Cast it away from you, and give up all thought of ever translating Dante. If you had been a young man, you might have looked forward to overtaking it; but now you are too old. Read and enjoy yourself, and bother your head no more about Dante.' "The steel struck fire," said Carlyle, "as was intended. John exclaimed Me too old! I'm nothing of the kind!' And, so, forthwith, he set to work, and produced one of the very best translations of Dante to be found anywhere." When Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen visited Turgenieff in Paris some years ago, they fell talking of Carlyle. Turgenieff related that once he visited the Chelsea sage, and found him loud in his denunciation of democracy, and very unreserved in his expression of sympathy with Russia and her Emperor. "This grand moving of great masses swayed by one powerful hand, brings," he said, "uniformity and purpose into history. In a country like Great Britain, it was wearisome to see how every petty individual could thrust forth his head, like a frog out of its swamp, and croak away at his contemptible sentiment as long as anybody had a mind to listen to him. Such a state of things could only result in confusion and disorder." Turgenieff told Carlyle in reply that he should only ask him to go to Russia and spend a month or two in one of the interior governments, just long enough to observe with his own eyes the effect of this much-admired despotism. Then, he thought, he would need no word of his to convince him. One day Carlyle met Browning, and wished to say something pleasant about The Ring and the Book; but somehow he got sadly mixed, with the result that what he did say was not entirely a compliment. "It is a wonderful book," he said; "one of the most wonderful poems ever written. I re-read it all throughall made out of an Old Bailey story, that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting." XII. "FOUND AGAIN IN THE HEART OF A FRIEND." "Perhaps the best of a song heard, or of any and all true love, or life's fairest episodes, or sailors', soldiers' trying scenes on land or sea, is the floating résumé of them, or any of them, long afterwards, looking at the actualities away back past, with all their practical excitations gone. How the soul loves to hover over such reminiscences !"-WALT WHITMAN. MOST of us know that charming little poem of Longfellow's — The Arrow and the Song: "I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth I knew not where ; "I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where ; "Long, long afterwards, in an oak What pleasure a man like Wordsworth must have reaped when he found any of his poetry embedded in the memory of a friend! Perhaps one of the most interesting instances of finding one's words in an unlooked-for quarter is the following: "John Howard Payne, the author of Home, Sweet Home, was a warm personal friend of John Ross, who will be remembered as the celebrated chief of the Cherokees. At the time the Cherokees were removed from their homes in Georgia to their present possessions west of the Mississippi River, Payne was spending a few weeks in Georgia with Ross, who was occupying a miserable cabin, having been forcibly ejected from his former home. A number ་ |