carefully laid over the back of it; and there I sat, ready for execution, with the palms of my hands pressed convulsively together, and the tears I in vain endeavored to repress welling up into my eyes and brimming slowly over, down my rouged cheeks-upon which my aunt, with a smile full of pity, renewed the color as often as these heavy drops made unsightly streaks in it. Once and again my father came to the door, and I heard his anxious "How is she?" to which my aunt answered, sending him away with words of comforting cheer. At last, "Miss Kemble called for the stage, ma'am!" accompanied with a brisk tap at the door, started me upright on my feet, and I was led round to the side scene opposite to the one from which I saw my mother advance on the stage; and while the uproar of her reception filled me with terror, dear old Mrs. Davenport, my nurse, and dear Mr. Keely, her Peter, and half the dramatis persona of the play (but not my father, who had retreated, quite unable to endure the scene) stood round me as I lay, all but insensible, in my aunt's arms. "Courage, courage, dear child! poor thing, poor thing!" reiterated Mrs. Davenport. "Never mind 'em, Miss Kemble!" urged Keely, in that irresistibly comical, nervous, lachrymose voice of his, which I have never since heard without a thrill of anything but comical association; "never mind 'em! don't think of 'em, any more than if they were so many rows of cabbages!" "Nurse!" called my mother, and on waddled Mrs. Davenport, and, turning back, called in her turn, "Juliet!" My aunt gave me an impulse forward, and I ran straight across the stage, stunned with the tremendous shout that greeted me, my eyes covered with mist, and the green baize flooring of the stage feeling as if it rose up against my feet; but I got hold of my mother, and stood like a terrified creature at bay, confronting the huge theatre full of gazing human beings. I do not think a word I uttered during this scene could have been audible; in the next, the ball-room, I began to forget myself; in the following one, the balcony scene, I had done so, and, for aught I knew, I was Juliet; the passion I was uttering sending hot waves of blushes all over my neck and shoulders, while the poetry sounded like music to me as I spoke it, with no consciousness of anything before me, utterly transported into the imaginary existence of the play. After this, I did not return into myself till all was over, and amid a tumultuous storm of applause, congratulation, tears, embraces, and a general joyous explosion of unutterable relief at the fortunate termination of my attempt, we went home. And so my life was determined, and I devoted myself to an avocation which I never liked or honored, and about the very nature of which I have never been able to come to any decided opinion. It is in vain that the undoubted specific gifts of great actors and actresses suggest that all gifts are given for rightful exercise, and not suppression; in vain that Shakespeare's plays urge their imperative claim to the most perfect illustration they can receive from histrionic interpretation: a business which is incessant excitement and factitious emotion seems to me unworthy of a man; a business which is public exhibition, unworthy of a woman. At four different periods of my life I have been constrained by circumstances to maintain myself by the exercise of my dramatic faculty; latterly, it is true, in a less painful and distasteful manner, by reading, instead of acting. But though I have never, I trust, been ungrateful for the power of thus helping myself and others, or forgetful of the obligation I was under to do my appointed work conscientiously in every respect, or unmindful of the precious good regard of so many kind hearts that it has won for me; though I have never lost one iota of my own intense delight in the act of rendering Shakespeare's creations; yet neither have I ever presented myself before an audience without a shrinking feeling of reluctance, or withdrawn from their presence without thinking the excitement I had undergone unhealthy, and the personal exhibition odious. Nevertheless, I sat me down to supper that night with my poor, rejoicing parents well content, God knows! with the issue of my trial; and still better pleased with a lovely little Geneva watch, the first I had ever possessed, all encrusted with gold-work and jewels, which my father laid by my plate and I immediately christened Romeo, and went, a blissful girl, to sleep with it under my pillow. Oliver Johnson. BORN in Peacham, Vt., 1809. THE GARRISONIAN POINT OF VIEW. [Garrison and his Times. 1880.] THERE can be no doubt that in the sixteen years immediately preceding the Rebellion, the Garrisonian movement did much to prepare the Northern people for the crisis through which they were called to pass. It taught them the folly of that superstitious reverence for the Constitution which was so long a main dependence of the Slave Power. It made further compromise impossible, and nerved the arm of the North to do and dare in the cause of liberty. If the moral influence that stood behind the Republican party in that trying hour, and which was very largely represented by the Garrisonian movement, had been withdrawn, who knows into what new depth of humiliation the North might have been dragged? If Abraham Lincoln, in the hope of thereby averting a civil war, could execute the infamous Fugitive Slave law, what might not have been