enough she was a woman who had rule over knows that it best respects itself, in respecting herself, and therefore was capable of ruling other its superiors. There is no humility like that of people. Out of her own conscientiousness she wisdom, and no presumption like that of ignojustly judged her inferiors, and her own weak-rance. I would wish to see every human being ness taught her lenity towards theirs. With whom it has pleased Heaven to place in the all her individuality of ladyhood, her sympathies ranks of servitude raised, by moral example, were wide enough to give her some meeting- by judicious and liberal education, and especially point of interest with the meanest Cinderella by invariable justice of treatment. to that safe that ever scudded slipshod across a floor; and height of self-knowledge and self-respect which, her large charity could, even in the darkest pic-alone, is true "respectability." ture of humanity, trace a little brightness litle hope. Above all, she had the rarely feminine quality of being able-let the vexed question be ever so confused, and her own feelings ever so mixed up therewith-always to see clearly the other side.

a

"Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part-there all the honor lies." Finally, I would fain refer to a higher Authority still; one, read unconsciously by my clerical It is this other side-the Kitchen-side-which nephew-in-law, on the very Saturday-evening I would have viewed more clearly, and more when the gigot went down stairs; heard, unconoften in parlors; viewed as a question of simple sciously, by my pretty niece in her fireside armjustice, in which the one wide law of a common chair, as well as by cook, housemaid, and nurhumanity, with its common rights, merits, and sery-maid, sitting apart by the dining-room door, errors, is perpetually recognized. Not by preach-in a white-aproned, respectful row; - an Auing up an unnatural, unwholesome, and impossi-thority which, among many others, society acble equality; not, in any case, by lowering the knowledges with its lips, but would recoil in position of the mistress, but by raising that of astonishment if expected to believe in, or still the servant. Small fear that, so raised, she will worse-to act upon. Did you ever, my dear grow "above her place". above the condition church-going friend, think of the plain, literal where her lot is cast, and for which she is best meaning of these plain words: "For one is qualified. I have always noticed that the higher your master, even Christ and all ye are a man or woman rises in the scale of intelligence, brethren? the more both gain of that honest pride which

From the American Agriculturist.
THE NEW MOWN HAY.

BY PARK BENJAMIN.

Talk not to me of southern bowers,
Of odors breathed from tropic flowers,
Of spice-trees after rain;
But of those sweets that freely flow
When June's fond breezes stir the low
Grass heaped upon the plain.

This morning stood the verdant spears,
All wet with diamond dews-the tears
By Night serenely shed;
This evening, like an army slain,
They cumber the pacific plain
With their fast fading dead.

And where they fell and all around
Such perfumes in the air abound,

As if long hidden hives
Of sudden richness were unsealed,
When on the freshly trodden field
They yielded up their lives.

In idle mood I love to pass
These ruins of the crowded grass;

Or listlessly to lie,

Inhaling the delicious scents,

From rural scenes so fair,
Can never know in lighted rooms,
Pervaded by exotic blooms-

This taste of natural air!

This air, so softened by the breath
Exhaled and wafted from the death
Of herbs that simply bloom,
And, scarcely noted, like the best
Dear friend, with whom this world is blest,
Await the common doom-

And leave behind such sweet regret
As in our hearts is living yet,

Though heroes pass away-
Talk not to me of tropic flowers,
Or odors breathed from southern bowers,
But of the new mown hay!

OBLIGE PRONOUNCED OBLEEGE.-I have little doubt that this was the fashionable pronunciation of the word some sixty years ago. I am acquainted with one or two octogenarians, persons who pride themselves on their education; they always say obleege and obleeged. In a spellingbook of the date of 1748, I find that the young

Crushed from those downcast, verdurous tents, ladies of that generation were directed to pro

Bencach a sunset sky.

nounce farthing farden, such being the fashion-
able mode of pronunciation. Times are chang-
ed; we only find farden now among the very
lowest classes.-Notes and Queries.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 594.-13 OCTOBER 1855.

useful arts.
Pope)-

Go! from the creatures thy instruction take;
"To man the voice of nature spake:-
Learn from the birds what food the thickets
yield-

Learn from the beasts the physic of the field.
Thy arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.
Learn each small people's genius-policies-
The ant's republic, and the realm of bees:
How those in common all their wealth bestow,
And anarchy, without confusion, know.
And these for ever, though a monarch reign,
Their separate cells and properties maintain."

