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posed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. expenses of the empress, of his household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums. His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he directed, he owed to the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king only as far as the Revolution or the interests of the industrious masses found an organ and a leader in him.

In the social interests he knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. The principal works that have survived him are his magnificent roads. He filled his troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his court never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed under his eye that which no others could do. The best document of his relation to his troops is the order of the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops that he will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to their leader.

GOOD BY, PROUD WORLD!

GOOD BY, proud world! I'm going home;
Thou art not my friend; I am not thine :
Too long through weary crowds I roam,
A river ark on the ocean brine,

Too long I am tossed like the driven foam;
But now, proud world, I'm going home.

Good by to Flattery's fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace:
To upstart Wealth's averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;
To crowded halls, to court and street,

To frozen hearts, and hasting feet,
To those who go, and those who come,
Good by, proud world, I'm going home.

I go to seek my own hearth-stone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone;
A secret lodge in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned,
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,

And evil men have never trod

A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I mock at the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools, and the learned clan;
For what are they all in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

THE SEA.

BEHOLD the Sea,

The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July :
Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
Purger of earth, and medicine of men ;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Rich are the sea-gods: — who gives gifts but they?
They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls :
They pluck Force thence, and give it to the wise.

For every wave is wealth to Dædalus,

Wealth to the cunning artist who can work

This matchless strength. Where shall he find, O waves! A load your Atlas shoulders cannot lift?

HAWTHORNE.

1804-1864.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, the most brilliant and original writer of romance that America has yet produced, was born in Salem in 1804 and died in 1864. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1825, being a classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He began to write at an early age; but his first efforts received little encouragement. Modest, retiring, and singularly sensitive, he was unwilling to thrust himself forward, but patiently awaited the recognition of his claims to literary honors, and the rewards which accrue to the successful author. During the early years of his manhood he filled offices in the Custom Houses of Boston and Salem; but while discharging his duties with fidelity, he gave his thought and heart to literary labor. His first book, Twice Told Tales, found few readers; and it may be said that ten years after its publication his name would hardly have found a place in a catalogue of American writers. In The Scarlet Letter, however, he vindicated his right to the title of author, and from the publication of that book his reputation steadily and rapidly increased in brilliancy. In 1853 he was appointed Consul to Liverpool by his friend and classmate, President Pierce, and held that office several years, receiving flattering attentions in the most cultivated circles of England. During his residence in that country he gathered material for Our Old Home, one of the most delightful records of travel and observation ever written. At the expiration of his term of office he proceeded to Italy, where he lived for some time, and, as the fruit of this sojourn, gave to the world The Marble Faun. During the last years of his life the condition of his health obliged him to abstain, measurably, from literary work; but he left behind him several chapters of The Dolliver Romance which warrant the opinion that the completed work would have been his masterpiece. Several years after his death there was discovered among his papers the manuscript of Septimius Felton, a weird and repulsive, but strikingly characteristic, story. Mr. Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, while on a journey with Ex-President Pierce.

On the whole, Hawthorne must be esteemed the foremost writer of prose among Americans; and it would not be easy to select a name from the crowded annals of English literature that is more closely and honorably associated with the marriage of fine thoughts to fine language, which constitutes the charm of prose. As a romancist, he stands alone and unapproached. His psychological insight was simply marvelous, and gave a distinguishing and inimitable character to all his writings. The dark side of things especially attracted him; he dwelt broodingly and with the devotion of an enthusiast upon abnormal manifestations of human nature, and delighted in delineating the intricacies of human passion. Yet to those who knew him intimately he was eminently lovable; and in his writings one can catch glimpses of moods of genuine sunny humor. His style is remarkable for its purity and gracefulness. The Scarlet Letter and The House of The Seven Gables are generally esteemed his best works. The extracts are from Our Old Home and Mosses from an Old Manse.

CIVIC BANQUETS IN ENGLAND.

