tant missive, spurring his horse covered with foam to the desired goal, where he arrives at the critical moment of time, after a thousand petty obstacles and difficulties have been overcome, is far more favorable to poetry than the express train, running at the greatest measured speed ever yet attained. The very figures spoil the poetry of the thing. The electric telegraph, again, is very wonderful; but we are too much in the secret of the invention to extract the materials of poetry out of it. Even that most awful of all things, the wholesale destruction of human life, seems to affect us less when brought about by causes we entirely understand, than when attended with circumstances savoring of mystery. Thus it happens that railway accidents, and steamboat collisions, and wholesale suffocations inflicted by man's own ignorance and carelessness, though they fill us with indignation and horror, do not excite poetic emotions. We know too much about the causes which have produced them. There is ground, therefore, for the apprehension that science and the march of invention tend to destroy many of the elements of poetry.

Have they anything to offer in the way of compensation? Let us take a striking example:

Their

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. One day telleth another; and one night certifieth another. There is neither speech nor language; but their voices are heard among them. sound is gone out into all lands; and their words into the ends of the world. In them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun; which cometh forth as a bridegooom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course. It goeth forth from the uttermost part of the heaven, and runneth about unto the end of it again; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."

Such is the language of poetry, full of personification, and suggestive of images of beauty and power. The earth turning on its axis at the rate of more than one thousand miles an hour, and revolving round the sun with a speed of upwards of sixty-eight thousand miles in the same time; the earth and the other planets of our system, under the stern compulsion of two opposed forces moving in curves around the same common centre; the entire system-sun, planets, and satellitesbound by some mystic chain to an undiscovered centre, and moving toward a point in space at the rate of thirty-three millions five hundred and fifty thousand geographical miles, whilst our

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earth is performing a single revolution round the sun; the earth rocking regularly upon a point round which it rapidly revolves, whilst it progresses onward in its orbit, like some huge top in tremulous gyration upon the deck of a vast aerial ship, gliding rapidly through space; and all this progress of worlds taking place with a velocity and impetus which, if the powers of the physical forces were for a moment suspended, would be sufficient to scatter the mass of our planet over space as a mere star-dust; and yet, so long as these forces continue to act in harmony, in such sort as that the delicate down which rests so lightly upon the flower is undisturbed. Such is the language of Science, striving after poetic forms of expression; but failing in her object. There is too much of the balance, the compass, and the plummet; too much of detail, too many figures, to produce an agreeable impression on the mind. The idea of the calculator seems ever striving to mix itself up with the thought of the first Great Cause; and, practically, the impression upon the mind is altogether disproportioned to the gigantic forces in operation.

This discloses the true bearing of Science on Poetry. The path from scientific discovery and practical invention to the great Author and Giver of the powers of nature is apt to be overlaid and overlooked. It is more easy "to look through Nature up to Nature's God," than it is to raise the mind from science up to the Author of all knowledge. But the mind once turned in this right direction, it is indisputable that science affords ample and unrivalled materials for pious and truly poetic reflection. If this view of the true tendency of science were practically acted on, then would every new observation in natural science add a page to that great didactic poem, and every addition to the philosophy of physical science swell the majestic march of that grand epic; the visible creation brought into bolder relief by closer observation would become the well-spring of a poetry rich in the elements of the beautiful, and the more recondite truths of science in the material of that higher poetry which has the sublime for its basis. A new source of poetic feeling will, in the mean time, be opened out on the ever-growing appreciation of the Power which has endowed the human mind with faculties capable of penetrating so many mysteries, and adapting the inexhaustible materials and most potent forces of creation to the growing wants and multifarious purposes of mankind.

THE parks of London are its greatest ornament and luxury. They are called the lungs of the metropolis. They are of immense extent. Regent's Park contains three hundred and sixty acres, and Hyde Park is still larger; and all laid out with exquisite English taste. You enter a broad, shady avenue, which stretches before you for a mile. On either side are little lakes, fringed with trees and shrubbery. Swans are swimming about and sporting in the water. Clumps of oaks dot the green in every direction, and invite you to sit down and enjoy the mild evening. Here, on a summer afternoon, troops of children come and gambol over the smooth-shaven lawn. It makes one's heart light to see so many happy creatures in this sorrowful world.

I often wondered, while in London, at the remissness and indifference of our American cities to secure these priceless luxuries. There is not a single park in this country that is worthy to be compared with those in London. Boston Common approaches nearest to an English park. But that has so few trees that it looks naked and cold.

