From The Economist. The Republic of Liberia, its Products and Resources. By Gerald Ralston, ConsulGeneral for Liberia. A Paper read before the Society of Arts, and reprinted from the "Journal of the Society of Arts," for May 23, 1862. ston had explained this allusion, especially as we heard, some months ago, similar rumors of a painful nature, of which we would gladly hear the correct version.) The population at present numbers 500,000, of which 16,000 are Americo-Liberians, and the remaining 484,000 aboriginal inhabitants. We infer from Mr. Ralston's statements that the Americo-Liberians, or AngloSaxon negroes, as he calls them, act as pio isfactory price. The chief solicitude has been to purchase the line of sea-coast, so as to connect the different settlements under one government, and to exclude the slave trade, which formerly was most extensively carried on at Cape Mesurado, Tradetown, Little Bassa, Digby, New Sesters, Gallinas, THE little state of Liberia owes its founda- and other places at present within the Retion to that very questionable and half-public, but now happily excluded-except hearted association of slaveholders known as in a recent instance at Gallinas, under pethe American Colonization Society. But, culiar circumstances." (We wish Mr. Ralpainful as is the episode which the history of that Society forms in the annals of the "Slave Power" in America, its one good deed beyond the sea promises to survive and flourish. The settlement of Liberia, founded in 1822, was, on the 24th of August, 1847, proclaimed a free and independant state, and regularly installed as the Republic of Liberia. Acknowledged speedily by England, and afterwards by France, Belgium, Prussia, Brazil, Denmark, and Portugal, it has now,neers and civilizers of their African brothros in its fortieth year, been at last recognized him and Charles I. in the lobby of the House by the United States. The paper before us of Commons during those debates which is a brief sketch of its past history and pres- cost the king his crown. Here, too, in its ent condition by its Consul-General, Mr. Ral-, bands of red silk, is the correspondence of ston, which was read before the Society of the same monarch with his children, when Arts last May, and was followed by an in- they had taken refuge in France; and here, teresting discussion in which several colored in sombre winding-sheets of black silk, and gentlemen from Liberia took part. On the, seals to match, are the letters that passed whole, the impression we gain of this littler after Charles' execution. Here are the corstate is favorable and promising. In mate-t respondence of the parliamentary generals, rial and commercial development it is fam the papers of the unhappy non-jurors; of inferior to Hayti, but it is, perhaps, capable- Archbishop Sancroft, and of Bishop Ken, of a higher ultimate development. Its Prot-whose name lives forever in the Morning estantism will render it more acceptable ton Anglicized negroes than the French-Catho-s lic republic of the West Indies; while itse position as an outpost of civilization on the! African continent is very important as ant, influence for good upon the tribes of the interior, which it endeavors to draw to itselfat by honest and conciliatory measures. Mr.rRalston tells us that "it has about six hun-ve Of late some attempt has been made by dred miles of coast line, and extends backas the authorities of Oxford to sort and tabuabout one hundred miles on an average, but is late their treasures; and Mr. Hackman's with the facility of almost indefinite exten- catalogue, which we have until this late sion into the interior, the natives everywhere is period in our article unconsciously omitted manifesting the greatest desire that treatiese. to notice-rapt in reminiscences of Bodley should be formed with them, so that the lim-he is partly the result of these new efforts. its of the republic may be extended over allsthe neighboring districts. The Liberianaterritory has been purchased by more thanit. twenty treaties, and in all cases the natives of have freely parted with their titles for a satey, and Evening Hymn. And here are the details of the Pretender's doings, and his secret friends in England, in the reigns of Anne, George I., and George II. And what else there may be of curious lore and unrevealed mysteries in that capacious and undisturbed receptacle of "Mighty Bodley," who shall tell us? We wish to deal gently with Mr. Hackman's labors. His errors of omission and commission in the execution of his task we will not censure heavily; for who that has had dealings with manuscripts does not know how ate for four. The President and Vice-Pres- advantage; and with some of the coast tribes, ident (who are elected for two years) must a knowledge of English is beginning to be each be thirty-five years of age, and pos- regarded as a necessary qualification for the sessed of real property to the amount of six ruling men of the chief towns." hundred dollars. "The judicial power is Mr. Ralston's 66 paper was illustrated by a vested in a supreme court, and such subor- collection of the products of Liberia as sent dinate courts as the Legislature may from to the International Exhibition. These contime to time establish." "Such of the abo- sisted of specimens of cotton cloth, well manrigines as have for three years previously ufactured, and dyed; of coffee, sugar, raw adopted and maintained civilized habits, are cotton, palm oil, rice, silkworm cocoons. entitled to the elective franchise, and a con- Swords made by the natives from the iron siderable number exercise this privilege." of the country, with stone anvils and ham"There are native [i.e., pure African, we con- mers, pouches, leather accoutrements for clude] magistrates and jurors." This is an horses, and a great variety of fibres were extremely hopeful feature, and