66

Nothing," said Moses; "I suppose I must sell my best horse, if you can't do without the money; but then I can't take you to town, you know, with my one horse and sighing heavily he went out of the house, and sat alone with the moon and the winds.

And the horse was sold, and Mrs. Wolfe wore the new cuffs, and went to town in the public coach; everybody said it was strange Moses could not take his wife to town in a private carriage, but he had become a strange man and could not be expected to do as other folks did.

Mrs. Wolfe did not come home in the coach the horses were frightened, ran away on the way to town, and she was thrown from her seat and killed.

Those who wish to read the particulars of this frightful calamity, will find them all recorded in "The Incorruptible Democrat," the editor of which applied to the subject the moving rhetoric with which he painted the ruin of his country, in case of his party's defeat, and printed his article with an abundance of exclamation points, italics, small and large capitals, and other sensational indications, as was perfectly proper. I will not here dwell upon so melancholy a catastrophe.

"I wonder if Moses will not reflect on himself now," said the neighbors. They were curious to see how he would get along, now that he had nobody to help him. They supposed he would break quite down and very soon follow his wife. In all the country no one had ever so large a funeral as Mrs. Wolfe, or was so generally and so deeply mourned.

Many came to condole with, Moses, telling him he must cheer up and be comforted; he had good friends still, though he could never hope to supply the place of his angel wife.

And Moses Wolfe did cheer up, and he was comforted; not till after a season of deep affliction, it is true; yet earlier than he ought, people said, he began to think his home not altogether desolate; and he was no sooner seen to smile, and to wear a new hat, than it was thought he was "sprucing up " for a new wife. If he could have sunk lower in the estimation of his neighbors than previously, he would have done so now; but that was quite impossible.

Passing by his house one afternoon, Mrs. Speed saw Moses whitewashing the fence about the yard; she saw that the

dead trees were gone, and that some new shrubbery had been planted. That night she and Mrs. Weed drank tea together, and said many things about Moses Wolfe and Anne Hadly, which I need not repeat. Mrs. Speed did not see Anne as she passed the house, but she knew well enough from the looks of things she was there; she thought, too, Moses was growing younger every day, and she did not think it looked very well for a widower to smile and bow as he did. Of course, neither Mrs. Speed nor Mrs. Weed cared one straw what Moses Wolfe did, nor what Anne Hadly did; it was none of their business; but really it did look too bad. They talked of Anne's age again, and this time established it to their entire satisfaction that she was forty-five and a half years old.

The apples were red in the orchard; it was September, and it was his own orchard now-the farm was paid for. The young housekeeper was gone: Anne had learned that it had been her habit to carry home, without leave, sugar, coffee, tea, butter, &c., enough to supply a family of five persons. No wonder Moses had not got along! she thought. The horse Moses had sold so reluctantly, had been bought back again; the corn was ready to gather, the wheat and hay harvest had been good, and the house was as clean and orderly as a house could be. Two lighted candles were on the table, where baked apples and milk, and broiled chicken and steaming tea waited the coming in of the master of the house. Walking quite erect, and looking more as he did when a young man than she had seen him for years, Anne thought, Moses came in; but she looked thoughtful and felt sad.

When Moses inquired what she was thinking of, she answered, looking thoughtfully at her plate, "You must get a housekeeper." Moses looked thoughtful, too, for a moment, left the table in silence, unlocked an old chest, and taking from it a bunch of withered flowers, laid them in Anne's lap, saying with such tenderness and seriousness as I cannot write:-"Twenty years ago, dear Anne, I went a mile out of my way, when the work was done, to gather these flowers for you: you would not take them then, and in spite and vexation I—But no matter will you have them now ?"

Anne bent her head lower and lower

over the flowers, and Moses bent lower and lower over her, to hear what she would say, till his lips quite touched her forehead. I need scarcely say her sighs ended in blushes and smiles, and that that supper was not the last by a great many which they ate together.

When the neighbors once became reconciled, they said, one and all, they wished Moses and his wife happy, and thought the marriage prudent; but of course there was no love in the case. Anne, they said, was a poor old maid who wanted a home, and Moses a widower who needed a housekeeper, and who would have had anybody who came in his way.

So much for appearances.

[For the National Magazine.]

DERIVED MEN AND RADICAL MEN.

VIEWED

as actors in society, men may be divided into two great orders, in one of which each individual, as to all the essentials of character, is found to be many times repeated; while, in the other, every man stands out by himself as a bold, earnest, and self-possessed unit. In other words, society is made up of derived men and radical men. Of the first order, a single example may be taken as a representative of the whole, and a single picture will contain all the features that belong to it. But of the other, there need to be just as many separate pictures as the order contains individuals; since every radical man possesses a peculiar personality or self, which cannot be repeated in any other man. These two sorts of men have figured as cotemporaries at every stage of human history, and have exerted their respective influences on the world. Let us spend a little time in discovering the leading characteristics of each.

