I have not been there since. I called, indeed, once, and Charles called on me, but I have been little in London during the last season, and they have been much in the country. I could not have equitably maintained an intimacy with them, for I felt neutrality would be quite out of the question: thus, although the recurrence of my old friendship with Charles Franklin has been productive of no very satisfactory results as relate to ourselves personally, it has given me an additional ZARA'S EAR-RINGS. "My ear-rings! my ear-rings! they've dropt into the well, "Twas thus, Granada's fountain by, spoke Albuharez' daughter. "My ear-rings! my ear-rings! they were pearls in silver set, "My ear-rings! my ear-rings! he'll say they should have been, "He'll think, when I to market went, I loitered by the way; "He'll say I am a woman, and we are all the same; "I'll tell the truth to Muça, and I hope he will believe That I thought of him at morning, and thought of him at eve! J. G. LOCKHART. EXTRACT FROM "THE BIBLE OF HUMANITY." [JULES MICHELET, the distinguished French Historian, was born 1798, died 1874: when forty years of age he was appointed professor of History in the College of France, from which he was displaced by Napoleon III., because he refused to take the oath to uphold his government. Michelet's chief works are: "The Republic," “History of France," "The Women of the Revolution," "Love," "The Sea," "The Insect,” and “The Bible of Humanity." [J. W. Bouton, New York.] From his last "epic in prose," we make extract.] Volney and Sacy opened up Syria and Arabia. Champollion, standing by the Sphynx, the mysterious Egypt, construed her inscriptions, and showed that she was a civilized empire sixty centuries before Jesus Christ. Eugene Burnouf established the consanguinity of the two ancestors of Asia-the two branches of the Aryas, the Indo-Persians of Bactriana; and the Parsee scholars who had been educated in the College of France quoted in the most remote regions of Hindostan this Western Magician against their Angelican disputant. The Mahabharata, the poetical encyclopedia of the Brahmins, the expurgated translations of the books of Zoroaster, and the splendid heroic history of Persia-the Shah-Nameh-came next. It was known that behind Persia, behind the Brahmanic India, there was extant a book of the remotest antiquity, of the first pastoral age an age which preceded the agricultural. This book, the Rig-Veda, a collection of hymns and prayers, enables us to follow the shepherds of that early period in their religious aspirations-the first soarings of the human mind toward heaven and light. In 1833, Rosen published a specimen of it. It can now be read in the Sanscrit, German, English, and French. In this very year, 1863, a profound and able critic, who is also a Burnouf, has expounded its true meaning, and shown its scope. In consequence of all this research we can now see the perfect agreement between Asia and Europe-the most remote age and the present era. It has taught us that man, in all ages, thought, felt, and loved in the same way; and therefore there is but one humanity, a single heart only! A great harmony has been established through all space and time. Let the silly irony of skeptics, teachers of doubt, who hold that truth varies according to latitude, be for ever silenced. The feeble voice of sophists expires in the immense concert of human brotherhood. INDIAN ART. Whatever the English may do to make it appear that the Indian Bible is more modern than the Jewish, it must be admitted that primeval India was the original cradle, the matrix of the world, the principal and dominant source of races, of ideas, and of languages for Greece, Rome, and modern Europe, and that the Semitic movementthe Jewish-Arabian influence-though very considerable, is nevertheless secondary. But if the English were constrained to admit her renowned antiquity, yet they affirmed that India was dead and buried forever in her elephantine grottoes, her Vedas and her Ramayana, like Egypt in her pyramids. They regarded the country, as large as all Europe, and her population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls, as insignificant, and even contemptuously declared that this numerous people were made up from the refuse of a worn-out nation. Haughty England, who considered India as a land fit to be cultivated only for the purpose of enriching her rapacious rulers, together with the indignities heaped upon her people by both protestants and catholics, and the indifference of all Europe, made it appear that the Indian soul was really dead. Was not the very race dried up? What is the feeble Hindoo, with his delicate, feminine hand, compared with the blonde European, nourished, surfeited with strong meat and drink, and doubling his force of race, with that half drunken rage which the devourers of meat and blood always exhibit? The English do not hesitate to boast that they have killed India. The wise and humane W. H. Russell thought so, said so. They have oppressed her with taxes and prohibitory tariffs, and discouraged her arts as far as it was possible. In the more humane markets of Java and Bassora the products of Indian art find a ready sale, and it is solely because of this high estimate of the eastern merchants that her arts exist. The specimens of Indian art exhibited in England in 1841, surprised and confounded the English people; and when Mr. Royle, a conscientious Englishman, explained these marvels of enchantment, the jury could not award them a prize, because the prizes were only to be given on the progress of fifteen years," while these productions of India were the work of an eternal art, alien to every fashion, and more ancient than our arts, which are old at the beginning. In order to secure a fair specimen of