ing condition; and all at once his mind became engrossed with one idea, that of leaving Rome as soon as possible, because he could not bear the idea of laying his bones in the cursed soil. It was a trying case, for I did not feel at all sure that he could ever reach Florence; but he was bent upon going, in spite of rain and wind. Dr. Appleton, of Boston, who had attended him regularly, went so far in his kindness towards Mr. Parker as to accompany us; he also provided for the carriage, the passports, and all the little comforts that might be necessary on the journey. Thus we started on the 20th of April,-- Mr. and Mrs. Parker, Mr. and Mrs. Appleton, and myself, with a vetturino,- for Florence. He declared that he had decided upon reaching Florence;" that he had "wound himself up to the task, and would get there," but after that he did not promise anything at all. It was the last effort of his strong, energetic mind. So it happened. But the effort he had to make was followed by a great prostration. As soon as we arrived he went to bed, not to rise again. He at the same time lost the control of his mind, which, with the exception of a few lucid intervals, was more or less wandering all the time. In one of these lucid intervals he asked for me, and gave me the direction for his burial (which has been followed), observing that he hoped it would soon be over,-but did no longer express any regret about his unfinished work. He seemed perfectly resigned. This was the last time he spoke to us in a perfectly lucid way. Still he always recognized his friends, though he was unconscious of the placeshe mostly thought himself at Boston, or on board the steamer on his way home. I have tried to cheer him as much as I could. His wife never left him an instant. Miss Stevenson had left him a short time before my arrival, but came back when informed of his failing. His death was a very quiet, and, I dare say, unconscious one: his wife did not become aware of it for a time after his breath *** came no longer.

I hastened off as soon as possible, and sought some distraction among the collections of Boulogne, Milan and Turin. It is a hard experience of advancing age that we must see all those who were dear to us disappear, one after the other, at a period of life when we have no longer the required adaptiveness to form new friends.

Last summer, when at my chalet, at the occasion of the death of my friend Küchler, with whom he had been staying some time,

we decided together that we should write a kind of album dedicated to his memory, and in which all those assembled at CombeVaria should take part. Mr. Parker promised two articles, one on the Teutonic races, the other a fine irony upon the pretensions of some modern naturalists (of the Bridgewater school)-" A Bumble-Bee's Thoughts on the Plan and Purpose of Creation." The first was not written out, but the latter has just gone through the press; it is, therefore, Theodore Parker's last production, and will be the jewel of the Album. I have given direction to the printer to send several copies to America. The publication of the Album must, of course, be somewhat postponed in order to enable me to write a short notice of Mr. Parker. The Album will now be called Ein Nachruf an Parker und Küchler.

Will not the scientific and literary bodies of the United States feel ashamed now for the manner in which they have treated the the man who, after a short time, will outweigh them all-the noblest specimen of American scholarship that ever lived? Had he lived but two months longer I would have secured for him the Secular Doctorship at the Jubilee of the University of Basle, to bet celebrated next month.

LOVE.

I THINK that Love makes all things musical:

I think that, touched by its deep spiritual breaths,
Our barren lives to blossoming lyrics swell,
And new births, shining upward from old deaths,
Clasp dark glooms with white glories. Thus, to-day,
Watching the simple people in the street,

I thought the lingering and the passing feet
Moved to a delicate sense of rythm alway,
And that I heard the yearning faces say,
"Soul, sing me this new Song." The very leaves
Throbbed grand pulsations of an audible tune;
And when a warm shower wet the roofs at noon,
Low melodies seemed to slide down from the eaves
Dying delicious in a dreamy swoon.

URSULA.

BY HONORE DE BALZAC.

CHAPTER V.

MADAME DE PORTENDUERE, alone with the curate in her cold little parlor on the ground floor, had at last confided her griefs to this good priest, her only friend. She held in her hand the letters which the Abbé Chaperon had just returned her, after having read them, and which sharpened her anguish to the highest point. Seated in her bergère, on one side of the square table where the remains of the dessert were seen, the old lady looked at the curate, who, on the other side, drawn up in his arm-chair, caressed his chin with that gesture common to valets on the stage, to mathematicians, to priests, and which betrays meditation on a difficult problem.

This little parlor, lighted by two windows upon the street and adorned with a carved wood-work painted grey, was so damp that the panels below showed the geometrical fissures of rotten wood, when it is only kept together by paint. The tiled floor, red, and rubbed by the old lady's only servant, required before each seat little round stools in esparto, on one of which the Abbé held his feet. The curtains, of a light-green old damask with green flowers, were drawn, and the blinds had been closed. Two candles lighted the table, and kept the room not quite dark. Need we say

that between the two windows a fine pastil of Latour's showed the famous Admiral de Portenduère, the rival of the Suffren, the Kergarouet, the Guichen, and the Simeuse? On the wood-work in face of the chimney appeared the Vicount de Portenduère and the mother of the old lady, a Kergarouet Ploëgat.

