The North will bear all costs, meet all difficulties, rather than have the Union remain as it was, rather than have the South continue in its present barbarism and social degradation.

Our legislators can well afford to wait and deliberate. The hours on the clock of fate are slow. The state of feeling generated by slavery, and exasperated by the sting of defeat, will not soon die away, cannot even be speedily ameliorated. The danger is in expecting too rapid change and settlement. Let not Congress yield to the natural eagerness of the whole country for quiet and restoration of settled order. It was the attempt to keep bad things from being disturbed, to preserve quiet when there was no quiet, that brought on the war. Let it not be cajoled by any false cry of magnanimity to an enemy. The true magnanimity of the occasion is to insist on what is requisite for future peace, for permanent union,- for the happiness of the South no less than of the North,- for the establishment of liberty and justice throughout the land.

ART. XI.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

1.- The Gulistan, or Rose Garden. By MUSLE-HUDDEEN SHEIK SAADI, of Shiraz. Translated from the Original by FRANCIS GLADWIN. With an Essay on Saadi's Life and Genius, by JAMES Ross, and a Preface, by R. W. EMERSON. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1865. 16mo. pp. 379.

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MR. EMERSON has said so well, in his Preface to this volume, almost all that need be said of Saadi, that he has left little for the critic to say concerning the character and merits of the Persian poet. It needs no great acquaintance with the East to enable one to enter into the Rose Garden. If one has read in childhood the Arabian Nights,-if one likes to read them now, he will find the tone and manner of the Gulistan neither unfamiliar nor unpleasant. Saadi will afford to him a comment on the Arabian Nights; and they, in their turn, will give freshness and vivacity to the apologues of Saadi. "It is the privilege of genius," says Mr. Emerson, "to play its game indifferently with few as with many pieces, as Nature draws all her opulence out of a few elements." It is no less its privilege to be everywhere at home, welcome to all,

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and of equal service to all. "Through his Persian dialect, Saadi speaks to all nations; and, like Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne, is perpetually modern." Let the distance from East to West be as great as you please, yet the wisdom of the one is as the wisdom of the other. We cap the stories of Saadi with others we have heard before.

"A Vizier," says Saadi, "went to Zoolnoon of Egypt, and, asking his blessing, said, 'I am day and night employed in the service of the king, hoping for some good from him, and dreading his wrath.' Zoolnoon wept, and said, 'If I had feared God as you have feared the king, I should have been reckoned in the number of the just."" Wolsey but repeats these words. The speech which Shakespeare puts into his mouth was reported by Cavendish: "Well, well, Master Kingston,' quoth he; if I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs.'"

The same Zoolnoon said to the Caliph, "One to whom you have given power is an oppressor, and commits daily wrongs and violences.” The Caliph replied, "There will come a day when I will severely pun'ish him." "Yes," "returned the other, "you will wait until he has taken all the goods of the subjects; then you will bestir yourself, and snatch them from him, and will fill your treasury. But what good will that do to your poor and miserable people?" "The king was ashamed, and ordered the instant punishment of the offender.” This is but the Eastern version of the legend concerning Trajan, which was sculptured on the capital of the Pillar of Justice in the arcade of the Doge's Palace at Venice, and was seen by Dante in the visibile parlare on the marble wall of Purgatory;

Such resemblances as these are numerous. But there remains much that is the sole possession of Saadi, — much that is both original and excellent, not merely in expression, in fancy, and in taste, but also in observation and reflection. The style of the Eastern and of the Western poet is not to be compared; the literary taste of Persia is as different from that of Europe as the date-palm is from the apple-tree; but it is curious, and helps us to understand the Crusades, and the longing of Europe for the East during the Middle Ages, to remember that Saadi was a man fifty years old at the time when St. Louis adventured to Egypt and the Holy Land; and that he was just past seventy when Dante was born. He tells us himself that he was, in his youth, made prisoner by the Franks, and was forced to labor in the ditches at Tripoli. Did any of his captors listen to the stories told by the prisoner, and carry from his lips to Europe some of the wisdom of the East? If Saadi's experience of the Franks was thus hard, it was more than made up for by the honor and regard in which he was held by his

own countrymen. His name was famous wherever the language of Persia was spoken; and from that day to this he has remained one of the most popular of authors.

The contrast between the civilization with which he came in contact at Tripoli, and that of his own people, is curiously illustrated in his books. They take the reader into a world of ideas, habits, morals, strangely different from those of Europe. It is hard to recognize their author as a contemporary of St. Francis and St. Dominic. Saadi's world has all the sunshine of the East, while Europe was in its dark ages. The main difference is, no doubt, in the character of the religious spirit of the East and of the West. Mohammedanism reconciled the faithful with life. The Christianity of those days made the true believer disquieted, and filled him with gloomy solicitudes. The East, as compared with the West, was courteous, refined, well-mannered, affable. The manners of the knights and nobles of the Crusades, as we learn them from Joinville and the other Chroniclers, were rude and brutal beside the elegance and grace of the good manners that Saadi inculcates and depicts. The politics of the East were troubled, violent, and shifting; but society was unshaken by the fate of kingdoms. Immobility of the social order, fixedness of the social code, is the secret of the advance and of the stagnation of Oriental civilization. Europe must have seemed a region of barbarians to Saadi, and to those who took delight in his couplets or his stories. His Rose Garden is a compendium of good manners and of practical wisdom, with here and there a fine moral lesson, and here and there a revelation of poetic, and even mystic piety. "By a man's manners you may know his wisdom," says Saadi; and he tells the saying of Lokman, who, when asked where he learned his good manners, replied, "From the unmannerly." Saadi himself was well instructed by his father. He tells us that, in his youth, when he was much given to the formal practice of religion, he sat up one night in presence of his father, never once closing his eyes, and holding the precious Koran open on his lap, while the company around them were fast asleep. "I said to my father, 'Not one of these will raise his head to perform his genuflections; but they all are so fast asleep that you might fancy them dead."' He replied, 'O emanation of thy father! it were better that thou also hadst slept, than that thou shouldst be thus censorious of the failings of mankind.'”

