Spaniards imagined the noise to indicate a desperate sortie of the citizens. Everything was vague and mysterious. Day dawned, at length, after the feverish night, and the Admiral prepared for the assault. Within the fortress reigned a death-like stillness, which inspired a sickening suspicion. Had the city, indeed, been carried in the night; had the massacre already commenced; had all this labor and audacity been expended in vain? Suddenly a man was descried, wading breasthigh through the water from Lammen towards the fleet, while at the same time, one solitary boy was seen to wave his cap from the summit of the fort. After a moment of doubt, the happy mystery was solved. The Spaniards had fled, panic struck, during the darkness. Their position would still have enabled them, with firmness, to frustrate the enterprise of the patriots, but the hand of God, which had sent the ocean and the tempest to the deliverance of Leyden, had struck her enemies with terror likewise. The lights which had been seen moving during the night were the lanterns of the retreating Spaniards, and the boy who was now waving his triumphant signal from the battlements had alone witnessed the spectacle. So confident was he in the conclusion to which it led him, that he had volunteered at daybreak to go thither all alone. The magistrates, fearing a trap, hesitated for a moment to believe the truth, which soon, however, became quite evident. Valdez, flying himself from Leyderdorp, had ordered Colonel Borgia to retire with all his troops from Lammen. Thus, the Spaniards had retreated at the very moment that an extraordinary accident had laid bare a whole side of the city for their entrance. The noise of the wall, as it fell, only inspired them with fresh alarm; for they believed that the citizens had sallied forth in the darkness, to aid the advancing flood in the work of destruction. All obstacles being now removed, the fleet of Boisot swept by Lammen, and entered the city on the morning of the 3d of October. Leyden was relieved. The quays were lined with the famishing population, as the fleet rowed through the canals, every human being who could stand, coming forth to greet the preservers of the city. Bread was thrown from every vessel among the crowd. The poor creatures, who for two months had tasted no wholesome human food, and who had literally been living within the jaws of death, snatched eagerly the blessed gift, at last too liberally bestowed. Many choked themselves to death, in the greediness with which they devoured their bread; others became ill with the effects of plenty thus suddenly succeeding starvation; — but these were isolated cases, a repetition of which was prevented. The Admiral, stepping ashore, was welcomed by the magistracy, and a solemn procession was immediately formed. Magistrates and citizens, wild Zealanders, emaciated burgher guards, sailors, soldiers, women, children, nearly every living person within the walls, all repaired without delay to the great church, stout Admiral Boisot leading the way. The starving and heroic city, which had been so firm in its resistance to an earthly king, now bent itself in humble gratitude before the King of kings. After prayers, the whole vast congregation joined in the thanksgiving hymn. Thousands of voices raised the song, but few were able to carry it to its conclusion, for the universal emotion, deepened by the music, became too full for utterance. The hymn was abruptly suspended, while the multitude wept like children. This scene of honest pathos terminated, the necessary measures for distributing the food and for relieving the sick were taken by the magistracy. A note despatched to the Prince of Orange, was received by him at two o'clock, as he sat in church at Delft. It was of a somewhat different purport from that of the letter which he had received early in the same day from Boisot; the letter in which the Admiral had informed him that the success of the enterprise depended, after all, upon the desperate assault upon a nearly impregnable fort. The joy of the Prince may be easily imagined, and so soon as the sermon was concluded, he handed the letter just received to the minister, to be read to the congregation. Thus, all participated in his joy, and united with him in thanksgiving. [From The Rise of the Dutch Republic, part iv, chapter 2.] Ꮓ HENRY DAVID THOREAU [Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. His father, a pencil-maker, was the son of a Boston merchant, who came of a Jersey family of French extraction, and had emigrated to America in 1773. Both Thoreau's mother and grandmother were Scotch. He was educated at Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1837. For a few years he taught school, and at times, in later years, he lectured, but throughout his life he preferred to support himself largely by the work of his hands. He was an expert pencil-maker, an excellent surveyor, and by the intermittent exercise of these employments, as well as by farm work, he earned enough to supply his simple wants and the needs of the relatives who were at times dependent upon him. He was on intimate terms with the little band of American transcendentalists, especially with Emerson, at whose house he lived for some years, repaying the cost of his maintenance by his labor. But wherever Thoreau lived, and whatever was his occupation, his prevailing passion was a deep and constant delight in nature. Much of his time was spent in the open air in pleasant companionship, or, more commonly still, alone. He was thoroughly familiar with the woods, fields, and waters about his native place, and made longer journeys, on several occasions, to Cape Cod, the Maine forests, and the White Mountains. His ruling passions - his love for simplicity and independence and his love for nature — were perhaps most completely and naturally gratified when he spent more than two years in a little hut which he built on Walden Pond near Concord, tilling a small plot of ground, and depending for sustenance and for enjoyment almost entirely on his own resources. Thoreau was a man whose personal views and tenets were carried out to the point of eccentricity; but his life was blameless and he was loved and respected by all who knew him. - Only two books of Thoreau's were published during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1848) and Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854). He contributed, however, to several periodicals, and these essays and addresses, together with much matter from his journals and other papers, have since been issued in the following volumes: Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1863), Cape Cod (1865), Letters to Various Persons (1865), A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866), Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), Autumn (1892), Familiar Letters (1894).] THERE has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may be claimed as parallels, but not justly. Poe even during his life rode often on the very wave of success, until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again, had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence, while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and above board; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm or at least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples. As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his attic chamber; who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four biographies of him have been issued in America (by Emerson, Channing, Sanborn, and Jones) besides two in England (by Page and Salt). Up to the time of his death he was unappreciated away from home, and this was naturally also true of him at his place of residence, since such is the way of the world. Even Sir Walter Scott, as we learn from the lately published letters of Mrs. Grant, was not so much of a hero in Edinburgh as elsewhere. Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., and died there, and was therefore more completely identified with that town than any of her other celebrities. Yet when I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade his sister to let me edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said: "Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should any one wish to have Thoreau's journals printed?" Ten years later four successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O. Blake, tummoder eing a mali e as out a slight Is yencer surg suce Lost any man's autograph can be 99% ned for two postage stampe if the request be put vih cer age. 3, — be me the financa standard can be surely why do mne to thiny jean after a mat's death & comes Dresy bear to a permanent fame. 12 te that Thoreau had Emerson as the editor of four of ila pattonoa vida; but it is also true that he had against Dim the strong voice of Lowel, whose folowing as a critic was far greater that. Enervoz's. It will always remain a puzzle why it was that Lowell, who had reviewed Thoreau's first bock with cordially in the Massachusetts Quarters Review and had said to me afterwards, on hearing him compared to Izaak Walton, "There is room for three or four Waltons in Thoreau," should have written the really harsh attack on the latter which afterwards appeared and in which the plain facts were unquestionably perverted. To transform Thoreau's two brief years of study and observation at Walden, within two miles of his mother's door, into a life long renunciation of his fellow-men; to complain of him as waiving all interest in public affairs when the great crisis of John Brown's execution had found him far more awake to it than Lowell was, this was only explainable by the lingering tradition of that savage period of criticism, initiated by Poe, in whose hands the thing became a tomahawk. As a matter of fact the tomahawk had in this case its immediate effect; and the English editor and biographer of Thoreau has stated that Lowell's criticism is to this day the great obstacle to the acceptance of Thoreau's writings in England. It is to be remembered, however, that Thoreau was not wholly of English but partly of French origin, and was, it might be added, of a sort of moral-Oriental |