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perial. But pope, patriarch, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, and all the lesser glories, bore palm branches in their hands. Not veritable palm branches, but their imitation in turned yellow wood; and all through Rome that day, the palm branch was waving and hanging. Who could not see its beauty, even in the turned yellow wood? Who did not feel it was a sacred tree as well as romantic?

For palm branches were strewn before Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, and for ever, since, the palm symbolizes peace. Wherever a grove of palms waves in the low moonlight or starlight wind, it is the celestial choir chanting peace on earth, good will to men. Therefore is it the foliage of the old religious pictures. Mary sits under a palm, and the saints converse under palms, and the prophets prophesy in their shade, and cherubs float with palms over the Martyr's agony. Nor among pic tures is there any more beautiful than Correggio's Flight into Egypt, wherein the golden-haired angels put aside the palm branches, and smile sunnily through, upon the lovely Mother and the lovely child. The palm is the chief tree in religious remembrance and religious art. It is the chief tree in romance and poetry. But its sentiment is always Eastern, and it always yearns for the East. In the West it is an exile, and pines in the most sheltered gardens. Among Western growths in the Western air, it is as unsphered as Hafiz in a temperance society. Yet of all Western shores it is happiest in Sicily; for Sicily is only a bit of Africa drifted westward. There is a soft Southern strain in the Sicilian skies, and the palms drink its sunshine like dew. Upon the tropical plain behind Palermo, among the sun-sucking aloes, and the thick, shapeless cactuses, like elephants and rhinoceroses enchanted into foliage, it grows ever gladly. For the aloe is of the East, and the prickly pear, and upon that plain the Saracens have been, and the palm sees the Arabian arch, and the oriental sign-manual stamped upon the land.

In the Villa Serra di Falco, within sound of the vespers of Palermo, there is a palm beautiful to behold. It is like a Georgian slave in a pacha's hareem. Softly shielded from eager winds, gently throned upon a slope of richest green, fringed with brilliant and fragrant flowers, it stands separate and peculiar in the odorous garden air. Yet it droops and saddens, and bears no fruit. Vain is the exquisite environment of foreign fancies. The poor slave has no choice but life. Care too tender will not suffer it to die. Pride and admiration surround it with the best beauties, and feed it upon the warmest sun. But I heard it sigh as I passed. A wind blew warm from the East, and it lifted its arms hopelessly, and when the wind, love-laden with the most subtile sweetness, lingered, loth to fly, the palm stood motionless upon its little green mound, and the flowers were so fresh and fair-and the leaves of the trees so deeply hued, and the native fruit so golden and glad upon the boughs-that the still warm garden air seemed only the silent, voluptuous sadness of the tree; and had I been a poet my heart would have melted in song for the proud, piling palm.

But the palms are not only poets in the West, they are prophets as well. They are like heralds sent forth upon the farthest points to celebrate to the traveller the glories they foreshow. Like spring birds they sing a summer unfading, and climes where Time wears the year as a queen a rosary of diamonds. The mariner, eastward-sailing, hears tidings from the chance palms that hang along the couthern Italian shore. They call out to him across

the gleaming calm of a Mediterranean noon, "Thon happy mariner, our souls sail with thee."

The first palm undoes the West. The Queen of Sheba and the Princess Shemselnihar look then upon the most Solomon of Howadji's. So far the Orient has come-not in great glory, not handsomely, but as Rome came to Britain in Roman soldiers. The crown of imperial glory glittered yet and only upon the seven hills, but a single ray had penetrated the northern night-and what the golden house of Nero was to a Briton contemplating a Roman soldier, is the East to the Howadji first beholding a palm.

At Alexandria you are among them. Do not deery Alexandria as all Howadji do. To my eyes it was the illuminated initial of the oriental chapter. Certainly it reads like its heading-camels, mosques, bazaars, turbans, baths, and chibouques: and the whole East rows out to you, in the turbaned and fluttering-robed rascal who officiates as your pilot and moors you in the shadow of palms under the pacha's garden. Malign Alexandria no more, although you do have your choice of camels or omnibuses to go to your hotel, for when you are there and trying to dine, the wild-eyed Bedoueen who serves you, will send you deep into the desert by masquerading costume and his eager, restless eve, looking as if he would momently spring through the window, and plunge into the desert depths. These Bedoneen or Arab servants are like steeds of the sun for carriage horses. They fly, girt with wild fascination, for what will they do next!

