him; intoxicating, poisoning. Fashion went her idle way, to gaze on Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters, or what else there might be; forgot this man,-who unhappily could not in his turn forget. The intoxicating poison had been swallowed; no force of natural health could cast it out. Unconsciously, for most part in deep unconsciousness, there was now the impossibility to live neglected; to walk on the quiet paths, where alone it is well with us. Singularity must henceforth succeed Singularity. O foulest Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Applause! madness is in thee, and death; thy end is bedlam and the grave. For the last seven years, Irving, forsaken by the world, strove either to recall it or to forsake it; shut himself up in a lesser world of ideas and persons, and lived isolated there. Neither in this was there health for this man such isolation was not fit; such ideas, such persons. One light still shone on him; alas, through a medium more and more turbid: the light from Heaven. His Bible was there, wherein must lie healing for all sorrows. To the Bible he more and more exclusively addressed himself. If it is the written Word of God, shall it not be the acted Word too? Is it mere sound, then; black printer's-ink on white rag-paper? A half-man could have passed on without answering; a whole man must answer. Hence prophecies of millenniums, gifts of tongues, whereat Orthodoxy prims herself into decent wonder, and waves her avaunt! Irving clave to his belief as to his soul's soul; followed it whithersoever, through earth or air, it might lead him; toiling as never man toiled to spread it, to gain the world's ear for it, in vain. Ever wilder waxed the confusion without and within. The misguided nobleminded had now nothing left to do but die. He died the death of the true and brave. His last words, they say, were: "In life and in death I am the Lord's."-Amen! Amen! One who knew him well, and may with good cause love him, has said: "But for Irving, I had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with: I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever (after trial enough) found in this world, or now hope to find." Frazer's Magazine, 1835. 1 CROMWELL-SHAKSPEARE. While Oliver Cromwell was entering himself of Sidney-Sussex college, William Shakspeare was taking his farewell of this world. Oliver's father saw Oliver write in the album at Cambridge; at Stratford, Shakspeare's Ann Hathaway was weeping over his bed. The first world-great thing that remains of English history, the April 23, 1616. literature of Shakspeare, was ending; the second world-great thing that remains of English history, the armed appeal of Puritanism to the invisible God of Heaven against many very visible devils, on earth and elsewhere, was, so to speak, beginning. They have their exits and their entrances. And one people in its time plays many parts. CROMWELL'S CONVERSION. Life of Cromwell. It is in these years, undated by history, that we must place Oliver's clear recognition of Calvinistic Christianity; what he, with unspeakable joy, would name his conversion; his deliverance from the jaws of eternal death. Certainly a grand epoch for a man: properly the one epoch; the turning-point which guides upwards, or guides downwards, him and his activity for evermore. Wilt thou join with the Dragons; wilt thou join with the Gods? Of thee, too, the question is asked;-whether by a man in Geneva gown, by a man in "Four surplices at Allhallow-tide," with words very imperfect; or by no man and no words, but only by the Silences, by the Eternities, by the Life everlasting and the Death everlasting. That the "sense of difference between right and wrong" had filled all time and all space for man, and bodied itself forth into a heaven and hell for him: this constitutes the grand feature of those Puritan, old Christian ages; this is the element which stamps them as heroic, and has rendered their works great, manlike, fruitful to all generations. It is by far the memorablest achievement of our species; without that element, in some form or other, nothing of heroic had ever been among us. Oliver was henceforth a Christian man; believed in God, not on Sundays only, but on all days, in all places, and in all cases. CROMWELL'S LETTERS. The same I called these letters good,-but withal only good of their kind. No eloquence, elegance, not always even clearness of expression, is to be looked for in them. They are written with far other than literary aims; written, most of them, in the very flame and conflagration of a revolutionary struggle, and with an eye to the despatch. of indispensable pressing business alone: but it will be found, I conceive, that for such end they are well written. Superfluity, as if by a natural law of the case, the writer has had to discard; whatsoever quality can be dispensed with is indifferent to him. With unwieldy movement, yet with a great solid step he presses through, towards his object; has marked out very decisively what the real steps towards it are; discriminating well the essential from the extraneous;-forming to himself, in short, a true, not an un true picture of the business that is to be done. There is in these letters, as I have said above, a silence still more significant of Oliver to us than any speech they have. Dimly we discover features of an intelligence, and soul of a man, greater than any speech. The intelligence that can, with full satisfaction to itself, come out in eloquent speaking, in musical singing, is, after all, a small intelligence. He that works and does some poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of poet. Cromwell, emblem of the dumb English, is