Mr. Peabody's review articles cover most of the social and educational questions of the day, with the discussion of many topics of miscellaneous literature. He handles a ready and vigorous pen, is clear and animated in style, and well skilled in the arts of the reviewer. His address before the united literary societies of Dartmouth College on "the Uses of Classical Literature," is a suggestive analysis of this important question. Mr. Peabody is at present engaged in editing and preparing for the press, a Memoir of the late Gov. William Plumer of New Hampshire, from a manuscript life, left by his son the late Hon. William Plumer. FIRST VIVID IMPRESSIONS IN THE ANCIENT CLASSICS.* The Greek and Roman authors lived in a newer, younger world than ours. They were in the process of learning many things now well known. They were taking first glances, with earnestness and wonder, at many things now old and trite,-no less worthy of admiration than they were then, but dropped from notice and neglected. They give us first impressions of many forms of nature and of life, -impressions, which we can get nowhere else. They show us ideas, sentiments, and opinions in the process of formation,-exhibit to us their initial elements,--reveal their history. They make known to us essential steps in human culture, which, in these days of more rapid progress, we stride over unmarked. They are thus invaluable aids in the study of the human mind, and of the intellectual history of the race, in the analysis of ideas and opinions,-in ascertaining, apart from our artificial theories, the ultimate, essential facts in every department of nature and of human life. For these uses, the classics have only increased in value with the lapse of time, and must still grow more precious with every stage of human progress and refinement, so that classical literature must ever be a favorite handmaid of sound philosophy. On subjects of definite knowledge, what we call the progress of knowledge is, in one aspect, the growth of ignorance. As philosophy becomes more comprehensive, it becomes less minute. As it takes in broader fields of view, it takes less accurate cognizance of parts and details. Even language participates in this process. Names become more general. Definitions enumerate fewer particulars. What are called axioms, embrace no longer self-evident propositions alone, but those also, which have been so established by the long and general consent of mankind, that the proofs on which they rest, and the truths which they include, are not recurred to. schoolboy now takes on trust, and never verifies, principles, which it cost ages of research to discover and mature. What styles itself analysis goes not back to the "primordia rerum." Now, the more rigid and minute our analysis, the more accurate of course our conceptions. Indeed, we do not fully understand general laws or comprehensive truths, until we have traced them out in detail, and seen them mirrored back from the particulars which they include. A whole can be faithfully studied only in its parts; and every part obeys the law, and bears the A May, 1815, and edited it for two years. Then, from May, 1817, to March, 1818, inclusive, it was edited by Jared Sparks; from May, 1818, to Oct. 1819, inclusive, by Edward T. Channing; from Jan. 1820, to Oct. 1823, inclusive, by Edward Everett; from Jan. 1824, to April, 1880, inclusive, by Jared Sparks; from July, 1880, to Oct. 1835, by Alexander H.Everett: from Jan. 1886, to Jan. 1843, by John G. Palfrey; from 1848 to 1853, by Francis Bowen; and since, by Andrew P. Peabody. From the address on the "Uses of Classical Literature." 1 type of the system, to which it belongs, so that, the more numerous the parts with which we are conversant, the more profound, intimate, vivid, experimental, is our knowledge of the whole. This minute, exhausting analysis we may advantageously prose cute by the aid of ancient philosophy and science. Laugh as we may at the puerile theories in natural Pliny, they often, by their detailed sketches of facts history, broached or endorsed by Aristotle and by and phenomena, which we have left unexamined because we have thought them well known, invest common things with absorbing interest, as the exponents of far reaching truths and fundamental laws In like manner, in Plato's theories of the universe and of the human soul, or in the ethical treatises of Cicero, though we detect in them much loose and vague speculation, and many notions which shur the better light of modern times, we often find the constituent elements of our own ideas,-the parent thoughts of our truest thoughts,-those ultimate facts in the outward and the spiritual universe, which suggest inquiry and precede theory. A similar train of remark applies emphatically to the departments of rhetoric and eloquence. I know of no modern analysis of