hereafter, with its paradise in the sun, and its curious subdivisions into heavens and hells appropriate to the complaint or act by which the soul was separated from the body.

A very interesting part of this book is that in which the author treats of the origin of the world and of man as he finds the idea in the uncorrupted myths of the aborigines. The native imagination never grasped the notion of creation. Matter, for them, always existed; but there was a fabulous period when a flood of waters hid everything, and when the dry land began to emerge. Back of this period they could not go; yet they had no trouble in supposing an end of matter, and they had no clearer belief than that of the destruction of the world, of a last day, and of a resurrection of the dead. All their myths teach more or less directly that man was not growth from lower animal life or from vegetable life, but "a direct product from the great creative power."

Dr. Brinton examines at length into the nature of those myths by virtue of which the cardinal points of the compass and the number four became sacred to the aborigines, and by which the Cross became the symbol of the east, west, north, and south, as widely and universally employed as the knowledge of these points.

"The Catholic missionaries found it was no new object of adoration to the red race, and were in doubt whether to ascribe the fact to the pious labors of Saint Thomas or the sacrilegious subtlety of Satan. It was the central object in the great temple of Cozumel, and is still preserved on the basreliefs of the ruined city of Palenque. From time immemorial it had received the prayers and sacrifices of the Aztecs and Toltecs, and was suspended as an august emblem from the walls of temples in Popoyan and Cundinamarca. In the Mexican tongue it bore the significant and worthy name 'Tree of our Life,' or 'Tree of our Flesh' (Tonacaquahuitl). It represented the god of rains and of health, and this was everywhere its simple meaning. Those of Yucatan,' say the chroniclers, 'prayed to the cross as the god of rains when they needed water.' The Aztec goddess of rains bore one in her hand, and at the feast celebrated to her honor in the early spring victims were nailed to a cross and shot with arrows. Quetzalcoatl, god of the winds, bore as his sign of office a mace like the cross of a bishop'; his robe was covered with them

strown like flowers, and its adoration was throughout connected with his worship. When the Muyscas would sacrifice to the goddess of waters, they extended cords across the tranquil depths of some lake, thus forming a gigantic cross, and at their point of intersection threw in their offerings of gold, emeralds, and precious oils. The arms of the cross were designed to point to the cardinal points and represent the four winds, the rain-bringers. To confirm this explanation, let us have recourse to the simpler ceremonies of the less cultivated tribes, and see the transparent meaning of the symbol as they employed it.

"When the rain-maker of the Lenni Lenape would exert his power, he retired to some secluded spot and drew upon the earth the figure of a cross, (its arms toward the cardinal points?) placed upon it a piece of tobacco, a gourd, a bit of some red stuff, and commenced to cry aloud to the spirits of the rains. The Creeks at the festival of the Busk celebrated, as we have seen, to the four winds, and, according to their legends instituted by them, commenced with making the new fire. The manner of this was 'to place four logs in the centre of the square, end to end, forming a cross, the outer ends pointing to the cardinal points; in the centre of the cross the new fire is made.'

"As the emblem of the winds who dispense the fertilizing showers it is emphatically the tree of our life, our subsistence, and our health. It never had any other meaning in America, and if, as has been said, the tombs of the Mexicans were cruciform, it was perhaps with reference to a resurrection and a future life as portrayed under this symbol, indicating that the buried body would rise by the action of the four spirits of the world, as the buried seed takes on a new existence when watered by the vernal showers. It frequently recurs in the ancient Egyptian writings, where it is interpreted life; doubtless, could we trace the hieroglyph to its source, it would likewise prove to be derived from the four winds."

Throughout Dr. Brinton's work there is a prevalent synthetic effort, by which the varying forms of the aboriginal myths are brought to one expression, and the ruder traditions are made to approach their interpretation through the perfected symbolism of the civilized Mexicans and Peruvians. Here, as nearly everywhere else, the author has most readers in his power; but we

have a conviction that he does not abuse his power. In any case, the result is in many respects absolutely satisfactory. Something is evoked from chaos, that commends itself both to the reason and the fancy, and makes Dr. Brinton's book a very entertaining one; and that doubt, scarcely more merciful than atheism, whether man might not somewhere be destitute of belief in God and his own immortality, is removed, so far as concerns the Americans. Their supernaturalism included both ideas, and from it all our author evolves his opinion that the supreme deity of the red race was a not less pure and spiritual essence than Light. Their God, however, destroyed them, for always connected with belief in him was their faith in that immemorable tradition which taught that out of his home, the east, should come a white race to conquer and possess their land, and to which Dr. Brinton is not alone, nor too daring, in attributing the collapse of powers and civilizations like those of Peru and Mexico before a hantiful of Spanish adventurers.

Hans Breitmann's Party. With other Ballads. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers.

