the splendor of their deeds of arms. Til- would sometimes issue the most absurd ly, Gustavus Adolphus, and even Bernard and capricious orders. Schiller relates de Weimar, excelled him as conquerors; that he once ordered that none but red but neither of them equaled him in the sashes should be worn in the army, under art of drawing multitudes to his standard. penalty of death. A captain of horse no Twice did the magic of his name impro- sooner heard the decree than he tore off vise an immense army; and twice he had his gold-embroidered sash and trod it unthe fate of Germany, perhaps of Europe, der foot! and Wallenstein, on the spot, in his hands. We are not to attribute the promoted him to the rank of Colonel. On success of these great levies to the fame another occasion, he published sentence of of Wallenstein's arms: when he raised death against all who should be caught the first great army he had done nothing pillaging; and himself meeting a straggler extraordinary; and the remembrance of in the open country, had him seized, and his signal defeat at Stralsund must have thundered out, "Hang the brute," accordbeen fresh in all minds when he raised the ing to his custom. The soldier pleaded, second. It was not by victory that he and proved his innocence. "Hang, then, fascinated the wild spirits he drew around innocent," cried Wallenstein; "the guilty him, but by the license he permitted. He will have all the more reason to tremble." made his officers the guests of his own The man, driven desperate, flew at his table, where they feasted luxuriously. He judge to avenge himself, but was overwinked at the excesses of the soldiers, so powered and disarmed. "Now let him long as strict discipline was observed in go," said the Duke; "it will excite suffiactual service. His camp was ever joy- cient terror." ous and gay; he allowed crowds of campfollowers, but no chaplain. He enlisted all that came-robbers, bandits, free-booters, of whatever nation, and promoted the most able, so that every private soldier had the highest rank open before him; and he rewarded every act of bravery with princely munificence. On the other hand, his severity was almost fiendish. Cowardice he punished inexorably with death. At the smallest breach of discipline, he would dispose of the offender with the brief order, "Let the brute be hanged." Men, in his hands, were the mere tools with which he worked. When Gustavus once made a proposition to him to give quarter, he sent back for answer: "The troops may either fight or rot." He did not care to be gazed at by his soldiers, and they were directed, when he walked between their tents or through their ranks, not to appear to take any notice of him. "The men were struck with a strange awe when Wallenstein's tall, thin figure glided along like a ghost; there was about all his being something solemn, mysterious, and unearthly. The soldiers were fully convinced that their general had a bond with the powers of darkness; that he read the future in the stars; that he could not bear to hear the barking of the dog, nor the crowing of the cock; that he was proof against bullet as well as against cut and stab; and, above all, that he had charmed Fortune to stand by his colors!" To test the obedience of his troops, he Wallenstein owed his ruin to his unbridled ambition and his unbounded arrogance, and presents a signal example of the working of that irrevocable law, enunciated in the Word of God, and illustrated so frequently in the history of mankind, that "pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." It was this latter quality which offended, because it wounded his most intimate associates, and transformed those whom he had raised by his favor and enriched by his bounty into secret enemies and betrayers. It is said that Gustavus believed him mad, and was not alone in his belief. Those who entertained this opinion seem to have grounded it upon those periods of inaction and indecision in Wallenstein's career, by which he appeared to throw away the best opportunities offered him by the vicissitudes of the war; while others see a stronger reason for the imputation in the fact that, at a period when the fallacy of the pretensions and pursuits of astrologers had been made manifest to all reasoning minds, he should have squandered so much time and money in the prosecution of that study, and given credence to its absurd prognostications. We have already stated, with respect to the charges brought by his adversaries against Wallenstein, of treachery to the Emperor, that we see no grounds for believing them true up to the period when, at the earnest solicitations of Ferdinand, he raised the second powerful army, and as sumed the command. We even go yet further, and submit that it would be difficult to produce satisfactory evidence of treason on his part previous to the convoking of the generals at Pilsen. It is our conviction that, up to the hour of that meeting, although he may have meditated defection, he had come to no resolution, much less taken any active measures, to carry it out. Wallenstein knew, by the command which he had received to evacuate Bohemia, and to weaken his