crimson, the scarlet, and the gold-all those colors which burn upon the faraway clouds in our mountain home, are here close by; we touch them with our hands. But ah! it must be confessed, shorn of their spirituality; no longer making us think of the raiment of the cherubim, but rather of the earthly, silken, and velvet robes of queens and kings.

But glorious enough, however, for this every-day world, I think. What more can one ask for when the soul is filled to overflowing by a contemplation of all the fairness round.

as

And lovingly, too, the sun, though he shines from gray sky, rests his beams on the transformed leaves. Lovingly, seeming to shower kisses upon them, as a departing lover upon his chosen mistress. Lovingly over the whole woods, though he said, "be of good cheer and pine not, for soon I will hasten back from the south and bright ye shall break forth again in bud and blossom; sweet in your spring time as a young girl; and slowly ye shall pass on to voluptuous womanhood, through the fervid months of summer."

A sweet stillness rests over hill and dale; there is not a breath of wind from morn 'till eve, and so it has been for days, for "Where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest." and not a sound-wave comes from the vales but those that have traveled so far that they fall upon the soft, deep grass with a sigh, as a tired wavelet upon a strip of sand.

It is a pleasant task to sit and pick out all the notes in this rapturous symphony of color-those that can be picked outor to see them glide (if the term is allowable) into one another with such tender, subtle modulations that the eye cannot follow them, though they make themselves felt in the general harmony. In places the color is massed in trembling, pulsating mysteries; at others its outlines are sharply defined, crisp, clear, rising, as it were. through the scale to one high piercing note of treble.

As I pass along the road the pictures change. Sometimes it will be a vignette, tender, quaint or idyllic; sometimes a

broad, sweeping-lined landscape, focussed by objects or figures of rural life. What could be more sweet, more unconventional, than this little vignette in sight: A huge old beach tree, standing on a green slope of hill, with its under leaves all fallen, making a thick, round, amber-red mat upon the grass, the upper ones, yet on the branches, shining like shields in a fairy armory; a palegray sky, and across the distance a mass of the thick woods of purplish, brownish maroon, dashed with dusky gold.

Or this one: an ancient hemlock, low, but with its branches reaching far out from the trunk and holding a great weight of sombre-green foliage; by its side a tall, slim ash, and its fallen, paly yellow leaves lodged in the dusky hemlock; appearing as though a whole troop of weary butterflies were resting there.

The broad landscapes are superlative of their kind. The winding streams, which reflect groups of the tamarack, the hickory, the sycamore and the butternut, and which form deep, wide pools, or fall softly over ledges of sand or limestone, bringing down from the sky into the mass of warm colors, lines and flecks of pearlgray blue, are crossed by long, wooden bridges, with covered galleries; and in the distant vales are seen well-to-do farm houses, while the hill side clearings are covered yet with stacks of corn, or littered with orange-gold pumpkins. The long, winding roads leading from village to village, and rising and falling with the undulating country over which they pass are enlivened by figures which might have given an idea for an opening chapter to Trollope or Collins-the country doctor, perhaps, in his vehicle, answering to a sudden call; or the village squire, with his daughter; or a rider, with the saddle bags on each side of his pony-the country postman going his rounds.

III.

THE "TURNERS,", IN LENOX LIBRARY.

These two pictures-a scene on the French coast, with an English ship-ofwar stranded; and Staffa, Fingal's Cave, Scotland-the one crumbling, cracking, fading rapidly away, and the other darkened already by time, bring us face to

face with some of the deepest problems of art. Both painted during that period of his life in which, many affirm, Turner was but an artistic madman, raving in color as others do in words; but which other critics say, Ruskin among the number, was the time in which he produced his most perfect work, (artistically not technically), from 1830 to 1845; they exemplified what he, and he alone, had to report of the more evanescent beauties of nature, after he had looked upon them with the eyes of love and discernment, through the long years of his industrious life.

We are bound to ask before these works, where ends the domain of art?in landscape art, I mean. Dare its votaries aspire to the rendering of light-the undimmed glories of the rising or setting luminary, bathing, in his ineffable glory, earth, water and sky? Or must they worship only, not daring, through the instrumentality of paint, an attempt to disclose what has been revealed unto them? Inimitable Turner! in one sense he was a martyr-striving after the unattainable, and being misunderstood and mocked at for it.

