Germs.Sporoi

STAR TREK: THE FIVE ENTERPRISES

2011-06-03T09:29:00.001-07:00

STAR TREK: THE FIVE ENTERPRISES
by KENNETH A. LOWENBERG .1995
PROLOGUE
Q was shocked by the surprise he felt. After all, he
and his fellow continuum-mates were all-knowing and all-
seeing ... until now.
The force of the energy invading -- yes INVADING -- the
Q-Continuum caught all Q by surprise.
The energy force probed their consciousness leaving
other Q helpless in its wake.
Qs ... helpless?!
This Q, the most important in his own mind, found some
satisfaction at first in finding his companions caught off
guard. They, after all, had the audacity to once take away
his powers, after he played some minor pranks on Picard and
his lackeys.
He had presently returned to the continuum after
jostling with Vash, the interesting human female who had
miraculously found her way back from the Gamma Quadrant,
where Q tossed her, thanks to another group of Starfleet
minions on the flatly named space station Deep Space Nine.
At his arrival in the continuum, Q was overwhelmed by
this energy. No longer amused, he realized its predatory
powers presented a threat to him.
It was probing consciousness looking for weakness, it
had locked onto Q's mind, on his thoughts of moments ago, of
humans.
Q struggled, focusing his powers against the invader's.
To no avail...except for an image.
An image of intent.
Conquer ...everything.
Then he felt something else, something familiar,
something which gave him hope and confidence.
It was the Q, his brothers and sisters!
The ones who had been subdued found a way to channel
their powers to him, the returnee. All the power of the Q
now resided in him.
The invaders hesitated a moment, caught off guard by
this new defense.
Then Q grappled with the creatures, probed them back,
looking for weakness... and found none, except...
...It was there and suddenly gone.
The creature fought back, focusing on what it had
learned from Q. What it apparently perceived as a
weakness... humans.
Humans and their homeworld, Earth.
This meant something to Q, strike at it and the Q
itself would be easy to stop.
'Ridiculous,' Q thought to the attacker. 'Humans mean
nothing...'
But it was too late. The attacker had found Earth, Q
saw the image of the small blue world, not just now but in
all moments. The planet Earth throughout time.
Suddenly Q knew the creatures' intentions, and in the
mili-second the creature was occupied, Q focused all his
new-found power, all the power of the Q on one word, one
image, one starship. "Enterprise."
In the next millisecond, the creature erased the planet
Earth from all of time.

CHAPTER ONE
"Checkmate."
Worf looked at the tri-chess board, and then at
Counselor Troi, seated across the table from him. Behind
her, the window showed the colorful star streaks of the
Enterprise traversing space at warp speed. He scowled, "I
concede the game to you, Deanna."
The Betazoid smiled and reached for the game pieces,
beginning to reset the board. "Let's see. That's three.
Shall we try again?"
Worf stood. "Perhaps another time, Counselor. I
obviously am not having a good day."
Deanna stood up, too. "Don't fret, Worf. I was the All-
District chess champion at my high school."
"So you've mentioned ... many times."
She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. "Funny, I
don't recall. Let's get a bite to eat, I'm starved." They
walked out of the rec room together. Deanna was glad to have
this time to spend with Worf, ever since their duty
schedules matched up so they were off-duty together. Worf
had been through some emotional hardships lately concerning
his late father. He had been quite reserved. Geordi and Data
asked her to look after their friend. She didn't need to be
asked.
They arrived at Ten Forward to find a small group of
officers and civilians huddled near the bar. At the center
of the huddle was Dr. Beverly Crusher helping Guinan to her
feet. Worf and Troi rushed over, pushing their way through
the crowd.
"Step back," Worf barked as people automatically
stepped away.
"Beverly," Troi said. "My God, what happened?"
"I just got a little... woozy," Guinan said as Crusher
helped her onto a bar stool.
"Guinan fainted dead away," Beverly clarified. "One of
her assistants called sickbay and she was still out when I
got here. Frankly, Guinan. I'm concerned. We should get you
to sickbay."
"Nonsense," the barkeep said. "I'm fine now."
The Doctor waved a medical sensor up and down the
length of Guinan's body. "No unusual readings. Well, I can't
force you to come with me. Just take it easy."
"Certainly." Guinan said. "Maybe I'll end my shift a
little early."
The crowd had backed away and the others had given her
breathing room. Guinan got up and stepped into the sanctuary
of her office behind the bar.
Once inside, she fell onto the oversized couch facing
the large viewport. Her brow wrinkled as she tried to
decipher the images and feelings which temporarily robbed
her of consciousness.

"Q, here! I guess I was stupid to think we would ever
escape from that clown's grip," Miles O'Brien sank his teeth
into a mutton shank.
"He's gone now." Keiko sat across from him in the
dinning area of their quarters on the Bajoran space station
Deep Space Nine. "Well, how is it?"
Miles took the napkin from his lap and swapped at his
face. "It's absolutely delicious. How did you get those
bloody Cardassian replicators to do it?"
"I didn't. I bought the meat from Quark."
"What?!"
"He told me he knew a supplier of Earth delicacies and
he would sell it to us at a discount. Said something about
owing you a favor for help at his bar."
Miles shook his head. "Honey, you should know Quark is
not to be trusted."
"Not usually, I guess. But when I discovered I had the
chance to fix your favorite meal, I couldn't say no."
"Ahh, that's nice sweetheart." He took another bite of
his dinner. "And since Quark needs me to help keep his
computers up, he probably wouldn't poison me."
Miles laughed at the look of shock that crossed his
wife's face.

The perimeter alarms rang through Ops. Major Kira
Nerys, the officer on duty, called for sensors. "Is a ship
coming through the wormhole?"
"Negative," said the Starfleet man sitting at Dax's
usual station. "Neutrino readings are normal."
"Then what?," Kira said frustratingly. The perimeter
alert alarms meant something was approaching the station.
"Unknown," the man said.
"Raise shields! Scan for cloaking device signatures and
get me Commander Sisko," Kira took a step toward the
overhead viewer which was normally focused on the wormhole.
All appeared quiet, but the damn alarms were still blaring
in her ears.
The familiar hydraulic sounds of the turbolift cut
through the alarms and Kira spun to see Sisko, Dax and
O'Brien disembarking onto the deck.
"Report, Major," Sisko's deep voice demanded. Even
though the tone was harsh it had a surprising calming effect
on Kira.
"I can't explain it, Sir. The sensors obviously think
something's there but they won't tell us what it is."
Sisko walked up behind Dax, who had taken her spot at
the science station. "What can you tell me, Lieutenant?"
Dax shook her head slightly, "Kira's right. The sensors
are confused. But I can tell you it is more than one thing
approaching us."
"Approaching us from where?," Sisko said.
Then the viewscreen changed and five Federation
starships suddenly orbited Deep Space Nine.

CHAPTER TWO

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise
picked himself off the command deck and surveyed the bridge.
Everyone was doing the same, no one having been able to keep
their footing during the severe buffeting.
"Report," William Riker, his Number One, said from next
to him.
"All systems are coming back on line," said Ensign Ro
Laren from the Ops station.
"Data," Picard said coming up behind his android
science officer at the helm station, "What was that?"
"Unknown, Sir."
The darkened main viewscreen encompassing the entire
front wall of the bridge sprung to life, flickering into a
multi-colored test pattern.
"Where are we?" Riker asked.
"Sensors will be operational momentarily," Data said.
The turbolift doors opened slowly behind the command
center of the bridge. Troi and Worf emerged.
"Mr. Worf," Picard said. "As soon as the internal
sensors are on-line, I need a status report."
"Yes, Sir."
The viewscreen blinked again and a very blurry image
materialized and slowly coalesced into a familiar image.
"Deep Space Nine," Picard said.

Sisko and his crew stared dumbfounded at the main Ops
viewscreen.
"I don't believe this," Sisko said.
"It does seem impossible," Dax concurred from behind
him.
On the screen were five starships -- all named
Enterprise. All from different time periods.
"Commander," O'Brien called out. "We are getting a hail
from the Enterprise, ah, 1701-D, Sir."
"On the screen."
The screen changed from the historic image to one of
familiarity, a Galaxy-Class starship's main bridge. In the
center was Jean-Luc Picard, a man Sisko once despised, for
as Locutus of Borg, Picard destroyed the Starfleet at Wolf
359, in the process killing his wife Jennifer.
Sisko's violent emotions had ebbed since he met Picard
-- not Locutus -- when the Enterprise arrived to assist in
the establishment of a Federation presence on DS9 earlier
this year.
But the viewer's image brought back strong emotions of
Jennifer, nearly overwhelming Sisko for a moment.
"Captain Picard," he said with too much emotion.
"Commander Sisko," Picard said. "I am at a lack to
understand how we got here, all of us. I was wondering if
you could explain further."
"I'm afraid we are as much in the dark as you." Sisko
said.
"However, it looks as if we are about to be a part of
history."

CHAPTER THREE
"Captain, the communications between the starship and
the space station are on recognizable, albeit advanced,
Federation hails."

"The code signatures from the vessels and the station
fall within Starfleet parameters. There is a 92 percent
probability they are Federation crafts."
The Captain spun in his chair to look at the center
viewscreen. "But of a much advanced design." He got up and
walked over to his science officer. The Starship Enterprise
was just returning from the Khitomer Conference en route to
decommissioning when the ship began to shake apart.
"So, Spock," Captain James T. Kirk said to his Vulcan
First Officer, "Could the buffeting we just experienced have
been a time warp?"
Spock raised an eyebrow. "All evidence supports the
conclusion."
"And," Kirk said, rubbing his hands together, "From
what we've just heard, it seems Captain Picard of Enterprise
...D, knows Commander Sisko of DS9."
"It would seem so."
"So perhaps we are in their time period. Uhura," Kirk
said to his communications officer. "Get me Captain Picard
... of the Starship Enterprise."
"Yes, Sir."

"Who?" Picard asked incredulously.
"Captain James T. Kirk," Worf repeated.
"I guess I should have expected this," Picard
commented.
He stood up, as did Riker and Troi.
Picard glanced toward his Number One.
"Well, Sir. It's not every day you get to address a
legend," Riker said.
Picard put his hands up in front of him, as if he were
pushing something away. "Now, everyone. I know how important
James Kirk and his crew were to Federation history, but we
must remember they are apparently here from the past. We can
not let them know more about their future than is absolutely
necessary. Or else we risk altering our history."
"I'm afraid it's much too late for that, Jean-Luc,"
said a familiar voice from behind him.
Picard spun on his heel to face... "Q!"

"Of course," Picard fumed as he took two steps toward
the entity. "This little affair has your trademark of chaos
all over it."
Q took two steps back. "Normally, I'd agree with you,
Picard. But this time its something far worse than a common
prank."
"Q!"
"Picard, this is serious, not only to you but to me."
"Oh come now, Q. What could possibly harm an omnipotent
entity?," the Captain said rolling his eyes. "Now deliver
those starships back to..."
"That's just it Picard. Unbelievably, something has
affected me and all Q. We're immobilized."
Data stood up, "Immobilized? As I understood it, the Q
Continuum was omnipotent and, to the extent of the known
physical universe, all-powerful."
"A nice thought," Q said. "But, alas, no longer true.
There's a new bully in the neighborhood."
Picard brow furrowed. "Indeed, and just what is this
bully's intentions."
Q plopped down onto the nearest chair. "To conquer ...
everything. And they've started by neutralizing the
continuum and eliminating... something else."
"And what is that?," Worf asked.
"Believe me, Microbrain, you don't want to know."
"Q," Picard yelled. "Stop this evasiveness and..."
"Earth, Picard. They eliminated the Planet Earth. It
never existed."
No one said anything. There was no movement on the
bridge.
"Speechless," Q said. "I would never had believed it. I
guess these new guys are more powerful."
"Come ...now..., Q." Picard said slowly. "If what you
say were true than how could any of us be here."
"At the last moment before your beloved home was
vanquished, I used all the remaining power of the Q to ...
save you."
"Why?" Data asked.
"Because, my dear Data, you and your crew were all that
I could think of... off the top of my head... that could
help me banish these bullies."
"Really?" Picard said. "And... the other Enterprises."
"An aftereffect, I suppose, Jean-Luc. I only had a
mali-second to act, and my powers were unfocused due to the
invaders. So when I thought Starship Enterprise, we got more
than we bargained for."
"...And DS9?"
"Simply the last place I visited in your universe
before the invasion."
"Wonderful." Picard said.
Riker stepped up next to his Captain. "It looks as if
we have a problem, Sir."
"Always the master of understatement, Riker," Q said.
"Well, at least you've got me along to help for the
duration."
"Marvelous," Worf said.

"No response, Sir," Uhura said.
"Hmmm. Are our hailing frequencies compatible with
theirs?"
Uhura shrugged, "Assuming they are from our future they
should be able to read us. After all, I can read old-style
radio waves."
"Good point," Kirk said. "Well..."
He was interrupted by a beeping from Uhura's station.

"Is it Picard?" Kirk asked.
"No, Sir. It's from the previous Enterprise. NCC-1701."
Kirk looked at Spock then turned slowly to the
viewscreen. "Visual."
The screen wavered and a familiar visage filled it, a
ruggedly handsome man, who Kirk noted with sadness, was
doomed to spend his older years crippled by Delta Ray
exposure. "This is Captain Christopher Pike of the Starship
Enterprise. Come in, please."
Kirk swallowed. "This is Captain James T. Kirk ... of a
future Starship Enterprise."
Pike nodded, "Our sensors confirm all the starships
orbiting the station are future versions of my ship."
"Yes," Kirk said. "We have come to the same
conclusion."
"Mr. Spock, my science officer," Pike said, "has
suggested we have as little exposure as possible so as not
to further disrupt the course of future events. I just
needed to confirm our findings."
"I ... understand," Kirk replied. "For now, we should
limit communications to emergencies."
"Agreed, Pike out."
The viewscreen wavered and resumed the image of the
Enterprises orbiting Deep Space Nine.
Kirk turned to Spock, "Do you remember ever giving that
suggestion to Captain Pike."
"Negative, Captain. I have no recollection of these
events ever occurring on the other Enterprise. I will scan
the library computer records."
"Curiouser and curiouser," Kirk said as he sat in his
chair.

"You saved us?," Riker shook his head in bewilderment.
Q shrugged, "I admit to a touch of temporary insanity."
Picard walked to the main viewscreen. Four Starship
Enterprises -- a legacy spanning the history of the United
Federation of Planets. From Captain April to Captain
Garrett, NCC-1701 has defined the eras of their service.
Now, if Q could be believed -- and Picard admitted he had no
reason not to believe -- Earth had been eliminated, had
never existed.
And through a fluke of undefinable cosmic powers, these
historic ships and crews have come together to face their
greatest challenge: To restore humanity.
And to defeat a force more powerful than the most
powerful entity Picard had ever encountered.
"Mind-boggling, eh, Mon Capitan," Q said, coming up
behind him.
Picard turned and marched past him up the ramp to
Worf's security station. He turned and faced the entity, who
still stood front and center. "Let's say your right, Q, and
Earth is gone."
"I AM right, Picard. I checked. It's not just gone, it
was never there. Eight planets, not nine. Mercury, Venus,
Mars. Earth is an asteroid belt."
"Which leaves me two immediate questions." Picard said
gripping the security station. "One: why did these
aggressors spare you? And two: what has this done to
galactic history?"
Q shook his head and walked toward the command chair.
"Good questions. One: to taunt me, I suppose. The great
taunter of the Universe, being taunted himself. They
probably are having a laugh riot -- biding their time before
they play out their game.
"And two: I said before humans were not important.
However, you have had a large impact on this sector of space
-- in another reality. Now it's open season."
"Who controls this space?," Worf asked.
"I'm not sure really," Q responded. "But, I'll bet we
find out soon enough."
Data turned in his chair, "If I may, one can
extrapolate, using known history as a referent, that this
sector of space is probably controlled by the Cardassian
Alliance. Assuming there was no Federation to help excise
them from Bajoran Space."
"Assuming the Klingon Empire has not staked claim to
this space long ago," Worf said with a bit of pride.
Picard looked at him with surprise. "Mr. Worf?"
"The Klingons had a strong military presence in this
sector long before the Cardassians were a power. If there
was no Federation..."
"You would have all died after Praxis or been conquered
by the Romulans at Khitomer. Power, indeed." Q said.
Worf growled.
Q laughed.
Picard clapped his hands, "Gentlemen, this speculation
is foolhardy and useless. Mr. Data. Mr. Worf. Start long
range sensor sweeps. See if we can get some answers."
"Deep Space Nine may be of some assistance, Sir," Data
added.
"Indeed," Picard agreed. "Get me Commander Sisko. And
send a general hail to the other Enterprises telling them to
stand by for more information."

"Can we confirm these are friendly vessels?," Odo asked
seconds after arriving at Ops.
Sisko shrugged, "It is the Enterprise out there --our
Enterprise from our time period, Constable. I have no reason
to believe the others are anything but what they seem."
"Never-the-less," Odo countered, "It might be wise if
we take more defensive measures."
O'Brien stood from behind his station, slightly
annoyed.
"Odo, the Enterprise would never take any action
against this station."
"Just the same, Chief, caution is warranted. This is a
highly unusual situation..."
The security chief was interrupted by a signal from
O'Brien's station. "Its Captain Picard, Sir."
Sisko moved to center of Ops and then thought twice,
"In my office, please, Chief."

Sisko sat behind his desk turning his baseball over and
over in his hand, tossing it between the two. He was trying
to absorb the information Picard just gave him.
No Earth. Never an Earth.
Blast Q. Sisko could not believe Q wasn't behind this,
and was frankly surprised at how easily Picard seems to have
excepted his word. As far as Sisko could tell, Q couldn't be
trusted as far as an infant could toss his baseball.
However, if there were entities more powerful than Q
out to conquer the Universe, than what the hell could Sisko,
could any of them do, to stand in its way?
Picard had suggested a meeting of all the captains on
DS9. Sisko agreed and left the Enterprise Captain to deal
with his counterparts. He had to deal with getting the
station ready for the historic event and ready to deal with
whatever came next.
He would need to call a meeting of his senior staff. If
Picard was right and history had reset itself sans an Earth
and human race, then they would inevitably encounter the
political forces of the sector very soon.

Rom had rarely heard his brother laugh so excitedly.
Quark came up from behind and slapped him on the back
so hard it almost knocked him over. "Don't be some glum,
Rom. This is the profit-making event of the month... at
least. All the Captains of the Enterprises. We'll have them
all here, at Quark's Place. Who in their right mind would
pass up the opportunity to meet so many heroes at one time?
Everyone on the station ...on the ships ... on Bajor... will
be here. Buying, gambling, drinking ...loosing their
money... to us."
Rom coughed. "But brother, what if the rumor is true,
that Earth has been erased from existence, and that the
Federation doesn't exist either?"
Quark laughed louder, "Then, finally, Sisko has no
authority to check my books." And the Ferengi howled with
pleasure all the way to the holo-suites.

CHAPTER FOUR
Spock looked up from his sensor station. The red alert
klaxons were blaring. "The ship matches no correlations in
our library banks. It is from a race we have not yet
encountered."
"Ok, everyone," Kirk called out to his bridge staff.
"Our priority in a combat situation will be to shield NCC-
1701, Captain Pike's ship, from attack. At this point, we
can only worry about the direct links to our past and let
the future take care of itself. Clear?"
"Aye, Sir," Chekov and the helmsman, McGarity, chimed
together.
Uhura spoke up, "Captain Picard coming on all-hail,
Sir."
"On screen," Kirk said, very frustrated by this turn of
events. His shields were up and his weapons primed but Kirk
knew he was facing a technology out-matching his... however,
that wouldn't stop him from engaging the enemy, and
defeating him.
The French-accented voice of the Captain of Enterprise-
D filled Kirk's bridge, "The vessel approaching is a
Cardassian Galor-Class Warship. I respectfully suggest all
ships remain in orbit, while 1701-D dispatches her."
The signal broke and Kirk turned to his crew.
"Opinions."
"As you said, Captain," Spock began. "We must let the
future take care of itself. Also, if the Cardassian craft is
of Picard's time period, his ship is the best equipped to
deal with it."
Kirk nodded, "I agree. I just hate to sit this out."
"Captain," Chekov called out. "Enterprise-B is breaking
orbit! She is pursuing Captain Picard's ship."
"What? On visual."
The screen blipped away from Deep Space Nine to show
1701-B pursuing 1701-D toward the Cardassians.
Kirk stood up and stepped toward the viewer. "An
Excelsior-Class ship. We should be able to stop her."
"Perhaps, Captain," Spock said. "Assuming the
Enterprise-B is indeed a Excelsior Class as we are aware of
them. She may be significantly more advanced. Also, we are
not certain her actions are hostile."
"Status of 1701 and 1701-C?"
"Still in orbit," McGarity said.
"Stand by to break orbit on my signal," Kirk ordered.
"Aye, Sir," Chekov replied.

"Raise Enterprise-B!"
"No response, Sir," Worf said. "The Cardassian is
somehow interfering with communications."
"It is possible in this altered reality," Data said,
"The Cardassian technology is quite different."
Picard paced in front of the command chairs, glancing
once at Q who sat quietly, for once, next to Troi.
"Counselor, can you sense anything from the ships?"
She concentrated for a few moments, "I sense hostility
and a bit of confusion from the warship. From the
Enterprise, I sense confusion and helplessness."
"They've never seen the likes of us before," Riker
intoned. "Captain, the Federation doesn't exist so the
Cardassians have no idea what they're facing."
"All they know is we are invaders," Worf added. "And
apparently that is enough."
"Get us directly between the Warship and Enterprise-B,"
Picard ordered.
Just then, the Galor-Class Warship opened fire,
striking 1701-B with a full weapons spread. Picard and crew
watched as the energy pulses danced across the other
starship's weakening defense screens.

"Break orbit," Kirk ordered. "Lock phasers and photon
torpedoes on the warship."
"Aye, Sir," Chekov said.
"Sir," Uhura called out, "The other ships are breaking
orbit as well. Moving in to assist."

"Benjamin, if the Enterprises are destroyed, our
history will be irrevocably altered, even if we find a way
to restore Earth," Dax said.
Sisko made the decision he contemplated when 1701-B
broke orbit. "Chief O'Brien divert all power to the tractor
beams. Hold those three starships in place."
O'Brien fingers flew frantically over his engineering
board. "The power systems will be strained, Sir, especially
if they attempt warp speed."
"Engage the beams," Sisko ordered.
He watched as three energy lances emanated from the
outer ring of Deep Space Nine, catching the Enterprises as
they began to break orbit. The lights in Ops dimmed
momentarily and slowly brightened to normal.
"Got'um, Sir," O'Brien said.
Then the comm board started screaming at him.

"DS9 has them in tractors," Riker said.
"That Sisko is such a bully," Q commented.
"Status of Enterprise-B," Picard barked.
"The ship is experiences intermittent power overloads
due to the Cardassian attack," Data reported. "It is
unlikely they will withstand another assault."
"If we can tell that, so can they," Riker responded.
"Mr. Worf, fire phasers at the warship."
"Yes, Sir."
Daggers of power lanced forth from Enterprise-D. The
bridge crew watched as the phasers struck the Cardassians,
flaring on the ship's forward shields and dissipating
rapidly.
"Damage report," Picard inquired.
Worf scowled and looked at his security readouts,
"Minor damage to their forward deflectors. It appears the
Cardassians have advanced shield technology in this
reality."
Picard nodded, "Arm the phot--"
"Sir," Worf called out. "Enterprise-B has fired photon
torpedoes."
On the screen, the weapons struck the Cardassians in
the same spot as the phasers moments ago. This time,
however, the stronger plasma blasts broke through, causing
minor explosions to dance along the ship's hull.
"Helm," Picard ordered. "Get us back in between --"
It was too late. The Cardassian ship fired a full
barrage of phasers, torpedoes, and something else,
unidentifiable by Worf's computers.
The massive power struck the Enterprise-B dead-on.

"Damn it." Kirk yelled, "Uhura, get me Commander Sisko,
now."
"They are refusing our hails, Sir, as well as the hails
from the other Enterprises."
"Mr. Chekov, target the source of that tractor beam and
lock phasers."
"Yes, Sir," Chekov said as his hands flew across his
board.
"Fire!" Kirk said, launching an attack on Deep Space
Nine.

"The Enterprise-B has suffered severe casualties," Worf
reported. "They are near a power shutdown."
"What about their warp core?" Riker asked.
"Scanning..."
Picard glared at the Warship, contemplating the next
move. Obviously, the Cardassian was more advanced then what
he was used to, but why had Enterprise-B acted in such an
irrational manner, risking so much?
"Sir," Worf said. "The other Enterprise is going to
warp speed! They are on a collision course with..."
"Mr. Data, warp speed!" Riker called. "Get us out of
here."
"Worf, raise the Enterprise, now!" Picard called out.

Then the explosion blanketed the viewscreen,
overloading the visual circuits momentarily, as the two star
crafts collided.

"Evasive," Kirk ordered, as his Enterprise, primed for
battle, found itself instead riding the waves of a warp
drive explosion, pushing her back toward the space station.

"The shields will be overloaded," O'Brien cried over
the alert klaxons in Ops. "Impossible to tell if they will
hold."
"Brace yourselves," Sisko said, as the waves slammed
DS9 throwing everyone mercilessly to the deck.

Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott saw the station
approaching quickly on the main viewer in the engine room.
His Enterprise would be smashed like an old wooden ocean-
going craft slamming into a rocky shoreline. 'Not this
ship,' he thought as he made some rapid calculations on his
master controls, altering the ship's course and warp speed
output just enough to push his ship above and away from Deep
Space Nine.
"Never again will I loose ya," he uttered to no one as
he petted his control panel. "Never."

"All systems coming back on," O'Brien said, then added
with a surprise. "The Cardassian tractors held, too. The
Enterprises still in the beam survived and were held away
from the station."
"Enterprise-A barely missed us, Sir," Kira said.
Sisko nodded his head, "And Picard's ship."
"They went to warp speed seconds before the explosion.
Sensors cannot penetrate the incident horizon," Dax said.
"In other words, you don't know," Sisko clarified.
"Correct," Dax replied.

"Status report, Number One."
The dark-haired woman turned from the helm console to
look at her Captain. "All systems are coming back on line,
Sir. The shields were strained by repelling the explosion.
They will need some repairs. The station's tractor beam kept
us from being propelled into her hull. Dr. Boyce reports no
casualties."
Christopher Pike nodded. His ship was saved by the beam
trapping them from assisting the Enterprise-B and D with the
alien ship. Now, Enterprise-B was destroyed, altering the
future, unless that Enterprise was originally destined to be
annihilated at this point. Unlikely.
Pike turned to his science officer, who was under his
station examining the circuitry behind an open vent. "Mr.
Spock?"
The young officer perked up, bumping his head on the
vent. Pike smiled slightly, noting the brief grimace of
embarrassment before the Vulcan got a hold of himself.
"Yes, Captain?"
"I am assigning you to be our liaison to the other
ships and Deep Space Nine."
"But, Sir, there are higher-ranked..."
"Belay that, Mister. You got the job. Number One will
assist you, but you're our man."
Number One raised an eyebrow. "Captain..."
Pike turned. "You should work with Enterprise-A, first.
I recognize her captain, James Kirk. He is currently a
promising Lieutenant under Captain Garrovick on the
Farrugut. Currently, meaning our time, of course. In fact,
we've met. I believe his future self is our best bet for
gathering information."
"Logical," Number One said.
"Indeed," Spock agreed.
"Get to it then."
"Aye, Sir," they said in unison as they departed the
bridge.

"Well, how about those pyrotechnics?" Q said as he
stood and stretched.
Picard clapped his hands together, "That is all you
have to say? Hundreds of people just lost their lives."
Q shrugged, "Hey, what can we do? Grieve and move on,
Captain. But of course you are again missing the big
picture. How about you, Riker? Can you figure it out?"
Riker took a step toward the entity, "All I can figure
out is I've had enough of your shenanigans, Q."
"The brilliance in this room!" Q said as he stepped
toward the helm. "Data, save me from human stupidity."
The android stared at Q for a moment and then turned to
look at Picard, "Perhaps Q is referring to the fate of NCC-
1701-B. In our timeline the ship was not destroyed in combat
with Cardassians."
Q clapped. "Very good. You get the gold star, Data."
"Obviously, Q," Picard said loudly. "The Federation and
Cardassians hadn't encountered each other during that time
period."
"And now...?" Q said encouraging Picard to think more.
When he didn't say anything, Q collapsed in a chair. "Why we
ever got interested in you...? History is not locked in
place anymore. Those bullies have released the flood gates."
"I'd say that was an obvious conclusion when they
eliminated Earth," Riker said.
"But," Q said, "You see, you can't realign only a part
of history. That's why tampering with the space-time
continuum isn't done more often. Because you leave yourself
open for annihilation."
"Q, I'm afraid we don't see the same cosmic picture,"
Picard said.
"Picard, listen. They erased humanity -- most of it.
Now nothing's locked in place anymore. We can go back and
erase them. The timestream can now be rewritten any number
of times."
"This sounds like an extraordinarily dangerous option,"
Data commented.
"With Earth eliminated and the Q paralyzed, what do any
of us have to loose? Nothing! And we've got everything to
gain. How about it Picard, we can finally be a team." Q
reached his hand toward the Captain.
Picard unconsciously grasped it and Q pulled him into a
big hug, to everyone's surprise, especially the Captain's.
"Now," Q said, releasing Picard. "Helm, take us back to
Deep Space Nine." Then he moved his right hand in a familiar
gesture. "Engage!" Nothing happened as Q looked at an angry
Captain. "Just kidding. Sense of humor, Jean-Luc, is a
useful character trait. Look into it."

CHAPTER FIVE
"Odo, you look flustered, which I must admit is quite
gratifying," Quark said as he approached the security chief
in the Promenade.
"I am not flustered," Odo snapped. "Just preoccupied."
"With the Captains' meeting?"
"What captains' meeting?"
"Come on, Odo, give me a little credit. The meeting
Sisko is calling for the Enterprise captains."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Alright," Quark smiled as he walked away. "But I'm
inviting all of them to my bar for a celebration as soon as
the meeting is over." He turned and looked behind him. "And
believe it or not, you're invited."
Odo stopped his gait, shook his head and decided to
walk in another direction.

"It is agreed then. The meeting will adjourn on Deep
Space Nine at 1350 hours."
"Fine. I'm looking forward to it," Kirk said.

"Enterprise out," Picard's image vanished from the
Enterprise-A's viewscreen.
"The Enterprise-D has resumed orbit," Chekov reported.
Kirk nodded and turned back to Uhura. "Have Doctor
McCoy meet me in my quarters. Mr. Chekov you have the conn.
Spock with me."
When they entered the turbolift, Kirk turned to first
officer. "Well, what do you think?"
Spock raised an eyebrow. "If we are to learn anything
more about our situation, it will be necessary to meet with
the others as Captain Picard suggests. In addition, as we
have witnessed, we may have to rely on the newer class
starships for future conflict."
"What about the time flow conflicts?"
"History has apparently already been seriously
compromised, considering I have no personal recollection and
Starfleet records show no indication of NCC-1701 ever
undergoing our current situation."
Kirk nodded as the turbolift opened. Spock was right,
but he didn't enjoy the idea of having to reset history. It
reminded him of Edith, and threatened to unleash the
emotional turmoil tied to her memory.
When they arrived at his quarters, Dr. Leonard McCoy
was waiting.
"Well, it about time you decided to clue me in," he
said.
"Let's go inside," Kirk responded waving his best
friends through the doorway. "Would anyone like a drink?"
Spock shook his head.
"For God's sake, Jim, dispense with the pleasantries
and start talking. I hate to be in the dark."
"Sorry, Bones." He sat on his bed. "Well, it seems that
we are here due to an imbalance in the powers of an entity
named Q."
Bones shook his head, "Don't tell me. All-knowing, all-
seeing, self-righteous..."
Kirk nodded. "Yes, Doctor, One of those."
McCoy plopped down on a chair, "Wonderful."
"It seems this Q entity was attacked," Kirk continued,
"by an even more powerful being. This second entity has
immobilized the Q and has erased Earth."
McCoy did a double-take, "Come again."
"Doctor," Spock began, "Earth has apparently been
deleted from the time stream."
McCoy stared blankly for a moment, "Well then how the
hell are we here?"
Kirk shrugged, "According to Captain Picard, the Q
entity currently on Enterprise-D's bridge has had previous
encounters with her crew. Q felt Enterprise could help in
banishing the other entity. The rest of us are here because
Q's powers were unfocused and dragged every Federation
Starship Enterprise along for the ride."
McCoy stood, "And you're going over to the station to
meet with the other captains."
"Yes. Captain Pike, Captain Picard and Captain Rachel
Garrett... along with station Commander Benjamin Sisko and
this Q. And you and Spock, of course."
"And we are all are gonna talk about ...what? Finding
another home?"
Spock folded his hands together. "It would be logical
to assume the topic will be rescuing Earth."
Bones stood up, "Oh sure. Maybe if we say to this
super-entity 'pretty please' it will change its mind and
give us our planet back. Damn it, how are we going to combat
an entity that can alter history at will?"
Kirk joined them in standing, "How did we combat
Apollo, or Trelane, the Kelvans... or Charlie Evans ... or
Gary? We did it because we are the best crew in Starfleet.
We did it because we never lost confidence in ourselves or
each other."
McCoy shook his head, "Maybe we are the luckiest group
of people in space. Maybe our luck is running out."
Kirk walked up and clapped his hands on the doctor's
shoulders. "You don't believe that, Bones. Now we've got a
job to do, and I'll need you both. Let's show these next
generation Enterprises why our crew is in the history
books."
"Agreed," Spock said.
"Nice pep talk, Jim," Bones said.
"Thanks," Kirk grinned as they left his quarters.

Benjamin Sisko was getting ready in his quarters.
Sisko hated the dress uniform, but felt compelled to
wear it. After all, he was about to meet some of the
greatest heros of the U.F.P. The dress uniform was the least
he could do to honor them. He had read about the missions of
the Starships Enterprise at the academy, some were assigned
readings.
However, Cadet Sisko made Enterprise his unofficial
hobby, soaking up library disc after library disc full of
log reports and summaries. These stories of adventure and
exploration drove him to space. However, in all his readings
he never came across the logs describing this situation.
Surely, it would have been recorded by Captain Pike and
Captain Kirk, for they kept extremely detailed log entries.
But it wasn't. Sisko double checked the records hours ago,
no mention. He planned to make this a point at the meeting.
"Excited, Dad?"
Benjamin turned to see his son smiling in the doorway
to his bedroom. He smiled, "Absolutely, Jake. The people
coming on the station are the reason your old man joined
Starfleet."
Jake looked down and frowned, "I see. That is exciting,
I guess. Well, Major Kira is in the living room waiting."
Now, what was that look all about? Sisko put his hand
on his son's shoulder. "Jake?"
The boy looked up and smiled. "It's nothing, dad. I
just ...get into moods sometimes."
So that was it. Mentioning his entrance to Starfleet
reminded Jake of his mom and her death aboard a starship.
Sisko reprimanded himself, he had to be careful about what
he said, the boy still hurt as much as he did, perhaps more
in some ways. "Hang in there, Jake. We can talk when I get
back."
Jake shrugged, "It's no big deal, Dad. Don't worry."
"That's a dad's job, Jake. I'll be back soon."
Benjamin walked out into the living room to meet his
first officer.
"Snazzy, Commander," Major Kira Nerys said, looking at
his attire.
"Shall we go."
"Of course, the members of the Enterprise are aboard.
Dax and Odo have escorted them to Mrs. O'Brien's classroom."
"Excellent," Sisko said. His staff had decided the
school was the least conspicuous and most secure area to
hold the meeting. Odo, in fact, had already began the
security planning before the others had finalized their
decision. And Sisko trusted the Constable's instincts, so
the classroom became the site.

James Kirk shook Christopher Pike's hand. "It's a
pleasure to see you again, Captain," Kirk said.
"Indeed, Captain. It's good to see the promising young
man from the Farragut has done so well."
"Thank you, Sir. What do you think of all this?"
"I think this is an extraordinarily unusual and
dangerous situation. Any wrong move on our part -- however
that may be defined -- can have disastrous repercussions."
"The fate of Enterprise-B may have already caused
irreparable repercussions."
"True, but we must deal with our immediate futures,
Captain Kirk. As long as there is an Enterprise-A there will
be a B. The Federation can be restored."
"I agree, Sir."
Spock of Enterprise-A came into the promenade and
approached the two men with whom he held the most loyalty.
"The meeting is ready to begin, Captains."

