assignees or purchasers of his original right; but also that they might, if they chose, prohibit its further use to any country or to the world, at any time when any of the vagaries of human caprice might prompt such an act. No; no such right exists in the original foundations of natural morals. The unanimous good sense of all the nations which have legislated on the subject has not been mistaken in regarding this privilege of ownership in copyright or patentright as an artificial and limited, not a natural and absolute right of property. Accordingly, it has been granted-unlike other species of property-for limited terms of years, and generally confined to the subjects of the legislating sovereignty. No country has dreamed of protecting the copyrights or patent rights of other countries. It is a right entirely the creature of legislation, local, special, and conventional, founded partly on the equity of remuneration to the author and his immediate family, under the authority of that government of which he is a subject, and partly on the consideration of that expediency which dictates that such privilege should be conferred on him and his-for a term not too long to conflict with the general interest of the community-as an inducement to him and to others, superadded to those other and higher moral influences which bid him speak for the same reason that the bird sings, the flower blooms, and the star shines, Both of these motives call for a long and liberal grant of the quasi property privilege in question, by every government which would desire thus to reward this most valuable class of its citizens, and to foster and stimulate their noble toils; but no member of one political body or system can have the right to demand it from the government of another, unless by a transfer of residence he should bring himself within the pale of its protection, and the scope of its internal policy. It is very certain, that to grant the proposed privilege to the trans-Atlantic claim ants in the present case, would be one of the extremest applications of the principle of this moral right of property, which, if it exist at all, must be both universal and perpetual; and it is equally certain, that it seems at least somewhat premature to urge such a demand-and not a little imVOL. XII.-NO. LVI.

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pertinent to accompany it with such gross abuse as the alternative to its concession-when neither of the two countries in question has yet recog nized at all that very principle of literary property on which alone the petitioners for International Copyright can attempt to plant a foundation for their claim. Has yet?-no, nor is ever likely to do so; its recognition not being asked for from their own government by those who are so vehe ment in demanding it from ours.

But the demand being made, it is to be judged of simply as a question of expediency. It may be generous in some cases to allow to foreign authors some extent of copyright privilege in our country, though we deny that they have any shadow of title to claim it as a right either legal or moral. Possibly it may by some be regarded as expedient for the encouragement and benefit of foreign authors by our government, on similar principles to those on which is founded the legislation of their own in their behalf; though we doubt whether very many minds will be found likely to take this view of the case. It certainly would not be very highly expedient for the benefit of American authors, who are now free from the competition of the former in the copyright market, if we may so term the offices of our publishing booksellers.

Individuals may, if they

choose, volunteer to a great foreign author from whose labors they have derived pleasure and instruction, any tribute of their gratitude they choose

a far more sensible and acceptable mode of expressing their sentiments, by the way, than by public balls and dinners. We do not doubt, that in the hour of Scott's need a large sum might have been raised for him in this mode, which it would have been as honorable for the one party to receive as for the other to give. Or if the experiment were tried by any of our publishers, enjoying the public respect and confidence, of issuing the same edition of any new work by a popular English writer at two prices, the one a little more than the other, as a species of gratuitous author's benefit-some imprint on the title-page distinguishing between the two-a very considerable number of the beneficiary edition would doubtless be purchased, even if not more than of the other; and ali

either recognizing a moral obligation or feeling an impulse of grateful liberality, would have an opportunity of satisfying their conscience and indulging their heart. But as for right or reason to demand it from our government as a matter of compulsory legislation, none such exists, while on the other hand it would be seriously injurious to our own literature and literary classes. And as for the arrogance of the tone and mode in which it is insisted upon, and the impertipence of the abuse which has been

lavished on us for hesitating to concede the modest demand, we will only say that they can produce no other effect than to redouble the improbability of its ever being granted.

So much for what we have to say about International Copyright at this present. Reversing the usual practice which prescribes the beginning of a book as the place for the dedication, we will make it the end of our Article, by dedicating it to the Committee of Congress before which the consideration of the question is now pending.

