heavens, face to face, and angels bending down, are whispering that I may yet be happy, Poor, poor fool! Happy for another hour, perhaps another day, and then Why, then the sun will rise again, and all the world be glad, but I shall not know it; and every tone that to the common world is sweetest music, and every look and smile that are unlike thee; the song not thine; the book not read by thee; and every beautiful and lovely thing, that hath not caught some parted grace of thine, shall be to me a half formed thing, lacking the tint that's loveliest, the form that 's dearest to my heart; a thing unfinished, as Heaven were interrupted in the making, or lost the trick, not having thee to copy! But now, the dashing of my heart is like the seas that clap their hands in gladness. My Gon, I thank Thee for that joy forever! Those words have mingled with my spirit, quickening it to lightning; and if I get a home above, and have a power in Heaven, I'll build a world whose sky shall light it with those burning words! Ah, how the time goes on! I miss it not, for I am happy, and it brings no change. The sun has set, and night has come with countless stars, as glowing, beautiful, and bright, as each one were a separate joy of mine; a heaven all full, as is my brimming heart, Well; you will laugh at all this rhapsody, and chide me for a foolish boy. I only say, 'My HEART is talking to you, not my HEAD... But we must part; and then, if angels, strayed from home, may note that scene, touched by the love of one so beautiful, it will be written down in Heaven, that two souls made to match, have gone apart forever. Farewell! I only ask of you, that when a warm thought flutters at your heart, just fancy ('t will be true) that I have come to nestle there, and give it welcome. And when the night comes. and you rest alone with your own beauty and the sentinel stars, oh, clasp the little rascal to your heart, and think of your dream in the morning!'

OUR impression is-'we may be wrong, but that is our opinion'—that the young gentleman who penned the foregoing rhapsody is hankering after some young woman. Ah! well; though his style is not over-pellucid, there is much truth in his sentences. There is a communion between the heart of Nature and the hearts of lovers; and with gentle affections and pure thoughts, her face is always beautiful. With the same mail which brought us the Thing of Beauty' aforesaid, came the following, copied in the neatest of all crow-quill chirography, bearing the Saratoga post-mark, and a French-gray seal, with two loving doves. It struck us, on a first perusal, that possibly it might proceed from some young lady in love with some young gentleman! It has that look: '

A world of the young heart's creation, bright
And brilliant as 't is false and fleeting, where
All seems a beauteous fairy-land; to mark
No varied season and no fight of time,
Save in the weary absence of the loved one;
To live but in the atmosphere he breathes,
To gaze upon his eyes as on the light

That beacons us to bliss, the only sun

Of our unreal world; in the sad hours

Of absence to be filled with thousand thoughts

Of tenderness, that to repeat we deem

Will make the hours of meeting more delicious;
Yet when that time is come, to feel they are
Unutterable: then to count the moments,
And watch his coming as the early dawn
Of an untried existence; (is not love

A new existence ?) yet when he is come,
To feel that deep, oppressive sense of bliss
Weighing upon the heart, that we could wish
To find our joy less perfect This is love!'

No sneers, if you please, gentlemen bachelors of the incorrigible class; no 'pshaws!' ye 'paired but not matched' people, at encountering here these tender tributes of the heart; for the lover, where is he not? 'Wherever parents look round upon their children, there he has been; wherever children are at play together, there he soon will be; wherever there are roofs under which men dwell, wherever there is an atmosphere vibrating with human voices, there is the lover, and there is his lofty worship going on. True love continues and will continue to send up its homage amidst the meditations of every eventide, and the busy hum of noon, and 'the song of the morning stars.'... IF the unhappy young man who has recently filled the journals of the metropolis with the details of his folly and crime could, before yielding to temptation, have looked in upon the state-prisoners at Sing-Sing, as we did the other day, surely he would have shrunk back from the vortex before him. Poor wretches, in their best estate! How narrow their cells; how ceaseless their toil; what a negation of comfort their whole condition! It was a sweltering August day, breathless and oppressive; but there was no rest for the eight hundred unhappy convicts who plied their never-ending tasks within those walls. Stealthy glances from halfraised eyes; pale countenances, stamped with meek submission, or gleaming with powerless hate or impotent malignity; and hard labor in the fullest sense, were the main features of the still-life scene, as we passed through the several work-shops. But what a picture was presented as their occupants came swarming into the open court-yard at sound of the bell, to proceed to their cells with their dinner! From the thick atmosphere of the carpet and rug-shops, leaving the

