name.

begins to tell a thing I believe in finishin' on't some time or other. Some folks have a way of talkin' round and round and round forevermore, and never comin' to the pint. Now there's Miss Jinkins, she that was Poll Bingham afore she was married, she is the tejusest individooal to tell a story that ever I see in all my born days. But I was a gwine to tell you what husband said. He says to me, says he, "Silly"; says I, "What?" I dident say, "What, Hezekier?" for I dident like his The first time I ever heard it I near killed myself a laffin. "Hezekier Bedott," says I, "well, I would give up if I had sich a name,” but then you know I had no more idee o' marryin' the feller than you have this minnit o' marryin' the governor. I s'pose you think it's curus we should a named our oldest son Hezekiah. Well, we done it to please father and mother Bedott; it's father Bedott's name, and he and mother Bedott both used to think that names had ought to go down from gineration to gineration. But we always called him Kier, you know. Speakin' o' Kier, he is a blessin', ain't he? and I ain't the only one that thinks so, I guess. Now don't you never tell nobody that I said so, but between you and me I rather guess that if Kezier Winkle thinks she is a gwine to ketch Kier Bedott she is a leetle out of her reckonin'. But I was going to tell what husband said. He says to me, says he, "Silly"; I says, says I, "What?" If I dident say "what" when he said "Silly" he'd a kept on saying "Silly," from time to eternity. He always did, because you know, he wanted me to pay pertikkeler attention, and I ginerally did; no woman was ever more attentive to her husband than what I was. Well, he says to me, says he, "Silly." Says I, "What?" though I'd no idee what he was gwine to say, dident know but what 'twas something about his sufferings, though he wa'n't apt to complain, but he frequently used to remark that he wouldent wish his worst enemy to suffer one minnit as he did all the time; but that can't be called grumblin'-think it can? Why I've seen him in sitivations when you'd a thought no mortal could a helped grumblin'; but he dident. He and me went once in the dead of winter in a one-hoss shay out to Boonville to see a sister o' hisen. You know the snow is amazin' deep in that section o' the kentry. Well, the hoss got stuck in one o' them are flambergasted snow-banks, and there we sot, onable to stir, and to cap all, while we was a sittin' there, husband was took with a dretful crik in his back. Now that was what I call a perdickerment, don't you? Most men would a swore, but husband dident. He only said, says he, "Consarn it." How did we get out, did you ask? Why we might a been sittin' there to this day fur as I know, if there hadent a happened to come along a mess o' men in a double team, and they hysted us out. But I was gwine to tell you that observation of hisen. Says he to me, says he, “Silly" (I could see by the light o' the fire, there dident hap

VOL. VII.-7

pen to be no candle burnin', if I don't disremember, though my memory is sometimes ruther forgitful, but I know we wa'n't apt to burn candles exceptin' when we had company)—I could see by the light of the fire that his mind was oncommon solemnized. Says he to me, says he, "Silly." I says to him, says I, "What?" He says to me, says he, "We're all poor critters!"

WE

George Washington Greene.

BORN in East Greenwich, R. I., 1811. DIED there, 1883.

WITH COLE, THE PAINTER, AT ROME.

[Biographical Studies. 1860.]

E sat and watched the lingering day. We saw the shadows slowly stealing up from the valley, and the last sunbeams meekly fading into twilight. We saw that second glow which bursts forth when the sun is gone; the last look of expiring day at the scenes which it had gladdened by its smile, swathing the mountain-sides in golden floods, and playing along their rugged crests like lightning on the edges of a cloud. Then this, too, passed away, and through the mountain gap above Tivoli rose a soft and silvery gleam, gradually extending over the horizon, and growing purer and brighter, till the full moon came forth unveiled, and shed her beams so gently on all that magic scene, that the rough mountain-side seemed to smile at their touch, and the dank vapors, that floated cloud-like far and wide over the Campagna, looked like islands of liquid light.

We spoke of the past; of the thousands who had come from distant places to look upon that scene; of the mysterious decree which had crowded so large a portion of the world's destinies within that narrow circle. We summoned the plebeians of old to people once more the deserted hill on which they had called into life the second element of Roman greatness. We pitched the tent of the Carthaginian on the banks of the Anio, and watched the beams that fell on the gray mounds that once were the Tusculum of Cicero. And as we asked ourselves why all this had been, and why it had been so, and not otherwise, Cole's thoughts went back to his "Course of Empire," and the conception from which it had sprung, and how he had hoped to make landscape speak to the heart. by the pencil, as it was speaking to us, there, of the great questions of life. He talked, too, of the works which he had planned, in which nature was to tell a story of vaster import than the rise and fall of

human power-the triumph of religion. And as he spoke, his heart seemed to glow with the conception, and his imagination called up wonderful forms, and his words flowed fast and with burning eloquence, for it was a thought which had long been dear to him. He had clung to it through disappointment and depression. When compelled to force himself down to little tasks for his daily bread, it had still been with him a burning aspiration and a strengthening hope; and a few years later, when he laid down his pencil for the last time, the third picture of the first of that wonderful series stood yet unfinished on his easel.

