little, because they need to reduce to beauty their abundance and wealth.

Remember what St. Francis of Sales said in speaking of the 'Imitation of Jesus Christ': "I have sought repose everywhere, and have only found it in a small corner with a small book. Happy the author who can supply the need.

Force is not energy: some authors have more muscle than talent.

Where there is no delicacy of touch, there is no literature. In literary work, fatigue is what gives to the writer warning of loss of power for the moment.

Indolence as well as labor is sometimes

mind.

needed by the

If a work shows the file, it is because it is not sufficiently polished; if it smells of the oil, it is because one has not sat up late enough over it [qu'on a trop peu veillé ].

What with the fever of the senses, the delirium of the heart, and the weakness of the mind; with the storms of time and the great trials of life; with hunger, thirst, dishonor, illness, and death, one can construct any number of romances that will bring tears; but the soul says, "You do me harm!"

It is not needful that love should be introduced into a book; but there should always be an impression of tenderness.

T

LITERARY JUDGMENTS

HERE never will be an endurable translation of Homer unless all the words can be chosen with art, and be full of variety, of freshness, and of grace. The diction moreover must be as antique, as simple, as the manners, the events, and the personages described. With our modern style everything is distorted. in Homer, and his heroes seem grotesque figures that take grave and proud attitudes.

Plato found philosophy made of bricks, and rebuilt it of gold.

In Plato, seek only forms and ideas: this is what he himself sought. There is in him more of light than of objects, more form than substance. He should be inhaled, not fed upon.

Plato loses himself in the void; but we see the play of his wings and hear their sound.

Aristotle rectified all the rules, and in all the sciences added new truths to those already known. His works are an ocean of instruction, as it were the encyclopædia of antiquity.

The 'Memorabilia' of Xenophon are a fine thread with which he has the art of weaving magnificent lace, but with which we can sew nothing.

Cicero is in philosophy a sort of moon. His doctrine has a light extremely soft, but borrowed; a light wholly Greek, which the Roman softened and weakened.

There are a thousand ways of employing and seasoning words: Cicero loved them all.

In Catullus one finds two things, than the union of which nothing can be worse: affected delicacy with grossness.

It is the symmetries in the style of Seneca that make him. quoted.

I look upon Plutarch's 'Lives' as one of the most precious monuments left to us by antiquity. There we are shown whatever has appeared that is great in the human race, and the best that men have done is put before us as an example. The whole of ancient wisdom is there. For the writer I have not the same esteem that I have for his work.

In the annals of Tacitus there is a narrative interest which will not let us read little, and a depth and grandeur of expres sion which will not permit us to read much. The mind, divided between the curiosity which absorbs it and the attention which holds it, experiences some fatigue: the writer takes possession of the reader even to doing him violence.

Most of the thoughts of Pascal on laws, usages, customs, are but the thoughts of Montaigne recast.

Fénelon dwells amid the valleys and slopes of thought; Bossuet on its elevations and mountain peaks.

M. de Beausset says of Fénelon, "He loved men more than he knew them." This phrase is charming: it would be impossible to praise with more wit what one blames, or to praise more highly while blaming.

Im

Voltaire retained through life, in the world and in affairs, a very strong impress from the influence of his first masters. petuous as a poet, and polite as a courtier, he knows how to be as insinuating and crafty as any Jesuit. No one ever followed more carefully, and with more art and skill, the famous maxim he so ridiculed: To be all things to all men.

Voltaire is sometimes sad, or he is excited; but he is never serious. His graces even are impudent.

There are faults hard to recognize, that have not been classed or defined or christened. Voltaire is full of them.

It is impossible that Voltaire should satisfy, and impossible that he should not please.

Voltaire introduced and put into vogue such luxury in literary work, that one can no longer offer common food except on dishes of gold or silver.

J. J. Rousseau had a voluptuous nature. In his writings the soul is blended with the body, and never leaves it. No man ever gave such an impression of flesh absolutely mingled with spirit, and of the delights of their marriage.

Rousseau gave, if I may so speak, bowels to words; infused into them such a charm, savors so penetrating, energies so potent, that his writings affect the soul somewhat as do those forbidden pleasures that extinguish taste and intoxicate reason.

When we read Buffon, we think ourselves learned; when we have read Rousseau, we think ourselves virtuous: but for all that we are neither.

