of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar -for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick,— "Fire! for God's sake fire!"-and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity, such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them. "Æneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity. A similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill. ARTHUR CLEVELAND COXE. ARTHUR CLEVELAND COXE is the son of the Rev. Samuel H. Coxe, of Brooklyn, the author of Quakerism, not Christianity; Interviews, Memorable and Useful, from Diary and Memory, reproduced; and other publications. He was born at Mendham, New Jersey, May 10, 1818. On his mother's side he is a grandson of the Rev. Aaron Cleveland, an early poet of Connecticut. Mr. Cleveland was born at Haddam, February 3, 1744. His father, a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, dying when the son was but thirteen years of age, the latter received few educational advantages. He, how. ever, at the age of nineteen, produced a descriptive poem, The Philosopher and Boy, of some merit. He soon after became a Congregational minister. In 1775 he published a poem on Slavery, in blank verse. He was also the author of several satirical poems directed against the Jeffersonians. He died on the twenty-first of September, 1815.* Mr. Coxe was prepared for college under the private tuition of Professor George Bush. He entered the University of the City of New York, and was graduated in 1838. During his freshman year he wrote a poem, The Progress of Ambition, and in 1837 published Advent, a Mystery, a poem after the manner of the religious dramas of the Middle Ages. In 1838 appeared Athwold, a Romaunt, and Saint Jonathan, the Lay of the Scald, designed as the commencement of a semihumorous poem, in the Don Juan style. Mr. Coxe soon after became a student in the General Theological Seminary, New York. While at this institution he delivered a poem, Athanasion, before the Alumni of Washington College, Hartford, at the Commencement in 1840. In the same year he published Christian Ballads, a collection of poems, suggested for the most part by the holy seasons and services of his church. Five editions of this popular volume have since appeared. Mr. Coxe was ordained deacon in July, 1841. and in the August following became rector of St. Anne's church, Morrisania, where he wrote his poem Halloween, privately printed in 1842. He was next called to St. John's church, at Hartford. During his residence at that place he putlished, in 1845, Saul, a Mystery, a dramatic pota of much greater length than his Advent, but, like that production, modelled on the early religions Everest's Poets of Connecticut. plays. He is at present rector of Grace church, Baltimore. In addition to his poetical volumes Mr. Coxe has published Sermons on Doctrine and Duty, preached to the parishioners of St. John's church, Hartford, and numerous articles in the Church Review and other periodicals. He has also translated a work of the Abbe Laborde, on the Impossibility of the Immaculate Conception as an Article of Faith, with notes. OLD TRINITY. Easter Even, 1840. Thy servants think upon her stones, and it pitieth them to sce her in the dust.-Psalter. The Paschal moon is ripe to-night On fair Manhada's bay, And soft it falls on Hoboken, As where the Saviour lay; And beams beneath whose paly shine Show many a blood-besprinkled door But here, where many an holy year Oh, where's the consecrated porch, And where's that antique steeple's height I seem to miss a mother's face And in thine own blest bound, They've laid thee low, dear mother church, The vaulted roof that trembled oft The quaint old altar where we owned The chimes that ever in the tower And held me spell-bound in the way The marble monuments within ; The mitre and the legend there All these thou knewest, Paschal moon, And thou wast shining on this spot But oh, its look that Easter morn, The Saviour only knows. A thousand years-and 'twas the same, And so, till good Queen Anna reigned, But when they made its virgin turf, And when Apostles came, They claimed, for Christ, its battlements, VOL. II.