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ence diffusion; and when a social portraiture, such as Dickens might envy Miss Griffith's pen, may not be mirrored on the conscience of her country, when the double obstruction of an envenomed press and of stolidity preclude the possibility for such a voice as this to reach the Southern ear, for such a heart as this to wake responsive sympathies, too sure a moral gangrene taints the air. If any printed book could awaken to sanity and inspire with horror at outrages in which the law of the land and the fury of the mob strive to outdo each other in iniquity, it would be a diamond edition of "MADGE VERTNER." Its idiomatic fidelity to local scenes and characters forms the indispensable vehicle for its social convictions. Above all literary merit, it has that living and loving spirit which creates personal sympathy between the reader and the author, a quality so penetrative that even children yet too young to read or to understand half the words laugh or cry on hearing it, and persons of the most violent pro-slavery opinions sit spell-bound under its charm. This is the record of actual experiment with mixed audiences. Families have hailed the chapter of Madge Vertner every Thursday as the most delightful or thrilling event of the week, and sympathetic fusion was then effected among persons who never met one of de ole stock, for all dat." He took the pipe from his mouth, looked kindly, condescendingly at his wife, reseated himself upon the stool, and smiled a self-conscious smile of Brahminical satisfaction.

"Good morning, Uncle Peter and Aunt Polly; why, how sleepy and dumpsy you look," cried a young, gay voice, and Madge Vertner stood in front of them.

"Good mornin', Miss Madge," exclaimed the two old negroes, and Uncle Peter rose, dashed his pipe away, and remained standing in the presence of his young mistress.

"Sit down, Uncle Pete," said Madge.

"No, please, missy, not when you is 'bout."

"Sit down, I say," repeated Madge, and Uncle Peter, with a politeness something akin to that of the Earl De Stair, obeyed the command of majesty.

"Aunt Polly, you look cross; has he (pointing to Uncle Peter) been scolding you?"

"Bless yer, Miss Madge, Peter's allers a hurtin' of my feelin's, and throwin' up to me dat I am not one of de reg'lar family sarvants - dat I come 'long wid a bought lot. Now, I'se bin a good bit of time in dis family plenty long for um to quit dat sort of talk."

"I think so, too, Aunt Polly; and if he married you he ought not to trouble you in this way. Why, Uncle Peter, a man's wife is as good as himself, isn't she?"

"Yes, Miss Madge, Polly is 'nuff better 'an me, an' she is my ole ooman, an' a good un into the bargain; but for all of 'at, she didn't come of as high a family. I an' my pappy, an' his pappy, an' his pappy's pappy afore um, 'longed to the Vartners, an' dar wan't no better breed saved from de ark dan de Vartners."

on any other point. The interest which we have observed could hardly be exceeded by the best representations which the drama affords.

The triumph of Madge Vertner is to have so absolutely incarnated or personified the truths which she conceives, that every scene she traverses is heart-lit from her presence, and the highest effects of the chorus in Greek tragedy are secured without the cumbrous intervention of that impersonal machinery. The social South is passed in judgment before the light of the spirit of Jesus, shining through an organism the loveliest in which ever humanity enshrined it. It was a noble day for humanity when France could raise the standard of " Art for its own sake;" for this implied the essential unity of the good and true with every æsthetic perception of harmony; the rythm of substance with form.

It were a nobler day of which Madge Vertner should herald the dawn, for here is a Christallization in which the art of fiction has endued that spiritual glory of Love of which Jesus is the permanent focus. It is owing perhaps to the habit of using the heart for an inkstand that winged seeds of thought sown by this artist pen, creations all organic, take instant root in ours. True ideas differ

Madge smiled, her eyes sparkled queenly, and a dash of red stained her cheek and brow. The blood of the Vertners acknowledged the compliment of the veteran slave.

"But, Uncle Peter, hasn't she been living in the family long enough to become one of them? Why, we have a good number of servants, papa says, who do not belong to the original stock.”

"Tain't no use a-talkin' 'bout it, young missy, kase yer kan't make a body of de ole family stock. They's got to be born to it."

Madge smiled, and did not seek further to convince him. Perhaps she believed his doctrine sound, at least when applied to people of a different complexion from herself.

