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But thus far the relative position of England and the United States has been such that our proportional contribution to the common literature was naturally a small one. England, by her great superiority in wealth and population, was of course the head-quarters of science and learning. All this is rapidly changing. You are already touching the point when your wealth and population will equal those of England. The superior rapidity of our progress will, at no distant period, give you the ascendency. It will then belong to your position to take the lead in arts and letters, as in policy, and to give the tone to the literature of the language. Let it be your care and study not to show yourselves unequal to this high calling, to vindicate the honour of the new world

in this generous and friendly competition with the old. You will perhaps be told that literary pursuits will disqualify you for the active business of life. Heed not the idle assertion. Reject it as a mere imagination, inconsistent with principle, unsupported by experience. Point out to those who make it, the illustrious characters who have reaped in every age the highest honours of studious and active exertion. Show them Demosthenes, forging by the light of the midnight lamp those thunderbolts of eloquence, which

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Shook the arsenal and fulmined over Greece To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne. “

Ask then if Cicero would have been hailed with rapture as the father of his country, if he had not been its pride and pattern in philosophy and letters. Inquire whether Cæsar, or Frederick, or Bonaparte, or Wellington, or Washington, fought the worse because they knew how to write their own commentaries. Remind them of Franklin, tearing at the same time the lightning from heaven, and the sceptre from the hands of the oppressor. Do they say to you that study will lead you to scepticism? Recall to their memory the venerable names of Bacon, Milton, Newton and Locke. Would they persuade you that devotion to learning will withdraw your steps from the paths of pleasure? Tell them they are mistaken. Tell them that the only true pleasures are those which result from the diligent exercise of all the faculties of body, and mind, and heart, in pursuit of noble ends by noble means. Repeat to them the ancient apologue of the youthful Hercules, in the pride of

strength and beauty, giving up his generous soul to the worship of virtue. Tell them your choice is also made. Tell them, with the illustrious Roman orator, you would rather be in the wrong with Plato, than in the right with Epicurus. Tell them that a mother in Sparta would have rather seen her son brought home from battle a corpse upon his shield, than dishonoured by its loss. Tell them that your mother is America, your battle the warfare of life, your shield the breast-plate of Religion.

THE DURABILITY OF REPUTATION.

THE age of Louis XIV. is universally considered as one of the brightest periods in the history of civilization. What gave it this splendid preeminence? Louis XIV. himself, although he possessed great qualities and eclipsed the glory of most of his predecessors, now comes in for a very moderate share of the attention we bestow on the time in which he lived. His generals, Conde, Turenne, Luxemburg, and the rest, — unquestionably men of distinguished talent, were yet in no way superior to the thunderbolts of war that have wasted mankind from age to age, and are now forgotten. His ministers, Fouquet, Colbert, Louvois, have left no marked traces in history. The celebrated beauties that charmed all eyes at the court festivals have long since mouldered into dust. Yet we still cling with the deepest interest to the memory of the age of Louis XIV., because it was the age of Pascal and Corneille, of Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine, of Bossuet, Fénélon, Bourdaloue, Massillon, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucault, and Madame de Sévigné. The time will probably come, in the progress of civilization, when the military and civic glories of this period will be still more lightly, because more correctly, estimated than they are now: when the King, who could make war upon Holland, because he was offended by the device of a burgomaster's seal, the general who burnt the Palatinate in cold blood, will be looked upon, with all their refinement and merit of a certain kind, as belonging essentially to the same class

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SCENERY OF LAKE SUPERIOR.

FEW portions of America can vie in scenic attractions with this interior sea. Its size alone gives it all the elements of grandeur, but these have been heightened by the mountain masses which nature has piled along its shores. In some places these masses consist of vast walls of coarse gray or drab sandstone, placed horizontally until they have attained many hundred feet in height above the water. The action of such an immense liquid area, forced against these crumbling walls by tempests, had caused wide and deep arches to be worn into the solid structure at their base, into which the billows rush with a noise resembling low pealing thunder. By this means, large areas of the impending mass are at length undermined and precipitated into the lake, leaving the split and rent parts from which they have separated standing like huge misshapen turrets and battlements. Such is the varied coast called the Pictured Rocks.

At other points of the coast volcanic forces have operated, lifting up these level strata into positions nearly vertical, and leaving them to stand like the leaves of an open book. At the same time, the volcanic rocks sent up from below have risen in high mountain piles. Such is the condition of things at the Porcupine Mountains.

The basin and bed of this lake act as a vast geological mortar, in which the masses

of-broken and fallen stones are whirled about and ground down till all the softer ones, such as the sandstones, are brought into the state of pure yellow sand. This sand is driven ashore by the waves, where it is shoved up in long wreaths till dried by the sun. The winds now take it up and spread it inland, or pile it immediately along the coast, where it presents itself in mountain masses. Such are the great Sand Dunes of the Grande Sables.

