Chapter IV (2)

I wonder if we, as a people, have any conception of the grandeur and glory of the Times in which we are living; if we at all appreciate the importance of the history which is being lived all around us; if we feel the colossal magnitude of the every-day events which so crowd upon us that we have hardly time to grasp them; if we are fully aware of the infinite possibilities of what has been so well called this 'fearfully glorious present'? I think not, and I do not know that it is possible for us to do so. Only when we look back upon it from the hight of the far-off future, shall we see the country through which we are journeying in all its grand, sweeping outlines, its majestic proportions, and its imperial tints of coloring. The days of peace and tranquillity in a nation as in a life are robed in colors sweet and grateful to the eye--softened hues of green and gold--but the days of war and tribulation are days of scarlet and crimson, and all that can be seen in heaven and earth is black and flame; but the days when Right achieves great triumphs, even through bloodshed and desolation, are days of imperial purple, hues royal in their magnificence. Thank Heaven that, through the days of blood and black, we have at last reached the purple days of life as a nation. A little more than a year of war, and now the skies are brightening. Thank God! for they have been black, black, black with horror and suffering and crime. And yet such a year as this, I am almost persuaded, is worth a score of years of peace. It certainly has achieved more for truth and humanity and God than the score of years which preceded it. As a nation, we had become almost despicable. Such supple, yielding slaves of 'Democratic' demagogues; such cringing, fawning, knee-bending, hand-kissing agents of the diabolical, traitorous Slave-Power; such apologists and supporters of Wrong; such pusillanimous, weak-hearted advocates of the unpopular Right; such slaves to Cotton and its threats, that we had almost lost the God-given independence of American freemen, and seemed--thank God! events have proved only _seemed_--to be entirely given up to money and mechanics, to have become, indeed, a nation of peddlers. So much so, indeed, that our prophets were stoned in their own lands, our apostles stricken down in the national councils, and the few voices that were raised for God and humanity, from out the miry slough of a trafficking age, were almost unheard in the general din which went up from all the nations, and the burden of whose song seemed to be: 'There is no God but Cotton, and we are all his prophets.' But the moment the first gun was fired, how all this changed! How regally the whole nation rose up! How magnificently she threw off the garment of rags and filth which had hidden her fair proportions, and donned the imperial toga of humanity, and wrapping the rich folds of the gorgeous mantle around her, stood out before the world in all the dignity of freedom and virtue--a form which made the whole earth glad and the heavens clap their hands in exultation. What giant leaps the nation made in manhood and heroism, strides following each other thick and fast, until the most cynical of the doubters of humanity began to open their eyes, and acknowledge that they would not have thought her capable of such unexampled deeds. The national heroism which the Northern people have displayed is indeed unparalleled. They have risen up as one man to the support of the Government. They have offered property and life and the most sacred treasures of the heart upon the shrine of constitutional liberty. At the sound of the drum, they have left the farm and the barn, the anvil and the mill, the church and the forum, and formed into the grand army of invincibles which, at the word of command, have marched forward, conquering and resistless. They have borne patiently with delay and defeat, with blunders and crimes, with humiliation and taxation, and have, in short, proved themselves _Americans_ worthy of the name. Of course, national heroism has inspired individual heroism, and to-day the country blazes from frontier to metropolis with gallant records of daring deeds. Their number is infinite; they can not be individually remembered, but only massed together, one sublime mosaic by which the gallantry and heroism of the free, untrammeled North is proved. We doubt not there is a leaf for each hero in the heroic record of heaven, and the due share of hero-worship paid to each by those angels who love to pore over the chronicles of earth. And we mourn less over the coming of this war at the present time than we should, did we not perceive that sooner or later it was inevitable. It was written in the fate-book of God. Never before was war so emphatically a war of principle. It mitigates the suffering much to know this. It is something to know that all the brave men who have fallen have fallen for the right; and when we believe so, we do firmly believe that their death will give liberty and happiness to millions yet to be. We can not think but that their lives are well spent. There are some who are written upon God's muster-scroll as martyrs to liberty. Who would not esteem it a happiness and a glory to belong to this Old Guard, who from age to age have rallied and rallied and rallied to the support of liberty, to the rescue of this holy sepulchre from the hands of desolators and barbarians, who have ever fought where the fight was thickest, have ever been the advance-guard of the world in its onward progress, and been enshrined in the great heart of the world, there to glow like the stars forever and ever? Is it a hardship to die that one may live forever? Is it a hardship to die that millions who now live in wailing and woe, in chains and degradation, may live in happiness and freedom in all time to come? The voice of the great army of American freemen rolls back the answer, like the majestic anthem of the sea, No! a deep, continuous no, which echoes from the broad Atlantic to the sunset-dyed Pacific, from the summits of Nevada to the great lakes of the North. Yes, I tell you the whole people feel the depth and sacredness of this war; they feel it to be, as Carlyle said of the French Revolution, 'truth, though a truth clad in hell-fire.'

