large part of the reminiscence of all his acquaintance. Perhaps I seem to describe a quite ordinary quality in using those words, yet, in truth, it is very rare. The sense of contact with a human spirit, a real meeting-as distinguished from a passing recognition-is, with most persons, a distinction stamped with preference. It must be a part of the recollection of all personal dealing with him, even when it was not all genial. I remember about the same time as my National Gallery interview, a beautiful girl speaking with impatience of his "affected humility," and the remark of a hearer that one would be glad of a little even affected humility in him. The two remarks recur with reference to a quality which was, I am sure, deeply sincere, but which, no doubt, seemed heterogeneous with much else in him. It was mainly those who knew him through his books who thought him conceited. Whatever they may have had to complain of, it was not anything that had a touch of condescension. Whatever they may have missed, it was not the open door of an hospitable mind.

Of

I should sum up the impressions I have tried to revive in saying that Ruskin seemed to me to gather up all that was best in spiritual democracy. what may be called his democracy in a more exact sense I have confessed that I have nothing to say. In spite of some weighty testimony, I cannot regard it as even a strong influence, from him on his time; it seems to me rather the vivid expression of a strong influence upon him from others. But it sprang from that central core of his teaching, his belief in beauty as a Divine Sacrament. For this belief involves the conviction that this table of the Lord must be open to all. From that feast none must be shut out. And the discovery that whole classes are shut out, that the bulk of the world's workers cannot see the beauty of a

tree or a flower, because sordid cares and physical wretchedness weave an opaque veil before their eyes-this discovery made Ruskin a Socialist. Why, he seemed always saying, should a message, in its nature universal, be silenced by luxury on the one hand, as much as by penury on the other? The feverish hunt for wealth curtains off the influence of Nature almost as much as the desperate struggle with poverty, while the commercial development which creates a few millionaires and a mass of overdriven workers (so he reasoned) creates also a hideous world. He longed to spread the truly human life. He hated the phase of civilization which cut off, as he thought, from whole classes of men the power to drink in the message of Nature and of Art. Those of his writings which deal with this subject fail to exhibit to my eyes the grace and force which belong to his earlier period. But their true spirit of brotherhood must be acknowledged by

all.

Ruskin must always have been singularly open to influence from other minds. I remember well his meeting Frederick Maurice at our house, soon after the publication of his "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds," a little theological pamphlet which, according to a story told and probably invented at the time, was bought by a farmer who thought its title an index to its contents. Mr. Maurice was made very indignant by some passage in it which suggested a stricter fencing of the Christian life from the invasion of sinners. "Mr. Ruskin ought to do penance in a white sheet for such a doctrine," he said, in a letter to a common friend. The letter was shown to Ruskin and drew from him a beautifully candid and simple request for explanation, unaccompanied by an angry word. Mr. Maurice was profoundly touched, and the little correspondence brought out from those two noble souls a music

that lingers in my ears as does hardly any other utterance of either. "Mine is a dark faith," Ruskin wrote, with a full readiness to be enlightened by one who had applied such severe words to his utterance. It might certainly be said that one who felt his own a dark faith had better not try to enlighten others, but I think the candor and humility of his willingness, under those circumstances, to be enlightened are much more rare and much more valuable than a modest caution in advancing opinions which had afterwards to be withdrawn. He lived his faith, The Contemporary Review.

whatever it was, as fully as ever did a human being. I have said that those who admire him are sometimes thinking of different men, but that dual personality of which most of us are so mournfully conscious both within and without-the seeker after lofty truth, and the compromiser with what is low and narrow-of this he knew nothing. He was true to his aspirations; they may not always have been either wise or consistent, but they were always one with his life. A teacher can hardly have a nobler epitaph.

Julia Wedgwood.

It is difficult to say whether the two Englands, the Old and the New, have or have not more points of resemblance than of contrast. They are very like, and also very unlike. Both are separated from the rest of the world by tangible barriers, and, in a measure, isolated. England is cut off by sundry seas and watery channels from the continent of Europe and her adjacent islands, and divided from her only land neighbor by romantic, if not very lofty, hills.

New England is nearly severed from the rest of the American continent (speaking without minute geographical exactness) by a range of picturesque mountains and two noble and broadflowing rivers; while the Atlantic Ocean forms an effective barrier between her shores and the continents of this hemisphere. If the Old England is physically insular, the New England is peninsular; and it is possible that the limitations which are supposed to characterize the people of the one are not wholly unshared by those of the other.

To explain and define New England

is not so unnecessary as it may seem, as several writers and especially novelists appear to confound it with the whole of the American Union, oblivious of the fact that it is merely its small easternmost corner, the six states originally settled by the English Puritans, who gave it its name, and the social, religious and intellectual characteristics for which it has long been known.

