SUMMER at last! And so-just as our city squares begin to look green and warm, and just as the sky begins to smile overhead, and the delicious atmosphere converts our daily business-walk into a pleasant promenade, and the sunlight makes our homes cheery all day, and the moonlight makes the streets romantic all night-off we must go, and leave the empty town to the million or so of people who remain after "everybody has departed."

What a thoroughly modern phenomenon it is, this practice of "emptying" the town! But a few years ago, you might have counted upon your fingers the families which habitually "went into the country," every summer, from any of our great cities. Real invalids used to toddle off to the Springs, or down to the sea-shore; adventurous young people made up parties to explore the Hudson, or visit the Falls; but the great multitude, and the most respectable and flourishing citizens of Boston and Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore, kept themselves as cool as they could in their city houses; darkening the windows by day, and wandering about in the moonlight by night, in search of ice-creams.

Now all this has been changed. The Baltimoreans follow their orioles northwards, or vanish in the direction of the watering-places which are said to exist in the interior of Maryland and the south of Pennsylvania. Saratoga and Newport, Sharon and Rockaway, grow familiar with the flat sound of the letter a, and with the subdued toilette which marks the perfect Philadelphian. Our own citizens, like the influences of their city, disperse themselves throughout the land; elbow the Bostonians in their own Nahant; outclimb the natives up the New Hampshire hills; criticise the fortifications of Quebec, and ride tournaments, with the chivalry, at the Virginia Springs. What comes of all this wandering, is a question most fit to be asked, but not very easily to be answered.

If the object of it all were health-health of mind as well as of body! But is it so? It is a good thing to escape the heat of the city; but then the city heats the spirit as well as the flesh-and it is the fever of the soul which makes the most and the worst victims and it is to be feared, that of the

hurrying thousands, whom the rushing, screaming trains, and the swift-gliding steamers, bear into all the recesses of the rural world, and all the nooks of the surfbeaten shore, a goodly number carry the winter's giant with them into the summer's retreat. Mere change of air is wholesome, no doubt, but that complex creature, man, does not live by air alone; he breathes a double atmosphere; and all the pure oxygen the Newport breezes bring, will hardly chase the weariness and weakness from his heart, if the human world about him teem still with the deadly azote of an artificial society. Monotony is the mother of all manner of mischiefs; but you cannot escape from monotony by a mere change of scenes, without a change of pursuits. The growth of the spirit is dependent upon the expansion of the mind's horizon. If the same people--a people of the same sort, the same interests, or analogous interestssurround a man in June, that surrounded him in January, it is of slight importance, comparatively, whether he stands under a gray sky or a blue, in the slush of the city streets, or on the sand of the shining beaches. It is because cobblers, in general, have not gone beyond their lasts, that a cobbler who does go beyond his last seems ridiculous. If all cobblers made a practice of going beyond their lasts, at convenient seasons, they would be better men, brighter talkers, and, probably, not the worse cobblers.

And, certainly, if the men and women of the world would avail themselves of the genial invitations of nature, who is "at home" in so many lovely places through the pleasant season now begun; if they would throw themselves somewhat out of their habitual associations, and see new faces, and think new thoughts, and aim at new objects, they would find life considerably more rich than we fancy it will seem to them at the end of another three months of monotonous excitements and familiar adventures. From which text, we shall preach a longer sermon at another day. Those who need the sermon, to be sure, need it most now, at the beginning of the season; but precisely for that reason, we know that they will not attend to it now. It is only the bitterly repent

ant who understand and appreciate the value of good advice, and few will be saints till they have learned how very dreary a thing it is to be sinners. So our revelers must run their old race-chase the old vanities-weep the old tears, and then come back to us-contrite, because disappointed, and penitent, because they have been so sadly bored-and listen to wisdom, when it is too late to be wise, and approve of exhortations which they can no longer improve!

To the few, already wise, who welcome the summer as the bringer of peace and quiet, and cheerful variety, and healthful stimulus-the few who will find the pleasure they seek, and bring back the sunshine of the sky, and the beauty of a thousand scenes in their hearts and minds, we have no sermons to make. Them we cordially congratulate on the advent of this opening month of the annual villeggiatura. June has come, and in June, you know, the poets tell us

"If ever, come perfect days."

And what gift of God is more divine, to a wise and genial human soul, than the gift of a perfect day?