WHOEVER has sojourned in Germany long enough to associate much with Germans, must have remarked the singular mildness, the pleasing simplicity of manners, the elegance of habits, and the general urbanity of deportment, forming the characteristics of a people which, in order to hold a first rank among the great powers of the earth, need only to be united under a single and national government. That a people so long oppressed by a multitude of petty princes, domineered over by a numerous and heartless aristocracy, inhabiting, too, a country often desolated by the invasion of foreign armies, which for centuries have made it their battle-ground, should have preserved, nevertheless, the primitive kindliness and amenity of their nature, is a moral phenomenon which, while visiting in that country both the palaces of the greatest and the humblest abodes of the peasantry, I have been tempted to attribute more to the love of music that obtains through all classes of German society, than to any other cause. There the fiercer passions kindled during day of suffering and trial, instead of being exasperated by the angry repinings of

the family circle, when the workingman returns home, are on the contrary lulled to rest by the harmony of song. The madness of Saul yielded to the harp of David. Polybius says, that music softened the ferocity of the Arcadians, who inhabited a region where the climate was impure and damp; while the people of Cynoethe, who held that science in contempt, continued to be the most barbarous of the Greeks. In Germany, music creates for the careworn laborer another and better world, a middle region between this earth, where wealth and the enjoyments it procures are allotted to the few, while to the many are assigned privations, contumelies, irremediable poverty, and that future world where equality, that banished exile from earth, has fixed its only and last abode. It is to that ideal region, that the German peasant's mind is gently wafted on the wings of melody, by the soft voices of his wife, daughters and sons, together with the strains of his own flute or hautboy. It is music, in fact, which, while Frenchmen, Russians, and Englishmen lord it over earth and seas, has given to Germans the undisputed sway of boundless imaginary space.

This humanizing of a whole people through its taste for one of the fine arts, has been equally wrought on another nation, claiming the same origin, through that which it has ever manifested for painting and the kindred harmonies of colors, such as are displayed in beauteous accord among flowers--a visible poetry that, which goes to the heart through the eye, as the poetry of sounds reaches it through the ear. At Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, the Hague, and above all, at Harlaem, the floral city, crowds of individuals of all the classes of society are seen assembled at the flower markets, held twice a week in each of these great cities. The rich attends them to make exclusively his own, by purchase, the emeralds, the rubies, the sapphires of the vegetable kingdom, in addition to those which he already possessed, formed in the depths of the earth through the slow elaborations of ages; but, in spite of his covetous eagerness to obtain the monopoly even of these, nature's treasures, the indigent too has seen these dazzling gems of the spring; he has inhaled their perfume; and, while the variegated Camelia, the purple Lagestremia, the gaudy, inodorous Cactus, the more sweet-scented but still gorgeous Peony, and all the costly exotics are borne away to spread a greater lustre over the abode of opulence, the humble Violet, the Rose, (now thought to be a vulgar flower, though still blush ing its loveliness and exhaling the most exquisite of fragrance), are taken to the home of the poor, to light the gloom of his lowly shed-to give sweetness to the little air he is yet allowed to breathe. I always attended these floral markets, and I do not remem ber, crowded as they always are, ever to have heard a quarrel there. An elegance of manners, nay, of language, seemed inspired by the grace and beauty of these ephemeral gardens; every one present acted and spoke as if he feared either to injure by brutal acts, or to soil by the expression of indelicate thoughts, these tender and fragile treasures of the spring. All

