LXXVII.-VISIT TO THE LOUVRE.

Ir has a vast collection of the great schools of painters, ancient and modern. Each school has its saloons, and they follow one after another until the mind reels and staggers under the before unconceived and inconceivable riches. No description will impress you with the multitudinousness of this repository of art. All the streams of pictorial beauty seem, since the world began, to have flowed hither, and this is the ocean.

The first feeling which overwhelmed me was that of surprise-profound wonder. It seemed as if all picture admiration before had been of one sort, but this of another and a higher—the result of instant conversion, if the expression be not irreverent. The number of pictures the great number of good pictures!-not stuff to fill upbut noble, enchanting pieces, some of vast size, of wonderful brilliancy, of novel subjects, in positions the most favorable for the finest effect-all this filled me with exquisite surprise.

Can you imagine the feelings which you would have, if, after all the flowers you have seen, you should, in a chance drive, unexpectedly come into some mountain pass, and find the sides far up perfectly overspread with flowers, the most beautiful and new, of all forms, of every color, of fragrance surpassing any hitherto found, of every size, and so growing that one set off another, and all of them spread abroad on ruby rocks, with diamonds, and every precious stone, gleaming out between the leaves? In some such way did I stand surprised when first in these grand galleries.

This surprise soon changed to a more complex pleasure. It was not the enjoyment of color alone; nor of form, nor of the composition, nor of the sentiment of the pieces, but a harmony of pleasure from all of these. The walls beam upon you as if each was a summer; and, like one strolling at summer's eve, you cannot tell whether it be the clouds, the sky, the light, the shadows, the scenery, or the thousand remembrances which rise over the soul in such an hour, that give the pleasure.

I saw all that the painter painted, and more; I imagined in each scene (for the most were pictures of human forms) what had gone before, and what had followed. I talked with the beautiful or fearful creatures, and they spake to me. As I gradually journeyed down the gallery, the sense of multitudinous beauty increased, and all that I had seen, and all that I was seeing, seemed to run together and form a bewildering sense of tropical luxuriance of conception and execution. There was that same individuality of picture that there is of trees in a forest; and yet, like trees, each picture seemed to extend its branches into others, so that there was a unity-a forest.

The sense of beauty-beauty of every kind-of form, feature, expression, attitude, intent, gröuping, beauty of drawing, of coloring, of each thing by itself, and of all together-was inexpressible.

I could not tell whether hours or minutes were passing. It was a blessèd exhalation of soul, in which I seemed freed from matter, and, as a diffused intelligence, to float in the atmosphere. I could not believe that a dull body was the centre from which thought and emotion radiated. I had a sense of expansion, of etherealization, which gave me some faint sense of a spiritual state. Nor was I in a place altogether unfitted for such a state. The subjects of many of the works-suffering, heroic resistance, angels, Arcadian scenes, especially the scenes of Christ's life and death-seemed a not unfitting accompaniment to my mind, and suggested to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing near of a redeemed soul to the precincts of Heaven! Oh, with what an outburst of soul did I implore Christ to wash me and all whom I loved in His precious blood, that we might not fail of entering the glorious city, whose builder and maker is God!

All my sins seemed not only sins, but great deformities. They seemed not merely affronts against God, but insults to my own nature. My soul snuffed at them, and trod them down as the mire in the street. Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God, or toward man, seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets along the west at sunset, crowned with glory; and the gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness and knowledge seemed to me like silvery mists though which the morning is striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films heavenward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for one's fellows, or for one's own purity, seemed not only natural, but as things without which a soul could not live. REV. HENRY W. 'BEECHER.

LXXVIII.-BERNARDO DEL CARPIO.

THE warrior bowed his crested head, and tamed his heart of fire,

And sued the haughty king to free his long-imprisoned sire;

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'I bring thee here my fortress keys, I bring my captive train,

I pledge thee faith, my liege, my lord !-oh, break my father's chain !"

"Rise, rise! even now thy father comes, a ransomed man this day;
Mount thy good horse, and thou and I will meet him on his way:"
Then lightly rose that loyal son, and bounded on his steed,
And urged, as if with lance in rest, the charger's foamy speed.

And lo! from far, as on they pressed, there came a glittering band,
With one that midst them stately rode, as a leader in the land;

"Now haste, Bernardo, haste! for thêre, in very truth, is he, The father whom thy faithful heart hath yearned so long to see.”

His dark eye flashed, his proud breast heaved, his cheek's blood came and went;

He reached that gray-haired chieftain's side, and there, dismounting,

bent;

A lowly knee to earth he bent, his father's hand he took,-
What was there in its touch that all his fiery spirit shook?

That hand was cold-a frozen thing-it dropped from his like lead-
He looked up to the face above-the face was of the dead!

A plume waved o'er the noble brow-the brow was fixed and white;He met at last his father's eyes-but in them was no sight!

Up from the ground he sprang, and gazed-but who could paint that gaze?

They hushed their very hearts that saw its horror and amaze;
They might have chained him, as before that stony form he stood,
For the power was stricken from his arm, and from his lip the blood.

"Father!" at length he murmured low-and wept like childhood then,

Talk not of grief till thou hast seen the tears of warlike men!—
He thought on all his glorious hopes, on all his young renown,
He flung the falchion from his side, and in the dust sat down.

