EDITOR’S TABLE.

The Inner Life of Man.—We are indebted to the kindness of an esteemed friend who was present at the recent delivery of a lecture before the ‘Young Men’s Society’ of Newark, New-Jersey, by Mr. Charles Hoover, upon ‘The Inner Life of Man,’ for a few passages from that admirable performance, which may be relied upon as very nearly identical with the language that fell from the lips of the speaker. We cannot but hope, on behalf of our citizens, that Mr. Hoover may be invited to repeat his lecture in this city. Surely, its enlarged views, its benign inculcations, its tender remonstrances, are needed among us; nor will the good seed fall altogether upon stony ground, nor be utterly choked by the tares that abound in our field of bustling and busy existence. ‘But what,’ the reader may ask, ‘is this inner, higher life, concerning which we hear so much in these latter days?’ Let Mr. Hoover make answer: ‘It is that ethereal, spiritual nature, which by an incarnation only less mysterious than that of the Son of God, is in present temporary alliance and partnership with our animal nature; which, itself imperishable and immortal, measures the cycle of its probation burthened with a dead body. It is that in man which loves the beautiful and the good, which expands and warms to the breathing and the voice of love; which, like the child listening to the murmuring sea-shell, catches the far-off sound of the solemn future, and hears celestial harmonies in silentest hours. It is that which in infancy gathers in its first excursion the stuff that infant dreams are made of; which in childhood makes the welkin ring with joy and laughter, crowns itself with flowers, and arches life and the world, and all inaccessible things and places, with airy bridges; which sees angel-forms in flitting clouds, and in the gorgeous glory of setting suns beholds the vestibule and drapery of other worlds: which holds communion with flowers as things of life, and with birds as beautiful and gentle friends; which rebounds like a liberated bow from the touch of grief to the freedom of joy, and sees in its own tear-drop a perfect rainbow. To the inner life of man, in its gradual and successive unfoldings, belong those deep musings of the heart, which suggested perhaps by trifles light as air, become mighty, like pent-up fires in a mountain’s bosom, and tossing off the superincumbent pressure, burst forth in a flame of patriotism to unyoke a nation, or in heroic religious love to bless a world. In the inner life of man are born and nurtured those deep and intense affections which make a man willing to die for his country, his faith, and his friends; which purified, lift him up an angel; which poisoned, burn to hell, and turn him into a fiend; there rise the fountains of generous sensibility; there dawn hope and love, and reverence and faith; there yearn the immortal desires of continued existence and eternal joy; there is the chamber of prophetic visions and poetic fires; there conscience holds its court, and in God’s stead utters its solemn decision. There too the acutest of our sensibilities to suffering reside. ••• And this inner, spiritual nature of man is his distinguishing glory, the priceless, inalienable treasure which he carries with him amid all the changes of time, and all the disasters of the universe. It is his all. It is his proper self. Other things are circumstances of his being. This is his being, subsisting independently of every other thing and being except the Deity. It invests all external objects with its own character and coloring; paints its own image on the sky, the floods, the fields, and faces of men, and turns the world into a thousand-faced mirror, and every face flings back upon the soul its own likeness, and all its flitting, changeful phases of mood and feeling. Is it guilty? ‘The fiends of its own bosom people air with kindred fiends that hunt it to despair.’ Is it sad? The sighing of the softest breeze is heard as a requiem, and the natural beatings of its own heart sound like ‘funeral marches and muffled drums.’ Is it glad, innocent, and happy? All nature smiles and puts on the garments of beauty; the stars sing together, the trees of the forest rejoice, and the floods clap their hands. Thus the visible universe becomes a mere reproduction of the spirit of man that beholds it. Create a mind, and it creates for its residence an external world of its own hue and character. Make that mind happy, and its external world, from pole to pole and from the zenith to its centre, is resplendent with light and beauty; balm-like airs, soft and fragrant as those of uncursed Eden, breathe upon it, and all its life is love. Dreaming, it sees a ladder reaching to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending on errands of mercy, and waking, exclaims with reverential joy, ‘Surely God is in this place.’ Make a mind miserable, and you darken its universe. The stars fall from its heaven, the golden fruitage of its paradise decays, and winter winds wail around it, and night and storm mingle their pitiless elements on its unsheltered head. Intertwined and involved in the inner life, are occurring at all times the great things of human history. In the sanctuary of unrevealed bosoms, in the ‘silent, secret sessions’ of thought, and in the glow of individual feeling, in the field, at the fire-side, in the closet, or on the sleepless bed, there is man’s history: there, unfolding to act, or infolding itself to die, the soul is in its greatness, is in labor with itself, and struggling with big, burning thoughts, and ‘truths that wake to perish never;’ decreeing with solemn form and force what is to be done, and what endured. Let no man despise what is revolved in the private mind.’

We scarcely know which most to admire, the nervous thoughts embodied in the following passage, or the fervent and beautiful language in which a just reproof is conveyed:

‘In all our wanderings round this world of care, we have been deeply moved and amazed at the fact, that down into the world of troubled, sorrowing mind and tortured sensibilities, the professors and light-bearers of the religion of Jesus have thrown so few of its melting beams. Of transcendent mysteries this is not the least, that of those who hold to a religion that is comprehended in one burning word, one transforming principle, Love; which is not a theory, but a divine passion, and whose hopes all rest on the doctrine of forgiveness; so few practically and heartily pity, forgive, and love the erring and the wretched of the family of man. Oh! it was not thus when Pity, eighteen hundred years ago, habited as a man, and leaning upon a pilgrim’s staff, set out from the brow of Nazareth to the hill of Calvary, tracing with tearful eye and weary foot the roads of Judea and the streets of Jerusalem! ••• In an age which, in sorrow not in anger, in heart-felt regret, not in bitterness, we are compelled to regard as extensively pseudo-philanthropic; when a vaunting benevolence is current, which hovers every where and alights no where; which loves all men in general and no man in particular; profuse of pity to the heathen, while bloated with poisonous hate to its neighbor; it is refreshing to see occasional instances of practical brotherhood with poor, down-trodden, benumbed and forsaken humanity. That is true benevolence, which with mingled faith, reverence, and love, descends in quest of the inner life beneath repulsive appearances, and tainted name, and shattered fortune, and from the depths brings up a bleeding heart, a scathed soul, and speaks to it of hope and consolation, and cheers it up to the purpose of self-recovery, and the recommencement of a virtuous life, and the reconstruction of a broken, blasted fame; that rekindles with vestal care its dying fires, and like a pious mother, nurses it through weakness, infirmity, irresolution, and despondency, back to hale strength and vigor; that by a generous confidence in its earliest repentings, and a generous forgiveness of its gravest faults, lends strength to its purposes and permanence to its reform. Oh! there are such hearts all around us, still warm and beating, though pierced through with many sorrows, goaded it may be at once by a sense of guilt and the horrors of abandonment, yet not dead to virtue, nay, sensitively alive to it; ‘for as certain flowers open only in the night, so often in the dark hours of a great sorrow the human soul first opens to the light of the eternal stars.’ There are such hearts buried all around us; and from their unquiet graves come up the low wail, the stifled sob, the muttered curse, the anguished prayer, appealing to the thoughtless brotherhood above them for a ray of light, and a breath of the free air of heaven! Hearken, and ye shall hear the tones of an eternal miserére, mingling and swelling like distant organ-peals, drowned by the din of day-light, but re-heard in all hours of thought and stillness, in all places of meditative retirement. Listen, and ye shall hear soliloquies of the heart with itself, revealing pleasant memories and hopes, and tendernesses and joys, that come up from the past in shadowy troops, with lights and garlands—and vanish, making the darkness more visible and solitude more hideous. Blessed, we say, for Heaven has said it, blessed are they whose ministry of love is in that unquiet inner world; whose sympathies intertwine themselves with its strained, snapped fibres and ligaments; whose hand gently withdraws the barbed arrows of outrageous fortune, and into the ragged wound pours the oil of consolation and the balm of joy! Select, sacred, and heaven-ordained and anointed priests and priestesses they, of a God of love in a world of sorrow. Not their commission is it to declare to cowering criminals a God wrathful, vindictive, and scarcely less bloody than the Druid’s deity, hating with infinite venom the unhappy violator of his laws; not theirs to deal out curious metaphysics and cold abstractions, giving a stone for bread and an adder for an egg to the sons of sorrow and the daughters of misfortune; but to inspire hope in the desponding and peace in the troubled bosom; to give light for darkness, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; to bring back the lost to their Father’s house, and raise the dead to life again.’

