in leaves than which the lip of an Indian shell was never more delicately teinted; the still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing with the noble things whose summer they had shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the death-struck glory of their companions.

The dull colours of English autumnal foliage give you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon. The change here is gradual; in America it is the work of a night-of a single frost!

Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the morning to a spectacle like this!

It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through the tree-tops-as if the sunsets of a summer-gold, purple, and crimson-had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light and colour over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf in those countless trees had been painted to outflush the tulip-as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, rubies, had let forth their imprisoned colours to mount through the roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the perishing leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.

I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled, when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder. "St. John? Impossible!"

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Bodily!" answered my quondam classmate.

I looked at him with astonishment. The soigné man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap of rich otter skin; his pantaloons spread with a slovenly carelessness over his feet; and, altogether, there was that in his air which told me at a glance that he had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if he was brooding over the more idle days in which we had been acquainted. "And where are you bound?" I asked, having answered the same question for myself. "Westward with the chiefs!"

with the world, I had adopted some precocious principles; and one was, that a man's influence over others was vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his history."

I smiled, and as the boat sped on her way over the calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on leisurely with a story which is scarce remarkable enough for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed his early youth on the borders of civilization, between whites and Indians, and that he had been more particularly indebted for protection to the father of Nunu. Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond life in the different cities had taught him the caution and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with the means of education, and, with singular application in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied himself to study under a private master, fitted himself for the university in half the usual time, and cultivated, in addition, the literary taste which I have remarked upon.

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This," he said, smiling at my look of astonishment, "brings me up to the time when we met. I came to college at the age of eighteen with a few hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experience of the rough side of the world, great confidence in myself, and distrust of others, and, I believe, a kind of instinct of good manners, which made me ambitious of shining in society. You were a witness to my debût. Miss Temple was the first highly educated woman I had ever known, and you saw her effect on me."

"And since we parted?"

No; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I had my turn. You see me in my new character now. But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, playing my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for a woman worth ten thousand of her -and here she is."

As Nunu came up the companion-way from the cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in the usual manner, but with the most absolute simplicity. She had changed in those five years from the child to the woman, and, with a round and welldeveloped figure, additional height, and manners at once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked the chieftain's daughter. St. John took her hand, and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes.

"That I could ever have put a creature like this," he said, "into comparison with the dolls of civilization!"

We parted at Buffalo; St. John with his wife and the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara.

NAHANT.

FROM THE SAME.

Ir you can imagine a buried Titan lying along the length of a continent with one arm stretched out into the midst of the sea, the place to which I would transport you, reader mine! would lie as it were in the palm of the giant's hand. The small promontory to which I refer, which becomes an island in certain states of the tide, is at the end of one of the long capes of Massachusetts, and is still called by its Indian name, Nahant. Not to make you uncomfortable, I beg to introduce you at once to a pretentious hotel, "squat like a toad" upon the unsheltered and highest point of this citadel in mid sea, and a very great resort for the metropolitan New Englanders. Nahant is perhaps, liberally measured, a square half-mile; and it is distant from what may fairly be called mainland, perhaps a league.

Road to Nahant there is none. The oi polloi go there by steam; but when the tide is down, you may drive there with a thousand chariots over the bottom of the sea. As I suppose there is not such another place in the known world, my tale will wait while I describe it more fully. If the Bible had been a fiction, (not to speak profanely,) should have thought the idea of the destruction of Pharaoh and his host had its origin in some such wonder of nature.