The chairs will set up in a circle. At the top sat
Jean-Luc Picard. Then around clockwise were Q, Riker, Pike,
Number One, Spock, Kirk, McCoy, Sisko, Kira, Garrett and her
first officer Alexander Okuda. Outside the room, Odo and
Worf led the security team.
Sisko stood first, "As commander of this station, I
would like to welcome you all to Deep Space Nine. This is an
unprecedented meeting of some of the most important citizens
ever to represent Starfleet and the United Federation of
Planets. We are honored by your presence and know that with
all of us working together, we can return the time stream
and the universe to its proper alignment. Thank you." He
sat.
Q leaned over to Picard, "Not an elegant speech maker,
huh, Jean-Luc?"
Picard brow creased, "Q, please..."
"Excuse me," James Kirk said, standing. "These
pleasantries are time consuming and pointless. No offense,
Commander Sisko, but if you hadn't been so arrogant as to
lock a tractor beam on my ship and the others, 500 important
Federation citizens wouldn't be space dust now. Now, I think
we should cut to the chase and stop treating this like a
mutual admiration society. We've got a universe to set
right."
"Bravo," Q said clapping, "I like this one, Picard."
Kirk took two steps toward the entity, "You must be Q."
"Greetings and felicitations, Kirk," Q smiled.
"I have no use for super-powered egotistical know-it-
alls, Q," Kirk said. "Now do you have something useful to
offer or are you just here for comic relief?"
Q smiled and nodded, standing and clapping Kirk on the
shoulder. He laughed as Kirk recoiled. "I have more to offer
than your puny mind can comprehend, Kirk. The question is
when do I feel like offering it."
Kirk took another step toward Q. Picard jumped up and
put himself between the two. "Q, Captain Kirk," Picard said.
"It would be unfortunate if this cordial meeting
degenerated."
"If I find you are withholding important information,
Q..." Kirk said staring the entity in the eyes. They locked
gazes for a long moment, then they went back to their mutual
seats.
"Good combative spirit, Kirk." Q called out as he was
facing away from the Captain. "Definitely old school."
"I hope you don't mind if I interrupt," Christopher
Pike called over Q's remarks. "There are obviously going to
be some personality clashes. However, Starfleet Academy, in
my day, emphasized accomplishment of goals over
dispositions. I hope that still stands with today's
graduates."
"Of course, Captain," Picard said. "We are in a unique
scenario obviously, and I feel Q is most qualified to
introduce the situation."
"Ah, correct, Jean-Luc, " Q said standing and
straightening his tunic, "I'll try to make this as easy to
understand as possible." He turned and smiled at Kirk. "You
see, the Q, an omnipotent race of which I am very highly
ranked, have been invaded, caught off guard, actually, by a
very powerful -- and bullying -- entity or entities. I was
the only Q to escape their grasp--"
"And the others?" Pike's Number One asked.
"They, my lady, are immobilized back in the continuum."
"Not so omnipotent after all, eh," McCoy said.
"Watch your tongue, little man," Q blurted.
Kirk jumped out of his chair, "The doctor's right. And
if this entity was able to take the rest of the Q out, I
don't see how you can help us."
Q's face grimaced, "As if you understand anything about
the nature of the universe, Kirk."
"That's how he's gonna help us, Jim," McCoy chortled.
"By hurtling insults."
"The degree of our understanding the nature of the
universe," Spock said, "seems to have little to do with our
current scenario."
Q laughed, pointing toward Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. "You
boys have a few puny success stories over a quarter century
--less than infinitesimal in universal measure-- and you
think everyone should bow. The great exploits of the
Starship Enterprise." He laughed louder.
"That's enough!" Christopher Pike yelled. "Mr. Q, if
you have something worthwhile to tell us, fine. Do so,
without interruption and insult, or else turn the meeting
over to someone else."
Q's eyed widened. "Fine, see if you insignifigants can
solve this without me. After all, you'd all be less than
spacedust without my help. So, go ahead. I've done my share
already, anyhow." He crossed his arm and closed his eyes.
Picard turned to him, "Q, this is childish."
He nodded and whispered, "Tell them when they stop
acting like children, maybe I'll be willing to help."
Seconds later he was quietly snoring.
"According to Q," Pike was saying, "This new force is
very powerful -- it would have to be to annihilate Earth and
alter history. So, we need to find allies who can help us."
"Q ... on a good day," Riker intoned.
After a moment of silence Kirk whispered, "All is as it
was before."
McCoy looked at his captain and a flash of recognition
crossed his face. "Many such journeys are possible. Let me
be your gateway."
"Gentlemen...," Spock started but McCoy jumped in.
"The Guardian of Forever. Great idea, Jim." He let his
head fall into his palm. "Ohh, but just thinking of that
portal gives me a headache."
Q perked up, "The doughnut? You guys know about the
doughnut?"
Kirk gave Q a hard stare.
"Hmmm. An elementary school science project gone awry,"
Q said smirking.
"Elementary school science project, in a pig's eye,"
Bones McCoy snorted. "This Q is either a super being or
certifiable."
"Probably close to both," Kirk replied. He, Bones, and
Spock were walking through the promenade of Deep Space Nine.
"Spock, what's your opinion about the meeting?"
The Vulcan raised his right eyebrow. "Captains Picard
and Garrett and Commander Sisko seem to be competent
Starfleet officers. However, to solve this situation will
require a substantial leap beyond competency. I cannot say
from our meeting whether or not these officers are up to the
task at hand."
"And we, of course, are," McCoy said dryly.

Kirk shrugged and was about to reply when a voice
called from behind them.
"Admiral Kirk! Admiral Kirk! We meet at last..."
Kirk turned around to see a little man with a large
head and very exaggerated ears. He was from a race Kirk
didn't recognize. The little man jogging toward him was
holding a drink. He offered it to the 'admiral.' "Saurian
Brandy?," the man said.
Kirk didn't take the proffered beverage. "And you are?"
"Me? I am Quark, owner of the entertainment capital for
this section of the galaxy, Quark's."
Kirk exchanged glances with his officers. "A bar?"
"Not simply a bar, Admiral. An oasis," he grabbed
Kirk's sleeve. "Allow me to show you and your men."
Kirk stood his ground and yanked his arm back. "It's
Captain Kirk, Mr. Quark, and I'd thank you to not manhandle
me."
"Quark!"
Kirk recognized the new voice belonged to Deep Space
Nine's Security Chief.
The shapeshifter marched up to the group and grabbed
Quark's arm, lifting him half-way off his feet. "I am sorry
if this Ferengi pest was annoying you, Captain Kirk."
'Ferengi?', Kirk thought. 'Another new race for
another century, amazing!' He glanced from Quark to Odo and
shook his head. "No problem, Odo. We'll just be on our way."
"Stop by any time," Quark called out as Odo dragged him
off.

"Your opinion, Commander?"
Sisko looked into the penetrating eyes of Jean-Luc
Picard. "My opinion, Sir, is we have no choice but to try to
restore the Federation and the universe the way it was
before."
Picard nodded. "I concur. I sincerely hope we have the
means necessary." The two officers arrived at Sisko's
quarters, when they heard laughter. They turned to see Q
leaning against a bulkhead.
Picard scowled, "I thought you said your powers were
nullified."
"They are, Mon Capitan. However, my powers of stealth
are fully operational. You boys are doubting if you have the
proper muster? You are wise to question. This is larger than
all of us."
"Q..."
"Hold on, Picard. I always let you have your speeches,
now return the courtesy." Q stood tall and straightened his
tunic in a blatant parody of the Enterprise-D captain. "You
know, we talk about resetting the universe to its ... proper
... flow. Maybe this is the proper flow. Who's to say? Maybe
we've stumbled upon reality here. No Earth, no Federation,
no Q continuum. Sobering thinking, wouldn't you say? Maybe
there never was any where to boldly go." Q smiled at his
listeners.
Sisko grimaced and turned to Picard, "You do have
quarters arranged for him on the Enterprise."
Picard nodded.
"Thank goodness."

"Christopher, is it?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Oh, please. Rachel."
"Very well. Rachel."
Rachel Garrett reached out and shook hands with a
legend, Captain Christopher Pike. But, she'd be damned if
she'd act like a star-struck girl. She was a Captain of the
Enterprise as well and would act with proper decorum. "Can
we talk for a moment before returning to our ships?"
"Of course."
"Christopher..."
He smiled, "Chris."
"Chris," She smiled back. "I have to say that I've
studied the history of my ship. Of the Enterprises past.
They have got into their shares of crises. Your crew, Robert
April's crew before you and Captain Kirk's..."
"What's on your mind, Rachel?"
"Well, I took over the reigns of Enterprise-C on
Stardate... well I guess that doesn't ... five months ago.
My crew is a bit untried. Certainly not as seasoned as the
other Enterprises orbiting Deep Space Nine."
"You're nervous."
She gulped unconsciously and then cursed herself, "A
bit."
"So am I."
"Sir?"
They strolled through the promenade and sat down at a
table near the entrance of Quark's. A strange little man
with ears came up to them. Obviously the bartender. Pike
waved him off, and the man left with a look of disgust on
his face.
"Rachel," He continued. "Being a starship captain
doesn't mean you check your feelings at the dock. However,
you must learn to use those feelings advantageously."
She nodded. "I had served as a starship captain for
eight years before getting the Enterprise. But, he's not
just any ship."
'He? A female captain and a male ship,' Pike thought.
'Number One would appreciate this woman.' "From what I can
see, the Enterprise of any era is a force to be reckoned
with. Rachel, I recently dealt with a personal struggle. My
CMO told me to face it head on and lick it, or turn my back
and whither away. Just transfer your strength to your crew.
Show them that this is the Enterprise. That they are the
Enterprise. A proud legacy. They'll follow you."
She nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir."
"Uh-uh. Chris."
Her smile broadened. "Chris."
"Now, I think its time we get back to our ships."

CHAPTER SIX
"Captain Picard on hailing frequencies."
"Thank you, Commander. On screen." Kirk stood and
glanced at his command crew: Spock, Scotty, Chekov and
Uhura; his friends. He was about to rely on them to help
save civilization once again. But not Sulu, he and the crew
of the U.S.S. Excelsior were victims of the time distortion
along with everyone else they knew, the other friends and
family that filled his crews' lives. All wiped away, waiting
in entropy for the Starships Enterprise to act -- if they
can.
The screen flickered and a now familiar face filled it.
"Captain Picard. The Enterprise-A stands ready."
"Captain Kirk, 1701-D standing by. The probes from DS9
reconfirm our findings that Cardassian forces are at least
three days away. We have that long."
Kirk nodded, "Captain Pike and Captain Garrett report
their ships are fully prepared for battle."
"Commander Sisko also confirms his station's battle
readiness."
"Then that leaves us with our job. You have the
coordinates."
"Indeed, Captain Kirk."
"Then, follow our lead, Captain Picard. Kirk out." The
screen flicked back to the space scape.
"Voice only signals from Captains Pike and Garrett and
the station," Uhura said. "They wish good luck."
"Acknowledge them, please, Commander. Mr. McGarity, set
course for Forever World. Mr. Chekov, ahead warp factor
seven. Spock, keep those sensors peeled for any party
crashers. As of now, the ship is on a standing yellow
alert."
A chorus of 'aye, sirs' met Kirk as he sat back in the
chair, mentally wished good luck to all.

"This is interesting," Q said as he paced the bridge of
Enterprise-D.
"Sit down," Riker intoned. "Stop marching like a toy
soldier."
Q shrugged and sat down Indian-style in the center of
the bridge.
Troi couldn't help but smirk.
"I hesitate to ask this," Picard said, "but what is
interesting, Q?"
"Going to the doughnut. It is feasible it survived the
alterations. It may even be useful. Q would be besides
himself."
"Q?," Data queried from his seat at comm.
"Q, Mr. Data. An irascible student in his day, worse
than me. I idolized him for a bit, until I got tired of his
immature pranks. Anyway, Q would be besides himself to know
that his little pet school project may actually help save
the whole continuum ... the whole universe. Of course, if it
does, I'm not going to tell him. He would be more impossible
to be around."
"The Q," Riker said, "sound as if they all come from
the same spoiled crib."
"Watch yourself, Riker. That crib is the essence of the
universe, the previous universe ... before this one."
"Q," Picard said. "If your friend built the Guardian,
then perhaps your knowledge..."
"Forget it, Jean-Luc," Q frowned, "My friend, as you
call him, was very tight-lipped. You always had to ask him
direct questions if you wanted answers. And after our
falling out, I never wanted to get that personal. Nope, I'm
afraid I'll have to figure it out with the rest of you
people ... and Worf."
Worf snarled from the above security station.
Q laughed, "I love pissing him off."

"Bajor."
"What about it, Major?" Sisko and Kira were standing in
Sisko's office overlooking Ops.
"The planet is right where it was before this mess,
Commander. We might find some of the answers we seek down
there."
Sisko nodded and pitched his baseball between his
hands. "Perhaps. But that isn't the real reason for your
request."
Kira sat down on the couch. "I have to know how the
planet's survived in this timeframe."
"We sent probes..."
"Which show the cities decimated, I know. But, they
also indicated life around the sanctuary outside the
capital."
"Bajoran life forms."
Kira leaped up again. "Yes! Maybe survivors of the
Vedek Assembly or the Kai herself..."
Sisko shrugged. "Or maybe not."
"Commander..."
"Major." Sisko put the baseball back in its holder on
the desk and paused for a few moments. He then turned to his
first officer. "I agree with your plan. There may be clues
down there to Cardassian strength and I am curious also to
what Bajor is like in this timeframe. If Picard and Kirk
fail, we may be here for a long time. We will need allies
and supplies. Let me discuss it with Pike and Garrett. Get
their recommendations. In the meantime, have O'Brien prep
the Rio Grande."
Kira smiled, "Thank you, Sir."

"All scanners show clear," Number One said.
Pike squinted at the viewscreen, as if trying to
increase the magnification mentally of his fully-magnified
main viewer. Space. But, nothing like he had experienced.
Perhaps, out there nothing was familiar. The Cardassians
were powerful, they after all helped take out a ship two
generations beyond his own. But, he was sure that between
himself, Enterprise-C and the station they would put up a
fight if necessary, enough to hold off these Cardassians
until reinforcements arrived, if they ever did.
"Report at the slightest peep, Number One."
"Aye, Sir."
"Incoming signal from the station, Captain," Spock
exclaimed.
"Okay, Mr. Spock. Let's have it."
The screen wavered into the image of Commander Sisko.
"Captain Pike."
"Commander."
"Sir, as you know, the Planet Bajor is in this sector.
we have had extensive dealings with this planet in the real
time line."
"Your first officer is Bajoran."
"Yes. Our probes indicate life on the planet near a
major religious enclave. Major Kira believes that members of
the religious community may be alive and in need of
assistance. I suggest authorizing am away mission led by her
to the planet's surface."
"If the others don't succeed we will need more than we
currently have to survive."
"My thoughts exactly, Captain."
Pike nodded and crossed his arms. "So, what do you need
from me?"
"It was my feeling that this should be a joint
operation between staffs. I will provide the runabout and
assign Major Kira and my science officer, Lieutenant Dax."
Pike frowned. Bajor was on the fringes of Federation
space in the 24th Century. During his time, it was years
away from being even charted. Therefore, theoretically, his
crew should have no contact at all with Bajor or this
sector. But, they were here and they weren't going to get
the Federation back by playing it safe. "Very well, Captain.
Lieutenant Spock and my Number One will join your team. They
will transport over to the station shortly."
"We will be ready." The screen wavered back into an
image of the final frontier.

Garrett looked at Lieutenants Harcourt Long and Melanie
Jacoby. They were two of her finest security personnel and
they volunteered to join the officers on the away mission to
Bajor.
"I have the utmost confidence in you two," She said smiling.
"And I want a complete report when you return."
"Yes, Sir," Jacoby snapped. Garrett went to the academy
with her father, Captain Jeremy Jacoby of the U.S.S.
Republic. The Captain of the Enterprise-C marveled again at
the strength of will of her new crew, knowing that parents
and friends like Jacoby had ceased to exist. And yet, the
crew of her ship stood tall and were ready to serve. A
phrase ran through Garrett's head suddenly, 'This isn't a
mission, it's personal.'
Long nodded to his Captain, "You'll have it, Sir."
"Very good." She turned to the ensign behind the
console. "Energize."

"ETA, Data."
The android looked up at the main viewscreen and turned
to Commander Riker. "18 hours, present speed."
'IMZADI!'
The force of the thought made Riker cringe. He turned
to look at Deanna at the chair next to his. She was
perfectly composed, looking straight ahead. Riker's brow
creased in confusion "De..."
'IMZADI, MY MOTHER. I CAN'T FEEL HER PRESENCE ANYMORE.
I THOUGHT I DID BUT IT WAS JUST AN ECHO FROM THE PAST. SHE'S
NOT THERE, WILL. NOT ON BETAZED, NOWHERE.'
Riker thought back, 'I KNOW, IMZADI. NEITHER IS MY
FATHER.'
'OH, I'M BEING SELFISH. I'M SORRY.'
'NOT AT ALL. IT'S CERTAINLY OVERWHELMING IF YOU THINK
ABOUT IT. ESPECIALLY IF YOU THINK THAT WE'RE HERE BY Q'S
GOOD GRACES ...OR SCREWUPS.'
'WE HAVE TO SUCCEED, WILL. WE MUST SUCCEED.'
'I KNOW.'

"Kirk to Enterprise."
"Enterprise, Picard here." Jean-Luc sat behind his
ready room desk with Kirk's image on the screen. Q lounged
on the couch across the room.
"Your status, Captain?"
"All is well, so far. Our sensors show clear."
"As do ours. We should start making plans for the
landing party. Obviously, myself and Captain Spock should
beam down since we have experience with the Guardian."
"Agreed. I will join you, as will my science officer,
Commander Data and Worf, head of Security..."
A loud sneeze came from the couch.
Kirk started, "I'm sorry, Captain. I didn't get that."
"He said 'And Q,' Captain Kirk," exclaimed Q who walked
up to the desk and span the viewer to face him.
"I most certainly did not," said Picard, spinning the
viewer back.
"Gentlemen, Gentlemen," Kirk cried out, "Please, I'm
getting dizzy."
"You have to admit, Jean-Luc," Q declared, "I am an
essential on this away team. More so than you, in fact. I
can't wait to see Riker's reaction when you announce you're
beaming down."
"Enough, Q. Captain Kirk, Q says a friend..."
"...acquaintance..."
"...of his constructed the Guardian. If this is so,
then perhaps he may be of some use on the away team."
Kirk nodded, "Very well. Your discretion, of course,
Captain. Kirk out." The screen blinked off.
"I was afraid he was going to say that." Jean-Luc
looked up at Q's smiling face.

"She's ready, Sir," O'Brien said from his station at
Ops.
"Sisko to Rio Grande."
"Kira here. We're all checked in and eager to go,
Commander."
"Very well, Major. Good luck."
"Thank you. Kira out."

"Everyone strapped in?," Kira called back to her crew.
Dax sat next to her at the Conn. Number One manned the
science station, Spock manned the sensors. Lieutenants
Jacoby and Long sat in the aft compartment going over the
readiness of the 24th Century phasers.
They all signaled they were ready.
"Rio Grande to O'Brien. We're out of here."
"Good luck, Major."
A surge of power and Deep Space Nine fell out from
under the Runabout.
"Next stop," Dax announced. "Bajor."

CHAPTER SEVEN

"Entering Forever World's system."
"Thank you, Mr. Chekov. Uhura, raise the Enterprise."
"Yes, Sir. Captain Picard on screen."
The captain of the future appeared. "Yes, Captain
Kirk."
"We're almost there. Are your people ready?"
"Indeed so, Captain. We've had to go through some
computer security protocol to get to your reports concerning
the Guardian. The Federation has them classified at the
highest level even in our time."
Kirk nodded. "I'm not surprised. The dangers involved
with using the Guardian are cataclysmic. But, in our present
situation
I don't see what we have to lose."
"Standard orbital approach, Sir?" said Chekov and, on
the screen, Ro at the same time, both gazing quickly at the
other and then turning to their respective commanders.
"Affirmative," Kirk said.
"Make it so," responded Picard.
Then they both said, "Good luck, Captain."
"See you below," Kirk added before the communication
ceased.

The young lieutenant tossed and turned in his bed, on
the verge of sleep. Days after being assigned to the
Enterprise, hand picked by the captain, the ship and crew
were flung into a situation in which he felt helpless.
'Damn,' he thought in a half-conscious haze. 'I can't let
this ship or this captain down, not like when...' Sleep
captured him finally, cutting off all conscious thought.
The familiar beeping broke through his dreams. The
lieutenant sat up quickly, drenched in sweat, unaware of how
long he had been resting. The beep recurred. Someone was at
the door to his quarters. A glance at his chrono indicated
his shift was still ninety minutes away, but in their
present situation... "Hold on a moment."
He jumped out of bed and wrapped a robe around himself.
Stepping forward, the sensor automatically detected his
presence and opened the door to reveal ... the captain.
"Sir?," he said fumbling at his half-open robe.
"At ease, Castillo." She said glancing at the blushing
officer. "May I come in?"
"Of course," Richard Castillo replied, regaining his
composure.
Captain Garrett walked past him and sat down on the
nearest chair.
"Can I get you anything, Sir? Coffee, maybe or..."
"No time, Lieutenant."
Castillo blinked in surprise. "Of course, Sir."
"I realize you have logged very little time on a
starship, but as you know, I chose you for your excellent
academy credentials. You had more than your fair share of
crises as a cadet. You know our current situation?"
"Yes."
"Then you are aware we are preparing to re-engage the
Cardassians. You also know we have no backup support save a
rickety space station and a starship that belongs in a
museum. There is no guarantee that the other Enterprises
will succeed in their mission. I need my best people in
positions where they will be of the best use. Therefore, I
am promoting you to the bridge as helmsman."
"Sir?," Castillo was genuinely taken aback. Garrett was
leapfrogging him over a dozen officers.
"You would have made it there eventually, but I don't
have time to put people through the ranks. The Cardassians
and our other enemies aren't giving us such luxury. I'm just
sorry your new duties will have to be performed in a
situation such as this one. Your shift starts in thirty
minutes, helmsman. See you on the bridge."
And she was gone, leaving a flabbergasted man in her
wake.

"We should land near the arboretums adjacent to the
Vedek Assembly," Kira said.
"If they exist," Dax countered.
Kira shot her a vexing glance.
Number One, from the original Enterprise, stood and
walked toward the front of the runabout where the two DS9
officers were seated. "It is logical to assume the
conditions of the planet in which you are familiar will vary
with those on the planet below, Major Kira."
"I understand, Sir," Kira responded in a fluster. "But
we have no choice but to assume we can accomplish our
mission."
"I agree," Number One concurred.
Spock monitored the science console. "Sensors indicate
Bajoran life forms in the area designated by the Major."
"Bingo," Kira cried out, clenching her fist. "Everyone
prepare for descent."

The sounds brought back the agony. Kirk watched as the
landscape that is forever burned in his memory materialized
around him. Kirk turned to see Spock standing next to him.
Moments later, a nearly familiar sound filled Kirk's ears as
the Enterprise-D's transporter deposited Picard, Riker, the
android Data, the Klingon security officer Worf (Kirk caught
himself tense and quickly regained composure), and Q on the
planet's surface.
"Well, well. Could use a good cleaning service," Q said
as he bounded toward the Guardian. "Come along everyone."
Worf grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
"Caution is warranted, Q," Picard said.
"Get your Neanderthal off me, Jean-Luc."

"Worf is mainly here to keep you in check, Q. I commend
him for his quickness."
Kirk and Spock stepped toward the away team. "Captain,"
Kirk said, "I know this is clichι, but time is of the
essence."
Q groaned.
"Right then, Captain," Picard said. "Shall we?" he
gestured toward the Guardian.
"That's where I was going," Q gasped. "I see. One of
the headliners has to move the plot along. Well, let me just
say... Owww, Microbrain, that hurts. Stop squeezing so
hard."

Until now, the Entity monitored the last vestiges of
the two species with curiosity and humor. It enjoyed
watching them flop around the galaxy like fish out of water.
But, it started feeling something more, restlessness and
annoyance. It was almost time to move on, which meant
squashing the last of the bugs...

CHAPTER EIGHT
"Ask it the right question, or else. I didn't nick-name
it the Blabberer of Forever for nothing," Q smiled, and shot
Worf, who still held him, a menacing glance, "I hope you're
enjoying that arm while you can, Klingon."
Looming before the six men was one of the most ominous
encounters in Federation history, the Guardian of Forever.
Kirk swallowed unconsciously. "Let's get on with it."
Spock nodded, "Guardian, this is Spock from the
Federation Starship Enterprise. Do you remember us?"
"I RECOGNIZE THREE WHO STAND BEFORE ME. TWO FROM TRAVEL
AND ONE FROM THE BEGINNING." The voice seemed to emanate
from everywhere at once.
The officers turned and looked at Q.
Q smiled and pulled himself free from Worf. "See, see.
didn't believe me, did you? Well, from now on I certainly
expect..."
"Guardian," Kirk said cutting Q off. "Can you show us
the history of my home planet?"
"BEHOLD"
The center of the vortex filled with mist and phantom
images appeared. Images of a molten world, suddenly cooling.
Reds gave way to blues. The smallest of creatures became the
largest.
Q yawned, "Seen it, been there."
"Quiet, Q." Picard said, his eyes however remained
transfixed to the center of the time vortex.
"Analysis, Data," Riker said in a whisper.
"We are seeing the birth of Earth. Moving through the
ages of history. Jurassic, Cretaceous, Triassic ages."
"Dinosaurs," Riker said.
"Correct, Sir. We are now moving beyond into the
Paleolithic era. Old Earth calendar, approximately 500,000
B.C."
"Amazing," Picard said.
"Spock," Kirk said looking at his science officer,
concentrating on his tricorder. "Does this jive with your
original Guardian recordings?"
"Yes, Sir."
Picard turned to his science officer, "Data, does the
Guardian's images match actual Earth history."
"Yes, Sir."
Kirk and Picard glanced at each other and then returned
their gazes to the Guardian. Images of cave drawings and
early humanity.
"Neolithic Age," Data said. "7,000 B.C."
Suddenly a flash appeared and filled the center of the
vortex, forcing everyone except Data and Q to shield their
eyes. When they were able to look again, the Guardian was
inactive.
"THE HISTORY OF YOUR WORLD HAS PLAYED ITS COURSE."
"What?," Riker and Kirk said together.
"Guardian," Spock said taking a step forward. "This is
not correct. You say you remember us from traveling before.
We traveled in an era much later than the one just
concluded."
"HISTORY HAS BEEN RESTORED. THE PLANET EARTH'S HISTORY
IS AS IT WAS BEFORE."
Kirk smiled for a moment until he realized that the
situation was not good. The Guardian actually thought that
Earth history was supposed to end with the Neolithic Age.
Somehow, the entity that had destroyed humanity had also
affected the Guardian. "Suggestions," he said turning to the
others.
"We must try to restore history," Picard replied. "And
this seems to be our best option."
"The Guardian appears to have been altered along with
the universe around us," Spock said. "It doesn't seem to
have a recollection of the previous history. However,
whatever occurred apparently did so in Earth's Neolithic
Period."
"We have to stop it," Riker said.
"Oh, right," Q replied. "Let's just go get our phasers,
tricorders, and universal translators and get the entity
that took out the continuum and destroyed humanity. Good
idea, Riker."
"I don't see another choice," Picard said.

"Neither do I," Kirk said.
"There is the question of where to travel," Data said.
"Assuming the entity was on Earth during the Neolithic
Period, how do we get close enough to encounter it?"
Spock nodded. "We have to assume that even in its
altered state, time still retains the equivalency of a
river, with eddies and backwash. The same flow that pulled
the entity from our time to Neolithic Earth will bring us
there as well."
"Everyone ready," Kirk asked.
"No," Q said. Worf squeezed his shoulder. "Uhh ...
Yes."
"Stand by." Kirk turned back to the vortex. "Guardian,
Can you show us Earth's history again?"
"BEHOLD."

"They're definitely coming."
"Very well, Mr. O'Brien," Sisko said from behind his
desk in the office above Ops. "How long do we have?"
"Twenty hours until the Cardies bring their weapons to
bear."
"Send a signal recalling the Rio Grande, and get me
Captains Pike and Garrett."
"Yes, Sir."
O'Brien left the office. And suddenly an image filled
Sisko's mind: Jennifer's lifeless body beneath the rubble of
their quarters on the U.S.S. Saratoga, minutes before the
Borg destroyed her and the majority of Starfleet at Wolf
359. A hopeless battle.

Captain Pike sat in his command chair looking at the
split screen images of Benjamin Sisko and Rachel Garrett. "I
disagree with recalling the runabout. We have twenty hours.
Let's use them."
"I will not have my crew returning in the middle of a
firefight with the Cardassians," Sisko said.
"Our crews, Commander. I have my Number One and science
officer down there as well. They just landed on Bajor. We
need to give them time to accomplish something."
Garrett was nodding. "If they can do any good we need
to give them the chance."
Sisko's face hardened. "Very well, but I want them back
in our protection before the attack force arrives."
Pike smirked, "I don't think anyone would disagree with
that." 'Even though a twenty-fourth century runabout may be
nearly as well equipped as my Enterprise in this battle,' he
thought.

"The Vedek Assembly complex is due north, 1000 meters."
Kira said glancing at her tricorder.
The crew disembarked from the Rio Grande onto the lush
ground. Number One analyzed her tricorder readings, "Major,
didn't you say the assembly consisted of 112 members?"
"Yes."
"The tricorder's life indicators show..."
"Yes, I know, I know!" Kira called out.
"...considerably less," she finished.
Dax frowned and looked at her friend, then called back
to the group. "Red alert everyone. Let's stay on our toes."
Spock raised an eyebrow and fell into step behind his
commanding officer. Everyone had their phasers drawn. The
procession headed north into the unknown.

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends...," Kirk said
as the team leaped through the Guardian.
The winds changed, the ground changed, the sound
changed.
Out of nowhere, "Henry V. Act Three, Scene One," an
android and a Vulcan said in unison on Earth in 7,000 B.C.
"Is everyone okay?," Picard asked.
"Please, Daddy? Can we do it again?," Q replied.
"Tricorder," Kirk said.
Data and Spock didn't need to be told. They were busy
with their devices.
"At least we skipped that period where everything
smells like sulfur, Whew." Q said, crinkling his nose.
Spock and Data conferred momentarily and then Spock
turned to the group. "All readings seem to indicate we are
in the Neolithic Era of Earth History."
"Something's coming," Q said a bit nervously. "Phasers
ready."
Picard shot a look at him. Then glanced at the science
officers. "Anything?"
Data looked at his tricorder. "An animal lifeform, I
believe it's..."
"A dog," Kirk said as a large dog, very similar to a
gray wolf, came into view, tail wagging As it approached the
party it lowered its head. "Seems friendly enough."
"At this time in history," Data said. "Humans began
domesticating animals, including canines."
Picard moved toward it when it suddenly barked and
turned back the way it came, turning its head toward the
group and then started walking quickly away from them.
"Come on," Picard said and followed after the animal,
with the others close behind.
Q started to complain, but shut up when Worf growled at
him.
"Too bad they never learned how to domesticate on the
Klingon Homeworld."

The once-beautiful Vedek Gardens were overgrown with
weeds. It pained Kira to see it like this. She was nearly
tempted to get down on her hands and knees and begin to
clean the place up. But, there was more important things to
accomplish.
"Life forms are emanating from the building beyond,"
Spock said pointing to the monastery beyond the growth.
Kira swallowed. "Let's go." She moved forward
accompanied by the security officers and Spock.
Number One touched Dax's arm. "Lieutenant, a word
please."
"Of course."
"Major Kira obviously has close personal feelings
toward this place. Do you think she can handle herself if
events continue to take a bad turn?"
"Commander," Dax replied. "Kira Nerys has been fighting
for her life and the lives of her fellow Bajorans since she
was 12 years old. Granted she is devoutly religious and
therefore has strong ties to the Vedek Assembly and what
they stand for, but have no doubts. She will do her job to
restore Bajor, the Federation, and the universe, if
possible."
"If she incurs such loyalty in one who has lived as
long and seen as much as you have, Dax, I will trust her,
too." Number One pointed toward the building. "Shall we go?"

The monastery was in shambles. Stained glass windows
were smashed. Rubble was strewn everywhere. Kira trudged
through it, face steeled ahead, all business. "Life forms?"
"The next room," Spock replied.
Just then, a painful groan emerged from the indicated
doorway. Kira's heart clenched and she ran into the room.
A man knelt on the floor, head down, facing a charred
painting of one of the Tears of the Prophets. He mumbled to
himself.
Kira walked up next to him, unwilling to interfere with
his prayers. Then, the man looked up at her. Kira's heart
fell further. "Vedek ... Vedek Bareil?"
A shadow of confusion crossed the man's face. His voice
was weak and cracked, "Do I know you, child?"
'May the Prophets help me,' she thought. "My name is
Kira Nerys. I am ... a freedom fighter. These people are my
associates."
The man who she respected, who meant so much to her
religiously and otherwise looked up at her hauntingly. Fear
touched his eyes, "Run, Kira. All of you. Save yourselves
before he returns. Hurry."

The dog lead the team to a young woman, trapped beneath
a fallen tree. The animal went to her, licking her hand. She
stirred and reached weakly for the dog's snout. Then, she
caught glimpse of the six strangers and snarled, terror in
her eyes.
"We must get that tree off her," Riker said.
Data and Spock were there immediately, lifting the
broken trunk off the frightened primitive, ignoring the
crying and snarling.
"You really couldn't communicate too well at this point
in history," Q said to no one in particular. "Thank goodness
you had the animals to help."
The women, once freed struggled to her feet and started
limping away as quickly as possible, looking back a few
times with fear and horror in her eyes. The dog followed.
"What could have frightened her so much?," Riker said.
"Ever look at Worf?," Q asked.
Riker nodded.
Picard smirked, "Yes, of course. How soon we forget?"
Q turned suddenly, a look crossed his face like none
Picard had seen before, "Or maybe not..."

Kira reached down and took Bareil by the arm. "You are
coming with us."
The Vedek struggled against her grasp, "No, please,
child. I am sworn to protect the Monastery."
Confusion crossed the Major's face, "Who did this?"
Suddenly her communicator beeped, "Kira here."
"Major, this is Lieutenant Long. I think you and the
others better get out..." Static and silence.
"Too late," Bareil cried.
Kira, Dax, Spock and Number One ran to the security
officers' location.
They were greeted by a bearded, gray-haired, elderly
humanoid in flowing, black robes. His black eyes were wild
with mania.
They were greeted by hideous laughter.

Q's voice shook. "Who are you?"
The others turned to see a bearded, gray-haired,
elderly humanoid in flowing, black robes. His black eyes
were wild with mania.
The others heard his hideous laughter.
Kirk and Spock stepped forward.
The Captain's mouth went dry. "Ayelborne."

CHAPTER NINE
"YOU KNOW ME, PUNY ONE. HOW INTERESTING. THE
ENTERTAINMENT VALUE GOES UP."
The voice was deafening. Kirk took two steps closer to
the entity. "Ayelborne, what have you done?"
"EVERYTHING I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO. EVERYTHING I
COULD NEVER DO UNTIL NOW." The entity smiled widely. "YOU
SURPRISED ME. THAT GRANTS YOU AND THE OTHERS A REPRIEVE,
JAMES T. KIRK. USE IT WISELY."
Suddenly everything changed, and Kirk and the others
stood before the Guardian.

Kira and crew were aboard the Rio Grande in deep space.
"What happened?"
"Unknown," Number One and Dax said in unison.
Everyone was aboard including the security team,
although the two men had no memory of the strange humanoid.
"What is our course?," Spock asked.
Dax studied her instruments, "Headed back to the
station. Fascinating."
Kira jumped out of her seat. "We've got to reverse
course and save the Vedek Assembly from that madman."
"Incoming signal from Deep Space Nine," Spock said
suddenly. Moments later he looked gravely at the others.
"Five Cardassian Warships have entered the system."

