allowed to take possession of heart, senses, and will; and in his hero's success we have portrayed the true method by which the lowly can rise; not by pulling down the great, but the worship of a high and pure aim in life; by having always the loftiest instead of the lowest standard for our endeavours, a standard without which nothing truly great in art or morals has ever been achieved. These seem grave thoughts to have been suggested by a semi-fabulous romance, but we think the author will not be sorry to see his allegory thus interpreted, or unwilling that we should perceive this meaning in the adventures of Calendau the fisher-boy, who made it his boast that he became the best and most trustworthy man between Arles and Vence. The opening of the poem contains a fine invocation to Pro

One other extract we make, because the scenery is familiar to many travellers, and nothing in the world is more beautiful than the journey from Cannes, by the Esterels and Toulon, to Marseilles. Calendau performs it in a boat, and in great haste; for Count Séveran has discovered his wife's hiding-place on Mount Gibal, (how near Africa we seem to be on this Provençal shore !) and Calendau flies to defend her:

1 As it may interest our readers to compare the French and Provençal idioms, instead of translating the above we venture to give a French version from the pen of M. Louis Ratisbonne :

'Ame de mon pays,
Toi qui luit en traits manifestes
Et dans sa langue et dans ses gestes
Quand le baron Picard, Allemand,
Bourguignon,

Assiégeait Toulouse et Beaucaire,
Toi qui remplit d'un feu de guerre
Contre leur horde sanguinaire

Les hommes de Marseille et d'Avignon.

'Par la grace des souvenances, Toi qui gardes nos espérances :

Toi qui dans la jeunesse, et plus chaud et plus beau,

Malgré la mort, divins mystères,"
Fais remonter le sang de nos pères,
Toi qui soufflais nos doux trouvères,
Et plus tard fis mugir la voix de
Mirabeau.

'Ame sans cesse renaissante,
Joyeuse ame, fière et revante

Qui souffle dans les bruits du Rhone
et dans ses eaux,

Ame des bois harmonieux

De la patrie esprit pieux

Viens viens! encarne-toi dans mes vers provençaux.'

'Boufo! lou Cassidien souspiro,' etc. etc.

"Blow!" to the sirocco the Cassidien

sighed:

To the siroc that softly breathed:
"Blow! mignon! blow!" and the gay
little wind

As if expressly to please him,
(So you would say) moved the air:
And in the tremulous space
Swift shot the frail tillac.

'Beneath the canopy of freshest morn,
In all their legendary light,

The Lérin isles (green rosettes in the
floods)

Rose from the coloured seas-
Of Honorat and of Marguerite
(His sister isle), the flowery palms,
Like mystic trees waved in the air.

Raise thine eyes, and sweeping,

Tear the blue sea's bosom,- Leander thus

Guided by torch of his loved Hero,

'Did swim the Dardanelles.

Then onwards. So the skiff
Already bounds beneath the verti-
ginous capes,

Of mountains (Maures), pine woods,
Great reedy flats and chains of rocks,
Of limestone, granite, schist, they
pass:

All full of horror, sunshine, and of
flowers.

"A splendid blending sunshine.

The Archipelago they then thread,
Of the golden isles; the Titan first,
Then Porteros, now a burnt-out nest:
Then bosky Porquerole,

Then Fourmil's little shoal,

And Gien, a tongue of land beside a

mere.

They only heard the plaintive cry
Of boatmen, and the bellowing waves
That broke among the scattered rocks,
Or drew the tinkling pebbles down the
beach.

The boat swept on.

Yonder is Hières, full of flowers and

green:

A very garden of Hesperides:
Hières, with slopes all lying to the sun,
With pomegranates and orange-trees,
flies past:

As also flies the arid Carquierane,
And now with perfume of the Margo-
laines,

The loaded air less swiftly seems to

move.

Passing Toulon, Calendau is becalmed, but at length—

'At last, at very last, oh! bliss,

He sees the mount of his desires,
Gibal! Gibal! descried by him afar.
Fresh nerve he takes who sees again
Each well-known point and bay;
Bandol, les Lèques and that sweet shore
Of ilex, olive, terebinth for ever full.'

Imperfect as any prose rendering of this passage must be, we think it will gain much admiration, and that it may be allowed to challenge comparison with the opening of the second canto of Marmion. If a neo-Provençal poet can ever be sure of general sympathy, it is when he describes his native country; for the 'province of provinces,' as she was once fondly called, is dear alike to the historian and to the artist, to the student and to the invalid. It is with this pleasant impression upon our minds that we should wish to take leave of the subject.

ART. III-1. The Dial: A Magazine of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Co. 1840-43. 2. The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 7 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1865.

3. May-Day and other Pieces. By R. W. EMERSON. London: Routledge and Sons. 1867.

'ERNEST began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart and mind. His words had power because they accorded with his thoughts, and his thoughts had reality and depth because they harmonized with the life that he had always lived.' It is pleasant to believe that the noble apologue of 'The Great Stone Face' is a tribute paid by the novelist to the philosopher of Concord, and that these sentences are designed to disclose, as they really do disclose, the secret of Mr. Emerson's influence over his countrymen. Mr. Hawthorne had no sympathy with the Sturm' and 'Drang' of the new movement headed by his contemporary. He preferred loitering down the Assabeth and admiring its 'incurable indolence' to NeoPlatonic rhapsodies and scraps of the Vedas. Buried in the old manse, in the moonlight of his own mysticism, he cast a half-compassionate smile on the pilgrims who thronged to the neighbouring cottage as to an American Mecca,- young visionaries, to whom just as much of insight had been imparted as to make life a labyrinth around them, coming to seek the clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment; grey-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, travelling painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom.' Yet he united with them in admiring the genius of the thinker. It was good to meet him in the woodpaths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining

one.'

