Taking leave of our kind guide, to whom we were indebted for a visit of deep interest, we paused a moment on the terrace ere we 66 passed the massy gate of that old hall," to receive once more into our memory

"the old mansion and the accustomed hall

And the remembered chambers, and the place, The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade."

A holy stillness pervaded the venerable house and its surrounding scenery, a peace which breathed of a purer sphere, where what is best on earth finds its correspondence.

We wondered not, that, when the deep waters of the poet's soul, too often ruffled by passion, polluted by vice, or made turbid by selfishness, were calm and pure enough to mirror heaven, they ever reflected the bright and morning star of Annesley.

The transition from Annesley Hall to Newstead Abbey is inevitable in thought and rapid in fact, the road, over which the young poet so often passed, between the two estates, being only three miles in length. We had lingered so long at Annesley that the day was nearly spent before we reached the Abbey. How did the venerable pile, with its mysterious memories, fateful histories, and poetical associations, flash out into light and darken into shadow as the October sun sank behind the distant hills!

The Abbey church is now only a ruin, but the airy span of its rich Gothic window remains, as evidence of its original beauty. Through the now vacant space, once the wide door of entrance, we saw the floor of green grass, and in the cen

tre the monument to Byron's favorite dog, Bowswain. All was silent about the ruin, except the cawing of a thousand rooks, who were settling themselves for the night with a vast amount of noise and bustle on the high branches of the old trees which sweep down on one side of the Abbey.

The residence which adjoins the church, once a monastery, was inherited by Lord Byron, with the title: to part with it was a dire necessity. Colonel Wildman, the school-fellow of Byron at Harrow, purchased the estate from the unhappy poet in the most liberal and generous manner, and blessed it into a home. On entering the house, we were shown through long corridors and vaulted passages, in which the monastic character of the building was preserved. When Byron came to Newstead from college, the Abbey was in a most dilapidated condition, and he had only means enough to make a few rooms habitable for himself and his mother. A gloomy and desolate abode it must have been. The furniture of Byron's

bedroom remains as it stood when removed from Cambridge. On the walls are prints of his school at Harrow, and Trinity College, with various relics and boyish treasures. The window commands a view of the sheet of water which stretches before the Abbey, with its wooded banks, a scene which he loves and remembers even when "Lake Leman wooes him with her crystal face," for he writes to his sister,

"It doth remind me of our own dear lake By the old hall, which shall be mine no more."

Adjoining Byron's room is a suite of apartments, ruinous and roofless in his day, but which Colonel Wildman has restored, and furnished most appropriately with old tapestry and antique tables and chairs. These rooms wear a ghostly aspect, and we were not surprised to learn that one, at least, had the reputation of being haunted. The great drawingroom, once the dormitory of the mks, is now a splendid apartment richly decorated; above the chimney is a fine

portrait of Lord Byron, and in an ancient cabinet was shown the cup made from a skull found in one of the stone coffins near the Abbey church. It is mounted in silver, and the well-known lines, written by Byron, are engraved on the rim. "Having it made" was, as he said himself, "one of his foolish freaks, of which he was ashamed." The cup, however, bears little resemblance to a skull. Colonel Wildman preserved the furniture of Byron's dining-room, and other apartments, (very simple it is,) without alteration, in the hope that he might return from Greece and revisit the halls of his fathers. Had Fate so willed, he would have found how kindly and faithfully his early friend had associated him with Newstead, and preserved every memorial of past history connected with the place. Yet thoughts of bitterness would even then have mingled with these familiar scenes, for it was not the heir of the Byrons who had restored Newstead Abbey to beauty and order.

Quitting the Abbey, and passing into the gardens, we followed the gardener through the deepening gloom to the wood, where, in former days, an ancestor of the Byrons set up leaden statues of satyrs, which the country-people called "the old lord's devils"; and very much like demons they looked. The tree was pointed out upon which Byron cut the names of "Augusta" and " Byron," with the date, during a last walk the brother and sister took together at Newstead. It is a double tree, springing from one root, which he chose as emblematical of themselves. The dim light barely enabled us to discern letters deeply carved, but growing less visible with the expanding bark. One of the trees has withered under that spell which seems to have blasted all connected with the name, and is cut off just above the inscription. The oak planted by Byron in his youth in a different part of the grounds was also shown to us. It is yet strong and vigorous. We picked up a yellow leaf, which the wind bore to our feet, as a fitting memorial of the place and the hour.

blem of that warm heart which had shed light upon the once desolate abode of its early friend.