There are yet other theatres of action for this sublime mass of inland waters, where it has manifested perhaps still more strongly, if not so strikingly, its abrasive powers. The whole force of the lake, under the impulse of a north-west tempest, is directed against prominent portions of the shore, which consist of the black and hard volcanic rocks. Solid as these are, the waves have found an entrance in veins of spar or minerals of softer structure, and have thus been led inland, and torn up large fields of amygdaloid and other rock, or left portions of them standing in rugged knobs or promontories. Such are the east and west coasts of the great peninsula of Keweena, which has recently become the theatre of mining operations.

When the visiter to these remote and boundless waters comes to see this wide and varied scene of complicated attractions, he is absorbed in wonder and astonishment. The eye, once introduced to this panorama

of waters, is never done looking and admiring. Scene after scene, cliff after cliff, island after island, and vista after vista are presented. One day's scenes are but the prelude to another, and when weeks and months have been spent in picturesque rambles along its shores, the traveller has only to ascend some of its streams and go inland to find falls and cascades, and cataracts of the most beautiful or magnificent character. Go where he will, there is something to attract him. Beneath his feet the pebbles are agates. The water is of the most crystalline purity. The sky is filled at sunset with the most gorgeous piles of clouds. The air itself is of the purest and most inspiriting kind. To visit such a scene is to draw health from its purest fountains, and to revel in intellectual delights.

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rage of capacity to endure tortures without complaint of a heroic and noble independence. They tell us that these precincts, now waving with yellow corn, and smiling with villages, and glittering with spires, were once vocal with their war songs, and resounded with the chorusses of their corn feasts. We descry, as we plough the plain, the well-chipped darts which pointed their arrows, and the elongated pestles that crushed their maze. We exhume from their obliterated and simple graves the pipe of steatite, in which they smoked, and offered incense to these deities, and the fragments of the culinary vases, around which the lodge circle gathered to their forest meal. Mounds and trenches and ditches speak of the movement of tribe against tribe, and dimly shadow forth the overthrow of nations. There are no plated columns of marble no tablets

of inscribed stone no gates of rust-coated brass. But the man himself survives in his generation. He is a walking statue before us. His looks and his gestures and his language remain. And he is himself an attractive monument to be studied. Shall we neglect him and his antiquarian vestiges, to run after foreign sources of intellectual study? Shall we toil amid the ruins of Thebes and Palmyra, while we have before us the monumental enigma of an unknown race? Shall philosophical ardour expend itself in searching after the buried sites of Nineveh, and Babylon, and Troy, while we have not attempted, with decent research, to collect, arrange, and determine the leading data of our aboriginal history and antiquities?...

No branch of the human family is an object unworthy of high philosophic inquiry. Their food, their language, their arts, their physical peculiarities, and their mental traits are each topics of deep interest, and susceptible of being converted into evidences of high importance. Mistaken our Red Men clearly were, in their theories and opinions on many points. They were wretched theologists and poor casuists. But not more so, in three-fourths of their dogmas, than the disciples of Zoroaster, or Confucius. They were polytheists from their very position. And yet, there is a general idea, that under every form they acknowledged but one divine intelligence under the name of the Great Spirit.

They paid their sacrifices to the imaginary and fantastic gods of the air, the woods and water, as Greece and Rome had done, and done as blindly, before them. But they were a vigorous, hardy, and brave off-shoot of the original race of man. They were full of humanities. They had many qualities to command admiration. They were wise in council, they were eloquent in the defence of their rights. They were kind and humane to the weak, bewildered, and friendless. Their lodge-board was ever ready for the wayfarer. They were constant to a proverb in their professed friendships. They never forgot a kind act. Nor can it be recorded to their dispraise, that they were a terror to their enemies. Their character was formed on the military principle, and to acquire distinction in this line, they roved over half the continent. . . .

...

But all their efforts would have ended

in disappointment had it not been for that principle of confederation, which, at an early day, pervaded their councils and converted them into a phalanx, which no other tribe could successfully penetrate or resist. It is this trait by which they are most distin

guished from the other hunter nations of North America, and it is to their rigid adherence to the verbal compact, which bound them together as tribes and clans, that they owe their present celebrity, and owed their former power.

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.
Born 1807.

FASHION AND INTELLECT IN
NEW YORK.

rather less than more valued by their own sex for being thus much ,,above their business," and there is no recompensing preference of them (shall we say it?) by the society standards of our ,,fashionable women.“ They are a kind of men, too, who will go nowhere ,,through a stooping door," and whom Society must seek. Consequently like the classes formed altogether by predominance in intellectual qualities they are

How to add the genius of New York to the society which exercises its gaieties and hospitalities is a problem, to the solution of which, as our readers know, we have once or twice put out preparatory feelers. Knowing as we do that there is resident in New York material for as intellectual, sparkling,,,not in society." and brilliant a society as exists in the world

and that this material is wholly unsought, and almost wholly unrepresented, in the circles most courted by inhabitants and most seen by strangers we feel as if the excellent stones, which worthily form the base of high civilization, were being forgetfully continued into the superstructure; and that it is time to suggest the want, of such as are chiselled, to carry out the upper design of social architecture to build fitly into its columns, and point its pinnacles and arches.

