freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to com- plete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. WAITING FOR SPRING. WAITING for Spring-The mother watching lonely Waiting for Spring-Ah me! all nature tarries, As motionless and cold, she lies asleep; Wrapt in her green pine robe that never varies, Wearing out winter by this Southern deep. The tints are too unbroken on the bosom Red clustering roses, golden briony, See, too, my queen, my peerless passion-flower! Of these great woods,-we want some light And ah, perhaps, alas! too oft unknown. green shoots; We want the white and red acacia blossom, The blue life hid in all these russet roots. Waiting for Spring-The hearts of men are watching, Each for some better, brighter, fairer thing; Waiting for Spring-The nations in their anger, guor, And better spirits in them throb and thrill. Waiting for Spring-Poor hearts, how oft ye weary! Looking for better things and grieving much; Earth lieth still, though all her bowers be dreary, She trusts her God, nor thrills but at his touch. It must be so-The man, the soul, the nation, A grub, a root that holds our higher state. Waiting for Spring-the germ for its perfection, Droops her red weeping lids the fuchsia coy, Fair, frail coquette, for all that artless mien, TOGETHER. SWEET hand that, held in mine, Of sweeter days in store I have not much to say, Nor any words that fit such fond request: Thrice blest the faithful hand Sweet hand, that, thus in mine, JUNE. SHE comes! an empress in her summer-car, Her golden tresses the laburnum waves, FAITH AND WORKS. FAITH is the compass by the which to steer The vessel of our Works; the wise and brave If undirected she should could go astray, Faith without Works, a meaning not conveyed LOUIS NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.* sprang BY ALEX. WILLIAM KINGLAKE. the President; had been intrusted with power to place under martial law any districts in which disturbIn the beginning of the winter of 1851 which went on in the Chamber, though they ances seemed likely to occur. The struggles France was still a republic; but the Constiwere unsightly in the eyes of military men tution of 1848 had struck no root. There and of those who love the decisiveness and was a feeling that the country had been surprised and coerced into the act of declaring healthy political action than of danger to the consistency of despotism, were rather signs of itself a republic, and that a monarchical sys- State. It is not true, as was afterwards pretem of government was the only one adapted for France. The sense of instability which tended, that the Executive was wickedly or from this belief was connected with perversely thwarted either by the votes of the an agonizing dread of insurrections like those Assembly or by the speeches of its members; still less is it true that the representative which forty months before had filled the streets of Paris with scenes of bloodshed. body was engaged in hatching plots against Moreover, to those who watched and feared,membering the humiliations of 1848, was in and although the army, reit seemed that the shadow on the dial was moving on with a terrible steadiness to the hour when a return to anarchy was, as it were, pre-ordained by law; for the Constitution required that a new President should be chosen in the spring of the following year, and the French, being by nature of a keen and anxious temperament, cannot endure that lasting pressure upon the nerves which is inflicted by a long-impending danger. Their impulse under such trials is to rush forward, or to run back, and what they are least inclined to do is to stand still and be calm, or make a steady move to the front. ill-humor with the people, and was willing upon any fit occasion to act against them, there was no general officer of any repute who would consent to fire a shot without what French Commanders deemed to be the one lawful warrant for action—an order from the Minister of War. But the President of the republic was Prince Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the statutory heir of the first French Emper * or. The election which made him the chief of the State, had been conducted with perfect fairness, and since it happened that in former which aimed at the throne of France, he had years he had twice engaged in enterprises good right to infer that the millions of citizens who elected him into the Presidency, were willing to use his ambition as a means of restoring to France a monarchical form of government. In general, France thought it best that, notwithstanding the Rule of the Constitution which stood in the way, the then President should be quietly re-elected; and a large majority of the Assembly, faithfully representing this opinion, had come to a vote which sought to give it effect; but their desire was baffled by an unwise provision of the Repub-ambition which was almost cast upon him by But if he had been open in disclosing the lican Charter which had laid it down that no the circumstances of his birth, he had been constitutional change should take place without the sanction of three-fourths