rougher but more quaint old play of the kind starting up now and then in the Tyrol. The very careful account of Miracle Plays generally, and of the Oberammergau play, which has already appeared in this Magazine (January, 1871) renders it unnecessary for me to go into the details of the performance which I witnessed. The impressiveness of the scene of the crucifixion was only marred whenever any word was spoken. In every interval of absolute silence the scene seemed to gather about it the inaudible voices of an invisible host-of martyrs and confessors, and of the millions who had lived and died with that form ever before their eyes—and we were encircled by the cloud of witnesses. ed not only by the influences I have named (it being as lucrative as a fair to their sterile district), but also by the fact that the specialty of the village-ornamental woodcarving-has led the villagers to study carefully holy figures and saintly forms. The one art has played into the hands of the other. The very children are constantly employed in helping to copy the conventional forms, faces, draperies, of Christian art. When not working they get up little tableaux to personate saints and apostles. Thus this kind of representation has become the animating soul of Oberammergau. The Jewish mother of old hardly looked forward with more awe and hope to the possibility that the real Messiah might be born in her home than the Ammergau mother to the vision of a dramatic Christ or Madonna being born of her household. The persons who are to represent the various characters are selected by the voice of the community, and it is de-ed whale's mouth was laughable. An old clared that they fix upon the most pious man at my side takes a draught out of his man for the Christ and on the most avaricious long stone pot of beer, and remarks the for the Judas of the play. That the long whale looks more astonished than Jonah. presence of this peculiar institution has ex- But, on the whole, as a series of Bible picercised a potent moral influence on the at- tures, the performance was very effective. mosphere of the village I am convinced. Before us passed the scenes of Cain and Abel, There is about the Ammergauer a gentle Joab and Amasa, foreshadowing the treachand pious air, a Samaritan-like tendency to ery of Judas; Jacob receiving Joseph's coat, pause with total strangers and ask if it is suggesting the cruelties to Christ; Abraham well with them; a religious tone in every-day about to sacrifice Isaac, typifying the sacrilife, which suggests that the holy drama in fice of Christ; the raising of Esther and huwhich they have been for so many genera-miliation of the haughty Vashti, symboliztions absorbed has made them over into its ing the downfall of Jerusalem; Adam and image and likeness. But this was true throughout: the tableaux represented the artistic power of the Passion Play. Some of these living pictures were grotesque. Jonah coming out of the paint Eve tilling the earth in the sweat of their brow, their little naked sons struggling with briers, suggesting Christ's bloody sweat in the garden; Joseph in his triumphal chariot; the persecution of Daniel and other prophets; Moses smiting the rock, lifting the brazen serpent; and Israel gathering the manna-each followed by a related scene, as the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, his persecutions, his feeding his disciples with the manna of the Last Supper, or his lifting up on the cross, like the brazen serpent. These scenes, in which the figures and colors of Dürer, Da Vinci, and Wohlgemuth continually passed before us, held all spellbound without weariness from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, the hour's respite at noon being alone tedious. At eight o'clock in the morning the boom of a cannon sounds from the mountain-side. A series of low, portentous monotones from the orchestra. A gentle rising of the violins into a simple adagio. These make the prelude of the somewhat pastoral overture, reminding one of the earlier style of Haydn. When it is finished a chorus of about fifteen young men and maidens, as stately as any that ever graced the ancient Greek stage, march out-part from the right, part from the left-and stand before the curtain, their splendid costumes making a sort of rainbow. Their long locks float back in freedom, and they wear brilliant diadems. They sing the prologue, and as it proceeds one detects the hand of a scholar, if not, indeed, a poet therein. It was Dr. Ottman Weiss, who, remaining from the Benedictine fraternity of Ettal as a teacher, took in hand the older form of the Miracle Play, and (1843) made it into the present ingenious libretto. (The themes of the ancient music are retained, but the composition was re-arranged and much improved in 1860 by Herr Pfarrer, of Oberammergau.) Dr. Weiss expurgated all gro-another dawn in the deep barbaric colors on tesqueries from the play, abolished the devil, who used to be an important figure, and, indeed, civilized the thing too much for the taste of the antiquarian, who can now find a Much was certainly in the exquisite framework of nature in which these rich Oriental pictures were set. The mountains, fretted with snow, stood solemnly around