A brace of Pellets from ‘Julian.’—Not one of our readers, we will venture to say, has forgotten the spiritual Julian, whose ‘Top of New-York,’ and the inquiry concerning ‘the law’ between man and wife, in regard to getting up first in the morning, attracted so much attention and remark two or three months since. We annex two late paper-pellets of his brain; and must ask the reader to admire with us the fervent feeling of new paternity wreaked upon expression in the first, and the ease and simplicity of style which mark the unstudied sketch that succeeds it: ‘Have you ever any nervous days, my kind Editor? Nervous, beyond publishing days, or the want of copy; beyond excesses, the reaction of excitement, fast-days, and the giving of thanks?—for these last are animal only, and for such, doctors are made and abound every where. The cure for them you may get in a brown-paper parcel; it is buyable; and of late it is eatable; you may take it in a lozenge. But the days of which I speak are such as you must endure patiently unto the end. ‘They come like shadows, so depart,’ but the cloud that gives the shadow is beyond your reach. A new doubt or apprehension, or an old one with an uglier face than usual; a hideousness not before seen, a devilishness of malice flashing upon you for the first time, or even an unkind word, added to your previous gathering of matériel, may tip the balance of your pleasant thoughts, and then, all colors changing into one, the black cloud rolls over you, and dark thoughts, wholly foreign to your nature, throng round and stab at you, till at last, by that old snakish sympathy of excitement, your own dark passions rise and embrace them, and the sensitive guardians of the brain, mingling in the fray, give you up, one by one, captive to the devil. In the lighter hours of the day, the dead hopes of the Past, the beauties of other days, throng round you, and shake their dry bones; and oh, what efforts at sprightliness! what ravishing of graces! what whirling and rattling of bare bones, as they waltz round to that music of other days! And now, born of these, comes another group, with the laughing eye of young years and a full heart; and ah! the tempting lip, the heaving bosom, the light step of the perfect form; ha! ha! there is life, there is beauty in the world again! But then will they betray you? Will they grow old and ugly? Will they live to mock at you? And now the words, ‘No you don’t, you can’t come it,’ tremble upon your lips; but then, oh! the delight of giving up to it; going the whole, the entire, the unclipt, the blind-folded, the universal; ‘ha! ha! come to my heart, my beauties!’ and with open arms you stagger to their embraces. But in that long, long, kiss, with the hot breath of passion, and the bounding blood and brain reeling to madness, there is the bitterness of death. Dust and ashes!—take them away. ••• The drop too much in all this is, that you get no sympathy from others; it is quite too personal, too exclusive for that. Whereas, in the solemnities of New-Year’s, and in all the concernments of that day, the whole world beareth company. Not but that we have occasion for all our bravery, our greetings and rejoicings; it is well to affect that, for there is a strange man about town, all that day, and a disci mori whispered about the streets; and although we pretend not to know, or to hear him, there is one at our house who hath let him in; and all day long is he parleying and protesting and offering refreshments, forsooth, to that unwelcome visitor. But there is a pleasure in the assurance that the cunning of our neighbors shall not avail more than ours with his impertinence; that he shall be stabbed under the fifth rib, that he shall wince under his hits, his jokes, his stinging rebuke! There is also something companionable in the thought, that we are not alone in this onward movement of years, this stern necessity of motion, this tread-mill step! No one can defalcate in this particular; no one can Texas-ize and be quit of his transgressions and his onward travel. But millions of our own kith and kin travel the same way; England goes with us; Europe goes with us; and let not the indolent Turk dream that he is becalmed the while; let not the exclusives of the rising sun imagine that they in their nearness to Heaven do not, nevertheless, whirl on in the general motion, even as the outer barbarians! Decidedly, they do; their somersets avail not, and the edicts of the great Ching-poo are astounded at their non-effect. This is one pleasant reflection born of New-Year’s; beside, it would be amusing, if one could laugh at any thing so sad, to observe the humors of the few who think upon the bearings of that solemn time. In the year to be, there are many to come, many to go, and but few to tarry; yet all have their ambitions of a life-time; those even, to whom the stars have grown dim, and life become almost a mockery under Heaven, dashing into the coming day with something of the old zest; while the many, the oi polloi, who have not yet made their grand move, are now ready, and think that therefore the earth is to take a new route in creation; forgetting that the old round must be the round for ever. Nights sleepless with joy, nights sleepless with pain, nights long with watching, feverish thought; crime that stings like an adder, and nights short with perfect rest; days long and weary, days bright and dashing, hot and cold, wet and dry, and days and nights with all of these—as hath been in the time that’s past, and will be in the time to come.

‘There is something very pitiable in these humors, Mr. Editor; indeed very laughable, if your mouth is shaped to that effect; but as it happens with me to-night, my mouth refuses to twitch except in one direction. Its corners have what Prof. P—— used to call the ‘downward tendencies.’ Perhaps it is because this is with me the anniversary of a day upon the events of which are hanging the movements of all after-life; it may be this, and there may be thereto added the coloring of a winter’s day. The wind howls about the house-tops, and the air pierces like needles; even the stars, when they look down in thousands, as the rack goes by, seem to shiver in their high places; yet perhaps there is nothing so personal in all that, considering that just so the wind howled last night, and may for a month to come; but oh! as I am a nervous man, and look back upon the circling months, and feel the sting here and the stab there, in that galvanic battery; and as I look forward with eager eye, and ear open to the faintest whisper of the dim to-morrow, it is not as the stars shiver from excess of light, but with a shudder at the heart from the cooler blood of——Good night, my kind Editor; that sentence is quite too long already, and there are some things too personal to tell.

‘P. S.—Whoop! hurrah! Light upon the world again! Where are you, my fine Editor? I say Sir, I was an ass—do you hear?—an ass, premature, wise before my time, a brute, a blockhead! Did I talk of dust and ashes? Oh! Sir, I lied multitudinously. Every nerve, every muscle that didn’t try to strangle me in that utterance, lied. No, Sir; let me tell you it’s a great world; glorious—magnificent; a world that can’t be beat! Talk of the stars and a better world, but don’t invite me there yet. Make my regrets, my apology to Death, but say that I can’t come; ‘positive engagement; happy some other time, but not now.’ Oh, no; this morning is quite too beautiful to leave; and beside, I would rather stay, if only to thank God a little longer for this glorious light, this pure air that can echo back my loudest hurrah. And then, my boy——But haven’t I told you? Why Sir, I’ve got a boy!—a boy—ha, ha! I shout it out to you—a Boy; fourteen pounds, and the mother a great deal better than could be expected! And I say, Mr. Editor, it’s mine! hurrah and hallelujah forever! Oh, Sir! such legs, and such arms, and such a head!—and Oh my God! he has his mother’s lips! I can kiss them forever! And then, Sir, look at his feet, his hands, his chin, his eyes, his every thing, in fact—so ‘perfectly O. K.!’ Give me joy, Sir; no you needn’t either. I am full now; I run over; and they say that I ran over a number of old women, half killed the mother, pulled the doctor by the nose, and upset a ’pothecary-shop in the corner; and then didn’t I ring the tea-bell? Didn’t I blow the horn? Didn’t I dance, shout, laugh, and cry altogether? The women say they had to tie me up. I don’t believe that; but who is going to shut his mouth when he has a live baby? You should have heard his lungs, Sir, at the first mouthful of fresh air—such a burst! A little tone in his voice, but not pain; excess of joy, Sir, from too great sensation. The air-bath was so sudden, you know. Think of all his beautiful machinery starting off at once in full motion; all his thousand outside feelers answering to the touch of the cool air; the flutter and crash at the ear; and that curious contrivance the eye, looking out wonderingly and bewildered upon the great world, so glorious and dazzling to his unworn perceptions; his net-work of nerves, his wheels and pulleys, his air-pumps and valves, his engines and reservoirs; and within all, that beautiful fountain, with its jets and running streams dashing and coursing through the whole length and breadth, without stint, or pause—making altogether, Sir, exactly fourteen pounds!

‘Did I ever talk brown to you, Sir, or blue, or any other of the devil’s colors? You say I have. Beg your pardon, Sir, but you—are mistaken in the individual. I am this day, Sir, multiplied by two. I am duplicate. I am number one of an indefinite series, and there’s my continuation. And you observe, it is not a block, nor a block-head, nor a painting, nor a bust, nor a fragment of any thing, however beautiful; but a combination of all the arts and sciences in one; painting, sculpture, music (hear him cry,) mineralogy, chemistry, mechanics (see him kick,) geography, and the use of the globes (see him nurse;) and withal, he is a perpetual motion—a time-piece that will never run down! And who wound it up? But words, Sir, are but a mouthing and a mockery. ••• When a man is nearly crushed under obligations, it is presumed that he is unable to speak; but he may bend over very carefully, for fear of falling, nod in a small way, and say nothing; and then, if he have sufficient presence of mind to lay a hand upon his heart, and look down at an angle of forty-five degrees, with a motion of the lips—unuttered poetry—showing the wish and inability, it will be (well done) very gracefully expressive. With my boy in his first integuments, I assume that position, make the small nod aforesaid, and leave you the poetry unuttered.’

