always likely, almost certain, indeed,-to overwhelm such chancedropped words.

If we descend to verbal criticism,—we are half-ashamed of ourselves not to be above it in the presence of workmanship so splendid, -we are conscious of some slight disturbance of perfect satisfaction at coming upon coinages like "innative," "disvoiced,”—coinages not so felicitous as to be their own sufficient vindication. "Brood" and "breed " are linked, by usage, with associations too ignoble to make them wholly agreeable in application to men. We can easily understand how Mr. Lowell may even have meant to flout a taste, judged effeminately finical, by using these very words. But it affects us as if it were a trick of language, rather than the natural utterance of a genuine quasi-scornful masculinity. It is to us a little flaw in the finish of the work to have "in't" made conspicuous by being matched for rhyme with "stint." Mr. Lowell has a weakness for compounding words, and this ode has not escaped. In the strophe quoted, it seems a false antithesis to say of an Homeric shepherd of the people that he

loved his flock, but never loved to lead,

a modesty characteristic enough of Lincoln, but hardly so of an ideal shepherd. Was it in the highest key of "noble anger" to write the strophe beginning, "Who now shall sneer?" It strikes us as too much a condescension in a strain of passion so august and transcendent.

The strophe numbered "IX" attempted a very difficult achievement. The thought in it is sublime; and if the expression of the thought had been perfectly successful, the passage would be as noble as anything that we know in the whole range of poetry. Perhaps there is a certain prolixity of expression, in the course of which the thought almost gets sublimated sheer away from us. What was it that embarrassed those strong wings, and hindered that aspiring flight from quite gaining its high goal? We believe that it was nothing but the lack of that hardness of vigor which only exercise gives. Original strength needs to have been trained long, by arduous use, in order to bring such soaring adventures fairly to their aim. The humored caprice of the close of the ode, the self-checking spirit of humility taking fresh headway again and bursting forth in a peal of joyful pride unrestrained, is quite like Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington."

No other college in the country had the choice among its alumni of so many prominent names in poetry and in eloquence, to illustrate its patriotic memorial services, as had the University at Cambridge.

The alumni of Harvard number a very large share of the chief reputations in our American republic of letters. This noteworthy disparity in favor of Hartford is to be accounted for, in part, by the antiquity of its foundation, and, in part, by its numerous list of graduates. But not wholly. Yale is nearly as old, and the number of its alumni is nearly as great. But the contrast between these two colleges, in respect to their proportion of literary celebrities, is striking. We have been at the pains to run carefully over the catalogues of both from the year eighteen hundred down. We should say that Harvard outnumbers Yale, at least three to one, in names of eminent literary men. There must be reasons for this. One reason, perhaps, is found in the fact (it is a fact, we believe,) that Yale drew its patronage, for many years, in greater proportion from the South; while Harvard recruited its classes more from New England, and especially from Massachusetts. Scholarship and literature were never the leading ambition of the ingenuous South; and, besides, New England, and by eminence Massachusetts, boys enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a far better preparatory training.

Another reason, however, we are compelled to believe, must lie in the different manner in which Yale and Harvard have manned their departments of belles-lettres instruction. Second-rate abilities and second-rate culture cannot occupy the chair of rhetoric for a long series of years, at a seat of high education, without registering an appropriate effect in the intellectual character and development of the students. On the other hand, genius and accomplishments, like those of a Ticknor, a Longfellow, a Lowell (the illustrious triumvirate of recent succession in the chair of elegant literature at Harvard), cannot preside over the literary studies of a series of classes without impressing a corresponding character upon their intellectual development. It is a capital mistake for boards of college oversight to suppose that they have done the best for the literary education of young men, when they have provided them with an instructor who is willing to go through unlimited drudgery, in the way of minute rudimentary criticism of their essays with the pencil or the pen. Infinitely better, in our judgment, it would be for college classes, if their rhetorical teacher should even, save in exceptional cases, never once see the essays of their pupils. This is no place for discussing a point of education, and we cannot pause to vindicate our opinion. We scarcely state it, indeed. We baldly suggest it. Stimulus, more than criticism, is what the forming literary mind requires. Vigorous growth can better be trusted, than the most laborious pruning-knife, to give symmetry of form. Besides, only vigorous growth responds

to the pruning-knife with desirable results. The criticism that is applied should be living criticism,-by which we mean oral criticism, in which the criticised writer himself should share as respondent, while the writer's classmates, under stimulating and regulating direction from the head of the department, should take a principal part in it. It is in some such way that the voluntary societies of a college manipulate their members; and many a student will testify that he is more indebted to their influence than to the influence of the regular instruction for the forming of his literary habits. This colluctant play of mental faculties in generous social exercise, is worth, for literary discipline, all the dead pen-strokes that could be strewn on a manuscript essay by the most industrious grammarian in the world. A teacher who can do, has done, is doing literary work of acknowledged value himself, provided always that it be with art, and not wholly by instinct, is the man to teach literary workmanship to college students. Such a man will not be a drudge. And such a man need not be. An ounce of stimulus here outweighs a ton of drill.

