But if the scenes and characters are in some sense local, the main theme is open to no such charge. Principles as broad as the earth; feelings and impulses that live wherever a human heart is groping its way between temptations on the one hand, and noble longings on the other; struggles that have been raging, unseen and unrecorded, in every human breast ever since the world began these are subjects that have a significance and a personality wherever they go. In exterior circumstances men differ so greatly that but few can sympathize together. No common, universal chord is touched when the outward life of the great hurrying world is the theme. But in the inward experience the brotherhood of the human race is seen. As face answereth to face in water, so the heart of man to man.” The music of human hearts that goes up from the four corners of the great world, unheard save by the Father of Spirits, is ever the old familiar refrain, unbroken by discord of strange notes.

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The chief power of the book seems to us, then, to lie in these two facts; that it has dignified the humdrum everyday life, and that too under a theme that strikes home to every individual experience and consciousness. There are plenty of books that treat of heroic life and great actions. But while such life is only occasional and peculiar, we all know what everyday living and struggling is, and there are particular struggles and experiences which are more universal than the rest; when, therefore, some masterly mind, with a far richer experience than ourselves, throws new worth and dignity around this daily life, and glorifies these common longings and strivings, it is but natural that he should command our interest and thought. To ennoble daily life would not effect this if it were not our daily life, nor would it gain our lively interest to portray our occasional and heroic promptings as it does to deal with thoughts that live within us and bear fruit every day. Combining these two powerful forces, the poem at once awakens a personal interest; it rouses memory, it kindles thought, and thought makes us stronger men.

The question suggests itself-what rank in the world of letters such a poem should occupy. It cannot be said to possess in an eminent degree those qualities which render poets immortal. It does not read like a book written for immortality. But as a book to elevate men, to kindle the generous fires of manliness and christian magnanimity, it has a power which greater works might covet. It has an honest and manly tone that goes far to give it influence with beings that are made to love what is manly and true. We limit the sphere of poetry unjustly when we think of it only as administering to our

finer tastes, and our love of the beautiful. It has a higher mission— to inspire men with nobler impulses, to lead them to a higher life, to teach them to be forgetful of self and to strive after great ideas and comprehensive motives. And if in doing this it fail to impress us with its own beauty or loftiness, is it altogether a fault? Whately will have it that some of the greatest orators that have ever lived were never imagined to be such by those who heard them. And why ? Because they made their subjects every thing and themselves nothing. And so if a poem produce its most important effect, what matter if it does it silently and without display? Let the poem with all its beauties be forgotten; let the author fail of immortality; yet if he gained his cause, and elevated and strengthened the minds he reached, is he not a true poet? And there is the silent influence still working, after its direct source is forgotten. It is a great work to have helped to raise one's fellow-men to worthier life. Doubtless it is not unpleasant to be admired in one's works. It is no small boon to be allowed to write grand harmonies, that shall be music in the ears of many generations, but even that music is less grand than that of human hearts and lives, tuned to a higher symphony by unselfish labor in the great fields of literature.

H. P. DE

Fores

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The Heroic in Common Life.

Deem not him only brave, who rides the ocean,
And triumphs o'er its waves by tempests driven;
Nor him who bides some time of fierce commotion,
Or some dread hour to mortal conflict given.

To breast the raging storm, in strong assurance
Of coming calm,—when all but hope is gone,
To bear and struggle still, in firm endurance,—
Oh, these are manful!-but not these alone.

Oh, true and brave is he, that hath forsaken
The banners of the many and the strong,
And, through contempt and hate, his portion taken
Among the few that battle with the wrong.

Strong is the soul, that in its season sharing

The sweet with brother hearts, hath faithful proved

To taste the bitter; gladly, proudly bearing
Scorn for the honored, hatred for the loved.

"Tis noble, when, in twilight's calm unbroken,

Sad memory comes to claim her thoughtful sway,
To mourn the burning words in anger spoken,

Nor proudly dash the trembling tear away.

For though 'tis brave, with hearts that never fail us,
To bear, to strive, to conquer in the field,

Yet still, when only Right and Truth assail us,
May heaven, in mercy, grant us but to yield.

He is a hero, who mid toil unending,

The dizzy whirl of care, the eager strife

For bread, and gold, and fame, with soul unbending,
Hath struggled for a purer, fuller life.

I pray not, when the black storm bursts before me,
To face its lightnings with untrembling frame;
I long not, with my flag high waving o'er me,
For strength to die amid the battle flame.

But be it mine to bide the long and weary,
The heat and labor of the dusty day;
And marching on the desert vast and dreary,
With strong unfailing heart to keep my way.

So, when the hoarse alarm, on midnight breaking,
Shall rouse the host to fierce and sudden fight,
I know I can abide such fearful waking,

Nor quail amid the cannon's horrid light.