Then covering with his steel-gloved hands his darkly mournful brow,
"No more,
there is no more," he said, "to lift the sword for now,-
My king is false, my hope betrayed, my father-oh! the worth,
The glory and the loveliness, are passed away from earth!

"I thought to stand where banners waved, my sire! beside thee yet, I would that there our kindred blood on Spain's free soil had met,Thou wouldst have known my spirit then,-for thee my fields were

won,

And thou hast perished in thy chains, as though thou hadst no son !"

Then, starting from the ground once more, he seized the monarch's rêin,

Amidst the pale and wildered looks of all the courtier train;

And with a fierce, o'ermastering grasp, the rearing war-horse led, And sternly set them face to face, -the king before the dead!—

"Came I not forth, upon thy pledge, my father's hand to kiss?— Be still, and gaze thou on, false king! and tell me what is this!

The voice, the glance, the heart I sought-give answer, where are

they?

If thou wouldst clear thy perjured soul, send life through this cold clay!

"Into these glassy eyes put light-be still! keep down thine ire,-
Bid these white lips a blessing speak-this earth is not my sire!
Give me back him for whom I strove, for whom my blood was shed-
Thou canst not—and a king?—His dust be mountains on thy head!”

He loosed the steed; his slack hand fell,-upon the silent face
He cast one long, deep, troubled look,-then turned from that sad
place:

His hope was crushed, his after fate untold in martial strain,
His banner led the spears no more amidst the hills of Spain.
MRS. F. D. HEMANS.

LXXIX.-CLOSE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

THE reign of George III., embraces, beyond all question, the most eventful and important period in the annals of mankind. In its eventful days were combined the growth of Grecian democracy with the passions of Roman ambition; the fervor of °plebeian zeal with the pride of aristocratic power; the blood of Marius with the genius of Cæsar; the opening of a nobler hemisphere to the enterprise of Columbus, with the rise of a social agent as mighty as the press or the powers of steam.

But if new elements were called into action in the social world, of surpassing strength and energy, in the course of this memorable reign, still more remarkable were the characters which rose to oeminence during its continuance. The military genius, unconquerable courage, and enduring constancy of Frederick; the ardent mind, burning eloquence, and lofty patriotism of Chatham; the incorruptible integrity, sagacious intellect, and philosophic spirit of Franklin; the disinterested virtue, prophetic wisdom, and imperturbable fortitude of WASHINGTON; the masculine understanding, feminine passions, and blood-stained ambition of "Catharine, would alone have been sufficient to cast a radiance over any other age of the world.

But bright as were the stars of its morning light, more brilliant still was the constellation which shone forth in its meridian splendor, or cast a glow over the twilight of its evening shades. Then were to be seen the rival genius of Pitt and Fox, which, emblematic of the antagonist powers which then convulsed mankind, shook the British senate by their vehemence, and roused the spirit destined, ere

long, for the dearest interests of humanity, to array the world in arms; then the great soul of Burke cast off the unworldly fetters' of ambition or party, and, °fraught with a giant's force and a prophet's wisdom, regained its destiny in the cause of mankind; then the arm of 'Nelson cast its thunderbolts on every shore, and preserved unscathed in the deep the ark of European freedom; and, ere his reign expired, the wisdom of Wellington had erected an impassable barrier to Gallic ambition, and said, even to the deluge of imperial power, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed."

Nor were splendid genius, heroic virtue, gigantic wickedness, wanting on the opposite side of this heart-stirring conflict. Mirabeau had thrown over the morning of the French Revolution the brilliant but deceitful light of democratic genius; Danton had colored its noontide glow with the passions and the energy of tribunician power; "Carnot had exhibited the combination, rare in a corrupted age, of republican energy with private virtue; Robespierre had darkened its evening days by the blood and agony of selfish ambition; °Napoleon had risen like a meteor over its midnight darkness, dazzled the world by the brightness of his genius and the lustre of his deeds, and 'lured its votaries, by the deceitful blaze of glory, to perdition.

In calmer pursuits, in the tranquil walks of science and literature, the same age was, beyond all others, fruitful in illustrious men. Doctor Johnson, the strongest intellect and the most profound observer of the eighteenth century; Gibbon, the architect of a bridge over the dark gulf which separates ancient from modern times, whose vivid genius has tinged with brilliant colors the greatest historical work in existence; "Hume, whose simple but profound history will be coeval with the long and eventful thread of English story; "Robertson, who first threw over the maze of human events the light of philosophie genius and the spirit of enlightened reflection; "Gray, whose burning thoughts had been condensed in words of more than classic beauty; Burns, whose lofty soul spread its own pathos and dignity over the "short and simple annals of the poor;" "Smith, who called into existence a new science, fraught with the dearest interests of humanity, and nearly brought it to perfection in a single lifetime; 'Reid, who carried into the recesses of the human mind the torch of cool and sagacious inquiry; Stewart, who cast a luminous glance over the philosophy of mind, and warmed the inmost recesses of metaphysical inquiry by the delicacy of taste and the glow of eloquence; Watt, who added an unknown power to the resources of art, and, in the regulated force of steam, discovered the means of approximating the most distant parts of the earth, and spreading in the wildness of nature the wonders of European enterprise and the blessings of Christian civilization; these formed some of the ornaments of