are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts. Tricks, vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for a stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other; and they all pay penalties of a light kind which God exacts smilingly for the sake of keeping our disorders at a minimum. Comedy also funds a great deal of its charm in the unconsciousness of an infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each one is perfectly understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and vapor through an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the wearers can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently with advertisements of our price and quality. Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity. Humor is gravity concealed behind the jest. Our grave and noble tendencies are brought in this world of ours into contact with very ordinary styles of living, which are stubborn; they neither surrender nor give way. Humor steps in to mediate: it seeks to put in the same light and color all the parts of this incongruity, the ideal and the vulgar real; and the constant inference of humor is that all the ideals of right, honor, goodness, manly strength, are serious with a divine purpose.

Even the coarsest and most revolting things can be adopted by this temper and cheerfully assigned to their places in the great plan. Jamie Alexander, the old Scotch grave-digger, had the habit of carrying home fragments of old coffins, long seasoned in the earth which was turned up by his exploring spade. He used to make clocks and fiddles of them, thus coaxing time and tune out of these repulsive tokens of human infirmity. Our mouldiest accessories can furnish material for humor; since "a good wit," says Shakespeare, "will make use of anything; it will turn diseases to commodity."

We cannot say that man derives this power to resolve contrariety into delight from the divine mind, though we have the habit of saying that every intellectual act must spring from an original source of intelligence, just as affection must have its root in the infinite love. But Deity can have no consciousness of incongruities in creation, because the whole must at every instant be comprehended in the Creator of the whole, who originates the real relation of all its parts and their mutual interdependence. Human dissatisfaction springs from want of this ability to comprehend the whole within one reconciling idea. This incompetency is felt by us because we have an instinct that all dissonant things ought to be reconciled, and can be in some way, but only can be by the finite becoming the infinite. Humor strives to bridge this gulf. It is man's device to pacify his painful sense that so many things appear wrong and evil to him, and so many circumstances inconsistent with our feeling that Deity must have framed the world in a temper of perfect goodness.

We get relief by trying to discover the ideas which may effect a temporary reconcilement, to approach as far as we can to the temper of divine impartiality in which all circumstances must have been ordained. That temper passing down through our incompleteness is refracted, broken all up into a tremulousness of human smiles. Nothing that a Creator has the heart to tolerate can disturb him. But where there is no sense of incongruity there can be no sense of humor. That sense is man's expedient to make his mortality endurable. The laughter of man is the contentment of God.

William Ellery Channing.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1818.

FROM "A POET'S HOPE."

[Poems. 1843.-Poems. Second Series. 1847.]

LADY, there is a hope that all men have,

Some mercy for their faults, a grassy place
To rest in, and a flower-strown, gentle grave;
Another hope which purifies our race,

That, when that fearful bourne forever past,
They may find rest,-and rest so long to last.

I seek it not, I ask no rest for ever,

My path is onward to the farthest shores,

Upbear me in your arms, unceasing river,

That from the soul's clear fountain swiftly pours,

Motionless not, until the end is won,

Which now I feel hath scarcely felt the sun.

To feel, to know, to soar unlimited

'Mid throngs of light-winged angels sweeping far,
And pore upon the realms unvisited

That tessellate the unseen unthought star,-
To be the thing that now I feebly dream
Flashing within my faintest, deepest gleam.

Ah! caverns of my soul! how thick your shade,
Where flows that life by which I faintly see,-
Wave your bright torches, for I need your aid,
Golden-eyed demons of my ancestry!

Your son though blinded hath a light within,
A heavenly fire which ye from suns did win.

And, lady, in thy hope my life will rise
Like the air-voyager, till I upbear
These heavy curtains of my filmy eyes
Into a lighter, more celestial air:

A mortal's hope shall bear me safely on,
Till I the higher region shall have won.

O Time! O Death! I clasp you in my arms,
For I can soothe an infinite cold sorrow,

And gaze contented on your icy charms

And that wild snow-pile which we call to-morrow;
Sweep on, O soft and azure-lidded sky,
Earth's waters to your gentle gaze reply.

I am not earth-born, though I here delay;
Hope's child, I summon infiniter powers,
And laugh to see the mild and sunny day
Smile on the shrunk and thin autumnal hours;
I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me,-
If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea.

ΜΕ

SONNET.

