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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5,
+November 1864, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864
+       Devoted To Literature And National Policy
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE
+
+  CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:
+
+  DEVOTED TO
+
+  LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.
+
+
+
+  VOL. VI.--NOVEMBER, 1864--No. V.
+
+
+
+
+THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+There are three classes of persons in the loyal States of this Union who
+proclaim the present civil war unnecessary, and clamor for peace at any
+price: first, a multitude of people, so ignorant of the history of the
+country that they do not know what the conflict is about; secondly, a
+smaller class of better-informed citizens, who have no moral
+comprehension of the inevitable opposition of democracy and aristocracy,
+free society and slave society, and who believe sincerely that a
+permanent compromise or trade can be negotiated between these opposing
+forces in human affairs; thirdly, a clique of demagogues, who are trying
+to use these two classes of people to paralyze the Government, and force
+it into a surrender to the rebels on such terms as they choose to
+dictate: their separation from the United States or recall to their old
+power in a restored and reconstructed Union.
+
+It will be my purpose, in this article, to show the complete fallacy of
+this notion, by presenting the facts concerning the progress of the
+different portions of our country in the American idea of liberty during
+the years preceding this war. The census of 1860, if honestly studied,
+must convince any unprejudiced man, at home or abroad, that the Slave
+Power deliberately brought this war upon the United States, to save
+itself from destruction by the irresistible and powerful growth of free
+society in the Union. This war had the same origin and necessity of
+every great conflict between the people and the aristocracy since the
+world began.
+
+Every war of this kind in history has been the result of the advancement
+of the people in liberty. Now the people have inaugurated the conflict
+against the aristocracy, either in the interest of self-government, or
+an imperial rule which should virtually rest upon their suffrage. Now
+the aristocracy has risen upon the people, who were becoming too strong
+and free, to conquer and govern them through republican or monarchical
+forms of society. There has always been an irrepressible conflict
+between aristocracy and democracy; in times of peace carried on by all
+the agencies of popular advancement; but in every nation finally
+bursting into civil war. And every such war, however slow its progress,
+or uncertain its immediate consequence, has finally left the mass of
+the people nearer liberty than it found them.
+
+The northern Grecian states represented the cause of the people; and the
+oriental empires the cause of the few. These little states grew so
+rapidly that the despots of Asia became alarmed, and organized gigantic
+expeditions to destroy them. At Marathon and Salamis, the people's cause
+met and drove back the mighty invasion; and two hundred years later,
+under the lead of Alexander, dissolved every Asiatic empire, from the
+Mediterranean to the Euphrates, to its original elements.
+
+Julius Cæsar destroyed the power of the old Roman aristocracy in the
+interest of the people of the Roman empire. Under the name of 'The
+Republic,' that patrician class had oppressed the people of Rome and her
+provinces for years as never was people oppressed before. After fifty
+years of civil war, Julius and Augustus Cæsar organized the masses of
+this world-wide empire, and established a government under which the
+aristocracy was fearfully worried, but which administered such, justice
+to the world as had never before been possible.
+
+The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
+involved the whole of Europe for eighty years, were begun by the civil
+and religious aristocracy of Europe to crush the progress of religious
+and civil liberty among the people. These wars continued until religious
+freedom was established in Germany, Holland, and Great Britain, and
+those seeds of political liberty sown that afterward sprang up in the
+American republic.
+
+The English civil wars of the seventeenth century were begun by the king
+and great nobles to suppress the rising power of the commons, and
+continued till constitutional liberty was practically secured to all the
+subjects of the British empire.
+
+The French Revolution was the revolt of the people of France against one
+of the most cruel and tyrannical aristocracies that ever reigned; and
+continued, with brief interruptions, till the people of both France and
+Italy had vindicated the right to choose their emperors by popular
+suffrage.
+
+During the half century between the years 1775 and 1825, every people in
+North America had thrown off the power of a foreign aristocracy by war,
+and established a republican form of government, except the Canadas,
+which secured the same practical results by more peaceful methods.
+
+The historian perceives that each of these great wars was an inevitable
+condition of liberty for the people, and has exalted their condition. In
+all these struggles there were the same kinds of opponents to the war:
+the ignorant, who knew nothing about it; the morally indifferent, who
+could not see why freemen and tyrants could not agree to live together
+in amity; and the demagogues, who were willing to ruin the country to
+exalt themselves. But we now understand that only through these red
+gates of war could the peoples of the world have marched up to their
+present enjoyment of liberty; that each naming portal is a triumphal
+arch, on which is inscribed some great conquest for mankind.
+
+The present civil war in the United States is the last frantic attempt
+of this dying feudal aristocracy to save itself from inevitable
+dissolution. The election of Mr. Lincoln as President of the United
+States, in 1860, by the vote of every Free State, was the announcement
+to the world that the people of the United States had finally and
+decisively conquered the feudal aristocracy of the republic after a
+civil contest of eighty years. With no weapons but those placed in their
+hands by the Constitution of the United States, the freemen of the
+republic had practically put this great slave aristocracy under their
+feet forever. That portion of the Union which was controlled by the will
+of the whole people had become so decidedly superior in every attribute
+of power and civilization, that the slave aristocracy despaired of
+further peaceful resistance to the march of liberty through the land.
+Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the
+people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of
+it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy.
+
+This great people was not plunged into civil war by unfriendly talking,
+or by the unfriendly legislation of the Northern people, or by the
+accidental election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Nations do not go
+to war for hard words or trifling acts of unfriendliness or accidental
+political changes; although these may be the ostensible causes of
+war--the sparks that finally explode the magazine. There was a real
+cause for this rebellion--_the peaceful, constitutional triumph of the
+people over the aristocracy of the republic, after a struggle of eighty
+years_. If ever a great oligarchy had good reason to fight, it was the
+Slave Power in 1860. It found itself defeated and condemned to a
+secondary position in the republic, with the assurance that its death
+was only a question of time. It is always a good cause of war to an
+aristocracy that its power is abridged; for an aristocracy cares only
+for itself, and honestly regards its own supremacy as the chief interest
+on earth. This Slave Power has only done what every such power has done
+since the foundation of the world. It has drawn the sword against the
+inevitable progress of mankind, and will be conquered by mankind. It is
+waging this terrible war, not against Northern Abolitionists, or the
+present Administration, _but against the United States census tables of
+1860_; against the mighty realities of the progress of free society in
+the republic, which have startled us all; but with which no class of men
+were so well acquainted as Mr. Jefferson Davis and his associates in
+rebellion.
+
+There has always been a conflict in our country between this old slave
+aristocracy and the people. The first great victory of the people was in
+the war of the Revolution. That war was inaugurated and forced upon the
+country by the masses of the people of the New England and Middle
+States. The aristocracy of the South, with their associates in the
+North, resisted the movement to separate the people from the crown of
+Great Britain, till resistance was impossible, and then came in, to some
+extent, to lead the movement and appropriate the rewards of success. But
+the free people of the North brought on and sustained the war.
+Massachusetts was then the fourth province in population; but she sent
+eight thousand more soldiers to the field during those bloody eight
+years than all the Southern States united. Virginia was then the empire
+State of the Union, and Rhode Island the least; but great, aristocratic
+Virginia furnished only seven hundred more soldiers than little,
+democratic Rhode Island. New England furnished more than half the troops
+raised during the Revolution; and the great centres of aristocracy in
+the Middle and Southern States were the stronghold of Toryism during the
+war. Indeed, a glance at the map of the Eastern and Middle States
+reveals the fact that the headquarters of the 'peace party' in the
+Revolutionary and the present war are in precisely the same localities.
+The 'Copperhead' districts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are
+the old Tory districts of the Revolution. The Tories of that day, with
+the mass of the Southern aristocracy, tried to 'stop the war' which was
+to lay the foundations of the freedom of all men. The Tories of to-day
+are engaged in the same infamous enterprise, and their fate will be the
+same.
+
+Had the Slave Power been united in 1776, we should never have gained our
+independence. But it was divided. Every State was nominally a Slave
+State; but slaveholders were divided into two classes. The first was led
+by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other illustrious aristocrats,
+North and South; and, like the Liberal lords of Great Britain, threw
+their influence on the side of the people. This party, very strong in
+Virginia, very weak in the Carolinas, dragged the South through the war
+by the hair of its head; and compelled it to come into the Union. It
+also resolved to abolish the Slave Power, and succeeded in consecrating
+the whole Northwestern territory to freedom as early as 1790. The
+opposition party had its headquarters at Charleston, was treasonable or
+luke-warm during the war, and refused to come into the Union without
+guarantees for slavery.
+
+The result of the whole struggle was, that the people of the thirteen
+colonies, with the help of a portion of their aristocracy, severed the
+country from Great Britain, and established a Government by which they,
+the people, believed themselves able, in time, to control the whole
+Union, and secure personal liberty in every State. For 'the compromises
+of the Constitution' mean just this: that our National Government was a
+great arena on which aristocracy and democracy could have a free fight.
+If the aristocracy beat, that Government would be made as despotic as
+South Carolina; if the democracy triumphed, it would become as free as
+Massachusetts. That was what the people had never before achieved: _a
+free field to work for a Christian democracy_. God bless the sturdy
+people of New England and the Middle States for this! God bless George
+Washington and Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and the liberal gentlemen
+of the Old Dominion, for helping the people do it. They did not win the
+victory, as many have supposed; but they bravely helped to lead the
+people of the Free States to this great military and civil achievement.
+Virginia was richly paid for the service of her aristocracy. But history
+tells us who did the work, and how nobly it was done.
+
+The republic was now established, with a Constitution which might be
+made to uphold a democratic or an aristocratic government, as either
+party should triumph. The Slave Power, forced half reluctantly into the
+Union, now began to conspire to rule it for its own uses. All that was
+necessary, it thought, was to unite the aristocracy against the people.
+And this work was at once well begun. The first census was taken in
+1790, and the last in 1860. This period divides itself, historically,
+into two portions. The thirty years from 1780 may be regarded as the
+period of the _consolidation of the Slave Power, and its first distinct
+appearance as a great sectional aristocracy in 1820, in the struggle
+that resulted in the 'Missouri Compromise_.' The forty years succeeding
+1820 may be called the period of the _consolidation of freedom to resist
+this assault, and the final triumph of democracy in 1860, by the
+election of a President_.
+
+The first thirty years was a period of incessant activity by the slave
+aristocracy. It incurred a nominal loss in the abolition of slavery in
+eight Eastern and Middle States, and the consecration of the great
+Northwestern territory to freedom; out of which three great Free States
+had already been carved; making, in 1820, eleven Free States. But it had
+gained by the concentration of its power below the line of the Ohio and
+Pennsylvania boundary, the division of the territory belonging to the
+Carolinas, and the Louisiana purchase; whereby it had gained five new
+Slave States; making the number of Slave States equal to the
+Free--eleven. It put forward the liberal aristocracy of Virginia to
+occupy the Presidential chair during thirty-two of the thirty-six years
+between 1789 and 1825; thus compelling Virginia and Maryland to a firm
+alliance with itself. It had man[oe]uvred the country through a great
+political struggle and a foreign war, both of which were chiefly
+engineered to secure the consolidation of the slave aristocracy. In
+1820 its power was extended in eleven States, containing four hundred
+and twenty-four thousand square miles, with one hundred and seventy-nine
+thousand square miles of territory sure to come in as Slave States; and
+the remainder of the Louisiana purchase not secure to liberty. It had a
+white population only seven hundred thousand less, while its white and
+black population was a million more than all the Free States.
+
+The North was barely half as large in area of States: two hundred and
+seventy thousand square miles, with only one hundred thousand square
+miles in reserve of the territory dedicated to liberty. With an equality
+of representation in the Senate of the United States, and a firm hold of
+all the branches of the Government, the prospect of the oligarchy for
+success was brilliant. In every nation the aristocracy first gets
+possession, organizes first, and proceeds deliberately to seize and
+administer the government. The people are always unsuspicious, slow,
+late in organizing, and seem to blunder into success or be led to it by
+a Providence higher than themselves. In this Government the slave
+aristocracy first consolidated, and in 1820 appeared boldly on the
+arena, claiming the superiority, and threatening ruin to the republic in
+the event of the failure of their plans. It had managed so well that
+there was now no division in its ranks, and for the last forty years has
+moved forward in solid column to repeated assaults on liberty.
+
+The people, as usual, did not suspect the existence of this concentrated
+power till 1820. They made a brave militia fight then against the
+aristocracy, and compelled it to acknowledge a drawn battle by the
+admission of Maine to balance Missouri, and the establishment of a line
+of compromise, which would leave all territory north of 36° 30'
+consecrated to freedom. The Slave Power submitted with anger, intending
+to break the bargain as soon as it was strong enough, and continued on
+its relentless struggle for power. It determined to gain possession of
+the Senate of the United States; make it a house of nobles; control
+through it the foreign policy, the Executive, and the Supreme Court;
+and, with this advantage, reckoned it could always manage the House of
+Representatives and govern the nation. The key to all the political
+policy of the Slave Power through these last forty years is this
+endeavor to capture the Senate of the United States, and hold it, by
+bringing in a superior _number_ of Slave States. So well did it play
+this card that, till 1850, it maintained an equality of senatorial
+representation, and, by the help of Northern allies and the superior
+political dexterity of the aristocracy, controlled our foreign policy;
+kept its own representatives in all the great courts of Europe; made
+peace or war at will; managed the Executive through a veto on his
+appointments; and endeavored to fill the Supreme Court with men in favor
+of its policy, while the House of Representatives never was able to pass
+a measure without its consent. Under the past forty years' reign of the
+Slave Power, the Senate of the United States has been a greater farce in
+the republic than the crown and House of Lords in the British empire.
+Indeed, so well did this aristocracy play its part, _that it was
+supposed by the whole world to be the American Government_; and the news
+that the people of the United States had refused, in 1860, to register
+its behests, was received abroad with the same astonishment and
+indignation as if there had been a revolt of the subjects of any
+European nation against their anointed rulers.
+
+But spite of these great advantages at the outset--spite of its
+incredible political activity and admirable concentration, the slave
+aristocracy was finally defeated by the people. How this was done is the
+most interesting narrative in modern history. Never has the intrinsic
+superiority of a democratic over an aristocratic order of society been
+so magnificently vindicated as during the last forty years of our
+national career. During that period the free portion of this Union has
+grown to an overwhelming superiority over the slave portion, and
+compelled the slaveholders to draw the sword to save themselves from
+material and providential destruction.
+
+This period of forty years may be regarded as that of the _consolidation
+of the people_. The first thirty years of it was the era of their
+_industrial and social consolidation_; the last ten years has been the
+period of their _political union against the Slave Power_.
+
+An aristocracy always exhibits the uttermost pitch of human policy in
+its career, and amazes and outwits society by its marvellous display of
+executive ability. But the people are always moved by great supernatural
+forces that are beyond their comprehension, often disowned or scorned by
+them, but which mould their destiny and lead them to a victory spite of
+themselves. The people always grow without conscious plan or method, and
+rarely know their own strength. But there are always a few great men who
+represent their destiny, and, often against their will, direct them in
+the path to liberty. History will record the names of three great men
+who, during the last forty years, have been the most notable figures in
+this consolidation of the people in this republic; three men that the
+implacable hatred of the Slave Power has singled out from all other
+Northern men as special objects of infamy; men who represent the
+industrial, moral, and political phases of the people's growth to
+supremacy. Each came when he was wanted, and faithfully did his work;
+and their history is the chronicle of this advance of liberty in the
+republic.
+
+The first of these men was De Witt Clinton, of New York. No Northern man
+so early discovered the deep game of the Slave Power as he. He was the
+ablest statesman of the North in the days when the aristocracy of the
+South was just effecting its consolidation. He was a prominent candidate
+for the Presidency, and was scornfully put down by the power that ruled
+at Richmond. The slaveholders knew him for their clear-headed enemy, and
+drove him out of the arena of national politics. Never was political
+defeat so auspicious. Cured of the political ambition of his youth, Mr.
+Clinton turned the energies of his massive genius to the _industrial
+consolidation of the North_. He saw that all future political triumph of
+liberty must rest on the triumph of free labor. He anticipated the
+coming greatness of the Northwest, and boldly devoted his life to the
+inauguration of that system of internal improvements which has made the
+Northern States the mighty, free industrial empire it now is. Within the
+period of ten years lying nearest 1820, the people, under the lead of
+Clinton and his associates, had brought into active operation the three
+great agencies of free labor--the steamer, the canal, the railroad;
+while our manufacturing industry dates from the same period.
+
+This was the providential movement of a great people, organizing a
+method of labor which should overthrow the American aristocracy. Of
+course the people did not know what all this meant; thousands of the men
+who were foremost in organizing Northern industry did not suspect the
+end; but De Witt Clinton knew. The wiseacres of the city of New York
+nicknamed his canal 'Clinton's Ditch.' It was the first ditch in that
+series of continental 'parallels' by which the people of the North have
+approached the citadel of the Slave Power. They have dug in those vast
+intrenchments for forty years, to such purpose that in 1860 the great
+guns of free labor commanded every plantation in the Union. Pardon them,
+then, O lieutenant-generals of the slavery forces, if they still think
+well of the spade that has dug their highway to power. The Northern
+spade is a slow machine--but it will yet shovel the slave aristocracy
+into the Gulf of Mexico as sure as God lives!
+
+Glance over this field of industrial and material growth in the free
+portion of the Union, as it appeared in 1860.
+
+At that time the Free States had increased to nineteen, while the Slave
+States were fifteen, containing eight hundred and seventy-five thousand
+square miles. The people had nine hundred and fifty thousand square
+miles organized into free-labor States, with eight vast Territories,
+containing one million square miles, an area equal to twenty-four States
+as large as New York. In this vast extent of States and Territories,
+including two thirds the land of the Union, there were not a hundred
+slaves. _The Government holds all those States and Territories to-day._
+
+Look at the position and value of these possessions of freedom. In 1850
+liberty secured the great State of California, and in 1860 the State of
+Kansas. These States insure the possession of the whole Pacific coast,
+the entire mineral wealth of the mountains, the Indian Territory, and
+the vast spaces of Northwestern Texas to freedom, and open Mexico to
+Northern occupation. In the East, freedom had already secured the best
+harbors for commerce; in the Northwest, the granary of the world; the
+inexhaustible mineral wealth of Lake Superior, and the navigation of
+thousands of miles upon the great inland seas that separate the republic
+from the Canadas. From the Northern Atlantic and the Pacific it
+commanded the trade of Europe and Asia. This region embraces the best
+climates of the continent for the habitation of a vigorous race of men,
+and contains all the elements of imperial power.
+
+Freedom had secured, in 1860, a population of twenty millions, while the
+Slave Power had reached but twelve millions, one third of whom were
+slaves. From 1850 to 1860 the Union _gained_ almost as much in
+population as the entire census of 1820; and of that gain the North
+secured forty-one and the South but twenty-seven per cent. The slave
+population increased but twenty-three per cent. At this rate of increase
+the year 1900 will see a population of one hundred millions in the
+Union, of whom nine millions will be negroes, and a vast majority of the
+white population located in territory now free. Between 1820 and 1860
+five million emigrants reënforced the Union, of which the North received
+the greater portion. Between the war of 1814 and 1860, Great Britain and
+Ireland sent to us more people than inhabited the thirteen States that
+formed the Union, and of this immigrant population there was an excess
+of nine hundred and fifty thousand _men_--a nation poured in upon the
+great, free North, to reënforce the people.
+
+Already was this increase of free population telling upon slave labor in
+Slave States. Even in the Gulf cities Sambo was fast receding before the
+brawny arms of Hans and Patrick. Northwestern Texan was becoming a new
+Germany. Western Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware were rapidly
+losing in slave labor; while along the border had grown up a line of ten
+cities in Slave States, containing six hundred thousand people, of whom
+less than ten thousand were slaves. This line of cities, from Wilmington
+Delaware, to St. Louis, Missouri, was becoming a great cordon of
+free-labor citadels; supported in the rear by another line of Free
+Border-State cities, stretching from Philadelphia to Leavenworth,
+containing nine hundred thousand; thus _massing a free population of one
+million five hundred thousand in border cities that overlooked the land
+of despotism_.
+
+Then consider the growth of free agriculture. In 1860 the South had a
+cotton and rice crop as her exclusive possession. Already the Northwest
+was encroaching upon her sugar cultivation. Against her agriculture,
+mainly supported by one great staple, which can also be cultivated all
+round the globe, the free North could oppose every variety of crop;
+several of greater value than the boasted cotton. In all the grains, in
+cattle and the products of the dairy, in hay, in fruits; in the superior
+cultivation of land; in the vastly superior value of land; in
+agricultural machinery, probably representing a labor force equal to all
+the slaves--the superiority of freedom was too evident for discussion.
+_The value of agricultural machinery in the Free States had trebled
+between 1850 and 1860_. The Homestead Law was the fit result of this
+vast advance of free labor, and has sealed the destiny of every present
+and future Territory of the Union.
+
+Then contemplate the vast expansion of manufacturing industry, of which
+nine tenths belong to the Free States. _In ten years from 1850 to 1860,
+this branch of labor had increased eighty-six per cent._, reaching the
+enormous sum of $2,000,000,000; $60 for every inhabitant of the Union. A
+million and a half of people were engaged as operatives therein,
+supporting nearly five millions--one sixth the whole population of the
+Union; while fully one third our population may be said to directly and
+indirectly live by manufactures.
+
+The increase of iron manufactures in ten years was forty-four per cent.;
+the coal mines reached a treble yield in ten years; $10,000,000, of
+clothing were produced in 1860. The lumber trade had increased
+sixty-four percent, in ten years, reaching $100,000,000. Flouring mills
+showed sixty-five per cent, increase, reaching $225,000,000; spirits,
+$24,000,000; cotton manufactures had increased seventy-six per cent, in
+ten years, reaching $115,000,000; woollens had increased sixty-seven per
+cent.; boots and shoes walked up to $76,000,000, and leather to
+$63,000,000. The fishermen of New England increased mightily. The gold
+of California, copper of the Northwest, the salt of New York and
+Michigan had reached colossal proportions. Whoever studies the
+manufacturing statistics of the North for the past ten years will be at
+no loss to know why the manufacturers of Great Britain are willing to
+sever the Slave States from the Union, to gain a customer it was thus
+supplying in 1860.
+
+Now add to this array of agriculture, manufactures, extent of territory,
+and excess of population, the superiority of the Free States in
+commerce. The tonnage of the Union was twenty-six millions in 1860, the
+fourth of which was the growth of the ten years previous. Out of the one
+thousand and seventy-one ships built in 1860, the 'nation' of South
+Carolina produced one steamer and one schooner! Contemplate the money
+power of the city of New York, the vast capital invested in trade, in
+banks, insurance, and the like, in the North. The slave aristocracy was
+becoming imprisoned in a vast web of financial dependence--a web that
+war and wholesale repudiation of debts alone could break through.
+
+In 1860 there were in the Union 30,- 600 miles of railroad, costing
+$1,134,- 452,909, four times the extent of 1850. In 1850 only one line
+of railroad connected the Atlantic with the Mississippi. Now, of the
+eight great railroad and canal routes connecting the sea coast with this
+valley, six run through the Free States; transportation on these avenues
+costs but one tenth the old methods. Governor Letcher declares the
+Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has 'abolitionized' Northern and Western
+Virginia, and the Southern rebellion has been especially savage on
+railroads. Whoever would understand one secret of the consolidation of
+the people should study the railroad map of the Northern States, and
+contrast it with the South. It was a fine tribute to the value of the
+railroad that the first use the people made of their new political
+supremacy in 1860 was to pass the bill for connecting the Atlantic and
+Pacific by the iron rail and the telegraphic wire.
+
+This vast advancement in free labor, from 1820 to 1850, was fitly closed
+in 1850 by the annexation of California to the roll of the Free States,
+securing to liberty the gold mines and the Pacific coast. It is
+impossible to comprehend all the consequences of this step. It was the
+decisive industrial triumph of the people over the slave aristocracy.
+The Slave Power went mad over the defeat, _and for the last ten years
+has virtually abandoned the rivalry of industries, and turned to
+violence_, breaking of compromises, forcible seizure of the ballot box,
+repudiation of debts, stealing of arms, and finally cruel war, as if
+lying and robbing, in the long run, could upset free and honest
+industry. After the loss of California and the Pacific coast, the
+struggle for the Territories was but a, preliminary skirmish of the war
+for the conquest and desolation of the Union. The people had _waged the
+battle of liberty with the gigantic agencies of material prosperity for
+forty years, and the aristocracy was completely in their power_.
+
+For this material superiority of the free-labor States inevitably inured
+to the advantage of liberty. In vain did every new Free State, year
+after year, vote with the Slave Power; in vain did every great railroad
+and manufacturing corporation of the North obey the political behests of
+the lords of the plantations; in vain was the mercantile aristocracy of
+all the great cities the fast friend of the slave aristocracy; and
+vainly did almost the entire immigrant population fall politically into
+its control. All this was as nothing _against the irresistible natural
+tendency of free labor_. The Irishman who voted against the negro was
+breaking his chain with every blow of his pick. The Wall-street banker,
+the great railroad king, the cotton manufacturer, who railed against
+abolitionism like mad, were condemning the slave aristocracy every day
+they lived. There is a divine law by which the work of freemen shall
+root out the work of slaves; and no law enacted by the will of Northern
+doughfaces could repeal this statute of nature. These Northern friends
+of the aristocracy supposed themselves to be helping their ambitious
+allies by their political support. But the slaveholders knew how
+fallacious was this aid. They saw that the North was gaining a huge
+superiority to the South; that the people were slowly consolidating;
+that when the free-labour interest did finally concentrate, it would
+carry every Northern interest with it, and, when the pinch came, no
+Northern party or statesman could or would help them do their will. They
+carefully sifted all offers of aid from such quarters, and having used
+every Northern interest and institution and party till it was squeezed
+dry of all its black blood, they turned their backs haughtily on the
+white sections of the Union, plundered friend and foe alike, and flew
+into civil war, out of spite and rage at the census of 1860; in other
+words, _declared war against the providence of God as manifested in the
+progress of free society_. They have fought well; at first, perhaps,
+better than we; but when General Lee 'flanks' the industrial decrees of
+the Almighty, and Stuart 'cuts the communications' between free labor
+and imperial power, they will destroy this republic--and not till then.
+
+But was this great material gain of the people to be accompanied by a
+corresponding spiritual advancement? _Was man to become the chief object
+of reverence in this wonderfully expanding industrial empire?_ If not,
+all this progress was deceptive, and nobody could predict how soon our
+very superiority should be turned to the advantage of that aristocracy
+which had perverted so many things in the republic.
+
+It could not be denied that the Free States were making wonderful
+strides, during these forty years, in mental cultivation and power. The
+free industry of the North was an education to the people, and nowhere
+has so much popular intelligence been carried into the business of life
+as here. This period also witnessed the organization of the free school
+everywhere outside of New England, its home; the daily press, the public
+lecture, the creation of an American literature, all Northern; the
+growth of all institutions of learning and means of intellectual and
+artistic cultivation unparalleled in any other age or land. No
+well-informed person could also deny the astonishing progress in
+furnishing the means of religious instruction, the multiplication of
+churches, great ecclesiastical organizations, and philanthropic leagues.
+Notwithstanding the apparent absorption of the North in its material
+prosperity, no people ever was so busy in furnishing itself with the
+means of spiritual improvement; and though a population of several
+millions of ignorant and superstitious foreigners was thrown in upon it
+during these eventful years, it came out at the end the most intelligent
+people, the best provided with the apparatus of religion, that was ever
+known.
+
+But there was one element yet wanting to assure the right usage of all
+this wealth of material, intellectual, and ecclesiastical power. This
+was what the slaveholding aristocracy saw at once to be the fatal omen
+for their cause, and nicknamed 'Abolitionism.' _Abolitionism, as
+recognized by the Slave Power, is nothing more nor less than the
+religious reverence for man and his natural rights._ This moral respect
+for the nature and rights of all men has always encountered the peculiar
+scorn of aristocracies, and no men have been so bitterly persecuted in
+history as those who represented the religious opposition to despotism.
+The Hebrew aristocracy in old Palestine called this sentiment 'atheism'
+in Jesus Christ, and crucified Him. The pagan aristocracy called it a
+'devilish superstition' in the early Christians, and slaughtered them
+like cattle. The priestly and civil absolutism of the sixteenth century
+called it 'fanaticism' in the Dutch and German reformers, and fought it
+eighty years with fire and rack and sword. The church and crown
+nicknamed it 'Puritanism,' and persecuted it till it turned and cut off
+the head of Charles the First, and secured religious liberty. The slave
+aristocracy stigmatized it 'Abolitionism,' and let loose upon it every
+infernal agency in its power.
+
+One great man, yet alive, but not yet recognized as he will be, was the
+representative of this religious reverence for the rights of man. Lloyd
+Garrison has been, for the last twenty-five years, the best-hated man in
+these Northern States, not because he failed to see just how a Union of
+Free and Slave States could endure; not because of any visionary theory
+of political action or the structure of society he cherished; but,
+strangely enough, because _he stood-up for man and his divine right to
+freedom_. This was what the aristocracy hated in him, and this is what,
+with inexpressible rage, it saw gaining in the North. It truly said that
+our education, our arts, our literature, our press, our churches, our
+benevolent organizations, our families, all that was best in Northern
+society, even our politics, were being consolidated by this
+'fanaticism,' Puritanism,' 'Abolitionism'--otherwise, by _reverence for
+man and his right to freedom_.
+
+It grew, however, almost as fast as the material power of the
+North--this moral conviction of the divine right of man to liberty; grew
+so fast, that in 1860, South Carolina glanced over the November election
+returns, saw the name of Abraham Lincoln at the head, shrieked, '_The
+North is abolitionized!_' and rushed out of the Union, with ten other
+Slave States at her heels, while four more were held back by the strong
+arm of the national power. The North is not yet 'abolitionized,' but
+every volley fired at liberty by the Slave Power these last three years,
+has killed a lover of slavery, and made an Abolitionist; as the juggler
+fires his pistol at your old black hat, and, when the smoke clears up, a
+white dove flutters in its place. If the Slave Power shoots at us long
+enough, we shall all become Abolitionists, and all learn to love our
+fellow man and protect him in the enjoyment of every right given him by
+God!
+
+Thus had the Free States, the people's part of the Union, gone up
+steadily to overshadowing material, intellectual, moral power. But up to
+1850 this mighty growth had got no fit expression in State or national
+politics. All the great parties had mildly tried to remonstrate with the
+slave aristocracy, but quickly recoiled as from the mouth of a furnace.
+A few attempts had been made to organize a party for freedom, but
+nothing could gain foothold at Washington. A few noble men had lifted
+their voices against the rampant tyranny of the slaveholders: chief
+among these was John Quincy Adams, the John the Baptist crying in the
+desert of American partisan politics the coming of the kingdom of
+Heaven! But when the people had come up to a consciousness of their
+consolidated power, and the reverence for human right was changing and
+polarizing every Northern institution--in the fierce struggle that
+ushered in and succeeded the admission of California, between 1848 and
+1856--this Northern superiority culminated in a great political movement
+against slavery. _This movement assumed a double form-positive, in the
+assertion that the Slave Power should be arrested; negative, in the
+assertion that the people should have their own way with it._ The
+Republican party said: _The slave aristocracy shall go no farther._ The
+'Popular Sovereignty' party, or Douglas Democracy, said: _The people
+shall do what they choose about this matter._ Now the people were
+already the superior power in the republic, and were rapidly growing to
+hate the Slave Power; so the slaveholders, saw that the Northern
+Democracy, with their war cry of _popular sovereignty_, might in time be
+just as dangerous to them as their more open enemies. They repudiated
+both forms of Northern politics, and tied the executive, under James
+Buchanan, and the Supreme Court, under Judge Taney, to their dogma: _The
+right of the aristocracy is supreme. Slavery, not liberty, is the law of
+the republic._
+
+The great leaders of these Northern parties were Stephen H. Douglas and
+William H. Seward. Mr. Douglas was the best practical politician,
+popular debater, and magnetizer of the masses, the North has yet
+produced. _He was the representative of the blind power of the North_,
+and stood up all his life, in his better hours, for the right of the
+people to make the republic what they would. But the representative
+statesman of the era is the Secretary of State. The whole career of Mr.
+Seward is so interwoven with the history of the political consolidation
+of the people against the Slave Power, that the two must be studied
+together to be understood. Nowhere so clearly and eloquently as in the
+pages of this great philosophical statesman can be read the rapid growth
+of that political movement that in twelve years captured every Free
+State, placed a President in the chair, and then, with a splendid
+generosity, invited the whole loyal people to unite in a party of the
+Union, _knowing that henceforth the Union meant the people and liberty
+against the aristocracy and slavery_. And only in the light of this view
+can the course of this man and his great seeming opponent, but real
+associate, be fitly displayed. _Douglas had taught the people of the
+North that their will should be the law of the republic. Seward had told
+them that will should be in accordance with the 'higher law' of justice
+and freedom._ Like men fighting in the dark, they supposed themselves
+each other's enemies, while they were only commanders of the front and
+rear of the army of the people. Both appeared on the national arena in
+the struggle of 1850, and soon strode to the first place. The Slave
+Power repudiated Seward and his 'higher law' of justice and liberty at
+once. They tolerated Douglas and his 'popular sovereignty ' ten years
+longer, when they found it even a more dangerous heresy, and threw him
+overboard.
+
+In the election of 1860 there were but two parties--the two wings of the
+people's army, under the patriots Lincoln and Douglas; the two wings of
+the slave host, under the traitors Breckinridge and Bell. Of course the
+people triumphed. Had Douglas been elected instead of Lincoln, the Slave
+Power would not have stayed in the Union one hour longer. _It was not
+Lincoln, but the political supremacy of the people they resisted._ The
+Free States had at last consolidated, never to recede, and that was
+enough. Henceforth no party could live in the North that espoused the
+cause of this rebel aristocracy. Whoever was Governor or President,
+Democrat, Republican, Union, what not, the people's party was henceforth
+supreme, and the aristocracy, with all its works of darkness, was second
+best.
+
+The political victory of 1860 was virtually complete. For the first time
+in eighty years had the people concentrated against the Slave Power. The
+executive was gained, placing the army, navy, appointments, and
+patronage in the hands of the President, the people's representative by
+birth and choice. The North had a majority of eight in the Senate and
+sixty-five in the House of Representatives, insuring a control of the
+foreign policy and the financial affairs of the republic; while the
+Supreme Court, the last bulwark of despotism, could be reconstructed in
+the interest of the Constitution. It is true the people did not
+appreciate the magnitude of the victory, or realize what it implied.
+They would probably have made no special use of it at once, and the
+aristocracy might have outwitted them again, as they had for three
+quarters of a century past. But the slaveholders knew that now was just
+the time to strike. If they waited till the people understood themselves
+better, and learned how to administer the Government for liberty, it
+would be too late. They still had possession of the executive, with all
+the departments, the Supreme Court, army, and navy, for four precious
+months. This was improved in inflicting as much damage on the Government
+as possible, and organizing a confederacy of revolted States. The people
+did not believe they would fight, and offered them various compromises,
+_everything except the thing they desired--unlimited power to control
+the republic_. The aristocracy knew that no compromises would do them
+good which proposed anything less than a reconstruction of the Union
+which would insure their perpetual supremacy. They even doubted if this
+could be effectually accomplished in a peaceful way. The people must
+first be subdued by arms, their Union destroyed, and brought to the
+verge of anarchy by this mighty power, backed by the whole despotism of
+Europe; then might they be compelled to accept such terms as it chose to
+dictate. It waited no longer than was necessary to complete its
+preparations, and opened ed its guns in Charleston harbor. When the
+smoke of that cannonade drifted away, the people beheld with
+consternation the Slave Powers arrayed in arms, from Baltimore and St.
+Louis to New Orleans and the Rio Grande, advancing to seize their
+capital and overthrow the republic.
+
+Having conquered the aristocracy by its industry, education, religion,
+and politics--driven it from every position on the great field of
+American society in an era of peace--the people slowly awoke to the
+conviction that they must now conquer it on the field of arms. They were
+slow to come to that conviction. Their ablest leaders were not
+war-statesmen, and did not comprehend at once the full meaning of the
+war. They called it a 'conspiracy,' a 'rebellion,' an 'insurrection,' a
+'summer madness,' anything but what it was--_the American stave
+aristocracy in arms to subdue the people of the United States with every
+other aristocracy on earth wishing it success_. But the people did not
+refuse the challenge. In April, 1861, they rushed to the capital, saved
+their Government from immediate capture or dispersion, and then began to
+prepare, after their way, for--they hardly knew what--to suppress a riot
+or wage a civil war.
+
+In every such conflict as this the aristocracy has a great advantage,
+especially if it can choose its own time to begin the war. Never was an
+oligarchy more favored in its preparations than ours. Since 1820 it had
+contemplated and prepared for this very hour. It had almost unlimited
+control over fifteen States of the Union. Society was constructed in all
+these States on a military basis, the laboring class being held in place
+by the power of the sword. An aristocracy is always preceded by military
+ambition; for all subordinate orders of its people have acquired the
+habit of respect for rank and implicit obedience to superiors, so
+essential to success in war. When the war broke out, the Slave Power was
+ready. Its arms and ammunition and forts were stolen; its military
+organizations had been perfected in secret societies; its generals were
+selected--its president perhaps the best general of all; its military
+surveys were made, every Southern State mapped, and every strategical
+point marked; its subordinate officers, in which the real efficiency of
+an army consists, had been educated in military schools kept by such
+teachers as Hill and Stonewall Jackson. It had a full crop of cotton as
+a basis for finance. Its government was practically such a despotism as
+does not exist in the world. At the sound of the first gun in
+Charleston, the aristocracy sprang to arms; in a fortnight every
+strategical point in fifteen States was practically in its possession,
+and Washington tottered to its fall.
+
+The people, as the people always are, were unprepared for war. Their
+entire energies had been concentrated for forty years in organizing the
+gigantic victory of peace which they had just achieved. When they woke
+up to the idea that there was yet another battle to be fought before the
+aristocracy would subside, they _began to learn the art of war_. And
+never did the people begin a great war so unprepared. The people of
+Europe have always had military traditions and cultivation to fall back
+upon in their civil wars. The North had no military traditions later
+than the Revolution, for no war since that day had really called forth
+their hearty efforts. Three generations of peace had destroyed even
+respect for war as an employment fit for civilized men. There were not
+ten thousand trained soldiers in all the nineteen States in April, 1861.
+There were not good arms to furnish fifty thousand troops in the
+possession of the National or loyal State Governments. Most of the
+ablest military men of the North had left the army, and were engaged in
+peaceful occupations. Halleck was in the law; McClellan, Burnside,
+Banks, on the railroad; Mitchel and Sigel teaching schoolboys; Hooker,
+Kearny, McCall, Dix, retired gentlemen; Fremont digging gold; Rosecrans
+manufacturing oil, and Grant in a tanyard; and so on to the end of the
+chapter; while Scott, the patriot hero, who was but once defeated in
+fifty years' service, was passing over into the helplessness of old age.
+Of course such a people did not realize the value of military education,
+and fell into the natural delusion that a multitude of men carrying guns
+and wearing blue coats is an army; and any 'smart man' can make a
+colonel in three months. There was not even a corporal in the Cabinet,
+and Mr, Lincoln's military exploits were confined to one campaign, in
+the war of 1812, and one challenge to fight a duel. There were not ten
+Northern men in Congress who could take a company into action. In short,
+we had the art of war to learn; even did not know it was necessary to
+learn to fight as to do anything else; especially to fight against an
+aristocracy that had been studying war for forty years.
+
+For more than three years have the people of the United States waged
+this gigantic war thus precipitated upon them by their aristocracy to
+arrest the irresistible growth of modern society in the republic. Every
+year has been a period of great success, though our peaceful population,
+unacquainted with war, and often ignorant of the vast issues of this
+conflict, have often inclined to despondency. Of course the aristocracy
+fought best, at first, as every aristocracy in the world has done. With
+half our number of better disciplined troops, better commanded and
+man[oe]uvred, and the great advantage of interior lines, supported by
+railroad communications, and possessing in Virginia, perhaps, the most
+defensible region in the Union, they held our Army of the Potomac at bay
+for two years; have thrice overrun Maryland and the Pennsylvania border,
+and yet hold their fortified capital; while every step of our victorious
+progress in the Southwest has been bitterly contested. Yet this war of
+martial forces has been strangely like the long, varied war of material,
+moral, and political forces of which it is the logical sequel.
+
+The Union navy won the earliest laurels in the war. The navy has been
+the right arm of the people in all ages. The Athenian navy repelled the
+invasion of Greece by the Persian empire. Antony, Pompey, Cæsar, the
+people's leaders in Rome, built up their youthful power upon the sea.
+The Dutch and English navies saved religious and civil liberty in the
+sixteenth century; and all the constitutional Governments that now exist
+in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United
+States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the
+seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the
+continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of
+defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval
+power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active
+navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over
+the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in
+the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred
+vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of
+naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever
+known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port
+Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all
+its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of
+Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia,
+seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed
+every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we
+are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more
+will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect
+the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or
+their friends abroad.
+
+But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently
+behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was
+only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending
+against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it
+wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the
+capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the
+campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have
+conquered from the aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an
+area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of
+people--a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave
+State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really
+put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the
+national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and
+Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have
+never lost a decisive battle, we have saved all the Territories of the
+United States, cut the 'Confederacy' in two equal parts, holding the
+western division at our mercy, opened the Mississippi and all its
+tributaries, and crowded the rebellion into the five States nearest the
+Atlantic coast. In the east we have fought a score of battles with the
+most formidable army ever marshalled on this continent, composed of the
+flower of the rebel soldiery led by their best generalship, and, spite
+of frequent repulses, have forced it from the Potomac and below the
+Rappahannock to the James, away from the smell of salt water, holding
+firmly every seaport from Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, and
+a belt of land and water commanding the approach to the interior of
+every Atlantic State. The military force of the rebellion is rapidly
+being crowded into one army, not exceeding two hundred and fifty
+thousand men, against which the mighty power of the Union can be
+marshalled in overwhelming array. I know well enough that the decisive
+moment will really come when we confront that desperate and veteran
+host, on which the fate of aristocratic government upon this continent
+depends. But we shall then have a great army of veterans, marshalled
+under commanders fit to lead them in the name of liberty and the people.
+
+It is not strange it has taken us three years to find who can fight
+among us. The Germans fought fifty years against religious despotism
+before they found Gustavus Adolphus to lead them to victory. The English
+fought ten years before Cromwell took command of his Ironsides. The
+French blundered ten years before the 'little corporal' led the army of
+the republic over the Alps to dethrone half the monarchs of Europe. The
+people had but one great general in the Revolutionary War. Until 1860
+the aristocracy had furnished the only great American commander. But
+great generals have now appeared among the people; and if we fight
+stoutly and treat men fairly, our commander will appear when his army of
+veterans is ready.
+
+The aristocracy at first moved armies faster than the people, for the
+same reason that the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Arabs, the Indians, and
+all semi-barbarians move more rapidly in war than a civilized people. A
+semi-barbarous oligarchy fights because it loves war; a civilized people
+fights to _establish civilization and peace_. The Southern army carries
+little along, lives on the food and wears the dress of the semi-savage,
+and overruns vast spaces, leaving a smoking desolation and a ruined
+society. The Northern army moves slowly, because it carries American
+civilization in its knapsack and baggage wagons, organizes republican
+society as it goes, and prepares to hold for liberty all it has gained.
+The people's army has paved the way for liberty and a democratic order
+of society over two hundred thousand square miles, among four millions
+of people, in three years. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Beaufort,
+Alexandria, every slave city in our possession, is being made over into
+a free city.
+
+The army goes slow because it is only the people's pioneer to level the
+mountains and fill up the valleys, and construct the highway of liberty
+from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The Secretary of State has well
+said: '_The war means the dissolution of slave society._' It was entered
+into with the distinct understanding that it was the last expedient to
+save the negro oligarchy from ruin, and every day it goes on its
+thundering course it more emphatically pronounces its doom. The war for
+the Union is the people's final contest for liberty, a contest in which
+they will be victorious, as in the strife of industry, morals, and
+politics. The people, like John Brown's soul, are 'marching on' to
+dissolve the slave oligarchy and establish democracy. The people now
+possess three fourths the territory, population, and wealth of the
+republic. There are yet some six million black and white people in the
+South to rescue from their masters, who now use them against us. They
+are being prepared for Union with us by this war. The poor white man
+will be made better, more intelligent, more ambitious even, by service
+in the rebel army, and on the return of peace will become the small
+farmer of a free soil. The black men will be raised, in due time made
+freemen, and start as a free peasantry on a new career. A hundred
+thousand slaveholders, with their families, not more than one million of
+people in all, will hate the Union permanently. They will be defeated,
+we hope and believe, and disorganized as a social and political power,
+and the people rule in every State they have cursed by their ambition
+for the last fifty years.
+
+We do not prophesy just when or how the people will triumph. The
+victory, we believe, will come; but whether all at once, or through
+temporary revulsions of purpose and alternate truce and war, whether
+finished by arms or yet cast again into the arena of polities, whether
+by occupying all this three millions of square miles of territory or
+gaining on despotism year by year, nobody knows. The Slave Power has not
+yet played its trump card. It has a hundred devilish resources yet to
+foil us. It may yet try to use the negroes it still holds against us by
+emancipation. It may yet drag us into a war with Europe, and Saratoga
+and Lake Erie and Plattsburg, and Long Island and Trenton and Bunker
+Hill, and Detroit and New Orleans may yet be fought over again. But we
+have seen how, for the last forty years, the people of the United States
+have strode on toward supremacy, led by a Power they did not always
+recognize, and sometimes scorned, but led to victory spite of
+themselves.
+
+There has indeed been a Divine Intelligence guiding the destiny of our
+republic by the 'higher law' of the progress of free society toward a
+Christian democracy. We do not think the Peace Party will be able to
+abolish that 'higher law,' as certain of our politicians expect. We
+believe God Almighty is shaping a free and exalted civilized nation out
+of this republic, by a law of progress which we did not make and cannot
+repeal. We may postpone that nation by our folly and sins, but it must
+be made. Through labor and education, and religion and arts, and
+politics and war, 'it marches' on to supremacy--_the people's nation_.
+And when it is established it will be the controlling nation of this
+continent, one of the firmest powers on the earth, the terror of every
+aristocracy, and the joy and hope of every people on the round globe.
+
+
+
+
+THE UNDIVINE COMEDY-A POLISH DRAMA.
+
+Dedicated to Mary
+
+
+PART III.
+
+     'Il fut administé, parceque le niais demandait un prètre, puis
+     pende à la satisfaction generale,' etc, etc.--_Rapport du citoyen
+     Gaillot, commissaire de la sixième chambre, an III., 5 prairial._
+
+     'The sacraments were administered to him, because the fool demanded
+     a priest; he was hung to the general satisfaction.'--_Report of
+     citizen Gaillot, commissary of the sixth session, 3d year, 5th
+     prairial._
+
+
+A song! a new song!
+
+Who will begin it? Who will end it?
+
+Give me the Past, clad in steel, barbed with iron, floating in knightly
+plumes! With magic power I would invoke before you gothic towers and
+castellated turrets, bristling barbacans and mighty arches, baronial
+halls and clustered shafts; I would throw around you the giant shadows
+of vaulted domes and of revered cathedrals: but it may not be; all that
+is with the Past: the Past is never to return!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Speak, whosoever thou mayst be, and tell me in what thou believest! It
+is easier to lose thy life than to invent a faith; to awaken any belief
+in it!
+
+Shame upon you all, great and small, for all things pursue their own
+course in defiance of your schemes! You may be mean and wretched,
+without hearts and without brains, yet the world hastens to its allotted
+destiny; it hurries you on whether you will or no, throws you in the
+dust, tosses you into wild confusion, or whirls you in resistless
+circles, which cease not until they grow into dances of Death! But the
+world rolls on--on; clouds and storms arise and vanish; then it grows
+slippery--new couples join the dance of Death--they totter--fall--lost
+in an abyss of blood--for it is slippery-blood-human blood is gushing
+everywhere, as if the path to peace led through a charnel house!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behold the crowds of people thronging the gates of the cities, the
+hills, the valleys, and resting beneath the shadows of the trees! Tents
+are spread about, long boards are placed on the trunks of fallen trees
+or on pikes and sticks to serve as tables; they are covered with meat
+and drink, the full cups pass from hand to hand, and, as they touch the
+eager mouth, threats, oaths, and curses press forth from the hot lips.
+Faster and faster fly the cups from hand to hand, beaded, bubbling,
+glittering, always filling, striking, tinkling, ringing, as they circle
+among the millions: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup of drunkenness and
+joy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How fiercely they are agitated; how impatiently they wait! They murmur,
+they break into riotous noise!
+
+Poor wretches! scarcely covered with their miserable rags, the seal of
+weary labors deeply stamped upon their sunburnt faces set with uncombed,
+bristling hair, the sweat starting from their rugged brows, their strong
+and horny hands armed with scythes, axes, hammers, hatchets, spades!
+
+Look at that broad youth with the pickaxe; at the slight one with the
+sword. Here is one who holds aloft a glittering pike; another who
+brandishes a massive club with his brawny arm! There under the willows a
+boy crams cherries into his mouth with the one hand, and with the other
+punches the tree with a long, sharp awl. Women are also there, wives,
+mothers, daughters, poor and hungry as the men, Not a single trace of
+womanly beauty, of healthful freshness upon them; their hair is
+disordered and sprinkled with the dust of the highways, their tawny
+bodies scarcely covered with unsightly rags, their gloomy eyes seem
+fading into their sockets, only half open as if gluing together in very
+weariness: but they will soon be quickened, for the full cup flies from
+lip to lip, they quaff long draughts: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup
+of drunkenness and joy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hark! a noise and rustling among the masses! Is it joy, or is it grief?
+Who can read the meaning of a thing so monstrously multiform!
+
+A man arrives, mounts a table, harangues and sways the multitude. His
+voice drags and grates upon the ear, but hacks itself into sharp, strong
+words, clearly heard and easily understood; his gestures are slow and
+light, accompanying his words as music, song. His brow is high and
+strong, his head is entirely bald; thought has uprooted its last hair.
+His skin is dull and tawny, the blood never tinges its dingy pallor, no
+emotion ever paints its secrets there, yellow wrinkles form and cross
+between the bones and muscles of his face, and a dark beard, like a
+black wreath, encircles it from temple to temple. He fastens a steady
+gaze upon his hearers, no doubt or hesitation ever clouds his clear,
+cold eye. When he raises his arm and stretches it out toward the people,
+they bow before him, as if to receive, prostrate, the blessing of a
+_great intellect_, not that of a _great heart_! Down, down with the
+great hearts! Away, away with old prejudices! Hurrah! hurrah! for the
+words of consolation! Hurrah for the license to murder!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This man is the idol of the people, their passion, the ruler of their
+souls, the stimulator of their enthusiasm. He promises them bread and
+money, and their cries rise like the rushing of a storm, widening and
+deepening in every direction: 'Long live Pancratius! Hurrah! Bread and
+money! Bread for us, our wives, our children! Hurrah! hurrah!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the feet of the speaker, leaning against the table on which he
+stands, rests his friend, companion, and disciple. His eye is dark and
+oriental, shadowed by long and gloomy lashes, his arms hang down, his
+limbs bend under him, his body is badly formed and distorted, his mouth
+is sensual and voluptuous, his expression is sharp and malicious, his
+fingers are laden with rings of gold--he joins the tumult, crying with a
+rough, hoarse voice: 'Long live Pancratius!' The speaker looks at him
+carelessly for a moment, and says: 'Citizen, Baptized, hand me a
+handkerchief!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meantime the uproar continues; the cries become more and more
+tumultuous: 'Bread for us! Bread! bread! Long live Pancratius! Death to
+the nobles! to the merchants! to the rich! Bread! bread! Bread and
+blood! Hurrah! hurrah!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A tabernacle. Lamps. An open book lies on a table. Baptized Jews.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. My wretched brethren; my revenge-seeking, beloved
+brethren! let us suck nourishment from the pages of the Talmud, as from
+the breast of our mother; it is the breast of life from which strength
+and honey flow for us, bitterness and poison for our enemies.
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Jehovah is our God, and ours alone; therefore
+has He scattered us in every land!
+
+Like the coiled folds of an enormous serpent, He has wreathed us
+everywhere round and through the adorers of the cross; our lithe and
+subtile rings pass round and through our foolish, proud, unclean
+rulers.
+
+Let us thrice spew them forth to destruction! Threefold curses light
+upon them!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Rejoice, my brethren! the Cross of our Great Enemy is
+already more than half hewn down; it is rotting to its fall; it is only
+standing on a root of blood: if it once plunge into the abyss it will
+never rise again. Hitherto the nobles have been its sole defence, but
+they are ours! ours!
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Our work, our long, long work of centuries, our
+sad, ardent, painful work is almost done!
+
+Death to the nobles--let us thrice spew them forth to destruction!
+Threefold curses light upon them!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The might of Israel shall be built upon a liberty without
+law or order, upon a slaughter without end, upon the _pride_ of the
+nobility, the _folly_ of the masses. The nobles are almost destroyed; we
+must drive the few still left into the abyss of death, and scatter over
+their livid corpses the ruins of the shattered cross in which they
+trusted!
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. The cross is now our holy symbol; the water of
+baptism has reunited us with men; the scorning repose upon the love of
+the scorned!
+
+The freedom of men is our cry; the welfare of the people our aim; ha!
+ha! the eons of Christ trust the sons of Caiaphas!
+
+Centuries ago our fathers tortured our Great Enemy to death; we will
+again torture him to death this very day--but He will never rise more
+from the grave which we prepare for Him!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Yet a little space, a little time, a few drops of poison,
+and the whole world will be our own, my brethren!
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Jehovah is the God of Israel, and of it alone.
+
+Let us thrice spew forth the nations to destruction! Threefold curses
+light upon them!
+
+  Knocking is heard at the door.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Take up your work, brethren! And thou, Holy Book, away
+from sight--no unclean look shall soil thy spotless leaves! Who is
+there?
+
+  Hides the Talmud.
+
+VOICE (_without_). A friend. Open in the name of freedom.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Quick to your hammers and looms, my brethren!
+
+  He opens the door.
+
+  Enter Leonard.
+
+LEONARD. Well done, citizens. You watch, I see, and whet your swords for
+to-morrow.--(_Approaching one of the men:_) What are you making here in
+this corner?
+
+ONE OF THE BAPTIZED. Ropes.
+
+LEONARD. You are right, citizen, for he who falls not by iron must hang!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Citizen Leonard, is the thing really to come off
+to-morrow?
+
+LEONARD. He who thinks, feels, and acts with the most force among us,
+has sent me to you to appoint an interview. He will himself answer your
+question.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. I go to meet him. Brethren, remain at work. Look well to
+them, citizen Yankel.
+
+  Exit with Leonard.
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Ye ropes and daggers, ye clubs and bills, the
+works of our hands, ye wilt go forth to destroy them!
+
+The people will kill the nobles upon the plains, will hang them in the
+forests, and then, having none to defend them, we will kill and hang the
+people! The Despised will arise in their anger, will array themselves in
+the might of Jehovah: His Word is Redemption and Love for His people
+Israel, but scorn and fury for their enemies!
+
+Let us thrice spew them forth to destruction: threefold curses fall upon
+them!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  A tent. A profusion of flasks, cups, and
+  flagons. Pancratius alone.
+
+PANCRATIUS. The mob howled in applause but a moment ago, shouted in loud
+hurrahs at every word I uttered. But is there a single man among them
+all who really understands my ideas, or who comprehends the end and aim
+of that path upon which we have entered, or where the reforms will
+terminate which have been so loudly inaugurated within the last hour?
+'Ah! fervidum imitatorum pecus!'
+
+  Enter Leonard and the Baptized Jew.
+
+Do you know Count Henry?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. I know him well by sight, great citizen, but I am not
+personally acquainted with him. I remember once when I was approaching
+the Lord's Supper, he cried to me, '_Out of the way!_' and looked down
+upon me with the arrogant look peculiar to the nobles--for which I vowed
+him a rope in my soul.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Prepare to visit him early to-morrow morning, and announce
+to him that it is my wish to confer with him alone.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. How many men will you send with me on this embassy? I do
+not think it would be safe to undertake it without a guard.
+
+PANCRATIUS. You must go alone, my name will be sufficient guard, and the
+gallows on which you hung the baron yesterday, your shield.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Woe is me!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Tell him I will visit him to-morrow night.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. And if he should put me in chains or order me to be hung?
+
+PANCRATIUS. You would die a martyr for the freedom of the people!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. I will sacrifice all for the freedom of the
+people.--(_Aside_.) Woe is me!--(_Aloud._) Good night, citizen.
+
+  Exit the Baptized.
+
+LEONARD. Pancratius, why this delay, these half measures, these
+contracts, this strange interview? When I swore to honor and obey you,
+it was because I believed you to be a hero of extremes, an eagle flying
+even in the face of the sun directly to its aim; a brave man ready to
+venture all upon the cast of a die.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Silence, child!
+
+LEONARD. Everything is ready; the baptized Jews have forged arms and
+woven ropes; the masses clamor for immediate orders. Speak but the word
+now, and the electric sparks will fly, the millions flash into forked
+lightnings, kindle into flame, and consume our enemies!
+
+PANCRATIUS. You are young, and the blood mounts rapidly into your brain;
+but will the hour of combat find you more resolute than myself?
+
+LEONARD. Think well what you are doing. The nobles, weak and exhausted,
+have fled for refuge to the famous fortress of the Holy Trinity,[1] and
+await our arrival, as men wait the knife of the guillotine.
+
+[Footnote 1: A renowned fort in Polish history. It stood on the old
+battlefield between Turkey and Poland, between Europe and Asia.]
+
+Forward, citizen, attack them without delay, and it is over with them
+forever!
+
+PANCRATIUS. It can make no difference; they have lost the old energy of
+their caste in luxury and idleness. To-morrow or the next day they must
+fall, what matter which?
+
+LEONARD. What and whom do you fear, and why do you delay?
+
+PANCRATIUS. I fear nothing. I act but in accordance with my own will.
+
+LEONARD. And am I to trust it blindly?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Yes. Blindly.
+
+LEONARD. You may betray us, citizen!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Betrayal rings forever from your lips like the refrain of an
+old song.
+
+But hush! not so loud--if any one should hear us ...
+
+LEONARD. There are no spies here; and what if some one should hear us?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Nothing; only five balls in your heart for having ventured
+to raise your voice a tone too high in my presence. (_Approaching close
+to him_.) Leonard, trust me, and be tranquil!
+
+LEONARD. I confess I have been too hasty, but I fear no punishment. If
+my death could help the cause of the down-trodden masses, I would
+cheerfully die.
+
+PANCRATIUS. You are full of life, hope, faith. Happiest of men, I will
+not rob you of the bliss of existence.
+
+LEONARD. What do you say, citizen?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Think more; speak less; the time will come when you will
+fully understand me!
+
+Have you collected the provisions for the carousal of the millions?
+
+LEONARD. They have all been sent to the arsenal under guard.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Has the contribution from the shoemakers been received?
+
+LEONARD. It has. Every one gave with the greatest eagerness; it amounts
+to a hundred thousand.
+
+PANCRATIUS. They must all be invited to a general festival to-morrow.
+
+Have you heard nothing of Count Henry?
+
+LEONARD. I despise the nobles too deeply to credit what I hear of him.
+The dying race have no energy left; it is impossible they should dare or
+venture aught.
+
+PANCRATIUS. And yet it is true that he is collecting and training his
+serfs and peasants, and, confiding in their devotion and attachment to
+himself, intends leading them to the relief of the fortress of the Holy
+Trinity.
+
+LEONARD. Who can oppose us? _The ideas of our century stand incorporated
+in us!_
+
+PANCRATIUS. I am determined to see Count Henry, to gaze into his eyes,
+to read the very depths of his brave spirit, to win him over to the
+glorious cause of the people.
+
+LEONARD. An aristocrat, body and soul!
+
+PANCRATIUS. True: but also a Poet!
+
+Good night, Leonard, I would be alone.
+
+LEONARD. Have you forgiven me, citizen?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Sleep in peace: if I had not forgiven you, you would ere
+this have slept the eternal sleep.
+
+LEONARD. And will nothing take place to-morrow?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Good night, and pleasant dreams!
+
+  Leonard is retiring.
+
+Ho, Leonard!
+
+LEONARD. Citizen general?
+
+
+PANCRATIUS. You will accompany me day after morrow on my visit to Count
+Henry.
+
+LEONARD. I will obey.
+
+  Exit Leonard.
+
+PANCRATIUS. How is it that this man, Count Henry, still dares to resist
+and defy _me_, the ruler of millions? His forces will bear no comparison
+with mine; indeed he stands almost alone, although it is true that some
+hundred or two of peasants, confiding blindly in his word and clinging
+to him as the dog clings to his master, still cluster round him--but
+that is all folly, and can amount to nothing. Why, then, do I long to
+see him, long to win him to our side? Has my spirit for the first time
+encountered its equal? Can it progress no farther in the path in which
+he stands to oppose me? His resistance is the last obstacle to be
+overcome--he must be overthrown--and then? ... and then! ...
+
+O my cunning intellect! Canst thou not deceive _thyself_ as thou hast
+deceived others?...
+
+Shame! thou shouldst know thine own might! Thou art _thought_, the
+intelligence and reason of the people--the ruler of the masses--thou
+controllest the millions, so that their will and giant force is _one_
+with _thine_--all authority and government are incarnated and
+concentrated in thee alone--all that would be crime in others is in thee
+fame and glory--thou hast given name and place to unknown and obscure
+men--thou hast given faith and eloquence to beings who had been almost
+robbed of moral sentiment--thou hast created a new world in thine own
+image, and _art thyself its god_! and yet ... and yet ... thou art
+wandering in unknown wastes, and fearest to be lost thyself--to go
+astray!
+
+Thou knowest not thyself, nor of what thou art capable; thou rulest
+others, yet doubt'st thyself--thou knowest not what thou art--whither
+thou goest--nor whence thou earnest! No ... no.... Thou art sublime!
+
+  Sinks upon a chair in silent thought.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A forest, with a cleared hill in its midst, upon which stands a
+     gallows; huts, tents, watchfires, barrels, tables, and crowds of
+     men. The Man disguised in a dark cloak and red liberty cap, and
+     holding the Baptized Jew by the hand.
+
+THE MAN. Remember!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_in a whisper_). Upon my honor, I will lead your
+excellency aright, I will not betray you.
+
+THE MAN. Give but one suspicious wink, raise but a finger, and my bullet
+finds its way to your heart! You may readily imagine that I attach no
+great value to your life when I thus lightly risk my own.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Oh woe! You press my hand like a vice of steel. What is it
+you wish me to do?
+
+THE MAN. Appear to the crowd as if I were an acquaintance--treat me as a
+newly arrived friend.
+
+What kind of a dance is that?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The dance of a free people.
+
+     Men and woman dance, leap, and sing round the gallows.
+
+THEIR CHORUS. Bread! meat! work! wood in winter, rest in summer! Hurrah!
+hurrah!
+
+God had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+Kings had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+The nobles had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+We renounce God, kings, and nobles: Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!
+
+THE MAN (_to a maiden_). I am glad to see you look so gay, so blooming.
+
+THE MAIDEN. I am sure we have waited quite long enough for such a day as
+this! I have washed dishes and cleaned knives and forks all my life,
+without ever having heard a kind word spoken to me: it is high time I
+too should begin to eat, to dance, to make merry. Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+THE MAN. Dance, citizeness!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. For God's sake, be cautious, count! You may be recognized;
+let us go!
+
+THE MAN. If any one should recognize me, you are lost. We will mingle
+with the throng.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. A crowd of servants are sitting under the shade of this
+oak.
+
+THE MAN. Let us approach them.
+
+FIRST SERVANT. I have just killed my first master.
+
+SECOND SERVANT. And I am on the search for my baron. Your health,
+citizens!
+
+VALET DE CHAMBRE. In the sweat of our brows, in the depths of
+humiliation, licking the dust from the boots of our masters, and
+prostrate before them, we have yet always felt our rights as men: let us
+drink the health of our present society!
+
+CHORUS OF SERVANTS. Here's to the health of our citizen President! one
+of ourselves, he will lead us to glory!
+
+VALET DE CHAMBRE. Thanks, citizens, thanks!
+
+CHORUS OF SERVANTS. Out of dark kitchens, dressing rooms, and
+antechambers, our prisons of old, we rush together into freedom: Hurrah!
+
+We know the ridiculous follies, peevishness, and perversity of our
+masters; we have been behind the shows and shams of glittering halls:
+Hurrah!
+
+THE MAN. Whose voices are those I hear so harsh and wild from that
+little mound on our left?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The butchers are singing a chorus.
+
+CHORUS OF THE BUTCHERS. The cleaver and axe are our weapons; our life is
+in the slaughter house; we know the hue of blood, and care not if we
+kill _cattle_ or _nobles_!
+
+Children of blood and strength, we look with indifference upon the pale
+and weak; he who needs us, has us; we slaughter beeves for the nobles;
+the nobles for the people!
+
+The cleaver and axe are our arms; our life is in the slaughter house:
+Hurrah for the slaughter house! the slaughter house! the slaughter
+house! the slaughter house!
+
+THE MAN. Come! I like the next group better; honor and philosophy are at
+least named in it. Good evening, madame!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. It would be better if your excellency should say,
+'citizeness,' or 'woman of freedom.'
+
+WOMAN. What do you mean by the title, 'madame?' From whence did it come?
+Fie! fie! you smell of mould!
+
+THE MAN. Pardon my mistake!
+
+WOMAN. I am as free as you, I am a free woman; I give my love freely to
+the community, because they have acknowledged my right to lavish it
+where I will!
+
+THE MAN. And have the community given you for it these jewelled rings,
+these chains of violet amethysts?... O thrice beneficent community!
+
+THE WOMAN. No, the community did not give them to me; but at my
+emancipation I took these things secretly from the casket of my husband,
+for he was my enemy, the enemy of freedom, and had long held me
+enslaved!
+
+THE MAN. Citizeness, I wish you a most agreeable promenade!
+
+     They pass on.
+
+Who is this marvellous-looking warrior leaning upon a two-edged sword,
+with a death's head upon his cap, another upon his badge, and a third
+upon his breast? Is he not the famous Bianchetti, a condottiere employed
+by the people, as the condottieri once were by the kings and nobles?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Yes, it is Bianchetti; he has been with us for the last
+eight or ten days.
+
+THE MAN (_to Bianchetti_). What is General Bianchetti considering with
+so much attention?
+
+BIANCHETTI. Look through this opening in the woods, citizen, and you
+will see a castle upon a hill: with my glass I can see the walls,
+ramparts, bastions, etc.
+
+THE MAN. It will be hard to take, will it not?
+
+BIANCHETTI. Kings and devils! it can be surrounded by subterranean
+passages, undermined, and....
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_winking at Bianchetti_). Citizen general....
+
+THE MAN (_in a whisper to the Baptized_). Look under my cloak how the
+cock of my pistol is raised!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). Oh woe!--(_Aloud._) How do you mean to conduct
+the siege, citizen general?
+
+BIANCHETTI. Although you are my brother in freedom, you are not my
+confidant in strategy. After the capitulation of the castle, my plans
+will be made public.
+
+THE MAN (_to the Baptized_). Take my advice, Jew, and strike him dead,
+for such is the beginning of all aristocracies.
+
+A WEAVER. Curses! curses! curses!
+
+THE MAN. Poor fellow! what are you doing under this tree, and why do you
+look so pale and wild?
+
+THE WEAVER. Curses upon the merchants and manufacturers! All the best
+years of my life, years in which other men love maidens, meet in wide
+plains, or sail upon vast seas, with free air and open space around
+them, I have spent in a narrow, dark, gloomy room, chained like a galley
+slave to a silk loom!
+
+THE MAN. Take some food! Empty the full cup which you hold in your hand!
+
+WEAVER. I have not strength enough left to carry it to my lips! I am so
+tired; I could scarcely crawl up here--it is the day of freedom! but a
+day of freedom is not for me--it comes too late, too late!--(_He falls,
+and gasps out_:) Curses upon the manufacturers who make silks! upon the
+merchants, who buy them! upon the nobles, who wear them! Curses! curses!
+curses!
+
+     He writhes on the ground and dies.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. What a ghastly corpse!
+
+THE MAN. Baptized Jew, citizen, poltroon of freedom, look upon this
+lifeless head, shining in the blood-red rays of the setting sun! Where
+are now your words and promises; the equality, perfectibility, and
+universal happiness of the human race?
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). May you soon fall into a like ruin, and the dogs
+tear the flesh from your rotting corpse!--(_Aloud._) I beg that your
+excellency will now permit me to return, that I may give an account of
+my embassy!
+
+THE MAN. You may say that, believing you to be a spy, I forcibly
+detained you.--(_Looking around him._) The tumult and noise of the
+carousal is dying away behind us; before us there is nothing to be seen
+but fir and pine trees bathed in the crimson rays of sunset.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Clouds are gathering thick and fast over the tops of the
+trees: had you not better return to your people, Count Henry, who have
+been waiting so long for you in the vault of St. Ignatius?
+
+THE MAN. Thank you for your exceeding care of me, Sir Jew! But back! I
+will return and take another look at the festival of the citizens.
+
+VOICES (_under the trees_). The children of Ham bid good night to thee,
+old Sun!
+
+VOICE (_on the right_). Here's to thy health, old enemy! Thou hast long
+driven us on to unpaid work, and awaked us early to unheeded pain! Ha!
+ha! When thou risest upon us to-morrow, thou wilt find us with fish and
+flesh: now off to the devil, empty glass!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The bands of peasants are coming this way.
+
+THE MAN. You shall not leave me. Place yourself behind this tree trunk,
+and be silent!
+
+CHORUS OF PEASANTS. Forward, forward, under the white tents to meet our
+brethren! Forward, forward, under the green shade of the beeches, to
+rest, to sleep, to pleasant sunset greetings!
+
+Our maidens there await us; there await us our slaughtered oxen, the
+old teams of our ploughs!
+
+A VOICE. I am pulling and dragging him on with all my strength--now he
+turns and defends himself--down! down among the dead!
+
+VOICE OF THE DYING NOBLE. My children, pity! pity!
+
+SECOND VOICE. Chain me to your land and make me work without pay
+again--will you!
+
+THIRD VOICE. My only son fell under the blows of your lash, old lord;
+either wake him from the dead, or die to join him!
+
+FOURTH VOICE. The children of Ham drink thy health, old lord! they beg
+thee for forgiveness, lord!
+
+CHORUS OF PEASANTS (_passing on out of sight_). A vampire sucked our
+blood, and lived upon our strength:
+
+We have caught the vampire, he shall escape no more!
+
+By Satan, thou shalt hang as high as a great lord should!
+
+By Satan, thou shalt die high, high above us all!
+
+Death to the nobles; tyrants were they all!
+
+Drink, food, and rest for us; poor, weary, hungry, thirsty, naked!
+
+Your bodies shall lie like sheaves upon our fields; the ruins of your
+castles fly like chaff beneath the flail of the thresher!
+
+VOICE. The children of Ham will dance merrily round their bonfires!
+
+THE MAN. I cannot see the face of the murdered noble, they throng so
+thickly round him.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. It is in all probability a friend or relation of your
+excellency!
+
+THE MAN. I despise him, and hate you!
+
+Poetry will sweeten all this horror hereafter. Forward, Jew, forward!
+
+     They disappear among the trees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Another part of the forest. A mound upon which watchfires are
+     burning. A procession of people bearing torches.
+
+THE MAN (_appearing among them with the Baptized_). These drooping
+branches have torn my liberty cap into tatters.
+
+Ha! what hell of flame is this throwing its crimson light into the
+gloom, and leaping through these heavily fringed walls of the forest?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. We have wandered from our way while seeking the pass of
+St. Ignatius. We must retrace our steps immediately, for this is the
+spot in which Leonard celebrates the solemnities of the New Faith!
+
+THE MAN. Forward, in the name of God! I must see these solemnities. Fear
+nothing, Jew, no one will recognize us.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Be prudent; our lives hang on a breath!
+
+THE MAN. What enormous ruins are these scattered around us! This
+ponderous pile must have lasted centuries before it fell!
+
+Pillars, pedestals, capitals, fallen arches--ha! I am treading upon the
+broken remnants of an escutcheon. Bas-reliefs of exquisite sculpture are
+scattered about upon the earth! Heavens! that is the sweet face of the
+Virgin Mother shining through the heart of the darkness! The light
+flickers, I can see it no more. Here are the slight-fluted shafts of a
+shrine, panes of colored glass with cherub heads, a carved railing of
+bronze, and now, in the light of yonder torch, I see the half of a
+monumental figure of a reclining knight in armor thrown upon the burnt
+and withered grass: Where am I, Jew?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. You are passing through the graveyard of the last church
+of the Old Faith; our people labored forty days and forty nights without
+intermission to destroy it; it seemed built for eternal ages.
+
+THE MAN. Your songs and hymns, ye new men, grate harshly on my ears!
+
+Dark forms are moving forward in every direction, from before us, behind
+us, and from either side; lights and shadows, driven to and fro by the
+wind, float like living spirits through the throng.
+
+A PASSER-BY. I greet you, citizens, in the name of freedom!
+
+SECOND PASSER-BY. I greet you in the name of the slaughter of the
+nobles!
+
+THIRD PASSER-BY. The priests chant the praise of freedom; why do you not
+hasten forward?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. We cannot resist the pressure of the throng; they drive us
+on from every side.
+
+THE MAN. Who is this young man standing in front of us, mounted upon the
+ruins of the shrine? Three flames burn beneath him, his face shines from
+the midst of fire and smoke, his voice rings like the shriek of a
+maniac; and his gestures are rapid and eager?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. That is Leonard, the inspired and enthusiastic prophet of
+freedom. Our priests, our philosophers, our poets, our artists, with
+their daughters and loved ones, are standing round him.
+
+THE MAN. Ha, I understand; your aristocracy! Point out to me the man who
+sent you to seek an interview with me.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. He is not here.
+
+LEONARD. Fly to my arms; cling to my lips; come to me, my beautiful
+bride! Independent, free, stripped of the veils of hypocrisy, full of
+love, untrammelled from the chilling fetters of prejudice, come to me,
+thou chosen one of the lovely daughters of freedom!
+
+VOICE OF A MAIDEN. I fly to thee, beloved one!
+
+SECOND MAIDEN. Look upon me! I stretch forth my arms to thee, but have
+sunk fainting among the ruins; I cannot rise, and have only strength
+left to turn to thee, beloved!
+
+THIRD MAIDEN. I have outstripped them all; through cinders and ashes,
+flame and smoke, I fly to thee, beloved!
+
+THE MAN. With long, dishevelled hair far floating on the wind, with
+snowy bosom panting with wild excitement, she clambers up the smoking
+ruins to his arms!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Thus is it every night.
+
+LEONARD. To me! to me! my bliss, my rapture! Lovely daughter of freedom,
+thou tremblest with delicious, god-like madness!
+
+Inspiration, flood my soul! Listen to me, all ye people, for now will I
+prophesy unto you!
+
+THE MAN. Her head sinks on his bosom; she faints in his arms.
+
+LEONARD. Look upon us, ye people! we offer you an image of the human
+race, freed from trammels, and risen into new life from the death of
+forms. We stand upon the ruins of old dogmas, of old gods; yea, glory
+unto us, for we have torn the old gods limb from limb!
+
+They have rotted into dust; our spirits have conquered theirs; their
+very souls have fallen into the abyss of nothingness!
+
+CHORUS OF WOMEN. Happy among women is the bride of the prophet: we stand
+below and envy her glory!
+
+LEONARD. I announce to you a new world; to a new god I have given the
+heavens; to the god of freedom and of bliss, the god of the people;
+every offering of their vengeance, the piled corpses of their
+oppressors, be his fitting altar! The old tears and agonies of humanity
+will be forever swept away in an ocean of blood!
+
+We now inaugurate the perpetual happiness of men; freedom and equality
+belong of right to all!
+
+Damnation and the gallows to him who would reorganize the Past; to him
+who would conspire against the common fraternity!
+
+CHORUS OF MEN. The towers of superstition, of tyranny, of pride, have
+fallen, have fallen! To him who would save one stone from the old
+buildings--damnation and death!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). Ye blasphemers of Jehovah, I thrice spew you
+forth to destruction!
+
+THE MAN. Keep but thy promise, Eagle, and I will build on this very spot
+and upon their bowed necks a new temple to the Son of God, the Merciful!
+
+A CONFUSED CRY FROM MINGLING VOICES. Freedom! Equality! Bliss! Hurrah!
+hurrah!
+
+CHORUS OF THE NEW PRIESTS. Where are the lords, where are the kings, who
+lately walked the earth with crown and sceptre, ruled with pride and
+scorn?
+
+FIRST MURDERER. I killed King Alexander.
+
+SECOND MURDERER. I stabbed King Henry.
+
+THIRD MURDERER. I murdered King Immanuel!
+
+LEONARD. Go on without fear; murder without a sting of conscience!
+
+Remember that you are the Elect of the Elect; the Holy among the Holy;
+the brave heroes and blessed martyrs of equality and freedom!
+
+CHORUS OF MURDERERS. We go in the darkness of night; we move in the
+gloom of the shadow! With the dagger firmly clutched in our unsparing
+hands, we go, we go!
+
+LEONARD (_to the Maiden_). Arouse thee, my beautiful and free!
+
+     A loud clap of thunder is heard.
+
+Reply to the living god of thunder: raise high the hymn of strength!
+Follow me all, all! Let us once more trample under our feet the ruined
+temple of the dead God!
+
+THE MAIDEN. I glow with love to thee and to thy god! I will share my
+love with the whole world: I glow! I glow!
+
+THE MAN. Some one blocks the way; he falls upon his knees, raises his
+joined hands, struggles, sighs, sobs....
+
+THE BAPTIZED. He is the son of a famous philosopher.
+
+LEONARD. What do you demand, Herman?
+
+HERMAN. High priest, give me the Sacrament of Murder!
+
+LEONARD (_to the Priests_). Give me the oil, the dagger, and the
+poison!--(To Herman.) With the sacred oil once used to anoint kings, I
+now anoint thee to their destruction!
+
+The arm once used by knights and nobles, I give thee now for their
+destruction!
+
+I hang upon thy breast this flask of poison, that where the sword cannot
+reach, it may gnaw, corrode, and burn the bowels of the tyrants!
+
+Go, and destroy the old race in all parts of the world!
+
+THE MAN. He is gone! I see him, at the head of a band of assassins,
+crossing the crest of the nearest hill.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. They turn, they approach us, we must move out of their
+way!
+
+THE MAN. No. I will dream this dream to its end!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). I thrice spew thee forth to destruction!--(_To
+the Man_). Leonard might recognize me, your excellency. Do you not see
+the knife glittering upon his breast?
+
+THE MAN. Wrap yourself up in my cloak. What ladies are those dancing
+before him you call Leonard?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Princesses and countesses who have forsaken their
+husbands.
+
+THE MAN. Once my angels!!
+
+The people now surround him on every side, I can see him no longer, I
+only know by the retreating music that he is going farther from us.
+Follow me, Jew, we can see him better up here!
+
+     He clambers up the parapet of a wall.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Woe! woe! We will certainly be discovered.
+
+THE MAN. There, now I can see him again! Ha! other women are with him
+now, pale, confused, trembling, following him convulsively; the son of
+the philosopher foams and brandishes his dagger; they are stopping by
+the ruins of the North Tower.
+
+They remain standing for a moment, they climb upon the ruins, they tear
+them down, they pull the shrine apart, they throw coals upon the
+prostrate altars, the votive wreaths, the holy pictures; the fire
+kindles, columns of smoke darken all before me: Woe to the destroyers!
+Woe!
+
+LEONARD. Woe to the men who still bow down before the dead God!
+
+THE MAN. Dark masses of the people turn and drive upon us.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. O Father Abraham!
+
+THE MAN. Old Eagle of glory, is it not true that my hour is not yet
+come?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. We are lost!
+
+LEONARD (_stopping immediately in front of Count Henry_). Who are you
+with that haughty face, citizen, and why do you not join in the
+solemnities?
+
+THE MAN. I hastened here when I heard of the revolution; I am a murderer
+of the Spanish league, and have only arrived to-day.
+
+LEONARD. Who is that man hiding himself in the folds of your mantle?
+
+THE MAN. He is my younger brother. He has taken an oath to show his face
+to no one, until he has at least killed a baron.
+
+LEONARD. Of whose murder can you yourself boast?
+
+THE MAN. My elder brothers consecrated me only two days before my
+departure, and....
+
+LEONARD. Whom do you think of killing?
+
+THE MAN. You in the first place, if you should prove false to us!
+
+
+LEONARD. For this use, brother, take my dagger!
+
+     Hands it to him.
+
+THE MAN. For such use my own will suffice me, brother!
+
+MANY VOICES. Long live Leonard! Long live the Spanish murderer!
+
+LEONARD. Meet me to-morrow in the tent of Pancratius, our citizen
+general.
+
+CHORUS OF PRIESTS. We greet thee, stranger, in the name of the Spirit of
+Liberty: we intrust to thy hand a share of our emancipation!
+
+To men who combat without cessation, who kill without pity or weakness,
+who work for freedom by day, and dream of it by night, will be at last
+the victory!
+
+     They pass on out of sight.
+
+CHORUS OF PHILOSOPHERS. We have wakened the human race, and torn them
+away from the days of childhood! We have found truth, and brought it to
+light from the womb of darkness! Combat, murder, and die for it,
+brethren!
+
+THE SON OF THE PHILOSOPHER (_to the Man_). Brother and friend, I drink
+your health out of the skull of an old saint! May we soon meet again!
+
+A MAIDEN (_dancing_). Kill Prince John for me!
+
+SECOND MAIDEN. Count Henry for me!
+
+CHILDREN. Bring us back the head of a noble for a ball.
+
+OTHER VOICES. Good fortune guide your daggers home!
+
+CHORUS OF ARTISTS. On these sublime old ruins we build no temples more;
+we paint no pictures, mould no statues for forgotten shrines; our arches
+shall be formed of pointed pikes and naked blades; our pillars built of
+ghastly piles of human skulls; the capitals of human hair dyed in
+gushing streams of crimson blood; our altar shall be white as snow, our
+god will rest upon it, the cap of liberty: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+OTHER VOICES. On! on! the morning dawn already breaks!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. They will soon catch and hang us; we are but one step from
+the gallows.
+
+THE MAN. Fear nothing, Jew, they follow Leonard, and observe us no
+longer. I see with my own eyes, I understand with my own mind, and for
+the last time before it engulfs me, the chaos now generating in the
+abyss of Time, in the womb of Darkness, for my own destruction, for the
+annihilation of my brethren!
+
+Driven on by madness, stung by despair, my thoughts awake in all their
+strength....
+
+O God! give me again the power which Thou didst not of old deny me, and
+I will condense this new and fearful world, which does not understand
+itself, into _one_ burning word, but which one word will be the Poetry
+of the entire Past!
+
+VOICE IN THE AIR. Poet, thou chant'st a drama!
+
+THE MAN. Thanks for thy good counsel!
+
+Revenge for the desecrated ashes of my fathers--malediction upon the new
+races! their whirlpool is around me, but it shall not draw me into the
+giddying and increasing circles of its abyss! Keep but thy promise,
+Eagle; Eagle of glory!
+
+Jew, I am ready now for the vault of St. Ignatius!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The day dawns; I can go no farther.
+
+THE MAN. Lead me on until we strike the right path; I will then release
+you!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Why do you drag me on through mist, through thorns and
+briers, through ashes and embers, over heaps of ruins? Let me go, I
+entreat!
+
+THE MAN. Forward! forward! and descend with me!
+
+The last songs of the people are dying away behind us; a few torches
+here and there just glimmer through the gloom!
+
+Ha! under those hoary trees drooping with the night dew, and through
+this curdling, whitening vapor, see you not the giant shadow of the dead
+Past? Hark! hear you not that wailing chant?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Everything is shrouded in the thickening mist; at every
+step we descend, deeper, deeper!
+
+CHORUS OF WOOD SPIRITS. Let us weep for Christ, the persecuted, martyred
+Jesus!
+
+Where is our God; where is His church?
+
+THE MAN. Unsheathe the sword--to arms! to arms!
+
+I will restore Him to you; upon thousands and thousands of crosses will
+I crucify His enemies!
+
+CHORUS OF SPIRITS. We kept guard by day and night around the altar and
+the holy graves; upon untiring wings we bore the matin chime and vesper
+bell to the ear of the believer; our voices floated on the organ's peal!
+In the glitter of the stained and rainbow panes, the shadows of the
+vaulted domes, the light of the holy chalice, the blessed consecration
+of the Body of our Lord--was our whole life centred!
+
+Woe! woe! what will become of us?
+
+THE MAN. It is growing lighter; their dim forms fade and melt into the
+red of morn!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Here lies your way: this is the entrance to the Pass.
+
+THE MAN. Hail! Christ Jesus and my sword! (_He tears off the liberty
+cap, throws it upon the ground, and casts pieces of silver upon it.)_
+Take together the Thing and the Image for a remembrance!
+
+
+THE BAPTIZED. You pledge your word to me for the honorable treatment of
+him who will visit you at midnight?
+
+THE MAN. An old noble never repeats or breaks a promise!
+
+Hail! Christ Jesus and our swords!
+
+VOICES (_from the depths of the Pass_). Mary and our swords! Long live
+our lord, Count Henry!
+
+THE MAN. My faithful followers, to me--to me!
+
+Aid me, Mary, and Christ Jesus!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Night. Trees and shrubbery. Pancratius, Leonard, and attendants.
+
+PANCRATIUS (_to his attendants_). Lie upon this spot with your faces to
+the turf, remain perfectly still, kindle no fires, beat no signals, and,
+unless you hear the report of firearms, stir not until the dawn of day!
+
+LEONARD. I once more conjure you, citizen!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Lean against this tall pine, Leonard, and pass the night in
+reflection.
+
+LEONARD. I pray you, Pancratius, take me with you! Remember, you are
+about to intrust yourself alone with an aristocrat, a betrayer, an
+oppressor....
+
+PANCRATIUS (_interrupting him, and impatiently gesturing to him to
+remain behind_). The old nobles seldom broke a plighted promise!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A vast feudal hall in the castle of Count Henry. Pictures of
+     knights and ladies hang upon the walls. A pillar is seen in the
+     background bearing the arms and escutcheons of the family. The
+     Count is seated at a marble table upon which are placed an antique
+     lamp of wrought silver, a jewel-hilted sword, a pair of pistols, an
+     hourglass, and clock. Another table stands on the opposite side,
+     with silver pitchers, decanters, and massive goblets.
+
+THE MAN. At the same hour, surrounded by appalling perils, agitated by
+foreboding thoughts, the last Brutus met his Evil Genius.
+
+I await a like apparition. A man without a name, without ancestors,
+without a faith or guardian angel; a man who is destroying the Past, and
+who will, in all probability, establish a new era, though himself sprung
+from the very dust, if I cannot succeed in casting him back into his
+original nothingness--is now to appear before me!
+
+Spirit of my forefathers! inspire me with that haughty energy which once
+rendered you the rulers of the world! Give me the lion heart which erst
+throbbed in your dauntless breasts! Give me your peerless dignity, your
+noble and chivalric courtesy!
+
+Rekindle in my wavering soul your blind, undoubting, earnest faith in
+Christ and in His church: at once the source of your noblest deeds on
+earth, your brightest hopes in heaven! Oh, let it open for me, as it was
+wont to do for you; and I will struggle with fire and sword against its
+enemies! Hear me, the son of countless generations, the sole heir of
+your thoughts, your courage, your virtues, and your faults!
+
+     The castle bell sounds twelve.
+
+It is the appointed hour: I am prepared!
+
+     An old and faithful servant, Jacob, enters, fully armed.
+
+JACOB. My lord, the person whom your excellency expects is in the
+castle.
+
+THE MAN. Admit him here.
+
+     Exit Jacob.
+
+     He reappears, announcing Pancratius, and again retires.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Count Henry, I salute you! The word 'count' sounds strangely
+on my lips.
+
+     He seats himself, throws off his cloak and liberty cap, and fastens
+     his eyes on the pillar on which hang the arms and shield.
+
+THE MAN. Thanks, guest, that you have confided in the honor of my house!
+Faithful to our ancient forms, I pledge you in a glass of wine. Your
+good health, guest!
+
+     He takes a goblet, fills, tastes, and hands it to Pancratius.
+
+PANCRATIUS. If I am not mistaken, this red and blue shield was called a
+coat of arms in the language of the Dead; but such trifles have vanished
+from the face of the earth.
+
+     He drinks.
+
+THE MAN. Vanished? With the aid of God, you will soon look upon them by
+thousands!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Commend me to the old noble! always confident in himself,
+though without money, arms, or soldiers; proud, obstinate, and hoping
+against all hope; like the corpse in the fable, threatening the driver
+of the hearse at the very door of the charnel house, and confiding in
+God, or at least pretending to confide in Him, when confidence in
+himself is no longer even possible!
+
+Pray, Count Henry, give me but one little glimpse of the lightning which
+is to be sent from heaven, for your especial benefit, to blast me and my
+millions; or show me at least one angel of the thousands of the heavenly
+hosts, who are to encamp on your side, and whose prowess is so speedily
+to decide the combat in your favor!
+
+     He empties the goblet.
+
+THE MAN. You are pleased to jest, leader of the people; but atheism is
+quite an old formula, and I looked for something _new_ from the _new
+men_!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Laugh, if you will, at your own wit, but my faith is wider,
+deeper, and more firmly based than your own. Its central dogma is the
+emancipation of humanity. It has its source in the cries of despair
+which rise unceasingly to heaven from the hearts of tortured millions,
+in the famine of the operatives, the grinding poverty of the peasants,
+the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the
+race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices--from all
+this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to
+establish: _'Man has a birthright of happiness_.' These thoughts are my
+god, a god which will give bread, rest, bliss, glory to man!
+
+     He fills, drinks, and casts and goblet from him.
+
+THE MAN. I place my trust in that God who gave power and rule, into the
+hands of my forefathers!
+
+PANCRATIUS. You trust Him still, and yet through your whole life you
+have been but a plaything in the hands of the Devil!
+
+But let us leave such discussions to the theologians, if any such still
+linger upon earth:--to business, Count Henry, to stern facts!
+
+THE MAN. What do you seek from me, redeemer of the people, citizen-god?
+
+PANCRATIUS. I sought you, in the first place, because I wished to know
+you; in the second, because I desire to save you.
+
+THE MAN. For the first, receive my thanks; for the second, trust my
+sword!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Your God! your sword! vain phantoms of the brain! Look at
+the dread realities of your situation! The curses of the millions are
+upon you; myriads of brawny arms are already raised to hurl you to
+destruction! Of all the vaunted Past nothing remains to you save a few
+feet of earth, scarcely enough to offer you a grave. Even your last
+fortress, the castle of the Holy Trinity, can hold out but a few days
+longer. Where is your artillery? Where are the arms and provisions for
+your soldiers? Where are your soldiers? and what dependence can you
+place on the few you still retain? You must surely know there is
+nothing left you on which to hang a single hope!
+
+If I were in your place, Count Henry, I know what I would do!
+
+THE MAN. Speak! you see how patiently I listen!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Were I Count Henry, I would say to Pancratius: 'I will
+dismiss my troops, my few retainers; I will not go to the relief of the
+Holy Trinity--and for this I will retain my title and my estates; and
+you, Pancratius, will pledge your own honor to guarantee me the
+possession of the things I require.'
+
+How old are you, Count Henry?
+
+THE MAN. I am thirty-six years old, citizen.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Then you have but about fifteen years of life to expect, for
+men of your temperament die young; your son is nearer to the grave than
+to maturity. A single exception, such as yours, can do no harm to the
+great whole. Remain, then, where you are, the last of the counts. Rule,
+as long as you shall live, in the house of your fathers; have your
+family portraits retouched, your armorial bearings renewed, and think no
+more of the wretched remnant of your fallen order. Let the justice of
+the long-injured people be fulfilled upon them! (_He fills for himself
+another cup._) Your good health, Henry, the last of the counts!
+
+THE MAN. Every word you utter is a new insult to me! Do you really
+believe that, to save a dishonored life, I would suffer myself to be
+enslaved and dragged about, chained to your car of triumph?
+
+Cease! cease! I can endure no longer! I cannot answer as my spirit
+dictates, for you are my guest, sheltered from all insult while under my
+roof by my plighted honor!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Plighted honor and knightly faith have, ere this, swung from
+a gallows! You unfurl a tattered banner whose faded rags seem strangely
+out of place among the brilliant flags and joyous symbols of universal
+humanitarian progress. Oh, I know you, and protest against your course!
+Full of life and generous vigor, you bind to your heart a putrefying
+corpse! You court your own destruction, clinging to a vain belief in
+privileged orders, in worn-out relics, in the bones of dead men, in
+mouldering escutcheons and forgotten coats of arms--and yet in your
+inmost heart you are forced to acknowledge that your brother nobles have
+deserved their punishment, that forgetfulness were mercy for them!
+
+THE MAN. You, Pancratius, and your followers, what do you deserve?
+
+
+PANCRATIUS. Victory and life! I acknowledge but one right, I bow to but
+one law, the law of perpetual progress, and this law is your death
+warrant. It cries to you through my lips: 'Worm-eaten, mouldering
+aristocracy! full of rottenness, crammed with meat and wine, satiated
+with luxury--give place to the young, the strong, the hungry!'
+
+But I will save you, and you alone!
+
+THE MAN. Cease! I will not brook your arrogant pity!
+
+I know you, and your new world; I have visited your camp at night, and
+looked upon the restless swarms upon whose necks you ride to power! I
+saw all: I detected the _old_ crimes peering through the thin veils of
+_new_ draperies, shining under new shams, whirling to new tunes,
+circling in new dances--but the end was ever the same which it has been
+for centuries, which it will forever be: adultery, license, theft, gold,
+blood!
+
+But I saw you not there; you were not with your guilty children; you
+know you despise them in the depths of your soul; and if you do not go
+mad yourself in the mad dances of the blood-thirsty and blood-drunken
+people, you will soon scorn and despise yourself!
+
+Torture me no more!
+
+     He rises, moves hurriedly to and fro, then seats himself under his
+     escutcheon.
+
+PANCRATIUS. It is true my world is in its infancy, unformed and
+undeveloped; it requires food, ease, material gratifications; but
+it is growing, and the time will come--(_He rises from his chair,
+approaches the count, and leans against the pillar supporting the
+escutcheons_)--the time will come when my world will arrive at maturity,
+will attain the consciousness of its own strength, when it will say, I
+AM; and there will be no other voice on earth able to reply, 'I ALSO
+AM!'
+
+THE MAN. And then?
+
+PANCRATIUS. A race will spring from the generation I am now quickening
+and elevating, stronger, higher, and nobler than any the world has yet
+produced; the earth has never yet seen such men upon her bosom. They
+will be free, lords of the globe from pole to pole; the earth will be a
+blooming garden, every part of her surface under the highest culture;
+the sea will be covered with floating palaces and argosies of wealth and
+commerce; a universal exchange of commodities will carry civilization,
+mutual recognition, and comfort to every clime; prosperous cities will
+crown every height, and expand their blessings of refinement and culture
+o'er every plain; earth will then offer happy and tranquil homes to all
+her children, she will be one vast and united house of blissful industry
+and highest art!
+
+THE MAN. Your words and voice dissemble well, but your pale and rigid
+features in vain struggle to assume the generous glow of a noble
+enthusiasm, which your soul cannot feel.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Interrupt me not! Men have begged on bended knees before me
+for such prophecies.
+
+The world of the Future will possess a god whose highest fact will not
+be his own defeat and death upon a cross; a god whom the people, by
+their own power and skill, _will force_ to unveil his face to them; a
+god who will be torn by the very children whom he once scattered over
+the face of the earth in his anger, from the infinite recesses of the
+distant heavens in which he loves to hide! Babel will be no more, all
+tribes and nations will meet and understand their mutual wants, and,
+united by a _universal language_, his scattered children, having
+attained their majority, assert their _right_ to know their creator, and
+claim their just inheritance from a common father: '_the full possession
+of all truth_!'
+
+The god of humanity at last reveals himself to man!
+
+THE MAN. Yes, He revealed Himself some centuries ago; through Him is
+humanity already redeemed.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Alas! let the redeemed delight in the sweetness of such
+redemption! let them rejoice in the multiplied agonies which have in
+vain cried to a Redeemer for relief during the three thousand years
+which have elapsed since His defeat and death!
+
+THE MAN. Blasphemer, cease! I have seen the Cross, the holy symbol of
+His mystic love, standing in the heart of the eternal city, Rome; the
+ruins of a power far greater than thine were crumbling into dust around
+It; hundreds of gods such as those you trust in, were lying prostrate on
+the ground, trampled under careless feet, not even daring to raise their
+crushed and wounded heads to gaze upon the Crucified. It stood upon the
+seven hills, stretching its mighty arms to the east and to the west, its
+holy brow glittering in the golden sunshine; men wistfully gazed upon
+its perfect lesson of self-abnegating Love; it won all hearts, it RULED
+THE WORLD!
+
+PANCRATIUS. An old wife's tale, hollow as the rattling of these vain
+escutcheons! (_He strikes the shield._) These discussions are in vain,
+for I have read all the secrets of your yearning heart! If you really
+wish to find the _infinite_ which has so long baffled your search; if
+you love the _truth_, and are willing to suffer for it; if you are a
+_man_, created in the image of our common humanity, and not the
+impossible hero of an old nursery song--listen to me! Oh, let not these
+rapidly fleeting moments, the last in which you can possibly be saved,
+pass in vain! The race renews itself, man of the Past; and _of the blood
+we shed to-day, no trace will be found to-morrow_! For the last time I
+conjure you, if you are what you once appeared to be, A MAN, rise in
+your former might, aid the down-trodden and oppressed people, help to
+emancipate and enlighten your fellow men, work for the common good,
+forsake your false ideas of a personal glory, quit these tottering ruins
+which all your pride and power cannot prevent from crumbling o'er you,
+desert your falling house, and follow me!
+
+THE MAN. O youngest born of Satan's brood!--(_He paces up and down the
+hall, speaking to himself_:) Dreams, dreams, beautiful dreams--but their
+realization is impossible! Who could achieve them? Adam died in the
+desert--the flaming sword still guards the gates--we are never more to
+enter Paradise! In vain we dream!
+
+PANCRATIUS (_aside_). I have driven the probe to the core of his heart;
+I have struck the electric nerve of Poetry, which quivers through the
+very base of his complicated being!
+
+THE MAN. Progress of humanity; universal happiness; I once believed them
+possible! There--there--take my head--my life--if that were possi--....
+(_He sighs, and is silent for a moment._) It is past! two centuries ago
+it might have been--but now.... But now I have seen and know there will
+be nothing but assassination and murder--murder on either side--nothing
+can satisfy now but an unceasing war of mutual extermination!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Woe then to the vanquished! Falter not, seeker of universal
+happiness! Cry but once with us: '_Woe to the oppressors of the
+people_!' and stand preëminent o'er all, the First among the Victors!
+
+THE MAN. Have you already explored all the paths in the dark and unknown
+country of the Future? Did Destiny, withdrawing at midnight the curtains
+of your tent, stand visibly before you, and, placing her giant hand upon
+your scheming brain, impress upon it the mystic seal of victory? or in
+the heat of midday, when the world slept, and you alone were watching,
+did she glide pale, pitiless, and stern before you, and promise
+conquest, that you thus threaten me with defeat and ruin? You are but a
+man of clay as fragile as my own, and may be the victim of the first
+well-aimed ball, the first sharp thrust of the sword! Your life, like
+mine, hangs on a single thread, and you have no immunity from death!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Dreams! idle dreams! Oh do not deceive yourself with hopes
+so vain, for no bullet aimed by man will reach me, no sword will pierce
+me, while a single member of your haughty caste remains capable of
+resisting the task which it is my destiny to fulfil. And what doom
+soever may befall me, after its completion, count, will be too late to
+offer you the least advantage. (_The clock strikes._) Hark! time
+flies--and scorns us both!
+
+If you are weary of your own life, save at least your unfortunate son!
+
+THE MAN. His pure soul is already saved in heaven: on earth he must
+share the fate of his father.
+
+     His head sinks heavily, and remains for some time buried in his
+     hands.
+
+PANCRATIUS. You reject too all hope for him?... (_Pauses._) Nay--you are
+silent--you reflect--it is well: reflection becomes him who stands upon
+the brink of the grave!
+
+THE MAN. Away! away! Back from the passionate mysteries now surging
+through the depths of my soul! Profane them not with a word; they lie
+beyond your sphere!
+
+The rough, wide world belongs to you; feed it with meat; flood it with
+wine; but press not into the holy secrets of my heart! Away! away from
+me, framer of material bliss!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Shame upon you, warrior, scholar, poet, and yet the slave of
+one idea and its dying forms! Thought and form are wax beneath my
+plastic fingers!
+
+THE MAN. In vain would you seek to follow my thoughts; you will never
+understand me, for all your forefathers were buried in a common ditch,
+as dead things, not as men of individual character and bold distinctive
+spirit. (_He points to the portraits of his ancestors._) Look upon these
+pictures! Love of country, of family, of the home hearth, feelings at
+war with all your ideas, are written in every line of their firm
+brows--their spirit lives entire in me, their last heir and
+representative. Tell me, O man without ancestors, where is your natal
+soil? You spread your wandering tent each coming eve Upon the ruins of
+another's home, every morning roll it up again that it may be unrolled
+anew at night to blight and spoil! Yon have not yet found a _home_, a
+_hearth_, and you will never find one as long as a hundred men live to
+cry with me: '_Glory to our fathers_!'
+
+PANCRATIUS. Yes, glory to your fathers in heaven and upon earth; but it
+will repay us to look at them a little more closely. (_He points to one
+of the portraits._) This gentleman was a famous Starost; he shot old
+women in the woods, and roasted the Jews alive: this one with the
+inscription, 'Chancellor,' and the great seal in his right hand,
+falsified and forged acts, burned archives, stabbed knights, and sullied
+the inheritance with poison; through him came your villages, your
+income, your power. That dark man played at adultery with the wife of
+his friend. This one, with the golden fleece on his Spanish cloak,
+served in a foreign land, when his own country was in danger.
+
+This pale lady with the raven ringlets carried on an intrigue with a
+handsome page. That one with the lustrous braids is reading a letter
+from her gallant; she smiles, as well she may, for night approaches, and
+love is bold.
+
+This timid beauty with the deep blue eyes and golden curls, clasping a
+Roman hound in her braceleted arm, was the mistress of a king, and
+soothed his softer hours.
+
+Such is the true history of your unbroken, ancient, and unsullied line!
+But I like this jolly fellow in the green riding jacket; he drank and
+hunted with the nobles, and employed the peasants to run down the tall
+deer with the hounds. Indeed, the ignorance, stupidity, and wretchedness
+of the serf were the strength of the noble, and give convincing proof of
+his own intellect.
+
+But the Day of Judgment is approaching: I promise you that none of your
+vaunted ancestors, that nought of their fame shall be forgotten in the
+dark award.
+
+THE MAN. You deceive yourself, son of the people! Neither you nor your
+brethren could have preserved existence, had not our noble ancestors
+nourished you with their bread, and defended you with their blood. In
+times of famine, they gave you grain, and when the plague swept over you
+with its hot breath of death, they built hospitals to receive you, found
+nurses to take care of you, and educated physicians to save you from the
+grave. When from a herd of unformed brutes they had nurtured you into
+human beings, they built schools and churches for you, sharing
+everything with you save the dangers of the battle field, for war they
+knew you were not formed to bear. As the sharp lance of the pagan was
+wont to recoil, shattered and riven, from the glittering armor of my
+fathers, so recoil your vain words as they strike the dazzling record
+of their long-consecrated glory. They disturb not the repose of their
+sacred ashes. Like the howlings of a mad dog, who froths, bites, and
+snaps as he runs, until he is driven out of the pale of humanity, so
+fall your accusations, dying out in their own insanity.
+
+But it is almost dawn, and time you should depart from the halls of my
+ancestors! Pass in safety and in freedom from their home, my guest!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Farewell then, until we meet again upon the ramparts of the
+Holy Trinity. And when your powder and ball shall be utterly exhausted?
+
+THE MAN. _We will then approach within the length of our swords._
+Farewell!
+
+PANCRATIUS. We are twin Eagles, but your nest is shattered by the
+lightning! (_He takes up his cloak and liberty cap._) In passing from
+your threshold, I leave the curse, due to decrepitude, behind me. I
+devote you and your son to destruction!
+
+THE MAN. Ho! Jacob!
+
+     Enter Jacob.
+
+Conduct this man in safety through my last post on the hill!
+
+JACOB. So help me God the Lord!
+
+     Exit Jacob with Pancratius.
+
+
+
+
+DEATH IN LIFE.
+
+
+  In some dull hour of doubt or pain,
+  Who has not felt that life is slain--
+  And while there yet remain
+
+  Long years, perhaps, of joyless mirth,
+  Ere earth shall claim its kindred earth,
+  Such years were nothing worth
+
+  But that some duty still demands
+  The sweating brow, the weary hands?
+  And so Existence stands
+
+  With an appeal we cannot shun,
+  To make complete what Life begun,
+  With toil from sun to sun.
+
+  And so we keep the sorry tryst,
+  With all its fancied sweetness missed--
+  Consenting to exist
+
+  When Life has fled beyond recall,
+  And left us to its heir in thrall,
+  With chains that will not fall.
+
+  Belated stars were waning fast
+  As through an open gate I passed,
+  And crossed a meadow vast--
+
+  And, still descending, followed still
+  The path that wound adown the hill
+  And by the ruined mill--
+
+  Till in its garden I espied
+  The cottage by the river side
+  Where dwelt my promised bride.
+
+  Beneath the porch no lantern flared,
+  No watch dog kept his faithful ward,
+  The window blinds were barred.
+
+  Entering with eager eye and ear,
+  And ushered by the phantom Fear,
+  I stood beside the bier
+
+  Of one who, passing hence away,
+  Left something more than lifeless clay,
+  As twilight lingers after day,
+
+  The pulseless heart, the pallid lips,
+  The eyes just closed in death's eclipse,
+  The fairy finger tips
+
+  So lightly locked across the breast,
+  Seemed to obey the sweet behest
+  By angels whispered--Rest!
+
+  That beauty had been mine alone,
+  Those hands had fondly pressed my own,
+  Those eyes in mine had shone.
+
+  The open door was banged about,
+  As wailing winds went in and out
+  With sigh and groan and shout.
+
+  And darkly ran the river cold,
+  Whose swollen waters, as they rolled,
+  A tale of sorrow told.
+
+  I could not choose but seek that stream,
+  Whose sympathetic moan did seem
+  The music of a dream.
+
+  O River, that unceasing lay
+  Charms each fair tree along thy way,
+  Until it falls thy prey!
+
+  O endless moan within my heart,
+  Thy constancy has made me part
+  Of what thou wert and art!
+
+  And while I stood upon the brink,
+  And tried to think, but could not think,
+  Nor sight with reason link--
+
+  A form I had not seen before
+  Came slowly down the dismal shore;
+  A sombre robe she wore,
+
+  And in her air and on her face
+  There was a sterner kind of grace,
+  Heightened by time and place--
+
+  A sort of conscious power and pride,
+  A soul to substance more allied--
+  Than that of her who died.
+
+  With scarce a semblance of design,
+  Toward me her steps she did incline,
+  And raised her eyes to mine
+
+  So sweetly, so imploringly,
+  I scarcely wished, and did not try,
+  To put their pleading by,
+
+  And, ere a movement I had made,
+  Her hand upon my arm she laid,
+  And whispered: I obeyed.
+
+  While one into the darkness sped,
+  I followed where the other led;
+  Yet often turned my head,
+
+  As one who fancies that he hears
+  His own name ringing in his ears
+  Shouted from far-off spheres.
+
+  Oh! bliss misplaced is misery!
+  I love the life I've lost, but, see!
+  The life that's here loves me.
+
+  And while I seem her willing slave,
+  My heart is hid in weeds that wave
+  Above a distant grave.
+
+
+
+
+ÆNONE:
+
+A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+In an hour from that time the banqueting hall of the palace was prepared
+for its guests. Silken couches had been drawn up around the table. Upon
+it glittered a rich array of gold and silver. Between the dishes stood
+flasks of rare wines. Upon the buffet near by were other wines cooling
+in Apennine snow. Tall candelabras in worked and twisted bronze stood at
+the ends and sides of the table, and stretched overhead their arms hung
+with lamps. From the walls were suspended other lamps, lighting up the
+tapestries and frescoes. At one end of the hall, richly scented spices
+burned upon a tripod. With a readiness and celerity for which the Vanno
+palace was famous, a feast fit for the emperor had been improvised in a
+few minutes, and nothing was now wanting except the guests.
+
+These now began to drop in one by one. The poet Emilius--the comedian
+Bassus--the proconsul Sardesus--others of lesser note; but not one who
+had not a claim to be present, by reason of intimate acquaintance or
+else some peculiarly valuable trait of conviviality. In collecting
+these, the armor bearer had made no mistake; and knowing his master's
+tastes and intimates, he had made up the roll of guests as discreetly as
+though their names had been given him. One he had met in the
+street--others he had found at their homes. None to whom he gave the
+invitation was backward in accepting it upon the spot, for there were
+few places in Rome where equal festal gratification could be obtained.
+To have been called to the house of Sergius Vanno and not to have gone
+there, was to have lost a day to be forever regretted. None, therefore,
+who had been spoken to, among that club of congenial spirits, was
+absent. Of those who did not come, one was sick and two were at their
+country villas. These, however, were lesser lights, valuable by
+themselves, perhaps, but of no account in comparison with others who had
+come; and therefore their absence was scarcely noticed.
+
+Sergius stood at the door receiving his guests as each arrived. He had
+arrayed himself in his most festive costume, and had evidently resolved
+that whatever might happen on the morrow, that night at least should be
+passed in forgetfulness and unbridled enjoyment. Even now his face was
+flushed with the wine he had taken in anticipation, in the hope of
+giving an artificial elation to his spirits. But it seemed as though for
+that time the wine had lost its accustomed charm. Although at each
+greeting he strove to wreathe his face in smiles, yet it was but a
+feeble mask, and could not hide the more natural appearances of care and
+gloom which rested upon his features; and while his voice seemed to
+retain its old ring of joyous welcome, there was an undertone of sad
+discordance. As the guests entered and exchanged greetings with their
+host, each, after the first moment, looked askant at him, with the dim
+perception that, in some way, he was not as he was wont to be; and so,
+in a little while, they sank, one by one, into a troubled and
+apprehensive silence. He, too, upon his part, looked furtively at them,
+wondering whether they had yet heard the thing that had befallen him. It
+was but a short time ago, indeed, and yet in how few minutes might the
+unrestrained gossip of a slave have spread the ill tidings! For the
+moment, Sergius recoiled from the difficult task of entertainment which
+he had taken upon himself. Why, indeed, had he called these men around
+him? How could he sit and pledge them in deep draughts, and all the time
+suspect that each one knew his secret, and was laughing about it in his
+sleeve? And if they knew it not, so much the worse, for then he must
+tell the tale himself. Was it not partly for this purpose that he had
+assembled them? Far better to speak of it himself--to let them see how
+little he regarded the misfortune and the scandal--to treat it as a
+brave jest--to give his own version of it--than to have the matter leak
+out in the ordinary way, with all conceivable distortions and
+exaggerations. But how, in fact, could he tell it? Was there one among
+them who would not, while openly commiserating him, laugh at him in the
+heart? Did there not now sit before him the lieutenant Plautus, who,
+only a month before, had met with a like disgrace, and about whom he had
+composed derisive verses? Would not the lieutenant Plautus now rejoice
+to make retaliatory odes? Would it not b e better, then, after all, to
+forbear any mention of the matter, and, letting its announcement take
+the usual chance course, to devote this night, at least, to unbroken
+festivity? But what if they already knew it?
+
+Thus wandering in his mind from one debate to another, and ever, in a
+moment, coming back to his original suspicion, he sat, essaying
+complimentary speeches and convivial jests, and moodily gazing from face
+to face, in a vain attempt to read their secret thoughts. He was wrong
+in his suspicions. Not one of them knew the reason of the burden upon
+his mind. All, however, perceived that something had occurred to disturb
+him, and his moody spirit shed its influence around, until the
+conversation once again flagged, and there was not one of the party who
+did not wish himself elsewhere. The costliest viands and wines spread
+out before them were ineffective to produce that festive gayety upon
+which they had calculated.
+
+'By Parnassus!' exclaimed the poet Emilius, at length, pushing aside his
+plate of turbot, and draining his goblet 'Are we to sit here, hour after
+hour, winking and blinking at each other like owls over their mice? Was
+it merely to eat and drink that we have assembled? Hearken! I will read
+that to you which will raise your spirits, to a certainty. To-morrow the
+games and combats commence in the arena of the new amphitheatre. Well;
+and is it known to you that I am appointed to read a dedicatory ode
+before the emperor and in honor of that occasion? I will give you a
+pleasure, now. I will forestall your joy, and let you hear what I have
+written. And be assured that this is no small compliment to your
+intelligence, since no eye hath yet looked upon a single verse thereof.'
+
+With that the poet dragged from his breast his silken bundle, and
+carefully began to unwind the covering.
+
+'You will observe,' he said, as he brought the precious parchment to
+light, and smoothed it out upon the table before him, 'you will observe
+that I commence with an invocation to the emperor, whom I call the most
+illustrious of all the Cæsars, and liken to Jove. I then congratulate
+the spectators, not only upon the joy of living in his time, but also
+upon being there to bask in the effulgence of--'
+
+'A truce to such mummery!' cried Sergius, suddenly arousing from his
+spiritual stupor and bursting into a shrill laugh. 'Do we care to listen
+to your miserable dactyls? Is it not a standing jest through Rome that,
+for the past month, you have daily read your verses to one person after
+another, with the same wretched pretence of exclusive favoritism? And do
+we not know that no warrant has ever been given to you to recite a
+single line before the emperor, either in or out of the arena? We are
+here to revel, not to listen to your stale aphorisms upon death and
+immortality. Ho, there, more wine! Take off these viands, which already
+pall upon us! Bring wine-more wine!'
+
+The guests were not slow to respond to the altered mood of their host;
+for it was merely the reflection of his sullen gravity that had eclipsed
+their own vivacity. The instant, therefore, that he led the way, the
+hall began to resound with jest and laughter. The poet, with some
+humiliation, which he endeavored to conceal beneath an affectation of
+wounded dignity, commenced rolling up his manuscript, not before a
+splash of wine from a carelessly filled flagon had soiled the
+fair-written characters. More flasks were placed upon the table by ready
+and obedient hands--and from that moment the real entertainment of the
+evening commenced.
+
+Faster than any of his guests, as though care could be the better
+drowned by frequent libations, Sergius now filled and refilled his
+flagon; and though the repeated draughts may not have brought
+forgetfulness, yet, what was the nearest thing, they produced reckless
+indifference. No longer should the cloud which he had thus suddenly
+swept away from his brow be suffered to remain. Was he not master in his
+own house? If woman deceives, was that a reason why man should mourn and
+grow gray with melancholy? What though a random thought might at times
+intrude, of one who, in the next room, with her head against the wall,
+lay in a half stupor, listening to the ring of goblets and the loud
+laugh and jest? Had she not brought it all upon herself? He would fill
+up again, and think no more about it! And still, obedient to his
+directing tone, the guests followed him with more and more unbridled
+license, until the hall rang with merriment as it had never rung before.
+
+Then, of course, came the throwing of dice, which, at that time, were as
+essential a concomitant of a roystering party as, in later centuries,
+cards became. Nor were these the least attraction of the feasts of
+Sergius; for though the excellence of his viands and wines was
+proverbial, the ease with which he could be despoiled at the gambling
+table was not less so. Already he was known to have seriously crippled
+his heritage by continued reverses, springing from united ill luck and
+want of skill; but it was as well understood that much still remained.
+And then, as now, the morality of gambling was of a most questionable
+character--invited guests not thinking it discreditable to unite in any
+combinations for the purpose of better pillaging their host. This seemed
+now the general purpose; for, leaving each other in comparative freedom
+from attack, they came forward one by one and pitted their purses, great
+and small, against Sergius, who sat pouring down wine and shaking the
+dicebox, while he called each by name, and contended against him. The
+usual result followed; for, whether owing to secret signs among the
+players, or to superior skill, the current of gold flowed but one way,
+from the host to his guests. For a while he bore the continued ill luck
+with undiminished gayety, deeming that in meeting their united prowess
+he was doing a brave thing, and that, whatever befell him, he should
+remember that in character of host, he must consent to suffer. But at
+length he began to realize that his losses had been carried far enough.
+He had never suffered so severely in any one evening before. Even his
+duty to them as their host did not demand that he should completely ruin
+himself, and he began to suspect that he had half done so already. With
+a hoarse laugh he pushed the dice away, and arose.
+
+'Enough--quite enough for one night,' he exclaimed. 'I have no more
+gold, nor, if I had, could I dare to continue, with this ill run against
+me. Perhaps after another campaign I may meet you again, and take my
+revenge; which, if the Fates are just, must one day or another be
+allotted me. But not now.'
+
+He thought that he was firm in his refusal, but his guests had not yet
+done with him. It needed but gentle violence to push him back again upon
+his seat, and to replace the dicebox in his hand.
+
+'Art weary, or afraid to continue?' said the prætorian captain. 'Well,
+let there be one more main between us, and then we will end it all.
+Listen! I have won this night two hundred sestertia. What is the worth
+of that quarry of yours to the south of the Porta Triumphalis?'
+
+'Three hundred sestertia--not less,' responded Sergius.
+
+'Nay, as much as that?' rejoined the captain, carelessly throwing down
+his own dice. 'Then it is useless to propose what I was about to. I had
+thought that as the quarry had been well worked already, and was now
+overrun with fugitive slaves and Nazarenes, and the like, to ferret out
+whom would require half a legion, I could offer to put the two hundred
+sestertia against it, so that you might chance to win them back. But it
+is of little consequence.'
+
+Sergius sat for the moment nervously drumming upon the table. He knew
+that the other was purposely disparaging the property and trying to
+tempt him into an equal stake; and yet he suffered himself to be
+tempted. The luck might this time be with him. It were worth while to
+try it, at least. If he lost, it would be but one more buffet of
+fortune. And if he won, how easily would those two hundred sestertia
+have been regained, and what a triumph over the one who had enticed him!
+And therefore they threw--five times a piece; and after a moment of
+breathless excitement, the play was decided in favor of the captain.
+
+'The quarry is mine, therefore,' he said, endeavoring to assume a
+nonchalant air of indifference. 'Would you still win it back, Sergius?
+And the sesteria also? Well, there is that vineyard of yours on the
+slope of Tivoli, which--'
+
+'Stay!' exclaimed the proconsul Sardesus, who, of all the party had not
+as yet touched the dicebox. 'Let this be enough. Will you plunder him
+entirely? Have you no regard for my rights over him? Do you not know
+that to-morrow, at the amphitheatre, Sergius and I are to match
+gladiators against each other for a heavy wager, and that I expect to
+win? How, then will I get this money, if you now strip him of all that
+he owns?'
+
+Probably the proconsul felt no fear about collecting what he might win,
+and spoke jestingly, and with the sole intention of putting a stop to a
+system of pillage which seemed to him already too flagrant and
+unscrupulous. But his words were too plainly spoken not to give offence
+at any time, more particularly now that all present were heated with
+excitement; and the usual consequence of disinterested interference
+ensued. The other guests in no measured language, began to mutter their
+displeasure at the insinuations against themselves; while the host, for
+whose benefit the interruption had been intended, resented it most
+strongly of all. He needed no counsel, but was well able to take care of
+himself, he intimated. And he remembered that he had entered into some
+sort of a wager about the result of a gladiatorial combat, and he had
+supposed that no one would have doubted his ability to pay all that he
+might lose therein. It was proper, at least, to wait until there had
+been some precedent of the kind proved against him. No one, so far, had
+found him wanting. And the like.
+
+'And yet,' he continued, as after a moment of reflection he began to
+realise the value of the wager, and how inconvenient it would be to
+lose, and that he had not yet succeeded in making any preparation for
+the contest, 'when I tell you that I have not yet found a gladiator to
+my mind, you will not force this match upon me to-morrow? You will
+forbear that advantage, and will consent to postpone our trial to
+another time?'
+
+The proconsul shrugged his shoulders.
+
+'Was it in the bond,' he said, 'that one should await the convenience of
+the other? Has there not been time enough for each to procure his man?
+This wager was made between us mouths ago, Sergius--before even you went
+into the East.'
+
+'And it was while I was there,' exclaimed Sergius eagerly, 'that I found
+my man--a Rhodian, with the forehead, neck, and sinews of a bull. He
+could have hugged a bull to death almost. Having him, I felt safe, for
+who could you obtain to stand up against him? But in an evil hour, not
+over a month ago, this play actor here--this Bassus--by a stupid trick
+gained him from me. What, then, have I been able to do for myself since?
+I have sought far and near to replace him, but without success; and had
+made up my mind, if you would not postpone the trial, to pay up the
+forfeit for not appearing, and think no more about it. But by the gods!
+I will, even at this late hour, make one more attempt. Harkee, Bassus!
+Whenever I have asked you about this Rhodian, you have said that you
+have sold him; and, for some low reason, you have refused to tell who
+owns him now. Tell me, now, to whom you sold him, so that I can purchase
+him at once! Tell me, I say; or there will be blood between us!'
+
+'What can he say,' interrupted the proconsul, 'but that he sold his
+Rhodian to me, the day thereafter? You do well to praise him, Sergius.
+Never have I seen such a creature of brawn and muscle. And with the
+training I have given him, who, indeed, could overcome him? You will see
+him to-morrow, in the arena. You will see how he will crush in the ribs
+of your gladiator, like an egg shell.'
+
+Sergius gave vent to a groan of mingled rage and despair.
+
+'And you will not postpone this trial?' he said. 'Will you, then, take
+up with an offer to play off that Rhodian against ten of my slaves? No?
+Against twenty, then? What else will tempt you? Ah, you may think that I
+have but little to offer to play against you, but it is not so. I have
+no gold left, and my last quarry is gone. But I have my vineyards and
+slaves in plenty. What say you, therefore?'
+
+'Tush! Beseech him not!' interrupted Emilius, to whom the mention of
+vineyards and slaves gave intimation of further spoils. 'Do you not see
+that he shakes his head? And do you not know his obstinacy? You could
+not move him now were you to pay him in full the amount of the forfeit.
+It is not the gold that he longer cares for, but the chance to
+distinguish himself by the exhibition of the slave of greatest strength
+and prowess. So let that matter go for settled. Rather strive, in some
+other manner, to win the money with which to pay your forfeit. This,
+with good luck, you may do--a little here and a little there--who knows?
+Perhaps even I can help you. Have I not won fifty sestertia from you? I
+will now wager it back against a slave.'
+
+'Against any slave?'
+
+'By Bacchus, no! I have enough of ordinary captives to suit me, and care
+but little for any accession to the rabble of them. But you have one
+whom I covet--a Greek of fair appearance and pleasing manners--fit not
+for the camp or the quarries, but of some value as a page or cupbearer.
+It was but lately that I saw him, writing at your lady's dictation, and
+I wished for him at once. Shall we play for him?'
+
+'No! a thousand times, no!' exclaimed Sergius, striking the table so
+heavily with his open hand that the dice danced and the flagons shook.
+'Were you to offer me thrice his value--to pay off my forfeit to
+Sardesus to the last sestertium--to gain me back my quarry and my
+vineyards--all that I have lost--I would not give up that slave. My
+purpose is sweeter to me than all the gold you could offer, and I will
+not be cheated out of it. That slave dies to-morrow in the
+amphitheatre--between the lion's jaws!'
+
+'Dies? In the arena?' was the astonished exclamation.
+
+'Is there aught wonderful in that?' Sergius fiercely cried. 'Have you
+never before known such a thing as a master giving up his slave for the
+public amusement? And let no man ask me why I do it. It may be that I
+wish revenge, hating him too much to let him live. It may be that I seek
+to be a benefactor like others, and furnish entertainment to the
+populace at my own expense. It is sufficient that I choose it. Will not
+any other slave answer, Emilius?'
+
+'Nay, no other will do,' remarked the poet, throwing himself carelessly
+back, with the air of one dismissing a fruitless subject from his mind.
+'This was the only one whom I coveted. For any other I would not care to
+shake the dicebox three times, though I might feel sure to win.'
+
+'Will you offer the same to me, Sergius?' eagerly cried the comedian. 'I
+also have won heavily from you. Will you play any other slave than this
+page against fifty sestertia?'
+
+For his only answer, Sergius seized the dice, and began impatiently to
+rattle them. The eyes of Bassus sparkled with anticipated victory.
+
+'You hear?' he cried, to all around him. 'Against my fifty sestertia he
+will stake any of his slaves excepting this Greek page?'
+
+'They all hear the terms,' retorted Sergius. 'Now throw!'
+
+'Whether male or female?' continued Bassus, still looking around to see
+that all understood.
+
+'Are they fools? Can they not hear? Will you throw or not?' shouted
+Sergius.
+
+In a wild delirium of excitement, the comedian began the game, and in a
+few minutes it was concluded. Then he leaped from his seat, crying out:
+
+'I have won! And there can be no dispute now! You all heard that he gave
+the choice of his slaves, whether male or female?'
+
+'Fool!' sneered Sergius, throwing himself back. 'What dispute can there
+be? Do you think that I would deny my word? And do you suppose I did not
+know your aims, cunningly as you may think you veiled them? Would I have
+given up Leta to you, if she had been of any further value to myself? By
+the gods! had you waited a while, I do not know but what I would have
+made her a present to you; not however, to oblige you, but to punish
+her!'
+
+The comedian listened in chopfallen amazement. Already it seemed to him
+that his prize had lost half its value.
+
+'Be at rest, though,' Sergius continued, in a contemptuous tone. 'I have
+merely tired of her, that is all. Her eyes are as bright and her voice
+as silvery as ever. She may not ever come to love you much, but she will
+have the wit to pretend that she does; and if she makes you believe
+her--as you doubtless will--it will be all the same thing to you. Who
+knows, too, with what zeal she may worm herself into your affection,
+under the guidance of her ambition? For, that she has ambition, you will
+soon discover. By Bacchus! since you have no wife or household to fetter
+your fancies, it would not surprise me were you to succumb to her wiles,
+and to make of her your wife. You may recline there and smile with
+incredulity; but such things have been done before this, and by men who
+would not condescend to look upon one in your poor station. Yes, I will
+wager that, in the end, you will make of her your wife. Well, it would
+be no harm to you. She will then deceive you, of course; but what of
+that? Have not better men submitted to that inevitable lot? Yes, she
+will deceive you; and then will smile upon you, and you will believe her
+word, and be again deceived. But you will have only yourself to blame
+for it. I have warned you in advance.'
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+As the shouts of laughter elicited by the host's remark rang through the
+hall, drowning the muttered response of the comedian, Leta glided softly
+and rapidly from behind the screen of tapestry which veiled the open
+doorway. There, crouching out of sight, she had remained concealed for
+the last hour--watching the revellers through a crevice in the
+needlework, and vainly hoping, either in the words or face of Sergius,
+to detect some tone or expression indicative of regretful thought or
+recollection of herself. When at last her name had been mentioned, for a
+moment she had eagerly held her breath, lest she might lose one syllable
+from which an augury of her fate could be drawn. Then, repressing, with
+a violent effort, the cry of despair which rose to her lips, upon
+hearing herself thus coolly and disdainfully surrendered as the stake of
+a game of dice, and with less apparent regret than would have been felt
+for the loss of a single gold piece, she drew the folds of her dress
+closely about her and passed out.
+
+Out through the antechamber--down the stairway--and into the central
+court; no other purpose guiding her footsteps than that of finding some
+place where she could reflect, without disturbance, upon the fate before
+her. In that heated hall she must have died; but it might be that in the
+cool, open air, she could conquer the delirium which threatened to
+overwhelm her, and could thus regain her self-control. If only for five
+minutes, it might be well. With her quick energy and power of decision,
+even five minutes of cool, deliberate counsel with herself might suffice
+to shape and direct her whole future life.
+
+Hardly realizing how she had come there, she found herself sitting upon
+the coping of the courtyard fountain. The night was dark, for thick
+clouds shut out the gleam of moon and stars. No one could see her, nor
+was it an hour when any one was likely to be near. From one end to the
+other the court was deserted, except by herself. No light, other than
+the faint glow from the windows of the banquet hall upon the story above
+her. No sound beyond the sullen splash of the water falling into the
+marble basin of the fountain. There was now but little to interfere with
+deliberate reflection.
+
+What demon had possessed the Fates that they should have brought this
+lot upon her? It could not be the destiny which had been marked out for
+her from the first. That had been a different one, she was sure. Her
+instinct had whispered peace and success to her. Such were the blessings
+which should have been unravelled for her from off the twirling spindle;
+but some malignant spirit must have substituted another person's
+deserved condemnation in place of her more kindly lot.
+
+That she had failed in attaining the grand end of her desires was not,
+of itself, the utmost of her misfortune. She had aimed high, because it
+was as easy to do that as to accept a lower object of ambition. She had
+taken her course, believing that all things are possible to the
+energetic and daring, but, at the same time, fully realizing the chances
+of failure. But to fail had simply seemed to her to remain where she
+was, instead of ascending higher--to miss becoming the wife of the
+imperator, but to continue, as before, the main guide and direction of
+his thoughts, impulses, and affections.
+
+And now, without previous token or warning, had come upon her the
+terrible realization that she had not only gained nothing, but had lost
+all, and that the fatal chance which had fettered her schemes, had also
+led to her further degradation. Thrown aside like a broken toy-with a
+jeering confession that she had wearied her possessor--with a cool,
+heartless criticism upon her character, and with cruel prophecies about
+her future--gambled for with one whose sight filled her with
+abhorrence--and, when won, made over to him as a bone is tossed to a
+dog--what more bitterness could be heaped upon her?
+
+But there was now no use in mourning about the past. What had been done
+could not be altered. Nor could she disguise from herself the
+impossibility of ever regaining her former position and influence. Those
+had passed away forever. She must now look to the future alone, and
+endeavor so to shape its course as to afford herself some relief from
+its terrors. Possibly there might yet be found a way of escape.
+
+Should she try to fly? That, she knew, could not be done--at least,
+alone. The world was wide, but the arm of the imperial police was long;
+and though she might, for a little while, wander purposelessly hither
+and thither, yet before many hours the well-directed efforts of a
+pursuer would be sure to arrest her. She could die--for in every place
+death is within reach of the resolute; but she did not wish to die. For
+one instant, indeed, she thought of the Tiber, and the peace which might
+be found beneath its flow--but only for an instant. And she almost
+thanked the gods in her heart that it had not yet gone so far with her
+as that.
+
+Burying her face in her hands, she sat for a moment, endeavoring to
+abstract her thoughts from all outward objects, so as the more readily
+to determine what course to adopt. But for a while it seemed as though
+it was impossible for her to fix her mind aright. Each instant some
+intruding trifle interfered to distract her attention from the only
+great object which now should claim it. A long-forgotten incident of the
+past would come into her mind--or perhaps some queer conceit which at
+the time had caused laughter. She did not laugh now, but none the less
+would she find herself revolving the merits of the speech or action.
+Then, the soft fall of the water into the fountain basin annoyed her,
+and it occurred to her that it might be this--which prevented undivided
+reflection. Stooping over, therefore, and feeling along the edge of the
+basin, she found the vent of the pipes, and stopped the flow. At once
+the light stream began to diminish and die away, until in a moment the
+water was at rest, except for the few laggard drops which one by one
+rolled off the polished shoulders of the bronze figures. These gradually
+all trickled down, and then it seemed as though at last there must be
+silence. But the murmur of the evening breeze among the trees
+intervened; and, far more exasperating than all, she could now hear the
+bursts of merriment which rang out from the banqueting room overhead.
+Therefore, once more putting her hand into the basin, she turned on the
+flow, and the gentle stream again sprang from the outstretched cup and
+fell down, deadening all lesser sounds.
+
+Then Leta looked up at the sky, overspread with its thick pall of
+clouds, and wondered vacantly whether there would be rain upon the
+morrow, and if so, whether the games appointed for the new amphitheatre
+would take place. But she recovered herself with a start, and again
+buried her face in her hands. What were games and combats of that kind
+to her? She was to enter upon a different kind of struggle. She must
+reflect--reflect!--and when she had reflected, must act!
+
+For ten minutes she thus remained; and now, indeed, seemed to have
+gained the required concentration of thought. No outward sound disturbed
+her. Once a Nubian slave, who had heard the stoppage of the fountain's
+flow, emerged from beneath an archway, as though to examine into the
+difficulty. Finding that the water was still playing as usual, he
+imagined that he must have been mistaken, gave utterance to an oath in
+condemnation of his own stupidity, slowly walked around the basin,
+looked inquiringly at Leta, and, for the moment, made as though he would
+have accosted her--and then, changing his mind, withdrew and walked back
+silently into the house. Still she did not move.
+
+At length, however, she raised her head and stood upright. Her eyes now
+shone with deep intensity of purpose, and her lips were firmly set.
+Something akin to a smile flickered around the corners of her mouth,
+betraying not pleasure, but satisfaction. She had evidently reflected to
+some purpose, and now the trial for action had arrived.
+
+'Strange that I should not have thought of it before,' she murmured to
+herself. Then stepping under the archway which led from the courtyard
+into the palace, she reached up against the wall and took down two keys
+which hung there. Holding them tightly, so that they might not clink
+together, she glided along, past the fountain--through the clump of
+plane trees--keeping as much as possible in the deeper shadows of arch
+and shrubbery--and so on along the whole length of the court, until she
+stood by the range of lower erections which bounded its farther
+extremity. Then, fitting one of the keys into an iron door, she softly
+unlocked it.
+
+Entering, she stood within a low stone cell. It was the prison house of
+the palace, used for the reception of new slaves, and for the punishment
+of such others as gave offence. It was a long, narrow apartment, paved
+with stone and lighted by a single grated aperture set high in the wall
+upon the courtyard side. The place was of sufficient dimensions to hold
+fifty or sixty persons, but, in the present case, there was but one
+tenant--Cleotos---Not even a guard was with him, for the strength of the
+walls and the locks were considered amply sufficient to prevent escape.
+
+Cleotos was sitting upon a stone bench, resting his head upon his right
+hand. At the opening of the door he looked up. He could not see who it
+was that entered, but the light tread and the faint rustle of a waving
+dress sufficiently indicated the sex. If it had been daylight, a flush
+might have been seen upon his face, for the thought flashed upon his
+mind that it might be Ænone herself coming to his assistance. But the
+first word undeceived him; and he let his head once more fall between
+the palms of his hands.
+
+'Cleotos,' whispered Leta, 'it is I. I have come to set you free.'
+
+'It is right,' he said, moodily. 'All this I owe to you alone. It is
+fit that you should try to undo your work.'
+
+'Could I foresee that it would come to this?' she responded, attempting
+justification. 'How was I to know that my trivial transgression would
+have ended so sorrowfully for you? But all that is easily mended. You
+have money, and a token which will identify you to the proper parties.
+There is yet time to reach Ostia before that ship can sail.'
+
+'How knew you that I had gold--or this signet ring; or that there was a
+ship to sail from Ostia?' he exclaimed with sudden fierceness. 'You,
+then, had been listening at the door! And having listened, you must have
+known with what innocence we spoke together! And yet, seeing all this,
+you called him to the spot and left him to let his eyes be deceived and
+his heart filled with bitter jealousy, and have played upon his passion
+by wicked misrepresentation, until you have succeeded in bringing ruin
+upon all about you! I see it all now, as clearly as though it were
+written upon a parchment rolled out before me! To think that the gods
+have beheld you doing this thing, and yet have not stricken you dead!'
+
+'I have sinned,' she murmured, seizing his hand and bending over, so
+that a ready tear rolled down upon it. He felt it fall, but moved not.
+Only a few days before, her tears would have moved him; but now his
+heart was hardened against her. He had found out that her nature was
+cruel and not easily moral to repentance, and that, if emotion was ever
+suffered to overcome her, it was tolerated solely for some crafty
+design. The falling tear, therefore, simply bade him be upon his guard
+against deceit, lest once again she might succeed in weaving her wiles
+about him. Or, if she really wept with repentance, he knew that it was
+not repentance for the sin itself, but rather for some baffled purpose.
+
+'Go on,' he simply said.
+
+'I have sinned,' she repeated, still clinging to his hands. 'But, O
+Cleotos! when I offer to undo my work and set you free, you will surely
+forgive me?'
+
+'Yes, it is right that you should repair the mischief you have caused,'
+he repeated; 'and I will avail myself of it. To-night, since you offer
+to set me free, and claim that you have the power to do so--to-night for
+Ostia; and then, then away forever from this ruthless land! But stay!
+What of our mistress? I will not go hence until I know that she is safe
+and well.'
+
+'She is well,' responded Leta, fearful lest the truth might throw a new
+obstacle before her plans. 'And all is again right between her lord and
+herself, for I have assured him of her innocence.'
+
+'Then, since this is so, there is no motive for me to tarry,' he said.
+He believed her, and was satisfied; not that he esteemed her worthy of
+belief, but because it did not seem to him possible that such a matter
+as a grateful kiss upon a protecting hand could require much
+explanation. 'I would like well once more to see her and bid her
+farewell, and utter my thanks for all her kindness; but to what purpose?
+I have done that already, and could do and say no more than I have
+already done and said. There remains, therefore, nothing more than to
+fulfil her commands, and return to my native home. But tell her, Leta,
+that my last thought was for her, and that her memory will ever live in
+my heart.'
+
+'I cannot tell her this,' slowly murmured Leta, 'for I shall not see her
+again. I--I go with you.'
+
+Cleotos listened for a moment in perplexed wonderment, and then, for his
+sole answer, dropped her hand and turned away. She understood him as
+well as though he had spoken the words of refusal.
+
+'You will not take me with you, then; is it not so?' she said. 'Some
+nice point of pride, or some feeling of fancied wrong, or craving for
+revenge, or, perhaps, love for another person, tells you now to separate
+yourself from me! And yet you loved me once. This, then, is man's
+promised faith!'
+
+'You dare to talk to me of faith and broken vows!' he exclaimed, after a
+moment of speechless amazement at her hardiness in advancing such a
+plea. 'You, who for weeks have treated me with scorn and
+indifference--who have plotted against me, until my life itself has been
+brought into danger--who, apart from all that, cast me off when first we
+met in Rome, telling me then that I was and could be nothing to you,
+yes, even that our association from the first had been a mistake and a
+wrong! Yes, Leta, there was a time when I truly loved you, as man had
+never then done, or since, or ever will again; but impute not to me the
+blame that I cannot do so now.'
+
+'I was to blame,' she said; and it seemed that this night must be a
+night of confession for her, in so few things could she justify herself
+by denial or argument. 'I acknowledge my fault, and how my heart has
+been drawn from you by some delusion, as powerful and resistless as
+though the result of magic. But when I confess it freely, and tell you
+how I now see my duty and my heart more clearly, as though a veil of
+after all, I find no forgiveness in your heart, said I not truly that
+man's faith cannot be trusted? Am I not the same Leta as of old?'
+
+'The same as of old?' he exclaimed. 'Can you look earnestly and
+truthfully into your soul, and yet avow that you are the pure-hearted
+girl who roamed hand in hand with me only a year ago, in our native
+isle, content to have no ambition except that of living a humble life
+with me? And now, with your simple tastes and desires swept away--with
+your soul covered with love of material pleasures as with a lava
+crust--wrapt up in longing for Rome's most sinful, artificial
+excesses--having, for gold or position or power or ambition, or what
+not, so long as it was not for love, given yourself up a willing victim
+to a heartless master--do you dare, after this, to talk to me of love,
+and call yourself the same?'
+
+'And are you one of those who believe that there can be no forgiveness
+for repentant woman?'
+
+'Of forgiveness, all that can be desired; but of forgetfulness, none.
