soul with a strangely solemn effect. One could not hear it coming from the lips of these children, without thinking that even they, young as they were, had been taught how fleeting was everything around them, and that in life there were no cheerful lessons for them to learn, nor cheerful tasks to perform, but all must consist in a sad and earnest preparation for what is to be beyond life. I could catch but few of the words, so rapidly were the verses repeated, and in such strange accents. But the burden of every verse seemed

to be

"Riches have wings, Riches have wings."

One would be led to suppose that, from the meaning of the word "Shaker," and the fact that it arose from peculiarities of religious worship, there must be something in their devotional exercises both interesting and ridiculous. That it is interesting every one will admit, but that it is ridiculous few would say, who had viewed it in a charitable spirit. In their worship, they only carry out the old Bible injunction of "Worship God in the song and the dance"; and I can conceive here, among a comparatively simple people, singing and dancing would be more adequate to meet a religious want than preaching and praying. We can all of us sing and dance on an emergency, and thus feel a personal interest in worship, but there are few so gifted as to preach; and the many whose only part is to listen are quite apt to get weary. There is a large, quadrangularshaped building at Lebanon, covering at least a half-acre of ground, which serves the purpose of a church. It contains but one apartment, and affords ample room for eight hundred or a thousand worshippers to perform their evolutions, and leave a space for spectators, whose numbers are generally quite large. At a given hour of a Sabbath morning, the men and women leave their respective abodes, and, marching in double file, sometimes singing and dancing on the way, proceed to the church. This they enter at different doors, and without any ado begin their work at once. The women, clad in white linen garments, and covered with a cap of the same material, which gives to the countenance an unnatural pallor, look more like animated ghosts than human beings. Arranging themselves in parallel rows, ten, twelve, or twenty deep as the case may be, the men on one side of the house and the women on the other,

they face the The singing

choir, and, as the singing begins, strike up the dance. resembled that in the school, like a dirge or a chant one moment,

on the next a sort of wild shouting, without the least pretension to VOL. VIII. NO. 68.

10

melody. The parallel ranks advance and retreat, now clapping the hands as the music alternates, now stamping the feet and whirling suddenly from right to left or from left to right. After a half-hour's course like this, benches are brought into the room, and the congregation seat themselves, men and women facing each other. If the preacher has anything to say, he stands up between the sexes and says it. He had a great deal to say the morning I heard him, for he, like all other preachers, was a little vainglorious and dogmatic, and a faith, no matter how pure and simple, is ruined if dogmatists get hold of it.

When he finishes his sermon, or talk, the benches are noiselessly removed, and the congregation begin singing and dancing again. This time the singers stand in the middle of the room, and the men and women seem to be performing drill around them, going through with evolution after evolution with most perfect regularity, and as though all moved with one impulse. The movement is between a hop and an ordinary step, and so executed as to keep time to the music. The hands are held out in front of the person, and beat the air up and down in unison with the movements of the feet. Every Shaker, whether he enters the ring or not, keeps up this incessant sweeping of the hands, and the effect produced on a stranger is certainly striking. I noticed that even in the school-room, as soon as the children began singing, the teacher began rocking. So I suppose that, as among other denominations it is customary to bow the head during prayer, here it is expected of every believer by one of these outward signs to recognize the sacred character of the song. Such a worship as this, when conducted by a thousand or more strangely clad enthusiasts, their serious faces lit up by an almost unearthly expression, seems to me far from ridiculous.

Shakerism has its defects, I presume, like all other human or divine institutions here on earth. There have been hard stories told of persecution and tyranny among them, and many of these perhaps are true. Some leave the society, and never wish to return to it again; but more enter it who are willing to stay and die there.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

WHILE England's chief poetess is so lately dead, it may be well to throw a glance back over her life, as far as we can see it, and turn a page or two of the books we have gathered so much pleasure from.

Mrs. Browning was born in London, in the year 1809. Concerning her early life, we know little else than what we gather from her writings, and this is meagre indeed. It would seem not improbable, however, that the father of Aurora Leigh is the antitype, in more points than one, of the father of Elizabeth Barrett, and that Aurora Leigh's education is a ghost of Miss Barrett's. We know that she pored over Latin and Greek before losing the child's lisp. In one of her shorter poems, we read:

:

"Nine years old! The first of any,

Seem the happiest years that come.
Yet when I was nine, I said

No such word! - I thought instead
That the Greeks had used as many

In besieging Ilium."