When we returned home, he asked for a copy of Bryant, and read the "Thanatopsis," and the "Hymn to the North Star"; and as his mind. grew calmer under the influence of the poet he loved most, his thoughts turned homewards to gentler and familiar scenes, and he went on with the "Rivulet," and "Green River," and others of those exquisite pieces, which reflect the sweet aspect of nature so truthfully that their melody steals into the heart with the balmy freshness of nature's own soothings.

Cole remained in Rome till April. The "Voyage of Life" had always been one of his favorite compositions, and he felt a peculiar pleasure in painting it over again in Rome.

When the first three pictures were finished and the fourth nearly so, Terry lent him his studio in the Orto di Napoli to exhibit them in, and he became anxious to have Thorwaldsen see them. As I had frequent opportunities of meeting him, I undertook to arrange an interview between the two artists. Thorwaldsen accepted the invitation at once, and fixed upon the next morning for his visit. Crawford, who neglected no opportunity' of conversing with his great master, offered to show him the way, and I went before to see that all was ready.

The moment that he entered the room, I could see by the lighting up of his clear, blue eye, that he felt himself at home; and before Cole could do anything more than name the subject of the series, he took up the interpretation himself, and read the story off from the canvas, with a readiness that made Cole's eyes moisten with delight. When he came to the last, he paused and gazed; then returned to the first, passed slowly before them all; and coming back to the last again, stood before it for a long while without uttering a word. It seemed to me as if he felt that he, too, had reached that silent sea, and was comparing the recollections of his own eventful career with the story of the old man and his shattered bark. And to this day I can never look upon that picture without fancying that I still see Thorwaldsen standing before it, with his gray locks falling over his shoulders, like those of the hero of the picture, and his serene features composed to deep and solemn meditation. It was the old man, in Young, walking

When, at last, he spoke, it was in the strongest terms of gratification: and often as we used to meet during those last two years of his life in Rome, he never forgot to inquire after Cole; always ending with-"Great artist, great artist."

Henry James.

BORN in Albany, N. Y., 1811. DIED at Cambridge, Mass., 1882.

OUR EXISTING CIVILIZATION.

[Is Marriage Holy ?—The Atlantic Monthly. 1870.]

SOCIETY is getting to mean, now, something very different from what

it has ever before meant. It has all along meant an instituted or conventional order among men, and this order was to be maintained at whatever cost to the individual man; if need be, at the cost of his utmost physical and moral degradation. People no longer put this extravagant estimate upon our civic organization. Our existing civilization seems now very dear at that costly price. Society, in short, is beginning to claim interests essentially repugnant to those of any established order. It utterly refuses to be identified with any mere institutions, however conventionally sacred, and claims to be a plenary divine righteousness in our very nature. The critical moment of destiny seems to be approaching, the day of justice and judgment for which the world has been so long agonizing in prayer, a day big with wrath against every interest of man which is organized upon the principle of his inequality with his brother, and full of peace to every interest established upon their essential fellowship. Every day an increasing number of persons reject our cruel civilization as a finality of God's providence upon earth. Every day burns the conviction deeper in men's bosoms, that there is no life of man on earth so poor and abject, whose purification and sanctification are not an infinitely nearer and dearer object to the heart of God than the welfare of any Paris, any London, any New York extant. And this rising preponderance of the human sentiment in consciousness over the personal one is precisely what accounts for the growing disrespect into which our legal administration is falling, and precisely what it must try to mould itself upon, if it would recover again the lost ground to which its fidelity to the old ideas is constantly subjecting it.

Noah Porter.

BORN in Farmington, Conn., 1811. DIED at New Haven, Conn, 1892.

RELIGIOUS BOOKS.

[Books and Reading. 1870.]

RELIGIOUS books may be divided into four classes: good books, i. e.,

books which are very good-goodish books-books which are good for nothing-books which are worse than nothing.

Good books are such as are positive and conspicuous for one or all of three merits-merits of thought, feeling, and diction. Every good book can show a raison d'être. There is some occasion for its being produced and read. Good books invariably bear marks of having originated in a gifted mind-in a mind set apart by nature or called of God to speak to one's fellow-men by reason of the gift of genius or of earnestness. They show the signs of this calling and these gifts, and awaken a response in the ear and the hearts of the truly earnest or the truly cultured of those who hear them, and thus prove there was an occasion for their being written. Goodish books are books of second-hand goodness-books that are consciously or unconsciously imitated from good books-books that repeat old thoughts, by stupid and servile copying, or with such original variations as despoil them of their freshness and life-books which seek to express simple and familiar emotions without just or real feeling-books which strain out affected conceits, or extravagant imagery, with some empty ambition of originality-books whose authors are willing to gain the admiration of the uncultured and the half-cultured by any extravagance of thought or diction. Above all, they are books which utter the words of religious feeling when the writer does not really possess it, or possessing it describes the objects of his excited emotion in borrowed or stereotyped phraseology. Such books are deformed by more or less of cant in the strict and proper acceptation of that term, as characterizing an unsuccessful attempt to sing what another sings heartily and sings well. Goodish books may have more or less positive merit, with all their strained and factitious untruth-they may be eminently useful to readers who do not observe their defects or are not offended by them, who do not require anything better, or who may have a taste so perverted as to prefer them to good books, even though good books would be far better for them. There is unhappily, in the religious world, a very large class of books of whom the remark of a shrewd observer will hold, "Men who are simply and earnestly good, I like exceedingly, but goodish men or those who put on airs of goodness, not at all."