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He was then attached to the Prince Albert of the English expedition. After visiting the Greenland settlements of Proven and Uppernavik, with an unsuccessful attempt, against floes and icebergs, to resume the search through Wellington Channel, the expedition returned to New York in September. The duties and scientific employments of Dr. Kane during the voyage were arduous and constant. After his return he employed himself upon the preparation of his journal for publication, and bringing before the public in lectures at Washington and the chief Atlantic cities, his views in reference to another attempt at Arctic discovery. His account of his voyage, The U. S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin; A Personal Narrative, was written and left for publication in the hands of the Harpers, when he sailed on his second Arctic expedition from New York, on the 31st May, 1853, in command of the Advance, fitted out by the liberality of Mr. Grinnell of New York, and Mr. Peabody, the wealthy broker of London. His design on this voyage was to advance to the head of Baffin's Bay, and in the winter and spring of 1854 traverse with dogs and sledges the upper portions of the peninsula or island of Greenland, in an endeavor to reach the supposed open Polar sea.

The publication of the book which Dr. Kane had left behind him was delayed by the burning of the edition, just then completed, at the great fire of the Messrs. Harper's establishment in Cliff and Pearl streets in December, 1853. The stereotype plates were saved, and the work was published in the spring of 1854. It is written with great fidelity and spirit, in a style highly characteristic of the life and energy of the man. Its descriptions are vivid, and its felicity of expression remarkable, illuminating to the unscientific reader the array of professional and technical terms with which the subject is appropriately invested. There

is a frosty crystallization, as it were, about the style, in keeping with the theme. The scientific merits of the work are important, particularly in the careful study of the ice formations, on which subject Dr. Kane has mentioned his intention to prepare an elaborate essay for the Smithsonian publications. Not the least attraction of the book are the numerous careful drawings and spirited illustrations from the pencil of Dr. Kane himself.

Dr. Kane has also been a contributor to the scientific journals of Europe and America. In 1843 he published a paper on Kyestine, which was well received by the medical profession.

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ARCTIC INCIDENTS.

I employed the dreary intervals of leisure that heralded our Christmas in tracing some Flemish portraitures of things about me. The scenes themselves had interest at the time for the parties who figured in them; and I believe that is reason enough, according to the practice of modern academics, for submitting them to the public eye. I copy them from my scrap-book, expurgating only a little.

"We have almost reached the solstice; and things are so quiet that I may as well, before I forget it, tell you something about the cold in its sensible effects, and the way in which as sensible people we met it.

"You will see, by turning to the early part of my journal, that the season we now look back upon as the perfection of summer contrast to this outrageous winter was in fact no summer at all. We had the young ice forming round us in Baffin's Bay, and were measuring snow-falls, while you were sweating under your grass-cloth. Yet I remember it as s time of sunny recreation, when we shot bears upon the floes, and were scrambling merrily over glaciers and murdering rotges in the bright glare of our daymidnight. Like a complaining brute, I thought it cold then-I, who am blistered if I touch a brass button or a ramrod without a woollen mit.

"The cold came upon us gradually. The first thing that really struck me was the freezing up of our water-casks, the drip-candle appearance of the bung-holes, and our inability to lay the tin cup down for a five-minutes' pause without having its contents made solid. Next came the complete inability to obtain drink without manufacturing it. For a long time we had collected our water from the beautiful fresh pools of the icebergs and floes; now we had to quarry out the blocks in fiinty, glassy lumps, and then melt it in tins for our daily drink. This was in Wellington Channel.

"By-and-by the sludge which we passed through as we travelled became pancakes and snow-balls We were glued up. Yet, even as late as the 11th of September, I collected a flowering Potentilla from Barlow's Inlet. But now anything moist or wet began to strike me as something to be looked at-a curious, out-of-the-way production, like the bits of broken ice round a can of mint-julep. Our decks became dry, and studded with botryoidal lumps of dirty foot-trodden ice. The rigging had nightly ac cumulations of rime, and we learned to be careful about coiled ropes and iron work. On the 4th of October we had a mean temperature below zero.

"By this time our little entering hatchway had become so complete a mass of icicles, that we had to give it up, and resort to our winter door-way. The opening of a door was now the signal for a gush of smoke-like vapor: every stove-pipe sent out clouds of purple steam; and a man's breath looked like the firing of a pistol on a small scale.