I

Nahant is so far out in the ocean, that what is called the "ground swell," the majestic heave of its great bosom going on for ever like respiration, (though its face may be like a mirror beneath the sun, and wind may not have crisped its surface for days and weeks,) is as broad and powerful within a rood of the shore as is a thousand miles at sea. The promontory itself is never wholly left by the ebb; but, from its western extremity, there runs a narrow ridge, scarce broad enough for a horsepath, impassable for the rocks and sea-weed of which it is matted, and extending at just highwater mark from Nahant to the mainland. Seaward from this ridge, which is the only connection of the promontory with the continent, descends an expanse of sand, left bare six hours out of the twelve by the retreating sea, as smooth and hard as marble, and as broad and apparently as level as the plain of the Hermus. For three miles it stretches away without shell or stone, a surface of white, fine-grained sand, beaten so hard by the eternal hammer of the surf, that the hoof of a horse scarce marks it, and the heaviest wheel leaves it as printless as a floor of granite. This will be easily understood when you remember the tremendous rise and fall of the ocean swell, from the very bosom of which, in all its breadth and strength, roll in the waves of the flowing tide, breaking down on the beach, every one, with the thunder of a host precipitated from the battlements of a castle. Nothing could be more solemn and anthem-like than the succession of these plunging surges. And when the "tenth wave" gathers, far out at sea, and rolls onward to the shore, first with a glassy and heaving swell as if some mighty monster were

lurching inland beneath the water, and then, bursting up into foam, with a front like an endless and sparry crystal wall, advances and overwhelms every thing in its progress, till it breaks with a centupled thunder on the beach-it has seemed to me, standing there, as if thus might have beaten the first surge on the shore after the fiat which "divided sea and land." I am no Cameronian, but the sea (myself on shore) always drives me to Scripture for an illustration of my feelings.

The promontory of Nahant must be based on the earth's axle, else I cannot imagine how it should have lasted so long. In the mildest weather, the ground-swell of the sea gives it a fillip at every heave that would lay the "castled crag of Drachenfels" as low as Memphis. The wine trembles in your beaker of claret as you sit after dinner at the hotel; and if you look out at the eastern balcony, (for it is a wooden pagoda, with balconies, verandahs, and colonnades ad libitum,) you will see the grass breathless in the sunshine upon the lawn, and the ocean as polished and calm as Mladi's brow beyond, and yet the spray and foam dashing fifty feet into the air between, and enveloping the "Devil's Pulpit" (a tall rock split off from the promontory's front) in a perpetual kaleidoscope of mists and rainbows. Take the trouble to transport yourself there! I will do the remaining honours on the spot. A cavern as cool (not as silent) as those of Trophonius lies just under the brow of yonder precipice, and the waiter shall come after us with our wine. You have dined with the Borromeo in the grotto of Isola Bella, I doubt not, and know the perfection of art—I will show you that of nature. (I should like to transport you for a similar contrast from Terni to Niagara, or from San Giovanni Laterano to an aisle in a forest of Michigan; but the Dadalian mystery, alas! is unsolved. We "fly not yet.”)

Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave.” The floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look forth upon the broad Atlantic-the shores of Ireland the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool left by the retreating | tide for a refrigerator, and with the champagne in the midst, we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned pleasure in the east, and drink to the small-featured and purple-lipped Mignons" of Syria-those fine-limbed and fiery slaves, adorable as Peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch of piastres (say 51. 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian-fit dolls for the sensual Turk-is, to him who would buy soul, dear at a para the hecatomb.

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We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid, with a hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the pearly arch of heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock below, the "tenth"

surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its retreating fellows, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts!would you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls!-would you not think the foundation of the deep had given way? A plain, broad enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far-the respiration of a sleeping child not more regular and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself! The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open; but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we should stumble on such a moral in the cave!

By the deeper base of its hoarse organ, the sea is now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear! how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing and dull hiss among the seaweed, and, like a myriad of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine music in the sea!

And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and the first gold teint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were paved with pearl, and the changing light

struck up through the waters. And there heaves a ship into the horizon, like a white-winged bird lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a welcome off the shore. She comes from "merry England." She is freighted with more than merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it; for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green valley of his home! What links of human affection brings she over the sea? How much comes in her that is not in her "bill of lading," yet worth, to the heart that is waiting for it, a thousand times the purchase of her whole venture!