EN change,-that heaven above not more,
Which now with white clouds is all beautiful,

Soon is with gray mists a poor creature dull;
Thus, in this human theatre, actions pour
Like slight waves on a melancholy shore;
Nothing is fixed, the human heart is null,
'Tis taught by scholars, 'tis rehearsed in lore;
Methinks this human heart might well be o'er.
O precious pomp of eterne vanity!

O false fool world! whose actions are a race
Of monstrous puppets; I can't form one plea
Why any man should wear a smiling face.
World! thou art one green sepulchre to me,
Through which, mid clouds of dust, slowly I pace.

TO-MORROW.

NO-MORROW comes; dost say my friend To-morrow?

TO-M

Far down below those pines the sunset flings

Long arching o'er, its lines of ruddy light,

And the wind murmurs little harmonies,

And underneath their wings the tender birds
Droop their averted heads,-silent their songs.
But not a word whispers the moaning wind,
Nor when in faint array the primal stars
Trail with the banners of the unfurled night,
Nor even when the low-hung moon just glints
And faintly with few touches seres the wood,
Not there, nor then, doth Nature idly say
Nor whisper idly of another day;

That other morn itself its morrow is,

That other day shall see no shade of this.

IN

THOREAU.

[Thoreau: the Poet-Naturalist. 1873.]

N height, he was about the average; in his build, spare, with limbs that were rather longer than usual, or of which he made a longer use. His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Cæsar (more like a beak, as was said); large, overhanging brows above the deepest-set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,-eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open a stream of the most varied and unusual and instructive sayings. His hair was a dark brown, exceedingly abundant, fine and soft; and for several years he wore a comely beard. His whole figure had an active earnestness, as if he had no moment to waste. The clenched hand betokened purpose. In walking, he made a short cut if he could, and when sitting in the shade or by the wall-side seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the next piece of activity. Even in the boat he had a wary, transitory air, his eyes on the outlook,-perhaps there might be ducks, or the Blondin turtle, or an otter, or sparrow.

Thoreau was a plain man in his features and dress, one who could. not be mistaken. This kind of plainness is not out of keeping with beauty. He sometimes went as far as homeliness, which again, even if there be a prejudice against it, shines out at times beyond a vulgar sense. Thus, he alludes to those who pass the night on the steamer's deck, and see the mountains in moonlight; and he did this himself once on the Hudson at the prow, when, after a "hem" or two, the passenger who

stood next inquired in good faith: "Come, now, can't ye lend me a chaw o' baccy?" He looked like a shipmate.

With these plain ways, no person was usually easier misapplied by the cultivated class than Thoreau. Some of those afflicted about him have started with the falsetto of humming a void estimate on his life, his manners, sentiments, and all that in him was. His two books, "Walden" and the "Week," are so excellent and generally read, that a commendation of their easy, graceful, yet vigorous style and matter is superfluous. Singular traits run through his writing. His sentences will bear study; meanings not detected at the first glance, subtle hints which the writer himself may not have foreseen, appear. It is a good English style, growing out of choice reading and familiarity with the classic writers, with the originality adding a piquant humor and unstudied felicities of diction. He was not in the least degree an imitator of any writer, old or new, and with little of his times or their opinions. in his books. Never eager, with a pensive hesitancy he steps about his native fields, singing the praises of music and spring and morning, forgetful of himself. No matter where he might have lived, or in what circumstance, he would have been a writer: he was made for this by all his tendencies of mind and temperament; a writer because a thinker and even a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. No bribe could have drawn him from his native fields, where his ambition was-a very honorable one-to fairly represent himself in his works, accomplishing as perfectly as lay in his power what he conceived his business. More society would have impaired his designs; and a story from a fisher or hunter was better to him than an evening of triviality in shining parlors where he was misunderstood. His eye and ear and hand fitted in with the special task he undertook,-certainly as manifest a destiny as any man's ever Other gifts were subsidiary to his literary gift. He

was.

observed nature; but who would have known or heard of that except through his literary effort? He observed nature, yet not for the sake of nature, but of man; and says, "If it is possible to conceive of an event outside to humanity, it is not of the slightest importance, though it were the explosion of the planet."

EDITH.

DITH, the silent stars are coldly gleaming,

ED

The night wind moans, the leafless trees are still.

Edith, there is a life beyond this seeming,

So sleeps the ice-clad lake beneath thy hill.