We can imagine her a strange, lonely, quiet girl, shrinking from London streets and the noisy sports of her companions, to a quiet room, with the books from which most children so instinctively fly. There are some who unfold the manly or womanly-oftener the womanly nature within them before the little body has well reached even boy's or girl's stature. These gaze down into us, and thrill us with their large, deep eyes, while their grave, childish prattle is so inwoven with precocious wisdom or poetry, that we shudder, and fear an early death for them. Such we believe Mrs. Browning to have been. At ten she wrote prose and verse, and at fifteen she earned a reputation as a talented girl among the circle of her acquaintance. Of her early attempts at composition, she says, in dedicating the first collection of her poems to her father:

"When your eyes fall upon this page of dedication, and you start to see to whom it is inscribed, your first thought will be of the time far off when I was a child and wrote verses, and when I dedicated them to you, who were my public and my critic."

It would be pleasant to have some detailed record, at her own hand, of her childhood, and the dawning of her genius; but she has left nothing more definite than these lines:

"And I think of those long mornings
Which my heart goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio's turnings,

Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.
Past the pane the mountain spreading,
Swept the sheep-bell's tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading

Somewhat low for a's and ous."

Thus trained, she grew through girlhood. When only seventeen years of age, she published her first book, entitled "An Essay on Mind, and other Poems." It was a strange thing that so youthful a maiden should attempt so old a subject. We can conceive that the Essay was somewhat crude; and the authoress held the same opinion, for she long since withdrew it from circulation.

"I wrote false poems, and thought them true Because myself was true in writing them,”

says Aurora Leigh, and, through her, Mrs. Browning.

In 1833, being now twenty-four, she published a translation of the "Prometheus Bound" of Eschylus. This work her more mature judgment has condemned as "an early failure"; and the translation at present standing among her poems is entirely remodelled. In 1838 came "The Seraphim," &c., including "Isabel's Child," "My Doves," and the beautiful poem entitled "The Sleep."

Miss Barrett had never been robust; but about this time she ruptured a blood-vessel in the lungs, and fell dangerously sick. By order of her physician, she was removed, at the commencement of winter, to Torquay, in Devonshire, but only to receive a more severe shock in mind than she had felt in body. Her brother had taken charge of her removal, and stayed to watch over her, and bear her company. A year passed thus, in a house at the sea-side, beneath the cliffs. Miss Barrett's health had been much bettered by the invigorating breezes of the ocean. One morning in summer, her brother, with two companions, embarked in a pleasure-boat, for a few hours' sail. No danger was feared, as they were all practised boatmen; but before they had crossed the bar, the boat sank within plain sight of their own windows, and their bodies were never found. "This tragedy," says Miss Mitford, "nearly killed Elizabeth Bar

rett.

She was utterly prostrated by the horror and the grief, and by a natural, but a most unjust feeling, that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery. It was not until the following year that

she could be removed, in an invalid carriage, and by journeys of twenty miles a day, to her afflicted family and her London home." She sank back into illness, and for long years remained an apparently hopeless invalid, bedridden, or nearly so, in a darkened chamber, seeing no one but such friends as were nearest her, with no other amusement than such as her favorite languages and her taste for poetic composition afforded. Even these enjoyments were at one time denied her by a too anxious physician, and she was obliged to have a Greek author bound like a novel, before she could read him in peace.

Of these "sweet, sad years," these "melancholy years," she writes, in one of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese":

"I lived with visions for my company,
Instead of men and women, years ago,

And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.

But soon their trailing purple was not free

Of this world's dust, - their lutes did silent grow,

And I myself grew faint and blind below

Their vanishing eyes."

She languished. Her friends despaired of ever seeing her in health, or, indeed, of keeping her long with them. The woman's nature, turned inward too long, was burning up the feeble body; when a new experience came, to make the invalid a strong womanly woman, and to give the world, instead of a learned priestess of Apollo, who could have had but cold fame at the best, a poetess of motherhood and wifehood, of love in its most perfect form, to thrill the heart of humanity with some living fire.

Her sickness had not been idle. The study of the Greek writers, Pagan and Christian, had been continued and perfected, and she had contributed to the London Athenæum a series of articles on the Greek Christian Poets. In 1844 was issued the first collected edition of her works. In it was included "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," said by Miss Mitford to have been written in the short space of twelve hours, merely to fill out the second volume to uniform size with the first. In this poem she thus praises Robert Browning:

"Or at times some modern volumes, - Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt's ballad verse, or Tennyson's enchanted reverie,

Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity,"