Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/256

248 living, to no more "extraordinary seeking," than his country has a right to claim from all her sons,—called to no sterner sacrifice, to no severer suffering, than many a brave lad has faced and may yet face again. If we could read the silent history of these last years, should we not find in thousands of young hearts the story of a resolve no less firm, of a pain scarcely less deadly? The pent-up agony in the prison-house of Slavery before Northern cannon thundered at its doors is a tale that will never be told. God grant its horrors may never be surpassed,—never renewed! But we cannot say that Herman's woe is too highly wrought. We cannot console ourselves with thinking, that, however vividly delineated, it is mere fictitious suffering. We know that such things have happened,—yes, and things immeasurably worse. We know that Herman did only what any high and clear-souled man ten years ago might have owed to do, and that he suffered only the natural consequences of such doing. Ten years ago this country of ours was so that a man might legally and without redress be tortured to death for doing that which was not merely a plain obedience to the plainest precepts of the Bible, but what in any other Christian country than our own would have been instantly recognized as a deed of the highest heroism. And if we are not careful to do justly, all the new ropes wherewith we have bound this accursed Samson of Slavery will be broken like a thread, and our last state be worse than our first.

We know no work of fiction so full as this of beauty and wisdom, so free from folly, so resplendent with intellectual life, with moral purity, and Christian holiness, so apt to teach, so graceful in the teaching. We follow it with admiration and sympathy, from its gay beginning, through all the pain, the passion, and the peace, to the heartache of its closing pages,—that close, supremely sad, yet strangely beautiful. "She sang to him, and he slept; she spoke, and he did not awaken." It is the record of heavy struggle, of defeat that was triumph, and triumph that was Heaven.

We offer no congratulations to the new author; nor do we deprecate for him any harsh censure;—not only because praise and censure seem alike rugged and halting by the sweet strains we seek to celebrate, but because he who in his "saintly solitude" can create a world so fair is independent of these light afflictions. For him there is always sympathy, great companionship, and godlike work. From this Earth can nothing take away; than this she has nothing more to give.

has given us a book replete with interesting matter; and yet, owing to some lack of intellectual mastery in him over his materials, it leaves a singularly vague and dispiriting impression on the mind in reading it. The author has a plethora of knowledge in regard to the surface changes in history, but no insight whatever apparently into the meaning of history itself, into the philosophic causes which these changes attest and obey. He is a man of uncommon bulk, but deficient muscle. His mental furniture enfeebles his intellectual faculty. His body obstructs his soul. Sumptus fructum superat. His book costs the author more than it comes to. He is so absorbed in the contemplation of the accidents of history as to forget that history itself is but a narrow river, conducting to the broad, illimitable ocean of human brotherhood or equality,—and that to stand upon the bank, therefore, and watch its successive waves, instead of manfully leaping in and committing one's life and fortunes to it, is scarcely the part of a wise man. Mr. Lecky's essay would seem to have originated more in a desire to try his hand at theorizing than in any necessity to ventilate some previous drifts from the beginning to the end of his book. You never feel yourself in a compact, water-tight boat, obedient to rudder and sail, but at most on a raft, drifting at the absolute gré of the tides, in a certain general direction, no doubt, but with no foresight of the specific intellectual port at which you are to bring up. Occasionally the mist condenses, the rain patters down, you catch a glimpse of far-off mountaintops, and suppose the entire landscape will soon be bathed in sunshine. But no, a new inrush of illustrative facts takes place, and all is fog again. There is a great deal of good writing in the book, and it leaves nothing to be desired in the way of advanced sentiment. But we fail to perceive its bearing upon the progress of ideas. It may flatter a superficial scientific optimism, but it will obstruct rather than promote the interests