bounding, careened so fearfully that nothing but a more sudden change of position on the part of Mr. Harley saved it and its contents from being precipitated down a clift. For six miles they held on their headlong progress, until the open valley, with its long stretch of stone fences and level fields of snow, and sparkles of lighted windows in peaceful farmhouses, was gained. Then, Mr. Harley spoke: "Soho, old fellow! you have done your work well! Gently! gently!" His tones were replete with soothing and grateful affection, and Red Rover subsided from his excited trot into a more moderate gait. At the appearance of these favourable signs of the times, Master Johnny ventured to lift his abased pate and to peep over the spatter-board at the favourite. "Yes, Johnny." "Then why did you keep whistling to him to go on ?" "That is the best way to cure a horse of running away-to urge him forward until he is tired of the fun and anxious to stop." "But what will the woman do, papa "I am sure I do not know, dear!" very drily. It was clear that Mr. Harley was "cured" of confiding his secrets to Johnny. Mrs. Harley was at the window when they drove up to the front gate, and Fred had had no harder struggle that eventful night than the effort he made to master the sickness that came over him as he compared the present scene with the phantasm of the lonely watcher which had haunted him an hour ago. The quick eye of the wife detected the signs of recent emotion as he folded her to his heart within the lighted hall. "Fred, love, how pale and ill look!" you "No wonder !" put in Johnny, his eyes starting from his head in the animation of having a marvellous piece of news to communicate. "Red Rover ran away, mamma! I tell you we have had some rough travelling!" hearts around the family hearth that night, and never ascended more fervent thanksgivings from mortal lips than went up from that home to the Guide of the traveller, the Guard of the defenceless. Mr. Harley privately, but vigilantly, instituted inquiries with regard to the would-be robber and murderer; but the search was fruitless. When he left the pseudo-sister of Moses Nixon in the middle of the road that January night, he lost every clue to the discovery of him who had so nearly proved his assassin. To this day the muff and pistols remain unclaimed in the Harley family, and may be seen, upon application to the proprietors, by any reader who is disposed to question the authenticity of what I hereby affirm to be a true story; for other portions as well as the principal idea have their "foundation in fact." OFF SHORE. Rock, little boat, beneath the quiet sky! Only the stars behold us, where we lieOnly the stars, and yonder brightening moon. On the wide sea to-night alone are we: The sweet, bright, summer day dies silently; Its glowing sunset will have faded soon. Rock softly, little boat, the while I mark The far-off gliding sails, distinct and dark, Across the west pass steadily and slow. But on the eastern waters sad they change And vanish, dream-like, gray and cold and strange, And no one knoweth whither they may go. We care not-we, drifting with wind and tide, With glad waves darkening upon every side, Save where the moon sends silver sparkles down, And yonder slender stream of changing light, Now white, now crimson, tremulously bright, Where dark the light-house stands, with fiery crown. Thick falls the dew, soundless, on sea and shore; "Ran away!" repeated Mrs. Harley, in- Along the boat from stern to curvèd prow. credulously. Reassured by her husband's significant smile, she set the story down to the credit of Johnny's imagination, and asked no more questions until that youth was snugly ensconced in his bed. Then, Fred brought in the muff and its contents-a pair of loaded pistols-and gently told to the two sisters the tale of his peril and escape. There were tearful eyes and throbbing Comes the careering wind, blows back my hair All damp with dew, to kiss me unawareMurmuring, "Thee I love," and passes on. Sweet sounds on rocky shores the distant note. Ob, could we float forever, little boat, Under the blissful sky drifting alone! ADVICE TO AUTHORS. My dear young gentleman or young ladyfor many are the Cecil Dreemes of literature who superscribe their offered manuscripts with very masculine names in very feminine handwriting-it seems wrong not to meet your accumulated and urgent epistles with one comprehensive reply, thus condensing many private letters into a printed one. And so large a proportion of readers either might, would, could, or should be contributors also, that this epistle will be sure of perusal, though "The Commoner's Daughter" be uncut and Mr. H's "Passenger" go without readers. Far from me be the wild expectation that every author will not habitually measure the merits of a periodical by its appreciation of his or her last manuscript: I should as soon ask a young lady not to estimate the management of a ball by her own private luck in respect to partners. But it is worth while at least to point out that in the treatment of every contribution the real interests of editor and writer are absolutely the same, and any antagonism is merely traditional, like the supposed hostility between France and England, or between England and America. No editor can afford the rejection of a good thing, and no author the publication of a bad one. The only difficulty lies in drawing the line. Were all offered manuscripts unequivocally good or bad, there would be no great trouble; it is the vast range of mediocrity which perplexes: the majority are too bad for blessing and too good for banning; so that no conceivable reason can be given for either fate, save that upon the destiny of any single one may hang that of a hundred others just like it. But whatever be the standard fixed, it is equally