is ascribed, not to want of power but to want | ransom as he had experienced when he first of will, and the relatives sometimes wreak fell into their hands. Determined to make a summary vengeance upon the physician, who, desperate effort for freedom, he suddenly in their opinion, has maliciously forborne to broke away from them, and rushed down to effect a cure. Mr. Bourne, knowing this, was the beach, hotly pursued by the savages. naturally much alarmed when, on one occa- After a hurried parley with the boatmen in sion, the chief took it into his head that his English, he threw himself into the water, and captive must be an able doctor, and required swam out through the surf to the boat, which him to undertake the cure of a sick woman. he reached in a nearly exhausted state. He The patient was a widow, and a person of was immediately drawn into it by the boatsome consequence, being the owner of several men, and conveyed to the island, where he horses, and, in virtue of that wealth, holding was received with the greatest kindness by a distinguished position in Patagonian so- the persons in charge of the establishment. ciety. Finding it of no use to disclaim the The name of the place, he learned, was Seamedical ability which was ascribed to him, lion Island; the last word being that which Mr. Bourne took care, at all events, to make the Patagonians, in their guttural pronuncihis prescription as harmless as possible, ation, had transformed into Holland. The merely directing, with much solemnity, that party then occupying it consisted of only ten the very untidy patient should be thoroughly men, who had been placed on the island by washed from head to foot with warm water. an English commercial company, for the purThis treatment, he thought, would at least pose of collecting guano, which was from meet the most obvious indications of her case. time to time taken away by the vessels of the Luckily for him, the prescription worked to company The agent in charge of the party, good effect, and the widow recovered. But, Mr. Hall, whom the grateful seaman praises strange to say, notwithstanding the public as "a noble specimen of a true-hearted Enginterest then evinced in her behalf, she was lishman," "" behaved in the most generous shortly afterwards deliberately put to death manner to the unfortunate American, furin cold blood by some men of the tribe, with nished him with clothing, and took him into the chief's consent, and without the slightest his own habitation. After residing_for a provocation; their only motive being a desire considerable time on the island, Mr. Bourne to get possession of her horses. was at length taken off by an American whaleship which chanced to pass that way. Mr. Bourne, in his anxiety to escape from his painful captivity, continued, by promises It deserves notice, that it was in the Strait and persuasions, to urge the savages to convey of Magellan, at no great distance from the him to some settlement of white men. At place where Mr. Bourne was taken prisoner, first, he proposed that they should proceed that Captain Gardiner and his companions with him to the Chilian penal settlement, in met with their deplorable fate in the year the Strait of Magellan; but to this request 1851-encountering death from starvation they gave a prompt and decided refusal; and while engaged in the attempt to commence a he afterwards learned that they had lately mission among these very Patagonians. Had returned from a horse-stealing expedition in the information which this narrative affords that quarter, and naturally did not feel inclined been possessed by the unfortunate missionato repeat their visit. They assured him, ries or their friends in England, different however, that they would take him to a much arrangements would doubtless have been made, better place, which they called "Holland," and that calamitous result would probably and where there were "twenty or thirty white have been avoided. men, and plenty of rum and tobacco. Mr. Bourne had never before heard of this South American Holland, and was much inclined to doubt its existence. However, after wander- FIRST USE OF GAS AS AN ARTIFICIAL LIGHT. ing about for three months, in various direc- In the year 1792, Mr. Murdoch made use of ges tions, they at length reached the river Santa in lighting his house and office at Redruth, in Cruz, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean, Cornwall, where he then resided. The mines at about 150 miles north of the Strait of Magel- which he worked being distant some miles from lan. Sure enough, on an island opposite the his house, he was in the constant practice of fillmouth of the river, were visible several small ing a bladder with coal-gas, in the neck of which buildings, which he was told were occupied through which the gas issued; this being ignited, he fixed a metallic tube, with a small orifice, by white men. A signal was made, which served as a lantern to light his way for the conhad the effect of attracting a boat from the siderable distance he had nightly to traverse. island. As it came near, the Indians ordered This mode of illumination being then generally their captive to keep back, and he saw reason unknown, it was thought by the common people to fear that they meant to practise the same that magical art