No. 918.-4 January, 1862. CONTENTS. PAGE. 1. A Snow Picnic, 2. Oxford and Cambridge, 3. Dr. Hayes' Arctic Exploration, Saturday Review, 14 17 [With revisions and additions by Dr. Hayes, for this work.] 4. The English Pompeii, 5. Poisonous Wells, 6. Compliments, 7. Masks and Faces, 8. Dogs in the Catacombs, 9. An Electrotype Wedding, 10. Theories about Light, [This is he whom Mr. Webster, in his letter to the Austrian minister, praised POETRY.-Unknown, yet Well-known, 2. I know not When, 2. Mary Magdalen, 2. Only Nine Miles to the Junction, 34. Laura, don't Secede, 34. Song in Norfolk, 34. A Poet's Grave, 64. Qua Cursum Ventus, 64. SHORT ARTICLES.-Palgrave's Golden Treasury, 13. Right of Secession, 13. Testament of Augustus, 26. Solar Photography, 29. Novel Musket for Successive Firing, 29. Leigh Hunt's Correspondence, 29. Skeleton Leaves, 33. Father Passaglia, 36. Photographing Silk, 36. Rain after Cannonade, 40. Excellent Agricultural Condition of Upper Austria, 50. Exploration of the Amazon District, 50. Sculptors in Florence, 52. New Tombstone to Flora Macdonald, 52. Shakspeare's Gardens, 63. NEW BOOKS. Montrose and other Biographical Sketches. Boston: Soule & Williams. [Containing Latour, Brummell, Dr. Johnson, and Montrose. The first was originally published in The Living Age. From our knowledge of the Author, we venture to recommend this book to our readers, and promise much pleasure to ourself in its perusal.] ERRATUM. Page 18, 7th line from bottom, instead of 86° read 80°. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded free of postage. Complete sets of the First Series, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a halfin numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. men were all; It may be that before the Lord his meed shall not be small. Perhaps the noise of human pride were idle For him the foremost and the best of all the Ch. Ch., Oxford. I KNOW NOT WHEN. I KNOW not when; but this I know, Gilding with splendor all the way; Some night, I know, the shades will gather, The last that I shall see below; Some spring-time I shall mark the trees The dead leaves rustle 'neath my tread, Will fall from off the wings of Death; But when this last great change shall come, It matters not how soon I rest; MARY MAGDALEN. BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. Thou weepest days of innocence departing; move The Lord to pity and love. The greatest of thy follies is forgiven, Even for the least of all the tears that shine Thou didst kneel down to him who came from Evil and ignorant, and thou shalt rise It is not much that to the fragrant blossom Nor that, upon the wintry desert's bosom, Bear home abundant grain. But come and see the bleak and barren moun- Thick to their tops with roses; come and see The perished plant set out by living fountains, -Christian Register. From Fraser's Magazine. move in Canadian society depends more or less upon the military; but this picnic was peculiarly ours, being our first attempt at a return for months of dinners and balls and hearty hospitalities, such as are dispensed nowhere but in a colony;-the only sort of return which it lay in our power to make, for the architect of Alfredsburg Barracks, among other severe privations with which he saw fit to distress the garrison, had omitted to supply the very obvious and vital requirement of a ball-room, without which, either his own or another's, what officer in her majesty's service can possibly achieve the amount of exercise necessary for pre Is it in the experience of any one living that a picnic has ever passed off as it ought to pass has not before its termination caused some one or more present to state, imply, or think, that had they only known what was going to happen, they would never have come? If haply such there be, let him come forward and advertise me and the public of the remarkable instance, authenticating his information with the names and opinions of two unimpeachable eye-witnesses, and he shall receive, by the very next post, the current number of Fraser's Magazine as a guerdon. I frankly confess that I have no serving the physique of a soldier? This such experience. Of all the hundred and gross dereliction of duty on the part of a one contretemps, physical or moral, atmos- government official compelled our entertainpheric or geological, culinary or bacchana- ment to be of an al fresco nature. So a lian, equine, bovine, human, or entomologi- picnic was resolved upon, invitations were cal, to which picnics are liable, always one, issued for that day week, and an hour mengenerally many, have intervened whenever tioned at which the party was to assemble I have been present. Sometimes I may in sleighs at a given point in the middle of have been personally in fault: often I can- the river St. Alfred. not have been. I take it rather to be an in- Does any reader start at our choosing the herent vice of the picnic, that so many being middle of a broad and mighty river as a the well-regulated families necessary to its rendezvous for horses and sleighs, and find composition, the possibility of accidents pred- involuntary images of Pharaoh and his host icated of such households singly, becomes (with their chariot wheels already taken off) by mere multiplication a certainty. And un- crowding into his mind? To such be it told til we can go a gypsying by special train to that during many months of the year the Utopia, this state of things will assuredly frozen Canadian rivers are as highways to last. the