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PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

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FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club THE LIVING AGE with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY.

THE QUAKER MEERING-1688,

[From "The Germantown Pilgrim," an unpublished poem.]

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

FAIR First Day mornings, steeped in summer calm,

Warm, tender, restful, sweet with woodland balm,

Came to him like some mother-hallowed psalm

To the tired grinder at the noisy wheel
Of labor, winding off from memory's reel
A golden thread of music, with no peal
Of bells to call them to the house of praise.
The scattered settlers through green forest ways
Walked meetingward. In reverent amaze.
The Indian trapper saw them from the dim
Shade of the alders, on the rivulet's rim,
Seek the Great Spirit's house to talk with him.
There, through the gathered stillness, multiplied
And made intense by sympathy, outside
The sparrows sang, and the gold-robin cried
A-swing upon his elm. A faint perfume
Breathed through the open windows of the room,
From locust trees heavy with clustered bloom.

Thither, perchance, sore-tried professors came;
Whose fervor jail nor pillory could tame
Proud of the cropped ears meant to be their

shame.

Men who had eaten Slavery's bitter bread
In Indian isles; pale women, who had bled
Under the hangman's lash and bravely said
God's message through their prison's iron bars;
And gray old soldier-converts, seamed with scars
From every stricken field of England's wars.

Lowly before the Unseen Presence knelt
Each waiting heart, till, haply, some one felt
On his moved lips the seal of silence melt.

Or, without spoken words, low breathings stole
Of a diviner life from soul to soul,
Baptizing in one tender thought the whole.

When shaken hands announced the meeting o'er,
The friendly group still lingered near the door,
Greeting, inquiring, sharing all the store

Of weekly tidings. Meanwhile youth and maid
Down the green vistas of the woodland strayed,
Whispered and smiled, and oft their feet delayed.
And solemn meeting, summer sky and wood,
Old, kindly faces, youth and maidenhood,
Seemed, like God's new creation, very good.
And, greeting all with quiet smile and word,
Pastorius went his way. The unscared bird
Sang at his side, scarcely the squirrel stirred
At his hushed footstep on the mossy sod;
And wheresoe'er the good man looked or trod
He felt the peace of nature and of God.

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Up from this dimmer sunlight into the light of
God.

Perhaps He will come in the stillness of the mild
and quiet night,

When the earth is calmly sleeping 'neath the moonbeam's silvery light;

When the stars are softly shining o'er slumbering land and sea,

Perhaps in the holy stillness the Master will come for me.

I think I would rather hear it, that Voice so low and sweet,

Calling me out from the shadows, my blessed

Lord to meet,

Up through the glowing splendors of a starry, earthly night,

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see the King in His beauty," in a land of purer light.

DISCORDS.

Parish Visitor.

Ir had some grains of truth, at least,
That fable of the Sybarite,
For whom, because one leaf was creased,
The rose-strewn couch had no delight.
I think not even sanguine youth
Expects its gold without alloy;
But this is still the sober truth:
A little pain can mar much joy.

"Tis pity, that one thwarting thought,
One adverse chance, one sudden fear
Or sharp regret, can turn to nought

The full content that seemed so near!
But this strange life of ours abounds
With notes so subtle, they afford
A thousand discords and harsh sounds
For one harmonious perfect chord.

Chambers's.

From The Edinburgh Review. YULE'S EDITION OF MARCO POLO.*

-

last four centuries; and although the majority of such editions have been mere reTHE publication of Colonel Yule's productions or translations of a faulty text "Marco Polo" is an epoch in geographi- without any serious effort at emendation cal literature. Never before, perhaps, did or explanation, still in some instances a book of travels appear under such ex- as in the Italian editions of Baldello-Boni, ceptionally favourable auspices; an editor of Lazari, and of Adolfo Bartoli - sound of a fine taste and ripe experience, and and able criticism has been exerted, by possessed with a passion for curious me- which Colonel Yule has duly profited; dieval research, having found a publisher and moreover, in two particular instances willing to gratify that passion without -the English edition of Marsden, pubstint on the score of expenditure; and the lished in 1818, and the French edition of result being the production of a work Pauthier, published in 1865 — illustration which, in so far as it combines beauty of has been added of a comprehensive, if not typography and wealth of illustration with a very scholarly, character. Marsden's a rich variety of recondite learning, may edition of "Marco Polo," an honest and be regarded as a phenomenon in these unpretentious work, represents the knowldays of thrifty and remunerative book-edge, or rather the want of knowledge, of making. Nor is it a slight praise thus to" Sixty Years since." Pauthier's edition, pronounce Colonel Yule's edition to be a with very much more of pretension, is great success; for never, perhaps, has hardly an improvement on Marsden in rethere been a more difficult book of the gard to the historical or geographical illusclass to expound than Marco Polo's trav-tration of Western and Central Asia; els, since his great prototype, Herodotus, though it must be admitted that his Chirecited his history at Athens. Every page nese learning stands him in good stead, is a puzzle; every chapter contains strange and has enabled him to furnish many valnames which it is hard to recognize, uable extracts from original sources, restrange stories which it is harder still lating to Eastern Asia, in support or exeither to believe or to explain. And in-planation of Marco Polo's own notices. deed, when we remember Marco Polo's At any rate, we think the general impersonal character, and the peculiar cir- pression will be, on comparing the baldcumstances under which his very extraor-ness and inaccuracy of previous editors dinary experiences were reduced to writing, our wonder must be, not that there is so much requiring illustration in this account of his Eastern travels, but rather that the narrative should be in any degree intelligible — and especially that a commentator should have been found with the knowledge, the ingenuity, and the perseverance requisite to place the book in a really attractive form before the reading public of the nineteenth century.