By a derived man, we mean a man who has no firmly-rooted manhood. He is, in a true sense, not a being, but merely an imitation of being. He has no fixed and impregnable self. He is more a manikin than a man. His character, in all its capital features, is, in fact, not his own, but is the result of innumerable decimations and copyings. He is an induced, rather than an educed man. He thinks other men's thoughts. His own soul never feels the birth of an original idea. His view is limited entirely to the surface

world. His mind feeds on appearances mainly. His theories take their whim from the images made upon the retina of his eye, and the vibrations communicated to the tympanum of his ear. He is a faithful reverencer and commemorator of the past, and, to his view, distance lends a powerful enchantment. He dreams vividly of classic Greece, and olive-growing France, and wild Switzerland, and sunny Italy; and in his childish veneration for the antique and the distant, he fancies that a respectable man on this side of the ocean can never be a genius until he has picked up some relic of barbarism in the old Vatican of Rome, or snuffed muskmelon perfumes along the Nile.

He will

He is, besides, a bookish man. name over to you his chosen authors; but you find that his circle is made up of such as impose the lightest tax on the intellect of the reader. He writes down on paper only what he has read from paper. Every period he reels off would convict him of plagiarism. He has no settled style of his own, writes fast, blots but little, and thanks his stars for the quotation privilege. He worries his reader with a long, drizzling rain of rhetoric, unenlivened by a single flash of keen, quick-thrilling lightning, and unbroken by a solitary peal of grand and hearty thunder. His works are soon out of the way and forgotten.

He speaks affectedly, and with no native force. You tire under his spiritless elocution, as under the tedious monotony of revolving machine-wheels. He stirs you with no blunt spontaneities of manner, overwhelms you with no rich hurrying gushes of extemporary eloquence. His forced gesticulations and speechless eyes soon betray the unsuccessful man-mimic, and you retire from his presence with disappointment and disgust.

His actions are alike spiritless and stillborn. He is a moving automaton-a ceremony on feet. His best deeds smack of the fashionable etiquette of the day, just as the preserves of harvest-fruit do of sugar and lemon. He dresses according to fashion, talks according to fashion, studies according to fashion, votes according to fashion, goes to church according to fashion, gives alms according to fashion, believes, prays, and preaches according to fashion. He is a man of fashion from head to heart, and from heart to limb; from the quality of a thought to the cut

of a finger-nail.

man.

Self

Let us notice now some of the characteristics of the radical man. He is, as the term implies, a man from nature. He has an innate and indomitable self or soul on which he relies, whatever be the occasion. This immovable self is his genius. By this is he nerved and sustained, made indefatigable in labor, defiant of opposition, and brave in the hour of conflict. development is his aim and his education. Like Milton, he calls the faculties of his being not his, nor another's, but him. His thoughts are new and strange thoughts, that come leaping hot from his inmost soul, like shouting victors from a battlefield. He is a desperate thinker. His books go down to posterity over the ruins of libraries of tinsel tomes. One word of his can chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight. He writes not for money, not for stupid praise. He writes his own great self down on paper to be read by the world. His peerless soul glows and gleams there on every leaf. These are his own thoughts, his own beliefs, his own ideals of truth. He scorns to copy; he despises plagiarism. To walk, and commune, and wrestle with nature, is his highest ambition, and the very joy of his existence.

He is no blusterer, no fanatic. He goes forth to his work with a calm forehead and a still, small voice, yet with steadfast hope and invincible courage. Other men faint with despair, and forsake their purposes; but he presses on in spite of all obstacles. Other men joined hands with Luther; but no one, save Luther, was sufficient for the Protestant Reformation. Other men suffered with the Puritan pilgrims, but, they only had courage to dare the deep, and pilot toward the land of deliverance.

