far West, and fish as delicious as was ever jerked from brook or ocean ministered to his appetite. His hotels, like his steamboat palaces, becoming each later one more gilded and gorgeous than the last, for rivalry and the spirit of innovation forbade his settling in quiet ruts and leaving things to grow venerable, were miracles of accommodation; while his railway trains were better fitted for popular travel than those of any other country in the world. Horse railways could be watched in New York city from the Astor House windows the first year of Pierce's presidency; since which time Boston and others of our richer muncipalities had permitted them. Aerial locomotion had not been untried; for this very summer La Mountain made his experimental voyage from St. Louis to the Atlantic seaboard in his "air ship," or mammoth balloon; which, after dipping accidentally into Lake Ontario, landed in a tree on the neighboring shore, and on a second trip upset the repentant navigator in the great Canadian wilderness, a hundred and fifty miles north of Ottawa, where he wandered four days without food until providentially rescued. A great danger of such journeying was in aerial currents, which drove one from his

course.

Vulcanized rubber and the sewing-machine were among the thousand new American discoveries applied to the general comfort. Pennsylvania, luckiest of commonwealths in amassing fortunes, struck coal oil as the sperm disappeared, and illumined the world anew. Kane and other daring souls pursued their Arctic explorations, incited by the search for the bones of the British Sir John Franklin. College students put new zest into boating and athletics, moved by the graphic scenes of English life depicted in "School Days at Rugby." The turf had its patrons, too, though to transplant the fashionable glories of the Epsom or Derby was for the present hopeless. Americans of the North were busy, their idlers were chiefly of the loafing

"An American hotel," wrote William Chambers, in 1853, "is not a house, it is a town."

1859.

ARTS AND LITERATURE.

435

and dissipated set, and hence they performed the baser recreations by deputy. John Morrissey, as the champion of the United States, pommelled Heenan, the "Benicia Boy," in 1858. The French Houdin, in 1859, undismayed by the fate of Sam Patch, walked across Niagara River, at a short distance below the cataract, on a tight rope. Paul Morphy, the English chess-player, was one of the latest foreign celebrities who catered to our entertainment, among a long list of singers, musicians, actresses, authors, and light professionals, from Jenny Lind, Sontag, Thackeray, and the tragic Rachel, down to the piquant and scandal-breeding Lola Montes. Jullien, the conductor, with his airy bâton and hurricane symphonies, had served his turn; orchestras of imported talent mingled in their more popular selections occasional bits of classical music; and against the prudish protests of older men and women, who danced square dances only, the long "German" was coming into fashion among the youngsters of society. The best French and Italian operas were patronized by the cream of our chief cities, and among the latest and most admired of them were Trovatore, Traviata, and Martha. The American stage was enlarging its influence, and among native actors the ranting Forrest, and Booth the younger, whose melancholy Dane was his own natural image, stood highest in popular estimation. Audiences wept at Miss Heron's impersonation of "Camille," but confessed that the play was like a peep at Satan.

American literature had reached a golden pinnacle; serene, as it looked, above the angry waves which lashed our most dangerous headland. Cooper and Prescott were in their graves; the genial Irving died this year; but Bancroft and Motley were still among the historians; Hawthorne, doubtful of his country's fate, was extending hist picturesque studies abroad; and of poets, Bryant, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and Whittier were a host for any age, though the first-named had laid aside his lyre, and the anti-slavery effusions of the last offended good breeding. Everett and Ticknor were figures in cultured circles, the former, by his lecture upon "George Wash

ington" and descriptive papers printed in the well-paid columns of the "New York Ledger," aiding the ladies of the Union to purchase Mount Vernon for a national memorial.

Lyceum committees still arranged their lecture courses for the long winter evenings; and star lecturers, of whom the great majority were literary writers, politicians, and men of the learned professions, roamed through the North and West, educating from the platform, and satisfying the rural craving to look upon the owners of familiar names. Among celebrities who increased their incomes in this way were Wendell Phillips, the philosophical Emerson, and preachers of renown like Chapin and Henry Ward Beecher. The physical strain of this work was very great, involving long winter journeys by incommodious trains which missed their connections, and lonely breakfasts at unseasonable hours. There were no more living orators like Webster; none who could fan into a blaze the idolatrous love of an undivided country. Orators on this theme betrayed either despondency or quaking boldness. Choate, who now passed into the shades, had deplored in one of his latest orations the modern rise of little politicians, little preachers, and little men; but his own failure to appreciate the dawning age caused the misconception. Conservatism, with its horizon of narrow diameter, was losing its hold upon our society; radical ideas were coming fast into fashion. As in religious thought the new theories of science made rapid inroad, and men feared not to discuss glaciers, vestiges of creation, and the plurality of worlds, so in politics there was a growing regard felt for men who spoke and acted boldly.

