conceived the beautiful idea, that certain rivers are holy, and that their waters have the power of cleansing from all sin. The Ganges is, as it always has been, that river of the Hindoos." As the Jews and Catholic pilgrims visit their Jordan, so the Hindoos, from the remotest parts of the earth, must visit their sacred river at least once in a life-time. Those that can, come here to die in the holy city of Benares, on its banks, as the pious Jew seeks a grave in the valley of Jehosaphat. They think heaven is more accessible from this place than any other. Princes and men of wealth build costly temples on its banks. And hither they bring their dead, where thousands of fires consume their remains by perpetual burnings. Bathing pilgrims are all dressed in snow-white robes. Laving in its sacred waters unloads the soul from sins. So they believe. Thither many a mother brings her new-born babe, either to wash or drown. it in its stream.

HAND-WRITING.

Was Chesterfield correct when he said, that "every man, who has the use of his eyes and his right hand can write whatever hand he pleases?" If so, would Byron have put his burning verse into such a miserable school-boy scrawl, Emerson write so sprawling a hand, or Napoleon I. have written the worst hand on record-so bad that his letters to Josephine from Germany were sometimes mistaken for maps of the seat of war? No doubt the vileness of his pot-hooks was aggravated by the speed, with which he wrote. Jacob Bryant said of Archdeacon Coxe's hieroglyphics, that they could be called neither a hand nor a fist, but a foot, and that a club one. Sydney Smith's hand, with the exception of Jeffrey's, was the worst that Constable's printers had to puzzle out for the "Edinburgh Review." He himself compared it to the hieroglyphics of a swarm of ants escaping from an ink-bottle, and walking over a sheet of paper without wiping their legs. When his wife inclosed to him an illegible passage from one of his letters from London, containing directions about the management of his farm, and asked for an explanation, he simply returned it with the remark, that he must decline ever reading his own hand-writing twenty-four hours after he had written it!

Rufus Choate's hand-writing could not be deciphered without the help of a pair of compasses and a quadrant. The best specimens look like the hieroglyphics on a Chinese tea chest. Having been invited on a certain occasion to address a public meeting in New Hampshire, he replied by letter; but the committee, after puzzling for hours over the scrawl, despaired of deciphering it, and were obliged to send a special message to learn his answer.

A BIOGRAPHY CARVED IN MARBLE.

BY THE EDITOR.

Man shrinks from oblivion. He pants for the imperishable. Mortal man evermore sighs for immortality. Not only in the world beyond, in the "Great Hereafter," but in time and space, he longs to live on in the hearts and memories of his fellows. Hereafter, was the last word that fell from the lips of Peter the Great, when dying. But what hereafter did he mean? In his hereafter

we are now living.

I still remember with what solemn impressions I stood for the first time before one of the statues of Phidias. The gray moss of twenty-five hundred years had gathered on it. It was standing in a square of Rome. His name, carved on it. A grand human body, surmounted by a head to suit it, he had cut in marble, so symmetrical and fully developed, as if it had grown into its present shape from a baby. The noble Greek did it. His mind moulded it in Athens. And now, after the changes, battles, victories, and defeats of twenty-five hundred years, it turns up in a market-place of Rome. Since then Empires have risen and fallen, Kings and Emperors have been made and unmade, but the grand work of the old Greek has defied the tooth of time, and is admired and studied by the roving children of the nineteenth century after, no less than by the Athenians in the fourth century before Christ. How rarely can men rear for themselves such enduring monuments as did Phidias. Herein the sculptor has the advantage. The painter paints on perishable material. The last Supper of Da Vinci, at Milan, has almost crumbled to dust. Many of the works of Raphael, Rubens, Titian, and other masters, need continual retouching. The best color fades, the best canvas decays; becomes worm or moth-eaten, but marble gains with age. The grayer and the more moss-covered, the grander. The philosopher, poet, theologian, put their grand thoughts in books, or at best impress them on human hearts and minds. Again they propagate their thoughts in other minds. Thus Shakspeare and Bacon live on in their disciples, and in the systeins, laws, and constitutions of the nations of the earth. the sculptor's thought is petrified; it retains its original shape, upon which the passing crowd of two thousand years can look, and through it commune with the author, and learn the lessons which he teaches.

But

Many of the finest statues in the principal cities of Europe have the name of Thorwalsden inscribed on them. The King of Bavaria in Munich; Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, in the market-place of Mayence. Goethe, Schiller and other great men, stand in their places, in summer's heat and winter's cold, in the silence of midnight when the watchman goes on his lonely beat, and in the busy, noisy noonday they proclaim the genius who put their features and form into a permanent mould-Albert Thorwalsden. Bertel his Danish admirers call him, Alberto the Italians.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, November 19th, 1770, he was born. His father, Gotto Kalk, was a poor wood carver, his mother, the daughter of a Jutland peasant, poor enough too. They had to work hard for their living, in the cold inhospitable North-land. They lived in a poor hut, near the wharf, where trade, tricks, dirt, dogs, and dismal sounds abounded. Hans Christian Andersen, a brother genius of the same city, tells us in one of his sweet stories, that the Copenhagen dogs make day and night hideous by incessant howlings.

It was a dreary Northern home into which Bertel was born. In his untidy cradle, the baby was left many an hour neglected, mingling his cries with the howls of the curs around him. It is said he loved his bottle-most likely such a bottle as afflicted. and neglected babies often get to love for want of something better.