us. The sun was rising when we began, and it seemed to be rising all the morning, purpling peak after peak, and falling slowly down to us along a stairway of summits until it found our stage. The tinkling of sheep bells just outside of the inclosure blended with the violins; the larks rising in the air, and other songsters sometimes nestling in the trees about us, mingled their glad notes with the voice of the chorus. Butterflies came out of the field to add reality to our flowers of Paradise. Nature without and within folded her gentle arms around every picture. heroism and the allegories which mark its ascent, and which art can express, rather than dogmas and discords hateful to every art. No history, no truth, has disclosed all that is folded in it until it has bloomed into beauty for eye and ear; for our senses within and those without correspond as harpstrings and harp; and each truth will sweep every chord, and make every part of that mysterious being that we are vibrate with its glory. Where art comes all falsity is separated, all coarseness is refined, and the ugliness flies away, like the old Ammergau devil, who was dropped because he could not be made picturesque without being made attractive. Here were hundreds of In the night I sat late at my window pondering the import of what I had seen. A flush of the gloaming still rested on the snow of the mountains-the after-glow of a day that could never return. On a far-away height shone a light that quickly grew to brilliancy. It is a St. John's fire-the last surviving symbol of Loki (Leucht), goddess once of all earthly fires. Relegated long ago to nether fires, her supernal torch passed to the half-clad prophet of the desert. That St. John's fire, too, is the after-glow of a Protestant people admiring even the action day forever past. What will the pilgrim of St. Veronica-whose handkerchief, offered who wanders here in the next century to Jesus on his way to Calvary, returns to find at Oberammergau? Not, I imagine, the her with his portrait on it-who would leave spoken and uttered Passion Play. The words any church where the same thing was preand acts will decrease which attempt to ut-sented in dogmatic form. Only that lasts ter the ineffable. The moving silence will which can charm. The more the Passionsincrease, and therewith those old cartoons Spiel is acted, the more, as I believe, will of the mountain-side will increase in beauty. the details that wound sentiment disappear Nay, I am not sure that the tableaux may from it, even as they now begin to vanish not be imitated elsewhere. There was a from the memory of the writer hereof, leavtime when the arts dwelt in every temple; ing the vision to be cherished of sky and and there may be a period when they will mountain and kindled hearts, all weaving a return. They will return just in the pro- frame for the glowing pictures with which portion that bigotry and dissension disap- the lowly peasants devoutly rehearsed the pear, and when the soul learns to love the ancient story of the Man of Sorrows. Editor's Easy Chair. IN tom yanse," that picture full of sweet- cent spray was Ellery's; and his, too, the lumps fountain's bed, and brightened both our faces by the reflection. Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it with the mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had the profit and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the knowledge that it was there." N the prefatory sketch to Hawthorne's "Mosses | talk like the bubble of a fountain. The evanesness and repose of the quaint and slumberous of golden thought that lay glimmering in the old house and its surroundings, the author says, speaking of the few companions who invaded the solitude: "Or it might be that Ellery Channing came up the avenue to join me in a fishing excursion on the river. Strange and happy times were those when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air to live like the Indians, or any less conventional race, during one bright semicircle of the sun." They turn their boat from the Concord into the shadowy, sheltered Assabet. The little stream sleeps along its course, and dreams of the shy and clustering foliage. "But both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and had it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river had strayed forth out of the rich scenery of my companion's inner world; only the vegetation along its banks should then have had an Oriental character." They wind along the lovely solitude, startling the kingfisher and the ducks, and at last draw up their skiff upon the grassy shore, and in a natural bower they kindle the fire for their noonday feast. They laugh and talk as they heap the fire with dry wood and cook their dinner."So amidst sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up gushed our VOL. XLIII-No. 258.