From the National Era. THE ANGEL OF PATIENCE. A FREE PARAPHRASE OF THE GERMAN. To weary hearts, to mourning homes, There's quiet in that angel's glance, TENNYSON'S "ORIANA." Perhaps no one acquainted with the beautiful Scotch ballad "I wish I was where Helen lies," on first reading Tennyson's "Oriana" could fail to be struck with their similarity of catastrophe, though brought about by incidents so far apart. A writer in an evening paper, giving an account of Prof. Aytoun's third Lecture, says that the professor, speaking of the two poems, seemed to hold an opinion, but not absolutely affirming it, that "Helen of Kirconnell" may be deemed the original after which "Oriana" has been formed, and that their agreement is not fortuitous. This opinion is perhaps the correct one - but the question can be decided Nor wounds with words the mourner's car; only by the poet himself. Entirely disclaim But ills and woes he may not cure Angel of Patience! sent to calm O! thou, who mournest on thy way, From Punch. ing any intention of making an invidious com- Curst be the heart that thought the thought, when hurling imprecations against the un- A "SWELL'S" HOMAGE TO MRS. STOWE. equalled in "Oriana" : A MUST Wead Uncle Tom—a wawk Of MRS. HABWIETBEECHASTOWE. T'is not as if A saw ha name To walls and windas still confined; All that is meawly vulga fame: A don't wespect the public mind. But Staffa'd House has made haw quite She wished to know if I admiawd Whethaw A did n't hate LEGWEE? Bai JOVE! A was completely flaw'd; A felt myself a gweata fool Than A had evaw felt befaw; None but my foe to be my guide, O'er fair Kirconnell Lee. I lighted down, my sword did draw; I hacked him in pieces sma, I hacked him in pieces sma, For her sake that died for me. PORTABLE HOMES. - To a casual observer passing up or down the river Thames, the Isle of Dogs has at present the aspect of a newly-discovered gold region. Numerous temporary erections of galvanized tinned iron arise one day, and are the next unbolted, unscrewed, and packed in the smallest possible space for the colonies. Curious that the mother country should provide homes for the emigrant from her shores! From what we have recently seen, through the courtesy of Messrs. Moorewood and Rogers, of the Steelyard, Thames street, not only is the small shed, or the dwelling of 2 to 12 rooms, with every appliance of English comfort, to be had "to order,' but warehouses, factories, and even foundries are equally subject to a tariff of so much per foot. One of the latter- a foundry for Australia, of 150 by 30 feet, of the simplest geometrical principles of strength and proportion, was in the course of erection during our visit. London Morning Herald. T of so vast a body-politic. The America for which they lived and labored was a mere strip of coast, separated by a voyage of six weeks from an old world, from which it had been politically cut adrift; the America of today has that preponderance assured to it in the general affairs of the world, which belongs to the virtual proprietorship of an entire continent. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that what America can do in the world at present, is limited only by what she herself chooses to attempt. Not what lessons the nations may spontaneously learn from America, but what lessons America will be apt to teach the nations whether they care to learn them or not this is now the question; this is the new point of view from which America must be looked at. Hitherto that which has most interested the rest of the world in the great transatlantic Among the things which have awakened republic has been its history as a part of the the attention of speculative politicians to this carth disconnected from the other and older new view of the place and duty of America parts, a theatre where an independent civil- in the general affairs of the earth, the most ization has sprung up under new and remark- important by far has been Kossuth's trip able conditions. At the time when Franklin across the Atlantic. The very purpose of the and Washington were born, there were, per- visit of the great Hungarian was to expound haps, not more than half a million of individ- to America, more clearly than she could do uals in the British colonies of America; and herself, her place and mission among the now the community formed by that half mil- contemporary nations. Nor can this question lion and their immediate descendants, has be more appropriately discussed than in conswelled into a vast nation of twenty millions, nexion with a book written by two of Kospossessing a continent over which its energies suth's personal friends, who accompanied may expatiate for generations to come, or- him on his visit, and whose impressions of ganized on a basis of political arrangements American society were determined in the such as the world has never seen before, and main by this very idea of what America could