The humbled poet at last resigns every clinging thought of the world, hoping to find his peace and the favor of the Spirit in entire renunciation:

Easter-Day breaks-"no paradise stands barred to entry " -spite of dreary moments hope is elastic, and the poet knows that "mercy every way is infinite."

So cordial is our agreement with the pure spirit of all this, that we cannot spend a word upon occasional disagreements in theology. Filled with this spirit of religious love, the reader can return to the power and beauty of this world, portrayed with such loving sympathy in all the verse of Mr. Browning, and permit them amid enjoyment to kindle worship of the unseen world, the kingdom of munificent correspondences to these partial shows of time. Thanks to Mr. Browning, we learn from his poem to mingle content with aspiration. We will keep every charm of earth, every beautiful line that he has added to the treasury of poets, every minute marvel with which God tempts us to think of the plenitude of heaven. "All partial beauty" is a pledge of that. The pledge shall not suffice our mood, yet we cannot refuse to love it now with a tranquil hope. Nothing of late has so lifted the veil behind our customary routine and feeling, letting in upon them ripples of glory from the sphere of perfect beauty, as the latter half of " EasterEve," with its presageful lines, its credible anticipations, its cosmic thought. We forbear to mar the sustained and solemn grace of the poem by quotations of that which every man must buy and read. It has the full, vital force of all the other strokes from the same pen. There is no easy sentiment for summer afternoons, and reading it is not an amusement; for that, as the word purports, carries us oftener away from the muses than keeps us in their instructive company. Mr. Browning makes our senses all alert; we cannot listen to him in a reverie, but with self-possessed faculties. Sometimes even his best images require a salutary effort to clutch them; occasional conceits excepted, they are not far-fetched, confused and

dim, but palpable, the handle towards the hand, marshalling the fancy the way it ought to go. This is true of all his works. We think we can perceive in "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day" that Mr. Browning has also gained clearness, without sacrificing a single quality of his genius. Indeed, its power is materially increased, for his pen serves the thought with a greater regard for human sympathy. Such lofty beauty which the many need, is more conformed to the style of the many, without ever stooping to win by a dilution of its subtle energies. Is it too much to say that, with this pen for his sceptre, Mr. Browning can exact the homage of all hearts? He will permit us to apply to his conceptions of truth and beauty, what he says of the "chief, best way of worship": "let me strive

To find it, and, when found, contrive
My fellows also take their share.”

We deem that he possesses all the gifts and the exuberant life needed by the great artist, and he makes us conscious of a religiousness that can command their services for the good of men. Give the world a direction towards the good. Schiller says to the artist: "You have given it this direction, if as a teacher you elevate its thoughts to the necessary and eternal; if, while acting or composing, you transform the necessary and eternal into an object of its impulse. Create the conquering truth in the modest stillness of your soul, array it in a form of beauty, that not only thought may pay it homage, but sense lovingly comprehend its presence.

Last words of admiration and gratitude linger on our pen. We bespeak for every future line of Mr. Browning a cordial welcome here. And it is pleasant to think that he cannot regard the warm, personal friendships he has unconsciously established here, with indifference. We assure him that he can take his piece entitled "Time's Revenges," and for " a friend" in the first line read "friends," adapting the passage to express our ever-increasing regard for the books he writes. Contrive, contrive

66

To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive?
Our men scarce seem in earnest now;
Distinguished names! but 'tis somehow
As if they played at being names
Still more distinguished, like the games
Of children. Turn our sport to earnest."

ART. V. The History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the Continent to the Organization of Government under the Federal Constitution. By RICHARD HILDRETH. In three volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1849.

AT the present day, the United States present one of the most interesting and important political phenomena ever offered in the history of mankind. England has planted her colonies in New Holland, in New Zealand, in the East and the West Indies, at Cape Good Hope, and at Labrador; at Mauritius, Gibraltar, and in the Islands of the Pacific. She has forced an entrance into China; she longs to get firm footing in Borneo and Nicaragua. Wheresoever her children wander, they carry the seed out of which British institutions are sure to grow; institutions, however, which never produce their like, but nobler and better on another soil. Omitting all mention of Ireland, abundantly treated in a previous article, America was the oldest of these colonies; the first to detach itself from the parent stem, and is, perhaps, the prophecy of what most of the others are destined to become.