Mais montons nous! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that "remainder biscuit," and the echoes of our philosophy, to the Naiads who have lent us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, or Arethusa! whatever thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave! adieu!

Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent! So! Here we are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course! The polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye can see, the surf comes in below, breast-high ere it breaks, and the white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. Oh, how noiselessly

runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind, and by the trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark the colour of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less-a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man, by the returning sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crowquill-you may course over its dazzling expanse with a troop of chariots.

Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left the sand, it holds the water without losing its firmness, and is like a gray mirror, bright as the bosom of the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!)

And now lean over the dasher, and see those small fetlocks striking up from beneath--the flying mane, the thoroughbred action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's swan, he

"Trots double, horse and shadow." You would swear you were skimming the surface of the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the white foam of the "tenth wave" skims in beneath wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element gliding away visibly beneath you.

fairly measured, are left behind, and 'Thalaba's blood We seem not to have driven fast, yet three miles, is up. Fine creature! I would not give him

"For the best horse the Sun has in his stable."

We have won champagne ere now, Thalaba and I, trotting on this silvery beach; and if ever old age comes on me, and I intend it never shall on aught save my mortal coil, (my spirit vowed to perpetual youth,) I think these vital breezes, and a trot on these exhilarating sands, would sooner renew my prime than a rock in St. Hilary's cradle, or a dip in the well of Kanathos. May we try the experiment together, gentle reader?

I am not settled in my own mind whether this description of one of my favourite haunts in America was written most to introduce the story that is to follow, or the story to introduce the description. Possibly the latter, for having consumed my callow youth in wandering "to and fro in the earth," like Sathanas of old, and looking on my country now with an eye from which all the minor and temporary features have gradually faded, I find my pride in it (after its glory as a republic) settling principally on the superior handiwork of nature in its land and water. When I talk of it now, it is looking through another's eyes-his who listens. I do not describe it after my own memory of what it was once to me, but according to my idea of what it will seem now to a stranger. Hence I speak not of the friends I made, rambling by lake or river. The lake and the river are there, but the friends are changed-to themselves and me. I speak not of the lovely and loving ones that stood

by me, looking on glen or waterfall. The glen and the waterfall are romantic still, but the form and the heart that breathed through it are no longer lovely or loving. I should renew my joys by the old mountain and river, for, all they ever were I should find them still, and never seem to myself grown old, or cankered of the world, or changed in form or spirit, while they reminded me but of my youth, with their familiar sunshine and beauty. But the friends that I knew-as I knew themare dead. They look no longer the same; they have another heart in them; the kindness of the eye, the smilingness of the lip, are no more there. Philosophy tells me the material and living body changes and renews, particle by particle, with time; and experience-cold-blooded and stony monitortells me, in his frozen monotone, that heart and spirit change with it and renew! But the name remains, mockery that it is! and the memory sometimes; and so these apparitions of the past-that we almost fear to question when they encounter us, lest the change they have undergone should freeze our blood-stare coldly on us, yet call us by name, and answer, though coldly to their own, and have that terrible similitude to what they were, mingled with their unsympathizing and hollow mummery, that we wish the grave of the past, with all that it contained of kind or lovely, had been sealed for ever. The heart we have lain near before our birth (so read I the book of human life) is the only one that cannot forget that it has loved

UNWRITTEN MUSIC.
FROM THE SAME.

MEPHISTOPHELES could hardly have found a more striking amusement for Faust than the passage of three hundred miles in the canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson. As I walked up and down the deck of the packet-boat, I thought to myself, that if it were not for thoughts of things that come more home to one's "business and bosom," (particularly "bosom,") I could be content to retake my berth at Schenectady, and return to Buffalo for amusement. The Erie canal-boat is a long and very pretty drawing-room afloat. It has a library, sofas, a tolerable cook, curtains or Venetian blinds, a civil captain, and no smell of steam or perceptible motion. It is drawn generally by three horses at a fair trot, and gets you through about a hundred miles a day, as softly as if you were witched over the ground by Puck and Mustard-seed. The company (say fifty people) is such as pleases Heaven; though I must say (with my eye all along the shore, collecting the various dear friends I have made and left on that long canal)

there are few highways on which you will meet so many lovely and loving fellow-passengers. On this occasion my star was bankrupt-Job Smith being my only civilized companion-and I was left to the unsatisfactory society of my own thoughts and the scenery.

