When I and all who know

And love me vanish so,
What harm to them or me

Will the lost memory be?

If any words of mine,

Through right of life divine,

Remain, what matters it

Whose hand the message writ?

Why should the "crowner's quest ”

Sit on my worst or best?

Why should the showman claim

The poor ghost of my name?

Yet, as when dies a sound
Its spectre lingers round,
Haply my spent life will
Leave some faint echo still.

A whisper giving breath
Of praise or blame to death,
Soothing or saddening such
As loved the living much.

Therefore with yearnings vain
And fond I still would fain
A kindly judgment seek,
A tender thought bespeak.

And, while my words are read,
Let this at least be said:
"Whate'er his life's defeatures,
He loved his fellow-creatures.

"If, of the Law's stone table,
To hold he scarce was able,
The first great precept fast,
He kept for man the last.

"Through mortal lapse and dullness What lacks the Eternal Fullness,

If still our weakness can

Love Him in loving man?

"Age brought him no despairing

Of the world's future faring;

In human nature still

He found more good than ill.

"To all who dumbly suffered, His tongue and pen he offered;

1883.

His life was not his own,
Nor lived for self alone.

"Hater of din and riot
He lived in days unquiet;
And, lover of all beauty,
Trod the hard ways of duty.

"He meant no wrong to any,
He sought the good of many,
Yet knew both sin and folly,-
May God forgive him wholly!"

THE

Edmund Quincy.

BORN in Boston, Mass., 1808. DIED at Dedham, Mass., 1877.

AN OLD HOUSE IN BOSTON.

[The Haunted Adjutant, and Other Stories. 1885.]

HE good old class of "garden-houses," in which it is recorded that Milton always chose to live, is now almost as entirely extinct here as in London itself. How well do I remember one of these, in which some of my happiest days and merriest nights were spent! It stood with its end to the street, overshadowed by a magnificent elm of aboriginal growth, which made strange and solemn music in my boyish ears when the autumn winds called forth its hidden harmonies at midnight. Entering the gate, you proceeded on a flagged walk, having the house close to you on your left, and on your right the courtyard, filled with "flowers of all hues," and fragrant shrubs, each forming the mathematical centre of an exact circle cut in the velvet greensward. When within the front door, you had on your left hand the best parlor, opened only on high solemnities, and which used to excite in my young mind a mysterious feeling of mingled curiosity and awe whenever I stole a glance at its darkened interior, with its curiously carved mahogany chairs black as ebony with age, its blue damask curtains, the rare piece of tapestry which served as a carpet-all reflected in the tall mirror, with its crown and sceptred top, between the windows. I remember it used to put me in mind of the fatal blue chamber in Bluebeard. I am not sure now that there was not something supernatural about it.

But it was the parlor opposite that was the very quintessence of snug

ness and comfort, worth half a hundred fantastic boudoirs and modern drawing-rooms bedizened with French finery. On your right hand as you entered were two windows opening upon the courtyard above commemorated, with their convenient window-seats-an accommodation which I sadly miss-with their appropriate green velvet cushions, a little the worse for wear. On the opposite side of the room to the windows was a glass door opening into the garden,—a pleasant sight to see, with its rectangular box-lined gravel walks, its abundant vegetables, its luxuriant fruit-trees, its vine trained over the stable-wall. As you returned to the house through the garden-door, you had on your right the door of a closet with a window looking into the garden, which was entitled the study, having been appropriated to that purpose by the deceased master of the house. This recess possessed substantial charms to my infant imagination as the perennial fountain of cakes and apples, which my good aunt of whom presently-conducted in a never-failing stream to the never-satisfied mouth of an urchin of six years old. I thought they grew there by some spontaneous process of reproduction.

A little farther on, nearer to the study-door than the one by which we entered, was the fireplace, fit shrine for the Penates of such a household; its ample circumference adorned with Dutch tiles, where stout shepherdesses in hoops and high-heeled shoes gave sidelong looks of love to kneeling swains in cocked hats and trunk-hose; while their dogs and sheep had grown so much alike from long intimacy as to be scarcely distinguishable. How I loved those little glimpses into pastoral life! I have one of them now, which I rescued from the wreck of matter when the house came down. Within the ample jaws of the chimney, which might have swallowed up at a mouthful a century of patent grates, crackled and roared the merry wood fire,-fed with massy logs which it would take two men to lift, as men are now,-casting its cheerful light as evening drew in on the panelled walls, bringing out the curious "eggand-anchor" carvings, which were my special pride and wonder, and flashing back from the mirror globe which depended from the beam which divided the comfortable low ceiling into two unequal parts. And let me not forget the mantelpiece, adorned with grotesque heads in wood and clusters of fruit and flowers, of which Grinling Gibbons him self need not have been ashamed. And then the Turkey carpet, covering the breadth, but not the length, of the room; and the books,--the "Spectator's" short face in his title-page, the original "Tatler," the first editions of Pope. But time would fail me were I to record all the wellremembered contents of that dear old room,-the sofa or settee, of narrow capacity, looking as if three single chairs had been rolled into one; the card-table, with its corners for candles, and its pools for fish scooped out of the verdant champaign of green broadcloth. But enough: let us

now approach the divinity whose penetralia we have entered, and who well befits such a shrine.