It was this same radical man who invented the telescope, and the compass, and the printing-press, and the lightning-rod, and the steam-engine, and the magnetic telegraph, and every other great instrument of human improvement. He is the great Napoleon of human progress. On his stout and stubborn manhood the nations lean like little children on a father. All that is strong, and enduring, and excellent in civilization, bears the marks of his fingers, and partakes of the power of his genius. Just in proportion to the num

His thoughts and feelings, and often his beliefs, pass into other men, and become a part of their very being. Above all, does he communicate his heroism. Thus Socrates, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Epicurus, each gathered about him a sect, every man of whom thought his thoughts, felt his feelings, believed his beliefs, and partook of his heroism. Thus, too, Napoleon, as he often boasted, picked his generals up out of the mud, and made them Napoleonic; and thus Washington came to be surrounded, in the revolution, by an army of Washingtons. The radical man, in some sense, even possesses the whole world with his spirit. Death is not the end of this man's life. Though scarcely appreciated, it may be, in his day, yet, as Lord Bacon said of himself, his name and memory will surely be treasured up" after some time be passed over." The sweep of revolutions, and the coming in of new economies, cannot efface the record of his genius. After men have buried him up beneath the ground, he lives on in human tradition. But few men have ever read Shakspeare; yet who does not know his name by heart? Who does not feel that Shakspeare is a part of his very being? That great man's memory has become an eternal presence. His spirit, like an imponderable agent, envelops the whole world. The blood of every generation of men that has existed since his own has been instinct with his genius; and were it possible to blot out every shining word he wrote while living, Shakspeare would still live on, and his memory would be fresh a thousand years hence.

It has been a growing fault of all the later ages of the world, that men have exhibited too little pride in true radicalism

of character. Now, it would seem, that there are but a very few genuine men left to stand up between the past and the present, in the glory of their God-given manhood, like those grand old mountains of the world, whose lofty tops have never been striated and scoured down by driftagency. And these few surviving examples of the olden heroism, you will today hear spoken of out in the world, under the title of "eccentric characters." The phrase has a deeper meaning than most men are wont to suppose. In these days of fashionable man-mimicry, one can bear no truer honor than to deserve the name of being eccentric. Eccentric men are the very bone and sinew of society. If to be a deep and self-relying thinker, and a heroic, out-spoken declarer of one's thoughts; if to have courage to defy and shame down a popular wrong, at the risk of scorn, and ridicule, and reproach; if to retire with disgust from the surface-world, where pride, and avarice, and affectation, and deceit are rampant, and with a noble ambition to elevate and improve mankind, to seek the solitary walks of life, and struggle there alone with great purposes; if to be a bold, rugged, undaunted, unique man at all times and in all places; true to nature and true to nature's God honest, though the heavens fall; unswerving from duty, as the sun from its course; never stooping to do an unmanly deed, or speak a false word, or think a base thought-if to be, and to do thus, is eccentric, then eccentricity is the highest style of manhood, and an honor that cannot be bought at too dear a price.

The sixteenth century gave birth to two Englishmen, who were born only eight years apart, William Prynne and John Milton. Both these men were graduates of college, and inheritors alike of all the | learning and refinement of their time. But they were not the same men. Milton possessed strong radicalism of character, Prynne had none. Nothing can be more full of interest and instruction to the student of human nature than to notice the figure which each character made in the world.

It is almost needless to speak of the career and fame of John Milton. The force, and greatness, and sublimity of that genius which encircled his whole being, like a halo of ethereal glory, and showed itself, in all his aims and actions, while he

lived, have only been renewing the wonder and admiration of mankind through every succeeding generation. The name of Milton has passed into an eternal remembrance. Every system of moral philosophy, and every Christian's ideal of paradisiacal bliss that has been formed since he wrote his great work of works, has incorporated more or less of the maxims of his sublime wisdom and the divine visions of his lofty soul.

But what of his cotemporary Prynne? Away back, in one corner of D'Israeli's "Calamities of Authors," you will find the name and career of this singular man, honored, if honor it be, with a brief notice, under the significant title of" A Voluminous Author without Judgment." He wrote more than two hundred works, and was a martyr to his pen, ink, and paper. The chief work of the long lifetime of this ineffectual scribbler was a quarto, of eleven hundred pages, containing his arguments against theatrical exhibitions, and entitled the Histriomastix-a book which was seven years under the hand of the writer, and four years in press. Lord Cottington, amazed at this paragon of voluminosity, was provoked to the declaration, that "Prynne could not have written that work himself: he either assisted the devil, or was assisted by him." And a wit of his time, affected with like disgust at his habits of indefatigable application and research, without any appearance of genius or originality, made the significant remark of him, that "Nature makes ever the dullest beasts most laborious, and the greatest feeders."

Such was the career of a learned man, without any radicalism of character; or to speak, perhaps, more appropriately in the language of him who has rescued Prynne's abortive life from complete oblivion, "Such is the history of a voluminous author, whose genius was such, that he could write a folio much easier than a page; and who seldom dined that he might quote squadrons of authorities."

It cannot be said, in truth, that William Prynne survived his own generation. He left no lasting marks of his influence upon the world. His memory comes down to us of to-day; but as a solemn warning against presuming upon a life of great usefulness and enduring fame, on the ground of vast learning, unaccompanied by genuine radicalism of character.