silence with the roar of their struggle "), | serene and godlike. Witness, too, his picFather Ishmael shall be a sheikh of honor,ture of the tombs of the kings at Thebes but of dominion no longer, and sit turbaned of the Memnonium — of Karnak, “older in the chimney corner, while his hatted* than history, yet fresh, as if just ruined for heirs rule the house and the children clus- the romantic," as though Cambyses and his ter around him, fascinated with his beautiful Persians had marched upon Memphis only traditions, and curiously comparing their last week-and of the Sphinx, grotesque little black shoes with his red slippers. darling of the desert," its bland gaze serious and sweet," a voice inaudible seeming to trail from its thinned and thinning lips,' declaring its riddle still unread, while its eyes are expectantly settled towards the East, whence they dropped not "when Cambyses or Napoleon came.

66

What an open eye, nevertheless, our tourist has for the sublime and beautiful in Egyptian life, or life in death, may be seen in every section of his sketch-book. Witness his description of the temples at Aboo Simbel, and the solemn session there of kingly colossi figures of Rameses the Great, breathing grandeur and godly grace the stillness of their beauty steeped in a placid passion, that seems passionlessness - the beautiful balance of serene wisdom, and the beautiful bloom of eternal youth in their faces, with no trace there of the possibility of human emotion ta type of beauty alone in sculpture,

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fort be allowed to displace the turban. It will seem, if turban be rejected for hat, that the heads of men are thickened, rather than their thoughts widened, by the process of the suns. For we hold, with the lively author of " Esthetics of Dress," that the hat is one of the strangest

vestimental anomalies of the nineteenth century:

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--

Young America is much given to Carlylish phraseology, and Mr Curtis deals largely on his own account in this questionable line. This is one of the "conceits" which prejudice many against him. He loves to repeat, in the Latter-day Pamphleteer's fashion, certain compound epithets, indifferently felicitous at times, of his own coinage-as "Bunyan's Pilots," "Poet Harriet " (scil. Miss Marti*Lamentable will it be, if the hat lasts a para-neau)," beaming elderly John Bull," "Rev. mount fashion until that time of day-and a Dr. Duck," "Mutton Suet," and "Wind shame it will be to the arbiters of taste, to every and Rain. This habit of "calling names living "Glass of fashion and mould of form," has set many a matter-of-fact reader against if that monstrous device of ugliness and discomhim. More, however, have taken exception to his prolonged description of the dancinggirls of Esue a voluptuous theme, on which tis pity that chapter after chapter should find him "still harping," with voluntary and variations not attuned to healthy English "What a covering! what a termination to the taste. But it is a mistake to pronounce him capital of that pillar of the creation, Man! what all levity and quicksilver to deny him a an ungraceful, mis-shapen, useless, and uncomfort- heart that can ache with deep feeling, or a able appendage to the seat of reason- the brain- brain that can throb with generous and elebox! Does it protect the head from either heat, vated thought. Capricious he is, and eccencold, or wet? Does it set off any natural beauty tric, waywardly independent in outspoken of the human cranium? Are its lines in har-habits-dashingly reckless in his flights of mony with, or in becoming contrast to, the expressive features of the face? Is it," &c. &c. In the fancy, and quaintly exaggerated in his parts single article of head-gear we should have hotly of speech; but they must have read him very sympathized with that Disraelitish youth, of superficially, or in some translation of their whom Charles Lamb asked, in the parting scram- own, who overhear not, amid his fantasies, a ble for hats, what he had done with his turban ? still sad music of humanity, an earnestness, + Mr. Curtis' impressions of Egyptian sculpture remind us of a passage in the English Opium-eat- a sober sadness, a yearning sympathy with er's writings, in reference to the Memnon's head, Richter's trinity, the Good, the Beautiful, and which, then recently brought from Egypt, struck the True. him as "simply the sublimest sight which in this The Howadji of the Nile Notes appeared sight-seeing world he had seen." Regarding it as next, and in continuation, as the "Wanderer not a human but as a symbolic head, he read there, in Syria." He tells us that, of the Eastern he tells us, "First the peace which passeth all understanding. Secondly: the eternity which tours without number of learned and poetic baffles and confounds all faculty of computation; men, with which he is acquainted, the most, the eternity which had been, the eternity which either despairing of imparting the true Orienwas to be. Thirdly the diffusive love, not such tal flavor to their works (thinking, perhaps, as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, that Eastern enthusiasm must needs exhale in not such as sinks and swells by undulations of the record, as the Neapolitans declare that time, but a procession - -an emanation from some the Lachrymae Christi can have the genuine mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated from the lips, the radiation flavor only in the very Vesuvian vineyard