+There is one thing that no man can forget; and were I to repulse the
+admonitions of my judgment, and strive to pass that thing by, who would
+sooner scorn me than yourself? Let all this end. Know that I love you
+not, and could never love you again. Your scorn, indifference, and
+deceit have long ago crushed from my heart all the love it once held.
+Know further, that if I did still love you, my pride would condemn the
+feeling, and I would never rest until I had destroyed it, even were it
+necessary to destroy myself rather than to yield.'
+
+'These are brave words, indeed!' she exclaimed, taunted by his rebuke
+into a departure from her assumption of affection. 'But they better suit
+the freeman upon his own mountain side than the slave in his cell. Samos
+is still afar off. The road from here to Ostia has not yet been
+traversed by you in safety. Even this door between you and the open
+street has not been thrown back. And yet you dare to taunt me, knowing
+that I hold in my hand the key, and, by withdrawing it, can take away
+all hope from you. Do you realize what will be your fate if you remain
+here--how that on the morrow the lions and leopards of the amphitheatre
+will quarrel over your scattered limbs?'
+
+'Is this a threat?' he cried. 'Is it to tell me that if I do not give my
+love where my honor tells me it should not be given, I must surely die!
+So, then, let it be. I accept the doom. One year ago, I would have
+cheerfully fought in the arena for your faintest smile. Now I would
+rather die there than have your sullied love forced upon me.'
+
+Without another word he sat down again upon the stone bench. Even in
+that darkness she could note how resolute was his expression, how firm
+and unyielding his attitude. She had roused his nature, as she had never
+seen it before. She had not believed that a spirit which she had been
+accustomed to look upon as so much inferior in strength to her own,
+could show such unflinching determination; and for the moment she stood
+admiring him, and wondering whether, if he had always acted like that,
+he might not have bound her soul to his own and kept her to himself
+through all temptation and trial. Then, taking the other key, she
+unlocked the door in the rear wall of the cell, and threw it open. The
+narrow street behind the court was before him, and he was free to go.
+
+'I meant it not for a threat,' she said. 'However low I may sink, I have
+not yet reached the pass of wishing to purchase or beg for affection.
+Why I spoke thus, I know not. It may be that I thought some gratitude
+might be due me for rescuing you. But I cannot tell what I, thought. Or
+it might have been that words were necessary for me, and that I used the
+first that came. But let that pass. Know only that your safety lies
+before you, and that it is in your power to grasp it. And now, farewell.
+You leave me drifting upon a downward course, Cleotos. Sometimes,
+perhaps, when another person is at your side, making your life far
+happier than I could have made it, you will think kindly of me.'
+
+'I think kindly of you now, Leta,' he said. 'Whatever love I can give,
+apart from the love which I once asked you to accept, is yours. In
+everything that brotherly affection can bestow, there will be no limit
+to my care and interest for you. Nay, more, you shall now go away from
+hence with me; and though I cannot promise more than a brother's love,
+yet with that for your guide and protection, you can reach your native
+home in peace and security, and there work out whatever repentance you
+may have here begun.'
+
+'And when we are there, and those who have known us begin to ask why,
+when Cleotos has brought Leta back in safety, he regards her only as a
+sister and a friend, and otherwise remains sternly apart from her, what
+answer can be given which will not raise suspicion and scorn, and make
+my life a burden to me? No, Cleotos, it cannot be. Cruel as my lot may
+be here, I have only myself to answer for it, and it is easier to hide
+myself from notice in this whirl of sin and passion than if at home
+again. And whatever may henceforth happen to me, the Fates are surely
+most to blame. How can one avoid his destiny?'
+
+'The Fates do not carve out our destiny,' he said. 'They simply carry
+into relentless effect the judgments which our own passions and
+weaknesses pronounced upon ourselves. O Leta! have you considered what
+you are resolved upon encountering? Do you not know that some day this
+master of yours will tire of you, and fling you to some friend of his--a
+soldier, actor, or what not--that as the years run on and your beauty
+fades, you will fall lower and lower? Have not thousands like yourself
+thus gone on, until at last, becoming old and worthless, they are left
+to die alone upon some island in the Tiber? Pray that you may die a
+better death than that!'
+
+'It is a sad picture,' she answered. 'It is not merely possible, but
+also probable. I acknowledge it all. And yet, if I saw it all unrolled
+before me as my certain doom, I do not know that I would try to shun it.
+Already the glitter of this world has changed my soul from what it was,
+and I am now too feeble of purpose to spend long years in retrieving the
+errors of the past. There came into my heart a thought--a selfish
+thought--that you might forget what has gone before; and then it seemed
+that I might succeed in winning back my peace, and so shun the fate
+which lies before me. But you cannot forget. I blame you not: you are
+right. You have never spoken more truly than when you said that I would
+have despised you if you had yielded. Therefore, that hope is gone; and
+now I must submit to the destiny which is coming upon me.'
+
+'But, Leta, only strive to think that--'
+
+'Nay, what is the use? Rather let me throw all regrets away, and strive
+not to think at all. Why not yield with a pleasant grace to the current,
+when we know that, in the end, struggle as we may, it will surely sweep
+us under?'
+
+'Leta--dear Leta--'
+
+'Not a word, dear Cleotos; it must not be. From this hour I banish all
+human affections from my heart, as I banish all hope. Could you remain
+here, you would see how relentless and fierce my nature will grow. Plots
+and schemes shall now be my amusement; for if I must be destroyed,
+others shall fall with me. This must be the last tender impulse of my
+life. I know not why it is, but I could now really weep. Cleotos,
+forgive me! I came hither, loving you not, but hoping to beguile you
+into receiving me again. I have failed, and I ought to hate you for it;
+and yet I almost love you instead. It is strange, is it not?
+
+'But, Leta--'
+
+'How my heart now feels soft and tender with our recollections of other
+days! Do you remember, Cleotos, how once, when children, we went
+together and stole the grapes from Eminides's vine? And how, when he
+would have beaten you, I stood before you, and prevented him? Who would
+then have thought that, in a few years, we should be here in
+Rome--slaves, and parting forever? We shall never again together see
+Eminides's vineyard, shall we?'
+
+'O Leta--my sister--'
+
+'There, there; speak not, but go at once, for some one comes near. Tarry
+no longer. If at home they ask after me, tell them I am dead. Farewell,
+dear Cleotos. Kiss me good-by. Do not grudge me that, at least. And may
+the gods bless you!'
+
+He would still have spoken, would have claimed a minute to plead with
+her and try to induce her to leave the path she was pursuing, and go
+with him. But at that instant the voice of some one approaching sounded
+louder, and the tones of Sergias could be distinguished as he tried to
+troll forth the catch of a drinking melody. There was no time to lose.
+With a farewell pressure of her arm about Cleotos's neck, Leta pushed
+him through the aperture into the dark back street; and then, leaving
+the keys in the locks, turned back into the garden, and fled toward the
+house.
+
+
+
+
+CREATION.
+
+
+The primary characteristics of creation are aggregation, producing all
+existing forms; and dissolution, in which the parts suffer
+disintegration, their varied elements entering into new combinations.
+The active powers producing such normal condition of matter, which is
+ceaseless motion, are comprehended in attraction for aggregation, and
+repulsion for dissolution, alternately. This power of combing atoms and
+dissolving their connection is electric, which is only possessed by that
+element, in its dual character of attraction and repulsion; and thus we
+may reasonably assume that electricity is the material wherewith
+creative energy manifests its power in the varied combinations,
+dissolutions, and reconstructions which comprise all animate and
+inanimate existences. This same cosmical power, electricity, holds all
+worlds in their normal relations, and is the source of light and heat,
+as well as the connecting link, through our electric nerve cords, by
+which our minds alone commune with the outer world, in direct contact
+with our bodily senses, and hence becomes the medium of all our
+knowledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ELECTRICITY AS THE SOURCE OF LIGHT, HEAT, GRAVITATION, AND THE ORIGIN op
+ALL GLOBES, NEBULÆ, AND COMETIC MATTER.
+
+If space were wholly devoid of matter, all globes, or other masses of
+matter, would be dissipated into it, or _à priori_ could not have been
+formed from it. The material interchange, passing through space, between
+globes, in all stages of formation, such as light, heat, and
+gravitation, could not be conducted through a vacuum, as their very
+presence would be destructive of vacuity. Materiality would be
+dissipated or absorbed in an attempted passage through vacuity;
+therefore, as we know that light, heat, and gravitation are,
+necessarily, material, space is but diffused materiality, at its minimum
+of etheriality. Globes moving in their orbits and on their axes must
+thus meet with resistance: this, together with the internal motion of
+their contained elements, necessarily excites the constant production of
+electricity, in its dual character of attraction and repulsion,
+according to its well-known laws; and this double character, alone
+possessed by electricity, when concentrated produces material affinity,
+with reciprocal attraction and repulsion, in all its atoms, thus forever
+preventing entire solidity or entire separation of its parts. Such
+condensation of matter by electric action, is the origin of heat and the
+variety produced by incandescence, which, therefore, accounts for the
+formation of globes from the materials in space, and their sustentation
+in orbit.
+
+As motion is the normal condition of matter, and is the producer of
+electricity, therefore electric actions, concentrated in space,
+necessarily gathers cometic and nebulous matter from space, the
+materials, through incandescence, for future globes, with orbits
+contracting in proportion to condensation, its maximum of attraction. As
+material space is boundless, so the creation of globes is endless
+therein, through electric action, by producing gradual centres of
+material condensation, the mere whirlpool specks in infinite space.
+
+Revolving bodies, gaseous, fluid, or solid, thus impress or charge the
+centres of their motion, by superinduced attraction, with electricity,
+as their Leyden jars. So, too, the central body, or primary of a system,
+so overcharged with electricity by its revolving secondaries, becomes
+positively electrified or repellant to all such revolving bodies; and
+thus the producers and accumulator are mutually attractive and repellant
+of each other.
+
+The planets, by their lightning speed in orbits and on their axes, being
+producers, and the sun the recipient or accumulator of electricity; the
+latter, as the centre of our revolving system, is the Leyden jar, and
+thus becomes the overcharged positive source and dispenser of electric
+light and heat to the surrounding planets.
+
+The planets, as producers, are always negatively electric, tending
+toward the accumulator, the sun; while the latter, as the accumulator,
+being overcharged, is positively electric, and repels. The sun being the
+greater body, the planets' negative electric attraction for it must
+always yield to the greater mass and tend toward the sun; while that
+great body, overcharged with accumulated positive electricity, is fully
+capable of repelling such tendency of the lesser revolving planets
+toward it. Attraction or gravitation with the planets, and repulsion
+(instead of centrifugal force) with the sun, forever and inexhaustibly
+retain the various bodies, of each system, in their respective orbits.
+As motion is the normal condition of matter, eternally producing
+electric action, and when centralized evolving light and heat; so light
+and heat are as inexhaustibly eternal as motion, and may thus be
+demonstrated as electric. The same principle of action applies to all
+individual globes of each separate system, conjointly; and collectively,
+the different systems mutually attract and repel each other,
+proportionate to mass and the weakened forces of distance, thus
+preserving a cosmical harmony throughout creation, forever forbidding
+collision or destruction of individual globes.
+
+This theory will be found to correspond with the well-known laws of
+positive and negative electric action; as well as illustrative of the
+influence of electric light on vegetable production--the only
+artificially produced light, capable of imparting a healthy growth, and
+color--which, I think, clearly proves it to be of the same character as
+solar light. It is also corroborative of much that is inexplicable,
+except in the identity of electricity with solar effulgence, as the
+source of light, heat, and gravitation, as well as substituting
+repulsion for centrifugal force, and must forever disprove the theory of
+solar light being the result of mere metallic incandescence, or any
+other equally exhausting combustion. The latter theory, with such
+supposed expedients in nature, to carry out the mighty design of
+creation, belittles the subject by its transitoriness, and is,
+therefore, unworthy the conception of modern generations.
+
+
+
+
+PHENOMENA OF HAZE, FOGS, AND CLOUDS.
+
+
+The predominant haze, which generally envelops the landscape and reddens
+the sun and moon during long droughts, is usually ascribed to smoke from
+burning woods and forests, pervading the air. I have observed a similar
+prevalent haze, connected with other extensive droughts than the one
+from which the country is now (August) suffering, and have invariably
+heard the same vague and inadequate cause assigned. Observation proves
+conclusively, that the assigned is not the true general cause (although
+it has its purely local effect), as with winds, for days together, in
+opposite quarters from local fires on mountain or plain, such widespread
+districts remain enveloped in haze, although hundreds of miles distant.
+Neither over such districts was there any odor as from smoke pervading
+the atmosphere (except temporarily from some neighboring chimneys, which
+the then heavy air kept near the earth), nor felt by the eyes, which
+very perceptibly smart when exposed to smoke. It is impossible, with
+varying winds, that mere local fires should spread smoke so uniformly as
+to comprise most of the area of the drought, which on this occasion
+extended from our great western lakes to the Atlantic seacoast; and
+anomalously, too, that it should have continued so long after a rain had
+extinguished those fires.
+
+I should assign a very different cause for this phenomenon. Rain drops
+are negatively electric, while suspended moisture, such as fog, displays
+itself in the form of vesicles or globules, distended by the presence
+and prevalence of positive electricity, which refracts the rays of light
+from so many myriad surfaces, that all objects are thus, necessarily,
+obscured to the eye. During droughts, when haze prevails, positive
+electricity in the air becomes in excess, which is heating, and
+therefore serves still more to subdivide, as well as to expand or
+distend the floating moisture in the atmosphere (of which it is never
+entirely deprived) into infinitesimal vesicles, or globules, like minute
+soap bubbles, and thus from such an infinite number of refracting
+surfaces is produced the haze, as well as the obscuration of the
+landscape and the reddened disks of the sun and moon, by the absorption
+of their heat or red rays, so characteristic of great droughts. This
+same infinitesimal vesicular condition of suspended moisture, is also
+the sufficient cause of there being no deposition of dew on such
+occasions, except where a local change of electric condition cools the
+air, thus temporarily clearing the atmosphere, and permitting a local
+deposition of the previously suspended moisture, in the form of dew.
+
+All fogs are due to this same cause, as well as that which, in extreme
+wintry cold, overhangs the open water, as it yields its comparative heat
+to the air. The formation and suspension of clouds, in all their varied
+characteristics, have the same origin. That highly attenuated haze which
+invests the distant landscape, particularly mountains, with its magical
+purple hue, is due to the same, but still more ethereal interposition of
+infinitesimal globules of suspended moisture. In corroboration of this
+being the true explanation of the phenomena of haze, fogs, etc., is the
+fact, that as soon as clouds prevail, denoting an electric change in the
+atmosphere, all haze immediately disappears, or becomes embraced in the
+larger vesicles or globules, forming clouds.
+
+
+
+
+FLY LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER.
+
+PART II.--CHEVRONS.
+
+
+She sewed them on upside down. Please to remember that this was in May,
+1861 (or was it 1851? it seems a long time ago), when a young lady of
+the most finished education, polished to the uttermost nine, could not
+reasonably be expected to know what a sergeant-major was, much less the
+particular cut and fashion of his badge of rank. I told her, exultingly,
+that I was appointed sergeant-major of our battalion. 'What's that?' she
+inquired, simply enough. I explained. The dignity and importance of the
+office was scarcely diminished in her mind by my explanation; and,
+indeed, I thought it the grandest in the army. Who would be a
+commissioned officer, when he could wear our gorgeous gray uniform,
+trimmed with red, the sleeves wellnigh hidden behind three broad red
+stripes in the shape of a V, joined at the top by as many broad red
+arcs, all beautifully set off by the lithe and active figure of
+Sergeant-Major William Jenkins? As for Mary, who protested that she
+never could learn the difference between all these grades, or make out
+the reason for them, she was for her part convinced that not even the
+colonel himself, certainly not that fat Major Heavysterne, could be
+grander, or handsomer, or more important than her William. So I forgave
+her for sewing on my chevrons upside down, although it was at the time
+an infliction grievous to be born, inasmuch as the fussy little
+quartermaster-sergeant was thereby enabled to get a day's start of in
+the admiration and envy of our old company. How they envied us, to be
+sure! But I had one consolation: Oates' were all straight; mine were
+arched. And _she_ sewed mine on. His were done by Cutts & Dunn's
+bandy-legged foreman.
+
+There never was such a uniform as ours. Not even the 'Seventh'
+itself--incomparable in the eyes of the _three_-months'--could vie in
+grand and soldierly simplicity, we thought, with the gray and red of the
+9th Battalion, District of Columbia Volunteers. Gray cap, with a red
+band round it, letters A S, for 'American Sharpshooters' (Smallweed used
+to say he never saw it spelt in that way before, and to ask anxiously
+for the other S), gray single-breasted frock coat, with nine gilt
+buttons, and red facings on the collar and cuffs. Gray pantaloons, with
+a broad red stripe down the outer seam. The drummers sported the most
+gorgeous red stomachs ever seen, between two rows of twenty little
+bullet buttons. The color rendered us liable to be mistaken for the
+rebels, it is true; but this source of anxiety to the more nervous among
+us was happily prevented from leading to any unfavorable results by the
+fatherly care displayed by poor old General Balkinsop, under whose
+protection, we were sent into the field, in always keeping at least a
+day's march from the enemy!
+
+When we non-commissioned staff officers were first promoted, we felt
+badly about leaving our companies; wanted to drill with them still, and
+so on. But this soon wore off under the pressure of new duties. For my
+part, I soon found that the adjutant, Lieutenant Harch, regarded it as
+quite a natural arrangement that the sergeant-major should attend to the
+office duties, while the adjutant occupied himself exclusively with what
+he was pleased to style the military part of the business; meaning
+thereby, guard mounting every morning and Sunday morning, inspection
+once a week, making an average of, say, twenty minutes work per diem for
+the adjutant, and leaving the poor sergeant-major enough to occupy and
+worry him for ten or eleven hours. 'Sergeant-major, publish these
+orders,' Lieutenant Harch would say, in tones of authority exceeding in
+peremptory curtness anything I have ever heard since from the commander
+of a grand army; and then, scraping a match--my match--upon the wall, he
+would begin attending to his 'military duties' by lighting a cigar--my
+cigar--and strolling up the avenue, on exhibition, preparatory to going
+home to dine, while the fag remained driving the pen madly, kindly
+assisted sometimes by Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, until long after the
+dinner hour of the non-commissioned staff. I think the company
+commanders must sometimes have doubted (unless they carefully refrained
+from reading orders, as I have sometimes thought probable) whether the
+adjutant could write his name; for all our orders used to be signed:
+
+                'By order of Major JOHNSON HEAVYSTERNE:
+                          FREDERICK HARCH, 1st Lieutenant and Adjutant,
+                                   By WILLIAM JENKINS, Sergeant-Major.'
+
+Now, if the printer sets this up properly, you will see that, even at
+that early day, we knew too much to adopt the sensation style of signing
+orders which some officers have since learned from the _New York
+Herald_, thus:
+
+                          By command of
+                                Major-General BULGER!
+                                   WASHINGTON SMITH, A. A.-G.
+
+In those days there was but little of that distinction of ranks which
+has come to be better observed now that our volunteers have grown into
+an army. You see, the process of forming an army out of its constituent
+element follows pretty much the fashion set by that complex machine the
+human animal: the materials go through all the processes of swallowing,
+digestion, chylifaction, chymifaction, absorption, alteration, and
+excretion; bone, muscle, nerve, sinew, viscera, and what not, each
+taking its share, and discarding the useless material that has only
+served, like bran in horse feed, to give volume and _prehensibility_ to
+the mass. Our non-commissioned staff messed with the major, who was as
+jolly a bachelor as need be, of some forty-nine years of growth, and
+thirty of butchering, that being his occupation. The adjutant, being
+newly married to a gaunt female, who, I hope, nagged him as he us,
+_preferred_ to take his meals at home. Smallweed, who had somehow got
+made quartermaster, couldn't go old Heavysterne, he said, and so kept as
+long as he could to his desultory habits of living as a citizen and a
+bachelor. So our mess consisted of the major, who exercised a paternal
+care over the rest of us, superintending, indeed often joining in, our
+amusements and discussions, our quarrels and makings up; of
+Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, who knew all about everything and
+everybody better than anybody, and was always ready to ventilate his
+superior knowledge on the slightest provocation, and who, as Smallweed,
+now Lieutenant Smallweed, used to say, 'would have made a d----d elegant
+quartermaster-sergeant, if he hadn't had a moral objection to issuing
+anything;' of Chaplain Bender, a sanctified-looking individual of
+promiscuous theology and doubtful morals (the funny men used to speak of
+him irreverently as Hell Bender); of the battalion commissary,
+Lieutenant Fippany, an unmitigated swell; of Commissary-Sergeant Peck, a
+stumpy little fellow, full of facts and figures, and always quiet and
+ready; of the writer, Sergeant-Major Jenkins, or Jinkens as my name used
+to be mispronounced, infinitely to my disgust; and lastly,
+semi-occasionally, of the sutler, Mr. Cann. The surgeon, old Doctor
+Peacack, ran a separate mess, consisting of himself, the assistant
+surgeon, Dr. Launcelot Cutts, and hospital steward Spatcheloe.
+
+The drum-major, Musician Tappit, having refused to be mustered in, and
+the War Department having presently refused to let us have any musicians
+at all, used to appear only on parades, gorgeous in his gray uniform and
+ornamental red stomach, disappearing with exemplary regularity, and
+diving into his upholsterer's cap and baize apron upon the slightest
+prospect of work or danger. I don't think it was ever my bad fortune to
+eat more unpleasant meals than those eaten at our mess table. The
+officers, excepting the major, but specially including the chaplain,
+used to insist on being helped first and excessively to everything; also
+on inviting their friends to dine on our plates, there being no extra
+ones; also on giving us the broken chairs, one in particular, that was
+cracked in a romp between the chaplain and the adjutant, and that
+pinched you when you sat on it. Then Lieutenant Harch was always playing
+adjutant at the dinner table, settling discussions _ex cathedra_ in a
+sharp tone, and ordering his companions to help him to dishes, as thus:
+'Sergeant-Major, p'tatoes!' 'Oates, beef!' 'Hurry up with those beans!'
+To be monosyllabic, rude to his superiors and equals, and overbearing to
+his inferiors in rank, this fledgling soldier--our comrade of a few days
+since, and presently the subordinate of most of us, through standing
+still while we went ahead--used to think the perfection and essence of
+the military system. And then that smug-faced, smooth-tongued,
+dirty-looking chaplain, with his second-hand shirt collars and slopshop
+morality--was it whiskey or brandy that his breath smelt oftenest of? He
+was the first chaplain I had seen, and I confess his rank breath, dirty
+linen, and ranker and dirtier hypocrisy, gave me a disgust toward his
+order that it took long months and many good men to obliterate.
+
+The best part of May we spent in drilling and idling and grumbling, and
+some of us, not so hard worked as Sergeant-Major Jenkins, in the true
+military style of conviviality, usually terminating in an abrupt entry
+in the orderly book, opposite the name of the follower of Bacchus,
+'Drunk; two extra tours guard duty;' or 'Drunk again; four extra tours
+knapsack drill.' Now, the knapsack drill, as practised by well-informed
+and duty-loving sergeants of the guard, simply consists in requiring the
+delinquent to shoulder, say, for two hours in every six, a knapsack
+filled with stones, blankets, or what not, until it weighs twenty,
+thirty, or perhaps forty pounds, according to the nature of the case and
+the officer who orders the punishment.
+
+Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates and I went up, one afternoon, with
+Lieutenant Smallweed, Corporal Bledsoe of our old company, and two or
+three others, to see the famous 'Seventh' drill, out at Camp Cameron,
+which I suppose nearly everybody knows is situated about a mile and a
+half north of the President's house, on the 14th-street road, and just
+opposite to a one-horse affair that used to call itself 'Columbian
+College,' but which, after passing through a course of weak
+semi-religio-secessionism, gradually dried up, leaving its skin to the
+surgeon-general for a hospital. The afternoon we selected to visit Camp
+Cameron turned out to be an extra occasion. General Thomas, the
+adjutant-general of the army, was to present a stand of colors to the
+'Seventh' on behalf of Mr. Secretary Cameron, on behalf of some ladies,
+I think. Ladies! I admire you very much, for the very many things
+wherein you are most admirable, but why, oh! why, in the name of the
+immortals, will you, why will you present flags? Don't do it any more,
+please. They are always packed up in a box and left somewhere almost as
+soon as your handkerchiefs have ceased waving, your soprano hurrahs
+ceased ringing; or else they are given to some pet officer for a
+coverlet. They cost a great deal of money; they oblige the poor soldiers
+to endure a mort of flatulent oratory at a parade rest; and they force
+the poor colonel, in a great perspiration, to stumble through a few
+feeble, ineffectual, and disjointed words of thanks, which he committed
+to memory last night from the original, written for him by the adjutant
+or the young regimental poet, but of which he has forgotten almost every
+other word. The wise old Trojan says, speaking of the horse (I get my
+quotations from the newspapers, you may be sure):
+
+     'Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes;'
+
+implying that he is opposed to going into that speculation in wooden
+horseflesh, because he fears the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.
+Just so, I fear the ladies, especially when they present flags. Remember
+_Punch's_ advice to young persons about to be married? _'Don't!'_
+
+The Seventh, after going through the usual evening parade, and a few
+simple man[oe]uvres, formed square, facing inward, with General Thomas
+and the oil-skin sausage that contained the new colors, and all the
+regimental officers, in the centre. General Thomas's feeble pipes
+sounded faintly enough for about half an hour, during which time no man
+in the ranks heard more than a dozen words. Then Colonel Lefferts
+responded in a few inaudible, but no doubt very appropriate remarks.
+Then 'the boys,' seeing that the time had come, cheered lustily, after
+the hypothetical manner of the rocket. But there was one thing we did
+hear, standing on tiptoe, and straining every ear. The Seventh was to go
+somewhere. The crisis of the war had come. The Seventh was going to
+shoot at it. Their thirty days were almost out; but they were going to
+be shot at, just like any of us three-months men.
+
+To leave their canned fruits, and milk, and fresh eggs, and board
+floors, and a stroll on the avenue in the afternoon, and go where glory
+waited for them! Happy, happy gray-breasts! We wandered enviously round
+the excited camp, and talked with our friends. Many were the rumors,
+appalling to us in those days, when we were yet unused to camp 'chin.'
+The regiment was to go to Harper's Ferry. Johnston was there. They would
+hang him if they took him. They were to march straight to Richmond, One
+man of the 'Engineer Company' was going to resign, he said, because his
+company had to remain to guard the camp. They were to take two days'
+rations and forty rounds of cartridges per man--_ball_ cartridges. Forty
+rounds of ball cartridges and two days' work! Surely, we thought, the
+days of the rebellion are numbered. And then, chewing the bitter cud of
+the reflection that the war would almost certainly be ended before we
+got a chance at the enemy, we wandered sadly back to our quarters,
+Smallweed growling horribly all the way. Our 'headquarters' we find in a
+great state of excitement. We find the orderly and Major Heavysterne
+discussing the prospects of the rebels being able to hold out a month,
+and Color-Sergeant Hepp and the adjutant both trying to decide the
+dispute. Hepp thinks they can't do without leather, and the adjutant
+thinks the want of salt must fetch them in a few weeks. Thinks? Decides!
+Whatever may be doubtful, this is certain. Everybody seems strangely
+excited. We tell them our news. 'Tell us some'n do'n know!' rasps
+Lieutenant Harch; 'our b'ttalion's goin', too; get ready, both of,
+quick! Smallweed, where in the h-- have you been? I've had to do all
+your work.' We were to go at nine o'clock at night. It was then eight.
+Whither? No one knew. The chaplain comes in, with symptoms of erysipelas
+in his nose, and a villanous breath, to tell us, while we--the
+quartermaster-sergeant and I--are packing our knapsacks and leaving
+lines of farewell for those at home and at other people's homes, that
+the major has imparted to him in confidence the awful secret that we are
+bound for Mount Vernon, to remove the bones of Washington. This gives us
+something terrible to think of as we march down, in quick time (a
+suggestion of that adjutant, I know), to the Long Bridge, and during the
+long delay there, spent by commanding officers in pottering about and
+gesticulating. By commanding officers? There is one there who does not
+potter, standing erect--that one with the little point of fire between
+his fingers that marks the never-quenched cigarette--talking to Major
+Heavysterne in low and earnest tones, but perfectly cool and clear the
+while. That is our splendid Colonel Diamond, as brave and good a soldier
+as ever drew sword, as noble and true a Christian as ever endured
+persecution and showed patience. They are discussing a plan for crossing
+the river in boats, landing at a causeway where the Alexandria road
+crosses Four Mile Run, and so cutting off the impudent picket of the
+enemy's cavalry that holds post at the Virginia end of the Long Bridge.
+The battalion commanders are evidently dazzled by the brilliancy of the
+moonlight and the colonel's scheme, for it soon becomes apparent that
+they haven't the pluck and dash necessary to render such an operation
+successful. Even we young soldiers, intent upon the awful idea of
+resurrecting Washington's bones, and little dreaming then of becoming
+the pioneers of the great invasion, could see the hitch. Presently the
+major got a definite order, and beckoning to us of the battalion staff,
+began to cross the bridge. Dusky bodies of troops, their arms glistening
+in the moonlight, had been silently gliding past us while the discussion
+progressed. Most of them seemed to have halted on the bridge, we found
+as we passed on, and to have squatted down in the shade of the parapet,
+gassing, smoking, or napping. It was nearly midnight. We had got to the
+middle of the causeway, and found ourselves alone, bathed in silence and
+moonlight and wonder, when up dashed a horseman from the direction of
+the Virginia side. He stopped, and peered at us over his horse's neck.
+'O'Malley, is that you?' says the major, seeing it is an Irish officer
+belonging to Colonel Diamond's staff. 'Yes,' says the captain, 'and who
+the devil are you?' 'Major Heavysterne. Won't you please ride back and
+send my battalion forward? You'll find the boys standing on the draw.
+Cap'n Bopp, of the Fisler Guards, is the senior officer, I believe.' But
+the Irishman was off, with an oath at the major's stupidity in
+forgetting to order his men forward. Presently the battalion came
+creeping up, silently enough, I thought, but the adjutant made the
+excuse of a casual 'ouch' from a man on whose heels Hrsthzschnoffski
+had casually trodden, to shriek out his favorite 'Stop 'at talken'!' 'Do
+you command this battalion?' asks Captain Pipes, sternly; and
+straightway there would have been a dire altercation, but for the
+major's gentle interference. The bridge began to sway and roar under our
+steps. We were on the draw. Clinging to the theory of Washington's
+bones, I peered over the draw, in the hope of seeing a steamer; there
+was nothing there but the sop and swish of the tide. Perhaps we were not
+going to Mount Vernon at all! 'Halt! Who are these sleeping beauties on
+the draw? Ah! these are the Bulgers. 'Say, Bulger,' I ask of one of
+them, 'who's ahead of you?' 'A'n't nobody,' he replied indignantly, as
+who should say, Who _can_ be ahead of the invincible Bulger Guards.
+Nobody! Here was great news. ''_Orr'd_ H'RCH!' drones the major, in low
+tones; and '_Owa_'' H'MP,' sharply, ''_Orrrr_ 'RRRCH,' gruffly, repeat
+the captains. On we go, breaking step to save the bridge, surprise and
+fluttering in our hearts. A'n't nobody ahead! Now we are on the hard
+dirt, the sacred soil, of the pewter State, mother of Presidents, the
+birthplace of Washington, the feeding ground of hams, but otherwise the
+very nursery and hive of worthlessness, humbug, sham, and superstition.
+Virginia, that might have been the first, and proudest, and most
+enlightened State in the Union, that is the last and most besodden State
+in or half out of it--But while my apostrophe runs on, the bit between
+its teeth, the head of our little column muffles its tread on the sacred
+soil itself, dirtying its boots in the sacred mud, the roar of the
+bridge ceases, the last files and the sergeant-major run after them to
+close up, in obedience to the sharp mandate of the major, and the
+invasion is begun. No man spoke a word; no sound was audible save the
+distant hum and cracking of the city, the cry of a thousand frogs, and
+the muffled tramp of our advancing footsteps. I thought the enemy, if
+any were near, must surely hear the cartridges rattle in my cartridge
+box as we double-quicked to close up, and I put my hand behind me to
+stop the clatter. If any enemy were near, indeed! There seemed an enemy
+behind every bush, a rebel in every corner of the worm fence. I am in
+the rear of the column, I thought, and my heart went thump, bump, and my
+great central nervous ganglion ached amain. 'Sergeant-major,' whispers
+Major Heavysterne; 'Sergeant-major,' barks the adjutant. 'Fall out four
+files and keep off to the right, and about fifty paces in advance of the
+battalion, and examine the ground thoroughly. Report any signs of the
+enemy.' The ache grew bigger, and I perspired terribly as I inquired, in
+tones whose tremor I hoped would be mistaken for ardor, whether any one
+was ahead of us. 'No one except the enemy,' laughed the major, quietly.
+No one except the enemy! Fifty paces from any one except the enemy, by
+my legs, each pace a yard! 'The ground to the right is all water, and
+about seven feet deep,' I reported joyfully, having ascertained the
+fact. 'Then go fifty yards ahead, as far to the right as you can get,
+and keep out of sight,' were our new orders. I thought we would keep out
+of sight well enough! We were going up hill--up the hill on which Fort
+Runyon now stands. Here is a shanty. What if it should be full of the
+enemy, and we but four poor frightened men, with our battalion hidden by
+the turn in the road. Mechanically I cocked my rifle and opened the
+door, and strained my eyes into the darkness. Nobody. I let down the
+hammer again.
+
+Fear had oozed out of my fingers' ends, in lifting the latch, just as
+valor did from those of Bob Acres, and Jenkins was himself again. We
+jobbed our bayonets under the lager-beer counter, to provide for the
+case of any lurking foe in that quarter. Just here the road forked.
+Sending two of us to the right, the rest kept on the Alexandria. 'Look
+there,' chatters Todd second between his teeth, wafting in my face a
+mingled odor of fear and gin cocktails. 'Where?' 'Why there! on top of
+the hill--a horse.' 'Is that a horse?' 'Yes.' 'A man on him, too!' 'Two
+of 'em!' Click, click, click, from our locks. We creep on and up
+stealthily. We are scarcely thirty yards distant from the two horsemen,
+when a man darts out from the left-hand side of the road behind us--two
+men--three! We are surrounded. Todd second would have fired, but I held
+him back. '_Who's that?_' I whispered; '_speak quick, or I fire!_'
+'Can't you see, you d--d fool,' barks out our surly adjutant, who,
+unknown to us, had been leading a similar scout on the opposite side of
+the road. Click, click, from up the hill. The enemy are going to shoot.
+An awful moment. We steady our rifles and our nerves; all trace of fear
+is gone; nothing remains but eagerness for the conflict that seems so
+near, and with a bound, without waiting for orders, we move quickly up
+the hill. Lieutenant Harch moves his men out into the road, where the
+bright moonlight betrays, perhaps multiplies, their number; the horsemen
+spring to their saddles, and are off at a clattering gallop, to alarm
+Alexandria. 'Don't shoot!' shrieks the adjutant; our rifles waver; the
+hill hides the flying picket; the chance is lost; presently all
+Alexandria will be awake, and a beautiful surprise frustrated. As we
+peer into the moonlit distance from the top of the hill now almost
+spaded away and trimmed up into Fort Runyon, feeling the solemnity of
+the occasion impressed upon us with dramatic force by all the
+surroundings--by our loneliness, by our character as the harbingers of
+the advance of the armies of American freedom and American nationality,
+and by the recent flight of the first squad of the enemy whom we had met
+with hostile purpose: as we dreamily drink in all these and many other
+vague ideas, up comes our battalion, and occupies the hill, the major
+sending off a company to hold the bridge where the road crosses the
+canal and forks to Arlington and Fairfax Court House. Presently there
+pass by us regiments from Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and it may be
+from other States which I forget. Some turn off to the right, to settle
+on the hill which is now scooped into Fort Albany; others press forward
+to Alexandria, the bells of which town very soon begin to ring a
+frightened peal of alarm and confusion. We move out a half mile farther
+and halt, our night's work being over, and other things in store; the
+moonlight wanes, and grows insensibly into a chilly daylight, presently
+reddened by the sun of to-morrow. All this seems to us to have occupied
+scarcely half an hour, but it is broad day again for certain, and surely
+we are a mortally tired and aching battalion as we march back listless,
+hot, sleepy, and gastric, over the Long Bridge, to our armory, there to
+fall asleep over breakfast in sheer exhaustion, and to spend the
+remainder of the day in a dry, hard series of naps, not the least
+refreshing--such as leave you the impression of having slept in hot
+sand. As we--the quartermaster-sergeant and I--stroll down the avenue
+that afternoon according to our wont, we hear the news of Ellsworth's
+death, of the occupation of Alexandria by our forces, and of the flight
+of the enemy's handful of silly, braggadocio Virginia militia, hastily
+collected to brag and drink the town safe from the pollution of the vile
+Yankee's invading foot. Ah! V'ginia; as thou art easily pleased to sing
+of thy sister-in-law, Ma'yland,
+
+     'The taäirahnt's foot is awn thaï sho','
+
+and will be likely to remain thar a right tollable peert length of time,
+I expect.
+
+Nothing but bridge guarding in the festering swamp on the Virginia side
+of the Potomac, varied by multiplying details for extra duty as clerks
+in all imaginable offices, falls to our lot until the 10th of June,
+when, after a number of rumors, and many dark forebodings as to what the
+District men would do, we are finally ordered into the field as a part
+of the Chickfield expedition, originally designed for the capture of
+Dregsville, I believe; an object which may have been slightly interfered
+with by its detailed announcement about a week beforehand in one of the
+Philadelphia papers. The expedition consisted of the First, Third,
+Fifth, and Ninth Battalions of District of Columbia Volunteers, the
+First New Hampshire, the Ninth New York, and the Seventeenth
+Pennsylvania, which _would_ call itself the First. I think four other
+regiments from the same State did the same thing, it being a cardinal
+principle with them, perhaps, that each regiment was to claim two
+different names and three different numbers, and that at least four
+other regiments were fiercely to dispute with it each name and each
+number: for example, there was the
+
+  First Pennsylvania Artillery,           }
+  calling itself the...                   }
+                                          }
+  First Pennsylvania Militia, Infantry,   } First
+  calling itself the...                   } Pennsylvania
+                                          } Regiment.
+  First Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry,}
+  calling itself the...                   }
+                                          }
+  First Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry,}
+  calling itself, and called by           }
+  the Governor, the...                    }
+
+And for another example there was a regiment which called itself the
+'Swishtail Carbines,' after a beastly ornament in the hats of its men;
+the 'Shine Musketoons,' after their lieutenant-colonel; the '289th
+Pennsylvania Volunteers,' after the State series of numbers, which began
+with 280 or thereabout; and the 'First Regiment of the Pennsylvania
+Volunteer Reserve Corps, Breech-Loading Carbineers,' and doubtless by
+other names, though I don't remember them.
+
+Besides this tremendous host--we had never seen so large a force
+together, and thought it the most invincible of armadas--we had a
+battery of artillery, composed of three or four different kinds of guns,
+as the fashion was in the good old days of our company posts, wherefrom
+we were just emerging in a chrysalis state, and also two companies of
+cavalry; one a real live company of regulars, commanded by Captain
+Cautle, of the Third Dragoons, the other led by Captain (he called
+himself major, and his company a battalion) Cutts, formerly and since an
+enterprising member of the firm of Cutts & Dunn, who made my uniform,
+and who will make your clothes, if you wish, my dear reader, and charge
+you rather less than three times their value, after the manner of
+Washington tailors; which charge will appear especially moderate when
+you remember that the clothes will almost fit, and won't wear out so
+very soon after all, as is the way with Washington clothes. Indeed, as
+the tactics say, 'this remark is general for all the deployments;' and
+the same may as well be said of all bills and things made in the great
+city of sheds, contractors, politicians, dust, and unfinished buildings.
+But is this a description of Washington? We are at Chickfield, where the
+loyal Maryland farmers come to us to protect their loyalty, to charge a
+dollar a panel for old worm fences thrown down by 'the boys,' to sell
+forage at double prices, to reclaim runaway negroes, and to assure us of
+the impossibility of subjugating the South. And here, in the peaceful
+village of Chickfield, the object of our expedition having been happily
+frustrated by the newspapers, we enjoy our ease for a week or ten days,
+and our first camp experiences. Oh! that first experience of unboxing
+tents smelling loudly as of candle grease, of finding the right poles,
+of vainly endeavoring to pitch them straight, of hot and excited
+officers rushing hither and thither in a flurry, trying to instruct the
+different squads in their work, and straightway frustrated by the thick
+heads, or worse, by the inevitable suggestions of those remarkably
+intelligent corporals, who seem to consider themselves as having a
+special mission direct from heaven to know everything except how to do
+what they are bid. And oh! the first camp cookery, when everything is
+overdone except what is underdone; when the soup is water, and the
+coffee grounds, and the tea (we had tea in the _three_-months!) senna!
+And after a day of worry, hurry, confusion, and awful cooking, the first
+rough sleep, with a root running across your ribs, and a sizable gravel
+indenting the small of your back! How the teamsters talk all night, and
+the sentinels call wildly, incessantly, for the corporal of the guard!
+How you dream of being hung on a wire, as if to dry, with your head on a
+jagged rock; of an army of sentinels pacing your breast, ceaselessly
+engaged in coming to an 'order arms;' of millions of ants crawling over
+and through you; of having your legs suddenly thrust into an icehouse,
+and a brush fire built under your head; of black darkness, in which you
+fall down, down, down, down--faster, faster, faster!--till crash! you
+bump against something, and split wide open with a thundering roar,
+which gradually expands into the sound of a bugle as you awake to
+renewed misery, and are, as Mr. Sawin says, 'once more routed out of bed
+by that derned reveille.'
+
+Presently there comes an order for us to march to Billsburg, and there
+join the army of the Musconetcong, commanded by that dauntless hero,
+Major-General Robert Balkinsop. Of course we march in a hurry, as much
+as possible by night, 'without baggage,' as the orders say--meaning with
+only _two_ wagons to a company. The other battalions of D.C. Vols. stay
+behind and loaf back to Washington, there to be mislaid by Major-General
+Blankhed, who is so preoccupied with issuing and affixing his sign
+manual to passes for milk, eggs, and secessionists, to cross and recross
+Long Bridge, that the war must wait for him or go ahead without him. We
+go on to glory, as we suppose (deluded _three_-months!), and march
+excitedly, with all our legs, fearing we shall be too late. As we near
+Billsburg, we can hear the since familiar _tick--tack_, _pip--pop--pop_
+of a rattling skirmish, and the _vroom--vroom_ of volley firing.
+Anxiously, eagerly--no need for the colonel to cry 'Step out
+lively!'--we press forward, with all the ardor of recruits. Recruits!
+Hadn't we been a month in service, and been through one great invasion
+already? There they are! See the smoke? Where? On top of that hill!
+Halt! Our battalion deploys as skirmishers with a useless cheer. We
+close up. We load with ball cartridge, and most of us, on our individual
+responsibility, fix bayonets; it looks so determined--nothing like the
+cold steel, we think. Slowly, resolutely, we advance. An aid comes
+galloping back. We crowd round him. The colonel looks disgustedly
+handsome. What does he say? Pshaw! It's only the 284th Pennsylvania,
+part of General Balkinsop's body guard, discharging muskets after rain.
+Only three soldiers, a negro, a couple of mules, and an old woman, have
+been hurt so far, and 'the boys' will be through in an hour or so more!
+
+Well, as we were sent for in a hurry, of course we waited a week. How
+General Balkinsop man[oe]uvred the great army of the Musconetcong; what
+fatherly, nay, grandmotherly care he took to keep us out of danger; how
+cautiously he spread, his nets for the enemy, and how rapidly he left
+them miles behind; how we killed nothing but chickens, wounded nothing
+but our own silly pride, and captured nothing but green apples and
+roasting ears; all this, and more, let history tell. The poor old
+general kept us safe, at all events; and if the enemy, with half our
+numbers, was left unharmed, and allowed quietly and leisurely to move
+off and swell his force elsewhere, and so whip us in detail, what of it?
+Didn't we save our wagon train? And isn't that, as everyone knows, the
+highest result of strategy?
+
+And then came the battle (the _battle!_) of Bull Run, with its first
+glowing, crowing accounts of victory, and its later story of humiliation
+and shame! Ah! let me shut up the page! My heart grows sick over this
+mangy, scrofulous period of our national disease; give me air!
+
+Luckily for me, I had a raging fever just after that awful 21st of July,
+1861. When I awoke from my delirium, and had got as far as tea, toast,
+and the door of the hospital, they told me of the great uprising of the
+people, of General McClellan's appointment to command the Army of the
+Potomac, of how 'our boys' had reënlisted for the war, and of how I, no
+longer Sergeant-Major William Jenkins, was to be adjutant of the
+regiment, and might now take off my _chevrons_, and put on my SHOULDER
+STRAPS.
+
+_She_ sent them to me in a letter. Wait a month, and I'll tell you.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST FANATIC.
+
+
+  When Noah hewed the timber
+    Wherewith to build the ark,
+  Outside the woods one shouted--
+    'That wild fanatic!--_hark!_'
+
+  And when he drew the beams
+    And laid them on the plain,
+  One said,'He has no balance,
+    He surely is insane.'
+
+  And when he raised the frame,
+    One clear, sunshiny day,
+  'Poor fool of _one idea_,'
+    A smiling man did say.
+
+  When he foretold the flood,
+    And stood repentance teaching,
+  They sneered, 'You radical,
+    We'll hear no ultra preaching!'
+
+  And when he drove the beasts and birds
+    Into the ark one morn,
+  They shouted, 'Odd enthusiast!'
+    And laughed with ringing scorn.
+
+  When he and all his house went in,
+    They gazed, and said, 'Erratic!'
+  'A pleasant voyage to you, Noah!
+    You canting, queer fanatic!'
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES OF AMERICAN LIFE AND SCENERY.
+
+V.--THE ADIRONDACS.
+
+
+This interesting mountain region embraces the triangular plateau lying
+between Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario and the
+Mohawk. The name was formerly restricted to the central group containing
+the highest peaks, but is now applied to the various ranges traversing
+the northeastern counties of the State of New York. The loftiest points
+are found in the County of Essex and the neighboring corners of
+Franklin; but the surfaces of Clinton, St. Lawrence, Herkimer, Hamilton,
+Warren, and Washington are all diversified by the various branches of
+the same mountain system. The principal ranges have a general
+northeasterly and southwesterly direction, and are about six in number.
+They run nearly parallel with one another, and with the watercourses
+flowing into Lake Champlain, namely, Lake George and Putnam's Creek, the
+Boquet, Au Sable, and Saranac Rivers. Recent surveys made by, or under
+the direction of, Professor A. Guyot, will doubtless furnish us with
+more accurate information regarding ranges and measurements of heights
+than any we can now refer to. So far as we have been able to learn from
+the best authorities within our reach,[2] the situation and names of the
+most prominent ranges are as follows: The most southerly is that known
+as the Palmertown or Luzerne Mountains, and embraces the highlands of
+Lake George, terminating at Mount Defiance, on Lake Champlain. This
+range has also been called Black Mountain range and Tongue Mountains.
+The second range, the Kayaderosseras, ends in the high cliff overlooking
+Bulwagga Bay. The third, or Schroon range, terminates on Lake Champlain
+in the high promontory of Split Rock. It borders Schroon Lake, and its
+highest peak is Mount Pharaoh, nearly 4,000 feet above tidewater. The
+fourth, or Boquet range, finds its terminus at Perou Bay, and contains
+Dix Peak (5,200 feet), Nipple Top (4,900 feet), Raven Hill, and Mount
+Discovery. The fifth or Adirondac range (known also as Clinton or Au
+Sable) meets Lake Champlain in the rocks of Trembleau Point, and
+embraces the highest peaks of the system, namely, Mount Tahawus (Marcy),
+5,379 feet, and Mounts Mc-Intire, McMartin, and San-da-no-na, all above
+5,000 feet in elevation. The series nest succeeding on the northwest,
+does not consist of a single distinguishable range, but of a
+continuation of groups which may be considered as a sixth range, under
+the name of Chateaugay or Au Sable. Its highest points are Mount Seward
+(5,100 feet), and Whiteface, nearly 5,000 feet in height. We have also
+seen noticed as distinguishable a ridge still exterior to the last
+mentioned, as Chateaugay, _i.e._, the range of the St. Lawrence.
+
+[Footnote 2: NEW YORK SATE GAZETTEER.]
+
+The above-named ranges are not always clearly defined, as cross spurs or
+single mountains sometimes occupy the entire space between two ridges,
+reducing the customary valley to a mere ravine. The usual uncertainty
+and redundancy of nomenclature common to mountain regions, adds to the
+difficulty of obtaining or conveying clear ideas of the local
+distribution of elevation and depression. On the northern slope, the
+three rivers, Boquet, Au Sable (with two branches, East and West), and
+Saranac, furnish to the traveller excellent guides for the arrangement
+of his conceptions, regarding the general face of the country. To the
+south, the same office is performed by the various branching headwaters
+of the Hudson.
+
+These mountains are granitic, and the river bottoms have a light, sandy
+soil. The Au Sable well deserves its name, not only from the bar at its
+mouth, but also from the sand fields through which it chiefly flows.
+Steep, bare peaks, wild ravines, and stupendous precipices characterize
+the loftier ranges. The waterfalls are numerous and beautiful, and the
+lakes lovely beyond description. More than one hundred in number, they
+cluster round the higher groups of peaks, strings of glittering gems
+about the stately forms of these proud, dark-browed, Indian
+beauties--mirrors wherein they may gaze upon the softened outlines of
+their haughty heads, their wind-tossed raiment of spruce fir, pines, and
+birch.
+
+In the lowest valleys the oak and chestnut are abundant, but as we leave
+the shores of Lake Champlain and ascend toward the west, the beech and
+basswood, butternut, elm, ash, and maple, hemlock and arbor vitæ,
+tamarack, white, black, and yellow pines, white and black birch,
+gradually disappear, until finally the forest growth of the higher
+portions of the loftier summits is composed almost exclusively of the
+various species of spruce or fir. The tamarack sometimes covers vast
+plains, and, with the long moss waving from its sombre branches, looks
+melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe
+felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to
+the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under
+whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have
+reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone--that some splendid
+specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest,
+that on the more secluded lake shores an occasional deer may yet be seen
+coming down to drink, and that in the shadier pools the wary and
+sagacious prince of fishes still disports himself and cleaves the
+crystal water with his jewelled wedge.
+
+Berries of all sorts spring up on the cleared spots; the wide-spreading
+juniper, with its great prickly disks, covers the barer slopes; the
+willow herb, wild rose, clematis, violet, golden rod, aster, immortelle,
+arbutus, harebell, orchis, linnæa borealis, mitchella, dalibarda,
+wintergreen, ferns innumerable, and four species of running pine, all in
+due season, deck the waysides and forest depths.
+
+The climate is intensely cold in winter, and in the summer cool upon the
+heights, but in the narrow sandy valleys the long days of June, July,
+and August are sometimes uncomfortably hot. The nights, however, are
+ordinarily cool. Going west through the middle of the region, from
+Westport to Saranac, a difference of several weeks in the progress of
+vegetation is perceptible. Long after the linnæa had ceased to bloom at
+Elizabethtown, we found its tender, fragrant, pink bells flushing a
+wooded bank near Lake Placid. Good grass grows upon the hillsides, and
+in the valleys are found excellent potatoes, oats, peas, beans, and
+buckwheat. The corn is small, but seems prolific, and occasional fields
+of flax, rye, barley, and even wheat, present a flourishing appearance.
+Lumber, charcoal, and iron ore of an excellent quality are, however, the
+present staples of this mountain region. Bears and panthers are found in
+some secluded localities, and the farmer still dreads the latter for his
+sheep. The wolves are said to kill more deer than the hunters. The otter
+and beaver are found among the watercourses, and the mink or sable is
+still the prey of the trapper. The horses are ordinarily of a small
+breed, but very strong and enduring.
+
+The men are chiefly of the Vermont type, most of the original settlers
+having come from the neighboring State. The school house, court house,
+church, and town hall are hence regarded as among the necessary
+elements of life to the well-ordered citizen. Honest dealing, thrift,
+and cleanliness are the rule, and the farm houses are comfortable and
+well cared for. The men look intelligent, and the women are handsome,
+although, indeed, too many pale or sallow complexions give evidence of
+sedentary habits, and of the almost universal use of _saleratus_ and hot
+bread [??]. The families of many farmers far in among the mountains
+rarely taste fresh meat, but subsist chiefly upon salt pork, fish, fresh
+or salted, as the season will permit, potatoes, wheat, rye, and Indian
+meal, with berries, dried apples, perhaps a few garden vegetables,
+plenty of good milk, and excellent butter. Eggs, chickens, and veal are
+luxuries occasionally to be enjoyed, and, should one of the family be a
+good shot, venison and partridge may appear upon the bill of fare.
+Bright flowers ornament the gardens, and gay creepers embower doors and
+windows. Along the more secluded roads are the log cabins of the
+charcoal burners, said cabins containing, if apparently nothing else,
+two or three healthy, chubby, pretty children, and a substantial cooking
+stove, of elaborate pattern, recently patented by some enterprising
+compatriot.
+
+Among the most remarkable features of these mountains are the 'Passes,'
+answering to Gaps, Notches, and Cloves in other parts of the Union. They
+afford means for excellent roads from end to end of the mountain region,
+and are, in addition, eminently picturesque. The two most noteworthy are
+the Indian and Wilmington Passes; the first too rugged for the present
+to admit of a road; and the latter containing the beautiful Wilmington
+Fall. Many of the mountains have been burned over, and the bare,
+gaunt-limbed timber, and contorted folds of gray, glittering rock,
+afford a spectral contrast to the gentler contours of hills still clad
+in their natural verdure, bright or dark as deciduous or evergreen trees
+preponderate. The variety of form is endless; long ridges, high peaks,
+sharp or blunt, sudden clefts, great bare slides, flowing curves, convex
+or concave, serrated slopes crowned with dark spruce or jagged as the
+naked vertebræ of some enormous antediluvian monster, stimulate the
+curiosity and excite the imagination of the beholder. There is an
+essential difference in the character of the views obtained, whether
+looking from the south, or the east. In the former case, the eye,
+following the axes of the ranges, sees the mountains as a cross ridge of
+elevated peaks; and in the latter, where the sight strikes the ranges
+perpendicularly to their axes, one, or, at most, two ridges are all that
+can be seen from any single point.
+
+This region may be approached from Lake Champlain by way of Ticonderoga,
+Crown Point, Port Henry, Westport, and Port Kent, the two latter places
+being the nearer to the higher peaks; or from the lake country in
+Hamilton County, by way of Racket and Long Lakes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The night boat for Albany, June 27th, 1864, was crowded with passengers
+fleeing from pavements, summer heats, and stifling city air, to green
+fields, cool shadows of wooded glens, or life-giving breezes from
+mountain heights. True, there were some who, like Aunt Sarah Grundy,
+bitterly lamented the ample rooms and choice fare of their own
+establishments, and whose idea of a 'summer in the country' was limited
+to a couple of months at Saratoga or Newport, with a fresh toilette for
+each succeeding day; but even these knew that there were at both places
+green trees, limpid waters, whether of lake or ocean, and a wide horizon
+wherein to see sunsets, moonrises, and starlight. Aunt Sarah went to
+Newport; she found there fewer of such persons as she was pleased to
+designate as 'rabble,' and the soft, warm fogs were exactly the summer
+atmosphere for a complexion too delicate to be exposed to the fervent
+blaze of a July sun.
+
+But the majority were not of Aunt Sarah's stamp. They were men, wearied
+with nine months' steady work, eager for country sports, for the freedom
+of God's own workhouse, where labor and bad air and cramped positions
+need not be synonymous; or women, glad to escape the routine of
+housekeeping, the daily contest with Bridget or Katrine, with Jean,
+Williams, or Priscilla. There were young girls, with round hats and
+thick boots, anxious to substitute grassy lanes or rocky hillsides for
+the flagstones of avenues; lads, to whom climbing of fruit trees and
+rowing boats were pleasant reminiscences of some foregone year; and
+finally, children, who longed for change, and whose little frames needed
+all the oxygen and exercise their anxious parents could procure for
+them.
+
+Such, doubtless, was a large portion of the precious freight of our
+'floating palace,' whose magnificence proved to us rather of the
+Dead-Sea-apple sort, as we had arrived upon the scene of action too late
+to procure comfortable quarters for the night, and, in addition, soon
+after daybreak found ourselves aground within sight of Albany, and with
+no prospect of release until after the departure of the train for
+Whitehall. At a few moments past seven, we heard the final whistle, and
+knew that our journey's end was now postponed some four and twenty
+hours. We afterward learned that by taking the boat to Troy we would
+have run less risk of delay, as the Whitehall and Rutland train usually
+awaits the arrival of said boat. At nine o'clock we reached Albany, and
+one of our number spent a dreary day, battling with headache and the
+ennui of a little four year old, who could extract no amusement from the
+unsuggestive walls of a hotel parlor. About five in the afternoon we
+left for Whitehall, where we purposed passing the night. This movement
+did not one whit expedite the completion of our journey, but offered a
+change of place, and an additional hour of rest in the morning, as the
+lake-boat train from Whitehall was the same that left Albany shortly
+after seven.
+
+We found Whitehall a homely little town, in a picturesque situation, on
+the side of a steep hill, past which winds the canal, and under which
+thundered the train that on the following morning bore us to the lake,
+where the pleasant steamboat 'United States' awaited her daily cargo.
+The upper portion of Lake Champlain is very narrow, and the channel
+devious; the shores are sometimes marshy, sometimes rocky, and the
+bordering hills have softly swelling outlines. Our day was hazy, and the
+Green Mountains of Vermont seemed floating in some species of celestial
+atmosphere suddenly descended upon that fair State. We passed the
+Narrows (a singular, rocky cleft, through which flows the lake), and
+soon after came to Ticonderoga, with its ruined fort and environing
+hills.
+
+After leaving Crown Point, the lake becomes much wider, and at Port
+Henry spreads out into a noble expanse of water. Behind Port Henry, the
+Adirondac peaks already begin to form a towering background. Westport,
+however, has a still more beautiful situation. The lake there is very
+broad, the sloping shores are wooded, the highest peaks of the Green
+Mountains are visible to the east and northeast, and the Adirondacs
+rise, tier after tier, toward the west.
+
+On the boat were wounded soldiers going to their homes. Poor fellows!
+They had left their ploughs and their native hills, to find wounds and
+fevers in Virginia. When one looked upon the tranquil lake and
+halo-crowned mountains, it seemed almost impossible that the passions of
+evil men should have power to draw even that placid region into the
+vortex, and hurl back its denizens scarred and scathed, to suffer amid
+its beauty. And yet were these men the very marrow and kernel of the
+landscape, the defenders of the soil, the patriots who were willing to
+give themselves that their country might remain one and undivided, that
+the 'home of the brave' might indeed be the 'land of the free.'
+
+At Westport we left the boat, and found the stage to Elizabethtown, a
+_buckboard_, already crowded with passengers. An inn close at hand
+furnished us the only covered wagon we chanced to see during our ten
+weeks' sojourn among the Adirondacs. The drive to Elizabethtown (eight
+miles) was hot and dusty, for we faced the western sun, and the long
+summer drought was just then commencing to make itself felt.
+Nevertheless, there was beauty enough by the wayside to make one forget
+such minor physical annoyances. As the road rose over the first hills,
+the views back, over the lake and toward those hazy, dreamy-looking
+Vermont mountains, seemed a leaf from some ancient romance, wherein
+faultless knights errant sought peerless lady loves with golden locks
+flowing to their tiny feet, and the dragons were all on the outside,
+dwellers in dark caverns and noisome dens. In our day, I fear, we have
+not improved the matter, for the dark caverns seem to have passed
+within, and the dragons have been adopted as familiars.
+
+By and by, on some arid spots, appeared the low, spreading juniper,
+which we had previously known only as the garden pet of an enthusiastic
+tree fancier. And thus, perhaps, the virtues which here we cultivate by
+unceasing care and watchfulness, will, when we are translated to some
+wider sphere, nearer to the Creator of all, burst upon us as simple,
+natural gifts to the higher and freer intelligences native to that
+sphere.
+
+Raven Hill is the highest point between Westport and Elizabethtown. It
+is a beautifully formed conical hill, rising some twenty-one hundred
+feet above the sea level, and contributing the cliffs on the northern
+side of the 'Pass,' through which leads the road into the valley of the
+Boquet, that vale known formerly as the 'The Pleasant Valley,' in which
+was Betseytown, now dignified into Elizabethtown. Does an increase in
+civilization and refinement indeed destroy familiarity, render us more
+strange one to another, even, through much complexity, to our own
+selves? The southern side of the Pass is formed by the slope of the
+'Green Mountain,' once so called from its beautiful verdure, now, alas!
+burnt over, bristling with dead trees and bare rocks, and green only by
+reason of weeds, brambles, and a bushy growth of saplings. The view,
+descending from the summit of the Pass into the Pleasant Valley, is
+charming. The Boquet runs through green meadows and cultivated fields,
+while round it rise lofty mountains--the 'Giant of the Valley' (alias
+'Great Dome' or 'Bald Peak'), being especially remarkable, with its
+summits, green or bare, round or peaked, glittering with white scars of
+ancient slides. To the west lies the Keene Pass, a steep, rocky gateway
+to the Au Sable River and the wonders beyond. This view of the descent
+into the Pleasant Valley is even more striking from a road passing over
+the hills some five miles south of Elizabethtown. The vale is narrower,
+the point of view higher, and the opposite mountains nearer and more
+lofty. The Giant of the Valley rises directly in the west, and Dix's
+Peak closes the vista to the south. On a semi-hazy afternoon, with the
+sunlight streaming through in broad pathways of quivering glory, it
+would be difficult to imagine a more enchanting scene.
+
+There are in Elizabethtown two inns,[3] one down by the stream, a branch
+of the Boquet, and the other up on the 'Plain,' near the court house.
+The latter has decidedly the advantage in situation. Both are owned by
+the same landlord, and are well kept. We arrived in the midst of court
+week, and found every place filled with lawyers, clients, witnesses, and
+even, behind the bars of the brick jail, we could see the prisoners,
+more fortunate than their city compeers, in that they breathed pure air,
+and could look out upon the everlasting hills, solemn preachers of the
+might and the rights, as well as the mercy of their Creator.
+
+[Footnote 3: During the past season, the Mansion House, on the Plain,
+was not opened until near the close Of the summer. We understand it is
+to be henceforth a permanent 'institution.']
+
+From two to three miles from the Valley House is the top of Raven Hill,
+seemingly a watchtower on the outskirts of the citadel of the
+Adirondacs. The ascent is easy, and the view panoramic, embracing Lake
+Champlain and the Green Mountains, Burlington and Westport, the bare,
+craggy hills to the north, the higher ranges to the west, with the
+abrupt precipices of the 'Keene Pass' and the lofty 'Dome' and 'Bald
+Mountain,' Dix's Peak to the south, a clear lake known as 'Black Pond'
+among the hills toward Moriah, and at the base the Pleasant Valley with
+the winding Boquet River.
+
+Near the lower hotel is Wood Mountain, about half as high as Raven Hill,
+and offering a view somewhat similar, although of course not so
+extended. The distance to the top is but little over a mile, and the
+pathway, although somewhat steep, is very good.
+
+A visit to the iron mines and works at Moriah can readily be made from
+Elizabethtown. The distance is from twelve to fourteen miles. One of the
+mines is quite picturesque, being cut into the solid rock, under a roof
+supported by great columns of the valuable ore. The workmen, with their
+picks and barrows, passing to and fro, as seen from the top of the
+excavation, look like German pictures of tiny gnomes and elves delving
+for precious minerals. The yield from the ore is about eighty per cent.,
+and of very superior quality. The return road passes down the hill,
+whence is the splendid view of the 'Valley' before mentioned.
+
+A delightful excursion can also be made to 'Split Rock,' about nine
+miles up the valley of the Boquet. The little river there, in two
+separate falls, makes its way through a rocky cleft. The basins of the
+upper, and the singularly winding chasm of the lower fall, are
+especially worthy of observation. At Split Rock we first made any
+extensive acquaintance with a costume which threatens to be immensely
+popular among the Adirondacs, namely, the _Bloomer_, and in the agility
+displayed by some of its fair wearers we beheld the results likely to
+spring from its adoption as a mountain walking dress. Our private
+observation was, that moderately full, short skirts, without hoop of
+course, terminating a little distance above the ankle, and worn with
+clocked or striped woollen stockings, were more graceful than a somewhat
+shorter and scantier skirt, with the pantalette extending down to the
+foot. The former seems really _à la paysanne_, while the latter, in
+addition to some want of grace, suggests _Bloomer_, and the many
+absurdities which have been connected with that name. It is a great pity
+that a sensible and healthful change in walking attire should have been
+caricatured by its own advocates, and thus rendered too conspicuous to
+be agreeable to many who would otherwise have adopted it in some
+modified and reasonable form.
+
+Near New Russia, about five miles from Elizabethtown, is a brook
+flowing among moss-covered stones and rocks, overhung by giant trees of
+the original forest; and just out of Elizabethtown is a glen, through
+which pours a pretty stream, making pleasant little cascades under the
+shadow of a less aged wood, and within a bordering of beautiful ferns,
+running pines, and bright forest blossoms. We should also not neglect to
+mention Cobble Hill, a bold pile of rocks, rising directly out of the
+plain on which a portion of the town is situated.
+
+But we had heard of the 'Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,' and Elsie and I
+could not rest until our own eyes had witnessed that they were worthy of
+their reputation. We left Elizabethtown at half past six in the morning,
+our team a fast pair of ponies, belonging to our landlord. The previous
+days had been warm and obstinately hazy, but for that especial occasion
+the atmosphere cooled and cleared, and lent us some fine views back
+toward the Giant of the Valley and the Keene Pass. The first ten miles
+of road were excellent. We then crossed a little stream known as Trout
+Brook, a tributary of the Boquet, and, by a somewhat rough and stony
+way, began to ascend the high land separating the Boquet from the Au
+Sable. This ridge includes the 'Poke a Moonshine' Mountain, a rude pile
+of rocks, burnt over, and with perpendicular precipices of some three or
+four hundred feet, facing the road which winds along the bottom of the
+declivity. This cleft thus becomes another 'Pass,' and, with the huge
+rocks fallen at its base, offers a wild and rather dreary scene. To the
+north, near the foot of the mountain, are two ponds, Butternut and
+Auger, which wind fantastically in and out among the hills. As we
+descended the ridge, we looked toward Canada, far away over rolling
+plains and hillocks, and soon after reached the sandy stretch of the
+basin of the Au Sable, in the midst of which is Keeneville, twenty-two
+miles from Elizabethtown.
+
+By the wayside we passed a solitary grave, the mound and headstone in a
+patch of corn and potatoes. Was the unknown occupant some dear one whom
+the dwellers in the humble cabin near by were unwilling to send far away
+from daily remembrance, or were they too poor to seek the shelter of the
+common graveyard, or, again, had the buriers of that dead one followed
+to the 'land of promise,' or departed to some other far country, leaving
+this grave to the care or rather carelessness of stranger hands, and did
+the snowy headstone recall no memory of past love to the laborer who
+ploughed his furrow near that mound, or to the children who played
+around it?
+
+Ah! thus, not only in the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and
+romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn
+and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of
+aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily
+act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to
+which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with
+the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller
+from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter
+weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a
+noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently
+useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow
+along his way seeds of beauty not lost upon the thinking beings about
+him, and bearing fruit perhaps in some future generation. The woman
+whose reveries have pictured her a Joan of Arc, leading her country's
+armies to victory, and finally yielding her life in the good cause, may
+sew for sanitary commissions, and, nursing in some hospital, dropping
+medicines, making soups and teas, die of some deadly fever, a willing
+sacrifice to her country.
+
+Later in the day we saw the corn and potatoes growing up to the very
+verge of an exquisite waterfall, reckless strength and glorious poetry
+side by side with patient utility and humble prose. This union seemed
+not strange and unnatural, as did that of the solitary grave with the
+active labor of supplying the living with daily food, the grave the more
+lonely that the living with their material wants encircled it so
+closely.
+
+Keeseville is a manufacturing town, situated upon the Au Sable, which
+here breaks through a layer of Potsdam sandstone, and presents a series
+of most interesting and wonderful falls and chasms. About a mile below
+the village is the first fall of eighty feet. The river has here a large
+body of water, and falls in fan shape over a rapid descent of steps. It
+takes a sharp turn, so that without crossing the stream, a fine view can
+be obtained of the dancing, glittering sheet of foam. About half a mile
+below is Birmingham, another manufacturing town, which has done its
+best, but without entire success, to destroy the beauty of the second
+fall, immediately below the bridge, said bridge being erected upon
+natural piers at the sides and in the centre of the stream.
+
+Here begins a chasm which continues for the distance of about a mile and
+a half. Wonderfully grand are these Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,
+through, which rushes the river, pent up between literally perpendicular
+walls, a hundred or more feet in height, and from eleven to sixty or
+eighty feet apart, generally from twelve to fourteen. The water
+sometimes rushes smoothly and deeply below, and sometimes falls over
+obstructions, roaring, and tumbling, and foaming. The turns in the river
+are very sudden, and there are great cracks and gullies extending from
+top to base, pillars of rock standing alone or leaning against their
+companions. Occasionally, looking down one of these clefts, one sees
+nothing but the rock walls with a foaming, rapid rushing below. At one
+of these most remarkable points, a rude stairway has been constructed,
+by which the traveller can descend to the bottom, and, standing by the
+water's edge, look up to the top of this singular chasm. The walls
+finally lower, and the river flows out into a broad basin, whence it ere
+long finds its way into Lake Champlain. The banks are wooded with pines,
+hemlocks, spruce, arbor vitaæ, beech, birch, and basswood, and the
+ground is covered with ferns, harebells, arbutus, linnæa, mitchella,
+blue lobelia, and other wild flowers.
+
+There is an excellent inn, the Adirondac House, in Keeseville. Our
+attentive host told us of Professor Agassiz, and the fiery nature of his
+speculations regarding the probable history of the sandstone, whose
+strata, laid as at Trenton Falls, horizontally, layer above layer, add
+such interest and beauty to the stupendous walls, with their unseen,
+water-covered depths below, and their graceful wreaths of arbor vittæ
+nodding and swaying above.
+
+He also told us a tale of the war of 1812, when a bridge, known as the
+'High Bridge,' crossed the Au Sable at the narrowest point, some eleven
+feet in width. A rumor was abroad that the British were about to march
+up from Plattsburg; whereupon the bridge, consisting of three beams,
+each nine inches wide, was stripped of its planking. A gentleman had
+left his home in the morning, and, ignorant of the fate of the bridge,
+returned quite late at night. Urging his steed forward, it refused to
+cross the bridge, and not until after repeated castigation would it make
+the attempt. The crossing was safely accomplished, and the rider
+suspected nothing amiss until he reached home and was asked how he had
+come. 'By the High Bridge,' was his reply; whereupon he was informed
+that the planking had been torn away, and he must have crossed upon a
+string piece nine inches wide, hanging some hundred feet above the
+surface of the water. His sensations may be imagined.
+
+A venturesome expedition had also been essayed by our host, in the shape
+of a voyage down the chasm in a boat. We presume he went at high water,
+when the rapids would be less dangerous.
+
+Keeseville is only four miles from Port Kent, a steamboat landing on
+Lake Champlain nearly opposite Burlington, and the Adirondacs may then
+be approached in several ways. A stage runs three times per week from
+Keeseville through Elizabethtown and Schroon River to Schroon Lake.
+North Elba and Lake Placid are some thirty-six miles distant, and may be
+reached by a good road through the Wilmington Pass. Saranac is somewhat
+farther, but readily accessible. Strong wagons and good teams are
+everywhere to be found, and the only recommendation we here think
+needful to make to the traveller is to have a good umbrella, a thick
+shawl or overcoat, and as little other baggage as he or she can possibly
+manage to find sufficient. Trunks are sadly in the way, and carpet bags
+or valises the best forms for stowage under seats or among feet.
+
+
+
+
+LOIS PEARL BERKELEY.
+
+
+The fiery July noon was blazing over the unsheltered depot platform,
+where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's
+work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day
+was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still
+life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings.
+Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser
+than ever; there was the usual _mêlée_ of leave-takings and greetings.
+With the choking dust and scalding glare of the sun, the whole scene
+might have been an anteroom to Tophet.
+
+From the car window, Clement Moore, brown, hollow-cheeked, and clad in
+army blue, looked out with weary eyes on all the confusion. Half asleep
+in the parching heat, visions of cool, green forest depths, and endless
+ripple of leaves, of the ceaseless wash and sway of salt tides, drifted
+across his brain, and rapt him out of the sick, comfortless present. But
+they vanished like a flash with the sudden cessation of motion, and the
+reality of his surroundings came back with a great shock. Captain
+George, coming in five minutes after with a glass of iced lemonade in
+one hand and a half dozen letters in the other, found necessary so much
+of cheer and comfort as lay in--
+
+'Keep courage, Clement, old fellow, it's only a few hours longer now.'
+
+And then he fell to reading his epistles, testifying his disapprobation
+of their contents presently by sundry grunts, ending finally in a
+'Confound it!' given explosively and an explanation:
+
+'Too bad, Moore! Here am I taking you home to get well in peace and
+quiet, and Ellen has filled the house up with half a dozen girls, more
+or less. Writes me to come home and be 'made a lion of;' as sensible as
+most women!' And the grumble subsided. He broke out again shortly:
+'Louise Meller--Lois Berkeley--Susy--' the other names were drowned in
+the rattle of the starting train. The captain finished his letters, and
+Clement Moore took up his broken dreams, but this time with a new
+element.
+
+Lois Berkeley. With the name came back a fortnight of the last
+summer--perfect bright days, far-off skies filled with drifting fleets
+of sunny vapor, summer green piled deep over the land, the gurgle of
+falling waters, the shimmer of near grain fields, deep-hued flowers
+glowing in the garden borders, all the prodigality of splendor that July
+pours over the world. And floating through these memories, scarce
+recognized, but giving hue and tone to them like a far-off, half-heard
+strain of music--a woman's presence. By some fine, subtile harmony, such
+as spirits recognize, all the summer glow and depth of color, as it came
+back to him, came only as part of an exquisite clothing and setting for
+a slender figure and dark face. All the dainty adaptations of nature
+were but an expression, in a rude, material way, for those elegances and
+fitnesses which surrounded her, and which were as natural to her very
+existence as to the birds and flowers. Only a fortnight, and in that
+fortnight every look and word of hers, every detail of dress, even to
+the texture of the garments she wore, were indelibly fixed in his
+memory. She was so daintily neat in everything, nothing soiled or coarse
+ever came near her. Careless, too, he thought, remembering how, coming
+through the parlor in the evening dusk, he had entangled himself in the
+costly crape shawl left trailing across a chair, of the gloves he had
+picked up fluttering with the leaves on the veranda, and the
+handkerchiefs always lying about. Perhaps Clement Moore was over
+critical in his fancies about ladies' dresses, and felt that inner
+perfect cleanliness and refinement worked itself out in such little
+matters as the material and color and fit of garments, and all the
+trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a
+dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character.
+He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by
+which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An
+excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him
+involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course
+to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been
+disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and
+others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him
+apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill
+natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he
+accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the
+beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the
+polished, unimpressible man of society.
+
+But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal.
+Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange
+according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that
+was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking
+it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming,
+never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with
+that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried
+to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he
+was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all
+humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably--does not
+put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this
+undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty
+orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears,
+waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened
+and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black,
+hopeless _never_ drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable
+because simply a moral obligation.
+
+Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out
+of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a
+passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore,
+being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of
+his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had
+blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the
+sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in
+this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the
+excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think
+soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to
+be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a
+pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or
+whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of
+loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling
+on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be
+trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the
+golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid
+days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead,
+or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor
+thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new,
+strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that
+had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners.
+He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that
+sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of
+desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to
+now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard
+of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going
+somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless
+journeys. After--as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he
+lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming--his thoughts were
+always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward
+dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden
+way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its
+necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as
+a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and
+unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any
+abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.
+
+Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning,
+unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These
+especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and
+spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His
+first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual
+racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the
+physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect
+action--the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted
+nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for
+inaction--he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting
+his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of
+the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness
+was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that
+fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that
+attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills
+flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.
+
+So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness,
+paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience,
+George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre,
+and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color
+from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling
+the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other
+days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the
+charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words
+and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with
+such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest
+touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So
+that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains
+of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its
+associations.
+
+And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back
+with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day,
+separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear
+were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor
+dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of
+difference.
+
+A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot
+of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a
+slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward
+him--a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes
+under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless,
+silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks
+under the narrow-brimmed straw hat. A face full of a waiting look, not
+hopeful nor expectant, simply unsettled and watchful, yet fresh, and
+rounded with the dimples and childlike curves of eighteen. Whatever of
+yearning and unrest the years had brought lingered only about the
+shadowy eyes and fine mouth. There were no haggard nor worn outlines,
+and a baby's skin could not have been softer and finer.
+
+At her feet crisped the shining ripples of the incoming tide. Far
+beyond, calm and burnished, stretched the summer sea into the dreamy
+distance, where the white noon sky, stricken through with intensest
+light and heat, dropped down a palpitating arch to meet it. And in all
+the dazzle of blue and white and silver and bare shining gray, she
+stood, a straight, slender, haughty little figure, as indefinite of
+color as all the rest; all but a narrow strip of scarlet at her throat,
+falling in a flaming line to her waist. The shimmering atmosphere seemed
+to pant about her; and through the high noon, over the still waters and
+sleeping shore, hummed the peering strains of a weird little song. She
+was singing softly:
+
+  'For men must work and women must weep,
+  And the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.'
+
+In the long parlor, the leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting
+in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight
+dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness,
+lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan
+lilies burned against the pure drapery, and another handful of tea
+violets lay crushed in the fleecy handkerchief on the floor. Against the
+cushions the exquisite contour of the sleeping face showed plainly.
+Coolest quiet sphered the whole figure; not a suggestion of anything but
+slowest calm grace disturbed its repose. But with the hushing rustle of
+leaves with the summer murmur flowing in, seemed to come also the deep
+monotone of the waves, when this inanimate statue was striking out at
+his side through the rattle and rush of the surf, the wide eyes filled
+with fierce light, the whole face fixed and stern with the strain of
+heart muscle, toward the helpless shape shooting out on the undertow. He
+had not seen her after, and, coming to seek her that night with words of
+compliment and thanks, he was met by this white vision that had absorbed
+all the fire and force of the afternoon into its blankness.
+
+A depot platform--long afternoon shadows fell over the pretty country
+station--standing alone in the woods. The small, temporary bustle about
+the waiting train was not discordant with the dreamy, restful look of
+the whole picture. Then the culminating hurry, the shriek and rattle of
+the starting train--a little figure poising itself for an instant on the
+car step--a face flushed a little, and dark eyes brightened with a flash
+of surprised recognition--a quick gesture of greeting and farewell, and
+then she was gone into the purple shades of evening.
+
+Once again he had seen her, but from afar off, in the glare and heat of
+a crowded assembly room. The face was a little thinner now, and the eyes
+were looking farther away than ever. The blood-red light of rubies
+flashed in the soft lace at her throat and wrists, and dropped in
+glittering pendants against the slender neck. She was talking evidently
+of a brilliant bouquet of pomegranates and daphnes that lay in her lap,
+swinging dreamily the dainty, glittering white fan. And while he looked,
+she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread--a
+slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women.
+The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long
+fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the
+deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and,
+remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than the tone
+or feeling:
+
+'As much of a princess as ever?'
+
+And Captain George answered:
+
+'As much of a princess!' both unmindful that no word had been spoken to
+token who was in the thought of each.
+
+Very trifling things these were to remember. Very likely he had seen
+scores of far more graceful and memorable scenes; but just these
+trifles, coming back so vividly, proved to him, as nothing else could
+have done, with what a keen, intense sympathy every word and look of
+hers had been noted.
+
+The spoken words roused him. In the ride that followed, twenty different
+persons and things came into their talk; but never once the princess.
+_That_, arousing himself again from his half-dreamful lapse from the old
+guarded habit, was put away steadily and quietly. His battle had been
+fought once. He was not to weaken his victory with fancies of the 'might
+have been.' He had not been tempted, through all these months; he would
+not tempt himself, now that real trial was so near at hand. Man as he
+was, if escape had been possible, he would have fled. But there was
+nothing to do but to go forward, and he called up that old, mighty,
+intangible safeguard of honor. The matter was settled beyond any
+question of surprise--he must avoid the long, sapping days of contact,
+the wasting, feverish yearnings of absence coming after.
+
+Flying over miles and miles of the summer land, heaped with the red
+tangled sweets of clover fields, belted with white starry mayweed, blue
+with marshy growth of wild flag, with hazy lines of far-off hills,
+fading into purple depths of distance, and near low ones lying green and
+calm close beside them, with brown clear brooks, famous trout streams,
+after the New England fashion, went running across their way, the old
+home pride leaped up in George's eyes and voice, and even Moore forgot
+his weariness, and talked with a flash of the old, careless spirit.
+
+The hack that brought them to their destination left them, deep in the
+summer night, at the foot of the long avenue of elms--going up which,
+with slow steps, on a sudden the house broke on them, ablaze with
+lights, athrob with music, whereat there was a renewal of explosive
+utterances, and the captain led his friend to the rear of the house to
+insure a quiet entrance.
+
+From the dark piazza, where he waited while George summoned some one to
+receive them, he caught, through the long, open casement, the vista of
+the parlors, with their glitter and confusion of light drapery and
+glimpses of bright faces and light forms, and softened hum of voices, as
+the dancers circled with the music. And through it all, straight down
+toward him, floating in one of the weird Strauss waltzes, came the
+princess, swathed in something white, airy, wide-falling. The same dark,
+unflushed face, the same wide, far-looking eyes, and fixed mouth, the
+same silky falling hair, but cut short now, and floating back as she
+moved. It was only for a moment: the perfumed darkness that seemed to
+throb with a sudden life of its own, the great, slow, summer stars above
+him, the wailing, passionate music that came trembling out among the
+heavy dew-wet foliage, the dark, calm earth about him, and the light and
+color and giddy motion that filled the gleaming square before him,
+struck in on his senses with staggering force; and then she swayed out
+of his sight, and Mrs. Morris came forward with words of cheer and
+welcome.
+
+That night, lying sleepless after the music was hushed and the wheels
+had done rolling away from the door, as if material enough for all fever
+fancies had not been given, backward and forward through the corridor a
+woman's garments trailed with light rustle, and a low voice hummed
+brokenly the waltz he had heard. Ceasing by and by in a murmur of girls'
+voices, and the old-remembered air, sung softly:
+
+  'For men must work and women must weep,
+  Though storms be sudden and waters deep.'
+
+After that many days went by unmarked. His wound, aggravated by fatigue,
+racked him with renewed pain; and when that was over, vitality was at
+too low an ebb for anything but the most passive quiet. Before listless,
+unnoting eyes drifted the crystal mornings, the golden hours steeped
+deep in summer languors, the miracles of sun-settings and star-filled
+holy nights. From his window he saw and heard always the ocean, blue and
+calm, lapping the shore with dreamy ripple in bright days--driving
+ghostly swirls of spray and fog clown the beach in stormy, gray ones.
+The house itself seemed set in the deepest haunt of summertime. Great
+trees, draped in the fullest growth of the year, rippled waves of green
+high about it. All day long the leaf sounds and leaf shadows came
+drifting in at the windows. Perfectest hush and quiet wrapped its
+occasional faint strains of music, or chime of voices came up to him,
+but did not break the silence. A place for a well soul to find its full
+stature, for a tired or sick one to gather again its lost forces. And by
+slow degrees the life held at first with so feeble a grasp came back to
+him.
+
+By and by there came a day when, from his balcony, he witnessed a
+departure, full of girls' profuse adieux, and then the hush of vacancy
+fell on the wide halls and airy rooms of the great house. That evening,
+with slow steps, he came down the staircase. In the twilight of the
+parlors showed dimly outlined a drift of woman's drapery, and the piano
+was murmuring inarticulately. Outside, on the broad stone doorstep,
+showed another drift, resolving itself into the muslins of Miss Nelly
+Morris, springing up with glad words of welcome as his unsteady frame
+came into view. Before half the protracted and vehement hand shaking was
+over, Moore turned at a soft rustle behind him, and Nelly found her
+introduction forestalled. Moore hoped, with his courtliest reverence,
+that Miss Berkeley had not forgotten him.
+
+She made two noiseless steps forward, and put out a small, brown band.
+He took it in his left, with a smiling glance of apology at the
+sling-fettered right arm. It was not often that Miss Berkeley's broad
+lids found it worth their while to raise themselves for such a wide,
+clear look as they allowed with the clasp. And then Nelly broke in:
+
+'Then you two people know each other. Grand! And I've been wondering
+these two weeks what to do with you! Why didn't you tell me, Leu?'
+
+'How was I to identify Mr. Moore with 'George's friend from the army'?
+Mr. Moore remembers he was on debatable ground last summer.'
+
+Her soft, slow speech fell on his hearing like the silver ripple of
+water, clear and fine cut, but without a bit of the New England
+incisiveness of tone that filled his delicate Southern ear with slight,
+perpetual irritation.
+
+'But I've made my calling and election sure at last. I was transformed
+into a mudsill and Northern hireling last spring.'
+
+'In spite of the transformation, I recognized you as soon as you spoke.
+I was not quite willing to be forgotten, you see, by any one who wore
+the glorifying army cloth.'
+
+They were out on the veranda now. Nelly was gazing with pitiful eyes at
+the sleeve fastened away, while the wasted left hand drew forward a
+great wicker chair into the circle of the moonlight. He caught the look:
+
+'Not so very bad, Miss Nelly; not off, you see, only useless for the
+present;' and he took a lowly seat at her side, near the princess's
+feet.
+
+'You are guiltless of shoulder straps. You might have obtained a
+commission, I think. Why didn't you, I wonder,' she said speculatively.
+
+'Because I knew nothing of military matters, for one thing, and hadn't
+the assurance to take my first lesson as lieutenant or captain.'
+
+Miss Berkeley's white lids lifted themselves again.
+
+'More nice then wise, sir. Others do it,' was Nelly's comment.
+
+'Yes, but I haven't forgotten the old copy-book instructions, 'Learn to
+obey before you command,' and began at the beginning. I've taken the
+first step toward the starred shoulder straps'--he wore the corporal's
+stripes--' and am hopeful.'
+
+'You'll never attain to them, you lazy Southron. Tell as about your camp
+life.'
+
+'There's very little to tell. Drill, smoke, loaf--begging your pardon
+for the rough expression of a rough fact--drill again. As one day is, so
+is another; they're all alike.'
+
+'Well, tell us about your getting wounded, then, and the fight. George
+will not get wounded himself, in spite of my repeated requests to that
+effect.'
+
+And so Moore fought his battle over again, in the midst of which Miss
+Berkeley dropped out of the talk, folded some soft brilliant net over
+her light dress, and went down the walk leading to the shore, and he did
+not see her again that night.
+
+After that he spent much of his time below stairs. Much alone; there
+were walks and rides in which he could take no part. Despite of George's
+prediction, he had peace and quiet, and gathered strength hourly.
+Whatever of graciousness he _had_ seen or fancied in Miss Berkeley's
+manner in that first unexpected meeting had all vanished. A subtile,
+unconquerable something shut her out from all friendliness of speech or
+action. She went about the house in her slow, abstracted way, or in her
+other mood, with sudden darting motions like a swallow, or dreamed all
+day beside the summer sea, coming back browner and with mistier looks in
+her gray eyes, but always alone and unapproachable. So that in half a
+dozen days he had not received as many voluntary sentences from her.
+
+But one morning the clouds had gathered black and heavy. The sea fogs
+had pitched their tents to landward, and their misty battalions were
+driving gray across the landscape. Dim reaches of blank water--lay
+beyond, weltering with an uneasy, rocking motion against the low, dark
+sky. White, ghostly sea birds wheeled low, a fretful wind grieved about
+the house, and a New England northeast storm was in progress. She was
+standing at the window, looking out with eyes farther away than ever
+over the haze-draped sea. Some fine, heavy material, the same indistinct
+hue as the day outside, fell about her in large, sweeping folds. A
+breath of sudden, penetrating perfume struck across his senses as he
+approached her. 'And gray heliotrope!' he said; but the heliotrope
+vanished as she turned and displayed the blaze of carnations at her
+throat, and the gleam of crimson silk under the jaunty zouave.
+
+'Lois Pearl Berkeley,' he read from the golden thimble he had nearly
+crushed under foot. He half wondered if she would know what it was. He
+never saw her do anything. She was never 'engaged,' nor in haste about
+any occupation. The perfect freedom from the universal Yankee necessity
+of motion, with which the brown, small hands fell before her, was as
+thoroughly a part of her as the strange Indian scent which clung to
+everything she touched, and sphered her like the atmosphere of another
+world. He never could associate the idea of any kind of personal
+care-taking with her dainty leisure, more than with the lilies of the
+field, though they never appeared in as many graceful arrays as she.
+
+'Yes, mine, thank you,' she said, and composedly dropped it into its
+place in the most orderly of useless conglomerations of silken pockets
+and puzzling pigeon holes. He watched her fingers, and then looked back
+at her.
+
+'Lois--such an odd name for you--such a quaint, staid Puritan name.'
+
+'And I am neither quaint nor staid nor Puritan. Thank you. Yes, my
+mother must have had recollections of her New England home strong on her
+when she gave it me, down on the Louisiana shores. It always sounded
+even to me a little strange and frigid among such half-tropical
+surroundings.'
+
+As she spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A
+rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the
+dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it
+was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house,
+always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the
+superficial lotus-charm of Southern life--and he had lived it
+superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught
+away his breath and choked sudden tears into his eyes. Came and went
+like a flash--for before she had done speaking a sudden new bond of
+sympathy put away the _stranger_ forevermore, and he was no longer
+alone.
+
+'Then you are Southern born too,' he said, with a quick step forward,
+and involuntarily outstretched hand. Hers dropped into it.
+
+'Yes, I am hardly acclimated yet. I shiver under these pale Northern
+skies from August till June. O my Louisiana, you never made 'life a
+burden' with such dark, chill days, and sobbing, cruel winds!' She
+turned to the windows. A sudden uncontrollable quaver of impatience and
+longing ran through her speech and hurried the words with unusual
+vehemence.
+
+'I thought you must have liked the day, since you robed yourself in its
+haze and mist.' He laid his hand lightly on her gray drapery with
+reverent touch.
+
+'And _I_ thought my carnations would redeem that. Since they
+didn't--'and she tossed the whole bright, spicy handful on the table.
+
+In a vase on the mantle, gray, passionate, odorous blooms were massed
+loosely about a cluster of fragile, intense day lilies, and a dash of
+purple and crimson trailed with the fuchsias over its edge, and gleamed
+up from the white marble ledge. He went to the vase, shook out the
+fuchsias, and laid the residue in her lap.
+
+'Heliotrope, finally,' he said.
+
+She brushed it lightly away with a half shudder.
+
+'Not that. I don't like heliotrope. Its perfume is heart-breaking,
+hopeless. It belongs in coffins, about still, dead faces. If it had a
+voice, we should hear continual moans. It would be no worse than this,
+though.'
+
+'You will wear the lilies then, unless the heliotrope scent clings to
+them too,' he said, gathering up the obnoxious flowers.
+
+'Yes, if it doesn't jar your ideal to see them worn against such a
+stormy day dress. To me they are the perfection of summer. No _color_
+could be more intense than this spotless whiteness. There!' Fastening
+them, the brittle stems snapped, and the flowers fell at her feet. 'No
+flowers for me to-day, of your choosing at least. Practically, lilies
+have such an uncomfortable way of breaking short off.'
+
+A broad, bright ribbon lay drawn through 'Charles Anchester' on the
+table. She knotted it carelessly at her throat.
+
+'That will do for the now; but, O my carnations, how your mission
+failed!' hovering over them a minute.
+
+'Then you are not satisfied with the New England mean of perfection, in
+everything, mentally, morally, and meteorologically?' going back to the
+weather again.
+
+'Satisfied! I'd exchange this whole pale summer for one hour of broad,
+torrid noonlight. Deep, far-off tropical skies, great fronds of tropical
+foliage, drawing their sustenance from the slowest, richest juices of
+nature, gorgeous depths of color blazing with the very heart of the sun,
+deep, intoxicating odors poured from creamy white or flaming flower
+chalices, and always the silver-sprayed wash of the blue sea. I remember
+that of my home. It is months and months since I have seen a magnolia or
+jasmine.'
+
+Fate sent Miss Morris to the parlor just then, luckily enough, perhaps,
+and the first dash of rain from the coming storm struck the windows
+sharply. Miss Berkeley shivered; a gray shadow swept up over her face,
+and absorbed all the gleam and unrest. She moved off with her book to a
+window; shut herself out from the room, and into the storm, with a heavy
+fall of curtains; and Nelly's voice rippled through a tripping, Venetian
+barcarole.
+
+It stormed all the next day, and when twilight came, it rained still
+with desperation. A narrow sphere of light from the flame low down in
+its alabaster shade held the piano, and through the warm scented gloom
+that filled the rest of the parlor thrilled echoing chords. Moore,
+coming in, stopped in the dimness to listen. A troubled uncertainty made
+itself felt through the strains, a sudden discordant crash jarred
+through the room, and the performer rose abruptly. He came forward.
+
+'O my prophetic soul, magnolias!' said Nelly, from her lounge, just
+outside the lighted circle.
+
+It had just come from him, the light, exquisite basket he held filled
+with great, pink, flushed magnolia blooms. Nelly raved in most
+fashionably extravagant adjectives. Lois looked at it with hungry eyes,
+but motionless and speechless. He laid it before her on the table, and
+turned away. She stood for a moment looking gravely down on it, then
+buried her face among the cool petals with a sudden caressing motion.
+Looking up again shortly, 'Thank you,' she said simply to the giver
+chatting carelessly.
+
+A broad illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after,
+and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little
+skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she
+could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed
+with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous
+with purple light, shining through the tears that gathered in them.
+
+Then the piano began, played dreamily, irregularly, with slender, single
+threads of tune, and frequent pauses, as if the preoccupied mind let the
+listless fingers fall away from the keys. They gathered up finally all
+the broken strains into a low, slow-moving harmony. Through it Moore
+heard the soft lap of waves, the slow rock of Pacific tidal swells,
+flowing and ebbing and flowing again through flaming noons, about
+half-submerged bits of world, palm-shaded, sun-drenched, or swaying
+white with moonlight under purple midnights, holy with the clear burning
+stars: heard the gurgle and ripple of falling streams, deepening into
+the wide flow of mighty rivers, bearing in their calm sweep the secrets
+of a zone--of ice-choked springs, of the dead stillness of Northern
+forests, and the overgrowth, and passionate life of endless summers.
+
+The red and white combatants now held truce over a queen check, while
+the players sat silent, listening.
+
+Suddenly, through the murmur and rhythmic flow of water sounds, struck
+shrill and sharp the opening strains of a march--not such marches as
+mark time for dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant,
+cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat--steadying the tramp of weary
+feet over red battle fields. Its unswerving hurry, its terrible, calm
+excitement, brought before his vision long blue lines--the fixed faces
+sterner than death, with steady eyes and quickened breath--the nervous
+clutch of muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came
+nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and
+sweet May breath--and the quick, questioning note of a meadow lark
+dropped down through the silence of the advancing column. As the
+maddening music stormed and beat about him, his heart throbbed audibly,
+and the rushing currents of his fiery Southern blood sounded in his
+ears. Honor, prudence, resolution, everything was swept away in the lava
+tide of excitement. Before him he saw the crown of his life. All heaven
+and all earth should not stop him short of it. He rose and began
+crossing the room, with heavy, resolute tread. In the dimness, the
+player was hardly visible; he would assure himself of her mortality at
+least. A sudden, fierce hunger for sight and touch thrilled him.
+
+Midway he stopped. The music dropped with a shock from its fiery
+enthusiasm. Was it only an echo, or an army of ghosts crossing a dim
+field, long since fought over--the steady tramp, tramp, the pendulum of
+time? Unutterably wailing, pitiful, it sent plaintive, piercing cries up
+to the calm, dead heavens. All the fearful sights he had seen rose
+before him. Upturned lay faces calm in death as in a child's sleep, with
+all camp roughnesses swept away in that still whiteness; strong men's,
+with that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death
+on them--mangled and crushed forms--all the wreck of a fought battle,
+terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water
+voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant
+arpeggio flashed up the keys like a shower of gold, and Miss Berkeley
+rose with white face and trembling breath, and Nelly was alone in the
+room, sobbing nervously in her armchair.
+
+The storm passed that night, with great swayings of trees, and dash of
+broad raindrops, and piled up broken masses of fleecy white clouds,
+tossed about by the rough, exultant September wind. Bright days
+followed, mellowing with each one to sunnier, calmer perfection. Moore
+passed them in his own room. That night had torn away all the disguises
+that he had put upon his heart. He knew now that he loved this
+woman--knew it with such a bitter sense of humiliation as such proud
+spirits writhe under when honor turns traitor and betrays them to the
+enemy. 'Lead us not into temptation.' If it meant anything in the old
+habit of child's prayer which clung to him yet, it meant that he should
+put himself out of its way, since he had proved himself too weak to meet
+it. His inborn honesty let him build no excuses for his failure. He saw,
+and acknowledged with a flush of scorn and curling lip, his own
+treachery to himself in his hour of need. That he had not committed
+himself--that his self-betrayal was only known to self--was no merit of
+his--simply a circumstance. And circumstances seemed mighty in their
+influence upon him, he thought, with a feeling of deepest contempt. All
+pride and self-reliance were taken out of him. Absence, at least, would
+be a safeguard, since it would render harmless such impulses as those of
+that night. However much he might sin in yearning, she; should never
+know, never be exposed to the risk of being drawn into his guilt and
+pain. He had come at last to the place where all the old delicate pride
+was merged in the one anxious fear that she should suffer. He would go
+away the next day; he would not see her again--never see her
+voluntarily--putting away fiercely the sudden pang of yearning: not that
+he came at once to such a conclusion.
+
+Honor, pride, self-respect, having failed him once, were not easily
+recalled to their allegiance. His was no feeble nature, to sin and
+repent in an hour. He fought over every inch of his way, and came out at
+last conqueror, but scarred and weary and very weak in heart, and
+distrustful of himself.
+
+They had gone to ride that afternoon--he had seen them drive away. He
+would go down and make the necessary arrangements for his departure. And
+so it happened that he stood an hour before sunset in the parlor. A
+sudden heart sickness drove the blood from his lips with the wrench of
+remembrance. It did not strengthen him to meet her, cool and royal, in
+filmy purple, putting out her hand with frank friendliness, and with a
+new quaver of interest in her voice. Those fatal magnolias: all the
+outside world seemed pressing nearer these two strangers in a strange
+land.
+
+'How pale you are! You have been ill again.'
+
+'No,' he said, almost harshly. 'You like tiger lilies,' lifting a stem
+crowded with the flaming whirls.
+
+'Like them? yes--don't you? As I like the fiery, deafening drum-roll and
+screaming fife, and silver, sweet bugle-calls. Think where they found
+these wide, free curves of outline--that flaming contrast of color.
+Indian skies have rounded over them, Indian suns poured their fervor
+into their hearts. In the depth of forest jungles the velvet-coated
+tiger has shaken off their petals--glittering, deadly cobras crushed
+them in their slow coils; gorgeous-winged birds and insects swept them
+in their flight.'
+
+Some new mental impulse sent a rare, faint flush to the olive cheeks,
+and filled the uplooking clear eyes with light. This purple-clad shape,
+with fiery nasturtiums burning on the breast and filling the air with
+their peculiar odor, with the barbaric splendor of tiger lilies
+reflecting their lurid glare about her as she stood, bore no more
+likeness to the ordinary haughty woman than fire to snow. He would have
+liked to have crowned her with pomegranate blossoms--have dropped the
+silvery sheen of ermine under her feet, and have knelt there to worship.
+
+She moved away impatiently, trailed her noiseless drapery through the
+room once or twice, and came back to the window, where he stood looking
+out. Before them lay the sea, calm in a sheen of blue, gathering faint
+amethystine vapors, that the sunset would light up in a miracle of
+bronze and purple and rose.
+
+'You should have been with us last night! A soft, rushing south wind
+filled all the air with whispers, and drew up a veil of lace round the
+horizon, very high up in the east. Stars were few; the new moon dropped
+tender, faint beams down into the gray mist and grayer water that broke
+in ripples of white fire against the dark in the west, and mingled with
+the mystery in the east. I want to go again. Mr. Moore, I can manage a
+boat; will you go with me?'
+
+With every minute he saw his hard-earned victory slipping away. With
+every minute his reeling sense lost foothold in the strange, new
+fascination of her excited presence. Will rallied to a last effort; he
+muttered some broken excuse, that she must have thought an assent, for
+she dropped a soft, white, clinging shawl over her shoulders, slipped
+the tie of the jaunty hat beneath her chin, and he could only follow her
+as she slid through the flicker of shade and sunshine down to the beach,
+where the summer sea washed lazily.
+
+Low in the west and northwest lay piled ominous clouds; white, angry
+thunder heads began showing themselves.
+
+'A grand sunset for to-night, and a shower perhaps. We shall be back
+before it breaks.'
+
+A small boat--a frail thing of white and gilding--floated at anchor.
+Lois shook out the sail in her character of manager, seated herself at
+the helm, and they drifted out. No word was spoken; the light in her
+eyes grew brighter and brighter; the scarlet curves of her mouth more
+and more intense. Sitting with face turned away from the west, she did
+not see, as he did, the rising blackness. The wind freshened, skimming
+in fitful gusts over the waves, and the little craft flung off the spray
+like rain. Away off in the shadow of the cloud the water was black as
+death, a faint line of white defining its edge. Was she infatuated? As
+for him, he grew very calm, with a kind of desperation. Better to die
+so, with her face the last sight on earth--his last consciousness her
+clinging arms, sinking down to the dark, still caverns beneath--than to
+live out the life that lay before him. He leaned forward and looked over
+into the green depths of the sea. Sunshine still struck down in rippling
+lines, a golden network. Soft emerald shadows hung far down, breaking up
+into surface rifts of cool dimness as the waves swung over them.
+
+Her hat had fallen back; her whole face was alive with a proud, exultant
+delight in the exhilarating motion. Higher and higher rose the veil of
+cloud, and the blackness in the water was creeping toward them. Sea
+birds wheeled low about them, with their peculiar quavering cry, and a
+low swell made itself felt. Miss Berkeley turned her head; a sudden look
+of affright blanched her face to deadliest whiteness. A hand's breadth
+of clear sky lay beneath the sun, and down after them, with the speed of
+a racer, came that great black wave. Before it the blue ripples shivered
+brightly; behind it the angry water tossed and seethed. In its bosom,
+lurid, phosphorescent lights seemed to flit to and fro. Its crest was
+ragged and white with dashes of foam. She took in the whole in a
+second's glance, and made a movement to bring the boat's head up to the
+wind. As the white face turned toward him, a quick instinct of
+self-preservation seized him, and he sprang up to lower the sail.
+Something caught the halliards. His left arm was of little service; his
+right hung useless at his side. She reached forward--one hand on the
+tiller--to help him. The rim of the storm slipped up over the sun--a
+sudden flaw struck them--the rudder flew sharp round, wrenched out of
+her slight hold--the top-heavy sail caught the full force of the blow,
+surged downward with a heavy lurch, and the gale was on them. A great
+blow, and swift darkness, then fierce currents rushing coldly past him;
+strange, wild sounds filling his ears; and when his vision cleared
+itself, he saw Lois, unimpeded by her light drapery, striking out for
+the sunken ledge, half a dozen yards away, over which the spray was
+flying furiously. He ground his teeth with impatience as his nerveless
+arm fell helpless; but he reached her side at last. A narrow shelf, with
+barely sufficient standing room for two. Great, dark waves, with strange
+lights flashing through them, whirled blinding deluges high above their
+heads, as he held her close. With the instinct of the weaker toward the
+stronger, she grasped and clung to him; and the fierce exultation that
+thrilled through his veins with actual contact, made him strong as a
+giant. And then, close on the gale, came the rain, beating down the
+waves with its heavy pour. In the thunder and tramp of the storm no
+human voice could have made itself audible, if speech had been needed.
+
+The storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. Through a rift in the
+clouds a dash of blood-red light burst over the troubled waters, and
+with it a sudden quiet fell about them. They were to have their 'grand
+sunset' finally.
+
+'We are too far from the mainland to reach it without help; no boats are
+likely to pass this way after this storm; the tide is at its lowest now;
+it rises high over this ledge.'
+
+In his quiet voice a half-savage triumph made itself heard. This
+near-coming fate, that he believed inevitable, put away completely all
+claims of that world that lay behind him--shut out everything but their
+own individuality. Time had narrowed to a point; all landmarks were
+swept away.
+
+Miss Berkeley's face had lost none of its whiteness; but the pallor was
+not of fear. The great eyes burned star-like, and the mouth was like
+iron. She looked up as his even tones fell on her ear. Something in his
+gaze fixed hers; through fearless, unveiled eyes, the soul looked
+straight out to his. What he saw there dazzled and blinded him. He
+caught her up to his heart suddenly and fiercely. His lips crushed hers
+in a long, clinging kiss, that seemed to drink up her very life. For
+them, the brightness that for others is dissipated over long years of
+the future, was concentrated into the single intense moment of the
+present--this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the
+fruition of a lifetime. The sky lifted away and poured down fuller
+floods of light; the air vibrated with strange, audible throbs. When he
+released her, she did not move away. Never again, though they lived out
+a century, could the past be quite what it had been before; through it
+they had come to this, the crowning perfection of their lives. Through
+the future would run the memory of a caress in which--she was not a
+woman who measured her gifts--she had dissolved all the hope and promise
+of that future for him. Desperation was no small element in the whirl.
+Only into the eternities could he carry the _now_ pure and loyal. It had
+nothing to do with time; only through the shadow of the coming death had
+he attained to it.
+
+The fancy that had always haunted him with her peculiar name and dainty
+presence, prompted the 'Marguerite!'
+
+She was not a woman to whom people give pet names. A _rested_, loving
+smile gleamed over her face, and her lips sought his again.
+
+'My darling!'
+
+'Mine!' and then time drifted on, unbroken by the speech which would
+have jarred the new, perfect harmony. Neither _thought_--the life
+currents that had met so wildly and suddenly, left space in their full,
+disturbed flow, for just the one consciousness of delirious, satisfying
+love. While the fiery sunset paled, he held the little drenched figure
+close, her warm breath flowing across his cheek.
+
+Out of the gathering dimness shoreward, came a hail. It struck him with
+an icy chill that death could never have brought. She raised her head,
+listening. The longing and temptation to hold her to his breast, and
+sink down through the green, curling waves, came back stronger than
+ever. Only so could he hope to keep her. That inexorable future of time
+reaching out to grasp him back again, would put them apart so
+hopelessly. His voice was hoarse--broken up with the heart wrench.
+
+'Marguerite, will you die here with me, or go back again to the life
+that will separate us?'
+
+She did not understand him. Why should she? Did she not love him, and he
+her? and what _could_ come between them? For her a future burst suddenly
+into hope with that faint call. In it lay untried, unfathomable sources
+of happiness.
+
+Another breathless kiss--this time crowded with the agony of a parting
+for him--and then, as the hail came again, nearer and more distinct, the
+white shawl, that still clung about her, floated in the air as a signal.
+
+They lifted her into the rescuing boat shortly, white and breathless,
+and wrapped her in heavy shawls. Not senseless, lying against his
+breast, the dark eyes opened once to meet his, and the pallid face
+nestled a little closer to its resting place. He could not tell if the
+time were long or short, before Nelly's voice broke on his ear.
+
+'Only a comedy, instead of the tragedy which mother is arranging up at
+the house!'
+
+The half-hysterical quaver broke into the woman's refuge of tears, and
+sobs with that; and Moore gave up his burden to stronger arms.
+
+'Up at the house,' Mrs. Morris, busied with her blazing fires and
+multitudinous appliances for any stage of disaster, met them with the
+quiet tears that mothers learn to shed, and the reverent 'Thank God!'
+that comes oftenest from mothers' lips.
+
+And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the
+face. The man was in no sense a coward--_flinch_ was not in him. He came
+out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over
+whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat
+Marguerite--the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at
+his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching
+eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion
+in his heart leaped up--a groan came in place of the words he had
+promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not
+strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet.
+He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward
+to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words
+that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through
+clenched teeth.
+
+'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not
+dead; the engagement is not broken.'
+
+There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any
+right to use--harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the
+earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted
+the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur.
+
+There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified
+glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell,
+and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect
+comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid
+before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom
+again. She looked into it with just the same attitude--even to the
+tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing--as five minutes before she
+had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white
+face--whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight--saw a look of utter,
+hopeless quiet settle there--such quiet as one sees in an unclosed
+coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving,
+as covers deadly wounds--settle never again to rise till Death shall
+sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces
+gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.
+
+Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On
+this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the
+curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give--the promise
+of lifelong love and tenderness--was itself a deadly wrong--would blast
+his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood
+there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest
+realization of helplessness went over his heart.
+
+She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his
+bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made
+itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up;
+even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that
+sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her
+hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek
+with quick, light contact, and glided away.
+
+Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon,
+and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and
+ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed
+in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face,
+and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long
+hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of
+sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night
+with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred
+the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night
+noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo;
+till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and
+the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded
+itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.
+
+To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attention, had taken in
+every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a
+personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her
+pain--that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same
+face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and
+sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.
+
+But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking
+came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her
+own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite
+sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the
+pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of
+the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind
+of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes
+or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.
+
+There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these
+wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of
+body--not a sound or struggle testifies to pain--receiving blow after
+blow without hope or thought of appeal--going off by and by to die, or
+to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps--a passive,
+hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or
+shape a lifetime. Rarely ever eyes that have watched out such a night
+see the sun rise with its old promise.
+
+Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium,
+found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another
+fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George--off on some
+scouting expedition--was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on
+the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the
+hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway
+followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always
+ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding
+finally with--
+
+'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George!
+The prodigious effort _ought_ to have kept the heart throb out of his
+voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a
+wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took
+refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months--feeling
+like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save
+either himself or his friend from coming evil. Another item added to
+retributive justice.
+
+'I thought you knew'--flashing the diamond on his hand in the
+moonlight--'somewhere beyond the lines yonder a lady wears the companion
+to this--or did, last spring.'
+
+And George's spirits rose immensely thereupon.
+
+The old, miserable monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him,
+this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days
+and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor
+memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole
+strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to
+face with his life, he met the chances of his future like the man he
+was, and at last, out of the blackness end desolation, came the comfort
+of conquering small, every-day temptations, more of a comfort than we
+are willing to admit at first thought.
+
+This bare, unbroken life cuts straight down to the marrow of a man.
+Stripped of all conventionalities, individuals come out broadly. The
+true metal shows itself grandly in this strange, impartial throwing
+together of social elements--this commingling on one level of all ranks
+and conditions of men in the same broad glare of every-day trial,
+unmodified by any of society's false lights. The factitious barriers of
+rank once broken over, all early associations, whether of workshop or
+college, go for nought, or, rather, for what they are worth. The _man_
+gravitates to his proper place, whether he makes himself known with the
+polished sentences of the school, or in terse, sinewy, workman's talk.
+And through the months Moore learned to respect humanity as it showed
+itself, made gentler to every one, driven out from himself, perhaps, by
+the bitterness and darkness that centred in his own heart. It was a new
+phase of life for him, but he bated his haughty Southern exclusiveness
+to meet it. Before, he had kept himself aloof as far as the surroundings
+allowed from those about him--now, his never-failing good nature, his
+flow of song and story, his untiring physical endurance, all upborne by
+a certain proud delicacy and reticence, made him a general favorite. But
+he hailed as a relief the long, exhausting marches that came after a
+while. Bodily weariness stood in the place of head or heart exercise,
+and men falling asleep on the spot where they halted for the night,
+after a day in the clinging Virginia mud, had little time for the noisy
+outbreaks that filled the evenings in days of inaction. So he did his
+private's duty bravely, with cheery patience, relieving many a slender
+boy's arms of his gun, helping many another with words of cheer as he
+slumped on at his side, always with some device for making their dreary
+night-stops more endurable. Thanksgiving came and went. George went
+home on furlough. Moore refused one, and ate the day's extra allowance
+of tough beef and insipid rice with much fought-against memories of his
+New England festivals. The winter went on. Christmas days came. The
+man's brown face was getting positively thinner with homesick
+recollections of the Southern carnival. This brilliant, ready spirit,
+who never grew sour nor selfish under any circumstances, actually spent
+two good hours, the afternoon before Christmas day, in a brown study,
+and with a suspicious, tightened feeling in his throat, and mistiness in
+his eyes. Coming in at nightfall from his picket duty, tired and hungry,
+Jim Murphy, stretching his long length before the fire, rose on his
+elbow to find half a dozen epistles he had brought down to camp that
+day.
+
+'Yer letthers, Musther Moore.' Jim, even with his sudden accession of
+independence as an American citizen, paid unconscious deference to the
+world-old subtile difference between gentleman and 'rough,' and used the
+title involuntarily.
+
+He opened them sitting by the same fire, munching his hard tack as he
+read. Murphy, watching him, saw his lips quiver and work over one
+bearing half a dozen postmarks--a letter from his mother, conveyed
+across the lines by some sleight-of-hand of influence or pay, and mailed
+and remailed from place to place, till weeks had grown into months since
+it was written. Noncommittal as it had need to be--filled with home
+items to the last page--there his heart stood still, to bound again
+furiously back, and his breath came sharp and hot. He rose blinded and
+staggering. Jim Murphy, seeing how white and rigid his face had grown,
+came toward him, putting out his hand with a dumb impulse of sympathy,
+not understanding how the shock of a great hope, springing full grown
+into existence, sometimes puts on the semblance of as great a loss.
+
+Private Moore's application for a furlough being duly made, that night
+was duly granted.
+
+'Just in time--the last one for your regiment!' said the good-natured
+official, registering the necessary items.
+
+In another hour he was whirling away, and in early evening two days
+later he stepped out into the clear moonlight and crisp air of a
+Northern city.
+
+A New England sleighing season was at its height. The streets were
+crowded with swift-flying graceful vehicles, the air ringing with bell
+music and chimes of voices. Out through the brilliant confusion he went
+to the quiet square where the great trees laid a dark tracery of shadow
+upon the snow beneath. No thought of the accidents of absence or
+company, or any of the chances of everyday life, had occurred to him
+before. A carriage stood at the door. He almost stamped with impatience
+till the door opened and he was admitted. The change to the warm,
+luxurious gloom of the parlors quieted him a little, but he paced up and
+down with long strides while he waited. The strong stillness that he had
+resolutely maintained was broken down now with a feverish restlessness.
+
+She came at length--it seemed to him forever first--with the rustle and
+shimmer of trailing lengths of silk down the long room. A fleecy mist
+covered neck and arms, and some miracle of a carriage wrapping lay white
+and soft about her face. She did not recognize him in the obscurity; his
+message of 'a friend' had not betrayed him. But his voice, with its new,
+proud hopefulness, its under vein triumphant and eager, struck her into
+a blinding, giddy whirl, in which voice and words were lost. It passed
+in a moment, and he was saying, 'And I am free now--honorably free--and
+have come where my heart has been, ever since that month on the seaside.
+Most gracious and sovereign lady,'--he broke into sudden, almost
+mirthful speech, dropping on one knee with a semblance of humility
+proved no mockery by the diamond light in the brown eyes and the
+reverent throb that came straight from his voice.
+
+She bent over him as he knelt, and drew her cool, soft hands across his
+forehead and down his face, and her even, silvery syllables cut like
+death:
+
+'Mr. Moore, last night I promised to marry your friend, Captain Morris.'
+
+For the space of a minute stillness like the grave filled the room, and
+then all the intense strain of heart and nerve gave way, as the bitter
+tide of disappointment broke in and rolled over his future; and without
+word or sound he dropped forward at her feet.
+
+She knelt down beside him with a low, bitter cry. It reached his dulled
+sense; he rose feebly.
+
+'Forgive me; I have not been myself of late, I think; and this--this was
+so sudden,' and he walked away with dull, nerveless tread.
+
+On the table, near her, lay her handkerchief. It breathed of heliotrope.
+Her words came back to him: 'Only in coffins, about still, dead faces.'
+He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Forever he should
+remember all that ghostly sheen of silvery white about a rigid face with
+unutterably sad fixed mouth and drooping lids. He thrust the fleecy
+handful into his breast.
+
+'I may keep this?' and took permission from her silence.
+
+'Good-by;' the words came through ashy lips, a half sob. She knelt as
+impassive as marble, as cold and white. He waited a moment for the word
+or look that did not come, turned away, the hall door fell heavily shut,
+and he was gone.
+
+Fifteen minutes after, Miss Berkeley was whirling to the house where she
+was to officiate as bridesmaid, and where she was haughtier, and colder,
+and ten times more attractive than ever.
+
+Private Moore, waiting for the midnight return train, found life a grim
+prospect.
+
+Three weeks after, a summons came from the captain's tent. George had
+just returned from his own furlough, and this was their first meeting.
+Even while their hands clasped, his new, happy secret told itself.
+
+'Congratulate me, Clement Moore! You remember Lois Berkeley? She has
+promised to be Lois Berkeley Morris one day!' and, with happy lover's
+egotism, did not notice the gray shade about his hearer's lips.
+
+Various items of news followed.
+
+'A truce boat goes over to-morrow,' remembering the fact suddenly;
+'there will be opportunity to send a few letters; so, if you wish to
+write to that lady 'beyond the lines'--
+
+The voice that replied was thin and harsh:
+
+'Miss Rose declined alliance with a 'Yankee hireling,' and was married
+last October.'
+
+Honest George wrung his friend's hand anew, and heaped mental anathemas
+on his own stupidity for not seeing how haggard and worn the dark face
+had grown--anathemas which were just enough, perhaps, only he hardly saw
+the reason in quite the right light. But he spared all allusions to his
+own prospects thereafter, and finding that Moore rather avoided than
+sought him, measured and forgave the supposed cause by his own heart.
+
+At length came a time when a new life and impulse roused into action
+even that slowly moved great body, the officers of the Potomac Army, and
+that much-abused and sorely tried insignificant item, the army itself.
+On every camp ground reigned the confusion of a flitting. All the roads
+were filled with regiments hurrying southward, faces growing more and
+more hazard with fatigue and privation, weak and slender forms falling
+from the ranks, cowards and traitors skulking to the rear, till at
+length on the banks of the river stood an army, hungry, footsore,
+marchworn, but plucky, and ready for any service that might be required
+of them, even if that service were but to 'march up the hill and then
+march down again'--what was left of them.
+
+An atom in the moving mass of blue, Clement Moore shared the pontoon
+crossing, was silent through the storms of cheers that greeted each
+regiment as they splashed over and up the bank, and, drawn up in line of
+battle at last, surveyed the field without a pulsation of emotion. Other
+men about him chafed at the restraint; he stood motionless, with eyes a
+thousand miles away. And when the advance sounded, and the line started
+with a cheer, no sound passed his lips. A half-unconscious prayer went
+up that he might fall there, and have it over with this life battle,
+that had gone so sorely against him. He moved as in a dream. The whirl
+and roar of battle swept around and by him; he charged with the
+fiercest, saw the blue lines reel and break only to close up and charge
+again, took his life in his hand a dozen times, and stood at length with
+the few who held that first line of rifle pits, gazing in each other's
+faces in the momentary lull, and wondering at their own existence. Then
+came a shock, shivers of red-hot pain ran through every nerve, and
+then--blissful, cool unconsciousness. Captain George, galloping by, with
+the red glare of battle on his face, saw the fall, and halted. A half
+dozen ready hands swung the body to his saddle. For a little the tide of
+battle eddied away, and in the comparative quiet, George tore down the
+hill to a spring bubbling out under the cedars.
+
+The darkness that wrapped the wounded man dissolved gradually. The
+thunder and crash of guns, the mad cheers, the confusion of the bands
+withdrew farther and farther, and drifted away from his failing senses.
+He was back in his Southern home; the arm under his head was his
+mother's; and he murmured some boyish request. Jasmine and clematis
+oppressed him with their oversweetness; overhead the shining leaves of
+the magnolia swung with slow grace. So long since he had seen a
+magnolia, not since that evening--a life time ago, it seemed; the sight
+and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The
+heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother--a
+drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not
+cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away
+with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs.
+He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a woman's,
+bent over him.
+
+'O Clement, dear old fellow, do you know me?'
+
+He smiled faintly, with stiffening lips. 'Yes, I know. I've prayed for
+it, George. I couldn't live to see her your wife. Good-by, dear boy.
+Tell mother--' He wandered again. 'Kiss me, mother--now Lois, my
+Marguerite. Into thy hands, O Lord--' A momentary struggle for breath,
+and then Morris laid back the grand head, and knelt, looking down on the
+beautiful face, over which the patient strength of perfect calm had
+settled forever.
+
+'So that was it, after all,' he said, bitterly. 'Fool not to see; and he
+was worth a generation of such as I.'
+
+He turned away, tightened his saddle girths, cast a look on the
+pandemonium before him, looked back with one foot already in the
+stirrup.
+
+'I sha'n't see him again in this hell, even if I come out of it myself.'
+And going back, with gentle fingers he removed the few trinkets on the
+body. In an inner pocket of the blouse he found a small packet. He
+opened it on the spot. A lady's handkerchief, silky fine, white as ever.
+No need of the delicate tracery in the corners to tell him whose. The
+perfume that haunted it still called back too vividly that evening when
+he had wondered at and loved her more for the strange, perfect calm that
+chilled a little his outburst of happiness. He folded it back carefully,
+touched his lips as a woman might have done to the cold forehead, and
+mounted, plunging up the hill to the fight that had recommenced over the
+trench. Later in the day, the ball that fate moulded for Captain George
+found him. He gave one low, pitiful cry as it crashed through his bridle
+arm, and then a merciful darkness closed about him.
+
+Two months after, white and thin, with one empty sleeve fastened across
+his chest, he stood where another had stood waiting for the same woman.
+Through the window drifted in the early spring fragrance; a handful of
+early spring flowers lay on the table. A soft rustle and slow step
+through the hall, and he rose as Lois came in. She glanced at the empty
+sleeve with grave, wide eyes, and sat down near him. He would not have
+known the face before him, it had so altered; the hair pushed back from
+hollow, blue-veined temples, the sharpened, angular outlines, and an
+old, suffering look about the mouth and sunken eyes.
+
+Few words were spoken--nothing beyond the most commonplace greetings.
+Then she said:
+
+'I should have come to you, but I have been ill myself; near death, I
+believe,' she added, wearily.
+
+She gave the explanation with no throb of feeling. She would have
+apologized for a careless dress with more spirit once.
+
+He rose and laid a packet before her.
+
+'A lady's handkerchief--yours, I think. I was with him when he died,
+though his body was not found afterward. I was hurt myself, you know,
+and could not attend to it,' he said, deprecatingly.
+
+She did not touch it, looking from it up to him with eyes filled with
+just such a grieved, questioning look as might come into the eyes of
+some animal dying in torture. He could not endure it. He put out his
+white, wasted left hand.
+
+'My poor child!' She shivered, caught her breath with a sob, and,
+burying her face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears
+in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor
+to speak--wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who
+was left lying stark and still beneath the cedars.
+
+The storm passed. She lay quiet now, all but the sobs that shook her
+whole slight frame. He said, at last, very gently:
+
+'If I had known--you should have told me. He was my best friend.' His
+voice trembled a little. 'I know how I must seem to you. His murderer,
+perhaps; surely the murderer of your happiness.' A deeper quaver in the
+sorrowful tones. 'It is too late now, I know; but if it would help you
+ever so little to be released from your promise--'
+
+There was no reply.
+
+'You are free. I am going now.' He bent over her for a breath, making a
+heart picture of the tired face, the closed eyes, and grieved mouth.
+Only to take her up for a moment, with power to comfort her--he would
+have given his life for that--and turned away with a great, yearning
+pain snatching at his breath. In the hall he paused a moment, trying to
+think. A light step, a frail hand on his arm, a wistful face lifted to
+his.
+
+'Forgive me; I have been very unkind. You are so good and noble. I will
+be your wife, if you will be any happier.'
+
+He looked down at her pityingly. 'You are very tired. Shall you say that
+when you are rested again? Remember, you are free.'
+
+'If not yours, then never any one's.'
+
+His arm fell about her, his lips touched her forehead quietly; he led
+her back to her couch, and arranged her pillow, smiling a little at his
+one awkward hand.
+
+'I shall not see you again before I go back, unless you send for me.'
+
+She put out her hand and touched the bowed face quickly and lightly; and
+with that touch thrilling in his veins he went away.
+
+Through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Charleston siege, Captain
+George, no longer captain, now twice promoted for cool bravery, has
+borne a charmed life--a grave, calm man, remembering always a still
+face, 'pathetic with dying.'
+
+Out from the future is turned toward him another face, no less pathetic
+in its unrest of living. The soldiers in the Capital hospitals, dragging
+through the weary weeks of convalescence, know that face well. For hours
+of every day she goes about busied with such voluntary service as she is
+permitted to do. She sees tired faces brighten at her coming--is
+welcomed by rough and gentle voices. Always patient, ready, thoughtful,
+she is 'spending' herself--waiting for the end.
+
+
+
+
+THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER
+LANGUAGES.
+
+_ARTICLE TWO._
+
+CORRESPONDING FIRST DISCRIMINATIONS IN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE.
+
+
+The purpose of these papers, as announced and partially carried forward
+in the preceding one, is to explain the nature of the NEW SCIENTIFIC
+UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, a component part of the new Science of UNIVERSOLOGY,
+and to exhibit its relation to the Lingual Structures hitherto extant.
+For this purpose we entered upon the necessary preliminary consideration
+of the fundamental question of the Origin of Speech. We found that the
+latest developments of Comparative Philology upon this subject, as
+embodied in Prof. Müller's recent work, 'Lectures on the Science of
+Language,' brought us no farther along to the goal of our investigation
+than Compound Roots--one-, two-, three-, four-, five--(or more) letter
+Roots--some four or five hundred of which are the insoluble residuum
+which the Philologists furnish as the Ultimate Elements of Language. It
+was pointed out that these Roots are not, however, the _Ultimate_
+Elements of Language, any more than Compound Substances are the Prime
+Constituents of Matter; and that, as Chemistry, as a Science, could
+begin its career, only after a knowledge of the veritable Ultimate
+Elements of the Physical Constitution of the Globe was obtained, so a
+_True Science of Language_ must be based upon an understanding of the
+value and meaning of the True Prime or Ultimate Elements of Speech--the
+_Vowels_ and _Consonants_.
+
+It is with the exposition of the nature of these Fundamental
+Constituents of Language, and of their Correspondential Relationship or
+_Analogy_ with the Fundamental Constituents of Thought, the Ultimate
+Rational Conceptions of the Mind, that the New UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE begins
+its developments. Through its agency we may hope to find, therefore, a
+satisfactory solution to the problem of the Origin of Speech, which
+Comparative Philology abandons at the critical point, and so to be able
+to pass to the consideration of the more specific objects of our present
+inquiry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+UNIVERSOLOGY establishes the fact that there is Analogy or Repetition of
+Plan throughout the various Departments of the Universe. It
+demonstrates, in other words, that the same Principles which generate,
+and the same Laws which regulate, the Phenomena of the Universe as a
+whole, fulfil the same functions in connection with the Phenomena of
+every one of its parts. The Mathematical, Psychological, or any other
+specific Domain is, therefore, an expression or embodiment of the same
+System of Principles and Laws, with reference to both Generals and
+Details, which is otherwise exhibited in Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry,
+and elsewhere universally; just as the same Architectural Plan may be
+variously employed in constructions of different size, material, color,
+modes of ornamentation, etc.; and may be modified to suit the
+requirements of each individual construction. To every Elementary Form
+of _Thought_ there is, consequently, a corresponding and related Law of
+_Number_, of _Form_, of _Color_, of _Chemical_ Constitution, and of
+_Oral Sound_ or _Speech_. Every Basic Idea, to state it otherwise,
+pertaining to the Universe at large or to any of its Divisions, has its
+counterpart or double in every other Division. Or, to express it yet
+another way: the manifold, diverse, and unlike Appearances or Phenomena
+which the Universe presents to our understanding, are not _radically_
+and _essentially_ different; but are the same Typal Ideas or Thoughts of
+God or of Nature, arrayed in various garbs, and, hence, assuming varying
+presentations. The Numerical _Unit_, the Geometrical _Point_, the
+Written _Dot_, the _Globule_, the Chemical _Atom_, the Physical
+_Molecule_, the Physiological _Granule_, the _Yod_ or _Iota_, the least
+Element of Sound, are, for example, _Identical Types_, differently
+modified or clothed upon in accordance with the medium through which
+they are to be _phenomenally_ presented. It is with this _Echo_ or
+Repetitory Relationship, existing between all the Domains of the
+Universe, but more particularly as exhibited between the two Domains of
+_Ideas_ and _Language_, that we are at present concerned.
+
+It is sufficiently obvious that Analogy should be sought for first, in
+the _Generals_ of any department under examination, and, subsequently,
+through them, in the _Particulars_. In respect to the two Domains now
+under special consideration, this relation is between the Fundamental
+Elements of Thought, including those called by the Philosophers the
+Categories of the Understanding, and the Fundamental Elements of
+Language. In pointing out the Correspondence subsisting between the
+Elements of these two Domains, I shall use, partly by way of
+condensation, and partly by copious extracts, the Elaborate Expositions
+contained in the yet unpublished text books of Universology. And, as
+what follows relating to this subject will consist, almost wholly, of
+this material, I do not deem it essential to encumber the page with
+numerous and unnecessary quotation marks. It is advisable to caution the
+Reader, however, that as my present purpose is explanation and
+illustration only, and not formal demonstration, what is about to be
+given will be mostly in the nature of mere statement, unaccompanied by
+any other evidence of its truthfulness than may be found in the
+self-supporting reasonableness of the statements themselves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the basic and axiomatic proposition of Hegel's Philosophy, that
+the first discrimination of Thought and Being in any sphere is into two
+factors, a _Something_ and a _Nothing_;--that which constitutes the
+_main_ or _predominant_ element of the Conception or Creation, and that
+which we endeavor to exclude from contemplation or activity, but which,
+nevertheless, by virtue of the impossibility of _perfect_ or _absolute_
+abstraction, inevitably becomes a _minor_ or _subordinate_ element in
+the Idea or the Act which may be engaging the attention. _Something_ and
+_Nothing_ are also averred to be _equal_ factors in the Constitution of
+Thoughts or Things, because both are alike indispensable to the
+cognition of either; because, in other words, it is only by the presence
+of the _Nothing_ as a _background_ or _contrasting_ element, that the
+_Something_ has an independent or cognizable existence. If there were no
+blank space, for instance, there could be no Moon, relatively, or so far
+as our ability to perceive it is concerned. For the Moon is, in this
+illustration, a _Something_ which is visible to us, and of which we have
+a knowledge, only by reason of the fact that it is surrounded by and
+contrasted with that which is _not_ Moon, and which, in reference to the
+particular aspect under consideration is, therefore, a _Nothing_; though
+it in turn may be a _Something_ or main object of attention in some
+other view or conception, where some other factor shall be the Nothing.
+
+That this Relationship of Antithesis and Rank existed, as between the
+Constituents of some Thoughts or Things, was known from the earliest
+times, and gave rise to the terms _Positive_ and _Negative_, expressive
+of it. But Hegel was the first--of modern Philosophers, at least--to
+point out its necessarily _Universal_ and fundamental character, and to
+assume it as the starting-point in the development of all Philosophy and
+Science.
+
+So far as concerns the investigation of the Universe from the
+_Philosophical_ point of view (which is the less precise and definite
+aspect), Hegel is right in affirming that the first discrimination of
+all Thought and Being is that between _Something_ and _Nothing_. But he
+is wrong in regarding the starting-point or first differentiation of
+_Science_, as being identical with that of _Philosophy_. Science
+considers, primarily and predominantly, the more exact and rigorous
+relations of Phenomena; and the existence of an _exact_ and _definite_
+point of departure in Thought and Being, more fundamental, from the
+Scientific or rigorously precise point of view, than that of Hegel, is
+the initiatory proposition of UNIVERSOLOGY.
+
+A full explanation of the nature of this Starting-point is not, however,
+in place here. And as the discrimination into _Something_ and _Nothing_
+serves all the purposes of our present inquiry, a single word respecting
+the character of the Universological Point of Departure in question is
+all that it is now necessary to say concerning it.
+
+This Starting-point of Thought and Action has reference to the Ideas of
+_Oneness_ (Primitive Unity) and _Twoness_ (Plurality). These conceptions
+give rise to _two_ Primordial Principles, which form the basis of the
+development of UNIVERSOLOGY, and which are fundamental in every
+Department of the Universe and in the Universe as a whole, namely: _The
+Principle of Unism_ (from the Latin _unus_, _one_), the _Spirit_ of the
+Number _One_, the Principle of _Undifferentiated_, _Unanalyzed_,
+_Agglomerative_ Unity; and _The Principle of_ DUISM (from the Latin
+_duo_, _two_), the _Spirit_ of the Number _Two_, the Principle of
+_Differentiation_, _Analysis_, _Separation_, _Apartness_, or
+_Plurality_, typically embodied in _Two_, the first division of the
+Primitive Unity, and especially representative of the Principle of
+Disunity, the essence of all division or plurality. _One_, in the Domain
+of _Number_, and UNISM, in the Department of Primordial Principles,
+correspond, it must be added, with _The Absolute_ (the Undifferentiated
+and Unconditioned), as one of the Aspects of Being; while _Two_, in the
+Domain of _Number_, and _Duism_, among Primordial Principles, are allied
+with _The Relative_ (the Differentiated and Conditioned), of which
+latter Domain _Something_ and _Nothing_ are the two Prime Factors. The
+distinction between _One_ and _Two_, or their analogous Aspects of
+Being, _Absolute_ and _Relative_, is, therefore, prior to that between
+_Something_ and _Nothing_, because _Something_ and _Nothing_ are two
+terms of _The Relative_ (_Two_), which has first to be itself
+discriminated from _The Absolute_ (_One_) before it can be sub-divided
+into these two factors.
+
+While the nature of this discrimination into _Something_ and _Nothing_
+may be sufficiently intelligible to the student of Metaphysics, it may
+not be so to the Reader unaccustomed to Philosophical Speculation. For
+the purpose, therefore, of rendering it somewhat clearer, I will point
+out the manner in which it exhibits itself in respect to the
+Constitution of the External World and elsewise.
+
+The Totality of all material objects and substances is the _Positive_
+Material Universe. This is contained in _Space_, which is the _Negative_
+Material Universe. Compoundly the two, _Matter_ and _Space_, are the
+whole Material Universe, as to the Parts or Constituent Factors of which
+it consists.
+
+Theoretically, and in one, and by no means an unimportant sense, the
+_Zero_-Element or _Nothing_-side of the Universe or of a given
+Department of Being, is one whole half, or an equal hemisphere of the
+Totality of Being. Thus, for example, _Zero_ (0) in the usage of the
+Arabic Numbers, while it is represented in an obscure way merely by a
+single figure below the nine digits, yet stands over, in a sense,
+against all the digits, and all their possible combinations, as equal to
+them all in importance. For it is by means of this _Zero_ (0) that the
+One (1) for instance, becomes 10, 100, 1000, etc.; and that all the
+_Positive_ Numbers acquire their relative values, according to the
+places or positions in space which they occupy.
+
+In another sense, however, the Negative Ground of Being, in the Universe
+at large, or in any given Domain, quickly sinks out of view, and
+Positive Being becomes the whole of what is commonly regarded. It is in
+this sense that, ordinarily, in speaking of The Digits of Number, the
+_Zero_ is left out of the count.
+
+In the same manner, when speaking or thinking of the Material Universe,
+while the notion of _Space_ is ever present, and is, in the absolute
+sense, an equal half of the whole conception, still it is Matter, the
+total congeries of objects and substances in Space, of which we mainly
+think; the Space, as such, being understood and implied, but
+subordinated as a mere _negative_ adjunct of the _positive_ idea.
+
+In strictness, _Matter_ and _Space_ are so mutually dependent on each
+other, that either without the other is an impossible conception. The
+notion of Space permeates that of Matter; passing through it, so to
+speak, as well as surrounding it; so that it needs no proof that Matter
+cannot be conceived of as existing without Space. But, on the other
+hand, Space is only the negation of Matter; the shadow, as it were, cast
+by Matter; and, so, dependent on Matter for the very origin of the idea
+in the mind.
+
+If _Space_, therefore, be the analogue of _Nothing_; _Matter_, wholly
+apart from Space, is only a _theoretical_ Something, really and actually
+as much a Nothing as Space itself, when abstractly considered in its
+equally impossible separation from Matter. But Matter, completely
+separated from Space, is the exact external analogue of the _Something_
+opposed to the _Nothing_ of abstract Metaphysical Thinking. Here, then,
+is a lucid exposition, by virtue of these analogies, of the famous
+Metaphysical Axiom of Hegel, which, at its announcement, threw all
+Europe into amazement:
+
+  _Something_ = (_equal to_) _Nothing_.
+
+It is the logic of this statement that all _Reality_ or Relative Being
+is a product of two factors, each of which is a _Nothing_. The
+strangeness of this proposition will disappear when it is recognized
+that these two Nothings are mere aspects or sides of presentation of the
+Product, which is itself the only Reality. In respect to the _Real
+Being_, those two sides are _Nothings_. But, as appearances or ideal
+views of the Reality under the process of analytical abstraction in the
+mind, they are so far _Somethings_ as to receive names and to be treated
+of and considered as _if_ they were _Realities_. _Reality_ in the
+_Absolute_ aspect, the aspect of _Undifferentiated Unity_, (Unismal),
+contains these two factors interblended and undiscriminated. In the
+_Relative_ aspect, that of _Duality_, (Duismal), it is the compound of
+these two factors separated and distinguished. Finally, in the
+_Integral_ aspect of _Compound Unity_ (Trinismal), it consists of the
+_Unismal_ and the _Duismal_ aspects contrasted--the only _real_ state,
+or possible condition of actual existence. _And this is the Type of all
+Reality or Real Existence in every department of Being in the Universe._
+
+But practically and ordinarily, these strictly analytical views of the
+question of existence are abandoned. Reality, compounded, as we have
+seen that it is when viewed in this way, of a Positive and a Negative
+Factor, is assumed as itself a Simple Element and set over against the
+grand residuum of Negation in the Universe of Being. This is what Kant,
+less analytical than Hegel, has done, when, in distributing the
+Categories of Thought, he has contrasted REALITY with NEGATION.
+
+This is, as if, in respect to the External Material World, we were to
+divide Matter--the Planets, for example, first assigning to them the
+portions of Space which they bodily and respectively fill as if it were
+a part of themselves--from the remaining ocean or grand residuum of
+Space which surrounds them and in which they float. This residuum of
+Space would then be spoken of as _Space_, and the Planetary Bodies,
+_along with and including the spaces which they fill_, would be spoken
+of as _Matter_. This is a kind of division, less analytical, but more
+convenient, obvious, and practical, than the other which would attempt
+to separate the whole of Space from the Matter within Space. It is in
+this more practical manner that we _ordinarily_ think of the division of
+the Heavens into the Domains of _Matter_ and _Space_.
+
+Between _Reality_, then, including a subordinate portion of Space--the
+content and volume of the Planet--and the grand ocean of Space, outlying
+and surrounding the Planet, there is _Limitation_, the outline of the
+Planet, the _Limit_ or dividing surface between the space within it and
+the space without.
+
+It is this Congeries of the Aspects of Being which Kant denominates
+QUALITY, as a name of a Group of the Categories of the Understanding;
+and which he divides into
+
+  1. REALITY.
