the cause of that blight which had so suddenly fallen upon her late healthful frame. "My daughter," said he," how long have you been ill?" →

"I wrote from the very first," was her equivocal reply. For the first time in her life, she felt that she had deceived her father, and keen as were her sufferings from another cause, this thought gave her an additional pang. "It will soon be over," thought she, "and I will not add to their sorrows by telling them of the cause of the disease of which I am dying."

When she reached home, she wept for the first time since the blow, as her mother's tears flowed fast over the change that a few days had wrought in her darling child. Friends gathered around her, the choicest medical skill was put in requisition, but in vain. She continued to fade and wither almost as rapidly as the flower which has been nipped by an untimely frost. She uttered no complaint. She knew in whom she had believed. Ere the time of her release came, her friends were consoled by the assurance that she desired to depart and be at rest. She passed away at evening, at the very hour which she was accustomed to spend with him who was now far away. A smile was upon her wan lips as her broken hearted parents received her last breath, and felt the last throb of that heart that had beat so warmly.

Many were the tears that were shed, and many the expressions of sympathy for the absent one. They knew not that his was the hand which gave the blow.

Among her papers was the following letter to Parker, with directions that it should be forwarded to him after her decease. My beloved Friend:

I am now in a condition to speak without reserve. Had it been in my power to have done so at all times, we should have been spared much of what we have suffered. I say we, for your letter proves, that all unworthy as I was, I did not err when I entertained the fond belief that I had the first place in your warm and generous heart. You have suffered and I have wept for you. I cannot die without telling you, you were in error. If there ever was

a heart that could estimate the full value of a love like yours, that heart was mine- however unworthy it may have been of yours in other respects. I was unwilling to be absent from L-for a single day when you were there. I intended to return in a week or two at the most. Your note caused my immediate return, and I will not conceal it, I brought with me the sentence of death. I have suffered silently. What has passed between us is known to God alone.

I needed this disappointment, this suffering. Earth had else been too pleasant for me. I had else been an idolater. In the solemn circumstances in which I write, I feel it proper to speak without reserve. May your sufferings be sanctified to you. May we meet where misapprehension cannot find a place, where life is love a love unalloyed by the imperfections of earth. I leave

you my Bible. I have written your name in it near my own. Study it that you may be wise unto salvation. Yours, in my heart's best affections,

F. R.

The letter was forwarded to Parker, who was residing at an university on the continent, rivalling even the iron diligence of a German student. On its receipt he hastened to his native land. He hastened to the grave of Fanny, where night after night he spent hours of unavailing sorrow. He begged her parents to regard him as their son. He took up his abode in their house. He occupied the chamber that had been hers. He sat in her seat and kneeled in her place at the family altar. He studied her Bible daily and pondered on its passages, especially those that had been marked by her hand. A change gradually came over his griefstricken spirit. With a chastened diligence he renewed his attention to his studies and entered at length on the labors of his profession from a sense of duty. Truth and righteousness found in him an able advocate. Honors and offices, at which his heart would once have leaped with joy, were now accepted only at the call of duty. The glory of the world had lost its charm, and ere thirty winters had passed over him, time had written many a wrinkle in his once haughty brow, and sprinkled with frost his once raven hair, and ere he had journeyed half a score of years further onwards, he was as a wayworn pilgrim, sighing for his place of rest. The hour of his release was not long in coming. He had performed as an hireling his day, and rejoiced to receive his discharge. Though the visions of glory that flitted before his youthful vision had faded, and the dreams of his heart were never realized; yet he felt that he had not lived in vain. He adored that mercy which had made the wreck of all his hopes by his own perversity, the occasion of his preparation to meet his beloved in "the better land."

THE DESTINIES OF POETRY.

[From the French of Lamartine.]

BY L'A.