:

was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations or
memorials of flesh.
The atmosphere
was the breathlessness which belongs to a saintly
trance; the holy thing seemed to live by silence."
Surely the Memnon's head must have been a sub-
lime and oft-recurring presence in the Opium-

eater's dreams. and a national set-off, we would hope, against the horrors of being kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles (see "Confessions"), and lost with unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

where it grows) or hugging some forlorn | was Mac Whirter-held in semi-contempt, hope that the reader's imagination will warm semi-abhorrence by the Howadji, as indeed the dry bones of detail into life-do in effect the camel species at large seems to be; for write their books as bailiffs take an inventory he regards them as "strange demoniac of attached furniture: "Item.-One great animals," and describes, apparently with a pyramid, four hundred and ninety-eight feet shudder, their amorphous and withered frame, high. Item.- One tomb in a rock, with two and their level-lidded, unhuman, and repulbushels of mummy dust. Item. - Two hun- sive eyes. The name, "ship of the desert," dred and fifty miles over a desert. Item. he accepts, however, and dilates upon, as One grotto at Bethlehem, and contents, to suggestively true. The strings of camels perwit: ten golden lamps, twelve silver ditto, petually passing through the streets of Cairo, twenty yards of tapestry, and a marble pave- threading the murmurous city life with the ment. Let no student of statistics, there- desert silence, he likens to mariners in tarfore, let no auctioneer's catalogue-loving paulins and pea-jackets, who roll through the soul, let no consulting actuary, addicted to streets of seaports and assert the sea. And tables and figures, — let no political econo-in the desert itself, not only is the camel the mist, no census-taking censor, no sturdy means of navigation, but his roll is like that prosaist, look for a kindred spirit in this of a vessel, and his long, flexible neck like a Howadji, or for mémoires pour servir, service- pliant bowsprit.* able memorabilia, in his picturesque pages. The Howadji found Mac Whirter's neck too His avowed object is, not to state a fact, but long and flexible by half, when, in his first to impart an impression. His creed is that desert days, he thought to alter the direction the Arabian Nights and Hafiz are more valua- of the beast by pulling the halter (instead of ble for their practical communication of the touching the side of his neck with a stick), spirit and splendor of oriental life, than all and found, to his consternation, that he only the books of Eastern travel ever written.* drew the long neck quite round, so that the And he affirms the existence of an abiding great stupid head was almost between his charm in those books of travel only which knees, and the hateful eyes stared mockingly are faithful records of individual experience, at his own." The weariness and tedium of under the condition, always, that the indi- this kind of locomotion are vividly described vidual has something characteristic and its continuous rock, rock jerk, jerk - till dramatic in his organization-heroic in you are sick of the thin, withered slip of a adventure, or of graceful and accurate culti-tail in front, and the gaunt, stiff movement vation-with a nature en rapport with the nature of the land he visits.

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of the shapeless, tawny legs before you while the sluggish path trails through a defile of glaring sand, whose sides just contemptuously obstruct your view, and exasperate you because they are low and of no fine outline. Wearied and fevered in the desert of Arabia, the sun becomes Mandragora, and you sleep. And lo! the pomp of a wintry landscape dazzles your awaking the sweeps and drifts of the sand-hills among which you are winding have the sculpturesque grace of snow. Up rises a seeming lake, circled with low, melancholy hills, bare, like the rock-setting of mountain tarns; and over the whole broods the death of wintry silence. The Howadji's picture of Jerusalem, the "Joy of the whole Earth," is comparatively tame. The Beth"lehem grotto forms a high-colored piece

From Cairo to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Damascus, the wanderer meanders (not maunders) on, in his "brilliant, picturesque, humorous and poetic manner. The people he discusses are, some of them, the same as those known in "Nile Notes". though they come out" with less power, and with fewer salient points. A new, and mark-worthy, acquaintance we form in the instance of Mac Whirter. And who is Mac Whirter? A bailie from the Salt-market? or a bagman from a Paisley house? or a writer from Charlotte-square? or a laird from the wilds of Ross? or a red-whiskered halfpay of the Scots' Greys? Nay; Mac Whirter is our Howadji's ship of the desert,' poetically speaking; or, in plain prose, his camel; the great, scrawny, sandy, bald back of whose head, and his general rusty toughness and clumsiness, insensibly begot for him in his rider's mind this Carlylish appellative. An immense and formidable brute

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*Of which books he pronounces Eothen certainly the best, as being brilliant, picturesque, humorous, and poetic. Yet he complains of even Eothen that its author is a cockney, who never puts off the Englishman, and is suspicious of his own enthusiasm, which, therefore, sounds a little exaggerated.

