"WESTWARD HO!" INCE the day of Berkeley's | provided himself with a comfortable home poetic prophecy not only from which he may direct the rapid march has the "star of empire of new inventions- for killing time and anmoved Westward, but indus- nihilating space. His vision is our reality. trial progress has kept pace We see the iron horse with its train of merwith the great advance. chandise speeding across a stronger bridge; Clearings have been fur- hilltop and vales and river-banks crowded nished with log cabins and with houses; wharves are teeming with the corner stores, which have busy life of merchandise. In a word, it is a soon been magically trans- great city, which has sprung up in a day, formed into mansions on but which shall last for ages-when the town-lots. Ferries have star of empire shall have become the midbeen superseded by bridges, towns have day sun of power, prosperity and peace, and become cities, and the traveller who after the world shall long have confessed with the twenty years revisits the scenes of his far-seeing bishop, youthful wanderings rubs his eyes in doubt whether the scene is real or whether he has suddenly been set down in a region of Arabian "divinations and enchantments." It is the midway of that progress which is depicted in our engraving. A Southwestern settlement in the days gone by is emerging from the primeval nature. There is the bridge. The "high-pressure" boat is at the wharf, ready to take on the cotton lying in bales under the shed. The log cabin still figures in the scene, but the stage-coaches from opposite directions, discharging loads of people who hurry to the boat, promise better accommodations soon at the landing. Indeed, towering above the next point in the river, a house with a belvedere indicates that the owner and manager of these interests has already "Time's noblest offspring is the last." VICTOR HUGO. THIS truly great man-romancer, drama tist, politician, orator, statesman, and, above all, par excellence, poet, the poet of France in the modern period-was born at Besançon on the 26th of February, 1802. Entering the world almost with the century and living until 1884, his life, actions and writings form a striking illustration of the marvellous history of France during that period. There is not a cardinal event, political or social, which is not clearly mirrored in his writings. He was the son of a general officer in the French army, and, with his father, led a wandering life in his youth, according to the exigences of service, in Italy, Switzerland and Spain. General Hugo was devoted to the first emperor, and his son inherited that loyalty and admiration; to both he was always Napoleon le Grand. During his early life his father and mother separated, and Victor, remaining with his father, devoted himself to literature. In 1822 he published his Odes et Ballades, which informed the French that a young but very promising poet had risen among them. This was soon followed by two romantic and very vivid stories entitled Hans of Iceland and Bug-Jargal. In 1826 he issued a second volume of Odes and Ballads, and in 1827 his Cromwell, a drama. While all these works were well received, they were as nothing in comparison with his powerful and very realistic novel named Les derniers Jours d'un Condamné-the confessions of a criminal just before his execution. Thus far Hugo's literary efforts were somewhat desultory, written at the caprice of his fancy; but he now undertook a dangerous and logical conflict in the arena of letters: it was nothing less than a furious and deadly as sault upon the classic school, which had up to that time and for centuries past prevailed in France, and which was illustrated by the immortal works of Corneille, Racine and Molière. He set forth Romanticism as the true field and home of the drama. In direct contradiction to the pedantic stiffness and the theatrical heroes of the older playwrights, he seized the idea of passion in its modern and more touching reality, taking for his heroes of every period men and women with whom we can sympathize, scorning at once the unities and the proprieties of the classic drama, and letting into the cumbrous stageeffects of the earlier day a touch of fervid nature which makes the whole world kin. The gage of battle was thrown down by his presentation of Hernani in 1830. The theatre was thronged and surrounded by the contending factions and a furious, literary war was waged. The French Academy-arbiter literarum-given over to classicism, petitioned the king, Charles X., to suppress the play and the author. The revolution of the three days of July in that same year, which sent the king flying for his life to Holyrood, caused a temporary truce; but Hugo continued the attack. In 1830 he also produced Marion de l'Orme, and in 1832 Le Roi s'amuse, the presentation of which was forbidden by the government. This was the surest way to help him to success. In 1831 he had published his splendid novel Notre Dame de Paris— known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame-which seemed to cap the climax of his renown. Then followed at short intervals his dramas Lucrece Borgia, Marie Stuart, Ruy Blas, and others. So thoroughly had his power and pertinacity conquered opposition that in 1841 the Academy, which ten years before had tried to crush him, had been so far converted to his views that they admitted him among the immortal forty, and in 1845 he was created a peer of France. Of a wonderful energy, by nature impulsive and violent, he was almost always in opposition. When Louis Philippe was driven away, in 1848, he acknowledged the republic, and would have continued to act with the council of the nation; but when the coup d'état of 1851 came, he found a cause upon which to exhaust his invective. He was driven into exilefirst to the island of Jersey, where he em THE EFFECTS OF INFLATION IN THE DAYS OF THE REVOLUTION. ployed his pen in denouncing the new emperor, in his Napoléon le Petit and Les Châtiments. He was obliged to leave Jersey and take refuge in the English island of Guernsey, where he continued to live until the downfall of Napoleon III., in 1871. Admitted more than once to amnesty during that interval, he proudly refused it. When his wife died, her body was taken to France for burial. The husband mournfully conducted it to the French frontier, and, there consigning it with tears to the hands of friends, he retraced his steps to his now self-imposed exile. 