can be enduring; friendship, poetry, romance and even learning (wo to the scholar who knows it not) have their times of incantation. But to give full occasion for such experience there must be a nice conjuncture of place and age and person; which befel me under some signal aspect of the celestial signs when our quiet groves were visited by Albert de Mornay. A few months had graven on him the characters of years. Though at a later period he came to some knowledge of his departed Mentor, the meek and venerable Guerin, Albert at this time lamented him as lost, and mourned over the lessons of wisdom which, in the buoyancy of a spirit which now seemed frivolous, he had neglected and all but derided. Now the full shadow of his preceptor's tenets, example and character, fell upon him with too sombre a veil. What he remembered was chiefly the recluse pensiveness of the solitary. Books which he might otherwise have forgotten, and discourses to which he had scarcely known himself to be attending, while he was adjusting his rifle or making flies for the angle, revisited his thoughts like memories of the dead. It was Plato, it was Petrarca, it was Fenelon, that became the resort of his gentle spirit. And as he grew paler, as his voice became softer and more feminine, so his sentiments assumed a sad or rather an aspiring mood, much in contrast with the loudness and exuberance of his mountain days of health. Mingled with this were a group of qualities which fastened me to him as "with hooks of steel." No more to guide the foaming steed, or cheer the hunting company with his sonorous voice, he hung over the volumes of ancient lore, and sat at the embowered window gazing on the moon which twinkled all night on the reflecting ripples of the Roanoke. Greek tragedy possesses a secret charm for such moments, which is undetected even by many a ripe scholar in our baby-whirling age. It was Electra, it was Antigone, and it was Alcestis, that rose before the enchanted eye of the once gay Frenchman, with the austere but unearthly loveliness of antique sculpture. To me this was a lesson but partially comprehended, yet I owe to Albert my transition from the vexing punctilios of the grammarian to the high contemplations of literary and poetic enthusiasm. old capital of Burgundy to the mount where St. Bernard was born. All this I owed to the contagion of a lofty and loving soul. CHAPTER XIV. Parole adorne di lingua piu d'una. MILTON. SONNET IV. Fancy to yourself two enthusiasts sitting under a magnificent liriodendron (pity it is that common usage should have degraded the glory of our forests into a poplar; it is no poplar, and even the name tulip-tree has a hybrid sound, half Norman half Anglo-Saxon; "it follows not," says holy but funny Fuller, "that the foreign tulip is better than the rose because some usurping fancies would prefer it;") fancy, I say, gentle Alice, and gentle reader, two students of old books under a lofty tree, on a knoll in sight of a broad Southern river, with the bank all bespread with volumes. One of these youths is tall, slender, and-"call it fair, not pale," because two damask rose-leaves give a hectic beauty to the skin through which the eloquent blood courses almost visibly and all too rapidly. The brown hair, long and neglected, falls about the neck and over the linen collar of a country jacket. The great, liquid eye now rolls and now fixes, and the teeth, which medical observation recognizes as more pearly in consumptives, are disclosed in a speaking smile, as the attenuated and almost dainty fingers turn over the heavy leaves of a Greek folio. The approach of fatal disease (we remember Kirk White and Godman) seems only to quicken the appetency and spiritualize the enjoyment of knowledge. Dewy bushes, birds in the branches, a flock of sheep on the green hill-side, and a squadron of lazy boats in the distance, only aid the pursuit. Study is not confined to cells and conventual towers. Pedant. The greatest solitude I ever felt was in a great city; when I was in an old, tumble-down street in London. Albert. O give me the open air of heaven! I used to spout speeches in the Virginia mountains, where I could halloo to the echoes and fear no overhearing. But that was when I dreamed of the forum and the senate. It is past! Pedant. Cicero makes much of these shades, as he calls them. He says Eloquence did not flourish in war-times. "Pacis est comes otiique socia, et jam hene constitutæ civitatis quasi alumna quædam Eloquentia." The gabble and fuss of much that is called learned talk in our towns is destructive of deep feeling and thus of high art. Albert. Yes, and as my honored abbé used to quote from Goethe, concerning such a litterateur: "All the springs of natural feeling, which were open in all their fullness to our fathers, are shut to him. The Friendship adds intelligence to letters. I felt then and feel now the force of the nisi hoc sciat alter. In solitary lucubration I might have grown into the accomplished school-master; but I should never have had an ear for the august harmonies which sometimes swell through the terrestrial infidelity of Lucretius, if I had not heard the heroic measures read with the dulcet music of a companion's voice. I never should have been able, as at a