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What is more beautiful than the parting of the friends at the street corner in Boston, where their ways diverge ?

Still can I hear his voice's shrilling might
(With pauses broken, while the fitful spark
He blew more hotly rounded on the dark
To hint his features with a Rembrandt light)
Call Oken back, or Humboldt, or Lamarck,
Or Cuvier's taller shade, and many more

Whom he had seen, or knew from other's sight,
And make them men to me as ne'er before:
Not seldom, as the undeadened fibre stirred
Of noble friendships knit beyond the sea,
German or French thrust by the lagging word,
For a good leash of mother-tongues had he.
At last, arrived at where our paths divide,

"Good night!" and, ere the distance grew too wide,
"Good night!" again; and now with cheated ear
I half hear his who mine shall never hear.

In the poetical preface to the volume, we are told.

"Along the wayside where we pass bloom few
Gay plants of heartsease, more of saddening rue;
So life is mingled; so should poems be

That speak a conscious word to you and me."

After dwelling on these "plants of saddening rue," it seems almost irreverent to pass to the "Poems of Humor," of which there are several which are really exquisite. But, alas! so is "life mingled."

"Fitz Adam's Story," as a picture of the New Englander of the back woods, is unsurpassed. In poetry, it will serve as a companion piece to that admirable novel of Mr. Russell's brother, "The new Priest of Conception Bay," which, we are glad to notice, has just been republished in Boston.

Who has not seen "Ezra " the landlord of the "Eagle " inn?

"When first I chanced the Eagle to explore,
Ezra sat listless by the open door;
One chair careened him at an angle meet,
Another nursed his hugely-slippered feet;
Upon a third reposed a shirt-sleeved arm,
And the whole man diffused tobacco's charm.
Are you the landlord?' Wahl, I guess I be,'
Watching the smoke, he answered leisurely.
He was a stoutish man, and through the breast
Of his loose shirt there showed a brambly chest ;

6

Streaked redly as a wind-foreboding morn,

His tanned cheeks curved to temples closely shorn;
Clean-shaved he was, save where a hedge of gray
Upon his brawny throat leaned every way
About an Adam's-apple, that beneath

Bulged like a boulder from a brambly heath.
The Western World's true child and nursling he,
Equipt with aptitudes enough for three:

What more true to nature than this conversation?

"Can I have lodging here?' once more I said.
He blew a whiff, and, leaning back his head,
'You come a piece through Bailey's woods, I s'pose,
Acrost a bridge where a big swamp-oak grows?
It don't grow, neither; it 's ben dead ten year,
Nor th' ain't a livin' creetur, fur nor near,
Can tell wut killed it; but I some misdoubt
"T was borers, there's sech heaps on 'em about.
You did n' chance to run ag'inst my son,
A long, slab-sided youngster with a gun?
He'd oughto ben back more 'n an hour ago,
An' brought some birds to dress for supper-sho!
There he comes now. 'Say, Obed, wut ye got?
(He 'll hev some upland plover like as not.)
Wal, them 's real nice uns, an 'll eat A 1,

Ef I can stop their bein' over-done;
Nothin' riles me (I pledge my fastin' word)
Like cookin' out the natur' of a bird;

(Obed, you pick 'em out o' sight an' sound,

Your ma'am don't love no feathers cluttrin' round :)
Jes' scare 'em with the coals,-thet 's my idee.'
Then, turning suddenly about on me,

'Wal, Square, I guess so. Callilate to stay?

I'll ask Mis' Weeks; 'bout thet it 's hern to say.'

Who has not seen the inn's parlor ?

"There was a parlor in the house, a room
To make you shudder with its prudish gloom.
The furniture stood round with such an air,
There seemed an old maid's ghost in every chair,
Which looked as it had scuttled to its place

And pulled extempore a Sunday face,
Too smugly proper for a world of sin,
Like boys on whom the minister comes in.

The table, fronting you with icy stare,
Strove to look witless that its legs were bare,
While the black sofa with its horse-hair pall
Gloomed like a bier for Comfort's funeral.

Each piece appeared to do its chilly best
To seem an utter stranger to the rest,
As if acquaintanceship were deadly sin,
Like Britons meeting in a foreign inn.

Two portraits graced the wall in grimmest truth,
Mister and Mistress W. in their youth,-

New England youth, that seems a sort of pill,
Half wish-I-dared, half Edwards on the Will,
Bitter to swallow, and which leaves a trace
Of Calvinistic cholic on the face.

Between them, o'er the mantel, hung in state
Solomon's temple, done in copperplate;
Invention pure, but meant, we may presume,
To give some Scripture sanction to the room.
Facing this last, two samplers you might see,
Each, with its urn and stiffly-weeping tree,
Devoted to some memory long ago

More faded than their lines of worsted woe;

Cut paper decked their frames against the flies,

Though none e'er dared an entrance who were wise,

And bushed asparagus in fading green

Added its shiver to the franklin clean.

