HERMEUS:

OR LETTERS FROM A MODERN GREEK.*

LETTER IV.

I RESUME my pen, my esteemed friend, but it is not to reply to the learned and profound disquisitions in your last letter; that would require a calmness and a serenity of mind, which I, alas! do not now possess. Disdain not my weakness, when I tell you that my unstrung soul is now ill fitted to cope with the mastery of yours. But the assurances of your friendship and affection are sweet as the honey of my own Hymettus to my depressed spirits. They convince me, that in pouring out my feelings, whether of joy or wo, in one noble breast, at least, I shall find interest and sympathy.

My voyage is commenced; my bark moves gracefully over the deep blue waters, marking its course with a silvery streak. Athens, hallowed by so many glorious associations, is fading from my view. But city of the soul, nurse of genius, of all that is redeeming in our natures! how do I leave thee? Years may elapse ere I again behold thee; and during that period how often will thy image rise before me, linked with all the tender and endearing remembrances of youth and happier days. It is these remembrances, connected with the birth of affection for those who watched over, protected, and loved us in our infancy; and in our wayward youth, ere we comprehended love, or could analyze our own emotions; or when, during the fire and impetuosity of dawning manhood, the passions made themselves felt in all their force; and the soul, revelling in its new existence, is moved by joy or wo, loves or hates with all the intensity of its nature-it is these brilliant moments on which fancy loves to linger, and to which the mind so often and so fondly turns during our after-pilgrimage, that links us with an invisible chain to the spot which witnessed their birth; invests with a halo of loveliness the beings by whom we were then surrounded; and clothes with beauty the landscape, were it even sterile and a wilderness, associated in memory with the awakening of our intellectual existence. This is the source of that passionate yearning after home, the home of our youth, which haunts our after-life; which

*From Alexis Hermeus to Adelheid Eichwald, Professor of Greek at University. Continued from the January Number.

kindles a glow, even in the breasts of the dull and the apathetic, and tunes the soul of genius to all its finer impulses.

Athens! thy classic domes, thy groves, the marble columns of thy beautiful fanes, no longer greet my view. My bark bears me on to visit other climes; I go where the soft inflections of thy harmonious language will not fall upon my ear; and oh! more than all, manes of my revered father of my beloved Euthasie, I cannot now inhale the night breeze wafted above your tombs; or, believing that your souls sympathized with mine, give vent to the pent up feelings of my breast, at that still hour when the strife and contentions of men are suspended; when genius seeks to extend the limited confines of science, or, with wing unfettered, guides the poet through the unbounded regions of imagination. When the great Spirit of the Universe holds communing with nature, and traces out the destiny of worlds.

I have passed the day upon deck, watching the changing outlines of rock, and cape, and shore, till the last faint streak of day died in the west. Then the sea, on the placid bosom of which our vessel pressed so lightly, rose indeed a queen, assumed her fiery diadem, and clothed herself in a mantle of phosphoric brightness, that emitted myriads of pure stars, which rivalled in their evanescent splendor those gemming the canopy above.

The evening song of the sailors has ceased, the night-watch is set, and no sound now breaks the stillness but the measured tread of the pilot as he paces the deck, and the gentle ripple of the water as it laves the sides of the vessel.

Onward we go, cheerily pursuing our course, and feeling as secure in our temporary tenement as in one whose foundations were fixed on the solid earth whilst my thoughts are again fixed with wonder and admiration upon that wayward and incomprehensible, so often erring but still so highly gifted being, Man! that crowning work of the divine intelligence.

What is man? has been asked again and again; for philosophers in all climes, in all ages, have been naturally led to turn their investigation upon their own existence, upon their own powers and feelings. And what has been the knowledge they have attained? Have they been able to elucidate the mystery of our being, to trace the stream of feeling to its fount; to calculate the workings of mind, or to know how the developement of some peculiar organs of the brain produces intellect in all its various modifications; or the rarer, and more ethereal endowments of imagination and genius?

What is man? I have asked myself, and after plunging in a vortex of metaphysical disquisition, the victim of doubt and perplexity, I have escaped only by merging it in a wilder field, and taking the physical universe, instead of this frail structure, for my study. In attempting

to analyze our intellectual being, even metaphysicians have failed. But man, in his moral state, may be known; we judge him by his actions; these are open to our observation, and moralists tell us this is the noblest field for our study.

One of the most amiable of authors, describing a wise and benevolent old man, says, "that he foresaw the future by his experience and knowledge, which made him know men and the designs of which they were capable." Can any experience, any knowledge, teach us to do this? Oh no; and it is for our happiness that they cannot. How can the virtuous man, he whose soul is embued with all the noble and gentle emotions of our nature, know that of which bad men, in all their different grades, are capable? Can candor leave his heart for a moment, so that he may know the subterfuges, the littleness of which the mean-spirited are guilty? Can goodness and humanity cease to animate his breast for ever so short a period, so that he may know the torturing hell which crime makes the breast of the miser, the gambler, or the murderer; and without this, can he anticipate their actions? neither can the vicious enter into the feelings of the generous and highminded.