But while we thus attribute a deserved preeminence to Harvard University, for its share in the nurture of those minds which have hitherto represented American letters, a just deduction from its praise remains to be made. The circle of culture which centres at Harvard has done little in the way of such production as is fitted both to endure itself and to produce its like again. Its work has been mainly epideictic work. Its history is likely to turn out more valuable as writing than as history. Its eloquence tends to be rhetoric rather than eloquence. Its poetry seems to be the echo of singing rather than song. As for its theology, that is the empty shell of negation, out of which the positive kernel of gospel has gone. Reverence, as a matter of religion, has mostly disappeared; the decorous affectation of it that remains is a matter of aesthetics. Self-complacency is the broadest trait that characterizes this school of culture. It is a very well-bred self-complacency, and it rallies itself with admirable pleasantry. But it is an evident token of shallowness. The end is easy to predict. The literary sceptre will surely depart from Boston. Puritanism gave the Boston mind a great launch. But the force of that launch will not last forever. New Boston will have to borrow vigor from an earnestness rooted in religion deeper than aesthetics, or the days of its literary dominion are numbered.

"An age too late" is, perhaps, Mr. Lowell's misfortune. The bracing moral atmosphere that blew down on an earlier generation, from the heroic heights of a more religious time, would have suited better with something in the man that allies him to an order of

greatness, toward which the current Boston aspiration is no longer hospitable. Dr. Holmes is the perfectly-contented child of present Boston,-furnished with a complete assortment of easy solutions for the problems that perplex nobler minds, and quite incapable of their unworldly sorrow. But when Mr. Lowell speaks in the dialect of this shallow complacency, he always seems, somehow, to be using a language that is not his mother tongue. He is haunted by doubts, and fears, and guesses, that are not dreamed of in the popular Boston philosophy. Puritanism would very likely have oppressed Dr. Holmes, and quite silenced his chirrup. But Puritanism might almost have made Mr. Lowell a lesser Milton. It is creditable to Mr. Lowell that his moral and his intellectual sympathies are in the noblest sense conservative. That heady radicalism in religion and in politics, which Boston calls progress, has long ago, we believe, left Mr. Lowell in the rear. His present aspect, if we do not mistake, is rather toward a past prematurely forsaken, than toward a future plucked at by rash hands before its "season due." Whatever mutations impend in literary judgment, Mr. Lowell, if one may venture without offence to anticipate the criticism of the future, will always be remembered as one of the greatest and best of that school of briliant wits who contented themselves with making a transient eddy in the main current of intellectual human activity, the direction of which they might, perhaps, have influenced, and the volume of which they might have contributed, in some degree, to swell.

TARRYTOWN N. Y.

W. C. WILKINSON.

BALAAM, THE PROPHET OF SYRIA.

NE of the most interesting and striking episodes belonging to the

early history of the nation of Israel, is the story and prophecies of Balaam, contained in the Book of Numbers, chapters xxii-xxiv. The purpose of the present paper is to inquire what can be ascertained of his life, character, and prophecies. There is a deep fascination in this story, exceedingly provocative of further investigation, though, it must be confessed, that the data for such investigation, looking also to satisfactory conclusions, are few, being limited to the narrative in these chapters, and a few pregnant allusions elsewhere in the Scriptures.

1. His Name, Descent, Nation, and Place.

In pursuing this inquiry, we naturally begin with his name, which, in its Hebrew orthography, is Bileam (?). The spelling of our English Bible is taken from that of the Septuagint, Baladμ; that of Josephus is Balapos. As to its derivation, Gesenius and Fürst compound it of and Dy, "not a people; perhaps, same as foreigner;" Vitringa of by and Dy, "lord of the people;" while the two principal American writers who have discussed it, Bush and R. D. C. Robbins (in Bib. Sac.), derive it, after Simonis, from ye and by," destroyer of the people;" as if with reference to his pretended and supposed malign power. We will say no more than that, whether we consider the form or the signification, the last seems to us the most probable derivation.