‘Odd-zounds!’ thought we, on glancing at the subject of the ensuing piscatory epistle, ‘what can all this outcry mean?’ But that exclamatory query we shall permit Julian himself to answer, in his own peculiar way:

‘Gammon!’ said Harry. ‘Wait a moment,’ said I; ‘I shall throw sixes;’ and to be sure down came the sixes, striking him on the ‘seize’ point, and then rebounding to my own, swept every man from the table. The board was put up, and after a little closing chat with Mrs. H——, I was taking leave, when Harry called me back. ‘Julian,’ said he, ‘Come and breakfast to-morrow upon ‘Zounds and Sounds.’’ ‘Zounds and Sounds!’ said I, ‘I shall be delighted! What a charming dish! I remember of——’ ‘And Jule,’ said Harry, interrupting me, ‘perhaps Fanny would come?’ ‘Oh, impossible! you know she is delicate yet, and the mornings are quite chilly.’ ‘Well, good night; and don’t forget that we breakfast early.’ ‘My dear Sir,’ said I, ‘I could rise at cock-crow for Zounds and Sounds.’ ••• Now, I had never even heard the words before; but I pique myself on knowing strange and choice dishes; not the far-fetched things of the French, but things good per se, and without a sea of condiments; the delicate, the rare subtleties which our own women know so well to compound. Of course, I ought to know Zounds and Sounds, and of course, I should not hurry to disclaim that knowledge. Harry might have known, and then again he might not; but he remembered, as I have since ascertained, of having eaten something of the kind some thirty years since; something he had perhaps cloyed of, and so forgotten, but something very delectable; something that would perhaps touch his palate again like the maple-sugar and other dainties of his boyhood. Having found the article that day, he had secured a large quantity without asking what they were, and had them taken privately to his house, with a view of making up the dish himself. I came home, rolling the magic words ‘as a sweet morsel under my tongue,’ and immediately sought out a curious dictionary, in which various strange things are expounded; and failing in that, looked into Crabbe’s Synonymes, (by the rule of contraries, I suppose, for there certainly could be nothing like Zounds and Sounds,) but as Longfellow says, ‘All in vain!’ Fanny having retired, I got into my slippers and sat down by the fire to ruminate a little. ‘Zounds and Sounds!’ said I. ‘What an incomparable phrase! What a sweet suffusion of the z! What vibratory tingling upon the tympanum! How pleasantly percussive to the brain; and how even the teeth partake of the sensation! I declare! I must write a song upon Zounds and Sounds! I will. I will write an invitatory song to the Editor. Let me see. Zounds, rounds, bounds and hounds. Exactly! Now then:

Finishing the song, I looked about for my flute to find a tune for it, but reflecting that I should wake the house, put it by again for another time. ‘After all,’ said I, ‘a flute couldn’t touch that z sound. Indeed what can? What is there like it? Has a church-bell any tone approximating it even? Has a violin? Has a hautboy? Has a French horn? Has a jew’s-harp? Ay, that’s the thing! A Jew’s-harp has something like it; and so—so has a bumble-bee. A thought strikes me! It is possible that Zounds and Sounds are—Yes,’ said I, rising and shouting with the excitement, ‘Zounds and Sounds are bumble-bees!—bumble-bees curiously prepared; gathered in some warm climate where they abound, and pickled! Henceforth let no man call that bee ‘humble;’ he is bumble, most decidedly!’ And with this thought I hurried off to bed. ••• It may have been an hour afterward, while I was in the maze between sleeping and waking, that the words ‘Zounds and Sounds’ escaped me, unawares. ‘What’s that?’ said Fanny, starting up. ‘Are you sure that I spoke?’ said I. ‘Indeed, I am; you said something about going down town.’ ‘Did I? Well, I forgot to tell you. I am going down town; so you must not be surprised at my rising early to-morrow. I think of breakfasting out.’ ‘You think! I should think you did; thinking aloud, and asleep too! Don’t think so again, dear; you woke me out of a sound sleep.’ ••• At an early hour the next morning, I was at my friend’s house. How I got there, I do not now remember; but I have a distinct recollection of a ringing sensation in my head, and of not being quite sure that I was awake, till the romping of a dozen children, and a buzzing sound every where of Zounds and Sounds aroused me to a full sense of the great treat that was coming. Then it was that I sang the last night’s song, and it took immensely, especially with the children. Harry was not there to hear it, and lost that pleasure, (as I have never repeated it,) unless he heard it in the kitchen, where he was superintending the burden of the song. Shortly after, came the call of ‘breakfast,’ and we all walked in, at least fifteen of us, and took seats at the table before the Zounds and Sounds were brought in. Harry was already seated at the head. Presently the Zounds came in, piping hot; but before they had reached the table, Harry turned to me and asked if I had any preference. ‘Have you taken the stingers out?’ said I, thinking of bumble-bees. ‘Stingers!’ said Harry. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said I; ‘only a joke;’ and making a bold guess at some white things that now appeared on the table, added, ‘A little of the breast.’ Harry smiled, but said nothing. Plates were now served all around. Breakfast went on, and Zounds and Sounds went down, and every body appeared to be perfectly charmed with the dish. One might say, to be sure, that they were a little saltish, and then again, with that exception, there was no remarkable flavor; but that might be the rarity, not to have any flavor. No one, however, thought aloud in this manner. On the contrary, there was a manifest inclination to detect resemblances of taste and flavor to those of very many rare and delicate cookeries; but after awhile there came a pause. It was during this pause, that my friend turned to his wife and inquired if she was quite sure they were seasoned properly. ‘I think they are a little salt,’ said Mrs. H——; but, my dear, you know you prepared them yourself.’ Harry looked thunder-clouds, and called one of the servants. ‘Mary,’ said he, ‘take the key and bring me a raw Zound. You will find two buckets-full in the wine-cellar.’ Wondering at this, we wondered still more at finding our coffee-cups all empty at the same time. Each one was waiting for drink. The raw Zound was now brought, and Harry, plunging his fork into it, while all eyes were fixed upon him, turned it over and over, examining it on all sides, and then, with his arm at a right angle, raised it deliberately to his nose. Almost instantaneously, and while still some distance off, there came a very wise expression about his nostrils, which, as the Zound came nearer, dilated still more and more, deepening the expression to a frightful extent, till, all doubts removed, he shouted out: ‘Codfish! by thunder!’

We had actually taken within us, and bepraised, the unfreshened tongues and bladders of codfish!

It is now more than a week, O Editor! since this breakfast came off, or rather since it went down, for it isn’t off yet; even now, that taste——Do you know what it is, Sir, to have your jaws hang?—to be always on the eve of a gape?—to be afraid of the tongs or the snuffers, or a tall man, especially in tights, lest the next yawn may wholly tear up your spinous process, your spheroid cartilage?—hang the doctors!—do you understand? Well; I am in that way; and it’s all from those confounded Zounds and Sounds!

Gossip with Readers and Correspondents.—Coming home lateish to-night from the opera, we found the following, written in what Mrs. Malaprop would term ‘rather ineligible characters,’ as if hastily reduced to paper. Howbeit, we knew it at once for the ‘hand-write’ of our favorite, facile and felicitous historian of Tinnecum. He is one of your persons now who thinks, and not a member of that hum-drum class who only think they think; moreover, he knows ‘how to observe’ better even than Miss Martineau. It was an every-day thing which struck him, in the aspect of our winter-sleighs, as he rode up in one of them a day or two ago; but this sketch of ‘The Snow-Omnibus’ is not so common: ‘Past midnight! The embers are dying. The thunder of the city becomes a dull roar, the roar a murmur: then comes a dead pause, interrupted sometimes by the watchman’s club as it rings on the pavement, or the shrill, solitary whistler executing the threadbare airs of the opera, or ‘Life on the Ocean Wave.’ The door opens without noise. I lift up my nodding head and see Dr. Bartolo, his hat like a miller’s, and his whiskers fringed with white. With tread soft as a mouse or an apparition, he illumes his candle, turns on his heel, and says in a whisper very appropriate to the time, the place, and the fact conveyed: ‘It snows!’ Such is the only intimation to break the magic and the mystery of the early morning, unless it be the small tinkling of bells like frogs in a brook; a complete shifting or rather change of scene noiselessly wrought; a foul city purified, whitened, sparkling, and glorious, like a Scarlet Lady who emerges with her meretricious charms in chaste robes, chaste as Diana. She taketh the veil. The virgin-snow is unsullied upon her bosom, just as it dropped softly out of heaven, undefiled by footsteps, dazzling only to conceal. ’Tis but the momentary semblance of purity. The sun is up. Hark! the tumult and excitement is begun. The crowds throng and jostle through the pure element; the horses prance to the gay and perpetual chimes, and Broadway is the paradise of belles. Underneath all is the obscenity of filth! What attracts our attention, however, is your snow-omnibus, very different in looks, spirit and animation from the same lumbering carriage upon wheels. What do you see in the latter? A set of cross, hungry-looking men, going up town to dinner, packed together in a magnetizing attitude, with knees jammed against knees, and eyes wherever they can find a place to put them; women crushed between stout fellows, and indecently nudged at every apology of a jolt; in short, a penthouse of ill-humour; twelve ‘all full’ people; whiskerandi, gentle maidens, wives, and ‘live widders,’ ranged with solemn regularity like coffins in a vault. All fix their eyes where their minds are, on vacuity, and try to be for the time present, what they seem to be, as stupid as the devil, as if they dreaded some sympathetic contact, revealing bank-frauds and transactions in stocks. Who ever saw a smile in an omnibus, even when court-plasters have changed places? You might as well look into a slow-driven hearse for something sunshiny! Your broker dares not even chuckle. Your exquisite cannot resort for consolation to the suction of his cane, but all look grim and virtuous as Seneca, until they pull the leather, pass up six-pence through the port-hole, and as they open the door, their faces begin to expand, but only with the animal anticipation of dinner. Compare this with the grouping and animation of the Sleigh-omnibus; heads piled upon heads, as in a picture; black hats, feathers, plumage, barrel-caps, etc., bobbing about in a lively manner to the music of bells. Down they go into the gullies, through thick and thin, with a ludicrous contrast and juxtaposition of faces; all forced in spite of themselves to give expression to their several humors, mirth, deviltry, or spleen. Cheeks glow, eyes shine, spectacles sparkle, glances fly impudently to the windows where the face of beauty presses against the cold pane. The runner sinks into a ‘rut,’ and that makes the company bow to each other, and gives that old rascal of a sexegenarian an excuse to bring his gray whiskers very near to the blooming visage of a girl whose charming modesty is shrined in colors more delicate than the blush on the cheek of a magnum-bonum plum. Sixty must not aspire after such fruitage; but in an omnibus, where’s the harm? But we have a remark to make on nosology, or the noses of the group. So spicy a variety of folk cheek-by-jowl (Parthians and Elamites, Medes, Jews and Persians,) begets contrast. Nose-bridges of all styles show their peculiar architecture, Roman or Grecian; while straight, crooked, bottle, snub, pug; some flat and with no bridge at all, others very much abridged; are brought together in an amicable jostling, ‘comparing themselves by themselves,’ and setting off one another as a rose sets off a geranium. While I point out these peculiarities to my friend Phiz, a coral shriek rends the air, and by heavens! the whole load is upset!’ ••• We hear from all quarters ‘good exclamation’ on the Directions for Sonnet-Making, from the popular pen of our friend ‘T. W. P.’ in our last number. An eastern correspondent, however, questions the correctness of one assumption of the writer: ‘It would be well to avoid coupling such words as moon and spoon; breeze and cheese and sneeze; Jove and stove; hope and soap; all of which it might be difficult to bring together harmoniously.’ Our correspondent thinks that this decree was issued without due reflection; and he proceeds to substantiate his position by ‘the ocular proof:’

