Oh ho! how they march, Making sounds as they tread; Ho-ho! how they skip, Going down to the dead! Going down to the dead! With a skull on his shoulder. But ho! how he steps With a high tossing head, That clay-covered bone, Going down to the dead! JOHN STEINFORT KIDNEY Is the author of a volume, Catawba River, and Other Poems, published in 1847. He is a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, settled at Saratoga Springs, New York. He was born in 1819, in Essex County, N. J., where his ancestors had lived for a hundred and fifty years, was educated partly at Union College, and gave some attention to the law before entering the church through the course of instruction of the General Theological Seminary. After his ordination he was for a time rector of a parish in North Carolina, and afterwards in Salem, N. J. His verses show an individual temperament, and the tastes of a scholar and thinker. COME IN THE MOONLIGHT. Come in the moonlight-come in the cold, Come, ye sad lovers, friends who have parted, All boovy-hearted ones, Come-O come! Come to the beauty of frost in the silence, Deep is the sky-pearl of the morning, Lost in its blueness, Come-O come! Look up and shudder; see the lone moon Come-O come! Lo! she is weeping;-tears in the heaven Twinkle and tremble. Tenderest sister! Come-O come! Keen is the air;-keener the sparkles Sprinkling the snow-drift, Glancing and glittering, Come-O come! Look to the earth-from earth to her sister, See which is brightest! Both white as the angels! Come-O come! Robed in the purity heaven hath sent her, Drowned in the holiness. Grief hath no wailing:-Rapture is silent. GEORGE H. COLTON. GEORGE HOOKER COLTON, the son of the Rev. George Colton, was born at Westford, Otsego County, New York, on the 27th of October, 1818. He was graduated, with a high rank in his class, at Yale College, in 1840. In the fall of the same year, while engaged as a teacher in Hartford, he determined to write a poem on the Indian Wars in which the newly elected President, General Harrison, had been engaged. It was to have appeared at the time of the Inauguration, but, the plan expanding as the author proceeded, was not published until the spring of 1842. The poem, Tecumseh, or the West Thirty Years Since, is in nine cantos, in the octosyllabic measure and style of Sir Walter Scott, with the usual ordinary felicities of illustration bestowed upon this class of compositions in America, of which many have been produced with little success. In 1842 Mr. Colton also prepared, from the materials which he had accumulated during the progress of his poem, a course of lectures on the Indians, which were delivered in various places during 1842 and 1843. In the summer of 1844 he delivered a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Yale College. In January, 1845, he published the first number of the American Whig Review, a monthly magszine of politics and literature, under his editorship. Mr. Colton entered upon this important enterprise with great energy, securing a large number of the leading politicians and authors of the country as its friends and contributors. He edited the work with judgment, wrote constantly for its pages, and had succeeded in gaining a fair measure of success, when he was seized in November, 1847, by a violent attack of typhus fever, which put an end to his life on the first of December following.* PHILIP SCHAFF. DR. PHILIP SCHAFF, Professor of Theology in the Seminary of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pa., the author of a History of the Apostolic Church and of other theological works, which have received considerable attention in America, is a native of Switzerland. He was born at Coire (Chur), Canton Graubundten, January 1, 1819. He was educated at the college of his native city, afterwards at the Gymnasium of Stuttgart, and in the Universities of Tubingen, Halle, and Berlin. He received his degree in 1841, as Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Divinity, at the University of Berlin, which subsequently (1854) presented him the Diploma of D.D. honoris causâ. At the conclusion of his early college life, he travelled for nearly two years through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy, as tutor of a young Prussian nobleman. In 1842 he became a lecturer on theology in the University of Berlin, after having gone through the examination of public academic teachers. In 1843, he received a unanimous call as professor of Church History and Exegesis to the Theologi * New Englander, vii. 299. cal Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, from the Synod of the German Reformed Church of the United States, on the recommendations of Drs. Neander, Hengstenberg, Tholuck, Muller, Krummacher, and others, who had been consulted about a suitable representative of German Evangelical Theology for America. In the spring of 1844 he left Berlin, and after some months' travel in Southern Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and England, he crossed the Atlantic and soon identified himself with American interests. He has since been engaged in teaching the various branches of exegetical and historical theology at Mercersburg, both in the German and English languages, with the exception of the year 1854, which he spent on a visit to his friends in Europe. The Church History of Dr. Schaff is remarkable for its thorough and apparently exhaustive learning, for its clear style and somewhat artistic groupings, for its union of doctrinal persistency with philosophical enlargement. His position is that of strong supernaturalism, with great emphasis upon the church organism, and the high Lutheran doctrine of divine grace, which is saved from Calvinism by the decided high church view of the sacraments. His life of Augustine is a scholarlike and philosophical development of the great saint's doctrinal positions from his experience and life.