How torn and maimed I've been I'll tell in brief, And then how passed along from thief to thief. "Twill seem incredible; but once I set off at a gallop round, And traversed all the world full speed; I lost my balance and I fell down smack Then was a rumpus and a row; Men of all nations, greatest, least, My ruin to complete just then, Or may be later, an M. D.,' Poured down some thousand thousand miles, Leaving his drugs and shop, rushed forth; Led by the Devil and a priest: Some caught the leg, some held the tasselled tie; And "touch and take" was on all sides the cry. A priest, regardless of the faith, Helped or unhelped would put me on, Theu found I did not fit his foot, So let me out to any one; And thus at last in the first comer's hands A German braggart with the priest Full many a time I've seen him flee. Again he hither came; but sore of foot; Nor has he ever yet quite donned the Boot. Unworn for one whole age or more, Then pulled on by a merchant plain, He greased me fresh, and made me trot To the Levant and back again. Unpolished, true;-but not one jot I failed, With rare good hobs and sparables well nailed. The merchant throve; then thought it right I wore the spur, the fleece of gold; Change followed change, that now I plainly see, That my first nails were far the best for me. I had nor rip nor wrinkle then; A proverbial expression, signifying barefoot. Upon my upper leathers he To help my case devised intrigues and lies, Whose web was woven for three centuries. He polished, gimcracked me all o'er, And with emollients, glosses rare, He rubbed me till I lost my skin; And he who had me next in care Still doctored me according to the rule Of that iniquitous and cursed school. Thus tossed about from hand to hand, Who played the "Devil and Baker's" game. Don Quixote proved at length the lucky wight; But rent and ridiculed he held me tight. Who saw me on the Spaniard's foot, Though greased and varnish-daubed, and styled, "Chiarissimo - "Illustrissimo." But on the sly he used the file so sore, That I was left more ragged than before. Thenceforth each one at his own will Rogues, Bullies, Barons, great and small, To torture me had each a new idea, "Et diviserunt vestimenta mea." Sicilian Vespers. 3 Berlicche. A grotesque character of Italian farce, who stands open-mouthed and looks like a fool. The allusion is to the famous scene between Pietro Capponi and Charles the Eighth. The Medici. Thus shuffled on from hoof to hoof Of each untutored clownish brute, I've come to lose the olden print Of that upright, well-planted foot, On which, without one single crooked tread, The circuit of the Universe I made. O wretched boot! I must confess One foolish plan has me undone; Of walking with another's legs When it was time to use my own; And more than this, the madness most unmeet, Of hoping change of luck from change of feet. With tears I say it; for I feel Myself all shattered and awry; Earth seems to shake beneath my tread If but one single step I try. By dint of letting bad guides lead me so, I've lost the habit and the power to go. But my worst foes have been the priests, I'd have at certain poets too' Who count their bead-roll nowadays, Christ goes for nothing; the Decretal puts A veto 'gainst the priesthood wearing "boots." Torn and neglected now I lie, And pawed by every dirty hand, Long have I waited for some leg To fill my wrinkles, make me stand; No German leg or Frenchman's be it known, But one within my native country grown. A certain great man's once I tried, Who, had he not gone strolling forth, Might well have boasted he possessed In me the strongest boot on earth. But snowstorms, on his crooked course one day, Froze both his legs just as he got half-way. Refitted on the ancient last And subject to the knife again, Though once of mighty worth and weight, My under-leathers scarce remain; 1 The recently renewed Catholic tendencies in France and Germany have shown themselves also in Italy in the creation of a school of literature. Manzoni, and perhaps Silvio Pellico, etc., are the poets belonging to the class here alluded to. And as for patching holes both new and old, It is not thread nor pegs will make them hold. The cost is dear, the labor long; You must patch over piece by piece; Brush off the dirt in ancient mode, Drive nails and brads; then by degrees Find me but out some man; he'll do, I find myself upon his foot, Should some kind sir, like former men, Presume with me in the old way to treat, We'll give him a sound kick on honor's seat. Translated in Quarterly Review. THE HORIZON. A CONVERSATION BETWEEN A CHILD AND ITS MOTHER. [Franz Franzen was born at Uleaborg, in Finland, in 1772, and was educated at the University of Abo, where he afterward became Librarian and Professor of Literary History. Later he received the living of Kumla in the district of Orebro in Sweden. In 1835 he became incumbent of Santa Clara, in Stockholm; and in 1841 Bishop of Hörnösand, where he died in 1847.] "See! where to earth bends down the sky! To go to Heaven, my mother dear, "Come," said the mother, "no delaying- "How beautiful! This sure must be Eden itself; what fruit! what flowers; And yet-Heaven is not in these bowers, O'er church and moor it seems to flee. Far off, I see the golden cloud With splendor all the village shroud." 