Chapter XXXV (5)

Twice he saw Napoleon--once in 1811, and again in the following year--and his impressions are worth recording, especially as they are given in his most characteristic manner: "What were my feelings when I saw him with my own favored eyes!--himself, hosannah! the emperor! It was in the avenue of the court-garden at Düsseldorf. As I pushed my way among the gaping people I thought of his battles and his deeds; and yet I thought at the same time of the police regulations against riding through the avenue on pain of a five-thaler fine, and the emperor rode quietly through the avenue and no policeman stopped him. Never will his image vanish from my memory. I shall always see him high upon his steed, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperial face looking down with the calmness of Fate on the guards defiling by. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers looked up to him in such awful devotion, such deeply-conscious sympathy, such pride of death!--

Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant!

Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me whether I have really seen him, whether we really were his associates; and then it seems to me as if his image, snatched from the meagre frame of the present, melts ever more proudly and more imperiously into the twilight of the past. His name already sounds like a voice from the ancient world, and as antique and heroic as the names of Alexander and Cæsar." Even to Heine, Napoleon was the representative of the great principles of the Revolution: moreover, he assumed at one time the rôle of liberator of the Jews by conferring on them civil and political rights, while in his armies positions of the highest distinction, dependent only on personal merit, awaited them. But this too ardent hero-worship did not last. "Take me not, dear reader, I pray, for an unconditional Bonapartist," he says sorrowfully on the battle-field of Marengo. "My homage does not touch the actions but the genius of the man, whether his name be Alexander or Cæsar or Napoleon. I did love him unconditionally until the Eighteenth Brumaire: then he betrayed liberty." And again, later: "It is true, it is a thousand times true, that Napoleon was an enemy of freedom, a crowned despot of selfishness:" "he could deal with men and personal interests, not with ideas; and that was his greatest fault and the reason of his fall." "At bottom he is nothing but a brilliant fact, the meaning of which is still half a secret."

Among Heine's home-influences during his childhood that of his mother stands most prominent for good, and he never speaks of her but with reverence and affection. Of the character of his father very little is known. Harry, as the boy was originally named, was destined for a business career, as his parents were unable to send him to the university, and he was placed for this purpose in a banker's office in Frankfort. The situation was exceedingly distasteful to him, and he left it at the end of two weeks. Another attempt was made to establish him in the banking-business at Hamburg under the charge of a millionaire uncle, one of Hamburg's most worthy and respectable citizens, who plays an important part in the earlier part of Heine's career. Here he remained about two years, but with little better result than before. His Hamburg life seems to have been a failure in almost every sense. He got into trouble with certain of his uncle's relations, fell in love with one of his cousins, who shortly after married a more successful rival, and chafed under the dreary monotony which a business life offered to his susceptible temperament; until finally his uncle, seeing that he was in every way unfitted for his occupation, determined to send him to the University of Bonn, under the condition that he should fit himself for the legal profession. Thus Heine was pledged, as it were, from the first to his conversion--a fact all the more remarkable as Solomon Heine, the uncle, was a sturdy adherent of the Jewish faith himself.

The next five years were passed, with certain intervals, at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, and the elder Heine must have watched with some natural concern the career of his wilful protégé, who pursued anything but the course of study marked out for him, and turned his attention mainly to Oriental and mediæval literature, history, philology and other congenial pursuits, quite to the detriment of his professional studies. It was during the years of his university life that he appeared before the world as an author. His first volume of poems was published in 1821, soon followed by the two tragedies of _Ratcliffe_ and _Almanzor_--deservedly the least popular of all his works--and the first volume of the _Reisebilder_. Never were the writings of an unknown author greeted with a speedier recognition, and he stepped at once into the full sunshine of his fame. Nevertheless, fame alone without its more substantial benefits could not free him from a pecuniary dependence on his uncle which was often as humiliating as it was indispensable. "Had the stupid boy learned anything," replied the latter once when congratulated upon his distinguished nephew, "he would not need to write books;" and these words betray an abundant source for those wearisome and ceaseless misunderstandings between uncle and nephew which only ceased with the former's death, and indicate perhaps one reason for the unhappy temper of the young author's genius.

There is but one theme in nearly all the early poems of Heine, and more particularly in those of the _Lyrisches Intermezzo_. The sorrows of an unhappy love are sung with a passion and a fervor such as one finds only in the higher forms of poetry. He adopted for his verse the old mediæval ballad-metre, preserving in a wonderful degree the limpid simplicity of the original, and infusing into it, as into all that comes from his pen, the modern sentiment and spirit. He calls upon all external Nature to share his sufferings, and invests every natural object with an intense personal interest which belongs only to that people whose egoism has outlived centuries of obliterating influences. The following songs, although they are very familiar ones, illustrate particularly well the characteristics just mentioned. I give them in the original, as they suffer unusually by translation:

Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen,
Wie tief verwundet mein Herz,
Sie würden mit mir weinen,
Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.

Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen,
Wie ich so traurig und krank,
Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallen
Erquickenden Gesang.

Und wüssten sie meine Wehe,
Die goldenen Sternelein,
Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe,
Und sprächen Trost mir ein.

Die alle können's nicht wissen,
Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz:
Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen,
Zerrissen mir das Herz.

Or--

Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass,
O sprich, mein Lieb, warum?
Warum sind denn im grünen Gras
Die blauen Veilchen so stumm?

Warum singt denn mit so kläglichem Laut
Die Lerche in der Luft?
Warum steigt denn aus dem Balsamkraut
Hervor ein Leichenduft?

Warum scheint denn die Sonn' auf die Au
So kalt und verdriesslich herab?
Warum ist denn die Erde so grau
Und öde wie ein Grab?

Warum bin ich selbst so krank und so trüb,
Mein liebes Liebchen? Sprich!
O sprich, mein herzallerliebstes Lieb,
Warum verliessest du mich?

Heine could never write in any of the classic metres, and an amusing anecdote is related by Maximilian Heine, the younger brother of the poet, of an attempt once made by the latter at hexameter verse. This brother, Max, was at the time in one of the upper classes of the Gymnasium, and, pluming himself greatly on his own proficiency in the composition of hexameters, urged the young poet to try his skill in the same direction. Heine complied, and came in due time to read to his brother the result of his efforts. Hardly had he reached the third line when Max broke forth impatiently: "For Heaven's sake, dear brother, this hexameter has but five feet!" and he pompously scanned the verse. When convinced of his error Heinrich petulantly tore the paper into bits, exclaiming, "Shoemaker, stick to your last!" and nothing more was heard about hexameters until two days later, when Max was awakened early one morning to find his brother at his bedside. "Ah, dear Max," he began with a piteous air, "what a fearful night have I passed! Only think! Directly after midnight, just as I had gone to sleep, I felt a mountain's weight upon me: the unhappy hexameter had come limping on five feet to my bedside, demanding of me, in terrible tones and with the most fearful threats, its sixth foot. Shylock could not have insisted more obstinately upon his pound of flesh. It appealed to its primeval classic right, and left me with the most frightful menaces, only on condition that I never again in my whole life would meddle with a hexameter."

The time of Heine's entrance in the field of literature was no unfavorable one for an individual genius like his own. The so-called Classic and Romantic schools of Germany had each in its own direction reached the ultimate limits of its development. Schiller was dead, Goethe was at work upon the second part of _Faust_ and the _Westöstliche Divan_, while such of the Romantic writers as were left had penetrated far into the realms of mediæval mysticism to bring to the light only wild and distorted forms of imagery and the most extravagant creations of morbid fancy. In Heine, who could sing of love and moonlight and nightingales with the best of them, they thought they had found a new champion to revive their now declining glory, little dreaming that ten years later, in his famous essay on the Romantic school, he was destined to deal their cause its deathblow and disperse for ever the lingering mists and spectres of German Romanticism. Nevertheless, all Heine's earlier writings, prose as well as verse, show very clearly the influence of the school. "I am tired of this guerrilla warfare," he writes in 1830, "and long for rest. What an irony of fate, that I, who would rest so gladly on the pillow of a quiet, contemplative inner life--that I should be destined to scourge my poor fellow-countrymen from their comfortable existence and stir them into activity--I, who like best to watch the passing clouds, to invent (_erklügeln_) metrical magic, to hearken to the secrets of the spirits of the elements and absorb myself in the wonder-world of old tales,--I must edit political annals, preach the topics of the time, stir up the passions!" A little later comes the news of the Revolution in Paris, and all these vague romantic longings have vanished into air, melted away by the beams of the July sun.