Indian art for the Exhibition, a prize of twelve and a half dollars was offered, and was carried off by Hubioula, a common weaver of Golconda, who produced a piece of muslin, which threw into the shade all English textile fabrics, and which was so fine that it could be put through a small ring, and so light that three hundred yards of it weighed less than two pounds. It was a genuine gauze, like that with which Bernardin de Saint Pierre clothed his Virginia, like those in which Aureng Zeb wrapped the corpse of his beloved daughter when he laid her in the white marble mausoleum of Aurungabad. But neither the endeavors of Mr. Royle, nor the acknowledgment of the French that they were treated better than the Orientals, could induce England to give her Indian subjects any other reward than these barren words: "For the charm and beauty of the invention, and the distinctness, variety, commingling and happy blending of colors, there is nothing to be compared to it. What a lesson for European manufactures!" Oriental art is by far the most brilliant and the least costly. The cheapness of labor is excessive; I had almost said deplorable. The workman lives on a trifle. A handful of rice satisfies him for a day. And then the mildness of the climate, the admirable air and light, the ethereal food which is taken through the eyes, and the singular beauty and harmony of all nature, develop and refine the perceptions and make the senses acute. This is noticeable even in all the animals, and especially in the elephant, who, though huge and shapeless in bulk, and rough in exterior, is a voluptuous connoisseur of perfumes, selecting the most fragrant herbs, and showing his preference for the orange-tree, which he first smells, and then eats its flowers, its leaves, and its wood. Here man acquires an exquisite fineness of perception and feeling. Nature makes him a colorist, and endows him with special privileges as her own child. He lives with her, and all that he does is charming. He combines the most diverse strains, and commingles the dullest hues in such a manner as to produce the sweetest and most exquisite effect. The sky does everything for the Oriental. A quarter of an hour before sunrise, and a quarter of an hour after sunset, he enjoys that supreme privilege, the perfect vision or light, which is then divine with its peculiar transfigurations and inward revealings, with its tenderness and glory in which his soul is swallowed up-lost in the boundless ocean of a mysterious Friendship. In the midst of this ineffable mildness the humble, feeble, half-nourished, and wretched looking being conceives the idea of the wonderful Indian shawl. As the profound poet Valmiki beheld his great poem, the Ramayana, gathered, as it were, in the hollow of his hand, so this poetic weaver perceives his great artistic work which sometimes is continued through a century. His son or his nephew, with the same soul, hereditary and identical, and with the like delicate hand, will follow the same line of thought and carry it on until completed. An In the execution of strange and exquisite jewelry, and in the fanciful ornamentation of furniture and arms, the hand of the workman is unique. Some of the latest Princes of India sent to the Exhibition referred to, arms which had been worn by their ancestors, and therefore so peculiarly dear to them, as well as of such great value, that we can scarcely understand how they consented to entrust them to others. other of those Rajahs sent a bedstead of ivory, possibly of his own workmanship, as he superscribed his name on it, which was sculptured and carved with infinite ingenuity and delicacy—an exquisite, chaste, or virgin-like piece of furniture, full of love, it seems, and of dreams. Are these objects things? They seem to be almost human, and to be possessed with the ancient soul of India, as well as with that of the artist who made them, and the Prince who used them. But these sumptuous productions of rare artists do not indicate the genius of the race so fully as do the inferior arts, and the more simple handiwork. Without expense or noise the Hindoos, with apparent ease, produce works that appear to us very diffi cult. With a little clay for a crucible, and for bellows a couple of the strong, elastic leaves peculiar to the country, a single man in the forest will, in a few hours, turn the crude ore into iron, and again, with the addition of swallow wort, turn the iron into steel, which, when carried by caravans as far as the Euphrates, is called Damascus steel. It has been observed by many that the peculiar chemical insight of this people has enabled them not only to extract the most vivid colors, but also the corresponding | consider that to train a horse, which is so grade of mordant, which fixes and makes small compared to the elephant, a bit and these colors eternal. The Indian spinster, spurs of steel, and reins and bridles are with her native instinct and no other machine than her spindle and her delicate hands, will obtain a thread of incredible fineness, with which the most intricate and beautiful designs are executed. needed, it must have seemed an almost hopeless undertaking to curb and restrain by force this living mountain, this mighty Colossus. They succeeded, however, and nothing could have been greater or more beautiful. It was a moral victory. They treated the elephant as if he were a man, a wise man, a Brahmin, and he was influenced by it, and behaved accordingly. To-day the treatment is similar; the elephant has two servants to look after him, to remind him of his duties, and to warn him if he deviates from Brah manical decorum. The cornac sits on his neck, scratches his ears, guides him and rules him by the voice, teaching him how to behave himself: while the other servant walks beside