-42 Then, Paschal moon, this sacred spot Till flames brought down the holy place, That mother church sublime! Ay, look with smiles, for never there So wane away, old Paschal moon, They rear old Trinity once more: Our Paschal Lamb himself shall come HE STANDETH AT THE DOOR AND KNOCKETH. In the silent midnight watches, How it knocketh-knocketh-knocketh, Say not 't is thy pulse is beating: Tis thy heart of sin; 'Tis thy Saviour knocks, and crieth"Rise, and let me in." Death comes on with reckless footsteps, To the hall and hut: Think you, Death will tarry, knocking, Jesus waiteth, waiteth, waiteth- Grieved away thy Saviour goeth; Then, 'tis time to stand entreating At the gate of heaven beating, THE VOLUNTEER'S MArch. As darkness grows drearer: Going down to the dead! How blithesome they skip, Oh ho! how they march, Making sounds as they tread; Ho-ho! how they skip, Going down to the dead! Going down to the dead! With a skull on his shoulder. But ho! how he steps With a high tossing head, That clay-covered bone, Going down to the dead! JOHN STEINFORT KIDNEY Is the author of a volume, Catawba River, and Other Poems, published in 1847. He is a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, settled at Saratoga Springs, New York. He was born in 1819, in Essex County, N. J., where his ancestors had lived for a hundred and fifty years, was educated partly at Union College, and gave some attention to the law before entering the church through the course of instruction of the General Theological Seminary. After his ordination he was for a time rector of a parish in North Carolina, and afterwards in Salem, N. J. His verses show an individual temperament, and the tastes of a scholar and thinker. GEORGE HOOKER COLTON, the son of the Rev. George Colton, was born at Westford, Otsego County, New York, on the 27th of October, 1818. He was graduated, with a high rank in his class, at Yale College, in 1840. In the fall of the same year, while engaged as a teacher in Hartford, he determined to write a poem on the Indian Wars, in which the newly elected President, General Harrison, had been engaged. It was to have appeared at the time of the Inauguration, but, the plan expanding as the author proceeded, was not published until the spring of 1842. The poem, Tecumseh, or the West Thirty Years Since, is in nine cantos, in the octosyllabic measure and style of Sir Walter Scott, with the usual ordinary felicities of illustration bestowed upon this class of compositions in America, of which many have been produced with little success. In 1842 Mr. Colton also prepared, from the materials which he had accumulated during the progress of his poem, a course of lectures on the Indians, which were delivered in various places during 1842 and 1843. In the summer of 1844 he delivered a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Yale College. In January, 1845, he published the first number of the American Whig Review, a monthly magazine of politics and literature, under his editorship. Mr. Colton entered upon this important enterprise with great energy, securing a large number of the leading politicians and authors of the country as its friends and contributors. He edited the work with judgment, wrote constantly for its pages, and had succeeded in gaining a fair measure of success, when he was seized in November, 1847, by a violent attack of typhus fever, which put an end to his life on the first of December following.* PHILIP SCHAFF. DR. PHILIP SCHAFF, Professor of Theology in the Seminary of the German Reformed Church at Mercersburg, Pa., the author of a History of the Apostolic Church and of other theological works, which have received considerable attention in America, is a native of Switzerland. He was born at Coire (Chur), Canton Graubundten, January 1, 1819. He was educated at the college of his native city, afterwards at the Gymnasium of Stuttgart, and in the Universities of Tubingen, Halle, and Berlin. He received his degree in 1841, as Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Divinity, at the University of Berlin, which subsequently (1854) presented him the Diploms of D.D. honoris causâ. At the conclusion of his early college life, he travelled for nearly two years through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy, as tutor of a young Prussian nobleman. In 1842 he became a lecturer on theology in the University of Berlin, after having gone through the examination of public academic teachers. In 1843, he received a unanimous call as professor of Church History and Exegesis to the Theologi • New Englander, vii. 229. cal Seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, from the Synod of the German Reformed Church of the United States, on the recommendations of Drs. Neander, Hengstenberg, Tholuck, Muller, Krummacher, and others, who had been consulted about a suitable representative of German Evangelical Theology for America. In the spring of 1844 he left Berlin, and after some months' travel in Southern Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and England, he crossed the Atlantic and soon identified himself with American interests. He has since been engaged in teaching the various branches of exegetical and historical theology at Mercersburg, both in the German and English languages, with the exception of the year 1854, which he spent on a visit to his friends in Europe. The Church History of Dr. Schaff is remarkable for its thorough and apparently exhaustive learning, for its clear style and somewhat artistic groupings, for its union of doctrinal persistency with philosophical enlargement. His position is that of strong supernaturalism, with great emphasis upon the church organism, and the high Lutheran doctrine of divine grace, which is saved from Calvinism by the decided high church view of the sacraments. His life of Augustine is a scholarlike and philosophical development of the great saint's doctrinal positions from his experience and life.