at the age of seventeen to a blacksmith. He had acquired, however, a taste for the observations written in books from the narratives of the old revolutionary soldiers who came to his father's house. He wished to know more, and life thus taught him the use of books. When his apprenticeship was ended he studied with his brother, who, driven from his career as a schoolmaster at the South, had returned to establish himself in this capacity in his native town, learning something of Latin, French, and Mathematics. At the end of six months he returned to the forge, watching the castings in the furnace with a copy of the Greek grammar in his hand. He took some intervals from his trade for the study of his favorite grammars, gradually adding to his stock of languages till he attacked the Hebrew. To procure oriental books he determined to embark from Boston as a sailor, and spend his wages at the first European port in books, but was diverted from this by the inducements of the library of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester, the happily endowed institution of Isaiah Thomas, in a thrifty manufacturing town which offered employment for his arm as well as his brain. Here, in 1837, he forged and studied, recording in his diary such entries as these. Monday, June 18, headache; forty pages Cuvier's Theory of the Earth, sixtyfour pages French, eleven hours forging. Tuesday, sixty-five lines of Hebrew, thirty pages of French, ten pages Cuvier's Theory, eight lines Syriac, ten ditto Danish, ten ditto Bohemian, nine ditto Polish, fifteen names of stars, ten hours forging."

66

When the overwearied brain was arrested by a headache he worked that off by a few hours' extra forging.

Thus on his sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.

A letter to a friend inquiring for employment as a translator of German, and telling his story, reached Edward Everett, then Governor of Massachusetts, who read the account at a public meeting, and Burritt became at once installed among the curiosities of literature. He was invited to pursue his studies at Harvard, but he preferred the forge at Worcester, airing his grammatical knowledge by the publication of a monthly periodical to teach French entitled The Literary Gemini. This was published in 1839 and continued for a year. In 1840 he commenced as a lecturer, one of the few profitable avenues of literary occupation open in the country, which he has since pursued with distinguished success. He translated Icelandic sagas and papers from the Samaritan, Arabic, and Hebrew, for the Eclectic Review, still adding to his stock of languages. In 1844 he commenced at Worcester a paper called The Christian Citizen, in which he was diverted from philology to philanthropy, advocating peace and fraternity. He published his Olive Leaves at this time from the same office. He became engaged in circulating a mutual system of addresses in behalf of peace between England and America, and in 1846 was the proprietor and editor of The Peace Advocate. His Bond of Brotherhood was a periodical tract which he circulated among travellers. In the same year he went to England, where he enjoyed a cordial reception and full employment among the philanthropists, writing for

Douglas Jerrold's weekly newspaper, and forming peace associations. One of his latest employments of this kind was the distribution, in 1852, of a series of " friendly addresses" from Englishmen through the different departments of France.

Burritt's latest publication (1854) is entitled Thoughts and Things at Home and Abroad, a collection of various contributions to the press, written with a certain enthusiasm, without exactness of thought and expression, in the form of sketches, and covering the favorite topics of the writer in war, temperance, and kindred subjects.

80.

WHY I LEFT THE ANVIL.

I see it, you would ask me what I have to say for myself for dropping the hammer and taking up the quill, as a member of your profession. I will be honest now, and tell you the whole story. I was transposed from the anvil to the editor's chair by the genius of machinery. Don't smile, friends, it was even I had stood and looked for hours on those thoughtless, iron intellects, those iron-fingered, sober, supple automatons, as they caught up a bale of cotton, and twirled it in the twinkling of an eye, into a whirlwind of whizzing shreds, and laid it at my feet in folds of snow-white cloth, ready for the use of our most voluptuous antipodes. They were wonderful things, those looms and spindles; but they could not spin thoughts; there was no attribute of Divinity in them, and I admired them, nothing more. They were excessively curious, but I could estimate the whole compass of their doings and destiny in finger power; so I am away and left them spinning

cotton.