pervaded throughout its entire mass by senti- do if she were to let herself loose among the ments, customs, and institutions, developed, nations as a force of change and rectification. it is true, out of germs taken from old Eu- In the volumes before us, it is true, there are rope, but developed with a very extraordinary sketches of American society in various other difference. To describe the constitution of aspects, and even criticisms of American this youngest addition to the great family of manners and customs, as they appeared to nations, to trace the successive steps by which minds capable of judging them by the highit has become what it is, and to derive from est standard of European refinement; but, on its example hints for the instruction of older the whole, the matter of the volumes, and societies, have already been the laudable aims certainly their greatest merit, consists, not in of many European writers and political theo- social criticisms for the behoof of America rists. But the world is beginning to be struck itself, but in what is suggested and implied with an entirely new idea in reference to as to the function of America in a cosmopoAmerica. It begins to be felt that this reser- litical point of view. It is to this part of the voir, which has been gradually filling, has subject that Mr. Pulszky chiefly addresses now reached such a point of fulness that it is himself in the portions of the book to which he very likely to run over. It begins to be felt lays claim; the less disquisitional portions, that this great accumulation of the race on a containing what may be called the gossip of new theatre, and under new conditions, has Kossuth's progress through America, and the not been going on for nothing; that it is not cursory delineations of American manners as any longer as a mere spectacle that America they attracted the remark of the Hungarian claims the interest of the cisatlantic nations; visitors, come more appropriately from the but that, having served long enough as a pas- pen of Madame Pulszky. What with the sive illustration of the working of certain prin- disquisition, and what with the gossip, the ciples and forms of government, she is rousing work is one of very great interest. herself even now for a work of aggression and propagandism. For the America of to-day is not the America of Washington and Jefferson; nor can the maxims of these men serve any longer as the adequate breath and inspiration The first thing to be attended to, in a. theoretical study of the civilization and destinies of any people, is the nature of the geographical theatre which they occupy, or over which they are to expatiate; and we a uniform surface, gently rolling, but destitute of mountains, and pass into one another by dividing ridges, which distribute their own waters into each valley, but whose superior elevation is only distinguishable among the general undulations by the water-sheds they form. Around the whole continent, leaving a compararim of mountains, giving the idea of a vast amtively narrow slope towards the oceans, runs a phitheatre. Through this rim penetrate, towards the south-east and north, the above great rivers only, forming at their débouchés the natural doors of the interior; but no stream penetrates west, through the Sierra Madre, which forms an unbroken water-shed from the Isthmus to Behrring Straits. Thus we find more than three fifths of our continent to consist of a limitless plain, intersected by countless navigable streams, flowing everywhere from the circumference towards common centres grouped in close proximity, and only divided by what connects them into one homogeneous plan. To the American people, then, belongs this vast interior space, covered over its uniform surface of 2,300,000 square miles with the richest calcareous soil, touching the snows towards the north, and the torrid heats towards the south, bound together by an infinite internal navigation, of a temperate climate, and constituting in the whole the most magnificent dwelling-place marked out by God for man's abode. There we perceive, in the formation of the Atlantic part of the American continent, a sublime simplicity, a complete economy of arrangement singular to itself, and the reverse of what distinguishes the ancient world. To understand this, let us compare them. The chain of the Andes, debouching north from the Isthmus, opens like the letter Y, into two primary chains, or Cordilleras. On the right the Sierra Madre (Rocky Mountains), with their Piedmont, the Black Hills, which mask the front of the Sierra, trending along the coast of the Mexican Gulf, divides the Northern Continent almost centrally, forming an unbroken water-shed to Behring's Straits. On the left the Andes follow the coast of the Pacific, warp around the Gulf of California, and, passing along the coast of California and Oregon, under the name of Sierra Nevada, terminate also