forces by sending off six thousand men to a distance so great as to prevent their recall, that he had lost the favor of the Emperor, who took these means of diminishing his influence and authority. He saw in this an evidence that the machinations of his implacable enemy, Maximilian of Bavaria, and the stealthy hostility of the Jesuits, had prevailed with Ferdinand against him; and that the latter, while professedly favorable and friendly, had decreed and was working his overthrow. This was the conviction that rankled in Wallenstein's breast, and made of him a rebel. At Pilsen, the ostensible adherence of the generals to his interests hastened the formation and development of his plans, which were defeated by his trust in them, and their precipitate treason to their benefactor. Wallenstein fell, not because he designed treason against the Emperor, but because the Emperor was first a traitor to his engagements, both public and private, with himself. He saw Ferdinand, under the mask of friendship, striking at his authority and reputation; his self-love revolted at the spectacle, and his pride and arrogance goaded him to a fatal revenge. This appears to us the natural solution of the long-vexed question, about which it is probable nothing decisive will ever be known. By the friends of Wallenstein's fame it is argued that no documents have ever been discovered which show him to have been guilty of the treason laid to his charge. To which it may be replied, that the treasonable plans being recently formed, it was not likely that there should ever have been many such documents in existence; and further, that it is shown on evidence perfectly reliable that, on the night previous to that of his death, Wallenstein destroyed at Egra six hundred letters and documents, the contents of which were known only to himself; and again, that immediately after his death the Countesses Terzky and Kinsky destroyed by fire the whole of the papers of their murdered husbands, Wallenstein's most confidential associates. Notwithstanding the absence of all documentary proof, to our thinking the guilt of Wallenstein, from the moment of his reception of the Emperor's command to divide his forces and quit Bohemia, is morally proved in a manner the most incontestible. How else are we to explain the desertion of his generals, who profited more by his favor than they were ever likely to do by the Emperor's, who were all chosen by himself, and owed their prosperity to him? and how else is it possible to account for the march of the Duke of Lauenburg and Bernard de Weimar toward Egra, which was to have been treasonably delivered up to them, and where the former fell, and the latter narrowly escaped falling into the hands of the Imperialists? The defection of Wallenstein, however, does not excuse or palliate the doubledealing and base falsehood of Ferdinand, which brought it about. That he should decree, without even the form of a trial, the death of a man who had saved his empire from ruin, and to whose welfare he was pledged by solemn compact, is a plot so foul as to be almost without a parallel in the records of any other reigning family. The crimes and treacheries of individuals and dynasties seldom end with their perpetrators; they bear fruit, according to God's irreversible laws, from generation to generation; and in the prostrate and insecure condition of the Austrian dominions, the thoughtful mind will recog nize evidences of the retributive hand of a righteous Providence. From the Leisure Hour. CELESTIAL FIREWORKS. It was a brilliant and an imposing spec- | had the phenomenon before him on its tacle the flight of ten thousand rockets, grandest scale when he indited the pasfrom the summit of Primrose Hill, at the sage referring to the opening of the sixth recent celebration of the Peace. Up they seal: "And the stars of heaven fell unto went, not one by one, or score after score, the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her but in a monster burst-flaring, hissing, untimely figs, when she is shaken of a and vaulting, then curling and winding mighty wind." aloft like so many fiery flying serpents, till they finally dissolved in a shower of stars, most dazzling to the fifty thousand pair of upturned eyes that followed their course. The display, duly advertised before hand, fully answered to expectation, but did not much exceed it. Though admiration was excited, there was little surprise, except among the juveniles. Much less was the mind of the multitude stirred with those feelings of awe bordering on apprehension, which are usually roused when the impression to the eye is so occult as to defy intelligence to apprehend its cause-a splendid but mysterious apparition. The whole was of the earth, earthy. It was known to be of man's device, and of no difficult manipulation, while only gorgeous, or even visible, within a very limited range. At a comparatively short distance from the scene of action, the lofty seemed low, the beautiful was obscure, and the imposing became insignificant. It dwindled down to the likeness of a few squibs, fired by some frolicsome urchins escaped from school, till, a little farther