Since our visit to Newstead, (seven years ago,) the Abbey has passed into other hands, and even a royal owner is now reported to possess the poet's ancestral home. We shall ever deem ourselves fortunate that our destiny led us to make this pilgrimage during the lifetime of Colonel Wildman and while the place was under his enlightened and generous ownership.

A few miles from Newstead Abbey is Hucknall, a poor, desolate - looking village, at the end of whose street stands an old church, beneath which is the burial-place of the Byrons. The building is ancient and gray, but dreary rather than venerable. Standing in its comfortless interior, we remembered that Byron once asked to be buried under the green, grassy floor of the roofless church at Newstead Abbey, with his faithful dog at his feet. The poet, whose rapid glance seized every glory and beauty of Nature, whose memory, wax to receive, and marble to retain, transferred the vision through the medium of his rare command of language, should have had a grave over which winds sweep, birds sing, and stars watch. Not so. A white marble tablet let into the wall above the family-vault was erected to Byron's memory by his sister. Perhaps the simplicity of the monument was suggested by these lines, written at the early age of nineteen years:

"When to his airy hall my father's voice Shall call my spirit, happy in the choice, When poised upon the gale my form shall ride,

Or dark in mist descend the mountain-side,
Oh, may my shade behold no sculptured urns
To mark the spot where dust to dust returns,
No lengthened scroll, no praise-encumbered
stone!

My epitaph shall be my name alone.
If that with honor fail to crown my clay,
Oh, may no other fame my deeds repay!
That, only that, shall single out the spot,
By that remembered, or by that forgot."

[February,

The inscription upon the tablet, after his name and title, designates him as the Author of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," who died while aiding the cause of Liberty in Greece: thus striking the noblest notes in a powerful, eccentric, blotted score, as the fundamental chord of Byron's requiem.

NORTHERN Invasions, when successful, advance the civilization of the world. It would not be difficult to present from all history a mass of illustrations of this thesis wellnigh sufficient in themselves to establish it. And there is no doubt that the principles of human nature, which appear in those illustrations, can be set in such order as to prove the thesis beyond a question. The softness of Southern climates produces, in the long run, gentleness, effeminacy, and indolence, or passionate råther than persevering effort. It produces, again, the palliatives or disguises of these traits which are found in formal religions, and in institutions of caste or slavery. The rigor of Northern climates produces, on the other hand, in the long run, hardy physical constitutions among men, with determined individuality of character. It produces, therefore, freedom even to democracy in politics, protestantism even to rationalism in religion, and grim perseverance even to the bitter end in war. A certain stern morality, often amounting to asceticism, is imposed on Northern constitutions. So superficial is it, so much a creature of circumstance, that Norman, Scandinavian, Goth, or Icelander, deserves no sort of credit for it. All history shows that it vanishes before the temptations of any Vinland which the frozen barbarians stumble upon. None the less does it give them vigor of muscle, and power to endure hardship, which, in the end, tells, over the accomplishments of the most warlike Romans, Greeks, Persians, or other Southrons. Fight us, if you like," said Ariovistus to Cæsar; "but remember that none of us have slept under a roof for fourteen years." That sort of people are apt to succeed in the long run.

