had not yet thawed, while the dark purple and brown of the distant ranges blended in a scene of indescribable beauty and wonderful sublimity. The hues on the mountain sides, mellowed in the light of a clouded sky, gave a finish to the landscape, rendering it as charming as the most vivid imagination. could conceive.

Laramie River rises in the southern part of the Territory, and running northeast along the boundary of Laramie Plains, empties into the North Fork of the Platte; Fort Laramie is situated near its junction with the Platte; Laramie City, as before mentioned, is on the railroad; so that this Territory has Laramie enough, in all conscience. I believe this was the name of a frontier man who lived years ago. If living still, he can not complain that injustice has been done to him in the way of perpetuating his name.

The Indians who live here are the Sioux or Dakotas, the Snakes or Shoshonies, and the Bannacks. The Snakes, or Shoshonies, and Camanches all speak the same language. The Snakes of Green River are called Washa-kee's band, Wash-a-kee being the head chief among them. Salmon River Snakes are called Took-a-rik-ah, or mountain sheep-eaters. These two bands are genuine Snakes, all the others being inferior branches of the Snake family. This band lives upon the mufflon or mountain sheep, which is the same or nearly the same as the musmon or musimon or wild sheep, described by the ancients as common in Barbary, Corsica and Sardinia, and is supposed by Buffon and other naturalists to be the sheep in a wild state. The hunters call them big horns, and the stories they tell of these sheep jumping off the crags and cliffs of the mountains and striking on their horns and forehead, are quite wonderful. The inferior bands of the Snakes are the Salt Lake Diggers or Ho-can-dik-ah,

who live near Salt Lake, in Utah, and were almost exterminated by the California volunteers in a fight on Bear River, on the 19th of January, 1863; the Salmon-Eaters, or Ag-a-dik-ah, who live near Salmon Falls on Snake River, in Idaho, and subsist on salmon; and, lastly, the Humboldt and Goose Creek Diggers, or, as they are called, Tos-aweet or White-Knives, and sometimes Sho-she-go or Footmen. They are similar in their modes of life and habits to all the other tribes in the Great Basin, consisting of Pi-Utes, Gos-Utes, and several other branches of the Utes and Digger Bannacks.

The Bannacks are divided into two bands - Ti-ge's band, which roams about from Soda Springs, Idaho, to Fort Hall, and in winter lives at Wind River, Wyoming. Ti-ge-to-atse is the name of this band, which speaks a language different from that of the Snakes. The other is Piv-i-a-mo's, or Big Finger's band, which roams in winter toward the Yellowstone River, and in the spring returns to the vicinity of Virginia City, Montana, and the upper waters of Snake River. They encamp about all summer, living on the fine trout which abound in that stream. In the autumn they go back to the buffalo grounds.

The Sioux, in the northern part of the Territory, are enemies of the whites, and seem determined to hold on to their country in spite of all obstacles. Forts Reno and Phil Kearney were established therein; and at the latter place one of the most deplorable massacres of white soldiers that ever occurred in this country took place. This was on the 21st of December, 1866, at which time three officers and eighty-two men who had been sent out to protect a wood train which the Indians had attacked about five miles from the fort, were killed. The Indians demanded that the country north of the North Platte should be theirs. This was as

sented to by a governmental commission, and the troops were withdrawn in June and July, 1868.

The present Governor is his excellency John A. Campbell, a native of Ohio, and an officer who served with much distinction during the Rebellion. He will do every thing in his power to advance its interests. Judge William A. Carter, of Fort Bridger, is an enthusiastic friend, and seems fully impressed that Wyoming has a future replete with greatness before it. He is a man who is using all his energies in assisting it, and good fortune must crown his efforts.

But there remains every thing to be done, and it is a question not yet settled whether grain can be raised here or not. It is a good grazing country during the summer; but the winters are long and severe. Good mines will be discovered in the mountains, and these will attract a hardy and energetic population. Nothing develops a country as rapidly as mines; and our whole Pacific Coast owes its unprecedented ad

vancement to these great sources of national and individual wealth.

The days of isolation for the Far West of the American Continent are rapidly passing away, and the completion of the Pacific Railroad opens a new era in the progress of our Territories. That mines of great value will soon be found, and that miners and the attendant influx of population will flow into this Territory, is as sure as any event of the future. The dull and monotonous mode of traveling by wagon across the Plains is nearly a thing of the past; and he who has accomplished that feat will speak of it years hence as something which reflects great credit upon himself, and is certainly difficult to be realized by those who pass across now in comfortable cars on the Pacific Railroad.

Meantime, let us wish well to our youngest Territory, and hope that her vast coal fields and immense plains will some day make her one of the brightest stars of the Republic.

