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From “Western Clearings.”

=_209._= THE BEE TREE.

One of the greatest temptations to our friend Silas, and to most of his class, is a bee hunt.  Neither deer, nor ’coons, nor prairie hens, nor even bears, prove half as powerful enemies to anything like regular business, as do these little thrifty vagrants of the forest.  The slightest hint of a bee tree will entice Silas Ashburn and his sons from the most profitable job of the season, even though the defection is sure to result in entire loss of the offered advantage; and if the hunt prove successful, the luscious spoil is generally too tempting to allow of any care for the future, so long as the “sweet’nin” can be persuaded to last.  “It costs nothing,” will poor Mrs. Ashburn observe; “let ’em enjoy it.  It isn’t often we have such good luck.”

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=_Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1810-1850._= (Manual, p. 502.)

From “At Home and Abroad.”

=_210._= CHARACTER OF CARLYLE.

Accustomed to the infinite wit and exhuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes.  He does not converse,—­only harangues.  It is the usual misfortune of such marked men (happily not one invariable or inevitable) that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.  Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound.  This is not the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; on the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought; but it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase.  Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing, but in his arrogance there is no littleness or self-love:  it is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror,—­it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons.  You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere, and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron, in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you if you senselessly go too near.  He seemed to me quite isolated, lonely as the desert; yet never was man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood.  He finds such, but only in the past.  He sings rather than talks.  He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heretical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up near the beginning some