From The Leisure Hour. and a number of firms have offices and agencies in all the seaports. Under the THIS magnificent island, once in the system of cultivation, the planters possession of England, but now the reserving a third of the produce and property of the Dutch, is nearly the handing two-thirds to the government, size of Great Britain, and has a popu- there is room for a large amount of lation about half as great. But out of compulsory service little different the eighteen million scarcely thirty from slavery, at least in the districts thousand are Europeans. The bulk of requiring field labor for coffee and other the people are Javanese of the Malay produce. race, with about two hundred thousand Somabaya is the principal place of Chinese, and of Arabs, Hindoos, and export for sugar, and there are large other races little more than twenty-five ship-building docks there, besides a thousand. A large part of the island is great floating dock, a naval arsenal, and uncultivated, with mountains, forests, extensive forts and batteries to protect swamps, and great volcanic tracts, wild the harbor. The government monopoly and desolate. But the parts under in sugar has of late years been much culture are amongst the most fertile relaxed, owing to the action of the and productive in all the tropics. Tea, Liberal party in Holland. Up till now, coffee, spices, sugar, indigo, tobacco, the sugar-planter made his bargain with tin, are among the numerous products exported, and which bring great wealth both to the planters and to the trading companies of the Netherlands. the government, by which, in return for certain payments he received a fixed portion of land and so much forced labor from the natives on the estate. This The capital, Batavia, the chief city of system is gradually being brought to a Dutch India, has a population of about close, but it is strange that the governseventy thousand, and there are sev- ment still cling to their monopoly in eral other towns, Buitenzor, Bantam, coffee and sugar. There are a few Samarang, Rembang, with large popu- large estates in private hands, which lation. Banjumaas, the capital of a were organized by their owners when rich district, nominally under a native the island belonged to Great Britain, ruler, is said to have fifty thousand in- and the enlightened Sir Stamford Rafhabitants. The religion of the natives fles was governor. One large estate, is Mohammedan mostly, but there are near the seaport of Cheribon, has a popstill many heathen throughout the isl-ulation of about forty thousand natives and, and the Christianity of the Dutch on it, and they furnish the necessary is not of a very decided or aggressive kind. Batavia has an English Church and chaplain, and other Europeans have chapels and ministers according to their creed. cultivation for the estate, keep the roads and bridges in repair, and for this they receive no less than four-fifths of the whole crop, the remaining fifth going to the proprietor. There is much to Batavia not being healthy at most interest a traveller in Java in studying seasons, the residents of position resort the land tenure and cultivation system to Buitenzor, forty miles distant, where as practised by the Dutch, and the many there is better climate and magnificent striking scenes of tropical vegetation scenery on every side. The governor will reward the lover of the beautiful general has his palace here, a handsome and picturesque in nature. edifice with splendid grounds and gar- The flourishing condition of Singadens. Hotel life in Java is very luxu-pore must have considerable effect on rious to Europeans, and the mansions the prosperity of the Javanese ports, of the wealthy planters abound in every but the wealth of the island is great, comfort. There is a large trade carried and the Dutch are justly proud of their on with America as well as Europe, possessions in the East. I. HIPPOLYTE TAINE. By Gabriel Monod,. Contemporary Review, Chambers' Journal, . TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. 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 copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. A DREAM OF OUR BIRTH. EACH man, before he takes his mortal birth Ere yet upon him rises life's sad sun Dwells in the Eden of a perfect earth, Where living unpolluted waters run: Thoughtless of sin, and ignorant of sorrow, He passes peacefully from morn to morrow. There, as on earth, the measured seasons roll, With days of innocence and nights of rest. Haply such labors as delight the soul, With fruit that neither moth nor worm molest, Are there the sinless spirits' recreation, Blest with contentment in a lowly station. Sealed to their vision is the Book where lie The countless mysteries of good and ill; They live forever in the Father's eye, And love unquestioning his ways and will.. No problem agitates their reason's powers, As that of life and death perplexes ours. We cannot say their knowledge is so high: They are contented with the light of heaven, Nor seek to know the infinitudes that lie Beyond the sphere which to their sight is given, Better and wiser in this pure condition Than we with all our restless mad ambition. There are the fairest of this earth's delights Its pride of forests and its wealth of Ah, with how sudden and how deep a woe There comes that death to them which we call birth! That leaving of their paradise to go From tearless Eden to distressful earth; How loth they leave, with glances backward turning To where the angel stands with symbol burning. Poor exiles from a dear delightful home, The stainless fields of innocence and bliss, Whose light must vanish from them as they roam Through tangled paths of such a world as As from the visions of a quiet sleeping Weeping-and yet they know not why For earth is very fair, and God is kind; And as we oft, on rising from our sleep, Lose memory of the dreams we leave be hind, So do these sons of God and heirs of glory Lose all remembrance of their earlier story. And yet the dreams have not deserted quite ; Some gleams of mystic memory linger still, That make us vaguely struggle for a light To clear the vapors that elude our will. Sometimes a sudden flash, as quickly fleeing, Points through the shadows to a former being. Sometimes a visitant with pinions bright Pierces the cloud of misery and sin; Sometimes in solitude of silent night The doors are opened, and we enter in ; Sometimes we hear a sound of distant singing, Like bells of buried cities strangely ringing. Do there not come strange voices from the sea, Callings and whispers from the winter wind, That strike upon the ear familiarly, And waken ghostly echoes through the mind? Do not the forests from their green depths call us, And in their sylvan solitudes