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of July with a paper in the President's own handwriting, expressed in these words:

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, July 18, 1864. To whom it may concern: Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States, will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points, and the bearer or bearers thereof shall have safe conduct both ways.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Mr. Greeley had already begun to have some impression of the unfortunate position in which he had placed himself, and the reading of this straightforward document still further nettled and perplexed him. He proposed to bring Jewett into conference; this Major Hay declined. He then refused to cross the river to Clifton unless Major Hay would accompany him, and himself deliver the paper to the Confederate emissaries. They therefore went together and met Mr. Holcombe in a private room of the Clifton House (Mr. Clay being absent for a day), and handed him the President's letter. After a few moments' conversation they separated, Mr. Greeley returning to New York and Major Hay remaining at Niagara to receive any answer that might be given to the letter. Before taking the train Mr. Greeley had an interview with Jewett, unknown to Major Hay, in which he seems to have authorized Jewett to continue to act as his representative. Jewett lost no time in acquainting the emissaries with this fact, informing them of the departure of Mr. Greeley, of "his regret at the sad termination of the initiatory steps taken for peace, in consequence of the change made by the President in his instructions to convey commissioners to Washington for negotiations, unconditionally, and that Mr. Greeley would be pleased to receive their answer" through him (Jewett). They replied to Jewett with mutual compliments, inclosing a long letter to Mr. Greeley, arraigning the President for his alleged breach of faith, which Jewett promptly communicated to the newspapers of the country without notice to Major Hay, informing him afterwards in a note that he did this by way of revenging the slight of the preceding day.

In giving the letter of the rebel emissaries to the press instead of sending it to its proper destination, Jewett accomplished the purpose for which it was written. It formed a not ineffective document in a heated political campaign. It would be difficult to ascertain, at this day, whether Mr. Greeley ever communi

cated to Jewett or Sanders, and whether they, in their constant flittings to and fro over the Suspension Bridge, ever made known to Clay and Holcombe the conditions of negotiation laid down by Mr. Lincoln in his letters of the 9th and 15th of July. At all events they pretended to be ignorant of any such conditions, and assumed that the President had sent Mr. Greeley to invite them to Washington without credentials and without conditions, to convey to Richmond his overtures of peace. They did not say with any certainty that even in that event his overtures would have been accepted, but expressed the hope that in case the war must continue there might "have been infused into its conduct something more of the spirit which softens and partially redeems its brutalities." They then went on to accuse the President of a "sudden and entire change of views," of a "rude withdrawal of a courteous overture," of "fresh blasts of war to the bitter end"; attributing this supposed change to some "mysteries of his cabinet" or some "caprice of his imperial will." They plainly intimated that while the South desired peace, it would not accept any arrangement which bartered away its self-government; and in conclusion they called upon their fellow-Confederates to strip from their "eyes the last film of delusion" that peace is possible, and "if there were any patriots or Christians" in the North, they implored them "to recall the abused authority and vindicate the outraged civilization of their country."

Even this impudent and uncandid manifesto did not convince Mr. Greeley that he had committed an error. On the contrary, he adopted the point of view of the rebel emissaries, and contended after his return to New York that he regarded the safe conduct given him on the 16th of July as a waiver by the President of all the conditions of his former letters. Being attacked by his colleagues of the press for his action at Niagara, he could only defend himself by implied censure of the President, and the discussion grew so warm that both he and his assailants at last joined in a request to Mr. Lincoln to permit the publication of the correspondence between them. This was an excellent opportunity for Mr. Lincoln to vindicate his own proceeding. But he rarely looked at such matters from the point of view of personal advantage, and he feared that the passionate, almost despairing appeals of the most prominent Republican editor in the North for peace at any cost would deepen the gloom in the public mind and have an injurious effect upon the Union cause. He therefore proposed to Mr. Greeley, in case the correspondence should be published, to omit some of the most vehement