One day I was tuning my anvil beneath a hot iron, and busy with the thought, that there was as much intellectual philosophy in my hammer as in any of the enginery agoing in modern times, when a most unearthly screaming pierced my ears: I stepped to the door, and there it was, the great Iron Horse! Yes, he had come looking for all the world like the great Dragon we read of in Scripture, harnessed to half a living world and just landed on the earth, where he stood braying in surprise and indignation at the "base use" to which he had been turned. I saw the gigantic hexiped move with a power that made the earth tremble for miles. I saw the army of human beings gliding with the velocity of the wind over the iron track, and droves of cattle travelling in their stables at the rate of twenty miles an hour towards their city-slaughter-house. It was wonderful. The little busy bee-winged machinery of the cotton factory dwindled into insignificance before it. Monstrous beast of passage and burden! it devoured the intervening distance, and welded the cities together! But for its furnace heart and iron sinews, it was nothing but a beast, an enormous aggregation of-horse power. And I went back to the forge with unimpaired reverence for the intellectual philosophy of my hammer. Passing along the street one afternoon I heard a noise in an old building, as of some one puffing a pair or bellows. So without more ado, I stepped in, and there, in a corner of a room, I saw the chef d'oeuvre of all the machinery that has ever been invented since the birth of Tubal Cain. In its construction it was as simple and unassuming as a cheese press. It went with a leverwith a lever, longer, stronger, than that, with which Archimedes promised to lift the world.

"It is a printing press," said a boy standing by the ink trough with a queueless turban of brown paper on his head. "A printing press!" I queried musingly to myself. "A printing press? what do you print!" I asked. "Print?" said the boy, staring at

me doubtfully, "why we print thoughts." "Print thoughts!" I slowly repeated after him; and we stood looking for a moment at each other in mutual admiration, he in the absence of an idea, and I in pursuit of one. But I looked at him the hardest, and he left another ink mark on his forehead from a pathetic motion of his left hand to quicken his appre hension of my meaning. "Why, yes," he reiterated, in a tone of forced confidence, as if passing an idea, which, though having been current a hundred years, might still be counterfeit, for all he could show on the spot, "we print thoughts, to be sure." But, my boy," I asked in honest soberness, "what are thoughts, and how can you get hold of them to print them?" "Thoughts are what come out of the people's minds," he replied. "Get hold of them, indeed? Why minds arn't nothing you can get hold of, nor thoughts either. All the minds that ever thought, and all the thoughts that minds ever made, wouldn't make a ball as big as your fist. Minds, they say, are just like air; you can't see them; they don't make any noise, nor have any color; they don't weigh anything. Bill Deepcut, the sexton, says, that a man weighs just as much when his mind has gone out of him as he did before.-No, sir, all the minds that ever lived wouldn't weigh an ounce troy."

Then how do you print thoughts?" I asked. "If minds are thin as air, and thoughts thinner still, and make no noise, and have no substance, shade, or color, and are like the winds, and more than the winds, are anywhere in a moment; sometimes in heaven, and sometimes on earth and in the waters under the earth; how can you get hold of them? how can you see them when caught, or show them to others?"

Ezekiel's eyes grew luminous with a new idea, and pushing his ink-roller proudly across the metallic page of the newspaper, replied, "Thoughts work and walk in things what make tracks; and we take them tracks, and stamp them on paper, or iron, wood, stone, or what not. This is the way we print thoughts. Don't you understand?"

The pressman let go the lever, and looked interrogatively at Ezekiel, beginning at the patch on his stringless brogans, and following up with his eye to the top of the boy's brown paper buff cap. Ezekiel comprehended the felicity of his illustration, and wiping his hands on his tow apron, gradually assumed an attitude of earnest exposition. I gave him an encouraging wink, and so he went on.