for the interest of all concerned that it be enforced without flinching. Nor is there the slightest foundation for the supposed editorial prejudice against new or obscure contributors. On the contrary, every editor is always hungering and thirsting after novelties. To take the lead in bringing forward a new genius is as fascinating a privilege as that of the physician who boasted to Sir Henry Halford of having been the first man to discover the Asiatic cholera and to communicate it to the public. It is only stern necessity which compels the magazine to fall back so constantly on the regular old staff of contributors, whose average product has been gauged already. Of course no editor is infallible, and the best magazine contains an occasional poor article. Do not blame the unfortunate conductor. He knows it as well as you do-after the deed is done. The newspapers kindly pass it over, still preparing their accustomed opiate of sweet praises, so much for each contributor, so much for the magazine collectively. But I can tell you that there is an official person who meditates and groans, meanwhile, in the night-watches, to think that in some atrocious moment of goodnature or sleepiness he left the door open, and let that ungainly intruder in. An editor thus shows himself to be but human; and it is well enough to remember this fact, when you approach him. He is not a gloomy despot, no Nemesis or Rhadamanthus, but a bland and virtuous man, exceedingly anxious to secure plenty of good subscribers and contributors, and very ready to perform any acts of kindness not inconsistent with this grand design. His time has some value, if yours has not; and he has therefore educated his eye till it has become microscopic, like a naturalist's, and can classify nine out of ten specimens by one glance at a scale or a feather. Do not despise any honest propitiation, however small, in dealing with your editor. Look to the physical aspect of your manuscript, and prepare your page so neatly that it shall allure instead of repelling. Use good pens, black ink, nice white paper and plenty of it. Do not emulate "paper-sparing Pope," whose chaotic manuscript of the "Iliad," written chiefly on the backs of old letters, still remains in the British Museum. If your document be slovenly, the presumption is that its literary execution is the same, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding. An editor's eye becomes carnal, and is easily attracted by a comely outside. If you really wish to obtain his good-will for your production, do not first tax his time for deciphering it, any more than in visiting a millionnaire to solicit a loan you would begin by asking him to pay for the hire of the carriage which takes you to his door. On the same principle, send your composition in such a shape that it shall not need the slightest literary revision before printing. Many a bright production dies discarded which might have been made thoroughly presentable by a single day's labour of a competent scholar, in shaping, smoothing, dovetailing, and retrenching. The revision seems so slight an affair that the aspirant cannot conceive why there should be so much fuss about it. "The piece you think is incorrect: why take it; I'm all submission: what you'd have it make it." But to discharge that friendly office no universal genius is salaried; and for intellect in the rough there is no market. Rules for style, as for manners, must be chiefly negative: a positively good style indicates certain natural powers in the individual, but an unexceptionable style is merely a matter of culture and good models. Dr. Channing established in New England a standard of style which really attained almost the perfection of the pure and the colourless, and the disciplinary value of such a literary influence, in a raw and crude nation, has been very great; but the defect of this standard is that it ends in utterly renouncing all the great traditions of literature, and ignoring the magnificent mystery of words. Human language may be polite and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the high thoughts it utters; or it may in itself become so saturated with warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables. The statue is not more surely included in the block of marble than is all conceivable splendour of utterance in "Dr. Johnson's Unabridged." And as Ruskin says of painting that it is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous line that the claim to immortality is made, so it is easy to see that a phrase may outweigh a library. Keats heads the catalogue of things real with "sun, moon, and passages of Shakespeare"; and Keats himself has left behind him winged wonders of expression which are not surpassed by Shakespeare, or by any one else who ever dared touch the English tongue. There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have laboured in vain to utter: there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence. thin, with the complete manuscript in his hand not only written, but almost rewritten, so thoroughly was the original copy altered, interlined, and rearranged. This strange production, almost illegible, was sent to the unfortunate printers; with infinite difficulty a proof-sheet was obtained, which, being sent to the author, was presently returned in almost as hopeless a chaos of corrections as the manuscript first submitted. Whole sentences were erased, others transposed, everything modified. A second and a third followed, alike torn to pieces by the ravenous pen of Balzac. The despairing printers laboured by turns, only the picked men of the office being equal to the task, and they relieving each other at hourly intervals, as beyond that time no one could endure the fatigue. At last, by the fourth proof-sheet, the author too was wearied