THE reader laughs at the fantastic drollery of these ballads, and, acknowledging the genuineness of the humor, cannot help wishing that it had a wider range and a securer means of expression. Its instrument is not a dialect or patois characterizing a race or locality, but merely the broken English of the half-Americanized German fellow-citizen, which varies according to accident or individual clumsiness, and is not nearly so fixed in form, or so descriptive of generic facts and ideas, as the Irish brogue. We own it is funny; and for once it did very well. Indeed, few American poems have been held in better or more constant remembrance than the ballad of Hans Breitmann's Party. It is one of those perennials, which, when not blossoming in the newspapers, are carefully preserved in many scrap-books, and, worn down to the quick with handling, and with only enough paper and print about them to protect the immortal germ, are carried round in infinite waistcoat-pockets. The other ballads here printed with it are a good deal like it, and betray not so much a several inspiration, as a growth from its success. They celebrate chiefly the warlike career of Hans Breit

Und ve roosh to embrace him, und shtill more ve find

Dat wherever he 'd peen, he 'd left noding pehind.
In bofe of his poots dere vas porte-moneys crammed,
Mit creen-packs stoof full all his haversack jammed;
In his bockets cold dollars vere shinglin' deir doons,
Mit dwo doozen votches, und four doozen shpoons,
Und dwo silber tea-pods for makin' his dea,
Der ghosdt haf bring mit him, en route to de sea."

This is true history as well as good fun, we imagine; and we suspect that the triumphal close of the ballad of "Breitmann in Kansas," whither he went, after peace came, on one of those Pacific Railroad pleasure-parties, which people somehow understand to be civilizing influences impelled by great moral engines, is more accurately suggestive of the immediate objects of such expeditions:

"Hans Breitmann vent to Kansas;
He have a pully dime:

Bu 't vas in oldt Missouri

Dat dey rooshed him up sublime.
Dey took him to der Bilot Nob,

Und all der nobs around:
Dey spreed him und dey tea'd him
Dill dey roon him to de ground.
"Hans Breitmann vent to Kansas
Troo all dis earthly land;
A vorkin' out life's mission here
Soobyectifly und grand.
Some beoblesh runs de beautiful,
Some works philosophie,

Der Breitmann solfe de Infinide
Ash von eternal shpree!"

The ballad of Die Schöne Wittwe, and mock-romantic ballad at the end, are the poorest of all, yet they make you laugh; and "Breitmann and the Turners" is as

good as any of the war-ballads, with a peculiarly wild movement of spirit, and a jolly breadth of drollery : —

"Hans Breitmann choined de Toorners,
Dey all set oop some shouts,

Dey took'd him into deir Toorner Hall
Und poots him a course of sphrouts.
Dey poots him on de barrell-hell bars
Und shtands him oop on his head,
Und dey poomps de beer mit an engine-hose
In his mout' dill he 's 'pout half tead!

"Hans Breitmann choin de Toorners,
Mit a Limburg cheese he coom:
Ven he open de box it smell so loudt
It knock de music doomb.
Ven de Deutschers kit de flavor
It coorl de haar on dere head;
But dere vas dwo Amerigans dere,

Und by tam ! it kilt dem dead!"

Throughout all the ballads, it is the same figure presented, an honest Deutscher drunk with the new world as with new wine, and rioting in the expression of purely Deutsch nature and half-Deutsch ideas through a strange speech. It is a true figure enough, and recognizable; but it was fully developed in the original ballad, and sufficiently portrayed there.

Cannot Mr. Leland, who is in every way so well qualified to enjoy and reproduce the peculiarities of Pennsylvania Dutch, give us some ballads in that racy and characteristic idiom?

he will take care in speaking the French tongue to place the words in "the exact reverse of the English" order, and will remember that "the more they are chopped up, mangled, swallowed, and ejected through the nose (like tobacco-smoke by old smokers), the more possibility will exist of their being understood by a Frenchman." While travelling at the frightful speed of fifteen miles an hour on the recklessly managed German railways, he can profitably employ his leisure in committing to memory the phrases, "Ich habe mich das Bein - den Arm zerbrochen "; but we hope nothing free and enlightened not even a shorttrip American, will ever be brought so low in strange lands as to stand in need of the German for "I am very poor! Give me an alms for God's sake! or, For the Holy Virgin's sake!" and we should be very sorry if any traveller came into possession of those obsolete Italian coinages which Mr. Morford is at the pains to reduce into United States money.

The author devotes eighty of his three hundred and thirty pages to advice for the exigencies of a sea-voyage, and the conduct of short-trip citizens abroad; twenty to those remarkably "Useful Phrases in French and German," of which we will own that we have not given the most useful, though we have to add that we have but faintly hinted the general absurdity of Mr. Morford's ideas of language, — and ten to puffs of American hotels and wateringplaces. Consequently there are but two thirds of the book given to actual information, which is always of the meagerest and scrappiest kind, and delivered with an air of indescribable vulgar jauntiness, and the accompaniment of silly and irrelevant stories. We must complain particularly of our author for advising his short-trip Americans to practise corruption of European customs-officers. The advice is not only immoral, but, as addressed to citizens of a country offering the largest inducements in the world to smuggling and bribery, appears to us quite superfluous.

