tion; and we mention this to bespeak the reader's faith in what we shall write hereafter, if he is not acquainted with us already. If he is, he will no more doubt us than the children do at our fireside. We have had so much sorrow, and yet are capable of so much joy, and receive pleasure from so many familiar objects, that we sometimes think we should have had an unfair portion of happiness, if our life had not been one of more than ordinary trial.

The reader will not be troubled in future with personal intimations of this kind; but in commencing a new work of the present nature, and having been persuaded to put our name at the top of it (for which we beg his kindest constructions, as a point conceded by a sense of what was best for others), it will be thought, we trust, not unfitting in us to have alluded to them. We believe we may call ourselves the father of the present penny and three-halfpenny literature, - designations once distressing to " ears polite," but now no longer so, since they are producing so many valuable results, fortunes included. The first number of the new popular review, the "Printing Machine,' - in an article for the kindness and cordiality of which we take this our best opportunity of expressing our gratitude, and can only wish we could turn these sentences into so many grips of the hand to show our sense of it, did us the honor of noticing the "Indicator” as the first successful attempt (in one respect) to revive something like the periodical literature of former days. We followed this with the "Companion," lately republished in connection with the "Indicator;" and a few years ago, in a fit of anxiety at not being able to meet some obli

gations, and fearing we were going to be cut off from life itself without leaving answers to still graver wants, we set up a half-reviewing, half-theatrical periodical, under the name of the "Tatler” (a liberty taken by love), in the hope of being able to realize some sudden as well as lasting profits! So little, with all our zeal for the public welfare, had we found out what was so well discerned by Mr. Knight and others, when they responded to the intellectual wants of the many. However, we pleased some readers, whom it is a kind of prosperity even to rank as such; we conciliated the good-will of others, by showing that an ardent politician might still be a man of no ill-temper, nor without good-will to all; and now, once more setting up a periodical work, entirely without politics, but better calculated, we trust, than our former ones, to meet the wishes of many as well as few, we are, in hearty good earnest, the public's very sincere and cordial friend and servant.

19

ON A PEBBLE.

OOKING about us during a walk to see what subject we could write upon in this our second number, that should be familiar to everybody, and afford as striking a specimen as we could give of the entertainment to be found in the commonest objects, our eyes lighted upon a stone. It was a common pebble, a flint; such as a little boy kicks before him as he goes, by way of making haste with a message, and saving his new shoes.

66 a flint!

"A stone!" cries a reader, - the very symbol of a miser! What can be got out of that?" The question is well put; but a little reflection on the part of our interrogator would soon rescue the poor stone from the comparison. Strike him at any rate, and you will get something out of him; warm his heart, and out come the genial sparks that shall gladden your hearth, and put hot dishes on your table. This is not miser's work. A French poet has described the process, well known to the maid-servant (till lucifers came up), when she stooped, with flashing face, over the tinder-box on a cold morning, and rejoiced to see

the first laugh of the fire. A sexton, in the poem we allude to, is striking a light in a church:

"Boirude, qui voit que le péril approche,

Les arrête, et tirant un fusil de sa poche,
Des veines d'un caillou, qu'il frappe a 1 nême instant,

Il fait jaillir un feu qui pétille en sortant;

Et bientôt au brasier d'une mèche enflammée,
Montre, à l'aide du souffre, une cire allummée."

"The prudent sexton, studious to reveal

BOILEAU.

Dark holes, here takes from out his pouch a steel,
Then strikes upon a flint. In many a spark
Forth leaps the sprightly fire against the dark:
The tinder feels the little lightning hit,

The match provokes it, and a candle's lit."

We shall not stop to pursue this fiery point into all its consequences; to show what a world of beauty or of formidable power is contained in that single property of our friend flint; what fires, what lights, what conflagrations, what myriads of clicks of triggers,awful sounds before battle, when, instead of letting his flint do its proper good-natured work of cooking his supper, and warming his wife and himself over their cottage-fire, the poor fellow is made to kill and be killed by other poor fellows, whose brains are strewed about the place for want of knowing better.

But to return to the natural, quiet condition of our friend, and what he can do for us in a peaceful way, and so as to please meditation. What think you of him as the musician of the brooks? as the unpretending player on those watery pipes and flageolets during the hot noon or the silence of the night? Without the pebble, the brook would want its prettiest murmur;

and then, in reminding you of these murmurs, he reminds you of the poets.

"A noise as of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night

Singeth a quiet tune."

Coleridge.

Yes, the brook singeth; but it would not sing so well, it would not have that tone and ring in its music, without the stone.

"Then 'gan the shepherd gather into one

His straggling goats, and drove them to a ford,
Whose cœrule stream, rumbling in pebble-stone,*
Crept under moss as green as any gourd."

SPENSER'S Gnat.

Spenser's "Gnat," observe: he wrote a whole poem upon a gnat, and a most beautiful one too, founded upon another poem on the same subject written by the great Roman poet Virgil, not because these great poets wanted or were unequal to great subjects, such as all the world think great, but because they thought no care, and no fetching-out of beauty and wonder, ill bestowed upon the smallest marvellous object of God's workmanship. The gnat, in their poems, is the creature that he really is, full of elegance and vivacity, airy, trumpeted, and plumed, and dancing in the sunbeams, - not the contempt of some thoughtless understanding, which sees in it nothing but an insect coming

*"Rumbling in pebble-stone" is a pretty enlargement of Virgil's susurrantis ("whispering "). Green as any gourd is also an improvement as well as an addition. The expression is as fresh as the color.