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ple in the Scriptures. Think of Keats writ- watched by his bedside constantly. Bying such a poem as the elegant and virtuous and-by, so wearied became the sick man of Mr. Addison's " Spacious Firmament on his thoughts, so fretted and tortured, that High"! He loved the world with an aching he began to long for a release. Severn intense affection. He sent his soul back to writes, "He talks of the quiet grave as the the old Greek days and etherealized its first rest he can ever have." He gave the clumsy decorations of woods and streams line for his epitaph so well known, and he into creatures of air and light and sunshine, waited with great calmness now for the end. who symbolized nature fittingly. Yet Keats It came at last. "On the twenty-third, cannot be accused of paganism. There was about four, the approaches of death came that in his blood, indeed, which he could on: Severn-I-lift me up-I am dynot help, but he had not the heartlessness ing; I shall die easy. Don't be frightened or the drear fatalism of a pagan. All this tended to tie him to the ground, and there is no doubt he felt a bitter anguish when he knew that his life was to be contracted far within the common limits. The following passage of his biography shows how he took the first summons:

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be firm, and thank God it has come.' I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sunk into death, so quiet that I still thought he slept." Keats was buried in Rome, his grave surrounded with flowers, of which he had told Severn when dying he thought "the in"One night, about eleven o'clock, Keats returned home in a state of strange physical extensest pleasure he had received in life was citement; it might have appeared to those who in watching the growth of flowers." To did not know him one of fierce intoxication. He him Shelley raised the glorious monument told his friend he had been outside the stage of "Adonais," and, in a few years, next to coach, had received a severe chill, was a little the resting place of Keats was placed a fevered, but added, 'I don't feel it now.' He tombstone inscribed with the name of Shelwas easily persuaded to go to bed, and as he ley. It is gratifying to think that the fame leaped into the cold sheets, before his head was of both has now increased, and that their on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and said, works have left an enduring and wholesome That is blood from my mouth; bring me the impress upon literature. They were emicandle- - let me see this blood.' He gazed stead-nently discoverers of poetry, as fearless and fastly for some moments at the ruddy stain, and as self-sacrificing in their searches as the then looking in his friend's face, with an expression of sudden calmness never to be forgot

ten, said, I know the colour of that blood- - it is arterial blood

I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death-warrant. I must

die.'

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men who have braved the deserts of Africa and Australia. Their intellectual courage was their special characteristic. We may regret that Keats was not of stouter fibre; we may deplore his fragile nature, but he has left the world in his debt, and it was Although he recovered this attack, and not an over-kind world to him. He has many others, he never forgot the incident, supplied to English poetry with others of and always looked upon it as an unmistaka- his school-what it very much required, ble warning. Nevertheless it did not ma- an element of pure æsthetic beauty as apart terially impair his spirits, which were at from the beauty of sheer power and loftitimes of a hectic brightness. He was ad- ness, or the beauty of proportion. Keats vised to go to Italy, and not before it was gave his readers the essence of poetry, and time. In his journey he suffered severely. many of our modern writers have not failed The poor fellow wrote the following from to discover the value of this essence when Naples; one almost shrinks from extracting diluted. He would have been more popuit so full is it of pain and solitariness: lar, perhaps, had he mingled his rare ex"I can bear to die- I cannot bear to leave cellence with coarser materials, - had he her. Oh, God! God! God! . . . . My tickled, in fact, those instincts and sentiimagination is horribly vivid about her-Iments which Byron was never above apsee her I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her for a moment. Oh, that I could be buried near where she lives. . . . I am afraid to write to her; to receive a letter from her, to see her handwriting, would break my heart; even to hear of her anyhow to see her name written would be more than I can bear." And so on. Severn, who had accompanied Keats,

pealing to. But he was ever faithful to art, and he has compassed at least in part the glorious designs which he so desired to manifest: :

"He has outsoared the shadow of our night,

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again."

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Bremen Weser Zeitung,
Sunday Magazine,

[Readers who remember the time of the First Napoleon and the First Alexander of Russia will share our interest in the mystic who had so much influence over the latter.] 4. NOTES FROM THE SCOTTISH ISLES. No. III. Canna

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Spectator,
Spectator,

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["Is there a heart that never loved?' Many centuries have rolled over us - we
mean almost all the years of this century—since our paternal heart mourned over
the loss of Jack- "sole Dolly of our house and heart."]

6. BAD ENGLISH,

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La Revue des Deux Mondes,. 305

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Spectator,
Spectator,

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London Review,.

