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THE DANCING LESSON.

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sified a blending of styles and shapes, different | corner by a temple of true Egyptian, or if depersons will judge differently. By one plan sirable embraced by it on three sides, as a the Egyptian style is substituted throughout; hollow court? and by another, the lower portion is left off entirely, leaving the obelisk to tower in its naked height, and providing only for the needful offices in a simpler plinth or base. Before the majestic shaft is finished, there will be time to decide.

One consideration has been stated by the committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, quite fatal one should think, to any plan that so hugs and obscures the lower portion of the obelisk. It is, that no adequate conception can be given of the magnitude of the monument as a whole. To one standing near, the lofty colonnade will almost hide the shaft ; and the only close view of it will be one which cuts off a hundred feet. These hundred feet, of the most elaborate workmanship of all, will be worse than wasted-only in the way. It is only by standing at the base and following up the line that almost loses itself in the clouds, that one can get the full feeling which it is meant to impress. To do it in imagination even now, standing at the bottom of what is only begun, is more impressive, perhaps, than the effect of the whole will be, if thus carried out. Still, one feels a sympathy with that splendid idea of the grand gallery, where sculpture, and banners, and historical paintings might have a fitting exhibition. Why could there not be a terrace or platform, say two hundred feet square and the height of the present beautiful entrance, flanked at each

This is one of the points that invite the critical judgment of the whole nation. We all have an interest in saying that the magnificent and unmatched shaft shall stand "in naked majesty" against the open sky. And we all have an interest in carrying out at least this grand and unexceptionable feature to completion. It is already one of the rallying points of our patriotic sentiment. Already state after state has expressed its loyalty by inscriptions on the blocks of marble and granite to be built into its walls. "Indiana knows no North, no South, nothing but the Union." Delaware, "The first to accept will be the last to desert the Constitution." Massachusetts declares that "The Country is safe, while the Memory of Washington is Revered." Louisiana, Kentucky, and Maryland, and I know not how many more, have caused similar sentiments to be recorded on their enduring gifts. It is an interesting thing to us that it was commenced and is growing up side by side and step by step with the Smithsonian Institution. Both are the property of the Nation, and should be watched with a national and jealous regard. And while one is labouring to supply two of our great wants, a generous scheme of scientific operations, and a library commensurate with the expanding culture of our people, the other will form a triumphal crown to the splendid array of public institutions, that are slowly growing up in the capital of the Republic.

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THE PROPHET'S CHASTENING.

BY MARY YOUNG.

The word of the Lord came unto me, saying; Son of man. behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men.

So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded.-EZEKIEL XXIV. 15-18.

THE loneliest river of Chaldea lay
Beneath the hushing twilight. Its low tone
Of rippling waters by the sedgy shore
Reached not the arches of its clustering palms,
Nor stirred the voiceless, brooding mystery where
Knelt captive Judah's prophet. Since high noon
He had bowed lowly thus, but the damp brow,
Half hid in the dark mantle's fold, bore not
On its pale loftiness the radiant calm
That told of high communings-and yet God
Had met and spoken with him.

Grief and care
Had been the stern companions of each step
Through all the prophet's life-path. He had turned,
With the sick weariness of a pure heart,
From haunts of foul idolatry, and when,
Soul-thrilled with trembling earnestness and awe,
He told the fearfulness of coming wrath,
Had seen it disregarded. Through long days
And nights, with the bare earth and silent heaven,
He had kept painful vigil, his deep heart
Mysteriously wrung with guilt not his;
And yet those lips which lie not had decreed
A new, deep suffering to him. The sole chord
Unswept of pain's harsh fingers, must awake-
That chord which in the depth of human breasts,
Though hung in loneliness on mourning willow,
Or with relentless hand strained to a task
Of other themes, still in rich undertone
Will breathe its burden out of human love.

