PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY 675 FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. 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 & GAY. A MYSTERY. BY JOHN G. WHITTIER. THE river hemmed with leaning trees One sharp, tall peak above them all No clue of memory led me on, So up the long and shorn foot-hills The river wound as it should wind; Their place the mountains took, The white, torn fringes of their clouds Wore no unwonted look. Yet ne'er before that river's rim A presence, strange at once and known, Was it a dim remembered dream? Or glimpse through sons old? The secret which the mountains kept, But from the vision ere it passed That love would temper every change, And, misty with the dreams of earth, The hills of Heaven arise. And he said, as he looked at its ominous white, "There'll be mist ere noontide, and storm ere night." The dream was as bright as a dream could be, He was so gallant, so fair was she. As glad as the sunshine they moved together, In their gracious love, through the golden weather. Till a trifle jarred on the sensitive chords, The flush of young love, and the break of the day; What is so fair or so fleet as they? Gather the buds while the dew-drops shine, ORGAN CHANT. ALONE, with God, alone, we bow before His throne, And crave of Him His pardon for sins of the past day! Alone, with God, alone, we bow before His throne And pray that for the love of Christ our sins be washed away. Alone, with God, alone, we bow before His throne For the spirit craves a shrine where to wor ship and to pray. Alone, with God, alone, rings the mighty an them-tone, The vesper-chant of nations at closing of the day. Alone, with God, alone, sounds the voice of ages flown Alone, with God, alone, we bow before His throne And crave of Him His pardon for sins of the past day! Alone, with God, alone! Yet with Christ upon His throne, We feel that for the love of Him our sins are washed away. Dublin University Magazine. From The Quarterly Review. or Nor are the incidents with which they are mixed up, the topics which call them "MADAME DE SEVIGNE, like La Fon- forth or give occasion for them, of so local taine, like Montaigne, is one of those sub- and temporary a character as to repel the jects which are perpetually in the order of general reader. She is the chief chronithe day in France. She is not only a classic, cler of the three stirring and eventful she is an acquaintance, and, better still, a epochs which constitute what is commonly neighbour and a friend." She will never called the Age of Louis Quatorze: the be this, or anything like it, in England. Her choicest materials for its history are to be name is equally familiar, almost as much a found in her Letters; and her private life household word; and there are always cannot be told without connecting it, at amongst us a select few who find an inex-many trying and interesting conjunctures, haustible source of refined enjoyment in with the lives of her most illustrious and her letters. The Horace Walpole set celebrated contemporaries. The pupil of affected to know them by heart: George Ménage and Chapelain, the pride of the Selwyn meditated an edition of them, and Hôtel Rambouillet, the object of vain purpreceded Lady Morgan in that pilgrimage suit to such men as Bussy, Conti, Fouquet, to the Rochers which she describes so en- and Turenne, the friend or associate of thusiastically in her "Book of the Bou- de Retz, Rochefoucauld, Corneille, Racine, doir." Even in our time it would have Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Bossuet, La been dangerous to present oneself often at Grande Mademoiselle, the Scudérys, MaHolland House or the Berrys', without be- dame la Fayette, Madame Maintenon-in ing tolerably well up in them. Mackin- short, of almost every Frenchman tosh rivalled Walpole in exalting her. But Frenchwoman of note for more than half the taste is not on the increase the wor- a century, she might be made the censhippers decline apace: we hear of no recent tral figure of a series of historic groups, English visitors to the Breton shrine: the had she never been known to fame as a famous flourish about the Grande Made-letter-writer. Neither can we admit the moiselle marriage, with the account of argument that all who wish to become inthe death of Vattel, form the sum of timately acquainted with her, to make her what is correctly known on this side of (what Sainte-Beuve says she is in France) the Channel of her epistolary excellence: a neighbour and a friend, will repair by her personal history is not known at all, preference to French writers: to the exand maternal love is the only quality which haustive "Mémoires" of Walckenaer, or nineteen cultivated people out of twenty the critical "Notice" of Mesnard.