278 ress. THE IMMORTAL IN LITERATURE. But the same mental impulse, in Germany, while it availed itself of the disinterred treasures of classic antiquity, assumed a religious direction, was inspired and urged on by that marvelous literature of Judæa, the fountain of living waters to all ages and nations, was transmitted from province to province, and from land to land, and is still at work throughout Protestant Christendom. In this movement there was vitality and the widest diffusiveness. The books which inspired it, and those which grew from it, were for all people. Luther's Bible found its way into every cottage in Germany. The noble lyrics of the Reformation were heard from the sheep-cot and the farm-yard. The infant literature of Germany, in every department, breathed a spirit which addressed the universal human heart, which gave it free course, and made it both living and life-giving,-indeed, the same spirit, which prompted that ever memorable rejoinder of William Tyndale to the popish priest: "If God give me life, ere many years the ploughboy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do." The Scriptures, taken collectively, are mainly indebted to the philanthropic element for the interest which attaches itself to them among all nations and conditions of men. They are, indeed, made quick and powerful in their action upon the moral nature by the same divine spirit, through whose aid they were written. But, when we consider them purely in a literary point of view, we must bring the phenomena of their diffusion and reception under the laws which govern literature. Now it is an undeniable fact, that, without reference to their religious uses, the Scriptures are read with avidity wherever they are a new book, that they have a peculiar charm for the young, are attractive to the unenlightened, are heard or read with gladness in the far-off isl ands and settlements, whither missionary enterprise has carried them, and at the same time furnish rich and ever new gratification to the most refined and cultivated taste, while they extort the unwilling tribute of intellectual admiration from those who deny and oppose the religion which they reveal. This universal adaptation of the Bible to the tastes of man, and to such widely various tastes, bearing kindred to each other through a common nature alone, can be accounted for, as we think, only by the fact, that it is full of the spirit of humanity, that it breathes diffusive kindness, love without limit or alloy, that it reconciles man to man, and makes all feel the same fraternal and filial tie, that it addresses those elements and affections which belong to man's essence, and not to the accidents of his condition. The Mosaic Law has been termed by shallow, short-sighted critics, a hard yoke for a stubborn people. But, in point of fact, it is full of the broadest principles of freedom, humanity, and kindness. Its measures of philanthropy, and of tender thoughtfulness for the rights and wants of all, is beyond that of even the political millennium of modern theorists. The whole Levitical code is pervaded by the most loving spirit for the lowly and distressed. He who has waxen poor, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, is to be relieved without delay. If he pledge his mantle, it must be restored to him before night-fall. The sun must not go down upon the hireling's unpaid wages; " for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it." The careful gleaning of the harvest and the second beating of the fruit-tree are forbidden the wealthy owner, and left to the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. National distinctions are to be merged in the claims of a common nature. "If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him; but thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye know the heart of a stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." How like the cool breath of heaven upon the fevered brow must precepts like these ever fall upon the bruised and oppressed spirit, upon the soul that has been shut out from sympathy, and has bowed under the inequalities, burdens, and mortifica. tions incident to the most free and perfect social state, which, except under an avowed theocracy, man can never attain! But with how much higher power comes home to the universal heart the fact, foreshadowed in prophecy, portrayed in the New Testament, that God lighted up his only spotless image upon earth amidst the lowliest forms and fortunes of humanity! Here the extremes of the spiritual universe are brought together. God takes up his tabernacle among the despised and rejected of men; man, the stricken, way-worn, burden-bearing, is lifted to be the peer of angels and a partaker of the divine nature. And then, in the Scriptures both Old and New, man finds himself encircled as in the arms of a motherly tenderness, is made to feel that a