From the Dublin University Magazine. According to the doctrine of the metempTHE MYSTERY OF THE BEASTS. sychosis-introduced into Greece by PythagoIN that tract of time which lies between the ras and Timæus-the brute animals are huages of fable and the epoch when the blended man beings in altered form. In their new civilization of Rome and Greece assumed its shape, they preserve a recollection of their former condition. They were believed by most gorgeous aspect, in all antiquity, the sciences which rest on the observation of positive sensitive, rational, and vegetative soul-cor some philosophers to possess three souls-the facts made no progress. We cannot say they did not exist. One man opened the inquiry, responding to what, in recent times, has been but in this line of philosophy that solitary in- A book was written by Plutarch, to prove that termed intellectual, organic, and animal life. dividual had no disciples. Aristotle, the phi- animals possess reason, inasmuch as the oper losopher we allude to, perused with attention ations of our boasted understanding are moro the habits of brutes, and recorded them with liable to error than the mysterious operations care, and classed them in accordance with the of instinct. Poets, and even philosophers, relaws of a rude comparative physiology. But he had no followers in this path. The sci-garded them as our earliest teachers of the ences of which he laid the basis, and of which At an early period (according to he foresaw the results, were stifled by the swarming luxuriance of fable. In lieu of observations, the most incredible and preposterous romances were massed together in the pages, for instance, of Elian, Ctesias, and even Pliny himself, philosophers who seem to have swallowed the grossest figments without a twinge of fastidiousness. It is perfectly amazing, and we can only account for it by weave; supposing in those ages writing was so rare and costly an accomplishment, that individuals who could use the pen deemed it unbecoming to use their eyes. If the theologians of pagan antiquity were poets, as Bacon observes, their naturalists were even worse. Animals that crowded about their steps, and which they could not move their eyes without seeing, are the heroes of the most extravagant legends. The whole world is metamorphosed by super- A grasshopper, instructed by the melodious stition. Truth is ignominiously swept out, teachings of the nightingale, carried off the and dreams substituted for reality. Writers prize in the Pythian games. The chargers of stride forward from prodigy to prodigy, with the Sybarites were famous for pleasing manthe arrogance and self esteem of authors who ners and accomplishments. They particularly scorn to be observers. In the presence of surpassed in dancing; and on one occasion, brute instinct, man—the king of the creation when the battle-trumpet sounded a charge, -abdicates his reason, in order to endow the and all the Sybarite cavalry were advancing meanest animals with this prerogative. Noth- at the signal, the Crotonian enemy suddenly ing is more strange. When every being in struck up a reel, or jig, or dancing tune, existence is metamorphosed, he next proceeds whereupon the Sybarite chargers, mistaking a industriously to invent a world of impossible beings, and his childish credulity greedily believes in all that his own teeming fancy invents. Finally, Polytheism attributes prescience to brutes-the power of ascertaining and indicating futurity; and, by way of climax to this pile of absurdities, sublimates them into deities. It is, we think, worthy of inquiry, why the inferior animals should be thus humanized at once by superstition, and poetry, and philosophy.

DXCIV. LIVING AGE. VOL. XL. 5

..

battle for a ball, began to foot it featly to the measure, and capered, and pranced, and tramped, so as to disorder the ranks, and, through love of pleasure, forfeited victory.

Narratives and statements such as these frequently occur in the writings of the ancients, who tell them with the grave air of satisfied and undoubting credulity. Indeed they saw no reason to doubt them, when their philoso phers, whose names were symbolical of wis dom, recognized men in brutes, in birds, and

even in insects; and when beasts were assimi- For example: the brute has three souls; he

