But my heart is very desolate To think that they are gone.

INDOLENCE.

Time! thou destroy'st the relics of the past,
And hidest all the footprints of thy march
On shattered column and on crumbled arch,
By moss and ivy growing green and fast.
Hurled into fragments by the tempest-blast,
The Rhodian monster lies: the obelisk,
That with sharp line divided the broad disc
Of Egypt's sun, down to the sands was cast:
And where these stood, no remnant-trophy stands,
And even the art is lost by which they rose:
Thus, with the monuments of other lands,

The place that knew them now no longer knows. Yet triumph not, oh, Time; strong towers decay, But a great name shall never pass away!

SPORT.

To see a fellow of a summer's morning,

With a large foxhound of a slumberous eye
And a slim gun, go slowly lounging by,
About to give the feathered bipeds warning,
That probably they may be shot hereafter,
Excites in me a quiet kind of laughter;
For, though I am no lover of the sport

Of harmless murder, yet it is to me
Almost the funniest thing on earth to see
A corpulent person, breathing with a snort,
Go on a shooting frolic all alone;

For well I know that when he's out of town,
He and his dog and gun will all lie down,

And undestructive sleep till game and light are flown.

STEPHEN GREENLEAF BULFINCH,

A UNITARIAN CLERGYMAN, and contributor to the collection of hymns in use in that denomination, was born in Boston, June 18th, 1809. At nine years of age he was taken to Washington, in the District of Columbia, where his father, Charles Bulfinch, had been appointed architect of the Capitol. He was graduated at the Columbian College, D. C., in 1826, and entered the Divinity School at Cambridge the following year. From 1830 to 1837, with some interruptions, he ministered as a Unitarian clergyman at Augusta, Georgia. After this he preached and kept school at Pittsburgh, Pa., for a short time, and was then engaged in similar relations for six years at Washington, D. C. In 1845 he became settled at Nashua, N. H., and in 1852 removed to Boston, where he has been since established.

His writings are a volume, Contemplations of the Saviour, published at Boston in 1832; a volume of Poems published at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1834; The Holy Land, issued in Ware's Sunday Library in 1834; Lays of the Gospel, 1845; a devotional volume, Communion Thoughts, 1852; with several sermons and contributions to the Magazines.

Father! these rocks are thine,
Of Thee the everlasting monument,
Since at thy glance divine,

Earth trembled and her solid hills were rent.
Thine is this flashing wave,

Poured forth by thee from its rude mountain urn,
And thine yon secret cave,

Where haply, gems of orient lustre burn.

I hear the eagle scream;

And not in vain his cry! Amid the wild
Thou hearest! Can I deem

Thou wilt not listen to thy human child?

God of the rock and flood!
In this deep solitude I feel thee nigh.
Almighty, wise and good,

Turn on thy suppliant child a parent's eye.

Guide through life's vale of fear

My placid current, from defilement free,
Till, seen no longer here,

It finds the ocean of its rest in Thee!

ROBERT CHARLES WINTHROP.

MR. WINTHROP is justly and honorably considered a representative man of Massachusetts. Tracing his descent through six generations of a family always eminent in the state, he arrives at the first emigrant of the name, John Winthrop, who became the first Governor of the colony, and who bore not only the truncheon of office but the pen of the chronicler.*

His son John, the Governor of Connecticut, was also a man of liberal tastes, was one of the founders of the Royal Society, and contributed to its proceedings and collections. His second wife was a step-daughter of Hugh Peters. Of his two sons, one of them, Fitz John, was Governor of Connecticut, and the younger, Wait Still (a family and not a fanciful Puritanical designation), became Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts. The latter left a son John, who renewed the connexion with the Royal Society and removed to England. His son John married in New England and was a gentleman of wealth and leisure, passing his time in New London, Conn. His son, Thomas Lindall Winthrop, in the fifth generation of the American founder of the family, filled the position of Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. He married a daughter of Sir John Temple, the associate of Franklin in England, and a grand-daughter of Governor James Bowdoin.

