WITH A ROSE FROM CONWAY CASTLE. N hoary Conway's battlemented height, ΟΝ O poet-heart, I pluck for thee a rose! Through arch and court the sweet wind wandering goes; Circle and wheel, all bathed in amber light; Fling forth their pennants to the freshening breeze, Like God's own benison this sunshine falls. Therefore, O friend, across the sundering seas, SLEEP. HO calls thee "gentle Sleep" ?-O rare coquette, WE Who comest crowned with poppies, thou should'st wear Nettles instead, or thistles, in thy hair; For thou'rt the veriest elf that ever yet Made weary mortals sigh and toss and fret! Thou dost float softly through the drowsy air My restless pillow; but ere I can set My arms to clasp thee, without sign or speech, Save one swift, mocking smile, thou'rt out of reach. Yet, some time, thou, or one as like to thee 1866. Joseph Brownlee Brown. BORN in Charleston, S. C., 1824. DIED in Brooklyn, N. Y., 1888. I THALATTA! THALATTA! CRY OF THE TEN THOUSAND. STAND upon the summit of my life: Behind, the camp, the court, the field, the grove, Beyond these weary ways, Behold! the Sea! A widening heaven, a current without care, William Mumford Baker. BORN in Washington, D. C., 1825. DIED in South Boston, Mass., 1883. A SOUTHERNER ON SOUTH CAROLINA. [Inside: A Chronicle of Secession. 1866.] "THO HOUGH, while we are upon the subject, there is one thing in regard to Columbia I have never yet fully understood," said Mrs. Bowles, after a while. Rutledge Bowles has explained it to me over and over again in his letters-the perpetual revolutions in the College, I mean. From what Rutledge Bowles writes it has been impossible for the students to pursue, consistently with their own honor, any other course. It seems strange that the many Faculties of the College cannot come to understand, any of them, what the youth of South Carolina are, and what they will not submit to. Strange! It is a great interruption to the studies, I fear. I know very little of the institutions out of the State; but I fear it is something peculiar to Columbia," said Mrs. Bowles, though her fear sounded far more like pride. Yes, in the history, eventful enough, of the College of South Carolina, at Columbia, you have, in epitome, the character and history of the State itself. Self-will, contempt for rightful authority, reckless disregard of everything except the selfish abstraction of the hour! Gallant, generous, high-toned youth, they yield their own notions to that of their Faculty? No, Sir! Rather than that, let the institution be wrecked to its foundation! Rather than that, let their own education, and consequent success in life, perish! See the same youth when grown a few inches higher in stature and immeasurably more generous, gallant, high-toned, and all the rest; they submit their own ideas to the superior authority of the General Government? they yield a hair's-breadth from their own heated view of their own rights and wrongs-imprescriptible rights, infinite wrongs? By all that elevates the man above the brute and the negro, never, Mr. Speaker, never! Rather, Sir, let the General Government be wrecked till not a spar floats to tell where once it sailed! Rather perish the hope of the human race! Above all, rather, Mr. Speaker, we of South Carolina lose every negro from our fields, every cent from our coffers, every city from our soil, every son on the field of battle from our hearth-stones! Perish the universe and we, Sir, we with it, rather than it move save as we intend it shall move! From his birth to his death never in the ages such a conspiracy as against your South Carolinian. Nurse, parent, schoolmaster, College Faculty, General Government, opinion of Christendom, course of God's eternal providence-one earlybegun, universal, incessant combination against him. But not more magnificent the coalition than the defiance thereof on his part! Poor Mrs. Bowles! From its foundation was practical Secession the incidental but leading part of the Columbia Curriculum, and well was the lesson learned. The yellow-fever is, they say, a standing affair in Cuba; and there lives scarce a man beside the Pedees, the Congaree, the Edisto, and the Cooper and Ashley but inhaled Secession as his vital atmosphere. It was too strong even for the Gospel. Heaven defend us, even in the conventions of religious bodies. It was: Mr. Chairman, Mr. Moderator, it is painful to us, Sir, it is very painful, but on this point we cannot yield. No one can regret it more than ourselves, but if brethren will press this point, there is, Sir, but one course left us— In sæcula sæculorumque, aut South Carolina aut nullus. Sturdy, wrong-headed little State! Look at it on the map there, altogether unlike North Carolina even on the one side, and Georgia on the other; tough, three-sided fragment of mediæval granite, refusing to be dissolved or to lose an angle even in the rolling of the great waters of progress; requiring something besides the silent, serene processes of nature by which the craggy mountains are being melted slowly down. and the rough globe rounded into shape; requiring the extra force and fury as of waters too long and too obstinately dammed back from their natural and inevitable course. Every soul of us, however, admires the South Carolinian at last. Only let him be master, and a truer gentleman