These tendencies may have first roused the determined hostility with which the followers of Goethe greeted the new poet and indignantly repelled the claims of his friends for his succession to Goethe's lyric muse. There was, at all events no love lost between the great Goethe himself and his younger contemporary. Goethe simply ignored Heine, and the latter, though he could not reciprocate in this way, did not spare his mighty rival certain home-thrusts on his most vulnerable side. He made a pilgrimage to Weimar in 1824 on his return from the famous Harz journey, but he is exceedingly reticent on the subject, and the following humorous account from the _Romantische Schule_ is almost the only one to be had of the visit. "His form," he writes, "was harmonious, clear, joyous, nobly-proportioned, and Greek art could be studied in him as in an antique: his eyes were at rest like those of a god. It is generally the distinguishing mark of the gods that their gaze is steadfast, and their eyes do not wander in uncertainty hither and thither. Napoleon's eyes had this peculiarity also, and therefore I am convinced that he was a god. Goethe's eyes were as divine in his advanced age as in his youth. Time had covered his head with snow, but it could not bend it. He bore it ever proud and high, and when he reached forth his hand, it was as if he would prescribe to the stars their course in the heavens. There are those who profess to have observed the cold lines of egotism about his mouth, but these lines belong also to the immortal gods, and above all to the Father of the gods, the great Jupiter, with whom I have already compared Goethe. In truth, when I visited him in Weimar and stood before him, I glanced involuntarily aside to see if the eagle and the thunderbolts were at hand. I came very near addressing him in Greek, but when I noticed that he understood German I told him in German that the plums on the road between Weimar and Jena tasted very good. I had pondered in so many long winter nights over all the lofty and profound things I should say to Goethe if I should ever see him, and when at last I saw him I told him that the Saxon plums tasted very good; and Goethe smiled with the same lips that had once kissed the fair Leda, Europa, Danäe, Semele, and so many other princesses or even ordinary nymphs."--"My soul is shaken," he cries elsewhere, "and my eye burns, and that is an unfavorable condition for a writer, who should control his material and remain beautifully objective (_hübsch objektiv bleiben soll_), as the Art School requires and as Goethe has done. He has become eighty years old by it," he adds with incomparable irony, "and minister, and well-to-do (_wohlhabend_). Poor German people! this is thy greatest man!" To all this there is a keenly personal edge, but the real gulf between the two lies deeper than wounded vanity on the one side and possible jealousy on the other, and is as wide and impassable as Heine's own distinction between the Hellenic and the Judaic views of life. Heine, vitally absorbed in all the questions that the present brought, and in the very heat and stress of its conflicts, watched the "Great Pagan" in the fulness of his years crystallizing his life's experience in beautiful and polished, but ever more and more lifeless, forms of verse, striving toward pure Hellenism, as Goethe's followers called his imitation of classic forms, withdrawn from all the social and political problems of the day far into the realms of scientific research; and he cried out impatiently about coldness, indifference to the true interests of mankind--compared Goethe's creations to the Greek statues in the Louvre, with no humanity in them, but only divinity and stone. But Goethe, with his theory of color, with his botany, anatomy, osteology and the rest, had caught a spark from what was to be the genius of a future generation, and this Heine was not prophet enough to see.

The time, we have said, was favorable for Heine's entrance into literature: it was anything but favorable for the rôle which he began almost at once to play--that of political and social agitator. The political atmosphere of Germany during the years that preceded the July Revolution was stifling in the extreme. The famous War of Liberation had freed the people from the grasp of Napoleon, but seemed only to have increased the weight of home despotism: the press was subjected to searching government investigation, and as a result all political opinions were suppressed in the daily journals, which in lieu of politics supplied little else but theatrical and musical gossip. This was no condition of things for Heine, who could never move in prescribed paths in any direction, and who had to submit to seeing his work scarred and mutilated by the red pencil of the censorship; and he began to look toward France as a land of refuge in case of accident, as it were, until finally, after the July Revolution, the Rhine became a Jordan and Paris a New Jerusalem to his longing eyes, and he emigrated thither, to the land of freedom and "good cheer," to return but once again to his native country. There is no real evidence of his exile being a compulsory one, but under such circumstances his life at home must have been at best a precarious one. According to his own delightfully humorous account, he had learned from an old councillor at Berlin who had passed many years at the fortress of Spandau how unpleasant it was to wear chains in winter. "'If they had only warmed our chains for us a little they would not have made such an unpleasant impression: they ought, too, to have had the forethought to have them perfumed with essence of roses and laurel, as they do in this country.' I asked my councillor if he often had oysters at Spandau. He said, 'No: Spandau was too far from the sea. Meat,' he said, 'was quite rare there too, and there was no other kind of fowl than the flies which fell into the soup.' And so, as I really needed recreation, and Spandau was too far from the sea for oysters, and the Spandau fowl-broth did not tempt me especially, and the Prussian chains were very cold in winter and quite detrimental to my health, I resolved to journey to Paris, and there, in the fatherland of champagne and the Marseillaise, to drink the one and to hear the other sung."

Few particulars of Heine's Parisian life are known, notwithstanding that during its earlier period he reached the zenith of his fame and popularity, and lived, according to his own statement, like a god--a life to end, alas! only too soon. He set himself during these years to the task of bringing about a mutual understanding between the French and the German people, and with this end in view he wrote his famous essays on the _Romantic School_ and _Religion and Philosophy in Germany_, and sent to the Augsburg _Allgemeine Zeitung_ those letters on the politics and art of the day which give one of the most brilliant and vivid pictures in existence of Paris under the "Citizen" monarchy. Well for Heine if those bright Parisian days had lasted! He was overtaken only too soon by a fate as terrible as any that martyr was ever called upon to endure. His nervous organization had always been an exceedingly sensitive one, and he had long suffered from severe and frequent headaches. During the latter part of his life in Paris his health gradually declined, until in 1848 he received his deathblow in a stroke of paralysis which left him almost blind, crippled and helpless, and subject to frequent attacks of intense physical agony--a blow which did not kill him, however, for eight years. His patience--nay, his heroism--through all his lingering torture was the testimony of every one who was a witness of his sufferings; and, what was more wonderful, he retained the powers of his mind in undiminished vigor to the very end. He died in February, 1856, poor as he had almost always lived, and almost in obscurity, for the world had withdrawn from the spectacle of so much suffering, and only a few friends remained to him to the last.

