CROSSED IN LOVE.

I Do not care a farthing about any man, woman, or child, in the world. You think that I am joking, Jemmy; but you are mistaken. What! you look at me again with those honest eyes of yours staring with wonder, and making a demipathetic, demi-angry appeal for an exception in your favor. Well, Jemmy, I do care about you, my honest fellow, so uncork the other bottle.

Did you ever see me out of humor in your life for the tenth part of a second? Never, so help me, heaven! Did you ever hear me speak ill of another? I might, perhaps, have cracked a joke-indeed, I have cracked a good many such in my time at a man's expense behind his back; but never have I said any thing which I would not say to his face, or what I would not take from him with treble hardness of recoil, if it so pleased him to return it; but real bona fide evil-speaking was never uttered by me. I never quarreled with any one. You are going to put me in mind of my duel with Captain Maxwell. I acknowledge I fought it, and fired three shots. What then? Could I avoid it? I was no more angry with him when I sent the message, than I was at the moment of my birth. Dueling is an absurd custom of the country, which I must comply with when occasion requires. The occasion had turned up, and I fought of course. Never was I happier than when I felt the blood trickling over my shoulders-for the wise laws of honor were satisfied, and I was rid of the cursed trouble. I was sick of the puppyism of punctilio, and the booby legislation of the seconds, and was glad to escape from it by a scratch. I made it up with Maxwell, who was an honest, though a hot-headed and obstinate man-and you know I was executor to his will. Indeed, he dined with me the very day-week after the duel. Yet, spite of this cquanimity, I repeat it, that I do not care for any human being on earth, (the present company always excepted,) more than I care for one of those filberts which you are cracking with such laudable assiduity.

But I have dirtied my fingers with ink, you say, and daubed other people's faces with them. I admit it. My pen has been guilty of various political jeux d'esprit, but let me whisper it, Jemmy, on both sides. Don't start, it is not worth while.My tory quizzes I am suspected of; suspected, I say, for I am not such a goose as to let them be any more than mere matters of suspicion; but of quizzes against tories I am no more thought guilty than I am of petty larceny. Yet such is the case. I write with no ill feeling; public men or people who thrust themselves before the public in any way, I just look on as phantoms of the imagination, as things to throw off commonplaces about. You know how I assassinated Jack ****, in the song which you transcribed for me; how it spread in thousands, to his great annoyance. Well, on Wednesday last, he and I supped tete-a-tete, and a jocular follow he is. It was an accidental rencontre-he was sulky at first, but I laughed and When the second bottle had sung him into good humor. loosened his tongue, he looked at me most sympathetically, and said, "May I ask you a question?" "A thousand," I replied, "provided you do not expect me to answer them." "Ah," he cried, "it was a shame for you to abuse me the way you did, and all for nothing; but, hang it, let by-gones be by-gones you are too pleasant a fellow to quarrel with." I told him he appeared to be under a mistake-he shook his head— emptied his bottle, and we staggered home in great concord. In point of fact, men of sense think not of such things, and mingle freely in society as if they never occurred. Why, then, should I be supposed to have any feeling whatever, whether of anger or pleasure about them?

My friends? Where are they? Ay, Jemmy, I do understand what that pressure of my hand means. But where is the other? No where! Acquaintances I have in hundreds; boon companions in dozens-fellows to whom I make myself as agreeable as I can, and whose society gives me pleasure. There's Jack Meggot, the best joker in the world; Will Thompson, an unexceptionable ten-bottle man; John Mortimer, a singer of most renowned social qualities; there 's-but why need I enlarge the catalogue? You know the men I mean. I live with them, and that right gaily; but would one of them crack a joke the less, drink a glass the less, sing a song the less, if I died before morning? Not one; nor do I blame them, for if they were engulfed in Tartarus, I should just go through my usual daily round-keep moving in the same monotonous tread-mill of life, with other companions to help me through as steadily as I do now. The friends of my boyhood are gone; ay, all-all gone! I have lost the old familiar faces, and shall not try for others to replace them. I am now happy with a mail-coach companion whom I never saw before and never will see again. My cronies come like shadows, so depart.' Do you remember the story of Abon Hassan, in some of the Oriental tales? He was squandering a fine property on some hollow friends, when he was advised to try their friendship by pretending poverty and asking their assistance. It was refused, and he determined never to see them more-never to make a friend— nay, not even an acquaintance-but to sit, according to the custom of the East, by the way-side, and invite to his board the three first passers-by, with whom he spent the night in festive debauchery, making it a rule never to ask the same person a second time.

