“This,” says Mr. Bayard Taylor, in the Notes to his translation of Faust, “this is an old song of the people of Germany.  Herder published it in his Volkslieder, in 1779, but it was no doubt familiar to Goethe in his childhood.  The original melody, to which it is still sung, is as simple and sweet as the words.”

AMONG THE PERUVIANS.

The extremes of civilization and barbarism are nearer together in those countries which the Spaniards have wrested from their native inhabitants, than in any other portion of the globe.  Before other European races, aboriginal tribes, even the fiercest, gradually disappear.  They hold their own before the descendants of the conquistadores, who conquered the New World only to be conquered by it.  Out of Spain the Spaniard deteriorates, and nowhere so much as in South America.  Of course he is superior there to the best of the Indian tribes with which he is thrown in contact; but we doubt whether he is superior to the intelligent, but forgotten, races which peopled the regions around him centuries before Pizzaro set foot therein, and which built enormous cities whose ruins have long been overgrown by forests.  To compare the Spaniard of to-day, in Peru, with its ancient Incas is to do him no honor.  To be sure, he is a good Catholic, which the Incas were not, but he is indolent, enervated, and enslaved by his own passions.  His religion has not done much for him—­at least in this world, whatever it may do in the next.  It has done still less, if that be possible, for the aboriginal Peruvians.

“In all parts of Peru,” says a recent traveler, “except amongst the savage Indian tribes, Christianity, at least nominally prevails.  The aborigines, however, converted by the sword in the old days of Spanish persecution, do not, as a rule, seem to have more notion of that faith in the country parts, than such as may be obtained from stray visits of some errant, image-bearing friar, whose principal object is to obtain sundry reals in consideration of prayers offered to his little idols.  These wandering ministers also distribute execrably colored prints of various saints, besides having indulgences for sale.  As to the nature of the pious offerings from their disciples, they are not at all particular.  They go upon the easy principle that all is fish that comes into their net.  If the ignorant and superstitious givers have not ‘filthy lucre’ wherewithal to propitiate the ugly represented saints, wax candles, silver ore, cacao, sugar, and any other description of property is as readily received.  Thus, it often happens that these peripatetic friars have a long convoy of heavily-laden mules with which to gladden the members of their monastery when they return home.

[Illustration:  FASHIONABLE LOUNGERS OF LIMA.]