any check in the trade brings immediate suffering. The people, nevertheless, are very patient; they invariably prefer work to mendicancy, and are cheerful and contented so long as they succeed in clothing and feeding themselves. The Minorcans seemed to me even more independent and original in character than the Majorcans. There is still less of the Spaniard, but also less of the Moor, about them. I should guess their blood to be mostly Vandal, but I stand ready to be corrected by any ethnologist who knows better. They have a rugged, sturdy air, little grace and elegance, either of body or of manner, and a simplicity which does not exclude shrewdness or cunning. It is considered almost an insult if the stranger speaks of them as Spaniards. The Governor of the island said to Marshal Serrano, the other day, when the latter was in Port Mahon in temporary exile: "The Minorcans are a curious people. You probably find that they do not take off their hats to you in the street, as you are accustomed to be saluted in Madrid?" "Yes," answered the Marshal, "I have already learned that they care nothing whatever for either you or me." The older people look back on the English occupation with regret; the younger generation would be exceedingly well satisfied if Spain would sell the island to the United States for a naval station. But all unite in calling themselves Minorcans, or Mahonese, and in drawing a very broad line between themselves and the Spaniards of the Peninsula. The Consul confirmed my first impressions of the honesty of the people. "You may walk on any road in the island," said he, "at any hour of the day or night, with the most perfect security." He also gave them the highest praise for cleanliness and order in their domestic life, which are certainly not Spanish qualities. The young men and women who are betrothed save every penny of their earnings, and invest them in the articles of furniture necessary to the establishment of a household. Simple as are these latter, many years often elapse before they are all procured and the nuptials may be celebrated, the parties remaining steadfastly constant to each other during the long time of waiting. They are a people in whom almost any honest system of education, any possible sound ideas of progress, would take immediate root; but under the combined shadow of Spain and Rome what progress is possible? I have never seen Broek, in Holland, but I think San Luis must be the cleanest village in Europe. I attributed its amazing brightness, as we approached, to the keen semi-African sun and the perfectly clear air; but I found that all the houses had been whitewashed that very afternoon, as they regularly are every Saturday. The street was swept so conscientiously that we might have seated ourselves and taken our dinner anywhere, without getting more than each man's inevitable proportion of dust in the dishes. In the open doors, as I passed, I saw floors of shining tiles, clean wooden furniture, women in threadbare but decent dresses, and children-no, the children were dirty, and I confess I should not have been pleased to see them otherwise. The sand and fig-stains on those little faces and hands were only health-marks, and they made the brightness of the little village endurable. It would else have seemed to be struck with an unusual disease. We went into a house where two old women - very, very poor they were, but uncomplaining - received us with simple, unaffected friendliness. I spoke in Spanish and they in Minorcan, so that the conversation was not very intelligible; but the visit gave me a fleeting impression of the sterling qualities of the people, inasmuch as it harmonized with all that I had previously seen and heard. The Consul conducted me to a little casino, where refreshments, limited in character, were to be procured. The maestro, a stout fellow, with the air of a Bowery butcher, opened his heart on learning that we were Americans. He had served a year on board one of our men-of-war, and repeated, over and over again, "The way things were managed there satisfied me, it corresponded with my own ideas!" He made me read, around a spiral pillar, the words, "Casino del Progreso," saying, "That's what I go for!" There was a church nearly opposite, and from its architecture a man with half an eye could see that the Jesuits had had a hand in building it. This I sketched, and the progressive host, leaning over my shoulder, interpreted the drawing correctly. His extravagant admiration made me feel that I had done well, and we parted mutually satisfied. Indeed, this little village interested me even more than Port Mahon, because it was more purely Minorcan in char acter. The quantities of the fig-bearing cactus about the country-houses surprised me, until I learned that the fleshy leaves are used during the dry season as food for the mules and asses. The fruit, which is said to be remarkably fine on the island, is eaten by the inhabitants, and must form, in times of want, an important article of their food; yet so much space would not be given to the plant, or rather tree, if the animals had not been taught to subsist upon it. I have never before heard, in any part of the world, of the cactus being utilized in this way. Its huge, grotesque masses are an inseparable part of every landscape on the island. We walked back to Port Mahon in the face of a north-wind which was almost cold, which blew away the rich color from the sunset sky, leaving it pale, clear, and melancholy in tone; yet thunder and violent rain followed in the night. I spent my last evening with the Consul and his agreeable family, and embarked on the steamer for Barcelona in the morning. As we passed out of the harbor, Antonio's daughter waved her handkerchief from the window high above, on the cliff. The salute was not intended for me, but for her husband, who was bound for Madrid, carrying with him the cheese for Marshal Serrano. Rocked on a rough sea, and with a keen wind blowing, we again coasted along the southern shore of Minorca, crossed the strait, touched at Alcudia, and then, passing the mouth of the Bay of Pollenza, reached the northern headland of Majorca at sunset. Here the mountain-chain falls off in perpendicular walls a thousand feet in height, the bases of which are worn into caverns and immense echoing vaults. The coast-forms are as grand and wonderful as those of Norway. Point after point, each more abrupt and distorted than the last, came into view as we cleared the headland, - all growing luminous in the mist and the orange light of the setting sun. Then the light faded; the wild mountain-forms were fused together in a cold gray mass above the sea; the stars came out, and my last Balearic day was at an end. WE ASPECTS OF CULTURE.* E meet to-day under happy omens to our ancient society, to the commonwealth of letters, to the country, and to mankind. No good citizen but shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal Union. The heart still beats with the public pulse of joy, that the country has withstood the rude trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with the vast augmentation of strength which it draws from this proof. The storm which has been resisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength to the ship. We may be well contented with our fair inheritance. Was ever such coincidence of advantages in time and place as in America to-day?the fusion of races and religions; the hungry cry which goes up from the wide continent for men; the answering facility of immigration, permitting every wanderer to choose his climate and government. Men come hither by nations. Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to fly with them over the sea, and to send their messages under it. They come from crowded, antiquated kingdoms to the easy sharing of our simple forms. Land without price is offered to the settler, cheap education to his children. The temper of our people delights in this whirl of life. Who would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope? Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor." All this activity has added to the value of life, and to the scope of the intellect. I will not say that American institutions have given a new enlargement to our idea of a finished man, but they have added important features to the sketch. Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted. • Address read before the Phi Beta Kappa The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. Now that, by the increased humanity of law, she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power. The war gave us the abolition of slavery, the success of the Sanitary Commission and of the Freedmen's Bureau. Add to these the new scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of imprisonment for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of intemperance; the search for just rules affecting labor; the co-operative societies; the insurance of life and limb; the free-trade league; the improved almshouses; the enlarged scale of charities to relieve local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering Greeks; the incipient series of international congresses,-all, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary,- teaching nations the taking of government into their own hands, and superseding kings. The spirit is new. A silent revolution has impelled, step by step, all this activity. A great many full-blown conceits have burst. The coxcomb goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has found that this country and this age belong to the most liberal persuasion; that the day of ruling by scorn and sneers is past; that good sense is now in power, and that resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, and, better yet, on convictions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are now to be astonished by seeing acts of good-nature, common civility, and Christian charity proposed by statesmen, and executed by justices of the peace, by policemen and the constable. The fop is unable to cut the patriot in the street; nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the club. Society of Harvard University, July, 1867. Mark, too, the large resources of a the polarization of light have carried statesman, of a socialist, of a scholar, us to sublime generalizations, have affected an imaginative race like poetic inspirations. We have been taught to tread familiarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont ourselves to daring conjectures. The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory, and a new and healthful air regenerates the human mind, and imparts a sympathetic enlargement to its own inventions and method. in this age. Take as a type the boundless freedom here in Massachusetts. People have in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are commonplaces at all our breakfasttables. Every one who was in Italy twenty-five years ago will remember the caution with which his host or guest, in any house there, looked around him, if a political topic were broached. Here the tongue is free, and the hand; and the freedom of action goes to the brink, if not over the brink, of license. A controlling influence of the times has been the wide and successful study of Natural Science. Steffens said, "The religious opinions of men rest on their views of nature." Great strides have been made within the present century. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded grand results. The correlation of forces and That cosmical west wind which, meteorologists tell us, constitutes, by the revolution of the globe, the upper current, is alone broad enough to carry to every city and suburb - to the farmer's house, the miner's shanty, and the fisher's boat - the inspirations of this new hope of mankind. Now, if any one say we have had enough of these boastful recitals, then I say, Happy is the land wherein benefits like these have grown trite and commonplace. We confess that in America everything looks new and recent. Our towns are still rude, -the make-shifts of emigrants, and the whole architecture tent-like, when compared with the monumental solidity of mediæval and primeval remains in Europe and Asia. But geology has effaced these distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom speed over entire history. The oldest empires, what we called venerable antiquity, now that we have true measures of duration, show like creations of yesterday; and our millenniums, and stones, and bones of Copts and Kelts, are the first experimental pullulations and transitional meliorations of the chimpanzee. 'Tis yet quite too early to draw sound conclusions. The old six thousand years of chronology become a kitchen clock, -no more a measure of time than an hour-glass or an egg-glass, since the duration of geologic periods has come into view. Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added; and the rocks of Nahant or the dikes of the White Hills disclose that the world is a crystal, and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old but the mind. But I find not only this equality between new and old countries, as seen by the eye of science, but also a certain equivalence of the ages of history; and as the infant child is in his playthings working incessantly at studies of natural philosophy, working as hard and as successfully as Newton, - so it were ignorance not to see that each nation and period has done its full part to make up the result of existing civility. We are all agreed that we have not on the instant better men to show than Plutarch's heroes. The world is always equal to itself. We cannot yet afford to drop Homer, nor Æschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after the breaking up of the Roman Empire, had its romantic era, and the productions of that era in each rose to about the same height. Take for an example in literature the Romance of Arthur, in Britain, or in the opposite province of Brittany; the Chansons de Roland, in France; the Chronicle of the Cid, in Spain; the Nibelungen Lied, in Germany; the Norse Sagas, in Scandinavia; and, I may add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast. But if these works still survive and multiply, what shall we say of names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their coevals, — names of men who have left remains that certify a height of genius in their several directions not since surpassed, and which men in proportion to their wisdom still cherish, as Zoroaster, Confucius, and the grand scriptures, only recently known to Western nations, of the Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the Mahabarat and the Ramayana ? In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares to call them so now? They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the eyes with which we see. 'Tis one of our triumphs to have reinstated them. Their Dante and Alfred and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon; their Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner's compass, gunpowder, glass, paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic architecture, their painting,- are the delight and tuition of ours. Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, and the necessity of reform in the calendar; - looking over how many horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, announced that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer; carriages, to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals; and machines to fly into the air like birds. Even the races that we still call savage, or semi-savage, and which preserve their arts from immemorial traditions, vindicate their faculty by the skill with which they make their yam-cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs. The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance to the yacht America. As we find thus a certain equivalence in the ages, there is also an equipollence of individual genius to the nation which it represents. It is a curious fact, that a certain enormity of culture makes a man invisible to his contemporaries. 'T is always hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders of nations, the wise men and inventors, who shine afterwards as their gods, were probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and artists of the world, - 't is doubtful who they were, they are lifted so fast into mythology, - Homer, - But, |