countries through which they pass, as Yet have I known one such excursion boulevards to the towns upon their banks; which approached as near perfection as any-ay, and boulevards with avenues on them thing out of Utopia well could approach, and that, owing not to the paucity but the frequency of its casualties, and not to any freedom from alarm and inconvenience, but to a spirit which looked upon alarm and inconvenience as the great objects of the day, and came determined to derive only increased enjoyment from all the known difficulties and dangers of the proceeding. It was not in England: both the dangers and the spirit which enjoyed them would be impossible here. Nor was it in summer, or even colonial good temper might have melted under colonial heat. This most successful réunion was achieved in the month of December and the neighborhood of the good town of Alfredsburg, which, as everybody knows, is one of the principal cities of Upper Canada. We got it up at the barracks. Every too, for no invention being yet perfected for supplying them with gas-lamps, the benighted traveller is guided along their shortest or most frequented routes by rows of pines of decent growth, cut from the neighboring forest and planted bodily in the ice, where, embalmed by frost and snow, they perform the role of most respectable live trees till the thaws of April or May involve them and their soil in a common ruin. Among these trees, and upon the magnificent open roadway which they garnished, was it arranged that our party should assemble, there to await further orders, like an outward-bound fleet, to which the admiral cannot divulge the contents of his papers till after twenty-four hours' sail from harbor. The next object was to fix on a spot in the forest for the bivouac; and to this end a messenger was despatched to the Indian 66 camp for the mighty Moween, or "the nation on the globe, has regularly avoided Great Bear." He came, the descendent of America, fearing doubtless that from a more a long line of princes, the chief by heritage, general intimacy with the transatlantic the mightiest in prowess, of the great tribe bush, his loving but fickle subjects might of Micmacs, whose dominions have included gain for the next barricades in the Rue St. the whole of the St. Alfred country, even Denis or Faubourg St. Antoine "ideas" from the sea until thou comest unto the which would be by no means Napolesecond and third cataracts; he came, the onian." To these revolutionary accommoslayer of the moose and cariboo, the leader dations snow is, however, another revoluof the feast and dance, tall and dignified in tion,-a "great leveller" to the chaotic stature, handsome and swarthy in counte- masses,-high on the superstratum of which nance, and withal as dirty and ragged and it is in many places possible, with the occadisreputable a scoundrel as the Savoyard sional assistance of an axe, to ply the luxuof the most excruciating organ in the quiet-rious sleigh, or the more fatiguing snowest street in London. Ragged, however, as shoe, with a calm indifference to the tangled he appears ordinarily, he can array himself with some taste when he thinks the occasion is sufficient; and dirty or clean, he was most important to the present arrangement and future management of the picnic. His heart being opened by brandy, Moween undertook the whole affair directly. "Oh! I guess me and Saul and Gabe, and two tree more, we make tracks in morning with one treboggin, and make camp up Pokioctikook; then you see tracks and find us, s'pose about five miles up Pokioctikook." He paused, took three puffs of smoke, and then added, "You bring plenty brandy, of course; " which proposition being greeted with assent, considering business now over, he finished his present instalment of that liquor at a draught, gave a "who-oop" which was nigh to breaking the windows, executed an extemporary dance which was nigher still to breaking the floor, seized the last cheroot from Spencer's open cigar-case, and staggered away. nature of the ground underneath. It is this ability to penetrate deeper than usual into the forest which gives one peculiar charm to the Canadian Snow Picnic. But the Muse shall relate who were the invited guests, and what sleighs assembled at the trysting-place. Last in arrival, but first in mention, came the great generalcommandant himself, the veteran of Hydepark and Aldershot, the victor in many a hotly contested engagement of blank cartridge. With that taste for procession and display which so conduces to military authority Sir Martin Etty dashed into the throng with a brilliant staff of three sleighs, the vanguard of his force being composed of himself, Lady Etty, and their two younger daughters, while Fox, his military secretary, in command of his eldest daughter, formed the centre, and his two boys led-yca, bearled-by their tutor, brought up the rear. The éclat of the arrival was, however, somewhat marred by this rear-guard, whose learned driver secmed scarcely sufficiently conversant with the properties of the modern biga, and turning his sleigh at too sharp an angle upon "glare" ice, allowed it to slew round till it got before the horses, and whirled on automotously (as is the manner Now the Pokioctikook is a smaller river which joins the St. Alfred nearly opposite Alfredsburg, flowing down thereinto through some of the wildest and finest forest scenery in Upper Canada. Save on the rough attempt at a road made by distant settlers along, and often in the course of