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From The Examiner.

The Cottages of the Alps: or, Life and Man-
ners in Switzerland. By a Lady. In two
volumes. Sampson Low, Son, & Co.
THIS is a valuable sketch of the present
state of Switzerland by an American lady,
who has already written a good account of
Peasant Life in Germany, but cannot make
the titles of her two works uniform, because
in republican Switzerland there is no peas-
ant class. The work is dedicated to the
Princess Dora d'Istria, a liberal student of
Swiss liberties, come from the East, who
met with sympathy all the impressions of
the lady from the West. The social state of
Switzerland, in the present time, and the
forms of the independence threatened by the
late French annexations,- as well as by the
possible ideas for which France may here-
after make war,-are very well set forth by
the writer of the book. She has blended
personal detail with matter of research, treats
systematically of each canton in turn, and
even adds, in an appendix, a brief outline of
Swiss history. It is not every Swiss tourist
who cares, as this lady appears to have cared,
mainly about the life of the people, and but
incidentally about the mountains. Yet she
can describe passages of mountain travel
well. Her account of a visit to the Rhone
glacier is worthy of a traveller whose whole
mind is devoted to the picturesque. Whether
she writes of men or glaciers, the lady speaks
with refinement. She is never flippant, never
obtrusive of herself. In the religious feel-
ing underlying many of her comments, there
is a broad, wise charity predominant. For
example, while discussing with singular fair-
ness the contrast observed by every traveller
between the well-to-do Protestant and the
less prosperous Catholic cantons, she re-
marks the drawback suffered by the Prot-
estants in the removal of much gayety out
of their lives by the severity of Calvinist
opinion:-

"The well-meant, but ill-directed, zeal of the

Reformers led them to forbid the dance and

song and festive mirth, not knowing that, unless they substituted something in their place, they only produced an aching void, which drove the revellers to darker deeds. The human mind cannot live on vacancy, and it must be one of marvellous construction that can support itself on solitude. Statistics prove that excitement does not cause so much insanity as meditation, and not so many cases of madness occur in great cities as in rural solitudes. The first case of

and no idea of even the meaning of meditation?

"Statistics also prove that there are not so many cases of insanity among Catholics genbe, that the assurances which they continually erally as among Protestants. One reason may receive of pardon, and their credulity with regard to the efficacy of the means they use for salvation, preserve them from disturbing doubts and fears, and the amusements which they are allowed divert them from speculations which avail nothing even with strong and healthy intellects, and must surely destroy weak ones, if they do not utterly distract them.

"We do not give this as an argument in favor of Catholicism, but only as a fact. There is no reason why Protestants should not be as happy as Catholics. Those who are ignorant, or those who need it for any reason, whether of one faith or another, should be furnished with healthful amusement; and those who are content with intellectual cultivation and resources should endeavor for an hour to conceive what they would do without them."

The writer is in Friburg and among Gessenay shepherds, when such thoughts are suggested to her. We quote a few Gessenay customs :

"The law again allowed the peasants of Gessenay first to dance on week days and at certain annual festivals, but now there is no restriction they may dance all the year. It was found they would resort to the woods and ravines at midnight, and the evil consequences became more, and had a more frightful fatality, than when they were permitted to assemble at proper times and in proper places.

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They have a curious custom of assembling at little inns called cabarets, after morning service in church at New Year's Eve, every unmarchosen for the occasion. They spend two or ried youth conducting a maiden, whom he has three days there together, and when they leave are betrothed. The marriages are performed at the Feast of Annunciation, when they go in pairs to church, powdered to correspond with their mountains, and the bridegroom carrying a long sword. If it is a widow who marries, they around the village, with great noise and shoutchoose a king, and bear him on their shoulders ing, finishing with theatricals, representing various scenes in their history.

