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makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are laid up for all the year's provision, and the man that gathers them eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid up for eternity; and he that escapes till winter, only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit, cold and agues, are the four quarters of the year; and you can go no whither but you tread upon a dead man's bones.

The wild fellow in Petronius, that escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore, espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy, the sea, towards the shore to find a grave. And it cast him into some sad thoughts: that peradventure this man's wife in some part of the continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man's return; or, it may be, his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old man's cheek, ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father's arms. These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs: a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. Then, looking upon the carcass, he knew it, and found it to be the master of the ship, who, the day before, cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade, and named the day when he thought to be at home. See how the man swims who was so angry two days since! His passions are becalmed with the storm, his accounts cast up, his cares at an end, his voyage done, and his gains are the strange events of death, which, whether they be good or evil, the men that are alive seldom trouble themselves concerning the interest of the dead.

It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood; from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of fiveand-twenty, to the hollowness and deadly paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and, at first, it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder

breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces. The same is the por tion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonor, and our beauty so changed that our acquaintance quickly knew us not; and that change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings, that they who, six hours ago, tended upon us either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot, without some regret, stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honor. I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving way, that after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty change; and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? what friends to visit us? what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral?

WHO AM I?

THOMAS CARLYLE-"SARTAR RESARTUS."

'With men of a speculative turn,' writes Teufelsdröckh, there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask your. self that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say "I"? The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and thick-plied tissues of commerce and polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments of society and a body, wherewith your existence sits surrounded,-the sight reaches forth into the void deep, and you are alone with the universe, and silently commune with it as one mysterious presence with another.

Who am I; what is this ME? A voice, a motion, an appearance;-some embodied, visualised idea in the eternal mind? Alas, poor cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough I am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies around, written in all colors and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit

as in a boundless phantasmagoria and dream-grotto: boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-colored visions flit around our sense; but Him, the unslumbering, whose work both dream and dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious rainbow; but the sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that strange dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancyng ourselves most awake! Which of your philosophical systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown? What are all your national wars, with their Moscow retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled revolutions, but the somnambulism of uneasy sleepers? This dreaming, this somnambulism is what we on earth call life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.

Pity that all metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of man's being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot read; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your axioms, and categories, and systems, and aphorisms? Words, words. High air-castles are cunningly built of words, the words well bedded also in good logicmortar; wherein, however, no knowledge will come to lodge. The whole is greater than the part: how exceedingly true! Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, Nothing can act but where it is: with all my heart; only where is it? Be not the slave of words: is not the distant, the dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it, here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that same Where, with its brother, When, are from the first the master-colors of our dream-grotto; say rather, the canvas whereon all our dreams and life-visions are painted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that the Where and When, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial Everywhere and Forever: have not all nations conceived their God as omnipresent and eternal; as existing in a universal Here, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find that space is but a mode of our human sense, so likewise time; there is no space and no time. We are-we know not what;-light-sparkles floating in the æther of Deity!

So that this so solid-seeming world, after all, were but an air-image, our Me the only reality: and nature, with its thousand-fold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward force, the "phantasy of our dream;" or what the earth-spirit in Faust names it, the living visible Garment of God.

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"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of the living:

'Tis thus at the roaring loom of time I ply, And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the meaning thereof?

DEMAND FOR A BETTER WORLD.

JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE.

When I contemplate the world as it is, independently of any injunction, there manifests itself in my interior the wish, the longing, no! not a longing merely, the absolute demand for a better world. I cast a glance at the relations of men to each other and to Nature, at the weakness of their powers, at the strength of their appetites and passions. It cries to me irresistibly from my innermost soul: "Thus it cannot possibly be destined always to remain. It must, O! it must all become other and better!"

I can in no wise imagine to myself the present condition of man as that which is designed to en dure. I cannot imagine it to be his whole and final destination. If so, then would everything be dream and delusion, and it would not be worth the trouble to have lived and to have taken part in this everrecurring, unproductive and unmeaning game. Only so far as I can regard this condition as the means of something better, as a point of transition to a higher and more perfect, does it acquire any value for me. Not on its own account, but on account of something better for which it prepares the way, can I bear it, honor it, and joyfully fulfil my part in it. My mind can find no place, nor rest a moment in the present; it is irresistibly repelled by it. My whole life streams irrepressibly on toward the future and better.

