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old home farms. Their very names are new, but they are God's and Nature's good gift as truly as are their long-descended relations, and play their part in the enrichment of mankind as honestly. In the spring they flood the sunny prairieland with a measureless foam of blossom, and in autumn they yield to pickers and packers an incalculable harvest of topaz and ruby globes, as precious and profitable as the gold of their neighboring mountains.

It is a lesson in the sensitiveness of the species to surroundings, to compare the apple tree grown in the deep loam of a Western prairie with that of its Eastern kindred. In the bleak mountain orchards of the Catskills I have seen ancient apple trees whose boles were turned in climbing

folds as regular as the carven legs of an antique mahogany table; row after row of fluted trunks telling forever of the winter winds and biting frosts which twisted them so sorely in the pliable days of their youth. The sap veins which vitalize them follow the curved and circling lines, unhesitatingly doing their spring and summer food-carrying over a long and crooked road as cheerfully and effectively as if it were straight and young. But wherever we may find them, -crowded in thick-set hedges within sight of the salty seas, or springing between the rocks of mountain clearings, or standing in well-ordered orchards of Eastern or Western plains, they are everywhere and always a preeminent gift and blessing.

ALCHEMY

BY EDWARD WILBUR MASON

OUT of the songs of frailest birds,
Out of the winds that veer,
My soul has winnowed deathless words
Of faith and hope and cheer!

Out of the passing stars of night,
And waning suns of day,
My soul has woven robes of light
That shall not fade away!

Out of the lowering clouds above,
And out of storm and stress,
My soul has gathered dews of love,
And golden happiness!

Out of its travail like the sea,
Out of the breath of dust,
My soul has shaped Infinity,
And made itself august!

MR. RHODES'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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BY BERNADOTTE PERRIN

"FAILURE makes us the vassals of an arrogant people," runs the appeal to the people by the last Confederate Congress, March 21, 1865. "Failure will compel us to drink the cup of humiliation even to the bitter dregs of having the history of our struggle written by New England historians." Mr. Rhodes is not a New Englander, indeed, but he is the next thing to it, a product of the Western Reserve, - and he has written "something very near to what time will prove to be the accepted story of the nation's great struggle for self-preservation." This includes, of course, the struggle of the Southern States for independence, which has here been treated, by the acknowledgment of a Southern critic, as fairly and judicially as any American can now treat it. This acknowledgment was made on the appearance of the fifth volume, which concludes the story of the Civil War. If the same Southern critic should pronounce judgment on the whole work, now that its history of the Reconstruction period is complete in the sixth and seventh volumes, he would surely be forced to modify, if not to recall, his assertion that 'a sympathetic treatment of both sides is naturally impossible at present."

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For though in his first two volumes, describing the agitations of the slavery question which led up to war, Mr. Rhodes is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Webster as to be a strong nationalist, in the last two volumes, describing "the pitiless years of reconstruction," he is no less thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Lincoln, so that his sympathies are unreservedly and warmly with the oppressed South; and in the three intermediate volumes, describing the Civil War, he is a model of rigorous impartiality. No South

erner could depict with a tenderer touch the heroic sacrifices and the appalling sufferings in the Lost Cause, none do finer justice to its brave soldiers and great leaders. "These with other circumstances show that men both at the North and the South were frequently better than their words. More than once each side was seemingly on the brink of retaliatory executions which would have been followed by stern reprisals. From such shedding of blood and its bitter memories we were spared by the caution and humanity of Abraham Lincoln, General Lee, and Jefferson Davis." A history of the struggle of the South written in the spirit of Lincoln, by one who holds that the evolution of the character of Lincoln was one of the main compensations for the fearful losses of the war on both sides, can never add to the bitterness of any "cup of humiliation.”

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Mr. Rhodes has devoted nineteen of the best years of his life to this monumental work. From the beginning to the end he has "envisaged"—to use a rather too frequent word of his own his subject in its entirety, and in its impressive dramatic unity. His sense of proportion is artistic, as well as his perspective. In one particular only has his initial purpose been modified. The original terminus ad quem which he set for his work was the return of the Democratic party to power by the election of Cleveland to the presidency in 1884. For this, on most convincing grounds, he has substituted the final restoration of Home Rule at the South after the election of Hayes in 1877. "The withdrawal of the United States troops from South Carolina and Louisi

ana, following upon the tacit consent of the North to the overthrow of the other Southern carpet-bag-negro governments by the educated and property-holding people of the several states, was proof that the Reconstruction of the South, based on universal negro suffrage, was a failure and that, on the whole, the North was content that the South should work out the negro problem in her own way, subject to the three constitutional amendments, which embodied the results of the Civil War; and subject, also, to the public opinion of the enlightened world."