"Oh, laws, Uncle Pete, has you hearn the news?" cried a hearty-looking negro girl, as she rushed up, half breathless, to the cabin; "beg pardon, Miss Madge, didn't see you at fust;" and she dropped an odd, graceless, but polite curtsy to the young mistress.

"What's the matter, Ruth?

"Laws, Miss Madge, some of our folks has done run 'way last nightorful."

"Who?" inquired Madge, without any effort to seem surprised. "Its orful mean of um to run 'way I wouldn't do sich a thing" (she was then debating in her mind the safest method of escape.) "Hopes they'll be kotched. They desarves to be even sold to de rice-fields, too— hope mas er won't let 'em stay here."

The old negro man slowly, steadily eyed the speaker, then took another whiff of his pipe, and as the girl began another harangue, said:

"Hush, Ruth; yer says a sight more an' yer believes."
"Laws, Uncle Peter, I doesn't; 'pon my soul, I doesn't."

from grammatical, intelligible and even elegant phrases, precisely by this kind of vitality. Its quality differs according to their source; some sting like wasps, some crawl like snakes; those of Madge Vertner bloom or fly. So we have books that drop to pieces like a card house, while others fast founded in personal experience receive the heart's historic honors and propagate their spiritual species. Such do we owe to this photographic pencil whose graces. of fantasy and sentiment are inlaid upon an exquisite delicacy of conception, in all that belongs to friendship and to love, the inworld of the home. Upon a pure white ground, the virgin snow of maidenhood, arise in fine relief the dramatis personæ of this work, motives and wills embodied, hosts of light and darkness battling for the heritage of Earth. And, beautiful echo of womanhood in Nature, bursts forth with the spring of its perennial youth the fresh abounding charm of an Earth unpolluted in sunniest glades of the forest, warbling her mild rebuke of human crime and cruelty, when

"Ardennes waves above them her green leaves,
Dewy with Nature's tear drops as they pass,"

with all the angelic sense of shame and shock that such deeds can be on an Earth so fair!

"Off now, Ruth, an' don't be swarin' in front of my cabin. I tells you yer has mighty little soul to swar by."

Our heroine had watched Uncle Peter's face closely during this conversation. She had read but few books, and had never known society or life in cities; she turned away from poetry, romance, and social pleasure; but a human face in the rough was a book full of interest to her. This one of the old negro's, however, puzzled her. There was an untranslatable something in his manner that went home to her, but his countenance was moveless and heavy.

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"Now, I tell you, Peter, them ar niggers is gwine to be found out, kotched an' brung back." Aunt Polly said this as she entered the cabin where Uncle Peter sat smoking away at his old pipe.

"Who tole you so, Polly?"

"Why, Peter, Lord love you, I hear masser a-talkin' to 'em about it, an' he says he's done gone and got Tom Hynes and his men sot on thar track, and then they's kotched as clar as guns."

Humph!" muttered the old man, and smoked away at his pipe. His wife knew that it was not worth while to ply him with further talk, so she set about furbishing up her pans and arranging the scanty furniture of her cabin. It was Saturday afternoon, and she said that she must "fix up for Sunday." What a blessed and beneficent institution in the slave's life is the Sabbath! The pleasant sunshiny afternoon was drawing to a close, and the quarter looked unusually cheerful. Each little grass-plat in front of the cabins had been carefully swept. Two or three of the negroes were

In reading this work, one feels ever so sweetly related with the beautiful beyond humanity, as well as within it. Thus when smarting with the keenest sense of wrong and woe, as after the scene with Jack and Milly in the jail, the Mammoth Cave opens to us a refuge in its crystal palaces, cooling the fevered spirit in Serena's bower; or the blue and sunlit firmament filters through verdure on the forest floor, the lessons of the won to the hour. If these consolations are real, it is because, finited as we are by our own faculties to do or to be, every emotional genius opens free passage to and from the Infinite, reanimating the tie between man and his Father eternal.