2 But mind who the cobbler is. The Earth sang not thy peerless might Amid the heavenly hosts of old; Thou spakest-and from empty night Thou spakest-and with glad devotion, High soared the mountains Then opened out the quiet dale, Then ran the brooks from moorlands brown Along the verdant lea; And the fleet fowls of heaven shot down Into a leafy sea. 'Mid the wild herd's rejoicing throng, The nightingale's accord; All Nature raised its matin song And praised Thee-Nature's Lord: O Thou who wast, and art, and e'er shalt be! Feels grace and wisdom infinite in Thee! And answer gives the sea The fathomless ocean The waste without end, Where in ceaseless commotion Where myriads that live, without count, with out name, Crawling or swimming in strange meander, Fill the deep, as it were, with a quivering flame, Where the heavy whale doth wander Through dumb night's hidden reign. And man, unwearied with earth's wide strife, Still hunts around death's grim domain The over-flood of life. To Thee! to Thee! Thou Sire of all, Our prayers in faith ascend. All things that breathe, both great and small, On Thee alone depend. Thy bounteous hand thou dost unclose, And happiness unstinted flows In streams that know no end. Scotland, about 1836. He says, at the end of his Fourin-Hand in Britain (1880), page 333: "We landed at the Broonilaw (Glasgow), whither father and mother and Tom and I sailed thirty odd years ago to the land of promise, poor emigrants in quest of fortune; but, mark you, not without thoughts in the radical breasts of our parents that it was advisable to leave a land which tolerated class distinctions for the government of the people." After the family had drifted to Pittsburg, where his father died two years afterwards, Andrew was employed in the Ohio Telegraph Company's office, and, being a bright lad, gradually worked his way upwards into a position of great importance in the Pennsylvania WHEN THE SWALLOWS HOME- Railroad Company's employ, which he resigned to WARD FLY. [Karl Herrlossohn, originally Herloss, was born 1804, at Prague, and died 1849, at Leipzig. Herrlossohn is the author of many hastily written historical and satirical novels, and of a great many lyrics, of which several are directed against religious and political despotism.] When the swallows homeward fly, Hush, my heart! why thus complain? Tr. Anonymous. MARRIAGE CUSTOMS IN CHINA AND JAPAN. Andrew Carnegie, author, philanthropist, millionaire and lecturer, was born at Dunfermline, enter the business of iron manufacturer, in which he associated his younger brother Tom, and together they made a large fortune. Andrew showed no particular promise as a literary man till he published his Voyage Round the World (1878-79), which immediately stamped him as an original thinker and writer of brilliancy and force. This work was followed by his American Fourin-Hand in Great Britain in 1880 (published 1883), which showed him in a lighter vein, and of descriptive powers of the first order-often touched with the most exquisite humor and pathos. These two books had the disad vantage of being written by an amateur; but when in 1885 appeared his more ambitious work, Triumphant Democracy, the reading public awoke to the fact that they had among them a new author, whose statement of facts about America in particular and civilization in general was true to the core, though pitched in a high note of patriotic pride. Yet the spirit of tender thankfulness for emancipation runs through the whole narrative, ranking him among the foremost thinkers of the Scott never more patriotically wrote, age. "This is my own, my native land," than Mr. Carnegie in his pithy prose, backed by facts and figures unanswerable, says: "This broad American Republic, which has in a hundred years accomplished those grand results which place it now in the van of civilization, is the land of my adoption." In Triumphant Democracy Americans generally, for the first time, may clearly learn the plain reasons WHY they should prize their great, country above all others; and, as Franklin's pamphlets, and Burns' poems, and Rousseau's essays, and Paine's Rights of Man had much to do with the march of liberty inaugurated at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, so we predict that Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy will strike deep, in disturbance, to the rotten roots of systems of monarchy and despotism, in all Europe, and first of all, in England. Already some of our cities have shown their appreciation of its value by making it a text-book for study in the public schools. Carnegie is a man to push the car of progress