gorgeous with silver and golden lamps, with vases and heavy tapestries, with marbles and ivories -dim with the smoke of incense, and thick with its breath. In the hush of sudden splendor it is the secret cave of Alaed-deen, and you have rubbed the precious

The marine analogy in question was strengthened and fixed forever by one of Mr. Curtis' fellow-pilgrims, a German, who, he tells us, "with the air of a man who had not slept, and to whom the West-Oestlicher Divan was of small account, went off in the gray dawn, sea-sick upon hia camel."

tion

-

at

lamp." The Jordan winds imposing through | pleads for youth's privilege to love the lotus, these pages the "beautiful, bowery Jor- and thrive upon it; saying, "Let Zeno dan". its swift, turbid stream eddying frown. Philosophy, common sense, and rethrough its valley course, defying its death signation, are but synonyms of submission to with eager motion, and with the low gurgling the inevitable. I dream my dream. Men song of living water fringed by balsam whose hearts are broken, and whose faith poplars, willows, and oleanders, that shrink falters, discover that life is a warfare, and from the inexorable plain behind it, and clus- chide the boy for loitering along the seater into it with trembling foliage, and arch it shore, and loving the stars. But leave him, with green, as if tree and river had sworn for- inexorable elders, in the sweet entanglement lorn friendship in that extremity of solitude. of the trailing clouds of glory' with which The Dead Sea lies before us like molten lead; he comes into the world. Have no fear that lying under the spell, not of Death, but of they will remain and dim his sight. Those Insanity for its desolation is not that of morning vapors fade away you have learned pure desert, and that is its awfulness. The it. And they will leave him chilled, philoVale of Zabulon comes in triumphant relief; sophical, and resigned, in the light of flowers set, like stars, against the solemn common day'-you have proved it. But do night of foliage; the broad plain flashing not starve him to-day, because he will have with green and gold, state-livery of the royal no dinner to-morrow." And these eldern year; the long grasses languidly overleaning sages are reminded, that the profoundest winding water-courses, indicated only by a thinkers of them all have discovered an inmore luxuriant line of richness; the blooming scrutable sadness to be the widest horizon of surfaces of nearer hills, and the distant blue life, and that the longing eye is more sympamistiness of mountains, walls, and bulwarks thetic with nature, than the shallow stare of of the year's garden, melting in the haze, practical scepticism of truth and beauty. sculptured in the moonlight, firm as relics of The "mixed mood" of our Wanderera fore-world in the celestial amber of clear once pointedly indicative, tenderly optative, afternoons. We coast the Sea of Galilee vaguely infinitive-passes through a strange embosomed in profound solitude and moun-conjugation: sometimes he sneers, sometimes tainous sternness; and scrutinize its popula- is almost caught suppressing a sob, often a -the men in sordid rags, with long sigh. He is sarcastic upon tourist Angloelfish earlocks, a wan and puny aspect, and a Catholics at the Calvary Chapel, "holding kind of drivelling leer and cunning in the eye candles, and weeping profusely - and upon -"a singular combination of Boz's Fagin the Mount Zion Protestant mission, by which and Carlyle's Apes of the Dead Sea; -the "the tribes of Israel are gathered into the women, however, even comely, with fair round fold at the rate of six, and in favorable years, faces of Teutonic type, and clad in the eight converts per annum." He is pathetic coarse substantiality of the German female on the solicitude of Mary, at the fountain of costume." Longingly and lingeringly we El Bir, when she discovered, on her homegaze on Damascus, the "Eye of the East" ward route, that the child Jesus had tarried - whose clustering minarets and spires, as in Jerusalem- and it is her mournful figure of frosted flame, glitter above the ambrosial that there haunts his imagination - Madarkness of endless groves and gardens; the donna, elected of the Lord to be the mother metropolis of romance, and the well-assured of the Saviour, and yet, blessed above women, capital of oriental hope; on the way to no to taste little maternal joy, to feel that He Christian province, and therefore unpurged would never be a boy, and, with such sorrow of virgin picturesqueness by western trade. as no painter has painted, and no poet sung, Each Damascus house is a paradise —each to know that even already He must be about interior a poem set to music, a dream-palace, His Father's business. He is serious on the such a pavilion as Tennyson has built in sanctity of Jerusalem - in whose precincts melody for Haroun El Raschid. In this way the image of its great King in the mind perdoth the Howadji etch his Wanderings in petually rebukes whatever is not lofty and Syria. sincere in your thoughts, and sternly requires reality of all feeling exhibited there; for, though in Rome you can tolerate tinsel, because the history of the faith there, and its ritual, are a kind of romance, it is intolerable in Jerusalem, where, in the presence of the same landscape, and within the same walls, you have a profound personal feeling and reverence for the Man of Sorrows.

