forced the latter upon his heart as his unavoidable familiars. All about and within him were plots, anbitions, wraths, chagrins, jealousies, miseries. The times and his own distresses darkened his mood to the lurid hue of Hell. Moreover, the happiness of Heaven, the rewards of the spirit, its empyreal joys, can be but faintly pictured by visual corporeal images, the only ones the earthly poet possesses. The thwarted imagination loses itself in a vague, dazzling, golden mist. On the contrary, the trials and agonies of the spirit in Purgatory and Hell, are by such images suitably, forcibly, definitely set forth. The sufferings of the wicked while in the flesh are thereby typified. And this suggests to me, that one bent, as many are, upon detecting Allegory in Dante, might regard the whole poem as one grand Allegory, wherein, under the guise of a picture of the future world, the poet has represented the effect of the feelings in this; the pangs, for example, of the murderer and glutton in Hell, being but a portraiture, poetically colored, of the actual torments on earth of those who commit murder and gluttony. Finally, in this there is evidence--and is it not conclusive? -of the superiority of the Book of Hell, that in that book occur the two most celebrated passages in the poem,-passages, in which with unsurpassed felicity of diction and versification, the pathetic and terrible are rounded by the spirit of poetry into pictures, where simplicity, expression, beauty, combine to produce effects unrivalled in this kind in the pages of literature. I refer of course to the stories of Francesca and Ugolino.

Dante's work is untranslatable. Not merely because the style, form, and rhythm of every great poen, being the incarnation of inspired thought, you cannot but lacerate the thought in disembodying it; but because, moreover, much of the elements of its boly, the words namely in which the spirit made itself visible, have passed away. To get a faithful English transcript of the great Florentine, we should need a diction of the fourteenth century, moulded by a more fiery and potent genius than Chaucer. Not the thoughts solely, as in every true poe n, are so often virgin thoughts; the words, too, many of them, are virgin words. Their freshness and unworn vigor are there alone in Dante's Italian. Of the modern intellectual movement, Dante was the majestie herald. In his poem are the mysterious shadows, the glow, the fragrance, the young life-promising splendors of the dawn. The broad day has its strength and its blessings; but it can give only a faint image of the glories of its birth.

The bitter woes of Daute, hard and bitter to the shortening of his life, cannot but give a pang to the reader whom his genius has exalted and delighted. He was a life-long sufferer. Early disappointel in love; not blest, it would seem, in his marriage; foile as a statesman; misjudged and relentlessly proscribed by the Florentines, upon whom from the pits of Hell his wrath wreaked itself in a damning line, calling them, "Gente avara, invida, e superba;" a homeless wanderer; a dependant at courts where, though honored, he could not be valued; obliged to consort there with buffoons and parasites, he whose great heart was full of honor, and nobleness, and tenderness; and at last, all his political plans and hopes baffled, closing his mournful days far, far away from home and kin, wasted, sorrow-stricken, brokenhearted. Most sharp, most cruel were his woes. Yet to them perhaps we owe his poem. Had he not been discomfited and exiled, who can say that the mood or the leisure would have been found for such poetry? His vicissitudes and woes were the soil to feed and ripen his conceptions. They steeped him in dark experiences, intensified his passions, enrich

ing the imagination that was tasked to people Hell and Purgatory; while from his own pains he turned with keener joy and lightened pen to the beatitudes of Heaven. But for his sorrows, in his soul would not have been kindled so fierce a fire. Out of the seething gloom of his sublime heart shot forth forked lightnings which still glow, a perennial illumination -to the eyes of men, a beauty, a marvel, a terror. Poor indeed he was in purse; but what wealth had he not in his bosom! True, he was a father parted from his children, a proud warm man, eating the bread of cold strangers; but had he not his genius and its bounding offspring for company, and would not a day of such heavenly labor as his outweigh a month, aye, a year of crushed pride? What though by the world he was misused, received from it little, his own even wrested from him; was he not tho giver, the conscious giver, to the world of riches fineless? Not six men, since men were, have been blest with such a power of giving.

THE NUN.

From amidst the town flights of steps led me, on a Sunday morning, up a steep height, about two hundred feet, to the palace of the Grand Duke. Begilded and bedamasked rooms, empty of paintings or sculpture, were all that there was to see, so I soon passed from the palace to the terrace in front of it.

