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No. 731.-29 May 1858.-Enlarged Series, No. 9.

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POETRY. A Night Scene, 642. Rejoice Evermore, 642. An Old Maid's Retrospections, 673. Punch's Song of the North Wind, 673. Home and Rest, 720. Hour of Prayer, 120. Buried To-day, 720. Dead Reckoning, 720. Sors Horatiana, 720.

SHORT ARTICLES.-Character of Talleyrand, 655. Family of Temperance, 655. A Child on the Eternal Fitness of Things, 655. King of Sardinia, 656. Photography applied to Medicine, 656. Cause and Treatment of Tuberculous Diseases, 672. Convulsions of Pregnancy, etc., 672. The Timely Retreat, 672. Unnatural Deaths, 685. Mahommed's Conversions, 689. Good Meaning Men, 689. Russian Serfs, 691. New Names of London Streets, 697. Women and Tortoises, 705. Chase of the Ostrich, 712. Yankee Conceit, 717. Charter to the London University, 717. Doctor of Science, 717. Gospels in Greek, A.D. 480, 717. Short Stories, 717. Life and Times of Hugh Miller, 719.

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From Harper's Monthly.

A NIGHT SCENE.

BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

On River, gentle River, gliding on, In silence, underneath this starless sky! Thine is a ministry that never rests, Even while the living slumber. For a time, The meddler, man, hath left the elements In peace; the ploughman breaks the clods no

more;

The miner labors not, with steel and fire,

To rend the rock; and he that hews the stone,
And he that fells the forest; he that guides
The loaded wain, and the poor animal
That drags it, have forgotten, for a while,
Their toils, and share the quiet of the earth.

Thou pausest not in thine allotted task,
Oh darkling River! through the night I hear
Thy wavelets rippling on the pebbly beach;
I hear thy current stir the rustling sedge
That skirts thy bed; though intermittest not
Thine everlasting journey, drawing on
A silvery train from many a mountain brook
And woodland spring. The dweller by thy side,
Who moored his little boat upon thy beach,
Though all the waters that upbore it then
Have slid away o'er night, shall find, at morn,
Thy channel filled with waters freshly drawn
From distant cliffs, and hollows where the rill
Comes up amid the water-flags. All night
Thou givest moisture to the thirsty roots
Of the lithe willow and o'erhanging plane,
And cherishest the herbage on thy bank,
Speckled with little flowers; and sendest up,
Perpetually, the vapors from thy face

To steep the hills with dew, or darken heaven With marching clouds that trail the abundant showers.

Oh River, darkling River! what a voice Is that thou utterest while all else is still! The ancient voice that, centuries ago, Sounded between thy hills while Rome was yet A weedy solitude by Tiber's stream! How many, at this hour, along thy course, Slumber to thine eternal murmerings, That mingle with the utterance of their dreams! At dead of night the child awakes and hears Thy soft, familiar dashings, and is soothed, And sleeps again. An airy multitude Of little echoes, all unheard by day, Faintly repeat, till morning, after thee, The story of tine endless goings forth.

Yet there are those who lie beside thy bed, For whom thou once didst rear the bowers that

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Of those who last were gathered to the earth-
Lingering within the homes in which they sat,
Hovering about the paths in which they trod,
Haunting them like a presence. Even now
They visit many a dreamer in the forms
They walked in, ere, at last, they wore the
shroud;

And eyes there are that will not close to dream,
For weeping and for thinking of the grave,
The new-made grave, and the pale one within.
These memories and these sorrows all shall fado
And pass away, and fresher memories
And newer sorrows come and dwell awhile
Beside thy border, and, in turn, depart.

On glide thy waters till at last they flow
Beneath the windows of the populous town,
And all night long give back the gleam of lamps,
And glimmer with the trains of light that stream
From halls where dancers whirl. A dimmer

ray

Touches thy surface from the silent room
In which they tend the sick, or gather round
The dying; and a slender, steady beam
Comes from the little chamber in the roof,
Where, with a feverous crimson on her cheek,
The solitary damsel, dying too.