near Behring Straits. The immense interval between these chains is a succession of intramontane basins, and forms the great platform of the table-lands, being a longitudinal section about two sevenths of the whole area between the two oceans, but walled from both, and having but three outlets for its waters, the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and Columbia. Columnar basalt forms the basement of this whole region, and volcanic action is everywhere prominent.. Its general level is about 6000 feet above the sea. Rain seldom falls, and timber is rare. The ranges of mountains which separate the basins are often rugged and capped with perpetual snow, while isolated masses of great height elevate themselves from the plains. Such is the region of the table-lands; beyond these is the maritime region, for the great wall of the Andes, receding from the beach of the Pacific, leaves between itself and the sea a half valley, as it were, forming the seaboard slope, across which descends to the sea a series of fine rivers, like the little streams descending from the Alleghanies to the Atlantic. This resembles and balances the maritime slope of the Atlantic side of the continent, from the Alleghanies to the sea; it is of the highest agricultural excellence, basaltic in formation, and grand beyond the powers of description, the snowy points of the Andes being everywhere visible from the sea, Whilst its climate is entirely exempt from the frosts of winter. Such, and so grand, is our continent towards the Pacific. Let us turn our glance towards the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and scan the geography in front. Four great valleys appear, each one drained by a river of first magnitude. First, the Mississippi valley, greatest in magnitude, and embracing the heart and splendor of the continent, gathers the waters of 1,500,000 square miles, and sheds them into the Gulf of Mexico; second, the St. Lawrence, Exactly similar to Europe, though grander in whose river flows into the North Atlantic; third, size and populations, is Asia. From the stupenthe Nelson and Severn Rivers into the Hudson's dous central barrier of the Himalaya and the Bay; and fourth, the great valley of the Mac-table-land of Tartary run the great rivers of Kenzie River, rushing north into the Hyperborean China, the Blue and the Yellow, due east to Sea. These valleys, everywhere calcareous, have discharge themselves beneath the rising sun; Europe, the smallest of the grand divisions of the land, contains in its centre the icy masses of the Alps; from around their declivities radiate the large rivers of that continent, the Danube directly east to the Euxine, the Po south-east to the Adriatic, the Rhone south-west to the Mediterranean, the Rhine to the Northern Ocean. Walled off by the Pyrenees, and Carpathians, and the Ural, divergent and isolated are the Tagus, the Elbe, the Vistula, the Don, and Volga, and other single rivers, affluents of the Baltic, of the Atlantic, of the Mediterranean, and of the Euxine. Descending from common radiant points, and diverging every way from one another, no inter-communication exists between the rivers of Europe; navigation is petty and feeble, nor have art and commerce, during many centuries, united so many small valleys, remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence upon each river dwells a distinct people, different from all the rest in race, language, habits, and interests. Though often politically amalgamated by conquest, they again relapse into fragments from innate geographical incoherence. The history of these nations is a story of perpetual war. towards the south run the rivers of India, the Indus and Ganges, with their tributaries; towards the west, the Oxus and Jaxartes; and north to the Arctic Seas, the four great rivers of Siberia. During fifty centuries, as now, the Alps and the Hindukush have proved inseparable barriers to the amalgamation of nations around their bases, and dwelling in the valleys which radiate from their slopes. The continent of Africa, as far as we know the details of its surface, is even more than these split into disjointed fragments. Thus the continents of the Old World resemble a bowl placed bottom upwards, which scatters everything poured upon it, whilst Northern America, right side up, receives and gathers towards its centre whatever falls within its rim. There is a stroke of Yankee genius in this comparison of the North American continent to a bowl right side up, which receives and gathers to its centre whatever falls within its rim. The next thing, of course, is to inquire what are the ingredients that have been put into the bowl. That whatever social material is deposited on such a geographical theatre will, by mere geographical necessity, be more thoroughly amalgamated, and made one homogeneous substance, than it could be in any continent of the old world, may, as Colonel