là-bas,

c'est l'amour exclusif du beau avec les nuages les nuages qui passent toutes ses subdivisions exprimé dans le les merveilleux nulangage le mieux approprié. . . . Le ages." That was the answer of both principe de la poésie est strictement of them to a generation of materialet simplement, l'aspiration humaine ists. vers une Beauté supérieure, et la manifestation de ce principe est dans un enthousiasme, un enlèvement de l'âme; enthousiasme tout-à-fait indépendant de la passion, qui est l'ivresse du cœur, et la vérité, qui est la pâture de la raisou."

We might go on choosing passages on this favorite theme from both poets, but there is no need; extracts are only useful as patterns of the whole material, and cutting off short lengths should be avoided.

To make Baudelaire better understood is also to raise Edgar Poe on a higher pedestal. If we doubt where to place this latter, we know his translator had no difficulty on the subject. The glory of both has increased with years; and if they failed on earth and among their fellow men, they must at last have joined hands in the spirit-world, and claimed from thence their rightful meed of praise.

Those who ranked Baudelaire very high (even before reading Mr. Swinburne's famous poem or Mr. Saintsbury's article) had no need of any incentive to place him anywhere but amongst a small but very choice circle of truly original immortals, even if the selection is made from some of those whom the world knoweth not. Baudelaire chose his mental affinity from the same class of genius- déclassé―and determined to place him higher. Though he could not gain honor for himself, though he could not keep his pathetic vows or make publishers pay him highly, he could bestow fame on another poor mortal, a poet of the nineteenth century that age extolled not for dreams, but for its common sense and its material progress.

They were potters who fashioned their clay into exquisite moulds, and artists who cared not at all for uselessness or utility. They understood that the beauty of a Grecian urn is not impaired by its being put to vile use, and that the maker of it will not incur the blame, for, the result being achieved, his hours of toil have not been wasted, and the beauty he created must last as long as his creation exists. As Baudelaire wrote: "La beauté est une qualité si forte qu'elle ne peut qu'ennoblir les âmes." ESME STUART.

From Bailey's Journal. NEW ORLEANS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

THEIR houses are generally built of wood, and boarded very plain on the inside, and made very open, that there may be a free circulation of air; consequently they avoid all the inconvenience and expense of paper, carpets, fires, curtains, and hangings of different kinds. The bedrooms are fitted up in the same plain style, and are furnished with nothing but a hard-stuffed bed, raised very much in the middle, and covered with a clean, white sheet; aud over the whole there is a large gauze net (called a bar), which is intended as a defence against the mosquitoes, and serves tolerably well to keep off those tormenting creatures. On this sheet (spread upon the bed and under the net) you lie down without any other covering, and (if it be summer time) with the doors and windows open, so intolerable is the heat of the climate. During several days when I was here, the thermometer was at 117° in the shade. The dress of the inhabitants is There was but one form of progress also correspondent to the furniture of these two cared about, not the progress the houses; being clothed in the lightof science or of electric light, but the est mauner possible, and every one in increased power of seeing visions and the manner which pleases him best, dreaming dreams. "Et qu'aimes-tu there is not (in these new countries) donc, extraordinaire étranger? J'aime that strange propensity to ridicule every

one who deviates from the forms which practice, I presume, they have adopted

from the Americans, who (in the southern part of that continent) follow this amusement very much. They have a playhouse, which is rather small. It consists of one row of boxes only, with an amphitheatre in the middle, which is raised above the pit, and over the whole there is a gallery. The plays are performed in French, and they have a tolerable set of actors. The inhabitants are also musical, but this lies chiefly among the French. The gentlemen of the place often perform in the orchestra at the theatre; in fact, there is no other music there but such as they obtain in this voluntary way.

New

a more established society may have prescribed to itself; but every one, in this respect," doeth that which is right in his own eyes." Some will wear the short linen jacket of the Americans; others the long flowing gown, or the cloak of the Spaniards; some the open trousers and naked collar; others the modern dress of tight pantaloons and large cravats; some, with the white or black chip hat; others, with the beaver and feathers, after the manner of the Spaniards; and so in respect to all the other minutiae of dress. There is but one printing-press in this place, and that is made use of by the government only. The Spanish government Orleans may contain about a thousand is too jealous to suffer the inhabitants houses. It is one hundred miles from to have the free exercise of it; for, the sea, down the Mississippi; but however strange it may appear, yet it is across the country by land it is not absolutely true that you cannot even more than seven leagues. Owing to stick a paper against the wall (either to the rapidity of the current, vessels are recover anything lost, or to advertise a long while in coming up here. There anything for sale) without its first hav-is a port, called Balize, at the mouth of ing the signature of the governor or of the river; but I am informed that it his secretary attached to it; and on all furnishes no defence to it. those little bills which are stuck up at the corners of the streets you see the word "Permitted, "" written by the governor or his agent. . . . As to the diversions of the place, they consist principally in billiards, of which there are several tables in the town. This

The tide ascends but very little way up the channel of the Mississippi, owing to the rapidity of its current. The banks of this river are well settled for a few miles below the city; but after that there are no plantations of any consequence.

