had never been properly secured before the yacht left Birkenhead. The consequence was, that, when a heavy sea broke on board, the water lifted the skylights up a few inches and rushed in like a cataract. This unfortunate piece of carelessness would never have been overlooked if our invaluable "Chippy" (the carpenter) had not been laid up with a severe attack of bronchitis, and been left behind in England.

When I went along forward, I found the saloon in just as bad a state as the nursery, and from just the same cause. These little mishaps almost always happen when rough weather comes on, directly after the commencement of a fresh voyage, before the new hands have had time to settle down to their work properly.

Having described our experience below, I will now relate what was going on on deck. About twelve o'clock at night, the look-out man suddenly reported a light on the port bow, following this up by shouting out "Hard-a-starboard!" The man at the wheel, not recognizing the voice, owing to the roaring and howling of the wind, obeyed the order only too promptly, before Tom-who had noticed, what the lookout man had not seen in the blinding rain and snow, that the light was that of a steamer and not of a sailing vessel -could countermand it. The result was that, as the course was altered, and the Sunbeam came suddenly up to the wind, the press of canvas she was carrying caused her to bury herself in the sea, from which she emerged with the loss of her jibboom. Fortunately, however, the fore-topmast stood the strain, and did not follow suit, as is so often the case. Sturmer, the man who was steering, said to me afterward : As soon as I put the helm down, ma'am, she seemed to bury herself completely in the sea. I could see and hear nothing of anybody; there was nothing but waves pouring right over her. I thought they were all washed overboard, and that no one but me was left to manage the vessel." Both watches and every available hand were on deck, reefing sails, lowering topmasts, and stowing boats. Presently another great sea came on board, filling the waist of the vessel completely, and tearing out the

bows of the big cutter that was secured on deck, and carrying away a piece of the lee rail. The poor Glance is the same boat we so nearly lost in 1877, as we were running up to Yokohama, when she was washed out of the davits in a storm.

When Saturday morning broke, matters did not mend. The gale continued, the sea ran mountains high, and got worse and worse every minute. From eight o'clock until noon was a most anxious period. Sail had been shortened, and all preparations were made to heave to; so that when it was decided that it would be better to run, there was great difficulty in getting sail enough on her in time to prevent her being pooped. Twice in quick succession were two helmsmen knocked down at the wheel, washed into the lee-scuppers, and very nearly carried overboard. One man was raised by the water level with the rail, but happily kept his presence of mind, and, floating with his hands open, managed to seize a rope and so save himself. I never saw Tom look so anxious and worn-out as at this time, for he had had no rest at all since the gale commenced. Twice he took the wheel himself-up to his waist in water-to prevent her broaching-to. Once a helmsman, less experienced than the others, did allow her to broach-to; and in a moment our square sail was carried completely away, and we were very near going to the bottom altogether. Our pace was now so much diminished that the tops of the waves, which seemed to pursue us with demon-like fury, kept coming over the stern and covering the decks with water, while there was, of course, always the risk of one higher and fiercer than the rest breaking on board and filling us up altogether. However they soon managed to get the double-reefed square topsail on her (which would have been better done before, and would probably have saved the square-sail; but one can only learn by experience), and once more we were scudding away before the gale. The force of the wind may be imagined from the fact that, in spite of the delay caused by these misfortunes, and the small amount of canvas we were able to carry, we ran 315 nautical, or 360 statute, miles, in twenty-four hours,

utes she had lost her fore and main masts over the side-snapped off short within six feet of the deck-and was obliged to make the best of her way back to England to refit. This happened in not nearly so bad a tempest as we have just encountered. The forestay is one of the most important parts of the rigging of a ship, for upon it falls a great portion of the strain of keeping all the three masts in an upright position.

Wednesday, January 26.-The weather was squally and very thick. The gale from the southwest had come at last, and being on the beam it caused us to tumble about even more than we had done on Friday and Saturday, when we were running before the wind.

It was another day of anxiety for Tom, as we were sailing along a lee shore, close reefed, at a speed of nine knots, and it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards ahead through the driving rain and mist, or to tell precisely where we were.