Gilpin avers, be true enough; but, after all, the most important question is, whether the material there deposited has been such, that the resulting amalgam is sure to be not an amalgam of rubbish, like that which the continent has once already had in the native American tribes, but an amalgam of precious stuff, good to be looked at as a whole on its own proper area, and to be used in flakes and morsels for chemical commixture with the rest of the world. language, which will also be common to the outstanding blacks. Whether the blacks, too, will ultimately be incorporated in this amalgam is a problem of the future. Of the ethnographical constituents as they now stand, the Anglo-Saxons are indubitably in the ascendant. A claim, indeed, has recently been advanced in favor of the Celts; and it has been maintained that, taking into account the immense Irish immigration of the last half-century, the actual majority of the American people are not of Anglo-Saxon, but of Celtic extraction. This claim, however, the fond illusion of some patriotic Celt, has broken down most completely under the figures furnished by the American census; and theorists are still at liberty to make as much as they like out of the fact, that the Americans are in the main a people of the Anglo-Saxon stock. After the Anglo-Saxons, the probable order of numerical proportion, reckoning only the more important of the white ingredients, and omitting the blacks entirely, would be as follows:- Celts from the British islands, Germans, French, Spaniards. In some spots the Germans are a very large percentage, and there are still in the Union about a million of persons using the German language. Now, though our ethnographical science is not by any means in such a state as to enable us to appreciate very precisely the effects of this amalgamation of so many races in one nationality, yet that a nation so formed must be different, in essential respects, from any yet existing on the face of the earth, may be assumed as self-evident. It seems even to be a natural supposition that such a nation is a nearer approach, than anything yet seen, to that final condition of humanity to which the On this point, fortunately, there is every whole world is tending. For, if there is to be reason to be well satisfied. The American progress at all, one of two things must ultipeople is an amalgam of all the picked races mately happen-either the fusion of the of the world, with the Anglo-Saxon predomi- nations of the earth into one population pant. English, Scotch, Irish, French, Span- homogeneous in the main, or their organizaiards, and Germans in large masses; Jews, tion in a confederacy in which all will be Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Swedes, Danes, represented. In either case, the great quesand Chinese in smaller proportions such tion is, what elements are to have the preare the elements out of which the American ponderance, and what are to be eliminated. nationality has been or is being formed; a If the result is to be a fusion of all the races nationality also comprehending within its into one, what are the true combining probosom, though it does not civilly acknowledge, portions of the races, as they now are? If the an immense population of Africans. In some result is to be a confederacy, on what principarts of the Union there are still considerable plo of proportionate value are the nations to knots of some of these races undissolved into be coördinated? The mere attempt to conthe general mass-Spaniards, for example, sider such questions inevitably leads the in the south, Frenchmen on the Mississippi, and Germans in the western settlements; everywhere, however, the process of absorption is going on, and there can be no doubt that ultimately all the white population will be a tolerably homogeneous amalgam of the various constituent races united in their relative proportions, speaking one English thoughts to America. The proportions in which the races are commingled there may not be the true combining proportions which theory would prescribe for the ultimate amalgam, but they are a practical experiment in that direction; and the amalgam they form must, at all events, be regarded as a necessary intermediate between our day and the final result. On the other hand, if confederacy is an amalgam of a great variety of races and to be the rule, we have here, in the vast nations; it is an amalgam, moreover, of transatlantic nation, weight enough to break what may be called the ejected and expelled down any scheme of confederacy we may have of those nations. This is a very important been forming with reference only to the nations fact. America was colonized originally, and of the old world. It is not long ago since a is being colonized still, not by the normal theorizing Frenchman, propounding his scheme representatives of the various nations of the of the confederacy which was to take