later day, to pore serenely over Goethe's Iphigenia. I never should have comprehended the enigmas of the Re-paper-hangings, which fade on his walls in the course ligio Medici. I never should have loved the sententious sweetness of Quesnel. I never should have found myself awakened, as at a trumpet's alarum, by the undoctrinal and vague, but stimulating rhapsodies of Schleiermacher's Reden. I never should have made pilgrimage, as I did long after, from the of a few years, are a token of his taste and a type of his works." Pedant. Yet we lack great libraries here in our remote place. Albert. We must be ignorant of many things to know any. True-though said by a man I hate-- Helvetius. My friend, let me play the old man and Pedant. Thus far I can read Plato best in a version. Albert. Pfeffers is a fool-pardon me-your friend Pfeffers is duped by the cold, bloodless philosophers of the High Dutch universities. So Hardouin undertook to prove that Homer, and Virgil, and all, were vamped up by monks in the Middle Age. Papae! When that is done, I will demonstrate that the Tem ple of Neptune at Paestum was built by the crusad. ers, and that the Antinous was chipped out of marble by a couple of Savoyard image-boys in the year 1789. The microscopic objections of Bahrdt and Paulus are just such infinitesimal lichens and abrasions and scratchings as a strong lens will detect on the cheek of the Discobolos, or the Venus of Florence. Is there sweetness in that breath of wild roses which comes over us from the west? Was it Albert. A version! It is my aversion. There goes my first pun. Think of Pope's Homer! Open the books at Vaucluse for a sample, as your uncle draws a hand of tobacco from a hogshead. Here-made to be enjoyed? Is it correlate with this olfac take the Odyssey, xvii. 26-36. What can be simpler than the original-what more meretricious than the copy? ̓Αρτέμιδι ἱκέλη δὲ χρυσέῃ ̓Αφροδίτη. Pope thus: "The beauteous cheeks the blush of Venus wear, Chistened with coy Diana's pensive air." And then, in plain English, "Weeping, she threw her arms about her dear boy, and kissed his brow and his two fair eyes, and murmuring plaintively, spake these winged words!" But Pope, doubtless in wig and ruffles, thus: "Hangs o'er her son, in his embraces dies; tory sense? Then is the seventeenth chapter of St. John a heavenly aroma, formed for this inward craving of a departing soul. Take me back to my wild Indians, and their medicine-men with gourds and wampum, rather than to the drivel of a learning once Christian, but now materialistic or godless! That manna was good, but it has bred worms. Corruptio optimi pessima est. Pedant. Dearest De Mornay, you flush and injure yourself. Albert. Thanks to thee, Paul Guerin, that thou leftest me lessons which live in the soil of this heart and germinate after thy departure! God grant that grief and the suns of Martinique may not despoil the earth of the purest of the emigrant clergy. That day we had to carry Albert into the house, and his subsequent studies and conversations were CHAPTER XV. et à combien d'escueils ordinaires et naturels elle est exIl me semble que considerant la foiblesse de nostre vie, posée, on n'en devroit pas faire si grande part à la nais sance, à l'oisiveté et à l'apprentissage. Pedant. Hold-I give up, Pope; but all translators have not his redundancy and pomp of words. Albert. There are few good translators; and mechiefly in a swinging hammock of Mexican grass, judice, the latest are the best. Wolfius is a miracle. suspended in our northern veranda. Our Frenchmen have shown their sense by giving the ancient poets in prose; for it is death to classic metres and classic thought to entangle them in Alexandrines, with male and female rhymes. Taylor's Plato is close enough and bald enough, but it is harder than the Greek. It is easy to turn simplex munditiis into "simple in mundicity," but it becomes neither sense nor English. Cervantes knew what he was about, when he compared a version to the wrong side of a piece of tapestry; you make out the figures, but where are the tone, the beauty, the expression? Pedant. Then you must learn Hebrew to read the Bible. MONTAIGNE, ch. 57. In a second visit to Europe after the death of De Mornay, I sought out the hamlet where his father lived. It was Chateaux-Prix sur L'Emmat. The place is very French, being in the neighborhood of a dismantled fortification. But the green slopes are still kept trim for promenades. Long, long rows of Lombardy poplars, very different from the spindling things we have, stretch a mile along the water. The low, red houses, with red tiles, huddle together about the red church, like a brood crowding around the hen. In the evenings, the brown peasants in blouses, and the brown mothers and maids in broad straw plats, cluster under vines at the doors, with long loaves of bread and flasks of country wine. Clumps of Grenoble walnut-trees-we call them Englishhalf conceal with their full foliage the immense rood of timber which predominates over a village spring. Near this, as the sun sinks, are heard the sound of Pedant. My friend Pfeffers protests that the gos- the tabor and pipe, and the clatter of sabots, as the pels are fabricated. boys and girls run to the merry-making. Donkeys