Then forward, noble army of the brave and true! Rally and forward, and forward again, until every Malakoff of Wrong is reduced, and every suffering Lucknow of our country hears the slogan of deliverance. You have glorious successes to cheer you now. You can think of Somerset and Donelson, and all the glorious battles of the war--of forts taken, of enemies driven, of towns evacuated, of the great cities of the enemy in our hands, of all the stirring, glorious successes of our army and our flag--and even had you none of these to think of, you could think of our cause, and this would be enough. Then let the bugles sound, the trumpets clang, the drums beat, the cannons roar, and we will march, and rally, and forward, and charge and charge and charge, until victory or death crown our labors; and if death to us, so let it be--it will be victory to our successors. This is the spirit of our Northern army. Sing plaudits to it, ye sons of song. Let your eloquence be inspired by it, ye golden-mouthed men--ye Everetts and Sumners. Write of them, ye gifted who would live in the coming time. Weave garlands for them, ye white-handed and lily-browed. Write anthems and oratorios for them, ye men of music. Pray for them, each and all of you, night and day, with heart and voice. But we can not, if we would, overlook the desolation which the war has brought and must bring upon our favored land. We can not conceal from ourselves the fact that, end when it will, or how it may, it must bring desolation to thousands of happy households, and inflict never-healing wounds upon thousands of happy hearts. For every man who falls in battle some one mourns. For every man who dies in hospital-wards, and of whom no note is made, some one mourns. For the humblest soldier shot on picket, and of whose humble exit from the stage of life little is thought, some one mourns. Nor this alone. For every soldier disabled; for every one who loses an arm or a leg, or who is wounded or languishes in protracted suffering; for every one who has 'only camp-fever,' some heart bleeds, some tears are shed. In far-off humble households, perhaps, sleepless nights and anxious days are passed, of which the world never knows; and every wounded and crippled soldier who returns to family and friends, brings a lasting pang with him. Oh! how the mothers feel this war! If ever God is sad in heaven, it seems to me it must be when he looks upon the hearts of mothers. We who are young, think little of it, know nothing of it; neither, I think, do the fathers or the brothers know much of it; but it is the poor mothers and wives of the soldiers. God help them! But the theme is too sad--let us leave it. And amid this wild rush of war, let us not forget our individual duties and responsibilities. Carlyle truly says: 'Each of us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or not victorious, has he not a little life of his own to lead? One life--a little gleam of life between two eternities--no second chance to us for evermore.' Let us not forget the loves, the amenities and charities of social life. Let us not forget that the education of the world must go on as ever, that the great virtues of charity and self-denial must more than ever be exercised, and that the discipline and perfection of our own characters is as ever our grand life-work. Then let the angry waves of tumult dash up and froth at our feet, let the skies blacken and the tempest roar, God is over all. This one thing we are to remember, and be cheerful. Browning says:

'God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world.'

THE CRISIS AND THE PARTIES.

From two points of view, the great and preëminently _American_ nation vibrates at present in a crisis of immense historical significance. The first is, that of the war between the United and so-called Confederate States, which is virtually a strife between Free Labor seeking to enlarge its sphere and retain its power against agricultural aristocracy maintained by slave labor. All the energies and theories of industrial progress, of science, and of constant intellectual development; in a word, all that is most characteristic of 'the spirit of the Nineteenth Century,' is enlisted on the one side; all that is fading out and wearing away, with all that characterizes the unwisest conservatism has taken its last stand on the other. It is the old story of 'the generation which comes and of that which goes,' reduced to the intense form of a fierce fight. All of this--but little understood within a very few years--has been of late made generally intelligible on this side of the border, thanks, perhaps, as much to Mr. Hammond's word 'mudsill' as to any other cause. In the short sentence which declared that there should always exist, in every community, one ever-sunken and permanently degraded class, the great point of difference between the South and North was set forth in a form intelligible to the humblest capacity, and it _was_ understood--how well has been shown in many a bloody field.

The other crisis in which we are at present involved is domestic and purely political. It is the growth of opposing political parties, and its existence is undoubtedly to be regretted, if we take only a _superficial_ view of the causes of its birth. We could all wish for some time to come--perhaps forever--to see only a single Union-party, with all men, looking neither to the right nor the left, pushing steadily on to the great goal of unity, commercial development, and social progress. But we forget that so surely as night follows day, even so surely, in every community, will there be a conservative section and a progressive; the 'extreme right' of the former consisting of frozen conservatives, advocating the preservation of every antiquated evil, because it has acquired in their eyes a halo of 'respectability,' while on the 'extreme left' of their opponents will be found the radical innovators, for whom no extravagance of reform is too great; so that as each molecule or group of atoms has its positive and negative electrical point, and as each atom in turn obeys the same law, so we see the positive and negative poles of North and South again reflected in the rapidly increasing divisions among us of Conservatives, who, by a singular fatality, still indicate the plebeian origin which they would now so gladly disown by the term Democrats; and, on the other hand, of Republicans, nick-named at present Radicals--somewhat unjustly; since the term is strictly applicable only to a very limited portion of their number.