A landscape looks best on Sunday. With the repose of man Nature sympathizes, and in the inward stillness, imparted unconsciously to every spirit by the general calm, outward beauty is more faithfully imaged.

From the landscape my mind was soon withdrawn, to an object beneath me. Glancing over the terracerailing almost into the chimneys of the houses below, my eyes fell on a female figure in black, pacing round a small garden inclosed by high walls. From the privileged spot where I stood, the walls were no defence, at least against masculine vision. The garden was that of a convent, and the figure walking in it was a nun, upon whose privacy I was thus involuntarily intruding. Never once raising her eyes from her book, she walked round and round the inclosure in the Sabbath stillness. But what to her was this weekly rest? She is herself an incessant sabbath, her existence is a continuous stillness. She has set herself apart from her fellows; she would no more know their work-day doings; she is a voluntary somnambulist, sleeping while awake; she walks on the earth a flesh-and-blood phantom. What a fountain of life and love is there dried up! To cease to be a woman! The warm currents that gush from a woman's heart, all turned back upon their source! What an agony!-And yet, could my eyes, that follow the quiet nun in her circumscribed walk, see through her prison into the street behind it, there they might, perchance at this very moment, fall on a sister going freely whither she listeth, and yet, inclosed within a circle more circumscribed a thousand fold than any that stones can build-the circle built by public reprobation. Not with downcast lids doth she walk, but with a bold stare that would out-look the scorn she awaits. No Sabbath stillness is for her-her life is a continuous orgie. No cold phantom is she--she has smothered her soul in its flesh. Not arrested and staguant are the currents of her woman's heart-infected at their spring, they flow foul and fast. Not apart has she set herself from her fellows-she is thrust out from among them. Her mother knows her no more, nor her father, nor her brother, nor her sister. In exchange for the joys of danghter, wife, mother,, woman, she has shame and lust. Great God! What

a tragedy she is. To her agony all that the poor nun has suffered is beatitude.-Follow now, in your thought, the two back to their childhood, their sweet chirping innocence. Two dewy buds are they, exhaling from their folded hearts a richer perfume with each maturing month,-two beaming cherubs, that have left their wings behind them, eager to bless and to be blest, and with power to replume themselves from the joys and bounties of an earthly life. In a few short years what a distortion! The one is a withered, fruitless, branchless stem; the other, an unsexed monster, whose touch is poisonous. Can such things be, and men still smile and make merry? To many of its members, society is a Saturn that eats his children-a fiend, that scourges men out of their humanity, and then mocks at their fall.

A nun, like a suicide, is a reproach to Christianity -a harlot is a judgment on civilization.

BONAPARTE

Bonaparte was behind his age; he was a man of the past. The value of the great modern instruments and the modern heart and growth he did not discern. He went groping in the medieval times to find the lustreless sceptre of Charlemagne, and he saw not the paramount potency there now is in that of Faust. He was a great cannoneer, not a great builder. In the centre of Europe, from amidst the most advanced, scientific nation on earth, after nineteen centuries of Christianity, not to perceive that lead in the form of type is far more puissant than in the form of bullets; not to feel that for the head of the French nation to desire an imperial crown was as unmanly as it was disloyal, that a rivalry of rotten Austria and barbarie Russia was a despicable vanity; not to have yet learned how much stronger ideas are than blows, principles than edicts-to be blind to all this, was to want vision, insight, wisdom. Bonaparte was not the original genius he has been vaunted; he was a vulgar copyist, and Alexander of Macedon and Frederick of Prussia were his

models. Force was his means, despotism his aim; war was his occupation, pomp his relaxation. For him the world was divided into two-his will, and those who opposed it. He acknowledged no duty, he respected no right, he flouted at integrity, he despiseth truth. He had no belief in man, no trust in God. In his wants he was ignoble, in his methods ignorant. He was possessed by the lust of isolated, irresponsible, boundless, heartless power, and he believed that he could found it with the sword and bind it with lies; and so, ere he began to grow old, what he had founded had already toppled, and what he had bound was loosed. He fell, and as if history would register his disgrace with a more instructive emphasis, he fell twice; and exhausted France, beleaguered by a million of armed foes, had to accept the restored imbecile Bourbons.

MOLIERE AND RACHEL.