phrases of his letters and those in which he advocated peace negotiations solely for political effect; at the same time he invited him to come to Washington and talk with him freely. Mr. Greeley, writing on the 8th of August, accepted both suggestions in principle, but he querulously declined going to Washington at that time, on the ground that the President was surrounded by his "bitterest personal enemies," and that his going would only result in further mischief, as at Niagara. "I will gladly go," he continued, "whenever I feel a hope that their influence has waned." Then, unable to restrain himself, he broke out in new and severe reproaches against the President for not having received Mr. Stephens, for not having sent a deputation to Richmond to ask for peace after Vicksburg, for not having taken the Democrats in Congress at their word, and sent "three of the biggest of them as commissioners to see what kind of a peace they could get." He referred once more to Niagara, and said magnanimously, "Let the past go"; but added the stern admonition, "Do not let this month pass without an earnest effort for peace." He held out a hope that if the President would turn from the error of his ways he would still help him make peace; but for the time being, "knowing who are nearest you," he gave him up. The only meaning this can have is simply, Dismiss Seward from your Cabinet and do as I tell you, and then perhaps I can save your Administration.

The next day, having received another telegram from the President, who, regardless of his own dignity, was still endeavoring to conciliate and convince him, Mr. Greeley wrote another letter, which we shall give more fully than the rest, to show in what a dangerous frame of mind was the editor of the most important organ of public opinion in the North. He begins by refusing to telegraph, "since I learned by sad experience at Niagara that my dispatches go to the War Department before reaching you."

I fear that my chance for usefulness has passed. I know that nine-tenths of the whole American people, North and South, are anxious for peace peace on almost any terms-and utterly sick of human slaughter and devastation. I know that, to the general eye, it now seems that the rebels are anxious to negotiate and that we refuse their advances. I know that if this impression be not removed we shall be beaten out of sight next November. I firmly believe that, were the election to take place to-morrow, the Democratic majority in this State and Pennsylvania would amount to Now if the rebellion can be crushed before November it will do to go on; if not, we are rushing to

100,000, and that we should lose Connecticut also.

certain ruin.

What, then, can I do in Washington? Your trusted VOL. XXXVIII.— 56.

advisers nearly all think I ought to go to Fort Lafayette for what I have done already. Seward wanted me sent there for my brief conference with M. Mercier. The cry has steadily been, No truce! No ing but surrender at discretion! I never heard of armistice! No negotiation! No mediation! Nothsuch fatuity before. There is nothing like it in history. It must result in disaster, or all experience is delusive.

Now I do not know that a tolerable peace could be had, but I believe it might have been last month; and, at all events, I know that an honest, sincere And I think no Government fighting a rebellion effort for it would have done us immense good. should ever close its ears to any proposition the rebels may make.

I beg you, implore you, to inaugurate or invite proposals for peace forthwith. And in case peace cannot now be made consent to an armistice for one year, each party to retain unmolested all it now holds, but the rebel ports to be opened. Meantime let a national convention be held, and there will surely be no more war at all events.

In a letter of the 11th of August, Mr. Greeley closed this extraordinary correspondence by insisting that if his letters were published they should be printed entire. This was accepted by Mr. Lincoln as a veto upon their publication. He could not afford, for the sake of vindicating his own action, to reveal to the country the despondency-one might almost say the desperation of one so prominent in Republican councils as the editor of the "Tribune." The spectacle of this veteran journalist, who was justly regarded as the leading controversial writer on the antislavery side, ready to sacrifice everything for peace, and frantically denouncing the Government for refusing to surrender the contest, would have been, in its effect upon public opinion, a disaster equal to the loss of a great battle. The President had a sincere regard for Mr. Greeley also, and was unwilling to injure him and his great capacities for usefulness by publishing these ill-considered and discouraging utterances. His magnanimity was hardly appreciated. Mr. Greeley, in this letter of the 11th of August, and afterwards, insisted that the President had in his letter and his dispatch of the 15th of July changed his ground from that held in his letter of the 9th, which ground, he asserted, was again shifted in his paper "To whom it may concern." This was of course wholly without foundation. The letter of the 9th authorized Mr. Greeley to bring to Washington any one "professing to have any proposition from Jefferson Davis, in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union, and abandonment of slavery"; the letter of the 15th repeats the offer contained in that of the 9th, saying, "Show that and this to them, and if they will come on the terms

stated in former, bring them." The next day Major Hay gave Mr. Greeley a formal safe conduct for himself and party, and neither of them thought of it as nullifying the President's letters. Indeed, Mr. Greeley's sole preposterous justification for his claim that his safe conduct superseded the President's instructions was that Major Hay did not say that it did not.

