his translations of German and Italian lyrics retain the very tone and spirit of the original thought. His merit as a lyric poet is enhanced by the exceeding simplicity and crystal clearness of his language. He rarely takes any but the sharply-cut and expressive words in common use. Sometimes he even sacrifices dignity, though never aptness of diction, in his close adherence to Saxon speech. Like Goethe, he turns the simplest language into living pictures of his ideas. His lyrics are remarkable for their melody. Though his blank verse seldom trips in rhythm, and flows on almost like impassioned prose, his mastery of the lyric measure is complete. He even rivals Shelley. The strain is always musical, and often he seems to use words only to embody the mysterious music of another world. None but some lone spirit like himself can feel the full force of his lyric inspiration; yet whenever he touches the common sympathies of the race, his lyrics glow with the fire and energy of Burns. What lover of his country does not feel the blood quicken in his veins, as he reads "New England," "The Flag," and "To the Eagle"? Who that has held communion with high thoughts can fail of sympathy with "Genius Waking"? Who that has struggled up to fame, and felt its emptiness, will not respond to his "Farewell to my Lyre"? Who that has passionately loved an ideal will not be touched by the pure crystal beauty of his songs? Who can fail to drink in with joy the clear melody of "The Serenade" and "Midnight Music"? What softened pathos in his elegiac verse! What a lofty feeling courses through that address to the sun in "Prometheus," beginning, "Centre of light and energy!" Yet beautiful as his lyrics are in expression and melody, like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, which

"Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart,”

they are mostly lacking in those touches of feeling which "make the whole world kin.”

His sonnets, however, are not less remarkable for depth of feeling than for delicate finish and nice shadings of thought. The limitations of the sonnet at once restrained his tendency to pile thought on thought in endless succession, and gratified his pride in mastering the difficulties of versification.. The

sonnet, indeed, is in one sense a measure of poetic power. It is the true confessional of poets. Perhaps no other form of composition has been so generally cultivated in English poetry; and it is curious to notice how, in the hands of different poets, it clings close to the heart, and wrests thence the secrets of the inner life. For Spenser and Sidney it became the record of sweet and tender fancies; with Shakespeare, gently veiling the events of his personal history, it was infused with manly vigor; at one time harsh with the war-cry of religious liberty, at another, plaintive with self-chiding, it gains added strength in the hands of Milton; Wordsworth still further widens its sphere, and breathes into it his "sweet, silent thoughts" with Nature, not less than his earnest meditations on human life; Hartley Coleridge lends it rare sweetness and gentle movement; Keats pours into it the passing emotions of his singularly ideal life; Lowell trusts it with feelings almost too delicate for words; Mrs. Browning and Jones Very utter in it their mystical religious aspirations; while Percival fills it with the sad, thoughtful, and often religious yearnings of his lonely life. He delighted to express in it his passionate love of Nature and Beauty and Truth. How gentle and deep is the feeling here embodied, and how felicitously expressed!

"O Evening! I have loved thee with a joy
Tender and pure, and thou hast ever been
A soother of my sorrows.
When a boy,

I wandered often to a lonely glen,

And, far from all the stir and noise of men,
Held fond communion with unearthly things,

Such as come gathering brightly round us, when
Imagination soars and shakes her wings.

Yes, in that secret valley, doubly dear

For all its natural beauty, and the hush

That ever brooded o'er it, I would lay

My thoughts in deepest calm, and if a bush
Rustled, or small bird shook the beechen spray,

There seemed a ministering angel whispering near."

In the following sonnet the poet seems to have given a true picture of the earnest, thoughtful spirit with which he turned to Nature as the sole companion of his meditations:

"O Thou sole-sitting Spirit of Loneliness!
Whose haunt is by the wild and dropping caves,
Thou of the musing eye and scattered tress,
I meet thee with a passionate joy, no less
Than when the mariner, from off his waves,
Catches the glimpses of a far blue shore,
He thinks the danger of his voyage o’er,
And, pressing all his canvas, steers to land,
With a glad bosom and a ready hand.

So I would hie me to thy desolate shade,
And seat myself in some deep-sheltered nook,
And never breathe a wish again to look

On the tossed world, but rather, listless laid,
Pore on the bubbles of the passing brook."

ART. V. Histoire de l'Esclavage dans l'Antiquité. Par H. WALLON, Licencié en Droit, Maître de Conférences à l'École Normale, Professeur Suppléant d'Histoire Moderne à la Faculté des Lettres de Paris. Paris: Imprimé par Autorisation du Roi, à l'Imprimerie Royale. MDCCCXLVII. 3 vols. 8vo.