Am I only to eat and to drink that I may hunger and thirst again, and again eat and drink, until the grave, yawning beneath my feet, swallows me up, and I myself spring up as food from the ground? Am I to beget beings like myself, that they also may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves, who shall do the same that I have done? To what purpose this circle which perpetually returns into itself; this game forever re-commencing, after the same manner in which everything is born but to perish, and perishes but to be born again as it was? This monster which forever devours itself, that it may produce itself again, and which produces itself that it may again devour itself? Never can this be the destination of my being and

of all being. There must be something which exists because it has been brought forth, and which now remains and can never be brought forth again, after it has been brought forth once. And this, that is permanent, must beget itself amid the mutations of the perishing, and continue amid those mutations, and be borne along unhurt upon the waves of time.

THE CITY OF BAGDAD.

EWD, GIBBON-" DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE." Almansor, the brother and successor of Saffah, laid the foundations of Bagdad (762 A. D.), the imperial seat of his posterity during a reign of five hundred years. The chosen spot is on the eastern bank of the Tigris, about fifteen miles above the ruins of Modain: the double wall was of a circular form; and such was the rapid increase of a capital now dwindled to a provincial town, that the funeral of a popular saint might be attended by eight hundred thousand men and sixty thousand women of Bagdad and the adjacent villages. In this city of peace, amidst the riches of the east, the Abbasides soon disdained the abstinence and frugality of the first caliphs, and aspired to emulate the magnificence of the Persian kings. After his wars and buildings, Almansor left behind him in gold and silver about thirty millions sterling; and this treasure was exhausted in a few years by the vices or virtues of his children. His son Mahadi, in a single pilgrimage to Mecca, expended six millions of dinars of gold. A pious and charitable motive may sanctify the foundation of cisterns and caravanseras, which he distributed along a measured road of seven hundred miles; but his train of camels, laden with snow, could serve only to astonish the natives of Arabia, and to refresh the fruits and liquors of the royal banquet. The courtiers would surely praise the liberality of his grandson Almamon, who gave away four-fifths of the income of a province-a sum of two millions four hundred thousand gold dinars-before he drew his foot from the stirrup. At the nuptials of the same prince, a thousand pearls of the largest size were showered on the head of the bride, and a lottery of lands and houses displayed the capricious bounty of fortune. The glories of the court were brightened rather than impaired in the decline of the empire, and a Greek ambassador might admire or pity the magnificence of the feeble Moctader. "The caliph's whole army," says the historian Abulfeda, "both horse and foot, was under arms, which together made a body of one hundred and sixty thousand men. His state-officers, the favorite slaves, stood near him in splendid apparel, their belts glittering with gold and gems. Near them were seven thousand eunuchs, four thousand of them white, the remainder black. The porters or door-keepers were in number seven hundred. Barges and boats, with the most superb decorations, were seen swimming upon the Tigris. Nor was the palace itself less

splendid, in which were hung up thirty-eight thousand pieces of tapestry, twelve thousand five hundred of which were of silk embroidered with gold. The carpets on the floor were twenty-two thousand. A hundred lions were brought out, with a keeper to each lion. Among the other spectacles of rare and stupendous luxury was a tree of gold and silver spreading into eighteen large branches, on which, and on the lesser boughs, sat a variety of birds made of the same precious metals, as well as the leaves of the tree. While the machinery affected spontaneous motions, the several birds warbled their natural harmony. Through this scene of magnificence the Greek ambassador was led by the vizier to the foot of the caliph's throne." In the west, the Ommiades of Spain supported, with equal pomp, the title of commander of the faithful. Three miles from Cordova, in honor of his favorite sultana, the third and greatest of the Abdalrahmans constructed the city, palace, and gardens of Zehra. Twenty-five years, and above three millions sterling, were employed by the founder: his liberal taste invited the artists of Constantinople, the most skillful sculptors and archi. tects of the age; and the buildings were sustained or adorned by twelve hundred columns of Spanish and African, of Greek and Italian marble. The hall of audience was incrusted with gold and pearls, and a great basin in the center was surrounded with the curious and costly figures of birds and quadrupeds In a lofty pavilion of the gardens, one of these basins and fountains, so delightful in a sultry climate, was replenished, not with water, but with the purest quicksilver. The seraglio of Abdalrahman, his wives, concubines, and black eunuchs, amounted to six thousand three hundred persons; and he was attended to the field by a guard of twelve thousand horse, whose belts and scimitars were studded with gold. In a private condition, our desires are perpetually repressed by poverty and subordination; but the lives and labors of millions are devoted to the service of a despotic prince, whose laws are blindly obeyed, and whose wishes are instantly gratified. Our imag. ination is dazzled by the splendid picture; and whatever may be the cool dictates of reason, there are few among us who would obstinately refuse a trial of the comforts and the cares of royalty. It may therefore be of some use to borrow the experience of the same Abdalrahman, whose magnificence has perhaps excited our admiration and envy, and to transcribe an authentic memorial which was found in the closet of the deceased caliph. "I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man! place not thy confidence in this present world."