As you donkey out of Alexandria to Pompey's Pillar, you will pass a beautiful garden of palms, and by sunset nothing is so natural as to see only those trees. Yet the fascination is lasting. The poetry of the first exiles you saw, does not peri-h in the presence of the nation, for those exiles stood beckoning like angels at the gate of Paradise, sor rowfully ushering you into the glory whence themselves were outcasts for ever:-and as you curiously looked in passing, you could not believe that their song was truth, and that the many would be as beautiful as the one.

Thenceforward, in the land of Egypt, palms are perpetual. They are the only foliage of the Nile, for we will not harm the modesty of a few Mimosas and Sycamores by foolish claims. They are the shade of the mud villages, marking their site in the landscape, so that the groups of palms are the number of villages. They fringe the shore and the horizon. The sun sets golden behind them, and birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float glorious among their trunks; on the ground beneath are flowers; the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade nor the tobacco, and the yellow flowers of the cotton-plant star its dusk at evening. The children play under them, and the old men crone and smoke, the donkeys graze, the surly bison and the conceited camels repose. The old Bible pictures are ceaselessly painted, but with softer, clearer colors than in the venerable book.

The palm-grove is always enchanted. If it stretch inland too alluringly, and you run ashore to stand under the bending boughs to share the peace of the doves swinging in the golden twilight, and to make yourself feel more scripturally, at least to surround yourself with sacred emblems, having small other hope of a share in the beauty of holiness-yet you will never reach the grove. You will gain the trees, but it is not the grove you fancied-that golden gloom will never be gained-it is an endless El Dorado gleaming along these shores. separate columnar trunks ray out in foliage above, but there is no shade of a grove, no privacy of s wood, except, indeed, at sunset,

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A privacy of glorious light. Each single tree has a little shade that the mass standing at wide ease can never create the shady solitude, without which there is no grove.

But the eye never wearies of palms more than the ear of singing birds. Solitary they stand upon the sand, or upon the level, fertile land in groups, with a grace and dignity that no tree surpasses. Very soon the eye beholds in their forms the original type of the columns which it will afterward admire in the temples. Almost the first palm is architecturally suggestive, even in those Western gardensbut to artists living among them and seeing only them! Men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals, but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art and poetry and religion, and of all trees would the Howadji be a palm, wide-waving peace and plenty, and feeling is kin to the Parthenon and Raphael's pictures.

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the War of the North American Tribes against the English Colon es after the Conquest of Canada, appeared in an octavo volume in 1851. The work attracted attention by its individuality of subject, respect by its evidences of thorough investigation, and popularity by its literary merits. Mr. Parkman at once attained a foremost rank as a historian. His volume is written in a clear, animated tone, giving in its pages due prominence to the picturesque scenery as well as the dramatic action of its topic.

Mr. Parkman is at present occupied in the preparation of a History of French Discovery and Colonization in North America, a subject well adapted to his powers.

THE ILLINOIS.