clustered around them, like bees; and all, like bees, appeared to gather from them nothing but sweetness. There is a tradition at the Hague, that Johannes Secundus, the Dutch poet who sang of Kisses, (whose house, near the flower markets in that city, is still to be seen), always wrote with a nosegay on his table. After hearing of this, as I read his Basia over again, I fancied in the poetry, besides the charm inherent to the subject, the aroma of the flowers he loved. Here, I may be allowed, without digressing much, to speak of the harvest of roses which always draws to the fields where they are culiivated, near the Hague, numerous visitors. In the month of May, nothing can be imagined more beautiful than the aspect of those rose fields. The air, filled with the sweet emanations, makes you aware of your approach to them, before you have come in sight of them, surrounded as they are by thick live hedges, intended to guard the young buds from the inclement winds. An air of festival spread all around proclaims that this is no vulgar field-work. Hundreds of young girls, dressed as if for a village holiday, commence the gatherring with appropriate songs. The first time I witnessed this novel harvest scene, it seemed like a dream; I became doubtful whether I stood on Batavian ground; the ethereal sweetness inhaled in every breeze, the earth cov ered, as it were, with a green carpet embroidered with roses, the melodious voices of so many young and beautiful girls, would have indeed wafted the imagination to the milder regions of Greece or Italy, but that the azure eyes and golden hair of the pretty Rosières, proclaimed them of Norman race. Those roses gathered in Holland, strange as it may appear, are shipped to Constantinople, destined to return to Europe so concentrated by chemical art, that the perfume of ten thousand is often used by a lady to scent her embroidered handkerchief.*

On my return home after a long residence in Holland, where I had witnessed the salutary effect produced on the manners of a whole nation by a

taste for gardening, I was delighted to find in America a growing passion for botany, in its application to the culture of flowers and fruit-trees. This new born taste ought to be fostered by the Press, since it procures both to our town and country populations an elegant and useful occupation in periods of comparative leisure. To females particularly, so becomingly exempt among us from all laborious tasks, it offers an amusement both healthy and instructive; one that never palls on the mind which has formed a taste for a pursuit so fraught with delight. It is an enjoyment within the reach of every one in our country, since whoever can dispose of a quarter of an acre, may enjoy the luxury of a flower garden; of one, too, from which scarcely a flower need now to be excluded; for such have been the recent improvements in floriculture, that the only advantage of the rich over the poor, in this respect, at least, is that of possessing rare plants one year perhaps before the industry of the florist-gardener has brought them within the reach of the humblest cottager. Flowers, it may truly be said, wherever they are cultivated, spread an air of elegant comfort and innocent mirthfulness; they grace the brow of a rural beauty in the village dance, as they adorn at her sumptuous ball the head of a city belle; they enliven age, to which their emanations bring back in pleasing associations the perfumed remembrances of by-gone days.* The Vine, the Honeysuckle, (that sweet inviter of the humming-bird), the Jasmine, and all the creepers, (innocuous parasites, these, living almost on air and water), now spread curtains of verdure, embroidered with gold and purple, over walls and palings formerly dark and squalid.

Industry, which ever watches the birth of novel propensities and pursuits, has been prompt in administering to this new-born taste. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans-all our large cities, already

contain splendid flower and fruit-gardens, green-houses and hot-houses, cultivated, not as were the few unsightly gardens of earlier days, by mere laborers who stupidly witnessed the varied processes of germination, flowering and fructification, untaught by science the beauteous system in obedience to whose eternal laws these phenomena are governed, but by real botanists, men who have devoted years to the acquirement of all that Linnæus and Jussieu have taught and written on plants.

In an age when knowledge walks the streets, not, as in the days of Molière, with a wig, and clothed in uncouth sable robes, but dressed in the fashion of the time, and often in the humblest garb of common life-when astronomy herself, the most austere of the muses, descending from the heights of her observatories of London, Paris, or Leyden, enters unceremoniously the popular lecture-room, there to reveal, through a Lardner, her eloquent interpeter, the laws which govern the eterual gyrations of countless worlds, in language so precise, so simple, so limpid, that they become intelligible even to the unlearned,-at such an epoch, we say, it would not have been endured that young botany with her garlands of Amaranths, Tulips, and Hyacinths, should continue to wear the antiquated garments in which that fair daughter of Linnæus was first saluted at Leyden by the enraptured crowd.