"All our eatables became laughably consolidated, and after different fashions, requiring no small ex

perience before we learned to manage the peculiarities of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples became one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, a conglomerate of sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches the same. To get these out of the barrel, or the barrel out of them, was a matter impossible. We found, after many trials, that the shortest and best plan was to cut up both fruit and barrel by repeated blows with a heavy axe, taking the lumps below to thaw. Saur-kraut resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A crow-bar with chiseled edge extracted the lamina badly; but it was perhaps the best thing we could resort to.

Sugar formed a very funny compound. Take 9. 8. of cork raspings, and incorporate therewith another 2. 8. of liquid gutta percha caoutchouc, and allow to harden: this extemporaneous formula will give you the brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract with the saw; nothing but the saw will suit. Butter and lard, less changed, require a heavy cold chisel and mallet. Their fracture is conchoidal, with hæmatitic (iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little change, and molasses can at -28° be half scooped, half cut by a stiff iron ladle.

Pork and beef are rare specimens of Florentine mosaic, emulating the lost art of petrified visceral monstrosities seen at the medical schools of Bologna and Milan: crow-bar and handspike! for at-30° the axe can hardly chip it. A barrel sawed in half, and kept for two days in the caboose house at +76o, was still as refractory as flint a few inches below the surface. A similar bulk of lamp oil, denuded of the staves, stood like a yellow sandstone roller for a gravel walk.

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"Ices for the dessert come of course unbidden, in all imaginable and unimaginable variety. I have tried my inventive powers on some of them. Roman punch, a good deal stronger than the noblest Roman ever tasted, forms readily at -20°. Some sugared cranberries, with a little butter and scalding water, and you have an impromptu strawberry ice. Many a time at those funny little jams, that we call in Philadelphia parties, where the lady-hostess glides with such nicely-regulated indifference through the complex machinery she has brought together, I have thought I noticed her stolen glance of anxiety at the cooing doves, whose icy bosoms were melting into one upon the supper-table before their time. We order these things better in the Arctic. Such is the composition and fierce quality' of our ices, that they are brought in served on the shaft of a hickory broom; a transfixing rod, which we use as a stirrer first and a fork afterward. So hard is this terminating cylinder of ice, that it might serve as a truncheon to knock down an ox. The only difficulty is in the processes that follow. It is the work of time and energy to impress it with the carvingknife, and you must handle your spoon deftly, or it fastens to your tongue. One of our mess was tempted the other day by the crystal transparency of an icicle to break it in his mouth; one piece froze to his tongue, and two others to his lips, and each carried off the skin: the thermometer was at -28°."

SAMUEL ELIOT,

THE author of a History of Liberty, was born at Boston, the son of William H. Eliot, December 22, 1821. He was educated in Boston and at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1839. He continued his studies in Europe. He formed the idea of writing a History of Liberty in Rome, where he spent the winter of 1841-5, and has since been engaged upon the work.

In 1847, he published in Boston, Passages from the History of Liberty, in which he traced the career of the early Italian reformers, Arnaldo da Brescia, Giovanni di Vicenza, and others; of Savonarola; of Wycliffe in England, and the War of the Communities in Castile.

The first series of his more elaborate history in two volumes, appeared in 1849 with the title, The Liberty of Rome. In 1853, this work was reprinted in a revised form as The History of Liberty: Part I. The Ancient Romans, and in the same year appeared two similar volumes relating to The Early Christians. These constituted two parts of an extensive work, of which three others are projected, devoted successively to the Papal Ages, the Monarchical Ages, and the American Nation.

The speciality of Mr. Eliot's historic labors is fully indicated in their title. It is to read the past, not for the purpose of curiosity, entertainment, or controversy, for the chronicle of kings and emperors, or the story of war and conquest, unless for their subordination to the progress of Liberty. His work is therefore a critical analysis rather than a narrative. As such it possesses much philosophical acumen, and bears evidences of a diligent study of the original and later authorities. The conception of the work is a noble one, and it may without vanity be said to be appropriately undertaken by an American.

As a specimen of the author's manner, we present a passage at the close of the history of Roman liberty with the establishment of the Emperors, and at the dawn of the new divine dispensation for all true freedom and progress of humanity in Christianity.

CLOSE OF ANTIQUITY.

Thus is our Era to be named of Hope. CARLYLE, French Revolution, Book m. ch. 8. The course of the olden time was run. Its generations had wrought the work appointed them to do. Their powers were exhausted. Their liberty, in other words, their ability to exercise their powers, was itself overthrown.

