exhort us to an examination of conscience, Yet why generalize, why speak of lum- hearts everlasting, welcome for such as more the many-nooked attic in an oldfashioned farmhouse, where two rosycheeked children played in winter on a floor strewn with store-fruit and ripening damsons? It had been revealed to them that, if a certain curious hair trunk were opened, with due rites and at propitious hour, the dolls they had fondled, lost, forgotten, and after many days desired with Belief in a millennium, as we have sug tears, would suddenly be discovered lying gested, may justify the more honorable bright and uninjured as on the day of gift. contents of our lumber-room, some hope A warming credulity crept through me as that one day they may be reunited to the I listened to details of the anticipated re-glory of the ball-room and the banquet; union. We discussed the toilettes of lost but what shall we say of the objects favorites that "suddenly as rare things stowed away in its lowlier corners, the will, had vanished," the oddities and in-homely, discarded things an elder world firmity of others taken from us by violence or disaster. We recalled the lovable traits of creatures fallen to decay through illusage or neglect. We named them by name-Zinga, the Only Son, Antoinette. Everything was ready; faith flowed to the brim of the event. Had the Child Christ been there, immediately must that hair trunk have yielded up its dead. I remember the chill of heart with which I heard that nothing had been found. There was some quiet weeping on the attic stairs, then all reference to the lost generations ceased. The number of these small children of the resurrection was to have exceeded fifty. Great must have been the depopulating of the imagination! For the tradition of a millennium, a return of the goodliest creatures that have sojourned with us, is exciting and recurrent, and will never be banished from the hospitable human heart passionate to entertain its heroes. The past must return to us, and something more than the past the past and our joy in meeting it again. It cannot be that King Arthur and Barbarossa have taken leave of us forever. We want to walk the earth with them again; they kept us in tune; they dispersed the influences that made life spiritless; they set a-ripple the current of our days; let the saints break through to an alien Paradise; the children of earth guard in their esteemed beautiful, buried by us out of sight with revolt and a struggling shame; or, it may be, the creatures of our own caprice, the fad, the extravagance of an hour, the ephemeral display, the relic of a season's finery that instead of rotting with last summer's leaves continues to grin on us from an obtrusive peg? Why did we not give these things to the elements? What prompted us to preserve them? Has the savage, we cry in our irritation, his lumber-room as well as his idol-chamber? Does he revere his rubbish and his gods? We respect the squirrel's instinct to hoard nuts. What animal, even of the more sober Scripture kind, has been known to retain and consecrate its tar nished weapons, its frayed garniture, or forsaken cell? Is then this habit of storing a spiritual habit of which we may be proud, or one for which a future architect will make no provision? As we reflect on the great lumber-rooms of the world, on the difference in quality between the warehouse and the museum, our conclusion visits us as a smile; had man destroyed universally, instead of discarding, had he never learnt to spare that from which his vital interest was withdrawn, antiquity would not now be lying about us as the hills round about Jerusalem, protecting us against those gusts from chaos that sweep across the plain of time. One of the peculiar and moving attri-old acquaintance is that with him is debutes of lumber is its persistency. We stroyed so much of old-fashioned experiare forever confounding it with rubbish, ence, philosophy fallen out of repute, and but rubbish is ephemeral lumber and not inconsequent religion. Evidence harasses worth a thought. Lumber incommodes us, tradition consoles. To-day is for the us, the grim fostering it requires is bur- craftsman, yesterday for the artist. We densome; rot, that woody rheumatism, cannot reverence what we are ever handmay infest its bones; it has need of air, ling. The sculptor sees his work as it in certain cases of light and warmth. Yet will be when it cools into immortality. He it does not reward our solicitude. The who would attain distinction in the use of indefinable grace of length of days, a speech must have knowledge of the undisshadow as from the under-feathers of turbed, monumental languages. The Entime's wing, rests over it; its corporeal gland we touch and converse with to-day presence is disconcerting. Our