We turn to a region of which, as yet, we have caught but transient glimpses; a region which to our forefathers seemed remote and strange, as to us the mountain strongholds of the Apaches, or the wastes of farthest Oregon. The country of the Illinois was chiefly embraced within the boundaries of the state which now retains the name. Thitherward, from the east, the west, and the north, three mighty rivers rolled their tributary waters; while countless smaller streams-smaller only in comparison-traversed the land with a watery network, impregnating the warin soil with exuberant fecundity. From the eastward, the Ohio-La Belle Rivière-pursued its windings for more than a thousand miles. The Mississippi descended from the distant north; while from its fountains in the west, three thousand miles away, the Missouri poured its torrent towards the same common centre. Born among mountains, trackless even now, except by the adventurous footstep of the trapper,-nurtured amid the howling of beasts and the war-cries of savages, never silent in that wilderness,-it holds its angry course through sun-scorched deserts, among towers and palaces, the architecture of no human hand, among lodges of barbarian hordes, and herds of bison blackening the prairie to the horizon. Fierce, reckless, headstrong, exulting in its tumultuous force, it plays a thousand freaks of wanton power; bearing away forests from its shores, and planting them, with roots uppermost, in its quicksands; sweeping off islands, and rebuilding them; frothing and raging in foam and whirlpool, and, again, gliding with dwindled current along its sandy channel. At length, dark with uncurbed fury, it pours its muddy tide into the relutant Mississippi. That majestic river, drawing life from the pure fountains of the north, wandering among emerald prairies and wood-crowned bluffs, loses all its earlier charm with this unhallowed union. At first, it shrinks, as with repugnance, and along the same channel the two streams flow side by side, with unmingled waters. But the disturbing power prevails at length; and the united torrent bears onward in its might, boiling up from the bottom, whirling in many a vortex, flooding its shores with a malign deluge fraught with pestilence and fever, and burying forests in its depths to insnare the heedless voyager. Mightiest among rivers, it is the connecting link of adverse climates and contrasted races; and while at its northern source the fur-clad Indian shivers in the cold,-where it mingles with the ocean, the growth of the tropics springs along its banks, and the panting negro cools his limbs in its refreshing waters.

To these great rivers and their tributary streams the country of the Illinois owed its wealth, its grassy prairies, and the stately woods that flourished on its deep, rich soil. This prolific land teemed with life.

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It was a hunter's paradise. Deer grazed on its meadows. The elk trooped in herds, like squadrons of cavalry. In the still morning, one might hear the clatter of their antlers for half a mile over the dewy prairie. Countless bison roamed the plains, filing in grave procession to drink at the rivers, plunging and snorting among the rapids and quicksands, rolling their huge bulk on the grass, or rushing upon each other in hot encounter, like champions under shield. The wildcat glared from the thicket; the raccoon thrust his furry countenance from the hollow tree, and the opossum swung, head downwards, from the overhanging bough.

With the opening spring, when the forests are budding into leaf, and the prairies gemmed with flowers; when a warm, faint haze rests upon the landscape-then heart and senses are inthralled with luxurious beauty. The shrubs and wild fruittrees, flushed with pale red blossoms, and the small clustering flowers of grape-vines, which choke the gigantic trees with Laocoon writhings, fill the forest with their rich perfume. A few days later, and a cloud of verdure overshadows the land, while birds innumerable sing beneath its canopy, and brighten its shades with their glancing hues.

Yet this western paradise is not free from the curse of Adam. The beneficent sun, which kindles into life so many forms of loveliness and beauty, fails not to engender venom and death from the rank slime of pestilential swamp and marsh. In some stagnant pool, buried in the jungle-like depths of the forest, where the hot and lifeless water reeks with exhalations, the water-snake basks by the margin, or winds his checkered length of loathsome beauty across the sleepy surface. From beneath the rotten carcass of some fallen tree, the moccason thrusts out his broad flat head, ready to dart on the intruder. On the dry, sun-scorched prairie, the rattlesnake, a more generous enemy, reposes in his spiral coil. De scorns to shun the eye of day, as if conscious of the honor accorded to his name by the warlike race, who, jointly with him, claim lordship over the land. But some intrusive footstep awakes him from his slumbers. His neck is arched; the white fangs gleam in his distended jaws; his small eyes dart rays of unutterable fierceness; and his rattles, invisible with their quick vibration, ring the sharp warning which no man will rashly contemn.

