"publishers failed" we do not know; but promptly the next month the Pioneer appeared, and Mr. Hale speaks of this, in his article in the preceding pages, as the successor of the Miscellany. Certainly it was much the same kind of a magazine; its pages looked like those of the Miscellany, and its contributors were largely the same. The editor's Introduction was as follows. We give it entire, as it is a characteristic expression, and the first important one, of those views of our American literature which continued to control Mr. Lowell, and of which the next notable expression was in the "Fable for Critics."

DR. JOHN NORTH, a man of some mark in his day, wrote on the first leaf of his note-book these significant words: "I beshrew his heart that gathers my opinion from anything wrote here!" As we seated ourselves to the hard task of writing an introduction for our new literary journal, this sentence arose to our minds. It seemed to us to point clearly at the archwant of our periodical literature. We find opinions enough and to spare, but scarce any of the healthy, natural growth of our soil. If native, they are seldom more than scions of a public opinion, too often planted and watered by the prejudices or ignorant judgments of individuals, to be better than a upas-tree shedding a poisonous blight on any literature that may chance to grow up under it. Or if foreign, they are, to borrow a musical term, "recollections" of Blackwood or the quarterlies, of Wilson, Macaulay, or Carlyle - -not direct imitations, but endeavors, as it were, to write with their cast-off pens freshnibbed for Cisatlantic service. The whole regiment comes one by one to our feast of letters in the same yellow domino. Criticism, instead of being governed as it should be by the eternal and unchanging laws of beauty which are a part of the soul's divine nature, seems rather to be a striving to reduce Art to one dead level of conventional inediocrity which only does not offend taste, because it lacks even the life and strength to produce any decided impression whatever.

We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for- namely, a National literature; for the same mighty lyre of the human heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime, and any literature, as far as it is national, is diseased, inasmuch as it appeals to some climatic peculiarity, rather than to the universal nature. Moreover, everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of caste, to widen the boundary between races, and so to put farther off the hope of one great brotherhood, should be steadily resisted by all good men. But we do long for a natural literature. One green leaf, though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of the daintiest Paris milliners. For it is the glory of nature that in her least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of her's we may behold the type of all her sublime mys

We

teries; as in the least fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. would no longer see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the OLD WORLD; but rather lying like one of our own inland oceans, reflecting not only the mountain and the rock, the forest and the redman, but also the steamboat and the railcar, the cornfield and the factory. Let us learn that romance is not married to the past, that it is not the birthright of ferocious ignorance and chivalric barbarity, but that it ever was and is an inward quality, the darling child of the sweetest refinements and most gracious amenities of peaceful gentleness, and that it can never die till only water runs in these red rivers of the heart, that cunning adept which can make vague cathedrals with blazing oriels and streaming spires out of our square meeting boxes

"Whose rafters sprout upon the shady side."

We do not mean to say that our writers should not profit by the results of those who have gone before them, nor gather from all countries those excellencies which are the effects of detached portions of that universal tendency to the Beautiful, which must be centred in the Great Artist. But let us not go forth to them; rather let us draw them by sympathy of nature to our own heart, which is the only living principle of every true work. The artist must use the tools of others, and understand their use, else were their lives fruitless to him, and his, in turn, vain to all who come after but the skill must be of his own toilsome winning, and he must not, like Goethe's magician's apprentice, let the tools become his masters. But it seems the law of our literature to receive its impulses from without rather than from within. We ask oftener than the wise king of Ashantee, "What is thought of us in England?" We write with the fear of the newspapers before our eyes, every one of which has its critic, the Choragus of his little circle, self-elected expounder of the laws of Nature- - which he at first blush understands more thoroughly than they whom nature herself has chosen, and who have studied them life-long- - and who unites at pleasure the executive with the judiciary to crush some offender mad enough to think for himself. Men seem endowed with an insane alacrity to believe that wisdom elects the dullest heads for her confidants, and crowd to burn incense to the hooting owl, while the thoughtful silence of the goddess makes them mistake her for her bird.

We boast much of our freedom, but they who boast thereof the loudest have mostly a secret sense of fetters.