In an elbow-chair at the right of the fireplace, sat my excellent aunt, Mrs. Margaret Champion, widow of the Honorable John Champion, long one of His Majesty's Council for this Province. When I first remember her, she had passed her seventieth year, and she lived in a green old age till near a hundred winters had passed over her head. What a picture of serene and beautiful old age! Her placid countenance, which a cheerful piety and constitutional philosophy had kept almost unwrinkled; her large black eyes, in which the fires of youth were not yet wholly extinguished; the benevolent smile which was seldom absent from her lips-spoke of a frame on which Time had laid a gentle hand, and of a mind at ease. When I knew her, the profane importunities of the fairer part of her relatives had obtained a reluctant consent to abandon the gently swelling hoop and lowering crape cushion in which she once rejoiced. But you could never have seen how she became her decent white lace cap, her flowing black lace "shade," her rich silks for common wear, and her stiff brocades for high solemnities, and not have known that she was a gentlewoman born.

Salmon Portland Chase.

BORN in Cornish, N. H., 1808. DIED in New York, N. Y., 1873.

AN APPEAL TO THE HIGHER LAW.

[Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention, Cincinnati, 11 and 12 June,

WE

1845.]

E would appeal, also, to slaveholders themselves. We would enter at once within the lines of selfish ideas and mercenary motives, and appeal to your consciences and your hearts. You know that the system of slaveholding is wrong. Whatever theologians may teach and cite Scripture for, you know-all of you who claim freedom for yourselves and your children as a birthright precious beyond all price, and inalienable as life—that no person can rightfully hold another as a slave. Your courts, in their judicial decisions, and your books of common law in their elementary lessons, rise far above the precepts of most of your religious teachers, and declare all slaveholding to be against natural right. You feel it to be so. God has so made the human heart, that, in spite of all theological sophistry and pretended Scripture proofs,

you cannot help feeling it to be so. There is a law of sublimer origin and more awful sanction than any human code, written, in ineffaceable characters, upon every heart of man, which binds all to do unto others as they would that others should do unto them. And where is there one of all your number who would exchange conditions with the happiest of all your slaves? Produce the man! and until he is produced, let theological apologists for slaveholding keep silence. Most earnestly would we entreat you to listen to the voice of conscience and obey the promptings of humanity. We are not your enemies. We do not pretend to any superior virtue; or that we, being in your circumstances, would be likely to act differently from you. But we are all fellow-citizens of the same great Republic. We feel slaveholding to be a dreadful incubus upon us, dishonoring us in the eyes of foreign nations; nullifying the force of our example of free institutions; holding us back from a glorious career of prosperity and renown; sowing broadcast the seeds of discord, division, disunion: and we are anxious for its extinction. With Jefferson, we tremble for our country, when we "remember that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever." With Washington, we believe, "that there is but one proper and effectual mode by which the extinction of slavery can be accomplished, and that is, by legislative authority; and this, so far as our suffrages will go, shall not be wanting."

We would not invade the Constitution; but we would have the Constitution rightly construed and administered according to its true sense and spirit. We would not dictate the mode in which slavery shall be attacked in particular States; but we would have it removed at once from all places under the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government, and also have immediate measures taken, in accordance with constitutional rights and the principles of justice, for its removal from each State by State authority. In this work we ask your coöperation. Shall we ask in vain? Are you not convinced that the almost absolute monopoly of the offices and patronage of the Government, and the almost exclusive control of its legislative and executive and judicial administration, by slaveholders, and for the purposes of slavery, is unjust to the non-slaveholders of the country? Can you blame us for saying that we will no longer sanction it? Are you not satisfied, to use the language of one of your own number, "that slavery is a cancer, a slow consuming cancer, a withering pestilence, an unmitigated curse"? And can you wonder that we should be anxious, by all just and honorable and constitutional means, to effect its extinction in our respective States, and to confine it to its constitutional limits? Are you not fully aware that the gross inconsistency of slaveholding with our professed principles astonishes the world, and makes the name of our country a mock, and the