THE FEAST OF HARVEST.

HE fair Earth smiled and turned herself and woke,
And to the Sun with nuptial greeting said:
:-

"I had a dream, wherein it seemed men broke
A sovran league, and long years fought and bled,
Till down my sweet sides ran my children's gore,
And all my beautiful garments were made red,

And all my fertile fields were thicket-grown,
Nor could thy dear light reach me through the air;
At last a voice cried, 'Let them strive no more!'
Then music breathed, and lo! from my despair
I wake to joy, —- yet would not joy alone!

"For, hark! I hear a murmur on. the meads, —
Where as of old my children seek my face,
The low of kine, the peaceful tramp of steeds,
Blithe shouts of men in many a pastoral place,
The noise of tilth through all my goodliest land;
And happy laughter of a dusky race

Whose brethren lift them from their ancient toil,
Saying: 'The year of jubilee has come;
Gather the gifts of Earth with equal hand;

Henceforth ye too may share the birthright soil, The corn, the wine, and all the harvest-home.'

"O, my dear lord, my radiant bridegroom, look!
Behold their joy who sorrowed in my dreams, -
The sword a share, the spear a pruning-hook ;
Lo, I awake, and turn me toward thy beams
Even as a bride again! O, shed thy light
Upon my fruitful places in full streams!

Let there be yield for every living thing;
The land is fallow, let there be increase
After the darkness of the sterile night;
Ay, let us twain a festival of Peace

Prepare, and hither all my nations bring!

The fair Earth spake: the glad Sun speeded forth,
Hearing her matron words, and backward drave
To frozen caves the icy Wind of the North,

And bade the South Wind from the tropic wave
Bring watery vapors over river and plain, —

And bade the East Wind cross her path, and lave The lowlands, emptying there her laden mist, — And bade the Wind of the West, the best wind, blow After the early and the latter rain,

And beamed himself, and oft the sweet Earth kissed, While her swift servitors sped to and fro.

Forthwith the troop that, at the beck of Earth,
Foster her children, brought a glorious store
Of viands, food of immemorial worth,

Her earliest gifts, her tenderest evermore.
First came the Silvery Spirit, whose marshalled files
Climb up the glades in billowy breakers hoar,

Nodding their crests, and at his side there sped The Golden Spirit, whose yellow harvests trail Across the continents and fringe the isles,

And freight men's argosies where'er they sail :

O, what a wealth of sheaves he there outspread!

Came the dear Spirit whom Earth doth love the best,
Fragrant of clover-bloom and new-mown hay,
Beneath whose mantle weary ones find rest,
On whose green skirts the little children play :
She bore the food our patient cattle crave.
Next, robed in silk, with tassels scattering spray,
Followed the generous Spirit of the Maize, —
And many a kindred shape of high renown
Bore in the clustering grape, the fruits that wave
On orchard branches or in gardens blaze,
And those the wind-shook forest hurtles down.

Even thus they laid a great and marvellous feast,
And Earth her children summoned joyously,
Throughout that goodliest land wherein had ceased
The vision of battle, and with glad hands free.

618

These took their fill, and plenteous measures poured,
Beside, for those who dwelt beyond the sea;

Praise, like an incense, upward rose to Heaven
and the autumnal Sun
For that full harvest,

-

Stayed long above, and ever at the board,

Peace, white-robed angel, held the high seat given,
And War far off withdrew his visage dun.

A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.

T is the misfortune of American

I biography

more or less provincial, and that, con-
trary to what might have been pre-
dicted, this quality in it predominates in
proportion as the country grows larger.
Wanting any great and acknowledged
centre of national life and thought,
our expansion has hitherto been rather
aggregation than growth; reputations
must be hammered out thin to cover so
wide a surface, and the substance of
most hardly holds out to the boundaries
of a single State. Our very history
wants unity, and down to the Revolu-
tion the attention is wearied and con-
fused by having to divide itself among
thirteen parallel threads, instead of be-
ing concentred on a single clew. A
sense of remoteness and seclusion
comes over us as we read, and we can-
not help asking ourselves, "Were not
these things done in a corner?" No-
toriety may be achieved in a narrow
sphere, but fame demands for its evi-
dence a more distant and prolonged
reverberation. To the world at large
we were but a short column of figures
in the corner of a blue-book, New Eng-
land exporting so much salt-fish, tim-
ber, and Medford rum, Virginia so
many hogshead of tobacco, and buying
with the proceeds a certain amount of
The story of
English manufactures.
our early colonization. had a certain
moral interest, to be sure, but was alto-
gether inferior in picturesque fascina-
tion to that of Mexico or Peru. The

lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in saying,

Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo";

