For it tells of the departed, By the iron hand of Time. But the blow of the destroyer, And the memory of loved ones, Spirit Voices! Spirit Voices! They will often sing to me, When the drifting sun is sinking Like a golden ship at sea. When the little stars rise upward, Spirit Voices! Spirit Voices! When Life's fire light flickers dim, They'll be chanting, ever chanting To my soul a Vesper Hymn. Till an Angel leads it slowly, And the blessed Spirit Land. EGO!!! "Whims, fancies, semi-intuitions, embryo-conceptions."-CHARLES LAMB. IV. "HISTORY," Somebody has said," is a stupendous lie." We are not prepared to admit the whole of this charge, but there is too much reason for it, nevertheless. We cannot believe that all which history relates is false, but we are equally unable to entertain the conviction that all its statements are true. There may be, and there doubtless is much truth in history, but just as truly are some of its pages only records of lies. The historian has too frequently mistaken the true object of history, and has palmed off upon us his own warped and onesided views, while his only business should have been to give us a candid statement of the several facts, just as they occurred. Perfection, we do not expect to find in any man, and we ought not to look for it in the historian,—but we do expect, and we have a right to demand, that he should lay aside his prejudices and give us a record of men and things as they are;—that he should give things their right names and not call that true which anything but the mere circumstances in which he happens to be placed, would show him to be false. If he cannot do this, he had better let the matter alone entirely. We had rather remain in ignorance of the truth than to know only what is false. Justice moreover to the actors in the scenes of which he treats requires him to be silent concerning them or else give us only the true part which they played. This may be a hard matter and it is rarely done, but it is what we have a right to expect from every one who undertakes to chronicle the doings of the age in which he lives. The historian should place himself in the situation of the men whose characters he would delineate, and must try to think as they thought and to feel as they felt, so that the picture which he holds up to our view may be a living scene from life's drama where the real actors are moving and acting out their parts just as they did act when they lived and moved among men. The oversight of this principle is exhibited in the history of Charles V. and more particularly in the accounts which have come down to us of the life and times of the great Protector. Who that reads the early histories of Cromwell ;-that sees this great apostle of toleration loaded down with all the odium which narrow-minded bigotry could heap upon him,-that beholds age after age reverencing the tales which his enemies have put forth in their bitter malice and prejudice, and will not say that history with all her sober statements, may yet grossly belie the characters of which she treats. If history has not held out to our view a false character of Cromwell, then we know not what a false chara ter is. His enemies who hated him, simply because he was right and they were wrong;-his enemies who unburied his bones and vented their rage upon his senseless corpse ;-his enemies, who during his life, had trembled at the bare mention of his name-these are they who have given the world its histories of Oliver Cromwell. They have ventured to call Oliver Cromwell a hypocrite and a liar; -they have branded him as an apostate and a usurper, they have heaped upon him all the odium that could rest upon narrow minded bigotry and low ambition; while some have dared to name him a weak man, raised up to fill an important place by the force of circumstances. These are the Englishman's histories of one of the purest and the greatest souls that ever honored England as its birth place. These are their views of the character of a man, who two hundred years ago, ran a conquering career almost unsurpassed in history ;of a man from whose one solitary mind went forth a power which changed the destinies of England and brightened the history of the world; of a man who gave an onward impulse to human freedom and sped the cause of toleration more than all the hosts that had lived and died before him ;-of a man, who, when England was tottering with anarchy and confusion, made her interests the object of his untiring energy, and took her up on his strong arms and carried her, till he placed her first among the nations of the earth. This is Cromwell; this is the Puritan Round-head, who has been reviled and ridiculed almost without exception, by historians down to the present time. But we do not intend to attempt to justify the Protector, we did not intend to write so much upon the subject when we took up our pen. Cromwell needs not our justification, nor that of any one. He justifies himself. His letters and speeches on religious subjects, are perfect jewels in their way. "They are" says Carlyle, " coruscations terrible as lightning and beautiful as lightning from the innermost temple of the human soul, intimations still credible of what a hu man soul does mean when it believes in the Highest." They show a genial warmth dwelling ever in the heart of the stern old Puritan, and tell us that though he was at times terrible as the lion, he could yet be meek and gentle as the lamb. They are like a gleam of sunshine, resting upon the bosom of the thunder cloud, lighting up the dark birth-place of the tempest and making it smile with its own heaven born radiance. V Reader have you ever seen the Princess? Not Adelaide, nor Alice Maud Mary, nor any of those in whose veins the blood royal is now coursing, do we mean;-no, but Tennyson's Princess,-his story of the fair Ida who lived in days of barbarism years ago, when it was maintained, that, with equal husbandry The woman were an equal to the man." We suppose you have seen it, perchance read it, if so, what think you of it? Metaphysical young ladies have pronounced it "vewy nice;"-lisping young gentlemen have laid down the book and exclaimed "thplendid,"-the "nice young man" who waits on old ladies to "lectures" and "negro educational meetings," has called it the revival of true poetry ;-the critics have chuckled over it and praised it to the highest heaven, while edition after edition sold off in rapid succession, has bid fair to make the fortunes of the booksellers by its frequent reprisals upon the pockets of this reading age. Every body spoke highly of it, and so we got the book. Unlike Sydney Smith, we read it before we once thought of reviewing it, and having read it, our feelings were as we shut up its pages-disappointment unmitigated. At first, we were impatient of the slow work which the ivory made in separating the leaves, but we soon felt no disposition to hurry it. As for poetry, it is our opinion that the specimens of it are few and far between in the Princess. It professes to be a medley, and so it is, but a medley of the "blankest sort of verse" with the tamest kind of poetry. But we do not propose to review the book in these "Jottings Down"-far from it. It has been reviewed already times innumerable, and we are not at all anxious to add to the number of useless *Vide Nat. Hist. of Bores. |