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however usually attending lofty natures. But, if we regard the common opinion of mankind, they are not those that the ordinary New England character most needs to be guarded against. The philosophy of Benjamin Franklin has done too much towards lowering the tone of the youth-I should rather say, of the partially educated youth-of New England. Franklin deserved the statue you (Mr. Winthrop) helped to raise to him, and the eloquent oration with which you inaugurated it, for he did great things for science, and rendered the greatest services to his country in her struggle for independence. He brought to her aid sagacity, energy and patience, and shed much honor on our infant name.

But,

take from Benjamin Franklin what he did for science and the independence of his country, and try him alone upon his philosophy and maxims for life, and I would rather, a thousand times rather, that any one in whose veins ran my blood, that any—all the youth of New England-should look to the example of Josiah Quincy than to that of Benjamin Franklin.

Mr. President,-Among all the true and gratifying commendations that have been and will be passed upon Mr. Quincy, I trust we shall not overlook nor keep in the background, but always put foremost, those qualities which made him the heroic, lofty gentleman.

walked in to where the other dog was lying. He
then stood quite still, and in ten minutes fell on
his face, and never afterwards moved his limbs;
he continued to breathe seven minutes.
We now
tried a fowl, which died in a minute and a half.
We threw in another, which died before touching
the ground. During these experiments we expe-
rienced a heavy shower of rain; but we were so
interested by the awful sight before us that we
did not care for getting wet. On the opposite side,
near a large stone, was the skeleton of a human
being, who must have perished on his back, with
his right hand under his head. From being ex-
posed to weather, the bones were bleached as
white as ivory. I was anxious to procure this
skeleton, but an attempt to get it would have
been madness.-New York Observer.

A VALLEY OF DEATH IN JAVA.-The destructive agency of carbonic acid gas on animal life is well exemplified in certain places where large quantities are evolved from the earth. The most striking instance, however, is the celebrated valley of Java, which, if any animal enters, he never leaves. The following interesting account is given by an eye-witness: We took with us two dogs and some fowls to try experiments in this poisonous hollow. On arriving at the foot of the mountain we dismounted and scrambled up the side, about a quarter of a mile, holding on by the branches of trees. When within a few yards of the valley, we experienced a strong, nauseous suffocating smell, but on coming close to its edge this disagreeable odor left us. The valley appeared to be about half a mile in circumference, oval, and the depth from thirty to thirty-five feet; the bottom quite flat; no vegetation; strewed with some very large (apparently) river stones, and the whole covered with THE Spectator gives a brief sketch of the life skeletons of human beings, tigers, pigs, deer, pea- of Rev. Samuel Crowther, the black man lately cocks, and all sorts of birds. We could not perceive appointed Bishop of Niger, and the first pure any vapor or any opening in the ground, which last negro ever elevated to the episcopal see in the appeared to us to be of a hard, sandy substance. English Church. He was born fifty years ago It was now proposed by one of the party to enter the in the Yoruba country, one hundred miles from valley; but at the spot where we were, this was the Bight of Benin, and his name was Adjai. In difficult, at least for me, as one false step would 1821, he was carried off by a Mahommedan tribe, have brought us to eternity, seeing no assistance exchanged for a horse, cruelly treated, and fincould be given. We lighted our cigars, and with ally sold as a slave for some tobacco. the assistance of a bamboo, we went down within captured by an English man-of-war in 1822, and eighteen feet of the bottom. Here we did not ex-landed at Sierra Leone. He was baptized in perience any difficulty in breathing, but an offen- 1825, when he took the name of Crowther. He sive nauseous smell annoyed us. We now fast-accompanied the first Niger exhibition, came to ened a dog to the end of a bamboo eighteen feet long, and sent him in. We had our watches in our hands, and in fourteen seconds he fell on his back, he did not move his limbs or look round, but continued to breathe eighteen minutes. We then sent in another, or rather he got loose and

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England, was educated at the Church Missionary College, Islington, and ordained by the Bishop of London. He went on the second Niger expedition in 1854, and wrote, it is said, a very able account of it. He has translated the Bible in Yoruba.

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POETRY.The Lost Lamb, 578. In Vain, 578. A Portrait of Shakspeare, 578. Nineveh, 615. No Peace for the Wicked, 616. Twilight in the North, 616. Home and Heaven, 616.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Santiago and Valparaiso Railway, 602. The Circassian Exodus, 614. Irish and Scotch Loyalty, 614.

NEW BOOKS.

POEMS, by David Gray. With Memoirs of his Life. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

THE REBELLION RECORD: A Diary of American Events, 1860-1864. Part 43. By Frank Moore, Author of " Diary of the American Revolution." New York: G. P. Putnam. This Part contains Portraits of Generals Hazen and Willcox.

POEMS, by Jean Ingelow, ninth edition. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

In the present number we begin to publish "The Clever Woman of the Family," by the author of the "Heir of Redclyffe." When completed, it will be published as a separate work.