Albert. O, that I could! As it is-one chapter of St. John's Greek is glorious, beyond all the scores of version from St. Jerome to Campbell. I never could endure the barbarisms of the Vulgate, even from the lips of my honored abbé. I think even he blushed when he recited—Amen, amen dico vobis: quia plorabitis et flebitis vos, etc., S. Joann. cap. xvi, 20. Yet it is better in its senility than the French-polish of Castalio. And your English Bible has a venerableness from the lordly old English of its day. Our French Bibles smack of the salon; the tournure of phrase is colloquial and courtly. E are loose among the road-side thistles, and the long | but my love of life has a tenacity as tough as my twilight is not over before all are in bed. But the De Mornays had flitted out of France, and I found them-almost the only remaining Huguenots in Louvain, which once was so famous a Protestant town. The portrait of Gaston du Plessis, Albert's grand-uncle, hanging at Doctor De Mornay's, might —with another dress-have passed for a likeness of my friend; but it was in feather and coat-armor. Madame Guers, a young widow, heard with tears my remembrances of her cousin. It was she who carried me to see the Hôtel de Ville, built some time in the fifteenth century, and told me gay romances of the Dukes of Brabant. She had never heard of Froissart! I cannot remember whether it was here or at Liège that 1 wondered at the Holy Family of Quentin Matsys. The Louvain beer is famous, and I advise tourists to acquaint themselves with the Brabant John Barleycorn at the Maison des Brasseurs, or Brewer's Hall, or at the convent of Pare, with its fish-ponds, not far distant. Being still out of my head about teaching, I was dinned with talk concerning the Methode Jacotot, which is as little remembered there as Manual Labor Schools with us. And, surely, a comical method it was! For Jacotot presumed to teach every thing out of one book, by an everlasting repetition. Hun2 dreds of schools were set up on this plan. corded fingers. Every preparation for "that vast As an old man, I perceive that young creatures are too gay. The loud laugh reaches me, but I have lost the bon mot which caused it. The books they are in raptures about are not in my collection. Was I ever thus? And did those grave looks of my seniors proceed from something like this in their heedless offspring? Heigh-ho! It is time for me to look for hat and stick, as a conviva satur. The teeth which Gardette furnished me are the admiration of all companies; and I speak with only a perceptible click produced by the play of the gold and porcelain. Yet what I say is evidently less relished than when I used to be in blue broad-cloth and hair-powder, and with six unstarched cravats about my neck. My Latin quotations are unintelligible, for I retain the old continental sound of the vowels, and cannot break my organs into the Anglicism of Rambling old man that I am! It is time my chap- payter, frayter, and nigh-sigh, for pater, frater, and ters came to an end. Alice is horrified at my read- nisi. I can't learn to change the Spanish Quijote ing out of Homer a passage in the twentieth book of into Quixotte, with a double T; or to talk" of paythe Odyssey, and says she shall dream of it. I defying over over ten dollars," when I mean "paying Pfeffers to find any thing more ghastly in German story. It is where the guests are suddenly struck mad. They burst forth into sardonic laughter. Blood issues from their mouths, and tears pour from their eyes. Meanwhile Theoclymenus, gifted with sudden clairvoyance, beholds the sun perishing from the heavens, the porch filled with spectres, and the walls sweating gore. Why has it not been quoted by our Northern spiritualists? Old folks do not acquire wisdom in a natural way; that is, as they acquire short breath, puckered lips, gray hairs, crowsfeet, weak knees and shuffling feet. Habit is habit. Idle youth-idle age. I love books as much and as fondly as when I was in my father's garret. But my glasses are too young for me, and McAlister is five hundred miles away, and folios are hard to manage, and my grand-daughter is in peril of laryngitis by reading so loud to me, and my eyes close in the middle of periods, and my pipe goes out ten times a-day. When I was young I thought life pleasant, but I also thought that after three-score I should be ready to yield it without a sigh. I do not know how it is, * I may be in but so my Commissionaire Jean d'Ypres told me. error, over more than ten dollars." Alice has never found her favorite "reliable" in any English author before the days of Sir Robert Peel; or any classic writer who ever uttered the phrase "on to-morrow." I am old-fashioned enough to present to each other visitors who meet at a morning call, and to show them to the door; nor can I wear my hat in the house, bald as I am. Quere. Whether Methusalem had these disabilities in proportion to his longinquity? CHAPTER XVI. "He is insensibly subdued They say old age is cold, but this summer weather boils my blood, and drives me to every corner where a little motion among the leaves affords a surmise of gentle airs. Which reminds me of the comic sufferings of my friend Pfeffers, when first he made trial of our cis-atlantic climate. He so