+  2. NEGATION.
+  3. LIMITATION.
+
+He then treats REALITY as synonymous with the _Affirmative_ (Positive),
+and NEGATION as synonymous with the _Negative_; although, as we have
+seen, this Affirmative is not strictly equivalent to the _Something_ of
+Hegel, nor this Negative to his _Nothing_. For _Reality_ we may, in a
+general sense, put _Substance_, and for _Limitation_ we may put _Form_,
+Omitting Negation which repeats the _Nothing_, as Reality repeats the
+_Something_, it may now be said that the next Grand Division of the
+Elements of Universal Being (after that into Something and Nothing) is
+into
+
+  1. SUBSTANCE. )
+                            = 3. EXISTENCE.
+  2. FORM.      )
+
+That is to say: _The Relative_ (The Domain of Cognizable Being) is first
+made known to us through the _differentiation_ and _discrimination_ of
+the two Factors _Something_ and _Nothing_ which lie _undifferentiated_
+and _indistinguishable_ in _The Absolute_ (The Primitive Ground of
+Being). _The Relative_ then subdivides into 1. _Substance_ (Reality),
+and, 2. _Form_ (Limitation), which reunite to constitute that actualized
+Being which we denominate _Existence_. Or, tabulated, thus:
+
+  THE ABSOLUTE (THE PRIMITIVE
+  GROUND OF BEING)
+  CONTAINS UNDIFFERENTIATED AND INDISTINGUISHABLE
+  THE TWO FACTORS
+  SOMETHING and NOTHING
+  WHICH CONSTITUTE THE FIRST TERMS
+  AND DISCRIMINATIONS OF
+  THE RELATIVE (THE DOMAIN OF
+  COGNIZABLE BEING);
+  WHICH ITSELF DIVIDES INTO
+  SUBSTANCE (REALITY) and FORM
+  (LIMITATION),
+  THE PRIME CONSTITUENTS OF
+  EXISTENCE.
+
+To comprehend the vast importance of these discriminations, it is
+necessary to understand that precisely those Principles of Distribution
+which are applicable to the Universe at large are found to be applicable
+to every minor sphere or domain of the Universe; in the same manner as
+the same Geometrical Laws which prevail in the largest circle prevail
+equally in the smallest. It is the prevalence of _Identical Principles_
+in _diverse spheres_ which is the source of that Universal Analogy
+throughout _all_ spheres that lies at the basis of UNIVERSOLOGY, and
+gives the possibility of such a Science. The nature of this Analogy, as
+well as the value of the discriminations themselves, will be more
+clearly seen by glancing at corresponding discriminations in other
+spheres.
+
+In the Constitution of the External World, _Something_ is represented,
+as we have seen, by the solid and tangible substance which we call
+_Matter_, and _Nothing_ by the Expanse of Space.
+
+In the Science of Acoustics, _Sound_, the pure _Phonos_, is the
+_Something_, the _Reality_, as it is denominated by Kant, the _Positive_
+Factor of Speech. _Silence_ is the relative _Nothing_, the Negation, so
+called by Kant, the _Negative_ Factor of Speech. The Silences, or
+Intervals of Rest which intervene between Sounds (and also between
+Syllables, Words, Sentences, and still larger divisions of Speech), are
+only so many successive reappearances of this _negative_ element.
+Silence, the Nothing of Sound, is, in fact, in the most radical aspect
+of the subject, one entire half or hemisphere or equal Factor of the
+whole of Speech or Music. Josiah Warren, the author of a work entitled
+'Music as an Exact Science,' is the only writer I have noticed who has
+had the discrimination _distinctively_ to recognize Silence as one of
+the Elements of the Musical Structure.
+
+_Impliedly_ it is, however, always so recognized. The Silences
+intervening between tones _tunewise_, or in respect to altitude, are, in
+Musical Nomenclature, denominated _Intervals_. _Timewise_ Silences, or
+those which intervene between Tones rhythmically considered, are called
+_Rests_. The Intervals of Silence between Syllables and Words, in Oral
+Speech, are represented in the printed book by what the Printer calls
+_Spaces_, which are _blank_ or _negative_ Types interposed between the
+positive Types expressive of Sounds. This term _Space_ or _Spaces_
+carries us to the analogous Total Space or Blank Space and intervening
+reaches of Space between the Planets, Orbs or Material Worlds, the
+former the corresponding _Nothing_ of the total Material Universe of
+which these worlds are the _Something_; as exhibited in the
+demonstrations of UNIVERSOLOGY.
+
+In the Domain of Optics, covering the Phenomena of Light, Shade and
+Color, _Light_ is the _Positive_ Factor or _Something_, and _Darkness_
+the _Negative_ Factor or _Nothing_. _Light_ is, therefore, the analogue
+of _Sound_, and _Darkness_ the analogue of _Silence_. That is to say,
+each of these two, Silence and Darkness, denote the absence, the lack,
+the want or the negation of the opposite and _Positive_ Element or
+Factor.
+
+So in Thermotics, the Science of Heat, _Heat_ itself is the
+_Positismus_ or _Something_ of the Domain; and _Cold_ the _Negatismus_
+or Correlative _Nothing_. _Heat_ is, consequently, the analogue of
+_Sound_ and _Light_; while _Cold_ is the analogue of _Silence_ and
+_Darkness_.
+
+In respect to the Domain of Mind, _Positive Mental Experience_
+(Feelings, Thoughts, and Volitions, including self-consciousness) are
+the _Positive_ Factor, the _Something_ of Mentality. _Inexperience_, the
+lack of mental exercitation, hence _Ignorance_, is the _Negative_
+Factor, or _Nothing_. The Correspondential Relationship or Analogy
+existing between this Domain of the Universe and others already
+mentioned is testified to in a remarkable manner by our use of Language.
+We denominate the want of Feeling _Cold_ or _Frigidity_--in respect to
+the Mind or the individual character. The absence of Thought and
+Knowledge, or, in other words, Intellectual Barrenness, is called
+_Darkness_ or _Obscurity_ of the Mind. While the lack of Will or Purpose
+in the Mind is said to be the absence of _Tension_ or _Strain_ (the
+great Musical term); and the Stillness or quiet hence resulting may be
+appropriately designated as the _Silence_ of the Mind; Musical Silences
+being, as pointed out above, technically termed Rests.
+
+With this superficial exhibition of the most radical aspect of the _Echo
+of Idea_ or _Repetition of Type_ which subsists between all the
+departments of the Universe, I pass to the more specific consideration
+of this Analogy as concerning the Domain of Thought and the Domain of
+Language.
+
+Setting aside from our present consideration _Silence_, the _Negative_
+factor or _Negatismus_ of Language, and fixing our attention upon
+_Sound_, the Positive factor or _Positismus_ of Language, we discover it
+to be composed of two constituents, _Vowels_ and _Consonants_.
+
+The _Vowel_ is the _Substance_, the Reality of Language, and the
+_Consonant_ is the _Form_, the Limitation.
+
+By _Vowel_ sound is meant the free or unobstructed, and as such
+unlimited flow of the vocalized or sounding breath. Vowels are defined
+in the simplest way as those sounds which are uttered with the month
+open; as _a_ (ah) in F_a_ther, _o_ in r_o_ll, etc.
+
+Consonants are, on the contrary, those sounds which are produced by the
+crack of commencing or by obstructing, breaking, or cutting off the
+sounding breath, by completely or partially closing the organs of
+speech; as, for instance, by closing the lips, as when we pronounce
+_p_ie, _b_y, _m_y, etc.; or by pressing the point of the tongue against
+the gums and teeth, as when we say t_ie_, d_ie_, etc.; or by lifting the
+body of the tongue against the hard palate or roof of the mouth, as when
+we give the _k_ or hard _g_ sound, as in rac_k_, ra_g_, or in any other
+similar way.
+
+Consonants are, therefore, the breaks or _limitations_ upon the
+otherwise unbroken and continuous vocality, voice, or vocalized breath.
+In other words, as already said, _Vowel_-Sound is the Elemental
+_Substance_, and _Consonant_-Sound the Elemental _Form_ of Language, or
+Speech. (By Vowels and Consonants are here meant, the Reader should
+closely observe, Vowel-_Sounds_ and Consonant-_Sounds_, as produced by
+the _Organs_ of _Speech_, and as they address themselves to the _Ear_,
+distinguished and wholly apart from the _letters_ or combinations of
+letters by which they are diversely represented to the _Eye_ in
+different languages.)
+
+By a valid but somewhat remote analogy, the _Vowel_-Sounds of Language
+may be regarded collectively as the _Flesh_, and the _Consonant_-Sounds
+as the _Bone_ or _Skeleton_ of the Lingual Structure. Flesh is an
+_Analogue_ or Correspondential Equivalent of Substance. Bone or
+Skeleton, which gives _outline_ or _shape_ to the otherwise soft,
+collapsing, and lumpy flesh-mass of the Human or Animal Body, is an
+_Analogue_ of Correspondential Equivalent of Limitation or Form; as the
+framework of a house is the shaping or form-giving factor or agent of
+the entire structure.
+
+_Vowel_-Sounds are soft, fluent, changeful, and evanescent. One passes
+easily into another by slight deviations of pronunciation, resulting
+from trivial differences in National and Individual condition and
+culture; like the Flesh of the animal, which readily decays from the
+Bony Skeleton, while the last remains preserved for ages as a fossil.
+The Vowel-Sounds so readily lose their identity, that they are of slight
+importance to the Etymologist or Comparative Philologist, who is, in
+fact, dealing in the _Paleontology_ of Language.
+
+The _Consonants_ are, on the contrary, the _Fossils_ of Speech; bony and
+permanent representatives of Framework, of _Limitation_, of Form.
+Consonant-Sounds are also sometimes denominated _Articulations_. This
+word means _joinings_ or _jointings_. It is from the Latin _articulus_,
+a JOINT, and is instinctually applied to the Consonant-Sounds in
+accordance with their analogy with the _Skeleton_ of the Human or Animal
+System.
+
+By an easy and habitual slide in the meaning of Words, a term like
+_Joint_ is sometimes used to denote the _break_ or _opening_ between
+parts, and sometimes to denote one of the parts intervening between such
+breaks; as when we speak of a _joint_ of meat, meaning thereby what a
+Botanist would signify by the term _Internode_, the stretch or reach or
+shaft of bone extending from one joint (break) to another, with the meat
+attached to it.
+
+Consonants have, in like manner, a double aspect as Articulations or
+_Joints_. In a rigorous and abstract sense, the Consonant has no sound
+of its own. It is simply a break or interruption of Sound.
+Etymologically, it is from the Latin _con_, WITH, and _sonans_,
+SOUNDING; as if it were a mere accessory to a (vowel) Sound; the Vowels
+being, in that sense, the only sounds. In this sense, the Consonants are
+analogous with the mere cracks or opening _joints_, which intervene
+between the bones of the Skeleton. In other words, they are no sounds,
+but mere nothings; the analogy, in that case, of _Abstract_ Limitation.
+
+Practically, on the contrary, the Consonant takes to itself such a
+portion of the vocalized or sounding breath which it serves primarily to
+limit, that it becomes not merely a sound ranking with the Vowel; but
+the more prominent and abiding sound of the two. It is in this latter
+sense, that it is the Analogue of the Bone.
+
+In Phonography, as in Hebrew and some other Languages, the letters
+representing the Consonant-Sounds only are written or printed; the
+Vowel-Sounds being either represented by mere points added to the
+Consonant characters, or left wholly unrepresented, to be supplied by
+the intelligence of the Reader. The written words so constructed,
+represent the real words with about the degree of accuracy with which a
+skeleton represents the living man; so that the meaning can be readily
+gathered by the practised reader, by the aid of the context. In
+Phonography, the Consonant-Sounds, which are simple straight or curved
+lines, are joined together at their ends, forming an outline shape,
+somewhat like a single script (written) letter of our ordinary writing.
+These outline words are then instinctually and technically called
+_Skeleton-words_, from the natural perception of a genuine Scientific
+Analogy.
+
+Consonants constitute, then, what may be denominated the _Limitismus_
+(Limiting Domain) of Language. The Limit is primarily represented by the
+Line (a line, any line); then by the Line embodying Substance as _seam_,
+_ridge_, _bar_, _beam_, _shaft_, _or bone_; and, finally, by a System of
+Lines, Shafts or Bones which may then be jointed or limited in turn
+among themselves, forming a concatenation of Lines, Bars or Shafts, the
+framework of a machine or house or other edifice, or the ideal columnar
+and orbital structure of the Universe itself. All these conceptions or
+creations belong to the practical Limitismus, the Form Aspect or
+Framework of Being in Universals and in Particulars in every Sphere and
+Department of the Universe.
+
+The _Limitismus_ of Being so defined then stands over against or
+contrasted with the _Substancismus_ (Substance-Domain) of Being which
+embraces the Substances, Materials or Stuffs of creation of whatsoever
+name that infill the interstices of the Framework or are laid upon it,
+and constitute the richness and fulness and plumpness of the Structure,
+as the Flesh does of the Body.
+
+The wholeness or _Integrality_ of the structure then consists of the
+composity of these Two (Limitismus and Substancismus), as the wholeness
+of the Body consists of the Flesh and the Bone. The Consonants being the
+Limitismus, and the Vowels the Substancismus of Language; the Two united
+and coordinated comprise the Trinismal Integrality or Integralismus of
+Speech.
+
+The Vowels denote, then, _Reality_, as distinguished from _Limitation_,
+or, what is nearly the same thing, _Substance_, as distinguished from
+_Form_.
+
+There are in all _Seven_ (7); or if we include one somewhat more obscure
+than the rest, a kind of semi-tone, there are _Eight_ (8) full-toned,
+perfectly distinct and primary Vowel-Sounds, which constitute the
+Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Alphabet. Their number and
+nature is governed by the Mechanical Law of their organic production in
+the mouth. And the number can only be increased by interposing minor
+shades of sound, as we produce minor shades of color by blending the
+Seven (7) Prismatic Colors. The new Sound will then belong, in
+predominance and as a mere variety, to one of these Seven (7) Primary
+Sounds.
+
+These Seven (7) Sounds constitute the Leading Vowel-System of all
+Languages; with certain irregularities of omission in the Vowel-System
+of some Languages.
+
+By the addition of Five (5) equally leading _Diphthongs_ (or Double
+Vowels) the number of leading Vowel representations is carried up to
+Twelve (12) or Thirteen (13)--which may then be regarded as the
+Completed Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Lingual Alphabet.
+
+_There are, in like manner, Seven (7)--or Eight (8)--Leading Realities
+of the Universe_, AND OF EVERY MINOR SPHERE OR DOMAIN OF BEING IN THE
+UNIVERSE, _which correspond with, echo or repeat, and are therefore the
+Scientific Analogues of, these Seven (7) Leading Vowel-Sounds, as they
+occur among the Elements of Speech_.
+
+In representing the Vowel-Sounds, it is better, for numerous reasons, to
+use the letters with their general _European_ Values, than it is to
+conform to their altered or corrupted _English_ Values. For instance,
+the Vowel I (i) is pronounced in nearly every language of Europe, and in
+all those languages which the Missionaries have reduced to writing, as
+we pronounce _e_ or _ee_, or as _i_ in mach_i_ne, or p_i_que; E (e) is
+pronounced as we enunciate _a_ in paper; and A is reserved for the full
+Italian sound of _a_ (_ah_), as in father; _U_ is pronounced like _oo_,
+as in German, Spanish, Italian and many other languages.
+
+The Seven (7) Vowels in question are then as follows:
+
+  1. I, i (_ee_ in f_ee_l).
+  2. E, e (_a_ in m_a_te).
+  3. A, a (_a_ in f_a_-ther).
+  4. _o_, _o_ (_aw_ in _aw_ful).
+  5. _u_, _u_ (_u_ in c_u_rd).
+  6. O, o (_o_ in n_o_-ble).
+  7. U, u (_oo_ in f_oo_l).
+
+These sounds are produced in the middle, at the back, and at the front
+of the mouth respectively. These localities, and something of the nature
+of the sounds themselves, as _slender_ or _full_, will be plainly
+illustrated by the annexed figure:
+
+  3. Front-   1. Middle-     2. Back-
+     Mouth       Mouth          Mouth
+
+
+      ou           i         e (^a) a; _o_ _u_
+
+The following description of the organic formation or production of
+these sounds now becomes important.
+
+The Vowel-Sound I (ee) is the most slender and condensed of the
+Vowel-Scale. It is produced at the middle or central part of the mouth,
+by forcing a slight, closely-squeezed current of Sounding Breath,
+through a small, smooth channel or opening made by forming _a gutter or
+scoop of the flattened point of the tongue_; while, at the same time,
+the tongue is applied at the edges to the teeth and gums. This sound
+has, therefore, an actual _form_ resembling that of a thread or line; or
+still better, like that of a wire drawn through one of the iron openings
+by means of which wire is manufactured. It resembles also a slight,
+smooth, roundish stream of fluid escaping through a tube or trough.
+
+This sound has relation, therefore, in the first place, to _Centrality_
+or CENTRE; and then to LENGTH (or Line), which is the First Dimension of
+Extension. The I-sound continued or prolonged gives the idea of Length.
+But broken into Least Units of the same quality of Sound, we have
+individualized Vowel-Sounds of this quality, each one of which is a new
+_Centre_; like the successive _Points_ of which a _Line_ is composed.
+
+An individual sound, I, has relation, therefore, to _Centre_ and to
+_Point_ generally. As such it stands representatively for the _Soul_ or
+_Identity_ or _Central Individuality of Being_--for that which gives to
+anything its distinctive character, as existing in the _Point_ or the
+_Unit_, or the _Atom_, or in any Individual Object or Thing from the
+Atom up to a World and to the Universe as a whole. _Identity_ is,
+perhaps, the best single term furnished by our Language to signify this
+basic idea. _Individuality_ approximates the meaning. It is the
+_pivotal_ notion of Being itself, and has relation, therefore, to
+Ontology, the Science of Abstract Being. _Essence_ and _Essential Being_
+are terms which may also be used in defining it. The Reader should
+understand, however, that with reference to this Sound, as to those to
+be hereafter considered, there is no term or terms in any Language which
+will indicate their meaning _exactly_. The analysis of Ideas upon which
+UNIVERSOLOGY is based is more fundamental than any which has preceded
+it. Its Primary Conceptions are, therefore, broader and more inclusive
+than any former ones which existing terms are employed to denote. In
+explaining the meaning of these First Elements of Sound, then, as
+related to the First Elements of Thought, all that is now attempted is
+to convey as clear a notion of this meaning as is possible with our
+present terminology, without any expectation that the _precise_ meaning
+intended will be at once or entirely apprehended.
+
+The sound E (_a_ in m_a_te) is likewise a slender, abstract-like,
+middle-mouth sound; but differs from I in the fact that it is produced
+by _flattening_ the opening for the Sounding Breath instead of retaining
+it in a roundish position. The angles of the mouth are drawn asunder, as
+if pointing outward to the sides of the head, and the sound is, as it
+were, _elongated in the crosswise direction_, as if a stick or a quill
+were held in the teeth, the extremities extending outward to the sides.
+A line, in this direction, is the measurer of BREADTH, which is the
+Second Dimension of Extension, crossing the Length-line represented by I
+at right angles. _Side-wise-ness_ is synonymous with RELATION, as one of
+the Sub-divisions of Reality, or, in other words, of the Realities of
+Being. _Re-lation_ is, etymologically, from the Latin _re_, BACK or
+REFLECTED, and _latus_, SIDE; that which mutually and reciprocally
+re-sides the _Centre_, or furnishes it with sides or _wings_. The
+Vowel-Sound E (_a_, in m_a_te) is, therefore, the Analogue or
+Corresponding Representative or Equivalent in the Domain of Sound of
+that _Fundamental Conception_ which, in respect to Thought, is
+denominated _Relation_, in respect to Position _Collaterality_ or
+_Sideness_, and in respect to Dimension _Breadth_ or _Width_.
+
+The Sound A (_a_ in f_a_ther) is made farther back in the mouth, with
+the mouth stretched quite open, and is the richest and most harmonious
+of the Vowel Sounds--the Queen of the Vowels. It is the Italian A, the
+sound most allied with Music and Euphony, and yet a sound which is
+greatly lacking in the English Language.
+
+The English Reader must guard himself from confounding the Vowel-Sound
+of which we are here speaking, with the Consonant R, the alphabetical
+name of which is by a lax habit of pronunciation made to be nearly
+identical with this Vowel-Sound; while for this beautiful and brilliant
+and leading Vowel in the Alphabet of Nature we have no distinct letter
+in English, and reckon it merely as one of the values or powers of the
+Letter A, to which we ordinarily give the value of E (_a_ in m_a_te,
+_ai_ in p_ai_n).
+
+This Vowel A (_ah_, _a_ in f_a_ther) is made with the mouth so open that
+the form of its production suggests the insertion of a stick or other
+elongated object in a perpendicular direction to retain the jaws in
+their position; a practice said sometimes to be resorted to by the
+Italian Music Teacher, in order to correct the bad habit of talking
+through the teeth, common among his English pupils.
+
+This height and depth involved in the Sound of the Vowel A (ah) relates
+it to THICKNESS, the Third Dimension of Extension; as the Sound I is
+related to _Length_, the First of these Dimensions, and the Sound E to
+_Breadth_, the Second of them.
+
+_Thickness_ is again related to _richness_ and _sweetness_, to _fulness_
+and _fatness_, as of the good condition of an Animal in flesh, or of
+rich and productive soils. And these ideas are again related to _wealth_
+or to _riches_ generally; and, hence, again to SUBSTANCE. The objects of
+wealth are called _goods_, and a wealthy man is said to be a '_man of
+substance_.' A (ah) is the representative or pivotal Vowel; that one
+which embodies most completely the _Vowel Idea_. Its inherent meaning is
+especially, therefore, that of SUBSTANCE or REALITY, which, is, in a
+more general way, as we have seen, the meaning of all the Vowels. The
+most real, tangible, sensible substance from an ordinary point of view
+being. Matter, this Vowel-Sound allies itself also with _Matter_ or
+_Materiality_ as contrasted with _Spiritual_ Substance.
+
+There is, it must now be observed, a flattened variety of A (ah), which
+will here be represented by the same letter italicized, thus, _A_, _a_,
+which is the so-called flat sound of A (ah) as when heard prolonged in
+m_a_re, pe_a_r, etc., or when stopped, in m_a_n, m_a_t, etc. This sound
+is intermediate in position between E and A (ah). That is to say, it is
+produced farther back in the mouth and with the mouth somewhat more open
+than when we say E, and not so far back as when we say A (ah); and with
+the mouth less open. As contrasted with the A (ah), it is a thin, flat,
+and slightly unsatisfactory and disagreeable sound, analogically related
+to the natural semitone _fa_ of the Diatonic Scale of Musical Tones.
+This Sound signifies accordingly, THINNESS, ATTENUATED MATTER, the Ghost
+or Spirit of Nature, related to Odic Force, Magnetisms, Electricity,
+etc.; still not, however, Spirit in the sense of Mind, or in the
+Religio-Spiritual sense of the word. This is the exceptional or bastard
+Vowel-Sound which has but an imperfect or half claim to be inserted in
+the Leading Vowel Scale. When inserted, its natural position is between
+the E and the A (ah), although for certain reasons it sometimes changes
+position with the A (ah), following instead of preceding it.
+
+The next two Vowel-Sounds, _o_ (_aw_ in _aw_ful), and _u_ (_u_ in
+c_u_rd), are somewhat like the _a_ (_a_ in m_a_re), exceptional or
+bastard Sounds. They are unheard in many Languages, and unrecognized as
+distinct sounds in many Languages where they are, in fact, heard. Very
+few Languages have distinct Letter-Signs for them. In using the Roman
+Alphabet, I am compelled to adopt a contrivance to represent them; which
+is, as in the case of the _a_, to print them in italic types, for which,
+when the remainder of the word is in italic, small capitals are
+substituted, thus: _O_ful (awful); _U_rgent; or, in case the whole word
+is intended to be italicized, for the sake of emphasis, O_ful_,
+U_rgent_. In script or handwriting, the italic Letter is marked by
+underscoring a single line, and the small capital by underscoring two
+lines.
+
+_O_ (aw) is the fullest of the Vowel-Sounds. It is made with the mouth
+still farther open than when we say A (ah), and somewhat farther back;
+or, rather, with the cavity enlarged in all directions, and especially
+deepened. The mouth is stretched in all ways to its utmost capacity,
+giving a hollow, vacant effect to the voice, instead of the rich, mellow
+and substantial sound of the A (ah). The Sound so produced is,
+nevertheless, on the one hand, a broader quality of the A (ah), and
+there is a strong tendency on the part of the A (ah) to degenerate into
+it, as when the uneducated German, says _Yaw_ for _Ja_ (yah). On the
+other hand, this sound has something of the quality of O. It is,
+therefore, intermediate in quality between A (ah) and O. In respect to
+meaning, it is the Type, Analogue, Equivalent, or Representative of
+Volume or SPACE, whether filled or unfilled by Substance. That is to
+say, it is the Analogue of Space, not in the sense in which we formerly
+regarded Space as the _negation_ of Matter; but in the sense of
+_Infinite Dimensionality_, or of Dimensionality in all directions, as a
+vague generalization from the three special dimensions _Length_,
+_Breadth_, and _Thickness_. It is, therefore, round or ball-like, and
+huge, and, in respect to the nature of the tone, vague and vacant.
+
+Space _as mere nothing_ has no Letter-Sign in the Alphabet; but is
+represented by the blank types or spaces used by the printer to separate
+his syllables and words, as shown heretofore. Space _as a Department of
+Reality_, as one of the _Realities_ of the Universe, a bastard or
+semi-Reality it is true, but nevertheless, belonging to that Domain, is
+denoted by the Vowel-Sound _o_ (aw).
+
+The Sound _u_ (uh, _u_ in c_u_rd), the fifth of the Scale, is called
+among Phoneticians, the _Natural_ Vowel. It is the simple, unmodulated
+or unformed vocal breath permitted to flow forth from the throat or
+larynx with no effort to produce any specific sound. It is the mere
+grunt, a little prolonged; the unwrought material out of which the other
+and more perfect Vowel Sounds are made by modulation, or, in other
+words, by the shapings and strains put upon the machinery of utterance.
+The Hebrew _scheva_, the French _eu_, and _e_ mute, are varieties of
+this easily-flowing, unmodulated, unstable, unsatisfactory sound. Like
+the _o_ (aw), this sound _u_ (uh) has a vacant, unfinished, and
+inorganic character as a sound, while yet, from its great fluency, its
+frequent occurrence tends, more than that of any other sound, to give to
+Language that conversational fluency, rapidity and ease which are
+especially characteristic of the French Tongue. From this same easy
+laxity of its nature all the other Vowel Sounds tend, in English
+particularly, when they are not accented, to fall back into this Natural
+Vowel; as in the following instances: Rom_a_n, brok_e_n, m_i_rth,
+mart_y_r, Bost_o_n, c_u_rd, etc.; words which we pronounce nearly
+Rom_u_n, brok_u_n, m_u_rth, mart_u_r, Bost_u_n, c_u_rd, etc.
+
+This Sound, as to inherent meaning, is, by its alliance with the idea of
+flux, flow and continuity, the Type, Analogue, Equivalent or
+Representative in the Domain of Oral Sound of that _Fundamental
+Conception_ which, in respect to Idea, we denominate TIME; and of
+Stream-like or _Currental_ Being of all kinds.
+
+_Space_, denoted by _o_ (aw), has relation to the Air as an atmosphere,
+and to the Ocean of Ether in filling the Great Spheral Dome of Empyrean
+or Firmament. The Vowel-Sound _u_ (uh) has a similar relation to
+Fluidity or Liquidity, and, hence, to Water as a typical fluid, to the
+Ocean Flux or Tide, to the Flowing Stream, etc. This Time-like idea is
+uni-dimensional or elongate in a _general_ or _fluctuating_ sense; not
+_specifically_ like I. It is in view of this characteristic, that it is
+broadly and primarily contrasted with the Spacic significance of _o_
+(aw), which is omnidimensional.
+
+The two remaining Vowel-Sounds, the O and U (oo), repeat the _o_ (aw)
+and _u_ (uh), in a sense, but in a new and more refined stage or degree
+of development. The sound O is made at the front mouth--the locality the
+most openly in sight of any at which Sound is produced--by rounding the
+lips into an irregularly-circular, face-like, or disk-like presentation.
+The O Sound so produced denotes Presence, as of an object by virtue of
+its reflection of Light; and, hence, LIGHT, _Clearness_, _Purity_,
+_Reflection_.
+
+The U (_oo_ in f_oo_l) is an obscured or impure pronunciation of the O.
+The lips are protruded as if to say O; but not being sufficiently so for
+the production of the pure Sound, the Sound actually given is mixed, or
+made turbid or thick. The U-Sound denotes accordingly _Retiracy_,
+_Obscurity_, _Shade_, _Turbidity_, _Mixedness_, or _Impurity_, as of
+Colors in a dim light, or as of Materials in a slime or plasma, etc.
+
+Metaphysically, O denotes PURE THEORY, the _Abstract_; and U (oo)
+signifies the ACTUAL or PRACTICAL, the Tempic, the Concrete (the
+Temporal or Profane), which is always mixed with contingency.
+
+Other Vowel-Sounds, shades more or less distinct of some one of these
+Leading Sounds, are interspersed by nature between these _diatonic_
+Sounds, like the half tones and quarter tones in Music. Two of these
+French _eu_ and _e muet_ modifications of _u_ (uh) have been mentioned.
+_Eu_ is modulated at the lips, and _e muet_ at the middle mouth, but
+both have the general character of _u_ (uh). The French U is a
+modification of the U (oo), of the Scale just given, but made finer, and
+approximating I (ee). The Italian O is a modification of _o_ (aw). These
+four are the Leading Semi-tone Sounds; which along with _a_ carry the
+Scale from Seven (7) diatonic up to twelve (12) chromatic. As they will
+be passed over for the present with this mere mention, the points of the
+Scale at which they intervene will not be now considered.
+
+Discarding these minor shades of Sounds, the Leading Scale of
+Vowel-Sounds is augmented from Seven (7) or Eight (8) to Twelve (12) or
+Thirteen (13), by the addition of the following five (5) Diphthongs or
+Double Vowels. In respect to the _quality_ of Sound, they are pronounced
+just as the Vowels of which they are composed would be if separated and
+succeeding each other. To make the Diphthong _long_, the two Sounds are
+kept quite distinct. To make it _short_, they are closely blended; as,
+AU (ah-oo), long; A[)U] (ahoo), short. With no diacretical mark they are
+pronounced _ad libidum_, or neither very long nor short.
+
+The following are the five (5) Diphthongs which complete the Vowel
+Scale:
+
+The IU is composed of the first Vowel I (ee) and the last U (oo). The
+I-sound, so placed before another Vowel-Sound, tends readily to be
+converted into or more properly to prefix to itself the weak
+Consonant-Sound represented in English by Y (in German and Italian by
+J); thus YIU for IU. The whole of the three Sounds so involved (a real
+Triphthong) are represented by the English U long--which is never a
+_simple_ Vowel-Sound--as in _union_, pronounced _yioonyun_.
+
+This Diphthong IU (or yiu) denotes _Conjunction_, _Conjuncture_, _Event_
+(the two ends meeting); and also _Coupling_ or _Unition_; a central
+point between extremes.
+
+The next and the most important of the Diphthongs (except AU) is AI,
+compounded of the third (A) and the first (I) of the simple
+Vowel-Sounds. It is pronounced very nearly like the English long I, as
+in p_i_ne, f_i_ne, etc., which is not a _simple_ Vowel; but is
+compounded of the two simple Vowels above mentioned (A and I, ahee) in a
+very close union with each other; or, as it were, squeezed into each
+other. The Tikiwa (Tee-kee-wah) combination (this is the name of the
+Scientific Universal Language), AI, is not ordinarily quite so close,
+and when pronounced _long_, is quite open, so that each Vowel is
+distinctly heard (ah-ee).
+
+This Diphthong AI may be regarded as embracing and epitomizing the lower
+or ground wing or half of the Simple Vowel-Scale (I E _a_ A); its
+meaning is, therefore, that of BASIC or SUBSTANTIAL REALITY: the GROUND
+of Existence.
+
+Contrasted with this is the next Diphthong, _O_I (aw-ee), compounded of
+the fifth (_o_) and the first (I) Vowel-Sounds. It is the Sound of _oy_
+in b_oy_. The I contained in this Diphthong may be regarded as standing
+in the place of U at the other extremity of the Scale. This last Sound
+has a tendency to return into I through the French slender U,
+illustrating the Principle of the Contact of Extremes. The Diphthong
+_O_I may, therefore, be viewed as embracing and epitomizing the upper or
+ethereal wing or half of the Simple Vowel Scale (_o_ _u_ O U); its
+meaning is, therefore, that of AERIAL or ASCENDING REALITY; LOFTINESS or
+LOFT.
+
+Next there occurs a Diphthong OI, pronounced as the same letters in the
+English word g_oi_ng, which has a half claim to be ranked with the
+Leading Diphthongs. It is sometimes reckoned into, and sometimes out of,
+the Scale--like _a_ among the Simple Vowels. Its meaning is that of
+FRONTNESS, PROSPECT.
+
+Finally, the great Focal Diphthong, that which includes and epitomizes
+the whole Vowel Scale, is AU (ah-oo), compounded of the third
+Vowel-Sound (A) and the Seventh (or Eighth) U. It is the sound heard in
+_ou_r, or in the Spanish c_au_sa. The meaning of this Supreme Diphthong
+and general Vowel Representative is UNIVERSAL REALITY. It stands
+practically in the place of all the Vowels, in the Composition of Words
+of an inclusive meaning. That is to say, it integrates in its
+signification, all that is inherently signified by all the other Vowels.
+
+While, however, AU is practically and usually the Representative,
+Analogue or Equivalent, in the Domain of Language, of Universal Reality
+among the Elements of Being, this is so _only in practice_.
+_Theoretically_, the Diphthong best adapted to represent this Idea is
+AO; the A and the O being, in a supreme sense, the two most prominent or
+leading Vowels. But it is a little difficult to retain the Organs of
+Utterance in the position which they must assume in order to pronounce
+these two Vowel-Sounds in conjunction. The organs readily and naturally
+slide into the easier position in which they utter AU. This is
+correspondential with the difficulty always experienced in adhering to
+_Pure Theory_ (O); and the natural tendency to glide from it, as ground
+too high for permanent occupation, into the more accommodating Domain of
+the _Practical_ (U).
+
+The Full Scale of Vowel Sounds coupled with the Full Scale of the
+(Indeterminate) Realities of Universal Being is, therefore, as follows:
+
+       1. SOUNDS.                          2. REALITIES OF BEING.
+
+ 1. I, i (ee as in feel).             ENTITY or IDENTITY (Centre, Least
+                                        Element, Essential Being,
+                                        Individuality).
+
+ 2. E, e (a as in mate).              RELATION (Sideness, Collaterality,
+                                        Adjectivity).
+
+ 3. _A_, _a_ (a as in mare).          UNSUBSTANTIALITY (Thinness, Ghost,
+                                        Apparition).
+
+ 4. A, a (a as in fa-ther).           SUBSTANCE (Thickness, Materiality,
+                                        Richness, Goodness).
+
+ 5. _O_, _o_ (aw as in awful).        SPACE (Volume, Expansion).
+
+ 6. _U_, _u_ (u as in curd).          TIME (Flux, Flow).
+
+ 7. O, o (o as in noble).             LIGHT (Reflection, Parity, Clearness,
+                                        Theory).
+
+ 8. U, u (oo as in fool).             SHADE (Retiracy, Turbidity, Mixture,
+                                        Practice).
+
+ 9. IU, iu (YIU), (u in union, use).  CONJUNCTION (Event, Joining).
+
+ 10. AI, ai (ah-ee, i in fine).       BASIC REALITY (Ground of Existence).
+
+ 11. OI, oi (aw-ee, oy in boy).       AERIAL or ASCENDING REALITY (Loft,
+                                        Loftiness).
+
+ 12. _O_I, _o_i (o-ee, oi in going).  FRONTNESS, PROSPECT.
+
+ 13. AU, au (ou in our).              UNIVERSAL REALITY.
+
+The Vowels and Diphthongs of this Basic Scale may be Long or Short,
+without any change of quality. This difference is indicated by
+diacritical marks, which it is not now necessary to exhibit.
+
+In addition to these merely _quantitative_ differences in the
+Vowel-Sounds, there is a corresponding difference of _Quality_, which
+produces a Counter-Scale of Vowel-Sounds; an echo or repetition of the
+Basic Scale throughout its entire length. This new Scale is a Series of
+Sounds predominantly _short_ in quantity. They are called by Mr. Pitman
+the _Stopped_ Vowels. (In German they are denominated the _Sharp_
+Vowels.) These Sounds are nearly always followed by a Consonant-Sound in
+the same syllable, by which they are _stopped_ or _broken abruptly off_,
+and the purity of their quality as Vowels affected or disturbed.
+
+It is not essential for our present purpose to give a detailed list of
+these Vowels; more especially as every Reader will readily recall them;
+as I, in pIn; E, in pEt; A in pAt; _o_, in n_o_t; _u_, in b_u_t; O, in
+stOne, cOAt; U, in fUll.
+
+In respect to the Vowel Diphthongs, the _Stopped_ Sounds are not
+materially different from the _short_ quantities of the corresponding
+Full ones; and no effort need be made to distinguish the two former
+varieties of Sound. The same is true of the Short and Stopped Sounds of
+A (ah). But the difference is very marked in the remaining Seven (7)
+Simple Vowels; the Stopped Sounds of which are given above. For the
+ordinary purposes of Language it is not necessary to distinguish these
+Stopped Sounds by any diacritical mark. But in the short Root-Words,
+where a difference of meaning depends upon the difference between the
+_full_ and _stopped_ Vowel, the so-called _grave_ accent is employed to
+denote the _stopped_ quality, as pique, pick, for example, written thus:
+pik, pik.
+
+The meaning of the Stopped Vowel-Sounds is merely the broken or
+_fractionized_ aspect of the same ideas which are symbolized by the
+corresponding _Full_ Vowel-Sounds.
+
+The nature and meaning of the Vowels being thus explained with
+sufficient amplitude for the uses now in view, we are prepared to
+advance, in a subsequent paper, to the consideration of the individual
+Consonant-Sounds, their character and inherent signification.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO PLATFORMS.
+
+
+It was the opprobrium of the Republican party in the Presidential
+campaign of 1860, that the Southern States were not, in any but a
+limited degree, represented in its ranks; and so it was called a
+sectional party. The Presidential campaign of 1864 is not less
+remarkable, on the other hand, because the party which now appropriates
+the honored name of Democratic seems to ignore the crime of rebellion on
+the part of those Southern States, and thus invites an even more
+obnoxious appellation. History will record with amazement, as among the
+strange phenomena of a war the most wicked of all the wicked wars with
+which ambition has desolated the earth (phenomena that will perplex men
+and women of loyal instincts and righteous common sense to the latest
+day), the resolutions of the Chicago Convention of 1864.
+
+It is the purpose of this article to consider as dispassionately as may
+be, those Chicago resolutions, as well as the ones previously adopted at
+Baltimore; desiring to look at them both from the standpoint of a
+patriotism which loves the whole country as one indivisible nation--the
+gift of God, to be cherished as we cherish our homes and our altars.
+
+A convention called of all those, without respect to former political
+affinities, who believed in an uncompromising prosecution of the war for
+the Union till the armed rebellion against its authority should be
+subdued and brought to terms, met at Baltimore on the 7th of June last,
+and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, for reëlection as President,
+and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, for election as Vice-President. The
+convention, with exceeding good sense, and obedient to the just and
+patriotic impulses of the people, disregarded all party names of the
+past, and called itself simply a National Union Convention. Two months
+later, and on the 29th of August last, obedient to the call of
+Democratic committees, a convention met at Chicago, composed of men
+whose voices were for peace, and nominated for President General George
+B. McClellan, of New Jersey, and for Vice-President George H. Pendleton,
+of Ohio. This convention took the name of Democratic, indicating thereby
+not the idea of the equal rule of all the people, as the name imports,
+but the traditions and policies of those degenerate days before the war,
+when Democracy had strangely come to mean the rule of a few ambitious
+men. In other words, it ignored the crime of those men (who have
+sacrificed their country to their ambition), and assumed that the
+country could also overlook the crime. It supposed the people ready to
+strike hands with rebellion and elevate the authors of rebellion to
+power again.
+
+Perhaps the difference between the two conventions may be concisely
+stated thus: The Chicago Convention was for peace first, and Union
+afterward; the Baltimore Convention for Union first, then peace. Let us
+see.
+
+
+THE CHICAGO PLATFORM.
+
+We suppose that no one will think us wanting in fairness when we
+characterize the Chicago Platform as one of peace.[4] If there is any
+reproach in the term, it surely is not the fault of those who take men
+to mean what they say.
+
+[Footnote 4: It is presumed that every one is familiar with the two
+platforms, as they are so easily obtained, and it is, therefore, not
+deemed necessary to encumber the pages of the Magazine with inserting
+them in full.]
+
+Indeed, it is simply the truth to declare that the general impression on
+the first publication of it confirmed the view we have taken, and that
+even among the supporters of the convention there were many who
+proclaimed their confident expectation that General McClellan, if he
+should accept the nomination, would disregard the platform, and stake
+his chances on his own more warlike record. We will not stop to consider
+in this place whether that expectation has been fulfilled. It suffices
+for our present purpose to remind our readers that the great doctrine of
+the Democratic party of former days was expressed in the motto,
+'Principles, not men;' and that the rigid discipline of the party has
+always required the nominee to be the mere representative of the
+platform--its other self, so to speak: as witness the case of Buchanan,
+who declared himself, following the approved formulas of his party, no
+longer James Buchanan, but the Cincinnati Platform. It ought also to be
+borne in mind, that General McClellan's letter of acceptance does not,
+in terms, repudiate the platform, and is not necessarily inconsistent
+with it.
+
+The first one of the six resolutions that constitute the Chicago
+Platform, has the sound of true doctrine. 'Unswerving fidelity to the
+Union under the Constitution,' is the duty of every citizen, and has
+always been the proud war-cry of every party; and they who swerve from
+it are subject not simply to our individual censure, but to the sanction
+of our supreme law. The just complaint against this platform is, that,
+while thus proclaiming good doctrine, it overlooks the departure
+therefrom of a large portion of the people, misled by wicked men. When
+we look at the other resolutions, the first one seems all 'sound and
+fury, signifying nothing.'
+
+Nor will we withhold what of approval may possibly be due, in strict
+justice, to the sixth and last resolution; although the approval can
+only be a limited one. No one can overlook the entire lack in that
+resolution of cordial sympathy with the sacred cause of nationality, to
+which the brave heroes of the war have given their lives and fortunes.
+It restricts itself to a simple recognition of the 'soldiery of our
+army,' as entitled to 'sympathy,' with a promise of 'protection' to
+them, 'in the event of our attaining power.' It ignores the navy, and
+passes by the gallant heroes who on sea and river have upheld the flag
+of our country with a lustre that pales not before the names of Paul
+Jones, and Perry, and Decatur. Moreover, the sympathy 'extended to the
+soldiery' is the sympathy not of the American people, but of 'the
+Democratic party.' Surely, this phrase was ill conceived. It has a touch
+of partisan exclusiveness that is sadly out of place. But the resolution
+is unpartisan and patriotic in another respect that deserves notice. It
+extends the 'sympathy of the Democratic party to the soldiery of our
+army,' without making any discrimination to the prejudice of the negro
+soldiers; and thus commits the 'Democratic party,' with honorable
+impartiality, to the 'care and protection' of _all_ 'the brave soldiers
+of the Republic.'
+
+With these criticisms upon the first and sixth resolutions, we proceed
+to record our total disapprobation of the remaining four. In all candor,
+we contend that those four resolutions are a surrender of the national
+honor, and a violation of the national faith. They are unworthy the old
+glory of the Democratic party. For what is the purport of them? Is it
+condemnation of a rebellion that has 'rent the land with civil feud, and
+drenched it in fraternal blood'? Is it to stimulate the heroism of those
+whose breasts are bared to the bullets of traitors in Virginia and
+Georgia, and who have 'borne aloft the flag and kept step to the music
+of the Union' these three years and a half in unwearied defence of the
+nation? Ah, no; they declare the war a 'failure'! The second resolution
+is the keynote of the platform, reciting 'that after four years (three
+years and a half) of _failure_ to restore the Union by the _experiment
+of war_,... justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand
+that _immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities_.' Upon
+this resolution there can be no better comment than the remembrance of
+Donelson and Pea Ridge, Pittsburg Landing and Vicksburg, Murfreesboro'
+and Chattanooga, Antictam and Gettysburg; not to speak of that splendid
+series of battles from the Wilderness to Petersburg, which at last has
+brought the rebel general to bay; nor of the glorious victories, since
+the Chicago Convention, at Mobile and Atlanta, and in the Shenandoah
+Valley. It can never be forgotten that on the fourth of July, 1863,
+Governor Seymour, in a public discourse at the Academy of Music, in New
+York, drew a deplorable picture of the straits to which the nation was
+at last reduced, with the enemy marching defiantly across the fertile
+fields of Pennsylvania, and men's hearts failing them for fear of
+danger, not alone to the political capital, Washington, but also to the
+financial capital, New York; and that, even while the words fell from
+the speaker's lips, that defiant enemy, already beaten, was rapidly
+retreating before the magnificent old Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg:
+while victorious Grant had already broken the left of the rebel line,
+and was celebrating the nation's anniversary in the triumph of
+Vicksburg. Even so, let it never be forgotten that the delegates who
+adopted this second resolution, so burdened with despair, had scarcely
+reached their homes, ere the stronghold of the Southern Confederacy,
+which, ever since the war was begun, has been boastfully proclaimed the
+key of its military lines, and as impregnable as Gibraltar, fell before
+the unconquerable progress of the armies of the West, under General
+Sherman; and thus the rebel centre, as well as left, had been broken,
+and only the rebel right, at Richmond, yet remains to the Southern army.
+
+In further answer to the discouraging language of this resolution, let
+us offset the following terse and comprehensive statement of what has
+been accomplished in the course of the nation's 'experiment of war.' It
+is copied from _The Evening Post_ of a recent date, and the writer
+supposes the soldiers to speak thus:
+
+     'We have not failed; on the contrary, we have fought bravely and
+     conquered splendidly. In proof of our words we can point to such
+     trophies as few wars can equal and none surpass. Besides defending
+     with unusual vigilance and completeness two thousand miles of
+     frontier, in three years we have taken from the enemies of the
+     Union, by valor and generalship, thirty complete and thoroughly
+     furnished fortresses; we have captured over two thousand cannon; we
+     have reconquered and now hold nearly four thousand miles of
+     navigable river courses; we have taken ten of the enemy's principal
+     cities, three of them capitals of States; in thirty days last
+     summer we captured sixty thousand prisoners; we have penetrated
+     more than three hundred miles into the territory claimed by the
+     enemy; we have cut that territory into strips, leaving his armies
+     without effectual communication with each other; the main
+     operations and interests of the war, which were lately concentrated
+     about Baltimore, Paducah, and St. Louis, have been transferred, by
+     our steady and constant advance, to the narrow limits of the
+     seaboard Slave States; we hold every harbor but one, of a coast six
+     thousand miles long. And whatever we have taken we hold; we have
+     never turned back, or given up that which we once fairly
+     possessed.'
+
+It has, however, been fittingly reserved for the chief of the rebellion
+himself to give the full and complete answer to this dishonorable
+complaint of failure. Not a month after the meeting of the Chicago
+Convention, and on the 23d of September last, Jeff. Davis uttered these
+words, in a public speech, at Macon, Geo.: '_You have not many men
+between eighteen and forty-five left_.... Two-thirds of our men are
+absent, some sick, some wounded, but _most of them absent without
+leave_. ... _In Virginia the disparity of numbers is just an great as it
+is in Georgia._'
+
+But let it be granted that after these three years and a half of war,
+and having accomplished such unquestionably important results, the Union
+is not yet restored, what then? Is that a reason for giving up now? Our
+fathers fought the British seven years without flinching; and under the
+indomitable leader God had given them, they would have fought seven
+years longer with equal determination. Are we less determined than they
+were? Are we such degenerate sons that we are willing to give up the
+legacy they left us, at half its original cost? There is just the same
+reason that we should yield the contest now as there was in 1861 that we
+should yield it then; neither more nor less. The integrity of the
+nation, the perpetuity of our institutions, the safety, honor, and
+welfare of the people are still at stake.
+
+If it is true that 'justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare
+demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities,'
+then those same holy principles were assailed when the war was begun. If
+the United States Government was the assailant, it did wrong, and has
+continued doing wrong ever since; and not a century of such wrong-doing
+can make the war just and right on our part. This brings us face to face
+with the question, Who began the war? Who, in this contest, has assailed
+the principles of 'justice, humanity, and liberty'? Who has attacked the
+'public welfare'? Has it been the United States Government? Let us
+revert to the occasion of the war. Confining ourselves to what all
+parties admit--even the rebels themselves--the immediate occasion of the
+war was the election of a President distasteful, for whatever cause, to
+the Southern leaders. Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the
+United States under the organic law of the nation, in strict accordance
+with all its modes and requirements, and none ever disputed the fairness
+of the election. That organic law is the Constitution, to which the
+South is bound equally with the North. The men of the Chicago
+Convention, who have recalled to our minds its high supremacy, neglected
+to express their opinion of those who, immediately on the election of
+President Lincoln, contemptuously spurned it, and have sought these
+three years and a half to overthrow it and destroy the Union which it
+upholds.
+
+Every sentiment of 'justice' was outraged when wicked sedition thus
+without cause reared its head against the covenant of the nation. Every
+instinct of 'humanity' was stifled by the traitors who surrounded a
+gallant garrison of seventy men with a force of ten thousand, and opened
+fire on the heroes who stood by the flag that had been the glory and
+defence of both for more than half a century. 'Liberty,' in all its
+blessed relations of home, and country, and religion, was struck at when
+blind ambition thus set at defiance the power of the Union, to which
+liberty owes its life on this continent, and its hopes throughout the
+world. The constitutional liberty that is the glory of our civilization,
+the liberty regulated by law that is the pride of our institutions, was
+attacked by those who at Montgomery fiercely defied the Constitution and
+laws. And what shall we say of the constitution which these traitors to
+their country and humanity affected to establish, instead of that, the
+heritage of their and our Washington and his compeers, which had made
+our country powerful among nations, and blessed it with equal laws and
+equal protection to all? What shall we say of the constitution that
+ordained slavery as the corner stone of a new confederacy, to teach
+mankind the folly of Christian civilization, and bring back the
+'statelier Eden' of the dark ages? To which party in this terrible
+strife of brothers does 'liberty' look for protection to-day? Which of
+the two armies of brothers now arrayed against each other on the plains
+of Virginia and Georgia, is fighting for the principle of order, which
+is the 'public welfare'? Let these questions be answered, and then it
+will appear how much reason there is in the declaration that 'liberty,
+justice, humanity, and the public welfare' demand the 'cessation of
+hostilities.' On the contrary, these very principles demand that the war
+be continued without abatement till they are guaranteed safe residence
+and sure protection under the United States Constitution.
+
+But, it is objected, you ignore the basis on which, this 'cessation of
+hostilities' is proposed, namely, 'the Federal Union of the States.'
+There is a word to be said in reference to this clause which will
+illustrate the high-toned patriotism of some of the convention which
+adopted it. There was an alteration in the wording of the resolution,
+and some of the papers printed it accordingly, '_the basis of the
+Federal States_.' The editor of the _New York Freeman's Journal_ (a
+paper which zealously supports the Chicago platform and all peace
+measures, and is called Democratic), being requested to explain which
+version was correct, said, in a late issue of his journal, that in the
+original draft of the resolution 'it was not the _bold doctrine_ of
+Federal States;' it was the _delusion and snare_ of a Federal 'Union,'
+and that therefore the latter must be taken as the correct version.
+
+Replying to the above objection, we say that we neither ignore this
+'delusion and snare' of the Federal Union as the basis of the proposed
+peace, nor those other words in the fourth resolution, 'that the aim and
+object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the
+rights of the States unimpaired.' The question is, how possibly to
+reconcile the demand for an immediate 'cessation of hostilities' with
+this great anxiety to preserve the Federal Union? For the Federal Union
+can only be preserved by subduing the armed rebellion that menaces it.
+Anything short of the absolute and thorough defeat of the Southern
+armies must lower the dignity of the nation, and weaken and subvert the
+foundations of the Union. Thus far, by the grace of God and our right
+arm, the Constitution and Union are preserved, and so long as they
+'still stand strong,' the basis of settlement remains; and whenever the
+rebels are tired of trying their strength against them, the nation
+stands ready to welcome them back, as penitent prodigals. It is not we
+who are unreconciled to them: it is they who refuse to be reconciled to
+us. If the illustration offend no weaker brother, we may say that, like
+the ever-surrounding love of God, the Federal Union is still watching
+over the rebels, and is only waiting the first symptom of their
+returning conscience to run and fall on their necks and kiss them, and
+bring them in peace to the home they so foolishly left. They are
+striving to destroy the Constitution and the Union. We oppose them. Let
+us consider what, under these circumstances, 'a cessation of
+hostilities' means.
+
+In the first place, how are hostilities to cease, unless the power that
+controls the Southern armies so wills it? That power is a military
+despotism. It has usurped all other power within the limits of the
+rebellion, and the United States Government is seeking to overthrow it,
+in order that the Constitution may be restored, in all its benignity, to
+the people of the South, whom the usurpation has deprived of it. Is it,
+then, for the United States Government to propose to the authors of this
+usurpation to cease seeking its total overthrow? The question recurs,
+moreover, what 'cessation' have we to propose? It is for them to offer
+to yield: they are the aggressors, threatening the life of the nation.
+Is any among us so base he would have peace with dishonor? A nation
+cannot submit to be dishonored before the world--for its honor is its
+life. Yet what sort of peace would that be which we should thus begin by
+seeking? It is far from pertinent to cite, as some have done, the
+example of Napoleon on this point: even supposing that civil war were,
+in respect of this thing, the same as war between independent nations.
+For Napoleon never proposed suspensions of hostilities except in his own
+extremity, and as a convenient means to extricate himself from
+difficulties which he had the art of concealing from his adversaries.
+Are we in extremity, that this example of Napoleon should be suggested
+in support of the Chicago platform?
+
+As to how our overtures might be received at Richmond, we are no longer
+left any excuse for doubting. The oft-repeated assurances of all who
+have fled from the rebel tyranny since the war was begun, are, at
+length, confirmed by the authoritative declaration of Jeff. Davis
+himself. It is a declaration promulgated not only by Colonel Jaquess and
+Mr. Gilmore, in the account given by the latter of their recent visit to
+Richmond, but also by Mr. Benjamin, the rebel Secretary of State, in a
+circular letter written for the purpose of giving the rebel account of
+that visit. We are told by the rebel chief himself, that as _preliminary
+to any negotiations, the independence of the Southern Confederacy must
+be first acknowledged_. Why does not the Chicago platform suggest a way
+of avoiding this difficulty? Why has it left the country in uncertainty
+on a question so vital?
+
+But, in the second place, suppose it were possible to have a 'cessation
+of hostilities' without this preliminary acknowledgment of the
+Confederate independence, and that the war might be at an absolute stand
+still for a definite season, are we fully aware of the risks attending
+this measure? For the Chicago platform has left them out of sight. 'A
+cessation of hostilities' is an armistice; and there is no such thing
+known in the authorities on international law, or in history, as 'a
+cessation of hostilities' distinct from an armistice. In defining the
+incidents of war, Wheaton speaks of a '_suspension of hostilities by
+means of a truce_, or _armistice_,' and uses the three terms
+interchangeably. In other words, whatever 'cessation (or suspension, as
+it is called in the books) of hostilities,' there may occur between the
+parties to a war, it is known among men and in history as an armistice,
+which is also the technical term for it. There would be no need to
+enlarge upon this point, if it had not been made already the basis of
+fallacious appeals to popular ignorance. Now, the incidents of an
+armistice are well defined, giving to both parties, besides the
+advantage of time to rest, full liberty to repair damages and make up
+losses of men and material; and it is perfect folly, or worse, to talk
+of 'a cessation of hostilities' without giving to the rebels these
+important advantages. But the controlling consideration in reference to
+this whole thing, and which every person ought to ponder carefully, is
+the effect of the proposed 'cessation of hostilities' upon our neutral
+neighbors. On this point the doctrine of international law is thus
+stated by the distinguished French writer, Hautefeuille, 'the eminent
+advocate of neutral rights,' as he is justly called by the American
+editor of Wheaton, and whose works on neutral relations are always cited
+with respect, and recognized as authority.
+
+     'The duties imposed on neutrals by the state of war belong
+     essentially to the state of war itself. From the moment it ceases,
+     for whatever cause, even temporarily, the duties of neutrals
+     likewise cease; _as to them, peace is completely restored during
+     the suspension of arms_. They resume then all the rights which had
+     been modified by the war, and can exercise them in their full
+     extent during the whole time fixed for the duration of the truce,
+     if this time has been limited by the agreement; and until the
+     resumption of hostilities has been officially announced to them, if
+     it has not been limited.'[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: 'Des Droits des Nations Neutres,' t. I., p. 301]
+
+Can language be clearer? It will not do to treat it lightly. It is a
+statement of what international law is on this point from an authority;
+and the reasons for the doctrine are clear and incontrovertible.
+Neutrality depends on the fact of war; when, for any cause, that fact no
+longer exists, neutrality ceases likewise, of course. It is only the
+application of a well-known maxim of law, that when the reason of a rule
+fails, the rule itself fails. Let there be 'a cessation of hostilities,'
+then, as proposed in the Chicago platform, and how long would it be
+before rebel ships of war from English ports would be ready to desolate
+our coast, destroy our shipping, raise the blockade, and give to the
+rebellion the aid and sustenance it must have ere long or perish?
+
+There is still another difficulty in the way of suspending hostilities,
+which it is well for us not to ignore. If we propose to the rebels 'a
+cessation of hostilities,' does not the question immediately become one
+of negotiation between separate Governments? Have we not in that moment,
+and in that thing, then recognized the Southern Confederacy as a
+separate and independent Power? For does not 'a cessation of
+hostilities' presuppose parties of equal sovereignty on both sides?
+Indeed, _The London Times_ of a recent date already declares that 'it
+would concede to the South a position of equality.' Such a concession
+cannot, for a moment, be thought of. For the very question at issue is
+our constitutional supremacy. When that is yielded, all is yielded. The
+exchanging of prisoners, and the numerous like questions that
+perpetually arise in the progress of war, are matters of common
+humanity, that depend upon their own law. They are totally independent
+of the questions at issue between the parties belligerent; and our
+dealings with the South, in reference to such matters, cannot be
+construed into a recognition of its separate independence. If we consent
+to treat with the rebel chiefs, however, in regard to the very question
+involved in the war, how can we longer compel the non-interference of
+foreign Powers? If _we_ acknowledge the authority of Jeff. Davis to
+speak for the Southern people, we cannot then take offence if other
+nations acknowledge him as the representative and head of a new
+Government.
+
+Such and so great are the consequences of a 'cessation of hostilities,'
+which the Chicago platform proposes to the serious consideration of the
+American people.
+
+It thus appears how irreconcilable are the expressions in that platform
+in regard to the preservation of the Federal Union, with the clearly
+announced determination to propose immediately 'a cessation of
+hostilities.' They are vague generalities, and can have no other purpose
+than to catch the popular ear so as more effectually to deceive the
+popular heart. That this is not a harsh judgment, consider how the four
+resolutions that treat of the war all hinge upon the proposition to
+suspend hostilities. For they concern themselves with what? With
+condemnation of the rebellion, its authors, and objects, suggesting, at
+the same time, how more effectually to bring upon it its righteous
+retribution? Far from it. Indeed, a stranger to all that has passed in
+our country during the last three years, would suppose, from a study of
+these resolutions, that the United States Government had usurped the
+power of a despotism, and that all who are not arrayed in open
+rebellion, against its authority were groaning under the yoke of a
+tyrant. The platform throughout ignores the one supreme question that is
+before the people to-day. That one question is, Shall we maintain the
+integrity of the nation? It is vain to introduce other issues; they must
+abide the event of arms. The old maxim that in the midst of war the laws
+are silent, is not to be condemned. For our laws are of no avail, the
+nation cannot enforce them, so long as armed rebellion threatens its
+existence. With the nation, all its laws, principles, vital forces, are
+equally menaced and imperilled; and they are, in virtue of that very
+fact, in abeyance, in order that they may be saved. It is said that the
+Constitution is not suspended because of rebellion, and this is the
+basis of much declamation, both in the Chicago platform and elsewhere,
+against the exercise of extraordinary powers on the part of the
+President. But the Constitution authorizes the suspension of the writ of
+_habeas corpus_, that great writ of right which is the bulwark of our
+Anglo-Saxon liberty, 'when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public
+safety may require it;' and confers upon Congress full power to
+legislate for the defence of the nation, making it then the duty of the
+President to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.' What more
+is needed as a warrant for extraordinary power? The Chicago Convention
+has appealed to the Constitution, and in that has done wisely. But what
+is the Constitution? It is the organic law of the nation. In virtue of
+it the nation exists, and by the supreme warrant of it the nation
+maintains its existence against parricidal treason. Under the
+Constitution all power is granted to the public authorities to quell
+insurrection; and the grant of a power, by one of the first principles
+of law, as also of common sense, implies every essential incident to
+make the grant effectual.
+
+In support of these views it is pertinent to cite the authority of an
+approved text writer on municipal law, whose book has appeared since
+they were first written, and who has elaborately investigated the points
+involved. The result of his patient and thorough study is stated in
+these propositions:
+
+     'That no civil power resides in any department of the Government to
+     interfere with the fundamental, personal rights of life, liberty,
+     and property, guaranteed by the Constitution; that a warlike power
+     is given by the Constitution to the President temporarily to
+     disregard these rights by means of the martial law; that under the
+     sanction of this species of law, the President and his subordinate
+     military officers may, within reasonable limits, suspend the
+     privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_, cause arrests to be made,
+     trials and condemnations to be had, and punishments to be
+     inflicted, in methods unknown to the civil procedure, but are
+     responsible for an abuse of the power; and that the martial law, as
+     a necessary adjunct of military movements, may be enforced in time
+     of invasion or rebellion, wherever the influence and effect of
+     these movements directly extends.'[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: §716 of 'An Introduction to Municipal Law,' by John Norton
+Pomeroy, Esq., Professor of Law in the New York University Law School.
+The whole chapter from which the extract is taken is worthy of diligent
+perusal, and the writer regrets that want of space alone prevents him
+quoting more fully from Professor Pomeroy's lucid exposition of the
+doctrine of martial law under our Constitution.]
+
+These conclusions of the law are worthy to be considered carefully in
+view of the solemn resolutions of the Chicago platform, that 'military
+necessity' and the 'war power' are 'mere pretences' to override the
+Constitution.
+
+It remains to say, with reference to the third and fifth resolutions of
+this platform, that they are chargeable with an equal and common
+ignorance: the third, in ignoring the necessity of the presence of the
+military at the elections referred to, in order that disloyalty and
+treason might not openly defy the authority of the nation; the fifth, in
+ignoring two things, first, the monstrous baseness of the rebel
+treatment of our prisoners, who have been starved alive, with a
+refinement of cruelty reserved for this Christian age, and practised
+only by the Christian chivalry of the South; and secondly, the rebel
+refusal to exchange prisoners man for man; the resolution seeking,
+moreover, to charge upon the United States Government the fault of both
+these rebel violations of humanity. It may be asked, moreover, in
+further reference to the third resolution, if the convention really
+meant to pledge itself to revolution;[7] and why, if the President, as
+chief of 'the military authority of the United States,' should be guilty
+of any abuses, the proper remedy is not by impeachment, as provided in
+the Constitution? The language of this resolution is gravely suggestive,
+and cannot be too closely criticised. It seems to shadow forth some dark
+design, which surely is in harmony with the whole tone of hostility to
+our Government that pervades the platform. Taken, moreover, in
+connection with the fact that the Chicago Convention declared itself a
+permanent body, subject to the call of the chairman, this criticism does
+not seem unreasonable; for permanent conventions have generally been the
+beginning of revolution.
+
+[Footnote 7: The third resolution is, 'That the direct interference of
+the military authority of the United States in the recent elections held
+in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware, was a shameful violation
+of the Constitution, and the repetition of such acts in the approaching
+election _will be held as revolutionary, and resisted with all the means
+and power under our control_.']
+
+
+THE BALTIMORE PLATFORM.
+
+The Baltimore platform consists of eleven resolutions; and we may
+perceive at a glance the important respect in which it differs from the
+one adopted at Chicago. That confines itself to criticism and censure of
+those who are striving to uphold the Constitution and the Union against
+an armed rebellion, which it does not so much as by a single word
+condemn. This declares the purpose of the people 'to aid the Government
+in quelling by force the rebellion now raging against its authority;' so
+that its power shall be felt throughout the whole extent of our
+territory, and its blessings be restored to every section of the Union.
+
+It is impossible to overlook this essential distinction of the two
+platforms. The one is full of the captious complaint of partisanship,
+intent on power, and oblivious of the highest duty of patriotism in this
+hour of the country's need; the other recognizes no higher duty now than
+the union of all parties for the sake of the Union. The one vainly cries
+peace when there is no peace; the other thinks not of peace except in
+and through the Union, without which there cannot be peace. Above all,
+the one takes us back to the former times of purely party strife, and
+seeks to revive the political issues of the past; the other, leaving
+'the dead past to bury its dead,' keeps pace with the living present,
+and looks forward to a future of glory in a restored and regenerated
+Union. For it is folly to suppose there can ever again be 'the Union as
+it was.' This is a superficial phrase, which it is marvellous that any
+reflecting person can delude himself with. 'The Constitution as it is'
+is the motto that condemns it; for under the Constitution we are to have
+'a more perfect Union,' as our fathers designed, and so stated in the
+Constitution itself. We are to have a constitutional Union in which
+every right guaranteed by the Constitution shall be maintained; and this
+was not so in 'the Union as it was.'
+
+Thus it is that the Baltimore platform, after pledging the people to
+maintain 'the paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the
+United States,' and approving the 'determination of the Government not
+to compromise' this authority, but holding out the same Constitution and
+laws as our only and the sufficient 'terms of peace' to all who will
+accept them, proceeds to take notice of what none but the wilfully blind
+fail to perceive, the changed aspect of the slavery question. It is
+impossible to hold the same position to-day in regard to this vexed
+question as in the days before the war. As an element of the politics of
+this country its aspect is wholly changed, and there is no sort of
+consistency in upholding our opinions of four years ago in reference to
+it. We do well to remember that consistency is not obstinacy. It is not
+an absolute, but a relative thing, and takes note of all the new
+elements which are ever entering into public affairs. The criterion of
+one's political consistency in our country is unfaltering devotion to
+the Union. If the measures he advocates look always to its paramount
+authority, his record is truly and honorably inconsistent. On the other
+hand, he who forgets the end of his labors in the ardor of seeking to
+save the means, is chargeable with the grossest inconsistency. What,
+therefore, consists with the perpetuity and strength of the Union? is
+the question which the American patriot proposes to himself.
+
+It is in reference to this question that the Baltimore Platform
+challenges comparison with the one adopted at Chicago. For guided by the
+experience of the past four years (the culmination of fifty years'
+experience), and noting without fear the facts which that experience has
+revealed as in the clear light of midday, it declares that slavery is
+inconsistent with the existence of the Union. Does anybody deny it? Men
+tell us that the Union and slavery have heretofore, for more than half a
+century, existed together, and why may they not continue to exist in
+harmonious conjunction for the next half century? We are asked,
+moreover, with sarcastic disdain, if our wisdom is superior to that of
+the fathers. Our wisdom is not, indeed, superior to that of the fathers
+of the republic, but it would be far beneath it, and we should be
+unworthy sons of such fathers, if we undertook to carry out, in 1864,
+the policies and measures of 1764. The progress of affairs has developed
+the antagonism that was only latent before, but which, nevertheless,
+some of the wisest of our fathers foresaw; and it is now very clear that
+there is a terrible antagonism (no longer latent) between slavery and
+the principles that underlie the Constitution. The time has come to
+vindicate the wisdom of the Constitution by utterly removing what seeks
+to disgrace and destroy it--as it were a viper in the bosom of the
+nation.
+
+We must show that our Government is strong enough not only to control,
+but also destroy, the interest which arrays itself in arms and war
+against it. It is useless, surely, to deny that the Southern Confederacy
+means slavery. Over and over again the Southern journals have asserted,
+and Southern politicians have said, that free labor was a mistake, and
+that slavery was the true condition of labor. That these are the
+deliberate convictions of the Southern leaders, and these the doctrines
+on which the Montgomery constitution is based, no reflecting person can
+hesitate to believe; and the boastful declaration of the rebel
+vice-president, that slavery was the corner stone of the rebel
+confederacy, serves to confirm our conclusion beyond possibility of
+doubt. What these things prove is nothing more nor less than that the
+Union with such an element in it to feed the ambition of politicians
+with, as this slavery has shown itself to be, is henceforth impossible.
+For we see now that for the sake of slavery the slaveholding leaders are
+willing to destroy the Government. Who can complain if the basis of
+their rebellious scheme is annihilated? The answer to those who say,
+Touch tenderly the institutions of the South, is, Nay, but let them
+first cease their rebellion. Therefore, so long as the rebellion lifts
+its unblushing front against the Government, so long it is the duty of
+every lover of the Government, in the language of the third resolution
+of this platform, to 'uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by
+which the Government, in its own defence, has aimed a death blow at this
+gigantic evil.'
+
+But that makes us, Abolitionists, says the reader. Be it so. Are we not
+willing to be Abolitionists for the sake of saving the Constitution and
+the Union? And if, despising our proffers of 'the Constitution as it
+is,' which we have now held out to them for three years and a half, the
+rebels continue to defy the authority of the Government, who can
+complain if we proceed to adopt an amendment to the Constitution that
+shall leave no possibility of slaveholding treason hereafter? Surely
+none but themselves. Let them, then, come back and vote against it; for
+three fourths of all the States must concur in such an amendment before
+it can become part of the Constitution. Ah, the leaders of the Southern
+rebellion know full well how the great masses at the South would vote on
+such a measure! Let us be ready, then, acting not for ourselves alone,
+but also for our deluded brethren of the South, who are to-day the
+victims of a military usurpation the most monstrous the world ever saw,
+to put the finishing stroke to the scheme of this Confederate rebellion
+by adopting the proposed amendment.
+
+The fifth resolution commits us to the approval of two measures that
+have aroused the most various and strenuous opposition, the Proclamation
+of Emancipation and the use of negro troops. In reference to the first,
+it is to be remembered that it is a war measure. The express language of
+it is: 'By virtue of the power in me vested as commander-in-chief of the
+army and navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion
+against the authority and Government of the United States, and as a _fit
+and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion_.' Considered
+thus, the Proclamation is not merely defensible, but it is more; it is a
+proper and efficient means of weakening the rebellion which every person
+desiring its speedy overthrow must zealously and perforce uphold.
+Whether it is of any legal effect beyond the actual limits of our
+military lines, is a question that need not agitate us. In due time the
+supreme tribunal of the nation will be called to determine that, and to
+its decision the country will yield with all respect and loyalty. But in
+the mean time let the Proclamation go wherever the army goes, let it go
+wherever the navy secures us a foothold on the outer border of the rebel
+territory, and let it summon to our aid the negroes who are truer to the
+Union than their disloyal masters; and when they have come to us and put
+their lives in our keeping, let us protect and defend them with the
+whole power of the nation. Is there anything unconstitutional in that?
+Thank God, there is not. And he who is willing to give back to slavery a
+single person who has heard the summons and come within our lines to
+obtain his freedom, he who would give up a single man, woman, or child,
+once thus actually freed, is not worthy the name of American. He may
+call himself Confederate, if he will.
+
+Let it be remembered, also, that the Proclamation has had a very
+important bearing upon our foreign relations. It evoked in behalf of our
+country that sympathy on the part of the people in Europe, whose is the
+only sympathy we can ever expect in our struggle to perpetuate free
+institutions. Possessing that sympathy, moreover, we have had an element
+in our favor which has kept the rulers of Europe in wholesome dread of
+interference. The Proclamation relieved us from the false position
+before attributed to us of fighting simply for national power. It placed
+us right in the eyes of the world, and transferred men's sympathies from
+a confederacy fighting for independence as a means of establishing
+slavery, to a nation whose institutions mean constitutional liberty,
+and, when fairly wrought out, must end in universal freedom.
+
+We are to consider, furthermore, that from the issuing of the
+Proclamation dates the organization of negro troops--a measure that is
+destined to affect materially the future composition, as it is
+believed, of our regular army. This is 'the employment as Union soldiers
+of men heretofore held in slavery,' which the fifth resolution asks us
+to approve. Can we not approve it? The fighting qualities of the
+despised 'niggers' (as South Carolina chivalry terms the gallant fellows
+who followed Colonel Shaw to the deadly breach of Wagner, reckless of
+all things save the stars and stripes they fought under) have been
+tested on many battle fields. He whose heart does not respond in
+sympathy with their heroism on those fields, while defending from
+disgrace his country's flag, need not approve. The approval of the
+country will be given, nevertheless. There can be nothing better said,
+on this point than President Lincoln's own words, as reported lately by
+Judge Mills, of Wisconsin, to whom the President uttered them in
+conversation. They cover also the question of the Proclamation, and will
+fitly conclude our discussion of these two important measures:
+
+     'Sir,' said the President, 'the slightest knowledge of arithmetic
+     will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed
+     with Democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of
+     the North to do it. There are now in the service of the United
+     States near two hundred thousand ablebodied colored men, most of
+     them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory. The
+     Democratic strategy demands that these forces be disbanded, and
+     that the masters be conciliated by restoring them to slavery. The
+     black men who now assist Union prisoners to escape, they are to be
+     converted into our enemies in the vain hope of gaining the good
+     will of their masters. We shall have to fight two nations instead
+     of one.
+
+     'You cannot conciliate the South if you guarantee to them ultimate
+     success; and the experience of the present war proves their success
+     is inevitable if you fling the compulsory labor of millions of
+     black men into their side of the scale. Will you give our enemies
+     such military advantages as insure success, and then depend on
+     coaxing, flattery, and concession to get them back into the Union?
+     Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men, take two hundred
+     thousand men from our side and put them in the battle field or corn
+     field against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in
+     three weeks.
+
+     'We have to hold territory in inclement and sickly places; where
+     are the Democrats to do this? It was a free fight, and the field
+     was open to the war Democrats to put down this rebellion by
+     fighting against both master and slave, long before the present
+     policy was inaugurated.
+
+     'There have been men base enough to propose to me to return to
+     slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee, and thus win
+     the respect of the masters they fought. Should I do so, I should
+     deserve to be damned in time and eternity. Come what will, I will
+     keep my faith with friend and foe. My enemies pretend I am now
+     carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. So long as
+     I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of
+     restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion
+     without the use of the emancipation policy, and every other policy
+     calculated to weaken the moral and physical forces of the
+     rebellion.
+
+     'Freedom has given us two hundred thousand men raised on Southern
+     soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from
+     the enemy; and instead of alienating the South, there are now
+     evidences of a fraternal feeling growing up between our men and the
+     rank and file of the rebel soldiers. Let my enemies prove to the
+     country that the destruction of slavery is not necessary to a
+     restoration of the Union. I will abide the issue.'
+
+Surely these are words of exceeding good sense. They are full of a
+feeling of the speaker's responsibility to God and his country; and the
+man who cares not for his responsibility to God, may well be distrusted
+by his country. Is he who speaks these words of patriotism a tyrant and
+usurper? Are not the words convincing proof that President Lincoln is
+honest and faithful and capable? And if he thus meets those three
+requirements of Jefferson's comprehensive formula, let us not refuse the
+language of the platform: 'That we have full confidence in his
+determination to carry these and all other constitutional measures
+essential to the salvation of the country into full and complete
+effect.'
+
+The remaining six resolutions of this platform deserve the general
+remark, that they declare with no uncertain sound the views of the
+Baltimore Convention in reference to vital questions of public policy;
+whereas, the Chicago Convention has not even alluded to those questions.
+That in this hour of the country's crisis, in this life struggle of the
+nation with foes both open and secret, there should be 'harmony in the
+national councils;' that men once clothed in the uniform of United
+States soldiers become entitled to 'the full protection of the laws of
+war,' as forming part of the nation's defenders when those who ought to
+be its defenders have joined in an unholy sedition to destroy its life;
+that 'foreign immigration,' deserves especial encouragement at a time
+when the demands of the army leave the places of home labor without
+adequate means of refilling them; that a Pacific Railroad, uniting the
+extreme Western portion of the Union with all the other sections, and
+thus bringing within nearer reach of our California and Oregon
+countrymen all the advantages and facilities of the Government, while at
+the same time binding more closely the ties that make us one people with
+the West equally with the South; and that the nation's faith with all
+its creditors must be strictly kept, be the cost what it may; all these
+are duties which the terrible emergency of the hour only makes more
+imperative and exacting of fulfilment than ever before.
+
+The eleventh and last resolution commits the country anew to the Monroe
+Doctrine. In view of the great crime that is enacting in Mexico, where a
+foreign power has assumed to change the Government of that afflicted
+country at its own arbitrary will, the declaration that we have not
+abandoned the doctrine is appropriate and necessary. It is a warning
+that our eyes are not closed to the schemes on foot for the suppression
+of republican government on this continent. While our present necessity
+compels us, as of course, to act with great circumspection, yet it would
+be unbecoming our dignity to quietly ignore the spoliation of Mexico. It
+is often said that President Lincoln, in his letter accepting the
+Baltimore nomination, has repudiated this resolution. These are his
+words:
+
+     'While the resolution in regard to the supplanting of republican
+     government upon the Western Continent is fully concurred in, there
+     might be misunderstanding were I not to say that the position of
+     the Government in relation to the action of France in Mexico, as
+     assumed through the State Department, and indorsed by the
+     convention, among the measures and acts of the Executive, will be
+     faithfully maintained so long as the state of facts shall leave
+     that position pertinent and applicable.'
+
+It is not fair to say that this is a repudiation of the resolution, or
+of the Monroe Doctrine, until it is first shown that the Government
+'through the State Department,' has already repudiated the doctrine. The
+time for the enforcement of that doctrine has not yet come, and this
+seems to be the position that has been assumed by the Government. It
+certainly is the position of common sense and patriotism.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The candid reader has now before him a brief exposition of the two
+platforms, and of the doctrines and bearing of each. It is believed that
+nothing has been extenuated; nor, on the other hand, has aught been here
+set down in malice. Let every one study the platforms and try
+conclusions for himself; then say whether the foregoing discussion could
+well have shaped itself differently. The sum of the whole matter seems
+to be, War and Union, or Peace and Disunion. If we have Union, it can
+only be now through war. We must 'seek peace with the sword.' The
+rebels have appealed from the civil law to the military law, from the
+Constitution to the sword; let us not shrink from the ordeal. No
+revolution to perpetuate oppression can hope for the favor of a God of
+justice.
+
+There are two platforms in this Presidential campaign, representing the
+two parties into which the voters will be divided. But there is a third
+party, without platform and without vote, which has, nevertheless,
+interests at stake transcending even ours. Let the calmly considered
+words of an impartial English journal,[8] which wishes well to our
+country, speak, in conclusion, on behalf of that third party:
+
+     'There are three parties to the American war. There are the slaves,
+     the bondsmen of the South, whose flight was restrained by the
+     Fugitive Bill, and whose wrongs have brought about the disruption;
+     there are the Confederates, who, when Southern supremacy in the
+     republic was menaced by the election of Abraham Lincoln, threw off
+     their allegiance; and there are the Government and its supporters,
+     who are striving to restore the integrity of the Union. These are
+     the three parties; and as the war has gone on from year to year,
+     the cause of the negro has brightened, and hundreds of thousands of
+     the African race have passed out of slavery into freedom. They
+     flock in multitudes within the Federal lines, and take their stand
+     under the Constitution as free men. Abandoned by their former
+     masters, or flying from their fetters, the chattels become
+     citizens, and rejoice. No matter what their misery, they keep their
+     faces to the North, and bear up under their privations. Every
+     advance of the national army liberates new throngs, and they rush
+     eagerly to the camps where their brethren are cared for. The
+     exodus, continually going on, increases in volume.
+
+     [Footnote 8: London Inquirer.]
+
+     'Such are the colored freedmen, the innocent victims of the war,
+     the slaves whom it has marvellously enfranchised; such are the
+     dusky clouds that flit o'er the continent of America and settle
+     down on strange lands--the harbingers of a social revolution in the
+     great republic of the West. More than fifty thousand are formed
+     into camps in the Mississippi Valley, and not fewer in Middle and
+     East Tennessee and North Alabama. It is a vast responsibility which
+     is cast upon the Government and the people of the North, a sore and
+     mighty burden; and proportionate are the efforts which have been
+     made to meet the trying emergency. The Government finds rations for
+     the negro camps, provides free carriage for the contributions of
+     the humane, appoints surgeons and superintendents, enlists in the
+     army the men who are suitable, and, as far as possible, gives
+     employment to all. Clothing and other necessaries are forwarded to
+     the camps by the ton by benevolent hands, and books for the schools
+     by tens of thousands. All along the banks of the Mississippi, from
+     Cairo to New Orleans, and in Arkansas and Tennessee, the aged and
+     infirm fugitives, the women and children, are collected into
+     colored colonies, and tended and taught with a care that is worthy
+     of a great and Christian people. All that can work are more than
+     willing to do so; they labor gladly; and among old and young there
+     is an eager desire for education. Books are coveted as badges of
+     freedom; and the negro soldier carries them with him wherever he
+     goes, and studies them whenever he can. It is a great work which is
+     in progress across the Atlantic. Providence, in a manner which man
+     foresaw not, is solving a dark problem of the past, and we may well
+     look on with awe and wonder. There were thousands of minds which
+     apprehended the downfall of the 'peculiar institution.' There were
+     a prophetic few, who clearly perceived that it would be purged away
+     by no milder scourge than that of war. But there were none who
+     dreamed that the slaveholder would be the Samson to bring down the
+     atrocious system of human slavery by madly taking arms in its
+     defence! Yet so it was; and the Divine penalty is before us. The
+     wrath of man has worked out the retributive justice of God. The
+     crime which a country would not put away from it has ended in war,
+     and slavery is a ruin.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LITERARY NOTICES unavoidably postponed until the ensuing issue of THE
+CONTINENTAL.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5,
+November 1864, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5,
+November 1864, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864
+       Devoted To Literature And National Policy
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h2>The</h2>
+
+<h1>CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:</h1>
+
+<h4>DEVOTED TO</h4>
+
+<h2>Literature and National Policy</h2>
+
+
+<h3>VOL. VI.&mdash;November, 1864&mdash;No. V.</h3>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="90%" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_PROGRESS_OF_LIBERTY_IN_THE_UNITED_STATES">THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_UNDIVINE_COMEDY-A_POLISH_DRAMA">THE UNDIVINE COMEDY-A POLISH DRAMA.&mdash;PART III.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#DEATH_IN_LIFE">DEATH IN LIFE.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#AENONE">&AElig;NONE:&mdash;A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#CREATION">CREATION.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#PHENOMENA_OF_HAZE_FOGS_AND_CLOUDS">PHENOMENA OF HAZE, FOGS, AND CLOUDS.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#FLY_LEAVES_FROM_THE_LIFE_OF_A_SOLDIER">FLY LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER.&mdash;PART II. CHEVRONS.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_FIRST_FANATIC">THE FIRST FANATIC.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#SKETCHES_OF_AMERICAN_LIFE_AND_SCENERY">SKETCHES OF AMERICAN LIFE AND SCENERY.&mdash;PART V. THE ADIRONDACS.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#LOIS_PEARL_BERKELEY">LOIS PEARL BERKELEY.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_SCIENTIFIC_UNIVERSAL_LANGUAGE_ITS_CHARACTER_AND_RELATION_TO_OTHER">THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES.&mdash;ARTICLE TWO.</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><a href="#THE_TWO_PLATFORMS">THE TWO PLATFORMS.</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_PROGRESS_OF_LIBERTY_IN_THE_UNITED_STATES" id="THE_PROGRESS_OF_LIBERTY_IN_THE_UNITED_STATES"></a>THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.</h2>
+
+
+<p>There are three classes of persons in the loyal States of this Union who
+proclaim the present civil war unnecessary, and clamor for peace at any
+price: first, a multitude of people, so ignorant of the history of the
+country that they do not know what the conflict is about; secondly, a
+smaller class of better-informed citizens, who have no moral
+comprehension of the inevitable opposition of democracy and aristocracy,
+free society and slave society, and who believe sincerely that a
+permanent compromise or trade can be negotiated between these opposing
+forces in human affairs; thirdly, a clique of demagogues, who are trying
+to use these two classes of people to paralyze the Government, and force
+it into a surrender to the rebels on such terms as they choose to
+dictate: their separation from the United States or recall to their old
+power in a restored and reconstructed Union.</p>
+
+<p>It will be my purpose, in this article, to show the complete fallacy of
+this notion, by presenting the facts concerning the progress of the
+different portions of our country in the American idea of liberty during
+the years preceding this war. The census of 1860, if honestly studied,
+must convince any unprejudiced man, at home or abroad, that the Slave
+Power deliberately brought this war upon the United States, to save
+itself from destruction by the irresistible and powerful growth of free
+society in the Union. This war had the same origin and necessity of
+every great conflict between the people and the aristocracy since the
+world began.</p>
+
+<p>Every war of this kind in history has been the result of the advancement
+of the people in liberty. Now the people have inaugurated the conflict
+against the aristocracy, either in the interest of self-government, or
+an imperial rule which should virtually rest upon their suffrage. Now
+the aristocracy has risen upon the people, who were becoming too strong
+and free, to conquer and govern them through republican or monarchical
+forms of society. There has always been an irrepressible conflict
+between aristocracy and democracy; in times of peace carried on by all
+the agencies of popular advancement; but in every nation finally
+bursting into civil war. And every such war, however slow its progress,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span>or uncertain its immediate consequence, has finally left the mass of
+the people nearer liberty than it found them.</p>
+
+<p>The northern Grecian states represented the cause of the people; and the
+oriental empires the cause of the few. These little states grew so
+rapidly that the despots of Asia became alarmed, and organized gigantic
+expeditions to destroy them. At Marathon and Salamis, the people's cause
+met and drove back the mighty invasion; and two hundred years later,
+under the lead of Alexander, dissolved every Asiatic empire, from the
+Mediterranean to the Euphrates, to its original elements.</p>
+
+<p>Julius C&aelig;sar destroyed the power of the old Roman aristocracy in the
+interest of the people of the Roman empire. Under the name of 'The
+Republic,' that patrician class had oppressed the people of Rome and her
+provinces for years as never was people oppressed before. After fifty
+years of civil war, Julius and Augustus C&aelig;sar organized the masses of
+this world-wide empire, and established a government under which the
+aristocracy was fearfully worried, but which administered such, justice
+to the world as had never before been possible.</p>
+
+<p>The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
+involved the whole of Europe for eighty years, were begun by the civil
+and religious aristocracy of Europe to crush the progress of religious
+and civil liberty among the people. These wars continued until religious
+freedom was established in Germany, Holland, and Great Britain, and
+those seeds of political liberty sown that afterward sprang up in the
+American republic.</p>
+
+<p>The English civil wars of the seventeenth century were begun by the king
+and great nobles to suppress the rising power of the commons, and
+continued till constitutional liberty was practically secured to all the
+subjects of the British empire.</p>
+
+<p>The French Revolution was the revolt of the people of France against one
+of the most cruel and tyrannical aristocracies that ever reigned; and
+continued, with brief interruptions, till the people of both France and
+Italy had vindicated the right to choose their emperors by popular
+suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>During the half century between the years 1775 and 1825, every people in
+North America had thrown off the power of a foreign aristocracy by war,
+and established a republican form of government, except the Canadas,
+which secured the same practical results by more peaceful methods.</p>
+
+<p>The historian perceives that each of these great wars was an inevitable
+condition of liberty for the people, and has exalted their condition. In
+all these struggles there were the same kinds of opponents to the war:
+the ignorant, who knew nothing about it; the morally indifferent, who
+could not see why freemen and tyrants could not agree to live together
+in amity; and the demagogues, who were willing to ruin the country to
+exalt themselves. But we now understand that only through these red
+gates of war could the peoples of the world have marched up to their
+present enjoyment of liberty; that each naming portal is a triumphal
+arch, on which is inscribed some great conquest for mankind.</p>
+
+<p>The present civil war in the United States is the last frantic attempt
+of this dying feudal aristocracy to save itself from inevitable
+dissolution. The election of Mr. Lincoln as President of the United
+States, in 1860, by the vote of every Free State, was the announcement
+to the world that the people of the United States had finally and
+decisively conquered the feudal aristocracy of the republic after a
+civil contest of eighty years. With no weapons but those placed in their
+hands by the Constitution of the United States, the freemen of the
+republic had practically put this great slave aristocracy under their
+feet forever. That portion of the Union which was controlled by the will
+of the whole people had become so decidedly superior in every attribute<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span>
+of power and civilization, that the slave aristocracy despaired of
+further peaceful resistance to the march of liberty through the land.
+Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the
+people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of
+it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy.</p>
+
+<p>This great people was not plunged into civil war by unfriendly talking,
+or by the unfriendly legislation of the Northern people, or by the
+accidental election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Nations do not go
+to war for hard words or trifling acts of unfriendliness or accidental
+political changes; although these may be the ostensible causes of
+war&mdash;the sparks that finally explode the magazine. There was a real
+cause for this rebellion&mdash;<i>the peaceful, constitutional triumph of the
+people over the aristocracy of the republic, after a struggle of eighty
+years</i>. If ever a great oligarchy had good reason to fight, it was the
+Slave Power in 1860. It found itself defeated and condemned to a
+secondary position in the republic, with the assurance that its death
+was only a question of time. It is always a good cause of war to an
+aristocracy that its power is abridged; for an aristocracy cares only
+for itself, and honestly regards its own supremacy as the chief interest
+on earth. This Slave Power has only done what every such power has done
+since the foundation of the world. It has drawn the sword against the
+inevitable progress of mankind, and will be conquered by mankind. It is
+waging this terrible war, not against Northern Abolitionists, or the
+present Administration, <i>but against the United States census tables of
+1860</i>; against the mighty realities of the progress of free society in
+the republic, which have startled us all; but with which no class of men
+were so well acquainted as Mr. Jefferson Davis and his associates in
+rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>There has always been a conflict in our country between this old slave
+aristocracy and the people. The first great victory of the people was in
+the war of the Revolution. That war was inaugurated and forced upon the
+country by the masses of the people of the New England and Middle
+States. The aristocracy of the South, with their associates in the
+North, resisted the movement to separate the people from the crown of
+Great Britain, till resistance was impossible, and then came in, to some
+extent, to lead the movement and appropriate the rewards of success. But
+the free people of the North brought on and sustained the war.
+Massachusetts was then the fourth province in population; but she sent
+eight thousand more soldiers to the field during those bloody eight
+years than all the Southern States united. Virginia was then the empire
+State of the Union, and Rhode Island the least; but great, aristocratic
+Virginia furnished only seven hundred more soldiers than little,
+democratic Rhode Island. New England furnished more than half the troops
+raised during the Revolution; and the great centres of aristocracy in
+the Middle and Southern States were the stronghold of Toryism during the
+war. Indeed, a glance at the map of the Eastern and Middle States
+reveals the fact that the headquarters of the 'peace party' in the
+Revolutionary and the present war are in precisely the same localities.
+The 'Copperhead' districts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are
+the old Tory districts of the Revolution. The Tories of that day, with
+the mass of the Southern aristocracy, tried to 'stop the war' which was
+to lay the foundations of the freedom of all men. The Tories of to-day
+are engaged in the same infamous enterprise, and their fate will be the
+same.</p>
+
+<p>Had the Slave Power been united in 1776, we should never have gained our
+independence. But it was divided. Every State was nominally a Slave
+State; but slaveholders were divided into two classes. The first was led
+by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span> Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other illustrious aristocrats,
+North and South; and, like the Liberal lords of Great Britain, threw
+their influence on the side of the people. This party, very strong in
+Virginia, very weak in the Carolinas, dragged the South through the war
+by the hair of its head; and compelled it to come into the Union. It
+also resolved to abolish the Slave Power, and succeeded in consecrating
+the whole Northwestern territory to freedom as early as 1790. The
+opposition party had its headquarters at Charleston, was treasonable or
+luke-warm during the war, and refused to come into the Union without
+guarantees for slavery.</p>
+
+<p>The result of the whole struggle was, that the people of the thirteen
+colonies, with the help of a portion of their aristocracy, severed the
+country from Great Britain, and established a Government by which they,
+the people, believed themselves able, in time, to control the whole
+Union, and secure personal liberty in every State. For 'the compromises
+of the Constitution' mean just this: that our National Government was a
+great arena on which aristocracy and democracy could have a free fight.
+If the aristocracy beat, that Government would be made as despotic as
+South Carolina; if the democracy triumphed, it would become as free as
+Massachusetts. That was what the people had never before achieved: <i>a
+free field to work for a Christian democracy</i>. God bless the sturdy
+people of New England and the Middle States for this! God bless George
+Washington and Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and the liberal gentlemen
+of the Old Dominion, for helping the people do it. They did not win the
+victory, as many have supposed; but they bravely helped to lead the
+people of the Free States to this great military and civil achievement.
+Virginia was richly paid for the service of her aristocracy. But history
+tells us who did the work, and how nobly it was done.</p>
+
+<p>The republic was now established, with a Constitution which might be
+made to uphold a democratic or an aristocratic government, as either
+party should triumph. The Slave Power, forced half reluctantly into the
+Union, now began to conspire to rule it for its own uses. All that was
+necessary, it thought, was to unite the aristocracy against the people.
+And this work was at once well begun. The first census was taken in
+1790, and the last in 1860. This period divides itself, historically,
+into two portions. The thirty years from 1780 may be regarded as the
+period of the <i>consolidation of the Slave Power, and its first distinct
+appearance as a great sectional aristocracy in 1820, in the struggle
+that resulted in the 'Missouri Compromise</i>.' The forty years succeeding
+1820 may be called the period of the <i>consolidation of freedom to resist
+this assault, and the final triumph of democracy in 1860, by the
+election of a President</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The first thirty years was a period of incessant activity by the slave
+aristocracy. It incurred a nominal loss in the abolition of slavery in
+eight Eastern and Middle States, and the consecration of the great
+Northwestern territory to freedom; out of which three great Free States
+had already been carved; making, in 1820, eleven Free States. But it had
+gained by the concentration of its power below the line of the Ohio and
+Pennsylvania boundary, the division of the territory belonging to the
+Carolinas, and the Louisiana purchase; whereby it had gained five new
+Slave States; making the number of Slave States equal to the
+Free&mdash;eleven. It put forward the liberal aristocracy of Virginia to
+occupy the Presidential chair during thirty-two of the thirty-six years
+between 1789 and 1825; thus compelling Virginia and Maryland to a firm
+alliance with itself. It had man&oelig;uvred the country through a great
+political struggle and a foreign war, both of which were chiefly
+engineered to secure the consolidation of the slave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span> aristocracy. In
+1820 its power was extended in eleven States, containing four hundred
+and twenty-four thousand square miles, with one hundred and seventy-nine
+thousand square miles of territory sure to come in as Slave States; and
+the remainder of the Louisiana purchase not secure to liberty. It had a
+white population only seven hundred thousand less, while its white and
+black population was a million more than all the Free States.</p>
+
+<p>The North was barely half as large in area of States: two hundred and
+seventy thousand square miles, with only one hundred thousand square
+miles in reserve of the territory dedicated to liberty. With an equality
+of representation in the Senate of the United States, and a firm hold of
+all the branches of the Government, the prospect of the oligarchy for
+success was brilliant. In every nation the aristocracy first gets
+possession, organizes first, and proceeds deliberately to seize and
+administer the government. The people are always unsuspicious, slow,
+late in organizing, and seem to blunder into success or be led to it by
+a Providence higher than themselves. In this Government the slave
+aristocracy first consolidated, and in 1820 appeared boldly on the
+arena, claiming the superiority, and threatening ruin to the republic in
+the event of the failure of their plans. It had managed so well that
+there was now no division in its ranks, and for the last forty years has
+moved forward in solid column to repeated assaults on liberty.</p>
+
+<p>The people, as usual, did not suspect the existence of this concentrated
+power till 1820. They made a brave militia fight then against the
+aristocracy, and compelled it to acknowledge a drawn battle by the
+admission of Maine to balance Missouri, and the establishment of a line
+of compromise, which would leave all territory north of 36&deg; 30'
+consecrated to freedom. The Slave Power submitted with anger, intending
+to break the bargain as soon as it was strong enough, and continued on
+its relentless struggle for power. It determined to gain possession of
+the Senate of the United States; make it a house of nobles; control
+through it the foreign policy, the Executive, and the Supreme Court;
+and, with this advantage, reckoned it could always manage the House of
+Representatives and govern the nation. The key to all the political
+policy of the Slave Power through these last forty years is this
+endeavor to capture the Senate of the United States, and hold it, by
+bringing in a superior <i>number</i> of Slave States. So well did it play
+this card that, till 1850, it maintained an equality of senatorial
+representation, and, by the help of Northern allies and the superior
+political dexterity of the aristocracy, controlled our foreign policy;
+kept its own representatives in all the great courts of Europe; made
+peace or war at will; managed the Executive through a veto on his
+appointments; and endeavored to fill the Supreme Court with men in favor
+of its policy, while the House of Representatives never was able to pass
+a measure without its consent. Under the past forty years' reign of the
+Slave Power, the Senate of the United States has been a greater farce in
+the republic than the crown and House of Lords in the British empire.
+Indeed, so well did this aristocracy play its part, <i>that it was
+supposed by the whole world to be the American Government</i>; and the news
+that the people of the United States had refused, in 1860, to register
+its behests, was received abroad with the same astonishment and
+indignation as if there had been a revolt of the subjects of any
+European nation against their anointed rulers.</p>
+
+<p>But spite of these great advantages at the outset&mdash;spite of its
+incredible political activity and admirable concentration, the slave
+aristocracy was finally defeated by the people. How this was done is the
+most interesting narrative in modern history. Never has the intrinsic
+superiority of a democratic over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span> an aristocratic order of society been
+so magnificently vindicated as during the last forty years of our
+national career. During that period the free portion of this Union has
+grown to an overwhelming superiority over the slave portion, and
+compelled the slaveholders to draw the sword to save themselves from
+material and providential destruction.</p>
+
+<p>This period of forty years may be regarded as that of the <i>consolidation
+of the people</i>. The first thirty years of it was the era of their
+<i>industrial and social consolidation</i>; the last ten years has been the
+period of their <i>political union against the Slave Power</i>.</p>
+
+<p>An aristocracy always exhibits the uttermost pitch of human policy in
+its career, and amazes and outwits society by its marvellous display of
+executive ability. But the people are always moved by great supernatural
+forces that are beyond their comprehension, often disowned or scorned by
+them, but which mould their destiny and lead them to a victory spite of
+themselves. The people always grow without conscious plan or method, and
+rarely know their own strength. But there are always a few great men who
+represent their destiny, and, often against their will, direct them in
+the path to liberty. History will record the names of three great men
+who, during the last forty years, have been the most notable figures in
+this consolidation of the people in this republic; three men that the
+implacable hatred of the Slave Power has singled out from all other
+Northern men as special objects of infamy; men who represent the
+industrial, moral, and political phases of the people's growth to
+supremacy. Each came when he was wanted, and faithfully did his work;
+and their history is the chronicle of this advance of liberty in the
+republic.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these men was De Witt Clinton, of New York. No Northern man
+so early discovered the deep game of the Slave Power as he. He was the
+ablest statesman of the North in the days when the aristocracy of the
+South was just effecting its consolidation. He was a prominent candidate
+for the Presidency, and was scornfully put down by the power that ruled
+at Richmond. The slaveholders knew him for their clear-headed enemy, and
+drove him out of the arena of national politics. Never was political
+defeat so auspicious. Cured of the political ambition of his youth, Mr.
+Clinton turned the energies of his massive genius to the <i>industrial
+consolidation of the North</i>. He saw that all future political triumph of
+liberty must rest on the triumph of free labor. He anticipated the
+coming greatness of the Northwest, and boldly devoted his life to the
+inauguration of that system of internal improvements which has made the
+Northern States the mighty, free industrial empire it now is. Within the
+period of ten years lying nearest 1820, the people, under the lead of
+Clinton and his associates, had brought into active operation the three
+great agencies of free labor&mdash;the steamer, the canal, the railroad;
+while our manufacturing industry dates from the same period.</p>
+
+<p>This was the providential movement of a great people, organizing a
+method of labor which should overthrow the American aristocracy. Of
+course the people did not know what all this meant; thousands of the men
+who were foremost in organizing Northern industry did not suspect the
+end; but De Witt Clinton knew. The wiseacres of the city of New York
+nicknamed his canal 'Clinton's Ditch.' It was the first ditch in that
+series of continental 'parallels' by which the people of the North have
+approached the citadel of the Slave Power. They have dug in those vast
+intrenchments for forty years, to such purpose that in 1860 the great
+guns of free labor commanded every plantation in the Union. Pardon them,
+then, O lieutenant-generals of the slavery forces, if they still think
+well of the spade that has dug their highway to power. The Northern
+spade is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[Pg 487]</a></span> a slow machine&mdash;but it will yet shovel the slave aristocracy
+into the Gulf of Mexico as sure as God lives!</p>
+
+<p>Glance over this field of industrial and material growth in the free
+portion of the Union, as it appeared in 1860.</p>
+
+<p>At that time the Free States had increased to nineteen, while the Slave
+States were fifteen, containing eight hundred and seventy-five thousand
+square miles. The people had nine hundred and fifty thousand square
+miles organized into free-labor States, with eight vast Territories,
+containing one million square miles, an area equal to twenty-four States
+as large as New York. In this vast extent of States and Territories,
+including two thirds the land of the Union, there were not a hundred
+slaves. <i>The Government holds all those States and Territories to-day.</i></p>
+
+<p>Look at the position and value of these possessions of freedom. In 1850
+liberty secured the great State of California, and in 1860 the State of
+Kansas. These States insure the possession of the whole Pacific coast,
+the entire mineral wealth of the mountains, the Indian Territory, and
+the vast spaces of Northwestern Texas to freedom, and open Mexico to
+Northern occupation. In the East, freedom had already secured the best
+harbors for commerce; in the Northwest, the granary of the world; the
+inexhaustible mineral wealth of Lake Superior, and the navigation of
+thousands of miles upon the great inland seas that separate the republic
+from the Canadas. From the Northern Atlantic and the Pacific it
+commanded the trade of Europe and Asia. This region embraces the best
+climates of the continent for the habitation of a vigorous race of men,
+and contains all the elements of imperial power.</p>
+
+<p>Freedom had secured, in 1860, a population of twenty millions, while the
+Slave Power had reached but twelve millions, one third of whom were
+slaves. From 1850 to 1860 the Union <i>gained</i> almost as much in
+population as the entire census of 1820; and of that gain the North
+secured forty-one and the South but twenty-seven per cent. The slave
+population increased but twenty-three per cent. At this rate of increase
+the year 1900 will see a population of one hundred millions in the
+Union, of whom nine millions will be negroes, and a vast majority of the
+white population located in territory now free. Between 1820 and 1860
+five million emigrants re&euml;nforced the Union, of which the North received
+the greater portion. Between the war of 1814 and 1860, Great Britain and
+Ireland sent to us more people than inhabited the thirteen States that
+formed the Union, and of this immigrant population there was an excess
+of nine hundred and fifty thousand <i>men</i>&mdash;a nation poured in upon the
+great, free North, to re&euml;nforce the people.</p>
+
+<p>Already was this increase of free population telling upon slave labor in
+Slave States. Even in the Gulf cities Sambo was fast receding before the
+brawny arms of Hans and Patrick. Northwestern Texan was becoming a new
+Germany. Western Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware were rapidly
+losing in slave labor; while along the border had grown up a line of ten
+cities in Slave States, containing six hundred thousand people, of whom
+less than ten thousand were slaves. This line of cities, from Wilmington
+Delaware, to St. Louis, Missouri, was becoming a great cordon of
+free-labor citadels; supported in the rear by another line of Free
+Border-State cities, stretching from Philadelphia to Leavenworth,
+containing nine hundred thousand; thus <i>massing a free population of one
+million five hundred thousand in border cities that overlooked the land
+of despotism</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Then consider the growth of free agriculture. In 1860 the South had a
+cotton and rice crop as her exclusive possession. Already the Northwest
+was encroaching upon her sugar cultivation. Against her agriculture,
+mainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[Pg 488]</a></span> supported by one great staple, which can also be cultivated all
+round the globe, the free North could oppose every variety of crop;
+several of greater value than the boasted cotton. In all the grains, in
+cattle and the products of the dairy, in hay, in fruits; in the superior
+cultivation of land; in the vastly superior value of land; in
+agricultural machinery, probably representing a labor force equal to all
+the slaves&mdash;the superiority of freedom was too evident for discussion.
+<i>The value of agricultural machinery in the Free States had trebled
+between 1850 and 1860</i>. The Homestead Law was the fit result of this
+vast advance of free labor, and has sealed the destiny of every present
+and future Territory of the Union.</p>
+
+<p>Then contemplate the vast expansion of manufacturing industry, of which
+nine tenths belong to the Free States. <i>In ten years from 1850 to 1860,
+this branch of labor had increased eighty-six per cent.</i>, reaching the
+enormous sum of $2,000,000,000; $60 for every inhabitant of the Union. A
+million and a half of people were engaged as operatives therein,
+supporting nearly five millions&mdash;one sixth the whole population of the
+Union; while fully one third our population may be said to directly and
+indirectly live by manufactures.</p>
+
+<p>The increase of iron manufactures in ten years was forty-four per cent.;
+the coal mines reached a treble yield in ten years; $10,000,000, of
+clothing were produced in 1860. The lumber trade had increased
+sixty-four percent, in ten years, reaching $100,000,000. Flouring mills
+showed sixty-five per cent, increase, reaching $225,000,000; spirits,
+$24,000,000; cotton manufactures had increased seventy-six per cent, in
+ten years, reaching $115,000,000; woollens had increased sixty-seven per
+cent.; boots and shoes walked up to $76,000,000, and leather to
+$63,000,000. The fishermen of New England increased mightily. The gold
+of California, copper of the Northwest, the salt of New York and
+Michigan had reached colossal proportions. Whoever studies the
+manufacturing statistics of the North for the past ten years will be at
+no loss to know why the manufacturers of Great Britain are willing to
+sever the Slave States from the Union, to gain a customer it was thus
+supplying in 1860.</p>
+
+<p>Now add to this array of agriculture, manufactures, extent of territory,
+and excess of population, the superiority of the Free States in
+commerce. The tonnage of the Union was twenty-six millions in 1860, the
+fourth of which was the growth of the ten years previous. Out of the one
+thousand and seventy-one ships built in 1860, the 'nation' of South
+Carolina produced one steamer and one schooner! Contemplate the money
+power of the city of New York, the vast capital invested in trade, in
+banks, insurance, and the like, in the North. The slave aristocracy was
+becoming imprisoned in a vast web of financial dependence&mdash;a web that
+war and wholesale repudiation of debts alone could break through.</p>
+
+<p>In 1860 there were in the Union 30,- 600 miles of railroad, costing
+$1,134,- 452,909, four times the extent of 1850. In 1850 only one line
+of railroad connected the Atlantic with the Mississippi. Now, of the
+eight great railroad and canal routes connecting the sea coast with this
+valley, six run through the Free States; transportation on these avenues
+costs but one tenth the old methods. Governor Letcher declares the
+Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has 'abolitionized' Northern and Western
+Virginia, and the Southern rebellion has been especially savage on
+railroads. Whoever would understand one secret of the consolidation of
+the people should study the railroad map of the Northern States, and
+contrast it with the South. It was a fine tribute to the value of the
+railroad that the first use the people made of their new political
+supremacy in 1860 was to pass the bill<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span> for connecting the Atlantic and
+Pacific by the iron rail and the telegraphic wire.</p>
+
+<p>This vast advancement in free labor, from 1820 to 1850, was fitly closed
+in 1850 by the annexation of California to the roll of the Free States,
+securing to liberty the gold mines and the Pacific coast. It is
+impossible to comprehend all the consequences of this step. It was the
+decisive industrial triumph of the people over the slave aristocracy.
+The Slave Power went mad over the defeat, <i>and for the last ten years
+has virtually abandoned the rivalry of industries, and turned to
+violence</i>, breaking of compromises, forcible seizure of the ballot box,
+repudiation of debts, stealing of arms, and finally cruel war, as if
+lying and robbing, in the long run, could upset free and honest
+industry. After the loss of California and the Pacific coast, the
+struggle for the Territories was but a, preliminary skirmish of the war
+for the conquest and desolation of the Union. The people had <i>waged the
+battle of liberty with the gigantic agencies of material prosperity for
+forty years, and the aristocracy was completely in their power</i>.</p>
+
+<p>For this material superiority of the free-labor States inevitably inured
+to the advantage of liberty. In vain did every new Free State, year
+after year, vote with the Slave Power; in vain did every great railroad
+and manufacturing corporation of the North obey the political behests of
+the lords of the plantations; in vain was the mercantile aristocracy of
+all the great cities the fast friend of the slave aristocracy; and
+vainly did almost the entire immigrant population fall politically into
+its control. All this was as nothing <i>against the irresistible natural
+tendency of free labor</i>. The Irishman who voted against the negro was
+breaking his chain with every blow of his pick. The Wall-street banker,
+the great railroad king, the cotton manufacturer, who railed against
+abolitionism like mad, were condemning the slave aristocracy every day
+they lived. There is a divine law by which the work of freemen shall
+root out the work of slaves; and no law enacted by the will of Northern
+doughfaces could repeal this statute of nature. These Northern friends
+of the aristocracy supposed themselves to be helping their ambitious
+allies by their political support. But the slaveholders knew how
+fallacious was this aid. They saw that the North was gaining a huge
+superiority to the South; that the people were slowly consolidating;
+that when the free-labour interest did finally concentrate, it would
+carry every Northern interest with it, and, when the pinch came, no
+Northern party or statesman could or would help them do their will. They
+carefully sifted all offers of aid from such quarters, and having used
+every Northern interest and institution and party till it was squeezed
+dry of all its black blood, they turned their backs haughtily on the
+white sections of the Union, plundered friend and foe alike, and flew
+into civil war, out of spite and rage at the census of 1860; in other
+words, <i>declared war against the providence of God as manifested in the
+progress of free society</i>. They have fought well; at first, perhaps,
+better than we; but when General Lee 'flanks' the industrial decrees of
+the Almighty, and Stuart 'cuts the communications' between free labor
+and imperial power, they will destroy this republic&mdash;and not till then.</p>
+
+<p>But was this great material gain of the people to be accompanied by a
+corresponding spiritual advancement? <i>Was man to become the chief object
+of reverence in this wonderfully expanding industrial empire?</i> If not,
+all this progress was deceptive, and nobody could predict how soon our
+very superiority should be turned to the advantage of that aristocracy
+which had perverted so many things in the republic.</p>
+
+<p>It could not be denied that the Free States were making wonderful
+strides, during these forty years, in mental cul<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span>tivation and power. The
+free industry of the North was an education to the people, and nowhere
+has so much popular intelligence been carried into the business of life
+as here. This period also witnessed the organization of the free school
+everywhere outside of New England, its home; the daily press, the public
+lecture, the creation of an American literature, all Northern; the
+growth of all institutions of learning and means of intellectual and
+artistic cultivation unparalleled in any other age or land. No
+well-informed person could also deny the astonishing progress in
+furnishing the means of religious instruction, the multiplication of
+churches, great ecclesiastical organizations, and philanthropic leagues.
+Notwithstanding the apparent absorption of the North in its material
+prosperity, no people ever was so busy in furnishing itself with the
+means of spiritual improvement; and though a population of several
+millions of ignorant and superstitious foreigners was thrown in upon it
+during these eventful years, it came out at the end the most intelligent
+people, the best provided with the apparatus of religion, that was ever
+known.</p>
+
+<p>But there was one element yet wanting to assure the right usage of all
+this wealth of material, intellectual, and ecclesiastical power. This
+was what the slaveholding aristocracy saw at once to be the fatal omen
+for their cause, and nicknamed 'Abolitionism.' <i>Abolitionism, as
+recognized by the Slave Power, is nothing more nor less than the
+religious reverence for man and his natural rights.</i> This moral respect
+for the nature and rights of all men has always encountered the peculiar
+scorn of aristocracies, and no men have been so bitterly persecuted in
+history as those who represented the religious opposition to despotism.
+The Hebrew aristocracy in old Palestine called this sentiment 'atheism'
+in Jesus Christ, and crucified Him. The pagan aristocracy called it a
+'devilish superstition' in the early Christians, and slaughtered them
+like cattle. The priestly and civil absolutism of the sixteenth century
+called it 'fanaticism' in the Dutch and German reformers, and fought it
+eighty years with fire and rack and sword. The church and crown
+nicknamed it 'Puritanism,' and persecuted it till it turned and cut off
+the head of Charles the First, and secured religious liberty. The slave
+aristocracy stigmatized it 'Abolitionism,' and let loose upon it every
+infernal agency in its power.</p>
+
+<p>One great man, yet alive, but not yet recognized as he will be, was the
+representative of this religious reverence for the rights of man. Lloyd
+Garrison has been, for the last twenty-five years, the best-hated man in
+these Northern States, not because he failed to see just how a Union of
+Free and Slave States could endure; not because of any visionary theory
+of political action or the structure of society he cherished; but,
+strangely enough, because <i>he stood-up for man and his divine right to
+freedom</i>. This was what the aristocracy hated in him, and this is what,
+with inexpressible rage, it saw gaining in the North. It truly said that
+our education, our arts, our literature, our press, our churches, our
+benevolent organizations, our families, all that was best in Northern
+society, even our politics, were being consolidated by this
+'fanaticism,' Puritanism,' 'Abolitionism'&mdash;otherwise, by <i>reverence for
+man and his right to freedom</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It grew, however, almost as fast as the material power of the
+North&mdash;this moral conviction of the divine right of man to liberty; grew
+so fast, that in 1860, South Carolina glanced over the November election
+returns, saw the name of Abraham Lincoln at the head, shrieked, '<i>The
+North is abolitionized!</i>' and rushed out of the Union, with ten other
+Slave States at her heels, while four more were held back by the strong
+arm of the national power. The North is not yet 'abolitionized,' but
+every volley fired at liberty by the Slave Power these last three years,
+has killed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[Pg 491]</a></span> a lover of slavery, and made an Abolitionist; as the juggler
+fires his pistol at your old black hat, and, when the smoke clears up, a
+white dove flutters in its place. If the Slave Power shoots at us long
+enough, we shall all become Abolitionists, and all learn to love our
+fellow man and protect him in the enjoyment of every right given him by
+God!</p>
+
+<p>Thus had the Free States, the people's part of the Union, gone up
+steadily to overshadowing material, intellectual, moral power. But up to
+1850 this mighty growth had got no fit expression in State or national
+politics. All the great parties had mildly tried to remonstrate with the
+slave aristocracy, but quickly recoiled as from the mouth of a furnace.
+A few attempts had been made to organize a party for freedom, but
+nothing could gain foothold at Washington. A few noble men had lifted
+their voices against the rampant tyranny of the slaveholders: chief
+among these was John Quincy Adams, the John the Baptist crying in the
+desert of American partisan politics the coming of the kingdom of
+Heaven! But when the people had come up to a consciousness of their
+consolidated power, and the reverence for human right was changing and
+polarizing every Northern institution&mdash;in the fierce struggle that
+ushered in and succeeded the admission of California, between 1848 and
+1856&mdash;this Northern superiority culminated in a great political movement
+against slavery. <i>This movement assumed a double form-positive, in the
+assertion that the Slave Power should be arrested; negative, in the
+assertion that the people should have their own way with it.</i> The
+Republican party said: <i>The slave aristocracy shall go no farther.</i> The
+'Popular Sovereignty' party, or Douglas Democracy, said: <i>The people
+shall do what they choose about this matter.</i> Now the people were
+already the superior power in the republic, and were rapidly growing to
+hate the Slave Power; so the slaveholders, saw that the Northern
+Democracy, with their war cry of <i>popular sovereignty</i>, might in time be
+just as dangerous to them as their more open enemies. They repudiated
+both forms of Northern politics, and tied the executive, under James
+Buchanan, and the Supreme Court, under Judge Taney, to their dogma: <i>The
+right of the aristocracy is supreme. Slavery, not liberty, is the law of
+the republic.</i></p>
+
+<p>The great leaders of these Northern parties were Stephen H. Douglas and
+William H. Seward. Mr. Douglas was the best practical politician,
+popular debater, and magnetizer of the masses, the North has yet
+produced. <i>He was the representative of the blind power of the North</i>,
+and stood up all his life, in his better hours, for the right of the
+people to make the republic what they would. But the representative
+statesman of the era is the Secretary of State. The whole career of Mr.
+Seward is so interwoven with the history of the political consolidation
+of the people against the Slave Power, that the two must be studied
+together to be understood. Nowhere so clearly and eloquently as in the
+pages of this great philosophical statesman can be read the rapid growth
+of that political movement that in twelve years captured every Free
+State, placed a President in the chair, and then, with a splendid
+generosity, invited the whole loyal people to unite in a party of the
+Union, <i>knowing that henceforth the Union meant the people and liberty
+against the aristocracy and slavery</i>. And only in the light of this view
+can the course of this man and his great seeming opponent, but real
+associate, be fitly displayed. <i>Douglas had taught the people of the
+North that their will should be the law of the republic. Seward had told
+them that will should be in accordance with the 'higher law' of justice
+and freedom.</i> Like men fighting in the dark, they supposed themselves
+each other's enemies, while they were only commanders of the front and
+rear of the army of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[Pg 492]</a></span> the people. Both appeared on the national arena in
+the struggle of 1850, and soon strode to the first place. The Slave
+Power repudiated Seward and his 'higher law' of justice and liberty at
+once. They tolerated Douglas and his 'popular sovereignty ' ten years
+longer, when they found it even a more dangerous heresy, and threw him
+overboard.</p>
+
+<p>In the election of 1860 there were but two parties&mdash;the two wings of the
+people's army, under the patriots Lincoln and Douglas; the two wings of
+the slave host, under the traitors Breckinridge and Bell. Of course the
+people triumphed. Had Douglas been elected instead of Lincoln, the Slave
+Power would not have stayed in the Union one hour longer. <i>It was not
+Lincoln, but the political supremacy of the people they resisted.</i> The
+Free States had at last consolidated, never to recede, and that was
+enough. Henceforth no party could live in the North that espoused the
+cause of this rebel aristocracy. Whoever was Governor or President,
+Democrat, Republican, Union, what not, the people's party was henceforth
+supreme, and the aristocracy, with all its works of darkness, was second
+best.</p>
+
+<p>The political victory of 1860 was virtually complete. For the first time
+in eighty years had the people concentrated against the Slave Power. The
+executive was gained, placing the army, navy, appointments, and
+patronage in the hands of the President, the people's representative by
+birth and choice. The North had a majority of eight in the Senate and
+sixty-five in the House of Representatives, insuring a control of the
+foreign policy and the financial affairs of the republic; while the
+Supreme Court, the last bulwark of despotism, could be reconstructed in
+the interest of the Constitution. It is true the people did not
+appreciate the magnitude of the victory, or realize what it implied.
+They would probably have made no special use of it at once, and the
+aristocracy might have outwitted them again, as they had for three
+quarters of a century past. But the slaveholders knew that now was just
+the time to strike. If they waited till the people understood themselves
+better, and learned how to administer the Government for liberty, it
+would be too late. They still had possession of the executive, with all
+the departments, the Supreme Court, army, and navy, for four precious
+months. This was improved in inflicting as much damage on the Government
+as possible, and organizing a confederacy of revolted States. The people
+did not believe they would fight, and offered them various compromises,
+<i>everything except the thing they desired&mdash;unlimited power to control
+the republic</i>. The aristocracy knew that no compromises would do them
+good which proposed anything less than a reconstruction of the Union
+which would insure their perpetual supremacy. They even doubted if this
+could be effectually accomplished in a peaceful way. The people must
+first be subdued by arms, their Union destroyed, and brought to the
+verge of anarchy by this mighty power, backed by the whole despotism of
+Europe; then might they be compelled to accept such terms as it chose to
+dictate. It waited no longer than was necessary to complete its
+preparations, and opened ed its guns in Charleston harbor. When the
+smoke of that cannonade drifted away, the people beheld with
+consternation the Slave Powers arrayed in arms, from Baltimore and St.
+Louis to New Orleans and the Rio Grande, advancing to seize their
+capital and overthrow the republic.</p>
+
+<p>Having conquered the aristocracy by its industry, education, religion,
+and politics&mdash;driven it from every position on the great field of
+American society in an era of peace&mdash;the people slowly awoke to the
+conviction that they must now conquer it on the field of arms. They were
+slow to come to that conviction. Their ablest leaders were not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span>
+war-statesmen, and did not comprehend at once the full meaning of the
+war. They called it a 'conspiracy,' a 'rebellion,' an 'insurrection,' a
+'summer madness,' anything but what it was&mdash;<i>the American stave
+aristocracy in arms to subdue the people of the United States with every
+other aristocracy on earth wishing it success</i>. But the people did not
+refuse the challenge. In April, 1861, they rushed to the capital, saved
+their Government from immediate capture or dispersion, and then began to
+prepare, after their way, for&mdash;they hardly knew what&mdash;to suppress a riot
+or wage a civil war.</p>
+
+<p>In every such conflict as this the aristocracy has a great advantage,
+especially if it can choose its own time to begin the war. Never was an
+oligarchy more favored in its preparations than ours. Since 1820 it had
+contemplated and prepared for this very hour. It had almost unlimited
+control over fifteen States of the Union. Society was constructed in all
+these States on a military basis, the laboring class being held in place
+by the power of the sword. An aristocracy is always preceded by military
+ambition; for all subordinate orders of its people have acquired the
+habit of respect for rank and implicit obedience to superiors, so
+essential to success in war. When the war broke out, the Slave Power was
+ready. Its arms and ammunition and forts were stolen; its military
+organizations had been perfected in secret societies; its generals were
+selected&mdash;its president perhaps the best general of all; its military
+surveys were made, every Southern State mapped, and every strategical
+point marked; its subordinate officers, in which the real efficiency of
+an army consists, had been educated in military schools kept by such
+teachers as Hill and Stonewall Jackson. It had a full crop of cotton as
+a basis for finance. Its government was practically such a despotism as
+does not exist in the world. At the sound of the first gun in
+Charleston, the aristocracy sprang to arms; in a fortnight every
+strategical point in fifteen States was practically in its possession,
+and Washington tottered to its fall.</p>
+
+<p>The people, as the people always are, were unprepared for war. Their
+entire energies had been concentrated for forty years in organizing the
+gigantic victory of peace which they had just achieved. When they woke
+up to the idea that there was yet another battle to be fought before the
+aristocracy would subside, they <i>began to learn the art of war</i>. And
+never did the people begin a great war so unprepared. The people of
+Europe have always had military traditions and cultivation to fall back
+upon in their civil wars. The North had no military traditions later
+than the Revolution, for no war since that day had really called forth
+their hearty efforts. Three generations of peace had destroyed even
+respect for war as an employment fit for civilized men. There were not
+ten thousand trained soldiers in all the nineteen States in April, 1861.
+There were not good arms to furnish fifty thousand troops in the
+possession of the National or loyal State Governments. Most of the
+ablest military men of the North had left the army, and were engaged in
+peaceful occupations. Halleck was in the law; McClellan, Burnside,
+Banks, on the railroad; Mitchel and Sigel teaching schoolboys; Hooker,
+Kearny, McCall, Dix, retired gentlemen; Fremont digging gold; Rosecrans
+manufacturing oil, and Grant in a tanyard; and so on to the end of the
+chapter; while Scott, the patriot hero, who was but once defeated in
+fifty years' service, was passing over into the helplessness of old age.
+Of course such a people did not realize the value of military education,
+and fell into the natural delusion that a multitude of men carrying guns
+and wearing blue coats is an army; and any 'smart man' can make a
+colonel in three months. There was not even a corporal in the Cabinet,
+and Mr,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span> Lincoln's military exploits were confined to one campaign, in
+the war of 1812, and one challenge to fight a duel. There were not ten
+Northern men in Congress who could take a company into action. In short,
+we had the art of war to learn; even did not know it was necessary to
+learn to fight as to do anything else; especially to fight against an
+aristocracy that had been studying war for forty years.</p>
+
+<p>For more than three years have the people of the United States waged
+this gigantic war thus precipitated upon them by their aristocracy to
+arrest the irresistible growth of modern society in the republic. Every
+year has been a period of great success, though our peaceful population,
+unacquainted with war, and often ignorant of the vast issues of this
+conflict, have often inclined to despondency. Of course the aristocracy
+fought best, at first, as every aristocracy in the world has done. With
+half our number of better disciplined troops, better commanded and
+man&oelig;uvred, and the great advantage of interior lines, supported by
+railroad communications, and possessing in Virginia, perhaps, the most
+defensible region in the Union, they held our Army of the Potomac at bay
+for two years; have thrice overrun Maryland and the Pennsylvania border,
+and yet hold their fortified capital; while every step of our victorious
+progress in the Southwest has been bitterly contested. Yet this war of
+martial forces has been strangely like the long, varied war of material,
+moral, and political forces of which it is the logical sequel.</p>
+
+<p>The Union navy won the earliest laurels in the war. The navy has been
+the right arm of the people in all ages. The Athenian navy repelled the
+invasion of Greece by the Persian empire. Antony, Pompey, C&aelig;sar, the
+people's leaders in Rome, built up their youthful power upon the sea.
+The Dutch and English navies saved religious and civil liberty in the
+sixteenth century; and all the constitutional Governments that now exist
+in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United
+States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the
+seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the
+continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of
+defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval
+power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active
+navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over
+the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in
+the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred
+vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of
+naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever
+known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port
+Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all
+its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of
+Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia,
+seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed
+every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we
+are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more
+will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect
+the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or
+their friends abroad.</p>
+
+<p>But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently
+behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was
+only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending
+against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it
+wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the
+capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the
+campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have
+conquered from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span> aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an
+area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of
+people&mdash;a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave
+State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really
+put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the
+national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and
+Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have
+never lost a decisive battle, we have saved all the Territories of the
+United States, cut the 'Confederacy' in two equal parts, holding the
+western division at our mercy, opened the Mississippi and all its
+tributaries, and crowded the rebellion into the five States nearest the
+Atlantic coast. In the east we have fought a score of battles with the
+most formidable army ever marshalled on this continent, composed of the
+flower of the rebel soldiery led by their best generalship, and, spite
+of frequent repulses, have forced it from the Potomac and below the
+Rappahannock to the James, away from the smell of salt water, holding
+firmly every seaport from Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, and
+a belt of land and water commanding the approach to the interior of
+every Atlantic State. The military force of the rebellion is rapidly
+being crowded into one army, not exceeding two hundred and fifty
+thousand men, against which the mighty power of the Union can be
+marshalled in overwhelming array. I know well enough that the decisive
+moment will really come when we confront that desperate and veteran
+host, on which the fate of aristocratic government upon this continent
+depends. But we shall then have a great army of veterans, marshalled
+under commanders fit to lead them in the name of liberty and the people.</p>
+
+<p>It is not strange it has taken us three years to find who can fight
+among us. The Germans fought fifty years against religious despotism
+before they found Gustavus Adolphus to lead them to victory. The English
+fought ten years before Cromwell took command of his Ironsides. The
+French blundered ten years before the 'little corporal' led the army of
+the republic over the Alps to dethrone half the monarchs of Europe. The
+people had but one great general in the Revolutionary War. Until 1860
+the aristocracy had furnished the only great American commander. But
+great generals have now appeared among the people; and if we fight
+stoutly and treat men fairly, our commander will appear when his army of
+veterans is ready.</p>
+
+<p>The aristocracy at first moved armies faster than the people, for the
+same reason that the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Arabs, the Indians, and
+all semi-barbarians move more rapidly in war than a civilized people. A
+semi-barbarous oligarchy fights because it loves war; a civilized people
+fights to <i>establish civilization and peace</i>. The Southern army carries
+little along, lives on the food and wears the dress of the semi-savage,
+and overruns vast spaces, leaving a smoking desolation and a ruined
+society. The Northern army moves slowly, because it carries American
+civilization in its knapsack and baggage wagons, organizes republican
+society as it goes, and prepares to hold for liberty all it has gained.
+The people's army has paved the way for liberty and a democratic order
+of society over two hundred thousand square miles, among four millions
+of people, in three years. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Beaufort,
+Alexandria, every slave city in our possession, is being made over into
+a free city.</p>
+
+<p>The army goes slow because it is only the people's pioneer to level the
+mountains and fill up the valleys, and construct the highway of liberty
+from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The Secretary of State has well
+said: '<i>The war means the dissolution of slave society.</i>' It was entered
+into with the distinct understanding that it was the last ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span>pedient to
+save the negro oligarchy from ruin, and every day it goes on its
+thundering course it more emphatically pronounces its doom. The war for
+the Union is the people's final contest for liberty, a contest in which
+they will be victorious, as in the strife of industry, morals, and
+politics. The people, like John Brown's soul, are 'marching on' to
+dissolve the slave oligarchy and establish democracy. The people now
+possess three fourths the territory, population, and wealth of the
+republic. There are yet some six million black and white people in the
+South to rescue from their masters, who now use them against us. They
+are being prepared for Union with us by this war. The poor white man
+will be made better, more intelligent, more ambitious even, by service
+in the rebel army, and on the return of peace will become the small
+farmer of a free soil. The black men will be raised, in due time made
+freemen, and start as a free peasantry on a new career. A hundred
+thousand slaveholders, with their families, not more than one million of
+people in all, will hate the Union permanently. They will be defeated,
+we hope and believe, and disorganized as a social and political power,
+and the people rule in every State they have cursed by their ambition
+for the last fifty years.</p>
+
+<p>We do not prophesy just when or how the people will triumph. The
+victory, we believe, will come; but whether all at once, or through
+temporary revulsions of purpose and alternate truce and war, whether
+finished by arms or yet cast again into the arena of polities, whether
+by occupying all this three millions of square miles of territory or
+gaining on despotism year by year, nobody knows. The Slave Power has not
+yet played its trump card. It has a hundred devilish resources yet to
+foil us. It may yet try to use the negroes it still holds against us by
+emancipation. It may yet drag us into a war with Europe, and Saratoga
+and Lake Erie and Plattsburg, and Long Island and Trenton and Bunker
+Hill, and Detroit and New Orleans may yet be fought over again. But we
+have seen how, for the last forty years, the people of the United States
+have strode on toward supremacy, led by a Power they did not always
+recognize, and sometimes scorned, but led to victory spite of
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>There has indeed been a Divine Intelligence guiding the destiny of our
+republic by the 'higher law' of the progress of free society toward a
+Christian democracy. We do not think the Peace Party will be able to
+abolish that 'higher law,' as certain of our politicians expect. We
+believe God Almighty is shaping a free and exalted civilized nation out
+of this republic, by a law of progress which we did not make and cannot
+repeal. We may postpone that nation by our folly and sins, but it must
+be made. Through labor and education, and religion and arts, and
+politics and war, 'it marches' on to supremacy&mdash;<i>the people's nation</i>.
+And when it is established it will be the controlling nation of this
+continent, one of the firmest powers on the earth, the terror of every
+aristocracy, and the joy and hope of every people on the round globe.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[Pg 497]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_UNDIVINE_COMEDY-A_POLISH_DRAMA" id="THE_UNDIVINE_COMEDY-A_POLISH_DRAMA"></a>THE UNDIVINE COMEDY-A POLISH DRAMA.</h2>
+
+<h2>Dedicated to Mary</h2>
+
+
+<h3>PART III.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Il fut administ&eacute;, parceque le niais demandait un pr&egrave;tre, puis
+pende &agrave; la satisfaction generale,' etc, etc.&mdash;<i>Rapport du citoyen
+Gaillot, commissaire de la sixi&egrave;me chambre, an III., 5 prairial.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The sacraments were administered to him, because the fool demanded
+a priest; he was hung to the general satisfaction.'&mdash;<i>Report of
+citizen Gaillot, commissary of the sixth session, 3d year, 5th
+prairial.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p>A song! a new song!</p>
+
+<p>Who will begin it? Who will end it?</p>
+
+<p>Give me the Past, clad in steel, barbed with iron, floating in knightly
+plumes! With magic power I would invoke before you gothic towers and
+castellated turrets, bristling barbacans and mighty arches, baronial
+halls and clustered shafts; I would throw around you the giant shadows
+of vaulted domes and of revered cathedrals: but it may not be; all that
+is with the Past: the Past is never to return!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Speak, whosoever thou mayst be, and tell me in what thou believest! It
+is easier to lose thy life than to invent a faith; to awaken any belief
+in it!</p>
+
+<p>Shame upon you all, great and small, for all things pursue their own
+course in defiance of your schemes! You may be mean and wretched,
+without hearts and without brains, yet the world hastens to its allotted
+destiny; it hurries you on whether you will or no, throws you in the
+dust, tosses you into wild confusion, or whirls you in resistless
+circles, which cease not until they grow into dances of Death! But the
+world rolls on&mdash;on; clouds and storms arise and vanish; then it grows
+slippery&mdash;new couples join the dance of Death&mdash;they totter&mdash;fall&mdash;lost
+in an abyss of blood&mdash;for it is slippery-blood-human blood is gushing
+everywhere, as if the path to peace led through a charnel house!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Behold the crowds of people thronging the gates of the cities, the
+hills, the valleys, and resting beneath the shadows of the trees! Tents
+are spread about, long boards are placed on the trunks of fallen trees
+or on pikes and sticks to serve as tables; they are covered with meat
+and drink, the full cups pass from hand to hand, and, as they touch the
+eager mouth, threats, oaths, and curses press forth from the hot lips.
+Faster and faster fly the cups from hand to hand, beaded, bubbling,
+glittering, always filling, striking, tinkling, ringing, as they circle
+among the millions: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup of drunkenness and
+joy!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How fiercely they are agitated; how impatiently they wait! They murmur,
+they break into riotous noise!</p>
+
+<p>Poor wretches! scarcely covered with their miserable rags, the seal of
+weary labors deeply stamped upon their sunburnt faces set with uncombed,
+bristling hair, the sweat starting from their rugged brows, their strong
+and horny hands armed with scythes, axes, hammers, hatchets, spades!</p>
+
+<p>Look at that broad youth with the pickaxe; at the slight one with the
+sword. Here is one who holds aloft a glittering pike; another who
+brandishes a massive club with his brawny arm! There under the willows a
+boy crams cherries into his mouth with the one hand, and with the other
+punches the tree with a long, sharp awl. Women are also there, wives,
+mothers, daughters, poor and hungry as the men, Not a single trace of
+womanly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[Pg 498]</a></span> beauty, of healthful freshness upon them; their hair is
+disordered and sprinkled with the dust of the highways, their tawny
+bodies scarcely covered with unsightly rags, their gloomy eyes seem
+fading into their sockets, only half open as if gluing together in very
+weariness: but they will soon be quickened, for the full cup flies from
+lip to lip, they quaff long draughts: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup
+of drunkenness and joy!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Hark! a noise and rustling among the masses! Is it joy, or is it grief?
+Who can read the meaning of a thing so monstrously multiform!</p>
+
+<p>A man arrives, mounts a table, harangues and sways the multitude. His
+voice drags and grates upon the ear, but hacks itself into sharp, strong
+words, clearly heard and easily understood; his gestures are slow and
+light, accompanying his words as music, song. His brow is high and
+strong, his head is entirely bald; thought has uprooted its last hair.
+His skin is dull and tawny, the blood never tinges its dingy pallor, no
+emotion ever paints its secrets there, yellow wrinkles form and cross
+between the bones and muscles of his face, and a dark beard, like a
+black wreath, encircles it from temple to temple. He fastens a steady
+gaze upon his hearers, no doubt or hesitation ever clouds his clear,
+cold eye. When he raises his arm and stretches it out toward the people,
+they bow before him, as if to receive, prostrate, the blessing of a
+<i>great intellect</i>, not that of a <i>great heart</i>! Down, down with the
+great hearts! Away, away with old prejudices! Hurrah! hurrah! for the
+words of consolation! Hurrah for the license to murder!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This man is the idol of the people, their passion, the ruler of their
+souls, the stimulator of their enthusiasm. He promises them bread and
+money, and their cries rise like the rushing of a storm, widening and
+deepening in every direction: 'Long live Pancratius! Hurrah! Bread and
+money! Bread for us, our wives, our children! Hurrah! hurrah!'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>At the feet of the speaker, leaning against the table on which he
+stands, rests his friend, companion, and disciple. His eye is dark and
+oriental, shadowed by long and gloomy lashes, his arms hang down, his
+limbs bend under him, his body is badly formed and distorted, his mouth
+is sensual and voluptuous, his expression is sharp and malicious, his
+fingers are laden with rings of gold&mdash;he joins the tumult, crying with a
+rough, hoarse voice: 'Long live Pancratius!' The speaker looks at him
+carelessly for a moment, and says: 'Citizen, Baptized, hand me a
+handkerchief!'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Meantime the uproar continues; the cries become more and more
+tumultuous: 'Bread for us! Bread! bread! Long live Pancratius! Death to
+the nobles! to the merchants! to the rich! Bread! bread! Bread and
+blood! Hurrah! hurrah!'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A tabernacle. Lamps. An open book lies on a table. Baptized Jews.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> My wretched brethren; my revenge-seeking, beloved
+brethren! let us suck nourishment from the pages of the Talmud, as from
+the breast of our mother; it is the breast of life from which strength
+and honey flow for us, bitterness and poison for our enemies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Baptized Jews.</span> Jehovah is our God, and ours alone; therefore
+has He scattered us in every land!</p>
+
+<p>Like the coiled folds of an enormous serpent, He has wreathed us
+everywhere round and through the adorers of the cross; our lithe and
+subtile rings pass round and through our foolish, proud, unclean
+rulers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us thrice spew them forth to destruction! Threefold curses light
+upon them!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Rejoice, my brethren! the Cross of our Great Enemy is
+already more than half hewn down; it is rotting to its fall; it is only
+standing on a root of blood: if it once plunge into the abyss it will
+never rise again. Hitherto the nobles have been its sole defence, but
+they are ours! ours!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Baptized Jews.</span> Our work, our long, long work of centuries, our
+sad, ardent, painful work is almost done!</p>
+
+<p>Death to the nobles&mdash;let us thrice spew them forth to destruction!
+Threefold curses light upon them!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> The might of Israel shall be built upon a liberty without
+law or order, upon a slaughter without end, upon the <i>pride</i> of the
+nobility, the <i>folly</i> of the masses. The nobles are almost destroyed; we
+must drive the few still left into the abyss of death, and scatter over
+their livid corpses the ruins of the shattered cross in which they
+trusted!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Baptized Jews.</span> The cross is now our holy symbol; the water of
+baptism has reunited us with men; the scorning repose upon the love of
+the scorned!</p>
+
+<p>The freedom of men is our cry; the welfare of the people our aim; ha!
+ha! the eons of Christ trust the sons of Caiaphas!</p>
+
+<p>Centuries ago our fathers tortured our Great Enemy to death; we will
+again torture him to death this very day&mdash;but He will never rise more
+from the grave which we prepare for Him!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Yet a little space, a little time, a few drops of poison,
+and the whole world will be our own, my brethren!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Baptized Jews.</span> Jehovah is the God of Israel, and of it alone.</p>
+
+<p>Let us thrice spew forth the nations to destruction! Threefold curses
+light upon them!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+Knocking is heard at the door.
