and baffle. "Mediocrity frightens me," he says, "my wish is to love, and become great by genius and study." His intense susceptibility to beauty, his impassioned and exacting sympathy, created in him the deepest necessity for love; but his deformity, poverty, and sickness, prevented the fulfilment of this master desire. Opposed by a hostile fate within and without, disappointed at every turn, without health of body or peace of mind, accepting in its direst extent that philosophy of despair which denies God, Providence, and Immortality; surrounded for the most part by tyrannical bigots and ignorant boors, possessed by an inexpressible melancholy, alleviated only by the activities of his own genius and the occasional attentions of one or two friends and correspondents, the unhappy Leopardi lived in the deepest and saddest of solitudes. Knowing how great his intellectuality and his sensibility were, it makes one's heart ache to read his recorded wish that he might become a bird, in order, for a little season, to experience their happiness and peace. He has partially described the hopeless monotony of his life, in the dilapidated old town of Recanati, in his poem, "La Vita Solitaria." In the poem on the Recollections of Youth," he paints the dismal and trying loneliness of his maturity with painful power :

Condemned to waste and pass my prime

In this wild native village, amid a race

Unlearned and dull, to whom fair Wisdom's name,
And Knowledge, like the names of strangers sound,
An argument of laughter and of jest ;

They hated me and fled me. Not that they

Were envious; of no greater destiny

They held me than themselves; but that I bore
Esteem for my own being in my heart,
Though ne'er to man disclosed by any sign.
Here passed my years, recluse and desolate,
Without or love or life. Bitter and harsh
Among the unkindly multitude I grew.
Here was I robbed of pity and of trust,
And, studying the poor herd, became of men
A scorner most disdainful. Ah, at times
My thoughts to you go back, O hopes, to you,
Blessed imaginations of my youth!
When I regard my life, so mean, and poor,

And mournful, and that death alone is all
To which so much of hope has brought my days,
I feel my heart stand still, and know not how
To be consoled for such a destiny.

surpassingly

which

The cause

The soul of Leopardi was too powerful affectionate and terribly disappointed as he was in life to permit him usually to express his misanthropy, his grief and wretchedness, either in sentimental sighs or in wails of despair. His dark views and unhappy feelings vented themselves rather in forms of smiling irony, philosophic satire, and a quiet humor, wherein tender melancholy and bitter force of thought are equally mixed. His writings are marked by classic finish and repose. The manly courage and fortitude that breathe in them are not less obvious than the plaintiveness not lackadaisical, but heroic betrays how constant and deep his pain was. of his spiritual isolation and misery was not merely his rare genius and earnestness, absorbing thought and study, not merely his profound unbelief, not merely his yearning and regurgitating affection, but also his chronic ill-health and nervous exhaustion. Nearly all his life he was the victim of depressing physical disease. He says, "It appears to me that weariness is of the nature of air, which fills all the space intervening between material things, and all the voids contained in them. When anything is removed and the room is not filled by another thing, weariness takes its place immediately. Thus all the interstices of human life between the pleasures and misfortunes are filled up with weariness."

"the two sweet whom fate gave

From the bleaker climate and more inhospitable society of Recanati, Leopardi wandered to Florence, Bologna, Rome, and lastly to Naples. Here he died in the arms of his good and dear friend Ranieri. He had written in his fine poem of "Love and Death," lords, friends to the human race, to being together," at the close of this poem he had said, "Lovely Death! bow to the power of unaccustomed prayers, and shut my sad eyes to the light. Calm, alone, I await the time when I shall sleep on thy virgin breast." Rarely has death been more welcome to a mortal,

rarely has one lived capable of a keener or vaster happiness, had his fellow-creatures but come up to the standard his genius exacted, and answered his cravings. In the suburbs of Naples, in the little church of San Vitale, stands the monument reared by the loving friend and biographer on whose bosom "he gave up his soul with an ineffable and angelic smile." The traveller who lingers to read the inscription, traced by the pen of Gioberti, draws a deep sigh, and hopes that the great hapless spirit whose clayey part sleeps there, is now, in a higher form, under fairer conditions, enjoying the harmony and love he so vainly longed for here.

FOSTER.