out, though not contented. "I work ten hours out of the twenty-four," said he, "over the elaboration of my unhappy style, and I am never satisfied, myself, when all is done." Do not complain that this scrupulousness is probably wasted, after all, and that nobody knows. The public knows. People criticize higher than they attain. When the Athenian audience hissed a public speaker for a mispro nunciation, it did not follow that any one of the malcontents could pronounce as well as the orator. "There never yet was a good tongue," said old Fuller, "that wanted ears to hear it." If one were expecting to be judged by a few scholars only, one might hope somehow to cajole them; but it is this vast, unimpassioned, unconscious tribunal, this average judgment of intelli Such being the majesty of the art you seek to practise, you can at least take time and deliberation before dishonouring it. Disabuse your-gent minds, which is truly formidable. self especially of the belief that any grace or flow of style can come from writing rapidly. Haste can make you slipshod, but it can never make you graceful. With what dismay one reads of the wonderful fellows in fashionable novels, who can easily dash off a brilliant essay in a single night! When I think how slowly my poor thoughts come in, how tardily they connect themselves, what a delicious prolonged perplexity it is to cut and contrive a decent clothing of words for them, as a little girl does for a doll-nay how many new outfits a single sentence sometimes costs before it is presentable-I certainly should never dare to venture into print, but for the confirmed suspicion that the greatest writers have done even so. I can hardly believe that there is any autograph in the world so precious or instructive as that scrap of paper, still preserved at Ferrara, on which Ariosto wrote, in sixteen different revisions, one of his most famous stanzas. Do you know, my dear neophyte, how Balzac used to compose? As a specimen of the labour that sometimes goes to make an effective style, the process is worth recording. When Balzac had a new work in view, he first spent weeks in studying from real life for it, haunting the streets of Paris by day and night, note-book in hand. His materials gained, he shut himself up till the book was written, perhaps two months, absolutely excluding everybody but his publisher. He emerged pale and The first demand made by the public upon every composition is, of course, that it should be attractive. In addressing a miscellaneous audience, whether through eye or ear, it is certain that no man living has a right to be tedious. Every editor is therefore compelled to insist that his contributors should make themselves agreeable, whatever else they may do. To be agreeable, it is not necessary to be amusing; an essay may be thoroughly delightful without a single witticism, while a monotone of jokes soon grow tedious. Charge your style with life, and the public will not ask for conundrums. But the profounder your discourse the greater must necessarily be the effort to refresh and diversify. Labour, therefore, not in thought alone, but in utterance; clothe and reclothe your grand conception twenty times, until you find some phrase that with its grandeur shall be lucid also. It is this unwearied literary patience that has enabled Carlyle and Emerson not merely to introduce, but even to popularize, thoughts of such a quality as never reached the popular mind before. In learning to write availably, a newspaperoffice is a capital preparatory school. Nothing is so good to teach the use of materials, and to compel to pungency of style. Being always at close quarters with his readers, a journalist must shorten and sharpen his sentences, or he is doomed. Yet this mental alertness is bought ness of the eighteenth century with the vital vigour of the seventeenth, so that Sir Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as near to us as Pope or Addison-a style penetrated with the best spirit of Carlyle, without a trace of Carlylisın. at a severe price; such living from hand to mouth and then hate our prison forever. How sparkcheapens the whole mode of intellectual exist- ling was Reade's crisp brilliancy in Peg ence, and it would seem that no successful Woffington"!-but into what disagreeable afjournalist could ever get the newspaper out of fectations it has since degenerated! Carlyle his blood, or achieve any high literary success. was a boon to the human race, amid the tameFor purposes of illustration and elucidation, ness into which English style was declining. and even for amplitude of vocabulary, wealth of He was the Jenner of our modern style, inocuaccumulated materials is essential; and whether lating and saving us all by his quaint frank this wealth be won by reading or by experience Germanism, then dying of his own disease. makes no great difference. Coleridge attended Now the age has outgrown him, and is approachDavy's chemical lectures to acquire new meta-ing a mode of writing which unites the smoothphors; and it is of no consequence whether one comes to literature from a library, a machineshop, or a forecastle, provided he has learned to work with thoroughness the soil he knows. After all is said and done, however, books remain the chief quarries. Johnson declared (putting the thing perhaps too mechanically), "The greater part of an author's time is spent in reading in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book." Addison collected three folios of materials before publishing the first number of the "Spectator." Remember, however, that copious preparation | has its perils also, in the crude display to which it tempts. The object of high culture is not to exhibit culture, but its results. You do not put guano on your garden that your garden may blossom guano: indeed, even for the proper subordination of one's own thoughts the same self-control is needed; and there is no severer test of literary training than in the power to prune out one's most cherished sentence, when it grows obvious that the sacrifice will help the symmetry or vigour of the whole. Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be struck out. Remember the Lacedemonian who was fined for saying that in three words which might as well have been expressed in two. Do not throw a dozen vague epithets at a thing, in the hope that some one of them will fit; but study each phrase so carefully that the most ingenious critic cannot alter it without spoiling the whole passage for everybody but himself. For the same reason, do not take refuge, as was the practice a few years since, in German combinations, heart-utterances, soulsentiments, and hyphenized phrases generally; but roll your thought into one good English word. There is no fault which seems so hopeless as commonplaceness; but it is really easier to elevate the commonplace than to reduce the turgid. How few men in all the pride of culture can emulate the easy grace of a bright woman's letter! Have faith enough in your own individuality to keep it resolutely down for a year or two. A man has not much intellectual capital who cannot treat himself to a brief interval of modesty. Premature individualism commonly ends either in a reaction against the original whims, or in a mannerism which perpetuates them. For mannerism no one is great enough; because, though in the hands of a strong man it imprisons us in novel fascination, yet we soon grow weary, Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language: the one fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told the Emperor Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. To be sure, Louis XIV. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for mon carrosse, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future Frenchmen. But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned. Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives us an affluence of synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can show. Utterly shun slang, whether native or foreign-born. There are certain minor matters, subsidiary to elegance, if not elegancies, and therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly. Strive always to remember though it does not seem intended that we should quite bring it home to ourselves-that "To-Day is a king in disguise," and that this periodical literature of ours will be just as classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured. There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the door of Hazlitt's lecture room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's "Anecdotes," Pope and Addison appear no further off; and wherever I open Bacon's "Essays," I am sure to end at last with that one magical sentence, annihilating centuries, "When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in the flower of her years." Ten years ago the Times was bewailing that all thought and culture in England Dost TO THE NEW YEAR. Thou, like the Phoenix born, take thy station in the circling years; Thy advent greet with hopeful smiles and tears. Riding We hail thee from afar, adown the whirlwind and the storm; were suspended by the Crimean war. "We The Old Year sleepeth sound, The slain and slayer sleep in sweet accord: How many beaming eyes, How many a beating heart, the poet's own sylvan groves had been suddenly Will lose their brightness and have passed away! cut down, and opened a view of Olympus. Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man. So few men in any age are born with a Yet earth, so fair and bright, marked gift for literary expression, so few of Else why Spring's blossoms that successive rise; With all the rich perfume With Winter robed in white; this number have access to high culture, so few even of these have the personal nobleness to use their powers well, and this small band is The finally so decimated by disease and manifold disaster, that it makes one shudder to observe how little of the embodied intellect of any age The is left behind. Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms. Think how Spain and Portugal once divided the The globe between them in a treaty, when England was a petty kingdom of illiterate tribes!-and now all Spain is condensed for us into Cervantes, and all Portugal into the fading fame of the unread Camoens. The long magnificence of Italian culture has left us only I Quattro Poeti, And let Time steal away with noiseless wing? the Four Poets. The difference between Shakspeare and his contemporaries is not that he is read twice, ten times, a hundred times as much With bright eyes beaming through, Extract Then let us not complain; Make life a summer's day, Yea, let us do our best, And leave to Heaven the rest, as they it is an absolute difference-he is read, Nor die a thousand deaths in fearing one : and they are only printed. Yet, if our life be immortal, this temporary distinction is of little moment, and we may learn And, humility without learning despair, from earth's evanescent glories. Who cannot bear a few disappointments if the vista be so wide that the mute inglorious Miltons of this sphere may in With some other sing their Paradise as Found? War or peace, fame or forgetfulness, can bring no real injury to one who has formed the fixed purpose to live nobly day by day. If we but cheerful be, Sorrow and care will flee, rose-like, Time will fragrance leave when gone Then hail to thee, New Year, song and welcome we our voices raise; That, through all coming time, And thou, our own loved land, A beacon-light to penetrate earth's gloom! May health and sweet content In every home and heart serenely bloom! |