have twelve-inch walls instead of six, and iron in place of wood for the great fires of Boston and Chicago. A score of men are smothered in a mine: and aroused sympathy crystallizes in law, and there are no more mines of a single egress, to be traps for human life. When the survivors of the wrecked Atlantic pass our streets, four hundred men and not a woman among them, the need of an educated self-reliance for woman is enforced as no arguments could enforce it. The blood has long since dried from the footprints at Valley Forge; but the principle that taxation without representation is tyranny, has passed, through that seven-years agony, from an abstract theory to a living reality. And through a series of lesser sensations, in which Stephen Foster and Abby Smith are pioneers, the same truth must slowly gain its universal acknowledgment.

The vital element, therefore, in any sensation is the idea involved: if at any point it touches upon the eternal verities, it is living, cumulative, victorious, even in apparent defeat. We found out early in our civil war that we could not carry it on a sentiment. The great wave of enthusiasm that swept the North when the flag was fired upon sufficed for the time; but we soon needed some deeper inspiration than pretty talk about union and the dear old flag. Neither God nor humanity was with us in heart until we had forsaken all mere sentimentality and stood square to the conflict on equal human rights.

The lives of all great men have a touch of this sensational element; but whether it has potency and in effect will live after them, depends on the issues to which their lives are set. The career of Napoleon was an immense sensation; but it affords no inspiration to-day, unless it be to the Bonaparte family and those tew Frenchmen who connect it with the glory of France. It lights the world no more than a last year's meteor. Garabaldi, Kossuth, Victor Hugo, Washington, were never such names to conjure by, but they will thrill on the lips of posterity, because they are linked with the eternal preciousness of freedom and equal rights. The shouts about the triumphal car of Cæsar are as dead to our ears

as those about the wooden idol at Ephesus; "great is Cæsar" and "great is Diana" are all one. Little cares the world for a lifetime of uproarious fame when it is gone; he who would render immortal the thrill of his little hour of clamor, must wed it to an undying principle.

Men must

It would be strange if religion, appealing to the finest and most emotional elements of our nature, were not abounding in sensational manifestations. These may be coarse and material, or refined and spiritual, according to the capacity of those exercised. thereby. but some appeal to the emotions is legitimate, nay, is inevitable. be made to feel, before they will begin to reason and reach conviction and faith. The Catholics understand this well, and suit their forms of religion to an ignorant populace, with their processions and regalia, their holy orders, their decorated churches, their material symbols of spiritual truths. But their trouble is that this degenerates into a mere perfunctory manufacture of ends. The effect, that defeats its own forced "revivals" in Protestant churches are mischievous, not on account of their appeal to the emotions, but because they trade upon the emotional, without reaching the rational and permanent. Lasting zeal, true enthusiasm in religion cannot be manufactured. It must be the spontaneous effect of an overcharged life within. It is this thrill of inward vitality bursting its bonds, that make the great religious movements of the ages so glorious. Buddha and Mohammed had it in their day, perhaps Mokanna in his. Arnold's definition of religion is, "morality touched with emotion;" and this stress of deep feeling is the power with which he sees the great prophets clothed, who one after another arose to thrill Israel into a new sense of its God and his righteousness. The preaching of John the Baptist was a great sensation. What preacher of a later day compares in mere notoriety and personal power with this young anchorite of the wilderness, who summoned thousands to his discourses, and of whom they said that Elijah had come back from the deal? The ministry of Jesus, with his ever-growing fame, his following by great multitudes, his persecution

unto death, exhibits the same characteristic in more wonderful degree. The apostles were stigmatized as men "who turned the world upside down." The excitement of intense and impassioned enthusiasm at tended the planting of Christianity, as it has all great religious movements. And its historic epochs, have been, with this high significance, sensational epochs. The time of Luther illustrates it; the time of Wesley, of Channing, of Ballou. Their principles survive, but we can have but a poor conception of the intensity of feeling which like a mountain flood swept on those great movements.