"A traveller relates that one day, when climbing the mountains, he met a young girl who had sole charge of the flocks and herds, no other person being within miles of her. He asked her to give him a cup of milk. She answered, 'The milk belongs to my mother.' 'But I am very thirsty,' said the wanderer. She looked down a moment in deep thought, and then ran quickly away, and soon returned with a foaming tankard. He offered her money, and she said with serious surprise, 'You told me you were thirsty, and I gave you milk; what would my mother

suicide among theso simple Alpine people was
known when they were condemned to practise
the forms of a new religion without understand
ing any thing of its spirit. Neither their minds
nor hearts had received any cultivation that say if I sold her milk?'”

fitted them for a serious and earnest life. What Of books of travel written by ladies this were they to do, or think about, suddenly con- is, in short, one of the most liberal and senpemned to idleness, with no food for thought, sible.

No. 842.-21 July, 1860.

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1. Concerning Growing Old,

2. Retribution,

3. The Works of De Quincey,

4. The Wild Sports of India,

CONTENTS.

5. The Protestant Movement in Italy, 6. Mental Stature,

7. The Humboldt Correspondence,

8. The Austrian and Russian Reforms, 9. European Anxieties,

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10. The Neapolitan Crash,

11. Yeast: the Political Fermentation, 12. The Treason of Charles Lee,

13. A Final Arctic Search,

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183

Chambers's Journal,

187

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Press,
Examiner,
Spectator,

14. Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, Athenæum,

15. The Ruling Passion,

16. An Arctic Boat Journey,

POETRY.-The Best Gift, 130. Two Roads to a Red Riband, 168. Lament, 192.

The Rook, 130. Lines in a Season of Sickness, 130.
Cheer for Garibaldi, 168. The Conveyancer's Pupil's

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SHORT ARTICLES.-Remains of Man in Caves, 142. Arctic Boat Journey, 150. Fall down a Well at Pompeii, 154. Discoveries in Van (Assyria), 165. Life of Hallam, 170. Egyptian Monuments, 180. Cheap Meat, 189.

NEW BOOKS.

THE UNION. Crocker and Brewster, Boston.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON.

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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 half in 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.

THE BEST GIFT.

HEART, thou wilt grieve no more,

Darkness is past;

Storm-cloud and gloom are o'er,
Peace come at last.
Fate smiles at length on

The web she hath wove,
Gives one to love me, Heart,
Some one to love!

Summer there is but one,
Day without night;
Winter's a name alone,
No frost nor blight-
Grief passes stingless by,
Cares pointless prove,

For some one loves me, Heart,
Some one I love.

Flowers have sweeter sprung,

Skies seemed more clear,
Birds have more blithely sung,
Heaven seemed so near-
Life gained a sudden worth,
All price above,

Since some one loves me, Heart,
Since I have loved.

Harshness, where bides it now?
Sorrow, where fled?
Weariness buried low,
Joy come instead.
Patience that hopeth all,
Trust to be proved,

By one that loves me, Heart,
One that I love.

Speak to me, silver stream,
Language thou'st found,
Soft clouds of sunset's dream
Floating around.
Voices in all of ye,

Field, brook, and grove,
Whisper, one loves me, Heart,
One that I love.

Sweet rose, thou hast a voice
In thy soft breath,
In thy world I rejoice-
Hark! what she saith-
"Last glimpse of Paradise,
Where I had birth,
To thee is granted,
O daughter of earth;

Prize it, and treasure it,

All else above "

Some one to love thee, Heart,

Some one to love!

-National Magazine.

THE ROOK.

LET the Skylark make her boast

Of the high and laurelled host

F. O.

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agree,

While their private lives-I guess,

Mr. R. 'twould quite distress

To name his wife with such a bird as she!
Oh, to see her pick up sticks

(Which to her are stone and bricks),

For the building of her mansion in the elm! Oh, to see her mother-beak

Far too full of worms to speak—

'Tis a lesson for her sex throughout the realm! True it is, at morn and eve,

When they seek their nests or leave,

There seems often not a little to be said;
But, again, of this we're certain,

They've no lectures of the curtain,

And they shut their golden beaks when they're abed!

