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ped a poor mechanic with a small parcel under his arm. He stood and read attentively. He went back a few paces, and returned again to read. The writing seemed to him too good --- the room would probably be too expensive; so he passed on.

On the opposite sidewalk Terenia now perceived a young gentleman, dressed with great elegance. He wore a dark green cloak, jauntily thrown over the left shoulder. His hat shone, and from underneath the brim peeped out curls of black hair, elaborately arranged. The face, youthful, fresh, and smiling, betrayed great self-complacency. In his hand he carried a beautiful slender cane, with which he gracefully cut the air. The poorer people made way for him.

"Heavens!" thought Terenia; “if he should come and read the card!"

As if the young exquisite had overheard the wish, he crossed the street, and began to study the card of invitation.

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ed. Why? She could not account for it herself.

The future lodger entered the room.

CHAPTER IX.

THE NEW LODGER.

The women all looked with curiosity at the unknown who stood before them. He was a rather ordinary looking man. His age might have been twenty. His face was somewhat weatherbeaten, as if it had been nipped by sharp winds. Two blue eyes looked calmly before them. The hair, close cut, was of a dark color, and bristled up like the hair of some hungry animal. A short cloak of dark homespun was fastened across his chest with a steel buckle. In his hand he carefully carried a silk hat so as not to injure it.

Terenia dropped her eyes on the paper, and went on with her drawing. Somehow the new-comer did not at all resemble the lodger of her dreams.

The old lady contemplated the unknown for some time, waiting for him to speak first. But as he remained silent, she at last said to him:

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You probably come, sir, to see the little room, of which the card informed you below?"

"Yes, madam," replied the stranger, obviously embarrassed. "I was told that the room was up here."

"Well, sir," said the old lady, "see if you think you will like it."

Saying this, she rose from her chair, and went out into the passage with the key of the room.

The unknown followed. While he was looking about in the little room, the old lady keenly observed all his movements, as if she expected to discover from them who this young fellow could be.

In the mean time, the two women left alone discussed the new comer.

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would not come home, and then disturb us late at night. It would be better if the lodger were a more steady man. He would remain at home, and one might eventually even chat with him."

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And to me it seems also," said Terenia," that he will not live here. The little room will most likely not please him."

She had hardly concluded her remark, when the old lady and the unknown returned.

Terenia looked at him with anxiety, to read in his face what he had decided to do. The exquisite with the slender cane flitted again before her vision.

"So you say, sir, that the little room pleases you," said the old lady. “But I must first inform you that, poor folks as we are, we like comfort in our own house. We want no disturbance, no noise, near us; there must be no intrusions at night on the stairs, no bringing home of brawling companions."

Terenia looked into the face of the unknown to observe what impression her grandmother's remarks would make on him. By some means the face now appeared to her in a more favorable light than at first, though it was not yet like that of the exquisite with the slender cane.

"It strikes me," said the stranger, with a winning smile, directed rather at Terenia than her grandmother, "that I shall be a quiet lodger, for I also am poor, and have to work for my bread."

The old lady was much struck by these words. For a young man to confess himself poor at the outset, and in the presence of a charming bright haired young lady, was either praiseworthy heroism or ignorance of the world.

She thought for some time over the matter. Terenia's face clouded up, and assumed an expression of indifference.

Elizabeth looked at the unknown with unconcealed contempt.

What is your name, sir? and how do you earn your bread?" asked the old lady, after a pause.

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My name is Bernard," began the unknown, his features brightening up. Bernard Bernard!" interrupted the old lady. "May the Lord take you into His keeping! You have uttered a name which always touches me deeply. My dead husband's name was also Bernard. It is almost thirty years since he was called before the judgment seat; and the human heart is of such a nature that the further its memories reach back the more it sees there the good, for the bad wears out of itself. So you are called Bernard ? ''

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"The story of the order is strictly true. I happened to be with my uncle. One evening a courier arrived from headquarters, and brought the general a sealed so called ordre de bataille, from Napoleon. Delivering the packet, the messenger uttered the first word, saluted, and rode off. The General had long been in bad humor at his inactivity. He now supposed that the Emperor had sent him a decoration ; and flung the sealed packet on the stove. Pacing the room with long strides, he cried: An order! an or.

der an order! Napoleon sends me an order, while I-an hundred devils!want to fight! What do I want with an order, when the country expects something far different from me? Great God! General Kwasniewski sitting idly on the borders of Pomerania!' When the aide-de-camp and I went to the General's quarters and heard his bitter complaints, we became curious to see the decoration. I climbed on the stove, and great was our horror to discover in its stead the Emperor's order of battle."