There were men of high intelligence among the founders of the _old_ Democratic party; men who understood in many respects the true interests of humanity and its inevitable tendency, under the influences of free labor, free schools, and science. But with the masses, it owed its growth to the old assumed 'natural antagonism' of labor to capital, or of 'the poor against the rich.' It was essentially the same party as that which was played upon by low demagogues like Cleon in the old Greek day; by men who stirred up the poor and ignorant against the privileged and rich, for their own selfish advantage. Of late years, more enlightened and intelligent views have prevailed in all parties, and the Cleons of the present day have been compelled to adventure more and more among the lowest and most ignorant for dupes. For the workman is gradually learning with his employer that there is a harmony of interests and a gradual adjustment of the prices allotted to the relative values of time, labor, brains, and capital, and that the most serious obstacle to this adjustment is, the keeping up of a constant warfare between laborers and employers. It is the skilled _employé_ who becomes himself the capitalist in due time, under a peaceable and well-organized system, as labor and brains rise in value, and the greatest impediment to his rise is a settled state of war between himself and the employer. Education and political equality, the competition of capital, and the ever-increasing appreciation of intelligence, are constantly promoting this harmony and enabling labor to secure its rights.

It is easy to see how the ancient Democracy, or rather its leaders, having for many years held political supremacy and shared the spoils, actually took the place of their opponents, and, in their decline, naturally enough, formed a coalition with the intensely aristocratic South. Meanwhile, what became of the once aristocratic Opposition, with its 'silk-stocking gentry,' as they were termed? Like the Democracy, it died a natural death, so far as the active enforcement of its principles was concerned, after those principles had no longer a foundation in the social developments of the age. Here and there, an old and incurable devotee to mere forms or party shibboleth, who could not comprehend the new order of thought, went over to the 'Democratic' conservatives. Of such were the old gentlemen who, in Philadelphia, voted for the white waistcoat and immaculate snowy neck-tie of James Buchanan. They fled to their ancient foes, that they might die happily in the holy odor of respectability, quite ignorant that a new gospel of what may be termed Respect Ability was being preached, and building up a higher and grander order of nobility than they had ever dreamed of.

Meanwhile, the arrogance of the South and its desperate struggle to secure political preponderance, by extending slavery to the territories, developed in the North a free-soil and free-labor party, which received, most appropriately, the name of Republican. The doctrine of free-labor being intimately allied to every other form of social freedom, and of active thought and social science, had a natural affinity for 'intellect.' The old Opposition, which had boasted, or been taunted with, possessing 'all the dignity,' including that of superior culture, swelled the ranks of this new party with writers and thinkers of eminence. So it grew in power, taking in, of course, many varied elements, both good and bad.

As might have been expected, the proper conduct of the war, and the disposal of the enemy in case of victory, soon led to decided differences between the Democracy, who could not--owing to ancient custom--throw aside their love for the name, or their antipathy to the new doctrines which threatened their power. The mass of them had grown up in firm alliance with the South, and duped and cat's-pawed as they had been--irritated as they were at the treachery of their old allies and despite the noble service which many of them rendered, in fighting the common foe--many have never been able to hate _ab imo pectore_ the men of that false and foul feudal party which, when the rupture fairly came, expressed for their old allies a scorn and contempt deeper even than they felt for 'the Abolitionists.' In vain the South protested fiercely that it meant disunion and nothing but disunion, and made its words good by offering, both in Europe and in its own press, to sacrifice, if need be, even slavery, rather than be longer bound to the North; still, the remaining ultra Democracy could not, would not, even now _will not_ believe that the South would or could be so unfriendly. It was this hope of compromise and conciliation which lost us forts, and ships, and millions of dollars in munitions of war; for it was said: 'The South is only boasting, and must not be driven to extremes.' With eyes wide open to the thefts, the Democratic leaders smiled a languid, cowardly assent, and let the enemy prepare for war. And war came. It might have been prevented; it might, beyond all doubt, have been limited and crushed; but the hand of the braggart South had been so long on the throat of the doughfaces, that they dared not move, and the doughfaces were in power. The country at large has had to pay dearly for that old doughface love for the South; it is paying every day in lives and money.

Even now, it is amazing to see how the leaders among the Democracy, while pecking the South with the bill, continue to fondle it with the wing. Again and again, since the war began, they have humiliated the North and encouraged the desperate foe by efforts at peace-parties, conciliations, outcries for amnesty, and entreaties not to 'exasperate' the enemy. They have urged and advocated the maintenance of slavery, the great cause of Southern arrogance and secession, with as much zeal as any Southron of them all, and fiercely deprecated any allusion to a subject which can no more he kept from consciousness than can a deadly and madly irritating cancer. Every suggestion, even the mildest and most equitable, for arranging this difficulty, has been stigmatized by them as out of place and time, while their press has, without exception, as we believe, given currency to statements denouncing directly as swindlers and prostitutes the innocent and well-meaning men and women who went South with the sole object of clothing, nursing, and teaching the disorganized masses of blacks set free by our army. In all of this, we have a melancholy illustration of the difficulty with which unthinking men of the blind mass which rolls itself away into 'parties,' and follows its leaders, embrace new truths or shake off old habits of slavery.