Yes it is true-I have borne myself toward my family unexceptionably, as the world has it. I married off my sisters, sent my brothers to the colleges, and did what was fair for my mother. But I shall not be hypocrite enough to pretend to high motives for so doing. My father's death left them entirely to me, and what could I do with them? Turn them out? That would be absurd, and just as absurd to retain them at home without treating them properly. They were my family. My own comforts would have been materially invaded by any other line of conduct. I therefore executed the filial and fraternal affections in a manner which will be a fine panegyric for my obituary. Heaven help the idiots who write such things! They to talk of motives, and feelings, and the impulses that sway the human heart! They, whose highest ambition is to furnish provender, at so much a line, for magazine or newspaper. Yet from them shall I receive the tribute of a tear. The world shall be informed in due time, and I care not how soon, that "DIED, at his house, etc. etc. a gentleman, exemplary in every relation of life, whether we consider him as a son, a brother, a friend, or a citizen. His heart," and so on to the end of the fiddle faddle. The winding up of my family affairs, you know, is, that I have got rid of them all; that I pay the good people a visit once a month, and ask them to a humdrum dinner on my birth-day, which you are perhaps aware occurs My life is almost the same-true it is that I know the exbut once a year, I am alone. I feel that I am alone. terior conformation, and the peculiar habits of those with whom My politics-what then? I am, externally at least, a tory, I associate, but our hearts are ignorant of one another. They a toute outrance, because my father and my grandfather (and vibrate not together; they are ready to enter into the same I cannot trace my genealogy any higher) were so before me. communication with any passer-by. Nay, perhaps, Hassan's Besides, I think every gentleman should be a tory; there is an plan was more social. He was relieved from inquiries as to easiness, a suavity of mind, engendered by toryism, which it is the character of his table-mates. Be they fair, be they foul, vain for you to expect from fretful whiggery, or bawling radi- they were nothing to him. I am tormented out of calism, and such should be a strong distinctive feature in every such punctilios as I daily must submit to. "I wonder you keep gentleman's character. And I admit, that in my youth I did company," says a friend-friend! well, no matter-"with R. many queer things, and said many violent and nonsensical He is a scoundrel-he is suspected of having cheated fifteen matters. But that fervor is gone. I am still outside the same; years ago at play, he drinks ale, he fought shy in a duel busibut inside how different! I laugh to scorn the nonsense I hear ness, he is a whig-a radical, a muggletonian, a jumper, a vented about me in the clubs which I frequent. The zeal moderate man, a jacobin; he asked twice for soup, he wrote about nothings, the bustle about stuff, the fears and the pre-a libel, his father was a low attorney, nobody knows him in cautions against fancied dangers, the indignation against good society," etc. etc. Why, what is it to me? I care not writings which no decent man thinks of reading, or against whether he broke every commandment in the decalogue, prospeeches which are but the essence of stupidity; in short, the vided he be a pleasant fellow, and that I am not mixed up with whole tempest in a tea-pot appears to me to be ineffably ludic- his offences. But the world will so mix. me up in spite of myI join now and then, nay very often, in these discus- self. Burns used to say, the best company he was ever in was sions; why should not I? Am I not possessed of the un- the company of professed blackguards. Perhaps he was right. doubted liberties of a Briton, invested with the full privilege I dare not try. of talking nonsense? And, if any of my associates laugh inside at me, why, I think them quite right.

rous.