lated in intellect to men, we cannot be sur- has consequently the same faculties as man, prised if animals employed human language; and the faculties being the same, the passions that is, when reason dwelt in the mind, we must be identical. Though modern science can readily suppose it spoken by the tongue. yields its unwilling assent to the undoubted The narratives of the fabulists are only dra- and melancholy fact, that the material appematic versions of universally accredited tradi- tites and instincts of man are only too identitions. That Æsop's fox should converse with cal with those of the brute, yet it refuses to the stork, or that a philosophic discussion admit of this analogy in the moral sentiments. should beguile the leisure of the town rat, A profound and even infinite difference is when visited by an acquaintance from the clearly recognized, though to define what this country, is not to be wondered at, when histo- difference consists in is a task of which modern ry itself teems with similar examples. On the science is incapable. It knows and proclaims, fall of Tarquin, a dog, in the open streets, however, that the sacred ray which enlightens could not contain his political sentiments, but and warms man has not reached the lower ani gave expression to his republican opinions by mals. Now, antiquity was blind to this dis loudly vociferating his congratulations. When tinction. To the lower animals it attributede Domitian was assassinated, an observant crow, not merely the passions which agitate, but the perched on the capitol, favored the city with moral sentiments which dignify, and the affec it regicidal views by applauding the murder- tions which console, mankind. Rivals are "It's a good deed," screamed the crow; found among the beasts and birds for the he "it is right well done." When Otho oppress-roes of tragic passion, such as Phædra, Ores ed Rome, and Vitellius threatened the walls, tes, Pylades, etc. A goose, according to Pliny, the golden reins, to the terror of the alarmed fell desperately in love with a youth named eity, dropped from the hands of the statue of Victory, and the oxen, in a low tone, were overheard exchanging private opinions on public affairs. When Lepidus and Catullus were consuls, a cock, in the farm-yard of Galerius, conversed like a human being; and Pliny, animadverting on this fact, gravely remarks, that "speaking cocks are very rare in history."

ers.

One of the most extraordinary features in this superstition is, that while beasts are adepts in the language of men, it is only in exceedingly rare cases that men ever attain to any knowledge of the language of beasts. All antiquity produced but five individuals who reached this extraordinary height of science, namely Tiresias, Helenus, Cassandra, Apollonius of Tyana, and Melampus. Apollonius was suddenly gifted with this privilege in India, while manducating the heart of a dragon; and serpents communicated the faculty to Melampus. Here is the story:-The servants of Melampus found a nest of serpents in a hollow oak, which, after killing the old ones, they brought to Melampus, who ordered the young creatures to be carefully brought up. When these serpents reached maturity, their grati tude for the care bestowed on their education caused them one day, while Melampus was wrapped in profound repose, to glide close to his ears and lick them repeatedly, a process which improved his hearing to such exquisite fineness, that, he was astonished, on awaking, to hear the brutes utter sounds that were quite intelligible to him.

While it must be confessed that the zoology of antiquity is as fantastic and fabulous as an Arabian tale, it must be also admitted that, as far as we have yet gone, it is perfectly logical.

Egius; and in Egypt a tender passion was conceived for the beautiful Glauce, a female musician of distinguished merit in the Court of Ptolemy by an amorous ram. A sublime constancy in friendship has been manifested from time to time by horses, eagles, and dolphins.

A young girl in Sestos reared and fed an eagle, which, upon her death, was inconsolable; it rushed into her funeral pyre, and perished

For these he changed the smoke of turf,.
A heathery land, and misty sky,
And turned on rocks and raging surf
His golden eye..

But fretted in our climate cold,

He lived and chattered many a-day,
Until with age, from green and gold,
His wings grew gray.

At last, when blind, and seeming dumb,.
He scolded, laughed, and spoke na mora
A Spanish stranger chanced to come
To Mulla's shore:

He hailed the bird in Spanish speech→→→
In Spanish speech the bird replied,
Flapped round the cage with joyous screech,
Dropt down, and died!"

upon her ashes. A dolphin died of grief for onocentaurs, and the hippocentaurs, the hu1 the loss of a child, during the reign of Au- man shape is blended with that of the horse, gustus. This child was accustomed, on its the goat, the monkey, and the fish. Eschylus way to school, to cross the Lucrine lake every day, which the dolphin observing, approached the child and bore it on its back, safely depositing its burden on the opposite shore. One day the child failed to appear, and the dolphin was seen waiting with evident uneasiness. The dolphin came the next day and the next, but the child was dead, and the sympathetic fish, as if it were

"A crime in heaven to love too well,"

sickened and perished of grief.

speaks of the daughters of Phorcys, who had one common eye among five sisters, an eye which passed from hand to hand, apparently like a modern opera-glass. Snakes seen curling on the heads of the Gorgons, in lieu of ordinary locks.

