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230 THE COURANT ; A SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

[COLUMN 1]

"Oh, not for him, the loved and true, for whom she waited long,
Not for the joyou festival, the happy bridal throng,
But for a sterner, sadder scene, those stainless flowers bloom
That blossomed for her bridal wreath to fade upon her tomb.

"Though not in cloisters dim and cold,
'Mid gloomy cells and arches old,
My wasted hands I meekly fold ;—

"Though not where midnight tapers shine
I kneel before some sainted shrine
With him and orison divine,—

"Nor vow myself to 'love and sigh'
With those who shan each earthly tie,
Alone to live, alone to die;—

"Yet like to these my task is done—
My sands of life in silence run ;
I am, in very sooth, a nun.

"Like these I musing dwell apart,
Like these I bear a sealed heart,
Where worldly image hath no part.

"No curious eyes, no voices rude,
No empty vanities intrude
Upon my cloistered solitude.

"But gentle thoughts, unsummoned, dwell
Like angels, in my lonely cell,
And soothe me with their holy spell.

"And sad regretful thought arise,
And, clad in penitential guise,
Look on me with their tearful eyes.

"And soothed amid that calm retreat
Pour out their precious ointment sweet,
And bathe with tears those angels' feet."

"At times thou comest unto me
In the semblance of a fairy,
Borne on pinions light and airy—
Pinions as the breezes free ;
And I follow as I may,
As with light Psychéan grace
Through illimitable space
Thou tak'st thy pathless way.
Thou leadest me to lonely woods
And to the sea-grit strand,
Where all throughout the lonely night,
The plunging waters, hoarse and white,
Beat on the ribbed sand,—
And the ships go sailing by,
Sailing on the shadowy sea
Like the pale stars in the sky,
Silently—silently :
Or to fairy-haunted rills
Welling forth for ever more
From the lonely hearts of silent hills,
'Mid fluted shell and sparry ore ;—
Or where, in some deserted isle
Standeth an old Cathedral pile,
'Neath whose matted ivy screen
Peer from corners dusk and dim
Carved forms and faces grim,
With feathery fern and lichens hoar
and richest misses mantled o'er—
Richest moss of rarest green :
And then it is a joy to me
'Mid these ruins lone and hoary
Thus to stray with thee—
Listening to some ghostly story
Of the wondrous olden time,
Or some wild and monkish legend
Weaving into rhyme."

"And seeming as they wander by
A strange unbidden memory
Of something heard, or something seen,
Of something felt—I know not where—
A love that shall be, or hath been,
In a more heavenly atmostphere."

THE SCHILLER CENTENARY.—The committee of the Schiller
jubilee, which takes place the present week, has issued the following
programme :

"The celebration will commence with a representation of
Schiller's 'Karlsshueler,' at the Stadt Theatre, on the evening
of the eighth. The next day (Wednesday), at noon, there will
be a celebration at the Cooper Institute, with addresses by
Messrs. Dr. Schramm, William Cullen Bryant, Dr. Wiesner,
and Judge Daly ; after which there will be a presentaation of a
Schiller medal. In the evening, a grand concert will be given
at the Assembly Rooms, by the Musical Society, Liederkranz,
Saengerbund, and an orchestra of seventy musicians. The
conductors are Messrs. Eisfeld, Anchuetz, Bergmann, and Paur.
Part second of the concert will consist of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony. On the evening of the teenth, there will be a series
of plastic performances, representing scenes from Schiller's
principal dramas ; also, a representation of 'Wallenstein's
Camp,' by Stadt Theatre dramtic corps, at the Academy of
Music. On the eleventh, a number of balls and banquets will
take place at various places in commemoration of the great
German poet, Frederick von Schiller."

This festival in commemoration of the anniversary of Schiller's
one hundredth birth-day, will, we doubt not, surpass, in
variety of entertainment, anything of the kind ever attempted
in this country. The German ladies of our city have been
deeply engaged in the getting up on the tableaux, and are most
enthusiastic in the matter.—Home Journal.

THE transfer of The Atlantic Monthly to Messrs. Ticknor &
Fields is a measure very much approved by literary men,
and is considered to be an auspicious event for its future success.
In contradiction to some current reports, the purchase of
the entire property for ten thousand dollars was a business
measure of those gentlemen alone, perfectly free and unembarrassed
with any conditions, and gives them the entire ownership
of the Magazine. If it is not considered desirable to revive
one of the original features of the plan—the enlisting foreign
talent in its support—Mr. Fields' favourable position with
English authors will give them great facility for carrying it
out; but the general sentiment is for its continuing a purely
American work, supported by writers in the United States.