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The land thus prodigal of good and evil, so remote from the sea, so primitive in its aspect, might well be deemed an undiscovered region, ignorant of European arts; yet it may boast a colonization as old as that of many a spot to which are accorded the scanty honors of an American antiquity. The earliest settlement of Pennsylvania was made in 1681; the first occupation of the Illinois took place in the vious year. La Salle may be called the father of the colony. That remarkable man entered the country with a handful of followers, bent on his grand scheme of Mississippi discovery. A legion of enemies rose in his path; but neither delay, disappointment, sickness, famine, open force, nor secret conspiracy, could bend his soul of iron. Disasters accumulated upon him. He flung them off, and still pressed forward to his object. His victorious energy bore all before it, but the success on which he had staked his life served only to entail fresh calamity, and an untimely death; and his best reward is, that his name stands forth in history an imperishable monument of heroic constancy. When on his way to the Mississippi in the year 1680, La Salle built a fort in the country of the Illinois, and, on his return from the mouth of the great river, some of his followers remained, and established themselves near the spot. Heroes of another stamp took up the work which

the daring Norman had begun. Jesuit missionaries, among the best and purest of their order, burning with zeal for the salvation of souls, and the gaining of an immortal crown, here toiled and suffered, with a self-sacrificing devotion which extorts a tribute of admiration even from sectarian bigotry. While the colder apostles of Protestantism labored upon the outskirts of heathendom, these champions of the cross, the forlorn hope of the army of Rome, pierced to the heart of its dark and dreary domain, confronting death at every step, and well repaid for all, could they but sprinkle a few drops of water on the forehead of a dying child, or hang a gilded crucifix round the neck of some warrior, pleased with the glittering trinket. With the beginning of the eighteenth century, the black robe of the Jesuit was known in every village of the Illinois. Defying the wiles of Satan and the malice of his emissaries, the Indian sorcerers, exposed to the rage of the elements, and every casualty of forest life, they followed their wandering proselytes to war and to the chase; now wading through morasses, now dragging canoes over rapids and sand-bars; now scorched with heat of the sweltering prairie, and now shivering houseless in the blasts of January. At Kaskaskia and Cahokia they established missions, and built frail churches from the bark of trees, fit emblems of their own transient and futile labors. Morning and evening, the savage worshippers sang praises to the Virgin, and knelt in supplication before the shine of t. Joseph.

Soldiers and fur-traders followed where these pioneers of the church had led the way. Forts were built here and there throughout the country, and the cabins of settlers clustered about the missionhouses. The new colonists, emigrants from Canada or disbanded soldiers of French regiments, bore a close resemblance to the settlers of Detroit, or the primitive people of Acadia, whose simple life poetry has chosen as an appropriate theme. The Creole of the Illinois, contented, light-hearted, and thriftless, by no means fulfilled the injunction to increase and multiply, and the colony languished in spite of the fertile soil. The people labored long enough to gain a bare subsistence for each passing day, and spent the rest of their time in dancing and merrymaking, smoking, gossiping, and hunting. Their native gayety was irrepressible, and they found means to stimulate it with wine made from the fruit of the wild grape-vines. Thus they passed their days, at peace with themselves, hand and glove with their Indian neighbors, and ignorant of all the world beside. Money was scarcely known among them. Skins and furs were the prevailing currency, and in every village a great portion of the land was held in common. The military commandant, whose station was at Fort Chartres, on the Mississippi, ruled the colony with a sway absolute as that of the Pacha of Egypt, and judged civil and criminal cases without right of appeal. Yet his power was exercised in a patriarchal spirit, and he usually commanded the respect and confidence of the people. Many years later, when, after the War of the Revolution, the Illinois came under the jurisdiction of the United States, the perplexed inhabitants, totally at a loss to understand the complicated machinery of republicanism, begged to be delivered from the intolerable burden of self-government, and to be once more subjected to a military commandant.

ERASTUS W. ELLSWORTH

Was born November, 1823,in East Windsor, Conn., where he is at present a resident. He was educated at Amherst College, studied law, but was

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"They eat their fill, and they are filled with wind.
They do the noble works of noble mind.
Repute, and often bread, the world refuse.
They go unto their place,

The greatest of the race.
What is the use?

"Should some new star, in the fair evening sky
Kindle a blaze, startling so keen an eye
Gf flamings eminent, athwart the dews,
Our thoughts would say: No doubt
That star will soon burn out.
What is the use?

