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on its woods was the existence of the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer venom under our cold northern sky than the cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and poisons.

From the earliest settlement of the place, this fact had been, next to the Indians, the reigning nightmare of the inhabitants. It was easy enough, after a time, to drive away the savages; for 'a screeching Indian Divell,' as our fathers called him, could not crawl into the crack of a rock to escape from his pursuers. But the venomous population of Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their fortress that might have defied the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol. In its deep embrasures and its impregnable casemates they reared their families, they met in love or wrath, they twined together in family knots, they hissed defiance in hostile clans, they fed, slept, hibernated, and in due time died in peace. Many a foray had the town's-people made, and many a stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,-nay, there were families where the children's first toy was made from the warning appendage that once vibrated to the wrath of one of these 'cruel serpents.' Sometimes one of them, coaxed out by a warm sun, would writhe himself down the hill-side into the roads, up the walks that led to houses,— worse than this, into the long grass, where the bare-footed mowers would soon pass with their swinging scythes,-more rarely into houses, -and on one memorable occasion, early in the last century, into the meeting-house, where he took a position on the pulpit-stairs,—as is narrated in the ‘Account of some Remarkable Providences,' &c., where it is suggested that a strong tendency of the Rev. Didymus Bean, the Minister at that time, towards the Arminian Heresy may have had something to do with it, and that the Serpent supposed to have been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs was a false show of the Dæmon's Contrivance, he having come in to listen to a Discourse which was a sweet Savour in his Nostrils, and, of course, not being capable of being killed Himself. Others said, however, that, though there was good Reason to think it was a Dæmon, yet he did come with Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful Servant, &c.

One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of a rattlesnake in this town early in the present century. After this there was a great snakehunt, in which very many of these venomous beasts were killed,—one in particular, said to have been as big round as a stout man's arm, and to have had no less than forty joints to his rattle,-indicating, according to some, that he had lived forty years, but, if we might put any faith in the Indian tradition, that he had killed forty human beings,—an idle fancy, clearly. This hunt, however, had no permanent effect in keeping down the serpent population. Viviparous creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but oviparous ones only give their notes, as it were, for a future brood,—an egg being, so to speak, a promise to pay a young one by and by, if nothing happen. Now the domestic habits of the rattlesnake are not studied very closely, for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to all intents and purposes oviparous. Consequently it has large families, and is not easy to kill out.

In the year 184—, a melancholy proof was afforded to the inha

bitants of Rockland that the brood which infested The Mountain was not extirpated. A very interesting young married woman, detained at home at the time by the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of her own house by a rattlesnake which had found its way down from The Mountain. Owing to the almost instant employment of powerful remedies, the bite did not prove immediately fatal; but she died within a few months of the time when she was bitten.

All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of shadow over The Mountain. Yet, as many years passed without any accident, people grew comparatively careless, and it might rather be said to add a fearful kind of interest to the romantic hill-side, that the banded reptiles, which had been the terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white men's service, if they meddled with them.”

On the incident described in the last paragraph but one of the preceding extract, the story turns. Elsie Venner is the daughter of the lady who is bitten by the rattlesnake; she is born shortly after the accident. The poison of the reptile, however, has entered her system; a nature lower than human is grafted upon, and overshadows, and suppresses, her womanly qualities. She is a Lamia--a serpent. In external indications, as well as in character, this fact expresses itself. She walks with a peculiar undulation of movement. The pattern of her dress, the mode in which her scarf is twisted round her, her habit of coiling and uncoiling her gold chain about her wrist, her sibilant utterance, the power of mysterious fascination which lurks through the strange cold glitter of her eyes, and compels an involuntary obedience, perplex observers, and reveal the serpent nature to the reader, who is in the secret. She bites a playfellow in childish anger, and the wound requires to be cauterised, that it may not be mortal; when provoked, "she throws her head back, her eyes narrowing, and her forehead drawing down;" so that an observer "thought her head actually flattened itself." Round her neck is a mysterious circular mark, always concealed by a golden chain. She visits alone Rattlesnake Ledge, and exercises a mysterious ascendency over its fearful inhabitants, saving a chance wanderer to that spot.

"Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and looked into it. His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth steady motion towards the light and himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb, staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear that cannot move, as in the terror of dreams. The two sparks of light came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted themselves up, as if in angry surprise. Then for the first ti me thrilled in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing which

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breathes, be it man or brute, can hear unmoved,—the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge thick-bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were drawn as with magnets toward the circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man with her anæsthetics. The cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's first shake deadens the man's fear and feeling; and the crotalus paralyses before he strikes. He waited as in a trance,-waited as one that longs to have the blow fall, and all over, as the man who shall be in two pieces in a second waits for the axe to drop. But while he looked straight into the flaming eyes, it seemed to him that they were losing their light and terror, that they were growing tame and dull; the charm was dissolving, the numbness was passing away, he could move once more. He heard a light breathing close to his ear, and, half turning, saw the face of Elsie Venner, looking motionless into the reptile's eyes, which had shrunk and faded under the stronger enchantment of her own."