Plies the quick needle till the stars grow pale.
There, close beside the haunts of revel, stand
The blank, unlighted windows, where the poor,
In darkness and in hunger, wake till morn.
There, drowsily, on the half-conscious ear
Of the dull watchman, pacing on the wharf,
Falls the soft ripple of thy waves that strike
On the moored bark; but guiltier listeners
Are near, the prowlers of the night, who steal
From shadowy nook to shadowy nook, and start
If other sounds than thine are in the air.

Oh glide away from those abodes, that bring
Pollution to thy channel and make foul
Thy once clear current. Summon thy quick

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"REJOICE EVERMORE."

I ERR'D this day, O Lord, and am
Not worthy to be call'd thy son;
But if thy will be, heavenly Lamb,
That I rejoice, thy will be done.
Death I deserve; I'm yet in life:

Ill is my wage; thou pay'st me good;
These are my children, this my wife,

I feel the spring, I taste my food. Thy love exceeds, then all my blame. Ŏ, grant me, since thou grantest these, Still to put "Hallow'd be thy name," Before "Forgive my trespasses." -Fraser's Magazine.

C. P.

From The Quarterly Review.

1. The Speeches of Lord Chatham, Sheridan, Erskine, and Fox; with Biographical Memoirs, and Introductions and Explanatory Notes. Edited by a Barrister. 4th edition. 2 vols. imp. 8vo. London, 1855.

2: Speeches on Social and Political Subjects, with Historical Introductions. By Henry Lord Brougham, F.R.S., Member of the National Institute of France, and of the Royal Academy of Naples. 2 vols. post 8vo. London,

1857.

3. An Inaugural Address delivered by Earl Stanhope at his Installation as Lord Rector of Marischal University, Aberbeen. 8vo. London, 1858.

"he lisped in numbers, for the numbers came; " but if they came unsought, it was a felicity which forsook him as his understanding matured. Though by no means a voluminous writer, considering the many years he worked at his craft, Swift complained that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he "had always some poetical scheme in his head." He was in the habit of jotting down in the night, as he lay in bed, any striking thought or lucky expression which passed through his mind, lest it should be forgotten before morning. He recorded lines or fragments of lines, which he hoped to turn to account at a future period, and allowed not a crumb to fall to the ground. What he comIN an admirable address to the University posed with care, he corrected with patience. of Aberdeen, Lord Stanhope has recently He kept his pieces by him long before conproved to the students, by numerous happy signing them to the press; he read them to illustrations drawn from the lives of eminent his friends, and invited their criticism; and men in the various departments of literature his condensed couplets, which seem "finished and science, that success is only to be ob- more through happiness than pains," really tained by industry. He repudiated the no- owe their first quality to the last. As we astion of heaven-born genius, if by that term cend higher the same truth is equally appar is meant genius which spontaneously pours ent. Milton's studies are revealed in every forth its stores without labor or study. The page of the "Paradise Lost." One of the greatest talents, like the richest soil, only most original of poets in his conceptions and yields its choicest fruits to preserving tillage. style, his particular phrases and allusions may If there is one branch of excellence which be tracked in all the best literature both anmore than another has been supposed to be cient and modern which existed before his the gift of untutored nature, it is the faculty day. He who invoked his muse to raise him of verse; if there is one poet more than an- to the "height of his great argument" did other who derived his inspiration from the by that very expression intimate how vast an innate passions of his heated mind, and who effort he considered to be necessary to treat appeared to possess the body of embodying worthily so sublime a theme, as in his Lycidas fervid feelings in glowing rhymes without the he had declared, "that to scorn delights and smallest effort, it was unquestionably Lord live laborious days" was the indispensable Byron. Yet in a conversation, quoted by condition of fame. Of the habits of ShakeLord Stanhope, he asserted that it was non-speare we know nothing, except the players / sense to talk of extemporising verse. The boasted that he never blotted a line, which prodigious quantity which he wrote during only proves that he must have matured his his short life is no less a proof of his dili- conceptions before committing them to pagence than of his fertility. Mr. Trelawny per. The knowledge of human nature is a represents him as spending the larger part of matter of experience and not of intuition; his waking hours in meditating his works; and at least he must have been a diligent and no physician or lawyer in extensive prac- reader of men if he had been a careless tice ever followed their professions with more reader of books. He must, however, have dogged perseverance. His friend Moore, studied these not a little also, for his language whose songs and tales have a far-fetched in his poetical dialogue is not the language of prettiness which indicates greater elaboration, conversation alone. Nor is there any poet confesses of himself that "he had been at all whose effusions bear the impress of more setimes a slower and more painstaking work- vere thought, which not only impregnates, man than would ever be guessed from the but some times obscures, his "thick-coming result." Pope tells us that in his boyhood fancies." If internal evidence is to be a