of the As-as successful as the first Brutus in passing sembly. By this clumsy bar the action of the State system was hampered, and many whose minds generally inclined them to respect legality were forced to acknowledge that the Constitution wanted a wrench. Still, the republic had long been free from serious outbreak. The law was obeyed; and indeed the determination to maintain order at all sacrifices was so strong, that, even upon somewhat slight foundation, the President *This is an episode in "The Invasion of the Crimea," our copy of which was burned a few weeks ago. The work is in press of Messrs. Harpers, to whose kindness we owe the opportunity of fulfilling the promise made to the readers of The Living Age. and in England at that time men in general People in *I.e. by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804. a throne, but rather as though he were a bal- | ture of the science at which he labored. loon-man, who had twice had a fall from the Many men before him had suffered themselves skies, and was still in some measure alive. Yet the more men knew him in England, the more they liked him. He entered into English pursuits and rode fairly to hounds. He was friendly, social, good-humored, and willing enough to talk freely about his views upon the throne of France. The sayings he uttered about his "" destiny were addressed (apparently as a matter of policy) to casual acquaintance, but to his intimate friends he used the language of a calculating and practical aspirant to Empire. to bring craft into politics. Many more, toiling in humbler grades, had applied their cunning skill to the conflicts which engage courts of law; but no living man perhaps, except Prince Louis Bonaparte, had passed the hours of a studious youth and the prime of a thoughtful manhood in contriving how to apply stratagem to the science of jurisprudence. It was not perhaps from natural baseness that his mind took this bent. The inclination to sit and sit planning for the attainment of some object of desire-this indeed was in his nature; but the inclination to labor at the task of making law an engine of deceit, this did not come perforce with his blood. Yet it came with his parentage. It the indication given him by the accident of his birth, and to remain a private citizen; but when once he resolved to become a pretender to the imperial throne, he of course had to try and see how it was possible-how it was possible in the midst of this centurythat the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 could be made to sit kindly upon the neck of France; and, France being a European nation, and the yoke being in substance a yoke such as Tartars make for Chinese, it followed that the accommodating of the one to the other was only to be effected by guile. The opinion which men had formed of his ability in the period of exile was not much altered by his return to France; for in the Assembly his apparent want of mental power caused the world to regard him as harmless, is true he might have determined to reject and in the chair of the President he commonly seemed to be torpid. But there were always a few who believed in his capacity, and observant men had latterly remarked that from time to time there appeared a State Paper, understood to be the work of the President, which teemed with thought, and which showed that the writer, standing solitary and apart from the gregarious nation of which he was the chief, was able to contemplate it as something external to himself. His long, endless study of the mind of the first Napoleon had caused him to adopt and imitate the Emperor's habit of looking down upon the French people and treating the mighty nation as a substance to be studied and controlled by a foreign brain. Indeed, during the periods of his imprisonment and of his exile, the relations between him and the France of his studies were very like the relations between an anatomist and a corpse. He lectured upon it; he dissected its fibres; he explained its functions; he showed how beautifully Nature in her infinite wisdom had adapted it to the service of the Bonapartes; and how, without the fostering care of those same Bonapartes, the creature was doomed to degenerate and to perish out of the world. If his intellect was of a poorer quality than men supposed it to be at the time of the Anglo-French alliance, it was much above the low gauge which people used to assign to it in the earlier period which began in 1836 and ended at the close of 1851. That which had so long veiled his cleverness from the knowledge of mankind was the repulsive na Therefore by the sheer exigencies of his inheritance, rather than by inborn wickedness, Prince Louis was driven to be a contriver; and to expect him to be loyal to France, without giving up his pretensions altogether, would be as inconsistent as to say that the heir of the first Perkin might undertake to revive the fleeting glories of the House of Warbeck, and yet refrain from imposture. For years the Prince pursued his strange calling; and by the time his studies were over, he had become highly skilled. Long before the moment had