my

life by

My early companions I did care for, and where are they? Poor Tom Benson, he was my class-fellow at school; we oc

cupied the same rooms in college, we shared our studies, our amusements, our flirtations, our follies, our dissipations together. A more honorable or upright creature never existed. Well, sir, he had an uncle, lieutenant-colonel of a cavalry regiment, and at his request Tom bought a cornetcy, in the corps. I remember the grand-looking fellow strutting about in the full splendor of his yet unspotted regimentals, the cynosure of the bright eyes of the country town in which he resided. He came to London, and then joined his regiment. All was well for a while, but he had always an unfortunate itch for play. In our little circle it did him no great harm; but his new companions played high, and far too skilfully for Tom--perhaps there was roguery, or perhaps there was not-I never inquired. At all events, he lost all his ready-money. He then drew liberally on his family; he lost that too; in short, poor Tom at last staked his commission, and lost it with the rest. This, of course, could not be concealed from the uncle, who gave him a severe lecture, but procured him a commission in an infantry regiment destined for Spain. He was to join it without delay; but the infatuated fellow again risked himself, and lost the infantry commission also. He now was ashamed or afraid to face his uncle, and enlisted (for he was a splendid-looking young man, and was instantly accepted,) as a private soldier in the twenty-sixth foot.

I suppose that he found his habits were too refined and too finaly fixed to allow him to be satisfied with the scanty pay, and coarse food, and low company, of an infantry soldier. It is certain, that he deserted in a fortnight after enlistment. The measure of poor Tom's degradation was not yet filled up. He had not a farthing when he left the twenty-sixth. He went to his uncle's at an hour when he knew that he would not be at home, and was with difficulty admitted by the servant, who recognized him. He persuaded him at last that he meant to throw himself on the mercy of his uncle, and the man, who loved him-every body of all degrees who knew him loved him-consented to his admission. I am almost ashamed to go on. He broke open his uncle's escrutoir, and took from it whatever money it contained-a hundred pounds or thereabouts and slunk out of the house. Heavens! what were my feelings when I heard this-when I saw him proclaimed in the newspapers as a deserter, and a thief! A thief! Tom Benson a thief! I could not credit the intelligence of my eyes or my cars. He whom I knew only five months before-for so brief had his career been-would have turned with scorn and disgust from any action deviating a hair's breadth from the highest honor.

and the bitterest remorse.

reproaches might have been I knew not, nor do I care, but a
thought struck me that Tom might have been of this army,
and I inquired, as, indeed, I did of every body coming from a
foreign country, if he knew any thing of a man of the name of
Benson. "Do you?" stammered out the drunken patriot-"I
do," was my reply.
the officer. "I did-I do," again I retorted. "Why then,"
"Do you care about him?" again asked
said he "take a short stick in your hand, and step across to
Valparaiso, their you will find him two feet under ground,
snugly wrapped up in a blanket. I was his sexton myself, and
had no time to dig him a deeper grave, and no way of getting
a stouter coffin. It will just do as well. Poor fellow, it was
all the clothes he had for many a day before." I was shocked
at the recital, but Holmes was too much intoxicated to pursue
the subject any farther.

had joined as a private soldier in this desperate service, under
I called on him in the morning, and learned that Benson
the name of Maberly-that he speedily rose to a command-
seemed quite reckless of life-had, however, been treated with
was distinguished for doing desperate actions, in which he
his baggage-was compelled to part with almost all his wear-
considerable ingratitude-never was paid a dollar-had lost
ing apparel for subsistence, and had just made his way to the
sea-side, purposing to escape to Jamaica, when he sunk, over-
come by hunger and fatigue. He kept the secret of his name
till the last moment, when he confided it, and a part of his un-
happy history, to Holmes. Such was the end of Benson, a
man born to high expectations, of cultivated mind, considera-
ble genius, generous heart, and honorable purposes.
Jack Dallas and I became acquainted with each other at
Brazen Nose. There was a time that I thought I would have
died for him; and, I believe, that his feelings toward me
were equally warm. Ten years ago we were the Damon and
Pythias-the Pylades and Orestes of our day. Yet I lost him
by a jest. He was wooing most desperately a very pretty
girl, equal to him in rank, but rather meagre in the purse.
He kept it, however, a profound secret from his friends. By
accident I found it out, and when I next saw him, I began to
quiz him. He was surprised at the discovery, and very sore
at the quizzing. He answered so testily, that I proceeded to
annoy him. He became more and more sour, I more and
more vexatious in my jokes.

