"And the great camel-mountains that have lain

On the green deserts since the world was made."

Camel-mountains lying down on green deserts! A fine touch of humor.

"The gods are dear! (Schiller) But with them did not die

The spell of beauty, nor the light and shade,
And the deep yearnings of Divinity-"

As excellent a piece of nonsense as Pope's "Lines by a person of Quality." The divinities are dead, but the yearnings of divinity survive; they leave behind them the spell of beauty, light and shade, in fact, a complete stock in trade, for a poet.

"Ourselves are mean or noble; we are fate: We mould our destinies like plastic clay Shaping a hero or a recreant

The rest is "only leather or prunella." "-you say, We are poor laggards on the trail of rhyme, Born in the sundown of the dregs of time." Or,

"We are poor laggards on the trail of time, Born in the sundown of the dregs of rhyme." Either way, how trenchant the satire! "Know ye, faint-hearted, ye disconsolate, That who sings well can never sing too late."

No one will pretend to dispute the value of this axiom.

"Now I! (ego) the humblest of the singing train

ms

That ever felt the longing and the pain, And all the glorious ecstasy of songI, (ego) in the sweetest of New England TOWNS. Videlicet, Boston! The bathos of these few lines wonderfully neat and wellturned.

"Touched with the freshness of this sunny June ;

Filled with the scents and beauty of the downs;"

"All in the Downs."-GAY.

"Wild with the breezy uplands (Beacon street and the State House), and the strong, Delicious voices of the wind in tune, (?) Have felt a passion and a power to say Something above the nothing I have said; And cre the summer shall be cold and deadEre the cool leaves be flushed with hectic red,

I shall have given you my passion lay (exit)." To this poet, One and Two sneeringly respond, because they know he can't do .it.

Whoever wrote that little eclogue in the Home Journal, has a most delicate appre

ciation of what is called "transcendental poetry." The satire is benevolent as it is just. There is scarcely a line of that mock-heroic dialogue, in front of Ticknor & Fields's store, that is not barbed with wit.

With some regret, we are compelled to publish the following verses, written in ten minutes, under peculiar circumstances, by a gentleman in affliction; but, as they afford a lively contrast to the above, the reader will, no doubt, appreciate the differ

ence :

"TO THE FIXED STARS.

"Ye stars that are the jewelry of heaven!
If, in your purple whiteness, you can lean
From your ethereal thrones, and cast your
glare

Into this vegetative brain, whose sap
Rises and falls with the light tide of dreams,
Do it! nor leave the task to me. Dispel
These turgid aspirations -windy hopes-
These porcellaneous effigies of life-
These statuettes of fancy-marionettes-
These Punch-and-Judy woodenanities-
And let me soar to thy empiric skies,
Far from the reach of common, common

Like bright diaphanous harp-strings; I you know!

But not for these, but not for these I moan-
Poor senseless luminaries! Not for these,
But for Conglubious Pithos! that's my aim!
That inarticulate pulsate of the heart,
The globulated motor of the brain,
That lifts the poet high above his peers,
Into eternal Gos! Above the peaks
Of purple Himalayas, when the clouds
Bedeck the skies with Indian millinery-
That is my aim. Can I descend to nature,
Pathos, or concrete forms of verse, or mount
The hackney Pegasus? Not I-my-steed
I ride alone! And you, bijoutrious stars,
That mid the fillagree o' th' heavens shine,
Believe me, I shall sit within your sphere,
Crown my curled hair with Zodiac's diadem,
And wear Arcturus as a bosom-pin !

And would you know who thus addresses you,
Prismatic stars? Listen, orchestral bands-
Suspend your viols, shawms, and stellar
pipes-

Your astronomic ophicleides and flutes-
Till I repeat my nomen. I am he
Called Ancient Pistol!' and the world I
make

Mine oyster!-you its pearled shells!"

EXHIBITION.-Formerly the annual exhibitions have been limited to new pictures, or, rather, to original pictures, never before shown in any public gallery; but we learn it is the intention of the Academy, this year, to indulge the lovers of art with

THE ACADEMY OF DESIGN-SPRING

a retrospective view of what has been done in past years, and allow the artists to make such selections from their works as they please, whether these be new or old, whether before shown or not, so long as they be originals, and not copies. We may, therefore, expect a rich show of arttreasures, and be able to trace the progress of the pencil and the chisel for nearly half a century. Of course, many of the pictures will be much improved by the mellow touch of age—a great advantage— and many familiar chef d'œuvres of past years will recall the earlier days of the Academy. One suggestion we will venture to make, which is: each artist

should be entitled to a certain space, within the limits of which his pictures shall be hung together; so that, instead of a heterogeneous collection, there will be a panel of Durand's, a panel of Kensett's, a panel of Elliott's, a panel of Hicks's, a panel of Huntington's, a panel of Gray's, and so on an arrangement which will materially add, reflectively, to the merits of the pictures themselves, and, at the same time, afford additional gratification to the public.