Such a death is terribly sad, but its heroism has all the pathos and nobility of real tragedy, and atones in more than full measure for a life that was not always heroic. Can it atone as well for a literary name that was not wholly untarnished? Nothing can quite justify certain literary sins which Heine at times committed, but when such offences are noted down it is best to let them go. Heine's life was certainly one of unremitting warfare--one long record of personal attacks on his enemies, of broils with his critics, of unblushing license of speech, of undaunted adherence to the ideas for which he lived and wrote--one long cry of protest against the outward conditions of life and society as he found them, which rings in those strange minor tones of feeling that are the keynote of his genius, rising sometimes to an almost childish petulance, and sinking again into chords of the truest pathos. Where is his place and what was his achievement it is very hard to say. He was one of those figures which arise here and there in the history of literature--of men intensely penetrated with the spirit of the age in which they live, who are alike bitterly impatient of its follies and its conservatism. They cannot see far into the future, they cannot always estimate the past: their genius is not universal, but it has always something of the vitality of present interest about it, and is subject in no common degree to the errors of contemporary judgment. Byron was another such figure, and, though his genius had almost nothing in common with Heine's, the ideas for which they fought were very nearly the same--ideas which were the outgrowth of the Revolution, by which they sought to stem the tide of reactionary feeling that set in so strongly from every direction, in religion and politics as well as in literature, during the early part of our own century. Their method of fighting, too, was the same, for they both used their own persons as weapons in their cause; but where Byron's egotism becomes dreary and oppressive, Heine's awakens that vivid feeling of interest which comes usually with personal intercourse alone. He uses himself, along with and as a part of his material, in such a way that his very egotism lends to his writings the greater part of their force and originality, and becomes one of the most potent instruments of his irony and wit.

Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat. That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from the _Romancero_ will show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable translation: it is called

ENFANT PERDU.

In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and more
A lonely outpost have I held in vain,
With no triumphant hope or prize in store,
Without a thought to see my home again.

I watched both day and night: I could not sleep
Like my well-tented comrades far behind,
Though near enough to let their snoring keep
A friend awake if e'er to doze inclined.

And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,
Or fear--for all but fools know fear sometimes--
To rouse myself and them I piped, and took
A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.

Yes, there I stood, my musket always ready,
And when some sneaking rascal showed his head
My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,
And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.

But war and justice have far different laws,
And worthless acts are often done right well:
The rascals' shots were better than their cause,
And I was hit--and hit again, and fell!

That outpost is abandoned: while the one
Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart.
Unconquered, I have done what could be done,
With sword unbroken and with broken heart.

This little poem represents rather pathetically, and in a certain sense the limitations of Heine's genius; for it is impossible not to feel that his genius never found its highest expression--that confined within a narrower channel its force would have been irresistible where now it is only brilliantly dispersive. It seems as if literature in its proper sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all the conflicts of his day--as if the man of ideas had tried to approach too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves; and never was reconcilement less possible between the real and the ideal than at the time of which we speak. This is the meaning of the _Weltschmerz_ and the _maladie du siècle_ of which we hear so much, and everything seemed to conspire to render Heine its chief representative.

But a negative judgment is not enough for a final estimate of Heinrich Heine. Much of his service to literature and to mankind was of a very positive character. As a man of letters he created a prose style unequalled in clearness and brilliancy by anything previously known in German literature--Goethe's prose is ponderous in comparison--and its influence will be felt long after certain of its mannerisms have passed into oblivion. His wit is destined to immortality by reason of the serious purpose that underlies it. It has a spontaneity which no wit exercised merely for its own ends can ever have. Those who call Heine frivolous and a mocker, simply because he can jest at serious things, can only know him very superficially or else must be ignorant of the real part which humor has to play in the world. Perhaps there never was a writer who shook himself so free of all conventionalities of style. His very mannerisms--and his writings abound in them--have a spontaneity about them, and only become affectations in the innumerable imitations which cluster around all his literary productions. This is his service to literature: his service to posterity was as great. He did some goodly service in the "War of Liberation of humanity," if in no other way, by setting the example of a man who could speak unflinchingly for principles at a time when such utterance was not easy.

It will not be possible to follow up these general statements with any further examination of Heine's life or his writings. It has been the present purpose to indicate only in the broadest outlines the scope and general character of the man and his work, and leave to the reader to prove the truth of what has been said by his own investigation. There is no single literary figure that is better worth the task of study than Heine, and to sum up briefly what this article has been mainly designed to show, we must pronounce him if not one of the greatest, at least one of the most original, figures in all literature.

A. PARKER.

DAWN.

