another's. But such people as Uncle Jake, who, you know, is too lazy to even brush the flies off his bowl of buttermilk and bit of bacon and hoe-cake-such as he would be good-for-nothing, shiftless, worthless creatures anywhere, and it is a merciful thing there are those who feel it to be their duty to clothe and feed them."

mer.

"Yes, chile, Jake am a lazy coot, fo' fac'. My ole man say he neber take off de suit ob clo'es marse gib him in de fall, till he creeps outen it in de spring fo' to get inter de new shirt and trousers he gets fo' de sumBut jus' s'posen de brack man be smart up dar whar yo' cum from, honey, an' make a heap ob money fo' hese'f, whar am he gwine fo' to spen' it? Wha' comfort am dar in gwine anywhars ef yo' mus' keep in de dark corners all de time? De darkey like plenty ob sunshine-neber get too much -neber quite happy 'dout it. No, honey, I 'pinionate dat fo' a cullud pusson to hab money in he own pocket don' count like it do when he am money in somebody else's pocket; an' I knows fo' sartin dat dar hain't dat feelin' 'gin us down hyar dat the norferns hab and kin't seem to get ober, de bery bes' ob 'em. It all cums, I 'low, from deir not bein' fotched up 'long side ob us. Dey kin't seem to forgib us fo' habin' brack skins an' kinky ha'r. Ef dey had been rocked to sleep ebery night ob deir libes when dey was babies and little chil'ens on some brack mammy's lap, been sung to sleep, cuddled close to some fond ole brack heart, in arms ez was allus open fo' 'em night an' day, an' dun grow'd up playin' 'long wif dat mammy's own little brack babies an' chil'ens, an' fed from de same breas', been watched ober an' waited on all deir days, jus' ez I hab dun ober Mis' Lucy and her chil'en, and her mudder's afore her, dey wouldn't act so much like dey smelt pisen in de air ebery time a brack pussun cum a nigh 'em. O, I'se hearn tell ob de airs dey gibs dersel's. Dey's got a nat❜ral verjuice agin us. You's lived so much among us down hyar, comin' an' goin' eber sence yo' was a little un, dat de verjuice am not so deep wif yo', mebbe; but dey mos❜ly all has it mo' nor less."

"You mean prejudice, Aunty. But don't bother your simple old heart any more over that matter. There are bad people and good, consistent and inconsistent, everywhere, and will be to the end. You know what the Bible says about the wheat and tares growing together until the harvest-time don't you, Mauma? Wiser heads than yours and mine are puzzling over the prolific question of what is to be done with you and your race. But let them ponder and plan. as they will, it is, after all, only God's purpose concerning you that will prevail ; and you can trust him, can't you, Aunty, to do that for you and yours which is best and wisest? He will permit and he will restrain until out of all this confusion of blood and strife good shall be wrought. O, how we should despair in these dark, sorrowful days, when the whole land is full of aching, bleeding hearts, if we could not feel that, high over all, he reigns unchangeable and just. The result to which all eyes are now looking, all hearts seeking to foreshadow; the pregnant future from which so many are eager to lift the veil, but which is mystery all, to us—has been known to God from the foundation of the world; and in some way, in the midst of much present sorrow and darkness, his work is going on, making all ready for the eternal morning."

Wondering why I had been permitted to make so long a speech without interruption from the garrulous old soul within, I leaned back from my seat on the door-step, and peeping inside the door, beheld Lamb standing just behind me, leaning against the doorway, his face wearing a serious, thoughtful expression. His eyes were fixed on the blue heavens above with an intentness of expression almost startling; so full were they of prayer, that the earnest soul looking forth from them seemed to have entered the very presence of his Maker, and there stood pleading his cause with impassioned importunity.

But Phillis, with her head laid back on the window-sill, her apron thrown over her face, her pipe dropped to the floor, and her arms hanging down each side of her, was fast

asleep, and giving utterance to an unmistakable snore. Like all of her race I ever knew in their southern homes, be they young or old, recognizing no present necessity. for either physical or mental activity, she had let fall her eyelids, and sleep that had no haunting care or responsibility for the morrow to baffle its invitings spread its wing above the weary form and wrapped it in its oblivion.