It was characteristic of Mr. Lincoln that, seeing the temper in which Mr. Greeley regarded the transaction, he dropped the matter and submitted in silence to the misrepresentations to which he was subjected by reason of it. The correspondence preceding the Niagara conference was not published until after the President's death; that subsequent to it sees the light for the first time in these pages. The public, having nothing of the record except the impudent manifesto of Clay and Holcombe, the foolish chatter of Jewett, and such half-statements as Mr. Greeley chose to make in answer to the assaults of his confrères of the press, judged Mr. Lincoln unjustly. Some thought

he erred in giving any hearing to the rebels; some criticized his choice of a commissioner; and the opposition naturally made the most of his conditions of negotiation, and accused him of embarking in a war of extermination in the interest of the negro. So that this wellmeant effort of the President to ascertain what were the possibilities of peace through negotiation, or, failing that, to convince the representative of a large body of Republicans of his willingness to do all he could in that direction, resulted only in putting a keener edge upon the criticisms of his supporters, and in arming his adversaries with a weapon which they used, after their manner, among the rebels of the border States and their sympathizers in the North. Nevertheless, surveying the whole transaction after the lapse of twenty-five years, it is not easy to see how any act of his in relation to it was lacking in wisdom, or how it could have been changed for the better. Certainly every step of the proceeding was marked with his usual unselfish sincerity and magnanimity to friend and to foe.

NILS'S

MONG a thousand students in a university town there will always be two or three in whom science and poetry hold each other at a deadlock. The headquarters for these few was, in my time, the delightful room of Edward Tenniman on the spot where the new Law School now stands. He himself was the high priest of this double altar, the professor of these incompatible elective studies. The room was in an old colonial house of the humbler description, the ceiling was low with a crosstimber, the walls were wainscoted, and there was a large, open fireplace. The arrangements of the room followed half unconsciously the double bent of the owner's mind. All one side was devoted to serve botanical science: tin boxes, specimens, herbaria, microscopes, and a recess filled with Latin and German botanical works. The middle of the room was, as it were, transitional: there was a desk with an

1 On the morning that the letter of the rebel emissaries was printed Major Hay, returning to Washington, heard this colloquy between two draymen on a Jersey City ferry-boat: Have you heard the news?" "No; what is it?" "Old Abe and Jeff. Davis have been try ing to make peace." "How did they make out?" “ 'Old

GARDEN.

Eschylus forever open, and a great copy of Liddell and Scott's lexicon, then a novelty. On the other side one passed into high philosophy and dreamland: a portrait of Coleridge, his framed autograph, a picture of his study, and a whole library of mystical philosophy, including, I remember, the folio edition of Jacob Behmen in five volumes, over whose symbolic plates we used to pore. With what delight after a rather stiff lesson in botany — for he took a few of us as private pupils-did we turn to the other side of the room, when Tenniman would unfold for us Behmen's "Aurora, or Day-Spring," and, better yet, the "Signatura Rerum, or the signature of all things, showing the Sign and Signification of the several Forms and Shapes in the Creation; and what the Beginning, Ruin, and Cure of every Thing is, it proceeds out of Eternity into Time, and again out of time into Eternity, and comprehends all Mysteries. Written in High Dutch, 1622, by Jacob Behmen, alias Teutonicus Phylosophus." No doubt this side of the room was very unscientific, in the modern sense, but it was certainly refreshing after an hour or two at the microscope. It Abe, he says, 'Let the niggers go free, and we'll stop fighting.' Jeff., he says, I'll let them be free that 's free now, and the rest stay as they are.' Old Abe, he says, 'No, they got to be all free'; and so they broke up on that." These draymen were not the only citizens who gave this brief and dramatic form to the negotiations.

perhaps made bad poets out of those whom Tenniman might otherwise have made into good observers, like himself; but a moderate amount of it certainly contributed to the enriching and enlarging of the whole man, and I have never regretted having been steeped for hours together in the perilous fascinations of that old room.