clack of shuttles, the dull thump of the 'weaver's beam,' and the long, confused perspective of cords, and pullies, and patterns, and multitudinous 'harness,' they poured forth; from murky smithys, streamed the imps of VULCAN, grim as the dark recesses from which they emerged; from doors which open upon interminable rows of close-set benches burst forth the knights of the awl and hammer; the rub-a-dub of the cooper's mallet, the creak of his shaving-knife, were still; the stone-hammer was silent; and the court-yard was full of that striped crew! GOD of compassion! what a sight it was, to see that motley multitude take up, in gangs, their humiliating march! Huge negroes, weltering in the heat, were interspersed among the lines;' hands crimson with murder rested upon the shoulders of beings young alike in years and crime; the victim of bestiality pressed against the heart-broken tool of the scathless villain; and all were blended in one revolting mass of trained soldiers of guilt; their thousand legs moving as the leg of one man: all in silence, save the peculiar sound of the sliding tread, grating not less upon the ear than the ground. One by one, they took their wooden pails of dingy and amphibious-looking' grub,' and passed on, winding up the stairs of the different stories, and streaming along the narrow corridors to their solitary cells. It was too much for the tender heart of poor E., this long procession of the gangs. As they passed on in slow succession, her lip began to quiver; and one after another drops of pity rolled down her cheek. 'All these,' said she to the keeper, had a mother, who looked upon their childhood, and blessed their innocence! Ah! how many infant feet, softer than velvet to the touch, have been pressed to maternal lips, that now shuffle along these prison-isles!' There spoke the mother;' and with her gentle words of pity' we take our leave of the State's-prison and its unhappy inmates. .. THE love of literature is a beneficial and noble propensity of soul. It cannot be doubted,' writes the accomplished MARY CLAVERS, 'that every accession of intellectual light carries with it an increase of happiness; happiness which depends not in any great degree upon the course of public events, and not, beyond a certain limited extent, upon the smiles of fortune. Those debasing and embittering prejudices which must ever wait upon ignorance, melt away in the rays of mental illumination, and every departed prejudice leaves open a new inlet for happiness. I may be considered an enthusiast, but it is my deliberate conviction that next to religion-heart-felt, operative religion - a true love of reading is the best softener of the asperities of life, the best consoler under its inevitable ills." HOOD, writing recently from his bed' to the Secretary of a provincial Athenæum, of which he had been elected a 'patron,' deposes to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow; how generous mental food can atone for a meagre diet; 'rich fare on paper, for short commons on the cloth.' Although ill, and condemned to lenten fare, animal food being strictly interdicted, yet the 'feast of reason and the flow of soul' were still his. 'Denied beef, I had Bul-wer and Cow-per; forbidden mutton, there was Lamb; and in heu of pork, Bacon or Hogg.' Eschewing wine, he had still his Butler; and in the absence of liquor, all the choice spirits, from Toм BROWN to TOM MOORE. Confined physically to water, he had yet not only the best of home-made' but the champaigne of MOLIERE, the hock of SCHILLER, and the sherry of CERVANTES:

DEPRESSED bodily by the fluid that damps every thing, I got intellectually elevated with MILTON, a little merry with SWIFT, or rather jolly with RABELAIS, whose Pantagruel, by the way, is quite equal to the best gruel with rum in it. So far can literature palliate or compensate for gastronomical privations. But there are other evils, great and small, in this world, which try the stomach less than the head, and the temper, and ill winds that blow with the pertinacity of monsoon. Of these, Providence bas allotted me a full share; but still, paradoxical as it may sound, my burthen has been greatly lightened by a load of books. Many, many a dreary, weary hour have I got over; many a mental or bodily annoyance forgotten, by help of the tragedies and comedies of our dramatists and novelists Many a trouble has been soothed by the still small voice of the moral philosopher; many a dragon-like care charmed to sleep by the sweet song of the ret For all which I cry incessantly, not aloud, but in my heart, 'Thanks and honor to the glorious masters of the pen, and the great inventors of the press!'

