crowd around her, was too solemn, grave, dignified to flatter. His words inspired, cheered, thrilled, moved her. They sounded like a prophet's voice, speaking out from the sybil cave of destiny. Long after the professor had gone, Nepenthe sat thinking, and these were her thoughts. "There are hearts in the world never pierced, never bruised, never stabbed, never scorched. They go through the world unscathed, untouched, * unblighted, like dry, carefully kept bulbs in life's herbarium. But as years pass, they shrink and shrivel like those unscathed, unpierced bulbs in the professor's herbarium, growing older, mustier, and mouldier, never unfolding in fragrant beauty for any eye; while here and there is some lonely heart so rent by the sharp knife of trouble, so scorched and burned by sorrow's hottest furnace iron, that after years of calamity's heaviest pressures have passed, as you open the leaves of life, you'll find springing out of the broken, burning heart, some balmy leaves of fragrant sympathy, sweetly perfuming all life's surrounding pages." "I will call my story Dawn," thought Nepenthe. "It may be from my poor, scorched, stabbed, burning, longing heart, it may come forth as a little germ unfolding into beauty, blooming in the sunshine and dew of young, bright eyes, and at last take deep and abiding root in the world's heart." "A flower of hope-float up to the light, Its whitened umbels gleam through the night." "Will one of its little leaves," thought she, "be preserved forever in Fame's great herbarium, so full of the illustrious classes and noble orders of soul-flowers." Nepenthe sings in a low voice, as she looks out that night at the stars: "Up, high up in the Poet's mind The Belfry bells are ringing, In silver chimes, Telling or past or future times, But ever they tell of the golden climes, Where, ever the bells are ringing.” CHAPTER XXVI. CARLEYN'S CONCEIT. "Enfin dans le cerveau si l'image est tracée, DE LILLE, L'IMAGINATION. "THERE'S one thing I don't like about that Carleyn," said Miss Charity Gouge," he is so conceited." Conceited."" said Kate Howard. "I have never seen anything conceited in him. I am sure his manners are plain and unpretending." 66 Yes; but for all that, he is conceited. He knows he is If a genius, and when a man knows that, it spoils him. you should ask him pat and plump if he didn't think he could paint beautiful portraits, he'd say, ' Yes, I know I can.' I believe in not letting the left hand know what the right hand doeth.' "Yes," said Kate; "but the right hand need not forget its cunning. Don't the poet feel that he is a poet? Don't he feel the waves of emotion dashing on the shore of thought? As his swelling soul careers over the ocean of beauty, does he not first catch the murmurs of liquid melody and first see the pearls beneath? As he grasps the floating images of fragrant thought, and carves them into lyric forms, may he not value best their worth and cost? If Pythagoras first found the proportions of musical notes from the sounds of hammers upon an anvil, each true poet knows the proportion of his exquisite melodies, as he catches the echo of the hammer of thought as it strikes the anvil of his sounding soul. On the walls of Carleyn's soul were stained, at its earliest creation, beautifal pictures. Long toiling through gathering thoughts and misty fancies, he has at last brushed away the dust of years, and with clear eye and cunning hand, reproduced these inborn images. After exploring these won drous tracings and shadings, may he not modestly say, 'I have toiled, and brushed, and polished, and found at last this beautiful picture in my soul?'"' "I hate this bragging," said Miss Charity. "Let another man praise thee, and not thine own lips; a stranger, and not thine own mouth. Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit, there is more hope of a fool than of him." "We give the miner credit for his golden findings," said Kate, "yet he who toils on alone, and strikes at last a vein of golden thought, as he catches its first sparkle and sees its earliest glow, can't he best weigh the hard-earned treasure; if he coins rare images from the mint of thought, can't he have sense enough to see the stamp and know the value? In the tower of each great soul is a mint for the coining of thought, vested with the royal prerogative of stamping its own coin with name and value. The soul's coronation time is when through its dim chaos of doubt it first cries out to its new-orbed thought, it is my own, and it is good-then God puts the laurel crown on the worshipping soul as it kneels in its inner court. Applause may or may not come afterwards from the outer court of the great congregation of thought worshippers. This first joy flush is never vain, but tearful and meek in its triumph-in every giant soul's causeway is a basaltic touchstone, on which each pure thought leaves its genuine mark; and these crusty jealous people who are always find. ing out and testing a great man's conceit-I always call them not touch-needles but touchy-needles. If I were a man I'd write one lecture about this conceit. I'd write it and deliver it too-if I had to pay myself a hundred dollars for the privilege. There hardly lives a great