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Take up your work, brethren! And thou, Holy Book, away
+from sight&mdash;no unclean look shall soil thy spotless leaves! Who is
+there?</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+Hides the Talmud.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voice</span> (<i>without</i>). A friend. Open in the name of freedom.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Quick to your hammers and looms, my brethren!</p>
+
+<p class="right">He opens the door.
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+Enter Leonard.
+</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Well done, citizens. You watch, I see, and whet your swords for
+to-morrow.&mdash;(<i>Approaching one of the men:</i>) What are you making here in
+this corner?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One of the Baptized.</span> Ropes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> You are right, citizen, for he who falls not by iron must hang!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Citizen Leonard, is the thing really to come off
+to-morrow?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> He who thinks, feels, and acts with the most force among us,
+has sent me to you to appoint an interview. He will himself answer your
+question.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> I go to meet him. Brethren, remain at work. Look well to
+them, citizen Yankel.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Exit with Leonard.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Baptized Jews.</span> Ye ropes and daggers, ye clubs and bills, the
+works of our hands, ye wilt go forth to destroy them!</p>
+
+<p>The people will kill the nobles upon the plains, will hang them in the
+forests, and then, having none to defend them, we will kill and hang the
+people! The Despised will arise in their anger, will array themselves in
+the might of Jehovah: His Word is Redemption and Love for His people
+Israel, but scorn and fury for their enemies!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Let us thrice spew them forth to destruction: threefold curses fall upon
+them!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<blockquote><p>
+A tent. A profusion of flasks, cups, and
+flagons. Pancratius alone.
+</p></blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. The mob howled in applause but a moment ago, shouted in loud
+hurrahs at every word I uttered. But is there a single man among them
+all who really understands my ideas, or who comprehends the end and aim
+of that path upon which we have entered, or where the reforms will
+terminate which have been so loudly inaugurated within the last hour?
+'Ah! fervidum imitatorum pecus!'</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+Enter Leonard and the Baptized Jew.
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Do you know Count Henry?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. I know him well by sight, great citizen, but I am not
+personally acquainted with him. I remember once when I was approaching
+the Lord's Supper, he cried to me, '<i>Out of the way!</i>' and looked down
+upon me with the arrogant look peculiar to the nobles&mdash;for which I vowed
+him a rope in my soul.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Prepare to visit him early to-morrow morning, and announce
+to him that it is my wish to confer with him alone.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. How many men will you send with me on this embassy? I do
+not think it would be safe to undertake it without a guard.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. You must go alone, my name will be sufficient guard, and the
+gallows on which you hung the baron yesterday, your shield.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. Woe is me!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Tell him I will visit him to-morrow night.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. And if he should put me in chains or order me to be hung?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. You would die a martyr for the freedom of the people!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. I will sacrifice all for the freedom of the
+people.&mdash;(<i>Aside</i>.) Woe is me!&mdash;(<i>Aloud.</i>) Good night, citizen.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Exit the Baptized.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. Pancratius, why this delay, these half measures, these
+contracts, this strange interview? When I swore to honor and obey you,
+it was because I believed you to be a hero of extremes, an eagle flying
+even in the face of the sun directly to its aim; a brave man ready to
+venture all upon the cast of a die.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Silence, child!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. Everything is ready; the baptized Jews have forged arms and
+woven ropes; the masses clamor for immediate orders. Speak but the word
+now, and the electric sparks will fly, the millions flash into forked
+lightnings, kindle into flame, and consume our enemies!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. You are young, and the blood mounts rapidly into your brain;
+but will the hour of combat find you more resolute than myself?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. Think well what you are doing. The nobles, weak and exhausted,
+have fled for refuge to the famous fortress of the Holy Trinity,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and
+await our arrival, as men wait the knife of the guillotine.</p>
+
+
+<p>Forward, citizen, attack them without delay, and it is over with them
+forever!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. It can make no difference; they have lost the old energy of
+their caste in luxury and idleness. To-morrow or the next day they must
+fall, what matter which?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. What and whom do you fear, and why do you delay?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. I fear nothing. I act but in accordance with my own will.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. And am I to trust it blindly?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[Pg 501]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Yes. Blindly.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. You may betray us, citizen!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Betrayal rings forever from your lips like the refrain of an
+old song.</p>
+
+<p>But hush! not so loud&mdash;if any one should hear us ...</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. There are no spies here; and what if some one should hear us?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Nothing; only five balls in your heart for having ventured
+to raise your voice a tone too high in my presence. (<i>Approaching close
+to him</i>.) Leonard, trust me, and be tranquil!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. I confess I have been too hasty, but I fear no punishment. If
+my death could help the cause of the down-trodden masses, I would
+cheerfully die.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. You are full of life, hope, faith. Happiest of men, I will
+not rob you of the bliss of existence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. What do you say, citizen?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Think more; speak less; the time will come when you will
+fully understand me!</p>
+
+<p>Have you collected the provisions for the carousal of the millions?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. They have all been sent to the arsenal under guard.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Has the contribution from the shoemakers been received?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. It has. Every one gave with the greatest eagerness; it amounts
+to a hundred thousand.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. They must all be invited to a general festival to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>Have you heard nothing of Count Henry?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. I despise the nobles too deeply to credit what I hear of him.
+The dying race have no energy left; it is impossible they should dare or
+venture aught.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. And yet it is true that he is collecting and training his
+serfs and peasants, and, confiding in their devotion and attachment to
+himself, intends leading them to the relief of the fortress of the Holy
+Trinity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. Who can oppose us? <i>The ideas of our century stand incorporated
+in us!</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. I am determined to see Count Henry, to gaze into his eyes,
+to read the very depths of his brave spirit, to win him over to the
+glorious cause of the people.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. An aristocrat, body and soul!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. True: but also a Poet!</p>
+
+<p>Good night, Leonard, I would be alone.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. Have you forgiven me, citizen?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Sleep in peace: if I had not forgiven you, you would ere
+this have slept the eternal sleep.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. And will nothing take place to-morrow?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. Good night, and pleasant dreams!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Leonard is retiring.
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Ho, Leonard!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. Citizen general?</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. You will accompany me day after morrow on my visit to Count
+Henry.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span>. I will obey.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Exit Leonard.
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span>. How is it that this man, Count Henry, still dares to resist
+and defy <i>me</i>, the ruler of millions? His forces will bear no comparison
+with mine; indeed he stands almost alone, although it is true that some
+hundred or two of peasants, confiding blindly in his word and clinging
+to him as the dog clings to his master, still cluster round him&mdash;but
+that is all folly, and can amount to nothing. Why, then, do I long to
+see him, long to win him to our side? Has my spirit for the first time
+encountered its equal?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[Pg 502]</a></span> Can it progress no farther in the path in which
+he stands to oppose me? His resistance is the last obstacle to be
+overcome&mdash;he must be overthrown&mdash;and then? ... and then! ...</p>
+
+<p>O my cunning intellect! Canst thou not deceive <i>thyself</i> as thou hast
+deceived others?...</p>
+
+<p>Shame! thou shouldst know thine own might! Thou art <i>thought</i>, the
+intelligence and reason of the people&mdash;the ruler of the masses&mdash;thou
+controllest the millions, so that their will and giant force is <i>one</i>
+with <i>thine</i>&mdash;all authority and government are incarnated and
+concentrated in thee alone&mdash;all that would be crime in others is in thee
+fame and glory&mdash;thou hast given name and place to unknown and obscure
+men&mdash;thou hast given faith and eloquence to beings who had been almost
+robbed of moral sentiment&mdash;thou hast created a new world in thine own
+image, and <i>art thyself its god</i>! and yet ... and yet ... thou art
+wandering in unknown wastes, and fearest to be lost thyself&mdash;to go
+astray!</p>
+
+<p>Thou knowest not thyself, nor of what thou art capable; thou rulest
+others, yet doubt'st thyself&mdash;thou knowest not what thou art&mdash;whither
+thou goest&mdash;nor whence thou earnest! No ... no.... Thou art sublime!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>
+Sinks upon a chair in silent thought.
+</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A forest, with a cleared hill in its midst, upon which stands a
+gallows; huts, tents, watchfires, barrels, tables, and crowds of
+men. The Man disguised in a dark cloak and red liberty cap, and
+holding the Baptized Jew by the hand.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span>. Remember!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span> (<i>in a whisper</i>). Upon my honor, I will lead your
+excellency aright, I will not betray you.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span>. Give but one suspicious wink, raise but a finger, and my bullet
+finds its way to your heart! You may readily imagine that I attach no
+great value to your life when I thus lightly risk my own.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. Oh woe! You press my hand like a vice of steel. What is it
+you wish me to do?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span>. Appear to the crowd as if I were an acquaintance&mdash;treat me as a
+newly arrived friend.</p>
+
+<p>What kind of a dance is that?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. The dance of a free people.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Men and woman dance, leap, and sing round the gallows.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Their Chorus</span>. Bread! meat! work! wood in winter, rest in summer! Hurrah!
+hurrah!</p>
+
+<p>God had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!</p>
+
+<p>Kings had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!</p>
+
+<p>The nobles had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!</p>
+
+<p>We renounce God, kings, and nobles: Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span> (<i>to a maiden</i>). I am glad to see you look so gay, so blooming.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Maiden</span>. I am sure we have waited quite long enough for such a day as
+this! I have washed dishes and cleaned knives and forks all my life,
+without ever having heard a kind word spoken to me: it is high time I
+too should begin to eat, to dance, to make merry. Hurrah! hurrah!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span>. Dance, citizeness!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. For God's sake, be cautious, count! You may be recognized;
+let us go!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span>. If any one should recognize me, you are lost. We will mingle
+with the throng.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span>. A crowd of servants are sitting under the shade of this
+oak.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span>. Let us approach them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">First Servant</span>. I have just killed my first master.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Second Servant</span>. And I am on the search for my baron. Your health,
+citizens!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Valet de Chambre</span>. In the sweat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span> of our brows, in the depths of
+humiliation, licking the dust from the boots of our masters, and
+prostrate before them, we have yet always felt our rights as men: let us
+drink the health of our present society!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Servants.</span> Here's to the health of our citizen President! one
+of ourselves, he will lead us to glory!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Valet de Chambre.</span> Thanks, citizens, thanks!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Servants.</span> Out of dark kitchens, dressing rooms, and
+antechambers, our prisons of old, we rush together into freedom: Hurrah!</p>
+
+<p>We know the ridiculous follies, peevishness, and perversity of our
+masters; we have been behind the shows and shams of glittering halls:
+Hurrah!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Whose voices are those I hear so harsh and wild from that
+little mound on our left?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> The butchers are singing a chorus.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of the Butchers.</span> The cleaver and axe are our weapons; our life is
+in the slaughter house; we know the hue of blood, and care not if we
+kill <i>cattle</i> or <i>nobles</i>!</p>
+
+<p>Children of blood and strength, we look with indifference upon the pale
+and weak; he who needs us, has us; we slaughter beeves for the nobles;
+the nobles for the people!</p>
+
+<p>The cleaver and axe are our arms; our life is in the slaughter house:
+Hurrah for the slaughter house! the slaughter house! the slaughter
+house! the slaughter house!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Come! I like the next group better; honor and philosophy are at
+least named in it. Good evening, madame!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> It would be better if your excellency should say,
+'citizeness,' or 'woman of freedom.'</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Woman.</span> What do you mean by the title, 'madame?' From whence did it come?
+Fie! fie! you smell of mould!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Pardon my mistake!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Woman.</span> I am as free as you, I am a free woman; I give my love freely to
+the community, because they have acknowledged my right to lavish it
+where I will!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> And have the community given you for it these jewelled rings,
+these chains of violet amethysts?... O thrice beneficent community!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Woman.</span> No, the community did not give them to me; but at my
+emancipation I took these things secretly from the casket of my husband,
+for he was my enemy, the enemy of freedom, and had long held me
+enslaved!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Citizeness, I wish you a most agreeable promenade!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>They pass on.</p></div>
+
+<p>Who is this marvellous-looking warrior leaning upon a two-edged sword,
+with a death's head upon his cap, another upon his badge, and a third
+upon his breast? Is he not the famous Bianchetti, a condottiere employed
+by the people, as the condottieri once were by the kings and nobles?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Yes, it is Bianchetti; he has been with us for the last
+eight or ten days.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span> (<i>to Bianchetti</i>). What is General Bianchetti considering with
+so much attention?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Bianchetti.</span> Look through this opening in the woods, citizen, and you
+will see a castle upon a hill: with my glass I can see the walls,
+ramparts, bastions, etc.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> It will be hard to take, will it not?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Bianchetti.</span> Kings and devils! it can be surrounded by subterranean
+passages, undermined, and....</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span> (<i>winking at Bianchetti</i>). Citizen general....<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span> (<i>in a whisper to the Baptized</i>). Look under my cloak how the
+cock of my pistol is raised!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span> (<i>aside</i>). Oh woe!&mdash;(<i>Aloud.</i>) How do you mean to conduct
+the siege, citizen general?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Bianchetti.</span> Although you are my brother in freedom, you are not my
+confidant in strategy. After the capitulation of the castle, my plans
+will be made public.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span> (<i>to the Baptized</i>). Take my advice, Jew, and strike him dead,
+for such is the beginning of all aristocracies.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Weaver.</span> Curses! curses! curses!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Poor fellow! what are you doing under this tree, and why do you
+look so pale and wild?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Weaver.</span> Curses upon the merchants and manufacturers! All the best
+years of my life, years in which other men love maidens, meet in wide
+plains, or sail upon vast seas, with free air and open space around
+them, I have spent in a narrow, dark, gloomy room, chained like a galley
+slave to a silk loom!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Take some food! Empty the full cup which you hold in your hand!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Weaver.</span> I have not strength enough left to carry it to my lips! I am so
+tired; I could scarcely crawl up here&mdash;it is the day of freedom! but a
+day of freedom is not for me&mdash;it comes too late, too late!&mdash;(<i>He falls,
+and gasps out</i>:) Curses upon the manufacturers who make silks! upon the
+merchants, who buy them! upon the nobles, who wear them! Curses! curses!
+curses!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He writhes on the ground and dies.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> What a ghastly corpse!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Baptized Jew, citizen, poltroon of freedom, look upon this
+lifeless head, shining in the blood-red rays of the setting sun! Where
+are now your words and promises; the equality, perfectibility, and
+universal happiness of the human race?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span> (<i>aside</i>). May you soon fall into a like ruin, and the dogs
+tear the flesh from your rotting corpse!&mdash;(<i>Aloud.</i>) I beg that your
+excellency will now permit me to return, that I may give an account of
+my embassy!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> You may say that, believing you to be a spy, I forcibly
+detained you.&mdash;(<i>Looking around him.</i>) The tumult and noise of the
+carousal is dying away behind us; before us there is nothing to be seen
+but fir and pine trees bathed in the crimson rays of sunset.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Clouds are gathering thick and fast over the tops of the
+trees: had you not better return to your people, Count Henry, who have
+been waiting so long for you in the vault of St. Ignatius?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Thank you for your exceeding care of me, Sir Jew! But back! I
+will return and take another look at the festival of the citizens.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voices</span> (<i>under the trees</i>). The children of Ham bid good night to thee,
+old Sun!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voice</span> (<i>on the right</i>). Here's to thy health, old enemy! Thou hast long
+driven us on to unpaid work, and awaked us early to unheeded pain! Ha!
+ha! When thou risest upon us to-morrow, thou wilt find us with fish and
+flesh: now off to the devil, empty glass!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> The bands of peasants are coming this way.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> You shall not leave me. Place yourself behind this tree trunk,
+and be silent!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Peasants.</span> Forward, forward, under the white tents to meet our
+brethren! Forward, forward, under the green shade of the beeches, to
+rest, to sleep, to pleasant sunset greetings!</p>
+
+<p>Our maidens there await us; there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span> await us our slaughtered oxen, the
+old teams of our ploughs!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Voice.</span> I am pulling and dragging him on with all my strength&mdash;now he
+turns and defends himself&mdash;down! down among the dead!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voice of the Dying Noble.</span> My children, pity! pity!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Second Voice.</span> Chain me to your land and make me work without pay
+again&mdash;will you!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Third Voice.</span> My only son fell under the blows of your lash, old lord;
+either wake him from the dead, or die to join him!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Fourth Voice.</span> The children of Ham drink thy health, old lord! they beg
+thee for forgiveness, lord!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Peasants</span> (<i>passing on out of sight</i>). A vampire sucked our
+blood, and lived upon our strength:</p>
+
+<p>We have caught the vampire, he shall escape no more!</p>
+
+<p>By Satan, thou shalt hang as high as a great lord should!</p>
+
+<p>By Satan, thou shalt die high, high above us all!</p>
+
+<p>Death to the nobles; tyrants were they all!</p>
+
+<p>Drink, food, and rest for us; poor, weary, hungry, thirsty, naked!</p>
+
+<p>Your bodies shall lie like sheaves upon our fields; the ruins of your
+castles fly like chaff beneath the flail of the thresher!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voice.</span> The children of Ham will dance merrily round their bonfires!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> I cannot see the face of the murdered noble, they throng so
+thickly round him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> It is in all probability a friend or relation of your
+excellency!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> I despise him, and hate you!</p>
+
+<p>Poetry will sweeten all this horror hereafter. Forward, Jew, forward!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>They disappear among the trees.</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Another part of the forest. A mound upon which watchfires are
+burning. A procession of people bearing torches.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man</span> (<i>appearing among them with the Baptized</i>). These drooping
+branches have torn my liberty cap into tatters.</p>
+
+<p>Ha! what hell of flame is this throwing its crimson light into the
+gloom, and leaping through these heavily fringed walls of the forest?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> We have wandered from our way while seeking the pass of
+St. Ignatius. We must retrace our steps immediately, for this is the
+spot in which Leonard celebrates the solemnities of the New Faith!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Forward, in the name of God! I must see these solemnities. Fear
+nothing, Jew, no one will recognize us.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Be prudent; our lives hang on a breath!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> What enormous ruins are these scattered around us! This
+ponderous pile must have lasted centuries before it fell!</p>
+
+<p>Pillars, pedestals, capitals, fallen arches&mdash;ha! I am treading upon the
+broken remnants of an escutcheon. Bas-reliefs of exquisite sculpture are
+scattered about upon the earth! Heavens! that is the sweet face of the
+Virgin Mother shining through the heart of the darkness! The light
+flickers, I can see it no more. Here are the slight-fluted shafts of a
+shrine, panes of colored glass with cherub heads, a carved railing of
+bronze, and now, in the light of yonder torch, I see the half of a
+monumental figure of a reclining knight in armor thrown upon the burnt
+and withered grass: Where am I, Jew?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> You are passing through the graveyard of the last church
+of the Old Faith; our people labored forty days and forty nights without
+intermission to destroy it; it seemed built for eternal ages.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Your songs and hymns,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span> ye new men, grate harshly on my ears!</p>
+
+<p>Dark forms are moving forward in every direction, from before us, behind
+us, and from either side; lights and shadows, driven to and fro by the
+wind, float like living spirits through the throng.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Passer-by.</span> I greet you, citizens, in the name of freedom!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Second Passer-by.</span> I greet you in the name of the slaughter of the
+nobles!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Third Passer-by.</span> The priests chant the praise of freedom; why do you not
+hasten forward?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> We cannot resist the pressure of the throng; they drive us
+on from every side.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Who is this young man standing in front of us, mounted upon the
+ruins of the shrine? Three flames burn beneath him, his face shines from
+the midst of fire and smoke, his voice rings like the shriek of a
+maniac; and his gestures are rapid and eager?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> That is Leonard, the inspired and enthusiastic prophet of
+freedom. Our priests, our philosophers, our poets, our artists, with
+their daughters and loved ones, are standing round him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Ha, I understand; your aristocracy! Point out to me the man who
+sent you to seek an interview with me.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> He is not here.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Fly to my arms; cling to my lips; come to me, my beautiful
+bride! Independent, free, stripped of the veils of hypocrisy, full of
+love, untrammelled from the chilling fetters of prejudice, come to me,
+thou chosen one of the lovely daughters of freedom!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voice of a Maiden.</span> I fly to thee, beloved one!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Second Maiden.</span> Look upon me! I stretch forth my arms to thee, but have
+sunk fainting among the ruins; I cannot rise, and have only strength
+left to turn to thee, beloved!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Third Maiden.</span> I have outstripped them all; through cinders and ashes,
+flame and smoke, I fly to thee, beloved!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> With long, dishevelled hair far floating on the wind, with
+snowy bosom panting with wild excitement, she clambers up the smoking
+ruins to his arms!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Thus is it every night.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> To me! to me! my bliss, my rapture! Lovely daughter of freedom,
+thou tremblest with delicious, god-like madness!</p>
+
+<p>Inspiration, flood my soul! Listen to me, all ye people, for now will I
+prophesy unto you!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Her head sinks on his bosom; she faints in his arms.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Look upon us, ye people! we offer you an image of the human
+race, freed from trammels, and risen into new life from the death of
+forms. We stand upon the ruins of old dogmas, of old gods; yea, glory
+unto us, for we have torn the old gods limb from limb!</p>
+
+<p>They have rotted into dust; our spirits have conquered theirs; their
+very souls have fallen into the abyss of nothingness!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Women.</span> Happy among women is the bride of the prophet: we stand
+below and envy her glory!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> I announce to you a new world; to a new god I have given the
+heavens; to the god of freedom and of bliss, the god of the people;
+every offering of their vengeance, the piled corpses of their
+oppressors, be his fitting altar! The old tears and agonies of humanity
+will be forever swept away in an ocean of blood!</p>
+
+<p>We now inaugurate the perpetual happiness of men; freedom and equality
+belong of right to all!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[Pg 507]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Damnation and the gallows to him who would reorganize the Past; to him
+who would conspire against the common fraternity!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Men.</span> The towers of superstition, of tyranny, of pride, have
+fallen, have fallen! To him who would save one stone from the old
+buildings&mdash;damnation and death!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span> (<i>aside</i>). Ye blasphemers of Jehovah, I thrice spew you
+forth to destruction!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Keep but thy promise, Eagle, and I will build on this very spot
+and upon their bowed necks a new temple to the Son of God, the Merciful!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Confused cry from mingling Voices.</span> Freedom! Equality! Bliss! Hurrah!
+hurrah!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of the New Priests.</span> Where are the lords, where are the kings, who
+lately walked the earth with crown and sceptre, ruled with pride and
+scorn?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">First Murderer.</span> I killed King Alexander.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Second Murderer.</span> I stabbed King Henry.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Third Murderer.</span> I murdered King Immanuel!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Go on without fear; murder without a sting of conscience!</p>
+
+<p>Remember that you are the Elect of the Elect; the Holy among the Holy;
+the brave heroes and blessed martyrs of equality and freedom!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Murderers.</span> We go in the darkness of night; we move in the
+gloom of the shadow! With the dagger firmly clutched in our unsparing
+hands, we go, we go!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span> (<i>to the Maiden</i>). Arouse thee, my beautiful and free!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A loud clap of thunder is heard.</p></div>
+
+<p>Reply to the living god of thunder: raise high the hymn of strength!
+Follow me all, all! Let us once more trample under our feet the ruined
+temple of the dead God!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Maiden.</span> I glow with love to thee and to thy god! I will share my
+love with the whole world: I glow! I glow!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Some one blocks the way; he falls upon his knees, raises his
+joined hands, struggles, sighs, sobs....</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> He is the son of a famous philosopher.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> What do you demand, Herman?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Herman.</span> High priest, give me the Sacrament of Murder!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span> (<i>to the Priests</i>). Give me the oil, the dagger, and the
+poison!&mdash;(To Herman.) With the sacred oil once used to anoint kings, I
+now anoint thee to their destruction!</p>
+
+<p>The arm once used by knights and nobles, I give thee now for their
+destruction!</p>
+
+<p>I hang upon thy breast this flask of poison, that where the sword cannot
+reach, it may gnaw, corrode, and burn the bowels of the tyrants!</p>
+
+<p>Go, and destroy the old race in all parts of the world!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> He is gone! I see him, at the head of a band of assassins,
+crossing the crest of the nearest hill.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> They turn, they approach us, we must move out of their
+way!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> No. I will dream this dream to its end!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized</span> (<i>aside</i>). I thrice spew thee forth to destruction!&mdash;(<i>To
+the Man</i>). Leonard might recognize me, your excellency. Do you not see
+the knife glittering upon his breast?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Wrap yourself up in my cloak. What ladies are those dancing
+before him you call Leonard?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Princesses and countesses who have forsaken their
+husbands.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[Pg 508]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Once my angels!!</p>
+
+<p>The people now surround him on every side, I can see him no longer, I
+only know by the retreating music that he is going farther from us.
+Follow me, Jew, we can see him better up here!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He clambers up the parapet of a wall.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Woe! woe! We will certainly be discovered.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> There, now I can see him again! Ha! other women are with him
+now, pale, confused, trembling, following him convulsively; the son of
+the philosopher foams and brandishes his dagger; they are stopping by
+the ruins of the North Tower.</p>
+
+<p>They remain standing for a moment, they climb upon the ruins, they tear
+them down, they pull the shrine apart, they throw coals upon the
+prostrate altars, the votive wreaths, the holy pictures; the fire
+kindles, columns of smoke darken all before me: Woe to the destroyers!
+Woe!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Woe to the men who still bow down before the dead God!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Dark masses of the people turn and drive upon us.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> O Father Abraham!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Old Eagle of glory, is it not true that my hour is not yet
+come?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> We are lost!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard</span> (<i>stopping immediately in front of Count Henry</i>). Who are you
+with that haughty face, citizen, and why do you not join in the
+solemnities?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> I hastened here when I heard of the revolution; I am a murderer
+of the Spanish league, and have only arrived to-day.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Who is that man hiding himself in the folds of your mantle?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> He is my younger brother. He has taken an oath to show his face
+to no one, until he has at least killed a baron.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Of whose murder can you yourself boast?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> My elder brothers consecrated me only two days before my
+departure, and....</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Whom do you think of killing?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> You in the first place, if you should prove false to us!</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> For this use, brother, take my dagger!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Hands it to him.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> For such use my own will suffice me, brother!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Many Voices.</span> Long live Leonard! Long live the Spanish murderer!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> Meet me to-morrow in the tent of Pancratius, our citizen
+general.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Priests.</span> We greet thee, stranger, in the name of the Spirit of
+Liberty: we intrust to thy hand a share of our emancipation!</p>
+
+<p>To men who combat without cessation, who kill without pity or weakness,
+who work for freedom by day, and dream of it by night, will be at last
+the victory!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>They pass on out of sight.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Philosophers.</span> We have wakened the human race, and torn them
+away from the days of childhood! We have found truth, and brought it to
+light from the womb of darkness! Combat, murder, and die for it,
+brethren!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Son of the Philosopher</span> (<i>to the Man</i>). Brother and friend, I drink
+your health out of the skull of an old saint! May we soon meet again!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Maiden</span> (<i>dancing</i>). Kill Prince John for me!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Second Maiden.</span> Count Henry for me!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Children.</span> Bring us back the head of a noble for a ball.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Other Voices.</span> Good fortune guide your daggers home!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Artists.</span> On these sublime old ruins we build no temples more;
+we paint no pictures, mould no statues for forgotten shrines; our arches
+shall be formed of pointed pikes and naked blades; our pillars built of
+ghastly piles of human skulls; the capitals of human hair dyed in
+gushing streams of crimson blood; our altar shall be white as snow, our
+god will rest upon it, the cap of liberty: Hurrah! hurrah!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Other Voices.</span> On! on! the morning dawn already breaks!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> They will soon catch and hang us; we are but one step from
+the gallows.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Fear nothing, Jew, they follow Leonard, and observe us no
+longer. I see with my own eyes, I understand with my own mind, and for
+the last time before it engulfs me, the chaos now generating in the
+abyss of Time, in the womb of Darkness, for my own destruction, for the
+annihilation of my brethren!</p>
+
+<p>Driven on by madness, stung by despair, my thoughts awake in all their
+strength....</p>
+
+<p>O God! give me again the power which Thou didst not of old deny me, and
+I will condense this new and fearful world, which does not understand
+itself, into <i>one</i> burning word, but which one word will be the Poetry
+of the entire Past!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voice in the Air.</span> Poet, thou chant'st a drama!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Thanks for thy good counsel!</p>
+
+<p>Revenge for the desecrated ashes of my fathers&mdash;malediction upon the new
+races! their whirlpool is around me, but it shall not draw me into the
+giddying and increasing circles of its abyss! Keep but thy promise,
+Eagle; Eagle of glory!</p>
+
+<p>Jew, I am ready now for the vault of St. Ignatius!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> The day dawns; I can go no farther.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Lead me on until we strike the right path; I will then release
+you!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Why do you drag me on through mist, through thorns and
+briers, through ashes and embers, over heaps of ruins? Let me go, I
+entreat!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Forward! forward! and descend with me!</p>
+
+<p>The last songs of the people are dying away behind us; a few torches
+here and there just glimmer through the gloom!</p>
+
+<p>Ha! under those hoary trees drooping with the night dew, and through
+this curdling, whitening vapor, see you not the giant shadow of the dead
+Past? Hark! hear you not that wailing chant?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Everything is shrouded in the thickening mist; at every
+step we descend, deeper, deeper!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Wood Spirits.</span> Let us weep for Christ, the persecuted, martyred
+Jesus!</p>
+
+<p>Where is our God; where is His church?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Unsheathe the sword&mdash;to arms! to arms!</p>
+
+<p>I will restore Him to you; upon thousands and thousands of crosses will
+I crucify His enemies!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Chorus of Spirits.</span> We kept guard by day and night around the altar and
+the holy graves; upon untiring wings we bore the matin chime and vesper
+bell to the ear of the believer; our voices floated on the organ's peal!
+In the glitter of the stained and rainbow panes, the shadows of the
+vaulted domes, the light of the holy chalice, the blessed consecration
+of the Body of our Lord&mdash;was our whole life centred!</p>
+
+<p>Woe! woe! what will become of us?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> It is growing lighter; their dim forms fade and melt into the
+red of morn!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> Here lies your way: this is the entrance to the Pass.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Hail! Christ Jesus and my sword! (<i>He tears off the liberty
+cap, throws it upon the ground, and casts pieces of silver upon it.)</i>
+Take together the Thing and the Image for a remembrance!</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Baptized.</span> You pledge your word to me for the honorable treatment of
+him who will visit you at midnight?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> An old noble never repeats or breaks a promise!</p>
+
+<p>Hail! Christ Jesus and our swords!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Voices</span> (<i>from the depths of the Pass</i>). Mary and our swords! Long live
+our lord, Count Henry!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> My faithful followers, to me&mdash;to me!</p>
+
+<p>Aid me, Mary, and Christ Jesus!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Night. Trees and shrubbery. Pancratius, Leonard, and attendants.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span> (<i>to his attendants</i>). Lie upon this spot with your faces to
+the turf, remain perfectly still, kindle no fires, beat no signals, and,
+unless you hear the report of firearms, stir not until the dawn of day!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> I once more conjure you, citizen!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Lean against this tall pine, Leonard, and pass the night in
+reflection.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leonard.</span> I pray you, Pancratius, take me with you! Remember, you are
+about to intrust yourself alone with an aristocrat, a betrayer, an
+oppressor....</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span> (<i>interrupting him, and impatiently gesturing to him to
+remain behind</i>). The old nobles seldom broke a plighted promise!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A vast feudal hall in the castle of Count Henry. Pictures of
+knights and ladies hang upon the walls. A pillar is seen in the
+background bearing the arms and escutcheons of the family. The
+Count is seated at a marble table upon which are placed an antique
+lamp of wrought silver, a jewel-hilted sword, a pair of pistols, an
+hourglass, and clock. Another table stands on the opposite side,
+with silver pitchers, decanters, and massive goblets.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> At the same hour, surrounded by appalling perils, agitated by
+foreboding thoughts, the last Brutus met his Evil Genius.</p>
+
+<p>I await a like apparition. A man without a name, without ancestors,
+without a faith or guardian angel; a man who is destroying the Past, and
+who will, in all probability, establish a new era, though himself sprung
+from the very dust, if I cannot succeed in casting him back into his
+original nothingness&mdash;is now to appear before me!</p>
+
+<p>Spirit of my forefathers! inspire me with that haughty energy which once
+rendered you the rulers of the world! Give me the lion heart which erst
+throbbed in your dauntless breasts! Give me your peerless dignity, your
+noble and chivalric courtesy!</p>
+
+<p>Rekindle in my wavering soul your blind, undoubting, earnest faith in
+Christ and in His church: at once the source of your noblest deeds on
+earth, your brightest hopes in heaven! Oh, let it open for me, as it was
+wont to do for you; and I will struggle with fire and sword against its
+enemies! Hear me, the son of countless generations, the sole heir of
+your thoughts, your courage, your virtues, and your faults!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The castle bell sounds twelve.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is the appointed hour: I am prepared!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>An old and faithful servant, Jacob, enters, fully armed.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jacob.</span> My lord, the person whom your excellency expects is in the
+castle.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Admit him here.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Exit Jacob.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He reappears, announcing Pancratius, and again retires.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Count Henry, I salute you! The word 'count' sounds strangely
+on my lips.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[Pg 511]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He seats himself, throws off his cloak and liberty cap, and fastens
+his eyes on the pillar on which hang the arms and shield.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Thanks, guest, that you have confided in the honor of my house!
+Faithful to our ancient forms, I pledge you in a glass of wine. Your
+good health, guest!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He takes a goblet, fills, tastes, and hands it to Pancratius.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> If I am not mistaken, this red and blue shield was called a
+coat of arms in the language of the Dead; but such trifles have vanished
+from the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He drinks.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Vanished? With the aid of God, you will soon look upon them by
+thousands!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Commend me to the old noble! always confident in himself,
+though without money, arms, or soldiers; proud, obstinate, and hoping
+against all hope; like the corpse in the fable, threatening the driver
+of the hearse at the very door of the charnel house, and confiding in
+God, or at least pretending to confide in Him, when confidence in
+himself is no longer even possible!</p>
+
+<p>Pray, Count Henry, give me but one little glimpse of the lightning which
+is to be sent from heaven, for your especial benefit, to blast me and my
+millions; or show me at least one angel of the thousands of the heavenly
+hosts, who are to encamp on your side, and whose prowess is so speedily
+to decide the combat in your favor!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He empties the goblet.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> You are pleased to jest, leader of the people; but atheism is
+quite an old formula, and I looked for something <i>new</i> from the <i>new
+men</i>!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Laugh, if you will, at your own wit, but my faith is wider,
+deeper, and more firmly based than your own. Its central dogma is the
+emancipation of humanity. It has its source in the cries of despair
+which rise unceasingly to heaven from the hearts of tortured millions,
+in the famine of the operatives, the grinding poverty of the peasants,
+the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the
+race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices&mdash;from all
+this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to
+establish: <i>'Man has a birthright of happiness</i>.' These thoughts are my
+god, a god which will give bread, rest, bliss, glory to man!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He fills, drinks, and casts and goblet from him.</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> I place my trust in that God who gave power and rule, into the
+hands of my forefathers!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> You trust Him still, and yet through your whole life you
+have been but a plaything in the hands of the Devil!</p>
+
+<p>But let us leave such discussions to the theologians, if any such still
+linger upon earth:&mdash;to business, Count Henry, to stern facts!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> What do you seek from me, redeemer of the people, citizen-god?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> I sought you, in the first place, because I wished to know
+you; in the second, because I desire to save you.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> For the first, receive my thanks; for the second, trust my
+sword!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Your God! your sword! vain phantoms of the brain! Look at
+the dread realities of your situation! The curses of the millions are
+upon you; myriads of brawny arms are already raised to hurl you to
+destruction! Of all the vaunted Past nothing remains to you save a few
+feet of earth, scarcely enough to offer you a grave. Even your last
+fortress, the castle of the Holy Trinity, can hold out but a few days
+longer. Where is your artillery? Where are the arms and provisions for
+your soldiers? Where are your soldiers? and what dependence can you
+place on the few you still retain? You must surely know there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[Pg 512]</a></span> is
+nothing left you on which to hang a single hope!</p>
+
+<p>If I were in your place, Count Henry, I know what I would do!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Speak! you see how patiently I listen!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Were I Count Henry, I would say to Pancratius: 'I will
+dismiss my troops, my few retainers; I will not go to the relief of the
+Holy Trinity&mdash;and for this I will retain my title and my estates; and
+you, Pancratius, will pledge your own honor to guarantee me the
+possession of the things I require.'</p>
+
+<p>How old are you, Count Henry?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> I am thirty-six years old, citizen.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Then you have but about fifteen years of life to expect, for
+men of your temperament die young; your son is nearer to the grave than
+to maturity. A single exception, such as yours, can do no harm to the
+great whole. Remain, then, where you are, the last of the counts. Rule,
+as long as you shall live, in the house of your fathers; have your
+family portraits retouched, your armorial bearings renewed, and think no
+more of the wretched remnant of your fallen order. Let the justice of
+the long-injured people be fulfilled upon them! (<i>He fills for himself
+another cup.</i>) Your good health, Henry, the last of the counts!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Every word you utter is a new insult to me! Do you really
+believe that, to save a dishonored life, I would suffer myself to be
+enslaved and dragged about, chained to your car of triumph?</p>
+
+<p>Cease! cease! I can endure no longer! I cannot answer as my spirit
+dictates, for you are my guest, sheltered from all insult while under my
+roof by my plighted honor!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Plighted honor and knightly faith have, ere this, swung from
+a gallows! You unfurl a tattered banner whose faded rags seem strangely
+out of place among the brilliant flags and joyous symbols of universal
+humanitarian progress. Oh, I know you, and protest against your course!
+Full of life and generous vigor, you bind to your heart a putrefying
+corpse! You court your own destruction, clinging to a vain belief in
+privileged orders, in worn-out relics, in the bones of dead men, in
+mouldering escutcheons and forgotten coats of arms&mdash;and yet in your
+inmost heart you are forced to acknowledge that your brother nobles have
+deserved their punishment, that forgetfulness were mercy for them!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> You, Pancratius, and your followers, what do you deserve?</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Victory and life! I acknowledge but one right, I bow to but
+one law, the law of perpetual progress, and this law is your death
+warrant. It cries to you through my lips: 'Worm-eaten, mouldering
+aristocracy! full of rottenness, crammed with meat and wine, satiated
+with luxury&mdash;give place to the young, the strong, the hungry!'</p>
+
+<p>But I will save you, and you alone!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Cease! I will not brook your arrogant pity!</p>
+
+<p>I know you, and your new world; I have visited your camp at night, and
+looked upon the restless swarms upon whose necks you ride to power! I
+saw all: I detected the <i>old</i> crimes peering through the thin veils of
+<i>new</i> draperies, shining under new shams, whirling to new tunes,
+circling in new dances&mdash;but the end was ever the same which it has been
+for centuries, which it will forever be: adultery, license, theft, gold,
+blood!</p>
+
+<p>But I saw you not there; you were not with your guilty children; you
+know you despise them in the depths of your soul; and if you do not go
+mad yourself in the mad dances of the blood-thirsty and blood-drunken
+people, you will soon scorn and despise yourself!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[Pg 513]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Torture me no more!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>He rises, moves hurriedly to and fro, then seats himself under his
+escutcheon.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> It is true my world is in its infancy, unformed and
+undeveloped; it requires food, ease, material gratifications; but it is
+growing, and the time will come&mdash;(<i>He rises from his chair, approaches
+the count, and leans against the pillar supporting the
+escutcheons</i>)&mdash;the time will come when my world will arrive at maturity,
+will attain the consciousness of its own strength, when it will say, I
+<span class="smcap">am</span>; and there will be no other voice on earth able to reply, <span class="smcap">'I also
+am</span>!'</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> And then?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> A race will spring from the generation I am now quickening
+and elevating, stronger, higher, and nobler than any the world has yet
+produced; the earth has never yet seen such men upon her bosom. They
+will be free, lords of the globe from pole to pole; the earth will be a
+blooming garden, every part of her surface under the highest culture;
+the sea will be covered with floating palaces and argosies of wealth and
+commerce; a universal exchange of commodities will carry civilization,
+mutual recognition, and comfort to every clime; prosperous cities will
+crown every height, and expand their blessings of refinement and culture
+o'er every plain; earth will then offer happy and tranquil homes to all
+her children, she will be one vast and united house of blissful industry
+and highest art!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Your words and voice dissemble well, but your pale and rigid
+features in vain struggle to assume the generous glow of a noble
+enthusiasm, which your soul cannot feel.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Interrupt me not! Men have begged on bended knees before me
+for such prophecies.</p>
+
+<p>The world of the Future will possess a god whose highest fact will not
+be his own defeat and death upon a cross; a god whom the people, by
+their own power and skill, <i>will force</i> to unveil his face to them; a
+god who will be torn by the very children whom he once scattered over
+the face of the earth in his anger, from the infinite recesses of the
+distant heavens in which he loves to hide! Babel will be no more, all
+tribes and nations will meet and understand their mutual wants, and,
+united by a <i>universal language</i>, his scattered children, having
+attained their majority, assert their <i>right</i> to know their creator, and
+claim their just inheritance from a common father: '<i>the full possession
+of all truth</i>!'</p>
+
+<p>The god of humanity at last reveals himself to man!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Yes, He revealed Himself some centuries ago; through Him is
+humanity already redeemed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Alas! let the redeemed delight in the sweetness of such
+redemption! let them rejoice in the multiplied agonies which have in
+vain cried to a Redeemer for relief during the three thousand years
+which have elapsed since His defeat and death!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Blasphemer, cease! I have seen the Cross, the holy symbol of
+His mystic love, standing in the heart of the eternal city, Rome; the
+ruins of a power far greater than thine were crumbling into dust around
+It; hundreds of gods such as those you trust in, were lying prostrate on
+the ground, trampled under careless feet, not even daring to raise their
+crushed and wounded heads to gaze upon the Crucified. It stood upon the
+seven hills, stretching its mighty arms to the east and to the west, its
+holy brow glittering in the golden sunshine; men wistfully gazed upon
+its perfect lesson of self-abnegating Love; it won all hearts, it <span class="smcap">RULED
+THE WORLD</span>!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> An old wife's tale, hollow as the rattling of these vain
+escutcheons! (<i>He strikes the shield.</i>) These discussions are in vain,
+for I have read all the secrets of your yearn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[Pg 514]</a></span>ing heart! If you really
+wish to find the <i>infinite</i> which has so long baffled your search; if
+you love the <i>truth</i>, and are willing to suffer for it; if you are a
+<i>man</i>, created in the image of our common humanity, and not the
+impossible hero of an old nursery song&mdash;listen to me! Oh, let not these
+rapidly fleeting moments, the last in which you can possibly be saved,
+pass in vain! The race renews itself, man of the Past; and <i>of the blood
+we shed to-day, no trace will be found to-morrow</i>! For the last time I
+conjure you, if you are what you once appeared to be, <span class="smcap">A MAN</span>, rise in
+your former might, aid the down-trodden and oppressed people, help to
+emancipate and enlighten your fellow men, work for the common good,
+forsake your false ideas of a personal glory, quit these tottering ruins
+which all your pride and power cannot prevent from crumbling o'er you,
+desert your falling house, and follow me!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> O youngest born of Satan's brood!&mdash;(<i>He paces up and down the
+hall, speaking to himself</i>:) Dreams, dreams, beautiful dreams&mdash;but their
+realization is impossible! Who could achieve them? Adam died in the
+desert&mdash;the flaming sword still guards the gates&mdash;we are never more to
+enter Paradise! In vain we dream!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius</span> (<i>aside</i>). I have driven the probe to the core of his heart;
+I have struck the electric nerve of Poetry, which quivers through the
+very base of his complicated being!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Progress of humanity; universal happiness; I once believed them
+possible! There&mdash;there&mdash;take my head&mdash;my life&mdash;if that were possi&mdash;....
+(<i>He sighs, and is silent for a moment.</i>) It is past! two centuries ago
+it might have been&mdash;but now.... But now I have seen and know there will
+be nothing but assassination and murder&mdash;murder on either side&mdash;nothing
+can satisfy now but an unceasing war of mutual extermination!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Woe then to the vanquished! Falter not, seeker of universal
+happiness! Cry but once with us: '<i>Woe to the oppressors of the
+people</i>!' and stand pre&euml;minent o'er all, the First among the Victors!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Have you already explored all the paths in the dark and unknown
+country of the Future? Did Destiny, withdrawing at midnight the curtains
+of your tent, stand visibly before you, and, placing her giant hand upon
+your scheming brain, impress upon it the mystic seal of victory? or in
+the heat of midday, when the world slept, and you alone were watching,
+did she glide pale, pitiless, and stern before you, and promise
+conquest, that you thus threaten me with defeat and ruin? You are but a
+man of clay as fragile as my own, and may be the victim of the first
+well-aimed ball, the first sharp thrust of the sword! Your life, like
+mine, hangs on a single thread, and you have no immunity from death!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Dreams! idle dreams! Oh do not deceive yourself with hopes
+so vain, for no bullet aimed by man will reach me, no sword will pierce
+me, while a single member of your haughty caste remains capable of
+resisting the task which it is my destiny to fulfil. And what doom
+soever may befall me, after its completion, count, will be too late to
+offer you the least advantage. (<i>The clock strikes.</i>) Hark! time
+flies&mdash;and scorns us both!</p>
+
+<p>If you are weary of your own life, save at least your unfortunate son!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> His pure soul is already saved in heaven: on earth he must
+share the fate of his father.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>His head sinks heavily, and remains for some time buried in his
+hands.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> You reject too all hope for him?... (<i>Pauses.</i>) Nay&mdash;you are
+silent&mdash;you reflect&mdash;it is well: reflection becomes him who stands upon
+the brink of the grave!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[Pg 515]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Away! away! Back from the passionate mysteries now surging
+through the depths of my soul! Profane them not with a word; they lie
+beyond your sphere!</p>
+
+<p>The rough, wide world belongs to you; feed it with meat; flood it with
+wine; but press not into the holy secrets of my heart! Away! away from
+me, framer of material bliss!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Shame upon you, warrior, scholar, poet, and yet the slave of
+one idea and its dying forms! Thought and form are wax beneath my
+plastic fingers!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> In vain would you seek to follow my thoughts; you will never
+understand me, for all your forefathers were buried in a common ditch,
+as dead things, not as men of individual character and bold distinctive
+spirit. (<i>He points to the portraits of his ancestors.</i>) Look upon these
+pictures! Love of country, of family, of the home hearth, feelings at
+war with all your ideas, are written in every line of their firm
+brows&mdash;their spirit lives entire in me, their last heir and
+representative. Tell me, O man without ancestors, where is your natal
+soil? You spread your wandering tent each coming eve Upon the ruins of
+another's home, every morning roll it up again that it may be unrolled
+anew at night to blight and spoil! Yon have not yet found a <i>home</i>, a
+<i>hearth</i>, and you will never find one as long as a hundred men live to
+cry with me: '<i>Glory to our fathers</i>!'</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Yes, glory to your fathers in heaven and upon earth; but it
+will repay us to look at them a little more closely. (<i>He points to one
+of the portraits.</i>) This gentleman was a famous Starost; he shot old
+women in the woods, and roasted the Jews alive: this one with the
+inscription, 'Chancellor,' and the great seal in his right hand,
+falsified and forged acts, burned archives, stabbed knights, and sullied
+the inheritance with poison; through him came your villages, your
+income, your power. That dark man played at adultery with the wife of
+his friend. This one, with the golden fleece on his Spanish cloak,
+served in a foreign land, when his own country was in danger.</p>
+
+<p>This pale lady with the raven ringlets carried on an intrigue with a
+handsome page. That one with the lustrous braids is reading a letter
+from her gallant; she smiles, as well she may, for night approaches, and
+love is bold.</p>
+
+<p>This timid beauty with the deep blue eyes and golden curls, clasping a
+Roman hound in her braceleted arm, was the mistress of a king, and
+soothed his softer hours.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the true history of your unbroken, ancient, and unsullied line!
+But I like this jolly fellow in the green riding jacket; he drank and
+hunted with the nobles, and employed the peasants to run down the tall
+deer with the hounds. Indeed, the ignorance, stupidity, and wretchedness
+of the serf were the strength of the noble, and give convincing proof of
+his own intellect.</p>
+
+<p>But the Day of Judgment is approaching: I promise you that none of your
+vaunted ancestors, that nought of their fame shall be forgotten in the
+dark award.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> You deceive yourself, son of the people! Neither you nor your
+brethren could have preserved existence, had not our noble ancestors
+nourished you with their bread, and defended you with their blood. In
+times of famine, they gave you grain, and when the plague swept over you
+with its hot breath of death, they built hospitals to receive you, found
+nurses to take care of you, and educated physicians to save you from the
+grave. When from a herd of unformed brutes they had nurtured you into
+human beings, they built schools and churches for you, sharing
+everything with you save the dangers of the battle field, for war they
+knew you were not formed to bear. As the sharp lance of the pagan was
+wont to recoil, shattered and riven, from the glittering armor of my
+fa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[Pg 516]</a></span>thers, so recoil your vain words as they strike the dazzling record
+of their long-consecrated glory. They disturb not the repose of their
+sacred ashes. Like the howlings of a mad dog, who froths, bites, and
+snaps as he runs, until he is driven out of the pale of humanity, so
+fall your accusations, dying out in their own insanity.</p>
+
+<p>But it is almost dawn, and time you should depart from the halls of my
+ancestors! Pass in safety and in freedom from their home, my guest!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> Farewell then, until we meet again upon the ramparts of the
+Holy Trinity. And when your powder and ball shall be utterly exhausted?</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> <i>We will then approach within the length of our swords.</i>
+Farewell!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pancratius.</span> We are twin Eagles, but your nest is shattered by the
+lightning! (<i>He takes up his cloak and liberty cap.</i>) In passing from
+your threshold, I leave the curse, due to decrepitude, behind me. I
+devote you and your son to destruction!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Man.</span> Ho! Jacob!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Enter Jacob.</p></div>
+
+<p>Conduct this man in safety through my last post on the hill!</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jacob.</span> So help me God the Lord!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Exit Jacob with Pancratius.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="DEATH_IN_LIFE" id="DEATH_IN_LIFE"></a>DEATH IN LIFE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In some dull hour of doubt or pain,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Who has not felt that life is slain&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And while there yet remain</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Long years, perhaps, of joyless mirth,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ere earth shall claim its kindred earth,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Such years were nothing worth</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">But that some duty still demands</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sweating brow, the weary hands?</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And so Existence stands</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With an appeal we cannot shun,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To make complete what Life begun,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With toil from sun to sun.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And so we keep the sorry tryst,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With all its fancied sweetness missed&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Consenting to exist</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When Life has fled beyond recall,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And left us to its heir in thrall,</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[Pg 517]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">With chains that will not fall.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Belated stars were waning fast</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As through an open gate I passed,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And crossed a meadow vast&mdash;</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And, still descending, followed still</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The path that wound adown the hill</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And by the ruined mill&mdash;</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Till in its garden I espied</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The cottage by the river side</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Where dwelt my promised bride.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Beneath the porch no lantern flared,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">No watch dog kept his faithful ward,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The window blinds were barred.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Entering with eager eye and ear,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And ushered by the phantom Fear,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I stood beside the bier</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of one who, passing hence away,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Left something more than lifeless clay,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As twilight lingers after day,</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The pulseless heart, the pallid lips,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The eyes just closed in death's eclipse,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The fairy finger tips</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So lightly locked across the breast,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Seemed to obey the sweet behest</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">By angels whispered&mdash;Rest!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That beauty had been mine alone,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Those hands had fondly pressed my own,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Those eyes in mine had shone.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The open door was banged about,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As wailing winds went in and out</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With sigh and groan and shout.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And darkly ran the river cold,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whose swollen waters, as they rolled,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A tale of sorrow told.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I could not choose but seek that stream,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whose sympathetic moan did seem</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The music of a dream.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">O River, that unceasing lay</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Charms each fair tree along thy way,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Until it falls thy prey!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">O endless moan within my heart,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Thy constancy has made me part</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[Pg 518]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of what thou wert and art!</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And while I stood upon the brink,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And tried to think, but could not think,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nor sight with reason link&mdash;</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A form I had not seen before</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Came slowly down the dismal shore;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A sombre robe she wore,</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And in her air and on her face</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">There was a sterner kind of grace,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Heightened by time and place&mdash;</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A sort of conscious power and pride,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A soul to substance more allied&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Than that of her who died.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With scarce a semblance of design,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Toward me her steps she did incline,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And raised her eyes to mine</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So sweetly, so imploringly,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I scarcely wished, and did not try,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">To put their pleading by,</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And, ere a movement I had made,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Her hand upon my arm she laid,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And whispered: I obeyed.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">While one into the darkness sped,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I followed where the other led;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Yet often turned my head,</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As one who fancies that he hears</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His own name ringing in his ears</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Shouted from far-off spheres.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Oh! bliss misplaced is misery!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I love the life I've lost, but, see!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The life that's here loves me.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And while I seem her willing slave,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">My heart is hid in weeds that wave</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Above a distant grave.</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[Pg 519]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="AENONE" id="AENONE"></a>&AElig;NONE:</h2>
+
+<h3>A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.</h3>
+
+
+<h4>CHAPTER XIV.</h4>
+
+<p>In an hour from that time the banqueting hall of the palace was prepared
+for its guests. Silken couches had been drawn up around the table. Upon
+it glittered a rich array of gold and silver. Between the dishes stood
+flasks of rare wines. Upon the buffet near by were other wines cooling
+in Apennine snow. Tall candelabras in worked and twisted bronze stood at
+the ends and sides of the table, and stretched overhead their arms hung
+with lamps. From the walls were suspended other lamps, lighting up the
+tapestries and frescoes. At one end of the hall, richly scented spices
+burned upon a tripod. With a readiness and celerity for which the Vanno
+palace was famous, a feast fit for the emperor had been improvised in a
+few minutes, and nothing was now wanting except the guests.</p>
+
+<p>These now began to drop in one by one. The poet Emilius&mdash;the comedian
+Bassus&mdash;the proconsul Sardesus&mdash;others of lesser note; but not one who
+had not a claim to be present, by reason of intimate acquaintance or
+else some peculiarly valuable trait of conviviality. In collecting
+these, the armor bearer had made no mistake; and knowing his master's
+tastes and intimates, he had made up the roll of guests as discreetly as
+though their names had been given him. One he had met in the
+street&mdash;others he had found at their homes. None to whom he gave the
+invitation was backward in accepting it upon the spot, for there were
+few places in Rome where equal festal gratification could be obtained.
+To have been called to the house of Sergius Vanno and not to have gone
+there, was to have lost a day to be forever regretted. None, therefore,
+who had been spoken to, among that club of congenial spirits, was
+absent. Of those who did not come, one was sick and two were at their
+country villas. These, however, were lesser lights, valuable by
+themselves, perhaps, but of no account in comparison with others who had
+come; and therefore their absence was scarcely noticed.</p>
+
+<p>Sergius stood at the door receiving his guests as each arrived. He had
+arrayed himself in his most festive costume, and had evidently resolved
+that whatever might happen on the morrow, that night at least should be
+passed in forgetfulness and unbridled enjoyment. Even now his face was
+flushed with the wine he had taken in anticipation, in the hope of
+giving an artificial elation to his spirits. But it seemed as though for
+that time the wine had lost its accustomed charm. Although at each
+greeting he strove to wreathe his face in smiles, yet it was but a
+feeble mask, and could not hide the more natural appearances of care and
+gloom which rested upon his features; and while his voice seemed to
+retain its old ring of joyous welcome, there was an undertone of sad
+discordance. As the guests entered and exchanged greetings with their
+host, each, after the first moment, looked askant at him, with the dim
+perception that, in some way, he was not as he was wont to be; and so,
+in a little while, they sank, one by one, into a troubled and
+apprehensive silence. He, too, upon his part, looked furtively at them,
+wondering whether they had yet heard the thing that had befallen him. It
+was but a short time ago, indeed, and yet in how few minutes might the
+unrestrained gossip of a slave have spread the ill tidings! For the
+moment, Sergius recoiled from the difficult task of entertainment which
+he had taken upon himself. Why, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[Pg 520]</a></span>deed, had he called these men around
+him? How could he sit and pledge them in deep draughts, and all the time
+suspect that each one knew his secret, and was laughing about it in his
+sleeve? And if they knew it not, so much the worse, for then he must
+tell the tale himself. Was it not partly for this purpose that he had
+assembled them? Far better to speak of it himself&mdash;to let them see how
+little he regarded the misfortune and the scandal&mdash;to treat it as a
+brave jest&mdash;to give his own version of it&mdash;than to have the matter leak
+out in the ordinary way, with all conceivable distortions and
+exaggerations. But how, in fact, could he tell it? Was there one among
+them who would not, while openly commiserating him, laugh at him in the
+heart? Did there not now sit before him the lieutenant Plautus, who,
+only a month before, had met with a like disgrace, and about whom he had
+composed derisive verses? Would not the lieutenant Plautus now rejoice
+to make retaliatory odes? Would it not b e better, then, after all, to
+forbear any mention of the matter, and, letting its announcement take
+the usual chance course, to devote this night, at least, to unbroken
+festivity? But what if they already knew it?</p>
+
+<p>Thus wandering in his mind from one debate to another, and ever, in a
+moment, coming back to his original suspicion, he sat, essaying
+complimentary speeches and convivial jests, and moodily gazing from face
+to face, in a vain attempt to read their secret thoughts. He was wrong
+in his suspicions. Not one of them knew the reason of the burden upon
+his mind. All, however, perceived that something had occurred to disturb
+him, and his moody spirit shed its influence around, until the
+conversation once again flagged, and there was not one of the party who
+did not wish himself elsewhere. The costliest viands and wines spread
+out before them were ineffective to produce that festive gayety upon
+which they had calculated.</p>
+
+<p>'By Parnassus!' exclaimed the poet Emilius, at length, pushing aside his
+plate of turbot, and draining his goblet 'Are we to sit here, hour after
+hour, winking and blinking at each other like owls over their mice? Was
+it merely to eat and drink that we have assembled? Hearken! I will read
+that to you which will raise your spirits, to a certainty. To-morrow the
+games and combats commence in the arena of the new amphitheatre. Well;
+and is it known to you that I am appointed to read a dedicatory ode
+before the emperor and in honor of that occasion? I will give you a
+pleasure, now. I will forestall your joy, and let you hear what I have
+written. And be assured that this is no small compliment to your
+intelligence, since no eye hath yet looked upon a single verse thereof.'</p>
+
+<p>With that the poet dragged from his breast his silken bundle, and
+carefully began to unwind the covering.</p>
+
+<p>'You will observe,' he said, as he brought the precious parchment to
+light, and smoothed it out upon the table before him, 'you will observe
+that I commence with an invocation to the emperor, whom I call the most
+illustrious of all the C&aelig;sars, and liken to Jove. I then congratulate
+the spectators, not only upon the joy of living in his time, but also
+upon being there to bask in the effulgence of&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'A truce to such mummery!' cried Sergius, suddenly arousing from his
+spiritual stupor and bursting into a shrill laugh. 'Do we care to listen
+to your miserable dactyls? Is it not a standing jest through Rome that,
+for the past month, you have daily read your verses to one person after
+another, with the same wretched pretence of exclusive favoritism? And do
+we not know that no warrant has ever been given to you to recite a
+single line before the emperor, either in or out of the arena? We are
+here to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[Pg 521]</a></span> revel, not to listen to your stale aphorisms upon death and
+immortality. Ho, there, more wine! Take off these viands, which already
+pall upon us! Bring wine-more wine!'</p>
+
+<p>The guests were not slow to respond to the altered mood of their host;
+for it was merely the reflection of his sullen gravity that had eclipsed
+their own vivacity. The instant, therefore, that he led the way, the
+hall began to resound with jest and laughter. The poet, with some
+humiliation, which he endeavored to conceal beneath an affectation of
+wounded dignity, commenced rolling up his manuscript, not before a
+splash of wine from a carelessly filled flagon had soiled the
+fair-written characters. More flasks were placed upon the table by ready
+and obedient hands&mdash;and from that moment the real entertainment of the
+evening commenced.</p>
+
+<p>Faster than any of his guests, as though care could be the better
+drowned by frequent libations, Sergius now filled and refilled his
+flagon; and though the repeated draughts may not have brought
+forgetfulness, yet, what was the nearest thing, they produced reckless
+indifference. No longer should the cloud which he had thus suddenly
+swept away from his brow be suffered to remain. Was he not master in his
+own house? If woman deceives, was that a reason why man should mourn and
+grow gray with melancholy? What though a random thought might at times
+intrude, of one who, in the next room, with her head against the wall,
+lay in a half stupor, listening to the ring of goblets and the loud
+laugh and jest? Had she not brought it all upon herself? He would fill
+up again, and think no more about it! And still, obedient to his
+directing tone, the guests followed him with more and more unbridled
+license, until the hall rang with merriment as it had never rung before.</p>
+
+<p>Then, of course, came the throwing of dice, which, at that time, were as
+essential a concomitant of a roystering party as, in later centuries,
+cards became. Nor were these the least attraction of the feasts of
+Sergius; for though the excellence of his viands and wines was
+proverbial, the ease with which he could be despoiled at the gambling
+table was not less so. Already he was known to have seriously crippled
+his heritage by continued reverses, springing from united ill luck and
+want of skill; but it was as well understood that much still remained.
+And then, as now, the morality of gambling was of a most questionable
+character&mdash;invited guests not thinking it discreditable to unite in any
+combinations for the purpose of better pillaging their host. This seemed
+now the general purpose; for, leaving each other in comparative freedom
+from attack, they came forward one by one and pitted their purses, great
+and small, against Sergius, who sat pouring down wine and shaking the
+dicebox, while he called each by name, and contended against him. The
+usual result followed; for, whether owing to secret signs among the
+players, or to superior skill, the current of gold flowed but one way,
+from the host to his guests. For a while he bore the continued ill luck
+with undiminished gayety, deeming that in meeting their united prowess
+he was doing a brave thing, and that, whatever befell him, he should
+remember that in character of host, he must consent to suffer. But at
+length he began to realize that his losses had been carried far enough.
+He had never suffered so severely in any one evening before. Even his
+duty to them as their host did not demand that he should completely ruin
+himself, and he began to suspect that he had half done so already. With
+a hoarse laugh he pushed the dice away, and arose.</p>
+
+<p>'Enough&mdash;quite enough for one night,' he exclaimed. 'I have no more
+gold, nor, if I had, could I dare to continue, with this ill run against
+me. Perhaps after another campaign I may meet you again, and take my
+revenge;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[Pg 522]</a></span> which, if the Fates are just, must one day or another be
+allotted me. But not now.'</p>
+
+<p>He thought that he was firm in his refusal, but his guests had not yet
+done with him. It needed but gentle violence to push him back again upon
+his seat, and to replace the dicebox in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>'Art weary, or afraid to continue?' said the pr&aelig;torian captain. 'Well,
+let there be one more main between us, and then we will end it all.
+Listen! I have won this night two hundred sestertia. What is the worth
+of that quarry of yours to the south of the Porta Triumphalis?'</p>
+
+<p>'Three hundred sestertia&mdash;not less,' responded Sergius.</p>
+
+<p>'Nay, as much as that?' rejoined the captain, carelessly throwing down
+his own dice. 'Then it is useless to propose what I was about to. I had
+thought that as the quarry had been well worked already, and was now
+overrun with fugitive slaves and Nazarenes, and the like, to ferret out
+whom would require half a legion, I could offer to put the two hundred
+sestertia against it, so that you might chance to win them back. But it
+is of little consequence.'</p>
+
+<p>Sergius sat for the moment nervously drumming upon the table. He knew
+that the other was purposely disparaging the property and trying to
+tempt him into an equal stake; and yet he suffered himself to be
+tempted. The luck might this time be with him. It were worth while to
+try it, at least. If he lost, it would be but one more buffet of
+fortune. And if he won, how easily would those two hundred sestertia
+have been regained, and what a triumph over the one who had enticed him!
+And therefore they threw&mdash;five times a piece; and after a moment of
+breathless excitement, the play was decided in favor of the captain.</p>
+
+<p>'The quarry is mine, therefore,' he said, endeavoring to assume a
+nonchalant air of indifference. 'Would you still win it back, Sergius?
+And the sesteria also? Well, there is that vineyard of yours on the
+slope of Tivoli, which&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'Stay!' exclaimed the proconsul Sardesus, who, of all the party had not
+as yet touched the dicebox. 'Let this be enough. Will you plunder him
+entirely? Have you no regard for my rights over him? Do you not know
+that to-morrow, at the amphitheatre, Sergius and I are to match
+gladiators against each other for a heavy wager, and that I expect to
+win? How, then will I get this money, if you now strip him of all that
+he owns?'</p>
+
+<p>Probably the proconsul felt no fear about collecting what he might win,
+and spoke jestingly, and with the sole intention of putting a stop to a
+system of pillage which seemed to him already too flagrant and
+unscrupulous. But his words were too plainly spoken not to give offence
+at any time, more particularly now that all present were heated with
+excitement; and the usual consequence of disinterested interference
+ensued. The other guests in no measured language, began to mutter their
+displeasure at the insinuations against themselves; while the host, for
+whose benefit the interruption had been intended, resented it most
+strongly of all. He needed no counsel, but was well able to take care of
+himself, he intimated. And he remembered that he had entered into some
+sort of a wager about the result of a gladiatorial combat, and he had
+supposed that no one would have doubted his ability to pay all that he
+might lose therein. It was proper, at least, to wait until there had
+been some precedent of the kind proved against him. No one, so far, had
+found him wanting. And the like.</p>
+
+<p>'And yet,' he continued, as after a moment of reflection he began to
+realise the value of the wager, and how inconvenient it would be to
+lose, and that he had not yet succeeded in making any preparation for
+the contest, 'when I tell you that I have not yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[Pg 523]</a></span> found a gladiator to
+my mind, you will not force this match upon me to-morrow? You will
+forbear that advantage, and will consent to postpone our trial to
+another time?'</p>
+
+<p>The proconsul shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>'Was it in the bond,' he said, 'that one should await the convenience of
+the other? Has there not been time enough for each to procure his man?
+This wager was made between us mouths ago, Sergius&mdash;before even you went
+into the East.'</p>
+
+<p>'And it was while I was there,' exclaimed Sergius eagerly, 'that I found
+my man&mdash;a Rhodian, with the forehead, neck, and sinews of a bull. He
+could have hugged a bull to death almost. Having him, I felt safe, for
+who could you obtain to stand up against him? But in an evil hour, not
+over a month ago, this play actor here&mdash;this Bassus&mdash;by a stupid trick
+gained him from me. What, then, have I been able to do for myself since?
+I have sought far and near to replace him, but without success; and had
+made up my mind, if you would not postpone the trial, to pay up the
+forfeit for not appearing, and think no more about it. But by the gods!
+I will, even at this late hour, make one more attempt. Harkee, Bassus!
+Whenever I have asked you about this Rhodian, you have said that you
+have sold him; and, for some low reason, you have refused to tell who
+owns him now. Tell me, now, to whom you sold him, so that I can purchase
+him at once! Tell me, I say; or there will be blood between us!'</p>
+
+<p>'What can he say,' interrupted the proconsul, 'but that he sold his
+Rhodian to me, the day thereafter? You do well to praise him, Sergius.
+Never have I seen such a creature of brawn and muscle. And with the
+training I have given him, who, indeed, could overcome him? You will see
+him to-morrow, in the arena. You will see how he will crush in the ribs
+of your gladiator, like an egg shell.'</p>
+
+<p>Sergius gave vent to a groan of mingled rage and despair.</p>
+
+<p>'And you will not postpone this trial?' he said. 'Will you, then, take
+up with an offer to play off that Rhodian against ten of my slaves? No?
+Against twenty, then? What else will tempt you? Ah, you may think that I
+have but little to offer to play against you, but it is not so. I have
+no gold left, and my last quarry is gone. But I have my vineyards and
+slaves in plenty. What say you, therefore?'</p>
+
+<p>'Tush! Beseech him not!' interrupted Emilius, to whom the mention of
+vineyards and slaves gave intimation of further spoils. 'Do you not see
+that he shakes his head? And do you not know his obstinacy? You could
+not move him now were you to pay him in full the amount of the forfeit.
+It is not the gold that he longer cares for, but the chance to
+distinguish himself by the exhibition of the slave of greatest strength
+and prowess. So let that matter go for settled. Rather strive, in some
+other manner, to win the money with which to pay your forfeit. This,
+with good luck, you may do&mdash;a little here and a little there&mdash;who knows?
+Perhaps even I can help you. Have I not won fifty sestertia from you? I
+will now wager it back against a slave.'</p>
+
+<p>'Against any slave?'</p>
+
+<p>'By Bacchus, no! I have enough of ordinary captives to suit me, and care
+but little for any accession to the rabble of them. But you have one
+whom I covet&mdash;a Greek of fair appearance and pleasing manners&mdash;fit not
+for the camp or the quarries, but of some value as a page or cupbearer.
+It was but lately that I saw him, writing at your lady's dictation, and
+I wished for him at once. Shall we play for him?'</p>
+
+<p>'No! a thousand times, no!' exclaimed Sergius, striking the table so
+heavily with his open hand that the dice danced and the flagons shook.
+'Were you to offer me thrice his value&mdash;to pay off my forfeit to
+Sardesus to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[Pg 524]</a></span> the last sestertium&mdash;to gain me back my quarry and my
+vineyards&mdash;all that I have lost&mdash;I would not give up that slave. My
+purpose is sweeter to me than all the gold you could offer, and I will
+not be cheated out of it. That slave dies to-morrow in the
+amphitheatre&mdash;between the lion's jaws!'</p>
+
+<p>'Dies? In the arena?' was the astonished exclamation.</p>
+
+<p>'Is there aught wonderful in that?' Sergius fiercely cried. 'Have you
+never before known such a thing as a master giving up his slave for the
+public amusement? And let no man ask me why I do it. It may be that I
+wish revenge, hating him too much to let him live. It may be that I seek
+to be a benefactor like others, and furnish entertainment to the
+populace at my own expense. It is sufficient that I choose it. Will not
+any other slave answer, Emilius?'</p>
+
+<p>'Nay, no other will do,' remarked the poet, throwing himself carelessly
+back, with the air of one dismissing a fruitless subject from his mind.
+'This was the only one whom I coveted. For any other I would not care to
+shake the dicebox three times, though I might feel sure to win.'</p>
+
+<p>'Will you offer the same to me, Sergius?' eagerly cried the comedian. 'I
+also have won heavily from you. Will you play any other slave than this
+page against fifty sestertia?'</p>
+
+<p>For his only answer, Sergius seized the dice, and began impatiently to
+rattle them. The eyes of Bassus sparkled with anticipated victory.</p>
+
+<p>'You hear?' he cried, to all around him. 'Against my fifty sestertia he
+will stake any of his slaves excepting this Greek page?'</p>
+
+<p>'They all hear the terms,' retorted Sergius. 'Now throw!'</p>
+
+<p>'Whether male or female?' continued Bassus, still looking around to see
+that all understood.</p>
+
+<p>'Are they fools? Can they not hear? Will you throw or not?' shouted
+Sergius.</p>
+
+<p>In a wild delirium of excitement, the comedian began the game, and in a
+few minutes it was concluded. Then he leaped from his seat, crying out:</p>
+
+<p>'I have won! And there can be no dispute now! You all heard that he gave
+the choice of his slaves, whether male or female?'</p>
+
+<p>'Fool!' sneered Sergius, throwing himself back. 'What dispute can there
+be? Do you think that I would deny my word? And do you suppose I did not
+know your aims, cunningly as you may think you veiled them? Would I have
+given up Leta to you, if she had been of any further value to myself? By
+the gods! had you waited a while, I do not know but what I would have
+made her a present to you; not however, to oblige you, but to punish
+her!'</p>
+
+<p>The comedian listened in chopfallen amazement. Already it seemed to him
+that his prize had lost half its value.</p>
+
+<p>'Be at rest, though,' Sergius continued, in a contemptuous tone. 'I have
+merely tired of her, that is all. Her eyes are as bright and her voice
+as silvery as ever. She may not ever come to love you much, but she will
+have the wit to pretend that she does; and if she makes you believe
+her&mdash;as you doubtless will&mdash;it will be all the same thing to you. Who
+knows, too, with what zeal she may worm herself into your affection,
+under the guidance of her ambition? For, that she has ambition, you will
+soon discover. By Bacchus! since you have no wife or household to fetter
+your fancies, it would not surprise me were you to succumb to her wiles,
+and to make of her your wife. You may recline there and smile with
+incredulity; but such things have been done before this, and by men who
+would not condescend to look upon one in your poor station. Yes, I will
+wager that, in the end, you will make of her your wife. Well, it would
+be no harm to you. She will then deceive you, of course; but what of
+that? Have not better men submitted to that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[Pg 525]</a></span> inevitable lot? Yes, she
+will deceive you; and then will smile upon you, and you will believe her
+word, and be again deceived. But you will have only yourself to blame
+for it. I have warned you in advance.'</p>
+
+
+<h4>CHAPTER XV.</h4>
+
+<p>As the shouts of laughter elicited by the host's remark rang through the
+hall, drowning the muttered response of the comedian, Leta glided softly
+and rapidly from behind the screen of tapestry which veiled the open
+doorway. There, crouching out of sight, she had remained concealed for
+the last hour&mdash;watching the revellers through a crevice in the
+needlework, and vainly hoping, either in the words or face of Sergius,
+to detect some tone or expression indicative of regretful thought or
+recollection of herself. When at last her name had been mentioned, for a
+moment she had eagerly held her breath, lest she might lose one syllable
+from which an augury of her fate could be drawn. Then, repressing, with
+a violent effort, the cry of despair which rose to her lips, upon
+hearing herself thus coolly and disdainfully surrendered as the stake of
+a game of dice, and with less apparent regret than would have been felt
+for the loss of a single gold piece, she drew the folds of her dress
+closely about her and passed out.</p>
+
+<p>Out through the antechamber&mdash;down the stairway&mdash;and into the central
+court; no other purpose guiding her footsteps than that of finding some
+place where she could reflect, without disturbance, upon the fate before
+her. In that heated hall she must have died; but it might be that in the
+cool, open air, she could conquer the delirium which threatened to
+overwhelm her, and could thus regain her self-control. If only for five
+minutes, it might be well. With her quick energy and power of decision,
+even five minutes of cool, deliberate counsel with herself might suffice
+to shape and direct her whole future life.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly realizing how she had come there, she found herself sitting upon
+the coping of the courtyard fountain. The night was dark, for thick
+clouds shut out the gleam of moon and stars. No one could see her, nor
+was it an hour when any one was likely to be near. From one end to the
+other the court was deserted, except by herself. No light, other than
+the faint glow from the windows of the banquet hall upon the story above
+her. No sound beyond the sullen splash of the water falling into the
+marble basin of the fountain. There was now but little to interfere with
+deliberate reflection.</p>
+
+<p>What demon had possessed the Fates that they should have brought this
+lot upon her? It could not be the destiny which had been marked out for
+her from the first. That had been a different one, she was sure. Her
+instinct had whispered peace and success to her. Such were the blessings
+which should have been unravelled for her from off the twirling spindle;
+but some malignant spirit must have substituted another person's
+deserved condemnation in place of her more kindly lot.</p>
+
+<p>That she had failed in attaining the grand end of her desires was not,
+of itself, the utmost of her misfortune. She had aimed high, because it
+was as easy to do that as to accept a lower object of ambition. She had
+taken her course, believing that all things are possible to the
+energetic and daring, but, at the same time, fully realizing the chances
+of failure. But to fail had simply seemed to her to remain where she
+was, instead of ascending higher&mdash;to miss becoming the wife of the
+imperator, but to continue, as before, the main guide and direction of
+his thoughts, impulses, and affections.</p>
+
+<p>And now, without previous token or warning, had come upon her the
+terrible realization that she had not only gained nothing, but had lost
+all, and that the fatal chance which had fettered her schemes, had also
+led to her further degradation. Thrown aside<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[Pg 526]</a></span> like a broken toy-with a
+jeering confession that she had wearied her possessor&mdash;with a cool,
+heartless criticism upon her character, and with cruel prophecies about
+her future&mdash;gambled for with one whose sight filled her with
+abhorrence&mdash;and, when won, made over to him as a bone is tossed to a
+dog&mdash;what more bitterness could be heaped upon her?</p>
+
+<p>But there was now no use in mourning about the past. What had been done
+could not be altered. Nor could she disguise from herself the
+impossibility of ever regaining her former position and influence. Those
+had passed away forever. She must now look to the future alone, and
+endeavor so to shape its course as to afford herself some relief from
+its terrors. Possibly there might yet be found a way of escape.</p>
+
+<p>Should she try to fly? That, she knew, could not be done&mdash;at least,
+alone. The world was wide, but the arm of the imperial police was long;
+and though she might, for a little while, wander purposelessly hither
+and thither, yet before many hours the well-directed efforts of a
+pursuer would be sure to arrest her. She could die&mdash;for in every place
+death is within reach of the resolute; but she did not wish to die. For
+one instant, indeed, she thought of the Tiber, and the peace which might
+be found beneath its flow&mdash;but only for an instant. And she almost
+thanked the gods in her heart that it had not yet gone so far with her
+as that.</p>
+
+<p>Burying her face in her hands, she sat for a moment, endeavoring to
+abstract her thoughts from all outward objects, so as the more readily
+to determine what course to adopt. But for a while it seemed as though
+it was impossible for her to fix her mind aright. Each instant some
+intruding trifle interfered to distract her attention from the only
+great object which now should claim it. A long-forgotten incident of the
+past would come into her mind&mdash;or perhaps some queer conceit which at
+the time had caused laughter. She did not laugh now, but none the less
+would she find herself revolving the merits of the speech or action.
+Then, the soft fall of the water into the fountain basin annoyed her,
+and it occurred to her that it might be this&mdash;which prevented undivided
+reflection. Stooping over, therefore, and feeling along the edge of the
+basin, she found the vent of the pipes, and stopped the flow. At once
+the light stream began to diminish and die away, until in a moment the
+water was at rest, except for the few laggard drops which one by one
+rolled off the polished shoulders of the bronze figures. These gradually
+all trickled down, and then it seemed as though at last there must be
+silence. But the murmur of the evening breeze among the trees
+intervened; and, far more exasperating than all, she could now hear the
+bursts of merriment which rang out from the banqueting room overhead.
+Therefore, once more putting her hand into the basin, she turned on the
+flow, and the gentle stream again sprang from the outstretched cup and
+fell down, deadening all lesser sounds.</p>
+
+<p>Then Leta looked up at the sky, overspread with its thick pall of
+clouds, and wondered vacantly whether there would be rain upon the
+morrow, and if so, whether the games appointed for the new amphitheatre
+would take place. But she recovered herself with a start, and again
+buried her face in her hands. What were games and combats of that kind
+to her? She was to enter upon a different kind of struggle. She must
+reflect&mdash;reflect!&mdash;and when she had reflected, must act!</p>
+
+<p>For ten minutes she thus remained; and now, indeed, seemed to have
+gained the required concentration of thought. No outward sound disturbed
+her. Once a Nubian slave, who had heard the stoppage of the fountain's
+flow, emerged from beneath an archway, as though to examine into the
+difficulty. Finding that the water was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_527" id="Page_527">[Pg 527]</a></span> still playing as usual, he
+imagined that he must have been mistaken, gave utterance to an oath in
+condemnation of his own stupidity, slowly walked around the basin,
+looked inquiringly at Leta, and, for the moment, made as though he would
+have accosted her&mdash;and then, changing his mind, withdrew and walked back
+silently into the house. Still she did not move.</p>
+
+<p>At length, however, she raised her head and stood upright. Her eyes now
+shone with deep intensity of purpose, and her lips were firmly set.
+Something akin to a smile flickered around the corners of her mouth,
+betraying not pleasure, but satisfaction. She had evidently reflected to
+some purpose, and now the trial for action had arrived.</p>
+
+<p>'Strange that I should not have thought of it before,' she murmured to
+herself. Then stepping under the archway which led from the courtyard
+into the palace, she reached up against the wall and took down two keys
+which hung there. Holding them tightly, so that they might not clink
+together, she glided along, past the fountain&mdash;through the clump of
+plane trees&mdash;keeping as much as possible in the deeper shadows of arch
+and shrubbery&mdash;and so on along the whole length of the court, until she
+stood by the range of lower erections which bounded its farther
+extremity. Then, fitting one of the keys into an iron door, she softly
+unlocked it.</p>
+
+<p>Entering, she stood within a low stone cell. It was the prison house of
+the palace, used for the reception of new slaves, and for the punishment
+of such others as gave offence. It was a long, narrow apartment, paved
+with stone and lighted by a single grated aperture set high in the wall
+upon the courtyard side. The place was of sufficient dimensions to hold
+fifty or sixty persons, but, in the present case, there was but one
+tenant&mdash;Cleotos&mdash;-Not even a guard was with him, for the strength of the
+walls and the locks were considered amply sufficient to prevent escape.</p>
+
+<p>Cleotos was sitting upon a stone bench, resting his head upon his right
+hand. At the opening of the door he looked up. He could not see who it
+was that entered, but the light tread and the faint rustle of a waving
+dress sufficiently indicated the sex. If it had been daylight, a flush
+might have been seen upon his face, for the thought flashed upon his
+mind that it might be &AElig;none herself coming to his assistance. But the
+first word undeceived him; and he let his head once more fall between
+the palms of his hands.</p>
+
+<p>'Cleotos,' whispered Leta, 'it is I. I have come to set you free.'</p>
+
+<p>'It is right,' he said, moodily. 'All this I owe to you alone. It is
+fit that you should try to undo your work.'</p>
+
+<p>'Could I foresee that it would come to this?' she responded, attempting
+justification. 'How was I to know that my trivial transgression would
+have ended so sorrowfully for you? But all that is easily mended. You
+have money, and a token which will identify you to the proper parties.
+There is yet time to reach Ostia before that ship can sail.'</p>
+
+<p>'How knew you that I had gold&mdash;or this signet ring; or that there was a
+ship to sail from Ostia?' he exclaimed with sudden fierceness. 'You,
+then, had been listening at the door! And having listened, you must have
+known with what innocence we spoke together! And yet, seeing all this,
+you called him to the spot and left him to let his eyes be deceived and
+his heart filled with bitter jealousy, and have played upon his passion
+by wicked misrepresentation, until you have succeeded in bringing ruin
+upon all about you! I see it all now, as clearly as though it were
+written upon a parchment rolled out before me! To think that the gods
+have beheld you doing this thing, and yet have not stricken you dead!'</p>
+
+<p>'I have sinned,' she murmured, seizing his hand and bending over, so
+that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_528" id="Page_528">[Pg 528]</a></span> a ready tear rolled down upon it. He felt it fall, but moved not.
+Only a few days before, her tears would have moved him; but now his
+heart was hardened against her. He had found out that her nature was
+cruel and not easily moral to repentance, and that, if emotion was ever
+suffered to overcome her, it was tolerated solely for some crafty
+design. The falling tear, therefore, simply bade him be upon his guard
+against deceit, lest once again she might succeed in weaving her wiles
+about him. Or, if she really wept with repentance, he knew that it was
+not repentance for the sin itself, but rather for some baffled purpose.</p>
+
+<p>'Go on,' he simply said.</p>
+
+<p>'I have sinned,' she repeated, still clinging to his hands. 'But, O
+Cleotos! when I offer to undo my work and set you free, you will surely
+forgive me?'</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, it is right that you should repair the mischief you have caused,'
+he repeated; 'and I will avail myself of it. To-night, since you offer
+to set me free, and claim that you have the power to do so&mdash;to-night for
+Ostia; and then, then away forever from this ruthless land! But stay!
+What of our mistress? I will not go hence until I know that she is safe
+and well.'</p>
+
+<p>'She is well,' responded Leta, fearful lest the truth might throw a new
+obstacle before her plans. 'And all is again right between her lord and
+herself, for I have assured him of her innocence.'</p>
+
+<p>'Then, since this is so, there is no motive for me to tarry,' he said.
+He believed her, and was satisfied; not that he esteemed her worthy of
+belief, but because it did not seem to him possible that such a matter
+as a grateful kiss upon a protecting hand could require much
+explanation. 'I would like well once more to see her and bid her
+farewell, and utter my thanks for all her kindness; but to what purpose?
+I have done that already, and could do and say no more than I have
+already done and said. There remains, therefore, nothing more than to
+fulfil her commands, and return to my native home. But tell her, Leta,
+that my last thought was for her, and that her memory will ever live in
+my heart.'</p>
+
+<p>'I cannot tell her this,' slowly murmured Leta, 'for I shall not see her
+again. I&mdash;I go with you.'</p>
+
+<p>Cleotos listened for a moment in perplexed wonderment, and then, for his
+sole answer, dropped her hand and turned away. She understood him as
+well as though he had spoken the words of refusal.</p>
+
+<p>'You will not take me with you, then; is it not so?' she said. 'Some
+nice point of pride, or some feeling of fancied wrong, or craving for
+revenge, or, perhaps, love for another person, tells you now to separate
+yourself from me! And yet you loved me once. This, then, is man's
+promised faith!'</p>
+
+<p>'You dare to talk to me of faith and broken vows!' he exclaimed, after a
+moment of speechless amazement at her hardiness in advancing such a
+plea. 'You, who for weeks have treated me with scorn and
+indifference&mdash;who have plotted against me, until my life itself has been
+brought into danger&mdash;who, apart from all that, cast me off when first we
+met in Rome, telling me then that I was and could be nothing to you,
+yes, even that our association from the first had been a mistake and a
+wrong! Yes, Leta, there was a time when I truly loved you, as man had
+never then done, or since, or ever will again; but impute not to me the
+blame that I cannot do so now.'</p>
+
+<p>'I was to blame,' she said; and it seemed that this night must be a
+night of confession for her, in so few things could she justify herself
+by denial or argument. 'I acknowledge my fault, and how my heart has
+been drawn from you by some delusion, as powerful and resistless as
+though the result of magic. But when I confess it freely, and tell you
+how I now see my duty and my heart more clearly, as though a veil of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[Pg 529]</a></span>
+after all, I find no forgiveness in your heart, said I not truly that
+man's faith cannot be trusted? Am I not the same Leta as of old?'</p>
+
+<p>'The same as of old?' he exclaimed. 'Can you look earnestly and
+truthfully into your soul, and yet avow that you are the pure-hearted
+girl who roamed hand in hand with me only a year ago, in our native
+isle, content to have no ambition except that of living a humble life
+with me? And now, with your simple tastes and desires swept away&mdash;with
+your soul covered with love of material pleasures as with a lava
+crust&mdash;wrapt up in longing for Rome's most sinful, artificial
+excesses&mdash;having, for gold or position or power or ambition, or what
+not, so long as it was not for love, given yourself up a willing victim
+to a heartless master&mdash;do you dare, after this, to talk to me of love,
+and call yourself the same?'</p>
+
+<p>'And are you one of those who believe that there can be no forgiveness
+for repentant woman?'</p>
+
+<p>'Of forgiveness, all that can be desired; but of forgetfulness, none.
+There is one thing that no man can forget; and were I to repulse the
+admonitions of my judgment, and strive to pass that thing by, who would
+sooner scorn me than yourself? Let all this end. Know that I love you
+not, and could never love you again. Your scorn, indifference, and
+deceit have long ago crushed from my heart all the love it once held.
+Know further, that if I did still love you, my pride would condemn the
+feeling, and I would never rest until I had destroyed it, even were it
+necessary to destroy myself rather than to yield.'</p>
+
+<p>'These are brave words, indeed!' she exclaimed, taunted by his rebuke
+into a departure from her assumption of affection. 'But they better suit
+the freeman upon his own mountain side than the slave in his cell. Samos
+is still afar off. The road from here to Ostia has not yet been
+traversed by you in safety. Even this door between you and the open
+street has not been thrown back. And yet you dare to taunt me, knowing
+that I hold in my hand the key, and, by withdrawing it, can take away
+all hope from you. Do you realize what will be your fate if you remain
+here&mdash;how that on the morrow the lions and leopards of the amphitheatre
+will quarrel over your scattered limbs?'</p>
+
+<p>'Is this a threat?' he cried. 'Is it to tell me that if I do not give my
+love where my honor tells me it should not be given, I must surely die!
+So, then, let it be. I accept the doom. One year ago, I would have
+cheerfully fought in the arena for your faintest smile. Now I would
+rather die there than have your sullied love forced upon me.'</p>
+
+<p>Without another word he sat down again upon the stone bench. Even in
+that darkness she could note how resolute was his expression, how firm
+and unyielding his attitude. She had roused his nature, as she had never
+seen it before. She had not believed that a spirit which she had been
+accustomed to look upon as so much inferior in strength to her own,
+could show such unflinching determination; and for the moment she stood
+admiring him, and wondering whether, if he had always acted like that,
+he might not have bound her soul to his own and kept her to himself
+through all temptation and trial. Then, taking the other key, she
+unlocked the door in the rear wall of the cell, and threw it open. The
+narrow street behind the court was before him, and he was free to go.</p>
+
+<p>'I meant it not for a threat,' she said. 'However low I may sink, I have
+not yet reached the pass of wishing to purchase or beg for affection.
+Why I spoke thus, I know not. It may be that I thought some gratitude
+might be due me for rescuing you. But I cannot tell what I, thought. Or
+it might have been that words were necessary for me, and that I used the
+first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[Pg 530]</a></span> that came. But let that pass. Know only that your safety lies
+before you, and that it is in your power to grasp it. And now, farewell.
+You leave me drifting upon a downward course, Cleotos. Sometimes,
+perhaps, when another person is at your side, making your life far
+happier than I could have made it, you will think kindly of me.'</p>
+
+<p>'I think kindly of you now, Leta,' he said. 'Whatever love I can give,
+apart from the love which I once asked you to accept, is yours. In
+everything that brotherly affection can bestow, there will be no limit
+to my care and interest for you. Nay, more, you shall now go away from
+hence with me; and though I cannot promise more than a brother's love,
+yet with that for your guide and protection, you can reach your native
+home in peace and security, and there work out whatever repentance you
+may have here begun.'</p>
+
+<p>'And when we are there, and those who have known us begin to ask why,
+when Cleotos has brought Leta back in safety, he regards her only as a
+sister and a friend, and otherwise remains sternly apart from her, what
+answer can be given which will not raise suspicion and scorn, and make
+my life a burden to me? No, Cleotos, it cannot be. Cruel as my lot may
+be here, I have only myself to answer for it, and it is easier to hide
+myself from notice in this whirl of sin and passion than if at home
+again. And whatever may henceforth happen to me, the Fates are surely
+most to blame. How can one avoid his destiny?'</p>
+
+<p>'The Fates do not carve out our destiny,' he said. 'They simply carry
+into relentless effect the judgments which our own passions and
+weaknesses pronounced upon ourselves. O Leta! have you considered what
+you are resolved upon encountering? Do you not know that some day this
+master of yours will tire of you, and fling you to some friend of his&mdash;a
+soldier, actor, or what not&mdash;that as the years run on and your beauty
+fades, you will fall lower and lower? Have not thousands like yourself
+thus gone on, until at last, becoming old and worthless, they are left
+to die alone upon some island in the Tiber? Pray that you may die a
+better death than that!'</p>
+
+<p>'It is a sad picture,' she answered. 'It is not merely possible, but
+also probable. I acknowledge it all. And yet, if I saw it all unrolled
+before me as my certain doom, I do not know that I would try to shun it.
+Already the glitter of this world has changed my soul from what it was,
+and I am now too feeble of purpose to spend long years in retrieving the
+errors of the past. There came into my heart a thought&mdash;a selfish
+thought&mdash;that you might forget what has gone before; and then it seemed
+that I might succeed in winning back my peace, and so shun the fate
+which lies before me. But you cannot forget. I blame you not: you are
+right. You have never spoken more truly than when you said that I would
+have despised you if you had yielded. Therefore, that hope is gone; and
+now I must submit to the destiny which is coming upon me.'</p>
+
+<p>'But, Leta, only strive to think that&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'Nay, what is the use? Rather let me throw all regrets away, and strive
+not to think at all. Why not yield with a pleasant grace to the current,
+when we know that, in the end, struggle as we may, it will surely sweep
+us under?'</p>
+
+<p>'Leta&mdash;dear Leta&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'Not a word, dear Cleotos; it must not be. From this hour I banish all
+human affections from my heart, as I banish all hope. Could you remain
+here, you would see how relentless and fierce my nature will grow. Plots
+and schemes shall now be my amusement; for if I must be destroyed,
+others shall fall with me. This must be the last tender impulse of my
+life. I know not why it is, but I could now really weep. Cleotos,
+forgive me! I came hither, loving you not, but hop<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_531" id="Page_531">[Pg 531]</a></span>ing to beguile you
+into receiving me again. I have failed, and I ought to hate you for it;
+and yet I almost love you instead. It is strange, is it not?</p>
+
+<p>'But, Leta&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'How my heart now feels soft and tender with our recollections of other
+days! Do you remember, Cleotos, how once, when children, we went
+together and stole the grapes from Eminides's vine? And how, when he
+would have beaten you, I stood before you, and prevented him? Who would
+then have thought that, in a few years, we should be here in
+Rome&mdash;slaves, and parting forever? We shall never again together see
+Eminides's vineyard, shall we?'</p>
+
+<p>'O Leta&mdash;my sister&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>'There, there; speak not, but go at once, for some one comes near. Tarry
+no longer. If at home they ask after me, tell them I am dead. Farewell,
+dear Cleotos. Kiss me good-by. Do not grudge me that, at least. And may
+the gods bless you!'</p>
+
+<p>He would still have spoken, would have claimed a minute to plead with
+her and try to induce her to leave the path she was pursuing, and go
+with him. But at that instant the voice of some one approaching sounded
+louder, and the tones of Sergias could be distinguished as he tried to
+troll forth the catch of a drinking melody. There was no time to lose.
+With a farewell pressure of her arm about Cleotos's neck, Leta pushed
+him through the aperture into the dark back street; and then, leaving
+the keys in the locks, turned back into the garden, and fled toward the
+house.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CREATION" id="CREATION"></a>CREATION.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The primary characteristics of creation are aggregation, producing all
+existing forms; and dissolution, in which the parts suffer
+disintegration, their varied elements entering into new combinations.
+The active powers producing such normal condition of matter, which is
+ceaseless motion, are comprehended in attraction for aggregation, and
+repulsion for dissolution, alternately. This power of combing atoms and
+dissolving their connection is electric, which is only possessed by that
+element, in its dual character of attraction and repulsion; and thus we
+may reasonably assume that electricity is the material wherewith
+creative energy manifests its power in the varied combinations,
+dissolutions, and reconstructions which comprise all animate and
+inanimate existences. This same cosmical power, electricity, holds all
+worlds in their normal relations, and is the source of light and heat,
+as well as the connecting link, through our electric nerve cords, by
+which our minds alone commune with the outer world, in direct contact
+with our bodily senses, and hence becomes the medium of all our
+knowledge.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h4>ELECTRICITY AS THE SOURCE OF LIGHT, HEAT, GRAVITATION,<br />AND THE ORIGIN op
+ALL GLOBES, NEBUL&AElig;, AND COMETIC MATTER.</h4>
+
+<p>If space were wholly devoid of matter, all globes, or other masses of
+matter, would be dissipated into it, or <i>&agrave; priori</i> could not have been
+formed from it. The material interchange, passing through space, between
+globes, in all stages of formation, such as light, heat, and
+gravitation, could not be con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_532" id="Page_532">[Pg 532]</a></span>ducted through a vacuum, as their very
+presence would be destructive of vacuity. Materiality would be
+dissipated or absorbed in an attempted passage through vacuity;
+therefore, as we know that light, heat, and gravitation are,
+necessarily, material, space is but diffused materiality, at its minimum
+of etheriality. Globes moving in their orbits and on their axes must
+thus meet with resistance: this, together with the internal motion of
+their contained elements, necessarily excites the constant production of
+electricity, in its dual character of attraction and repulsion,
+according to its well-known laws; and this double character, alone
+possessed by electricity, when concentrated produces material affinity,
+with reciprocal attraction and repulsion, in all its atoms, thus forever
+preventing entire solidity or entire separation of its parts. Such
+condensation of matter by electric action, is the origin of heat and the
+variety produced by incandescence, which, therefore, accounts for the
+formation of globes from the materials in space, and their sustentation
+in orbit.</p>
+
+<p>As motion is the normal condition of matter, and is the producer of
+electricity, therefore electric actions, concentrated in space,
+necessarily gathers cometic and nebulous matter from space, the
+materials, through incandescence, for future globes, with orbits
+contracting in proportion to condensation, its maximum of attraction. As
+material space is boundless, so the creation of globes is endless
+therein, through electric action, by producing gradual centres of
+material condensation, the mere whirlpool specks in infinite space.</p>
+
+<p>Revolving bodies, gaseous, fluid, or solid, thus impress or charge the
+centres of their motion, by superinduced attraction, with electricity,
+as their Leyden jars. So, too, the central body, or primary of a system,
+so overcharged with electricity by its revolving secondaries, becomes
+positively electrified or repellant to all such revolving bodies; and
+thus the producers and accumulator are mutually attractive and repellant
+of each other.</p>
+
+<p>The planets, by their lightning speed in orbits and on their axes, being
+producers, and the sun the recipient or accumulator of electricity; the
+latter, as the centre of our revolving system, is the Leyden jar, and
+thus becomes the overcharged positive source and dispenser of electric
+light and heat to the surrounding planets.</p>
+
+<p>The planets, as producers, are always negatively electric, tending
+toward the accumulator, the sun; while the latter, as the accumulator,
+being overcharged, is positively electric, and repels. The sun being the
+greater body, the planets' negative electric attraction for it must
+always yield to the greater mass and tend toward the sun; while that
+great body, overcharged with accumulated positive electricity, is fully
+capable of repelling such tendency of the lesser revolving planets
+toward it. Attraction or gravitation with the planets, and repulsion
+(instead of centrifugal force) with the sun, forever and inexhaustibly
+retain the various bodies, of each system, in their respective orbits.
+As motion is the normal condition of matter, eternally producing
+electric action, and when centralized evolving light and heat; so light
+and heat are as inexhaustibly eternal as motion, and may thus be
+demonstrated as electric. The same principle of action applies to all
+individual globes of each separate system, conjointly; and collectively,
+the different systems mutually attract and repel each other,
+proportionate to mass and the weakened forces of distance, thus
+preserving a cosmical harmony throughout creation, forever forbidding
+collision or destruction of individual globes.</p>
+
+<p>This theory will be found to correspond with the well-known laws of
+positive and negative electric action; as well as illustrative of the
+influence of electric light on vegetable production<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[Pg 533]</a></span>&mdash;the only
+artificially produced light, capable of imparting a healthy growth, and
+color&mdash;which, I think, clearly proves it to be of the same character as
+solar light. It is also corroborative of much that is inexplicable,
+except in the identity of electricity with solar effulgence, as the
+source of light, heat, and gravitation, as well as substituting
+repulsion for centrifugal force, and must forever disprove the theory of
+solar light being the result of mere metallic incandescence, or any
+other equally exhausting combustion. The latter theory, with such
+supposed expedients in nature, to carry out the mighty design of
+creation, belittles the subject by its transitoriness, and is,
+therefore, unworthy the conception of modern generations.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PHENOMENA_OF_HAZE_FOGS_AND_CLOUDS" id="PHENOMENA_OF_HAZE_FOGS_AND_CLOUDS"></a>PHENOMENA OF HAZE, FOGS, AND CLOUDS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The predominant haze, which generally envelops the landscape and reddens
+the sun and moon during long droughts, is usually ascribed to smoke from
+burning woods and forests, pervading the air. I have observed a similar
+prevalent haze, connected with other extensive droughts than the one
+from which the country is now (August) suffering, and have invariably
+heard the same vague and inadequate cause assigned. Observation proves
+conclusively, that the assigned is not the true general cause (although
+it has its purely local effect), as with winds, for days together, in
+opposite quarters from local fires on mountain or plain, such widespread
+districts remain enveloped in haze, although hundreds of miles distant.
+Neither over such districts was there any odor as from smoke pervading
+the atmosphere (except temporarily from some neighboring chimneys, which
+the then heavy air kept near the earth), nor felt by the eyes, which
+very perceptibly smart when exposed to smoke. It is impossible, with
+varying winds, that mere local fires should spread smoke so uniformly as
+to comprise most of the area of the drought, which on this occasion
+extended from our great western lakes to the Atlantic seacoast; and
+anomalously, too, that it should have continued so long after a rain had
+extinguished those fires.</p>
+
+<p>I should assign a very different cause for this phenomenon. Rain drops
+are negatively electric, while suspended moisture, such as fog, displays
+itself in the form of vesicles or globules, distended by the presence
+and prevalence of positive electricity, which refracts the rays of light
+from so many myriad surfaces, that all objects are thus, necessarily,
+obscured to the eye. During droughts, when haze prevails, positive
+electricity in the air becomes in excess, which is heating, and
+therefore serves still more to subdivide, as well as to expand or
+distend the floating moisture in the atmosphere (of which it is never
+entirely deprived) into infinitesimal vesicles, or globules, like minute
+soap bubbles, and thus from such an infinite number of refracting
+surfaces is produced the haze, as well as the obscuration of the
+landscape and the reddened disks of the sun and moon, by the absorption
+of their heat or red rays, so characteristic of great droughts. This
+same infinitesimal vesicular condition of suspended moisture, is also
+the sufficient cause of there being no deposition of dew on such
+occasions, except where a local change of electric condition cools the
+air, thus temporarily clearing the atmosphere, and permit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[Pg 534]</a></span>ting a local
+deposition of the previously suspended moisture, in the form of dew.</p>
+
+<p>All fogs are due to this same cause, as well as that which, in extreme
+wintry cold, overhangs the open water, as it yields its comparative heat
+to the air. The formation and suspension of clouds, in all their varied
+characteristics, have the same origin. That highly attenuated haze which
+invests the distant landscape, particularly mountains, with its magical
+purple hue, is due to the same, but still more ethereal interposition of
+infinitesimal globules of suspended moisture. In corroboration of this
+being the true explanation of the phenomena of haze, fogs, etc., is the
+fact, that as soon as clouds prevail, denoting an electric change in the
+atmosphere, all haze immediately disappears, or becomes embraced in the
+larger vesicles or globules, forming clouds.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="FLY_LEAVES_FROM_THE_LIFE_OF_A_SOLDIER" id="FLY_LEAVES_FROM_THE_LIFE_OF_A_SOLDIER"></a>FLY LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER.</h2>
+
+<h3>PART II.&mdash;CHEVRONS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>She sewed them on upside down. Please to remember that this was in May,
+1861 (or was it 1851? it seems a long time ago), when a young lady of
+the most finished education, polished to the uttermost nine, could not
+reasonably be expected to know what a sergeant-major was, much less the
+particular cut and fashion of his badge of rank. I told her, exultingly,
+that I was appointed sergeant-major of our battalion. 'What's that?' she
+inquired, simply enough. I explained. The dignity and importance of the
+office was scarcely diminished in her mind by my explanation; and,
+indeed, I thought it the grandest in the army. Who would be a
+commissioned officer, when he could wear our gorgeous gray uniform,
+trimmed with red, the sleeves wellnigh hidden behind three broad red
+stripes in the shape of a V, joined at the top by as many broad red
+arcs, all beautifully set off by the lithe and active figure of
+Sergeant-Major William Jenkins? As for Mary, who protested that she
+never could learn the difference between all these grades, or make out
+the reason for them, she was for her part convinced that not even the
+colonel himself, certainly not that fat Major Heavysterne, could be
+grander, or handsomer, or more important than her William. So I forgave
+her for sewing on my chevrons upside down, although it was at the time
+an infliction grievous to be born, inasmuch as the fussy little
+quartermaster-sergeant was thereby enabled to get a day's start of in
+the admiration and envy of our old company. How they envied us, to be
+sure! But I had one consolation: Oates' were all straight; mine were
+arched. And <i>she</i> sewed mine on. His were done by Cutts &amp; Dunn's
+bandy-legged foreman.</p>
+
+<p>There never was such a uniform as ours. Not even the 'Seventh'
+itself&mdash;incomparable in the eyes of the <i>three</i>-months'&mdash;could vie in
+grand and soldierly simplicity, we thought, with the gray and red of the
+9th Battalion, District of Columbia Volunteers. Gray cap, with a red
+band round it, letters A S, for 'American Sharpshooters' (Smallweed used
+to say he never saw it spelt in that way before, and to ask anxiously
+for the other S), gray single-breasted frock coat, with nine gilt
+buttons, and red facings on the collar and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_535" id="Page_535">[Pg 535]</a></span> cuffs. Gray pantaloons, with
+a broad red stripe down the outer seam. The drummers sported the most
+gorgeous red stomachs ever seen, between two rows of twenty little
+bullet buttons. The color rendered us liable to be mistaken for the
+rebels, it is true; but this source of anxiety to the more nervous among
+us was happily prevented from leading to any unfavorable results by the
+fatherly care displayed by poor old General Balkinsop, under whose
+protection, we were sent into the field, in always keeping at least a
+day's march from the enemy!</p>
+
+<p>When we non-commissioned staff officers were first promoted, we felt
+badly about leaving our companies; wanted to drill with them still, and
+so on. But this soon wore off under the pressure of new duties. For my
+part, I soon found that the adjutant, Lieutenant Harch, regarded it as
+quite a natural arrangement that the sergeant-major should attend to the
+office duties, while the adjutant occupied himself exclusively with what
+he was pleased to style the military part of the business; meaning
+thereby, guard mounting every morning and Sunday morning, inspection
+once a week, making an average of, say, twenty minutes work per diem for
+the adjutant, and leaving the poor sergeant-major enough to occupy and
+worry him for ten or eleven hours. 'Sergeant-major, publish these
+orders,' Lieutenant Harch would say, in tones of authority exceeding in
+peremptory curtness anything I have ever heard since from the commander
+of a grand army; and then, scraping a match&mdash;my match&mdash;upon the wall, he
+would begin attending to his 'military duties' by lighting a cigar&mdash;my
+cigar&mdash;and strolling up the avenue, on exhibition, preparatory to going
+home to dine, while the fag remained driving the pen madly, kindly
+assisted sometimes by Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, until long after the
+dinner hour of the non-commissioned staff. I think the company
+commanders must sometimes have doubted (unless they carefully refrained
+from reading orders, as I have sometimes thought probable) whether the
+adjutant could write his name; for all our orders used to be signed:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+'By order of Major <span class="smcap">Johnson Heavysterne</span>:</p>
+<p class="author"><span class="smcap">Frederick Harch</span>,<br />
+1st Lieutenant and Adjutant,<br />
+By <span class="smcap">William Jenkins</span>, Sergeant-Major.'
+</p>
+
+<p>Now, if the printer sets this up properly, you will see that, even at
+that early day, we knew too much to adopt the sensation style of signing
+orders which some officers have since learned from the <i>New York
+Herald</i>, thus:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+By command of</p>
+<p class="author">Major-General BULGER!<br />
+<span class="smcap">Washington Smith</span>, A. A.-G.
+</p>
+
+<p>In those days there was but little of that distinction of ranks which
+has come to be better observed now that our volunteers have grown into
+an army. You see, the process of forming an army out of its constituent
+element follows pretty much the fashion set by that complex machine the
+human animal: the materials go through all the processes of swallowing,
+digestion, chylifaction, chymifaction, absorption, alteration, and
+excretion; bone, muscle, nerve, sinew, viscera, and what not, each
+taking its share, and discarding the useless material that has only
+served, like bran in horse feed, to give volume and <i>prehensibility</i> to
+the mass. Our non-commissioned staff messed with the major, who was as
+jolly a bachelor as need be, of some forty-nine years of growth, and
+thirty of butchering, that being his occupation. The adjutant, being
+newly married to a gaunt female, who, I hope, nagged him as he us,
+<i>preferred</i> to take his meals at home. Smallweed, who had somehow got
+made quartermaster, couldn't go old Heavysterne, he said, and so kept as
+long as he could to his desultory habits of living as a citizen and a
+bachelor. So our mess consisted of the major, who exercised a paternal
+care over the rest of us, superintend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_536" id="Page_536">[Pg 536]</a></span>ing, indeed often joining in, our
+amusements and discussions, our quarrels and makings up; of
+Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, who knew all about everything and
+everybody better than anybody, and was always ready to ventilate his
+superior knowledge on the slightest provocation, and who, as Smallweed,
+now Lieutenant Smallweed, used to say, 'would have made a d&mdash;&mdash;d elegant
+quartermaster-sergeant, if he hadn't had a moral objection to issuing
+anything;' of Chaplain Bender, a sanctified-looking individual of
+promiscuous theology and doubtful morals (the funny men used to speak of
+him irreverently as Hell Bender); of the battalion commissary,
+Lieutenant Fippany, an unmitigated swell; of Commissary-Sergeant Peck, a
+stumpy little fellow, full of facts and figures, and always quiet and
+ready; of the writer, Sergeant-Major Jenkins, or Jinkens as my name used
+to be mispronounced, infinitely to my disgust; and lastly,
+semi-occasionally, of the sutler, Mr. Cann. The surgeon, old Doctor
+Peacack, ran a separate mess, consisting of himself, the assistant
+surgeon, Dr. Launcelot Cutts, and hospital steward Spatcheloe.</p>
+
+<p>The drum-major, Musician Tappit, having refused to be mustered in, and
+the War Department having presently refused to let us have any musicians
+at all, used to appear only on parades, gorgeous in his gray uniform and
+ornamental red stomach, disappearing with exemplary regularity, and
+diving into his upholsterer's cap and baize apron upon the slightest
+prospect of work or danger. I don't think it was ever my bad fortune to
+eat more unpleasant meals than those eaten at our mess table. The
+officers, excepting the major, but specially including the chaplain,
+used to insist on being helped first and excessively to everything; also
+on inviting their friends to dine on our plates, there being no extra
+ones; also on giving us the broken chairs, one in particular, that was
+cracked in a romp between the chaplain and the adjutant, and that
+pinched you when you sat on it. Then Lieutenant Harch was always playing
+adjutant at the dinner table, settling discussions <i>ex cathedra</i> in a
+sharp tone, and ordering his companions to help him to dishes, as thus:
+'Sergeant-Major, p'tatoes!' 'Oates, beef!' 'Hurry up with those beans!'
+To be monosyllabic, rude to his superiors and equals, and overbearing to
+his inferiors in rank, this fledgling soldier&mdash;our comrade of a few days
+since, and presently the subordinate of most of us, through standing
+still while we went ahead&mdash;used to think the perfection and essence of
+the military system. And then that smug-faced, smooth-tongued,
+dirty-looking chaplain, with his second-hand shirt collars and slopshop
+morality&mdash;was it whiskey or brandy that his breath smelt oftenest of? He
+was the first chaplain I had seen, and I confess his rank breath, dirty
+linen, and ranker and dirtier hypocrisy, gave me a disgust toward his
+order that it took long months and many good men to obliterate.</p>
+
+<p>The best part of May we spent in drilling and idling and grumbling, and
+some of us, not so hard worked as Sergeant-Major Jenkins, in the true
+military style of conviviality, usually terminating in an abrupt entry
+in the orderly book, opposite the name of the follower of Bacchus,
+'Drunk; two extra tours guard duty;' or 'Drunk again; four extra tours
+knapsack drill.' Now, the knapsack drill, as practised by well-informed
+and duty-loving sergeants of the guard, simply consists in requiring the
+delinquent to shoulder, say, for two hours in every six, a knapsack
+filled with stones, blankets, or what not, until it weighs twenty,
+thirty, or perhaps forty pounds, according to the nature of the case and
+the officer who orders the punishment.</p>
+
+<p>Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates and I went up, one afternoon, with
+Lieutenant Smallweed, Corporal Bledsoe of our old company, and two or
+three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[Pg 537]</a></span> others, to see the famous 'Seventh' drill, out at Camp Cameron,
+which I suppose nearly everybody knows is situated about a mile and a
+half north of the President's house, on the 14th-street road, and just
+opposite to a one-horse affair that used to call itself 'Columbian
+College,' but which, after passing through a course of weak
+semi-religio-secessionism, gradually dried up, leaving its skin to the
+surgeon-general for a hospital. The afternoon we selected to visit Camp
+Cameron turned out to be an extra occasion. General Thomas, the
+adjutant-general of the army, was to present a stand of colors to the
+'Seventh' on behalf of Mr. Secretary Cameron, on behalf of some ladies,
+I think. Ladies! I admire you very much, for the very many things
+wherein you are most admirable, but why, oh! why, in the name of the
+immortals, will you, why will you present flags? Don't do it any more,
+please. They are always packed up in a box and left somewhere almost as
+soon as your handkerchiefs have ceased waving, your soprano hurrahs
+ceased ringing; or else they are given to some pet officer for a
+coverlet. They cost a great deal of money; they oblige the poor soldiers
+to endure a mort of flatulent oratory at a parade rest; and they force
+the poor colonel, in a great perspiration, to stumble through a few
+feeble, ineffectual, and disjointed words of thanks, which he committed
+to memory last night from the original, written for him by the adjutant
+or the young regimental poet, but of which he has forgotten almost every
+other word. The wise old Trojan says, speaking of the horse (I get my
+quotations from the newspapers, you may be sure):</p>
+
+<p class="center">'Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes;'</p>
+
+<p>implying that he is opposed to going into that speculation in wooden
+horseflesh, because he fears the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.
+Just so, I fear the ladies, especially when they present flags. Remember
+<i>Punch's</i> advice to young persons about to be married? <i>'Don't!'</i></p>
+
+<p>The Seventh, after going through the usual evening parade, and a few
+simple man&oelig;uvres, formed square, facing inward, with General Thomas
+and the oil-skin sausage that contained the new colors, and all the
+regimental officers, in the centre. General Thomas's feeble pipes
+sounded faintly enough for about half an hour, during which time no man
+in the ranks heard more than a dozen words. Then Colonel Lefferts
+responded in a few inaudible, but no doubt very appropriate remarks.
+Then 'the boys,' seeing that the time had come, cheered lustily, after
+the hypothetical manner of the rocket. But there was one thing we did
+hear, standing on tiptoe, and straining every ear. The Seventh was to go
+somewhere. The crisis of the war had come. The Seventh was going to
+shoot at it. Their thirty days were almost out; but they were going to
+be shot at, just like any of us three-months men.</p>
+
+<p>To leave their canned fruits, and milk, and fresh eggs, and board
+floors, and a stroll on the avenue in the afternoon, and go where glory
+waited for them! Happy, happy gray-breasts! We wandered enviously round
+the excited camp, and talked with our friends. Many were the rumors,
+appalling to us in those days, when we were yet unused to camp 'chin.'
+The regiment was to go to Harper's Ferry. Johnston was there. They would
+hang him if they took him. They were to march straight to Richmond, One
+man of the 'Engineer Company' was going to resign, he said, because his
+company had to remain to guard the camp. They were to take two days'
+rations and forty rounds of cartridges per man&mdash;<i>ball</i> cartridges. Forty
+rounds of ball cartridges and two days' work! Surely, we thought, the
+days of the rebellion are numbered. And then, chewing the bitter cud of
+the reflection that the war would almost certainly be ended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[Pg 538]</a></span> before we
+got a chance at the enemy, we wandered sadly back to our quarters,
+Smallweed growling horribly all the way. Our 'headquarters' we find in a
+great state of excitement. We find the orderly and Major Heavysterne
+discussing the prospects of the rebels being able to hold out a month,
+and Color-Sergeant Hepp and the adjutant both trying to decide the
+dispute. Hepp thinks they can't do without leather, and the adjutant
+thinks the want of salt must fetch them in a few weeks. Thinks? Decides!
+Whatever may be doubtful, this is certain. Everybody seems strangely
+excited. We tell them our news. 'Tell us some'n do'n know!' rasps
+Lieutenant Harch; 'our b'ttalion's goin', too; get ready, both of,
+quick! Smallweed, where in the h&mdash; have you been? I've had to do all
+your work.' We were to go at nine o'clock at night. It was then eight.
+Whither? No one knew. The chaplain comes in, with symptoms of erysipelas
+in his nose, and a villanous breath, to tell us, while we&mdash;the
+quartermaster-sergeant and I&mdash;are packing our knapsacks and leaving
+lines of farewell for those at home and at other people's homes, that
+the major has imparted to him in confidence the awful secret that we are
+bound for Mount Vernon, to remove the bones of Washington. This gives us
+something terrible to think of as we march down, in quick time (a
+suggestion of that adjutant, I know), to the Long Bridge, and during the
+long delay there, spent by commanding officers in pottering about and
+gesticulating. By commanding officers? There is one there who does not
+potter, standing erect&mdash;that one with the little point of fire between
+his fingers that marks the never-quenched cigarette&mdash;talking to Major
+Heavysterne in low and earnest tones, but perfectly cool and clear the
+while. That is our splendid Colonel Diamond, as brave and good a soldier
+as ever drew sword, as noble and true a Christian as ever endured
+persecution and showed patience. They are discussing a plan for crossing
+the river in boats, landing at a causeway where the Alexandria road
+crosses Four Mile Run, and so cutting off the impudent picket of the
+enemy's cavalry that holds post at the Virginia end of the Long Bridge.
+The battalion commanders are evidently dazzled by the brilliancy of the
+moonlight and the colonel's scheme, for it soon becomes apparent that
+they haven't the pluck and dash necessary to render such an operation
+successful. Even we young soldiers, intent upon the awful idea of
+resurrecting Washington's bones, and little dreaming then of becoming
+the pioneers of the great invasion, could see the hitch. Presently the
+major got a definite order, and beckoning to us of the battalion staff,
+began to cross the bridge. Dusky bodies of troops, their arms glistening
+in the moonlight, had been silently gliding past us while the discussion
+progressed. Most of them seemed to have halted on the bridge, we found
+as we passed on, and to have squatted down in the shade of the parapet,
+gassing, smoking, or napping. It was nearly midnight. We had got to the
+middle of the causeway, and found ourselves alone, bathed in silence and
+moonlight and wonder, when up dashed a horseman from the direction of
+the Virginia side. He stopped, and peered at us over his horse's neck.
+'O'Malley, is that you?' says the major, seeing it is an Irish officer
+belonging to Colonel Diamond's staff. 'Yes,' says the captain, 'and who
+the devil are you?' 'Major Heavysterne. Won't you please ride back and
+send my battalion forward? You'll find the boys standing on the draw.
+Cap'n Bopp, of the Fisler Guards, is the senior officer, I believe.' But
+the Irishman was off, with an oath at the major's stupidity in
+forgetting to order his men forward. Presently the battalion came
+creeping up, silently enough, I thought, but the adjutant made the
+excuse of a casual 'ouch'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_539" id="Page_539">[Pg 539]</a></span> from a man on whose heels Hrsthzschnoffski
+had casually trodden, to shriek out his favorite 'Stop 'at talken'!' 'Do
+you command this battalion?' asks Captain Pipes, sternly; and
+straightway there would have been a dire altercation, but for the
+major's gentle interference. The bridge began to sway and roar under our
+steps. We were on the draw. Clinging to the theory of Washington's
+bones, I peered over the draw, in the hope of seeing a steamer; there
+was nothing there but the sop and swish of the tide. Perhaps we were not
+going to Mount Vernon at all! 'Halt! Who are these sleeping beauties on
+the draw? Ah! these are the Bulgers. 'Say, Bulger,' I ask of one of
+them, 'who's ahead of you?' 'A'n't nobody,' he replied indignantly, as
+who should say, Who <i>can</i> be ahead of the invincible Bulger Guards.
+Nobody! Here was great news. ''<i>Orr'd</i> <span class="smcap">H'RCH</span>!' drones the major, in low
+tones; and '<i>Owa</i>'' <span class="smcap">H'MP</span>,' sharply, ''<i>Orrrr</i> '<span class="smcap">RRRCH</span>,' gruffly, repeat
+the captains. On we go, breaking step to save the bridge, surprise and
+fluttering in our hearts. A'n't nobody ahead! Now we are on the hard
+dirt, the sacred soil, of the pewter State, mother of Presidents, the
+birthplace of Washington, the feeding ground of hams, but otherwise the
+very nursery and hive of worthlessness, humbug, sham, and superstition.
+Virginia, that might have been the first, and proudest, and most
+enlightened State in the Union, that is the last and most besodden State
+in or half out of it&mdash;But while my apostrophe runs on, the bit between
+its teeth, the head of our little column muffles its tread on the sacred
+soil itself, dirtying its boots in the sacred mud, the roar of the
+bridge ceases, the last files and the sergeant-major run after them to
+close up, in obedience to the sharp mandate of the major, and the
+invasion is begun. No man spoke a word; no sound was audible save the
+distant hum and cracking of the city, the cry of a thousand frogs, and
+the muffled tramp of our advancing footsteps. I thought the enemy, if
+any were near, must surely hear the cartridges rattle in my cartridge
+box as we double-quicked to close up, and I put my hand behind me to
+stop the clatter. If any enemy were near, indeed! There seemed an enemy
+behind every bush, a rebel in every corner of the worm fence. I am in
+the rear of the column, I thought, and my heart went thump, bump, and my
+great central nervous ganglion ached amain. 'Sergeant-major,' whispers
+Major Heavysterne; 'Sergeant-major,' barks the adjutant. 'Fall out four
+files and keep off to the right, and about fifty paces in advance of the
+battalion, and examine the ground thoroughly. Report any signs of the
+enemy.' The ache grew bigger, and I perspired terribly as I inquired, in
+tones whose tremor I hoped would be mistaken for ardor, whether any one
+was ahead of us. 'No one except the enemy,' laughed the major, quietly.
+No one except the enemy! Fifty paces from any one except the enemy, by
+my legs, each pace a yard! 'The ground to the right is all water, and
+about seven feet deep,' I reported joyfully, having ascertained the
+fact. 'Then go fifty yards ahead, as far to the right as you can get,
+and keep out of sight,' were our new orders. I thought we would keep out
+of sight well enough! We were going up hill&mdash;up the hill on which Fort
+Runyon now stands. Here is a shanty. What if it should be full of the
+enemy, and we but four poor frightened men, with our battalion hidden by
+the turn in the road. Mechanically I cocked my rifle and opened the
+door, and strained my eyes into the darkness. Nobody. I let down the
+hammer again.</p>
+
+<p>Fear had oozed out of my fingers' ends, in lifting the latch, just as
+valor did from those of Bob Acres, and Jenkins was himself again. We
+jobbed our bayonets under the lager-beer counter, to provide for the
+case of any lurking foe in that quarter. Just here the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_540" id="Page_540">[Pg 540]</a></span> road forked.
+Sending two of us to the right, the rest kept on the Alexandria. 'Look
+there,' chatters Todd second between his teeth, wafting in my face a
+mingled odor of fear and gin cocktails. 'Where?' 'Why there! on top of
+the hill&mdash;a horse.' 'Is that a horse?' 'Yes.' 'A man on him, too!' 'Two
+of 'em!' Click, click, click, from our locks. We creep on and up
+stealthily. We are scarcely thirty yards distant from the two horsemen,
+when a man darts out from the left-hand side of the road behind us&mdash;two
+men&mdash;three! We are surrounded. Todd second would have fired, but I held
+him back. '<i>Who's that?</i>' I whispered; '<i>speak quick, or I fire!</i>'
+'Can't you see, you d&mdash;d fool,' barks out our surly adjutant, who,
+unknown to us, had been leading a similar scout on the opposite side of
+the road. Click, click, from up the hill. The enemy are going to shoot.
+An awful moment. We steady our rifles and our nerves; all trace of fear
+is gone; nothing remains but eagerness for the conflict that seems so
+near, and with a bound, without waiting for orders, we move quickly up
+the hill. Lieutenant Harch moves his men out into the road, where the
+bright moonlight betrays, perhaps multiplies, their number; the horsemen
+spring to their saddles, and are off at a clattering gallop, to alarm
+Alexandria. 'Don't shoot!' shrieks the adjutant; our rifles waver; the
+hill hides the flying picket; the chance is lost; presently all
+Alexandria will be awake, and a beautiful surprise frustrated. As we
+peer into the moonlit distance from the top of the hill now almost
+spaded away and trimmed up into Fort Runyon, feeling the solemnity of
+the occasion impressed upon us with dramatic force by all the
+surroundings&mdash;by our loneliness, by our character as the harbingers of
+the advance of the armies of American freedom and American nationality,
+and by the recent flight of the first squad of the enemy whom we had met
+with hostile purpose: as we dreamily drink in all these and many other
+vague ideas, up comes our battalion, and occupies the hill, the major
+sending off a company to hold the bridge where the road crosses the
+canal and forks to Arlington and Fairfax Court House. Presently there
+pass by us regiments from Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and it may be
+from other States which I forget. Some turn off to the right, to settle
+on the hill which is now scooped into Fort Albany; others press forward
+to Alexandria, the bells of which town very soon begin to ring a
+frightened peal of alarm and confusion. We move out a half mile farther
+and halt, our night's work being over, and other things in store; the
+moonlight wanes, and grows insensibly into a chilly daylight, presently
+reddened by the sun of to-morrow. All this seems to us to have occupied
+scarcely half an hour, but it is broad day again for certain, and surely
+we are a mortally tired and aching battalion as we march back listless,
+hot, sleepy, and gastric, over the Long Bridge, to our armory, there to
+fall asleep over breakfast in sheer exhaustion, and to spend the
+remainder of the day in a dry, hard series of naps, not the least
+refreshing&mdash;such as leave you the impression of having slept in hot
+sand. As we&mdash;the quartermaster-sergeant and I&mdash;stroll down the avenue
+that afternoon according to our wont, we hear the news of Ellsworth's
+death, of the occupation of Alexandria by our forces, and of the flight
+of the enemy's handful of silly, braggadocio Virginia militia, hastily
+collected to brag and drink the town safe from the pollution of the vile
+Yankee's invading foot. Ah! V'ginia; as thou art easily pleased to sing
+of thy sister-in-law, Ma'yland,</p>
+
+<p class="center">'The ta&auml;irahnt's foot is awn tha&iuml; sho','</p>
+
+<p>and will be likely to remain thar a right tollable peert length of time,
+I expect.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing but bridge guarding in the festering swamp on the Virginia side<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[Pg 541]</a></span>
+of the Potomac, varied by multiplying details for extra duty as clerks
+in all imaginable offices, falls to our lot until the 10th of June,
+when, after a number of rumors, and many dark forebodings as to what the
+District men would do, we are finally ordered into the field as a part
+of the Chickfield expedition, originally designed for the capture of
+Dregsville, I believe; an object which may have been slightly interfered
+with by its detailed announcement about a week beforehand in one of the
+Philadelphia papers. The expedition consisted of the First, Third,
+Fifth, and Ninth Battalions of District of Columbia Volunteers, the
+First New Hampshire, the Ninth New York, and the Seventeenth
+Pennsylvania, which <i>would</i> call itself the First. I think four other
+regiments from the same State did the same thing, it being a cardinal
+principle with them, perhaps, that each regiment was to claim two
+different names and three different numbers, and that at least four
+other regiments were fiercely to dispute with it each name and each
+number: for example, there was the</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="90%" cellspacing="0" summary="First Pennsylvania Regiment">
+<tr><td align='left'>First Pennsylvania Artillery, calling itself the...</td><td rowspan="4">First<br />Pennsylvania<br />Regiment</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>First Pennsylvania Militia, Infantry, itself the...</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>First Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry, calling itself the...</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>First Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry, calling itself, and called by the Governor, the...</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>And for another example there was a regiment which called itself the
+'Swishtail Carbines,' after a beastly ornament in the hats of its men;
+the 'Shine Musketoons,' after their lieutenant-colonel; the '289th
+Pennsylvania Volunteers,' after the State series of numbers, which began
+with 280 or thereabout; and the 'First Regiment of the Pennsylvania
+Volunteer Reserve Corps, Breech-Loading Carbineers,' and doubtless by
+other names, though I don't remember them.</p>
+
+<p>Besides this tremendous host&mdash;we had never seen so large a force
+together, and thought it the most invincible of armadas&mdash;we had a
+battery of artillery, composed of three or four different kinds of guns,
+as the fashion was in the good old days of our company posts, wherefrom
+we were just emerging in a chrysalis state, and also two companies of
+cavalry; one a real live company of regulars, commanded by Captain
+Cautle, of the Third Dragoons, the other led by Captain (he called
+himself major, and his company a battalion) Cutts, formerly and since an
+enterprising member of the firm of Cutts &amp; Dunn, who made my uniform,
+and who will make your clothes, if you wish, my dear reader, and charge
+you rather less than three times their value, after the manner of
+Washington tailors; which charge will appear especially moderate when
+you remember that the clothes will almost fit, and won't wear out so
+very soon after all, as is the way with Washington clothes. Indeed, as
+the tactics say, 'this remark is general for all the deployments;' and
+the same may as well be said of all bills and things made in the great
+city of sheds, contractors, politicians, dust, and unfinished buildings.
+But is this a description of Washington? We are at Chickfield, where the
+loyal Maryland farmers come to us to protect their loyalty, to charge a
+dollar a panel for old worm fences thrown down by 'the boys,' to sell
+forage at double prices, to reclaim runaway negroes, and to assure us of
+the impossibility of subjugating the South. And here, in the peaceful
+village of Chickfield, the object of our expedition having been happily
+frustrated by the newspapers, we enjoy our ease for a week or ten days,
+and our first camp experiences. Oh! that first experience of unboxing
+tents smelling loudly as of candle grease, of finding the right poles,
+of vainly endeavoring to pitch them straight, of hot and excited
+officers rushing hither and thither in a flurry, trying to instruct the
+different squads in their work, and straightway frus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_542" id="Page_542">[Pg 542]</a></span>trated by the thick
+heads, or worse, by the inevitable suggestions of those remarkably
+intelligent corporals, who seem to consider themselves as having a
+special mission direct from heaven to know everything except how to do
+what they are bid. And oh! the first camp cookery, when everything is
+overdone except what is underdone; when the soup is water, and the
+coffee grounds, and the tea (we had tea in the <i>three</i>-months!) senna!
+And after a day of worry, hurry, confusion, and awful cooking, the first
+rough sleep, with a root running across your ribs, and a sizable gravel
+indenting the small of your back! How the teamsters talk all night, and
+the sentinels call wildly, incessantly, for the corporal of the guard!
+How you dream of being hung on a wire, as if to dry, with your head on a
+jagged rock; of an army of sentinels pacing your breast, ceaselessly
+engaged in coming to an 'order arms;' of millions of ants crawling over
+and through you; of having your legs suddenly thrust into an icehouse,
+and a brush fire built under your head; of black darkness, in which you
+fall down, down, down, down&mdash;faster, faster, faster!&mdash;till crash! you
+bump against something, and split wide open with a thundering roar,
+which gradually expands into the sound of a bugle as you awake to
+renewed misery, and are, as Mr. Sawin says, 'once more routed out of bed
+by that derned reveille.'</p>
+
+<p>Presently there comes an order for us to march to Billsburg, and there
+join the army of the Musconetcong, commanded by that dauntless hero,
+Major-General Robert Balkinsop. Of course we march in a hurry, as much
+as possible by night, 'without baggage,' as the orders say&mdash;meaning with
+only <i>two</i> wagons to a company. The other battalions of D.C. Vols. stay
+behind and loaf back to Washington, there to be mislaid by Major-General
+Blankhed, who is so preoccupied with issuing and affixing his sign
+manual to passes for milk, eggs, and secessionists, to cross and recross
+Long Bridge, that the war must wait for him or go ahead without him. We
+go on to glory, as we suppose (deluded <i>three</i>-months!), and march
+excitedly, with all our legs, fearing we shall be too late. As we near
+Billsburg, we can hear the since familiar <i>tick&mdash;tack</i>, <i>pip&mdash;pop&mdash;pop</i>
+of a rattling skirmish, and the <i>vroom&mdash;vroom</i> of volley firing.
+Anxiously, eagerly&mdash;no need for the colonel to cry 'Step out
+lively!'&mdash;we press forward, with all the ardor of recruits. Recruits!
+Hadn't we been a month in service, and been through one great invasion
+already? There they are! See the smoke? Where? On top of that hill!
+Halt! Our battalion deploys as skirmishers with a useless cheer. We
+close up. We load with ball cartridge, and most of us, on our individual
+responsibility, fix bayonets; it looks so determined&mdash;nothing like the
+cold steel, we think. Slowly, resolutely, we advance. An aid comes
+galloping back. We crowd round him. The colonel looks disgustedly
+handsome. What does he say? Pshaw! It's only the 284th Pennsylvania,
+part of General Balkinsop's body guard, discharging muskets after rain.
+Only three soldiers, a negro, a couple of mules, and an old woman, have
+been hurt so far, and 'the boys' will be through in an hour or so more!</p>
+
+<p>Well, as we were sent for in a hurry, of course we waited a week. How
+General Balkinsop man&oelig;uvred the great army of the Musconetcong; what
+fatherly, nay, grandmotherly care he took to keep us out of danger; how
+cautiously he spread, his nets for the enemy, and how rapidly he left
+them miles behind; how we killed nothing but chickens, wounded nothing
+but our own silly pride, and captured nothing but green apples and
+roasting ears; all this, and more, let history tell. The poor old
+general kept us safe, at all events; and if the enemy, with half our
+numbers, was left unharmed, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[Pg 543]</a></span> allowed quietly and leisurely to move
+off and swell his force elsewhere, and so whip us in detail, what of it?
+Didn't we save our wagon train? And isn't that, as everyone knows, the
+highest result of strategy?</p>
+
+<p>And then came the battle (the <i>battle!</i>) of Bull Run, with its first
+glowing, crowing accounts of victory, and its later story of humiliation
+and shame! Ah! let me shut up the page! My heart grows sick over this
+mangy, scrofulous period of our national disease; give me air!</p>
+
+<p>Luckily for me, I had a raging fever just after that awful 21st of July,
+1861. When I awoke from my delirium, and had got as far as tea, toast,
+and the door of the hospital, they told me of the great uprising of the
+people, of General McClellan's appointment to command the Army of the
+Potomac, of how 'our boys' had re&euml;nlisted for the war, and of how I, no
+longer Sergeant-Major William Jenkins, was to be adjutant of the
+regiment, and might now take off my <i>chevrons</i>, and put on my <span class="smcap">SHOULDER
+STRAPS</span>.</p>
+
+<p><i>She</i> sent them to me in a letter. Wait a month, and I'll tell you.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_FIRST_FANATIC" id="THE_FIRST_FANATIC"></a>THE FIRST FANATIC.</h2>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When Noah hewed the timber</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Wherewith to build the ark,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Outside the woods one shouted&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">'That wild fanatic!&mdash;<i>hark!</i>'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And when he drew the beams</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And laid them on the plain,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">One said,'He has no balance,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">He surely is insane.'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And when he raised the frame,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">One clear, sunshiny day,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">'Poor fool of <i>one idea</i>,'</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A smiling man did say.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When he foretold the flood,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And stood repentance teaching,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They sneered, 'You radical,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">We'll hear no ultra preaching!'</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And when he drove the beasts and birds</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Into the ark one morn,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They shouted, 'Odd enthusiast!'</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And laughed with ringing scorn.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When he and all his house went in,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">They gazed, and said, 'Erratic!'</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">'A pleasant voyage to you, Noah!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">You canting, queer fanatic!'</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_544" id="Page_544">[Pg 544]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SKETCHES_OF_AMERICAN_LIFE_AND_SCENERY" id="SKETCHES_OF_AMERICAN_LIFE_AND_SCENERY"></a>SKETCHES OF AMERICAN LIFE AND SCENERY.</h2>
+
+<h3>V.&mdash;THE ADIRONDACS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>This interesting mountain region embraces the triangular plateau lying
+between Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario and the
+Mohawk. The name was formerly restricted to the central group containing
+the highest peaks, but is now applied to the various ranges traversing
+the northeastern counties of the State of New York. The loftiest points
+are found in the County of Essex and the neighboring corners of
+Franklin; but the surfaces of Clinton, St. Lawrence, Herkimer, Hamilton,
+Warren, and Washington are all diversified by the various branches of
+the same mountain system. The principal ranges have a general
+northeasterly and southwesterly direction, and are about six in number.
+They run nearly parallel with one another, and with the watercourses
+flowing into Lake Champlain, namely, Lake George and Putnam's Creek, the
+Boquet, Au Sable, and Saranac Rivers. Recent surveys made by, or under
+the direction of, Professor A. Guyot, will doubtless furnish us with
+more accurate information regarding ranges and measurements of heights
+than any we can now refer to. So far as we have been able to learn from
+the best authorities within our reach,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> the situation and names of the
+most prominent ranges are as follows: The most southerly is that known
+as the Palmertown or Luzerne Mountains, and embraces the highlands of
+Lake George, terminating at Mount Defiance, on Lake Champlain. This
+range has also been called Black Mountain range and Tongue Mountains.
+The second range, the Kayaderosseras, ends in the high cliff overlooking
+Bulwagga Bay. The third, or Schroon range, terminates on Lake Champlain
+in the high promontory of Split Rock. It borders Schroon Lake, and its
+highest peak is Mount Pharaoh, nearly 4,000 feet above tidewater. The
+fourth, or Boquet range, finds its terminus at Perou Bay, and contains
+Dix Peak (5,200 feet), Nipple Top (4,900 feet), Raven Hill, and Mount
+Discovery. The fifth or Adirondac range (known also as Clinton or Au
+Sable) meets Lake Champlain in the rocks of Trembleau Point, and
+embraces the highest peaks of the system, namely, Mount Tahawus (Marcy),
+5,379 feet, and Mounts Mc-Intire, McMartin, and San-da-no-na, all above
+5,000 feet in elevation. The series nest succeeding on the northwest,
+does not consist of a single distinguishable range, but of a
+continuation of groups which may be considered as a sixth range, under
+the name of Chateaugay or Au Sable. Its highest points are Mount Seward
+(5,100 feet), and Whiteface, nearly 5,000 feet in height. We have also
+seen noticed as distinguishable a ridge still exterior to the last
+mentioned, as Chateaugay, <i>i.e.</i>, the range of the St. Lawrence.</p>
+
+<p>The above-named ranges are not always clearly defined, as cross spurs or
+single mountains sometimes occupy the entire space between two ridges,
+reducing the customary valley to a mere ravine. The usual uncertainty
+and redundancy of nomenclature common to mountain regions, adds to the
+difficulty of obtaining or conveying clear ideas of the local
+distribution of elevation and depression. On the northern slope, the
+three rivers, Boquet, Au Sable (with two branches, East and West), and
+Saranac, furnish to the traveller excellent guides for the arrangement
+of his conceptions, regarding the general face of the country. To the
+south, the same office is performed by the va<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_545" id="Page_545">[Pg 545]</a></span>rious branching headwaters
+of the Hudson.</p>
+
+<p>These mountains are granitic, and the river bottoms have a light, sandy
+soil. The Au Sable well deserves its name, not only from the bar at its
+mouth, but also from the sand fields through which it chiefly flows.
+Steep, bare peaks, wild ravines, and stupendous precipices characterize
+the loftier ranges. The waterfalls are numerous and beautiful, and the
+lakes lovely beyond description. More than one hundred in number, they
+cluster round the higher groups of peaks, strings of glittering gems
+about the stately forms of these proud, dark-browed, Indian
+beauties&mdash;mirrors wherein they may gaze upon the softened outlines of
+their haughty heads, their wind-tossed raiment of spruce fir, pines, and
+birch.</p>
+
+<p>In the lowest valleys the oak and chestnut are abundant, but as we leave
+the shores of Lake Champlain and ascend toward the west, the beech and
+basswood, butternut, elm, ash, and maple, hemlock and arbor vit&aelig;,
+tamarack, white, black, and yellow pines, white and black birch,
+gradually disappear, until finally the forest growth of the higher
+portions of the loftier summits is composed almost exclusively of the
+various species of spruce or fir. The tamarack sometimes covers vast
+plains, and, with the long moss waving from its sombre branches, looks
+melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe
+felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to
+the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under
+whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have
+reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone&mdash;that some splendid
+specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest,
+that on the more secluded lake shores an occasional deer may yet be seen
+coming down to drink, and that in the shadier pools the wary and
+sagacious prince of fishes still disports himself and cleaves the
+crystal water with his jewelled wedge.</p>
+
+<p>Berries of all sorts spring up on the cleared spots; the wide-spreading
+juniper, with its great prickly disks, covers the barer slopes; the
+willow herb, wild rose, clematis, violet, golden rod, aster, immortelle,
+arbutus, harebell, orchis, linn&aelig;a borealis, mitchella, dalibarda,
+wintergreen, ferns innumerable, and four species of running pine, all in
+due season, deck the waysides and forest depths.</p>
+
+<p>The climate is intensely cold in winter, and in the summer cool upon the
+heights, but in the narrow sandy valleys the long days of June, July,
+and August are sometimes uncomfortably hot. The nights, however, are
+ordinarily cool. Going west through the middle of the region, from
+Westport to Saranac, a difference of several weeks in the progress of
+vegetation is perceptible. Long after the linn&aelig;a had ceased to bloom at
+Elizabethtown, we found its tender, fragrant, pink bells flushing a
+wooded bank near Lake Placid. Good grass grows upon the hillsides, and
+in the valleys are found excellent potatoes, oats, peas, beans, and
+buckwheat. The corn is small, but seems prolific, and occasional fields
+of flax, rye, barley, and even wheat, present a flourishing appearance.