compassionate regard ever rests upon him, sees eyes of God and hears voices of love in every scene of nature and of life. It is this spirit which carries a welcome for the Bible, and causes its beauty and grandeur to be felt and owned even by those who have no taste for its humbling doctrines, no will for its self-denying du ties. To pass from the Scriptures to the literature into which they have breathed the philanthropic element, we would refer to one department of AUTUMN. literature, which this element has almost created, namely, that which has for its office the delineation of natural scenery,- -a large and cherished department in moden Christendom, but which, except in the Bible, has left but few and vague vestiges among the remains of ancient literature; for among the classics, descriptions of nature are very rare, and, when they do occur, are generally incidental and fragmentary. Man cannot bear the contemplation of nature, unless the Creator's smile be reflected from it. Reader, did you ever see a little child taken by his father to view some glittering pageant, to the child's eye immensely vast and grand? And have you not marked how such a child will, every moment, look away from the gay show up to his father's face, as if to fortify himself by a glance of love? And does not the child say, in that mute appeal, that he is dazzled and bewildered by the gay show, and could not look upon it with a safe and happy feeling, unless he were supported by his father's eye? Just such emotions we have all had, when we have stood by the ocean or on the mountaintop, when we have considered the heavens, and beheld the stars, as " at the commandment of the Holy One they stand in their order, and faint not upon their watches." We have been amazed and bewildered. We have felt lonely and desolate; and a silent, shuddering awe has come over us. These emotions are the child's yearning for the Father's eye. We cannot bear to find ourselves in a universe so vast, unless we stand in the felt presence of One who numbers the hairs of our heads and the sands of our lives. The Atheist would carefully cut himself off from every grand and extensive view of nature, would shun the ocean and the mountain, would close his eyes to the crimson sunset and the gemmed vault of night; for all these things would tell him what a lonely being he was and how unsheltered, would speak to him of agencies beyond his control or 279 calculation, of powers of nature far mightier than his boasted intellect. In like manner, could the polytheist have taken no unalloyed satisfaction in the contemplation or description of nature; for to him it was cantoned out among “gods many and lords many," among deities of limited power, of conflicting interests, of brutal passions, among deities who might sleep or be on a journey, whose presence could not be invoked, or their aid depended upon with any degree of assurance. In a fatherless universe, or in a creation tenanted by vague, uncertain, and divided deity, the social craving is not met. The cry still is, "Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves Without a spirit? Are the dropping caves Without a feeling in their silent tears?" It is only when nature speaks to us in accents of love, when our souls in very truth feel "the intense Reply of hers to our intelligence," that her hills and valleys, her stars and waters invite and attract us. It is only this intimate communion with the paternal spirit in nature, which can give either the wish or the power so to portray her scenes, that the portraiture shall live in the memory of man, and pass from land to land and from age to age. All those, who have written sweetly and constrainingly in this department, have occupied the attitude of highpriests and interpreters of Nature as she lies bathed in the Creator's blessing, and have discharged this loving ministry in a loving spirit. It is because Cowper occupies this position, that he lives still, while many of his contemporaries of greater vigor of thought, and finer polish of style, are already consigned to oblivion. It is because Wordsworth exercises the same ministry, that neither ridicule nor reason can deprive him of his power over our sensibilities, or make him otherwise than a favorite with the people. AUTUMN leaves around me falling, Heed oh, heed my silent warning! Life is like a day of summer All its pleasures fraught with pain; Yet the spells which memory gives us Gladly would we weave again. AUTUMN. Where the cherished friends we number'd, Learn! oh learn a truthful lesson! Type I am of their decay. THE WORLD A WILDERNESS WITHOUT LOVE. AN ORIENTAL REVERY. ASHAH lived in a little house, in the neighborhood of Gesan, at the southern termination of the mountains of Irak, and he cultivated a little farm with his own sturdy hands, and supported little wife and five little children on the grapes, and dates, and melons, and