interesting to me by the very inadequacy of his speech. Heroic insight, valor and belief, without words,-how noble is it in comparison to eloquent words without heroic insight! THE ENGLISH PURITANS. The same. I will venture to give the reader two little pieces of advice, which, if his experience resemble mine, may prove furthersome to him in this inquiry: they include the essence of all that I have discovered respecting it. The first is, by no means to credit the wide-spread report that these seventeenth-century Puritans were superstitious, crack brained persons; given up to enthusiasm, the most part of them; the minor ruling part being cunning men, who knew how to assume the dialect of the others, and thereby, as skilful Machiavels, to dupe them. This is a wide-spread report; but an untrue one. I advise my reader to try precisely the opposite hypothesis. To consider that his fathers, who had thought about this world very seriously indeed, and with very considerable thinking faculty indeed, were not quite so far behindhand in their conclusions respecting it. That actually their "enthusiasms," if well seen into, were not foolish but wise. That Machiavelism, Cant, Official Jargon, whereby a man speaks openly what he does not mean, were, surprising as it may seem, much rarer then than they have ever since been. Really and truly it may in a manner be said, Cant, Parliamentary and other Jargon, were still to invent in this world. O Heavens, one could weep at the contrast! Cant was not fashionable at all; that stupendous invention of "Speech for the purpose of concealing Thought" was not yet made. A man wagging the tongue of him, as if it were the clapper of a bell to be rung for economic purposes, and not so much as attempting to convey any inner thought, if thought he have, of the matter talked of,-would at that date have awakened all the horror in men's minds, which at all dates, and at this date, too, is due to him. The accursed thing! No man as yet dared to do it; all men believing that God would judge them. In the History of the Civil War far and wide, I have not fallen in with one such phenomenon. The use of the human tongue was then other than it now is. 1 counsel the reader to leave all that of Cant, Dupery, Machiavelism, and so forth, decisively lying at the threshold. He will be wise to believe that these Puritans do mean what they say, and to try unimpeded if he can discover what that is. Gradually a very stupendous phenomenon may rise on his astonished eye. A practical world based on belief in God;-such as many centuries had seen before, but as never any century since has been privileged to see. It was the last glimpse of it in our world, this of English Puritanism: very great, very glorious; tragical enough to all thinking hearts that look on it from these days of ours. My second advice is, not to imagine that it was Constitution, "Liberty of the people to tax themselves," privilege of Parliament, triennial or annual Parliaments, or any modification of these sublime privileges, now waxing somewhat faint in our admirations, that mainly animated our Cromwells, Pyms, and Hampdens, to the heroic efforts we still admire in retrospect. Not these very measurable "Privileges," but a far other and deeper, which could not be measured; of which these, and all grand social improvements whatsoever, are the corollary. Our ancient Puritan Reformers were, as all Reformers that will ever much benefit this Earth are always, inspired by a Heavenly Purpose. To see God's own law, then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world; to see this, or the true unwearied aim and struggle towards this: it was a thing worth living for and dying for! Eternal Justice; that God's Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven: corollaries enough will flow from that, if that be there; if that be not there, no corollary good for much will flow. The same. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. THE facts in the life of ELIZABETH BARRETT, one of the most distinguished of the female poets of England, which have come to our knowledge, are very few. Up to her marriage with Robert Browning, (himself no mean poet,) in November, 1846, she went very little into society. Since that time she has resided with her husband in Florence, and is now (1853) about forty-two years of age. Mrs. Browning's publications are as follow: "Essay on Mind, a Poem;" "Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous Poems;" "The Seraphim, and other Poems;" "Collected Poems," in two volumes; "A Drama of Exile, and other Poems," two volumes. Mrs. Browning has been styled "the learned poetess of the day,-familiar with Homer, and Eschylus, and Sophocles, and to the musings of Tempe she has added the inspirations of Christianity." This is readily granted, and yet we cannot say that her poetry, as a whole, deeply interests us. With the exception of some few pieces, it takes no permanent hold upon the heart, simply because it is addressed more to the reason than to the feelings or affections. The following, we think, are some of her best pieces-pieces of the most simplicity and feeling, if they do not, so well as some others, illustrate her general style. THE PET-NAME. I have a name, a little name, Though I write books, it will be read And afterwards, when I am dead, Whoever chanceth it to call, May chance your smile to win ;- The sudden tears within! My brother gave that name to me No shade was on us then, save one Of chestnuts from the bill And through the word our laugh did run Nay, do not smile! I hear in it I hear the birthday's noisy bliss, And voices-which to name me, aye To some I never more can say In heaven these drops of weeping! |