the delirium of the chase had passed away, I was peculiarly sensible to these circumstances. The silence of the waste was now and then broken by the cry of a distant flock of pelicans, stalking like spectres about a shallow pool; sometimes by the sinister croaking of a raven in the air; while occasionally a scoundrel wolf might scour off from before me, and, having attained a safe distance, would sit down and howl and whine, with tones that gave a dreariness to the surrounding solitude.

RICHARD HENRY WILDE. 1789-1847. (Manual, pp. 501, 521.) From "Conjectures concerning Torquato Tasso."

152. INTEREST OF TASSO'S LIFE.

THERE is scarcely any poet whose life excites a more profound and melancholy interest than that of Torquato Tasso.

His short and brilliant career of glory captivates the imagination, while the heart is deeply affected by his subsequent misfortunes. Greater fame and greater misery have seldom been the lot of man, and a few brief years sufficed for each extreme.

An exile even in his boyhood, the proscription and confiscation suffered by his father deprived him of home and patrimony. Honor and love, and the favor of princes, and enthusiastic praise, dazzled his youth. Envy, malice, and treachery, tedious imprisonment and imputed madness, insult, poverty, and persecution, clouded his manhood. The evening of his days was saddened by a troubled spirit, want, sickness, bitter memories, and deluded hopes; and when at length a transient gleam of sunshine fell upon his prospects, death substituted the immortal for the laurel crown.

Mystery adds its fascination to his story. The causes of his imprisonment are hidden in obscurity: it is still disputed whether he was insane or not.

Few points of literary history, therefore, are more interesting, or more obscure, than the love, the madness, and the imprisonment of Tasso.

GEORGE TICKNOR. 1791-1871. (Manual, p. 502.)

153.

From "The History of Spanish Literature."

DESIGN OF CERVANTES IN WRITING DON QUIXOTE.

AT the very beginning of the work, he announces it to be his sole purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry, and at the end of the whole he declares anew, in his own person, that

"he had no other desire than to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry;" exulting in his success as an achievement of no small moment. And such, in fact, it was, for we have abundant proof that the fanaticism for these romances was so great in Spain, during the sixteenth century, as to have become matter of alarm to the more judicious.

To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in the character of all classes of men, to break up the only reading which at that time could be considered widely popular and fashionable, was certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks anything rather than a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith in what is most to be valued in our common nature. The great wonder is, that Cervantes succeeded. But that he did there is no question. No book of chivalry was written after the appearance of Don Quixote, in 1605; and from the same date, even those already enjoying the greatest favor ceased, with one or two unimportant exceptions, to be reprinted; so that, from that time to the present, they have been constantly disappearing, until they are now among the rarest of literary curiosities a solitary instance of the power of genius to destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire department, and that, too, a flourishing and favored one, in the literature of a great and proud nation.

JAMES HALL. 1793-. (Manual, p. 510.)

From "Statistics of the West."

154. DESCRIPTION OF A PRAIRIE.

IMAGINE a stream of a mile in width, whose waters are as transparent as those of the mountain spring, flowing over beds of rock or gravel. Fancy the prairie commencing at the water's edge a natural meadow covered with grass and flowers, rising, with a gentle slope, for miles, so that in the vast panorama thousands of acres are exposed to the eye. The prospect is bounded by a range of low hills, which sometimes approach the river, and again recede, and whose summits, which are seen gently waving along the horizon, form the level of the adjacent country. The timber is scattered in groves and strips, the whole country being one vast illimitable prairie, ornamented by small collections of trees. But more often we see the single tree, without a companion near, or the little clump, composed of a few dozen oaks or elms; and not unfrequently, hundreds of acres embellished with a kind of open woodland, and exhibiting the appearance of a splendid park, decorated with skill and care by the hand of taste. Here we behold the beautiful lawn enriched with flowers, and studded with trees, which are so dispersed about as not to intercept

.

the prospect, standing singly, so as not to shade the ground, and occasionally collected in clusters, while now and then the shade deepens into the gloom of the forest, or opens into long vistas and spacious plains, destitute of tree or shrub.

HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT. 1793-1864. (Manual, p. 504.)

From "Oneota."