So long as man himself endures, can man's noblest faculty perish? What, after all, is poetry? Like all else in us that is divine, it cannot be defined by one word nor by a thousand. It is the incarnation of the deepest things of the heart and the most godlike things of the intellect: of the most magnificent originals of external nature and its most melodious sounds. It is at once sentiment and sensation, spirit and matter; and therefore it is that complete language, that peculiar language which satisfies the en

tire man; for the intellect, ideas; for the soul, sentiment; images for the imagination and melody for the ear. Therefore it is that this language when fitly spoken, transfixes man like the thunderbolt, overcomes him with internal conviction and unreasoned proofs or intoxicates like a love-potion and lulls him motionless and charmed, like a cradled infant, to the loving accents of a mother's voice. This also is the reason why man can neither produce nor bear much poetry: for, laying hold of the entire man, by the soul and the sense, and exalting at once his two-fold powers, the intellect by thought, the sense by feeling, it exhausts him, it soon overwhelms him, like every excess of pleasure, with voluptuous weariness, and makes him pour forth in a few lines, and in a few moments, all the life and sentient power that exist in his two-fold being. Prose addresses itself only to the intellect; poetry at once to the intellect and the sensibilities. This language, mysterious, instinctive as it is, or rather for the very reason that it is instinctive and mysterious, will never die. It is not, as they have not ceased to declare, despite the denials of successive ages, it is not merely the language of a people's infancy, the stammerings of human intelligence; it is the language of all the ages of mankind, naïve and simple, when at the cradle of the nations, loquacious and marvellous as a nurse beside the child's pillow; sentimental and pastoral among young and pastoral nations; warlike and epic among warlike and conquering tribes; mystical, lyric, prophetic or aphoristic in the theocracies of Egypt or Judea; grave, philosophical and corrupting in the advanced civilization of Rome, Florence or of Louis XIV.; frenzied and clamorous in periods of convulsion and ruin as in '93; fresh, melancholy, doubting, timid and bold, all together, as at present: afterwards, in the old age of nations, sad, gloomy, grieving and discouraged as the people itself; now breathing in its verses doleful presentiments, fantastic reveries of the world's last catastrophe, and again the firm and divine hopes of a resurrection for humanity under another form. Such is Poetry. It is man himself; it is the echo from within, of all his impressions; it is the voice of thinking and seeing humanity caught up and attuned by certain men, more truly men than the people-mens divinior-and which floats above this tumultuous and commingled noise of generations and survives them; witnessing to posterity their sorrows or their joys, their deeds or their imaginings. This voice shall never be extinct here below; for it is not man that invented it. God himself gave it to man; and it is the first cry of humanity that uprose to Him! It will be the last cry, too, that the Creator shall hear from his creature when He shall destroy it. Sprung from Him, to Him it must return..

One day, I had planted my tent in a stony field where grew a few knotty and stunted olives, under the walls of Jerusalem, a few hundred feet from the tower of David and just above the fountain of Siloah, which still flows along the worn pavement of its grotto, near the tomb of the poet-king who has so often sung