N former articles we have spoken

which surrounded Shakespeare's youth and early manhood-influences traceable in his works, and also discoverable by synchronism in what we know of the associations of his home and of the manners and customs of his age. We need not dwell long on the subsequent events of his external life. "Being naturally inclined to poetry and acting," as old Aubrey says, he went to London. His arrival in the metropolis (according to Dyce) can not well be

fixed earlier than the year 1586 or 1587. There exists documentary evidence that he was in 1589 one of the proprietors of the Blackfriars' Theater. It is difficult to understand how he could have found time meanwhile to hold gentlemen's horses at the door of the play-house, or by what means he could have been promoted during this brief interval from the mean position of hostler to an ownership in the concern. This story-which does not endure the test of historical criticism for a moment-was first published by Dr.

Johnson, who claims to have received it from Mr. Pope. Mr. Pope says that it was communicated to him by Mr. Rowe, who strangely enough makes no allusion to it in his Life of Shakespeare. Thus it grew up very much after the style of "the house that Jack built," and with no more substantial foundation to rest upon. Evidently it is a rope of sand that perishes in the twisting. Every great man, especially if his life has flowed away in deep undercurrents of art or poetry, without making much noise among his contemporaries, is pretty sure to become the nucleus of a whole system of mythol ogy. And with what poverty of invention the same kind of trash is repeated from century to century! Seneca tells us that when Parrhasius was about to paint the "Prometheus Chained," he put an Olynthian captive to the rack in order to watch the writhings of his victim and to catch the true expression of bodily agony; and at Rome you hear how Michael Angelo crucified a poor peasant in order to give vigor and vitality to the pencil that has so often sketched the scene of Calvary.

Shakespeare is said to have shown considerable talent as an actor; indeed, according to Aubrey, "he did act exceedingly well;" and Hamlet's advice to the players (the fullest and concisest statement of histrionic principles ever written) evinces a subtle and profound knowledge of the theory at least. He is known to have played the part of the ghost in "Hamlet," as Goethe also personated Orestes in his own drama of "Sphegenia." The German poet is said to have shone on the stage with all the manly grace and beauty of an Apollo; and it certainly required a form and bearing not less noble to represent worthily "the buried majesty of Denmark." Yet Shakespeare does not seem to have liked the histrionic profession-perhaps on account of the social indignities to which it necessa

rily subjected him. For, although the player was not, like the wandering minstrel, "a rogue by act of Parliament," yet he was held in almost universal contempt as a sort of vagrant and outcast, a horror to all respectable householders, living perpetually under the dark frown of the magistrate, and managing only by great dexterity to keep on the sunny side of the statutes. Indeed, an act passed in 1572 "for the punishment of vagabonds," was especially designed to include those players who did not belong to one of the nobles of the realm. Such a condition would necessarily be intolerable to the sensitive and gentle-hearted poet; and in the one hundred and eleventh sonnet he thus bemoans his fate:

"Oh, for my sake do thou with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means, which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To that it works in, like the dyer's hand."

Also in the one hundred and tenth sonnet, he says:

"Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view."

Very naturally, the sense of degradation expressed in these passages soon induced him to quit the stage; and after obtaining a competency, he returned to Stratford, where he was regarded as the most considerable man of the place. Here he lived for a number of years in the midst of friends and family, sending up occasionally a new play to London-where his twin-genius in the histrionic art, Richard Burbadge, was still enchanting the people of the metropolis by his wonderful personations of "Richard III.," "Hamlet," and "the grieved Moor,"—but otherwise leading the tranquil life of a country gentleman. He died on the fiftysecond anniversary of his birth. One of his last acts was the exercise of hos

pitality towards two of his best and most congenial friends, Jonson and Drayton. Nothing further is known of the circumstances of his death or of the nature of the malady that carried him off into

"The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveler returns."

Personally, Shakespeare was of a free, social nature. According to the testimony of Ben Jonson, with whom he had many "wit combats" at the Mermaid Tavern, he "had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary that he should be stopped." These last words reveal whole volumes respecting his peculiar literary character, which consisted in this: that no other man had such transcendent power of expressing what he felt and saw and thought. No other man has uttered such fine things or all subjects universally. Coleridge, the eloquent talker, was a poor stutterer in comparison with him. From "the gray-coated knat" and the jew eled ring on an alderman's finger, to the highest human thought and human deed, there is nothing which has not been transfigured and glorified by the vigor and wealth of his imagination and the unparalleled luxuriance of his diction. He had a full healthy mind, "a brain exhaling thoughts and images" and seeking vent in the clubroom as well as in the drama. There was no taint of hypochondria in him. He kept his health by not too-anxiously caring for it, and was the last man to undermine his constitution by persistently feeling of his pulse and looking at his tongue in the mirror. It was in a metaphysical rather than in a melancholy mood that he liked to talk of "that churl, death." Like his own Hamlet, he was prone to ponder the mysteries of man's origin and destiny, and in his contemplations was fond of

