resolved to recommend it to my own countrymen. On our prairies especially it would have a charming effect. It is not a grove or forest, such as we sometimes have about our prairie farm-houses, but a simple inclosure, designed with the precision of a fence or wall. A forest is not the place for a house; it is too exclusive and gloomy even on a prairie. Approaching the French farm-house by the gracefully curving alley of trees, you enter at last into this arbored circle or square. You find it incloses an acre or more, according to the size of the estate. Where there is a wealthy proprietor with several peasant families, his own mansion or chateau occupies the principal site, and the thatched chaumières of his laborers are placed in picturesque groups or lines among the trees behind it; while at the further angles or points of the inclosure are the out-houses, barns, and stables, half hid in the foliage. Sometimes the kitchen garden itself is within the inclosure. The effect of this arrangement is really beautiful, and it is also convenient and comfortable. The trees are so arranged as not to interfere with the crops by their shade. They break the fierceness of the winds. They are usually the tallest kind of fruit trees, deprived of their lower branches, in order not only to open a clearer view to the inclosed buildings, but to give a more upward growth to the remaining boughs and to enrich the fruit. They are far enough apart to admit whatever amount of light or sun may be desirable for either the houses or the gardens. Some of the out-houses are circled about by secondary inclosures of smaller trees, which add greatly to the beauty of the picture. Picture I call it, for it really is such; and I am frank to admit that the French people excel us as much in their good taste for such picturesque effects, as we do them in the energy and skill of our agricultural industry. If it is vandalism to disregard or destroy the monuments of taste and art, it is certainly no less a barbarism to treat, in like manner, the monuments and adornments of nature. I have seen not a few nations in my day, but I have seen nowhere more thoroughgoing vandalism of this kind than in the United States. In some of the states, however, an era of good taste has commenced; it shows itself especially in the improvement of our villa and cottage archi tecture. I take the liberty of suggesting this beautiful example of French ornamentation to my countrymen. It is susceptible of many fine modifications, and of any modifications which may be necessary to adapt it to utilitarian conditions. Planted with fruit trees, it would supply at once an orchard and an ornamental boundary. However dear other associations of our American rural homes may be, recollections of their appearance become very tame among the picturesque exteriors of European cottages and chateaux. We build the strictest, straightest, most mathematical, most ugly, most comfortable farmhouses on the earth-with rigorous angles, parallelogram doors and windows, and chimneys courageous and defiant in their grim stiffness. And then our universal superabundant white paint—how it begrimes our houses and our scenery! In our interiors, to be sure, we have comfort, for we have contrivance, as a people, if we have not taste; but comfort, in one sense of the term, is not the whole of enjoyment. On the contrary, as there is more enjoyment in the sentiments than in the senses, so is there more happiness in the demands of taste than in those of mere convenience. But the two are compatible, and hardly separable. We Americans nevertheless contrive, as of set purpose, to separate them. The lowliest houses of men, nearly everywhere else, show some regard to the picturesque. Look at the Swiss cottages, famous over the world for their charming, though sometimes fantastic irregularity; the peasant houses of France and Germany, all bearing their peculiar style, expressive and striking in their way, however humble; the cottages of England, with their thatched roofs, latticed windows, and woodbine and eglantine. Even the wigwam of the Indian is more picturesque than our whitened, stiff New-England exteriors. How would a little more curved work here, a slight projection there, a rounding off of this angle or the extension of that one, some other form than a rigid parallelogram for the casements, or of a naked mathematical square for the chimneyhow would a little more taste and liberality in any of these respects add to the beauty of our country homes? "But it would not be economical." That may be doubted, good sir; but suppose it costs a few more dollars, is it only to inclose ourselves that we build our "gracefulness," which is an idiosyncracy homes? Is it economical to spend only of the national mind. Personal cleanlion our accommodations? Are not grati- ness is seen everywhere, even among the fications legitimate demands of our nature lowest classes. Women unable to buy a -and stronger demands even in some bonnet wear the cap; it is often an heredrespects than conveniences? More useful itary article in the family; its style is too by their elevating influence upon our sometimes grotesquely antique, a part, it better susceptibilities. The purest utili- may be, of the costume of five hundred tarianism of nature is in the beautiful, and years ago. You see it in some places in a certain sense the same can be affirmed mounting above the head in a cambric of art. Nature, that is, in better words, turret at least two feet in height, or