+Lumber, charcoal, and iron ore of an excellent quality are, however, the
+present staples of this mountain region. Bears and panthers are found in
+some secluded localities, and the farmer still dreads the latter for his
+sheep. The wolves are said to kill more deer than the hunters. The otter
+and beaver are found among the watercourses, and the mink or sable is
+still the prey of the trapper. The horses are ordinarily of a small
+breed, but very strong and enduring.</p>
+
+<p>The men are chiefly of the Vermont type, most of the original settlers
+having come from the neighboring State. The school house, court house,
+church,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_546" id="Page_546">[Pg 546]</a></span> and town hall are hence regarded as among the necessary
+elements of life to the well-ordered citizen. Honest dealing, thrift,
+and cleanliness are the rule, and the farm houses are comfortable and
+well cared for. The men look intelligent, and the women are handsome,
+although, indeed, too many pale or sallow complexions give evidence of
+sedentary habits, and of the almost universal use of <i>saleratus</i> and hot
+bread [??]. The families of many farmers far in among the mountains
+rarely taste fresh meat, but subsist chiefly upon salt pork, fish, fresh
+or salted, as the season will permit, potatoes, wheat, rye, and Indian
+meal, with berries, dried apples, perhaps a few garden vegetables,
+plenty of good milk, and excellent butter. Eggs, chickens, and veal are
+luxuries occasionally to be enjoyed, and, should one of the family be a
+good shot, venison and partridge may appear upon the bill of fare.
+Bright flowers ornament the gardens, and gay creepers embower doors and
+windows. Along the more secluded roads are the log cabins of the
+charcoal burners, said cabins containing, if apparently nothing else,
+two or three healthy, chubby, pretty children, and a substantial cooking
+stove, of elaborate pattern, recently patented by some enterprising
+compatriot.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most remarkable features of these mountains are the 'Passes,'
+answering to Gaps, Notches, and Cloves in other parts of the Union. They
+afford means for excellent roads from end to end of the mountain region,
+and are, in addition, eminently picturesque. The two most noteworthy are
+the Indian and Wilmington Passes; the first too rugged for the present
+to admit of a road; and the latter containing the beautiful Wilmington
+Fall. Many of the mountains have been burned over, and the bare,
+gaunt-limbed timber, and contorted folds of gray, glittering rock,
+afford a spectral contrast to the gentler contours of hills still clad
+in their natural verdure, bright or dark as deciduous or evergreen trees
+preponderate. The variety of form is endless; long ridges, high peaks,
+sharp or blunt, sudden clefts, great bare slides, flowing curves, convex
+or concave, serrated slopes crowned with dark spruce or jagged as the
+naked vertebr&aelig; of some enormous antediluvian monster, stimulate the
+curiosity and excite the imagination of the beholder. There is an
+essential difference in the character of the views obtained, whether
+looking from the south, or the east. In the former case, the eye,
+following the axes of the ranges, sees the mountains as a cross ridge of
+elevated peaks; and in the latter, where the sight strikes the ranges
+perpendicularly to their axes, one, or, at most, two ridges are all that
+can be seen from any single point.</p>
+
+<p>This region may be approached from Lake Champlain by way of Ticonderoga,
+Crown Point, Port Henry, Westport, and Port Kent, the two latter places
+being the nearer to the higher peaks; or from the lake country in
+Hamilton County, by way of Racket and Long Lakes.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The night boat for Albany, June 27th, 1864, was crowded with passengers
+fleeing from pavements, summer heats, and stifling city air, to green
+fields, cool shadows of wooded glens, or life-giving breezes from
+mountain heights. True, there were some who, like Aunt Sarah Grundy,
+bitterly lamented the ample rooms and choice fare of their own
+establishments, and whose idea of a 'summer in the country' was limited
+to a couple of months at Saratoga or Newport, with a fresh toilette for
+each succeeding day; but even these knew that there were at both places
+green trees, limpid waters, whether of lake or ocean, and a wide horizon
+wherein to see sunsets, moonrises, and starlight. Aunt Sarah went to
+Newport; she found there fewer of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_547" id="Page_547">[Pg 547]</a></span> such persons as she was pleased to
+designate as 'rabble,' and the soft, warm fogs were exactly the summer
+atmosphere for a complexion too delicate to be exposed to the fervent
+blaze of a July sun.</p>
+
+<p>But the majority were not of Aunt Sarah's stamp. They were men, wearied
+with nine months' steady work, eager for country sports, for the freedom
+of God's own workhouse, where labor and bad air and cramped positions
+need not be synonymous; or women, glad to escape the routine of
+housekeeping, the daily contest with Bridget or Katrine, with Jean,
+Williams, or Priscilla. There were young girls, with round hats and
+thick boots, anxious to substitute grassy lanes or rocky hillsides for
+the flagstones of avenues; lads, to whom climbing of fruit trees and
+rowing boats were pleasant reminiscences of some foregone year; and
+finally, children, who longed for change, and whose little frames needed
+all the oxygen and exercise their anxious parents could procure for
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Such, doubtless, was a large portion of the precious freight of our
+'floating palace,' whose magnificence proved to us rather of the
+Dead-Sea-apple sort, as we had arrived upon the scene of action too late
+to procure comfortable quarters for the night, and, in addition, soon
+after daybreak found ourselves aground within sight of Albany, and with
+no prospect of release until after the departure of the train for
+Whitehall. At a few moments past seven, we heard the final whistle, and
+knew that our journey's end was now postponed some four and twenty
+hours. We afterward learned that by taking the boat to Troy we would
+have run less risk of delay, as the Whitehall and Rutland train usually
+awaits the arrival of said boat. At nine o'clock we reached Albany, and
+one of our number spent a dreary day, battling with headache and the
+ennui of a little four year old, who could extract no amusement from the
+unsuggestive walls of a hotel parlor. About five in the afternoon we
+left for Whitehall, where we purposed passing the night. This movement
+did not one whit expedite the completion of our journey, but offered a
+change of place, and an additional hour of rest in the morning, as the
+lake-boat train from Whitehall was the same that left Albany shortly
+after seven.</p>
+
+<p>We found Whitehall a homely little town, in a picturesque situation, on
+the side of a steep hill, past which winds the canal, and under which
+thundered the train that on the following morning bore us to the lake,
+where the pleasant steamboat 'United States' awaited her daily cargo.
+The upper portion of Lake Champlain is very narrow, and the channel
+devious; the shores are sometimes marshy, sometimes rocky, and the
+bordering hills have softly swelling outlines. Our day was hazy, and the
+Green Mountains of Vermont seemed floating in some species of celestial
+atmosphere suddenly descended upon that fair State. We passed the
+Narrows (a singular, rocky cleft, through which flows the lake), and
+soon after came to Ticonderoga, with its ruined fort and environing
+hills.</p>
+
+<p>After leaving Crown Point, the lake becomes much wider, and at Port
+Henry spreads out into a noble expanse of water. Behind Port Henry, the
+Adirondac peaks already begin to form a towering background. Westport,
+however, has a still more beautiful situation. The lake there is very
+broad, the sloping shores are wooded, the highest peaks of the Green
+Mountains are visible to the east and northeast, and the Adirondacs
+rise, tier after tier, toward the west.</p>
+
+<p>On the boat were wounded soldiers going to their homes. Poor fellows!
+They had left their ploughs and their native hills, to find wounds and
+fevers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_548" id="Page_548">[Pg 548]</a></span> in Virginia. When one looked upon the tranquil lake and
+halo-crowned mountains, it seemed almost impossible that the passions of
+evil men should have power to draw even that placid region into the
+vortex, and hurl back its denizens scarred and scathed, to suffer amid
+its beauty. And yet were these men the very marrow and kernel of the
+landscape, the defenders of the soil, the patriots who were willing to
+give themselves that their country might remain one and undivided, that
+the 'home of the brave' might indeed be the 'land of the free.'</p>
+
+<p>At Westport we left the boat, and found the stage to Elizabethtown, a
+<i>buckboard</i>, already crowded with passengers. An inn close at hand
+furnished us the only covered wagon we chanced to see during our ten
+weeks' sojourn among the Adirondacs. The drive to Elizabethtown (eight
+miles) was hot and dusty, for we faced the western sun, and the long
+summer drought was just then commencing to make itself felt.
+Nevertheless, there was beauty enough by the wayside to make one forget
+such minor physical annoyances. As the road rose over the first hills,
+the views back, over the lake and toward those hazy, dreamy-looking
+Vermont mountains, seemed a leaf from some ancient romance, wherein
+faultless knights errant sought peerless lady loves with golden locks
+flowing to their tiny feet, and the dragons were all on the outside,
+dwellers in dark caverns and noisome dens. In our day, I fear, we have
+not improved the matter, for the dark caverns seem to have passed
+within, and the dragons have been adopted as familiars.</p>
+
+<p>By and by, on some arid spots, appeared the low, spreading juniper,
+which we had previously known only as the garden pet of an enthusiastic
+tree fancier. And thus, perhaps, the virtues which here we cultivate by
+unceasing care and watchfulness, will, when we are translated to some
+wider sphere, nearer to the Creator of all, burst upon us as simple,
+natural gifts to the higher and freer intelligences native to that
+sphere.</p>
+
+<p>Raven Hill is the highest point between Westport and Elizabethtown. It
+is a beautifully formed conical hill, rising some twenty-one hundred
+feet above the sea level, and contributing the cliffs on the northern
+side of the 'Pass,' through which leads the road into the valley of the
+Boquet, that vale known formerly as the 'The Pleasant Valley,' in which
+was Betseytown, now dignified into Elizabethtown. Does an increase in
+civilization and refinement indeed destroy familiarity, render us more
+strange one to another, even, through much complexity, to our own
+selves? The southern side of the Pass is formed by the slope of the
+'Green Mountain,' once so called from its beautiful verdure, now, alas!
+burnt over, bristling with dead trees and bare rocks, and green only by
+reason of weeds, brambles, and a bushy growth of saplings. The view,
+descending from the summit of the Pass into the Pleasant Valley, is
+charming. The Boquet runs through green meadows and cultivated fields,
+while round it rise lofty mountains&mdash;the 'Giant of the Valley' (alias
+'Great Dome' or 'Bald Peak'), being especially remarkable, with its
+summits, green or bare, round or peaked, glittering with white scars of
+ancient slides. To the west lies the Keene Pass, a steep, rocky gateway
+to the Au Sable River and the wonders beyond. This view of the descent
+into the Pleasant Valley is even more striking from a road passing over
+the hills some five miles south of Elizabethtown. The vale is narrower,
+the point of view higher, and the opposite mountains nearer and more
+lofty. The Giant of the Valley rises directly in the west, and Dix's
+Peak closes the vista to the south. On a semi-hazy afternoon, with the
+sunlight streaming through in broad pathways of quivering glory,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_549" id="Page_549">[Pg 549]</a></span> it
+would be difficult to imagine a more enchanting scene.</p>
+
+<p>There are in Elizabethtown two inns,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> one down by the stream, a branch
+of the Boquet, and the other up on the 'Plain,' near the court house.
+The latter has decidedly the advantage in situation. Both are owned by
+the same landlord, and are well kept. We arrived in the midst of court
+week, and found every place filled with lawyers, clients, witnesses, and
+even, behind the bars of the brick jail, we could see the prisoners,
+more fortunate than their city compeers, in that they breathed pure air,
+and could look out upon the everlasting hills, solemn preachers of the
+might and the rights, as well as the mercy of their Creator.</p>
+
+<p>From two to three miles from the Valley House is the top of Raven Hill,
+seemingly a watchtower on the outskirts of the citadel of the
+Adirondacs. The ascent is easy, and the view panoramic, embracing Lake
+Champlain and the Green Mountains, Burlington and Westport, the bare,
+craggy hills to the north, the higher ranges to the west, with the
+abrupt precipices of the 'Keene Pass' and the lofty 'Dome' and 'Bald
+Mountain,' Dix's Peak to the south, a clear lake known as 'Black Pond'
+among the hills toward Moriah, and at the base the Pleasant Valley with
+the winding Boquet River.</p>
+
+<p>Near the lower hotel is Wood Mountain, about half as high as Raven Hill,
+and offering a view somewhat similar, although of course not so
+extended. The distance to the top is but little over a mile, and the
+pathway, although somewhat steep, is very good.</p>
+
+<p>A visit to the iron mines and works at Moriah can readily be made from
+Elizabethtown. The distance is from twelve to fourteen miles. One of the
+mines is quite picturesque, being cut into the solid rock, under a roof
+supported by great columns of the valuable ore. The workmen, with their
+picks and barrows, passing to and fro, as seen from the top of the
+excavation, look like German pictures of tiny gnomes and elves delving
+for precious minerals. The yield from the ore is about eighty per cent.,
+and of very superior quality. The return road passes down the hill,
+whence is the splendid view of the 'Valley' before mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>A delightful excursion can also be made to 'Split Rock,' about nine
+miles up the valley of the Boquet. The little river there, in two
+separate falls, makes its way through a rocky cleft. The basins of the
+upper, and the singularly winding chasm of the lower fall, are
+especially worthy of observation. At Split Rock we first made any
+extensive acquaintance with a costume which threatens to be immensely
+popular among the Adirondacs, namely, the <i>Bloomer</i>, and in the agility
+displayed by some of its fair wearers we beheld the results likely to
+spring from its adoption as a mountain walking dress. Our private
+observation was, that moderately full, short skirts, without hoop of
+course, terminating a little distance above the ankle, and worn with
+clocked or striped woollen stockings, were more graceful than a somewhat
+shorter and scantier skirt, with the pantalette extending down to the
+foot. The former seems really <i>&agrave; la paysanne</i>, while the latter, in
+addition to some want of grace, suggests <i>Bloomer</i>, and the many
+absurdities which have been connected with that name. It is a great pity
+that a sensible and healthful change in walking attire should have been
+caricatured by its own advocates, and thus rendered too conspicuous to
+be agreeable to many who would otherwise have adopted it in some
+modified and reasonable form.</p>
+
+<p>Near New Russia, about five miles from Elizabethtown, is a brook
+flow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_550" id="Page_550">[Pg 550]</a></span>ing among moss-covered stones and rocks, overhung by giant trees of
+the original forest; and just out of Elizabethtown is a glen, through
+which pours a pretty stream, making pleasant little cascades under the
+shadow of a less aged wood, and within a bordering of beautiful ferns,
+running pines, and bright forest blossoms. We should also not neglect to
+mention Cobble Hill, a bold pile of rocks, rising directly out of the
+plain on which a portion of the town is situated.</p>
+
+<p>But we had heard of the 'Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,' and Elsie and I
+could not rest until our own eyes had witnessed that they were worthy of
+their reputation. We left Elizabethtown at half past six in the morning,
+our team a fast pair of ponies, belonging to our landlord. The previous
+days had been warm and obstinately hazy, but for that especial occasion
+the atmosphere cooled and cleared, and lent us some fine views back
+toward the Giant of the Valley and the Keene Pass. The first ten miles
+of road were excellent. We then crossed a little stream known as Trout
+Brook, a tributary of the Boquet, and, by a somewhat rough and stony
+way, began to ascend the high land separating the Boquet from the Au
+Sable. This ridge includes the 'Poke a Moonshine' Mountain, a rude pile
+of rocks, burnt over, and with perpendicular precipices of some three or
+four hundred feet, facing the road which winds along the bottom of the
+declivity. This cleft thus becomes another 'Pass,' and, with the huge
+rocks fallen at its base, offers a wild and rather dreary scene. To the
+north, near the foot of the mountain, are two ponds, Butternut and
+Auger, which wind fantastically in and out among the hills. As we
+descended the ridge, we looked toward Canada, far away over rolling
+plains and hillocks, and soon after reached the sandy stretch of the
+basin of the Au Sable, in the midst of which is Keeneville, twenty-two
+miles from Elizabethtown.</p>
+
+<p>By the wayside we passed a solitary grave, the mound and headstone in a
+patch of corn and potatoes. Was the unknown occupant some dear one whom
+the dwellers in the humble cabin near by were unwilling to send far away
+from daily remembrance, or were they too poor to seek the shelter of the
+common graveyard, or, again, had the buriers of that dead one followed
+to the 'land of promise,' or departed to some other far country, leaving
+this grave to the care or rather carelessness of stranger hands, and did
+the snowy headstone recall no memory of past love to the laborer who
+ploughed his furrow near that mound, or to the children who played
+around it?</p>
+
+<p>Ah! thus, not only in the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and
+romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn
+and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of
+aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily
+act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to
+which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with
+the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller
+from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter
+weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a
+noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently
+useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow
+along his way seeds of beauty not lost upon the thinking beings about
+him, and bearing fruit perhaps in some future generation. The woman
+whose reveries have pictured her a Joan of Arc, leading her country's
+armies to victory, and finally yielding her life in the good cause, may
+sew for sanitary commissions, and, nursing in some hospital, dropping
+medicines, making soups and teas, die of some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_551" id="Page_551">[Pg 551]</a></span> deadly fever, a willing
+sacrifice to her country.</p>
+
+<p>Later in the day we saw the corn and potatoes growing up to the very
+verge of an exquisite waterfall, reckless strength and glorious poetry
+side by side with patient utility and humble prose. This union seemed
+not strange and unnatural, as did that of the solitary grave with the
+active labor of supplying the living with daily food, the grave the more
+lonely that the living with their material wants encircled it so
+closely.</p>
+
+<p>Keeseville is a manufacturing town, situated upon the Au Sable, which
+here breaks through a layer of Potsdam sandstone, and presents a series
+of most interesting and wonderful falls and chasms. About a mile below
+the village is the first fall of eighty feet. The river has here a large
+body of water, and falls in fan shape over a rapid descent of steps. It
+takes a sharp turn, so that without crossing the stream, a fine view can
+be obtained of the dancing, glittering sheet of foam. About half a mile
+below is Birmingham, another manufacturing town, which has done its
+best, but without entire success, to destroy the beauty of the second
+fall, immediately below the bridge, said bridge being erected upon
+natural piers at the sides and in the centre of the stream.</p>
+
+<p>Here begins a chasm which continues for the distance of about a mile and
+a half. Wonderfully grand are these Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,
+through, which rushes the river, pent up between literally perpendicular
+walls, a hundred or more feet in height, and from eleven to sixty or
+eighty feet apart, generally from twelve to fourteen. The water
+sometimes rushes smoothly and deeply below, and sometimes falls over
+obstructions, roaring, and tumbling, and foaming. The turns in the river
+are very sudden, and there are great cracks and gullies extending from
+top to base, pillars of rock standing alone or leaning against their
+companions. Occasionally, looking down one of these clefts, one sees
+nothing but the rock walls with a foaming, rapid rushing below. At one
+of these most remarkable points, a rude stairway has been constructed,
+by which the traveller can descend to the bottom, and, standing by the
+water's edge, look up to the top of this singular chasm. The walls
+finally lower, and the river flows out into a broad basin, whence it ere
+long finds its way into Lake Champlain. The banks are wooded with pines,
+hemlocks, spruce, arbor vita&aelig;, beech, birch, and basswood, and the
+ground is covered with ferns, harebells, arbutus, linn&aelig;a, mitchella,
+blue lobelia, and other wild flowers.</p>
+
+<p>There is an excellent inn, the Adirondac House, in Keeseville. Our
+attentive host told us of Professor Agassiz, and the fiery nature of his
+speculations regarding the probable history of the sandstone, whose
+strata, laid as at Trenton Falls, horizontally, layer above layer, add
+such interest and beauty to the stupendous walls, with their unseen,
+water-covered depths below, and their graceful wreaths of arbor vitt&aelig;
+nodding and swaying above.</p>
+
+<p>He also told us a tale of the war of 1812, when a bridge, known as the
+'High Bridge,' crossed the Au Sable at the narrowest point, some eleven
+feet in width. A rumor was abroad that the British were about to march
+up from Plattsburg; whereupon the bridge, consisting of three beams,
+each nine inches wide, was stripped of its planking. A gentleman had
+left his home in the morning, and, ignorant of the fate of the bridge,
+returned quite late at night. Urging his steed forward, it refused to
+cross the bridge, and not until after repeated castigation would it make
+the attempt. The crossing was safely accomplished, and the rider
+suspected nothing amiss until he reached home and was asked how he had
+come. 'By the High Bridge,' was his reply; whereupon he was informed
+that the planking had been torn away,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_552" id="Page_552">[Pg 552]</a></span> and he must have crossed upon a
+string piece nine inches wide, hanging some hundred feet above the
+surface of the water. His sensations may be imagined.</p>
+
+<p>A venturesome expedition had also been essayed by our host, in the shape
+of a voyage down the chasm in a boat. We presume he went at high water,
+when the rapids would be less dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>Keeseville is only four miles from Port Kent, a steamboat landing on
+Lake Champlain nearly opposite Burlington, and the Adirondacs may then
+be approached in several ways. A stage runs three times per week from
+Keeseville through Elizabethtown and Schroon River to Schroon Lake.
+North Elba and Lake Placid are some thirty-six miles distant, and may be
+reached by a good road through the Wilmington Pass. Saranac is somewhat
+farther, but readily accessible. Strong wagons and good teams are
+everywhere to be found, and the only recommendation we here think
+needful to make to the traveller is to have a good umbrella, a thick
+shawl or overcoat, and as little other baggage as he or she can possibly
+manage to find sufficient. Trunks are sadly in the way, and carpet bags
+or valises the best forms for stowage under seats or among feet.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="LOIS_PEARL_BERKELEY" id="LOIS_PEARL_BERKELEY"></a>LOIS PEARL BERKELEY.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The fiery July noon was blazing over the unsheltered depot platform,
+where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's
+work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day
+was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still
+life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings.
+Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser
+than ever; there was the usual <i>m&ecirc;l&eacute;e</i> of leave-takings and greetings.
+With the choking dust and scalding glare of the sun, the whole scene
+might have been an anteroom to Tophet.</p>
+
+<p>From the car window, Clement Moore, brown, hollow-cheeked, and clad in
+army blue, looked out with weary eyes on all the confusion. Half asleep
+in the parching heat, visions of cool, green forest depths, and endless
+ripple of leaves, of the ceaseless wash and sway of salt tides, drifted
+across his brain, and rapt him out of the sick, comfortless present. But
+they vanished like a flash with the sudden cessation of motion, and the
+reality of his surroundings came back with a great shock. Captain
+George, coming in five minutes after with a glass of iced lemonade in
+one hand and a half dozen letters in the other, found necessary so much
+of cheer and comfort as lay in&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'Keep courage, Clement, old fellow, it's only a few hours longer now.'</p>
+
+<p>And then he fell to reading his epistles, testifying his disapprobation
+of their contents presently by sundry grunts, ending finally in a
+'Confound it!' given explosively and an explanation:</p>
+
+<p>'Too bad, Moore! Here am I taking you home to get well in peace and
+quiet, and Ellen has filled the house up with half a dozen girls, more
+or less. Writes me to come home and be 'made a lion of;' as sensible as
+most women!' And the grumble subsided. He broke out again shortly:
+'Louise Meller&mdash;Lois Berkeley&mdash;Susy&mdash;' the other names were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_553" id="Page_553">[Pg 553]</a></span> drowned in
+the rattle of the starting train. The captain finished his letters, and
+Clement Moore took up his broken dreams, but this time with a new
+element.</p>
+
+<p>Lois Berkeley. With the name came back a fortnight of the last
+summer&mdash;perfect bright days, far-off skies filled with drifting fleets
+of sunny vapor, summer green piled deep over the land, the gurgle of
+falling waters, the shimmer of near grain fields, deep-hued flowers
+glowing in the garden borders, all the prodigality of splendor that July
+pours over the world. And floating through these memories, scarce
+recognized, but giving hue and tone to them like a far-off, half-heard
+strain of music&mdash;a woman's presence. By some fine, subtile harmony, such
+as spirits recognize, all the summer glow and depth of color, as it came
+back to him, came only as part of an exquisite clothing and setting for
+a slender figure and dark face. All the dainty adaptations of nature
+were but an expression, in a rude, material way, for those elegances and
+fitnesses which surrounded her, and which were as natural to her very
+existence as to the birds and flowers. Only a fortnight, and in that
+fortnight every look and word of hers, every detail of dress, even to
+the texture of the garments she wore, were indelibly fixed in his
+memory. She was so daintily neat in everything, nothing soiled or coarse
+ever came near her. Careless, too, he thought, remembering how, coming
+through the parlor in the evening dusk, he had entangled himself in the
+costly crape shawl left trailing across a chair, of the gloves he had
+picked up fluttering with the leaves on the veranda, and the
+handkerchiefs always lying about. Perhaps Clement Moore was over
+critical in his fancies about ladies' dresses, and felt that inner
+perfect cleanliness and refinement worked itself out in such little
+matters as the material and color and fit of garments, and all the
+trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a
+dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character.
+He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by
+which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An
+excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him
+involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course
+to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been
+disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and
+others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him
+apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill
+natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he
+accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the
+beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the
+polished, unimpressible man of society.</p>
+
+<p>But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal.
+Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange
+according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that
+was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking
+it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming,
+never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with
+that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried
+to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he
+was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all
+humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably&mdash;does not
+put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this
+undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty
+orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears,
+waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened
+and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black,
+hopeless <i>never</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_554" id="Page_554">[Pg 554]</a></span> drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable
+because simply a moral obligation.</p>
+
+<p>Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out
+of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a
+passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore,
+being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of
+his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had
+blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the
+sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in
+this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the
+excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think
+soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to
+be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a
+pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or
+whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of
+loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling
+on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be
+trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the
+golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid
+days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead,
+or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor
+thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new,
+strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that
+had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners.
+He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that
+sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of
+desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to
+now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard
+of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going
+somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless
+journeys. After&mdash;as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he
+lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming&mdash;his thoughts were
+always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward
+dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden
+way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its
+necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as
+a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and
+unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any
+abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.</p>
+
+<p>Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning,
+unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These
+especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and
+spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His
+first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual
+racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the
+physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect
+action&mdash;the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted
+nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for
+inaction&mdash;he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting
+his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of
+the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness
+was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that
+fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that
+attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills
+flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_555" id="Page_555">[Pg 555]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness,
+paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience,
+George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre,
+and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color
+from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling
+the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other
+days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the
+charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words
+and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with
+such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest
+touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So
+that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains
+of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its
+associations.</p>
+
+<p>And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back
+with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day,
+separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear
+were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor
+dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of
+difference.</p>
+
+<p>A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot
+of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a
+slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward
+him&mdash;a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes
+under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless,
+silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks
+under the narrow-brimmed straw hat. A face full of a waiting look, not
+hopeful nor expectant, simply unsettled and watchful, yet fresh, and
+rounded with the dimples and childlike curves of eighteen. Whatever of
+yearning and unrest the years had brought lingered only about the
+shadowy eyes and fine mouth. There were no haggard nor worn outlines,
+and a baby's skin could not have been softer and finer.</p>
+
+<p>At her feet crisped the shining ripples of the incoming tide. Far
+beyond, calm and burnished, stretched the summer sea into the dreamy
+distance, where the white noon sky, stricken through with intensest
+light and heat, dropped down a palpitating arch to meet it. And in all
+the dazzle of blue and white and silver and bare shining gray, she
+stood, a straight, slender, haughty little figure, as indefinite of
+color as all the rest; all but a narrow strip of scarlet at her throat,
+falling in a flaming line to her waist. The shimmering atmosphere seemed
+to pant about her; and through the high noon, over the still waters and
+sleeping shore, hummed the peering strains of a weird little song. She
+was singing softly:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">'For men must work and women must weep,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In the long parlor, the leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting
+in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight
+dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness,
+lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan
+lilies burned against the pure drapery, and another handful of tea
+violets lay crushed in the fleecy handkerchief on the floor. Against the
+cushions the exquisite contour of the sleeping face showed plainly.
+Coolest quiet sphered the whole figure; not a suggestion of anything but
+slowest calm grace disturbed its repose. But with the hushing rustle of
+leaves with the summer murmur flowing in, seemed to come also the deep
+monotone of the waves, when this inanimate statue was striking out at
+his side through the rattle and rush of the surf, the wide eyes filled
+with fierce light, the whole face fixed and stern with the strain of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_556" id="Page_556">[Pg 556]</a></span>
+heart muscle, toward the helpless shape shooting out on the undertow. He
+had not seen her after, and, coming to seek her that night with words of
+compliment and thanks, he was met by this white vision that had absorbed
+all the fire and force of the afternoon into its blankness.</p>
+
+<p>A depot platform&mdash;long afternoon shadows fell over the pretty country
+station&mdash;standing alone in the woods. The small, temporary bustle about
+the waiting train was not discordant with the dreamy, restful look of
+the whole picture. Then the culminating hurry, the shriek and rattle of
+the starting train&mdash;a little figure poising itself for an instant on the
+car step&mdash;a face flushed a little, and dark eyes brightened with a flash
+of surprised recognition&mdash;a quick gesture of greeting and farewell, and
+then she was gone into the purple shades of evening.</p>
+
+<p>Once again he had seen her, but from afar off, in the glare and heat of
+a crowded assembly room. The face was a little thinner now, and the eyes
+were looking farther away than ever. The blood-red light of rubies
+flashed in the soft lace at her throat and wrists, and dropped in
+glittering pendants against the slender neck. She was talking evidently
+of a brilliant bouquet of pomegranates and daphnes that lay in her lap,
+swinging dreamily the dainty, glittering white fan. And while he looked,
+she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread&mdash;a
+slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women.
+The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long
+fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the
+deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and,
+remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than the tone
+or feeling:</p>
+
+<p>'As much of a princess as ever?'</p>
+
+<p>And Captain George answered:</p>
+
+<p>'As much of a princess!' both unmindful that no word had been spoken to
+token who was in the thought of each.</p>
+
+<p>Very trifling things these were to remember. Very likely he had seen
+scores of far more graceful and memorable scenes; but just these
+trifles, coming back so vividly, proved to him, as nothing else could
+have done, with what a keen, intense sympathy every word and look of
+hers had been noted.</p>
+
+<p>The spoken words roused him. In the ride that followed, twenty different
+persons and things came into their talk; but never once the princess.
+<i>That</i>, arousing himself again from his half-dreamful lapse from the old
+guarded habit, was put away steadily and quietly. His battle had been
+fought once. He was not to weaken his victory with fancies of the 'might
+have been.' He had not been tempted, through all these months; he would
+not tempt himself, now that real trial was so near at hand. Man as he
+was, if escape had been possible, he would have fled. But there was
+nothing to do but to go forward, and he called up that old, mighty,
+intangible safeguard of honor. The matter was settled beyond any
+question of surprise&mdash;he must avoid the long, sapping days of contact,
+the wasting, feverish yearnings of absence coming after.</p>
+
+<p>Flying over miles and miles of the summer land, heaped with the red
+tangled sweets of clover fields, belted with white starry mayweed, blue
+with marshy growth of wild flag, with hazy lines of far-off hills,
+fading into purple depths of distance, and near low ones lying green and
+calm close beside them, with brown clear brooks, famous trout streams,
+after the New England fashion, went running across their way, the old
+home pride leaped up in George's eyes and voice, and even Moore forgot
+his weariness, and talked with a flash of the old, careless spirit.</p>
+
+<p>The hack that brought them to their destination left them, deep in the
+summer night, at the foot of the long avenue of elms&mdash;going up which,
+with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_557" id="Page_557">[Pg 557]</a></span> slow steps, on a sudden the house broke on them, ablaze with
+lights, athrob with music, whereat there was a renewal of explosive
+utterances, and the captain led his friend to the rear of the house to
+insure a quiet entrance.</p>
+
+<p>From the dark piazza, where he waited while George summoned some one to
+receive them, he caught, through the long, open casement, the vista of
+the parlors, with their glitter and confusion of light drapery and
+glimpses of bright faces and light forms, and softened hum of voices, as
+the dancers circled with the music. And through it all, straight down
+toward him, floating in one of the weird Strauss waltzes, came the
+princess, swathed in something white, airy, wide-falling. The same dark,
+unflushed face, the same wide, far-looking eyes, and fixed mouth, the
+same silky falling hair, but cut short now, and floating back as she
+moved. It was only for a moment: the perfumed darkness that seemed to
+throb with a sudden life of its own, the great, slow, summer stars above
+him, the wailing, passionate music that came trembling out among the
+heavy dew-wet foliage, the dark, calm earth about him, and the light and
+color and giddy motion that filled the gleaming square before him,
+struck in on his senses with staggering force; and then she swayed out
+of his sight, and Mrs. Morris came forward with words of cheer and
+welcome.</p>
+
+<p>That night, lying sleepless after the music was hushed and the wheels
+had done rolling away from the door, as if material enough for all fever
+fancies had not been given, backward and forward through the corridor a
+woman's garments trailed with light rustle, and a low voice hummed
+brokenly the waltz he had heard. Ceasing by and by in a murmur of girls'
+voices, and the old-remembered air, sung softly:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">'For men must work and women must weep,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Though storms be sudden and waters deep.'</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>After that many days went by unmarked. His wound, aggravated by fatigue,
+racked him with renewed pain; and when that was over, vitality was at
+too low an ebb for anything but the most passive quiet. Before listless,
+unnoting eyes drifted the crystal mornings, the golden hours steeped
+deep in summer languors, the miracles of sun-settings and star-filled
+holy nights. From his window he saw and heard always the ocean, blue and
+calm, lapping the shore with dreamy ripple in bright days&mdash;driving
+ghostly swirls of spray and fog clown the beach in stormy, gray ones.
+The house itself seemed set in the deepest haunt of summertime. Great
+trees, draped in the fullest growth of the year, rippled waves of green
+high about it. All day long the leaf sounds and leaf shadows came
+drifting in at the windows. Perfectest hush and quiet wrapped its
+occasional faint strains of music, or chime of voices came up to him,
+but did not break the silence. A place for a well soul to find its full
+stature, for a tired or sick one to gather again its lost forces. And by
+slow degrees the life held at first with so feeble a grasp came back to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>By and by there came a day when, from his balcony, he witnessed a
+departure, full of girls' profuse adieux, and then the hush of vacancy
+fell on the wide halls and airy rooms of the great house. That evening,
+with slow steps, he came down the staircase. In the twilight of the
+parlors showed dimly outlined a drift of woman's drapery, and the piano
+was murmuring inarticulately. Outside, on the broad stone doorstep,
+showed another drift, resolving itself into the muslins of Miss Nelly
+Morris, springing up with glad words of welcome as his unsteady frame
+came into view. Before half the protracted and vehement hand shaking was
+over, Moore turned at a soft rustle behind him, and Nelly found her
+introduction forestalled. Moore hoped, with his courtliest reverence,
+that Miss Berkeley had not forgotten him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_558" id="Page_558">[Pg 558]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She made two noiseless steps forward, and put out a small, brown band.
+He took it in his left, with a smiling glance of apology at the
+sling-fettered right arm. It was not often that Miss Berkeley's broad
+lids found it worth their while to raise themselves for such a wide,
+clear look as they allowed with the clasp. And then Nelly broke in:</p>
+
+<p>'Then you two people know each other. Grand! And I've been wondering
+these two weeks what to do with you! Why didn't you tell me, Leu?'</p>
+
+<p>'How was I to identify Mr. Moore with 'George's friend from the army'?
+Mr. Moore remembers he was on debatable ground last summer.'</p>
+
+<p>Her soft, slow speech fell on his hearing like the silver ripple of
+water, clear and fine cut, but without a bit of the New England
+incisiveness of tone that filled his delicate Southern ear with slight,
+perpetual irritation.</p>
+
+<p>'But I've made my calling and election sure at last. I was transformed
+into a mudsill and Northern hireling last spring.'</p>
+
+<p>'In spite of the transformation, I recognized you as soon as you spoke.
+I was not quite willing to be forgotten, you see, by any one who wore
+the glorifying army cloth.'</p>
+
+<p>They were out on the veranda now. Nelly was gazing with pitiful eyes at
+the sleeve fastened away, while the wasted left hand drew forward a
+great wicker chair into the circle of the moonlight. He caught the look:</p>
+
+<p>'Not so very bad, Miss Nelly; not off, you see, only useless for the
+present;' and he took a lowly seat at her side, near the princess's
+feet.</p>
+
+<p>'You are guiltless of shoulder straps. You might have obtained a
+commission, I think. Why didn't you, I wonder,' she said speculatively.</p>
+
+<p>'Because I knew nothing of military matters, for one thing, and hadn't
+the assurance to take my first lesson as lieutenant or captain.'</p>
+
+<p>Miss Berkeley's white lids lifted themselves again.</p>
+
+<p>'More nice then wise, sir. Others do it,' was Nelly's comment.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, but I haven't forgotten the old copy-book instructions, 'Learn to
+obey before you command,' and began at the beginning. I've taken the
+first step toward the starred shoulder straps'&mdash;he wore the corporal's
+stripes&mdash;' and am hopeful.'</p>
+
+<p>'You'll never attain to them, you lazy Southron. Tell as about your camp
+life.'</p>
+
+<p>'There's very little to tell. Drill, smoke, loaf&mdash;begging your pardon
+for the rough expression of a rough fact&mdash;drill again. As one day is, so
+is another; they're all alike.'</p>
+
+<p>'Well, tell us about your getting wounded, then, and the fight. George
+will not get wounded himself, in spite of my repeated requests to that
+effect.'</p>
+
+<p>And so Moore fought his battle over again, in the midst of which Miss
+Berkeley dropped out of the talk, folded some soft brilliant net over
+her light dress, and went down the walk leading to the shore, and he did
+not see her again that night.</p>
+
+<p>After that he spent much of his time below stairs. Much alone; there
+were walks and rides in which he could take no part. Despite of George's
+prediction, he had peace and quiet, and gathered strength hourly.
+Whatever of graciousness he <i>had</i> seen or fancied in Miss Berkeley's
+manner in that first unexpected meeting had all vanished. A subtile,
+unconquerable something shut her out from all friendliness of speech or
+action. She went about the house in her slow, abstracted way, or in her
+other mood, with sudden darting motions like a swallow, or dreamed all
+day beside the summer sea, coming back browner and with mistier looks in
+her gray eyes, but always alone and unapproachable. So that in half a
+dozen days he had not received as many voluntary sentences from her.</p>
+
+<p>But one morning the clouds had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_559" id="Page_559">[Pg 559]</a></span> gathered black and heavy. The sea fogs
+had pitched their tents to landward, and their misty battalions were
+driving gray across the landscape. Dim reaches of blank water&mdash;lay
+beyond, weltering with an uneasy, rocking motion against the low, dark
+sky. White, ghostly sea birds wheeled low, a fretful wind grieved about
+the house, and a New England northeast storm was in progress. She was
+standing at the window, looking out with eyes farther away than ever
+over the haze-draped sea. Some fine, heavy material, the same indistinct
+hue as the day outside, fell about her in large, sweeping folds. A
+breath of sudden, penetrating perfume struck across his senses as he
+approached her. 'And gray heliotrope!' he said; but the heliotrope
+vanished as she turned and displayed the blaze of carnations at her
+throat, and the gleam of crimson silk under the jaunty zouave.</p>
+
+<p>'Lois Pearl Berkeley,' he read from the golden thimble he had nearly
+crushed under foot. He half wondered if she would know what it was. He
+never saw her do anything. She was never 'engaged,' nor in haste about
+any occupation. The perfect freedom from the universal Yankee necessity
+of motion, with which the brown, small hands fell before her, was as
+thoroughly a part of her as the strange Indian scent which clung to
+everything she touched, and sphered her like the atmosphere of another
+world. He never could associate the idea of any kind of personal
+care-taking with her dainty leisure, more than with the lilies of the
+field, though they never appeared in as many graceful arrays as she.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, mine, thank you,' she said, and composedly dropped it into its
+place in the most orderly of useless conglomerations of silken pockets
+and puzzling pigeon holes. He watched her fingers, and then looked back
+at her.</p>
+
+<p>'Lois&mdash;such an odd name for you&mdash;such a quaint, staid Puritan name.'</p>
+
+<p>'And I am neither quaint nor staid nor Puritan. Thank you. Yes, my
+mother must have had recollections of her New England home strong on her
+when she gave it me, down on the Louisiana shores. It always sounded
+even to me a little strange and frigid among such half-tropical
+surroundings.'</p>
+
+<p>As she spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A
+rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the
+dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it
+was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house,
+always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the
+superficial lotus-charm of Southern life&mdash;and he had lived it
+superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught
+away his breath and choked sudden tears into his eyes. Came and went
+like a flash&mdash;for before she had done speaking a sudden new bond of
+sympathy put away the <i>stranger</i> forevermore, and he was no longer
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>'Then you are Southern born too,' he said, with a quick step forward,
+and involuntarily outstretched hand. Hers dropped into it.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, I am hardly acclimated yet. I shiver under these pale Northern
+skies from August till June. O my Louisiana, you never made 'life a
+burden' with such dark, chill days, and sobbing, cruel winds!' She
+turned to the windows. A sudden uncontrollable quaver of impatience and
+longing ran through her speech and hurried the words with unusual
+vehemence.</p>
+
+<p>'I thought you must have liked the day, since you robed yourself in its
+haze and mist.' He laid his hand lightly on her gray drapery with
+reverent touch.</p>
+
+<p>'And <i>I</i> thought my carnations would redeem that. Since they
+didn't&mdash;'and she tossed the whole bright, spicy handful on the table.</p>
+
+<p>In a vase on the mantle, gray, passionate, odorous blooms were massed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_560" id="Page_560">[Pg 560]</a></span>
+loosely about a cluster of fragile, intense day lilies, and a dash of
+purple and crimson trailed with the fuchsias over its edge, and gleamed
+up from the white marble ledge. He went to the vase, shook out the
+fuchsias, and laid the residue in her lap.</p>
+
+<p>'Heliotrope, finally,' he said.</p>
+
+<p>She brushed it lightly away with a half shudder.</p>
+
+<p>'Not that. I don't like heliotrope. Its perfume is heart-breaking,
+hopeless. It belongs in coffins, about still, dead faces. If it had a
+voice, we should hear continual moans. It would be no worse than this,
+though.'</p>
+
+<p>'You will wear the lilies then, unless the heliotrope scent clings to
+them too,' he said, gathering up the obnoxious flowers.</p>
+
+<p>'Yes, if it doesn't jar your ideal to see them worn against such a
+stormy day dress. To me they are the perfection of summer. No <i>color</i>
+could be more intense than this spotless whiteness. There!' Fastening
+them, the brittle stems snapped, and the flowers fell at her feet. 'No
+flowers for me to-day, of your choosing at least. Practically, lilies
+have such an uncomfortable way of breaking short off.'</p>
+
+<p>A broad, bright ribbon lay drawn through 'Charles Anchester' on the
+table. She knotted it carelessly at her throat.</p>
+
+<p>'That will do for the now; but, O my carnations, how your mission
+failed!' hovering over them a minute.</p>
+
+<p>'Then you are not satisfied with the New England mean of perfection, in
+everything, mentally, morally, and meteorologically?' going back to the
+weather again.</p>
+
+<p>'Satisfied! I'd exchange this whole pale summer for one hour of broad,
+torrid noonlight. Deep, far-off tropical skies, great fronds of tropical
+foliage, drawing their sustenance from the slowest, richest juices of
+nature, gorgeous depths of color blazing with the very heart of the sun,
+deep, intoxicating odors poured from creamy white or flaming flower
+chalices, and always the silver-sprayed wash of the blue sea. I remember
+that of my home. It is months and months since I have seen a magnolia or
+jasmine.'</p>
+
+<p>Fate sent Miss Morris to the parlor just then, luckily enough, perhaps,
+and the first dash of rain from the coming storm struck the windows
+sharply. Miss Berkeley shivered; a gray shadow swept up over her face,
+and absorbed all the gleam and unrest. She moved off with her book to a
+window; shut herself out from the room, and into the storm, with a heavy
+fall of curtains; and Nelly's voice rippled through a tripping, Venetian
+barcarole.</p>
+
+<p>It stormed all the next day, and when twilight came, it rained still
+with desperation. A narrow sphere of light from the flame low down in
+its alabaster shade held the piano, and through the warm scented gloom
+that filled the rest of the parlor thrilled echoing chords. Moore,
+coming in, stopped in the dimness to listen. A troubled uncertainty made
+itself felt through the strains, a sudden discordant crash jarred
+through the room, and the performer rose abruptly. He came forward.</p>
+
+<p>'O my prophetic soul, magnolias!' said Nelly, from her lounge, just
+outside the lighted circle.</p>
+
+<p>It had just come from him, the light, exquisite basket he held filled
+with great, pink, flushed magnolia blooms. Nelly raved in most
+fashionably extravagant adjectives. Lois looked at it with hungry eyes,
+but motionless and speechless. He laid it before her on the table, and
+turned away. She stood for a moment looking gravely down on it, then
+buried her face among the cool petals with a sudden caressing motion.
+Looking up again shortly, 'Thank you,' she said simply to the giver
+chatting carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>A broad illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after,
+and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little
+skill<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_561" id="Page_561">[Pg 561]</a></span> necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she
+could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed
+with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous
+with purple light, shining through the tears that gathered in them.</p>
+
+<p>Then the piano began, played dreamily, irregularly, with slender, single
+threads of tune, and frequent pauses, as if the preoccupied mind let the
+listless fingers fall away from the keys. They gathered up finally all
+the broken strains into a low, slow-moving harmony. Through it Moore
+heard the soft lap of waves, the slow rock of Pacific tidal swells,
+flowing and ebbing and flowing again through flaming noons, about
+half-submerged bits of world, palm-shaded, sun-drenched, or swaying
+white with moonlight under purple midnights, holy with the clear burning
+stars: heard the gurgle and ripple of falling streams, deepening into
+the wide flow of mighty rivers, bearing in their calm sweep the secrets
+of a zone&mdash;of ice-choked springs, of the dead stillness of Northern
+forests, and the overgrowth, and passionate life of endless summers.</p>
+
+<p>The red and white combatants now held truce over a queen check, while
+the players sat silent, listening.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, through the murmur and rhythmic flow of water sounds, struck
+shrill and sharp the opening strains of a march&mdash;not such marches as
+mark time for dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant,
+cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat&mdash;steadying the tramp of weary
+feet over red battle fields. Its unswerving hurry, its terrible, calm
+excitement, brought before his vision long blue lines&mdash;the fixed faces
+sterner than death, with steady eyes and quickened breath&mdash;the nervous
+clutch of muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came
+nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and
+sweet May breath&mdash;and the quick, questioning note of a meadow lark
+dropped down through the silence of the advancing column. As the
+maddening music stormed and beat about him, his heart throbbed audibly,
+and the rushing currents of his fiery Southern blood sounded in his
+ears. Honor, prudence, resolution, everything was swept away in the lava
+tide of excitement. Before him he saw the crown of his life. All heaven
+and all earth should not stop him short of it. He rose and began
+crossing the room, with heavy, resolute tread. In the dimness, the
+player was hardly visible; he would assure himself of her mortality at
+least. A sudden, fierce hunger for sight and touch thrilled him.</p>
+
+<p>Midway he stopped. The music dropped with a shock from its fiery
+enthusiasm. Was it only an echo, or an army of ghosts crossing a dim
+field, long since fought over&mdash;the steady tramp, tramp, the pendulum of
+time? Unutterably wailing, pitiful, it sent plaintive, piercing cries up
+to the calm, dead heavens. All the fearful sights he had seen rose
+before him. Upturned lay faces calm in death as in a child's sleep, with
+all camp roughnesses swept away in that still whiteness; strong men's,
+with that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death
+on them&mdash;mangled and crushed forms&mdash;all the wreck of a fought battle,
+terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water
+voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant
+arpeggio flashed up the keys like a shower of gold, and Miss Berkeley
+rose with white face and trembling breath, and Nelly was alone in the
+room, sobbing nervously in her armchair.</p>
+
+<p>The storm passed that night, with great swayings of trees, and dash of
+broad raindrops, and piled up broken masses of fleecy white clouds,
+tossed about by the rough, exultant September wind. Bright days
+followed, mellowing with each one to sunnier, calmer perfection. Moore
+passed them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_562" id="Page_562">[Pg 562]</a></span> his own room. That night had torn away all the disguises
+that he had put upon his heart. He knew now that he loved this
+woman&mdash;knew it with such a bitter sense of humiliation as such proud
+spirits writhe under when honor turns traitor and betrays them to the
+enemy. 'Lead us not into temptation.' If it meant anything in the old
+habit of child's prayer which clung to him yet, it meant that he should
+put himself out of its way, since he had proved himself too weak to meet
+it. His inborn honesty let him build no excuses for his failure. He saw,
+and acknowledged with a flush of scorn and curling lip, his own
+treachery to himself in his hour of need. That he had not committed
+himself&mdash;that his self-betrayal was only known to self&mdash;was no merit of
+his&mdash;simply a circumstance. And circumstances seemed mighty in their
+influence upon him, he thought, with a feeling of deepest contempt. All
+pride and self-reliance were taken out of him. Absence, at least, would
+be a safeguard, since it would render harmless such impulses as those of
+that night. However much he might sin in yearning, she; should never
+know, never be exposed to the risk of being drawn into his guilt and
+pain. He had come at last to the place where all the old delicate pride
+was merged in the one anxious fear that she should suffer. He would go
+away the next day; he would not see her again&mdash;never see her
+voluntarily&mdash;putting away fiercely the sudden pang of yearning: not that
+he came at once to such a conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>Honor, pride, self-respect, having failed him once, were not easily
+recalled to their allegiance. His was no feeble nature, to sin and
+repent in an hour. He fought over every inch of his way, and came out at
+last conqueror, but scarred and weary and very weak in heart, and
+distrustful of himself.</p>
+
+<p>They had gone to ride that afternoon&mdash;he had seen them drive away. He
+would go down and make the necessary arrangements for his departure. And
+so it happened that he stood an hour before sunset in the parlor. A
+sudden heart sickness drove the blood from his lips with the wrench of
+remembrance. It did not strengthen him to meet her, cool and royal, in
+filmy purple, putting out her hand with frank friendliness, and with a
+new quaver of interest in her voice. Those fatal magnolias: all the
+outside world seemed pressing nearer these two strangers in a strange
+land.</p>
+
+<p>'How pale you are! You have been ill again.'</p>
+
+<p>'No,' he said, almost harshly. 'You like tiger lilies,' lifting a stem
+crowded with the flaming whirls.</p>
+
+<p>'Like them? yes&mdash;don't you? As I like the fiery, deafening drum-roll and
+screaming fife, and silver, sweet bugle-calls. Think where they found
+these wide, free curves of outline&mdash;that flaming contrast of color.
+Indian skies have rounded over them, Indian suns poured their fervor
+into their hearts. In the depth of forest jungles the velvet-coated
+tiger has shaken off their petals&mdash;glittering, deadly cobras crushed
+them in their slow coils; gorgeous-winged birds and insects swept them
+in their flight.'</p>
+
+<p>Some new mental impulse sent a rare, faint flush to the olive cheeks,
+and filled the uplooking clear eyes with light. This purple-clad shape,
+with fiery nasturtiums burning on the breast and filling the air with
+their peculiar odor, with the barbaric splendor of tiger lilies
+reflecting their lurid glare about her as she stood, bore no more
+likeness to the ordinary haughty woman than fire to snow. He would have
+liked to have crowned her with pomegranate blossoms&mdash;have dropped the
+silvery sheen of ermine under her feet, and have knelt there to worship.</p>
+
+<p>She moved away impatiently, trailed her noiseless drapery through the
+room once or twice, and came back to the window, where he stood looking
+out. Before them lay the sea, calm in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_563" id="Page_563">[Pg 563]</a></span> sheen of blue, gathering faint
+amethystine vapors, that the sunset would light up in a miracle of
+bronze and purple and rose.</p>
+
+<p>'You should have been with us last night! A soft, rushing south wind
+filled all the air with whispers, and drew up a veil of lace round the
+horizon, very high up in the east. Stars were few; the new moon dropped
+tender, faint beams down into the gray mist and grayer water that broke
+in ripples of white fire against the dark in the west, and mingled with
+the mystery in the east. I want to go again. Mr. Moore, I can manage a
+boat; will you go with me?'</p>
+
+<p>With every minute he saw his hard-earned victory slipping away. With
+every minute his reeling sense lost foothold in the strange, new
+fascination of her excited presence. Will rallied to a last effort; he
+muttered some broken excuse, that she must have thought an assent, for
+she dropped a soft, white, clinging shawl over her shoulders, slipped
+the tie of the jaunty hat beneath her chin, and he could only follow her
+as she slid through the flicker of shade and sunshine down to the beach,
+where the summer sea washed lazily.</p>
+
+<p>Low in the west and northwest lay piled ominous clouds; white, angry
+thunder heads began showing themselves.</p>
+
+<p>'A grand sunset for to-night, and a shower perhaps. We shall be back
+before it breaks.'</p>
+
+<p>A small boat&mdash;a frail thing of white and gilding&mdash;floated at anchor.
+Lois shook out the sail in her character of manager, seated herself at
+the helm, and they drifted out. No word was spoken; the light in her
+eyes grew brighter and brighter; the scarlet curves of her mouth more
+and more intense. Sitting with face turned away from the west, she did
+not see, as he did, the rising blackness. The wind freshened, skimming
+in fitful gusts over the waves, and the little craft flung off the spray
+like rain. Away off in the shadow of the cloud the water was black as
+death, a faint line of white defining its edge. Was she infatuated? As
+for him, he grew very calm, with a kind of desperation. Better to die
+so, with her face the last sight on earth&mdash;his last consciousness her
+clinging arms, sinking down to the dark, still caverns beneath&mdash;than to
+live out the life that lay before him. He leaned forward and looked over
+into the green depths of the sea. Sunshine still struck down in rippling
+lines, a golden network. Soft emerald shadows hung far down, breaking up
+into surface rifts of cool dimness as the waves swung over them.</p>
+
+<p>Her hat had fallen back; her whole face was alive with a proud, exultant
+delight in the exhilarating motion. Higher and higher rose the veil of
+cloud, and the blackness in the water was creeping toward them. Sea
+birds wheeled low about them, with their peculiar quavering cry, and a
+low swell made itself felt. Miss Berkeley turned her head; a sudden look
+of affright blanched her face to deadliest whiteness. A hand's breadth
+of clear sky lay beneath the sun, and down after them, with the speed of
+a racer, came that great black wave. Before it the blue ripples shivered
+brightly; behind it the angry water tossed and seethed. In its bosom,
+lurid, phosphorescent lights seemed to flit to and fro. Its crest was
+ragged and white with dashes of foam. She took in the whole in a
+second's glance, and made a movement to bring the boat's head up to the
+wind. As the white face turned toward him, a quick instinct of
+self-preservation seized him, and he sprang up to lower the sail.
+Something caught the halliards. His left arm was of little service; his
+right hung useless at his side. She reached forward&mdash;one hand on the
+tiller&mdash;to help him. The rim of the storm slipped up over the sun&mdash;a
+sudden flaw struck them&mdash;the rudder flew sharp round, wrenched out of
+her slight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_564" id="Page_564">[Pg 564]</a></span> hold&mdash;the top-heavy sail caught the full force of the blow,
+surged downward with a heavy lurch, and the gale was on them. A great
+blow, and swift darkness, then fierce currents rushing coldly past him;
+strange, wild sounds filling his ears; and when his vision cleared
+itself, he saw Lois, unimpeded by her light drapery, striking out for
+the sunken ledge, half a dozen yards away, over which the spray was
+flying furiously. He ground his teeth with impatience as his nerveless
+arm fell helpless; but he reached her side at last. A narrow shelf, with
+barely sufficient standing room for two. Great, dark waves, with strange
+lights flashing through them, whirled blinding deluges high above their
+heads, as he held her close. With the instinct of the weaker toward the
+stronger, she grasped and clung to him; and the fierce exultation that
+thrilled through his veins with actual contact, made him strong as a
+giant. And then, close on the gale, came the rain, beating down the
+waves with its heavy pour. In the thunder and tramp of the storm no
+human voice could have made itself audible, if speech had been needed.</p>
+
+<p>The storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. Through a rift in the
+clouds a dash of blood-red light burst over the troubled waters, and
+with it a sudden quiet fell about them. They were to have their 'grand
+sunset' finally.</p>
+
+<p>'We are too far from the mainland to reach it without help; no boats are
+likely to pass this way after this storm; the tide is at its lowest now;
+it rises high over this ledge.'</p>
+
+<p>In his quiet voice a half-savage triumph made itself heard. This
+near-coming fate, that he believed inevitable, put away completely all
+claims of that world that lay behind him&mdash;shut out everything but their
+own individuality. Time had narrowed to a point; all landmarks were
+swept away.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Berkeley's face had lost none of its whiteness; but the pallor was
+not of fear. The great eyes burned star-like, and the mouth was like
+iron. She looked up as his even tones fell on her ear. Something in his
+gaze fixed hers; through fearless, unveiled eyes, the soul looked
+straight out to his. What he saw there dazzled and blinded him. He
+caught her up to his heart suddenly and fiercely. His lips crushed hers
+in a long, clinging kiss, that seemed to drink up her very life. For
+them, the brightness that for others is dissipated over long years of
+the future, was concentrated into the single intense moment of the
+present&mdash;this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the
+fruition of a lifetime. The sky lifted away and poured down fuller
+floods of light; the air vibrated with strange, audible throbs. When he
+released her, she did not move away. Never again, though they lived out
+a century, could the past be quite what it had been before; through it
+they had come to this, the crowning perfection of their lives. Through
+the future would run the memory of a caress in which&mdash;she was not a
+woman who measured her gifts&mdash;she had dissolved all the hope and promise
+of that future for him. Desperation was no small element in the whirl.
+Only into the eternities could he carry the <i>now</i> pure and loyal. It had
+nothing to do with time; only through the shadow of the coming death had
+he attained to it.</p>
+
+<p>The fancy that had always haunted him with her peculiar name and dainty
+presence, prompted the 'Marguerite!'</p>
+
+<p>She was not a woman to whom people give pet names. A <i>rested</i>, loving
+smile gleamed over her face, and her lips sought his again.</p>
+
+<p>'My darling!'</p>
+
+<p>'Mine!' and then time drifted on, unbroken by the speech which would
+have jarred the new, perfect harmony. Neither <i>thought</i>&mdash;the life
+currents that had met so wildly and suddenly, left space in their full,
+disturbed flow, for just the one consciousness of delirious,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_565" id="Page_565">[Pg 565]</a></span> satisfying
+love. While the fiery sunset paled, he held the little drenched figure
+close, her warm breath flowing across his cheek.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the gathering dimness shoreward, came a hail. It struck him with
+an icy chill that death could never have brought. She raised her head,
+listening. The longing and temptation to hold her to his breast, and
+sink down through the green, curling waves, came back stronger than
+ever. Only so could he hope to keep her. That inexorable future of time
+reaching out to grasp him back again, would put them apart so
+hopelessly. His voice was hoarse&mdash;broken up with the heart wrench.</p>
+
+<p>'Marguerite, will you die here with me, or go back again to the life
+that will separate us?'</p>
+
+<p>She did not understand him. Why should she? Did she not love him, and he
+her? and what <i>could</i> come between them? For her a future burst suddenly
+into hope with that faint call. In it lay untried, unfathomable sources
+of happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Another breathless kiss&mdash;this time crowded with the agony of a parting
+for him&mdash;and then, as the hail came again, nearer and more distinct, the
+white shawl, that still clung about her, floated in the air as a signal.</p>
+
+<p>They lifted her into the rescuing boat shortly, white and breathless,
+and wrapped her in heavy shawls. Not senseless, lying against his
+breast, the dark eyes opened once to meet his, and the pallid face
+nestled a little closer to its resting place. He could not tell if the
+time were long or short, before Nelly's voice broke on his ear.</p>
+
+<p>'Only a comedy, instead of the tragedy which mother is arranging up at
+the house!'</p>
+
+<p>The half-hysterical quaver broke into the woman's refuge of tears, and
+sobs with that; and Moore gave up his burden to stronger arms.</p>
+
+<p>'Up at the house,' Mrs. Morris, busied with her blazing fires and
+multitudinous appliances for any stage of disaster, met them with the
+quiet tears that mothers learn to shed, and the reverent 'Thank God!'
+that comes oftenest from mothers' lips.</p>
+
+<p>And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the
+face. The man was in no sense a coward&mdash;<i>flinch</i> was not in him. He came
+out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over
+whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat
+Marguerite&mdash;the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at
+his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching
+eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion
+in his heart leaped up&mdash;a groan came in place of the words he had
+promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not
+strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet.
+He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward
+to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words
+that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through
+clenched teeth.</p>
+
+<p>'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not
+dead; the engagement is not broken.'</p>
+
+<p>There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any
+right to use&mdash;harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the
+earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted
+the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur.</p>
+
+<p>There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified
+glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell,
+and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect
+comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid
+before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom
+again. She looked into it with just the same atti<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_566" id="Page_566">[Pg 566]</a></span>tude&mdash;even to the
+tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing&mdash;as five minutes before she
+had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white
+face&mdash;whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight&mdash;saw a look of utter,
+hopeless quiet settle there&mdash;such quiet as one sees in an unclosed
+coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving,
+as covers deadly wounds&mdash;settle never again to rise till Death shall
+sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces
+gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On
+this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the
+curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give&mdash;the promise
+of lifelong love and tenderness&mdash;was itself a deadly wrong&mdash;would blast
+his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood
+there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest
+realization of helplessness went over his heart.</p>
+
+<p>She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his
+bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made
+itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up;
+even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that
+sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her
+hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek
+with quick, light contact, and glided away.</p>
+
+<p>Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon,
+and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and
+ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed
+in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face,
+and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long
+hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of
+sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night
+with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred
+the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night
+noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo;
+till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and
+the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded
+itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attention, had taken in
+every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a
+personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her
+pain&mdash;that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same
+face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and
+sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.</p>
+
+<p>But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking
+came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her
+own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite
+sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the
+pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of
+the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind
+of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes
+or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.</p>
+
+<p>There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these
+wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of
+body&mdash;not a sound or struggle testifies to pain&mdash;receiving blow after
+blow without hope or thought of appeal&mdash;going off by and by to die, or
+to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps&mdash;a passive,
+hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or
+shape a lifetime. Rarely ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_567" id="Page_567">[Pg 567]</a></span> eyes that have watched out such a night
+see the sun rise with its old promise.</p>
+
+<p>Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium,
+found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another
+fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George&mdash;off on some
+scouting expedition&mdash;was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on
+the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the
+hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway
+followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always
+ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding
+finally with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George!
+The prodigious effort <i>ought</i> to have kept the heart throb out of his
+voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a
+wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took
+refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months&mdash;feeling
+like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save
+either himself or his friend from coming evil. Another item added to
+retributive justice.</p>
+
+<p>'I thought you knew'&mdash;flashing the diamond on his hand in the
+moonlight&mdash;'somewhere beyond the lines yonder a lady wears the companion
+to this&mdash;or did, last spring.'</p>
+
+<p>And George's spirits rose immensely thereupon.</p>
+
+<p>The old, miserable monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him,
+this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days
+and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor
+memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole
+strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to
+face with his life, he met the chances of his future like the man he
+was, and at last, out of the blackness end desolation, came the comfort
+of conquering small, every-day temptations, more of a comfort than we
+are willing to admit at first thought.</p>
+
+<p>This bare, unbroken life cuts straight down to the marrow of a man.
+Stripped of all conventionalities, individuals come out broadly. The
+true metal shows itself grandly in this strange, impartial throwing
+together of social elements&mdash;this commingling on one level of all ranks
+and conditions of men in the same broad glare of every-day trial,
+unmodified by any of society's false lights. The factitious barriers of
+rank once broken over, all early associations, whether of workshop or
+college, go for nought, or, rather, for what they are worth. The <i>man</i>
+gravitates to his proper place, whether he makes himself known with the
+polished sentences of the school, or in terse, sinewy, workman's talk.
+And through the months Moore learned to respect humanity as it showed
+itself, made gentler to every one, driven out from himself, perhaps, by
+the bitterness and darkness that centred in his own heart. It was a new
+phase of life for him, but he bated his haughty Southern exclusiveness
+to meet it. Before, he had kept himself aloof as far as the surroundings
+allowed from those about him&mdash;now, his never-failing good nature, his
+flow of song and story, his untiring physical endurance, all upborne by
+a certain proud delicacy and reticence, made him a general favorite. But
+he hailed as a relief the long, exhausting marches that came after a
+while. Bodily weariness stood in the place of head or heart exercise,
+and men falling asleep on the spot where they halted for the night,
+after a day in the clinging Virginia mud, had little time for the noisy
+outbreaks that filled the evenings in days of inaction. So he did his
+private's duty bravely, with cheery patience, relieving many a slender
+boy's arms of his gun, helping many another with words of cheer as he
+slumped on at his side, always with some device for making their dreary
+night-stops more endurable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_568" id="Page_568">[Pg 568]</a></span> Thanksgiving came and went. George went
+home on furlough. Moore refused one, and ate the day's extra allowance
+of tough beef and insipid rice with much fought-against memories of his
+New England festivals. The winter went on. Christmas days came. The
+man's brown face was getting positively thinner with homesick
+recollections of the Southern carnival. This brilliant, ready spirit,
+who never grew sour nor selfish under any circumstances, actually spent
+two good hours, the afternoon before Christmas day, in a brown study,
+and with a suspicious, tightened feeling in his throat, and mistiness in
+his eyes. Coming in at nightfall from his picket duty, tired and hungry,
+Jim Murphy, stretching his long length before the fire, rose on his
+elbow to find half a dozen epistles he had brought down to camp that
+day.</p>
+
+<p>'Yer letthers, Musther Moore.' Jim, even with his sudden accession of
+independence as an American citizen, paid unconscious deference to the
+world-old subtile difference between gentleman and 'rough,' and used the
+title involuntarily.</p>
+
+<p>He opened them sitting by the same fire, munching his hard tack as he
+read. Murphy, watching him, saw his lips quiver and work over one
+bearing half a dozen postmarks&mdash;a letter from his mother, conveyed
+across the lines by some sleight-of-hand of influence or pay, and mailed
+and remailed from place to place, till weeks had grown into months since
+it was written. Noncommittal as it had need to be&mdash;filled with home
+items to the last page&mdash;there his heart stood still, to bound again
+furiously back, and his breath came sharp and hot. He rose blinded and
+staggering. Jim Murphy, seeing how white and rigid his face had grown,
+came toward him, putting out his hand with a dumb impulse of sympathy,
+not understanding how the shock of a great hope, springing full grown
+into existence, sometimes puts on the semblance of as great a loss.</p>
+
+<p>Private Moore's application for a furlough being duly made, that night
+was duly granted.</p>
+
+<p>'Just in time&mdash;the last one for your regiment!' said the good-natured
+official, registering the necessary items.</p>
+
+<p>In another hour he was whirling away, and in early evening two days
+later he stepped out into the clear moonlight and crisp air of a
+Northern city.</p>
+
+<p>A New England sleighing season was at its height. The streets were
+crowded with swift-flying graceful vehicles, the air ringing with bell
+music and chimes of voices. Out through the brilliant confusion he went
+to the quiet square where the great trees laid a dark tracery of shadow
+upon the snow beneath. No thought of the accidents of absence or
+company, or any of the chances of everyday life, had occurred to him
+before. A carriage stood at the door. He almost stamped with impatience
+till the door opened and he was admitted. The change to the warm,
+luxurious gloom of the parlors quieted him a little, but he paced up and
+down with long strides while he waited. The strong stillness that he had
+resolutely maintained was broken down now with a feverish restlessness.</p>
+
+<p>She came at length&mdash;it seemed to him forever first&mdash;with the rustle and
+shimmer of trailing lengths of silk down the long room. A fleecy mist
+covered neck and arms, and some miracle of a carriage wrapping lay white
+and soft about her face. She did not recognize him in the obscurity; his
+message of 'a friend' had not betrayed him. But his voice, with its new,
+proud hopefulness, its under vein triumphant and eager, struck her into
+a blinding, giddy whirl, in which voice and words were lost. It passed
+in a moment, and he was saying, 'And I am free now&mdash;honorably free&mdash;and
+have come where my heart has been, ever since that month on the seaside.
+Most gracious and sovereign lady,'&mdash;he broke into sudden, al<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_569" id="Page_569">[Pg 569]</a></span>most
+mirthful speech, dropping on one knee with a semblance of humility
+proved no mockery by the diamond light in the brown eyes and the
+reverent throb that came straight from his voice.</p>
+
+<p>She bent over him as he knelt, and drew her cool, soft hands across his
+forehead and down his face, and her even, silvery syllables cut like
+death:</p>
+
+<p>'Mr. Moore, last night I promised to marry your friend, Captain Morris.'</p>
+
+<p>For the space of a minute stillness like the grave filled the room, and
+then all the intense strain of heart and nerve gave way, as the bitter
+tide of disappointment broke in and rolled over his future; and without
+word or sound he dropped forward at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>She knelt down beside him with a low, bitter cry. It reached his dulled
+sense; he rose feebly.</p>
+
+<p>'Forgive me; I have not been myself of late, I think; and this&mdash;this was
+so sudden,' and he walked away with dull, nerveless tread.</p>
+
+<p>On the table, near her, lay her handkerchief. It breathed of heliotrope.
+Her words came back to him: 'Only in coffins, about still, dead faces.'
+He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Forever he should
+remember all that ghostly sheen of silvery white about a rigid face with
+unutterably sad fixed mouth and drooping lids. He thrust the fleecy
+handful into his breast.</p>
+
+<p>'I may keep this?' and took permission from her silence.</p>
+
+<p>'Good-by;' the words came through ashy lips, a half sob. She knelt as
+impassive as marble, as cold and white. He waited a moment for the word
+or look that did not come, turned away, the hall door fell heavily shut,
+and he was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Fifteen minutes after, Miss Berkeley was whirling to the house where she
+was to officiate as bridesmaid, and where she was haughtier, and colder,
+and ten times more attractive than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Private Moore, waiting for the midnight return train, found life a grim
+prospect.</p>
+
+<p>Three weeks after, a summons came from the captain's tent. George had
+just returned from his own furlough, and this was their first meeting.
+Even while their hands clasped, his new, happy secret told itself.</p>
+
+<p>'Congratulate me, Clement Moore! You remember Lois Berkeley? She has
+promised to be Lois Berkeley Morris one day!' and, with happy lover's
+egotism, did not notice the gray shade about his hearer's lips.</p>
+
+<p>Various items of news followed.</p>
+
+<p>'A truce boat goes over to-morrow,' remembering the fact suddenly;
+'there will be opportunity to send a few letters; so, if you wish to
+write to that lady 'beyond the lines'&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The voice that replied was thin and harsh:</p>
+
+<p>'Miss Rose declined alliance with a 'Yankee hireling,' and was married
+last October.'</p>
+
+<p>Honest George wrung his friend's hand anew, and heaped mental anathemas
+on his own stupidity for not seeing how haggard and worn the dark face
+had grown&mdash;anathemas which were just enough, perhaps, only he hardly saw
+the reason in quite the right light. But he spared all allusions to his
+own prospects thereafter, and finding that Moore rather avoided than
+sought him, measured and forgave the supposed cause by his own heart.</p>
+
+<p>At length came a time when a new life and impulse roused into action
+even that slowly moved great body, the officers of the Potomac Army, and
+that much-abused and sorely tried insignificant item, the army itself.
+On every camp ground reigned the confusion of a flitting. All the roads
+were filled with regiments hurrying southward, faces growing more and
+more hazard with fatigue and privation, weak and slender forms falling
+from the ranks, cowards and traitors skulking to the rear, till at
+length on the banks of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_570" id="Page_570">[Pg 570]</a></span> river stood an army, hungry, footsore,
+marchworn, but plucky, and ready for any service that might be required
+of them, even if that service were but to 'march up the hill and then
+march down again'&mdash;what was left of them.</p>
+
+<p>An atom in the moving mass of blue, Clement Moore shared the pontoon
+crossing, was silent through the storms of cheers that greeted each
+regiment as they splashed over and up the bank, and, drawn up in line of
+battle at last, surveyed the field without a pulsation of emotion. Other
+men about him chafed at the restraint; he stood motionless, with eyes a
+thousand miles away. And when the advance sounded, and the line started
+with a cheer, no sound passed his lips. A half-unconscious prayer went
+up that he might fall there, and have it over with this life battle,
+that had gone so sorely against him. He moved as in a dream. The whirl
+and roar of battle swept around and by him; he charged with the
+fiercest, saw the blue lines reel and break only to close up and charge
+again, took his life in his hand a dozen times, and stood at length with
+the few who held that first line of rifle pits, gazing in each other's
+faces in the momentary lull, and wondering at their own existence. Then
+came a shock, shivers of red-hot pain ran through every nerve, and
+then&mdash;blissful, cool unconsciousness. Captain George, galloping by, with
+the red glare of battle on his face, saw the fall, and halted. A half
+dozen ready hands swung the body to his saddle. For a little the tide of
+battle eddied away, and in the comparative quiet, George tore down the
+hill to a spring bubbling out under the cedars.</p>
+
+<p>The darkness that wrapped the wounded man dissolved gradually. The
+thunder and crash of guns, the mad cheers, the confusion of the bands
+withdrew farther and farther, and drifted away from his failing senses.
+He was back in his Southern home; the arm under his head was his
+mother's; and he murmured some boyish request. Jasmine and clematis
+oppressed him with their oversweetness; overhead the shining leaves of
+the magnolia swung with slow grace. So long since he had seen a
+magnolia, not since that evening&mdash;a life time ago, it seemed; the sight
+and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The
+heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother&mdash;a
+drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not
+cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away
+with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs.
+He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a woman's,
+bent over him.</p>
+
+<p>'O Clement, dear old fellow, do you know me?'</p>
+
+<p>He smiled faintly, with stiffening lips. 'Yes, I know. I've prayed for
+it, George. I couldn't live to see her your wife. Good-by, dear boy.
+Tell mother&mdash;' He wandered again. 'Kiss me, mother&mdash;now Lois, my
+Marguerite. Into thy hands, O Lord&mdash;' A momentary struggle for breath,
+and then Morris laid back the grand head, and knelt, looking down on the
+beautiful face, over which the patient strength of perfect calm had
+settled forever.</p>
+
+<p>'So that was it, after all,' he said, bitterly. 'Fool not to see; and he
+was worth a generation of such as I.'</p>
+
+<p>He turned away, tightened his saddle girths, cast a look on the
+pandemonium before him, looked back with one foot already in the
+stirrup.</p>
+
+<p>'I sha'n't see him again in this hell, even if I come out of it myself.'
+And going back, with gentle fingers he removed the few trinkets on the
+body. In an inner pocket of the blouse he found a small packet. He
+opened it on the spot. A lady's handkerchief, silky fine, white as ever.
+No need of the delicate tracery in the corners to tell him whose. The
+perfume that haunted it still called back too vividly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_571" id="Page_571">[Pg 571]</a></span> that evening when
+he had wondered at and loved her more for the strange, perfect calm that
+chilled a little his outburst of happiness. He folded it back carefully,
+touched his lips as a woman might have done to the cold forehead, and
+mounted, plunging up the hill to the fight that had recommenced over the
+trench. Later in the day, the ball that fate moulded for Captain George
+found him. He gave one low, pitiful cry as it crashed through his bridle
+arm, and then a merciful darkness closed about him.</p>
+
+<p>Two months after, white and thin, with one empty sleeve fastened across
+his chest, he stood where another had stood waiting for the same woman.
+Through the window drifted in the early spring fragrance; a handful of
+early spring flowers lay on the table. A soft rustle and slow step
+through the hall, and he rose as Lois came in. She glanced at the empty
+sleeve with grave, wide eyes, and sat down near him. He would not have
+known the face before him, it had so altered; the hair pushed back from
+hollow, blue-veined temples, the sharpened, angular outlines, and an
+old, suffering look about the mouth and sunken eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Few words were spoken&mdash;nothing beyond the most commonplace greetings.
+Then she said:</p>
+
+<p>'I should have come to you, but I have been ill myself; near death, I
+believe,' she added, wearily.</p>
+
+<p>She gave the explanation with no throb of feeling. She would have
+apologized for a careless dress with more spirit once.</p>
+
+<p>He rose and laid a packet before her.</p>
+
+<p>'A lady's handkerchief&mdash;yours, I think. I was with him when he died,
+though his body was not found afterward. I was hurt myself, you know,
+and could not attend to it,' he said, deprecatingly.</p>
+
+<p>She did not touch it, looking from it up to him with eyes filled with
+just such a grieved, questioning look as might come into the eyes of
+some animal dying in torture. He could not endure it. He put out his
+white, wasted left hand.</p>
+
+<p>'My poor child!' She shivered, caught her breath with a sob, and,
+burying her face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears
+in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor
+to speak&mdash;wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who
+was left lying stark and still beneath the cedars.</p>
+
+<p>The storm passed. She lay quiet now, all but the sobs that shook her
+whole slight frame. He said, at last, very gently:</p>
+
+<p>'If I had known&mdash;you should have told me. He was my best friend.' His
+voice trembled a little. 'I know how I must seem to you. His murderer,
+perhaps; surely the murderer of your happiness.' A deeper quaver in the
+sorrowful tones. 'It is too late now, I know; but if it would help you
+ever so little to be released from your promise&mdash;'</p>
+
+<p>There was no reply.</p>
+
+<p>'You are free. I am going now.' He bent over her for a breath, making a
+heart picture of the tired face, the closed eyes, and grieved mouth.
+Only to take her up for a moment, with power to comfort her&mdash;he would
+have given his life for that&mdash;and turned away with a great, yearning
+pain snatching at his breath. In the hall he paused a moment, trying to
+think. A light step, a frail hand on his arm, a wistful face lifted to
+his.</p>
+
+<p>'Forgive me; I have been very unkind. You are so good and noble. I will
+be your wife, if you will be any happier.'</p>
+
+<p>He looked down at her pityingly. 'You are very tired. Shall you say that
+when you are rested again? Remember, you are free.'</p>
+
+<p>'If not yours, then never any one's.'</p>
+
+<p>His arm fell about her, his lips<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_572" id="Page_572">[Pg 572]</a></span> touched her forehead quietly; he led
+her back to her couch, and arranged her pillow, smiling a little at his
+one awkward hand.</p>
+
+<p>'I shall not see you again before I go back, unless you send for me.'</p>
+
+<p>She put out her hand and touched the bowed face quickly and lightly; and
+with that touch thrilling in his veins he went away.</p>
+
+<p>Through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Charleston siege, Captain
+George, no longer captain, now twice promoted for cool bravery, has
+borne a charmed life&mdash;a grave, calm man, remembering always a still
+face, 'pathetic with dying.'</p>
+
+<p>Out from the future is turned toward him another face, no less pathetic
+in its unrest of living. The soldiers in the Capital hospitals, dragging
+through the weary weeks of convalescence, know that face well. For hours
+of every day she goes about busied with such voluntary service as she is
+permitted to do. She sees tired faces brighten at her coming&mdash;is
+welcomed by rough and gentle voices. Always patient, ready, thoughtful,
+she is 'spending' herself&mdash;waiting for the end.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_SCIENTIFIC_UNIVERSAL_LANGUAGE_ITS_CHARACTER_AND_RELATION_TO_OTHER" id="THE_SCIENTIFIC_UNIVERSAL_LANGUAGE_ITS_CHARACTER_AND_RELATION_TO_OTHER"></a>THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES.</h2>
+
+
+<h3><i>ARTICLE TWO.</i></h3>
+
+<h3>CORRESPONDING FIRST DISCRIMINATIONS IN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE.</h3>
+
+
+<p>The purpose of these papers, as announced and partially carried forward
+in the preceding one, is to explain the nature of the <span class="smcap">New Scientific
+Universal Language</span>, a component part of the new Science of <span class="smcap">Universology</span>,
+and to exhibit its relation to the Lingual Structures hitherto extant.
+For this purpose we entered upon the necessary preliminary consideration
+of the fundamental question of the Origin of Speech. We found that the
+latest developments of Comparative Philology upon this subject, as
+embodied in Prof. M&uuml;ller's recent work, 'Lectures on the Science of
+Language,' brought us no farther along to the goal of our investigation
+than Compound Roots&mdash;one-, two-, three-, four-, five&mdash;(or more) letter
+Roots&mdash;some four or five hundred of which are the insoluble residuum
+which the Philologists furnish as the Ultimate Elements of Language. It
+was pointed out that these Roots are not, however, the <i>Ultimate</i>
+Elements of Language, any more than Compound Substances are the Prime
+Constituents of Matter; and that, as Chemistry, as a Science, could
+begin its career, only after a knowledge of the veritable Ultimate
+Elements of the Physical Constitution of the Globe was obtained, so a
+<i>True Science of Language</i> must be based upon an understanding of the
+value and meaning of the True Prime or Ultimate Elements of Speech&mdash;the
+<i>Vowels</i> and <i>Consonants</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is with the exposition of the nature of these Fundamental
+Constituents of Language, and of their Correspondential Relationship or
+<i>Analogy</i> with the Fundamental Constituents of Thought, the Ultimate
+Rational Conceptions of the Mind, that the New <span class="smcap">Universal Language</span> begins
+its developments. Through its agency we may hope to find, therefore, a
+satisfactory solution to the problem of the Origin of Speech, which
+Comparative Philology abandons at the critical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_573" id="Page_573">[Pg 573]</a></span> point, and so to be able
+to pass to the consideration of the more specific objects of our present
+inquiry.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Universology</span> establishes the fact that there is Analogy or Repetition of
+Plan throughout the various Departments of the Universe. It
+demonstrates, in other words, that the same Principles which generate,
+and the same Laws which regulate, the Phenomena of the Universe as a
+whole, fulfil the same functions in connection with the Phenomena of
+every one of its parts. The Mathematical, Psychological, or any other
+specific Domain is, therefore, an expression or embodiment of the same
+System of Principles and Laws, with reference to both Generals and
+Details, which is otherwise exhibited in Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry,
+and elsewhere universally; just as the same Architectural Plan may be
+variously employed in constructions of different size, material, color,
+modes of ornamentation, etc.; and may be modified to suit the
+requirements of each individual construction. To every Elementary Form
+of <i>Thought</i> there is, consequently, a corresponding and related Law of
+<i>Number</i>, of <i>Form</i>, of <i>Color</i>, of <i>Chemical</i> Constitution, and of
+<i>Oral Sound</i> or <i>Speech</i>. Every Basic Idea, to state it otherwise,
+pertaining to the Universe at large or to any of its Divisions, has its
+counterpart or double in every other Division. Or, to express it yet
+another way: the manifold, diverse, and unlike Appearances or Phenomena
+which the Universe presents to our understanding, are not <i>radically</i>
+and <i>essentially</i> different; but are the same Typal Ideas or Thoughts of
+God or of Nature, arrayed in various garbs, and, hence, assuming varying
+presentations. The Numerical <i>Unit</i>, the Geometrical <i>Point</i>, the
+Written <i>Dot</i>, the <i>Globule</i>, the Chemical <i>Atom</i>, the Physical
+<i>Molecule</i>, the Physiological <i>Granule</i>, the <i>Yod</i> or <i>Iota</i>, the least
+Element of Sound, are, for example, <i>Identical Types</i>, differently
+modified or clothed upon in accordance with the medium through which
+they are to be <i>phenomenally</i> presented. It is with this <i>Echo</i> or
+Repetitory Relationship, existing between all the Domains of the
+Universe, but more particularly as exhibited between the two Domains of
+<i>Ideas</i> and <i>Language</i>, that we are at present concerned.</p>
+
+<p>It is sufficiently obvious that Analogy should be sought for first, in
+the <i>Generals</i> of any department under examination, and, subsequently,
+through them, in the <i>Particulars</i>. In respect to the two Domains now
+under special consideration, this relation is between the Fundamental
+Elements of Thought, including those called by the Philosophers the
+Categories of the Understanding, and the Fundamental Elements of
+Language. In pointing out the Correspondence subsisting between the
+Elements of these two Domains, I shall use, partly by way of
+condensation, and partly by copious extracts, the Elaborate Expositions
+contained in the yet unpublished text books of Universology. And, as
+what follows relating to this subject will consist, almost wholly, of
+this material, I do not deem it essential to encumber the page with
+numerous and unnecessary quotation marks. It is advisable to caution the
+Reader, however, that as my present purpose is explanation and
+illustration only, and not formal demonstration, what is about to be
+given will be mostly in the nature of mere statement, unaccompanied by
+any other evidence of its truthfulness than may be found in the
+self-supporting reasonableness of the statements themselves.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was the basic and axiomatic proposition of Hegel's Philosophy, that
+the first discrimination of Thought and Being in any sphere is into two
+factors, a <i>Something</i> and a <i>Nothing</i>;&mdash;that which constitutes the
+<i>main</i> or <i>predominant</i> element of the Conception or Creation, and that
+which we endeavor to exclude from contemplation or activity,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_574" id="Page_574">[Pg 574]</a></span> but which,
+nevertheless, by virtue of the impossibility of <i>perfect</i> or <i>absolute</i>
+abstraction, inevitably becomes a <i>minor</i> or <i>subordinate</i> element in
+the Idea or the Act which may be engaging the attention. <i>Something</i> and
+<i>Nothing</i> are also averred to be <i>equal</i> factors in the Constitution of
+Thoughts or Things, because both are alike indispensable to the
+cognition of either; because, in other words, it is only by the presence
+of the <i>Nothing</i> as a <i>background</i> or <i>contrasting</i> element, that the
+<i>Something</i> has an independent or cognizable existence. If there were no
+blank space, for instance, there could be no Moon, relatively, or so far
+as our ability to perceive it is concerned. For the Moon is, in this
+illustration, a <i>Something</i> which is visible to us, and of which we have
+a knowledge, only by reason of the fact that it is surrounded by and
+contrasted with that which is <i>not</i> Moon, and which, in reference to the
+particular aspect under consideration is, therefore, a <i>Nothing</i>; though
+it in turn may be a <i>Something</i> or main object of attention in some
+other view or conception, where some other factor shall be the Nothing.</p>
+
+<p>That this Relationship of Antithesis and Rank existed, as between the
+Constituents of some Thoughts or Things, was known from the earliest
+times, and gave rise to the terms <i>Positive</i> and <i>Negative</i>, expressive
+of it. But Hegel was the first&mdash;of modern Philosophers, at least&mdash;to
+point out its necessarily <i>Universal</i> and fundamental character, and to
+assume it as the starting-point in the development of all Philosophy and
+Science.</p>
+
+<p>So far as concerns the investigation of the Universe from the
+<i>Philosophical</i> point of view (which is the less precise and definite
+aspect), Hegel is right in affirming that the first discrimination of
+all Thought and Being is that between <i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i>. But he
+is wrong in regarding the starting-point or first differentiation of
+<i>Science</i>, as being identical with that of <i>Philosophy</i>. Science
+considers, primarily and predominantly, the more exact and rigorous
+relations of Phenomena; and the existence of an <i>exact</i> and <i>definite</i>
+point of departure in Thought and Being, more fundamental, from the
+Scientific or rigorously precise point of view, than that of Hegel, is
+the initiatory proposition of <span class="smcap">Universology</span>.</p>
+
+<p>A full explanation of the nature of this Starting-point is not, however,
+in place here. And as the discrimination into <i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i>
+serves all the purposes of our present inquiry, a single word respecting
+the character of the Universological Point of Departure in question is
+all that it is now necessary to say concerning it.</p>
+
+<p>This Starting-point of Thought and Action has reference to the Ideas of
+<i>Oneness</i> (Primitive Unity) and <i>Twoness</i> (Plurality). These conceptions
+give rise to <i>two</i> Primordial Principles, which form the basis of the
+development of <span class="smcap">Universology</span>, and which are fundamental in every
+Department of the Universe and in the Universe as a whole, namely: <i>The
+Principle of Unism</i> (from the Latin <i>unus</i>, <i>one</i>), the <i>Spirit</i> of the
+Number <i>One</i>, the Principle of <i>Undifferentiated</i>, <i>Unanalyzed</i>,
+<i>Agglomerative</i> Unity; and <i>The Principle of</i> <span class="smcap">Duism</span> (from the Latin
+<i>duo</i>, <i>two</i>), the <i>Spirit</i> of the Number <i>Two</i>, the Principle of
+<i>Differentiation</i>, <i>Analysis</i>, <i>Separation</i>, <i>Apartness</i>, or
+<i>Plurality</i>, typically embodied in <i>Two</i>, the first division of the
+Primitive Unity, and especially representative of the Principle of
+Disunity, the essence of all division or plurality. <i>One</i>, in the Domain
+of <i>Number</i>, and <span class="smcap">Unism</span>, in the Department of Primordial Principles,
+correspond, it must be added, with <i>The Absolute</i> (the Undifferentiated
+and Unconditioned), as one of the Aspects of Being; while <i>Two</i>, in the
+Domain of <i>Number</i>, and <i>Duism</i>, among Primordial Principles, are allied
+with <i>The Relative</i> (the Differentiated and Conditioned), of which
+latter Domain <i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i> are the two Prime Factors. The
+distinction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_575" id="Page_575">[Pg 575]</a></span> between <i>One</i> and <i>Two</i>, or their analogous Aspects of
+Being, <i>Absolute</i> and <i>Relative</i>, is, therefore, prior to that between
+<i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i>, because <i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i> are two
+terms of <i>The Relative</i> (<i>Two</i>), which has first to be itself
+discriminated from <i>The Absolute</i> (<i>One</i>) before it can be sub-divided
+into these two factors.</p>
+
+<p>While the nature of this discrimination into <i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i>
+may be sufficiently intelligible to the student of Metaphysics, it may
+not be so to the Reader unaccustomed to Philosophical Speculation. For
+the purpose, therefore, of rendering it somewhat clearer, I will point
+out the manner in which it exhibits itself in respect to the
+Constitution of the External World and elsewise.</p>
+
+<p>The Totality of all material objects and substances is the <i>Positive</i>
+Material Universe. This is contained in <i>Space</i>, which is the <i>Negative</i>
+Material Universe. Compoundly the two, <i>Matter</i> and <i>Space</i>, are the
+whole Material Universe, as to the Parts or Constituent Factors of which
+it consists.</p>
+
+<p>Theoretically, and in one, and by no means an unimportant sense, the
+<i>Zero</i>-Element or <i>Nothing</i>-side of the Universe or of a given
+Department of Being, is one whole half, or an equal hemisphere of the
+Totality of Being. Thus, for example, <i>Zero</i> (0) in the usage of the
+Arabic Numbers, while it is represented in an obscure way merely by a
+single figure below the nine digits, yet stands over, in a sense,
+against all the digits, and all their possible combinations, as equal to
+them all in importance. For it is by means of this <i>Zero</i> (0) that the
+One (1) for instance, becomes 10, 100, 1000, etc.; and that all the
+<i>Positive</i> Numbers acquire their relative values, according to the
+places or positions in space which they occupy.</p>
+
+<p>In another sense, however, the Negative Ground of Being, in the Universe
+at large, or in any given Domain, quickly sinks out of view, and
+Positive Being becomes the whole of what is commonly regarded. It is in
+this sense that, ordinarily, in speaking of The Digits of Number, the
+<i>Zero</i> is left out of the count.</p>
+
+<p>In the same manner, when speaking or thinking of the Material Universe,
+while the notion of <i>Space</i> is ever present, and is, in the absolute
+sense, an equal half of the whole conception, still it is Matter, the
+total congeries of objects and substances in Space, of which we mainly
+think; the Space, as such, being understood and implied, but
+subordinated as a mere <i>negative</i> adjunct of the <i>positive</i> idea.</p>
+
+<p>In strictness, <i>Matter</i> and <i>Space</i> are so mutually dependent on each
+other, that either without the other is an impossible conception. The
+notion of Space permeates that of Matter; passing through it, so to
+speak, as well as surrounding it; so that it needs no proof that Matter
+cannot be conceived of as existing without Space. But, on the other
+hand, Space is only the negation of Matter; the shadow, as it were, cast
+by Matter; and, so, dependent on Matter for the very origin of the idea
+in the mind.</p>
+
+<p>If <i>Space</i>, therefore, be the analogue of <i>Nothing</i>; <i>Matter</i>, wholly
+apart from Space, is only a <i>theoretical</i> Something, really and actually
+as much a Nothing as Space itself, when abstractly considered in its
+equally impossible separation from Matter. But Matter, completely
+separated from Space, is the exact external analogue of the <i>Something</i>
+opposed to the <i>Nothing</i> of abstract Metaphysical Thinking. Here, then,
+is a lucid exposition, by virtue of these analogies, of the famous
+Metaphysical Axiom of Hegel, which, at its announcement, threw all
+Europe into amazement:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>Something</i> = (<i>equal to</i>) <i>Nothing</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>It is the logic of this statement that all <i>Reality</i> or Relative Being
+is a product of two factors, each of which is a <i>Nothing</i>. The
+strangeness of this prop<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_576" id="Page_576">[Pg 576]</a></span>osition will disappear when it is recognized
+that these two Nothings are mere aspects or sides of presentation of the
+Product, which is itself the only Reality. In respect to the <i>Real
+Being</i>, those two sides are <i>Nothings</i>. But, as appearances or ideal
+views of the Reality under the process of analytical abstraction in the
+mind, they are so far <i>Somethings</i> as to receive names and to be treated
+of and considered as <i>if</i> they were <i>Realities</i>. <i>Reality</i> in the
+<i>Absolute</i> aspect, the aspect of <i>Undifferentiated Unity</i>, (Unismal),
+contains these two factors interblended and undiscriminated. In the
+<i>Relative</i> aspect, that of <i>Duality</i>, (Duismal), it is the compound of
+these two factors separated and distinguished. Finally, in the
+<i>Integral</i> aspect of <i>Compound Unity</i> (Trinismal), it consists of the
+<i>Unismal</i> and the <i>Duismal</i> aspects contrasted&mdash;the only <i>real</i> state,
+or possible condition of actual existence. <i>And this is the Type of all
+Reality or Real Existence in every department of Being in the Universe.</i></p>
+
+<p>But practically and ordinarily, these strictly analytical views of the
+question of existence are abandoned. Reality, compounded, as we have
+seen that it is when viewed in this way, of a Positive and a Negative
+Factor, is assumed as itself a Simple Element and set over against the
+grand residuum of Negation in the Universe of Being. This is what Kant,
+less analytical than Hegel, has done, when, in distributing the
+Categories of Thought, he has contrasted <span class="smcap">Reality</span> with <span class="smcap">Negation</span>.</p>
+
+<p>This is, as if, in respect to the External Material World, we were to
+divide Matter&mdash;the Planets, for example, first assigning to them the
+portions of Space which they bodily and respectively fill as if it were
+a part of themselves&mdash;from the remaining ocean or grand residuum of
+Space which surrounds them and in which they float. This residuum of
+Space would then be spoken of as <i>Space</i>, and the Planetary Bodies,
+<i>along with and including the spaces which they fill</i>, would be spoken
+of as <i>Matter</i>. This is a kind of division, less analytical, but more
+convenient, obvious, and practical, than the other which would attempt
+to separate the whole of Space from the Matter within Space. It is in
+this more practical manner that we <i>ordinarily</i> think of the division of
+the Heavens into the Domains of <i>Matter</i> and <i>Space</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Between <i>Reality</i>, then, including a subordinate portion of Space&mdash;the
+content and volume of the Planet&mdash;and the grand ocean of Space, outlying
+and surrounding the Planet, there is <i>Limitation</i>, the outline of the
+Planet, the <i>Limit</i> or dividing surface between the space within it and
+the space without.</p>
+
+<p>It is this Congeries of the Aspects of Being which Kant denominates
+<span class="smcap">Quality</span>, as a name of a Group of the Categories of the Understanding;
+and which he divides into</p>
+
+<ul><li>1. <span class="smcap">Reality</span>.</li>
+<li>2. <span class="smcap">Negation</span>.</li>
+<li>3. <span class="smcap">Limitation</span>.</li></ul>
+
+
+
+<p>He then treats <span class="smcap">Reality</span> as synonymous with the <i>Affirmative</i> (Positive),
+and <span class="smcap">Negation</span> as synonymous with the <i>Negative</i>; although, as we have
+seen, this Affirmative is not strictly equivalent to the <i>Something</i> of
+Hegel, nor this Negative to his <i>Nothing</i>. For <i>Reality</i> we may, in a
+general sense, put <i>Substance</i>, and for <i>Limitation</i> we may put <i>Form</i>,
+Omitting Negation which repeats the <i>Nothing</i>, as Reality repeats the
+<i>Something</i>, it may now be said that the next Grand Division of the
+Elements of Universal Being (after that into Something and Nothing) is
+into</p>
+
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="1" width="45%" cellspacing="0" summary="Something and Nothing">
+<tr><td align='left'>1. <span class="smcap">Substance</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align='left'>= 3. <span class="smcap">Existence</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>2. <span class="smcap">Form</span>.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>That is to say: <i>The Relative</i> (The Domain of Cognizable Being) is first
+made known to us through the <i>differentiation</i> and <i>discrimination</i> of
+the two Factors <i>Something</i> and <i>Nothing</i> which lie <i>undifferentiated</i>
+and <i>indistinguishable</i> in <i>The Absolute</i> (The Primitive Ground of
+Being). <i>The Relative</i> then subdivides into 1. <i>Substance</i> (Reality),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_577" id="Page_577">[Pg 577]</a></span>
+and, 2. <i>Form</i> (Limitation), which reunite to constitute that actualized
+Being which we denominate <i>Existence</i>. Or, tabulated, thus:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">THE ABSOLUTE (The Primitive Ground of Being</span>)<br />
+<span class="smcap">CONTAINS UNDIFFERENTIATED AND INDISTINGUISHABLE THE TWO FACTORS</span><br />
+SOMETHING and <span class="smcap">NOTHING WHICH CONSTITUTE THE FIRST TERMS</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">AND DISCRIMINATIONS OF</span><br />
+THE RELATIVE (<span class="smcap">The Domain Of Cognizable Being</span>);<br />
+<span class="smcap">WHICH ITSELF DIVIDES INTO</span><br />
+SUBSTANCE (<span class="smcap">Reality</span>) and <span class="smcap">FORM (Limitation</span>),<br />
+<span class="smcap">THE PRIME CONSTITUENTS OF EXISTENCE.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>To comprehend the vast importance of these discriminations, it is
+necessary to understand that precisely those Principles of Distribution
+which are applicable to the Universe at large are found to be applicable
+to every minor sphere or domain of the Universe; in the same manner as
+the same Geometrical Laws which prevail in the largest circle prevail
+equally in the smallest. It is the prevalence of <i>Identical Principles</i>
+in <i>diverse spheres</i> which is the source of that Universal Analogy
+throughout <i>all</i> spheres that lies at the basis of <span class="smcap">Universology</span>, and
+gives the possibility of such a Science. The nature of this Analogy, as
+well as the value of the discriminations themselves, will be more
+clearly seen by glancing at corresponding discriminations in other
+spheres.</p>
+
+<p>In the Constitution of the External World, <i>Something</i> is represented,
+as we have seen, by the solid and tangible substance which we call
+<i>Matter</i>, and <i>Nothing</i> by the Expanse of Space.</p>
+
+<p>In the Science of Acoustics, <i>Sound</i>, the pure <i>Phonos</i>, is the
+<i>Something</i>, the <i>Reality</i>, as it is denominated by Kant, the <i>Positive</i>
+Factor of Speech. <i>Silence</i> is the relative <i>Nothing</i>, the Negation, so
+called by Kant, the <i>Negative</i> Factor of Speech. The Silences, or
+Intervals of Rest which intervene between Sounds (and also between
+Syllables, Words, Sentences, and still larger divisions of Speech), are
+only so many successive reappearances of this <i>negative</i> element.
+Silence, the Nothing of Sound, is, in fact, in the most radical aspect
+of the subject, one entire half or hemisphere or equal Factor of the
+whole of Speech or Music. Josiah Warren, the author of a work entitled
+'Music as an Exact Science,' is the only writer I have noticed who has
+had the discrimination <i>distinctively</i> to recognize Silence as one of
+the Elements of the Musical Structure.</p>
+
+<p><i>Impliedly</i> it is, however, always so recognized. The Silences
+intervening between tones <i>tunewise</i>, or in respect to altitude, are, in
+Musical Nomenclature, denominated <i>Intervals</i>. <i>Timewise</i> Silences, or
+those which intervene between Tones rhythmically considered, are called
+<i>Rests</i>. The Intervals of Silence between Syllables and Words, in Oral
+Speech, are represented in the printed book by what the Printer calls
+<i>Spaces</i>, which are <i>blank</i> or <i>negative</i> Types interposed between the
+positive Types expressive of Sounds. This term <i>Space</i> or <i>Spaces</i>
+carries us to the analogous Total Space or Blank Space and intervening
+reaches of Space between the Planets, Orbs or Material Worlds, the
+former the corresponding <i>Nothing</i> of the total Material Universe of
+which these worlds are the <i>Something</i>; as exhibited in the
+demonstrations of <span class="smcap">Universology</span>.</p>
+
+<p>In the Domain of Optics, covering the Phenomena of Light, Shade and
+Color, <i>Light</i> is the <i>Positive</i> Factor or <i>Something</i>, and <i>Darkness</i>
+the <i>Negative</i> Factor or <i>Nothing</i>. <i>Light</i> is, therefore, the analogue
+of <i>Sound</i>, and <i>Darkness</i> the analogue of <i>Silence</i>. That is to say,
+each of these two, Silence and Darkness, denote the absence, the lack,
+the want or the negation of the opposite and <i>Positive</i> Element or
+Factor.</p>
+
+<p>So in Thermotics, the Science of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_578" id="Page_578">[Pg 578]</a></span> Heat, <i>Heat</i> itself is the
+<i>Positismus</i> or <i>Something</i> of the Domain; and <i>Cold</i> the <i>Negatismus</i>
+or Correlative <i>Nothing</i>. <i>Heat</i> is, consequently, the analogue of
+<i>Sound</i> and <i>Light</i>; while <i>Cold</i> is the analogue of <i>Silence</i> and
+<i>Darkness</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In respect to the Domain of Mind, <i>Positive Mental Experience</i>
+(Feelings, Thoughts, and Volitions, including self-consciousness) are
+the <i>Positive</i> Factor, the <i>Something</i> of Mentality. <i>Inexperience</i>, the
+lack of mental exercitation, hence <i>Ignorance</i>, is the <i>Negative</i>
+Factor, or <i>Nothing</i>. The Correspondential Relationship or Analogy
+existing between this Domain of the Universe and others already
+mentioned is testified to in a remarkable manner by our use of Language.
+We denominate the want of Feeling <i>Cold</i> or <i>Frigidity</i>&mdash;in respect to
+the Mind or the individual character. The absence of Thought and
+Knowledge, or, in other words, Intellectual Barrenness, is called
+<i>Darkness</i> or <i>Obscurity</i> of the Mind. While the lack of Will or Purpose
+in the Mind is said to be the absence of <i>Tension</i> or <i>Strain</i> (the
+great Musical term); and the Stillness or quiet hence resulting may be
+appropriately designated as the <i>Silence</i> of the Mind; Musical Silences
+being, as pointed out above, technically termed Rests.</p>
+
+<p>With this superficial exhibition of the most radical aspect of the <i>Echo
+of Idea</i> or <i>Repetition of Type</i> which subsists between all the
+departments of the Universe, I pass to the more specific consideration
+of this Analogy as concerning the Domain of Thought and the Domain of
+Language.</p>
+
+<p>Setting aside from our present consideration <i>Silence</i>, the <i>Negative</i>
+factor or <i>Negatismus</i> of Language, and fixing our attention upon
+<i>Sound</i>, the Positive factor or <i>Positismus</i> of Language, we discover it
+to be composed of two constituents, <i>Vowels</i> and <i>Consonants</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Vowel</i> is the <i>Substance</i>, the Reality of Language, and the
+<i>Consonant</i> is the <i>Form</i>, the Limitation.</p>
+
+<p>By <i>Vowel</i> sound is meant the free or unobstructed, and as such
+unlimited flow of the vocalized or sounding breath. Vowels are defined
+in the simplest way as those sounds which are uttered with the month
+open; as <i>a</i> (ah) in F<i>a</i>ther, <i>o</i> in r<i>o</i>ll, etc.</p>
+
+<p>Consonants are, on the contrary, those sounds which are produced by the
+crack of commencing or by obstructing, breaking, or cutting off the
+sounding breath, by completely or partially closing the organs of
+speech; as, for instance, by closing the lips, as when we pronounce
+<i>p</i>ie, <i>b</i>y, <i>m</i>y, etc.; or by pressing the point of the tongue against
+the gums and teeth, as when we say t<i>ie</i>, d<i>ie</i>, etc.; or by lifting the
+body of the tongue against the hard palate or roof of the mouth, as when
+we give the <i>k</i> or hard <i>g</i> sound, as in rac<i>k</i>, ra<i>g</i>, or in any other
+similar way.</p>
+
+<p>Consonants are, therefore, the breaks or <i>limitations</i> upon the
+otherwise unbroken and continuous vocality, voice, or vocalized breath.
+In other words, as already said, <i>Vowel</i>-Sound is the Elemental
+<i>Substance</i>, and <i>Consonant</i>-Sound the Elemental <i>Form</i> of Language, or
+Speech. (By Vowels and Consonants are here meant, the Reader should
+closely observe, Vowel-<i>Sounds</i> and Consonant-<i>Sounds</i>, as produced by
+the <i>Organs</i> of <i>Speech</i>, and as they address themselves to the <i>Ear</i>,
+distinguished and wholly apart from the <i>letters</i> or combinations of
+letters by which they are diversely represented to the <i>Eye</i> in
+different languages.)</p>
+
+<p>By a valid but somewhat remote analogy, the <i>Vowel</i>-Sounds of Language
+may be regarded collectively as the <i>Flesh</i>, and the <i>Consonant</i>-Sounds
+as the <i>Bone</i> or <i>Skeleton</i> of the Lingual Structure. Flesh is an
+<i>Analogue</i> or Correspondential Equivalent of Substance. Bone or
+Skeleton, which gives <i>outline</i> or <i>shape</i> to the otherwise soft,
+collapsing, and lumpy flesh-mass of the Human or Animal Body, is an
+<i>Analogue</i> of Correspondential Equivalent of Limitation or Form; as the
+framework of a house is the shaping or form-giving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_579" id="Page_579">[Pg 579]</a></span> factor or agent of
+the entire structure.</p>
+
+<p><i>Vowel</i>-Sounds are soft, fluent, changeful, and evanescent. One passes
+easily into another by slight deviations of pronunciation, resulting
+from trivial differences in National and Individual condition and
+culture; like the Flesh of the animal, which readily decays from the
+Bony Skeleton, while the last remains preserved for ages as a fossil.
+The Vowel-Sounds so readily lose their identity, that they are of slight
+importance to the Etymologist or Comparative Philologist, who is, in
+fact, dealing in the <i>Paleontology</i> of Language.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Consonants</i> are, on the contrary, the <i>Fossils</i> of Speech; bony and
+permanent representatives of Framework, of <i>Limitation</i>, of Form.
+Consonant-Sounds are also sometimes denominated <i>Articulations</i>. This
+word means <i>joinings</i> or <i>jointings</i>. It is from the Latin <i>articulus</i>,
+a <span class="smcap">Joint</span>, and is instinctually applied to the Consonant-Sounds in
+accordance with their analogy with the <i>Skeleton</i> of the Human or Animal
+System.</p>
+
+<p>By an easy and habitual slide in the meaning of Words, a term like
+<i>Joint</i> is sometimes used to denote the <i>break</i> or <i>opening</i> between
+parts, and sometimes to denote one of the parts intervening between such
+breaks; as when we speak of a <i>joint</i> of meat, meaning thereby what a
+Botanist would signify by the term <i>Internode</i>, the stretch or reach or
+shaft of bone extending from one joint (break) to another, with the meat
+attached to it.</p>
+
+<p>Consonants have, in like manner, a double aspect as Articulations or
+<i>Joints</i>. In a rigorous and abstract sense, the Consonant has no sound
+of its own. It is simply a break or interruption of Sound.
+Etymologically, it is from the Latin <i>con</i>, <span class="smcap">WITH</span>, and <i>sonans</i>,
+<span class="smcap">SOUNDING</span>; as if it were a mere accessory to a (vowel) Sound; the Vowels
+being, in that sense, the only sounds. In this sense, the Consonants are
+analogous with the mere cracks or opening <i>joints</i>, which intervene
+between the bones of the Skeleton. In other words, they are no sounds,
+but mere nothings; the analogy, in that case, of <i>Abstract</i> Limitation.</p>
+
+<p>Practically, on the contrary, the Consonant takes to itself such a
+portion of the vocalized or sounding breath which it serves primarily to
+limit, that it becomes not merely a sound ranking with the Vowel; but
+the more prominent and abiding sound of the two. It is in this latter
+sense, that it is the Analogue of the Bone.</p>
+
+<p>In Phonography, as in Hebrew and some other Languages, the letters
+representing the Consonant-Sounds only are written or printed; the
+Vowel-Sounds being either represented by mere points added to the
+Consonant characters, or left wholly unrepresented, to be supplied by
+the intelligence of the Reader. The written words so constructed,
+represent the real words with about the degree of accuracy with which a
+skeleton represents the living man; so that the meaning can be readily
+gathered by the practised reader, by the aid of the context. In
+Phonography, the Consonant-Sounds, which are simple straight or curved
+lines, are joined together at their ends, forming an outline shape,
+somewhat like a single script (written) letter of our ordinary writing.
+These outline words are then instinctually and technically called
+<i>Skeleton-words</i>, from the natural perception of a genuine Scientific
+Analogy.</p>
+
+<p>Consonants constitute, then, what may be denominated the <i>Limitismus</i>
+(Limiting Domain) of Language. The Limit is primarily represented by the
+Line (a line, any line); then by the Line embodying Substance as <i>seam</i>,
+<i>ridge</i>, <i>bar</i>, <i>beam</i>, <i>shaft</i>, <i>or bone</i>; and, finally, by a System of
+Lines, Shafts or Bones which may then be jointed or limited in turn
+among themselves, forming a concatenation of Lines, Bars or Shafts, the
+framework of a machine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_580" id="Page_580">[Pg 580]</a></span> or house or other edifice, or the ideal columnar
+and orbital structure of the Universe itself. All these conceptions or
+creations belong to the practical Limitismus, the Form Aspect or
+Framework of Being in Universals and in Particulars in every Sphere and
+Department of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Limitismus</i> of Being so defined then stands over against or
+contrasted with the <i>Substancismus</i> (Substance-Domain) of Being which
+embraces the Substances, Materials or Stuffs of creation of whatsoever
+name that infill the interstices of the Framework or are laid upon it,
+and constitute the richness and fulness and plumpness of the Structure,
+as the Flesh does of the Body.</p>
+
+<p>The wholeness or <i>Integrality</i> of the structure then consists of the
+composity of these Two (Limitismus and Substancismus), as the wholeness
+of the Body consists of the Flesh and the Bone. The Consonants being the
+Limitismus, and the Vowels the Substancismus of Language; the Two united
+and coordinated comprise the Trinismal Integrality or Integralismus of
+Speech.</p>
+
+<p>The Vowels denote, then, <i>Reality</i>, as distinguished from <i>Limitation</i>,
+or, what is nearly the same thing, <i>Substance</i>, as distinguished from
+<i>Form</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There are in all <i>Seven</i> (7); or if we include one somewhat more obscure
+than the rest, a kind of semi-tone, there are <i>Eight</i> (8) full-toned,
+perfectly distinct and primary Vowel-Sounds, which constitute the
+Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Alphabet. Their number and
+nature is governed by the Mechanical Law of their organic production in
+the mouth. And the number can only be increased by interposing minor
+shades of sound, as we produce minor shades of color by blending the
+Seven (7) Prismatic Colors. The new Sound will then belong, in
+predominance and as a mere variety, to one of these Seven (7) Primary
+Sounds.</p>
+
+<p>These Seven (7) Sounds constitute the Leading Vowel-System of all
+Languages; with certain irregularities of omission in the Vowel-System
+of some Languages.</p>
+
+<p>By the addition of Five (5) equally leading <i>Diphthongs</i> (or Double
+Vowels) the number of leading Vowel representations is carried up to
+Twelve (12) or Thirteen (13)&mdash;which may then be regarded as the
+Completed Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Lingual Alphabet.</p>
+
+<p><i>There are, in like manner, Seven (7)&mdash;or Eight (8)&mdash;Leading Realities
+of the Universe</i>, <span class="smcap">and of every Minor Sphere or Domain of Being in the
+Universe</span>, <i>which correspond with, echo or repeat, and are therefore the
+Scientific Analogues of, these Seven (7) Leading Vowel-Sounds, as they
+occur among the Elements of Speech</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In representing the Vowel-Sounds, it is better, for numerous reasons, to
+use the letters with their general <i>European</i> Values, than it is to
+conform to their altered or corrupted <i>English</i> Values. For instance,
+the Vowel <span class="smcap">I</span> (i) is pronounced in nearly every language of Europe, and in
+all those languages which the Missionaries have reduced to writing, as
+we pronounce <i>e</i> or <i>ee</i>, or as <i>i</i> in mach<i>i</i>ne, or p<i>i</i>que; <span class="smcap">E</span> (e) is
+pronounced as we enunciate <i>a</i> in paper; and <span class="smcap">A</span> is reserved for the full
+Italian sound of <i>a</i> (<i>ah</i>), as in father; <i>U</i> is pronounced like <i>oo</i>,
+as in German, Spanish, Italian and many other languages.</p>
+
+<p>The Seven (7) Vowels in question are then as follows:</p>
+
+<ul><li>1. <span class="smcap">I</span>, i (<i>ee</i> in f<i>ee</i>l).</li>
+<li>2. <span class="smcap">E</span>, e (<i>a</i> in m<i>a</i>te).</li>
+<li>3. <span class="smcap">A</span>, a (<i>a</i> in f<i>a</i>-ther).</li>
+<li>4. <i>o</i>, <i>o</i> (<i>aw</i> in <i>aw</i>ful).</li>
+<li>5. <i>u</i>, <i>u</i> (<i>u</i> in c<i>u</i>rd).</li>
+<li>6. <span class="smcap">o</span>, o (<i>o</i> in n<i>o</i>-ble).</li>
+<li>7. <span class="smcap">u</span>, u (<i>oo</i> in f<i>oo</i>l).</li></ul>
+
+
+
+<p>These sounds are produced in the middle, at the back, and at the front
+of the mouth respectively. These localities, and something of the nature
+of the sounds themselves, as <i>slender</i> or <i>full</i>, will be plainly
+illustrated by the annexed figure:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_581" id="Page_581">[Pg 581]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/587.jpg" width="400" height="147" alt="" title="sounds are produced in the middle, at the back, and at the front of the mouth" />
+</div>
+
+<p>The following description of the organic formation or production of
+these sounds now becomes important.</p>
+
+<p>The Vowel-Sound <span class="smcap">I</span> (ee) is the most slender and condensed of the
+Vowel-Scale. It is produced at the middle or central part of the mouth,
+by forcing a slight, closely-squeezed current of Sounding Breath,
+through a small, smooth channel or opening made by forming <i>a gutter or
+scoop of the flattened point of the tongue</i>; while, at the same time,
+the tongue is applied at the edges to the teeth and gums. This sound
+has, therefore, an actual <i>form</i> resembling that of a thread or line; or
+still better, like that of a wire drawn through one of the iron openings
+by means of which wire is manufactured. It resembles also a slight,
+smooth, roundish stream of fluid escaping through a tube or trough.</p>
+
+<p>This sound has relation, therefore, in the first place, to <i>Centrality</i>
+or <span class="smcap">Centre</span>; and then to <span class="smcap">Length</span> (or Line), which is the First Dimension of
+Extension. The <span class="smcap">I</span>-sound continued or prolonged gives the idea of Length.
+But broken into Least Units of the same quality of Sound, we have
+individualized Vowel-Sounds of this quality, each one of which is a new
+<i>Centre</i>; like the successive <i>Points</i> of which a <i>Line</i> is composed.</p>
+
+<p>An individual sound, <span class="smcap">I</span>, has relation, therefore, to <i>Centre</i> and to
+<i>Point</i> generally. As such it stands representatively for the <i>Soul</i> or
+<i>Identity</i> or <i>Central Individuality of Being</i>&mdash;for that which gives to
+anything its distinctive character, as existing in the <i>Point</i> or the
+<i>Unit</i>, or the <i>Atom</i>, or in any Individual Object or Thing from the
+Atom up to a World and to the Universe as a whole. <i>Identity</i> is,
+perhaps, the best single term furnished by our Language to signify this
+basic idea. <i>Individuality</i> approximates the meaning. It is the
+<i>pivotal</i> notion of Being itself, and has relation, therefore, to
+Ontology, the Science of Abstract Being. <i>Essence</i> and <i>Essential Being</i>
+are terms which may also be used in defining it. The Reader should
+understand, however, that with reference to this Sound, as to those to
+be hereafter considered, there is no term or terms in any Language which
+will indicate their meaning <i>exactly</i>. The analysis of Ideas upon which
+<span class="smcap">Universology</span> is based is more fundamental than any which has preceded
+it. Its Primary Conceptions are, therefore, broader and more inclusive
+than any former ones which existing terms are employed to denote. In
+explaining the meaning of these First Elements of Sound, then, as
+related to the First Elements of Thought, all that is now attempted is
+to convey as clear a notion of this meaning as is possible with our
+present terminology, without any expectation that the <i>precise</i> meaning
+intended will be at once or entirely apprehended.</p>
+
+<p>The sound <span class="smcap">E</span> (<i>a</i> in m<i>a</i>te) is likewise a slender, abstract-like,
+middle-mouth sound; but differs from <span class="smcap">I</span> in the fact that it is produced
+by <i>flattening</i> the opening for the Sounding Breath instead of retaining
+it in a roundish position. The angles of the mouth are drawn asunder, as
+if pointing outward to the sides of the head, and the sound is, as it
+were, <i>elongated in the crosswise direction</i>, as if a stick or a quill
+were held in the teeth, the extremities extending outward to the sides.
+A line, in this direction, is the measurer of <span class="smcap">Breadth</span>, which is the
+Second Dimension of Extension, crossing the Length-line represented by <span class="smcap">I</span>
+at right angles. <i>Side-wise-ness</i> is synonymous with <span class="smcap">Relation</span>, as one of
+the Sub-divisions of Reality, or, in other words, of the Realities of
+Being. <i>Re-lation</i> is, etymologically, from the Latin <i>re</i>, <span class="smcap">BACK</span> or
+<span class="smcap">REFLECTED</span>, and <i>latus</i>, <span class="smcap">SIDE</span>; that which mutually and reciprocally
+re-sides the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_582" id="Page_582">[Pg 582]</a></span> <i>Centre</i>, or furnishes it with sides or <i>wings</i>. The
+Vowel-Sound <span class="smcap">E</span> (<i>a</i>, in m<i>a</i>te) is, therefore, the Analogue or
+Corresponding Representative or Equivalent in the Domain of Sound of
+that <i>Fundamental Conception</i> which, in respect to Thought, is
+denominated <i>Relation</i>, in respect to Position <i>Collaterality</i> or
+<i>Sideness</i>, and in respect to Dimension <i>Breadth</i> or <i>Width</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The Sound <span class="smcap">A</span> (<i>a</i> in f<i>a</i>ther) is made farther back in the mouth, with
+the mouth stretched quite open, and is the richest and most harmonious
+of the Vowel Sounds&mdash;the Queen of the Vowels. It is the Italian A, the
+sound most allied with Music and Euphony, and yet a sound which is
+greatly lacking in the English Language.</p>
+
+<p>The English Reader must guard himself from confounding the Vowel-Sound
+of which we are here speaking, with the Consonant <span class="smcap">R</span>, the alphabetical
+name of which is by a lax habit of pronunciation made to be nearly
+identical with this Vowel-Sound; while for this beautiful and brilliant
+and leading Vowel in the Alphabet of Nature we have no distinct letter
+in English, and reckon it merely as one of the values or powers of the
+Letter A, to which we ordinarily give the value of <span class="smcap">E</span> (<i>a</i> in m<i>a</i>te,
+<i>ai</i> in p<i>ai</i>n).</p>
+
+<p>This Vowel <span class="smcap">A</span> (<i>ah</i>, <i>a</i> in f<i>a</i>ther) is made with the mouth so open that
+the form of its production suggests the insertion of a stick or other
+elongated object in a perpendicular direction to retain the jaws in
+their position; a practice said sometimes to be resorted to by the
+Italian Music Teacher, in order to correct the bad habit of talking
+through the teeth, common among his English pupils.</p>
+
+<p>This height and depth involved in the Sound of the Vowel <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah) relates
+it to <span class="smcap">Thickness</span>, the Third Dimension of Extension; as the Sound <span class="smcap">I</span> is
+related to <i>Length</i>, the First of these Dimensions, and the Sound <span class="smcap">E</span> to
+<i>Breadth</i>, the Second of them.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thickness</i> is again related to <i>richness</i> and <i>sweetness</i>, to <i>fulness</i>
+and <i>fatness</i>, as of the good condition of an Animal in flesh, or of
+rich and productive soils. And these ideas are again related to <i>wealth</i>
+or to <i>riches</i> generally; and, hence, again to <span class="smcap">Substance</span>. The objects of
+wealth are called <i>goods</i>, and a wealthy man is said to be a '<i>man of
+substance</i>.' <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah) is the representative or pivotal Vowel; that one
+which embodies most completely the <i>Vowel Idea</i>. Its inherent meaning is
+especially, therefore, that of <span class="smcap">Substance</span> or <span class="smcap">Reality</span>, which, is, in a
+more general way, as we have seen, the meaning of all the Vowels. The
+most real, tangible, sensible substance from an ordinary point of view
+being. Matter, this Vowel-Sound allies itself also with <i>Matter</i> or
+<i>Materiality</i> as contrasted with <i>Spiritual</i> Substance.</p>
+
+<p>There is, it must now be observed, a flattened variety of <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah), which
+will here be represented by the same letter italicized, thus, <span class="smcap"><i>A</i></span>, <i>a</i>,
+which is the so-called flat sound of <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah) as when heard prolonged in
+m<i>a</i>re, pe<i>a</i>r, etc., or when stopped, in m<i>a</i>n, m<i>a</i>t, etc. This sound
+is intermediate in position between <span class="smcap">E</span> and <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah). That is to say, it is
+produced farther back in the mouth and with the mouth somewhat more open
+than when we say <span class="smcap">E</span>, and not so far back as when we say <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah); and with
+the mouth less open. As contrasted with the <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah), it is a thin, flat,
+and slightly unsatisfactory and disagreeable sound, analogically related
+to the natural semitone <i>fa</i> of the Diatonic Scale of Musical Tones.
+This Sound signifies accordingly, <span class="smcap">Thinness</span>, <span class="smcap">Attenuated Matter</span>, the Ghost
+or Spirit of Nature, related to Odic Force, Magnetisms, Electricity,
+etc.; still not, however, Spirit in the sense of Mind, or in the
+Religio-Spiritual sense of the word. This is the exceptional or bastard
+Vowel-Sound which has but an imperfect or half claim to be inserted in
+the Leading Vowel Scale. When inserted, its natural position is between
+the E and the <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah), although for certain reasons it sometimes changes
+position<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_583" id="Page_583">[Pg 583]</a></span> with the <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah), following instead of preceding it.</p>
+
+<p>The next two Vowel-Sounds, <i>o</i> (<i>aw</i> in <i>aw</i>ful), and <i>u</i> (<i>u</i> in
+c<i>u</i>rd), are somewhat like the <i>a</i> (<i>a</i> in m<i>a</i>re), exceptional or
+bastard Sounds. They are unheard in many Languages, and unrecognized as
+distinct sounds in many Languages where they are, in fact, heard. Very
+few Languages have distinct Letter-Signs for them. In using the Roman
+Alphabet, I am compelled to adopt a contrivance to represent them; which
+is, as in the case of the <i>a</i>, to print them in italic types, for which,
+when the remainder of the word is in italic, small capitals are
+substituted, thus: <i>O</i>ful (awful); <i>U</i>rgent; or, in case the whole word
+is intended to be italicized, for the sake of emphasis, <span class="smcap">O</span><i>ful</i>,
+<span class="smcap">U</span><i>rgent</i>. In script or handwriting, the italic Letter is marked by
+underscoring a single line, and the small capital by underscoring two
+lines.</p>
+
+<p><i>O</i> (aw) is the fullest of the Vowel-Sounds. It is made with the mouth
+still farther open than when we say <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah), and somewhat farther back;
+or, rather, with the cavity enlarged in all directions, and especially
+deepened. The mouth is stretched in all ways to its utmost capacity,
+giving a hollow, vacant effect to the voice, instead of the rich, mellow
+and substantial sound of the <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah). The Sound so produced is,
+nevertheless, on the one hand, a broader quality of the <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah), and
+there is a strong tendency on the part of the <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah) to degenerate into
+it, as when the uneducated German, says <i>Yaw</i> for <i>Ja</i> (yah). On the
+other hand, this sound has something of the quality of <span class="smcap">O</span>. It is,
+therefore, intermediate in quality between <span class="smcap">A</span> (ah) and <span class="smcap">O</span>. In respect to
+meaning, it is the Type, Analogue, Equivalent, or Representative of
+Volume or <span class="smcap">Space</span>, whether filled or unfilled by Substance. That is to
+say, it is the Analogue of Space, not in the sense in which we formerly
+regarded Space as the <i>negation</i> of Matter; but in the sense of
+<i>Infinite Dimensionality</i>, or of Dimensionality in all directions, as a
+vague generalization from the three special dimensions <i>Length</i>,
+<i>Breadth</i>, and <i>Thickness</i>. It is, therefore, round or ball-like, and
+huge, and, in respect to the nature of the tone, vague and vacant.</p>
+
+<p>Space <i>as mere nothing</i> has no Letter-Sign in the Alphabet; but is
+represented by the blank types or spaces used by the printer to separate
+his syllables and words, as shown heretofore. Space <i>as a Department of
+Reality</i>, as one of the <i>Realities</i> of the Universe, a bastard or
+semi-Reality it is true, but nevertheless, belonging to that Domain, is
+denoted by the Vowel-Sound <i>o</i> (aw).</p>
+
+<p>The Sound <i>u</i> (uh, <i>u</i> in c<i>u</i>rd), the fifth of the Scale, is called
+among Phoneticians, the <i>Natural</i> Vowel. It is the simple, unmodulated
+or unformed vocal breath permitted to flow forth from the throat or
+larynx with no effort to produce any specific sound. It is the mere
+grunt, a little prolonged; the unwrought material out of which the other
+and more perfect Vowel Sounds are made by modulation, or, in other
+words, by the shapings and strains put upon the machinery of utterance.
+The Hebrew <i>scheva</i>, the French <i>eu</i>, and <i>e</i> mute, are varieties of
+this easily-flowing, unmodulated, unstable, unsatisfactory sound. Like
+the <i>o</i> (aw), this sound <i>u</i> (uh) has a vacant, unfinished, and
+inorganic character as a sound, while yet, from its great fluency, its
+frequent occurrence tends, more than that of any other sound, to give to
+Language that conversational fluency, rapidity and ease which are
+especially characteristic of the French Tongue. From this same easy
+laxity of its nature all the other Vowel Sounds tend, in English
+particularly, when they are not accented, to fall back into this Natural
+Vowel; as in the following instances: Rom<i>a</i>n, brok<i>e</i>n, m<i>i</i>rth,
+mart<i>y</i>r, Bost<i>o</i>n, c<i>u</i>rd, etc.; words which we pronounce nearly
+Rom<i>u</i>n, brok<i>u</i>n, m<i>u</i>rth, mart<i>u</i>r, Bost<i>u</i>n, c<i>u</i>rd, etc.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_584" id="Page_584">[Pg 584]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This Sound, as to inherent meaning, is, by its alliance with the idea of
+flux, flow and continuity, the Type, Analogue, Equivalent or
+Representative in the Domain of Oral Sound of that <i>Fundamental
+Conception</i> which, in respect to Idea, we denominate <span class="smcap">Time</span>; and of
+Stream-like or <i>Currental</i> Being of all kinds.</p>
+
+<p><i>Space</i>, denoted by <i>o</i> (aw), has relation to the Air as an atmosphere,
+and to the Ocean of Ether in filling the Great Spheral Dome of Empyrean
+or Firmament. The Vowel-Sound <i>u</i> (uh) has a similar relation to
+Fluidity or Liquidity, and, hence, to Water as a typical fluid, to the
+Ocean Flux or Tide, to the Flowing Stream, etc. This Time-like idea is
+uni-dimensional or elongate in a <i>general</i> or <i>fluctuating</i> sense; not
+<i>specifically</i> like <span class="smcap">I</span>. It is in view of this characteristic, that it is
+broadly and primarily contrasted with the Spacic significance of <i>o</i>
+(aw), which is omnidimensional.</p>
+
+<p>The two remaining Vowel-Sounds, the <span class="smcap">O</span> and <span class="smcap">U</span> (oo), repeat the <i>o</i> (aw)
+and <i>u</i> (uh), in a sense, but in a new and more refined stage or degree
+of development. The sound <span class="smcap">O</span> is made at the front mouth&mdash;the locality the
+most openly in sight of any at which Sound is produced&mdash;by rounding the
+lips into an irregularly-circular, face-like, or disk-like presentation.
+The <span class="smcap">O</span> Sound so produced denotes Presence, as of an object by virtue of
+its reflection of Light; and, hence, <span class="smcap">Light</span>, <i>Clearness</i>, <i>Purity</i>,
+<i>Reflection</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The <span class="smcap">U</span> (<i>oo</i> in f<i>oo</i>l) is an obscured or impure pronunciation of the <span class="smcap">O</span>.
+The lips are protruded as if to say <span class="smcap">O</span>; but not being sufficiently so for
+the production of the pure Sound, the Sound actually given is mixed, or
+made turbid or thick. The <span class="smcap">U</span>-Sound denotes accordingly <i>Retiracy</i>,
+<i>Obscurity</i>, <i>Shade</i>, <i>Turbidity</i>, <i>Mixedness</i>, or <i>Impurity</i>, as of
+Colors in a dim light, or as of Materials in a slime or plasma, etc.</p>
+
+<p>Metaphysically, <span class="smcap">O</span> denotes <span class="smcap">Pure Theory</span>, the <i>Abstract</i>; and <span class="smcap">U</span> (oo)
+signifies the <span class="smcap">Actual</span> or <span class="smcap">Practical</span>, the Tempic, the Concrete (the
+Temporal or Profane), which is always mixed with contingency.</p>
+
+<p>Other Vowel-Sounds, shades more or less distinct of some one of these
+Leading Sounds, are interspersed by nature between these <i>diatonic</i>
+Sounds, like the half tones and quarter tones in Music. Two of these
+French <i>eu</i> and <i>e muet</i> modifications of <i>u</i> (uh) have been mentioned.
+<i>Eu</i> is modulated at the lips, and <i>e muet</i> at the middle mouth, but
+both have the general character of <i>u</i> (uh). The French U is a
+modification of the <span class="smcap">U</span> (oo), of the Scale just given, but made finer, and
+approximating <span class="smcap">I</span> (ee). The Italian O is a modification of <i>o</i> (aw). These
+four are the Leading Semi-tone Sounds; which along with <i>a</i> carry the
+Scale from Seven (7) diatonic up to twelve (12) chromatic. As they will
+be passed over for the present with this mere mention, the points of the
+Scale at which they intervene will not be now considered.</p>
+
+<p>Discarding these minor shades of Sounds, the Leading Scale of
+Vowel-Sounds is augmented from Seven (7) or Eight (8) to Twelve (12) or
+Thirteen (13), by the addition of the following five (5) Diphthongs or
+Double Vowels. In respect to the <i>quality</i> of Sound, they are pronounced
+just as the Vowels of which they are composed would be if separated and
+succeeding each other. To make the Diphthong <i>long</i>, the two Sounds are
+kept quite distinct. To make it <i>short</i>, they are closely blended; as,
+<span class="smcap">AU</span> (ah-oo), long; <span class="smcap">A[)U]</span> (ahoo), short. With no diacretical mark they are
+pronounced <i>ad libidum</i>, or neither very long nor short.</p>
+
+<p>The following are the five (5) Diphthongs which complete the Vowel
+Scale:</p>
+
+<p>The <span class="smcap">IU</span> is composed of the first Vowel <span class="smcap">I</span> (ee) and the last <span class="smcap">U</span> (oo). The
+<span class="smcap">I</span>-sound, so placed before another Vowel-Sound, tends readily to be
+converted into or more properly to prefix to itself the weak
+Consonant-Sound represented in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_585" id="Page_585">[Pg 585]</a></span> English by Y (in German and Italian by
+J); thus <span class="smcap">YIU</span> for <span class="smcap">IU</span>. The whole of the three Sounds so involved (a real
+Triphthong) are represented by the English U long&mdash;which is never a
+<i>simple</i> Vowel-Sound&mdash;as in <i>union</i>, pronounced <i>yioonyun</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This Diphthong <span class="smcap">IU</span> (or yiu) denotes <i>Conjunction</i>, <i>Conjuncture</i>, <i>Event</i>
+(the two ends meeting); and also <i>Coupling</i> or <i>Unition</i>; a central
+point between extremes.</p>
+
+<p>The next and the most important of the Diphthongs (except <span class="smcap">AU</span>) is <span class="smcap">AI</span>,
+compounded of the third (<span class="smcap">A</span>) and the first (<span class="smcap">I</span>) of the simple
+Vowel-Sounds. It is pronounced very nearly like the English long <span class="smcap">I</span>, as
+in p<i>i</i>ne, f<i>i</i>ne, etc., which is not a <i>simple</i> Vowel; but is
+compounded of the two simple Vowels above mentioned (<span class="smcap">A</span> and <span class="smcap">I</span>, ahee) in a
+very close union with each other; or, as it were, squeezed into each
+other. The Tikiwa (Tee-kee-wah) combination (this is the name of the
+Scientific Universal Language), <span class="smcap">AI</span>, is not ordinarily quite so close,
+and when pronounced <i>long</i>, is quite open, so that each Vowel is
+distinctly heard (ah-ee).</p>
+
+<p>This Diphthong <span class="smcap">AI</span> may be regarded as embracing and epitomizing the lower
+or ground wing or half of the Simple Vowel-Scale (<span class="smcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">E</span> <i>a</i> <span class="smcap">A</span>); its
+meaning is, therefore, that of <span class="smcap">Basic</span> or <span class="smcap">Substantial Reality</span>: the <span class="smcap">Ground</span>
+of Existence.</p>
+
+<p>Contrasted with this is the next Diphthong, <i>O</i><span class="smcap">I</span> (aw-ee), compounded of
+the fifth (<i>o</i>) and the first (<span class="smcap">I</span>) Vowel-Sounds. It is the Sound of <i>oy</i>
+in b<i>oy</i>. The <span class="smcap">I</span> contained in this Diphthong may be regarded as standing
+in the place of <span class="smcap">U</span> at the other extremity of the Scale. This last Sound
+has a tendency to return into <span class="smcap">I</span> through the French slender <span class="smcap">U</span>,
+illustrating the Principle of the Contact of Extremes. The Diphthong
+<i>O</i><span class="smcap">I</span> may, therefore, be viewed as embracing and epitomizing the upper or
+ethereal wing or half of the Simple Vowel Scale (<i>o</i> <i>u</i> <span class="smcap">O</span> <span class="smcap">U</span>); its
+meaning is, therefore, that of <span class="smcap">Aerial</span> or <span class="smcap">Ascending Reality</span>; <span class="smcap">Loftiness</span> or
+<span class="smcap">Loft</span>.</p>
+
+<p>Next there occurs a Diphthong <span class="smcap">OI</span>, pronounced as the same letters in the
+English word g<i>oi</i>ng, which has a half claim to be ranked with the
+Leading Diphthongs. It is sometimes reckoned into, and sometimes out of,
+the Scale&mdash;like <i>a</i> among the Simple Vowels. Its meaning is that of
+<span class="smcap">Frontness</span>, <span class="smcap">Prospect</span>.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, the great Focal Diphthong, that which includes and epitomizes
+the whole Vowel Scale, is <span class="smcap">AU</span> (ah-oo), compounded of the third
+Vowel-Sound (<span class="smcap">A</span>) and the Seventh (or Eighth) <span class="smcap">U</span>. It is the sound heard in
+<i>ou</i>r, or in the Spanish c<i>au</i>sa. The meaning of this Supreme Diphthong
+and general Vowel Representative is <span class="smcap">Universal Reality</span>. It stands
+practically in the place of all the Vowels, in the Composition of Words
+of an inclusive meaning. That is to say, it integrates in its
+signification, all that is inherently signified by all the other Vowels.</p>
+
+<p>While, however, <span class="smcap">AU</span> is practically and usually the Representative,
+Analogue or Equivalent, in the Domain of Language, of Universal Reality
+among the Elements of Being, this is so <i>only in practice</i>.