BOOKS OF ANTIQUITY.

JULES MICHELET.

Voney and Sacy opened up Syria and Arabia, Champollion, standing by the Sphinx, the mysterious Egypt, construed her inscriptions, and showed that she was a civilized empire sixty centuries before Jesus Christ. Eugene Burnouf established the consanguinity of the two ancestors of Asia-the two branches of the Aryas, the Indo-Persians of Bactri ana; and the Parsee scholars who had been educated in the College of France quoted in the most remote regions of Hindostan this Western Magician against their Angelican disputant.

The Mahabharata, the poetical encyclopedia of the Brahmins, the expurgated translations of the books of Zoroaster, and the splendid heroic history of Persia-the Shah-Nameh-came next. It was known that behind Persia, behind the Brahmanic India, there was extant a book of the remotest antiquity, of the first pastoral age-an age which preceded the agricultural. This book, the Rig-Veda, a collection of hymns and prayers, enables us to follow the shepherds of that early period in their religious aspirations-the first soarings of the human mind toward heaven and light. In 1833, Rosen published a specimen of it. It can now be read in the Sanscrit, German, English, and French. In this very year, 1863, a profound and able critic, who is also a Burnouf, has expounded its true meaning, and shown its scope.

In consequence of all this research, we can now see the perfect agreement between Asia and Europe -the most remote age and the present era. It has taught us that man, in all ages, thought, felt, and loved in the same way; and therefore there is but one humanity, a single heart only! A great harmony has been established through all space and time. Let the silly irony of skeptics, teachers of doubt, who hold that truth varies according to latitude, be forever silenced. The feeble voice of sophists expires in the immense concert of human brotherhood.

HEAVEN, PARADISE AND HELL.

JACOB BOEHME.

There is nothing that is nearer you, than heaven, Paradise and hell; unto which of them you are inclined, and to which of them you tend or walk, to that in this lifetime you are most near. You are between both; and there is a birth between each of them. You stand in this world between both the gates, and you have both the births in you. God beckons to you in one gate, and calls you; the devil beckons you in the other gate and calls you; with whom you go, with him you enter in. The devil has in his hand, power, honor, pleasure, and worldly joy; and the root of these is death and hell-fire. On the contrary, God has in his hand, crosses, persecution,

misery, poverty, ignominy, and sorrow; and the root of these is a fire also, but in the fire there is a light, and in the light the virtue, and in the virtue the Paradise; and in the Paradise are the angeis, and among the angels, joy. The gross fleshly eyes cannot behold it, because they are from the third principle, and see only by the splendor of the sun; but when the Holy Ghost comes into the soul, then he regenerates it anew in God, and then it becomes a paradisiacal child, who gets the key of Paradise, and that soul sees into the midst thereof.

DRIVE ON.

SYDNEY SMITH.

The best advice to the young man just setting out in the world, is to "drive on." In other words, live energetically. Whatever you undertake, do it with a will; and do it well. Do it as far as possible in the completest manner. In this way alone can an efficient, useful and successful career be accomplished. Don't be reckless, but keep digging, always bearing in mind to do nothing dishonorable or disreputable. Don't whine. It's of no use, for life is pretty much as you take it and make it. If you are poor, thank God and take courage, for poverty is one of the best tests of human quality in existence. A triumph over it is like graduating with honor at Harvard. It demonstrates stuff and stamina. Don't sit down and give up at little set backs, but pitch in, drive on, and you will come out all right in the end. It may be a long way, but perseverance will be sure to bring you out successfully.

FATE.

GEORGE ELIOT.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath toward infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

SHYNESS. Many a young man fails by that species of vanity called shyness, who might, for ins asking, have his will.

COMBAT OF HECTOR AND AJAX.

HOMER "THE ILIAD."