the following also on the table." Iron ore abounds all facts are equally encouraging. "The Eng-over Liberia, and every species of tropical lish is the mother tongue of the Liberians, produce thrives there. Cotton grows sponand they are extending its use along the taneously all over the country, and the Libecoast and into the interior. Nothing is more rians, encouraged by the Manchester Cotton common than for the native chiefs and the Supply Association, are now paying greater head men and other important persons among attention to its production than they have the tribes within the jurisdiction of Liberia, hitherto done. We rejoice to note all these and even far beyond, to place their sons at hopeful tokens, and wish the fullest success the early age of three, four, or five years, in to this brave little African Republic. A nothe family of the Americo-Liberians expressly ble work lies before it, and we hope that to learn English and to acquire civilized every European influence that can accelerate habits. Among the natives, to understand its progress will be heartily exerted in its English is the greatest accomplishment and behalf. From The Spectator. RELICS OF SHELLEY.* bow of promise in imagination up to the zenith and down again to the horizon, while every hiatus in Shelley's many-colored thought is simply beyond all human power to supply. For example, what is this dislocated stanza worth,-part of the shining ore of Shelley's mind though it evidently is,― without the whole movement of which it must have been an essential element ?— passion, which, if interrupted, is a mere spray of isolated drops,-if completed, adds WE regret the publication of this volume. another new movement to the few distinct It is evident that Shelley's most attached vibrations of intellectual melody that perfriends and relatives, while from delicate manently possess the imagination of youth. and honorable motives they refrain as yet To have Shelley's poetry in disjointed from telling all they know of Shelley's-in particles is more disappointing than to have some respects-unhappy life, lest it should broken atoms of a rainbow; for though give pain to surviving relatives of the per- there also the whole beauty consists in the sons involved, yet cannot help hovering rare proportions of the continuous curve, round the subject of his more questionable the least arc will enable us to pursue the actions, as the moth hovers round the candle, neither willing as yet to explain fully what might refute the worst reflections upon his conduct, nor able to let the subject sleep till the time arrives when they could do so. The literary worth of the fragments in these volumes is not such as to have demanded separate publication, even if it would have justified publication at all; and the little instalment of correspondence printed here, would have been of far more value if woven into the correspondence already published. There is, in fact, scarcely any motive for the book, except Mr. Garnett's rejoinder to Mr. T. L. Peacock, in reference to the conduct of Shelley towards his first wife and this it would have been far more dignified to defer till it was possible to produce all the particulars to which so many mysterious references are made. Except a beautiful poem of Shelley which was published a few months ago in Macmillan's Magazine, and one of some merit of Mr. Garnett's own on the poet, written in the neighborhood of Mrs. Shelley's tomb, there is nothing in this book that has any literary unity or finish. It is a basket of literary chips and shavings, gathered up from the poet's workshop. : "At the creation of the Earth Of an ever-lengthening line, With a beauty clear and warm." And many of the fragments are far more fragmentary even than this is; for example, the following excluded passage in the Adonais : Charioted on the "A mighty Phantasm, half concealed In darkness of his own exceeding light, Which clothed his awful presence unrevealed, night Of thunder-smoke, whose skirts were chrysolite And like a sudden meteor, which outstrips The splendor-winged chariot of the sun, eclipse There is no writer in the whole range of English literature who will less bear this piecemeal treatment than Shelley. It is not the rich light of imaginative thought-as The armies of the golden stars, each one with Coleridge, the passion of deep insight Pavilioned in its tent of light-all strewn Over the chasms of blue night-as with Wordsworth,-nor the gleam of fanciful sentiment-as with Moore,-which There is, we feel, far more pain in the sense takes hold of us,-all these might be to of mutilation which such passages produce some extent preserved in fragments, and the sense of a broken melody-than preserved even without loss of power. But Shelley's poems, whatever else they are meant to be, are meant at least to be felt and seen as wholes-as melodies complete in themselves, expressing some one wave of Relics of Shelley. Edited by Richard Garnett. London: Moxon & Co. 1862. pleasure in the occasional gleam of Shelley's genius which remains there; for the breathless continuity of his song, which rolls onward to the end without rest or pause, was of the true essence of Shelley's genius, and to have shattered fragments of his music is like listening to a stammering lark. Nor is the injury to Shelley's poetry involved in this fragmentary treatment greater than that to his biography. Never was any great poet made known to the world by more fitful and inadequate biographic hints; never was there any great poet whose story stood more in need of a continuous and frank narrative, or whose nature was more susceptible of a living and distinct portraiture in such a narrative, than Shelley's. His life was like one of his own lyrics,-eager to breathlessness when the spell of action or emotion was on him,-faint to sickness in the after-mood of