tar as a subject of prayer. But so far was he from accepting the overture with his usual philosophical equanimity, that he threw the friendly arm from his neck with a precipitancy of manner that indicated any thing but gratitude for the attention bestowed upon him. For several days he was almost constantly saying or doing something, for which his nice sense of propriety would oblige him soon after to apologize. He wanted to see religion prosper, but matters did not go on to suit him. Still, he could not keep away from the meetings; he must come and see what was being done. But then these altar devotions and humiliations were to him an insoluble mystery. How people could be saved there, in the way they professed to be, was something he could not understand. At any rate he was too philosophical and calculating to be at all profited by any such expedient. The place for him to "obtain a hope" was his closet, where he could calmly read his Bible and cautiously introspect his own mental states and processes. If pressed at once to carry out his own plans, even this was little more acceptable to him than an invitation to the altar itself. Nothing suited him. He was, indeed, "like the troubled sea."

One evening the sermon was upon the cure of the blind man, spoken of in the ninth chapter of St. John's Gospel. The great Teacher first anointed the eyes of the poor man with "clay and spittle," a compound that seemed ill-suited to diseased optics; and then, as if to complete the climax of absurdities, directed him to go and wash the same diseased organ in the dirty waters of Siloam. All of this seemed much like an utter outrage on human philosophy. The spiritually blind Pharisee would be likely to say, that the man who could pay any attention to such unreasonable prescriptions deserved to have no eyes all the rest of his days. But so thought not the patient. Faith in the great Teacher, disregarding every philosophical objection, adopted the remedy; and the poor man was soon made to see. The simplicity of God's remedies is often offensive to the pride of man, but when faithfully applied they are always found effectual. All that is now said against the reasonableness of coming to the altar might have been urged with still greater propriety not only against the Savior's prescription, in the present case, but against washing in Jordan, as Naaman the leper was directed to do. But when God commands, it is our duty to obey, and not to cavil. Not only lit tle means, but seemingly unsuitable means, in God's hands, may achieve great and beneficent results.

Such was the drift of the sermon. In view of the facts adduced, Tyler felt that his philosophy was sadly at fault, and at the proper time

consented to be led forward to the altar by his friend Wilber. Still, he was by no means subdued. Though the judgment may have been in a measure convinced, the heart continued in a state of rebellion. At the close of the meeting he said with much tartness to the pastor, "There, I am no better! I knew and told you it would do me no good." A tender word was said in reply, when he was left to his own reflections. The next evening, contrary to our fears, he was again at the altar, but in a very different spirit. The stout-hearted philosopher was soon weeping like a stricken child. Adequately to describe the scene that followed, would be impossible. I am sure that the pure beings who minister before the throne seldom look down upon such a spectacle. The coincidences of the hour have probably had few parallels in the history of the race. The day of eternity alone can fully disclose the glories of the scene. At any rate, I can now only allude to the individual case.

Tyler had a godly sister with him in the Seminary, who was a member of the Presbyterian Church, and who was as remarkable for her modesty as she was for most other Christian graces. Such, however, was her solicitude for her own dear brother, and such the overwhelming influences of the meeting, that, by some process which she was wholly unable to explain, she actually got within the rail, and there kneeling threw her arms around his neck. In that posture they both remained, weeping and praying, till the close of the service. When the meeting ended Tyler seemed too much overcome to give any account of his spiritual status, if indeed he had at the time any distinct perceptions of it himself. Unable to speak he retired to his room; from whence, however, at about three o'clock in the morning, he dispatched his friend Wilber to the parsonage with the message that "all was well." Whether this were the mere offspring of irrepressible emotion, or whether he thought the intelligence would cause the pastor to sleep more refreshingly during the rest of the night, it would be difficult to say. At any rate, however unusual, it was by no means an unpleasant disturbance at the parsonage.