315

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258 A LARK'S FLIGHT, .

SHORT ARTICLES.

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LORD ALVANLEY ON CROCKFORD,

MR. DICKENS AND ALL THE YEAR ROUND, 304 THE ROCK AHEAD,.

LEARNING BY HEART, OR ART,

In No. 1275 we shall begin two good stories, to be afterward published separately: 1. MADAME THERESE. BY ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN-(two celebrated French authors.) This has been translated for the "Living Age," and will continue every week till concluded. 2. LETTICE LISLE; which is probably by Miss Thackeray.

NEW BOOKS:

RECOLLECTIONS OF A BUSY LIFE. By Horace Greeley. New York: T. B. Ford & Co. Boston: H. A. Brown & Co.

ers.

[We shall find opportunities to make this record of a remarkable man well known to our readMr. Greeley has been an important part of the late years of the Republic.] THE TROTTING HORSE OF AMERICA, How to train and drive him. With Reminiscences. By Hiram Woodruff. Edited by Charles J. Foster, etc., etc. New York: T. B. Ford & Co. Boston: H. A. Brown & Co.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money.

From The New Monthly Magazine.
THE SHIP AT SEA.

BY NICHOLAS MICHELL.

I.

A SHIP at sea, no land to cheer the eye,

Billows turn rubies, as day's smile they meet,
Up leaps the dolphin warming beams to meet,
Light in rich streams through heaven's vast
dome is poured,

And nature, wide rejoicing, hails her lord.

VII.

Nothing but waves below, and skies o'erhead, Soon upon deck the late dull sleepers come,
Nothing to break that blue monotony,

The round world seeming one vast ocean-bed;
The unfathomed deep now peaceful, now at strife,
Heaving forever like a thing of life;
Forever rolling on as at its birth,
Belting with solemn glory all the earth.

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In bustling crowds, to inhale the breath of Pale Sickness felt new vigour nerve his frame, Morn;

Drinking the breeze o'er freshening billows
borne;

The maiden laughed, upon her cheek the spray,
Tripped to and fro, some ballad tuning gay;
And Age, for England sighing, raised more high
His drooping form, and glanced around the
sky.

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From St. James' Magazine.

ONE HUNDRED PLANETS.

some sim

monies in the music of the spheres. He
quickly noticed a certain evidence of law in
the distribution of the planets at various
distances from the great centre of the sys-
tem. He tried many methods -
ple, others complex-for harmonising the
planetary distances, but he was always
foiled at one particular point of his inquiry.
A gap, which his devices were insufficient
to bridge over, appeared to exist between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
length," says he, "I have become bolder,
and I now place a new planet between these
two "-a happy anticipation of future dis-

"At

It is probable that before these pages appear, the number of known asteroids, or minor planets, will be increased to one hundred. As we write, two are wanting from that number; but scarcely a month has passed lately without adding one of these minute worlds to the planetary system. It would almost seem as if astronomers had been more than usually on the alert of late, on account of the near prospect of entering on the second hundred of the asteroidal family. The history of the discovery that there coveries, somewhat marred, it should seem, exists in space a zone of worlds circling by a guess which has not been confirmed round the sun in interwoven orbits, is one the supposition, namely, that an unseen which can hardly fail to be interesting, even planet revolves between the orbits of Merto those who have not made astronomy a cury and Venus. subject of special study. By a singular accident, this history belongs wholly to the nineteenth century, the discovery of the first asteroid having been effected on the first day of the century. We propose to discuss some of the more interesting circumstances which have attended the search after new members of the zone of asteroids. When Copernicus had shown that the planets circle around the sun, and had thus swept away the whole of Ptolemy's complicated system, with its

"Centrics and eccentrics scribbled o'er,

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb,"

astronomers began for the first time to be sensible of the symmetry and orderliness of the planetary system. They saw six beautiful orbs all circling in one direction around a massive central globe; and around one of these orbs - —our own earth-they saw a secondary orb, or satellite, revolving in the same direction as the primary planets. Then came the discovery of Jupiter's moons, revolving in symmetrical orbits around the giant of the solar system, and still astronomers saw no change from the law by which all the members of the solar system, satellites as well as primaries, seemed bound to revolve in one direction.