Both of these pictures show the hour of sunset, and one of them, the first named, contains the famous scarlet shadow, which, Ruskin says, was his most distinctive innovation as a colorist. In the other we see his passionate love of color in his later years, and also his transcendent genius in the arrangement of lines and chiaroscuro, the picture being one of those kind in which he stood alone-a study of drifting clouds and mist; smoke swirled by the wind; beating rain and tossing waves; all lit by a low and lurid sun.

Those visions; those dreams; those inspirations of Turner's, what could he do with them? Let them glow and burn within his brain like volcanic fire, and then die out unexpressed! or did he do well, think you, in attempting to report them to us, even though the technicalities, the limitations of his art made the report imperfect, as would be the divine and sweet harmonies of some master composer, should he try to interpret

89

"How oft we saw the sun retire,

And burn the threshold of the night,
Full from his ocean-lane of fire,

And sleep beneath his pillar'd light!"

he knew that the imaginative mind would respond; nothing between him, the purity of the language (which will not change with time), and the sympathy of his reader. But with Turner, what? Between him, the impression he had received, the beauty he had dreamed, and the one whose imagination he sought to reach, was the vulgarities of paint; the deadness of flake white; the staring crudity of chrome yellow; the coarseness of red lead; the delusiveness of vermillion, smalt, and verditer. Poor Turner! how his heart must have ached at the difference between the dream and its realization; between the vision and the painted canvas.

A poet? Yes, one of the greatest of the poets! Fit to walk in spirit with Milton, Shakspeare, Dante, Æscuylus. One who, though his life was not writ in water, was nevertheless, unfortunate enough to have embodied some of the grandest, wildest, most beautiful and sublime thoughts that have ever come to man, in fugitive pigments, working their own destruction. Fading or blackening through chemical changes-false servants betraying their master.

A poet who, though thousands deny him, some because their eyes are blind to the most subtle, mysterious beauties of nature; some because they are insincere; and others because of their envy, was, beyond all doubt, the one whose eyes saw plainest, whose heart loved best, and whose hand was most skilful to portray, of all those who have yet worshipped at

cause or another suffers from a scarcity of food, there will necessarily be many who are brought to the point of death by famine. In an emergency of this kind a free man will perhaps resort to the only means that is left him of escaping a fearful death. He will sell his children, his wife, or wives, and finally himself, as slaves. Dr. Laidley, an early slave-trader in Africa, relates that, during a famine in the countries of Gambia, which lasted for three years, many free men came and begged him to be put on his slave-chain, to save them from perishing of hunger.

3. INSOLVENCY. If a trader in Africa has contracted a debt on some mercantile speculation, payment to be given at a certain time, and he is unable to fulfil his obligations, the creditor can seize upon and sell not only his property but himself also, in order to satisfy his lawful demands.

Mungo Park, describing the situation, as he found it some ninety years ago, says: "When a negro takes up goods on credit, from any of the Europeans on the coast, and does not make payment at the time appointed, the European is authorized, by the laws of the country, to seize upon the debtor himself, if he can find him; or, if he cannot be found, on any member of his family; or, in the last resort, on any native of the same kingdom. The person thus seized upon is detained, while his friends are sent in quest of the debtor. When he is found, a meeting is called of the chief people of the place, and the debtor is compelled to ransom his friend by fulfilling his engagement. If he is unable to do this, his person is immediately secured and sent down to the coast, and the other released. If the debtor cannot be found, the person seized on is obliged to pay double the amount of the debt, or is himself sold into slavery."

Such laws seem to have existed and to have been enforced by Europeans as late as in the beginning of this century. It is to be hoped that they are no longer used since slavery can no more be carried on openly by people who lay claim to civilization; but there is little doubt Mohammedan merchants and

that

native traders still obtain many slaves on account of men becoming unable to pay their debts, in those parts of the country where the European powers as yet have but little to say.

4. CRIMES. There are three crimes for the committing of which slavery is attached as the penalty. These are murder, adultery and witchcraft. If a person commits murder, the nearest relation of the victim has the right either to kill the murderer, or to sell him as a slave. In the case of adultery, the injured person may either accept a fine or sell the offender into slavery. By witchcraft is meant administering of some poison whereby the health or lives of other persons are jeopardized. Anyone convicted of this crime may be sold as a slave.