While the modern Democratic party firmly believed--as its majority still seems to--that all this trouble was caused solely by the Abolitionists, and simply for the sake of liberating some four millions of blacks, they had at least some color for their iron conservatism. European humanity did not agree with us; but we of America are more tropical in our feelings, and so we made up our minds that it _was_ too bad to cut one another's throats for the sake of benefiting certain 'fat and lazy niggers,' who were probably rather better off as chattels than as free men. But it is not from this point of view that the world is now beginning to view the subject. Common-sense has ascertained clearly enough that without the agitation of Abolition, the South would have become intolerable and tyrannical--it was imperious, sectional, and arrogant in the days of its weakness, while the Abolitionists scarcely existed, and given to secession for any and every cause. The insolent, individual independence which prompted the wearing of weapons, wild law and wild life, free from mutual social obligations, contained within itself the germs of withdrawal from a civilized and superior people and a stable government. For such men, one pretense served as well as another. They of South-Carolina employed Nullification long before they dreamed of Anti-Abolition.

Still more absurd is the 'Democratic' opposition, since Abolition for the sake of the Negro has been changed into the cry of _Emancipation for the sake of the White Man_. Before this cry, before the inevitable and mighty demand of the free white labor of the future on the territories of the South, all protestations against 'meddling' with emancipation shrivel up into trifles and become contemptible. The prayer of the ant petitioning against the removal of a mountain, where a nation was to found its capital, was not more verily frivolous and inconsiderable than are these timid ones of 'let it alone!' And _why_ let it alone? The Emancipation-for-the-sake-of-the-white-man party, as represented by President Lincoln's Message, commending remuneration, asks for no undue haste, no violent or sudden aggressive measures. It is satisfied to let the South free itself when it shall be disposed so to do; simply offering it a kindly aid when this measure shall become popular and expedient. More than this we have never asked for in these columns; yet it would be hard to imagine a term of 'newspaper abuse,' which has not been given us by the 'Democratic' press. Yes, at a time when ninety-nine men in a hundred in the free States avow that they would like to see slavery 'out of the way,' if only to avoid the endless war which its continuance _must_ entail, all mention of it is tabooed by the men who claim to head the party of the virtual majority! No matter how far off the friends of Emancipation and of the Administration are willing to postpone the practical execution of the measure, 'it must not be mentioned.' For the greater part, these Northern friends of the South at present still earnestly desire the perpetual establishment of slavery 'on a constitutional basis.'

The contemptible efforts at Washington to build up a separate and distinct Democratic party, when no party save that of the Union existed, will condemn to everlasting opprobrium the Vallandighams, Carlisles, Garret Davises, and other false friends of freedom, who at such a time crowded together like hungry political cormorants, to hatch out the egg of faction, and secure a prospective share of the spoils. Have these 'Conservatives' reflected on the disgraceful show which their names will make _in history_, in after-years, when freedom shall have been proclaimed throughout the land, and when those who opposed its progress will appear like nothing else than traitors! Heaven help the men who, at a time when others were gathering in full measure of glory in a holy cause, were piling up naught but shame for their posterity. For it is not more certain that God is just, than that the full measure of iniquity will be heaped upon their names in the after-chronicles of freedom.

Even to the present moment, the 'Conservative' alias the 'Democratic'--or the Black, alias the White--party struggles with might and main to defend and protect its old Southern whippers-in, even at the risk of dividing and distracting the Union. To effect this, it has--almost successfully--insolently thrust the Commander-in-chief forward as _its_ centre, and broadly slandered the Secretary of War and President in no measured terms, as having toiled to defeat McClellan and prolong the war. Through all the glossy web of lies, the light of truth shines or will shine to their disgrace.

Chiefly and most unwisely is the conservative hand shown at present in opposition to every proposition for confiscation or punishing the rebels. After having hurried us by their cowardice and Southern toad-eating into this war; after urging it by their contemptible procrastination to its present tremendous proportions, they cry out 'humanity!' for the men who have murdered our relatives, and shake the Constitution for protection over estates which have been directly used to contribute to Southern war! While every mail from the South gives fresh instances of desperation, and while we search in vain for a trace of proof that there is the slightest hope of reconciliation, we are still entreated to restore every thing in _statu quo ante bellum_, and bear all the results of the war ourselves, as if forsooth we had been after all in the wrong. And so the Vallandighams and Davises declare that we were. 'Abolitionism caused it all,' they say, 'nothing but Abolition.'

Meanwhile, the question urges itself on us every day with more pressing power, how we are really to settle the whole difficulty? We see but one course--the 'Northing' of the South. We are content to waive for the present all theory or project of confiscation, save so far as promoting the settlement of those soldiers and emigrants who may wish to settle in the South is concerned. _This_ question demands consideration, and must have it. Whether the lands to be appropriated for this purpose come from rebel estates which have ministered to the war, or whether they are to be taken from State property, they must be had; for the settlement of the South and the proper rewarding of the army are matters of paramount importance. The South can no longer exist in its present social condition. People who believe, to use the language of their most respectable journal, the Richmond _Whig_, that:

'Yankees are the most contemptible and detestable of God's
creation; vile wretches, whose daily sustenance consists in the
refuse of all other people; for they eat nothing that any body else
will buy;... who have long very properly looked upon themselves as
our social inferiors, as our serfs:'