the elements and laws of written or uttered discourse, which can bear a moment's comparison with those of Cicero or Quintilian. We may, indeed, have higher moral conceptions of the art of writing and of oratory than they had We may perhaps hold forth a loftier aim. We may see more clearly than they did, the intrinsic dignity of the author's or the orator's vocation; and may feel, as none but a Christian can, of what incalcula ble moment for time and for eternity his influence may be. But these eighteen centuries have only generalized, without augmenting, the catalogue of instruments by which mind is to act on mind, and heart on heart,-of the sources of argument and modes of appeal, which those master-rhetoricians defined in detail. Nor is it possible that, eighteen centuries hence, the "De Oratore" of Cicero should seem less perfect, or be less fruitful, or constitute a less essential part, than now, of the training of him, who would write what shall live, or utter what is worthy to be heard. Modern rhetoricians furnish us with weapons of forensic attack and defence, ready cast and shaped, and give us technical rules for their use. Cicero takes us to the mine and to the forge,--exhibits every stage of elaboration through which the weapons pass,-proves their temper, tries their edge for us. By his minute subdivision of the whole subject of oratory, by his detailed description of its kinds, its modes, and its instruments, by his thorough analysis of arguments, and of the sources whence they are drawn, he wrote in anticipation a perfect commentary on the precepts of succeeding rhetoricians; and we must look to him to test the principles and to authenticate the laws, which they lay down. And this preeminence belongs not to his transcendent genius alone; but is, to a great degree, to be traced to the fact, that he wrote when oratory as an art was young in Rome, and had perished before it grew old in Greece,when it had no established rules, no authoritative canons, no prescriptive forms, departure from which was high treason to the art, when therefore it was incumbent on the orator to prove, illustrate, and defend whatever rules or forms he might propose. The view of ancient literature now under consideration obviously extends itself to the whole field of poetry. In our habitual straining after the vast and grand, we pass by the poetry of common and little things, and are hardly aware how much there is worthy of song in daily and unnoticed scenes and events,--in the unenduring clouds, In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone The region of the partly known and dimly seen, the confines of the unexplored, constitute in all ages the poet's chosen field. But that field has been continually diminishing before the resistless progress of truth and fact. Science has measured the stars, sounded the sea, and made the ancient hills tell the story of their birth. Fancy now finds no hidingplace in grove or cavern,--no shrine so secluded, so full of religious awe, as to have been left unmeasured and uncatalogued. Poetry, impatient of the line and compass of exact science, is thus driven from almost every earthly covert; and dreary, prosaic fact, is fast establishing its undivided empire over land, and sea, and sky. It is therefore refreshing and kindling to go back in ancient song to The power, the beauty, and the majesty Then the world was young, and infant science had not learned to roam. Mystery brooded over the whole expanse of nature. Darkness was upon the face of the deep. The veil was unremoved from grotto and from forest. We often talk of the poetry of common life. What now styles itself thus, is, for the most part, stupid prose on stilts. The real poetry of common life was written when what is our common life was poetic, -heroic,-when our merest common-places of existence were rare and grand. The themes of ancient song are almost all of this class; and the great poems of antiquity derive an absorbing, undying interest and charm from the fact, that they bring out the wayside poetry of ordinary life, which gunpowder, steam, the loadstone, and the march of mind have banished from the present age, and which can never be written again unless the world strides back to barbarisin. The expedition of the Argonauts, so vast that they paused two years on their way to gather strength and courage,-a tourist of the cockney class, darting through the Hellespont on the fire-wings of modern navigation, would hardly enter on his journal. The shipmaster, who could not shun Carybdis without falling into Scylla, would be remanded without a dissenting voice to the forecastle. The Odyssey was founded on a mere coasting voyage; its chief adventures turn upon nautical blunders, which would cast shame on the most awkward skipper of a modern fishing smack. The siege of Troy would now be finished in a