ing, there is no better crucible in which to test a man than in the active brain shop of a metropolitan newspaper. There obtains in the latter an esprit de corps that is surpassed nowhere except, perhaps, in a well organized and drilled military troop in active service. There can be no loafers or laggards in either corps. A man is soon "sized up" and rated for what he is worth. John Edwards has been "sized up" in both of these professions. Ask any of his old army comrades-all of them--and there is but one reply: He was the truest, the bravest among the brave, and withal the most modest and unselfish." So, also, would be the verdict of his newspaper friends, and especially those with whom he was last associated; he was true always to his convictions, whether right or wrongthat he was brave goes without saying-that he was modest and unselfish, there is an avalanche of testimony.

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I shall add to these notes neither analysis nor panegyric which I leave to other but not more devoted friends. I have felt that no pen but his own could do full justice to such a character as that of John N. Edwards. To us who were for so many years his daily companions; who have experienced the loyalty of his friendship, the ineffable charm of his personality, and the masterful force of his genius, the loss is a bitter one, and words die upon the lips as we look into this open grave. Thousands and tens of thousands share the bereavement who also shared his loving kindness and charity-his daily practice of the sentiment:

'In men whom men condemn as ill,

I find so much of goodness still;
In men whom men pronounce divine,

I see so much of sin and blot,

I hesitate to draw a line,

Between the two where God has not."

The life which closed with the death of John Edwards grows no less beautiful and admirable as we realize that he has gone from us. He has left imperishable mementoes through which he will live wherever human hearts. beat to generous emotions. But far the most cherished

recollections will be those of his personal friends, those who knew how genuine were his qualities, how warm and tender and true he was back of the genius which flashed through his pages.

These lines from Pope might serve as a fitting epitaph:

"-Friend to truth, of soul sincere,

In action faithful, and in honor clear;

Who broke no promise, served no private end,
Who gained no title, and who lost no friend."

KANSAS CITY, June 8, 1889.

WRITINGS OF JOHN N. EDWARDS.

"POOR CARLOTTA."

[From the Kansas City Times, May 29, 1870.]

DISPATCHES from Europe say that the malady is at its worst, and that the young widow of Maximilian is near her death hour. Ah! when the grim king does come, he will bring to her a blessing and a benediction. The beautiful brown eyes have been lusterless these many months; the tresses of her sunny hair have long ago been scorched with fever and pain; the beautiful and brave young Spartan, rich in energy, in love, in passionate devotion, knows no more the roses and lawns of Miramar; the Mediterranean brings no more from over perilous seas the silken pennon of her fair-haired royal sailor lover. It is quiet about Lacken, where the Empress lays a-dying; but Time will never see such another woman die until the whole world dies.

It is not much to die in one's own bed, peaceful of conscience and weary of child-bearing. The naked age is crowded thick with little loves, and rose water lines, and the pink and the white of the bridal toilettes. Here is a queen now in extremity, who reigned in the tropics, and whose fate has over it the lurid grandeur of a volcano. A sweet Catholic school-girl she was when the Austrian came a-wooing, with a ship of the line for chariot. She played musical instruments; she had painted rare pictures of Helen, and Omphale in the arms of Hercules, and Jeanne d'Arc with the yellow hair, and the pensive Roland-her of the Norman face-over whose black doom there still flits a ruddy fervor, streaks of bright Southern tint, not wholly swallowed up of death. Yes! it was a love-match, rare in king-craft and court cunning. Old Leopold's daughter married with the flags of three nations waving over her, amid the roar of artillery and the broadsides of battle-ships. The sea gave its sapphire bloom and the skies their benison. Afar off French eagles were seen, alas! to shadow all the life of the bride with the blood of the husband. The nineteenth century witnessed the heroic epic which darkened to such a tragedy. She came to Mexico, bringing in her gentle hands two milk-white doves, as it were, Charity and Religion.

Pure as all women; stainless as an angel-guarded child; proud as Edith of the swan's neck; beautiful; a queen of all hearts where honor dwelt; mistress of the realms of music; rare in the embroidery she wove; having time for literature and letters; sensuous only in the melody of her voice; never a mother-it was as though God had sent an angel of light to redeem a barbaric race and sanctify a degraded people. How she tried and how she suffered, let the fever which is burning her up alive give answer. It is not often that the world looks upon such a death-bed. Yet in the rosy and radiant toils of the honeymoon, a bride came to govern an empire where

armies did her bidding, and French Marshals, scarred at Inkermann and Solferino, kissed with loyal lips her jeweled hand and murmured through their gray moustaches words of soldierly truth and valor. She sate herself down in the palace of the Montezumas and looked out amid the old elms where Cortez's swart cavaliers had made love in the moonlight, their blades not dry with blood of the morning's battle; upon Chepultepec, that had seen the cold glitter of American steel and the gleam of defiant battle flags; upon the Alemada where Alvarado took the Indian maiden to kiss, who drove the steel straight for his heart, and missed, and found a surer lodgment in her own.