I stole quietly away, leaving her to rest undisturbed, remembering that she was old, and her strength broken, and hardly equal to the labor her present position in the household entailed.

A few hours later, just as the sun was sinking from sight, Lamb appeared at the veranda where the family were gathered, and with some hesitation and uneasy glances at his mistress, said he would like to speak about Phillis. "Something strange," he said, "has come to her, Miss Lucy, an' I'se feared it is death.”

With a grievous cry my friend sprung up, and together we hurried to the kitchen. Phillis lay just as I had left her hours before, and appeared to have passed from sleep to death without pain or consciousness. She had, indeed, as she foreboded, performed her last service for us. She had left us, but not, as she predicted, for the weary toil of the cotton field; but of the new life upon which she had entered, who that has passed beyond has ever returned to tell?

A more devoted heart was never buried from out this eager, striving, selfish world

than the one we the next day laid in its grave, in the grove of oaks where the burying place of the blacks had been set apart.

All through the years of my friend's married life, Phillis had thus far been her faithful attendant, seldom beyond call night or day, and always ready with affectionate zeal to serve and wait, proving herself in all times of sickness or sorrow a soothing minister and unfailing dependence. In her arms the two lovely daughters of the household, just as they reached early womanhood, had breathed their last, being lovingly tended as far into the dark valley as human love might make itself felt by this true friend, while the mother lay prostrate with grief. Through all her deep sorrow over the death of her husband, which quickly followed that of her children, this same true heart had been a full and overflowing fountain of sympathy and watchful care for the stricken one. No wonder, then, that my friend was loth to believe that death had stilled forever its generous throbbings; that no cry from her sad life for comfort would ever again reach it. With her own hand she planted the turf above the grave with flowers; and at its head and foot Lamb placed a crape myrtle, whose beautiful pink clusters were in life Phillis's special delight, and whose rich blossoms every summer after fell thickly upon the green turf above her, as the breezes whispered and swept among the branches of the grand old oaks, whose steadfast hearts were fit emblems of the one moldering to dust beneath their shade.

Sara D. Halsted.

THE East and West are enigmas to each other. To the native of the Orient the sound that comes from the Occident is like the note of a pibroch; that which comes from the East is like those tones which Hermes awoke upon his tortoise lyre, when he swept its chords and evoked strains of wonderful sweetness as he "sang of the

loves of Zeus, in the beautiful home of his mother, Maia, the daughter of Atlas, and of the olden time when the gods were born and the world was young."

This is intended to be but a sketch-an attempt to grasp merely some of the salient points of the operations of the Oriental mind; and will, therefore, perhaps lack that

unity of design which it would possess if devoted merely to the consideration of some particular school of eastern philosophy.

The two principal opposing characteristics of the Oriental and Occidental mind are most compendiously summed up in the terms "subjective" and "objective." The western mind is pre-eminently objective, energetic, and direct in its operations. The poetry of Wordsworth, who was a true Oriental in sentiment, is perhaps the nearest approach that is made in English verse to an expression of the eastern quality. We may look on every side for a competent expression of its opposite, but hardly anywhere more successfully than in the trumpettones of Scott. Pick out a stanza anywhere, and it will exemplify this fact; for example :

"Fair Margaret, from the turret head,
Heard, far below, the coursers' tread,
While loud the harness rung,

As to their seats, with clamor dread,
The ready horseman sprung;
And trampling hoofs, and iron coats,
And leaders' voices, mingled notes;
And out, and out, in hasty rout,
The horsemen galloped forth;
Dispersing to the south to scout,
And east, and west, and north,
To view their coming enemies
And warn their vassals and allies." 1

But the Oriental mind is intensely subjective, introspective, contemplative, complex, and delighting in indirection. The climate has much to do with this. Where the heat of the sun and the abundant luxuriance of tropical harvests combine, the first to drive man indoors and the latter to keep him there, from the lack of the sharp goad of necessity to spur him to labor, the mind quite naturally will turn in ward and feed upon itself. The influence of climate is best known by physiologists and comparative philologists. The Aryan race, before it migrated to India, is well known to have been of a much lighter color than at present. It was undoubtedly white; it is not even necessary to go into the details of the proof. So with the technicalities of language: the milder climes have pro

1 Lay of the Last Minstrel, III., XXVIII.

duced the harmonious tongues of the South, while contact with nature in her harsher moods has fostered a more emphatic and less euphonious utterance in the vigorous dialects of the North.