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His characteristic enthusiasm, scepticism, sentiment and satire, might be illustrated from many a passage. Thus, in Gaza, city which he had vaguely figured to himself, when a child he listened wondering to the story of Samson, Sunday came to him" with the old Sabbath feeling, with that spirit of devotional stillness in the air which broods over our home Sundays, irksome by their sombre gravity to the boy, but remembered by the man with sweet sadness." Thus he

And closely in keeping with his tone of thought is the finale-the Nunc Dimittis he calls it - of his wanderings, when he pires

himself homeward bound, receding over the summer sea, and watching the majesty of Lebanon robing itself in purple darkness, and lapsing into memory, until night and the past have gently withdrawn Syria from his view - then sighing that the East can be no longer a dream, but a memory-feeling that the rarest romance of travel is now ended grieving that no wealth of experience equals the dower of hope, because

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thought and feeling colors and warms every page, and sustains its predominance by frequent citations from his favorite minstrels. Thus we find him again and again quoting whole pieces from Herrick, and introducing Uhland's Rhine ballad, Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee" -and Heine's tenderlyphrased legend of Lorelei-and tid-bits from Wordsworth's Yarrow, and Tennyson's Princess, and Longfellow's Waif, and Keats' What's won is done, Joy's soul lies in the doing-Rose!" and Charles Lamb's "Gipsy's MalNightingale, and Waller's "Go, lovely and, as a snow-peak of Lebanon glances through the moonlight like a star, fearing lest the poet sang more truly than he knew, and in another sense,

ison," and George Herbert, and Shelley, and Browning, and Charles Kingsley,* and (for is not he also among the poets?) Thomas de Quincey. Being no longer on eastern ground, the author's style is, appropriately enough, far more subdued and prosaic than when it was the exponent of a Howadji; yet of brilliant and rhapsodical passages there is no lack. His characteristic vein of reflection, too, pursues its course as of old-and the blood thereof, which is the life thereof, will repay extraction.† American as he is, to the core, he by no means contends that the homescenery he depicts is entitled to "whip creation." Indeed, both implicitly and explicitly his creed in this respect is a little independ

*The lines, namely, in "Alton Locke," beginning

O Mary, go and call the cattle home,

which certainly have a pictorial power and a wild suggestive music, all their own- and of which Mr. Curtis justly says: "Who that feels the penetrating pathos of the song but sees the rain-shroud, the straggling nets, and the loneliness of the beach? There is no modern verse of more tragic reality."

We are here too stinted for room to apply the lancet with effect. But in illustration of the aphoristic potentiality ('w' noç' einer) of the lotos-eater, we may refer to his wise contempt for

Give us long rest or death, dark death or dream- an indiscriminate eulogy of travelling, as though

ful ease.

scep

But this Summer Book" is, in fact, a
record of Mr. Curtis' summer tour among the
hills and lakes of his native land. The lotos-
eater is a shrewd and satirical, as well as
poetical observer, who steams it up the Hud-
son, and ridicules the outer womanhood of the
chambermaid at Catskill, and reveals how the
Catskill Fall is turned on to accommodate
parties of pleasure, and criticizes dress and
manner and dinner at Saratoga, and is
tical where others are enthusiastic at Lake
George, and impatiently notes the polka-
dancing and day-long dawdling of Newport,
with its fast horses, fast men, and fast
women,its whirl of fashionable equipages,
its ccnfused din of "hop" music, scandal,
flirtation, serenades, and supreme voice of the
sea breaking through the fog and dust. Not
that the prevailing tone, however, is ironical.
On the contrary, his own poetical habit of

it involved an opus operatum grace and merit of its
own-saying, "A mile horizontally on the sur-
face of the earth does not carry you one inch
towards its centre, and yet it is in the centre that
the gold mines are. A man who truly knows
Shakspeare only, is the master of a thousand who
have squeezed the circulating libraries dry."
stamp: "Any great natural object
The following, again, has the true Emerson
-a cataract,
an alp, a storm at sea- are seed too vast for any
sudden flowering. They lie in experience mould-
ing life. At length the pure peaks of noble aims
and the broad flow of a generous manhood betray
that in some happy hour of youth you have seen
the Alps and Niagara."

One more, and a note-worthy excerpt: "He is a tyro in the observation of nature who does not know that, by the sea, it is the sky-cape, and not the landscape, in which enjoyment lies. If a man dwelt in the vicinity of beautiful inland scenery, yet near the sea, his horse's head would be turned haustless in interest as in beauty, while, in the daily to the ocean, for the sea and sky are excomparison, you soon drink up the little drop of: satisfaction in fields and trees.”