ange-blossoms and fruit abound in midwinter. In wonderful contrast you shall see, far up the heights of the Sierra, the snow-plant blossoming amid sterility and eternal snow. The OVERLAND has been the one consummate flower of our better intellectual life and thought. Its fit test symbols are the snow-plant and the orange-blossom, which so nearly compass all the zones, and are yet in some special sense our own. No one has sought to live here exclusively by authorship. It has only been the incidental occupation of most persons, who have written out of the fullness of their own lives. If they heard no mysterious voice saying unto them, "Write!" the great mountains encamped about like sleeping dromedaries, the Glimpses of Spirit Land..........................Samuel H. Lloyd. Gloverson, and his Silent Partners....Ralph Keeler. valleys filled with the aroma of a royal fruitage, the serene sky, and the rhythm of the great sea, all made audible signs to write. They have written, out of a fresh new life. In the streets of Herculaneum you may see the ruts made more than two thousand years ago. The grooves of society are often narrow and rigid with the fixedness of centuries. It may be better, by way of change, to propel a velocipede on a fresh track than to run four gilded wheels in the dead grooves which have been cut by the attrition of ages. After one has known the satiety which comes from the mild gabble of society, there is a wonderful freshness in a war-whoop uttered in the depths of the wilderness! It is this large acquaintance with nature this lying down with the mountains until one is taken into their confidencea grim fellowship with untamed savageness-that may give a new vitality, and enlarge the horizon of intellectual life. Whence comes this man with his new poetry, which confounds the critics? and that man with his subtile wit borrowed from no school? I pray you note that for many a day his carpet hath been the spicula of pine, and his atmosphere hath been perfumed by the firtree. He has seen the mountains clad in beatific raiment of white, and their "sacristy set round with stars." He will never go so far that he will not come back to sing and talk of these, his earliest and divinest loves. So Miller sings Natural Wealth of California.........T. F. Cronise. ..Charles W. Stoddard, .Charles W. Stoddard. Life Among the Apaches.........John C. Cremony. Path of a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church................. The Hermitage, and other Our Sister Republic..... A la California..... California Pilgrim.... Sermons..... .........P. H. Burnett. Poems........E. R. Sill. The Luck of Roaring Camp. The Lost Galleon... Poems.. Outcroppings.. Condensed Novels.... California Indians.. Muskingum Legends. Manual of American Ideas. The Resurrection.... Inglenook..... Candy Elephant........... Phoebe Travers.. The Oatman Children.. Chips of the Old Block... Republicanism in America. Ben Nebo Onward. Songs of the Sierra.. Songs of the Sunland.. Life Among the Modocs.. Pacific Poems...... .Albert S. Evans. .Charles Wadsworth. ...Bret Harte. Bret Harte. .Bret Harte. .Bret Harte. ...Bret Harte. .Stephen Powers. ..Stephen Powers. .Caspar T. Hopkins. D. A. Dryden. ........A. J. Grayson. .....Carrie Carleton. Clara G. Dolliver. "Aunt Florida," .Mr. Stratton. .......A. Delano. .R. Guy McClellan. Hector A. Stuart. ...A. W. Patterson. Joaquin Miller. ..Joaquin Miller. ...Joaquin Miller. ..Joaquin Miller. ..... of "The Sierra," of "Arizona," of "The Ship in the Desert." And Harte comes back again to his miners' camp, and to the larger liberty of the mountains. And there fell on Starr King a grander inspiration after he had seen the white banners of the snow-storm floating from the battlements of Yosemite. We have brought forth nothing out of our poverty, but rather out of an affluence which could not be wholly restrained. As a gardener clips his choicest shrubs, casting the tangled riotousness of bud and blossom over the wall, so there are many here who have only trimmed a little what they have planted in their own gardens of poetry and fiction. The little that has been done here in Legal Titles to Mining Claims and Water Rights in California..... Gregory Vale. Distillation, Brewing, and Malting....J. McCulloch. Chinese and English Phrase-book... Benoni Lancto. Russian and English Phrase-book..A. Honcharenko, Fairy Tales from Gold Land...." May Wentworth," Overland Monthly-15 vols. Harte, Bartlett, Avery, and Fisher. Patrons of Husbandry of the Pacific Coast.E. S. Car. Life of James Capen Adams.... .................................. Hittel. The Pacific Law Encyclopedia.......J. F. Cowdery. Semi-tropical California........ .Ben. C. Truman art is rather a sign of better things to come. Art must not only have inspiration, but it needs wealth and the society of a ripe community for its best estate. It is possible to paint for immortality in a garret. But a great deal of work done there has gone to the lumber-room. Not only must there be the fostering spirit of wealth and letters, but art also needs a picturesque world without-the grand estate of mountains and valleys, atmospheres, tones, lights, shadows—and if there be a picturesque people, we might look for a new school of art, and even famous painters. Where a poet can be inspired, there look also for the poetry which is put on canvas. In one respect our modern civilization is nearly fatal to art. Philip Hamerton says that "a noble artist will gladly paint a peasant driving a yoke of oxen; but not a commercial traveler in his gig. ... Men and women have a fatal liberty which mountains have not. They have the liberty of spoiling themselves, of making themselves ugly, and mean, and ridiculous. A mountain can not dress in bad taste, neither is it capable of degrading itself by vice. Noble human life in a great and earnest age is better artistic material than wild nature; but human life in an age like ours is not." If a great artist were asked to paint a fashionable woman in the prevailing stringent costume, do not blame him if he faints away. There will never get into a really great painting any of the stiff and constrained costumes of our time. Observe that the sculptor rarely cuts the statue of a modern statesman without the accessories of some flowing and graceful attire. He can not sculpture a modern dress-suit without feeling that he has offered an affront to art. But in spite of our civilization we have a great deal that is picturesque among the people-the Parsee, Mohammedan, Malay, and Mongol, whom one may VOL. 15.