she began to regret that so stupendous a mission had been imposed on the fragility of a woman. Her faith in the new philosophy was as mighty as ever, and so was her confidence in her own adequate development of it, now about to be given to the world; yet she wished, or fancied so, that it might never have been her duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to stagger feebly forward under her immense burden of responsibility and renown. So far as her personal concern in the matter went, she would gladly have forfeited the reward of her patient study and labor for so many years, her exile from her country and estrangement from her family and friends, her sacrifice of health and all other interests to this one pursuit, if she could only find herself free to dwell in Stratford and be forgotten. She liked the old slumberous town, and awarded the only praise that ever I knew her to bestow on Shakspeare, the individual man, by acknowledging that his taste in a residence was good, and that he knew how to choose a suitable retirement for a person of shy, but genial temperament. And at this point, I cease to possess the means of tracing her vicissitudes of feeling any farther. In consequence of some advice which I fancied it my duty to tender, as being the only confidant whom she now had in the world, I fell under Miss Bacon's most severe and passionate displeasure, and was cast off by her in the twinkling of an eye. It was a misfortune to which her friends were always particularly liable; but I think that none of them ever loved, or even respected, her most ingenuous and noble, but likewise most sensitive and tumultuous character, the less for it. At that time her book was passing through the press. Without prejudice to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was wholly unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, among many other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest Every to know what to leave out. leaf and line was sacred, for all had been written under so deep a conviction of truth as to assume, in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A practised book-maker, with entire control of her materials, would have shaped out a duodecimo volume full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation,-criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other people's critical remarks on Shakspeare, -philosophic truths which she imagined herself to have found at the roots of his conceptions, and which certainly come from no inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would have shovelled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the mud; for they were the hack critics of the minor periodical press in London, than whom, I suppose, though excellent fellows in their way, there are no gentlemen in the world less sensible of any sanctity in a book, or less likely to recognize an author's heart in it, or more utterly careless about bruising, if they do recognize it. It is their trade. They could not do otherwise. I never thought of blaming them. From the scholars and critics of her own country, indeed, Miss Bacon might have looked for a worthier appreciation, because many of the best of them have higher cultivation and finer and deeper literary sensibilities than all but the very profoundest and brightest of Englishmen. But they are not a courageous body of men; they dare not think a truth that has an odor of absurdity, lest they should feel themselves bound to speak it out. If any American ever wrote a word in her behalf, Miss Bacon never knew it, nor did I. Our journalists at once republished some of the most brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting their poor country woman with stolen mud, without even waiting to know whether the ignominy was deserved. And they never have known it, to this day, nor ever will. The next intelligence that I had of Miss Bacon was by a letter from the mayor of Stratford-on-Avon. He was a medical man, and wrote both in his official and professional character, telling me that an American lady, who had recently published what the mayor called a " Shakspeare book," was afflicted with insanity. In a lucid interval she had referred to me, as a person who had some knowledge of her family and affairs. What she may have suffered before her intellect gave way, we had better not try to imagine. No author had ever hoped so confidently as she; none ever failed more utterly. A superstitious fancy might suggest that the anathema on Shakspeare's tombstone had fallen heavily on her head in requital of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturbing the dust beneath, and that the "Old Player" had kept so quietly in his grave, on the night of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and terribly he would be avenged. But if that benign spirit takes any care or cognizance of such things now, he has surely requited the injustice that she sought to do him—the high justice that she really did-by a tenderness of love and pity of which only he could be capable. What matters it, though she called him by some other name? He had wrought a greater miracle on her than on all the world besides. This bewildered enthusiast had recognized a depth in the man whom she decried, which scholars, critics, and learned societies, devoted to the elucidation of his unrivalled scenes, had never imagined to exist there. She had paid him the loftiest honor that all these ages of renown have been able to accumulate upon his memory. And when, not many months after the outward failure of her life-long object, she passed into the better world, I know not why we should hesitate to believe that the immortal poet may have met her on the threshold and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to mankind so well. I believe that it has been the fate of this remarkable book never to have had more than a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it only in insulated chapters and scattered pages and paragraphs. But, since my return to America, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is completely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, and not to me, whom, in almost the last letter that I received from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work, it belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due position before the public and posterity. This has been too sad a story. To lighten the recollection of it, I will think of my stroll homeward past Charlecote Park, where I beheld the most stately elms, singly, in clumps, and in groves, scattered all about in the sunniest, shadiest, sleepiest fashion; so that I could not but believe in a lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoyment which these trees must have in their existence. Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it need not be keen nor bubble into thrills and ecstasies, like the momentary delights of short-lived human beings. They were civilized trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an indescribable difference. as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to express between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, No At a distance of some hundreds of yards from Charlecote Hall, and almost hidden by the trees between it and the road-side, is an old brick archway and porter's lodge. In connection with this entrance there appears to have been a wall and an ancient moat, the latter of which is still visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base of an embankment of the lawn. About fifty yards within the gate-way stands the house, forming three sides of a square, with three gables in a row on the front and on each of the two wings; and there are several towers and turrets at the angles, together with projecting windows, antique balconies, and other quaint ornaments suitable to the half-Gothic taste in which the edifice was built. Over the gate-way is the Lucy coat-of-arms, emblazoned in its proper colors. The mansion dates from the early days of Elizabeth, and probably looked very much the same as now when Shakspeare was brought before Sir Thomas Lucy for outrages among his deer. The impression is not that of gray antiquity, but of stable and time-honored gentility, still as vital as ever. the richer and more luxuriant) Nature speare the tender and pitiful descrip of England, and the rude, shaggy, bar- tion of a wounded stag, in "As You barous Nature which offers us its ra- Like It." cier companionship in America. less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit what the English call their forests. By-andby, among those refined and venerable trees, I saw a large herd of deer, mostly reclining, but some standing in picturesque groups, while the stags threw their large antlers aloft, as if they had been taught to make themselves tributary to the scenic effect. Some were running fleetly about, vanishing from light into shadow and glancing forth again, with here and there a little fawn careering at its mother's heels. These deer are almost in the same relation to the wild, natural state of their kind that the trees of an English park hold to the rugged growth of an American forest. They have held a certain intercourse with man for immemorial years; and, most probably, the stag that Shakspeare killed was one of the progenitors of this very herd, and may himself have been a partly civilized and humanized deer, though in a less degree than these remote posterity. They are a little wilder than sheep, but they do not snuff the air at the approach of human beings, nor evince much alarm at their pretty close proximity; although, if you continue to advance, they toss their heads and take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or something akin to feminine skittishness, with a dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their having come of a wild stock. They have so long been fed and protected by man, that they must have lost many of their native instincts, and, I suppose, could not live comfortably through even an English winter without human help. One is sensible of a gentle scorn at them for such dependency, but feels none the less kindly disposed towards the half-domesticated race; and it may have been his observation of these tamer characteristics in the Charlecote herd that suggested to Shak All It is a most delightful place. about the house and domain there is a perfection of comfort and domestic taste, an amplitude of convenience, which could have been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labor of many successive generations, intent upon adding all possible improvement to the home where years gone by and years to come give a sort of permanence to the intangible present. An American is sometimes tempted to fancy that only by this long process can real homes be produced. One man's lifetime is not enough for the accomplishment of such a work of Art and Nature, almost the greatest merely temporary one that is confided to him; too little, at any rate, yet perhaps too long, when he is discouraged by the idea that he must made his innse warn and tellgicfal for a musei.aderns rære i meresOTI of whom the one thing tertain 3. taas au wa vichiren w... act se among them. Sula repinlage as are here g poteft, sower, come only from the face, that, bred in Enginn habite of taonght, sa most of a are, we have not ya moder our instincts to the nenessities of our new forms of ille. A lodging in a wigwam or under a tent has rea..y as many advantages, when we come to know them, as a home beneath the roof-tree of Charlecote Hall Bat, aaa! our patcmpters have not yet taught us to see what is beat, nor have dar poets sing us what a beautiff Dest, in the kind of te man we must lead: and therefore we still read the cid EngIsh vistom, and harp pen the ancient strings. And thence it happens, that, when we look at a me-hcored hal, it seems more possitie for men who inheris such a home, than for