him as living, and successfully tracing out the tribes of Bucharia, for the confirmation of his theory of the origin of our race, I know not. The world has taken small notice of him, but by its neglect he is not affected: he looks to posterity. In case he should not be heard from by the sixth year of the date of his voyage, his writings are to be given to the world, a sufficient sum having been set apart for that purpose ;-this being the fifth year of his absence. I begin already to think his bones may be whitening on the Indian Caucasus, which he vowed to visit as the true Ararat and sacred nursery of the human race. Reach ing this point through India, he resolved to follow the migrations of the Teutonic tribes in their dispersion; passing from Cashmere into Thibet; thence descending into Bucharia; thence about the sea of Aral, along the plains of Asia, and to the Black Sea and the Baltic; tracing the route by which those families would have moved, who gave origin to the tribes of Europe. In expectation of the event, I have already entered into correspondence with a publisher for the issue of his works. They will be contained in five volumes folio; which was the number directed by himself. The dimensions of the volumes are very exactly laid down in his instructions. They are to be as seven to five in the oblong, and printed in three different forms of type; the title-pages and preface in Latin, to strike an awe into the unlearned: the text in English, such as it is; for I am sorry to admit of my friend, his worst fault is his style; of which, to say that it is ambitious, obscure and anatomical-a crude assemblage of periods, stuffed with Gallicisms, Latinisms, Germanisms, philosophisms, and dullardisms-is truly to say the least that can be said: so far Pantol, though otherwise courteous and polite, is unhappily no gentleman-he writes a bad style. Of the contents of these folios I have little to say at present; by and by I may give you some curious extracts. To enable you to form a general conception of their scope, I will just add, that the first folio is a new organon of philosophy, or complete analysis of the human mind, in which are some wonderful developments. The second is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of things in general, which I suspect to be a kind of ponderous satire, though it is not easy, in any part of his works, to tell if the author be in earnest; a particular in which he resembles his friend and correspondent, the famous and mysterious Teuyfelsdroeck; but in other particulars, the Sartor doth not resemble him: nay, their lines of erudition are wholly divergent; for, while Teuyfelsdroeck is undoubtedly the philanthropist of these days, Pantol is no less unquestionably the savan. My friend is indeed deficient in the sublime quality of Hope; his aim is to know things as they are, not as what they may become; in which, indeed, I grant a disadvantage; but this is balanced by a happy hatred of man-worship, (with which our German admits himself to have been grievously afflicted in his youth,) and a savantical scorn of speculation, carried to the verge of a fault; so that even his treatise of the mind reads like a bare statement of facts; but I find, on considering the facts as he has placed them, their principles start out of themselves. His third folio is of literature; or rather, of speech and writing at large; in which, among a number of satirical hits, I find the following: "Out of the history of letters, 1 have endeavored, at various times, to extract some tolerable definition of the word literature, as distinguished from mere speech, or talking. The result is far from satisfactory. Indeed, I am inclined to suspect that, when all is done, there is no such species as literature. Chirography, phonetic, rhetoric, rhythmic, poetic, logic, metaphysic, didactic, physiologic, hermeneutic, tragic, comic, hieroglyphic, with what else may end in ic, I find reducible to a definition; but for the very Ic itself, the soul of these, I cannot compass a statement of it. Literature may be, after all, a mere fantastical term for a library. There is no proper treatise of the matter, nor even a bare exposition of the question, what is literature? which, if properly investigated, might yield important results. If the mere delivery of words by writing is literature, it were a proud day for lying puffers and venders of false news. If a pretty handling of words is the matter, fortunate are they who indite bad sentiment at the second hand. If mean wit and gross maxims may set up a claim to be literature, I concede it to provincial dabsters and brokenwinded jokers. A pert logician, starting at the prospect of a dispute, tells me of two sorts of tradition, or delivery by writing-the permanent and the perisha ble; the former being literature proper, the second, literature by courtesy, as having the ostent and feature without the soul. But this would give great offence. Then he asks whether a literature, consisting wholly of critics, should be set among the permanent or perishable? I would give a hundred golden eagles for an answer to either question, that should be satisfactory." You will see, by inspection of the above passage, the defect of my friend's intellect; for do but observe with what ease you may arrive at the conclusion he seeks. Take a good fair copy of the works of each of the following authors, to wit: Bacon, Milton, Shakspeare; Plato, Sophocles, Homer; Cicero, Virgil, Livy; Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire; Luther, Lessing, Goethe; Isaiah, St. Paul, and the author of Job; Calderon, Lope, Cervantes; Dante, Boccacio, Tasso; Calidas, Vrihaspiti, Menu, and so on through the list; of the authors of each language taking the three best, (I insist upon three,) read attentively (at least in a translation) as many of them as your leisure will permit, and I warrant you will find yourself too profitably busy to trouble your head any farther about the matter in dispute. His fourth volume is of races; an enormous, not to say overloaden assemblage of facts relating to man as a species, or moving and talking animal. În his chapter of the African tribes, he talks in such a high strain as the following : "A certain German moralist (Kant, I believe) lays the corner-stone of his ethical system in the following absurdity: No just man can use another as a tool; this is the first principle of ethics,' proceeding on the hypothesis of an I know not what difference between the human and the animal soul. He adds rather doggedly, that for a service rendered, or exacted, there must be an equivalent, or there is no recognition of any basis or possibility of right. Now, (continues Pantol,) I appeal from this wiseacre to the facts of history and nature. Is it not the very soul of high probity, not so much to employ as actually to seize upon men, and force them into one's service? What is all this miserable twaddle about, using a man as a tool,' when there's not a man of us all, who is not secretly charmed with the idea? Why, is not this same relationship of the tool to the hand that wields it one of a deep not to say a di vine significance? The Creator of the world is said to make tools of tyrants and assassins to work out good to the world-nay, the very d-1 himself, what is he but a kind of dingy tool, and subaltern? Is not the soldier the tool of his corporal, the corporal of the captain, the captain of the colonel, the colonel of the commander, and he of the king, the ministry, or the party? Why not?why not? Can you explain the matter, sir? or you, madam? Certainly your husband is a very convenient tool; you use him to build your house, buy your elegances, put you at your ease, and for the equivalent, you render him "woman's rights,” and ***** fie!" Indeed my friend is very harsh; soured by early disappointment, I doubt―a cross, confirmed bachelor, past the marriageable age, poor in purse, ugly in person, weak in health; all which being taken into the account, not forgetting that he shows the best of tempers in the main, I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive him. His fifth volume is of religions. By this it appears the author is a Trinitarian, though I confess his treatment of the matter has an air of mysticism, not to say of mystery. Indeed, if it be not coldly received by respectable persons generally, then am I quite ignorant of the spirit of this age. Take the following: 66 In my first volume I have endeavored to establish a true distinction between the immortal soul in man, and the brutal; I have said that this immortal or personal soul, though an absolute unity in itself, yet consists of three personal elements, or modes of immortality, to wit: Spiritual Love, Spiritual Will, and Spiritual Knowledge, or rather of the substance and sources of these. Now as the Creator made man in his own image, this human divinity is the mystical image of the Divine one." Alas, my poor friend! that thou shouldst have wasted thyself in vain efforts to interpret St. Augustin and the Platonic Christians, when with far less toil of the brain thou mightest have added an improvement to the steamengine, or written an imperishable treatise of herb-gardening. Not to gainsay the much quoted opinion of my Lord Bacon, wherein he pretendeth to set meditation above invention and the sources of the useful arts above those arts; as if one might not see with half an eye that the mind of man was created for the glorious arts, and not these arts for the mind; nor to weaken his apophthegm, "that as sight is more beautiful than the uses of light, so is the knowledge of things as they are more dignified than the utility of discoveries,*-I yet aver that Pantol might have put his thoughts to better advantage on the gestation of a new system of society, instead of the fishing and fumbling amid the relics of the ancient truth for certain mouldy verities, of no interest to the masses. Indeed, notwithstanding all his savantical scepticism and declaring of himself "a Progress Man," and "a Reformer," I do profoundly suspect him of a certain conservatism; idosyncratic, it may be, with himself." His habit of looking into the principles of things, and search ing out their pith, enables him to a variety of curious observations, and the discovery of good in unexpected quarters. But above all I note this in him as peculiar-when he kicks off the old shoe, it is with no intention of going barefoot that day forth; but incontinently he orders one of the same leather, and the same easy fit; admitting all improvements, with due allowance for the season and the fashion. "None buta madman,” says he angrily, "will change a good custom, even in a shoe, until he knows a better can be had forthright in its stead. To cashier your tailor or your clergyman, and to burn your breeches or your Bible, in such a biting winter as this is, with no certainty of even a rag to cover your body, or a divine word to comfort your soul, what is it but a mad vanity or a furious improvidence ?" SONG. WHEN I was a little tiny boy, In the fresh hours of prime; O then 'twas pleasant far away, To sport among the flowers so gay, But Spring has all too short a date, Where the silver clouds did stray; Then came the cold November winds, In the sad days of the year: For now the grape dropped from the wall, And all the paths were brown and chill, See Novum Organon B. 1. 