Lost in the wide Atlantic! Not a speck
Remains, a splinter of her mast or deck!
Death came, and none beheld; perhaps in sleep,
And whirled her with her hundreds, stark and dead,
Into the fathomless, abysmal deep!

No storms can touch her, nor the sounding lead
Bring up a fragment of their loosened hair;
But they must rest, 'midst secrets foul and fair,
Wilder than dreams, in the sea-caverns, fraught
With riches beyond count, until the world
Is bare of waters, or some star is hurled
Out of its orbit, and the Earth is-nought!

3. A CATALOGUE OF COMMONPLACES.

“What is Earth ?" the poet saith.
It is a place of birth and death;

A school wherein the schoolmen teach,
And never practise as they preach;

Where Greek and Latin stamp the scholar;

Where Fame is reckoned by the dollar;

Where Scandal bold, and İnuendo

Taint all that women and e'en men do;

Where Lie the first is peerless reckoned,

Until thrust out by Lie the second :

Where Candour, Worth, and Thought are sleeping;

Where Cant is upwards, upwards creeping;

Where Age is drivelling; Youth pedantic;

Religion frozen, or else frantic ;

Where great Palaver despot reigneth;
Where Wisdom to the moon complaineth ;
Where folks who winds and waters measure,
And chattering sçavans take their pleasure,
And meet each year from hall and college,
Stunning the soul with scraps of knowledge;
Where Strength is right; where Truth is wrong;
Where Genius shrinks into a song,

Where struggling girlhood toils and dies;

Where Childhood pines; where Hunger cries,
And none respondeth to its call;

And yet-blue Heaven is over all!

C. L

SHORT RIDES IN AN AUTHOR'S OMNIBUS.

EXPERIENCE AND FORESIGHT.

"EXPERIENCE," says Coleridge, "is like the stern-lantern of a ship, which only shows the dangers we have passed;" but surely this light may be so thrown forward by reflection as to guard us against the perils that are coming. We can best read what is to be by perusing the book of what has been. Leibnitz tells us that "le présent est gros de l'avenir," and we may fairly conclude that the unborn child will bear the same resemblance to its parent, that an echo, as yet unheard, will bear to the sound by which it was produced. We may question Campbell's averment that "coming events cast their shadows before;" but there can be little doubt that past occurrences cast a gleam behind them, reverting enough to give us glimpses of those that are following them.

PURSUING BETTER THAN CATCHING.

THERE was sweetness even in the bitterness, mirth even in the curse that condemned man to labour for his bread; for exercise itself is health and very often happiness; but as art is man's nature, and civilization the intention of Providence, there must be a class to cultivate the intellectual soil, that our minds may eat the bread of thoughtful life. Constant occupation of some sort is indispensable to a healthy enjoyment of existence; stagnation is corruption-disease, misery.

Life has been well compared to a fox-chase; for the pleasure consists in chasing, not in overtaking your object; and when you have caught the fame, fortune, rank-whatever you were hunting-you have but the poor gratification of being in at the death of your own enjoyment-unless you start a fresh quarry. No matter how trivial this may be, it is better to do nothings than nothing: but it need not necessarily be frivolous, for after we have achieved the great objects of this world, we have a noble pursuit in preparing for the next. When the warriors in the days of chivalry became too old for their vocation, they exchanged the battle-axe for the bible, the rapier for the rosary, and took to counting off beads instead of cutting off heads. A wise man, in order that he may not exhaust his resources, will keep the attained beneath the attainable, and always leave himself something to anticipate, well knowing that to realize all your hopes is to leave yourself in a hopeless state.

"It is all over with me!" exclaimed Thorwaldsen, as he contemplated his sublime statue of Christ, "my genius is decaying, for I am satisfied with it."

It was the first time that the execution had reached the idea. The hand had overtaken the mind; and success in his pursuit had destroyed the pleasure that arises from the pursuit of success.

SYMPATHY.

"A FELLOW-feeling makes us wondrous kind," but feeling with, or even for others, often arises from feeling for ourselves; and the love of our neighbour is simply self-love at second-hand.

Swift has well exposed this selfish sympathy in the "Verses on his own Death."

Yet should some neighbour feela pain
Just in the parts where I complain,
How many a message would he send,
What hearty prayers that I should mend!
Inquire what regimen I kept,

What gave me ease, and how I slept,
And more lament, when I was dead,
Than all the snivellers round my bed.

In jocose illustration of the fellow-feeling that makes us so wondrous kind, the late James Smith, said,

"Since I once bit my own tongue at dinner, I have always chewed a neat's tongue with peculiar tenderness."

GRINNING GRAYBEARDS.

WE may admire a tear-drop on the cheek of youth and beauty, not less than a dew-drop on a rose; but a smirk upon the sickly and wrinkled features of old age displeases us as an incongruity. Its misplaced brightness is like the gloomy glitter of a coffin-plate or rather may we compare it to those clocks which play a merry tune just before they strike the hour of midnight.

GRATITUDE.