It has often perplexed me to imagine how an Englishman will be able to reconcile himself to any future state of existence from which the earthly institution of dinner shall be excluded. Even if he fail to take his appetite along with him (which it seems to me hardly possible to believe, since this endowment is so essential to his composition), the immortal day must still admit an interim of two or three hours during which he will be conscious of a slight distaste, at all events, if not an absolute repugnance, to merely spiritual nutriment.

The

idea of dinner has so imbedded itself among his highest and deepest characteristics, so illuminated itself with intellect and softened itself with the kindest emotions of his heart, so linked itself with Church and State, and grown so majestic with long hereditary customs and ceremonies, that by taking it utterly away, Death, instead of putting the final touch to his perfection, would leave him infinitely less complete than we have already known him. In this connection I should be glad to invite the reader to the official dinner-table of his Worship the Mayor, at a large English seaport where I spent several years.

The Mayor's dinner-parties occur as often as once a fortnight, and, inviting his guests by fifty or sixty at a time, his Worship probably assembles at his board most of the eminent citizens and distinguished personages of the town and neighborhood more than once during his year's incumbency, and very much, no doubt, to the promotion of good feeling among individuals of opposite parties and diverse pursuits in life. A miscellaneous party of Englishmen can always find more comfortable ground to meet upon than as many Americans, their differences of opinion being incomparably less radical than ours, and it being the sincerest wish of all their hearts, whether they call themselves Liberals or what not, that nothing in this world shall ever be greatly altered from what it has been and is. Thus there is seldom such a virulence of political hostility that it may not be dissolved in a glass or two of wine, without making the good liquor any more dry or bitter than accords with English taste.

The first dinner of this kind at which I had the honor to be present took place during assize-time, and included among the guests the judges and the prominent members of the bar. Reaching the Town Hall at seven o'clock, I communicated my name to one of several splendidly dressed footmen, and he repeated it to another on the first staircase, by whom it was passed to a third, and thence to a fourth at the door of the reception-room, losing all resemblance to the original sound in the course of these transmissions; so that I had the advantage of making my entrance in the character of a stranger, not only to the whole company, but to myself as well. His Worship, however, kindly recognized me, and put me on speaking terms with two or three gentlemen, whom I found very affable, and all the more hospitably attentive on the score of my nationality. It is very singular how kind an Englishman will almost invariably be to an individual

American, without ever bating a jot of his prejudice against the American character in the lump. My new acquaintances took evident pains to put me at my ease; and, in requital of their good-nature, I soon began to look round at the general company in a critical spirit, making my crude observations apart, and drawing silent inferences, of the correctness of which I should not have been half so well satisfied a year afterwards as at that moment.

man.

There were two judges present, a good many lawyers, and a few officers of the army in uniform. The other guests seemed to be principally of the mercantile class, and among them was a ship-owner from Nova Scotia, with whom I coalesced a little, inasmuch as we were born with the same sky over our heads, and an unbroken continuity of soil between his abode and mine. There was one old gentleman, whose character I never made out, with powdered hair, clad in black breeches and silk stockings, and wearing a rapier at his side; otherwise, with the exception of the military uniforms, there was little or no pretence of official costume. It being the first considerable assemblage of Englishmen that I had seen, my honest impression about them was, that they were a heavy and homely set of people, with a remarkable roughness of aspect and behavior, not repulsive, but beneath which it required more familiarity with the national character than I then possessed always to detect the good breeding of a gentleBeing generally middle-aged, or still farther advanced, they were by no means graceful in figure; for the comeliness of the youthful Englishman rapidly diminishes with years, his body appearing to grow longer, his legs to abbreviate themselves, and his stomach to assume the dignified prominence which justly belongs to that metropolis of his system. His face (what with the acridity of the atmosphere, ale at lunch, wine at dinner, and a well-digested abundance of succulent food) gets red and mottled, and develops at least one additional chin, with a promise of more; so that, finally, a stranger recognizes his animal part at the most superficial glance, but must take time and a little pains to discover the intellectual. Comparing him. with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an æsthetic point of view. It seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor had not done so much as he might and ought for these heavy figures, but had gone on wilfully exaggerating their uncouthness by the roominess of their garments; he had evidently no idea of accuracy of fit, and

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