-A gentleman, a linguist by profession, is about publishing, at his own expense, a volume of modern poetry in the English tongue, for the purpose of familiarizing foreigners with the true pronunciation. The plan of the book is very simple; the poems are to be written phonographically, in order to convey the actual sound of the words, so that a Frenchman, Italian, or German, although ignorant of our language, could at once readily read any of the poems with the pure English accent. We have been allowed to make a few selections, which will at once give an idea of the work:

FRENCH PHONOGRAPHIC THANATOPSIS. "Tou him hou inn thi loof aff nechir houltz Kammuneyun huith hir vizibl farms, shi spikz

E veryus lainkuiouitch; farr hiss geyir ours
Shi hez e voiz aff gladniz, ann e smaile
Ann elikhuinz aff biuti, ann shi glaidz
Iuntu hiz darkhir muizingz huith e maild
Ann hiling simpithi thet stilz ehuey
Ther charpnez err hi iss ebuir.—"

FRENCH PHONOGRAPHIC GENERAL MORRIS.

"Houdmin speir thet tri

Tetch nat e singl bau
Inn youth itt cheltird mi
Anu aill protekt itt nau.

T'hauz mai far fathurs haind That plaict itt nir hiss cat Thein houdmin lett itt stend Thai aix chal harm itt natt."

LOW DUTCH PHONOGRAPHIC SHAKESPEARE.

"Oo! then Y si quin Mæb hæth bin with joe.
Sjie is thi færis midwif an sjio kums
In sjæp noo biggir than an agit-stoon
Oon the far fingir af an ool dirmun,
Dran with æ tim af littl atumis
Ofer mon's noosis as thæ ly æslip."

The specimens in Italian, German, Russian, and Modern Greek, are equally interesting. We commend the book to the attention of all foreigners who are desirous of speedily acquiring a knowledge of English poetry.

-LENGTH OF THE DAY OR NIGHT.-TO ascertain the length of the day and night, any time of the year, double the time of the sun's rising, which gives the length of the night, and double the time of its setting, which gives the length of the day. This is a simple method which but few people know. To ascertain the time it will take to travel from the city of New York to any given point on the Erie railroad, multiply the number of miles to be run by the price of the ticket; the quotient will be average mean time from place to place.

The long-expected revolution has burst forth! Eugenie, empress of France, appeared at a levee without a hoop, and in twenty-four hours Paris was hoopless! The world of fashion is reduced to onequarter of its dimensions-the giddy whirl and sweep of crinoline no more turns the heads of sober-minded men; the ball-room will no longer be the outskirts of bankruptcy; ladies will cease to declare they wear "them," because they are conducive to health; we are upon the very brink of tight times, and this reform will reduce domestic expenses below crisis point.

PHILOLOGICAL REFORM.-The reading public of the metropolis has been immensely amused by a pitched battle, between two bookworms, in the pages of the Evening Post. The great question upon which they are encountered, yard-arm to yard-arm, is, whether the word "couple" is equivalent to the word "two." " Anglicus" contends that common usage sanctions the familiar idiom. "W" stands out against common usage. "Anglicus" quotes authorities-Shakespeare, Dryden,

Addison-the "long thirty-twos” of England. "W" disputes their range and calibre. "Anglicus" then sallies out, sword-inhand, and, after a brilliant sortie, in open field, spikes a couple of W's guns, whereupon W retaliates by pursuing a masterly inactivity. This controversy brings to mind one of the most remarkable passages in modern philosophy, namely, the brilliant analysis, by Victor Cousin, of the inexplicable fact, that two and two make four. Thus the great psychologist :

