Thy love-light is a living guest, Its glitter to a lily's breast, Or in unbounded space a starry line Stretches, till flagging Thought must droop her wing to rest. Oh, let me not die young, A powerless child among The ancient grandeurs of thy awful world! Faint murmurs of the surge, The deep, surrounding, everlasting roar My fragile bark with trembling from the verge Of caverned earth and fathomless thought, Of Life and Death, and their twin mysteries, Before and After, on my spirit press Tempting and awful, with high promise fraught, And guardian terrors, whose out-flashing swords Beleaguer Paradise and the holy Tree Sciential. Step by step the way is fought That leads from Darkness, through her miscreant hordes, Back to the heavens of wise, and true, and free: Minerva's Gorgon, Ammon's cyclic Asp, And the fierce flame-sword of the Cherubim, That flashed like hate across the pallid gasp Of exiled Eve and Adam, flare, and glare, And hiss venenate, round the steps of him Who thirsts for heavenly Wisdom, if he dare Climb to her bosom, or with artless grasp Pluck the sweet fruits that hang around him, ripe and fair. Oh! glorious Youth Is the true age of prophecy, when Truth Of time makes din her rounded form, From the polluted swarm Of armed Chimeras that environ her. To sow the world again, And fill the eager wants of the New Age's youth. A thousand flashes of uncertain light Cleave the thick darkness, driving far athwart They sow with thunders. Thought on burning thought His brave world spinning, or some drifting isle Far winnowing and black, Our cheated souls to 'wilder and beguile. Impassionate years, can sheave the scattered rays Into one sun, these mingled arrows tell Each to its quiver, the divine and fell, And life's lone meteors to their centre trace. In sin and beauty, our beloved Earth Their harps with steel to catch the lightning's fire, And only wears, for crown and aureole, The glow-worm light of lowliest human love, Shall fill with low, sweet undertones the chasms Of silence, 'twixt the booming thunder-spasms. And Earth has need of Prophets fiery-lipped And deep-souled, to announce the glorious dooms Writ on the silent heavens in starry script, And flashing fitfully from her shuddering tombs,-Commissioned Angels of the new-born Faith, To teach the immortality of Good, The soul's God-likeness, Sin's coeval death, And Man's indissoluble Brotherhood. Yet never an age, when God has need of him, Earth's hollow want is prophet of his coming: Ye hear the near invisible humming Deeps beyond deeps, of sapphire calm, to cheer Father! thy will be done, Holy and righteous One! Though the reluctant years May never crown my throbbing brows with white, Deeper than joy or sorrow,-by the thrill, By all that lifts me o'er my outward peers Where soul dissolves the bonds by Nature bound,— Or by the hand of fratricidal rage, I cannot now die young! * ODDS AND ENDS FROM THE OLD WORLD. My first visit to Turin dates as far back as 1831. We are so personal, that our impressions of things depend less on their intrinsic worth than on such or such extrinsic circumstance which may affect our mental vision at the moment. I suppose mine was affected by the mist and rain which graced the capital of Piedmont on the morning of my arrival there. Another incident, microscopic, and almost too ludicrous to mention, had no less its weight in the scale of prepossession. I was tired and hungry, and, while the diligence was being unloaded, I entered a caffé close by, and called for some buttered toast. My hair (I had plenty at that time) stood on end at the answer I received. There was no buttered toast to be had, the waiter said. "It was not the custom." I confess I augured ill of a city from whose caffés, unlike all others throughout Italy, such a staple of breakfast was banished. I am fond of buttered toast, I own. If it is a weakness, I candidly plead guilty. My mother-bless her soul !—brought me up in the faith of buttered toast. I had breakfasted upon it all my life. I could conceive of no breakfast without it. Hence the shock I felt. "Not the custom!" Why not, I wondered. A problem of no easy solution, I can tell you! It has been haunting me for the last seven-and-twenty years. If I had a thousand dollars,-a bold supposition for one of the brotherhood of the pen,-I would even now found a prize, and adjudge that sum to the best memoir on this question:-"Why is buttered toast excluded from the caffes of Turin ?" It is not from lack of proper materials, for heaps of butter and mountains of rolls are to be seen on every side; it is not from lack of taste,-for the people which has invented the grisini, and delights in the white truffle, shows too keen a sense of what is dainty not to exclude the charge of want of taste. 66 Pray, what are the grisini? what is the white truffle?" asks the inquisitive reader. The grisini are bread idealized, bread under the form of walking-sticks a third of a little finger in diameter, and from which every the least particle of crumb has been carefully eliminated. It is light, easy of digestion, cracks without effort under your teeth, and melts in your mouth. It is savory eaten alone, excellent with your viands, capital sopped in wine. A good Turinese would rather have no dinner at all than sit down to one without a good-sized bundle of these torrified reeds on his right or left. Beware of the spurious imitations of this inimitable mixture of flour, which you will light on in some passages in Paris! They possess nothing of the grisini but the name. “I have it!” I fancy I hear some imaginative reader exclaim at this place. "The passion for the grisini accounts most naturally for the want of buttered toast in Turin. Don't you see that it is replaced by the grisini?" A mistake, a profound mistake. Grisini are never served with your coffee or chocolate. Try again. The white truflle,-white, mark you, and not to be confounded with its black, hard, knotty, poor cousin of Périgord,— well, the white truffle is the white truffle. There are things which admit of no definition. It would only spoil them. Define the Sun, if you dare. "Look at it," would be your answer to the indiscreet questioner. And so I say to you,-Taste it, the white truffle. Not that you will relish it, on a first or second trial. No. It requires a sort of initiation. Ambrosia, depend upon it, would prove unpalatable, at first, to organs degraded by coarse mortal food. It has, the white truffle, I mean, not the ambrosia, which I have never tasted,it has a shadow of a shade of mitigated garlic flavor, which demands time and a certain training of the gustatory apparatus, to be fully appreciated. Try again, and it will grow upon you,- again and again, and you will go crazy after the white truffle. I have seen persons, who had once turned up their noses at it, declare themselves capable of any crime to get at it. Nature gave it to Piedmont, "e poi ruppe la stampa." Gold you may find in different places, and under different latitudes;-the white truffle is an exclusive growth of Piedmont. To return. If it is not the want of proper materials, or of taste to use them, what can be the cause of the unjust ostracism against buttered toast? A Genoese friend of mine accounts for it on the same principle on which another friend of mine, a Polish refugee in London, accounted for the difference, nay, in many points, the direct opposition, between English and French habits of life, that is to say, on the principle of national antagonism. Why does the English Parliament hold its sittings at night? my Polish friend would ask. The reason is obvious. Because the French Parliament sits in broad day, when it sits at all. Why is winter the season of villeggiatura in England? Because in France it is summer and autumn. Why are beards and moustaches tabooed in Great Britain? Because it is common to wear them in France. Why are new pipes preferred in England for smoking? Because in France the older and more culottée a pipe, the more welcome it is. And so on, ad infinitum. Arguing on the same principle, my Genoese friend avers that buttered toast is proscribed at Turin because it is so justly popular in Genoa. The Genoese, in fact, excel in the preparation of that dainty article. They have, for the purpose, delicious little rolls, which they cut |