"My dear," said I last autumn to

a young married lady friend, whom in the spring I had seen brilliantly blooming and handsome, "it strikes me you are looking a little careworn.”

"I am," returned she, with great animation, "and I have been giving it as my opinion that quite too much is expected of women. First, I had all the packing and moving of going down to the sea-shore to attend to. Then, my house was full of visitors all summer;

and I had to take breath as well as I

could between hurrying a cake into the could between hurrying a cake into the oven and being in the parlor to receive or entertain them. Of course there was any quantity of sewing to do; and, as if all this were not enough, Mr. would come in daily to know if I had learned my French lesson, and whether I had given my regular hour to my piano; and now I have just got through with the pleasant experience of selling and stowing our furniture preparatory to going to Europe. So it is no wonder if I have grown a little thin; and, in fact, as I said before, I

tirely too much is expected of women !”

Whether the conclusion be just or otherwise, nothing could more perfectly represent the plight of a multitude of intelligent and ambitious young matrons of moderate means than the lively complaint of my beautiful friend. For in these days of strain and struggle and desire, who of us is there that understands how to live? who that possesses a domestic machinery so perfectly balanced, so nicely adjusted, so exquisitely oiled and polished, that every duty and every pleasure glide from it noiseless and complete as do the separate marvels that fall from the crafty wheels and lathes of this modern era ? THE OLD-FASHIONED HOUSEKEEPER.

That the art of living, so far as the body and its surroundings are concerned, can be, and often is, carried to a very high degree of perfection, the superlative housekeepers we all have known are ample proof. My whole girlhood was spent just across the street from the greatest genius in this

respect that I have ever met. The fresh exterior of her square white dwelling, with its immaculate board walk crossing her greenest sward, and its shining windows, through which smiled her roses and carnations upon the passer-by, gave pleasant promise of the absolute spotlessness of everything within. She was not one of that dismal type of housekeepers who exclude the light and muffle everything into shapelessness lest damask and carpets should fade. On the contrary, her house was flooded with the brightest sunshine, challenged to find a speck of dust if it could. The air, laden with the perfume of cut flowers or house-plants, seemed purer than that outside, and, whatever the weather, its temperature was perfect. Nothing, was for show, and but little for pure ornament, but everything was the best of its kind and in true taste and keeping. As for her table, “never, till life and mem'ry perish, can I forget" the vision of that tea-cloth, far whiter than snow, with its gleaming silver and glass and china, displaying incomparable viands, whose delicacy and perfection were all her own, - that sweet and solid cube of golden butter; the foam-light and foam-white biscuit, each a separate thought; the cake, crowned with every ideal attribute that cake can possess; the ruby and topaz of her preserved strawberries and plums; and O, O, the flavor of that deep-red tongue, the meltingness of her cold corned-beef! At this ambrosial board she sat, a lady of sixty or seventy, upright as an arrow, wearing no cap, nor needing any, with her beautiful chestnut hair braided in almost as thick a tress as a quarter of a century ago; low-voiced, intelligent, self-contained; with a comprehension in her eye, a firmness in her mouth, a concentrated and disciplined energy speaking from her whole quiet person, that convinced one that she could have administered the affairs of an empire with the same ease and exactness that she did those of her household. With one elderly servant she did it all; and as she was never in a hurry, nor ever unprepared, she seemed to accomplish

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it with no more effort than the glittering engine which one finds stowed away in some lower corner of a great building, playing easily and noiselessly as if for its own pleasure, while in reality it is driving with mighty energy a hundred wheels, and employing ceaselessly a hundred hands.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE AGE.

Now, such housewifery as this seems to me perfect, but I seldom observe any approach to it in the homes of my young married friends, nor, though it worries me, and in my secret mind often makes me unhappy, do I attempt anything like it myself. Yet what a contrast appears in the success of two women, both of whom were perhaps equally endowed by nature with talent, ambition, and the artistic sense! The one rushing in feverish haste, overtasked, inaccurate, anxious; the other walking in cool quiet, her whole life stretching behind and before her in fair order and freshness, milestoned with gracious duties remembered afar off and beautifully finished with love and care, each in its own time and for its own sake. The contrast cannot be explained by the difference in years and temperament, for in sketching one I have meant to typify us all. It is the CENTURY that speaks as loudly in the transformation of us young matrons as in any of its more obtrusive revolutions; and all our domestic imperfections are chargeable upon the modern feminine education, which differs so entirely from that of fifty years ago, that the housewifely devotion of our grandmothers is as difficult and disagreeable to us as our accomplishments and extravagance would be impossible to them. In a general way, we feel that we ought to look after our households, and, since we earn nothing for our families, to save what hired labor we can. But our fragile American physique, as well as the fastidious. taste born of school-day studies and fanciful young-lady pursuits, makes us shrink from kitchen and storeroom; nor can we bear to lose our hold, feeble