* Marshall College, with which, under the presidency of the Rev. Dr. John W. Nevin, Dr. Schaff held the Professorship of Esthetics and German Literature, was first situated at Mercersburg, Franklin Co. Pa., and was founded under a charter from the Legislature of Pennsylvania in 1835. It sprang originally out of the high school attached to the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church, and is in intimate union with that institution. By an act of the state in 1850, it was united with Franklin College at Lancaster, and in 1853 was removed to that place, the new institution bearing the title Franklin and Marshall College. Adolphus L. Koeppen, author of a series of lectures on Geography and History, and a valua The following is a list of the publications of Dr. Schaff:1. The Sin against the Holy Ghost, and the Dogmatical and Ethical Inferences derived from it. With an Appendix on the Life and Death of Francis Spiera. Halle, 1841. (German.) 2. James, the Brother of the Lord, and James the Less. An exegetical and historical essay. Berlin, 1842. (German.) 3. The Principle of Protestantism, as related to the present state of the Church. Chambersburg, Pa., 1845. (German and English Translation, with an Introduction by Dr. Nevin.) 4. What is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development. Philadelphia, 1846. (English.) 5. History of the Apostolic Church, with a General Introduction to Church History. First German edition, Mercersburg, Pa., 1851. Second German edition, Leipzic, 1854. (English translation by the Rev. E. Yeomans, New York, 1858. Reprinted in Edinburgh, 1854.) 6. Life and Labors of St. Augustine (English edition, New York, 1853, and another, London, 1854. German edition, Berlin, 1854.) 7. America. The Political, Social, and Religious Condition of the United States of N. Á. Berlin, 1954. (German. An English translation will appear before the end of 1855.) 8. Der Deutsche Kirchenfreund ("The German Church Friend, or Monthly Organ for the General Interests of the German Churches in America," commenced in 1848, and edited and published by Dr. Schaff till the close of the 6th volume in 1853; now continued by the Rev. William J. Mann, Philadelphia, Pa.) 9. Several Tracts and Orations on Anglo-Germanism, Dante, Systematic Benevolence, etc. etc., and Articles in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Methodist Quarterly, Mercersburg Review, and other journals of America and Germany. ble publication on the subject, is Professor of German Literature, Esthetics, and History, in this institution. Dr. Nevin, the associate of Professor Schaff, is alse the author of a work on The Mystical Presence, a Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and other theological writings of the school of divinity to which he is attached, and of which the Mercersburg Review, commenced in January, 1849, has been the organ. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Is the descendant of an old New England family, which has long held important stations in Massachusetts. His ancestor, Percival Lowell, settled in the town of Newbury in 1639. His grandfather, John Lowell, was an eminent lawyer, a member of Congress and of the convention which formed the first constitution of Massachusetts. His father is Charles Lowell, the venerable pastor of the West Church in Boston; his mother was a native of New Hampshire, a sister of the late Capt. Robert T. Spence of the U. S. Navy, and is spoken of as of remarkable powers of mind and possessing in an eminent degree the faculty of acquiring languages.* This faculty is inherited by her daughter, Mrs. Putnam, whose controversy with Mr. Bowen, editor of the North American Review, respecting the late war in Hungary, brought her name prominently before the public. Mrs. Putnam converses readily in French, Italian, Gerinan, Polish, Swedish, and Hungarian, and is familiar with twenty modern dialects, besides the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persic, and Arabic. Mrs. Putnam made the first translation into English of Frederica Bremer's novel of the Neighbors, from the Swedish. The translation by Mary Howitt was made from the German.