guide, he, as little as any one, could have dis- sor to consideration with equal rapidity, none pensed with previous meditation and prelimi- for which there is so constant a demand in nary discipline. the church, in the senate, or at the bar, and Wherever prose-writers have been remark-none, strange to say, which is so little studied able for some particular quality, it will be equally found that the point in which they have excelled was one upon which they had bestowed commensurate pains. Those, for example, who are distinguished for the beauty of their style have acquired their skill as the artist acquires his power of drawing-not by contenting themselves with the first rude and rapid draught, but by repeated references to better models, by an incessant renewal of their attempts, and by the untiring correction of defects. Every one knows that Pascal wrote each of his "Provincial Letters" many times over. The draught of his " Epoques de la Nature" which Buffon sent to the press was the eleventh. The Benedictine editor of Bossuet's works, stated that his manuscripts were bleared over with such numerous interlineations that they were nearly illegible. Burke penned his political pamphlets three times at least before they were put into type, and then he required to have a large margin for his manifold corrections. Sterne was incessantly employed for six months in perfecting one very diminutive volume. "I mention this," says Paley, to whom we owe our knowledge of the fact, "for the sake of those who are not sufficiently apprised that in writing, as in many other things, ease is not the result of negligence, but the perfection of art." The proposition that uncommon excellence arises from the concurrence of great talents with great industry is supported by so many examples that they might be produced by the score. The extraordinary effect, indeed, of sustained application might almost seem to countenance the saying of Buffon, that "genius was patience." The idle may dream over the fancied possession of intuitive powers which they never display. Those who enter the arena and engage in the contest know that strength cannot be put forth without strenuous exertion, nor skill be manifested without assiduous practice.

by the majority of aspirants. Dr. King, in his "Anecdotes of his Own Time," which was written in 1760, complains that the want of a proper power of expression was a universal defect in the English nation. Many admirable scholars whom he had known could not . speak with propriety in a common conversation, whereas among the French and Italians he had met with few learned men who did not talk with ease and elegance. The only three persons of his acquaintance among our own countrymen who expressed themselves in a manner which would have been pronounced excellent if everything they uttered had been committed to writing, were Bishop Atterbury, Dr. Gower, and Dr. Johnson. That his pupils might acquire the art of speaking with correctness and facility, he used to recommend them to get by heart a page of some English classic every morning and the method was often attended with complete success. There is still the same disproportion as in his day between the extensive learning of the educated classes and their capability of imparting it. Great pains are taken at our schools and universities to obtain knowledge, but upon the mode of conveying it in a way which shall be pleasing and forcible, no pains are bestowed at all. It is as if years should be spent in collecting materials for the construction of a mighty edifice without any attempt to dispose them in an order which would secure beauty, strength, or convenience. Lord Chesterfield was for ever impressing upon his son the necessity, if he wished to be listened to, of acquiring an elegant style and a good delivery. He appealed to the instances within his own experience of the applause which followed those who possessed these advantages, and of the uselessness without them of the most solid acquirements. Lord Townshend, he said, who invariably spoke with sound argument and abundant knowledge, was heard Of all the attainments which Lord Stan- with impatience and ridicule, because his dichope, in his graceful and attractive speech, tion was always vulgar and frequently unshowed to depend upon cultivation, none grammatical, his cadences false, and his voice more needed to be dwelt upon before a body inharmonious; whereas the Duke of Argyle, of students than that of oratory. There is no accomplishment which even when possessed in a moderate degree, raises its posses

whose matter was flimsy, and his reasoning the weakest ever addressed to an intelligent * He was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford.

