The imagination may sometimes make him appear cowardly, for instance, through the vividness with which he imagines dangers that do not touch the nerves of the stolid or prosaic. On the other hand, the same faculty may make him brave, when excited by a great purpose, excluding all immediate fears. So the imagination may make him appear cruel sometimes, when it takes the form of an intense desire to solve the mystery of life and death, and to assert the wondrous fact of human control over them; an impulse beginning when the boy kills his first bird, and not always satiating itself in the most experienced hunter. But the same imaginative power may also make him humane, if it be led to dwell on the sufferings of the animal, the bereaved nest, the dying young. "God gives him wings and I shoot him down," says Bettine. "Ah, no; that chimes not in tune." I suppose we are all at times more sentimental than we consent to acknowledge, and at other times more hard-hearted; and it is for education so to direct our imaginative power that it shall help us in the contest between right and wrong.

Nevertheless parents, as must be owned, often regard the imagination as a faculty to be dreaded for their children. People are like Mr. Peter Magnus in Pickwick, who disliked anything original, and did not see the necessity for it. They assume that this faculty is a misleading gift, tending to untruth-making a boy assert that a hundred cats are fighting in the garden, when there are only his own and another. Yet even this extreme statement is not to be ranked among deliberate falsehoods-it is only an intense expression, what the Greeks called a plural of reverence. For the boy two cats are as good or as bad as a hundred, if they only scratch and sputter enough, which, indeed, they are apt to do. He cannot report the battle as greater than his imagination sees it. Objectively there may be but two cats, subjectively there are a thousand. Indeed, each single animal expands before his eyes like that dog in Leech's "Brown, Jones, and Robinson," which is first depicted as it seemed to those travelers vast, warlike, terrific;-and afterward, as it would have seemed to the unimaginative observer, only a poor little barking cur. To give the full value of the incident both pictures are needful, and it is only when the power of expression matures that we learn to put both into one, securing vividness without sacrificing truth.

Professor Jared Sparks, the most painstaking of historians, used to tell us in college that no man could write history well without enough of imaginative power to make it graphic.

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The fables of children and of child-like nations, even where they give tongues to animals and trees, have an element of truth which causes them now to be collected for the purposes of science. While the philosopher looks for the signs of human emotion in the facial expression of animals, children boldly go farther, and attribute words as well as signs. "I was never so be-rhymed," says Shakespeare's Rosalind, "since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember." But children, as Heine says, still remember when they were animals and trees; and the theory of transmigration always has great fascination for them, as all those who were brought up on 'Evenings at Home" will recall. Even the conception of their own preexistence sometimes gets into their heads. A meditative little fellow, the son of a friend of mine, waked one morning with the mystical remark on his lips: "Mamma, we have all been here more than once, and I was only the last that was sent." the thought of God and of the future life, too, their imaginations have play, sometimes leading to the most familiar and amusing utterances, and then to words that help older minds to trust a higher guidance, and to keep an outlook into spheres unseen. The easy faith of children strengthens our own, and reminds us that the very word "juvenile" comes from the Latin juvo, which means "to help."

In

Every autumn I collect in my room the young seed-vessels of the common milkweed, which may be found by every roadside. They presently open, and all winter long the graceful tufts of sheeny silk are slowly detaching themselves with constant, tireless, noiseless motion; each mounting into the currents of warm air and silently floating away. You cannot keep these little voyagers down; you cannot guide them as they soar; they are presently found clinging in unexpected places and are set free at a touch, to float away again; they occupy the room with a delicate aërial life of their own. Like these winged things are the fancies of childhood, giving to the vital seed of thought its range; bearing it lightly over impurities and obstructions, till it falls into some fitting soil at last, there to recreate itself and bear fruit a hundred fold.

"WHY, it looks like hooks and eyes!" said a friend to whom the book was shown. It did look like hooks and eyes. But, then, what can one expect of Tamil? It is bad enough to have a Sanskrit text forced on one's attention, although its solid letters are of considerable beauty, and augur well for the nobility of the language; but Tamil! Why should not Tamil look like hooks and eyes? Nevertheless the dictionary says that it is a language spoken by some ten millions of thriving aboriginals of Lower India, and ten millions of human beings are not to be put aside irreverently; neither do hooks and eyes, delicately shaped and arranged in line across a page from left to right, form such an ungraceful sight, after all; the open-handed fling of some of the Tamil letters gives the character a decided individuality. One who 'tells fortunes by the handwriting would say that the writers of Tamil must have been imaginative persons of a romantic turn of mind.