Data regained his composure first. "Guardian of
Forever, can you show us the Planet Earth's history?"
"BEHOLD"
Once again the early eras of Earth played before the
command crews of two Starships Enterprise and Q. The images
reached the Neolithic age, the flash. Darkness.
"Nothing has changed," Picard said.
"Damn," Kirk muttered.
"Who is Ayelborne?," Riker asked.
Kirk nodded to Spock, who spoke up, "He is the leader
of the Council of Elders on the Planet Organia."
"Organia?," Worf asked. "As in The Organian Peace
Treaty?"
"Correct," Kirk said. "Ayelborne is not humanoid at
all, obviously. The Organians are extremely powerful non-
corporal entities."
"Sworn to the ethics of non-violence, I thought,"
Picard said.
"So did I," Kirk replied. "Something is very wrong."
"Imagine the audacity," Q said. "Immobilizing the
continuum ... for entertainment."
Riker rolled his eyes, "Yeah, imagine anyone as
horrible as that."
"Well, we seem to have a reprieve of some sort," Picard
said.
"I suggest returning to Organia." Spock said. "If
Ayelborne has gone mad, we must enlist the other members of
the council to assist us in containing him."
"Agreed, Spock," Kirk answered. "We'll head there.
Captain Picard..."
"There is the matter of the Cardassians returning to
attack Deep Space Nine and the other Enterprises." Picard
said. "We need to dispatch assistance."
Data stepped forward. "If the mission to Organia is not
successful, it will be only a matter of time before the
Cardassians overwhelm us. However, Ayelborne would expect an
attempt to travel to Organia. If his fellows are a threat to
him, he will try to stop us from gaining their assistance."
Spock looked at him, "So, logically, the more powerful
starship should head to Organia."
Kirk shook his head, "I don't think so, Spock. We need
to take care of Organia personally. Captain Picard is more
experienced with combating the Cardassians."
"Switch ships."
They all turned to Q.
"Well, isn't it obvious, people? La Forge could spruce
up Kirk's Enterprise, hand it to Jean-Luc, and off they go
to fight side by side with Sisko and clowns. Meanwhile, Kirk
and Spock could have a reunion with their superbuddies on
the supership, such as it is. But one thing is certain. I am
going to Organia to take on this Ayelborne. I've got a
vendetta to carry out."
Everyone stood silent for a moment.
"Logical," Spock said.
"Indeed," Data replied.

"I dinna know if I can approve, Sir."
James Kirk, back aboard the Enterprise, 1701-A, was in
the briefing room with his staff: Spock, McCoy, Uhura,
Chekov and Scott. The Captain looked at his trusted Chief
Engineer. He knew Scotty would not be keen to the idea of a
new commander handling what Kirk knew the Scotsman
considered as his ship.
"Don't worry, Scotty. You'll be staying aboard to
insure she's treated right."
Scott frowned, "It's just as well, Sir. But I canna
approve of this La Forge poking around m' engine room,
either."
Kirk nodded, "I understand your concerns and I'd be
lying if I said I didn't share some of them. However, the
Cardassian ships are from an advanced time. We need to give
the Enterprise a fighting chance against them."
Scott nodded.
Kirk looked around the table. "I know all of us share
concerns about the mission. But be aware that Jean-Luc
Picard and William Riker are extremely experienced Starfleet
officers. I expect all of you to follow their commands to
the letter, just as you would if I were giving them. I know
you will. Any comments?"
McCoy snorted, "Yeah, why not switch doctors, too?"
"Bones, you are the most familiar with sickbay and with
the medical records of this crew. You are essential for this
ship, just as Beverly Crusher needs to remain with the other
Enterprise."
"I don't like sending you off like this."
The others agreed.
Kirk stood, "I am appreciative of your concern. I know
we've been through a great deal together over the years, but
we must put our personal concerns behind us. It is paramount
that we restore history and this course is the best to
accomplish that goal ... besides I will be more comfortable
knowing my trusted officers and friends will remain onboard
to look after my ship."
Silence fell.
Then Uhura stood and stepped toward Kirk, "Good luck,
Captain, Mr. Spock."
Kirk smiled, "To all of us."

"I cannot sanction this course, Captain."
"Mr. Worf, I know you are doing your duty in voicing
your concerns, however, we must carry forth." Picard looked
over his crew in the observation lounge behind the bridge.
"We cannot be sure if the other members of the Organian
High Council have been affected like Ayelborne," Data said.
"You must ascertain that, Data," Riker said.
"All of you," Picard said. "I know all of you are
somewhat familiar with the service records of James T. Kirk
and Spock. You, therefore, know that the Enterprise will be
in the best hands."
"Almost," Crusher uttered.
"Good luck, Captain, Commander," Troi said.
Picard was about to respond but was cut off by loud
snoring from Q in the corner of the room.
"Let's get this over with," Riker said.

"The updated phase inducers will give you a burst of
speed when you need it."
Scotty poured through the spec sheets La Forge gave him
an hour ago. "Aye, if it doesn't sheer the ship in half."
La Forge looked at the older man, "These Enterprise-
Class ships were able to take a lot more than the designers
originally intended."
"Ach, designers. They never logged a single star hour
and they think they know what needs to go into a starship."
La Forge smiled, he had run into a few designers in his
day and couldn't agree with Scott more. "The new refitted
parts from my Enterprise will give your weapons an added
kick and firm up the shields."
Scotty looked at the blind man intensely, "Will it be
enough?"
La Forge shrugged, "It's the best we can do. It would
help the odds against the Cardassians I'm familiar with, but
the ones we just faced showed abilities beyond what I'm used
to."
Scotty sighed, "It pains me to say this, but it will
take more than the machinery. I'd feel more comfortable if
James Kirk wouldna leave the center seat. No offense."
La Forge felt a flush of anger but quickly pushed it
aside. After all, this man had served with Kirk for years,
was used to his style of command, just as La Forge was used
to Jean-Luc Picard. "I'm sure we'll all be okay."
Scotty smiled, "We've got good people around us. The
universe canna be in better hands."
"Amen."

James Kirk entered his ready room. The room was nearly
as large as his quarters on the original ship, the one now
orbiting Deep Space Nine. Kirk looked at the book encased on
the desk near the entrance. Shakespeare. Henry V.
Appropriate in any era.
Then, the captain walked over to Livingston, swimming
carefree in his aquarium. Carefree, Kirk couldn't remember
when he felt that way, did he ever feel that way?
A twinkling chorus of bells filled the air. After a
moment, Kirk recognized the 24th Century door chime. "Come."
The door swhoosed open, "I am used to free access here
you understand, Kirk," Q said as he marched in and flopped
onto the couch.
"Get used to disappointment."
"Now, now. If we're going to work together you should
be more cordial."
"Cordial." Kirk walked toward the entity, stopped and
placed his hands on his hips in annoyance. "I didn't know
that word was in your vocabulary."
"I have a large vocabulary, Kirk. Many things about me
are large, and you're going to need all of them to take out
this Ayelborne fellow."
"Q, I have managed quite well through the years without
the help of entities like you. In fact, I've found the ones
I've encountered to be pains in the neck."
"Picard used to think the way you do, but now you see
that we're fast friends."
Kirk raised his eyebrows and was about to say something
when Spock's voice filled the room, "Captain Kirk, report to
the bridge, please."
"On my way. Q stay here."
"Why?"
"Because I said so."
Q laughed and got up to leave, when suddenly Kirk
pushed him back down, "Let's get this straight here and now,
you may have charmed Jean-Luc Picard, but on this ship --
now my ship -- I expect my orders followed. And I will not
have you in my way. Am I clear?"
Q's eyes darkened. "You are tempting fate, James T. Ki-
-"
"Save it, Q. I've got work to do." And he was gone,
leaving Q to stew.

"Mr. Chekov, ship's status?" Picard sat in the center
seat, and immediately noticed how uncomfortable it was. He
glanced at Riker, who was standing and fidgeting. There was
no place for a first officer to recline on this ship. Picard
repressed a grin.
"All systems on line," the navigator said.
"Very good," Picard responded. "Mr. Uhura, please
signal Captain Kirk."
"Enterprise-D on the screen," she said.
Riker starred at the cavernous bridge of his
Enterprise, noting with envy how much space and elegance the
command center on the screen had. He felt he could reach
every point on the bridge of Enterprise-A if he stretched
out far enough. This somehow annoyed him.
"We are ready to depart for the station, Captain Kirk,"
Picard said.
"And we for Organia, Captain Picard. Good luck."
"And to you," The screen filled with stars. "Mr.
Chekov, engage."
"Aye, sir."
On the massive screen in front of the bridge, Kirk
watched Enterprise-A entered warp space. He stood for a few
moments, as Spock walked up to him, "Captain?"
"I just have this feeling, Spock..."
The Vulcan lifted his left eyebrow, "Feeling?"
Kirk nodded toward the empty starfield, "Like I'm never
going to see her again." Kirk turned and stepped back toward
the command center. "Let's get the hell out of here. Mr.
Data, take us to Organia. Warp factor 5."
The android tapped his console and the Enterprise-D
jumped into action.

CHAPTER TEN
"We're as ready as we'll ever be," O'Brien reported to
his commander.
Sisko nodded, "Time?"
"Twenty minutes till they bring their weapons to bear."
"The Rio Grande?"
The Chief Engineer checked his console. "Docking now."
Sisko nodded, relieved, "Have Major Kira and Lt. Dax
report to Ops immediately. And have the others transported
to their respective Enterprises. They are going to be needed
there."
Moments later, Sisko's First Officer and Science
Officer arrived. Their commander looked up at them intently.
"What was it Major? What was down there?"
Kira looked flabbergasted, "A wildman, Sir. His eyes
were intense. I haven't seen anything like that since the
Cardassians occupied Bajor and saw their marksmen shooting
our children in cold blood..."
Sisko's brow ruffled in concern, "Dax, your report?"
The Trill shrugged, "Definitely humanoid in appearance,
but my tricorder registered nothing."
O'Brien's eyed brightened. "A Q?"
Dax shrugged again, "The possibility exists."
Sisko shook his head, "It doesn't match his style. I
think we're dealing with a creature who will do anything it
pleases including annihilating whole cultures. That isn't
Q."
Odo spoke up, "Might I remind everyone that why we're
speculating so freely, the Cardassians are getting closer."

Jean-Luc Picard span his chair around 360 degrees.
These people on this bridge defined Starfleet in their time.
Their missions, their exploits were legendary. Through his
readings and studying, Picard came to know these people and
their accomplishments from a perspective even they would
never understand. 'I know you better then you know
yourselves,' he found himself thinking.
So why did Jean-Luc feel so uncomfortable around them.
Was it because he suddenly felt as if he was flying into
battle with a boatload of children? Ridiculous, but the
Captain of the Enterprise couldn't shake the irrationality.
'I'm the fish out of water here,' he thought.
"Deep Space Nine rendezvous in six minutes," Lt.
McGarity reported from the helm.
Picard nodded.
"Sensor report," Riker called.
Chekov hovered over the rear science console. "Sensors
indicate five Cardassion warships bearing down on the
station and the Enterprises. Their weapons are discharging."
"Red alert," Riker intoned.
"Full power to the shields and weapons," Picard
ordered. He met Riker's eyes briefly. They were about to
take the most renowned ship and crew in Starfleet into an
impossible battle.
Even if they were victorious, they had no home.

"Time till Organia," Kirk asked.
"Thirty minutes," Data and Spock replied
simultaneously.
"Keep your eyes peeled," Kirk said.
Suddenly, an incoming communication announced itself on
Mr. Worf's rear panel. "Captain Kirk," the Klingon said as
he tapped some buttons on his board. He growled, "It is our
opponent."
Kirk slowly stood. "On screen."
Q bounded out of the ready room as a transparent figure
coalesced against the starfield on the main viewer.
Kirk's memory swam with images of Apollo and 'Abraham
Lincoln.' Ayelborne's presentation was similar to theirs
many years ago.
"This is Kirk."
"DO NOT PROCEED, CAPTAIN."
Q bounded toward the screen. "Getting scared, Organian?
Are we touching nerves?"
"Q!!" Kirk grabbed the entity's arm. "Worf, restrain
him."
"Aye, Sir," Worf replied with a gleam of satisfaction
in his eyes.
"Don't you dare, Kirk, Klingon," Q barked. "This is
personal." Then Q spun back toward the screen, venomously
thundering at the screen. "Frightened of humans and
machines. Why not finish your cowardly act, Ayelborne? Wipe
us out of existence, too."
Kirk stepped forward, leaving Q be. "Or raise the
entertainment factor more, Ayelborne. If it's a game you
want, a challenge, a battle, we'll give you one. But you
have to play more fairly..."
"...To get the full value, to relish in the conquest,"
Q continued.
Kirk stepped past Q, almost nose to the viewer. "Up
till now it's been so easy, Ayelborne, wave a magic wand and
wipe away the challenge before it's begun. No guts, no
glory, no victory, Ayelborne. Championship. You have no idea
what it is, because you've raided the game. But you have a
reprieve. A fair fight and all the rewards are yours, but
you have to let us get our sword, before we enter the arena.
And then its a fight you will never forget. I promise."
The visage on the screen hardened and then exploded in
a phantasm of lights and sounds, buffeting the Enterprise
and throwing Kirk back...
... Into Q's arms. He smiled as the captain
straightened. "The ultimate battle is about to begin, my
ally. And the only thing we have to loose ... is everything,
everywhere."
Kirk glared at Q and then turned toward Spock and
Picard's crew. "At least we get a chance to fight. Continue
on course for Organia, best possible speed, Mr. Data."
Q stepped toward the screen as the ship jumped into
warp, "To boldly go where all men have died before..."

"Captain's Personal Log. No Stardate. On final approach to
Organia, with a starship and crew a generation beyond me.
Never-the-less, Spock and I have been here before. The
Organians insisted on a society without violence and war.
Their peace treaty forged the way for what I now know to be
an alliance between the Klingons and the Federation. In
fact, it was Ayelborne of Organia who told Captain Kor and
me that such a forging of powers was inevitable. Now, it
seems Ayelborne has destroyed humanity. How can such a
difference of personality occur? And if he is such an
unstable entity, how am I going to restore humanity, next
generation allies or not?

"It is simply not there," Data said from the conn.
"Recalibrate the sensors," Kirk ordered as he looked
over the android's shoulder. "Spock, are these the correct
coordinates?"
Captain Spock, at Science station one at the rear of
the bridge, keyed the padd. The screens in front of him
looked like a kaleidoscope. "Affirmative, Sir. Sensors
indicate we are where we're supposed to be."
Kirk grimaced. "Explanations," he said to no one in
particular.
Worf scowled, "The planet could have been destroyed,
like Earth."
"Unlikely," Data replied.
"Indeed," Spock concurred. "A planet's destruction
would leave some residual indications, even if it occurred
millennia ago. There is no such evidence."
'That's a relief,' Kirk thought. If the Organian's were
destroyed...
"There is another explanation," Q said, from his
position next to Spock. He walked toward Kirk, "The bad guy
could have stuffed it."
Kirk turned, annoyed, "Come again?"
Q laughed, "You humans. Stuffed it away. It's cut off
from the rest of the universe, while the inhabitants don't
know anything's wrong. It's like putting the whole planet
inside one of those holodecks."
Everyone on the bridge stared at the entity.
Q spun around slowly so he could see everyone as he
spoke, "The Q would do it all the time. If there was some
cosmic event - actual or helped along- and we didn't want
primitives to know about it, we would stuff them for a while
until we were finished. They would have no clue there were
fireworks going on in their galactic back yard because
everything looked normal from the planet's surface, or
orbit, or star system, whatever was necessary. We even
practiced on starships at times." His smile grew very broad
on that last remark.
"Fascinating," Spock said.
"Annoying is more like it," Kirk replied.
"How often would you practice this stuffing, Q?," Troi
asked.
He shrugged, "Me? Hardly ever. If I take the time to
set off fireworks, Counselor, I want everyone to enjoy the
show."
Kirk returned his gaze to the viewscreen, stepping
forward, "Is there any way to tell if Ayelborne has ...
stuffed ... Organia?"
Q put his palms up in front of him, "Not in my
condition, and certainly not with this equipment."
Kirk spun and faced the entity, "That's not the right
answer, Q. I want you, Spock, and Data working on a way,
immediately."
Spock and Data were about to respond when Q put up his
hand. "If it's that important -- which I guess it is -- I
can give you a solution, but you're not gonna like it."
Kirk put his hands on his sides, "And that is?"
"Plow right into the center of the planet. If it's
there, if it's not there, we'll know pretty quick."
"We'll break into the pocket?"
Q laughed, "Oh, yes."
Worf's scowl deepened, "... and crash into the planet."
"A side effect," Q snipped.
Kirk turned toward the front again. "We don't have a
lot of time to second guess. We need to know now. Mr. Data,
set a course for coordinates: planet center. One quarter
impulse power."
"Faster," Q said.
"Faster?," Troi gasped.
"If we don't want to bounce off the pocket," Q replied.
Kirk stared hard for a moment, "Full impulse power." He
ordered, glancing at Q.
Q nodded, "That ought to do it."
And Enterprise-D leapt toward it's destiny.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
"Hit, port nacelle. Shields holding, but weakening,"
Ckekov reported.
"Shield strength?," Riker asked.
"Seventy-six percent of normal."
Picard grimaced. They had arrived at Deep Space Nine
almost simultaneously to the Cardassian attack force. Picard
had no time to confer with the other Enterprise Captains or
Sisko before the enemy engaged his ship in battle.
Garrett had engaged two warships and was taking a
beating. However, she was dishing it out as well. Both
Cardassian vessels had substantial damage. The battle
continued.
Two warships were engaging the station. Pike was
keeping within range of DS9, apparently trying to make use
of the station's mass and shield formation to enhance his
own defenses. The original Enterprise had a nasty disrupter
scar blazed across her main hull. The image shook Picard,
for some reason. Like a classic woman who had been raped.
As for his Enterprise-A, a fifth Cardassian ship had
broken away from the station to engage them on arrival. The
warship had just taken the first shot.
Picard stood and walked toward the conn. "Lock all
weapons on target. Full spread on my mark."
The Cardassian was coming around, bringing her forward
disrupters to bear.
"Fire."
Chekov's fingers flew across his board. Streams and
balls of energy leapt from the Enterprise's weapon emitters,
striking the warship. Picard's jaw dropped when the ship
imploded.
"We got him, Sir." Chekov exclaimed, fists clenched in
victory.
Picard walked backwards to his chair, eyes never
leaving the collapsing remnants of the Cardassian.
Riker grabbed him on the shoulder, a look of shock on
his face as well, "I guess the old folktale about Kirk and
his Enterprise are true."
Picard nodded, "Fortunately for us, Number One.
Commander Uhura, raise Captains Pike and Garret and
Commander Sisko. Inform them of our arrival. Commander
Chekov, let's give Enterprise-C a hand, shall we."
"Setting a course, Sir."

"Time to impact."
Worf didn't hesitate, "Fifteen seconds."
Kirk gripped his seat arms. "Mr. Data, prepare to swing
us into orbit as soon as we get the first glimmer of
Organia's bearings."
"Aye, Sir."
Kirk smiled, his experience with androids had not been
pleasant, but he was glad to have one at the helm today.
With his computer speed, Data was their best bet for not
impacting on the surface.
Suddenly the ship buffeted hard, "Report," Kirk called.
"The pocket's outer sleeve, as it were," Q said.
"Status."
Spock scanned, now thoroughly familiar with Enterprise-
D's
science stations. "Still no sign ... Organia, we have just
entered the outer atmosphere."
The buffeting drastically increased. The automatic red
alert activated.
"Mr. Data," Kirk yelled over the noise.
"Orbital heading laid in, Sir. Adjusting course now. I
have activated reverse thrusters and impulse engines to slow
our decent."
"Outer hull temperature up 39 degrees," La Forge
reported from engineering.
"Structural integrity field weakening," Spock said.
"Our course is leveling," Data said. The shaking
lessened, "We are in atmospheric orbit, upper stratosphere."
"Spock," Kirk turned to his first officer.
The Vulcan was consulting his computers, "We can
maintain this orbit for approximately five hours before the
strain on the shields and SIF will pose a threat to the
ship."
"Can we get any higher?"
"Not without risking entering the pocket."
Kirk shrugged, "Very well, we've got a job to do and
very little time to accomplish it. Spock, do you have the
coordinates to the Organian Council Rooms."
"Affirmative."
"Mr. Spock, contact Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi.
Have them meet us in the transporter room. You, Mr. Worf,
and Q with me. Mr. Data, you have the conn."
"Aye, Sir," Data said.
Q sidled up to Kirk, "Good choice, Mon new capitan."
Kirk shot Q a dagger-like glance, "Don't make me regret
it."
Q shot Kirk a 'What, little old me?' look and they all
entered the turbolift, to Organia.

"We're ....ing ....ood ...fight," The crackle from the
ship-to-ship pierced Enterprise-A's bridge. Garrett was an
excellent tactician, it seemed. Of the two warships engaging
her, one was apparently crippled, while the other continued
to blast away at the near-crippled Enterprise-C.
Picard paced the bridge, "Lock phasers on the active
Cardassian. Commander Uhura, signal Captain Garrett. Tell
her she's got pleasant company now."
Uhura smiled and turned to her station.
Riker looked over Chekov's shoulder, "Cardassian in
range... now."
"Confirmed," Chekov responded, "Phasers locked."
"Fire," Picard ordered.
Again, beams of death leapt from the starship, chopping
into the Cardassian.

The Castle rose from the mist, just as Kirk remembered.
The coordinates were the same as years ago. Before, people
wearing robes and sandals walking the dirt street they
materialized on, oblivious to the technology witnessed. The
elderly man approached the party, "Welcome..." Now.
Kirk stared at the old man.
"You!," Q barked as he lunged.

The heat of explosion burned the back of Picard's neck.
The Cardassian had successfully returned fire. The
lieutenant at the burning science station was down. Riker
leapt to assist. "Medical emergency, to the bridge," Number
One declared.
"On my way," McCoy replied.
"Status," Picard asked.
Chekov's hands flew. "Shields penetrated, main
connection struts. Latching integrity system damaged."
Picard thought back to his academy days. Enterprise-A
had the ability for saucer separation, although he couldn't
remember when -- if -- it was ever used. But, at least it
presented another option. "Engineering, firm up the shields.
Priority one."
"I'm doin' all I c'n for ya'. She's packin' quite a
wallop," Scott responded over the intercom.
"Shields firming," Chekov reported as McCoy entered the
bridge
"It's time to hit back," Riker said as he stepped down
to give the doctor space to work.
"I concur," Picard replied as he stepped toward the
main viewer again. The Cardassian swung back into their
crosshairs. "Fire!"

Worf had Q by the throat. "Do not struggle!," The
Klingon growled, "If you know what's good for you."
Ayelborne ignored this, turning to face Kirk and Spock.
"Your presence is a surprise, Captain. I thought we had
asked to be left alone at our last encounter."
Kirk winced, "Circumstances warranted our return."
"Indeed," Ayelborne replied. "Curious. Perhaps, then,
we should adjourn to the council room." He swung his arm
toward the castle.
"It's a trap!," Q gurgled through Worf's clenched
grasp. "Damn you, Klingon." Q jabbed Worf in the ribs ...
hard. The Klingon surprisingly stumbled back, releasing the
entity.
Crusher turned to tend Worf, who clutched his chest.
Troi grabbed Q's wrist, "I sense no deception, Q."
Q smiled, "You are way out of your league, Counselor."
Crusher turned to Q, "Two of Worf's ribs are cracked."
"Serves him right," the entity replied.
"Enough!," Kirk called out. "Doctor, tend to him. Q,
explain yourself."
"He was being a brute..."
"No," Kirk stepped menacingly toward Q. "About the
'trap'."
Ayelborne stood by, face unwavering, as Q began, "He is
Ayelborne. He tried to stop us too many times, now we are
standing here defenseless. Isn't it obvious, Kirk? he has us
right where he wants us."
"I disagree," Spock finally spoke.
"Oh, really."
"Yes, Q. As you said, this planet is locked in a
temporal pocket..."
Ayelborne gasped suddenly, "Temporal pocket, you know
of such things?"
Kirk stepped forward, "Organia is locked within one
right now."
"Impossible. We would know... Come, to the council. I
must speak with Trefayne." And he turned and started
walking.
Q grabbed Kirk's arm, "You're making a big mistake,
Kirk. Strike him down, now."
"Assuming I could, which I won't, where'd that leave
us, Q? Still no Earth, still no continuum. Besides, I
believe you're wrong."
Kirk and the party started following the Organian.
"Isn't this fun...," Q said as he followed Kirk, with
Worf behind him. "Can't take a little ribbing,
Microbrain...?"

CHAPTER TWELVE
Quark looked at the blood on his hands.
"Just keep at it, Quark," Dr. Julian Bashir cried out
from across the Promenade. Quark glanced at him. The young
doctor was covered with the blood of the wounded personnel
and civilians splayed across the deck. "Apply pressure. Stop
the bleeding. I need your help while everyone else is in
ops."
"It's not that," Quark looked down, through misting
eyes, and placed his hand back on his patient's bleeding
chest. "Just hold on. You will be okay."
"Thanks, Quark," Jake Sisko said weakly as he lost
consciousness.

Benjamin Sisko watched the disrupter blast tear into
Christopher Pike's Enterprise. "Maintain shield integrity
around 1701!"
"We can't expend the energy," O'Brien called out.
"We're barely shielding the station," Kira said.
"Damn," Sisko muttered under his breath as his
peripheral vision registered another blast strike DS9. He
braced himself for the buffeting. He knew the battle
wouldn't last much longer. Not much at all. Images of
Jennifer and Jake flooded his mind as he gave the order to
fire one of the last of DS9's photon torpedoes.

"Station Deep Space Nine can no longer protect us,"
Spock raised his voice above the sounds of crashing
circuitry and exploding consoles.
Christopher Pike assessed the situation and thought
about the actions of Enterprise-B. "Number One, theoretical
analysis. What would be the results of a space warp-powered
collision with one of our Cardassian friends out there?"
Number One turned to her Captain, "Just what you would
expect, Sir. However, I do not recommend such actions."
Pike shrugged, "I don't know, Number One. I once read
somewhere about the needs of the many outweighing the needs
of the few."
"Charles Dickens," Spock said.
"Yes, Mr. Spock. A prolific man," Pike nodded. "Prepare
parameters for a space warp drive collision sequence, Number
One. I want all options open."
She turned to her board, "Yes, Sir." So much for
commanding a starship, she thought. Then chastised herself,
she wasn't -- they weren't -- dead yet.

Castillo held on for dear life. Bridge duty was more
challenging than he imagined. Suddenly, the Conn panel
erupted into flame. Ensign Johannson was flung to the deck.
Castillo turned to her.
"Maintain your post," Garrett ordered above the din.
"Engineering, emergency bypass: Conn control to aft bridge
stations. Medical: Dr. Cochrane to the bridge. Hold on
people. Phasers..."
"Emergency full, on your order, Captain." Castillo
reported, ignoring the unmoving body of Johannson.
"I'm sending a nurse up, I can't leave with all the
casualties, Captain." Cochrane's message registered in the
Captain's mind as she concentrated on the flickering
viewscreen.
There they were ...point-blank.
"Fire, Castillo!"
The starship let loose. The Cardassian took the full
force of the third generation's phasers. And exploded.
-- Engulfing Enterprise -C in a plasma explosion.

The ancient doors mysteriously swung open to reveal the
chamber of the Organian Council of Elders. Sitting behind
the table were a group of ancient men, all with far away
looks on their faces. Ayelborne took his place seated at the
center, facing Kirk and the away team.
Q took a step forward, "What! These ... sheepish old
men, with their corny smiles, are going to help us?"
Kirk stepped past him, "Others once made the mistake
you are making now, Q."
Worf nodded, "Indeed. My people's history tells us they
are not to be underestimated."
Ayelborne spoke: "You, Kirk, and a Klingon working
together."
Kirk nodded, "It seems you were correct all those years
ago. But we have more pressing matters."
Another council member spoke, "It has been 90 cycles,
yet the visitor looks so young. I did not think humans were
so long-lived. How are we mistaken?"
Ayelborne reached and touched the man's arm. "Not to
worry, Trefayne. Captain Kirk indicates Organia is enveloped
in a temporal pocket. Indeed, his youthfulness tells us
something is very wrong."
Trefayne looked puzzled, "A pocket, impossible."
"The evidence indicates he is correct, my friend,"
Ayelborne said. "What can you sense?"
The older-looking man concentrated.
Dr. Crusher touched Troi's shoulder, "Deanna, can you
sense anything?"
Troi shrugged, "I know this sounds a bit clichι, but I
sense power beyond anything I've ever encountered."
"Ohhhh..." Trefayne moaned and slumped over. Crusher
jogged around the table, Med-kit in hand.
Q laughed, "Give it up, Doctor. Your inept
ministrations can barely help humans, let alone entities."
Kirk shot him a glance.
"What?!," Q said.
Ayelborne put his hand on Trefayne's temple, reminding
Kirk of a Vulcan mind meld. Trefayne stirred and sat up.
"Incredible," he said.
"Please explain, my friend," Ayelborne prompted.
"The universe seems correct, then I peered beyond and
saw nothing is as it should be. Most distressing," Trefayne
shook his head sadly.
Ayelborne and the elders sat up in astonishment.
Q laughed, "You boys have been duped. Tell me, how does
it feel to join our club?"
Spock stepped past him, "Gentlemen, what can we do now
to correct this problem? It seems someone or something is
impersonating Ayelborne and is responsible for annihilating
Earth and paralyzing the Q Continuum, altering the dynamics
of the universe."
The leader of the Elders nodded. "It is obvious now
what you say is true. We must take action."
Trefayne shook his head, "If we act too rashly he will
know. We will give up our advantage."
"Surely," another Elder spoke, "The fact the humans
have penetrated the pocket has alerted Ayelborne."
Kirk's brow furrowed, "Ayelborne?"
The leader stood up and pointed at Q, "You penetrated
the pocket with the starship. You are not human."
"Thank goodness," Q said.
Ayelborne stepped around the table, toward Q, "You are
an energy being, like ourselves. We can merge with you. Then
Ayelborne will be caught off guard, thinking we did not
leave the pocket."
"You know that will not be enough," Trefayne said.
"It is a start."
"If he can create a pocket, then so can we," Trefayne
said.
Kirk nodded, annoyed that he was not more involved in
the decisions occurring around him, "A cloak."
Spock raised an eyebrow, "Indeed, if we can find a way
to cloak the Enterprise, it would perhaps give us an
advantage."
Q coughed, "You have got to be kidding. A cloaking
device will be useless against someone of such abilities.
After all, I can see right through them."
"Q is correct. A standard mechanical device would be
useless. However a temporal cloak would fool Ayelborne the
same way it has fooled us," Ayelborne said.
"Excuse me," Dr. Crusher interrupted. "Aren't you
Ayelborne? To whom are you referring?"
"Perhaps an explanation is in order. I am Ayelborne.
One time, many cycles ago, we were like you. However, as we
evolved, we were able to separate the violent part of
ourselves, just as you are able to repress your own violent
tendencies."
"And this Ayelborne is your violent self?," Troi asked.
Trefayne sighed, "We were able to separate and
extinguish the worst part of ourselves. My friend,
Ayelborne, however, was hesitant."
Ayelborne nodded, "I concluded that extinguishing a
part of myself was in itself a violent act. So I refused.
Instead I, for lack of a better term, locked it away."
"Locked?," Kirk asked. "Where?"
"First, inside my self. However, as we evolved and
became more powerful, I thought about banishing it. It was
becoming too dangerous. So, I did, making sure it would be
powerless, but free."
"Something went wrong," Q said.
Ayelborne nodded, "Apparently my violent half was able
to rebuild it's powers after all these millennia."
"So, because you were weak we are all now paying the
price," Q said.
"Enough, Q," Kirk scolded. "Ayelborne, your violent
half is only as powerful as one Organian, correct."
"However, he has altered the universe into his image,
which gives him an advantage."
"How much of an advantage?," Worf asked.
Ayelborne shrugged, "We should be able to equalize
things by using Q's body."
Q stepped back, "Now wait one moment, I don't know if I
can approve of this."
Dr. Crusher put her hand on Q's shoulder, "Frightened,
Q?"
The entity frowned, "I thought the Betazoid was the
shrink, Bev."
Troi nodded, "I would say terrified ... Bev."
"I had him marked as a coward since Farpoint," Worf
snarled.
"And we didn't know him before that," Crusher said.
"Once a coward...," Worf began.
"Okay!," Q bellowed, turning to the Organians, "Do what
you must ..." Then he spun menacingly toward the Enterprise-
D crew, "As for you, I will someday have my powers back..."
Suddenly, the chamber was filled with bright light and
a chilling noise. The Starfleet officers covered their ears
and squinted.
Then, Q collapsed into a fetal position ... eyes glazed
over, face frozen in shock.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The away team materialized. Every one stepped down
immediately except Q who gazed wide-eyed, turning his head
slowly to take in his surroundings.
The captain glanced up. "Kirk to bridge."
"Data here," the android's disembodied voice responded.
"Status?," Kirk asked as the team left the transporter
room, marching toward the turbolift. Q lagged slightly
behind.
"We have 20 minutes before the Structural Integrity
Field goes critical."
"Acknowledged. On my way." he said as he entered the
lift. As the lift began moving upward, Kirk turned to Q.
"And now...?"
Q looked gazes with him. The entity's eyes were intense
and unblinking. "It will take a few of your minutes to
create the pocket. Then we can proceed to the station." Q's
voice echoed, as if emanating from more than one set of
vocal chords. The sound created streams of memories for
Kirk: memories of Gary Mitchell and Apollo -- entities that
started out as peaceable and then grew into very dangerous
adversaries.
"Please go ahead," Kirk said.
"Aye, aye Mon Capitan," Q said smiling.
The turbolift doors opened, revealing the bridge. Worf
went to his station immediately. Q took two steps out of the
lift and stopped. Spock, Troi, and Crusher followed Kirk to
the command level. "Engineering, I want full warp power on
my command."
LaForge's voice piped in from the lower decks, "For how
long, Sir?"
"As long as it takes, Commander. Mr. Data, set course
for Deep Space Nine."
"Aye, Sir," the android said unfazed.
"Spock, passive scanners only, but keep your eyes and
ears open," Kirk ordered.
The Vulcan simply nodded and stepped back toward
Science I.
"Now, Kirk." Q said finally. "The Enterprise has been
enclosed in a temporal pocket similar to Organia. Ayelborne
will look right past us ... hopefully."
Kirk shrugged, "I've said it before, risk is our
business. And the stakes are very high. In other words, Mr.
Data, take us out and give us all she's got."

The explosion temporarily blinded the captain. The
automatic viewscreen filters were not a necessity and its
power was diverted to the phaser blast just emitted from
Enterprise.
The Captain's vision began to clear.
"That's all of them, Sir."
The Captain smiled.

Jean-Luc Picard sat slowly into the command chair,
"Hailing frequencies, please, Commander."
Uhura sighed, glancing quickly at the bridge of the
Starship Enterprise with pride. "Aye, Aye, Sir."

On his bridge, Christopher Pike glanced at the burn
marks on his hands, the panel on his chair erupted in flame
from the last impact.
Dr. Boyce was spraying ointment on the injuries. He
clapped a hand on the Captain's shoulders. The older man
whispered in his ear, "Good work, Chris. More exciting than
a horse farm, too."
Pike smirked, "Thank you, Phil. Please start tending to
the others."
Boyce nodded, "Right away, Captain."
"Incoming message from Captain Picard on 1701-A."
Pike nodded, "Main screen, if you would, Spock."

Castillo's vision blurred, his mind fogged. Suddenly,
there was a shape over him. "Hold on, Lieutenant..."
"Captai---"
"Don't try to talk. Dr. T'Ress is on her way up. You'll
be fine. And, Castillo, you are one hell of a helmsman."
The young man smiled faintly and passed out.
Garrett lowered his head gently to the deck just as the
turbolift opened letting the medical team on to the bridge.
Dr. T'Ress rushed to Castillo's aide. "Bring the gurney down
here," the Vulcan said, checking the unconscious man with a
tricorder. "He will be fine, Captain."
Garrett nodded, returning to her seat. Her crew had
many casualties including Dr. Jeremy Cochrane who had signed
aboard Enterprise at Garrett's request. 'Can't think about
this now.'
"Captain," her Comm officer called.
"Yes, Lt. Varrington?"
"Captain Picard on all hail, Sir."
Garrett sighed deeply, "On visual, please."

"I'd say we're in pretty good shape, considering."
O'Brien said to no one in particular.
Dax and Kira were running through station diagnostics
and both concurred with the operations manager.
"Any word from sickbay?" Dax asked.
"Nothing." Kira looked up at her friends. "I'm sure
Jake is okay."
A beeping emanated from O'Brien's board. "It's the
Captain... Captain Picard, signaling for Commander Sisko."
"I'll take it," Kira said. "Let's leave the Commander
be with his son for now. On main screen, Chief."