forward, Wealthy beyond the fabled riches of Croesus, and all won by his own enter. prise and thrift: the poetic temperament marked by his appreciative sympathies with the poet in all his writinga, he completely reverses our ideas of the shiftless, thriftless literary man. He endows libraries of from $80,000 to half a million-witness Braddock, Dunfermne, Allegheny City, Pittsburg, and Edinburgh, all free libraries with less parade than some men bestow a drinking fountain. A busy business man, of heavy responsibilities, wielding immense enterprises, he yet finds time to devote to lectures and to literature, with a success that would earn him independent means, were he not already abundantly blessed in that particular. We quote from three of his books.] While bemoaning the absence of foreign young ladies here (in China) and in Japan, I may as well tell those at home something of the marriage customs of the East, for Japan, China, and India all have much in common here. First and foremost, then, please understand that the couple about to be married have nothing whatever to do with the affair. The match has been made by the parents, and as a rule neither has seen the other until after the contract has been closed; and, in many cases, it is thought advisable that they should meet for the first time when the ceremony begins. It is considered one of the most important duties of a mother to select a wife for each of her sons as he arrives at maturity, as a failure to do this might involve the fearful catastrophe of a break in the worship of the family's ancestors, and indeed, of her own and her husband's ashes, for there might be no men to perform the sacred rites over them. The parents of the young men take the initiative, but how to propose is said to be even more embarrassing than it would be to the son himself, as a refusal implies that the lady's parents consider the proposal much beneath them. There exists, therefore, a class of "marriage brokers," who keep themselves in formed of the eligible sons and daughters in their circle, and can sound the parents, name the dot to be given or required, and suggest and finally bring about a satisfactory alliance without wounding the family pride upon either side. The Chinese are very superstitious, and no union takes place without the astrologer's sanction. He must consult the stars, and see that there is proper conjunction. If all is favorable, the marriage takes place. But now, my lady friends, don't imagine that the happy pair set up a separate establishment, as you expect to do when you marry. No; the wife goes in every case to reside with her mother-in-law, to whom, as also to her husband's father, she readers implicit obedience. This obedience to parents is the most conspicuous duty in their religion. Should the daughter-in-law be disrespectful, even to her husband's parents, these would be upheld in putting her away, even against the wish of her husband, and unless the son happened to have an independent income or means of support, which is very rarely the case, his parents would select for him another wife who knew her duty better. The deference exacted and bestowed not only by children but by grown men and women to their parents, is wholly inconceivable by Americans; but, remember, their religion teaches them that those from whom they derive existence are entitled to their worship. No priest is required at a marriage. The ceremony always takes place at the man's house, the bride coming from her parents in grand procession through the streets in a sedan chair, with its blinds closely drawn, the presents being ostentatiously displayed by men carrying them in front. We saw several of these processions. I cannot give a tithe of all the customs observed; they would fill pages. But one is significant: the bride is required to kneel before the husband's family tablet, and to worship his ancestors, her own being from that moment apparently of no account to her, and her father gives her, as his parting injunction, the command to yield hereafter to her new parents the obedience and reverence hitherto his due. When the entire day has been spent in the ceremonies required, dinner for the couple is announced, and they are left alone with each other for the first time in their lives; but she may not partake one morsel of the feast, and, harder still, perhaps, not one syllable must she speak. Etiquette demands that she "sit in silence, grave and dignified," and she cannot break fast upon her wedding day. The woman's chief study is a book giving minute instructions for her guidance through life. In this are prescribed the three great duties of woman: (1) obedience when a child to her parents; (2) obedience when a wife to her husband; (3) obedience when a widow to her eldest son. The government of man is thus secured for the weaker vessel from the cradle to the grave. No Eastern man could be made to believe that the influence of the masculine intellect is not abso |