It was quite wrong on my part; but heaven knows I meant nothing by it. I did not know that he had just parted with his father, who had refused all consent to the match, adding injurious insinuations about the mercenary motives of the How he spent the next six months of his life, I know not; young lady. Dallas had been defending her, but in vain; and but about the end of that period a letter was left at my door by then, while in this mood, did I choose him as the butt of my a messenger, who immediately disappeared. It was from him. silly witticisms. At last something I said—some mere piece It was couched in terms of the most abject self-condemnation, of nonsense-nettled him so much, that he made a blow at me. He declared he was a ruined man I arrested his arm, and cried, "Jack, you would have been in character, in fortune, in happiness, in every thing, and con- very sorry had you put your intentions into effect." He colored jured me, for the sake of former friendship, to let him have five as if ashamed of his violence, but remained sullen and silent guineas, which he said would take him to a place of safety.- for a moment, and then left the room. We never have spoke From the description of the messenger, who, Tom told me ir since. He shortly after went abroad, and we were thus kept his note, would return in an hour, guessed it was himself from meeting and explaining. On his return we joined differWhen the time came, which he had put off to a moment cent coteries, and were of different sides in politics. In fact, I almost complete darkness, I opened the door to his fearful rap. It was he-I knew him at a glance, as the lamp flashed over his face and, uncertain as was the light, it was bright enough to let me see that he was squalid, and in rags; that a fearful and ferocious suspicion, which spoke volumes, as to the life he had lately led, lurked in his side-looking eyes; those eyes that a year before spoke nothing but joy and courage, and that a premature grayness had covered with pie-bald patches the once glossy black locks which straggled over his unwashed face, or through his tattered hat.

I had that he asked-perhaps more-in a paper in my hand. I put it into his. I had barely time to say "O Tom!" when he caught my hand, kissed it with burning lips, exclaimed, "Don't speak to me-I am a wretch!" and bursting from the grasp with which I wished to detain him, fled with the speed of an arrow down the street, and vanished into a lane. Pursuit was hopeless. Many years clapsed, and I heard not of him-no one heard of him. But about two years ago I was at a coffee-house in the Strand, when an officer of what they called the Patriots of South America, staggered into the room. He was very drunk. His tawdry and tarnished uniform proclaimed the service to which he belonged, and all doubt on the subject was removed by his conversation. It was nothing but a tissue of curses on Bolivar and his associates, who, he asserted, had seduced him from his country, ruined his prospects, robbed him, cheated him, and insulted him. How true these

did not see him for nearly seven years until last Monday, when he passed me with his wife-a different person from his early passion, the girl on account of whom we quarreled-leaning on his arm. I looked at him, but he bent down his eyes, pretending to speak to Mrs. Dallas. So be it.

Then there was my brother-my own poor brother-one year younger than myself. The verdict-commonly a matter of course-must have been true in this case. What an inward revolution that must have, which could have bent that gay and free spirit, that joyous and buoyant soul, to think of self-destruction! But I cannot speak of poor Arthur. These were my chief friends, and I lost the last of them about ten years ago; and since that time I know no one, the present company excepted, for whom I care a farthing. Perhaps, if they had lived with me as long as my other companions, I would have been as careless about them as I am about Will Thomson, Jack Megget, or my younger brother. I am often inclined to think that my feelings toward them are but warmed by the remembered fervor of boyhood, and made romantic by distance of time. I am pretty sure, indeed, that it is so. And if we could call up Benson, innocent, from the mould of South America-could restore poor, dear Arthur-make Dallas forget his folly-and let them live together again in my society, I should be speedily indifferent about them too.

My mind is as if slumbering, quite wrapped up in itself, and never wakes but to act a part. I rise in the morning, to eat,

drink, talk-to say what I do not think, to advocate questions FISHING SONG OF SHETLAND....BY W. H.C. HOSMER. which I care not for-to join companions whom I value not, to indulge in sensual pleasures which I despise-to waste my hours in trifling amusements, or more trifling business, and to retire to my bed perfectly indifferent as to whether I am ever again to see the shining of the sun. Yet is my outside gay, and my conversation sprightly. Within I generally stagnate, but sometimes there comes a twinge, short indeed, but bitter. Then it is that I am, to all appearance, most volatile, most eager in dissipation; but could you lift the covering which shrouds the secrets of my bosom, you would see that, like the inmates of the hall of Eblis, my very heart was fire.