Some of the passengers were very miserable in their berths below, but baby, all unconscious of danger, seemed, as usual, to thoroughly enjoy the various ludicrous incidents and small catastrophes that always occur on these occasions. There was a good deal of loose water flying about, and not much room on deck, with all the boats in board. A snug place was therefore found for her, just inside the deckhouse door, where, enveloped in macintoshes, she fairly screamed with 'delight as the men slithered and slid and fell about on the slippery decks. She thought it especially amusing when the cook opened the meat safe and a leg of mutton flew out in his face, while a large piece of beef followed suit, striking him on the chest and completely knocking

him over. The cook's boy was busily engaged at the same time in the vain pursuit of carrots, turnips, and potatoes, that broke loose from the vegetable bunkers and were floating about in the lee-scuppers, while a few poor miserable-looking draggle-tailed cocks and hens sought shelter beneath the sails and completed the picture of discomfort and confusion. One of the hencoops had already been washed adrift, and its twelve unfortunate occupants drowned.

Cooking was rather a difficult operation, on account of the smoke being driven back into the galley by the wind coming out of the sails, and by the roll of the vessel; but, fortunately, no one was very hungry.

The gale continuing, steam was got up in case of an emergency, but soon after noon the fog lifted for a few minutes and showed us Cape Trafalgar, right ahead. The course was accordingly altered and the engines were stopped for a time.

As soon as we had sighted Tarifa, another change of course was made, the wind became more favorable, and we ceased to roll about so much. It was still, however, blowing hard, and Tom accordingly decided, after going close to Europa, to anchor at Algeciras for the night, so as to be under shelter of the land and to afford his passengersto say nothing of himself-the opportunity of enjoying a quiet night in smooth water.

Thursday, January 27.—At 6.30 A.M. all hands were mustered, and two hours later we were anchored inside the New Mole, having thus made the passage from England, a distance of 1276 knots, in six days and three hours, 914 knots under sail and 362 under steam.-Fraser's Magazine.

THE value of literature, as an art of expression, unquestionably depends upon the social conditions under which it is practised. However differently, in particular cases, the balance of inNEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXIV., No. 1

debtedness between the author and his age may be accounted, society does determine somewhat his mental characteristics, and still more the limits of his experience; his work is a reflex of the

2

social life in which he shared. If it fortunately happens that the authors and the people of a country think and feel about the same objects in ways not so dissimilar as to make them unintelligible to each other, and thus possess an essential bond of union, literature becomes an expression of national life, a permanent embodiment of the national spirit. The literature of England answers most nearly to this idea of a national literature; and therefore M. Taine, as he himself says, chose to write of it, because it best illustrates and supports his theory that a nation's life--the character and circumstances of its people and the special social movements of its successive ages-determines, by a force akin to natural law, a specific literature. If he had chosen to write of American literature, how ill would it have served his purpose! Perhaps M. Taine would reply that we in America are not a literary people, that we have no national literature, and that what literature has flourished among us is of a leaf and fibre sprung from foreign soil; in such a reply, indeed, there would be much truth. Certainly, our literature has been, to a remarkable degree, remote from the national life. There has been but slight mutual obligation between our books and our politics or our society. Even among men of genius, who are usually more withdrawn than others from the influence peculiar to their time, and are either indifferent to them or masters over them, our men of genius seem pe culiarly isolated. Their temperaments, in so far as these were the result of past human experience working secretly through the subtle channels of hereditary descent, were born of a civilization far different from our own, a civilization religious, colonial, and local, not secular, self-sustaining, and national. These men fashioned, the treasures of our literature by their own creative force and artistic instinct, with but slight obligation to their country either for the material of their work or for the knowledge of their craft. Engrossed with their own unshared powers and qualities, they stood aloof from the nation and its concerns. They set out on the eternal search for beauty and truth, guided, like all the greatest, by the elemental principles in human nature, like

voyagers on strange seas, steering by the pole star, borne on by trade wind or gulf-stream; but their ships were unfreighted with a public hope. Orsince voyagers is too venturesome a name for them-say rather, they joined the company of pure artists, who, illuminating the spirit of man rather than the spirit of their age, acknowledge the lordship of no country, but belong to the race the men who gather within themselves, as into a star of intenser light, the scattered and obscure rays that are a lamp of beauty to the feet of every man. Amid that company how should they hear the axe ringing in the lonely wilderness of the Genesee, or catch the joy on the face of the adventurous explorer on hard-won mountain peaks, with the promised land spread out westward before him? Some unreal Hiawatha-echo did penetrate even there; some prospect of an Astoria, with its natural marvel and human hardihood (less prized than the ruinous, legend-haunted Alhambra), was caught sight of; a spell of romance was woven about the Hudson, and a mysterious beauty evoked from the wintry life of Puritan dwellers by the shores of Massachusetts Bay; but to the America present before them it is scarcely too much to say our men of genius were well-nigh deaf and blind. There is something startling in this spectacle of the gifted and trained mind absorbed in its pursuit of imaginative delight, heedless of the humble muscle which was meanwhile building up a great nation; seldom, in literary history, has there been so complete a sundering of the changeless work of men's spirits from the work of men's hands which, however transmuted, still no less endures.