Thus honorably connected, in the direct and collateral branches of the family tree, Robert Charles Winthrop was born in Boston, May 12, 1809. He was educated at the Boston Latin school, and once, as "a medal boy,” received a set of books from the city authorities. He was graduated at Harvard in 1828. For the next three years he studied law with Daniel Webster. Being a man of fortune, with an inherited taste for public life, he chose employment in affairs of the state in preference to the more private pursuit of the law. He took a prominent part in military affairs as captain of the Boston Light Infantry and other civic stations of the kind. In 1834 he became a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature, and was speaker of its House of Representatives from 1838 till his election to Congress in 1840.

* Ante, vol. i. pp. 25–35.

Robe Minthrop .

After seven years' service in the national House of Representatives he was chosen its speaker for the sessions of 1848-9. In 1850 he was appointed by the executive of Massachusetts to succeed Webster in the Senate, when the latter withdrew to the office of Secretary of State under President Fillmore. In 1851 he was a candidate for the office of Governor of Massachusetts, and received 65,000 votes, the two other candidates receiving about 40,000 and 30,000 respectively; but an absolute majority being required for an election by the people, he was defeated by a coalition of the minority parties in the legislature.

Besides his political relations Mr. Winthrop is President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, of which his father was also President, and which he lately represented in 1854, delivering a speech of much ability at the semi-centennial anniversary of the New York Historical Society; a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and of other kindred institutions.

The claims to literary distinction of Mr. Winthrop are through his Addresses and Orations. A series of these is strung along the whole course of his public life; all marked by their careful execution, literary propriety, and marked utility. They are easy, natural, finished performances, whether addressed to the State Legislature or the larger audience of national Representatives; whether in the popular political meeting, at an Agricultural, Scientific, or Historical Anniversary, or at the brilliant Public Dinner The prominent trait of the orator and rhetorician, as he shows himself on these occasions, is self-command; command of himself and of his subject. In person at once lithe and full-formed, tall and erect, he speaks with plenary, distinct tone, without the least effort. Each thought takes its appropriate place in his skilful method, which seems rather the result of a healthy physique of the mind than of art. In temper he is moderate, as his counsels

in affairs of state have shown. This disposition is reflected in his discourses. The style has a tendency to expansion which might degenerate into weakness were it not relieved by the frequent points of a poetical or fanciful nature, at times of great ingenuity.

The Congressional speeches of Mr. Winthrop, with others of a special character, are included in a volume of Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions, published in 1852. It includes, besides his political efforts, his address on the laying the corner-stone of the national monument to Washington at the Seat of Government, July 4, 1848; his Maine Historical Society address on the life of James Bowdoin, and several educational and other themes. Since that volume was issued he has published his address before the association of the alumni of Harvard in 1852; a Lecture on Algernon Sidney before the Boston Mercantile Library Association in 1853; and in the same season his Lecture on Archimedes and Franklin, which gave the suggestion and impulse to the erection of a statue of Franklin in Boston.*

PEACE BETWEEN ENGLAND AND AMERICA.t

If it be a fit subject for reproach, to entertain the most anxious and ardent desire for the peace of this country, its peace with England, its peace with all the world, I submit myself willingly to the fullest measure of that reproach. War between the United States and Great Britain for Oregon! Sir, there is something in this idea too monstrous to be entertained for a moment. The two greatest nations on the globe, with more territorial possessions than they know what to do with already, and bound together by so many ties of kindred, and language, and commercial interest, going to war for a piece of barren earth! Why, it would put back the cause of civilization a whole century, and would be enough not merely to call down the rebuke of men, but the curse of God. I do not yield to the honorable gentleman in a just concern for the national honor. I am ready to maintain that honor, whenever it is really at stake, against Great Britain.as readily as against any other nation. Indeed, if war is to come upon us, I am quite willing that it should be war with a firstrate power-with a foeman worthy of our steel.