Struck by the order and symmetry thus exhibited within the solar system, the ingenious astronomer Kepler was led to seek for new evidence of symmetrical arrangement, or, as he quaintly expressed it, for new har

A century and a half later, Professor Titius, of Wittemberg, propounded a singular law of planetary distances, which only required for its completeness the supposition that an unseen planet revolves between Mars and Jupiter. This law, commonly called Bode's law, is usually presented with an array of figures, which leads the beginner to suppose that the law is a complex one. In reality, however, the law is very simple, and may be expressed in few words, thus: the distances of the successive planets from the orbit of Mercury increases in a twofold proportion. The law is not fulfilled exactly, but there is an approximation to exactness which is sufficiently remarkable. Thus, according to the law, if we called the distance of the earth from Mercury's orbit two, the distance of Venus should be one, that of Mars four, that of the missing planet eight, that of Jupiter sixteen, and that of Saturn thirty-two. The actual distances are as follows: — -That of Venus is one and a tenth, that of Mars three and four-fifths, that of Jupiter sixteen, and that of Saturn thirty and a half. Although we recognize the possibility that this approximation may be merely accidental, yet it cannot fail to strike us as involving, at the least, a very singular coincidence.

Here matters remained until the discovery of Uranus by Sir William (then Dr.) Herschel. As soon as the orbit of the new planet had been determined, it was found

that its distance corresponds very closely which had moved away to other regions of to Bode's law. As Uranus travels outside the sky, we shall probably never learn. Saturn's orbit, its distance from Mercury's Certain it is that Piazzi could not detect orbit should be represented by sixty-four any star where Wollaston had marked one (on the above-named scale). The actual in. But his search was soon rewarded by distance is sixty-two and two-thirds. This a discovery of greater value. On the 1st close agreement attracted much attention of January, 1801, he observed a small star, to Bode's law, and many eminent astronomers began to attach considerable importance to Kepler's prediction, that between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter there would be found a planet too small to be seen by the unaided eye.

which was not recorded in his own, or any other catalogue. On the 2nd he looked again for the star, proposing to determine its place afresh. To his surprise, he found that the star had moved away from the place it had before occupied. The motion was Nearly nineteen years elapsed, however, inconsiderable, indeed, but yet he could before any measures were taken to institute feel little doubt respecting its reality. On a rigid search for the missing body. At the 3rd he looked again for the stranger, length, in 1800, six distinguished astrono- and now there was absolute certainty remers held a meeting at Lilienthal, at which specting its motion. Yes, the star was the subject was earnestly discussed. It slowly moving from east to west, or, to use was finally arranged that the zodiac that a technical expression, slowly retrograding. region of the celestial sphere along which This was precisely the sort of motion which all the planets are observed to movewould be exhibited by a planet occupying should be divided into twenty-four belts, the apparent position of the stranger. But which were to be explored by as many as- as it was a kind of motion which might betronomers, each astronomer taking a separ-long to a body moving in a very different The superintendence of the manner, Piazzi waited for further information. If the stranger were really a planet, it could not retrograde long, but was bound presently to resume its forward motion. Why this is so, we need not here stop to explain. Let it suffice to remark that, It has often happened in the history of along certain parts of their paths, the astronomy that the results of the most care-planets seem for awhile to move backwards, fully organized research have been antici- just as an advancing train might seem to pated by observers not engaged in carrying do if observed by a passenger in a train out the appointed plan of operations. For instance, when all the astronomers of Europe were sweeping the heavens for Halley's comet in 1758, a Saxon farmer Palisch anticipated them all by detecting and that with the unaided eye the return of the wanderer. Something similar happened in the present instance.

ate zone.

whole process was assigned to the eminent observer Schroeter; and Baron de Lach, to whom the institution of the search was mainly due, was chosen as the president of the new Society of Planet-seekers.

-

travelling more rapidly in the same direction. For eleven days Piazzi's star continued to retrograde, but he observed with satisfaction that its motion diminished daily. On the 12th of January it was stationary. Then slowly it began to advance along the zodiac signs.

There was no longer any doubt respectThe celebrated Italian astronomer Piazzi ing the character of the stranger; and after was engaged in constructing an extensive watching the star for twelve more days, catalogue of the fixed stars. While prose- Piazzi wrote to Bode and Orani, two memcuting this work, he was led to examine a bers of the planet-seeking association, inportion of the constellation Taurus, in which | forming them of the nature of his discovery. a certain star (assigned by Wollaston to Unfortunately his letters did not reach them this region) was missing. For several until the end of March, and in the meannights in succession Piazzi prosecuted his time-after tracking the star until the 11th inquiry after the missing orb. Whether of February - Piazzi was seized with a Wollaston had made a mistake, or whether very dangerous illness which put a stop to he had recorded the place of an asteroid his observations. When Bode and Orani

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