This distinct terminal point accepted, the great drama has for prologue the events leading up to the compromise measures of 1850; for complication of the action, the upsetting of this compromise and the triumph of a sectional party, 1850 -1860; for catastrophe, the Civil War, 1861-1865; and for exodus and close, the period of Reconstruction, 1865–1877. Mr. Rhodes devotes two volumes to prologue and complication; three volumes to the catastrophe, which Mommsen called "the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals;" and two volumes to the exodus and close. "My subject has been varied and important, my materials superabundant; and, while conscious of my limitations, I have endeavored throughout this history of the great conflict to maintain such standards of research and judgment as should elicit the utmost of truth."

Specialists in this field of history are practically unanimous in their testimony that Mr. Rhodes has maintained the very highest "standards of research and judg

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cussion of the treatment on both sides of prisoners of war "is enormous, and a year were none too much for an exact and comprehensive study of it. The desire to complete the task I laid out for myself in the first page of this work, the endeavor to compass what Carlyle terms 'the indispensablest beauty in knowing how to get done,' have prevented me from giving more than a part of that time to the subject, and I shall therefore state with diffidence the conclusions at which I have arrived."

Aside from the almost unexampled impartiality of judgment which the work displays throughout, its most striking characteristics to the lay reader will be found in its subordination of the literary to the judicial element, — its freedom, that is, from rhetoric; in its marvelous pen-portraits of the prominent actors in the drama; and in its apparently unconscious, and therefore all the more artistic contrasts of light and shade. Mr. Rhodes manages well the long pause at a dramatic point, a supreme moment, as, for instance, when, after the account of Lincoln's election, we are held in suspended expectation of the loosing of the dogs of war by the long twelfth chapter on the state of society in America during the decade of 1850-1860. Behind the gloom and disappointment at the North in consequence of McClellan's failures, the form of the great conqueror, Grant, is made to loom like a portent. Amid the vague uncertainties which mark Lee's earlier career, the reader is made to await eagerly the unfolding of that genius which should make men of North and South alike "look upon him as the English of our day regard Washington." And when "the great captain of the rebellion" had been compelled to do what he would rather have died a thousand deaths than do, and the North was rejoicing with an exuberant joy, as it had never rejoiced before," nor did it during the remainder of the century on any occasion show such an exuberance of gladness,”— the art is consummate with which the

"horror and deep mourning" which was to follow Lincoln's death is made to cast its shadow before. So, too, it is just after we have been led to realize the great magnanimity of Lincoln, and his peculiar fitness to secure the compromises which must accompany any readjustment of the relations between North and South, that we are brought to Johnson. "Under Lincoln Reconstruction would have been a model of statecraft which would have added to his great fame. Of all men in public life it is difficult to conceive of one so ill-fitted for this delicate work as was Andrew Johnson." Of course such artistic contrasts are made possible only by that "knowledge of the end," which Mr. Rhodes well knows to be "one of the most dangerous pitfalls which beset the writers of history;" but knowledge which results merely in the most effective grouping of events, and not in partisan judgment upon them, needs no elimination.

From beginning to end of the work, from Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, to Hayes, Lamar, and Tilden, the great actors in the drama are made to live and breathe before us by the writer's wonderful power of portraiture. Almost everywhere in these portraits there is what the painter calls "modeling," and that of a high order. For us too the world seems "lonesome" without Daniel Webster, though we know his failings well. In all of us, when Lee finally decided to serve Virginia rather than the national government, "censure's voice upon the action of such a noble soul is hushed." All of us feel as it were the loss of a right arm when Stonewall Jackson and Reynolds die. Exceeding keen is the analysis of such complex and impulsive characters as General Sherman or Alexander H. Stephens. Remorseless though charitable is the exposure of weakness in McClellan or Frémont. The varying weaknesses and greatnesses of Seward and Chase are clearly differentiated, there is no blurring in the strokes. But most clearly of course, because most minutely portrayed, the features of the great leaders stand out