* Porcould specify in illustration of her characson frankly admitted that, consummate ter. Yet no man or woman ever lived Grecian as he was, he never read a Greek who was less national (in the exclusive play as easily as an English newspaper; sense) or more cosmopolitan in heart and and there is a numerous class in this mind, in feeling and in thought. It is not French nature, but human nature in its full breadth and variety, that she represents or typifies. Her sparkling fancy, her fine spirit of observation, her joyous confiding (and self-confiding) frankness, her utter absence of affectation, her generosity, her loyalty, her truth, are of no clime. Indeed we are by no means sure that her most sterling qualities will not just now be best understood, felt, and preciated out of France. ap * M. Paul Mesnard is the author of the "Notice biographique" prefixed to the annotated edition of the Letters in fourteen volumes, royal octavo, forming the commencement of the collection entitled, Paris, 1862. The fullest account of Madame de Sevigne and her times (to 1680) is to be found in the "Les Grands Ecrivains de la France." Hachette, "Memoires touchant la Vie et les Ecrits de Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Dame de Bourbilly, Marquise de Sevigne," &c., &c. By Baron Walckenaer, six volumes with the Continuations. Amongst the of 1970 with a Treatise on her epistolary style by M. abridged editions of the Letters, the best is the one Suard. There is a useful English work, published in 1842, entitled "Madame de Sevigne and her Contemporaries," composed of a series of biographical notices, one of which, of about thirty pages, is de voted to Mesdames de Sevigne et Grignan. country who approach the French classics, ume, she has worked herself tolerably free with more hesitation and diffidence than of her Gallic tendencies; which are faintly Porson felt towards the Greek. They discernible in the second, and will not be come to them as to a task: they are often found to deduct materially from the sterobliged to pause and construe as they ling value of the book. Its range is wide, proceed; and therefore is it that an Eng- and the foreground is so crowded by lish biography of a Frenchwoman so far "contemporaries" as to require no ordifamed, yet (as regards England) so really nary stretch of attention to keep Madame little known as Madame de Sévigné, may de Sévigné distinctly in view throughout. confidently reckon on a favourable recep- It strikes us, therefore, that a sketch of her tion; provided it fulfil the conditions and them on a more reduced scale may which an English public is fairly entitled prove a useful introduction, to the complete and rather diffuse biography. to exact. The choice fell on her uncle, The work before us fulfils many of Marie de Rabutin, or de Chantal, or de them. Madame de Puliga has diligently Chantal-Rabutin, as she was alternately studied her subject in all its bearings; she called before she became Marquise de is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Sévigné, was paternally descended from an the period of which she treats: she is at ancient and illustrious race. She was born home with both correspondents and con- at Paris on the 5th February, 1626, and temporaries: without aiming at research within six years became an orphan. Her or originality (for which there was neither father was killed fighting against the room nor occasion on so beaten a track), English under Buckingham at the Isle of she has made a judicious selection from Rhé, on July 22, 1627, and her mother died the embarrassing abundance of materials some time in 1633, leaving Marie to the accumulated to her hands: treading fre- care of a maternal grandmother, who died quently on very delicate ground, she is within twelve months, when the child never wanting in feminine refinement or fell under the charge of her maternal good taste; and although she occasionally grandfather, Philippe de Coulanges, for provokes a feeling of opposition by dwell-three years, and he also dying being too often and too ecstatically on the fore she had attained her tenth year, virtues of her heroine, she somehow man- a family council was held to name a ages to bring us very nearly round to her guardiau. opinion in the end. Unluckily there is the Abbé de Coulanges, Prieur de Livry, one condition that is not fulfilled. When a man of twenty-nine, who discharged his we were expecting Madame de Sévigné in trust so kindly and efficiently, that she a simple English dress, she is presented to never ceased proclaiming the boundless us in a costume which has obviously been debt of gratitude she owed to him, and fashioned after French models and is rath- gave him the name of Bien Bon, by which er showily adorned with French point. he is indelibly associated with her memory. In other words, the language and phrase-It is worth noting in contrast with the ology lead to the impression that the ac- depth of the maternal love which aftercomplished