Savinien had, then, for his grandfather the Vice Admiral Kergarouet, and for his cousin the Count de Portenduère, both of them very rich. The Vice Admiral Kergarouet lived in Paris, and the Count de Portenduère at the chateau of that name in Dauphiny. This cousin (the Count) represented the elder branch, and Savinien was the only offset of the cadet branch of the Portenduères. The Count, past forty, who had made a wealthy alliance, had three children. His fortune, augmented by several inheritances, afforded, it was said, an income of sixty thousand francs. Deputy of Isère,

he passed his winters in Paris, where he had repurchased the hotel de Portenduère, with the indemnities secured to him by the law Villèle. Vice Admiral de Kergarouet had recently married his niece, Mademoiselle de Fontaine, simply with the view of securing his fortune to her.

The Vicount's faults must then have lost to him two powerful protectors. Young and a handsome fellow, if Savinien had entered the navy, with his name and supported by an admiral, by a deputy, perhaps at his twenty-third year he would have been already lieutenant. But his mother, opposed to her only son's adopting the profession of arms, had educated him at Nemours, with the aid of Abbé Chaperon's vicar, and had flattered herself with keeping her son near her until her death. She wished to marry him prudently with a demoiselle d'Aiglemont, of twelve thousand francs income, to whose hand the name Portenduère and the farm des Bordières allowed her to pretend. This plan, limited, but safe, and which might raise the family by the second generation, had been baffled by events. The Aiglemonts were then ruined, and one of their daughters (the eldest, Helena,) had disappeared without this mystery having ever been explained by the family. The ennui of a life without air, without issue and without action, without other aliment than the love of sons for their mothers, rendered Savinien so impatient that he broke his chains, gentle as they were, and swore never to live in a country town, comprehending rather late that his future did not lie in the street des Bourgeois. At the age of twenty-one he had, then, left his mother to claim recognition by his relatives and try his fortune at Paris. It must have been a fatal contrast which life at Nemours and life at Paris presented to a young man of twenty-one, free, without any one to control him, famished for pleasures, and for whom the name of Portenduère and his rich relationship opened the best society. Certain that his mother was keeping her economies of twenty years amassed in some cachette, Savinien had soon expended the six thousand francs that she had given him to see Paris. This sum did not defray his first six months, and he then owed twice as much to his hotel, to his tailor, to his boot-maker, to his livery-stable, to a jeweler, to all those ornamental trades which gravitate like satellites around. the stars of young ambition. He had hardly succeeded in making himself known, hardly knew how to converse, how to present himself, to wear his waistcoats and to choose them, to order his coats I.—36.

and tie his cravat, before he found himself at the head of thirty thousand francs of liabilities, and was still at a loss for a delicate style of declaring his love to the sister of the Marquis de Ronguerolles, Madame de Sérizy, an elegant woman, but whose youth had shone under the Empire.

How did you manage, young lions," said Savinien, one day, in after-breakfast chat, to some young men of fashion with whom he had formed that sort of attachment which grows up among those whose pretensions are in all respects similar, and who claim an impossible equality. "You were no richer than I am. Now, you move without cares you maintain yourselves, and I have already debts!"

"We all began that way," gaily said Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempré, Maxime de Trailles, Emile Blondet - the dandies of the day.

"If De Marsay found himself rich at the outset of life, it is a chance," said the amphitryon, a parvenu named Finot, who was trying to make his way among these young gents. "And had he not been himself," he added, bowing, "his fortune might have ruined him."

"That is the word," said Maxime de Trailles.

"And the idea, also," said Rastignac.

"My dear," gravely said De Marsay to Savinien, "debts are the order on experience. A good education at the university with masters of the polite and the impolite, costs sixty thousand francs. If education by the world costs twice as much, it teaches you life, business, politics, men, and sometimes women."

Blondet finished this lesson by rendering thus a verse of La Fontaine's:

"The world sells very dear what we think it gives!"

Instead of reflecting on the sensible things that these ablest pilots of the Parisian archipelago said to him, Savinien found only pleasantries in them.

"Take care, my dear," said De Marsay to him; "you have a fine name, and if you do not acquire the fortune that your name bespeaks, you may go and end your days under a quartermaster's dress in a regiment of cavalry.

'Nous avons vu tomber de plus illustres tête!'"*

We have seen more illustrious heads than yours fall.