rice, and rye, which his farm grew; and he clothed the same with the produce of the cocoons which his thousands of silk-worms produced. Ashah's house was not the sort of place in which western pachas and agas dwell. There was no furniture of polished rosewood, and boxwood, and wood of Honduras there; no china of Sevres; no rich draperies of Lyons; no ottomans of down covered with velvet of Genoa; no carpets of Stamboul; no shawls of Cashmere. Nevertheless, Ashah believed that his was the fairest, sweetest home in all Irak, and Kurdistan to boot. Ashah was mas ter of only one room, where his wife and daughters sat, and chanted and combed their long glittering tresses during the day; and he was the superior of only one terrace with a silken covered verandah, where the whole family assembled in the evening, and listened to the traditions which Ashah related with so much spirit; and to the songs which Allety his wife sung with so much feeling and sweetness. It mattered not, however, whether Ashah and his wife and children were on the terrace or in the divan, the music of the bulbul came stealing on their ears from the mulberry groves wherever they were, and the perfume of the banks of flowers always floated on the morning and evening breezes around them. The night wind came sighing into their open windows, and kissed their sleeping cheeks, as they lay upon their soft mats; and the morning zephyr scattered the perfumes of Arabia amongst their curls when they awoke. When Allety struck up a song on the house-top, her voice, accompanied by those of her daughters, Tiva and Korna, would fall upon the ears of Ashah, as he and his first-born, Anah, tended the silk-worms in the mulberry-grove; and then father and son would answer back the lay, and all the song-birds of the east would join in the joyous chorus. his head upon his father's lap, and look sweetly up into his eyes, and listen with smiles to his tales. Amongst the things that Ashah most delighted to tell, were the glories of Bagdad, with its splendid palaces and gardens, where Haroun the wise, caliph of all the East, and Abdalrahman the voluptuous, and Vatheck the cruel, and Almansor the ambitious, and Mahadi the devout, had dwelt; but yet he loved best to recount the glories of the times of Haroun, which were the prime of the oriental golden age, when the streams were glittering with precious metals and amber, when the flower-cups were filled with purest honey, and when the peris loved to roam in the terrestrial gardens. "And why did the amber melt in the streams, and the gold dissolve amongst the waters? and why did the peris go away to paradise again?" the child Anah would always ask. Ashah and Allety would look at each other when he spoke thus, and they would be silent for a moment, and then they would answer him both together. "Oh, these things are still at Bagdad! for beauty and magnificence lived though Haroun died;" and then Anah would dream of beautiful Bagdad, and he would long to be there. Ashah's little boys, Selim and Ali, and his daughters, Tiva and Korna, sung through the bright summer days, and danced among the showers of sunbeams that fell broken through the leaves and boughs of the mulberry and date trees; but Anah, as he grew up, wandered by the streams and in the groves all alone; and he saw visions of Bagdad in the transparent waters, and he heard the winds murmuring songs of its glory, and the bulbul repeating the tale, until he thought of nothing, saw nothing, dreamed of nothing but the palaces and gardens of Bagdad. "Mother," he said, at last, as Allety kissed his brow one night, and covered him with a purple coverlet, "I long to see the gardens of Bagdad." "Then may the angels who water the flowers of Paradise, and who love to gratify good children, take you there," said his mother, with a smile, as she kissed him again and again, and Anah, the son of Ashah, was a very thought-pressed him to her bosom. ful child, and yet he was a child of smiles. He would lie for hours together, and gaze upon his mother's face as she sung; and he would nestle His mother's kiss was still warm on his lips, when Anah arose and stole from his own bright happy home, and he wandered away and awa THE WORLD A WILDERNESS WITHOUT LOVE. 281 most varied and brilliant colors, wound amongst shrubs and trees of every form and clime. Lakes, from Gesan, by the side of his native stream, which, being only a few furlongs in length, leads to the east bank of the Tigris, to which it is a trib-gemmed with white and yellow water-lilies, and utary. The stars and the moon lighted the young dreamer on his path. In his visions he had pictured Bagdad to be far away; and as his father had told him that the brook Gesan flowed on till it fell into the Tigris " far away," he was sure that the city of his pilgrimage must be there, and he wandered on. Anah walked for. ward among groves, and bowers, and by