A CURIOUS OPTICAL ILLUSION is de- port, which is illuminated from a lamp, scribed by M. Bourdon in the Revue Philo- while a screen is introduced to give a sophique. If an object moves before our shadow (the order being, observer, lamp, eye, kept fixed, it undergoes, in passing screen, vertical support, pendulum, dark from direct to indirect vision, an obscura- | wall). The white thread in its swing tion, a change of coloration; and the oppo- passes into the shadow of the rod and site effect occurs when the object comes screen, and each time it enters or reappears into the field of direct vision. It is natural its velocity seems increased considerably. to suppose that this plays a part in the It seems as if attracted into the shadow, perception of motion, and one fact proving and as if it entered into the light with a that it does so is, that if we render a slow-sudden shock. It is necessary that the moving object suddenly invisible—e.g., thread should cease to be visible when it by means of a shadow-its velocity of enters the shadow. With a red thread the displacement seems much increased. M. illusion also occurs, perhaps somewhat less Bourdon describes an arrangement in vividly. A simpler plan than the above is which a long pendulum with white thread to hang a pendulum from the ceiling, shadis swung from a cross bar on a vertical sup-ing with a screen.

Nature.

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From Temple Bar.
AMELIA OPIE.

NORWICH, quaint and picturesque in itself, and interesting from many historical associations, has also been among the best praised and best abused of English towns with regard to its literary circles.

her parents, in the charge of an Indian nurse. Mrs. Alderson was beautiful and intelligent. She brought up her only child, Amelia, born in 1769, with great care; and Mrs. Opie in her. fragment of autobiography traces her lifelong interest in the cause of emancipation, and her strong sympathy for Between the declaration of Basil the insane, to her mother's firm and Montagu that Sir James Mackintosh sensible mode of combating two great and he "always found Norwich a haven imaginative terrors of her childhood. of rest" when they visited it on circuit, These were a negro named Aboar, and because of the intellectual society with a mad woman who called herself Old which it abounded, and Harriet. Mar- Happiness; Amelia was persuaded to tineau's denunciation of it as "a rival make friends with them, and to do to Lichfield itself, in the time of the them kindnesses, and before long it Sewards, for literary pretension and became her greatest pleasure to visit the vulgarity of pedantry," lies a wide the neighboring lunatic asylum with margin for difference of opinion. flowers and gifts, to add to which she Truth, no doubt, as usual, will be found saved her small stock of pocket money. within the two extremes. The poor lunatics soon began to watch for her visits, and called her "the little girl from St. George's," the parish in which Dr. Alderson lived. She had to throw her offerings over the iron gates, and never could quite overcome her horror at the clanking of the chains of the unfortunate creatures who crept up to fetch them on the other side.

There may have been a tendency amongst the Norwich illuminati of the close of the last and beginning of the present century to form themselves into a mutual admiration society; but it cannot fairly be denied that they had amongst them very much justly to admire. The family of Taylor alone would have saved any town from the charge of pretension to culture. Even Miss Martineau qualifies her sweeping censure with respect to Mrs. John Taylor and Mrs. Opie, though against William Taylor no words that she can say are fierce enough; and Dr. Alderson, Mrs. Opie's father, she calls "solemn and sententious and eccentric in manner, but not an able man in any way.' Other pens have described him as clever enough, at all events, to be a very fascinating, popular, and successful physician; and he was gratefully remembered, thirty years after his death, by poor patients to whom he had freely given time and care.

Dr. Alderson married Amelia Briggs, a descendant of an old Norfolk family,2 but born in Bengal, and sent to England while yet a child, on the death of

1 Harriet Martineau's Autobiography. Smith & Elder, 1877. Vol. i., p. 300.

2 Mrs. Opie notes with satisfaction that "before the reign of Edward I.," her maternal ancestors "assumed the surname of De Ponte or Pontibus, i.e., 'at Brigge' or 'Brigges.'"'

The wise mother, unfortunately; had always been delicate, and on the 31st December, 1784, she died, leaving Amelia, then fifteen years old, to take the head of her father's house.

The love and sympathy between father and daughter were intense. Dr. Alderson made Amelia his constant companion, and introduced her to all his friends, who formed a very gay and varied circle. Her own favorite amongst them—and it says much for the young girl's good taste and judgment - was Mrs. John Taylor, of whom we find this description in a letter from Basil Montagu:

A most intelligent and excellent woman, mild and unassuming, quiet and meek, sitting amidst her large family busy with her needle and domestic occupations, but always assisting by her great knowledge the advancement of kind and dignified sentiment and conduct. Manly wisdom and feminine gentleness were in her united with such attractive manners that she was universally loved and respected. In "high