Winthrop, not far behind, with the Charter of Connecticut, of whose separate Colonies Hooker and Haynes and Hopkins and Eaton and Davenport and Ludlow had laid the foundations. There is Roger Williams, "the Apostle of soul freedom," as he has been called, with the Charter of Rhode Island. There is the brave and generous Stuyvesant of the New Netherlands. There are the Catholic Calverts, and the noble Quaker Penn, building up Maryland and Pennsylvania alike, upon principles of toleration and philanthropy. There is the benevolent and chivalrous Oglethorpe, assisted by Whitefield and the sainted Wesleys, planting his Moravian Colony in Georgia. There is Franklin, with his first proposal of a Continental Union, and with his countless inventions. in political as well as physical science. There is James Otis with his great argument against Writs of Assistance, and Samuel Adams with his inexorable demand for the removal of the British regiments from Boston. There are Quincy with his grand remonstrance against the Port Bill, and Warren, offering himself as the Proto-martyr on Bunker Hill. There is Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence fresh from his own pen, with John Adams close at his side, as its "Colossus on the floor of Congress." There are Hamilton and Madison and Jay bringing forward the Constitution in their united arms; and there, Ieaning on their shoulders, and on that Constitution, but towering above them all, is WASHINGTON, the consummate commander, the incomparable President, the world-honored Patriot. There are Marshall and Story as the expounders of the Constitution, and Webster as its defender. There is John Quincy Adams with his powerful and persistent plea for the sacred Right of Petition. There is Jackson with his Proclamation against Nullification. There is Lincoln with his ever memorable Proclamation of Emancipation. there, closing for the moment that procession of the dead, for I presume not to marshal the living, is George Peabody with his world-wide munificence and his countless benefactions. Other figures may present themselves to other eyes as that grand Panorama is unrolled. Other figures will come into view as that great procession advances. But be it prolonged, as we pray God it may be, even "to the crack of doom," first and foremost, as it moves on and on in radiant files, -"searing the eyeballs" of oppressors and tyrants, but rejoicing the hearts of the lovers of freedom throughout the world, will ever be seen and recognized the men whom we commemorate to-day, the Pilgrim Fathers of New England. No herald announces their approach. No pomp or parade attends their advent. "Shielded and helmed and weapon'd with the truth,” visible guards are around them, either for honor or defence. Bravely but humbly, and almost unconsciously, they assume their perilous posts, as pioneers of an advance which is to know no backward steps, until, throughout this Western hemisphere, it shall have prepared the way of the Lord and of liberty. They come with no charter of human inspiration. They come with nothing but the open Bible in their hands, leading a march of civilization and human freedom, which shall go on until time shall be no more. - if only that Bible shall remain open, and shall be accepted and reverenced, by their descendants as it was by themselves, as the Word of God!

And

no

It is a striking coincidence that while they were just taking the first steps in the movement which

terminated at Plymouth Rock, that great clerical Commission was appointed by King James, which prepared what has everywhere been received as the standard English version of the Holy Scriptures; and which, though they continued to use the Geneva Bible themselves, has secured to their children and posterity a translation which is the choicest treasure of literature as well as of religion. Nor can I fail to remember, with the warmest interest, that, at this moment, while we are engaged in this Fifth Jubilee Commemoration, a similar Commission is employed, for the first time, in subjecting that translation to the most critical revision; not with a view, certainly, to attempt any change or improvement of its incomparable style and language, but only to purge the sacred volume from every human interpolation or error.

No more beautiful scene has been witnessed in our day and generation, nor one more auspicious of that Christian unity which another world shall witness, if not this, than the scene presented in Westminster Abbey, in the exquisite chapel of Henry VII., by that Revision Commission, in immediate preparation for entering on their great task, on the morning of the 22d of June last; "such a scene, as the accomplished Dean Alford has well said, "as has not been enacted since the name of Christ was first named in Britain." I can use no other words than his, in describing it: "Between the latticed shrine of King Henry VII. and the flat pavement tomb of Edward VI. was spread God's board,' and round that pavement tomb knelt, shoulder to shoulder, bishops and dignitaries of the Church of England, professors of her Universities, divines of the Scottish Presbyterian and Free Churches, and of the Independent, Baptist, Wesleyan, Unitarian Churches in England, -a representative assembly, such as our Church has never before gathered under her wing, of the Catholic Church by her own definition, of all who profess and call themselves Christians.' It was a scene to give character to an age; and should the commission produce no other valuable fruit, that opening Communion will make it memorable to the end of time.

Yes, the open Bible was the one and all-sufficient support and reliance of the Pilgrim Fathers. They looked, indeed, for other and greater reformations in religion than any which Luther or Calvin had accomplished or advocated; but they looked for them to come from a better understanding and a more careful study of the Holy Scriptures, and not from any vainglorious human wisdom or scientific investigations. As their pastor Robinson said, in his farewell discourse, "He was confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his Holy Word."