[COLUMN 2]

For the Courant.
SENTIMENTAL WRITING.

The "Sentimental Journey," of Sterne, the "Man of Feeling,"
by McKenzie, and the "Sorrows of Werter," of Goëthe,
have, by the general consent of criticism, been assigned the
highest place, or the rank of chefs d`oeuvre, in this difficult and
not very popular species of composition. No writers, either
of the English or any other language, have come at all into
competition with these great prose-poets in those deep yet
delicate probings of the human heart, which it requires so
much previous study of, and so thorough an acquaintance with,
its organization, its sympathies and most secret workings, to
conduct with success ; and which enabled these master-minds
to produce all the effects, without intruding upon the province
of Tragedy,* without the appliances or aid of its scenery, its
sparking buskins and its trailing stoles, its dagger or its bowl.
The author of the "Sorrows of Werter," has succeeded in rendering
the afflications of his heart-struck hero no less interesting
and affecting than those of Orestes or Hamlet, and the woes
of Clarissa Harlow and of Charlotte Temple have cause quite
as many tears to flow as those of poor "Monimia," or of Sophanisba.

Among out America works, or attempts in this kind of
composition, the "Broken Heart," of Mr. Washington Irving,
the pathetic, and as we are told, " o'er true tale " of "Charlotte
Temple," and a few others that might be mentioned, are
highly creditable to their authors,yet they still leave us, as it
is unncessary to state, but scantily supplied with these rare
and most delicate growths of the otherwise well-stocked and
exuberant garden of modern literature. A recent cultor, however,
of this difficulty-reared sensitive-plant, or this mimosa of
the Muses, has appeared in the person of the "Professor at
the Breakfast Table," who, in introducing and attempting to
naturalize in our ungenial soil this tender exotic, of which
lovers' tears are the maturing dews and lovers' sighs the fanning
gales, or the only breath they will bear—says, depreciatingly
and justly, that "it comes up as a Southern seed
dropped by accident in one of our gardens, and that finds itself
trying to grow, and blow into flower among the homely roots
and hardy shrubs that surround it." This "Curiousity of Literature"
appears in the last or October number of the "Atlantic
Monthly," and is entitled "Iris, her book," and purports
to be written by the young boarding-school Miss whose fanciful
name it bears, and who was introduced to the readers of
the Magazine in its previous or September issue. In this truly
tender and touching production, we have the "heart history"
of a sensitive and air-drawn being, or of the aetherial creature
who thus "in the colours of the rainbow live," or in the
delicate delineations of her own fantastic and prismy pencil,
which, though managed with some effect and grace, is not quite
so skilfully guided as the hand of Melzel's better-constructed
automaton was by the dwarf in the machinery whose MORPHY-an
feats and skill—or defeats of all its antagonists—so
much mystified and astonished the world some thirty or forty
years ago. His double, however, of the "Breakfast Table" is
not only unable to achieve even the personal concealment of a
prompter behind the scenes of a theatre, but manages his
female-dressed puppet, or "Yankee Girl," so blunderingly and
awkwardly, that is constantly loses the game ; or does its "spirting"
so badly as to render the invention a signal and entire
failture, and to deprive its "weak master" of all claim to the
credit that is derived from a successful deception—that is, one
that deceives no body, but is acquiesced in by every body, on
account of its cleverness and originiality, and approach to
reality which it is always, at best, but a far-off and imperfect
imitation. Yet so blinded is the author by literary vanity
and conceit, that he hesitates not himself to say that "there
never has been a book like this of Iris," (this is certainly more
true than the writer supposes it to be,) "or one so full of the
heart's silent language ; and of which the meaning is so
clear (!) as to be absolutely transparent-- so that the heart may
be seen beating through it." A book written in a silent lan-
guage must be a curiosity, indeed, and would be more likely, we
should think, to be found full of emptiness than one of solid
contents ; and the extracts given from it, certainly approach as
nearlyto the character and consistency of mere "moonshine,"
as any thing "on this side of nothing" can well be, or was
ever brought to even the most successful of those "writers
upon air"— the ancient Schoolmen or the modern Transcendentalists.

The Professor, in a word, whose facetise, learned humour,
and recondite witticisms, have so oftern set-- not the convivial

* We should have included in this category, the "Clarissa Harlow,"
of Richardson. This great novel rivals in interest— in the
tragic pathos of its closing scenes— the finest and most affecting of
the dramas and Schiller or Shakespeare. The author of these remarks
once called at the house of a female friend, who apologized
for the non-appearance of her daughter— a young lady of eighteen—
who, she stated, had just finished reading "Clarissa Harlow," and
was "so foolish" that she had been weeping for two days, and
"refused to be comforted." The whole narrative, indeed, lays hold
of the attention, with the force, and produces all the effects of,
reality, or that could possibly be caused by a true history.