In days of yore, poetry, by its enchantments, had metamorphosed lovely maids and beauteous youths into trees and flowers. Science, during the last century, with power no less weird, has restored each tree, each plant, each flower, to its pristine form; endowing each, however, with life and sensibility, thus linking them to the animal king dom with the silken bond of one universal spirit and universal love.

But since we have been led by our subject to speak of the ancients, (and what subject of beauty, grace, har

mony, or poesy, does not lead us back to the master-spirits who have embodied all these in their undying works?) we must be allowed to express the regret we always feel as we peruse the lays of Anacreon-songs which after the lapse of centuries seem still to glow with the rose he loved, and still to exhale its fragrance-that the Bard of Teos had scarcely another flower of bright hue and sweet odor to entwine with the Rose among his silver locks; to wreathe the cup in which he drank inspiration, pleasure, and immortality; in that sear season of life which, to all but the favourite poet of Dione and the Graces, is one of decay and sorrow; for such was the poverty of the gardens of Greece in his days, that whoever sought to weave a garland of varied blossoms, after gathering among these the Rose, the Narcissus, the Hyacinth, the Lily, and the Violet, was driven into the fields and woods to complete it out of wild-flowers. It is a singular fact, attested however by the historians and poets of antiquity, one, too, affirming the opinions which we have before expressed, of the elegance of manners which ever accompanies a fondness for horticulture, that gardening, in every age and among every nation, has always been one of the most tardy of the conquests of a high civilisation. A fact so remarkable in the history of human attainments did not pass unnoticed by the sagacity of Bacon, when, as a relaxation from graver occupations, he wrote his Essay on Gardens. "When ages grow to civility and elegancy," he says in that interesting composition, "men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection." In illustration of this assertion of Bacon, (if, indeed, any assertion of that wonderful man required other authority beside that of his name), we need only allow our memory to travel up the long stream of centuries. It matters not at what time Homer wrote, or only sang, the imperishable poems that bear his name; it is enough that we find in one of these that in his days there were already gardens in Greece or in Asia(since we will not take on ourselves to decide whether the lovely isle over which the good Alcinous reigned belonged to Europe or to Asia)-in order, from that isolated fact, to come

to the conclusion that, since Alcinous had gardened finely, others, before him, had built stately-in other words, "that the age had grown into civility." Like all great artists, Homer paints best where he copies nature; even when describing the gods, the nymphs, and all the inferior deities of the pagan heaven, he still had, as living models set before him, the forms of mortal beauty which these popular divinities, the familiar visitors of man, the inhabitants of forests, fields, rivers and fountains, were wont to assume, and under which they were always worshipped. It is this which makes his pictures ever true to nature, even when he paints things supernatural. Spurning the creation of vegetable monsters, his genius refused to imagine flowers he had never seen, whose odor he had never inhaled-the flavor of fruits he had never tasted-the aspects and bearings of trees he had not seen waving in the luxuriance of their foliage. It was already too bold a metaphor-he perhaps thought-to have feigned that, in the garden of the Hesperides were trees bearing golden apples. In imitation of Homer, all epic poets have sung of gardens. Virgil, who was born in the country, always retained, amidst all the allurements of the court of Augustus, the fond remembrance of the fields wrested from him by one of the veteran soldiers of the triumvirs. Rome, its splendors, its enchantments, its long glories, could never efface from his memory the beauteous lake on whose verdant margin he wandered, when, in early youth, the Muses filled his breast with their sacred inspirations. The Elysian Fields, where

neas sees the shades of Grecian and Trojan heroes who had met an untimely death, were but the reflections both of Mantuan scenes, and of the magnificent gardens of Sallust and Lucullus; for Virgil, even when he invented, still kept nature in sight. Two other Italian poets, like Virgil, have sung of gardens; one, with equal melody of numbers; the other, borne on wings of bolder flight. The one with the wand of Armida, the other with that of Alcina, have made verdant groves, beds of sweet flowers, to spring up spontaneous, and crystal fountains to flow amidst a dreary wilderness. Milton, too, has told of that garden, a