We may first advert to philological peculiarities as illustrative of the complexity of which we have spoken.

By the European a grammar is considered a necessary evil, to be mastered as quickly as possible, so that one may enter the harvest fields of the literature to which it is a key; but it is characteristic of the Hindu that he regards the complexity of the Sanskrit, the most elaborate and artificial language in the world, as a positive recommendation. "He views in it an evidence and a pledge of the sacred and unapproachable character of the tongue which he venerates as divine. To him the study of its intricate grammar is an end, complete and satisfying. in itself. He wanders with delight in its perplexing mazes, and values that grammar most which enters most minutely into an abstract analysis of the construction of the language, apart from its practical bearing on the literature, or even on the formation of his own vernacular dialect."2

From the same grammarian we quote the following regarding the grammatical system of the greatest native writer upon this subject, Panini: "That the reader may judge for himself of the almost incredible brevity and hopeless obscurity of these grammatical aphorisms, we here present him with the closing Sutra at the end of the eighth lecture, as follows: 'a, a.' Will it be believed that this is interpreted to mean, 'Let short a be held to have its organ of utterance contracted,' now that we have reached the end of the work, in which it was necessary to regard it as being otherwise?"

The rules for the combination and permutation of letters form a mountain of difficulty; but this once passed, the grammatical system of Sanskrit is comparatively simple. Another illustration of the Hindu penchant for obscurity, when clearness would better subserve one's purpose, is to be ob2 Monier Williams's preface to Sanskrit Grammar.

served in the junction of all, or nearly all, the words on a line into what is apparently one word; this, taken together with the exceedingly artificial euphonic rules just adverted to, causes the student many years of labor to enable him to pick out the separate words. The Latin phrase, “Rara avis in terris," if Sanksrit, would appear as, "Raravir ins terrih," and would undoubtedly be thus joined, "Raravirinsterrih."

The literature shares in the same tendency. The translation of the first sentence (an invocation or prayer to Siva) of that charming drama, Kalidasa's Sakuntala, reads thus: “(That visible form) which (was) the first creation of the Creator [i. e., water]; (that) which bears the oblation offeredaccording-to-scriptural-rule [i. e., fire]; and (that) which (is) the offerer [i. e., the officiating priest who offers the oblation]; (those) two (visible forms) which define the time [i. e., the sun and moon which cause day and night]; (that) which perpetually pervades all space, having (conveying) the quality [sound] perceptible by the ear [i. e., ether]; (that) which they call the birthplace [the proximate cause of all created things [i. e., the earth]; (that) by which living beings are furnished with breath [i. e., the air]; endowed with [manifested in, known by] these eight visible forms Isa [the supreme lord] preserve thee." This, of course, seems much more simple to the Hindu than to us, who do not think in Sanskrit, and who are un acquainted with the local and religious allusions; but the involved character of the composition presents an additional charm to the Indian mind.

There is much that is interesting in an examination of the peculiarities of the Semitic dialects. So hyper-æsthetic is the Oriental mind, that we find the consonants considered in the alphabetical representation of these languages, the body of a word, the vowels the spirit; spirit being something that is intangible and imperceptible, it would plainly be a monstrous solecism to attempt an alphabetical representation of it; consequently it is not in accord with the true Semitic theory to admit vowel signs into

the alphabet. Their introduction in any form into the written text is the work of a latter day; the devices to imply or supply them are numerous and ingenious. They are attached, for example, to the Ethiopic or Abyssinian consonants in such grotesque forms and shapes, that to acquire familiarity with the alphabet is a labor of the greatest difficulty, for some of the signs actually turn a somersault in the attempt to indicate the inherency of a vowel. The general rule in the Semitic dialects is not to represent the vowels at all, or to indicate them by means of accompanying dots and dashes, precisely as in our phonography.

The fundamental distinction between present, past, and future in the Aryan tongues does not exist in the Semitic; there are but two tenses in the inflection of the verb, one answering to the idea of the action done and the other to that of the action not done. The process of reasoning, in brief, is this: There is great inexactness in the notion of present time, for the moment one says, "I do this thing," that action has taken its place in the irrevocable past: there is no middle ground; all is past or to come. The idea is analogous to the reason for the virtual abolition of a neuter gender from the Romanic tongues of the south of Europe, where the existence of a neuter gender is considered a manifest absurdity-a contradiction in terms.