flapGod himself, everywhere refutes and defies ping above the ears in fans a foot square; our rigid and false utilitarianism. He in most cases, however, it now assumes the snug, coquettish modern style, but never, not even among the huckster women of the market or the streets, do you see it soiled; that, to a French woman, would be next to a soiled reputation, and even worse in some instances, perhaps. scatters ornament and beauty over all things; studs the heavens with stars, and decks the earth with flowers and beautiful outlines, its internal rocks with gems and precious stones, and even the depth of its seas with shells as varied and beautiful as the flowers of the field. Over all the other demonstrations of wisdom and goodness in His works, everywhere the beautiful shines, and first appeals to the observation of men. The most obvious lesson taught us by His works is to unite the beautiful with the useful, or rather to crown all humbler utility with the higher utility of the beautiful-to perfect the provisions for our necessities by provisions for our tastes. Old Plato uttered an admirable saying when he declared that "Beauty is the essential splendor of truth." The foreigner is puzzled in Paris to know what becomes of the poor-the suburban outcasts which seem inseparable from all other great cities. He sees nobody in rags. The blouse is, to be sure, a convenient cover for a multitude of such sins against Parisian good taste; but then the women do not wear the blouse, and the women are everywhere-and nowhere in rags. The fact that they are everywhere is a good reason, perhaps, why there is so little apparent poverty, or its usual English and American ragamuffin uniform. A hundred kinds of business done in other countries by men, whether in doors or out of doors, here belong to the women. They are clerks in the largest and the pettiest mercantile establishments. A Parisian merchant's wife is often his chief book-keeper, and knows his affairs a little better than he does himself. Don't Of our universal white paint it is necessary, I know, to speak considerately, if not respectfully. I must beg pardon of our good Eastern housewives for impeaching so favorite a predilection. No type of it can be found in nature, except in the hidden quarries, the wintry snows, a few of the flowers, and the sheep's back. It includes all the elementary rays of the sun-look equivocally at the fact, dear madam, beam, the philosophers tell us; but nature disguises it with other hues, even in light itself. No picture by a great artist ever presents a white cottage; it would be unpardonable, it would confound his ideal; it would be looked at askance by a plowboy from the whitest of the white cottages of New-England, as, some how or other, unnatural in a fine landscape. Natural tints are what genius always and instinctively selects for rural buildings on canvas. If we will not adopt a better architectural style in our cottage buildings, let us, at least, choose a better color. There is a noticeable love of neatness among these French people; it arises, I suppose, from its intimate alliance with VOL. VII.-22 for she is sometimes not only the truest man of the firm, but the accomplished Parisian lady as well as chief clerk-presiding at her husband's dinner parties, and in her evening saloon, with the grace of a countess. When we democrats from America enter the counting-houses, and whisper in the ear of the subordinate but fortunate husband our astonishment at this feminine surveillance, he shrugs his shoulders with still greater astonishment, and whispers back that it is the reason why there are fewer failures in France than in America; and that if we were reasonable enough to adopt it there would be fewer not only in America, but in France also. The government even employs female clerks I am told, and I have seen women in Rouen cleaning the streets, and always "tidy" too, for you must accept the affirmation (though I know it is absolutely incredible, to a New-Yorker at least) that the streets of French cities are cleaner than the side-walks of Broadway. I assure you, good reader, that I have not written a more soberly truthful line in this article than that assertion. I mean precisely what I say. You have at least dust, fragments of paper, and other flying remnants on your Broadway side-walks; but excepting the slightest, most unavoidable modicum of the first, there is soberly nothing of the kind here in Paris. The streets are nearly white in their bleached cleanness. Besides the labors of the city street-cleaners, the chiffoniers (rag-pickers) seize every fragment of paper, or of almost everything else, as soon as it appears. As the paving stones are not pebbles, but square blocks, you can walk upon them almost as well as upon the sidewalks; and owing to their absolute cleanness, the people hardly choose between them, except where there are many carriages. I know not the city regulations on the subject, nor the mode of street cleaning here; and the mystery is, that in Paris at least I can never, from daylight to midnight, catch a glimpse of a streetcleaner. I leave all these matters to the inquiries of his honor the mayor of NewYork; but were I before him "on oath," I could deliberately declare that in any five miles that I have walked in the streets of Paris, there could not be found the amount of garbage and filth which could be | seen before I left New-York, in hundreds of instances, within twice as many rods. A I have no doubt that this external