ART. XI. Memoir of ROBERT WHEATON, with Selections from his Writings. Boston Ticknor, Reed, & Fields. 1854. pp. 385.

We have here, delicately traced by a sister's hand, the outlines of a mind and a life of singular beauty and promise. Robert Wheaton, the son of Henry Wheaton, the distinguished diplomatist and world-renowned writer on international law, was born in 1826, and spent nearly the whole of his short life in Europe, mostly at Copenhagen, Berlin, and Paris, where he enjoyed the best advantages of education furnished in those cities, without being separated, except for comparatively a short period, from the fostering influences of a home enlightened by the most cultivated society, and enriched by the intelligence, the refinement, the warm affections and Christian graces, which lend a charm to the privacy of domestic life. He was brought up in those European capitals with as much simplicity and purity as he could have been in the retirement of a New England village. In 1847 he returned to America, and in the spring of 1848, by the death of his father, between whom and himself the most intimate and confidential relations had always existed, new and heavy responsibilities devolved upon him. But he was not unprepared for them. He was engaged in the study of the law, and at the same time filled the office of a teacher in Harvard University, where he secured, to an unusual extent, the confidence and affection of all with whom he was connected. In July, 1851, he was admitted to the Boston bar, and on the 9th of the October following, four days after he had completed his twenty-fourth year, he died at his mother's home in Providence.

Such is the brief and naked outline of a life, short indeed, but filled up with as many attractive qualities, as many kind thoughts and graceful acts, as are often allowed to one so young. As a scholar he was led by high aims through habits of well-ordered industry to uncommon attainments, and his example is one which might well be held up to all young stu dents, while in the different relations of life his conduct was such as must win their esteem and love. We gladly recom

mend the book to them, and to all who as parents and teachers would direct the education of the young. It is modestly and simply prepared, with fine touches of character and deep feeling, written evidently with a tearful eye, but with a trusting heart and a hand that firmly suppresses more than it allows to appear. The delicate labor of love could not have been more delicately or more lovingly performed, and yet the portraiture is as faithful as it is delicate. They who knew Robert Wheaton while he lived will not shrink from this as an exaggerated or distorted picture of their friend.

We were going to say, that there was nothing unhealthy or precocious in the development of his faculties. His writings evince calmness, good sense, and that desire to see all round a subject, which, when united, as in this case, with habits of patient research, give the surest promise of constant growth, and of intellectual distinction and success. But perhaps he

was right, when, in quoting the remark, "A soul of thirty in a body of fourteen," he says, sadly, "I find in it my portrait at fourteen." It may be that the orderly and harmonious habits of his early life, grasping at no sudden prize, but looking on to distant results, gave some evidence of a premature wisdom, and some presage of an early death. He always looked upon himself as destined to a short life. Except for the sake of his friends, he desired no other. And as we think of him now with a knowledge of the event, we see in his early character indications of what the result must have been.

The Memoir is a touching, a beautiful one. But it belongs to a class of books which we can ill afford to have multiplied among us. The sense of what we and the community have lost in furnishing such a subject for a Memoir, is too painful to allow us to enjoy, as we otherwise might, the rare and lovely traits which are brought before us.

This book, which we have read with such mingled emotions of pleasure and sadness, calls up before us a whole series of lives cut off just as it was beginning to appear how richly endowed and full of promise they were. Among them are Margaret and Lucretia Davidson, whose names are endeared to us, and made to hold a lasting place in our literature, through the beautiful Memoirs of their lives which have been

prepared by Miss Sedgwick and Washington Irving. To these we may add William Friend Durant, "an only son," of whose short life (for he died when in his nineteenth year) a very instructive and affecting account was given by his father, Robert Swain, and Robert Troup Paine, both, like Durant and Robert Wheaton, only sons, whose lives were too beauti ful to perish wholly from the earth; and James Jackson, Jr., whose Memoirs by his father, so simple, modest, and truthful, we should delight to have placed in the hands of every boy who is capable of being touched by a pure example of youthful virtue and intelligence. We might add other names more widely known in the world of letters. There is Henry Kirke White, at the age of twenty-one, sinking, to use his own expressive words,

"As sinks a stranger in the crowded streets
Of busy London,"

but to whose name and writings the sympathy excited by his early death has given an interest, with which the faithful labors of a longer life might have failed to invest them. Chatterton, "the marvellous boy," born in 1752, and dying before he had completed his eighteenth year, though superior in genius, does not awaken the same undisturbed feelings of love and respect which are inspired by the other names that we have mentioned, or by that of Keats, who comes before us almost as the ideal of a youthful poet, calling out all our tenderness, but too frail and sensitive for life, and, at the age of twenty-four, passing away,

"Purpureus veluti quum flos succisus aratro
Languescit moriens."