This complete or partial isolation has led to conditions of much similarity in the two countries in regard to wars-that is, to the wars of their respective empires, if one may so speak. Both, for many years, have been centres of comparative calm, while the storms of battle have raged without. England, though her armies have been fighting almost continuously abroad, and in or upon the outskirts of her more distant possessions, has known no war in any large military sense for upwards of two hundred years. New England cannot claim quite so long an immunity, the battles of Bunker Hill and Bennington and the

encounter at Lexington having taken place within her borders; but even during the Revolution the main tides of conflict flowed elsewhere-in New York, New Jersey, and the more Southern States. To find the Puritan States under the stress of general warfare within their own limits, one must go back to the seventeenth century, to the struggles with the native Indian tribes. Here one meets with fighting of the most sanguinary kind, horrors enough and to spare, and, as George Herbert says, "anguish of all sizes." There is no more painful reading than the accounts of the night attacks by the stealthy and cruel savages on the unprepared English settlements, such as Deerfield, Hadley and others, and the massacres of men, women and children that followed. It is the stuff that nightmares are made of. The humane and civilized English of the seventeenth century,— speaking, as we always must, in the comparative degree, for there were abundant faults on their own sidefound themselves plunged back into the conditions of the eighth and ninth, when the Danes over-ran the land, burning town, hamlet and monastery, and sparing none. The battles of the early settlers, in dark forests and treacherous swamps, with Pequods, Narragansets and Wampanoags (names probably more picturesque than their owners) may not have been magnificent, but they were certainly war of the most effective kind, and usually meant little less than the extermination of the vanquished tribes. After the period of original conquest and occupation, however, the zone of Indian fighting moved westward, and, as I have said, the land saw little warfare on its own soil. The battles with the French, which cost this country the lives of Braddock and Wolfe and first brought Washington into prominence, were fought elsewhere; so, too, were those in the second conflict with England early in the present

century, and, of course, those of the Mexican War some years later, as well as the recent Spanish War with its legacy in the Philippines. It is needless to say that all the operations of the American Civil War were carried on at a distance from the New England States.

The two Englands, therefore, are alike in long exemption from internal wars, and in sending forth their citizens to wage them in other fields. In the younger community, the closest analogy to the conditions now existing here was furnished by the great Civil War of 1861-65. It was called variously a war of secession, a civil war, and a rebellion; but with respect to most of the Northern States, it had much more the nature of a foreign war. The famous political line known as Mason's and Dixon's, which divided the slaveowning states from those in which the "peculiar institution" has long ceased to exist, was by no means unlike the boundary between two different nations. I have personally a faint recollection of crossing the mystic parallel in early youth, and, although there was no frontier custom-house or marked change in the dress or speech of the people on entering the Southern dominions, of feeling myself on foreign ground. It is not, indeed, too much to say that, throughout the greater portion of the North, the call to arms by President Lincoln, after the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861, was responded to in much the same spirit that would have been aroused by the invasion of a foreign foe.

The lack of military preparations throughout the North at the opening of the conflict is supposed to furnish one of the lessons of history, and the speed with which they were made, when it was seen to be inevitable, another. No large regular army, it is needless to say, with an organized body of reserves and militia to draw from, existed; the

small standing army of the Union being, at the time, parcelled out into minute bodies of men serving as garrisons in various forts or stations widely separated from each other and usually remote from the seat of government. The vast Northern army of the war, which began with seventy-five thousand men, enlisted for three months in 1861, was mainly a volunteer one, the draft not taking place till later in the struggle. But all this, again, is matter of history, and straying into wider fields than my title allows. In the New England States the call to war was responded to with an enthusiasm not surpassed in any other part of the country. It is curious that the states which disapproved most strongly of the war with this country in 1812-14, and withheld their support as much as possible, should have burst into a flame of patriotism at the threat of civil war. But doubtless the issues at stake were felt to be of more importance, and the impending conflict promised to be within strictly sectional bounds. To say truth, from the land of the Puritans, or of their descendants, to the sunny South, it was then a particularly far cry, and the separating gulf was not one of distance only. The bar of social differences and repulsions which slavery and a large slave-owning class had erected, had grown more and more formidable as the years went by.

The fitness of the New Englander, whether bred in town or country, for the duties of a soldier was abundantly demonstrated in the proof. The man of the fields, no doubt, had a better physique to begin with, for my impression is that the New England townsman was then somewhat lacking in robustness, the tide of athletics not having fully set in; but the more varied conditions of urban life, and perhaps a better knowledge of hygienic laws, gave the town-enlisted soldier an advantage in the malarial and fever-stricken districts

of the South. The countryman often fared hardly, and in many places it was no mere figure to say that the climate slew more than the enemy. As a rule, he was not a traveller. Men in the amphibious communities of the coast, it is true, sometimes made voyages, long or short, but the inland farmer and laborer were apt to be fixtures, except when they went West for good. It is supposed by some that persons of mature life who have never been beyond the boundaries of their parish are peculiar to these islands; I have, however, met with individuals in the remoter parts of the land of Longfellow who had rarely or never visited the town nearest them, and regarded the attractions of the more distant centres like Boston, New Haven, and New York, as the French peasant in the poem did the fabled glories of Carcassonne, only with less desire to behold them. Others I have seen who literally had never been out of the township in which they were born. Living, therefore, all his life in a climate of noted healthfulness, if of severe extremes, it is not surprising that the rural New Englander often found the conditions of less tonic latitudes more deadly than the enemy's bullets. In this respect he was less fortunate than his British brother, whose much maligned climate seems an excellent preparative for every other. Nevertheless, he not infrequently survived the agues of Virginia, and the rigors of yellow fever in New Orleans, as well as the hail of lead, and returned home with a broadened horizon. One indispensable requisite for soldiering he possessed in common with most Americans; he had the hereditary instinct of marksmanship, the latent, if not always developed, capacity for shooting straight. The blood of the early Indian fighters still ran in his veins, though he was rarely cognizant of their exploits; and he had enjoyed a fair amount of practice upon the game of