People, we say, who believe this of us, must be taught to think differently and truthfully. If they lived in China, it would be otherwise; but linked to us as they are, we can no longer tolerate such outrageous superciliousness as they manifest. Those among them who will learn, may be taught; those who will not, must be supplanted by people who are not too proud to work, who do not 'abominate the system of free schools, because the schools are free,'[B] and revile free labor, because it consists of 'greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, and small-fisted farmers.' The task is great; but it must be accomplished. The war is drawing to an end; but a greater and nobler task lies before the soldiers and the free men of America--the extending of _civilization_ into the South. Let us lift our minds above the narrow limits of 'party,' and realize the mighty work which we have in hand. Let the introduction of free labor to the South be in future the subject to which every thinking American mind shall be devoted. Let them stream in by millions!--the free laborers of all the world!--there is room for them all; and the right of man to work never yet had such fair and just opportunity to have justice done it. Agricultural aristocracy, supported by involuntary servitude and unsupported by manufactures, has been tried, and found worse than wanting. Let its place be filled as promptly as possible by that truly higher aristocracy of industry and of culture which is at present common to Europe and our own portion of America. The turn of the North to rule has at length come. Let its reign be inaugurated by great, noble, and philanthropic efforts to extend the blessings of true civilization to all the continent.

I WAIT.

I wait--watching and weary, I wait;
You wander from the way!
My heart lies open, however late,
However you delay!

I wait--watching and weary, I wait;
But day must dawn at last!
Together, beyond the reach of fate,
Love shall redeem my past.

I wait, ah! forever I can wait;
Forever? I am brave:
Time can not fathom a love so great--
It waits beyond the grave!

TAKING THE CENSUS.

Moses Grant sat in his vine-grown arbor one fine afternoon in August. A fine afternoon, I call it--a little sultry, to be sure, which made Moses Grant's eyes heavy; but the hum of the bees that played around the white clover-blossoms, and the sound of the leaves as they rustled in the warm wind, and the richly colored clouds that floated around in the deep, deep blue of the summer sky, and a thousand other things which I will not pause to note, but which every observing reader has noted on many an August day, made the afternoon I speak of as glorious as any afternoon could be in all our glorious summer.

Moses Grant's eyes were heavy--or eye-lids, if the reader should be a critic. He had brought a book from his daughter's book-case. He remembered the volume--it was called _A Book of a Thousand Stories_--as the one his daughter Mary read aloud one evening, when the witty turns of speech put all the company into the best of humor. But, somehow, the wit had now lost its point--the joke had lost its zest--and let him try as he would to collect his scattered thoughts, and let him set his eyes on his book never so firmly, his fancy would go on long journeys into the past, and come back again, wearied more and more with each journey, till at last it had sunk to rest, and Moses Grant's eyes were closed. The bees buzzed on, the leaves quivered as before, and the great world moved in its wonted way, yet our hero did not heed it; the world moved on just the same, O reader! as it will one day move--one long, long day--when you and I will not heed it.

Suddenly Moses Grant heard his name spoken. When aroused, he saw his neighbor, Johnson, seated in the rustic chair that mated the one in which he himself sat.

'Good-day, neighbor Johnson,' said Moses Grant. 'What in the world are you doing with that great book?'

'I am taking the census.' And he began turning the leaves as if searching for a lost place, remarking, laconically: 'Sultry.'

'Yes, a very close afternoon. But is it ten years since the census was taken? It seems but as many months. Oh! well, time flies!'

And he looked at the beautiful sky and at the beautiful landscape, and lingeringly at his own stately mansion, guarded by venerable trees that his own hand had transplanted from the forest--and the great truth, half-realized, yet almost as common as our daily life, that time was sweeping all things into the dead past, day by day and year by year, gave him a passing thought of how much he loved them.

The name of Moses Grant was duly inscribed in the book. Then the question was asked by neighbor Johnson:

'When were you born?'

'In the year 1800--sixty years ago the day before yesterday--though I declare I forgot all about my birthday.'

'Well, how much real estate shall I set down to you?'

'I _have_ said that I owned about fifty thousand dollars in that kind of property, perhaps a little more, but not half as much as some persons estimate.'

'Well, how much personal property?'

'I guess about twenty thousand will not go far out of the way, reckoning mortgages and all.'

After a few minutes, which neighbor Johnson occupied by telling how Sime Jones tried to get the appointment of census-taker by wriggling about in an undignified way, and in talking about the prospects of his political party, the visitor left the old man, (such we have a right to call him since he has confessed his age,) and the old man (he would not thank us for using the term so often, for he tries to think he is still young--the old man, I must again repeat) fell a thinking. His eyes were no longer closed, although his book _was_; he leaned forward in his rustic chair, and commenced to talk aloud--which is said to be a growing habit with most old men:

'Sixty years of human life!' The words were uttered slowly, as though their full meaning were felt in the speaker's heart. After a little while they were repeated: 'Sixty years of human life!' There was a mournfulness in his voice now; it had sunk to the low, tender tones that, years before, when his faithful wife vanished from earth, revealed to all his friends that there was sadness in his heart, while there seemed cheerfulness in his words. 'Welladay!' he continued; 'I have, at any rate, been a _successful_ man. My business has prospered beyond my expectations, and I am what people call a rich man. There was a time when I feared I should come to want; but now, if I could but think so, I have enough. And mine has been an industrious life. When I was elected to the State Senate wasn't my name held up in the newspapers as an example for young men? Wasn't my reputation admitted to be spotless? Yes, I _have_ been a successful man--more successful than nearly all who started with me.'

