[Footnote 57:  A native of Philadelphia, who has resided much abroad, and pursued a varied literary career; he possesses a familiarity with the German language and character, which he has turned to good account in the comic ballads by Hans Breitman.]

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=_George William Curtis, 1824-._= (Manual, p. 504.)

From “Nile Notes of a Howadji.”

=_243._= UNDER THE PALMS.

Thenceforward, in the land of Egypt, palms are perpetual.  They are the only foliage of the Nile; for we will not harm the modesty of a few mimosas and sycamores, by foolish claims.  They are the shade of the mud villages, marking their site in the landscape, so that the groups of palms are the number of villages.  They fringe the shore and the horizon.  The sun sets golden behind them, and birds sit swinging upon their boughs and float gloriously among their trunks; on the ground beneath are flowers; the sugar-cane is not harmed by the ghostly shade, nor the tobacco, and the yellow flowers of the cotton-plant star its dusk at evening.  The children play under them; the old men crone and smoke; the surly bison and the conceited camels repose.  The old Bible-pictures are ceaselessly painted, but with softer, clearer colors, than in the venerable book.

...  But the eye never wearies of palms, more than the ear of singing-birds.  Solitary they stand upon the sand, or upon the level, fertile land in groups, with a grace and dignity that no tree surpasses.  Very soon the eye beholds in their forms the original type of the columns which it will afterwards admire in the temples.  Almost the first palm is architecturally suggestive, even in those western gardens—­but to artists living among them and seeing only them! men’s hands are not delicate in the early ages, and the fountain fairness of the palms is not very flowingly fashioned in the capitals; but in the flowery perfection of the Parthenon the palm triumphs.  The forms of those columns came from Egypt, and that which was the suspicion of the earlier workers, was the success of more delicate designing.  So is the palm inwound with our art, and poetry, and religion, and of all trees would the Howadji be a palm, wide-waving peace and plenty, and feeling his kin to the Parthenon and Raphael’s pictures.

But nature is absolute taste, and has no pure ornament, so that the palm is no less useful than beautiful.  The family is infinite, and ill understood.  The cocoa-nut, date, and sago, are all palms.  Ropes and sponges are wrought of their tough interior fibre.  The various fruits are nutritious; the wood, the roots, and the leaves, are all consumed.  It is one of nature’s great gifts to her spoiled sun-darlings.  Whoso is born of the sun is made free of the world.  Like the poet Thompson, he may put his hands in his pockets and eat apples at leisure.

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=_John L. McConnell, 1826-._= (Manual, p. 510.)