neatness, this very cleanness of the streets, has as much to do, morally, with the tastes and habits of the people, as it has physiologically with their health. It is a great municipal education to cleanliness. Frenchman, with his extreme sensitiveness to fashion or custom, could not, of course, have his house-yard, or court-yard, or "interior," less neat than the open streets themselves. The result is, that wherever my gaze has penetrated I have seen no garbage: where it goes to and how it goes, are questions respecting which I remain in mysterious but "blissful ignorance." I have said that there was little extreme poverty seen here. It exists, doubtless, but it does not show itself as in other countries. Among us, especially, it luxuriates in its rags, and tears, and whining obsequiousness. I have been in France several months, and have not seen three beggars. Disabled persons-the blind, lame, aged-have a way of getting alms, but it is not by the disgusting obtrusion of their sufferings and imploring complaints. That would hardly suit French taste. They amuse you into liberality by some comic performance or artifice; or, if too sober in their temperament or sorrows for this, they treat you to sweet or sad music, (Partant pour la Syrie is now the vogue,) and often really good music, on harps, flutes, or violins. The omnipresent organ-grinder is here, but the Parisian street musician despises him; he is an ultramontanist, an Italian barbarian, and wanders about like an outcast spirit, seeking coppers and finding none. He generally vamoses to America-the paradise toward which the eye of all European beggary squints hopefully, as it is understood that among our other essential liberties is the full liberty to beg. Mendicity is prohibited generally in France, as it should be in all civilized states, except during periods of general scarcity or financial disaster. It exasperates only the evils of the poor. It is the most costly method by which a community can relieve its poor. It has no curative efficacy, but, like certain drugs, only relieves the sufferings of the moment-debilitating what strength remains, and aggravating the miseries of the future. The incessant applications for "cold victuals" made at our doors, in American cities, from daylight to sunset, would drive the Parisians "to arms" and a 66 revolution," if it were allowed by their government. You know no such annoyance here. A harp played under your window while you are rising, or in the twilight at evening, is, I assure you, a very agreeable substitute for it. A New-York family on arriving here feel emparadised in respect to this one deliverance at least. Whatever we may consider exceptionable in the social character of France, we must accord it one truly gracious and truly great excellence-it provides, better than any other nation on earth, for the multiform infirmities and calamities of humanity. Asylums for the poor, hospitals for the sick or disabled, retreats for old age, for little children; institutions for the insane, for mutes, for the blind, for the restoration of fallen women, for the instruction of idiots, abound here. The noble buildings devoted to these purposes alone in Paris, if put side by side, might form a city of themselves. To France, indeed, we owe most of our scientific ameliorations of these evils. I stumbled by accident, the other day, against an obscure tomb in Père-la-Chaise. Its tablet was small, but it needed no monument, for the name it recorded is inscribed on thousands of grateful hearts throughout the civilized world. It bore the illustrious name of the Abbé Sicard, and the alphabet of the dumb. It was erected by his pupils, and in one sentence spoke a whole oration, whose eloquence made the tears spring to my eyes: "He has made us men!" We owe to France, too, the initiation of the new treatment of the insane. The French were the first to change the prisons of these sufferers into homes-to disarm madness of more than half its horrors, by showing that it is among the most curable of diseases. The facilities they have provided for the education of the blind are known to all the world; and as for their hospitals for the sick, these, like their medical researches, are divided and subdivided into " specialities"—they are the most extensive and the best endowed in the world; and we may affirm, without a word of qualification, that the foremost medical skill on the earth now stands around the sick beds of the poor in the Parisian hospitals. It owes its supremacy to the fact that it is there. But these are all very favorable "Impressions," certainly; are there no contrasts? Yes, doubtless; but we are not yet half through the grateful enumeration of our favorable ones. We will look at both sides of the subject at another time. Meanwhile the warm breezes are stirring the trees of the Luxembourg beneath our window-the little Parisian children are gamboling through its green alleys with their blooming bonnes. Yonder comes a sister of charity with her hilarious infant school. What a pity that religion should thus, among these little ones, begrim both itself and her womanly beauty by those black weeds! Yonder strolls a gens d'armes, in happy oblivion of his duties; and there moves a soldier of the line, dreaming, perhaps, of Sebastopol. Look at that family group, embroidering and reading under the trees; how perfectly comfortable they seem: and behold that old couple advancing, feebly, arm-in-arm, toward the garden bench; they have been married, perhaps, a