separated from her while this stress of danger lasted.

"Eloise," he cried, " you must not give way so. Keep up good courage. Sing, The Lord is my Shepherd.' Let your voice out, loud and clear, now, and I will sing with you."

The appeal touched the living, earnest nature of the woman. She felt the blood stirring to life again in her veins.

"Oh! Richard," she said; "how near to heaven we are. God must hear us now, if we cry to him."

He could not smile at the childish conceit; he could only bid her sing. She commenced in a low, faltering tone, but the grand inspiration of the anthem thrilled her as sudden sunlight might have done, and, gathering strength as she proceeded, her voice rang out across the floods, above the tempest, like a silver clarion: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me-thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.'

When she ceased, her deathly fear was gone. She sat erect upon the timber which supported her, and looked off into the face of the storm with an eye that kindled like a prophet's.

They were drifting rapidly on, past woods and hills and fertile fields. They swept at last into a broad eddy, where Richard had had some hope that he might be able so to turn the course of the fragment on which they rode as to direct it upon a jutting headland. The effort proved vain, and they rushed along into the narrower and more turbulent channel beyond. Richard knew then what their fate would be. Below were the Waterford Mills. Inevitably they must be carried over the dam. As he sat there, holding fast to her arm, with the full knowledge that they were rushing as fast as that mad river could carry them to an almost certain death, his face grew very white, but not a muscle of it relaxed from its

firmness and resolve. His eye did not quail, but burned rather with a deep and steady light. He could give up life and all it held for him without a sigh, so that he might carry with him into the shining reaches beyond the glooms of death the only earthly boon that his soul longed for.

So near the bounds of life, the spirit grows strong, and casts off its bonds. Sitting, still and speechless, side by side, amid the rush and roar of the elements, the strong tides of feeling flowed from heart to heart, in utter disdain of language. The vision which Eloise had seen dimly in the morning was a strong and present reality to

her at this moment.

Human laws and customs shrivelled to that insignificance which is their true estate in the divine realm of soul; and she knew that the love which lightened this hour and made it, in all its external hideousness, a pure foretaste of heaven, was a thing of eternity, foreordained in the past, as all law is foreordained-eternal in the future, as God is eternal. She was lost to time and space and all mundane things but this presence beside her, and the new relation which she perceived between herself and him, when suddenly a low roar, that was not of the winds, nor yet the ceaseless commotion of the waters to which her ear was accustomed, broke on her ear. She looked up and saw through the gathering darkness the great gray walls of the Waterford Mills. A sudden shiver ran through her frame, but the forces of her soul were in command of her being now, and she grew calm. She could not have told why she asked, but the question seemed the natural expression of her thought:

Richard, what do that long line across the river, and the thunderous sound beyond it, mean?”

LITERARY NOTICES.

CORRECTION.

THE words, "Christ's Political Record," (the title under which the third article in the last number of The Friend was published), was added by the printer, and, though inadvertently adopted, are felt by the writer to be a misnomer of it.

The article may properly be called "The Political Record of Jesus." Christ is the spirit, which ever did and will exist independently of the man; and it is the man, and not the spirit, which furnishes political records. In this case it was felt by Jesus that his would be such that he could properly say to his disciples: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword." J. J M.

THE FRIEND.

VOL. III.—MAY, 1868.- NO. 29.

S

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

(From the German of HERMAN GRIMM.)

Literally translated for THE FRIEND.

EVERAL years ago, at the house of an American friend, I found, accidentally lying upon the table, a volume of Emerson's Essays. I opened the book, read a page and was astonished at not having precisely comprehended a single sentence, although I understood English tolerably well. I inquired about the author and was informed that he was the foremost writer of America and very rich in thought, but withal somewhat erratic at times, and that he was frequently even unable to interpret his own sentences. Yet no one was so esteemed as a character and as a prose writer. In short, this description ran so strangely that I looked again into the book; several sentences so flashed upon my mind, that I felt an imperative impulse to put the book in my pocket and examine it more closely at home. I deem it already much, when, in our day, a book so attracts one that he determines, without restraint, to look within; in our day, when from a desire for self-preservation, one is compelled to place himself to the utmost on the defensive against men and books, if one will preserve his time, his humor and his own thoughts. I took Webster's Dictionary and commenced to read. The construction of the sentences seemed to me most extraordinary. Soon I discovered the

secret.

They were real thoughts, it was a real language, a real man, that I had before me, no fictitious--but I need not carry the contrast further. I bought the book. Since that time I have not ceased to read these works, and every time I take them up it is as though I read them for the first time.