+<i>Theoretically</i>, the Diphthong best adapted to represent this Idea is
+<span class="smcap">AO</span>; the <span class="smcap">A</span> and the <span class="smcap">O</span> being, in a supreme sense, the two most prominent or
+leading Vowels. But it is a little difficult to retain the Organs of
+Utterance in the position which they must assume in order to pronounce
+these two Vowel-Sounds in conjunction. The organs readily and naturally
+slide into the easier position in which they utter <span class="smcap">AU</span>. This is
+correspondential with the difficulty always experienced in adhering to
+<i>Pure Theory</i> (<span class="smcap">O</span>); and the natural tendency to glide from it, as ground
+too high for permanent occupation, into the more accommodating Domain of
+the <i>Practical</i> (<span class="smcap">U</span>).</p>
+
+<p>The Full Scale of Vowel Sounds coupled with the Full Scale of the
+(Indeterminate) Realities of Universal Being is, therefore, as follows:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_586" id="Page_586">[Pg 586]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" width="85%" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><th align='left'><span class="smcap">1. Sounds.</span></th><th align='left'><span class="smcap">2. Realities of Being.</span></th></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'>1. <span class="smcap">I</span>, i (ee as in feel).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Entity</span> or <span class="smcap">Identity</span> (Centre, Least Element, Essential Being, Individuality).</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='left'>2. <span class="smcap">E</span>, e (a as in mate).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Relation</span> (Sideness, Collaterality, Adjectivity).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>3. <i>A</i>, <i>a</i> (a as in mare).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Unsubstantiality</span> (Thinness, Ghost, Apparition).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>4. <span class="smcap">A</span>, a (a as in fa-ther).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Substance</span> (Thickness, Materiality, Richness, Goodness).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>5. <span class="smcap"><i>O</i></span>, <i>o</i> (aw as in awful).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Space</span> (Volume, Expansion).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>6. <span class="smcap"><i>U</i></span>, <i>u</i> (u as in curd).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Time</span> (Flux, Flow).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>7. <span class="smcap">O</span>, o (o as in noble).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Light</span> (Reflection, Parity, Clearness, Theory).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>8. <span class="smcap">U</span>, u (oo as in fool).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Shade</span> (Retiracy, Turbidity, Mixture, Practice).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>9. <span class="smcap">IU</span>, iu (YIU), (u in union, use).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Conjunction</span> (Event, Joining).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>10. <span class="smcap">AI</span>, ai (ah-ee, i in fine).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Basic Reality</span> (Ground of Existence).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>11. <span class="smcap">Oi</span>, oi (aw-ee, oy in boy).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Aerial or Ascending Reality</span> (Loft, Loftiness).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>12. <span class="smcap"><i>O</i>I</span>, <i>o</i>i (o-ee, oi in going).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Frontness</span>, <span class="smcap">Prospect.</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>13. <span class="smcap">AU</span>, au (ou in our).</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap">Universal Reality.</span></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>The Vowels and Diphthongs of this Basic Scale may be Long or Short,
+without any change of quality. This difference is indicated by
+diacritical marks, which it is not now necessary to exhibit.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to these merely <i>quantitative</i> differences in the
+Vowel-Sounds, there is a corresponding difference of <i>Quality</i>, which
+produces a Counter-Scale of Vowel-Sounds; an echo or repetition of the
+Basic Scale throughout its entire length. This new Scale is a Series of
+Sounds predominantly <i>short</i> in quantity. They are called by Mr. Pitman
+the <i>Stopped</i> Vowels. (In German they are denominated the <i>Sharp</i>
+Vowels.) These Sounds are nearly always followed by a Consonant-Sound in
+the same syllable, by which they are <i>stopped</i> or <i>broken abruptly off</i>,
+and the purity of their quality as Vowels affected or disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>It is not essential for our present purpose to give a detailed list of
+these Vowels; more especially as every Reader will readily recall them;
+as <span class="smcap">I</span>, in p<span class="smcap">I</span>n; <span class="smcap">E</span>, in p<span class="smcap">E</span>t; <span class="smcap">A</span> in p<span class="smcap">A</span>t; <i>o</i>, in n<i>o</i>t; <i>u</i>, in b<i>u</i>t; <span class="smcap">O</span>, in
+st<span class="smcap">O</span>ne, c<span class="smcap">OA</span>t; <span class="smcap">U</span>, in f<span class="smcap">U</span>ll.</p>
+
+<p>In respect to the Vowel Diphthongs, the <i>Stopped</i> Sounds are not
+materially different from the <i>short</i> quantities of the corresponding
+Full ones; and no effort need be made to distinguish the two former
+varieties of Sound. The same is true of the Short and Stopped Sounds of
+<span class="smcap">A</span> (ah). But the difference is very marked in the remaining Seven (7)
+Simple Vowels; the Stopped Sounds of which are given above. For the
+ordinary purposes of Language it is not necessary to distinguish these
+Stopped Sounds by any diacritical mark. But in the short Root-Words,
+where a difference of meaning depends upon the difference between the
+<i>full</i> and <i>stopped</i> Vowel, the so-called <i>grave</i> accent is employed to
+denote the <i>stopped</i> quality, as pique, pick, for example, written thus:
+pik, pik.</p>
+
+<p>The meaning of the Stopped Vowel-Sounds is merely the broken or
+<i>fractionized</i> aspect of the same ideas which are symbolized by the
+corresponding <i>Full</i> Vowel-Sounds.</p>
+
+<p>The nature and meaning of the Vowels being thus explained with
+sufficient amplitude for the uses now in view, we are prepared to
+advance, in a subsequent paper, to the consideration of the individual
+Consonant-Sounds, their character and inherent signification.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_587" id="Page_587">[Pg 587]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="THE_TWO_PLATFORMS" id="THE_TWO_PLATFORMS"></a>THE TWO PLATFORMS.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was the opprobrium of the Republican party in the Presidential
+campaign of 1860, that the Southern States were not, in any but a
+limited degree, represented in its ranks; and so it was called a
+sectional party. The Presidential campaign of 1864 is not less
+remarkable, on the other hand, because the party which now appropriates
+the honored name of Democratic seems to ignore the crime of rebellion on
+the part of those Southern States, and thus invites an even more
+obnoxious appellation. History will record with amazement, as among the
+strange phenomena of a war the most wicked of all the wicked wars with
+which ambition has desolated the earth (phenomena that will perplex men
+and women of loyal instincts and righteous common sense to the latest
+day), the resolutions of the Chicago Convention of 1864.</p>
+
+<p>It is the purpose of this article to consider as dispassionately as may
+be, those Chicago resolutions, as well as the ones previously adopted at
+Baltimore; desiring to look at them both from the standpoint of a
+patriotism which loves the whole country as one indivisible nation&mdash;the
+gift of God, to be cherished as we cherish our homes and our altars.</p>
+
+<p>A convention called of all those, without respect to former political
+affinities, who believed in an uncompromising prosecution of the war for
+the Union till the armed rebellion against its authority should be
+subdued and brought to terms, met at Baltimore on the 7th of June last,
+and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, for re&euml;lection as President,
+and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, for election as Vice-President. The
+convention, with exceeding good sense, and obedient to the just and
+patriotic impulses of the people, disregarded all party names of the
+past, and called itself simply a National Union Convention. Two months
+later, and on the 29th of August last, obedient to the call of
+Democratic committees, a convention met at Chicago, composed of men
+whose voices were for peace, and nominated for President General George
+B. McClellan, of New Jersey, and for Vice-President George H. Pendleton,
+of Ohio. This convention took the name of Democratic, indicating thereby
+not the idea of the equal rule of all the people, as the name imports,
+but the traditions and policies of those degenerate days before the war,
+when Democracy had strangely come to mean the rule of a few ambitious
+men. In other words, it ignored the crime of those men (who have
+sacrificed their country to their ambition), and assumed that the
+country could also overlook the crime. It supposed the people ready to
+strike hands with rebellion and elevate the authors of rebellion to
+power again.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the difference between the two conventions may be concisely
+stated thus: The Chicago Convention was for peace first, and Union
+afterward; the Baltimore Convention for Union first, then peace. Let us
+see.</p>
+
+
+<h4>THE CHICAGO PLATFORM.</h4>
+
+<p>We suppose that no one will think us wanting in fairness when we
+characterize the Chicago Platform as one of peace.<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> If there is any
+reproach in the term, it surely is not the fault of those who take men
+to mean what they say.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_588" id="Page_588">[Pg 588]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it is simply the truth to declare that the general impression on
+the first publication of it confirmed the view we have taken, and that
+even among the supporters of the convention there were many who
+proclaimed their confident expectation that General McClellan, if he
+should accept the nomination, would disregard the platform, and stake
+his chances on his own more warlike record. We will not stop to consider
+in this place whether that expectation has been fulfilled. It suffices
+for our present purpose to remind our readers that the great doctrine of
+the Democratic party of former days was expressed in the motto,
+'Principles, not men;' and that the rigid discipline of the party has
+always required the nominee to be the mere representative of the
+platform&mdash;its other self, so to speak: as witness the case of Buchanan,
+who declared himself, following the approved formulas of his party, no
+longer James Buchanan, but the Cincinnati Platform. It ought also to be
+borne in mind, that General McClellan's letter of acceptance does not,
+in terms, repudiate the platform, and is not necessarily inconsistent
+with it.</p>
+
+<p>The first one of the six resolutions that constitute the Chicago
+Platform, has the sound of true doctrine. 'Unswerving fidelity to the
+Union under the Constitution,' is the duty of every citizen, and has
+always been the proud war-cry of every party; and they who swerve from
+it are subject not simply to our individual censure, but to the sanction
+of our supreme law. The just complaint against this platform is, that,
+while thus proclaiming good doctrine, it overlooks the departure
+therefrom of a large portion of the people, misled by wicked men. When
+we look at the other resolutions, the first one seems all 'sound and
+fury, signifying nothing.'</p>
+
+<p>Nor will we withhold what of approval may possibly be due, in strict
+justice, to the sixth and last resolution; although the approval can
+only be a limited one. No one can overlook the entire lack in that
+resolution of cordial sympathy with the sacred cause of nationality, to
+which the brave heroes of the war have given their lives and fortunes.
+It restricts itself to a simple recognition of the 'soldiery of our
+army,' as entitled to 'sympathy,' with a promise of 'protection' to
+them, 'in the event of our attaining power.' It ignores the navy, and
+passes by the gallant heroes who on sea and river have upheld the flag
+of our country with a lustre that pales not before the names of Paul
+Jones, and Perry, and Decatur. Moreover, the sympathy 'extended to the
+soldiery' is the sympathy not of the American people, but of 'the
+Democratic party.' Surely, this phrase was ill conceived. It has a touch
+of partisan exclusiveness that is sadly out of place. But the resolution
+is unpartisan and patriotic in another respect that deserves notice. It
+extends the 'sympathy of the Democratic party to the soldiery of our
+army,' without making any discrimination to the prejudice of the negro
+soldiers; and thus commits the 'Democratic party,' with honorable
+impartiality, to the 'care and protection' of <i>all</i> 'the brave soldiers
+of the Republic.'</p>
+
+<p>With these criticisms upon the first and sixth resolutions, we proceed
+to record our total disapprobation of the remaining four. In all candor,
+we contend that those four resolutions are a surrender of the national
+honor, and a violation of the national faith. They are unworthy the old
+glory of the Democratic party. For what is the purport of them? Is it
+condemnation of a rebellion that has 'rent the land with civil feud, and
+drenched it in fraternal blood'? Is it to stimulate the heroism of those
+whose breasts are bared to the bullets of traitors in Virginia and
+Georgia, and who have 'borne aloft the flag and kept step to the music
+of the Union' these three years and a half in unwearied defence of the
+nation? Ah, no; they declare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_589" id="Page_589">[Pg 589]</a></span> the war a 'failure'! The second resolution
+is the keynote of the platform, reciting 'that after four years (three
+years and a half) of <i>failure</i> to restore the Union by the <i>experiment
+of war</i>,... justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand
+that <i>immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities</i>.' Upon
+this resolution there can be no better comment than the remembrance of
+Donelson and Pea Ridge, Pittsburg Landing and Vicksburg, Murfreesboro'
+and Chattanooga, Antictam and Gettysburg; not to speak of that splendid
+series of battles from the Wilderness to Petersburg, which at last has
+brought the rebel general to bay; nor of the glorious victories, since
+the Chicago Convention, at Mobile and Atlanta, and in the Shenandoah
+Valley. It can never be forgotten that on the fourth of July, 1863,
+Governor Seymour, in a public discourse at the Academy of Music, in New
+York, drew a deplorable picture of the straits to which the nation was
+at last reduced, with the enemy marching defiantly across the fertile
+fields of Pennsylvania, and men's hearts failing them for fear of
+danger, not alone to the political capital, Washington, but also to the
+financial capital, New York; and that, even while the words fell from
+the speaker's lips, that defiant enemy, already beaten, was rapidly
+retreating before the magnificent old Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg:
+while victorious Grant had already broken the left of the rebel line,
+and was celebrating the nation's anniversary in the triumph of
+Vicksburg. Even so, let it never be forgotten that the delegates who
+adopted this second resolution, so burdened with despair, had scarcely
+reached their homes, ere the stronghold of the Southern Confederacy,
+which, ever since the war was begun, has been boastfully proclaimed the
+key of its military lines, and as impregnable as Gibraltar, fell before
+the unconquerable progress of the armies of the West, under General
+Sherman; and thus the rebel centre, as well as left, had been broken,
+and only the rebel right, at Richmond, yet remains to the Southern army.</p>
+
+<p>In further answer to the discouraging language of this resolution, let
+us offset the following terse and comprehensive statement of what has
+been accomplished in the course of the nation's 'experiment of war.' It
+is copied from <i>The Evening Post</i> of a recent date, and the writer
+supposes the soldiers to speak thus:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'We have not failed; on the contrary, we have fought bravely and
+conquered splendidly. In proof of our words we can point to such
+trophies as few wars can equal and none surpass. Besides defending
+with unusual vigilance and completeness two thousand miles of
+frontier, in three years we have taken from the enemies of the
+Union, by valor and generalship, thirty complete and thoroughly
+furnished fortresses; we have captured over two thousand cannon; we
+have reconquered and now hold nearly four thousand miles of
+navigable river courses; we have taken ten of the enemy's principal
+cities, three of them capitals of States; in thirty days last
+summer we captured sixty thousand prisoners; we have penetrated
+more than three hundred miles into the territory claimed by the
+enemy; we have cut that territory into strips, leaving his armies
+without effectual communication with each other; the main
+operations and interests of the war, which were lately concentrated
+about Baltimore, Paducah, and St. Louis, have been transferred, by
+our steady and constant advance, to the narrow limits of the
+seaboard Slave States; we hold every harbor but one, of a coast six
+thousand miles long. And whatever we have taken we hold; we have
+never turned back, or given up that which we once fairly
+possessed.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It has, however, been fittingly reserved for the chief of the rebellion
+himself to give the full and complete answer to this dishonorable
+complaint of failure. Not a month after the meeting of the Chicago
+Convention, and on the 23d of September last, Jeff. Davis uttered these
+words, in a public<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_590" id="Page_590">[Pg 590]</a></span> speech, at Macon, Geo.: '<i>You have not many men
+between eighteen and forty-five left</i>.... Two-thirds of our men are
+absent, some sick, some wounded, but <i>most of them absent without
+leave</i>. ... <i>In Virginia the disparity of numbers is just an great as it
+is in Georgia.</i>'</p>
+
+<p>But let it be granted that after these three years and a half of war,
+and having accomplished such unquestionably important results, the Union
+is not yet restored, what then? Is that a reason for giving up now? Our
+fathers fought the British seven years without flinching; and under the
+indomitable leader God had given them, they would have fought seven
+years longer with equal determination. Are we less determined than they
+were? Are we such degenerate sons that we are willing to give up the
+legacy they left us, at half its original cost? There is just the same
+reason that we should yield the contest now as there was in 1861 that we
+should yield it then; neither more nor less. The integrity of the
+nation, the perpetuity of our institutions, the safety, honor, and
+welfare of the people are still at stake.</p>
+
+<p>If it is true that 'justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare
+demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities,'
+then those same holy principles were assailed when the war was begun. If
+the United States Government was the assailant, it did wrong, and has
+continued doing wrong ever since; and not a century of such wrong-doing
+can make the war just and right on our part. This brings us face to face
+with the question, Who began the war? Who, in this contest, has assailed
+the principles of 'justice, humanity, and liberty'? Who has attacked the
+'public welfare'? Has it been the United States Government? Let us
+revert to the occasion of the war. Confining ourselves to what all
+parties admit&mdash;even the rebels themselves&mdash;the immediate occasion of the
+war was the election of a President distasteful, for whatever cause, to
+the Southern leaders. Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the
+United States under the organic law of the nation, in strict accordance
+with all its modes and requirements, and none ever disputed the fairness
+of the election. That organic law is the Constitution, to which the
+South is bound equally with the North. The men of the Chicago
+Convention, who have recalled to our minds its high supremacy, neglected
+to express their opinion of those who, immediately on the election of
+President Lincoln, contemptuously spurned it, and have sought these
+three years and a half to overthrow it and destroy the Union which it
+upholds.</p>
+
+<p>Every sentiment of 'justice' was outraged when wicked sedition thus
+without cause reared its head against the covenant of the nation. Every
+instinct of 'humanity' was stifled by the traitors who surrounded a
+gallant garrison of seventy men with a force of ten thousand, and opened
+fire on the heroes who stood by the flag that had been the glory and
+defence of both for more than half a century. 'Liberty,' in all its
+blessed relations of home, and country, and religion, was struck at when
+blind ambition thus set at defiance the power of the Union, to which
+liberty owes its life on this continent, and its hopes throughout the
+world. The constitutional liberty that is the glory of our civilization,
+the liberty regulated by law that is the pride of our institutions, was
+attacked by those who at Montgomery fiercely defied the Constitution and
+laws. And what shall we say of the constitution which these traitors to
+their country and humanity affected to establish, instead of that, the
+heritage of their and our Washington and his compeers, which had made
+our country powerful among nations, and blessed it with equal laws and
+equal protection to all? What shall we say of the constitution that
+ordained slavery as the corner stone of a new confederacy, to teach
+mankind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_591" id="Page_591">[Pg 591]</a></span> the folly of Christian civilization, and bring back the
+'statelier Eden' of the dark ages? To which party in this terrible
+strife of brothers does 'liberty' look for protection to-day? Which of
+the two armies of brothers now arrayed against each other on the plains
+of Virginia and Georgia, is fighting for the principle of order, which
+is the 'public welfare'? Let these questions be answered, and then it
+will appear how much reason there is in the declaration that 'liberty,
+justice, humanity, and the public welfare' demand the 'cessation of
+hostilities.' On the contrary, these very principles demand that the war
+be continued without abatement till they are guaranteed safe residence
+and sure protection under the United States Constitution.</p>
+
+<p>But, it is objected, you ignore the basis on which, this 'cessation of
+hostilities' is proposed, namely, 'the Federal Union of the States.'
+There is a word to be said in reference to this clause which will
+illustrate the high-toned patriotism of some of the convention which
+adopted it. There was an alteration in the wording of the resolution,
+and some of the papers printed it accordingly, '<i>the basis of the
+Federal States</i>.' The editor of the <i>New York Freeman's Journal</i> (a
+paper which zealously supports the Chicago platform and all peace
+measures, and is called Democratic), being requested to explain which
+version was correct, said, in a late issue of his journal, that in the
+original draft of the resolution 'it was not the <i>bold doctrine</i> of
+Federal States;' it was the <i>delusion and snare</i> of a Federal 'Union,'
+and that therefore the latter must be taken as the correct version.</p>
+
+<p>Replying to the above objection, we say that we neither ignore this
+'delusion and snare' of the Federal Union as the basis of the proposed
+peace, nor those other words in the fourth resolution, 'that the aim and
+object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the
+rights of the States unimpaired.' The question is, how possibly to
+reconcile the demand for an immediate 'cessation of hostilities' with
+this great anxiety to preserve the Federal Union? For the Federal Union
+can only be preserved by subduing the armed rebellion that menaces it.
+Anything short of the absolute and thorough defeat of the Southern
+armies must lower the dignity of the nation, and weaken and subvert the
+foundations of the Union. Thus far, by the grace of God and our right
+arm, the Constitution and Union are preserved, and so long as they
+'still stand strong,' the basis of settlement remains; and whenever the
+rebels are tired of trying their strength against them, the nation
+stands ready to welcome them back, as penitent prodigals. It is not we
+who are unreconciled to them: it is they who refuse to be reconciled to
+us. If the illustration offend no weaker brother, we may say that, like
+the ever-surrounding love of God, the Federal Union is still watching
+over the rebels, and is only waiting the first symptom of their
+returning conscience to run and fall on their necks and kiss them, and
+bring them in peace to the home they so foolishly left. They are
+striving to destroy the Constitution and the Union. We oppose them. Let
+us consider what, under these circumstances, 'a cessation of
+hostilities' means.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, how are hostilities to cease, unless the power that
+controls the Southern armies so wills it? That power is a military
+despotism. It has usurped all other power within the limits of the
+rebellion, and the United States Government is seeking to overthrow it,
+in order that the Constitution may be restored, in all its benignity, to
+the people of the South, whom the usurpation has deprived of it. Is it,
+then, for the United States Government to propose to the authors of this
+usurpation to cease seeking its total overthrow? The question recurs,
+moreover, what 'cessation' have we to pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_592" id="Page_592">[Pg 592]</a></span>pose? It is for them to offer
+to yield: they are the aggressors, threatening the life of the nation.
+Is any among us so base he would have peace with dishonor? A nation
+cannot submit to be dishonored before the world&mdash;for its honor is its
+life. Yet what sort of peace would that be which we should thus begin by
+seeking? It is far from pertinent to cite, as some have done, the
+example of Napoleon on this point: even supposing that civil war were,
+in respect of this thing, the same as war between independent nations.
+For Napoleon never proposed suspensions of hostilities except in his own
+extremity, and as a convenient means to extricate himself from
+difficulties which he had the art of concealing from his adversaries.
+Are we in extremity, that this example of Napoleon should be suggested
+in support of the Chicago platform?</p>
+
+<p>As to how our overtures might be received at Richmond, we are no longer
+left any excuse for doubting. The oft-repeated assurances of all who
+have fled from the rebel tyranny since the war was begun, are, at
+length, confirmed by the authoritative declaration of Jeff. Davis
+himself. It is a declaration promulgated not only by Colonel Jaquess and
+Mr. Gilmore, in the account given by the latter of their recent visit to
+Richmond, but also by Mr. Benjamin, the rebel Secretary of State, in a
+circular letter written for the purpose of giving the rebel account of
+that visit. We are told by the rebel chief himself, that as <i>preliminary
+to any negotiations, the independence of the Southern Confederacy must
+be first acknowledged</i>. Why does not the Chicago platform suggest a way
+of avoiding this difficulty? Why has it left the country in uncertainty
+on a question so vital?</p>
+
+<p>But, in the second place, suppose it were possible to have a 'cessation
+of hostilities' without this preliminary acknowledgment of the
+Confederate independence, and that the war might be at an absolute stand
+still for a definite season, are we fully aware of the risks attending
+this measure? For the Chicago platform has left them out of sight. 'A
+cessation of hostilities' is an armistice; and there is no such thing
+known in the authorities on international law, or in history, as 'a
+cessation of hostilities' distinct from an armistice. In defining the
+incidents of war, Wheaton speaks of a '<i>suspension of hostilities by
+means of a truce</i>, or <i>armistice</i>,' and uses the three terms
+interchangeably. In other words, whatever 'cessation (or suspension, as
+it is called in the books) of hostilities,' there may occur between the
+parties to a war, it is known among men and in history as an armistice,
+which is also the technical term for it. There would be no need to
+enlarge upon this point, if it had not been made already the basis of
+fallacious appeals to popular ignorance. Now, the incidents of an
+armistice are well defined, giving to both parties, besides the
+advantage of time to rest, full liberty to repair damages and make up
+losses of men and material; and it is perfect folly, or worse, to talk
+of 'a cessation of hostilities' without giving to the rebels these
+important advantages. But the controlling consideration in reference to
+this whole thing, and which every person ought to ponder carefully, is
+the effect of the proposed 'cessation of hostilities' upon our neutral
+neighbors. On this point the doctrine of international law is thus
+stated by the distinguished French writer, Hautefeuille, 'the eminent
+advocate of neutral rights,' as he is justly called by the American
+editor of Wheaton, and whose works on neutral relations are always cited
+with respect, and recognized as authority.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'The duties imposed on neutrals by the state of war belong
+essentially to the state of war itself. From the moment it ceases,
+for whatever cause, even temporarily, the duties of neutrals
+likewise cease; <i>as to them, peace is completely restored during
+the suspension of arms</i>. They resume then all the rights which had
+been modified by the war, and can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_593" id="Page_593">[Pg 593]</a></span> exercise them in their full
+extent during the whole time fixed for the duration of the truce,
+if this time has been limited by the agreement; and until the
+resumption of hostilities has been officially announced to them, if
+it has not been limited.'<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Can language be clearer? It will not do to treat it lightly. It is a
+statement of what international law is on this point from an authority;
+and the reasons for the doctrine are clear and incontrovertible.
+Neutrality depends on the fact of war; when, for any cause, that fact no
+longer exists, neutrality ceases likewise, of course. It is only the
+application of a well-known maxim of law, that when the reason of a rule
+fails, the rule itself fails. Let there be 'a cessation of hostilities,'
+then, as proposed in the Chicago platform, and how long would it be
+before rebel ships of war from English ports would be ready to desolate
+our coast, destroy our shipping, raise the blockade, and give to the
+rebellion the aid and sustenance it must have ere long or perish?</p>
+
+<p>There is still another difficulty in the way of suspending hostilities,
+which it is well for us not to ignore. If we propose to the rebels 'a
+cessation of hostilities,' does not the question immediately become one
+of negotiation between separate Governments? Have we not in that moment,
+and in that thing, then recognized the Southern Confederacy as a
+separate and independent Power? For does not 'a cessation of
+hostilities' presuppose parties of equal sovereignty on both sides?
+Indeed, <i>The London Times</i> of a recent date already declares that 'it
+would concede to the South a position of equality.' Such a concession
+cannot, for a moment, be thought of. For the very question at issue is
+our constitutional supremacy. When that is yielded, all is yielded. The
+exchanging of prisoners, and the numerous like questions that
+perpetually arise in the progress of war, are matters of common
+humanity, that depend upon their own law. They are totally independent
+of the questions at issue between the parties belligerent; and our
+dealings with the South, in reference to such matters, cannot be
+construed into a recognition of its separate independence. If we consent
+to treat with the rebel chiefs, however, in regard to the very question
+involved in the war, how can we longer compel the non-interference of
+foreign Powers? If <i>we</i> acknowledge the authority of Jeff. Davis to
+speak for the Southern people, we cannot then take offence if other
+nations acknowledge him as the representative and head of a new
+Government.</p>
+
+<p>Such and so great are the consequences of a 'cessation of hostilities,'
+which the Chicago platform proposes to the serious consideration of the
+American people.</p>
+
+<p>It thus appears how irreconcilable are the expressions in that platform
+in regard to the preservation of the Federal Union, with the clearly
+announced determination to propose immediately 'a cessation of
+hostilities.' They are vague generalities, and can have no other purpose
+than to catch the popular ear so as more effectually to deceive the
+popular heart. That this is not a harsh judgment, consider how the four
+resolutions that treat of the war all hinge upon the proposition to
+suspend hostilities. For they concern themselves with what? With
+condemnation of the rebellion, its authors, and objects, suggesting, at
+the same time, how more effectually to bring upon it its righteous
+retribution? Far from it. Indeed, a stranger to all that has passed in
+our country during the last three years, would suppose, from a study of
+these resolutions, that the United States Government had usurped the
+power of a despotism, and that all who are not arrayed in open
+rebellion, against its authority were groaning under the yoke of a
+tyrant. The platform throughout ignores the one supreme question that is
+before the people to-day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_594" id="Page_594">[Pg 594]</a></span> That one question is, Shall we maintain the
+integrity of the nation? It is vain to introduce other issues; they must
+abide the event of arms. The old maxim that in the midst of war the laws
+are silent, is not to be condemned. For our laws are of no avail, the
+nation cannot enforce them, so long as armed rebellion threatens its
+existence. With the nation, all its laws, principles, vital forces, are
+equally menaced and imperilled; and they are, in virtue of that very
+fact, in abeyance, in order that they may be saved. It is said that the
+Constitution is not suspended because of rebellion, and this is the
+basis of much declamation, both in the Chicago platform and elsewhere,
+against the exercise of extraordinary powers on the part of the
+President. But the Constitution authorizes the suspension of the writ of
+<i>habeas corpus</i>, that great writ of right which is the bulwark of our
+Anglo-Saxon liberty, 'when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public
+safety may require it;' and confers upon Congress full power to
+legislate for the defence of the nation, making it then the duty of the
+President to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.' What more
+is needed as a warrant for extraordinary power? The Chicago Convention
+has appealed to the Constitution, and in that has done wisely. But what
+is the Constitution? It is the organic law of the nation. In virtue of
+it the nation exists, and by the supreme warrant of it the nation
+maintains its existence against parricidal treason. Under the
+Constitution all power is granted to the public authorities to quell
+insurrection; and the grant of a power, by one of the first principles
+of law, as also of common sense, implies every essential incident to
+make the grant effectual.</p>
+
+<p>In support of these views it is pertinent to cite the authority of an
+approved text writer on municipal law, whose book has appeared since
+they were first written, and who has elaborately investigated the points
+involved. The result of his patient and thorough study is stated in
+these propositions:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'That no civil power resides in any department of the Government to
+interfere with the fundamental, personal rights of life, liberty,
+and property, guaranteed by the Constitution; that a warlike power
+is given by the Constitution to the President temporarily to
+disregard these rights by means of the martial law; that under the
+sanction of this species of law, the President and his subordinate
+military officers may, within reasonable limits, suspend the
+privilege of the writ of <i>habeas corpus</i>, cause arrests to be made,
+trials and condemnations to be had, and punishments to be
+inflicted, in methods unknown to the civil procedure, but are
+responsible for an abuse of the power; and that the martial law, as
+a necessary adjunct of military movements, may be enforced in time
+of invasion or rebellion, wherever the influence and effect of
+these movements directly extends.'<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<p>These conclusions of the law are worthy to be considered carefully in
+view of the solemn resolutions of the Chicago platform, that 'military
+necessity' and the 'war power' are 'mere pretences' to override the
+Constitution.</p>
+
+<p>It remains to say, with reference to the third and fifth resolutions of
+this platform, that they are chargeable with an equal and common
+ignorance: the third, in ignoring the necessity of the presence of the
+military at the elections referred to, in order that disloyalty and
+treason might not openly defy the authority of the nation; the fifth, in
+ignoring two things, first, the monstrous baseness of the rebel
+treatment of our prisoners, who have been starved alive, with a
+refinement of cruelty reserved for this Christian age, and practised
+only by the Christian chivalry of the South; and secondly, the rebel
+refusal to exchange prisoners man for man;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_595" id="Page_595">[Pg 595]</a></span> the resolution seeking,
+moreover, to charge upon the United States Government the fault of both
+these rebel violations of humanity. It may be asked, moreover, in
+further reference to the third resolution, if the convention really
+meant to pledge itself to revolution;<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> and why, if the President, as
+chief of 'the military authority of the United States,' should be guilty
+of any abuses, the proper remedy is not by impeachment, as provided in
+the Constitution? The language of this resolution is gravely suggestive,
+and cannot be too closely criticised. It seems to shadow forth some dark
+design, which surely is in harmony with the whole tone of hostility to
+our Government that pervades the platform. Taken, moreover, in
+connection with the fact that the Chicago Convention declared itself a
+permanent body, subject to the call of the chairman, this criticism does
+not seem unreasonable; for permanent conventions have generally been the
+beginning of revolution.</p>
+
+
+
+<h4>THE BALTIMORE PLATFORM.</h4>
+
+<p>The Baltimore platform consists of eleven resolutions; and we may
+perceive at a glance the important respect in which it differs from the
+one adopted at Chicago. That confines itself to criticism and censure of
+those who are striving to uphold the Constitution and the Union against
+an armed rebellion, which it does not so much as by a single word
+condemn. This declares the purpose of the people 'to aid the Government
+in quelling by force the rebellion now raging against its authority;' so
+that its power shall be felt throughout the whole extent of our
+territory, and its blessings be restored to every section of the Union.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to overlook this essential distinction of the two
+platforms. The one is full of the captious complaint of partisanship,
+intent on power, and oblivious of the highest duty of patriotism in this
+hour of the country's need; the other recognizes no higher duty now than
+the union of all parties for the sake of the Union. The one vainly cries
+peace when there is no peace; the other thinks not of peace except in
+and through the Union, without which there cannot be peace. Above all,
+the one takes us back to the former times of purely party strife, and
+seeks to revive the political issues of the past; the other, leaving
+'the dead past to bury its dead,' keeps pace with the living present,
+and looks forward to a future of glory in a restored and regenerated
+Union. For it is folly to suppose there can ever again be 'the Union as
+it was.' This is a superficial phrase, which it is marvellous that any
+reflecting person can delude himself with. 'The Constitution as it is'
+is the motto that condemns it; for under the Constitution we are to have
+'a more perfect Union,' as our fathers designed, and so stated in the
+Constitution itself. We are to have a constitutional Union in which
+every right guaranteed by the Constitution shall be maintained; and this
+was not so in 'the Union as it was.'</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is that the Baltimore platform, after pledging the people to
+maintain 'the paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the
+United States,' and approving the 'determination of the Government not
+to compromise' this authority, but holding out the same Constitution and
+laws as our only and the sufficient 'terms of peace' to all who will
+accept them, proceeds to take notice of what none but the wilfully blind
+fail to perceive, the changed aspect of the slavery question. It is
+impossible to hold the same position to-day in regard to this vexed
+question as in the days before the war. As an element of the politics of
+this country its aspect is wholly changed, and there is no sort of
+consistency in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_596" id="Page_596">[Pg 596]</a></span> upholding our opinions of four years ago in reference to
+it. We do well to remember that consistency is not obstinacy. It is not
+an absolute, but a relative thing, and takes note of all the new
+elements which are ever entering into public affairs. The criterion of
+one's political consistency in our country is unfaltering devotion to
+the Union. If the measures he advocates look always to its paramount
+authority, his record is truly and honorably inconsistent. On the other
+hand, he who forgets the end of his labors in the ardor of seeking to
+save the means, is chargeable with the grossest inconsistency. What,
+therefore, consists with the perpetuity and strength of the Union? is
+the question which the American patriot proposes to himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is in reference to this question that the Baltimore Platform
+challenges comparison with the one adopted at Chicago. For guided by the
+experience of the past four years (the culmination of fifty years'
+experience), and noting without fear the facts which that experience has
+revealed as in the clear light of midday, it declares that slavery is
+inconsistent with the existence of the Union. Does anybody deny it? Men
+tell us that the Union and slavery have heretofore, for more than half a
+century, existed together, and why may they not continue to exist in
+harmonious conjunction for the next half century? We are asked,
+moreover, with sarcastic disdain, if our wisdom is superior to that of
+the fathers. Our wisdom is not, indeed, superior to that of the fathers
+of the republic, but it would be far beneath it, and we should be
+unworthy sons of such fathers, if we undertook to carry out, in 1864,
+the policies and measures of 1764. The progress of affairs has developed
+the antagonism that was only latent before, but which, nevertheless,
+some of the wisest of our fathers foresaw; and it is now very clear that
+there is a terrible antagonism (no longer latent) between slavery and
+the principles that underlie the Constitution. The time has come to
+vindicate the wisdom of the Constitution by utterly removing what seeks
+to disgrace and destroy it&mdash;as it were a viper in the bosom of the
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>We must show that our Government is strong enough not only to control,
+but also destroy, the interest which arrays itself in arms and war
+against it. It is useless, surely, to deny that the Southern Confederacy
+means slavery. Over and over again the Southern journals have asserted,
+and Southern politicians have said, that free labor was a mistake, and
+that slavery was the true condition of labor. That these are the
+deliberate convictions of the Southern leaders, and these the doctrines
+on which the Montgomery constitution is based, no reflecting person can
+hesitate to believe; and the boastful declaration of the rebel
+vice-president, that slavery was the corner stone of the rebel
+confederacy, serves to confirm our conclusion beyond possibility of
+doubt. What these things prove is nothing more nor less than that the
+Union with such an element in it to feed the ambition of politicians
+with, as this slavery has shown itself to be, is henceforth impossible.
+For we see now that for the sake of slavery the slaveholding leaders are
+willing to destroy the Government. Who can complain if the basis of
+their rebellious scheme is annihilated? The answer to those who say,
+Touch tenderly the institutions of the South, is, Nay, but let them
+first cease their rebellion. Therefore, so long as the rebellion lifts
+its unblushing front against the Government, so long it is the duty of
+every lover of the Government, in the language of the third resolution
+of this platform, to 'uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by
+which the Government, in its own defence, has aimed a death blow at this
+gigantic evil.'</p>
+
+<p>But that makes us, Abolitionists, says the reader. Be it so. Are we not
+willing to be Abolitionists for the sake<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_597" id="Page_597">[Pg 597]</a></span> of saving the Constitution and
+the Union? And if, despising our proffers of 'the Constitution as it
+is,' which we have now held out to them for three years and a half, the
+rebels continue to defy the authority of the Government, who can
+complain if we proceed to adopt an amendment to the Constitution that
+shall leave no possibility of slaveholding treason hereafter? Surely
+none but themselves. Let them, then, come back and vote against it; for
+three fourths of all the States must concur in such an amendment before
+it can become part of the Constitution. Ah, the leaders of the Southern
+rebellion know full well how the great masses at the South would vote on
+such a measure! Let us be ready, then, acting not for ourselves alone,
+but also for our deluded brethren of the South, who are to-day the
+victims of a military usurpation the most monstrous the world ever saw,
+to put the finishing stroke to the scheme of this Confederate rebellion
+by adopting the proposed amendment.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth resolution commits us to the approval of two measures that
+have aroused the most various and strenuous opposition, the Proclamation
+of Emancipation and the use of negro troops. In reference to the first,
+it is to be remembered that it is a war measure. The express language of
+it is: 'By virtue of the power in me vested as commander-in-chief of the
+army and navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion
+against the authority and Government of the United States, and as a <i>fit
+and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion</i>.' Considered
+thus, the Proclamation is not merely defensible, but it is more; it is a
+proper and efficient means of weakening the rebellion which every person
+desiring its speedy overthrow must zealously and perforce uphold.
+Whether it is of any legal effect beyond the actual limits of our
+military lines, is a question that need not agitate us. In due time the
+supreme tribunal of the nation will be called to determine that, and to
+its decision the country will yield with all respect and loyalty. But in
+the mean time let the Proclamation go wherever the army goes, let it go
+wherever the navy secures us a foothold on the outer border of the rebel
+territory, and let it summon to our aid the negroes who are truer to the
+Union than their disloyal masters; and when they have come to us and put
+their lives in our keeping, let us protect and defend them with the
+whole power of the nation. Is there anything unconstitutional in that?
+Thank God, there is not. And he who is willing to give back to slavery a
+single person who has heard the summons and come within our lines to
+obtain his freedom, he who would give up a single man, woman, or child,
+once thus actually freed, is not worthy the name of American. He may
+call himself Confederate, if he will.</p>
+
+<p>Let it be remembered, also, that the Proclamation has had a very
+important bearing upon our foreign relations. It evoked in behalf of our
+country that sympathy on the part of the people in Europe, whose is the
+only sympathy we can ever expect in our struggle to perpetuate free
+institutions. Possessing that sympathy, moreover, we have had an element
+in our favor which has kept the rulers of Europe in wholesome dread of
+interference. The Proclamation relieved us from the false position
+before attributed to us of fighting simply for national power. It placed
+us right in the eyes of the world, and transferred men's sympathies from
+a confederacy fighting for independence as a means of establishing
+slavery, to a nation whose institutions mean constitutional liberty,
+and, when fairly wrought out, must end in universal freedom.</p>
+
+<p>We are to consider, furthermore, that from the issuing of the
+Proclamation dates the organization of negro troops&mdash;a measure that is
+destined to affect materially the future composition, as it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_598" id="Page_598">[Pg 598]</a></span> is
+believed, of our regular army. This is 'the employment as Union soldiers
+of men heretofore held in slavery,' which the fifth resolution asks us
+to approve. Can we not approve it? The fighting qualities of the
+despised 'niggers' (as South Carolina chivalry terms the gallant fellows
+who followed Colonel Shaw to the deadly breach of Wagner, reckless of
+all things save the stars and stripes they fought under) have been
+tested on many battle fields. He whose heart does not respond in
+sympathy with their heroism on those fields, while defending from
+disgrace his country's flag, need not approve. The approval of the
+country will be given, nevertheless. There can be nothing better said,
+on this point than President Lincoln's own words, as reported lately by
+Judge Mills, of Wisconsin, to whom the President uttered them in
+conversation. They cover also the question of the Proclamation, and will
+fitly conclude our discussion of these two important measures:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'Sir,' said the President, 'the slightest knowledge of arithmetic
+will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed
+with Democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of
+the North to do it. There are now in the service of the United
+States near two hundred thousand ablebodied colored men, most of
+them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory. The
+Democratic strategy demands that these forces be disbanded, and
+that the masters be conciliated by restoring them to slavery. The
+black men who now assist Union prisoners to escape, they are to be
+converted into our enemies in the vain hope of gaining the good
+will of their masters. We shall have to fight two nations instead
+of one.</p>
+
+<p>'You cannot conciliate the South if you guarantee to them ultimate
+success; and the experience of the present war proves their success
+is inevitable if you fling the compulsory labor of millions of
+black men into their side of the scale. Will you give our enemies
+such military advantages as insure success, and then depend on
+coaxing, flattery, and concession to get them back into the Union?
+Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men, take two hundred
+thousand men from our side and put them in the battle field or corn
+field against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in
+three weeks.</p>
+
+<p>'We have to hold territory in inclement and sickly places; where
+are the Democrats to do this? It was a free fight, and the field
+was open to the war Democrats to put down this rebellion by
+fighting against both master and slave, long before the present
+policy was inaugurated.</p>
+
+<p>'There have been men base enough to propose to me to return to
+slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee, and thus win
+the respect of the masters they fought. Should I do so, I should
+deserve to be damned in time and eternity. Come what will, I will
+keep my faith with friend and foe. My enemies pretend I am now
+carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. So long as
+I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of
+restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion
+without the use of the emancipation policy, and every other policy
+calculated to weaken the moral and physical forces of the
+rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>'Freedom has given us two hundred thousand men raised on Southern
+soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from
+the enemy; and instead of alienating the South, there are now
+evidences of a fraternal feeling growing up between our men and the
+rank and file of the rebel soldiers. Let my enemies prove to the
+country that the destruction of slavery is not necessary to a
+restoration of the Union. I will abide the issue.'</p></div>
+
+<p>Surely these are words of exceeding good sense. They are full of a
+feeling of the speaker's responsibility to God and his country; and the
+man who cares not for his responsibility to God, may well be distrusted
+by his country. Is he who speaks these words of patriotism a tyrant and
+usurper? Are not the words convincing proof that President Lincoln is
+honest and faithful and capable? And if he thus meets those three
+requirements of Jefferson's comprehensive formula, let us not refuse the
+language of the platform: 'That we have full confidence in his
+deter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_599" id="Page_599">[Pg 599]</a></span>mination to carry these and all other constitutional measures
+essential to the salvation of the country into full and complete
+effect.'</p>
+
+<p>The remaining six resolutions of this platform deserve the general
+remark, that they declare with no uncertain sound the views of the
+Baltimore Convention in reference to vital questions of public policy;
+whereas, the Chicago Convention has not even alluded to those questions.
+That in this hour of the country's crisis, in this life struggle of the
+nation with foes both open and secret, there should be 'harmony in the
+national councils;' that men once clothed in the uniform of United
+States soldiers become entitled to 'the full protection of the laws of
+war,' as forming part of the nation's defenders when those who ought to
+be its defenders have joined in an unholy sedition to destroy its life;
+that 'foreign immigration,' deserves especial encouragement at a time
+when the demands of the army leave the places of home labor without
+adequate means of refilling them; that a Pacific Railroad, uniting the
+extreme Western portion of the Union with all the other sections, and
+thus bringing within nearer reach of our California and Oregon
+countrymen all the advantages and facilities of the Government, while at
+the same time binding more closely the ties that make us one people with
+the West equally with the South; and that the nation's faith with all
+its creditors must be strictly kept, be the cost what it may; all these
+are duties which the terrible emergency of the hour only makes more
+imperative and exacting of fulfilment than ever before.</p>
+
+<p>The eleventh and last resolution commits the country anew to the Monroe
+Doctrine. In view of the great crime that is enacting in Mexico, where a
+foreign power has assumed to change the Government of that afflicted
+country at its own arbitrary will, the declaration that we have not
+abandoned the doctrine is appropriate and necessary. It is a warning
+that our eyes are not closed to the schemes on foot for the suppression
+of republican government on this continent. While our present necessity
+compels us, as of course, to act with great circumspection, yet it would
+be unbecoming our dignity to quietly ignore the spoliation of Mexico. It
+is often said that President Lincoln, in his letter accepting the
+Baltimore nomination, has repudiated this resolution. These are his
+words:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'While the resolution in regard to the supplanting of republican
+government upon the Western Continent is fully concurred in, there
+might be misunderstanding were I not to say that the position of
+the Government in relation to the action of France in Mexico, as
+assumed through the State Department, and indorsed by the
+convention, among the measures and acts of the Executive, will be
+faithfully maintained so long as the state of facts shall leave
+that position pertinent and applicable.'</p></div>
+
+<p>It is not fair to say that this is a repudiation of the resolution, or
+of the Monroe Doctrine, until it is first shown that the Government
+'through the State Department,' has already repudiated the doctrine. The
+time for the enforcement of that doctrine has not yet come, and this
+seems to be the position that has been assumed by the Government. It
+certainly is the position of common sense and patriotism.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The candid reader has now before him a brief exposition of the two
+platforms, and of the doctrines and bearing of each. It is believed that
+nothing has been extenuated; nor, on the other hand, has aught been here
+set down in malice. Let every one study the platforms and try
+conclusions for himself; then say whether the foregoing discussion could
+well have shaped itself differently. The sum of the whole matter seems
+to be, War and Union, or Peace and Disunion. If we have Union, it can
+only be now through war. We must 'seek peace with the sword.' The
+rebels<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_600" id="Page_600">[Pg 600]</a></span> have appealed from the civil law to the military law, from the
+Constitution to the sword; let us not shrink from the ordeal. No
+revolution to perpetuate oppression can hope for the favor of a God of
+justice.</p>
+
+<p>There are two platforms in this Presidential campaign, representing the
+two parties into which the voters will be divided. But there is a third
+party, without platform and without vote, which has, nevertheless,
+interests at stake transcending even ours. Let the calmly considered
+words of an impartial English journal,<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> which wishes well to our
+country, speak, in conclusion, on behalf of that third party:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'There are three parties to the American war. There are the slaves,
+the bondsmen of the South, whose flight was restrained by the
+Fugitive Bill, and whose wrongs have brought about the disruption;
+there are the Confederates, who, when Southern supremacy in the
+republic was menaced by the election of Abraham Lincoln, threw off
+their allegiance; and there are the Government and its supporters,
+who are striving to restore the integrity of the Union. These are
+the three parties; and as the war has gone on from year to year,
+the cause of the negro has brightened, and hundreds of thousands of
+the African race have passed out of slavery into freedom. They
+flock in multitudes within the Federal lines, and take their stand
+under the Constitution as free men. Abandoned by their former
+masters, or flying from their fetters, the chattels become
+citizens, and rejoice. No matter what their misery, they keep their
+faces to the North, and bear up under their privations. Every
+advance of the national army liberates new throngs, and they rush
+eagerly to the camps where their brethren are cared for. The
+exodus, continually going on, increases in volume.</p>
+
+<p>'Such are the colored freedmen, the innocent victims of the war,
+the slaves whom it has marvellously enfranchised; such are the
+dusky clouds that flit o'er the continent of America and settle
+down on strange lands&mdash;the harbingers of a social revolution in the
+great republic of the West. More than fifty thousand are formed
+into camps in the Mississippi Valley, and not fewer in Middle and
+East Tennessee and North Alabama. It is a vast responsibility which
+is cast upon the Government and the people of the North, a sore and
+mighty burden; and proportionate are the efforts which have been
+made to meet the trying emergency. The Government finds rations for
+the negro camps, provides free carriage for the contributions of
+the humane, appoints surgeons and superintendents, enlists in the
+army the men who are suitable, and, as far as possible, gives
+employment to all. Clothing and other necessaries are forwarded to
+the camps by the ton by benevolent hands, and books for the schools
+by tens of thousands. All along the banks of the Mississippi, from
+Cairo to New Orleans, and in Arkansas and Tennessee, the aged and
+infirm fugitives, the women and children, are collected into
+colored colonies, and tended and taught with a care that is worthy
+of a great and Christian people. All that can work are more than
+willing to do so; they labor gladly; and among old and young there
+is an eager desire for education. Books are coveted as badges of
+freedom; and the negro soldier carries them with him wherever he
+goes, and studies them whenever he can. It is a great work which is
+in progress across the Atlantic. Providence, in a manner which man
+foresaw not, is solving a dark problem of the past, and we may well
+look on with awe and wonder. There were thousands of minds which
+apprehended the downfall of the 'peculiar institution.' There were
+a prophetic few, who clearly perceived that it would be purged away
+by no milder scourge than that of war. But there were none who
+dreamed that the slaveholder would be the Samson to bring down the
+atrocious system of human slavery by madly taking arms in its
+defence! Yet so it was; and the Divine penalty is before us. The
+wrath of man has worked out the retributive justice of God. The
+crime which a country would not put away from it has ended in war,
+and slavery is a ruin.'</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Literary Notices</span> unavoidably postponed until the ensuing issue of <span class="smcap">The
+Continental</span>.</h4>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> A renowned fort in Polish history. It stood on the old
+battlefield between Turkey and Poland, between Europe and Asia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <span class="smcap">New York Sate Gazetteer</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> During the past season, the Mansion House, on the Plain,
+was not opened until near the close Of the summer. We understand it is
+to be henceforth a permanent 'institution.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> It is presumed that every one is familiar with the two
+platforms, as they are so easily obtained, and it is, therefore, not
+deemed necessary to encumber the pages of the Magazine with inserting
+them in full.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Des Droits des Nations Neutres,' t. I., p. 301</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> &sect;716 of 'An Introduction to Municipal Law,' by John Norton
+Pomeroy, Esq., Professor of Law in the New York University Law School.
+The whole chapter from which the extract is taken is worthy of diligent
+perusal, and the writer regrets that want of space alone prevents him
+quoting more fully from Professor Pomeroy's lucid exposition of the
+doctrine of martial law under our Constitution.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> The third resolution is, 'That the direct interference of
+the military authority of the United States in the recent elections held
+in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware, was a shameful violation
+of the Constitution, and the repetition of such acts in the approaching
+election <i>will be held as revolutionary, and resisted with all the means
+and power under our control</i>.'</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> London Inquirer.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5,
+November 1864, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***
+
+***** This file should be named 23689-h.htm or 23689-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/3/6/8/23689/
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@@ -0,0 +1,8268 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5,
+November 1864, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864
+       Devoted To Literature And National Policy
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2007 [EBook #23689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by Cornell University Digital Collections)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE
+
+  CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:
+
+  DEVOTED TO
+
+  LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.
+
+
+
+  VOL. VI.--NOVEMBER, 1864--No. V.
+
+
+
+
+THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+There are three classes of persons in the loyal States of this Union who
+proclaim the present civil war unnecessary, and clamor for peace at any
+price: first, a multitude of people, so ignorant of the history of the
+country that they do not know what the conflict is about; secondly, a
+smaller class of better-informed citizens, who have no moral
+comprehension of the inevitable opposition of democracy and aristocracy,
+free society and slave society, and who believe sincerely that a
+permanent compromise or trade can be negotiated between these opposing
+forces in human affairs; thirdly, a clique of demagogues, who are trying
+to use these two classes of people to paralyze the Government, and force
+it into a surrender to the rebels on such terms as they choose to
+dictate: their separation from the United States or recall to their old
+power in a restored and reconstructed Union.
+
+It will be my purpose, in this article, to show the complete fallacy of
+this notion, by presenting the facts concerning the progress of the
+different portions of our country in the American idea of liberty during
+the years preceding this war. The census of 1860, if honestly studied,
+must convince any unprejudiced man, at home or abroad, that the Slave
+Power deliberately brought this war upon the United States, to save
+itself from destruction by the irresistible and powerful growth of free
+society in the Union. This war had the same origin and necessity of
+every great conflict between the people and the aristocracy since the
+world began.
+
+Every war of this kind in history has been the result of the advancement
+of the people in liberty. Now the people have inaugurated the conflict
+against the aristocracy, either in the interest of self-government, or
+an imperial rule which should virtually rest upon their suffrage. Now
+the aristocracy has risen upon the people, who were becoming too strong
+and free, to conquer and govern them through republican or monarchical
+forms of society. There has always been an irrepressible conflict
+between aristocracy and democracy; in times of peace carried on by all
+the agencies of popular advancement; but in every nation finally
+bursting into civil war. And every such war, however slow its progress,
+or uncertain its immediate consequence, has finally left the mass of
+the people nearer liberty than it found them.
+
+The northern Grecian states represented the cause of the people; and the
+oriental empires the cause of the few. These little states grew so
+rapidly that the despots of Asia became alarmed, and organized gigantic
+expeditions to destroy them. At Marathon and Salamis, the people's cause
+met and drove back the mighty invasion; and two hundred years later,
+under the lead of Alexander, dissolved every Asiatic empire, from the
+Mediterranean to the Euphrates, to its original elements.
+
+Julius Caesar destroyed the power of the old Roman aristocracy in the
+interest of the people of the Roman empire. Under the name of 'The
+Republic,' that patrician class had oppressed the people of Rome and her
+provinces for years as never was people oppressed before. After fifty
+years of civil war, Julius and Augustus Caesar organized the masses of
+this world-wide empire, and established a government under which the
+aristocracy was fearfully worried, but which administered such, justice
+to the world as had never before been possible.
+
+The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
+involved the whole of Europe for eighty years, were begun by the civil
+and religious aristocracy of Europe to crush the progress of religious
+and civil liberty among the people. These wars continued until religious
+freedom was established in Germany, Holland, and Great Britain, and
+those seeds of political liberty sown that afterward sprang up in the
+American republic.
+
+The English civil wars of the seventeenth century were begun by the king
+and great nobles to suppress the rising power of the commons, and
+continued till constitutional liberty was practically secured to all the
+subjects of the British empire.
+
+The French Revolution was the revolt of the people of France against one
+of the most cruel and tyrannical aristocracies that ever reigned; and
+continued, with brief interruptions, till the people of both France and
+Italy had vindicated the right to choose their emperors by popular
+suffrage.
+
+During the half century between the years 1775 and 1825, every people in
+North America had thrown off the power of a foreign aristocracy by war,
+and established a republican form of government, except the Canadas,
+which secured the same practical results by more peaceful methods.
+
+The historian perceives that each of these great wars was an inevitable
+condition of liberty for the people, and has exalted their condition. In
+all these struggles there were the same kinds of opponents to the war:
+the ignorant, who knew nothing about it; the morally indifferent, who
+could not see why freemen and tyrants could not agree to live together
+in amity; and the demagogues, who were willing to ruin the country to
+exalt themselves. But we now understand that only through these red
+gates of war could the peoples of the world have marched up to their
+present enjoyment of liberty; that each naming portal is a triumphal
+arch, on which is inscribed some great conquest for mankind.
+
+The present civil war in the United States is the last frantic attempt
+of this dying feudal aristocracy to save itself from inevitable
+dissolution. The election of Mr. Lincoln as President of the United
+States, in 1860, by the vote of every Free State, was the announcement
+to the world that the people of the United States had finally and
+decisively conquered the feudal aristocracy of the republic after a
+civil contest of eighty years. With no weapons but those placed in their
+hands by the Constitution of the United States, the freemen of the
+republic had practically put this great slave aristocracy under their
+feet forever. That portion of the Union which was controlled by the will
+of the whole people had become so decidedly superior in every attribute
+of power and civilization, that the slave aristocracy despaired of
+further peaceful resistance to the march of liberty through the land.
+Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the
+people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of
+it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy.
+
+This great people was not plunged into civil war by unfriendly talking,
+or by the unfriendly legislation of the Northern people, or by the
+accidental election of Abraham Lincoln as President. Nations do not go
+to war for hard words or trifling acts of unfriendliness or accidental
+political changes; although these may be the ostensible causes of
+war--the sparks that finally explode the magazine. There was a real
+cause for this rebellion--_the peaceful, constitutional triumph of the
+people over the aristocracy of the republic, after a struggle of eighty
+years_. If ever a great oligarchy had good reason to fight, it was the
+Slave Power in 1860. It found itself defeated and condemned to a
+secondary position in the republic, with the assurance that its death
+was only a question of time. It is always a good cause of war to an
+aristocracy that its power is abridged; for an aristocracy cares only
+for itself, and honestly regards its own supremacy as the chief interest
+on earth. This Slave Power has only done what every such power has done
+since the foundation of the world. It has drawn the sword against the
+inevitable progress of mankind, and will be conquered by mankind. It is
+waging this terrible war, not against Northern Abolitionists, or the
+present Administration, _but against the United States census tables of
+1860_; against the mighty realities of the progress of free society in
+the republic, which have startled us all; but with which no class of men
+were so well acquainted as Mr. Jefferson Davis and his associates in
+rebellion.
+
+There has always been a conflict in our country between this old slave
+aristocracy and the people. The first great victory of the people was in
+the war of the Revolution. That war was inaugurated and forced upon the
+country by the masses of the people of the New England and Middle
+States. The aristocracy of the South, with their associates in the
+North, resisted the movement to separate the people from the crown of
+Great Britain, till resistance was impossible, and then came in, to some
+extent, to lead the movement and appropriate the rewards of success. But
+the free people of the North brought on and sustained the war.
+Massachusetts was then the fourth province in population; but she sent
+eight thousand more soldiers to the field during those bloody eight
+years than all the Southern States united. Virginia was then the empire
+State of the Union, and Rhode Island the least; but great, aristocratic
+Virginia furnished only seven hundred more soldiers than little,
+democratic Rhode Island. New England furnished more than half the troops
+raised during the Revolution; and the great centres of aristocracy in
+the Middle and Southern States were the stronghold of Toryism during the
+war. Indeed, a glance at the map of the Eastern and Middle States
+reveals the fact that the headquarters of the 'peace party' in the
+Revolutionary and the present war are in precisely the same localities.
+The 'Copperhead' districts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are
+the old Tory districts of the Revolution. The Tories of that day, with
+the mass of the Southern aristocracy, tried to 'stop the war' which was
+to lay the foundations of the freedom of all men. The Tories of to-day
+are engaged in the same infamous enterprise, and their fate will be the
+same.
+
+Had the Slave Power been united in 1776, we should never have gained our
+independence. But it was divided. Every State was nominally a Slave
+State; but slaveholders were divided into two classes. The first was led
+by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other illustrious aristocrats,
+North and South; and, like the Liberal lords of Great Britain, threw
+their influence on the side of the people. This party, very strong in
+Virginia, very weak in the Carolinas, dragged the South through the war
+by the hair of its head; and compelled it to come into the Union. It
+also resolved to abolish the Slave Power, and succeeded in consecrating
+the whole Northwestern territory to freedom as early as 1790. The
+opposition party had its headquarters at Charleston, was treasonable or
+luke-warm during the war, and refused to come into the Union without
+guarantees for slavery.
+
+The result of the whole struggle was, that the people of the thirteen
+colonies, with the help of a portion of their aristocracy, severed the
+country from Great Britain, and established a Government by which they,
+the people, believed themselves able, in time, to control the whole
+Union, and secure personal liberty in every State. For 'the compromises
+of the Constitution' mean just this: that our National Government was a
+great arena on which aristocracy and democracy could have a free fight.
+If the aristocracy beat, that Government would be made as despotic as
+South Carolina; if the democracy triumphed, it would become as free as
+Massachusetts. That was what the people had never before achieved: _a
+free field to work for a Christian democracy_. God bless the sturdy
+people of New England and the Middle States for this! God bless George
+Washington and Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and the liberal gentlemen
+of the Old Dominion, for helping the people do it. They did not win the
+victory, as many have supposed; but they bravely helped to lead the
+people of the Free States to this great military and civil achievement.
+Virginia was richly paid for the service of her aristocracy. But history
+tells us who did the work, and how nobly it was done.
+
+The republic was now established, with a Constitution which might be
+made to uphold a democratic or an aristocratic government, as either
+party should triumph. The Slave Power, forced half reluctantly into the
+Union, now began to conspire to rule it for its own uses. All that was
+necessary, it thought, was to unite the aristocracy against the people.
+And this work was at once well begun. The first census was taken in
+1790, and the last in 1860. This period divides itself, historically,
+into two portions. The thirty years from 1780 may be regarded as the
+period of the _consolidation of the Slave Power, and its first distinct
+appearance as a great sectional aristocracy in 1820, in the struggle
+that resulted in the 'Missouri Compromise_.' The forty years succeeding
+1820 may be called the period of the _consolidation of freedom to resist
+this assault, and the final triumph of democracy in 1860, by the
+election of a President_.
+
+The first thirty years was a period of incessant activity by the slave
+aristocracy. It incurred a nominal loss in the abolition of slavery in
+eight Eastern and Middle States, and the consecration of the great
+Northwestern territory to freedom; out of which three great Free States
+had already been carved; making, in 1820, eleven Free States. But it had
+gained by the concentration of its power below the line of the Ohio and
+Pennsylvania boundary, the division of the territory belonging to the
+Carolinas, and the Louisiana purchase; whereby it had gained five new
+Slave States; making the number of Slave States equal to the
+Free--eleven. It put forward the liberal aristocracy of Virginia to
+occupy the Presidential chair during thirty-two of the thirty-six years
+between 1789 and 1825; thus compelling Virginia and Maryland to a firm
+alliance with itself. It had man[oe]uvred the country through a great
+political struggle and a foreign war, both of which were chiefly
+engineered to secure the consolidation of the slave aristocracy. In
+1820 its power was extended in eleven States, containing four hundred
+and twenty-four thousand square miles, with one hundred and seventy-nine
+thousand square miles of territory sure to come in as Slave States; and
+the remainder of the Louisiana purchase not secure to liberty. It had a
+white population only seven hundred thousand less, while its white and
+black population was a million more than all the Free States.
+
+The North was barely half as large in area of States: two hundred and
+seventy thousand square miles, with only one hundred thousand square
+miles in reserve of the territory dedicated to liberty. With an equality
+of representation in the Senate of the United States, and a firm hold of
+all the branches of the Government, the prospect of the oligarchy for
+success was brilliant. In every nation the aristocracy first gets
+possession, organizes first, and proceeds deliberately to seize and
+administer the government. The people are always unsuspicious, slow,
+late in organizing, and seem to blunder into success or be led to it by
+a Providence higher than themselves. In this Government the slave
+aristocracy first consolidated, and in 1820 appeared boldly on the
+arena, claiming the superiority, and threatening ruin to the republic in
+the event of the failure of their plans. It had managed so well that
+there was now no division in its ranks, and for the last forty years has
+moved forward in solid column to repeated assaults on liberty.
+
+The people, as usual, did not suspect the existence of this concentrated
+power till 1820. They made a brave militia fight then against the
+aristocracy, and compelled it to acknowledge a drawn battle by the
+admission of Maine to balance Missouri, and the establishment of a line
+of compromise, which would leave all territory north of 36 deg. 30'
+consecrated to freedom. The Slave Power submitted with anger, intending
+to break the bargain as soon as it was strong enough, and continued on
+its relentless struggle for power. It determined to gain possession of
+the Senate of the United States; make it a house of nobles; control
+through it the foreign policy, the Executive, and the Supreme Court;
+and, with this advantage, reckoned it could always manage the House of
+Representatives and govern the nation. The key to all the political
+policy of the Slave Power through these last forty years is this
+endeavor to capture the Senate of the United States, and hold it, by
+bringing in a superior _number_ of Slave States. So well did it play
+this card that, till 1850, it maintained an equality of senatorial
+representation, and, by the help of Northern allies and the superior
+political dexterity of the aristocracy, controlled our foreign policy;
+kept its own representatives in all the great courts of Europe; made
+peace or war at will; managed the Executive through a veto on his
+appointments; and endeavored to fill the Supreme Court with men in favor
+of its policy, while the House of Representatives never was able to pass
+a measure without its consent. Under the past forty years' reign of the
+Slave Power, the Senate of the United States has been a greater farce in
+the republic than the crown and House of Lords in the British empire.
+Indeed, so well did this aristocracy play its part, _that it was
+supposed by the whole world to be the American Government_; and the news
+that the people of the United States had refused, in 1860, to register
+its behests, was received abroad with the same astonishment and
+indignation as if there had been a revolt of the subjects of any
+European nation against their anointed rulers.
+
+But spite of these great advantages at the outset--spite of its
+incredible political activity and admirable concentration, the slave
+aristocracy was finally defeated by the people. How this was done is the
+most interesting narrative in modern history. Never has the intrinsic
+superiority of a democratic over an aristocratic order of society been
+so magnificently vindicated as during the last forty years of our
+national career. During that period the free portion of this Union has
+grown to an overwhelming superiority over the slave portion, and
+compelled the slaveholders to draw the sword to save themselves from
+material and providential destruction.
+
+This period of forty years may be regarded as that of the _consolidation
+of the people_. The first thirty years of it was the era of their
+_industrial and social consolidation_; the last ten years has been the
+period of their _political union against the Slave Power_.
+
+An aristocracy always exhibits the uttermost pitch of human policy in
+its career, and amazes and outwits society by its marvellous display of
+executive ability. But the people are always moved by great supernatural
+forces that are beyond their comprehension, often disowned or scorned by
+them, but which mould their destiny and lead them to a victory spite of
+themselves. The people always grow without conscious plan or method, and
+rarely know their own strength. But there are always a few great men who
+represent their destiny, and, often against their will, direct them in
+the path to liberty. History will record the names of three great men
+who, during the last forty years, have been the most notable figures in
+this consolidation of the people in this republic; three men that the
+implacable hatred of the Slave Power has singled out from all other
+Northern men as special objects of infamy; men who represent the
+industrial, moral, and political phases of the people's growth to
+supremacy. Each came when he was wanted, and faithfully did his work;
+and their history is the chronicle of this advance of liberty in the
+republic.
+
+The first of these men was De Witt Clinton, of New York. No Northern man
+so early discovered the deep game of the Slave Power as he. He was the
+ablest statesman of the North in the days when the aristocracy of the
+South was just effecting its consolidation. He was a prominent candidate
+for the Presidency, and was scornfully put down by the power that ruled
+at Richmond. The slaveholders knew him for their clear-headed enemy, and
+drove him out of the arena of national politics. Never was political
+defeat so auspicious. Cured of the political ambition of his youth, Mr.
+Clinton turned the energies of his massive genius to the _industrial
+consolidation of the North_. He saw that all future political triumph of
+liberty must rest on the triumph of free labor. He anticipated the
+coming greatness of the Northwest, and boldly devoted his life to the
+inauguration of that system of internal improvements which has made the
+Northern States the mighty, free industrial empire it now is. Within the
+period of ten years lying nearest 1820, the people, under the lead of
+Clinton and his associates, had brought into active operation the three
+great agencies of free labor--the steamer, the canal, the railroad;
+while our manufacturing industry dates from the same period.
+
+This was the providential movement of a great people, organizing a
+method of labor which should overthrow the American aristocracy. Of
+course the people did not know what all this meant; thousands of the men
+who were foremost in organizing Northern industry did not suspect the
+end; but De Witt Clinton knew. The wiseacres of the city of New York
+nicknamed his canal 'Clinton's Ditch.' It was the first ditch in that
+series of continental 'parallels' by which the people of the North have
+approached the citadel of the Slave Power. They have dug in those vast
+intrenchments for forty years, to such purpose that in 1860 the great
+guns of free labor commanded every plantation in the Union. Pardon them,
+then, O lieutenant-generals of the slavery forces, if they still think
+well of the spade that has dug their highway to power. The Northern
+spade is a slow machine--but it will yet shovel the slave aristocracy
+into the Gulf of Mexico as sure as God lives!
+
+Glance over this field of industrial and material growth in the free
+portion of the Union, as it appeared in 1860.
+
+At that time the Free States had increased to nineteen, while the Slave
+States were fifteen, containing eight hundred and seventy-five thousand
+square miles. The people had nine hundred and fifty thousand square
+miles organized into free-labor States, with eight vast Territories,
+containing one million square miles, an area equal to twenty-four States
+as large as New York. In this vast extent of States and Territories,
+including two thirds the land of the Union, there were not a hundred
+slaves. _The Government holds all those States and Territories to-day._
+
+Look at the position and value of these possessions of freedom. In 1850
+liberty secured the great State of California, and in 1860 the State of
+Kansas. These States insure the possession of the whole Pacific coast,
+the entire mineral wealth of the mountains, the Indian Territory, and
+the vast spaces of Northwestern Texas to freedom, and open Mexico to
+Northern occupation. In the East, freedom had already secured the best
+harbors for commerce; in the Northwest, the granary of the world; the
+inexhaustible mineral wealth of Lake Superior, and the navigation of
+thousands of miles upon the great inland seas that separate the republic
+from the Canadas. From the Northern Atlantic and the Pacific it
+commanded the trade of Europe and Asia. This region embraces the best
+climates of the continent for the habitation of a vigorous race of men,
+and contains all the elements of imperial power.
+
+Freedom had secured, in 1860, a population of twenty millions, while the
+Slave Power had reached but twelve millions, one third of whom were
+slaves. From 1850 to 1860 the Union _gained_ almost as much in
+population as the entire census of 1820; and of that gain the North
+secured forty-one and the South but twenty-seven per cent. The slave
+population increased but twenty-three per cent. At this rate of increase
+the year 1900 will see a population of one hundred millions in the
+Union, of whom nine millions will be negroes, and a vast majority of the
+white population located in territory now free. Between 1820 and 1860
+five million emigrants reenforced the Union, of which the North received
+the greater portion. Between the war of 1814 and 1860, Great Britain and
+Ireland sent to us more people than inhabited the thirteen States that
+formed the Union, and of this immigrant population there was an excess
+of nine hundred and fifty thousand _men_--a nation poured in upon the
+great, free North, to reenforce the people.
+
+Already was this increase of free population telling upon slave labor in
+Slave States. Even in the Gulf cities Sambo was fast receding before the
+brawny arms of Hans and Patrick. Northwestern Texan was becoming a new
+Germany. Western Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware were rapidly
+losing in slave labor; while along the border had grown up a line of ten
+cities in Slave States, containing six hundred thousand people, of whom
+less than ten thousand were slaves. This line of cities, from Wilmington
+Delaware, to St. Louis, Missouri, was becoming a great cordon of
+free-labor citadels; supported in the rear by another line of Free
+Border-State cities, stretching from Philadelphia to Leavenworth,
+containing nine hundred thousand; thus _massing a free population of one
+million five hundred thousand in border cities that overlooked the land
+of despotism_.
+
+Then consider the growth of free agriculture. In 1860 the South had a
+cotton and rice crop as her exclusive possession. Already the Northwest
+was encroaching upon her sugar cultivation. Against her agriculture,
+mainly supported by one great staple, which can also be cultivated all
+round the globe, the free North could oppose every variety of crop;
+several of greater value than the boasted cotton. In all the grains, in
+cattle and the products of the dairy, in hay, in fruits; in the superior
+cultivation of land; in the vastly superior value of land; in
+agricultural machinery, probably representing a labor force equal to all
+the slaves--the superiority of freedom was too evident for discussion.
+_The value of agricultural machinery in the Free States had trebled
+between 1850 and 1860_. The Homestead Law was the fit result of this
+vast advance of free labor, and has sealed the destiny of every present
+and future Territory of the Union.
+
+Then contemplate the vast expansion of manufacturing industry, of which
+nine tenths belong to the Free States. _In ten years from 1850 to 1860,
+this branch of labor had increased eighty-six per cent._, reaching the
+enormous sum of $2,000,000,000; $60 for every inhabitant of the Union. A
+million and a half of people were engaged as operatives therein,
+supporting nearly five millions--one sixth the whole population of the
+Union; while fully one third our population may be said to directly and
+indirectly live by manufactures.
+
+The increase of iron manufactures in ten years was forty-four per cent.;
+the coal mines reached a treble yield in ten years; $10,000,000, of
+clothing were produced in 1860. The lumber trade had increased
+sixty-four percent, in ten years, reaching $100,000,000. Flouring mills
+showed sixty-five per cent, increase, reaching $225,000,000; spirits,
+$24,000,000; cotton manufactures had increased seventy-six per cent, in
+ten years, reaching $115,000,000; woollens had increased sixty-seven per
+cent.; boots and shoes walked up to $76,000,000, and leather to
+$63,000,000. The fishermen of New England increased mightily. The gold
+of California, copper of the Northwest, the salt of New York and
+Michigan had reached colossal proportions. Whoever studies the
+manufacturing statistics of the North for the past ten years will be at
+no loss to know why the manufacturers of Great Britain are willing to
+sever the Slave States from the Union, to gain a customer it was thus
+supplying in 1860.
+
+Now add to this array of agriculture, manufactures, extent of territory,
+and excess of population, the superiority of the Free States in
+commerce. The tonnage of the Union was twenty-six millions in 1860, the
+fourth of which was the growth of the ten years previous. Out of the one
+thousand and seventy-one ships built in 1860, the 'nation' of South
+Carolina produced one steamer and one schooner! Contemplate the money
+power of the city of New York, the vast capital invested in trade, in
+banks, insurance, and the like, in the North. The slave aristocracy was
+becoming imprisoned in a vast web of financial dependence--a web that
+war and wholesale repudiation of debts alone could break through.
+
+In 1860 there were in the Union 30,- 600 miles of railroad, costing
+$1,134,- 452,909, four times the extent of 1850. In 1850 only one line
+of railroad connected the Atlantic with the Mississippi. Now, of the
+eight great railroad and canal routes connecting the sea coast with this
+valley, six run through the Free States; transportation on these avenues
+costs but one tenth the old methods. Governor Letcher declares the
+Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has 'abolitionized' Northern and Western
+Virginia, and the Southern rebellion has been especially savage on
+railroads. Whoever would understand one secret of the consolidation of
+the people should study the railroad map of the Northern States, and
+contrast it with the South. It was a fine tribute to the value of the
+railroad that the first use the people made of their new political
+supremacy in 1860 was to pass the bill for connecting the Atlantic and
+Pacific by the iron rail and the telegraphic wire.
+
+This vast advancement in free labor, from 1820 to 1850, was fitly closed
+in 1850 by the annexation of California to the roll of the Free States,
+securing to liberty the gold mines and the Pacific coast. It is
+impossible to comprehend all the consequences of this step. It was the
+decisive industrial triumph of the people over the slave aristocracy.
+The Slave Power went mad over the defeat, _and for the last ten years
+has virtually abandoned the rivalry of industries, and turned to
+violence_, breaking of compromises, forcible seizure of the ballot box,
+repudiation of debts, stealing of arms, and finally cruel war, as if
+lying and robbing, in the long run, could upset free and honest
+industry. After the loss of California and the Pacific coast, the
+struggle for the Territories was but a, preliminary skirmish of the war
+for the conquest and desolation of the Union. The people had _waged the
+battle of liberty with the gigantic agencies of material prosperity for
+forty years, and the aristocracy was completely in their power_.
+
+For this material superiority of the free-labor States inevitably inured
+to the advantage of liberty. In vain did every new Free State, year
+after year, vote with the Slave Power; in vain did every great railroad
+and manufacturing corporation of the North obey the political behests of
+the lords of the plantations; in vain was the mercantile aristocracy of
+all the great cities the fast friend of the slave aristocracy; and
+vainly did almost the entire immigrant population fall politically into
+its control. All this was as nothing _against the irresistible natural
+tendency of free labor_. The Irishman who voted against the negro was
+breaking his chain with every blow of his pick. The Wall-street banker,
+the great railroad king, the cotton manufacturer, who railed against
+abolitionism like mad, were condemning the slave aristocracy every day
+they lived. There is a divine law by which the work of freemen shall
+root out the work of slaves; and no law enacted by the will of Northern
+doughfaces could repeal this statute of nature. These Northern friends
+of the aristocracy supposed themselves to be helping their ambitious
+allies by their political support. But the slaveholders knew how
+fallacious was this aid. They saw that the North was gaining a huge
+superiority to the South; that the people were slowly consolidating;
+that when the free-labour interest did finally concentrate, it would
+carry every Northern interest with it, and, when the pinch came, no
+Northern party or statesman could or would help them do their will. They
+carefully sifted all offers of aid from such quarters, and having used
+every Northern interest and institution and party till it was squeezed
+dry of all its black blood, they turned their backs haughtily on the
+white sections of the Union, plundered friend and foe alike, and flew
+into civil war, out of spite and rage at the census of 1860; in other
+words, _declared war against the providence of God as manifested in the
+progress of free society_. They have fought well; at first, perhaps,
+better than we; but when General Lee 'flanks' the industrial decrees of
+the Almighty, and Stuart 'cuts the communications' between free labor
+and imperial power, they will destroy this republic--and not till then.
+
+But was this great material gain of the people to be accompanied by a
+corresponding spiritual advancement? _Was man to become the chief object
+of reverence in this wonderfully expanding industrial empire?_ If not,
+all this progress was deceptive, and nobody could predict how soon our
+very superiority should be turned to the advantage of that aristocracy
+which had perverted so many things in the republic.
+
+It could not be denied that the Free States were making wonderful
+strides, during these forty years, in mental cultivation and power. The
+free industry of the North was an education to the people, and nowhere
+has so much popular intelligence been carried into the business of life
+as here. This period also witnessed the organization of the free school
+everywhere outside of New England, its home; the daily press, the public
+lecture, the creation of an American literature, all Northern; the
+growth of all institutions of learning and means of intellectual and
+artistic cultivation unparalleled in any other age or land. No
+well-informed person could also deny the astonishing progress in
+furnishing the means of religious instruction, the multiplication of
+churches, great ecclesiastical organizations, and philanthropic leagues.
+Notwithstanding the apparent absorption of the North in its material
+prosperity, no people ever was so busy in furnishing itself with the
+means of spiritual improvement; and though a population of several
+millions of ignorant and superstitious foreigners was thrown in upon it
+during these eventful years, it came out at the end the most intelligent
+people, the best provided with the apparatus of religion, that was ever
+known.
+
+But there was one element yet wanting to assure the right usage of all
+this wealth of material, intellectual, and ecclesiastical power. This
+was what the slaveholding aristocracy saw at once to be the fatal omen
+for their cause, and nicknamed 'Abolitionism.' _Abolitionism, as
+recognized by the Slave Power, is nothing more nor less than the
+religious reverence for man and his natural rights._ This moral respect
+for the nature and rights of all men has always encountered the peculiar
+scorn of aristocracies, and no men have been so bitterly persecuted in
+history as those who represented the religious opposition to despotism.
+The Hebrew aristocracy in old Palestine called this sentiment 'atheism'
+in Jesus Christ, and crucified Him. The pagan aristocracy called it a
+'devilish superstition' in the early Christians, and slaughtered them
+like cattle. The priestly and civil absolutism of the sixteenth century
+called it 'fanaticism' in the Dutch and German reformers, and fought it
+eighty years with fire and rack and sword. The church and crown
+nicknamed it 'Puritanism,' and persecuted it till it turned and cut off
+the head of Charles the First, and secured religious liberty. The slave
+aristocracy stigmatized it 'Abolitionism,' and let loose upon it every
+infernal agency in its power.
+
+One great man, yet alive, but not yet recognized as he will be, was the
+representative of this religious reverence for the rights of man. Lloyd
+Garrison has been, for the last twenty-five years, the best-hated man in
+these Northern States, not because he failed to see just how a Union of
+Free and Slave States could endure; not because of any visionary theory
+of political action or the structure of society he cherished; but,
+strangely enough, because _he stood-up for man and his divine right to
+freedom_. This was what the aristocracy hated in him, and this is what,
+with inexpressible rage, it saw gaining in the North. It truly said that
+our education, our arts, our literature, our press, our churches, our
+benevolent organizations, our families, all that was best in Northern
+society, even our politics, were being consolidated by this
+'fanaticism,' Puritanism,' 'Abolitionism'--otherwise, by _reverence for
+man and his right to freedom_.
+
+It grew, however, almost as fast as the material power of the
+North--this moral conviction of the divine right of man to liberty; grew
+so fast, that in 1860, South Carolina glanced over the November election
+returns, saw the name of Abraham Lincoln at the head, shrieked, '_The
+North is abolitionized!_' and rushed out of the Union, with ten other
+Slave States at her heels, while four more were held back by the strong
+arm of the national power. The North is not yet 'abolitionized,' but
+every volley fired at liberty by the Slave Power these last three years,
+has killed a lover of slavery, and made an Abolitionist; as the juggler
+fires his pistol at your old black hat, and, when the smoke clears up, a
+white dove flutters in its place. If the Slave Power shoots at us long
+enough, we shall all become Abolitionists, and all learn to love our
+fellow man and protect him in the enjoyment of every right given him by
+God!
+
+Thus had the Free States, the people's part of the Union, gone up
+steadily to overshadowing material, intellectual, moral power. But up to
+1850 this mighty growth had got no fit expression in State or national
+politics. All the great parties had mildly tried to remonstrate with the
+slave aristocracy, but quickly recoiled as from the mouth of a furnace.
+A few attempts had been made to organize a party for freedom, but
+nothing could gain foothold at Washington. A few noble men had lifted
+their voices against the rampant tyranny of the slaveholders: chief
+among these was John Quincy Adams, the John the Baptist crying in the
+desert of American partisan politics the coming of the kingdom of
+Heaven! But when the people had come up to a consciousness of their
+consolidated power, and the reverence for human right was changing and
+polarizing every Northern institution--in the fierce struggle that
+ushered in and succeeded the admission of California, between 1848 and
+1856--this Northern superiority culminated in a great political movement
+against slavery. _This movement assumed a double form-positive, in the
+assertion that the Slave Power should be arrested; negative, in the
+assertion that the people should have their own way with it._ The
+Republican party said: _The slave aristocracy shall go no farther._ The
+'Popular Sovereignty' party, or Douglas Democracy, said: _The people
+shall do what they choose about this matter._ Now the people were
+already the superior power in the republic, and were rapidly growing to
+hate the Slave Power; so the slaveholders, saw that the Northern
+Democracy, with their war cry of _popular sovereignty_, might in time be
+just as dangerous to them as their more open enemies. They repudiated
+both forms of Northern politics, and tied the executive, under James
+Buchanan, and the Supreme Court, under Judge Taney, to their dogma: _The
+right of the aristocracy is supreme. Slavery, not liberty, is the law of
+the republic._
+
+The great leaders of these Northern parties were Stephen H. Douglas and
+William H. Seward. Mr. Douglas was the best practical politician,
+popular debater, and magnetizer of the masses, the North has yet
+produced. _He was the representative of the blind power of the North_,
+and stood up all his life, in his better hours, for the right of the
+people to make the republic what they would. But the representative
+statesman of the era is the Secretary of State. The whole career of Mr.
+Seward is so interwoven with the history of the political consolidation
+of the people against the Slave Power, that the two must be studied
+together to be understood. Nowhere so clearly and eloquently as in the
+pages of this great philosophical statesman can be read the rapid growth
+of that political movement that in twelve years captured every Free
+State, placed a President in the chair, and then, with a splendid
+generosity, invited the whole loyal people to unite in a party of the
+Union, _knowing that henceforth the Union meant the people and liberty
+against the aristocracy and slavery_. And only in the light of this view
+can the course of this man and his great seeming opponent, but real
+associate, be fitly displayed. _Douglas had taught the people of the
+North that their will should be the law of the republic. Seward had told
+them that will should be in accordance with the 'higher law' of justice
+and freedom._ Like men fighting in the dark, they supposed themselves
+each other's enemies, while they were only commanders of the front and
+rear of the army of the people. Both appeared on the national arena in
+the struggle of 1850, and soon strode to the first place. The Slave
+Power repudiated Seward and his 'higher law' of justice and liberty at
+once. They tolerated Douglas and his 'popular sovereignty ' ten years
+longer, when they found it even a more dangerous heresy, and threw him
+overboard.
+
+In the election of 1860 there were but two parties--the two wings of the
+people's army, under the patriots Lincoln and Douglas; the two wings of
+the slave host, under the traitors Breckinridge and Bell. Of course the
+people triumphed. Had Douglas been elected instead of Lincoln, the Slave
+Power would not have stayed in the Union one hour longer. _It was not
+Lincoln, but the political supremacy of the people they resisted._ The
+Free States had at last consolidated, never to recede, and that was
+enough. Henceforth no party could live in the North that espoused the
+cause of this rebel aristocracy. Whoever was Governor or President,
+Democrat, Republican, Union, what not, the people's party was henceforth
+supreme, and the aristocracy, with all its works of darkness, was second
+best.
+
+The political victory of 1860 was virtually complete. For the first time
+in eighty years had the people concentrated against the Slave Power. The
+executive was gained, placing the army, navy, appointments, and
+patronage in the hands of the President, the people's representative by
+birth and choice. The North had a majority of eight in the Senate and
+sixty-five in the House of Representatives, insuring a control of the
+foreign policy and the financial affairs of the republic; while the
+Supreme Court, the last bulwark of despotism, could be reconstructed in
+the interest of the Constitution. It is true the people did not
+appreciate the magnitude of the victory, or realize what it implied.
+They would probably have made no special use of it at once, and the
+aristocracy might have outwitted them again, as they had for three
+quarters of a century past. But the slaveholders knew that now was just
+the time to strike. If they waited till the people understood themselves
+better, and learned how to administer the Government for liberty, it
+would be too late. They still had possession of the executive, with all
+the departments, the Supreme Court, army, and navy, for four precious
+months. This was improved in inflicting as much damage on the Government
+as possible, and organizing a confederacy of revolted States. The people
+did not believe they would fight, and offered them various compromises,
+_everything except the thing they desired--unlimited power to control
+the republic_. The aristocracy knew that no compromises would do them
+good which proposed anything less than a reconstruction of the Union
+which would insure their perpetual supremacy. They even doubted if this
+could be effectually accomplished in a peaceful way. The people must
+first be subdued by arms, their Union destroyed, and brought to the
+verge of anarchy by this mighty power, backed by the whole despotism of
+Europe; then might they be compelled to accept such terms as it chose to
+dictate. It waited no longer than was necessary to complete its
+preparations, and opened ed its guns in Charleston harbor. When the
+smoke of that cannonade drifted away, the people beheld with
+consternation the Slave Powers arrayed in arms, from Baltimore and St.
+Louis to New Orleans and the Rio Grande, advancing to seize their
+capital and overthrow the republic.
+
+Having conquered the aristocracy by its industry, education, religion,
+and politics--driven it from every position on the great field of
+American society in an era of peace--the people slowly awoke to the
+conviction that they must now conquer it on the field of arms. They were
+slow to come to that conviction. Their ablest leaders were not
+war-statesmen, and did not comprehend at once the full meaning of the
+war. They called it a 'conspiracy,' a 'rebellion,' an 'insurrection,' a
+'summer madness,' anything but what it was--_the American stave
+aristocracy in arms to subdue the people of the United States with every
+other aristocracy on earth wishing it success_. But the people did not
+refuse the challenge. In April, 1861, they rushed to the capital, saved
+their Government from immediate capture or dispersion, and then began to
+prepare, after their way, for--they hardly knew what--to suppress a riot
+or wage a civil war.
+
+In every such conflict as this the aristocracy has a great advantage,
+especially if it can choose its own time to begin the war. Never was an
+oligarchy more favored in its preparations than ours. Since 1820 it had
+contemplated and prepared for this very hour. It had almost unlimited
+control over fifteen States of the Union. Society was constructed in all
+these States on a military basis, the laboring class being held in place
+by the power of the sword. An aristocracy is always preceded by military
+ambition; for all subordinate orders of its people have acquired the
+habit of respect for rank and implicit obedience to superiors, so
+essential to success in war. When the war broke out, the Slave Power was
+ready. Its arms and ammunition and forts were stolen; its military
+organizations had been perfected in secret societies; its generals were
+selected--its president perhaps the best general of all; its military
+surveys were made, every Southern State mapped, and every strategical
+point marked; its subordinate officers, in which the real efficiency of
+an army consists, had been educated in military schools kept by such
+teachers as Hill and Stonewall Jackson. It had a full crop of cotton as
+a basis for finance. Its government was practically such a despotism as
+does not exist in the world. At the sound of the first gun in
+Charleston, the aristocracy sprang to arms; in a fortnight every
+strategical point in fifteen States was practically in its possession,
+and Washington tottered to its fall.
+
+The people, as the people always are, were unprepared for war. Their
+entire energies had been concentrated for forty years in organizing the
+gigantic victory of peace which they had just achieved. When they woke
+up to the idea that there was yet another battle to be fought before the
+aristocracy would subside, they _began to learn the art of war_. And
+never did the people begin a great war so unprepared. The people of
+Europe have always had military traditions and cultivation to fall back
+upon in their civil wars. The North had no military traditions later
+than the Revolution, for no war since that day had really called forth
+their hearty efforts. Three generations of peace had destroyed even
+respect for war as an employment fit for civilized men. There were not
+ten thousand trained soldiers in all the nineteen States in April, 1861.
+There were not good arms to furnish fifty thousand troops in the
+possession of the National or loyal State Governments. Most of the
+ablest military men of the North had left the army, and were engaged in
+peaceful occupations. Halleck was in the law; McClellan, Burnside,
+Banks, on the railroad; Mitchel and Sigel teaching schoolboys; Hooker,
+Kearny, McCall, Dix, retired gentlemen; Fremont digging gold; Rosecrans
+manufacturing oil, and Grant in a tanyard; and so on to the end of the
+chapter; while Scott, the patriot hero, who was but once defeated in
+fifty years' service, was passing over into the helplessness of old age.
+Of course such a people did not realize the value of military education,
+and fell into the natural delusion that a multitude of men carrying guns
+and wearing blue coats is an army; and any 'smart man' can make a
+colonel in three months. There was not even a corporal in the Cabinet,
+and Mr, Lincoln's military exploits were confined to one campaign, in
+the war of 1812, and one challenge to fight a duel. There were not ten
+Northern men in Congress who could take a company into action. In short,
+we had the art of war to learn; even did not know it was necessary to
+learn to fight as to do anything else; especially to fight against an
+aristocracy that had been studying war for forty years.
+
+For more than three years have the people of the United States waged
+this gigantic war thus precipitated upon them by their aristocracy to
+arrest the irresistible growth of modern society in the republic. Every
+year has been a period of great success, though our peaceful population,
+unacquainted with war, and often ignorant of the vast issues of this
+conflict, have often inclined to despondency. Of course the aristocracy
+fought best, at first, as every aristocracy in the world has done. With
+half our number of better disciplined troops, better commanded and
+man[oe]uvred, and the great advantage of interior lines, supported by
+railroad communications, and possessing in Virginia, perhaps, the most
+defensible region in the Union, they held our Army of the Potomac at bay
+for two years; have thrice overrun Maryland and the Pennsylvania border,
+and yet hold their fortified capital; while every step of our victorious
+progress in the Southwest has been bitterly contested. Yet this war of
+martial forces has been strangely like the long, varied war of material,
+moral, and political forces of which it is the logical sequel.
+
+The Union navy won the earliest laurels in the war. The navy has been
+the right arm of the people in all ages. The Athenian navy repelled the
+invasion of Greece by the Persian empire. Antony, Pompey, Caesar, the
+people's leaders in Rome, built up their youthful power upon the sea.
+The Dutch and English navies saved religious and civil liberty in the
+sixteenth century; and all the constitutional Governments that now exist
+in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United
+States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the
+seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the
+continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of
+defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval
+power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active
+navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over
+the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in
+the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred
+vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of
+naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever
+known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port
+Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all
+its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of
+Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia,
+seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed
+every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we
+are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more
+will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect
+the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or
+their friends abroad.
+
+But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently
+behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was
+only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending
+against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it
+wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the
+capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the
+campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have
+conquered from the aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an
+area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of
+people--a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave
+State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really
+put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the
+national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and
+Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have
+never lost a decisive battle, we have saved all the Territories of the
+United States, cut the 'Confederacy' in two equal parts, holding the
+western division at our mercy, opened the Mississippi and all its
+tributaries, and crowded the rebellion into the five States nearest the
+Atlantic coast. In the east we have fought a score of battles with the
+most formidable army ever marshalled on this continent, composed of the
+flower of the rebel soldiery led by their best generalship, and, spite
+of frequent repulses, have forced it from the Potomac and below the
+Rappahannock to the James, away from the smell of salt water, holding
+firmly every seaport from Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, and
+a belt of land and water commanding the approach to the interior of
+every Atlantic State. The military force of the rebellion is rapidly
+being crowded into one army, not exceeding two hundred and fifty
+thousand men, against which the mighty power of the Union can be
+marshalled in overwhelming array. I know well enough that the decisive
+moment will really come when we confront that desperate and veteran
+host, on which the fate of aristocratic government upon this continent
+depends. But we shall then have a great army of veterans, marshalled
+under commanders fit to lead them in the name of liberty and the people.
+
+It is not strange it has taken us three years to find who can fight
+among us. The Germans fought fifty years against religious despotism
+before they found Gustavus Adolphus to lead them to victory. The English
+fought ten years before Cromwell took command of his Ironsides. The
+French blundered ten years before the 'little corporal' led the army of
+the republic over the Alps to dethrone half the monarchs of Europe. The
+people had but one great general in the Revolutionary War. Until 1860
+the aristocracy had furnished the only great American commander. But
+great generals have now appeared among the people; and if we fight
+stoutly and treat men fairly, our commander will appear when his army of
+veterans is ready.
+
+The aristocracy at first moved armies faster than the people, for the
+same reason that the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Arabs, the Indians, and
+all semi-barbarians move more rapidly in war than a civilized people. A
+semi-barbarous oligarchy fights because it loves war; a civilized people
+fights to _establish civilization and peace_. The Southern army carries
+little along, lives on the food and wears the dress of the semi-savage,
+and overruns vast spaces, leaving a smoking desolation and a ruined
+society. The Northern army moves slowly, because it carries American
+civilization in its knapsack and baggage wagons, organizes republican
+society as it goes, and prepares to hold for liberty all it has gained.
+The people's army has paved the way for liberty and a democratic order
+of society over two hundred thousand square miles, among four millions
+of people, in three years. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Beaufort,
+Alexandria, every slave city in our possession, is being made over into
+a free city.
+
+The army goes slow because it is only the people's pioneer to level the
+mountains and fill up the valleys, and construct the highway of liberty
+from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The Secretary of State has well
+said: '_The war means the dissolution of slave society._' It was entered
+into with the distinct understanding that it was the last expedient to
+save the negro oligarchy from ruin, and every day it goes on its
+thundering course it more emphatically pronounces its doom. The war for
+the Union is the people's final contest for liberty, a contest in which
+they will be victorious, as in the strife of industry, morals, and
+politics. The people, like John Brown's soul, are 'marching on' to
+dissolve the slave oligarchy and establish democracy. The people now
+possess three fourths the territory, population, and wealth of the
+republic. There are yet some six million black and white people in the
+South to rescue from their masters, who now use them against us. They
+are being prepared for Union with us by this war. The poor white man
+will be made better, more intelligent, more ambitious even, by service
+in the rebel army, and on the return of peace will become the small
+farmer of a free soil. The black men will be raised, in due time made
+freemen, and start as a free peasantry on a new career. A hundred
+thousand slaveholders, with their families, not more than one million of
+people in all, will hate the Union permanently. They will be defeated,
+we hope and believe, and disorganized as a social and political power,
+and the people rule in every State they have cursed by their ambition
+for the last fifty years.
+
+We do not prophesy just when or how the people will triumph. The
+victory, we believe, will come; but whether all at once, or through
+temporary revulsions of purpose and alternate truce and war, whether
+finished by arms or yet cast again into the arena of polities, whether
+by occupying all this three millions of square miles of territory or
+gaining on despotism year by year, nobody knows. The Slave Power has not
+yet played its trump card. It has a hundred devilish resources yet to
+foil us. It may yet try to use the negroes it still holds against us by
+emancipation. It may yet drag us into a war with Europe, and Saratoga
+and Lake Erie and Plattsburg, and Long Island and Trenton and Bunker
+Hill, and Detroit and New Orleans may yet be fought over again. But we
+have seen how, for the last forty years, the people of the United States
+have strode on toward supremacy, led by a Power they did not always
+recognize, and sometimes scorned, but led to victory spite of
+themselves.
+
+There has indeed been a Divine Intelligence guiding the destiny of our
+republic by the 'higher law' of the progress of free society toward a
+Christian democracy. We do not think the Peace Party will be able to
+abolish that 'higher law,' as certain of our politicians expect. We
+believe God Almighty is shaping a free and exalted civilized nation out
+of this republic, by a law of progress which we did not make and cannot
+repeal. We may postpone that nation by our folly and sins, but it must
+be made. Through labor and education, and religion and arts, and
+politics and war, 'it marches' on to supremacy--_the people's nation_.
+And when it is established it will be the controlling nation of this
+continent, one of the firmest powers on the earth, the terror of every
+aristocracy, and the joy and hope of every people on the round globe.
+
+
+
+
+THE UNDIVINE COMEDY-A POLISH DRAMA.
+
+Dedicated to Mary
+
+
+PART III.
+
+     'Il fut administe, parceque le niais demandait un pretre, puis
+     pende a la satisfaction generale,' etc, etc.--_Rapport du citoyen
+     Gaillot, commissaire de la sixieme chambre, an III., 5 prairial._
+
+     'The sacraments were administered to him, because the fool demanded
+     a priest; he was hung to the general satisfaction.'--_Report of
+     citizen Gaillot, commissary of the sixth session, 3d year, 5th
+     prairial._
+
+
+A song! a new song!
+
+Who will begin it? Who will end it?
+
+Give me the Past, clad in steel, barbed with iron, floating in knightly
+plumes! With magic power I would invoke before you gothic towers and
+castellated turrets, bristling barbacans and mighty arches, baronial
+halls and clustered shafts; I would throw around you the giant shadows
+of vaulted domes and of revered cathedrals: but it may not be; all that
+is with the Past: the Past is never to return!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Speak, whosoever thou mayst be, and tell me in what thou believest! It
+is easier to lose thy life than to invent a faith; to awaken any belief
+in it!
+
+Shame upon you all, great and small, for all things pursue their own
+course in defiance of your schemes! You may be mean and wretched,
+without hearts and without brains, yet the world hastens to its allotted
+destiny; it hurries you on whether you will or no, throws you in the
+dust, tosses you into wild confusion, or whirls you in resistless
+circles, which cease not until they grow into dances of Death! But the
+world rolls on--on; clouds and storms arise and vanish; then it grows
+slippery--new couples join the dance of Death--they totter--fall--lost
+in an abyss of blood--for it is slippery-blood-human blood is gushing
+everywhere, as if the path to peace led through a charnel house!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Behold the crowds of people thronging the gates of the cities, the
+hills, the valleys, and resting beneath the shadows of the trees! Tents
+are spread about, long boards are placed on the trunks of fallen trees
+or on pikes and sticks to serve as tables; they are covered with meat
+and drink, the full cups pass from hand to hand, and, as they touch the
+eager mouth, threats, oaths, and curses press forth from the hot lips.
+Faster and faster fly the cups from hand to hand, beaded, bubbling,
+glittering, always filling, striking, tinkling, ringing, as they circle
+among the millions: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup of drunkenness and
+joy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How fiercely they are agitated; how impatiently they wait! They murmur,
+they break into riotous noise!
+
+Poor wretches! scarcely covered with their miserable rags, the seal of
+weary labors deeply stamped upon their sunburnt faces set with uncombed,
+bristling hair, the sweat starting from their rugged brows, their strong
+and horny hands armed with scythes, axes, hammers, hatchets, spades!
+
+Look at that broad youth with the pickaxe; at the slight one with the
+sword. Here is one who holds aloft a glittering pike; another who
+brandishes a massive club with his brawny arm! There under the willows a
+boy crams cherries into his mouth with the one hand, and with the other
+punches the tree with a long, sharp awl. Women are also there, wives,
+mothers, daughters, poor and hungry as the men, Not a single trace of
+womanly beauty, of healthful freshness upon them; their hair is
+disordered and sprinkled with the dust of the highways, their tawny
+bodies scarcely covered with unsightly rags, their gloomy eyes seem
+fading into their sockets, only half open as if gluing together in very
+weariness: but they will soon be quickened, for the full cup flies from
+lip to lip, they quaff long draughts: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup
+of drunkenness and joy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hark! a noise and rustling among the masses! Is it joy, or is it grief?
+Who can read the meaning of a thing so monstrously multiform!
+
+A man arrives, mounts a table, harangues and sways the multitude. His
+voice drags and grates upon the ear, but hacks itself into sharp, strong
+words, clearly heard and easily understood; his gestures are slow and
+light, accompanying his words as music, song. His brow is high and
+strong, his head is entirely bald; thought has uprooted its last hair.
+His skin is dull and tawny, the blood never tinges its dingy pallor, no
+emotion ever paints its secrets there, yellow wrinkles form and cross
+between the bones and muscles of his face, and a dark beard, like a
+black wreath, encircles it from temple to temple. He fastens a steady
+gaze upon his hearers, no doubt or hesitation ever clouds his clear,
+cold eye. When he raises his arm and stretches it out toward the people,
+they bow before him, as if to receive, prostrate, the blessing of a
+_great intellect_, not that of a _great heart_! Down, down with the
+great hearts! Away, away with old prejudices! Hurrah! hurrah! for the
+words of consolation! Hurrah for the license to murder!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This man is the idol of the people, their passion, the ruler of their
+souls, the stimulator of their enthusiasm. He promises them bread and
+money, and their cries rise like the rushing of a storm, widening and
+deepening in every direction: 'Long live Pancratius! Hurrah! Bread and
+money! Bread for us, our wives, our children! Hurrah! hurrah!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the feet of the speaker, leaning against the table on which he
+stands, rests his friend, companion, and disciple. His eye is dark and
+oriental, shadowed by long and gloomy lashes, his arms hang down, his
+limbs bend under him, his body is badly formed and distorted, his mouth
+is sensual and voluptuous, his expression is sharp and malicious, his
+fingers are laden with rings of gold--he joins the tumult, crying with a
+rough, hoarse voice: 'Long live Pancratius!' The speaker looks at him
+carelessly for a moment, and says: 'Citizen, Baptized, hand me a
+handkerchief!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meantime the uproar continues; the cries become more and more
+tumultuous: 'Bread for us! Bread! bread! Long live Pancratius! Death to
+the nobles! to the merchants! to the rich! Bread! bread! Bread and
+blood! Hurrah! hurrah!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A tabernacle. Lamps. An open book lies on a table. Baptized Jews.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. My wretched brethren; my revenge-seeking, beloved
+brethren! let us suck nourishment from the pages of the Talmud, as from
+the breast of our mother; it is the breast of life from which strength
+and honey flow for us, bitterness and poison for our enemies.
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Jehovah is our God, and ours alone; therefore
+has He scattered us in every land!
+
+Like the coiled folds of an enormous serpent, He has wreathed us
+everywhere round and through the adorers of the cross; our lithe and
+subtile rings pass round and through our foolish, proud, unclean
+rulers.
+
+Let us thrice spew them forth to destruction! Threefold curses light
+upon them!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Rejoice, my brethren! the Cross of our Great Enemy is
+already more than half hewn down; it is rotting to its fall; it is only
+standing on a root of blood: if it once plunge into the abyss it will
+never rise again. Hitherto the nobles have been its sole defence, but
+they are ours! ours!
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Our work, our long, long work of centuries, our
+sad, ardent, painful work is almost done!
+
+Death to the nobles--let us thrice spew them forth to destruction!
+Threefold curses light upon them!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The might of Israel shall be built upon a liberty without
+law or order, upon a slaughter without end, upon the _pride_ of the
+nobility, the _folly_ of the masses. The nobles are almost destroyed; we
+must drive the few still left into the abyss of death, and scatter over
+their livid corpses the ruins of the shattered cross in which they
+trusted!
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. The cross is now our holy symbol; the water of
+baptism has reunited us with men; the scorning repose upon the love of
+the scorned!
+
+The freedom of men is our cry; the welfare of the people our aim; ha!
+ha! the eons of Christ trust the sons of Caiaphas!
+
+Centuries ago our fathers tortured our Great Enemy to death; we will
+again torture him to death this very day--but He will never rise more
+from the grave which we prepare for Him!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Yet a little space, a little time, a few drops of poison,
+and the whole world will be our own, my brethren!
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Jehovah is the God of Israel, and of it alone.
+
+Let us thrice spew forth the nations to destruction! Threefold curses
+light upon them!
+
+  Knocking is heard at the door.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Take up your work, brethren! And thou, Holy Book, away
+from sight--no unclean look shall soil thy spotless leaves! Who is
+there?
+
+  Hides the Talmud.
+
+VOICE (_without_). A friend. Open in the name of freedom.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Quick to your hammers and looms, my brethren!
+
+  He opens the door.
+
+  Enter Leonard.
+
+LEONARD. Well done, citizens. You watch, I see, and whet your swords for
+to-morrow.--(_Approaching one of the men:_) What are you making here in
+this corner?
+
+ONE OF THE BAPTIZED. Ropes.
+
+LEONARD. You are right, citizen, for he who falls not by iron must hang!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Citizen Leonard, is the thing really to come off
+to-morrow?
+
+LEONARD. He who thinks, feels, and acts with the most force among us,
+has sent me to you to appoint an interview. He will himself answer your
+question.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. I go to meet him. Brethren, remain at work. Look well to
+them, citizen Yankel.
+
+  Exit with Leonard.
+
+CHORUS OF BAPTIZED JEWS. Ye ropes and daggers, ye clubs and bills, the
+works of our hands, ye wilt go forth to destroy them!
+
+The people will kill the nobles upon the plains, will hang them in the
+forests, and then, having none to defend them, we will kill and hang the
+people! The Despised will arise in their anger, will array themselves in
+the might of Jehovah: His Word is Redemption and Love for His people
+Israel, but scorn and fury for their enemies!
+
+Let us thrice spew them forth to destruction: threefold curses fall upon
+them!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  A tent. A profusion of flasks, cups, and
+  flagons. Pancratius alone.
+
+PANCRATIUS. The mob howled in applause but a moment ago, shouted in loud
+hurrahs at every word I uttered. But is there a single man among them
+all who really understands my ideas, or who comprehends the end and aim
+of that path upon which we have entered, or where the reforms will
+terminate which have been so loudly inaugurated within the last hour?
+'Ah! fervidum imitatorum pecus!'
+
+  Enter Leonard and the Baptized Jew.
+
+Do you know Count Henry?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. I know him well by sight, great citizen, but I am not
+personally acquainted with him. I remember once when I was approaching
+the Lord's Supper, he cried to me, '_Out of the way!_' and looked down
+upon me with the arrogant look peculiar to the nobles--for which I vowed
+him a rope in my soul.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Prepare to visit him early to-morrow morning, and announce
+to him that it is my wish to confer with him alone.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. How many men will you send with me on this embassy? I do
+not think it would be safe to undertake it without a guard.
+
+PANCRATIUS. You must go alone, my name will be sufficient guard, and the
+gallows on which you hung the baron yesterday, your shield.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Woe is me!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Tell him I will visit him to-morrow night.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. And if he should put me in chains or order me to be hung?
+
+PANCRATIUS. You would die a martyr for the freedom of the people!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. I will sacrifice all for the freedom of the
+people.--(_Aside_.) Woe is me!--(_Aloud._) Good night, citizen.
+
+  Exit the Baptized.
+
+LEONARD. Pancratius, why this delay, these half measures, these
+contracts, this strange interview? When I swore to honor and obey you,
+it was because I believed you to be a hero of extremes, an eagle flying
+even in the face of the sun directly to its aim; a brave man ready to
+venture all upon the cast of a die.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Silence, child!
+
+LEONARD. Everything is ready; the baptized Jews have forged arms and
+woven ropes; the masses clamor for immediate orders. Speak but the word
+now, and the electric sparks will fly, the millions flash into forked
+lightnings, kindle into flame, and consume our enemies!
+
+PANCRATIUS. You are young, and the blood mounts rapidly into your brain;
+but will the hour of combat find you more resolute than myself?
+
+LEONARD. Think well what you are doing. The nobles, weak and exhausted,
+have fled for refuge to the famous fortress of the Holy Trinity,[1] and
+await our arrival, as men wait the knife of the guillotine.
+
+[Footnote 1: A renowned fort in Polish history. It stood on the old
+battlefield between Turkey and Poland, between Europe and Asia.]
+
+Forward, citizen, attack them without delay, and it is over with them
+forever!
+
+PANCRATIUS. It can make no difference; they have lost the old energy of
+their caste in luxury and idleness. To-morrow or the next day they must
+fall, what matter which?
+
+LEONARD. What and whom do you fear, and why do you delay?
+
+PANCRATIUS. I fear nothing. I act but in accordance with my own will.
+
+LEONARD. And am I to trust it blindly?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Yes. Blindly.
+
+LEONARD. You may betray us, citizen!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Betrayal rings forever from your lips like the refrain of an
+old song.
+
+But hush! not so loud--if any one should hear us ...
+
+LEONARD. There are no spies here; and what if some one should hear us?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Nothing; only five balls in your heart for having ventured
+to raise your voice a tone too high in my presence. (_Approaching close
+to him_.) Leonard, trust me, and be tranquil!
+
+LEONARD. I confess I have been too hasty, but I fear no punishment. If
+my death could help the cause of the down-trodden masses, I would
+cheerfully die.
+
+PANCRATIUS. You are full of life, hope, faith. Happiest of men, I will
+not rob you of the bliss of existence.
+
+LEONARD. What do you say, citizen?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Think more; speak less; the time will come when you will
+fully understand me!
+
+Have you collected the provisions for the carousal of the millions?
+
+LEONARD. They have all been sent to the arsenal under guard.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Has the contribution from the shoemakers been received?
+
+LEONARD. It has. Every one gave with the greatest eagerness; it amounts
+to a hundred thousand.
+
+PANCRATIUS. They must all be invited to a general festival to-morrow.
+
+Have you heard nothing of Count Henry?
+
+LEONARD. I despise the nobles too deeply to credit what I hear of him.
+The dying race have no energy left; it is impossible they should dare or
+venture aught.
+
+PANCRATIUS. And yet it is true that he is collecting and training his
+serfs and peasants, and, confiding in their devotion and attachment to
+himself, intends leading them to the relief of the fortress of the Holy
+Trinity.
+
+LEONARD. Who can oppose us? _The ideas of our century stand incorporated
+in us!_
+
+PANCRATIUS. I am determined to see Count Henry, to gaze into his eyes,
+to read the very depths of his brave spirit, to win him over to the
+glorious cause of the people.
+
+LEONARD. An aristocrat, body and soul!
+
+PANCRATIUS. True: but also a Poet!
+
+Good night, Leonard, I would be alone.
+
+LEONARD. Have you forgiven me, citizen?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Sleep in peace: if I had not forgiven you, you would ere
+this have slept the eternal sleep.
+
+LEONARD. And will nothing take place to-morrow?
+
+PANCRATIUS. Good night, and pleasant dreams!
+
+  Leonard is retiring.
+
+Ho, Leonard!
+
+LEONARD. Citizen general?
+
+
+PANCRATIUS. You will accompany me day after morrow on my visit to Count
+Henry.
+
+LEONARD. I will obey.
+
+  Exit Leonard.
+
+PANCRATIUS. How is it that this man, Count Henry, still dares to resist
+and defy _me_, the ruler of millions? His forces will bear no comparison
+with mine; indeed he stands almost alone, although it is true that some
+hundred or two of peasants, confiding blindly in his word and clinging
+to him as the dog clings to his master, still cluster round him--but
+that is all folly, and can amount to nothing. Why, then, do I long to
+see him, long to win him to our side? Has my spirit for the first time
+encountered its equal? Can it progress no farther in the path in which
+he stands to oppose me? His resistance is the last obstacle to be
+overcome--he must be overthrown--and then? ... and then! ...
+
+O my cunning intellect! Canst thou not deceive _thyself_ as thou hast
+deceived others?...
+
+Shame! thou shouldst know thine own might! Thou art _thought_, the
+intelligence and reason of the people--the ruler of the masses--thou
+controllest the millions, so that their will and giant force is _one_
+with _thine_--all authority and government are incarnated and
+concentrated in thee alone--all that would be crime in others is in thee
+fame and glory--thou hast given name and place to unknown and obscure
+men--thou hast given faith and eloquence to beings who had been almost
+robbed of moral sentiment--thou hast created a new world in thine own
+image, and _art thyself its god_! and yet ... and yet ... thou art
+wandering in unknown wastes, and fearest to be lost thyself--to go
+astray!
+
+Thou knowest not thyself, nor of what thou art capable; thou rulest
+others, yet doubt'st thyself--thou knowest not what thou art--whither
+thou goest--nor whence thou earnest! No ... no.... Thou art sublime!
+
+  Sinks upon a chair in silent thought.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A forest, with a cleared hill in its midst, upon which stands a
+     gallows; huts, tents, watchfires, barrels, tables, and crowds of
+     men. The Man disguised in a dark cloak and red liberty cap, and
+     holding the Baptized Jew by the hand.
+
+THE MAN. Remember!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_in a whisper_). Upon my honor, I will lead your
+excellency aright, I will not betray you.
+
+THE MAN. Give but one suspicious wink, raise but a finger, and my bullet
+finds its way to your heart! You may readily imagine that I attach no
+great value to your life when I thus lightly risk my own.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Oh woe! You press my hand like a vice of steel. What is it
+you wish me to do?
+
+THE MAN. Appear to the crowd as if I were an acquaintance--treat me as a
+newly arrived friend.
+
+What kind of a dance is that?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The dance of a free people.
+
+     Men and woman dance, leap, and sing round the gallows.
+
+THEIR CHORUS. Bread! meat! work! wood in winter, rest in summer! Hurrah!
+hurrah!
+
+God had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+Kings had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+The nobles had no compassion upon us: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+We renounce God, kings, and nobles: Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!
+
+THE MAN (_to a maiden_). I am glad to see you look so gay, so blooming.
+
+THE MAIDEN. I am sure we have waited quite long enough for such a day as
+this! I have washed dishes and cleaned knives and forks all my life,
+without ever having heard a kind word spoken to me: it is high time I
+too should begin to eat, to dance, to make merry. Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+THE MAN. Dance, citizeness!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. For God's sake, be cautious, count! You may be recognized;
+let us go!
+
+THE MAN. If any one should recognize me, you are lost. We will mingle
+with the throng.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. A crowd of servants are sitting under the shade of this
+oak.
+
+THE MAN. Let us approach them.
+
+FIRST SERVANT. I have just killed my first master.
+
+SECOND SERVANT. And I am on the search for my baron. Your health,
+citizens!
+
+VALET DE CHAMBRE. In the sweat of our brows, in the depths of
+humiliation, licking the dust from the boots of our masters, and
+prostrate before them, we have yet always felt our rights as men: let us
+drink the health of our present society!
+
+CHORUS OF SERVANTS. Here's to the health of our citizen President! one
+of ourselves, he will lead us to glory!
+
+VALET DE CHAMBRE. Thanks, citizens, thanks!
+
+CHORUS OF SERVANTS. Out of dark kitchens, dressing rooms, and
+antechambers, our prisons of old, we rush together into freedom: Hurrah!
+
+We know the ridiculous follies, peevishness, and perversity of our
+masters; we have been behind the shows and shams of glittering halls:
+Hurrah!
+
+THE MAN. Whose voices are those I hear so harsh and wild from that
+little mound on our left?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The butchers are singing a chorus.
+
+CHORUS OF THE BUTCHERS. The cleaver and axe are our weapons; our life is
+in the slaughter house; we know the hue of blood, and care not if we
+kill _cattle_ or _nobles_!
+
+Children of blood and strength, we look with indifference upon the pale
+and weak; he who needs us, has us; we slaughter beeves for the nobles;
+the nobles for the people!
+
+The cleaver and axe are our arms; our life is in the slaughter house:
+Hurrah for the slaughter house! the slaughter house! the slaughter
+house! the slaughter house!
+
+THE MAN. Come! I like the next group better; honor and philosophy are at
+least named in it. Good evening, madame!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. It would be better if your excellency should say,
+'citizeness,' or 'woman of freedom.'
+
+WOMAN. What do you mean by the title, 'madame?' From whence did it come?
+Fie! fie! you smell of mould!
+
+THE MAN. Pardon my mistake!
+
+WOMAN. I am as free as you, I am a free woman; I give my love freely to
+the community, because they have acknowledged my right to lavish it
+where I will!
+
+THE MAN. And have the community given you for it these jewelled rings,
+these chains of violet amethysts?... O thrice beneficent community!
+
+THE WOMAN. No, the community did not give them to me; but at my
+emancipation I took these things secretly from the casket of my husband,
+for he was my enemy, the enemy of freedom, and had long held me
+enslaved!
+
+THE MAN. Citizeness, I wish you a most agreeable promenade!
+
+     They pass on.
+
+Who is this marvellous-looking warrior leaning upon a two-edged sword,
+with a death's head upon his cap, another upon his badge, and a third
+upon his breast? Is he not the famous Bianchetti, a condottiere employed
+by the people, as the condottieri once were by the kings and nobles?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Yes, it is Bianchetti; he has been with us for the last
+eight or ten days.
+
+THE MAN (_to Bianchetti_). What is General Bianchetti considering with
+so much attention?
+
+BIANCHETTI. Look through this opening in the woods, citizen, and you
+will see a castle upon a hill: with my glass I can see the walls,
+ramparts, bastions, etc.
+
+THE MAN. It will be hard to take, will it not?
+
+BIANCHETTI. Kings and devils! it can be surrounded by subterranean
+passages, undermined, and....
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_winking at Bianchetti_). Citizen general....
+
+THE MAN (_in a whisper to the Baptized_). Look under my cloak how the
+cock of my pistol is raised!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). Oh woe!--(_Aloud._) How do you mean to conduct
+the siege, citizen general?
+
+BIANCHETTI. Although you are my brother in freedom, you are not my
+confidant in strategy. After the capitulation of the castle, my plans
+will be made public.
+
+THE MAN (_to the Baptized_). Take my advice, Jew, and strike him dead,
+for such is the beginning of all aristocracies.
+
+A WEAVER. Curses! curses! curses!
+
+THE MAN. Poor fellow! what are you doing under this tree, and why do you
+look so pale and wild?
+
+THE WEAVER. Curses upon the merchants and manufacturers! All the best
+years of my life, years in which other men love maidens, meet in wide
+plains, or sail upon vast seas, with free air and open space around
+them, I have spent in a narrow, dark, gloomy room, chained like a galley
+slave to a silk loom!
+
+THE MAN. Take some food! Empty the full cup which you hold in your hand!
+
+WEAVER. I have not strength enough left to carry it to my lips! I am so
+tired; I could scarcely crawl up here--it is the day of freedom! but a
+day of freedom is not for me--it comes too late, too late!--(_He falls,
+and gasps out_:) Curses upon the manufacturers who make silks! upon the
+merchants, who buy them! upon the nobles, who wear them! Curses! curses!
+curses!
+
+     He writhes on the ground and dies.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. What a ghastly corpse!
+
+THE MAN. Baptized Jew, citizen, poltroon of freedom, look upon this
+lifeless head, shining in the blood-red rays of the setting sun! Where
+are now your words and promises; the equality, perfectibility, and
+universal happiness of the human race?
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). May you soon fall into a like ruin, and the dogs
+tear the flesh from your rotting corpse!--(_Aloud._) I beg that your
+excellency will now permit me to return, that I may give an account of
+my embassy!
+
+THE MAN. You may say that, believing you to be a spy, I forcibly
+detained you.--(_Looking around him._) The tumult and noise of the
+carousal is dying away behind us; before us there is nothing to be seen
+but fir and pine trees bathed in the crimson rays of sunset.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Clouds are gathering thick and fast over the tops of the
+trees: had you not better return to your people, Count Henry, who have
+been waiting so long for you in the vault of St. Ignatius?
+
+THE MAN. Thank you for your exceeding care of me, Sir Jew! But back! I
+will return and take another look at the festival of the citizens.
+
+VOICES (_under the trees_). The children of Ham bid good night to thee,
+old Sun!
+
+VOICE (_on the right_). Here's to thy health, old enemy! Thou hast long
+driven us on to unpaid work, and awaked us early to unheeded pain! Ha!
+ha! When thou risest upon us to-morrow, thou wilt find us with fish and
+flesh: now off to the devil, empty glass!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The bands of peasants are coming this way.
+
+THE MAN. You shall not leave me. Place yourself behind this tree trunk,
+and be silent!
+
+CHORUS OF PEASANTS. Forward, forward, under the white tents to meet our
+brethren! Forward, forward, under the green shade of the beeches, to
+rest, to sleep, to pleasant sunset greetings!
+
+Our maidens there await us; there await us our slaughtered oxen, the
+old teams of our ploughs!
+
+A VOICE. I am pulling and dragging him on with all my strength--now he
+turns and defends himself--down! down among the dead!
+
+VOICE OF THE DYING NOBLE. My children, pity! pity!
+
+SECOND VOICE. Chain me to your land and make me work without pay
+again--will you!
+
+THIRD VOICE. My only son fell under the blows of your lash, old lord;
+either wake him from the dead, or die to join him!
+
+FOURTH VOICE. The children of Ham drink thy health, old lord! they beg
+thee for forgiveness, lord!
+
+CHORUS OF PEASANTS (_passing on out of sight_). A vampire sucked our
+blood, and lived upon our strength:
+
+We have caught the vampire, he shall escape no more!
+
+By Satan, thou shalt hang as high as a great lord should!
+
+By Satan, thou shalt die high, high above us all!
+
+Death to the nobles; tyrants were they all!
+
+Drink, food, and rest for us; poor, weary, hungry, thirsty, naked!
+
+Your bodies shall lie like sheaves upon our fields; the ruins of your
+castles fly like chaff beneath the flail of the thresher!
+
+VOICE. The children of Ham will dance merrily round their bonfires!
+
+THE MAN. I cannot see the face of the murdered noble, they throng so
+thickly round him.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. It is in all probability a friend or relation of your
+excellency!
+
+THE MAN. I despise him, and hate you!
+
+Poetry will sweeten all this horror hereafter. Forward, Jew, forward!
+
+     They disappear among the trees.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Another part of the forest. A mound upon which watchfires are
+     burning. A procession of people bearing torches.
+
+THE MAN (_appearing among them with the Baptized_). These drooping
+branches have torn my liberty cap into tatters.
+
+Ha! what hell of flame is this throwing its crimson light into the
+gloom, and leaping through these heavily fringed walls of the forest?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. We have wandered from our way while seeking the pass of
+St. Ignatius. We must retrace our steps immediately, for this is the
+spot in which Leonard celebrates the solemnities of the New Faith!
+
+THE MAN. Forward, in the name of God! I must see these solemnities. Fear
+nothing, Jew, no one will recognize us.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Be prudent; our lives hang on a breath!
+
+THE MAN. What enormous ruins are these scattered around us! This
+ponderous pile must have lasted centuries before it fell!
+
+Pillars, pedestals, capitals, fallen arches--ha! I am treading upon the
+broken remnants of an escutcheon. Bas-reliefs of exquisite sculpture are
+scattered about upon the earth! Heavens! that is the sweet face of the
+Virgin Mother shining through the heart of the darkness! The light
+flickers, I can see it no more. Here are the slight-fluted shafts of a
+shrine, panes of colored glass with cherub heads, a carved railing of
+bronze, and now, in the light of yonder torch, I see the half of a
+monumental figure of a reclining knight in armor thrown upon the burnt
+and withered grass: Where am I, Jew?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. You are passing through the graveyard of the last church
+of the Old Faith; our people labored forty days and forty nights without
+intermission to destroy it; it seemed built for eternal ages.
+
+THE MAN. Your songs and hymns, ye new men, grate harshly on my ears!
+
+Dark forms are moving forward in every direction, from before us, behind
+us, and from either side; lights and shadows, driven to and fro by the
+wind, float like living spirits through the throng.
+
+A PASSER-BY. I greet you, citizens, in the name of freedom!
+
+SECOND PASSER-BY. I greet you in the name of the slaughter of the
+nobles!
+
+THIRD PASSER-BY. The priests chant the praise of freedom; why do you not
+hasten forward?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. We cannot resist the pressure of the throng; they drive us
+on from every side.
+
+THE MAN. Who is this young man standing in front of us, mounted upon the
+ruins of the shrine? Three flames burn beneath him, his face shines from
+the midst of fire and smoke, his voice rings like the shriek of a
+maniac; and his gestures are rapid and eager?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. That is Leonard, the inspired and enthusiastic prophet of
+freedom. Our priests, our philosophers, our poets, our artists, with
+their daughters and loved ones, are standing round him.
+
+THE MAN. Ha, I understand; your aristocracy! Point out to me the man who
+sent you to seek an interview with me.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. He is not here.
+
+LEONARD. Fly to my arms; cling to my lips; come to me, my beautiful
+bride! Independent, free, stripped of the veils of hypocrisy, full of
+love, untrammelled from the chilling fetters of prejudice, come to me,
+thou chosen one of the lovely daughters of freedom!
+
+VOICE OF A MAIDEN. I fly to thee, beloved one!
+
+SECOND MAIDEN. Look upon me! I stretch forth my arms to thee, but have
+sunk fainting among the ruins; I cannot rise, and have only strength
+left to turn to thee, beloved!
+
+THIRD MAIDEN. I have outstripped them all; through cinders and ashes,
+flame and smoke, I fly to thee, beloved!
+
+THE MAN. With long, dishevelled hair far floating on the wind, with
+snowy bosom panting with wild excitement, she clambers up the smoking
+ruins to his arms!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Thus is it every night.
+
+LEONARD. To me! to me! my bliss, my rapture! Lovely daughter of freedom,
+thou tremblest with delicious, god-like madness!
+
+Inspiration, flood my soul! Listen to me, all ye people, for now will I
+prophesy unto you!
+
+THE MAN. Her head sinks on his bosom; she faints in his arms.
+
+LEONARD. Look upon us, ye people! we offer you an image of the human
+race, freed from trammels, and risen into new life from the death of
+forms. We stand upon the ruins of old dogmas, of old gods; yea, glory
+unto us, for we have torn the old gods limb from limb!
+
+They have rotted into dust; our spirits have conquered theirs; their
+very souls have fallen into the abyss of nothingness!
+
+CHORUS OF WOMEN. Happy among women is the bride of the prophet: we stand
+below and envy her glory!
+
+LEONARD. I announce to you a new world; to a new god I have given the
+heavens; to the god of freedom and of bliss, the god of the people;
+every offering of their vengeance, the piled corpses of their
+oppressors, be his fitting altar! The old tears and agonies of humanity
+will be forever swept away in an ocean of blood!
+
+We now inaugurate the perpetual happiness of men; freedom and equality
+belong of right to all!
+
+Damnation and the gallows to him who would reorganize the Past; to him
+who would conspire against the common fraternity!
+
+CHORUS OF MEN. The towers of superstition, of tyranny, of pride, have
+fallen, have fallen! To him who would save one stone from the old
+buildings--damnation and death!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). Ye blasphemers of Jehovah, I thrice spew you
+forth to destruction!
+
+THE MAN. Keep but thy promise, Eagle, and I will build on this very spot
+and upon their bowed necks a new temple to the Son of God, the Merciful!
+
+A CONFUSED CRY FROM MINGLING VOICES. Freedom! Equality! Bliss! Hurrah!
+hurrah!
+
+CHORUS OF THE NEW PRIESTS. Where are the lords, where are the kings, who
+lately walked the earth with crown and sceptre, ruled with pride and
+scorn?
+
+FIRST MURDERER. I killed King Alexander.
+
+SECOND MURDERER. I stabbed King Henry.
+
+THIRD MURDERER. I murdered King Immanuel!
+
+LEONARD. Go on without fear; murder without a sting of conscience!
+
+Remember that you are the Elect of the Elect; the Holy among the Holy;
+the brave heroes and blessed martyrs of equality and freedom!
+
+CHORUS OF MURDERERS. We go in the darkness of night; we move in the
+gloom of the shadow! With the dagger firmly clutched in our unsparing
+hands, we go, we go!
+
+LEONARD (_to the Maiden_). Arouse thee, my beautiful and free!
+
+     A loud clap of thunder is heard.
+
+Reply to the living god of thunder: raise high the hymn of strength!
+Follow me all, all! Let us once more trample under our feet the ruined
+temple of the dead God!
+
+THE MAIDEN. I glow with love to thee and to thy god! I will share my
+love with the whole world: I glow! I glow!
+
+THE MAN. Some one blocks the way; he falls upon his knees, raises his
+joined hands, struggles, sighs, sobs....
+
+THE BAPTIZED. He is the son of a famous philosopher.
+
+LEONARD. What do you demand, Herman?
+
+HERMAN. High priest, give me the Sacrament of Murder!
+
+LEONARD (_to the Priests_). Give me the oil, the dagger, and the
+poison!--(To Herman.) With the sacred oil once used to anoint kings, I
+now anoint thee to their destruction!
+
+The arm once used by knights and nobles, I give thee now for their
+destruction!
+
+I hang upon thy breast this flask of poison, that where the sword cannot
+reach, it may gnaw, corrode, and burn the bowels of the tyrants!
+
+Go, and destroy the old race in all parts of the world!
+
+THE MAN. He is gone! I see him, at the head of a band of assassins,
+crossing the crest of the nearest hill.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. They turn, they approach us, we must move out of their
+way!
+
+THE MAN. No. I will dream this dream to its end!
+
+THE BAPTIZED (_aside_). I thrice spew thee forth to destruction!--(_To
+the Man_). Leonard might recognize me, your excellency. Do you not see
+the knife glittering upon his breast?
+
+THE MAN. Wrap yourself up in my cloak. What ladies are those dancing
+before him you call Leonard?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Princesses and countesses who have forsaken their
+husbands.
+
+THE MAN. Once my angels!!
+
+The people now surround him on every side, I can see him no longer, I
+only know by the retreating music that he is going farther from us.
+Follow me, Jew, we can see him better up here!
+
+     He clambers up the parapet of a wall.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Woe! woe! We will certainly be discovered.
+
+THE MAN. There, now I can see him again! Ha! other women are with him
+now, pale, confused, trembling, following him convulsively; the son of
+the philosopher foams and brandishes his dagger; they are stopping by
+the ruins of the North Tower.
+
+They remain standing for a moment, they climb upon the ruins, they tear
+them down, they pull the shrine apart, they throw coals upon the
+prostrate altars, the votive wreaths, the holy pictures; the fire
+kindles, columns of smoke darken all before me: Woe to the destroyers!
+Woe!
+
+LEONARD. Woe to the men who still bow down before the dead God!
+
+THE MAN. Dark masses of the people turn and drive upon us.
+
+THE BAPTIZED. O Father Abraham!
+
+THE MAN. Old Eagle of glory, is it not true that my hour is not yet
+come?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. We are lost!
+
+LEONARD (_stopping immediately in front of Count Henry_). Who are you
+with that haughty face, citizen, and why do you not join in the
+solemnities?
+
+THE MAN. I hastened here when I heard of the revolution; I am a murderer
+of the Spanish league, and have only arrived to-day.
+
+LEONARD. Who is that man hiding himself in the folds of your mantle?
+
+THE MAN. He is my younger brother. He has taken an oath to show his face
+to no one, until he has at least killed a baron.
+
+LEONARD. Of whose murder can you yourself boast?
+
+THE MAN. My elder brothers consecrated me only two days before my
+departure, and....
+
+LEONARD. Whom do you think of killing?
+
+THE MAN. You in the first place, if you should prove false to us!
+
+
+LEONARD. For this use, brother, take my dagger!
+
+     Hands it to him.
+
+THE MAN. For such use my own will suffice me, brother!
+
+MANY VOICES. Long live Leonard! Long live the Spanish murderer!
+
+LEONARD. Meet me to-morrow in the tent of Pancratius, our citizen
+general.
+
+CHORUS OF PRIESTS. We greet thee, stranger, in the name of the Spirit of
+Liberty: we intrust to thy hand a share of our emancipation!
+
+To men who combat without cessation, who kill without pity or weakness,
+who work for freedom by day, and dream of it by night, will be at last
+the victory!
+
+     They pass on out of sight.
+
+CHORUS OF PHILOSOPHERS. We have wakened the human race, and torn them
+away from the days of childhood! We have found truth, and brought it to
+light from the womb of darkness! Combat, murder, and die for it,
+brethren!
+
+THE SON OF THE PHILOSOPHER (_to the Man_). Brother and friend, I drink
+your health out of the skull of an old saint! May we soon meet again!
+
+A MAIDEN (_dancing_). Kill Prince John for me!
+
+SECOND MAIDEN. Count Henry for me!
+
+CHILDREN. Bring us back the head of a noble for a ball.
+
+OTHER VOICES. Good fortune guide your daggers home!
+
+CHORUS OF ARTISTS. On these sublime old ruins we build no temples more;
+we paint no pictures, mould no statues for forgotten shrines; our arches
+shall be formed of pointed pikes and naked blades; our pillars built of
+ghastly piles of human skulls; the capitals of human hair dyed in
+gushing streams of crimson blood; our altar shall be white as snow, our
+god will rest upon it, the cap of liberty: Hurrah! hurrah!
+
+OTHER VOICES. On! on! the morning dawn already breaks!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. They will soon catch and hang us; we are but one step from
+the gallows.
+
+THE MAN. Fear nothing, Jew, they follow Leonard, and observe us no
+longer. I see with my own eyes, I understand with my own mind, and for
+the last time before it engulfs me, the chaos now generating in the
+abyss of Time, in the womb of Darkness, for my own destruction, for the
+annihilation of my brethren!
+
+Driven on by madness, stung by despair, my thoughts awake in all their
+strength....
+
+O God! give me again the power which Thou didst not of old deny me, and
+I will condense this new and fearful world, which does not understand
+itself, into _one_ burning word, but which one word will be the Poetry
+of the entire Past!
+
+VOICE IN THE AIR. Poet, thou chant'st a drama!
+
+THE MAN. Thanks for thy good counsel!
+
+Revenge for the desecrated ashes of my fathers--malediction upon the new
+races! their whirlpool is around me, but it shall not draw me into the
+giddying and increasing circles of its abyss! Keep but thy promise,
+Eagle; Eagle of glory!
+
+Jew, I am ready now for the vault of St. Ignatius!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. The day dawns; I can go no farther.
+
+THE MAN. Lead me on until we strike the right path; I will then release
+you!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Why do you drag me on through mist, through thorns and
+briers, through ashes and embers, over heaps of ruins? Let me go, I
+entreat!
+
+THE MAN. Forward! forward! and descend with me!
+
+The last songs of the people are dying away behind us; a few torches
+here and there just glimmer through the gloom!
+
+Ha! under those hoary trees drooping with the night dew, and through
+this curdling, whitening vapor, see you not the giant shadow of the dead
+Past? Hark! hear you not that wailing chant?
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Everything is shrouded in the thickening mist; at every
+step we descend, deeper, deeper!
+
+CHORUS OF WOOD SPIRITS. Let us weep for Christ, the persecuted, martyred
+Jesus!
+
+Where is our God; where is His church?
+
+THE MAN. Unsheathe the sword--to arms! to arms!
+
+I will restore Him to you; upon thousands and thousands of crosses will
+I crucify His enemies!
+
+CHORUS OF SPIRITS. We kept guard by day and night around the altar and
+the holy graves; upon untiring wings we bore the matin chime and vesper
+bell to the ear of the believer; our voices floated on the organ's peal!
+In the glitter of the stained and rainbow panes, the shadows of the
+vaulted domes, the light of the holy chalice, the blessed consecration
+of the Body of our Lord--was our whole life centred!
+
+Woe! woe! what will become of us?
+
+THE MAN. It is growing lighter; their dim forms fade and melt into the
+red of morn!
+
+THE BAPTIZED. Here lies your way: this is the entrance to the Pass.
+
+THE MAN. Hail! Christ Jesus and my sword! (_He tears off the liberty
+cap, throws it upon the ground, and casts pieces of silver upon it.)_
+Take together the Thing and the Image for a remembrance!
+
+
+THE BAPTIZED. You pledge your word to me for the honorable treatment of
+him who will visit you at midnight?
+
+THE MAN. An old noble never repeats or breaks a promise!
+
+Hail! Christ Jesus and our swords!
+
+VOICES (_from the depths of the Pass_). Mary and our swords! Long live
+our lord, Count Henry!
+
+THE MAN. My faithful followers, to me--to me!
+
+Aid me, Mary, and Christ Jesus!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Night. Trees and shrubbery. Pancratius, Leonard, and attendants.
+
+PANCRATIUS (_to his attendants_). Lie upon this spot with your faces to
+the turf, remain perfectly still, kindle no fires, beat no signals, and,
+unless you hear the report of firearms, stir not until the dawn of day!
+
+LEONARD. I once more conjure you, citizen!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Lean against this tall pine, Leonard, and pass the night in
+reflection.
+
+LEONARD. I pray you, Pancratius, take me with you! Remember, you are
+about to intrust yourself alone with an aristocrat, a betrayer, an
+oppressor....
+
+PANCRATIUS (_interrupting him, and impatiently gesturing to him to
+remain behind_). The old nobles seldom broke a plighted promise!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     A vast feudal hall in the castle of Count Henry. Pictures of
+     knights and ladies hang upon the walls. A pillar is seen in the
+     background bearing the arms and escutcheons of the family. The
+     Count is seated at a marble table upon which are placed an antique
+     lamp of wrought silver, a jewel-hilted sword, a pair of pistols, an
+     hourglass, and clock. Another table stands on the opposite side,
+     with silver pitchers, decanters, and massive goblets.
+
+THE MAN. At the same hour, surrounded by appalling perils, agitated by
+foreboding thoughts, the last Brutus met his Evil Genius.
+
+I await a like apparition. A man without a name, without ancestors,
+without a faith or guardian angel; a man who is destroying the Past, and
+who will, in all probability, establish a new era, though himself sprung
+from the very dust, if I cannot succeed in casting him back into his
+original nothingness--is now to appear before me!
+
+Spirit of my forefathers! inspire me with that haughty energy which once
+rendered you the rulers of the world! Give me the lion heart which erst
+throbbed in your dauntless breasts! Give me your peerless dignity, your
+noble and chivalric courtesy!
+
+Rekindle in my wavering soul your blind, undoubting, earnest faith in
+Christ and in His church: at once the source of your noblest deeds on
+earth, your brightest hopes in heaven! Oh, let it open for me, as it was
+wont to do for you; and I will struggle with fire and sword against its
+enemies! Hear me, the son of countless generations, the sole heir of
+your thoughts, your courage, your virtues, and your faults!
+
+     The castle bell sounds twelve.
+
+It is the appointed hour: I am prepared!
+
+     An old and faithful servant, Jacob, enters, fully armed.
+
+JACOB. My lord, the person whom your excellency expects is in the
+castle.
+
+THE MAN. Admit him here.
+
+     Exit Jacob.
+
+     He reappears, announcing Pancratius, and again retires.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Count Henry, I salute you! The word 'count' sounds strangely
+on my lips.
+
+     He seats himself, throws off his cloak and liberty cap, and fastens
+     his eyes on the pillar on which hang the arms and shield.
+
+THE MAN. Thanks, guest, that you have confided in the honor of my house!
+Faithful to our ancient forms, I pledge you in a glass of wine. Your
+good health, guest!
+
+     He takes a goblet, fills, tastes, and hands it to Pancratius.
+
+PANCRATIUS. If I am not mistaken, this red and blue shield was called a
+coat of arms in the language of the Dead; but such trifles have vanished
+from the face of the earth.
+
+     He drinks.
+
+THE MAN. Vanished? With the aid of God, you will soon look upon them by
+thousands!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Commend me to the old noble! always confident in himself,
+though without money, arms, or soldiers; proud, obstinate, and hoping
+against all hope; like the corpse in the fable, threatening the driver
+of the hearse at the very door of the charnel house, and confiding in
+God, or at least pretending to confide in Him, when confidence in
+himself is no longer even possible!
+
+Pray, Count Henry, give me but one little glimpse of the lightning which
+is to be sent from heaven, for your especial benefit, to blast me and my
+millions; or show me at least one angel of the thousands of the heavenly
+hosts, who are to encamp on your side, and whose prowess is so speedily
+to decide the combat in your favor!
+
+     He empties the goblet.
+
+THE MAN. You are pleased to jest, leader of the people; but atheism is
+quite an old formula, and I looked for something _new_ from the _new
+men_!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Laugh, if you will, at your own wit, but my faith is wider,
+deeper, and more firmly based than your own. Its central dogma is the
+emancipation of humanity. It has its source in the cries of despair
+which rise unceasingly to heaven from the hearts of tortured millions,
+in the famine of the operatives, the grinding poverty of the peasants,
+the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the
+race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices--from all
+this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to
+establish: _'Man has a birthright of happiness_.' These thoughts are my
+god, a god which will give bread, rest, bliss, glory to man!
+
+     He fills, drinks, and casts and goblet from him.
+
+THE MAN. I place my trust in that God who gave power and rule, into the
+hands of my forefathers!
+
+PANCRATIUS. You trust Him still, and yet through your whole life you
+have been but a plaything in the hands of the Devil!
+
+But let us leave such discussions to the theologians, if any such still
+linger upon earth:--to business, Count Henry, to stern facts!
+
+THE MAN. What do you seek from me, redeemer of the people, citizen-god?
+
+PANCRATIUS. I sought you, in the first place, because I wished to know
+you; in the second, because I desire to save you.