Is N'T Law a very curious thing, take it altogether? An adept in it must needs know all the precedents, all the legal discussions and litigations; must read innumerable volumes, filled with innumerable subtleties and cohesions, and written in an unintelligible jargon; must study rules by which a certain class of future events shall be judged, when those events can only be partially and imperfectly foreseen; a rule which never varies, while the cases never agree; a law which is general while the cases are individual; a law where the penalty is uniform, while the justice or injustice of the case is continually different. Who in view of these things' can wonder that the worse is often made to appear the better reason? Does not a lawyer triumph most, and acquire most fame, when he can gain a cause in the very teeth of the law he professes to support and revere? Who is the greatest lawyer? Not he who can most enlighten, but he who can most perplex and confound the understanding and embroil and mislead the intellect of judge and jury. We have before us a striking illustration of these remarks, in an unsettled case in the Court of Errors, on an appeal from a decree of the chancellor. A wife and mother, well stricken

in years, leaves the bed and board of her husband, in consequence of long-continued ill treatment, and by her next friend' sues for alimony. Her husband, it appears in evidence, is an ' unclean beast' personally; moreover, he throws his tea-cup at her at the table; will not permit her to have a fire in the room in which she is ill, though it is in the depth of winter, but opens doors and windows to freeze her out; orders all the beds taken down, that she may not sleep; goes himself about the house at times in puris naturalibus; threatens to throw his wife into the well; when she is seated on a chair, pushes her out of it, and when she takes another, pushes her out of that also, and so forth. Now reader, it would amuse you to look over the Points on the part of the Apellant' in this case. By his next friend,' the attorney, he complains that vicechancellors are exceeding their credentials in assuming to be 'Chesterfieldian censors of the lesser morals.' He admits indeed that the husband was uncourteous, in rudely throwing his tea-cup instead of handing it respectfully to the lady-in-waiting,' meaning the wife aforesaid; that he was guilty of impoliteness, in capriciously commanding a change of chairs;' that he certainly did use 'an inconsiderate expression concerning the well;'.but that in driving his wife out of her sick room, by opening all the doors and windows on a cold winter-day, he was only enforcing wholesome exercise as a substitute for prejudicial inaction!' All these examples, let us add, are of the lesser abuses and grievances which the unhappy woman suffered, year after year; yet the 'deeds without a name' are softened or defended with equal plausibility and ingenuity. The counsel for the appellant objects to the interference of the law-officers with such matters. 'Courts of chancery,' says he, with true Johnsonian grandiloquence, 'cannot, like ecclesiastical tribunals or inquisitions, regulate, by means of auricular confession and domiciliary visitation, connubial rights and duties! The chancellor's doctrine would perpetuate wordy wars and family feuds, and impart to conjugal caterwauling more than feline vitality!' But hold; we are interfering between man and wife,' an injudicious act, as 't is said. 'D. G.'s' Height of Impudence' (it is not new ') reminds

us of an incident which occurred in the hearing of a friend at one of our cheap metropolitan eating-houses last winter. A tall, raw boned Hibernian called for a dish of pork-and-beans. 'Let it be 'most all pork, and plenty of beans,' said he; and a liberal supply was placed smoking before him. Before he had gorged his fill, he called for more bread; it was given him, and soon disappeared, with the remainder of his dish. He then called for another slice, and was piling the butter in pyramids upon small pieces of the same, when the waiter, who had been eyeing him closely, and who thought the repast' rather too much for a shilling,' addressed him with: 'Mister, that butter cost two shillings and sixpence a pound.' The huge feeder said nothing, but proceeded to pile about a quarter of a pound of it on a small crust of bread, placed it in his mouth, rolled it for a time as a sweet morsel under his tongue,' and then remarked: Well, I should say 't was well wor-r-th it!" His main anxiety appeared to be, to convince the waiter that his principal had not been taken in by the vender... WE promised that our readers should renew their acquaintance with 'Hugh Trevor;' accordingly we condense a scene or two from that remarkable work. Going down St. James'-street, London, one evening, with a person who has treated him with much civility, our hero is run violently against by an accomplice of his companion, knocked down, and robbed of all his money. His 'civil' friend leaves him in the lurch, and he seeks his lodgings, there being no remedy for his loss. To divert his mind, he repairs to the theatre, and takes his stand among the crowd which surround the entrance. He observes that the people about him seem watchful of each other; and presently the cry of Take care of your pockets!' renews his fears; and putting his hand to his fob, he misses his watch! Looking eagerly around, he fixes his eyes upon his quondam friend, who had aided in robbing him:

