facit per alium, facit per se.' Yes, Sir, nature makes blunderbusses, Sir. I have studied these things, Sir; I read nature, Sir. Her pages are not sealed books to me. I have the open sesame' to her most hidden treasures, Sir. There's your fee, Sir. Good morning, Sir.'

What a powerful intellect that man has!' said a good-natured and slightly-troubled-with-the-fool friend of mine, who had been a listener to our discourse; 'what a pity he is so eccentric! If he would only apply his vast learning to some useful object, if he were not quite so positive and rude, he would be a most estimable and distinguished man.'

'What an ass you are!' I was tempted to say; but I checked myself. Now, reader, both these men were crazy as mad as March hares.' The first imagined himself one of the master spirits of the age, and his rudeness he considered the sure indication of genius; and the base coin passed current with the other man. He mistook the coarse, rude, stubborn, digressive, and insane speech of his co-madman, for genuine intelligence, and commendable decision. And so it generally passes with the world. Kindness and gentleness of manner is regarded as the unerring index of a weak and vacillating mind, while the brute, who tramples on the feelings of all those on whom he dares to make the experiment, is looked upon as a man of energy and firmness, and as veiling under the exterior of a bear the gentleness and amiability of the dove. That anomalous class of mankind, merchant tailors,' show their judgment of human nature in this respect, when they hang a pea-jacket at their doors, to indicate that they have fine broad-cloth coats and linen shirts for sale within. Now a sensible man, or, to speak more correctly, a man whose monomania was of a different kind, would have put the question thus : 'Sir, a dog broke into my ground yesterday, and after making three efforts to drive him out, I killed him. I am desirous to know what consequences would attach to the act, if, under similar circumstances, I should kill a man?' But this would have been regarded, by the bystander of whom I spoke, as mere common-place, while all his encomiums were lavished on the rigmarole stuff of the pompous maniac, in whose whole speech there was not a single word of meaning or common sense. Stop, reader; I take back the last assertion. There were three words in that speech, which were indicative of sound judgment, clear perception, and unclouded intellect. They were, if I may speak figuratively, the sun's ray amid the morning mist; the eye in the toad; the grain of wheat in the dung-hill; the green spot in the desert. The most acute observer of human nature, the soundest philosopher, the most kind-hearted and benevolent individual, could not have used more fit, more appropriate, more intelligible expressions. In truth, they softened my wrath, they mollified my displeasure. I forgot the stubbornness of the individual who stood before me, and I could not help thinking, after all, that my good-natured friend was half right; if he were not quite so positive and rude, he would be a most estimable and distinguished man. 'Can you guess the talismanic words? No? Then I'll tell you. They are contained in the last sentence but one, when, suiting the action to the word, he observed: There's your fee !'

SENEX.

FUNERAL OF SHELLY,

'You can have no idea what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has, on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back ground, and the sea before.'

Avon, (N. Y.,) 1838.

To funeral pile we bore

The lord of lute and lay,

Made on the lonely Tuscan shore,
From England far away.
Before us was a sea

Of dark, unquiet mien,

And in her arms of treachery

Slept beauteous isles of green.

Behind us, graced with pines,
And intermingling boughs,
The tall, majestic Appenines
Reared their eternal brows:
Above, the skies were dark,

And shaded with their frown
Those waves, wherein his little bark,
Amid the storm, went down.

From forest and from flood

We heard sad tones ascend,

And thought the nymphs of wave and wood
Were mourning for our friend.

For when alive he sung

In places sweet and lone,

And on the beach of ocean, strung
His harp of deathless tone.

And well he loved the streams,
Old rocks, and hoary trees,
While spirits from the land of dreams
Came harping on the breeze.
We thought, while round his pyre,
The blue waves at our feet,

For voiceless monarch of the lyre,
The rites of old were meet.

His couch of proud repose

We fired at last, and high

The flame, like crimson column, rose

In perfume to the sky :

The wild and waters round

Were kindled by the glow,

And frighted, with a boding sound,

The gull flew to and fro.

Soon died away the light

Of myrrh and crackling pino,

And on the relics, warm and white,
Was thrown the sacred wine.

Peace to the bard! amid

The marble wrecks of Rome,
By flowers and wreathing ivy hid,
His ashes have a home!

And though around him lie,

In consecrated mould,

The great of centuries gone by,

And demigods of old;

From far to view his tomb,

The sons of genius throng,

And chaunt, while they bewail his doom,
Sweet, tributary song.

BYRON'S LETTERS.

W. H. C. H.

RANDOM PASSAGES

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNAL AND CORRESPONDENCE OF THE LATE MRS. SOPHIE MANNING PHILLIPS.

NUMBER TWO.

THE extracts which follow, complete the selections from the journal alluded to in our last number, kept in Providence, (R. I.,) previous to the marriage of the writer, and her removal to West Point. A wider field, novel scenes, and new affections and cares, will impart to the passages which are to follow, from other records, even an added interest and value.

