camp), for they had the tour of the great marsh to make before they could strike into the road to Rome. In the Laurentine wood, that forest of dark ilex and dense undergrowth and fallacious footways, unchanged since Vergil described it, they were surrounded and brought to bay. Into this dim labyrinth Nisus plunged to the rescue of his younger comrade, whom he would not survive, and the "happy pair," as Vergil calls them, fell together not far from the spot where Castel Fusano now stands. It was within the same charmed sylvan circle that Turnus also perished, expiating the slaughter of the youthful Pallas, and with the proudest and most pathetic of all recorded last words upon his dying lips: "Your fiery gibes afYour fiery gibes affright me not, fierce man. It is the gods I fear, and Jove who is my enemy." It is, perhaps, the flitting presence of those three heroic shades which gives their peculiar and solemn enchantment to the desolate lawns about the old Chigi villa; and in all my own wanderings I have seen no spot so suggestive of the mystical phrase "religio loci" perpetually recurring under Vergil's pen. The hand of the passive Lavinia was bestowed upon the conqueror, and he founded a city which he called by her name. All the authorities agree, for once, in fixing the site of Lavinium at Pratica, now a ruinous hamlet midway between Castel Porziano and Ardea, consisting of a score of houses encircled by crumbling medieval walls. Nibby thinks that the very name Pratica is a corruption of Pater Indigetes, that is Eneas; and Bonstetten sees a resemblance in the shape of the deep valley to the north of the circumscribed bit of table-land on which Pratica stands to that in which Turnus vainly prepared an ambush for Æneas. There are fragments of ancient sculpture about the piazza of the poor little town; one the pedestal, doubtless, of an ideal statue which is boldly in scribed Æneas Sylvius, son of Æneas and Lavinia. Tradition says, with a coloring of general probability, that there was no love between Lavinia and her step-son Ascanius; that she fled into the forest through fear of him, before her own child was born (whence the sylvan cognomen); and that this was why, after his father's untimely death, Ascanius withdrew to the hills, carrying the Trojan Penates with him, and founded Alba Longa. But the Penates behaved strangely; for though he built them a temple and closed the doors, they escaped twice and returned to Lavinium by night. After that no one dared again to attempt their removal. Six hundred men were detailed to return and reside with them, that the Penates might have worshipers, and the earlier town became in the end a kind of sacred city, whose inhabitants were principally priests and their servitors. "There," says Varro, "was the home of our Penates." The temple of the household gods at Lavinium acquired, with the lapse of years, a very peculiar sanctity; the archaic images of the gods themselves being shrouded in the utmost mystery. Down to the very last days of the Republic annual festivals were held there, and pious generals who were about starting on distant expeditions went out to Lavinium and sacrificed for their success. (Crassus did so before starting for the Parthian war.) Dionysius says that in his day there were still many brass statues about the mossy forum, representing the sow, the wolf, and other legends, and that the tomb of Æneas continued to be shown, a small hillock planted with trees, admirably arranged, and well worth seeing." The name of the holy burg was changed to that of Lauro - Lavinium, after it had absorbed what remained of the original city of Latinus, and it is last mentioned by Bishop Symmachus in the fourth century of the Christian era as a “religiosa civitas." - On the outermost seaward promontory Volscian Hills, with the walls and towers of the Alban range stands the curious of some ancient stronghold gleaming town which the Romans called Lanu- from every outlying spur. Circe's cape vium. It also claimed an origin from runs into the southern sea, and following Diomede, and was a conspicuous mem- the dim shore upward toward the northber of the Latin league. At the close west, we trace the dark limits of the imof the Republic it was wealthy and memorial forest; we divine, and fancy powerful, and intimately associated with that we distinguish, among similar elemany great names and stirring events. vations, the wooded cliff of Ardea; we It must also then have been very splen- clearly sight the perpendicular lines of didly adorned, so rich is it even now in Tor Paterno. The great dome signifies dishonored fragments of the most deli- the city of all the ages; and further cate sculpture; so numerous and impor- northward still, describing an arc which tant have been its contributions to almost embraces more of imperious association all the great collections, especially those than any other equal space of earth and of the Vatican and the British Museum. sky, the eye leaps to the aerial crest of But when or how, during the bewilder- Soracte and the heights above Tibur. ment of the dark ages, it came to confuse itself with Lavinium, and to adopt its present name of Civita Lavinia, is not exactly known. The cunning, kindly, garrulous folk who go up and down their steep hillside over the most perfectly preserved of Roman paving, and have a nobly sculptured sarcophagus for the basin of the fountain in their central piazza, think lightly of these authentic antiquities, but are as tenacious as people are apt to be elsewhere of their assumed ancestral honors. They show you Æneas's tower, and the stout iron ring, now painted green, upon the westward wall of their city, to which he moored his bark; and if you have so little tact as to point to the distance of the silver sea-line, and respectfully suggest geological objections, they pity and pardon you, a poor forestiere, for your ignorance of the fact that in the times of which they speak the sea-waves broke at the foot of their promontory, as they do upon Circello, which they indicate, to-day. You waive discussion then, and willingly content yourself with the outlook from the