very nearly the means with which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred,-and on the other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I chose to occupy it. He had nothing further to do after his "family baking," which, the family consisting of a unit, could not have been large or have come round very often, than to read, think, and observe. Ho. mer appears to have been his favorite book. The thinking was unlimited, and the observation that of a man with an instinctive tact for the wonders of natural history. He sees and describes insects, birds, such "small deer" as approached him, with a felicity which would have gained him the heart of Izaak Walton and Alexander Wilson. A topographical and hydrographical survey of Walden Pond, is as faithful, exact, and labored, as if it had employed a government or admiralty commission. As in the author's previous work, the immediate incident is frequently only the introduction to higher themes. The realities around him are occasionally veiled by a hazy atmosphere of transcendental speculation, through which the essayist sometimes stumbles into abysmal depths of the bathetic. We have more pleasure, however, in dwelling upon the shrewd humors of this modern contemplative Jacques of the forest, and his fresh, nice observation of books and men, which has occasionally something of a poetic vein. He who would acquire a new sensation of the world about him, would do well to retire from cities to the banks of Walden pond; and he who would open his eyes to the opportunities of country life, in its associations of fields and men, may loiter with profit along the author's journey on the Merrimack, where natural history, local antiquities, records, and tradition, are exhausted in vitalizing the scene. A CHARACTER FROM WALDEN. Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man, he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here, -a Canadian, a wood-chopper and post maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself, taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus, for his sad countenance." Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?" Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia? He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose there's no harm in going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father's house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house, for he chopped all summer,-in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my beanfield, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall,-loving to dwell long upon these themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, How thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week and one day." A BATTLE OF ANTS-FROM WALDEN. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of seve ral of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was-Conquer or die. In the mean while there came along a single red ant on the hill-side of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar -for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick,"Fire! for God's sake fire!"—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity, such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "Æneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity. A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presideney of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill. ARTHUR CLEVELAND COXE. ARTHUR CLEVELAND COXE is the son of the Rev. Samuel H. Coxe, of Brooklyn, the author of Quakerism, not Christianity; Interviews, Memorable and Useful, from Diary and Memory, reproduced; and other publications. He was born at Mendham, New Jersey, May 10, 1818. On his mother's side he is a grandson of the Rev. Aaron Cleveland, an early poet of Connecticut. Mr. Cleveland was born at Haddam, February 3, 1744. His father, a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, dying when the son was but thirteen years of age, the latter received few educational advantages. He, however, at the age of nineteen, produced a descriptive poem, The Philosopher and Boy, of some merit. He soon after became a Congregational minister. In 1775 he published a poem on Slavery, in blank verse. He was also the author of several satirical poems directed against the Jeffersonians. He died on the twenty-first of September, 1815.* Mr. Coxe was prepared for college_under the private tuition of Professor George Bush. He entered the University of the City of New York, and was graduated in 1838. During his freshman year he wrote a poem, The Progress of Ambition, and in 1837 published Adrent, a Mystery, a poem after the manner of the religious dramas of the Middle Ages. In 1838 appeared Athwold, a Romaunt, and Saint Jonathan, the Lay of the Scald, designed as the commencement of a semihumorous poem, in the Don Juan style. Mr. Coxe soon after became a student in the General Theological Seminary, New York. While at this institution he delivered a poem, Athanasion, before the Alumni of Washington College, Hartford, at the Commencement in 1840. In the same year he published Christian Ballads, a collection of poems, suggested for the most part by the holy seasons and services of his church. Five editions of this popular volume have since appeared. Mr. Coxe was ordained deacon in July, 1841, and in the August following became rector of St. Anne's church, Morrisania, where he wrote his poem Halloween, privately printed in 1842. He was next called to St. John's church, at Hartford. During his residence at that place he published, in 1845, Saul, a Mystery, a dramatic poem of much greater length than his Advent, but, like that production, modelled on the early religious • Everest's Poets of Connecticut. plays. He is at present rector of Grace church, ! Baltimore. In addition to his poetical volumes Mr. Coxe has published Sermons on Doctrine and Duty, preached to the parishioners of St. John's church, Hartford, and numerous articles in the Church Review and other periodicals. He has also translated a work of the Abbé Laborde, on the Impossibility of the Immaculate Conception as an Article of Faith, with notes. OLD TRINITY. Easter Even, 1840. Thy servants think upon her stones, and it pitieth them to see her in the dust.-Psalter. The Paschal moon is ripe to-night On fair Manhada's bay, And soft it falls on Hoboken, As where the Saviour lay; And beams beneath whose paly shine But here, where many an holy year Oh, where's the consecrated porch, And where's that antique steeple's height I seem to miss a mother's face They've laid thee low, dear mother church, The vaulted roof that trembled oft The quaint old altar where we owned And held me spell-bound in the way The marble monuments within; The mitre and the legend there All these-thou knewest, Paschal moon, But ne'er shalt know again! And thou wast shining on this spot But oh, its look that Easter morn, The Saviour only knows. A thousand years-and 'twas the same, And so, till good Queen Anna reigned, But when they made its virgin turf, They claimed, for Christ, its battlements, VOL. II.-42 Then, Paschal moon, this sacred spot Till flames brought down the holy place, That mother church sublime! Ay, look with smiles, for never there So wane away, old Paschal moon, They rear old Trinity once more: Oh lay its deep foundations strong, Our Paschal Lamb himself shall come HE STANDETH AT THE DOOR AND KNOCKETH. In the silent midnight watches, How it knocketh-knocketh-knocketh, Say not 't is thy pulse is beating: "Tis thy heart of sin; 'Tis thy Saviour knocks, and crieth 66 Rise, and let me in." Death comes on with reckless footsteps, To the hall and hut: Think you, Death will tarry, knocking, Where the door is shut? Jesus waiteth, waiteth, waiteth But the door is fast; Grieved away thy Saviour goeth ;] Then, 'tis time to stand entreating At the gate of heaven beating, Nay,-alas, thou guilty creature! THE VOLUNTEER'S MARCHI.. As darkness grows drearer: Going down to the dead! March-march-march! Making sounds as they tread, Ho-ho! how they laugh, Going down to the dead! How they whirl, how they trip, How they smile, how they dally, How blithesome they skip, Going down to the valley! 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 clergy man 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 heavy-hearted ones, Come-O come! Come to the beauty of frost in the silence, Loves be forgotten,- Deep is the sky-pearl of the morning, Lost in its blueness, Come-O come! Look up and shudder; see the lone moon Lo! she is weeping;-tears in the heaven Tenderest sister! Come-O come! Keen is the air;-keener the sparkles Sprinkling the snow-drift, Glancing and glittering, Come- 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. 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 magazine 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 ineasure 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.* 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 causà. 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 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, 1858, and another, London, 1854. German edition, Berlin, 1854.) 7. America. The Political, Social, and Religions Condition of the United States of N. Á. 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 1:53; 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. Ilis 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. Putram 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 th Swedish. The translation by Mary Howitt was made from the German.-Homes of American Authors-Art. LOWELL. |