In New York we have nothing that is worthy to be called a park. We have several little grass-plots, such as Union Square and Bowling Green, through which children can trundle their hoops. But we have not a single open space large enough to permit the introduction of much variety of landscape. Washington Square answers very well for a parade-ground, but there

M. FIELD.

is nothing rural about it. No one walking through it would ever imagine himself in the country. It is a mere oblong piece of ground, flat as a prairie, and divided by a dozen paths which cross it in straight lines. There is no variety in the laying out of the grounds; no deep wood, penetrated by winding walks; no cool grove; no alternations of mound and dell, and murmur of waterfalls, such as enter into the composition of an European park. If in New York a belt of land were set apart, a quarter of a mile wide, and running from the North to the East River, it would not be larger than the Champs Elysees in Paris. Imagine such a park in New York, long avenues lined with trees, stretching from one river to the other, where the rich could drive in their carriages, and the poor could saunter and converse through the summer twilight, and what a source of health and happiness would it be to our population. The merchant, feverish from the excitement of business, would find his spirit soothed under the cool shade; and the poor man, in the enjoyment of nature, would forget his labor and his care. It would be the resort of the student, of the professional man, of the artist, the mechanic; of the invalid, of the young and the old. All classes and ages would resort to it to enjoy the simple pleasures of exercise, of walking and talking in the open air. The influence of such a promenade for the whole city might be traced farther, in the increased cheerfulness, softened manners and improved character of our population.

WE judge too rashly both of men and things,
Giving to-day's opinions on the morrow
Utter denial, while we strive to borrow
Hollow apologies that-like the wings

Of butterflies-show many colors. Sorrow
Hideth its tears, and we disclaim its presence
Where it hath deepest root; Hate softly brings
A smile, which we account Love's sweetest

essence;

Simplicity seems Art; and Art we deem
White-hearted Innocence-misjudging ever
Of all we see! Let us, then, grant esteem,
Or grudge it with precaution only; never
Forgetting that rash haste right judgment mars:
What men count but as clouds may prove bright
stars!

THERE are few scenes in history more striking than the interviews between these two celebrated personages. Mary, Queen of Scots! The name calls up, like a spell, thoughts of poetry, and pathos, and tenderness towards beauty in misfortune, which almost irresistibly warp the judg ment from the right. It will be long before the stern truth of history tempers, in the popular mind, that mistaken fondness which, in sympa thy for the woes of the woman, loses sight of the guilt of the sovereign; which forgets that the interests of freedom and Protestant Christianity are on one side reaching through ages and extending to nations, and on the other, one frail heart stained with crime, and one fair face bathed in tears.

"Her comely form and graceful mien
Bespoke the Lady and the Queen:
The woes of one so fair and young
Moved every heart and every tongue.
Driven from her home, a helpless child,
To brave the winds and billows wild,
An exile bred in realms afar,
Amid commotions, broils and war;
In one short year her hopes all crossed,

A parent, husband, kingdom lost!
And all ere eighteen years had shed
Their honors o'er her royal head."*

I do not include her mournful end, nor refer to the just indignation against her great, but hateful assassin. I refer to the period when she was still Queen of Scots, and when all her efforts were bent, with a most unhappy persistency, to force on her subjects the odious ceremonies of the Papal church. It is well that men were living in Scotland at that time, of another sort than the poets and romancers who have been wailing at the "Queen's Wake," these two hundred years

or more.

Among those men John Knox stands proudly eminent; a simple minister of the Gospel, who, without rank, or wealth, or worldly power, stood against royalty, in the imminent deadly breach, and, under God, secured the triumph of Protestantism in Scotland.

* Ettrick Shepherd-The Queen's Wake.

John Knox was doubtless a very indifferent courtier--not exactly what we should call a polite or "chivalrous" person in these days; in fact a very different sort of material than that out of which carpet-knights and courtiers are made. He was a resolute, inflexible, cool, sardonic man, whom none of the appliances of a court could stir, when the interests of truth were at stake; a man perfectly insensible both to love and fear, when they came in conflict with what he conceived to be duty. If the charge is that Knox was hard, unsentimental, unpractised in the ways of

"Starr'd and spangled courts,

Where low-bowed flattery wafts perfume to pride,"

I shall set up no defense for him on that point. These were not arts which he had cultivated. But his manners were as good as the manners of his age and nation. They certainly will not suf fer in comparison with those of the nobles who stabbed Rizzio under Mary's chair, and laid the heavy gauntletted hand on her arm, when she shrunk from signing her abdication.

"Mary" was an ill-favored name in the British kingdoms, about the middle of the sixteenth century. Both England and Scotland were governed by women of that name. The queen regent of the northern kingdom, after the death James the Fifth, was Mary of Guise, a sister of that fanatical and persecuting family that was straining every nerve to exterminate the Protestants of France. Contemporaneously with her, England was ruled by that wretched woman, the only princess in English history whose name is indissolubly wedded to a title of infamy, "bloody Mary." Mary of Guise gave place to her daughter Mary, "Queen of Scots."* These three wo

It is noticeable also that four Scottish ladies of the same name, famous for partaking both of the beauty and the frailty of their mistress, were in the train of the queen. They were Mary Seaton, Mary Beaton, Mary Hamilton and Mary Carmichael. A verse of an old Scottish ballad runs thus, if I remember right:

"There were four Marys served Queen Mary,
Three in the kirk-yard lie;

They were Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton,
And Mary Carmichael and I."