There was a creature with an angel brow
And soft, dark, floating tresses, who had dwelt
Within the prophet's home. There was a hand,
Fair as the gleaming ivory of Tyre,

Whose light, caressing touch failed not to smooth
The deep lines from his forehead, and could woo
His spirit oft from its dread tension back
To gentlest joy.-Oh! beautiful she was,
And bright, and young, and her rich maiden heart
And peerless beauty, all, were freely given
To the stern prophet. Nought to her were locks
Of shining darkness, and the pomegranate bloom
On youthful cheeks, when he stood calmly up,
And to the high commission sealed in light-
In Heaven's own kindling glory on his front-
Strong rebel hearts that yielded not would stoop;
And if at times an awe almost too deep
Came o'er her love, she thought of other hours
When he, so raised above humanity,
So clothed in majesty by God's own hand,
In very human weariness would seek

An humbler ministry. She was the link,
The one pure, priceless link, through which he felt
Sweet drawings of a human brotherhood;
Yet she, for Israel's sake, must die.

Came to the prophet's pillow, and the hum
Of busy crowds brought no forgetfulness,
For the mysterious power that dwelt within
Ceased not its boding whispers to his heart.
He sought the place of prayer, but as he knelt,
Sudden and swift as comes the lightning's flash,
Over his spirit came a consciousness

That the rich joy which bound him at her side-
His bosom's dove-bore in Heaven's sovereign eye
The dark seal of idolatry.

To earth in dread humiliation bent
Was that majestic brow, from which had shone
So oft inspiring Godhead; but no words
Of lowly, sad confession had found way,
Ere the still voice of all unearthly peace
Told o'er the troubled waters of his grief
That the one error of a chastened heart
Had found forgiveness. Once again he raised
Beseeching hands to Heaven, and would have asked
That He who had forgiven, yet would spare;
But then no utterance came. He knew the cup
Might not pass from his lips; and still he knelt,
Hour after hour, with his full aching heart
Of sorrow bared before the Merciful.

The glassy stream rolled on. Soft, starry light
Stole through the breathless palm-boughs, and white
flowers

Looked up with dewy eyes. With one brief prayer
For strength that might not fail, the prophet rose
And sought his home.

The iron lamp hung low,
And wrought on the stone floor in ebon shade
Its semblance; but a clear, calm radiance fell
Where, on a low, white couch, lay droopingly
A fair and silent form. Beside that couch
Stood one with dark robes, and tight-folded arms,
And stern, still breast-Jehovah's prophet looked
Upon his dead. Her cold, transparent cheek
Had scarce a fainter tint of the pale rose
Than it had worn before, and the hushed lips
Had their own serious sweetness in each curve:
Yet hovering where the fringed, pure eyelids lay
Too strangely still, was a soft mournfulness
Which seemed to plead for but one tear. And he
Who was so desolate must look on her,
Remembering all her swerveless truth, her calm,
Deep, holy love, and then turn back the tide
Of swelling tenderness on his own heart;
And that heart might not break, but bear its burden.
With a firm footstep and uplifted brow

He must go forth, and, binding on white robe
And priestly mitre, meet the gaze of men
As he was wont. "Twas done: and as the throng
Gathered around, with eloquence well taught
By the deep spell of inward agony,

He spake what God commanded.

No rest

LIFE IN THE NORTH.

BY FREDERIKA BREMER.

WRITTEN FOR SARTAIN'S MAGAZINE, AND TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL SWEDISH

CHAPTER V.

BY MARY HOWITT.

(Concluded from page 164.)

YOUNG and vigorous shoots are richly germinating at the present moment in the literature of Denmark, in its poetry, as well as in its prose. Love to the fatherland, and to that which is peculiar in its scenery and in the life of its people, is the chief character of these. This love is felt in Stein Steinsen Blicher's vivid description of the grand scenery of Jutland, and the present life there. And the Every-day Stories published by J. L. Heiberg, in which the hand of a woman is universally recognised, and which delineate the life of the middle classes in Denmark with equal cordiality and humour, have been favourites through the whole of Scandinavia. Fresh and vigorous, it is a plant which springs up from the life of the people in the North.