66

Thoughts make tracks," he continued impressively, as if evolving a new phase of the idea by repeating it slowly. Seeing we assented to this proposition inquiringly, he stepped to the type-case, with his eye fixed admonishingly upon us. "Thoughts make tracks," he repeated, arranging in his left hand a score or two of metal slips, " and with these here letters we can take the exact impression of every thought that ever went out of the heart of a human man; and we can print it too," giving the inked form a blow of triumph with his fist, we can print it too, give us paper and ink enough, till the great round earth is blanketed around with a coverlid of thoughts, as much like the pattern as two peas.' Ezekiel seemed to grow an inch at every word, and the brawny pressman looked first at him, and then at the press, with evident astonishment. "Talk about the mind's living for ever!" exclaimed the boy, pointing patronizingly at the ground, as if mind were lying there incapable of immortality until the printer reached it a helping hand, "why the world is brimful of live, bright, industrious thoughts, which would have been dead, as dead as a stone, if it hadn't been for boys like me who have run the ink rollers. Immortality, indeed! why, people's minds," he con

tinued, with his imagination climbing into the profanely sublime, "people's minds wouldn't be ammortal if 'twasn't for the printers-at any rate, in this here planetary burying-ground. We are the chaps what manufacture immortality for dead men," he subjoined, slapping the pressman graciously un the shoulder. The latter took it as if dubbed knight of the legion of honor, for the boy had jut the mysteries of his profession in sublime apocalypse. "Give us one good healthy mind," resumed Izekiel, "to think for us, and we will furnish a dozen worlds as big as this with thoughts to order. Give us such a man, and we will insure his life; we will keep him alive for ever among the living. He can't die, no way you can fix it, when once we have touched him with these here bits of inky pewter. He shan't die nor sleep. We will keep his mind at work on all the minds that live on the earth, and all the minds that shall come to live here as long as the world stands."

Ezekiel," I asked, in a subdued tone of reve rence," will you print my thoughts too!"

64

"Yes, that I will," he replied, "if you will think some of the right kind."" Yes, that we will," echoed the pressman.

And I went home and thought, and Ezekiel has printed my "thought-tracks" ever since.

moved to Albany, where he has since resided. He married a daughter of Mr. Smith Weed, of that place, and has for several years held the appointment of state librarian.

A

Mr. Street commenced his literary career at an early age as a poetical writer for the magazines. His first volume, The Burning of Schenectady, and other Poems, was published in 1842. The leading poem is a narration of a well known incident of the colonial history of New York; the remaining pieces are of a descriptive character. second collection, Drawings and Tintings, appeared in 1844. It includes a poem on Nature, of decided merit in its descriptions of the phenomena of the seasons, which was pronounced by the author in 1840 before the Euglossian Society of Geneva College.

In 1849 Mr. Street published in London, and in the same year in this country, Frontenac, or the Atotarho of the Iroquois, a Metrical Romance, a poem of some seven thousand lines in the octosyllabic measure, founded on the expedition of Count Frontenac, governor-general of Canada, against the powerful Indian tribe of the Iroquois. The story introduces many picturesque scenes of Indian life, and abounds in passages of description of natural scenery, in the author's best vein of careful elaboration.

He

In 1842, a collection of the poems of Mr. Street, embracing, with the exception of a few juvenile pieces and the romance of Frontenac, all that he had written to that period, was published in New York. He has since contributed to various magazines a number of pieces sufficient to form a volume of similar size. has also written a narrative poem, of which La Salle is the hero, extending to some three thousand lines, which still remains in manuscript. He is besides the author of a number of prose tale sketches, which have appeared with success in the magazines of the day.

Mr. Street's poems are chiefly occupied with descriptions of the varied phases of American scenery. He has won a well merited reputation by the fidelity of his observation. As a descriptive writer he is a patient and accurate observer of Nature, daguerreotyping the effects of earth and air, and the phenomena of vegetable and animal life in their varions relation to the landscape. He has been frequently described by critics by comparison with the minute style of the painters of the Dutch school. Mr. Tuckerman, in an article in the Democratic Review, has thus alluded to this analogy, and to the home atmosphere of the author's descriptions of American nature:-"Street is a true Flemish painter, seizing upon objects in all their verisimilitude. As we read him, wild flowers peer up from among brown leaves; the drum of the partridge, the ripple of waters, the flickering of autumn light, the sting of sleety snow, the cry of the panther, the roar of the winds, the melody of birds, and the odor of crushed pine-boughs are present to our senses. In a foreign land his poems would transport us at once to home. He is no second-hand limner, content to furnish insipid copies but draws from reality. His pictures have th, freshness of origina's. They are graphic, detai ed, never untrue, and ofn vigorous; he is essentially an American poet."

