dismissed,) and had been in bed some
time, having extinguished the candles. No sleep visited his
eyelids; and the thought recurred which had so often troubled
him, why he had never received the promised token from
Ferdinand, whether his friend’s spirit were among the
blest—whether his silence (so to speak) proceeded from
unwillingness or incapacity to communicate with the living. A
mingled train of reflections agitated his mind; his brain grew
heated; his pulse beat faster and faster. The castle clock
tolled eleven—half-past eleven. He counted the strokes:
and at that moment the moon rose above the dark margin of the
rocks which surrounded the castle, and shed her full light into
Edward’s room. Every object stood out in relief from the
darkness. Edward gazed, and thought, and speculated. It seemed
to him as if something moved in the furthest corner of the
room. The movement was evident—it assumed a
form—the form of a man, which appeared to advance, or
rather to float forward. Here Edward lost all sense of
surrounding objects, and found himself once more sitting at the
foot of the monument in the garden of the academy, where he had
contracted the bond with his friend. As formerly, the moon
streamed through the dark branches of the fir-trees, and shed
its pale cold light on the cold white marble of the monument.
Then the floating form which had appeared in the room of the
castle became clearer, more substantial, more earthly-looking;
it issued from behind the tombstone, and stood in the full
moonlight. It was Ferdinand, in the uniform of his regiment,
earnest and pale, but with a kind smile on his features.

“Ferdinand, Ferdinand!” cried Edward, overcome by joy and
surprise, and he strove to embrace the well-loved form, but it
waved him aside with a melancholy look.

“Ah! you are dead,” continued the speaker; “and why then do
I see you just as you looked when
living?”

“Edward,” answered the apparition, in a voice that sounded
as if it came from afar, “I am dead, but my spirit has no
peace.”

“You are not with the blest?” cried Edward, in a voice of
terror.

“God is merciful,” it replied; “but we are frail and sinful
creatures; inquire no more, but pray for me.”

“With all my heart,” cried Edward, in a tone of anguish,
while he gazed with affection on the familiar features; “but
speak, what can I do for thee?”

“An unholy tie still binds me to earth. I have sinned. I was
cut off in the midst of my sinful projects. This ring burns.”
He slipped a small gold ring from his left hand. “Only when
every token of this unholy compact is destroyed, and when I
recover the ring which I exchanged for this, only then can my
spirit be at rest. Oh, Edward, dear Edward, bring me back my
ring!”

“With joy—but where, where am I to seek it?”

“Emily Varnier will give it thee herself; our engagement was
contrary to holy duties, to prior engagements, to earlier vows.
God denied his blessing to the guilty project, and my course
was arrested in a fearful manner. Pray for me, Edward, and
bring me back the ring, my ring,” continued the voice, in a
mournful tone of appeal.

Then the features of the deceased smiled sadly but tenderly;
then all appeared to float once more before Edward’s
eyes—the form was lost in mist, the monument, the
fir-grove, the moonlight, disappeared; a long, gloomy,
breathless pause followed. Edward lay, half sleeping, half
benumbed, in a confused manner; portions of the dream returned
to him—some images, some sounds—above all, the
petition for the restitution of the ring. But an indescribable
power bound his limbs, closed his eyelids, and silenced his
voice; mental consciousness alone was left him, yet his mind
was a prey to terror.

At length these painful sensations subsided—his nerves
became more braced, his breath came more freely, a pleasing
languor crept over his limbs, and he fell into a peaceful
sleep. When he awoke it was already broad daylight; his sleep
toward the end of the night had been quiet and refreshing. He
felt strong and well, but as soon as the recollection of his
dream returned, a deep melancholy took possession of him, and
he felt the traces of tears which grief had wrung from him on
his eyelashes. But what had the vision been? A mere dream
engendered by the conversation of the evening, and his
affection for Hallberg’s memory, or was it at length the
fulfillment of the compact?

There, out of that dark corner, had the form risen up, and
moved toward him. But might it not have been the effect of
light and shade produced by the moonbeams, and the dark
branches of a large tree close to the window, when agitated by
the high wind? Perhaps he had seen this, and then fallen
asleep, and all combined, had woven itself into a dream. But
the name of Emily Varnier! Edward did not remember ever to have
heard it; certainly it had never been mentioned in Ferdinand’s
letters. Could it be the name of his love, of the object of
that ardent and unfortunate passion? Could the vision be one of
truth? He was meditating, lost in thought, when there was a
knock at his door, and the servant entered. Edward rose
hastily, and sprang out of bed. As he did so, he heard
something fall with a ringing sound; the servant stooped and
picked up a gold ring, plain gold, like a wedding-ring. Edward
shuddered: he snatched it from the servant’s hand, and the
color forsook his cheeks as he read the two words “Emily
Varnier” engraved inside the hoop. He stood there like one
thunderstruck, as pale as a corpse, with the proof in his hand
that he had not merely dreamed, but had actually spoken with
the spirit of his friend. A servant of the household came in to
ask whether the Lieutenant wished to breakfast in his room, or
down stairs with the family. Edward would willingly have
remained alone with the thoughts that pressed heavily on him,
but a secret dread lest his absence should be remarked, and
considered as a proof of fear, after all that had passed on the
subject of the haunted room, determined him to accept the
proposal. He dressed hastily, and arranged his hair carefully,
but the paleness of his face, and the traces of tears in his
eyes, were not to be concealed, and he entered the saloon,
where the family were already assembled at the breakfast-table,
with the chaplain and the doctor.