glittering streams that murmured as sweetly in his ears, as if the nymphs and naiads were making melody, and at last, without knowing where he was, he laid himself down in that very lawn of paradise grass at Bagdad, which had been formed for Abbassides, who, despising the frugality of the first caliphs, made all his empire to minister to his desires, and to become subservient to the aggrandizement of his glory. The angel of the morning kissed the eyes of Anah, and scattered her first sunbeams on his cheeks and lips. Those eyes so soft and beautiful sparkled for a moment in the new-born light, and his lips so fresh and rosy trembled with the emotion of a smile, but it was only for a moment, for when sleep spread her dark wings and floated toward the caves of everlasting silence, she wafted the transient joy from Anah's glance and the radiance from his cheeks. He was in the midst of a grove of more splendid trees than ever his dreaming eye had fallen upon. The arbores vitæ surrounded him like green pyramids, and the silver-leaved service-trees formed a hundred beautiful and fantastic bowers. The dark foliage of the fig mingled with the classic foliage of the vine, and the graceful, slender olive was festooned with the rapient clematis. But the sun. beams seemed to bury themselves in the darkest shades; the zephyrs trembled for a moment amongst the branches of the plants, and then died away with a sigh; the butterflies became lethargic and paralytic if they alighted for an instant on a single leaf of all that grove of plants; and the birds that peopled it were drowsy and dumb; the honeysuckle and the deadly night. shade twined round each other, and their blossoms lay cheek to cheek; but the bees shunned them with an angry hum, as if they knew that the honey was poisoned which filled their cups. The beautiful boy looked around him upon a scene of the most gorgeous eastern beauty, and yet his eye did not lighten with a sympathetic ray. "How beautiful it is !" he exclaimed; "but where are the gold and amber waters? where are the flowers amongst which the peris loved to roam ?" Walks, bordered with blossoms of the paved with submarine mosses, lay on every side, with barges floating on their surfaces, painted in loveliest hues and ornamented with gold. But there was no perfume emitted from the flowers, and the lakes refused to mirror the plants that stood in cold and stately pride upon their shores. "How fair and lovely are all things here!" cried Anah; "but where are the smiles that dimpled the waters in the days of Haroun and where are the flowers that the peris used to kiss?" In the lakes were little islands, from which kiosks of Moorish architecture raised their elab orate minarets, while bridges of the most elegant and airy forms linked isle to isle. But chief of all the magnificence which Anah beheld was the palace of the Caliph, and the velvety lawn which was spread around it. The palace was built of marble, and covered a hundred roods of ground. Its piazzas and terraces were of the richest workmanship, and were adorned profusely with ornaments of every style, from Greek to Arabesque. Seven hundred door-keepers were ready to admit the caliph's guests, and seven thousand slaves were ready to serve them. Twenty-two thousand carpets covered the palace-floors, and thirty-eight thousand pieces of tapestry floated on the palace-walls. On the lawn were a hundred lions, bound with chains of gold, and a hundred keepers in robes of silk and gold attended them. Before the great portal of the palace was a tree with silver trunk, and boughs, and twigs, and leaves, and fruit of gold. On this tree of eighteen branches sat birds of the most precious metals, and they spread their wings and hopped from twig to twig by the unseen agency of machinery. Twelve hundred pillars of African, Greek, and Italian marble sustained the magnificent pile, and its saloons and halls were encrusted with gems and fretted gold, and adorned with the statues of men and animals. Anah walked like a stray child of Paradise through this scene of pomp and magnificence, on which the morning sun looked languidly down, and yet his heart was not stirred within him. Men and maidens beautiful to behold flitted past him, but on every brow he saw a scowl, in every eye the yellow plaguelight of suspicion. Muttered curses broke from every lip; deep growls of hatred from every heart. As he looked more closely into the flowers of the garden, he saw that they emitted a subtile, volatile poison, which dried up the sap in each other's vesicles, although it did not destroy their outward bloom. On the leaves branches of the trees he perceived t 1 282 THE WORLD A WILDERNESS WITHOUT LOVE. prickles, and the waters were as opaque as quicksilver. "Alas!" cried the wearied, heart-sick boy, as he threw himself down, despondingly and in bewilderment, beside a plant of amaranth; "where are the flowers