Picard watched the rear screens on the Enterprise-A
bridge as each became one of the Captains of another
Enterprise, except Major Kira of Deep Space Nine. "It is
most gratifying to see you all. Congratulations on beating
the odds."
"For now," Kira said. "If there is one constant in any
universe, it is the Cardassians are persistent. They won't
be gone long."
Pike nodded, "I agree with the Major. We probably don't
have much of a reprieve."
Garrett nodded, "I don't know about you, but I'm not in
any position to put up much of a fight without some repair
time."
"I think we can all agree to that," Picard said. "Major
Kira are the station's docking rings in decent shape."
"Decent enough," the Bajoran said. "Just don't expect
any R and R, we're picking up the pieces here, too."
"Acknowledged," Picard said. "I believe we should all
dock at the station and pool our resources."
The others agreed and signed off. The Starships
Enterprise, safe for the moment, began limping toward the
docking rings of Deep Space Nine.
As Picard's borrowed starship moved into position,
Jean-Luc couldn't help thinking that the most challenging
part of their 'mission' was still on the horizon.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rachel Garrett stared at the brutal, burning scars all
over his body. The air left her throat momentarily. How
could she have done this to him, after he entrusted so much
to her.
"Captain?"
She slowly turned away from the viewport and looked at
Christopher Pike.
Pike saw the haunted look and recognized it from the
mirror. "It is hard. They mean so much ..."
She shook her head, "I can't understand it, I've been
on other ships, even as captain. I've been in combat, but
..."
They both turned and gazed at the scared and pitted
visage of the Starship Enterprise-C.
"It's the name, isn't it?," Garrett said.
"To me?," Pike commented. "My Enterprise is nearly at
the beginning of what I can see will be an elaborate
historical tapestry." He shook his head slowly, "No, not the
name, not the history. It's the imagination, the human
potential. That's what she represents to me. That's what
kept me aboard her. That's why Enterprise is special. My
Enterprise."
Garrett nodded as Miles O'Brien approached them.
"Captains, the engineering teams report all ships are
progressing as expected. Captain Picard requests a Command
level meeting in Commander Sisko's office as soon as
possible."
They nodded, "Inform Captain Picard we are on our way,"
Garrett said as O'Brien left.
As the two turned away from the viewport, Garrett
touched Pike's arm. "Thank you, Captain."
He smiled, "Not at all, Captain."

The meeting adjourned almost immediately after it
started, DS9's sensors activated the red alert. The
commanding officers uniformly jumped out of their chairs.
"Ops, report," Sisko demanded into the air.
O'Brien's concerned voice filled the office,
"Unidentified ship decloaking..."
"Pike to...
"Garrett to...
"Picard to ...

... Enterprise. Beam me aboard."
Three transporter hums filled Sisko's office as the
Commander crossed the threshold into Ops. He glanced at the
viewscreen in time to see a decloaking wave unlike any he'd
seen before, which shouldn't be surprising, he thought,
considering where he was. Before the wave entirely
dissipated, the screen blinked and the main bridge of the
arriving vessel appeared.
James Kirk stood in the center of Sisko's screen.
Then, suddenly, without warning, a deafening, hideous,
laughter filled every speaker, every ear, encompassed
everything around the station and the Enterprises.
Just as loud came three words, echoing off every
surface.
"TIME TO DIE!"

"Now," Q yelled, and staggered against a bulkhead. Five
energy patterns fled his body, expanding, until they
engulfed the Enterprise-D's main bridge. As soon as they
appeared, they were gone.
And the ship began to shake itself apart.
"Report," Kirk yelled as he was flung to the deck.
"Readings are off the scale," Spock replied.
"The surrounding space is charged with an energy I have
never encountered," Data said.
The shaking increased dramatically with each passing
second. Consoles began to explode from the quaking.
"Will the shields hold?" Kirk asked, trying to be heard
above the din.
"Unknown," Data answered.
Then everything went black.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Jim."
The serenity of unconsciousness shattered around the
Captain. Dizziness and nausea replaced the peace. Kirk
struggled to identify the voice, it seemed like eons since
he heard anything. "...Bones?"
McCoy stood up, away from his friend. "He'll be
alright, thank goodness." He mentally thanked Dr. Bashir for
keeping a well-stocked infirmary on Deep Space Nine, since
most of the crews of each Enterprise were beamed aboard the
station after the conscious Captains deemed DS9 the
sturdiest place to be after the evil Ayelborne's sudden
reappearance.
"That is agreeable, since we will need him for our
endeavor," Ayelborne said.
"I am still unclear as to what this endeavor will
accomplish," Jean-Luc Picard said. He stood over Kirk, brow
furrowed with concern.
Q shook his head, "You know, Jean-Luc. Sometimes you
can be so daft. Oh, well. Believe it or not, Ayelborne and I
agree that you will be required as well."
"Bones...," Kirk said weakly, trying to push himself
onto his elbows.
"Now, Jim. Be careful. You're not ready to be going
after bad guys quite yet."
"Bad guys... Ayelborne."
Spock stepped into his Captain's view, "The 'evil'
Ayelborne is contained for the moment, Sir. You can take a
few minutes to recuperate."
"Recuperate from what?"
Picard stepped forward, "The Organian council members
caught our opponent by surprise when they suddenly separated
from Q. However, the ensuing conflict was engaged just
beyond Enterprise-D's shield perimeter. The ship was
moderately damaged and you were knocked unconscious."
Kirk sat up completely and swung his legs over the side
of the bed. He now could see everyone in the room, standing
toward the back of the infirmary were Scotty, Uhura, and
Chekov. They smiled at Kirk. Kirk nodded back, then looked
at Picard. "Casualties?"
"Surprisingly minimal," Picard said. "And the ship is
under repair. LaForge says she will be fully operational
within hours."
"Scotty," Kirk said.
"Sair," the engineer replied stepping forward.
"Please assist Commander LaForge."
"Aye, Sair. It's good to have you back, Captain."
Kirk nodded and slowly stood up. Picard grabbed his arm
to steady him. "She's a fine ship," Kirk smiled, "And a good
crew."
Picard nodded, "I was about to say the same thing to
you."
"Can we stop the mutual admiration society, please." Q
grimaced. "In case anyone's forgotten, we've still got a lot
of work to do."
Kirk and Picard, arm over arm, looked at the entity.
"Lead the way," Kirk said.
"Indeed," Picard replied.
Q opened and closed his mouth in shock. "Well, it's
about time."

The four captains, Sisko, Ayelborne, Trefayne, and Q
sat in DS9's observation lounge.
"Where is the other Ayelborne?," Kirk asked.
Trefayne nodded, "Perhaps you should explain it to the
Captain, my friend."
"Very well," Ayelborne laced his fingers in front of
his chest and took a deep breath. "My other self is trapped,
temporarily to be sure, in a pocket similar to the one
around Organia."
Kirk hesitated for a moment, "I see. But as soon as he
realizes its a pocket..."
Ayelborne nodded, "He will do what he can to break
free."
Q nodded, "Which will be tougher than he thinks."
Picard looked at his nemesis, "Explain."
Q smiled, "Well, in a justifiable twist of fate, we've
put a kibosh on his powers."
Ayelborne nodded, "Q speaks the truth but only
temporarily. His powers will gradually return in the pocket
and instantly return if he leaves."
Kirk nodded, "And where do we come in?"
Ayelborne looked gravely at the Captain, "Ayelborne is
not easily duped for long. He will realize he is in a pocket
and escape, unless the pocket is fortified. That we must
do."
Pike looked confused, "How could he possibly escape
without any powers."
Trefayne spoke up, "Remember his powers will slowly
return, therefore the pocket must be powerful enough to hold
him for all time. We will be using our inherent energies to
strengthen it. If Ayelborne senses our endeavor, he will be
able to turn those energies back and break free."
Sisko, "And then we'll be back to square one."
Kirk stood up, "Which is why you need Picard and me. To
keep Ayelborne occupied why you strengthen his prison."
"That is correct," Ayelborne said. "We will transport
you into the pocket and then begin reinforcing it."
Pike stood, "Why only Kirk and Picard?"
Q, "I'll field this one. Because the Organians are
familiar with Kirk's abilities and I volunteered Jean-Luc.
Don't worry, Pike. You'll have plenty to do."
Ayelborne, "Moments before we finish with the pocket,
the Captains will need to be transported out. We will be too
occupied to do so, therefore we surmise that interlinking
the transporter systems on the four ships and the station
and diverting all power to them should generate enough to
...how do you say ...beam ...Kirk and Picard out of the
pocket."
Garrett, "There will only be enough energy for two
transporter signals?"
Q, "Yes. Yes. Sorry you get to miss the fun."
Ayelborne, "It will require a very delicate balance of
timing and energy for the transport to be successful."
Picard, "When do we leave?"
Ayelborne, "As soon as possible."
Kirk, "Let's do it."

Miles O'Brien wiped his brow, standing up from the
splayed system components laid out across the deck. "This is
going to be very tight, Sirs. To do what the Organians
request will require nearly every once of power we can
generate by all our systems combined, from all sources."
Sisko nodded, and stepped toward the console of
Enterprise-D's transporter room, where all the commanding
officers had convened, "Can you do it, Chief?"
"It will require the coordinated efforts of the
Enterprises' engineering staffs, but I think its possible."
"Good," Picard said.
"How long until we can leave?," Kirk asked.
O'Brien looked at the floor, "As soon as I can put this
back together. Fifteen minutes."

The Captains and first officers of the Enterprises,
along with Sisko and Kira stood in the observation lounge
behind Enterprise-D's bridge. Kirk stared at the visage out
the large viewports. The Starships Enterprise and
Enterprise-A were clearly visible. 'My whole life,' he
thought. 'All that I am.' Suddenly another thought, 'Is
there nothing more?' The question Spock posed from the
refurbished 1701's sickbay, the wonderings of V'ger as it
strove to identify itself.
'Is there nothing more?,' Kirk thought. 'My god, we
were on our way to be decommissioned before Ayelborne and Q
interfered. And if we succeed in restoring history? Where
does that leave me?'
"Captain," Picard called, breaking through Kirk's
revelry. "We don't have much time."
"Of course," Kirk said. "Captain Pike, as elder
statesman of our group will you please make the
declaration."
Pike stood, "Thank you, Captain Kirk. In the event that
the mission about to be undertaken by Captain James T. Kirk
and Captain Jean-Luc Picard fails, it is declared on this
date, New Stardate 44001.1, that Captain Rachel Garrett,
Commander Benjamin Sisko, Captain Spock, Commander William
Riker and I will adopt the Constitution to our present
timeline and thereby reestablish the United Federation of
Planets. The Starships Enterprise will be the foundation of
the new Starfleet, with Deep Space Nine to be recommisioned
Starbase One. It will be our first priority to ask Bajor and
Organia to join the UFP. Defenses will be created against
our Cardassian neighbors and space exploration will begin
anew with the purpose of finding a way of one day restoring
the timeline."
"A tall order," Riker said.
"But a sense of purpose and identity," Picard
countered.
"We must put the Declaration to official vote," Kirk
said.
Each name called by Captain Spock, each reply,
"Agreed."
Pike nodded, "Then by unanimous vote of command level
personnel, I hearby officially establish the United
Federation of Planets in our present timeline."
"Good luck, Captains," Garrett said.
"To us all," Kirk replied.

"We are ready," Ayelborne said.
Kirk noticed that his eyes were glazed over, as were
the four other Organians who stood together in the empty
promenade of Deep Space Nine. Q leaned against a wall, but
even he seemed transfixed by the Organians' actions.
Picard glanced at Kirk. Kirk at Picard. They each felt
their utility belts. Phaser, tricorder, and Kirk had his
communicator. Picard's was of course built into his insignia
pin.
The two captains nodded to each other. Then Kirk turned
to Ayelborne. "Go ahead."
Kirk's senses exploded and everything he knew was gone.
Moments later, Sisko's voice carried over the station's
speakers, "Red Alert!"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"They came upon us quickly," Spock said, reporting to
his Captain on the bridge of Enterprise.
Pike stared hard at the Cardassian Warship approaching
the station. "Battle status."
Number One looked up from her console, "All systems are
committed to the transporter sequence for Kirk and Picard.
If we divert power for battle, we may not be able to beam
them out of the pocket."
"The same is true for all the Enterprises and the
station," Spock said.
Pike stared hard at the viewscreen, "If we respond to
the Cardassians, the Captains could be trapped in the pocket
with Ayelborne for eternity."
Doctor Boyce, standing to the left of Pike, put his
hand on his captain's shoulder, "Then, Chris, either they're
dead men or we're sitting ducks."

Kirk lifted himself off the ground spitting out a
mouthful of dirt. All around him was a barren field. Picard
stood near surveying the surroundings with his tricorder.
"Are you alright, Captain?," Picard asked.
"Yes, just a little dazed. Where are we?"
"We appear to be on Bajor. Or a reasonable facsimile."
Kirk looked up at the sky, which was a very odd color
of off-blue. "Of course, the Organians recreated the nearest
planet so as not to alert Ayelborne prematurely."
Picard nodded, "Or part of the planet. In any case, we
are within the temporal pocket."
Kirk took out his tricorder, "Life signs?"
Jean-Luc pointed toward some hills in the distance.
"Over there."
Kirk scanned, "Very slight. But there's nothing else
registering. It must be our man." He pulled out his phaser.
"Shall we?"
The two of them headed off into the hills.

"There is one alternative," the elder Spock said as he
stared at the commanding officers on the screens of 1701-A's
bridge. "There are independent systems..."
"The shuttles," Garrett said. "But they can't withstand
a battleship..."
"Weapons range in three minutes," Data said from behind
Riker.
"We don't have any time," Riker said. "We need to
launch the shuttles now."
"Not the shuttles," Pike said.
"The Runabouts," Sisko said.
"They are our best bet," Spock said.
"Fine," Pike said. "I'll be right over."
"As will I," Garrett responded.
"What?," Sisko asked.
"You heard the declaration, we are responsible for
defending the new Federation," Pike said before cutting the
connections.
"Besides," Garrett replied, "We're the Captains."

The launch bays of Deep Space Nine were prepped in
record time. The Ganges under command of Sisko with Dax; the
Rio Grande under command of Garrett with Data; and the
Yangtzee Kiang under command of Pike with Kira, launched
three minutes after the communiquι on the respective bridges
ended.
And as they launched, the Cardassian started firing
viciously.

On the promenade, Trefayne's eyes opened slightly,
"This is getting harder."
"Concentration," Ayelborne responded, eyes squeezed
shut. "Concentration, my friend."

The height of the hills was an optical illusion. As the
captains got closer, they realized how slight they were. But
they were high enough to hide a man.
Ayelborne leaped from his hiding space and tackled
Picard, "What do you want of me!"
Kirk crouched phaser ready, but Ayelborne was
surprisingly quick, kicking the weapon from the Captain's
grasp. Kirk grabbed the man's shoulders pulling him off
Picard, spinning him into a head-lock. "That's as far as you
go, Ayelborne!"
The man gasped, repeating his original question. Then,
"I am peaceful here, why do you invade my home?"
"You destroy my entire race," Kirk spit, "And you
wonder why I traipsed across a field. Sorry it doesn't wash,
pal."
Ayelborne gasped, "I--I don't know what you're talking
about--"
Picard grabbed Kirk's arm. "A moment, Captain."
Kirk glared at Picard, and then loosened his grip, but
still holding the entity around the neck.
Picard stared at Ayelborne, "What do you mean, you
don't know --"
Tears began to flow down the man's cheeks, "All I know
is you came near my home uninvited. I was afraid you would
harm me."
Kirk grimaced, "So you attacked us. Good strategy."
Ayelborne was crying now, unable to speak. Kirk
loosened his grasp. The entity fell to the ground sobbing
heavily. Kirk stepped over and retrieved his phaser, aiming
it at Ayelborne. "Opinion?," Kirk whispered to Picard.
Picard shrugged, "It is possible that his battle with
the Organians has affected his memory?"
Kirk nodded, "It's a ruse."
"Perhaps, but if he honestly has no memory of what he's
done--"
"We still watch him carefully and wait for beam out."

The Ganges took the lead, as Sisko and Dax were the
most familiar with runabouts. "Someday, old man, we might
want to think about a larger ship to guard the station,"
Sisko said.
"Agreed. Hope we get the chance to petition for it."
Sisko nodded and opened a channel to the other
runabouts. "Everyone, Pattern Jen 1 now."
The Rio Grande and Yangtzee Kiang sent signals of
concurment, and they began their moves.

On the bridge of Enterprise-A, Uhura stared at the main
viewer, as the runabouts began their formation around the
Cardassian. Scotty was busy running between engineering and
the main transporter rooms finalizing the power links for
the Captains' beamout... And she felt helpless, and hated
it. 'If only we had a prefix code...' She suddenly smiled
and turned to the center seat. "Mr. Spock, would it be fair
to say that during your tenure on Enterprise-D, you
familiarized yourself with their databanks on Cardassian
technology?"
Spock turned to her and raised an eyebrow. "Indeed."
McCoy, standing to between Spock and Uhura, turned
toward her. "What have you got in mind, Commander?"
Uhura stood and leaned with her hands against the upper
level guardrail. "If I got you a line into their computers,
Spock. I assume you could wreck some havok with their
systems. Correct?"
"Perhaps. But I must remind you that all our systems,
including communications, have been diverting for the
beamout."
Uhura's smile grew wider, "There are other power
sources than just what the ship can provide."
McCoy turned to Spock, "Ahhh... wait, like Murasaki all
those years ago. Phaser energy, Spock. Brilliant, Uhura."
Spock shook his head, "We utilized phaser energy as a
fuel substitute for the old-style shuttlecraft. It cannot be
adapted for a communications panel, Doctor. However..."
"...The power cells from communicators and tricorders
could be networked together," Uhura finished.
"Highly logical, Commander."
Uhura bounced on her heels, "Twenty plus years is
rubbing off, Captain. Chekov, Doctor. If you could grab as
many tricorders and communicators as possible, Spock and I
can give the Cardassians a very large headache."
McCoy and Chekov nodded and bounded for the turbolift.

The disrupter blast caused the Yangtzee Kiang's shields
to explode in sparkles of deadly energy.
"Chris!," Rachel Garrett shouted suddenly from her
viewpoint at the helm of the Rio Grande. She sighed as the
attacked runabouts shields finally dissipated the blast.
Garrett choked back on her words, embarrassed by the
flair of emotion. She glanced at her co-pilot. Data was
unlike anything she had seen before, the first sentient
android in Starfleet... was staring at her.
"Commander," she said.
"I am curious as to your exclamation. It is as if you
have a deep attachment to Captain Christopher Pike."
Garrett looked icily for a moment, "You deduced that
from one exclamation? I am just concerned for any human's
life."
"I see. This makes sense, since there are so few left."
Data concluded as he resumed his Ops duty. "It is time for
our attack run."
"Engage," Garrett said, and the Cardassian warship
seemed to leap toward them.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"You know, Doctor McCoy said the same thing..."
"McCoy!!" Kirk grabbed her shoulders. "Leonard McCoy?"
"Yes," she said, startled by his emotion. "He's in the
mission."
Kirk turned and started across the street, turning back
briefly. "Wait! Wait right there! Spock!" He called after
his Vulcan friend who started down the New York City street
moments before. "Spock!"
The Vulcan seemed to appear from nowhere, "What is it?"
"McCoy! He's in the mission."
As if on cue, Doctor McCoy stepped out from the doors
in front of Kirk, "Jim!"
"Bones," Kirk said delighted, as Spock, in a lapse of
control, grabbed McCoy in a seeming bear hug.
Then, McCoy's eyes widened, something behind him.
Kirk turned, "Edith!" His voice, a ghostly gasp.
McCoy tried to push past. Kirk turned, grabbing him,
his comrades screaming something, his name, Kirk didn't
hear. He buried his face in his friend's shoulder. A screech
of tire.... a final scream.
"I could of saved him. Jim, do you know what you just
did?," said the anguished voice. An unexpected voice, Kirk
looked up at the person he was holding:
Carol Marcus. "Do you know what you just did?"
Kirk blinked. What?? He turned to the crowd gathering
in the street. On the ground was the broken body of ...
David. His son, his dead son.
He turned back to Carol, shocked. What....?
"He knows, Doctor. He knows."
Kirk looked past Carol.
And saw Ayelborne smiling, delighted.

Kirk awoke with a start, his head swimming. Standing
over him was Jean-Luc Picard. "Wha..?"
"Jim, Ayelborne attacked, suddenly. Knocked me down,
and grabbed you. You passed out."
Kirk put his hand on his head, "Some sort of mind game.
I'm not amused." He reached for his phaser, on the ground
next to him, and tried to stand, but couldn't get his
bearing. Picard grabbed him before he fell. "Which...
way...?"
"Ayelborne took off over the hill." Picard pointed past
the hills before them. "You recover. I'll go after him."
Kirk nodded. "Be careful, I'll be right there."
Picard nodded and left in a sprint.
Kirk tried to calm the 'Red Alert' blaring in his head.
Above, the skies grew into a darker red.

Linked tricorders and communicators snaked along the
floor of the bridge away from Uhura's station. Her head was
buried beneath her console. Chekov stood over her.
"How's it going?," he asked.
"A few moments more," her muffled voice answered.
Spock was busy at his station, McCoy standing near him.
"Think it will work?," the Doctor asked.
"I estimate a 57.4 percent chance of success." Spock
said, looking up momentarily. "For even though I analyzed
the databanks, the Cardassians of this timeline have
displayed altered abilities. Their computer system may also
be different."
"You can do it, Spock. If any one can."
"Curious."
"What?"
"As illogical as it seems, sometimes I miss your ...
barbs."
"That's only human," McCoy beamed. "Now stop wasting
time and get back to work."
Spock did.

Q stared at the old men, gathered in DS9's Promenade.
'Old men,' he winced. 'How foolish a thought. I must get out
of this human guise soon. I'm starting to lose intellect.'
Of course, they were not old men, these Organians. They had
kept their presence hidden from the Continuum. Formidable
indeed. Q thanked --God?-- ('another human concept?,' he
thought.) that the Organians had nonagressive tendencies. If
one Organian, or part of an Organian, could pop the
continuum like Ayelborne had... no, that was because of
surprise. If it were a fair fight, it would be the battle of
the universe. A menacing smile came to Q's lips, 'Of course,
that would never happen.'

Ayelborne and his compatriots were on another plane,
even though their humanoid dopplegangers remained visible on
the Federation Station.
'Do you hear the Q's thoughts?,' Trefayne projected to
him.
'I do. He is but a child, daydreaming. It is of no
consequence. Remain focused, our job here is not completed.'
Trefayne projected acknowledgment and returned to their
duty at hand.

Kira Nerys struggled at the controls of the damaged
Yangtzee Kiang. The other runabouts were drawing the
Cardassians' fire away from them. But they couldn't wait
much longer. "I'm having trouble holding the ship on course,
Captain. The helm controls were damaged by that blast."
Christopher Pike frowned. He knew the ship wasn't going
to make it. He glanced briefly at the sensor display of the
four remaining Starships Enterprise docked at Deep Space
Nine. 'My legacy,' the words flashed in his mind. It was
true, in his day Starfleet was an upstart association,
daring to think they could go where no man had gone before.
The U.S.S. Enterprise, his Enterprise, was the most advanced
starship in the young fleet, having successfully completed a
shake-down tour under Robert April, she was handed over to
Pike. He was supposed to be the man who would go beyond
human ken, exploring new worlds, and seeking out new life. I
only scratched the surface, Pike knew. But if he, his crew,
and his starship hadn't been the intrepid explorers, then
there may never have been an Enterprise -A, B, C, or D , or
what was still to come. It was a legacy he must protect at
all costs.
"You served in the Bajoran Underground against the
Cardassian occupation of your planet. Correct, Major."
She shook her head and turned to look him in the eyes.
"One last blow against tyranny, Captain?"
He nodded. "Prepare to engage the warp engines."
She swallowed, but didn't hesitate. She grew taller in
her chair, bringing herself to the attention she knew all of
Bajor, of the Federation, deserved at this moment. "Bringing
the mains on line."

Jean-Luc Picard reached the other side of the hill and
saw the Chapel of the Vedek Monastery. It's large wood front
door was open wide, almost begging someone to cross the
threshold. He glanced up to the ever-reddening sky. It
became harder to see, with the amber sheen over everything.
The Captain pulled his phaser from his belt and walked
toward the entrance. He turned back momentarily, no sign of
Kirk. Picard hoped his counterpart had recovered.
Picard crossed the threshold and listened. Utter
silence. In front of him was a typical layout for a place of
worship. Rows of pews before a raised alter. The room was
very dark.
Except, something glowed from the alter.
The Captain stepped carefully and methodically, looking
at each row of pews before moving on. No indication of
Ayelborne.
Moving closer to the alter, Picard made out the glow: a
Tear of the Prophet, one of the 'hourglasses' from the
beings living inside the newly discovered wormhole. He
swallowed, the tears were very powerful. Although the extent
of their abilities were unknown, Sisko -- the 'Emissary,' as
he became known not long after excepting his position at DS9
-- had reported in depth about their abilities to manipulate
time, at least for an individual exposed to the tear. Why
was one here, in the Organian's temporal pocket?
Picard climbed the steps of the alter and stepped
toward the tear in its transparent casing. The item's warmth
calmed him, the transparent casing, apparently sensing the
presence of a body, opened. Picard felt compelled, almost
hypnotized, as he reached for the tear---
--- Just as Ayelborne, leaping from somewhere above the
alter, tackled Picard to the ground.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"Ready, Mr. Spock."
"As am I, Commander Uhura. You may begin."
The Commander played her console like a master pianist.
Moments later, she smiled. "We're in. Work your magic."
Spock's left eyebrow rose slightly, as he began to
weave a web around the Cardassians' data streams.

Montgomery Scott tensed slightly as he made the final
adjustment. There. He signaled his counterpart on
Enterprise-D. "Mr. LaForge, can I count on ya?"
There was a smile in the voice that came back over the
comm system, "Yes, Sir. Mr. Scott. The power link is
completed and acknowledged on all ships and the station.
We're ready for the beam out anytime."
Scott smiled broadly, "Ayyyy," he said with pride. "
And laddie, call me Scotty."

"There is a fluctuation in their shields, " Dax
reported on the Ganges.
"Excellent," Sisko said from beside her. "I see it.
Just enough Old Man, to punch some holes."
Dax nodded, "But where did their sudden power lose come
from?"
Sisko shrugged his shoulders, "All I care about for now
is that its there. Contact the others. Tell them to commence
with round robin fire patterns."
Dax reached for the comm board, when she noticed the
readings coming from the Yangtzee Kiang. "Kira!"

Onboard the Rio Grande, Data analyzed his readings,
"They appear to be energizing their warp engines. I can only
surmise their course of act---"
"Chris," Garrett punched the comm. "Wait." She heard a
signal overlapping from the Ganges, essentially the same
hail. "Chris. Don't do this --- We need you," her voice
cracked slightly, "I need you."

Pike closed the comm channels. "Are you sure you're
ready for this, Major?"
"Their shield degradation is strongest along the upper
pylon struts," she snapped militarily.
Pike nodded. He reached out and touched her hand.
"Engage."
"May the Prophets be with us."
The Yangtzee Kiang went to warp speed.

Picard's head struck the hard wood surface, dazing him.
"SO RELIGION IS YOUR DEATH KNELL, PICARD." Ayelborne's
voice echoed through his already ringing head. No longer
meek like outside, the Captain could only surmise that the
being's powers were returning. How could he deal with that?
With a back hand punch and a roll Picard shook himself
free momentarily from the entity. He tried to get up, but
stumbled.
Ayelborne held his hand to his head, where the Captain
struck. "PAIN... A UNIQUE FEELING. ONE I CAN LIVE WITHOUT.
FEEL YOUR LAST PAIN, PICARD."
Ayelborne stepped forward, Picard rose to his knees,
trying a crouch stance.
"Freeze!"
The voice came from the back of the room. Ayelborne
looked up, startled for a moment, to see James Kirk pointing
a phaser at the entity's chest.
Ayelborne laughed. "TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE,
EXCELLENT."
He swung his arm back with lightning speed... and
shattered the Tear of the Prophet.

On the Promenade, Ayelborne opened his eyes and turned
to Q, "Now."
Q looked puzzled, "Now?.... ahh, oh, Now! Now!" He
looked up to activate the station's comm system, "Attention,
everyone. This is Q." He pulled down on the front of his
Starfleet tunic. "Now." He said with infinite calm.

The sky was falling. Kirk dodged immense shards of wood
and glass, covering his eyes and face as he moved as best he
could toward the disintegrating alter. "Jean-Luc!"

Picard was blown off the alter stage by Ayelborne's
actions, landing on his side at the first row of pews. He
tried to get up, sharp pains, 'broken ribs,' Picard thought.
Chapel pieces were falling all around him, a chapel that if
Picard couldn't move would become a tomb.

The communication system worked perfectly as Scotty, La
Forge, O'Brien, Kyle, and Bailey energized in sinc. All
power diverted to the linked transporters, in an attempt to
grab two patterns from the nearly-sealed pocket.
And the attempt failed.

Kirk saw Picard struggling toward the back, the debris
piles were growing all around him. Huge amounts were
blocking his path to the other man. Kirk decided to use his
phaser to blast a path.
Picard heard the familiar whine, still getting to his
feet, "Damn the pain,' he thought to himself.
And then Ayelborne's laughter returned.

"Resets in place," Miles O'Brien said from his location
on DS9. "Emergency systems are shunted to the pattern
buffers."
"Energize," Scotty and LaForge ordered together.

Jean-Luc Picard rose, and limped, albeit quickly,
through the newly cleared path.
James Kirk met him as their eyes locked, "Let's get out
of here, Captain."
"I second that, Captain."
They turned around to begin their trek, and then
Ayelborne yelled.
"NO!!!!"
And Picard and Kirk no longer controlled their
destinies.
And Picard and Kirk once again controlled their
destinies.

EPILOGUE

The doors shwooshed open and Christopher Pike gladly
crossed the threshold into his quarters. He yawned and
rubbed his eyes. It wasn't an overly stressful assignment
the Enterprise was carrying out, but perhaps he was still
recovering from the events of Talos IV. He tugged at his
uniform tunic, contemplating changing into something more
comfortable, but the bunk was too alluring. He flopped onto
it.
Not knowing how much time had passed, or even if he had
fallen asleep at all, the next thing Pike heard was the
pinging of his door chime. "Come," he said sleepily.
The door opened to reveal his young -- for a Vulcan --
science officer. "I apologize if this is a bad time,
Captain."
Pike sat up, "No, not at all, Mr. Spock. How can I help
you?"
The Vulcan stepped inside and the door closed. Pike
noticed he was holding a bottle of liquor. "Saurian Brandy,"
Spock said. "I understand it is a delicacy you appreciate."
Pike nodded, "Indeed. Join me in a toast?"
Spock hesitated a moment, he normally didn't imbibe,
but he did bring the brandy. "Of course."
Pike relieved him of the bottle and found two glasses.
"I am here to ... thank you, Captain."
Pike hesitated, "Thank me?"
"For allowing me to join the crew."
Pike chuckled, "Don't be ridiculous, Spock. I didn't
allow you to do anything. You certainly earned this
posting." He offered Spock a glass.
Spock took it, "Perhaps you are aware of the
...disappointment in some quarters by my actions."
Pike knew indeed. Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan was a
living legend in Federation Diplomacy. The fact that he
strongly opposed his son's entrance into Starfleet wasn't as
well known, "I'm aware of your father's displeasure."
"It has not made my life easy," Spock admitted,
throwing Pike off guard by the candidness. "I am glad there
are still individuals in my life to who I can turn for
guidance and acceptance."
Pike raised a glass, "I am honored you feel you can
come to me. I'll try not to let you down."
They clinked their glasses. Spock raised an eyebrow,
"What are we toasting, Sir?"
Pike thought but a moment, "To the future."
The two comrades and friends drank their drink.

'What about the future?,' James Kirk asked himself, as
he sat on the bridge of the battle-weary Enterprise-A. On
the screen was the Planet Earth, and the massive orbital
Space Dock that was this ship's last port. "Stand by,
automatic approach system." His words sounded as if they
were coming from somewhere else. "Advise approach control."
Uhura nodded, and ever so tentatively, at least that's
how it looked to Kirk, she tapped a key on her console,
"Approach control this is Enterprise-A, Ready for docking
maneuver."
The controller replied over the intercom in such a
cheery voice, Kirk almost made a vow to track him down later
and punch him in the nose. "Enterprise-A is cleared to dock.
Welcome Home."
"See to it, Mr. Chekov." Kirk replied and left the
bridge.
Moments later, he was walking toward his quarters where
he was suddenly met by Spock and McCoy. "Hey, Jim," McCoy
called out. "Spock has a surprisingly good idea. Follow us."
Kirk shrugged and wordlessly followed his two best
friends to Spock's quarters. The door opened to reveal a
table setting for three and a bottle ... of Saurian Brandy.
Well, this might be a fine idea after all. "Spock, I'm
shocked."
"It is somewhat of a tradition of mine to have a toast
with my Commanding Officer."
Kirk smiled sardonically, "And it took nearly 25 years
for me to learn of this tradition?"
Spock nodded, "I cannot think of a more fortuitous
occasion."
Kirk nodded, "Join us, Bones."
"Actually I thought I'd count the sparkles in Spock's
IDIC display over here ...of course I'll join you."
Spock poured the brandy and handed the glasses to his
friends. "To the future," he said as he raised a glass.
"And to the missions of the Enterprises' past," Kirk
added.
They clinked their glasses and drank.
Then Kirk sat down, "This is it for me, you know. After
they retire her, that's it. I'm through with starships and
hopping galaxies."
McCoy and Spock glanced at each other with knowing
looks, as the three friends sat infinitely comfortable in
each other's presence.

Captain John Harriman was infinitely uncomfortable,
'How could this have happened? This was supposed to be a
spin around the block! ....around the block!' Instead
Enterprise-B, on her maiden voyage had encountered a spatial
anomaly, it almost tore the ship apart. More importantly, on
his first watch as Enterprise Commander, he had lost one of
the most important figures in Federation history. James T.
Kirk was dead.
Harriman shook his head slightly, he still couldn't
believe it. But it was true, he stood at the rear of the
ship's chapel. In the front row stood Captain Montgomery
Scott, Captain Pavel Chekov and Ensign Demora Sulu. They
were conducting a private memorial service, as Enterprise-B
limped back to Earth.
Harriman bowed his head, and left the room. Kirk had
saved the Enterprise, as he had done so many times before,
different ships, linked together by one legacy. It was
Harriman who should have made the sacrifice. Kirk should be
alive and well, sitting in that chair on the bridge,
certainly John felt he didn't deserve to be there. The
Captain silently made a pledge to himself, a pledge only
someone familiar with the intricate possibilities of space
travel could sanely make: 'If I ever have a chance to
sacrifice myself to preserve you or your progeny, James T.
Kirk, I will not hesitate. I owe you, Captain.'

Rachel Garrett stood up from the center seat of
Enterprise-C and stepped down to the command console. "How
does it feel, Mr. Castillo?"
Richard Castillo just began his first watch as
helmsman. "Wonderful, Captain, Thank you."
"Don't thank me, Lieutenant. You earned this." She
patted him on the shoulder and returned to her chair. This
was a fine ship and a good crew. Enterprise-C would indeed
live up to the name's legacy, she would insure it. Suddenly,
an intense beeping emanated from the communications station.
The young woman manning it, Ensign Terri, spoke up.
"Emergency distress signal, Sir. From the Klingon Outpost
Nirendra III. They are under attack."
Garrett stood, "Distance."
"8 hours at present speed," Castillo announced.
Garrett shook her head, "Not good enough. Go to warp 8,
Mister. Course, Nirendra III. Ensign Terri, signal the
Klingons, help is on the way." 'Time to live up to the
legacy,' she thought.
And Enterprise-C warped toward her future.

Deanna Troi stood up from the chess match, "Don't fret,
Worf. I was the All-District chess champion at my high
school."
"So you've mentioned ... many times."
She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. "Funny, I
don't recall. Let's get a bite to eat, I'm starved." They
walked out of the rec room together. Deanna was glad to have
this time to spend with Worf, ever since their duty
schedules matched up so they were off-duty together. Worf
had been through some emotional hardships lately concerning
his late father. He had been quite reserved. Geordi and Data
asked her to look after their friend. She didn't need to be
asked. In fact, she was surprised and confused by her new
feelings for the Klingon. 'Maybe I need to talk to the
ship's counselor.' She smiled to herself.
They arrived at Ten Forward to find the Captain seated
alone, nursing a cooling cup of Earl Grey tea. Troi and Worf
exchanged glances. Then Troi asked if he wanted company.
"Certainly Counselor, Lieutenant," He stood in welcome
as they sat.
"It is unusual," Worf said, "to find you here."
Picard smiled, "I suppose so, Mr. Worf. I was just
watching." He pointed at the large picture windows adorning
one side of the lounge. Stars flew by, altered by the warp
field effect. As always, it was beautiful. "It's nice to see
them for real once in a while, not through some view screen
sensor array. And away from deck one."
Troi nodded, "I understand. Is something bothering you
though, Captain?"
Picard shook his head, "Not really Counselor, I guess
I'm still awed now and again by the scope of the universe.
How much is still out there..."
Just then, Guinan appeared from seemingly nowhere,
"Well, it's always a pleasure when my little hole in the
wall is graced by such company. Here," She placed a bottle
and some glasses down in the center of the table. "On the
house."
Troi and Picard smiled at the barkeep. Worf nodded as
she left. "What is it?," the Klingon asked.
Picard picked up the bottle, admiring it, "Saurian
Brandy. The perfect drink to share with friends." And the
Captain of the Enterprise began to pour.