SONNET.

If there be not a fruitful lesson in the subjoined, which we venture to separate from its context in a recent letter from an esteemed friend and contributor, then we—are mistaken: ‘Apropos of ‘American Ptyalism,’ in your March number: a friend was telling me the other day of the agonies he had suffered from dispensing with the use of tobacco. He had used it in various ways for thirty years, but finding that he was breaking down under it, he broke off abruptly, about a year ago. ‘Let a tobacco-chewer,’ said he, ‘who wishes to know what nerves are, abstain for only one day, and if he has a wife who is delicate and nervous, he will forever after look upon her with a sympathy that he never felt before. Why, Sir, for months after I had forsworn tobacco, my mouth and jaws were any thing but flesh and bone. They were fire, ice, and prussic-acid, alternately. The roof of my mouth would at one moment have the feeling of blistering, and the next of freezing; and in addition to that, needles would occasionally pierce my face in every imaginable way. My head, for the most part, was a large hogshead with a bumble-bee in it, and the bung stopped up. You know that I am not imaginative; but my teeth, Sir, would suddenly grow to the length of a mastodon’s, and perhaps five minutes after, (if at the table,) a narcotic deadness would take the place of the previous excitement, and I would seem to be mumbling my food like people whose teeth are gone. But in the street, I always seemed to be grinning at every body, like some horrible beast who couldn’t get his mouth shut. If you have ever stayed agape for an hour or so, while the doctor was on his way to reset your jaws, you can imagine how distressingly public that feeling is. One bitter cold night I woke on the cellar-stairs, having got that far in search of tobacco, in my night-dress. Did you ever do so? You may think it trifling; but whenever from any cause you have become nervous, the first night that you wake on the cellar-stairs in the dark will be something to remember. At another time I dreamed of dying. I had been long sick and had wasted to a mere nothing; but having had abundant time to prepare for death, I flattered myself that I was quite ready to go; and indeed, my hold upon life was so feeble, (a slight change in the weather would have snapped it, so it seemed,) my very breath was so fluttering and unsatisfactory, that I thought it would be as well perhaps to have done with it. The faces of friends, and the out-door world, with all its many goings-on, were pleasant to behold, but faintly so—indistinctly; my pulsations had gone down to such extreme tenuity, that the effort of getting at a pleasure killed it. But I was mistaken; for just before dying, the thought of my cigars came to me like a blessing; and although my physician told me I had but a few moments to live, I would not be refused. A cigar was brought; I seized it in my bony fingers, held it up to the light, smelt of it, and fondled it till the light was brought; and then, with what little grace my strength would allow, I inhaled that divine tobacco! How complacently, as far as I was able, did I then look around upon my surviving friends! My eyes, however, closed very soon from languor, and my breath now coming only at rather long intervals, the puffs were far between; notwithstanding which, I lived it through to the last inspiration; but in the closing draught, the fire from the cigar burnt my mouth so badly that I—awoke, and found I had actually bitten my lip in a most shocking manner! Well, Sir, you may think it was pleasant not to be dying, and so it was; but as I then felt, I think I would sooner have gone, if I could have taken with me the fragrance of that incomparable regalia.” ••• Our new friend, the writer of the ‘Lines to an Early Robin,’ who desires us to send him six numbers of the Knickerbocker containing his article, inquires ‘which kind of his writing we should prefer, prose or poetry?’ We hardly know what to say, in answer to this categorical query. It will not perhaps be amiss, however, to adopt the in medio tutissimus ibis style of the traveller, who, upon calling for a cup of tea at breakfast, handed it back to the servant, after tasting it, with the remark: ‘If this is tea, bring me coffee—if it is coffee, bring me tea; I want a change.’ If what ‘M.’ sends us is poetry, let him send us prose; if it is prose, (and it certainly ‘has that look,’) let him send us poetry, by all means. ••• Judges and other legal functionaries, though ostensibly ‘sage, grave men,’ are oftentimes sad wags, and fond of fun and frolic. From one of this class we derive the annexed: ‘A few months since, in a neighboring town, a knight of the yard-stick was paying his addresses to a Miss Inches, who, beside some personal attraction, was reputed to be mistress of a snug fortune. At first, the lady encouraged his addresses, but afterward jilted him. Rendered desperate by his double loss, the young man went home and deliberately shot himself; and the coroner’s jury next morning brought in a verdict of ‘Died by Inches!” ••• How very beautiful are these lines upon the death of a young and lovely girl, the bloom of whose fair cheek refused to wither at the blighting touch of the Destroyer:

We scarcely know when we have been more amused, than in reading lately a satirical sketch, entitled ‘The House of Mourning: a Farce.’ Squire Hamper and his lady, personages rather of the rustic order, who have come up to London from the family seat in the country, in the progress of shopping in a street at the west end of the metropolis, stop at a dry-goods undertakers, with a hatchment, and ‘Maison de Deuil,’ or House of Mourning, by way of a sign over the door. ‘Mason de Dool!’ exclaims the Squire, responding to his wife’s translation; ‘some foreign haberdasher’s, I ’spose.’ The lady, however, coaxes him to go in; for although she has lost no friends, she longs to see the ‘improvements in mourning,’ which she can do by ‘cheapening a few articles, and buying a penny-worth of black pins.’ The worthy pair enter, take an ebony chair at the counter, while a clerk in a suit of sables addresses the lady, and in sepulchral tones inquires if he ‘can have the melancholy pleasure of serving her.’ ‘How deep would you choose to go, Ma’am? Do you wish to be very poignant? We have a very extensive assortment of family and complimentary mourning. Here is one, Ma’am, just imported; a widow’s silk, watered, as you perceive, to match the sentiment. It is called the ‘Inconsolable,’ and is very much in vogue in Paris for matrimonial bereavements.’ ‘Looks rather flimsy, though,’ interposes the Squire; ‘not likely to last long, eh, Sir?’ ‘A little slight, praps,’ replies the shopman; ‘rather a delicate texture; but mourning ought not to last forever, Sir.’ ‘No,’ grumbles the Squire; ‘it seldom does, ’specially the violent sorts.’ ‘As to mourning, Ma’am,’ continues the shopman, addressing the lady, ‘there has been a great deal, a very great deal indeed, this season; and several new fabrics have been introduced, to meet the demand for fashionable tribulation, and all in the French style; they of France excel in the funèbre. Here for instance is an article for the deeply-afflicted; a black crape, expressly adapted to the profound style of mourning; makes up very sombre and interesting. Or, if you prefer to mourn in velvet, here’s a very rich one; real Genoa, and a splendid black; we call it the ‘Luxury of Woe.’ It’s only eighteen shillings a yard, and a superb quality; fit, in short, for the handsomest style of domestic calamity.’ Here the Squire wants to know ‘whether sorrow gets more superfine as it goes upward in life.’ ‘Certainly—yes, Sir—by all means,’ responds the clerk; ‘at least, a finer texture. The mourning of poor people is very coarse, very; quite different from that of persons of quality. Canvass to crape, Sir.’ The lady next asks if he has a variety of half-mourning; to which he replies: ‘O, infinite—the largest stock in town; full, and half, and quarter, and half-quarter mourning, shaded off from a grief prononcé to the slightest nuance of regret.’ The lady is directed to another counter, and introduced to ‘the gent. who superintends the Intermediate Sorrow Department;’ who inquires: ‘You wish to inspect some half-mourning, Madam? the second stage of distress? As such Ma’am, allow me to recommend this satin—intended for grief when it has subsided; alleviated, you see, Ma’am, from a dead black to a dull lead color. It’s a Parisian novelty, Ma’am, called ‘Settled Grief,’ and is very much worn by ladies of a certain age, who do not intend to embrace Hymen a second time.’ (‘Old women, mayhap, about seventy,’ mutters the Squire.) ‘Exactly so, Sir; or thereabout. Not but what some ladies, Ma’am, set in for sorrow much earlier; indeed, in the prime of life; and for such cases it is a very durable wear; but praps it’s too lugubre: now here’s another—not exactly black, but shot with a warmish tint, to suit a woe moderated by time. The French call it a ‘Gleam of Comfort.’ We’ve sold several pieces of it; it’s very attractive; we consider it the happiest pattern of the season.’ ‘Yes,’ once more interposes the Squire; ‘some people are very happy in it no doubt.’ ‘No doubt, Sir. There’s a charm in melancholy, Sir. I’m fond of the pensive myself. Praps, Madam, you would prefer something still more in the transition state, as we call it, from grave to gay. In that case, I would recommend this lavender Ducape, with only just a souvenir of sorrow in it; the slightest tinge of mourning, to distinguish it from the garb of pleasure. But possibly you desire to see an appropriate style of costume for the juvenile branches, when sorrow their young days has shaded? Of course, a milder degree of mourning than for adults. Black would be precocious. This, Ma’am, for instance—a dark pattern on gray; an interesting dress, Ma’am, for a little girl, just initiated in the vale of tears; only eighteen-pence a yard Ma’am, and warranted to wash.’ The ‘Intermediate Sorrow Department,’ however, derives no patronage from the ‘hard customer;’ and we next find her in the ‘Coiffure Department,’ looking at caps, and interrogating a show-woman in deep mourning, who is in attendance, and enlarging upon the beauty of her fabrics: ‘This is the newest style, Ma’am. Affliction is very much modernized, and admits of more gout than formerly. Some ladies indeed for their morning grief wear rather a plainer cap; but for evening sorrow, this is not at all too ornée. French taste has introduced very considerable alleviations.’ Failing however, in ‘setting her caps’ for the new customer, the show-woman ‘tries the handkerchief’ enticement; exhibiting one with a fringe of artificial tears worked on the border—‘the ‘Larmoyante,’ a sweet-pretty idea.’ The Squire intimates that as a handkerchief to be used, it would most likely be found ‘rather scrubby for the eyes.’ But the show-woman removes this objection: ‘O dear, no, Sir—if you mean wiping. The wet style of grief is quite gone out—quite! The dry cry is decidedly the genteel thing.’ No wonder that the Squire, as he left the establishment with his ‘better half,’ was fain to exclaim: ‘Humph! And so that’s a Mason de Dool! Well! if it’s all the same to you, Ma’am, I’d rather die in the country, and be universally lamented after the old fashion; for, as to London, what with the new French modes of mourning, and the ‘Try Warren’ style of blacking the premises, it do seem to me that before long all sorrow will be sham Abram, and the House of Mourning a regular Farce!’ ••• A Canadian Correspondent, in a few ‘free and easy’ couplets, advises us how much we have lost by declining a MS. drama of his, which he is hammering out on the anvil of his brain. We subjoin a few lines of ‘The Angry Poet:’

We have just received the following from an esteemed correspondent, who transcribes it verbatim from the familiar letter of a friend. If we have a solitary reader who can peruse it without emotion, let him confine his indifference within his own cold bosom:

‘I have just returned from the funeral of poor Emma G——, a little girl to whom I had been for years most tenderly attached. As there was something very touching in the circumstances connected with her death, I will relate them to you. She was the daughter of a widow, a near neighbor of mine. When I first knew her, she was a sprightly child of about four years of age, perfect in form and feature. The bloom of health was on her cheek; her eye was the brightest I ever saw; while in her bosom there glowed a generous affection that seemed to embrace all with whom she came in contact. But when she reached her seventh year, her health began to decline. The rose suddenly paled on her cheek, and her eye had acquired prematurely that sad, thoughtful expression which gives so melancholy a charm to the features of wasting beauty. Her mother looked on with an anxious heart and at an utter loss to account for so sudden a change in her health. But soon a new source of anxiety appeared. While dressing her one day, she observed on Emma’s back, just between the shoulders, a small swelling, of about the size of a walnut. As she watched this spot, and observed that it grew larger from day to day, the mother began to have sad misgivings. These however she kept to herself for a time. Soon afterward, a slight stoop in her gait became visible. The family physician was now called in, and the worst forebodings of the mother were confirmed. Her idolized child was fast becoming a hump-back!

‘I will not attempt to describe the feelings of the mother, who was thus doomed to witness from day to day the slow growth of that which was to make one so dear to her a cripple and a dwarf. Suffice it to say, her love as well as care seemed to be redoubled, and Emma became more than ever the child of her affections. Nor did her little companions neglect her when she could no longer join in their out-door sports, and her own sprightly step had given place to a slow, stooping-gait, and the sweet ringing voice to a sad or querulous tone, that sometimes made the very heart ache. On the contrary, all vied with each other in administering to her amusements. Among them, none clung to her with more assiduity than her brother William, who was the nearest to her own age. He gave up all his own out-door play, in order to be with her, and seemed never so happy as when he could draw a smile, sad though it was, from her thoughtful features. But after a while, Emma grew wayward under her affliction; and unfortunately, though generally good-natured, William had a quick temper, to check which required more self-command than commonly falls to one so young. Sometimes, therefore, when he found plan after plan, which he had projected for her amusement, rejected with peevish contempt, he could hardly conceal from her his own wounded feelings. Yet, though at times apparently ungrateful, Emma was perhaps not so in fact; and she loved her brother better than any one else, save her mother. It was only in moments when her too sensitive nature had been chafed perhaps by her own reflections—for like the majority of children in her circumstances, she was thoughtful beyond her years—that her conduct seemed unkind. And then, when she marked the clouded expression of her brother’s face, she would ask forgiveness in so meek a spirit, and kiss his cheek so affectionately, that he forgave her almost as soon as offended.

‘Years thus passed on, when one day, after she had been more than usually perverse and fretful, William, who had been reading to her, on receiving some slight rebuff, started suddenly from his seat by her side, called her ‘a little hunch-back,’ and left the room. In a moment, however, his passion subsided, and returning, he found his sister in tears. He attempted to put his arm around her neck, but she repulsed him, and slipping away, retired to her own chamber. Her mother soon after learned what had happened, and going to Emma, found her upon the bed in a paroxysm of grief. She endeavored to soothe her feelings, but in vain; she refused to be comforted. ‘I want to die, mother,’ she replied to all her endearments; ‘I have long felt that I was a burden to you all.’ She cried herself to sleep that night, and on the morrow was too ill to rise. The doctor was called in, and warned the mother against an approaching fever. For three days she remained in an uncertain state; but on the fourth, the fever came in earnest, and thenceforth she was confined to her pillow.

‘In the mean time, the grief of William had been more poignant even than that of his sister. Thrice he had been to her bedside to ask her forgiveness, and kiss once more her pallid cheek; but she turned her face resolutely away, and refused to recognize him. After these repulses he would slowly leave the room, and going to his own chamber, sit brooding for hours over the melancholy consequences of his rashness. Owing to the previous enfeebled health of Emma, the fever made rapid progress, and it soon became apparent that she must die. William, in consequence of the violent aversion of his sister, had latterly been denied admittance to the chamber, though he lingered all day about the door, eagerly catching the least word in regard to her state, and apparently unmindful of all other existence.

‘One morning there was evidently a crisis approaching; for the mother and attendants, hurrying softly in and out the sufferer’s chamber, in quick whispered words gave orders or imparted intelligence to others. William saw it all, and with the quick instinct of affection, seemed to know what it foreboded. Taking his little stool, therefore, he sat down beside the chamber-door, and waited in silence. In the mean time, the mother stood over the dying child, watching while a short unquiet slumber held her back for a little while longer. Several times a sweet smile trembled round the sufferer’s lips, and her arms moved as if pressing something to her bosom. Then she awoke, and fixing her eyes upon her mother, whispered faintly, ‘I thought William was here.’ A stifled sob was heard at the door, which stood partly open. Mrs. G—— stepped softly out, and leading William to the bed-side, pointed to his dying sister. He threw himself upon her bosom, and pressing his lips to her pale cheek, prayed for forgiveness. Emma did not heed him; but looking again in her mother’s face, and pointing upward, said softly: ‘I shant be so there!—shall I, mother?’

‘No, my poor child!’ replied the weeping parent; ‘I hope not. But don’t talk so, Emma. Forgive your poor brother, or you’ll break his heart.’

‘Emma tried to gasp something; but whatever it was, whether of love or hate, it never reached a mortal ear. In a few moments she was no more.’

