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so fired him with brave thoughts that he | I read that a contemporary of Handel said, wrote "The Bard" while the music was "If a lutenist lives to eighty he must have fresh in his soul. Woe is me! who can been sixty years tuning; and another, play this harp nowadays? This one looks writing to lutenists, gave them this warnbursting with music. I would give a few ing, "You shall do well ever when you lay pounds to hear 'Sweet Richard' played on it by to put it into a bed that is constantly it." But I ransacked Wales five years ago, used." So mankind rose against these and not one public harper did I find could invalid instruments and put them to bed play the triple harp. Yet their greatest once for all. airs were all composed for it, and are half lost without it.

Then there are Italian spinets, one of which ought to interest the ladies; for it has nineteen hundred and twenty eight precious stones outside it, and very little music inside. There is Handel's harpsichord. He had more harpsichords than Cromwell skulls. But this time there really is a tidy pedigree made out. There are two much finer double harpsichords with stops and swell, one of them made by Joseph Kirkman and lent by his descendants. I heard this harpsichord played by Mr. Sullivan and the learned Mr. Engel; and it is a great and beautiful instrument full of sweetness and tenderness, yet not deficient in grandeur: and sings to the heart. It ought never to have been allowed to die. There was room in the world for the pianoforte and the harpsichord too; each can do things the other cannot.

It seems at first sight strange and sad that so many stringed instruments should have been invented in modern Europe, and framed with so much skill and taste, only to die away, when so poor a thing as the guitar survives. They were not killed, as some people fancy, by our four-stringed instruments, for they ran parallel with these for centuries. Some of them no doubt deserved to die; the mandolins, and little citterns, for not making noise enough in such a world as this, and the lute and viola di Bardone for being always out of tune.

But I hope that true lovers of music, both male and female, will inspect the harpsichord, the viola d'amore, and the viola da gamba with candid eyes, and give them a trial. Put these two last at their lowest, they must be superior to the guitar, since they have more tone, and arpeggios can be played on them with the hand and suddenly the chords swept with the bow -a rare musical effect for any single instrument to produce. The larger viola of the two could also be fitted with the sympathetic wire strings; the finger-boards of both could be fretted, and I apprehend the bridge of each could be arched a little. Ladies could play the viola d'amore gracefully. Indeed, a Mrs. Ottey played the viola da gamba publicly in 1720, and a Miss Ford in 1761; teste viro doctissimo Carolo Engel. Meyerbeer thought well of the viola d'amore, for he wrote a part for it in "Les Iluguenots." The late Prince Consort had music of the sixteenth century performed on various ancient instruments such as are now on show. On that occation a viola da gamba - that figures in this very exhibition - was played by Mr. Hatton who, I hope, is alive to play it again and was much admired. The deceased Prince had many ideas before his age, and I think your readers will appreciate what he did for music in 1845, when in 1872 they have examined this noble collection with the attention it deserves.

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CHARLES READE.

THE FIREWEED. The epilobium, or fireweed, to separate them from the fibre. The plants a species of cotton plant, springs up spontane- grow close together on poor or rich soil, and in ously on evergreen lands that have been burnt any climate from forty degrees north to the Arcover. Hundreds of acres of this plant are to tic Circle. Its southern limit of growth is the be seen in the north woods of New York. It is northern limit of cotton, and is very similar to perennial, grows to the height of four to six cotton. Mr. Miller, of Utica, made candle and feet, the stem being one fourth of an inch in lamp wicks of it, and ropes that proved as diameter, and, some two feet from the top, put-strong as cotton ropes of the same size. Carded ting out a dozen to twenty branches, each bearing from fifteen to twenty pods, that, in August, open and display a white fibre like that in the boll of the cotton plant. The seeds are very small and numerous, but do not require ginning

and spun, it made excellent yarn, from which a stocking was knit. Its fibre makes the finest of paper, being almost equal to silk for this purpose. Public Opinion.

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PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

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FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers. the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY.

WALTER SCOTT AND BURNS.

I Do not think the following verses have ever been published; they were given to me many years ago by a son of Sir Walter Scott's valued friend, Mr. Robert Shortrede, of Jedburgh, with the following account of the circumstances under which they were written :

Mr. Shortrede went one day into his sittingroom, where Sir Walter was waiting for him, and found Sir Walter with a volume of Burns in his hand, reading the letter which contained the famous lines of Bruce's address to his men

Of happy curlews wheeling in the sky,
As seabirds meet the foam
Above their tossing home:
How sweet, in musing mood, to feel entwine
A trusting hand confidingly in mine;

After its reverie,

Aiding, to watch the glee

Of one known face whereon do mostly shine
Smiles that surpass the sunshine on the sea:
Nay more, and better still, to feel the glow
Of this vast globe; (as giants' pulses flow,
Steady and full and deep,
Though soundly laid to sleep;)

God:

Beyond all words to feel
God's purposes all weal,

before Bannockburn. As he closed the volume, Sure, though remote; straight from the life of Sir Walter said: "I always thought that the opening of those beautiful lines, as you read them by themselves, was too abrupt, and that if Burns had not sent them in a letter to a friend, he would have introduced them with some sort of description of the scene, or of the circumstances under which they were spoken."

