(He

cried Ernest, 'it is you, and you are sent to me; sent, I know, to answer a fearful question. That poor, thin, wasted figure that follows me, could not answer when I asked. But she has sent you to me. You who know what I seek to know, hear me, then!' motioned to Karl to withdraw, and the old man complied by falling back behind the tree.) 'Hear me, I say, Ida Conway; my sister is dead. You know how. She loved you. Something I have heard of a letter left for you, but it was never shown to me; what did she say there? did she speak of coming death? was it the work of fate, or was it the work of her own hand, of her great despair? If you can say it was not so, oh! speak to me! speak, and take from me the doubt that is worse than all besides. Speak! speak! speak!'

Ida looked on him wan and speechless. That was his answer, that awful silence, and too well he knew its meaning. His hand relaxed its hold, and from his stricken soul there rose a cry, piercing the thick air, sounding through the gloom, joining with the speech of the heaped-up thunder clouds. He fell; fell down, measuring his length out by the side of his sister's grave. The old steward, Eugénie, and Ida hurried to him. The storm drew close; its peals no longer rolled dull in the distance, but rattled sharply overhead, and flashes of intense light, at rapid intervals, showed every face its own terror. To all this strife, and to all strife, the young Count was insensible; he breathed, but he was unconscious. Hardly knowing how or what they did, those three others dragged him over the burial-ground into the chapel; and as they laid him out there by the dark altar steps, a vivid stream of light rushed through the chapel, a thunder-stroke, more mighty than all the rest, broke over the roof, and a crash came that brought Eugénie down upon her knees trembling in prayer, while the old steward, drawing Ida close to him in his agony, gasped

out

'Surely such a sound might wake the dead! Hark! The spire is struck!

In such a scene the young Count woke again to life-woke to find Ida leaning over him, whispering words of comfort, supplicating in tender tones; praying him to live. And here in this dim chapel-here on the altar steps, mingling prayers, mingling tears, with holy reconciling thoughts, in the lulling of that great tempest, those hands were linked together, those hearts were reunited; and as the sobbings of the air subsided into quiet, they walked forth together, not as Ida had once dreamed, hastening from the garden over the sunlit plains on to the high mountains in the full gladness of young passionate hearts, but in a solemn stillness, issuing from the house of prayer-pitying, subdued, chastened; with awe, reverence, and sorrow in their hearts, and sweet contrition.

LAST WORDS.

Here was a new event for Badheim; here was a theme for wonder and for talk. Let the reader imagine how fast it flowed and how long it continued. It is my business now to relate as briefly as possible the end of the other personages of my story. This conclusion fell heavily on Captain Warburton, who had persisted in his false hope, and he at last determined on that exchange for a regiment in India which he had so often threatened; but before he went away he made up his mind to shake hands with Count Ernest and wish him well, only he afterwards relieved his feelings in a confidence to his step-mother. He could have given up Ida, he said, almost cheerfully had she chosen Harry Conway; but he could not think well of a German marriage; and a churchyard and a mourning chapel seemed an odd beginning. He expressed the same sentiment in nearly the same words (for his vocabulary was not abundant) in a letter to Harry.

The Valincourts were, like many

other bad people, satisfied in all their desires; their debts were paid, and Sir Archibald must_become their sole property. When he heard of his daughter's final decision he shrugged his shoulders and sneered, but he had no objections to urge. His marriage with Félicie took place at Paris as before intended. His generosities to Auguste had greatly crippled his resources, and therefore for some years he found it necessary to live abroad. Three daughters were borne to him in the course of time, but the wished-for son was never sent to inherit Hollybrook.

Emily Warburton and Kitty Conway lived together, and the little Antonia was still Miss Conway's adopted daughter, for Félicie by no means desired the trouble of her education. They were sometimes abroad, sometimes in England, and frequently visited Wertheimburg. Kitty Conway was of course not the least surprised at the turn events had taken. She often said that as she sat at home at her embroidery with the little Antonia on the day of the great storm, while Ida was away, a wonderful presentiment had seized her. She had then felt a certain assurance of the unlooked-for meeting and reconciliation that had taken place. But the Baron confessed that he was astonished and delighted. Hand in hand with the Doctor, he came to see his adored Miss Ida.

'Ach, Gott! he had not felt such a sensation since ze hounds of all Badheim had been inspected for crazy-no, not since all hounds' day.'

And he had reason to feel deeply, for Ida's home was the resource of his old age, and among the little blossoms of the house of Wertheim he found favourites who reconciled him to the loss of Arno when that poor shivering greyhound gave his last yelp and was dead and buried.

Louisa, the pale teacher of the school at Gernsdorf, became one of Ida's best friends.

The Count and Countess of Hel

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fenstein were for ever welcome at Wertheimburg, and the jealousies and tremors of the past were like dreams gone by. But not like a dream was the lamentation for Dorothea. Her name between Ida and Ernest was cherished as a sacred thing breathed in awe. They shared their dreadful secret, which no other knew; and only the long course of time, the force of prayer, and the submission of a true piety, could soften the sharpness of that pang.

