and the war-dance rang through the moun- But where are they? Where are the villagers and warriors and youth, the sachems and the tribes, the hunters and their families? They have perished. They are consumed. The wasting pestilence has not alone done the mighty work. No, nor famine, nor war. There has been a mightier power-a moral canker which has eaten into their heartcores, a plague which the touch of the white man communicated, a poison which betrayed them into a lingering ruin. The winds of the Atlantic fan not a single region which they may now call their own. I see them leave their miserable homes—the aged, the helpless, the women and the warriors-" few and faint, yet fearless still." The ashes are cold on their native hearths. The smoke no longer curls round their lowly cabThey move on with a slow, unsteady step. The white man is upon their heels for terror or despatch, but they heed him not. They turn to take a last look of their deserted villages. They cast a last glance upon the graves of their fathers. They shed no tears, they utter no cries, they heave no groans. There is something in their hearts which passes speech. There is something in their looks, not of vengeance or submission, but of hard necessity, which stifles both, which chokes all utterance, which has no aim or method. It is courage absorbed in despair. They linger but for a moment. Their look is onward. They have passed the fatal stream. It shall never be repassed by them-no, never. Yet there lies not between us and them an impassable gulf. They know and feel that there is for them still one remove farther, not distant nor unseen. It is to the general burial-ground of their race. Reason as we may, it is impossible not to read in such a fate much that we know not how to interpret, much of provocation to cruel deeds and deep resentments, much of apology for wrong and perfidy, much of pity mingling with indignation, much of doubt and misgiving as to the past, much of painful recollections, much of dark forebodings. JUDGE STORY. THE DREAM OF ARBACES. FROM THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. HE sleep of the Egyptian had been unusually profound during the night, but as the dawn approached it was disturbed by strange and unquiet dreams which impressed him the more as they were colored by the peculiar philosophy he embraced. He thought that he was transported to the bowels of the earth, and that he stood alone in a mighty cavern supported by enormous columns of rough and primeval rock, lost, as they ascended, in the vastness of a shadow athwart whose eternal darkness no beam of day had ever glanced. And in the space between these columns were huge wheels that whirled round and round unceasingly and with a rushing and roaring noise. Only to the right and left extremities of the cavern the space between the pillars was left bare, and the apertures stretched away into galleries not wholly dark, but dimly lighted by wandering and erratic fires, that, meteor-like, now crept (as the snake creeps) along the rugged and dank soil, and now leaped fiercely to and fro, darting across the vast gloom in wild gambols, suddenly disappearing, and as suddenly bursting into tenfold brilliancy and power. And while he gazed wonderingly upon the gallery to the left, thin mistlike, aërial shapes passed slowly up; and when they had gained the hall, they seemed to rise aloft and to vanish, as the smoke vanishes, in the measureless ascent. He turned in fear toward the opposite extremity, and, behold! there came swiftly from the gloom above similar shadows, which swept hurriedly along the gallery to the right, as if borne involuntarily adown the tides of some invisible stream, and the faces of these spectres were more distinct than those that emerged from the opposite passage, and on some was joy, and on others sorrow; some were vivid with expectation and hope, some unutterably dejected by awe and horror. And so they passed swift and constantly on, till the eyes of the gazer grew dizzy and blinded with the whirl of an ever-varying succession of things impelled by a power apparently not their own. Arbaces turned away, and in the recess of the hall he saw the mighty form of a giantess seated upon a pile of skulls, and her hands were busy upon a pale and shadowy woof; and he saw that the woof communicated with the numberless wheels, as if it guided the machinery of their movements. He thought his feet, by some secret agency, were impelled toward the female, and that he was borne onward till he stood before her, face to face. The countenance of the giantess was solemn and hushed and beautifully serene. It was as the face of some colossal sculpture of his own ancestral sphinx. No passion, no human emotion, disturbed its brooding and unwrinkled brow; there was The neither sadness, nor joy, nor memory, nor hope it was free from all with which the wild human heart can sympathize. mystery of mysteries rested on its beauty; it awed, but terrified not it was the incarnation of the Sublime. And Arbaces felt the voice leave his lips without an impulse of his own, and the voice asked, "Who art thou, and what is thy task?" "I am that which thou hast acknowledged," answered, without desisting from its work, the mighty