"And did the honest General not learn French after that?"

"Never! He used to say that God had created man at once with his own language, and that it was not right to improve on His work."

The old lady was clearly delighted with these reminiscences. Even Terenia listened with greater interest.

"Is it true," she asked, with a smile, "that the General played such tricks with the Germans?"

"He treated them very humanely; only those who were unfriendly to the army, he punished in various original ways. Thus, for instance, when a German declined to give him quarters, he ordered his house to be walled up over night."

The old lady laughed most immoderately, for these stories about General Kwasniewski were then the talk of the whole country.

"And what were you in the army?" she asked after a while.

"I was a lieutenant," modestly renow I write in the plied Bernard; treasury."

The old lady was evidently pleased with the new lodger. Terenia scribbled absently on the paper. She still regretted the exquisite with the cane; but the new lodger was a decided improvement on the individual of the foxskin cap and the red nose.

The old lady pondered long with a finger on her nose, which meant that she was undecided about something.

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Is not poverty very nettling?" she asked at last.

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In the beginning," replied Bernard, when I was still young, it seemed hard. My parents had been sufficiently well off. Father perished in the legions; mother died; and uncle is so honest that he will never keep a penny."

"Then, you see, sir," said the old lady, with a peculiar effort," you have found people who also possessed once great wealth, but whom different public and private misfortunes have impoverished and ruined. You will, therefore, not be offended with us if, in spite of our regard for the honest General, we demand for that little room twenty florins."

"Twenty florins?" repeated Bernard; and added without the least hesitation. "agreed!"

The old lady made a wry face. Casting a displeased look at Bernard, she said:

"Why do you answer so quickly, 'agreed'? Why don't you bargain? Poor folks should always bargain."

"That is quite true," replied Bernard, with a smile; "but not with the poor."

The old lady laughed; but Terenia knit her white brow.

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'You are right, sir," said the appeased old lady; "but only those who are poor can feel that it is dear. I tell you, therefore, that I made a mistake, of which, by bargaining, you would have reminded me. Ten florins are Beall that is due for the little room. sides, you will have to wear out boots enough in climbing to the garret."

Bernard assented with a smile to the last offer, appearing to think very little about the money.

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S genius centennial? Does it gath

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er in clusters, like the stars? Do there come seasons when all felicitous influences converge, when all the sweet fancies of the age come to blossom, and usher a generation of poets upon the earth? Or is it a merè happening that the ten years between '70 and '80 of the last three centuries have been the most fertile decades of English literature? The generation in which Shakspeare wrote was barren and thin in its intellectual product; but between the years 1570 and 1580 were born rare Ben Jonson, Bishop Hall, Beaumont, and Fletcher. From 1670 to 1680, another galaxy of genius first saw the light: Congreve in 1670; Dick Steele and Colley Cibber in 1671; Addison in 1672; Walpole and Isaac Watts in 1674; Farquhar and Bolingbroke in 1678. The end of another century is attended by another astonishing efflorescence: Wordsworth, James Hogg, and George Canning were born in 1770; Montgomery, Sidney Smith, and Walter Scott in 1771; Coleridge in 1772; Jeffrey in 1773; Southey in 1774; Lamb and Landor in 1775; Campbell in 1777; Lord Brougham in 1778; and Moore in 1779. Perhaps the thought of finding any significance in these century tidal waves is merely fantastic; but the recurrence will contain something of interest to those who are fond of tracing curious coincidences, and will suggest the question, "Are the mothers of this

decade rocking in their arms a generation of inspired babes?"