In other branches of art this new life has also revealed itself. Contemporaneously with Oehlenschlager appeared THORWALDSEN, a poet in sculpture, and through him a vast wealth of works of plastic art, the admiration of our time. Thorwaldsen in form adhered to the antique, but in vividness of expression, in freshness, in youthful naiveté, he is the child of the "green islands," he is the son of Dana. This great artist was one of the fortunate of earth. His life was a continued glad creation; he lived acknowledged and honoured in his own time and by his own country, and died, shortly after the day of his public triumph, without sickness or the pains of death-died, or rather fell asleep, whilst listening to beautiful music in the temple of Thalia, surrounded by his friends and admirers.

The Danish people, in Thorwaldsen's Museum, have raised to him a monument as honourable to the artist as to the people, who thus know how to value their own great men, and who now, in the monument which is placed above his grave, possess a living fountain for the perpetual enjoyment of art, and for new inspiration. We are amazed when we behold the riches of the works produced by the hand of this master; the wealth of conception, of expression, of his many-sided comprehension

of the ideals of life. Thorwaldsen was a giant in plastic art; an intellectual Titan, who merely wanted one thing to conquer heaventhe knowledge of the highest ideal, of the sublimest beauty—the strength, the love, the sorrow and the joy of Christendom. In the centre of Thorwaldsen's Museum is Thorwaldsen's grave, covered with fresh, blooming roses-here emblems without flattery.

JERICHO and BISSEN are the greatest of Denmark's living sculptors, both of them men of strong and original powers. The former of these has shown by his " Christ," his " Angel of the Resurrection," and his groups of " Adam and Eve," his deep feeling for the deepest sentiment of life. The latter has begun to represent in marble the gods and the heroes of the northern mythology, and in so doing has opened to plastic art a new career.

Denmark has in painting a young and promising school of artists, who, whilst they confine themselves faithfully to nature, and seek for truth in its beauty, still more seek for these in their native land, and represent it in their pictures. Thus, of historical painters, MARSTRAND, SIMONSEN, and SONNE; of painters of genre pictures, SCHLEISNER and MONNIER; of sea-painters, MELBY and LORENSEN; of landscape, SKOOGAArd, Keirskow, and RUMP; of flower painters, JENSEN and OTTENSEN, and of portrait painters, GARTNER, SCHUTZ, and others. Amidst this group of Danish artists there has lately appeared one-neither Danish nor northern, but whom Denmark ought henceforth to reckon among her own-with all the glowing energy of colouring, of expression and eye peculiar to the South, and with faults and merits which belong to genius. It is a woman rich in genius, a daughter of Poland, and now the wife of a Danish artist. It is ELIZABETH BAUMAN, now Mrs. JERICHO, who has recalled in Denmark the memory of the pencil of Rubens, of his fire, and his creative life.

In music HARTMAN, RONG, and GADE, have caused tones to sound which never before were heard in scientific music, tones and melodies formerly heard only in the northern war-ballads and the songs of the people, but

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in which the northern genius reveals that deep feeling, that earnestness, and that fervency, that peculiar tone of gladness or of sorrow which belongs to its peculiar life, and which every heart in the North recognises as the innermost tone and voice of its own being. The most tender melancholy and the boldest strength here meet in harmonious conjunction. There is a voice that calls aloud" in this voice, a voice of sublime longing, and of prophetic consolation.

Whilst the genius of art has thus spread forth its wings, that of science is not behindhand. The mother tongue, the first common mark of a people, through the labours of the great philologist, Rask, and of Malbeck, the author of the Danish Dictionary, and an indefatigable collector of Danish historic literature, has freed itself from the fetters of foreign language, and the tongue of Norräna, in its primitive beauty, has drawn nearer to each other the hitherto separated classes of the people by means of that mother tongue which has become universally popular through the poets.