We take your amiable hint, good ‘P.’ of S——, and shall venture the forfeit. That our own ‘humor is no great shakes,’ we very cheerfully admit—so that there is an end to that ‘difference of opinion.’ ‘P.’ reminds us of an anecdote which we had not long since from a friend. ‘There, take that!’ said a would-be facetious doctor to a patient, whom he had been boring almost to extinction with what he fancied to be humor; ‘take it; ’t will do you good, though it is nauseous.’ ‘Don’t say a word about that,’ said the patient, swallowing the revolting potion; ‘the man who has endured your wit, has nothing to fear from your physic!’ ••• ‘C. M. P.’s parody on ‘Oh no, I never mention Him,’ is a very indifferent affair, compared with Hood’s transcript of that well-known song. We remember a stanza or two of it:

The kite-season has opened with great activity. Did you ever remark, reader, when Nature begins to waken from her winter-sleep; when the woods ‘beyond the swelling floods’ of the rivers begin to redden; when the first airs of spring assume their natural blandness; when ladies are out with their ‘spring hats’ and carmen with their spring-carts; when the snow has left us, and the city-trees are about leave-ing; how innumerous kites begin to thicken in the air? Yonder a big unwieldy fellow rises with calm dignity, trailing his long tail with great propriety behind him; here a little bustling creature ducks and dives, coquetting first on this side, then on that; until finally turning two or three somersets, it almost reaches the earth; but soon rises at a tangent, and sails far up into the bright blue firmament. Look! the air is full of them! It is a charming amusement, this kite-flying of the boys. We greatly affect it, even now, although we are ‘out of our ’teens!’ There is something ethereal in it; some thing that lifts up the young admiration

and the mysterious realm that lies beyond its visible confines. ••• We select from the ‘Random Reminiscences of a Retired Merchant’ a single passage; the entire article being quite too short for any other department of our work: ‘There once flourished in one of our commercial cities a little French merchant, who was very well known to every man and boy by the fact of his being always followed by a curly-haired yellow dog with his tail ‘cut a little too short by a d——d sight!’ During the last war, our little Frenchman was doing a very thriving business in the dry-goods line, and was supposed to be a little sharper at a bargain than any of his fellow-tradesmen. There also flourished at the same time, in the same city, an importing merchant of Yankee origin, who was noted as a long-headed, close-fisted dealer. It is well known that during the war English goods were sold at enormous prices. The Yankee merchant was in that line of trade; and a few days before the arrival in this country of the news of peace, he received private advices from the Continent which led him to anticipate it. As he had a large supply of English goods on hand at the time, the prices of which would of course instantly fall, he set about disposing of them as soon as possible to his less informed and unsuspecting customers. The little Frenchman was one of his victims. After much haggling, and the offer of a long credit, the importer effected a bill of sale of goods to him, to the amount of something like twenty thousand dollars, taking his notes on long time in payment. These he considered perfectly good, of course, as his customer’s reputation in the money-market was unsullied. The bargain being consummated, the two friends parted, each in a capital humor with himself; the Yankee to deposit the notes in his strong box, and the Frenchman to his store, where, receiving his newly-purchased goods, he immediately commenced marking them one hundred per cent. above cost, thus making before midnight, to use his own boast, a profit of twenty thousand dollars on his purchase! Three days afterward the official news of peace came; English goods instantly fell one half, and our little Frenchman awoke in horror from his dream of cent. per cent. Nine persons out of every ten under such circumstances would have failed at once. But nil desperandum was the motto of our Frenchman. He saw that he had been ‘bit’ by his commercial friend, and he immediately set his wits at work to turn the tables upon him. So, late in the evening of the next day he repaired to the dwelling of the importer, and told a long and pitiful story of his embarrassments. He said his conscience already smote him for making so heavy a purchase while in failing circumstances, and that he had come to make the only reparation in his power; namely, to yield up the goods obtained of the importer, on the latter’s cancelling the notes given therefor. The Yankee at first demurred; but on the Frenchman insisting that he was a bankrupt, and that he feared the moment he opened in the morning the sheriff would pounce upon him with a writ that would swallow up every thing, he finally agreed to the proposition. ‘Half a loaf was better than no bread,’ he thought; and so the notes and the bill of sale were accordingly cancelled. By daylight in the morning the Yankee was at the Frenchman’s store, with his teams, as had been agreed upon the night before, and every package of his goods was soon removed. The two merchants again parted, the Frenchman with a mind relieved of a heavy load, and the Yankee rather down in the mouth at the result of his trade. Two or three days afterward, as the importer was passing the Frenchman’s store, he observed his sign still up, and every thing apparently as flourishing as ever. He stepped in to see what it all meant. ‘Hallo! Mr. S——,’ said he, ‘I thought you had failed!’ ‘Failed!’ repeated the Frenchman, thrusting his thumbs in the arm-holes of his vest, and sliding his legs apart from counter to counter, till he resembled a small Colossus of Rhodes: ‘Failed? No, be gar! Firmer than ever, Mr. H——, but I should have failed, almosht, if I hadn’t got rid of dem tamn’d English goods at cost!’ Straitway the out-witted Yankee ‘departed the presence!’’ ••• It has been generally supposed that the oratorical efforts of ‘Major Pogram,’ as described by Mr. Dickens in a late number of his ‘Chuzzlewit,’ rather carricatured even the worst specimens of western eloquence; but the subjoined passage from the speech of a Mr. Maupin in the Indiana legislature, upon the subject of establishing a tobacco warehouse and inspection at Paducah, seems to militate against the validity of this ‘flattering function:’

‘Mr. Speaker: I feel incompetent to measure this comprehensive subject. Were my thoughts as deep as the Mississippi, and as clear as the Ohio, I could not grasp its whole magnitude. It requires a mighty mind; one that can look beyond the landscape; he must be able to look even beyond the ocean; to grapple with all the intricacies and winding convolutions of the subject, and to map in his mind the whole length and breadth of its territories. Here, Sir, is a river, whose broad and deep stream meanders from Paducah through one of the most fertile tobacco countries in the world, to Ross’s landing, and at the terminus of the great Charleston railroad, and possessing a steam navigation of eight hundred miles, and giving commercial facilities to the briny ocean. Behold this vast channel of commerce; this magnificent thoroughfare of trade; one grand, unbroken chain of inter-communication, like to a prodigious sarpent, with his head resting upon the shores of Europe, and his lengthened form stretching over the ocean and curling along this great winding stream in serpentine grandeur, proudly flaps his tail at Paducah! ••• Sir, the ball is in motion; it is rolling down in noise of thunder from the mountain heights, and comes booming in its majesty over the wide-spread plain. Yes, Sir, and it will continue to roll on, and on, gathering strength and bulk in its onward progress, until it sweeps its ponderous power to the town of Paducah, and there stand a towering monument of patriotic glory and sublime grandeur, with the noble American eagle proudly perched upon its cloud-capped summit, and gazing with swelling pride and admiration down upon the magnificent spectacle of the greatness of human wisdom and power!’

Every-body has heard of the good old lady who purchased a family Bible at a bookstore, and soon after returned it, being desirous to exchange it for one of larger print. ‘We have at present no Bible,’ said the clerk, ‘of a larger-sized type than the one you have.’ ‘Well,’ replied the lady, ‘I wish you would print me one, and I’ll call in a day or two and get it!’ She thought a request so reasonable could readily be complied with. One of our most prominent publishers mentions a clever anecdote of a poetess, who in reading the proofs of her forthcoming volume, found passages of a page or more in length enclosed in parenthetical pen-marks in the margin, with ‘Thomson,’ ‘Gray,’ ‘Moore,’ ‘Burns,’ ‘Wilson,’ etc., inscribed at the end. One day a letter accompanied the return-proofs, in which the lady remarked, that ‘she had endured the repeated insinuations of the publisher long enough; she was no plagiarist, whatever her other literary faults might be; she had on each occasion looked over the works of Moore, Thomson, Burns, Gray, etc., but with the exception perhaps of a passage in Wilson’s ‘Isle of Palms,’ there was not even the slightest pretext for a charge of plagiarism. She would thank the publisher, therefore, to discontinue in future his groundless hints upon the margins of the proof-sheets.’ The initiated will understand that the ‘insinuations’ of which the poetess complained, were simply the names of the different compositors, indicating the lines at which they severally began to place her effusions in type! ••• Many a reader will recall, as he peruses the subjoined unpretending sketch, a kindred scene in his own experience, ‘when life and hope were new:’

OUR OLD MEETING-HOUSE.