Oh, in sooth, I love that clangor

That, with solemn, dreamy languor,

Floateth o'er the leafless tree-tops in the

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A poor old buffer,

So much from gout and bile and indigestion?

Who have hailed her Heaven's Chorister so Some people gorge their brains with erudition,

long:

Let the Nightingale repeat

In her treble, low and sweet,

The lays that in her honor have been sung;

Learning and thinking;
Eating and drinking

So I've overworked my organs of nutrition.
-Punch.

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From Fraser's Magazine.

CONCERNING GROWING OLD.

might. So here, I thought, were three hands, not far apart. There was the little hand of infancy; four daisies were lying near it on the gravestone where it was laid down to compare with mine. Then the rather skinny and not very small hand, which is doing now the work of life. And a couple of yards beneath, there was another hand, whose work was over.

stone, and was walking quietly homeward, many thoughts came into my mind CONCERNING GLOWING OLD.

And, indeed, many of the most affecting thoughts which can ever enter the human mind are concerning the lapse of Time, and the traces which its lapse leaves upon human beings.

I WAS sitting, on a very warm and bright summer morning, upon a gravestone in the churchyard. It was a flat gravestone, elevated upon four little pillars, and covering the spot where sleeps the mortal part of a venerable clergyman who preceded me in It was a hand which had written my parish, and who held the charge of it for sixty years. I had gone down to the church- many sermons, preached in that plain church; yard, as usual, for a while after breakfast, which had turned over the leaves of the with a little companion, who in those days large pulpit-Bible (very old and shabby) was generally with me wherever I went. which I turned over now; which had often And while she was walking about, attended opened the door of the house where now I by a solemn dog, I sat down in the sunshine live. And when I got up from the graveon the stone, gray with lichen, and green with moss. I thought of the old gentleman who had slept below for fifty years. I wondered if he had sometimes come to the churchyard after breakfast before he began his task of sermon-writing. I reflected how his heart, mouldered into dust, was now so free from all the little heats and worries which will find their way into even the quietest life in this world. And sitting there, I put my right hand upon the mossy stone. The contrast of the hand upon the green surface caught the eye of my companion, who was not four years old. She came slowly up, and laid down her own hand beside mine on the mossy expanse. And after looking at it in various ways for several minutes, and contrasting her own little hand with the weary one which is now writing this page, she asked, thoughtfully and doubtfully, Was your hand ever a little hand like mine? Yes, I said, as I spread it out on the stone, and looked at it: it seems a very short time since that was a little hand like yours. It I remember, there, the porwas a fat little hand: not the least like those trait of a frail old lady, plainly on the furthin fingers and many wrinkles now. When thest confines of life. More than fourscore it grew rather bigger, the fingers had gener- years had left their trace on the venerable ally various deep cuts, got in making and head: you could fancy you saw the aged rigging ships: those were the days when I hands shaking. Opposite there hung the intended to be a sailor. It gradually grew picture of a blooming girl, in the fresh May bigger, as all little hands will do, if spared of beauty. The blooming girl was the in this world. And now, it has done a great mother of the venerable dame of fourscore. many things. It has smoothed the heads Painting catches but a glimpse of time; but of many children, and the noses of various it keeps that glimpse. On the canvas the horses. It has travelled, I thought to myself, along thousands of written pages. It has paid away money, and occasionally received it. In many things that hand has fallen short, I thought; yet several things which that hand found to do, it did with its

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There is something that touches us in the bare thought of Growing Old. I know a house on certain of whose walls there hang portraits of members of the family for many years back. It is not a grand house, where, to simple minds, the robes of brocade and the suits of armor fail to carry home the idea of real human beings. It is the house of a not wealthy gentleman. portraits represent people whose minds did not run much upon deep speculations or upon practical politics; but who, no doubt, had many thoughts as to how they should succeed in getting the ends to meet. With such people does the writer feel at home: with such, probably, does the majority of his readers.