panted and perspired, that we feared he might go off in a paroxysm of some tropical disease. It was many a long year ago, yet Pfeffers is still alive; by this token, that he is my guest at this present writing. His tongue retains a few scarcely perceptible Shibboleths of his German original. Long ago, he threw himself heart and soul into our American usages, and married an American wife. Age sits lightly on him. He is brown, and square built, and he dresses young. An auburn wig surmounts his mahogany visage with formidable dignity. Pfeffers is an ornithologist, and -with a zeal almost furious-has traversed all our Southern States in pursuit of the fowls of the air. That he has escaped poisoning himself with the arsenic which he uses in his taxidermy is to be ascribed to the volumes of tobacco-smoke which he has haled during half a century. man. point on which we agree. He loves to read Rabelais; whom, maugre all the eulogies of Coleridge and other great men, I continue to loathe as a filthy old He glories in Jean-Paul, whom I never could comprehend. He places Dante and Goethe above all poets, while I stick to Shakspeare, Milton and Schiller. He is a red-democrat, croaks songs of Freiin-ligrath, and rehearses rhapsodies of Kinkel; I am a conservative, an old federalist, and a hater of emeutes. He follows Blum and Heine, and is a Lichtfreund, or illuminé, ready to guillotine priests and proclaim a millenium of unbelief; I am a church In the odd changes of life's wheel, some of my youthful companions have turned up in strange places. Pfeffers has just informed me, that he met at Memphis not in Egypt—an old lady, who remem-goer, and almost a Quaker in my quiet musings. He bered having seen me in Dublin. It was no other than Grace O'Meara, whom I left a bouncing girl in her gallant father's house, and who is now a hale but wrinkled grandmamma. Through her report, I learned that Guerin-the friend of my beloved De Mornay-lived to a very great age in the island of Martinique, where he continued, till the last, to pursue his philosophical and humane studies. Gentle Frenchman-how many, less deserving, are honored with monumental marbles! My literary reminiscences were much freshened by Pfeffers, and his presence carried me back to the vine-clad heights of the Rhine. What delicious fragrance comes back to one's inner sense from the balmy fields of juvenile experience! Surely this is one of the principal compensations of benign Providence to men in years. Old age itself does not always impair the faculty of living over again the innocent pleasures of life. Garrulous we are, it cannot be denied, at our time of life, and every octogenarian is prone to be a laudator temporis acti. But if young folks were wise, they would lend willing ears, and thus would have us in our best moments, to wit-when we are rejoicing in the past, rather than tasking the outworn powers to receive the new impressions of the present. I seem to float again upon the Rhine, and again to hear the song of the vine-dressers, suspended from the craggy and terraced slopes where the white wines of princes are produced. Pfeffers and I have diverged more and more as we have grown older, and each is rigid in his cramps and oddities. Except in smoking, there is scarcely a derides all such dreams as those of Guerin and De Mornay, and votes all the Pascals, Nicoles, Fenelons and Gurneys to be milksops and pietistic fools; I equally scorn his Bruno Bauers and Carlyles. His old age is fiery, restless, testy and unmerciful; on the contrary, I grow calmer, and more averse to agitation. He is a thorough-paced abolitionist, of the ruat cælum school; I am disposed to follow Sir Robert Walpole's quiteta non movere. We live in a pleasing pain of endless controversy, which puts out his pipe a dozen times a-day, while it only cause» my clouds of smoke to roll away in heavier volume. My chief amusement has been in planting trees for the use of posterity, and in decorating a little church which the ladies of our neighborhood have been rearing out of the work of their own hands. I have inserted in my will-after a competency for Alice-a provision looking toward the perpetuation of a school, in the spot where my happy pedagogic days were past. The shadows of the evening have brought with them a grateful calm. As I contemplate the setting sun, it is soothing to consider that it will rise to-morrow on a land which grows greater and happier every day; a land which, in spite of occasiona agitations, has settled itself with dignity on the principles of Washington; a land in which fanatical bonfires die out without any conflagration. Adieu, gentlest reader! If these chapters seem to you rambling and empty, be assured they seem not less so to me. Yet the utterance of trifles has given me a relief; and if they add a pleasure to any who peruse them, it will be to me a content and a recom pense. SONNET.