opinion, was incapable of taking sides between virtue and vice. This is not said of Shakespeare as if it were a ghastly defect in his character. It is rather said as entirely homogeneous with the unmixed and unqualified eulogy of Shakespeare, which is the motive and material of the essay. On the next page Mr. Lowell holds this language: * "the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would have unfitted him for the pulpit." That is, Shakespeare's judgment was so perfect that he had no 'earnest convictions'! That is, the rights of good and the rights of evil in the world are so nicely balanced that equilibriuin of judgment, when it becomes Shakespearean, can find no difference in favor of the one or of the other! That is, it was some defect of 'judgment' that made Jesus a ‘propagandist' of virtue! That is, Paul could never have been the apostle that he was, if he had been equal to Shakespeare in judgment'! And such superhuman, with no hyperbole we may say, such supradivine, ‘equilibrium of judgment' in Shakespeare, essential to him as an artist,' is no bar to Mr. Lowell's rating the character above the genius of the man that possessed it!

We have not the heart to insist here upon the prodigious inconsistency between the above-quoted expressions of Mr. Lowell and that nobler sentiment of his respecting the necessity to good literature of earnest convictions. We are too much occupied with indignant literary chagrin and shame, that a man, native to everything severe and high in moral inspiration to intellectual achievement, should have been so enchanted out of his birthright by the evil charm of the charmer. We speak, in speaking thus, not on behalf of morals, but on behalf of literature. It is indeed the fact that inconsistencies and selfcontradictions like those which abound in Mr. Lowell's work are probably traceable at last to some defective reverence in the author for the sacred rights of truth. Still it is not to be said that Mr. Lowell is immoral, or that he teaches immorality, in his writings. But he escapes being immoral, and he escapes teaching immorality, in his writings, if the paradox will be allowed, by the happy insincerity with which he holds and applies

his own adopted canons of taste. By a fine revenge of the violated truth he does not however thus escape vital harm to the artistic value of his literary work from the infection of false principles in literary art. Nor does he -we must be so far true to ourselves— nor does he, we think, escape exerting such an influence in favor of the Goethean principles of aesthetics as is sure, however remotely, to have also its sequel of moral bale to those younger writers among his countrymen, who look to him as to their master. Alas, alas, say we, that no literary Luther was found betimes, to grapple the beautiful and climbing, yet leaning, spirit of the youthful Lowell as a literary Melancthon, strongly and safely to himself. How much might there not then have been saved to American literature-how much not to a fair, but halfdefeated, personal fame! In default of an original and independent endowment of impelling and steadying force in himself, such as a high conscious and determinate moral purpose would have supplied, the friendly attraction of some dominant intellect and conscience near, different from Emerson's, and better suited to Mr. Lowell's individual needs, seems the one thing wanting to have reduced the graceful eccentricities of his movement to an orderly orbit, and to have set him permanently in a sphere of his own, exalted, if not the most exalted, among the stars of the "clear upper sky."

Not prose, however, but verse is Mr. Lowell's true literary vernacular. He writes, as Milton wrote, with his left hand, in writing prose. But whether in prose or in verse, it is still almost solely by genius and acquirement quite apart from the long labor of art, and of course, therefore, apart from the exercised strength and skill of that discipline to art, which is the wages of long labor alone, that he produces his final results. He thus chooses his place in the Valhalla of letters among the many "inheritors of unfulfilled renown." It seems likely at least (but he is yet in his just mellowing prime, and Apollo avert the omen!) that his name is destined to be treasured in the history of American literature chiefly as a gracious tradition of personal character universally dear, of culture only second to the genius which it adorned, of fame constantly greater than the achievements to which it appealed.

CAN you have a back-log in July? That depends upon circumstances. In northern New England it is considered a sign of summer when the housewives fill the fireplaces with branches of mountain laurel and, later, with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweetwilliam and hollyhock at the front door. This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which has no other means of gratifying itself.

In the most rigid circumstances, the graceful nature of woman thus discloses itself in these mute expressions of an undeveloped taste. You may never doubt what the common flowers growing along the pathway to the front door mean to the maiden of many summers who tends them :-love and religion, and the weariness of an uneventful life. The sacredness of the Sabbath, the hidden memory of an unrevealed and unrequited affection, the slow years of gathering and wasting sweetness are in the smell of the pink and the sweet-clover. These sentimental plants breathe something of the longing of the maiden who sits in the Sunday evenings of summer on the lonesome front door-stone, singing the hymns of the saints, and perennial as the myrtle that grows thereby.

Yet not always in summer, even with the aid of unrequited love and devotional feeling, is it safe to let the fire go out on the hearth, in our latitude. I remember when the last almost total eclipse of the sun happened in August, what a bone-piercing chill came over the world. Perhaps the imagination had something to do with causing the chill from that temporary hiding of the sun to feel so much more penetrating than that from the coming on of night, which shortly followed. It was impossible not to experience a shudder as of the approach of the judgment day, when the shadows were flung upon the green lawn, and we all stood in the wan light looking unfamiliar to each other. The birds in the trees felt the spell. We could in fancy see those spectral camp-fires which men would build on the earth, if the sun should slow its fires down to about the brilliancy of the moon. It was a great relief to all of us to go into the house, and, before a blazing wood-fire, talk of the end of the world.