Mr. Shortrede at first questioned the soundness of this criticism, but after some discussion, asked what kind of introduction his friend would have? Sir Walter rejoined, "Why, something of this kind," and taking a pencil, wrote on the fly-leaf of the volume of Burns the following lines:

"By Bannockburn proud Edward lay;
The Scots they were na far away,
Just waiting for the break o' day,

To show them which were best.
The sun rose o'er the purple heath,
And lighted up the field of death;
When Bruce wi' soul-inspiring breath
His soldiers thus addrest :-

666 Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,' &c."
H. BARTLE G. FRERE.

Macmillan's Magazine.

His love, like sunlight pure, surrounding all.
Dublin University Mag.

H. P.

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ULFWA'S PLAYING.

SHE struck her golden harp - the sound
Through the woods and hills was ringing,
And the wild beasts springing all around
Listen'd, and stopp'd their springing.
She struck the golden harp again;

So sweet were the sounds it utter'd;
But when the grey falcon heard the strain,
On the branch his wings he flutter'd.
Her third stroke on the golden harp

Was sweeter still, and stronger,
And in the lake the swimming carp,
Entranced, could swim no longer.
The field broke into fragrant flower

When the gold harp play'd the Rune-
Th' enchanting notes the knight o'erpower:
He spurs his steed is gone!

Tr. Sir John Bowring.

Norse Ballad.

From The Contemporary Review.

THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY:

warrant the belief.* Materialism, resolving thought into a movement of matter, can only regard death as the destruction

AN ESSAY IN THE COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF RE- of the individual, and prefer everlasting

LIGIOUS THOUGHT.

PART I.

i. INTRODUCTORY.

annihilation to everlasting life.† Positivism, allowing spirit no place in its system, denies immortality to man, but confers it on humanity. Pantheism can grant no immortality to the individual, but prom

THE immortality of the soul, though a primary, can hardly be considered a primi-ises to him either, as a mode of the divine tive religious belief. It involves concep- thought or essence, eternity,§ or an imtions at once too abstract and positive to mortality which is realized by becoming be intelligible to primitive man, and what in the midst of the finite one with the inhe cannot conceive he cannot believe. finite and being in every moment eternal,|| or a return from relative to absolute being through the knowledge that identifies subject and object. Theism in all its forms, can as little dispense with the immortality of man as with the personality of God. Both are as necessary to pure Deism as to orthodox Christianity indeed, the articles in the creed of the older English Deism, by which it stood, with which it fell, when, in its exhausted old age, it had to confront at home the scepticism of Hume, abroad the full-grown sensualism of France and the highborn Transcendentalism of Germany.**

The belief in a life after death has, indeed, been coeval, or nearly so, with religion, but this differs from the belief in immortality as a Natural or Physical Polytheism differs from a Spiritual or Monotheistic faith. The belief grows up to satisfy a slowly evolved but deeply seated need of man, and marks a development in his religion almost equal to a revolution, or the creation of a new faith. The human mind then passes out of the mythical or creative into the metaphysical or deductive stage, and religion ceases to be a simple worship expressive of a people's instincts and impulses, and becomes a faith, shaping its institutions and manners, laws and literature, thoughts and hopes.

A religion never assumes or exercises its full authority, never awakens or satisfies the highest hopes of man, until it can command obedience here, and reward it with everlasting happiness hereafter. And this neither implies nor rests on any religious Utilitarianism, in Leigh Hunt's phrase, other-worldliness, but on the simple fact that the immortal nature of man demands a religion which can evoke and satisfy his aspirations after immortality.

were,

• Philosophical Works, vol. iv. pp. 547, ff. (Ed. 1854).

there was an older and less consistent materialism ↑ Buchner, Kraft and Stoff, p. 212. Of course represented by Dr. Priestley, which tried to maintain itself alongside a belief in a future state of repositions were too untenable to please these thorwards and punishments. But it is now effete; its ough-going days.

Mill's Comte and Positivism, pp. 135, 152.

Van der Linde, Spinoza, Seine Lehre u. deren erste § Spinoza, Ethices, Part V., Prop. xxiii. See also Nachwirkung in Holland, pp. 50 and 75.