THE SETTLER.

His echoing axe the settler swung
Amid the sea-like solitude,
And rushing, thundering, down were flung
The Titans of the wood;

Loud shrieked the eagle as he dashed
From out his mossy nest, which crashed
With its supporting bough,

And the first sunlight, leaping, flashed
On the wolf's haunt below.

Rude was the garb, and strong the frame
Of him who plied his ceaseless toil:
To form that garb, the wild-wood game
Contributed their spoil;

The soul that warmed that frame, disdained
The tinsel, gaud, and glare, that reigned
Where men their crowds collect;

The simple fur, untrimmed, unstained,
This forest tamer decked.

The paths which wound 'mid gorgeous trees, The streams whose bright lips kissed their flowers,

The winds that swelled their harmonies

Through those sun-hiding bowers,
The temple vast-the green arcade,
The nestling vale, the grassy glade,

Dark cave and swampy lair;
These scenes and sounds majestic, made
His world, his pleasures, there.

His roof adorned, a pleasant spot,

'Mid the black logs green glowed the grain, And herbs and plants the woods knew not, Throve in the sun and rain.

The smoke-wreath curling o'er the dell,
The low-the bleat-the tinkling bell,
All made a landscape strange,
Which was the living chronicle

Of deeds that wrought the change.
The violet sprung at Spring's first tinge,
The rose of Summer spread its glow,
The maize hung on its Autumn fringe,

Rude Winter brought his snow;
And still the settler labored there,
His shout and whistle woke the air,
As cheerily he plied

His garden spade, or drove his share
Along the hillock's side.

Ile marked the fire-storm's blazing flood
Roaring and crackling on its path,
And scorching earth, and melting wood,
Beneath its greedy wrath;
He marked the rapid whirlwind shoot,
Trampling the pine tree with its foot,

And darkening thick the day
With streaming bough and severed root,
Hurled whizzing on its way.

His gaunt hound yelled, his rifle flashed,

The grim bear hushed its savage growl,
In blood and foam the panther gnashed
Its fangs with dying howl;
The fleet deer ceased its flying bound,
Its snarling wolf foe bit the ground,

And with its moaning cry,
The beaver sank beneath the wound
Its pond-built Venice by.
Humble the lot, yet his the race!

When liberty sent forth her cry,
Who thronged in Conflict's deadliest place,
To fight-to bleed-to die.

Who cumbered Bunker's height of red,
By hope, through weary years were led,
And witnessed Yorktown's sun

Blaze on a Nation's banner spread, A Nation's freedom won.

AN AUTUMN LANDSCAPE.

A knoll of upland, shorn by nibbling sheep
To a rich carpet, woven of short grass
And tiny clover, upward leads my steps
By the seamed pathway, and my roving eye
Drinks in the vassal landscape. Far and wide
Nature is smiling in her loveliness,

Masses of woods, green strips of fields, ravines,
Shown by their outlines drawn against the hills,
Chimneys and roofs, trees, single and in groups,
Bright curves of brooks, and vanishing mountain
tops

Expand upon my sight. October's brush

The scene has colored; not with those broad hues
Mixed in his later palette by the frost,
And dashed upon the picture, till the eye
Aches with the varied splendor, but in tints
Left by light scattered touches. Overhead
There is a blending of cloud, haze and sky;
A silvery sheet with spaces of soft hue;
A trembling veil of gauze is stretched athwart
The shadowy hill-sides and dark forest-flanks;
A soothing quiet broods upon the air,

And the faint sunshine winks with drowsiness.
Far sounds melt mellow on the ear: the bark-
The bleat-the tinkle-whistle-blast of horn--
The rattle of the wagon-wheel-the low-
The fowler's shot-the twitter of the bird,
And e'en the hue of converse from the road.
The grass, with its low insect-tones, appears
As murmuring in its sleep. This butterfly
Seems as if loth to stir, so lazily

It flutters by. In fitful starts and stops
The locust sings. The grasshopper breaks out
In brief harsh strains; amidst its pausing chirps

The beetle glistening in its sable mail,

Slow climbs the clover-tops, and e'en the ant
Darts round less eagerly.