Let me not seem, my friends, to exaggerate the importance to our country of the event which we this day celebrate. The Pilgrims of the Mayflower did not establish the earliest permanent English settlement within the territories which now constitute our beloved country. I would by no means overlook or disparage the prior settlement at Jamestown in Virginia. The Old Dominion, with all its direct and indirect associations with Sir Walter Raleigh, and with Shakspeare's accomplished patron and friend, the Earl of Southampton, with Pocahontas, too, and Captain John Smith, must always be remembered by the old Colony with the respect and affection due to an elder sister. "I said an elder, not a better." Yet we may well envy some of her claims to distinction. More than ten years before an English

foot had planted itself on the soil of New England, that Virginia Colony had effected a settlement; and more than a year before the landing of the Pilgrims, -on the 30th of July, 1619, - the first Representative Legislative Assembly ever held within the limits of the United States was convened at Jamestown. That Assembly passed a significant Act against drunkenness; and an Act somewhat quaint in its terms and provisions, but whose influence might not be unwholesome at this day, against "excessive apparel," - providing that every man should be assessed in the church for all public contributions, if he be unmarried, according to his own apparel; if he be married, according to his own and his wife's, or either of their apparel." Such a statute would have been called puritanical, if it had emanated from a New England Legislature. It might even now, however, do something to diminish the dimensions, and simplify the material, and abate the luxurious extravagance, of modern dress. But that first Jamestown Assembly passed another most noble Act, for the conversion of the Indians and the education of their children, which entitles Virginia to claim pre-eminence, or certainly priority, in that great work of Christian philanthropy, for which our Fathers, with glorious John Eliot at their head, did so much, and for which their sons, alas! have accomplished so little, unless, perhaps, under the new and noble Indian policy of the last twelve months. The political organization of Virginia was almost mature, while that of New England was still in embryo.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

WAS born at Salem, Massachusetts, of a family of whom we have some glimpses in one of his late prefaces. His earliest American ancestor came from England, in the early part of the seventeenth century, a soldier, legislator, judge, a ruler in the church; " like the venerable Dudley "no libertine," in his opinions, since he persecuted the Quakers with the best of them. His son was a man of respectability in his day, for he took part in the burning of the witches. The race established by these founders of the family, "from father to son, for above a hundred years followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster in each generation retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray, and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire." From this old home at Salem, bleached and weatherbeaten, like most of the old houses there, Nathaniel Hawthorne went forth one day to College. He was a fellow student with Longfellow at Bowdoin, Maine, where he was graduated in 1825. His earliest acknowledged publications were his series of papers in the Token, from year to year; the popular annual conducted by Mr. S. G. Goodrich, who early appreciated the fine sensitive genius which adorned his pages

-though the public, which seldom has any profound understanding of literature in a book of amusement, scarcely recognised the new author. A portion of these stories and essays were collected in a volume, with the title Twice Told Tales, in 1837. Longfellow reviewed the book with enthusiasm, in the North American; but the publication languished, and a second edition was rather urged by his friends than called for by the public, when it appeared with a second series of the Tales in 1842.

It was about this time that Hawthorne became connected for a while with the occupants of the Brook Farm at Roxbury; a community of literati and philosophers, who supported the freedom of a rural life by the independent labor of their hands. Hawthorne took part in the affair, dropped his pen for the hoe, and looked over the horns and bristles of the brutes it was his lot to provide for, to the humanities gathered around him. Though he spiritualized the affair quite beyond any recognition of its actual condition, Brook Farm was the seed, in his mind, of the Blithedale Ro

mance.

His next publication was The Journal of an African Cruiser, which he re-wrote from the MS. of his friend and college companion, Mr. Horatio Bridge, of the United States Navy. It is a carefully prepared volume of judicious observation of the Canaries, the Cape de Verd, Liberia, Madeira, Sierra Leone, and other places of interest on the West Coast of Africa.

Hawthorne had now changed his residence to Concord, carrying with him his newly married wife, Miss Peabody, where he occupied the Old Manse, which he has described with quaint and touching fidelity in the introduction to the further collection of his papers from the magazines, the New England, the American Monthly, and a new gleaning of the fruitful old Token-to which he gave the title, Mosses from an Old Manse. He lived in close retirement in this old spot, concentrating his mind upon his habitual fancies for three years, during which time, if we are to take literally, and it is probably not far from the truth, the pleasant sketch of his residences by his friend, Mr. G. W. Curtis, he was not seen by more than a dozen of the villagers.