Tyler was now a new creature. His whole moral being had undergone a surprising transformation. He no longer lived unto himself, but to Him who died for him, and rose again. The story of the blind man seemed ever after to have a kind of talismanic power over him. He said to the writer, soon after that memorable night, "If I ever see you hereafter, to the end of life, and do not refer to the blind man healed,' take it for granted that I have backslidden." But he always did refer to it, making it a part of his in

variable salutation, till declining health led him to seek restoration in a southern clime. In this, however, he was totally unsuccessful, and hastened homeward with a hope that he might at least die in the midst of his much-loved domestic circle. Here also he failed. He died among strangers, but fell exulting in the blind man's almighty Healer. And now his then youthful friend, Perlee B. Wilber, who has since been permitted to make his mark upon many an immortal mind, serving God and his generation, has gone to the same blissful world. Who can doubt that, recognizing each other there, they have interchanged transporting congratulations? Ay, and who can doubt that, from their lofty dwelling-place, they have often looked back upon the starting-point in their upward course?

O, the religion of the cross is not a cunningly devised fable! It is-IT is a glorious reality! Let every reader of the Repository try it. What it has done for even the most gifted minds, it will do for the humblest. To all it will be not only a comfort through life, but an unfailing passport to the skies.

A

BERANGER, THE POET OF THE PEOPLE.

BY REV. EDWARD EGGLESTON.

FTER all we say of great Miltons and great Homers, the lyrist is the truest poet. It is not when Poesy, like the eagle, mounts heavenward, beyond the view of common men, that she fulfills her glorious mission; it is rather, when, angel-like, she stoops from the battlements of heaven to the abode of the poor man, cheering his dreary lot with her celestial melody; it is when she holds to the eyes of the toil-worn her magic prism, clothing his dull surroundings with the hues of romance. Her mission is to place in the poor man's hand the true alchymical philosopher's stone, that makes golden all the baser metals of life. Song, therefore, while it was the earliest, is the truest form of poetry.

Though the subject of this article wrote nothing but songs, and songs of the simplest kind, yet we claim for him, and on that account, a high place as a poet. He was preeminently the "poet of the people"-the prince of song-writers.

His father was a grocer's clerk, remarkable only for his persistent claiming of nobility, which led him to retain, or, as his son intimates, insert the particle "de" in his name, as an evidence of his title to aristocracy. This scion of nobility unfortunately was overcome by the charms of a little doll-faced milliner, that passed his door to her work every morning. He demanded her hand from her father, an old tailor, and the gro

cer's clerk and milliner, for a while, at least, forgot their nobility, in their short-lived happiness. Happily for the poet the father and mother separated at the end of six months of jarring discord. We say happily, for with his father's training Beranger would have been an idle aspirant for nobility; with his mother's instruction, he would have been, to use his own word, a “musklozenge." The world trained him better than his parents could have done, and he succeeded in proving his title to the nobility of genius, the only aristocracy of birth.

Pierre Jean de Beranger was born in the house of his maternal grandfather, August 17, 1780. His grandfather, whom he always mentions affectionately, took charge of him till he was nine years of age. We do not exaggerate when we say that these nine years fixed his destiny. With Herder, he might have said: "My whole life is but the interpretation of the oracles of my childhood." His place of birth was the only place | where he could properly be born; his circumstances were the most appropriate that we can conceive of as surrounding the infancy of the poet of the people. It was fitting that Burns should first see the light among the banks and | braes of Scotland. Had he been born any where else in the world, it would not have been Burns. It was essential to his destiny that he should be a plow-boy. We never contemplate the Reformer of Wittemberg with half the interest in any other situation that we do when we see him wandering through the streets of Eisenach and Magdeburg, singing Christmas carols and asking for bread for the love of God. Hugh Miller would have been entirely out of place had he been born any where else than among the hills of Cromarty. What a beautiful preface to the life of the great geologist was his stone-mason life, hammering from morn till eve the pre-adamite rocks, and gazing with boyish wonder on those hieroglyphics, vastly older than those of Egypt or Assyria, which he himself should read to a listening world. There was a like appropriateness in the life of Beranger. As we have said, he could not have been born out of Paris, consistently with his destiny. 'Twas not banks and braes, or beauteous rivers that should employ his muse. It was nature in man to which he was destined to give a tongue, and, what is more, it was nature in downtrodden man. How propitious, then, were his surroundings! His father a grocer's clerk, his mother a milliner, his first landscape a tailor-shop! The grocer's clerks, the milliners, the tailors, of this great throbbing heart of Europe were to find utterance in his songs. He was to be the Hugh Miller of these lower strata, this "Old Red Sandstone" formation of humanity.