before us, Lincoln and Davis, Grant and Lee. Lincoln bore the sorrows of the whole nation, and his soul expanded under the strain and agony; Davis bore the sorrows of a revolution, and his soul, unlike that of Lee, contracted under the strain of defeat and failure. After the minor issue of the war, that of slavery, has been decided, and the nobler major issue, that of independence and disunion, remains to be decided, none can fail to admire that indomitable hopefulness which made him, in spite of constant debility, "next to Lee the strongest individual influence in time of distress." And yet, compared with Lincoln, he is but a bitter partisan. "I spoke always of two countries," he said, after the Hampton Roads Conference. "Mr. Lincoln spoke of a common country. I can have no common country with the Yankees. My life is bound up with the Confederacy. . . . With the Confederacy I will live or die. Thank God I represent a people too proud to eat the leek or bow the neck to mortal man." And yet Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, with rare civic virtue, surrendered when the cause was lost., And Grant received Lee's surrender with a magnanimity which we are called upon by the historian to remember, and do gladly remember, amid the scandals of his presidential administrations. But we cannot linger among these admirable portraits, — a national gallery. Through them, more than through any other feature of the work, "we breathe the atmosphere of the period itself, and share the doubts, the fears, and the deep solicitude of the actors in it."

“Without a touch of rhetoric," writes an English reviewer of Mr. Rhodes's work. This is in the main true. That snare of the historian, ancient and modern, the temptation to lay less stress on what is told than on how it is told, Mr. Rhodes has avoided to a really wonderful degree. It is true that no period of our history has such dramatic unity or such dramatic intensity as the period he has chosen to portray. He has only to let

events speak for themselves in the simplest way, and he is sure of the attention and interest of his reader. But it is nevertheless a great virtue in a historian to do this, to hide himself and his style behind his material rather than to impress them on it, and Mr. Rhodes has apparently chosen for his model Gardiner's history of the English Civil War. The best thing to be said about Mr. Rhodes's literary style is that one seldom notices it at all. It is like the garments of a really well dressed man or woman, which attract no attention. In the main it is simple, straightforward, and unaffected, though not without a rugged vigor all its own. At very rare intervals the writer seems to say to himself, "Go to! I will be ornate a bit," and the result is something stilted or involved. To one who knows the probable beverage of a Southern Senator when stumping Kansas in 1854, it seems far-fetched to speak of a speech of his as "made under the influence of the invisible spirit of wine." But such minor blemishes are all the more noticeable for their rarity. Akin to them are the more frequent quotations for literary adornment which have the air of being lugged in by force, as when Tacitus and Thucydides are cited apropos of Sherman's "War is Hell," or the eleventh Æneid to rebuke the Democrats who, in 1863, believed that peace was possible without recognition of the Confederacy. On the other hand, such quotations are often admirably managed, as that from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when the tolling of the bells announced the death of Lincoln: "Men, wives and children stare, cry out and

run

As it were doomsday."

And no one questions for an instant the appropriation into the text, entire, of Walt Whitman's "O Captain! my Captain!"

Like Lincoln, Mr. Rhodes often uses with apparent unconsciousness and without quotation marks whole phrases of King James's Bible or of Shakespeare. On the death of a slave, "it was the loss of

money that was

bewailed, and not of the light which no Promethean heat can relume." When Theodore Parker preached his sermon on the death of Webster, "the preacher appeared to wish the good which Webster did interred with his bones and the evil to live after him." When Seward saw the rising flood of enthusiasm for Frémont in 1856, "the reflection must have come to him that he, instead of one who only began to labor in the vineyard at the eleventh hour, might have been the embodiment of this magnificent enthusiasm." Even so unconsciously did Lincoln write to Sherman of the great success at Savannah, "It brings those who sat in darkness to see a great light;" and who can forget the efficacy of his "A house divided against itself cannot stand"?

This suggests also Mr. Rhodes's rare gift for citation from authorities of every sort,-reports, speeches, letters, debates,

-so that the gist of matters is often given to the reader in the form of a smooth mosaic of original sources. Nor does his own style lack charm and lucidity. Often it rises to impressiveness, and issues in finalities of statement, many of which will live on in the citations of his successors. "Nor, if we suppose the Puritan to have settled Virginia and the Cavalier Massachusetts, is it inconceivable that, while the question would have remained the same, the Puritan should have fought for slavery and the Cavalier for liberty," a sentence which illustrates much besides the writer's style. "Manifestly superior as had been the advantages of Davis in family, breeding, training, and experience, he fell far below Lincoln as a compeller of men," - a judgment from which few will dissent, and which few could state more effectively. His study of the commercial intercourse between the South and the North during the war, so debasing to the participants on both sides, brings him to the conclusion that it was of greater advantage to the Confederacy than to the Union. “For the South it was a necessary evil; for the North it was an evil and not a necessary one." In

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