Schleiermacher, Reden uber Religion, Werke i. gion, pp. 71, ff. p. 264, (ed. 1843). Schelling, Philosophie u. Reli

¶ Caro, l'Idee de Dieu, pp. 370, ff. Hegel express

himself very rarely and cautiously concerning

cisively, when charged by Schubart with denying the immortality of the soul, though he said very deit, that in his philosophy the spirit was raised above struction, and death (Erdmann, Gesch. der Philos., all the categories which comprehended decay, deii. p. 650). The negative principles which lay in the Hegelian philosophy were held long in the background, but appeared distinctly enough in Richter's Lehre von den Letzen Dingen (1833), and his Neue Unsterblichkeitslehre (1833). Feuerbach's immortality of historical remembrance and Schopenhauer's Nihilism were, so far as our belief is concerned. coarser and more positive in their negations.

It is not the design of this essay to dis-ed cuss the question of Immortality either with or against our Modern Philosophies. Such a discussion would be in a great measure superfluous. Determine the fundamental conception or principle of any philosophy, and its relation to the belief in question is ascertained. But the discussion of a secondary or inferential position is useless, while the primary is untouched. Scepticism can simply, with Hume, deny that there are any grounds to

** Erdmann remarks (Gesch. der Philos., i. p. 650), with special reference to Fichte, in the first pe

Philosophy did not create the belief in so with the means of comparing their ear

lier and simpler, with their later and more complex, elements, and this comparison may help us to discover the principle of their growth, or the reason of their specific development. Then the several faiths can be compared with each other, and what is accidental and what essential in each, may thus be determined. Ethnographers, too,

immortality, and acknowledges or denies its validity, just as it is or is not involved in its own fundamental principles. Speculative thought has said all that it can say against the belief, and it still lives; has said, too, all that it can say for it, and it has not died. The old arguments, metaphysical, ethical, teleological, have been exhausted, advanced, answered, confirmed like the late Dr. Theodor Waitz, Mr. repelled in almost every possible form, and now thought must turn from the high road of abstract speculation, and study human belief as expressed in human religion. Religion, or rather its philosophic theology, may now become a science as purely inductive as any of the physical sciences. The now possible analysis of the faiths of the world, if accompanied by a searching analysis of the faculties of the mind, will hand over to thought our primary and necessary religious ideas, which, as ultimate religious truths, constitute in their synthesis the foundation of the universal and idea! religion of man.

Tylor, and Sir John Lubbock,* have collected an immense mass of information as to the beliefs of savage and primitive peoples. But each of these authors is so absorbed in the search after superficial resemblances as often to miss fundamental differences, and the very comprehensiveness which they aim at, forces them to overlook the course of genetic development in the cultured religions. Now, it may perhaps throw some light upon the growth of religious thought in general, the formation of the cultured religions in particular, and the progress of a people in civilization, if we can trace, though but in outline, the origin and evolution of the belief in immortality among two kindred but very different peoples, the Hindus and the Greeks. On this point their religions, while starting from a common goal, reach the point of sharpest contrast, and so can be most

On this ground, not as a dogma of religion, or a doctrine of philosophy, but as a specifically human property involved in the very nature of man, evolved in the evolution of that nature, the belief in immortality needs to be discussed. How does it arise and why? What is its ear- instructively studied. liest form? What the law or principle of its evolution? What are the final forms it assumes? Why one rather than another? The materials for this discussion are,

ii. THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE

BELIEF.

Perhaps it may be necessary to glance

in one respect, ample enough. Schol- here at the origin of the Belief. Death as ars have supplied us with exhaustive and accurate expositions of the several cultured religions, ancient and modern, and

riod of his philosophic thought, that the immortal

annihilation is a notion as little intelligible to a primitive or undeveloped mind as immortality. A child cannot understand death as loss of being, cannot imagine the dead as otherwise than still alive.

It

thinks of them as existing somewhere, as doing something; and neither the lifeless

The views of these ethnographers on our present subject will be found, Anthropologie der NaturVolker, i. 325, ii. 191 ff.; 411 ff., and very frequently; Primitive Culture, chapp. xii. xiii.; Origin of Civilization, 138 ff.

ity of man was for the eighteenth century the dogma par excellence. It was so because philosophy was then pre-eminently Theistic. From the rise of English Deism in Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to Rousseau in France, and Kant and Lessing in Ger many, theistic thinkers as a rule held the immortality of man to be as necessary to a religion as the being of God. Kant reverses the argument of Warburton, and maintains the Legation of Moses to be un-divine, because without the doctrine of immortality (Relig innerh. d. Grenzen d. blos. Vernunft, Werke, vi., 301, Hartenstein's Ed.) For Lessing's views, see Die Erzieh. d, Menschengesch §§ 22, ffly cannot apply to the Hindus. The men of the See also Wolfenbut. Frag. Viertes.

† Mr. Tylor admits that the early Aryans did not believe in transmigration (Prim. Cult., ii. 8), and his theory of the origin of the belief (pp. 14, 15) certain

Vedic age had been long out of that savage stage of

Dr. Theodor Waitz, Anthropologie der Natur- thought to which alone Mr. Tylor's theory is applicVolker, i. 325. able.

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