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and Quintilian, and others equally effective to contemporary princes, popes, and tribunes. The story of his attachment to Laura, of which we have heard so much, is treated with a respect it never merited; the grave arguments which learned men have written about it are as puerile as the thing itself, but they have succeeded in sheltering it from the contempt it deserves. If it was a solemn hoax, it was wondrous pitiful to persist in it fifty years to treat it in his letters to his intimate friends, and no doubt in his conversation too, as a reality, as the absorbing passion of his soul. He might have used it as a stalking-horse for his poetry without all this silly duplicity and affectation. But he liked the foppery of the thing; he was disposed, like those young gentlemen Prince Arthur speaks of, to "be as sad as night only for wantonness;" and, as a young gentleman and an old one, he played on this interesting part to the last. We have slid insensibly here from the hypothetical into the positive, and find ourselves asserting the humbug which we set out by supposing, but really the alternative is too nonsensical for a Yankee imagination. A passion suddenly conceived, even at first sight-by a priest, too-a man sworn to celibacy before God, and by all the religion he believed, perhaps more-and for the wife of another, and this passion lasting without encouragement, with little or no intercourse, or even acquaintance, through long absence and, in spite of the lover's having another mistress and a family, lasting twenty years, to Laura's death, and outliving her thirty more! All this is so contrary to our ideas of love, of sense, of reason, and of propriety, that it is hazarding very little to say, the poetry that sets it forth could never, under any circumstances, become popular or continue so here. The poetry is beautiful, often exquisite, polished, ingeni ous, soft, and musical, but as monotonous as an Æolian harp, and as worthless, when you sum its sense up, as a penny-whistle. Expressions occur which you remember and treasure up, gems of prettiness in language and thought, but all wasted on this silly tissue, which annoys and tires one more than all these incidental pleasures refresh. But this is what Petrarch has left behind him; to this

purpose he lived and died; by this performance he is now chiefly had in remembrance. Shall we say that he was great?

It would be a balm to many ambitious minds to be set right, once really and truly right, on this subject of greatness. It would be a pleasure to shake off the oppression of presumed inferiority, to reconcile one's self to obscurity, to feel the consciousness of approaching some standard of worth and honor which no breath of popular opinion, no caprice of fashion nor prejudice can exalt or debase. Philip Van Artevelde has said, "the world knows nothing of its greatest men," and very probably indeed it is so. The quali ties which make a man famous and conspicuous,-the qualities which give success in any career, or very often the chances which give it without qualities,-are what poets have taught men to respect; but these are not what our natures are formed in sincerity and truth to revere. The poets have misled us; they have pandered to our vices, and have used their art to set forth the joys of intemperance, the honors of tyranny and cruelty, and the puerilities of amatory nonsense; and thus possessing fully with their sweet tones the ear of childhood and youth, they have falsified our ideas of pleasure, honour and ambition through successive generations. The main error they teach is everywhere the same; they place the objects of life always in something extrinsic, they bid us look for celebrity and notoriety as the great tests and essential principles of happiness, and not to our own hearts or consciences, or to that narrow circle of domestic relations where alone we can in general be truly appreciated. No one can doubt that if bacchanalian songs had never been invented, millions of recruits would have been withheld from the armies of intemperance. If no Lauras had been sung and celebrated, many a female heart that now pants for the reputation of a belle, would be easy in the enjoyment and diffusion of some more tranquil and more attainable happiness. Many a man who now annoys mankind by his efforts at some sort of violent preeminence, who seeks, if not to extort our respect or approbation, at least to force himself upon our knowledge and compel us to be familiar with his name ;

many a man of this kind might have been a saint and a sage in private life, had the finger-posts of his infancy pointed him the way to independence, -true independence; that loftiest and most perfect condition of the soul, which only can place a man above mankind; can teach him to measure his faculties with his duties, and do truly and quietly that which he can do most effectually; and can procure to him sometimes the reward of that "self-approving hour," when he feels in the still small voice that says to him "well done," the direct inspiration of his God.