‘Many years ago, when ‘the dew of the morning was fresh upon me,’ there stood, just in the edge of the village where I was born, an old church edifice. The graves of many an early settler were round about it; and often as the shadows of evening were settling upon the valley, with half-averted face and hurried steps have I stole noiselessly by to our rural home. O, how many associations crowd upon the memory, in connection with that rude old meeting-house! It was an old-fashioned, square building, without portico, or steeple, or belfry. The winter’s hail and summer’s rain had beaten against it for half a century. Its numerous small windows, without curtain or blind, let in floods of light. Its small pulpit, perched high upon one side, and close to the wall, concealed the preacher’s body, while the heads of the congregation were just seen rising above the square high-backed pews. Hardly a cushion was to be seen; and the interior furnishing was of the simplest and plainest character. I have said that it had associations of great interest. It is now more than an hundred years since a small band of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians settled in that valley. Though but few in number, and braving the elements and the savages, they determined to carry with them into the wilderness not only the Christian’s hope, but the Christian’s ordinances. A small building of logs arose soon after the settlement, in which for many years an educated and regularly-ordained minister preached the gospel to a little flock. The inquiry had already commenced; ‘The prophets, where are they?’ The larger part of the pioneers had sunk into peaceful graves, when the war of the revolution commenced. It was still a frontier hamlet, and was soon swallowed up and lost in that terrible whirlwind of death which year after year swept over the settlements of Central New-York. When peace was restored, the remnant of the inhabitants whom war and disease had spared, returned to their former homes. But though war and disease had impoverished them, they had not forgotten the God of their fathers. Having no house for assembling together, the inhabitants met in what they termed ‘the meeting-house yard;’ and there organized anew that church which has continued thence to this day, and determined upon the erection of the old meeting-house of which I have spoken. Under the open heavens, with their feet upon their fathers’ graves, they dedicated themselves anew to the service of Him who was Lord overall, and whom they acknowledged as their only Sovereign. I have looked over the records of that meeting with emotions never to be forgotten. The gray-haired patriarch, loaning on his staff with one hand, and with the other guiding our youthful footsteps to the house of prayer on every Sabbath morning, was one of that small number, and took an active part in that solemn ceremony. The stillness of a Sabbath morning in the country has often been remarked. How often, amid the din and bustle of the great city, does the heart of him who has been accustomed to the holy quietness of the day of rest in some secluded valley, pant for a return to the home of his youth! Such has been my own experience; in the far-off past I see again the gathering of the quiet, orderly congregation; I hear the voice of the good old father who ministered in holy things; I sit by the open window and look out upon the green graves thick strown round the old meeting-house; the warbling of the feathered songsters in the grove near by falls softly upon the ear. The voice of prayer is hushed, and the voice of praise ascends. Alas! the voices of most of those which were then attuned on earth, are now attuned to more celestial music in another world!

‘But our old meeting-house, where is it? It has gone with those who, in the midst of trials, and in the plenitude of their poverty, with their own hands hewed out its massive timbers; and the place that knew it knows it no more! It was in the fall of the year that a traveller on horseback rode up to the principal hotel, and as he dismounted and handed the reins to his host, he inquired what building that was in the southern part of the village? On being informed that it was the meeting-house, he remarked, with a dogged air, that ‘he had often seen the Lord’s house, but had never seen the Lord’s barn before!’ The comical remark of the traveller produced an immediate action. The good old house soon disappeared. A more ambitious edifice was built in another part of the village. The land-marks are now entirely effaced, and the spot where it stood has been added to the ‘meeting-house yard.’ The monuments of the young and the aged who sleep there dot over the place where the first Presbyterian congregation, ay, the first congregation of Evangelical Christians of any denomination, in Central New-York, assembled to worship the living God.’

We are promised by an esteemed friend some interesting extracts from the original American correspondence of Mrs. Grant of Laggan, whose ‘Memoir and Correspondence,’ edited by her son, has recently attracted so much attention and remark in Great-Britain. Mrs. Grant appears to have been a woman of very remarkable powers, and of the most admirable common sense. Her observations upon the ‘amusive talents’ of Theodore Hook, and his entire devotion to their cultivation, are replete with the soundest wisdom. The distinction between living to amuse the public merely, and the exertion of one’s intellectual powers for one’s own benefit, and with an eye to the claims of riper years, is admirably discriminated and set forth. There is not perhaps a more instructive lesson than that conveyed by professional wits, who are ‘first applauded and then endured, when people see that it is all they have.’ As auxiliaries, as contrasts, with reflection and thoughtful exercitations of the mind, wit and humor are felicitous matters; as an intellectual main-stay, however, they have been weighed in the balance by a hundred brilliant examples, and have always been ‘found wanting.’ ••• Punch, at this present writing, save three or four numbers, in February, is among the missing. Late issues however, furnish some valuable contributions to academical statistics; as for example, Mr. Boys, who in his report upon the metropolitan school-visitation, writes as follows:

‘The use of sponge for cleaning slates he found confined to 17¼ per cent.; of whom 5½ used the sponge wet with water, and 11¾ with saliva; the remaining 82¾ made use of the latter liquid and the cuffs of their jackets instead of sponges, with an occasional recourse to the pocket-handkerchief. The author found, in schools in which the Latin language was not taught, a lamentable deficiency in the knowledge of the meaning of ‘meum’ and ‘tuum;’ he pointed out how the great extent of juvenile crime might thus be accounted for, as being caused by the absence of all instruction in the Latin language, and hoped that teaching it would soon be made obligatory upon all school-masters.’

There is a humorous sketch of an examination of law-students, from which we select an ‘exercise’ or two:

‘Ques: Have you attended any and what law lectures? Ans: I have attended to many legal lectures, when I have been admonished by police magistrates for kicking up rows in the streets, pulling off knockers, etc.

Ques: What is a real action? Ans: An action brought in earnest, and not by way of a joke.

Ques: What are a bill and answer? Ans: Ask my tailor.

Ques: How would you file a bill? Ans: I don’t know, but would lay the case before a blacksmith.

Ques: What steps would you take to dissolve an injunction? Ans: I should put it into some very hot water, and let it remain there until it was melted.

Ques: What are post-nuptial articles? Ans: Children.

Ques: What is simple larceny? Ans: Picking a pocket of a handkerchief, and leaving a purse of money behind.’

We have had books on etiquette, of various kinds, lately, but a work of this sort for prisons will be found, one would think, to supply an important desideratum. George Selwyn, when a servant was sent to Newgate, for stealing articles from the club-house of which Selwyn was a member, was very much shocked: ‘What a horrid report,’ said he, ‘the fellow will give of us to the gentlemen in Newgate!’ This feeling will doubtless be more general by and by:

‘In consequence of complaints that have been made by persons committed to prison before trial, who object to their not being allowed to mix with other prisoners, it has been thought necessary to frame a Book of Etiquette for prison purposes. Of course a superior delinquent, like a forger, could not be on visiting terms with a mere pick-pocket, nor could a man charged with stealing a hundred pounds, feel at his ease in the society of one whose alleged theft might be mean and insignificant. It is, we believe, intended to introduce the prisoners to each other formally, not by name, but by the offence with which they are charged. Thus, the Governor of Newgate would say to Felony: ‘Allow me to introduce you to Aggravated Larceny. You ought to know each other—indeed you ought. Aggravated Larceny, Felony; Felony, Aggravated Larceny.’ By a nice adjustment and proper application of the rules of etiquette, a very admirable system of social intercourse might be established in all our prisons, and the present complaint of a want of ‘good society,’ which falls so severely on superior scoundrels, would at once be got rid of.’