155. THE CHIPPEWA INDIAN.

ONE of the most curious opinions of this people is their belief in the mysterious and sacred character of fire. They obtain sacred fire, for all national and ecclesiastical purposes, from the flint. Their national pipes are lighted with this fire. It is symbolical of purity. Their notions of the boundary between life and death, which is also symbolically the limit of the material verge between this and a future state, are revealed in connection with the exhibition of flames of fire. They also make sacrifices by fire of some part of the first fruits of the chase. These traits are to be viewed, perhaps, in relation to their ancient worship of the sun, above noticed, of which the traditions and belief are still generally preserved. The existence of the numerous classes of jossakeeds, or mutterers (the word is from the utterance of sounds low on the earth), is a trait that will remind the reader of a similar class of men in early ages in the eastern hemisphere. These persons constitute, indeed, the Magi of our western forests.

From the Preface to "The Indian Tribes of the United States."

156. DIGNITY OF THE INDIAN CHARACTER.

WITH all their defects of character, the Indian tribes are entitled to the peculiar notice of a people who have succeeded to the occupancy of territories which once belonged to them. They constitute a branch of the human race whose history is lost in the early and wild mutations of men. We perceive in them many noble and disinterested traits. The simplicity of their eloquence has challenged admiration. Higher principles of devotion to what they believe to be cardinal virtues, no people ever evinced. Faith has furnished the Christian martyr with motives to sustain him at the stake; but the North American Indian has endured the keenest torments of fire without the consolations of the gospel. Civilized nations are cheered on their way to face the cannon's mouth by inspiring music; but the warrior of the forest requires no roll of the drum to animate his steps.

EDWARD EVERETT. 1794-1865. (Manual, pp. 487, 531.)

From "Orations and Speeches."

157. ASTRONOMY, FOR ALL TIME.

THERE is much by day to engage the attention of the observatory; the sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disk (to us the faint indications of movements of unimagined grandeur in his luminous atmosphere), a solar eclipse, a transit of the inferior planets, the mysteries of the spectrum—all phenomena of vast importance and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time; he goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest. A dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects, hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men, disappear; but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and Galileo, of Kepler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yea, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plough passes over the remains of mighty cities, the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic, as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star, and constellation, and galaxy still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love of Him who placed them in the heavens, and upholds them there.

HUGH S. LEGARÉ. 1797-1843. (Manual, p. 487.)
From his Collected Writings."

158. THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT CLASSICS.

NOT to have the curiosity to study the learned languages is not to have any vocation at all for literature: it is to be destitute of liberal curiosity and of enthusiasm ; to mistake a self-sufficient and superficial dogmatism for philosophy, and that complacent indolence which is the bane of all improvement, for a proof of the highest degree of it.

All that we ask, then, is, that a boy should be thoroughly taught the ancient languages from his eighth to his sixteenth year, or thereabouts, in which time he will have his taste formed, his love of

letters completely, perhaps enthusiastically, awakened, his knowledge of the principles of universal grammar perfected, his memory stored with the history, the geography, and the chronology of all antiquity, and with a vast fund of miscellaneous literature besides, and his imagination kindled with the most beautiful and glowing passages of Greek and Roman poetry and eloquence; all the rules of criticism familiar to him. - the sayings of sages and the achievements of heroes indelibly impressed upon his heart. He will have his curiosity fired for further acquisition, and find himself in possession of the golden keys which open all the recesses where the stores of knowledge have ever been laid up by civilized man. The consciousness of strength will give him confidence, and he will go to the rich treasures themselves, and take what he wants, instead of picking up eleemosynary scraps from those whom, in spite of himself, he will regard as his betters in literature. He will be let into that great communion of scholars throughout all ages and all nations, —like that more awful communion of saints in the holy church universal, - and feel a sympathy with departed genius, and with the enlightened and the gifted minds of other countries, as they appear before him, in the transports of a sort of vision beatific, bowing down at the same shrines, and flowing with the same holy love of whatever is most pure, and fair, and exalted, and divine in human nature.

FRANCIS L. HAWKS. 1798-1866. (Manual, p. 480.)

From "Narrative of the United States Expedition to Japan."

159. JAPAN INTERESTING IN MANY ASPECTS.

VIEWED in any of its aspects, the empire of Japan has long presented to the thoughtful mind an object of uncommon interest. And this interest has been greatly increased by the mystery with which, for the last two centuries, an exclusive policy has sought to surround the institutions of this remarkable country.

The political inquirer, for instance, has wished to study in detail the form of government, the administration of laws, and the domestic institutions, under which a nation systematically prohibiting intercourse with the rest of the world has attained to a state of civilization, refinement, and intelligence, the mere glimpses of which so strongly invite further investigation.

The student of physical geography, aware how much national characteristics are formed or modified by peculiarities of physical structure in every country, would fain know more of the lands and the seas, the mountains and the rivers, the forests and the fields, which fall within the limits of this almost terra incognita.