-Homes of American Authors-Art. LOWELL. his degree at Harvard. His first production in print, a class poem, appeared at this time. This was succeeded, in 1841, by a collection of poems -A Year's Life. It was marked by a youthful delicacy and sensibility, with a leaning to transcendental expression, but teeming with proofs of the poetic nature, particularly in a certain vein of tenderness. In January, 1843, he commenced, in conjunction with his friend Mr. Robert Carter, the publication of The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine, which, though published in the form of a fashionable illustrated magazine, was of too fine a cast to be successful. But three monthly numbers were issued: they contained choice articles from Poe, Neal, Hawthorne, Parsons, Dwight, and others, including the editors. This unsuccessful speculation was an episode in a brief career at the bar, which Mr. Lowell soon relinquished for a literary life. The reception of Mr. Lowell's first poetic volume had been favorable, and encouraged the author's next adventure, a volume containing the Legend of Brittany, Miscellaneous Poems and Sonnets, in 1844. There was a rapid advance in art in these pages, and a profounder study of passion. The leading poem is such a story as would have engaged the heart of Shelley or Keats. A country maiden is betrayed and murdered by a knightly lover. Her corpse is concealed behind the church altar, and the guilty presence made known on a festival day by a voice demanding baptism for the unborn babe in its embrace. The murderer is struck with remorse, and ends his days in repentance. The story thus outlined is delicately told, and its repulsiveness overcome by the graces of poetry and feeling with which it is invested in the character of the heroine Margaret. The poem in blank verse entitled Prometheus, which followed the legend in the volume, afforded new proof of the author's ability. It is mature in thought and expression, and instinet with a lofty imagination. The prophecy of the triumph of love, humanity, and civilization, over the brute and sensual power of Jove, is a fine modern improvement of the old fable. The apologue of Rhacus is also in a delicate, classical spirit. The next year Mr. Lowell gave the public a volume of prose essays a series of critical and esthetic Conversations on some of the Old Poets, Chaucer and the dramatists Chapman and Ford being the vehicles for introducing a liberal stock of reflections on life and literature generally. It is a book of essays, displaying a subtle knowledge of English literature, to which the form of dialogue is rather an incumbrance. Another series of Poems, containing the spirit of the author's previous volume, followed in 1848. About the same time appeared The Vision of Sir Launfal, founded on a legend of a search for the San Greal. The knight in his dream discovers charity to the suffering to be the holy cup. As a diversion to the pursuit of sentimental poetry, Mr. Lowell at the close of the year sent forth a rhyming estimate of contemporaries in & Fable for Critics, which, though not without some puerilities, contains a series of sharply drawn portraits in felicitous verse. The Biglow Papers, edited with an Introduction, Notes, Glossary, and Copious Inder, complete the record of this busy year. The book purports to be written by Homer Wilbur, A.M., Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam and (prospective) Member of many Literary, Learned, and Scientific Societies. It is cast in the Yankee dialect, and is quite an artistic product in that peculiar lingo. The subject is an exposure of the political pretences and shifts which accompanied the war with Mexico, the satire being directed against war and slavery. It is original in style and pungent in effect. This is Mr. Lowell's last published volume, his time having been since occupied in a residence abroad, though he has occasionally written for the North American Review, Putnam's Magazine, and other journals, and was for a time a stated contributor to the Anti-slavery Standard. We He was married in December, 1844, to Miss Maria White, of Watertown, a lady whose literary genius, as exhibited in a posthumous volume privately printed by her husband in 1855, deserves a record in these pages. She was born July 8, 1821, and died October 27, 1853. quote from the memorial volume alluded to, which is occupied with a few delicately simple poems of her composition, chiefly divided be tween records of foreign travel and domestic pathos, this touching expression of resignation :— THE ALPINE SHEEP-ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND AFTER THE LOSS When on my ear your loss was knelled, A little spring from memory welled, A portion of its mild relief, To steal some fever from your grief. Like a long twilight haunting lay, Was told to us by one we love. Soon crop the meadows' tender prime, That hang along the mountain's side, More dewy-soft than lowland mead, |