Deafness, although sometimes rather annoying—as for example in the case mentioned in preceding pages by John Waters—is yet not without its advantages. Your conversational ‘‘Deaf Burke,’ who can endure any amount of ‘punishment’ without being the worse for it,’ enjoys not unfrequently a great deal of negative felicity. We envied the condition of such an one the other day, while sitting with a friend at the ‘Globe,’ over such potables and edibles as that matchless establishment can alone set before its guests. At a table in near proximity, sat two Englishmen, whose comments upon ‘matters and things’ in America were embodied in such ‘voluble speech’ that we could scarcely hear ourselves speak. ‘They may talk about their hinstitutions as much as they please,’ said one of the speakers, ‘but honly look at ’em—see their heffect, from the ’ead of the government, down. Yesterday I perused in the ‘Courier’ newspaper an account of a negro’s skin, hentire, that was found with the ’ead attached, in the Mississippi river!’ ‘’Orid, isn’t it! Think o’ such a thing as that picked up in the Tems! And last week. I read in the ’Erald of a man near the Canada lines, who was found dead by the side of a fallen tree, half eaten up by wild hogs or panthers. He ’ad a flask of whiskey by his side, which he had taken ‘neat,’ till it had killed him; and in his pocket was a dirty pack o’ cards, wrapped up in a copy of the Declaration of Hindependence! That’s your liberty for ye!’ ☞ See if these very absurdities be not found embodied within a twelve-month in some new work by a travelling Englishman, upon that ‘miserable experiment at self-government, the United States of America!’ ••• Here are some scraps of ‘Parisian Gossip’ which will not be altogether uninteresting to American readers. One of our Paris letters states that at a splendid party given by Lady Cowley, there occurred a rather curious incident. ‘Among the guests was a Mr. L——, (one of the snobiculi, most likely,) who, believing that none but a friend whom he addressed was within hearing, said, ‘And they call this a party? Why, I never saw any thing so dull in all my life. It is not worth the trouble of dressing for such an affair; and then the rooms are so intolerably hot.’ Unfortunately, the noble hostess was standing near, and overheard him, and immediately said: ‘Mr. L——, there (pointing to the ante-room,) is a cooler room, and beyond it is the hall, still cooler.’ This prompt and significant hint was felt, understood, and taken.’ ‘Every body in Paris knows or has heard of Halevy the composer, and his brother, the author. A bon mot of a pretty and sarcastic lady, at the expense of both of them, is now going the round of the gossipping circles. ‘Do you like Halevy, the author?’ inquired a friend. ‘Pas du tout, pas du tout!’ answered the lady; ‘He is as dull as if his brother had composed him!’ Eugene Sue has hatched a large brood of ‘Mysteries.’ The Journal des Debats having published ‘Mysteries of Paris,’ the Courier Français is now publishing the ‘Mysteries of London.’ At Berlin no less than four different authors have published its ‘Mysteries.’ The ‘Mysteries of Brussels’ are being detailed in one of its journals. The ‘Mysteries of Hamburg’ have been exposed in print. At Vienna they are giving the ‘Mysteries of Constantinople;’ and a Paris newspaper promises in a short time the ‘Mysteries of St. Petersburg.’ Going on at this rate, there will soon be no ‘Mysteries’ in the world, and even the very word will become obsolete.’ ••• ‘The God of our Idolatry’ contains some home-thrusts at the national love of money, and not a few just animadversions upon the standard of respectability which obtains, in certain quarters, among us. Hamilton and Basil Hall’s experience in this regard seems also to have been that of our correspondent. The tendency of this standard, in a social and intellectual point of view, is very far from elevating. ‘You are going to the dinner at ——’s to-day, of course,’ said a lady with ‘an eye to the main chance’ to a friend of ours, the other day; ‘the company will be composed of some of our most ’fore-handed citizens—all heavy men,’ Our friend did go to the dinner; and he found the guests as ‘heavy’ as their best friends could have wished them to be. ••• Reading, in presence of a travelled friend, the proof of the admirable paper which opens the present number, we came to the passage which records the opinion of Kepler, that ‘the world is a vast animal, that breathes and reasons;’ whereupon our listener remarked: ‘No doubt of it; it is an animal; I’ve seen its four-quarters myself!’ It was a pun worthy of a butcher. ••• We are not so certain that the moral of ‘The Independent Man’ is ‘an unexceptionable one.’ The ‘Charcoal-sketcher’ expresses the general opinion, we fear, in this regard: ‘There’s a double set of principles in this world, one of which is to talk about and the other to act upon; one is preached and the other is practised. You’ve got hold, somehow, of the wrong set; the set invented by the knowing ones to check competition and to secure all the good things for themselves. That’s the reason people are always praising modest merit, while they are pushing along without either the one or the other. You always let go when any body’s going to take your place at table; you always hold back when another person’s wanting the last of the nice things on the dish. That’s not the way; bow and nod, and show your teeth with a fascination, but take what you want for all that. This is manners—knowing the world. To be polite is to have your own way gracefully; other people are delighted at your style—you have the profit.’ ••• The reader will not overlook the ‘Alligatorical Sketch’ in preceding pages. We begin to perceive how much the alligator has been slandered. It yawns merely, it would seem; and the only care requisite is, to be absent when its jaws close! ‘The ’gator isn’t what you may call a han’some critter, but there’s a great deal of openness when he smiles!’ The smile of an alligator!! ••• ‘Cleanliness,’ says Fuller, ‘is godliness;’ and he is not far out of the way; for no man, we think, can be a dirty Christian. In a moral and religious point of view, then, we are doing good service in calling public attention to the spacious baths of Mr. Charles Rabineau, at the Astor-House, and at his new establishment at Number 123 Broadway, Albany. Go wash in them and be clean, reader, and thank us for the joy which you will experience, when you shall have come out of the water and gone your ways. ••• One of the late London pictorial publications contains a portrait of Sir Hudson Lowe, the notorious keeper of Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, at St. Helena. It is in perfect keeping with the generally received estimate of the character of that functionary. The wretched thatch that disfigures without concealing the intellectual poverty of his narrow skull; the scowling features; the ragged penthouse brows; are ‘close denotements’ of the truth of ‘Common Report.’ In short, judging from the much-bepraised ‘likeness’ to which we allude, if Sir Hudson Lowe was not a tyrant, and a small-minded one withal, God doesn’t write a legible hand. ••• Some clever wag in the last Blackwood has an article, written in a hurry, upon the hurriedness of literary matters in these our ‘go-ahead’ days. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have not only ceased to purchase those old-fashioned things called books, but even to read them. Instead of cutting new works page by page, they cut them altogether:

‘When England luxuriated in the novels of Richardson, in eight volumes, it drove in coaches and four, at the rate of five miles an hour. A journey was then esteemed a family calamity; and people abided all the year round in their cedar parlors, thankful to be diverted by the arrival of the Spectator, or a few pages of the Pilgrim’s Progress, or a new sermon. To their incidental lives, a book was an event. Those were the days worth writing for! The fate of Richardson’s heroines was made a national affair; and people interceded with him by letter to ‘spare Clarissa,’ as they would not now intercede with her Majesty to spare a new Effie Deans. The successive volumes of Pope’s Iliad were looked for with what is called ‘breathless’ interest, while such political sheets as the Drapier’s Letters, or Junius, set the whole kingdom in an uproar. And now, if Pope, or Swift, or Fielding, or Johnson, or Sterne, were to rise from the grave, MS. in hand, the most adventurous publisher would pass a sleepless night before he undertook the risk of paper and print; would advise a small edition, and exact a sum down in ready money, to be laid out in puffs and advertisements! ‘Even then, though we may get rid of a few copies to the circulating libraries,’ he would observe, ‘do not expect, Sir, to obtain readers. A few old maids in the county towns, and a few gouty old gentlemen at the clubs, are the only persons of the present day who ever open a book!’ And who can wonder? Who has leisure to read? Who cares to sit down and spell out accounts of travels which he can make at less cost than the cost of the narrative? Who wants to peruse fictitious adventures, when rail-roads and steam-boats woo him to adventures of his own? People are busy ballooning or driving; shooting like stars along rail-roads, or migrating like swallows or wild-geese.’

In allusion to the illustrated newspapers, now vieing with each other in enterprise and expense, in the British metropolis, the writer says: ‘The pictorial printing press is now your only wear! Every thing is communicated by delineation. We are not told but shown how the world is wagging. Views of the Holy Land are superseding even the Holy Scriptures, and a pictorial Blackstone is teaching the ideas of sucking lawyers how to shoot. Libels are veiled in carricature. Instead of writing slander and flat blasphemy, the modern method is to draw it, and not to ‘draw it mild’ either. The columns of certain papers bear a striking likeness to a child’s alphabet, such as ‘A was an Archer, and shot at a frog.’ All the world is now instructed by symbols, as formerly the deaf and dumb. We have little doubt of shortly seeing announcements, standing like tomb-stones in those literary cemeteries, the Saturday papers, of ‘A new work upon America, from the graver of George Cruikshank;’ or ‘A new fashionable novel, (diamond edition,) from the accomplished pencil of ‘H. B.’’ ••• We have a ‘Query’ from a Philadelphia correspondent, as to whether Mr. and Mrs. Wood would not be likely to come over here, if invited, and in company with Brough, and other artists, establish English opera among us. Touching the disposition of the Woods in this matter, we know nothing; but Brough is too busily employed to admit of such a consummation. What with his agency for the new sporting gun-powder, (which Daniel Webster declares to be superior in strength and cleanliness to any other thing of the kind in the world,) and for the ‘Illustrated London News,’ ‘Old Parr’s Life-pills’ etc., he has scarcely leisure to achieve his private calls, and execute occasionally, for the gratification of his friends, those charming airs which are indissolubly associated with his name. ••• Messrs. Snelling and Tisdale’s ‘Metropolitan Library and Reading-Room,’ at 599 Broadway, near Houston-street, supplies an important desideratum in that quarter of the metropolis. In addition to a well-stocked library and reading-room, there are coffee, conversation, chess, and cigar-apartments, and all the belongings of a first establishment after its kind. ••• We had clipped for insertion, from a Baltimore journal, a poem in honor of Ole Bull, entitled ‘The Bewitched Fiddle,’ which we have unluckily mislaid or lost. It was by Mr. Hewitt, a popular song-writer and musical composer, and was one of the most fanciful and felicitous things we have seen in a month of Sundays. As it is at this moment out of our power to print it, we can only counsel our readers, if they encounter it any where, not to fail of its perusal. ••• We have a pleasant metropolitan story to tell one of these days, (at least we think so,) of which we have been reminded by the following from a late English magazine:

‘The vulgar genteel are nervously cautious concerning every thing they say or do; they are ever alive to the dread of compromising their ‘gentility.’ At a ball—it was a charity-ball!—given at a fashionable watering-place, a pretty young woman, who was sitting by her mother, was invited by a gentleman to dance. He led her to a set; when, instantly, two ‘young ladies’ who were of it, haughtily, withdrew to their seats. ‘They had no notion of dancing in such company’—and with good reason. The young person was nothing more than the daughter of a wealthy and respectable tradesman of the place; while they—the two Misses Knibbs—were members of its resident small ‘aristocracy.’ The places they had vacated were good-naturedly filled by two ladies who had witnessed the proceeding, one of whom was the daughter, the other, the niece, of a nobleman. Their position was too well established to be compromised by dancing for a quarter of an hour in the same set with a respectable tradesman’s daughter; but the two Misses Knibbs were the daughters of a retired soap-boiler.’

⁂ We have numerous communications in prose and verse, several of them from favorite contributors, of which we shall make more particular mention in our next. Three pages of ‘Literary Record,’ although in type, are unavoidably omitted.