the stilly night in inditing sonnets to her pale face. We now turn our eyes towards that interesting planet for the purpose of tracing the course of her turnpike-roads, and the boundaries of her potatoe-fields. The world of romance is turned topsy-turvy. The mighty spirit of steam has laid for ever the whole host of inferior powers, whether haunters of the lake or the river; and Fairy-land, ever since it has been lighted with gas, shows as bare and dismal, as the Mall in St. James's Park. But there are some minds, either naturally so opaque as to refuse all admission to the new light of science, or so obstinately wedded to ancient prejudices as to shut the eyes wilfully to its unwonted splendour. They still love to expatiate on the themes which delighted their youth, to lose themselves among the mysteries-mysteries to their blindness-of the world and of their own nature. They hate mathematical demonstrations, and look with suspicion on such things as must be subjected to the vulgar test of the senses. To the modern professors, who approach them with the square and the plummet, who analyse their arguments by means of the crucible, and pry into the secret recesses of their strongholds with the assistance of Sir Humphry Davy's lamp, they reply, generally, but with a shake of the head which is more eloquent than words,

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

The writer of the following pages-such is the force of fashion-is almost ashamed of being subjected to

the suspicion of belonging to this proscribed minority, and yet he chooses to set out with confessing that he has not been altogether able to keep pace with the time.

Still some prejudices-if prejudices they be-cling around his spirit; still the visions of the days of other years' crowd upon his soul with a distinctness, which he can hardly term a mockery, of reality,--still he loves to listen, amidst the business of the world, to the far-off echoes of the sounds which once captivated

his ear,

"And watch the dying notes, and start and smile!"

The benevolent reader, however, who may detect an air of obsolete antiquity in some of the pieces which are now presented to him, will perhaps look with more pity than anger on a fault to which he is himself so superior; and at all events he will laud the modesty which, in place of the full-sized pictures now in vogue among literary artists, has presumed to offer only a set of

"HEAD-PIECES AND TAIL-PIECES."

THE

EMIGRANT'S TALE.

What hid'st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells,
Thou hollow-sounding and mysterious main?
MRS. HEMANS.

IT is a thing familiar to the experience of every one, how deep an influence impressions laid in early life possess over the future character and conduct; and we find nothing surprising or preternatural in the occurrence of events which may be regularly traced, by a chain of circumstances, to their first germ in the youthfül mind. But when the catastrophe seems different from the ordinary course of human affairs, or when it happens unexpectedly, presenting suddenly something to our eyes which but a moment before was without the range of hope or of fear, the event becomes, to our startled imaginations, a mysterious judgment of good or

B

evil, and the idea with which our spirit was haunted so early, is termed a presentiment and a fatality. I do not presume to offer any opinion upon a subject so little understood-but to adepts in the occult moral sciences, the anecdote of my early life, which I am about to relate, will perhaps afford some materials for illustration, and it will be deemed the more valuable that it is literally true.

I was born in a little inland town, and had reached my seventeenth year before straying from the paternal home, beyond the limits of a holiday ramble. I had received from nature the dangerous gift of a strong imagination, an imagination of that sort which, when attended by equal strength of judgment, and fostered by proper cultivation, makes men poets and painters; it made me only a dreamer. The realities of life, which afford the true materials for poetry, were to me tasteless or disgusting; and even the external forms of nature, in their beauty and grandeur, I could behold with indifference, while my mind's eye was for ever fixed on scenes of my own creation. The country around was rich in fine scenery, and although not a fashionable resort for the hunters of the picturesque, many a traveller, while winding along the hills of has paused in admiration at the uncommon beauty and diversity of the landscape. There was