alone could produce such an efdeception and bad faith with regard to his fect. - Clegg's Treatise on Coal-gas. From the Spectator, 28th May. PROPOSED EXPEDITION FOR AUSTRALI AN EXPLORATION. THE proposed expedition to explore two important sections of the Australian continent hitherto untraversed -a project which was mentioned by Sir Roderick Murchison at the annual meeting of the Geographical Society on Monday last possesses many features of interest. The portions of the globe as yet untraversed in some way or other by scientific travellers are now very few and limited. Even the Arctic regions have been trodden so often, and to such an extent, that the shape of the region of magnetic intensity can be traced on the map. Yet, while regions of perpetual ice and snow, which can never in the common sense of the word be rendered useful to us, have been rendered so far familiar, the northern and north-western portion of our own colonial continent is unknown. pass across the interior, until, following the course of a northern river to a point in the Cambridge gulf, they could thus make their way to the mouth of the Victoria river, on the northern coast. Here a vessel would meet them, with refreshments, and would afford the opportunity of communicating with the world. By this line the quarter of Australia which has hitherto remained unknown would be brought within the range of positive geography. The course of the Victoria is doubtful, and the probable conjecture is, that in tracing its source upwards it would be found to bend, behind the heights parallel with the northern coast, to a far more distant interior range, watering a large and fertile tract of land. The expedition proposes to trace this river, and then to traverse the interior downwards towards the south, probably striking the Murray, and either passing it, or returning to society by its comparatively well-known stream. This route again would connect the discoveries of Leichardt, Mitchel, Sturt, Grey, Roe, and others, with the northern coast, and would supply the principal defect in the preliminary survey of the continent to the east of Lake Torrens parallel. Even the nature of the land in its interior is a matter of conjecture. From circumstances connected with the resemblance of the coast in one part to that in another-from the character of the rivers-which pour themselves into the waters of the Indian This very rough sketch of the route proArchipelago, and from the timber borne on posed by the expedition will show its imtheir streams-it is conjectured, with great portance and interest. The projectors propose probability, that those rivers are coast rivers, to avail themselves of the ordinary means of and that the interior of the north-western travelling in the interior, but to add to them quarter of Australia is occupied by an elevated the facilities afforded by the use of mules plateau, having its principal height towards and camels. Indeed, the experiences and the north, and gradually sloping towards that resources of Australian discovery will be all interior where a retreating sea has left relics turned to account, with any new suggestions of itself in the central Australian desert. that judgment may approve. The suggester Should this conjecture prove true, it would and proposed loader of the expedition is M. probably be found that the tropical climate Haug; a man who has had experience already of that part of Australia is corrected by the in military service, and in travelling. M. elevation of the land, and a new region of Haug forfeited a commission in the Austrian agriculture would be added to the varied in-service by his sympathy with the patriots; dustry of Australia. he is known and esteemed, for his personal qualities and his attainments, by many persons of influence in this country. He is of a nature peculiarly suited to the task-of tried courage, strong bodily constitution, eminently cheerful disposition; he has keen observing faculties, has been a practical as well as a theoretical geographer, and is acquainted with cognate branches of science. It is not probable that an exploring expedition could find a leader better suited to sustain its spirit or to direct its steps. The plan was stated in general terms by Sir Roderick Murchison (himself the best of judges in a question of Australian geography), at the anniversary of the Geographical Society; and it cannot fail to create considerable interest among the friends of Australia in this country and amongst the colonists. This part of the continent ought to be peculiarly interesting to the inhabitants of Western Australia; who have hitherto sustained the comparison with other colonics under great disadvantages, and who would find fur more profit and dignity in annexing to their territory one such as we suppose to exist, than in adulterating their population with convict labor. After having made themselves acquainted with the principal towns on the Australian continent, the feelings of its inhabitants, and the information to be thus collected, the members of the expedition would rendezvous at Perth; and would start from that town, making their way in the first place to the Gascoigne river. That stream they propose to trace to its source; and thence they would From the New Monthly Magazine. AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP, NO. III. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. ALREADY have we devoted a few pages of this Magazine to a general notice of the writings of Mr. Hawthorne. The present series, however, affords an opportunity for resuming the subject-with a particular reference to one of his publications ("Twicetold Tales") which was then hardly mentioned, and to another ("The Blithedale Romance") which has been subsequently pro duced. is a ence over "harmonic union." He has been magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again—the quotient being a very monster- which, though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves. In harmony with this tendency-this "making my prey of people's individualities, as my custom was"* fondness for merging ME (as the Germans have it) in NOT ME; as where one of Mr. Hawthorne's characters, in the wantonness of youth, strength, and comfortable condition, meeting with a forlorn, dejected, used-up old His reputation has advanced, is increasing, old fellow's, and take his view of the world, man, tries to identify his own mind with the and ought still to be progressive. He is now read, in their own consonant-crazy tongue, by at the sun. as if looking through a smoke-blackened glass In a curious disposition of mind, borderers on the Black Sea, and exiles of Sibe- of which these habits are exponents, lies much ria. There is an individual charm about his of the author's power and weakness both. writings, not, perhaps, to the minds most in- With special ability to depict exceptional fluenced by it, of a wholly unexceptionable modes of human nature is conjoined special kind; for it may be true that il fait que temptation to linger amid what is morbid, chacun, après l'avoir lu, est plus mécontent and to court intimacy with whatever deviates de son être." Indeed, it is impossible, we from the dull standard of conventionalism, should think, to read him without becoming and give to distortion and oddity the prefersadder if not wiser. in spite of an assumed air of gaillardise, and a cheery moral tacked described as walking abroad always at night, now and then to a sorrowful parable, he is so that it is but a moonlight glimmering which essentially sad-hearted, and confirms any similar tendency in his readers. We expect a has been said of a countryman of his, we may you catch of reality. Applying to him what hue-and-cry to be raised against him in this matter by the sanatory commissioners of criti-border-land between the material and spirpronounce his delight to lie in treading the cism and guardians of the literary board of itual worlds the debatable country of health. In his choice of subjects, he has dreams, sleep-walking, and clairvoyance. The already been indicted by them as himself a impression he leaves on the mind is usually mauvais sujet. He is charged with a fondness for the delineation of abnormal character; ing, enervating presence not to be put by. one of despondency and sadness; a depressand it is a true bill. If guilt be involved in He puts on paper, in palpable letters, which the indictment, guilty he will plead. In the dejected, doubting heart, in moody modividuality, idiosyncrasy, propria persona-lity, ments, knows too well how to spell into he must have at any price. Into the recesses "words that burn" into its own core — the and darker sub-surface nooks of human character he will penetrate at all hazards. floating, timid, but ever-recurring fears and "This fancies with which that heart, knowing its long while past," says Zenobia to the Blitheown bitterness, and not knowing its own dale romancer, 66 you have been following up whence and whither and why, is tremblingly your game, groping for human emotions in familiar. No wonder that Mr. Hawthorne the dark corners of the heart." The ro- should be so richly endowed, as some of his mancer himself records his fear, that a certain cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made him" pry with a speculative interest into people's passions and impulses," had gone far towards unhumanizing his heart. Elsewhere he expresses his apprehension that it is no healthy employ, devoting ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women; for, if the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance; or, if we put another under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, * New Monthly, February, 1852. 152; and vol. ii., pp. 84, 214. "He lives in the region and shadow of death, and never sees the glow of moral health anywhere. . . . . And it is only because he can see beauty in everything, and will look at nothing but beauty in anything, that he can either endure the picture himself, or win for it the admiration of others. He clears out for himself a new path in art, by developing the beauty of deformity!" The same reviewer charges Mr. Hawthorne with ever hunting out the anomalous, discovering more points of repulsion than of attraction, and peopling his creations with morbid beings, "wandering stars," plunging (in the "Blithedale Romance") orbit. less into the abyss of despair. See Westminster Review, Oct., 1852. observers assure us he is, with the divine faculty of silence, when mixing in social life. Small-talk, tea-table prattle, tripping gossip, versatile chit-chat- these