It is a detestable heresy and one for which poets chiefly are responsible, which teaches that there is no scope for great talent in private life. The mute Milton must be reproached that he is also inglorious; the guiltless Cromwell is set in our estimation at a pin's fee in comparison with the guilty one. A presumption of inferiority is deduced from the want of notoriety, success becomes thus invidious, and bad feel ings are generated which cause half the misery of society. All this is wrong. It is in private life that the human mind is most generally destined and designed to act; it is thither ward that its highest qualities tendit is there they must seek their natural exercise, their appointed tasks, and their reward. It is there that poetry should follow them; there it should seek the undisguised, unstudied man, in the freshness, the originality, the rich variety of nature. The mask, the costume, the grimace of public life are gone; the monotony of etiquette and affectation have given place to the play of feeling, the ebbs and flows of passicn, and the modes, phases and phantasies, and caprices, that successive hours and days, and time, and chance, bring with them. But sock and buskin courage, rhetorical patriotism, and scenic love, have had their day; our relish of them is gone, and we even hate them, except indeed in the fresh simplicity of those earliest bards who sang when everything was new.

Yet we must have poetry; the desire of it is as natural to man as language; he makes it wherever he has words. The step humanity is now taking, the object it is now seeking, the inspiration which is now breathing through the vast mind of the million, must some

where reach its sublimest conception, and find its loftiest and purest expression, and there is the Poet of the Age. Of the age only, if his theme be local, personal or transitory; and of all ages, if it be deep and broad, and general. Chevy Chase may go to its repose,--it touches no chords that vibrate in this generation. We have all read it, and perhaps with a certain pleasure; but when the page is laid aside, there is nothing in our daily life to call it up to us again, and its traces are effaced from our minds. But Prospero's reflections on the vanity of the world, Claudio's on Death, or Isabel's apostrophe to Heaven on Mercy; these, for the very contrary reason, we never forget; nor can they ever, after they are once impressed upon our memories, be very long absent from our thoughts. Scenes fitted to recall them pass before us every day; and when they do so, these refining, softening, and elevating thoughts find a readier welcome in our minds, dwell in them longer, and exercise on them a more familiar influence, by the aid of the exquisite beauty of the language in which they present themselves. Without the informing spirit, the beauty of expression and imagery were nothing; the polishers of words would be just as well employed to polish pebbles; but the man who has made the forms his own in which our holiest thoughts are fain to dress themselves, who is the interpreter between us and them, is become something higher than a man; he is an influence and a power upon the souls of a people.

Take this view of a poet's office, and what is Petrarch? Take this view of the subjects of poetry, and what is Laura? View the world from this point, and we perceive immediately that the thoughts which master it, are something widely different from the shrewd devices which attract its eye or please its ear for a moment, or gain a certain command of its physical energies. They are thoughts which the noise of war and conquest does not suggest, which grasping schemes of domination are certain to shut out, and which dwell not in the aspirations of him who through any of the thousand paths of human life is seeking mainly his self-glorification. But they are breathed and reciprocated through a vast brotherhood of sympathising spir

its, each one of whom is alone but as a drop, but the whole are as a tide, setting with irresistible force towards a point to which it is now God's manifest will to conduct Humanity. The mountains and hills shall be brought low, the valleys shall be exalted, the proud shall be abased, and grace shall

be given to the humble; and the holiest and purest and highest endowments of which our nature is susceptible, shall be as abundantly developed in our society, as beryl and jacinth and chrysoprasus in the foundations of the New Jerusalem.

THE ANGEL OF TEARS.

BY WALTER WHITMAN.

HIGH, high in space floated the angel Alza. Of the spirits who minister in heaven Alza is not the chief; neither is he employed in deeds of great import, or in the destinies of worlds and generations. Yet if it were possible for envy to enter among the Creatures Beautiful, many would have pined for the station of Alza. There are a million million invisible eyes which keep constant watch over the earth-each Child of Light having his separate duty. Alza is one of the Angels of Tears.

Why waited he, as for commands from above?