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We refer in this last sentence to those whose success (in their pursuit for a livelihood) depends on being more gifted than other men with the rarer and higher faculties of the mind artists, authors, journalists, architects, professional scholars, and musical and dramatic celebrities. There are enough of these at any one time, in New York, to furnish every party that is given

every circle that meets, in any shape its fair, or European, proportion of taste and intellect. But the fashionable world is almost entirely without ,,this little variety" New York (we mention it as a matter of citizen-for, artists, authors, journalists, of news) is rich in delightful people. What,,stars," and that sort of people, (as any we mean by „delightful people" cannot well young lady with a two-thousand-dollar neckbe conveyed in one definition; but they may lace will tell you,) are,,not in society." be loosely described as those who think new It is not that the door is shut very tight, as they talk, and do not talk stale as they by the Pocket Aristocracy, against these echo or remember. There are such in all aristocrats of the brain, but various small professions merchants, who slip Wall- causes combine to keep it closed. The masstreet from their tongues and faces as they ter of a new-made fortune, for instance, pass Bleecker, going home lawyers who is very apt to feel, like Milton's Satan, that put on and take off 'cuteness and suspici- it is

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ousness with their office-coat politicians,,Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven," whose minds, though only one-eared for po- and he willingly invites no class of persons litics, will open both ears to anything else to his house, by whom his ostentation will - freshminded and thought-recognizing men, be undervalued, or whose critical eyes will of every kind of business but they are be likely to see a want of harmony be

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tween house and owner. The mistress of a
fashionable house, on the other hand, is by
no means sure enough of her position to
run any risks; and though she is educated,
as her husband is not, and would very much
prefer an intellectual man as a chance com-
panion in a stage coach, she cannot venture
to dull the stylish air" of her party by the
presence of any one ill-drest
any one
that the dandies might mention slightingly
as one of,,the sort of people that were
there"
nor any one who does not visit
certain families to whose level she aspires.
The unmarried daughters are very young,
and if they have any voice in the matter,
they prefer the best-gloved, best waltzing-
partners, and the beaux who are likeliest
to,,have a team of their own" at Newport
or Saratoga.

These, and twenty other reasons, prevent intellectual men from being sought by the recognized Upper Society of New York; and as Intellect keeps modestly back partly from being able, usually, to make no return of hospitality, and partly from having too much pride to run any hazard of mortification they will not seek it, as Vulgarity will; and the chances are, that the two Aristocracies of Brain and Pocket will not, by any ,,natural course of things" come together, in this our day and gener

ation.

a matter

position, the proper influence must be brought perpetually to bear on men of new-made respectability and fortunes. But, let us venture to suggest an idea for the quicker pose of the wanting figure of Intellect upon our statue-less pedestal of Wealth.

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Till the society of men and women of talent is more attractive than its own or, at least, till they have graces and attractions, among themselves, that it would willingly borrow Fashion will never trouble itself to seek guests among those superior to itself by nature. What we want is what they have in Paris a society separate from fashion the admission to which would be a compliment to the quality of a man which would give its entertainments with humbler surroundings, but with wit, sparkle, and zest unknown to the japonicas and diamonds a freer society as to etiquette and dress and a circle of which the power to contribute to its pleasure and brilliancy would be the otherwise un-catechised pass. Vice and vi cious people need not necessarily belong to this circle, as they do possibly to the „artistic circles" of Paris. Though the manners are freer in these entertainments than in the drawing-rooms of titled society, there is nothing which could offend propriety; and gaiety by this freedom is but stripped of its unmeaning trammels. As we said

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Of the two sides of a door, the compar- before, New York is rich in delightful people ative pleasantness is, of course, of opinion; and the outside of a coarse millionaire's would be easily voted, by intellectual men, that of the best society, but that charming women, divine music, costly flowers and lights, pictures and statuary, are on the inside, with the Money. There is no doubt, therefore, in the mind of any man of sense, that the inside of a rich man's door is desirable, whether he is, or is not, himself, the drawback to its agreeableness. It is an object, we presume, quite worthy of advocacy in print, to bring about a freedom of the halls of Croesus to Intellect; to open the enchantments of Wealth the treasures of Art which it collects, the music and perfume which it buys, and the beauty, grace and polish which it brings together

to the class which, of these luxuries, has a thousand-fold the highest appreciation. This has been done in other countries. It should be done in America though, in our kaleidoscope reverses and somersets of

just the people for the formation of a rival aristocracy of mind. There are beautiful, accomplished and gifted women, who are known singly to artists and authors, journalists and scholars; and who would come where they might meet these freshminded men women who at present have no sphere in which they can shine, but who are as capable, perhaps, as the most brilliant belles of society, of the charming interchanges for which the sex is worshipped. There are dramatic artists, musical stars, foreigners of taste, looking for a society of mind, critics, poets, and strangers of eminence from other cities might combine with the superior men among our lawyers, merchants and politicians, and form a new level of intercourse, of which New York is at this moment capable, which would soon compare favorably in interest and excitement, with the most fascinating circles abroad.

all of whom

and

To such an arena for mind, taste and

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