Oh! the blood more stirs,
To rouse a lion, than to start a hare.

If the young Queen of England were the veritable Victoria whom the ancient poets have sometimes described as descending from the right hand of Jupiter to crown the banner of predestined Triumph, I would still not shrink from the attempt to vindicate the rights of my country on every proper occasion. To her forces, however, as well as to ours, may come the cita mors," as well as the "Victoria lata." We have nothing to fear from a protracted war with any nation, though our want of preparation might give us the worst of it in the first encounter. We are all and always ready for war, when there is no other alternative for maintaining our country's honor. We are all and always ready for any war into which a Christian man, in a civilized land, and in this age of the world, can have the face to enter. But I thank God that there are very few such cases. War and honor are fast getting to have less and less to do with each other. The highest honor of any

country is to preserve peace, even under provocations which might justify war. The deepest disgrace to any country is to plunge into war under circumstances which leave the honorable alternative of peace. I heartily hope and trust, Sir, that in deference to the sense of the civilized world, in deference to that spirit of Christianity which is now spreading its benign and healing influences over both hemispheres with such signal rapidity, we shall explore the whole field of diplomacy, and exhaust every art of negotiation, before we give loose to that passion for conflict which the honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania seems to regard as so grand and glorious an element of the American character.

OBJECTS AND LIMITS OF SCIENCE.

There are fields enough for the wildest and most extravagant theorizings, within his own appropriate domain, without overleaping the barriers which separate things human and divine. Indeed, I have often thought that modern science had afforded a most opportune and providential safety-valve for the intellectual curiosity and ambition of man, at a moment when the progress of education, invention, and liberty, had roused and stimulated them to a pitch of such unprecedented eagerness and ardor. Astronomy, Chemistry, and more than all, Geology, with their incidental branches of study, have opened an inexhaustible field for investigation and speculation. Here, by the aid of modern instruments and modern modes of analysis, the most ardent and earnest spirits may find ample room and verge enough for their insatiate activity and audacious enterprise, and may pursue their course not only without the slightest danger of doing mischief to others, but with the certainty of promoting the great e. of scientific truth.

Let them lift their vast reflectors or refractors to the skies, and detect new planets in their hidingplaces. Let them waylay the fugitive comets in their flight, and compel them to disclose the precise period of their orbits, and to give bonds for their punctual return. Let them drag out reluctant satellites from "their habitual concealments." Let them resolve the unresolvable nebulæ of Orion or Andromeda. They need not fear. The sky will not fall, nor a single star be shaken from its sphere.

66

Let them perfect and elaborate their marvellous processes for making the light and the lightning their ministers, for putting a pencil of rays" into the hand of art, and providing tongues of fire for the communication of intelligence. Let them foretell the path of the whirlwind and calculate the orbit of the storm. Let them hang out their gigantic pendulums, and make the earth do the work of describing and measuring her own motions. Let them annihilate human pain, and literally "charm ache with air, and agony with ether." The blessing of God will attend all their toils, and the gratitude of man will await all their triumphs.

Let them dig down into the bowels of the earth. Let them rive asunder the massive rocks, and unfold the history of creation as it lies written on the pages of their piled up strata. Let them gather up the fossil fragments of a lost Fauna, reproducing the ancient forms which inhabited the land or the seas, bringing them together, bone to his bone, till Leviathan and Behemoth stand before us in bodily presence and in their full proportions, and we almost tremble lest these dry bones should live again! Let them put nature to the rack, and torture her, in all her forms, to the betrayal of her inmost secrets and confidences. They need not forbear. The founda

From an Address to the Alumni of Harvard University, 1852.

tions of the round world have been laid so strong that they cannot be moved.