authoress had been accus-wards grew into an absorbing passion, tomed to think and write exclusively in that she manifests no filial tenderness. French, and that this is her first serious She never mentions or so much as alludes or sustained effort in English composition. Her style is cramped and artificial, neither flowing nor idiomatic, till she warms; and she is somewhat prone to mistake phrases for reflections, and to indulge in that kind of composition which Swift had in view when he told a young writer, "Whenever you have written anything you think particularly fine, strike it out." But by the time she has completed half her first vol to her mother in her voluminous correspondence, and when two or three times she names her father, it is in reference to his faults. In a letter to her daughter, July 22, she adds, after the date, "Jour de la Madeleine, où fut tué, il y a quelques années, un père que j'avais." It would seem that Bien Bon made no attempt to replace the mother and grandmother by a female companion or gov erness. The only instructors of whom we hear are Ménage and Chapelain, and. Ménage did his best to turn the relation of master and pupil into a romance of the Cadenus and Vanessa kind. But in his case the position was reversed: Marie did not fall in love with him, as Esther Vanhomrigh fell in love with Swift, and he could not have exclaimed like the Dean, "That innocent delight he took To see the virgin mind her book, She must have got well accustomed to it ere long, for we find admirers by the dozen brought one after the other, or three or four at once, to the same condition as Ménage; and she was actuated by the same spirit of refined coquetry through life; her guiding rule or principle—the counterpart of the one com Madame de Puliga says: "We must not be surprised at this. In the seven-mended by Lord Chesterfield to his son teenth century, rank created such a sep- being to make every man in love with her aration, birth threw such a gulf between and every woman her friend. human beings, that tender sentiments from those in an inferior station of life A were deemed of little consequence. woman of quality would take a pride in inspiring such feelings, but she was never supposed to be disturbed by their existence. Ménage might then freely declare himself the slave of Mademoiselle de Chan tal, and she consent to treat him as such." We notwithstanding take the liberty of of being somewhat surprised at a man Ménage's intellectual mark playing the fool in this fashion, and we have our misgivings whether it was more a matter of course in the seventeenth than in the nineteenth century for young ladies of quality to treat their tutors as Lady Clara Vere de Vere treated her yeoman lover, when, after luring him on to a declaration "She fixed him with a vacant stare, And slew him with her noble birth.” Clearly, Ménage did not think himself fairly used, or treated according to the laws of the game. He was deeply hurt, and very angry. Remembering, probably, the adage that the quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love, he tried to create an interest by getting up a quarrel; and we find from the lady's letters that he resorted to the hackneyed commonplace expedient of a simulated sense of wrong: "You wish to make me appear ridiculous by telling me that you have only quarrelled with me because you are sorry for my departure. If this were so, I should merit a lunatic asylum, and not your hatred; but there is all the differ "It was the property of her quick and ready nature," says Cousin, "to put, herself in unison with all who conversed with her. She is frivolous with Coulanges; she is rakish (gaillarde) enough with Ninon, austere with Pascal, sublime with Bossuet; with Bussy, her quickened malice spares nobody." Constantly playing with edge tools, she never cuts her fingers; her pitcher is never broken, although it goes often to the well, but it has frequently been made a question, to which we shall in due time recur, whether her impunity was owing to good fortune or good conduct, to the strength of her principles or the coldness of her heart. It incidentally appears, from a colloquy at the Hôtel Rambouillet, in which both her instructors took part, that she was not taught the learned languages. “Is it possible," said Madame de Rambouillet, "that M. Ménage has not yet made verses for "He has made Madame de Sévigné?' verses," replied Chapelain, "for Mademoiselle Marie de Rabutin, and also for Madame la Marquise, not only in French but in Italian, too.". "And I wager," broke "that he has also made in Saint-Pavin, "M. verses to her in Latin and Greek.". Ménage," remarked Madame de Sévigné, "is too much my friend to make me ashamed of my ignorance by addressing to me verses in languages which I do not understand." Either the rule restricting the introduction of girls into society did not exist in |