THE author of the essay on "Decision of Character,” John Foster, was always distinguished for his separateness of life and soul. His capacious, earnest, sombre, extremely sensitive and tenacious cast of mind unfitted him to herd with society. The greater his need the less his fitness. Contrasting himself with a lady whose "habit was so settled to solitude that she often felt the occasional hour spent with some other human beings tedious and teasing," he says: "Why is this being that looks at me and talks, whose bosom is warm, whose nature and wants resemble my own, more to me than all the inanimate objects on earth and all the stars of heaven? Delightful necessity of my nature! But to what a world of disappointments and vexations is this social feeling liable, and how few are made happy by it in any such degree as I picture to myself and long for!" Expressing his sympathy with his friend Mrs. Mant, who had complained of feeling desolate and solitary among uncongenial neighbors, he says: "Shall you be sorry that your mind is too thoughtful and too religious to suit their society? Could you be willing to humble yourself to a complacent agreement with their levity or their oddity? You ought to feel your superiority, and dismiss the anxious wish for a companionship which you cannot purchase but by descending

to a level where you would never feel happy if you did descend to it." After spending an hour with a handsome but ignorant and unsocial woman and a cat, Foster said he felt he could more easily make society of the cat than of the woman. He characterized fashionable worldlings, the hardened habitués of society, as "people who worship Indifference and are proud of their religion." One of his sharpest and saddest aphorisms is this: "We are interested only about self or about those who form a part of our self-interest. Beyond all other extravagances of folly is that of expecting or wishing to live in a great number of hearts." It was but natural that he should, as he did, fall back on himself, nature, and God, and spend the time in solitude, revolving the sombre and massive meditations out of which his writings grew.

CHANNING.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING is one of the most exalted and influential characters of modern time. He is a character as distinctly American as Washington, and worthy to be compared with him. For, if less commandingly conspicuous and imposing, he is far finer, sweeter, more spiritual, ideal, and religious. The average multitude of mankind live, by mechanical habit, on tradition. There are two classes of great men whose mission is by their original power and fire to redeem common men from their deathly passivity, and inspire them to newness of living. First, the creative minds who audaciously cast off the bonds of old authority, break through the limits of routine, and lay bare unheard-of regions of life. Second, those less endowed, but equally inspired natures, who, staying for the greater part by the traditions and authorities honored in their time, cannot abide anything lifelessly formal, but must vitalize all they touch, repudiating torpid conformity, making the old as good as new by stripping off its bandages and breathing a soul under its ribs of death. Channing belonged rather to this latter class, though not excluded from the other one. His was

more the greatness of balanced faculties, sincerity, patience, earnestness, consecration, than that startling greatness which, goaded to unparalleled deeds by a strange fire shut up in its bones, despises trembling prudence and leaps into the unknown to pluck its prizes.

Channing was great by the translucency of his large and lofty mind, and by the permeating morality of his character. No mechanical conformity could satisfy him. He must see for himself, and vitalize all his views. He sought with patience, by many-sided comparisons and tests, with the aid of the minds around him, to understand subjects justly. He fought as a divine champion to drive from his own soul the conceit, ignorance, delusion, dead traditionality of opinion he saw infesting ordinary souls, and always to live as far as possible at first hand, in genuine perception, faith, and love. His sincerity and earnestness fused his powers in every expression, so that he acted as a unit flowing with irresistible fervor and momentum. No accompaniments of his utterance created any obstacle to its effect: his impression was therefore integral, without those contradictions and jerks which take so much away from the influence of many speakers. The pillars of his being went down to the basis of primal truths, and rested, naked, alive, electric, on the moral foundations of things, in contact with the original sources of inspiration. Thus, although he was not a great scholar, nor a discoverer of any important thoughts or methods, he had great originality of character. The intensely sustained action of his faculties lent to the best thoughts and sentiments which he derived from his time new fire and importance, and gave a fresh impulse towards their dominion in the breasts of others. If he did not with penetrative intellect uncover new principles or provinces, his inspired contemplation made the commonplace burn unto the kindling of souls indifferent before. He is at this moment a creative moral influence, breathing in the literature and life of America. He is also at this moment, through translations of his works, a high ethical, educational, liberalizing influence in France, Germany, and Russia.