International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850

"I hope with your candle you'll throw some light upon the subject," said Uncle Bagges.

"I hope so," answered Harry. "Recollect it is the burning of the smoke, or soot, or carbon of the candle, that makes the candle-flame bright. Also that the candle won't burn without air. Likewise that it will not burn in nitrogen, or air that has been deprived of oxygen. So the carbon of the candle mingles with oxygen, in burning, to make carbonic acid gas; just as the hydrogen does to form water. Carbonic acid gas, then, is carbon or charcoal dissolved in oxygen. Here is black soot getting invisible and changing into air; and this seems strange, uncle, doesn't it?"

"Ahem! Strange, if true," answered Mr. Bagges. "Eh? Well! I suppose it's all right."

"Quite so, uncle. Burn carbon or charcoal either in the air or in oxygen, and it is sure always to make carbonic acid, and nothing else, if it is dry. No dew or mist gathers in a cold glass jar if you burn dry charcoal in it. The charcoal goes entirely into carbonic acid gas, and leaves nothing behind but ashes, which are only earthy stuff that was in the charcoal, but not part of the charcoal itself. And now, shall I tell you something about carbon?"

"With all my heart," assented Mr. Bagges.

"I said that there was carbon or charcoal in all common lights, so there is in every common kind of fuel. If you heat coal or wood away from the air, some gas comes away, and leaves behind coke from coal, and charcoal from wood; both carbon, though not pure. Heat carbon as much as you will in a close vessel, and it does not change in the least; but let the air get to it, and then it burns and flies off in carbonic acid gas. This makes carbon so convenient for fuel. But it is ornamental as well as useful, uncle. The diamond is nothing else than carbon."

"The diamond, eh! You mean the black diamond."

"No: the diamond, really and truly. The diamond is only carbon in the shape of a crystal."

"Eh? and can't some of your clever chemists crystalize a little bit of carbon, and make a Koh-i-noor?"

"Ah, uncle, perhaps we shall, some day. In the mean time I suppose we must be content with making carbon so brilliant as it is in the flame of a candle. Well; now you see that a candle-flame is vapor burning, and the vapor, in burning, turns into water and carbonic acid gas. The oxygen of both the carbonic acid gas and the water comes from the air, and the hydrogen and carbon together are the vapor. They are distilled out of the melted was by the heat. But, you know, carbon alone can't be distilled by any heat. It can be distilled, though, when it is joined with hydrogen, as it is in the wax, and then the mixed hydrogen and carbon rise in gas of the same kind as the gas in the streets, and that also is distilled by heat from coal. So a candle is a little gas manufactory in itself, that burns the gas as fast as it makes it."

"Haven't you pretty nearly come to your candle's end'!" said Mr. Wilkinson.

"Nearly. I only want to tell uncle, that the burning of a candle is almost exactly like our breathing. Breathing is consuming oxygen, only not so fast as burning. In breathing we throw out water in vapor and carbonic acid from our lungs, and take oxygen in. Oxygen is as necessary to support the life of the body, as it is to keep up the flame of a candle."

"So," said Mr. Bagges, "man is a candle, eh? and Shakspeare knew that, I suppose, (as he did most things,) when he wrote

'Out, out, brief candle!'

"Well, well; we old ones are moulds, and you young squires are dips and rushlights, eh? Any more to tell us about the candle?"

"I could tell you a great deal more about oxygen, and hydrogen, and carbon, and water, and breathing, that Professor Faraday said, if I had time; but you should go and hear him yourself, uncle."

"Eh? well! I think I will. Some of us seniors may learn something from a juvenile lecture, at any rate, if given by a Faraday. And now, my boy. I will tell you what," added Mr. Bagges, "I am very glad to find you so fond of study and science; and you deserve to be encouraged: and so I'll give you a what-d'ye-call-it'?—a Galvanic Battery, on your next birth-day; and so much for your teaching your old uncle the chemistry of a candle."

[From a Review of Griswold's Prose Writers of America, in the Southern Literary Messenger.]