[COLUMN 3]

but the "Breakfast Table" in a roar,—and with the fame of
which all Pedlingdom "now rings from side to side"—has,
with one of those changes of mood frequent with such geniuses,
suddenly become "gentlemanly and melancholy," or has
taken to the sentimental, both in prose and poetry : weeps over
the sorrows of a Laura-Matilda of a boarding-school--pens a
poem "to his mistress's eye-brow," and writes stanzas entitled
"Under the Violets" -- that even Touchstone himself might
have presented to his fair Audrey with the "pease cod"
which he so gallantly requested her to "wear for his sake."
We quote, as merely affording an evidence of the present
penseroso mood of their author, or as giving "a touch of his
quality" of the dainty ideas and tear-compelling lines con-
tained in this pleasingly-melancholy, but, as we think, rather
over-pleurant production:

"Lay her where the violets grow,
But not beneath a graven stone,
To plead with tears with [from] alien eyes;
A slender cross of wood alone,
'Shall say that here a maiden lies—
In peace beneath the peaceful skies.— [Atlas !]
* * * * * *
If any born of kindlier blood,
Should ask what maiden lies below— [ that is, her name.]
Say only this — a tender bud,
That tried to blossom in the snow—[ A rather deperate
Lies withered where the violets blow." [experiment.]

This "is sweet and contagious, i'faith," as Sir Andrew Aguecheek
says ; but why a maiden, whose death is deemed worthy
of being commemorated in verse, should be denied a tombstone;
why only a "slender wooden cross" is permitted to
mark her grave, and why, finally, her name is omitted from,
and her sex alone is particularized in, this "frail memorial,"
is not explained, or in any way accounted for. Why the wooden
cross should be a slender one, might, also, be naturally asked;
but it is of course vain to inquire into such matters, or attempt
to account for the whims and vagaries of a love-lorn and romantic
boarding-school young lady; and in reading such fine
and dreamy effusions as those contained in "the Drawing
Book," we must ever bear in mind the philosophical and pro-
found lines of Shakespeare—

" Oh melancholy !
Who ever yet could find thy bottom !"
or, in other words, who can ever guess at, or form even the
remotest idea of, the moods, fancies, and "twilight thoughts,"
of such aerial and supersensitive beings, as "Iris," or the
"Cynthia of the Minuet," of whom the following soaring or
(to use a somewhat slang phrase) hifaluten description is given
in the prefatory poem with which the Book, "through which
the heart of the heroine may be seen beating," so eloquently
opens :

"Iris had no mother to enfold her,
Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her."

Of her complex characters, at once fierce and tender, patient
and self-tormenting, we have the following rather strange and
mystifying account :

"Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring—
Then a poor mateless dove, that droops disparing.
Scornful as spirit fallen—its own tomentor ;
And then, all tears and anguish."

Poor girl! Such pendulum-like vibrations of feelings, such
dire alternations of mood—from daring, to despair; from
scorn, to tears—must have been trly trying and terrible. But
a little rational employment by day, and less indulgence in
"twilight thoughts," "unbidden tears," and the "luxury of
woe," by night, would not only have rendered her less unhappy,
but would have secured to her more sympathy--where she
became really distressed—than such mere sentimental sorrows
and self-inflicted miseries, as those described in the above lines,
would be likely to elicit even from the too-believing and pensive
public, prone as it is to listen to and weep over those fictitous
afflictions and imaginary sufferings which make no call upon
the purse beyond the price which it is willing to pay for the
entertainment it derives from the eloquent description given of
them in the pages of such writers as the Professor, the Albums
of the Irises, and the novelettes of the newspapers and periodicals of the day.
In addition to the other arts employed by the author of enlisting
the sympathies and enchaining the attention of the
reader, startling interjections, sudden and awful breaks in lines
—paragraphs left mysteriously unfinished, notes of admiration,
etc., etc., are frequently introduced, and judiciously thrown in,
in the course of the narrative, and particularly in the prefatory
poem, from which the above extracts are taken. These
have the effect of electrifying, or giving an occasional and seasonable
shock to the reader, who, unless an unually bad
sleeper, is very apt to feel the effects or the choloformed
handkerchief, which the monotonous sadness and desperate
character of the story obliges him to keep always in his eyes.
Such abrepted passages, alarming exclamations, and unexpected
interjections as the following, always affect the unprepared
and consternated reader with a peculiarr and concentrated force—