We habitually undervalue the sky and the air; and few of us think how much of the good and the evil in ourselves must be traced to the atmosphere. In fact, there is not a small number of worthy persons who consider it a lowering of their human dignity, to admit that the weather has any influence on their moods.

We knew such a person once: a schoolmistress of eminent gravity, who used to snub her scholars for looking solemn in November, and for smiling in May. Perhaps the school mistress was right, but we hardly think so. We lean to the belief, that Providence meant that the body of man should have some influence upon his soul; and though it may be very "creditable to be jolly under the circumstances" of a London fog, we think it is very discreditable not to be slightly intoxicated with delight, when every breath we breathe is soft and sweet, and every sight we see is gay and glancing. We pity the man who can preserve the dull equilibrium of his ordinary decorum, when heaven sends him one of our prize-days-such days as come to us in this lovely month of June, and shame the very tropics, and make dim

our dreams of Italy. For though we cannot claim the highest praises for our climate, we do aver, that nowhere on earth can certain days of our year be surpassed; luminous constant days,

"Charmed days,

When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow."

Such days, when they come, are to be received as roses are, and music heard at midnight, welcomed like the sail

"That brings a friend up from the underworld,"

with a joy that is religious in its depth, and child-like in its exuberance.

Such days may well make us happy, even in the city; and, in fact, it is just possible that one may get more health out of a June day, heartily enjoyed on the Battery, or even in Broadway, than the same twenty-four hours would yield, if they were passed under the supervision of polite enemies, and in the skirmishes of social warfare, amid the loveliest scenes of all the land.

In which some consolation may be found by the millions who must remain in New York after "everybody" has departed.

Provided, that is, always, that our municipal authorities do not dash this and all other consolations from our lips, by invit ing pestilence to come, when fashion goes. Are we to have our "days of June" one season of horror and fear, more dreadful to anticipate, more fatal in its devastations, than these terrible "days of June" which Paris shall never forget?

It will not be very easy for our grandchildren (at least, let us hope so) to believe that, in the year of our Lord 1856, the citizens and the government of the first city in America, having been well and frequently advised of the imminent danger of such a plague as had wasted two sister cities, in the year before, and plunged a mighty commonwealth into mourning, took no steps to avert the impending catastrophe, but calmly succumbing to the majesty of dirt and disorder, awaited the stroke of fate with a more than Constantinopolitan composure. Is it not a crying scandal, that a people who profess to govern themselves, should not take such common precautions to protect their city from pestilence, as an imbecile old bachelor would take to save him

self from a catarrh? Perhaps the pestilence will not come, you say. Perhaps not; but is the prosperity of a great communityare the lives of thousands of human beings to have no better protection than a "perhaps?"

We have no desire to propagate a panic; but the shameful indifference which our authorities have shown to the welfare of the public, ought to provoke the mildestmannered mortals into energetic speech. We have allowed our functionaries to spend their time over punch and politics, while our streets went uncleaned of snow, and our business was interrupted, and our pleasures were converted into perils; we have made no stir while every week swelled the calendar of crime, and the monthly returns of "wounded and missing" from among our population exceeded the average annual casualties of a South American war; we have laughed over the details of disgraceful trials, in which our civic authorities were implicated, by turns, as witnesses and as criminals; we have watched, with silent sorrow, the gradual elongation of our tax-bills, till by contrast with the least of them, an undertaker's face, at the funeral of a millionaire, seems short, and fat, and jovial. Is there no limit to our comfortable complacency—to our dangerous good-nature? Are we to shrug our shoulders, and submit to the decimation of our population?

It is long now since a true pestilencé ravaged New York. We have been visited by the cholera in recent time, it is true, and severely visited; but even the cholera, in its wrath, laid not so terrible a scourge upon us as the malignant fever, which this year menaces the Northern cities, has wielded over the seaboard towns of the South. The horrors of the Crimean campaign made all the world shudder-but what are the horrors of a Crimean campaign, to those of a visitation which sweeps away, in a few weeks, one-third of the citizens of a prosperous city, involving in one indiscriminate ruin the rich and the poor, the old and the young, parents and children, the strength of the present generation, and the hope of the generation to come? War brings mourning into many a home-but pestilence blots out the home itself from the earth; the scythe of war cuts down the stalk of the flower-but the poison of pestilence full often reaches the root itself. It cannot be

that we really mean to leave all the avenues of approach to our homes unguarded before the march of an enemy so fearful, That his banners have been seen within a few hundred miles of our city, should be reason enough for arming ourselves, and throwing up defenses against him.

