pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill, as it looked one February afternoon many years ago.

LABOR AND GENIUS.

SYDNEY SMITH.

(From "On the Conduct of the Understanding.")

The prevailing idea with young people has been the incompatibility of labor and genius; and therefore, from the fear of being thought dull, they have thought it necessary to remain ignorant. I have seen, at school and at college, a great many young men completely destroyed by having been so unfortunate as to produce an excellent copy of verses.

Their genius being now established, all that remained for them to do was, to act up to the dignity of the character; and as this dignity consisted in reading nothing new, in forgetting what they had already read, and in pretending to be acquainted with all subjects, by a sort of off-hand exertion of talents, they soon collapsed into the most frivolous and insignificant of men.

"When we have had continually before us,' says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "the great works of art, to impregnate our minds with kindred ideas, we are then, and not till then, fit to produce something of the same species.

"The greatest natural genius can not subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced from mere

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barrenness to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced." There is but one method, and that is hard labor; and a man who will not pay that price for distinction had better at once dedicate himself to the pursuits of the fox-or talk of bullocks, and glory in the goad! There are many modes of being frivolous, and not a few of being useful; there is but one mode of being intellectually great.

It would be an extremely profitable thing to draw up a short and well-authenticated account of the habits of study of the most celebrated writers with whose style of literary industry we happen to be most acquainted. It would go very far to destroy the absurd and pernicious association of genius and idleness, by showing them that the greatest poets, orators, statesmen, and historians-men of the most brilliant and imposing talents—have actually labored as hard as the makers of dictionaries and the arrangers of indexes; and that the most obvious reason why they have been superior to other men is, that they have taken more pains than other men.

Gibbon was in his study every morning, winter and summer, at six o'clock; Mr. Burke was the most laborious and indefatigable of human beings; Leibnitz was never out of his library; Pascal killed himself by study; Cicero narrowly escaped death by the same cause; Milton was at his books with as much regularity as a merchant or an attorneyhe had mastered all the knowledge of his time; so

had Homer. Raphael lived but thirty-seven years; and in that short space carried the art so far beyond what it had before reached, that he appears to stand alone as a model to his successors.

There are instances to the contrary, but, generally speaking, the life of all truly great men has been a life of intense and incessant labor. They have commonly passed the first half of life in the gross darkness of indigent humility-overlooked, mistaken, contemned, by weaker men-thinking while others slept, reading while others rioted, feeling something within them that told them they should not always be kept down among the dregs of the world; and then, when their time was come, and some little accident has given them their first occasion, they have burst out into the light and glory of public life, rich with the spoils of time, and mighty in all the labors and struggles of the mind.

Then do the multitude cry out, "A miracle of genius!" Yes, he is a miracle of genius, because he is a miracle of labor; because, instead of trusting to the resources of his own single mind, he has ransacked a thousand minds; because he makes use of the accumulated wisdom of ages, and takes as his point of departure the very last line and boundary to which science has advanced; because it has ever been the object of his life to assist every intellectual gift of nature, however munificent, and however splendid, with every resource that art could suggest, and every attention diligence could bestow.

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.

ADELAIDE A. PROCTER.

Girt round with rugged mountains
The fair Lake Constance lies;
In her blue heart reflected

Shine back the starry skies;
And, watching each white cloudlet
Float silently and slow,
You think a piece of Heaven
Lies on our earth below!

Midnight is there: and Silence,
Enthroned in Heaven, looks 'down
Upon her own calm mirror,

Upon a sleeping town:

For Bregenz, that quaint city
Upon the Tyrol shore,

Has stood above Lake Constance
A thousand years and more.

Her battlements and towers,
From off their rocky steep,
Have cast their trembling shadow
For ages on the deep:
Mountain, and lake, and valley,
A sacred legend know,

Of how the town was saved, one night,
Three hundred years ago.

Far from her home and kindred,

A Tyrol maid had fled,

To serve in the Swiss valleys,

And toil for daily bread;

And so she dwelt: the valley

More peaceful year by year;
When suddenly strange portents
Of some great deed seemed near.
The golden corn was bending
Upon its fragile stalk,

While farmers, heedless of their fields,
Paced up and down in talk.

The men seemed stern and altered,
With looks cast on the ground;

With anxious faces, one by one,
The women gathered round;

All talk of flax, or spinning,
Or work, was put away;

The very children seemed afraid
To go alone to play.