respect is not our country. Our country is where for it is mingled with admiration of our the moth and worm corrupt, on the battleown long-suffering. Comfort, luxury, con- field, and in the crypt. venience, counselled its removal; it owes Precious as we have proved our un its conservation to a lenient reliance on profitable effects, we can by no means un the hereafter. Its "patient continuance " reservedly maintain that all things fallen in uselessness impresses us. For how into discredit should be harbored in hope strong is the impulse in living things to of future spiritual authority. We must get done with themselves when their best discriminate between dead and lively lumis accomplished! "The flower fadeth" ber. Dead lumber is that which, before in that is its happiness. The pathos of it became lumber, fatigued and disgusted life lies, not in its transience, rather in its us; lively lumber is that which in its presurvival of beauty, its monotony, its in- lumber stage gave us interest and delight. stinct for the formation of habits. It is What once genuinely excited us may be natural that the blossom should scatter spared, so only it pertained not to controand the leaf drift. We suffer with the versy; for controversy, as St. Paul points withering flowers that linger, the uncomely out, should set before close of day. But creatures that cannot remove, the things any work of art, utensil, instrument, or that corrupt and do not find a grave, that paper that has depressed or wrought us alter, and yet wane not nor slip away. If evil, should, when its term is over, be oblit. a traveller, roving our northern coasts in erated cleanly as by flame. Though we November, turn from one of the inlet would deal tenderly with the pious prac coppices of its cliffs, silver with the tice of, as it were, providing almshouses curled-up meadow-sweet and gold with for our infirm and unserviceable chattels, wide-floundered fronds of blemished it has, like other gracious customs, its bracken, to the bare winter sea, he will abuse; we hoard documents less than inlearn the harshness of imperishable life.timate, and more than official. The great water lies as under a spell, stricken by its impotence to suffer change, to abandon itself to the passionate, capricious misery of the wind. It is sick of its own monotony; the currents of summer sunshine withdrawn, it would fain grow old, break up, and perish. Its tides heave in lethargic revolt against the oppression of their own routine; eternity clings to it as a fetter. It were not difficult to ponder till one pondered oneself into the paradox that nothing is useful till it has lost its use. From the moment anything is put aside its leavening potency begins. Our awe of the dead springs in part from the sense we have of their being no more subject to life's daily wear and tear. We think of them in the perfect employment of perfect leisure. Again it is the lumber on old faces that attracts us. The reason we feel so keenly the loss of even a commonplace, 66 "On ne peut écrire que les choses dures; quant aux choses douces, elles ne peuvent s'écrire et ce sont les seules choses amu. santes." Truth, Marie Bashkirtseff! the only amusing things, and of them, though you affirm they cannot be written, your own journal affords delicious examples. In correspondence "les choses dures,' should be consigned to the waste-paper basket; les choses douces to the pigeon-hole. We should be able to recur to favorite passages in our letters with the ease and familiarity with which we turn to favorite passages in our books. Instead of this possession of our friends' luminous suggestions and happy eloquence, we crowd our drawers with manuscripts that will never be handled till they are flung by impatient hands in basketfuls on the furnace. To judge of this habit of accumulation in its fondness and extremity, we must 521 take cognizance of it in the amassments of a lifetime, when the secret places of cabinets and bureaus expose black profiles no delicate personal recollections can tint; miniatures of ladies who open on us the full sweetness of their wide, shining, trustful eyes; locks of hair, alas ! not the shade of auburn of the miniatures, a cloudier brown, yet lovable in their strongfibred curl, baffling and beautiful tokens! We cannot interpret; we should be more at home among the catacombs. From this cynical thought we, guardians or distributors of the worthless treasure of the dead, are recalled by the manifestation, 'mid official files, of a packet curiously corded with flushed ribbon, giving glimpses of a handwriting intricate as fine trellis. Love-letters, modernity! We have reached the heart of our mystery. Our "dark tower is upon us. We at tain the very essence and underlying reality of rubbish in a packet