hovering on the extreme confines of the finite, "pressing against the barriers that separate it from the unknown." This is more or less true of all poets of the highest order. To use one of Coleridge's nice distinctions, they have an excess of the spiritual over the morala nature with the mobility of quicksilver, an organization like a photometer, in which the accumulations of ideal light and poetic susceptibility are measured by a certain tremulous sensitiveness. To this end all his faculties were happily coördinated. That his soul was easily swayed in every direction, proves the fineness of its balance. It was like those rocking stones frequently found upon mountain-tops, which a child may move with its finger, but which the sinews of Hercules could not overthrow. Yet, side by side with this cheerful temper, there was in him also a vein of melancholy peculiarly his own, "a most humorous sadness in which his often rumination wrapt him." Sometimes he even seems to be "out of love with his nativity," and almost "chides God for making him of that countenance that he is." In the twenty-ninth sonnet he "beweeps his outcast state," and wishes himself

"like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope."

In the sixty-second sonnet he speaks of himself as

"Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity."

Who would suspect, in looking at Shakespeare's portrait, that he ever could have envied another man's features? But, after all, this is a much healthier attitude of human nature than, like Narcissus, to be enamored of one's own image. And yet, in the very sonnet which thus bemoans his "disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," he rouses himself again from thoughts of self-contempt, and draws such strength

and joy from the faithful affection of his friend as to " scorn to change his state with kings."

Shakespeare's dramas may be divided critically into three classes, or chronologically into three periods. To the first belong "Titus Andronicus," "Pericles," the trilogy of "Henry VI.," the "Comedy of Errors," and the "Taming of the Shrew." All these are elaborations of older dramas; and we discover in them frequent outcroppings of the uncultured popular taste of a pre-Shakespearean age. They are not masterpieces, but studies, in which the young poet formed himself; they point to a stage in his development when Marlowe and Greene were still his prototypes and superiors. There is in them a certain discoloration that betrays their origin, like rivers which have their source in the union of many rivulets, muddy and turbulent at first, but clarifying as they flow. Indeed, we hardly know whether these plays belong to the canonical books or to the Shakespearean Apocrypha. According to Malone's computation with respect to the three parts of "Henry VI.," "out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding Shakespeare, 2373 by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and 1899 were entirely his own." The crudeness of these early dramas is seen particularly in the coarseness of the female characters; in Margaret, Eleanor and Katharina we detect tendencies wholly foreign to the usual refinement of Shakespeare's genius. Gervinus intimates (without sufficient proof, however) that this uniform portrayal of bad imperious women, such as he seldom afterwards depicted, was not accidental, but simply the unburdening of a heart heavy under its own domestic infelicities. But we think it would be difficult to show any connection between Ann Hathaway and the terrible wives of Gloster and the King, or to discover any touch of bitter personal experience

But

in the delineations of the Shrew. They point rather to the characteristics of the age out of which the poet grew and in which he still inhered-like the lion described by Milton, only halfshaped from the original clay and still "struggling to get free." Goethe has drawn many fine pictures of female character-the pure, womanly heroism and rectitude of Sphegenia; the tender and sensitive melancholy of Mignon; the ardent and passionate Clærchen; the pure and confiding Gretchen. beautiful and true as these portraits are, they do not have the power of Shakespeare's creations. So, too, the women of the Greek dramatists, Antigone, Alcestis, and Electra, are only impersonations of isolated abstract qualities, filial duty, conjugal devotion or sisterly affection, stern statuesque embodiments of this or that virtue, which De Quincey compares to marble groups with "no speculation" in their cold, stony eyes; no vital breath in their nostrils; no fine pulses of sensibility in their bosoms. It was not by photographing what he saw around him that Shakespeare produced these portraitures. His women are ideal that is, they are not transcripts from real life as he knew it, but are borrowed from the purity of his heart and the infinite riches of his prophetic imagination.

To the second period of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry belong the historical pieces-"Richard III.," "Richard II.,” both parts of "Henry IV.," "Henry V.," and "King John;" the erotic plays

"The Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Love's Labour's Lost," "All's Well that Ends Well," "Midsummer Night's Dream," " "Romeo and Juliet," and "The Merchant of Venice;" the comedies-"As You Like It," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Much Ado about Nothing," and "Twelfth Night." No one can study these works without being surprised at the inconceivable rapidity with which the poet has freed