the lead old world, but by men representing whatever in civilization, formulized it under the notion these nations have produced extreme in sentiof what he called an Occidental Fentarchy, ment, in character, or in systematic creed. embracing the five great nations of western Who were the first colonists of America? Europe the French, the English, the The Puritans and other sectaries of England, Italians, the Germans, and the Spaniards. including the Quakers; the cadets of royalist The common aspirations of these five nations houses during the civil wars; the most daring the élite of humanity, as he termed them adventurers among the Spaniards; the most were to be represented and turned to restless of French adventurers, including account by a central committee, sitting at Jesuit missionaries. America, at the very Paris (of course!); this committee to consist first, was the refuge for whatever was either of twenty delegates, in the following inter- intellectually or morally extreme in the society national proportions-six from France, that of Europe the most noble conscientiousness, country having the right to the first place in the most reckless blackguardism. And who virtue of its general superiority in all respects; have been the immigrants into America since? five from England, to represent the "practical Still sectarians and refugees - Protestants too sagacity" of our countrymen; four from Italy, Protestant for home, such as Huguenots from that the "admirable aesthetic spontaneity" France, and Moravians, Dunkers, Mennonites, of the Italians might have its part in the evo- and Schwenkfeldians from Germany; Catholution; three from Germany, as the native lics persecuted on the other hand for their country of the "generalizing tendency;" and ultra-Catholicism; Irishmen, full of fury two from Spain, as the land of "personal against Great Britain; exiles of all lands dignity and catholicity of spirit." We sadly flying from the pains of despotism. American fear that, even at the time when this scheme society is thus an amalgamation of the exof a Pentarchy of the west was propounded, a treme opinions, the extreme isms of Europe, due consideration of Russia and eastern whether in religion, in character, or in Europe, not to speak of the interests of the politics. All that Europe has rejected as too Scandinavian north, would have sufficed to advanced for it, or as anomalous in it—this knock it on the head. But, in any case, the is the very material with which American appearance in the other hemisphere of such civilization has set out in its operations, and a phenomenon as the American Republic, which it is its business to harmonize and to would rob the Pentarchy of aught like cosmo- work up. The statistics of religion in Ameripolitical precedency. There a power is form ca are especially curious under this head. In ing itself, by the other process of physical the whole Union, according to Mr. Pulszky, fusion, involving all the tendencies of race there are upwards of 36,000 places of worship, (with the single exception, perhaps, of the belonging to the leading religious sects in the admirable aesthetic spontaneity" accorded following proportions: first, the Methodists, to the Italians), which it would be the office the most active sect in the United States, of the Pentarchy to adjust and coördinate by who, from having only 83 ministers in the clever cogitation. And thus there would be year 1784, have increased so as now to have a rivalry of method between the two hemi- 6000 regular and 8000 local preachers, these spheres. In the American hemisphere, where representing, as we may suppose, about divers elements are in process of union to 13,000 churches: next, the Baptists, who, form one body politic, the watchword of from having 900 ministers and 1150 churches civilization would be "Annex, intermarry, in 1790, have now 8000 ministers and and speak English;" in the old hemisphere, 13,500 churches; next, the Presbyterians, cut up as it is into obdurate national masses, holding about 5960 churches; next the Conthe watchword would continue to be, "Fight gregationalists, or faithful representatives of each other as there is necessity, and cooperate the original Puritans, holding about 2000, as well as you can." An Occidental Pen-churches, of which 1400 are in New Engtarchy in Europe would be but a cluster of land; next the Episcopalians, with about separate nationalities, menaced by Russian 1550 churches, chiefly in the larger cities; Panslavism on the one hand, and taunted by next, the Roman Catholics, with 1073 American Pan-ethnicism on the other; while churches; and lastly the Unitarians, chiefly between Russia and America would lie the in New England, with 300 churches. These expanse of motley and incorrigible Asia. statistics do not fairly represent the numerical Not only, however, is the American people | proportions of the various sects in the popula |