For thirty years Petrarch adored, not the person, but the image of Laura: so much easier is it to maintain unchanged one's sentiments and one's ideas than one's sensations. Thence came the fidelity of the ancient knights.

No man knows better than Racine how to weave words, sentiments, thoughts, actions, events; and with him events, thoughts, sentiments, words, are all woven of silk.

Racine and Boileau are not fountains of water. A fine choice in imitation makes their merit. It is their books that copy books, and not their souls that copy souls. Racine is the Virgil of the

ignorant.

Molière is coolly comic; he makes others laugh without laughing himself: there lies his excellence.

Alfieri is but a convict, whom nature condemns to the galleys of the Italian Parnassus.

In La Fontaine there is an affluence of poetry which is found in no other French author.

Piron: He was a poet who played well on his jew's-harp. All the above translations were made by Colonel Higginson for this work.

SYLVESTER JUDD

(1813-1853)

YLVESTER JUDD was a figure in his place and time, as clergyman, lecturer, and author. And he is still a figure in American literature; for he wrote a novel-Margaret'— which must be recognized in the evolution of the native fiction, and is, judged by critical standards, a work of remarkable literary and spiritual power.

Judd was born at Westhampton, Massachusetts, July 23d, 1813. His father was a noted antiquarian. The son got his Yale degree in 1836, and then declined a professorship in Miami College to enter the Harvard Divinity School. In 1840 he became pastor of the Unitarian Church at Augusta, Maine, continuing in the one parish until his death, January 20th, 1853. While yet a theological student he published 'A Young Man's Account of his Conversion from Calvinism,' interesting as showing his serious nature and subjective tendency. At thirty he was working on 'Margaret,' which was printed in 1845; a revised edition in 1851; and a fine edition, with illustrations by Darley, in 1856.

SYLVESTER JUDD

In his ministerial work Judd developed the idea that all his congregation were born into full church privileges, and many other Maine parishes accepted his teaching. He was much in demand as a lecturer on temperance and other social topics. The same spirit of earnest didacticism runs through his noted novel. It is a loosely constructed story of old New England life, with fine descriptions of nature. The tale is made the vehicle of the conveyance of Judd's views on liberal Christianity, temperance, and universal peace. Thus it is a pioneer example of "purpose" fiction in American literature. The full title of the story, 'Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom; including sketches of a place not before described, called Mons Christi,' conveys a sense of this in language that now sounds stilted and sentimental.

But were 'Margaret' nothing more than an ill-disguised sermon, it would not be the remarkable book it indubitably is. Judd was first of all a literary man when he made it. It was written, as he says in the preface to the edition of 1851, "out of his heart and hope." And again: "This book was written for the love of the thing." It depicts with vigor and picturesqueness the crude, hearty New England country life of the period transitional between the Revolution and the settled Republic. Judd's genius puts before the reader the essential homely details of that life, described realistically and with great sympathy; the realism being relieved by descriptive passages of delicate beauty, or mystical imaginings in a high vein of poetry. And in the midst of the other admirable character sketches is the striking central conception of Margaret herself, child of nature and of dreams, a wood-flower growing up wild, to turn out a noble woman who rebukes even as she transcends the harshness, narrowness, and illiteracy that surround her. She is a lovely creation, which only a writer of rare gifts could have evolved. The book is unequal in parts; but the earlier portion of the novel, dealing with the heroine's childhood, is still an unsurpassed picture in its way.

Judd's other works include 'Philo: An Evangeliad' (1850), a didactic poem defending the Unitarian position; 'Richard Edney and the Governor's Family' (1850), another novel not dissimilar from 'Margaret' in purpose, but without its charm; and a posthumous work, 'The Church: In a Series of Discourses' (1854). He left in manuscript a tragedy called 'White Hills,' showing the evils of avarice. Arethusa Hall in 1854 published 'The Life and Character of Sylvester Judd.'

IT

THE SNOW-STORM

From Margaret'

Is the middle of winter, and is snowing, and has been all night, with a strong northeast wind. Let us take a moment when the storm intermits, and look in at Margaret's and see how they do. But we cannot approach the place by any ordinary locomotion: the roads, lanes, and by-paths are blocked up; no horse or ox could make his way through this great Sahara of snow. If we are disposed to adopt the means of conveyance formerly so much in vogue, whether snow-shoes or magic, we may possibly get there. The house or hut is half sunk in the general accumulation, as if it had foundered and was going to the bottom; the face of the pond is smooth, white, and stiff as