pseudo-city of Lavinia. For the complete map of Latium is outspread below you, and there is hardly a site celebrated in Vergil's epic but may hence be identified by the naked eye. Southward lies the blue rampart of the The horizon commanded by Monte Caro, the Alban mount par excellence, and common shrine of all the primitive tribes, which bore the great temple of Jove in Vergil's day, is a vastly wider one, only there the perch is too lofty for the features of the landscape to be clearly made out. Doubtless they were all fatally distinct to the celestial vision of Juno, when she watched from that high vantage-ground the muster of the native troops to meet the invader, and saw the final turn of the tide of battle against her own protégé. But to the purblind pilgrim of the nineteenth century the prospect from Civita Lavinia is quite sufficiently full and suggestive. Strange to say, moreover, in all the deeply storied region hereabout, by a law analogous, it may be, to that which makes an old man's recollections of his infancy more vivid than those of his prime, it is the intervening spaces, the middle distance of authentic history, which oftenest appear misty and unreal to the gazer's mind, while the legendary figures, the nursery tales which amused the childhood of the race, take on a supernatural clearness. Roman, barbarian, and Christian armies are alike submerged and pass from view in the red sea of the Campagna sunset, but the mild mother planet of him who " brought Troy to Latium and the conquered Penates" fills all the deepening twilight with its lustre; and on the silent ridge of Alba Longa, where the Penates refused to stay, what is the scene reflected in the dark waters of the mountain lake, what the sole voice out of the past which we find echoing there? "The legions were then brought up to destroy the town. But inside the gates they found none of that confusion and panic which are customary in captured cities. . . . Only sorrowful silence and speechless woe so weighed upon the souls of all, that aimless, forgetting what to take and what to leave, they went hither and thither, appealing one to another, and now stood still upon the thresholds of their homes, and now went over them for a last look." 1 We clasp the disinherited shadows to our hearts in tearful sympathy; we point to the gray desert across which their cruel captors marched to victory, and solemnly assure them that they are long since avenged, before we so much as remember that it is to the eloquence of a great prose-poet that they owe their persistent vitality, and that the very existence of their city is unproven. H. W. P. and L. D. FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. EMERSON says, "If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of revolution, . . . when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope?" New England, for many years before the civil war, was the scene of a slow moral revolution, which will never be fully understood until a good deal is known about the private lives of many comparatively humble individuals and families. To contribute to this knowledge is my purpose in offering some reminiscences of that period. Apologies are due to the public when narratives personal to the writer are imposed upon it; and my excuse for the story I have to tell lies in the fact that this very element of personality sometimes helps to make real to readers the environment of a past epoch. It not infrequently happens that though we care nothing at all for Jane or Joseph, we are still very much affected if we are told just what Joseph thought when the earthquake shattered his house in Charleston, or how Jane felt while the shells were flying over Vicksburg. I have no material earthquakes or bat tles to describe, but I have hoped that interest might attach to an account of the way in which the principles of liberty were handed down from generation to generation in one family, and became part of the vital experience of all its members, even the young children. In the household which I shall seek to re-create on paper, all daily life had an anti-slavery background, and, to carry the figure farther, this background was painted on a Quaker canvas. The elements of anti-slavery and Quaker beliefs so blended in the characters of the parents, and so conspired together to endow existence with whatever peculiarity it had, that I cannot separate them now and give the reminiscences of one influential factor without those of the other. My great-grandfather, William Buffum, a man in the early prime of life during our Revolutionary War, was a farmer possessed of property and wielding local influence. He was a member of a society advocating gradual emancipation, while slaves were still held in the North. He sheltered, in a little 1 Livy, i. 29. house on his land, a family of negroes who had escaped from bondage in New York State. They had been in hiding for some time before they came under Mr. Buffum's protection, and a baby had been born during this interval. The father considered this child different from the others, and used to tell his experiences to Arnold, the young son of his benefactor. One can easily fancy the quaintly dressed Quaker lad standing by, his serious eyes growing more thoughtful as the tale proceeded to its end, for the freedman always finished with these words: "An' Pedro love all his chil'en, but he love Cuffy best of all, because Cuffy was born free." This speech sank into the listener's heart, and made an Abolitionist of my grandfather, who grew up and led an active moral and mental life. At his death he left to his descendants a large number of patent papers, ranging in their dates over some fifty years of the republic's history. Those taken out in the beginning of the century bear witness to the fact that governmental business was not very pressing then, since they show that it was the custom for the President, the Secretary of State, and the AttorneyGeneral to sign all such papers. These documents, therefore, which represent little other wealth, past or present, are rich with the autographs of Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, James