man of his day?  I have just had it, and if it is new to you, I recommend it as an agreeable book to read at night just before you go to bed.  There is much curious matter concerning Catharine II.’s famous expedition into Taurida, which puts down some of the romantic stories prevalent on that score, but relates more surprising realities.  Also it gives much interesting information about that noble philosopher, Joseph II., and about the Turkish tactics and national character.’

* * * * *

’Cambridge, Jan. 1830.—­You need not fear to revive painful recollections.  I often think of those sad experiences.  True, they agitate me deeply.  But it was best so.  They have had a most powerful effect on my character.  I tremble at whatever looks like dissimulation.  The remembrance of that evening subdues every proud, passionate impulse.  My beloved supporter in those sorrowful hours, your image shines as fair to my mind’s eye as it did in 1825, when I left you with my heart overflowing with gratitude for your singular and judicious tenderness.  Can I ever forget that to your treatment in that crisis of youth I owe the true life,—­the love of Truth and Honor?’

[Footnote A:  Lydia Maria Child.]

LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE.

BY JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

* * * * *

  “Extraordinary, generous seeking.”

  GOETHE.

  “Through, brothers, through,—­this be
  Our watchword in danger or sorrow,
  Common clay to its mother dust,
  All nobleness heavenward!”

  THEODORE KOERNER.

  “Thou friend whose presence on my youthful heart
  Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain;
  How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
  In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
  Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
  And walk as free as light the clouds among!”

  SHELLY.

“There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions of society, of the emergency of the case with the despotism of the rule.  It is this, which, while it makes the interest of life, makes the difficulty of living.  It is a struggle, indeed, between unequal powers,—­between the man, who is a conscious moral person, and nature, or events, or bodies of men, which either want personality or unity; and hence the man, after fearful and desolating war, sometimes rises on the ruins of all the necessities of nature and all the prescriptions of society.  But what these want in personality they possess in number, in recurrency, in invulnerability.  The spirit of man, an agent indeed of curious power and boundless resource, but trembling with sensibilities, tender and irritable, goes out against the inexorable conditions of destiny, the lifeless forces of nature, or the ferocious cruelty of the multitude, and long before the hands are weary or the invention exhausted, the heart may be broken in the warfare.”

  N.A.  REVIEW, Jan., 1817, article “Dichtung und Wahrheit.”