DANIEL WEBSTER, AS A STATESMAN, AND AS A MAN OF LETTERS

Mr. Webster is properly selected as the representative of the best sense, and highest wisdom, and most consummate dignity, of the politics and oratory of the present times, because his great intelligence has continued to be so finely sensitive to all the influences that stir the action and speculation of the country.

With elements of reason, definite, absolute, and emphatic; with principles settled, strenuous, deep and unchangeable as his being; his wisdom is yet exquisitely practical: with subtlest sagacity it apprehends every change in the circumstances in which it is to act, and can accommodate its action without loss of vigor, or alteration of its general purpose. Its theories always "lean and hearken" to the actual. By a sympathy of the mind, almost transcendental in its delicacy, its speculations are attracted into a parallelism with the logic of life and nature. In most men, that intellectual susceptibility by which they are capable of being reacted upon by the outer world, and having their principles and views expanded, modified or quickened, does not outlast the first period of life; from that time they remain fixed and rigid in their policy, temper and characteristics; if a new phase of society is developed, it must find its exponent in other men. But in Webster this fresh suggestive sensibility of the judgment has been carried on into the matured and determined wisdom of manhood. His perceptions, feelings, reasonings, tone, are always up to the level of the hour, or in advance of it; sometimes far, very far in advance, as in the views thrown out in his speech at Baltimore, on an international commercial system, in which he showed that he then foresaw both the fate of the tariff and the fallacy of free-trade. No man has ever been able to say, or now can say, that he is before Webster. The youngest men in the nation look to him, not as representing the past, but as leading in the future.

This practicalness and readiness of adaptation are instinctive, not voluntary and designed. They are united with the most decided preference for certain opinions and the most earnest averseness to others. Nothing can be less like Talleyrand's system of waiting for events. He has never, in view of a change which he saw to be inevitable, held himself in reserve and uncommitted. What Webster is at any time, that he is strenuously, entirely, openly. He has first opposed, with every energy of his mind and temper, that which, when it has actually come, he is ready to accept, and make the best of. He never surrenders in advance a position which knows will be carried; he takes his place, and delivers battle; he fights as one who is fighting the last battle of his country's hopes; he fires the last shot. When the smoke and tumult are cleared off, where is Webster! Look around for the nearest rallying point which the view presents; there he stands, with his hand upon his heart, in grim composure; calm, dignified, resolute; neither disheartened nor surprised by defeat. "Leaving the things that are behind," is now the trumpet-sound by which he rallies his friends to a new confidence, and stimulates them to fresh efforts. It is obvious that Webster, when contending with all his force for or against some particular measure, has not been contemplating the probability of being compelled to oppose or defend a different policy, and, so, choosing his words warily, in reference to future possibilities of a personal kind: yet when the time has come that he has been obliged to fight with his face in another direction, it has always been found that no one principle had been asserted, no one sentiment displayed, incompatible with his new positions. This union of consistency with practicability has arisen naturally from the extent and comprehensiveness of his views, from the breadth and generality with which the analytical power of his understanding has always led him to state his principles and define his position. From the particular scheme or special maxim which his party was insisting upon, his mind rose to a higher and more general formula of truth.

Owing to the same superior penetration and reach of thought, the gloom of successive repulses has never been able to paralyze the power which it has saddened. The constitution has been so often invaded and trampled upon, that to a common eye it might well seem to have lost all the resentments of vitality. But Webster has distinguished between the constitution and its administration. He has seen that the constitution, though in bondage, is not killed; that the channels of its life-giving wisdom are stuffed up with rubbish, but not obliterated. He has been determined that if the rulers of the country will deny the truth, they shall not debauch it; if they depart from the constitution, they shall not deprave it. He has been resolved, that when this tyranny of corruption shall be overpast, and the constitution draws again its own free breath of virtue, truth and wisdom, it shall be found perfect of limb and feature, prepared to rise like a giant refreshed by sleep.