Ben Sisko wasn't sure about this idea, but how could he
say no to Dax, after all they had to find a way to recover
from Q's disruptive visit to the station. The dip and chips
Dax insisted on had arrived, and it was almost time for her,
Kira, O'Brien, Keiko, and Bashir to arrive. He was putting
on his fatigues when a knock came to his door. "Come in."
Jake bounded in his room, holding a deck of cards.
"Well, I'm ready."
"Ready ....for what?"
"For the game. So is Nog. He's on his way over."
Sisko shook his head, "Oh, no. Poker is a grownups'
game, Son."
"Ahh, come on, Dad. how come when it's time for me to
do chores or homework I ..." he lowed his voice to simulate
his dad "...have to start acting like a grownup... but when
it comes to the fun stuff, I'm just a kid."
Sisko was about to say, 'because I said so,' but
thought twice. "Just don't fight me on this, Okay, Jake."
His son paused for a moment with a droopy look on his
face, "Okay, Nog and I will just go to Quark's. Tonight's
The Dabo Girl Talent Show in the Holosuites."
".... you understand the difference between a straight
and a straight flush?"
Sisko draped his arm around his son as they left his
room.

Q arrived home with a headache. 'How can this be? I
don't get headaches, and where the hell was I just now? On
that decrepit space station?' Yes, that was it, but he had a
feeling there was something more to it, a lot more. If only
his mind would clear.
"So," came another's voice, "Out late again last
night."
Q looked up to see the face of his friend, not that he
actually had any real --friends -- in the continuum. At
least this one came the closest to one he cared anything
about, for now. But, he was annoying him at the moment.
"Excuuuse me. Have you found that asteroid belt, yet?"
The other smirked and went about his business.
As for Q, his head was clearing, and he had an
unmistakable urge .... for a doughnut.

Outside the Organian counsel room, Ayelborne and
Trefayne looked up into the night sky.
"The pocket around our world is indeed gone," Trefayne
said. "All is as it was before."
Ayelborne nodded, "I cannot help but feel that this was
all my fault."
"It was," Trefayne said.
Ayelborne looked at his compatriot, "I can never fault
you for your honesty, Trefayne."
"Unlike the rest of us, you did not kill, Ayelborne.
Not then, not now. If that is a fault," Trefayne shrugged,
"it is one I believe you can live with."
The other nodded. And then in two flashes of light,
they moved on.

Ayelborne stepped out from the rubble of the destroyed
Vedek Monastery. Fury was the only emotion he felt. He
looked up into the blazing red sky. A temporal pocket, they
got him at his own game. He underestimated the abilities of
the humans, of Kirk and Picard. He envisioned tearing the
captains apart, tearing his other self apart. They deserved
no better. But, they had escaped, with simple transporter
technology, they survived. Fury grew in its passion.
Ayelborne scanned the night skies, and for the briefest
of moments, he thought he saw a little black mixed into the
red. Perhaps not.
Ayelborne thoughts were molded into one word, one word
to obsess on for eternity if that's what it took....
The temporal pocket filled with hideous laughter.

The author would like to acknowledge the friends and
family who doubled as an editorial board for this story: Ray
Clark, Jason Dzubow, Matt Ferry, Dan Hegarty, Daniel R.
Lewis, Marc Lowenberg, Mike Poaletta and Jerry Smolens.
The author would also like to thank the 600+ America
Online readers who have commented and waited patiently for
part two.
The opening segment of Chapter Seventeen is adapted
from "The City on the Edge of Forever" by Harlan Ellison.
All elements of Star Trek are copyrights and trademarks
of Paramount Communications Corporation.
All other elements and content are copyright by Kenneth
A. Lowenberg.
The story is dedicated to Stuart William Lowenberg.

Uncollected Prose by Ralph Waldo Emerson (2)

2011-05-10T00:15:00.000-07:00

The Senses and the Soul

What we know is a point to what we do not know.” The first questions are still to be asked. Let any man bestow a thought on himself, how he came hither, and whither he tends, and he will find that all the literature, all the philosophy that is on record, have done little to dull the edge of inquiry. The globe that swims so silently with us through the sea of space, has never a port, but with its little convoy of friendly orbs pursues its voyage through the signs of heaven, to renew its navigation again forever. The wonderful tidings our glasses and calendars give us concerning the hospitable lights that hang around us in the deep, do not appease but inflame our curiosity; and in like manner, our culture does not lead to any goal, but its richest results of thought and action are only new preparation.
Here on the surface of our swimming earth we come out of silence into society already formed, into language, customs, and traditions, ready made, and the multitude of our associates discountenance us from expressing any surprise at the somewhat agreeable novelty of Being, and frown down any intimation on our part of a disposition to assume our own vows, to preserve our independence, and to institute any inquiry into the sweet and sublime vision which surrounds us.
And yet there seems no need that any should fear we should grow too wise. The path of truth has obstacles enough of its own. We dwell on the surface of nature. We dwell amidst surfaces; and surface laps so closely on surface, that we cannot easily pierce to see the interior organism. Then the subtlety of things! Under every cause, another cause. Truth soars too high or dives too deep, for the most resolute inquirer. See of how much we know nothing. See the strange position of man. Our science neither comprehends him as a whole, nor any one of its particulars. See the action and reaction of Will and Necessity. See his passions, and their origin in the deeps of nature and circumstance. See the Fear that rides even the brave. See the omnipresent Hope, whose fountains in our consciousness no metaphysician can find. Consider the phenomenon of Laughter, and explore the elements of the Comic. What do we know of the mystery of Music? and what of Form? why this stroke, this outline should express beauty, and that other not? See the occult region of Demonology, with coincidence, foresight, dreams, and omens. Consider the appearance of Death, the formidable secret of our destiny, looming up as the barrier of nature.
Our ignorance is great enough, and yet the fact most surprising is not our ignorance, but the aversation of men from knowledge. That which, one would say, would unite all minds and join all hands, the ambition to push as far as fate would permit, the planted garden of man on every hand into the kingdom of Night, really fires the heart of few and solitary men. Tell men to study themselves, and for the most part, they find nothing less interesting. Whilst we walk environed before and behind with Will, Fate, Hope, Fear, Love, and Death, these phantoms or angels, whom we catch at but cannot embrace, it is droll to see the contentment and incuriosity of man. All take for granted, — the learned as well as the unlearned, — that a great deal, nay, almost all, is known and forever settled. But in truth all is now to be begun, and every new mind ought to take the attitude of Columbus, launch out from the gaping loiterers on the shore, and sail west for a new world.
This profound ignorance, this deep sleep of the higher faculties of man, coexists with a great abundance of what are called the means of learning, great activity of book-making, and of formal teaching. Go into one of our public libraries, when a new box of books and journals has arrived with the usual importation of the periodical literature of England. The best names of Britain are on the covers. What a mass of literary production for a single week or month! We speculate upon it before we read. We say, what an invention is the press and the journal, by which a hundred pale students, each a hive of distilled flowers of learning, of thought, — each a poet, — each an accomplished man whom the selectest influences have joined to breed and enrich, are made to unite their manifold streams for the information and delight of everybody who can read! How lame is speech, how imperfect the communication of the ancient Harper, wandering from castle to hamlet, to sing to a vagrant audience his melodious thoughts! These unopened books contain the chosen verses of a hundred minstrels, born, living, and singing in distant countries and different languages; for, the intellectual wealth of the world, like its commercial, rolls to London, and through that great heart is hurled again to the extremities. And here, too, is the result, not poetic, of how much thought, how much experience, and how much suffering of wise and cultivated men! How can we in America expect books of our own, whilst this bale of wisdom arrives once or twice in a month at our ports?
In this mind we open the books, and begin to read. We find they are books about books; and then perhaps the book criticized was itself a compilation or digest of others; so that the page we read is at third or fourth hand from the event or sentiment which it describes. Then we find that much the largest proportion of the pages relates exclusively to matter of fact — to the superficial fact, and, as if systematically, shuns any reference to a thought or law which the fact indicated. A large part again, both of the prose and verse, is gleanings from old compositions, and the oft repeated praise of such is repeated in the phrase of the present day. We have even the mortification to find one more deduction still from our anticipated prize, namely, that a large portion of ostentatious criticism is merely a hired advertisement of the great booksellers. In the course of our turning of leaves, we fall at last on an extraordinary passage — a record of thought and virtue, or a clarion strain of poetry, or perchance a traveller makes us acquainted with strange modes of life and some relic of primeval religion, or, rarer yet, a profound sentence is here printed — shines here new but eternal on these linen pages, — we wonder whence it came, — or perhaps trace it instantly home — aut Erasmus aut Diabolus — to the only head it could come from.
A few thoughts are all we glean from the best inspection of the paper pile; all the rest is combination and confectionary. A little part abides in our memory, and goes to exalt the sense of duty, and make us happier. For the rest, our heated expectation is chilled and disappointed. Some indirect benefit will no doubt accrue. If we read with braced and active mind, we learn this negative fact, itself a piece of human life. We contrast this mountain of dross with the grains of gold, — we oversee the writer, and learn somewhat of the laws of writing. But a lesson as good we might be learning elsewhere.
Now what is true of a month’s or a year’s issue of new books, seems to me with a little qualification true of the age. The stock-writers , (for the honesty of the literary class has given this population a name,) vastly out-number the thinking men. One man, two men, — possibly, three or four, — have cast behind them the long-descended costume of the academy, and the expectations of fashion, and have said, This world is too fair, this world comes home too near to me than that I should walk a stranger in it, and live at second-hand, fed by other men’s doctrines, or treading only in their steps; I feel a higher right herein, and will hearken to the Oracle myself. Such have perceived the extreme poverty of literature, have seen that there was not and could not be help for the fervent soul, except through its own energy. But the great number of those who have voluminously ministered to the popular tastes were men of talents, who had some feat which each could do with words, but who have not added to wisdom or to virtue. Talent amuses; Wisdom instructs. Talent shows me what another man can do; Genius acquaints me with the spacious circuits of the common nature. One is carpentry; the other is growth. To make a step into the world of thought is now given to but few men; to make a second step beyond the first, only one in a country can do; but to carry the thought on to three steps, marks a great teacher. Aladdin’s palace with its one unfinished window, which all the gems in the royal treasury cannot finish in the style of the meanest of the profusion of jewelled windows that were built by the Genie in a night, is but too true an image of the efforts of talent to add one verse to the copious text which inspiration writes by one or another scribe from age to age.
It is not that the literary class or those for whom they write, are not lovers of truth, and amenable to principles. All are so. The hunger of men for truth is immense; but they are not erect on their feet; the senses are too strong for the soul. Our senses barbarize us. When the ideal world recedes before the senses, we are on a retrograde march. The savage surrenders to his senses; he is subject to paroxysms of joy and fear; he is lewd, and a drunkard. The Esquimaux in the exhilaration of the morning sun, when he is invigorated by sleep, will sell his bed. He is the fool of the moment’s sensations to the degree of losing sight of the whole amount of his sensations in so many years. And there is an Esquimaux in every man which makes us believe in the permanence of this moment’s state of our game more than our own experience will warrant. In the fine day we despise the house. At sea, the passengers always judge from the weather of the present moment of the probable length of the voyage. In a fresh breeze, they are sure of a good run; becalmed, they are equally sure of a long passage. In trade, the momentary state of the markets betrays continually the experienced and long-sighted. In politics, and in our opinion of the prospects of society, we are in like manner the slaves of the hour. Meet one or two malignant declaimers, and we are weary of life, and distrust the permanence of good institutions. A single man in a ragged coat at an election looks revolutionary. But ride in a stage-coach with one or two benevolent persons in good spirits, and the Republic seems to us safe.
It is but an extension of the despotism of sense, — shall I say, only a calculated sensuality, — a little more comprehensive devotion which subjugates the eminent and the reputed wise, and hinders an ideal culture. In the great stakes which the leaders of society esteem not at all fanciful but solid, in the best reputed professions and operations, what is there which will bear the scrutiny of reason? The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive. We defer to the noted merchants whose influence is felt not only in their native cities, but in most parts of the globe; but our respect does them and ourselves great injustice, for their trade is without system, their affairs unfold themselves after no law of the mind; but are bubble built on bubble without end; a work of arithmetic, not of commerce, much less of considerate humanity. They add voyage to voyage, and buy stocks that they may buy stocks, and no ulterior purpose is thought of. When you see their dexterity in particulars, you cannot overestimate the resources of good sense, and when you find how empty they are of all remote aims, you cannot underestimate their philosophy.
The men of letters and the professions we have charged with the like surrender to routine. It is no otherwise with the men of office. Statesmen are solitary. At no time do they form a class. Governments, for the most part, are carried on by political merchants quite without principle, and according to the maxims of trade and huckster; so that what is true of merchants is true of public officers. Why should we suffer ourselves to be cheated by sounding names and fair shows? The titles, the property, the notoriety, the brief consequence of our fellows are only the decoration of the sacrifice, and add to the melancholy of the observer.
“The earth goes on the earth glittering with gold,
The earth goes to the earth sooner than it should,
The earth builds on the earth castles and towers,
The earth says to the earth, all this is ours.”
All this is covered up by the speedy succession of the particulars, which tread so close on each other’s heel, as to allow no space for the man to question the whole thing. There is somewhat terrific in this mask of routine. Captain Franklin, after six weeks travelling on the ice to the North Pole, found himself two hundred miles south of the spot he had set out from. The ice had floated; and we sometimes start to think we are spelling out the same sentences, saying the same words, repeating the same acts as in former years. Our ice may float also.
This preponderance of the senses can we balance and redress? Can we give permanence to the lightnings of thought which lick up in a moment these combustible mountains of sensation and custom, and reveal the moral order after which the earth is to be rebuilt anew? Grave questions truly, but such as to leave us no option. To know the facts is already a choosing of sides, ranges us on the party of Light and Reason, sounds the signal for the strife, and prophesies an end to the insanity and a restoration of the balance and rectitude of man.

Transcendentalism

The more liberal thought of intelligent persons acquires a new name in each period or community; and in ours, by no very good luck, as it sometimes appears to us, has been designated as Transcendentalism. We have every day occasion to remark its perfect identity, under whatever new phraseology or application to new facts, with the liberal thought of all men of a religious and contemplative habit in other times and countries. We were lately so much struck with two independent testimonies to this fact, proceeding from persons, one in sympathy with the Quakers, and the other with the Calvinistic Church, that we have begged the privilege to transcribe an extract from two private letters, in order that we might bring them together.
The Calvinist writes to his Correspondent after this manner.
“All the peculiarities of the theology, denominated Trinitarian, are directly or indirectly transcendental. The sinfulness of man involves the supposition of a nature in man, which transcends all limits of animal life and of social moralities. The reality of spirit, in the highest sense of that holy word, as the essence of God and the inward ground and law of man’s being and doing, is supposed both in the fact of sin, and the possibility of redemption of sin. The mystery of the Father revealed only in the Son as the Word of Life, the Light which illumines every man, outwardly in the incarnation and offering for sin, inwardly as the Christ in us, energetic and quickening in the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, — the great mystery wherein we find redemption, this, like the rest, is transcendental. So throughout, as might be shown by the same induction suggested in relation to another aspect of the matter. Now here is my point. Trinitarians, whose whole system from beginning to end is transcendental, ideal, — an idea is the highest truth, — war against the very foundations of whatever is transcendental, ideal; all must be empiric, sensuous, inductive. A system, which used to create and sustain the most fervid enthusiasm, as is its nature, for it makes God all in all, leads in crusade against all even the purest and gentlest enthusiasm. It fights for the letter of Orthodoxy, for usage, for custom, for tradition, against the Spirit as it breathes like healing air through the damps and unwholesome swamps, or like strong wind throwing down rotten trees and rotten frameworks of men. It builds up with one hand the Temple of Truth on the outside; and with the other works as in a frenzy to tear up its very foundations. So has it seemed to me. The transcendentalists do not err in excess but in defect, if I understand the case. They do not hold wild dreams for realities; the vision is deeper, broader, more spiritual than they have seen. They do not believe with too strong faith; their faith is too dim of sight, too feeble of grasp, too wanting in certainty. I regret that they should ever seem to undervalue the Scriptures. For those scriptures have flowed out of the same spirit which is in every pure heart; and I would have the one spirit recognise and respond to itself under all the multiform shapes of word, of deed, of faith, of love, of thought, of affection, in which it is enrobed; just as that spirit in us recognises and responds to itself now in the gloom of winter, now in the cheer of summer, now in the bloom of spring, now in the maturity of autumn; and in all the endless varieties of each.”
The Friend writes thus.
“Hold fast, I beseech you, to the resolution to wait for light from the Lord. Go not to men for a creed, faint not, but be of good courage. The darkness is only for a season. We must be willing to tarry the Lord’s time in the wilderness, if we would enter the Promised Land. The purest saints that I have ever known were long, very long, in darkness and in doubt. Even when they had firm faith, they were long without feeling what they believed in . One told me he was two years in chaotic darkness, without an inch of firm ground to stand upon, watching for the dayspring from on high, and after this long probation it shone upon his path, and he has walked by its light for years. Do not fear or regret your isolation from men, your difference from all around you. It is often necessary to the enlargement of the soul that it should thus dwell alone for a season, and when the mystical union of God and man shall be completely developed, and you feel yourself newly born a child of light, one of the sons of God, you will also feel new ties to your fellow men; you will love them all in God, and each will be to you whatever their state will permit them to be.
“It is very interesting to me to see, as I do, all around me here, the essential doctrines of the Quakers revived, modified, stript of all that puritanism and sectarianism had heaped upon them, and made the foundation of an intellectual philosophy, that is illuminating the finest minds and reaches the wants of the least cultivated. The more I reflect upon the Quakers, the more I admire the early ones, and am surprised at their being so far in advance of their age, but they have educated the world till it is now able to go beyond those teachers.
“Spiritual growth, which they considered at variance with intellectual culture, is now wedded to it, and man’s whole nature is advanced. The intellectual had so lorded it over the moral, that much onesided cultivation was requisite to make things even. I remember when your intellect was all in all, and the growth of the moral sense came after. It has now taken its proper place in your mind, and the intellect appears for a time prostrate, but in due season both will go on harmoniously, and you will be a perfect man. If you suffer more than many before coming into the light, it is because your character is deeper and your happy enlargement will be proportioned to it.”
The identity, which the writer of this letter finds between the speculative opinions of serious persons at the present moment, and those entertained by the first Quakers, is indeed so striking as to have drawn a very general attention of late years to the history of that sect. Of course, in proportion to the depth of the experience, will be its independence on time and circumstances, yet one can hardly read George Fox’s Journal, or Sewel’s History of the Quakers, without many a rising of joyful surprise at the correspondence of facts and expressions to states of thought and feeling, with which we are very familiar. The writer justly remarks the equal adaptation of the philosophy in question “to the finest minds, and to the least cultivated.” And so we add in regard to these works, that quite apart from the pleasure of reading modern history in old books, the reader will find another reward in the abundant illustration they furnish to the fact, that wherever the religious enthusiasm makes its appearance, it supplies the place of poetry and philosophy and of learned discipline, and inspires by itself the same vastness of thinking; so that in learning the religious experiences of a strong but untaught mind, you seem to have suggested in turn all the sects of the philosophers.
We seize the occasion to adorn our pages with the dying speech of James Naylor, one of the companions of Fox, who had previously been for eight years a common soldier in the army. Its least service will be to show how far the religious sentiment could exalt the thinking and purify the language of the most uneducated men.
“There is a spirit which I feel,” said James Naylor a few hours before his death, “that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exultation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned, and it takes its kingdom with entreaty, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world’s joy it is murdered. I found it alone being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.”

Prayers

Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,
Nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor,
As fancy values them: but with true prayers,
That shall be up at heaven, and enter there
Ere sunrise; prayers from preserved souls,
From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate
To nothing temporal.
SHAKSPEARE.
Pythagoras said that the time when men are honestest, is when they present themselves before the gods. If we can overhear the prayer, we shall know the man. But prayers are not made to be overheard, or to be printed, so that we seldom have the prayer otherwise than it can be inferred from the man and his fortunes, which are the answer to the prayer, and always accord with it. Yet there are scattered about in the earth a few records of these devout hours which it would edify us to read, could they be collected in a more catholic spirit than the wretched and repulsive volumes which usurp that name. Let us not have the prayers of one sect, nor of the Christian Church, but of men in all ages and religions, who have prayed well. The prayer of Jesus is, as it deserves, become a form for the human race. Many men have contributed a single expression, a single word to the language of devotion, which is immediately caught and stereotyped in the prayers of their church and nation. Among the remains of Euripides, we have this prayer; “Thou God of all! infuse light into the souls of men, whereby they may be enabled to know what is the root from whence all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them.” In the Phaedrus of Plato, we find this petition in the mouth of Socrates; “O gracious Pan! and ye other gods who preside over this place! grant that I may be beautiful within; and that those external things, which I have, may be such as may best agree with a right internal disposition of mind; and that I may account him to be rich, who is wise and just.” Wacic the Caliph, who died A. D. 845, ended his life, the Arabian historians tell us, with these words; “O thou whose kingdom never passes away, pity one whose dignity is so transient.” But what led us to these remembrances was the happy accident which in this undevoutage lately brought us acquainted with two or three diaries which attest, if there be need of attestation, the eternity of the sentiment and its equality to itself through all the variety of expression. The first is the prayer of a deaf and dumb boy.
“When my long-attached friend comes to me, I have pleasure to converse with him, and I rejoice to pass my eyes over his countenance; but soon I am weary of spending my time causelessly and unimproved and I desire to leave him, (but not in rudeness ,) because I wish to be engaged in my business. But thou, O my Father, knowest I always delight to commune with thee in my lone and silent heart; I am never full of thee; I am never weary of thee; I am always desiring thee. I hunger with strong hope and affection for thee, and I thirst for thy grace and spirit.
“When I go to visit my friends, I must put on my best garments, and I must think of my manner to please them. I am tired to stay long, because my mind is not free, and they sometimes talk gossip with me. But, Oh my Father, thou visitest me in my work, and I can lift up my desires to thee, and my heart is cheered and at rest with thy presence, and I am always alone with thee, and thou dost not steal my time by foolishness . I always ask in my heart, where can I find thee?”
The next is a voice out of a solitude as strict and sacred as that in which nature had isolated this eloquent mute.
“My Father, when I cannot be cheerful or happy, I can be true and obedient, and I will not forget that joy has been, and may still be. If there is no hour of solitude granted me, still I will commune with thee. If I may not search out and pierce my thought, so much the more may my living praise thee. At whatever price, I must be alone with thee; this must be the demand I make. These duties are not the life, but the means which enable us to show forth the life. So must I take up this cross, and bear it willingly. Why should I feel reproved when a busy one enters the room? I am not idle though I sit with folded hands; but instantly I must seek some cover. For that shame I reprove myself. Are they only the valuable members of society who labor to dress and feed it? Shall we never ask the aim of all this hurry and foam, of this aimless activity? Let the purpose for which I live be always before me; let every thought and word go to confirm and illuminate that end; namely, that I must become near and dear to thee; that now I am beyond the reach of all but thee.
“How can we not be reconciled to thy will? I will know the joy of giving to my friend the dearest treasure I have. I know that sorrow comes not at once only. We cannot meet it, and say, now it is overcome, but again, and yet again its flood pours over us, and as full as at first.
“If but this tedious battle could be fought,
Like Sparta’s heroes at one rocky pass,
‘One day be spent in dying,’ men had sought
The spot and been cut down like mower’s grass.”
The next is in a metrical form. It is the aspiration of a different mind, in quite other regions of power and duty, yet they all accord at last.
“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high,
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which they kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou ‘st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practise more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs.”
The last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm and healthful spirit, and contains this petition.
“My Father! I now come to thee with a desire to thank thee for the continuance of our love, the one for the other. I feel that without thy love in me, I should be alone here in the flesh. I cannot express my gratitude for what thou hast been and continuest to be to me. But thou knowest what my feelings are. When nought on earth seemeth pleasant to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and teach me that which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on. I know that thou hast not created me and placed me here on earth, amidst its toils and troubles, and the follies of those around me, and told me to be like thyself, when I see so little of thee here to profit by; thou hast not done this, and then left me to myself, a poor, weak man, scarcely able to earn my bread. No; thou art my Father, and I will love thee, for thou didst first love me, and lovest me still. We will ever be parent and child. Wilt thou give me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption. Wilt thou show me the true means of accomplishing it. . . . I thank thee for the knowledge that I have attained of thee by thy sons who have been before me, and especially for him who brought me so perfect a type of thy goodness and love to men. . . . . I know that thou wilt deal with me as I deserve. I place myself therefore in thy hand, knowing that thou wilt keep me from all harm so long as I consent to live under thy protecting care.”
Let these few scattered leaves, which a chance, (as men say, but which to us shall be holy,) brought under our eye nearly at the same moment, stand as an example of innumerable similar expressions which no mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the times. Might they be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret experiences which are ineffable! But we must not tie up the rosary on which we have strung these few white beads, without adding a pearl of great price from that book of prayer, the “Confessions of Saint Augustine.”
“And being admonished to reflect upon myself, I entered into the very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct; and I was able to do it, because now thou wert become my helper. I entered and discerned with the eye of my soul, (such as it was,) even beyond my soul and mind itself the Light unchangeable. Not this vulgar light which all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind, as though the brightness of this should be manifold greater and with its greatness take up all space. Not such was this light, but other, yea, far other from all these. Neither was it so above my understanding, as oil swims above water, or as the heaven is above the earth. But it is above me, because it made me; and I am under it, because I was made by it. He that knows truth or verity, knows what that Light is, and he that knows it knows eternity, and it is known by charity. O eternal Verity! and true Charity! and dear Eternity! thou art my God, to thee do I sigh day and night. Thee when I first knew, thou liftedst me up that I might see there was what I might see, and that I was not yet such as to see. And thou didst beat back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams upon me after a vehement manner, and I even trembled between love and horror, and I found myself to be far off, and even in the very region of dissimilitude from thee.”

Fourierism and the Socialists

The increasing zeal and numbers of the disciples of Fourier, in America and in Europe, entitle them to an attention which their theory and practical projects will justify and reward. In London, a good weekly newspaper (lately changed into a monthly journal) called “The Phalanx,” devoted to the social doctrines of Charles Fourier and bearing for its motto, “Association and Colonization,” is edited by Hugh Doherty. Mr. Etzler’s inventions, as described in the Phalanx, promise to cultivate twenty thousand acres with the aid of four men only and cheap machinery. Thus the laborers are threatened with starvation if they do not organize themselves into corporations, so that machinery may labor for instead of working against them. It appears that Mr. Young, an Englishman of large property, has purchased the Benedictine Abbey of Citeaux, in the Mont d’Or, in France, with its ample domains, for the purpose of establishing a colony there. We also learn that some members of the sect have bought an estate at Santa Catharina, fifty miles from Rio Janeiro, in a good situation for an agricultural experiment, and one hundred laborers have sailed from Havre to that port, and nineteen hundred more are to follow. On the anniversary of the birthday of Fourier, which occurred in April, public festivals were kept by the Socialists in London, in Paris, and in New York. In the city of New York, the disciples of Fourier have bought a column in the Daily Tribune, Horace Greeley’s excellent newspaper, whose daily and weekly circulation exceeds twenty thousand copies, and through that organ are now diffusing their opinions.
We had lately an opportunity of learning something of these Socialists and their theory from the indefatigable apostle of the sect in New York, Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushes his doctrine with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and importunacy. As we listened to his exposition, it appeared to us the sublime of mechanical philosophy; for the system was the perfection of arrangement and contrivance. The force of arrangement could no farther go. The merit of the plan was that it was a system; that it had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment character of most popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive of facts to a wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or magnitude, or remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with a giant’s step, and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic web of cycle and epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable assiduity. Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism. One could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier and Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a mere trifler. It must now set itself to raise the social condition of man, and to redress the disorders of the planet he inhabits. The Desert of Sahara, the Campagna di Roma, the frozen polar circles, which by their pestilential or hot or cold airs poison the temperate regions, accuse man. Society, concert, cooperation, is the secret of the coming Paradise. By reason of the isolation of men at the present day, all work is drudgery. By concert, and the allowing each laborer to choose his own work, it becomes pleasure. “Attractive Industry” would speedily subdue, by adventurous, scientific, and persistent tillage, the pestilential tracts; would equalize temperature; give health to the globe, and cause the earth to yield ‘healthy imponderable fluids’ to the solar system, as now it yields noxious fluids. The hyaena, the jackal, the gnat, the bug, the flea, were all beneficent parts of the system; the good Fourier knew what those creatures should have been, had not the mould slipped, through the bad state of the atmosphere, caused, no doubt, by these same vicious imponderable fluids. All these shall be redressed by human culture, and the useful goat, and dog, and innocent poetical moth, or the wood-tick to consume decomposing wood, shall take their place. It takes 1680 men to make one Man, complete in all the faculties; that is, to be sure that you have got a good joiner, a good cook, a barber, a poet, a judge, an umbrella-maker, a mayor and aldermen, and so on. Your community should consist of 2000 persons, to prevent accidents of omission; and each community should take up 6000 acres of land. Now fancy the earth planted with fifties and hundreds of these phalanxes side by side, — what tillage, what architecture, what refectories, what dormitories, what reading rooms, what concerts, what lectures, what gardens, what baths! What is not in one, will be in another, and many will be within easy distance. Then know you and all, that Constantinople is the natural capital of the globe. There, in the Golden Horn, will be the Arch-Phalanx established, there will the Omniarch reside. Aladdin and his magician, or the beautiful Scheherzarade, can alone in these prosaic times, before the sight, describe the material splendors collected there. Poverty shall be abolished; deformity, stupidity, and crime shall be no more. Genius, grace, art, shall abound, and it is not to be doubted but that, in the reign of “Attractive Industry,” all men will speak in blank verse.
Certainly we listened with great pleasure to such gay and magnificent pictures. The ability and earnestness of the advocate and his friends, the comprehensiveness of their theory, its apparent directness of proceeding to the end they would secure, the indignation they felt and uttered at all other speculation in the presence of so much social misery, commanded our attention and respect. It contained so much truth, and promised in the attempts that shall be made to realize it so much valuable instruction, that we are engaged to observe every step of its progress. Yet in spite of the assurances of its friends, that it was new and widely discriminated from all other plans for the regeneration of society, we could not exempt it from the criticism which we apply to so many projects for reform with which the brain of the age teems. Our feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader; or, perhaps, as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced, but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New-Harmonies with each pulsation. There is an order in which in a sound mind the faculties always appear, and which, according to the strength of the individual, they seek to realize in the surrounding world. The value of Fourier’s system is that it is a statement of such an order externized, or carried outward into its correspondence in facts. The mistake is, that this particular order and series is to be imposed by force of preaching and votes on all men, and carried into rigid execution. But what is true and good must not only be begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by life. Could not the conceiver of this design have also believed that a similar model lay in every mind, and that the method of each associate might be trusted, as well as that of his particular Committee and General Office, No. 200 Broadway? nay, that it would be better to say, let us be lovers and servants of that which is just; and straightway every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of Christ. Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or humanized, and in the obedience to his most private being, he finds himself, according to his presentiment, though against all sensuous probability, acting in strict concert with all others who followed their private light.
Yet in a day of small, sour, and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it, which is superior and commanding: it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.
But now, whilst we write these sentences, comes to us a paper from Mr. Brisbane himself. We are glad of the opportunity of letting him speak for himself. He has much more to say than we have hinted, and here has treated a general topic. We have not room for quite all the matter which he has sent us, but persuade ourselves that we have retained every material statement, in spite of the omissions which we find it necessary to make, to contract his paper to so much room as we offered him.
Mr. Brisbane, in a prefatory note to his article, announces himself as an advocate of the Social Laws discovered by CHARLES FOURIER, and intimates that he wishes to connect whatever value attaches to any statement of his, with the work in which he is exclusively engaged, that of Social Reform. He adds the following broad and generous declaration.
“It seems to me that, with the spectacle of the present misery and degradation of the human race before us, all scientific researches and speculations, to be of any real value, should have a bearing upon the means of their social elevation and happiness. The mass of scientific speculations, which are every day offered to the world by men, who are not animated by a deep interest in the elevation of their race, and who exercise their talents merely to build up systems, or to satisfy a spirit of controversy, or personal ambition, are perfectly valueless. What is more futile than barren philosophical speculation, that leads to no great practical results?”

Chardon Street and Bible Conventions

In the month of November, 1840, a Convention of Friends of Universal Reform assembled in the Chardon Street Chapel, in Boston, in obedience to a call in the newspapers signed by a few individuals, inviting all persons to a public discussion of the institutions of the Sabbath, the Church and the Ministry. The Convention organized itself by the choice of Edmund Quincy, as Moderator, spent three days in the consideration of the Sabbath, and adjourned to a day in March, of the following year, for the discussion of the second topic. In March, accordingly, a three-days’ session was holden, in the same place, on the subject of the Church, and a third meeting fixed for the following November, which was accordingly holden, and the Convention, debated, for three days again, the remaining subject of the Priesthood. This Convention never printed any report of its deliberations, nor pretended to arrive at any Result , by the expression of its sense in formal resolutions, — the professed object of those persons who felt the greatest interest in its meetings being simply the elucidation of truth through free discussion. The daily newspapers reported, at the time, brief sketches of the course of proceedings, and the remarks of the principal speakers. These meetings attracted a good deal of public attention, and were spoken of in different circles in every note of hope, of sympathy, of joy, of alarm, of abhorrence, and of merriment. The composition of the assembly was rich and various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from all parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every shade of opinion, from the straitest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, — all came successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their hour , wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring innovators, and the champions-until-death of the old cause, sat side by side. The still living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing yet, after several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh merit, emerging, and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The assembly was characterized by the predominance of a certain plain, sylvan strength and earnestness, whilst many of the most intellectual and cultivated persons attended its councils. Dr. Channing, Edward Taylor, Bronson Alcott, Mr. Garrison, Mr. May, Theodore Parker, H. C. Wright, Dr. Osgood, William Adams, Edward Palmer, Jones Very, Maria W. Chapman, and many other persons of a mystical, or sectarian, or philanthropic renown, were present, and some of them participant. And there was no want of female speakers; Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy Sessions took a pleasing and memorable part in the debate, and that flea of Conventions, Mrs. Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her interminable scroll. If there was not parliamentary order, there was life, and the assurance of that constitutional love for religion and religious liberty, which, in all periods, characterizes the inhabitants of this part of America.
There was a great deal of wearisome speaking in each of those three days’ sessions, but relieved by signal passages of pure eloquence, by much vigor of thought, and especially by the exhibition of character, and by the victories of character. These men and women were in search of something better and more satisfying than a vote or a definition, and they found what they sought, or the pledge of it, in the attitude taken by individuals of their number, of resistance to the insane routine of parliamentary usage, in the lofty reliance on principles, and the prophetic dignity and transfiguration which accompanies, even amidst opposition and ridicule, a man whose mind is made up to obey the great inward Commander, and who does not anticipate his own action, but awaits confidently the new emergency for the new counsel. By no means the least value of this Convention, in our eye, was the scope it gave to the genius of Mr. Alcott, and not its least instructive lesson was the gradual but sure ascendency of his spirit, in spite of the incredulity and derision with which he is at first received, and in spite, we might add, of his own failures. Moreover, although no decision was had, and no action taken on all the great points mooted in the discussion, yet the Convention brought together many remarkable persons, face to face, and gave occasion to memorable interviews and conversations, in the hall, in the lobbies, or around the doors.
Before this body broke up in November last, a short adjournment was carried, for the purpose of appointing a Committee to summon a new Convention, to be styled ‘the Bible Convention,’ for the discussion of the credibility and authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. A Committee was agreed upon, and, by their invitation, the new Association met in the Masonic Temple, in Boston, on the 29th of March, of the present year. This meeting was less numerously attended, and did not exhibit at its birth the same vigor as its predecessors. Many persons who had been conspicuous in the former meetings were either out of the country, or hindered from early attendance. Several who wished to be present at its deliberations deferred their journey until the second day, believing that, like the former Convention, it would sit three days. Possibly from the greater unpopularity of its object, out of doors, some faintness or coldness surprised the members. At all events, it was hurried to a conclusion on the first day to the great disappointment of many. Mr. Brownson, Mr. Alcott, Mr. West, and among others a Mormon preacher took part in the conversation. But according to the general testimony of those present, as far as we can collect it, the best speech made on that occasion was that of Nathaniel H. Whiting, of South Marshfield. Mr. Whiting had already distinguished himself in the Chardon Street meetings. Himself a plain unlettered man, leaving for the day a mechanical employment to address his fellows, he possesses eminent gifts for success in assemblies so constituted. He has fluency, self-command, an easy, natural method, and very considerable power of statement. No one had more entirely the ear of this audience, for it is not to be forgotten that, though, as we have said there were scholars and highly intellectual persons in this company, the bulk of the assemblage was made up of quite other materials, namely, of those whom religion and solitary thought have educated, and not books or society, — young farmers and mechanics from the country, whose best training has been in the Anti-slavery, and Temperance, and Non-resistance Clubs.