"All our primitive judgments are personal and determinate, and yet under the depths of these personal and determinate judgments there are already relations, truths, principles, which are not personal and determinate, although they do determine and individualize themselves in the determinations and individuality of their terms. Such is the first form of the truths of geometry and arithmetic. Take, for example, two objects, and two more objects. Here all is determinate; the quantities to be added are concrete, not discrete. You judge that these two, and these two objects, make four objects. Now, what is to be noted in this judg. ment? Here again, as before, everything is contingent and variable except the relation. You can vary the objects, you can put pebbles in the place of these books, or hats in place of the pebbles, and the relation will remain unchanged and invariable. Still further; why do you judge that these two determinate objects, added to these two other determinate objects, make four determinate objects? Reflect. It is in virtue of this truth-namely, that two and two make four. Now, this truth of relation is altogether independent of the nature of the two concrete terms, whatever they may be. It is an abstract truth, involved and hidden in the concrete, which leads you to pronounce concerning the concrete, that two concrete objects, added to two concrete objects, make four concrete objects. The abstract is given in the concrete; the invariable and the necessary in the varia ble and contingent; the reason in sensation and consciousness."

This, of course, settles the question.

Tycho writes such a delicate, fine, feminine hand, that we must answer as neatly as may be.

A message sent at twelve o'clock noon, from New York, is in Boston, say, in round numbers, eight minutes after twelve; if sent to Washington at the same hour, it is there eight minutes before twelve o'clock. If the message is directed still further east, it arrives at each stage of the journey at a later hour in the day, until it touches the antipodal point, where the time is identical with our own, with the difference of being midnight, instead of mid-day time. If we send it westwardly, from Washington to Cincinnati, from Cincinnati to St. Louis, from St. Louis to San Francisco, from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands, from the Sandwich Islands to Kongtcheou, we find ourselves, at each progressive step, earlier and earlier in the morning, as we advance westward. In the one case the electric current is traveling over a path that has been already traversed by the sun; in the other it passes over a track yet to be traversed by that luminary. Suppose we could send an electric spark directly through the bulk of the earth to the Kongtcheouese, and say, "Come now, let us start fair, my crockery friends; this is Monday noon up here, make it Monday midnight with you;" would they not answer, "Yes, but we shall be in Tuesday in a minute, send us round our sun if you please, and we will return

it to you next day?" It is, therefore, plain enough, that, if we send our message, from point to point, westwardly, it reaches successively earlier hours on the morning of Monday until it touches Kongtcheou at Sunday midnight; if we send it eastwardly, it touches successively later hours of the same Monday, until it reaches Kongtcheou on the very brink of Tuesday morning. This is as plain as we can make the matter to Tycho.

MR. KALEIDOSCOPE:-On page 328 of the March number of Put's Mag. you say, speaking of Thackeray's nose-" precisely the lenght

of the Father of this Country's.'' Should it not be "Father's of this country," or does not your pointing of the passage imply that said nose belonged to the country," and not

to the "father" of it? Yours,

SNUB.

Certainly, it belongs to the country. Snub is disposed to be hypercritical, and, evidently, is of the short party: besides that, he does not spell according to the established forms. It is usual, in the word "length," for the "t" to precede the "h," and we would advise him to overhaul bis primer again, before he ventures to question our accuracy.

THE WORLD

THE spring has come upon us, we were about to say, and warns us that the season is at hand for reviewing the winter's life of our great city world; but that which we were about to say we shall forbear, for who can assure us that the spring has come, indeed?

Spring should have come, we know; for the voice of April is in the air, and the roar of the lion, March, should be dying away in the distance. But, alas! the times have changed since the days when bland old Chaucer could sing with such jocund confidence that

"April, with his shoueres sote

The drought of March hath perced to the

rote."

And no man, save the privileged and prophetic E. M., will dare to promise himself or others that the lion is absolutely gone off, and the lamb quietly lying down at our sides. For we all remember the tricks that ill-tempered February played us-how, when the buds had begun to swell, and the spring-fashions to peep forth, and the blue of Italy was deepening in the skies, and the sidewalks were assuming a Philadelphian propriety, and the country merchants, reckless of the garroter who walketh by night, as of the confidence-man who deceiveth by day, were crowding into the down-town hotels, and the dreamy dwellers in the upper streets were hearing, in their hearts, the music of the Newport bands and the murmurs of the summer ocean-how, even in that moment of melt

ing transition from the resignation which follows the end of one season to the anticipation which heralds the opening of another, a chill blast from the pole smote upon our city, and drove the snow into all our houses, and into all our hearts.

Cheated by February, can we trust ourselves to the smiles of April?

Let us not over-eagerly throw ourselves into the arms of this bewitching princess, who may, after all, beguile us only to our grief, and treat us as that fearful princess in the donjon of the old castle of Baden used to treat her victims-to a death of spikes and swords in an embrace of smooth and shining satin.