In 1846 Mr. Polk was President, and Mr. Bancroft the historian Secretary of the Navy, when

at Washington, and wrote The Scarlet Letier, in the preface to which he gives an account of his Custom-House Experiences, with a literary photograph of that honored building and its occupants.

The Scarlet Letter was at last a palpable hit, It was published by Ticknor & Co., and had been wisely enlarged at the suggestion of the author's friend, Mr. J. T. Fields, a member of the firm, from a sketch containing the germ of the story, to an entire volume.

The Scarlet Letter is a pyschological romance. The hardiest Mrs. Malaprop would never venture to call it a novel. It is a tale of remorse, a study of character, in which the human heart is anatomized, carefully, elaborately, and with striking poetic and dramatic power. Its incidents are simply these: A woman, in the early days of Boston, becomes the subject of the discipline of the court of those times, and is condemned to stand in the pillory and wear henceforth, in token of her shame, the scarlet letter A attached to her bosom. She carries her child with her to the pillory. Its other parent is unknown. At this opening scene her husband, from whom she had been separated in Europe, preceding him by ship across the Atlantic, reappears from the forest, whither he has been thrown by shipwreck on his arrival. He was a man of a cold intellectual temperament, and devotes his life thereafter to search for his wife's guilty partner, and a fiendish revenge. The young clergyman of the town, a man of a devout sensibility and warmth of heart, is the victim, as the Mephistophilean old physician fixes himself by his side, to watch over him and protect his health, an object of great solicitude to his parishioners, and, in reality, to detect his suspected secret, and gloat over his tortures. This slow, cool, devilish purpose, like the concoction of some sublimated hell broth, is perfected gradually and inevitably. The wayward, elfish child, a concentration of guilt and passion, binds the interests of the parties together, but throws little sunshine over the scene. These are all the characters, with some casual introductions of the grim personages and manners of the period, unless we add the scarlet letter, which, in Hawthorne's hands, skilled to these allegorical, typical semblances, becomes vitalized as the rest. It is the hero of the volume. The denouement is the death of the clergyman on a day of public festivity, after a public confession, in the arms of the pilloried, branded woman. But few as are these main incidents thus briefly told, the action of the story, or its passion, is "long, obscure, and infinite." It is a drama in which thoughts are acts. The material has been thoroughly fused in the writer's mind, and springs forth an entire perfect creation.

The public, on the appearance of the Scarlet Letter, was for once apprehensive, and the whole retinue of literary reputation-makers fastened upon the genius of Hawthorne. He had retired from Salem to Berkshire, Massachusetts, where he occupied a small, charmingly situated fariner's house at Lenox, on the Lake called the Stockbridge Bowl. There he wrote the House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851, one of the most elaborate and powerfully drawn of his later volumes.

In the preface to this work Mr. Hawthorne establishes a separation between the demands of the novel and the romance, and under the privilege of

the latter, sets up his claim to a certain degree of license in the treatment of the characters and incidents of his coming story. This license is in the direction of the spiritualities of the picce, in favor of a process semi-allegorical, by which an acute analysis may be wrought out, and the truth of feeling be minutely elaborated; an apology, in fact, for the preference of character to action, and of character for that which is allied to the darker elements of life-the dread blossoming of evil in the soul, and its fearful retributions. The Ilouse of the Seven Gables, one for each deadly sin, may be no unmeet adumbration of the corrupted soul of man. It is a ghostly, mouldy abode, built in some eclipse of the sun, and raftered with curses dark; founded on a grave, and sending its turrets heavenward, as the lightning rod transcends its cummit, to invite the wrath supernal. Every darker shadow of human life lingers in and about its melancholy shelter. There all the passions allied to crime,-pride in its intensity, avarice with its steely gripe, and unrelenting conscience, are to be expiated in the house built on injustice. Wealth there withers, and the human heart grows cold: and thither are brought as accessories the chill glance of speculative philosophy, the descending hopes of the aged laborer, whose vision closes on the workhouse, the poor necessities of the humblest means of livelihood, the bodily and mental dilapidation of a wasted life.

A residence for woman, child and man,
A dwelling-place, and yet no habitation
A Home,--but under some prodigious ban
Of excommunication.

O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

Yet the sunshine casts its rays into the old building, as it must, were it only to show us the darkness.