WE have, at last, with great regret, sold the stereotype plates of the First Series of The Living Age, to be melted by type-founders. We have a small number of copies of the printed work remaining, which we shall be glad to receive orders for so long as we can supply them.

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THE LOST LAMB.

THE marsh and meadow lay, in fog,

The night was chill with drizzly rains,
The gude-wife turned the smould'ring log,
And spread the snowy counterpanes.
The child within its downy bed

She tucked with more than wonted care,
Then laid her own thrift-weary head,
And into dreams slipped half her prayer.
Past midnight, and the dame awoke.

A cry of anguish filled the room! She listened: not a murmur broke The silence of the household gloom. Again and yet again she stirred

In startled slumber through the night, As oft her fevered fancy heard Some wild, strange summons of affright. Toward dawn it sounded yet again,

Plaintive and lone, and faint and far; 'Twas like a childish cry of pain,

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Or utterance, as "Mamma, mamma! She sprung from bed, and sought her child: Soft nested in its crib it lay, And on each sleeping feature smiled The first faint promise of the day. Back to her bed the gude-wife crept, Her eyes half blind with tender tears: "In God's own hand my darling's keptHow foolish are a woman's fears!

"Some lamb, most like, has strayed the fold, The poor lone thing was bleating ‘ba,' Which, borne upon the fog and cold, Seemed to my mother ears, Ma, ma.'

Next day a piteous tale went round;
The village street was all agog;
A child's dead body had been found
Stiff standing in the meadow bog!
The little feet had strayed away;
The clinging mire had held them fast
Till death, slow dawning with the day,
Brought her its blest release at last.
And there, throughout that livelong night,
A helpless child of tender years,
Fainter and fainter with affright,
Had called "Ma, ma" to sleeping ears!

I knew her not; I only found

In printed page this tale of fear; But when I cease to hear that sound, I shall have ceased all sounds to hear. -Harper's Magazine.

IN VAIN.

CLASP closer arms, press closer lips,
In last and vain caressing!
For never more that pallid cheek

Will crimson 'neath your pressing.
For these vain words and vainer tears
She waited yester even;
She waits you now,-but in the far
Resplendent halls of heaven.

With patient eyes fixed on the door,

She waited, hoping ever,

Till death's dark wall rose cold between
Her gaze and you forever.

She heard your footsteps in the breeze,
And in the wild-bee's humming;
The last breath that she shaped to words
Said softly," Is he coming?"
Now silenced lies the gentlest heart
That ever beat 'neath cover;
Safe-never to be rung again

By you, a fickle lover!
Your wrong to her knew never end,
Till earth's last bonds were riv;
Your memory rose cold between

Her parting soul and heaven.
Now vain your false and tardy grief,—
Vain your remorseful weeping;
For she, whom only you deceived,

Lies hushed in dreamless sleeping.
Go; not beside that peaceful form
Should lying words be spoken!
Go, pray to God, "Be merciful
As she whose heart I've broken."
-Lucy Hamilton Hooper's Poems.

A PORTRAIT OF SHAKSPEARE.
BY HIMSELF.

[At the recent fete for the benefit of the Dramatic College in London, the following card was sold in the stalls :]

A SWEETER or more lovable creature,
Framed in the prodigality of nature,

The spacious world cannot contain again.
His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in
him

That nature might stand up and say

To all the world, This was a man !
He was ever gracious, had a tear for pity,
And a hand open as day for melting charity!
His bounty was as boundless as the sea,
His love as deep; the more he gave the more
He had; for he was infinite.

Hear him but reason in divinity,
And, all admiring, with an inward wish,
You would desire to see him made a prelate.
Hear him debate on commonwealth affairs,
You'd say it hath ben all in all his study.
List his discourse on war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle rendered you in music.
Turn him to any cause of policy,

The Gordian knot of it he will unloose
Familiar as his garters. And when he speaks of
love!

The air, a chartered libertine, is still,
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears
To steal his sweet and honeyed sentences.
Our poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Did glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodied forth

The forms of things unknown, our poet's pen Turned them to shapes, and gave to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Found tongues in trees, books in the running

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From The Literary Examiner. Enoch Arden, etc. By Alfred Tennyson, D. C. L., Poet-Laureate. Moxon.

