One more very curious illustration of the divergence of judgment in our two new historians may be instanced. They have both written, as became them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; but he does not lament in their sad method of decay the loss of any element of manhood or of the higher ingredients of humanity. But Mr. Arnold pitches his requiem to a different strain. He reproduces and refines the romance which Dr. Palfrey would dispel. He exalts the Indian character; gathers comforts and joys and pleasing fashionings around their life; enlarges the sphere of their being, and asserts in them capacity to fill it. The wigwam of Massasoit is elegantly described by Mr. Arnold as "his seat at Mount Hope," (p. 23,)--and pungently, by Dr. Palfrey, as "his sty," in whose comfortless shelter, Winslow and Hopkins, of Plymouth, on their visit to the chief, had "a distressing experience of the poverty and filth of Indian hospitality." (pp. 183, 184.) Arnold tells us, the Indians "were ignorant of Revelation, yet here was Plato's great problem of the Immortality of the Soul solved in the American wilderness, and believed by all the aborigines of the West." (p. 78.) But Palfrey, knowing nothing of what his contemporary was writing, had already put into print this sentence:--"The New England savage was not the person to have discovered what the vast reach of thought of Plato and Cicero could not attain." (p. 49.) Here are strange variances of judgment. But how much more of interest and activity lives in the mind, both of writers and readers, when history is written with such divergent philosophies and comments! Nobly, in both cases before us, have the writers done their work, and heartily do we render our tribute to them. DRIFTING. My soul to-day Is far away, Sailing the Vesuvian Bay; My wingèd boat, A bird afloat, Swims round the purple peaks remote:-- Round purple peaks It sails, and seeks Blue inlets and their crystal creeks, Where high rocks throw, Through deeps below, A duplicated golden glow. Far, vague, and dim, The mountains swim; While on Vesuvius' misty brim, With outstretched hands, The gray smoke stands O'erlooking the volcanic lands. Here Ischia smiles O'er liquid miles; And yonder, bluest of the isles, Calm Capri waits, Her sapphire gates Beguiling to her bright estates.