It is not easy to tell what it is that draws us to an author, most difficult when we have to do with a contempoarry. One says generally, it is sympa

thy. With myself, it is most natural to represent my feelings through a comparison with the law of pressure and of weight. I assume that in every mature man the sum of all his experiences, his recollections, hopes, apprehensions and the circumstances which daily surround him, oppress his soul with a certain weight, and that he defines his happiness according to how far he now and then succeeds in escaping this pressure and feeling himself free. And hence it is that we often envy children, and at times even the dumb brutes. The most usual mode of escaping the pressure is by allowing ourselves to be engrossed in our daily work. We forget ourselves the most easily and naturally over it. Hence it is that I can in no wise concur in the opinion of many national economists, since, were the laborious work of the poor man the fruit of a sacrifice offered up by him to human society, and which lends to him a kind of halo of martyrdom, other people, with hands not indurated by hard labor, must needs blush with secret shame.

Another source of relief is found in voluptuous pleasures which serve to deaden the sensibilities. The noblest, however, is the study of nature and the fine arts.

Either one gives himself up entirely to this study, or one allows it to enter into those moments, when, tired of business, he must satisfy the craving spirit in another manner. One begins to choose and to turn toward that which most interests him and promises best to fulfill his purpose.

One is absorbed in Goethe, another in Shakespeare and Raphael, in Beethoven, in Handel, in Plato. Others of less depth grasp the hand of lower spirits, still others seek with avidity the latest novelty of the book store, the concert room or the theatre; an opposite disposition throws itself upon the remarkable and the unknown, and the spirit of a book, an engraving or a work of art appears to increase in value, so long as they enjoy exclusive ownership. To a rightly cultivated mind, however, this cannot suffice. Such a one looks upon these manifestations at first dispassionately; whenever any object claims his attention he stops and reflects upon it. So long as it fascinates him, just so long does he contemplate it. It benefits him. The question, whether that which filled his mind be beautiful? is the second question; the first always abides, viz.: did it really fasten his attention, and how long? Most diffidently then does he advance from enjoyment to knowledge, full of cautiousness he calls to mind the fatal spark that fell from the lamp of rash Psyche.

We so seldom know to a certainty where that which attracts us, in the work of a mind, lies, where the word stands which constrains us and which we obey. One skims through Plato as through an entertaining novel, the German translation of which suffices for him; another clings to every word, and sentence after sentence fills him with weighty material for reflection. One says, Goethe's Elective Affinities has interested me intensely; a second, it has deeply impressed me; a third, the book contains fearful secrets. Each is right in selecting that which benefits him most, in penetrating it as far as

he goes, if only he thereby accomplishes the desired purpose, lifts himself up above the misery of life, and with a frank, childlike and hopeful bearing perseveres as though the Ideal of life were alone the real, and the course of daily life but an oppressive dream.

Foremost, however, stand those Authors whose works accomplish a still greater marvel, who grasp this mournful commonplaceness itself, with firm hands, and while they skilfully unravel its preplexing maze, disclose its inner beauty; who do not rescue us from it through deceptive visions, but show it to us in its nearness, as most beautiful, and of God's creation, and allow us to behold the hidden glory which surrounds every earthly manifestation, and thus do not deceive us in regard to our sorrows but cause them to vanish as the work of a diseased imagination which has held us captive. Raphael and Goethe possess this power in the highest degree. That which they bring before us does not overstep by one line the measure of human nature. They never entice us into strange and impossible regions, they only open our eyes and at once the accustomed presence appears changed, bright and luminous, and now for the first time in its true light. They stand in the closest relation to nature. They hold before us no glass which magnifies or diminishes, that gives to objects an artificial roseate hue, or sunshine, or unwonted gloominess; they show us things as they are, i. e., not as a gloomy observer sees them, apathetically on a cheerless day, but as they must appear to an impartial eye; whilst our eyes, misused and ruined by wrong training, are no longer able of themselves to discern the original beauty of nature. They reconcile me to life. That which grieved me, now gladdens me; I no longer flee from it, I grasp it and in my hand it changes into beauty. Everything they touch is gold, becomes beautiful as though God's finger pointed to it and a secret voice whispered, "do but consider and learn to understand," and I have the power to understand it as long as they point it out to me.

This feeling I have also with Emerson in the purest measure. "But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he teaches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! if the stars should appear one night alone in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations, the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown them. But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile ;" and so on it is the commencement of the essay on "Nature." I read it, and as I proceeded sentence by sentence, it seemed to me as though I had met the most sincere and unaffected man, and was listening to him while he addressed me. I did not inquire whether he was ingenious, whether he might be able to demonstrate these or those after-thoughts from his propositions: I read one page after the other, it is possible that it was all difficult and confused,