Such earnest wo their features overcast,

They might have stirred, or sighed, or wept, or spoken ; But, save the hollow moaning of the blast,

The stillness was unbroken.

No other sound or stir of life was there,
Except my steps in solitary clamber,

From flight to flight, from humid stair to stair,
From chamber into chamber.

Deserted rooms of luxury and state,
That old magnificence had richly furnished
With pictures, cabinets of ancient date,
And carvings gilt and burnished.

Rich hangings, storied by the needle's art,
With scripture history, or classic fable;
But all had faded, save one ragged part,
Where Cain was slaying Abel.

The silent waste of mildew and the moth
Had marred the tissue with a partial ravage;
But undecaying frowned upon the cloth
Each feature stern and savage.

The sky was pale; the cloud a thing of doubt;

Some hues were fresh, and some decayed and duller; But still the BLOODY HAND shone strangely out

With vehemence of color!

The BLOODY HAND that with a lurid stain
Shone on the dusty floor, a dismal token,
Projected from the casement's painted pane,
Where all beside was broken.

The BLOODY HAND significant of crime,
That glaring on the old heraldic banner,
Had kept its crimson unimpaired by time,
In such a wondrous manner!

O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

The death-watch ticked behind the panneled oak,
Inexplicable tremors shook the arras,

And echoes strange and mystical awoke,

The fancy to embarrass.

Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,

But through one gloomy entrance pointing mostly The while some secret inspiration said,

That chamber is the ghostly!

Across the door no gossamer festoon

Swung pendulous-no web-no dusty fringes,

No silky chrysalis or white cocoon,
About its nooks and hinges.

The spider shunned the interdicted room,

The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banished,
And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom
The very midge had vanished.

One lonely ray that glanced upon a Bed,
As if with awful aim direct and certain,
To show the BLOODY HAND in burning red
Embroidered on the curtain.

And yet no gory stain was on the quilt-
The pillow in its place had slowly rotted:
The floor alone retained the trace of guilt,
Those boards obscurely spotted.

Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence
With mazy doubles to the grated casement-
Oh what a tale they told of fear intense,
Of horror and amazement!

What human creature in the dead of night

Had coursed like hunted hare that cruel distance?
Had sought the door, the window in his flight,
Striving for dear existence ?

What shrieking spirit in that bloody room
Its mortal frame had violently quitted?—
Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom,
A ghostly shadow flitted.

Across the sunbeam, and along the wall,
But painted on the air so very dimly,
It hardly veiled the tapestry at all,
Or portrait frowning grimly.

O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!

LIFE IN THE SICK ROOM.*

Of all the know-nothing persons in this world, commend us to the man who has "never known a day's illness." He is a moral dunce ; one who has lost the greatest lesson in life; who has skipped the finest lecture in that great school of humanity, the Sick Chamber. Let him be versed in mathematics, profound in metaphysics, a ripe scholar in the classics, a bachelor of arts, or even a doctor in divinity, yet is he as one of those gentlemen whose education has been neglected. For all his college acquirements, how inferior is he in wholesome knowledge to the mortal who has had but a quarter's gout, or a half-year of ague -how infinitely below the fellow-creature who has been soundly taught his tic-douloureux, thoroughly grounded in the rheumatics, and deeply red in the scarlet fever! And yet, what is more common than to hear a great hulking, florid fellow, bragging of an ignorance, a brutal ignorance, that he shares in common with the pig and the bullock, the generality of which die, probably, without ever having experienced a day's indisposition?

To such a monster of health the volume before us will be a sealed book; for how can he appreciate its allusions to physical suffering, whose bodily annoyance has never reached beyond a slight tickling of the epidermis, or the tingling of a foot gone to sleep? How should he, who has sailed through life with a clean bill of health, be able to sympathize with the feelings, or the quiet sayings and doings, of an invalid condemned to a lifelong quarantine in his chamber? What should he know of Life in the Sick Room? As little as our poor paralytic grandmother knows of Life in London.

* Life in the Sick Room. By an Invalid. Moxon.

With ourselves it is otherwise. Afflicted for twenty years with a complication of disorders, the least of which is elephantiasis-bedridden on the broad of our back till it became narrow-and then confined to our chamber as rigidly as if it had been a cell in the Pentonville Penitentiary-we are in a fit state, body and mind, to appreciate such a production as Mr. Moxon -not the Effervescing Magnesian, but the worthy publisherhas forwarded with so much sagacity, or instinct, to our own sick ward. The very book for us! if, indeed, we are not actually the Anonymous of its dedication-the very fellow-sufferer on whose sympathy-" confidently reckoned on though unasked,” the Invalid author so implicitly relies. We certainly do sympathize most profoundly; and as certainly we are a great sufferer, the greatest, perhaps, in England, except the poor incurable man who is always being cured by Holloway's Ointment.

Enough of ourselves:-and now for the book. The first thing that struck us, on the perusal, was a very judicious omission. Most writers on such a topic as the sick-room would have begun by recommending some pet doctor, or favorite remedy for all diseases; whereas the author has preferred to advise on the selection of an eligible retreat for laying up for life, and especially of a window towards that good aspect, the face of Nature. And truly, a long term of infirm health is such a very bad look out, as to require some better prospect elsewhere. For, not to mention a church-yard, or a dead wall, what can be worse for a sick prisoner, than to pass year after year in some dull street, contemplating some dull house, never new-fronted, or even insured in a new fire-office, to add a new plate to the two old ones under the middle window? What more dreadful than to be driven by the monotony outside to the sameness within, till the very figures of the chintz curtain are daguerreotyped on the brain, or the head seems lined with a paper of the same pattern as the one on the wall? How much better, for soul and body, for the invalid to gaze on such a picture as this:

"Between my window and the sea is a green down, as green as any field in Ireland; and on the nearer half of this down, haymaking goes forward