ture, or in that of the English tongue, will be determined only by the slow settling of opinion, which no critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems able to explain. I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will not be in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism.

Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the idiosyncrasies of the literary man. I mean that he regarded life not from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic, the metaphysic, the scientific or the theologic, but purely from the literary point of view.

He belongs to that class of which Johnson and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has added very few. The literary point of view is taken by few in any generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mould human life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like the poems of Horace. You must not ask more of them than that.

And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I cannot bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in the face of the current gospel of art for art's sake. There is something that made Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers, who had only the dimmest ideas of their personality. This was some quality perceived in what they wrote. Each one can define it for himself; there it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part of the authors-an element in the estimate of their future position-as what we term their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, or their art. However you rate it, you cannot account for Irving's influence in the world without it. In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted Thackeray, who saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary art in the sum total of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to Lockhart, "Be a good man, my dear." We know well enough that the great author of "The Newcomes" and the great author of "The Heart of Midlothian" recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences; and Irving's literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature. The author loved good women and little children and a pure life; he had faith in his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience to the highest; he retained a belief in the possibility of chivalrous actions, and did not care

to envelop them in a cynical suspicion; he was an author still capable of an enthusiasm. His books are wholesome, full of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry nor pretension.

And there he stood, stern foe of
men,

And shook his flowing mane.
There's not of all Rome's heroes, ten
That dare abide this game.
His bright eye naught of lightning lacked;
His voice was like the cataract.

They brought a dark-haired man along,

Whose limbs with gyves of brass were bound;

Youthful he seemed, and bold, and strong,

And yet unscathed of wound. Blithely he stepped among the throng,

And careless threw around

A dark eye, such as courts the path
Of him who braves a Dacian's wrath.

Then shouted the plebeian crowd,—

Rung the glad galleries with the sound; And from the throne there spake aloud

A voice,-"Be the bold man unbound!
And, by Rome's sceptre, yet unbowed,

By Rome, earth's monarch crowned,
Who dares the bold, the unequal strife,
Though doomed to death, shall save his life."

Joy was upon that dark man's face:

And thus, with laughing eye, spake he: "Loose ye the lord of Zaara's waste, And let my arms be free:

'He has a martial heart,' thou sayest; But oh! who will not be

A hero, when he fights for life,

For home and country, babes and wife?

And thus I for the strife prepare:
The Thracian falchion to me bring,
But ask th' imperial leave to spare
The shield, a useless thing,
Were I a Samnite's rage to dare,

Then o'er me would I fling
The broad orb; but to lion's wrath
The shield were but a sword of lath."

And he has bared his shining blade,
And springs he on the shaggy foe,
Dreadful the strife, but briefly played;-
The desert-king lies low:
His long and loud death-howl is made;
And there must end the show.
And when the multitude were calm,
The favorite freedman took the palm.

"Kneel down, Rome's emperor beside!"

He knelt, that dark man;-o'er his brow Was thrown a wreath in crimson dyed; And fair words gild it now:

"Thou art the bravest youth that ever tries
To lay a lion low;

And from our presence forth thou go'st
To lead the Dacians of our host."

Then flushed his cheek, but not with pride,
And grieved and gloomily spake he:
"My cabin stands where blithely glide
Proud Danube's waters to the sea:
I have a young and blooming bride,
And I have children three :-
No Roman wealth or rank can give
Such joy as in their arms to live.

"My wife sits at the cabin door,

With throbbing heart and swollen eyes :

568

JERUSALEM BY MOONLIGHT.

They pass to toil, to strife, to rest-
To halls in which the feast is spread-
To chambers where the funeral guest
In silence sits beside the bed.

And some to happy homes repair,

Where children pressing cheek to cheek, With mute caresses shall declare

The tenderness they cannot speak.

And some who walk in calmness here,
Shall shudder as they reach the door
Where one who made their dwelling dear,
Its flower, its light, is seen no more.
Youth, with pale cheek and tender frame,
And dreams of greatness in thine eye,
Go'st thou to build an early name,

Or early in the task to die?

Keen son of trade, with eager brow,
Who is now fluttering in thy snare,

Thy golden fortunes tower they now,
Or melt the glittering spires in air?
Who of this crowd to-night shall tread
The dance till daylight gleams again?
To sorrow o'er the untimely dead?

Who writhe in throes of mortal pain?

Some, famine struck, shall think how long

The cold, dark hours, how slow the light; And some, who flaunt amid the throng,

Shall hide in dens of shame to-night.

Each where his tasks or pleasure call,

They pass and heed each other not;
There is one who heeds, who holds them all
In His large love and boundless thought.
These struggling tides of life that seem
In wayward, aimless course to tend,
Are eddies of the mighty stream
That rolls to its appointed end.

JERUSALEM BY MOONLIGHT.

T

BENJAMIN DISRAELI.

HE broad moon lingers on the summit of Mount Olivet, but its beam has long left the garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of Absalom, the waters of Kedron and the dark abyss of Jehoshaphat. Full falls its splendor, however, on the opposite city, vivid and defined in its silvery blaze. A lofty wall, with turrets and towers, and frequent gates, undulates with the unequal ground which it covers, as it encircles the lost capital of Jehovah. It is a city of hills, far more famous than those of Rome; for all Europe has heard of Sion and of Calvary, while the Arab and the Assyrian, and the tribes and nations beyond, are ignorant of the Capitolian and Aventine Mounts.

The broad steep of Sion, crowned with the tower of David; nearer still, Mount Moriah, with the gorgeous temple of the God of Abraham, but built, alas! by the child of Hagar, and not by Sarah's chosen one; close to its cedars and its cypresses, its lofty spires and airy arches, the moonlight falls upon Bethesda's pool; farther on, entered by the gate of St. Stephen, the eye, though 'tis the noon of night, traces with ease the Street of Grief, a long, winding ascent to a vast cupolaed pile that now covers Calvary, called the Street of Grief because there the most illustrious of the human as well