THE HERMIT. (SEE PLATE.) THE beautiful ideal of Beattie's Hermit has been realized with great effect by the artist in the engraving we present with this number. If the graceful poem is familiar to the reader, the aptness of the illustration will be apparent. At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still, Ah! why, all abandon'd to darkness and woe, Now gliding remote, on the verge of the sky, Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue 'Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more: My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade, 'O pity, great Father of light,' then I cried, And darkness and doubt are now flying away; So breaks on the traveler, faint, and astray, On the cold check of Death smiles and roses are blending, SONNET-TO MEMORY. COME, pensive spirit, moonlight of the mind, Illume the dullness of the passing hour; When youth and health, and golden hopes were mine, OLIVER P. AND THE WALDENSES. BY PROF. SAMUEL M. HOPKINS. ONE of the greatest chapters in the greatest period of English history remains, so far at least as popular use is concerned, still to be written. Just two hundred years ago, the line of hereditary succession to the English throne was broken by the most extraordinary convulsion. A monarch predestinated to ruin by the incurable vices of his temper and his education, and strong only in the power of those consecrated fictions which buttress up a regular government, however bad, laid down his head on the block. Into the vacant throne there mounted a man of the people. His strength and his weakness were just the reverse of those of the late king. He had no title known to the laws, no illustrious descent, no charm of manner, blended of majesty and condescension, to captivate the hearts of men. He was, on any theory of government, a usurper. But he was strong in the possession of right kingly qualities; a vigorous understanding; a resolute will, to which the wills of other men bowed down, and did reverence; and a conscious adequacy for the highest station, which made the " butcher's son" the calm, self-assured peer of the proudest hereditary sovereigns of Europe. He sat without awkwardness in the seat of the Stuarts, because he was jure divino "our chief of men;" a king after the old type of Saul, higher than all the people by the shoulders and upward. For the first time since the opening of the seventeenth century, England had a ruler who was respectable as a prince, or honest as a Protestant: a ruler not by accident, but by the pre-eminent force of character. Sunk into insignificance in the family of States during the feeble reigns of the two preceding Stuarts, as she was during the shameful reigns of the two others, whom an angry Providence still had in reserve, England rose during these nine years of magnanimous administration to be the glory of Protestantism, and the terror of the persecuting bigots of Europe. During a long barren stretch of almost ninety years, there was one English prince whom foreign nations respected or feared, and that prince was OLIVER the PROTECTOR. In the time of which we speak, there was, as there still is, a small district on the map of Europe, scarce equal in its area to the least of our counties, the seat of a people whose tragic history is more thickly strewed with the record of suffering than that of any other, except the "tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast." Couched under the shadow of the Cottian Alps, and shut in on the other side by the sources of the Po, the inhabitants have, from our earliest knowledge of them, been penned, either from choice or compulsion, within the same narrow and rugged fold. Their villages nestle in the ravines (rather than valleys) of Angrogne, Saluzzo, and St. Jean. Their goats browse along the sides of the mountain spurs, which wall off with sky-piercing battlements each petty district from the other. To the south-east towers the lofty peak of Mount Viso. In the opposite quarter, at the distance of only thirty miles, glisten the cathedral towers of Turin, the residence for four hundred years of their despots and persecutors, the base and bigoted race of Savoy. The people of this region, the Vaudois or Waldenses, were Protestants before the Reformation. They claim never to have made a part of the apostate Church of Rome; but that, from the earliest times running far back into the darkness of the middle ages, they have been recognized as dissenters from the Romish communion. They have more than one bloody title-deed to show, attesting the fact of their "heresy" before the birth of Luther; and this heresy we know to have consisted in that scriptural faith and service, according to which we worship the God of our fathers. We omit any notice of the sufferings of the Waldenses previous to the middle of the seventeenth century. Repeated acts of outrage and massacre had been visited upon them during the preceding two hundred years. But the heaviest storm of Romish vengeance burst upon the valleys in sixteen hundred and fifty-five. In January of that year, a decree was issued by a Papal Inquisitor, under the authority of the Duke of 290 OLIVER P. AND THE WALDENSES. Savoy, requiring all the Protestant people of the valleys to