129. Then Winter came, so blue and cold, In the days of sleet and snow; The drift o'ertops the wall, And snows come sliding through the sky O Spring of life! O golden time! And summer's rage is but a toy To make them braver show: Or frosts below, or fires above, CYONIDES. THE WRITINGS AND LITERARY CHARACTER OF R. H. DANA. THE review of American novelists in the Foreign Quarterly, just and fair in the main, was yet guilty of omissions that should have been noticed at the time, and the authors neglected fully discussed by a competent critic. It is not our purpose at present to occupy the whole ground, nor to attempt filling the wide and unseemly gap left by the reviewermore, we apprehend, from ignorance or inadvertence, than from any desire to suppress excellence, or hide real merit. That duty we leave to the American critic, who can honestly appraise the peculiar talents and unique productions of several among our lighter writers, whose names we might mention, not one of whom is alluded to by the critic: while two serious writers the one a great painter, and the other a true poet, of unquestioned excellence as writers of prose fiction, Allston in his Monaldi, and Dana in certain tales, among prose fictions holding a somewhat analogous rank to that the master-pieces of Heywood and Middleton would sustain in a comparison with the Shaksperian drama-have been passed over without attracting the most casual remark. This extreme carelessness may furnish some excuse for the critical remarks we are about to make, and for attempting to sketch the features of one of the purest and noblest of our American men of genius. An equally good reason for such a sketch may be found in the fact of the great injustice done our author by the present race of readers, to whom he is known only by name. Genius and virtue like that of Mr. Dana's should be kept fresh and alive before his countrymen. Such men as he are not given to the world to be left in doubt as to whether they have lighted upon their appropriate sphere, or whether they have not wandered into some stranger orb. Though Mr. Dana has not been a voluminous writer, he has still written abun dantly enough, and with adequate power, to reveal to all who can understand him, the purity and nobleness of his aims, and to impress young and docile minds with the wisest lessons of life and duty. In his literary character, we will consider Mr. Dana as a writer of prose fiction, poet, and critical essayist. It is now nearly a quarter of a century popular to render his writings such; yet there is no element of that kind in our author's intellectual constitution. He is too honest to disguise his defects to individuals; too sincere, to please the literary mob. He is sure of the aristocracy of genius, and scholarship, and true worth; the class composed of the wisest and the best-the true aristocracy. To take an elevated example, he, like Milton, will always be read by the choice few, while, like him, he must remain caviare to the mass of readers. We insinuate nothing by way of comparison, between the two; for Milton is first among the greatest, while Dana would be too wise to accept of a place among the greatest at all. He is among the first of the lesser lights-the Dii Minores of our literary firmament. Sentiment, we apprehend, forms the most prominent feature in the genius and writings of Mr. Dana. No mere sentimentalist, our author is emphatically a man of sentiment; no hypocritical Joseph Surface, full of cant and moral pretensions, but a genuine man of feeling, unlike, or rather superior to, Mackenzie's hero, in being besides a true philosophic observer of life and character, a stern self-student, and a powerful painter, according to the stereotyped phrase, of men and manners. since we have seen anything in the way the cast of a writer's talents-must be This attribute of sentiment, in the instance of our author, is at one and the same time, a moral and intellectual quality, religious, high-toned, upright, masculine, partaking of the pathetic sweetness of Mackenzie, and the stern dignity of Wordsworth. Apart from this faculty, Mr. Dana is a writer of great purity and power, of much acuteness and elegance in other walks than in those of philosophic sentiment, or of sentimental description; but in those he is a master, and ranks first among his contemporaries and countrymen. He has vast power in depicting the struggles of the darker passions, jealousy, hatred, suspicion and remorse. Paul Felton has touches of Byronic force, and discloses a similar vein to that so fully opened, and with such popular effect, in the works of Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown. In " Paul Felton," Mr. Dana has exhibited power in depicting passion, as well as sentiment; and the same criticism applies to his "Thornton," though in a much inferior degree. Yet he is most at home in pictures of domestic life; 1 |