From the outset there had been no union amongst men. The opposite system of centralization, by which the many were bound to the few, had prevailed at the beginning. Weakened, indeed, but more than ever developed, it prevailed also at the end. To renew and to extend this system had been the appointed work of the ancient Romans. Not to unite, not to liberate the human race, had they been intrusted with dominion. It was to reduce mankind, themselves included, to dissension and to submission, that the Romans were allowed their liberty.

To such an end their liberty, like that of the elder nations, was providentially adapted. As a possession, it was in the hands not of the best, but of the strongest. As a right, it was not the right to improve one's self, but that to restrain others. It was the claim to be served by others. It was not the privilege of serving others. Much less was it the privilege of serving God. Struggling amidst the laws of man, instead of resting upon those of God, it was the liberty of men destined to contention until they fell in servitude.

There were exceptions. Not every one lost him. self in the dust and the agony of strife. Not every generation spent itself in conflicts. The physical powers were not always the only ones in exercise. At times the intellectual powers obtained develop. ment. At rarer seasons, the spiritual powers evinced themselves. A generation might thus attain to a liberty far wider than that of its predecessors. An individual might thus rise to a liberty far higher than that of his contemporaries. Yet these were but exceptions. The rule, confirmed by them, was the tendency of men to a lower, rather than a higher state. Indirectly, they were led towards the higher state, for which the lower was the necessary preparation. But the passage was to be made through the lower. Every bad work that succeeded, every good work that failed, brought mankind nearer to the end of the prevailing evil. The advent of the approaching good was hastened by every downward step towards prostration.

From the masses of the clouds the light first fades away. It presently vanishes from the patches in the skies originally undimmed. Then darkness

overspreads the heavens. Men fall supine upon the earth. The night of universal humiliation sets in. But the gloom is not unbroken. Overshadowed as is the scene, it is not overwhelmed. There still remain the vales where truth has descended. There still exist the peaks to which love in its longing has climbed. Desires too earnest to have been wasted, principles too honest to have been unproductive, still linger in promise of the coming day. were to be humbled. They needed to feel the insecurity of their liberty, of the powers which made it their right, of the laws which made it their possession. But they did not need to be bereft of the good which their laws and their powers, however imperfect, comprehended.

Men

The day of redemption followed. It was not too late. It was not too soon. The human race had been tried. It had not been annihilated. Then the angels sang their song of glory to God and peace amongst His creatures. We may believe that when the morning came, the oppression and the servitude of old had left their darkest forms amidst the midnight clouds. Before the death of Augustus, the Business of THE FATHER had already been begun in the Temple at Jerusalem; and near by, THE SON was increasing in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.

The sea, as it were, whereon wave has pursued wave through day and night, through years and centuries, before our eyes, is thus illumined with the advancing light which we have been waiting to behold. And as we stand upon the shore, conscious of the Spirit that has moved upon the face of the waters, we may lift our eyes with more confiding faith to the over-watching Heaven.

JAMES T. FIELDS

Was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1820. His partnership in the publishing house of Ticknor and Co. of Boston, whose liberal literary dealings with eminent authors at home and abroad he has always warmly seconded, has identified him with the best interests of literature.

James T. Fields

He is the poets' publisher of America, as Moxon has been of England, and like his brother of the

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The grass hung wet on Rydal banks,
The golden day with pearls adorning,
When side by side with him we walked
To meet midway the summer morning.
The west wind took a softer breath,

The sun himself seemed brighter shining,
As through the porch the minstrel stept-
His eye sweet Nature's look enshrinig.
He passed along the dewy sward,

The blue-bird sang aloft "good-morrow
He plucked a bud, the flower awoke,
And smiled without one pang of sorrow.
He spoke of all that graced the scene

In tones that fell like music round us,
We felt the charm descend, nor strove

To break the rapturous spell that bound us. We listened with mysterious awe,

Strange feelings mingling with our pleasure; We heard that day prophetic words,

High thoughts the heart must always treasure. Great Nature's Priest! thy calm career,

With that sweet morn, on earth has endedBut who shall say thy mission died When, winged for Heaven, thy soul ascended!

DIRGE FOR A YOUNG GIRL

Underneath the sod, low lying,

Dark and drear,

Sleepeth one who left, in dying,
Sorrow here.

Yes, they're ever bending o'er her,
Eyes that weep;

Forms that to the cold grave bore her
Vigils keep.

When the summer moon is shining
Soft and fair,

Friends she loved in tears are twining
Chaplets there.