its praise. The high, black terraces which once supported the temple of Solomon arose on my left, crowned by the three blue cupolas and the light and airy columns of the mosque of Omar, which now stands upon the ruins of Jehovah's house. The city of Jerusalem, which the plague was then ravaging, was flooded with the rays of a blinding sun, thrown back from its thousand domes, its white marbles, its towers of gilded stone and its walls, polished by time and by the salt winds of the Dead sea. Not a sound arose from its interior-silent and mournful as the couch of a dying man; its large gates opened, and you saw now and then the white turban and red cloak of the Arabian soldier, the useless sentinel of those abandoned walls: nothing entered, nothing came out. Only the morning wind lifted the heaving dust of the highway, and produced for a moment the illusion of a caravan; but when the breath of wind had passed, when it had gone to expire upon the battlements of the Pisan tower, or on the three palmtrees of the house of Caiaphas, the dust fell again-the desert was once more visible: but the step of no camel nor mule sounded upon the pavement of the way. Only every quarter-hour, the two embossed doors of each gate of Jerusalem unfolded and we saw pass out those who had died of the plague, whom two naked slaves bore upon biers toward the tombs scattered around us. Sometimes a long procession of Turks, Arabs, Armenians and Jews accompanied the dead and drew off, singing, among the low olive trees; then returned, silently and slow, into the city. But the dead were oftener unattended. And when the two slaves had dug the sand, or the earth of the hill-side, to a few palms' depth and placed the dead in his last couch, they sat down upon the mound which they had just raised, divided among themselves the garments of the deceased, and, lighting their long pipes, they smoked in silence and watched the smoke of the chibouks, rising in light blue columns, and vanishing away gracefully in the clear, transparent air of those autumn days. At my feet, stretched away the valley of Jehosaphat like a vast sepulchre: the parched Kedron, strewn with large pebbles, seemed to cut it as with a white furrow, and the two hill-sides that enclosed it were all white with tombs and with the sculptured turbans-the common monument of the Osmanlis. A little on the right, the hill of Olivet was dimly seen, and between the scattered chains of volcanic cones among the mountains of Jericho and of Saint Sabba, the horizon lengthened itself like an avenue of light between the tops of waving cypresses: the eye sought the spot involuntarily, attracted by the blue, livid lustre of the Dead sea, which glistened at the foot of those mountains; while behind, the blue hills of Arabia Petræa bounded the whole scene. But to bound is not the word, for the hills seemed transparent as crystal; and you saw, or thought you saw beyond, a vague and undefined horizon stretching still farther away and floating on the ambient exhalations of an atmosphere tinged with purple and glimmering red.

It was noon: the hour when the Muezzin spies the sun from the highest gallery of the minaret and, each hour, sings forth the hour and its prayer-a living, animated voice, that understands what it utters and what it sings; far more eloquent, it seems to me, than the stupid, unconscious voice of our cathedral bells. My Arabs had given the goat skin of barley to the horses tied here and there around my tent. With their feet bound to the rings of iron, the noble and gentle beasts stood motionless; their heads bent down and covered by their long, scattered inanes, and their gray coats shining and smoking beneath the rays of a vertical sun. My men gathered under the shade of the largest olive; they had spread their Damascus mats upon the ground, and now smoked in company, telling tales of the desert or singing the verses of Antar-Antar, that ideal of the wandering Arab, at once shepherd, warrior and poet, who had described the desert to perfection in his national songs; sublime as Homer, plaintive as Job, sentimental as Theocritus, philosophical as Solomon. His verses which soothe or fire the imagination of the Arab as much as the smoke of the narguilé, arose in guttural sounds from the animated group of my Saïs; and when the poet touched more skilfully or profoundly the delicate chord of those wild but susceptible men, you heard a slight murmur from their lips; they joined their hands, raised them above their ears, and bowing the head, cried, one after another, Allah! Allah! Allah! A few paces from me, a young Turkish woman, seated on one of those little monuments of white stone with which the hill-sides around Jerusalem are so thickly strewn, was bewailing her dead husband. She seemed hardly eighteen or twenty years of age, and I never saw so ravishing an image of grief. Her profile, which the veil, thrown be hind, permitted me to see, had all the purity of outline in the most faultless heads of the Parthenon; but at the same time, the softness, the suavity and the graceful languor of the Asiatic women,a beauty infinitely more feminine, more voluptuous, more fascinating than that severe and somewhat masculine beauty of the Grecian statues. Her hair, of a sort of golden blond, a color much esteemed in this land of the sun, of whose rays it is a kind of permanent reflection-her hair, unbound, fell all around her and literally swept the ground. Her bosom was entirely uncovered, as is the custom with the women in this part of Arabia; and when she bent over to embrace the sculptured turban or to place her ear against the tomb, her naked breast touched the earth and left its impress in the sand, like that mould from the beautiful bosom of the buried Atala, which the dust of the sepulchre still retained. She had strewn the tomb and the earth around with all kinds of flowers; a beautiful Damascus carpet lay under her knees. Upon the carpet were some vases of flowers and a light basket filled with figs and grains of barley; for this woman was about to pass the entire day in her lamentation. A hole dug in the ground, and which, as she thought, corresponded with the ear