stone. country, not a gratiá-Dei, nor a jure-divino one, but a defacto upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life as the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves, very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race, I don't mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton. When the spring chickens come to market-I beg your pardon, that is not what I was going to speak of. As the young females of each successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character of the next generation rises in consequence. It is plain that certain families have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and that in a small circle of city connections one may sometimes find models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would find it hard to match from all its townships put together. Because there is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life, among the richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious fact I have just spoken of, which in one or two generations more will be, I think, much more patent than just now. The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded to in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate glass of its windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach panels. It is very curious to observe of how small account military folks are held among our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I don't believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if it ever does come. -These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual green fruit of all the places in the world. I think so, at any rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous, and the market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries, get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises? Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits. There are literary greengroceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a button pear to a pineapple. It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and writing. The temptation of money fame is too great for young people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. we won't say who, editor of the-we won't say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have reveled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning the fact that the fifty cents was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention. -Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence. -I don't believe one word of what you are saying,-spoke up the angular female in black bombazine. -I I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, I said, and added softly to my next neighbor, but you prove it. The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity student said, in an undertone,- Optime dictum. Your talking Latin, said I,- reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them. You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about "æstivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to hibernation. Intramural æstivation, or town life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem : ESTIVATION. An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor. In candent ire the solar splendor flames; How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes, To me, alas! no verdurous visions come, Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! -I have lived by the seashore and by the mountains. —No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you. But this difference there is you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is feræ naturæ. You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the mountain side; you see a light halfway up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and you might share it. You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of your memory's chamber.—The sea remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet,-its huge flanks pur very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints, but their shining is that of a snake's belly, after all. — In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever. I Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by and by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at his bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury. — And then, to look at it with that inward eye, who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals, to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died. out and man is a fossil on its shores? -What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence? -Constitution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is essential to enjoyment. All sensitive people should remem ber that persons in easy circumstances suffer much more from cold in summer that is, the warm half of the year- than in winter, or the other half. You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as your clothing to your shape. After this, consult your taste and convenience. But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry mountains in your brain ; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must have an ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominoes with you; you must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you. -The schoolmistress said, in rather a mischievous way, that she was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic. Have you ever read the little book called "The Stars and the Earth"? - said I. - Have you seen the Declaration of Independence photographed in a surface that a fly's foot would cover? The forms or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing in themselves, - only our way of looking at things. You are right, I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world. Every man of reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly defined circle which is drawn about his intellect. He has a perfectly clear sense that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of many other minds of which he is cognizant. He often recognizes these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius. On the other hand, when we find a portion of an arc outside of our own, we say it intersects ours, but are very slow to confess or to see that it circumscribes it. Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it. -If I thought I should ever see the Alps! - said the schoolmistress. Perhaps you will, some time or other, I said. It is not very likely, she answered. I have had one or two opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a rich family. [Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! Well, I can't say I like you any the worse for it. How long will school keeping take to kill you? Is it possible the poor thing works with |