are not for one whose cherished habit is to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancies, and to sit in the shade to ruminate, while others traverse the gay meadow to graze. Nor is he to be ap ever, marked by the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion, he observes, there is sentiment; and even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. "Whether from lack of power," he continues, "or an unconquerable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humor; the tenderest woman, one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos." And he asks us, if we would see anything in the book, to read it in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; confessing that if open in the sunshine it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages. preciated but by those who, whatever their loquacity, are, au fond, pensive and given to speculative broodings. The art with which he can lend a superstitious awe to his stories, and subtilize their grosser common-places into ghostly significance, will indeed always secure him a good company of readers. But to enter into his mood as well as meaning, and to gather from his sentences and suggestions all When occupying the Old Manse, Mr. Haw- that was fermenting in his soul when he thorne is said to have been, to his neighbors, as wrote them, is for an inner circle of disciples. much a phantom and a fable as the old parson of Not that we arrogate a place there; but at the parish, dead half a century before, whose least we can recognize this esoteric initiation. faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its original in native dust. "The gate, fallen The Twice-told Tales" have been critifrom its hinges in a remote antiquity, was never cized by the author himself (and, he intire-hung. The wheel-track leading to the door re-mates, "with perfect sincerity and unremained still overgrown with grass. No bold vil-serve"), and compared by him to pale-tinted lager ever invaded the sleep of the glimmering flowers that have blossomed in too retired a shadows in the avenue. At evening, no lights shade gleamed in the windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old nobby-faced coachman at the railroad bring a fare to Mr. Hawthorne's." If ever his " darkly-clad figure" was to be seen in the garden, it was as a brief apparition"and passing farmers would think they had but dreamed of it, till again they caught a glimpse of the solitary. One of his vis-à-vis observers, howthus describes him :-"During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord, I have driven up with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood fire blazed on the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the hedge (?) of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long time, watching the dead white landscape. No appeal was made to All prizes, no blanks, the pages are not, him, nobody looked after him, the conversation whether read, as Jack Falstaff says, by day flowed steadily on as if everybody understood that or night, or any kind of light." But whenhis silence was to be respected. It was the same thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed ever read, at vespers or matins, on grass or in æsthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did garret, by youth or by age, the pages are not flower at his lips. But there was a light in studded, haud longis intervallis, with passages eye which assured me that nothing was lost. that pay their way. Amid so miscellaneous So supreme was his silence, that it presently en- a "store," we can select for passing mention grossed me to the exclusion of everything else. one or two only, which appear most characThere was very brilliant discourse, but this silence teristic of the narrator's manner of spirit. was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but much Such is "the Minister's Black Veil," which finer things were implied by the dumbness of this could have been written by none other than gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. the hand that traced in burning furrows the When he presently rose and went, Emerson, with "Scarlet Letter:" there is truly, as Parson the slow, wise smile' that breaks over his face, Hooper feels, a preternatural horror interwoven like day over the sky, said: Hawthorne rides with the threads of the black crape coverwell his horse of the night."" The same authority informs us, that during his three years' occupancy ing his face- an ambiguity of sin or sorrow of the Old Manse, Mr. Hawthorne was not seen, so enveloping the poor minister, that love or probably, by more than a dozen villagers-choos- sympathy can no longer reach him so that, ing the river-side, where he was sure of solitude, with self-shudderings and outward terrors, for his walks and loving to bathe every evening his earthly fate is to be ever groping darkly in the river after nightfall; and other illustra- within his own soul, or gazing through a tions are added, in a 66 very American" tone, of medium that saddens the whole world. Such the romancer's manner of manhood. - See that gayly-equipped gift-book, "Homes of American is also "The Wedding Knell" with that Authors," published last year by Messrs. Putnam. grotesquely repulsive rendezvous