He is gone. A kind animal, but a fool; exactly what is called the best creature in the world. I have that affection for him that I have for Old Towler, and I believe his feelings toward me are like Old Towler's-an animal love of one whom he looks up to an eating, drinking, good-humored, good-na-perience would not extend beyond individual life; the wisdom tured varlet, who laughs at my jokes when I tell him they are of each generation would be lost to its successor, and the to be laughed at, sees things exactly in the light that I see them world could never have emerged from the darkness of barbarin, backs me in my assertions, and bets on me at whist. I had rather than ten thousand pounds be in singleness of soul, in thoughtlessness of brain, in honesty of intention, in solid, contented ignorance, such as Jemmy Musgrave. That I cannot be, N'importe.

he would infallibly have been introduced, had he been then enrolled in the celestial ranks. It is obvious, therefore, that he was production of later mythologists; but, alas! the deity and his religion, the nations that worshipped him, and the cities where his temples were reared, are all swept away in one common ruin. Mortals and immortals, creeds and systems, nations and empires-all are annihilated together. Even their heaven is no more. Hyænas assemble upon Mount Olympus instead of deities: Parnassus is a desolate and waste; and the silence of that wilderness, once covered with laurel groves and gorgeous fanes, whence Apollo gave out his oracles, is now only broken by the occasional crumbling of some fragment from the rocky summit of the two-forked hill, scaring the wolf from his den and the eagle from her cliff.

And yet here is the poem of Homer fresh and youthful as when it first emanated from his brain; nay, it is probably in the very infancy of its existence, only in the outset of its career; generations whom it has delighted are as nothing compared to those whom it is destined to charm in its future progress to eternity. Contrast this majestic and immortal fate with that of the evanescent dust and clay, the poor perishing frame whose organization gave it birth; and what an additional argument does it afford, that the soul capable of such sublime efforts cannot be intended to revert to the earth with its miserable tegument of flesh. That which could produce immortality may well aspire to its enjoyment.

What laborious days, what watchings by the midnight lamp, what rackings of the brain, what hopes and fears, what long lives of laborious study, are here sublimized into print, and condensed into the narrow compass of these surrounding shelves! What an epitome of the past world, and how capricious the fate by which some of them have been preserved, while others of greater value have perished! The monks of the middle ages, being the great medium of conservation, and outraged nature inciting them to avenge the mortification of the body by the pruriousness of the mind, the amatory poets have not only come down to us tolerably entire, but they have added fat pollutions of their own,' passing off their lascivious elegies as the production of Cornelius Gallus, or anonymously sending forth into the world still more licentious and gross erotics. Some of the richest treasures of antiquity have been redeemed from the dust and cobwebs of monastic libraries, lumber-rooms, sacristies, and cellars; others have been excavated in iron chests, or disinterred from beneath ponderous tomes of controversial divinity, or copied from the backs of homilies and sermons, with which, in the scarcity of parchment, they had been overwritten. If some of our multitudinous writers would compile a circumstantial account of the resurrection of every classical author, and a minute narrative of the discovery of every celebrated piece of ancient sculpture, what an interesting volume might be formed!

are equal to that primitive model; our Ovidian elegies, our Pindaries, and our Anacreontics, all resemble their first parents in features as well as in name. Fertilizing our minds with the brains of our predecessors, we raise new crops of the old grain, and pass away to manure the intellectual field for future harvests of the same description. Destruction and reproduction is the system of the moral as well as of the physical world.

An anonymous book loses half its interest; it is the voice of the invisible, an echo from the clouds, the shadow of an unknown substance, an abstraction devoid of all humanity. One likes to hunt out an author, if he be dead, in obituaries and biographical dictionaries; to chase him from his birth; to be in at his death, and learn what other offspring of his brain survive him. Even an assumed name is better than none, though it is clearly a nominal fraud, a desertion from our own to enlist into another identity. It may be doubted whether we have any natural right thus to leap down the throat, as it were, of an imaginary personage, and pass off a counterfeit of our own creation for genuine coinage. But the strongest semi-vitality, or zoophite state of existence, is that of the writers of Ephemerides, who squeeze the whole bulk of their individuality into the narrow compass of a single consonant or vowel; who have an amphibious being as Mr. A., a liquid celebrity under the initial L., or attain an immortality of zigz-zag under the signature of Z. How fantastical to be personally known as an impersonal, to be literally a man of letters, to have all our virtues and talents intrusted to one little hierogliphic, like the bottles in the apothecary's shop!