* Marshall College, with which, under the presidency of the Rev. Dr. John W. Nevin, Dr. Schaff held the Professorship of Esthetics and German Literature, was first situated at Mercersburg, Franklin Co. Pa., and was founded under a charter from the Legislature of Pennsylvania in 1835. It sprang originally out of the high school attached to the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church, and is in intimate union with that institution. By an act of the state in 1850, it was united with Franklin College at Lancaster, and in 1853 was removed to that place, the new institution bearing the title Franklin and Marshall College. Adolphus L. Koeppen, author of a series of lectures on Geography and History, and a valua The following is a list of the publications of Dr. Schaff:1. The Sin against the Holy Ghost, and the Dogmatical and Ethical Inferences derived from it. With an Appendix on the Life and Death of Francis Spiera. Halle, 1841. (German.) 2. James, the Brother of the Lord, and James the Less. An exegetical and historical essay. Berlin, 1842. (German.) 3. The Principle of Protestantism, as related to the present state of the Church. Chambersburg, Pa., 1845. (German and English Translation, with an Introduction by Dr. Nevin.) 4. What is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development. Philadelphia, 1846. (English.) 5. History of the Apostolic Church, with a General Introduction to Church History. First German edition, Mercersburg, Pa., 1851. Second German edition, Leipzic, 1854. (English translation by the Rev. E. Yeomans, New York, 1853. Reprinted in Edinburgh, 1854) 6. Life and Labors of St. Augustine (English edition, New York, 1853, and another, London, 1854. German edition, Berlin, 1854.) 7. America. The Political, Social, and Religious Condition of the United States of N. A. Berlin, 1854. (German. An English translation will appear before the end of 1855.) 8. Der Deutsche Kirchenfreund ("The German Church Friend, or Monthly Organ for the General Interests of the German Churches in America," commenced in 1848, and edited and published by Dr. Schaff till the close of the 6th volume in 1853; now continued by the Rev. William J. Mann, Philadelphia, Pa.) 9. Several Tracts and Orations on Anglo-Germanism, Dante, Systematic Benevolence, etc. etc., and Articles in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Methodist Quarterly, Mercersburg Review, and other journals of America and Germany. ble publication on the subject, is Professor of German Literature, Esthetics, and History, in this institution. Dr. Nevin, the associate of Professor Schaff, is alse the author of a work on The Mystical Presence, a Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and other theological writings of the school of divinity to which he is attached, and of which the Mercersburg Review, commenced in January, 1849, has been the organ. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Is the descendant of an old New England family, which has long held important stations in Massachusetts. His ancestor, Percival Lowell, settled in the town of Newbury in 1639. His grandfather, John Lowell, was an eminent lawyer, a member of Congress and of the convention which formed the first constitution of Massachusetts. His father is Charles Lowell, the venerable pastor of the West Church in Boston; his mother was a native of New Hampshire, a sister of the late Capt. Robert T. Spence of the U. S. Navy, and is spoken of as of remarkable powers of mind and possessing in an eminent degree the faculty of acquiring languages.* This faculty is inherited by her daughter, Mrs. Putnam, whose controversy with Mr. Bowen, editor of the North American Review, respecting the late war in Hungary, brought her name prominently before the public. Mrs. Putnam converses readily in French, Italian, German, Polish, Swedish, and Hungarian, and is familiar with twenty modern dialects, besides the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persic, and Arabic. Mrs. Putnam made the first translation into English of Frederica Bremer's novel of the Neighbors, from the Swedish. The translation by Mary Howitt was made from the German.