But let them not think by searching to find out God. Let them not dream of understanding the Almighty to perfection. Let them not dare to apply their tests and solvents, their modes of analysis or their terms of definition, to the secrets of the spiritual kingdom. Let them spare the foundations of faith. Let them be satisfied with what is revealed of the mysteries of the Divine Nature. Let them not break through the bounds to gaze after the Invisible, lest the day come when they shall be ready to cry to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us!

VISIT OF CICERO TO THE GRAVE OF ARCHIMEDES.*

While Cicero was quæstor in Sicily, the first public office which he ever held, and the only one to which he was then eligible, being but just thirty years old, (for the Roman laws required for one of the humblest of the great offices of state the very same age which our American Constitution requires for one of the highest,)-he paid a visit to Syracuse, then among the greatest cities of the world."

The magistrates of the city, of course, waited on him at once, to offer their services in showing him the lions of the place, and requested him to specify anything which he would like particularly to see. Doubtless, they supposed that he would ask immediately to be conducted to some one of their magnificent temples, that he might behold and admire those splendid works of art with which,-notwithstanding that Marcellus had made it his glory to carry not a few of them away with him for the decoration of the Imperial City, Syracuse still abounded, and which soon after tempted the cupidity, and fell a prey to the rapacity, of the infamous Verres.

Or, haply, they may have thought that he would be curious to see and examine the ear of Dionysius, as it was called,-a huge cavern, cut out of the solid rock in the shape of a human ear, two hundred and fifty feet long and eighty feet high, in which that execrable tyrant confined all persons who came within the range of his suspicion,-and which was so ingeniously contrived and constructed, that Dionysius, by applying his own ear to a small hole, where the sounds were collected as upon a tympanum, could catch every syllable that was uttered in the cavern below, and could deal out his proscription and his vengeance accordingly, upon all who might dare to dispute his authority, or to complain of his cruelty.

Or they may have imagined perhaps, that he would be impatient to visit at once the sacred fountain of Arethusa, and the seat of those Sicilian Muses whom Virgil so soon after invoked in commencing that most inspired of all uninspired compositions, which Pope has so nobly paraphrased in his glowing and glorious Eclogue-the Messiah.

To their great astonishment, however, Cicero's first request was, that they would take him to see the tomb of Archimedes. To his own still greater astonishment, as we may well believe, they told him in reply, that they knew nothing about the tomb of Archimedes, and had no idea where it was to be found, and they even positively denied that any such tomb was still remaining among them.

But Cicero understood perfectly well what he was talking about. He remembered the exact description of the tomb. He remembered the very verses which had been inscribed on it. He remembered

* From the Lecture, "Archimedes and Franklin, " November 29, 1853.

the sphere and the cylinder which Archimedes had himself requested to have wrought upon it, as the chosen emblems of his eventful life. And the great orator forthwith resolved to make search for it himself.

Accordingly, he rambled out into the place of their ancient sepulchres, and, after a careful investigation, he came at last to a spot overgrown with shrubs and bushes, where presently he descried the top of a small column just rising above the branches. Upon this little column the sphere and the cylinder were at length found carved, the inscription was painfully decyphered, and the tomb of Archimedes stood revealed to the reverent homage of the illustrious Roman quæstor.

This was in the year 76 before the birth of our Saviour. Archimedes died about the year 212 before Christ. One hundred and thirty-six years, only, had thus elapsed since the death of this celebrated person, before his tombstone was buried up beneath briers and brambles, and before the place and even the existence of it were forgotten, by the magistrates of the very city, of which he was so long the proudest ornament in peace, and the most effective defender in war.

What a lesson to human pride, what a commentary on human gratitude, was here! It is an incident almost precisely like that which the admirable and venerable Dr. Watts imagined or imitated, as the topic of one of his most striking and familiar Lyrics:

Theron, amongst his travels, found

A broken statue on the ground;
And searching onward as he went,
He traced a ruined monument.