of yellow love-letters. Whether we read them or not matters little. They are the sacred writings, the civilizing scriptures of mankind. We do not open a Bible when we come upon it in foreign characters in a heathen land. We touch it and give thanks. MICHAEL FIELD. From Macmillan's Magazine. A BALLAD OF EAST AND WEST. KAMAL is out with twenty men to raise the Border side, And he has lifted the colonel's mare that is the colonel's pride; He has lifted her out of the stable door between the dawn and the day, Then up and spoke Mahommed Khan, the son of the Ressaldar : "If ye know the track of the morning mist, ye know where his pickets are. Lightly answered the colonel's son: "Do good to bird and beast, But count who come for the broken meats before thou makest a feast. At dusk he harries the Abazai -at dawn he If there should follow a thousand swords to And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer | Thy life is his-thy fate it is to guard him and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my own way back!" Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet. "No talk shall be of dogs," said he, "when wolf and grey wolf meet. May I eat dirt if thou hast hurt of me in deed or breath. What dam of lances brought thee forth to jest at the dawn with Death?" Lightly answered the colonel's son: "I hold by the blood of my clan; Take up the mare for my father's gift-she will carry no better man ! " The red mare ran to the colonel's son, and nuzzled against his breast, "We be two strong men," said Kamal then, but she loveth the younger best. So she shall go with a lifter's dower, my turquoise-studded rein, My broidered saddle and saddle-cloth, and silver stirrups twain." The colonel's son a pistol drew and held it muzzle-end, "Ye have taken the one from a foe," said he; "will ye take the mate from a friend?" "A gift for a gift," said Kamal straight; "a limb for the risk of a limb. Thy father has sent his son to me, I'll send my son to him!" With that he whistled his only son, that dropped from a mountain-crest He trod the ling like a buck in spring and he looked like a lance in rest. "Now here is thy master," Kamal said, "who leads a troop of the Guides, And thou must ride at his left side as shield to shoulder rides. Till Death or I cut loose the tie, at camp and board and bed, with thy head. And thou must eat the white queen's meat, and all her foes are thine, And thou must harry thy father's hold for the peace of the Border-line, And thou must make a trooper tough and hack thy way to power Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar when I am hanged in Peshawur." They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault, They have taken the Oath of the Brother-inBlood on leavened bread and salt; They have taken the Oath of the Brother-inBlood on fire and fresh-cut sod, On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife, and the wondrous names of God. The colonel's son he rides the mare and Kamal's boy the dun, And two have come back to Fort Monroe where there went forth but one. And when they drew to the Quarter-Guard, full twenty swords flew clear There was not a man but carried his feud with the blood of the mountaineer. THE PAINS OF MUSIC.-A good many Londoners will await with much interest the decision of a case which was before Mr. Justice Chitty on December 6. The owners of some flats in Westminster applied for an interim injunction restraining one of their tenants from playing a piano, violoncello, or any other musical instrument so as to annoy any of the plaintiffs' other tenants. It was stated that the son of the defendant, who occupied one of the flats, desired to become a professional musician, and practised on the violoncello from eight in the morning till ten at night, with certain intervals, when he practised on the piano, and a daughter and her governess also played on the piano. Such perseverance as this young man's appears to indicate a real liking for music, but how many hapless girls, without any ear for music, are daily condemned to spend weary hours in acquiring an art which they will hasten to abandon when liberated from parental control. It is a wearisome penance to the chil dren themselves, wasting their energies, and tending to produce a condition of nervous irritability. In a crowded city the habit of practising scales and exercises for hours at a time is, we venture to say, without using the term in a legal sense, a nuisance to everybody within earshot. It has, however, even more serious consequences, for we have but too often to note how the quiet and repose so much needed in sickness is destroyed by the slavish adherence to this antiquated fashion. British Medical Journal. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING Age, 18 cents. |