"License they mean when they cry liberty;"

and there is among us too much freedom to speak and think ill- a freedom matched with which the lowest of all other slaveries were as the blue tent of Heaven to a dungeon and too little freedom to think, and speak, and act the highest and holiest promptings of the eternal soul. We cheat to-morrow, to satisfy the petty dunning of to-day; we bribe ourselves with a bubble reputation, whose empty lightness alone lends it a momentary elevation, and show men our meanest part, as if

we could make ourselves base enough to believe that we should offend their vanity by showing our noblest and highest. Are prejudices to be overcome by grovelling to them? Is Truth no longer worthy of the name, when she stoops to take Falsehood by the hand and caresses her, and would fain wheedle her to forego her proper nature? Can we make men noble, the aim and end of every literature worthy of the name, by showing them our own want of nobleness? In the name of all holy and beautiful things at once, no! We want a manly, straightforward, true literature, a criticism which shall give more grace to beauty and more depth to truth, by lovingly embracing them wherever they may lie hidden, and a creed whose truth and nobleness shall be insured by its being a freedom from all creeds.

We

The young heart of every generation looks forth upon the world with restless and bitter longing. To it the earth still glitters with the dews of a yet unforfeited Eden, and in the midst stands the untasted tree of knowledge of good and evil. hear men speak of the restless spirit of the age, as if our day were peculiar in this regard. But it has always been the same. The Young is radical; the Old, conservative: they who have not, struggle to get; and they who have gotten, clinch their fingers to keep. The Young, exulting in its tight and springy muscles, stretches out its arms to clasp the world as its plaything; and the Old bids it be a good boy and mind its papa, and it shall have sugar-plums. But still the new spirit yearns and struggles, and expects great things; still the Old shakes its head, ominous of universal anarchy; still the world rolls calmly on, and the youth grown old shakes its wise head at the next era. Is there any more danger to be looked for in the radicalism of youth than in the conservatism of age? Both gases must be mixed ere the cooling rain will fall on our seedfield. The true reason for the fear which we often see expressed of a freedom which shall be debased into destructiveness and license, is to be found in a false judgment of the natural progress of things. Cheerfully will men reverence all that is true, whether in the new or old. It is only when you would force them to revere falsehoods that they will reluctantly throw off all reverence, without which the spirit of man must languish, and at last utterly die. Truth, in her natural and infinitely various exponents of beauty and love, is all that the soul reverences long; and, as Truth is universal and absolute, there can never be any balance in the progress of the soul till one law is acknowledged in all her departments. Radicalism has only gone too far when it has hated conservatism, and has despised all reverence because conservatism is based upon it, forgetting that it is only so inasmuch as it is a needful part of nature. To have claimed that reverence should not play at blindman's-buff had been enough.

In this country where freedom of thought does not shiver at the cold shadow of Spielberg (unless we name this prison of "public opinion" so), there is no danger to be apprehended from an excess of it. It is only where there is no freedom that anarchy is to be dreaded. The mere sense of freedom is of too pure and holy a nature to consist with injustice and wrong, We would fain

have our journal, in some sort at least, a journal of progress, -one that shall keep pace with the spirit of the age, and sometimes go near its deeper heart. Yet, while we shall aim at that gravity which is becoming of a manly literature, we shall hope also to satisfy that lighter and sprightlier element of the soul, without whose due culture the character is liable to degenerate into a morose bigotry and selfish precisianism.

To be one exponent of a young spirit which shall aim at power through gentleness, the only mean for its secure attainment, and in which freedom shall be attempered to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble hope. And to this end we ask the help of all who feel any sympathy in such an undertaking. We are too well aware of the thousand difficulties which lie in the way of such an attempt, and of the universal failure to make what is written come near the standard of what is thought and hoped, to think that we shall not at first disappoint the expectations of our friends. But we shall do our best, and they must bear with us, knowing that what is written from month to month, can hardly have that care and study which is needful to the highest excellence, and believing that

"We shall be willing, if not apt to learn;
Age and experience will adorn our mind
With larger knowledge: and, if we have done
A wilful fault, think us not past all hope,
For once."

The Pioneer had forty-eight pages in each number, or about one-third as many pages as the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE; and it was illustrated with what the prospectus called "engravings of the highest character, both on wood and steel." The steel engravings in the first number were certainly well executed. There were two of them - Flaxman's "Circe," engraved, as were almost all the pictures in the three numbers, by John Andrews, and a picture by G. Cuitt, entitled "Two Hundred Years Ago." These were the only illustrations in the first number, aside from the " emblematical marginal drawings" which accompanied Mr. Lowell's poem, "The Rose," and which the Advertiser, in its notice of the magazine, pronounced "a beautiful novelty in the line of magazine embellishments." These drawings, with the poem, occupied two pages, and were highly praised by other papers besides the Advertiser. The first of these two pages is reproduced herewith, as showing the style of illustration which so won the admiration of the Pioneer's constituency. The second number contained a sentimental picture entitled Genevieve," "designed expressly for the Pioneer, by

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"Two Hundred Years Ago."-From the first number of "The Pioneer."