us are clothed upon are far profounder than those of the world's elder families. Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron speculate on the various aspects of nature with a more lofty philosophy and feeling than do Virgil, Theocritus or Lucretius.

In a lower sense the imagination materially imposes upon facts. In contemplating cities, works of art, or even scenes of nature, we almost always appreciate them for the associations that belong to them-the imaginations they excite; at least we seem to do so the more cordially for that consideration. Let us look at a gray, bleak sort of plateau between hills at one side, and the blue sea at the other, and we see nothing, perhaps, to admire. But let somebody come and say, "That is Marathon!" In a moment, while the blood thrills at the word, a glory seems to be lightning over the immortal ground; the air is thick with phantoms;

"to the hearer's eye appear

were very rude, ignorant, and, in fact, ba. old times; but the innate imaginativenes of our nature will not be reasoned with and, in spite of ourselves, we are disposed E admit, with the poet, that

"Not rough or barren are the winding ways Of hoar antiquity, but strewn with flowers"

66

Any thing old and historic is appreciated mostly in proportion as it gives scope to us imagination to point a moral or adorn a tale" concerning it. We gaze on the wild hill, the vale, the stream, or the forest of a new country with none of those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an old land with the past history of which we are familiar. The former may be as fair or even fairer to see; but as

"A primrose by the river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him" of whom Wordsworth speaks, so this object without association is merely what it stands for, and no more. But the other is not so

career;

“The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow; The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear; Mountains above, earth's, ocean's plain below; Death in the front, destruction in the rear!" It is this quality of the imagination which gives all old or storied countries that superior charm which they possess beyond new and comparatively unhistoric soils. At sight of battle-fields, religious houses, cathedrals, castles, either in ruins or otherwise, we are gratified in calling up a crowd of shadows from the dust, and finding a sort of mysterious companionship with them, during those passing reveries in which, as Campbell truly says,

“'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view" and it is generally true of the human mind that it regards the past with a feeling of tenderness. The philosophers or sans culottes of the world may say what they please, but people will have a curious sort of leaning and looking to these same "old times." There is a certain charm in Time, who is the dominator of us all; and the ruins and remnants of any thing seem to speak a solemn warning of our own evanescent fate. That belief in the good old times is an instinct, so to speak, which has some

romance, a voice of tradition. In that valley is the legendary well, and close by is the inviolable fairy ring; by the stream is the ruined fortalice of some historic, highhanded name, and not very far from it is the old abbey of the Templars, now dwindled to a few ivied walls, three carved arches, and a broken oriel; on that moor was fought a bloody battle in which a king fell fighting with his sword in his hand; on the slope of yonder hill are Druid stones in a circle set up there, certainly, in the remote times of those giants who descended from Thor, and

"Lived in the olde days of King Artour."

It is greatly to the disadvantage of our scenery that it has not any of these old associations of history or romance. To be sure we have some of the noblest memories in the world entwined with some of our localities; but these are too much in the foreground; they are terribly authentic; they have none of that indistinctness which the imagination loves to live in; they could be sworn to, and are too closely connected with the matter-of-fact condition of things about us. Sometimes we find ourselves regretting, foolishly enough, that we have no fairies on this continent-no fairy mythology. The fairies of America" is a term

that sounds as impossibly as "Emperor of America," or as if one were to say, "The Duke of Massachusetts," or something of that kind. To be sure, in the latter case, we are ready to thank God for the impossibility. But, in the other, we should not be sorry to have a crowd of fairy traditions scattered over the flood and field of our republic. However, we must only try and be content with universal suffrage and this system of public school education; though we are poetically convinced that the other state of things would help a good deal to spiritualize the aspects of nature here, and tend to foster the imaginative faculties, now so subservient to the hard, commercial philosophy of the day. Our forests are, undoubtedly, noble objects, whether the breeze steals through their glades and shakes the upper boughs in sport, or the whole distracted army reels struggling and howling under the great buffeting of the tempest,

“And oaks come down with all their thousand

winters."