Karen Thorwalsden was a little fat woman, plump in form and speech, and withal not lacking in a certain kind of prettiness. She seems to have taken domestic matters somewhat easy, and left her baby genius to crow and kick up his heels in his confined quarters to his heart's content.

As much of the house work as was done, she did; nor nurse nor hired help of any kind could they keep. While she bore the father's daily dinners to the ship-yard, Bertel and the dogs were mutually the monarchs of all they surveyed. For Gotto Kalk Thorwalsden was a wood carver, and maintained his family by carving figure-heads for merchant vessels. And many a merry joke passed between the plump young mother and the admiring ship builders, when she brought her diligent spouse his noon-day coffee. It was a poor craft wherewith to support a family.

By doing his very best they got a home, and a poor one at that. But honest, virtuous, diligent they both were-he perhaps more so than she. Still she too, for a mother with a baby, to attend to and provide for her household, cook, wash, sweep, scrub, and daily carry the meals many squares to her husband, must be wide awake to get through with her work.

Meanwhile Bertel began to crawl, and walk, and gambol after

his mother, bearing the dinner kettle to the ship-yard. The sharp boy soon became a favorite with the ship builders, whom he greatly delighted with his apt jokes. This makes me think that after all the dog companions of the baby must have done all the crying, since no peevish, fretful, crying baby is ever likely to take to joking. He watched his father carving at his wooden figures.

Many years after, when he had become the great Thorwalsden, the ship carpenters in their old age, with pride described the pretty child, with blue eyes and light hair, who used to come to see his father in the ship-yards of Copenhagen.

One day Bertel was playing in the market-place with other boys. There stood a large equestrian statue of Christian V. of Denmark. The King astride of a great horse, the noble steed trampling the Monster Envy under his feet. While the other boys went after their play, the eye of the boy-genius fell on the statue. After a while the other boys found him standing before, and, forgetful of his whereabouts, lost in thought while he gazed upon it. His mischievous comrades raised him on the back of the horse, and then ran away. Perched on his lofty seat, cleaving fast to King Charles, the bewildered Bertel, with his red cotton cap, soon attracted the police, who harmlessly carried him to the police-station and then sent him home.

"The child is father to the man." It was so in this case. He was fond of sketching, and for a boy sketched remarkably well. His father got him to draw the designs for his wooden figures. Till his eleventh year he received no schooling but what he picked up at home. This neglect of his early education is seen throughout his noted life. In his letters and conversation one is constantly surprised with the glaring defects of scholarship in the great master of Sculpture. Little did the father dream of the future greatness of his son. Still such talents as he showed in drawing, he thought gave promise that a better fate than the father's awaited the son.

In

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, was a freeschool. There he began his studies, at eleven years of age. two years he learned enough to become quite a help to his father. He was a good student, but good only at one branch. In the usual branches of study he was good for nothing. Only in Sculpture he was zealous. During six years he made such little progress, that the Chaplain of the school became greatly discouraged with him. Even his Catechism he had so much neglected, that he was put in the lowest class, although seventeen years of age. How could good pastor Höyer confirm such a blockhead? Just then prizes were awarded among the students for progress in the Fine Arts. Bertel was rewarded with a small silver medal. The city

journals published the name of the successful boy, with flattering comments. The Chaplain read the notice, but never dreamed, that the successful Thorwalsden was his stupid pupil. When he came to school, the severe man of God asked the boy of marble:

"Thorwalsden, is it a brother of yours, who has just taken a prize at the Academy?"

Bertel blushed and timidly stammered, "It is myself, Herr Kaplain."

"Herr Thorwalsden, please pass up to the first class," exclaimed the astonished pastor in the hearing of all the boys.

In that country the title "Herr," as applied to a boy or youth, is a mark of extraordinary respect. When an old man, and burdened with the honors and decorations of royal favor, he was in the habit of saying, that glory had never been so sweet as on the day when good pastor Höyer called him "Herr Thorwalsden."

He became more calm, manly, and modest. Spoke little and thought much, and when at work, brought all his powers to bear upon it. All the while he carried his father's dinner to the shipyard, and was an obedient boy. And while Gotto Kalk ate his frugal meal, Bertel took up the chisel to correct and finish his father's work. No wonder the father thought of making his son a partner in his humble ill-paid toil. Two years later he gained another prize. Now he knows enough for a wood carver, thought the father. One of the Professors plead for the son. How unwise, indeed cruel, to smother a genius by tying him to life-long menial drudgery. But the old man wished his son to come honestly by his daily bread. That, he thought, a wood carver could do as well as any one. To start him on the path of a great man, might make him a fast and bad man.

At length the parent and professor compromised the matter. Half his time Bertel should help his father to work, the other study in the Academy. Meanwhile he continued to live at home, in the lowly hut of his parents. His mind soon outgrew the rude carvings of the ship-yard. In book studies, he was dull. At practical work, designing and moulding statues with clay, he excelled. Whilst his comrades discussed, he was busy with his clay. He translated his ideas into marble. The chisel was his pen. With it he engraved his grand ideas into the imperishable stone.

He was naturally diffident. He shrank from a task for which he was better fitted than any other student. Fearful that he could not succeed, he tried to escape from the school. A professor gently chides him, coaxes him to his work. The result was his Heliodorus, which won him the most flattering compliments.

Although much honored, he remained meek. He talked but little. His clear eye was not exempt from a certain melancholy dif