day appointed he opened the new debate upon it in an earnest speech. General discussion followed from time to time, occupying perhaps half the days of the month of January. As at the previous session, the Republicans all favored, while the Democrats mainly opposed it, but the important exceptions among the latter showed what immense gains the proposition had made in popular opinion and in congressional willingness to recognize and embody it. The logic of events had become more powerful than party creed or strategy. For fifteen years the Democratic party had stood as sentinel and bulwark to slavery; and yet, despite its alliance and championship, the peculiar institution was being consumed like dry leaves in the fire of war. For a whole decade it had been defeated in every great contest of congressional debate and legislation. It had withered in popular elections, been paralyzed by confiscation laws, crushed by Executive decrees, trampled upon by marching Union armies. More notable than all, the agony of dissolution had come upon it in its final stronghold-the constitutions of the slave States. Local public opinion had throttled it in West Virginia, in Missouri, in Arkansas, in Louisiana, in Maryland; and the same spirit of change was upon Tennessee, and even showing itself in Kentucky. Here was a great revolution of ideas, a mighty sweep of sentiment, which could not be explained away by the stale charge of sectional fanaticism, or by alleging technical irregularities of political procedure. Here was a mighty flood of public opinion, overleaping old barriers and rushing into new channels. The Democratic party did not and could not shut its eyes to the accomplished facts. "In my judgment," said Mr. Holman of Indiana, "the fate of slavery is sealed. It dies by the rebellious hand of its votaries, untouched by the law. Its fate is determined by the war; by the measures of the war; by the results of the war. These, sir, must determine it, even if the Constitution were amended."1 He opposed the amendment, he declared, simply because it was unnecessary. Though few other Democrats were so frank, all their speeches were weighed down by the same consciousness of a losing fight, a hopeless cause. The Democratic leader of the House, and lately defeated Democratic candidate for Vice-President, Mr. Pendleton, opposed the amendment, as he had done at the previous session, by asserting that three-fourths of the States did not possess constitutional power to pass it, this being—if the paradox be excused at the same time the weakest and the strongest argument: weakest, because the Constitution in terms contradicted the assertion; strongest, because under the circumstances nothing less than unconstitutionality could jus tify opposition. But while the Democrats as a party thus persisted in a false attitude, more progressive members had the courage to take independent and wiser action. Not only did the four Democrats - Moses F. Odell and John A. Griswold, of New York; Joseph Baily, of Pennsylvania; and Ezra Wheeler, of Wisconsin-who supported the amendment at the first session again record their votes in its favor, but they were now joined by thirteen others of their party associates, namely: Augustus C. Baldwin, of Michigan; Alexander H. Coffroth and Archibald McAllister, of Pennsylvania; James E. English, of Connecticut; John Ganson, Anson Herrick, Homer A. Nelson, William Radford, and John B. Steele, of New York; Wells A. Hutchins, of Ohio; Austin A. King and James S. Rollins, of Missouri; and George H. Yeaman, of Kentucky; and by their help the favorable two-thirds vote was secured. But special credit for the result must not be accorded to these alone. Even more than of Northern Democrats must be recognized the courage and progressive liberality of members from the border slave States - one from Delaware, four from Maryland, three from West Virginia, four from Kentucky, and seven from Missouri, whose speeches and votes aided the consummation of the great act; and, finally, something is due to those Democrats, eight in number, who were absent without pairs, and thus, perhaps not altogether by accident, reduced somewhat the two-thirds vote necessary to the passage of the joint resolution. Mingled with these influences of a public and moral nature it is not unlikely that others of more selfish interest, operating both for and against the amendment, were not entirely wanting. One, who was a member of the House, writes: The success of the measure had been considered very doubtful, and depended upon certain negotiations the result of which was not fully assured, and the particulars of which never reached the public.2 So also one of the President's secretaries wrote on the 18th of January: I went to the President this afternoon at the request of Mr. Ashley, on a matter connecting itself with the pending amendment of the Constitution. The Camden and Amboy railroad interest promised Mr. Ashley that if he would help postpone would in return make the New Jersey Democrats the Raritan railroad bill over this session they help about the amendment, either by their votes or absence. Sumner being the Senate champion of the Raritan bill, Ashley went to him to ask him to drop it for this session. Sumner, however, showed reluctance to adopt Mr. Ashley's suggestion, saying that he hoped the amendment would pass anyhow, 1 " Globe," Jan. 11, 1865, p. 219. 