All these monsters, according to a tradition which reminds us of the theories of geology, and which was known in the middle ages, were engendered in chaos, anteriorly to the formation of the earth. It was not merely poetry and popular credulity-science itself attested their existence. Pliny saw a centaur, embalmed in honey, exhibited in Rome in the reign of Claudius. The earliest Christian writers, Justin, Cyprian, and Jerome, admit their existence, believing them to be fallen angels, condemned to stroll through dismal solitudes and uninhabited forests, until the day of judgment.

"A cherub's head, a serpent all the rest."

Such tales justify us in maintaining that antiquity assimilated beasts to men. The mar vellous predominates in these facte:- On every hand real creatures are strangely transfigured; but the unbridled fancy of antiquity is not satisfied with transfiguration. When it has described grasshoppers that excelled in music, serpents that were profound linguists, These hybrid beings are dispersed in coneagles that committed suicide, and oxen that siderable numbers over the whole earth; but discussed polities, it turns from them in dis- there are creatures combining the limbs of gust to delight its greedy credulity with mon- men with the forms of beasts, which fail to re sters made up of the discordant fragments of produce their kind, or at best give birth to living types. Antiquity passionately loved a monsters of a different nature. One of these, monster, and slighted or neglected existing termed the chimera, the daughter of Echidna, animals, to conjure up with eager avidity ani-presented mals that could never exist. The woods, mountains, seas, and even the infernal regions teem with horrible and dreadful forms-such as dragons with enormous pinions, winged This interesting creature was united to the horses, crocottes, that cunningly lured wood- fierce and terrific Typhon, to whom she bore men from their toils by calling them by name, four very anomalous children, renowned for and enticing them into the solitudes of the an extravagant superfluity of members-such forests, where they devoured them; griffins, as the hydra of Lerna with a hundred with sharp snouts; four-legged birds, furnish-heads; the cerberus with fifty heads; and ed with lion's claws, and covered with red another chimera which had the undesirable feathers; the catoblepas, which shot from its peculiarity of possessing four feet and three terrible eyes glances that killed the most heads; as well as the dog of Geryon, slain by powerful warriors. The marticorus, according Hercules, etc. The heroes of antiquity, The to the description of Ctesias, was a strange seus, Bellerophon, and Hercules, amused their jumble of incongruous parts. It had green leisure meritoriously, in braining this unne eyes, a scarlet skin, a lion's body, three rows cessary plurality of heads, just as the solitary: of teeth, and the tail of a scorpion, in which, dragons that watched by the fountains or like a hand, it brandished a javelin. Accord haunted the forests of the Celts were destroy ing to Pliny, fishes with horses' heads were ofed by the heroes of a later period. As pagan= ten seen in the Arabian Sea, out of which ism and the devil were personified by the they crawled at night to graze in the fields. dragons of the Christian legends, we may take The backs of whales were often seen rising it for granted that the destructive carnivora above the surface of the Indian Ocean, to the of archaic ages (which retarded the progress extent of four acres; while in the waves of or arrested the foundation of civilization) were the Ganges enormous eels, thirty cubits long, represented by the monsters described above slowly rolled their vast volumes. The fleet Amid this crowd of grotesque monstrosities of Alexander was met by a shoal of monstrous the phoenix appears as the type of beauty! tunnies, which opposed it with the discipline gentleness, and grandeur. The existence of and numbers of an army. The Prætorian the phoenix is not simply asserted by the na guards fight with sea-serpents, and crimson turalists, the very gravest historians attest its the ocean with their blood to the extent of existence. The appearance of a phoenix in thirty thousand paces. In the centaurs, the the consulship of Paulus Fabius, and Vitellius,

"They don't wear out their time in sleeping and play,

But gather up corn in a sunshiny day,

And for winter they lay up their stores: They manage their work in such regular forms, One would think they foresaw all the frosts and the storms,