+
+THE MAN. For the first, receive my thanks; for the second, trust my
+sword!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Your God! your sword! vain phantoms of the brain! Look at
+the dread realities of your situation! The curses of the millions are
+upon you; myriads of brawny arms are already raised to hurl you to
+destruction! Of all the vaunted Past nothing remains to you save a few
+feet of earth, scarcely enough to offer you a grave. Even your last
+fortress, the castle of the Holy Trinity, can hold out but a few days
+longer. Where is your artillery? Where are the arms and provisions for
+your soldiers? Where are your soldiers? and what dependence can you
+place on the few you still retain? You must surely know there is
+nothing left you on which to hang a single hope!
+
+If I were in your place, Count Henry, I know what I would do!
+
+THE MAN. Speak! you see how patiently I listen!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Were I Count Henry, I would say to Pancratius: 'I will
+dismiss my troops, my few retainers; I will not go to the relief of the
+Holy Trinity--and for this I will retain my title and my estates; and
+you, Pancratius, will pledge your own honor to guarantee me the
+possession of the things I require.'
+
+How old are you, Count Henry?
+
+THE MAN. I am thirty-six years old, citizen.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Then you have but about fifteen years of life to expect, for
+men of your temperament die young; your son is nearer to the grave than
+to maturity. A single exception, such as yours, can do no harm to the
+great whole. Remain, then, where you are, the last of the counts. Rule,
+as long as you shall live, in the house of your fathers; have your
+family portraits retouched, your armorial bearings renewed, and think no
+more of the wretched remnant of your fallen order. Let the justice of
+the long-injured people be fulfilled upon them! (_He fills for himself
+another cup._) Your good health, Henry, the last of the counts!
+
+THE MAN. Every word you utter is a new insult to me! Do you really
+believe that, to save a dishonored life, I would suffer myself to be
+enslaved and dragged about, chained to your car of triumph?
+
+Cease! cease! I can endure no longer! I cannot answer as my spirit
+dictates, for you are my guest, sheltered from all insult while under my
+roof by my plighted honor!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Plighted honor and knightly faith have, ere this, swung from
+a gallows! You unfurl a tattered banner whose faded rags seem strangely
+out of place among the brilliant flags and joyous symbols of universal
+humanitarian progress. Oh, I know you, and protest against your course!
+Full of life and generous vigor, you bind to your heart a putrefying
+corpse! You court your own destruction, clinging to a vain belief in
+privileged orders, in worn-out relics, in the bones of dead men, in
+mouldering escutcheons and forgotten coats of arms--and yet in your
+inmost heart you are forced to acknowledge that your brother nobles have
+deserved their punishment, that forgetfulness were mercy for them!
+
+THE MAN. You, Pancratius, and your followers, what do you deserve?
+
+
+PANCRATIUS. Victory and life! I acknowledge but one right, I bow to but
+one law, the law of perpetual progress, and this law is your death
+warrant. It cries to you through my lips: 'Worm-eaten, mouldering
+aristocracy! full of rottenness, crammed with meat and wine, satiated
+with luxury--give place to the young, the strong, the hungry!'
+
+But I will save you, and you alone!
+
+THE MAN. Cease! I will not brook your arrogant pity!
+
+I know you, and your new world; I have visited your camp at night, and
+looked upon the restless swarms upon whose necks you ride to power! I
+saw all: I detected the _old_ crimes peering through the thin veils of
+_new_ draperies, shining under new shams, whirling to new tunes,
+circling in new dances--but the end was ever the same which it has been
+for centuries, which it will forever be: adultery, license, theft, gold,
+blood!
+
+But I saw you not there; you were not with your guilty children; you
+know you despise them in the depths of your soul; and if you do not go
+mad yourself in the mad dances of the blood-thirsty and blood-drunken
+people, you will soon scorn and despise yourself!
+
+Torture me no more!
+
+     He rises, moves hurriedly to and fro, then seats himself under his
+     escutcheon.
+
+PANCRATIUS. It is true my world is in its infancy, unformed and
+undeveloped; it requires food, ease, material gratifications; but
+it is growing, and the time will come--(_He rises from his chair,
+approaches the count, and leans against the pillar supporting the
+escutcheons_)--the time will come when my world will arrive at maturity,
+will attain the consciousness of its own strength, when it will say, I
+AM; and there will be no other voice on earth able to reply, 'I ALSO
+AM!'
+
+THE MAN. And then?
+
+PANCRATIUS. A race will spring from the generation I am now quickening
+and elevating, stronger, higher, and nobler than any the world has yet
+produced; the earth has never yet seen such men upon her bosom. They
+will be free, lords of the globe from pole to pole; the earth will be a
+blooming garden, every part of her surface under the highest culture;
+the sea will be covered with floating palaces and argosies of wealth and
+commerce; a universal exchange of commodities will carry civilization,
+mutual recognition, and comfort to every clime; prosperous cities will
+crown every height, and expand their blessings of refinement and culture
+o'er every plain; earth will then offer happy and tranquil homes to all
+her children, she will be one vast and united house of blissful industry
+and highest art!
+
+THE MAN. Your words and voice dissemble well, but your pale and rigid
+features in vain struggle to assume the generous glow of a noble
+enthusiasm, which your soul cannot feel.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Interrupt me not! Men have begged on bended knees before me
+for such prophecies.
+
+The world of the Future will possess a god whose highest fact will not
+be his own defeat and death upon a cross; a god whom the people, by
+their own power and skill, _will force_ to unveil his face to them; a
+god who will be torn by the very children whom he once scattered over
+the face of the earth in his anger, from the infinite recesses of the
+distant heavens in which he loves to hide! Babel will be no more, all
+tribes and nations will meet and understand their mutual wants, and,
+united by a _universal language_, his scattered children, having
+attained their majority, assert their _right_ to know their creator, and
+claim their just inheritance from a common father: '_the full possession
+of all truth_!'
+
+The god of humanity at last reveals himself to man!
+
+THE MAN. Yes, He revealed Himself some centuries ago; through Him is
+humanity already redeemed.
+
+PANCRATIUS. Alas! let the redeemed delight in the sweetness of such
+redemption! let them rejoice in the multiplied agonies which have in
+vain cried to a Redeemer for relief during the three thousand years
+which have elapsed since His defeat and death!
+
+THE MAN. Blasphemer, cease! I have seen the Cross, the holy symbol of
+His mystic love, standing in the heart of the eternal city, Rome; the
+ruins of a power far greater than thine were crumbling into dust around
+It; hundreds of gods such as those you trust in, were lying prostrate on
+the ground, trampled under careless feet, not even daring to raise their
+crushed and wounded heads to gaze upon the Crucified. It stood upon the
+seven hills, stretching its mighty arms to the east and to the west, its
+holy brow glittering in the golden sunshine; men wistfully gazed upon
+its perfect lesson of self-abnegating Love; it won all hearts, it RULED
+THE WORLD!
+
+PANCRATIUS. An old wife's tale, hollow as the rattling of these vain
+escutcheons! (_He strikes the shield._) These discussions are in vain,
+for I have read all the secrets of your yearning heart! If you really
+wish to find the _infinite_ which has so long baffled your search; if
+you love the _truth_, and are willing to suffer for it; if you are a
+_man_, created in the image of our common humanity, and not the
+impossible hero of an old nursery song--listen to me! Oh, let not these
+rapidly fleeting moments, the last in which you can possibly be saved,
+pass in vain! The race renews itself, man of the Past; and _of the blood
+we shed to-day, no trace will be found to-morrow_! For the last time I
+conjure you, if you are what you once appeared to be, A MAN, rise in
+your former might, aid the down-trodden and oppressed people, help to
+emancipate and enlighten your fellow men, work for the common good,
+forsake your false ideas of a personal glory, quit these tottering ruins
+which all your pride and power cannot prevent from crumbling o'er you,
+desert your falling house, and follow me!
+
+THE MAN. O youngest born of Satan's brood!--(_He paces up and down the
+hall, speaking to himself_:) Dreams, dreams, beautiful dreams--but their
+realization is impossible! Who could achieve them? Adam died in the
+desert--the flaming sword still guards the gates--we are never more to
+enter Paradise! In vain we dream!
+
+PANCRATIUS (_aside_). I have driven the probe to the core of his heart;
+I have struck the electric nerve of Poetry, which quivers through the
+very base of his complicated being!
+
+THE MAN. Progress of humanity; universal happiness; I once believed them
+possible! There--there--take my head--my life--if that were possi--....
+(_He sighs, and is silent for a moment._) It is past! two centuries ago
+it might have been--but now.... But now I have seen and know there will
+be nothing but assassination and murder--murder on either side--nothing
+can satisfy now but an unceasing war of mutual extermination!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Woe then to the vanquished! Falter not, seeker of universal
+happiness! Cry but once with us: '_Woe to the oppressors of the
+people_!' and stand preeminent o'er all, the First among the Victors!
+
+THE MAN. Have you already explored all the paths in the dark and unknown
+country of the Future? Did Destiny, withdrawing at midnight the curtains
+of your tent, stand visibly before you, and, placing her giant hand upon
+your scheming brain, impress upon it the mystic seal of victory? or in
+the heat of midday, when the world slept, and you alone were watching,
+did she glide pale, pitiless, and stern before you, and promise
+conquest, that you thus threaten me with defeat and ruin? You are but a
+man of clay as fragile as my own, and may be the victim of the first
+well-aimed ball, the first sharp thrust of the sword! Your life, like
+mine, hangs on a single thread, and you have no immunity from death!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Dreams! idle dreams! Oh do not deceive yourself with hopes
+so vain, for no bullet aimed by man will reach me, no sword will pierce
+me, while a single member of your haughty caste remains capable of
+resisting the task which it is my destiny to fulfil. And what doom
+soever may befall me, after its completion, count, will be too late to
+offer you the least advantage. (_The clock strikes._) Hark! time
+flies--and scorns us both!
+
+If you are weary of your own life, save at least your unfortunate son!
+
+THE MAN. His pure soul is already saved in heaven: on earth he must
+share the fate of his father.
+
+     His head sinks heavily, and remains for some time buried in his
+     hands.
+
+PANCRATIUS. You reject too all hope for him?... (_Pauses._) Nay--you are
+silent--you reflect--it is well: reflection becomes him who stands upon
+the brink of the grave!
+
+THE MAN. Away! away! Back from the passionate mysteries now surging
+through the depths of my soul! Profane them not with a word; they lie
+beyond your sphere!
+
+The rough, wide world belongs to you; feed it with meat; flood it with
+wine; but press not into the holy secrets of my heart! Away! away from
+me, framer of material bliss!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Shame upon you, warrior, scholar, poet, and yet the slave of
+one idea and its dying forms! Thought and form are wax beneath my
+plastic fingers!
+
+THE MAN. In vain would you seek to follow my thoughts; you will never
+understand me, for all your forefathers were buried in a common ditch,
+as dead things, not as men of individual character and bold distinctive
+spirit. (_He points to the portraits of his ancestors._) Look upon these
+pictures! Love of country, of family, of the home hearth, feelings at
+war with all your ideas, are written in every line of their firm
+brows--their spirit lives entire in me, their last heir and
+representative. Tell me, O man without ancestors, where is your natal
+soil? You spread your wandering tent each coming eve Upon the ruins of
+another's home, every morning roll it up again that it may be unrolled
+anew at night to blight and spoil! Yon have not yet found a _home_, a
+_hearth_, and you will never find one as long as a hundred men live to
+cry with me: '_Glory to our fathers_!'
+
+PANCRATIUS. Yes, glory to your fathers in heaven and upon earth; but it
+will repay us to look at them a little more closely. (_He points to one
+of the portraits._) This gentleman was a famous Starost; he shot old
+women in the woods, and roasted the Jews alive: this one with the
+inscription, 'Chancellor,' and the great seal in his right hand,
+falsified and forged acts, burned archives, stabbed knights, and sullied
+the inheritance with poison; through him came your villages, your
+income, your power. That dark man played at adultery with the wife of
+his friend. This one, with the golden fleece on his Spanish cloak,
+served in a foreign land, when his own country was in danger.
+
+This pale lady with the raven ringlets carried on an intrigue with a
+handsome page. That one with the lustrous braids is reading a letter
+from her gallant; she smiles, as well she may, for night approaches, and
+love is bold.
+
+This timid beauty with the deep blue eyes and golden curls, clasping a
+Roman hound in her braceleted arm, was the mistress of a king, and
+soothed his softer hours.
+
+Such is the true history of your unbroken, ancient, and unsullied line!
+But I like this jolly fellow in the green riding jacket; he drank and
+hunted with the nobles, and employed the peasants to run down the tall
+deer with the hounds. Indeed, the ignorance, stupidity, and wretchedness
+of the serf were the strength of the noble, and give convincing proof of
+his own intellect.
+
+But the Day of Judgment is approaching: I promise you that none of your
+vaunted ancestors, that nought of their fame shall be forgotten in the
+dark award.
+
+THE MAN. You deceive yourself, son of the people! Neither you nor your
+brethren could have preserved existence, had not our noble ancestors
+nourished you with their bread, and defended you with their blood. In
+times of famine, they gave you grain, and when the plague swept over you
+with its hot breath of death, they built hospitals to receive you, found
+nurses to take care of you, and educated physicians to save you from the
+grave. When from a herd of unformed brutes they had nurtured you into
+human beings, they built schools and churches for you, sharing
+everything with you save the dangers of the battle field, for war they
+knew you were not formed to bear. As the sharp lance of the pagan was
+wont to recoil, shattered and riven, from the glittering armor of my
+fathers, so recoil your vain words as they strike the dazzling record
+of their long-consecrated glory. They disturb not the repose of their
+sacred ashes. Like the howlings of a mad dog, who froths, bites, and
+snaps as he runs, until he is driven out of the pale of humanity, so
+fall your accusations, dying out in their own insanity.
+
+But it is almost dawn, and time you should depart from the halls of my
+ancestors! Pass in safety and in freedom from their home, my guest!
+
+PANCRATIUS. Farewell then, until we meet again upon the ramparts of the
+Holy Trinity. And when your powder and ball shall be utterly exhausted?
+
+THE MAN. _We will then approach within the length of our swords._
+Farewell!
+
+PANCRATIUS. We are twin Eagles, but your nest is shattered by the
+lightning! (_He takes up his cloak and liberty cap._) In passing from
+your threshold, I leave the curse, due to decrepitude, behind me. I
+devote you and your son to destruction!
+
+THE MAN. Ho! Jacob!
+
+     Enter Jacob.
+
+Conduct this man in safety through my last post on the hill!
+
+JACOB. So help me God the Lord!
+
+     Exit Jacob with Pancratius.
+
+
+
+
+DEATH IN LIFE.
+
+
+  In some dull hour of doubt or pain,
+  Who has not felt that life is slain--
+  And while there yet remain
+
+  Long years, perhaps, of joyless mirth,
+  Ere earth shall claim its kindred earth,
+  Such years were nothing worth
+
+  But that some duty still demands
+  The sweating brow, the weary hands?
+  And so Existence stands
+
+  With an appeal we cannot shun,
+  To make complete what Life begun,
+  With toil from sun to sun.
+
+  And so we keep the sorry tryst,
+  With all its fancied sweetness missed--
+  Consenting to exist
+
+  When Life has fled beyond recall,
+  And left us to its heir in thrall,
+  With chains that will not fall.
+
+  Belated stars were waning fast
+  As through an open gate I passed,
+  And crossed a meadow vast--
+
+  And, still descending, followed still
+  The path that wound adown the hill
+  And by the ruined mill--
+
+  Till in its garden I espied
+  The cottage by the river side
+  Where dwelt my promised bride.
+
+  Beneath the porch no lantern flared,
+  No watch dog kept his faithful ward,
+  The window blinds were barred.
+
+  Entering with eager eye and ear,
+  And ushered by the phantom Fear,
+  I stood beside the bier
+
+  Of one who, passing hence away,
+  Left something more than lifeless clay,
+  As twilight lingers after day,
+
+  The pulseless heart, the pallid lips,
+  The eyes just closed in death's eclipse,
+  The fairy finger tips
+
+  So lightly locked across the breast,
+  Seemed to obey the sweet behest
+  By angels whispered--Rest!
+
+  That beauty had been mine alone,
+  Those hands had fondly pressed my own,
+  Those eyes in mine had shone.
+
+  The open door was banged about,
+  As wailing winds went in and out
+  With sigh and groan and shout.
+
+  And darkly ran the river cold,
+  Whose swollen waters, as they rolled,
+  A tale of sorrow told.
+
+  I could not choose but seek that stream,
+  Whose sympathetic moan did seem
+  The music of a dream.
+
+  O River, that unceasing lay
+  Charms each fair tree along thy way,
+  Until it falls thy prey!
+
+  O endless moan within my heart,
+  Thy constancy has made me part
+  Of what thou wert and art!
+
+  And while I stood upon the brink,
+  And tried to think, but could not think,
+  Nor sight with reason link--
+
+  A form I had not seen before
+  Came slowly down the dismal shore;
+  A sombre robe she wore,
+
+  And in her air and on her face
+  There was a sterner kind of grace,
+  Heightened by time and place--
+
+  A sort of conscious power and pride,
+  A soul to substance more allied--
+  Than that of her who died.
+
+  With scarce a semblance of design,
+  Toward me her steps she did incline,
+  And raised her eyes to mine
+
+  So sweetly, so imploringly,
+  I scarcely wished, and did not try,
+  To put their pleading by,
+
+  And, ere a movement I had made,
+  Her hand upon my arm she laid,
+  And whispered: I obeyed.
+
+  While one into the darkness sped,
+  I followed where the other led;
+  Yet often turned my head,
+
+  As one who fancies that he hears
+  His own name ringing in his ears
+  Shouted from far-off spheres.
+
+  Oh! bliss misplaced is misery!
+  I love the life I've lost, but, see!
+  The life that's here loves me.
+
+  And while I seem her willing slave,
+  My heart is hid in weeds that wave
+  Above a distant grave.
+
+
+
+
+AENONE:
+
+A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+In an hour from that time the banqueting hall of the palace was prepared
+for its guests. Silken couches had been drawn up around the table. Upon
+it glittered a rich array of gold and silver. Between the dishes stood
+flasks of rare wines. Upon the buffet near by were other wines cooling
+in Apennine snow. Tall candelabras in worked and twisted bronze stood at
+the ends and sides of the table, and stretched overhead their arms hung
+with lamps. From the walls were suspended other lamps, lighting up the
+tapestries and frescoes. At one end of the hall, richly scented spices
+burned upon a tripod. With a readiness and celerity for which the Vanno
+palace was famous, a feast fit for the emperor had been improvised in a
+few minutes, and nothing was now wanting except the guests.
+
+These now began to drop in one by one. The poet Emilius--the comedian
+Bassus--the proconsul Sardesus--others of lesser note; but not one who
+had not a claim to be present, by reason of intimate acquaintance or
+else some peculiarly valuable trait of conviviality. In collecting
+these, the armor bearer had made no mistake; and knowing his master's
+tastes and intimates, he had made up the roll of guests as discreetly as
+though their names had been given him. One he had met in the
+street--others he had found at their homes. None to whom he gave the
+invitation was backward in accepting it upon the spot, for there were
+few places in Rome where equal festal gratification could be obtained.
+To have been called to the house of Sergius Vanno and not to have gone
+there, was to have lost a day to be forever regretted. None, therefore,
+who had been spoken to, among that club of congenial spirits, was
+absent. Of those who did not come, one was sick and two were at their
+country villas. These, however, were lesser lights, valuable by
+themselves, perhaps, but of no account in comparison with others who had
+come; and therefore their absence was scarcely noticed.
+
+Sergius stood at the door receiving his guests as each arrived. He had
+arrayed himself in his most festive costume, and had evidently resolved
+that whatever might happen on the morrow, that night at least should be
+passed in forgetfulness and unbridled enjoyment. Even now his face was
+flushed with the wine he had taken in anticipation, in the hope of
+giving an artificial elation to his spirits. But it seemed as though for
+that time the wine had lost its accustomed charm. Although at each
+greeting he strove to wreathe his face in smiles, yet it was but a
+feeble mask, and could not hide the more natural appearances of care and
+gloom which rested upon his features; and while his voice seemed to
+retain its old ring of joyous welcome, there was an undertone of sad
+discordance. As the guests entered and exchanged greetings with their
+host, each, after the first moment, looked askant at him, with the dim
+perception that, in some way, he was not as he was wont to be; and so,
+in a little while, they sank, one by one, into a troubled and
+apprehensive silence. He, too, upon his part, looked furtively at them,
+wondering whether they had yet heard the thing that had befallen him. It
+was but a short time ago, indeed, and yet in how few minutes might the
+unrestrained gossip of a slave have spread the ill tidings! For the
+moment, Sergius recoiled from the difficult task of entertainment which
+he had taken upon himself. Why, indeed, had he called these men around
+him? How could he sit and pledge them in deep draughts, and all the time
+suspect that each one knew his secret, and was laughing about it in his
+sleeve? And if they knew it not, so much the worse, for then he must
+tell the tale himself. Was it not partly for this purpose that he had
+assembled them? Far better to speak of it himself--to let them see how
+little he regarded the misfortune and the scandal--to treat it as a
+brave jest--to give his own version of it--than to have the matter leak
+out in the ordinary way, with all conceivable distortions and
+exaggerations. But how, in fact, could he tell it? Was there one among
+them who would not, while openly commiserating him, laugh at him in the
+heart? Did there not now sit before him the lieutenant Plautus, who,
+only a month before, had met with a like disgrace, and about whom he had
+composed derisive verses? Would not the lieutenant Plautus now rejoice
+to make retaliatory odes? Would it not b e better, then, after all, to
+forbear any mention of the matter, and, letting its announcement take
+the usual chance course, to devote this night, at least, to unbroken
+festivity? But what if they already knew it?
+
+Thus wandering in his mind from one debate to another, and ever, in a
+moment, coming back to his original suspicion, he sat, essaying
+complimentary speeches and convivial jests, and moodily gazing from face
+to face, in a vain attempt to read their secret thoughts. He was wrong
+in his suspicions. Not one of them knew the reason of the burden upon
+his mind. All, however, perceived that something had occurred to disturb
+him, and his moody spirit shed its influence around, until the
+conversation once again flagged, and there was not one of the party who
+did not wish himself elsewhere. The costliest viands and wines spread
+out before them were ineffective to produce that festive gayety upon
+which they had calculated.
+
+'By Parnassus!' exclaimed the poet Emilius, at length, pushing aside his
+plate of turbot, and draining his goblet 'Are we to sit here, hour after
+hour, winking and blinking at each other like owls over their mice? Was
+it merely to eat and drink that we have assembled? Hearken! I will read
+that to you which will raise your spirits, to a certainty. To-morrow the
+games and combats commence in the arena of the new amphitheatre. Well;
+and is it known to you that I am appointed to read a dedicatory ode
+before the emperor and in honor of that occasion? I will give you a
+pleasure, now. I will forestall your joy, and let you hear what I have
+written. And be assured that this is no small compliment to your
+intelligence, since no eye hath yet looked upon a single verse thereof.'
+
+With that the poet dragged from his breast his silken bundle, and
+carefully began to unwind the covering.
+
+'You will observe,' he said, as he brought the precious parchment to
+light, and smoothed it out upon the table before him, 'you will observe
+that I commence with an invocation to the emperor, whom I call the most
+illustrious of all the Caesars, and liken to Jove. I then congratulate
+the spectators, not only upon the joy of living in his time, but also
+upon being there to bask in the effulgence of--'
+
+'A truce to such mummery!' cried Sergius, suddenly arousing from his
+spiritual stupor and bursting into a shrill laugh. 'Do we care to listen
+to your miserable dactyls? Is it not a standing jest through Rome that,
+for the past month, you have daily read your verses to one person after
+another, with the same wretched pretence of exclusive favoritism? And do
+we not know that no warrant has ever been given to you to recite a
+single line before the emperor, either in or out of the arena? We are
+here to revel, not to listen to your stale aphorisms upon death and
+immortality. Ho, there, more wine! Take off these viands, which already
+pall upon us! Bring wine-more wine!'
+
+The guests were not slow to respond to the altered mood of their host;
+for it was merely the reflection of his sullen gravity that had eclipsed
+their own vivacity. The instant, therefore, that he led the way, the
+hall began to resound with jest and laughter. The poet, with some
+humiliation, which he endeavored to conceal beneath an affectation of
+wounded dignity, commenced rolling up his manuscript, not before a
+splash of wine from a carelessly filled flagon had soiled the
+fair-written characters. More flasks were placed upon the table by ready
+and obedient hands--and from that moment the real entertainment of the
+evening commenced.
+
+Faster than any of his guests, as though care could be the better
+drowned by frequent libations, Sergius now filled and refilled his
+flagon; and though the repeated draughts may not have brought
+forgetfulness, yet, what was the nearest thing, they produced reckless
+indifference. No longer should the cloud which he had thus suddenly
+swept away from his brow be suffered to remain. Was he not master in his
+own house? If woman deceives, was that a reason why man should mourn and
+grow gray with melancholy? What though a random thought might at times
+intrude, of one who, in the next room, with her head against the wall,
+lay in a half stupor, listening to the ring of goblets and the loud
+laugh and jest? Had she not brought it all upon herself? He would fill
+up again, and think no more about it! And still, obedient to his
+directing tone, the guests followed him with more and more unbridled
+license, until the hall rang with merriment as it had never rung before.
+
+Then, of course, came the throwing of dice, which, at that time, were as
+essential a concomitant of a roystering party as, in later centuries,
+cards became. Nor were these the least attraction of the feasts of
+Sergius; for though the excellence of his viands and wines was
+proverbial, the ease with which he could be despoiled at the gambling
+table was not less so. Already he was known to have seriously crippled
+his heritage by continued reverses, springing from united ill luck and
+want of skill; but it was as well understood that much still remained.
+And then, as now, the morality of gambling was of a most questionable
+character--invited guests not thinking it discreditable to unite in any
+combinations for the purpose of better pillaging their host. This seemed
+now the general purpose; for, leaving each other in comparative freedom
+from attack, they came forward one by one and pitted their purses, great
+and small, against Sergius, who sat pouring down wine and shaking the
+dicebox, while he called each by name, and contended against him. The
+usual result followed; for, whether owing to secret signs among the
+players, or to superior skill, the current of gold flowed but one way,
+from the host to his guests. For a while he bore the continued ill luck
+with undiminished gayety, deeming that in meeting their united prowess
+he was doing a brave thing, and that, whatever befell him, he should
+remember that in character of host, he must consent to suffer. But at
+length he began to realize that his losses had been carried far enough.
+He had never suffered so severely in any one evening before. Even his
+duty to them as their host did not demand that he should completely ruin
+himself, and he began to suspect that he had half done so already. With
+a hoarse laugh he pushed the dice away, and arose.
+
+'Enough--quite enough for one night,' he exclaimed. 'I have no more
+gold, nor, if I had, could I dare to continue, with this ill run against
+me. Perhaps after another campaign I may meet you again, and take my
+revenge; which, if the Fates are just, must one day or another be
+allotted me. But not now.'
+
+He thought that he was firm in his refusal, but his guests had not yet
+done with him. It needed but gentle violence to push him back again upon
+his seat, and to replace the dicebox in his hand.
+
+'Art weary, or afraid to continue?' said the praetorian captain. 'Well,
+let there be one more main between us, and then we will end it all.
+Listen! I have won this night two hundred sestertia. What is the worth
+of that quarry of yours to the south of the Porta Triumphalis?'
+
+'Three hundred sestertia--not less,' responded Sergius.
+
+'Nay, as much as that?' rejoined the captain, carelessly throwing down
+his own dice. 'Then it is useless to propose what I was about to. I had
+thought that as the quarry had been well worked already, and was now
+overrun with fugitive slaves and Nazarenes, and the like, to ferret out
+whom would require half a legion, I could offer to put the two hundred
+sestertia against it, so that you might chance to win them back. But it
+is of little consequence.'
+
+Sergius sat for the moment nervously drumming upon the table. He knew
+that the other was purposely disparaging the property and trying to
+tempt him into an equal stake; and yet he suffered himself to be
+tempted. The luck might this time be with him. It were worth while to
+try it, at least. If he lost, it would be but one more buffet of
+fortune. And if he won, how easily would those two hundred sestertia
+have been regained, and what a triumph over the one who had enticed him!
+And therefore they threw--five times a piece; and after a moment of
+breathless excitement, the play was decided in favor of the captain.
+
+'The quarry is mine, therefore,' he said, endeavoring to assume a
+nonchalant air of indifference. 'Would you still win it back, Sergius?
+And the sesteria also? Well, there is that vineyard of yours on the
+slope of Tivoli, which--'
+
+'Stay!' exclaimed the proconsul Sardesus, who, of all the party had not
+as yet touched the dicebox. 'Let this be enough. Will you plunder him
+entirely? Have you no regard for my rights over him? Do you not know
+that to-morrow, at the amphitheatre, Sergius and I are to match
+gladiators against each other for a heavy wager, and that I expect to
+win? How, then will I get this money, if you now strip him of all that
+he owns?'
+
+Probably the proconsul felt no fear about collecting what he might win,
+and spoke jestingly, and with the sole intention of putting a stop to a
+system of pillage which seemed to him already too flagrant and
+unscrupulous. But his words were too plainly spoken not to give offence
+at any time, more particularly now that all present were heated with
+excitement; and the usual consequence of disinterested interference
+ensued. The other guests in no measured language, began to mutter their
+displeasure at the insinuations against themselves; while the host, for
+whose benefit the interruption had been intended, resented it most
+strongly of all. He needed no counsel, but was well able to take care of
+himself, he intimated. And he remembered that he had entered into some
+sort of a wager about the result of a gladiatorial combat, and he had
+supposed that no one would have doubted his ability to pay all that he
+might lose therein. It was proper, at least, to wait until there had
+been some precedent of the kind proved against him. No one, so far, had
+found him wanting. And the like.
+
+'And yet,' he continued, as after a moment of reflection he began to
+realise the value of the wager, and how inconvenient it would be to
+lose, and that he had not yet succeeded in making any preparation for
+the contest, 'when I tell you that I have not yet found a gladiator to
+my mind, you will not force this match upon me to-morrow? You will
+forbear that advantage, and will consent to postpone our trial to
+another time?'
+
+The proconsul shrugged his shoulders.
+
+'Was it in the bond,' he said, 'that one should await the convenience of
+the other? Has there not been time enough for each to procure his man?
+This wager was made between us mouths ago, Sergius--before even you went
+into the East.'
+
+'And it was while I was there,' exclaimed Sergius eagerly, 'that I found
+my man--a Rhodian, with the forehead, neck, and sinews of a bull. He
+could have hugged a bull to death almost. Having him, I felt safe, for
+who could you obtain to stand up against him? But in an evil hour, not
+over a month ago, this play actor here--this Bassus--by a stupid trick
+gained him from me. What, then, have I been able to do for myself since?
+I have sought far and near to replace him, but without success; and had
+made up my mind, if you would not postpone the trial, to pay up the
+forfeit for not appearing, and think no more about it. But by the gods!
+I will, even at this late hour, make one more attempt. Harkee, Bassus!
+Whenever I have asked you about this Rhodian, you have said that you
+have sold him; and, for some low reason, you have refused to tell who
+owns him now. Tell me, now, to whom you sold him, so that I can purchase
+him at once! Tell me, I say; or there will be blood between us!'
+
+'What can he say,' interrupted the proconsul, 'but that he sold his
+Rhodian to me, the day thereafter? You do well to praise him, Sergius.
+Never have I seen such a creature of brawn and muscle. And with the
+training I have given him, who, indeed, could overcome him? You will see
+him to-morrow, in the arena. You will see how he will crush in the ribs
+of your gladiator, like an egg shell.'
+
+Sergius gave vent to a groan of mingled rage and despair.
+
+'And you will not postpone this trial?' he said. 'Will you, then, take
+up with an offer to play off that Rhodian against ten of my slaves? No?
+Against twenty, then? What else will tempt you? Ah, you may think that I
+have but little to offer to play against you, but it is not so. I have
+no gold left, and my last quarry is gone. But I have my vineyards and
+slaves in plenty. What say you, therefore?'
+
+'Tush! Beseech him not!' interrupted Emilius, to whom the mention of
+vineyards and slaves gave intimation of further spoils. 'Do you not see
+that he shakes his head? And do you not know his obstinacy? You could
+not move him now were you to pay him in full the amount of the forfeit.
+It is not the gold that he longer cares for, but the chance to
+distinguish himself by the exhibition of the slave of greatest strength
+and prowess. So let that matter go for settled. Rather strive, in some
+other manner, to win the money with which to pay your forfeit. This,
+with good luck, you may do--a little here and a little there--who knows?
+Perhaps even I can help you. Have I not won fifty sestertia from you? I
+will now wager it back against a slave.'
+
+'Against any slave?'
+
+'By Bacchus, no! I have enough of ordinary captives to suit me, and care
+but little for any accession to the rabble of them. But you have one
+whom I covet--a Greek of fair appearance and pleasing manners--fit not
+for the camp or the quarries, but of some value as a page or cupbearer.
+It was but lately that I saw him, writing at your lady's dictation, and
+I wished for him at once. Shall we play for him?'
+
+'No! a thousand times, no!' exclaimed Sergius, striking the table so
+heavily with his open hand that the dice danced and the flagons shook.
+'Were you to offer me thrice his value--to pay off my forfeit to
+Sardesus to the last sestertium--to gain me back my quarry and my
+vineyards--all that I have lost--I would not give up that slave. My
+purpose is sweeter to me than all the gold you could offer, and I will
+not be cheated out of it. That slave dies to-morrow in the
+amphitheatre--between the lion's jaws!'
+
+'Dies? In the arena?' was the astonished exclamation.
+
+'Is there aught wonderful in that?' Sergius fiercely cried. 'Have you
+never before known such a thing as a master giving up his slave for the
+public amusement? And let no man ask me why I do it. It may be that I
+wish revenge, hating him too much to let him live. It may be that I seek
+to be a benefactor like others, and furnish entertainment to the
+populace at my own expense. It is sufficient that I choose it. Will not
+any other slave answer, Emilius?'
+
+'Nay, no other will do,' remarked the poet, throwing himself carelessly
+back, with the air of one dismissing a fruitless subject from his mind.
+'This was the only one whom I coveted. For any other I would not care to
+shake the dicebox three times, though I might feel sure to win.'
+
+'Will you offer the same to me, Sergius?' eagerly cried the comedian. 'I
+also have won heavily from you. Will you play any other slave than this
+page against fifty sestertia?'
+
+For his only answer, Sergius seized the dice, and began impatiently to
+rattle them. The eyes of Bassus sparkled with anticipated victory.
+
+'You hear?' he cried, to all around him. 'Against my fifty sestertia he
+will stake any of his slaves excepting this Greek page?'
+
+'They all hear the terms,' retorted Sergius. 'Now throw!'
+
+'Whether male or female?' continued Bassus, still looking around to see
+that all understood.
+
+'Are they fools? Can they not hear? Will you throw or not?' shouted
+Sergius.
+
+In a wild delirium of excitement, the comedian began the game, and in a
+few minutes it was concluded. Then he leaped from his seat, crying out:
+
+'I have won! And there can be no dispute now! You all heard that he gave
+the choice of his slaves, whether male or female?'
+
+'Fool!' sneered Sergius, throwing himself back. 'What dispute can there
+be? Do you think that I would deny my word? And do you suppose I did not
+know your aims, cunningly as you may think you veiled them? Would I have
+given up Leta to you, if she had been of any further value to myself? By
+the gods! had you waited a while, I do not know but what I would have
+made her a present to you; not however, to oblige you, but to punish
+her!'
+
+The comedian listened in chopfallen amazement. Already it seemed to him
+that his prize had lost half its value.
+
+'Be at rest, though,' Sergius continued, in a contemptuous tone. 'I have
+merely tired of her, that is all. Her eyes are as bright and her voice
+as silvery as ever. She may not ever come to love you much, but she will
+have the wit to pretend that she does; and if she makes you believe
+her--as you doubtless will--it will be all the same thing to you. Who
+knows, too, with what zeal she may worm herself into your affection,
+under the guidance of her ambition? For, that she has ambition, you will
+soon discover. By Bacchus! since you have no wife or household to fetter
+your fancies, it would not surprise me were you to succumb to her wiles,
+and to make of her your wife. You may recline there and smile with
+incredulity; but such things have been done before this, and by men who
+would not condescend to look upon one in your poor station. Yes, I will
+wager that, in the end, you will make of her your wife. Well, it would
+be no harm to you. She will then deceive you, of course; but what of
+that? Have not better men submitted to that inevitable lot? Yes, she
+will deceive you; and then will smile upon you, and you will believe her
+word, and be again deceived. But you will have only yourself to blame
+for it. I have warned you in advance.'
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+As the shouts of laughter elicited by the host's remark rang through the
+hall, drowning the muttered response of the comedian, Leta glided softly
+and rapidly from behind the screen of tapestry which veiled the open
+doorway. There, crouching out of sight, she had remained concealed for
+the last hour--watching the revellers through a crevice in the
+needlework, and vainly hoping, either in the words or face of Sergius,
+to detect some tone or expression indicative of regretful thought or
+recollection of herself. When at last her name had been mentioned, for a
+moment she had eagerly held her breath, lest she might lose one syllable
+from which an augury of her fate could be drawn. Then, repressing, with
+a violent effort, the cry of despair which rose to her lips, upon
+hearing herself thus coolly and disdainfully surrendered as the stake of
+a game of dice, and with less apparent regret than would have been felt
+for the loss of a single gold piece, she drew the folds of her dress
+closely about her and passed out.
+
+Out through the antechamber--down the stairway--and into the central
+court; no other purpose guiding her footsteps than that of finding some
+place where she could reflect, without disturbance, upon the fate before
+her. In that heated hall she must have died; but it might be that in the
+cool, open air, she could conquer the delirium which threatened to
+overwhelm her, and could thus regain her self-control. If only for five
+minutes, it might be well. With her quick energy and power of decision,
+even five minutes of cool, deliberate counsel with herself might suffice
+to shape and direct her whole future life.
+
+Hardly realizing how she had come there, she found herself sitting upon
+the coping of the courtyard fountain. The night was dark, for thick
+clouds shut out the gleam of moon and stars. No one could see her, nor
+was it an hour when any one was likely to be near. From one end to the
+other the court was deserted, except by herself. No light, other than
+the faint glow from the windows of the banquet hall upon the story above
+her. No sound beyond the sullen splash of the water falling into the
+marble basin of the fountain. There was now but little to interfere with
+deliberate reflection.
+
+What demon had possessed the Fates that they should have brought this
+lot upon her? It could not be the destiny which had been marked out for
+her from the first. That had been a different one, she was sure. Her
+instinct had whispered peace and success to her. Such were the blessings
+which should have been unravelled for her from off the twirling spindle;
+but some malignant spirit must have substituted another person's
+deserved condemnation in place of her more kindly lot.
+
+That she had failed in attaining the grand end of her desires was not,
+of itself, the utmost of her misfortune. She had aimed high, because it
+was as easy to do that as to accept a lower object of ambition. She had
+taken her course, believing that all things are possible to the
+energetic and daring, but, at the same time, fully realizing the chances
+of failure. But to fail had simply seemed to her to remain where she
+was, instead of ascending higher--to miss becoming the wife of the
+imperator, but to continue, as before, the main guide and direction of
+his thoughts, impulses, and affections.
+
+And now, without previous token or warning, had come upon her the
+terrible realization that she had not only gained nothing, but had lost
+all, and that the fatal chance which had fettered her schemes, had also
+led to her further degradation. Thrown aside like a broken toy-with a
+jeering confession that she had wearied her possessor--with a cool,
+heartless criticism upon her character, and with cruel prophecies about
+her future--gambled for with one whose sight filled her with
+abhorrence--and, when won, made over to him as a bone is tossed to a
+dog--what more bitterness could be heaped upon her?
+
+But there was now no use in mourning about the past. What had been done
+could not be altered. Nor could she disguise from herself the
+impossibility of ever regaining her former position and influence. Those
+had passed away forever. She must now look to the future alone, and
+endeavor so to shape its course as to afford herself some relief from
+its terrors. Possibly there might yet be found a way of escape.
+
+Should she try to fly? That, she knew, could not be done--at least,
+alone. The world was wide, but the arm of the imperial police was long;
+and though she might, for a little while, wander purposelessly hither
+and thither, yet before many hours the well-directed efforts of a
+pursuer would be sure to arrest her. She could die--for in every place
+death is within reach of the resolute; but she did not wish to die. For
+one instant, indeed, she thought of the Tiber, and the peace which might
+be found beneath its flow--but only for an instant. And she almost
+thanked the gods in her heart that it had not yet gone so far with her
+as that.
+
+Burying her face in her hands, she sat for a moment, endeavoring to
+abstract her thoughts from all outward objects, so as the more readily
+to determine what course to adopt. But for a while it seemed as though
+it was impossible for her to fix her mind aright. Each instant some
+intruding trifle interfered to distract her attention from the only
+great object which now should claim it. A long-forgotten incident of the
+past would come into her mind--or perhaps some queer conceit which at
+the time had caused laughter. She did not laugh now, but none the less
+would she find herself revolving the merits of the speech or action.
+Then, the soft fall of the water into the fountain basin annoyed her,
+and it occurred to her that it might be this--which prevented undivided
+reflection. Stooping over, therefore, and feeling along the edge of the
+basin, she found the vent of the pipes, and stopped the flow. At once
+the light stream began to diminish and die away, until in a moment the
+water was at rest, except for the few laggard drops which one by one
+rolled off the polished shoulders of the bronze figures. These gradually
+all trickled down, and then it seemed as though at last there must be
+silence. But the murmur of the evening breeze among the trees
+intervened; and, far more exasperating than all, she could now hear the
+bursts of merriment which rang out from the banqueting room overhead.
+Therefore, once more putting her hand into the basin, she turned on the
+flow, and the gentle stream again sprang from the outstretched cup and
+fell down, deadening all lesser sounds.
+
+Then Leta looked up at the sky, overspread with its thick pall of
+clouds, and wondered vacantly whether there would be rain upon the
+morrow, and if so, whether the games appointed for the new amphitheatre
+would take place. But she recovered herself with a start, and again
+buried her face in her hands. What were games and combats of that kind
+to her? She was to enter upon a different kind of struggle. She must
+reflect--reflect!--and when she had reflected, must act!
+
+For ten minutes she thus remained; and now, indeed, seemed to have
+gained the required concentration of thought. No outward sound disturbed
+her. Once a Nubian slave, who had heard the stoppage of the fountain's
+flow, emerged from beneath an archway, as though to examine into the
+difficulty. Finding that the water was still playing as usual, he
+imagined that he must have been mistaken, gave utterance to an oath in
+condemnation of his own stupidity, slowly walked around the basin,
+looked inquiringly at Leta, and, for the moment, made as though he would
+have accosted her--and then, changing his mind, withdrew and walked back
+silently into the house. Still she did not move.
+
+At length, however, she raised her head and stood upright. Her eyes now
+shone with deep intensity of purpose, and her lips were firmly set.
+Something akin to a smile flickered around the corners of her mouth,
+betraying not pleasure, but satisfaction. She had evidently reflected to
+some purpose, and now the trial for action had arrived.
+
+'Strange that I should not have thought of it before,' she murmured to
+herself. Then stepping under the archway which led from the courtyard
+into the palace, she reached up against the wall and took down two keys
+which hung there. Holding them tightly, so that they might not clink
+together, she glided along, past the fountain--through the clump of
+plane trees--keeping as much as possible in the deeper shadows of arch
+and shrubbery--and so on along the whole length of the court, until she
+stood by the range of lower erections which bounded its farther
+extremity. Then, fitting one of the keys into an iron door, she softly
+unlocked it.
+
+Entering, she stood within a low stone cell. It was the prison house of
+the palace, used for the reception of new slaves, and for the punishment
+of such others as gave offence. It was a long, narrow apartment, paved
+with stone and lighted by a single grated aperture set high in the wall
+upon the courtyard side. The place was of sufficient dimensions to hold
+fifty or sixty persons, but, in the present case, there was but one
+tenant--Cleotos---Not even a guard was with him, for the strength of the
+walls and the locks were considered amply sufficient to prevent escape.
+
+Cleotos was sitting upon a stone bench, resting his head upon his right
+hand. At the opening of the door he looked up. He could not see who it
+was that entered, but the light tread and the faint rustle of a waving
+dress sufficiently indicated the sex. If it had been daylight, a flush
+might have been seen upon his face, for the thought flashed upon his
+mind that it might be AEnone herself coming to his assistance. But the
+first word undeceived him; and he let his head once more fall between
+the palms of his hands.
+
+'Cleotos,' whispered Leta, 'it is I. I have come to set you free.'
+
+'It is right,' he said, moodily. 'All this I owe to you alone. It is
+fit that you should try to undo your work.'
+
+'Could I foresee that it would come to this?' she responded, attempting
+justification. 'How was I to know that my trivial transgression would
+have ended so sorrowfully for you? But all that is easily mended. You
+have money, and a token which will identify you to the proper parties.
+There is yet time to reach Ostia before that ship can sail.'
+
+'How knew you that I had gold--or this signet ring; or that there was a
+ship to sail from Ostia?' he exclaimed with sudden fierceness. 'You,
+then, had been listening at the door! And having listened, you must have
+known with what innocence we spoke together! And yet, seeing all this,
+you called him to the spot and left him to let his eyes be deceived and
+his heart filled with bitter jealousy, and have played upon his passion
+by wicked misrepresentation, until you have succeeded in bringing ruin
+upon all about you! I see it all now, as clearly as though it were
+written upon a parchment rolled out before me! To think that the gods
+have beheld you doing this thing, and yet have not stricken you dead!'
+
+'I have sinned,' she murmured, seizing his hand and bending over, so
+that a ready tear rolled down upon it. He felt it fall, but moved not.
+Only a few days before, her tears would have moved him; but now his
+heart was hardened against her. He had found out that her nature was
+cruel and not easily moral to repentance, and that, if emotion was ever
+suffered to overcome her, it was tolerated solely for some crafty
+design. The falling tear, therefore, simply bade him be upon his guard
+against deceit, lest once again she might succeed in weaving her wiles
+about him. Or, if she really wept with repentance, he knew that it was
+not repentance for the sin itself, but rather for some baffled purpose.
+
+'Go on,' he simply said.
+
+'I have sinned,' she repeated, still clinging to his hands. 'But, O
+Cleotos! when I offer to undo my work and set you free, you will surely
+forgive me?'
+
+'Yes, it is right that you should repair the mischief you have caused,'
+he repeated; 'and I will avail myself of it. To-night, since you offer
+to set me free, and claim that you have the power to do so--to-night for
+Ostia; and then, then away forever from this ruthless land! But stay!
+What of our mistress? I will not go hence until I know that she is safe
+and well.'
+
+'She is well,' responded Leta, fearful lest the truth might throw a new
+obstacle before her plans. 'And all is again right between her lord and
+herself, for I have assured him of her innocence.'
+
+'Then, since this is so, there is no motive for me to tarry,' he said.
+He believed her, and was satisfied; not that he esteemed her worthy of
+belief, but because it did not seem to him possible that such a matter
+as a grateful kiss upon a protecting hand could require much
+explanation. 'I would like well once more to see her and bid her
+farewell, and utter my thanks for all her kindness; but to what purpose?
+I have done that already, and could do and say no more than I have
+already done and said. There remains, therefore, nothing more than to
+fulfil her commands, and return to my native home. But tell her, Leta,
+that my last thought was for her, and that her memory will ever live in
+my heart.'
+
+'I cannot tell her this,' slowly murmured Leta, 'for I shall not see her
+again. I--I go with you.'
+
+Cleotos listened for a moment in perplexed wonderment, and then, for his
+sole answer, dropped her hand and turned away. She understood him as
+well as though he had spoken the words of refusal.
+
+'You will not take me with you, then; is it not so?' she said. 'Some
+nice point of pride, or some feeling of fancied wrong, or craving for
+revenge, or, perhaps, love for another person, tells you now to separate
+yourself from me! And yet you loved me once. This, then, is man's
+promised faith!'
+
+'You dare to talk to me of faith and broken vows!' he exclaimed, after a
+moment of speechless amazement at her hardiness in advancing such a
+plea. 'You, who for weeks have treated me with scorn and
+indifference--who have plotted against me, until my life itself has been
+brought into danger--who, apart from all that, cast me off when first we
+met in Rome, telling me then that I was and could be nothing to you,
+yes, even that our association from the first had been a mistake and a
+wrong! Yes, Leta, there was a time when I truly loved you, as man had
+never then done, or since, or ever will again; but impute not to me the
+blame that I cannot do so now.'
+
+'I was to blame,' she said; and it seemed that this night must be a
+night of confession for her, in so few things could she justify herself
+by denial or argument. 'I acknowledge my fault, and how my heart has
+been drawn from you by some delusion, as powerful and resistless as
+though the result of magic. But when I confess it freely, and tell you
+how I now see my duty and my heart more clearly, as though a veil of
+after all, I find no forgiveness in your heart, said I not truly that
+man's faith cannot be trusted? Am I not the same Leta as of old?'
+
+'The same as of old?' he exclaimed. 'Can you look earnestly and
+truthfully into your soul, and yet avow that you are the pure-hearted
+girl who roamed hand in hand with me only a year ago, in our native
+isle, content to have no ambition except that of living a humble life
+with me? And now, with your simple tastes and desires swept away--with
+your soul covered with love of material pleasures as with a lava
+crust--wrapt up in longing for Rome's most sinful, artificial
+excesses--having, for gold or position or power or ambition, or what
+not, so long as it was not for love, given yourself up a willing victim
+to a heartless master--do you dare, after this, to talk to me of love,
+and call yourself the same?'
+
+'And are you one of those who believe that there can be no forgiveness
+for repentant woman?'
+
+'Of forgiveness, all that can be desired; but of forgetfulness, none.
+There is one thing that no man can forget; and were I to repulse the
+admonitions of my judgment, and strive to pass that thing by, who would
+sooner scorn me than yourself? Let all this end. Know that I love you
+not, and could never love you again. Your scorn, indifference, and
+deceit have long ago crushed from my heart all the love it once held.
+Know further, that if I did still love you, my pride would condemn the
+feeling, and I would never rest until I had destroyed it, even were it
+necessary to destroy myself rather than to yield.'
+
+'These are brave words, indeed!' she exclaimed, taunted by his rebuke
+into a departure from her assumption of affection. 'But they better suit
+the freeman upon his own mountain side than the slave in his cell. Samos
+is still afar off. The road from here to Ostia has not yet been
+traversed by you in safety. Even this door between you and the open
+street has not been thrown back. And yet you dare to taunt me, knowing
+that I hold in my hand the key, and, by withdrawing it, can take away
+all hope from you. Do you realize what will be your fate if you remain
+here--how that on the morrow the lions and leopards of the amphitheatre
+will quarrel over your scattered limbs?'
+
+'Is this a threat?' he cried. 'Is it to tell me that if I do not give my
+love where my honor tells me it should not be given, I must surely die!
+So, then, let it be. I accept the doom. One year ago, I would have
+cheerfully fought in the arena for your faintest smile. Now I would
+rather die there than have your sullied love forced upon me.'
+
+Without another word he sat down again upon the stone bench. Even in
+that darkness she could note how resolute was his expression, how firm
+and unyielding his attitude. She had roused his nature, as she had never
+seen it before. She had not believed that a spirit which she had been
+accustomed to look upon as so much inferior in strength to her own,
+could show such unflinching determination; and for the moment she stood
+admiring him, and wondering whether, if he had always acted like that,
+he might not have bound her soul to his own and kept her to himself
+through all temptation and trial. Then, taking the other key, she
+unlocked the door in the rear wall of the cell, and threw it open. The
+narrow street behind the court was before him, and he was free to go.
+
+'I meant it not for a threat,' she said. 'However low I may sink, I have
+not yet reached the pass of wishing to purchase or beg for affection.
+Why I spoke thus, I know not. It may be that I thought some gratitude
+might be due me for rescuing you. But I cannot tell what I, thought. Or
+it might have been that words were necessary for me, and that I used the
+first that came. But let that pass. Know only that your safety lies
+before you, and that it is in your power to grasp it. And now, farewell.
+You leave me drifting upon a downward course, Cleotos. Sometimes,
+perhaps, when another person is at your side, making your life far
+happier than I could have made it, you will think kindly of me.'
+
+'I think kindly of you now, Leta,' he said. 'Whatever love I can give,
+apart from the love which I once asked you to accept, is yours. In
+everything that brotherly affection can bestow, there will be no limit
+to my care and interest for you. Nay, more, you shall now go away from
+hence with me; and though I cannot promise more than a brother's love,
+yet with that for your guide and protection, you can reach your native
+home in peace and security, and there work out whatever repentance you
+may have here begun.'
+
+'And when we are there, and those who have known us begin to ask why,
+when Cleotos has brought Leta back in safety, he regards her only as a
+sister and a friend, and otherwise remains sternly apart from her, what
+answer can be given which will not raise suspicion and scorn, and make
+my life a burden to me? No, Cleotos, it cannot be. Cruel as my lot may
+be here, I have only myself to answer for it, and it is easier to hide
+myself from notice in this whirl of sin and passion than if at home
+again. And whatever may henceforth happen to me, the Fates are surely
+most to blame. How can one avoid his destiny?'
+
+'The Fates do not carve out our destiny,' he said. 'They simply carry
+into relentless effect the judgments which our own passions and
+weaknesses pronounced upon ourselves. O Leta! have you considered what
+you are resolved upon encountering? Do you not know that some day this
+master of yours will tire of you, and fling you to some friend of his--a
+soldier, actor, or what not--that as the years run on and your beauty
+fades, you will fall lower and lower? Have not thousands like yourself
+thus gone on, until at last, becoming old and worthless, they are left
+to die alone upon some island in the Tiber? Pray that you may die a
+better death than that!'
+
+'It is a sad picture,' she answered. 'It is not merely possible, but
+also probable. I acknowledge it all. And yet, if I saw it all unrolled
+before me as my certain doom, I do not know that I would try to shun it.
+Already the glitter of this world has changed my soul from what it was,
+and I am now too feeble of purpose to spend long years in retrieving the
+errors of the past. There came into my heart a thought--a selfish
+thought--that you might forget what has gone before; and then it seemed
+that I might succeed in winning back my peace, and so shun the fate
+which lies before me. But you cannot forget. I blame you not: you are
+right. You have never spoken more truly than when you said that I would
+have despised you if you had yielded. Therefore, that hope is gone; and
+now I must submit to the destiny which is coming upon me.'
+
+'But, Leta, only strive to think that--'
+
+'Nay, what is the use? Rather let me throw all regrets away, and strive
+not to think at all. Why not yield with a pleasant grace to the current,
+when we know that, in the end, struggle as we may, it will surely sweep
+us under?'
+
+'Leta--dear Leta--'
+
+'Not a word, dear Cleotos; it must not be. From this hour I banish all
+human affections from my heart, as I banish all hope. Could you remain
+here, you would see how relentless and fierce my nature will grow. Plots
+and schemes shall now be my amusement; for if I must be destroyed,
+others shall fall with me. This must be the last tender impulse of my
+life. I know not why it is, but I could now really weep. Cleotos,
+forgive me! I came hither, loving you not, but hoping to beguile you
+into receiving me again. I have failed, and I ought to hate you for it;
+and yet I almost love you instead. It is strange, is it not?
+
+'But, Leta--'
+
+'How my heart now feels soft and tender with our recollections of other
+days! Do you remember, Cleotos, how once, when children, we went
+together and stole the grapes from Eminides's vine? And how, when he
+would have beaten you, I stood before you, and prevented him? Who would
+then have thought that, in a few years, we should be here in
+Rome--slaves, and parting forever? We shall never again together see
+Eminides's vineyard, shall we?'
+
+'O Leta--my sister--'
+
+'There, there; speak not, but go at once, for some one comes near. Tarry
+no longer. If at home they ask after me, tell them I am dead. Farewell,
+dear Cleotos. Kiss me good-by. Do not grudge me that, at least. And may
+the gods bless you!'
+
+He would still have spoken, would have claimed a minute to plead with
+her and try to induce her to leave the path she was pursuing, and go
+with him. But at that instant the voice of some one approaching sounded
+louder, and the tones of Sergias could be distinguished as he tried to
+troll forth the catch of a drinking melody. There was no time to lose.
+With a farewell pressure of her arm about Cleotos's neck, Leta pushed
+him through the aperture into the dark back street; and then, leaving
+the keys in the locks, turned back into the garden, and fled toward the
+house.
+
+
+
+
+CREATION.
+
+
+The primary characteristics of creation are aggregation, producing all
+existing forms; and dissolution, in which the parts suffer
+disintegration, their varied elements entering into new combinations.
+The active powers producing such normal condition of matter, which is
+ceaseless motion, are comprehended in attraction for aggregation, and
+repulsion for dissolution, alternately. This power of combing atoms and
+dissolving their connection is electric, which is only possessed by that
+element, in its dual character of attraction and repulsion; and thus we
+may reasonably assume that electricity is the material wherewith
+creative energy manifests its power in the varied combinations,
+dissolutions, and reconstructions which comprise all animate and
+inanimate existences. This same cosmical power, electricity, holds all
+worlds in their normal relations, and is the source of light and heat,
+as well as the connecting link, through our electric nerve cords, by
+which our minds alone commune with the outer world, in direct contact
+with our bodily senses, and hence becomes the medium of all our
+knowledge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ELECTRICITY AS THE SOURCE OF LIGHT, HEAT, GRAVITATION, AND THE ORIGIN op
+ALL GLOBES, NEBULAE, AND COMETIC MATTER.
+
+If space were wholly devoid of matter, all globes, or other masses of
+matter, would be dissipated into it, or _a priori_ could not have been
+formed from it. The material interchange, passing through space, between
+globes, in all stages of formation, such as light, heat, and
+gravitation, could not be conducted through a vacuum, as their very
+presence would be destructive of vacuity. Materiality would be
+dissipated or absorbed in an attempted passage through vacuity;
+therefore, as we know that light, heat, and gravitation are,
+necessarily, material, space is but diffused materiality, at its minimum
+of etheriality. Globes moving in their orbits and on their axes must
+thus meet with resistance: this, together with the internal motion of
+their contained elements, necessarily excites the constant production of
+electricity, in its dual character of attraction and repulsion,
+according to its well-known laws; and this double character, alone
+possessed by electricity, when concentrated produces material affinity,
+with reciprocal attraction and repulsion, in all its atoms, thus forever
+preventing entire solidity or entire separation of its parts. Such
+condensation of matter by electric action, is the origin of heat and the
+variety produced by incandescence, which, therefore, accounts for the
+formation of globes from the materials in space, and their sustentation
+in orbit.
+
+As motion is the normal condition of matter, and is the producer of
+electricity, therefore electric actions, concentrated in space,
+necessarily gathers cometic and nebulous matter from space, the
+materials, through incandescence, for future globes, with orbits
+contracting in proportion to condensation, its maximum of attraction. As
+material space is boundless, so the creation of globes is endless
+therein, through electric action, by producing gradual centres of
+material condensation, the mere whirlpool specks in infinite space.
+
+Revolving bodies, gaseous, fluid, or solid, thus impress or charge the
+centres of their motion, by superinduced attraction, with electricity,
+as their Leyden jars. So, too, the central body, or primary of a system,
+so overcharged with electricity by its revolving secondaries, becomes
+positively electrified or repellant to all such revolving bodies; and
+thus the producers and accumulator are mutually attractive and repellant
+of each other.
+
+The planets, by their lightning speed in orbits and on their axes, being
+producers, and the sun the recipient or accumulator of electricity; the
+latter, as the centre of our revolving system, is the Leyden jar, and
+thus becomes the overcharged positive source and dispenser of electric
+light and heat to the surrounding planets.
+
+The planets, as producers, are always negatively electric, tending
+toward the accumulator, the sun; while the latter, as the accumulator,
+being overcharged, is positively electric, and repels. The sun being the
+greater body, the planets' negative electric attraction for it must
+always yield to the greater mass and tend toward the sun; while that
+great body, overcharged with accumulated positive electricity, is fully
+capable of repelling such tendency of the lesser revolving planets
+toward it. Attraction or gravitation with the planets, and repulsion
+(instead of centrifugal force) with the sun, forever and inexhaustibly
+retain the various bodies, of each system, in their respective orbits.
+As motion is the normal condition of matter, eternally producing
+electric action, and when centralized evolving light and heat; so light
+and heat are as inexhaustibly eternal as motion, and may thus be
+demonstrated as electric. The same principle of action applies to all
+individual globes of each separate system, conjointly; and collectively,
+the different systems mutually attract and repel each other,
+proportionate to mass and the weakened forces of distance, thus
+preserving a cosmical harmony throughout creation, forever forbidding
+collision or destruction of individual globes.
+
+This theory will be found to correspond with the well-known laws of
+positive and negative electric action; as well as illustrative of the
+influence of electric light on vegetable production--the only
+artificially produced light, capable of imparting a healthy growth, and
+color--which, I think, clearly proves it to be of the same character as
+solar light. It is also corroborative of much that is inexplicable,
+except in the identity of electricity with solar effulgence, as the
+source of light, heat, and gravitation, as well as substituting
+repulsion for centrifugal force, and must forever disprove the theory of
+solar light being the result of mere metallic incandescence, or any
+other equally exhausting combustion. The latter theory, with such
+supposed expedients in nature, to carry out the mighty design of
+creation, belittles the subject by its transitoriness, and is,
+therefore, unworthy the conception of modern generations.
+
+
+
+
+PHENOMENA OF HAZE, FOGS, AND CLOUDS.
+
+
+The predominant haze, which generally envelops the landscape and reddens
+the sun and moon during long droughts, is usually ascribed to smoke from
+burning woods and forests, pervading the air. I have observed a similar
+prevalent haze, connected with other extensive droughts than the one
+from which the country is now (August) suffering, and have invariably
+heard the same vague and inadequate cause assigned. Observation proves
+conclusively, that the assigned is not the true general cause (although
+it has its purely local effect), as with winds, for days together, in
+opposite quarters from local fires on mountain or plain, such widespread
+districts remain enveloped in haze, although hundreds of miles distant.
+Neither over such districts was there any odor as from smoke pervading
+the atmosphere (except temporarily from some neighboring chimneys, which
+the then heavy air kept near the earth), nor felt by the eyes, which
+very perceptibly smart when exposed to smoke. It is impossible, with
+varying winds, that mere local fires should spread smoke so uniformly as
+to comprise most of the area of the drought, which on this occasion
+extended from our great western lakes to the Atlantic seacoast; and
+anomalously, too, that it should have continued so long after a rain had
+extinguished those fires.
+
+I should assign a very different cause for this phenomenon. Rain drops
+are negatively electric, while suspended moisture, such as fog, displays
+itself in the form of vesicles or globules, distended by the presence
+and prevalence of positive electricity, which refracts the rays of light
+from so many myriad surfaces, that all objects are thus, necessarily,
+obscured to the eye. During droughts, when haze prevails, positive
+electricity in the air becomes in excess, which is heating, and
+therefore serves still more to subdivide, as well as to expand or
+distend the floating moisture in the atmosphere (of which it is never
+entirely deprived) into infinitesimal vesicles, or globules, like minute
+soap bubbles, and thus from such an infinite number of refracting
+surfaces is produced the haze, as well as the obscuration of the
+landscape and the reddened disks of the sun and moon, by the absorption
+of their heat or red rays, so characteristic of great droughts. This
+same infinitesimal vesicular condition of suspended moisture, is also
+the sufficient cause of there being no deposition of dew on such
+occasions, except where a local change of electric condition cools the
+air, thus temporarily clearing the atmosphere, and permitting a local
+deposition of the previously suspended moisture, in the form of dew.
+
+All fogs are due to this same cause, as well as that which, in extreme
+wintry cold, overhangs the open water, as it yields its comparative heat
+to the air. The formation and suspension of clouds, in all their varied
+characteristics, have the same origin. That highly attenuated haze which
+invests the distant landscape, particularly mountains, with its magical
+purple hue, is due to the same, but still more ethereal interposition of
+infinitesimal globules of suspended moisture. In corroboration of this
+being the true explanation of the phenomena of haze, fogs, etc., is the
+fact, that as soon as clouds prevail, denoting an electric change in the
+atmosphere, all haze immediately disappears, or becomes embraced in the
+larger vesicles or globules, forming clouds.
+
+
+
+
+FLY LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER.
+
+PART II.--CHEVRONS.
+
+
+She sewed them on upside down. Please to remember that this was in May,
+1861 (or was it 1851? it seems a long time ago), when a young lady of
+the most finished education, polished to the uttermost nine, could not
+reasonably be expected to know what a sergeant-major was, much less the
+particular cut and fashion of his badge of rank. I told her, exultingly,
+that I was appointed sergeant-major of our battalion. 'What's that?' she
+inquired, simply enough. I explained. The dignity and importance of the
+office was scarcely diminished in her mind by my explanation; and,
+indeed, I thought it the grandest in the army. Who would be a
+commissioned officer, when he could wear our gorgeous gray uniform,
+trimmed with red, the sleeves wellnigh hidden behind three broad red
+stripes in the shape of a V, joined at the top by as many broad red
+arcs, all beautifully set off by the lithe and active figure of
+Sergeant-Major William Jenkins? As for Mary, who protested that she
+never could learn the difference between all these grades, or make out
+the reason for them, she was for her part convinced that not even the
+colonel himself, certainly not that fat Major Heavysterne, could be
+grander, or handsomer, or more important than her William. So I forgave
+her for sewing on my chevrons upside down, although it was at the time
+an infliction grievous to be born, inasmuch as the fussy little
+quartermaster-sergeant was thereby enabled to get a day's start of in
+the admiration and envy of our old company. How they envied us, to be
+sure! But I had one consolation: Oates' were all straight; mine were
+arched. And _she_ sewed mine on. His were done by Cutts & Dunn's
+bandy-legged foreman.
+
+There never was such a uniform as ours. Not even the 'Seventh'
+itself--incomparable in the eyes of the _three_-months'--could vie in
+grand and soldierly simplicity, we thought, with the gray and red of the
+9th Battalion, District of Columbia Volunteers. Gray cap, with a red
+band round it, letters A S, for 'American Sharpshooters' (Smallweed used
+to say he never saw it spelt in that way before, and to ask anxiously
+for the other S), gray single-breasted frock coat, with nine gilt
+buttons, and red facings on the collar and cuffs. Gray pantaloons, with
+a broad red stripe down the outer seam. The drummers sported the most
+gorgeous red stomachs ever seen, between two rows of twenty little
+bullet buttons. The color rendered us liable to be mistaken for the
+rebels, it is true; but this source of anxiety to the more nervous among
+us was happily prevented from leading to any unfavorable results by the
+fatherly care displayed by poor old General Balkinsop, under whose
+protection, we were sent into the field, in always keeping at least a
+day's march from the enemy!
+
+When we non-commissioned staff officers were first promoted, we felt
+badly about leaving our companies; wanted to drill with them still, and
+so on. But this soon wore off under the pressure of new duties. For my
+part, I soon found that the adjutant, Lieutenant Harch, regarded it as
+quite a natural arrangement that the sergeant-major should attend to the
+office duties, while the adjutant occupied himself exclusively with what
+he was pleased to style the military part of the business; meaning
+thereby, guard mounting every morning and Sunday morning, inspection
+once a week, making an average of, say, twenty minutes work per diem for
+the adjutant, and leaving the poor sergeant-major enough to occupy and
+worry him for ten or eleven hours. 'Sergeant-major, publish these
+orders,' Lieutenant Harch would say, in tones of authority exceeding in
+peremptory curtness anything I have ever heard since from the commander
+of a grand army; and then, scraping a match--my match--upon the wall, he
+would begin attending to his 'military duties' by lighting a cigar--my
+cigar--and strolling up the avenue, on exhibition, preparatory to going
+home to dine, while the fag remained driving the pen madly, kindly
+assisted sometimes by Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, until long after the
+dinner hour of the non-commissioned staff. I think the company
+commanders must sometimes have doubted (unless they carefully refrained
+from reading orders, as I have sometimes thought probable) whether the
+adjutant could write his name; for all our orders used to be signed:
+
+                'By order of Major JOHNSON HEAVYSTERNE:
+                          FREDERICK HARCH, 1st Lieutenant and Adjutant,
+                                   By WILLIAM JENKINS, Sergeant-Major.'
+
+Now, if the printer sets this up properly, you will see that, even at
+that early day, we knew too much to adopt the sensation style of signing
+orders which some officers have since learned from the _New York
+Herald_, thus:
+
+                          By command of
+                                Major-General BULGER!
+                                   WASHINGTON SMITH, A. A.-G.
+
+In those days there was but little of that distinction of ranks which
+has come to be better observed now that our volunteers have grown into
+an army. You see, the process of forming an army out of its constituent
+element follows pretty much the fashion set by that complex machine the
+human animal: the materials go through all the processes of swallowing,
+digestion, chylifaction, chymifaction, absorption, alteration, and
+excretion; bone, muscle, nerve, sinew, viscera, and what not, each
+taking its share, and discarding the useless material that has only
+served, like bran in horse feed, to give volume and _prehensibility_ to
+the mass. Our non-commissioned staff messed with the major, who was as
+jolly a bachelor as need be, of some forty-nine years of growth, and
+thirty of butchering, that being his occupation. The adjutant, being
+newly married to a gaunt female, who, I hope, nagged him as he us,
+_preferred_ to take his meals at home. Smallweed, who had somehow got
+made quartermaster, couldn't go old Heavysterne, he said, and so kept as
+long as he could to his desultory habits of living as a citizen and a
+bachelor. So our mess consisted of the major, who exercised a paternal
+care over the rest of us, superintending, indeed often joining in, our
+amusements and discussions, our quarrels and makings up; of
+Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, who knew all about everything and
+everybody better than anybody, and was always ready to ventilate his
+superior knowledge on the slightest provocation, and who, as Smallweed,
+now Lieutenant Smallweed, used to say, 'would have made a d----d elegant
+quartermaster-sergeant, if he hadn't had a moral objection to issuing
+anything;' of Chaplain Bender, a sanctified-looking individual of
+promiscuous theology and doubtful morals (the funny men used to speak of
+him irreverently as Hell Bender); of the battalion commissary,
+Lieutenant Fippany, an unmitigated swell; of Commissary-Sergeant Peck, a
+stumpy little fellow, full of facts and figures, and always quiet and
+ready; of the writer, Sergeant-Major Jenkins, or Jinkens as my name used
+to be mispronounced, infinitely to my disgust; and lastly,
+semi-occasionally, of the sutler, Mr. Cann. The surgeon, old Doctor
+Peacack, ran a separate mess, consisting of himself, the assistant
+surgeon, Dr. Launcelot Cutts, and hospital steward Spatcheloe.
+
+The drum-major, Musician Tappit, having refused to be mustered in, and
+the War Department having presently refused to let us have any musicians
+at all, used to appear only on parades, gorgeous in his gray uniform and
+ornamental red stomach, disappearing with exemplary regularity, and
+diving into his upholsterer's cap and baize apron upon the slightest
+prospect of work or danger. I don't think it was ever my bad fortune to
+eat more unpleasant meals than those eaten at our mess table. The
+officers, excepting the major, but specially including the chaplain,
+used to insist on being helped first and excessively to everything; also
+on inviting their friends to dine on our plates, there being no extra
+ones; also on giving us the broken chairs, one in particular, that was
+cracked in a romp between the chaplain and the adjutant, and that
+pinched you when you sat on it. Then Lieutenant Harch was always playing
+adjutant at the dinner table, settling discussions _ex cathedra_ in a
+sharp tone, and ordering his companions to help him to dishes, as thus:
+'Sergeant-Major, p'tatoes!' 'Oates, beef!' 'Hurry up with those beans!'
+To be monosyllabic, rude to his superiors and equals, and overbearing to
+his inferiors in rank, this fledgling soldier--our comrade of a few days
+since, and presently the subordinate of most of us, through standing
+still while we went ahead--used to think the perfection and essence of
+the military system. And then that smug-faced, smooth-tongued,
+dirty-looking chaplain, with his second-hand shirt collars and slopshop
+morality--was it whiskey or brandy that his breath smelt oftenest of? He
+was the first chaplain I had seen, and I confess his rank breath, dirty
+linen, and ranker and dirtier hypocrisy, gave me a disgust toward his
+order that it took long months and many good men to obliterate.
+
+The best part of May we spent in drilling and idling and grumbling, and
+some of us, not so hard worked as Sergeant-Major Jenkins, in the true
+military style of conviviality, usually terminating in an abrupt entry
+in the orderly book, opposite the name of the follower of Bacchus,
+'Drunk; two extra tours guard duty;' or 'Drunk again; four extra tours
+knapsack drill.' Now, the knapsack drill, as practised by well-informed
+and duty-loving sergeants of the guard, simply consists in requiring the
+delinquent to shoulder, say, for two hours in every six, a knapsack
+filled with stones, blankets, or what not, until it weighs twenty,
+thirty, or perhaps forty pounds, according to the nature of the case and
+the officer who orders the punishment.
+
+Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates and I went up, one afternoon, with
+Lieutenant Smallweed, Corporal Bledsoe of our old company, and two or
+three others, to see the famous 'Seventh' drill, out at Camp Cameron,
+which I suppose nearly everybody knows is situated about a mile and a
+half north of the President's house, on the 14th-street road, and just
+opposite to a one-horse affair that used to call itself 'Columbian
+College,' but which, after passing through a course of weak
+semi-religio-secessionism, gradually dried up, leaving its skin to the
+surgeon-general for a hospital. The afternoon we selected to visit Camp
+Cameron turned out to be an extra occasion. General Thomas, the
+adjutant-general of the army, was to present a stand of colors to the
+'Seventh' on behalf of Mr. Secretary Cameron, on behalf of some ladies,
+I think. Ladies! I admire you very much, for the very many things
+wherein you are most admirable, but why, oh! why, in the name of the
+immortals, will you, why will you present flags? Don't do it any more,
+please. They are always packed up in a box and left somewhere almost as
+soon as your handkerchiefs have ceased waving, your soprano hurrahs
+ceased ringing; or else they are given to some pet officer for a
+coverlet. They cost a great deal of money; they oblige the poor soldiers
+to endure a mort of flatulent oratory at a parade rest; and they force
+the poor colonel, in a great perspiration, to stumble through a few
+feeble, ineffectual, and disjointed words of thanks, which he committed
+to memory last night from the original, written for him by the adjutant
+or the young regimental poet, but of which he has forgotten almost every
+other word. The wise old Trojan says, speaking of the horse (I get my
+quotations from the newspapers, you may be sure):
+
+     'Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes;'
+
+implying that he is opposed to going into that speculation in wooden
+horseflesh, because he fears the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.
+Just so, I fear the ladies, especially when they present flags. Remember
+_Punch's_ advice to young persons about to be married? _'Don't!'_
+
+The Seventh, after going through the usual evening parade, and a few
+simple man[oe]uvres, formed square, facing inward, with General Thomas
+and the oil-skin sausage that contained the new colors, and all the
+regimental officers, in the centre. General Thomas's feeble pipes
+sounded faintly enough for about half an hour, during which time no man
+in the ranks heard more than a dozen words. Then Colonel Lefferts
+responded in a few inaudible, but no doubt very appropriate remarks.
+Then 'the boys,' seeing that the time had come, cheered lustily, after
+the hypothetical manner of the rocket. But there was one thing we did
+hear, standing on tiptoe, and straining every ear. The Seventh was to go
+somewhere. The crisis of the war had come. The Seventh was going to
+shoot at it. Their thirty days were almost out; but they were going to
+be shot at, just like any of us three-months men.
+
+To leave their canned fruits, and milk, and fresh eggs, and board
+floors, and a stroll on the avenue in the afternoon, and go where glory
+waited for them! Happy, happy gray-breasts! We wandered enviously round
+the excited camp, and talked with our friends. Many were the rumors,
+appalling to us in those days, when we were yet unused to camp 'chin.'
+The regiment was to go to Harper's Ferry. Johnston was there. They would
+hang him if they took him. They were to march straight to Richmond, One
+man of the 'Engineer Company' was going to resign, he said, because his
+company had to remain to guard the camp. They were to take two days'
+rations and forty rounds of cartridges per man--_ball_ cartridges. Forty
+rounds of ball cartridges and two days' work! Surely, we thought, the
+days of the rebellion are numbered. And then, chewing the bitter cud of
+the reflection that the war would almost certainly be ended before we
+got a chance at the enemy, we wandered sadly back to our quarters,
+Smallweed growling horribly all the way. Our 'headquarters' we find in a
+great state of excitement. We find the orderly and Major Heavysterne
+discussing the prospects of the rebels being able to hold out a month,
+and Color-Sergeant Hepp and the adjutant both trying to decide the
+dispute. Hepp thinks they can't do without leather, and the adjutant
+thinks the want of salt must fetch them in a few weeks. Thinks? Decides!
+Whatever may be doubtful, this is certain. Everybody seems strangely
+excited. We tell them our news. 'Tell us some'n do'n know!' rasps
+Lieutenant Harch; 'our b'ttalion's goin', too; get ready, both of,
+quick! Smallweed, where in the h-- have you been? I've had to do all
+your work.' We were to go at nine o'clock at night. It was then eight.
+Whither? No one knew. The chaplain comes in, with symptoms of erysipelas
+in his nose, and a villanous breath, to tell us, while we--the
+quartermaster-sergeant and I--are packing our knapsacks and leaving
+lines of farewell for those at home and at other people's homes, that
+the major has imparted to him in confidence the awful secret that we are
+bound for Mount Vernon, to remove the bones of Washington. This gives us
+something terrible to think of as we march down, in quick time (a
+suggestion of that adjutant, I know), to the Long Bridge, and during the
+long delay there, spent by commanding officers in pottering about and
+gesticulating. By commanding officers? There is one there who does not
+potter, standing erect--that one with the little point of fire between
+his fingers that marks the never-quenched cigarette--talking to Major
+Heavysterne in low and earnest tones, but perfectly cool and clear the
+while. That is our splendid Colonel Diamond, as brave and good a soldier
+as ever drew sword, as noble and true a Christian as ever endured
+persecution and showed patience. They are discussing a plan for crossing
+the river in boats, landing at a causeway where the Alexandria road
+crosses Four Mile Run, and so cutting off the impudent picket of the
+enemy's cavalry that holds post at the Virginia end of the Long Bridge.
+The battalion commanders are evidently dazzled by the brilliancy of the
+moonlight and the colonel's scheme, for it soon becomes apparent that
+they haven't the pluck and dash necessary to render such an operation
+successful. Even we young soldiers, intent upon the awful idea of
+resurrecting Washington's bones, and little dreaming then of becoming
+the pioneers of the great invasion, could see the hitch. Presently the
+major got a definite order, and beckoning to us of the battalion staff,
+began to cross the bridge. Dusky bodies of troops, their arms glistening
+in the moonlight, had been silently gliding past us while the discussion
+progressed. Most of them seemed to have halted on the bridge, we found
+as we passed on, and to have squatted down in the shade of the parapet,
+gassing, smoking, or napping. It was nearly midnight. We had got to the
+middle of the causeway, and found ourselves alone, bathed in silence and
+moonlight and wonder, when up dashed a horseman from the direction of
+the Virginia side. He stopped, and peered at us over his horse's neck.
+'O'Malley, is that you?' says the major, seeing it is an Irish officer
+belonging to Colonel Diamond's staff. 'Yes,' says the captain, 'and who
+the devil are you?' 'Major Heavysterne. Won't you please ride back and
+send my battalion forward? You'll find the boys standing on the draw.
+Cap'n Bopp, of the Fisler Guards, is the senior officer, I believe.' But
+the Irishman was off, with an oath at the major's stupidity in
+forgetting to order his men forward. Presently the battalion came
+creeping up, silently enough, I thought, but the adjutant made the
+excuse of a casual 'ouch' from a man on whose heels Hrsthzschnoffski
+had casually trodden, to shriek out his favorite 'Stop 'at talken'!' 'Do
+you command this battalion?' asks Captain Pipes, sternly; and
+straightway there would have been a dire altercation, but for the
+major's gentle interference. The bridge began to sway and roar under our
+steps. We were on the draw. Clinging to the theory of Washington's
+bones, I peered over the draw, in the hope of seeing a steamer; there
+was nothing there but the sop and swish of the tide. Perhaps we were not
+going to Mount Vernon at all! 'Halt! Who are these sleeping beauties on
+the draw? Ah! these are the Bulgers. 'Say, Bulger,' I ask of one of
+them, 'who's ahead of you?' 'A'n't nobody,' he replied indignantly, as
+who should say, Who _can_ be ahead of the invincible Bulger Guards.
+Nobody! Here was great news. ''_Orr'd_ H'RCH!' drones the major, in low
+tones; and '_Owa_'' H'MP,' sharply, ''_Orrrr_ 'RRRCH,' gruffly, repeat
+the captains. On we go, breaking step to save the bridge, surprise and
+fluttering in our hearts. A'n't nobody ahead! Now we are on the hard
+dirt, the sacred soil, of the pewter State, mother of Presidents, the
+birthplace of Washington, the feeding ground of hams, but otherwise the
+very nursery and hive of worthlessness, humbug, sham, and superstition.
+Virginia, that might have been the first, and proudest, and most
+enlightened State in the Union, that is the last and most besodden State
+in or half out of it--But while my apostrophe runs on, the bit between
+its teeth, the head of our little column muffles its tread on the sacred
+soil itself, dirtying its boots in the sacred mud, the roar of the
+bridge ceases, the last files and the sergeant-major run after them to
+close up, in obedience to the sharp mandate of the major, and the
+invasion is begun. No man spoke a word; no sound was audible save the
+distant hum and cracking of the city, the cry of a thousand frogs, and
+the muffled tramp of our advancing footsteps. I thought the enemy, if
+any were near, must surely hear the cartridges rattle in my cartridge
+box as we double-quicked to close up, and I put my hand behind me to
+stop the clatter. If any enemy were near, indeed! There seemed an enemy
+behind every bush, a rebel in every corner of the worm fence. I am in
+the rear of the column, I thought, and my heart went thump, bump, and my
+great central nervous ganglion ached amain. 'Sergeant-major,' whispers
+Major Heavysterne; 'Sergeant-major,' barks the adjutant. 'Fall out four
+files and keep off to the right, and about fifty paces in advance of the
+battalion, and examine the ground thoroughly. Report any signs of the
+enemy.' The ache grew bigger, and I perspired terribly as I inquired, in
+tones whose tremor I hoped would be mistaken for ardor, whether any one
+was ahead of us. 'No one except the enemy,' laughed the major, quietly.
+No one except the enemy! Fifty paces from any one except the enemy, by
+my legs, each pace a yard! 'The ground to the right is all water, and
+about seven feet deep,' I reported joyfully, having ascertained the
+fact. 'Then go fifty yards ahead, as far to the right as you can get,
+and keep out of sight,' were our new orders. I thought we would keep out
+of sight well enough! We were going up hill--up the hill on which Fort
+Runyon now stands. Here is a shanty. What if it should be full of the
+enemy, and we but four poor frightened men, with our battalion hidden by
+the turn in the road. Mechanically I cocked my rifle and opened the
+door, and strained my eyes into the darkness. Nobody. I let down the
+hammer again.
+
+Fear had oozed out of my fingers' ends, in lifting the latch, just as
+valor did from those of Bob Acres, and Jenkins was himself again. We
+jobbed our bayonets under the lager-beer counter, to provide for the
+case of any lurking foe in that quarter. Just here the road forked.
+Sending two of us to the right, the rest kept on the Alexandria. 'Look
+there,' chatters Todd second between his teeth, wafting in my face a
+mingled odor of fear and gin cocktails. 'Where?' 'Why there! on top of
+the hill--a horse.' 'Is that a horse?' 'Yes.' 'A man on him, too!' 'Two
+of 'em!' Click, click, click, from our locks. We creep on and up
+stealthily. We are scarcely thirty yards distant from the two horsemen,
+when a man darts out from the left-hand side of the road behind us--two
+men--three! We are surrounded. Todd second would have fired, but I held
+him back. '_Who's that?_' I whispered; '_speak quick, or I fire!_'
+'Can't you see, you d--d fool,' barks out our surly adjutant, who,
+unknown to us, had been leading a similar scout on the opposite side of
+the road. Click, click, from up the hill. The enemy are going to shoot.
+An awful moment. We steady our rifles and our nerves; all trace of fear
+is gone; nothing remains but eagerness for the conflict that seems so
+near, and with a bound, without waiting for orders, we move quickly up
+the hill. Lieutenant Harch moves his men out into the road, where the
+bright moonlight betrays, perhaps multiplies, their number; the horsemen
+spring to their saddles, and are off at a clattering gallop, to alarm
+Alexandria. 'Don't shoot!' shrieks the adjutant; our rifles waver; the
+hill hides the flying picket; the chance is lost; presently all
+Alexandria will be awake, and a beautiful surprise frustrated. As we
+peer into the moonlit distance from the top of the hill now almost
+spaded away and trimmed up into Fort Runyon, feeling the solemnity of
+the occasion impressed upon us with dramatic force by all the
+surroundings--by our loneliness, by our character as the harbingers of
+the advance of the armies of American freedom and American nationality,
+and by the recent flight of the first squad of the enemy whom we had met
+with hostile purpose: as we dreamily drink in all these and many other
+vague ideas, up comes our battalion, and occupies the hill, the major
+sending off a company to hold the bridge where the road crosses the
+canal and forks to Arlington and Fairfax Court House. Presently there
+pass by us regiments from Michigan, New York, New Jersey, and it may be
+from other States which I forget. Some turn off to the right, to settle
+on the hill which is now scooped into Fort Albany; others press forward
+to Alexandria, the bells of which town very soon begin to ring a
+frightened peal of alarm and confusion. We move out a half mile farther
+and halt, our night's work being over, and other things in store; the
+moonlight wanes, and grows insensibly into a chilly daylight, presently
+reddened by the sun of to-morrow. All this seems to us to have occupied
+scarcely half an hour, but it is broad day again for certain, and surely
+we are a mortally tired and aching battalion as we march back listless,
+hot, sleepy, and gastric, over the Long Bridge, to our armory, there to
+fall asleep over breakfast in sheer exhaustion, and to spend the
+remainder of the day in a dry, hard series of naps, not the least
+refreshing--such as leave you the impression of having slept in hot
+sand. As we--the quartermaster-sergeant and I--stroll down the avenue
+that afternoon according to our wont, we hear the news of Ellsworth's
+death, of the occupation of Alexandria by our forces, and of the flight
+of the enemy's handful of silly, braggadocio Virginia militia, hastily
+collected to brag and drink the town safe from the pollution of the vile
+Yankee's invading foot. Ah! V'ginia; as thou art easily pleased to sing
+of thy sister-in-law, Ma'yland,
+
+     'The taaeirahnt's foot is awn thai sho','
+
+and will be likely to remain thar a right tollable peert length of time,
+I expect.
+
+Nothing but bridge guarding in the festering swamp on the Virginia side
+of the Potomac, varied by multiplying details for extra duty as clerks
+in all imaginable offices, falls to our lot until the 10th of June,
+when, after a number of rumors, and many dark forebodings as to what the
+District men would do, we are finally ordered into the field as a part
+of the Chickfield expedition, originally designed for the capture of
+Dregsville, I believe; an object which may have been slightly interfered
+with by its detailed announcement about a week beforehand in one of the
+Philadelphia papers. The expedition consisted of the First, Third,
+Fifth, and Ninth Battalions of District of Columbia Volunteers, the
+First New Hampshire, the Ninth New York, and the Seventeenth
+Pennsylvania, which _would_ call itself the First. I think four other
+regiments from the same State did the same thing, it being a cardinal
+principle with them, perhaps, that each regiment was to claim two
+different names and three different numbers, and that at least four
+other regiments were fiercely to dispute with it each name and each
+number: for example, there was the
+
+  First Pennsylvania Artillery,           }
+  calling itself the...                   }
+                                          }
+  First Pennsylvania Militia, Infantry,   } First
+  calling itself the...                   } Pennsylvania
+                                          } Regiment.
+  First Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry,}
+  calling itself the...                   }
+                                          }
+  First Pennsylvania Volunteers, Infantry,}
+  calling itself, and called by           }
+  the Governor, the...                    }
+
+And for another example there was a regiment which called itself the
+'Swishtail Carbines,' after a beastly ornament in the hats of its men;
+the 'Shine Musketoons,' after their lieutenant-colonel; the '289th
+Pennsylvania Volunteers,' after the State series of numbers, which began
+with 280 or thereabout; and the 'First Regiment of the Pennsylvania
+Volunteer Reserve Corps, Breech-Loading Carbineers,' and doubtless by
+other names, though I don't remember them.
+
+Besides this tremendous host--we had never seen so large a force
+together, and thought it the most invincible of armadas--we had a
+battery of artillery, composed of three or four different kinds of guns,
+as the fashion was in the good old days of our company posts, wherefrom
+we were just emerging in a chrysalis state, and also two companies of
+cavalry; one a real live company of regulars, commanded by Captain
+Cautle, of the Third Dragoons, the other led by Captain (he called
+himself major, and his company a battalion) Cutts, formerly and since an
+enterprising member of the firm of Cutts & Dunn, who made my uniform,
+and who will make your clothes, if you wish, my dear reader, and charge
+you rather less than three times their value, after the manner of
+Washington tailors; which charge will appear especially moderate when
+you remember that the clothes will almost fit, and won't wear out so
+very soon after all, as is the way with Washington clothes. Indeed, as
+the tactics say, 'this remark is general for all the deployments;' and
+the same may as well be said of all bills and things made in the great
+city of sheds, contractors, politicians, dust, and unfinished buildings.
+But is this a description of Washington? We are at Chickfield, where the
+loyal Maryland farmers come to us to protect their loyalty, to charge a
+dollar a panel for old worm fences thrown down by 'the boys,' to sell
+forage at double prices, to reclaim runaway negroes, and to assure us of
+the impossibility of subjugating the South. And here, in the peaceful
+village of Chickfield, the object of our expedition having been happily
+frustrated by the newspapers, we enjoy our ease for a week or ten days,
+and our first camp experiences. Oh! that first experience of unboxing
+tents smelling loudly as of candle grease, of finding the right poles,
+of vainly endeavoring to pitch them straight, of hot and excited
+officers rushing hither and thither in a flurry, trying to instruct the
+different squads in their work, and straightway frustrated by the thick
+heads, or worse, by the inevitable suggestions of those remarkably
+intelligent corporals, who seem to consider themselves as having a
+special mission direct from heaven to know everything except how to do
+what they are bid. And oh! the first camp cookery, when everything is
+overdone except what is underdone; when the soup is water, and the
+coffee grounds, and the tea (we had tea in the _three_-months!) senna!
+And after a day of worry, hurry, confusion, and awful cooking, the first
+rough sleep, with a root running across your ribs, and a sizable gravel
+indenting the small of your back! How the teamsters talk all night, and
+the sentinels call wildly, incessantly, for the corporal of the guard!
+How you dream of being hung on a wire, as if to dry, with your head on a
+jagged rock; of an army of sentinels pacing your breast, ceaselessly
+engaged in coming to an 'order arms;' of millions of ants crawling over
+and through you; of having your legs suddenly thrust into an icehouse,
+and a brush fire built under your head; of black darkness, in which you
+fall down, down, down, down--faster, faster, faster!--till crash! you
+bump against something, and split wide open with a thundering roar,
+which gradually expands into the sound of a bugle as you awake to
+renewed misery, and are, as Mr. Sawin says, 'once more routed out of bed
+by that derned reveille.'
+
+Presently there comes an order for us to march to Billsburg, and there
+join the army of the Musconetcong, commanded by that dauntless hero,
+Major-General Robert Balkinsop. Of course we march in a hurry, as much
+as possible by night, 'without baggage,' as the orders say--meaning with
+only _two_ wagons to a company. The other battalions of D.C. Vols. stay
+behind and loaf back to Washington, there to be mislaid by Major-General
+Blankhed, who is so preoccupied with issuing and affixing his sign
+manual to passes for milk, eggs, and secessionists, to cross and recross
+Long Bridge, that the war must wait for him or go ahead without him. We
+go on to glory, as we suppose (deluded _three_-months!), and march
+excitedly, with all our legs, fearing we shall be too late. As we near
+Billsburg, we can hear the since familiar _tick--tack_, _pip--pop--pop_
+of a rattling skirmish, and the _vroom--vroom_ of volley firing.
+Anxiously, eagerly--no need for the colonel to cry 'Step out
+lively!'--we press forward, with all the ardor of recruits. Recruits!
+Hadn't we been a month in service, and been through one great invasion
+already? There they are! See the smoke? Where? On top of that hill!
+Halt! Our battalion deploys as skirmishers with a useless cheer. We
+close up. We load with ball cartridge, and most of us, on our individual
+responsibility, fix bayonets; it looks so determined--nothing like the
+cold steel, we think. Slowly, resolutely, we advance. An aid comes
+galloping back. We crowd round him. The colonel looks disgustedly
+handsome. What does he say? Pshaw! It's only the 284th Pennsylvania,
+part of General Balkinsop's body guard, discharging muskets after rain.
+Only three soldiers, a negro, a couple of mules, and an old woman, have
+been hurt so far, and 'the boys' will be through in an hour or so more!
+
+Well, as we were sent for in a hurry, of course we waited a week. How
+General Balkinsop man[oe]uvred the great army of the Musconetcong; what
+fatherly, nay, grandmotherly care he took to keep us out of danger; how
+cautiously he spread, his nets for the enemy, and how rapidly he left
+them miles behind; how we killed nothing but chickens, wounded nothing
+but our own silly pride, and captured nothing but green apples and
+roasting ears; all this, and more, let history tell. The poor old
+general kept us safe, at all events; and if the enemy, with half our
+numbers, was left unharmed, and allowed quietly and leisurely to move
+off and swell his force elsewhere, and so whip us in detail, what of it?
+Didn't we save our wagon train? And isn't that, as everyone knows, the
+highest result of strategy?
+
+And then came the battle (the _battle!_) of Bull Run, with its first
+glowing, crowing accounts of victory, and its later story of humiliation
+and shame! Ah! let me shut up the page! My heart grows sick over this
+mangy, scrofulous period of our national disease; give me air!
+
+Luckily for me, I had a raging fever just after that awful 21st of July,
+1861. When I awoke from my delirium, and had got as far as tea, toast,
+and the door of the hospital, they told me of the great uprising of the
+people, of General McClellan's appointment to command the Army of the
+Potomac, of how 'our boys' had reenlisted for the war, and of how I, no
+longer Sergeant-Major William Jenkins, was to be adjutant of the
+regiment, and might now take off my _chevrons_, and put on my SHOULDER
+STRAPS.
+
+_She_ sent them to me in a letter. Wait a month, and I'll tell you.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST FANATIC.
+
+
+  When Noah hewed the timber
+    Wherewith to build the ark,
+  Outside the woods one shouted--
+    'That wild fanatic!--_hark!_'
+
+  And when he drew the beams
+    And laid them on the plain,
+  One said,'He has no balance,
+    He surely is insane.'
+
+  And when he raised the frame,
+    One clear, sunshiny day,
+  'Poor fool of _one idea_,'
+    A smiling man did say.
+
+  When he foretold the flood,
+    And stood repentance teaching,
+  They sneered, 'You radical,
+    We'll hear no ultra preaching!'
+
+  And when he drove the beasts and birds
+    Into the ark one morn,
+  They shouted, 'Odd enthusiast!'
+    And laughed with ringing scorn.
+
+  When he and all his house went in,
+    They gazed, and said, 'Erratic!'
+  'A pleasant voyage to you, Noah!
+    You canting, queer fanatic!'
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES OF AMERICAN LIFE AND SCENERY.
+
+V.--THE ADIRONDACS.
+
+
+This interesting mountain region embraces the triangular plateau lying
+between Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario and the
+Mohawk. The name was formerly restricted to the central group containing
+the highest peaks, but is now applied to the various ranges traversing
+the northeastern counties of the State of New York. The loftiest points
+are found in the County of Essex and the neighboring corners of
+Franklin; but the surfaces of Clinton, St. Lawrence, Herkimer, Hamilton,
+Warren, and Washington are all diversified by the various branches of
+the same mountain system. The principal ranges have a general
+northeasterly and southwesterly direction, and are about six in number.
+They run nearly parallel with one another, and with the watercourses
+flowing into Lake Champlain, namely, Lake George and Putnam's Creek, the
+Boquet, Au Sable, and Saranac Rivers. Recent surveys made by, or under
+the direction of, Professor A. Guyot, will doubtless furnish us with
+more accurate information regarding ranges and measurements of heights
+than any we can now refer to. So far as we have been able to learn from
+the best authorities within our reach,[2] the situation and names of the
+most prominent ranges are as follows: The most southerly is that known
+as the Palmertown or Luzerne Mountains, and embraces the highlands of
+Lake George, terminating at Mount Defiance, on Lake Champlain. This
+range has also been called Black Mountain range and Tongue Mountains.
+The second range, the Kayaderosseras, ends in the high cliff overlooking
+Bulwagga Bay. The third, or Schroon range, terminates on Lake Champlain
+in the high promontory of Split Rock. It borders Schroon Lake, and its
+highest peak is Mount Pharaoh, nearly 4,000 feet above tidewater. The
+fourth, or Boquet range, finds its terminus at Perou Bay, and contains
+Dix Peak (5,200 feet), Nipple Top (4,900 feet), Raven Hill, and Mount
+Discovery. The fifth or Adirondac range (known also as Clinton or Au
+Sable) meets Lake Champlain in the rocks of Trembleau Point, and
+embraces the highest peaks of the system, namely, Mount Tahawus (Marcy),
+5,379 feet, and Mounts Mc-Intire, McMartin, and San-da-no-na, all above
+5,000 feet in elevation. The series nest succeeding on the northwest,
+does not consist of a single distinguishable range, but of a
+continuation of groups which may be considered as a sixth range, under
+the name of Chateaugay or Au Sable. Its highest points are Mount Seward
+(5,100 feet), and Whiteface, nearly 5,000 feet in height. We have also
+seen noticed as distinguishable a ridge still exterior to the last
+mentioned, as Chateaugay, _i.e._, the range of the St. Lawrence.
+
+[Footnote 2: NEW YORK SATE GAZETTEER.]
+
+The above-named ranges are not always clearly defined, as cross spurs or
+single mountains sometimes occupy the entire space between two ridges,
+reducing the customary valley to a mere ravine. The usual uncertainty
+and redundancy of nomenclature common to mountain regions, adds to the
+difficulty of obtaining or conveying clear ideas of the local
+distribution of elevation and depression. On the northern slope, the
+three rivers, Boquet, Au Sable (with two branches, East and West), and
+Saranac, furnish to the traveller excellent guides for the arrangement
+of his conceptions, regarding the general face of the country. To the
+south, the same office is performed by the various branching headwaters
+of the Hudson.
+
+These mountains are granitic, and the river bottoms have a light, sandy
+soil. The Au Sable well deserves its name, not only from the bar at its
+mouth, but also from the sand fields through which it chiefly flows.
+Steep, bare peaks, wild ravines, and stupendous precipices characterize
+the loftier ranges. The waterfalls are numerous and beautiful, and the
+lakes lovely beyond description. More than one hundred in number, they
+cluster round the higher groups of peaks, strings of glittering gems
+about the stately forms of these proud, dark-browed, Indian
+beauties--mirrors wherein they may gaze upon the softened outlines of
+their haughty heads, their wind-tossed raiment of spruce fir, pines, and
+birch.
+
+In the lowest valleys the oak and chestnut are abundant, but as we leave
+the shores of Lake Champlain and ascend toward the west, the beech and
+basswood, butternut, elm, ash, and maple, hemlock and arbor vitae,
+tamarack, white, black, and yellow pines, white and black birch,
+gradually disappear, until finally the forest growth of the higher
+portions of the loftier summits is composed almost exclusively of the
+various species of spruce or fir. The tamarack sometimes covers vast
+plains, and, with the long moss waving from its sombre branches, looks
+melancholy enough to be fancied a mourner over the ring of the axe
+felling noble pines, the crack of the rifle threatening extermination to
+the deer once so numerous, or the cautious tread of the fisherman under
+whose wasteful rapacity the trout are gradually disappearing. We have
+reason to be thankful that all are not yet gone--that some splendid
+specimens are left to tell the glorious tale of the primeval forest,
+that on the more secluded lake shores an occasional deer may yet be seen
+coming down to drink, and that in the shadier pools the wary and
+sagacious prince of fishes still disports himself and cleaves the
+crystal water with his jewelled wedge.
+
+Berries of all sorts spring up on the cleared spots; the wide-spreading
+juniper, with its great prickly disks, covers the barer slopes; the
+willow herb, wild rose, clematis, violet, golden rod, aster, immortelle,
+arbutus, harebell, orchis, linnaea borealis, mitchella, dalibarda,
+wintergreen, ferns innumerable, and four species of running pine, all in
+due season, deck the waysides and forest depths.
+
+The climate is intensely cold in winter, and in the summer cool upon the
+heights, but in the narrow sandy valleys the long days of June, July,
+and August are sometimes uncomfortably hot. The nights, however, are
+ordinarily cool. Going west through the middle of the region, from
+Westport to Saranac, a difference of several weeks in the progress of
+vegetation is perceptible. Long after the linnaea had ceased to bloom at
+Elizabethtown, we found its tender, fragrant, pink bells flushing a
+wooded bank near Lake Placid. Good grass grows upon the hillsides, and
+in the valleys are found excellent potatoes, oats, peas, beans, and
+buckwheat. The corn is small, but seems prolific, and occasional fields
+of flax, rye, barley, and even wheat, present a flourishing appearance.
+Lumber, charcoal, and iron ore of an excellent quality are, however, the
+present staples of this mountain region. Bears and panthers are found in
+some secluded localities, and the farmer still dreads the latter for his
+sheep. The wolves are said to kill more deer than the hunters. The otter
+and beaver are found among the watercourses, and the mink or sable is
+still the prey of the trapper. The horses are ordinarily of a small
+breed, but very strong and enduring.
+
+The men are chiefly of the Vermont type, most of the original settlers
+having come from the neighboring State. The school house, court house,
+church, and town hall are hence regarded as among the necessary
+elements of life to the well-ordered citizen. Honest dealing, thrift,
+and cleanliness are the rule, and the farm houses are comfortable and
+well cared for. The men look intelligent, and the women are handsome,
+although, indeed, too many pale or sallow complexions give evidence of
+sedentary habits, and of the almost universal use of _saleratus_ and hot
+bread [??]. The families of many farmers far in among the mountains
+rarely taste fresh meat, but subsist chiefly upon salt pork, fish, fresh
+or salted, as the season will permit, potatoes, wheat, rye, and Indian
+meal, with berries, dried apples, perhaps a few garden vegetables,
+plenty of good milk, and excellent butter. Eggs, chickens, and veal are
+luxuries occasionally to be enjoyed, and, should one of the family be a
+good shot, venison and partridge may appear upon the bill of fare.
+Bright flowers ornament the gardens, and gay creepers embower doors and
+windows. Along the more secluded roads are the log cabins of the
+charcoal burners, said cabins containing, if apparently nothing else,
+two or three healthy, chubby, pretty children, and a substantial cooking
+stove, of elaborate pattern, recently patented by some enterprising
+compatriot.
+
+Among the most remarkable features of these mountains are the 'Passes,'
+answering to Gaps, Notches, and Cloves in other parts of the Union. They
+afford means for excellent roads from end to end of the mountain region,
+and are, in addition, eminently picturesque. The two most noteworthy are
+the Indian and Wilmington Passes; the first too rugged for the present
+to admit of a road; and the latter containing the beautiful Wilmington
+Fall. Many of the mountains have been burned over, and the bare,
+gaunt-limbed timber, and contorted folds of gray, glittering rock,
+afford a spectral contrast to the gentler contours of hills still clad
+in their natural verdure, bright or dark as deciduous or evergreen trees
+preponderate. The variety of form is endless; long ridges, high peaks,
+sharp or blunt, sudden clefts, great bare slides, flowing curves, convex
+or concave, serrated slopes crowned with dark spruce or jagged as the
+naked vertebrae of some enormous antediluvian monster, stimulate the
+curiosity and excite the imagination of the beholder. There is an
+essential difference in the character of the views obtained, whether
+looking from the south, or the east. In the former case, the eye,
+following the axes of the ranges, sees the mountains as a cross ridge of
+elevated peaks; and in the latter, where the sight strikes the ranges
+perpendicularly to their axes, one, or, at most, two ridges are all that
+can be seen from any single point.
+
+This region may be approached from Lake Champlain by way of Ticonderoga,
+Crown Point, Port Henry, Westport, and Port Kent, the two latter places
+being the nearer to the higher peaks; or from the lake country in
+Hamilton County, by way of Racket and Long Lakes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The night boat for Albany, June 27th, 1864, was crowded with passengers
+fleeing from pavements, summer heats, and stifling city air, to green
+fields, cool shadows of wooded glens, or life-giving breezes from
+mountain heights. True, there were some who, like Aunt Sarah Grundy,
+bitterly lamented the ample rooms and choice fare of their own
+establishments, and whose idea of a 'summer in the country' was limited
+to a couple of months at Saratoga or Newport, with a fresh toilette for
+each succeeding day; but even these knew that there were at both places
+green trees, limpid waters, whether of lake or ocean, and a wide horizon
+wherein to see sunsets, moonrises, and starlight. Aunt Sarah went to
+Newport; she found there fewer of such persons as she was pleased to
+designate as 'rabble,' and the soft, warm fogs were exactly the summer
+atmosphere for a complexion too delicate to be exposed to the fervent
+blaze of a July sun.
+
+But the majority were not of Aunt Sarah's stamp. They were men, wearied
+with nine months' steady work, eager for country sports, for the freedom
+of God's own workhouse, where labor and bad air and cramped positions
+need not be synonymous; or women, glad to escape the routine of
+housekeeping, the daily contest with Bridget or Katrine, with Jean,
+Williams, or Priscilla. There were young girls, with round hats and
+thick boots, anxious to substitute grassy lanes or rocky hillsides for
+the flagstones of avenues; lads, to whom climbing of fruit trees and
+rowing boats were pleasant reminiscences of some foregone year; and
+finally, children, who longed for change, and whose little frames needed
+all the oxygen and exercise their anxious parents could procure for
+them.
+
+Such, doubtless, was a large portion of the precious freight of our
+'floating palace,' whose magnificence proved to us rather of the
+Dead-Sea-apple sort, as we had arrived upon the scene of action too late
+to procure comfortable quarters for the night, and, in addition, soon
+after daybreak found ourselves aground within sight of Albany, and with
+no prospect of release until after the departure of the train for
+Whitehall. At a few moments past seven, we heard the final whistle, and
+knew that our journey's end was now postponed some four and twenty
+hours. We afterward learned that by taking the boat to Troy we would
+have run less risk of delay, as the Whitehall and Rutland train usually
+awaits the arrival of said boat. At nine o'clock we reached Albany, and
+one of our number spent a dreary day, battling with headache and the
+ennui of a little four year old, who could extract no amusement from the
+unsuggestive walls of a hotel parlor. About five in the afternoon we
+left for Whitehall, where we purposed passing the night. This movement
+did not one whit expedite the completion of our journey, but offered a
+change of place, and an additional hour of rest in the morning, as the
+lake-boat train from Whitehall was the same that left Albany shortly
+after seven.
+
+We found Whitehall a homely little town, in a picturesque situation, on
+the side of a steep hill, past which winds the canal, and under which
+thundered the train that on the following morning bore us to the lake,
+where the pleasant steamboat 'United States' awaited her daily cargo.
+The upper portion of Lake Champlain is very narrow, and the channel
+devious; the shores are sometimes marshy, sometimes rocky, and the
+bordering hills have softly swelling outlines. Our day was hazy, and the
+Green Mountains of Vermont seemed floating in some species of celestial
+atmosphere suddenly descended upon that fair State. We passed the
+Narrows (a singular, rocky cleft, through which flows the lake), and
+soon after came to Ticonderoga, with its ruined fort and environing
+hills.
+
+After leaving Crown Point, the lake becomes much wider, and at Port
+Henry spreads out into a noble expanse of water. Behind Port Henry, the
+Adirondac peaks already begin to form a towering background. Westport,
+however, has a still more beautiful situation. The lake there is very
+broad, the sloping shores are wooded, the highest peaks of the Green
+Mountains are visible to the east and northeast, and the Adirondacs
+rise, tier after tier, toward the west.
+
+On the boat were wounded soldiers going to their homes. Poor fellows!
+They had left their ploughs and their native hills, to find wounds and
+fevers in Virginia. When one looked upon the tranquil lake and
+halo-crowned mountains, it seemed almost impossible that the passions of
+evil men should have power to draw even that placid region into the
+vortex, and hurl back its denizens scarred and scathed, to suffer amid
+its beauty. And yet were these men the very marrow and kernel of the
+landscape, the defenders of the soil, the patriots who were willing to
+give themselves that their country might remain one and undivided, that
+the 'home of the brave' might indeed be the 'land of the free.'
+
+At Westport we left the boat, and found the stage to Elizabethtown, a
+_buckboard_, already crowded with passengers. An inn close at hand
+furnished us the only covered wagon we chanced to see during our ten
+weeks' sojourn among the Adirondacs. The drive to Elizabethtown (eight
+miles) was hot and dusty, for we faced the western sun, and the long
+summer drought was just then commencing to make itself felt.
+Nevertheless, there was beauty enough by the wayside to make one forget
+such minor physical annoyances. As the road rose over the first hills,
+the views back, over the lake and toward those hazy, dreamy-looking
+Vermont mountains, seemed a leaf from some ancient romance, wherein
+faultless knights errant sought peerless lady loves with golden locks
+flowing to their tiny feet, and the dragons were all on the outside,
+dwellers in dark caverns and noisome dens. In our day, I fear, we have
+not improved the matter, for the dark caverns seem to have passed
+within, and the dragons have been adopted as familiars.
+
+By and by, on some arid spots, appeared the low, spreading juniper,
+which we had previously known only as the garden pet of an enthusiastic
+tree fancier. And thus, perhaps, the virtues which here we cultivate by
+unceasing care and watchfulness, will, when we are translated to some
+wider sphere, nearer to the Creator of all, burst upon us as simple,
+natural gifts to the higher and freer intelligences native to that
+sphere.
+
+Raven Hill is the highest point between Westport and Elizabethtown. It
+is a beautifully formed conical hill, rising some twenty-one hundred
+feet above the sea level, and contributing the cliffs on the northern
+side of the 'Pass,' through which leads the road into the valley of the
+Boquet, that vale known formerly as the 'The Pleasant Valley,' in which
+was Betseytown, now dignified into Elizabethtown. Does an increase in
+civilization and refinement indeed destroy familiarity, render us more
+strange one to another, even, through much complexity, to our own
+selves? The southern side of the Pass is formed by the slope of the
+'Green Mountain,' once so called from its beautiful verdure, now, alas!
+burnt over, bristling with dead trees and bare rocks, and green only by
+reason of weeds, brambles, and a bushy growth of saplings. The view,
+descending from the summit of the Pass into the Pleasant Valley, is
+charming. The Boquet runs through green meadows and cultivated fields,
+while round it rise lofty mountains--the 'Giant of the Valley' (alias
+'Great Dome' or 'Bald Peak'), being especially remarkable, with its
+summits, green or bare, round or peaked, glittering with white scars of
+ancient slides. To the west lies the Keene Pass, a steep, rocky gateway
+to the Au Sable River and the wonders beyond. This view of the descent
+into the Pleasant Valley is even more striking from a road passing over
+the hills some five miles south of Elizabethtown. The vale is narrower,
+the point of view higher, and the opposite mountains nearer and more
+lofty. The Giant of the Valley rises directly in the west, and Dix's
+Peak closes the vista to the south. On a semi-hazy afternoon, with the
+sunlight streaming through in broad pathways of quivering glory, it
+would be difficult to imagine a more enchanting scene.
+
+There are in Elizabethtown two inns,[3] one down by the stream, a branch
+of the Boquet, and the other up on the 'Plain,' near the court house.
+The latter has decidedly the advantage in situation. Both are owned by
+the same landlord, and are well kept. We arrived in the midst of court
+week, and found every place filled with lawyers, clients, witnesses, and
+even, behind the bars of the brick jail, we could see the prisoners,
+more fortunate than their city compeers, in that they breathed pure air,
+and could look out upon the everlasting hills, solemn preachers of the
+might and the rights, as well as the mercy of their Creator.
+
+[Footnote 3: During the past season, the Mansion House, on the Plain,
+was not opened until near the close Of the summer. We understand it is
+to be henceforth a permanent 'institution.']
+
+From two to three miles from the Valley House is the top of Raven Hill,
+seemingly a watchtower on the outskirts of the citadel of the
+Adirondacs. The ascent is easy, and the view panoramic, embracing Lake
+Champlain and the Green Mountains, Burlington and Westport, the bare,
+craggy hills to the north, the higher ranges to the west, with the
+abrupt precipices of the 'Keene Pass' and the lofty 'Dome' and 'Bald
+Mountain,' Dix's Peak to the south, a clear lake known as 'Black Pond'
+among the hills toward Moriah, and at the base the Pleasant Valley with
+the winding Boquet River.
+
+Near the lower hotel is Wood Mountain, about half as high as Raven Hill,
+and offering a view somewhat similar, although of course not so
+extended. The distance to the top is but little over a mile, and the
+pathway, although somewhat steep, is very good.
+
+A visit to the iron mines and works at Moriah can readily be made from
+Elizabethtown. The distance is from twelve to fourteen miles. One of the
+mines is quite picturesque, being cut into the solid rock, under a roof
+supported by great columns of the valuable ore. The workmen, with their
+picks and barrows, passing to and fro, as seen from the top of the
+excavation, look like German pictures of tiny gnomes and elves delving
+for precious minerals. The yield from the ore is about eighty per cent.,
+and of very superior quality. The return road passes down the hill,
+whence is the splendid view of the 'Valley' before mentioned.
+
+A delightful excursion can also be made to 'Split Rock,' about nine
+miles up the valley of the Boquet. The little river there, in two
+separate falls, makes its way through a rocky cleft. The basins of the
+upper, and the singularly winding chasm of the lower fall, are
+especially worthy of observation. At Split Rock we first made any
+extensive acquaintance with a costume which threatens to be immensely
+popular among the Adirondacs, namely, the _Bloomer_, and in the agility
+displayed by some of its fair wearers we beheld the results likely to
+spring from its adoption as a mountain walking dress. Our private
+observation was, that moderately full, short skirts, without hoop of
+course, terminating a little distance above the ankle, and worn with
+clocked or striped woollen stockings, were more graceful than a somewhat
+shorter and scantier skirt, with the pantalette extending down to the
+foot. The former seems really _a la paysanne_, while the latter, in
+addition to some want of grace, suggests _Bloomer_, and the many
+absurdities which have been connected with that name. It is a great pity
+that a sensible and healthful change in walking attire should have been
+caricatured by its own advocates, and thus rendered too conspicuous to
+be agreeable to many who would otherwise have adopted it in some
+modified and reasonable form.
+
+Near New Russia, about five miles from Elizabethtown, is a brook
+flowing among moss-covered stones and rocks, overhung by giant trees of
+the original forest; and just out of Elizabethtown is a glen, through
+which pours a pretty stream, making pleasant little cascades under the
+shadow of a less aged wood, and within a bordering of beautiful ferns,
+running pines, and bright forest blossoms. We should also not neglect to
+mention Cobble Hill, a bold pile of rocks, rising directly out of the
+plain on which a portion of the town is situated.
+
+But we had heard of the 'Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,' and Elsie and I
+could not rest until our own eyes had witnessed that they were worthy of
+their reputation. We left Elizabethtown at half past six in the morning,
+our team a fast pair of ponies, belonging to our landlord. The previous
+days had been warm and obstinately hazy, but for that especial occasion
+the atmosphere cooled and cleared, and lent us some fine views back
+toward the Giant of the Valley and the Keene Pass. The first ten miles
+of road were excellent. We then crossed a little stream known as Trout
+Brook, a tributary of the Boquet, and, by a somewhat rough and stony
+way, began to ascend the high land separating the Boquet from the Au
+Sable. This ridge includes the 'Poke a Moonshine' Mountain, a rude pile
+of rocks, burnt over, and with perpendicular precipices of some three or
+four hundred feet, facing the road which winds along the bottom of the
+declivity. This cleft thus becomes another 'Pass,' and, with the huge
+rocks fallen at its base, offers a wild and rather dreary scene. To the
+north, near the foot of the mountain, are two ponds, Butternut and
+Auger, which wind fantastically in and out among the hills. As we
+descended the ridge, we looked toward Canada, far away over rolling
+plains and hillocks, and soon after reached the sandy stretch of the
+basin of the Au Sable, in the midst of which is Keeneville, twenty-two
+miles from Elizabethtown.
+
+By the wayside we passed a solitary grave, the mound and headstone in a
+patch of corn and potatoes. Was the unknown occupant some dear one whom
+the dwellers in the humble cabin near by were unwilling to send far away
+from daily remembrance, or were they too poor to seek the shelter of the
+common graveyard, or, again, had the buriers of that dead one followed
+to the 'land of promise,' or departed to some other far country, leaving
+this grave to the care or rather carelessness of stranger hands, and did
+the snowy headstone recall no memory of past love to the laborer who
+ploughed his furrow near that mound, or to the children who played
+around it?
+
+Ah! thus, not only in the mystical caverns of beauty, poetry, and
+romance are hidden the graves of buried hopes, but even amid the corn
+and potatoes of daily life rise the ghostly head and foot stones of
+aspirations dead and put away out of sight, dead in the body, in daily
+act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to
+which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with
+the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller
+from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter
+weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a
+noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently
+useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can nevertheless sow
+along his way seeds of beauty not lost upon the thinking beings about
+him, and bearing fruit perhaps in some future generation. The woman
+whose reveries have pictured her a Joan of Arc, leading her country's
+armies to victory, and finally yielding her life in the good cause, may
+sew for sanitary commissions, and, nursing in some hospital, dropping
+medicines, making soups and teas, die of some deadly fever, a willing
+sacrifice to her country.
+
+Later in the day we saw the corn and potatoes growing up to the very
+verge of an exquisite waterfall, reckless strength and glorious poetry
+side by side with patient utility and humble prose. This union seemed
+not strange and unnatural, as did that of the solitary grave with the
+active labor of supplying the living with daily food, the grave the more
+lonely that the living with their material wants encircled it so
+closely.
+
+Keeseville is a manufacturing town, situated upon the Au Sable, which
+here breaks through a layer of Potsdam sandstone, and presents a series
+of most interesting and wonderful falls and chasms. About a mile below
+the village is the first fall of eighty feet. The river has here a large
+body of water, and falls in fan shape over a rapid descent of steps. It
+takes a sharp turn, so that without crossing the stream, a fine view can
+be obtained of the dancing, glittering sheet of foam. About half a mile
+below is Birmingham, another manufacturing town, which has done its
+best, but without entire success, to destroy the beauty of the second
+fall, immediately below the bridge, said bridge being erected upon
+natural piers at the sides and in the centre of the stream.
+
+Here begins a chasm which continues for the distance of about a mile and
+a half. Wonderfully grand are these Walled Rocks of the Au Sable,
+through, which rushes the river, pent up between literally perpendicular
+walls, a hundred or more feet in height, and from eleven to sixty or
+eighty feet apart, generally from twelve to fourteen. The water
+sometimes rushes smoothly and deeply below, and sometimes falls over
+obstructions, roaring, and tumbling, and foaming. The turns in the river
+are very sudden, and there are great cracks and gullies extending from
+top to base, pillars of rock standing alone or leaning against their
+companions. Occasionally, looking down one of these clefts, one sees
+nothing but the rock walls with a foaming, rapid rushing below. At one
+of these most remarkable points, a rude stairway has been constructed,
+by which the traveller can descend to the bottom, and, standing by the
+water's edge, look up to the top of this singular chasm. The walls
+finally lower, and the river flows out into a broad basin, whence it ere
+long finds its way into Lake Champlain. The banks are wooded with pines,
+hemlocks, spruce, arbor vitaae, beech, birch, and basswood, and the
+ground is covered with ferns, harebells, arbutus, linnaea, mitchella,
+blue lobelia, and other wild flowers.
+
+There is an excellent inn, the Adirondac House, in Keeseville. Our
+attentive host told us of Professor Agassiz, and the fiery nature of his
+speculations regarding the probable history of the sandstone, whose
+strata, laid as at Trenton Falls, horizontally, layer above layer, add
+such interest and beauty to the stupendous walls, with their unseen,
+water-covered depths below, and their graceful wreaths of arbor vittae
+nodding and swaying above.
+
+He also told us a tale of the war of 1812, when a bridge, known as the
+'High Bridge,' crossed the Au Sable at the narrowest point, some eleven
+feet in width. A rumor was abroad that the British were about to march
+up from Plattsburg; whereupon the bridge, consisting of three beams,
+each nine inches wide, was stripped of its planking. A gentleman had
+left his home in the morning, and, ignorant of the fate of the bridge,
+returned quite late at night. Urging his steed forward, it refused to
+cross the bridge, and not until after repeated castigation would it make
+the attempt. The crossing was safely accomplished, and the rider
+suspected nothing amiss until he reached home and was asked how he had
+come. 'By the High Bridge,' was his reply; whereupon he was informed
+that the planking had been torn away, and he must have crossed upon a
+string piece nine inches wide, hanging some hundred feet above the
+surface of the water. His sensations may be imagined.
+
+A venturesome expedition had also been essayed by our host, in the shape
+of a voyage down the chasm in a boat. We presume he went at high water,
+when the rapids would be less dangerous.
+
+Keeseville is only four miles from Port Kent, a steamboat landing on
+Lake Champlain nearly opposite Burlington, and the Adirondacs may then
+be approached in several ways. A stage runs three times per week from
+Keeseville through Elizabethtown and Schroon River to Schroon Lake.
+North Elba and Lake Placid are some thirty-six miles distant, and may be
+reached by a good road through the Wilmington Pass. Saranac is somewhat
+farther, but readily accessible. Strong wagons and good teams are
+everywhere to be found, and the only recommendation we here think
+needful to make to the traveller is to have a good umbrella, a thick
+shawl or overcoat, and as little other baggage as he or she can possibly
+manage to find sufficient. Trunks are sadly in the way, and carpet bags
+or valises the best forms for stowage under seats or among feet.
+
+
+
+
+LOIS PEARL BERKELEY.
+
+
+The fiery July noon was blazing over the unsheltered depot platform,
+where everybody was in the agony of trying to compress half an hour's
+work into the fifteen minutes' stop of the long express train. The day
+was so hot that even the group of idlers which usually formed the still
+life of the picture was out of sight on the shady side of the buildings.
+Hackmen bustled noisily about; baggage masters were busier and crosser
+than ever; there was the usual _melee_ of leave-takings and greetings.
+With the choking dust and scalding glare of the sun, the whole scene
+might have been an anteroom to Tophet.
+
+From the car window, Clement Moore, brown, hollow-cheeked, and clad in
+army blue, looked out with weary eyes on all the confusion. Half asleep
+in the parching heat, visions of cool, green forest depths, and endless
+ripple of leaves, of the ceaseless wash and sway of salt tides, drifted
+across his brain, and rapt him out of the sick, comfortless present. But
+they vanished like a flash with the sudden cessation of motion, and the
+reality of his surroundings came back with a great shock. Captain
+George, coming in five minutes after with a glass of iced lemonade in
+one hand and a half dozen letters in the other, found necessary so much
+of cheer and comfort as lay in--
+
+'Keep courage, Clement, old fellow, it's only a few hours longer now.'
+
+And then he fell to reading his epistles, testifying his disapprobation
+of their contents presently by sundry grunts, ending finally in a
+'Confound it!' given explosively and an explanation:
+
+'Too bad, Moore! Here am I taking you home to get well in peace and
+quiet, and Ellen has filled the house up with half a dozen girls, more
+or less. Writes me to come home and be 'made a lion of;' as sensible as
+most women!' And the grumble subsided. He broke out again shortly:
+'Louise Meller--Lois Berkeley--Susy--' the other names were drowned in
+the rattle of the starting train. The captain finished his letters, and
+Clement Moore took up his broken dreams, but this time with a new
+element.
+
+Lois Berkeley. With the name came back a fortnight of the last
+summer--perfect bright days, far-off skies filled with drifting fleets
+of sunny vapor, summer green piled deep over the land, the gurgle of
+falling waters, the shimmer of near grain fields, deep-hued flowers
+glowing in the garden borders, all the prodigality of splendor that July
+pours over the world. And floating through these memories, scarce
+recognized, but giving hue and tone to them like a far-off, half-heard
+strain of music--a woman's presence. By some fine, subtile harmony, such
+as spirits recognize, all the summer glow and depth of color, as it came
+back to him, came only as part of an exquisite clothing and setting for
+a slender figure and dark face. All the dainty adaptations of nature
+were but an expression, in a rude, material way, for those elegances and
+fitnesses which surrounded her, and which were as natural to her very
+existence as to the birds and flowers. Only a fortnight, and in that
+fortnight every look and word of hers, every detail of dress, even to
+the texture of the garments she wore, were indelibly fixed in his
+memory. She was so daintily neat in everything, nothing soiled or coarse
+ever came near her. Careless, too, he thought, remembering how, coming
+through the parlor in the evening dusk, he had entangled himself in the
+costly crape shawl left trailing across a chair, of the gloves he had
+picked up fluttering with the leaves on the veranda, and the
+handkerchiefs always lying about. Perhaps Clement Moore was over
+critical in his fancies about ladies' dresses, and felt that inner
+perfect cleanliness and refinement worked itself out in such little
+matters as the material and color and fit of garments, and all the
+trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a
+dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character.
+He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by
+which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An
+excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him
+involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course
+to every woman he was thrown in contact with. He had always been
+disappointed, at first with a feeling of half disgust with himself and
+others, that his dreams were so different from the reality. It drove him
+apart from the sex, and gained him the reputation of being shy or ill
+natured. After finding that disappointments repeated themselves, he
+accepted them as the natural order of events, let his fancies go as the
+beau ideal that he was to seek for through life, and became the
+polished, unimpressible man of society.
+
+But this little Yankee girl had of a sudden realized his ideal.
+Something in their first meeting, momentary though it was, and strange
+according to conventional notions, struck the chord in his heart that
+was waiting silent for the magic fingers that knew the secret of waking
+it. If he had fancied that those fingers would never come, or coming,
+never find it, that something in his unhappy birth set him apart with
+that strange pain of yearning as his portion in life, and so had tried
+to forget or choke the want under commonplace attachments and ties, he
+was no worse than, nor different from, the rest of humanity. But all
+humanity does not meet trial as unflinchingly and honorably--does not
+put temptation out of its way as purely and honestly as did this
+undisciplined life. It is hard to take at once the path that duty
+orders: we linger to play with possibilities, shed some idle tears,
+waste life before the necessity, and go back to everyday work weakened
+and scarred and aching. And once or twice in a lifetime that black,
+hopeless _never_ drops down, not the less grievous and inexorable
+because simply a moral obligation.
+
+Well, only babies cry for the moon. Anything clearly impossible and out
+of our reach we very soon cease sighing for. Men do not cherish a
+passion which they recognize as utterly hopeless; and Clement Moore,
+being a man, and moreover an honorable one, put this summer idyl out of
+his head and heart with all despatch. 'All blundering is sin.' If he had
+blundered in allowing it to take such hold of his life, he expiated the
+sin bravely. Sympathies bud and blossom with miraculous quickness in
+this tropical atmosphere of affinity. He did not know till the
+excitement of actual presence was over, and he had time to think
+soberly, in the dead blank and quiet that followed, how it had grown to
+be a part of his very existence. But whether that part was to be just a
+pleasant remembrance through the dusty and hot years before him, or
+whether it was to go deeper and wring his heart with bitterest sense of
+loss, he did not quite realize. At any rate there was a risk in dwelling
+on it. He had no more right to be running that risk than he had to be
+trifling with a cup of deadliest poison; and so he shut away all the
+golden-winged fancies that had sprung into life with those long, fervid
+days. Shut them away and sealed their prison place. If they were dead,
+or pleading for freedom in his still moments, he never asked nor
+thought. He came back from his lounging summer trip with a certain new,
+strange drive of purpose in him never seen before. The many events that
+had crowded themselves into the next year did not smother his prisoners.
+He never saw their corpses or thought of them sneeringly, and by that
+sign knew they existed still. But dust and all the desolation of
+desertion gathered about the hidden chamber that he never recurred to
+now. Still he kept away from its neighborhood; at first setting a guard
+of persistent physical action. He was always reading or writing or going
+somewhere with a kind of hidden, misty aim in his most objectless
+journeys. After--as the necessity for such occupation wore away, and he
+lapsed back into the old listless ways of dreaming--his thoughts were
+always busy with the future; never now did he indulge in those wayward
+dreams of old. They had a dangerous tendency to take a certain forbidden
+way. Finally, this self-control became a habit, and he scarcely felt its
+necessity. The 'might have been' never came back more poignantly than as
+a vague, shadowy regret, that gave everything a slightly flat and
+unpalatable taste. But he did not take life any less fully, or with any
+abatement of whatever earnestness was in him.
+
+Men are not patient under sickness, at least not that unquestioning,
+unresisting patience which most women and the lower animals show. These
+especially who are usually well and robust are a trial to the flesh and
+spirit of those about them. Moore was not the wonderful exception. His
+first few weeks in the hospital were not so bad; but when the actual
+racking pain was over, and nothing remained but that halting of the
+physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect
+action--the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted
+nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for
+inaction--he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting
+his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of
+the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness
+was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that
+fretful self-exaggeration came that other unutterable yearning that
+attends the first proof that we are coheirs with others to the ills
+flesh is heir to, weary homesickness and childish desire for sympathy.
+
+So now, weakened physically with that strange new heartsickness,
+paralyzing his will and giving freer scope to is feverish impatience,
+George's careless words had rolled away the stone from the sepulchre,
+and its prisoners were free. Not dead, not having lost a shade of color
+from their wings, they nestled and gleamed through his heart, filling
+the summer day with just such intangible perfect witchery as those other
+days had been full of. Perhaps, too, time and absence had heightened the
+charm. Imagination has such a way of catching up little scenes and words
+and looks, and, without altering one of the facts, haloing them with
+such a golden deceptive atmosphere, adding, day by day, faintest
+touches, that they grow by and by into a something wholly different. So
+that fortnight came back to him, an illuminated poem, along rich strains
+of music, making every nerve thrill with the pleasure-pain of its
+associations.
+
+And by degrees, as the tide of sensation, thinned itself, lying back
+with closed eyes, while the long train swept on through the torrid day,
+separate pictures came before his inner sight. Just as keen and clear
+were they as when they first fell on his vision. He had not blurred nor
+dimmed their outlines with frequent recalling and suggestions of
+difference.
+
+A narrow strip of gray sand, ribbed with the wave wash to the very foot
+of the reddish brown bowlders that bounded it. Standing thereon a
+slender woman's figure, clad in quiet gray. The face was turned toward
+him--a dark, unflushed face, with calm, fixed mouth, and clear gray eyes
+under straight-drawn brows and long, separate, lashes. Fine, lustreless,
+silky hair was pushed back into a net glittering with shining specks
+under the narrow-brimmed straw hat. A face full of a waiting look, not
+hopeful nor expectant, simply unsettled and watchful, yet fresh, and
+rounded with the dimples and childlike curves of eighteen. Whatever of
+yearning and unrest the years had brought lingered only about the
+shadowy eyes and fine mouth. There were no haggard nor worn outlines,
+and a baby's skin could not have been softer and finer.
+
+At her feet crisped the shining ripples of the incoming tide. Far
+beyond, calm and burnished, stretched the summer sea into the dreamy
+distance, where the white noon sky, stricken through with intensest
+light and heat, dropped down a palpitating arch to meet it. And in all
+the dazzle of blue and white and silver and bare shining gray, she
+stood, a straight, slender, haughty little figure, as indefinite of
+color as all the rest; all but a narrow strip of scarlet at her throat,
+falling in a flaming line to her waist. The shimmering atmosphere seemed
+to pant about her; and through the high noon, over the still waters and
+sleeping shore, hummed the peering strains of a weird little song. She
+was singing softly:
+
+  'For men must work and women must weep,
+  And the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.'
+
+In the long parlor, the leaf ghosts that had all day long been flitting
+in, were darkening with the sunset and filling the room with twilight
+dimness. Deep in a crimson couch and haloed with the last brightness,
+lay the long, white outlines of a reclining figure. A handful of Japan
+lilies burned against the pure drapery, and another handful of tea
+violets lay crushed in the fleecy handkerchief on the floor. Against the
+cushions the exquisite contour of the sleeping face showed plainly.
+Coolest quiet sphered the whole figure; not a suggestion of anything but
+slowest calm grace disturbed its repose. But with the hushing rustle of
+leaves with the summer murmur flowing in, seemed to come also the deep
+monotone of the waves, when this inanimate statue was striking out at
+his side through the rattle and rush of the surf, the wide eyes filled
+with fierce light, the whole face fixed and stern with the strain of
+heart muscle, toward the helpless shape shooting out on the undertow. He
+had not seen her after, and, coming to seek her that night with words of
+compliment and thanks, he was met by this white vision that had absorbed
+all the fire and force of the afternoon into its blankness.
+
+A depot platform--long afternoon shadows fell over the pretty country
+station--standing alone in the woods. The small, temporary bustle about
+the waiting train was not discordant with the dreamy, restful look of
+the whole picture. Then the culminating hurry, the shriek and rattle of
+the starting train--a little figure poising itself for an instant on the
+car step--a face flushed a little, and dark eyes brightened with a flash
+of surprised recognition--a quick gesture of greeting and farewell, and
+then she was gone into the purple shades of evening.
+
+Once again he had seen her, but from afar off, in the glare and heat of
+a crowded assembly room. The face was a little thinner now, and the eyes
+were looking farther away than ever. The blood-red light of rubies
+flashed in the soft lace at her throat and wrists, and dropped in
+glittering pendants against the slender neck. She was talking evidently
+of a brilliant bouquet of pomegranates and daphnes that lay in her lap,
+swinging dreamily the dainty, glittering white fan. And while he looked,
+she drew away the heavy brocade she wore, from under a careless tread--a
+slight, slow motion, wholly unlike the careless sweeps of other women.
+The imperious nature that thrilled her even to the tips of the long
+fingers, manifested itself, as inborn natures always do, under the
+deepest disguises, in just this unconscious, most trifling of acts; and,
+remembering the gesture, he asked, with words far lighter than the tone
+or feeling:
+
+'As much of a princess as ever?'
+
+And Captain George answered:
+
+'As much of a princess!' both unmindful that no word had been spoken to
+token who was in the thought of each.
+
+Very trifling things these were to remember. Very likely he had seen
+scores of far more graceful and memorable scenes; but just these
+trifles, coming back so vividly, proved to him, as nothing else could
+have done, with what a keen, intense sympathy every word and look of
+hers had been noted.
+
+The spoken words roused him. In the ride that followed, twenty different
+persons and things came into their talk; but never once the princess.
+_That_, arousing himself again from his half-dreamful lapse from the old
+guarded habit, was put away steadily and quietly. His battle had been
+fought once. He was not to weaken his victory with fancies of the 'might
+have been.' He had not been tempted, through all these months; he would
+not tempt himself, now that real trial was so near at hand. Man as he
+was, if escape had been possible, he would have fled. But there was
+nothing to do but to go forward, and he called up that old, mighty,
+intangible safeguard of honor. The matter was settled beyond any
+question of surprise--he must avoid the long, sapping days of contact,
+the wasting, feverish yearnings of absence coming after.
+
+Flying over miles and miles of the summer land, heaped with the red
+tangled sweets of clover fields, belted with white starry mayweed, blue
+with marshy growth of wild flag, with hazy lines of far-off hills,
+fading into purple depths of distance, and near low ones lying green and
+calm close beside them, with brown clear brooks, famous trout streams,
+after the New England fashion, went running across their way, the old
+home pride leaped up in George's eyes and voice, and even Moore forgot
+his weariness, and talked with a flash of the old, careless spirit.
+
+The hack that brought them to their destination left them, deep in the
+summer night, at the foot of the long avenue of elms--going up which,
+with slow steps, on a sudden the house broke on them, ablaze with
+lights, athrob with music, whereat there was a renewal of explosive
+utterances, and the captain led his friend to the rear of the house to
+insure a quiet entrance.
+
+From the dark piazza, where he waited while George summoned some one to
+receive them, he caught, through the long, open casement, the vista of
+the parlors, with their glitter and confusion of light drapery and
+glimpses of bright faces and light forms, and softened hum of voices, as
+the dancers circled with the music. And through it all, straight down
+toward him, floating in one of the weird Strauss waltzes, came the
+princess, swathed in something white, airy, wide-falling. The same dark,
+unflushed face, the same wide, far-looking eyes, and fixed mouth, the
+same silky falling hair, but cut short now, and floating back as she
+moved. It was only for a moment: the perfumed darkness that seemed to
+throb with a sudden life of its own, the great, slow, summer stars above
+him, the wailing, passionate music that came trembling out among the
+heavy dew-wet foliage, the dark, calm earth about him, and the light and
+color and giddy motion that filled the gleaming square before him,
+struck in on his senses with staggering force; and then she swayed out
+of his sight, and Mrs. Morris came forward with words of cheer and
+welcome.
+
+That night, lying sleepless after the music was hushed and the wheels
+had done rolling away from the door, as if material enough for all fever
+fancies had not been given, backward and forward through the corridor a
+woman's garments trailed with light rustle, and a low voice hummed
+brokenly the waltz he had heard. Ceasing by and by in a murmur of girls'
+voices, and the old-remembered air, sung softly:
+
+  'For men must work and women must weep,
+  Though storms be sudden and waters deep.'
+
+After that many days went by unmarked. His wound, aggravated by fatigue,
+racked him with renewed pain; and when that was over, vitality was at
+too low an ebb for anything but the most passive quiet. Before listless,
+unnoting eyes drifted the crystal mornings, the golden hours steeped
+deep in summer languors, the miracles of sun-settings and star-filled
+holy nights. From his window he saw and heard always the ocean, blue and
+calm, lapping the shore with dreamy ripple in bright days--driving
+ghostly swirls of spray and fog clown the beach in stormy, gray ones.
+The house itself seemed set in the deepest haunt of summertime. Great
+trees, draped in the fullest growth of the year, rippled waves of green
+high about it. All day long the leaf sounds and leaf shadows came
+drifting in at the windows. Perfectest hush and quiet wrapped its
+occasional faint strains of music, or chime of voices came up to him,
+but did not break the silence. A place for a well soul to find its full
+stature, for a tired or sick one to gather again its lost forces. And by
+slow degrees the life held at first with so feeble a grasp came back to
+him.
+
+By and by there came a day when, from his balcony, he witnessed a
+departure, full of girls' profuse adieux, and then the hush of vacancy
+fell on the wide halls and airy rooms of the great house. That evening,
+with slow steps, he came down the staircase. In the twilight of the
+parlors showed dimly outlined a drift of woman's drapery, and the piano
+was murmuring inarticulately. Outside, on the broad stone doorstep,
+showed another drift, resolving itself into the muslins of Miss Nelly
+Morris, springing up with glad words of welcome as his unsteady frame
+came into view. Before half the protracted and vehement hand shaking was
+over, Moore turned at a soft rustle behind him, and Nelly found her
+introduction forestalled. Moore hoped, with his courtliest reverence,
+that Miss Berkeley had not forgotten him.
+
+She made two noiseless steps forward, and put out a small, brown band.
+He took it in his left, with a smiling glance of apology at the
+sling-fettered right arm. It was not often that Miss Berkeley's broad
+lids found it worth their while to raise themselves for such a wide,
+clear look as they allowed with the clasp. And then Nelly broke in:
+
+'Then you two people know each other. Grand! And I've been wondering
+these two weeks what to do with you! Why didn't you tell me, Leu?'
+
+'How was I to identify Mr. Moore with 'George's friend from the army'?
+Mr. Moore remembers he was on debatable ground last summer.'
+
+Her soft, slow speech fell on his hearing like the silver ripple of
+water, clear and fine cut, but without a bit of the New England
+incisiveness of tone that filled his delicate Southern ear with slight,
+perpetual irritation.
+
+'But I've made my calling and election sure at last. I was transformed
+into a mudsill and Northern hireling last spring.'