The moral qualities of this singular being are precisely correspondent. The story shows the gradual humanising of Elsie Venner, partly through the influence of a strong attachment, partly, we are left to infer, through the natural dying out of the lower nature engrafted on the higher. The physical change which the system is by some believed to have gone through in all its parts, by the time it reaches maturity, casts out the poison which had perverted it; but the struggle has been too long and protracted, and life perishes with it.

The conception of a literally brute nature in a human form is in itself by no means attractive. The idea of a reptile semiparentage is still more repulsive. In Elsie Venner we have the moral counterpart of the artistic incongruity which Horace

censures when

"turpiter atrum

Desinit in piscem mulier formosa supernè.”

Dr. Holmes, though not vouching for the possible existence of a nature so influenced as that of his heroine, evidently inclines to believe that such a case not only might occur but has occurred. In his preface he explains himself to the following effect:

"In calling this narrative a romance,' the author wishes to make sure of being indulged in the common privileges of the poetic license. Through all the disguise of fiction, a grave scientific doctrine may be detected lying beneath some of the delineations of character. He has used this doctrine as a part of the machinery of his story, without pledging his absolute belief in it to the extent to which it is asserted or implied. It was adopted as a convenient medium of truth, rather than as an accepted scientific conclusion. The reader must judge for himself what is the value of various stories cited from old authors. . . . . The author must be permitted, however, to say here, in his personal character, and

as responsible to the students of the human mind and body, that since this story has been in progress he has received the most startling confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like that which he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception in Elsie Venner."

We are quite incompetent to discuss the physiological basis of the story. We demur, however, to the propriety of illustrating a "grave scientific doctrine" by what may possibly be a wild and unscientific delusion; and still more to the artistic suitability of introducing into a story of prosaic modern life, abounding in Yankee vulgarisms, an incident so abnormal and unverified as that on which Elsie Venner hinges. Granting for the moment its possibility, granting its actuality, it still is out of place. The scenery and events, the tone and colouring of the tale, are not in keeping with it. The conception illustrates the fantastic extravagance, that lack of a controlling good taste, which mark American literature. It is "sensation writing;" the object is to startle. The best proof of this is that Dr. Holmes's serpentwoman does not excite awe, pity, or terror, but simply incredulity. Elsie Venner, so far as the heroine's character is concerned, has neither the verisimilitude of a story of real life, nor the instructiveness of avowed parable or allegory. Dr. Holmes is by no means the first to describe the gradual humanising of a character in which a nature lower than human predominates. Mr. Hawthorne has done so in his romance of Transformation. The stories of Undines and of Neckars are other instances. But these are avowedly only the mere play of a graceful or pathetic fancy, or the symbolical utterance of truths which we can detach from their exterior form. A case like that of Elsie Venner belongs to the morbid pathologist, and not to the novelist. To be treated with effect in fiction, it should be transferred to an age or country-to Egypt or Greece-where, in the strangeness of the surrounding scenery and costume, rites and beliefs, it would lose something of the monstrosity which attaches to it as actually presented.

The secondary characters in Elsie Venner are, to our mind, more happily conceived than that of the heroine. The work derives its chief value not form the "romance of destiny" which it contains, but from the glimpses which it affords us of ordinary American life in a provincial town of New England. The two ministers, Liberal and Calvinist, the Rev. Chauncy Fairweather and the Rev. Dr. Honeywood, each covertly leaning to the other's faith; Deacon Sloper and Colonel Sprowle and Mr. Silas Peckham, are, we dare say, faithful portraitures. The picture, if it be a correct one, is by no means flattering. It leaves an impression that over American society there is diffused an incurable vulgarity of speech, sentiment, and language, hard to define, but

perceptible in every word and gesture. We do not pretend that in the middle classes of an English town we should find any remarkable degree of refinement. But here there is a pervading atmosphere of good breeding, which extends to those who do not themselves possess access to the immediate sources of cultivation. Even more conclusive, however, than the genuine vulgarity of the characters whom Dr. Holmes intends to paint as vulgar, is the real vulgarity of those whom he would represent to us as well-taught and highly-bred gentlemen, of whom Mr. Bernard Langdon is the type. His utter failure in this character would seem as if the model on which it was founded was not over common. His success in delineating the Slopers and Sprowles is in remarkable contrast. In the one, probably he draws from experience, in the other, from imagination. Be this as it may, the latter have an air of reality which is entirely wanting to the former. The inference which is suggested by this, as to the condition of American society outside of the great centres of intelligence, may be unjust, but it is not unnatural.

ART. VI. THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE.

Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. By Max Müller. London: Longmans, 1861.

Letter to Baron Bunsen on the Turanian Languages. By Max Müller. Contained in vol. i. of Bunsen's Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, or vol. iii. of his Christianity and Mankind. London: Longmans, 1854.

Survey of Languages. By Max Müller. London: Williams and Norgate, 1855.

If it be true that the "proper study of mankind is man," there is surely no subject which ought to engage his thoughts and rivet his attention more than that of language. View it as we may, whether as binding humanity together by the bonds of a common superiority above the brutes, or in its countless varieties affording the most reliable means of classifying the several races of humanity itself, or as giving the key to many a dark question of mythology, history, religion, or philosophy, or as unlocking for us the stores of wisdom contained in the literatures of all nations from the world's beginning, and enabling us thereby to form an intelligent estimate of the relative intellec

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