Mr. Griswold, we suppose, is quite right in suggesting that the only name in modern times to which reference can with any fitness be made for purposes of analogy or comparison with Webster is that of Burke. In many respects there is a correspondence between their characters; in some others they differ widely. As a prophet of the truth of political morals, as a revealer of those essential elements in the constitution of life, upon which, or of which, society is constructed and government evolved, Burke had no peer. In that department he rises into the distance and grandeur of inspiration; nil mortote sonans. Nor do we doubt that the Providence of God had raised him up for the purposes of public safety and guidance, any more than we doubt the mission of Jeremiah or Elisha, or any other of the school of the Lord's prophets. But leaving Burke unapproached in this region of the nature and philosophy of government, and looking at him, in his general career, as a man of intellect and action, we might indicate an analogy of this kind, that the character, temper and reason of Burke seem to be almost an image of the English constitution, and Webster's of the American. To get the key to Burke's somewhat irregular and startling career, it is necessary, to study the idea of the old whig constitution of the English monarchy: viewing his course from that point of view, we comprehend his almost countenancing and encouraging rebellion in the case of the American colonies; his intense hostility to Warren Hastings' imperial system; his unchastised earnestness in opposition to French maxims in the decline of his life. The constitution of the United States, that most wonderful of the emanations of providential wisdom, seems to be not only the home of Webster's affections and seat of his proudest hopes, but the very type of his understanding and fountain of his intellectual strength:

——"hic illius arma;—— Hic currus."

The genius of Burke, like the one, was inexhaustible in resources, so composite and so averse from theory as to appear incongruous, but justified in the result; not formal, not always entirely perspicuous. Webster's mind, like the other, is eminently logical, reduced into principles, orderly, distinct, reconciling abstraction with convenience, various in manifestation, yet pervaded by an unity of character.

Mr. Webster has not merely illustrated a great range of mental powers and accomplishments, but has filled, in the eye of the nation, on a great scale, and to the farthest reach of their exigency, a diversity of intellectual characters; while the manner in which Burke's wisdom displayed itself was usually the same. We cannot suppose that Burke could have been a great lawyer. Webster possesses a consummate legal judgment and prodigious powers of legal logic, and is felt to be the highest authority on a great question of law in this country. The demonstrative faculty; the capacity to analyze and open any proposition so as to identify its separate elements with the very consciousness of the reader's or hearer's mind; this, which is the lawyer's peculiar power, had not been particularly developed in Burke, but exists in Webster in greater expansion and force than in any one since Doctor Johnson, who, it always appeared to us, had he been educated for the bar, would have made the greatest lawyer that ever led the decisions of Westminster-Hall. We should hardly be justified in saying that Burke would have made a great First Lord of the Treasury. Mr. Webster, as Secretary of State, proved himself to be a practical statesman of the highest; finest, promptest sagacity and foresight that this or any nation ever witnessed. Who now doubts the surpassing wisdom, who now but reverences the exalted patriotism, of the advice and the example which he gave, but gave in vain, to the Whig party at the beginning of Mr. Tyler's administration? His official correspondence would be lowered by a comparison with any state papers since the secretaryship of John Marshall. Does the public generally know what has become of that portentous difficulty about the Right of Search, upon which England and America, five years ago, were on the point of being "lento collisæ duello." Mr. Webster settled it by mere force of mind: he dissipated the Question, by seeing through it, and by compelling others to see a fallacy in its terms which before had imposed upon the understanding of two nations. In the essential and universal philosophy of politics, Webster is second only to Burke. After Burke, there is no statesman whose writings might be read with greater advantage by foreign nations, or would have been studied with so much respect by antiquity, as Webster's.

