THE LETTER TO THE DEAD.

"WE remember at the Wilderness a gallant Mississippian had fallen, and at night, just before burying him, there came a letter from her he loved best. One of the group around his body-a minister-whose tenderness was womanly, broke the silent tearfulness with which he saw the dead letter; he took it and laid it upon the breast of him whose heroic heart was still: 'Bury it with him. He will see it when he wakes.' It was the sublimest sentence of his funeral service." N. O. Picayune.

COMES the letter from a mother?

Are a sister's longings there?

Or the fondness of another,

Loved and loving, young and fair?
Seek not now to know the writer,

Seek not whence or why it came;
As he died, his dimmed eyes saw her;
As he died, he breathed her name.
It has come o'er hills and valleys,

Crossed o'er rivers, passed o'er lakes:
Bury it upon his bosom,

He will see it when he wakes."
Bury the dead with the letter unread,
There to remain,

Till the soldier awakes from his slumber,
To join in the battle again.

Ah! but never more to battle

He will march by beat of drum ;
Nevermore when fight is over

Sigh for gentle peace to come;
Nevermore to roll-call answer,
Nevermore will pace his round,
Keeping watch o'er sleeping comrades
Strewn upon the chilly ground;

Nevermore the light words utter

While his heart with sadness aches:

Bury it upon his bosom,

He will see it when he wakes."

Bury it deep with the soldier to sleep:

There let it lie,

While the green grass grows o'er the sleeper,
And the world goes hurrying by.

She who lingered as she wrote it
O'er each tender word she penned,
She perchance will find her sorrow
With some later lover end.

But for him those words of loving
May survive when time is o'er,
And, though she forget her fondness,
Greet him on the further shore.
Cross his arms and close his eyelids,

"Tis his slumber that he takes:

"Bury it upon his bosom,

He will see it when he wakes."

Lay him to rest with the scroll on his breast,
There, in the tomb,

Till the startled dead shall awaken

At the terrible day of doom.

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

PART V.

PECULIARITIES in the circumstances which surround a people are powerful agents in moulding their language, if not in forming it. The inhabitant of the tropics speaks dreamily, drowsily, lispingly. His voice is in harmony with the nature around him. The waving palm seems to add softness, and the noonday heat languor, to his tones. The dweller in a mountain home, beneath the skies of a temperate clime, where all his energies are needed to preserve life, attunes his voice to the nature which surrounds him. He hears the dash of the torrent fretting and raging over rocks and hills; he listens to the grand symphony of the free wind and the angry roar of the storm-king through the tree-tops, and stops not to measure out his words, but talks quickly, energetically, unhesitatingly, often in harsh and guttural sounds. The icy temperature of the Arctic regions forces man there to speak with closed teeth; so he hisses his tones through his lips. The free citizen of a republic, conscious of his dignity as a self-ruler, with head erect and lungs fully charged with the air of heaven, speaks freely and boldly. His words are uttered in clear, unmistakable accents. The serf, cringing and bowing to his master with bated breath and suppressed murmurings, mutters and mumbles over his utterances. So the characteristics of mind, temperament, habits, and customs of a people impress themselves strongly on their language.

The Germanic element, so largely entering into the present English, was introduced at a time the precise date of which can

not now certainly be obtained. But it made its entrance amid war and bloodshed, anarchy and confusion. An old-established tongue, which had been polished by the civilization of at least four centuries, was violently and forcibly displaced, and this planted in its stead. Although its introduction was not gradual, the slow work of ages, like those of the French and Spanish, but the work almost of a day, still the circumstances under which it was introduced, and the idiosyncrasies of the people who brought it to England, must have been stamped upon it for all time. Those circumstances were too marked, too violent, and the temperament and habits of its originators too peculiar, not to have had their influence. The race, who carried it to England, who spoke it and made it the language of the land, were Teutonic in their origin and blood. Like the tongue which they spoke, they were intruders in the island and antagonistical to the inhabitants whom they found there. They came for the purposes of conquest, and were successful. The objects of their invasion were not simply to subdue the people, suffer them to remain in the land, make them serfs and bondsmen, and use their nerve and muscle as cultivators of the soil or as workmen and drudges. Nor was it alone to impose their dominion upon the country by transferring the sovereignty from the old rulers to themselves. Their aims were broader. They coveted the entire possession of the land, freed from the presence of its old inhabitants. Their full purposes were açcomplished. The Kelt was driven out or exterminated, and the German became the undisputed ruler and possessor of the country. Not only a new language, but a new race was brought into the land, and both exist there to-day with the smallest possible mixture, either of the speech or of the blood of the people whom the German dispossessed. There has been no amalgamation of the one nor fusion of the other. There seemed to be, there was, an inherent antagonism which prevented the mingling or blending of speech or blood. It is possible that, subsequent to the conquest on the borders between the two peoples, there may have been some fusion of the two races, but it was slight and can not now be readily traced.