with the stores of solid, as well as curious, information poured forth by Colonel Yule with an unsparing hand, that the edition we are now considering was imperatively called for.

The story of Marco Polo's book is told with much liveliness and effect in Colonel Yule's introduction. This introduction, indeed, which extends to 160 pages, and is of a very miscellaneous character, forms, we think, in a literary point of view, the The attempt has often been made be- most important, as it certainly forms the fore to bring Marco Polo into notice. Ac- most interesting, portion of Colonel Yule's cording to a list, indeed, compiled by two portly volumes. Besides ample disColonel Yule, and given in the appendix sertations on such general topics as the to his work, twenty-seven different edi-state of the East in the thirteenth century, tions of these travels have been published the jealousies and wars of Genoa and in various European languages during the Venice, a digression on the war-galleys of the Middle Ages, &c. &c., it comprises all that can be recovered of the personal history of the Polo family, of the individual travellers, of their appearance, their char

• The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian. Newly translated and edited, with notes, by Colonel HENRY YULE, C.B. Two volumes 8vo. London:

1871.

acter, and their objects; their singular re- veracity," no one can doubt but that Marception at Venice on their return from co was disposed to exaggeration in his the East after twenty-four years' absence, phraseology, and indulged in a very high which reads, as has been said, like a colouring in all his descriptions. He seems, chapter from the Arabian Nights; their indeed, mainly to have risen into favour subsequent adventures; Marco's partici- with the Emperor from his skill in bringpation in the great defeat of the Vene-ing back sensational reports of the wontians at Curzola; his captivity at Genoa, ders which he saw when employed on depand dictation of his memoirs to a fellow- utation in strange countries - such reports prisoner, Rustician of Pisa; and finally, contrasting agreeably with the dry matit suggests how Rustician's notes, jotted | ter-of-fact relations of the ordinary comdown in the " Lingua franca" in which missioners; and we may well understand they were probably communicated, were that it was this proneness to extravagant enlarged, and amended, and annotated, talk, this habitual indulgence in "traveleither by Marco himself, or possibly by lers' tales," which gave him the nickname his uncle Maffeo, who had been his com- of "Master Millions" among his countrypanion throughout his travels; and how men, and which in fact discredited his genfrom these original notes the various texts eral authority. The process of dictation, were formed which are now extant in it may also be suggested, is of itself unseventy-five different manuscript copies of favourable to a very rigid accuracy of dea more or less authentic character. scription. In telling his stories viva voce to Rustician, as he paced the floor of his prison cell at Genoa, he may be forgiven if he occasionally warmed up his flagging memory by a few free touches of lively rodomontade.* That he did not designedly invent or falsify is all, we presume, that Colonel Yule contends for; and for this qualified acquittal there is ample authority

It is clear that Marco Polo, with little or no preliminary education, must still have possessed considerable natural abilities, since on his arrival at the Mongol court he acquired without difficulty the current languages of the country together with four different modes of writing (probably Mongolian, Ouiguor, Persian, and Thibetan *), and further ingratiated himself with the Emperor, so as to be employed by him on confidential affairs of state in preference to the officers of his own household; but it is equally clear that he fully shared in the credulity and superstition of the age; and although Colonel Yule does not scruple to avow his "entire confidence in the man's