2 George W. Julian," Political Recollections," p. 250. etc. Ashley thought he discerned in Sumner's manner two reasons: (1) That if the present Senate resolution were not adopted by the House, the Senate would send them another in which they would most likely adopt Sumner's own phraseology and thereby gratify his ambition; and (2) that Sumner thinks the defeat of the Camden and Amboy monopoly would establish a principle by legislative enactment which would effectually crush out the last lingering relics of the States rights dogma. Ashley therefore desired the President to send for Sumner, and urge him to be practical and secure the passage of the amendment in the manner suggested by Mr. Ashley. I stated these points to the President, who replied at once: "I can do nothing with Mr. Sumner in these matters. While Mr. Sumner is very cordial with me, he is making his history in an issue with me on this very point. He hopes to succeed in beating the President so as to change this Government from its original form and make it a strong centralized power." Then calling Mr. Ashley into the room, the President said to him, "I think I understand Mr. Sumner; and I think he would be all the more resolute in his persistence on the points which Mr. Nicolay has mentioned to me if he supposed I were at all watching his course on this matter."1 The issue was decided in the afternoon of the 31st of January, 1865. The scene was one of unusual interest. The galleries were filled to overflowing; the members watched the proceedings with unconcealed solicitude. "Up to noon," said a contemporaneous formal report, "the pro-slavery party are said to have been confident of defeating the amendment, and after that time had passed, one of the most earnest advocates of the measure said, ""T is the toss of a copper.'" 2 There were the usual pleas for postponement and for permission to offer amendments or substitutes, but at four o'clock the House came to a final vote, and the rollcall showed, yeas, 119; nays, 56; not voting, 8. Scattering murmurs of applause had followed the announcement of affirmative votes from several of the Democratic members. This was renewed when by direction of the Speaker the clerk called his name and he voted aye. But when the Speaker finally announced, "The constitutional majority of two-thirds having voted in the affirmative, the joint resolution is passed," "the announcement" - so continues the official report printed in the "Globe" "was received by the House and by the spectators with an outburst of enthusiasm. The members on the Republican side of the House instantly sprung to their feet, and, regardless of parliamentary rules, applauded with cheers and clapping of hands. The example was followed by the male spectators in the gal 1 J. G. N., " Personal Memoranda." MS. 2 Report of Special Committee of the Union League Club of New York. Pamphlet. 3 "Globe," Jan. 31, 1865, p. 531. leries, which were crowded to excess, who waved their hats and cheered loud and long, while the ladies, hundreds of whom were present, rose in their seats and waved their handkerchiefs, participating in and adding to the general excitement and intense interest of the scene. This lasted for several minutes."3 "In honor of this immortal and sublime event," cried Mr. Ingersoll of Illinois, "I move that the House do now adjourn," and against the objection of a Maryland Democrat the motion was carried by a yea and nay vote. A salute of one hundred guns soon made the occasion the subject of comment and congratulation throughout the city. On the following night a considerable procession marched with music to the Executive Mansion to carry popular greetings to the President. In response to their calls, Mr. Lincoln appeared at a window and made a brief speech, of which only an abstract report was preserved, but which is nevertheless important as showing the searching analysis of cause and effect which this question had undergone in his mind, the deep interest he felt, and the far-reaching consequences he attached to the measure and its success. He supposed [he said] the passage through Congress of the constitutional amendment for the abolishment of slavery throughout the United States was the occasion to which he was indebted for the honor of this call. The occasion was one of congratulation to the country and to the whole world. But there is a task yet before us-to go forward and have consummated by the votes of the States that which Congress had so nobly begun yesterday. He had the honor to inform those present that Illinois had to-day already done the work. Maryland was about half through, but he felt proud that Illinois was a little ahead. He thought this measure was a very fitting if not an indispensable