-59 These words describe days nearly thirty years ago. It was the prime of the transcendental epoch, as it was called, in New England: the moral, intellectual, social, and political renaissance of American life. Mr. Emerson was lecturing at the Masonic Temple in Boston, speaking at the Phi Beta Kappa and Divinity School anniversaries in Cambridge, with a significance and force of which the polished elegance of Mr. Everett's oratory, then the most familiar and esteemed, had been no herald whatever. The assemblies at Dr. Channing's of the young scholars and thinkers were ended when Hawthorne and his companion, who was the famous doctor's nephew, and bore his name, paddled their skiff up the Assabet. But the circle that gathered about Channing was the source of the new activity. How well appointed the leaders were was already apparent in the debate between Mr. Ripley and Professor Norton. Brook Farm, whose annals are now so faithfully written in "Old and New," had been planted in seclusion near the placid Charles, and Hawthorne, one of its pioneer settlers, had left it, and married, and settled at the old Manse. Theodore Parker was preaching to his country parish at West Roxbury, and standing with his sling, a dangerous frondeur, before the giants of Boston Unitarianism. Disturbing doctrines, as they were deemed by the old guard of conservatism, were heard on every hand. Antinomianism in modern guise was suspected. Here was a woman who was probably Ann Hutchinson come again. There was a man who troubled to-day's peace as Roger Williams that of two centuries ago. There, too, were pestilent Quakers and Baptists in fresher forms to be dealt with. And while the reverend dons were aghast at the new seal which seemed to have broken over Boston, there were young men and maidens who discerned in the movement of the time the dawn of a millennium, and who fondly fancied that daily life was on the very verge of turning out to be a perfect poem. That, indeed, is a revelation continually made to the individual; but it is inward and invisible. These young persons, however, anticipated a visible descent-a palpable heaven ascending and descending. They were, perhaps, finer Millerites, who conceived that the millennium would be effected not by translation, but by metamorphosis; not by soaring to another sphere, but by the sudden change of this. While the impulse was at its height it was felt to be most desirable that it should have an organ. A journal or periodical of some kind was eagerly planned, and in July, 1840, appeared the first number of "The Dial: a Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion.' It was issued quarterly, and they are fortunate who have a copy of it, a book so interesting and valuable both for itself and for its significance. Naturally it is a little crude and excessive. There is some consciousness of the trailing garments of glory in which the elect are clad. But what a group of names it contains; and of what a profound and humane influence it is the sign! Mr. Emerson and Margaret Fuller were understood to be the active editors. Theodore Parker and George Ripley were contributors. A. Bronson Alcott uttered in its pages his "Orphic Sayings," in which the skeptics of the new era sneered that the transcendental gibberish culminated; and one of them was long quoted in derision as solemn nonsense. "The popular genesis is historical. It is written to sense, not to the soul. Two principles, diverse and alien, intercharge the Godhead, and sway the world by turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in diversity. Unity is actual merely. The poles of things are not integrated: creation globed and orbed.' But no nut was too hard for the cracking wit of the new birth, and apparent obscurity was gladly hailed as presumptive wisdom. inscribed to him. With him were his friend and Margaret Fuller's, James Freeman Clarke; and John S. Dwight, who for so long has been our chief authority in the highest music; and Christopher P. Cranch, many of whose finest verses were first printed in the Dial; and Henry Thoreau, whose review of the Report upon the Natural History of Massachusetts first revealed the wonderful eye of that master of woods and forests; and Frederic Henry Hedge, still one of the most accomplished of American scholars and divines. There were other writers whose names are less familiar, but whose contributions to the Dial, in poetry or prose, have a fresh grace and delicacy which give a unique charm to this phenix of magazines. Hawthorne's mention of Ellery Channing has naturally brought the Dial and its illustrious company to mind, because in the second number, that for October, 1840, two years before the time of which Hawthorne writes, Mr. Emerson had an article upon "New Poetry," in which he speaks with unstinted praise of some verses which he had lately seen in manuscript; several of which he quotes in proud proof that "the muse is neither dead nor dumb, but has found a voice in these cold cisatlantic states." They were the work of Hawthorne's companion, William Ellery Channing, nephew of the great Dr. Channing. Emerson and Hawthorne are often thought to stand together at the head of our American literature; and they are certainly illustrious sponsors for any author. Two years before Hawthorne had written that his mind was richer merely by the knowledge of his friend Channing's genius, Emerson had said: "Here is poetry which asks no aid of magnitude or number, of blood or crime, but finds theatre enough in the first field or brook-side, breadth and depth enough in the flow of its own thought. Here is self-repose