the stream, of a sleigh) dragging them helplessly and this country is in summer impassable, the ignominiously behind, and drifting well fallen timber and broken underwood forming everywhere that one vast network of barricade of which those only who have penetrated into the "forest primæval" can form any conception. There is no fortifier like nature; and I cannot but admire the farsighted sagacity of his majesty the present Emperor of the French, who, while interfering in the internal affairs of every other down upon the rest of the party assembled with an irregular rotatory motion, like a comet with a very unwieldy tail. Fortunately, a casual breastwork of snow brought up the impending engine of destruction just when it threatened an instant collision, and the only result was a great laugh at the expense of the tutor, who may, however, have designed it to impress upon his pupils the grammatical paradox that though "slew" word in Canada. Were our great lexicog is the perfect of "slaying," it is something very imperfect in "sleighing." rapher happily now alive, we might expect to read in his next edition : “MUFFIN, v. n. To monopolize continually the exclusive society of the same individual member of the opposite sex, with a view more to immediate amusement than to eventual matrimony. "MUFFIN, n. s., com. gen., but mostly fem. One so monopolizing, or whose society is so monopolized." Followed doubtless by quotations from these very pages (for where indeed could he find higher authority ?) as examples of the word's use. Its derivation is rather a moot point, but I incline to look for it in the fact of the small tea-party element somewhat predominating in Canadian enter present might with some sentiment apply this simile to the refreshment which they liked best to take with their tea. It would thus be a cognate compliment to that which gave to the beauties of a former generation the name of "toasts;" and though in the latter case the mere mention of the adored object's name in her absence was supposed to add that relish to the cup for which the former required her presence, and the palm for subtlety of compliment thus rests undoubtedly with our forefathers, I think that in sobriety and delicacy at least, the modern phrase will be admitted to have a great advantage over its Bacchanalian predecessor. Brilliant, too, was the crowd already gathered, and thus miraculously saved from decimation, for winter is, "the season" at Alfredsburg when all the rank and fashion come into town from their less civilized settlements up the country. Senators with unexpected handles to their names, and their wives who wished the handles would carry double, and very rough sons, and very blooming daughters. Though absent was the bishop himself, were not his lordship's wife, daughter, and coachman waiting in his lordship's own sleigh,-blue, with red "runners," as an episcopal sleigh ought to be? and was not the clerical interest amply tainments, at which the nice young men represented by the further presence of the archdeacon, and his son the curate, both outside, and their numerous household all inside the capacious family ark? which ark, being rested on a small snowy Ararat formed by a capricious drift on the ice, gave to the two reverend gentlemen the appearance of being in a pulpit and about to address the assemblage. And Winbush was there, whom men style Dick, with his wife and boys, the most successful agriculturist, and withal the heartiest and best fellow, in the Alfredsburg neighborhood. And little Judge McPie was there, under the care and orders of his shrill, noisy wife; but the fair Miss Baby, their daughter, where was she? Had she not the whole season "muffined" with Warwick of ours, and where should she be but by his side in his own hired sleigh, her pert little nose and large blue eyes alone visible from beneath a mountain of robes and furs, which the gallant and anxious Warwick had supplied to keep his " muffin hot? And other muffining was apparent, adding greatly to the general effect and interest of the cortége; greatly, also, to the general amusement, when, for some unexplained cause, each sleigh so occupied endeavored on starting for the woods to keep in the rear of all the rest, and could with difficulty be persuaded to advance at all. It is a great institution is muffining. The word "muffin," in the sense in which it is thus used, is not, that I am aware, to be found in Johnson's or any other dictionary of our tongue, English or American; but is nevertheless an authentic and received However originally derived, it is now the name of, I repeat, a great and noble institution, differing from any cis-atlantic process of the kind in the thorough recognition and countenance accorded to it by all parties. A primitive society, if wanting in refinement, is certainly the more conspicuous in common sense; and when young John Alden of the new Burntwood settlement, and pretty little Priscilla Mayflower of Alfredsburg, take evident delight in each other's companionship, what can be more natural or sensible than to permit them to enjoy it on all reasonable occasions? They are tacitly recognized as muffining, and it is thenceforth spoken of with as little surprise and curiosity as if they were engaged or married. Anent it no prying and tattling old maid sits whispering in the ear in a corner: it is treated as a matter of course, and is known upon the house tops of society. No fidgety mamma whisks off Priscilla under her ruthless wing, to lecture |