But we must forbear, for we cannot transfer the whole poem to our pages. No New Englander can afford to remain ignorant of the delicious humor of this truly New England story. We will not even take exception to the description of the "deacon," for the satire is, after all, thoroughly good natured. "Corruptio optimi pessima" is true the world over?

As we write these words, the mirth which was so stirred within us but yesterday, as we followed this admirable story, is stilled as our eye falls on Mr. Lowell's concluding lines, which must carry all his older readers back to the times of the old fashioned New England landlords, who were indeed a noble class of men.

He says:

He adds:

Ezra is gone and his large-hearted kind,
The landlords cf the hospitable mind;
Good Warriner of Springfield was the last;
An inn is now a vision of the past;

One yet-surviving host my mind recalls,-
You'll find him if you go to Trenton Falls.”

To-day we read in the newspapers the announcement that Mr. Moore-perhaps the noblest of them all--whom so many of the first literary men of the land, for more than half a century, have been proud to regard as a friend, has passed away. To all who have ever known him, one of the most beautiful of all American places of summer resort has now lost its most characteristic attraction. WILLIAM L. KINGSLEY.

DR. PEABODY'S "HARVARD REMINISCENCES."*-In this little volume, Dr. Peabody has laid aside all formality, and in a chatty way has given his memories of the college officers-some seventy of them whose names appeared with his in the several catalogues in which he was "registered as undergraduate, theological student, and tutor." We venture to say that his "Reminiscences" will be read at Yale with almost as much interest as at Harvard itself,

There is a real bond of sympathy among all college menwhatever may be the color of the ribbon they wear-which is nowhere else paralleled except in the Christian Church. They are all alike devoted to the most noble pursuits. They are all working for the same object-the cultivation and extension of every kind of knowledge which can interest or broaden the mind. There can be no rivalry, in any low sense of the word, among men who are thus engaged.

Yale is known, the country over, as the "Mother of Colleges." For nearly two hundred years, she has been lending a helping hand to one and another of the educational institutions which now so plenteously dot the whole length and breadth of the land. She has hailed every advance of every kind that has been made by any of them, as an advance of the common cause for which all are laboring. But Yale has always regarded Harvard with a special interest as her elder sister. She does not forget that the idea which was afterwards carried out in the establishment of a college in New Haven may possibly have been conceived, by the men who planned this colony, as early as the idea of the establishment of a college in Cambridge. Certainly the college at New Haven would have begun its existence only a very few years after Harvard, had it not been for the special request of the friends of that college, who expressed their fears that, if two colleges were

* Harvard Reminiscences. By ANDREW P. PEABODY, D.D., LL.D. Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1888. 12mo, pp. 216.

established in New England, the success of both might be endangered. New Haven yielded, and showed her sense of the value of the higher education by a yearly contribution of money and material to the college that had been first begun. The cause of education was of more importance in her eyes than the carrying out of her own favorite plan; and to-day no doubt, the loyal sons of both universities, whatever may be their private predilections, are still animated by the same feeling;-ever the cause before either Harvard or Yale.

So, for more than two hundred years, the two colleges have stood in the most intimate and friendly relation. In 1700, at the time of the founding of Yale, one in thirty of the graduates of Harvard had gone there from this far off colony on the Sound, when its total population was only five hundred. And ever since, the names of the officers who have done good service at Cambridge have been known and honored here, and have been scarcely less familiar under the elms of New Haven than the names of her own instructors. No where have Harvard's successes and triumphs been more cordially applauded than at Yale.

Dr. Peabody's "Reminiscences" are of the Harvard of his youth. He has given us a charming book, and yet we have a serious complaint to make of it. The book is so full of interest that we are prompted to feel that he might have made one even more interesting. But he has certainly done enough to reveal to the outside world what a charm invests the men of a university, and in fact the whole university life. The "reminiscences," that he gives of these seventy instructors of Harvard cover only one generation of the many generations that have successively lived within its walls, and flourished, and passed away. Before the time of these men there were others, and before them also still others, no whit less deserving of our veneration. To-day, the places of these last are filled, and by men who nobly maintain the honor of their alma mater. A hundred years hence, too, the laurels of Harvard will still be green, and she will be even more fresh and strong than now, ever starting anew on her beneficent career. It is this confidence that memories of the past will always be accumulating and always be joined with anticipations of yet greater triumphs in the future which shall redound to the good of mankind, that makes every university a holy place to all its sons. It is certainly an inspiring thought to the graduates of every college. And to us in New Haven, who sing

Nomen, laudesque Yalenses

Cantabunt soboles, unanimique patres

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