cal criticism but united to religion, and is devoted to the interests of the Faith, so long as it is tolerant. In a word, he has so much reserve in his predilections, so many modifica tions in his opinions, so many withdrawals, shades, conditions, amendments and amendments to amendments, that it is very difficult to find out what this republican soul is or desires. If The judge Milton or Bonaparte, he lacks the courage. Before such giants his pencil trembles; he understands only common ambitions. When, for instance, the doctor thunders against conquerors, and upholds the literary profession, it is like a pedagogue vaunting his grammar, elevating his own profession above all others, and considering himself as the equal of heroes. "I have known," says Fielding, "an excellent man, with but one absurdity. It was to consider a schoolmaster as the greatest man on earth, and himself as tho greatest of schoolmasters. These two ideas could not havo been driven out of his head, though Alexander himself, at the head of his armies, should have attempted it."

There are strong and beautiful pages in the works of Channing; though that cloquence sustained, elaborated and got up for effect recalls too much the declamations of Seneca the Rhetorician, or of Thomas the Academician. And thus, in spite of real talent and powerful solemnity, Channing takes. no marked place among original writers.

Nations, like men, do not discover their proper originality until after long trials. Under the Puritans the literature of the United States is only a servile reproduction of the cross sermons of the Covenanters. With Franklin, and the American Cultivator, the American soul finds voice and accent, agreeable and graceful, but indistinct. Thus, in Irving, some pictures of American nature, or of Dutch households are gracefully and vigorously prominent. Fennimore Cooper fol

lows them closely and pushes farther on the slow creation of a new literature.

In Cooper, nature is more than man. The interest of his romances is concentrated upon nature, upon the sea, on the prairies; and one sometimes regrets that he has spoken of anything but the waves or the forests, so much does man disappear in these vast solitudes.

There is a traveller, who, occupied exclusively with the birds, lakes, wild deer, the eagle and his haunts, and identifying himself with whatever is mighty in nature, has become a great writer, superior in our view, to the loveable Irving and to his vigorous successor.

SECTION X.

AUDUBON.

Ilad you visited the English drawing-rooms in 1832, you would have remarked in the midst of a philosophic crowd, speaking obscurely, and overthrowing without pity, the highest questions of metaphysics, a man very different from those around him.

The absurd and mean European dress could not disguise that simple and almost wild dignity which is found in the bosom of the solitude which nurses it. While men of letters, a vain and talking race, disputed, in the conversational arena. the prize of epigram or the laurels of pedantry, the man of whom I speak remained standing, head erect, with free, proud eye, silent, modest, listening sometimes with disdainful though not caustic air, to the aesthetic tumult which seemed to astonish him. If he spoke, it was at au interval of repose; with

one word he discovered an error, and brought back discussion to its principle and its object. A certain naïve and wild good sense animated his language, which was just, moderate and energetic. His long, black waving hair was parted naturally upon his smooth white forehead, upon a front capable of containing and guarding the fires of thought. In his whole dress, there was an air of singular neatness; you would have said that the waters of some brook, running through the untrodden forest, and bathing the roots of oaks, old as the world, had served him for mirror.

At the sight of that long hair, that bared throat, the independent manner, the manly elegance which characterized him, you would have said, "that man has not lived long in old Europe; our civilization, mother of the affected politeness so universal in courts, cities, and villages, and substituting symbols for true sontiments, had not left its common trace on him. He has not been crushed by its weight. The alloy, the falsity of society form no part of his character or his manners.

It is pleasant to encounter such a man in those loquacious and scientific assemblies, where so many talents and pretentions bore you. If you add to what we have already given, a frank, calm face, clearly cut features, an eye quick, ardent, penetrating and fixed as a falcon's, a foreign accent, unusual expressions, highly colored, and brief, picturesque and clever, without seeming to be so, you will have a tolerably exact portrait of the Historian of Birds, the American Audubon.

As

He has quitted his name and calls himself the " American Woodsman ;" and it is the only title which would suit him. The wilderness was his study room. He has overrun thoroughly those great deserts peopled by wild animals. he respired the air charged with emanations of the primitive vegetation, he drew in with it that dignified self-respect, that consciousness of human energy which has never quitted him.

Audubon was nurtured in love for nature. He passed his life in the open air, at the foot of a tree whose branches were the homo of the feathered people whose habits he came to study and which he never lost sight of. The path which he chose, was that where the bird was hopping. The nest of the eagle whose throne was the peak of some inaccessible rock did not frighten him; he gave to this study the patience of a Benedictine and the passion of an artist; he has pursued his task through every peril, and recommenced it with unequalled perseverance. His dreams were winged, and full of melodious songs and murmurs; the forms of his favorites haunted his thoughts.

Do not mistake nor accuse of singularity this vocation which Audubon has received from God. Ho was ornithologist from his cradle. He needed the winged race to paint, observe, describe and love, sweet woodland concerts to hearken to, brilliant plumage to reproduce, wandering pinions whose curves and spiral flights he might follow.

Let us see how he analyzes this instinct of solitary observation; this devotion to an innocent study; this abnegation of all material cares, this intellectual force, which taught him, without a master, natural i.istory in the depth of the forests, and made him alone complete an important branch of science which one had always despaired of completing.

66 "I received life and light in the New World. When I had hardly yet learned to walk, and to articulate those first words, always so endearing to parents, the productions of nature that lay spread all around, were constantly pointed out to me. They soon became my playmates; and before my ideas were sufficiently formed to enable me to estimate the difference between the azure tints of the sky, and the emerald hue of the bright foliage, I felt that an intimacy with them, not consisting of friendships merely, but bordering ou frenzy,

must accompany my steps through life; and now, more than ever, am I persuaded of the power of those early impressions. They laid such hold upon me, that, when removed from the woods, prairies, and the brooks, or shut up from the view of the wide Atlantic, I experienced none of those pleasures most congenial to my mind. None but aerial companions suited. my fancy. No roof seemed so secure to me as that formed of the dense foliage under which the feathered tribes were scen to resort, or the caves and fissures of the massy rocks to which the dark winged cormorant and the curlew retired to rest, or to protect themselves from the fury of the tempest. My father generally accompanied my steps, procured birds and flowers for me with great eagerness,-pointed out the clegant movements of the former, the beauty and softness of their plumage, the manifestations of their pleasure or sense of danger, and the always perfect forms and splendid attire of the latter. My valued preceptor would then speak of the departure and the return of birds with the seasons, would describe their haunts, and, more wonderful than all, their cliango of livery; thus exciting me to study them, and to raise my mind toward their great Creator. A vivid pleasure shono upon those days of my early youth, attended with a calmness of feeling, that seldom failed to rivet my attention for hours, whilst I gazed in cestacy upon t'e pearly and shining eggs, as they lay imbedded in the softest down, or among dried leaves and twigs, or were exposed upon the burning sand or weatherbeaten rock of our Atlantic shores. I was taught to look upon them as flowers yet in the bud. I watched their opening, to see how nature had provided each different species with eyes, either open at birth, or closed for some time after; to trace the slow progress of the young birds toward perfection, or admire the celerity with which some of them, while yet unfledged, removed themselves from danger to security.