It was a piece of chance-work that Tamil turned up at all. In Ann street, on a spot now occupied by an ugly iron hive for offices, there stood formerly an old bookstore, infested, as if he were a spider, by a tall and grimy seller of second-hand books. He is gone, and his memory is embalmed in two popular reports,-one that New Orleans and an immense fortune has claimed him, the other that he is dead. Peace be with him in any case, for one day he stood on a table in the back part of his shop, and, murmuring words which he called English, but which none but a Creole Frenchman could understand, began stirring about in the thick dust of a certain shelf. Among a shower of Oriental manuscripts, old English books minus their covers, and the usual run of an old book-shop, there was one flat, gray octavo, which, being gingerly pried open, proved to be all hooks and eyes-in fact the Grammatica Damulica. If the question should arise why Damulica and Tamil are interchangeable, let it be understood that the Indians are to blame. They do not care a button whether you pronounce it D or T.

The next thing to do was to attempt roughly the deciphering of one or two letters of the curious alphabet. The hook which represented K was not only oftenest recurrent in the words, but looked strangely like the same letter in Sanskrit; much thinner, it is true, and very much curled. Then there was a nasal formed of three joined slim O's,

| which, together with a down-stroke, looked the shadow of that Sanskrit "n" which is pronounced from the roof of the mouth. Proceeding in this manner, the likeness of the Tamil written character to Sanskrit became patent, and memory hastened to recall a passage in a paper of Professor Wm. Dwight Whitney on India-now published in his second series of "Oriental and Linguistic Studies "—in which he alludes to the Tamils as a people found in India by that Sanskritspeaking race calling itself Arya which imposed its religion and letters on the occupants of the soil. This, then, was a Grammar of that people, and its written character showed the foreign source. In one alphabet, as in the other, the lengthening of words by a down-stroke placed immediately behind them is almost the same, as also the signs for the vowels "o" and "i" when they occur in the middle of a word. The same sign for “e” has been shifted from above the consonant to a position before it, and receives in Tamil hands a fine spiral sweep which gives it the shape of a pine shaving. As a consequence, the open, rolling text scorns space and that economy of paper which produces compactness in other languages. The writer of Tamil has no taste for the Sanskrit dot above the line which represents an "m," just as Western monks abbreviated the same letter in Latin. His "m" is an open right angle with a long foot ending in a flourish. But another fact of later discovery accounted for the peculiar length of Tamil words. Like all nations, it has its own fashion of articulation and probably its own individuality in the organs of speech. This consists in the inability or dislike to pronounce many combinations of consonants. Consequently short syllables containing one consonant take the place of two or three consonants, somewhat as Italian appears when compared to German. The tendency is shown in words of Sanskrit origin; thus, Brahma becomes Biruma. A single sound will sometimes take up half an inch of paper if the characters be printed on the scale, as to height, of the capitals on this page.

But curiosity once satisfied as to the identity of Grammatica Damulica, the next point of interest was the title-page. There Bartholomæus Ziegenbalg, Missionary of his Most Serene King of Denmark in the Oriental Indies, informs us that his book was composed on a travel through Europe, or on a Danish ship. Such particularity of state

It is pathetic to hear the bitterness breaking through his "conferences," and not less so is the brave face he puts on in the preface to his Tamil Grammar. His conversions, it is to be feared, were even fewer than the number he gives, and of those assured, how many were from interested motives? Let those answer who have been missionaries in Oriental lands. With him the difficulty was the same that missionaries find at the present day, but he had not the means of judging which we now possess. When his heathen opponents acknowledged the folly and wickedness of their rites, he could not see why they should hesitate; but they were perfectly aware that their debased religion rested on as sound precepts as his, and, like his, was daily perverted from the truth. He made the great mistake of treating Brahmans as heathen.

It is one thing to attack the savage rites of a barbarous tribe, and another, the ingrained religious observances of a mighty and deep religion. Ziegenbalg could not get sight of those mysterious sacred books the priests spoke of, and which we now know as the Vedas, and therefore concluded that they were myths; he looked upon the Tamils as

| low-grade savages, who allowed themselves to be imposed upon by the priests, while the latter juggled them with idols. What he said was partly true, but he did not know that the faithful inquirer, who penetrated at last into the arcana, discovered there the same great truths which underlay Ziegenbalg's faith; that was the knowledge he lacked, perhaps fortunately lacked, for it might have weakened that fiery energy of his, and the West would have been compelled to wait still longer for the Tamil Grammar.

Thus from two great nations, which issued, no one knows when, from some Central Asiatic region, no one knows where, came priests to the Tamil. The Brahmans came first, and Ziegenbalg found their work done. They had permitted idols, fostered the giving of sacrifices, reaped for themselves the benefits of appeals to charity, given the nation the kind of outward religion suited to their development. The Teutonic missionary arrived centuries later, and attempted to introduce among them a religion of the highest European stamp. It was as if he had come to Tranquebar with a cargo of hooks, and found in all Damulia no eyes.