without passing through the same long, tedious process of reorganizalion as in France during the post-revolutionary period. And for this reason, that the morphological development of Russia into a constitutional state may be expected to transpire in a quick succession of events when once the impulse is given. This rapidity of movement is peculiar to the history of new states like Russia. For here we may expect the operation of the biological law prevailing in the organic world, according to which the genesis of the individual is a short and rapid recapitulation of that of the tribe to which it belongs, by means of heredity and adaptation. Russia may still be considered in this stage of embryonic evolution which precedes the birth of a free nation, but passing rapidly through those stages which it has taken centuries of slow development to accomplish in that family of European nations to which she has been affiliated, and from which she has received her civilization by inheritance and adaptation.

Which of the two alternatives will be chosen it would be presumptuous to predict. The present dejection of Nihilism and the conciliatory measures adopted of late by the imperial government may perhaps be regarded as symptoms of a peaceful solution. In either case, the present crisis marks an important epoch in the history of national life in Russia.-MORITZ Kaufmann, in The Contemporary Review.

GEIST'S GRAVE.

FOUR years!-and didst thou stay above
The ground which hides thee now but four?

And all that life, and all that love,

Were crowded Geist! into no more?

Only four years those winning ways,

Which make me for thy presence yearn,

Call'd us to pet thee or to praise,

Dear little friend! at every turn?

That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span
To run their course, and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?

That liquid, melancholy eye,

From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry,*

The sense of tears in mortal things

That steadfast, mournful strain consoled
By spirits gloriously gay,

And temper of heroic mold

What, was four years their whole short day?

Yes, only four!-and not the course

Of all the centuries yet to come, And not the infinite resource

Of Nature, with her countless sum

Of figures, with her fullness vast
Of new creation evermore,
Can ever quite repeat the past,
Or just thy little self restore.

Stern law of every mortal lot!

Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, And builds himself I know not whatOf second life I know not where.

But, thou, when struck thine hour to go,
On us, who stood despondent by,
A meek last glance of love didst throw,
And humbly lay thee down to die.

Yet would we keep thee in our heart-
Would fix our favorite on the scene;
Nor let thee utterly depart

And be as if thou ne'er hadst been.

And so there rise these lines of verse

On lips that rarely form them now;

While to each other we rehearse:

Such ways, such arts, such looks hadst thou!

We stroke thy broad brown paws again,
We bid thee to thy vacant chair,

We greet thee by the window-pane,
We hear thy scuffle on the stair;

*Sunt lacrimæ rerum!

We see the flaps of thy large ears,
Quick raised to ask which way we go;
Crossing the frozen lake, appears

Thy small black figure on the snow!

Nor to us only art thou dear,

Who mourn thee in thine English home;
Thou hast thine absent master's tear,
Dropped by the far Australian foam.

Thy memory lasts both here and there,
And thou shalt live as long as we;
And after that-thou dost not care!
In us was all the world to thee.

Yet, fondly zealous for thy fame,
Even to a date beyond our own,
We strive to carry down thy name
By mounded turf and graven stone.

We lay thee, close within our reach,

Here, where the grass is smooth and warm, Between the holly and the beech,

Where oft we watch'd thy couchant form,

Asleep, yet lending half an ear

To travelers on the Portsmouth roadThere choose we thee, O guardian dear, Mark'd with a stone, thy last abode!

Then some, who through this garden pass,
When we too, like thyself, are clay,
Shall see thy grave upon the grass,
And stop before the stone and say:

"People who lived here long ago Did by this stone, it seems, intend To name for future times to know

The dachs-hound, Geist, their little friend.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD, in The Fortnightly Review

CALIFORNIAN SOCIETY.

The Resources of California. By JOHN S. HITTELL. Sixth edition. San Francisco, 1864.