Instead of thus preparing ourselves, however, we are really giving him aid and comfort, and insisting upon the favor of a visit from his devastating hordes.

As one of our contemporaries has well expressed it, "we hold out the promise of his favorite food to the malignant demon. We suffer all manner of foulness and filth to accumulate in our streets, that he may have wherewithal to make merry when he comes to us. We permit whole flocks of tenement houses to stand unswept, uncleansed, teeming with a diseased and neglected population, in the midst of garbage and refuse without measure, as without a name." And yet if the scourge should fall upon us, we shall hear the good people declaiming solemnly upon the "mysterious dispensation of Providence which has laid waste our city." Do you think it a mysterious dispensation that your bed should burn up when you leave a lighted candle beside the curtains?

We are more knowing than our ancestors, perhaps, but, after all, not very much wiser than they-for a man's wisdom is rather to be seen in his manner of using his opportunities and his materials, than in the abundance of opportunities and of materials which he may enjoy. At least, if our forefathers had no very intelligent notions of the origin of their disasters, they acted resolutely upon such notions as they had. It was neither very philosophical, nor very humane in the good people of Germany to imagine that the "black death," which swept Europe in the fourteenth century, was a consequence of the toleration impiously shown to the Jews. That the average number of Hebrews assassinated or kicked to death in the streets of the imperial cities had for years been steadily decreasing, was a fact upon which no true believer could look without dismay and disgust. Every right-minded and religious person of these times, whenever in his walks he met a Jew who bore no marks of a very recent flagellation, whose counte nance was undisfigured, and whose robes were whole, must have anticipated mis

chief. The mischief came at last; whole towns depopulated, provinces laid waste, gay cities turned into vast charnels. Then it was that Boccacio, leaving behind him Florence, and her hundred thousand dead, cheated his spirit out of a world of horror, into a realm of song and satire, among the gardens of Fiesole; then it was that at Paris the pestilence scattered the priesthood far and wide, and only the saintly sisters of charity, the unknown Florence Nightingales, who passed through silence and oblivion into paradise, five hundred years ago, moved as shapes of mercy along the streets choked with the dying and the dead. A short year then hushed the lays of the troubadours in Provence, and turned the meistersingers of Swabia into monks. Death was everywhere triumphant. And what did the Germans, who knew that he came to punish their unchristian meekness? They rose at once, resolved to do away the cause of this great evil. "In Germany," says William de Nangis, "they slew, and burned, and massacred thousands of Jews, without distinction of age or sex." Could we show, in dealing with our commissioners and councilmen, who are the real and imperiling causes of the dangers that menace us, but a little of the energy which our benighted forefathers thus exhibited in extirpating the imaginary source of their calamity, how much more comfortably we should all sleep in our beds!

But we do our government some injustice. We had really forgotten, for the moment, that this spring has given us the promise of a great public park-which is to serve as the lungs of our metropolis. There is not so utter an indifference to our lives and health, then, on the part of our rulers, as we had, for a moment, suffered ourselves to imagine! It is a fine and considerate thing, thus to lay out a noble pleasure-ground for the use and behoof of our grandchildren. To care for the future, is the distinguishing mark of the civilized

but he was a shrewd fellow, and if many as shrewd had smoked the pipe of reflection in the wigwams of the west, Tecumseh might now be wearing the scalp of Colonel Johnson at his royal belt. Fortunately, however, for Colonel Johnson, and the great republic in general, the most of the Indians have always been of the mind of a Dutch colonist, whom Captain Cowper Rose found living at the Cape, on a magnificent farm, quite bare of trees. "Why don't you plant trees?" quoth the captain. "Because I should be dead before they were big enough to shade me !" "But for your children's sake." "If my children want trees, let them plant them." We have been planting, or we mean to plant trees for our children-and it is not, perhaps, quite absurd, to dream of a not distant day, when Manhattan Park shall be as green and beautiful as Hyde Park, or the Regent's; and stately houses shall surround it; and noble equipages, and gallant cavaliers shall roll and prance along its grateful alleys; and well-dressed children shall trundle the hoop of joy about its walks; and comely nurse-maids shall exchange the ejaculations of sympathy and the whispers of confidence beneath its arching trees!