In a merely literary point of view, this perhaps may be said of Mr. Webster, that he is the only powerful and fervid orator, since the glorious days of Greece, whose style is so disciplined that any of his great public harangues might be used as models of composition. His language is beautifully pure, and his combinations of it exhibit more knowledge of the genius, spirit, and classic vigor of the English tongue, than it has entered the mind of any professor of rhetoric to apprehend. As the most impetuous sweeps of passion in him are pervaded and informed and guided by intellect, so the most earnest struggles of intellect seem to be calmed and made gentle in their vehemence, by a more essential rationality of taste. That imperious mind, which seems fit to defy the universe, is ever subordinate, by a kind of fascination, to the perfect law of grace. In the highest of his intellectual flights—and who can follow the winged rush of that eagle mind?—in the widest of his mental ranges-and who shall measure their extent?—he is ever moving within the severest line of beauty. No one would think of saying that Mr. Webster's speeches are thrown off with ease, and cost him but little effort; they are clearly the result of the intensest stress of mental energy; yet the manner is never discomposed; the decency and propriety of the display never interfered with; he is always greater than his genius; you see "the depth out not the tumult" of the mind. Whether, with extended arm, he strangles the "reluctantes dracones" of democracy, or with every faculty called home, concentrates the light and heat of his being in developing into principles those great sentiments and great instincts which are his inspiration; in all, the orator stands forth with the majesty and chastened grace of Pericles himself. In the fiercest of encounters with the deadliest of foes, the mind, which is enraged, is never perturbed; the style, which leaps like the fire of heaven, is never disordered. As in Guido's picture of St. Michael piercing the dragon, while the gnarled muscles of the arms and hands attest the utmost strain of the strength, the countenance remains placid, serene, and undisturbed. In this great quality of mental dignity, Mr. Webster's speeches have become more and more eminent. The glow and luster which set his earlier speeches a-blaze with splendor, is in his later discourses rarely let forth; but they have gained more, in the increase of dignity, than they have parted with in the diminution of brilliancy. We regard his speech before the shop-keepers, calling themselves merchants, of Philadelphia, as one of the most weighty and admirable of the intellectual efforts of his life. The range of profound and piercing wisdom; the exquisite and faultless taste; but above all, the august and indefectible dignity, that are illustrated from the beginning to the end of that great display of matured and finished strength, leave us in mingled wonder and reverence. There is one sentence there which seems to us almost to reach the intellectual sublime; and while it stirs within us the depths of sympathy and admiration, we could heartily wish that the young men of America would inhale the almost supra-mortal spirit which it breathes: "I would not with any idolatrous admiration regard the Constitution of the United States, nor any other work of man; but this side of idolatry, I hold it in profound respect. I believe that no human working on such a subject, no human ability exerted for such an end, has ever produced so much happiness, or holds out now to so many millions of people the prospect, through such a succession of ages and ages, of so much happiness, as the Constitution of the United States. We who are here for one generation, for a single life, and yet in our several stations and relations in society intrusted in some degree with its protection and support, what duty does it devolve, what duty does it not devolve, upon us!" In the name of distant ages, and a remote posterity, we hail the author of this and similar orations, as Webster the Olympian.

But we leave a subject which we have incidentally touched, sincerely disclaiming any attempt to estimate the character or define the greatness of Webster. In reference to him we feel, as Cicero said to Cæsar, "Nil vulgare te dignum videri possit."

[From the Athenæum.]

THE NEW PROPHET IN THE EAST. 5

The vicissitudes of the war in the Caucasus of late have been surprising enough to awaken the interest of Western Europe, even amidst her own nearer anxieties. Last year it was said that the conquest of Achulgo, the stronghold of the redoubtable Schamyl, had effectually broken the power of that daring leader. In direct contradiction to such reports, later accounts from Daghestan tell of the reappearance of the notable partisan amidst the lines of the Russians, and of a defeat of the latter, the most severe, if the details of the event be true, that they have yet suffered in the Caucasus. In any case, these exciting changes of fortune would be in favor of a book professing to describe this interesting region, and to add to our knowledge of its brave inhabitants. The main interest of Herr Bodenstedt's work will now be enhanced by its undertaking to give a more precise account than had previously appeared of the priest-warrior of Daghestan. and of the new sect as the prophet of which he succeeded in arraying the independent mountain clans against their common enemy with a kind of combination unknown in earlier periods of the struggle.