No! the winter is not over yet-the winter "season," at least, in the World of New York, is by no means ended. There are still balls to be given like unto the balls of December or of February-still dinners to be eaten as dinners were eaten two months ago-still parties to be made up for the theatres, and still concerts to be attended as when the snow turned every pleasuretrip into an Arctic expedition.

Of these things, therefore, let us still discourse awhile; and this the more particularly, and with the more earnestness, that the dusky interval of Lent is now growing gray with the first light of coming Easter.

Not all the world of America keeps Lent, we know, nor even all the world of New York; and yet, the influence of the season cannot be quite ignored by anybody, be his faith what it may be, or his temper, who

lives in a free Christian land. For the solemnities of Lent commemorate events which are sacred in the eyes of all Christendom, and the idea involved in these solemnities is born of the deepest consciousness of all men.

No Christian man can think, without emotion, of the weeks and days which preceded the sacrifice of Calvary and the mystery of the Resurrection; and no man can review his own life without perceiving his own personal and poignant need of an inward Lent. For forty days the bells of England and of Rome may ring out their summons to prayer at morning and at evening, unheeded of our busy world; and yet, whenever any man of us all pauses, in the midst of this selected season, from his passions and his purposes, the sound of these patient, persevering chimes must find some faint echo in his heart. Faint as that echo may be, and soon as it may vanish, it will not be wholly forgotten; for no true feeling, however evanescent may be the form it takes, ever wholly perishes within us. The film of gossamer, floating by, has dropped its seed and fulfilled its mission. Let the shadow of the ancient church, then, rest upon us a little, good reader, while we talk together now of our world and its worldly ways and works.

People do not give balls in Lent-they only plan them then, and while away the interval with minor amusements. They array themselves, as it were, in a kind of sixteenth-mourning-in such mourning as princes wear for very remotely allied royal cousins, and signify, by a deeper or lighter shade of sedateness, their sense of the fact that life, after all, has some serious meaning, and that the forty days of Lent are kept in token of this truth.

It is very easy to caricature such observance of such a season, and to make sardonically merry over a piety which displays itself only in such fantastic curtailments or variations of pleasure. The frankly mundane mind having perceived no sackcloth upon the person and no ashes upon the glossy hair of Mrs. Smith, at the opera on the first Wednesday in March, is naturally a little surprised to learn that Mrs. Smith has postponed her grand ball till the middle of April, because she has been under the necessity of clothing herself in sackcloth and of sprinkling ashes upon her tresses, ever since the last

Wednesday in February. Mrs. Brown, recoiling in holy horror from the thought of a polka at the inauguration ball, rejoices extremely at the prospect of witnessing Miss Heron's début in a new play a fortnight afterwards, and would, nevertheless, be extremely indignant at the supposition that she was not equally sincere in her horror and in her joy.

Grant that Mrs. Smith's sackcloth and ashes and Mrs. Brown's holy horror are not very imposing manifestations of reverential grief and awe (as they certainly are not), is it not, on the whole, better that even these feeble signs of spiritual life should flicker over the surface of such an existence as the Smiths and Browns have made for themselves than that they should be given over wholly to darkness, and a dreary dance of shadows?

Let us rather be grateful for these signs, as indications that the Smiths and Browns are not wholly indisposed to admit that there may be reality in this world worth looking after, and believing in, and so try to show them how they may make not only their Lent but the rest of their times and seasons more real. For the most serious trouble which the philosopher experiences, when he looks abroad over the face of this social world of ours, springs from the almost universal fluctuation, unsteadiness, and unsubstantiality of all that he beholds. He sees that the amusements, which are modified in this absurd way by the coming of Lent, are just as absurd and as hollow as the spirit, which prompts and determines their modification, can be.

What, for instance, is that grand ball which Mrs. Smith has postponed till the middle of April?

Is it a festivity, or just a frivolity-an entertainment, or an inevitable and fatiguing exhibition? Will Mrs. Smith be glad to give it, or glad, when it has been given, that it is fairly over and done with? Will Mrs. Smith's guests be glad to go to it, or to have gone to it?

It will not be an entertainment, we presume for we have every reason to suppose that it will precisely resemble six and twenty other balls which were given before Lent began, to most of which Mrs. Smith went-from most of which she came away thoroughly tired to death; and yet upon all of which she will studiously model her own ball when she gives it. Mrs. Smith