expected of smaller men, if they had not felt the influence of that moral power, which, independent of any party influence, was working in the hearts of their constituents? We needed in that awful hour all the strength which a whole generation of MORAL AGITATION had developed. No whit of it could have been safely spared -least of all that which came from the faithful founder and leader of the movement. The madness of the Rebellion changed all the conditions of the problem, and worked out the deliverance of the North as well as of the slaves by a process which no one had contemplated. But if the South had submitted to the election of Lincoln, and gone on demanding her "pound of flesh" under the Constitution, the Garrisonian movement would have brought victory by another process. It was simply impossi ble that the North could much longer endure the domination of the Slave Power. She must have found a way to annul the "covenant with death," and overthrow the "agreement with hell." All the signs pointed to that result. It was not in vain that the true character of the American Union, as affected by what John Quincy Adams called "the deadly venom of slavery," had been faithfully depicted for sixteen successive years by men whom no bribes could seduce and no terrors frighten from the field. When Abraham Lincoln accepted the task of suppressing the Rebellion, and the whole North rose up to sustain him, Mr. Garrison saw at once that the days of slavery were numbered; that the restoration of the Union under the old conditions was impossible; that the slaveholders themselves had discarded their main defence. There was no longer any need of inculcating the duty of disunion at the North. He at once removed from "The Liberator," as an anachronism, his motto of "No Union with Slaveholders," and set himself to work to develop that public opinion for which President Lincoln so long waited, and which at last made it safe for him to decree the emancipation of the slaves. To those who questioned his consistency in taking this course, he said, substantially as Benedick, when he said he would die a bachelor, did not think he would live till he were married, so he (Mr. Garrison), when he pledged himself to fight while life lasted against the "covenant with death" and the "agreement with hell," did not think that he should live to see death and hell secede from the Union. As they had done So, however, he thought his consistency might be safely left to take care of itself. As one who accepted the principle of non-resistance as taught and exemplified by Jesus, he could not himself bear arms even in the cause of liberty and humanity; but he felt it right to judge the people of the North by their own standard, and to tell them that, as they believed in war, they would be poltroons if they did not fight. Upon this point, also, he was willing to leave his consistency without defence. His own conscience was clear. He had tried to persuade the people to abolish slavery by peaceful means, warning them the while that, if they should refuse to do so, the judgments of God might come upon them in a war from which there would be no escape. The day of retribution had come, and the Northern people were shut up to the necessity of either sacrificing their own liberty or fighting for the freedom of the slave. After the war was over, and when the work of reconstruction was before the country, did any one not an apologist for slavery dream of restoring the Union under the Constitution as it then stood? Did not every loyal citizen see clearly that the instrument must be so amended. that death and hell could never again find protection in it? In the amendments which were then adopted, and by which slavery was forever debarred from the soil of the Republic, Mr. Garrison's doctrine of disunion was completely vindicated. The Constitution under which we are now living is not that which he publicly burned on a certain Fourth of July in Framingham; nor is the Union which he sought to dissolve any longer in existence. The Union of to-day is a Union "redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the Genius of Universal Emancipation.' Elizabeth Lloyd Howell. BORN in Philadelphia, Penn., 18-. MILTON'S PRAYER OF PATIENCE. AM old and blind! IA Men point at me as smitten by God's frown; Afflicted and deserted of my kind, Yet am I not cast down. I am weak, yet strong; I murmur not that I no longer see; Poor, old, and helpless, I the more belong, All-merciful One! When men are furthest, then art Thou most near; When friends pass by, my weaknesses to shun, Thy chariot I hear. Thy glorious face Is leaning toward me, and its holy light On my bended knee I recognize Thy purpose clearly shown; I have naught to fear; This darkness is the shadow of Thy wing; Can come no evil thing. Oh, I seem to stand Trembling, where foot of mortal ne'er hath been, Visions come and go: Shapes of resplendent beauty round me throng; It is nothing now, When heaven is opening on my sightless eyes, In a purer clime My being fills with rapture,- -waves of thought Break over me unsought. Give me now my lyre! I feel the stirrings of a gift divine: Benjamin Peirce. BORN in Salem, Mass., 1809. DIED at Cambridge, Mass., 1880. EVOLUTION THE METHOD OF AN OMNIPRESENT DEITY. [Ideality in the Physical Sciences. 1881.] ERTAIN wise and good men, jealous of their religious faith, have CERT feared that the nebular theory is liable to the reproach of being an |