At the Théâtre Français, I saw Molière and Rachel. It is no disparagement of Molière to call him a truncated Shakespeare. The naturalness, vigor, common sense, practical insight and scenic life of Shakespeare he has; without Shakespeare's purple glow, his reach of imagination and mighty intellectual grasp, which latter supreme qualities shoot light down into the former subordinate ones, and thus impart to Shakespeare's comic and lowest personages a poetic soul, which raises and refines them, the want whereof in Molière makes his low characters border on farce and his highest prosaic.

Rachel is wonderful. She is on the stage an em

bodied radiance. Her body seems inwardly illuminated. Conceive a Greek statue endued with speech and mobility, for the purpose of giving utterance to a profound soul stirred to its depths, and you have an image of the magic union in her personations of fervor and grace. Till I heard her, I never fully valued the might of elocution. She goes right to the heart by dint of intonation; just as, with his arm ever steady, the fencer deals or parries death by the mere motion of his wrist. Phrases, words, sylla bles, grow plastic, swell or contract, come pulsing with life, as they issue from her lips. Her head is superb; oval, full, large, compact, powerful She cannot be said to have beauty of face or figure; yet the most beautiful woman were powerless to divert from her the eyes of the spectator. Her spiritual beauty is there more bewitching than can be the corporeal. When in the Horaces she utters the curse, it is as though the whole electricity of a tempest played through her arteries. It is not Corneille's Camille, or Racine's Hermione, solely that you behold, it is a dazzling incarnation of a human soul.

SUMNER LINCOLN FAIRFIELD.

SUMNER LINCOLN, the son of Dr. Abner Fairfield, a physician of Warwick, Massachusetts, was born in that town on the twenty-fifth of June, 1803. In 1806 his father, who had previously removed to Athens, a village on the Hudson, died, leaving a widow and two children in humble circumstances. The family retired to the home of the mother's father, a farm-house in Western Massachusetts, where Fairfield remained until his twelfth year. After a twelvemonth passed at school he entered Brown University. Here he studied so unremittingly, that, after a few months, he was attacked by a severe fit of sickness. On his recovery he endeavored to eke out his support by teaching, but failing in this was forced to leave college and seek a living as a tutor at the south. He passed two years in this occupation, and in preparation for the ministry, but in consequence of the death of his friend and instructor, the Rev. Mr. Cranston of Savannah, he changed his plan of life and returned to the north. He had during this period published “two pamphlets of rhymes," which, as we are informed in his biography by his widow "he ever after shrunk from reading," were probably of indifferent merit.

Summer L. Faw futery

He returned to the north with the determination to pursue a literary life, and in December, 1825, sailed for London. He carried letters of introduction to the conductors of periodicals, and obtained engagements as a writer. His poem, The Cities of the Plain, a description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, appeared in the Oriental Herald, edited by J. S. Buckingham, the traveller and lecturer. He was received in France by La Fayette, and wrote his Père la Chaise and Westminster Abbey, at Versailles. He also wrote letters descriptive of his tour to the New York Literary Gazette, edited by James G. Brooks. He returned home in July, 1826, and soon after published a volume of poems, entitled The Sisters of Saint Clara, a tale of Portugal, which was followed in 1830 by Abaddon, the

And mouldered loveliness and soaring mind,
Yet whisper, "Faith surmounts the storm of death!"
Beautiful city of the dead! to sleep
Amid thy shadowed solitudes, thy flowers,
Thy greenness and thy beauty, where the voice,
Alone heard, whispers love-and greenwood choirs
Sing 'mid the stirring leaves-were very bliss
Unto the weary heart and wasted mind,
Broken in the world's warfare, yet still doomed
To bear a brow undaunted! Oh, it were
A tranquil and a holy dwelling-place
To those who deeply love but love in vain,
To disappointed hopes and baffled aims
And persecuted youth. How sweet the sleep
Of such as dream not-wake not-feel not here
Beneath the starlight skies and flowery earth,
'Mid the green solitudes of Père La Chaise!

ROBERT M. BIRD,

THE author of several successful plays and novels, was born at Newcastle, Delaware, in 1803. He was educated in Philadelphia, where he became a physician. His literary career commenced in 1828 by the publication, in the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine, of three tales entitled The Ice Island, The Spirit of the Reeds, and The Phantom Players, and a poem, Saul's Last Day. His tragedy of The Gladiator was soon after produced by Edwin Forrest, who enacted the principal character. The play still keeps possession of the stage as a favorite among his personations.