Even when we assume a literary individuality somewhat more substantial than this fanciful creation; when one is known, propria persona, as the real identical Tomkins, who writes in a popular magazine under the signature of any specific letter, to what does it amount?-an immortality of a month, after which we are tranquilly left to enjoy an eternity-of oblivion. Our very nature is ephemeral: we come like shadows, so depart.' From time to time some benevolent and disinterested compiler endeavors to pluck us from the Lethean gulf, by republishing our best papers under the captivating title of 'Beauties of the Magazines,' 'Spirit of the aodern Essayists,' or some such embalming words; but alas! like a swimmer in the wide occan, who attempts to uphold his sinking comrade, ho can but give him a few moments' respite, when both sink together in the waters of oblivion.

NOVEMBER.

This is the month in which we are said by the Frenchman to hang and drown ourselves. We also agree with him in calling it the gloomy month of November;' and above all, with our in-door, money-getting, and unimaginative habits, all the rest of the year we contrive to make it so. Not all of us, however; and fewer and fewer, we trust, every day. It is a fact well known to the medical philoshpher, that in proportion as people do not take air and exercise, their blood becomes darker and darker. Now what darkens and thickens the circulation, and keeps the humors within the pores, darkens and clogs the mind; and we are then in a state to receive pleasure indifferently or confusedly, and pain with ten-fold painfulness. If we add to this a quantity of unnecessary cares and sordid mistakes, it is so much the worse. A love of nature is the refuge. He who grapples with March, and has the smiling eyes upon him of June and August, need have no fear of November.

Numerous as they are, what are the books preserved in comparison with those that we have lost? The dead races of mankind scarcely outnumber the existing generation more prodigiously than do the books that have perished exceed those that remain to us. Men are naturally scribblers, and there has probably prevailed, in all ages since the invention of letters, a much more extensive literature than is dreamed of in our philosophy. Osymandias, the ancient King of Egypt, if Herodotus may be credited, built a library in his palace, over the door of which was the well known inscription: "Physic for the Soul." Job wishes that his adversary had written a book, probably for the consolation of cutting it up in some Quarterly or Jerusalem Review; the expression, at all events, indicates And as the Italian proverb says, every medal has its rever a greater activity in the Row' than we are apt to ascribe to November, with its loss of verdure, its frequent rains, the fall those primitive times. Allusion is made in the Scriptures to of the leaf, and the visible approach of winter, is, undoubtedly, the Library of the Kings of Persia, as well as one built by Ne- a gloomy month to the gloomy; but to others, it brings but hemiah. Ptolemy Philadelphus had a collection of 700,000 pensiveness, a feeling very far from destitute of pleasure; and volumes destroyed by Cæsar's soldiers; and the Alexandrian if the healthiest and most imaginative of us may feel their Library, burned by the Caliph Omar, contained 400,000 man- spirits pulled down by reflections connected with earth, its uscripts. What a combustion of congregated brains!-the mortalities, and its mistakes, we should but strengthen ourquintessence of ages-the wisdom of a world-all simultane- selves the more to make strong and sweet music with the ously converted into smoke and ashes! This, as Cowley would changeful but harmonious movements of nature. In no system have said, is to put out the fire of genius by that of the torch; is there really any such thing as death: all is but change and to extinguish the light of reason in that of its own funeral pyre; vitality. We become either spiritual essences or new physical to make matter once more triumph of mind. Possibly, how-beings, or rather both; and, with November's leave, if Pythagever, our loss is rather imaginary than real, greater in quantity oras did not shrink from the idea of being a bird, we do not than in quality. Men's intellects, like their frames, continue see why Tomkins should be so fastidious. There are but two pretty much the same in all ages, and the human faculty lim- things that are really horrible-malignity and superstition: one, ited in its sphere of action, and operating always upon the which disturbs the present world; and the other, which, beside same materials, soon arrives at an impassable acme which disturbing the present, makes a Pandemonium of the greater kaves us nothing to do but to ring the changes upon antiquity. part of the future. All other painful things are but follies; Half our epic poems are modifications of Homer, though none and indeed these are but of all follies the most painful.