THE blood mantled in my face. You have stolen my watch,' said I. He could not immediately escape, and made no reply, but turned pale, locked at me as if entreating silence and commiseration, and put a watch into my hand. I felt a momentary compassion, and he presently made his retreat. His retiring did but increase the press of the crowd, so that it was impossible for me so much as to lift up my arm: I therefore continued, as the safest way, to hold the watch in my hand. Soon afterward the door opened, and I hur ried it into my waistcoat pocket: for I was obliged to make the best use of all my limbs, that I might not be thrown down and trodden under foot. At length, after very uncommon struggles, I made my way to the money door, paid, and entered the pit. After taking breath and gazing around me, I sat down and inquired of my neighbors how soon the play would begin? I was told in an hour. This new delay occasioned me to put my hand in my pocket and take out my watch, which as I supposed had been returned by the thief. But, good Heavens! what was my surprise when. in lieu of my own plain watch, in a green chagrin-case, the one I was now possessed of was set round with diamonds! And, instead of ordinary steel and brass, its appendages were a weighty gold chain and seals! My astonishment was great beyond expression! I opened it to examine the work, and found it was capped. I pressed upon the nut and it immediately struck the hour. It was a repeater!'

It will not greatly puzzle the reader, we may presume, to conjecture what this adroit movement on the part of the pick-pocket ultimately led to; nor will he fail to recognize in the following limning a portrait of more than one character of these times. Mr. GLIBLY is entertaining Mr. TREVOR with a running commentary upon some of the prominent personages who enter the theatre: 'THERE,' said he pointing, is a Mr. MIGRATE; a famous clerical character, and as strange an original as any 50

VOL. XXII

this metropolis affords. He is not entitled to make a figure in the world either by his riches, rank, or understanding; but with an effrontery peculiar to Limself he will knock at any man's door, though a perfect stranger, ask him questions, give him advice, and tell him he will call again to give him more on the first oppor tunity. By this means he is acquainted with every body, but knows nobody; is always talking, yet nerer says any thing: is perpetually putting some absurd interrogation, but before it is possible he should understand the answer, puts another. His desire to be informed torments himself and every man of his acquaintance, which is almost every man he meets; yet, though he lives inquiring, he will die consummately igno rant. His brain is a kind of rag shop, receiving and returning nothing but rubbish. It is as difficult to affront as to get rid of him; and though you fairly bid him begone to day, he will knock at your door, march into your house, and if possible keep you answering his unconnected, fifty times answered queries to-morrow. He is the friend and the enemy of all theories and of all parties; and tortures you to decide for him which he ought to choose. As far as he can be said to have opinions, they are crude and contradictory in the extreme; so that in the same breath he will defend and oppose the same system. With all this confusion of intellect, there is no man so wise but he will prescribe to him how he ought to act. He has been a wreat traveller, and continually abuses his own countrymen for not adopting the manners and policy of cther nations. He pretends to be the universal friend of man, a philanthropist on the largest scale, get is so selfish that he would willingly see the world perish, if he could but secure paradise to himself. This is the only consistent trait in his character. In the same sentence, he frequently joins the most fulsome Hattery and some insidious question, that asks the person whom he addresses if he do not confess himself to be both knave and fool. Delicacy of sentiment is one of his pretensions, though his tongue is licentious, his language coarse, and he is occasionally seized with fits of the most vulgar abuse. He declaims against dissimulation, yet will smilingly accost the man whom — Ha! MIGRATE! How do you do? Give me leave to introduce you to Mr. TREVOR, a friend of mine, a gentleman and a scholar; just come from Oxford. Your range of Knowledge and universal intimacy with men and things, may be useful to him; and his erudite acquisitions, and philosophical research, will be highly gratifying to an inquirer like you. An intercourse between you must be mutually pleasing and beneficial, and I am happy to bring you acquainted This, addressed to the man whom he had been satirizing so unsparingly, was inconceivable! The unabashed facility with which he veered from calumny to compliment, and that too after he had accused the man whom he accosted of dissimulation, struck me dumb, I had perhaps seen something like it before, but nothing half so perfect in its kind. It doubly increased my stock of knowledge; it afforded a new instance of what the world is, and a new incitement to ask how it became so ?'