It was after the lapse of ten years from the date of her marriage that Ida received a letter from her cousin Harry, telling how he had been to see a famous fellow, a conjuror from Vienna, known as the great Austrian wizard, who astonished all the London public by his sleight-of-hand; and how he had with wonder recognised in this man Casimir Potolski; though a scar over his brow gave him a singularly unpleasant expression, he still retained something of his former beauty and grace, and he was greatly patronized by fine ladies. Through repeated losses and repeated disgraces the Pole had at last sunk to this, to sink yet lower before his end. Ernest read the letter in silence. He never spoke of that man, nor did Ida, unless when the Baron, in his contrite moods, forced the subject upon her. He generally concluded it with a moral reflection after his

own manner.

'Ach! my so adored Countess Ida. Yes, I shall confess it is all my faults, for I have shut up my too discreet lips, in my cautions and my delicacies, when I should have talked to my young Count quite loud out. Mein Gott! is it not our gracious Heaven's gift, best gift-our gift of speech-to separate us from poor beasts, and make us highest? Du Himmel! but it is so beastly not to speak; and it is safety for us all to know all. Ah! mon Dieu, but I have learned lessons now to help my fellow-creature, and I shall never more be silent. No, never, not once more!'

[August,

THEM

fall or the failure of the American Union is the greatest political event of the day. It is far more important than the rise of a new, or even the revival of an ancient nation. The Italians (for example) can be hoped, at the best, but to be again something of what they were before; they cannot be expected to give new lessons to mankind, by either their prosperity or even their misfortunes; the utmost aspirations entertained for them even in England, where their prospects are contemplated with something like enthusiasm, look no higher than imitation of our own time-honoured institutions. With the Americans, the case has been just the reverse. They had launched upon a career which was very largely new; new in government, in origin, in situation, in general circumstances. Now the issue of an experiment made under such conditions must be fraught with both a novel and valuable instruction, governmental and philosophical, to mankind at large. And that issue is already before us in full completeness, whether carried to a final establishment or not. The Union is now dissolved, morally, socially, and also constitutionally, as we hope to show; and should it be ulteriorly restored by means of force, why, then, such means would really be extraneous to the question, as they might equally, in due quantity, transform Europe into an Union. The case, then, of the Americans is quite complete for moralizing.

And if this case be of such consequence to social science in general, it must be pre-eminently pertinent to this country. From England sprung the people and institutions thus on trial. The American constitution was the English put in writing, and somewhat regularized by a smattering of French philosophy. The people, too, were mainly of that Anglo-Saxon breed, whose gift it is to work these institutions successfully. The great Republic was thus both in its agents and its enginery, in people and in plan, a pioneer to the

English system, sent before us by some happy providence as if to sound the route of progress. Thus the result is to England of a quite peculiar interest; and more especially at a juncture when she seems to be preparing to make a fresh advance in the American direction. As, however, the advance must at all events be made, it becomes indispensable to reconsider the direction; and to this end, to understand the principal causes through which it has conducted to the American catastrophe.

I. To begin with the most general or vague of these causes, we may describe it as consisting in the rapidity of growth and the constancy of prosperity of the American Republic.

The special laws of nature contravened by these phenomena, it may be somewhat difficult to indicate as yet; and hence it is that they are usually discarded as commonplace. But commonplace is rarely without a real foundation; and, in fact, these observations have a sound and a broad one. They plainly rest on both the analogy of general nature, and the historical experience of political communities.

Throughout nature, durability is (other things being equal) in direct proportion to slowness of growth. Among plants, those that blossom, also die within the year; while the palm and aloe trees, that ask a century for their maturity, are prolonged likewise in their existence and decline through several centuries. The fact is equally observed in the animal series; and if the case of man should appear an exception, it still holds strictly with the intellect, the slow growth of which retards and regulates that of the body. Moreover, man is, after all, among the most longæval animals. In fine, it is a common observation of the multitude, that children who grow rapidly are doomed to early death; and the thing is still more true of precocity of intellect, though here it is less noted, because relatively rare. The

rationale of the whole may be popularly this: that duration and decline are an unwinding of growth, and therefore proportional, as an inversion of the same process. Where or when the growth or the formation is rapid, the element of matter overwhelms that of form, and disturbs the vital forces, which fail outright, or remain feeble. And this applies pre-eminently to the social body, which is almost exclusively composed of force and form. In short, such compositions lack the ingredient of time, of which organization is but the slow entreasurement.

The constancy of prosperity and its enervating effects are very much amenable to the same law and analysis. Such a course implies the absence or the deficient exercise of most of the virtues that perpetuate a State or nation-such as caution, prudence, self-control, modesty, self-knowledge, and above all, experience of suffering. Among the most pregnant of the marks of Christianity, was the supreme importance which it attached to humility. But perhaps there has never existed on the earth a community so destitute of all these qualities as the American. They have a certain prudence and selfcontrol, no doubt; but, as is witnessed at this moment by their ultra-Fabian strategy, these attributes are really but cunning and calculation; things of mere head or instinct, and not of heart or temper, which could alone adapt them for a place among the social agencies. There was here, then, no resistance to the impetus of prosperity; and so the tendency of nature, as indicated, took its course, in a manner which will presently be stated more in detail.