adjunct to the winding up of the great difficulty. He wished the reunion of all the States perfected, and so effected as to remove all causes of disturbance in the future; and to attain this end, it was if possible, be rooted out. He thought all would necessary that the original disturbing cause should, bear him witness that he had never shrunk from doing all that he could to eradicate slavery, by issuing an Emancipation Proclamation. But that proclamation falls far short of what the amendment will be when fully consummated. A question might be raised whether the proclamation was legally that came into our lines, and that it was inoperative valid. It might be urged, that it only aided those as to those who did not give themselves up; or that it would have no effect upon the children of slaves born hereafter; in fact, it would be urged that it did not meet the evil. But this amendment is a king's cure-all for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up. He would repeat, that it was the fitting if not the indispensable adjunct to the consummation of the great game we are playing. He could not but congratulate all present himself, the country, and the whole world-upon this great moral victory. IN SORROW'S HOUR. HE brambles blow without you,-at the door They make late April, and the brier too Buds its first rose for other folk than you; Like flakes of flame blown down the gray, still air; Put my hand in your hand, feel the dear grace Lizette Wordworth Reese. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI (1402-12-1469). HE character of the work of Masaccio in art may be compared to that of Luther in religion, in kind if not in measure. It was the first bold and unequivocal departure from the authority of the traditions of art recognized by all the followers of Giotto, the first frank declaration of the value of individuality in art. Like Luther's, this reform did not extend to the repudiation of the great motives of the fathers, but was devoted to limitation of the manner of interpreting them and the forms they should take. The example set by Masaccio of turning his back on the world of the ecstatics and the types of authority and opening his eyes to the living flesh and blood about him was followed by his pupil, Fra Filippo Lippi, with a hearty and unreserved abandonment to the logical consequences, which would perhaps have surprised and repelled the master as much as the later doctrines of reform would have shocked Luther. In Masaccio we found the first unbiased, natural inspiration; in Filippo we have the first direct recourse to the individual as a substitute for the ideal. For though far from ideal in the large and now generally accepted use of the word, embracing the old and the new, the Greek as well as the Christian, the Byzantine type was an ideal as completely as the Phidian, and the imagery of the ecstatic school was drawn from the inner vision. Its Christ was the man of many sorrows, emaciated by spirit ual struggles and not beautiful to look on; its Madonna, the woman who mothered all human griefs-spiritual ideals, between which and the Greek ideals of physical beauty there was all the antagonism of the religions from which they grew. Not to push a parallel too far, the art of the school of Masaccio was an art involving the reform of externals; and in it, as might be expected, the departure of the followers in reform from the old canons was a rapidly accelerating progress. In Filippo the ideal becomes personal; and whatever may be the truth as to the stories of his relations to Lucrezia Buti, there is no mistaking the fact that some fair face had come between his eyes and the Madonna. The forms of beauty to him became all of one mold, and there is for the first time in the progress of Christian art a distinct and systematic employment of the individual and the personal in the representation of sacred personages, especially of the Madonna, an employment which later becomes the rule. No doubt the work of Donatello contributed greatly to this result, but that was still ideal. His system of types had a kind of individuality not known before in sculpture; but those types, distinct as they were, do not bear the mark of the model, but seem rather the outcome of an imaginative conception of the character more analogous to Greek idealization than to that of the art which began with Fra Filippo. From this time forward the naturalism of painting becomes more and more This whole story is denied by modern historians. Cavalcaselle declares that Fra Filippo was never at Ancona or at Naples; that he never abandoned his monkhood, since he signed himself to the end "Frater Filippus," and was by others given the same name; and finally that Vasari is untruthful when he speaks of the Carmelite as a dissolute man, as a letter of his to Piero de' Medici shows him in a very different light. In this letter he complains of having been underpaid for one of his pictures, and says that it has pleased Heaven to leave him the poorest friar in Florence, in charge of six marriageable nieces, who