A recent American writer finds his country well represented. in the Paris Exhibition, because its picture gallery contains the portrait of Emerson: a sentiment which, giving a but slightly exaggerated expression to the feeling of a large section of educated Americans, calls for an examination of the sources and claims of an influence so widely extended. In comparing Mr. Emerson's English with his home reputation, we must make allowance for his prestige as a brilliant conversationalist, and the power exerted by the 'controlling sincerity' of his character. His name is to us the sign-post of an

interesting stage in the progress of Transatlantic thought, and of a curious chapter in the history of mysticism.

In all new countries, commercial interests are at first the strongest. The febrile activity produced by fear of a sterile future leaves little room for speculative imagination. When the vast solitudes of the New World began to give place to noisy cities, the brains of her people were expended on the farm or the exchange, with a zeal only modified by the spirit and formulæ of the faith which led the founders of the Northern States across the sea, and continued to infuse a religious element into their enterprises. This religious element, which elevated the settlers of New England into a higher sphere than that of ordinary emigrants, adding to their strength and giving a faster dye to their morality, was yet in its original form scarcely more favourable to freedom or variety of thought than the industrialism by which it was surrounded. The early history of the American Quakers forcibly illustrates the attitude assumed by the Puritans towards every transgression of their own traditional authority; it was that of men who had been taught by persecution how to persecute. While the more elastic mysticism of Fox took on new shapes in Philadelphia, the Calvinism of Edwards remained rigid in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the storm of the Revolutionary war had diverted the majority of active minds into channels of activity hostile alike to poetry and metaphysics, and when the nation began to breathe leisurely in the first years of the century, that tide of imitation had set in which is only now beginning to ebb. European fashions reigned at New York, French political ideas at Washington. The mental philosophy of the West was limited to commentaries on Locke and Brown and the eclecticism of Cousin, when the republication of Sartor Resartus, backed by the elder authority of Coleridge, gave life and voice to a new intellectual world. Reputations on the other side of the Atlantic are made and unmade with an inconceivable rapidity. Ideas which filter slowly into English soil and abide there for a generation, flash like comets through the electric atmosphere of America. Coleridge and Carlyle were hailed as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen were still dubiously examining their credentials as interpreters, and suddenly every New Englander who thought he could think proclaimed himself a transcendentalist. The rate of this transformation was only surpassed by its apparent thoroughness. The converts soon put their teachers to the blush; in recoil from practical materialism and solid Scotch psychology, men rushed at once to the outer verge of idealism, mysticism, and pantheism; outstripping Hegel, and leaving Plotinus behind, they manifested in a

new direction the same impetuous disregard of limit and degree which marks the commercial enterprises of their great cities. As a shield from the accusation of cynicism, let us borrow from a Transatlantic reviewer the following sentences descriptive of the mental and moral mutiny then prevalent :

"Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile" was shouted on all hands with every variety of emphasis. Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. . . . Communities were established where everything was to be common but common-sense. Men re

nounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their allegiance on Thor or Buddha. . . . A belated gift of tongues spread like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible. It was the Pentecost of Shinar.'

Thus much and more he says regarding the ludicrous phase of the movement, characteristically caricaturing ideas which his countrymen had pushed to a characteristic extreme. But the fullest representation of the New England transcendentalists, as a group, is to be found in the pages of the Dial, a quarterly magazine which during the space of four years continued to represent their views throughout four volumes of very miscellaneous merit. The first essay of the series is devoted to an attack, after the approved manner, on critics as they are, and an exposition of the functions of the ideal critic: he is to be the servant of the maker,' not a base caviller, but a humble friend; he is not to stamp but to sift the works placed before him; he is to be something of a poet and a philosopher, as well as a good observer; he is to appreciate and make others appreciate 'religion, which in the two modulations of poetry and music, descends through an infinity of waves to the lowest abysses of human nature.' The last sentence is a fair specimen of the style and spirit of three-fourths of the Dial. In its pages there is abundance of criticism, mostly panegyrical; rhapsodies about Plato and Beethoven; salvos in honour of Carlyle; homage without stint to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; a few passable tales; several verses, seldom remarkable for anything but obscurity; vigorous sermons, spoilt by violences, of Theodore Parker; Alcott's Orphic sayings; Margaret Fuller's æsthetic ideas upon everything; and for backbone and brain, four or five essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The whole is pervaded by a spirit of defiance to all authority, save that of German literature, and of revolt against all uniformity, save that of the contributors. Rise up and be a man, cast off those cumbrous things of old, let conscience be your lawgiver, reason your oracle, nature your temple, holiness your high priest, and a divine life your offering,' is the vague yet ambitious refrain from its counsel. 'Pantheism in philosophy, rationalism

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