In New England it is scarcely ever safe to let the fire go out; it is best to bank it, for

it needs but the turn of a weather-vane at any hour to sweep the Atlantic rains over us, or to bring down the chill of Hudson's Bay. There are days when the steamship on the Atlantic glides calmly along under a full canvas, but its central fires must always be ready to make steam against head-winds and antagonistic waves. Even in our, most smiling summer days one needs to have the materials of a cheerful fire at hand. It is only by this readiness for a change that one can preserve an equal mind. We are made provident and sagacious by the fickleness of our cliWe should be another sort of people if we could have that serene, unclouded trust in nature which the Egyptian has. The gravity and repose of the Eastern peoples is due to the unchanging aspect of the sky and the deliberation and regularity of the great climatic processes. Our literature, politics, religion, show the effect of unsettled weather. But they compare favorably with the Egyptian, for all that.

mate.

II.

You cannot know, the Young Lady wrote, with what longing I look back to those winter days by the fire; though all the windows are open to this May morning, and the brown thrush is singing in the chestnut-tree, and I see everywhere that first, delicate flush of spring, which seems too evanescent to be color even, and amounts to little more than a suffusion of the atmosphere. I doubt, indeed, if the spring is exactly what it used to be, or if, as we get on in years [no one ever speaks of "getting on in years" till she is virtually settled in life], its promises and suggestions do not seem empty in comparison with the sympathies and responses of human friendship, and the stimulation of society. Sometimes nothing is so tiresome as a perfect day in a perfect season.

I only imperfectly understand this. The Parson says that woman is always most restless under the most favorable conditions, and that there is no state in which she is really happy except that of change. I suppose this is the truth taught in what has been called the "Myth of the Garden." Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and re-creates. She is the experimenter and the suggester of new combinations. She has no belief in any law of eternal fitness of things. She is never even content with any arrange

ment of her own house. The only reason the Mistress could give, when she re-arranged her apartment, for hanging a picture in what seemed the most inappropriate place, was that it never had been there before. Woman has no respect for tradition, and because a thing is as it is, is sufficient reason for changing it. When she gets into law, as she has come into literature, we shall gain something in the destruction of all our vast and musty libraries of precedents, which now fetter our administration of individual justice. It is Mandeville's opinion that women are not so sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature; being less poetical and having less imagination, they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make less failures in business. I have noticed the almost selfish passion for their flowers which old gardeners have, and their reluctance to part with a leaf or a blossom from their family. They love the flowers for themselves. A woman raises flowers for their use. She is destruction in a conservatory. She wants the flowers for her lover, for the sick, for the poor, for the Lord on Easter day, for the ornamentation of her house. She delights in the costly pleasure of sacrificing them. She never sees a flower but she has an intense but probably sinless desire to pick it.

It has been so from the first, though from the first she has been thwarted by the accidental superior strength of man. Whatever she has obtained has been by craft and by the same coaxing which the sun uses to draw the blossoms out of the apple-trees.

I am

not surprised to learn that she has become tired of indulgences, and wants some of the original rights. We are just beginning to find out the extent to which she has been denied and subjected, and especially her condition among the primitive and barbarous races. I have never seen it in a platform of grievances, but it is true that among the Fijians she is not, unless a better civilization has wrought a change in her behalf, permitted to eat people, even her own sex, at the feasts of the men; the dainty enjoyed by the men being considered too good to be wasted on women. Is anything wanting to this picture of the degradation of woman? By a refinement of cruelty, she receives no benefit whatever from the missionaries who are sent out by, what to her must seem a new name for Tantalus, the American Board.

I suppose the Young Lady expressed a nearly universal feeling in her regret at the breaking up of the winter-fireside company.

Society needs a certain seclusion and the sense of security. Spring opens the doors and the windows, and the noise and unrest of the world are let in. Even a winter thaw begets a desire to travel, and summer brings longings innumerable and disturbs the most tranquil souls. Nature is in fact a suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages, and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven. The summer, in these latitudes, is a campaign of sentiment, and a season for the most part of restlessness and discontent. We grow now in hot-houses roses which in form and color are magnificent, and appear to be full of passion; yet one simple June rose of the open air has for the Young Lady, I doubt not, more sentiment and suggestion of love than a conservatory full of them in January. And this suggestion, leavened as it is with the inconstancy of nature, stimulated by the promises which are so of ten like the peach-bloom of the Judas tree, unsatisfying by reason of its vague possibilities, differs so essentially from the more limited and attainable and home-like emotion born of quiet intercourse by the winter fireside, that I do not wonder the Young Lady feels as if some spell had been broken by the transition of her life from in-doors to outdoors. Her secret, if secret she has, which I do not at all know, is shared by the birds and the new leaves and the blossoms on the fruit-trees. If we lived elsewhere, in that zone where the poets pretend always to dwell, we might be content, perhaps I should say drugged, by the sweet influences of an unchanging summer; but not living elsewhere, we can understand why the Young Lady probably now looks forward to the hearth-stone as the most assured center of enduring attachment.

If it should ever become the sad duty of this biographer to write of disappointed love, I am sure he would not have any sensational story to tell of the Young Lady. She is one of those women whose unostentatious lives are the chief blessing of humanity; who, with a sigh heard only by herself and no change in her sunny face, would put behind her all the memories of winter evenings and the promises of May mornings, and give her life to some ministration of human kindness, with an assiduity that would make her occupation appear like an election and a first choice. The disappointed man scowls and hates his race and threatens self-destruction, choosing oftener the flowing-bowl than the dagger, and becoming a reeling nuisance in the world. It would be much more manly