What was thy dream, sweet Morning? for, behold!
Thine eyes are heavy with the balm of night,
And, like reluctant lilies, to the light
The languid lids of lethargy unfold.
Was it the tale of Yesterday retold--
An echo wakened from the western height,
Where the warm glow of sunset dalliance bright
Grew, with the pulse of waning passion, cold?
Or was it some heraldic vision grand
Of legends that forgotten ages keep
In twilight, where the sundering shoals of day
Vex the dim sails, unpiloted, of sleep,
Till, one by one, the freighting fancies gay,
Like bubbles, vanish on the treacherous strand?

JOHN B. TABB.

MRS. MARCELLUS.

BY A GUEST AT HER SATURDAYS.

All the celebrated creatures whom Fate or the lecture-committee chance to bring to our town profess themselves amazed that Mrs. Marcellus should continue to make this little-celebrated locality her home. The comment has a double import, containing at once a compliment and the reverse. If therein be conveyed an intimation that Hurville as a place of residence is devoid of those varied opportunities for self-improvement, gayety and æsthetic culture which render existence in the great centres so diversified and so charming, or even should the insinuation go so far as to clearly express the indubitable fact that it is a crude, ragged little town, with a few staring red brick business-houses fronting each other on the muddy or dusty or frozen main street (according to the season), and a numerous colony of wooden cottages dotted around "promiscuous" as an outer fringe--nay, should Hurville even be apostrophized as a "hole," as it was once by a lecturer who came during the mud-reign and failed to draw a house,--why, even the most enthusiastic Hurvillian need take no offence. But whatever the town may be, think what our fellow-townswoman, Mrs. Marcellus, is! One of the greatest favorites our lecture-committee secures for us each year, a dramatic reader with a stentorian voice and a fine frenzy rolling around loose in his eye, expressed the whole thing in what I may call a Shakespearian nutshell by a happy paraphrase of the great bard. "It was not," said Mr. Blankenhoff, "that people appreciated Hurville _less_, but Mrs. Marcellus _more_." That settled it.

I have been very frank, as you see, about Hurville, because, although many of our business-men, in a sort of small beer of local patriotism, insist upon taking up the utterly untenable position that Hurville is the only "live town" in the country outside of New York and Chicago, I am unable to recognize this astonishing vitality myself, and I always say that if Hurville is "live," I should like to know what something dead looks like, acts like, and especially buys and sells like. The commerce of the place has been completely stagnant for several years, and in Hurville, if ever anywhere, is it a mystery to one half the world how the other half lives. I believe both halves would now be one complete and thoroughly defunct whole were it not that the vital spark is kept alive in both sections by Mrs. Marcellus. Her position in a community so provincial, and in many respects so narrow-minded, as that of our little place, has always been an exceedingly singular one; yet she was lifted to the throne of leadership of our choicest circle on her arrival, and has wielded the sceptre uninterruptedly ever since, without the slightest breath of disaffection having arisen among her courtiers. When she first came to Hurville, fifteen years ago, she was a young widow of thirty, very handsome, very travelled, very cultured, very stylish and passably rich. She is all this yet, and much more that is good and lovable as well. On the left-hand side of the account there is nothing to make a blur except that she is now a motherly lady of forty-five, instead of being, as she was when she first came, just on the last step of the stairs where girlhood shuts the door in a woman's face finally--at thirty.

Her coming to Hurville was rather odd, and at first she had not the slightest intention of remaining. Her object in visiting the place was to negotiate the sale of the residence she now occupies, the best house in the town yet, and fifteen years ago considered a very imposing mansion--so much so that when the railroad came the heavy men of the community insisted on the track being laid in such a way that passengers inside the cars could get a full view of the Marcellus house as they whizzed by. The house was built for the father of Mrs. Marcellus's husband, a sharp old fellow who came to the town when the general impression prevailed that Hurville was going to make Chicago shut up shop, and ultimately to see the grass grow in what are still very thriving thoroughfares of the city of New York. Old Marcellus made all the money out of Hurville that the town will afford for the next half century at least, and died in the shanty he had always lived in just as the builders were putting the last touch on that elegant mansion, which was supposed to be but the first of a series of princely residences which when completed would make Fifth Avenue and Walnut street wonder what they were begun for if thus so early they were done for by the wealth and enterprise of Hurville. Old Marcellus's son never came to Hurville. He was educated abroad, and married this lady, a young New Yorker, at her home. He was in poor health and died in Paris, leaving his wife a good deal of property, including this house, and two little daughters to take care of.