The story of the House of the Seven Gables is a tale of retribution, of expiation, extending over a period of two hundred years, it taking all that while to lay the ghost of the earliest victim, in the time of the Salem witchcraft; for, it is to Salem that this blackened old dwelling, mildewed with easterly scud, belongs. The yeoman who originally struck his spade into the spot, by the side of a crystal spring, was hanged for a wizard, under the afflictive dispensation of Cotton Mather. His land passed by force of law under cover of an old sweeping grant from the State, though not without hard words and thoughts and litigations, to the possession of the Ahab of the Vineyard, Colonel Pyncheon, the founder of the house, whose statuesque death-scene was the first incident of the strongly ribbed tenement built on the ground thus suspiciously acquired. It was a prophecy of the old wizard on his execution at Gallows' Hill, looking steadfastly at his rival, the Colonel, who was there, watching the scene on horseback, that "God would give him blood to drink." The sudden death of apoplexy was thereafter ministered to the magnates of the Pyncheon family. After an introductory chapter detailing this early history of the house, we are

introduced to its broken fortunes of the present day, in its decline. An old maid is its one tenant, left there with a life interest in the premises by the late owner, whose vast wealth passed into the hands of a cousin, who immediately, touched by this talisman of property, was transformed from a youth of dissipation into a high, cold, and worldly state of respectability. His portrait is drawn in the volume with the repeated linings and labor of a Titian, who, it is known, would expend several years upon a human head. We see him in every light, walk leisurely round the vast circle of that magical outline, his social position, till we close in upon the man, narrowing slowly to his centre of falsity and selfishness. For a thorough witch laugh over fallen hollow-heartedness and pretence, there is a terrible sardonie greeting in the roll-call of his uncompleted day's performances as he sits in the fatal chamber, death-cold, having drunk the blood of the ancient curse. Other inmates gather round old maid Hepzibah. A remote gable is rented to a young artist, a daguerreotypist, and then come upon the scene the brother of the old maid, Clifford Pyncheon, one day let out from life incarceration for -what circumstantial evidence had brought home to him-the murder of the late family head. Thirty years had obliterated most of this man's moral and intellectual nature, save in a certain blending of the two with his physical instinct for the sensuous and beautiful. A rare character that for our spiritual limner to work upon! The agent he has provided, nature's ministrant to this feebleness and disease, to aid in the rebuilding of the man, is a sprig of unconscious spontaneous girlhood-who enters the thick shades of the dwelling of disaster as a sunbeam, to purify and nourish its stagnant life. Very beautiful is this conception, and subtly wrought the chapters in which the relation is developed. Then we have the sacrifice of pride and solitary misanthropy in the petty retail shop Hepzibah opens for the increasing needs of the rusty mansion.

one man in the world whom he will not meet. Every instinct of his nature rises within him, in self-protection of his weak, sensitive life, against the stern magnetic power of the coarse, granite judge. More than that lies underneath. Clifford had been unjustly convicted by those suspicious death-marks of his suddenly deceased relative-and the Judge had suffered it, holding all the time the key which would have unlocked the mystery,-besides some other shades of criminality, To escape an interview with this man, Clifford and Hepzibah leave the house in flight, while Judge Pyncheon sits in the apartment of his old ancestor, waiting for him. He is dead in his chair of apoplexy.

The fortunes of the House, after this tremendous purgation, look more brightly for the future. The diverted patrimony of his ex-respectability-the Governor in posse of Massachusetts-returns to its true channel to irrigate the dry heart of the Old Maid, and furnish Clifford the luxuries of the beautiful. The daguerreotypist, who turns out to be the descendant of the wizard,-the inventor of the curse-marries Phoebe, of course, and the parties have left the Old House, mouldering away in its by-street, for the sunny realm of a country summer retreat.

A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls, a series of delicately modernized versions of old classical myths and legends, followed, in a vein of fancy, pleasantry, and earnest sympathy, with the fresh simple mind of childhood.

Several small earlier volumes of a similar adaptation for the young, entitled Grandfather's Chair, in which biographical events of the old Puritan history were arranged about that family heirloom, with another volume of Biographical Stories, were also about this time collected and published together.

Then came in answer to the increasing demand, a new collection from the bountiful stock of the magazines and annuals, The Snow Image and other Twice Told Tales, at least as quaint, poetical, and reflective as its predecessors.

The Nemesis of the House is pressing for a new victim. Judge Pyncheon's thoughts are intent on an old hobby of the establishment, the procurement of a deed which was missing, and which was the evidence wanting to complete the title to a certain vast New Hampshire grant-a portentous and arch-deceiving ignis fatuus of the family. Clifford is supposed to know something of this matter; but, knowledge or not, the Judge is the

Wayside."

It has been generally understood that the character of Zenobia in this work was drawn, in some of its traits, from the late Margaret Fuller, who was an occasional visitor to the actual Brook Farm. The work, however, is anything but a literal description. In philosophical delineation of character, and its exhibition of the needs and shortcomings of certain attempts at improvement of the social state, set in a framework of imaginative romance, it is one of the most original and inventive of the author's productions.

In 1852, when his old friend and college companion, Franklin Pierce, was nominated for the Presidency, Mr. Hawthorne came forward as his biographer-a work which he executed in moderate space and with literary decorum. When the President was duly installed the following year,