And so brought their food within doors."

or the thirty-fourth year of our era, is des- thereby intimating the future opulence of the cribed by Tacitus as an event of the first im- sleeping boy:portance, and worthy of transmission to the remotest posterity Every five hundred years the phoenix," says Tacitus, "comes into existence, though it is true," he adds, "some assign four hundred and sixty-one years as the true period. The first phoenix appeared in the reign of Sesostris; the second was seen in the reign of Amasis; and the last under Ptolemy III. This last phoenix, surrounded by a crowd of feathered attendants whom it Bees clustered round the cradle of the sleepfar outshone in splendor of plumage, took its ing Plato, alighted on his lips, and intimated flight to Heliopolis, the city of the sun." The that the wisdom, of which bees are an emRoman historian does us the favor to inform blem, should one day issue from his eloquent us that "when its time of death approaches, lips. Serpents climb up and lock the infant the phoenix constructs a nest in its native Roscius in their folds; and, in the great pitchcountry, which it inundates with a generative ed battles of the Roman armies, eagles are principle. From this nest springs a new seen hovering in the sky, as heralds of victory. phoenix, which, on attaining maturity, take Mysteries to which men are blind are clearly diligent care to perform the funeral rites of perspicuous to birds; and this, owing to their its deceased parent, and exhibits extraordinary elevation over terrestrial things, the great sagacity in accomplishing its pious task. It length of their vision, the purity of their carries bundles of myrrh from great distances, aerial element, the innocency of their lives, to accustom itself to bear burdens, and, when and their power of ascending into the heavens. strong enough in the wing, takes its deceased The debates in the councils of the gods are parent on its back, and bears it through the audible to birds; indeed augury takes its air to the altar of the sun, where, laying the name from them, augur and augurium being, body down, it burns it with spices." according to Varro, derived from avium gar ritus, the chattering of the feathered race.

"At

Believed by the people and blazoned by poetry, and recorded by history, religion also As polytheism was altogether a religion of lent its sanction to these fables, while painting ceremony, negligent of morals and void of and sculpture gave them universal currency. dogma, it consecrated all these dreams, and The humbler animals, not sufficiently elevated thus resigned the management of most magniwhen placed merely on a level with mortals, ficent empires to the meanest animals. were advanced to the dignity of internuncios Rome the consuls and emperors have much between gods and human beings; they were less influence," says Pliny," than the sacred oracles of the future, and revealed the Divine chickens. The peckings of domestic fowls are will. The most momentous affairs, the armies contemplated with awe and solicitude. The and the colonies of the ancients, were, in all proceedings of the magistrates are regulated dangerous and foreign expeditions, guided by according to the caprices of these fowl. As birds. The dripping fugitives who escaped the chickens show an appetite or reluctance from the deluge of Deucalion, were guided to to feed, the magistrates open or shut their safety by a pack of wolves, and, in gratitude, houses. The legions engage the enemy when their new city was named Wolftown. Egypt the chickens are vivacious; they prognosticate was indebted to the same animal for its safety victory, and command the commanders of the from Ethiopian invasion. The sites of the world."

most renowned cities were indicated to their But it was not merely the Romans-the founders by quadrupeds or birds, as was espe- deities of Olympus applied for information to cially the case in the instance of Rome, Alba, birds. Jupiter, the master of the universe, and Constantinople. The lower animals were the real priests of ancient prophecy, and in the very desirable quality of clearness, the language of the brutes always surpasses that of the oracles. Achilles is told by his horse, without a shadow of ambiguity, that he must die before Troy. In the midst of the Forum, a patriotic ox warns the astonished people, bellows his threats, of the dangers which environ the republic. Ants are seen busily engaged in conveying grains of corn, and placing them in the mouth of the infant Midas,

was at one time somewhat puzzled to make out the precise centre of the earth; so he engaged two eagles to fly, the one to the east, the other to the west, and proceed constantly forward till they met. The eagles obeyed, and the oracle of Delphi being the spot over which they came together, the ancients believed Delphi to be the umbilical point, the budalós of the earth; and in grateful memory of the meeting of the eagles, the Delphians placed two golden images of that bird in the temple of Apollo. Delphi was to Greece what Meath