Rest in peace, thou gentle spirit,
Throned above;

Souls like thine with God inherit
Life and love!

EVENTIDE.

This cottage door, this gentle gale,
Hay-scented, whispering round,
Yon path-side rose, that down the vale
Breathes incense from the ground,

Methinks should from the dullest clod
Invite a thankful heart to God.
But, Lord, the violet, bending low,
Seems better moved to praise;
From us, what scanty blessings flow,

How voiceless close our days:

Father, forgive us, and the flowers
Shall lead in prayer the vesper hours,

DONALD G. MITCHELL.

MR. MITOHELL was born in Norwich, Connecticut, April, 1822. His father was the pastor of the Congregational church of that place, and his grandfather a member of the first Congress at Philadelphia, and for many years Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Connecticut.

After being prepared for college at a boardingschool, young Mitchell entered Yale, and was graduated in due course in 1841. His health being feeble, he passed the three following years on his grandfather's est te in the country. He became much interested in agriculture, wrote a number of letters for the Cultivator at Albany, and gained a silver cup from the New York Agricultural Society, as a prize for a plan of farm buildings.

He next crossed the ocean, and spent half a winter in the island of Jersey, and the other half in rambling over England on foot, visiting in this manner every county, and writing letters to the Albany Cultivator. After passing eighteen months on the continent he returned home, and commenced the study of the law in New York city. He soon after published, Fresh Gleanings; or, A New Sheaf from the Old Fields of Continental Europe; by Ik. Marvel, a pleasant volume of leisurely observation over a tour through some of the choice places of Central Europe. Mr. Mitchell's health suffering from confinement in a city office, he again visited Europe, and passed some of the eventful months of 1848 in the capital and among the vineyards of France.

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the History of the French Revolution. His next production was The Lorgnette, a periodical in size and style resembling Salmagundi. It appeared anonymously, and although attracting much attention in fashionable circles, the author's incognito was for some time preserved. It was written in a quiet, pure style, and contains some of the best passages in the author's writings.

During the progress of the Lorgnette, Mr. Mitchell published the Reveries of a Bachelor, a contemplative view of life from the slippered ease of the chimney corner. A slight story runs through the volume, containing some pathetic scenes tenderly narrated.

A volume of a similar character, Dream Life, appeared in the following year. In 1853 Mr. Mitchell received the appointment of United States Consul at Venice. He retained the office but a short time, and after passing several months in Europe, engaged in the collection of materials for a proposed history of Venice, returned home the summer of 1855. He is at present residing on a country-seat which he has purchased in the neighborhood of New Haven.

Mr. Mitchell's last publication, Fudge Doings, was originally published in the Knickerbocker Magazine. It consists of a series of sketches, in a connected form, of city fashionable life, in the vein of the Lorgnette.

LETTERS FROM THE REVERIES OF A BACHELOR.

Blessed be letters!-they are the monitors, they are also the comforters, and they are the only true heart-talkers. Your speech, and their speeches, are conventional; they are moulded by circumstances; they are suggested by the observation, remark, and influence of the parties to whom the speaking is addressed, or by whom it may be overheard.

Your truest thought is modified half through its utterance by a look, a sign, a smile, or a sneer. It is not individual; it is not integral: it is social and mixed,-half of you, and half of others. It bends, it sways, it multiplies, it retires, and it advances, as the talk of others presses, relaxes, or quickens.

But it is not so with Letters:-there you are, with only the soulless pen, and the snow-white, virgin paper. Your soul is measuring itself by itself, and saying its own sayings: there are no sneers to modify its utterance,-no scowl to scare,-nothing is present, but you and your thought.

Utter it then freely-write it down-stamp itburn it in the ink !-There it is, a true soul-print!

Oh, the glory, the freedom, the passion of a letter! It is worth all the lip-talk of the world. Do you say, it is studied, made up, acted, rehearsed, contrived, artistic?

Let me see it then; let me run it over; tell me age, sex, circumstances, and I will tell you if it be studied or real; if it be the merest lip-slung put into words, or heart-talk blazing on the paper.

I have a little pacquet, not very large, tied up with narrow crimson ribbon, now soiled with frequent handling, which far into some winter's night I take down from its nook upon my shelf, and untie, and open, and run over, with such sorrow, and such joy, such tears and such smiles, as I am sure make me for weeks after, a kinder and holier man.