*

Like twin stars in the heaven of science appeared, as thinkers and writers, the two brothers Oersted;-A. S. Oersted, the lawyer, penetrating with all the power of a methodical mind into the legislation of Denmark, recasting it, and establishing the state on a religious basis; the natural philsopher, H. C. Oersted, discovering hitherto unknown powers of nature, and erecting the physical world on the foundation of the spiritual -"the movable upon the immovable." His great discovery in the year 1820, of electro-magnetism, or of the law of sympathetic power between electrified bodies and the magnet, which caused his name and that of his native land to resound through the whole learned world, has, of late years, given birth to the electric telegraph, by whose wires the thoughts of the world, and the affairs of commerce fly from country to country, from city to city, from mind to mind. small, but from its contents great, work on "Kundshabs-evnens väsens-enhet i det hele verldens-allt," which may, perhaps, be translated in "The Identity of the Perceptive Faculty in the whole universe," is one of the seeds of thought which genius sows for the nourishment of centuries. This work, with its severe logic, its bold

His

* About the same time attention has again turned to the treasures of Icelandic literature. Former investigations acquired a higher national importance through the

labours of Finn, Magnusen, and Rafn, and those of later

times, by means of those zealous collectors, Thomson and N. M. Peterson, the translator and commentator of the Icelandic Sagas.

Which was delivered by him at Keil, at the scientific meeting there in 1844, and published in Germany from this oral delivery under the title, "Ueber die Wesenseinheit des Erkentnissvermogens im ganzen Welt-all."

trains of thought, and its grand views of the universe-this work, which casts new light on the light of the stars, which draws the whole starry firmament nearer to the human heart, which clearly demonstrates that there is nothing discoverable in the whole visible creation which is entirely foreign to human reason, and to the laws which are required and ordained for this earth, and which clearly makes out that the human being is a central thought in the universe-this work ought to be unknown neither to the true thinker nor to any true poetic mind.

Oersted, the lawyer and late minister, has, during the political disturbances of the last years in Denmark, become somewhat in opposition to the people, whose universally beloved leader he had so long been. He has experienced contradiction and hostility; he has been misunderstood; he has suffered injustice. Well to him! He has thus fully consummated a great life; for no great life is consummated without the fiery ordeal of misconception, without some portion of the martyr's lot. The great thing is to pass through all this and still to preserve love, and still to preserve hope. To do this is the glory of a human life. Nobility and steadfastness of character are, however opinions may differ, the rock against which the stormy billows break, which stands firm in silent grandeur, only becoming the more brilliant when the waters have withdrawn, when the billows are lulled, when the strife of the day is And the day of acknowledgment already dawns over the noble statesman, in the words which were addressed to him in the name of the states by one of his noble opponents, at the closing session at Roeskilde,-"As we thanked him when he stood forward to oppose our views, and led us either to abandon them or to support them more steadfastly, so will he live continually in our remembrance as one of life's most beautiful minds, whose gigantic intellectual powers are still exceeded by his amiable character."

over.

The life of Oersted the naturalist, appears to pass on in a joyous light. Rich in his "lightjoy," in science, in the comprehension of the laws of nature, of its harmonies and its responses, he still, youthful and fervent in his old age, endeavours daily to extend this joy over larger circles-to the young, to the unlearned, to women, to the people who labour in the sweat of their brow, and is aided to do so by his extraordinary skill in expressing himself clearly and intelligibly-in the best sense of the word popularly.