The South, with ampler leisure and a love of the open air, found less employment for the enginery of mental culture, and, to tell the truth, looked rather disdainfully upon it. This section, to match the galaxy of Northern bards and writers of voluminous fiction, had no literary author to name but William Gilmore Simms; its only living authority upon statistics and political economy was "De Bow's Review;" its sons were educated in Northern schools and colleges; and our national literature, like the

1859.

SOUTHERN TASTES AND TALENTS.

437

books into which the brains of authorship entered, was of Northern manufacture. A consciousness of this intellectual dependence, and jealousy that anti-slavery ideas should thus get rife, bred a new project at this time of a Southern university, where slaveholders' sons should be nurtured in studies appropriate to a master race. But in politics and the military profession the South bore great sons, as she had always done, being strong in the ascendency which is gained by personal contact; and among her most impassioned orators, in these years, besides the statesmen we have followed in active service, was William L. Yancey, of Alabama, whose silvery eloquence for conquest and race supremacy enchained many an audience.

1859,

October

16, 17.

It was just after the October elections that a cry of horror was heard through the land. Virginia, the mother of States, was invaded by a Northern horde; the national arsenal seized at Harper's Ferry; slavery assaulted on soil which the Federal Constitution held sacred; and a servile war inaugurated, that blacks might ravish, despoil, and murder. In the agitated condition of the Southern mind the danger was easily exaggerated; and at the first alarm it seemed as if the whole abolition army above the border, and meddlesome civilization itself, were in active motion to start the "irrepressible conflict." This panic subsided when the selfimprisoned invaders were secured with chains or shot dead, and the lanterns of investigation, prying from top to bottom and from corner to corner, revealed nothing more serious than a foolish and crack-brained plot; and the invading cohorts of "Black Republican" cut-throats and incendiaries dwindled down to a little band of twentytwo men, armed with rifles, pistols, and pikes, a family party for the most part, with a few companions, white and black, all headed by that obscure patriarch and selfappointed scourge of the Almighty, old John Brown.

Had this sporadic and nonsensical movement been calmly and considerately viewed by those against whom it was directed, had the pitiful and deluded assailants

been treated with the decent magnanimity for which so good an opportunity was afforded, John Brown's raid would have passed out of the public mind, like any other nine-days' wonder, and been forgotten. No negro uprising followed, nor the shadow of a servile war; the negro continued as docile, the Constitution as stringent in its protection of slave property as slavery could ever have expected. But the slave master showed on this occasion his innate tyranny and cruelty towards an adversary, by something of that gloating vengeance which our English code once inflicted when it quartered and disembowelled political traitors; and had the ill-calculating liberator dared the laws in one of the lower cotton States, instead of mild Virginia, there is little doubt that he would have been much more ignominiously dealt with. John Brown was arrested, tried, and convicted in hot haste; he was strung up on the gallows-tree; and meeting death like a gallant man who believes his cause to be right, he became a martyr, and consequently an inspiration and a figure in history.

Of Pilgrim pedigree and revolutionary fighting stock, our grim hero was one of those stern-faced sons of righteousness who read their Bible, rear great families of sons and daughters, and fight poverty's privations handicapped, with every chance of worldly success against them. John Brown's very name, rugged and familiar on the tongue, claims kin for him with a host of common people of English blood. Failing in one means of livelihood after another, he settled with his family on a farm among the lonely Adirondacks, where, under the countenance of that rich philanthropist, Gerrit Smith, he managed a scheme for the amelioration of free blacks, which, like most others to which he laid his unlucky hand, turned out badly. Kansas and the struggle to found a free State sent four of his children westward among the first settlers. The father followed with other sons in 1856, not as a peaceable

He had two wives (the latter of whom survived him), and nineteen children. Stearns's John Brown.