"He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain," was the reply. His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the steps leading to the cabin. The young per 143 son was talking earnestly with the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr. Cyprian Eveleth. MONA. AY and night, and night and day, And green leaves on the boughs! All sick and pale my Mona lies, And day and night my heart's wild beats O waters bound with curdling rime! O little golden-bodied bees, Hum tunes her heavy heart to ease! Upon your wings of red and brown, All buds with unfulfilled hours Have birth at once in perfect flowers, For when the unsanctioned is allied Not heaven itself can blame! Then shall the lily leave the shade, HE term "literature of the age of mind, it is, like every other outburst THE not literature produced in the reign of Elizabeth, but is a general name for an era in literature, commencing about the middle of her reign, in 1580, reaching its maturity in the reign of James I., between 1603 and 1626, and perceptibly declining during the reign of his son. It is called by the name of Elizabeth, because it was produced in connection with influences which originated or culminated in her time, and which did not altogether cease to act after her death; and these influences give to its great works, whether published in her reign or the reign of James, certain mental and moral characteristics in common. The most glorious of all the expressions of the English ble in itself. It occurred, but why it occurred we can answer but loosely. We can state the influences which operated on Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh, but the genesis of their genius is beyond our criticism. There was abundant reason, in the circumstances around them, why they should exercise creative power; but the possession of the power is an ultimate fact, and defies explanation. Still, the appearance of so many eminent minds in one period indicates something in the circumstances of the period which aided and stimulated, if it did not cause, the marvel; and a consideration of these circumstances, though it may not enable us to penetrate the mystery of genius, may still shed some light on its character and direction. The impulse given to the English mind in the age of Elizabeth was but one effect of that great movement of the European mind whose steps were marked by the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the study of the ancient classics, the rise of the middle class, the discovery of America, the Reformation, the formation of national literatures, and the general clash and conflict of the old with the new, -the old existing in decaying institutions, the new in the ardent hopes and organizing genius by which institutions are created. If the mind was not always emancipated from error during the stir and tumult of this movement, it was still stung into activity, and compelled to think; for if authority, whether secular or sacerdotal, is questioned, authority no less than innovation in stinctively frames reasons for its exist ence. If power was thus driven to use the weapons of the brain, thought, in its attempt to become fact, was no less driven to use the weapons of force. Ideas and opinions were thus all the more directly perceived and tenaciously held, from the fact that they kindled strong passions, and frequently demanded, not merely the assent of the intellect, but the hazard of fortune and life. At the time Elizabeth ascended the English throne, in 1558, the religious element of this movement had nearly spent its first force. There was a comparatively small band of intensely earnest Romanists, and perhaps a larger band of even more intensely earnest Puritans; but the great majority of the people were probably willing to acquiesce in the form given to the Protestant church by the Protestant state. Elizabeth won the proud distinction of being the head of the Protestant interest in Europe; but the very word interest indicates a distinction between Protestantism as a policy and Protestantism as a faith; and she did not hesitate to put down with a strong hand those of her subjects whose Protestantism most nearly agreed with the Protestantism VOL. XIX. -NO. I12. Had she aided in France and Holland. The Puritan Reformers, though they represented most thoroughly the doctrines and spirit of Luther and Calvin, were thus opposed by the English state, and were a minority of the English people. Had they succeeded in reforming the national Church, the national amusements, and the national taste, according to their ideas of reform, the history and the literature of the age of Elizabeth would have been essentially different; but they would have broken the continuity of the national life. English nature, with its basis of strong sense and strong sensuality, was hostile to their ascetic morality and their practical belief in the all-excluding importance of religious concerns. they triumphed then, their very earnestness might have made them greater, though nobler, tyrants than the Tudors or the Stuarts; for they would have used the arm of power to force evangelical faith and austere morality on a reluctant and resisting people. Sir Toby Belch would have had to fight hard for his cakes and ale; and the nose of Bardolph would have been deprived of the fuel that fed its fire. The Puritans were great forces in politics, as they afterwards proved in the Parliaments of Charles and the Commonwealth ; but in the time of Elizabeth they were politically but a faction, and a faction having at one time for its head the greatest scoundrel in England, the Earl of Leicester. They were great forces in literature, as they afterwards proved by Milton and Bunyan; but their position towards what is properly called the literature of the age of Elizabeth was strictly antagonistical. The spirit of that literature, in its poetry, its drama, its philosophy, its divinity, was a spirit which they disliked in some of its forms, and abhorred in others. Their energies, though mighty, are therefore to be deducted from the mass of energies by which that literature was produced. And this brings us to the first and most marked characteristic of this literature, namely, that it is intensely huHuman nature in its appetites, passions, imperfections, vices, virtues, man. in its thoughts, aspirations, imaginations, in all the forms of concrete character in which it finds expression, in all the heights of ecstasy to which it soars, in all the depths of depravity to which it sinks, this is what it represents or idealizes; and the total effect of this exhibition of human life and exposition of human capacities, whether it be in the romance of Sidney, the poetry of Spenser, the drama of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Bacon, or the divinity of Hooker, is the wholesome and inspiring effect of beauty and cheer. This belief in human nature, and tacit assumption of its right to expression, could only have risen in an age which stimulated human energies by affording fresh fields for their development, and in an age whose activity was impelled by a romantic and heroic, rather than a theological spirit. And the peculiar position of Elizabeth compelled her, absolute as was her