Madison, and John Quincy Adams. Arnold Buffum spent some years in Europe between 1825 and 1830. He knew the English Abolitionists, and in Paris he frequented Lafayette's salon. He brought home a story which the Frenchman told him, that Washington never learned to control his naturally violent temper. This statement, imparted to me in my childhood, together with an incident which Lafayette related confirmatory of it, I naturally held in such reverential credence that it prevented me from accepting the calmsouled image of Washington presented by more public chroniclers for the consideration of juvenile minds. Whether Mr. Buffum discussed the slavery question with Lafayette I know not. The Indian matter was so far a topic of conversation as to lead the marquis to say that he was very much interested in that race when he was in America. A few years after his return to his native country, Mr. Buffum went, as a matter of course, to Boston, and sought out William Lloyd Garrison in that "small chamber " where, "friendless and unseen," he toiled over his types. The act was the inevitable result of the Quaker's nature, of his principles and his past life. All his experience, inherited and personal, converged naturally in the pathway that led him up those narrow stairs to the printer's room. Mr. Garrison was thankful enough for Mr. Buffum's sympathy, -the sympathy of a respectable, middle-aged Quaker with the enthusiastic purposes of "a poor young man." It was one of those instances, frequent in history, when the lesser man, by dint of coming at the right time, seems for one brief moment to outweigh the greater one. Time soon restores the correct perspective, and the stature of the real leader looms up in its due proportion. Nevertheless, a light remains on the figure of the other, who dared to be as true, though he was not as great. Thus it was that Arnold Buffum became the first president of the first society ever formed in the United States to advocate the immediate abolition of slavery, and he was also its first lecturer in the field. Meanwhile, two of his daughters busied themselves in a female anti-slavery society in Fall River, which place was then merely a big village. Somebody proposed that one or two colored women should be admitted as members of this society, and other good ladies objected vehemently thereto. They wanted the slaves to be free, but they did not want any negroes to belong to the same association to which they did, or to seat themselves near their white persons while they were bending their philanthropy to bear on the lot of their race. Mr. Buffum's daughters did not share this feeling, being, even in that early day, free from any prejudice against color. One of them was a woman of decided character, who afterwards became the wife of Mr. B., the first mayor of Fall River. This gentleman was at one time a member of Congress, and when Millard Fillmore came to the city, after his presidential term was over, he proposed, having known him in Washington, that he and his wife should go and pay their respects to the ex-dignitary. Mrs. B. refused to go, saying emphatically that she would never shake the hand which signed the Fugitive Slave Law. Although the Quakers have always had the credit of being anti-slavery, the New England yearly meeting did not show itself to be, in season and out of season, disposed to insist on the abolition of the obnoxious institution after it had been retired to the distant Southern States. Many Friends deprecated the discussion of the matter because it was calculated to stir up strife. A prominent Quaker wrote home from Ohio, while Arnold Buffum was on a lecturing tour in the West, that he ought to be silenced in some way. Finally, the yearly meeting decided that the religious houses belonging to the scattered societies in New England must not be used for secular purposes. This resolve prohibited antislavery meetings in them; and then my mother decided that if the slave was to be thus shut out from the church of her ancestors, she must depart with him. She was influenced by the same sort of indignant determination to make common cause with those who needed aid that used to induce Wendell Phillips to walk a steamboat deck all night in company with Frederick Douglass, rather than enjoy in the cabin below the shelter denied to his comrade. The step which this woman proceeded to take was really heroic, for she was at that time an ardent Friend and a person of intense religious experience, having no sense of separation from the Quakers in theology, sentiment, or moral ideas except as related to this one question of "bearing testimony" against slavery. Quakerism, it must be remembered, is an hereditary religion. The child of a Quaker is held to be born a Quaker, just as the child of Americans is born an American. The instincts of this faith were part of my mother's flesh and blood, brain and heart. Her mind spoke naturally in its formulas, her spirit moved easily to expression in its conventionalities. Such an one might find another faith for her soul, but scarcely another religious language for her tongue to use in this world. It requires nerve, something like physical as well as moral courage, to break a spiritual relation such as was hers to Quakerism. She determined to do it, and thus threw the Society of Friends into an odd dilemma.. It was an age of dilemmas for American establishments in church and state. My mother sent into the meeting a written statement that she resigned her membership. The elders informed her that that availed nothing. The Book of Discipline, which is the code of rules governing Quakers, provided no way for a member to dissolve his connection with the society of his own accord. A person might be expelled or "disowned " for various kinds of ill-conduct, but apparently it had not entered into the minds of the framers of the Discipline that anybody could ever be so misguided as to think the society guilty of ill-conduct, and to wish to sever connection with it. When this was explained to my mother, she replied simply that, by rule or without rule, she had left the meeting, and that she should take no |