Then, soldiers, wait not for the coming morrow,

The trumpet call of duty to obey;

From idle hope no vigor shall ye borrow;

To-day be heroes,-bear your parts to-day!

J. B. M.

Theodore Winthrop.

It is now nearly a year since Theodore Winthrop fell, on the threshold of his life. Young, brave, stout-hearted, rich in gifts of nature, which had ripened under a careful culture, he had turned aside from old

associations and fond dreams, and, mindful of the terrible possibilities of war, had laid his life cheerfully on the altar of his country. The darkest chances to which he looked forward are to us historic facts. Amongst the first, at the call of his country, to throw himself into her ranks, he fell at his post, in the first battle, with his face toward the foe. Events have thickened since that disastrous day at Great Bethel, but in a war so novel to our peaceful nation, and whose duration is thus far measured only by months, the slightest incidents are not readily forgotten. We remember still how the graceful, athletic form, the refined, thoughtful face, the scholarly mind and the proud heart, whose march down Broadway on that bright afternoon in April, some of us saw and he has recorded, only as one of a thousand, was borne back in June, amidst sad hearts and solemn music, covered and cold. But we should do injustice to his memory if, either in the severity of our analysis of his character, or in the excess of our sympathy for his death, we who are moving amidst the scenes of his early life should overlook the peculiar debt which we owe him. To his country he has left a valuable legacy in the writings which amused his idle hours. For us he stands on higher ground, since, in his example of courage and self-renunciation, he seems to represent the relations and the duties of educated men to this War of the Rebellion. Let us notice it constantly and notice it thoughtfully, as we go on in the study of his character and his writings, that to the cause which we deem worthy of our sympathies, he brought all the wealth of his endowments and acquirements, and rounded the gift with the sacrifice of his life.

It was a life fitly closed amidst the adventure and romance of war, for it was full of romance and adventure. Winthrop was by nature a campaigner. To his restless mind the unexciting routine of business, and even the delights of a literary leisure, failed to afford the stimulus which he pined for, and which he sought in the bustle and exhiliration of travel. To such a life he seems to have been well adapted, both by nature and by training. The long rambles which he took with his father in childhood, enabled him to take with comparative ease his fifty or sixty miles a day in later years. Nature had given him a frame light and slender, but sinewy and athletic, sustaining fatigue and privation, under the tropics or on the plains, with an inherent elasticity which refused to be overborne. The secret of his endurance lay rather in his intense vitality than in any inordinate muscular power. In his apparently aimless wanderings he shunned rather than followed the paths of civilization, yet he caught no tinge of coarseness or vulgarity from the roughest society into which he was

thrown. Scrupulous, even to a fault, in his dress and his manners, he never lost the habits and the bearing of a gentleman. Such he was in College. Those who remember him as they knew him here, think of him as studied in his personal appearance, and polished in his address, but giving no promise of his future eminence as a writer, and winning no distinctions in the doubtful field of College oratory. On the appointment list he stood low, but by taking the Clark Scholarship with ease over the Salutatorian of his Class, he at once asserted his position as a scholar.

His life of stirring adventure after leaving College, the dangers he encountered, and the hardships he endured in his wayward wandering over two continents-all these have been eagerly gathered up by the readers of his books, and are familiar to the public. They were scenes through which no person could pass, however scantily gifted by nature, without acquiring a positive character. This Theodore Winthrop seems now to have wanted. It only remained, therefore, that it should be strengthened and confirmed by his singular experience. Yet when we come to analyze and estimate it, we find ourselves encompassed by peculiar difficulties. Our natural feelings attest the propriety of the old motto of the Romans, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum ;" and the extraordinary circumstances of Winthrop's life and death, seem to make it, for his critics, a binding rule. And yet strong characters are marked always by strong faults, and the blemishes, which were quite obscured by the sudden blaze of military glory in which he passed away, come out with unmistakable distinctness under a calmer study of his life and his writings. We think we shall only do justice to his virtues, if we recognize, without flinching, the points where he erred, and however closely and candidly we may study him, we shall be mistaken if we do not find very much in him to admire, and not a little to love. We have said that he was a scholar, nor do we need the record of the Townsend Premiums and the Berkleian Scholarships, to convince us of this. For however heretical the doctrine may appear, we venture the opinion that it is not on prize lists that the test or the degree of genuine scholarship is to be sought. It writes its own indelible record on character and life. It envelops like an atmosphere; is felt rather than read. The charm which it imparts is not in accumulated stores of facts or principles; it is not in a memory piled with the wealth of years of labor in historic mines. It is manifested rather as an essence pervading manners, conversation, and modes of thought, refining the intercourse of social life, moulding opinions, shaping character. It was in this rarest and highest sense that Winthrop was a scholar.