come for bringing his crooked science into use, he had learnt how to frame a Constitution which should seem to enact one thing and really enact another. He knew how to put the word "jury" in laws which robbed men of their freedom. He could set the snare which he called "universal suffrage." He knew how to strangle a nation in the night time with a thing he called a "Plebiscite." The lawyer-like ingenuity which had thus the pressure of a strong motive. He could maintain friendly relations with a man and speak frankly and truthfully to him for seven years, and then suddenly deceive him. Of course, men finding themselves ensnared by what had appeared to be honesty in his char been evoked for purposes of jurisprudence | for such an end) sometimes became a means could, of course, be applied to the composi- of deception, because after generating confition of State Papers and to political writings dence it would suddenly break down under of all kinds; and the older Prince Louis grew, the more this odd accomplishment of his was used to subserve his infirmities. It was his nature to remain long in suspense, not merely between similar, but even between opposite plans of action: this weakness grew upon him with his years; and, his conscience be-acter, were naturally inclined to believe that ing used to stand neuter in these mental conflicts, he never could end his doubt by seeing that one course was honest, and the other not; so, in order to be able to linger safely in his suspense, he had to be always making resting-places upon which for a time he might be able to stand undecided. Just as the indolent man becomes clever in framing excuses for his delays, so Prince Louis, because he was so often hesitating between the right and the left, became highly skilled in contriving-not merely ambiguous phrases, but -ambiguous schemes of action. Partly from habits acquired in the secret societies of the Italian Carbonari, partly from long years passed in prison, and partly too, as he once said, from his intercourse with the calm, self-possessed men of the English turf, he had derived the power of keeping long silence; but he was not by nature a reserved nor a secret man. Towards foreigners, and especially towards the English, he was generally frank. He was reserved and wary with the French, but this was upon the principle which makes a sportsman reserved and wary with deer and partridges and trout. No doubt he was capable of dissembling, and continuing to dissemble through long periods of time, but it would seem that his faculty of keeping his intentions secret was very much aided by the fact that his judgment was often in real suspense, and that he had therefore no secret to tell. His love of masks and disguises sprang more perhaps from the odd vanity and the theatric mania which will be presently spoken of than from a base love of deceit, for it is certain that the mystery in which he loved to wrap himself up was often contrived with a view to a melo-dramatic surprise. It is believed that men do him wrong who speak of him as void of all idea of truth. He understood truth, and in conversation he habitually preferred it to falsehood, but his truthfulness (though not perhaps contrived every semblance of a good quality was a mask; but it was more consistent with the principles of human nature to believe that a truthfulness continuing for seven years was a genuine remnant of virtue, than that it was a mere preparation for falsehood. His doubting and undecided nature was a help to concealment: for men got so wearied by following the oscillations of his mind, that their suspicions in time went to rest; and then, perhaps, when he saw that they were quite tired of predicting that he would do a thing, he gently stole out and did it. He had boldness of the kind which is produced by reflection rather than that which is the result of temperament. In order to cope with the extraordinary perils into which he now and then thrust himself, and to cope with them decorously, there was wanted a fiery quality which nature had refused to the great bulk of mankind as well as to him. But it was only in emergencies of a really trying sort, and involving instant physical danger that his boldness fell short. He had all the courage which would have enabled him in a private station of life to pass through the common trials of the world with honor unquestioned; but he had besides now and then a factitious kind of audacity produced by long dreamy meditation; and when he had wrought himself into this state, he was apt to expose his firmness to trials beyond his strength. The truth is that his imagination had so great a sway over him, as to make him love the idea of enterprises, but it had not strength enough to give him a foreknowledge of what his sensations would be in the hour of trial. So he was most venturesome in his schemes for action, and yet when at last he stood face to face with the very danger which he had long been courting, he was liable to be scared by it, as though it were something new and strange. He loved to contrive and brood over plots, and he had a great skill in making the repar |