Sleeps He the sleep that knows no morn? Pure Faith, and Truth that loves the light, Many a kind heart for Him makes moan; Thy love bids heaven restore again That which it took not as a loan: Were sweeter lute than Orpheus' given Into his dark assemblage, who Unlocks not fate to mortal's prayer. Hard lot! Yet light their griefs who BEAR JULIA WARD HOWE. Born in New York, May 27, 1819. Author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "The World's Own," a drama; "Life of Margaret Fuller," "Trip to Cuba," "Is Polite Society Polite? and Other Essays," "From the Oak to the Olive," and "Later Lyrics." As a philanthropist and woman of letters, she has been, during many years in the "Athens of America," the patron saint of that part of society which is devoted to all that is good and beautiful and true. THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC MINE eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I have read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on. I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: "As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on." He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat; O, be swift, my soul, to answer him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. Born at Martinsville, Ohio, March 1, 1837. He was consul at Venice, 1861-1865; editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly, 1871-1881; editor of The Editor's Study in Harper's Magazine, 1886-1891. Author of "Venetian Life," "Italian Journeys," "Their Wedding Journey," "A Chance Acquaintance," "A Foregone Conclusion," "The Parlor Car," "The Lady of the Aroostook," "The Undiscovered Country," "The Rise of Silas Lapham," "Indian Summer," "Tuscan Cities," "Poems," "Modern Italian Poets," Suburban Sketches," "My Literary Passions," "A Parting and a Meeting," "Impressions and Experiences," etc. Howells might be called, for his delicate humor, his clear style, and the agreeable flavor of his thought, "the Addison of American literature." (The following selection from "Suburban Sketches" is used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, the publishers.) MY DOOR-STEP ACQUAINTANCE VAGABONDS the world would no doubt call many of my doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt to defend them altogether against the world, which paints but black and white and in general terms. Yet I would fain veil what is only half-truth under another name, for I know that the service of their Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful ease as we associate with ideas of vagrancy, though I must own that they lead the life they do because they love it. They always protest that nothing but their ignorance of our tongue prevents them from practising some mechanical trade. "What work could be harder," they ask, "than carrying this organ about all day?" But while I answer with honesty that nothing can be more irksome, I feel that they only pretend a disgust with it, and that they really like organ-grinding, if for no other reason than that they are the children of the summer, and it takes them into the beloved open weather. One of my friends, at least, who in the warmer months is to all appearance a blithesome troubadour, living "A merry life in sun and shade," is a coal-heaver in winter; and though this more honorable and useful occupation is doubtless open to him the whole year round, yet he does not devote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal wharves and carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with his lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his tambourine but take up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day in a chance passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of his father's personal history. It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians live that one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets in Boston, with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings at their ground floor windows; with moldering archways between the buildings, and at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the Madonna; with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from which hung the linen swathings of young infants, and lovemaking maidens furtively lured the velvet-jacketed, leisurely youth below: a place haunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume from the blossom of vines and almond trees, mingling with less delicate smells, the traveled reader pleases to imagine. I do not say that I found Ferry Street actually different from this vision in most respects; but as for the vines and almond trees, they were not in bloom at the moment of my encounter with the little tambourine boy. As we stood and talked, the snow fell as heavily and thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a vague pain, the envy of a race toward another born to a happier clime, I heard from him that his whole family was going back to Italy in a month. The father had at last got together money enough, and the mother, who had long been an invalid, must be taken home; and, so far as I know, the population of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return, soon or late, to the native or the ancestral land. - More than one of my door-step acquaintance, in fact, seemed to have no other stock in trade than this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our sympathetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met the widow of Giovanni Cascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set fire to their home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in the flames. She was our first Italian acquaintance in Charlesbridge, presenting herself with a little subscription book which she sent in for inspection, with a printed certificate to the facts of her history signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that her object in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy; and the whole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even the nationality of the bearer; but we were put to shame by the decent joy she manifested in an Italian salutation. There was no longer a question of imposture in anybody's mind; we gladly paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked us with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligation where it belonged. As she turned to go with many good wishes, we pressed her to have some dinner, but she answered, with a compliment insurpassably flattering, she had just dined — in another palace. The truth is, there is not a single palace on Benicia Street, and our little box of pine and paper would hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where these things are often contrived with great simplicity; but as we had made a little Italy together, she touched it with the exquisite politeness of her race, and it became for the instant a lordly mansion, standing on the Chiaja, or the Via Nuovissima, or the Canalazzo. I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in Italian, but not, so far as I could see, surprised; and altogether the most amazing thing about my door-step acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never surprised to be spoken to in their own tongue, or, if they are, never show it. A chestnut roaster, who has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money would have bought of him in English, has not otherwise recognized the fact that Tuscan is not the dialect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying nonchalance with which my advances have always been received has long since persuaded me that to the grinder at the gate it is not remarkable that a man should open the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street, and welcome him in his native language. After the first shock of this indifference is past, it is not to be questioned but it flatters with an illusion, which a stare of amazement would forbid, reducing the encounter to a vulgar reality at |