enthral us? Like cuckoo-calls across a land of flowers, That grow the fainter as the year grows From The Contemporary Review. BY GABRIEL MONOD. mistress, and scientific truth for his end and aim; each strove to hasten the time when a scientific conception of FRANCE is discrowned. A little the universe should take the place of while ago it was her privilege to pos- the theological conception; but while sess two of those encyclopædic minds M. Taine believed it possible, without which contain in themselves the whole ever venturing beyond the narrow limits knowledge of their time, which sum up of acquired and demonstrable fact, to all its tendencies, intellectual and moral, lay the foundations of a definite system, and look out upon nature and history M. Renan delighted himself with the from an elevation which enables them visionary glimpses of sentiment and to obtain something like a bird's-eye reverie into the domain of the uncerview of the universe. Within five tain, the unknown, and even the unmonths these two men, so unlike in knowable, and loved to throw fresh personal character and in the qualities doubt upon established conclusions, of their work and thought (and there- and to warn other people against a fore all the more, the two of them, an fallacious intellectual security. Moreincarnation of the diverse aptitudes of over, the action of Renan had sometheir race and country), these two, uni- thing contradictory about it. He was versally recognized as the most authen-claimed by thinkers of the most oppotic exponents and the most authoritative site tendencies. He paved the way, to teachers of the generation which flour- some extent, for the momentary reacished between 1850 and 1880, have been taken from us in the plenitude of their powers, M. Renan in October, at the age of sixty-nine, and M. Taine in March, at the age of sixty-four. tion we see around us against the positive and scientific temper of recent times. In his irony, as in his flights of fancy and of hope, he seems to soar above his time and above his own work. M. Taine's work, on the other hand, while more limited in range, has a solid unity and a rigid logical consistency; and it is in strict relation with the time in which he lived, at once acting pow→ erfully upon it, and giving it its fullest and most complete expression. I. I will not indulge in the easy and deceptive pastime of drawing a parallel between them, nor weary the reader with a catalogue of forced and illusory likenesses and contrasts in order to pass a judgment on their relative merits as idle as it would be impertinent. I will only point out in passing that both these men-true children of our democratic modern society-rose, by dint TAINE was the theorist and the phi of their own genius and efforts, from a losopher of that scientific movement position of humble obscurity to fame which in France was the successor of and honor; that each (like so many of the romantic movement. The romantic the great writers of this century-like movement itself the work of the gen Chateaubriand, like Victor Hugo, like eration of 1820-1850 - had been a reacLamartine) lost his father in early life, tion against the hollow, conventional, and was brought up by a mother whom and sterile art and thought of the age he tenderly loved; and that, apart which preceded it. To the narrow and from the circumstances which drove rigid rules of the classical school of the the one from his seminary and the decadence it opposed the broad prinother from the public schools, the life ciple of the freedom of art; for the of each was unmarked by any adven- servile imitation of antiquity it substiture other than the adventures of the tuted the discovery of new fountains of intellect, and was devoted without in- inspiration in the works of the great terruption to literary or professorial masters of all times and countries; labors, lightened by the simple pleas- while the dull uniformities of a mechanures of the fireside or the circle of ical style gave place to the varying friends. Each took science for his caprices of individual taste, and the seized upon in the concrete reality, that is to say, scientific truth. This tendency of the time was so general, so profound, so truly organic, that it characterizes, consciously or unconsciously, every form of intellectual production. We note its presence no less in the paintings of Meissonier, of Millet, of Bastien Lepage, and the open-air painters than in the plays of Augier, no less in the poetry of Leconte de Lisle, or Hérédia, or Sully-Prudhomme than in the historical works of Renan or of Fustel de Coulanges, no less in the novels of Flaubert, Zola, or Maupassant than in the writings of philosophers like Taine himself. narrowness of a tame and timid ideol-shape for himself a vague and purely ogy to the broad horizons of a spiritual subjective ideal, it held fast to one comeclecticism which found room and rec- mon principle of life and art, the search ognition for all the great doctrines that for truth-truth, not as an abstract in their turn have swayed and capti-intellectual idea, subjective and arbivated the minds of men, and which trary, not as one of those visions of the even professed to reconcile philosophy imagination which people dignify with with religion. But, brilliant as was the name of truth, but truth objective this epoch of our intellectual history, and demonstrable, sought for and with its men of genius and its works of art-much as it did for the emancipation of taste and thought, and much as it gave to both art and literature of life and color and newness, it still fell short of fulfilling the hopes it had inspired. It was mistaken in asserting as a basal principle of art that liberty which is only one of its essential conditions. With its superficial eclecticism, its confused syncretism, it was lacking in unity of action, in definiteness of aim, in organic principle. It had replaced conventions by new conventions, the antiquated rhetoric of the classic writers by a rhetoric which from the first day seemed also faded; it had fallen, in its turn, into vague declamation and noisy commonplace; and it had made the fatal mistake of supposing that efforts of imagination and flights of fancy could take the place of serious study and acquired knowledge, and that the secret things of history and the human heart could be got at by guess-work and delineated with a clever sweep of the brush. Its philosophy, at the same time, had fallen into utter helplessness, while obstinately refusing the fresh impulsion of the spirit of research which was even then creating a new science of nature and of man, and relaying the experimental bases of psychology. The movement had had illustrious precursors; Héricault and Stendhal, Flaubert em |