But these aspects appeal to our higher perceptions of things-to our rarer and more abstract sense of what is great or beautiful. We admire and take to them, as it were, with effort. We cannot feel cordially towards them. Give us, in preference, a sight and sound of what remains of the New Forest, where William the Second

"By his loved huntsman's arrow bled;" or of the forest of Arden, where Rosalind wandered in her boy's dress, and the melancholy Jacques met the motley fool. Chimborazo and the Mountains of the Moon are

magnificent objects. We prefer the Alps; and so would most people, for the same reason because they are the Alps, the familiar Alps; they are covered with associations as well as snow:

Scipios and the Cæsars on the other; and then the poetry of Byron, Shelley and others is so linked with these lofty localities! Lake Leman, for similar reasons, is preferable to Lake Superior, and the Ægean dearer to the imagination than the Atlantic. After all, we have an idea that the human associations form the most attractive elements of the sublime and beautiful of objects; just as Thomson's poetry is a greater favorite with human nature than Shelley's. The farther you remove a thing from the human associations, the less the human imagination takes to it, the less it likes it, and the seldomer it recurs to it. We could here expatiate a little into metaphysics, and show the soundness of our opinions, from the natnre of our moral perceptions. But we shall take some other time for this. We are not going to turn short upon the good-natured and unsuspecting reader in that manner.

In fine, this faculty of the fancy is mixed up with what we consider most real in the world. The preacher calls the world a vain shadow; and the Berkeleyan philosopher calls it a huge delusion of the senses; and Shakspeare says:

-"the world is of such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep;"

also, that "nothing is but thinking makes it so." The practical philosophers, therefore, -the makers of railways, the managers of stocks and the owners of the telegraph or telegraphs, cannot be considered to have the matter all to themselves. The poet and the dreamer will have as much of "the thick rotundity of the world" as they, and certainly the most enchanting portion. Schiller gives us, in an admired lyric, the idea that the imaginative being was forgotten in the distribution of the properties of the earth by Jupiter, but received, as a compensation, a general invitation to the court of the divinities. This nether "maker or "finder" does still, of course, go up to the windy platform of supernals whenever he has a mind, but not as a matter of necessity. He has vindicated a pretty share in sublunary things, and has got a great many châteaux en Espagne, which he lets out to a multitude of tenants, very profitably.

W. D.

"Far from this being the case, I refer to the most kind and amiable person in the world-the most considerate and self-sacrificing that you can imagine; yet I have cause for doubt and fear."

Lucy made no observation, and he continued: "Were my now cheerless dwelling but enlivened by the presence of another, whose home it might be for the reason that it was my home; one who would guide my wayward fancy by gentle counsel; who, by the daily exhibition of true loveliness of character, would teach me gradually in some degree to imitate what I could not but admire; who would be to me a friend closer than a brother, my companion never to be parted from; one to be loved, cherished, adored! Can you, dear Lucy, be such a

one?"

"Mr. Randolph, I cannot."

His impassioned glance was turned full upon hers, which timidly sank beneath it.

Lucy! think that this is to me a subject vitally real and earnest. The time has passed when I could treat it with gayety or trifling; now I leave jesting to others. I throw my whole soul at your feet. You will not, you cannot cast it back to bitterness and despair. You will not withdraw the hand which I seize as my hope of salvation!"

He clasped her fair palm in his, so as to require some degree of force to extricate it. That force was exerted, however, and the hand withdrawn.

Instantly he stood upon his feet; his frame shook with ungovernable passion; every vein of his countenance was swollen, and his flashing eye added intensity to the cruelty of the words which burst from his lips:

Stay then as you are, a sneaking, penniless dependent; yes! a sneaking, mercenary, hypocritical, fortune-hunting dependent! Stay where you are: rob me of my inheritance, and share it with your base confederate!"

He rushed from the room and from the house, strode down the lawn, and then along the road to the village, at a rate which few could have equalled without absolutely running. It was not till he had reached the side of the tavern that he became sensible of the singularity of his motion, and to recover composure, relaxed into a very slow walk. Around the corner, and in front of the

tavern, was quite a throng, composed of inhabitants of the village and others. They had been discussing the late remarkable night occurrences at Colonel Trenchard's.

One of them observed:

"I don't somehow believe that Jim can have done it. What's your mind, Jack?"

Our old acquaintance, Chapman, the individual addressed, merely answered: "I don't know what to say about it."

"For my part," remarked Skinner, the overseer, "I'm inclined to think that old Ichabod was nearer right than wiser folks, after all, and that the Colonel hung himself, when out of his head. Indeed, he talks wild about the business even yet. What do you think, Mr. Leach? He says you had a hand in it; that he heard hand in it; that he heard your voice through

the window."

