Book,"--in blue and gold, in green and gold, in
red and gold;--in what colors, and in what language, does it not appear?
Yet the themes are of the simplest: a broken heart; a rural funeral; a
Christmas among the hollies; an hour in the Abbey of Westminster: what
is there new, or to care greatly for, in these things? Yet he touched
them, and all the world are touched by them. Your critic says there is
no serious insight, no deep probing; a pretty wind blows over,--that is
all.

Yes, that is all; but how many are there who can set such sweet currents
of wind aflow?

Only a bruised daisy, only a wounded hare, only Halloween,--and Burns,
with all his fresh, healthy, hearty manhood, and only a peasant's pen,
touches them in such way that his touch is making the nerves of men and
women vibrate, where-ever our Saxon speech is uttered.

There is many a light thing that we cherish,--with which we will not
easily part. That souvenir of some dear, dead one we do not value by its
weight in gold; that sweet story of the Vicar we do not measure by its
breadth of logic. And no American, no matter how late born he may be,
but, if he wander in the Catskills, shall hear the rumble of the Dutch
revellers at their bowling in the gorges of the mountains,--not one but
shall read, and reading shall love, the story of Rip Van Winkle.

It was only a quiet old gentleman of six-and-seventy who was buried
awhile ago from his home upon the Hudson: yet the village-shops were all
closed; the streets, the houses, the station, were hung in black;
thousands from the city thirty miles away thronged the high-road leading
to the little church where prayers were to be said.

How shall we explain this? The author is dead, indeed, whose writings
were admired by all; but there is something worthier to be said than
this:--At the little church lay the body of the man whom all men loved.

THE RIM.

PART II.

Affairs went smoothly and noiselessly on for some three months. Mr. St.
George had received the congratulations of the neighborhood, who,
perceiving that Eloise still remained at The Rim, presumed all was
satisfactory; and Eloise refused herself to all, the better by reason of
her term of mourning. The slaves on the estate no longer infected others
with the result of bad government; their association with the
Blue-Bluffs people, a notoriously bad set, as well they might be, was
broken up; they felt, though the reins hung freely and the burden