In history, as in nature, the same correlation between slowness of growth and durability is traceable. There is no instance on its record of a State or a nation of rapid formation and at the same time long endurance. The converse may indeed not be equally true that those of slow growth must be of long duration; for here there may be supervention of the element of force or

235

accident. But the duration being acquired, it is a proof of the slow formation; as all consequents imply their antecedents, though not reciprocally. Thus, for instance, in the Chinese empire, the known length of its duration presupposes, with its magnitude, as vast a period of growth as might satisfy or support the writer in the Essays and Reviews; and hence it is, that no record remains of that formation. On the other hand, in Egypt, whose secular growth is largely traceable, we find the State and even the nation notwithstanding to fall early; but to fall by extraneous and reiterated violence. Intermediate between these, in career as in locality, may range that line of turbulent and transitory empires-Assyrian, Babylonian, Chaldean, Medic, Persian; which have risen and then vanished with equal celerity, and of which few living traces remained to the age of history-with the exception of the present Persians, who are the native race of Iran. So with the medieval cycle of the like wild creations, by the Tartars, the Saracens, and even the Goths; not a vestige of all their kingdoms and empires remains for ages back; and if the Turks still linger, it is perfectly in keeping, for the empire of the Turks was really formed by degrees.

If we turn to the Romans, how confirmatory still the contrast. Originating in a hamlet, a den of robbers, a Riff of pirates; thence expanding to the conquest of city after city and tribe after tribe of the thousand native populations; attaining by this painful and multiplying process to the confines of the Peninsula but after five hundred years, and then advancing more rapidly to the reduction of the known world, this great empire has accordingly exhibited in its decline a slowness no less secular than that of its formation. Even still it survives in the three great bases of our civilization-the language, the law, and the religion of Rome; and a relic of the very territory, in the 'patrimony of St. Peter.' So its successor, Austriadubbed 'the Holy Roman Empire'

-having grown through several centuries from a duchy on the Danube, presents herself to-day, despite the conflicts of several races, and the oppressions of misgovernment, as baffling all predictions, because the prophets of her fall leave out of reckoning this work of time. To what does France owe her present unexampled power and influence, and the complete reversal of that national decrepitude which she, too, was wont some dozen years ago to be doomed to? Among other things, no doubt, to the unity of her race, and the pre-eminent organization which is its special faculty. But aside from all particulars, there was a single circumstance, a plain fact of history, that showed the folly of such hopes or fears. It is that France, in her reconstruction since the ninth or tenth century, and from the river islet of the duchy of Hugh Capet to the latest accessions under Louis XV., exhibits a formation, gradual, tesselated, even moral-that is to say, produced less by the sword than the pen -a social crystallization, unrivalled elsewhere upon the globe. But such a structure was not one to go to ruin either soon or suddenly, by even foreign violence, and still less by decay. And the re-union of long rent Italy will prove the converse of the principle. What is it that makes our English reforms so prudently gradual and so thriftily homoeopathic? or that permits a people, while continuing, themselves, quite up to the middle in the rubbish of the dark ages, to disregard the heap and lecture Europe upon progress? It is mainly that this heap, as being a secular growth, has locally lost the greater part of its innate noxiousness, and come to serve as a sort of ballast that gives steadiness to the new spirit, and without which the latter would be apt to suffer shipwreck.

2. This in fact, accordingly, is the next of the causes to which we trace the fall of the American Republic. The liberative spirit of our English institutions, detached from this its ballast, deradicated from its soil, and transported to a new

world, was the special origin of the Americans. But the spirit of liberty is not a spirit of foundation, but labours on the contrary to destroy all foundation; it requires, like all forces, to give it efficacy, some resistance; and the state of the Americans was absolutely without any. Nor can we assent to the dictum of De Tocqueville, that the Puritan religion supplied this social basis. The religion, like all the rest, and more than all the rest, was in this case a religion of liberation, of negation; was indeed the very 'liberty' that tore these people from the mother country. The anti-social spirit accordingly appeared in the memorable persecutions within even their petty colonies. Nor has it ceased to grow with the growth of the country, although reduced to modes of demonstration less obnoxious. It has shivered its own followers into a thousand sects, with each its distinct churches, and converts, and collections; in short, everything to isolate, except a serious doctrine. But how should that which cannot hold its own parts together, be to other things a basis or a cement of union? Accordingly, it is notorious that the clergy of America have been the fiercest instigators to the present rupture. Instead of standing aloof in the attitude of mediators, and reserving to society a refuge against faction, very many of them have acted as the firebrands of the factions; and not content with the already infinite sects, have of late been subdividing the same sects into churches, stigmatized as North and South, white and black, free and slaveholding. Could anything more fully evince that the religion has been here a mere tool of factious interests, not their controller? No; religion to be social must be more or less despotic. Romanism may be made to found a civil society, as for instance in the organizing Jesuits of Paraguay; or to retard its fall, as in distracted Mexico. But Protestantism is a religion of freedom; its privilege and pride is to break down such despotism; and if you would distort it to found or to