off, the horizon showed nothing in the direction but the ordinary darkness of night. Far otherwise is it with the fireworks which Nature occasionally exhibits. We allude not to the glare of the volcano, the flash of the lightning, or the coruscations of the northern lights, but to brilliant appearances of a more recondite description more remote, too, from terrestrial connections, most frequently and magnificently seen in tropical localities, sometimes visible over thousands of square miles of the earth's surface, and through a vast linear extent of celestial space, occurring both as isolated drops of light, and forming copious luminous showers. St. John might have VOL. XLI-NO. II. It is very common, when the curtains of the night are drawn, and clouds are absent from the star-decked sky, or only blot it in patches, for a line of light in the concave to arrest the eye, as though a fiery arrow had been shot from an invisible bow in space, or a star had fallen from its sphere into an extinguishing gulf. Hence the familiar names of shooting and falling stars applied to such apparitions. In certain situations-as when away from the din of towns, on shipboard, in the still valley, or on the solitary moor-the appearance is not a little impressive; and, being not more striking than well known in all climes and countries, it has been consecrated in the records of inspiration as an image of the complete and rapid overthrow of principalities and powers, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." Often as the sight has been witnessed, it seldom fails to arrest attention, whether contemplated by rustic ignorance or cultivated science, and to fix thought upon the inquiry, for the moment, "What can it be?" In the oldest literature we meet with allusions to these swift and evanescent luminosities. Homer compares the hasty flight of Minerva from the peaks of Olympus, to break the truce between the Greeks and Trojans, to the rapidity of a radiant overhead streamer. Virgil makes it a kind of telegraph between Jupiter and poor old Anchisse; and mentions the phenomenon, when frequent, as a prognostic of stormy weather: "And oft, before tempestuous winds arise, The seeming stars fall headlong from the skies. 16 Modern observations show that these and | involves only a few seconds; but the luother objects of the same class-the shoot-minous trains of the globular class have ing-stars, falling-stars, fire-balls, and thun- been seen from several minutes to half an derbolts of the vulgar-the meteors, meteorites, aërolites, bolides, eolides, and uranolites of the scientific-are to a moral certainty identical in their nature and origin, though differing in their exhibitions. The leading circumstances under which they appear may be stated. hour after the disappearance of the brilliant balls, while examples of the stationary amorphous kind have remained in sight much longer. 3. Their direction is in general more or less oblique, but sometimes it seems horizontal; and the extraordinary fact is mentioned in one instance of a shooting-star moving away from the earth, or upward, as if caught in the act of deserting celestial space, and dragged back into its depths by an attraction superior to terrestrial gravitation. It is usually the case that these objects move from north-east to south-west, which is contrary to the direction of the earth in its orbit. This seems to have an important bearing upon their physical history. 1. Shooting stars, meteors, or whatever else we may call them, vary in their form, magnitude, and brightness. Some consist of phosphoric lines, apparently described by a point; and these are the most numerous class. In others, the globular shape is occasionally very conspicuous, answering to a ball of fire, usually followed by a train of intensely white light; but this is sometimes tinged with various prismatic colors of great beauty. A third variety present no uniform aspect, remain station- 4. While limited to no particular part ary in the heavens, and are visible for a of the earth, state of the weather, or considerable time. Estimates of the dia- season of the year, they are most numemeters of the globular class give measure-rously seen in tropical localities, under ments of 500 feet, 1000 feet, and 2000 feet. Some are not more conspicuous than small stars to the naked eye, while others are more resplendent than the brightest of the planets, and throw a very perceptible illumination upon the path of the traveler. tranquil conditions of the atmosphere, toward the close of summer and the commencement of autumn, especially about the middle of August and November. The displays have been gorgeous and terrific, as seen in America, when at the same time nothing remarkable has been observed in European skies; while, contemporaneously, on other occasions, the revelation has been splendid in the atmosphere of opposite hemispheres. In 1837, a vast number appeared in Europe; and on the same day, on the other side of the globe, they were witnessed from the French-ship "Bonite." 