In 1834 Dr. Bird published Calavar, or the Knight of the Conquest, a Romance of Mexico, in which he has presented a glowing and carefully prepared historical picture.

The Infidel, or the Fall of Mexico, a second historical novel on the same picturesque period, and introducing several of the personages of the previous tale, appeared in 1835.

In 1836 Sheppard Lee, a novel, was published anonymously, but has been generally attributed to the author of Calavar. It is a fanciful story of a farmer who, discontented with his position of moderate wealth and independence, falls into a swoon, and in that state undergoes a series of transmigration into the bodies of several persons, whose circums ances in life he has heretofore deemed happier than his own. He finally returns with a thankful and contented heart to his pristine condition.

war.

In 1837 the author's most successful work, Nick of the Woods or the Jibbenainosay, appeared. The scene of this spirited romance is laid in Kentucky soon after the close of the Revolutionary The characters are all the strongly individualized men of pioneer life, and the Indians are portrayed from the point of view of the settler as vindictive and merciless savages, unrelieved by any atmosphere of poetry or sentiment, and are probably more true to life than those of Cooper.

In 1838 Dr. Bird published Peter Pilgrim, or a Rambler's Recollections, a collection of magazine papers, including an account of the Mammoth Cave, of which he was one of the early explorers, and the first to describe with any degree of minuteness.

This work was followed in 1839 by The Adventures of Robin Day, a novel of romantic adventure, in which the hero, cast an unknown orphan on the shore of Barnegat, and brought up among the rude wreckers of the beach, works his way through many interesting and surprising adventures, in which marine risks and the Florida war contribute an exciting quota, to a fair degree of repose and prosperity. The interest of an involved plot in this, as in Dr. Bird's other fictions, is maintained with much skill, though with some sacrifice of the probabilities from the outset to the close.

After the publication of this work Dr. Bird devoted himself for several years almost exclusively to the cultivation of a farm. He returned to Philadelphia to edit the North American Gazette, of which he became one of the proprietors, and died in that city of a brain fever in January, 1854.

Dr. Bird's fictions possess great animation in the progress and development of the story. The conversational portions show the practised hand of the dramatist. The incidents of the story are also managed with a view to stage effect; and a proof of these dramatic qualities has been afforded in the success which has attended an adaptation of Nick of the Woods for the theatre, in every part of the country.

THE BEECH-TREE.

There's a hill by the Schuylkill, the river of hearts,
And a beech-tree that grows on its side,
In a nook that is lovely when sunshine departs,
And twilight creeps over the tide:

How sweet, at that moment, to steal through the

grove,

In the shade of that beech to recline,

And dream of the maiden who gave it her love,
And left it thus hallowed in mine.

Here's the rock that she sat on, the spray that she held,

When she bent round its grey trunk with me; And smiled, as with soft, timid eyes, she beheld The name I had carved on the tree;

So carved that the letters should look to the west, As well their dear magic became,

So that when the dim sunshine was sinking to rest
The last ray should fall on her name.

The singing thrush moans on that beech-tree at morn,
The winds through the laurel-bush sigh,
And afar comes the sound of the waterman's horn,
And the hum of the water-fall nigh.

No echoes there wake but are magical, each,
Like words, on my spirit they fall;

They speak of the hours when we came to the beech,
And listened together to all.

And oh, when the shadows creep out from the wood,
When the breeze stirs no more on the spray,
And the sunbeam of autumn that plays on the flood,
Is melting, each moment, away;

How dear, at that moment, to steal through the grove,

In the shade of that beech to recline,
And dream of the maiden who gave it her love,
And left it thus hallowed in mine.

A RESCUE-FROM NICK OF THE WOODS.

With these words, having first examined his own and Rolan i's arms, to see that all were in proper battle condition, and then directed little Peter to ensconce in a bush, wherein little Peter straightway bestowed himself, Bloody Nathan, with an alacrity of motion an l ardor of look that indicated anything rather than distaste to the murderous work in hand, led the way along the risige, until he had reached the place where it dipped down to the valley, covered with the bushes through which he expected to advance to a desirable position undiscovere l.