and gifted man who is not called conceited. As for me I have always found the greatest fools and dunces displaying the most unbearable self-conceit." "Well," said Miss Charity in a spirited tone," Carleyn has great ideas of what he can do, it don't take a person of any sagacity long to find that out, and true modesty," she added triumphantly, "is an element of true greatness-it is a great eharm this perfect unconsciousness; and I never can admire a great man without it. I have seen a great deal of the world, and I know I am correct." "I haven't been as long in the world as you, Miss Charity," said Kate, "yet I have heard a great deal about this perfect unconsciousness, but I have never seen it. I have read in novels of radiantly beautiful women, who never knew they looked well, and irresistibly fascinating men, who unconsciously captivated every body, because they couldn't help it, but I don't meet any such men and women walking about. It is quite difficult for a person who owns a good lookingglass, and a good pair of ears, not to see and to hear about it, if he is handsome. We Americans must make such a fuss about every thing, fences and barns, and cars and curb-stones, book covers, medals and fans, even wagons and wayside rocks are plastered over with advertisements, of something new and wonderful. There's somebody's name on every thing. The chief aim of the people is to get their name up. Our almanacs-guides to infallible weather decisions, must be labelled 'guides to health '-which means a guide to some polychrestian physician, who cures every thing with some universal life invigorator. I don't despair yet of seeing some of the pure energy of vital action done up and for sale in boxes of salve, rolls of plaster, and bottles of lotion warranted to be made from a powdered philospher's stone, of purely vegetable origin, by a perpetually moving machine, circulating among all the crowned heads of Europe. Every thing is used as an advertising medium, but the sky over our heads-there are no caricatures up there yet -but if a balloon ever could get up so high some enterprising medicine vender would be for sending one of his posters up there, to fasten notices on some starry promontory, or suburban gates of some constellated city, to introduce among the bulls and bears of those shining streets, his valuable speculation, and benefit those upper circles by his philanthropic lotions, seeing that his sands of life have nearly run out. If a man praise any article to me, I begin to suspect that he has some of it in his pocket to sell. "Once upon a time somebody gave me a whole bottle of Tricopherous, for which liberal gift I could see no occasion; but some time thereafter the donor came round again wishing me to give my name to be inscribed on the outside of each bottle of Tricopherous in testimony of its virtues. I laughed till I cried at the thought of it-Kate Howard go ing round on a Tricopherous bottle! I never wish to see But I do say that a my name in print till I am married. well conceived and carefully polished thought deserves the acknowledgment of its original stamp far more than those bottles of nondescript perfume marked Parisienne, adoptee par le monde elegant. 13 Rue D'Enghier. 13, Paris, with white kid caps and fancy ribbon neck-ties, marked sometimes Bouquet de Caroline,' they might better be Bouquet de Jonathan,' or 'Pomade de Sallie,' for they have no memories of Outre Mer-and those sheets of cream-laid note paper, with 'Paris' carefully stamped in one corner, have no gay Parisian associations, but authentic memories of their native American rags. I have often wondered, as our Bridget says, how they can put such a deceitful countenance on their fair faces; and even a gentleman, in the estimation of many ladies, is not half finished or polished, or worth having, unless he has been to Europe, and come back with Paris marked all over him-boots, hat, gloves and all-he must eat, sleep, walk, talk, dress, and bow a la Francaise, and dance well 'les Lanciers.' "I am glad there is something can circulate, even in fashionable society, without full dress, white kids, and French manners-and that is, a plain drab-covered book or a poem. And no bars or bolts, or conventionalities shall keep plain Jane Eyre from telling her thrilling tale of Thornfield Hall, in stateliest mansion, to princely ears. You might as well put gloves and slippers on a canary, advertise a violet, recommend a mignionette, or puff a star through the market, as try to puff a genuine thought through the world. A star will shine-and a bright thought will burn and shine somewhere, if only in one dark heart; that is a glorious destiny, for when the heart beats up there, the thought goes with it. Each great thought, as it comes from the press of the soul, has an imported stamp-not of gay Paris; but on each noble thought is imprinted in legible type the stamp, HEAVEN; for every such good and perfect gift cometh down from the Father of Light, from the city beyond the sea of stars. It is a pity we couldn't get more of the patterns of our thoughts from the royal family above. "But don't you want a moral to all this rhodomontade ? It is this. If a man's name can be appropriately attached to |