"Who'll care for me, when I am dead and gone?
Not many now, and surely, soon, not one;
And should I sing like an immortal Muse,
Men, if they read the line,

Read for their good, not mine;
What is the use?

"And song, if passable, is doomed to pass-
Common, though sweet as the new-scythed grass.
Of human deeds and thoughts Time bears no news,
That, flying, he can lack,

Else they would break his back,
What is the use?

"Spirit of Beauty! Breath of golden lyres!
Perpetual tremble of immortal wires!
Divinely torturing rapture of the Muse!
Conspicuous wretchedness!
Thou starry, sole success!-
What is the use!

"Doth not all struggle tell, upon its brow,
That he who makes it is not easy now,
But hopes to be? Vain hope that dost abuse!
Coquetting with thine eyes,

And fooling him who sighs.

What is the use?

"Go pry the lintels of the pyramids;

Lift the old king's mysterious coffin lids

This dust was theirs whose names these stones

confuse,

These mighty monuments Of mighty discontents.

What is the use?

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Seeing this man so heathenly inclined-
So wilted in the mood of a good mind,
I felt a kind of heat of earnest thought;
And studying in reply,
Answered him, eye to eye:-

Thou dost amaze me that thou dost mistake
The wandering rivers for the fountain lake.
What is the end of living?-happiness?—

An end that none attain,
Argues a purpose vain.

Plainly, this world is not a scope for bliss,
But duty. Yet we see not all that is,
Or may be, some day, if we love the light.
What man is, in desires,

Whispers where man aspires.

But what and where are we?-what now-to

day?

Souls on a globe that spin our lives away

A multitudinous world, where Heaven and Hell, Strangely in battle met,

Their gonfalons have set.

Dust though we are, and shall return to dust,
Yet being born to battles, fight we must;
Under which ensign is our only choice.

We know to wage our best,

God only knows the rest.

Then since we see about us sin and dole,

And some things good, why not, with hand and soul
Wrestle and succor out of wrong and sorrow-

Grasping the swords of strife,
Making the most of life?

Yea, all that we can wield is worth the end,
If sought as God's and man's most loyal friend.
Naked we come into the world, and take
Weapons of various skill-

Let us not use them ill.

As for the creeds, Nature is dark at best;
And darker still is the deep human breast.
Therefore consider well of creeds and Books,

Lest thou mayst somewhat fail
Of things beyond the veil.

Nature was dark to the dim starry age
Of wistful Job; and that Athenian sage,
Pensive in piteous thought of Faith's distress;
For still she cried with tears:

"More light, ye crystal spheres !"

But rouse thee, man! Shake off this hideous death! Be man! Stand up! Draw in a mighty breath! This world has quite enough emasculate hands, Dallying with doubt and sin.

Come here is work-begin!

Come, here is work-and a rank field--begin. Put thou thine edge to the great weeds of sin; So shalt thou find the use of life, and see

Thy Lord, at set of sun,

Approach and say: "Well done!"

This at the last: They clutch the sapless fruit. Ashes and dust of the Dead Sea, who suit Their course of life to compass happiness;

But be it understood

That, to be greatly good, All is the use.

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Ring it out o'er hill and plain,

Through the garden's lonely bowers, Till the green leaves dance again,

Till the air is sweet with flowers!
Wake the cowslip by the rill,
Wake the yellow daffodil!
Robin's come!

Then as thou wert wont of yore,
Build thy nest and rear thy young,
Close beside our cottage door,

In the woodbine leaves among;
Hurt or harm thou need'st not fear,
Nothing rude shall venture near.
Robin's come!

Swinging still o'er yonder lane,
Robin answers merrily;
Ravished by the sweet refrain,
Alice claps her hands in glee,
Calling from the open door,
With her soft voice, o'er and o'er,
Robin's come!

WHAT SAITH THE FOUNTAIN?

What saith the Fountain,
Hid in the glade,
Where the tall mountain
Throweth its shade?

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