WHEN Dante taught men how a poet should write in his mother tongue, he expressed the simple truth of his soul through the artificial learning of his time, by saying that the nature of man allies him to the vegetable and to the animal world, as well as to that of his fellows. Man, he said, agrees with plants in seeking what is useful; for, indeed, the whole life of a plant consists in selecting from earth, water, and air, whatever will contribute to its healthy growth. With the lower animals he seeks what is delightful. And his race is alone or allied to the angels in desiring what is rational. The poet, according to Dante, when he addressed his countrymen in their own tongue, was to speak to their whole nature in its three parts and to each in its intensity, through that which is in its own way greatest. Now, he taught, in regard to usefulness, the chief thing is health; in regard to pleasure, love; and in regard to reason, virtue, a well-governed will. Judged by this test of the great Father of modern poetry, Mr. Tennyson is essentially a nation's poet. From earth, water, and air, his verse draws all that is most wholesome into its strong life, and while he sings in all its purest forms the exquisite delight of love, his music never leaves the higher soul of man untouched. The healthy English strain fastens upon our best household affections, and embodies in the purest poetry the better spirit of the land. My love and duty to you" is a homely phrase; but it has English character, and represents the side of English character for which Mr. Tennyson has shown his sympathy in many a former poem, and notably in the new volume which he publishes to-day. Its first poem, “Enoch Arden," is a tale of the tenderest domestic love reaching in the highest form of that virtue which lies in a self-governed will, by a sublime act of self-sacrifice. The next poem, " Aylmer's Field," is of true love under the ban of social forms that have

66

in them no soul of truth and honesty; and here Mr. Tennyson sings as he has sung before, and the best poets of our country have sung, and our best preachers preached, our best politicians worked and fought, and our best philosophers philosophized since England first became a nation, constant in battle against

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run,

"Lies the hawk's cast, the mole has made his
The hedgehog underneath the plantain bores,
The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,
The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there
Follows the mouse, and all is open field."

In the next poem, "Sea Dreams," the cares and blessings of married love blend fancifully with the swell of the great waters; but its dream-pictures fasten on realities of life, and they are true as gospel, for thence comes the whole light of their beauty. A poor city clerk and his wife wring from scanty means a month by the seaside for the health of their sick infant. The care of the world is heavy on the husband, for a pious hypocrite has duped him into buying shares in a mine that has swallowed up the little savings of his years, and threatens next to swallow up him too in utter ruin. They come to the sea on Saturday, on Sunday hear a Boanerges knock the world down in his chapel, in the evening play with their child by the sea, and on the Sunday sleep, with their child by them, within sound of the breaking waves:

So, now on sand, they walked, and now on cliff,
Lingering about the thymy promontories,
Till all the sails were darkened in the west,
And rose in the east; then homeward and to
bed;

Haunting a holy text, and still to that
Where she, who kept a tender Christian hope
Returning, as the bird returns, at night,
Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,'

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And silenced by that silence lay the wife,
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,
And musing on the little lives of men,
And how they mar this little by their feuds.

In the next poem, yet more full of tenderest home feeling, an old grandmother speaks upon hearing that her eldest boy Willy is He died at the age of sixty-five, but to his daughter, from whom while under her

dead.

But in the sea-dreams and the wakings from roof she has just received the news, she babbles tearless of the past. The dead man is again a babe in her young arms. Willy, my beauty, my eldest born, the flower of the

flock."

64

them and the still communion of the night; communion not so still but that the parent voices wake the child--the wife had wished their enemy forgiven before she told the news brought by a later comer from their town" Strong of his hands, and strong on his legs, but still of his tongue, who had spoken with her on the shore :

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"Saying this,

The woman half-turned round from him she loved,

Left him one hand, and reaching through the night

Her other, found (for it was close beside)
And half-embraced the basket cradle-head
With one soft arm, which, like the pliant bough
That moving moves the nest and nestling, swayed
The cradle, while she sang this baby song.

"What does little birdie say
In her nest at peep of day?
Let me fly, says little birdie,
Mother, let me fly away.
Birdie, rest a little longer,
Till the little wings are stronger.
So she rests a little longer,
Then she flies away.

"What does little baby say,

In her bed at peep of day?
Baby says, like little birdie,
Let me rise and fly away.
Baby, sleep a little longer,
Till the little limbs are stronger.
If she sleeps a little longer,
Baby too shall fly away.

"She sleeps: let us too, let all evil, sleep.
He also sleeps,-another sleep than ours.
He can do no more wrong: forgive him, dear,
And I shall sleep the sounder!"

Then the man,
"His deeds yet live, the worst is yet to come.
Yet let your sleep for this one night be sound:
I do forgive him!"

"Thanks, my love," she said, "Your own will be the sweeter," and they slept.

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1 ought to have gone before him; I wonder he went so young.

I cannot cry for him, Annie; I have not long to stay;

Perhaps I shall see him the sooner, for he lived far away.

"Why do you look at me, Annie? you think I am hard and cold;

But all my children have gone before me, I am so old;

I cannot weep for Willy, nor can I weep for the

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Shadow and shine is life, little Annie, flower and thorn.

"That was the first time, too, that ever I thought of death.

There lay the sweet little body that never had drawn a breath.

I had not wept, little Annie, not since I had been a wife;

But I wept like a child that day, for the babe had fought for his life.

"His dear little face was troubled, as if with anger or pain;

I looked at the still little body-his trouble had all been in vain.

For Willy I cannot weep, I shall see him another

morn;

But I wept like a child for the child that was dead before he was born.

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