Agriculture of Massachusetts

In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an orchard where two boys were grafting apple trees, and found the Farmer in his corn field. He was holding the plough, and his son driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he is so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all appearances, excellent and reverable in his old weather-worn cap and blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field, so honest withal, that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I still remember with some shame, that in some dealing we had together a long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in the affair, and I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here is the Caesar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer, after how many and many a hard-fought summer’s day and winter’s day, not like Napoleon hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand, and out of every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and useless city-limbs of ours will come to shame before this strong soldier, for his have done their own work and ours too. What good this man has, or has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year, and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robinhood ballad,
“Much, the miller’s son,
There was no inch of his body
But it was worth a groom.”
Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent spirit which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any shape. I walked up and down, the field, as he ploughed his furrow, and we talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the season and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good things in it; but it was easy to see that he felt towards the author much as soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp, more good nature than reverence for the gownsman.
The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I observe the first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every man has one thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes out at first. But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no pains are taken to send it to them; it was by accident that this copy came into my hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They could not afford to follow such advice as is given here; they have sterner teachers; their own business teaches them better. No; this was written for the literary men. But in that case, the State should not be taxed to pay for it. Let us see. The account of the maple sugar, — that is very good and entertaining, and, I suppose, true. The story of the farmer’s daughter, whom education had spoiled for everything useful on a farm, — that is good too, and we have much that is like it in Thomas’s Almanack. But why this recommendation of stone houses? They are not so cheap, not so dry, and not so fit for us. Our roads are always changing their direction, and after a man has built at great cost a stone house, a new road is opened, and he finds himself a mile or two from the highway. Then our people are not stationary, like those of old countries, but always alert to better themselves, and will remove from town to town as a new market opens, or a better farm is to be had, and do not wish to spend too much on their buildings.
The Commissioner advises the farmers to sell their cattle and their hay in the fall, and buy again in the spring. But we farmers always know what our interest dictates, and do accordingly. We have no choice in this matter; our way is but too plain. Down below, where manure is cheap, and hay dear, they will sell their oxen in November; but for me to sell my cattle and my produce in the fall, would be to sell my farm, for I should have no manure to renew a crop in the spring. And thus Necessity farms it, necessity finds out when to go to Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr. Colman can tell us.
But especially observe what is said throughout these Reports of the model farms and model farmers. One would think that Mr. D. and Major S. were the pillars of the Commonwealth. The good Commissioner takes off his hat when he approaches them, distrusts the value of “his feeble praise,” and repeats his compliments as often as their names are introduced. And yet, in my opinion, Mr. D. with all his knowledge and present skill, would starve in two years on any one of fifty poor farms in this neighborhood, on each of which now a farmer manages to get a good living. Mr. D. inherited a farm, and spends on it every year from other resources; other-wise his farm had ruined him long since; — and as for the Major he never got rich by his skill in making land produce, but by his skill in making men produce. The truth is, a farm will not make an honest man rich in money. I do not know of a single instance, in which a man has honestly got rich by farming alone. It cannot be done. The way in which men who have farms grow rich, is either by other resources; or by trade; or by getting their labor for nothing; or by other methods of which I could tell you many sad anecdotes. What does the Agricultural Surveyor know of all this? What can he know? He is the victim of the “Reports,” that are sent him of particular farms. He cannot go behind the estimates to know how the contracts were made, and how the sales were effected. The true men of skill, the poor farmers who by the sweat of their face, without an inheritance, and without offence to their conscience, have reared a family of valuable citizens and matrons to the state, reduced a stubborn soil to a good farm, although their buildings are many of them shabby, are the only right subjects of this Report; yet these make no figure in it. These should be holden up to imitation, and their methods detailed; yet their houses are very uninviting and unconspicuous to State Commissioners. So with these premiums to Farms, and premiums to Cattle Shows. The class that I describe, must pay the premium which is awarded to the rich. Yet the premium obviously ought to be given for the good management of a poor farm.
In this strain the Farmer proceeded, adding many special criticisms. He had a good opinion of the Surveyor, and acquitted him of any blame in the matter, but was incorrigible in his skepticism concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture of Massachusetts. I believe that my friend is a little stiff and inconvertible in his own opinions, and that there is another side to be heard; but so much wisdom seemed to lie under his statement, that it deserved a record.

The Zincali: or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain; with an Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry, by George Borrow. Two Volumes in one. New York: Wiley & Putnam.

Our list of tribes in America indigenous and imported wants the Gypsies, as the Flora of the western hemisphere wants the race of heaths. But as it is all one to the urchin of six years, whether the fine toys are to be found in his father’s house or across the road at his grandfather’s, so we have always domesticated the Gypsy in school-boy literature from the English tales and traditions. This reprinted London book is equally sure of being read here as in England, and is a most acceptable gift to the lovers of the wild and wonderful. There are twenty or thirty pages in it of fascinating romantic attraction, and the whole book, though somewhat rudely and miscellaneously put together, is animated, and tells us what we wish to know. Mr. Borrow visited the Gypsies in Spain and elsewhere, as an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and seems to have been commended to this employment by the rare accomplishment of a good acquaintance with the language of this singular people. How he acquired his knowledge of their speech, which seems to have opened their hearts to him, he does not inform us; and he appears to have prospered very indifferently in the religious objects of his mission; but to have really had that in his nature or education which gave him access to the gypsy gang, so that he has seen them, talked confidentially with them, and brought away something distinct enough from them.
He has given us sketches of their past and present manner of life and employments, in the different European states, collected a strange little magazine of their poetry, and added a vocabulary of their language. He has interspersed some anecdotes of life and manners, which are told with great spirit.
This book is very entertaining, and yet, out of mere love and respect to human nature, we must add that this account of the Gypsy race must be imperfect and very partial, and that the author never sees his object quite near enough. For, on the whole, the impression made by the book is dismal; the poverty, the employments, conversations, mutual behavior of the Gypsies, are dismal; the poetry is dismal. Men do not love to be dismal, and always have their own reliefs. If we take Mr. Borrow’s story as final, here is a great people subsisting for centuries unmixed with the surrounding population, like a bare and blasted heath in the midst of smiling plenty, yet cherishing their wretchedness, by rigorous usage and tradition, as if they loved it. It is an aristocracy of rags, and suffering, and vice, yet as exclusive as the patricians of wealth and power. We infer that the picture is false; that resources and compensation exist, which are not shown us. If Gypsies are pricked, we believe they will bleed; if wretched, they will jump at the first opportunity of bettering their condition. What unmakes man is essentially incredible. The air may be loaded with fogs or with fetid gases, and continue respirable; but if it be decomposed, it can no longer sustain life. The condition of the Gypsy may be bad enough, tried by the scale of English comfort, and yet appear tolerable and pleasant to the Gypsy, who finds attractions in his out-door way of living, his freedom, and sociability, which the Agent of the Bible Society does not reckon. And we think that a traveler of another way of thinking would not find the Gypsy so void of conscience as Mr. Borrow paints him, as the differences in that particular are universally exaggerated in daily conversation. And lastly, we suspect the walls of separation between the Gypsy and the surrounding population are less firm than we are here given to understand.

Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic. Translated, with Notes, by J. G. Lockhart. New York: Wiley & Putnam.

The enterprising publishers, Messrs. Wiley & Putnam, who have reprinted, in a plain but very neat form, Mr. Lockhart’s gorgeously illustrated work, have judiciously prefixed to it, by way of introduction, a critique on the book from the Edinburgh Review, and have added at the end of the volume an analytical account, with specimens of the Romance of the Cid, from the Penny Magazine. This is done with the greatest propriety, for the Cid seems to be the proper centre of Spanish legendary poetry. The Iliad, the Nibelungen, the Cid, the Robin Hood Ballads, Frithiof’s Saga, (for the last also depends for its merit on its fidelity to the legend,) are five admirable collections of early popular poetry of so many nations; and with whatever difference of form, they possess strong mutual resemblances, chiefly apparent in the spirit which they communicate to the reader, of health, vigor, cheerfulness, and good hope. In this day of reprinting and of restoration, we hope that Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid, which is a kind of “Harmony of the Gospels” of the Spanish Romance, may be republished in a volume of convenient size. That is a strong book, and makes lovers and admirers of “My Cid, the Perfect one, who was born in a fortunate hour.” Its traits of heroism and bursts of simple emotion, once read, can never be forgotten; “I am not a man to be besieged;” and “God! What a glad man was the Cid on that day,” and many the like words still ring in our ears. The Cortes at Toledo, where judgment was given between the Cid and his sons-in-law, is one of the strongest dramatic scenes in literature. Several of the best ballads in Mr. Lockhart’s collection recite incidents of the Cid’s history. The best ballad in the book is the “Count Alarcos and the Infanta Solisa,” which is a meet companion for Chaucer’s Griselda. The “Count Garci Perez de Vargas” is one of our favorites; and there is one called the “Bridal of Andalla,” which we have long lost all power to read as a poem, since we have heard it sung by a voice so rich, and sweet, and penetrating, as to make the ballad the inalienable property of the singer.

Tecumseh; a Poem. By George H. Colton. New York: Wiley & Putnam.

This pleasing summer-day story is the work of a well read, cultivated writer, with a skillful ear, and an evident admirer of Scott and Campbell. There is a metrical sweetness and calm perception of beauty spread over the poem, which declare that the poet enjoyed his own work; and the smoothness and literary finish of the cantos seem to indicate more years than it appears our author has numbered. Yet the perusal suggested that the author had written this poem in the feeling, that the delight he has experienced from Scott’s effective lists of names might be reproduced in America by the enumeration of the sweet and sonorous Indian names of our waters. The success is exactly correspondent. The verses are tuneful, but are secondary; and remind the ear so much of the model, as to show that the noble aboriginal names were not suffered to make their own measures in the poet’s ear, but must modulate their wild beauty to a foreign metre. They deserved better at the author’s hands. We felt, also, the objection that is apt to lie against poems on new subjects by persons versed in old books, that the costume is exaggerated at the expense of the man. The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins, or his calumet, his wampum, or his stone hatchet, but traits of character and sagacity, skill or passion; which would be intelligible at Paris or at Pekin, and which Scipio or Sidney, Lord Clive or Colonel Crockett would be as likely to exhibit as Osceola and Black Hawk.

Intelligence

Exploring Expedition. The United States Corvette Vincennes, Captain Charles Wilkes, the flag ship of the Exploring Expedition, arrived at New York on Friday, June 10th, from a cruise of nearly four years. The Brigs Porpoise and Oregon may shortly be expected. The Expedition has executed every part of the duties confided to it by the Government. A long list of ports, harbors, islands, reefs, and shoals, named in the list, have been visited and examined or surveyed. The positions assigned on the charts to several vigias, reefs, shoals, and islands, have been carefully looked for, run over, and found to have no existence in or near the places assigned them. Several of the principal groups and islands in the Pacific Ocean have been visited, examined, and surveyed; and friendly intercourse, and protective commercial regulations, established with the chiefs and natives. The discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean (Antarctic continent, — Observations for fixing the Southern Magnetic pole, &c.) preceded those of the French and English expeditions. The Expedition, during its absence, has also examined and surveyed a large portion of the Oregon Territory, a part of Upper California, including the Columbia and Sacramento Rivers, with their various tributaries. Several exploring parties from the Squadron have explored, examined, and fixed those portions of the Oregon Territory least known. A map of the Territory, embracing its Rivers, Sounds, Harbors, Coasts, Forts, &c., has been prepared, which will furnish the information relative to our possessions on the Northwest Coast, and the whole of Oregon. Experiments have been made with the pendulum, magnetic apparatus, and various other instruments, on all occasions, — the temperature of the ocean, at various depths ascertained in the different seas traversed, and full meteorological and other observations kept up during the cruise. Charts of all the surveys have been made, with views and sketches of headlands, towns or villages, &c., with descriptions of all that appertains to the localities, productions, language, customs, and manners. At some of the islands, this duty has been attended with much labor, exposure, and risk of life, — the treacherous character of the natives rendering it absolutely necessary that the officers and men should be armed, while on duty, and at all times prepared against their murderous attacks. On several occasions, boats have been absent from the different vessels of the Squadron on surveying duty, (the greater part of which has been performed in boats,) among islands, reefs, &c., for a period of ten, twenty, and thirty days at one time. On one of these occasions, two of the officers were killed at the Fiji group, while defending their boat’s crew from an attack by the Natives.

Harvard University

On the subject of the University we cannot help wishing that a change will one day be adopted which will put an end to the foolish bickering between the government and the students, which almost every year breaks out into those uncomfortable fracases which are called ‘Rebellions.’ Cambridge is so well endowed, and offers such large means of education, that it can easily assume the position of an University, and leave to the numerous younger Colleges the charge of pupils too young to be trusted from home. This is instantly effected by the Faculty’s confining itself to the office of Instruction, and omitting to assume the office of Parietal Government. Let the College provide the best teachers in each department, and for a stipulated price receive the pupil to its lecture-rooms and libraries; but in the matter of morals and manners, leave the student to his own conscience, and if he is a bad subject to the ordinary police. This course would have the effect of keeping back pupils from College, a year or two, or, in some cases, of bringing the parents or guardians of the pupil to reside in Cambridge; but it would instantly destroy the root of endless grievances between the student and teacher, put both parties on the best footing, — indispensable one would say, to good teaching, — and relieve the professors of an odious guardianship, always degenerating into espionage, which must naturally indispose men of genius and honorable mind from accepting the professor’s chair.

English Reformers

Whilst Mr. Sparks visits England to explore the manuscripts of the Colonial Office, and Dr. Waagen on a mission of Art, Mr. Alcott, whose genius and efforts in the great art of Education have been more appreciated in England than in America, has now been spending some months in that country, with the aim to confer with the most eminent Educators and philanthropists, in the hope to exchange intelligence, and import into this country whatever hints have been struck out there, on the subject of literature and the First Philosophy. The design was worthy, and its first results have already reached us. Mr. Alcott was received with great cordiality of joy and respect by his friends in London, and presently found himself domesticated at an institution, managed on his own methods and called after his name, the School of Mr. Wright at Alcott House, Ham, Surrey. He was introduced to many men of literary and philanthropic distinction, and his arrival was made the occasion of meetings for public conversation on the great ethical questions of the day.
Mr. Alcott’s mission, beside making us acquainted with the character and labors of some excellent persons, has loaded our table with a pile of English books, pamphlets, periodicals, flying prospectuses, and advertisements, proceeding from a class very little known in this country, and on many accounts important, the party, namely, who represent Social Reform. Here are Educational Circulars, and Communist Apostles; Alists; Plans for Syncretic Associations, and Pestalozzian Societies, Self-supporting Institutions, Experimental Normal Schools, Hydropathic and Philosophical Associations, Health Unions and Phalansterian Gazettes, Paradises within the reach of all men, Appeals of Man to Woman, and Necessities of Internal Marriage illustrated by Phrenological Diagrams. These papers have many sins to answer for. There is an abundance of superficialness, of pedantry, of inflation, and of want of thought. It seems as if these sanguine schemers rushed to the press with every notion that danced before their brain, and clothed it in the most clumsily compounded and terminated words, for want of time to find the right one. But although these men sometimes use a swollen and vicious diction, yet they write to ends which raise them out of the jurisdiction of ordinary criticism. They speak to the conscience, and have that superiority over the crowd of their contemporaries, which belongs to men who entertain a good hope. Moreover, these pamphlets may well engage the attention of the politician, as straws of no mean significance to show the tendencies of the time.
Mr. Alcott’s visit has brought us nearer to a class of Englishmen, with whom we had already some slight but friendly correspondence, who possess points of so much attraction for us, that we shall proceed to give a short account both of what we already knew, and what we have lately learned, concerning them. The central figure in the group is a very remarkable person, who for many years, though living in great retirement, has made himself felt by many of the best and ablest men in England and in Europe, we mean James Pierrepont Greaves, who died at Alcott-House in the month of March of this year. Mr. Greaves was formerly a wealthy merchant in the city of London, but was deprived of his property by French spoliations in Napoleon’s time. Quitting business, he travelled and resided for some time in Germany. His leisure was given to books of the deepest character; and in Switzerland he found a brother in Pestalozzi. With him he remained ten years, living abstemiously, almost on biscuit and water; and though they never learned each the other’s language, their daily intercourse appears to have been of the deepest and happiest kind. Mr. Greaves there made himself useful in a variety of ways. Pestalozzi declared that Mr. Greaves understood his aim and methods better than any other observer. And he there became acquainted with some eminent persons. Mr. Greaves on his return to England introduced as much as he could of the method and life, whose beautiful and successful operations he had witnessed; and although almost all that he did was misunderstood, or dragged downwards, he has been a chief instrument in the regeneration in the British schools. For a single and unknown individual his influence has been extensive. He set on foot Infant Schools, and was for many years Secretary to the Infant School Society, which office brought him in contact with many parties, and he has connected himself with almost every effort for human emancipation. In this work he was engaged up to the time of his death. His long and active career developed his own faculties and powers in a wonderful manner. At his house, No. 49 Burton Street, London, he was surrounded by men of open and accomplished minds, and his doors were thrown open weekly for meetings for the discussion of universal subjects. In the last years he has resided at Cheltenham, and visited Stockport for the sake of acquainting himself with the Socialists and their methods.
His active and happy career continued nearly to the seventieth year, with heart and head unimpaired and undaunted, his eyes and other faculties sound, except his lower limbs, which suffered from his sedentary occupation of writing. For nearly thirty-six years he abstained from all fermented drinks, and all animal food. In the last years he dieted almost wholly on fruit. The private correspondent, from whose account, written two years ago, we have derived our sketch, proceeds in these words. “Through evil reports, revilings, seductions, and temptations many and severe, the Spirit has not let him go, but has strongly and securely held him, in a manner not often witnessed. New consciousness opens to him every day. His literary abilities would not be by critics entitled to praise, nor does he speak with what is called eloquence; but as he is so much the ‘lived word,’ I have described, there is found a potency in all he writes and all he says, which belongs not to beings less devoted to the Spirit. Supplies of money have come to him as fast, or nearly as fast as required, and at all events his serenity was never disturbed on this account, unless when it has happened that, having more than his expenses required, he has volunteered extraneous expenditures. He has been, I consider, a great apostle of the Newness to many, even when neither he nor they knew very clearly what was going forward. Thus inwardly married, he has remained outwardly a bachelor.”
Mr. Greaves is described to us by another correspondent as being “the soul of his circle, a prophet of whom the world heard nothing, but who has quickened much of the thought now current in the most intellectual circles of the kingdom. He was acquainted with every man of deep character in England, and many both in Germany and Switzerland; and Strauss, the author of the ‘Life of Christ,’ was a pupil of Mr. Greaves, when he held conversations in one of the Colleges of Germany, after leaving Pestalozzi. A most remarkable man; nobody remained the same after leaving him. He was the prophet of the deepest affirmative truths, and no man ever sounded his depths. The best of the thought in the London Monthly Magazine was the transcript of his Idea. He read and wrote much, chiefly in the manner of Coleridge, with pen in hand, in the form of notes on the text of his author. But, like Boehmen and Swedenborg, neither his thoughts nor his writings were for the popular mind. His favorites were the chosen illuminated minds of all time, and with them he was familiar. His library is the most select and rare which I have seen, including most of the books which we have sought with so ill success on our side of the water.” (*)
* The following notice of Mr. Greaves occurs in Mr. Morgan’s “Hampden in the Nineteenth Century.” “The gentleman whom he met at the school was Mr. J. P. Greaves, at that time Honorary Secretary to the Infant School Society, and a most active and disinterested promoter of the system. He had resided for three (?) years with Pestalozzi, who set greater value upon right feelings and rectitude of conduct, than upon the acquisition of languages. A collection of highly interesting letters, addressed to this gentleman by Pestalozzi on the subject of education, has been published. Among the numerous advocates for various improvements, there was not one who exceeded him in personal sacrifices to what he esteemed a duty. At the same time he had some peculiar opinions, resembling the German mystical and metaphysical speculations, hard to be understood, and to which few in general are willing to listen, and still fewer to subscribe; but his sincerity, and the kindness of his disposition always secured for him a patient hearing.” — Vol. II. p. 22.

His favorite dogma was the superiority of Being to all knowing and doing. Association on a high basis was his ideal for the present conjuncture. “I hear every one crying out for association,” said he; “I join in the cry; but then I say, associate first with the Spirit, — educate for this spirit-association, and far more will follow than we have as yet any idea of. Nothing good can be done without association; but then we must associate with goodness; and this goodness is the spirit-nature, without which all our societarian efforts will be turned to corruption. Education has hitherto been all outward; it must now be inward. The educator must keep in view that which elevates man, and not the visible exterior world.” We have the promise of some extracts from the writings of this great man, which we hope shortly to offer to the readers of this Journal. His friend, Mr. Lane, is engaged in arranging and editing his manuscript remains.
Mr. Heraud, a poet and journalist, chiefly known in this country as the editor for two years of the (London) Monthly Magazine, a disciple, in earlier years, of Coleridge, and by nature and taste contemplative and inclined to a mystical philosophy, was a friend and associate of Mr. Greaves; and for the last years has been more conspicuous than any other writer in that connexion of opinion. The Monthly Magazine, during his editorship, really was conducted in a bolder and more creative spirit than any other British Journal; and though papers on the highest transcendental themes were found in odd vicinity with the lowest class of flash and so-called comic tales, yet a necessity, we suppose, of British taste made these strange bed-fellows acquainted, and Mr. Heraud had done what he could. His papers called “Foreign Aids to Self Intelligence,” were of signal merit, especially the papers on Boehmen and Swedenborg. The last is, we think, the very first adequate attempt to do justice to this mystic, by an analysis of his total works; and, though avowedly imperfect, is, as far as it goes, a faithful piece of criticism. We hope that Mr. Heraud, who announces a work in three volumes, called “Foreign Aids to Self Intelligence, designed for an Historical Introduction to the Study of Ontological Science, preparatory to a Critique of Pure Being,” as now in preparation for the press, and of which, we understand, the Essays in the Monthly Magazine were a part, will be enabled to fulfil his design. Mr. Heraud is described by his friends as the most amiable of men, and a fluent and popular lecturer on the affirmative philosophy. He has recently intimated a wish to cross the Atlantic, and read in Boston, a course of six lectures on the subject of Christism as distinct from Christianity.
One of the best contributors to Mr. Heraud’s Magazine was Mr. J. Westland Marston. The papers marked with his initials are the most eloquent in the book. We have greatly regretted their discontinuance, and have hailed him again in his new appearance as a dramatic author. Mr. Marston is a writer of singular purity of taste, with a heart very open to the moral impulses, and in his settled conviction, like all persons of a high poetic nature, the friend of a universal reform, beginning in education. His thought on that subject is, that “it is only by teachers becoming men of genius, that a nobler position can be secured to them.” At the same time he seems to share that disgust, which men of fine taste so quickly entertain in regard to the language and methods of that class with which their theory throws them into correspondence, and to be continually attracted through his taste to the manners and persons of the aristocracy, whose selfishness and frivolity displease and repel him again. Mr. Marston has lately written a Tragedy, called “The Patrician’s Daughter,” which we have read with great pleasure, barring always the fatal prescription, which in England seems to mislead every fine poet to attempt the drama. It must be the reading of tragedies that fills them with this superstition for the buskin and the pall, and not a sympathy with existing nature and the spirit of the age. The Patrician’s Daughter is modern in its plot and characters, perfectly simple in its style; the dialogue is full of spirit, and the story extremely well told. We confess, as we drew out this bright pamphlet from amid the heap of crude declamation on Marriage and Education, on Dietetics and Hydropathy, on Chartism and Socialism, grim tracts on flesh-eating and dram-drinking, we felt the glad refreshment of its sense and melody, and thanked the fine office which speaks to the imagination, and paints with electric pencil a new form,— new forms on the lurid cloud. Although the vengeance of Mordaunt strikes us as overstrained, yet his character, and the growth of his fortunes is very natural, and is familiar to English experience in the Thurlows, Burkes, Foxes, and Cannings. The Lady Mabel is finely drawn. Pity that the catastrophe should be wrought by the deliberate lie of Lady Lydia; for beside that lovers, as they of all men speak the most direct speech, easily pierce the cobwebs of fraud, it is a weak way of making a play, to hinge the crisis on a lie, instead of letting it grow, as in life, out of the faults and conditions of the parties, as, for example, in Goethe’s Tasso. On all accounts but one, namely, the lapse of five years between two acts, the play seems to be eminently fit for representation. Mr. Marston is also the author of two tracts on Poetry and Poetic Culture.
Another member of this circle is Francis Barham, the dramatic poet, author of “The Death of Socrates,” a tragedy, and other pieces; also a contributor to the Monthly Magazine. To this gentleman we are under special obligations, as he has sent us, with other pamphlets, a manuscript paper “On American Literature,” written with such flowing good will, and with an aim so high, that we must submit some portion of it to our readers.
Intensely sympathizing, as I have ever done, with the great community of truth-seekers, I glory in the rapid progress of that Alistic, (*) or divine literature, which they develop and cultivate. To me this Alistic literature is so catholic and universal, that it has spread its energies and influences through every age and nation, in brighter or obscurer manifestations. It forms the intellectual patrimony of the universe, delivered down from kindling sire to kindling son, through all nations, peoples, and languages. Like the God from whom it springs, on whom it lives, and to whom it returns, this divine literature is ever young, ever old, ever present, ever remote. Like heaven’s own sunshine, it adorns all it touches, and it touches all. It is a perfect cosmopolite in essence and in action; it has nothing local or limitary in its nature; it participates the character of the soul from which it emanated. It subsists whole in itself, it is its own place, its own time, nor seeks abroad the life it grants at home; aye, it is an eternal now, an eternal present, at once beginning, middle, and end of every past and every future.
* In explanation of this term, we quote a few sentences from a printed prospectus issued by Mr. Barham. “The Alist ; a Monthly Magazine of Divinity and Universal Literature . I have adopted the title of ‘the Alist, or Divine,’ for this periodical, because the extension of Divinity and divine truth is its main object. It appears to me, that by a firm adherence to the {to Theion}, or divine principle of things, a Magazine may assume a specific character, far more elevated, catholic, and attractive, than the majority of periodicals attain. This Magazine is therefore specially written for those persons who may, without impropriety, be termed Alists, or Divines; those who endeavor to develop Divinity as the grand primary essence of all existence, — the element which forms the all in all, — the element in which we live, and move, and have our being. Such Alists, (deriving their name from Alah — the Hebrew title of God,) are Divines in the highest sense of the word; for they cultivate Alism, or the Divinity of Divinities, as exhibited in all Scripture and nature, and they extend religious and philanthropical influences through all churches, states, and systems of education. This doctrine of Alism, or the life of God in the soul of man, affords the only prothetic point of union, sufficiently intense and authoritative to unite men in absolute catholicity. In proportion as they cultivate one and the same God in their minds, will their minds necessarily unite and harmonize; but without this is done, permanent harmony is impossible.”

It is, I conceive, salutary for us to take this enlarged view of literature. We should seek after literary perfection in this cosmopolite spirit, and embrace it wherever we find it, as a divine gift; for, in the words of Pope,
“both precepts and example tell
That nature’s masterpiece is writing well.”
So was it with the august and prophetic Milton. To him literature was a universal presence. He regarded it as the common delight and glory of gods and men. He felt that its moral beauty lived and flourished in the large heart of humanity itself, and could never be monopolized by times or places. Most deeply do I think and feel with Milton, when he utters the following words. “What God may have determined for me, I know not; but this I know, that if ever he instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man, he has instilled it into mine. Hence wherever I find a man despising the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire in sentiment and language and conduct to what the highest wisdom through every age has taught us, as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a kind of necessary attachment. And if I am so influenced by nature, or destiny, that by no exertions or labors of my own I may exalt myself to this summit of worth and honor, yet no power in heaven or earth will hinder me from looking with reverence and affection upon those, who have thoroughly attained this glory, or appeared engaged in the successful pursuit of it.”
Mr. Barham proceeds to apply this sentiment as analogous to his own sentiment, in respect to the literatures of other nations, but specially to that of America.
The unity of language unites the literature of Britain and America, in an essential and imperishable marriage, which no Atlantic Ocean can divide. Yes; I as an Englishman say this, and maintain it. United in language, in literature, in interest, and in blood, I regard the English in England and the English in America as one and the same people, the same magnificent brotherhood. The fact is owned in the common names by which they are noted; John and Jonathan, Angles and Yankees, all reecho the fact.
Mr. Barham proceeds to exhibit the manifold reasons that enjoin union on the two countries, deprecates the divisions that have sometimes suspended the peace, and continues;
Let us rather maintain the generous policy of Milton, and with full acclamation of concord recite his inspiring words;
“Go on both hand in hand, O nations, never to be disunited. Be the praise and the heroic song of all posterity. Merit this, but seek only virtue, not the extension of your limits. For what needs to win a fading triumphal laurel out of the tears of wretched men, but to settle the true worship of God and justice in the commonwealth. Then shall the hardest difficulties smooth themselves out before you, envy shall sink to hell, and craft and malice shall be confounded, whether it be homebred mischief or outlandish cunning. Yea, other nations will then covet to serve you; for lordship and victory are but the pages of justice and virtue. Commit securely to true wisdom the vanquishing and uncaging of craft and subtlety, which are but her two runagates. Join your invincible might to do worthy and godlike deeds, and then he that seeks to break your union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance throughout all generations.”
Mr. Barham then proceeds to express his conviction, that the specific character, which the literature of these countries should aim at, is the Alistic or Divine. It is only by an aim so high, that an author can reach any excellence.
“He builds too low who builds beneath the skies.”
But our limits forbid any more extracts from this friendly manuscript at present.
Another eminent member of this circle is Mr. Charles Lane, for many years manager of the London Mercantile Price Current; a man of a fine intellectual nature, inspired and hallowed by a profounder faith. Mr. Lane is the author of some pieces marked with his initials, in the Monthly Magazine, and of some remarkable tracts. Those which we have seen are, “The Old, the New-Old, and the New;” “Tone in Speech;” some papers in a Journal of Health; and last and best, a piece called “The Third Dispensation,” prefixed by way of preface to an English translation of Mme. Gatti de Gamond’s “Phalansterian,” a French book of the Fourier School. In this Essay Mr. Lane considers that History has exhibited two dispensations, namely, first , the Family Union, or connexion by tribes, which soon appeared to be a disunion or a dispersive principle; second , the National Union. Both these, though better than the barbarism which they displaced, are themselves barbarism, in contrast with the third , or Universal Union.
“As man is the uniter in all arrangements which stand below him, and in which the objects could not unite themselves, so man needs a uniter above him, to whom he submits, in the certain incapability of self-union. This uniter, unity, or One, is the premonitor whence exists the premonition Unity, which so recurrently becomes conscious in man. By a neglect of interior submission, man fails of this antecedent, Unity; and as a consequence his attempts at union by exterior mastery have no success.” Certain conditions are necessary to this, namely, the external arrangements indispensable for the evolution of the Uniting Spirit can alone be provided by the Uniting Spirit.
“We seem to be in an endless circle, of which both halves have lost their centre connexion; for it is an operation no less difficult than the junction of two such discs that is requisite to unity. These segments also being in motion, each upon a false centre of its own, the obstacles to union are incalculably multiplied.
“The spiritual or theoretic world in man revolves upon one set of principles, and the practical or actual world upon another. In ideality man recognizes the purest truths, the highest notions of justice; in actuality he departs from all these, and his entire career is confessedly a life of self-falseness and clever injustice. This barren ideality, and this actuality replete with bitter fruits, are the two hemispheres to be united for their mutual completion, and their common central point is the reality antecedent to them both. This point is not to be discovered by the rubbing of these two half globes together, by their curved sides, nor even as a school boy would attempt to unite his severed marble by the flat sides. The circle must be drawn anew from reality as a central point, the new radius embracing equally the new ideality and the new actuality.
“With this newness of love in men there would resplendently shine forth in them a newness of light, and a newness of life, charming the steadiest beholder.” — Introduction , p. 4.
The remedy, which Mr. Lane proposes for the existing evils, is his “True Harmonic Association.” But he more justly confides in “ceasing from doing” than in exhausting efforts at inadequate remedies. “From medicine to medicine is a change from disease to disease; and man must cease from self-activity, ere the spirit can fill him with truth in mind or health in body. The Civilization is become intensely false, and thrusts the human being into false predicaments. The antagonism of business to all that is high and good and generic is hourly declared by the successful, as well as by the failing. The mercantile system, based on individual aggrandizement, draws men from unity; its swelling columns of figures describe, in pounds, shillings, and pence, the degrees of man’s departure from love, from wisdom, from power. The idle are as unhappy as the busy. Whether the dread factory-bell, or the fox-hunter’s horn calls to a pursuit more fatal to man’s best interests, is an inquiry which appears more likely to terminate in the cessation of both, than in a preference of either.”
Mr. Lane does not confound society with sociableness. “On the contrary, it is when the sympathy with man is the stronger and the truer, that the sympathy with men grows weaker, and the sympathy with their actions weakest.”
We must content ourselves with these few sentences from Mr. Lane’s book, but we shall shortly hear from him again. This is no man of letters, but a man of ideas. Deep opens below deep in his thought, and for the solution of each new problem he recurs, with new success, to the highest truth, to that which is most generous, most simple, and most powerful; to that which cannot be comprehended, or overseen, or exhausted. His words come to us like the voices of home out of a far country.
With Mr. Lane is associated in the editorship of a monthly tract, called “The Healthian,” and in other kindred enterprises, Mr. Henry G. Wright, who is the teacher of the School at Ham Common, near Richmond, and the author of several tracts on moral and social topics.
This school is founded on a faith in the presence of the Divine Spirit in man. The teachers say, “that in their first experiments they found they had to deal with a higher nature than the mere mechanical. They found themselves in contact with an essence indefinably delicate. The great difficulty with relation to the children, with which they were first called to wrestle, was an unwillingness to admit access to their spiritual natures. The teachers felt this keenly. They sought for the cause. They found it in their own hearts. Pure spirit would not, could not hold communion with their corrupted modes. These must be surrendered, and love substituted in lieu of them. The experience was soon made that the primal duty of the educator is entire self-surrender to love. Not partial, not of the individual, but pure, unlimited, universal. It is impossible to speak to natures deeper than those from which you speak. Reason cries to Reason, Love to Love. Hence the personal elevation of the teacher is of supreme importance.” Mr. Alcott, who may easily be a little partial to an instructor who has adopted cordially his own methods, writes thus of his friend.
“Mr. Wright is a younger disciple of the same eternal verity, which I have loved and served so long. You have never seen his like, so deep serene, so clear, so true, and so good. His school is a most refreshing and happy place. The children are mostly under twelve years of age, of both sexes; and his art and method of education simple and natural. It seemed like being again in my own school, save that a wiser wisdom directs, and a lovelier love presides over its order and teachings. He is not yet thirty years of age, but he has more genius for education than any man I have seen, and not of children alone, but he possesses the rare art of teaching men and women. What I have dreamed and stammered, and preached, and prayed about so long, is in him clear and definite. It is life, influence, reality. I flatter myself that I shall bring him with me on my return. He cherishes hopes of making our land the place of his experiment on human culture, and of proving to others the worth of the divine idea that now fills and exalts him.”
In consequence of Mr. Greaves’s persuasion, which seems to be shared by his friends, that the special remedy for the evils of society at the present moment is association; perhaps from a more universal tendency, which has drawn in many of the best minds in this country also to accuse the idealism, which contents itself with the history of the private mind, and to demand of every thinker the warmest dedication to the race, this class of which we speak are obviously inclined to favor the plans of the Socialists. They appear to be in active literary and practical connexion with Mr. Doherty, the intelligent and catholic editor of the London Phalanx, who is described to us as having been a personal friend of Fourier, and himself a man of sanguine temper, but a friend of temperate measures, and willing to carry his points with wise moderation, on one side; and in friendly relations with Robert Owen, “the philanthropist, ‘who writes in brick and clay, in gardens and green fields,’ who is a believer in the comforts and humanities of life, and would give these in abundance to all men,” although they are widely distinguished from this last in their devout spiritualism. Many of the papers on our table contain schemes and hints for a better social organization, especially the plan of what they call “a Concordium, or a Primitive Home, which is about to be commenced by united individuals, who are desirous, under industrial and progressive education, with simplicity in diet, dress, lodging, &c., to retain the means for the harmonic development of their physical, intellectual, and moral natures.” The institution is to be in the country, the inmates are to be of both sexes, they are to labor on the land, their drink is to be water, and their food chiefly uncooked by fire, and the habits of the members throughout of the same simplicity. Their unity is to be based on their education in a religious love, which subordinates all persons, and perpetually invokes the presence of the spirit in every transaction. It is through this tendency that these gentlemen have been drawn into fellowship with a humbler, but far larger class of their countrymen, of whom Goodwyn Barmby may stand for the representative.
Mr. Barmby is the editor of a penny magazine, called “The Promethean, or Communitarian Apostle,” published monthly, and, as the covers inform us, “the cheapest of all magazines, and the paper the most devoted of any to the cause of the people; consecrated to Pantheism in Religion, and Communism in Politics.” Mr. Barmby is a sort of Camille Desmoulins of British Revolution, a radical poet, with too little fear of grammar and rhetoric before his eyes, with as little fear of the Church or the State, writing often with as much fire, though not with as much correctness, as Ebenezer Elliott. He is the author of a poem called “The European Pariah,” which will compare favorably with the Corn-law Rhymes. His paper is of great interest, as it details the conventions, the counsels, the measures of Barmby and his friends, for the organization of a new order of things, totally at war with the establishment. Its importance arises from the fact, that it comes obviously from the heart of the people. It is a cry of the miner and weaver for bread, for daylight, and fresh air, for space to exist in, and time to catch their breath and rest themselves in; a demand for political suffrage, and the power to tax as a counterpart to the liability of being taxed; a demand for leisure, for learning, for arts and sciences, for the higher social enjoyments. It is one of a cloud of pamphlets in the same temper and from the same quarter, which show a wholly new state of feeling in the body of the British people. In a time of distress among the manufacturing classes, severe beyond any precedent, when, according to the statements vouched by Lord Brougham in the House of Peers, and Mr. O’Connell and others in the Commons, wages are reduced in some of the manufacturing villages to six pence a week, so that men are forced to sustain themselves and their families at less than a penny a day; when the most revolting expedients are resorted to for food; when families attempt by a recumbent posture to diminish the pangs of hunger; in the midst of this exasperation the voice of the people is temperate and wise beyond all former example. They are intent on personal as well as on national reforms. Jack Cade leaves behind him his bludgeon and torch, and is grown amiable, literary, philosophical, and mystical. He reads Fourier, he reads Shelley, he reads Milton. He goes for temperance, for non-resistance, for education, and for the love-marriage, with the two poets above named; and for association, after the doctrines either of Owen or of Fourier. One of the most remarkable of the tracts before us is “A Plan for the Education and Improvement of the People, addressed to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom; written in Warwick Gaol, by William Lovett, cabinet-maker, and John Collins, tool-maker,” which is a calm, intelligent, and earnest plea for a new organization of the people, for the highest social and personal benefits, urging the claims of general education, of the Infant School, the Normal School, and so forth; announcing rights, but with equal emphasis admitting duties. And Mr. Barmby, whilst he attacks with great spirit and great contempt the conventions of society, is a worshipper of love and of beauty, and vindicates the arts. “The apostleship of veritable doctrine,” he says, “in the fine arts is a really religious Apostolate, as the fine arts in their perfect manifestation tend to make mankind virtuous and happy.”
It will give the reader some precise information of the views of the most devout and intelligent persons in the company we have described, if we add an account of a public conversation which occurred during the last summer. In the (London) Morning Chronicle, of 5 July, we find the following advertisement. “Public Invitation. An open meeting of the friends to human progress will be held to-morrow, July 6, at Mr. Wright’s Alcott-House School, Ham Common, near Richmond, Surrey, for the purpose of considering and adopting means for the promotion of the great end, when all who are interested in human destiny are earnestly urged to attend. The chair taken at Three o’clock and again at Seven, by A. Bronson Alcott, Esq., now on a visit from America. Omnibuses travel to and fro, and the Richmond steam-boat reaches at a convenient hour.”
Of this conference a private correspondent has furnished us with the following report.
A very pleasant day to us was Wednesday, the sixth of July. On that day an open meeting was held at Mr. Wright’s, Alcott-House School, Ham, Surrey, to define the aims and initiate the means of human culture. There were some sixteen or twenty of us assembled on the lawn at the back of the house. We came from many places; one 150 miles; another a hundred; others from various distances; and our brother Bronson Alcott from Concord, North America. We found it not easy to propose a question sufficiently comprehensive to unfold the whole of the fact with which our bosoms labored. We aimed at nothing less than to speak of the instauration of Spirit and its incarnation in a beautiful form. We had no chairman, and needed none. We came not to dispute, but to hear and to speak. And when a word failed in extent of meaning, we loaded the word with new meaning. The word did not confine our experience, but from our own being we gave significance to the word. Into one body we infused many lives, and it shone as the image of divine or angelic or human thought. For a word is a Proteus that means to a man what the man is. Three papers were successively presented.

Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. Two Volumes. Boston: W. D. Ticknor.

Tennyson is more simply the songster than any poet of our time. With him the delight of musical expression is first, the thought second. It was well observed by one of our companions, that he has described just what we should suppose to be his method of composition in this verse from “The Miller’s Daughter.”
“A love-song I had somewhere read,
An echo from a measured strain,
Beat time to nothing in my head
From some odd corner of the brain.
It haunted me the morning long,
With weary sameness in the rhymes,
The phantom of a silent song ,
That went and came a thousand times .”
So large a proportion of even the good poetry of our time is ever over-ethical or over-passionate, and the stock poetry is so deeply tainted with a sentimental egotism, that this, whose chief merits lay in its melody and picturesque power, was most refreshing. What a relief, after sermonizing and wailing had dulled the sense with such a weight of cold abstraction, to be soothed by this ivory lute!
Not that he wanted nobleness and individuality in his thoughts, or a due sense of the poet’s vocation; but he won us to truths, not forced them upon us; as we listened, the cope
“Of the self-attained futurity
Was cloven with the million stars which tremble
O’er the deep mind of dauntless infamy.”
And he seemed worthy thus to address his friend,
“Weak truth a-leaning on her crutch,
Wan, wasted truth in her utmost need,
Thy kingly intellect shall feed,
Until she be an athlete bold.”
Unless thus sustained, the luxurious sweetness of his verse must have wearied. Yet it was not of aim or meaning we thought most, but of his exquisite sense for sounds and melodies, as marked by himself in the description of Cleopatra.
“Her warbling voice, a lyre of widest range,
Touched by all passion, did fall down and glance
From tone to tone, and glided through all change
Of liveliest utterance.”
Or in the fine passage in the Vision of Sin, where
“Then the music touched the gates and died;
Rose again from where it seemed to fail,
Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale;” &c.
Or where the Talking Oak composes its serenade for the pretty Alice; but indeed his descriptions of melody are almost as abundant as his melodies, though the central music of the poet’s mind is, he says, as that of the
“fountain
Like sheet lightning,
Ever brightening
With a low melodious thunder;
All day and all night it is ever drawn
From the brain of the purple mountain
Which stands in the distance yonder:
It springs on a level of bowery lawn,
And the mountain draws it from heaven above,
And it sings a song of undying love.”
Next to his music, his delicate, various, gorgeous music, stands his power of picturesque representation. And his, unlike those of most poets, are eye-pictures, not mind-pictures. And yet there is no hard or tame fidelity, but a simplicity and ease at representation (which is quite another thing from reproduction) rarely to be paralleled. How, in the Palace of Art, for instance, they are unrolled slowly and gracefully, as if painted one after another on the same canvass. The touch is calm and masterly, though the result is looked at with a sweet, self-pleasing eye. Who can forget such as this, and of such there are many, painted with as few strokes and with as complete a success?
“A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand;
Left on the shore; that hears all night
The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white.”
Tennyson delights in a garden. Its groups, and walks, and mingled bloom intoxicate him, and us through him. So high is his organization, and so powerfully stimulated by color and perfume, that it heightens all our senses too, and the rose is glorious, not from detecting its ideal beauty, but from a perfection of hue and scent, we never felt before. All the earlier poems are flower-like, and this tendency is so strong in him, that a friend observed, he could not keep up the character of the tree in his Oak of Summer Chase, but made it talk like an “enormous flower.” The song,
“A spirit haunts the year’s last hours,”
is not to be surpassed for its picture of the autumnal garden.
The new poems, found in the present edition, show us our friend of ten years since much altered, yet the same. The light he sheds on the world is mellowed and tempered. If the charm he threw around us before was somewhat too sensuous, it is not so now; he is deeply thoughtful; the dignified and graceful man has displaced the Antinous beauty of the youth. His melody is less rich, less intoxicating, but deeper; a sweetness from the soul, sweetness as of the hived honey of fine experiences, replaces the sweetness which captivated the ear only, in many of his earlier verses. His range of subjects was great before, and is now such that he would seem too merely the amateur, but for the success in each, which says that the same fluent and apprehensive nature, which threw itself with such ease into the forms of outward beauty, has now been intent rather on the secrets of the shaping spirit. In ‘Locksley Hall,’ ‘St. Simeon Stylites,’ ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Love and Duty,’ ‘The Two Voices,’ are deep tones, that bespeak that acquaintance with realities, of which, in the ‘Palace of Art,’ he had expressed his need. The keen sense of outward beauty, the ready shaping fancy, had not been suffered to degrade the poet into that basest of beings, an intellectual voluptuary, and a pensive but serene wisdom hallows all his song.
His opinions on subjects, that now divide the world, are stated in two or three of these pieces, with that temperance and candor of thought, now more rare even than usual, and with a simplicity bordering on homeliness of diction, which is peculiarly pleasing, from the sense of plastic power and refined good sense it imparts.
A gentle and gradual style of narration, without prolixity or tameness, is seldom to be found in the degree in which such pieces as ‘Dora’ and ‘Godiva’ display it. The grace of the light ballad pieces is as remarkable in its way, as was his grasp and force in ‘Oriana,’ ‘The Lord of Burleigh,’ ‘Edward Gray,’ and ‘Lady Clare,’ are distinguished for different shades of this light grace, tender, and speaking more to the soul than the sense, like the different hues in the landscape, when the sun is hid in clouds, so gently shaded that they seem but the echoes of themselves.
I know not whether most to admire the bursts of passion in ‘Locksley Hall,’ the playful sweetness of the ‘Talking Oak,’ or the mere catching of a cadence in such slight things as
“Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, O sea,” &c.
Nothing is more uncommon than the lightness of touch, which gives a charm to such little pieces as the ‘Skipping Rope.’
We regret much to miss from this edition ‘The Mystic,’ ‘The Deserted House,’ and ‘Elegiacs,’ all favorites for years past, and not to be disparaged in favor of any in the present collection. England, we believe, has not shown a due sense of the merits of this poet, and to us is given the honor of rendering homage more readily to an accurate and elegant intellect, a musical reception of nature, a high tendency in thought, and a talent of singular fineness, flexibility, and scope.

A Letter to Rev. Wm. E. Channing, D. D. by O. A. Brownson Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. 1842.

That there is no knowledge of God possible to man but a subjective knowledge, — no revelation but the development of the individual within himself, and to himself, — are prevalent statements, which Mr. Brownson opposes by a single formula, that life is relative in its very nature . God alone is; all creatures live by virtue of what is not themselves, no less than by virtue of what is themselves, the prerogative of man being to do consciously, that is, more or less intelligently. Mr. Brownson carefully discriminates between Essence and Life. Essence, being object to itself, alone has freedom, which is what the old theologians named sovereignty; — a noble word for the thing intended, were it not desecrated in our associations, in being usurped by creatures that are slaves to time and circumstance. But life implies a causative object, as well as causative subject; wherefore creatures are only free by Grace of God.
That men should live, with God for predominating object, is the Ideal of Humanity, or the Law of Holiness, in the highest sense; for this object alone can emancipate them from what is below themselves. But a nice discrimination must be made here. The Ideal of Humanity, as used by Mr. Brownson, does not mean the highest idea of himself, which a man can form by induction on himself as an individual; it means God’s idea of man, which shines into every man from the beginning; “Enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,” though his darkness comprehendeth it not, until it is “made flesh.” It is by virtue of that freedom which is God’s alone, and which is the issue of absolute love, that is, “because God so loved the world,” he takes up the subject, Jesus, and makes himself objective to him without measure, thereby rendering his life as divine as it is human, though it remains also as human, — strictly speaking, — as it is divine.
To all men’s consciousness it is true that God is objective in a degree, or they were not distinctively human. His glory is refracted, as it were, to their eyes, through the universe. But only in a man, to whom he has made himself the imperative object, does he approach men, in all points, in such degree as to make them divine. He is no less free (sovereign) in coming to each man in Christ, than, in the first instance, in making Jesus of Nazareth the Christ. Men are only free inasmuch as they are open to this majestic access, and are able to pray with St. Augustine, “What art thou to me, oh Lord? Have mercy on me that I may ask . The house of my soul is too strait for thee to come into; but let it, oh Lord, be enlarged by thee. It is ruinous, but let it be repaired by thee,” &c.
The Unitarian Church, as Mr. Brownson thinks, indicates truth, in so far as it insists on the life of Jesus as being that wherein we find grace; but in so far as it does not perceive that this life is something more than a series of good actions, which others may reproduce, it leans on an arm of flesh, and puts an idol in the place of Christ. The Trinitarian Church, he thinks, therefore, has come nearer the truth, by its formulas of doctrine; and especially the Roman Catholic Church, by the Eucharist. The error of both Churches has been to predicate of the being, Jesus, what is only true of his life. The being, Jesus, was a man; his life is God. It is the doctrine of John the Evangelist throughout, that the soul lives by the real presence of Jesus Christ, as literally as the body lives by bread. The unchristianized live only partially, by so much of the word as shines in the darkness which may not hinder it quite. This partial life repeats in all time the prophecies of antiquity, and is another witness to Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.”
Mr. Brownson thinks that he has thus discovered a formula of “the faith once delivered to the saints,” which goes behind and annihilates the controversy between Unitarians and Trinitarians, and may lead them both to a deeper comprehension and clearer expression of the secret of life.
Literary Intelligence
The death of Dr. Channing at Bennington in Vermont, on the 2d October, is an event of great note to the whole country. The great loss of the community is mitigated by the new interest which intellectual power always acquires by the death of the possessor. Dr. Channing was a man of so much rectitude, and such power to express his sense of right, that his value to this country, of which he was a kind of public Conscience , can hardly be overestimated. Not only his merits, but his limitations also, which made all his virtues and talents intelligible and available for the correction and elevation of society, made our Cato dear, and his loss not to be repaired. His interest in the times, and the fidelity and independence, with which, for so many years, he had exercised that censorship on commercial, political, and literary morals, which was the spontaneous dictate of his character, had earned for him an accumulated capital of veneration, which caused his opinion to be waited for in each emergency, as that of the wisest and most upright of judges. We shall probably soon have an opportunity to give an extended account of his character and genius. In most parts of this country notice has been taken of this event, and in London also. Beside the published discourses of Messrs. Gannett, Hedge, Clarke, Parker, Pierpont, and Bellows, Mr. Bancroft made Dr. Channing’s genius the topic of a just tribute in a lecture before the Diffusion Society at the Masonic Temple. We regret that the city has not yet felt the propriety of paying a public honor to the memory of one of the truest and noblest of its citizens.
Confessions of St. Augustine . Boston: E. P. Peabody.
We heartily welcome this reprint from the recent London edition, which was a revision, by the Oxford divines, of an old English translation. It is a rare addition to our religious library. The great Augustine, — one of the truest, richest, subtlest, eloquentest of authors, comes now in this American dress, to stand on the same shelf with his far-famed disciples, with A-Kempis, Herbert, Taylor, Scougal, and Fenelon. The Confessions have also a high interest as one of the honestest autobiographies ever written. In this view it takes even rank with Montaigne’s Essays, with Luther’s Table Talk, the Life of John Bunyan, with Rousseau’s Confessions, and the Life of Dr. Franklin. In opening the book at random, we have fallen on his reflections on the death of an early friend.
“O madness, which knowest not how to love men like men! I fretted, sighed, wept, was distracted, had neither rest nor counsel. For I bore about a shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being borne by me, yet where to repose it I found not. All things looked ghastly; yea the very light; whatsoever was not what he was, was revolting and hateful, except groaning and tears. In those alone found I a little refreshment. I fled out of my country; for so should mine eyes look less for him where they were not wont to see him. And thus from Thagaste I came to Carthage. Times lose no time; nor do they roll idly by; through our senses they work strange operations on the mind. Behold, they went and came day by day, and by coming and going introduced into my mind other imaginations and other remembrances; and little by little patched me up again with my old kind of delights unto which that my sorrow gave way. And yet there succeeded not indeed other griefs, yet the causes of other griefs. For whence had that former grief so easily reached my inmost soul but that I had poured out my soul upon the dust in loving one, that must die, as if he would never die. For what restored and refreshed me chiefly, was the solaces of other friends with whom I did love what instead of thee I loved: and this was a |P1249|p1 great fable and protracted lie, by whose adulterous stimulus our soul, which lay itching in our ears, was defiled. But that fable would not die to me so oft as any of my friends died. There were other things which in them did more take my mind; to talk and jest together; to do kind offices by turns; to read together honied books; to play the fool or be earnest together; to dissent at times without discontent, as a man might with his ownself; and even with the seldomness of those dissentings, to season our more frequent consentings; sometimes to teach, and sometimes learn; long for the absent with impatience, and welcome the coming with joy.”
— BOOK 4.

Europe and European Books

The American Academy, the Historical Society, and Harvard University, would do well to make the Cunard steamers the subject of examination in regard to their literary and ethical influence. These rapid sailers must be arraigned as the conspicuous agents in the immense and increasing intercourse between the old and the new continents. We go to school to Europe. We imbibe an European taste. Our education, so called, — our drilling at college, and our reading since, — has been European, and we write on the English culture and to an English public, in America and in Europe. This powerful star, it is thought, will soon culminate and descend, and the impending reduction of the transatlantic excess of influence on the American education is already a matter of easy and frequent computation. Our eyes will be turned westward, and a new and stronger tone in literature will be the result. The Kentucky stumporatory, the exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of western pioneers, agriculturalists, and socialists, and the letters of Jack Downing, are genuine growths, which are sought with avidity in Europe, where our European-like books are of no value. It is easy to see that soon the centre of population and property of the English race, which long ago began its travels, and which is still on the eastern shore, will shortly hover midway over the Atlantic main, and then as certainly fall within the American coast, so that the writers of the English tongue shall write to the American and not to the island public, and then will the great Yankee be born.
But at present we have our culture from Europe and Europeans. Let us be content and thankful for these good gifts for a while yet. The collections of art, at Dresden, Paris, Rome, and the British Museum and libraries offer their splendid hospitalities to the American. And beyond this, amid the dense population of that continent, lifts itself ever and anon some eminent head, a prophet to his own people, and their interpreter to the people of other countries. The attraction of these individuals is not to be resisted by theoretic statements. It is true there is always something deceptive, self-deceptive, in our travel. We go to France, to Germany, to see men, and find but what we carry. A man is a man, one as good as another, many doors to one open court, and that open court as entirely accessible from our private door, or through John or Peter, as through Humboldt or Laplace. But we cannot speak to ourselves. We brood on our riches but remain dumb; that makes us unhappy; and we take ship and go man-hunting in order to place ourselves en rapport , according to laws of personal magnetism, to acquire speech or expression. Seeing Herschel or Schelling, or Swede or Dane, satisfies the conditions, and we can express ourselves happily.
But Europe has lost weight lately. Our young men go thither in every ship, but not as in the golden days, when the same tour would show the traveler the noble heads of Scott, of Mackintosh, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, Cuvier, and Humboldt. We remember when arriving in Paris, we crossed the river on a brilliant morning, and at the bookshop of Papinot, in the Rue de Sorbonne, at the gates of the University, purchased for two sous a Programme, which announced that every Monday we might attend the lecture of Dumas on Chemistry at noon; at a half hour later either Villemain or Ampere on French literature; at other hours, Guizot on Modern History; Cousin on the Philosophy of Ancient History; Fauriel on Foreign Literature; Prevost on Geology; Lacroix on the Differential Calculus: Jouffroy on the History of Modern Philosophy; Lacretelle on Ancient History; Desfontaines or Mirbel on Botany.
Hard by, at the Place du Pantheon, Degerando, Royer Collard, and their colleagues were giving courses on Law, on the law of nations, the Pandects and commercial equity. For two magical sous more, we bought the Programme of the College Royal de France, on which we still read with admiring memory, that every Monday, Silvestre de Sacy lectures on the Persian language; at other hours, Lacroix on the Integral Mathematics; Jouffroy on Greek Philosophy; Biot on Physics; Lerminier on the History of Legislation; Elie de Beaumont on Natural History; Magendie on Medicine; Thenard on Chemistry; Binet on Astronomy; and so on, to the end of the week. On the same wonderful ticket, as if royal munificence had not yet sufficed, we learned that at the Museum of Natural History, at the Garden of Plants, three days in the week, Brongniart would teach Vegetable Physiology, and Gay-Lussac Chemistry, and Flourent Anatomy. With joy we read these splendid news in the Cafe Procope, and straightway joined the troop of students of all nations, kindreds, and tongues, whom this great institution drew together to listen to the first savans of the world without fee or reward. The professors are changed, but the liberal doors still stand open at this hour. This royal liberality, which seems to atone for so many possible abuses of power, could not exist without important consequences to the student on his return home.
The University of Gottingen has sunk from its high place by the loss of its brightest stars. The last was Heeren, whose learning was really useful, and who has made ingenious attempts at the solution of ancient historical problems. Ethiopia, Assyria, Carthage, and the Theban Desart are still revealing secrets, latent for three millenniums, under the powerful night glass of the Teutonic scholars, who make astronomy, geology, chemistry, trade, statistics, medals, tributary to their inquisitions. In the last year also died Sismondi, who by his History of the Italian Republics reminded mankind of the prodigious wealth of life and event, which Time, devouring his children as fast as they are born, is giving to oblivion in Italy, the piazza and forum of History, and for a time made Italian subjects of the middle age popular for poets, and romancers, and by his kindling chronicles of Milan and Lombardy perhaps awoke the great genius of Manzoni. That history is full of events, yet, as Ottilia writes in Goethe’s novel, that she never can bring away from history anything but a few anecdotes, so the “Italian Republics” lies in the memory like a confused melee , a confused noise of slaughter, and rapine, and garments rolled in blood. The method, if method there be, is so slight and artificial, that it is quite overlaid and lost in the unvaried details of treachery and violence. Hallam’s sketches of the same history were greatly more luminous and memorable, partly from the advantage of his design, which compelled him to draw outlines, and not bury the grand lines of destiny in municipal details. Italy furnished in that age no man of genius to its political arena, though many of talent, and this want degrades the history. We still remember with great pleasure, Mr. Hallam’s fine sketch of the external history of the rise and establishment of the Papacy, which Mr. Ranke’s voluminous researches, though they have great value for their individual portraits, have not superseded.
It was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary calendar, when within the twelvemonth a single London advertisement announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by Tennyson, and a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth’s nature or character has had all the time it needed, in order to make its mark, and supply the want of talent. We have learned how to read him. We have ceased to expect that which he cannot give. He has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slipshod newspaper style! Many of his poems, as, for example, the Rylstone Doe, might be all improvised. Nothing of Milton, nothing of Marvell, of Herbert, of Dryden, could be. These are such verses as in a just state of culture should be vers de Societe , such as every gentleman could write, but none would think of printing or of claiming the poet’s laurel on their merit. The Pindar, the Shakspeare, the Dante, whilst they have the just and open soul, have also the eye to see the dimmest star that glimmers in the Milky Way, the serratures of every leaf, the test objects of the microscope, and then the tongue to utter the same things in words that engrave them on all the ears of mankind. The poet demands all gifts and not one or two only.
The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer to the sky than all surrounding objects down to the earth, and down to the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen, and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good story, and its meaning must hold as pure truth. In the debates on the Copyright Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley, the coroner, quoted Wordsworth’s poetry in derision, and asked the roaring House of Commons, what that meant, and whether a man should have a public reward for writing such stuff. Homer, Horace, Milton, and Chaucer would defy the coroner. Whilst they have wisdom to the wise, he would see, that to the external, they have external meaning. Coleridge excellently said of poetry, that poetry must first be good sense, as a palace might well be magnificent, but first it must be a house.
Wordsworth is open to ridicule of this kind. And yet Wordsworth, though satisfied if he can suggest to a sympathetic mind his own mood, and though setting a private and exaggerated value on his compositions, though confounding his accidental with the universal consciousness, and taking the public to task for not admiring his poetry, — is really a superior master of the English language, and his poems evince a power of diction that is no more rivalled by his contemporaries, than is his poetic insight. But the capital merit of Wordsworth is, that he has done more for the sanity of this generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a crisis, it is said, in his private affairs, he made his election between assuming and defending some legal rights with the chances of wealth and a position in the world — and the inward promptings of his heavenly genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a poet, and sat down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain fare to obey the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his will, manifested itself in every line to be real. We have poets who write the poetry of society, of the patrician and conventional Europe, as Scott and Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer, write the poetry of vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself into his place, made no reserves or stipulations; man and writer were not to be divided. He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin of Winandermere, and took their lustrous mornings and their sublime midnights for his theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace, nor Milton, nor Dante. He once for all forsook the styles, and standards, and modes of thinking of London and Paris, and the books read there, and the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and Winandermere, and the dim spirits which these haunts harbored. There was not the least attempt to reconcile these with the spirit of fashion and selfishness, nor to show with great deference to the superior judgment of dukes and earls, that although London was the home for men of great parts, yet Westmoreland had these consolations for such as fate had condemned to the country life; but with a complete satisfaction, he pitied and rebuked their false lives, and celebrated his own with the religion of a true priest. Hence the antagonism which was immediately felt between his poetry and the spirit of the age, that here not only criticism but conscience and will were parties; the spirit of literature, and the modes of living, and the conventional theories of the conduct of life were called in question on wholly new grounds, not from Platonism, nor from Christianity, but from the lessons which the country muse taught a stout pedestrian climbing a mountain, and in following a river from its parent rill down to the sea. The Cannings and Jeffreys of the capital, the Court Journals and Literary Gazettes were not well pleased, and voted the poet a bore. But that which rose in him so high as to the lips, rose in many others as high as to the heart. What he said, they were prepared to hear and confirm. The influence was in the air, and was wafted up and down into lone and into populous places, resisting the popular taste, modifying opinions which it did not change, and soon came to be felt in poetry, in criticism, in plans of life, and at last in legislation. In this country, it very early found a strong hold, and its effect may be traced on all the poetry both of England and America.
But notwithstanding all Wordsworth’s grand merits, it was a great pleasure to know that Alfred Tennyson’s two volumes were coming out in the same ship; it was a great pleasure to receive them. The elegance, the wit, and subtlety of this writer, his rich fancy, his power of language, his metrical skill, his independence on any living masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and gorgeous, discriminate the musky poet of gardens and conservatories of parks and palaces. Perhaps we felt the popular objection that he wants rude truth, he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask and alabaster, one is farther off from stern nature and human life than in Lallah Rookh and “the Loves of the Angels.” Amid swinging censers and perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain and frost. Otto of roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical friend of ours affirms that the vice, which bereaved modern painters of their power, is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended; to equal the masters in their exquisite finish, instead of in their religious purpose. The painters are not willing to paint ill enough: they will not paint for their times, agitated by the spirit which agitates their country; so should their picture picture us and draw all men after them; but they copy the technics of their predecessors, and paint for their predecessors’ public. It seems as if the same vice had worked in poetry. Tennyson’s compositions are not so much poems as studies in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry old masters. He is not the husband who builds the homestead after his own necessity, from foundation stone to chimney-top and turret, but a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint stair cases and groined ceilings. We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary expenditure. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy, hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson’s beauty is more grateful than Tennyson’s. It is a natural manly grace of a robust workman. Ben’s flowers are not in pots, at a city florist’s ranged on a flower stand, but he is a countryman at a harvest-home, attending his ox-cart from the fields, loaded with potatoes and apples, with grapes and plums, with nuts and berries, and stuck with boughs of hemlock and sweet briar, with ferns and pond lilies which the children have gathered. But let us not quarrel with our benefactors. Perhaps Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then? It is long since we have as good a lyrist; it will be long before we have his superior. “Godiva” is a noble poem that will tell the legend a thousand years. The poem of all the poetry of the present age, for which we predict the longest term, is “Abou ben Adhem” of Leigh Hunt. Fortune will still have her part in every victory, and it is strange that one of the best poems should be written by a man who has hardly written any other. And “Godiva” is a parable which belongs to the same gospel. “Locksley Hall” and “the Two Voices” are meditative poems, which were slowly written to be slowly read. “The Talking Oak,” though a little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is beautiful, and the most poetic of the volume. “Ulysses” belongs to a high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more cultivated in the next generation. “oEnone” was a sketch of the same kind. One of the best specimens we have of the class is Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” of which no special merit it can possess equals the total merit of having selected such a subject in such a spirit.
Next to the poetry the novels, which come to us in every ship from England, have an importance increased by the immense extension of their circulation through the new cheap press, which sends them to so many willing thousands. So much novel reading ought not to leave the readers quite unaffected, and undoubtedly gives some tinge of romance to the daily life of young merchants and maidens. We have heard it alleged, with some evidence, that the prominence given to intellectual power in Bulwer’s romances had proved a main stimulus to mental culture in thousands of young men in England and America. The effect on manners cannot be less sensible, and we can easily believe that the behavior of the ball room, and of the hotel has not failed to draw some addition of dignity and grace from the fair ideals, with which the imagination of a novelist has filled the heads of the most imitative class.
We are not very well versed in these books, yet we have read Mr. Bulwer enough to see that the story is rapid and interesting; he has really seen London society, and does not draw ignorant caricatures. He is not a genius, but his novels are marked with great energy, and with a courage of experiment which in each instance had its degree of success. The story of Zanoni was one of those world-fables which is so agreeable to the human imagination, that it is found in some form in the language of every country, and is always reappearing in literature. Many of the details of this novel preserve a poetic truth. We read Zanoni with pleasure, because magic is natural. It is implied in all superior culture that a complete man would need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. The eye and the word are certainly subtler and stronger weapons than either money or knives. Whoever looked on the hero, would consent to his will, being certified that his aims were universal, not selfish; and he would be obeyed as naturally as the rain and the sunshine are. For this reason, children delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in them as the servant of man, which they feel ought to be true. But Zanoni pains us, and the author loses our respect, because he speedily betrays that he does not see the true limitations of the charm; because the power with which his hero is armed, is a toy, inasmuch as the power does not flow from its legitimate fountains in the mind; is a power for London; a divine power converted into a burglar’s false key or a highwayman’s pistol to rob and kill with.
But Mr. Bulwer’s recent stories have given us, who do not read novels, occasion to think of this department of literature, supposed to be the natural fruit and expression of the age. We conceive that the obvious division of modern romance is into two kinds; first, the novels of costume or of circumstance , which is the old style, and vastly the most numerous. In this class, the hero, without any particular character, is in a very particular circumstance; he is greatly in want of a fortune or of a wife, and usually of both, and the business of the piece is to provide him suitably. This is the problem to be solved in thousands of English romances, including the Porter novels and the more splendid examples of the Edgeworth and Scott romances.
It is curious how sleepy and foolish we are, that these tales will so take us. Again and again we have been caught in that old foolish trap; — then, as before, to feel indignant to have been duped and dragged after a foolish boy and girl, to see them at last married and portioned, and the reader instantly turned out of doors, like a beggar that has followed a gay procession into a castle. Had one noble thought opening the chambers of the intellect, one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, the reader had been made a participator of their triumph; he too had been an invited and eternal guest; but this reward granted them is property, all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat and for none other, nay, a preference and cosseting which is rude and insulting to all but the minion.
Excepting in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent knew how to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the novels of costume are all one, and there is but one standard English novel, like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is repeated every Sunday from so many pulpits.
But the other novel, of which Wilhelm Meister is the best specimen, the novel of character , treats the reader with more respect; a castle and a wife are not the indispensable conclusion, but the development of character being the problem, the reader is made a partaker of the whole prosperity. Every thing good in such a story remains with the reader, when the book is closed.
A noble book was Wilhelm Meister. It gave the hint of a cultivated society which we found nowhere else. It was founded on power to do what was necessary, each person finding it an indispensable qualification of membership, that he could do something useful, as in mechanics or agriculture or other indispensable art; then a probity, a justice, was to be its element, symbolized by the insisting that each property should be cleared of privilege, and should pay its full tax to the State. Then, a perception of beauty was the equally indispensable element of the association, by which each was so dignified and all were so dignified; then each was to obey his genius to the length of abandonment. They watched each candidate vigilantly, without his knowing that he was observed, and when he had given proof that he was a faithful man, then all doors, all houses, all relations were open to him; high behavior fraternized with high behavior, without question of heraldry and the only power recognised is the force of character.
The novels of Fashion of D’Israeli, Mrs. Gore, Mr. Ward, belong to the class of novels of costume, because the aim is a purely external success.
Of the tales of fashionable life, by far the most agreeable and the most efficient, was Vivian Grey. Young men were and still are the readers and victims. Byron ruled for a time, but Vivian, with no tithe of Byron’s genius, rules longer. One can distinguish at sight the Vivians in all companies. They would quiz their father, and mother, and lover, and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty and fate, love and death, over the soup. They never sleep, go nowhere, stay nowhere, eat nothing, and know nobody, but are up to anything, though it were the Genesis of nature, or the last Cataclasm, — Festus-like, Faust-like, Jove-like; and could write an Iliad any rainy morning, if fame were not such a bore. Men, women, though the greatest and fairest, are stupid things; but a rifle, and a mild pleasant gunpowder, a spaniel, and a cheroot, are themes for Olympus. I fear it was in part the influence of such pictures on living society, which made the style of manners, of which we have so many pictures, as for example, in the following account of the English fashionist. “His highest triumph is to appear with the most wooden manners, as little polished as will suffice to avoid castigation, nay, to contrive even his civilities, so that they may appear as near as may be to affronts; instead of a noble high-bred ease, to have the courage to offend against every restraint of decorum, to invert the relation in which our sex stand to women, so that they appear the attacking, and he the passive or defensive party.”
We must here check our gossip in mid volley, and adjourn the rest of our critical chapter to a more convenient season.

The Bible in Spain, or the Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an attempt to circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula. By George Borrow. Author of “The Gipsies in Spain.

“This is a charming book, full of free breezes, and mountain torrents, and pictures of romantic interest. Mr. Borrow is a self-sufficing man of free nature, his mind is always in the fresh air; he is not unworthy to climb the sierras and rest beneath the cork trees where we have so often enjoyed the company of Don Quixote. And he has the merit, almost miraculous to-day, of leaving us almost always to draw our own inferences from what he gives us. We can wander on in peace, secure against being forced back upon ourselves, or forced sideways to himself. It is as good to read through this book of pictures, as to stay in a house hung with Gobelin tapestry. The Gipsies are introduced here with even more spirit than in his other book. He sketches men and nature with the same bold and clear, though careless touch. Cape Finisterre and the entrance into Gallicia are as good parts as any to look at.
Paracelsus
Mr. Browning was known to us before, by a little book called “Pippa Passes,” full of bold openings, motley with talent like this, and rich in touches of personal experience. A version of the thought of the day so much less penetrating than Faust and Festus cannot detain us long; yet we are pleased to see each man in his kind bearing witness, that neither sight nor thought will enable to attain that golden crown which is the reward of life, of profound experiences and gradual processes, the golden crown of wisdom. The artist nature is painted with great vigor in Aprile. The author has come nearer that, than to the philosophic nature. There is music in the love of Festus for his friend, especially in the last scene, the thought of his taking sides with him against the divine judgment is true as poesy.

Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle.