There are in this little pacquet, letters in the familiar hand of a mother-what gentle admonition -what tender affection!-God have mercy on him who outlives the tears that such admonitions, and such affection call up to the eye! There are others in the budget, in the delicate, and unformed hand of

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a loved, and lost sister;-written when she and you were full of glee, and the best mirth of youthful ness; does it harm you to recall that mirthfulness! or to trace again, for the hundredth time, that scrawling postscript at the bottom, with its i's so carefully dotted, and its gigantic t's so carefully crossed, by the childish hand of a little brother?

I have added latterly to that pacquet of letters; I almost need a new and longer ribbon; the old one is getting too short. Not a few of these new and cherished letters, a former Reverie has brought to me; not letters of cold praise, saying it was well done, artfully executed, prettily imagined-no such thing: but letters of sympathy of sympathy which means sympathythe παθήμι and the συν.

It would be cold and dastardly work to copy them; I am too selfish for that. It is enough to say that they, the kind writers, have seen a heart in the Reverie have felt that it was real, true. They know it; a secret influence has told it. What mat ters it, pray, if literally there was no wife, and no dead child, and no coffin, in the house? Is not feeling, feeling and heart, heart? Are not these fancies thronging on my brain, bringing tears to my eyes, bringing joy to my soul, as living, as anything human can be living? What if they have no ma terial type--no objective form? All that is crude, -a mere reduction of ideality to sense,-a transfor

mation of the spiritual to the earthy, a levelling

of soul to matter.

Are we not creatures of thought and passion! Is anything about us more earnest than that same thought and passion! Is there anything more real, -more characteristic of that great and dim destiny to which we are born, and which may be written down in that terrible word-Forever?

Let those who will then, sneer at what in their wisdom they call untruth-nt what is false, because it has no material presence: this does not create falsity; would to Heaven that it did!

And yet, if there was actual, material truth, superadded to Reverie, would such objectors sympathize the more? No!-a thousand times, no; the heart that has no sympathy with thoughts and feelings that scorch the soul, is dead also-whatever its mocking tears and gestures may say-to a coffin or a grave! Let them pass, and we will come back to these cherished letters.

A mother who has lost a child, has, she says, shed a tear-not one, but many-over the dead boy's coldness. And another, who has not, but who trembles lest she lose, has found the words failing as she reads, and a dim, sorrow-borne mist, spreading over the page.

Another, yet rejoicing in all those family ties that make life a charm, has listened nervously to careful reading, until the husband is called home, and the coffin is in the house"Stop !" she says; and n gush of tears tells the rest.

Yet the cold critic will say "it was artfully done." A curse on him!-it was not art: it was nature.

Another, a young, fresh, healthful girl-mind, has seen something in the love-picture-albeit so weak -of truth; and has kindly believed that it must be earnest. Aye, indeed is it, fair, and generous one, -earnest as life and hope! Who indeed with a heart at all, that has not yet slipped away irrepara bly and for ever from the shores of youth-from that fairy land which young enthusiasm creates, and over which bright dreams hover-but knows it to be real! And so such things will be real, till hopes

are dashed, and Death is come.

Another, a father, has laid down the book in tears. -God bless them all! How far better this, than

the cold praise of newspaper paragraphs, or the critically contrived approval of colder friends!

Let me gather up these letters carefully, to be read when the heart is faint, and sick of all that there is unreal and selfish in the world. Let me tie them together, with a new, and longer bit of ribbon-not by a love knot, that is too hard--but by an easy slipping knot, that so I may get at them the better. And now they are all together, a smug pacquet, and we will label them not sentimentally (I pity the one who thinks it), but earnestly, and in the best meaning of the term--SOUVENIRS DU CŒUR. Thanks to my first Reverie, which has added to such a treasure!

THOMAS BUCHANAN READ

WAS born in Chester county, Pennsylvania, March 12, 1822. His boyhood was passed among the scenes of country life until the age of seventeen, when, after the death of his father, he moved to Cincinnati, and obtained a situation in the studio of Clevinger the sculptor. Devoting himself to the fine arts, he soon obtained some local reputation as a portrait painter, and in 1841 removed to New York, with the intention of devoting himself to the art as a profession. He went within a year to Boston, where, in 1843-4 he published in the "Courier" a number of lyrics,

and in 1847 his first volume of Poems. It was followed by a second of Lays and Ballads in 1848, published at Philadelphia, whither he had removed in 1846. In 1818 he made a collection of specimens of the Female Poets of America, and has published an edition of his own verses, elegantly illustrated. He has passed some time in Europe with a view to the study of painting, and is now pursuing that object with success in Rome.

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