5. Commonly the sight is the only sense addressed. "There is no speech nor language their voice is not heard." But occasionally hissing noises and loud detonations have been distinctly audible, owing doubtless to greater contiguity. Windows and doors have rattled, and even buildings have trembled at the violence of the explosions. The meteor which passed over Italy, in 1676, disappeared to seaward in the direction of Corsica, with a report which was heard at Leghorn. A similar visitor, witnessed all over England in 1718, passed from north-east to southwest, and the sound of an explosion was heard through Devon and Cornwall, and along the opposite coast of Brittany. This was a very brilliant object. Sir Hans Sloane, being abroad in the streets of London at the time of its appearance-a quarter past eight at night-found his path suddenly and intensely illumined. He at first thought it proceeded from a discharge of rockets; but looking up, he saw an orb of fire traveling with immense velocity aloft, so vividly bright that several times he was compelled to turn away his eyes from it. The stars disappeared; the moon-nine days old, and high, near the meridian, the sky being very clear-was so effaced as to be scarcely visible. 6. On the same night, the appearance of falling-stars is ordinarily limited to two or three examples, and weeks may pass away without a single one being observed; but at times the number is prodigious, as if the whole celestial host had been loosened from the concave to rush in lawless flight toward the earth, resembling a perfect shower of fiery snow. Medieval chroni cles contain records of such events, once considered as marvels invented by the chroniclers, but now admitted to the class of facts, since modern experience is familiar with precisely similar displays. Some of these relations are worthy of notice. Arabian annalists state that on the night of the death of King Ibrahim ben Ahmed, referring to the month of October, in the year 902 of our era, an infinite number of falling stars were seen spreading themselves like rain over the heavens from right to left; and this year was afterwards called "the year of stars." In some annals of Cairo, it is related that "in this year, (1029 of our era,) in the month Redjeb, (August,) many stars passed, with a great noise and brilliant light." In another place the document states that "in the year 599, on Saturday night, in the last Moharrem, (1202 of our era, and on the 19th of October,) the stars appeared like waves upon the sky, toward the east and west; they flew about like grasshoppers, and were dispersed from left to right; the people were terror-struck." Mohammed, in a chapter of the Koran, alludes to the falling stars as the visible flame which the angels, guarding the constellations, hurl at the evil spirits who come too near. Hence a modern poet makes his Peri fly through space 66 Rapidly as comets run To th' embraces of the sun; On the night of April 25, 1095, both in France and England, the stars were seen "falling like a shower of rain from heaven upon the earth." The Chronicle of Rheims describes them as driven like dust before the wind; and great commotions in Christendom were foreboded in consequence by the members of the Council of Clermont. By the common people in England, the event was deemed ominous to the king, William Rufus, " that God was not content with his lyvyng; but he was so wilful and proude of minde, that he regarded little their saying." To come down to modern times. The last century was drawing to a close, when a grand meteoric shower was seen over a very considerable portion of the area of the globe. It became conspicuous toward midnight on the 12th of November, 1799, and rapidly waxed terrible, continuing for several hours. To the Moravian missionaries in Greenland, who witnessed the scene, the contrast was of the strangest description-a landscape of unvarying ice and snow around them, and the semblance of the heavens on fire above; for glowing points and masses, thick as hail, filled the firmament, as if some vast magazine of combustible materials had exploded in the far off depths of space. Humboldt and Bonpland observed the spectacle on the coast of Mexico. The former remarks :— "Thousands of bolides and falling-stars succeeded each other during four hours. Their direction was very regular from north to south. From the beginning of the phenomenon there was not a space in the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon which was not filled every instant with them. All the meteors left luminous traces or phosphorescent bands behind them, which lasted seven or eight seconds." Mr. Ellicott, at sea, off Cape Florida, was another spectator. called up," he states, "about three o'clock in the morning to see the shooting-stars, as they are called. The phenomenon was grand and awful. The whole heavens appeared as if illuminated with sky-rockets, which disappeared only by the light of the sun toward daybreak. The meteors, which at any one instant of time appeared as numerous as the stars, flew in all possible directions, except from the earth, toward which they all inclined, more or less; and some of them descended perpendicularly over the vessel we were in, so that I was in constant expectation of "I was |