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The benefit of good society is beautifully depicted in the following well-known apologue. "One day, as I was in the bath, a friend of mine put into my hand a piece of scented clay. I took it, and said to it, 'Art thou musk or ambergris, for I am charmed with thy perfume?' It answered, 'I was a worthless piece of clay; but I was some time in

the company of the rose, till the sweet quality of my companion was communicated to me.'" Is this the original of

"Je ne suis pas la rose, mais j'ai vécu près d'elle"?

The prevailing tone of good manners, rising sometimes to high breeding, makes Saadi more modern than his European contemporaries. His genius is helped by it to familiarity with us, as well as by the cheerfulness, ease, pleasantry, and good sense of his temper and discourse. He has seen life under so many aspects, that he has an abundant store of illustrations and observations with which to point his moral and enliven his reflections. He knows all ranks, from the king to the beggar, and he has learned wisdom from them all. His style is simple and clear. If he has not the flights of Hafiz, nor the splendor of his diction, neither has he his extravagances nor his conceits. His reputation in Persia, as Sir John Malcolm tells us, "is rather as a wise man and a moralist, than a poet." It is no wonder that he is constantly cited, and that his sayings are current in all mouths. "Have you no laws,'' asked Sir John Malcolm one day of a learned Persian, but the Koran, and the traditions upon that volume?' 'We have,' said he, gravely, 'the maxims of Saadi'; "— and, adds Sir John," were I to judge from my own observations, I should say that these stories and maxims, which are known to all, from the king, to the peasant, have fully as great an effect in restraining the arbitrary and unjust exercise of power as the laws of the Prophet."

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"The good behavior of rulers," as Mr. Emerson has remarked, "is a point to which Saadi constantly returns." "The monarch," he says, is for the protection of the subject, and not the subjects for the service of the king." "The sheep are not for the shepherd, but the shepherd for the sheep." The Instans Tyrannus is made afraid: "The tyrant fancied that he did me an injury; but round his neck it clung, and passed over me."

Saadi's life, says Sir William Jones, "was almost wholly spent in travel; but no man who enjoyed the greatest leisure ever left behind him more valuable fruits of his genius and industry." It is a pity that we English readers have so little acquaintance with his works; and that even this translation of the Gulistan, which is now republished in America, has little merit in the English style, or as a version of the original. We have never seen Professor Eastwick's translation; but though it may, on the whole, not be superior to that of Gladwin, yet we cannot but think a better book might have been made by a judicious selection from the three English translations, than by a literal reprint of either one of them. We are sure that Mr. Ross has rendered

some parts of the book with far more spirit and probable accuracy than Gladwin. Take, for example, the following lines, as translated by the latter: "The virtuous man under adversity preserves a cheerful countenance; but the wicked man in prosperity holds down his head.” With how much more force are they rendered by Ross: "The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven, and the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth." Or, again, Mr. Gladwin translates: "Telling a lie is like inflicting a wound, which, when healed, leaves a scar." Mr. Ross renders, with much more vigor: "To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a sabre; for though the wound may heal, the scar of it will remain." Mr. Gladwin tamely says: "It is better to suffer sorrow before than after the enjoyment of happiness." But Saadi said, if we may trust Mr. Ross: "The sorrow which is the harbinger of joy is preferable to the joy which is followed by sorrow." And once more, Mr. Gladwin says: "If the wicked man should escape to heaven from the hand of calamity, he would continue in calamity from the sense of his own evil disposition"; — which Mr. Ross translates incomparably better: "Let a wicked man ascend up into heaven that he may escape from the grasp of calamity, even thither would the hand of his own evil heart follow him with misfortune."

But with all its drawbacks, we accept gratefully this volume. A book of greater worth, or that deserves better audience, has not been published this year.

2.- The Secret of Hegel, being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter. By JAMES HUTCHINSON STIRLING. London: Longmans. 1865. 2 vols. 8vo.

HEGEL is reported to have said, on his death-bed, that "he left behind him but one man who understood him: and he didn't." Whether this was only a grim, expiring effort of the philosopher to formulate once more "the identity of contradictories," or whether it expressed his definitive judgment of men and Hegelians, Mr. Stirling at all events is persuaded of its literal conformity to fact, and sets himself with great alacrity to torment Hegel's famous formulas afresh, with a view to making them give up the ghost they are supposed to be haunted by. After studiously pondering Mr. Stirling's labor, we feel free to express the conviction, that, if anything remains of Hegel after the mastication, deglutition, digestion, assimilation, and reproduction he has here undergone, he is a hopelessly tough subject. Hegel is to be worthily encountered hereafter only in the pages of Mr. Stirling. The love of adventure must be preposterously strong in a man, if he prefer