'WONDER where our merriment comes from our laughter, our lightness, our pleasure? Oh, marvel past compare! that mirth, and misery, and fear, trust, doubt, despair, and hope, and discontent, and cheerfulness, should rule, all our lives long, in blessing or in chastisement, the self-same spirit! — the same, yet turned and wrought upon, almost beyond our power of cognizance. How strange it seems, sometimes, to me, that we should think of any thing but the dust wherein we must lie and fade, even as it were to-morrow. Yet here we are, looking now to the past— that, to be sure, is certain ! - now to futurity; rarely at least with me-pausing amidst, and appreciating, the present. The ties that bind our miserable flitting hours and days, what are they? A joy! a-nothingness! Broken, lost, forgotten, for ever and ever! Father! Sister! Lover! these are deep and gentle sounds; and yet they faint and die away, even as our lips unclose to utter them.

out upon the quiet stars at night, and hold communion with my eternal soul!

'FANNY H, the youthful, the beloved, gone down in utter silence to the grave! Her beautiful name, when I speak of lighter things, and her sweet living face, rise before me with a vividness for which I cannot account. Who, oh! who, shall dare approach the mother's and the father's yearning grief, that have looked their last upon a child like thee?-that have stood together beside that unshared pillow, and bent them down to thine unanswering lips, and laid their trembling hands upon thy lifeless brow, and whispered Gone!' Oh, colder to them shall be the summer, with her bursting bloom, than any winter's hour when thou wert by, and spoke, and smiled! Death! it cometh to each; but to see a child of light like thee, laid thus within the trodden dust; to know the throbbing hopes, and joys, and brightened images, that must have lived in thee, and think upon thy grave,

'Doth mock us drearly, in our busy places.'

Dreary to-day as clouds, and cold, and cankered falling leaves, could make it. Felt more forlorn than tongue can tell. Hoped for a letter, hoped for enfin, I hope for all things, strive for all, but the sure guidance of my Maker, in the way which leads to peace and perfect rest. Could I but feel the height and depth of heaven above earth; the immaculate truth of things celestial; the perishing ashes of things terrestrial; the folly of human wisdom; the falsehood of human promise! But I feel it not! With the very tears of disappointment, and impatience, and weariness, in my eyes, I feel it not! Knowledge and faith are different things; for I know that life is a sorrowful shadow, fleeing away into darkness; yet, trust not, as we are commanded, to the better and eternal meed beyond. I do not realize that bliss, before which the world's most real, most unmingled good, is but a dim and idle mockery.

the

" Eh bien! - it is well to know and to repeat, the past, past is surely and for ever ours! Hope, happiness, confiding days, and kind and fairy eves, and blessed phantasies, have all been mine; and in the very winter of life's course, I will remember. Friends may forsake, foes may pursue, ties that bind all human beings with an undisputed power, be broken, lost, trampled; there are moments, oh, I KNOW it! which quit our memory but in the grave; and these, it may be, are they which mount with us in everlasting life hereafter.' I love not the life I'm leading. For the society I meet in P―, it amounts (la plus art) to just precisely 000. I join in it of an evening; talk, giggle, perhaps sing a song; and if I catch the sight of a star in heaven, or the moon stealing in upon nonsense and noise, off, off go my thoughts on their fleet-winged errands, bringing me back no likeness of aught which is near and around me. What has come over me? In other days, the most common have interested, the most simple have satisfied me.' If that man comes ever to see me again, I must be carried out insensible! Stiff, prosy, smiling wretch! What pauses, big with awfulness, I suffered to occur, in the 'dim, distant' hope that he would go; and there he sat,

'yes, ma'am,' ' yes, ma'am,' till my patience jumped quite off her monument. The bare recollection of being subject two or three hours to that youth's narcotic devoirs, makes me as white as snow! Bitter is a dun, protruding chin, looking over a collarless black cravat! Bitter is straight lank hair! Bitter are two great red hands! Bitter is a vile-made boot, with nails in the heel! Bitter is Mr

'RAINY, cold, forlorn! But there is never a day, upon which I do not open mine eyes at morning, with an instant thankfulness that I am alive upon God's earth; that I shall behold the blessed faces of my familiar affection; that I shall hear the sounds of all familiar things; that my full heart is beating; that these veins are warm and glowing with the cheerful tide of life!' 'Looked out this.

morning upon trees stripped of their foliage, their glittering summer dew and song; upon sear places amidst the grass, and sullenness over the waters, and the brooding sorrow of a wet November day pervading earth and air; yet my spirit, nowise hindered, spread her untouched pinions, and 1 blessed the hour that saw and sees me living! Ay, 't is pleasant! Who shall say, There is no good thing in us?' Yet so cry the preachers, and among them, that nasalvoiced abhorrence of mine, the Rev. Mr. —— Oh false and fatal scheme! Do I not know there are existences within a human bosom, of most acceptable beauty, teaching gentleness to the lips, and kindness to the soul, and rising in odor neither 'distasteful,' nor 'disdained,' toward the altars of yonder unimagined heaven?

'Been troubled all this day about a dress! Even so; the shape of a garment to enfold and beautify the form we are told is clay, is sufficient to disturb our philosophy! And so shall it be, even unto the end of the world. Aspiring now to kindred and likeness with the angels, now vexed and wearied by the meanest insignificance, we all pass on to our journey's end, contending with low wants and lofty will.' Eh bien! 'T were a doleful thing, to often dive into these