But a better auxiliary even than the bushes was soon discovered by the two friends. A deep gully, washed in the side of the hill by the rains, was here found running obliquely from its top to the bottom affording a covere l way, by which, as they saw at a glance, they could approach within twenty or thirty yards of the foe untirely unseen; and, to add to its advantages, it was the bed of a little water-course, whose murmurs, as it leaped fon rock to rock, assured them they could as certainly approach unheard.

"Truly," muttered Nathan, with a grim chuckle, as he looked, first at the friendly ravine, and then at the savages below, "the Pailistine rascals is in our hands, and we will smite them hip and thigh!"

With this inspiring assurance he crept into the ravine; and Roland following, they were soon in possession of a post conmanding, not only the spot occupiel by the enemy, but the whole valley.

Peeping through the fringe of shrubs that rose, a verdant parapet, on the brink of the gully, they looked down upon the savage party, now less than forty paces from the muzzles of their guns, and wholly unaware of the fate preparing for them. The scene of diversion and torment was over: the prisoner, a man of powerful frame but squalid appearance, whose hat,-a thing of shreds and patches,

adorned the shorn pate of one of the Indians, while his coat, equally rusty and tattered, hung from the shoulders of a second, lay bound under a tree, but so

nigh that they could mark the laborious heavings of his chest. Two of the Indians sat near him on the grass, keeping watch, their hatchets in their hands, their guns resting within reach against the trunk of a tree overthrown by some hurricane of former years, and now mouldering away. A third was e gaged with his tomahawk, lopping away the few dry boughs that remained on the trunk. Squatting at the fire, which the third was thus laboring to replenish with fuel, were the two remaining savages; who, holding their rifles in their hands, divide I their attention betwixt a shoulder of venison roasting on a stick in the fire, and the captive, whom they seemed to regard as destined to be sooner or later disposed of in a similar manner.

The position of the parties precluded the hope Nathan had ventured to entertain of getting them in a cluster, and so doing double execution with each bullet; but the disappointment neither chilled his ardor nor embarrassed his plans. His scheme of attack had been framed to embrace all contingencies; and he wasted no further time in deliberation. A few whispered words conveyed his last instructions to the soldier; who, reflecting that he was fighting in the cause of humanity, remembering his own heavy wrongs, and marking the fiery eagerness that flamed from Nathan's visige, banished from his mind whatever disinclination he might have felt at beginning the fray in a mode so seemingly treacherous and ignoble. He laid his axe on the brink of the gully at his side, together with his foraging cap; and then, thrusting his rifle through the bushes, took aim at one of the savages at the fire, Nathan directing his piece against the other. Both of them presented the fairest marks, as they sat wholly unconscious of their danger, enjoying in imagination the tortures yet to be inflicted on the prisoner. But a noise in the gally, the falling of a stone loosened by the soldier's foot, or a louder than usual plash of water-suddenly roused them from their dreams: they started up, and turned their eyes towards the hill." Now, friend." whispered Nathan;-"if thee misses, thee loses thee maiden and thee life into the bargain.-Is thee ready?"

Realy," was the reply.

Right, then, through the dog's brain,-fire !" The crash of the pieces, and the fall of the two victims, both marked by a fatal aim, and both pierce through the brain, were the first announce ment of peril to their companions; who, springing up, with yells of fear and astonishment, and snatching at their arms, looked wildly around them for the unseen foe. The prisoner also, astounded out of his despair, raised his head from the grass, and glared around. The wreaths of smoke curling over the bushes on the hill-side, betrayed the lurking-place of the assailants, and savages and prisoner turning together, they all beheld at once the spectacle of two human heads,-or, to speak more correctly, two human caps, for the heads were far below them,rising in the smoke, and peering over the bushes, as if to mark the result of the volley. Loud, furious, and exulting were the screams of the Indians, as with the speed of thought, seduced by a stratagem often practise I among the wild heroes of the border, they raised and discharged their pieces against the imaginary foes so incautiously exposed to their vengeance. The caps fell, and with them the rifles that had been employed to raise them; and the voice of Nathan thundered through the glen, as he grasped his tomahawk and sprang from the ditch, Now, friend! up with thee axe, and do thee duty." With these words, the two assailants at once leaped into view, and with a bold hurrah, and bolder hearts, rushed towards the fire, where lay the undis

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