Walter Vose, Tenniman's favorite pupil, followed him alike in his profounder studies and his whims, and had a sunny, boyish temperament of his own that carried him cheerfully through all. One day at the Botanic Garden library, where Tenniman used sometimes to send us to practice analysis, the dear old professor, Amos Greene, came in upon Walter and found him with a copy of Pliny's Natural History before him.

"Do you get your botany from Pliny, my dear boy?" said the brisk and kindly professor. "No," said Walter, "but Tenniman thinks that all botany should still be written in Latin, as he wrote his little book on the Algæ, you know; so I am reading up my Pliny, and came upon a passage that set me thinking, for once." "Read it out," said the professor; and Walter Vose read and translated:

"No one can doubt that magic is the greatest of the sciences, seeing that it is the only one which embraces three other sciences having power over the human mind, and reduces them to one. No one doubts that it has sprung from medicine and become something loftier and holier than its parent."

"Yes, yes, yes," said the professor; "but really now

"Dear," said a woman who had just entered -a woman with a face so sweet that Pliny might have found some of his favorite magic in it," you should refer this young gentleman to old Nils and his garden."

"Yes, indeed," said the professor; "my wife has the right of it. You know old Nils?" "Never heard of him," said the young man, rather nipped in the bud.

"Come, come, come," said Professor Greene, with his usual eagerness; "we shall find him in the fern-room." As they entered an old man rose from his seat, where he was inspecting a minute fern in a vase.

Nils Bergen, as I remember him at that time, was a tall, thin, elderly man, with a seamed and weather-worn face, twinkling blue eyes, and a smile between shy and sly. He still wore in the greenhouses the Norwegian kneebreeches and short waistcoat, as well as the jacket thickly set with silver buttons. It was believed among the students that he kept in his little house a great box full of garments just like this, and that when his suit was hopelessly soiled from the garden he simply laid it aside

and took out a duplicate from the chest, while his granddaughter Sanna brushed, folded, and replaced the other. He always had his pockets stuffed with plants, and carried other plants stuck in the rim of his woolen cap, a headdress which he wore when the greenhouses were at the hottest. He straightened himself up at our approach and said only, "So?"

"Good morning, Nils," said the cheery professor. "This is one of my students. I found him reading Pliny on magic, and I brought him to you."

"I do know nothing of magic," said Nils, guardedly, "and of magic plants I know only what all may know who do read the authors. Some claim to know magic: there was one acquainted with me, in the Hardanger Valley, he did claim to know it well; but he who reads Plineius, or Apuleius, or Theophrastus Eresius, he must know well that there are magic plants."

"But those authors are not read in our colleges," said sweet Mrs. Greene.

"It is that the professors not take the care to theirselves," said Nils, impatiently. "But they do read about the powerful herbs of Medea, the enchanting plants of Lucan, the Nepenthe of Homer, the venomous flowers of Colchis and of Thessaly. Why then do they not know that in plants at least there is magical force?"

"Take them to your garden," said the professor, "and they will certainly know it."

Grumbling to himself, yet with a certain air of self-satisfaction, Nils finished his work of repotting, led the party through the back door of the main greenhouse, then up through a little open garden, sacred to rarities,- where grew, for instance, the edelweiss, so hard to rear in our climate,—and then passed to a locked door in a hedge, which he opened. They found themselves in a curious scene of confused and ill-assorted plants, some of them of coarse and lurid growth, among which were mingled many of the commonest and most innocent. But what first arrested attention was the curious plan of the little plantation itself.

The garden lay before them divided in twelve small domains, each of these being subdivided into three, so that the effect was like the ribbon-shaped subdivisions of a French farm. Each parterre had plants of its own, some plain, some gorgeous, planted without regard to regularity or general effect; while some plots were entirely empty, as if waiting for occupants.

"These are Nils's twelve signs of the zodiac," said the cheerful professor.