It must be a vigorous tribe of men which can hold so vast a portion of the Earth, while themselves are so few in numbers. Three hundred years ago, in the reign of Edward the Sixth, England was a third-rate power in Europe. Her population was less than three millions, her exports were trifling, and consisted of the raw materials of her clumsy agriculture, and her mineral treasures, which the Tyrians had traversed the ocean to purchase two thousand years before. Her soil could hardly raise a salad. Scotland was independent; Ireland not wholly subject to English rule; Wales had but lately been added to her realm. She was remarkable chiefly for the stormy seas which girt the Isle, and the chalky cliffs along her shore; for the fogs that cover it; for the rudeness of her inhabitants, and the tough valor of her soldiers. Now, in three hundred years, England contains some seventeen millions of inhabitants; Scotland and Ireland, ten millions more. Russia, Austria, and France, are the only nations in Europe that outnumber her in population. Turkey, with nine millions, and Spain, with twelve, are powerless beside her. Her ships are in all the oceans of the world; the sun never sets on her flag; her subjects capture the whale at Baffin's

Bay, and the elephant in India; they sport at hunting lions in South Africa. Her navigators, with scientific hardihood, explore each corner of the northern sea, or, locked in ice, wait the slow hand of death, or the slower sun of an arctic summer. She has climes too cold for the reindeer; climes too hot almost for the sugar-cane and the pine-apple; the lean larch of Scotland, and the banyan-tree of Hindostan, both grow in the same empire. Esquimaux, Gaboon, and Sanscrit, are tongues subject to Britain. At least an eighth part of the men now living in the world owe allegiance to the queen of that little island.

Her children came to America when the nation was in all the vigor of its most rapid growth. The progress of their descendants in population and in wealth has been without parallel. Two hundred and fifty years ago, there was not an English settler in the United States; now the population is not far from two and twenty millions; two-thirds of the people are of English origin. The increase of property has been more rapid than that of numbers. In fifty years, Boston has multiplied her inhabitants nearly five fold, and her property more than twenty-five fold in the same time. The increase of intelligence is very remarkable, and probably surpasses that of property.

The Americans are now trying a political experiment which has hitherto been looked on with great suspicion and even horror. Here is a Democracy on a large scale; a church without a bishop; a state without a king; society (in the Free States) without the theoretical distinction of patrician and plebeian. What is more surprising, the experiment succeeds better than its most sanguine friends ever dared to hope. The evils which were apprehended have not yet befallen us. The "Red Republic," which hostile prophets foretold, has not come to pass; there are "red" monarchies, enough of them, the other side of the world, born red; doomed, we fear, to die in that sad livery of woe; but in America, the person of the citizen is still respected quite as much as in Austria and England; and nowhere in the world is property safer or so much honored; the lovers of liberty here are lovers of order as its condition. Even Mr. Carlyle, accustomed to speak of America with bitterness and contempt, and of the ballot-box with loathing and nausea, confesses to the success of the experiment so far as wealth and numbers are concerned. Indeed, it is a matter of rejoicing to warm-hearted men, that we have cotton to cover and corn to feed the thousands of

exiles who yearly are driven by hunger from England, to seek a home or a grave on the soil of America. It is interesting to study the growth of the American people; to observe the progress of the idea on which the government rests, and the attempts to make the idea an institution.

This is one of the few great nations which can trace its history back to certain beginnings; there is no fabulous period in our annals; no mythical centuries, when

Οἱ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην,
Κλύοντες οὐκ ἤκουον· ἀλλ ̓ ὀνειράτων
* Αλίγκιοι μορφαῖσι, τὸν μακρὸν χρόνον
Εφυρον εἰκῇ πάντα, κοὔτε πλινθυφεῖς
Δόμους προσείλους ἦσαν, οὐ ξυλουργίαν·
Κατώρυχες δ' ἔναιον, ὥστε ἀήσυροι

Μύρμηκες, ἄντρων ἐν μυχοῖς ἀνηλίοις.

To be rightly appreciated, American history requires to be written by a democrat. A theocrat would condemn our institutions for lacking an established church with its privileged priesthood; an aristocrat, for the absence of conventional nobility. Military men might sneer at the smallness of the army and navy; and aesthetic men deplore the want of a splendid court, the lack of operatic and other spectacles in the large towns. The democrat looks for the substantial welfare of the people, and studies America with reference to that point. At present, America is not remarkable for her literature or her art; she has made respectable advances in science, but her industrial works and her political institutions are by far her most remarkable achievements hitherto. We are not sanguine enough to suppose that all the advantages of all the other forms of government are to be secured in this, but yet trust that the most valuable things will be preserved here. In due time, we doubt not the higher results of civilization will appear, and we shall estimate the greatness of the nation not merely by its numbers, its cotton, its cattle, and its corn. But "that is not first which is spiritual." First of all, the imperious wants of the body must be attended to, the woods are to be felled, the log-cabins built, the corn got into the ground, the wild beasts destroyed, the savages kept at peace. There must be many generations between the woodsman who erects the first shanty of logs, and the poet who sheds immortal beauty on logs and lumberers. Were there not ages between the wooden hut of Arcadian Pelasgos in Greece, and the Parthenon? From mythical Cecrops to Aristophanes, the steps are many,