And he began to look more cheerful and contented. He again looked at his mansion and broad fields, and again he opened his book. The jokes were better now than a little while before.

But the bees buzzed on; the trees sang their old soothing song; the air remained warm; and soon Moses Grant began to nod assent to his book, though the matters it contained were not of opinion, but of fancy. By which I mean that he grew sleepy.

* * * * *

Sudden darkness fell upon the earth. The sun, after sending its rays to glitter in the river so brightly that Moses Grant put his hand over his eyes as he looked from his arbor-door, went out, and the blackness of night wrapped itself about the world. The elms, that had rattled their deep green leaves in the wind, and the birch, that had so gracefully bowed its slender, yellowish head, were all colorless now. There was no storm-cloud to veil the heavens, and yet the sad-faced moon came not out to remind the world of their lost loves and deferred hopes--nor the stars, to twinkle in their silence, as though there were a great Soul in the skies that longed to speak to men, but had no utterance save a thousand love-lit eyes. All was darkness--dense, universal.

Yet Moses Grant had sat unmoved in his vine-grown arbor. His soul was passionless, his face was calm. His book had fallen to the ground, and his head rested on the back of his chair.

Suddenly there came a visitor to the arbor. Moses raised his head and saw a being--whether man or woman I can not tell--with a face, oh! so bright and calm, with eyes that looked from the deepest soul, and a pure forehead that spoke of unworldly rest--a face that shone in its own vista of light when all around was dark. The Presence bore an open book in its hands, and came and stood before Moses Grant and looked earnestly into his face.

'Who are you?' he cried, half in fear, before the calm look of his visitor, and half in confidence, because of the look of love.

'I am the census-taker.'

'No, no; it was he who came a little while ago.'

'He was one census-taker--he came to learn how much you _seemed_ to possess; I come to learn your _real_ possessions. I am the real census-taker.'

Moses Grant knew not what it meant; he sat speechless, in wonder. He would have fled, but he knew not where he could flee in the darkness; he must remain with his strange visitor, as all men must one day stand alone with an awakened Conscience.

'When were you born?' asked the Presence.

'Sixty years ago,' answered Moses.

'You understand me not. I do not ask for the time when you were born into your outward show of life, but when you commenced to live.'

'Still I do not know your meaning,' said Moses.

'Then you have not yet been born. You exist--you do not live. Say not again that you have lived sixty years, for your being has not yet expanded into life.'

Oh! what great thoughts and dark memories came into the mind of Moses Grant! Great thoughts of a nobler life of love than he had ever known--of realities to which he was fast approaching--and a thousand dark memories that he had often tried to obliterate from his mind. A little while before, he thought he possessed a spotless reputation--and so he did possess a spotless reputation when judged by human law. No man ever knew him to steal; no man ever knew him to transgress any important law. Nevertheless, he had had his own ends to gain, and he had gained them. Yes--we might as well confess it--Moses Grant had lived a selfish life. He knew how to take advantage of the technicalities of law, and he knew how to be severe and unmerciful toward the poor. He remembered how, years before, his son had longed for an education, and how the mother had pleaded that he might go to school and to college, and how sternly he said, 'No, I want him in my business;' and he remembered how he kept him slaving at his uncongenial tasks, how he scolded because he still pored over his books, until at last the mother had laid the poor boy in the grave before he had attained to manhood. He remembered how the mother grew paler day by day--she who had been such a help-meet in all his selfish schemes of hoarding and saving; how she had talked more and more about her 'dear lost boy,' till he, Moses Grant, commanded her never to utter that name again in his presence; how the mother still faded and faded, till at last she too, was laid in a quiet grave beside her boy. All this came into the mind of Moses Grant. And then he remembered how he had taken a poor widow's cottage, because his mortgage-deed gave him the privilege--he never thought the _right_--to take it; he remembered her sad face, that told of silent suffering, when she moved with her children from the cottage her husband had built. 'How,' he asked, in the silence of his own mind, 'oh! how could they say my reputation was unspotted?' Yet he had transgressed no outward law, had forged no mortgage-deed. He only acted like a man who thought that this world could only be enjoyed when he possessed a title-deed to it all; like one who thought that above and beyond this world there was nothing.

All this time has the Presence stood before Moses Grant, looking into his troubled face with its piercing eyes, and reading his every thought.

'Answer me now,' it said, 'have you yet begun to live?'

Then there was another and greater struggle in the mind of Moses. Pride said to him: 'Send this intrusive visitor away, or flee yourself.' But still the visitor stood there, waiting so calmly, and again Moses realized that the great world had faded from his vision; so he could neither send away the intruder, nor fly himself. Still those calm eyes looked into his inmost soul.