From the probable time of the Saxon invasion until the first reliable date in English Anglo-Saxon history, a century and a half elapsed. At the end of that period-the beginning of the seventh century-the Saxons and their fellow-invaders had securely settled themselves over the whole of the eastern and the best part of

the island. Wherever their rule extended, their language was spoken. The conquerors were called Saxons. Whether there was a single tribe which bore this distinctive name is doubtful. It seems rather a geographical than an ethnographical designation. The first mention of them by this title is made by Ptolemy in the second century after Christ. They are not at all mentioned by Cæsar, Livy, or Tacitus, and the notice of them by Ptolemy is rather topographical than historical. Their first appearance, in history, as Saxons, is in the works of some minor Latin writers of the middle of the third century. In the great Arminian confederacy, formed just at the beginning of the Christian era, and which destroyed the Roman power in Germany at the great series of battles fought with Varus 9 A.D., no trace of their name is found. The Cherusci were at the head of that great conspiracy, and, by some, the Saxons are believed to be derived from that prominent tribe. The Saxons, whether a single tribe or a union of several tribes, were not the only invaders from Germany who landed in England about the time of the Conquest and took part in the memorable events occurring there at that period. The two tribes known as Angles and Jutes invaded other parts of the island than those occupied by the Saxons, and founded kingdoms there. These two tribes belonged to the Scandinavian branch of the Teutonic race.

Ptolemy speaks of the Saxons as occupying, in the second century, the neck of the Cimbrian Chersonesus, between the rivers Elbe and Eyder, now part of the modern duchy of Holstein. The location, given by the historian and geographer of the second and third centuries, as the dwelling-place of the Saxons, is altogether too insignificant to have afforded a home for the thousands of restless freebooters who passed over to the continent of Europe in the third and fourth centuries, and afterward to England for conquest. Prior to the invasion of that island, the Saxons, either as a single tribe, or, more probably, as a confederacy of tribes, had left their original seats and spread themselves southward over the Elbe, and beyond that river as far west as the Rhine, and east to the Baltic. The present country of Germany, called Saxony, sinks into perfect insignificance when compared with the ancient possessions of these people.

The Angles lived, according to the best authorities, just north of the first seats of the Saxons, in the peninsula of Denmark. A district still called Angeln, in Schleswick, attests their presence

at one time in that country. The Jutes extended indefinitely northward from the Angles. Their tribal designation still exists in the name Jutland, by which the peninsula of Denmark is known at this day. In 852 A.D., Ruric, a Jute, passed out with his Vikings and founded Russia; and in the same century, twenty-eight years later, Gorm the Old, a Jute, founded the kingdom of Denmark, with almost the same boundaries which existed at the beginning of the present century. From the time that the Saxons had been first known in history until their lodgment in England, they were pirates and freebooters, making constant incursions upon their neighbors. They had invaded France, and had even gone so far as Armorica. Their name was a terror to the people who dwelt upon the shores of the Northern and Baltic seas. They despised agriculture and the arts of peace, and only deemed those occupations worthy of their attention which aided them in preparing weapons of war, or in building vessels in which to transport themselves and their arms. They delighted in storm, and braved the dangers of the ocean in barks of the slightest make, built of skins and wicker-work. At the time of their invasion of England they had much improved in the art of ship-building, and their chiules, or war-vessels, were equal if not superior to the Roman galley. They covered their heads with helmets, and the more exposed parts of the body they protected with armor. Their weapons were the bow, sword, spear, battle-ax, and a species of club with spikes at its end, called the hammer. Their weapons were of prodigious length and weight; but the Saxons were tall, athletic, and of great strength, and fully able, from long acquaintance and early teaching, to wield these formidable arms with terrible dexterity and tremendous effect. They were ferocious, rapacious, fearless, inured to cold and hardship from early youth. Their neighbors, the Angles and Jutes, partook of the same characteristics, though differing somewhat in physical appearance.

These were the people who displaced the Kelts in England. The revolution, which they effected in the island, must have been radical and effectual, and a language, spoken by such people, must have been peculiar in its characteristics.

The Jutes settled in the south-eastern part of the island, and founded a kingdom including within its boundaries the modern county of Kent, part of Hants, and the Isle of Wight. This was the first kingdom established of the Saxon Octarchy. The Saxons peopled and gave their names to the counties of Essex, Middlesex,