at the church his 66 altar; the aged bride, an insatiate woman of the world, clad in brightest splendor of youthful attire, and suddenly startled, as she awaits the bridegroom, by the dreadful anachronism of a tolling bell, the only flourish to announce her affianced one, who arrives in the midst of a slow funeral procession, his vestment a shroud! Such, again, is "Wakefield" with its warning monition, that amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world individuals are so nicely adjudged to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever, and becoming the Outcast of the Universe. It is a capital touch in this story of an eccentric man's twenty years' desertion of his wife and home, without assignable cause, even to himself, while dwelling all the while in the next street that of his venturing out for the first time from his secret lodging, partly resolving to cross the head of the street, and send one hasty glance towards his forsaken domicile, when, habit for he is a man of habits takes him by the hand, and guides him, wholly unaware, to his own door, where, just at the critical moment, he is aroused by the scraping of his foot upon the step" and, in affright, little dreaming of the doom to which his first backward step devotes him, he hurries away, breathless with agitation, and afraid to look back. Not always, as in this case, is Mr. Hawthorne careful to furnish his tales or vagaries with a "pervading spirit or moral," either implicit and implied, or "done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence." What, for instance, is the moral, what the spirit, what the meaning of "The Great Carbuncle ?"* Thought may, as be alleges, always have its efficacy, and every striking incident its moral; but interpreted as some, and they not purblind, critics apprehend, that allegory of the crystal mountains is efficacious only as a premium to scepticism, and a damper to all imagination that would with the lofty sanctify the low, and sublimate the human with the divine. No such intention may the allegorist have had; but at least he might have guarded against so justifiable a gloss by using a more intelligible cipher. uncon bates, who more than half determined to rob and, if need be, dirk the dreaming lad. When the coach-wheels awake him, and he mounts and rides away, David casts not one parting glance at the place of his hour's repose beside the maple-shaded fountain scious of the three unrealized Acts of that hour's unacted drama-ignorant that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon that fountain's waters, and that one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur, and that one of Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood; so true is it that, sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. Very significant of the author's meditative habit is his description of the interruption of the two rascals felonious design: "They left the spot with so many jests and such laughter at their unaccomplished wickedness, that they might be said to have gone on their way rejoicing. In a few hours they had forgotten the whole affair, nor once imagined that the recording angel had written down the crime of murder against their souls, in letters as durable as eternity." This thought is illustrated more at length in the "morality" called Fancy's Show Box" - which discusses, as a point of vast interest, the question whether the soul may contract stains of guilt, in all their depth and flagrancy, from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved upon, but which, physically, have never had existence-whether the fleshy hand, the visible frame of man, must set its seal to the evil designs of the soul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner. Casuistry of this sort is "nuts" to Mr. Hawthorne. 66 with "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," too, has the real Hawthorne odor. The quartette of withered worldlings who, by the doctor's magic art, enjoy a temporary rejuvenescence what cruel truth their weak points are exposed! First laughing tremulously at the ridiculous idea that, were youth restored them, they, with their experience of life, would or should or could ever go astray again— gray, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, without warmth enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of recovering their spring days. And then, when the spell began to work, lost in a delirium of levity, maddened with exuberant frolic, and disporting themselves in follies to be equalled only by their own absurdities half a century before. An apologue, styled "The Lily's Quest," relates the rambles of two lovers in search of a site for their Temple of Happiness - they, the In his best style is that brief fantasy of the mid-day slumberer beside the tuft of maples, "David Swan"-during whose hour's sleep there successively visit him as stray passengers on the highway, a pair of opulent elders, who half resolved to adopt him; and a heart-free maiden, who becomes a half-lover at first sight; and a couple of scampish repro-representatives of Hope and Joy, while there dogs them a darksome figure, type of all the woful influences which life can conjure up, and interposing a gloomy forbiddal whenever they think the site is found: a site is at |