THE decay and final overthrow of the Roman Republic form a series of events so grand in their proportions, so tragic in their incidents, and so important in their results, as to have merited and won the careful attention of the most sagacious students of history. Its causes if ascertained should be warnings in all times and among all nations; for causes themselves are simple and of constant recurrence, it is only their combinations that are manifold and of special application. But the disease which prostrated this mighty state was in itself so complicated, it lay so long hidden while its victim was vainly boasting of exuberant strength, and when at length it burst into view its attack was so virulent and fatal, that it is no wonder inquirers are baffled in their investigations, or led by specious symptoms to neglect the true seat of the malady. All of the various causes assigned, the inherent defects of

the political organization, the inadequacy of the control exercised by religion, the blasting influence of slavery, the enormous expansion of territory, the corrupting flood of wealth which poured in from Eastern conquests, the mischievous tenure of land, all these played their part in this melancholy drama; but the precise harm done by each, and how far each was an essential and adequate cause, how far a mere temporary adjunct, these are problems difficult to solve.

One of the causes enumerated above has been exhaustively discussed by M. Wallon, in its whole nature and bearing on the history of antiquity. His three volumes are devoted to slavery in Greece and the Orient, under the Roman Republic, and under the Empire. After considering the baneful effects of this institution, he adds:

"Latifundia perdidere Italiam, moxque provincias. The great domains! It is the form, in fact, under which this destructive action was carried on; but the principle of the evil was slavery. It is slavery, which, taking possession of the country, drove the free class to the city; it is slavery which in this seat still disputed with it for labor: so that, shut out from all honorable careers, it perished in corruption, and left empty, in the city, that place which the slaves then came to take by means of emancipation." - Vol. II. p. 392.

We propose to examine the process by which this was accomplished, with the aid we can derive from Wallon's work, and from Mommsen's Römische Geschichte, in which we find the most satisfactory discussion of the social and political changes under the Roman Republic.

The character of Roman slavery varied of course with the social and political institutions of the state, and may in general be divided into three periods. In the first, or patriarchal era, the slave was a member of the family; in the second, the later republic, he was an instrument of capital and speculation; in the last, he became a mere appendage to an establishment, kept rather for ostentation than for gain. It is hardly necessary to say, that neither of these forms existed independently of the others, nor can any precise epoch be assigned when one gave way to another. In general, it may be said that the second period lasted from shortly after the second Punic war almost to the time of the establishment of the Empire. Let us briefly

examine these periods, and see what influence slavery exerted in each over the public welfare.

Probably no state out of Asia has presented the patriarchal form of society so completely as Rome under its original, or patrician government. Each family formed a unit, the paterfamilias having power even of life and death over all his sons with their families, and over his unmarried daughters. The family also included the clients, who stood in a relation of dependence, and the slaves, who were absolute property. Powerful gentes, like the Fabii and Claudii, had large numbers of adherents of both classes. We learn, for example, that Attus Clausus migrated to Rome with no less than five thousand followers. Wealth in those days consisted in land, and what the wealthy land-owner could not cultivate with his own hands was divided into smaller estates, and given in trust to his clients or slaves, - probably for a low rent payable in kind. Thus the cultivation of large estates was, as Mommsen expresses it, not large-farming (Grosswirthschaft), "but a multiplication of small-farming" (eine vervielfältigte Kleinwirthschaft). Probably most of the citizens, however, had only as much land as each could cultivate, with the help perhaps of a single slave.*

"The patrimony of the Roman was in early times generally confined within these narrow limits, two jugera [about one acre]; afterward seven. There was put in practice at Rome a maxim which the Carthaginians put at least in writing; that the father of a family should be really master of the field, it was demanded that its extent should never surpass the measure of his means (ses forces). It is still within these limits that the portions assigned to citizens sent into colonies were comprised, and Manius Curius, the conquerors of the Samnites, declared him a dangerous citizen who was not satisfied with this. So long as property was confined within these limits, slavery, it is easily understood, must be much restricted. The father of the family could scarcely have more than one assistant in his labors. Also the slave was sufficiently designated by the name of his master. They said the slave of Quintus, of Marcus, Quintipor, Marcipor (Q. puer; M. puer); these old denominations had, according to Pliny, no other origin; and when

* It must not be supposed that this state of society was confined to Patrician Rome. It existed among other Italian nations, and a plebeian had the same right as paterfamilias with a patrician.