"This is a quite tolerable collection," said the old gardener proudly, "of the famed chemical plants mentioned by Origen and Stobæus:

the plants named for the Decani, or the divinities that do rule the thirty-six parts of the man's body. Three there are for each sign of the zodiac, and I have them thus divided here. For each divinity some plant was thus for him sacred; use as medicine that plant—it do cure that member or organ. My acquaintance in Hardanger Valley, he did try this garden of chemical plants; foolish! it were too cold. Even in the great garden at Christiania, where they do raise twelve different maizes, they could not do that."

"Does Sanna help you in this garden, Nils?" said the professor's wife.

"Sanna," he said, indifferently, "she never do come inside this gate. She is a woman; she do like to amuse herself. When it comes Sunday she shall take little Katrina to the fernery and read religious books, like as in Norway. By and by she do recommend herself for a teacher in the schools."

As they walked towards the upper end of the little garden, after passing the twelve beds, they came to seven smaller plots laid crosswise. "These are for the seven plants," said Nils. "This for another way of magic, that of Egypt. For example, this bed contains the compositæ, or composite plants, only the aster, the chrysanthemum. Why? Because it is they which do resemble to the sun. All things that do resemble to that in shape were known by the wise Egyptians to be good for the heart, because they did hold the heart to be, as it were, the sun of a smaller world. See you not?"

"Did they cure the patient?" asked Walter. "They cured whom they did cure," said Nils, indifferently. "There is no kind of medicine that shall do more than that. But this is not the art of the Egyptians. They did cure also by the aid of numbers with the wondrous plants. There is much in numbers. In Norway we still have a proverb when we see magpies-One is for sorrow, and two is for joy; three must be a marriage, and four do bring good fortune.' But the Egyptians they did go much further, as you will see by Proclus, his book on sacrifices and magic. They did anticipate Linne the Great in counting every part of the least plant; but they knew, as he did not, what the numbers did signify. They did choose ten gods whom they numbered in order. Thus they did connect sacred numbers with sacred gods, as is right."

"A celestial numeration table," remarked Walter.

"Then," went on the old man, unheeding, "they did search all plants for their various numbers of leaves, flowers, seeds; they did number the joints in the stems; they did observe the three-sided and four-sided stalks, the

stamens, the pistils; then they did dedicate these plants to the proper gods, and when they had dreamed of any god in the temple, they did take his consecrated plants for medicine and were cured.”

"But how came the invalids to be in the temple?" objected Walter. "With us, the more an invalid a man is the more he stays at home from church."

"So! that was for the beauty of the ancient religion," said Nils, devoutly. "Does not Jamblichus say, 'In the temple of Æsculapius diseases are cured by holy dreams'? Does not Aristophanes say, 'Let us lie down in the temple of Esculapius'? It wonders one that you come from college with long lists of knowledge that make no use, and do not learn either from Greek or Latin what really concerns us all to know."

"It is certainly true," mused Walter, "that we never were encouraged to have holy dreams during morning prayers. It's odd, but a doctor's certificate excuses us from the temple instead of sending us there. But, after all, what a dangerous kind of medical practice!"

"It shall not be dangerous at all," retorted Nils, impatiently. "Plants are very near to us; they do mean us no harm. Every plant it do correspond in form to some part of the body; thus the peony and poppy-buds to the head, any one can see that; then the caltha and anthemis,- what you call cowslip and mayweed, these resemble to the eye, these shall cure the eye; the dentaria for the teeth - you do call it toothwort even now; yonder it grows."

"Was it a Norwegian poet, Nils," interrupted the professor, "who talked about man's being one world and having another to attend him?"

"It shall be that it must be a different poet," said Nils, discontentedly; "but it shall be true for all that."

On the next Sunday afternoon Walter found himself near the Botanic Garden, and met the professor and his wife on their way to church.

"You will not find Nils to-day," said Mrs. Greene. "He usually shuts himself up on Sunday and reads religious books.”

"Or magical ones," said her husband. "But he ought to be visiting the greenhouses about this time, as it happens. However, you cannot always count upon him. He tells me that his national proverb says, 'When a Norwegian says immediately, look for him in half an hour.""

And they walked on. Walter Vose wandered through the gardens and up to the gate of the little corner which had been assigned to Nils as his own pleasure-ground. The wicket was locked; he could merely look through upon the fantastically arranged flowers. "What

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