-Homes of American Authors-Art. LOWELL. his degree at Harvard. His first production in print, a class poem, appeared at this time. This was succeeded, in 1841, by a collection of poems -A Year's Life. It was marked by a youthful delicacy and sensibility, with a leaning to transcendental expression, but teeming with proofs of the poetic nature, particularly in a certain vein of tenderness. In January, 1843, he commenced, in conjunction with his friend Mr. Robert Carter, the publication of The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine, which, though published in the form of a fashionable illustrated magazine, was of too fine a cast to be successful. But three monthly numbers were issued: they contained choice articles from Poe, Neal, Hawthorne, Parsons, Dwight, and others, including the editors. This unsuccessful speculation was an episode in a brief career at the bar, which Mr. Lowell soon relinquished for a literary life. The reception of Mr. Lowell's first poetic volume had been favorable, and encouraged the author's next adventure, a volume containing the Legend of Brittany, Miscellaneous Poems and Sonnets, in 1844. There was a rapid advance in art in these pages, and a profounder study of passion. The leading poem is such a story as would have engaged the heart of Shelley or Keats. A country maiden is betrayed and murdered by a knightly lover. Her corpse is concealed behind the church altar, and the guilty presence made known on a festival day by a voice demanding baptism for the unborn babe in its embrace. The murderer is struck with remorse, and ends his days in repentance. The story thus outlined is delicately told, and its repulsiveness overcome by the graces of poetry and feeling with which it is invested in the character of the heroine Margaret. The poem in blank verse entitled Prometheus, which followed the legend in the volume, afforded new proof of the author's ability. It is mature in thought and expression, and instinct with a lofty imagination. The prophecy of the triumph of love, humanity, and civilization, over the brute and sensual power of Jove, is a fine modern improvement of the old fable. The apologue of Rhacus is also in a delicate, classical spirit. The next year Mr. Lowell gave the public a volume of prose essays—a series of critical and æsthetic Conversations on some of the Old Poets, Chaucer and the dramatists Chapman and Ford being the vehicles for introducing a liberal stock of reflections on life and literature generally. It is a book of essays, displaying a subtle knowledge of English literature, to which the form of dialogue is rather an incumbrance. Another series of Poems, containing the spirit of the author's previous volume, followed in 1848. About the same time appeared The Vision of Sir Launfal, founded on a legend of a search for the San Greal. The knight in his dream discovers charity to the suffering to be the holy cup. As a diversion to the pursuit of sentimental poetry, Mr. Lowell at the close of the year sent forth a rhyming estimate of contemporaries in a Fable for Critics, which, though not without some puerilities, contains a series of sharply drawn portraits in felicitous verse. The Biglow Papers, edited with an Introduction, Notes, Glossary, and Copious Index, complete the record of this busy year. The book purports to be written by Homer Wilbur, 'A.M., Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam and (prospective) Member of many Literary, Learned, and Scientific Societies. It is cast in the Yankee dialect, and is quite an artistic product in that peculiar lingo. The subject is an exposure of the political pretences and shifts which accompanied the war with Mexico, the satire being directed against war and slavery. It is original in style and pungent in effect. This is Mr. Lowell's last published volume, his time having been since occupied in a residence abroad, though he has occasionally written for the North American Review, Putnam's Magazine, and other journals, and was for a time a stated contributor to the Anti-slavery Standard. He was married in December, 1844, to Miss Maria White, of Watertown, a lady whose literary genius, as exhibited in a posthumous vo lume privately printed by her husband in 1855, deserves a record in these pages. She was born July 8, 1821, and died October 27, 1853. We quote from the memorial volume alluded to, which is occupied with a few delicately simple poems of her composition, chiefly divided be tween records of foreign travel and domestic pathos, this touching expression of resignation: THE ALPINE SHEEP-ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND AFTER THE LOSS When on my ear your loss was knelled, A little spring from memory welled, Which once had quenched my bitter thirst, A portion of its mild relief, After our child's untroubled breath Was told to us by one we love. Soon crop the meadows' tender prime, That hang along the mountain's side, And down through mist the sunbeams slide. Along the dizzy verge to go, O'er frozen brooks, that flow unsheathed A blissful vision, through the night While, like the murmur of the sea, It is to the death of Maria Lowell, at Cambridge, that Mr. Longfellow alludes in his poem published in Putnam's Magazine in April, 1854, entitled THE TWO ANGELS. Two angels, one of Life, and one of Death, Passed o'er the village as the morning broke; The dawn was on their faces, and