him and teaches him the same lesson with a firm tone and equal tenderness of manner. Some one has said: "Instead of sending to Cashmere some hideous designs of shawls, which would corrupt the Indian taste, let us send our pattern-drawers to India to contemplate its brilliant nature and to imbibe its pure light." But it would be necessary that these designers should also catch the soul and the profound harmony of India, for between the great calmness of the patient soul of the Hindoo and the subduing mildness of the nature that surrounds him, there is such a complete agreement that the man and the native can scarcely realize that each is distinct from the other. Nor is this the effect of quietude simply, as some believe, but of that singular faculty, peculiar to the race, of seeing life at the bottom of every thing, and the soul in every living body. The herb is not simply an herb, nor the tree only a tree, but both herb and tree are the vehicles for the circulation of the divine spirit; and the animal is not all animal, but a soul that has been or will be a man. Without this faith they could never have accomplished the first and most necessary of all arts in the earliest times, the art of taming and humanizing the most important and useful servants, without which man could not have long existed. Without the dog and the elephant, man would have been at the mercy of the lion and the tiger. The books of Persia and India relate in a gratified manner how the dog was the first preserver of man, and how the men of those days formed friendships and entered into alliances with the very strong and large dogs who could strangle the lion. And in the Mahabharata it is narrated that the hero of that poem declined the reward of heaven unless he could enter Paradise with his dog. In lower India and in hot climates where the dog was lacking in strength, or was easily alarmed, and fled from the tiger, men invoked the protection of the elephant; but this was a more difficult alliance, for though the elephant becomes gentle in maturity, it is brutal, irascible, and capricious in youth, and terrible in its gluttony, and in its 'Twas at the royal feast, for Persia won, amusements, and therefore was scarcely less formidable than the tiger. And when we At present some writers speak very lightly about all that. The elephant has not only been disparaged, but has greatly degenerated. He has known servitude, and has felt the power of man. But in earlier times he was fierce and indomitable, and to have made him teachable and tractable must have required great boldness, calmness, affection, and sincere faith. Then they religiously believed what they said to him. They respected the soul of the dead in the body of the living; for according to the doctrines of their holy sages, the spirit of some departed one lived in the commanding and speechless form. When they saw him in the morning, at the hour in which the tiger leaves his ambush of night, coming deliberately out of the dense jungle and going majestically to drink of the waters of the Ganges, empurpled by the dawn, they confidently believed that he, too, hailing the open day, became impregnated by Vishnu, the All Pervading, the good Sun, and while immersing in this great soul, incarnated in himself a divine ray. ALEXANDER'S FEAST; OR THE AN ODE ON ST. CECILIA'S DAY. By Philip's warlike son; The god-like hero sate On his imperial throne: His valiant peers were placed around, Their brows with roses and with myrtle bound: (So should desert in arms be crowned.) The lovely Thais by his side Sate like a blooming Eastern bride, None but the brave, None but the brave, None but the brave deserves the fair. Timotheus, placed on high Amid the tuneful choir, With flying fingers touched the lyre: The song began from Jove, A dragon's fiery form belied the god: When he to fair Olympia pressed, And stamped an image of himself, a sov'reign of the world. The listening crowd admire the lofty sound: With ravished ears The monarch hears, Assumes the god, Affects to nod, And seems to shake the spheres. The praise of Bacchus then the sweet musician sung; Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young; The jolly god in triumph comes; He shows his honest face. Now give the hautboys breath; he comes! he comes! Bacchus, ever fair and young, Drinking joys did first ordain, Bacchus' blessings are a treasure, Drinking is the soldier's pleasure, Rich the treasure, Sweet the pleasure, Soothed with the sound the king grew vain; Fought all his battles o'er again; And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain. The master saw the madness rise, He sung Darius great and good, Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, With downcast look the joyless victor sate The various turns of chance below: The mighty master smiled to see Never ending, still beginning, Take the good the gods provide thee. The many rend the skies with loud applause; So love was crowned, but music won the cause. The prince, unable to conceal his pain, Gazed on the fair, Who caused his care, And sighed and looked, sighed and looked, At length, with love and wine at once oppressed, Now strike the golden lyre again; A louder yet, and yet a louder strain; And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder Hark! hark! the horrid sound Has raised up his head, As awaked from the dead, And, amazed, he stares around. 'Revenge! revenge!' Timotheus cries: 'See the furies arise! See the snakes that they rear, How they hiss in their hair, And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band, Each a torch in his hand! These are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain, And unburied remain, Inglorious on the plain : Give the vengeance due To the valiant crew. Behold how they toss their torches on high, |