Nature guides the pen in a story like "Madge Vertner;" the brush, in a picture like the Heart of the Andes, and groups such productions among the living realities of her spiritual magic. The heart's instinctual logic of liberty, its demand of the "Group" and of space, are delightfully formulized and realized in that garden of Kentucky, near the town of L., where the drama of our story unfolds itself. Madge groups with her father, with Helen, with Pomp, with Rover her dog, with her horse, her pet animals and flowers, and shines as the Passional Queen of the Negro-quarter dancing, while an old man played upon a fiddle. Over by a broken fence, and upon an old topple-down keg, which had been used for an ash-bucket, was seated the negro girl Ruth, engaged in an apparently interesting tetea-tete with Daniel, the dining-room servant. She practised, in an humble and grotesque way, all those blandishments of manner that render the city belle so attractive.

Negro women, old and middle-aged, sat out in front of their respective cabins, darning socks or patching old clothes for Sunday wear, while a group of half-dressed boys played marbles, and our little Pomp, in the rear of one of the cabins, but within hearing of the music (if music it was which came from feeble, untaught hands and broken bow), had a private dance all to himself. His motions were quite remarkable, and would no doubt have greatly startled a French dancing-master. Though not such graceful pirouettes or such dexterous vaulting as we have witnessed upon the stage, still, his leapings and twirls were admirable, if it were only for their accurate regard of time. His body seemed a musical instrument in perfect tune. As he danced, he accompanied himself with a unique song, the chorus of which we give for its very oddity:

"Jump up, Ginny, with your booties on,

Three or four yards of calico."

The boy seemed to be in the very rapture of enjoyment. His eyes sparkled, and his shining brown face literally ran over with mirth and frolic

someness.

Scenes of animal life and enjoyment such as these little gleams of sunshine and pleasure in a world of blight — form the basis upon which certain wiseacres build up a wondrous superstructure of argument in favor of slavery!

with an authority more spiritual, more real and divinely substantial than ever was boasted by Elizabeth of England or Catharine of Russia. She might have been equally queen wherever the human heart exists, but would she have had anything to gain by the exchange of positions? Let Mary Stuart answer!

Our sole intention, in the selections quoted, has been to show the kind of influence which an adored young mistress exerts among the negroes. It must not be supposed that the book is all in this vein. The humorous element always bears best to be isolated from the context of a serious novel. Madge is in all her developments, animal and spiritual alike, one of the noblest confessions that modern civilization has made of the immense superiority of Nature. She is a fountain-life of instinct, healthy, pure and wise, above the wisdom of the world, with an archangel's sword to guard and to maintain her sovereignty. The truly organic character of this work forbids farther citations. These with a regular analysis could not occupy less than a volume of two hundred pages. We must distinguish in this work

1. The opinions, which, although original with Miss Griffith, are equally those of the Garrisonian platform of abolitionism, claim

When the fun was at its highest, Madge Vertner, like a visiting angel, passed through the "quarter." She was dressed in white, with a few blue ribbons fluttering about her arms, neck, and waist, while her straw hat sat jauntily upon her head, and the brown curls, thrown back from her face, swept over her neck and shoulders. Of course, she was followed closely by her companion, Rover.

"Miss

The dancers did not stop the frolic did not halt for a moment. Madge" was no stranger to them, no stiff, exacting visitor-only a higher inspiration to increased pleasures. As they skipped, shuffled and danced along, their black, shiny faces looked happier for the coming of young mistress. As she passed gayly through, she had a word for each- -some patronizing comment upon the dance, some joke to give vent to. When she came to an old or a sick slave, she made a kind inquiry after his health, or proposed some nice little remedy which he could get by sending to the house; or, she drew from her pocket a litle roll of tea, sugar, or some such luxury, which she gave to him; and so her visits were always welcome. Pomp spied her, and, forgetting both his song and jig, rushed up to her, extending his hand, and cried out, "Please, Miss Madge."

"What, sir?" and she knocked off his hand with a small stick.

is it you want?"

"Please, ma'am, some of that ar."

"What?" and she held out her two empty hands.

"Some dat ar you's givin' Uncle Ned."

"What

"Uncle Ned is sick, and I brought him a little parcel of tea and sugar." "Please, ma'am, give me some sugar."

"Why, you are not sick."

The boy paused a moment; then, assuming a serious expression, said: "Yes, miss, I'se sick — I'se had headache in my back fur long time."

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