Meanwhile, that vast open space is secured to us as a "reservoir of pure air." For which, let us be thankful. But, while we are thankful for the "reservoir of pure air," are we to put up quietly with the reservoirs of air quite the reverse of pure? Because we have a medicine-chest up stairs, is that any reason why we should acquiesce in a muck-heap under the back windows? We trow not, and we devoutly hope that, in the universal avatar of "spring-cleaning," the streets will not be forgotten, even if the householders have to turn out themselves en masse, and achieve the work which their faithless servants so punctiliously neglect. When invasion is at the doors, the mildest citizen girds on the sword, nor thinks that martial tool disgraceful to his erst pacific hand. Believe us, oh civic reader, that the besom and the mop, wielded in a nation's cause, would never shame their bearers! With such weapons are to be won the victories of peace, more benign, more truly glorious, than the victories of war. So much more benign, so much more truly glorious, that even the dull world is beginning so to see

them. It is a comfortable thing that nobody seems to care one half so much for the "heroes of the Crimea," now the war is ended, as people used to care for "heroes" but a few years ago. Florence Nightingale has made a more illustrious name, even in the estimation of the living age, than all the admirals and generals have won. Is this wholly due to the greater humanity of our times, or to the greater indifference of our times, which is itself the fruit of the vast increase of individual effort and enterprise since the peace of 1815? Certain it is that there never was a war of equal magnitude in its proportions, or equal importance in its consequences, which filled so small a space, comparatively, in the history of its times, as has this war in the East, which has been just brought to an end at Paris, in the midst of songs and suppers, fire-works and babylinen. The energies of Russia alone have been absorbed in the conflict. In England and France, the gigantic struggle has only over-topped, not over-mastered, all other public interests. And now that it is all over, we, in America, have almost ceased to think about it. These fearful fights, that long agony of the siege, these innumerable, indistinguishable graves, filled with the dust that, but three years ago, laughed, and spoke, and walked, and loved, and thought, and wished-a multitude of hale and vigorous men-all, all have passed into the dimness of history. That "fire of hell," which roared for so many months in the ears of the world, has subsided into silence as utterly, its splendors and its terrors have vanished as completely, as the smoke and the sputter of the crackers that our boys exploded on the last Fourth of July. The past is past; its greatest and its least events, once fleeted by, are to the multitude as if they had never been. The warring nations return to their diplomacy and their traffic, as last night's revelers wake again to their daily business with a smart headache, and an indefinite sense of a very long bill to pay.

Not that nothing real remains to human history of all this strange-enacted drama. No! much remains of sorrow and of strength-of weakness and wickedness how much more! Over against the brutalizing of so many men, the fierce revival of hot and terrible instincts in so many hearts, what have we to set? A ballad of Balak

lava for England; for France, a new series of storming battle pictures,by Horace Vernet; more furious horses, more passionate men, more sabres and smoke, dashed off with magical force and speed upon stupendous canvases! And nothing more? We shall seewe shall see. But such speculations would lead us now too far from this our world of New York. And yet, does not our world of New York touch at a thousand points the larger world, whereof France and England, Austria and Russia, Sebastopol siege, and farcical reverences done about imperial cradles, are but episodes and chapters, mere sections and paragraphs? If every man is a microcosm, imaging in his one poor heart, that shall so soon cease to beat, the passions and the woes, the march and mystery of the mighty race, mankind, surely a city like this of ours, where every human family finds a representative, and the stir of life in remotest lands finds a quick echo, real though perhaps all unheard in the hum of the thousands, is an epitome of the earth. Nothing that touches human interest, but helps to mould and move our great metropolis. Yonder slatternly wretch in slops of dabbled blue, who crouches by the Park gates, and shivers in our cold winds over his poor, paltry box of miserable cigars and nauseous quids-yonder flatfaced, yellow-skinned being, the sport of thoughtless boys and heartless men, who is too abject of soul to look up, when the passing stranger drops a trifle at his feet, has a stake, however slight, in the mysterious convulsions that are now shaking the Central Flowery Empire through and through. If you could find the last bulletin of some imperial victory, and read to him the names of all the Chungs and Mungs whose heads were sliced off on the compendious guillotine of Chinese justice, it might well be that among those names that hapless fellow might start to hear that of a brother, a father, or a friend. Call this a wayward fancy, as no doubt it is, (but if it moves you to look with more pity upon these forlorn exiles of the East, we shall not repent your half contemptuous smile); yet this, at least, is no fancy-that every steamer which brings its quota of news from Italy and Germany, from Turkey and Spain, brings a thrill of keenest joy or keenest sorrow to hundreds of hearts here in New York. We dawdle listlessly at our breakfasts over the tale of murders