Can one, glowing with love for his fellow-creatures, soothing their sufferings, ministering to their wants with a liberal hand, and dedicating his life to promote their welfare, comprehend the passion of him, who, possessed of wealth and of the power to do good, passes his life in self-indulgence, and becomes the enervated and soul-degraded sensualist? or of him who, enveloped in haughty pride, hoards that which cannot minister a rational happiness, and, whilst possessed of millions, which, distributed, would relieve the needy and make thousands happy, wears out his life in constant anxiety; and at every gust of wind which flickers his lamp, trembles for the safety of that bark, the rich stores of which are to add to his already countless heaps?

Can the intellectual and high-minded enter for a moment into the feelings of the man, whose mind, unendowed with a single ray of its diviner essence, and with no nobler end in view but the attainment of wealth, is content to pass his life watching the turn of that market, the very existence of which is the bane of states, and deems the loss of a few thousands, which the chance of the lottery had subtracted from his millions, a misery to which life could offer no antidote ?*

But above all, can the humble peasant, who passes a peaceful and not unjoyous existence in tilling his fields and training his vines, know the jealousies, the distrusts, the visionary fears, which rob the tyrant of repose, which surround his couch with demons, and make his existence a perpetual nightmare?

* Such was the cause of the suicide of Goldsmid, the rich stock-broker.

Do I err, my friend? At least I do not when I affirm that your soul sympathizes with all that is exalted, all that is gentle and refining in

our natures.

Farewell.

LETTER V.

It is in a Russian bark that I am now passing these ever memorable shores; to what thoughts does this one fact give rise.

In the southern portions of Europe and Asia, we have seen nations, at first in barbarism, and been able to mark their gradual progression to the height of power, splendor, and refinement; enervated by luxury, ever the attendant of accumulated wealth and false refinement, subdued by some hardier race, softening the manners of their barbarous conquerors: having again mounted to the height of glory and refinement, presenting once more a rich booty to the hardy and uncivilized hordes of the north, and again experiencing the same changes. In the north, on the contrary, we behold none of these revolutions. The inhabitants of the colder and less genial regions have dragged on a monotonous and barbarous existence from the earliest records of time. All the vast empires which have succeeded each other, and spread their conquests, and their accompaniments, civilization and the arts, over such immense regions, have never extended their dominion there. The Assyrians, the Persians, the Grecians, and the Romans, have in succession subjected to their sway the fairest portion of the old world; but they penetrated not into Scandanavia and the vast deserts of Siberia.

To what moral cause can be attributed the intellectual night that the nations living under the northern latitudes of the temperate zone were immersed in for so many thousand years. It would appear as if

the southern sun has had as favorable an influence on mind as on matter, and to have matured the intellectual faculties, even as it fertilized the plains, and brought to perfection the richest productions of nature.

Enclosed within the limits of their empire, and what portion of intellect they might have been endued with not ignited by collision with the electric fire of genius, thousands of centuries rolled on, unmarked by a single event which can excite the interest of the moralist or the historian; it is true, not undisturbed by revolutions; but these the mere changes of one barbarian despot for another, not the revolutions of civilized states, which create a new era in the moral history of man. Thus the Russians remained for ages supinely bound in their iron chain of ignorance and indolence; and, as ever the case with the rude

and uninformed, believing themselves superior to all the world. They were even proud of the yoke which marked their degradation, and prevented their progression towards civilization and intelligence, the law which prohibited their young nobles from visiting foreign climes.

In the course of time, however, one master mind arose, endowed with genius which enabled him to dissipate the darkness in which his empire lay, to transform barbarians into men, and to call forth and add to the nations of the world, one, more extensive than had been ever yet beheld.

The Czar, Peter the First, effected all this; yet even he, in some of his greatest works, was but the instrument impelled by the superior genius of the humble watchmaker of Geneva.*

It would at first appear singular that the Romans, who thought it worth while to spend their treasure and employ their legions for so many years in the conquest of the distant and insulated Britons, should not have endeavored to possess themselves of the vast plains beyond the Bosphorus. Had Julius Cæsar received the Proconsulship of Greece instead of Gaul, it is more than probable that the Sarmatians would have been subdued, their country annexed to the already gigantic limits of the Roman empire, and consequently colonized, and themselves been led to renounce their wandering and predatory mode of life.

The Roman generals who commanded the legions in the east, chiefly occupied in exacting tribute from its wealthy cities, contented themselves with keeping the Scythians and Dacians beyond the Danube. Or when, impelled by a passion for conquest and glory, they sought to extend their sway, they were lured by the populous and luxurious cities of Asia, which offered a rich harvest of plunder; not by vast regions, which, however fertile by nature, would be of little worth till labor and cultivation had produced their happy effects, and transformed the wilderness into the lovely champaign teeming with its golden harvests.

Thus were the Sarmatians and Scythians left unsubdued, to harass and plunder the richer south, when no longer repressed by the superior skill of the southern warriors, and at length to pour forth their hordes, united with the Goths and Huns, to mar every vestige of civilization, submerge in their influx even imperial Rome, and replunge the most enlightened states in all the horrors of renewed ignorance.

Behold Russia now; who can read its future destiny! The other nations of Europe have their histories, which offer to our study a record of the high capabilities, the intellectual power of our species; and, alas! of the withering passions which have so often done the work