Living to a maturer age, though belonging to this same class, is Arthur Hallam, known within a limited circle through the Memoirs by his father, but known wherever our language is spoken through Tennyson's "In Memoriam," where his life and memory have become, like Milton's Lycidas, immortal.

It is not, however, our purpose to dwell on these examples of youthful promise, "fading timelessly," but rather on other topics suggested by them. Beautiful as have been the characters of those who have passed away so early, promising as their works have been, and touching as are the memorials VOL. LXXIX. NO. 164.

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of their lives that remain to us, there is no one among them all who has left a single work which, on its own merits, would take a permanent place in the higher literature of the world. Their names are preserved. Their lives are read with interest and profit. But maturer thoughts, and faculties enriched by longer study and a riper experience, are needed for the construction of those great works which live on in the minds and hearts of after generations. The richest intellectual soils are the slowest to mature their fruits. They may be, and they often are, the earliest to give indications of future greatness. But their best works are usually those which are produced after they have completed the first half of their threescore and ten years. Wonderful stories are told of such men as the Admirable Crichton, whose life was two years shorter than that of Robert Wheaton, and John Picus of Mirandola, who was already one of the most accomplished scholars of his time when he died, in 1494, at the age of thirty-one. We hear of their marvellous attainments, but no one reads their works.

The memory is sometimes singularly retentive in early life. The powers of acquisition are never perhaps greater. There is a quickness of perception and emotion, a rapidity of utterance, and an extraordinary dialectic skill. But the formative faculty which perfectly masters and controls its materials, moulding them into grand and beautiful poetic creations, or drawing from them the largest inductions of wisdom, belongs to a later age. The richness of style, which in all the higher works of literature has such power over us, but which is so much a part of the thought itself, and of the emotions by which the thought is pervaded, seldom belongs to the earlier productions of any distinguished writer.

From the age of twenty to that of thirty-five or forty is a period of great efficiency and activity. Politicians, orators, warriors, and artists are then formed, and some of their greatest triumphs gained. Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon had made themselves known by some of their most extraordinary military achievements before they were thirty. William Pitt was the prime minister of England when twenty-five, and as a statesman and debater in the House of Commons sustained himself from that day onward against such men as

Fox and Burke. In our own country, Alexander Hamilton was but little more than thirty years old when, in the Convention for framing the Constitution of the United States, he showed himself inferior to none of his able and experienced associates, and before he was thirty-seven, as Secretary of the Treasury, he had matured and carried into effect the most complicated and difficult measures for the successful administration of the new government.

But in the richer productions of genius which belong to the highest departments of literature, a longer preparation is needed, and among the greatest authors that the world has known we can call to mind only two or three who would have left any of their best works behind them, if they had died before the age of thirty-five, or even forty. Stores for future use have not only to be laid up, but to be prepared in the mind by the mellowing influence of time. A facility in the use of materials is to be acquired. The faculties are to be strengthened and harmonized. The grand thoughts which are to be perpetuated in later works have, perhaps, been suggested. An ideal of what is to be dawns vaguely upon the mind. The intellectual character is formed. But the perfected results are usually of a later growth. Newton, when twenty-four years old, had already anticipated the two great discoveries which were afterwards to lie at the foundation of his enduring fame; but he was forty before he had verified his grand conception of the law of gravitation, forty-two before he had completed his calculations, and forty-four before the great work on which his reputation rests was ready for the world. Bacon at the age of twenty-three had "taken all knowledge to be his province"; but if he and Newton had died before the age of forty, neither of them would have left any production to hold the highest place in his peculiar department, and if remembered at all, they would have been remembered only as among the lesser divinities of thought. Shakespeare's Hamlet was probably written when he was thirty-three, and revised three years afterwards. But, with this exception, his grandest works, The Tempest, Lear, Macbeth, and Othello, were among his latest productions, and composed after he was forty years of age. Milton was early moved by a consciousness of the ex