How appropriately did his life begin at the bottom of the quarry! The bard of revolution needed to be cradled in the crater of the revolutionary volcano.

In illustration we may cite an incident of his childhood. After nine years in Paris, then in a state of revolutionary effervescence, we find him at a boarding-school in the Faubourg St. Antoine. Here one day in July he hears the wild cry of the populace "à la Bastile! à la Bastile!" Standing on the roof of the school building, the little Beranger sees the mad torrent of humanity, a roaring Niagara of revolution, pour down the streets of Paris toward the Bastile. He watches the wild surges of popular fury dash against that sheltering rock of despotism. With a joyful heart he hears the shout, "The people have taken the Bastile." That great scene, that first act in the mammoth tragedy of revolution, photographed itself on the susceptible heart of young Beranger and made him a republican for life.

We find him next almost abandoned by his parents, in the care of a pious Catholic aunt at Peronne. But the poet of the people must have tutors. The dull ushers of the school at Peronne were not to be the only instructors of one who was to play so important a part in life. His destiny demanded that he should have a master. He found a great one. About the time that Voltaire's exhumed remains were borne in posthumous triumph through Paris, the writings of Voltaire were molding the mind of Beranger. We shudder at the thought of Voltaire's writings in the hands of youth, and well we may. But in our abhorrence of his blasphemous infidelity, we should not forget that, politically, Voltaire was the friend of the people. There are many tares in his works, but there are also some stalks of golden wheat. Alas, that the wheat alone was not sown in France! Alas, that the vile tares should take root in the mind of Beranger, and be reproduced in some of his immortal lyrics! But it was not all good that our poet got from Voltaire.

About this time M. Ballue de Ballenglise, a member of the convention from Peronne, started his political free school in his native place. In the mimic convention of the school, Beranger was chosen president, and he who afterward shrunk from publicity, might then have been seen haranguing his little convention in favor of revolutionary principles.

From the free academy he goes into the great high-school whence have graduated so many illustrious men the printing-office. It was while holding the composing-stick that he first manifested his poetic talent; and his enlightened employer, with a printer's generosity, gave him instruction

in French prosody and other necessary branches, thus rendering himself illustrious by helping a genius to reach his goal.

Some young men, without having half the advantages of Beranger, graduate. His education had been a grand one so far, for a French republican song-writer. He had learned patriotism at the fall of the Bastile; philosophy, of Voltaire; politics, in the school at Peronne, and poetry in a printing-office! Truly, he was entitled to a diploma. But he lacked yet one lesson, and to gain that his destiny carried him back to Paris.

His father, from having been successively, with true Yankee adaptability, a grocer's clerk, a notary, and a steward, has risen to the dignity of a banker, and sends for his long-neglected son. Ho is so pleased with him that he predicts that he will one day be a great banker, and immediately places him at the head of the bank, and goes to work to remove the republican notions from his mind. This is no very easy task, but as the nobility of the family is at stake, the father is very persevering and the son is very obstinate. Beranger, though but seventeen years old, was very successful in all his financial operations. His father's position as banker for the royalists, through whom money was remitted to the conspirators from London, made his position peculiarly valuable to him as furnishing him the means of becoming acquainted with the fallen and profligate nobility, who, after the restoration, became the chief butts of his ridicule. This last lesson having been learned, his pen now began its republican work.

Bankers make very poor poets. Rogers and Roscoe doubtless owe their second-rate position in literature to their occupation. It takes a Grubstreet garret and the pangs of hunger to make a poet of the first quality. Happily for Beranger his father failed, else, instead of writing songs, he might have spent his life in stock speculation on the Bourse.