But let us pursue these hair-splitting technicalities no farther. It is in his treatment of the great problem of existence and destiny that we behold the Oriental "on his native heath." The West has developed no forms of religion; they all deduce their origin from the East. It is the congenial soil of religious, philosophical, and metaphysical speculation. There also have originated those beautiful myths, the unraveling of which is the glory of the modern science of comparative mythology. There is something indescribably touching in the view that we obtain from those myths of the childhood of the human race; its joy in the presence of the radiant sun, the giver of life and health and strength, and its unutterable sorrow when the bright being dies in the evening, "when life

to man was an alternation of joy and sorrow, of terror and relief"; but this vast and charming theme lies beyond the scope of the present discussion.

Oriental subjectivity found in the pure monotheism of the Jews its loftiest expression. Their system, which became so interwoven with the very being of the state, differentiated them toto cœlo from every other class of men, and consequently tended inevitably to unite them together as a compact community, to the utter exclusion of all polytheistic nations. The semi-idolatry of the Samaritans, who "feared the Lord, but served their graven images," would admit of no harmony between them and the Jews. This pure monotheism is characteristic of the older books of the law. The influence of Persian ideas is manifest in the later books, when the Jews had been thrown into contact with the dualism of the Iranian creed; and they thereafter exhibited a tendency to adopt the Zoroastrian demonology, Satan appearing in the character of Ahriman, the arch-enemy of God, and not (as in the earlier Book of Job) as one of his ministers. Indeed, as Sir G. W. Cox has said, in his Mythology of the Aryan Nations, the notion of a being whose duty it was to tempt and try the hearts of men was that he was one of the sons of God, which is in strict consonance with the Hebrew philosophy, which regarded God as the author both of good and evil. The culminating exhibition of the physical attributes of Ahriman appearing as Satan is found in the Apocalypse, where he is called "the Dragon, the old Serpent who fights against God and his angels." The distinguishing trait of the ancient Persian system was a dualism "which divided the world between two opposing, self-existent deities (of good and evil), while it professedly left to men the power of choosing whom they should obey."

Mohammedanism is merely another form of that intense monotheism so characteristic of certain members of the Semitic stock; and we can but regard as correct the tenet of Rénan, that monotheism is the distinguishing type of nomadic, i. e., desert-dwelling, man, or of man dwelling in the midst of

sterility; for it has stood the test of experience. The intense monotony of the desert -one desert, one man, one sun; the universal sameness and uniformity of nature—must with unerring certainty point to one infinite Father, who fails not to regard with favor his creature wandering on the trackless wastes of sand. It is a remarkable fact that all the members of the Semitic stock located in the midst of luxuries, and in wealthy lands where nature manifests herself in myriad forms have personified those varied shapes and forms, and lapsed into the grossest polytheism. Though the five principal commandments of Islamism are prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, and war against the infidel, the influence of all but the first has waned, and Mohammedanism has become, like the religious system of the Jews, one whose divine service consists of prayer alone. "It is a creed without a priesthood or a church.”

We find no such cosmopolitanism in any oriental nation as in ours; for we, as Prof. Max Muller has said, "are Semitic in our religion, Greek in our philosophy, Roman in our politics, and Saxon in our morality." For homogeneity is another eastern trait. The attempt to impose religious uniformity in the West went down in the fire and smoke of dire and awful catastrophe. There is not a language of the Orient into which the phrase "constitutional liberty" can be properly translated. One has not to go far to seek the cause. There can only be liberty and the appreciation of it in lands of mighty activities. Quietism and passivity do not seek it, do not require it. Despotism is the very breath of their life.

If we turn to India, we behold a land where man has more deeply pondered on the dread problems of life, death, fate, and destiny than elsewhere on this sphere. In the cloisters of the Himalayas, marvelous systems of religious philosophy have been evolved. The Brahminical system avers the existence of a great Soul of the World, an ocean of spirit; man it regards as merely an atom of animated matter, to which a small portion of this inexhaustible fountain