While, therefore, the class of sensations that simply stimulate passion, flatter ambition, and produce an unhealthy restlessness of society are extremely mischievous, and another of passing novelties, and divertisements, can scarcely be called more than harmless, there is yet this higher range, where great thoughts and ideas have play, whose influence is altogether beneficent. Not everything that makes us feel deeply is for good but the capacity of deep and quick feeling is a good thing, for individuals and for the world. Life gets mechanical, commonplace, hard, if we are not now and then thrilled or even startled by something that takes us out of the ordinary grooves, and sets our feet on new levels and our thoughts to another key. One can almost forgive the clap-trap of the device, if it produce this result. One smiles at the Peace Jubilee and pays its price, and is thrilled by Parepa and Leutner nevertheless. But when there is no device about it, when the arousing force is the voice of deep calling unto deep of human life, then its power for good cannot be overvalued. It is the province of poetry, eloquence and song, themselves appealing to the same fine quality of human nature, to keep alive, for this ennobling purpose, all the great sensations of the past. Leonidas and his Spartans, and Horatius at the bridge, repeat on every schoolboy's tongue their immortal lesson of patriotism. The sentiment of love is made more tender by every pathetic tale of love crossed by fate, that poetry has sung. Philanthropy strikes its very liferoots into the deeds of heroic self-sacrifice

and unrewarded devotion that thrill the world from the pages of history. The story of the cross, with its dramatic intensity and power, its appeal of a suffering heart to suffering hearts, wins souls where the beatitudes fail. And so history will continue to be made, a record of sensations; of those nobler sensations which are the sudden flowering of strong feelings and great ideas. For indeed, the history of strong feelings and of great ideas has been the history of the world's progress.

THE SECOND-CLASS DRAWING-ROOM.

Scribner's Monthly for January takes a mournful view of American civilization, as exemplified in the second-class restaurant. The promiscuous assemblage of human beings gregarious without being social, the poor quality of food and poorer cooking, the clatter, the rudeness, the haste, the greed, the prices, all, severally and jointly, serve to depress the editor's soul when he contemplates them. And in truth, we know of but one more disheartening spectacle to the student of the social and æsthetical side of life. But one we do know, better fitted to cultivate a despair of our whole social system than even the second-class restaurant; and that is the second-class drawing-room.

For let the most unpromising set of people be absorbingly engaged in their own affairs, if it be only the eating of a bad dinner in half the normal time, and they cease to be more than objectively disagreeable. The spectator can contemplate them, mingle with them, without compromise or painful sense of responsibility. Who does not know the relief from an incubus of company, by the opportune happening of such employment, refreshment in a double sense? It is when people are on your hands, as you may say, that they and you are put upon mettle, and their best or worst, their inner wealth or utter emptiness and vacuity thrust themselves upon your attention. When people meet with no other intent than a good time and the enjoyment of each other's society, w.th nothing to draw upon but their own resources, they betray more accurately than under any other circumstances, the depth

of the coffers and the quality of the coin. And thus it is that commonplaceness and vulgarity never seem so dreary and depressing, because never so hopeless, as under this strong social light.

The second-class drawing-room, like the second-class restaurant, is a city institution. The provincial districts remain in that ignorance which is bliss, of its whole code of manners. Uncouth and bucolic their intercourse may be, but it is genuine. The young men and maidens, at their sparse frolickings, may sit stiffly ranged about the edges of the room, and some one may venture a remark on Joe's boots, and all may laugh, and it is at least an honest attempt at sociability. But given instead of ploughmen and dairymaids, clerks and shop-girls; let the scene change from the comfortless "best room" to a dingy parlor in some cramped street of the city; let it not savor too much of the home,-indeed, the so-called parlor of that perpetual second-class restaurant, the boarding-house, furnishes the best example,-given this young and lively company bent on mutual entertainment, and what is the social result?