Mould, moss, and shades had overgrown

The sculpture of the crumbling stone,
Yet ere he pass'd, with much ado,
He guessed, and spelled out, Sci-pi-o.
"Enough," he cried; "I'll drudge no more
In turning the dull stoics o'er;

And after all, how richly, how surpassingly, was this local ingratitude and neglect made up to the memory of Archimedes himself, by the opportunity which it afforded to the greatest orator of the greatest Empire of antiquity, to signalize his appreciation and his admiration of that wonderful genius, by going out personally into the ancient graveyards of Syracuse, and with the robes of office in their newest gloss around him, to search for his tomb and to do honor to his ashes! The greatest orator of Imperial Rome anticipating the part of Old Mortality upon the gravestone of the great mathematician and mechanic of antiquity! This, surely, is a picture for mechanics in all ages to contemplate with a proud satisfaction and delight.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Was born at Salem, Massachusetts, of a family of whom we have some glimpses in one of his late prefaces. His earliest American ancestor came from England, in the early part of the seventeenth century, "a soldier, legislator, judge, a ruler in the church; " like the venerable Dudley "no libertine," in his opinions, since he persecuted the

Quakers with the best of them. His son was a man of respectability in his day, for he took part in the burning of the witches. The race established by these founders of the family, "from father to son, for above a hundred years followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray, and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire." From this old home at Salem, bleached and weatherbeaten, like most of the old houses there, Nathaniel Hawthorne went forth one day to College. He was a fellow student with Longfellow at Bowdoin, Maine, where he was graduated in 1825. His earliest acknowledged publications were his series of papers in the Token, from year to year; the popular annual conducted by Mr. S. G. Goodrich, who early appreciated the fine sensitive genius which adorned his pages -though the public, which seldom has any profound understanding of literature in a book of amusement, scarcely recognised the new author. A portion of these stories and essays were collected in a volume, with the title Twice Told Tales, in 1837. Longfellow reviewed the book with enthusiasm, in the North American; but the publication languished, and a second edition was rather urged by his friends than called for by the public, when it appeared with a second series of the Tales in 1842.

It was about this time that Hawthorne became connected for a while with the occupants of the Brook Farm at Roxbury; a community of literati and philosophers, who supported the freedom of a rural life by the independent labor of their hands. Hawthorne took part in the affair, dropped his pen for the hoe, and looked over the horns and bristles of the brutes it was his lot to provide for, to the humanities gathered around him. Though he spiritualized the affair quite beyond any recognition of its actual condition, Brook Farm was the seed, in his mind, of the Blithedale Ro

mance.

His next publication was The Journal of an African Cruiser, which he re-wrote from the MS. of his friend and college companion, Mr. Horatio Bridge, of the United States Navy. It is a carefully prepared volume of judicious observation of the Canaries, the Cape de Verd, Liberia, Madeira, Sierra Leone, and other places of interest on the West Coast of Africa.

Hawthorne had now changed his residence to Concord, carrying with him his newly married wife, Miss Peabody, where he occupied the Old Manse, which he has described with quaint and touching fidelity in the introduction to the further collection of his papers from the magazines, the New England, the American Monthly, and a new gleaning of the fruitful old Token-to which he gave the title, Mosses from an Old Manse. He lived in close retirement in this old spot, concentrating his mind upon his habitual fancies for three years, during which time, if we are to take literally, and it is probably not far from the truth, the pleasant sketch of his residences by his friend, Mr. G. W. Curtis, he was not seen by more than a dozen of the villagers.

In 1846 Mr. Polk was President, and Mr. Bancroft the historian Secretary of the Navy, when

The Old Manse.

Hawthorne's friends secured his appointment as Surveyor in the Custom-House at Salem. He held this post for a year, discharging its duties with unfailing regularity, and meditating the characters of his associates, as the event proved, when he was dismissed on a change of the political powers at Washington, and wrote The Scarlet Letter, in the preface to which he gives an account of his Custom-House Experiences, with a literary photograph of that honored building and its occupants.