+
+'In spite of the transformation, I recognized you as soon as you spoke.
+I was not quite willing to be forgotten, you see, by any one who wore
+the glorifying army cloth.'
+
+They were out on the veranda now. Nelly was gazing with pitiful eyes at
+the sleeve fastened away, while the wasted left hand drew forward a
+great wicker chair into the circle of the moonlight. He caught the look:
+
+'Not so very bad, Miss Nelly; not off, you see, only useless for the
+present;' and he took a lowly seat at her side, near the princess's
+feet.
+
+'You are guiltless of shoulder straps. You might have obtained a
+commission, I think. Why didn't you, I wonder,' she said speculatively.
+
+'Because I knew nothing of military matters, for one thing, and hadn't
+the assurance to take my first lesson as lieutenant or captain.'
+
+Miss Berkeley's white lids lifted themselves again.
+
+'More nice then wise, sir. Others do it,' was Nelly's comment.
+
+'Yes, but I haven't forgotten the old copy-book instructions, 'Learn to
+obey before you command,' and began at the beginning. I've taken the
+first step toward the starred shoulder straps'--he wore the corporal's
+stripes--' and am hopeful.'
+
+'You'll never attain to them, you lazy Southron. Tell as about your camp
+life.'
+
+'There's very little to tell. Drill, smoke, loaf--begging your pardon
+for the rough expression of a rough fact--drill again. As one day is, so
+is another; they're all alike.'
+
+'Well, tell us about your getting wounded, then, and the fight. George
+will not get wounded himself, in spite of my repeated requests to that
+effect.'
+
+And so Moore fought his battle over again, in the midst of which Miss
+Berkeley dropped out of the talk, folded some soft brilliant net over
+her light dress, and went down the walk leading to the shore, and he did
+not see her again that night.
+
+After that he spent much of his time below stairs. Much alone; there
+were walks and rides in which he could take no part. Despite of George's
+prediction, he had peace and quiet, and gathered strength hourly.
+Whatever of graciousness he _had_ seen or fancied in Miss Berkeley's
+manner in that first unexpected meeting had all vanished. A subtile,
+unconquerable something shut her out from all friendliness of speech or
+action. She went about the house in her slow, abstracted way, or in her
+other mood, with sudden darting motions like a swallow, or dreamed all
+day beside the summer sea, coming back browner and with mistier looks in
+her gray eyes, but always alone and unapproachable. So that in half a
+dozen days he had not received as many voluntary sentences from her.
+
+But one morning the clouds had gathered black and heavy. The sea fogs
+had pitched their tents to landward, and their misty battalions were
+driving gray across the landscape. Dim reaches of blank water--lay
+beyond, weltering with an uneasy, rocking motion against the low, dark
+sky. White, ghostly sea birds wheeled low, a fretful wind grieved about
+the house, and a New England northeast storm was in progress. She was
+standing at the window, looking out with eyes farther away than ever
+over the haze-draped sea. Some fine, heavy material, the same indistinct
+hue as the day outside, fell about her in large, sweeping folds. A
+breath of sudden, penetrating perfume struck across his senses as he
+approached her. 'And gray heliotrope!' he said; but the heliotrope
+vanished as she turned and displayed the blaze of carnations at her
+throat, and the gleam of crimson silk under the jaunty zouave.
+
+'Lois Pearl Berkeley,' he read from the golden thimble he had nearly
+crushed under foot. He half wondered if she would know what it was. He
+never saw her do anything. She was never 'engaged,' nor in haste about
+any occupation. The perfect freedom from the universal Yankee necessity
+of motion, with which the brown, small hands fell before her, was as
+thoroughly a part of her as the strange Indian scent which clung to
+everything she touched, and sphered her like the atmosphere of another
+world. He never could associate the idea of any kind of personal
+care-taking with her dainty leisure, more than with the lilies of the
+field, though they never appeared in as many graceful arrays as she.
+
+'Yes, mine, thank you,' she said, and composedly dropped it into its
+place in the most orderly of useless conglomerations of silken pockets
+and puzzling pigeon holes. He watched her fingers, and then looked back
+at her.
+
+'Lois--such an odd name for you--such a quaint, staid Puritan name.'
+
+'And I am neither quaint nor staid nor Puritan. Thank you. Yes, my
+mother must have had recollections of her New England home strong on her
+when she gave it me, down on the Louisiana shores. It always sounded
+even to me a little strange and frigid among such half-tropical
+surroundings.'
+
+As she spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A
+rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the
+dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it
+was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house,
+always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the
+superficial lotus-charm of Southern life--and he had lived it
+superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught
+away his breath and choked sudden tears into his eyes. Came and went
+like a flash--for before she had done speaking a sudden new bond of
+sympathy put away the _stranger_ forevermore, and he was no longer
+alone.
+
+'Then you are Southern born too,' he said, with a quick step forward,
+and involuntarily outstretched hand. Hers dropped into it.
+
+'Yes, I am hardly acclimated yet. I shiver under these pale Northern
+skies from August till June. O my Louisiana, you never made 'life a
+burden' with such dark, chill days, and sobbing, cruel winds!' She
+turned to the windows. A sudden uncontrollable quaver of impatience and
+longing ran through her speech and hurried the words with unusual
+vehemence.
+
+'I thought you must have liked the day, since you robed yourself in its
+haze and mist.' He laid his hand lightly on her gray drapery with
+reverent touch.
+
+'And _I_ thought my carnations would redeem that. Since they
+didn't--'and she tossed the whole bright, spicy handful on the table.
+
+In a vase on the mantle, gray, passionate, odorous blooms were massed
+loosely about a cluster of fragile, intense day lilies, and a dash of
+purple and crimson trailed with the fuchsias over its edge, and gleamed
+up from the white marble ledge. He went to the vase, shook out the
+fuchsias, and laid the residue in her lap.
+
+'Heliotrope, finally,' he said.
+
+She brushed it lightly away with a half shudder.
+
+'Not that. I don't like heliotrope. Its perfume is heart-breaking,
+hopeless. It belongs in coffins, about still, dead faces. If it had a
+voice, we should hear continual moans. It would be no worse than this,
+though.'
+
+'You will wear the lilies then, unless the heliotrope scent clings to
+them too,' he said, gathering up the obnoxious flowers.
+
+'Yes, if it doesn't jar your ideal to see them worn against such a
+stormy day dress. To me they are the perfection of summer. No _color_
+could be more intense than this spotless whiteness. There!' Fastening
+them, the brittle stems snapped, and the flowers fell at her feet. 'No
+flowers for me to-day, of your choosing at least. Practically, lilies
+have such an uncomfortable way of breaking short off.'
+
+A broad, bright ribbon lay drawn through 'Charles Anchester' on the
+table. She knotted it carelessly at her throat.
+
+'That will do for the now; but, O my carnations, how your mission
+failed!' hovering over them a minute.
+
+'Then you are not satisfied with the New England mean of perfection, in
+everything, mentally, morally, and meteorologically?' going back to the
+weather again.
+
+'Satisfied! I'd exchange this whole pale summer for one hour of broad,
+torrid noonlight. Deep, far-off tropical skies, great fronds of tropical
+foliage, drawing their sustenance from the slowest, richest juices of
+nature, gorgeous depths of color blazing with the very heart of the sun,
+deep, intoxicating odors poured from creamy white or flaming flower
+chalices, and always the silver-sprayed wash of the blue sea. I remember
+that of my home. It is months and months since I have seen a magnolia or
+jasmine.'
+
+Fate sent Miss Morris to the parlor just then, luckily enough, perhaps,
+and the first dash of rain from the coming storm struck the windows
+sharply. Miss Berkeley shivered; a gray shadow swept up over her face,
+and absorbed all the gleam and unrest. She moved off with her book to a
+window; shut herself out from the room, and into the storm, with a heavy
+fall of curtains; and Nelly's voice rippled through a tripping, Venetian
+barcarole.
+
+It stormed all the next day, and when twilight came, it rained still
+with desperation. A narrow sphere of light from the flame low down in
+its alabaster shade held the piano, and through the warm scented gloom
+that filled the rest of the parlor thrilled echoing chords. Moore,
+coming in, stopped in the dimness to listen. A troubled uncertainty made
+itself felt through the strains, a sudden discordant crash jarred
+through the room, and the performer rose abruptly. He came forward.
+
+'O my prophetic soul, magnolias!' said Nelly, from her lounge, just
+outside the lighted circle.
+
+It had just come from him, the light, exquisite basket he held filled
+with great, pink, flushed magnolia blooms. Nelly raved in most
+fashionably extravagant adjectives. Lois looked at it with hungry eyes,
+but motionless and speechless. He laid it before her on the table, and
+turned away. She stood for a moment looking gravely down on it, then
+buried her face among the cool petals with a sudden caressing motion.
+Looking up again shortly, 'Thank you,' she said simply to the giver
+chatting carelessly.
+
+A broad illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after,
+and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little
+skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she
+could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed
+with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous
+with purple light, shining through the tears that gathered in them.
+
+Then the piano began, played dreamily, irregularly, with slender, single
+threads of tune, and frequent pauses, as if the preoccupied mind let the
+listless fingers fall away from the keys. They gathered up finally all
+the broken strains into a low, slow-moving harmony. Through it Moore
+heard the soft lap of waves, the slow rock of Pacific tidal swells,
+flowing and ebbing and flowing again through flaming noons, about
+half-submerged bits of world, palm-shaded, sun-drenched, or swaying
+white with moonlight under purple midnights, holy with the clear burning
+stars: heard the gurgle and ripple of falling streams, deepening into
+the wide flow of mighty rivers, bearing in their calm sweep the secrets
+of a zone--of ice-choked springs, of the dead stillness of Northern
+forests, and the overgrowth, and passionate life of endless summers.
+
+The red and white combatants now held truce over a queen check, while
+the players sat silent, listening.
+
+Suddenly, through the murmur and rhythmic flow of water sounds, struck
+shrill and sharp the opening strains of a march--not such marches as
+mark time for dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant,
+cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat--steadying the tramp of weary
+feet over red battle fields. Its unswerving hurry, its terrible, calm
+excitement, brought before his vision long blue lines--the fixed faces
+sterner than death, with steady eyes and quickened breath--the nervous
+clutch of muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came
+nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and
+sweet May breath--and the quick, questioning note of a meadow lark
+dropped down through the silence of the advancing column. As the
+maddening music stormed and beat about him, his heart throbbed audibly,
+and the rushing currents of his fiery Southern blood sounded in his
+ears. Honor, prudence, resolution, everything was swept away in the lava
+tide of excitement. Before him he saw the crown of his life. All heaven
+and all earth should not stop him short of it. He rose and began
+crossing the room, with heavy, resolute tread. In the dimness, the
+player was hardly visible; he would assure himself of her mortality at
+least. A sudden, fierce hunger for sight and touch thrilled him.
+
+Midway he stopped. The music dropped with a shock from its fiery
+enthusiasm. Was it only an echo, or an army of ghosts crossing a dim
+field, long since fought over--the steady tramp, tramp, the pendulum of
+time? Unutterably wailing, pitiful, it sent plaintive, piercing cries up
+to the calm, dead heavens. All the fearful sights he had seen rose
+before him. Upturned lay faces calm in death as in a child's sleep, with
+all camp roughnesses swept away in that still whiteness; strong men's,
+with that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death
+on them--mangled and crushed forms--all the wreck of a fought battle,
+terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water
+voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant
+arpeggio flashed up the keys like a shower of gold, and Miss Berkeley
+rose with white face and trembling breath, and Nelly was alone in the
+room, sobbing nervously in her armchair.
+
+The storm passed that night, with great swayings of trees, and dash of
+broad raindrops, and piled up broken masses of fleecy white clouds,
+tossed about by the rough, exultant September wind. Bright days
+followed, mellowing with each one to sunnier, calmer perfection. Moore
+passed them in his own room. That night had torn away all the disguises
+that he had put upon his heart. He knew now that he loved this
+woman--knew it with such a bitter sense of humiliation as such proud
+spirits writhe under when honor turns traitor and betrays them to the
+enemy. 'Lead us not into temptation.' If it meant anything in the old
+habit of child's prayer which clung to him yet, it meant that he should
+put himself out of its way, since he had proved himself too weak to meet
+it. His inborn honesty let him build no excuses for his failure. He saw,
+and acknowledged with a flush of scorn and curling lip, his own
+treachery to himself in his hour of need. That he had not committed
+himself--that his self-betrayal was only known to self--was no merit of
+his--simply a circumstance. And circumstances seemed mighty in their
+influence upon him, he thought, with a feeling of deepest contempt. All
+pride and self-reliance were taken out of him. Absence, at least, would
+be a safeguard, since it would render harmless such impulses as those of
+that night. However much he might sin in yearning, she; should never
+know, never be exposed to the risk of being drawn into his guilt and
+pain. He had come at last to the place where all the old delicate pride
+was merged in the one anxious fear that she should suffer. He would go
+away the next day; he would not see her again--never see her
+voluntarily--putting away fiercely the sudden pang of yearning: not that
+he came at once to such a conclusion.
+
+Honor, pride, self-respect, having failed him once, were not easily
+recalled to their allegiance. His was no feeble nature, to sin and
+repent in an hour. He fought over every inch of his way, and came out at
+last conqueror, but scarred and weary and very weak in heart, and
+distrustful of himself.
+
+They had gone to ride that afternoon--he had seen them drive away. He
+would go down and make the necessary arrangements for his departure. And
+so it happened that he stood an hour before sunset in the parlor. A
+sudden heart sickness drove the blood from his lips with the wrench of
+remembrance. It did not strengthen him to meet her, cool and royal, in
+filmy purple, putting out her hand with frank friendliness, and with a
+new quaver of interest in her voice. Those fatal magnolias: all the
+outside world seemed pressing nearer these two strangers in a strange
+land.
+
+'How pale you are! You have been ill again.'
+
+'No,' he said, almost harshly. 'You like tiger lilies,' lifting a stem
+crowded with the flaming whirls.
+
+'Like them? yes--don't you? As I like the fiery, deafening drum-roll and
+screaming fife, and silver, sweet bugle-calls. Think where they found
+these wide, free curves of outline--that flaming contrast of color.
+Indian skies have rounded over them, Indian suns poured their fervor
+into their hearts. In the depth of forest jungles the velvet-coated
+tiger has shaken off their petals--glittering, deadly cobras crushed
+them in their slow coils; gorgeous-winged birds and insects swept them
+in their flight.'
+
+Some new mental impulse sent a rare, faint flush to the olive cheeks,
+and filled the uplooking clear eyes with light. This purple-clad shape,
+with fiery nasturtiums burning on the breast and filling the air with
+their peculiar odor, with the barbaric splendor of tiger lilies
+reflecting their lurid glare about her as she stood, bore no more
+likeness to the ordinary haughty woman than fire to snow. He would have
+liked to have crowned her with pomegranate blossoms--have dropped the
+silvery sheen of ermine under her feet, and have knelt there to worship.
+
+She moved away impatiently, trailed her noiseless drapery through the
+room once or twice, and came back to the window, where he stood looking
+out. Before them lay the sea, calm in a sheen of blue, gathering faint
+amethystine vapors, that the sunset would light up in a miracle of
+bronze and purple and rose.
+
+'You should have been with us last night! A soft, rushing south wind
+filled all the air with whispers, and drew up a veil of lace round the
+horizon, very high up in the east. Stars were few; the new moon dropped
+tender, faint beams down into the gray mist and grayer water that broke
+in ripples of white fire against the dark in the west, and mingled with
+the mystery in the east. I want to go again. Mr. Moore, I can manage a
+boat; will you go with me?'
+
+With every minute he saw his hard-earned victory slipping away. With
+every minute his reeling sense lost foothold in the strange, new
+fascination of her excited presence. Will rallied to a last effort; he
+muttered some broken excuse, that she must have thought an assent, for
+she dropped a soft, white, clinging shawl over her shoulders, slipped
+the tie of the jaunty hat beneath her chin, and he could only follow her
+as she slid through the flicker of shade and sunshine down to the beach,
+where the summer sea washed lazily.
+
+Low in the west and northwest lay piled ominous clouds; white, angry
+thunder heads began showing themselves.
+
+'A grand sunset for to-night, and a shower perhaps. We shall be back
+before it breaks.'
+
+A small boat--a frail thing of white and gilding--floated at anchor.
+Lois shook out the sail in her character of manager, seated herself at
+the helm, and they drifted out. No word was spoken; the light in her
+eyes grew brighter and brighter; the scarlet curves of her mouth more
+and more intense. Sitting with face turned away from the west, she did
+not see, as he did, the rising blackness. The wind freshened, skimming
+in fitful gusts over the waves, and the little craft flung off the spray
+like rain. Away off in the shadow of the cloud the water was black as
+death, a faint line of white defining its edge. Was she infatuated? As
+for him, he grew very calm, with a kind of desperation. Better to die
+so, with her face the last sight on earth--his last consciousness her
+clinging arms, sinking down to the dark, still caverns beneath--than to
+live out the life that lay before him. He leaned forward and looked over
+into the green depths of the sea. Sunshine still struck down in rippling
+lines, a golden network. Soft emerald shadows hung far down, breaking up
+into surface rifts of cool dimness as the waves swung over them.
+
+Her hat had fallen back; her whole face was alive with a proud, exultant
+delight in the exhilarating motion. Higher and higher rose the veil of
+cloud, and the blackness in the water was creeping toward them. Sea
+birds wheeled low about them, with their peculiar quavering cry, and a
+low swell made itself felt. Miss Berkeley turned her head; a sudden look
+of affright blanched her face to deadliest whiteness. A hand's breadth
+of clear sky lay beneath the sun, and down after them, with the speed of
+a racer, came that great black wave. Before it the blue ripples shivered
+brightly; behind it the angry water tossed and seethed. In its bosom,
+lurid, phosphorescent lights seemed to flit to and fro. Its crest was
+ragged and white with dashes of foam. She took in the whole in a
+second's glance, and made a movement to bring the boat's head up to the
+wind. As the white face turned toward him, a quick instinct of
+self-preservation seized him, and he sprang up to lower the sail.
+Something caught the halliards. His left arm was of little service; his
+right hung useless at his side. She reached forward--one hand on the
+tiller--to help him. The rim of the storm slipped up over the sun--a
+sudden flaw struck them--the rudder flew sharp round, wrenched out of
+her slight hold--the top-heavy sail caught the full force of the blow,
+surged downward with a heavy lurch, and the gale was on them. A great
+blow, and swift darkness, then fierce currents rushing coldly past him;
+strange, wild sounds filling his ears; and when his vision cleared
+itself, he saw Lois, unimpeded by her light drapery, striking out for
+the sunken ledge, half a dozen yards away, over which the spray was
+flying furiously. He ground his teeth with impatience as his nerveless
+arm fell helpless; but he reached her side at last. A narrow shelf, with
+barely sufficient standing room for two. Great, dark waves, with strange
+lights flashing through them, whirled blinding deluges high above their
+heads, as he held her close. With the instinct of the weaker toward the
+stronger, she grasped and clung to him; and the fierce exultation that
+thrilled through his veins with actual contact, made him strong as a
+giant. And then, close on the gale, came the rain, beating down the
+waves with its heavy pour. In the thunder and tramp of the storm no
+human voice could have made itself audible, if speech had been needed.
+
+The storm passed as suddenly as it had risen. Through a rift in the
+clouds a dash of blood-red light burst over the troubled waters, and
+with it a sudden quiet fell about them. They were to have their 'grand
+sunset' finally.
+
+'We are too far from the mainland to reach it without help; no boats are
+likely to pass this way after this storm; the tide is at its lowest now;
+it rises high over this ledge.'
+
+In his quiet voice a half-savage triumph made itself heard. This
+near-coming fate, that he believed inevitable, put away completely all
+claims of that world that lay behind him--shut out everything but their
+own individuality. Time had narrowed to a point; all landmarks were
+swept away.
+
+Miss Berkeley's face had lost none of its whiteness; but the pallor was
+not of fear. The great eyes burned star-like, and the mouth was like
+iron. She looked up as his even tones fell on her ear. Something in his
+gaze fixed hers; through fearless, unveiled eyes, the soul looked
+straight out to his. What he saw there dazzled and blinded him. He
+caught her up to his heart suddenly and fiercely. His lips crushed hers
+in a long, clinging kiss, that seemed to drink up her very life. For
+them, the brightness that for others is dissipated over long years of
+the future, was concentrated into the single intense moment of the
+present--this one moment, that seemed to burst into bud and blossom, the
+fruition of a lifetime. The sky lifted away and poured down fuller
+floods of light; the air vibrated with strange, audible throbs. When he
+released her, she did not move away. Never again, though they lived out
+a century, could the past be quite what it had been before; through it
+they had come to this, the crowning perfection of their lives. Through
+the future would run the memory of a caress in which--she was not a
+woman who measured her gifts--she had dissolved all the hope and promise
+of that future for him. Desperation was no small element in the whirl.
+Only into the eternities could he carry the _now_ pure and loyal. It had
+nothing to do with time; only through the shadow of the coming death had
+he attained to it.
+
+The fancy that had always haunted him with her peculiar name and dainty
+presence, prompted the 'Marguerite!'
+
+She was not a woman to whom people give pet names. A _rested_, loving
+smile gleamed over her face, and her lips sought his again.
+
+'My darling!'
+
+'Mine!' and then time drifted on, unbroken by the speech which would
+have jarred the new, perfect harmony. Neither _thought_--the life
+currents that had met so wildly and suddenly, left space in their full,
+disturbed flow, for just the one consciousness of delirious, satisfying
+love. While the fiery sunset paled, he held the little drenched figure
+close, her warm breath flowing across his cheek.
+
+Out of the gathering dimness shoreward, came a hail. It struck him with
+an icy chill that death could never have brought. She raised her head,
+listening. The longing and temptation to hold her to his breast, and
+sink down through the green, curling waves, came back stronger than
+ever. Only so could he hope to keep her. That inexorable future of time
+reaching out to grasp him back again, would put them apart so
+hopelessly. His voice was hoarse--broken up with the heart wrench.
+
+'Marguerite, will you die here with me, or go back again to the life
+that will separate us?'
+
+She did not understand him. Why should she? Did she not love him, and he
+her? and what _could_ come between them? For her a future burst suddenly
+into hope with that faint call. In it lay untried, unfathomable sources
+of happiness.
+
+Another breathless kiss--this time crowded with the agony of a parting
+for him--and then, as the hail came again, nearer and more distinct, the
+white shawl, that still clung about her, floated in the air as a signal.
+
+They lifted her into the rescuing boat shortly, white and breathless,
+and wrapped her in heavy shawls. Not senseless, lying against his
+breast, the dark eyes opened once to meet his, and the pallid face
+nestled a little closer to its resting place. He could not tell if the
+time were long or short, before Nelly's voice broke on his ear.
+
+'Only a comedy, instead of the tragedy which mother is arranging up at
+the house!'
+
+The half-hysterical quaver broke into the woman's refuge of tears, and
+sobs with that; and Moore gave up his burden to stronger arms.
+
+'Up at the house,' Mrs. Morris, busied with her blazing fires and
+multitudinous appliances for any stage of disaster, met them with the
+quiet tears that mothers learn to shed, and the reverent 'Thank God!'
+that comes oftenest from mothers' lips.
+
+And the bustle being over, he looked reality and duty straight in the
+face. The man was in no sense a coward--_flinch_ was not in him. He came
+out on the upper balcony two hours later, with the face of a man over
+whom ten years more of life had gone heavily. A dozen steps away sat
+Marguerite--the white heart of a softened glow of light. She came out at
+his call quiet and stately, but with a kind of shy happiness touching
+eye and cheek with light and flame. At sight of her, all the mad passion
+in his heart leaped up--a groan came in place of the words he had
+promised himself. He strode away with heavy, hard footfalls. Not
+strange, since he was trampling Satan and his own heart under his feet.
+He came back again, quickly, eagerly, as a man forcing himself forward
+to a mortal sacrifice, who feels that resolution may fail. The words
+that came finally were half a groan, half an imprecation, hissed through
+clenched teeth.
+
+'Three years ago, a Louisiana lady promised to be my wife. She is not
+dead; the engagement is not broken.'
+
+There were no words beyond the plain statement of facts that he had any
+right to use--harsh and brutal though they seemed. Seen in the
+earth-light that had broken on him with that rescuing hail, he had acted
+the coward and villain. If she thought him so, he had no right to demur.
+
+There was no need of other words. The eyes, after their first terrified
+glance, had fixed themselves out on the night, and then the lids fell,
+and the wondering, stunned look changed slowly into one of perfect
+comprehension. Not a muscle moved. The present, leaping forward, laid
+before her the future, scorched and seared, beyond possibility of bloom
+again. She looked into it with just the same attitude--even to the
+tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing--as five minutes before she
+had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white
+face--whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight--saw a look of utter,
+hopeless quiet settle there--such quiet as one sees in an unclosed
+coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving,
+as covers deadly wounds--settle never again to rise till Death shall
+sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces
+gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.
+
+Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On
+this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the
+curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give--the promise
+of lifelong love and tenderness--was itself a deadly wrong--would blast
+his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood
+there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest
+realization of helplessness went over his heart.
+
+She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his
+bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made
+itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up;
+even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that
+sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her
+hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek
+with quick, light contact, and glided away.
+
+Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon,
+and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and
+ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed
+in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face,
+and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long
+hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of
+sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night
+with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred
+the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night
+noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo;
+till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and
+the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded
+itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.
+
+To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attention, had taken in
+every change of the night, the promise of the day came almost as a
+personal wrong. That the glare of the sunshine should fall on her
+pain--that the necessity for meeting mere acquaintances with the same
+face as yesterday should exist, now that her life lay so scorched and
+sere before her, filled her with rebellious impatience.
+
+But when, with the growing light, the first sounds of household waking
+came to her, she rose wearily, and went, with tired, heavy steps to her
+own room. And Nelly, coming in half an hour later, with an indefinite
+sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the
+pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of
+the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind
+of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes
+or ears, and Nelly did not realize them.
+
+There are a few women, mostly of this dark, slender type, who bear these
+wrenching heart agonies as some animals bear extremest suffering of
+body--not a sound or struggle testifies to pain--receiving blow after
+blow without hope or thought of appeal--going off by and by to die, or
+to suffer back to life alone. Not much merit in it, perhaps--a passive,
+hopeless endurance of an inevitable torture; but such tortures warp or
+shape a lifetime. Rarely ever eyes that have watched out such a night
+see the sun rise with its old promise.
+
+Clement Moore, coming slowly back to life after a fortnight of delirium,
+found the woods ablaze with October, and Miss Berkeley gone. Another
+fortnight, and he was with his regiment. Captain George--off on some
+scouting expedition--was not in camp to meet him. But stretched out on
+the dry turf a night or two after, through the clash of the band on the
+hillside above broke Captain George's sonorous voice, and straightway
+followed such a catalogue of questions as dwellers in camps have always
+ready to propound to the latest comer from the northward. Concluding
+finally with--
+
+'And you didn't fall in love with 'the princess'?' Poor Captain George!
+The prodigious effort _ought_ to have kept the heart throb out of his
+voice, though it didn't. Moore's quick ear caught it (sympathy has a
+wonderfully quickening effect on the perceptions sometimes), and he took
+refuge in a truth that in no way touched the past few months--feeling
+like a coward and traitor meanwhile, and yet utterly helpless to save
+either himself or his friend from coming evil. Another item added to
+retributive justice.
+
+'I thought you knew'--flashing the diamond on his hand in the
+moonlight--'somewhere beyond the lines yonder a lady wears the companion
+to this--or did, last spring.'
+
+And George's spirits rose immensely thereupon.
+
+The old, miserable monotony of camp life began again. It wore on him,
+this machine-like existence, this blind, unquestioning obedience, days
+and nights of purposeless waiting, brightened by neither hope nor
+memory. He had hated it before; now he loathed it with the whole
+strength of his unrestful soul. But it did him good. Brought face to
+face with his life, he met the chances of his future like the man he
+was, and at last, out of the blackness end desolation, came the comfort
+of conquering small, every-day temptations, more of a comfort than we
+are willing to admit at first thought.
+
+This bare, unbroken life cuts straight down to the marrow of a man.
+Stripped of all conventionalities, individuals come out broadly. The
+true metal shows itself grandly in this strange, impartial throwing
+together of social elements--this commingling on one level of all ranks
+and conditions of men in the same broad glare of every-day trial,
+unmodified by any of society's false lights. The factitious barriers of
+rank once broken over, all early associations, whether of workshop or
+college, go for nought, or, rather, for what they are worth. The _man_
+gravitates to his proper place, whether he makes himself known with the
+polished sentences of the school, or in terse, sinewy, workman's talk.
+And through the months Moore learned to respect humanity as it showed
+itself, made gentler to every one, driven out from himself, perhaps, by
+the bitterness and darkness that centred in his own heart. It was a new
+phase of life for him, but he bated his haughty Southern exclusiveness
+to meet it. Before, he had kept himself aloof as far as the surroundings
+allowed from those about him--now, his never-failing good nature, his
+flow of song and story, his untiring physical endurance, all upborne by
+a certain proud delicacy and reticence, made him a general favorite. But
+he hailed as a relief the long, exhausting marches that came after a
+while. Bodily weariness stood in the place of head or heart exercise,
+and men falling asleep on the spot where they halted for the night,
+after a day in the clinging Virginia mud, had little time for the noisy
+outbreaks that filled the evenings in days of inaction. So he did his
+private's duty bravely, with cheery patience, relieving many a slender
+boy's arms of his gun, helping many another with words of cheer as he
+slumped on at his side, always with some device for making their dreary
+night-stops more endurable. Thanksgiving came and went. George went
+home on furlough. Moore refused one, and ate the day's extra allowance
+of tough beef and insipid rice with much fought-against memories of his
+New England festivals. The winter went on. Christmas days came. The
+man's brown face was getting positively thinner with homesick
+recollections of the Southern carnival. This brilliant, ready spirit,
+who never grew sour nor selfish under any circumstances, actually spent
+two good hours, the afternoon before Christmas day, in a brown study,
+and with a suspicious, tightened feeling in his throat, and mistiness in
+his eyes. Coming in at nightfall from his picket duty, tired and hungry,
+Jim Murphy, stretching his long length before the fire, rose on his
+elbow to find half a dozen epistles he had brought down to camp that
+day.
+
+'Yer letthers, Musther Moore.' Jim, even with his sudden accession of
+independence as an American citizen, paid unconscious deference to the
+world-old subtile difference between gentleman and 'rough,' and used the
+title involuntarily.
+
+He opened them sitting by the same fire, munching his hard tack as he
+read. Murphy, watching him, saw his lips quiver and work over one
+bearing half a dozen postmarks--a letter from his mother, conveyed
+across the lines by some sleight-of-hand of influence or pay, and mailed
+and remailed from place to place, till weeks had grown into months since
+it was written. Noncommittal as it had need to be--filled with home
+items to the last page--there his heart stood still, to bound again
+furiously back, and his breath came sharp and hot. He rose blinded and
+staggering. Jim Murphy, seeing how white and rigid his face had grown,
+came toward him, putting out his hand with a dumb impulse of sympathy,
+not understanding how the shock of a great hope, springing full grown
+into existence, sometimes puts on the semblance of as great a loss.
+
+Private Moore's application for a furlough being duly made, that night
+was duly granted.
+
+'Just in time--the last one for your regiment!' said the good-natured
+official, registering the necessary items.
+
+In another hour he was whirling away, and in early evening two days
+later he stepped out into the clear moonlight and crisp air of a
+Northern city.
+
+A New England sleighing season was at its height. The streets were
+crowded with swift-flying graceful vehicles, the air ringing with bell
+music and chimes of voices. Out through the brilliant confusion he went
+to the quiet square where the great trees laid a dark tracery of shadow
+upon the snow beneath. No thought of the accidents of absence or
+company, or any of the chances of everyday life, had occurred to him
+before. A carriage stood at the door. He almost stamped with impatience
+till the door opened and he was admitted. The change to the warm,
+luxurious gloom of the parlors quieted him a little, but he paced up and
+down with long strides while he waited. The strong stillness that he had
+resolutely maintained was broken down now with a feverish restlessness.
+
+She came at length--it seemed to him forever first--with the rustle and
+shimmer of trailing lengths of silk down the long room. A fleecy mist
+covered neck and arms, and some miracle of a carriage wrapping lay white
+and soft about her face. She did not recognize him in the obscurity; his
+message of 'a friend' had not betrayed him. But his voice, with its new,
+proud hopefulness, its under vein triumphant and eager, struck her into
+a blinding, giddy whirl, in which voice and words were lost. It passed
+in a moment, and he was saying, 'And I am free now--honorably free--and
+have come where my heart has been, ever since that month on the seaside.
+Most gracious and sovereign lady,'--he broke into sudden, almost
+mirthful speech, dropping on one knee with a semblance of humility
+proved no mockery by the diamond light in the brown eyes and the
+reverent throb that came straight from his voice.
+
+She bent over him as he knelt, and drew her cool, soft hands across his
+forehead and down his face, and her even, silvery syllables cut like
+death:
+
+'Mr. Moore, last night I promised to marry your friend, Captain Morris.'
+
+For the space of a minute stillness like the grave filled the room, and
+then all the intense strain of heart and nerve gave way, as the bitter
+tide of disappointment broke in and rolled over his future; and without
+word or sound he dropped forward at her feet.
+
+She knelt down beside him with a low, bitter cry. It reached his dulled
+sense; he rose feebly.
+
+'Forgive me; I have not been myself of late, I think; and this--this was
+so sudden,' and he walked away with dull, nerveless tread.
+
+On the table, near her, lay her handkerchief. It breathed of heliotrope.
+Her words came back to him: 'Only in coffins, about still, dead faces.'
+He stopped in his walk and looked down on her. Forever he should
+remember all that ghostly sheen of silvery white about a rigid face with
+unutterably sad fixed mouth and drooping lids. He thrust the fleecy
+handful into his breast.
+
+'I may keep this?' and took permission from her silence.
+
+'Good-by;' the words came through ashy lips, a half sob. She knelt as
+impassive as marble, as cold and white. He waited a moment for the word
+or look that did not come, turned away, the hall door fell heavily shut,
+and he was gone.
+
+Fifteen minutes after, Miss Berkeley was whirling to the house where she
+was to officiate as bridesmaid, and where she was haughtier, and colder,
+and ten times more attractive than ever.
+
+Private Moore, waiting for the midnight return train, found life a grim
+prospect.
+
+Three weeks after, a summons came from the captain's tent. George had
+just returned from his own furlough, and this was their first meeting.
+Even while their hands clasped, his new, happy secret told itself.
+
+'Congratulate me, Clement Moore! You remember Lois Berkeley? She has
+promised to be Lois Berkeley Morris one day!' and, with happy lover's
+egotism, did not notice the gray shade about his hearer's lips.
+
+Various items of news followed.
+
+'A truce boat goes over to-morrow,' remembering the fact suddenly;
+'there will be opportunity to send a few letters; so, if you wish to
+write to that lady 'beyond the lines'--
+
+The voice that replied was thin and harsh:
+
+'Miss Rose declined alliance with a 'Yankee hireling,' and was married
+last October.'
+
+Honest George wrung his friend's hand anew, and heaped mental anathemas
+on his own stupidity for not seeing how haggard and worn the dark face
+had grown--anathemas which were just enough, perhaps, only he hardly saw
+the reason in quite the right light. But he spared all allusions to his
+own prospects thereafter, and finding that Moore rather avoided than
+sought him, measured and forgave the supposed cause by his own heart.
+
+At length came a time when a new life and impulse roused into action
+even that slowly moved great body, the officers of the Potomac Army, and
+that much-abused and sorely tried insignificant item, the army itself.
+On every camp ground reigned the confusion of a flitting. All the roads
+were filled with regiments hurrying southward, faces growing more and
+more hazard with fatigue and privation, weak and slender forms falling
+from the ranks, cowards and traitors skulking to the rear, till at
+length on the banks of the river stood an army, hungry, footsore,
+marchworn, but plucky, and ready for any service that might be required
+of them, even if that service were but to 'march up the hill and then
+march down again'--what was left of them.
+
+An atom in the moving mass of blue, Clement Moore shared the pontoon
+crossing, was silent through the storms of cheers that greeted each
+regiment as they splashed over and up the bank, and, drawn up in line of
+battle at last, surveyed the field without a pulsation of emotion. Other
+men about him chafed at the restraint; he stood motionless, with eyes a
+thousand miles away. And when the advance sounded, and the line started
+with a cheer, no sound passed his lips. A half-unconscious prayer went
+up that he might fall there, and have it over with this life battle,
+that had gone so sorely against him. He moved as in a dream. The whirl
+and roar of battle swept around and by him; he charged with the
+fiercest, saw the blue lines reel and break only to close up and charge
+again, took his life in his hand a dozen times, and stood at length with
+the few who held that first line of rifle pits, gazing in each other's
+faces in the momentary lull, and wondering at their own existence. Then
+came a shock, shivers of red-hot pain ran through every nerve, and
+then--blissful, cool unconsciousness. Captain George, galloping by, with
+the red glare of battle on his face, saw the fall, and halted. A half
+dozen ready hands swung the body to his saddle. For a little the tide of
+battle eddied away, and in the comparative quiet, George tore down the
+hill to a spring bubbling out under the cedars.
+
+The darkness that wrapped the wounded man dissolved gradually. The
+thunder and crash of guns, the mad cheers, the confusion of the bands
+withdrew farther and farther, and drifted away from his failing senses.
+He was back in his Southern home; the arm under his head was his
+mother's; and he murmured some boyish request. Jasmine and clematis
+oppressed him with their oversweetness; overhead the shining leaves of
+the magnolia swung with slow grace. So long since he had seen a
+magnolia, not since that evening--a life time ago, it seemed; the sight
+and fragrance fell on him as her cool touch did that last time. The
+heart throbs choked him then; he was choking again. 'Water, mother--a
+drink!' and something wet his lips and trickled down his throat, not
+cool and sweet as the rippling water he longed for, and he turned away
+with sickly fretfulness; but a new strength thrilled through his limbs.
+He opened his eyes; a face, battle-stained, but tear-wet like a woman's,
+bent over him.
+
+'O Clement, dear old fellow, do you know me?'
+
+He smiled faintly, with stiffening lips. 'Yes, I know. I've prayed for
+it, George. I couldn't live to see her your wife. Good-by, dear boy.
+Tell mother--' He wandered again. 'Kiss me, mother--now Lois, my
+Marguerite. Into thy hands, O Lord--' A momentary struggle for breath,
+and then Morris laid back the grand head, and knelt, looking down on the
+beautiful face, over which the patient strength of perfect calm had
+settled forever.
+
+'So that was it, after all,' he said, bitterly. 'Fool not to see; and he
+was worth a generation of such as I.'
+
+He turned away, tightened his saddle girths, cast a look on the
+pandemonium before him, looked back with one foot already in the
+stirrup.
+
+'I sha'n't see him again in this hell, even if I come out of it myself.'
+And going back, with gentle fingers he removed the few trinkets on the
+body. In an inner pocket of the blouse he found a small packet. He
+opened it on the spot. A lady's handkerchief, silky fine, white as ever.
+No need of the delicate tracery in the corners to tell him whose. The
+perfume that haunted it still called back too vividly that evening when
+he had wondered at and loved her more for the strange, perfect calm that
+chilled a little his outburst of happiness. He folded it back carefully,
+touched his lips as a woman might have done to the cold forehead, and
+mounted, plunging up the hill to the fight that had recommenced over the
+trench. Later in the day, the ball that fate moulded for Captain George
+found him. He gave one low, pitiful cry as it crashed through his bridle
+arm, and then a merciful darkness closed about him.
+
+Two months after, white and thin, with one empty sleeve fastened across
+his chest, he stood where another had stood waiting for the same woman.
+Through the window drifted in the early spring fragrance; a handful of
+early spring flowers lay on the table. A soft rustle and slow step
+through the hall, and he rose as Lois came in. She glanced at the empty
+sleeve with grave, wide eyes, and sat down near him. He would not have
+known the face before him, it had so altered; the hair pushed back from
+hollow, blue-veined temples, the sharpened, angular outlines, and an
+old, suffering look about the mouth and sunken eyes.
+
+Few words were spoken--nothing beyond the most commonplace greetings.
+Then she said:
+
+'I should have come to you, but I have been ill myself; near death, I
+believe,' she added, wearily.
+
+She gave the explanation with no throb of feeling. She would have
+apologized for a careless dress with more spirit once.
+
+He rose and laid a packet before her.
+
+'A lady's handkerchief--yours, I think. I was with him when he died,
+though his body was not found afterward. I was hurt myself, you know,
+and could not attend to it,' he said, deprecatingly.
+
+She did not touch it, looking from it up to him with eyes filled with
+just such a grieved, questioning look as might come into the eyes of
+some animal dying in torture. He could not endure it. He put out his
+white, wasted left hand.
+
+'My poor child!' She shivered, caught her breath with a sob, and,
+burying her face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears
+in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor
+to speak--wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who
+was left lying stark and still beneath the cedars.
+
+The storm passed. She lay quiet now, all but the sobs that shook her
+whole slight frame. He said, at last, very gently:
+
+'If I had known--you should have told me. He was my best friend.' His
+voice trembled a little. 'I know how I must seem to you. His murderer,
+perhaps; surely the murderer of your happiness.' A deeper quaver in the
+sorrowful tones. 'It is too late now, I know; but if it would help you
+ever so little to be released from your promise--'
+
+There was no reply.
+
+'You are free. I am going now.' He bent over her for a breath, making a
+heart picture of the tired face, the closed eyes, and grieved mouth.
+Only to take her up for a moment, with power to comfort her--he would
+have given his life for that--and turned away with a great, yearning
+pain snatching at his breath. In the hall he paused a moment, trying to
+think. A light step, a frail hand on his arm, a wistful face lifted to
+his.
+
+'Forgive me; I have been very unkind. You are so good and noble. I will
+be your wife, if you will be any happier.'
+
+He looked down at her pityingly. 'You are very tired. Shall you say that
+when you are rested again? Remember, you are free.'
+
+'If not yours, then never any one's.'
+
+His arm fell about her, his lips touched her forehead quietly; he led
+her back to her couch, and arranged her pillow, smiling a little at his
+one awkward hand.
+
+'I shall not see you again before I go back, unless you send for me.'
+
+She put out her hand and touched the bowed face quickly and lightly; and
+with that touch thrilling in his veins he went away.
+
+Through Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Charleston siege, Captain
+George, no longer captain, now twice promoted for cool bravery, has
+borne a charmed life--a grave, calm man, remembering always a still
+face, 'pathetic with dying.'
+
+Out from the future is turned toward him another face, no less pathetic
+in its unrest of living. The soldiers in the Capital hospitals, dragging
+through the weary weeks of convalescence, know that face well. For hours
+of every day she goes about busied with such voluntary service as she is
+permitted to do. She sees tired faces brighten at her coming--is
+welcomed by rough and gentle voices. Always patient, ready, thoughtful,
+she is 'spending' herself--waiting for the end.
+
+
+
+
+THE SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE: ITS CHARACTER AND RELATION TO OTHER
+LANGUAGES.
+
+_ARTICLE TWO._
+
+CORRESPONDING FIRST DISCRIMINATIONS IN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE.
+
+
+The purpose of these papers, as announced and partially carried forward
+in the preceding one, is to explain the nature of the NEW SCIENTIFIC
+UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, a component part of the new Science of UNIVERSOLOGY,
+and to exhibit its relation to the Lingual Structures hitherto extant.
+For this purpose we entered upon the necessary preliminary consideration
+of the fundamental question of the Origin of Speech. We found that the
+latest developments of Comparative Philology upon this subject, as
+embodied in Prof. Mueller's recent work, 'Lectures on the Science of
+Language,' brought us no farther along to the goal of our investigation
+than Compound Roots--one-, two-, three-, four-, five--(or more) letter
+Roots--some four or five hundred of which are the insoluble residuum
+which the Philologists furnish as the Ultimate Elements of Language. It
+was pointed out that these Roots are not, however, the _Ultimate_
+Elements of Language, any more than Compound Substances are the Prime
+Constituents of Matter; and that, as Chemistry, as a Science, could
+begin its career, only after a knowledge of the veritable Ultimate
+Elements of the Physical Constitution of the Globe was obtained, so a
+_True Science of Language_ must be based upon an understanding of the
+value and meaning of the True Prime or Ultimate Elements of Speech--the
+_Vowels_ and _Consonants_.
+
+It is with the exposition of the nature of these Fundamental
+Constituents of Language, and of their Correspondential Relationship or
+_Analogy_ with the Fundamental Constituents of Thought, the Ultimate
+Rational Conceptions of the Mind, that the New UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE begins
+its developments. Through its agency we may hope to find, therefore, a
+satisfactory solution to the problem of the Origin of Speech, which
+Comparative Philology abandons at the critical point, and so to be able
+to pass to the consideration of the more specific objects of our present
+inquiry.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+UNIVERSOLOGY establishes the fact that there is Analogy or Repetition of
+Plan throughout the various Departments of the Universe. It
+demonstrates, in other words, that the same Principles which generate,
+and the same Laws which regulate, the Phenomena of the Universe as a
+whole, fulfil the same functions in connection with the Phenomena of
+every one of its parts. The Mathematical, Psychological, or any other
+specific Domain is, therefore, an expression or embodiment of the same
+System of Principles and Laws, with reference to both Generals and
+Details, which is otherwise exhibited in Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry,
+and elsewhere universally; just as the same Architectural Plan may be
+variously employed in constructions of different size, material, color,
+modes of ornamentation, etc.; and may be modified to suit the
+requirements of each individual construction. To every Elementary Form
+of _Thought_ there is, consequently, a corresponding and related Law of
+_Number_, of _Form_, of _Color_, of _Chemical_ Constitution, and of
+_Oral Sound_ or _Speech_. Every Basic Idea, to state it otherwise,
+pertaining to the Universe at large or to any of its Divisions, has its
+counterpart or double in every other Division. Or, to express it yet
+another way: the manifold, diverse, and unlike Appearances or Phenomena
+which the Universe presents to our understanding, are not _radically_
+and _essentially_ different; but are the same Typal Ideas or Thoughts of
+God or of Nature, arrayed in various garbs, and, hence, assuming varying
+presentations. The Numerical _Unit_, the Geometrical _Point_, the
+Written _Dot_, the _Globule_, the Chemical _Atom_, the Physical
+_Molecule_, the Physiological _Granule_, the _Yod_ or _Iota_, the least
+Element of Sound, are, for example, _Identical Types_, differently
+modified or clothed upon in accordance with the medium through which
+they are to be _phenomenally_ presented. It is with this _Echo_ or
+Repetitory Relationship, existing between all the Domains of the
+Universe, but more particularly as exhibited between the two Domains of
+_Ideas_ and _Language_, that we are at present concerned.
+
+It is sufficiently obvious that Analogy should be sought for first, in
+the _Generals_ of any department under examination, and, subsequently,
+through them, in the _Particulars_. In respect to the two Domains now
+under special consideration, this relation is between the Fundamental
+Elements of Thought, including those called by the Philosophers the
+Categories of the Understanding, and the Fundamental Elements of
+Language. In pointing out the Correspondence subsisting between the
+Elements of these two Domains, I shall use, partly by way of
+condensation, and partly by copious extracts, the Elaborate Expositions
+contained in the yet unpublished text books of Universology. And, as
+what follows relating to this subject will consist, almost wholly, of
+this material, I do not deem it essential to encumber the page with
+numerous and unnecessary quotation marks. It is advisable to caution the
+Reader, however, that as my present purpose is explanation and
+illustration only, and not formal demonstration, what is about to be
+given will be mostly in the nature of mere statement, unaccompanied by
+any other evidence of its truthfulness than may be found in the
+self-supporting reasonableness of the statements themselves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the basic and axiomatic proposition of Hegel's Philosophy, that
+the first discrimination of Thought and Being in any sphere is into two
+factors, a _Something_ and a _Nothing_;--that which constitutes the
+_main_ or _predominant_ element of the Conception or Creation, and that
+which we endeavor to exclude from contemplation or activity, but which,
+nevertheless, by virtue of the impossibility of _perfect_ or _absolute_
+abstraction, inevitably becomes a _minor_ or _subordinate_ element in
+the Idea or the Act which may be engaging the attention. _Something_ and
+_Nothing_ are also averred to be _equal_ factors in the Constitution of
+Thoughts or Things, because both are alike indispensable to the
+cognition of either; because, in other words, it is only by the presence
+of the _Nothing_ as a _background_ or _contrasting_ element, that the
+_Something_ has an independent or cognizable existence. If there were no
+blank space, for instance, there could be no Moon, relatively, or so far
+as our ability to perceive it is concerned. For the Moon is, in this
+illustration, a _Something_ which is visible to us, and of which we have
+a knowledge, only by reason of the fact that it is surrounded by and
+contrasted with that which is _not_ Moon, and which, in reference to the
+particular aspect under consideration is, therefore, a _Nothing_; though
+it in turn may be a _Something_ or main object of attention in some
+other view or conception, where some other factor shall be the Nothing.
+
+That this Relationship of Antithesis and Rank existed, as between the
+Constituents of some Thoughts or Things, was known from the earliest
+times, and gave rise to the terms _Positive_ and _Negative_, expressive
+of it. But Hegel was the first--of modern Philosophers, at least--to
+point out its necessarily _Universal_ and fundamental character, and to
+assume it as the starting-point in the development of all Philosophy and
+Science.
+
+So far as concerns the investigation of the Universe from the
+_Philosophical_ point of view (which is the less precise and definite
+aspect), Hegel is right in affirming that the first discrimination of
+all Thought and Being is that between _Something_ and _Nothing_. But he
+is wrong in regarding the starting-point or first differentiation of
+_Science_, as being identical with that of _Philosophy_. Science
+considers, primarily and predominantly, the more exact and rigorous
+relations of Phenomena; and the existence of an _exact_ and _definite_
+point of departure in Thought and Being, more fundamental, from the
+Scientific or rigorously precise point of view, than that of Hegel, is
+the initiatory proposition of UNIVERSOLOGY.
+
+A full explanation of the nature of this Starting-point is not, however,
+in place here. And as the discrimination into _Something_ and _Nothing_
+serves all the purposes of our present inquiry, a single word respecting
+the character of the Universological Point of Departure in question is
+all that it is now necessary to say concerning it.
+
+This Starting-point of Thought and Action has reference to the Ideas of
+_Oneness_ (Primitive Unity) and _Twoness_ (Plurality). These conceptions
+give rise to _two_ Primordial Principles, which form the basis of the
+development of UNIVERSOLOGY, and which are fundamental in every
+Department of the Universe and in the Universe as a whole, namely: _The
+Principle of Unism_ (from the Latin _unus_, _one_), the _Spirit_ of the
+Number _One_, the Principle of _Undifferentiated_, _Unanalyzed_,
+_Agglomerative_ Unity; and _The Principle of_ DUISM (from the Latin
+_duo_, _two_), the _Spirit_ of the Number _Two_, the Principle of
+_Differentiation_, _Analysis_, _Separation_, _Apartness_, or
+_Plurality_, typically embodied in _Two_, the first division of the
+Primitive Unity, and especially representative of the Principle of
+Disunity, the essence of all division or plurality. _One_, in the Domain
+of _Number_, and UNISM, in the Department of Primordial Principles,
+correspond, it must be added, with _The Absolute_ (the Undifferentiated
+and Unconditioned), as one of the Aspects of Being; while _Two_, in the
+Domain of _Number_, and _Duism_, among Primordial Principles, are allied
+with _The Relative_ (the Differentiated and Conditioned), of which
+latter Domain _Something_ and _Nothing_ are the two Prime Factors. The
+distinction between _One_ and _Two_, or their analogous Aspects of
+Being, _Absolute_ and _Relative_, is, therefore, prior to that between
+_Something_ and _Nothing_, because _Something_ and _Nothing_ are two
+terms of _The Relative_ (_Two_), which has first to be itself
+discriminated from _The Absolute_ (_One_) before it can be sub-divided
+into these two factors.
+
+While the nature of this discrimination into _Something_ and _Nothing_
+may be sufficiently intelligible to the student of Metaphysics, it may
+not be so to the Reader unaccustomed to Philosophical Speculation. For
+the purpose, therefore, of rendering it somewhat clearer, I will point
+out the manner in which it exhibits itself in respect to the
+Constitution of the External World and elsewise.
+
+The Totality of all material objects and substances is the _Positive_
+Material Universe. This is contained in _Space_, which is the _Negative_
+Material Universe. Compoundly the two, _Matter_ and _Space_, are the
+whole Material Universe, as to the Parts or Constituent Factors of which
+it consists.
+
+Theoretically, and in one, and by no means an unimportant sense, the
+_Zero_-Element or _Nothing_-side of the Universe or of a given
+Department of Being, is one whole half, or an equal hemisphere of the
+Totality of Being. Thus, for example, _Zero_ (0) in the usage of the
+Arabic Numbers, while it is represented in an obscure way merely by a
+single figure below the nine digits, yet stands over, in a sense,
+against all the digits, and all their possible combinations, as equal to
+them all in importance. For it is by means of this _Zero_ (0) that the
+One (1) for instance, becomes 10, 100, 1000, etc.; and that all the
+_Positive_ Numbers acquire their relative values, according to the
+places or positions in space which they occupy.
+
+In another sense, however, the Negative Ground of Being, in the Universe
+at large, or in any given Domain, quickly sinks out of view, and
+Positive Being becomes the whole of what is commonly regarded. It is in
+this sense that, ordinarily, in speaking of The Digits of Number, the
+_Zero_ is left out of the count.
+
+In the same manner, when speaking or thinking of the Material Universe,
+while the notion of _Space_ is ever present, and is, in the absolute
+sense, an equal half of the whole conception, still it is Matter, the
+total congeries of objects and substances in Space, of which we mainly
+think; the Space, as such, being understood and implied, but
+subordinated as a mere _negative_ adjunct of the _positive_ idea.
+
+In strictness, _Matter_ and _Space_ are so mutually dependent on each
+other, that either without the other is an impossible conception. The
+notion of Space permeates that of Matter; passing through it, so to
+speak, as well as surrounding it; so that it needs no proof that Matter
+cannot be conceived of as existing without Space. But, on the other
+hand, Space is only the negation of Matter; the shadow, as it were, cast
+by Matter; and, so, dependent on Matter for the very origin of the idea
+in the mind.
+
+If _Space_, therefore, be the analogue of _Nothing_; _Matter_, wholly
+apart from Space, is only a _theoretical_ Something, really and actually
+as much a Nothing as Space itself, when abstractly considered in its
+equally impossible separation from Matter. But Matter, completely
+separated from Space, is the exact external analogue of the _Something_
+opposed to the _Nothing_ of abstract Metaphysical Thinking. Here, then,
+is a lucid exposition, by virtue of these analogies, of the famous
+Metaphysical Axiom of Hegel, which, at its announcement, threw all
+Europe into amazement:
+
+  _Something_ = (_equal to_) _Nothing_.
+
+It is the logic of this statement that all _Reality_ or Relative Being
+is a product of two factors, each of which is a _Nothing_. The
+strangeness of this proposition will disappear when it is recognized
+that these two Nothings are mere aspects or sides of presentation of the
+Product, which is itself the only Reality. In respect to the _Real
+Being_, those two sides are _Nothings_. But, as appearances or ideal
+views of the Reality under the process of analytical abstraction in the
+mind, they are so far _Somethings_ as to receive names and to be treated
+of and considered as _if_ they were _Realities_. _Reality_ in the
+_Absolute_ aspect, the aspect of _Undifferentiated Unity_, (Unismal),
+contains these two factors interblended and undiscriminated. In the
+_Relative_ aspect, that of _Duality_, (Duismal), it is the compound of
+these two factors separated and distinguished. Finally, in the
+_Integral_ aspect of _Compound Unity_ (Trinismal), it consists of the
+_Unismal_ and the _Duismal_ aspects contrasted--the only _real_ state,
+or possible condition of actual existence. _And this is the Type of all
+Reality or Real Existence in every department of Being in the Universe._
+
+But practically and ordinarily, these strictly analytical views of the
+question of existence are abandoned. Reality, compounded, as we have
+seen that it is when viewed in this way, of a Positive and a Negative
+Factor, is assumed as itself a Simple Element and set over against the
+grand residuum of Negation in the Universe of Being. This is what Kant,
+less analytical than Hegel, has done, when, in distributing the
+Categories of Thought, he has contrasted REALITY with NEGATION.
+
+This is, as if, in respect to the External Material World, we were to
+divide Matter--the Planets, for example, first assigning to them the
+portions of Space which they bodily and respectively fill as if it were
+a part of themselves--from the remaining ocean or grand residuum of
+Space which surrounds them and in which they float. This residuum of
+Space would then be spoken of as _Space_, and the Planetary Bodies,
+_along with and including the spaces which they fill_, would be spoken
+of as _Matter_. This is a kind of division, less analytical, but more
+convenient, obvious, and practical, than the other which would attempt
+to separate the whole of Space from the Matter within Space. It is in
+this more practical manner that we _ordinarily_ think of the division of
+the Heavens into the Domains of _Matter_ and _Space_.
+
+Between _Reality_, then, including a subordinate portion of Space--the
+content and volume of the Planet--and the grand ocean of Space, outlying
+and surrounding the Planet, there is _Limitation_, the outline of the
+Planet, the _Limit_ or dividing surface between the space within it and
+the space without.
+
+It is this Congeries of the Aspects of Being which Kant denominates
+QUALITY, as a name of a Group of the Categories of the Understanding;
+and which he divides into
+
+  1. REALITY.
+  2. NEGATION.
+  3. LIMITATION.
+
+He then treats REALITY as synonymous with the _Affirmative_ (Positive),
+and NEGATION as synonymous with the _Negative_; although, as we have
+seen, this Affirmative is not strictly equivalent to the _Something_ of
+Hegel, nor this Negative to his _Nothing_. For _Reality_ we may, in a
+general sense, put _Substance_, and for _Limitation_ we may put _Form_,
+Omitting Negation which repeats the _Nothing_, as Reality repeats the
+_Something_, it may now be said that the next Grand Division of the
+Elements of Universal Being (after that into Something and Nothing) is
+into
+
+  1. SUBSTANCE. )
+                            = 3. EXISTENCE.
+  2. FORM.      )
+
+That is to say: _The Relative_ (The Domain of Cognizable Being) is first
+made known to us through the _differentiation_ and _discrimination_ of
+the two Factors _Something_ and _Nothing_ which lie _undifferentiated_
+and _indistinguishable_ in _The Absolute_ (The Primitive Ground of
+Being). _The Relative_ then subdivides into 1. _Substance_ (Reality),
+and, 2. _Form_ (Limitation), which reunite to constitute that actualized
+Being which we denominate _Existence_. Or, tabulated, thus:
+
+  THE ABSOLUTE (THE PRIMITIVE
+  GROUND OF BEING)
+  CONTAINS UNDIFFERENTIATED AND INDISTINGUISHABLE
+  THE TWO FACTORS
+  SOMETHING and NOTHING
+  WHICH CONSTITUTE THE FIRST TERMS
+  AND DISCRIMINATIONS OF
+  THE RELATIVE (THE DOMAIN OF
+  COGNIZABLE BEING);
+  WHICH ITSELF DIVIDES INTO
+  SUBSTANCE (REALITY) and FORM
+  (LIMITATION),
+  THE PRIME CONSTITUENTS OF
+  EXISTENCE.
+
+To comprehend the vast importance of these discriminations, it is
+necessary to understand that precisely those Principles of Distribution
+which are applicable to the Universe at large are found to be applicable
+to every minor sphere or domain of the Universe; in the same manner as
+the same Geometrical Laws which prevail in the largest circle prevail
+equally in the smallest. It is the prevalence of _Identical Principles_
+in _diverse spheres_ which is the source of that Universal Analogy
+throughout _all_ spheres that lies at the basis of UNIVERSOLOGY, and
+gives the possibility of such a Science. The nature of this Analogy, as
+well as the value of the discriminations themselves, will be more
+clearly seen by glancing at corresponding discriminations in other
+spheres.
+
+In the Constitution of the External World, _Something_ is represented,
+as we have seen, by the solid and tangible substance which we call
+_Matter_, and _Nothing_ by the Expanse of Space.
+
+In the Science of Acoustics, _Sound_, the pure _Phonos_, is the
+_Something_, the _Reality_, as it is denominated by Kant, the _Positive_
+Factor of Speech. _Silence_ is the relative _Nothing_, the Negation, so
+called by Kant, the _Negative_ Factor of Speech. The Silences, or
+Intervals of Rest which intervene between Sounds (and also between
+Syllables, Words, Sentences, and still larger divisions of Speech), are
+only so many successive reappearances of this _negative_ element.
+Silence, the Nothing of Sound, is, in fact, in the most radical aspect
+of the subject, one entire half or hemisphere or equal Factor of the
+whole of Speech or Music. Josiah Warren, the author of a work entitled
+'Music as an Exact Science,' is the only writer I have noticed who has
+had the discrimination _distinctively_ to recognize Silence as one of
+the Elements of the Musical Structure.
+
+_Impliedly_ it is, however, always so recognized. The Silences
+intervening between tones _tunewise_, or in respect to altitude, are, in
+Musical Nomenclature, denominated _Intervals_. _Timewise_ Silences, or
+those which intervene between Tones rhythmically considered, are called
+_Rests_. The Intervals of Silence between Syllables and Words, in Oral
+Speech, are represented in the printed book by what the Printer calls
+_Spaces_, which are _blank_ or _negative_ Types interposed between the
+positive Types expressive of Sounds. This term _Space_ or _Spaces_
+carries us to the analogous Total Space or Blank Space and intervening
+reaches of Space between the Planets, Orbs or Material Worlds, the
+former the corresponding _Nothing_ of the total Material Universe of
+which these worlds are the _Something_; as exhibited in the
+demonstrations of UNIVERSOLOGY.
+
+In the Domain of Optics, covering the Phenomena of Light, Shade and
+Color, _Light_ is the _Positive_ Factor or _Something_, and _Darkness_
+the _Negative_ Factor or _Nothing_. _Light_ is, therefore, the analogue
+of _Sound_, and _Darkness_ the analogue of _Silence_. That is to say,
+each of these two, Silence and Darkness, denote the absence, the lack,
+the want or the negation of the opposite and _Positive_ Element or
+Factor.
+
+So in Thermotics, the Science of Heat, _Heat_ itself is the
+_Positismus_ or _Something_ of the Domain; and _Cold_ the _Negatismus_
+or Correlative _Nothing_. _Heat_ is, consequently, the analogue of
+_Sound_ and _Light_; while _Cold_ is the analogue of _Silence_ and
+_Darkness_.
+
+In respect to the Domain of Mind, _Positive Mental Experience_
+(Feelings, Thoughts, and Volitions, including self-consciousness) are
+the _Positive_ Factor, the _Something_ of Mentality. _Inexperience_, the
+lack of mental exercitation, hence _Ignorance_, is the _Negative_
+Factor, or _Nothing_. The Correspondential Relationship or Analogy
+existing between this Domain of the Universe and others already
+mentioned is testified to in a remarkable manner by our use of Language.
+We denominate the want of Feeling _Cold_ or _Frigidity_--in respect to
+the Mind or the individual character. The absence of Thought and
+Knowledge, or, in other words, Intellectual Barrenness, is called
+_Darkness_ or _Obscurity_ of the Mind. While the lack of Will or Purpose
+in the Mind is said to be the absence of _Tension_ or _Strain_ (the
+great Musical term); and the Stillness or quiet hence resulting may be
+appropriately designated as the _Silence_ of the Mind; Musical Silences
+being, as pointed out above, technically termed Rests.
+
+With this superficial exhibition of the most radical aspect of the _Echo
+of Idea_ or _Repetition of Type_ which subsists between all the
+departments of the Universe, I pass to the more specific consideration
+of this Analogy as concerning the Domain of Thought and the Domain of
+Language.
+
+Setting aside from our present consideration _Silence_, the _Negative_
+factor or _Negatismus_ of Language, and fixing our attention upon
+_Sound_, the Positive factor or _Positismus_ of Language, we discover it
+to be composed of two constituents, _Vowels_ and _Consonants_.
+
+The _Vowel_ is the _Substance_, the Reality of Language, and the
+_Consonant_ is the _Form_, the Limitation.
+
+By _Vowel_ sound is meant the free or unobstructed, and as such
+unlimited flow of the vocalized or sounding breath. Vowels are defined
+in the simplest way as those sounds which are uttered with the month
+open; as _a_ (ah) in F_a_ther, _o_ in r_o_ll, etc.
+
+Consonants are, on the contrary, those sounds which are produced by the
+crack of commencing or by obstructing, breaking, or cutting off the
+sounding breath, by completely or partially closing the organs of
+speech; as, for instance, by closing the lips, as when we pronounce
+_p_ie, _b_y, _m_y, etc.; or by pressing the point of the tongue against
+the gums and teeth, as when we say t_ie_, d_ie_, etc.; or by lifting the
+body of the tongue against the hard palate or roof of the mouth, as when
+we give the _k_ or hard _g_ sound, as in rac_k_, ra_g_, or in any other
+similar way.
+
+Consonants are, therefore, the breaks or _limitations_ upon the
+otherwise unbroken and continuous vocality, voice, or vocalized breath.
+In other words, as already said, _Vowel_-Sound is the Elemental
+_Substance_, and _Consonant_-Sound the Elemental _Form_ of Language, or
+Speech. (By Vowels and Consonants are here meant, the Reader should
+closely observe, Vowel-_Sounds_ and Consonant-_Sounds_, as produced by
+the _Organs_ of _Speech_, and as they address themselves to the _Ear_,
+distinguished and wholly apart from the _letters_ or combinations of
+letters by which they are diversely represented to the _Eye_ in
+different languages.)
+
+By a valid but somewhat remote analogy, the _Vowel_-Sounds of Language
+may be regarded collectively as the _Flesh_, and the _Consonant_-Sounds
+as the _Bone_ or _Skeleton_ of the Lingual Structure. Flesh is an
+_Analogue_ or Correspondential Equivalent of Substance. Bone or
+Skeleton, which gives _outline_ or _shape_ to the otherwise soft,
+collapsing, and lumpy flesh-mass of the Human or Animal Body, is an
+_Analogue_ of Correspondential Equivalent of Limitation or Form; as the
+framework of a house is the shaping or form-giving factor or agent of
+the entire structure.
+
+_Vowel_-Sounds are soft, fluent, changeful, and evanescent. One passes
+easily into another by slight deviations of pronunciation, resulting
+from trivial differences in National and Individual condition and
+culture; like the Flesh of the animal, which readily decays from the
+Bony Skeleton, while the last remains preserved for ages as a fossil.
+The Vowel-Sounds so readily lose their identity, that they are of slight
+importance to the Etymologist or Comparative Philologist, who is, in
+fact, dealing in the _Paleontology_ of Language.
+
+The _Consonants_ are, on the contrary, the _Fossils_ of Speech; bony and
+permanent representatives of Framework, of _Limitation_, of Form.
+Consonant-Sounds are also sometimes denominated _Articulations_. This
+word means _joinings_ or _jointings_. It is from the Latin _articulus_,
+a JOINT, and is instinctually applied to the Consonant-Sounds in
+accordance with their analogy with the _Skeleton_ of the Human or Animal
+System.
+
+By an easy and habitual slide in the meaning of Words, a term like
+_Joint_ is sometimes used to denote the _break_ or _opening_ between
+parts, and sometimes to denote one of the parts intervening between such
+breaks; as when we speak of a _joint_ of meat, meaning thereby what a
+Botanist would signify by the term _Internode_, the stretch or reach or
+shaft of bone extending from one joint (break) to another, with the meat
+attached to it.
+
+Consonants have, in like manner, a double aspect as Articulations or
+_Joints_. In a rigorous and abstract sense, the Consonant has no sound
+of its own. It is simply a break or interruption of Sound.
+Etymologically, it is from the Latin _con_, WITH, and _sonans_,
+SOUNDING; as if it were a mere accessory to a (vowel) Sound; the Vowels
+being, in that sense, the only sounds. In this sense, the Consonants are
+analogous with the mere cracks or opening _joints_, which intervene
+between the bones of the Skeleton. In other words, they are no sounds,
+but mere nothings; the analogy, in that case, of _Abstract_ Limitation.
+
+Practically, on the contrary, the Consonant takes to itself such a
+portion of the vocalized or sounding breath which it serves primarily to
+limit, that it becomes not merely a sound ranking with the Vowel; but
+the more prominent and abiding sound of the two. It is in this latter
+sense, that it is the Analogue of the Bone.
+
+In Phonography, as in Hebrew and some other Languages, the letters
+representing the Consonant-Sounds only are written or printed; the
+Vowel-Sounds being either represented by mere points added to the
+Consonant characters, or left wholly unrepresented, to be supplied by
+the intelligence of the Reader. The written words so constructed,
+represent the real words with about the degree of accuracy with which a
+skeleton represents the living man; so that the meaning can be readily
+gathered by the practised reader, by the aid of the context. In
+Phonography, the Consonant-Sounds, which are simple straight or curved
+lines, are joined together at their ends, forming an outline shape,
+somewhat like a single script (written) letter of our ordinary writing.
+These outline words are then instinctually and technically called
+_Skeleton-words_, from the natural perception of a genuine Scientific
+Analogy.
+
+Consonants constitute, then, what may be denominated the _Limitismus_
+(Limiting Domain) of Language. The Limit is primarily represented by the
+Line (a line, any line); then by the Line embodying Substance as _seam_,
+_ridge_, _bar_, _beam_, _shaft_, _or bone_; and, finally, by a System of
+Lines, Shafts or Bones which may then be jointed or limited in turn
+among themselves, forming a concatenation of Lines, Bars or Shafts, the
+framework of a machine or house or other edifice, or the ideal columnar
+and orbital structure of the Universe itself. All these conceptions or
+creations belong to the practical Limitismus, the Form Aspect or
+Framework of Being in Universals and in Particulars in every Sphere and
+Department of the Universe.
+
+The _Limitismus_ of Being so defined then stands over against or
+contrasted with the _Substancismus_ (Substance-Domain) of Being which
+embraces the Substances, Materials or Stuffs of creation of whatsoever
+name that infill the interstices of the Framework or are laid upon it,
+and constitute the richness and fulness and plumpness of the Structure,
+as the Flesh does of the Body.
+
+The wholeness or _Integrality_ of the structure then consists of the
+composity of these Two (Limitismus and Substancismus), as the wholeness
+of the Body consists of the Flesh and the Bone. The Consonants being the
+Limitismus, and the Vowels the Substancismus of Language; the Two united
+and coordinated comprise the Trinismal Integrality or Integralismus of
+Speech.
+
+The Vowels denote, then, _Reality_, as distinguished from _Limitation_,
+or, what is nearly the same thing, _Substance_, as distinguished from
+_Form_.
+
+There are in all _Seven_ (7); or if we include one somewhat more obscure
+than the rest, a kind of semi-tone, there are _Eight_ (8) full-toned,
+perfectly distinct and primary Vowel-Sounds, which constitute the
+Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Alphabet. Their number and
+nature is governed by the Mechanical Law of their organic production in
+the mouth. And the number can only be increased by interposing minor
+shades of sound, as we produce minor shades of color by blending the
+Seven (7) Prismatic Colors. The new Sound will then belong, in
+predominance and as a mere variety, to one of these Seven (7) Primary
+Sounds.
+
+These Seven (7) Sounds constitute the Leading Vowel-System of all
+Languages; with certain irregularities of omission in the Vowel-System
+of some Languages.
+
+By the addition of Five (5) equally leading _Diphthongs_ (or Double
+Vowels) the number of leading Vowel representations is carried up to
+Twelve (12) or Thirteen (13)--which may then be regarded as the
+Completed Fundamental Vowel Scale of the Universal Lingual Alphabet.
+
+_There are, in like manner, Seven (7)--or Eight (8)--Leading Realities
+of the Universe_, AND OF EVERY MINOR SPHERE OR DOMAIN OF BEING IN THE
+UNIVERSE, _which correspond with, echo or repeat, and are therefore the
+Scientific Analogues of, these Seven (7) Leading Vowel-Sounds, as they
+occur among the Elements of Speech_.
+
+In representing the Vowel-Sounds, it is better, for numerous reasons, to
+use the letters with their general _European_ Values, than it is to
+conform to their altered or corrupted _English_ Values. For instance,
+the Vowel I (i) is pronounced in nearly every language of Europe, and in
+all those languages which the Missionaries have reduced to writing, as
+we pronounce _e_ or _ee_, or as _i_ in mach_i_ne, or p_i_que; E (e) is
+pronounced as we enunciate _a_ in paper; and A is reserved for the full
+Italian sound of _a_ (_ah_), as in father; _U_ is pronounced like _oo_,
+as in German, Spanish, Italian and many other languages.
+
+The Seven (7) Vowels in question are then as follows:
+
+  1. I, i (_ee_ in f_ee_l).
+  2. E, e (_a_ in m_a_te).
+  3. A, a (_a_ in f_a_-ther).
+  4. _o_, _o_ (_aw_ in _aw_ful).
+  5. _u_, _u_ (_u_ in c_u_rd).
+  6. O, o (_o_ in n_o_-ble).
+  7. U, u (_oo_ in f_oo_l).
+
+These sounds are produced in the middle, at the back, and at the front
+of the mouth respectively. These localities, and something of the nature
+of the sounds themselves, as _slender_ or _full_, will be plainly
+illustrated by the annexed figure:
+
+  3. Front-   1. Middle-     2. Back-
+     Mouth       Mouth          Mouth
+
+
+      ou           i         e (^a) a; _o_ _u_
+
+The following description of the organic formation or production of
+these sounds now becomes important.
+
+The Vowel-Sound I (ee) is the most slender and condensed of the
+Vowel-Scale. It is produced at the middle or central part of the mouth,
+by forcing a slight, closely-squeezed current of Sounding Breath,
+through a small, smooth channel or opening made by forming _a gutter or
+scoop of the flattened point of the tongue_; while, at the same time,
+the tongue is applied at the edges to the teeth and gums. This sound
+has, therefore, an actual _form_ resembling that of a thread or line; or
+still better, like that of a wire drawn through one of the iron openings
+by means of which wire is manufactured. It resembles also a slight,
+smooth, roundish stream of fluid escaping through a tube or trough.
+
+This sound has relation, therefore, in the first place, to _Centrality_
+or CENTRE; and then to LENGTH (or Line), which is the First Dimension of
+Extension. The I-sound continued or prolonged gives the idea of Length.
+But broken into Least Units of the same quality of Sound, we have
+individualized Vowel-Sounds of this quality, each one of which is a new
+_Centre_; like the successive _Points_ of which a _Line_ is composed.
+
+An individual sound, I, has relation, therefore, to _Centre_ and to
+_Point_ generally. As such it stands representatively for the _Soul_ or
+_Identity_ or _Central Individuality of Being_--for that which gives to
+anything its distinctive character, as existing in the _Point_ or the
+_Unit_, or the _Atom_, or in any Individual Object or Thing from the
+Atom up to a World and to the Universe as a whole. _Identity_ is,
+perhaps, the best single term furnished by our Language to signify this
+basic idea. _Individuality_ approximates the meaning. It is the
+_pivotal_ notion of Being itself, and has relation, therefore, to
+Ontology, the Science of Abstract Being. _Essence_ and _Essential Being_
+are terms which may also be used in defining it. The Reader should
+understand, however, that with reference to this Sound, as to those to
+be hereafter considered, there is no term or terms in any Language which
+will indicate their meaning _exactly_. The analysis of Ideas upon which
+UNIVERSOLOGY is based is more fundamental than any which has preceded
+it. Its Primary Conceptions are, therefore, broader and more inclusive
+than any former ones which existing terms are employed to denote. In
+explaining the meaning of these First Elements of Sound, then, as
+related to the First Elements of Thought, all that is now attempted is
+to convey as clear a notion of this meaning as is possible with our
+present terminology, without any expectation that the _precise_ meaning
+intended will be at once or entirely apprehended.
+
+The sound E (_a_ in m_a_te) is likewise a slender, abstract-like,
+middle-mouth sound; but differs from I in the fact that it is produced
+by _flattening_ the opening for the Sounding Breath instead of retaining
+it in a roundish position. The angles of the mouth are drawn asunder, as
+if pointing outward to the sides of the head, and the sound is, as it
+were, _elongated in the crosswise direction_, as if a stick or a quill
+were held in the teeth, the extremities extending outward to the sides.
+A line, in this direction, is the measurer of BREADTH, which is the
+Second Dimension of Extension, crossing the Length-line represented by I
+at right angles. _Side-wise-ness_ is synonymous with RELATION, as one of
+the Sub-divisions of Reality, or, in other words, of the Realities of
+Being. _Re-lation_ is, etymologically, from the Latin _re_, BACK or
+REFLECTED, and _latus_, SIDE; that which mutually and reciprocally
+re-sides the _Centre_, or furnishes it with sides or _wings_. The
+Vowel-Sound E (_a_, in m_a_te) is, therefore, the Analogue or
+Corresponding Representative or Equivalent in the Domain of Sound of
+that _Fundamental Conception_ which, in respect to Thought, is
+denominated _Relation_, in respect to Position _Collaterality_ or
+_Sideness_, and in respect to Dimension _Breadth_ or _Width_.
+
+The Sound A (_a_ in f_a_ther) is made farther back in the mouth, with
+the mouth stretched quite open, and is the richest and most harmonious
+of the Vowel Sounds--the Queen of the Vowels. It is the Italian A, the
+sound most allied with Music and Euphony, and yet a sound which is
+greatly lacking in the English Language.
+
+The English Reader must guard himself from confounding the Vowel-Sound
+of which we are here speaking, with the Consonant R, the alphabetical
+name of which is by a lax habit of pronunciation made to be nearly
+identical with this Vowel-Sound; while for this beautiful and brilliant
+and leading Vowel in the Alphabet of Nature we have no distinct letter
+in English, and reckon it merely as one of the values or powers of the
+Letter A, to which we ordinarily give the value of E (_a_ in m_a_te,
+_ai_ in p_ai_n).
+
+This Vowel A (_ah_, _a_ in f_a_ther) is made with the mouth so open that
+the form of its production suggests the insertion of a stick or other
+elongated object in a perpendicular direction to retain the jaws in
+their position; a practice said sometimes to be resorted to by the
+Italian Music Teacher, in order to correct the bad habit of talking
+through the teeth, common among his English pupils.
+
+This height and depth involved in the Sound of the Vowel A (ah) relates
+it to THICKNESS, the Third Dimension of Extension; as the Sound I is
+related to _Length_, the First of these Dimensions, and the Sound E to
+_Breadth_, the Second of them.
+
+_Thickness_ is again related to _richness_ and _sweetness_, to _fulness_
+and _fatness_, as of the good condition of an Animal in flesh, or of
+rich and productive soils. And these ideas are again related to _wealth_
+or to _riches_ generally; and, hence, again to SUBSTANCE. The objects of
+wealth are called _goods_, and a wealthy man is said to be a '_man of
+substance_.' A (ah) is the representative or pivotal Vowel; that one
+which embodies most completely the _Vowel Idea_. Its inherent meaning is
+especially, therefore, that of SUBSTANCE or REALITY, which, is, in a
+more general way, as we have seen, the meaning of all the Vowels. The
+most real, tangible, sensible substance from an ordinary point of view
+being. Matter, this Vowel-Sound allies itself also with _Matter_ or
+_Materiality_ as contrasted with _Spiritual_ Substance.
+
+There is, it must now be observed, a flattened variety of A (ah), which
+will here be represented by the same letter italicized, thus, _A_, _a_,
+which is the so-called flat sound of A (ah) as when heard prolonged in
+m_a_re, pe_a_r, etc., or when stopped, in m_a_n, m_a_t, etc. This sound
+is intermediate in position between E and A (ah). That is to say, it is
+produced farther back in the mouth and with the mouth somewhat more open
+than when we say E, and not so far back as when we say A (ah); and with
+the mouth less open. As contrasted with the A (ah), it is a thin, flat,
+and slightly unsatisfactory and disagreeable sound, analogically related
+to the natural semitone _fa_ of the Diatonic Scale of Musical Tones.
+This Sound signifies accordingly, THINNESS, ATTENUATED MATTER, the Ghost
+or Spirit of Nature, related to Odic Force, Magnetisms, Electricity,
+etc.; still not, however, Spirit in the sense of Mind, or in the
+Religio-Spiritual sense of the word. This is the exceptional or bastard
+Vowel-Sound which has but an imperfect or half claim to be inserted in
+the Leading Vowel Scale. When inserted, its natural position is between
+the E and the A (ah), although for certain reasons it sometimes changes
+position with the A (ah), following instead of preceding it.
+
+The next two Vowel-Sounds, _o_ (_aw_ in _aw_ful), and _u_ (_u_ in
+c_u_rd), are somewhat like the _a_ (_a_ in m_a_re), exceptional or
+bastard Sounds. They are unheard in many Languages, and unrecognized as
+distinct sounds in many Languages where they are, in fact, heard. Very
+few Languages have distinct Letter-Signs for them. In using the Roman
+Alphabet, I am compelled to adopt a contrivance to represent them; which
+is, as in the case of the _a_, to print them in italic types, for which,
+when the remainder of the word is in italic, small capitals are
+substituted, thus: _O_ful (awful); _U_rgent; or, in case the whole word
+is intended to be italicized, for the sake of emphasis, O_ful_,
+U_rgent_. In script or handwriting, the italic Letter is marked by
+underscoring a single line, and the small capital by underscoring two
+lines.
+
+_O_ (aw) is the fullest of the Vowel-Sounds. It is made with the mouth
+still farther open than when we say A (ah), and somewhat farther back;
+or, rather, with the cavity enlarged in all directions, and especially
+deepened. The mouth is stretched in all ways to its utmost capacity,
+giving a hollow, vacant effect to the voice, instead of the rich, mellow
+and substantial sound of the A (ah). The Sound so produced is,
+nevertheless, on the one hand, a broader quality of the A (ah), and
+there is a strong tendency on the part of the A (ah) to degenerate into
+it, as when the uneducated German, says _Yaw_ for _Ja_ (yah). On the
+other hand, this sound has something of the quality of O. It is,
+therefore, intermediate in quality between A (ah) and O. In respect to
+meaning, it is the Type, Analogue, Equivalent, or Representative of
+Volume or SPACE, whether filled or unfilled by Substance. That is to
+say, it is the Analogue of Space, not in the sense in which we formerly
+regarded Space as the _negation_ of Matter; but in the sense of
+_Infinite Dimensionality_, or of Dimensionality in all directions, as a
+vague generalization from the three special dimensions _Length_,
+_Breadth_, and _Thickness_. It is, therefore, round or ball-like, and
+huge, and, in respect to the nature of the tone, vague and vacant.
+
+Space _as mere nothing_ has no Letter-Sign in the Alphabet; but is
+represented by the blank types or spaces used by the printer to separate
+his syllables and words, as shown heretofore. Space _as a Department of
+Reality_, as one of the _Realities_ of the Universe, a bastard or
+semi-Reality it is true, but nevertheless, belonging to that Domain, is
+denoted by the Vowel-Sound _o_ (aw).
+
+The Sound _u_ (uh, _u_ in c_u_rd), the fifth of the Scale, is called
+among Phoneticians, the _Natural_ Vowel. It is the simple, unmodulated
+or unformed vocal breath permitted to flow forth from the throat or
+larynx with no effort to produce any specific sound. It is the mere
+grunt, a little prolonged; the unwrought material out of which the other
+and more perfect Vowel Sounds are made by modulation, or, in other
+words, by the shapings and strains put upon the machinery of utterance.
+The Hebrew _scheva_, the French _eu_, and _e_ mute, are varieties of
+this easily-flowing, unmodulated, unstable, unsatisfactory sound. Like
+the _o_ (aw), this sound _u_ (uh) has a vacant, unfinished, and
+inorganic character as a sound, while yet, from its great fluency, its
+frequent occurrence tends, more than that of any other sound, to give to
+Language that conversational fluency, rapidity and ease which are
+especially characteristic of the French Tongue. From this same easy
+laxity of its nature all the other Vowel Sounds tend, in English
+particularly, when they are not accented, to fall back into this Natural
+Vowel; as in the following instances: Rom_a_n, brok_e_n, m_i_rth,
+mart_y_r, Bost_o_n, c_u_rd, etc.; words which we pronounce nearly
+Rom_u_n, brok_u_n, m_u_rth, mart_u_r, Bost_u_n, c_u_rd, etc.
+
+This Sound, as to inherent meaning, is, by its alliance with the idea of
+flux, flow and continuity, the Type, Analogue, Equivalent or
+Representative in the Domain of Oral Sound of that _Fundamental
+Conception_ which, in respect to Idea, we denominate TIME; and of
+Stream-like or _Currental_ Being of all kinds.
+
+_Space_, denoted by _o_ (aw), has relation to the Air as an atmosphere,
+and to the Ocean of Ether in filling the Great Spheral Dome of Empyrean
+or Firmament. The Vowel-Sound _u_ (uh) has a similar relation to
+Fluidity or Liquidity, and, hence, to Water as a typical fluid, to the
+Ocean Flux or Tide, to the Flowing Stream, etc. This Time-like idea is
+uni-dimensional or elongate in a _general_ or _fluctuating_ sense; not
+_specifically_ like I. It is in view of this characteristic, that it is
+broadly and primarily contrasted with the Spacic significance of _o_
+(aw), which is omnidimensional.
+
+The two remaining Vowel-Sounds, the O and U (oo), repeat the _o_ (aw)
+and _u_ (uh), in a sense, but in a new and more refined stage or degree
+of development. The sound O is made at the front mouth--the locality the
+most openly in sight of any at which Sound is produced--by rounding the
+lips into an irregularly-circular, face-like, or disk-like presentation.
+The O Sound so produced denotes Presence, as of an object by virtue of
+its reflection of Light; and, hence, LIGHT, _Clearness_, _Purity_,
+_Reflection_.
+
+The U (_oo_ in f_oo_l) is an obscured or impure pronunciation of the O.
+The lips are protruded as if to say O; but not being sufficiently so for
+the production of the pure Sound, the Sound actually given is mixed, or
+made turbid or thick. The U-Sound denotes accordingly _Retiracy_,
+_Obscurity_, _Shade_, _Turbidity_, _Mixedness_, or _Impurity_, as of
+Colors in a dim light, or as of Materials in a slime or plasma, etc.
+
+Metaphysically, O denotes PURE THEORY, the _Abstract_; and U (oo)
+signifies the ACTUAL or PRACTICAL, the Tempic, the Concrete (the
+Temporal or Profane), which is always mixed with contingency.
+
+Other Vowel-Sounds, shades more or less distinct of some one of these
+Leading Sounds, are interspersed by nature between these _diatonic_
+Sounds, like the half tones and quarter tones in Music. Two of these
+French _eu_ and _e muet_ modifications of _u_ (uh) have been mentioned.
+_Eu_ is modulated at the lips, and _e muet_ at the middle mouth, but
+both have the general character of _u_ (uh). The French U is a
+modification of the U (oo), of the Scale just given, but made finer, and
+approximating I (ee). The Italian O is a modification of _o_ (aw). These
+four are the Leading Semi-tone Sounds; which along with _a_ carry the
+Scale from Seven (7) diatonic up to twelve (12) chromatic. As they will
+be passed over for the present with this mere mention, the points of the
+Scale at which they intervene will not be now considered.
+
+Discarding these minor shades of Sounds, the Leading Scale of
+Vowel-Sounds is augmented from Seven (7) or Eight (8) to Twelve (12) or
+Thirteen (13), by the addition of the following five (5) Diphthongs or
+Double Vowels. In respect to the _quality_ of Sound, they are pronounced
+just as the Vowels of which they are composed would be if separated and
+succeeding each other. To make the Diphthong _long_, the two Sounds are
+kept quite distinct. To make it _short_, they are closely blended; as,
+AU (ah-oo), long; A[)U] (ahoo), short. With no diacretical mark they are
+pronounced _ad libidum_, or neither very long nor short.
+
+The following are the five (5) Diphthongs which complete the Vowel
+Scale:
+
+The IU is composed of the first Vowel I (ee) and the last U (oo). The
+I-sound, so placed before another Vowel-Sound, tends readily to be
+converted into or more properly to prefix to itself the weak
+Consonant-Sound represented in English by Y (in German and Italian by
+J); thus YIU for IU. The whole of the three Sounds so involved (a real
+Triphthong) are represented by the English U long--which is never a
+_simple_ Vowel-Sound--as in _union_, pronounced _yioonyun_.
+
+This Diphthong IU (or yiu) denotes _Conjunction_, _Conjuncture_, _Event_
+(the two ends meeting); and also _Coupling_ or _Unition_; a central
+point between extremes.
+
+The next and the most important of the Diphthongs (except AU) is AI,
+compounded of the third (A) and the first (I) of the simple
+Vowel-Sounds. It is pronounced very nearly like the English long I, as
+in p_i_ne, f_i_ne, etc., which is not a _simple_ Vowel; but is
+compounded of the two simple Vowels above mentioned (A and I, ahee) in a
+very close union with each other; or, as it were, squeezed into each
+other. The Tikiwa (Tee-kee-wah) combination (this is the name of the
+Scientific Universal Language), AI, is not ordinarily quite so close,
+and when pronounced _long_, is quite open, so that each Vowel is
+distinctly heard (ah-ee).
+
+This Diphthong AI may be regarded as embracing and epitomizing the lower
+or ground wing or half of the Simple Vowel-Scale (I E _a_ A); its
+meaning is, therefore, that of BASIC or SUBSTANTIAL REALITY: the GROUND
+of Existence.
+
+Contrasted with this is the next Diphthong, _O_I (aw-ee), compounded of
+the fifth (_o_) and the first (I) Vowel-Sounds. It is the Sound of _oy_
+in b_oy_. The I contained in this Diphthong may be regarded as standing
+in the place of U at the other extremity of the Scale. This last Sound
+has a tendency to return into I through the French slender U,
+illustrating the Principle of the Contact of Extremes. The Diphthong
+_O_I may, therefore, be viewed as embracing and epitomizing the upper or
+ethereal wing or half of the Simple Vowel Scale (_o_ _u_ O U); its
+meaning is, therefore, that of AERIAL or ASCENDING REALITY; LOFTINESS or
+LOFT.
+
+Next there occurs a Diphthong OI, pronounced as the same letters in the
+English word g_oi_ng, which has a half claim to be ranked with the
+Leading Diphthongs. It is sometimes reckoned into, and sometimes out of,
+the Scale--like _a_ among the Simple Vowels. Its meaning is that of
+FRONTNESS, PROSPECT.
+
+Finally, the great Focal Diphthong, that which includes and epitomizes
+the whole Vowel Scale, is AU (ah-oo), compounded of the third
+Vowel-Sound (A) and the Seventh (or Eighth) U. It is the sound heard in
+_ou_r, or in the Spanish c_au_sa. The meaning of this Supreme Diphthong
+and general Vowel Representative is UNIVERSAL REALITY. It stands
+practically in the place of all the Vowels, in the Composition of Words
+of an inclusive meaning. That is to say, it integrates in its
+signification, all that is inherently signified by all the other Vowels.
+
+While, however, AU is practically and usually the Representative,
+Analogue or Equivalent, in the Domain of Language, of Universal Reality
+among the Elements of Being, this is so _only in practice_.
+_Theoretically_, the Diphthong best adapted to represent this Idea is
+AO; the A and the O being, in a supreme sense, the two most prominent or
+leading Vowels. But it is a little difficult to retain the Organs of
+Utterance in the position which they must assume in order to pronounce
+these two Vowel-Sounds in conjunction. The organs readily and naturally
+slide into the easier position in which they utter AU. This is
+correspondential with the difficulty always experienced in adhering to
+_Pure Theory_ (O); and the natural tendency to glide from it, as ground
+too high for permanent occupation, into the more accommodating Domain of
+the _Practical_ (U).
+
+The Full Scale of Vowel Sounds coupled with the Full Scale of the
+(Indeterminate) Realities of Universal Being is, therefore, as follows:
+
+       1. SOUNDS.                          2. REALITIES OF BEING.
+
+ 1. I, i (ee as in feel).             ENTITY or IDENTITY (Centre, Least
+                                        Element, Essential Being,
+                                        Individuality).
+
+ 2. E, e (a as in mate).              RELATION (Sideness, Collaterality,
+                                        Adjectivity).
+
+ 3. _A_, _a_ (a as in mare).          UNSUBSTANTIALITY (Thinness, Ghost,
+                                        Apparition).
+
+ 4. A, a (a as in fa-ther).           SUBSTANCE (Thickness, Materiality,
+                                        Richness, Goodness).
+
+ 5. _O_, _o_ (aw as in awful).        SPACE (Volume, Expansion).
+
+ 6. _U_, _u_ (u as in curd).          TIME (Flux, Flow).
+
+ 7. O, o (o as in noble).             LIGHT (Reflection, Parity, Clearness,
+                                        Theory).
+
+ 8. U, u (oo as in fool).             SHADE (Retiracy, Turbidity, Mixture,
+                                        Practice).
+
+ 9. IU, iu (YIU), (u in union, use).  CONJUNCTION (Event, Joining).
+
+ 10. AI, ai (ah-ee, i in fine).       BASIC REALITY (Ground of Existence).
+
+ 11. OI, oi (aw-ee, oy in boy).       AERIAL or ASCENDING REALITY (Loft,
+                                        Loftiness).
+
+ 12. _O_I, _o_i (o-ee, oi in going).  FRONTNESS, PROSPECT.
+
+ 13. AU, au (ou in our).              UNIVERSAL REALITY.
+
+The Vowels and Diphthongs of this Basic Scale may be Long or Short,
+without any change of quality. This difference is indicated by
+diacritical marks, which it is not now necessary to exhibit.
+
+In addition to these merely _quantitative_ differences in the
+Vowel-Sounds, there is a corresponding difference of _Quality_, which
+produces a Counter-Scale of Vowel-Sounds; an echo or repetition of the
+Basic Scale throughout its entire length. This new Scale is a Series of
+Sounds predominantly _short_ in quantity. They are called by Mr. Pitman
+the _Stopped_ Vowels. (In German they are denominated the _Sharp_
+Vowels.) These Sounds are nearly always followed by a Consonant-Sound in
+the same syllable, by which they are _stopped_ or _broken abruptly off_,
+and the purity of their quality as Vowels affected or disturbed.
+
+It is not essential for our present purpose to give a detailed list of
+these Vowels; more especially as every Reader will readily recall them;
+as I, in pIn; E, in pEt; A in pAt; _o_, in n_o_t; _u_, in b_u_t; O, in
+stOne, cOAt; U, in fUll.
+
+In respect to the Vowel Diphthongs, the _Stopped_ Sounds are not
+materially different from the _short_ quantities of the corresponding
+Full ones; and no effort need be made to distinguish the two former
+varieties of Sound. The same is true of the Short and Stopped Sounds of
+A (ah). But the difference is very marked in the remaining Seven (7)
+Simple Vowels; the Stopped Sounds of which are given above. For the
+ordinary purposes of Language it is not necessary to distinguish these
+Stopped Sounds by any diacritical mark. But in the short Root-Words,
+where a difference of meaning depends upon the difference between the
+_full_ and _stopped_ Vowel, the so-called _grave_ accent is employed to
+denote the _stopped_ quality, as pique, pick, for example, written thus:
+pik, pik.
+
+The meaning of the Stopped Vowel-Sounds is merely the broken or
+_fractionized_ aspect of the same ideas which are symbolized by the
+corresponding _Full_ Vowel-Sounds.
+
+The nature and meaning of the Vowels being thus explained with
+sufficient amplitude for the uses now in view, we are prepared to
+advance, in a subsequent paper, to the consideration of the individual
+Consonant-Sounds, their character and inherent signification.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO PLATFORMS.
+
+
+It was the opprobrium of the Republican party in the Presidential
+campaign of 1860, that the Southern States were not, in any but a
+limited degree, represented in its ranks; and so it was called a
+sectional party. The Presidential campaign of 1864 is not less
+remarkable, on the other hand, because the party which now appropriates
+the honored name of Democratic seems to ignore the crime of rebellion on
+the part of those Southern States, and thus invites an even more
+obnoxious appellation. History will record with amazement, as among the
+strange phenomena of a war the most wicked of all the wicked wars with
+which ambition has desolated the earth (phenomena that will perplex men
+and women of loyal instincts and righteous common sense to the latest
+day), the resolutions of the Chicago Convention of 1864.
+
+It is the purpose of this article to consider as dispassionately as may
+be, those Chicago resolutions, as well as the ones previously adopted at
+Baltimore; desiring to look at them both from the standpoint of a
+patriotism which loves the whole country as one indivisible nation--the
+gift of God, to be cherished as we cherish our homes and our altars.
+
+A convention called of all those, without respect to former political
+affinities, who believed in an uncompromising prosecution of the war for
+the Union till the armed rebellion against its authority should be
+subdued and brought to terms, met at Baltimore on the 7th of June last,
+and nominated Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, for reelection as President,
+and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, for election as Vice-President. The
+convention, with exceeding good sense, and obedient to the just and
+patriotic impulses of the people, disregarded all party names of the
+past, and called itself simply a National Union Convention. Two months
+later, and on the 29th of August last, obedient to the call of
+Democratic committees, a convention met at Chicago, composed of men
+whose voices were for peace, and nominated for President General George
+B. McClellan, of New Jersey, and for Vice-President George H. Pendleton,
+of Ohio. This convention took the name of Democratic, indicating thereby
+not the idea of the equal rule of all the people, as the name imports,
+but the traditions and policies of those degenerate days before the war,
+when Democracy had strangely come to mean the rule of a few ambitious
+men. In other words, it ignored the crime of those men (who have
+sacrificed their country to their ambition), and assumed that the
+country could also overlook the crime. It supposed the people ready to
+strike hands with rebellion and elevate the authors of rebellion to
+power again.
+
+Perhaps the difference between the two conventions may be concisely
+stated thus: The Chicago Convention was for peace first, and Union
+afterward; the Baltimore Convention for Union first, then peace. Let us
+see.
+
+
+THE CHICAGO PLATFORM.
+
+We suppose that no one will think us wanting in fairness when we
+characterize the Chicago Platform as one of peace.[4] If there is any
+reproach in the term, it surely is not the fault of those who take men
+to mean what they say.
+
+[Footnote 4: It is presumed that every one is familiar with the two
+platforms, as they are so easily obtained, and it is, therefore, not
+deemed necessary to encumber the pages of the Magazine with inserting
+them in full.]
+
+Indeed, it is simply the truth to declare that the general impression on
+the first publication of it confirmed the view we have taken, and that
+even among the supporters of the convention there were many who
+proclaimed their confident expectation that General McClellan, if he
+should accept the nomination, would disregard the platform, and stake
+his chances on his own more warlike record. We will not stop to consider
+in this place whether that expectation has been fulfilled. It suffices
+for our present purpose to remind our readers that the great doctrine of
+the Democratic party of former days was expressed in the motto,
+'Principles, not men;' and that the rigid discipline of the party has
+always required the nominee to be the mere representative of the
+platform--its other self, so to speak: as witness the case of Buchanan,
+who declared himself, following the approved formulas of his party, no
+longer James Buchanan, but the Cincinnati Platform. It ought also to be
+borne in mind, that General McClellan's letter of acceptance does not,
+in terms, repudiate the platform, and is not necessarily inconsistent
+with it.
+
+The first one of the six resolutions that constitute the Chicago
+Platform, has the sound of true doctrine. 'Unswerving fidelity to the
+Union under the Constitution,' is the duty of every citizen, and has
+always been the proud war-cry of every party; and they who swerve from
+it are subject not simply to our individual censure, but to the sanction
+of our supreme law. The just complaint against this platform is, that,
+while thus proclaiming good doctrine, it overlooks the departure
+therefrom of a large portion of the people, misled by wicked men. When
+we look at the other resolutions, the first one seems all 'sound and
+fury, signifying nothing.'
+
+Nor will we withhold what of approval may possibly be due, in strict
+justice, to the sixth and last resolution; although the approval can
+only be a limited one. No one can overlook the entire lack in that
+resolution of cordial sympathy with the sacred cause of nationality, to
+which the brave heroes of the war have given their lives and fortunes.
+It restricts itself to a simple recognition of the 'soldiery of our
+army,' as entitled to 'sympathy,' with a promise of 'protection' to
+them, 'in the event of our attaining power.' It ignores the navy, and
+passes by the gallant heroes who on sea and river have upheld the flag
+of our country with a lustre that pales not before the names of Paul
+Jones, and Perry, and Decatur. Moreover, the sympathy 'extended to the
+soldiery' is the sympathy not of the American people, but of 'the
+Democratic party.' Surely, this phrase was ill conceived. It has a touch
+of partisan exclusiveness that is sadly out of place. But the resolution
+is unpartisan and patriotic in another respect that deserves notice. It
+extends the 'sympathy of the Democratic party to the soldiery of our
+army,' without making any discrimination to the prejudice of the negro
+soldiers; and thus commits the 'Democratic party,' with honorable
+impartiality, to the 'care and protection' of _all_ 'the brave soldiers
+of the Republic.'
+
+With these criticisms upon the first and sixth resolutions, we proceed
+to record our total disapprobation of the remaining four. In all candor,
+we contend that those four resolutions are a surrender of the national
+honor, and a violation of the national faith. They are unworthy the old
+glory of the Democratic party. For what is the purport of them? Is it
+condemnation of a rebellion that has 'rent the land with civil feud, and
+drenched it in fraternal blood'? Is it to stimulate the heroism of those
+whose breasts are bared to the bullets of traitors in Virginia and
+Georgia, and who have 'borne aloft the flag and kept step to the music
+of the Union' these three years and a half in unwearied defence of the
+nation? Ah, no; they declare the war a 'failure'! The second resolution
+is the keynote of the platform, reciting 'that after four years (three
+years and a half) of _failure_ to restore the Union by the _experiment
+of war_,... justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand
+that _immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities_.' Upon
+this resolution there can be no better comment than the remembrance of
+Donelson and Pea Ridge, Pittsburg Landing and Vicksburg, Murfreesboro'
+and Chattanooga, Antictam and Gettysburg; not to speak of that splendid
+series of battles from the Wilderness to Petersburg, which at last has
+brought the rebel general to bay; nor of the glorious victories, since
+the Chicago Convention, at Mobile and Atlanta, and in the Shenandoah
+Valley. It can never be forgotten that on the fourth of July, 1863,
+Governor Seymour, in a public discourse at the Academy of Music, in New
+York, drew a deplorable picture of the straits to which the nation was
+at last reduced, with the enemy marching defiantly across the fertile
+fields of Pennsylvania, and men's hearts failing them for fear of
+danger, not alone to the political capital, Washington, but also to the
+financial capital, New York; and that, even while the words fell from
+the speaker's lips, that defiant enemy, already beaten, was rapidly
+retreating before the magnificent old Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg:
+while victorious Grant had already broken the left of the rebel line,
+and was celebrating the nation's anniversary in the triumph of
+Vicksburg. Even so, let it never be forgotten that the delegates who
+adopted this second resolution, so burdened with despair, had scarcely
+reached their homes, ere the stronghold of the Southern Confederacy,
+which, ever since the war was begun, has been boastfully proclaimed the
+key of its military lines, and as impregnable as Gibraltar, fell before
+the unconquerable progress of the armies of the West, under General
+Sherman; and thus the rebel centre, as well as left, had been broken,
+and only the rebel right, at Richmond, yet remains to the Southern army.
+
+In further answer to the discouraging language of this resolution, let
+us offset the following terse and comprehensive statement of what has
+been accomplished in the course of the nation's 'experiment of war.' It
+is copied from _The Evening Post_ of a recent date, and the writer
+supposes the soldiers to speak thus:
+
+     'We have not failed; on the contrary, we have fought bravely and
+     conquered splendidly. In proof of our words we can point to such
+     trophies as few wars can equal and none surpass. Besides defending
+     with unusual vigilance and completeness two thousand miles of
+     frontier, in three years we have taken from the enemies of the
+     Union, by valor and generalship, thirty complete and thoroughly
+     furnished fortresses; we have captured over two thousand cannon; we
+     have reconquered and now hold nearly four thousand miles of
+     navigable river courses; we have taken ten of the enemy's principal
+     cities, three of them capitals of States; in thirty days last
+     summer we captured sixty thousand prisoners; we have penetrated
+     more than three hundred miles into the territory claimed by the
+     enemy; we have cut that territory into strips, leaving his armies
+     without effectual communication with each other; the main
+     operations and interests of the war, which were lately concentrated
+     about Baltimore, Paducah, and St. Louis, have been transferred, by
+     our steady and constant advance, to the narrow limits of the
+     seaboard Slave States; we hold every harbor but one, of a coast six
+     thousand miles long. And whatever we have taken we hold; we have
+     never turned back, or given up that which we once fairly
+     possessed.'
+
+It has, however, been fittingly reserved for the chief of the rebellion
+himself to give the full and complete answer to this dishonorable
+complaint of failure. Not a month after the meeting of the Chicago
+Convention, and on the 23d of September last, Jeff. Davis uttered these
+words, in a public speech, at Macon, Geo.: '_You have not many men
+between eighteen and forty-five left_.... Two-thirds of our men are
+absent, some sick, some wounded, but _most of them absent without
+leave_. ... _In Virginia the disparity of numbers is just an great as it
+is in Georgia._'
+
+But let it be granted that after these three years and a half of war,
+and having accomplished such unquestionably important results, the Union
+is not yet restored, what then? Is that a reason for giving up now? Our
+fathers fought the British seven years without flinching; and under the
+indomitable leader God had given them, they would have fought seven
+years longer with equal determination. Are we less determined than they
+were? Are we such degenerate sons that we are willing to give up the
+legacy they left us, at half its original cost? There is just the same
+reason that we should yield the contest now as there was in 1861 that we
+should yield it then; neither more nor less. The integrity of the
+nation, the perpetuity of our institutions, the safety, honor, and
+welfare of the people are still at stake.
+
+If it is true that 'justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare
+demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities,'
+then those same holy principles were assailed when the war was begun. If
+the United States Government was the assailant, it did wrong, and has
+continued doing wrong ever since; and not a century of such wrong-doing
+can make the war just and right on our part. This brings us face to face
+with the question, Who began the war? Who, in this contest, has assailed
+the principles of 'justice, humanity, and liberty'? Who has attacked the
+'public welfare'? Has it been the United States Government? Let us
+revert to the occasion of the war. Confining ourselves to what all
+parties admit--even the rebels themselves--the immediate occasion of the
+war was the election of a President distasteful, for whatever cause, to
+the Southern leaders. Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the
+United States under the organic law of the nation, in strict accordance
+with all its modes and requirements, and none ever disputed the fairness
+of the election. That organic law is the Constitution, to which the
+South is bound equally with the North. The men of the Chicago
+Convention, who have recalled to our minds its high supremacy, neglected
+to express their opinion of those who, immediately on the election of
+President Lincoln, contemptuously spurned it, and have sought these
+three years and a half to overthrow it and destroy the Union which it
+upholds.
+
+Every sentiment of 'justice' was outraged when wicked sedition thus
+without cause reared its head against the covenant of the nation. Every
+instinct of 'humanity' was stifled by the traitors who surrounded a
+gallant garrison of seventy men with a force of ten thousand, and opened
+fire on the heroes who stood by the flag that had been the glory and
+defence of both for more than half a century. 'Liberty,' in all its
+blessed relations of home, and country, and religion, was struck at when
+blind ambition thus set at defiance the power of the Union, to which
+liberty owes its life on this continent, and its hopes throughout the
+world. The constitutional liberty that is the glory of our civilization,
+the liberty regulated by law that is the pride of our institutions, was
+attacked by those who at Montgomery fiercely defied the Constitution and
+laws. And what shall we say of the constitution which these traitors to
+their country and humanity affected to establish, instead of that, the
+heritage of their and our Washington and his compeers, which had made
+our country powerful among nations, and blessed it with equal laws and
+equal protection to all? What shall we say of the constitution that
+ordained slavery as the corner stone of a new confederacy, to teach
+mankind the folly of Christian civilization, and bring back the
+'statelier Eden' of the dark ages? To which party in this terrible
+strife of brothers does 'liberty' look for protection to-day? Which of
+the two armies of brothers now arrayed against each other on the plains
+of Virginia and Georgia, is fighting for the principle of order, which
+is the 'public welfare'? Let these questions be answered, and then it
+will appear how much reason there is in the declaration that 'liberty,
+justice, humanity, and the public welfare' demand the 'cessation of
+hostilities.' On the contrary, these very principles demand that the war
+be continued without abatement till they are guaranteed safe residence
+and sure protection under the United States Constitution.
+
+But, it is objected, you ignore the basis on which, this 'cessation of
+hostilities' is proposed, namely, 'the Federal Union of the States.'
+There is a word to be said in reference to this clause which will
+illustrate the high-toned patriotism of some of the convention which
+adopted it. There was an alteration in the wording of the resolution,
+and some of the papers printed it accordingly, '_the basis of the
+Federal States_.' The editor of the _New York Freeman's Journal_ (a
+paper which zealously supports the Chicago platform and all peace
+measures, and is called Democratic), being requested to explain which
+version was correct, said, in a late issue of his journal, that in the
+original draft of the resolution 'it was not the _bold doctrine_ of
+Federal States;' it was the _delusion and snare_ of a Federal 'Union,'
+and that therefore the latter must be taken as the correct version.
+
+Replying to the above objection, we say that we neither ignore this
+'delusion and snare' of the Federal Union as the basis of the proposed
+peace, nor those other words in the fourth resolution, 'that the aim and
+object of the Democratic party is to preserve the Federal Union and the
+rights of the States unimpaired.' The question is, how possibly to
+reconcile the demand for an immediate 'cessation of hostilities' with
+this great anxiety to preserve the Federal Union? For the Federal Union
+can only be preserved by subduing the armed rebellion that menaces it.
+Anything short of the absolute and thorough defeat of the Southern
+armies must lower the dignity of the nation, and weaken and subvert the
+foundations of the Union. Thus far, by the grace of God and our right
+arm, the Constitution and Union are preserved, and so long as they
+'still stand strong,' the basis of settlement remains; and whenever the
+rebels are tired of trying their strength against them, the nation
+stands ready to welcome them back, as penitent prodigals. It is not we
+who are unreconciled to them: it is they who refuse to be reconciled to
+us. If the illustration offend no weaker brother, we may say that, like
+the ever-surrounding love of God, the Federal Union is still watching
+over the rebels, and is only waiting the first symptom of their
+returning conscience to run and fall on their necks and kiss them, and
+bring them in peace to the home they so foolishly left. They are
+striving to destroy the Constitution and the Union. We oppose them. Let
+us consider what, under these circumstances, 'a cessation of
+hostilities' means.
+
+In the first place, how are hostilities to cease, unless the power that
+controls the Southern armies so wills it? That power is a military
+despotism. It has usurped all other power within the limits of the
+rebellion, and the United States Government is seeking to overthrow it,
+in order that the Constitution may be restored, in all its benignity, to
+the people of the South, whom the usurpation has deprived of it. Is it,
+then, for the United States Government to propose to the authors of this
+usurpation to cease seeking its total overthrow? The question recurs,
+moreover, what 'cessation' have we to propose? It is for them to offer
+to yield: they are the aggressors, threatening the life of the nation.
+Is any among us so base he would have peace with dishonor? A nation
+cannot submit to be dishonored before the world--for its honor is its
+life. Yet what sort of peace would that be which we should thus begin by
+seeking? It is far from pertinent to cite, as some have done, the
+example of Napoleon on this point: even supposing that civil war were,
+in respect of this thing, the same as war between independent nations.
+For Napoleon never proposed suspensions of hostilities except in his own
+extremity, and as a convenient means to extricate himself from
+difficulties which he had the art of concealing from his adversaries.
+Are we in extremity, that this example of Napoleon should be suggested
+in support of the Chicago platform?
+
+As to how our overtures might be received at Richmond, we are no longer
+left any excuse for doubting. The oft-repeated assurances of all who
+have fled from the rebel tyranny since the war was begun, are, at
+length, confirmed by the authoritative declaration of Jeff. Davis
+himself. It is a declaration promulgated not only by Colonel Jaquess and
+Mr. Gilmore, in the account given by the latter of their recent visit to
+Richmond, but also by Mr. Benjamin, the rebel Secretary of State, in a
+circular letter written for the purpose of giving the rebel account of
+that visit. We are told by the rebel chief himself, that as _preliminary
+to any negotiations, the independence of the Southern Confederacy must
+be first acknowledged_. Why does not the Chicago platform suggest a way
+of avoiding this difficulty? Why has it left the country in uncertainty
+on a question so vital?
+
+But, in the second place, suppose it were possible to have a 'cessation
+of hostilities' without this preliminary acknowledgment of the
+Confederate independence, and that the war might be at an absolute stand
+still for a definite season, are we fully aware of the risks attending
+this measure? For the Chicago platform has left them out of sight. 'A
+cessation of hostilities' is an armistice; and there is no such thing
+known in the authorities on international law, or in history, as 'a
+cessation of hostilities' distinct from an armistice. In defining the
+incidents of war, Wheaton speaks of a '_suspension of hostilities by
+means of a truce_, or _armistice_,' and uses the three terms
+interchangeably. In other words, whatever 'cessation (or suspension, as
+it is called in the books) of hostilities,' there may occur between the
+parties to a war, it is known among men and in history as an armistice,
+which is also the technical term for it. There would be no need to
+enlarge upon this point, if it had not been made already the basis of
+fallacious appeals to popular ignorance. Now, the incidents of an
+armistice are well defined, giving to both parties, besides the
+advantage of time to rest, full liberty to repair damages and make up
+losses of men and material; and it is perfect folly, or worse, to talk
+of 'a cessation of hostilities' without giving to the rebels these
+important advantages. But the controlling consideration in reference to
+this whole thing, and which every person ought to ponder carefully, is
+the effect of the proposed 'cessation of hostilities' upon our neutral
+neighbors. On this point the doctrine of international law is thus
+stated by the distinguished French writer, Hautefeuille, 'the eminent
+advocate of neutral rights,' as he is justly called by the American
+editor of Wheaton, and whose works on neutral relations are always cited
+with respect, and recognized as authority.
+
+     'The duties imposed on neutrals by the state of war belong
+     essentially to the state of war itself. From the moment it ceases,
+     for whatever cause, even temporarily, the duties of neutrals
+     likewise cease; _as to them, peace is completely restored during
+     the suspension of arms_. They resume then all the rights which had
+     been modified by the war, and can exercise them in their full
+     extent during the whole time fixed for the duration of the truce,
+     if this time has been limited by the agreement; and until the
+     resumption of hostilities has been officially announced to them, if
+     it has not been limited.'[5]
+
+[Footnote 5: 'Des Droits des Nations Neutres,' t. I., p. 301]
+
+Can language be clearer? It will not do to treat it lightly. It is a
+statement of what international law is on this point from an authority;
+and the reasons for the doctrine are clear and incontrovertible.
+Neutrality depends on the fact of war; when, for any cause, that fact no
+longer exists, neutrality ceases likewise, of course. It is only the
+application of a well-known maxim of law, that when the reason of a rule
+fails, the rule itself fails. Let there be 'a cessation of hostilities,'
+then, as proposed in the Chicago platform, and how long would it be
+before rebel ships of war from English ports would be ready to desolate
+our coast, destroy our shipping, raise the blockade, and give to the
+rebellion the aid and sustenance it must have ere long or perish?
+
+There is still another difficulty in the way of suspending hostilities,
+which it is well for us not to ignore. If we propose to the rebels 'a
+cessation of hostilities,' does not the question immediately become one
+of negotiation between separate Governments? Have we not in that moment,
+and in that thing, then recognized the Southern Confederacy as a
+separate and independent Power? For does not 'a cessation of
+hostilities' presuppose parties of equal sovereignty on both sides?
+Indeed, _The London Times_ of a recent date already declares that 'it
+would concede to the South a position of equality.' Such a concession
+cannot, for a moment, be thought of. For the very question at issue is
+our constitutional supremacy. When that is yielded, all is yielded. The
+exchanging of prisoners, and the numerous like questions that
+perpetually arise in the progress of war, are matters of common
+humanity, that depend upon their own law. They are totally independent
+of the questions at issue between the parties belligerent; and our
+dealings with the South, in reference to such matters, cannot be
+construed into a recognition of its separate independence. If we consent
+to treat with the rebel chiefs, however, in regard to the very question
+involved in the war, how can we longer compel the non-interference of
+foreign Powers? If _we_ acknowledge the authority of Jeff. Davis to
+speak for the Southern people, we cannot then take offence if other
+nations acknowledge him as the representative and head of a new
+Government.
+
+Such and so great are the consequences of a 'cessation of hostilities,'
+which the Chicago platform proposes to the serious consideration of the
+American people.
+
+It thus appears how irreconcilable are the expressions in that platform
+in regard to the preservation of the Federal Union, with the clearly
+announced determination to propose immediately 'a cessation of
+hostilities.' They are vague generalities, and can have no other purpose
+than to catch the popular ear so as more effectually to deceive the
+popular heart. That this is not a harsh judgment, consider how the four
+resolutions that treat of the war all hinge upon the proposition to
+suspend hostilities. For they concern themselves with what? With
+condemnation of the rebellion, its authors, and objects, suggesting, at
+the same time, how more effectually to bring upon it its righteous
+retribution? Far from it. Indeed, a stranger to all that has passed in
+our country during the last three years, would suppose, from a study of
+these resolutions, that the United States Government had usurped the
+power of a despotism, and that all who are not arrayed in open
+rebellion, against its authority were groaning under the yoke of a
+tyrant. The platform throughout ignores the one supreme question that is
+before the people to-day. That one question is, Shall we maintain the
+integrity of the nation? It is vain to introduce other issues; they must
+abide the event of arms. The old maxim that in the midst of war the laws
+are silent, is not to be condemned. For our laws are of no avail, the
+nation cannot enforce them, so long as armed rebellion threatens its
+existence. With the nation, all its laws, principles, vital forces, are
+equally menaced and imperilled; and they are, in virtue of that very
+fact, in abeyance, in order that they may be saved. It is said that the
+Constitution is not suspended because of rebellion, and this is the
+basis of much declamation, both in the Chicago platform and elsewhere,
+against the exercise of extraordinary powers on the part of the
+President. But the Constitution authorizes the suspension of the writ of
+_habeas corpus_, that great writ of right which is the bulwark of our
+Anglo-Saxon liberty, 'when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public
+safety may require it;' and confers upon Congress full power to
+legislate for the defence of the nation, making it then the duty of the
+President to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed.' What more
+is needed as a warrant for extraordinary power? The Chicago Convention
+has appealed to the Constitution, and in that has done wisely. But what
+is the Constitution? It is the organic law of the nation. In virtue of
+it the nation exists, and by the supreme warrant of it the nation
+maintains its existence against parricidal treason. Under the
+Constitution all power is granted to the public authorities to quell
+insurrection; and the grant of a power, by one of the first principles
+of law, as also of common sense, implies every essential incident to
+make the grant effectual.
+
+In support of these views it is pertinent to cite the authority of an
+approved text writer on municipal law, whose book has appeared since
+they were first written, and who has elaborately investigated the points
+involved. The result of his patient and thorough study is stated in
+these propositions:
+
+     'That no civil power resides in any department of the Government to
+     interfere with the fundamental, personal rights of life, liberty,
+     and property, guaranteed by the Constitution; that a warlike power
+     is given by the Constitution to the President temporarily to
+     disregard these rights by means of the martial law; that under the
+     sanction of this species of law, the President and his subordinate
+     military officers may, within reasonable limits, suspend the
+     privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_, cause arrests to be made,
+     trials and condemnations to be had, and punishments to be
+     inflicted, in methods unknown to the civil procedure, but are
+     responsible for an abuse of the power; and that the martial law, as
+     a necessary adjunct of military movements, may be enforced in time
+     of invasion or rebellion, wherever the influence and effect of
+     these movements directly extends.'[6]
+
+[Footnote 6: Sec.716 of 'An Introduction to Municipal Law,' by John Norton
+Pomeroy, Esq., Professor of Law in the New York University Law School.
+The whole chapter from which the extract is taken is worthy of diligent
+perusal, and the writer regrets that want of space alone prevents him
+quoting more fully from Professor Pomeroy's lucid exposition of the
+doctrine of martial law under our Constitution.]
+
+These conclusions of the law are worthy to be considered carefully in
+view of the solemn resolutions of the Chicago platform, that 'military
+necessity' and the 'war power' are 'mere pretences' to override the
+Constitution.
+
+It remains to say, with reference to the third and fifth resolutions of
+this platform, that they are chargeable with an equal and common
+ignorance: the third, in ignoring the necessity of the presence of the
+military at the elections referred to, in order that disloyalty and
+treason might not openly defy the authority of the nation; the fifth, in
+ignoring two things, first, the monstrous baseness of the rebel
+treatment of our prisoners, who have been starved alive, with a
+refinement of cruelty reserved for this Christian age, and practised
+only by the Christian chivalry of the South; and secondly, the rebel
+refusal to exchange prisoners man for man; the resolution seeking,
+moreover, to charge upon the United States Government the fault of both
+these rebel violations of humanity. It may be asked, moreover, in
+further reference to the third resolution, if the convention really
+meant to pledge itself to revolution;[7] and why, if the President, as
+chief of 'the military authority of the United States,' should be guilty
+of any abuses, the proper remedy is not by impeachment, as provided in
+the Constitution? The language of this resolution is gravely suggestive,
+and cannot be too closely criticised. It seems to shadow forth some dark
+design, which surely is in harmony with the whole tone of hostility to
+our Government that pervades the platform. Taken, moreover, in
+connection with the fact that the Chicago Convention declared itself a
+permanent body, subject to the call of the chairman, this criticism does
+not seem unreasonable; for permanent conventions have generally been the
+beginning of revolution.
+
+[Footnote 7: The third resolution is, 'That the direct interference of
+the military authority of the United States in the recent elections held
+in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware, was a shameful violation
+of the Constitution, and the repetition of such acts in the approaching
+election _will be held as revolutionary, and resisted with all the means
+and power under our control_.']
+
+
+THE BALTIMORE PLATFORM.
+
+The Baltimore platform consists of eleven resolutions; and we may
+perceive at a glance the important respect in which it differs from the
+one adopted at Chicago. That confines itself to criticism and censure of
+those who are striving to uphold the Constitution and the Union against
+an armed rebellion, which it does not so much as by a single word
+condemn. This declares the purpose of the people 'to aid the Government
+in quelling by force the rebellion now raging against its authority;' so
+that its power shall be felt throughout the whole extent of our
+territory, and its blessings be restored to every section of the Union.
+
+It is impossible to overlook this essential distinction of the two
+platforms. The one is full of the captious complaint of partisanship,
+intent on power, and oblivious of the highest duty of patriotism in this
+hour of the country's need; the other recognizes no higher duty now than
+the union of all parties for the sake of the Union. The one vainly cries
+peace when there is no peace; the other thinks not of peace except in
+and through the Union, without which there cannot be peace. Above all,
+the one takes us back to the former times of purely party strife, and
+seeks to revive the political issues of the past; the other, leaving
+'the dead past to bury its dead,' keeps pace with the living present,
+and looks forward to a future of glory in a restored and regenerated
+Union. For it is folly to suppose there can ever again be 'the Union as
+it was.' This is a superficial phrase, which it is marvellous that any
+reflecting person can delude himself with. 'The Constitution as it is'
+is the motto that condemns it; for under the Constitution we are to have
+'a more perfect Union,' as our fathers designed, and so stated in the
+Constitution itself. We are to have a constitutional Union in which
+every right guaranteed by the Constitution shall be maintained; and this
+was not so in 'the Union as it was.'
+
+Thus it is that the Baltimore platform, after pledging the people to
+maintain 'the paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the
+United States,' and approving the 'determination of the Government not
+to compromise' this authority, but holding out the same Constitution and
+laws as our only and the sufficient 'terms of peace' to all who will
+accept them, proceeds to take notice of what none but the wilfully blind
+fail to perceive, the changed aspect of the slavery question. It is
+impossible to hold the same position to-day in regard to this vexed
+question as in the days before the war. As an element of the politics of
+this country its aspect is wholly changed, and there is no sort of
+consistency in upholding our opinions of four years ago in reference to
+it. We do well to remember that consistency is not obstinacy. It is not
+an absolute, but a relative thing, and takes note of all the new
+elements which are ever entering into public affairs. The criterion of
+one's political consistency in our country is unfaltering devotion to
+the Union. If the measures he advocates look always to its paramount
+authority, his record is truly and honorably inconsistent. On the other
+hand, he who forgets the end of his labors in the ardor of seeking to
+save the means, is chargeable with the grossest inconsistency. What,
+therefore, consists with the perpetuity and strength of the Union? is
+the question which the American patriot proposes to himself.
+
+It is in reference to this question that the Baltimore Platform
+challenges comparison with the one adopted at Chicago. For guided by the
+experience of the past four years (the culmination of fifty years'
+experience), and noting without fear the facts which that experience has
+revealed as in the clear light of midday, it declares that slavery is
+inconsistent with the existence of the Union. Does anybody deny it? Men
+tell us that the Union and slavery have heretofore, for more than half a
+century, existed together, and why may they not continue to exist in
+harmonious conjunction for the next half century? We are asked,
+moreover, with sarcastic disdain, if our wisdom is superior to that of
+the fathers. Our wisdom is not, indeed, superior to that of the fathers
+of the republic, but it would be far beneath it, and we should be
+unworthy sons of such fathers, if we undertook to carry out, in 1864,
+the policies and measures of 1764. The progress of affairs has developed
+the antagonism that was only latent before, but which, nevertheless,
+some of the wisest of our fathers foresaw; and it is now very clear that
+there is a terrible antagonism (no longer latent) between slavery and
+the principles that underlie the Constitution. The time has come to
+vindicate the wisdom of the Constitution by utterly removing what seeks
+to disgrace and destroy it--as it were a viper in the bosom of the
+nation.
+
+We must show that our Government is strong enough not only to control,
+but also destroy, the interest which arrays itself in arms and war
+against it. It is useless, surely, to deny that the Southern Confederacy
+means slavery. Over and over again the Southern journals have asserted,
+and Southern politicians have said, that free labor was a mistake, and
+that slavery was the true condition of labor. That these are the
+deliberate convictions of the Southern leaders, and these the doctrines
+on which the Montgomery constitution is based, no reflecting person can
+hesitate to believe; and the boastful declaration of the rebel
+vice-president, that slavery was the corner stone of the rebel
+confederacy, serves to confirm our conclusion beyond possibility of
+doubt. What these things prove is nothing more nor less than that the
+Union with such an element in it to feed the ambition of politicians
+with, as this slavery has shown itself to be, is henceforth impossible.
+For we see now that for the sake of slavery the slaveholding leaders are
+willing to destroy the Government. Who can complain if the basis of
+their rebellious scheme is annihilated? The answer to those who say,
+Touch tenderly the institutions of the South, is, Nay, but let them
+first cease their rebellion. Therefore, so long as the rebellion lifts
+its unblushing front against the Government, so long it is the duty of
+every lover of the Government, in the language of the third resolution
+of this platform, to 'uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by
+which the Government, in its own defence, has aimed a death blow at this
+gigantic evil.'
+
+But that makes us, Abolitionists, says the reader. Be it so. Are we not
+willing to be Abolitionists for the sake of saving the Constitution and
+the Union? And if, despising our proffers of 'the Constitution as it
+is,' which we have now held out to them for three years and a half, the
+rebels continue to defy the authority of the Government, who can
+complain if we proceed to adopt an amendment to the Constitution that
+shall leave no possibility of slaveholding treason hereafter? Surely
+none but themselves. Let them, then, come back and vote against it; for
+three fourths of all the States must concur in such an amendment before
+it can become part of the Constitution. Ah, the leaders of the Southern
+rebellion know full well how the great masses at the South would vote on
+such a measure! Let us be ready, then, acting not for ourselves alone,
+but also for our deluded brethren of the South, who are to-day the
+victims of a military usurpation the most monstrous the world ever saw,
+to put the finishing stroke to the scheme of this Confederate rebellion
+by adopting the proposed amendment.
+
+The fifth resolution commits us to the approval of two measures that
+have aroused the most various and strenuous opposition, the Proclamation
+of Emancipation and the use of negro troops. In reference to the first,
+it is to be remembered that it is a war measure. The express language of
+it is: 'By virtue of the power in me vested as commander-in-chief of the
+army and navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion
+against the authority and Government of the United States, and as a _fit
+and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion_.' Considered
+thus, the Proclamation is not merely defensible, but it is more; it is a
+proper and efficient means of weakening the rebellion which every person
+desiring its speedy overthrow must zealously and perforce uphold.
+Whether it is of any legal effect beyond the actual limits of our
+military lines, is a question that need not agitate us. In due time the
+supreme tribunal of the nation will be called to determine that, and to
+its decision the country will yield with all respect and loyalty. But in
+the mean time let the Proclamation go wherever the army goes, let it go
+wherever the navy secures us a foothold on the outer border of the rebel
+territory, and let it summon to our aid the negroes who are truer to the
+Union than their disloyal masters; and when they have come to us and put
+their lives in our keeping, let us protect and defend them with the
+whole power of the nation. Is there anything unconstitutional in that?
+Thank God, there is not. And he who is willing to give back to slavery a
+single person who has heard the summons and come within our lines to
+obtain his freedom, he who would give up a single man, woman, or child,
+once thus actually freed, is not worthy the name of American. He may
+call himself Confederate, if he will.
+
+Let it be remembered, also, that the Proclamation has had a very
+important bearing upon our foreign relations. It evoked in behalf of our
+country that sympathy on the part of the people in Europe, whose is the
+only sympathy we can ever expect in our struggle to perpetuate free
+institutions. Possessing that sympathy, moreover, we have had an element
+in our favor which has kept the rulers of Europe in wholesome dread of
+interference. The Proclamation relieved us from the false position
+before attributed to us of fighting simply for national power. It placed
+us right in the eyes of the world, and transferred men's sympathies from
+a confederacy fighting for independence as a means of establishing
+slavery, to a nation whose institutions mean constitutional liberty,
+and, when fairly wrought out, must end in universal freedom.
+
+We are to consider, furthermore, that from the issuing of the
+Proclamation dates the organization of negro troops--a measure that is
+destined to affect materially the future composition, as it is
+believed, of our regular army. This is 'the employment as Union soldiers
+of men heretofore held in slavery,' which the fifth resolution asks us
+to approve. Can we not approve it? The fighting qualities of the
+despised 'niggers' (as South Carolina chivalry terms the gallant fellows
+who followed Colonel Shaw to the deadly breach of Wagner, reckless of
+all things save the stars and stripes they fought under) have been
+tested on many battle fields. He whose heart does not respond in
+sympathy with their heroism on those fields, while defending from
+disgrace his country's flag, need not approve. The approval of the
+country will be given, nevertheless. There can be nothing better said,
+on this point than President Lincoln's own words, as reported lately by
+Judge Mills, of Wisconsin, to whom the President uttered them in
+conversation. They cover also the question of the Proclamation, and will
+fitly conclude our discussion of these two important measures:
+
+     'Sir,' said the President, 'the slightest knowledge of arithmetic
+     will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed
+     with Democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of
+     the North to do it. There are now in the service of the United
+     States near two hundred thousand ablebodied colored men, most of
+     them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory. The
+     Democratic strategy demands that these forces be disbanded, and
+     that the masters be conciliated by restoring them to slavery. The
+     black men who now assist Union prisoners to escape, they are to be
+     converted into our enemies in the vain hope of gaining the good
+     will of their masters. We shall have to fight two nations instead
+     of one.
+
+     'You cannot conciliate the South if you guarantee to them ultimate
+     success; and the experience of the present war proves their success
+     is inevitable if you fling the compulsory labor of millions of
+     black men into their side of the scale. Will you give our enemies
+     such military advantages as insure success, and then depend on
+     coaxing, flattery, and concession to get them back into the Union?
+     Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men, take two hundred
+     thousand men from our side and put them in the battle field or corn
+     field against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in
+     three weeks.
+
+     'We have to hold territory in inclement and sickly places; where
+     are the Democrats to do this? It was a free fight, and the field
+     was open to the war Democrats to put down this rebellion by
+     fighting against both master and slave, long before the present
+     policy was inaugurated.
+
+     'There have been men base enough to propose to me to return to
+     slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee, and thus win
+     the respect of the masters they fought. Should I do so, I should
+     deserve to be damned in time and eternity. Come what will, I will
+     keep my faith with friend and foe. My enemies pretend I am now
+     carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. So long as
+     I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of
+     restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion
+     without the use of the emancipation policy, and every other policy
+     calculated to weaken the moral and physical forces of the
+     rebellion.
+
+     'Freedom has given us two hundred thousand men raised on Southern
+     soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from
+     the enemy; and instead of alienating the South, there are now
+     evidences of a fraternal feeling growing up between our men and the
+     rank and file of the rebel soldiers. Let my enemies prove to the
+     country that the destruction of slavery is not necessary to a
+     restoration of the Union. I will abide the issue.'
+
+Surely these are words of exceeding good sense. They are full of a
+feeling of the speaker's responsibility to God and his country; and the
+man who cares not for his responsibility to God, may well be distrusted
+by his country. Is he who speaks these words of patriotism a tyrant and
+usurper? Are not the words convincing proof that President Lincoln is
+honest and faithful and capable? And if he thus meets those three
+requirements of Jefferson's comprehensive formula, let us not refuse the
+language of the platform: 'That we have full confidence in his
+determination to carry these and all other constitutional measures
+essential to the salvation of the country into full and complete
+effect.'
+
+The remaining six resolutions of this platform deserve the general
+remark, that they declare with no uncertain sound the views of the
+Baltimore Convention in reference to vital questions of public policy;
+whereas, the Chicago Convention has not even alluded to those questions.
+That in this hour of the country's crisis, in this life struggle of the
+nation with foes both open and secret, there should be 'harmony in the
+national councils;' that men once clothed in the uniform of United
+States soldiers become entitled to 'the full protection of the laws of
+war,' as forming part of the nation's defenders when those who ought to
+be its defenders have joined in an unholy sedition to destroy its life;
+that 'foreign immigration,' deserves especial encouragement at a time
+when the demands of the army leave the places of home labor without
+adequate means of refilling them; that a Pacific Railroad, uniting the
+extreme Western portion of the Union with all the other sections, and
+thus bringing within nearer reach of our California and Oregon
+countrymen all the advantages and facilities of the Government, while at
+the same time binding more closely the ties that make us one people with
+the West equally with the South; and that the nation's faith with all
+its creditors must be strictly kept, be the cost what it may; all these
+are duties which the terrible emergency of the hour only makes more
+imperative and exacting of fulfilment than ever before.
+
+The eleventh and last resolution commits the country anew to the Monroe
+Doctrine. In view of the great crime that is enacting in Mexico, where a
+foreign power has assumed to change the Government of that afflicted
+country at its own arbitrary will, the declaration that we have not
+abandoned the doctrine is appropriate and necessary. It is a warning
+that our eyes are not closed to the schemes on foot for the suppression
+of republican government on this continent. While our present necessity
+compels us, as of course, to act with great circumspection, yet it would
+be unbecoming our dignity to quietly ignore the spoliation of Mexico. It
+is often said that President Lincoln, in his letter accepting the
+Baltimore nomination, has repudiated this resolution. These are his
+words:
+
+     'While the resolution in regard to the supplanting of republican
+     government upon the Western Continent is fully concurred in, there
+     might be misunderstanding were I not to say that the position of
+     the Government in relation to the action of France in Mexico, as
+     assumed through the State Department, and indorsed by the
+     convention, among the measures and acts of the Executive, will be
+     faithfully maintained so long as the state of facts shall leave
+     that position pertinent and applicable.'
+
+It is not fair to say that this is a repudiation of the resolution, or
+of the Monroe Doctrine, until it is first shown that the Government
+'through the State Department,' has already repudiated the doctrine. The
+time for the enforcement of that doctrine has not yet come, and this
+seems to be the position that has been assumed by the Government. It
+certainly is the position of common sense and patriotism.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The candid reader has now before him a brief exposition of the two
+platforms, and of the doctrines and bearing of each. It is believed that
+nothing has been extenuated; nor, on the other hand, has aught been here
+set down in malice. Let every one study the platforms and try
+conclusions for himself; then say whether the foregoing discussion could
+well have shaped itself differently. The sum of the whole matter seems
+to be, War and Union, or Peace and Disunion. If we have Union, it can
+only be now through war. We must 'seek peace with the sword.' The
+rebels have appealed from the civil law to the military law, from the
+Constitution to the sword; let us not shrink from the ordeal. No
+revolution to perpetuate oppression can hope for the favor of a God of
+justice.
+
+There are two platforms in this Presidential campaign, representing the
+two parties into which the voters will be divided. But there is a third
+party, without platform and without vote, which has, nevertheless,
+interests at stake transcending even ours. Let the calmly considered
+words of an impartial English journal,[8] which wishes well to our
+country, speak, in conclusion, on behalf of that third party:
+
+     'There are three parties to the American war. There are the slaves,
+     the bondsmen of the South, whose flight was restrained by the
+     Fugitive Bill, and whose wrongs have brought about the disruption;
+     there are the Confederates, who, when Southern supremacy in the
+     republic was menaced by the election of Abraham Lincoln, threw off
+     their allegiance; and there are the Government and its supporters,
+     who are striving to restore the integrity of the Union. These are
+     the three parties; and as the war has gone on from year to year,
+     the cause of the negro has brightened, and hundreds of thousands of
+     the African race have passed out of slavery into freedom. They
+     flock in multitudes within the Federal lines, and take their stand
+     under the Constitution as free men. Abandoned by their former
+     masters, or flying from their fetters, the chattels become
+     citizens, and rejoice. No matter what their misery, they keep their
+     faces to the North, and bear up under their privations. Every
+     advance of the national army liberates new throngs, and they rush
+     eagerly to the camps where their brethren are cared for. The
+     exodus, continually going on, increases in volume.
+
+     [Footnote 8: London Inquirer.]
+
+     'Such are the colored freedmen, the innocent victims of the war,
+     the slaves whom it has marvellously enfranchised; such are the
+     dusky clouds that flit o'er the continent of America and settle
+     down on strange lands--the harbingers of a social revolution in the
+     great republic of the West. More than fifty thousand are formed
+     into camps in the Mississippi Valley, and not fewer in Middle and
+     East Tennessee and North Alabama. It is a vast responsibility which
+     is cast upon the Government and the people of the North, a sore and
+     mighty burden; and proportionate are the efforts which have been
+     made to meet the trying emergency. The Government finds rations for
+     the negro camps, provides free carriage for the contributions of
+     the humane, appoints surgeons and superintendents, enlists in the
+     army the men who are suitable, and, as far as possible, gives
+     employment to all. Clothing and other necessaries are forwarded to
+     the camps by the ton by benevolent hands, and books for the schools
+     by tens of thousands. All along the banks of the Mississippi, from
+     Cairo to New Orleans, and in Arkansas and Tennessee, the aged and
+     infirm fugitives, the women and children, are collected into
+     colored colonies, and tended and taught with a care that is worthy
+     of a great and Christian people. All that can work are more than
+     willing to do so; they labor gladly; and among old and young there
+     is an eager desire for education. Books are coveted as badges of
+     freedom; and the negro soldier carries them with him wherever he
+     goes, and studies them whenever he can. It is a great work which is
+     in progress across the Atlantic. Providence, in a manner which man
+     foresaw not, is solving a dark problem of the past, and we may well
+     look on with awe and wonder. There were thousands of minds which
+     apprehended the downfall of the 'peculiar institution.' There were
+     a prophetic few, who clearly perceived that it would be purged away
+     by no milder scourge than that of war. But there were none who
+     dreamed that the slaveholder would be the Samson to bring down the
+     atrocious system of human slavery by madly taking arms in its
+     defence! Yet so it was; and the Divine penalty is before us. The
+     wrath of man has worked out the retributive justice of God. The
+     crime which a country would not put away from it has ended in war,
+     and slavery is a ruin.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LITERARY NOTICES unavoidably postponed until the ensuing issue of THE
+CONTINENTAL.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5,
+November 1864, by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***
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