-35. sometimes meet on the same streetthe red shirt of the Italian fisherman, and the lateen sail which sends his boat flying over the water. The very distresses and distraints of men here have made them picturesque. I have seen a valedictorian of a leading college deep down in a gravel-mine, directing his hydraulic pipe against the bank. Clad in a gray shirt and slouch-hat, he was a far better subject for a painter than on the day he took his degree. The native Californian on horseback, with poncho, sombrero, and leggings, is a good subject for the canvas, as well as the quaint old church where he worships, so rich in its very ruins. Moreover, the whole physical aspect of the country is wonderfully picturesque. The palm-tree lifting up its fronded head in the desert, the great fir-tree set against the ineffable azure of the heavens, the vine-clad hills, the serrated mountains which the frosts have canonized with their sealed and unsealed fountains, and all the gold and purple which touch the hills at even-tide - these are the full rich ministries of nature. It may take art a thousand years to ripen even here. For how many ages had the long procession of painters come and gone before Raphael and Michael Angelo appeared? Our little art-school will some day have its treasures; and there will be hung on these walls the portraits of other men whose culture and influence will be worth more than all the gold of the mountains. Let the artist set up his easel and write his silent poem upon the canvas. Welcome all influences which soften this hard and barren materialism. Before the mountains were unvexed by the miner's drill the land itself was a poem and a picture. One day the turbid streams will turn to crystal again, and the only miner will be the living glacier sitting on its white throne of judgment and grinding the very mountains to powder. Fortunate they who can catch this wealth of inspiration. Welcome all poets, whether they sing as Harte or Stoddard, as Coolbrith, Sill, or Soulé. And welcome all painters, whether they paint as Rosenthal or Hill, as Keith, Brookes, Hahn, or Tojetti. These are the ministers and prophets whose larger and finer interpretation of nature are part of the treasures of the new commonwealth. The day is surely coming here when the fellowship of poet, artist, author, and teacher shall be rated above all vulgar wealth. Of the poem and the picture half-unwrought and the problem halfunsolved, some student here to-day may speak when he comes a quarter of a century hence, with frosted head, to tell what better intellectual fruitage there may be in the land. EL CABALLO DE MI QUERIDO—SANTA CRUZ.* * A Spanish maiden addresses the steed of her lover, which bears upon its forehead a cross-a mark always beheld in Spain or Mexico with much reverence, the owner being considered under the special protection of the Virgin. The steed is fawn-colored, with snow-white mane and tail; a most beautiful animal, universally christened "Santa Cruz," from the peculiar mark described. But as the dust thy proud hoofs toss, Thou lov'st the hand that guides thy rein; I love it too, and dream 'tis mine. Thy haughty blood with galling spur. O'er land and sea I've wandered wide. Yon fringed rebozo's broidered hem Shades eyes more bright than eastern gem; And, steed! O, steed! when bent on me I see but love—but love I see. An emblem of the name ye bear I HEARTS AND HANDS. AM a widow with one son and one daughter. We live on, the northwestern coast of Scotland, in a spacious house, built one hundred and fifty years ago by one of our ancestors. I have heard that he was a naval officer in the British service, and had lived under the English flag, "wherever the breeze could bear or ocean foam," until, weary with roaming, he sought this world-forgetting spot, manifesting his enduring love for the ocean by settling within the sound of the siren's voice, yet safe from her embrace. The mansion which he built must be an emblem of himselfhalf-feudal, half-modern- clinging to graceful tradition, yet mindful of living facts. Everything in and around the dwelling and the place suggests to me the symptoms of family traits: the wild shore, un visited save by the heaving ocean; the dark forest in one direction, looking as though its recesses might be the abiding-places of bogies or of beautiful fairies; while on the other hand lay the desolate yellow hills, crowned by gray clouds that seemed ever unwilling to yield to sunshine. The house itself suggested refined comfort. It was spacious and substantial. Every part of it was molded with a symmetry that lent grace to its strength, and clearly bespoke a nature cultivated and proud, secure of its own claims and confident of its own taste; but the lofty vestibule, the wide stair-way, and the spacious halls were imbued with a gloom that no fancy decoration, nor music, nor laughter, nor the intoxication of wine could unbend, for there was an invisible |