'Oh!' he cried at last, 'you have searched me through and through. No, I have not lived--I have not been born, I have no life for you to record in your book. Now, pray leave me--leave me in peace!'

'That were impossible,' said the Presence, 'you know not peace. You pride yourself on your possessions; but how can you have life or possessions, if they are not recorded in my book? The earth, that you love so well, has faded away. It will return to you for a brief moment, and then it will fade forever. What you now possess is but a shadow, like a sun-gilt cloud in a summer sky--changing and changing, and fading and fading, till at last it disappears. You have, if God wills, a few more years of mortal existence, and then, oh! then, you must exchange shadows for realities.'

'Leave me, oh! leave me!' cried Moses.

'Not yet; my mission is not fulfilled. Here in this book your name was written sixty years age, as one _to be_ born. Here your ledger has been kept, though you knew it not. Read the pages with your soul, and see how your account stands.'

Oh! how dark the page. A line was drawn through the middle, from top to bottom, and the good deeds were recorded on one side, in letters of gold, and the bad deeds on the other side in letters of ink. As the pages were turned, Moses looked eagerly for the bright letters, but they were few--too few; while every page was almost filled with the black records of selfish and sinful deeds. Every page made Moses Grant sicker at heart, and he would gladly have withdrawn his eyes from the book, but they were riveted, and he could not.

'O poor man!' exclaimed the Presence, in pity; 'how poor do you find yourself, you who were a little while ago so rich! But you must read no more, lest you sink in despair.'

And the book was closed. Moses Grant said not a word; his heart was too full to speak--too full of grief--too empty of hope.

'Despair not,' continued the strange Presence. 'Your record is not yet completed. You may yet cancel all those black letters by writing golden ones over them--which is to pray with your remaining strength and days for forgiveness. You have been a hard, selfish man, for sixty years. Men, for their own interests, have called you respectable; but before God you have merited displeasure and disapprobation. In the little time you have left, perhaps you may not be able to leave the world as pure as you began it; but you may hope for wonderful mercy and forbearance from God our Father. Have courage, and faith, and hope, and you will yet be rich indeed--rich in love and joy and peace undefiled, that fadeth not away.'

Then the Presence vanished. Still Moses sat in his chair. But a hand was laid on his forehead, and he awoke as he heard Mary say: 'Father, supper is ready.' He drew his hand across his eyes, and arose from his chair. He looked from his arbor-door. The world was all bathed in the light of the declining sun. As he came out and looked on the landscape, he thought that never before had he seen it so dreamy--never before had he seen it so beautiful and so glorious, for never before had he so felt the use of this world as a place in which to attain to the good and to shun the evil, to overcome temptation and to aspire to life.

His daughter wondered what caused his tone to be so tender that night; the next day his neighbors wondered that he visited a certain poor, struggling widow, and gave her the house her husband once owned; and in the months that have since passed, many a poor family has wondered what has turned their former oppressor into such a provident friend.

_I_ only wonder that so old and selfish a man could have had so bright and heavenly a dream.

* * * * *

A SENSIBLE EPITAPH.

'Reader, pass on: ne'er waste your time
On bad biography or bitter rhyme:
For what I _am_, this cumbrous clay insures,
And what I _was_, is no affair of yours.'

THE PELOPONNESUS IN MARCH.

'Fair clime I where every season smiles.

* * * * *

There, mildly dimpling, Ocean's check
Reflects the tints of many a peak
Caught by the laughing tides that lave
These Edens of the Eastern wave.
And if, at times, a transient breeze
Break the blue crystal of the seas,
Or sweep one blossom from the trees,
How welcome is each gentle air
That wakes and wafts the odors there!'

It was with thoughts like these running in our heads, that we found ourselves, at about half-past four o'clock, on a dark, cloudy, windy morning, March fifteenth, 18--, rolling slowly along the uneven road that leads from Athens to the Piraeus. Our guide was Dhemetri, of course--who ever heard of a guide that was not named Dhemetri? An excellent guide he was, too, never missing his way, answering correctly all our questions to which he knew the answers, and fabricating answers to the rest as near the truth as his moderate knowledge of antiquity would permit; providing us sedulously with creature comforts, and besieging our hearts daily with delicious omelettes and endless strings of figs. Arrived at the Piraeus, we were transferred, with beds, cooking apparatus, and baggage, to the Lloyd steamer, whose cloud of steam and smoke was seen dimly in the gray morning. At a reasonable time after the hour advertised, we sailed into the open bay, passed near enough the island of Ægina to see the ruined temple on one of its hights--almost to count its columns--then coasted along the rugged shores of Argolis, which we eagerly studied with the aid of a map. Here was the peninsula Methana, and half hiding it, the island Calauria, where Demosthenes put an end to his life, once the seat of a famous Amphictyony. Then the bold promontory which shuts in the fertile valley of Troezer, then the territory of Hermione, stretching between the mountains and the sea. We touched at Hydhra, famed in the history of the Greek Revolution, a strange, rambling town, picturesquely situated on a cleft in a bare island of gray rock, and shortly after at Spetzia, a town of much the same character; then toward night sailed into the beautiful bay of Napoli, or Nauplia, once the capital of Greece.