The Scarlet Letter was at last a palpable hit, It was published by Ticknor & Co., and had been wisely enlarged at the suggestion of the author's friend, Mr. J. T. Fields, a member of the firm, from a sketch containing the germ of the story, to an entire volume.

The Scarlet Letter is a pyschological romance. The hardiest Mrs. Malaprop would never venture to call it a novel. It is a tale of remorse, a study of character, in which the human heart is anatomized, carefully, elaborately, and with striking poetic and dramatic power. Its incidents are simply these: A woman, in the early days of Boston, becomes the subject of the discipline of the court of those times, and is condemned to stand in the pillory and wear henceforth, in token of her shame, the scarlet letter A attached to her bosom. She carries her child with her to the pillory. Its other parent is unknown. At this opening scene her husband, from whom she had been separated in Europe, preceding him by ship across the Atlantic, reappears from the forest, whither he has been thrown by shipwreck on his arrival. He was a man of a cold intellectual temperament, and devotes his life thereafter to search for his wife's guilty partner, and a fiendish revenge. The young clergyman of the town, a man of a devout sensibility and warmth of heart, is the victim, as the Mephistophilean old physician fixes himself by his side, to watch over him and protect his health, an object of great solicitude to his parishioners, and, in reality, to detect his suspected secret, and gloat over his tortures. This slow, cool, devilish purpose, like the concoction of some sublimated hell broth, is perfected gradually and inevitably. The wayward, elfish child, a concentration of guilt

and passion, binds the interests of the parties together, but throws little sunshine over the scene. These are all the characters, with some casual introductions of the grim personages and manners of the period, unless we add the scarlet letter, which, in Hawthorne's hands, skilled to these allegorical, typical semblances, becomes vitalized as the rest. It is the hero of the volume. The denouement is the death of the clergyman on a day of public festivity, after a public confession, in the arms of the pilloried, branded woman. But few as are these main incidents thus briefly told, the action of the story, or its passion, is "long, obscure, and infinite." It is a drama in which thoughts are acts. The material has been thoroughly fused in the writer's mind, and springs forth an entire perfect creation.

The public, on the appearance of the Scarlet Letter, was for once apprehensive, and the whole retinue of literary reputation-makers fastened upon the genius of Hawthorne. He had retired from Salem to Berkshire, Massachusetts, where he occupied a small, charmingly situated farmer's house at Lenox, on the Lake called the Stockbridge Bowl. There he wrote the House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851, one of the most elaborate and powerfully drawn of his later volumes.

In the preface to this work Mr. Hawthorne establishes a separation between the demands of the novel and the romance, and under the privilege of the latter, sets up his claim to a certain degree of license in the treatment of the characters and incidents of his coming story. This license is in the direction of the spiritualities of the piece, in favor of a process semi-allegorical, by which an acute analysis may be wrought out, and the truth of feeling be minutely elaborated; an apology, in fact, for the preference of character to action, and of character for that which is allied to the darker elements of life-the dread blossoming of evil in the soul, and its fearful retributions. The House of the Seven Gables, one for each deadly sin, may be no unmeet adumbration of the corrupted soul of man. It is a ghostly, mouldy abode, built in some eclipse of the sun, and raftered with curses dark; founded on a grave, and sending its turrets heavenward, as the lightning rod transcends its summit, to invite the wrath supernal. Every darker shadow of human life lingers in and about its melancholy shelter. There all the passions allied to crine,-pride in its intensity, avarice with its steely gripe, and unrelenting conscience, are to be expiated in the house built on injustice. Wealth there withers, and the human heart grows cold: and thither are brought as accessories the chill glance of speculative philosophy, the descending hopes of the aged laborer, whose vision closes on the workhouse, the poor necessities of the humblest means of livelihood, the bodily and mental dilapidation of a wasted life.

A residence for woman, child and man,
A dwelling-place, and yet no habitation
A Home, but under some prodigious ban
Of excommunication.

O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!