The Baron rose to greet him: one glance at the young
officer’s face was sufficient; he pressed his hand in silence,
and led him to a place by the side of the Baroness. An animated
discussion now began concerning the weather, which was
completely changed; a strong south wind had risen in the night,
so there was now a thaw. The snow was all melted—the
torrents were flowing once more, and the roads impassable.

“How can you possibly reach Blumenberg, to-day?” the Baron
inquired of his guest.

“That will be well nigh impossible,” said the doctor. “I am
just come from a patient at the next village, and I was nearly
an hour performing the same distance in a carriage that is
usually traversed on foot in a quarter of an hour.”

Edward had not given a thought this morning to the
shooting-match. Now that it had occurred to him to remember it,
he felt little regret at being detained from a scene of noisy
festivity which, far from being desirable, appeared to him
actually distasteful in his present frame of mind. Yet he was
troubled by the thought of intruding too long on the
hospitality of his new friends; and he said, in a hesitating
manner—

“Yes! but I must try how far—”

“That you shall not do,” interrupted the
[pg 192] Baron. “The road is always
bad: and in a thaw it is always dangerous. It would go
against my conscience to allow you to risk it. Remain with
us: we have no shooting-match or ball to offer you,
but—”

“I shall not certainly regret either,” cried Edward,
eagerly.

“Well, then, remain with us, Lieutenant,” said the matron,
laying her hand on his arm, with a kind, maternal gesture. “You
are heartily welcome; and the longer you stay with us, the
better shall we be pleased.”

The youth bowed, and raised the lady’s hand to his lips, and
said—

“If you will allow me—if you feel certain that I am
not intruding—I will accept your kind offer with joy. I
never care much for a ball, at any time, and to-day in
particular”—. He stopped short, and then added, “In such
bad weather as this, the small amusement—”

“Would be dearly bought.” interposed the Baron. “Come, I am
delighted; you will remain with us.”

He shook Edward warmly by the hand.

“You know you are with old friends.”

“And, beside,” said the doctor, with disinterested
solicitude, “it would be imprudent, for M. de Wensleben does
not look very well. Had you a good night, sir?”

“Very good,” replied Edward.

“Without much dreaming?” continued the other,
pertinaciously.

“Dreaming! oh, nothing wonderful,” answered the officer.

“Hem!” said the doctor, shaking his head, portentiously. “No
one yet—”

“Were I to relate my dream,” replied Edward, “you would
understand it no more than I did. Confused images—”

The Baroness, who saw the youth’s unwillingness to enlarge
upon the subject, here observed—

“That some of the visions had been of no great
importance—those which she had heard related, at
least.”

The chaplain led the conversation from dreams, themselves,
to their origin, on which subject he and the doctor could not
agree; and Edward and his visions were left in peace at last.
But when every one had departed, each to his daily occupation,
Edward followed the Baron into his library.

“I answered in that manner,” he said, “to get rid of the
doctor and his questioning. To you I will confess the truth.
Your room has exercised its mysterious influence over me.”

“Indeed!” said the baron, eagerly.

“I have seen and spoken with my Ferdinand, for the first
time since his death. I will trust to your kindness—your
sympathy—not to require of me a description of this
exciting vision. But I have a question to put to you.”

“Which I will answer in all candor, if it be possible.”

“Do you know the name of Emily Varnier?”

“Varnier!—certainly not.”

“Is there no one in this neighborhood who bears that
name?”

“No one: it sounds like a foreign name.”

“In the bed in which I slept I found this ring,” said
Edward, while he produced it; “and the apparition of my friend
pronounced that name.”

“Wonderful! As I tell you, I know no one so
called—this is the first time I ever heard the name. But
it is entirely unaccountable to me, how the ring should have
come into that bed. You see, M. von Wensleben, what I told you
is true. There is something very peculiar about that room: the
moment you entered, I saw that the spell had been working on
you also, but I did not wish to forestall or force your
confidence.”

“I felt the delicacy, as I do now the kindness, of your
intentions. Those who are as sad as I am can alone tell the
value of tenderness and sympathy.”

Edward remained this day and the following at the castle,
and felt quite at home with its worthy inmates. He slept twice
in the haunted room. He went away, and came back often; was
always welcomed cordially, and always quartered in the same
apartment. But, in spite of all this, he had no clew, he had no
means of lifting the vail of mystery which hung round the fate
of Ferdinand Hallberg and of Emily Varnier.

From Punch.

OUR “IN MEMORIAM.”

From the Southern Literary Messenger.

TO W.J.R., WITH A MS.

R.H. STODDARD

From the Knickerbocker Magazine.

THE ACTUAL.

R.B.X.