What difference marks
The scene from yester-noontide. Then the sky
Showed such rich, tender blue, it seemed as if
"Twould melt before the sight. The glittering

clouds

theological topics, which he collected in a volume of Critical and Miscellaneous Writings in 1843. In 1842 he published a treatise, A Discourse of Matters relating to Religion, in an octavo volume. It was the substance of a series of lectures delivered the previous season in Boston, and constituted a manifesto of the growing changes of the author in his doctrinal opinions, which had widely departed from points of church authority, the inspiration of the scriptures and the divine character of the Saviour. He had previously in May, 1841, startled his associates by his Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity, preached at the ordination of Mr. Charles C. Shackford, in Harris Place Church in Boston. Both these publications were met and opposed in the Christian Examiner.

Proscribed by the Unitarian Societies of Boston on account of the promulgation of his new views, Mr. Parker organized, by the aid of his friends, a congregation, which met in the old Melodeon in the city, and has since transferred itself to the ample accommodations of the new Music Hall. He has published a memorial of this change, in Two Sermons, on leaving an old and entering a new place of worship. His title, as appears from his printed discourses, is Minister of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society in Boston. In his new quarters he holds an independent service, delivering a weekly discourse on Sunday morning, frequently taking for his theme some topic of the times or point of morality. The questions of slavery, war, social and moral reforms of various kinds, are discussed with much acute analysis, occasional effective satire, and a rather unprofitable reliance on the powers of the individual. As a practical teacher, he is in the unfortunate position of a priest without a church, and a politician without a state. Though he interweaves some elegance of fancy in his discourses, yet it is of a dry quality, a flower of a forced growth, and his manner and matter seem equally unaffected by tender poetic imagination. He has nothing of the air of hearty impulse of a democratic leader of revolutionary opinion, as might be supposed, from the drift of his printed discourses. As a speaker he is slow, didactic, positive, and self-sufficient.

Mr. Parker has published several series of discourses, entitled Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and

He has borne a prominent part in the agitation of the Fugitive Slave' Law, of which he is a vigorous denouncer. A number of his discourses on this and other social topics are included in his two volumes, Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, published in 1852. He also delivered an elaborate critical essay on the character of John Quincy Adams, immediately after the death of that statesman, and a similar discourse, remarkable for its severity, on Daniel Webster.

As a specimen of Mr. Parker's manner on a topic of more general agreement than most of his writings afford, we may cite a few passages from a sermon published by him in 1854 on

OLD AGE.

I cannot tell where childhood ends, and manhood begins; nor where manhood ends, and old age begins. It is a wavering and uncertain line, not straight and definite, which borders betwixt the two. But the outward characteristics of old age are obvious enough. The weight diminishes. Man is commonly heaviest at forty, woman at fifty. After that, the body shrinks a little; the height shortens as the cartilages become thin and dry. The hair whitens and falls away. The frame stoops, the bones become smaller, feebler, have less animal and more mere earthy matter. The senses decay, slowly and handsomely. The is not so sharp, and while it penetrates fureye ther into space, it has less power clearly to define the outline of what it sees. The ear is dull; the appetite less. Bodily heat is lower; the breath produces less carbonic acid than before. The old man consumes less food, water, air. The hands grasp less The lungs strongly; the feet less firmly tread. suck the breast of heaven with less powerful collapse. The eye and ear take not so strong a hold upon the world:

And the big manly voice,
Turning again to childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.