are entirely dependent on him: he begs Piero to allow him a grant of corn and wine to support them while he is away. concrete; and though direct work from a model painted a panel in tempera for King Alfonso, as practiced to-day does not appear for a long and then returned to Florence. time after Fra Filippo, the naturalistic element gains strength with every generation of painters. It is not easy to decide upon the exact date of Fra Filippo's birth. Vasari says in his first edition 1402, in the second, 1412; and if we could accept his assertion that the Frate died at the age of fifty-seven the latter date would be correct, for we know that he was buried in 1469. The records state that he was the son of a Florentine butcher, that his mother died in 1412, shortly after his birth, and that his father died two years later, leaving the orphan to the care of an aunt, Monna Lapaccia, a woman in poor circumstances, as were all his relatives. Milanesi, however, says that the ledger of the Carmelite convent where Filippo passed his youth states that he professed at the age of sixteen, the date given being 1421, which would put the date of his birth at 1405-06. The legend runs that Monna Lapaccia kept him till he was eight years old, when, unable to support him longer, she placed him in the monastery of the Carmine, which, as fate would have it, was in the immediate vicinity of her house. Here the boy proved to be dexterous in all kinds of handicraft, but absolutely dull and indolent at his books. The "grammar-master" could make nothing of him: instead of studying he drew little figures all over his own and his classmates' books, so at last the prior very sensibly put him to drawing, and gave him every facility for developing his talent. Masaccio's frescos in the monastery were a source of great delight to the boy artist, who would spend long hours every day studying them. He made such rapid progress that every one prophesied that he would become famous, and Vasari says that "many thought that the spirit of Masaccio must have entered into Filippo." He painted many frescos in the Carmine, all of which have perished. In 1431-32 he seems to have left the monastery, though the reasons that are attributed to him for so doing are of the most opposite natures. Vasari says that, having become elated by the praise of all those who saw his work, he cast off his monkish garb and went into the world, where he led a life of dissipation. Being one day at Ancona in a little pleasure-boat with some friends, the party was captured by Moorish pirates and carried off to Barbary, where Filippo remained eighteen months. One day he amused himself by drawing his master in charcoal on a white wall, and this feat so much astonished and delighted the Moors that, having caused him to paint one or two pictures for them, they took him to Naples and set him free. There he This certainly does not look like the letter of a man whom, according to Vasari, Piero de' Medici was forced to lock up in order to get any work done, and who knotted his sheets together and escaped by the window after two days to get off and revel. Vasari relates that, being engaged by the nuns of St. Margaret to paint a panel, he fell in love with a young girl of whom the Sisters had charge, Lucrezia ButiFilippino Lippi being, according to this account, the child of this unlawful union. This again Cavalcaselle indignantly denies, and points out that it is unlikely that so immoral a person as was Fra Filippo should have been created chaplain to a convent of nuns in 1452, and rector of St. Quirico at Legnaia in 1457. He supposes the younger artist to have been adopted by the older, as was frequently done in those days. Very few of Fra Filippo's earliest works are known. Probably the Nativity in the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence belongs to the period of his monastic life, and it may be the one painted for Cosimo de' Medici of which Vasari speaks. It shows the influence of Fra Angelico much more than his later work. Another altar-piece, in the Berlin museum, bearing his signature, belongs to the same epoch. In the Louvre is a Madonna and Child painted by Fra Filippo at the age of twenty-six; in the Lateran Gallery another altar-piece, executed to the order of Carlo Marzuppini, in which the donor of the piece is introduced. Vasari says that Marzuppini called the artist's attention to the careless manner in which the hands and feet were drawn, and that Fra Filippo hid them with the drapery to hide their imperfection-one of those curious technical details continually occurring in the history of the art of this epoch which shows as clearly as any tradition can that the practice of drawing the subject from the model was not yet adopted, but that the figure was drawn from traditional and inherited knowledge of it, as it had been by the Byzantines. To understand the relations of the Italian art of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, it is necessary to have this always in mind, as it will then be easy to see how far and how fast