of paradise and the transparent waters of Gul?" As he spoke his eye fell upon a solitary dew-drop that hung like an angel's tear from a green leaf of the amaranth. One stray sunbeam, warm and glowing as love, fell on the pellucid globule, and was broken up into seven rays bright as the rainbow of the Apocalypse. Gradually the liquid spheroid expanded and brightened on the eye of Anah, until, in the transparent orb, he beheld a female form seated on a sapphire throne. The face of the beautiful spirit was as pure as celestial snow, and her cheeks and lips were delicately tinctured with the refined vermilion of roses. Her robe was made from the petals of the Ethiopian lily, and a convolvulus shaded her head and face from the ardent sunbeam. "My name is Luxa; I am the genius of poetry," said the beautiful spirit, while a smile suffused her countenance, so full of love. You are beautiful-oh, how beautiful!" said the boy, while the first smile that had played upon his face since he had awoke beamed on his lips and in his eyes. "I know you love me, Anah," said the fairy, shaking her odorous robes, and wafting the sweetest aroma of flowers around him. "It was I that made your heart thrill when your mother sung her songs at morning-tide, and I lightened up your eyes when your father told his evening tales. I filled your soul with dreams of beauty when you wandered by the waters of Gesan, and I carried your fancy away from the cottage where you was born, and the mulberry-groves where your brothers and sisters played, and where the bulbuls sang, and the flowers emitted breezes of perfume, and I led you to this region of grandeur and stately pomp." "It was the stars that led me hither," said Anah, sadly. "I think it must have been Ceres, with his tooth dipped in henbane, and his baleful eye." "The stars are but the lamps hung in the dome of Cœlum by Allah, which are lighted up by Uriel and his angels, when night spreads his black wings over the earth," said the fairy Luxa. "The stars were your outward lights, but I filled your heart with the inward desire to behold the gardens of Bagdad." "It was my father's tales of Haroun the wise that made me long to see the palace and gardens where the great caliph dwelt," said Anah, thoughtfully, and shaking his head. "You are dreaming of the outward still, my child," replied the spirit, her smile becoming more and more luminous, and her form more and more radiant. "I touched your heart with my finger, and filled it with celestial sympathies, without which there is no beauty, and without which, words have no meaning." "My heart is cold amongst all this grandeur that I see, then," said Anah, looking up meekly; "your charm has gone away from it forever.” The fairy floated nearer and nearer to him, until he felt the very warmth of her perfumed breath upon his cheek, and then he saw that she held a chalice of the rose of Sharon in her tiny right hand. 'There must be life in the outward world of a kindred nature with the inward life of him who contemplates it, before there can be beauty," said the fairy, in a silvery tone; and as she spoke, she touched his eyes with the charm her hand contained. Anah gazed into the translucent speculum which floated in prismatic glories around her, and then he saw landscapes of every clime adorning the liquid world in which Luxa reigned. On hills of snow, where the gloomy fir grew tapering, and the stunted juniper trembled in the biting north wind, he beheld a fur-clad Laplander, "with blue cold nose and wrinkled brow,” and he sighed with sorrow for his life of gloom and pain; but he saw the frozen eye of the stunted man suddenly light upon a tiny plant; he saw him pluck it from the mosses at his feet, and place it in his breast; and then his eye grew bright as the aurora, and his face relaxed into a smile, as he rubbed his hands amongst the drifted snow, and gamboled with his reindeers. The desert ocean of sand, the great Sahara, next rose upon Anah's vision, and stretched far out, until the copper-colored sky dipped down upon its borders. There was no beauty, no verdure, no attribute of sympathy in all its wide expanse, for the eye of Anah, save a Tibboo maiden, who sat alone and spun beneath a gnarled fig-tree, and ever and anon looked outward on the desert, and downward upon the arid patch of greenness at her feet. "Alas! poor mniden," sighed Anah; but presently she culled a little blossom that grew at her side, and then, as she placed it in her hair, her heart overflowed with the fullness of song, and her cheeks dimpled with joy. Wherever he turned his eye, Anah beheld some incongruity to disturb his external sense-something that did not harmonize with his ideal of beauty; but then he saw men pluck from the earth they trod some imperceptible blossom, and place it in their bosom, and then their faces lighted up with joy. "Oh, I wish that that flower grew by the leaden |