fortnight; and the Latian war would hardly fill a newspaper paragraph. The ex-Governor of New Hampshire publishes fifty-two Georgies a year, each containing more of agricultural science than Virgil could have gleaned through the whole Roman empire; while Virgil's beautiful fictions about the bees have been supplanted by Huber's stranger facts. Such are the themes of classic song,--thus trite, unromantic, prosaic, as now regarded and handled. But they are in fact what they were in the glowing verse of antiquity. Abridged and materialized though they be in our mechanical age, they are full of the richest materials for poetry, of grand and beautiful forms, of the types of an infinite presence, and of skill and power beyond thought,-full too of thrilling human experience, of man's vast aims and wild darings, of his wrath and his tenderness, his agony and his triumph. What though the loiterer on the steamboat deck heeds not the "monstra natantia," which made the hair of the ancient helmsman erect with fear? They are none the less there What though -fearful, marvellous, and mighty. Ipse pater, media nimborum in nocte, corusca What though any farmer's boy would laugh to scorn the river-goddess's recipe for replenishing the wasted beehive? Time has taken nothing from the truth to nature and to actual life, from the deep pathos and intense beauty of her son's lamentation, and of her own quick maternal sympathy, and anxious, persevering love. Yes; this ancient poetry, wide as it often is of fact, is full of truth. It beats throughout with the throbbings of the universal human heart,-of that heart, which, under the present reign of iron and steam, dares not full and free utterance; but which, in those simple days, spoke as it felt, and has left us, in verse that cannot die, its early communings with itself, with nature, with life's experience, and with the infinite Unknown. WILLIAM INGRAHAM KIP. He THE first member of the old New York family of Kip, who appears in history, was Ruloff de Kype, a partisan of the Duke of Guise in the French civil wars connected with the Reformation. was a native of Brittany, and on the defeat of his party took refuge in Holland. He afterwards joined the army of the Duke of Anjou, and was killed in battle near Jarnac. His son Ruloff became a Protestant, and remained in Holland, where the next in descent, Henry, was born in 1576. On arriving at manhood, he took an active part in "The Company of Foreign Countries," an association formed for the purpose of obtaining access to the Indies, by a different route from that possessed by Spain and Portugal. They first attempted to sail round the northern seas of Europe and Asia, but their expedition, despatched in 1594, was obliged to return on account of the ice in the same year. In 1609, they employed Henry Hudson to sail to the westward, in the little Half Moon, with happier results. Henry Kype came to New Amsterdam in 1635. He returned to Holland, but his sons remained, and rose to important positions as citizens and landed proprietors. One, Hendrick, became in 1647 and 1649 one of the council chosen by the people, to assist Governor Stuyvesant in the administration. Another, Jacobus, was Secretary of the city council, and received a grant of land on Kip's Bay, East River, where he built a house in 1641, which remained standing until 1850, when it was demolished on the opening of Thirty-fifth street. A third, Jacob, owned the ground now occupied by the Park. Five generations of the family were born at the house at Kip's Bay, a portion of whom settled at Rhinebeck. The mansion was occupied for a brief period by General Washington, and after the capture of the city as the head-quarters of the British officers. The proprietor, Jacobus Kip, was a Whig, and his son served in the American army. Other members of the family were officers in the British service. W. Ingraham Kip William Ingraham Kip is the eldest son of Leonard Kip, for many years President of the North River Bank, and is connected through his mother's family with Captain Ingraham, the spirited liberator of Martin Kozsta. He was born in New York, October 3, 1811, and prepared for college at schools in that city. After passing a twelvemonth at Rutgers College, he completed the remaining three years of his college course at Yale, in 1831. He commenced and continued for some time the study of law, which he then changed for that of Divinity, and was graduated from the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and ordained Deacon in 1835. His first parochial charge was at St. Peter's Church, Morristown, New Jersey, where he remained a year. He was next Assistant Minister of Grace Church, New York, and in 1838 called to the Rectorship of St. Peter's Church, Albany, where he remained, with the exception of a portion of the years 1844 and 1845, passed in