It is but just to the black population of the “Dark Continent" to say, that according to all reliable travelers, these crimes are comparatively less frequent among these heathens than they are in civilized countries, whether this depends on the wholesome effects of the penal code or not.

5. BIRTH. A child born of slaves continues in the same condition. Thus the social condition is perpetuated and naturalized, as it were, among the people. It has grown up with their other institutions, and nothing short of a social revolution can ever uproot it. The perpetuation of slavery, through birth, is to the native African mind just as proper and natural as is the perpetuation of nobility, or royalty, by the same means, in certain other countries.

So remarkably has the prophecy of Noah been fulfilled up to our present time! The finger of God has written on the pages of the history of the human race a testimony to the truth of the pages of His inspired records, that all may see and understand, and that none may have a just cause for doubt. S. M. Sjodahl.

The characteristic of the true gentleman, whether he be in the best of society or merely the humble drudge of the workshop, is chiefly recognized by the gentleness of his manners, and the resolute character of his actions.

THE hard mechanical training necessary for an engineer of the present day disinclines him to spend his scanty leisure in studies which cannot be turned to account. The result is that he conscientiously believes his art to be the special flower and glory of the age-in which he is not altogether wrong; but beyond that he regards all earlier feats of engineering as unworthy of serious discussion. And the public, as ignorant, with less excuse, encourages this view.

It is waste of time to ask him how the boulders of Stonehenge were conveyed to their resting-place; how the walls of Fiesole or Mycene were built; these marvels represent the power which lies in the brute force of multitudes, and there's an end of the question. Engineering now is an art and a science, with which the rude work of the savages has no sort of connection. One must not inquire why he takes it for granted that Stonehenge, for example, was built by savages, where the brute multitude came from, how they subsisted on Salisbury Plain, or why it is necessary to assume that they were unacquainted with mechanics. All that is chose jugee-beyond dispute. If you cite records of antiquity which tell of works he cannot rival, that fact alone is proof that the record is a lie; for how can it possibly be that mere Greeks and Romans should have been able to do what the builders of the Eiffel Tower and the Forth Bridge cannot accomplish? We had an amusing instance of this feeling lately. The ingenious M. Eiffel and the artistic M. Bartholdi have been gravely pondering the Colossus of Rhodesmeasuring it and weighing it as per description; and they concluded that the thing was simply impossible.

It could not have been set up, to begin with, and when set up it could not have stood the pressure of wind. This is demonstrated by all the rules of modern science, and he who does not admit the demonstration must be prepared to show that two and two do not make four. Those antique personages who professed to have seen the Colossus were victims of an occular delusion or flat story-tellers,

and that greater number who mention it incidentally, as we might mention the ruins of the Colosseum, were credulous gossips. The fact is that Messrs. Eiffel and Bartholdi argue in the fashion usual with engineers. Not all of them would pretend that they know every law of nature which applies in such a case. But very few would listen patiently if it were urged that the ancients knew some laws with which they were unacquainted.

So it appears, however, to the disinterested student, and we can bring forward evidence enough. If it be true that the Colossus of Rhodes is really proved "impossible,” according to the best modern authorities, this is a good illustration to begin with, for its existence is as well authenticated as the Temple at Delphi and the statue of the Olympian Zeus, or the Tower of London, for that matter, to one who has never seen it. By some means it was set up, and by adaption of some natural laws it was made to stand, until an earthquake overthrew it. One is embarrassed by the number and variety of illustrations to the same effect which crowd upon the mind. Since the Colosseum has been mentioned we may choose examples of that class. Is M. Eiffel prepared to put an awning over Trafalgar Square when the sun shines, and remove it promptly without the aid of a central support, of steam engines, or even chains? The area of the Colosseum is certainly not less. This may seem a trifling matter to the thoughtless, because they have never considered it. Roman engineers covered in that vast expanse with some woolen material, and they worked the ponderous sheet so easily and smoothly that it was drawn and withdrawn as the sky changed. The bulk of it must have weighed hundreds of tons, all depending by ropes from the circumference. the ancients thought so little of this feat that they have left us only one trivial de tail of the method.

But

So Julius Cæsar stretched an awning above the Forum Romanum and a great part of the Via Sacra in the space of a single night. Have any of our modern engineers pondered the contemporary