"An' more," answers answers Corny, shamefaced. "Katie, I don't believe we 'll go this fall";- and he mumbles something about work and wages; but Kathleen will not rest till she has the whole story, and glad enough is she. Now the winter is upon us, and Corny is harvesting great granaries of ice, with never a thought of fatherland, because he dreads the journey for his boy.

So I find that one little baby in long frocks wields a stronger power than "all the world" besides!

1*

II.

"GLORY, HALLELUJAH!”

E

VIDENTLY this lyric has a mission. It would not be surprising if the National Hymn-which the thirteen wise men of Gotham went a-fishing for last May, baiting their hooks with golden eagles, and getting many nibbles, but no fish should be

found at last in this rousing song. It is a wonderful combination of incongruities, and can scarcely have been marked out for an ordinary career. There is high, religious fervor; a sense of poetic justice and righteous retribution; a scorn of grammar and rhetoric and rhyme and reason; an incoherence, a brutality, a diabolism, a patriotism, and a heroism, which must make it go down the popular throat sweetly as the grapes of Beulah. It has something for everybody. It appeals to all the emotions. It sounds the gamut of humanity. It is like the great image which Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream. Its head is of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and thighs

of brass, its legs of iron, and its feet of clay. All this eminently fits it for a national song, since a national song is not a song of the poets, but the song of a people; and a people is heroic, and unreasonable, and incoherent, and brutal, and noble. Head of gold and feet of clay.

The origin of this song, like that of England's National Hymn, is somewhat foggy, or will be, if it is let alone a little longer. "God save the Queen" is said to have been a lay of the plotting Jacobites, who, in the early days of the Hanoverian dynasty, were continually scheming its downfall, and the restoration of the Stuarts; and the king who was sung to and prayed for was the exiled Stuart, not the "great George " actually on the throne. But the song somehow worked itself into the public taste, and by a high-handed process was furbished and handed over to the loyal Georgians "as good as new.” Was not this "Glory, Hallelujah!" sung by Colonel Ellsworth's Zouaves on their march from New York to Washington, and was it ever sung before? It seems about three hundred years since then; and, after such a lapse of time, one cannot, of course, certainly locate all events in the exact order of their occurrence, nor have I any documents at hand to verify my conjecture, but the "March till the battered gates of Sumter shall appear," savors of the honest and patriotic, but ignorant, "on to Richmond" enthusiasm of those

early days. That line surely cannot have been written since Bull Run, and the "pet lambs" point directly to the Caliban Zouaves, who, if I recollect right, christened themselves thus. Does any one know the author of the song, or the time of its first appearance?

Let us look at its head of gold.

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
His soul is marching on."

There is a slight suggestion of John Brown and the little Indian of the fossiliferous ages that preceded Fort Sumter, but it fades away before the real grandeur of the idea. The rude genius which struck out this lyric has hit upon a sublime principle. It is Bryant's royal thought clad in peasant garb.

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;

The eternal years of God are hers."

In homely phrase it recognizes, seizes, and promulgates the immortality of right, the indestructibility of truth; and the people recognize and receive it with a unanimity and an enthusiasm which reconcile one for a moment to that most capricious of apothegms, the voice of the people is the voice of God. On that summer day set in the brow of winter, that June morning lost amid December snows, when John Brown cast his eyes over the pleasant land which he had

come to redeem, as he passed to the gallows which was to be his triumphal car down the centuries,

when he stood guarded by twenty-five thousand soldiers, and surrounded by an innumerable throng, when throughout the South there was terror and hatred and exultation, and throughout the North admiration and sore regret, who foresaw to-day? Who looked forward through these two memorable years, and beheld the bristling hosts of Freedom pressing down upon Virginian soil, and ringing out the "Glory, Hallelujah!" on the spot made forever sacred by that martyrdom? Is there in history a retribution more swift, a justice more complete? Whatever may be the issue of the war, Virginia, mother of Presidents, mother of abominations, the cruel and cowardly State that was frantic with terror before a handful of brave men, and frantic with lust for their blood when other hands than hers had given them into her power, the traitorous and braggart State, fit offspring of fathers scummed from English cities and mothers bought for a hundred pounds of tobacco, has felt by her own firesides the bitterness of death and the sharper bitterness of desolation. John Brown violated law in his eagerness to dispense justice. Virginia violated law in her eagerness to dispense injustice, and “the curse shall be on her for ever and ever." Virginia slew John Brown in the interests of slavery, and in her despite of Freedom.