Ten to one, these young ladies and gentlemen in the heart of our Athens in this noon of the nineteenth century, know each other as Joe and Clem, all the same. But they meet on no other ground of friendship. The ordinary affairs of their everyday life, their real thoughts, feelings, opinions on any common subject, are topics entirely foreign to their mood. They meet on the stilted and artificial basis of being not simply young people,-not surely gentlemen and ladies-but to use A'drich's neat characteristic, "fellows" and "girls." They are pitted against each other in a small game of fencing and parrying, and he

is accounted wittiest who dares to be sauciest. The young ladies play with their ear-rings and look out from under mops of braids and, frizzes with languishing or dancing eyes. The young gentlemen by turns ridicule each other and parry the sallies of neighboring fair ones. Clem plays the indifferent, Jule is sarcastic, Nannie giggles. Some feminine Damon and Pythias retreat to a farther corner and whisper dreadful secrets supposed to bear on other members of the company and vastly amusing to themselves. Protests and entreaties of forsaken swains, arrowshafts of indifferent wit and barely supposable merriment, fly back and forth, and the end is probably a going over of the enemy. Small impertinences, alternate expressions of ridicule and of extravagant regard, slang-phrases, and overwhelming adjectives, the whole plentifully seasoned with screams of laughter,-these make up the conversational programme. If music is called for, some one shall be forthcoming to torture the piano with a dashing, clattering medley, skipping half the notes. A new-comer enters and takes this one's chair, and that one's plate, and in lieu of a hand to shake pulls the curl of the pianist who calls a saucy protest and rattles on. And all this they call in their own happy phrase, "fooling."

It is when one comes into the current of a social atmosphere like this, and reflects that to thousands of young men and women this is the interpretation of social intercourse and a good time, that this is the only basis on which they meet, and from which are to grow friendship and the most sacred relations of lite, it is then that one asks, as it were a hopeless conundrum, “Is civilization a failure, and is the Caucasian played out?"

-The most charming biography that has appeared for many a day is from the hand of Mrs. Somerville, the astronomer and mathematician, telling the story of her own

life.

This noble and gifted woman died in

* PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS from early life to old age, of Mary Somerville. With selection from her correspondence. By her daughter, Martha Somerville. Roberts Brothers. 377 PP. $2.00.

1872, lacking but a few days of ninety-two years of age; yet so clear and unimpaired were her faculties, that she carried the brief record of her life up to the very year of her death. Mrs. Somerville was the daughter of Captain Fairfax, a distinguished Scotch naval officer, who was afterwards knighted for his services. She was born in 1780,

on the eve of her father's departure for America in the war of the revolution. By a singular chance she was born in the home of her future husband, and nursed by his mother. This was at Jedburgh, but the home of the family was at Burntisland, a small seaport town opposite Edinburgh, where with her mother, a gentle and pious woman, and her elder brother, she spent a wild, free and happy childhood, At eight or nine years old she could not write, and could scarcely read. Her father in one of his intervals at home thought she must be taught enough to keep accounts, which was learning enough for a woman. So she went to a boarding-school for a year, where she was laced very tight, and taught very little. Returning to the free home life she became an insatiable reader, and soon felt an awakening thirst for knowledge. The story of the next few years is pathetic. She learned music and painting and needlework, and these accomplishments the family were proud of; but for her solid studies she found no sympathy. She learned Latin by herself; found out by chance, the meaning of the word algebra and procured cne by stealth. At length she found help in the tutor of her younger brother, who procured her a copy of Euclid and other mathematical works. She studied music and painting during the day, and pored over Euclid by night. Candles were taken away from her, and she went over the problems in memory, till she had the whole book by heart. So she grew up to young ladyhood, accomplished, brilliant, and extremely pretty, so much so that she was known as the "Rose of Jedwood." Her summers were spent at Burntisland and her winters in Edinburgh, where she enjoyed great social advantages. She was married at twenty-four to her cousin, the Russian consul to England, Samuel Greig. Her husband lived but three years, and she returned to her father's house with two little boys, the youngest dying in childhood. Her husband had not favored her studies and she had made but little progress in them. But now, with means and leisure at her command, she began them in earnest. The professor of mathematics in the University of Edin

gurgh became interested in her, and gave her a list of mathematical works, all in French, and reaching the highest of La Place's. These she purchased and set about conquering. She naively says that she was considered "eccentric and foolish," and that her conduct was highly disapproved by her friends, but of this she was now independent. In an allusion to the offers of marriage she had at this time, she remarks that one of these persons sent her a volume of sermons, with the page ostentatiously turned down at a sermon on the Duties of a Wife, most illiberal and narrow-minded in its tone. The book and its sender were of course declined.

