LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 476.-2 JULY, 1853. CONTENTS. 1. America from the Cosmopolitical Point of View, British Quarterly Review, 3 17 21 From the German of Karl Gutzkow, 31 Blackwood's Magazine,. 49 POETRY: The Little Straw Hat-Activity in the Royal Dockyards, 1; The Age of Patience A Swell's Homage to Mrs. Stowe, 2; Omnipotence, 30; Sun and Shadow, 48; Song by Barry Cornwall, 63. SHORT ARTICLES: Tennyson's Oriana - Portable Homes, 2; Dr. Dunlop Canine Mad- THE LITTLE STRAW HAT. And I hear the tones which in heaven have birth 'Tis a dear little hat, and it hangs there still-O, call him not back to this saddened earth! And its voice of the past bids our heart-strings thrill, For it seems like a shadow of days passed o'er, Of the bright one who that hat once wore. 'Tis a dear little hat, for each simple braid To the grateful taste of his youthful mind. Ay, the hat is the same, but it shades no more Sad memories they are; o'er their quivering strings Each breath of the by-gone a tremor flings, hand From Punch. ACTIVITY IN THE ROYAL DOCKYARDS. I STOOD in Portsmouth, on the Dockyard ground, I was mistaken; things pursued their course I saw nine men uniting all their force I saw four others working at a mast; I saw two horses drag a single stone; At scarce two miles an hour their pace I fix, Though by one horse the job could have been done Not at two miles an hour, but five or six. Yet Portsmouth boasts, they say, a model yard; We've heard that story many a time and oft; But he who henceforth thinks they're working hard At Portsmouth Dockyard, will be precious soft. 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 ear; only by the poet himself. Entirely disclaim But ills and woes he may not cure Angel of Patience! sent to calm Our feverish brow with cooling balm ; 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. HARWIETBEECHASTOWE. 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 A countess would pasist, last night, She wished to know if I admiawd Whethaw A didn'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, 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. - From the British Quarterly Review. White, Red, Black: Sketches of Society in the 1853. AMERICA has been written about, and written about, till we have a perfect library of volumes treating of American society and its peculiarities. Yet the subject is far from being exhausted. There is, in particular, one quite new point of view from which America is only now beginning to be regarded, and from which it presents aspects not yet familiar even to those who are best acquainted with its social statistics. which they lived and labored was a mere of so vast a body-politic. The America for 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 to the virtual proprietorship of an entire conthe general affairs of the world, which belongs tinent. 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 must be looked at. is the new point of view from which America the attention of speculative politicians to this Among the things which have awakened new view of the place and duty of America in the general affairs of the earth, the most important by far has been Kossuth's trip across the Atlantic. The very purpose of the visit of the great Hungarian was to expound to America, more clearly than she could do herself, her place and mission among the contemporary nations. be more appropriately discussed than in conNor can this question nexion with a book written by two of Kossuth's personal friends, who accompanied him on his visit, and whose impressions of American society were determined in the main by this very idea of what America could do if she were to let herself loose among the nations as a force of change and rectification. In the volumes before us, it is true, there are sketches of American society in various other aspects, and even criticisms of American manners and customs, as they appeared to minds capable of judging them by the highest standard of European refinement; but, on the whole, the matter of the volumes, and certainly their greatest merit, consists, not in social criticisms for the behoof of America itself, but in what is suggested and implied as to the function of America in a cosmopolitical point of view. It is to this part of the subject that Mr. Pulszky chiefly addresses himself in the portions of the book to which he containing what may be called the gossip of lays claim; the less disquisitional portions, Kossuth's progress through America, and the cursory delineations of American manners as they attracted the remark of the Hungarian visitors, come more appropriately from the pen of Madame Pulszky. What with the disquisition, and what with the gossip, the work is one of very great interest. Hitherto that which has most interested the rest of the world in the great transatlantic republic has been its history as a part of the carth disconnected from the other and older parts, a theatre where an independent civilization has sprung up under new and remarkable conditions. At the time when Franklin and Washington were born, there were, perhaps, not more than half a million of individuals in the British colonies of America; and now the community formed by that half million and their immediate descendants, has swelled into a vast nation of twenty millions, possessing a continent over which its energies may expatiate for generations to come, organized on a basis of political arrangements such as the world has never seen before, and pervaded throughout its entire mass by sentiments, customs, and institutions, developed, it is true, out of germs taken from old Europe, but developed with a very extraordinary difference. To describe the constitution of this youngest addition to the great family of nations, to trace the successive steps by which it has become what it is, and to derive from its example hints for the instruction of older societies, have already been the laudable aims of many European writers and political theorists. But the world is beginning to be struck with an entirely new idea in reference to America. It begins to be felt that this reservoir, which has been gradually filling, has now reached such a point of fulness that it is very likely to run over. that this great accumulation of the race on a It begins to be felt new theatre, and under new conditions, has not been going on for nothing; that it is not any longer as a mere spectacle that America claims the interest of the cisatlantic nations; but that, having served long enough as a passive illustration of the working of certain principles and forms of government, she is rousing herself even now for a work of aggression and propagandism. For the America of to-day is theoretical study of the civilization and desThe first thing to be attended to, in a not the America of Washington and Jefferson; tinies of any people, is the nature of the nor can the maxims of these men serve any geographical theatre which they occupy, or longer as the adequate breath and inspiration over which they are to expatiate; and wo 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 Pyrences, 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. face, 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 towards the south run the rivers of India, the | language, which will also be common to the Indus and Ganges, with their tributaries; to- outstanding blacks. Whether the blacks, wards the west, the Oxus and Jaxartes; and too, will ultimately be incorporated in this north to the Arctic Seas, the four great rivers amalgam is a problem of the future. Of the of Siberia. During fifty centuries, as now, the ethnographical constituents as they now Alps and the Hindukush have proved inseparable stand, the Anglo-Saxons are indubitably in barriers to the amalgamation of nations around the ascendant. A claim, indeed, has recently their bases, and dwelling in the valleys which radiate from their slopes. The continent of been advanced in favor of the Celts; and it Africa, as far as we know the details of its surhas 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. 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. 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 nant. 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 nationality also comprehending within its bosom, though it does not civilly acknowledge, an immense population of Africans. In some parts of the Union there are still considerable knots of some of these races undissolved into the general mass-Spaniards, for example, 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 If the result is to be a fusion of all the races into one, what are the true combining proportions of the races, as they now are? If the result is to be a confederacy, on what principle of proportionate value are the nations to be coördinated? The mere attempt to consider such questions inevitably leads the 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 |