THE traveler, when he comes to look over his journal, after having accomplished the tour of the world, can scarcely fail to be struck with the fact that, from a sociological point of view, one country riveted his attention more than any other, and that that country was California. We have chosen it as the subject of this article for two reasons: first, because we can speak of it from personal knowledge; and, secondly, because we feel satisfied that it is a subject just at present deserving the earnest attention of every thinking mindsince the phenomena exhibited in the development of so complex a social organism as is there presented must ever be "giving place to new," and, taken as a whole, can scarcely be repeated again elsewhere for many a long age to come.

For the student of past history there is little to learn: the space of a single century covers all he can hope to know; his facts are patent, and, there being few reasons for falsification, his authorities are generally trustworthy. For the student of sociology, on the other hand, that wonderful belt of land pent in between the Sierra and the sea presents a series of materials which, while by their numerical aggregate they convince him of the prairie-like extent of his subject, by their heterogeneity utterly dumfound him when he seeks to reduce them to a systematized form. He feels that the congeries before him, thrown together though it has been in comparatively a moment of time, if taken piecemeal, would require a life-work to digest; while the anomalies of the present mock all his boldest efforts to forecast a future. Whether the bent of his studies leads him to trace the growth of civilization from its cradle in the forest, where its representative is the Indian of lowest type, to its premature grave in the city, where the whisky of the states meets the opium of Asia; or, dwelling on the present alone, to watch the effect of the mingling of so many waters as are gathered together in the "Golden City," he will find, alike,.phenomena ready to his hand in a field which still for him is virgin soil.

In the following pages all descriptions of scenery will be omitted— not even excepting the grand Yosemité itself-unless they bear specially on the subject; and the reader will be spared any of those grandiloquent psychological results of what Professor Clifford has termed "cosmic emotion.' Any of that nauseous species of wayfarer's gossip which swells to deformity so many otherwise readable books of travel with details of hair-breadth escapes and heavy hotel charges L. M. VII- 13.

will be still more carefully eschewed. The object of the writer's visit to California was to probe the surface a little deeper than guidebooks would take him; to learn something of the manners and motives of men in a country where man is considered capable of taking care of himself, and his mind allowed to run alone; and lastly, to form, if possible, some notion as to the position California is entitled to occupy amongst the civilized communities of the world.

As in the sequel, when the reader will be asked to proceed down the Pacific coast into the Los Angelos country, and up into the mountains on the Nevada border, he will sometimes encounter the living representatives of states of society which are now no more, it will be well at the outset to ask him to take a brief retrospect of the three periods into which Californian history divides itself, previous to the hoisting of the "Stars and Stripes," and the dawning of the present so-called "grand cosmopolitan era." At the time when the seaboard of California first became known to navigators the country was occupied, though it can scarcely be said to have been possessed, by the Californian Indians. The indefinite nickname of "Digger" has been indiscriminately applied to all the various tribes and families of this race. It is, however, an unfortunate one, since it has tended to represent them as even more degraded beings than is warranted by fact. The slight acquaintance which the writer made with some of the survivors of the race, who still haunt the foot-hills of the Sierra, was sufficient to show him that, though in many of their habits they are filthy and disgusting, the germs of a nomad civilization may be distinctly detected among them. Ethnologically speaking, the Californian Indian is no allophylian: he is a legitimate member of the great family of North America, whose territory not long since extended from the land of the Esquimaux to the Isthmus, and from ocean to ocean. The nations to which he is most closely allied in language and habits are the Tinneh on the north and east and the Aztecs on the south. This fact of kinship is the more remarkable when we remember-with all the advantages of soil and climate in his favor-not one vestige can be discovered of the native Californian, either in ancient or modern times, ever having participated in that culture which distingushed his kindred nations, from the mound-builders of Ohio to the sculptors of Copan. "No excuse," says Mr. Hubert Bancroft, "can be offered for the degradation of the native of fertile California. On every side in regions possessing far fewer advantages we find a higher type of man.' The circumstance must indeed be regarded as the exception which proves the rule of Buckle, that "favorable climatal conditions are productive of high civilization."

It can scarcely be a matter of wonder that, on the arrival of another and a stronger race, that merciless law, by which we are apt to say that nature works her will, bore down on the Californian Indian