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When they succeed, as we have said, they advance civilization. To begin with the farthest East, all such strength as the Chinese Empire has to-day is due to the

Tartar cross in its blood; that is, it results from the conquest of imbecile China by Northern Tartar tribes. One or two more such invasions, followed by colonization of Northern emigrants, would have made China a much stronger power this day than she is, and a nation of higher grade. The history of Indian civilization, again, is a history of Northern conquests. They tell us, indeed, that the Indian castes may be resolved into so many beachmarks of the waves of successive invasions from the North, the highest caste representing the last innovation. When Abraham crossed from Ur of the Chaldees into Canaan, when Cambyses broke open the secrets of Egyptian civilization, when Alexander first opened to the world Egyptian science, these were illustrations of the same thing,-Canaan, Egypt, and the world were all improved by those processes. Greece died out, and has never yet reestablished herself, because she never had a complete infusion of Gothic blood in her worn-out system. Italy, on the other hand, had a new birth, and at this moment has a magnificent future, because Goths and Lombards did sweep in upon her with their up-country virtues and wilderness moralities. What the Ostrogoths did for Spain, what the Franks did for Gaul, what the Northmen did for England, are so many more illustrations. What Gustavus Adolphus would have done for Germany, if he had succeeded, would have been anoth

er.

What we are to do in the South, when we succeed, will be another. It makes the subject of this paper.

Nobody pretends, of course, that War itself does anything final in the advance of civilization. War itself is, what the poets call it, a terrible piece of ploughing. With us, just now, it is subsoilploughing, very deep at that. Stumps and stones have to be heaved out, which

had on them the moss and lichens and superficial soil of centuries, and which had fancied, in that heavy semi-consciousness which belongs to stumps and stones, that they were fixed forever. As the teams and the ploughshares pass over the ground which has lain fallow so long, they leave, God knows, and millions of bleeding hearts know, a very desolate prospect in the upheaved furrows behind them. It is very black, very rough, very desert to the eye, and in spots it is very bloody. This is what war does. So desolate the prospect, that we of the Northern States have certainly a right to thank God that it was not we who called out the ploughmen.

War, in itself, does nothing but plough, --but immediately on the end of the war, in any locality, he who succeeds begins on the harrowing and the planting. And because God is, and directs all such affairs, it is wonderful to see how short is the June which in His world covers all such furrows as His ploughmen make with new beauty. It is to the methods of that new harvest that the President has boldly led our attention in his admirable Proclamation of Amnesty. It is to the details of it that each loyal man has to look already. It is but a few weeks since we heard a sentimental grumbler, at a public meeting, lamenting over the discomforts of the freed slaves in the Southwest, as he compared them with their lost paradise. Men of his type, to whom the present is always worse than the past, succeed in persuading themselves that the incidental hardships of transition are to be taken as the type of a whole future. And so this apostle of discontent really believed that the condition of the fifty thousand freed slaves of the Mississippi, in the hands of such men as Grant, and Eliot, and Yeatman, and Wheelock, and Forman, and Fiske, and Howard, was really going to be worse than it was under the lashes of Legree, or at the auction-block of New Orleans. The more manly, as the more philosophical way of looking at the transition, is to discover the shortest path leading to that

future, which, without such a transition, cannot come.

The President, with courage which does him infinite honor, leads the way to this future. His Proclamation is really a rallying-cry to all true men and women, whether they are living at the North or at the South, to take hold and work for its accomplishment. With an army posted in each of the revolted States, with more than one of them completely under National control, he considers that the time for planting has come. He is no such idealist or sentimentalist as to leave these new-made furrows, so terribly torn up in three years of war, to renew their own verdure by any mere spontaneous vegetation.

Practical as the President always is, he is sublimely practical in the Proclamation. “Let us make good out of this evil as quickly as we can," he says; “let peace bring in plenty as quickly as she can." To bring this about, he promises the strong arm of the nation to protect anything which shall show itself worth protecting, in the way of social institutions of republican liberty. He does not ask, like a conqueror, for the keys of a capital. He does not ask, like a Girondist, for the vote of a majority. He knows, it is true, as all the world knows, that, if the vote of all the men of the South could ever be obtained, the majority would utterly overshadow the handful of gentry who have been lording it over white trash and black slaves together. But the President has no wish to prolong martial law to that indefinite future when this handful of gentlemen shall let the majority of their own people pronounce upon their claims to rule them. Waiving the requisitions of the theorists, and at the same time relieving himself from the necessity of employing military power a moment longer than is necessary, he announces, in advance, what will be his policy in extending protection to loyal governments formed in Rebel States. If there can be found

in any State enough righteous men willing to take the oath of allegiance and to