which, to our mind, is stabler than the Pyramids. Here is self-respect which leads a man to date from his heart more proudly than from Rome. Here is love which sees through surface, and adores the gentle nature and not the costume. Here is religion which is not of the Church of England nor of the Church of Boston. Here is the good, wise heart which sees that the end of culture is strength and cheerfulness. In an age, too, which tends with so strong an inclination to the philosophical muse, here is poetry more intellectual than any American verses we have yet seen, distinguished from all competition by two merits-the fineness of perception, and the poet's trust in his own genius to that degree that there is an absence of all conventional imagery, and a bold use of that which the moment's mood had made sacred to him, quite careless that it might be sacred to no other, and might even be slightly ludicrous to the first reader." These words introduced a new poet to the readers of the Dial, and there was a strong de Other contributors were William Henry Chan-sire to see his verses in a volume. The extracts ning, a cousin of Hawthorne's Ellery-one of the purest and noblest of men. He had an apostolic fervor of eloquence, the ardent devotion of a new Peter the Hermit; a spirit which could not tolerate the injustice and sorrow of society, and protested with passionate tenderness against social and theological wrongs. "The evil time's sole patriot," says Emerson, in the ode which he which Mr. Emerson made from the manuscript seemed to many most thoughtful readers to justify his praise; and in 1843 appeared a thin volume, in the familiar Boston style of that day"Poems by William Ellery Channing." By some of the most cultivated and critical readers, and by persons of mark and genius, the author was believed to be the chief if not the sole poet in our literature. His book had the imprint of one of the great publishing houses of the country, Little and Brown; yet it was entirely unheeded by the reading public; almost the only notice taken of it was a few gibes from Poe, which were unintelligible to his readers, because they knew nothing of the author he ridiculed; and at this day, probably, no one who reads these words knows the name of the poet, or has ever heard of his poetry, if he was not within the influence of the intellectual revival of thirty years ago. In the mean time, within that generation, how many names, then unknown, have risen into familiarity and into fame? Tennyson had been first published in America only in the previous year. Browning was scarcely known. Mrs. Browning's "Lay of the Brown Rosary" was circulating in manuscript, and her works were issued in two volumes in New York a year or two afterward. Milnes and "Barry Cornwall" were published in Boston a little later, and have had their day. Since then the newer English names have been written-Clough, Morris, Swinburne, "Owen Meredith," Matthew Arnold, Alexander Smith-poor fellow! so madly hailed, so swiftly contemned-Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti; while at home, since those days, Emerson himself has been acknowledged as a poet; Lowell has taken his place among the majores; and Bryant and Longfellow and Whittier still sit upon undisputed thrones. There are younger names-Bret Harte, Stoddard, and Taylor; and Boker and Hay and Stedman; and the newest of all, Joaquin Miller; and the "good gray poet," as Mr. W. D. O'Connor, his most loyal admirer, calls him, Walt Whitman. | currency, the world might have had the profit and he the fame." What is that mint-mark? It is the art, the form, the music of the poetry. "I don't care whether he has sense," said a great critic, speaking of a young poet; "but has he melody?" There is an undeniable carelessness in much of Channing's verse, which inevitably causes obscurity; and poets are not greatest when they are most obscure. Without the instinct of form, without the love of the art, a man may be poetical, but he is not a poet. Nevertheless, because he who runs can not read Browning, for instance, it can not be denied that Browning is a true poet. If Channing is sometimes rugged and halting in form, and difficult to follow, it is very foolish to suppose that he is therefore not worth following. He seems to be so intent upon his thought that, like a mountain climber resolved to pluck the edelweiss, he will mind no shocks or bruises. Poe laughed, and possibly made others laugh, at him; but if Poe is slipping out of mind, is it not because of the very want of that grave sincerity which pervades the poetry of Channing like the resinous odor of a pine grove? It is refreshing, also, in these echoing days, to hear a strain which is entirely without echo. Every new bard is apt to suggest some familiar strain. Even the dialect poetry has, as Mr. Alcott would orphically express it, an evident genesis. Certainly we need not require that there shall be no sign of culture in a new candidate for poetic honors, and that he shall be totally independent of the influences of his time. He can not be if he would. The subtile spirit of the age is his invisible master, and without any consent or care of his own he will show the time in which he lives and the