A

A single passage more, which will have especial interest for the correspondent to whom we are indebted for the capital sketch of 'Love-Making in Boarding-Houses,' must close our excerpts. maiden of an uncertain age is making a dead set' at our hero:

Sas was sure I must find myself a great favorite; I was a favorite with every body; and, for her part, she did not wonder at it. Not but it is a great pity, added she, aside, that you are such a rake, Mr TRSVOR This repeated charge very justly alarmed my morality, and I very seriously began a refutation. Put in vain. I might say what I would; she could see very plainly I was a prodigious rake, and nothing could convince her to the contrary. Though she had heard that your greatest rakes make the best husbands Perhaps it might be true, but she did not think she could be persuaded to make the venture. She did not know what might happen, to be sure; though she really did not think she could. She could not conceive how it was, but some how or another she always found something agreeable about rakes. It was a great pity they should be rakes, but she verily believed the women loved them, and encouraged them in their seducing arts. For her part, she would keep her fingers out of the fire as long as she could but, if it were her destiny to love a rake what could she do? Nobody could help being in love, and it would be very hard indeed to call what one cannot help, a crime."

WE must commend the cogent arguments in favor of national theft, contained in the article on "International Copy-right' in preceding pages, to the attention of the reader. It strikes us as one of the most tenable positions yet taken by the opponents of an exceedingly impolitic' literary measure. By the by; a new 'American Copy-right Club' has been recently established, with WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT and GULIAN C. VERPLANCK, Esquires, for its president and vicepresident; and for its secretaries and executive committee, several of the most prominent advocates of the proposed law to be found in our midst; including, we are glad to perceive, Mr. PUFFER HOPKINS MATHEWS, who has labored more abundantly than they all in the good cause, but with little success hitherto, we regret to be obliged to add. His metropolitan lecture last winter could scarcely have realized his own expectations; though it was not difficult to meet those of the public. A friend of ours who repaired early to the Tabernacle, with a ticket bearing a number above twelve hundred, found not three-score auditors in that capacious edifice. It is equally certain, that the following unkindest cut of all' at Mr. MATHEWs's international copy-right essays, which reaches us in the last number of the 'Dublin University Magazine,' embodies the opinion generally entertained of those efforts on this side the Atlantic: While on the subject of America, we would wish to add a line of a certain CORNELIUS MATHEWS, who writes pamphlets and delivers lectures in New-York, on the subject of an international copy-right law. Such is the complex involution of his style; such the headlong impetuosity with which tropes, figures, and metaphors run down, jostle, and overturn each other, that we have puzzled ourselves in vain to detect his meaning or the gist of his argument. Giants, elephants, 'tiger-mothers,' and curricles; angels, frigates, baronial castles, and fish-ponds, dance through his writings in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion;' and however desirous we may feel that a law of copy-right might protect British authors from American piracy, yet as one of the craft we boldly say: 'Non defensoribus istis! non tali auxilio! Let the question be put forward manfully and intelligibly; let it not be a piece of Indian jugglery, performed by CORNELIUS MATHEWS, but the plain and simple acknowledgement that literary property is property, and as such has its rights, sacred and inviolable.' We have quoted this passage for the purpose of showing that our own opinion of Mr. MATHEWS's rambling thoughts and disjointed style finds abundant confirmation wherever his writings' are

forced into temporary notice. . . . 'SERVED you right!' Carelessness like your's deserved just such a result. You'll not be guilty of a similar act of folly very soon, ''t an't likely :'

