is of unmistakable service. It bears the marks of patient and painstaking labor in gathering all the facts regarding Lincoln's origin and early years; and when the reader considers that Mr. Herndon was Lincoln's law partner for twenty years; that he made his acquaintance as far back as 1837; that he lived amongst Lincoln's early companions, and, so to speak, spoke the Illinois language, it is easy to see how important may be his testimony. In addition, the open-minded reader can scarcely read this artless book without feeling a growing confidence in Mr. Herndon's honesty and accuracy. The very offenses against good taste show him to be a good witness, and we do not see how any student of Lincoln's character, and especially any one who undertakes hereafter to set Lincoln forth, can avoid being strongly affected by this work. That the book is likely to have a general circulation, unless among the President's old neighbors, we are not quite ready to believe, though it will have many charms for educated readers through the very homeliness of the narrative. Nor is it the homeliness alone, but often a graphic touch, which will arrest the attention. Here is a passage, for instance, relating to Lincoln's loneliness in domestic life: "Mr. Lincoln never had a confidant, and therefore never unbosomed himself to others. He never spoke of his trials to me, or, so far as I knew, to any of his friends. It was a great burden to carry, but he bore it sadly enough and without a murmur. I could always realize when he was in distress, without being told. He was not exactly an early riser, that is, he never usually appeared at the office till about nine o'clock in the morning. I usually preceded him an hour. Sometimes, however, he would come down as early as seven o'clock, in fact, on one occasion I remember he came down before daylight. If, on arriving at the office, I found him in, I knew instantly that a breeze had sprung up over the domestic sea, and that the waters were troubled. He would either be lying on the lounge, looking skyward, or doubled up in a chair, with his feet resting on the sill of a back window. He would not look up on my entering, and only answered my 'Good-morning' with a grunt. I at once busied myself with pen and paper, or ran through the leaves of some book; but the evidence of his melancholy and distress was so plain, and his silence so significant, that I would grow restless myself, and, finding some excuse to go to the court-house or elsewhere, would leave the room. "The door of the office opening into a narrow hallway was half glass, with a curtain on it working on brass rings strung on wire. As I passed out on these occasions I would draw the curtain across the glass, and before I reached the bottom of the stairs I could hear the key turn in the lock, and Lincoln was alone in the gloom. An hour in the clerk's office at the court-house, an hour longer in a neighboring store, having passed, I would return. By that time either a client had dropped in, and Lincoln was propounding the law, or else the cloud of despondency had passed away, and he was busy in the recital of an Indiana story to whistle off the recollections of the morning's gloom. Noon having arrived, I would depart homeward for my dinner. Returning within an hour, I would find him still in the office, — although his house stood but a few squares away, lunching on a slice of cheese and a handful of crackers, which, in my absence, he had brought up from a store below. Separating for the day at five or six o'clock in the evening, I would still leave him behind, either sitting on a box at the foot of the stairway, entertaining a few loungers, or killing time in the same way on the court-house steps. A light in the office after dark attested his presence there till late along in the night, when, after all the world had gone to sleep, the tall form of the man destined to be the nation's President could have been seen strolling along in the shadows of trees and buildings, and quietly slipping in through the door of a modest frame house, which it pleased the world, in a conventional way, to call his home." Some of the incidents in this life will not be pleasant reading to those who have already constructed a Lincoln after their own imagination, and are loath to give up the shadow for the reality. But to those who wish to know the truth, at whatever cost to illusions, this work will come laden with many suggestions. It will play a large part, we are confident, in the future construction of Lincoln in the minds of men, and we suspect that it will have one significant effect. There is a disposition, expressed by Mr. Lodge, to speak of Lincoln as a typical American, or a typical Western American. Mr. Herndon's report will go far toward accenting those characteristics of Lincoln which set him by himself, and bring into high relief his marked personality, his uniqueness. We do not suppose the time will ever come when new lives of Franklin, Washington, and Lincoln will not be offered to American readers: a few new facts will come to light, the point of view will shift, the audience will change, new forms of biographic writing and new manners in literature will arise; but, above all, these three names will always contain an inspiration, and so long as a nation lives its interest in the great characters it has produced will be undying. Buildings crumble, battlefields become populated, but art in letters and character in persons survive. And of these two, character is the more