Our men of genius were isolated in yet another way. Underived and solitary genius has frequently not only stimulated and delighted its contemporaries; it has gathered about itself a band of disciples, has kindled zeal, deepened conviction, hardened intellectual strength, so that on its eclipse its battle with darkness went on in the victory of younger men, men not of genius, but of culture. Among us literature has had no such continuous tradition; where the torch fell it was extinguished. Irving, it is true, had imi

tators, who came to nothing; but our fiction does not seem to be different because Hawthorne lived, no poet has caught the music of Longfellow, no thinker carries forward the conclusions of Emerson. These men have left no lineage. They are not connected with their countrymen even by the secondary tie of calling into being a body of literature with power to enter effectively into the nation's life, to shape the character and determine the expansion of its thought. We have not earned the right to claim these men as a national possession by any important contribution to the growth of their genius, nor have they given us that right by anything distinctively national in their work or their influence; ushered in by Donatello and Evangeline, they find a welcome at the hearthstone of every lover of the beautiful, but, except for the accident of birth, there is little reason why the welcome should be warmer in America than in England.

Men of culture, whose work makes up the larger portion of any literature, are much indebted to circumstances and opportunity. In America they have been, as has been seen, without a literature of virile power; they have also been without a society vigorous enough to stamp an image of itself in letters. In the days of Queen Anne and the first two Georges, the wit, sense, and malice of a cultivated society expressed themselves with such intelligence that the age, although one of high political excitement and of great consequence to the institutions and civilization of England, is yet mainly known as a literary age. The society from which American men of culture took their bent was civilized in other ways than that at Twickenham, but it was so inferior to it in its sense of the value of literature to life, in active, keen intelligence, and in consummate mastery of the art of speech, that it was incapable of any similar literary expression. The lack of such a society as the wits of Queen Anne moved in, sent our men of culture to attend in English drawing-rooms and at English dinner-tables. This resort to the old world was natural, and, indeed, inevitable. The Revolution made us an independent nation, but in literature we remained a province. At the beginning

of the century it was sneeringly, yet truly, said that the Americans let Europe make their fashions and their books for them, as if our women were without taste and our men without mind. We developed ancient English political ideas, and, with our ears intent upon the future, we put ourselves under the sway of the ideas to come, democracy and its unrevealed forces; in literature, on the contrary, we sought neither to disestablish nor to amend the English tradition. We kept not only the unchangeable standards of good literature, but so possessed were we by the social spirit and tastes of the mother-country that we kept also the subject and the style in which the peculiarities of a nation manifest themselves if at all. Thus Irving, our first great man of letters, deriving his culture from social life abroad, taking his style from Addison and Steele, and interesting his readers in sketches of English rural life or in foreign legend, came to leave (in Mr. Lowell's phrase) a name either English or Yankee." So, too, Ticknor, Allston, and their successors were molded by the foreign influence; the foreign standard of education and literature became firmly established, and has not yet yielded its ground.

"You_steal_Englishmen's books and think Englishmen's thought,

With their salt on her tail your wild eagle is caught;

Your literature suits its each whisper and motion

To what will be thought of it over the ocean."

What Mr. Lowell wrote of his generation has not ceased to be true of our time. To-day American authors make their reputation by English criticism, and American magazines are rivals for English pens. In these later years, however, our strongly marked national life has given rise to a domestic literature (if I may so term it) having to do with ourselves and .our own concerns; it reflects, it is true, the ruder elements of our civilization-our rough life on the border, our vulgar life abroad, our homely middle-class life in the Eastand it is usually embodied in fugitive and imperfect forms, but sometimes, as in the work of Mr. Howells and Mr. James, in forms of exquisite finish.