Europe, until his consecration as Missionary Bishop of California, in October, 1853. He soon after removed to San Francisco, where he now resides, actively engaged in the arduous duties of his important position. In 1843 he published The Lenten Fast, a volume in which the origin, propriety, and advantages of the observance of the season are pointed out. It has passed through six editions. În 1844, The Double Witness of the Church, an exposition of the Via Media between Roman Catholic and unepiscopal Protestant doctrines, appeared. It is regarded as one of the most valuable of the many works on the subject, and has passed through several editions. The Christmas Holidays in Rome, a volume derived from the author's observations in 1844, appeared in the following year. In 1846 he prepared The Early Jesuit Missions in North America, an interesting and valuable volume, drawn from the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses ecrites des Missions Etrangères, the original narratives of the Jesuit missionaries and other contemporary records. In 1851 he issued in London, and afterwards in this country, a work on The Early Conflicts of Christianity-the conflicts including those of heresies within as well as opponents without the Early Church. The volume gives an animated picture of the varied scenes of the period. Bishop Kip's latest publication is a volume on The Catacombs of Rome, published in 1854. It contains a description, drawn from personal inspection, of these venerated resting-places of the fathers and confessors of the church of the first three centuries; and an account of the inscriptions and symbols which they contain, accompanied with pictorial representations and fac-similes, from Arringhi's folio and other early and rare works. These volumes are all written for popular circulation in a popular style, and are of moderate size. They, however, indicate ample and thorough research, and have given their author, in connexion with his highly successful pulpit composi tions, and numerous articles in the New York Review, Church Review, Evergreen, American Monthly Magazine, Churchman, and other periodicals, a high position as a theologian and scholar,, as well as author. ELIHU BURRITT. ELIHU BURRITT, "the learned Blacksmith," was born at New Britain, Connecticut, December 8, 1811, of an old New England family. His father was a shoemaker, a man of ready apprehension and charitable sympathies and action. He had ten children, and of his five sons the eldest and the youngest have both attained literary distinction. The former, Elijah, early developed a fondness for the mathematics. His friends sent him to college. The fruits of his studies have been a work entitled Log Arithmetic, published before he was twenty-one, and his Geography of the Heavens, which is in general use as a schoolbook. at the age of seventeen to a blacksmith. He had acquired, however, a taste for the observations written in books from the narratives of the old revolutionary soldiers who came to his father's house. He wished to know more, and life thus taught him the use of books. When his apprenticeship was ended he studied with his brother, who, driven from his career as a schoolmaster at the South, had returned to establish himself in this capacity in his native town, learning something of Latin, French, and Mathematics. At the end of six months he returned to the forge, watching the castings in the furnace with a copy of the Greek grammar in his hand. He took some intervals from his trade for the study of his favorite grammars, gradually adding to his stock of languages till he attacked the Hebrew. To procure oriental books he determined to embark from Boston as a sailor, and spend his wages at the first European port in books, but was diverted from this by the inducements of the library of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester, the happily endowed institution of Isaiah Thomas, in a thrifty manufacturing town which offered employment for his arm as well as his brain. Here, in 1837, he forged and studied, recording in his diary such entries as these. "Monday, June 18, headache; forty pages Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, sixtyfour pages French, eleven hours forging. Tues day, sixty-five lines of Hebrew, thirty pages of French, ten pages Cuvier's Theory, eight lines Syriac, ten ditto Danish, ten ditto Bohemian, nine ditto Polish, fifteen names of stars, ten hours forging." When the overwearied brain was arrested by a headache he worked that off by a few hours' extra forging. Thus on his sounding anvil shaped Не A letter to a friend inquiring for employment as a translator of German, and telling his story, reached Edward Everett, then Governor of Massachusetts, who read the account at a public meeting, and Burritt became at once installed among the curiosities of