Here is Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it. It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master’s mind, — and with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has conversed much on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and parties as are drawn to a scholar’s house, until such daily and nightly meditation has grown into a great connexion, if not a system of thoughts, and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance. “No new truth,” say the critics on all sides. Is it so? truth is very old; but the merit of seers is not to invent, but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other. The book makes great approaches to true contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and European system. It is such an appeal to the conscience and honor of England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be forgotten. It has the merit which belongs to every honest book, that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits all other men, and, as the country people say of good preaching, “comes bounce down into every pew.” Every reader shall carry away something. The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and mechanic shall toil with new resolution, nor forget the book when they resume their labor.
Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers a believer in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the times not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and the remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths. As we recall the topics, we are struck with the force given to the plain truths; the picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted, the poor enchanted so they cannot work, the rich enchanted so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain; the exposure of the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities; the proposition, that the laborer must have a greater share in his earnings; that the principle of permanence shall be admitted into all contracts of mutual service; that the state shall provide at least school-master’s education for all the citizens; the exhortation to the workman, that he shall respect the work and not the wages; to the scholar, that he shall be there for light; to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture of Abbot Samson, the true governor, who “is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness;” and the assumption throughout the book, that a new chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labor is replacing the old nobilities. These things strike us with a force, which reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters, and of no modern book. Truly in these things there is great reward. It is not by sitting still at a grand distance, and calling the human race larvae , that men are to be helped, nor by helping the depraved after their own foolish fashion, but by doing unweariedly the particular work we were born to do. Let no man think himself absolved because he does a generous action and befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so holds his property that a benefit goes from it to all. A man’s diet should be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so private a good. His house should be better, because that is for the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of the traveler. But his speech is a perpetual and public instrument; let that always side with the race, and yield neither a lie nor a sneer. His manners, — let them be hospitable and civilizing, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught anything better in canvass or stone; and his acts should be representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in his having and poor in his want.
It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all men for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of the problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe fruits. The task is superhuman; and the poet knows well, that a little time will do more than the most puissant genius. Time stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is unattainable. Each man can very well know his own part of duty, if he will; but to bring out the truth for beauty and as literature, surmounts the powers of art. The most elaborate history of to-day will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The historian of to-day is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend into the turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
But when the political aspects are so calamitous, that the sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher than literary inspiration may succor him. It is a costly proof of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should take his reputation in his hand, and should descend into the ring, and he has added to his love whatever honor his opinions may forfeit. To atone for this departure from the vows of the scholar and his eternal duties, to this secular charity, we have at least this gain, that here is a message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but hear. Though they die, they must listen. It is plain that whether by hope or by fear, or were it only by delight in this panorama of brilliant images, all the great classes of English society must read, even those whose existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria, — poor Sir Robert Peel, — poor Primate and Bishops, — poor Dukes and Lords! there is no help in place or pride, or in looking another way; a grain of wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm, which no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book which will be read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains, what hopes, what vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lordship and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a foot-ball into the air, and kept in the air with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal; and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this flaming sword of Cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon, and shows to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction, that the satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent in English land and institutions, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.
We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection which we feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In this work, as in his former labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humors, are expressed with so much force of constitution, that his fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the picture. It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in lurid stormlights. Every object attitudinizes, to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refractions of this wonderful humorist, and instead of the common earth and sky, we have a Martin’s Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always arrived which requires a deus ex machina . One can hardly credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us, — as of a failed world just recollecting its old withered forces to begin again and try and do a little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and imagination on English politics that a certain local emphasis and of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendor of wit cannot outdazzle the calm daylight, which always shows every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself; and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you with pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic) that it had none. But after a short time, down go its follies and weakness, and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and color. The revelation of Reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of humanity under all its subjective aspects, that to the cowering it always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only venerable to us, because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces, and say, Is that all?
And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing dangers of the English state, may easily excuse some over-coloring of the picture, and we at this distance are not so far removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not to share the gloom, and thank the love and the courage of the counsellor. This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this, as in all Mr. Carlyle’s works, than the attitude of the writer. He has the dignity of a man of letters who knows what belongs to him, and never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and honor. If the good heaven have any word to impart to this unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us. As a literary artist, he has great merits, beginning with the main one, that he never wrote one dull line. How well read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient for expressing those unproven opinions, which he entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of straw from the cell, and the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdrock, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveller says what is put into his mouth and disappears. That morbid temperament has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character, a luxury to many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south wind with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes with a whiplash like some renowned charioteers, — in all this glad and needful vending of his redundant spirits, — he does yet ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the very word, and then with new glee returns to his game. He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due.
One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fulness, though deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange half mad way, has entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigor and wealth of resource, which has no rival in the tourney play of these times; — the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system with its infinity of details into style. We have been civilizing very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New Holland and Oregon, — and it has not appeared in literature, — there has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books. Carlyle’s style is the first emergence of all this wealth and labor, with which the world has gone with child so long. London and Europe tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and east and west Indies for dependencies, and America, with the Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first experiment; and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again, sharper, simpler, but fortunate is he who did it first, though never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything in literature so like earthquakes, as the laughter of Carlyle. He “shakes with his mountain mirth.” It is like the laughter of the genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple, and Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as promise, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.

Antislavery Poems, by John Pierpont. Boston: Oliver Johnson. 1843.

These poems are much the most readable of all the metrical pieces we have met with on the subject; indeed, it is strange how little poetry this old outrage of negro slavery has produced. Cowper’s lines in the Task are still the best we have. Mr. Pierpont has a good deal of talent, and writes very spirited verses, full of point. He has no continuous meaning which enables him to write a long and equal poem, but every poem is a series of detached epigrams, some better, some worse. His taste is not always correct, and from the boldest flight he shall suddenly alight in very low places. Neither is the motive of the poem ever very high, so that they seem to be rather squibs than prophecies or imprecations: but for political satire, we think the “Word from a Petitioner” very strong, and the “Gag” the best piece of poetical indignation in America.

Sonnets and other Poems, by William Lloyd Garrison. Boston. 1843. pp. 96.

Mr. Garrison has won his palms in quite other fields than those of the lyric muse, and he is far more likely to be the subject than the author of good poems. He is rich enough in the earnestness and the success of his character to be patient with the very rapid withering of the poetic garlands he has snatched in passing. Yet though this volume contains little poetry, both the subjects and the sentiments will everywhere command respect. That piece in the volume, which pleased us most, was the address to his first-born child.

America — an Ode; and other Poems, by N. W. Coffin. Boston: S. G. Simpkins.

Our Maecenas shakes his head very doubtfully at this well-printed Ode, and only says, “An ode nowadays needs to be admirable to carry sail at all. Mr. Sprague’s Centennial Ode, and Ode at the Shakspeare Jubilee, are the only American lyrics that we have prospered in reading, — if we dare still remember them.” Yet he adds mercifully, “The good verses run like golden brooks through the dark forests of toil, rippling and musical, and undermine the heavy banks till they fall in and are borne away. Thirty-five pieces follow the Ode, of which everything is neat, pretty, harmonious, tasteful, the sentiment pleasing, manful, if not inspired. If the poet have nothing else, he has a good ear.”

Poems by William Ellery Channing. Boston. 1843.

We have already expressed our faith in Mr. Channing’s genius, which in some of the finest and rarest traits of the poet is without a rival in this country. This little volume has already become a sign of great hope and encouragement to the lovers of the muse. The refinement and the sincerity of his mind, not less than the originality and delicacy of the diction, are not merits to be suddenly apprehended, but are sure to find a cordial appreciation. Yet we would willingly invite any lover of poetry to read “The Earth-Spirit,” “Reverence,” “The Lover’s Song,” “Death,” and “The Poet’s Hope.”

A Letter

As we are very liable in common with the letter-writing world, to fall behindhand in our correspondence, and a little more liable because, in consequence of our editorial function, we receive more epistles than our individual share, we have thought that we might clear our account by writing a quarterly catholic letter to all and several who have honored us in verse, or prose, with their confidence, and expressed a curiosity to know our opinion. We shall be compelled to dispose very rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.
And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his speculations on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent shall have his own way. To the rail-way, we must say, like the courageous lord mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming, “Let it come, in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on ‘t.” Very unlooked for political and social effects of the iron road are fast appearing. It will require an expansion of the police of the old world. When a rail-road train shoots through Europe every day from Brussels to Vienna, from Vienna to Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or thirty miles, at a German customhouse, for examination of property and passports. But when our correspondent proceeds to Flying-machines, we have no longer the smallest taper light of credible information and experience left, and must speak on a priori grounds. Shortly then, we think the population is not yet quite fit for them, and therefore there will be none. Our friend suggests so many inconveniences from piracy out of the high air to orchards and lone houses, and also to other high fliers, and the total inadequacy of the present system of defence, that we have not the heart to break the sleep of the good public by the repetition of these details. When children come into the library, we put the inkstand and the watch on the high shelf, until they be a little older; and nature has set the sun and moon in plain sight and use, but laid them on the high shelf, where her roystering boys may not in some mad Saturday afternoon pull them down or burn their fingers. The sea and the iron road are safer toys for such ungrown people; we are not yet ripe to be birds.
In the next place, to fifteen letters on Communities, and the Prospects of Culture, and the destinies of the cultivated class, — what answer? Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers, obviously persons of sincerity and of elegance, should be dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with their company. They have exhausted all its benefit, and will not bear it much longer. Excellent reasons they have shown why something better should be tried. They want a friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a reasonable word. They are willing to work, so it be with friends. They do not entertain anything absurd or even difficult. They do not wish to force society into hated reforms, nor to break with society. They do not wish a township, or any large expenditure, or incorporated association, but simply a concentration of chosen people. By the slightest possible concert persevered in through four or five years, they think that a neighborhood might be formed of friends who would provoke each other to the best activity.
They believe that this society would fill up the terrific chasm of ennui, and would give their genius that inspiration which it seems to wait in vain. But ‘the selfishness!’ One of the writers relentingly says, What shall my uncles and aunts do without me? and desires to be distinctly understood not to propose the Indian mode of giving decrepit relatives as much of the mud of holy Ganges as they can swallow, and more, but to begin the enterprise of concentration, by concentrating all uncles and aunts in one delightful village by themselves! — so heedless is our correspondent of putting all the dough into one pan, and all the leaven into another. Another objection seems to have occurred to a subtle but ardent advocate. Is it, he writes, a too great wilfulness and intermeddling with life, — with life, which is better accepted than calculated? Perhaps so; but let us not be too curiously good; the Buddhist is a practical Necessitarian; the Yankee is not. We do a good many selfish things every day; among them all let us do one thing of enlightened selfishness. It were fit to forbid concert and calculation in this particular, if that were our system, if we were up to the mark of self-denial and faith in our general activity. But to be prudent in all the particulars of life, and in this one thing alone religiously forbearing; prudent to secure to ourselves an injurious society, temptations to folly and despair, degrading examples and enemies; and only abstinent when it is proposed to provide ourselves with guides, examples, lovers!—-
We shall hardly trust ourselves to reply to arguments by which we would too gladly be persuaded. The more discontent, the better we like it. It is not for nothing, we assure ourselves, that our people are busied with these projects of a better social state, and that sincere persons of all parties are demanding somewhat vital and poetic of our stagnant society. How fantastic and unpresentable soever the theory has hitherto seemed, how swiftly shrinking from the examination of practical men, let us not lose the warning of that most significant dream. How joyfully we have felt the admonition of larger natures which despised our aims and pursuits, conscious that a voice out of heaven spoke to us in that scorn. But it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends that, whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims. To live solitary and unexpressed, is painful, — painful in proportion to one’s consciousness of ripeness and equality to the offices of friendship. But herein we are never quite forsaken by the Divine Providence. The loneliest man after twenty years discovers that he stood in a circle of friends, who will then show like a close fraternity held by some masonic tie. But we are impatient of the tedious introductions of Destiny, and a little faithless, and would venture something to accelerate them. One thing is plain, that discontent and the luxury of tears will bring nothing to pass. Regrets and Bohemian castles and aesthetic villages are not a very self-helping class of productions, but are the voices of debility. Especially to one importunate correspondent we must say, that there is no chance for the aesthetic village. Every one of the villagers has committed his several blunder; his genius was good, his stars consenting, but he was a marplot. And though the recuperative force in every man may be relied on infinitely, it must be relied on, before it will exert itself. As long as he sleeps in the shade of the present error, the after-nature does not betray its resources. Whilst he dwells in the old sin, he will pay the old fine.
More letters we have on the subject of the position of young men, which accord well enough with what we see and hear. There is an American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls on young men in this country, as soon as they have finished their college education, which strips them of all manly aims and bereaves them of animal spirits, so that the noblest youths are in a few years converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of conventions. They are in the state of the young Persians, when “that mighty Yezdam prophet” addressed them and said, “Behold the signs of evil days are come; there is now no longer any right course of action, nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis.” As soon as they have arrived at this term, there are no employments to satisfy them, they are educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it. Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism of these things, which only embitters their sensibility to the evil, and widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at large. From this cause, companies of the best educated young men in the Atlantic states every week take their departure for Europe; for no business that they have in that country, but simply because they shall so be hid from the reproachful eyes of their countrymen, and agreeably entertained for one or two years, with some lurking hope, no doubt, that something may turn up to give them a decided direction. It is easy to see that this is only a postponement of their proper work, with the additional disadvantage of a two years’ vacation. Add that this class is rapidly increasing by the infatuation of the active class, who, whilst they regard these young Athenians with suspicion and dislike, educate their own children in the same courses, and use all possible endeavors to secure to them the same result.
Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described by the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite new and peculiar, though we should not know where to find in literature any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality; such undeniable apprehension without talent, so much power without equal applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in Theodore Mundt’s (*) account of Frederic Holderlin’s “Hyperion,” we were not a little struck with the following Jeremiad of the despair of Germany, whose tone is still so familiar, that we were somewhat mortified to find that it was written in 1799.
* Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart. 1842. p. 86.

“Then came I to the Germans. I cannot conceive of a people more disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you shall see, but no man; priests, but no man; thinkers, but no man. Is it not like some battlefield, where hands and arms and all members lie scattered about, whilst the life-blood runs away into the sand? Let every man mind his own, you say, and I say the same. Only let him mind it with all his heart, and not with this cold study, literally, hypocritically to appear that which he passes for, but in good earnest, and in all love, let him be that which he is; then there is a soul in his deed. And is he driven into a circumstance where the spirit must not live, let him thrust it from him with scorn, and learn to dig and plough. There is nothing holy which is not desecrated, which is not degraded to a mean end among this people. It is heartrending to see your poet, your artist, and all who still revere genius, who love and foster the Beautiful. The Good! They live in the world as strangers in their own house; they are like the patient Ulysses whilst he sat in the guise of a beggar at his own door, whilst shameless rioters shouted in the hall and ask, who brought the raggamuffin here? Full of love, talent and hope, spring up the darlings of the muse among the Germans; come seven years later, and they flit about like ghosts, cold and silent; they are like a soil which an enemy has sown with poison, that it will not bear a blade of grass. On earth all is imperfect! is the old proverb of the German. Aye, but if one should say to these Godforsaken, that with them all is imperfect, only because they leave nothing pure which they do not pollute, nothing holy which they do not defile with their fumbling hands; that with them nothing prospers; because the godlike nature which is the root of all prosperity, they do not revere; that with them, truly, life is shallow and anxious and full of discord, because they despise genius, which brings power and nobleness into manly action, cheerfulness into endurance, and love and brotherhood into towns and houses. Where a people honors genius in its artists, there breathes like an atmosphere a universal soul, to which the shy sensibility opens, which melts self-conceit, — all hearts become pious and great, and it adds fire to heroes. The home of all men is with such a people, and there will the stranger gladly abide. But where the divine nature and the artist is crushed, the sweetness of life is gone, and every other planet is better than the earth. Men deteriorate, folly increases, and a gross mind with it; drunkenness comes with disaster; with the wantonness of the tongue and with the anxiety for a livelihood, the blessing of every year becomes a curse, and all the gods depart.”
The steep antagonism between the money-getting and the academic class must be freely admitted, and perhaps is the more violent, that whilst our work is imposed by the soil and the sea, our culture is the tradition of Europe. But we cannot share the desperation of our contemporaries, least of all should we think a preternatural enlargement of the intellect a calamity. A new perception, the smallest new activity given to the perceptive power, is a victory won to the living universe from chaos and old night, and cheaply bought by any amounts of hard-fare and false social position. The balance of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. Superficialness is the real distemper. In all the cases we have ever seen where people were supposed to suffer from too much wit, or as men said, from a blade too sharp for the scabbard, it turned out that they had not wit enough. It may easily happen that we are grown very idle and must go to work, and that the times must be worse before they are better. It is very certain, that speculation is no succedaneum for life. What we would know, we must do. As if any taste or imagination could take the place of fidelity! The old Duty is the old God. And we may come to this by the rudest teaching. A friend of ours went five years ago to Illinois to buy a farm for his son. Though there were crowds of emigrants in the roads, the country was open on both sides, and long intervals between hamlets and houses. Now after five years he has just been to visit the young farmer and see how he prospered, and reports that a miracle has been wrought. From Massachusetts to Illinois, the land is fenced in and builded over, almost like New England itself, and the proofs of thrifty cultivation everywhere abound; — a result not so much owing to the natural increase of population, as to the hard times, which, driving men out of cities and trade, forced them to take off their coats and go to work on the land, which has rewarded them not only with wheat but with habits of labor. Perhaps the adversities of our commerce have not yet been pushed to the wholesomest degree of severity. Apathies and total want of work and reflection on the imaginative character of American life, &c. &c., are like seasickness, which never will obtain any sympathy, if there is a woodpile in the yard, or an unweeded patch in the garden; not to mention the graver absurdity of a youth of noble aims, who can find no field for his energies, whilst the colossal wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated, and the religious, civil, and judicial forms of the country are confessedly effete and offensive. We must refer our clients back to themselves, believing that every man knows in his heart the cure for the disease he so ostentatiously bewails.
As far as our correspondents have entangled their private griefs with the cause of American Literature, we counsel them to disengage themselves as fast as possible. In Cambridge orations, and elsewhere, there is much inquiry for that great absentee American Literature. What can have become of it? The least said is best. A literature is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result, and is the affair of a power which works by a prodigality of life and force very dismaying to behold, — the race never dying, the individual never spared, and every trait of beauty purchased by hecatombs of private tragedy. The pruning in the wild gardens of nature is never forborne. Many of the best must die of consumption, many of despair, and many be stupid and insane, before the one great and fortunate life, which they each predicted, can shoot up into a thrifty and beneficent existence.
But passing to a letter which is a generous and a just tribute to Bettina von Arnim, we have it in our power to furnish our correspondent and all sympathizing readers with a sketch, (*) though plainly from no very friendly hand, of the new work of that eminent lady, who in the silence of Tieck and Schelling, seems to hold a monopoly of genius in Germany.
* We translate the following extract from the Berlin Correspondence of the Deutsche Schnellpost of September.

“At last has the long expected work of the Frau von Arnim here appeared. It is true her name is not prefixed; more properly is the dedication, This Book belongs to the King , also the title; but partly because her genius shines so unmistakeably out of every line, partly because this work refers so directly to her earlier writings, and appears only as an enlargement of them, none can doubt who the author is. We know not how we should characterize to the reader this most original work. Bettina, or we should say, the Frau von Arnim, exhibits her eccentric wisdom under the person of Goethe’s Mother, the Frau Rath, whilst she herself is still a child, who, (1807) sits upon ‘the shawl’ at the foot of the Frau Rath, and listens devoutly to the gifted mother of the great poet. Moreover, Bettina does not conceal that she solely, or at any rate principally, propounds her views from the Frau Rath. And in fact, it could not be otherwise, since we come to hear the newest philosophical wisdom which makes a strange enough figure in the mouth of Goethe’s mother. If we mistake not, the intimate intercourse with Bruno Bauer is also an essential impulse for Frau von Arnim, and we must not therefore wonder if the Frau Rath loses her way in pure philosophical hypotheses, wherein she avails herself of the known phrases of the school. It is true, she quickly recovers herself again, clothes her perceptions in poetical garb, mounts bravely to the boldest visions, or, (and this oftenest happens,) becomes a humorist, spices her discourses in Frankfort dialect by idiomatic expressions, and hits off in her merriest humors capital sketches. For the most part, the whole humoristic dress seems only assumed in order to make the matter, which is in the last degree radical, less injurious. As to the object of these ‘sayings and narratives reported from memory’ of the Frau Rath, (since she leads the conversation throughout,) our sketch must be short. ‘It is Freedom which constitutes the truest being’ of man. Man should be free from all traditions, from all prejudices, since every holding on somewhat traditional, is unbelief, spiritual selfmurder. The God’s impulse to truth is the only right belief. Man himself should handle and prove, ‘since whoever reflects on a matter, has always a better right to truth, than who lets himself be slapped on the cheek by an article-of-Faith.’ By Sin she understands that which derogates from the soul, since every hindrance and constraint interrupts the Becoming of the soul. In general, art and science have only the destination to make free what is bound. But the human spirit can rule all, and, in that sense, ‘man is God, only we are not arrived so far as to describe the true pure Man in us.’ If, in the department of religion, this principle leads to the overthrow of the whole historical Christendom, so, in the political world, it leads to the ruin of all our actual governments. Therefore she wishes for a strong reformer, as Napoleon promised for a time to be, who, however, already in 1807, when these conversations are ascribed to the Frau Rath, had shown that instead of a world’s liberator, he would be a world’s oppressor. Bettina makes variations on the verse, ‘and wake an avenger, a hero awake!’ and in this sense is also her dedication to read. It were noble if a stronger one should come, who in more beautiful moderation, in perfecter clearness of soul and freedom of thought, should plant the tree of equity. Where remains the Regent, if it is not the genius of humanity? that is the Executive principle, in her system. The state has the same will, the same conscience-voice for good and evil as the Christ; yet it crumbles itself away into dogmaticalness of civil officers against one another. The transgressor is the state’s own transgression! the proof that it, as man, has trespassed against humanity. The old state’s doctors, who excite it to a will, are also its disease. But they who do not agree in this will, and cannot struggle through soul-narrowing relations, are the demagogues, against whom the unsound state trespasses, so long as it knows not how to bring their sound strength into harmony. And precisely to those must it dedicate itself, since they are its integration and restoration, whilst the others who conform to it, make it more sunken and stagnant. If it be objected, that this her truth is only a poetic dream which in the actual world has no place, she answers; ‘even were the truth a dream, it is not therefore to be denied; let us dedicate our genius to this dream, let us form an Ideal Paradise, which the spiritual system of Nature requires at our hands.’ ‘Is the whole fabric of state, she asks, only a worse arranged hospital, where the selfish or the ambitious would fasten on the poor human race the foolish fantastic malversations of their roguery for beneficent co;auoperation? and with it the political economy, so destitute of all genius to bind the useful with the beautiful, on which these state’s doctors plume themselves so much, and so with their triviality exhibit as a pattern to us, a wretched picture of ignorance, of selfishness, and of iniquity; when I come on that, I feel my veins swell with wrath. If I come on the belied nature, or how should I call this spectre of actuality! Yea justly! No! with these men armed in mail against every poetic truth, we must not parley; the great fools’ conspiracy of that actuality-spectre defends with mock reasoning its Turkish states’-conduct, before which certainly the revelation of the Ideal withdraws into a poetic dream-region.’ But whilst the existing state in itself is merely null, whilst the transgressor against this state is not incorporated with its authorizations with its directions and tendencies, so is the transgressor ever the accuser of the state itself. In general, must the state draw up to itself at least the lowest class, and not let it sink in mire; and Bettina lets the Frau Rath make the proposal, instead of shutting up the felon in penitentiaries, to instruct him in the sciences, as from his native energies, from his unbroken powers, great performances might be looked for. But in order also to show practically the truth of her assertions, that the present state does not fulfil its duties especially to the poorest class, at the close of the book are inserted, ‘Experiences of a young Swiss in Voigtland.’ This person visited the so-called Family-houses, which compose a colony of extremest poverty. There he went into many chambers, listened to the history of the life, still oftener to the history of the day, of the inhabitants; informed himself of their merit and their wants, and comes to the gloomiest results. The hard reproaches, which were made against the Overseers of the Poor, appear unhappily only too well founded. We have hastily sketched, with a few literal quotations, the contents of this remarkable book of this remarkable woman, and there remains no space further to elaborate judgment. The highflying idealism, which the Frau von Arnim cherishes, founders and must founder against the actuality which, as opposed to her imagination, she holds for absolute nothing. So reality, with her, always converts itself to spectres, whilst these dreams are to her the only reality. In our opinion an energetic thorough experiment for the realization of her ideas would plunge us in a deeper misery than we at present have to deplore.”

The Huguenots in France and America

The Huguenots is a very entertaining book, drawn from excellent sources, rich in its topics, describing many admirable persons and events, and supplies an old defect in our popular literature. The editor’s part is performed with great assiduity and conscience. Yet amidst this enumeration of all the geniuses, and beauties, and sanctities of France, what has the greatest man in France, at that period, Michael de Montaigne, done, or left undone, that his name should be quite omitted?

The Spanish Student. A Play in Three Acts, By H. W. Longfellow.

A pleasing tale, but Cervantes shall speak for us out of La Gitanilla .
“You must know, Preciosa, that as to this name of Poet , few are they who deserve it, — and I am no Poet , but only a lover of Poesy, so that I have no need to beg or borrow the verses of others. The verses, I gave you the other day, are mine, and those of to-day as well; — but, for all that, I am no poet, neither is it my prayer to be so.”
“Is it then so bad a thing to be a poet?” asked Preciosa.
“Not bad,” replied the Page, “but to be a poet and nought else, I do not hold to be very good. For poetry should be like a precious jewel, whose owner does not put it on every day, nor show it to the world at every step; but only when it is fitting, and when there is a reason for showing it. Poetry is a most lovely damsel; chaste, modest, and discreet; spirited, but yet retiring, and ever holding itself within the strictest rule of honor. She is the friend of Solitude. She finds in the fountains her delight, in the fields her counsellor, in the trees and flowers enjoyment and repose; and lastly, she charms and instructs all that approach her.”

The Dream of a Day, and other Poems, by James G. Percival. New Haven. 1843.

Mr. Percival printed his last book of poems sixteen years ago, and every school-boy learned to declaim his “Bunker Hill,” since which time, he informs us, his studies have been for the most part very adverse to poetic inspirations. Yet here we have specimens of no less than one hundred and fifty different forms of stanza. Such thorough workmanship in the poetical art is without example or approach in this country, and deserves all honor. We have imitations of four of the leading classes of ancient measures, — the Dactylic, Iambic, Anapestic, and Trochaic, to say nothing of rarer measures, now never known out of colleges. Then come songs for national airs, formed on the rhythm of the music, including Norwegian, German, Russian, Bohemian, Gaelic, and Welsh, — Teutonian and Slavonian. But unhappily this diligence is not without its dangers. It has prejudiced the creative power,
“And made that art, which was a rage.”
Neatness, terseness, objectivity, or at any rate the absence of subjectivity, characterize these poems. Our bard has not quite so much fire as we had looked for, grows warm but does not ignite; those sixteen years of “adverse” studies have had their effect on Pegasus, who now trots soundly and resolutely on, but forbears rash motions, and never runs away with us. The old critics of England were hardly steadier to their triad of “Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer,” than our American magazines to the trinity of “Bryant, Dana, and Percival.” A gentle constellation truly, all of the established religion, having the good of their country and their species at heart. Percival has not written anything quite as good on the whole as his two fast associates, but surpasses them both in labor, in his mimetic skill, and in his objectiveness. He is the most objective of the American poets. Bryant has a superb propriety of feeling, has plainly always been in good society, but his sweet oaten pipe discourses only pastoral music. Dana has the most established religion, more sentiment, more reverence, more of England; whilst Mr. Percival is an upright, soldierly, free-spoken man, very much of a patriot, hates cant, and does his best.

The Tragic

He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity. The conversation of men is a mixture of regrets and apprehensions. I do not know but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is melancholy. In the dark hours, our existence seems to be a defensive war, a struggle against the encroaching All, which threatens surely to engulf us soon, and is impatient of our short reprieve. How slender the possession that yet remains to us; how faint the animation! how the spirit seems already to contract its domain, retiring within narrower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its planted fields to erasure and annihilation. Already our own thoughts and words have an alien sound. There is a simultaneous diminution of memory and hope. Projects that once we laughed and leaped to execute, find us, now sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow. And in the serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot afford to let go any advantages. The riches of body or of mind which we do not need today, are the reserved fund against the calamity that may arrive tomorrow. It is usually agreed that some nations have a more sombre temperament, and one would say that history gave no record of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves to the English mind in both hemispheres as closely as to the strings of an Aeolian harp. Men and women at thirty years, and even earlier, have lost all spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprizes, they throw up the game. But whether we, and those who are next to us, are more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any right, which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease, poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear, and death.
What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature?
The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, — crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, — and heedless whether it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible idea that lies at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the ;oEdipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hopeless commiseration. They must perish, and there is no over-god to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery that grinds and thunders, and takes them up into its terrific system. The same idea makes the paralyzing terror with which the East Indian mythology haunts the imagination. The same thought is the predestination of the Turk. And universally in uneducated and unreflecting persons, on whom too the religious sentiment exerts little force, we discover traits of the same superstition; ‘if you baulk water, you will be drowned the next time:’ ‘if you count ten stars, you will fall down dead:’ ‘if you spill the salt;’ ‘if your fork sticks upright in the floor;’ ‘if you say the Lord’s prayer backwards;’ — and so on, a several penalty, nowise grounded in the nature of the thing, but on an arbitrary will. But this terror of contravening an unascertained and unascertainable will, cannot coexist with reflection: it disappears with civilization, and can no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood. It is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity herein: that the last is an Optimism, and therefore the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he is a part. But in Destiny, it is not the good of the whole or the best will that is enacted, but only one particular will . Destiny properly is not a will at all, but an immense whim; and this is the only ground of terror and despair in the rational mind, and of tragedy in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which was founded on this faith, can never be reproduced.
But after the reason and faith have introduced a better public and private tradition, the tragic element is somewhat circumscribed. There must always remain, however, the hindrance of our private satisfaction by the laws of the world. The law which establishes nature and the human race, continually thwarts the will of ignorant individuals, and this in the particulars of disease, want, insecurity, and disunion.
But the essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie in any list of particular evils. After we have enumerated famine, fever, inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness, and loss of friends, we have not yet included the proper tragic element, which is Terror, and which does not respect definite evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which haunts the afternoon and the night, idleness and solitude. A low haggard sprite sits by our side “casting the fashion of uncertain evils,” — a sinister presentiment, a power of the imagination to dislocate things orderly and cheerful, and show them in startling disarray. Hark! what sounds on the night wind, the cry of Murder in that friendly house: see these marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot. The whisper overheard, the detected glance, the glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge, and mistakes darken the brow and chill the heart of men. And accordingly it is natures not clear, not of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters from which somewhat is hidden that all others see, who suffer most from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are people who have an appetite for grief, pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain, mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mis-hear and mis-behold, they suspect and dread. They handle every nettle and ivy in the hedge, and tread on every snake in the meadow.
“Come bad chance,
And we add to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o’er us to advance.”
Frankly then it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a low region. It is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in the appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer. It looks like an insupportable load under which earth moans aloud, but analyze it; it is not I, it is not you, it is always another person who is tormented. If a man says, lo I suffer, — it is apparent that he suffers not, for grief is dumb. It is so distributed as not to destroy. That which would rend you, falls on tougher textures. That which seems intolerable reproach or bereavement, does not take from the accused or bereaved man or woman appetite or sleep. Some men are above grief, and some below it. Few are capable of love. In phlegmatic natures calamity is unaffecting, in shallow natures it is rhetorical. Tragedy must be somewhat which I can respect. A querulous habit is not tragedy. A panic such as frequently in ancient or savage nations put a troop or an army to flight without an enemy; a fear of ghosts; a terror of freezing to death that seizes a man in a winter midnight on the moors; a fright at uncertain sounds heard by a family at night in the cellar or on the stairs; are terrors that make the knees knock and the teeth chatter, but are no tragedy, any more than sea-sickness, which may also destroy life. It is full of illusion. As it comes, it has its support. The most exposed classes, soldiers, sailors, paupers, are nowise destitute of animal spirits. The spirit is true to itself, and finds its own support in any condition, learns to live in what is called calamity, as easily as in what is called felicity, as the frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand pounds of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same.
A man should not commit his tranquillity to things, but should keep as much as possible the reins in his own hands, rarely giving way to extreme emotion of joy or grief. It is observed that the earliest works of the art of sculpture are countenances of sublime tranquillity. The Egyptian sphinxes, which sit today as they sat when the Greek came and saw them and departed, and when the Roman came and saw them and departed, and as they will still sit when the Turk, the Frenchman, and the Englishman, who visit them now, shall have passed by, “with their stony eyes fixed on the East and on the Nile,” have countenances expressive of complacency and repose, an expression of health, deserving their longevity, and verifying the primeval sentence of history on the permanency of that people; “Their strength is to sit still.” To this architectural stability of the human form, the Greek genius added an ideal beauty, without disturbing the seals of serenity; permitting no violence of mirth, or wrath, or suffering. This was true to human nature. For, in life, actions are few, opinions even few, prayers few; loves, hatreds, or any emissions of the soul. All that life demands of us through the greater part of the day, is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and the genius of our life. There is a fire in some men which demands an outlet in some rude action; they betray their impatience of quiet by an irregular Catalinarian gait; by irregular, faltering, disturbed speech, too emphatic for the occasion. They treat trifles with a tragic air. This is not beautiful. Could they not lay a rod or two of stone wall, and work off this superabundant irritability. When two strangers meet in the highway, what each demands of the other is, that the aspect should show a firm mind, ready for any event of good or ill, prepared alike to give death or to give life, as the emergency of the next moment may require. We must walk as guests in nature, — not impassioned, but cool and disengaged. A man should try time, and his face should wear the expression of a just judge, who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing and even hopes nothing, but who puts nature and fortune on their merits: he will hear the case out, and then decide. For all melancholy, as all passion, belongs to the exterior life. Whilst a man is not grounded in the divine life by his proper roots, he clings by some tendrils of affection to society, — mayhap to what is best and greatest in it, and in calm times it will not appear that he is adrift and not moored; but let any shock take place in society, any revolution of custom, of law, of opinion, and at once his type of permanence is shaken. The disorder of his neighbors appears to him universal disorder; chaos is come again. But in truth he was already a driving wreck, before the wind arose which only revealed to him his vagabond state. If a man is centred, men and events appear to him a fair image or reflection of that which he knoweth beforehand in himself. If any perversity or profligacy break out in society, he will join with others to avert the mischief, but it will not arouse resentment or fear, because he discerns its impassable limits. He sees already in the ebullition of sin, the simultaneous redress.
Particular reliefs, also, fit themselves to human calamities, for the world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of exaggeration. Time, the consoler, time, the rich carrier of all changes, dries the freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new costumes, new roads, on our eye, new voices on our ear. As the west wind lifts up again the heads of the wheat which were bent down and lodged in the storm, and combs out the matted and dishevelled grass as it lay in night-locks on the ground, so we let in time as a drying wind into the seed-field of thoughts which are dank and wet, and low-bent. Time restores to them temper and elasticity. How fast we forget the blow that threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit still; the faculties will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new affections twine, and the broken is whole again.
Time consoles, but Temperament resists the impression of pain. Nature proportions her defence to the assault. Our human being is wonderfully plastic, if it cannot win this satisfaction here, it makes itself amends by running out there and winning that. It is like a stream of water, which, if dammed up on one bank, over-runs the other, and flows equally at its own convenience over sand, or mud, or marble. Most suffering is only apparent. We fancy it is torture: the patient has his own compensations. A tender American girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of “the middle passage:” and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to such as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse and barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse than the old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for the stench of the hold. They have gratifications which would be none to the civilized girl. The market-man never damned the lady because she had not paid her bill, but the stout Irish woman has to take that once a month. She, however, never feels weakness in her back because of the slave-trade. This self-adapting strength is especially seen in disease. “It is my duty,” says Sir Charles Bell, “to visit certain wards of the hospital where there is no patient admitted but with that complaint which most fills the imagination with the idea of insupportable pain and certain death. Yet these wards are not the least remarkable for the composure and cheerfulness of their inmates. The individual who suffers has a mysterious counterbalance to that condition, which, to us who look upon her, appears to be attended with no alleviating circumstance.” Analogous supplies are made to those individuals whose character leads them to vast exertions of body and mind. Napoleon said to one of his friends at St. Helena, “Nature seems to have calculated that I should have great reverses to endure, for she has given me a temperament like a block of marble. Thunder cannot move it; the shaft merely glides along. The great events of my life have slipped over me without making any impression on my moral or physical nature.”
The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching, or putting an interval between a man and his fortune, and so converts the sufferer into a spectator, and his pain into poetry. It yields the joys of conversation, of letters, and of science. Hence also the torments of life become tuneful tragedy, solemn and soft with music, and garnished with rich dark pictures. But higher still than the activities of art, the intellect in its purity, and the moral sense in its purity, are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us into a region whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot rise.