EVINCING your gratitude, when strictly analyzed, is only taking your revenge for a favour-cancelling by retaliating a benefit. Sinbad the sailor, was not more gratified when he shook the old man from his shoulders, than is every proud man when he can relieve himself from the humiliating burden of an obligation. It has been said that small favours strengthen, while great ones weaken friendship: the reason is obvious; we can repay the former, but must often remain in debt for the latter, and no man likes to meet his creditor oftener than he can help.

Of this truth Cardinal Mazarine was so well convinced, that he used to confer his favours with the worst possible grace, in order to wave his claim to any gratitude. A perfect equality is perhaps the best security for a perfect friendship.

Helvetius complained that he lost his old friends.

"Yet they were under great obligations to you," said Baron D'Holbach; "while I, who have never done anything for mine, continue to live with them the same as ever."

SPEECH NOT ALWAYS SPEAKING.

WHEN Metastasio places the following words in the mouth of a woman distracted with grief

Ah! non son io che parle,

E il barbaro dolore,

Che ini divide il core,

Che delirar mi fâ

may he not have been prompted by the speech of Hamlet's mother, when she attributes his reproaches not to himself, but his madness, and is admonished in reply,

Mother! for love of grace

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks.

Sill more happily was the same thought illustrated by a poor turnpike-
girl in Scotland, of whom the late Charles Matthews loved to make ho-
nourable mention. He and his postchaise companion had paid at the gate
on their
way to dine with a friend, and as it was past midnight when they
again reached it on their return, the girl demanded the toll for another
day. Deeming this an imposition, the companion, who had been sa-
crificing somewhat too liberally at the shrine of Bacchus, visited the
claimant with a shower of opprobrious terms, uttered in so loud a key
that they awakened the mother, who protruded her nightcapped head
from a little window above the door, exclaiming,

"Maggie, dear! for what is the gentleman abusing ye?"

To which the girl replied with an arch smile, "It's no the gentleman that's speaking now, mither; it's the wine!"

MONARCHIES AND REPUBLICS.

MONTESQUIEU, in his "Spirit of Laws," maintains that virtue is the principle of a republican government, and honour that of a monarchy; a position which Voltaire has taken some pains to refute.

The author of the " Pastor Fido," an habitual resident in courts, thus speaks of them:

L'ingannare, il mentir, la frode, il furto,

E la rapina di pietà vestita,
Creseir col danno eprecipizio d' altrui,
E far a se de l' altrui biasmo onore,
Son' le virtu di questa gente infida.

And the Regent Duke of Orleans, who was well qualified to form an opinion on the subject, said of one of the gentlemen of his suite, "C'est un parfait courtisan; 'il n'a ni humeur ni honneur"-(He is a perfect courtier-all compliance and no honour).

So that the disparaging pictures of courts are not always drawn, as some one has flippantly asserted, by those who never saw them.

"Do you ever play cards?" inquired George III. of Horne Tooke.

"Please your Majesty," was the reply (a reply, however, not very likely to be pleasing to majesty), " I am so little acquainted, even with the court cards, as not to know a king from a knave."

La Fayette's recipe for a perfect government was a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions; which Girardin compared to Gulliver environed and pinioned by the Lilliputians, who forgot when they had tied the giant's hands, that they could not make any further use

of him.

"What is the juste milieu, as to the division of political power?" demanded a French deputy.

"Ecoutez-le voici," replied his friend. "The côté droit maintain that twice four are ten; the côté gauche affirm that they are six; the juste milieu, of which I am proud to call myself a member, hit upon the exact truth, and pronounce that twice four are nine."

At the present moment there seems to be a rage for republics, but the example of those that have been recently established, is not much more conclusive as to their efficacy, than was the answer of the Irishman when asked whether he could drive.

"To be sure I can. Wasn't it I that overturned your honour in the ditch last year?"

Pope, perhaps, was nearest the truth when he asserted that, "Whate'er is best administered is best."

NOVELS AND HISTORY.

FIELDING thus defined the difference between a novel and a real history: In the former everything is true but the names and dates; in the latter, nothing is true but the names and dates. History is, in fact, a romance believed; a romance is a history not believed and yet we may be equally wrong in thus giving or withholding our faith; for Niebuhr has shown that we have been deceived, even as to many of the names and dates of Roman history; while no one has yet disproved a single tittle of " Gulliver's Travels."

THE LAWLESSNESS OF LAW.

IT is a blessed thing to live under the protection of justice, and doubly blessed is he who enjoys that privilege in England; for he must at the same time be living under the protection of another blind deity, ycleped Fortune. The monks were content with crying" No penny, no paternoster;" but we have barristers nowadays who will not take a brief without two or three thousand pounds; so that if you have not a long purse, you must put your law upon short commons. There is, however, a soul of goodness in things evil," for this outrageous cost exempts the poor from all the torments of litigation, while it often brings the rich down to their own level.

66

What a pleasant mockery is that clause of Magna Charta, " to none will we sell, to none will we deny justice;" when it is both sold and denied. In that all-ingulfing Sorbonian bog, that Augean stable of abuse-I beg its pardon-I mean that den of Cacus, wherein there are