literature. He was invited to pursue his studies at Harvard, but he preferred the forge at Worcester, airing his grammatical knowledge by the publication of a monthly periodical to teach French entitled The Literary Gemini. This was published in 1839 and continued for a year. In 1840 he commenced as a lecturer, one of the few profitable avenues of literary occupation open in the country, which he has since pursued with distinguished success. translated Icelandic sagas and papers from the Samaritan, Arabic, and Hebrew, for the Eclectic Review, still add ng to his stock of languages. In 1844 he commenced at Worcester a paper called The Christian Citizen, in which he was diverted from philology to philanthropy, advocating peace and fraternity. He published his Olive Leaves at this time from the same office. He became engaged in circulating a mutual system of addresses in behalf of peace between England and America, and in 1846 was the proprietor and editor of The Peace Advocate. His Bond of Brotherhood was a periodical tract which he circulated among travellers. In the same year he went to England, where he enjoyed a cordial reception and full employment among the philanthropists, writing for Douglas Jerrold's weekly newspaper, and forming peace associations. One of his latest employments of this kind was the distribution, in 1852, of a series of "friendly addresses" from Englishmen through the different departments of France. Burritt's latest publication (1854) is entitled Thoughts and Things at Home and Abroad, a collection of various contributions to the press, written with a certain enthusiasm, without exactness of thought and expression, in the form of sketches, and covering the favorite topics of the writer in war, temperance, and kindred subjects. WHY I LEFT THE ANVIL. I see it, you would ask me what I have to say for myself for dropping the hammer and taking up the quill, as a member of your profession. I will be honest now, and tell you the whole story. I was transposed from the anvil to the editor's chair by the genius of machinery. Don't smile, friends, it was even so. I had stood and looked for hours on those thoughtless, iron intellects, those iron-fingered, sober, supple automatons, as they caught up a bale of cotton, and twirled it in the twinkling of an eye, into a whirlwind of whizzing shreds, and laid it at my feet in folds of snow-white cloth, ready for the use of our most voluptuous antipodes. They were wonderful things, those looms and spindles; but they could not spin thoughts; there was no attribute of Divinity in them, and I admired them, nothing more. They were excessively curious, but I could estimate the whole compass of their doings and destiny in finger power; so I am away and left them spinning cotton. One day I was tuning my anvil beneath a hot iron, and busy with the thought, that there was as much intellectual philosophy in my hammer as in any of the enginery agoing in modern times, when a most unearthly screaming pierced my ears: I stepped to the door, and there it was, the great Iron Horse! Yes, he had come looking for all the world like the great Dragon we read of in Scripture, harnessed to half a living world and just landed on the earth, where he stood braying in surprise and indignation at the "base use" to which he had been turned. I saw the gigantic hexiped move with a power that made the earth tremble for miles. I saw the army of human beings gliding with the velocity of the wind over the iron track, and droves of cattle travelling in their stables at the rate of twenty miles an hour towards their city-slaughter-house. It was wonderful. The little busy bee-winged machinery of the cotton factory dwindled into insignificance before it. Monstrous beast of passage and burden! it devoured the intervening distance, and welded the cities together! But for its furnace heart and iron sinews, it was nothing but a beast, an enormous aggregation of-horse power. And I went back to the forge with unimpaired reverence for the intellectual philosophy of my hammer. Passing along the street one afternoon I heard a noise in an old building, as of some one puffing a pair of bellows. So without more ado, I stepped in, and there, in a corner of a room, I saw the chef d'oeuvre of all the machinery that has ever been invented since the birth of Tubal Cain. In its construction it was as simple and unassuming as a cheese press. It went with a leverwith a lever, longer, stronger, than that, with which Archimedes promised to lift the world. "It is a printing press," said a boy standing by the ink trough with a queueless turban of brown paper on his head. "A printing press!" I queried musingly to myself. "A printing press? what do you print!" I asked. "Print?" said the boy, staring at 66 me doubtfully, "why we print thoughts." "Print thoughts!" I slowly repeated after him; and