There was a man upon whose brow rested the stamp of the guilt of Cain. The man had slain his brother. Now he lay in chains awaiting the terrible day when the doom he himself had inflicted should be meted to his own per

son.

People of the Black Souls!-beings whom the world shrinks from, and whose abode, through the needed severity of the law, is in the dark cell and massy prison-it may not be but that ye have, at times, thoughts of the beauty of virtue, and the blessing of a spotless mind. For if we look abroad in the world, and examine what is to be seen there, we will know, that in every human heart resides a mysterious prompting which leads it to love goodness for its own sake. All that is rational has this prompting. It never dies. It can never be entirely stifled. It may be darkened by the tempests and storms of guilt, but ever and anon the clouds roll away, and it shines out again. Murderers and thieves, and the most abandoned criminals, have been unable to deaden this faculty.

It came to be, that an hour arrived

when the heart of the imprisoned fratricide held strange imagining. Old lessons and long forgotten hints, about heaven, and purity, and love, and gentle kindness, floated into his memory

vacillating, as it were, like delicate sea-flowers on the bosom of the turgid ocean. He remembered him of his brother as a boy-how they played together of the summer afternoons-and how, wearied out at evening, they slept pleasantly in each other's arms. O, Master of the Great Laws! couldst thou but roll back the years, and place that guilty creature a child again by the side of that brother! Such were the futile wishes of the criminal. And as repentance and prayer worked forth from his soul, he sank on the floor drowsily, and a tear stood beneath his eyelids.

Repentance and prayer from him! What hope could there be for aspirations having birth in a source so pollut ed? Yet the Sense which is never sleepless heard that tainted soul's desire, and willed that an answering mission should be sent straightway.

When Alza felt the mind of the Almighty in his heart-for it was rendered conscious to him in the moment -he cleaved the air with his swift pinions, and made haste to perform the cheerful duty. Along and earthward he flew-seeing far, far below him, mountains, and towns, and seas, and stretching forests. At distance, in the immeasurable field wherein he travelled, was the eternal glitter of countless worlds-wheeling and whirling, and motionless never. After a brief while the Spirit beheld the city of his destination; and, drawing nigh, he hovered over it-that great city, shrouded in

the depths of night, and its many thousands slumbering.

Just as his presence, obedient to his desire, was transferring itself to the place where the murderer lay, he met one of his own kindred spreading his wings to rise from the ground.

"O, Spirit," said Alza, “what a sad scene is here!"

"I grow faint," the other answered, "at looking abroad through these guilty places. Behold that street to the right."

He pointed, and Alza, turning, saw rooms of people, some with their minds maddened by intoxication, some uttering horrid blasphemies-sensual creatures, and wicked, and mockers of all holiness.

"O, brother," said the Tear-Angel, "let us not darken our eyes with the sight. Let us on to our appointed missions. What is yours, my brother ?"

"Behold!" answered the Spirit.

And then Alza knew for the first time that there was a third living thing near by. With meek and abashed gesture, the soul of a girl just dead stood forth before them. Alza, without asking his companion, saw that the Spirit had been sent to guide and accompany the stranger through the Dark Windings.

So he kissed the brow of the re-born, and said,

"Be of good heart! Farewell, both!" And the soul and its monitor departed upward, and Alza went into the dungeon.

Then, like a swinging vapor, the form of the Tear-Angel was by and over the body of the sleeping man. To his vision, night was as day, and day as night.

At first, something like a shudder went through him, for when one from the Pure Country approaches the wickedness of evil, the presence thereof is made known to him by an instinctive pain. Yet a moment, and the gentle Spirit cast glances of pity on the unconscious fratricide. In the great Mystery of Life, Alza remembered, though even he understood it not, it had been settled by the Unfathomable that Sin and Wrong should be. And the angel knew too, that Man, with all the darkness and the clouds about him, might not be contemned, even by the Princes of the Nighest Circle to the White Throne.

He slept. His hair, coarse and tangly through neglect, lay in masses about his head, and clustered over his neck. One arm was doubled under his cheek, and the other stretched straight forward. Long steady breaths, with a kind of hissing sound, came from his lips.