-AGE. BY WM. ALEXANDER. BROOD Sombrous clouds above a midnight sea; Of life's wide world. Through the thick mist that o'er Its nged voyager. His eyesight dim, Nor joy nor pleasure can to him belong- Into eternity's vast flood. All powers Fail now to him. With numerous sorrows rife, Enters he then the haven of immortal life. CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES. BY THOMAS B. SHAW. WE Consider the age of Chaucer as the true startng-point of the English literature properly so called. In Italy letters appear to have revived after the and gloomy period characterized by the somewhat faise term of "the dark ages," with astonishing rapidity. Like germs and seeds of plants which have ain for centuries buried deep in the unfruitful bowels of the earth, and suddenly brought up by some convulsion of nature to the surface, the intellect of Italy burst forth, in the fourteenth century, into a tropical luxuriance, putting out its fairest flowers of poetry, and its solidest and most beautiful fruits of wisdom and of wit. Dante died seven years before, and Petrarch and Boccaccio about fifty years after, the The first efforts of a revival of letters will always be birth of Chaucer, who thus was exposed to the made in the path of translation; and to this principle strongest and directest influence of the genius of Chaucer forms no exception. He was an indethese great men. How great that influence was, we fatigable translator; and the whole of many-nay, a shall presently see. The great causes, then, which great part of all-his works bears unequivocal traces modified and directed the genius of Chaucer were- of the prevailing taste for imitation. How much he first, the new Italian poetry, which then suddenly has improved upon his models, what new lights he burst forth upon the world, like Pallas from the brain has placed them in, with what skill he has infused of Jupiter, perfect and consummate in its virgin fresh life into the dry bones of obscure authors, it strength and beauty; second, the now decaying Ro- will hereafter be our business to inquire. He was manz or Provençal poetry; and third, the doctrines the poetical pupil of Gower, and, like Raphael and of the Reformation, which were beginning, obscurely Shakspeare, he surpassed his master: Gower always but irresistibly, to agitate the minds of men; a move-speaks with respect of his illustrious pupil in the art ment which took its origin, as do all great and permanent revolutions, in the lower depths of the popular heart, heaving gradually onward, like the tremendous ground-swell of the equator, until it burst with resistless strength upon the Romish Church in Germany and in England, sweeping all before it. WickLife, who was born in 1321, only four years before Chaucer, had undoubtedly communicated to the poet many of his bold doctrines: the father of our poetry and the father of our reformed religion were both attached to the party of the celebrated John of Gaunt, and were both honored with the friendship and protection of that powerful prince: Chaucer, indeed, was the kinsman of the earl, having married the sister of Catherine Swinford, first the mistress and ultimately the wife of "time-honored Lancaster;" and the poet's varied and uncertain career seems to have faithfully followed all the vicissitudes of John of Gaunt's eventful life. two learned sisters having apparently the best established right to the maternity—or at least the fosterage long-of so illustrious a nursling. Cambridge founds her claim upon the circumstance of Chaucer's having subscribed one of his early works "Philogenet of Cambridge, clerk." He afterward returned to London, and there became a student of the law. His detestation of the monks appears, from a very curious document, to have begun even so early as his abode in the grave walls of the Temple; for we find the name of Jeffrey Chaucer inscribed in an ancient registar as having been fined for the misdemeanor of beating a friar in Fleet street. Geoffrey Chaucer was born, as he informs us himself, in London; and for the date of an event so important to the destinies of English letters, we must fix it, on the authority of the inscription upon his tomb, as having happened in the year 1328; that is to say, at the commencement of the splendid and chivalrous reign of Edward III. The honor of having been the place of his education has been eagerly disputed by the two great and ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the former, however, of the of poetry; and, in his work entitled "Confessio And grete wel Chaucer, when ye mete, The which he for my sake made, etc. These lines also prove that Chaucer began early to write; and probably our poet continued during the whole course of his eventful life, to labor assiduously in the fields of letters. His earliest works were strongly tinctured with the manner, nay, even with the mannerism, of the age. They are much fuller of allegory than his later productions; they are distinguished by a greater parade of scholarship, and by a deeper tinge of that amorous and metaphysical mysticism which pervades the later Provençal poetry, and which reached its highest pitch of fantastical absurdity in the Arrêts d'Amour of Picardy and Languedoc. As an example of this we may cite his "Dream," an allegorical composition written to celebrate the nuptials of his friend and patron John of Gaunt, with Blanche, the heiress of Lancaster. Chaucer was in every sense a man of the world: he was the ornament of two of the most brilliant courts in the annals of England-those of Edward III. and his successor Richard II. He also accompanied |