we stood looking for a moment at each other in mutual admiration, he in the absence of an idea, and I in pursuit of one. But I looked at him the hardest, and he left another ink mark on his forehead from a pathetic motion of his left hand to quicken his apprehension of my meaning. Why, yes," he reiterated, in a tone of forced confidence, as if passing an idea, which, though having been current a hundred years, might still be counterfeit, for all he could show on the spot, "we print thoughts, to be sure." But, my boy," I asked in honest soberness, "what are thoughts, and how can you get hold of them to print them?" "Thoughts are what come out of the people's minds," he replied. "Get hold of them, indeed? Why minds arn't nothing you can get hold of, nor thoughts either. All the minds that ever thought, and all the thoughts that minds ever made, wouldn't make a ball as big as your fist. Minds, they say, are just like air; you can't see them; they don't make any noise, nor have any color; they don't weigh anything. Bill Deepcut, the sexton, says, that a man weighs just as much when his mind has gone out of him as he did before.-No, sir, all the minds that ever lived wouldn't weigh an ounce troy." "Then how do you print thoughts?" I asked. "If minds are thin as air, and thoughts thinner still, and make no noise, and have no substance, shade, or color, and are like the winds, and more than the winds, are anywhere in a moment; sometimes in heaven, and sometimes on earth and in the waters under the earth; how can you get hold of them? how can you see them when caught, or show them to others?" Ezekiel's eyes grew luminous with a new idea, and pushing his ink-roller proudly across the metallic page of the newspaper, replied, "Thoughts work and walk in things what make tracks; and we take them tracks, and stamp them on paper, or iron, wood, stone, or what not. This is the way we print thoughts. Don't you understand?" The pressman let go the lever, and looked interrogatively at Ezekiel, beginning at the patch on his stringless brogans, and following up with his eye to the top of the boy's brown paper buff cap. Ezekiel comprehended the felicity of his illustration, and wiping his hands on his tow apron, gradually assumed an attitude of earnest exposition. I gave him an encouraging wink, and so he went on. 66 66 Thoughts make tracks," he continued impressively, as if evolving a new phase of the idea by repeating it slowly. Seeing we assented to this proposition inquiringly, he stepped to the type-case, with his eye fixed admonishingly upon us. Thoughts make tracks," he repeated, arranging in his left hand a score or two of metal slips," and with these here letters we can take the exact impression of every thought that ever went out of the heart of a human man; and we can print it too," giving the inked form a blow of triumph with his fist, we can print it too, give us paper and ink enough, till the great round earth is blanketed around with a coverlid of thoughts, as much like the pattern as two peas." Ezekiel seemed to grow an inch at every word, and the brawny pressman looked first at him, and then at the press, with evident astonishment. "Talk about the mind's living for ever!" exclaimed the boy, pointing patronizingly at the ground, as if mind were lying there incapable of immortality until the printer reached it a helping hand, "why the world is brimful of live, bright, industrious thoughts, which would have been dead, as dead as a stone, if it hadn't been for boys like me who have run the ink rollers. Immortality, indeed! why, people's minds," he con tinued, with his imagination climbing into the profanely sublime, "people's minds wouldn't be immortal if 'twasn't for the printers at any rate, in this here planetary burying-ground. We are the chaps what manufacture immortality for dead men," he subjoined, slapping the pressman graciously on the shoulder. The latter took it as if dubbed a knight of the legion of honor, for the boy had put the mysteries of his profession in sublime apocalypse. "Give us one good healthy mind," resumed Ezekiel, "to think for us, and we will furnish a dozen worlds as big as this with thoughts to order. Give us such a man, and we will insure his life; we will keep him alive for ever among the living. He can't die, no way you can fix it, when once we have touched him with these here bits of inky pewter. He shan't die nor sleep. We will keep his mind at work on all the minds that live on the earth, and all the minds that shall come to live here as long as the world stands." "Ezekiel," I asked, in a subdued tone of reverence, "will you print my thoughts too!" "Yes, that I will," he replied, "if you will think some of the right kind." "Yes, that we will," echoed the pressman. And I went home and thought, and Ezekiel has printed my "thought-tracks" ever since. |