"That's queer enough," replied Sandy. "I know that I have a rough voice, but I should hardly think it would reach 'way from Davy Chapman's parlor to the house on the hill. If the old man's mind wanders in this way, I really must agree with you, Skinner, that he did the deed himself in a temporary fit of insanity. They say, too, that he was greatly vexed about the injury of his big tobacco crop."

"But did the footprints on the roof and through the corn-field only exist in imagination?" This question was addressed to Skinner by a young man in a green frockcoat, whose fowling piece and brace of pheasants showed that he had just returned from a hunting excursion. chestnut hair curled about a face of almost feminine beauty, and his form, though exceedingly graceful, was slight, and had hardly attained the ordinary stature.

His

"I saw them with my own eyes," said Skinner; "but then it must be considered that Mercer and I thought that they led from the piazza around to the front of the house, and the doctor struck upon the trai that led to Steve Randolph's sort of by guess or haphazard, without tracking them plainly along the grass to where we started from."

"And what reason could anybody have had for doing such a thing?" asked Sandy Leach.

"Truly," said the youth in green, Francis Herbert, "I do not see what motive Jim could have had; but as to others, there is more ground for doubt."

"Mr. Herbert, I don't see but he had as much reason as any nigger, and Colonel Trenchard says the man was certainly black." "But how easy and common it is for ruffians to make white black with candle smut, or a coal from the chimney corner!"

"Do you then suspect Ran lolph ?" exclaimed Leach.

"I have not said so; but if I were in his place, and innocent, I should be very restless till the mystery were cleared up."

Stephen Randolph had overheard the latter part of this conversation ere he turned the corner, and stepping up quickly to Her bert, said in a harsh tone:

"I did not understand your remark exactly repeat it, sir."

Herbert drew back slightly, but answered with firmness, and in a tone which showed a natural resentment at the dictatorial manner of the interrogator:

"I do not remember the words I used; but since you desire it, I will tell you my thought I fervently trust that you are innocent, but cannot help regretting that you do not show more zeal in searching out the culprit."

"Lend me this a moment." This was spoken by Randolph to a bystander, from whose hand he snatched a horsewhip, with which he made several smart blows upon Herbert's shoulder, saying as he did so, "You are a meddling puppy! Take that, and learn to behave yourself."

Herbert's face flushed to a deep crimson at the insult, and then sank to an almost deadly paleness. He raised his fowlingpiece, and, with an arm as rigid as if cast of bronze, held it pointed at the breast of Randolph; the hammer was thrown back, and his finger touched the trigger.

Thus both parties stood without motion for a space of time that seemed an age to those around. Then Herbert lowered his gun undischarged. Randolph smiled contemptuously and turned upon his heel. The youth, maddened at the sight, clenched the weapon and again had it half raised; but again he let it sink, and withdrawing his right hand, smote his forehead in bitterness and walked away from the group.

Herbert's agony cannot be described, and few indeed can imagine it in its whole extent; yet he must be less than human who is unable, in some degree, to understand how hard it is to bear a "wounded spirit."

CHAPTER V.

STEPHEN RANDOLPH's footsteps were yet audible along the hall, when Lucy burst into tears and went to throw herself into the arms of her mother. Mrs. Montgomery, surprised and grieved, clasped her head to her own sympathizing bosom and tenderly sought to know the cause of her agitation. As soon as her sobs allowed her utterance, she briefly related the conversation that had just taken place, and the harsh taunts which had been heaped upon her at its close; and then added, with her tears flowing afresh:

"Mother! mother! let us leave this place instantly; not another hour let us stay." "But alas! my child, what home have we beside?"

"Never mind, mother; let us trust to God to provide us a resting-place. Better, far better let us be tenants of the poor-house than remain here exposed to such horrible reproaches."

"Dear Lucy, you know not what you say: here we must stay or starve."

"Then if that is the alternative, oh! let us starve."

"My child, be calm. What, after all, do the wild words of young Randolph concern us? It is not upon him we are living; no right of his is touched; our own consciences, as well as the candor of Mr. Trenchard, justify us against his passionate charge. Why then should it leave a sting?"

"But, mother, it is dreadful to be subjected to the suspicion of such a thing. If we were away from here, the uncharitableness of Mr. Randolph himself could not soil our name with so much as a whisper. Let us pack up and go this very evening."

"Pack and go? Who talks about going? Why, what's all this-crying? Lucy, what's the matter?"