indestructible; so that it is even possible to care for Emerson's genius in his poems because of our admiration for his fine personality, while some later poet may speak a language more intelligible and more harmonious. We e can understand through these men how a people relying on tradition, and not on historical records, can come to elevate their heroes into demigods, and invest them with attributes taken from the entire series of events with which they were identified. Franklin thus becomes the personification of an optimistic shrewdness, a large, healthy nature, as of a young people gathering its strength and feeling its broadening power; Washington is the serene hero, undismayed by the failure of the hour, always confident in the success of the event; Lincoln, the sacrifice for national sin, and thus the bringer-in of national regeneration. But the clear light of a truth perpetually made more free from misconception is better than the most highly imagined myth, when character is in question; and every new historical writer who bends his endeavor to get at the exact truth regarding Franklin, Washington, or Lincoln is contributing to the slow building of just conceptions regarding men who are at once the highest product of national forces and the deepest foundation of national character. The most interesting outcome of the celebration of Washington's inauguration, last spring, was the evidence that it elicited of the power which Washington's name possessed. No one need despair of the republic so long as that name can be uttered as a rebuke and instantly arrest the public attention. Mr. Lodge may disabuse his mind of the fear that an artificial Washington has been constructed in the popular imagination. The figure which rises to the mind is both lofty and human. Thus, too, physiologists may refer Lincoln's melancholy to a disordered liver, and Mr. Herndon may weakly imagine that he was forever brooding over his obscure origin; but the mournful, sadeyed man who represented the nation in the hour of its agony has become too well known in the hearts of Americans to recede into narrower limits. With equal justice the people have learned to accept Franklin for what he was; not to ignore or disregard the complacency with which he looked back upon the mean morality of his youth, but to value the cheerfulness of his philosophy, and to see in his good citizenship the essential basis of that broad love of one's neighbor which a democratic republic always must regard as a prime requisite in its members. The Rock and Tree. THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB. THERE lie before me, as I the Singing write, a volume of familiar music and a little manuscript book of poems. The music is that exquisite collection of instrumental lyrics, the Lieder ohne Worte, which to readers even of this day awaken not alone a gracious train of sound-pictures, but the suggestion, and as it were the memory, of the brief life, the genius and joyous personality, of their composer; compositions which amid all the revolutions of the musical world remain a little apart, but unchanged, because people have the habit of loving them and cannot well break it. The poems which have lately fallen in my way, and in which I have found a charming and very genuine element of interest, have a connection with the music which it is not easy to define. Written as songs to accompany its measures, they have not merely, and perhaps not quite, the character of words made to music. They are written, for one thing, without the knowledge of musical phrasing which would render them available without alteration for that purpose; yet they run closer to the theme than poems suggested, as in the case of Miss Lazarus' Phantasies, by musical compositions, at the same time leading us along a roadbed of their own. It is perhaps hardly a critical homage to the genius of the composer to furnish words to songs intended to convey the sense of language through another element, to composi yet tions purposely left ohne Worte, it has been already done in several instances, with the adaptation of the music to the voice, a process which the copy before me has not yet undergone; and if excuse is needed for the existence of these new song-words, it is to be found in the sincerity and wholeness of purpose which binds a handful of verses, technically simple and by no flawless, to each other and to the music which inspired them. They have not been critically or deliberately brought into being, but are the record of thoughts which sang themselves in the writer's mind to a few loved and well-conned strains. To catch the full tones of any art we must listen with our lives. We all do this instinctively more or less, giving as well as receiving, lending of our circumstance to poem or melody, and are moved by them in proportion as life has moved us. In these verses dedicated to Mendelssohn I find a synthesis of the effect of his mood upon the tidewave of another mind in an element remote from that in which the original Lieder were created. The work of a New England woman living in a solitary region of the West, they show no attempt in the selection of themes to keep to such classical or romantic ideas as may be supposed to have inspired a musician cradled in the halcyon nest of German idealism; on the contrary, every stone in the new environment is brought as if toward a monument; all the doors of a modern life are flung open to the strains. The result is sometimes a curious sort of anachronism, as in the