So spoke the guardian of the Trojan state,
Then rush'd impetuous through the Scæan gate.
Him Paris follow'd to the dire alarms;
Both breathing slaughter, both resolv'd in arms.
As when the sailors lab'ring through the main,
That long had heav'd the weary oar in vain,
Jove bids at length th' expected gales arise;
The gales blow grateful and the vessel flies:
So welcome these to Troy's desiring train;
The bands are cheer'd, the war awakes again.
Bold Paris first the work of death begun
On great Menestheus, Areithous' son:
Sprung from the fair Philomeda's embrace,
The pleasing Arne was his native place.
Then sunk Eioneus to the shades below,
Beneath his steely casque he felt the blow
Full on his neck, from Hector's weighty hand,
And roll'd, with limbs relax'd, along the land.
By Glaucus' spear the bold Iphinous bleeds,
Fix'd in the shoulder as he mounts his steeds;
Headlong he tumbles: his slack nerves unbound
Drop the cold useless members on the ground.
When now Minerva saw her Argives slain,
From vast Olympus to the gleaming plain
Fierce she descends: Apollo mark'd her flight,
Nor shot less swift from Ilion's tow'ry height:
Radiant they met, beneath the beechen shade,
When thus Apollo to the blue-ey'd maid.

What cause, O daughter of almighty Jove!
Thus wings thy progress from the realms above?
Once more impetuous dost thou bend thy way,
To give to Greece the long-divided day?
Too much has Troy already felt thy hate,
Now breathe thy rage, and hush the stern debate:
This day, the business of the field suspend;
War soon shall kindle, and great Ilion bend;
Since vengeful goddesses confed'rate join
To raze her walls, though built by hands divine.
To whom the progeny of Jove replies:

I left, for this, the council of the skies:
But who shall bid conflicting hosts forbear,
What art shall calm the furious sons of war?
To her the god: Great Hector's soul incite
To dare the boldest Greek to single fight,
Till Greece, provok'd, from all her numbers show
A warrior worthy to be Hector's foe.

At this agreed, the heav'nly pow'rs withdrew;
Sage Helenus their secret counsels knew:
Hector, inspir'd he sought: to him addrest,
Thus told the dictates of his sacred breast.
O son of Priam! let thy faithful ear
Receive my words; thy friend and brother hear!
Go forth persuasive, and a while engage
The warring nations to suspend their rage;
Then dare the boldest of the hostile train
To mortal combat on the listed plain.

For not this day shall end thy glorious date;

The gods have spoke it, and their voice is fate.
He said: the warrior heard the word with joy;
Then with his spear restrain'd the youth of Troy
Held by the midst athwart. On either hand
The squadrons part; th' expecting Trojans stand:
Great Agamemnon bids the Greeks forbear;
They breathe, and hush the tumult of the war.
Th' Athenian maid, and glorious god of day,
With silent joy the settling hosts survey:
In form of vultures, on the beech's height,
They sit conceal'd, and wait the future fight.

The thronging troops obscure the dusky fields,
Horrid with bristling spears, and gleaming shields.
As when a gen'ral darkness veils the main,
(Soft Zephyr curling the wide wat'ry plain)
The waves scarce heave, the face of ocean sleeps,
And a still horror saddens all the deeps:
Thus in thick orders settling wide around,
At length compos'd they sit and shade the ground.
Great Hector first amidst both armies broke
The solemn silence, and their powers bespoke.
Hear, all ye Trojan, all ye Grecian bands,
What my soul prompts, and what some god com
mands.

Great Jove, averse our warfare to compose,
O'erwhelms the nations with new toils and woes⚫
War with a fierce tide once more returns,
Till Ilion falls, or till yon navy burns.
You then, O princes of the Greeks! appear,
'Tis Hector speaks, and calls the gods to hear:
From all your troops select the boldest knight,
And him, the boldest, Hector dares to fight.
Here if I fall, by chance of battle slain,
Be his my spoil, and his these arms remain;
But let my body, to my friends return'd,
By Trojan hands, and Trojan flames be burn'd,
And if Apollo, in whose aid I trust,
Shall stretch your daring champion in the dust;
If mine the glory to despoil the foe;
On Phoebus' temple I'll his arms bestow;
The breathless carcase to your navy sent,
Greece on the shore shall raise a monument;
Which when some future mariner surveys,
Wash'd by broad Hellespont's resounding seas,
Thus shall he say, 'A valiant Greek lies there,
By Hector slain, the mighty man of war.'
The stone shall tell your vanquished hero's name,
And distant ages learn the victor's fame.

This fierce defiance Greece astonish'd heard,
Blush'd to refuse, and to accept it fear'd.
Stern Menelaüs first the silence broke,
And inly groaning, thus opprobrious spoke.

Women of Greece! Oh scandal of your race, Whose coward souls your manly form disgrace, How great the shame, when ev'ry age shall know That not a Grecian met this noble foe!

Go then! resolve to earth, from whence ye grew,
A heartless, spiritless, inglorious crew!
Be what ye seem, unanimated clay!
Myself will dare the danger of the day.

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