Poetry had a new birth in 1800. The French and American revolutions had shaken tradition to pieces, and the realm of literature and poetry, like that of politics and life, demanded reconstruction. Previous writers, with one or two great exceptions, had run somewhat in a groove. They had written mainly of lords and ladies, of gorgeous imbecilities and courtly inanities, of city walls and city ways. Of all the earlier throng, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Thomson had ventured into the country; but Burns alone had broken wholly the shackles of habit, and struck out, without fear or affectation, in ways that were chiefly rustic. Wordsworth was a child of Burns. He and several others of that royal brotherhood who furnished the world with its "golden treasury" during the first quarter of this century, discovered that song was a rural accomplishment, and resolved to carry the captive muse back to her home.

The fame of Wordsworth has undergone curious mutations. First he suffered total obscurity; then derision; then contempt; then, after death had claimed most of his distinguished contemporaries, who would have scorned to call themselves his rivals, he won renown and rose to the first place in English hearts, and reigned from 1843 to 1850 as poet laureate — wearing the crown of bays that had grown bright

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upon the brows of Spenser, Dryden, Colley Cibber, Pye, and Robert Southey. No other poet has ever had such a severe and prolonged struggle with obloquy and derision; no man has waited half a century with greater serenity; no man ever did less to placate opposition and court popular favor, and no man ever won during his lifetime a securer place in the heart of his countrymen at last. After his death, his fame declined again, and he is now doubtless judged with tolerable fairness and impartiality, his great merits and his grave faults being both acknowledged.

Wordsworth is preeminently the bard of incongruities. He possessed genius of a high order; but he was one of the poorest artists that ever attempted to build a fabric of verse. He had no constructive talent. He scintillated with marvellous brilliancy, showing rare wisdom and thoughtfulness; but scarcely one of his poems longer than a sonnet is coherent, compact, and complete. It is equally true that some of his worst pieces, that would, on the whole, be deemed a disgrace to the writer of the average newspaper doggerel, contained embalmed within them rare gems of fancy that have been borrowed by the writers in all modern languages. The book of "Familiar Quotations" contains more extracts from Wordsworth than from Byron; twice as many as from Dryden; thrice as many as from Moore, Scott, or Burns. The world has never had a writer who produced so few good poems and so much good poetry. There are still differences of opinion about the rank and character of his genius; but the disputants will be likely to agree that in the six hundred pages of his works are found a few of the best and a good many of the worst poems ever printed in the English language.

Wordsworth seems to have become a poet of his own choice, after having passed through all the vicissitudes of poverty and the mutations of those volcanic years. In warm and eager sympathy with the French republicans,

he visited France in 1790, and became a Girondist- a member of that absurd party that sought revolution without blood; but fortunately, he suddenly found that he was penniless, and returned home just in time to save his neck from the guillotine. He had the same aversion to the pulpit which Milton manifested; but, like Milton and most of the other English poets, his objections to a government office were not so insurmountable. Journalism was to him the least odious of the professions; but just as he was about to enter that new field of labor, he received a timely legacy of two hundred and fifty dollars a year, with which, full of confident self-appreciation, he retired with his family to the obscurity of the lakes, and wrote for posterity.

Few men of sensibility would have suffered as little as Wordsworth apparently did, under the derision and denunciation of which his poetry was made the object during a whole generation. He held his work in supreme approval, above the opinion of critics, and seemed equally indifferent to praise and blame. "I write for the future," he would serenely say; "this Jeffrey does not understand my language." He received only five hundred dollars for all his volumes of verse during forty years of industrious writing; yet he never for a moment lost his calmness and confidence, and never ceased to feel the inferiority of contemporary poets.

The fact is, that, through this unparalleled storm of contumely, Wordsworth was upborne by the possession of an enormous self-esteem. It is the concurrent testimony of his best friends that he was vain and pompous in demeanor, stilted, affected, and incoherent in conversation, and that he held Pope and Byron scarcely entitled to the name of poet. Genial Kit North, his friend and sometimes his admirer, says of him:

"Here's to Will Wordsworth, so wise and so wordy,

And the sweet, simple hymns of his own hurdy-gurdy,

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