the practice obtained of drawing from nature as a preparation for the final work. In 1441 Fra Filippo executed a commission for the nuns of S. Ambrogio; and in the "Coronation of the Virgin," which he executed for them, there is a half-length portrait of himself, tonsured, which proves that at least as late as 1441 he retained the badge of monastic life. From this time Fra Filippo seems to have orders enough, one would think, to furnish means of subsistence for any number of relatives, yet he appears to have remained poor and needy. The Medici took him under their patronage, and in 1452 he was made chaplain in the convent of S. Giovannino in Florence. In 1456 he was at Prato, painting the series of frescos in the choir of the cathedral, which remains on the whole the most important of his works, both for size and for preservation. The next year he received an order from Giovanni de' Medici to leave his work and come to Florence and paint a picture for the king of Naples; and though loath to return to Florence, on account of debts he owed there, he obeyed his patron. We have a letter of his begging for money to buy the gold-leaf he needed to complete the picture; and the agent of the Medici, who went to his shop to urge him on with his work, says in a letter to Cosimo that he found a sale going on in Filippo's studio to pay his rent and some other debts. The picture for the king, and one for Count de Rohan, were sent to Naples, and gave much satisfaction, as we learn from a letter of Cosimo's; but they are no longer there, unless a panel in the museum, somewhat like one in the National Gallery, London, be by him; but it appears to me more like the work of Filippino. In the Pitti Gallery, Florence, there is an admirable madonna by Fra Filippo, which he is said to have painted from Lucrezia Buti. The head is of the same type as most of his representations of women. There is another reputed portrait of Lucrezia in the Louvre, but Cavalcaselle says the picture is not even by Fra Filippo, and attributes it to Peselli. At Prato, in the gallery, there is a madonna by Filippo, and in the municipal gallery a Virgin and Child with attendant saints. In the refectory of S. Dominico there is an extremely fine Nativity, which, with the frescos noted in the cathedral, shows that Fra Filippo's stay in Prato must have been a considerable one. His work there however seems to have suffered several interruptions. The first, as we have seen, was caused by a summons from his patron. In 1461 he went to Perugia to value the frescos of Benedetto Buonfigli in the chapel of the Palazzo del Comune; in 1463 and 1464 we find the representatives of Prato meeting in great perplexity as to how the painter can be forced to finish his work, for which he has been in part paid, and deciding to ask Messer Carlo de' Medici to interfere. By some means or other the frescos were completed, and in the last of the series, the "Death of S. Stefano," Lippi introduced a fine portrait of Carlo de' Medici, and one of himself. From Prato, Fra Filippo seems to have gone to Spoleto, where he painted in the cathedral several scenes from the life of the Virgin, which still remain, though in a damaged condition, being, moreover, never finished, as he died there in 1469, poisoned according to Vasari again-by the relatives of one of his mistresses. Lorenzo de' Medici erected a tomb to him in the cathedral of Spoleto, and Politian wrote his epitaph. One of Fra Filippo's chief pupils was Fra Diamante. Cavalcaselle brings forward the theory that he, and not his master, was guilty of Lucrezia's seduction, and that all the libertinism attributed by Vasari to Fra Filippo should be laid on his disciple. This he deduces from the fact that while Fra Filippo was at Prato, completing his commissions there, Fra Diamante was imprisoned in Florence, by order of his superior, and did not join his master till the latter went to Spoleto. He thinks that Fra Filippo would not have been able to continue at Prato had he been guilty of the crime Vasari charges him with, for fear of the vendetta which Lucrezia's father and the nuns would assuredly have tried to bring upon him. The sacrilegious intrigue, on account of which the life of the Frate has been so charged with obloquy, seems to me to be disputed with reason by Cavalcaselle, and the alleged poisoning at Spoleto for a similar offense is one of those vague statements of which the history of the Middle and subsequent ages is full. Any sudden death was attributed to poisoning, though we know now that many forms of malarial disease, for some of which Italy has always been noted, cause death as sudden and mysterious as poison. There were in Lippi's day no tests and no post-mortems, and suspicion was universal. And where suspicion of poisoning arose a motive was sure to be supplied. Current rumors are not evidence sufficient to establish accusations of such gravity that if recognized by the ecclesiastical authorities they would have brought Fra Filippo before the Inquisition. It is possible, and indeed probable, that the |