Discontented as I may seem to have been, I remember, through eight or ten years of stirring and thickly-sown manhood, every moment of that lonely evening. I remember the progression of the sunset, from the lengthening shadows and the first gold upon the clouds, to the deepening twilight and the new-sprung star hung over the wilderness. And I remember what I am going to describe-a twilight anthem in the forest-as you remember an air of Rossini's, or a transition in the half-fiendish, half-heavenly creations of Meyerbeer. I thought time dragged heavily then, but I wish I had as light a heart and could feel as vividly now!

The Erie canal is cut a hundred or two miles through the heart of the primeval wilderness of America, and the boat was gliding on silently and swiftly, and never sailed a lost cloud through the abyss of space on a course more apparently new and untrodden. The luxuriant soil had sent up a rank grass that covered the horse-path like velvet; the Erie water was clear as a brook in the winding canal; the old shafts of the gigantic forest spurred into the sky by thousands, and the yet unscared eagle swung off from the dead branch of the pine, and skimmed the tree-tops for another perch, as if he had grown to believe that gliding spectre a harmless phenomenon of nature. The horses drew steadily and unheard at the end of the long line; the steersman stood motionless at the tiller, and I lay on a heap of baggage in the prow, attentive to the slightest breathing of nature, but thinking, with an ache at my heart, of Edith Linsey, to whose feet (did I mention it?) I was hastening with a lover's proper impatience. I might as well have taken another turn in my "fool's paradise."

The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop's finger; the whip-poor-will had chanted the first stave of his lament; the bat was abroad, and the screech-owl, like all bad singers, commenced without waiting to be importuned, though we were listening for the nightingale. The air, as I said before, had been all day breathless; but as the first chill of evening displaced the warm atmosphere of the departed sun, a slight breeze crisped the mirrored bosom of the canal, and then commenced the night anthem of the forest, audible, I would fain believe, in its soothing changes, by the dead tribes whose bones whiten amid the perishing leaves. First, whisperingly yet articulately, the suspended and wavering foliage of the birch was touched by the many-fingered wind, and, like a faint prelude, the silver-lined leaves rustled in the low branches; and, with a moment's pause, when you could hear the moving of the vulture's claws upon the bark, as he turned to get his breast to the wind, the increasing breeze swept into the pinetops, and drew forth from their fringe-like and myriad tassels a low monotone like the refrain of

a far-off dirge; and still as it murmured, (seeming to you sometimes like the confused and heartbroken responses of the penitents on a cathedral floor,) the blast strengthened and filled, and the rigid leaves of the oak, and the swaying fans and chalices of the magnolia, and the rich cups of the tulip-trees, stirred and answered with their different voices like many-toned harps; and when the wind was fully abroad, and every moving thing on the breast of the earth was roused from its daylight repose, the irregular and capricious blast, like a player on an organ of a thousand stops, lulled and strengthened by turns, and from the hiss in the rank grass, low as the whisper of fairies, to the thunder of the impinging and groaning branches of the larch and the fir, the anthem went ceaselessly through its changes, and the harmony (though the owl broke in with his scream, and though the overblown monarch of the wood came crashing to the earth) was still perfect and without a jar. It is strange that there is no sound of nature out of tune. The roar of the waterfall comes, into this anthem of the forest like an accompaniment of bassoons, and the occasional bark of the wolf, or the scream of a night-bird, or even the deep-throated croak of the frog, is no more discordant than the outburst of an octave flute above the even melody of an orchestra; and it is surprising how the large raindrops, pattering on the leaves, and the small voice of the nightingale (singing, like nothing but himself, sweetest in the darkness) seems an intensitive and a low burden to the general anthem of the earthas it were, a single voice among instruments.