influences around him, as the child shows the family likeness. Yet the beauty and charm of the individual are none the less fresh and original because we recognize the general resemblance. Originality is not absolute novelty-it is independence. Again, Channing's poetry is not that of a man of the world in the usual sense. It is plainly that of a shy, solitary recluse, but a recluse like his friend Thoreau, who, indeed, was especially a man of the world, in the sense of an observer and lover of nature. The world of towns and social con but the world of nature, the earth and the heavens, bird, beast, and fish, the lily and the aster, he knew by heart. And this is a knowledge that Channing shares. How many who know all these names know that of the poet who was most valued by the best of his contemporaries? Since the early volume of which we have spoken, Mr. Channing has published "Poems, Second Series," "The Woodman," ," "Conversations in Rome" (a prose volume), and "Near Home" (a poem in blank verse of fifty pages, in 1858). He was also one of the contributors to the Dial, and wrote for it a series of letters in prose between the Poet and the Painter; and during most of the time, with the exception of a short visit in Europe, the author has lived at Concord, in Massachusetts. But his books have failed to catch the public ear, al-ventions he little knew, and superbly scorned; though they have touched many a private heart. What his friend Hawthorne playfully said of himself, after he became famous, that at one time he was the most unknown author in America, is still true of this poet. Many of those who hailed his first song are gone, but none who ever believed him to be essentially a poet have lost their faith. And now, after many years, Mr. Channing is about to publish another poem. Favor can not be bribed for it, nor success bought. But, at least, if the fact is known, there may be a willingness to consider the claims of an author so modest, and who is wholly free from the poetic fashion of the day. The mannered intensity, the excess, the voluptuous, sensuous vein which have become so familiar, are not to be found in this cool, remote, pensive, careless, sometimes sadly cynical strain. In quoting a few illustrations from the first volume we shall remember Hawthorne's wish: "Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it with the mint-inark that alone gives But thus far, like the preacher in the pulpit, "I hide in thy deep flower eyes, Those who are interested in Henry Thoreauand they are an increasing host-will be glad to see the ample recognition of him by his friend Channing in "Near Home:" "Yes! be to me a muse, if so, that thought Which is in thee, the King, that royal truth Spurning, all commonplace details of lie, All far-fetched harrowing curb-stones Of excuse, that fit men's actions to their Consciences, and so achieve content At the expense of honor: all low hopes, Apologies for self where weakness hides, And those worst virtues that the cozening world Pimps on her half-fledged brood: old shells and worms That saw ere deluged Noah at the plow If so, e'en in its faintest radiation, Thy abiding faith in God's great justice A distant thought of thine." Such manly homage is uncommon in any literature. The same vestal loftiness of nature would seem to have inspired these lines to Una: "We are centred deeper far Than the eye of any star, "In thy form I see the day "Yet with this lofty element Flows a pure stream of gentle kindness, In thy Promethean fearless arm, With mercy's love that would all angels charm. "So trembling meek, so proudly strong, Can kneel before thy pathless mind, And even on my tuneless lyre A faint, wan beam of radiance dies. "And might I say what I have thought "The evanescent spray was Ellery's," says Hawthorne; "and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay glimmering in the fountain's bed, and brightened both our faces by the reflection." Do not the few stanzas that we have quoted seem at least to justify his words? "These are proper manuscript inspirations," says Emerson; "honest, great, but crude." Yet of the contemplative strain which is so characteristic, and which naturally charmed Emerson, we have given scarcely an illustration. Let the seasonIable lines that follow show the sweet mood of intellectual tranquillity that reveals a genius modulated, harp-like, to the subtlest influences of nature. They are lines "written in the evening of a November day :" "Thee, mild autumnal day, I felt, not for myself; the winds may steal "Like thee the contrast is Of a new mood in a decaying man, "Our earth was gratified: Fresh grass, a stranger in this frosty clime, "How glowed the evening-star, As it delights to glow in summer's midst, "Peace was the will to-day: Love in bewildering growth our joyous minds "I felt for thee--for thee, Whose inward, outward life completely moves, Of this creative day." Amidst the verse which is popular at the moment this is a strain like that of Wordsworth to the devotees of Byron. Yet our age and our taste need not be less catholic than any other, and we shall be glad if these words shall lead any lover of poetry to turn to the new poem of Mr. Channing, and then to his earlier volumes, and |