'THE blank-verse halts for it' in the lines entitled 'Mournful Memories.' Beside, the tendency of the sentiment is not, we think, a useful one. Were all the dangers or ills of life to present themselves to the imagination in a body, drawn up in battle array, the prospect would indeed be dreadful; but coming individually, they are far less formidable, and successively as they occur are conquered. Foreboded, their aspect is terrific; but seen in retrospect, they frequently excite present satisfaction and future fortitude. It is with human life as with the phases of nature, whose regular course is calm and orderly; tempests and troubles being but lapses from the accustomed sobriety with which Providence works out the destined end of all things.' MUCH is said of the freedom' or 'licentiousness' of our public press; but we are far behind the press of London in this regard. Look for example at the comments in some of the London journals upon the recent marriage of the Hereditary Duke of Mecklenburg, a royal pensioner,' with the Princess AUGUSTA of Cambridge. The produce of his dukedom is described by the Charivari' as consisting of 'nothing in particular; its revenue purely nominal.' The wedding is turned into the broadest ridicule. The Duke had an audience of himself in the morning in the glass of his dressing-case; his 'master of the wardrobe, who was also comptroller of the leather portmanteau and groom of the hat-box,' being the only person in attendance. He wore the white seam of the German order of princes, and was looking remarkably well-as all the annuitants of England contrive generally to look.' The ceremony was performed in the usual style of royalty. And when the prelate who performed the office came to the words' With all my worldly goods I thee endow,' the Duke of Cambridge, who always thinks out loud, kept up a running accompaniment: 'Well, that's capital! worldly goods, indeed! I should like to see some of 'em!' and other pleasant observations; all which were taken to be a gush of fervent ejaculations from the father of the bride, invoking the happiness of the newly-married couple. The happy pair set out for Kew, to which place the Duke's Lord of the Luggage had already conveyed his carpet-bag! The trousseau of the Princess had been laid out at Cambridge House for the inspection of the bride's friends; but the illustrious bridegroom, with more modesty, laid out his trousseau on the bed in his private apartment, previous to packing.' Various articles are enumerated; among the rest, 'a splendid uniform for state occasions, consisting of the superb coat of an officer of the Blues, with Grenadier trowsers and a Lifeguards-man's helmet;' 'twelve false collars; nine pairs of cotton socks; two stocks, with long ends,' etc., etc. Such an invasion of aristocratic privacy may be termed 'licentiousness of the press' with as much truth, we conceive, as any of the gossipry of the American newspapers. ... IN looking lately over the 'Souvenirs Historiques' of NAPOLEON and MARIA LOUISA, by the Baron MENEVAL, his ancient secretary,' we were forcibly impressed with a passage which depicts the love of the Great Captain for his infant son. The child was brought every morning to his apartment:

'YES; that cabinet, which saw the origin of so many mighty plans, so many vast and generous schemes of administration, was also witness to the effusions of a father's tenderness. How often have I seen the emperor keeping his son by him, as if he were impatient to teach him the art of governing! Whether, seated by the chimney on his favorite sofa, he was engaged in reading an important document, or whether he went to his bureau to sign a despatch, every word of which required to be weighed, his son, seated on his knees, or pressed to his breast, was never a moment away from him Sometimes, throwing aside the thoughts which occupied his mind, he would lie down on the floor beside his beloved boy, playing with him like another child, attentive to every thing that could please or amuse him. The emperor had a sort of apparatus for trying military manoeuvres; it consisted of pieces of wood fashioned to represent battalions, regiments and divisions. When he wanted to try some new combinations of troops, or some new evolution, he used to arrange these pieces on the carpet. While he was seriously occupied with the disposition of these pieces, working out some skilful manoeuvre which might ensure the success of a battle, the child, lying at his side. would often overthrow his troops, and put into confusion his order of battle, perhaps at the most critical moment. But the emperor would recommence arranging his men with the utmost good humor.'