It had been our intention to procure horses that night, and ride as far as Mycenæ, but we were too late, so contented ourselves with a walk to Tiryus, and a rapid examination of its ruins. The massive walls of this venerable town--they were a wonder in the age of Pericles as in ours--still stand in their whole circuit, and here and there apparently in their whole hight. It is a small, steep, mound-like hill--you can walk around it in fifteen minutes--and within the walls the terraced slope, thickly sprinkled with fragments of ruins, is grown over with the tall purple flowers of the asphodel--a fit monument to the perished city. From the citadel of Tiryus the view over the wide plain of the Inachus, the broad bay beyond, covered with sails, the bold headland of Napoli crowned with the ruined castle, the noble citadel of Argos, and the mountain ranges on every side, made a picture beautiful even under the dull sky of that March evening. Our walk--quickened by the fear that the city gates would be found closed--gave us a hearty appetite, and a classic smack was imparted to our modest viands by the fact that Orestes himself waited on our table. We slept well, notwithstanding the uncomfortable reputation of the inn, and set off early the next morning upon our wanderings.

Traveling in Greece is no child's play. Roads there are none, except between some large towns; indeed, the nature of the country hardly allows of them, as it is made up chiefly of mountain ridges and ravines. Neither would the poverty-stricken inhabitants be able at present to make much use of them. When I expressed to Dhemetri the great benefits I conceived that roads would confer upon the community, he asked contemptuously: 'What good would roads be to them, when they have no carriages?' Inns, too, there are none, or almost none; after leaving Napoli we found none until we returned to Athens. In their stead, each village has its _khan_, a house rather larger than ordinary, and containing one large unfurnished room for guests. Here a fire is made on the hearth, (the smoke escaping, or intended to escape, through a hole in the roof, for chimneys do not exist,) and the traveler pitches his tent metaphorically in this apartment. The beds, which he carries with him, are spread on the floor, to do double duty as seats during the evening and beds by night. Thus the accommodations are reduced to their lowest terms--shelter and fire; to which add a lamb from the flock, eggs in abundance, or sometimes a chicken, loaf of bread, or string of figs. Wine, too, flavored with resin in true classic style, and tasting like weak spirits of turpentine, is to be had every where. But for any entertainment beyond this, the host is no-way responsible. If you do not choose to sleep on the bare floor, you must bring beds and bedding with you. If you wish the luxury of a knife and fork, you must furnish them yourself. Kettles, plates, saucepans, cups, coffee, sugar, salt, candles, all came from that mysterious basket which rode on the pack-horse with the baggage. Were I visiting Greece again, I would eschew all these vanities--carry nothing but a _Reisesack_, or travel-bag, as the Germans are wont to call every variety of knapsack--a shawl, and a copy of _Pausanias_, and live among the Greeks as the Greeks do; but I was inexperienced then.

So we set out with great pomp and circumstance, each on his beast--_alogon_, the Unreasonable Thing, is the word for horse--while a fifth, with two drivers, carried our goods. A ride of about three hours--passing the silent and deserted Tiryus--brought us to the village of Charváti, the modern representative of the 'rich Mycenae.' Here, while Dehmetri prepared our breakfast, we followed a villager, who led us by rapid strides up the rocky hill toward the angle formed by two mountains. As we rose over one elevation after another, he plucked his hands full of dry grass and brush, and then leading us into a hole in the side of the hill, informed us in good classic Greek that it was the tomb of Agamemnon. It is a large, round apartment, rising to the hight of forty-nine feet, and of about the same width, the layers of masonry gradually approaching one another until a single stone caps the whole; not conical in shape, however, but like a beehive. A single monstrous stone, twenty-seven feet long and twenty wide, is placed over the doorway. The whole is buried with earth, and covered with a growth of grass and shrubs, and a passage leads from it into a smaller chamber hewn in the solid rock, in which our guide lighted the fuel he had gathered. The gloomy walls were lighted up for a moment, then when the fire died away, we returned to the open air. A little further on is the famous gateway with two lionesses carved in relief above--the armorial bearings, we may call it, of the city--and in every direction are seen massive walls, foundation-stones, ruins of gates and of subterraneous chambers like the first we visited, conical hillocks, probably containing others in equally good preservation, and other marks of the busy hand of man--'_Spuren ordnender Menschenhand unter dem Gesträuch_.' Sidney Smith says: 'It is impossible to feel affection beyond seventy-eight degrees or below twenty degrees of Fahrenheit.... Man only lives to shiver or to perspire.' I think it is so with the sublime and beautiful, and deeply as I felt in the abstract the privilege I enjoyed in standing on the citadel of Agamemnon, and seeing the most venerable ruins that Europe can boast, that keen March wind was too much for me, and I was not sorry to return to the khan, where, sitting cross-legged on the floor, we ate with our fingers a roast chicken dissected with the one knife of the family, and drank a bumper of resinous wine.