reaction, when it had passed away; at all times penetrated with the glow of a temperament in which selfish calculation had absolutely no share,—at all times underrating law, or rather holding the law of impulse intrinsically higher than any other, and chafing at what he called "the infinite malice of Destiny," when that which Wordsworth would have bowed before as the awful form of Duty, bade him imperatively curb the wayward impulse of the hour; -in short, a life in which the throbbing pulses of intellectualized passion can be felt distinctly at almost every point, and so unique as a whole, that his outward lot, whether as regards his errors, his persecutions, his companions, or his strange death and stranger funeral rites, seems almost the inseparable vesture of his marvellous na ture. Mr. Garnett has struck the true key to the character in the following lines : "That Soul of planetary birth, Tempered for some more prosperous Earth, On this low world of want and care, The mood scarce human or divine, And truly, Shelley, thine were strains This "unearthly" form of earthly passions which marks itself so deeply on Shelley's poetry and fate, while it gives a singularly unique coloring to his whole life, was, no doubt, the real cause why there is so much both in his poetry and life which it is difficult to approach without some preconceived bias. No man of equal genius has been less adequately criticised either as a poet or a man. Even in these lines Mr. Garnett scarcely reaches the centre of the difficulty. Shelley's mysticism is not exactly of the kind which we can account for, even fancifully, by referring to its origin in another planet. It is quite true that his were strains At once to fire and freeze the veins; " but the rest of the suggested explanation seems to us scarcely to grasp the whole of the difficulty. The mysticism which runs both through his life and his poetry approaches, odd, as it may appear, very closely to a somewhat naked simplicity of nature. There was wanting in him that nameless "awe" which teaches men to feel the difference between the natural and the supernatural, and makes them hold even the most solemn impulses of their own nature in restraint. Byron, and many of Shelley's contemporaries, felt this awe and wantonly violated it. Shelley seems to us not even to have felt it. Hence the strange perfection of his pantheism. He could throw his imagination into all the forms and attitudes of natural life, and interpret them as if he were conscious of nothing higher than beauty or deformity,-without shrinking in any way from the most naturalistic view which they suggested. Hence all the marvellous passion of his poetry has about it a tone from which we shrink;-without any of the license of Byron, without anything of the erotic vulgarity of Moore, with the highest sense of the sacredness of passion, there is a bold, eager naturalism of tone, a complete absence of any sense of distinction between the supersensual and the sensuous, which gives to Shelley's writings something of the impression that they are the poetry of a man with no "spirit" in St. Paul's sense, though with a noble "soul" as well as a sensitive physical body. This seems to us one of the central features of all his poetry. It shows senses of ethereal fire, an intellect of wonderful subtlety, a soul of pure magnanimity, but no shadow of divine responsibility, no consciousness of living under an eternal eye and will, and none of the breadth of sympathy and judgment which that consciousness never fails to bring. But if this be the great negative feature of this wonderful poet's writings, the jar with which it strikes upon us is indefinitely increased by these fragmentary publications of facts bearing on the one or HAROLD's spies, before the battle of Hastings, reported that almost all the Norman army "had the appearance of priests, as they had the whole face with both lips shaven. For the English leave the upper lip unshorn, suffering the hair continually to increase; which Caesar affirms to have been a national custom with the ancient inhabitants of Britain." THE editor of Rabelais says "ce qu'il y a de certain, c'est que ce furent les Goths qui introduiserent l'usage de dîner et de souper, c'est à dire, de faire deux grands repas par jour. En quoi on s'éloigna de l'ancienne coutume qui étoit de dîner fort légèrement, et de souper à fond." A SAXON nun wrote six plays in imitation of Terrence, but in honor of virginity. They were published at Nusenberg, 1501; but the book is singularly scarce. She wrote circiter, A.D. 980. ALCUIN writes to the monks of Wearmouth, obliquely accusing them of having done the very thing which he begs them not to do. "Let the youths be accustomed to attend the praises of our heavenly King, not to dig up the burrows of foxes, or pursue the winding mazes of hares." ETHELBALD of Mercia, who died 756, exempted all monasteries and churches in his kingdom from public taxes, works, and impositions, except the building of forts and bridges, from which none can be released. before the conquest. He also gave the servants of God "perfect liberty in the product of their woods and lands, and the right of fishing." Ergo, there were "THE English at that time wore short gar-rights of the feudal character, and game laws ments reaching to the mid-knee; they had their hair cropped, their beards shaven, their arms laden with golden bracelets, their skins adorned with punctured designs. They were accustomed to eat till they became surfeited, and to drink till they were sick. These latter qualities they imparted to their conquerors; as to the rest they adopted their manners." ATHELSTAL, his hair was "flaxen, as I have seen by his reliques, and beautifully wreathed with golden threads." Was he then buried with his hair thus disposed? This was a fashion at Troy, see the death of Euphorbus. |