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face never grows old. As Dekker has it,
"False colors last after the true be filed."
I have often looked at the two pictures, in a
confused sort of reverie. If you ask what
it is that I thought of in looking at them, I
truly cannot tell you.
The fresh young

beauty was the mother: the aged grand-dame
was the child: that was really all. But
there are certain thoughts upon which
can vaguely brood for a long time.

you

"Twill murmur on a thousand years,
And flow as now it flows.
"And here, on this delightful day,
I cannot choose but think
How oft, a vigorous man, I lay
Beside this fountain's brink.
"My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,

For the same sound is in my ears

Which in those days I heard."" said on the subject. And it has always apThat is really the sum of what is to be peared to me that Mr. Dickens has shown does not always characterize him, when he an amount of philosophical insight which wrote certain reflections, which he puts in the mouth of one Mr. Roker, who was a turnkey in the Fleet Prison. I do not know

why it should be so; but these words are to me more strikingly truthful than almost any others which the eminent author ever produced:

You remember reading how upon a day, not many years since, certain miners, working far under ground, came upon the body of a poor fellow who had perished in the suffocating pit forty years before. Some chemical agent, to which the body had been subjected—an agent prepared in the laboratory of nature-had effectually arrested the progress of decay. They brought it up to the surface: and for a while, till it crumbled away, through exposure to the atmosphere, it lay there, the image of a fine sturdy young man. No convulsion had passed over the face in death: the features were tranquil; the hair was black as jet. No one recognized the face: a generation had grown up since the day on which the miner went down his shaft for the last time. But a tottering, old woman, who had hurried from her cot-Bless my dear eyes,' said Mr. Roker, shaking "You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? tage at hearing the news, came up: and she his head slowly from side to side, and gazing knew again the face which through all these abstractedly out of the grated window before years she had never quite forgot. The poor him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceminer was to have been her husband the day terday that he whopped the coal-heaver down at ful scene of his early youth, it seems but yesafter that on which he died. They were the Fox-under-the-Hill, by the wharf there. I rough people, of course, who were looking think I can see him now, a coming up the Strand on: a liberal education and refined feelings between two street-keepers, a little sobered by are not deemed essential to the man whose the bruising, with a patch o' winegar and brown work it is to get up coals, or even tin: but bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a paper over his right eyelid, and that 'ere lovely there were no dry eyes there when the gray- following at his heels. What a rum thing Time headed old pilgrim cast herself upon the is, aint it, Neddy?'" youthful corpse, and poured out to its deaf ear many words of endearment, unused for forty years. It was a touching contrast: the one so old, the other so young. They had both been young, these long years ago: but time had gone on with the living, and stood still with the dead. It is difficult to account for the precise kind and degree of feeling with which we should have witnessed the little picture. I state the fact: I can I mention it in proof of my principle, that a certain vague pensiveness is the result of musing upon the lapse of time; and a certain undefinable pathos of any incident which brings strongly home to us that lapse and its effects.

say no more.

"In silence Matthew lay, and eyed
The spring beneath the tree:

And thus the dear old man replied,
The gray-haired man of glee:

"No check, no stay, that streamlet fears-
How merrily it goes?

Here we find, truthfully represented, an essential mood of the human mind. It is a more pleasing picture, perhaps, that comes back upon us in startling freshness, making then, and our sentiment with regard to time us wonder if it is really so long ago since is more elegantly expressed; but it really comes to this. You can say no more of time than that it is a strange, undefinable, inexplicable thing; and when, by some caprice of memory, some long-departed scene comes vividly back, what more definite thing can you do than just shake your head, and gaze abstractedly, like Mr. Roker? Like distant bells upon the breeze, some breath from childhood shows us plainly for a moment the little thing that was ourself. What more can you do but look at the picture, and feel that it is strange ? More important things have been forgotten; but you remember how, when you were four years old, you ran a race along a path with a green slope beside it, and watched the small shadow keeping pace with you along the green slope; or you

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