All these were bridal gifts to the Austrian's bride-the browneyed, beautiful Carlota. Noble white vision in a land of red harlots, with soft, pitying, queenly face; hair flowing down to the girdle, and as true a heart as ever beat in woman's bosom. As a Grecian statue, serenely complete, she shines out in that black wreck of things a star.

It came suddenly, that death of her lover and her husband. It dared not draw near when the French eagles flew, but afterward what a fate for one so royal and so brave. God shielded the tried heart from the blow of his last words, for they were so tender as to carry a sorrow they could not heal. "Poor Carlota!" Youth, health, reason, crown, throne, empire, armies, husband, all gone. Why should the fates be so pitiless and so unsparing?

Somewhere in eternity within some golden palace walls, where old imperial banners float, and Launcelots keep guard, and Arthurs reign, and all the patriot heroes dwell, her Maximilian is waiting for his bride. Long ago that spotless soul has been there. Let death come quickly and take the body, and end its misery and subdue its pain. All that is immortal of Carlota is with her husband. The tragedy is nearly over. In an age of iron and steam and armies and a world at peace, it remained for a woman to teach nations how an empress loves and dies. Who shall dare to say hereafter there is nothing in blood or birth? What gentle sister, in the struggle and turmoil of life, will look away from that death-bed in Lacken Castle, and not bless God for being a woman and of the sex of her who is dying for her king and her empire? Sleep! the angels have, no need of sleep. Nothing suffices love. Having happiness, one wishes for Paradise; having Paradise, one wishes for Heaven. There is a starry transfiguration mingled with her crucifixion. The crown is almost hers, and in the beautiful garden of souls she will find once more the monarch of her youth.

A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

[Kansas City Times, April 26, 1872.]

It seems so strange that the hands of poetry should be laid upon perishable things. Heir of immortality itself, its offspring also should be immortal, having no stain of earth, no link that rusts, no flower that fades, no stream that runs dry, no passion that consumes, no sun that is obscured, no morning without its dawn, and no sky without its rainbow and its twilight. The picture that it calls into life, the book that it makes beautiful, the idea that it etherializes, the field that it decorates, the warrior that it ennobles, the woman that it makes angelic-all, all should live only in the atmosphere that surrounded their creation, in the memories the poem made impervious to time or the rough current of real and practical

things. Fancy has its own imperial caste, and surrenders but too sorrowfully its precious and adored deceits. There are too many lattice bars against which its wings beat in vain, and too many false and luring lights in the windows of its hope's first affiuence-in the color and charm of its day-dreams and its visions.

It can do no good-however sternly inexorable the logic of to-day may be to make the Cleopatra of our youth forty-two and crosseyed when Anthony lost Actuim for her own sweet sake. It can do no good to doubt the story of the asp, and deny the half-human, half-panther instinct which, cruel to the last, forgave not the losing of the battle, nor the deep sword-thrust that was sterner proof of Roman love than the starkest blow ever struck by legionary or Egyptian. Why deny that when the long, voluptuous dance was done-a dance dreamily danced in the odor of frankincense and the balm of myrrh-that the full, pouting lips of the beautiful Herodias made no pleading prayer for an august head laureled with God's benediction? It brings no peace to any dreamer's dream to know that the deft fingers which wove the web of long deceit and broken promise were gaunt and wrinkled, and that the good king, in the ceaseless clatter of Penelope's shrewish tongue, longed for the blue sweep of the seas running shoreward, for the wines of the nymphs-the Bacchanal court, and the sweet, long loves of the Queen Calypso.

And now the once fair "Maid of Athens" lies a-dying, old, withered, abandoned of the world and forgotten altogether. The wife of an English consul in Greece, Byron met her, loved her for a month and a day, sung of her, and sailed away. The song did not die-will not die. It was passionate and beautiful. Many remember it; many remember some voice that has lingered over it— some night when it dwelt in the memory as a star lives in the skysome intonation that had a meaning as sweet as it was hidden.

"Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh! give me back my heart."

She was beautiful then. The black hair was long and lustrous; her eyes that unfathomable hue born of a moment's pleasure or passion; her form the lithe, superb motion Byron's heroines always had, her voice softly musical and tuned to the old Italian airs he loved so dearly. The fancy pleased him passing well, but no sin came of it all, and over against his name-when the inexorable angel has made up the records of the world-there will be written naught of a folly that could darken the frown even on the unforgiving face of his uncharitable and unsympathetic wife.

And to-day the Maid of Athens, forgotten of the world, lies old, withered, helpless, waiting for death in sight of the blue waves that went out with her life's first romance and her poet lover. It is well, perhaps, that time kneels at no shrine and passes no heads by untinged of gray and unshorn of laurels. He would linger, else, too long for hearts that are breaking and weariness that would be at rest. The grave alone is sacred ground. Its confines mark the limit of finite beauty and bloom, and no matter how sweet the song that pours its fragrance out, nor how adored the idol lifted up in the placid past of youth and joyous retrospect, it were better that time shrouded and shattered all, than, like the wisest and best of humanity, it knelt at the feet of some alluring fancy-worshiped beneath the rays of some imperial beauty that had even Byron for votary or voluptuary.

And death should come quickly to her whose face is a picture