borrowing of Mendelssohn's music for the commemoration of such recent events as the wreck at Samoa or the death of Father Damien ; sometimes it is visible in a little over-strenuousness of tone, and in the introduction of problems possibly a little deeper and more troubled than were touched by the keys of the instrument under the fingers of the composer. All this belongs to the fact that it is a life which has listened, and has heard its steadfast purpose as well as its changing fancies played to it in music, — a life which has kept its cell somewhere apart, and distilled its labor of every day into a little drop of verse. In the case of those compositions already associated with a name this has in all instances been adhered to, as in the Hunting Song, Consolation, and the various Gondellieder. The spirit is reproduced in these pieces with great felicity, notably in the Spinning Song, where the variations and changes of tone are made to express the idea of beguiling noises from without, while the underlying whirr of the wheel accompanies the answer of the spinner, resolutely and cheerfully keeping to her labor and to the happy home life which it sustains and symbolizes. In other instances the subject is chosen by the writer, and the music attached to a story or fancy suggested by it. No. 1, an Andante con moto, with its running accompaniment of playful feeling along a tenderly emphasized theme, is fitted to the Endymion story, that favorite throughout art for the cool, the elusive, the magic quality of its passion. ENDYMION SONG. By enchantment led away Young Endymion doth stray. Ever as he goes he cries, A-i! A-i! Echo mockingly replies. Dian swiftly follows after, A-i! A-i! She with Echo mocking cries. Now he plucks the ripe fruits from their thorns by the way, And he sings as he wanders a roundelay, Now Dian comes, impelled by Love, Half frightened by unwonted bliss, She wakes Endymion with a kiss. There is a little strain of Fretcher's sylvan note here prettily played upon an ancient fancy. There is also a Sunrise, very fresh in feeling, which I cannot quote for fear of exceeding the time allowed to a member of the Club, and a little group of mountain pictures called Monadnock, the writer chooses, like Emerson, the mountain which holds the message of the heights for a certain quarter of New England, which have to be omitted on the same ground. The lovely air numbered 44, with its gentle, measured movement, carried in the treble to a soft brightening as of hope, has a little word-accompaniment with something of the simplicity and inwardness of George MacDonald's lyrics. Thy minute comes, Thy minute goes, The underlying plan of the songwords is the working out of the progress of a soul through pleasure, happiness, disappointment, trial, and doubt up to blessedness and the joy that comes through faith. That such a plan runs through the Mendelssohn lyrics is not to be supposed; there is no such order, for one thing, and to introduce it in regular sequence would require some shuffling of the numbers. But there is no attempt here to tamper with the character of the music, or to force it within the set bounds of a purpose; the unity of idea is carried on through variety, is felt rather than enforced, and is the result of that dualism which has already been alluded to, of the individuality and mental experience of the copyist entering as an element of sympathy and interpretation into the rendering of the master's work. In the song the title of which has been chosen by the writer as a general designation of the collection, the adaptation of a fairy-tale theme, or rather parable, to a very varied piece of music has been accomplished with sympathetic and happy result. The composition is No. 17, and its weird, fantastic quality, its transition from serenity to storm and again to hope, its thread of dream and of reality, are all woven into incident with a touch of fancy as well as of moral significance. THE ROCK AND THE SINGING TREE. Out from the Land of Youth at last Methought before my burning eyes Here for the weary blossomed rest, By nesting birds that music made There are many other pieces which are like hymns- or rather perhaps what hymns should be in their religious fervor and earnestness of feeling. It is the fervor of one who through sorrow has found faith, who has believed and seen, seen, possibly, with a little too much detail for poetic purposes, but with unmistakable insight and conviction. It is a little curious that the verses fitted to the composition known as Consolation are not the most striking of the collection, for the key-note of the whole is consolation and joy in consolation, a spirit of helpfulness and wide sympathy, the exercise of a fancy which lends itself to glad or to despondent themes, moving in many directions and with varying motions, but always under a guiding sense of serenity and trust. A New England Barny O'Reirdon. - There is a small wateringplace on the New England coast which owns a counterpart of Lover's amusing Barny O'Reirdon. He is a taciturn, not to say stolid villager, who finds an occupation in taking the summer boarders out in his sailboat. For want of more instructive conversation, these passengers have fallen into the way of chaffing Job for never having carried his craft across the Atlantic Ocean, and visiting the famous cities of Europe. He had never been farther from home than Boston, but these light-minded men tried to persuade him that Boston could not hold a candle to London and Paris. Job re |