She stayed a few weeks at the hotel of those days, a most comfortable one--for, though the building was of frame and the furniture old and shabby, travellers often say that the meals were better and the bed-linen cleaner and better aired than in the present imposing Dépôt Hotel--and finding no one willing or able to buy the Marcellus house at anything like its value, she one day astonished everybody by saying that the house was now withdrawn from sale and that she was going to live in it herself. What a sensation occurred when her furniture arrived! She had brought over all her elegant belongings from Paris, those being days when household effects which had been in use by Americans abroad for a year were passed free of duty at the custom-house. Even now you can scarcely find in any community a house more beautifully furnished than Mrs. Marcellus's. She still uses the things she brought from France, and never allows her head to be turned by any vagaries respecting house-decoration. Her pale-yellow satin drawing-room furniture is charming, a real reminiscence of Marie Antoinette's at the Little Trianon at Versailles. Bronzes and marbles of chaste and beautiful subjects, water-colors and oil-paintings signed by noted names, fresh flowers in lovely abundance at all seasons of the year,--oh, it is a rare home of beauty and culture! And the best of it is, as Mrs. Marcellus often tells us at her pleasant dinner-parties or her cozy Saturday evenings, that by living in Hurville she can enjoy this agreeable and ladylike mode of existence, can do what we know she does for the poor, can subscribe to all periodicals of the day in any way worthy, can entertain her friends often--to their great delight, all loudly exclaim--without being haunted by the slightest shadow of anxiety regarding her income. If she had continued to live in New York she would by this time probably be bankrupt, for a similar manner of living in that costly city would be a dozen times more expensive than it is in Hurville. As it is, she even lays up money; and when her daughters both married, as they did on the same day five years ago, Mrs. Marcellus astonished all the wedding-participants by announcing to them the growth of a plum to the credit of each which she had planted and preserved for them in the hothouse of an old reliable banker's safe in Boston.

I have mentioned Mrs. Marcellus's Saturday evenings. They are the sole means of intellectual exchange Hurville possesses. In fact, without them our mental condition must have degenerated long ere this into something analogous to that of the cabbage, for most of us are too poor to take trips to the cities to brush up our brains, and we have no public or private library worthy the name in the place. Of late even our lecture-course--which used to be renowned as one of the most successful in the country, for a small town--has dwindled down almost to nothing, the hard times affecting this as everything else. No, not everything: hard times make no difference in Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays, thank the powers! Every Saturday evening we gather around that yellow satin furniture, inspect once more those oft-inspected pictures (always discovering new beauties in them), try to air a little art-jargon concerning the statuettes and bric-à-brac, look over the last new periodicals, sniff the flowers and say "How sweet!"--the women always asking how she keeps them with the gas, and Mrs. Marcellus always answering that she doesn't: she has them changed. At nine o'clock tea and etceteras are served up. The fine tea-service of rarest old blue Nankin is laid out upon a tablecloth of daintiest linen deeply embroidered with blue of a corresponding shade. Tea-cakes and pâtés whose ingredients are to be found in no cookery-book whatever greet the delighted and unexpectant palate. With her white, shapely, graceful hands Mrs. Marcellus tenders us these luscious lollipops and again and again refills the steaming bowl. At eleven o'clock precisely the neat and pretty maid, who always wears a white cap, brings in Mrs. Marcellus's small bedroom lamp; and this means good-night to visitors. These evenings are the pride and comfort of the town, and it is a point of honor with those of us who know we are welcome to attend every Saturday without intermission. Whenever the gathering chances to be small you may be sure that the cause of it is to be found in a weather-condition when to say "raining cats and dogs," "blowing great guns" or "snowing like Siberia" is to use a comparison quite feeble and inexpressive. But even on such occasions a few gentlemen always contrive to drop in. They are sent by their wives when these cannot come, and they always find Mrs. Marcellus her amiable, reposeful self, whom no chances of temperature can affect.

On a particularly stormy and disagreeable Saturday of the past winter I hesitated long about making my usual call. Not that I did not want to go, nor that I cared much for the weather, but it seemed to me impossible that on such a night Mrs. Marcellus should take the trouble to light her gas-jets (always supplemented by a large, softly-beaming oil-lamp for the centre-table) or ignite the splendid roaring fire of wood and coal mingled which, burning redly in a deep, low, richly colored grate of brass and steel, gives in winter the finishing touch of comfort and home-likeness to that delicious yellow satin drawing room. In summer the grate is entirely removed, and the vacant space is filled with flowering plants, tastefully framed by the hanging mantelpiece valance above and long, narrow, gracefully draped curtains at the sides, which take away all look of bareness from that central point of interest in every apartment, the fireplace. Yet the prospect of spending in my own cheerless room and quite alone the only evening of the week on which circumstances permit me to sit up at all late was scarcely flattering. I have to be at the store every morning before eight, and therefore on every night but Saturday I retire at an hour of a primitive earliness only equalled by that prevailing in well-regulated nurseries. On Sunday mornings I am able to sleep rather late, but pay for the privilege by the enforced juxtaposition of the heavy breakfast sausage with the tough dinner roast beef, my landlady, in a fit of the contraries, always advancing dinner many hours on the day when of all others it should be very much retarded, and would be if the digestive apparatus of the American people had any rights which the landlady of the period were bound to respect.