387 The affection of his admiring countrymen, he died in 1884, mourned by a whole nation. and regretted by cultured people everywhere. Never was there a grander funeral. Pantheon-transformed from a church into a grand mausoleum when Mirabeau died, and bearing upon its pediment the inscription, "Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante "-was reopened to receive his honored remains. Truly, it might be said of him, as Mrs. Browning wrote of the burial of Napoleon I.: "I think this nation's tears thus poured together A splendid édition definitive of his works, in about fifty volumes, was issued during his last years. Whatever he left unpublished will be issued in the concluding volumes of the series. The story of the coup d'état in its painful details, rendered more painful by the settled anger of the writer, is told in his Histoire d'un Crime, which, although rapidly written in 1852, was not published until 1877. In February, 1876, he was elected a senator of France. His greatest work-in which, indeed, great strength of sentiment and power of moral description are allied with some redundancy of expression-is Les Misérables, which literally took the world by storm. It THE EFFECTS OF INFLATION IN THE was at once translated into nine languages. Always the ardent and sympathetic friend of the workingman and the champion of the poor, he has done more to ameliorate their condition by this book than could be effected by long codes of laws. Among his curious works are Les Travailleurs de la Mer ("The Toilers of the Sea") and L'Homme qui rit ("The Man who Laughs"). To realize the Reign of Terror in La Vendée, he wrote what is perhaps the least successful of his romances, but which abounds in fine descriptions-Quatre vingt treize ("'93"). After enjoying, on his return to France, in 1871, a series of ovations and the permanent DAYS OF THE REVOLUTION. MR. HUME informs us in his History of England that some old people, upon hearing the news of the restoration of Charles II., died suddenly of joy. There was a time. when I doubted the truth of this assertion, but I am now disposed to believe it, from having heard of a similar effect from an agreeable political event in the course of the American Revolution. The doorkeeper of Congress, an aged man, died suddenly immediately after hearing of the capture of Lord Cornwallis's army. His death was universally ascribed to a violent emotion of political joy. This species of joy ap pears to be one of the strongest emotions | well for water to cool his parched lips. His that can agitate the human mind. Perhaps the influence of that ardor in trade and speculation which seized many of the friends of the Revolution, and which was excited by the fallacious nominal amount of the paper money, should rather be considered as a disease than as a passion. It unhinged the judgment, deposed the moral faculty and filled the imagination, in many people, with airy and impracticable schemes of wealth and grandeur. Desultory manners and a peculiar species of extempore conduct were among its characteristic symptoms. It produced insensibility to cold, hunger and danger. The trading towns, and in some instances the extremities, of the United States, were frequently visited in a few hours or days by persons affected by this disease, and hence "to travel with the speed of a speculation" became a common saying in many parts of the country. This species of insanity (if I may be allowed to call it by that name) did not require the confinement of a Bedlam to cure it, like the South-Sea madness described by Dr. Mead. Its remedies were the depreciation of the paper money and the events of the peace. BENJAMIN RUSH. little dog stands up to beg the same boon of the little child, and the old, old story repeats itself as the simplest illustration of charity: "a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple." Strange but true it is that our best thoughts and holiest emotions are closely allied withindeed, spring out of-human sin and want and suffering. Without sorrow and need where would be "melting charity"? without sin, where repentance? and without painful penitence, where were the "joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth"? Without the pain of thirst under the pitiless glare of the noonday sun on material and moral highways, of what good would be the cool, limpid, life-restoring well? "A little spring had lost its way Amid the grass and fern; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that toil might drink. A CUP OF COLD WATER. FAR away in that Servian land where European civilization struggles with Turkish oppression the weary foot-traveller at noonday, pack on shoulder and shoulder and staff in hand, halts at the rustic fount under the cottage-eave and asks the comely damsel who stands like Rebecca at the EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY. DIODORUS SICULUS, in relating the tradition of the Egyptians respecting the formation of the universe, says, "In the beginning the heaven and the earth had but one form, being mingled together by their nature, but, afterward having been separated, the world began to take its present form. By the motion of the air the particles of fire |