His

but all the while he has the splendid
centuries of Greece and Rome behind
him, and can begin his poem with in-
voking a goddess from whom legend
derived the planter of his race.
eyes looked out on a landscape satu-
rated with glorious recollections; he
had seen Cæsar, and heard Cicero. But
who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato
- with Israel Putnam
Four Corners,
or Return Jonathan Meigs? We have
been transplanted, and for us the long
hierarchical succession of history is
broken. The Past has not laid its ven-
erable hands upon us in consecration,
conveying to us that mysterious influ-
ence whose force is in its continuity.
We are to Europe as the Church of
England to her of Rome. The latter
old lady may be the Scarlet Woman,
will,
or the Beast with ten horns, if you

-

but hers are all the heirlooms, hers
that vast spiritual estate of tradition,
nowhere yet everywhere, whose reve-
nues are none the less fruitful for being
levied on the imagination.
We may
claim that England's history is also
ours, but it is a de jure, and not a de
facto property that we have in it,
something that may be proved indeed,
yet is a merely intellectual satisfaction,
and does not savor of the realty. Have
we not seen the mockery crown and
sceptre of the exiled Stuarts in St.
Peter's? the medal struck so lately as
1784 with its legend, HEN IX MAG
BRIT ET HIB REX, whose contractions
but faintly typify the scantness of the
fact?

As the novelist complains that our
society wants that sharp contrast of
character and costume which comes of
caste, so in the narrative of our his-
torians we miss what may be called
background and perspective, as if the
events and the actors in them failed of
that cumulative interest which only a
long historical entail can give. Rela-
tively, the crusade of Sir William Pep-
perell was of more consequence than
that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us,
injured shade of the second American
baronet, if we find the narrative of Join-
ville more interesting than
spatches to Governor Shirley. Rela-
your de-
tively, the insurrection of that Daniel
whose Irish patronymic Shea was eu-
phonized into Shays, as a set-off for
the debasing of French chaise into
shay, was more dangerous than that of
Charles Edward; but for some reason
or other (as vice sometimes has the
advantage of virtue) the latter is more
enticing to the imagination, and the
least authentic relic of it in song or
story has a relish denied to the painful
industry of Minot. Our events seem
to fall short of that colossal proportion
which befits the monumental style.
Look grave as we will, there is some-
thing ludicrous in Counsellor Keane's
pig being the pivot of a revolution.
We are of yesterday, and it is to no
purpose that our political augurs divine
from the flight of our eagles that to-mor-

619

row shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail hereafter. Things do really great and cosmopolitan stage, because gain in greatness by being acted on a audience, and the nearer match that there is inspiration in the thronged puts men on their mettle. Webster than Fox, and Fisher Ames not much was more largely endowed by nature below Burke as a talker; but what a difference in the intellectual training, in the whole social outfit, of the men in the literary culture and associations, panions! who were their antagonists and comcollision with other minds and with It should seem that, if it be events that strikes or draws the fire might have something to do with the from a man, then the quality of those quality of the fire, - whether it shall be culinary or electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the inexoranity of a great metropolis, the inspiring ble criticism, the many-sided opportureinforcement of an undivided national consciousness. In everything but trade eign rivalry. We may prove that we we have missed the invigoration of forFourth-of-July orators have proved it are this and that and the other, our it; but the Muses are women, and have time and again,-the census has proved easily silenced by them. We are great, no great fancy for statistics, though we are rich, we are all kinds of good that somehow we are not interesting, things; but did it never occur to you safely be affirmed that for one cultiexcept as a phenomenon? vated man in this country who studies American, there are fifty who study European history, ancient or modern.

It may

Till within a year or two we have of Europe as Ecuador to our own. been as distant and obscure to the eyes Every day brings us nearer, enables us to see the Old World more clearly, and by inevitable comparison to judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is, as for a long be little better than apes and parrots time it must be, European; for we shall till we are forced to measure our mus