One day, out in the meadow The men walked up and down. That looked like lances 'mid the trees, At eve they all assembled, Then care and doubt were fled; Rose up, his glass in hand, "The night is growing darker, But one poor Tyrol maiden Nothing she heard around her, (Though shouts rang forth again,) Gone were the green Swiss valleys, The pasture, and the plain; Before her eyes one vision, And in her heart one cry, With trembling haste and breathless, Were standing in the shed; She loosed the strong, white charger, That fed from out her hand, She mounted, and she turned his head Towards her native land. Out-out into the darkness- "Faster!" she cries, "O faster!" Shall not the roaring waters Their headlong gallop check? The steed draws back in terror, She strives to pierce the blackness, He struggles through the foam, And see in the far distance Shine out the lights of home! Up the steep banks he bears her, And now, they rush again Towards the heights of Bregenz, That tower above the plain. They reach the gate of Bregenz, Just as the midnight rings, And out come serf and soldier To meet the news she brings. Bregenz is saved! Ere daylight Defiance greets the army That marches on the land. And if to deeds heroic Should endless fame be paid, Bregenz does well to honor The noble Tyrol maid. Three hundred years are vanished, And when, to guard old Bregenz, THE INVENTION OF PRINTING. SIR WALTER BESANT. (From "Westminster.") Who was the first printer? You may read all the books, pamphlets, and articles; you may consider all the arguments, and in the long run you will know no more than you knew at the beginning. Perhaps it was Coster of Haarlem, or perhaps it was Gutenberg of Mainz. No one knows, and really it matters little except for the antiquary and the historian. At this period some modification in the old method of copying was certain to be invented. It was by the greatest good luck, I have always thought, that a sort of shorthand, a representation of words by little easy symbols, was not invented. For instance, supposing a separate symbol for each of the prepositions, articles, and auxiliary verbs, and other separate symbols for the commoner words, there might be some thousands of symbols in all to be learned by the scribe; but his labor would be reduced to one-tenth. They might have invented some such method. Then, satisfied with the result, we should have gone on for centuries, and the art of printing would still have to be invented. But the time was come, and the invention, happily, came with it. Had printing been invented two centuries before, it would have been neglected and speedily forgotten, because there was no demand for books. Had it been invented two centuries later, it would have had to contend against some other contrivance for shortening labor and cheapening books. If an ingenious projector discovers some great truth or invents some useful contrivance before or after his time, he is lost-he and his discovery. Thus, in the reign of James the First a man of great ingenuity contrived a submarine boat - he was before his age. In the middle of the last century another ingenious person discovered a way of sending messages by electricity-he was before his age. In a romance, now a hundred and fifty years old, the possibility of photography was imagined by another person before his age. Men whose ideas are much before their age receive, as their reward, contempt, certainly; imprisonment, probably; and perhaps death in one of its most unpleasant forms. The generally received story, after all that has |