ourselves, to lead nocie ani græcefii lives, quietly doing good and lovely things as their daily work, and achieving deeds of simpie greatness when circumstances require them. I sometimes apprehend that our institutions may perish before we shall have discovered the most precious of the possibilities which they involve. MR. AXTELL. PART VL “THE leaves of the second autumn were half-shrivelled in drawing near to the winter of their age. She "I had been to see your mother. She was ill. Mary's death was slowly, surely bringing her own near. We had had a long talk that afternoon. Her visions of life were rare and beautiful. was like Mrs. Wilton, the embodiment of all that is purely woman. She had wrought a solemn spell over me,-made Eternity seem near. I had been changed since that prayer on the sea-shore, fourteen months before, but now I felt a longing to go away. Earth seemed so drear, mother was sick, Abraham unhappy, my father deep in the perplexing cares of his profession, mostly from home, Mrs. Percival was dying, -the year was passing away,and I, too, would be going; and as I went out of the house to go home, I remembered the day wherein I had waited in the viny arbor for Mary to awaken from sleep, how I had gone down to the sea to waken myself to a light that burned before it blessed. Since then I had avoided the place, barred with so many prison-wires. Now I felt a longing to go into it. The leaves were frost-bitten. I sympathized with them. Autumn winds went sighing over their misfortunes; spirit - winds blew past me, on their way to and from the land that is and the land that is not to us. The arbor was dear with a newborn love. I went out to greet it, as one might greet a ship sailing the same great ocean, though bound to a different port. There was a something in that old vine-clad arbor that was in me. I felt its shadows coming out to meet me. They chilled a little, but I went in. I looked at the little white office, across the yard, in the corner. I thought of the face that came out that day to see me, the face that drank up my heart in one long draught, begun across Alice dead, finished when I read that letter. The cup of my heart was empty,-so empty now! I looked down into it; it was fringed with stalactites, crystallized from the poison of the glass. Oh! what did I see there? A dead, dead crater, aching for the very fire that made it what it was, crying out of its fierce void for fiery fusion. Why did our God make us so,- us, who love, knowing we should not? I knew from the beginning that Bernard McKey ought not to be cared for by me; but could I help it? Now the veil of death, I believed, hung between, and the eup of my heart might be embalmed: the last change, I thought, had come to it, and left it as I that day found. "Chloe came around the corner, throwing her apron over her head. She looked up and down the way, as if in search of some one, went down the walk to the gate, looked as I had once seen her do at our house, taking it window by window, and finding no one, (the day seemed deserted,) she was walking back. I called to her from the arbor. "I was just looking for you, Miss Lettie. I've got a letter here. Mistress is too sick to read it for me, and Master 's away. Would you?' "It was addressed to Chloe. I broke the seal and opened it. It seemed a long letter. I gave a sigh at the task before me, and looked over to the end. I saw the signature: it was Bernard H. McKey. After that I saw Chloe's troubled black face written on my vision, and felt dripping drops about my head. "There, Miss Lettie, it's all over, now. I's so glad you 're come to! I won't bother you with reading any more letters. It would have to be much good in it that 'ud pay me for seeing you so.' "I was sitting in the arbor a little later, alone, reading the letter. Through the rending of the cup dew stole in; the mist was stifling. Still 't was better than the death that reigned before. The contents of my life were not poured out beyond the earth. The thought gave me comfort. It is so sad to feel the great gate shut down across the flume of your heart! to have the stilled waters set back, never more to join those that have escaped, gone on, to turn the wheel of Eternity! In that hour it was joy enough for me to know that he lived, even if the life was for another. I, too, had my bright portion in it. "Chloe came back. She had forgotten the letter, when she went in to Mrs. Percival. She said 'faintin' must be good for me; she had n't seen me look so fine in a many days.' "I told Chloe that the letter had been written to me, that it was not meant for her. At first she did not comprehend; after that I felt sure that a perception of the truth dawned in her mind, she watched me so closely. "I carried my letter home. That night I compared the two, the one Abraham had found (where I knew not, I never questioned him) with this. They bore no resemblance: but I remembered that two years make changes in all things; they might have effected this. The signatures were unlike; the latter contained the initial H. What if they were not written by the same person? The question was too mighty for me. I was compelled to await the answer. "Bernard would be in Redleaf in November. He named the day,-appointed the place of meeting. It was the old tower in the church-yard. I had a fancy, as you have, for the dreary dimness there. As children, we made it our temple for all the worships childhood knows. The door had long been gone; it was open to every one who chose to enter in. Before the coming of the day, I was in continual fear lest the new joy that had come into my life should trace itself visibly on my outward seeming. I took it in as the hungry do food, and tried to hide the sustenance it gave. I saw that my mother's eyes were often upon me,- that she was trying to follow my joy to its source. One day, it was the very one before his coming,—she came suddenly upon me when I was wrapt in my mantle of exquisite consciousness. I had gone |