quit their homes within three days, under pain of death, unless they were prepared to reconcile themselves to the Romish Church. This brutal edict, it is to be observed, fell upon the inoffensive and helpless inhabitants of the valleys in the depth of winter. With only three days of preparation, they were required, with their aged, their children, their delicate women and their sick, to wander abroad, outcasts from home, in the midst of all the terrors of an Alpine January, and along defiles and mountain-sides difficult to traverse under the most favorable circumstances. The terrors of this flight, it is vain to attempt describing. Many perished from cold and exposure. Many fell down the slippery rocks, and were dashed to pieces; some suffered the lingering agonies of starvation; and upon the more wretched families who were unable within the required time to begin their flight, there broke in a horde of French, Piedmontese, and Irish savages, compared with whose deeds the fury of the elements was gentleness. The miserable survivors, from their place of refuge, made their appeal for sympathy and aid to the Protestant Christians of Europe. Our tears, they said, are no longer of water, but of blood. Those who were once the richest among us, are reduced to beg their bread. Our beautiful and flourishing churches are scattered and in ruins. O, have pity upon the desolations of Jerusalem, and be grieved for the afflictions of Joseph! Compassionate the thousands of poor souls who have suffered things worse than death for the testimony of Jesus! This touching appeal met with such a response in England as must gladden the heart of every Christian reader of history. The great Protector, in the language of one of the writers of the time, "rose up like a lion out of his place." He was not the man to look on idly when truth lay bleeding under the iron hand of Bigotry. His first and immediate act was to issue an order for a day of fasting and prayer, in view of the distressed condition of the Protestants of the valleys. The next was to direct that contributions be taken up in all the churches for their relief; and so deeply were the sympathies of British Christians stirred, that in a short time, near forty thousand pounds were contributed to this object; a sum fully equal, considering the higher value of money at that time, to two hundred thousand dollars of our currency. Of this amount, two thousand pounds came from the Protector's own purse. But Oliver did not stop with this. He undertook the work of forcible remonstrance with the authors of the persecution. And with these steps opened that noble chapter in English diplomacy referred to in the beginning of this article. The heart that felt the atrocity of the massacre, and the insult it implied to every Protestant state, and the strong will that rose indignantly to rebuke it, did not lack the aid of the ready pen to convey its emotions. There was at the head of English affairs at that time, not only the mighty man and the man of war, but the counselor, the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator. The head of Moses was not left without the utterance of Aaron. In the office of Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to Cromwell, was that great master of language and of song, John Milton; and from his pen, in May of the year sixteen hundred and fifty-five, proceeded that series of letters signed OLIVER P., which sounded through the states of Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, a note that made both the ears of them that heard it to tingle. With all the decorum and courtesy of official correspondence, it made known to the Most Serene Princes" who were dipping their hands in Protestant blood, that the work of proscription must cease forthwith. "When intelligence was first brought us (was the language addressed to the court of Savoy) that a calamity so awful had befallen those most miserable peo ple, it was impossible for us not to feel the deepest sorrow and compassion. For as we are not only by the ties of humanity, but also by religious fellowship and fraternal relation, united to them, we conceived we could neither satisfy our own minds, nor discharge our duty to God, nor the obligations of brotherly kindness and charity, as professors of the same faith, if, while deeply sympathizing with our afflicted brethren, we should fail to use every endeavor that was within our reach to succor them under so many unexpected miseries." This firm and intelligible state paper lan guage was enforced by the address of the British envoy, Sir Samuel Moreland, on presenting it at the Court of Turin. This brave and honest gentleman took no pains to conceal his disgust at the proceedings of the court, nor to soften the tone of indignant expostulation in which he set the crime before the eyes of the perpetrators. "Were all the tyrants of past ages alive again," said he, in the presence of the royalty and court of Savoy, "they would own, contemplating these atrocities, that they had been but tyros in the work of persecution. Angels are horror-struck at the spectacle Heaven is astonished with the cries of dying men, and the earth blushes with the stain of innocent blood." The French king, Louis XIV., had lent his |