Let us pass over the three years passed in a garret in the Boulevard St. Martin-three years of "hope long deferred" and heart-sickness, increased by the dread of the conscription-three years in which his food was bread and cheese. Let us come to the time when Lucien Bonaparte drew him from his misery. We will let him tell his own story. We translate from his Autobiography:

"The gold watch and some other débris of our transient opulence were already pawned at the Mont de Piélé; my wardrobe was composed of three old shirts, that a friendly hand wearied itself in mending, a thin overcoat, quite threadbare, a pair of pantaloons with holes at the knees, and a pair of boots, which completed my despair,

answer.

for in cleaning them I found some new rent every morning. At this time I sent a letter to M. Lucien Bonaparte with four or five hundred lines of poetry, not revealing this attempt to any one after so many failures. Two days passed and no That night I dreamed of the | postman. But when I awoke, farewell illusions! there lay the ragged boots, and the grandson of a tailor had to patch his old pantaloons. Needle in hand, I was meditating some very misanthropic verses, when the porter entered in breathless haste, giving me a letter. Rhymes, needle, pantaloons were all dropped. I was so excited I could n't open the letter. At last I opened it. The senator, Lucien Bonaparte, had read my verses and wished to see me! Let young poets similarly situated imagine my joy and describe it if they can. It was not fortune that was before my eyes then, it was glory. I wept and praised God, whom I have never forgotten in moments of prosperity."

The patronage of the Emperor's brother secured him a pension of a thousand francsabout two hundred and fifty dollars-per annum. Even during the exile of the amiable Lucien, his friendship procured Beranger employment in the University. This saved him from poverty, but it was not till after his election to the Caveau, in 1815, that his reputation as a chansonnier was established on a firm basis. And after his songs were in great demand and were a source of great profit to his publishers, he steadily refused any compensation from the journals in which they appeared, thinking it not right to receive pay, he said, for that which it gave him so much pleasure to make.

Beranger's songs are a strange olla-podrida of humor, wit, pathos, patriotism, and sarcasm. He is, in one sense, the Hood of French literature. Yet he is more joyous than Hood. He not only makes you laugh at his witticisms, but he laughs also. If there were no wit in his songs, you would be compelled to laugh out of pure sympathy. On almost every page the merry face of the little Frenchman laughs at you. With him, as with Hood, humor is nearly allied to pathos, and if you laugh heartily with him in "Le Roi d' Yvetôt," or "Le Petit Homme Gris," you must weep with him in "Mon Ame" and "Le Vieux Sergent."

riotism is his ruling passion. The glory of France and the liberty of the people are the bur den of every song. He was the first chansonnier whom the critics ever styled a poet, and he first received the title from the Edinburgh Review, in 1821. The celebrated Benjamin Constant says: "Beranger aims only to write a song, but he unwittingly reaches the highest flights of poesy."

We need not say that he hated Jesuitism. No man ever yet loved humanity without hating it. It is a mortifying fact that French republicans, and Beranger among them, sometimes sneered at Christianity. We think, however, with Lamartine, that the responsibility of their infidelity rested chiefly on other shoulders. Intelligent men are apt to think with Sydney Smith, that Romanism is a system of flexions and genuflexions, postures and impostures. But this Romanism the French republicans mistook for Christianity.

Beranger was one of the few men who came on the stage of action just at the right time. About the time he became generally known as a song-writer the Restoration took place, and never did satirist have a finer theme than he found in the fossilized royalty of the Bourbons and the feudal nobility. In the quarter of a century of their absence France had made gigantic strides forward, and now the Restoration was rubbing its eyes, in a Rip Van Winkle way, while Beranger and his comrades laughed at its perplexity.

In 1815 he gathered his fugitive pieces for the first time into a volume. Though most of these pieces were written under the empire and had lit tle to do with the Bourbons, yet some of them were very objectionable to the government. "We can forgive much to the author of the Roi d' Yvetôt," said Louis XVIII. This song was a satire on Bonaparte.

In 1821 he thought best to publish again. One reason he assigns for publishing was that he thought such a bold move would encourage the liberal party, then very much disheartened. But his chief reason was that the government continued to him his little employment in the University in order to prevent his issuing his fugitive songs, which were already felt keenly, in a volume. Nothing would make him publish more certainly than to forbid him to do it. Well knowing the consequences, he issued 11,500 copies of his works in two volumes. In order to do this he plunged himself in debt; and that, too, while many of his timid friends were deserting him. The whole edition was taken immediately, and Beranger was deprived of his petty clerkship.