And if many did as he, if all the wealthy in light and in joy wished and worked in his spirit, how much of that which is dark and threatening in the physiognomy of the present

LIFE IN THE NORTH.

time would vanish! No, we do not deceive ourselves, and the experience of our own life strengthens this belief, that in the essential movement which agitates the age, there is, beyond its dark shadows, a secret longing for light; there is a thirsting for a finer, a more beautiful existence in thought, in feeling; for a nobler enjoyment in the proper light-life of humanity. The flowers and the trees press forwards towards the light; the birds sing to the light, and all nature longs for the life of light. "Light! more light!" is often the last word of the dying human being, and the most fortunate among the living has no higher name for his happiness than "light-joy." And they who sit in darkness, should not they follow the inborn impulse of all existence? Yes, they will long, they will struggle; they will through night and day, through evil and through good, seek their way to the light, until the Creator's "Let there be light!" shall have penetrated the world, and shall have filled every depth and every soul with the bright joy of existence. But over those, who in the love of their human brethren, in the divine impulse of

communication, go forth to their less-favoured fellow-beings to labour for them to that purpose, over them rests the blessing of the light!

Whilst H. C. Oersted from his little island proclaims the laws which regulate the whole universe, his disciple FORCHHAMMER, penetrating into the peculiar stratification of this island, has thrown new light on geology, and has opened the pathway to a deeper knowledge of the earth's history. And the young WAARSAC, searching into the depths of the graves, has compelled long-slumbering races, through the symbolic language, which he knows how to interpret, to bear a clearer testimony than hitherto, to the early inhabitants of the North, to their culture and their connexion with other

nations.

Professor SCHOUW, at the same time the favourite interpreter of the language of the vegetable world, and one of the noblest spirits of the political life of the present day, has, especially in his geography of plants, and his researches into the relative climates of the world, produced works of great value and interest. For the rest, almost every branch of natural science has in Denmark its young, promising worshippers.

To the group of naturalists belongs that of the Danish physicians which has, for a long time, been regarded as one of the most distinguished in Europe. Mighty foreign monarchs have called in the aid of Danish physicians. BANG, TRIER, and STEIN are names which resound with gratitude and praise, as well abroad,

as in Denmark.

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Philosophy has only of late opened its eye in the North, but when it has done so, it is with a glance peculiar to the North. That glance penetrates to the central region of life; to the depths, to the heights; it seizes upon the organic centre, and makes it its point of vision for the survey of the world. TYCHE ROTHE, who lived in the eighteenth century, may perhaps be considered as the first philosopher in Denmark. His work on the Effects of Christianity on the nations, shows a profound mind and great historical penetration.

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But the philosophical spirit has its new-birth in Denmark, with CH. F. SIBBERN. Sibbern in his youth was possessed by an excessive sensibility. He passed through every kind of suffering of which the human heart is susceptible; through every shade of its most violent pangs to its most subtle nervous pains. In "The Posthumous Letters of Gabriel" he has preserved to the world the remembrance of this period. But the new Werter was not overcome by his sorrows. He overcame them by a union with the higher powers of life, and thus his sorrows became the wings which bore him to a higher development of his own being. During his solitary Wanderings into wood and meadow, he turned the eye of contemplation down into his own breast. He now placed before himself the old rule, "Know thyself," as the point from which his new intellectual life should begin. His feelings grew into thoughts; his thoughts became systematized, and these produced his excellent work, Psychological Pathology," the fruit of a large and warm heart as well as a strong logical brain; a mine of deep, inspired observation conceived in the noblest philosophy of life. Sibbern's philosophy is a philosophy of life, the ground of which is peculiarly adapted to the people of the North. It is not the abstractions of Fichte, removed from the actual by a proud intellectual life which triumphs over pain, over combat, over weakness and sorrow, over all the struggling constitution of humanity. It is not that of Hegel,* a sublimating of existence into thought and understanding, as being the only real, and in consequence giving a somewhat depreciating view of the life of the heart and of feeling. No! It is a philosophy of life which embraces with love and power the whole of life; life in all its greatness; its littleness; its sweetness; its bitterness; in a word, in all its truth. It is a philosophy of life which regards combat as the condition and the glory of life; which considers suffering and sorrow as the purifying flames out of which

The service rendered to the world by the great German philosophers is not lessened for that they did not penetrate to the centrum of existence. They have

prepared the way. They had their time and their mission.

The time of the Scandinavian thinkers is come!

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