But these details have small bearing on the story I am relating. To resume: Driven out, in spite of the stormy weather, by the cheerlessness of my room, I hastened on the Saturday evening in question to seek the warm and comforting shelter of Mrs. Marcellus's abode. All was as serene within that model home as if the raging elements themselves had been subdued by the grand white hands of Mrs. Marcellus, and at her order had been stuffed with eiderdown and covered with yellow satin by a Paris upholsterer. How soothing to the rasped nerves was this interior--the crackling fire, the lights, the flowers, the soft rays from the lamp falling on the gray silk dress and the lace headdress of Mrs. Marcellus as she sat at the solid, large round centre-table with a basket of gay-colored embroidery-silks before her! Besides myself there were five visitors, all gentlemen of course, and most of them individuals who are not much given to loquacity. The lack of conversation was somewhat marked. Still, no one felt any obligation to keep the ball of small talk rolling. Mrs. Marcellus says that when people come to see her she wants them to converse or to keep silent as the spirit moves. The wings of silence brooded over this gathering again and again, yet no one felt guilty. There were many pleasant and home-like sounds--the tintinnabulation of the teaspoons and sugar-tongs, the pricking of the needle through the stiff linen, the whirl of a book-leaf, the laying down of card upon card in the game of solitaire which some one was playing, the bloodless execution of a paper-knife cutting apart the sheets of a newly-arrived magazine, the rustling of the Saturday's local paper, delivered just at dusk and not opened till now, the fresh ink made doubly pungent in the warm atmosphere till it yielded to the pressure of the summer-like temperature and dried up--like the rest of us.

"It is odd," said Henry L. Thompkins at length, closing a novel which he had been reading by slow instalments at Mrs. Marcellus's Saturdays for the last year at least, and whose finis he had now reached, "that so many authors write love-stories."

"Why shouldn't they," said Mrs. Marcellus, "when so many readers like to peruse them?"

"Who likes to peruse them?"

"Why, you do, I should think, else you would have laid down that book long ago. You've been perfectly absorbed in it: there have been chapters which made your color come and go with their exciting interest. I've watched you;" and she shook her needle at him accusingly.

I scarcely remember how it was that when upon this the conversation became animated it instantly drifted into love-stories and love-affairs and jiltings and heart-breakings, and all the rest of it. Everybody had something to say which he fancied had never before been said about the tender passion; and suddenly a proposition fell from the lips of Mrs. Marcellus which certainly took the company by surprise. She said that she wished, just for curiosity's sake, every one present would tell her about the last love-affair he had had. It would really be fun: she wished they would. Objections and modest declinings were unanimous at first, of course, but our hostess insisted; and finally this conditional agreement was decided upon: that her desire should be acceded to, provided Mrs. Marcellus would relate her own experience in this line and tell the company the particulars of _her_ last love-affair. She instantly consented, though I thought I detected a flying blush tinge her cheek at the rush of recollections brought about by the proposal.

The first autobiographer was Henry L. Thompkins himself. Mr. Thompkins is the principal banker of our place, and, from the almost dead level of Hurvillian impecuniosity, he is considered to be a man of colossal fortune. He is very well off in respect to wealth, and has been a widower for many years. In the grief and loneliness which engulfed him at the loss of his wife, he told us, he had sought solace in the warm affections of his sister, a widow lady with a large number of sons, and had recklessly adopted her boys and promised to be a father to them--an engagement which had placed him in such a position toward a lot of young spendthrifts that by actual experience he was now fully qualified to perform the part of the testy old uncle of Sheridan's plays, whose principal duty in life is to shake a stick in his nephew's face and exclaim, "Zounds! you young rascal!" or "Egad! you young dog!" But instead of one scapegrace nephew he had half a dozen to bleed him. During one of his visits to his sister, who lived in the West, he found there, also on a visit, a young lady who made a marked impression upon him. She was rather good-looking, kind, sensible and quiet in her ways. For her sake he lengthened his visit: every day her influence over him became stronger. On the final Sabbath of his stay it happened that of all the household he and she alone were able to attend service. The sermon had a distinct bearing on the sanctity of wedded life. As they walked home he resolved to sound her feelings on the subject of marriage. He began by saying that he was glad to see she was a friend of his family, because that empowered him to ask her this question: Would she like to become a member of it? She blushed, bit her lip and said, as Heaven was her judge, she would, but she had no fortune of her own, and she had seen too much of married life in poverty to dare to enter it under those circumstances. "Poverty!" exclaimed Mr. Thompkins: "you need have no fear of that. I will see that you have every comfort--indeed, every luxury." The girl was so startled she stood still in the street and gazed at him, tears flooding her handsome eyes. "Oh, Mr. Thompkins," she murmured, "you are the best man in the world, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I have felt from the first moment how really noble and generous you are; and it was only last evening I told Edward, when he took me to the Minstrels, that I believed if he'd muster up courage to ask his uncle for money enough to set him up in business, and tell him he wanted to marry and settle down, that you would do it." The only thing consoling about the affair was, that the girl never suspected anything. She married his eldest nephew, whom he has since set up in business three consecutive times (three consecutive failures following), and the couple are now rearing a plentiful crop of grand-nephews, who, though still young, have already developed to perfection the paternal eye for searching out the main chance, and invariably expect--nay, obstreperously claim--a full line of costly presents at Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving and all the anniversaries of everybody's birthday, wedding and demise.