never breathed. The Hardkoppig Piet in him is hidden under the Bayard, the Coeur de Lion. He is only a hundred years or so out of place, that is all. There is nothing to laugh at in Don Quixote except his living a century or two too late. Even then it is with pain that we smile at the ancient armor, language defiant of the universe, and, most sorrowful of all, poor old Rosinante which bears him up! A IN A SOUTHERN VILLAGE IN '64. [From the Same.] H, the eagerness with which we clutch a paper from the North! We get it as a great favor, to be read as rapidly as possible, to be returned exactly at such an hour to such a place. We button it up in our breast-pocket, and hurry home, for we dare not be seen with it on the streets. Arrived at home, we arrest all the household work, turn the children ignominiously out of the room with terrible threats in case they come in again, which, by-the-by, they are sure to do a dozen times during the reading, on pressing emergencies which cannot be postponed a moment; and so we carefully unfold and read the precious paper aloud to wife or sister, to say nothing of all the Union people in the neighborhood cautiously summoned in to hear. The editorials, dispatches, items, advertisements of hair oil, and the like-with greedy hunger we let no morsel or crumb of the paper escape us. In spite of all the effort we made, a dozen readers or two have had the document before us, as dozens will, eagerly wondering why we cannot remember that others want the paper as well as ourselves and get through with it, after us. In consequence of this, the paper is painfully illegible at the folds; we have, in the centre of the most interesting articles, to stop and puzzle around the chasms, often to take a flying leap over them and proceed. The little scraps of patriotic poetry, here and there, we often memorize even. And so the paper circulates till it is read, literally read, to shreds. There was Everett's speech at the Dedication at Gettysburg. Could the orator have imagined the zest with which his words there spoken would have been read from soiled and worn-out sheets by thousands at the South, his soul would have burned with sublimer enthusiasm than any wakened in him by the audience then visible to his eye. Who of us forgets the keen enjoyment with which we read our first fairy tales in childhood's sweet hour-not so keen, so delicious, that gratification as the reading, during the war, of all thoroughly American matter oozing in to us, parched with thirst, from abroad. The circulation through Somerville of one good paper of the kind did all the Union people—for if one individual thereof read it, every soul did or had it repeated to him-evident good for weeks to come. Perhaps the shortness of the allowance as with food doled out to the wrecked at sea-increased its value, months often elapsing between the rations. Let us keep secret the absolute faith even Mr. Ferguson placed in the least assertions of a Northern paper, his belief herein as absolute and sweeping as was his unbelief in reference to the Somerville "Star" and all its kind. And, as men build a mural tablet into the wall of an edifice with due inscription, permit the insertion here of this profound truth, that in very much every sense of the word human nature at the North and the South is exactly the same; with superficial differences we are at last One people. The fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson and the victory at Gettysburg send the Union people of Somerville quite up upon the crest of the everrolling sea, and Mr. Ellis, Dr. Ginnis, lowest of all-the Secessionists down into the trough thereof for months to come. "I tell you, Lamum," Dr. Peel says to the editor of the Somerville "Star," toiling away cold, pale, steady as ever in his business of lying by power-press, ever consistent in falsehood whatever news Bill Perkins brings in his budget-"I tell you. man, one screw loose in the machinery of the Confederate Government is the way the post-office is managed. What avails all you say in your paper so long as there is a perpetual stream of private letters coming in to the contrary? Federal papers, too, these Union people are constantly getting them; letters, also, from friends in the Federal lines-such things provision them, so to speak, to hold out. If a few more of them could be hanged—!” But this last remedy has been so thoroughly tried-not actually in Somerville, as yet, but all around it. There was Mrs. Isaac Smith's brother, John Jennings. Who did not know him? Gray-headed with fifty years of farming-farming with his own hard hands alone these days, his boys being in the Confederate service, and he owning no negroes. "You see, Mr. Arthur," Mrs. Isaac Smith says to that individual, who hurries to see her-is she not a member of his church ?-on hearing of the catastrophe, "they knew John was a Union man. He tried to help its being known, but he couldn't. Not that he said anything. He made a point to stay close at home-never opened his lips. But he was my brother, you know, and my husband being gone, that was enough. Every once in a while he'd come down from his place-fifteen miles, you know, it is from here-to bring me a little butter, or cheese, or wheat, whatever happened he could spare. Ever since Jim Boldin waylaid and |