regions of abstract imagination,. where the bodily eye cannot follow, but where that of the seer is gifted with a 'pervading vision."" CHAPTER LXXIV.-MISCELLANEOUS. Under the Palms. 1. I knew a palm-tree upon Capri." It stood in select society of shining fig-leaves and lustrous oleanders; it overhung the balcony, and so looked, far overleaning, down upon the blue Mediterranean. Through the dream-mists of southern Italian noons it looked up the broad bay of Naples and saw vague Vesuvius melting away; or at sunset the isles of the Sirens, whereon they singing sat, and wooed Ulysses as he sailed by. From the Sorrento, where Tasso was born, it looked across to pleasant Posilippo, where Virgil is buried, and to stately Ischia. The palm of Capri saw all that was fairest and most famous in the bay of Naples. of 2. The palm was a poet,—as all palms are poets. When I asked a bard whom I knew what the palm-tree sang in its melancholy measures of waving, he told me that not Vesuvius, nor the Sirens, nor Sorrento, nor Tasso, nor Virgil, nor stately Ischia, nor all the broad blue beauty of Naples bay, was the theme of that singing. But partly it sang a river forever flowing, and of cloudless skies, and green 'fields that never faded, and the mournful music of waterwheels, and the wild monotony of a tropical life,—and partly of the yellow silence of the Desert, and of drear solitudes inaccessible, and of wandering caravans, and lonely men. 3. Then it sang of gardens overhanging rivers that roll gorgeous-shored through Western fancies-of gardens in Bagdad watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris, whereof a See "Naples and Vicinity," Fifth Reader, p. 132. it was the fringe and darling ornament-of oases in those serc sad deserts, where it over-fountained fountains, and every leaf was blessed ;—more than all, it sang of the great Orient universally, where no other tree was so abundant, so loved, and so beautiful. 4. Palm branches were strewn before Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem, and forever, since, the palm symbolizes peace. Wherever a grove of palms waves in the low moonlight or starlight wind, it is the celestial choir chanting "peace on earth, good will to men." Therefore it is the foliage of the old religious pictures. Mary sits under a palm, and the saints converse under palms, and the prophets prophesy in their shade, and cherubs float with palms over the martyr's agony. Nor among pictures is there any more beautiful than Correggio's "Flight into Egypt," wherein the golden-haired angels put aside the palm branches, and smile sunnily through upon the lovely mother and the lovely child. 5. The palm is the chief tree in religious remembrance and religious art. It is the chief tree in romance and poetry. But its sentiment is always Eastern, and it always yearns for the East. In the West it is an exile, and pines in the most sheltered gardens. Yet of all Western shores it is happiest in Sicily; for Sicily is only a bit of Africa drifted westward. There is a soft Southern strain in the Sicilian skies, and the palms drink its sunshine like dew. Upon the tropical plain behind Palermo, among the sun-sucking aloes, and the thick, shapeless cactuses, like elephants and rhinoceroses enchanted into foliage, it grows ever gladly. For the aloe is of the East, and the prickly pear; and upon the Sicilian plain the Saracens have been, and the palm sees the Arabian arch, and the Oriental signmanual stamped upon the land. 6. But the palms are not only poets, they are prophets as well. They are like heralds sent forth upon the farthest points to celebrate to the traveller the glories they fore show. Like spring birds, they sing a summer unfading, and climes where Time wears the year as a queen a rosary of diamonds. The mariner, eastward sailing, hears tidings from the chance palms that hang along the southern Italian shore. They call out to him across the gleaming calm of a Mediterranean noon, "Thou happy mariner, our souls sail with thee." 7. In the land of Egypt, palms are perpetual. They are the only foliage of the Nile, for we will not harm the modesty of a few mimosas and sycamores by foolish claims. They are the shade of the mud villages, marking their site in the landscape, so that the groups of palms are the number of the villages. They fringe the shore and the horizon. The sun sets golden behind them, and birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float glorious among their trunks; the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade; and the yellow flowers of the cotton-plant star its dusk at evening. The children play under them, and the old men crone and smoke, the donkeys graze, and there the surly bison and the conceited camels repose. 8. The eye never wearies of palms, more than the ear of singing birds. Solitary they stand upon the sand, or upon the level fertile land in groups, with a grace and dignity that no tree surpasses. Very soon the eye beholds, in their forms, the original type of the columns which it will afterwards admire in the temples. Almost the first palm is architecturally suggestive, even in Western gardens-but to artists living among them and seeing only them! Men's hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs. The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing. So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion.-George William Curtis. CHAPTER LXXV.-JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.-1808. I.-Biographical. 1. The hostility of the Puritans to the Quakers did not prevent the latter from settling, in considerable numbers, on the banks of the Merrimac River in Massachusetts, where, at Haverhill, was born the subject of this notice, whose father was a Quaker. He spent his boyhood and youth on his father's farm, and, in accordance with the thrifty traditions of the time, he learned, in the winter, to make shoes. On coming of age, he went to Boston to edit a newspaper, spent the succeeding year at Hartford in a similar position, and then returned to the Haverhill farm. He represented his native town in the Massachusetts legislature, and in 1836 became the secretary of an anti-slavery society, and removed to Philadelphia to edit an abolition paper. In 1840 he removed to Amesbury, in his native State. 2. Whittier is one of the most popular and familiarlyknown of American poets. This is not owing to the artistic finish or the magnitude of his works, for he allows himself great license in versification, and has seldom gone beyond lyrical and short epic and pastoral idyls. His merits consist in the use of idiomatic Saxon, a fervor and energy of expression which give a lyrical character to nearly all his poems, and a passionate sympathy with both civil and religious freedom, with toil, and with fidelity to personal experiences and convictions. Seldom has his pen been moved except by some moral enthusiasm which his homely fervor makes contagious. As the distinguished and beloved Dr. Channing, of Boston, once said, "His poetry bursts from the soul with the fire and energy of an ancient prophet; and his noble simplicity of character is the delight of all who know him." 3. The poet has commemorated many local legends, notably those of New England. In Mr. Tuckerman's opinion, "there is a prophetic anathema and a bard-like invocation in some of his poems. He is a true son of New England, and beneath the calm, fraternal bearing of the Quaker he nurses the imaginative ardor of a devotee, both of nature and humanity." Whittier tells something of his own history, and expresses his sympathy with lowly child-life, in that home-like poem entitled II. The Barefoot Boy. 1. Blessings on thee, little man, Through thy torn brim's jaunty grace; From my heart I give thee joy,- Prince thou art,—the grown-up man Let the million-dollared ride! 2. O for boyhood's painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, |