I had what Wordsworth calls a "couchant ear" in my youth, and my story will wait, dear reader, while I tell you of another harmony that I learned to love in the wilderness.

noon.

There will come sometimes in the spring-say in May, or whenever the snow-drops and sulphur butterflies are tempted out by the first timorous sunshine-there will come, say, in that yearning and youth-renewing season, a warm shower at Our tent shall be pitched on the skirts of a forest of young pines, and the evergreen foliage, if foliage it may be called, shall be a daily refreshment to our eye while watching, with the west wind upon our cheeks, the unclothed branches of the elm. The rain descends softly and warm; but with the sunset the clouds break away, and it grows suddenly cold enough to freeze. The next morning you shall come out with me to a hillside looking upon the south, and lie down with your ear to the earth. The pine tassels hold in every four of their fine fingers a drop of rain frozen like a pearl in a long ear-ring, sustained in their loose grasp by the rigidity of the cold. The sun grows warm at ten, and the slight green fingers begin to relax and yield, and by eleven they are all drooping their icy pearls upon the dead leaves with a murmur through the forest like the swarming of the bees of Hybla. There is not much variety in its music, but it is a pleasant monotone for thought, and if you have a restless fever in your bosom, (as I had, when I learned to love it, for the travel which has corrupted the heart and the ear that it

soothed and satisfied then,) you may lie down with a crooked root under your head in the skirts of the forest, and thank Heaven for an anodyne to care. And it is better than the voice of your friend, or the song of your lady-love, for it exacts no gratitude, and will not desert you ere the echo dies upon the wind.

Oh, how many of these harmonies there are!— how many that we hear, and how many that are "too constant to be heard!" I could go back to my youth, now, with this thread of recollection, and unsepulture a hoard of simple and long-buried joys that would bring the blush upon my cheek to think how my senses are dulled since such things could give me pleasure! Is there no "well of Kanathos" for renewing the youth of the soul?— no St. Hilary's cradle? no elixir to cast the slough of heart-sickening and heart-tarnishing custom? Find me an alchymy for that, with your alembic and crucible, and you may resolve to dross again your philosopher's stone!

TRENTON FALLS.

FROM THE SAME.

TRENTON Falls is rather a misnomer. I scarcely know what you would call it, but the wonder of nature which bears the name is a tremendous torrent, whose bed, for several miles, is sunk fathoms deep into the earth-a roaring and dashing stream, so far below the surface of the forest in which it is lost, that you would think, as you come suddenly upon the edge of its long precipice, that it was a river in some inner world, (coiled within ours, as we in the outer circle of the firmament,) and laid open by some Titanic throe that had cracked clear asunder the crust of this "shallow earth." idea is rather assisted if you happen to see below you, on its abysmal shore, a party of adventurous travellers; for, at that vast depth, and in contrast with the gigantic trees and rocks, the same number of well-shaped pismires, dressed in the last fashions, and philandering upon your parlour floor, would be about of their apparent size and distinctness.

The

They showed me at Eleusis the well by which Proserpine ascends to the regions of day on her annual visit to the plains of Thessaly-but with the genius loci at my elbow in the shape of a Greek girl as lovely as Phryné, my memory reverted to the bared axle of the earth in the bed of this American river, and I was persuaded (looking the while at the feronière of gold sequins on the Phidian forehead of my Katinka) that supposing Hades in the centre of the earth, you are nearer to it by some fathoms at Trenton. I confess I have had, since my first descent into those depths, an uncomfortable doubt of the solidity of the globe-how the deuse it can hold together with such a crack in its bottom!

It was a night to play Endymion, or do any Tomfoolery that could be laid to the charge of the moon, for a more omnipresent and radiant atmosphere of moonlight never sprinkled the wilderness with silver. It was a night in which to wish it might