At thirty-two Mrs. Greig was married to her cousin William Somerville, with whom she spent a long life of uninterrupted happiness. To the family she had been deeply attached, and her uncle, Rev. Dr. Somerville, had the warmest sympathy with her studies. Her husband had lived abroad for several years, had travelled widely, was a fine scholar and a man of most liberal views. He was one of the earliest explorers of Africa, and it was a source of regret to his family that he did not write the history of his explorations. But the daughter says, "He was far happier in helping my mother." He was in entire sympathy with her studies, stimulated them, and gave her every facility for their prosecution. Great nobleness of soul is revealed in the daughter's remark of him, "He frankly acknowledged her superiority to himself."

Dr. Somerville was in the medical department of the army, and for many years their home was in London. Here she made the acquaintance of people eminent in science, art, music and fashion; for in all these spheres she was at home. Here her children were born, and several of them died, leaving but her eldest son, Woronzow Greig, and two daughters. Her husband was transferred from this happy home to the hospital at Chelsea, where in a lonely government house they spent several years. The loss of their fortune also added sadness to these years. In 1827 she was besought by Lord Brougham to write a description of La Place's "Mechanique Celeste." This request changed the whole

current of her life. Distrustful of herself, she yet undertook the great work, and thus began her career of authorship. On the remarkable success of this and following works, she does not dwell; but letters from the leading scientific men of the day abundantly attest it. She was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society at the same time with Caroline Herschel. In later years she wrote "The Connection of the Physical Sciences" the well-known work on "Physical Geography," and "Molecular and Microscopic Science."

For the whole half-century succeeding, her life was brilliant, successful and beautiful. Her friendships seem to embrace most of the eminent men and women of her day. The book gains an added interest for the grouping of these famous names in personal reminiscence. It might well be called "Mrs. Somerville and her friends," for the friends fill a larger space in it than herself. Her last years were spent in Italy where, alternating travel and repose, in the company of her husband and two daughters she still continued her studies and wrote her later works. Her husband died at Florence in 1860, and her only son in 1865. Of these events, like the earlier bereavements, she makes simple mention, without any expression of her feelings. The record of her last lonely years is as calm, and peaceful as if she had never known a sorrow. "She often said," writes her daughter, "that even in the joyous spring of life she had not been more truly happy."

Mrs. Somerville's large brain and heart made her a liberalist in politics and religion. She was a great hater of slavery; her interest in Italian independence was scarcely less than Mrs. Browning's. Her early struggles made her thoughtful of the disabilities of women. Her name headed petitions to parliament for their removal, and she wrote to Mr. Mill to thank him for his "Subjection of Women" which he said was a sufficient reward for writing it. She was deeply interested in the contest in this country and expresses her indignation that suffrage should be given the negro, and refused to the most highly-educated women of the republic. She writes in her

a lesson of strength

Let no one think to have gained an idea of the book from this brief review. To be known it must be read. We close by endorsing the words of a better reviewer. "Such a lesson for women has never before been printed, and beauty; of persevering study and womanly sweetness; of broad, noble thought and tender, faithful love; of brilliant success and perfect modesty; of scientific enthusiasm and undoubting faith; of life that grew to its very close, cheering, strengthening, and ennobling all who felt its influence. It is good to pause for a while and ponder on the surpassing beauty and power of Mary Somerville's life, and on her old age, exceeding in grace even Cicero's ideal."

- Comparison is not always a safe or just method of criticism. But in reading successively the two foremost autobiographies of the year, one can hardly be held responsible that the facts take that attitude towards each other. The life-story of John Stuart Mill* is as much more remarkable than that of Mrs. Somerville as his influence upon his time was greater than hers. But it is a far less pleasant book to read. Indeed there is but one point of resemblance between them, namely, that each was the last work of its author, carried on under the shadow of advancing age; although Mill died a quarter of a century earlier in life than the gentle lady of whom we have written. For the rest, nothing could be more dissimilar than the conditions of their lives. The contrast begins * Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. New York. Henry Holt & Co.