stituted for harmonious nature, an indescribable skeleton whose erudite labels were the toys of the learned. Read those old monographs. What do you find there? titles and words, figures and eternal classifications which address neither the soul nor the thought. Is, O God! this thy living and eternal work, so full of animation! What puerile invention in the place of a grand whole!

Here is an eagle on a peak; you talk much about a class of birds, which, say you, have crooked beaks and feet armed with talons. What do I care for that? Insipid cicerone, why do you come between me and the spectacle for which my curiosity is seeking the causes-I want to know why that eagle is there; what interest has driven him from the plain where his prey abounds; why he chooses for throne and place of rest, that sharp rock, that sterile mass of broken ice; where is neither food nor shelter. I would know too, of what use are these arid, granite mountains bathed by the sea. If you tell me that the eagle, has need of a very lofty peak wherefrom to take his flight because of the spread and disposition of his pinions; if you prove by the conformation of the globe, the necessity of mountains for the elaboration of metals, or as reservoirs for streams and rivers, then you will indeed instruct me-then I could understand something of the harmony of nature; and could bow respectfully before that vast and thousand-chorded instrument formed by the eternal Author of all.

Audubon has not only understood this harmony, in the midst of which he has lived, and whereof the music has re-echoed in the very deeps of his soul; but he has repro

duced it in a style admirable for its

simplicity, full of savor,

of sap, of cloquence, and of sobriety. It is his glory!

More varied than Irving; more brilliant and pure than Fennimore Cooper, with him ceases what we may call the first literary epoch of the United States.

CHAPTER II.

OF POPULAR LITERATURE, AND OF THE LITERATURE SO CALLED, IN ENGLAND AND IN THE UNITED

STATES.

SECTION I.

INFANCY AND FUTURE OF AMERICA AGE AND DESPAIR OF EUROPE-HOW AMERICA IS INCESSANTLY PEOPLED BY THE SUPERABUNDANT POPULATION OF EUROPE-EMIGRATION AND COLONIZATION.

THERE is no spectacle equal to that of which the thought has a presentiment now; of which the certainty does not rest upon hypothesis, but on the inevitable development of factsthe spectacle of that America, that new Europe, which occupics so vast a space, from sea to sea, from Greenland to the Antilles. All civilization moves towards the displacement of human destinies, and every effort which we make to sustain and prolong our lives, turns to the profit of that great heir of our wealth. The colonization of Canada, of which only a small part is occupied by the wrecks of French families, the wilds and forests of which are peopled by the British government with their poor, exported from Ireland and Scotland,

will aid the advance of this new civilization. In less than a century, all the colonists of those regions will speak English, and feel that there is a closer connection between them and the inhabitants of Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, more affinities of neighborhood, commerce, necessity, and situation, that exists between them and the citizens of London. All will be confounded—even the Southern republics -in that cluster of which Washington is the centre. The two colonizing nations will be represented there, Catholic Spain and Protestant England. France will have no representative if it be not in some unnoticed corner near Quebec or Montreal.

This is the chastisement of that careless violence, of that unpausing impetuosity which has made us neglect our colonies. There was even a grave fault-say what you will-in our helping the insurgent American colonies against their metropolis. The statesmen of that day thought only of revenging themselves upon their enemy and satisfying their anti-Britannic rancor. They saw not what is hardly visible even yet; that the question was about Europe's own self; and that it related rather to a continent (in spite of universal opinion) about to obtain an orbicular preponderance, than to a partial rebellion against an unjust mother-country. By her adhesion to the cause of America, France deserted the cause of Europe; and in playing the second role in the strife she lost her American colonies, without gaining the least advan tage. This singular concurrence of human affairs, which none can deny, and none, save God, completely understand, has made that same American war sound not only the first victory-peal of the New World, but the first death-bell of the Old.

Then you saw the ancient institutions of Europe crumble, and the thrones were broken, yet the people could not build

a durable habitation from the wreck; all ideas and all systems erred as chance willed, till a man of genius by the force of conquest, succeeded in binding together for awhile the broken fasces.

us.

What is still more strange, and what proves beyond contradiction, the future and inevitable dominion of that America, to which we will one day be what dying Egypt was to radiant Greece, is that American ideas invade, press us and every day usurp more space and power. They do not suit They have no analogy with our souvenirs, our life, our crowded populations, our rival cupidities. No matter, we cede to the logic of facts and antecedents, terrible necessity whose yoke we cannot break. Our hope of revival is by American ideas, as the Romans hoped for a moment to be revived by an Oriental infusion which ended by destroying them. These reflections, which belong only to the future and which cannot change the present, do not prevent the resolution of the British government and its efforts to people with poor families, Upper Canada, New Scotland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, from being a good and useful measure. There is in those regions, some of which are fertile, room for some millions of workers. The city of Toronto alone supports 15,000 workmen who gain £2 per month, and their board. France has not yet reached this point, nor can she now make use of this grand remedy, emigration.

If we become Americans, let us carefully imitate their commercial energy, spirit of enterprize and active resolution. If we become English, let us try to employ, after their example, colonization and emigration to augment the resources and to heal the wounds of our country.

We know how much England is embarrassed by the development of her industry, commerce and wealth. Her pecuniary and moral force, her population, ambition and luxury

have grown beyond measure; enclosed in the island which she occupies, she cannot enlarge its diameter, nor offer a theatre for labor proportionate to their need to these eager and famished avidities. Hence that furious competition, that excessive and vehement rivalry; that crowd which blocks up all the avenues of commerce and fortune; hence that difficulty of employing capital; that frightful pauperism; those poor laws which only aggravate the evil; that plethora which keeps up a permanent and burning fever in the veins of a vigorous body. Economists try a thousand means to counterbalance this movement, and to oppose a barrier to the progress of evil, which is, after all, only the progress of industry, of opulence and of commerce.

Mr. Malthus and Miss Martineau request the English not to marry any more, or at least very seldom, for the love of their country, since the increase of population is the evident source of the scourge. Other philosophers counsel the annual exportation of the poor to the American, Australian and even African colonies. While they offer an issue and means of decrease to this hungry crowd, permitting them to go work and die in some wild land far from their native one, England herself receives pauper crowds from Ireland, who not only replace the expatriated workmen, but lower, by their extreme misery and need, the price of labor, and increase the hardness of the lot of those who have not left the country. England, then, is like a vase, emptying itself at one end to be filled at another.

Ireland is a perpetual manufactory of poor-devil sans-culottes, who have no trade, and who, with three potatoes in their hand, cross the channel and go to demand work in England for the lowest possible wages. They get it, and then stretch themselves to sleep upon their rags. I wish that philanthropists and calculators would think of these things: they