beneath, The sombre houses hearsed with plumes of smoke. Their attitude and aspect were the same, Alike their features and their robes of white; But one was crowned with amaranth, as with flame, And one with asphodels, like flakes of light. I saw them pause on their celestial way, I recognised the nameless agony, The terror and the tremor and the pain, That oft before had filled and haunted me, And now returned with threefold strength again. The door I opened to my heavenly guest, And listened, for I thought I heard God's voice, And knowing whatsoe'er he sent was best, Dared neither to lament nor to rejoice. Then with a smile that filled the house with light, A shadow on those features fair and thin, Lo! he looks back from the departing cloud. In 1854 Mr. Lowell delivered a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute on English Poetry, including the old ballad writers Chaucer, Pope, and others, to Wordsworth and Tennyson. They were marked by an acute critical spirit and enlivened by wit and fancy. Mr. Lowell has edited the poems of Andrew Marvell and Donne in the series of Messrs. Little & Brown's standard edition of the English poets. Early in 1855 he was appointed to the Belles Lettres professorship lately held by Mr. Longfellow in Harvard College, with the privilege of passing a preliminary year in Europe before entering on its duties. MARGARET-FROM THE LEGEND OF BRITTANY. Fair as a summer dream was Margaret,- It circled her dear head with careless art, Mocking the sunshine, that would fain have lent To its frank grace a richer ornament. His loved-one's eyes could poet ever speak, So kind, so dewy, and so deep were hers,But, while he strives, the choicest phrase too weak, Their glad reflection in his spirit blurs; As one may see a dream dissolve and break Out of his grasp when he to tell it stirs, Like that sad Dryad doomed no more to bless The mortal who revealed her loveliness. She dwelt for ever in a region bright, Peopled with living fancies of her own, A summer cloud thrilled through with rosy light, And makes the cot a palace with his eyes;- And grew in gentleness and patience wise, Some grace that in her soul took root and grew; Nature to her glowed ever new-revealed, All rosy-fresh with innocent morning dew, And looked into her heart with dim, sweet eyes That left it full of sylvan memories. O, what a face was hers to brighten light, And give back sunshine with an added glow, To wile each moment with a fresh delight, And part of memory's best contentment grow! O, how her voice, as with an inmate's right, Into the strangest heart would welcome go, And make it sweet, and ready to become Of white and gracious thoughts the chosen home! None looked upon her but he straightway thought Of all the greenest depths of country cheer, And into each one's heart was freshly brought What was to him the sweetest time of year So was her every look and motion fraught With out-of-door delights and forest lere; Not the first violet on a woodland lea Seemed a more visible gift of spring than she. AN INCIDENT IN A RAILROAD car. He spoke of Burns: men rude and rough Pressed round to hear the praise of one Whose heart was made of manly, simple stuff As homespun as their own. And, when he read, they forward leaned, Slowly there grew a tender awe, It was a sight for sin and wrong A sight to make our faith more pure and strong I thought, these men will carry hence God scatters love on every side, And always hearts are lying open wide, There is no wind but soweth seeds Which burst, unlooked-for, into high-souled deeds, We find within these souls of ours The angel heart of man. And thus, among the untaught poor, All thoughts that mould the age begin To one who grasps the whole: In his broad breast the feeling deep All thought begins in feeling,-wide And, narrowing up to thought, stands glorified Nor is he far astray who deems That every hope, which rises and grows broad In the world's heart, by ordered impulse streams From the great heart of God. God wills, man hopes: in common souls Till from the poet's tongue the message rolls A blessing to his kind. Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men, It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century ; But better far it is to speak One simple word, which now and then Shall waken their free nature in the weak And friendless sons of men; To write some earnest verse or line, He who doth this, in verse or prose, But surely shall be crowned at last with those THE FIRST SNOW FALL The snow had begun in the gloaming, Every pine and fir and hemlock Wore ermine too dear for an earl, I stood and watched by the window I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn Up spoke our own little Mabel, Who cares for us all below. Again I looked at the snowfall, I remembered the gradual patience The scar of that deep-stabbed woe Alone can make it fall?" Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her, And she, kissing back, could not know That my kiss was given to her sister Folded close under deepening snow. THE COURTIN', Zekle crep' up, quite unbeknown, Agin' the chimbly crooknecks hung, The old queen's arm thet gran'ther Young |