The author has evidently lived for some time in the region which he describes, or in the bordering districts along the Caspian, both in Georgia and in North Daghestan, His acquaintance with Asiatic and Russian languages and customs appears to have been gained both by study and from intercourse with the natives of the south-eastern frontier. He is not ignorant of Oriental writings that refer to his subject; and his Russian statistics prove an access to official authorities which are not to be found in print. These, however obtained, can scarcely have been imparted to him as one of those writers whom the Court of St. Petersburg hires to promote its views through the press of Western Europe. His sympathies are declared against Russian usurpation; and the tendency of his essay is to prove how little real progress it has yet made in subduing the Caucasus, the enormous waste of money and life with which its fluctuating successes have been bought, and the fallacy of expecting a better result hereafter.

What it has cost in life on the Russian side to attack-hitherto with no lasting effect—the handful of Caucasian mountaineers, may be guessed from a single note, dated 1847: "The present Russian force in the Caucasus"—including of course, the armed Cossacks of the Kuban and Terek—"amounts to two hundred thousand." Taking into account the numbers yearly cut off by disease, more fatal even than the mountain war, every step of which must be won by the most reckless waste of life,—the "Russian Officer" may perhaps truly affirm that the annual expenditure of life by Russia, in her warfare with Schamyl, has for many years past exceeded the whole number of the population at any one time directly under the rule of that chieftain.

We have said that the most instructive part of Herr Bodenstedt's essay is his sketch of that politico-religious scheme which made Schamyl formidable to the Russians. This system, it is to be observed, arose and has since been fully developed only in the Eastern Caucasus, where of late the main stress of the war has been. The western tribes (our "Circassians") who took the lead at an earlier stage of the contest, were not then, nor have they since been, inspired by the fanatic zeal which united the tribes of Daghestan. They fought from a mere love of independence, each little republic by itself; and their efforts, however heroic, being without concert, gradually declined before the vast force of the invader. In the region looking westward from the Georgian frontier on the Euxine, on the one side of the Caucasian range, and along the lower Kuban on the other, the Russian posts are now seldom threatened but by small predatory bands; the natives, retired to their mountain villages, have for some time made but few more formidable incursions. The war is transferred to the region spreading eastward from the Elbrus to the Caspian; where the strife for free existence is animated not less by the hatred of Russian slavery than by a fresh outbreak of Mohammedan zeal against infidel invasion,—a revival, in fact, of that war-like fanaticism which made the Moslem name terrible from the eighth to the sixteenth century.

It dates from the years 1823-4; at which period a "new doctrine" began to be preached, secretly at first, to the select Uléma, afterward to greater numbers, in word and writing, by one Mullah Mohammed, a famous teacher and a judge (or kadi) of Jarach, in the Kurin district of Daghestan. He professed to have learnt it from Hadis-Ismail, an Alim of Kurdomir, highly famed for wisdom and sanctity. It laid bare the degradation into which his countrymen had sunk by irreligion and by the jealousy of sect; their danger, in consequence, from enemies of the true faith; and urged the necessity of reform in creed and practice, in order to regain the invincible character promised by the Prophet to believers. The theoretical part of the reformed doctrine seems to be a kind of Sufism,—the general character of which mode of Islam, long prevalent in the adjacent kingdom of Persia, has been described by our own orientalists. Disputed questions as to its origin, whether in Brahmin philosophy or in the reveries of Moslem mystics, cannot be discussed here; it must suffice to indicate those points which appear to connect it with the hieratic policy that has given a new aspect to the war in the Caucasus.

Proceeding nominally on the basis of the Koran, it inculcates or expounds a kind of spiritual transcendentalism; in which the adept is raised above the necessity of formal laws, which are only requisite for those who are not capable of rising to a full intelligence of the supreme power. To gain this height, by devout contemplation, must be the personal work and endeavor of each individual. The revelation of divine truth, once attained, supersedes specific moral injunctions; ceremonies and systems, even, of religion, become indifferent to the mind illuminated by the sacred idea. A higher degree is the perfect conception or ecstatic vision of the Deity;—the highest-reserved only for the prophetic few—a real immediate union with his essence. Here, it will be seen, are four steps or stages, each of which has its sacred manual or appropriate system of teaching. In the hieratic system, of which Schamyl is the head, the divisions seem to correspond pretty nearly with this arrangement, as follows:—