assembly, "charmed, warmed, and ravished the mind of the speaker and that of the his audience," by a noble air, a melodious hearer, and until this strait can be bridged voice, a just emphasis, and a polished style. the long antecedent journey is more than half Lord Cowper and Sir William Wyndham in vain. Nor need there be any fear that, if prevailed chiefly by the same means. By his elocution and style were more cultivated, a own account, Lord Chesterfield himself af- torrent of tedious declamation would be let forded an illustration of the truth of his posi- loose upon the world. Study, by improving tion when he introduced his bill into the taste, increases fastidiousness; and is rather House of Lords for reforming the Calendar. calculated to check than to encourage an illHe knew little of the matter, and resolved timed loquacity. Clergymen and lawyers, at to supply the deficiency by well-rounded pe- all events, are obliged by their calling to riods, and a careful delivery. "This," he address public assemblies; and the sole quescontinues," succeeded and ever will succeed; tion which remains to them is, whether they they thought I informed, because I pleased will do it well or ill. them; and many of them affirmed that I had The vulgar, said Lord Chesterfield, look made the whole very clear to them when, upon a fine speaker as a supernatural being, God knows, I had not even attempted it." and endowed with some peculiar gift of Lord Macclesfield, who was a profound as- heaven. He himself maintained that a good tronomer, followed, and with a perfect mas-speaker was as much a mechanic as a good tery of the subject, and with as much lucidity shoemaker, and that the two trades were as the question permitted, furnished a real explanation of it, but, as his sentences were not so good as those of Lord Chesterfield, "the preference," says the latter," was most unanimously though most unjustly given to me." Upon every occasion he had found, in like manner, that weight without lustre was lead.

equally to be learned by the same amount of application. In this there was some degree of exaggeration, but he was much nearer the truth than those who are deterred from every attempt to improve by the erroneous idea that unless the power is intuitive it can never be acquired. They might consider by what long repeated efforts a child learns to talk The total inattention to this truth is not, and read, or the years they pored over Greek therefore, a matter of inferior moment. Hun- and Latin before they gained a mastery over dreds of ripe scholars are unable in conse- these tongues, and they would not infer, bequence to bring their attainments to bear cause they felt no inherent aptitude for speakupon the understandings of those whom it is ing, that, therefore, nature had denied them their business to inform. Unadorned sense, the capacity. So much is it a matter of indry reasoning, a hard, flat, and colorless style dustry that, if any schoolboy were asked to make no impression except that of weariness. select the most conspicuous example of deIt is not only in Parliament and the pulpit fects subdued and excellence attained by indethat the faculty is required of rendering fatigable perseverance, he would certainly knowledge and argument attractive. Those name the first of orators. The most elowho observe the effects upon the lower orders quent of Romans went through a training as of bodily toil, must be sensible that their ed-severe as that of the illustrious Greek, and if ucation, from the time they leave school, will Demosthenes and Cicero found elaborate never be conducted in any marked degree preparation essential to success, it is no wonthrough the medium of books. Their chief der that lesser men should not be speakers instruction must be oral, and in many par- before they have studied how to speak. ishes the clergy have adopted the practice of Lord Chesterfield declares that he succeeded giving secular lectures, which succeed or fail in Parliament simply by resolving to succeed. in exact proportion as the lecturer is a profi- He early saw the importance of eloquence, cient in the art of speaking. Tawdry bom- and neglected nothing which could assist him bast and low humor will, indeed, excite the to become a proficient in it. He conned careadmiration of unrefined rustics as well as the fully all the fine passages he met with in his higher products of the intellect, but no learn-reading; he translated from various languages ing, however abundant, ever commands the into English; he attended to his style in the ears of these audiences, unless it is set off by freest conversations and most familiar letters; some extrinsic charm. A gulf is left between he never allowed a word to fall from his lips

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