We were very glad that Mr. Thompkins so framed the concluding sentence of his story as to allow us to laugh. We knew very well, from the character of the second speaker, that we should require all our store of thrills and shivers for his recital. He was a long, thin, red-headed man named McLaughlin, who by perseverance had absorbed the most of the leather and findings trade of Hurville and round about, but was always talking of the brilliant and exciting early days of his career, when, fired by a story he had read of the dangers and pleasures of life before the mast, he resolved to run away, and did run away, to sea. His love-story was a wild and inconsequent recital, with staccato stops, of an adventure he had when he was a sailor and his vessel lay in one of the ports of India for some weeks--at Calcutta, I think. Anyhow, there were tiger-skins mixed up in it, and elephants' tusks, and long, moist, horrible serpents trailing after people, and a house where his lady-love lived which was provided with traps and secret panels in the walls and other such trifles; and the lady-love was a native woman who desired to renounce the faith of her people for him, but was interfered with by a cochineal-colored father of a very unpleasant sort, who rampaged around twirling the lance he used in pig-sticking, and often finishing off his enemies with a poisoned creese, such as you read about. Of course there was nothing left for McLaughlin but to fight a duel with this unreasonable parent--a duel which suddenly became contagious, the whole population of Calcutta joining in it; the foreseen conclusion of the terrific narrative being of course that everybody was killed except McLaughlin. No one dared even to smile at this sanguinary catastrophe, for McLaughlin was really a fiery-tempered fellow, and on more than one occasion had been known to back his opinions by inserting his hand under his right coat-tail to find an additional argument wherewith to enforce a similarity of political views. Nevertheless, our hostess slyly asked if it could be possible that the native lady who had wished to relinquish the faith of her cochineal-colored fathers was the amiable--and she might have said, the essentially pale and milk-and-watery--lady who was known to the community as Mrs. McLaughlin, and who would have been, save for the storm, "one of ours" to-night. Mac said, Of course not; but what was the use of sitting down to talk about the jogtrot events of these later years, during which destiny and leather had bound him, as it were, to Hurville? He thought we wanted romance while we were about it.

No. 3 was our military man, an ex-brigadier-general who still wears the Kossuth hat of his grade, and who holds, to the satisfaction of all, the berth of postmaster at Hurville. Like most amateur army-officers, the general thinks that as regards military tactics he is a very Napoleon, and he has so impressed this opinion on Hurville that we know full well, though the country at large may not, exactly what brigadier-general it was by whom the stamping out of the rebellion was principally performed. In the various engagements which have taken place between the armies of Europe during the last decade none have had so satisfactory a termination as they might had our postmaster-general (if I may so compound him) been in command of the field. The French, for instance: it seems a great pity that that brilliant people should not have put themselves in communication with Hurville, if only by wire, at the time of the disastrous Prussian war. There was our general, every Saturday evening at Mrs. Marcellus's, winning the most stupendous victories for them on a large map of the seat of war, with little flags mounted on pins stuck all over it; and it was really exciting to see how the general caused the Prussian standard to retreat at Sedan, the tri-color advancing in triumph at the head of an overwhelming body of troops rushing upon the enemy _en masse_, hemming him in on all sides, while the stirring tones of an imaginary brass band entoned the glorious Marseillaise, its clarion cry proclaiming once again to _tout le monde_ that _les enfants de la patrie_ had won another victory for _la grande nation_. "_Marchons! marchons!_ tum-ti-tum--and victory or death!" Oh dear! what a surprise it was to us all when the cable-despatch came announcing a very different termination to the fray at Sedan! At first we were incredulous. The brigadier clapped his hand to his head, seized the paper, ran with it into a corner and turned his back on us, that he might study the matter from the strategic point of view undisturbed by uninformed comment. When he returned he said he saw quite clearly how it was: the French had failed to advance their left flank--the despatches showed it--and there was the fatal error. The despatches also showed quite clearly that the French had no left flank to advance, nor right either, not to speak of any rear; but the general said he couldn't help that--they should have advanced their left flank: that was the only really soldier-like thing for them to do. When armies meet on the battle-field they should almost always (I think he said) advance their left flank. Again (to hasten to recent events), here were these puerile, unspeakable, unutterable heathens, the Turks. Vile as their moral status was, their military advantages were such that had they had among their pachas one man who possessed the slightest glimmering of a conception of the art of war they would not only have held Stamboul, but they would have advanced their left flank right into the heart of Russia and set the Crescent flag to flying from the tops of the palaces on the banks of the Neva.