* The following are a few instances of Marco Polo's proneness to exaggeration in reporting what he heard as well as what he saw: - A ruc's feather brought from Madagascar measured, he was told, 90 spans, while the quill part was 2 palms in circumference; and two boars' tusks from the same place weighed more than 14 lbs. a-piece, the boars themthe bamboos were 3 palms in girth and 15 paces selves being as big as buffaloes (ii. 347). In Thibet in length, and in burning made a report that could be heard ten miles off (ii. 26). The Thibet mastiffs, * This is Colonel Yule's proposed identification of again, were as big as donkeys (ii. 32). The serpents the four" written characters" which were learnt by (ie. alligators) of Carajan were 10 paces in length Marco; but instead of Thibetan it is likely enough and 10 palms in girth, with eyes bigger than a great that he learnt the Baspa alphabet, which was estab lished, by orders of Kublai in 1269, as the official loaf of bread, and a mouth large enough to swallow a man whole (ii 45). The elephants of Birma carMongolian character, in contradistinction to the ried from twelve to sixteen well-armed fighting men old writing which, like the Ouigour and the Man-(ii. 63); and the oxen of the same province were as chu, was of Nestorian origin. At first sight it may seem hazardous to include Persian in this series, as it has no etymological or geographical connexion with Mongolian or Chinese, but Colonel Yule has shown good reason for suspecting that Persian must have been the common tongue of foreigners at the court of the Mongols (vol. i. p. cxxxv). In addition to the examples cited by Colonel Yule of such pure Persian names as Pul-i-sangin, Zar-dandan, &c. used by Marco Polo, it may be of interest to remark that in the famous Kitab-el-Fihrist, recently published, we find the Chinese commander-in-chief in the ninth century to have been named Sir-aspah, which is Persian for "head of the army."

tall as elephants (ii. 78). For travellers' tales" we may quote the story of the unicorn (or rhinoce ros) of Sumatra which licked its victim to death with its prickly tongue (ii. 227); the tailed men of Lambri on the same island (ii. 243); the dog-headed ruby, which was a palm in length and as thick as a men of the Andamans (ii. 251); the famous Ceylon man's arm (ii. 254); and especially the couvade of the Zar-dandan or "golden teeth" (ii. 52), which gave rise to the famous lines in Butler's "Hudi

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in the contemporary evidence that "when ing false readings or tedious repetitions Marco was asked by his friends on his à discrétion; but the result is certainly to death-bed to correct the book by remov- the advantage of the general reader; and ing everything that went beyond the facts, if a thorough dependence can be placed he replied, that he had not told one-half on the knowledge and judgment of the of what he had really seen." editor, there will be also felt an assurance that the " "eclectic text presents what the author said, or would have desired to say. This, at any rate, is what Colonel Yule has aimed at, and we are bound to say that we think on the whole he has been successful.

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Incidently at the outset of Marco Polo's narrative, a geographical question arises which well deserves a little careful consideration, since it involves the existence, or

Colonel Yule has allowed himself the fullest latitude in his adoption of a text. He calls his text "eclectic," which means that he has selected from several types the readings and expressions of which he approves, and has omitted those of which he disapproves. The basis of his translation is the same text which was used by Mons. Pauthier, and which is supposed to represent the version made from Rustician's barbarous "patois" into French non-existence, at that period of history of of the period, during Marco Polo's life, one of the great inland seas of Central and subject to his own curtailment, cor- Asia. The elder Poli, in their first journey rection, and revision; but he has not to the East, in A.D. 1260, are said to have slavishly followed this version, of which passed directly from the Volga to Bokháthere are exemplars at Paris, at Berne, rá by a route which, according to the presand at Oxford. He has admitted variant ent physical configuration of the country, readings of names, and many "expressions must have led them along the northern, of special interest and character" from or the southern border of the Sea of Aral; Rustician's original notes, published by yet neither in Marco's brief notice of this the Geographical Society of Paris in 1824; journey, nor in any other part of his work, and also in some instances he has bor- is there the slightest allusion to the sea rowed from other versions that were made in question; and a doubt therefore naturfrom that text (apparently during Marco ally arises in the reader's mind as to Polo's lifetime), first into Italian, and then whether the Aral could have been in exinto Latin-Pipino's Latin text, under istence in the thirteenth century. Colonel date A.D. 1320, being the type of this class Yule does not enter on the discussion of of MSS.; * and finally, he has introduced this curious question in either of his great between brackets, as indicative of their works, "Marco Polo" or "Cathay;" but supplementary character, a very large in another place he has casually considnumber of additional paragraphs, some ofered it, and the result of his investigation the highest interest and importance, which is that he supports the opinion of his disbear internal marks of emanating either tinguished relation, Sir Roderick Murchifrom Marco Polo or his uncle, but which are only known at present from their being included, without comment or explanation, in Ramusio's famous posthumous translation in Italian, which was published in A.D. 1559, nearly 240 years after Marco Polo's decease. It is hardly perhaps consistent with the strict canons of criticism thus to blend several texts into one, culling the best passages of each, and correct

• Colonel Yule mentions as a literary curiosity of some interest an Irish version which was made "with an astounding freedom" from this Latin text, and which is included in the famous Book of Lismore, written about A.D. 1450.

son, to the effect that notwithstanding certain admitted temporary deviations of the Oxus, and notwithstanding much amhiguity both of nomenclature and description, which is due, they think, to the carelessness or ignorance of the early geographers - the relative condition of the Caspian and Aral has in reality never materially varied during the historic period. A strong array of authorities, including the honoured names of Saint Martin, Malte Brun, Hugh Murray, Baillie Fraser, and Burnes, are even more positive in their opinions, maintaining that any such variaition has been simply impossible, since the

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