phantom. "My name is Nature. These are the wheels of the world, and my hand guides them for the life of all things." "And what," said the voice of Arbaces, “are these galleries that, strangely and fitfully illumined, stretch on either hand into the abyss of gloom?" Arbaces felt himself tremble as he asked again, Wherefore am I here?" "It is the forecast of thy soul, the prescience of thy rushing doom, the shadow of thy fate lengthening into eternity as it declines from earth." Ere he could answer Arbaces felt a rushing wind sweep down the cavern, as the wings of a giant god. Borne aloft from the ground and whirled on high as a leaf in the storms of autumn, he beheld himself in the midst of the spectres of the dead and hurrying with them along the length of gloom. As in vain and impotent despair he struggled against the impelling power, he thought the wind grew into something like a shape-a spectral outline of the wings and talons of an eagle, with limbs floating far and indistinctly along the air, and eyes that, alone clearly and vividly seen, glared stonily and remorselessly on his own. "What art thou?" again said the voice of the Egyptian. "I am that which thou hast acknowledged" "That," answered the giant-mother," which thou beholdest to the left is the gallery of the unborn. The shadows that flit onward and upward into the world are the souls that pass from the long eternity of being to their destined pilgrimage on earth. That which thou beholdest to thy right, wherein the shadows de--and the spectre laughed aloud—“and my scending from above sweep on, equally unknown and dim, is the gallery of the dead." "And wherefore," said the voice of Arbaces, "yon wandering lights, that so wildly break the darkness, but only break, not reveal?" "Dark fool of the human sciences! dreamer of the stars and would-be decipherer of the heart and origin of things! those lights are but the glimmerings of such knowledge as is vouchsafed to Nature to work her way, to trace enough of the past and future to give providence to her designs. Judge, then, puppet as thou art, what lights are reserved for thee." name is Necessity." 66 To what dost thou bear me?" To the unknown." "To happiness or to woe?" As thou hast sown, so shalt thou reap." "Dread thing, not so! If thou art the ruler of life, thine are my misdeeds, not mine." Thou hast sown crime: accuse not fate if thou reapest not the harvest of virtue." The scene suddenly changed. Arbaces was in a place of human bones; and, lo! in the midst of them was a skull, and the skull, still retaining its fleshless hollows, assumed slowly and in the mysterious confusion of a dream the face of Apæcides, and forth from the grinning jaws there crept a small worm, and it crawled to the feet of Arbaces. He attempted to stamp on it and crush it, but it became longer and larger with that attempt. It swelled and bloated till it grew into a vast serpent; it coiled itself round the limbs of Arbaces; it crunched his bones; it raised its glaring eyes and poisonous jaws to his face. He writhed in vain; he withered; he gasped beneath the influence of the blighting breath; he felt himself blasted into death. And then a voice came from the reptile, which still bore the face of Apæcides, and rang in his reeling ear: "Thy victim is thy judge! The worm thou wouldst crush becomes the serpent that devours thee." With a shriek of wrath and woe and despairing resistance, Arbaces awoke, his hair on end, his brow bathed in dew, his eyes glazed and staring, his mighty frame quivering as an infant's beneath the agony of that dream. He awoke; he collected himself; he blessed the gods whom he disbelieved that he was in a dream. EDWARD LYTTON BULWER. HEALTH. That's weary of the world and tired of life Death's thousand doors stand open. Who could force The ill-pleased guest to sit out his full time Self-preservation, fall by her own act? tempt! THE ingredients of health and long life Just reeking from self-slaughter, in a rage are To rush into the presence of our Judge, As if we challenged him to do his worst, And mattered not his wrath! Our time is fixed, and all our days are numare numbered How long, how short, we know not; this we know : Duty requires we calmly wait the summons, Nor dare to stir till Heaven shall give permission, Like a voice from those who love us, Breathing fondly, "Fare thee well !" When the waves are round me breaking As I pace the deck alone, Like sentries that must keep their destined What would not I give to wander THE POET'S EPITAPH. SCAPED the gloom of mortal life, a soul Here leaves its mouldering tenement of clay Safe where no cares their whelming billows roll, No doubts bewilder and no hopes betray. Like thee I once have stemmed the sea of life, Like thee have languished after empty joys, Like thee have labored in the stormy strife, Been grieved for trifles and amused with toys. Yet for a while 'gainst Passion's threatful blast Let steady Reason urge the struggling oar; Shot through the dreary gloom, the morn at last Gives to thy longing eye the blissful shore. Forget my frailties: thou art also frail; Forgive my lapses, for thyself mayst fall; Nor read unmoved my artless tender tale: I was a friend, O man! to thee-to all. JAMES BEATTIE. |