half century, and yet how mutually polite they are familiarity never diminishes respectfulness among this singular people; and how beautifully fresh and amiable old age preserves itself with their happy temperament and under their happy skies! It is a day to be abroad, and the French know well how to improve such days. See how they are thronging in at the gateways. Let us drop, then, the pen. Let us take a book and descend among them. Let us walk the shaded alleys with Chateaubriand, talking of "Attila" and "René," of the "Martyrs" and the "Génie du Christianism." Yonder among the trees is a marble statue of his "Veleda," and he walked these aisles himself in many a meditative hour. [For the National Magazine.] THE RAIN. THE day is cold, and dark, and drear, The rain that falls On castle walls, And ruins old and gray; On meadows fair, And mountains bare, And valleys green and gay. The clouds around the mountains lower, Grow pale and paler at the power Is pattering all the day :- H. L. SPENCER, GENTLE WORDS. USE gentle words, for who can tell [For the National Magazine.] CALIFORNIA. JALIFORNIA was discovered by Co It was first colonized by the Spaniards in 1768. It has been visited by several revolutions since the extermination of the Spanish power; and for several years previous to its occupancy by the United States troops in 1846, the authority of Mexico was very loose. It was ceded to this government by the treaty of 1848. General Vallejo, when endeavoring to portray the loveliness of Sonoma valley, declare it was the place where our Saviour was born! Abating all that is necessary for the exuberance of lively imaginations, there is yet enough left of reality in California to invest it with the glory of a semi-celestial land. We, who have been acquainted with its growth from the first, have mostly lost sight of much, just as we fail to be daily impressed with the stupendous glories of the sun, because we see them daily. We should look at the country as the captain of the Plover is said to have done. That exploring ship arrived at San Francisco in the latter part of 1854 from the Polar Sea, where she had been ice-bound since 1847. When she left San Francisco, seven years previously, it was a mere trading station, resorted to by a few vessels in pursuit of hides and tallow, and the village contained only a few houses. The captain and crew of the Plover expected to find the same San Francisco in 1854 that they left in 1847. They sailed into the bay without a pilot, and approached the city in the evening. But there was a strange phenomenon for which they could not account-there were hundreds of lights gleaming about the site of the old mudtown. When, the next morning, they awoke from their dream of seven years, they beheld a noble city, swarming with thousands of human beings. They had The nature of the country has been variously represented, according to the tastes and fortunes of describers. The unlucky have mostly abused it, while the successful have limited their praise by no bounds. No other country was ever talked of in greater extravagance. For illustration, I will relate a story which I heard concerning the life-giving power of the California climate. It was of a man who had lived in that country till he reached the great age of two hundred and fifty years! Such was the nature of the climate that, even at the end of this long period, he was in perfect health, and as supple as a boy. But he was tired of life. He wanted to die, and could not. He had thought of suicide, but the padres told him that was sinful; and as he was nominally a Christian, he concluded to banish it from his mind. But at last a lay friend (his heir perhaps) advised him to try the effects of another climate. Accordingly, he went to China and soon died. But he had pre-known nothing of the Mexican war, the viously bound his heir, under penalty of disinheritance, to remove his corpse to his own country for burial. So he was interred in California with due ceremony, the padres praying for his soul, and supposing it was on its way to heaven, while the heir was happy in the same conclusion. But no sooner was he inclosed in the lifegiving soil of that land, with the youthinspiring California zephyrs blowing over his grave, than he actually came to life, and, being endowed with Herculean strength, burst through the precincts of the tomb, and made his living appearance to his chop-fallen heir! The old man, finding himself unable even to stay dead in California, quietly submitted to his fate. Such extravagances, though absurd, have left impressions on hundreds of minds. Indeed, many of them, if not all, have their beginning in something real. I heard cession of California to the United States, and the many other great events which had taken place during the time they had been locked up in the frozen regions of the north. It was in the early part of May, 1852, that my eyes first looked on that golden land. When our proud vessel, majestically plowing the waters of the great Pacific like a thing of life, brought us alongside the shore, we all gazed anxiously and exclaimed, "This is California." The sight was by no means exhilarating. The place was rocky, sterile, depressed into ravines, and sharpened into peaks, which made it seem as the resort of owls, or the solitary residence of some Robinson Crusoe; and as the waters solemnly moved to and fro, each minute dashing against the shore, they appeared as singing the funeral dirge of a dead country, and kiss |