The animal life is making ready to go out. The very old man loves the sunshine and the fire, the armchair and the shady nook. A rude wind would jostle the full-grown apple from its bough, full-ripe, fullcolored, too. The internal characteristics correspond. General activity is less. Salient love of new things and of new persons, which bit the young man's heart, fades away. He thinks the old is better. He is not venturesome; he keeps at home. Passion once stung him into quickened life; now that gad-fly is no more buzzing in his ears. Madame de Stael finds compensation in Science for the decay of the passion that once fired her blood; but Heathen Socrates, seventy years old, thanks the gods that he is now free from that "ravenous beast," which had disturbed his philosophic meditations for many a year. Romance is the child of Passion and Imagination; the sudden father that, the long protracting mother this. Old age has little romance. Only some rare man, like Wilhelm Von Humboldt, keeps it still fresh in his bosom.

In intellectual matters, the venerable man loves to recall the old times, to revive his favorite old men, -no new ones half so fair. So in Homer, Nestor, who is the oldest of the Greeks, is always talking of the old times, before the grandfathers of men then living had come into being; "ot such as live in these degenerate days." Verse-loving John Quincy

Who pleased his childhood and informed his youth. The pleasure of hope is smaller; that of memory greater. It is exceeding beautiful that it is so. The venerable man loves to set recollection to beat the roll-call, and summon up from the grave the old time, "the good old time,"-the old places, old friends, old games, old talk, nay, to his ear the old familiar tunes are sweeter than anything that Mendelssohn, or Strauss, or Rossini can bring to pass. Elder Brewster expects to hear St. Martins and Old Hundred chanted in Heaven. Why not? To him Heaven comes in the long-used musical tradition, not in the neologies of sound.

*

Then the scholar becomes an antiquary; he likes not young men unless he knew their grandfathers before. The young woman looks in the newspaper for the marriages, the old man for the deaths. The young man's eye looks forward; the world is "all before him where to choose." It is a hard world; he does not know it: he works a little, and hopes much. The middle-aged man looks around at the present; he has found out that it is a hard world; he hopes less and works more. The old man looks back on the fields he has trod; "this is the tree I planted; this is my footstep," and he loves his old house, his old carriage, cat, dog, staff, and friend. In lands where the vine grows, I have seen an old man sit all day long, a sunny autumn day, before his cottage door, in a great arm-chair, his old dog couched at his feet, in the genial sun. The autumn wind played with the old man's venerable hairs; above him on the wall, purpling in the sunlight, hung the full clusters of the grape, ripening and maturing yet The two were just alike; the wind stirred the vine leaves, and they fell; stirred the old man's hair and it whitened yet more. Both were waiting The young for the spirit in them to be fully ripe. man looks forward; the old man looks back. How long the shadows lie in the setting-sun; the steeple a mile long reaching across the plain, as the sun stretches out the hills in grotesque dimensions. So are the events of life in the old man's consciousness.

more.

WILLIAM HAYNE SIMMONS-JAMES WRIGHT

SIMMONS.

DR. W. H. SIMMONS is a native of South Carolina, and at present a resident of East Florida. He is a graduate of the medical school of Philadelphia, but has never practised the profession. He published anonymously some years since at Charleston, an Indian poem, with the title, Onea, which contains descriptive passages of merit. Mr. Simmons is also the author of a History of the Seminoles. The following is from his pen :

THE BELL BIRD.*

Here Nature, clad in vestments rich and gay, Sits like a bride in gorgeous palace lone;

"It is generally supposed," says the Rev. R. Walsh, in his Notices of Brazil, "that the woods abound with birds whose flight and note continually enliven the forest, but nothing can be more still and solitary than everything around. The silence is appalling, and the desolation awful; neither are disturbed adds to the impression. Among the highest trees, and in the by the sight or voice of any living thing, save one-which only

deepest glens, a sound is sometimes heard so singular, that the noise seems quite unnatural. It is like the clinking of metals, as if two lumps of brass were struck together; and resembles sometimes the distant and solemn tolling of a church bell, struck at long intervals. This extraordinary sound proceeds from a bird called Araponga, or Quiraponga. It is about the