So he slumbered calmly. So the fires of a furnace, at night, though not extinguished, slumber calmly, when its swarthy ministers impel it not. Haply, he dreamed some innocent dream. Sleep on, dream on, outcast! There will soon be for you a reality harsh enough to make you wish those visions had continued alway, and you never awakened.

Oh, it is not well to look coldly and mercilessly on the bad done by our fellows. That convict-that being of the bloody hand-who could know what palliations there were for his guilt? Who might say there was no premature seducing aside from the walks of honesty-no seed of evil planted by others in his soul during the early years? Who should tell he was not so bred, that had he at manhood possessed aught but propensities for evil it would have been miraculous indeed? Who might dare cast the first stone?

The heart of man is a glorious temple; yet its Builder has seen fit to let it become, to a degree, like the Jewish structure of old, a mart for gross traf fic, and the presence of unchaste things. In the Shrouded Volume, doubtless, it might be perceived how this is a part of the mighty and beautiful Harmony; but our eyes are mortal, and the film is over them.

The Angel of Tears bent him by the side of the prisoner's head. An instant more, and he rose, and seemed about to depart, as one whose desire had been attained. Wherefore does that pleasant look spread like a smile over the features of the slumberer?

In the darkness overhead yet linger the soft wings of Alza. Swaying above the prostrate mortal, the Spirit bends his white neck, and his face is shaded by the curls of his hair, which hang about him like a golden cloud. Shaking the beautiful tresses back, he stretches forth his hands, and raises his large eyes upward, and speaks murmuringly in the language used among the Creatures Beautiful:

"I come. Spirits of Pity and Love, favored children of the Loftiest-whose

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ABOUT three years ago the name of Mr. Cambreleng was introduced in the present series, but owing to his absence from the country-(he was then travelling in Europe, before his appointment to the Russian Mission)-it was not in our power to procure a portrait, from which an engraving might be taken. That which serves as the usual monthly embellishment of our present Number, is copied with admirable fidelity from a Daguerreotype miniature recently executed by an artist in that line, who has certainly carried it to a degree of perfection unsurpassed, if equalled, on our side of the

Atlantic.

Mr. Cambreleng, who returned about a year ago from St. Petersburg, to which court he was appointed Minister by Mr. Van Buren, has long held a prominent position before the public eye, as one of the ablest and most consistent supporters of democratic principles, and of that liberal public policy which is closely akin to democratic principles, and which is comprised in the one expression, the result of all the analysis of the science of Political Economy, Free Trade. More distinctively, perhaps, than any feature of his public life, this may be said to constitute the chief characteristic which marks and individualizes him as a politician and a statesman.

He was born at Washington, North Carolina, in October, 1786. His name was derived from his great-grandfather, Churchill Caldom, whose father came from Scotland, and settled on the Pamlico River, in the beginning of the last

century. On the maternal side he is the grandson of Col. John Patten, a gallant revolutionary officer, who was a major in the second regiment in the North Carolina line, and who bore an honorable part in the battles of the Brandy wine, Germantown, and Monmouth, and in the defence of Charleston.

Mr. Cambreleng, by the death of his father, was left an orphan at an early age, the oldest of four children-three sons and a daughter; and the straitened circumstances of his family, occasioned by the long absence of his grandfather from home, while engaged in the service of his country, and the necessary sacrifices of such a period, together with the early death of his father, deprived him of the advantages of classical education. He was compelled to return home from the academy at Newbern, at which his first rudiments of instruction had been acquired, before the age of twelve years. None acquainted with Mr. Cambreleng can fail, however, to be made sensible how well this deficiency has been since supplied, by the native energies of a remarkably vigorous and observing mind, by self-cultivation, and by extensive travel both at home and abroad. At school he had been very ambitious, and soon, though but a short time enjoying its advantages, outstripped in a signal manner all his competitors for its distinctions. He was then studying with the expectation of being sent to Princeton College, when he was compelled to leave the academy, and retire to his grandmother's plantation, or

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