temper, to act in harmony with her people, and to allow individual enterprise its largest scope. Her revenue was altogether inadequate to carry on a war with Spain and a war with Ireland, to assist the Protestants of France and Holland, to inaugurate great schemes of American colonization, to fit out expeditions to harass the colonies and plunder the commerce of Spain, inadequate, in short, to make England a power of the first class. But the patriotism of her people, coinciding with their interests and love of adventure, urged them to undertake public objects as commercial speculations. They made war on her enemies for the spoils to be obtained from her enemies. Perhaps the most comprehensive type of the period, representing most vividly the stimulants it presented to ambition and avarice, to chivalrous sentiment and greed of gain, to action and to thought, was Sir Walter Raleigh. Poet, historian, courtier, statesman, military commander, naval commander, colonizer, filibuster, he had no talent and no accomplishment, no virtue and no vice, which the time did not tempt into exercise. He participated in the widely varying ambitions of Spenser and Jon son, of Essex and Leicester, of Burleigh, Walsingham, and Sir Nicholas Bacon, of Norris and Howard of Effingham, of Drake, Hawkins, and Cumberland; and in all these he was thoroughly human. The next characteristic of the higher literature of the period is its breadth and preponderance of thought, — a quality which seemed native to the time, and which was shared by the men of affairs. Indeed, no one could serve Elizabeth well whose loyalty of heart was unaccompanied by largeness of brain. She was so surrounded by foreign enemies and domestic factions, that the sagacity which makes the fewest mistakes was her only safety from dethronement or assassination. Her statesmen, however fixed might be their convictions and energetic their wills, were, by the necessities of their position, compelled to be wary, vigilant, politic, crafty, comprehensive in their views, compromising in their measures. The time required minds that could observe, analyze, infer, combine, foresee,— vigorous in the grasp of principles, exact in the scrutiny of facts. Such were the complications of political affairs, that the difficulty, in all but the most capacious intellects, was to decide at all; and even they sometimes found it wise to follow the drift of events which it was almost impossible to shape or to guide. It might be supposed, that if, in any person of the period, impetuosity of purpose or caprice of will would overbear all the restraints of prudence, that person was Elizabeth herself; but she really was as indecisive in conduct as she was furious in passion. fierce, vain, haughty, vindictive; a virago and a coquette; ready enough to box the ears of one of her courtiers, and threaten with an oath to unfrock one of her bishops; despotic in her relations with all over whom she had complete control; cursed, indeed, with every internal impulse which leads to reckless action, she was still a thinker; and thought revealed insecurities in her position, in considering which even her imperious will was puzzled into irreso Proud, lution, and shrank from the plain road of force to feel its way through the crooked paths of hypocrisy and craft. This comprehensiveness of thought did not, in the men of letters, interfere with loftiness of thought, but it connected thought with life, gave it body and form, and made it fertile in those weighty maxims which, while they bear directly on practical conduct, and harmonize with the experience of men, are also characterized by that easy elevation of view and of tone which distinguishes philosophic, wisdom from prudential moralizing. The Elizabethan thinkers instinctively recognized the truth that real thinking implies the action of the whole nature, and not of a single isolated faculty. They were men of large understandings; but their understandings rarely acted apart from observation, the sight of what appears, from imagination, the sight of what is, from sentiment, passion, and character. They not only reasoned, but they had reason. They looked at things, and round things, and into things, and through things. Though they were masters of the processes of logic, their eminent merit was their broad grasp of the premises of logic, – their ready anticipation of the results of logic. They could argue; but they preferred to flash the conclusions of argument rather than to recite its details, and their minds darted to results to which slower intelligences creep. From the fact that they had reason in abundance, they were somewhat chary of reasons. Their thinking, indeed, gives us the solid, nutritious, enriching substance of thought. While it comprehends the outward facts of life, it connects them with those great mental facts beheld by the inner eye of the mind. It thus combines the most massive good sense with a Platonic elevation of spiritual perception, and especially avoids the thinness and juicelessness which are apt to characterize the greatest efforts of the understanding, when understanding is divorced from human nature. of the faculties of the mind and the feelings of the heart, which give to these writers their largeness, dignity, sweetness, and power, are to be referred in a great degree to the imaginative element of their natures. They lived, indeed, in an imaginative age,—an age in which thought, feeling, aspiration, character, whether low or exalted, aimed to embody themselves in appropriate external forms, and be made visible to the eye. In the great poets and philosophers this imagination existed both as ecstatic insight of spiritual facts and as shaping power, - both as the "vision and the faculty divine "; but all over the Elizabethan society, in dress, in manners, in speech, in the badges of professions, in amusements, in pageants and spectacles, character, class, and condition, in all their varieties, were directly imaged. Lamb calls all this a visible poetry; and much which we now read as poetry was simply the transference into language of the common facts of the time. This imaginative tendency of the national mind appeared in a still higher form in that chivalrous cast of feeling and of thought which we observe in all the nobler men of the time. "Higherected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy," is Sir Philip Sidney's definition of the gentleman; and this was the standard to which many aspired, if few reached. This chivalry was a poetic reflection of the feudal age, which was departing in its rougher and baser realities, but lingering in its beautiful ideas and ideals, especially in the knightly love of adventure and the knightly reverence for woman. It gave an air of romance to acts, enterprises, and amusements which sometimes had their vulgar side. Raleigh tilted in silver armor before the Queen, though the silver from which the armor was made had been stolen from Spanish merchantmen. Sidney was eager to fight in single combat with the anonymous defamer of his uncle Leicester, though his uncle richly deserved the gibbet. Cumberland was a knight-errant of the seas, strangely blending the love of This equipoise and interpenetration glory with the love of gold, the spirit |