taste for books; to cultivate this, I immured myself, not in the beautiful retreats of woods and fields, where they who are sick of life are wont to retire, but in the very heart of a populous city. From what cause, I know not, but so it was, I hated not only my own family, but the world. I hated men, and in the true spirit of misanthrophy I lived where I could see their sufferings and misery. It would have been little consolation to me to know that yonder clouded atmosphere, which I might have beheld from some distant elevation, was hanging over the usual scenes of crime and guilt which are ever to be found in the marts of man---No! I watched them all, I constantly kept my eyes on them, as the beast of prey on his victim. There was no pity mingled with my hate.

Here too my restless spirit at length grew tired. As I read and became more conversant with my own mind, some few sparks of my once generous nature again revived. The long dried-up spring again sent forth a few trickling drops. I longed for something on which to fix what little affection I now discovered myself possessed of. I could not receive the balm which memory gives when it goes back to early years,---and yet I felt I must find something to which I might cling. I felt that the mind of man could never for any length of time stand by itself. It is at best a weak and fragile plant, that can lend its little strength to the support of something from which it receives assistance in return.

In one of my early summers, I formed an acquaintance with a beautiful girl, while on a visit in the country. I became more intimate with her than I ever did with any human being; she was an orphan and was then undergoing many of those hardships and cruelties incident to that unhappy state. I made her acquainted, young as I then was, with my own ill-fated lot, and she, in return, unlocked her own heart to me. She unfolded all her misery and her gloomy anticipations. I was then but sixteen, and she was a few years younger than myself; but we were just at that period of life when one of the deepest feelings of the human breast is strongest for if sympathy be stronger at one time of life than another, it certainly is in youth, when we are less locked up in self, before we have been dragged through a world, which, instead of making our sensibility to the sufferings of others more acute, turns it all inward upon our own. It was this sacred feeling which linked us together then, and which had continued to connect us through all the misery of which we were both large partakers. To this lovely creature I resolved to return, and in a few months I did so. It was sometime since I had seen her; I found that time and misfortune had worked their usual changes. She was, however, still beautiful-beautiful to me at least -for I did not want to look upon the blooming cheek, to feast my eyes on beauty which was the mere result of youth and health, and

which with these would fade. I found what I expected to find; I loved what I had resolved to love; a kind of melancholy loveliness which was more congenial to my own nature. On her beautifully formed features was displayed that sadness and sorrow which to my eye made up for all that the bloom of womanhood could bestow. I soon succeeded in rekindling that affection for me which had never entirely died away. She was still in trouble and distress, and while her heart was throbbing with the emotion which the recital of her own affliction had excited, I told her of the waste in my own barren bosom. I told her again of my former misfortunes, of my future hopes. I laid bare the altar of my own heart, and shewed her that no flame could be kindled there, but that which burned for her. She loved me with all the intensity of woman's love. She yielded to my entreaties and fled with me from her unnatural and cruel protec

I completed her imperfect education, and she was all to me that I could desire. Even now, while I am trembling under the effects of infirmity and age, recollection teems with the many happy hours I have spent with the only being that ever loved me. This old breast throbs and these dried veins swell as I imagine her in my embrace, as I think of the sweet kiss I have imprinted upon her lips. She tried to awaken within me the feelings of a man. She strove to make me embrace the religion of which she was herself a lovely ornament. She urged me to return to my family, but she only bound me more closely to herself. I disregarded her entreaties, and became more zealous in my devotion to herself. Never, never, in this or another world can I forget the bliss I then enjoyed. It was communion of mind with mind, of heart with heart.

I remember in the full tide of all my happiness a circumstance which came like a check upon my soul;—it well nigh made me what I should have always been, a feeling, natural man. I was one day riding with her in one of the streets of the city, a few miles from which we resided. We were passing the proud mansion of my unnatural mother. There was a collection of carriages and persons about the entrance, and as I rode towards them, I saw what could leave no doubt of the occasion-a hearse. It was my mother's funeral! The first feeling that arose, would have prompted me to avoid it; but my old hate drove me onward, and as I rode by the door, the coffin was brought down the steps. I looked towards it. There was a glass lid, and I distinctly saw the features. Oh! the agony of that moment! I was well nigh mastered. I could have gone, and wept upon it. In spite of all that had passed, I knew I could make all right with my brothers, but the next moment somewhat restored me to myself, and I drove furiously onward. For some days I was sensibly affected by what I had seen. In addition to this, my wife took advantage of the favorable opportunity, and

used all those powers of persuasion which woman so well knows how to exercise; but my old feeling of bitterness and contempt for my relations returned, and that affection which she would have divided with them, was the more concentrated upon her.

A few years rolled away and my wife died. The only cord which bound me to the world about me, was snapt. I mourned over her corpse as if it had been that of the only human being in the world, and when at last it was placed in the new made grave in the garden where I had walked with her and lost myself in her love, even then I went and knelt over it. For many, many years afterward I passed the nights of summer there-fondly imagining while I was near her ashes, that I was not far from that heart I had idolized-from that lovely being who had been my world. The only pleasure I now had to enjoy, was in recollection of her; this at least could not be taken from me, and with this I trusted I could bear the years that still remained.

One by one, my brothers went to their long home, and as I had been a stranger to that grief which one feels when lamenting for the mother that bore him, so was I to all brotherly affection. I heard of their deaths, but this was all; I neither mourned for the departed nor sympathized with those who were left; I was alike insensible to the dead and the living.

It is now many years since I could claim kindred with any one. I am far beyond the ordinary life of man, and it is now that I feel my misery. I see through the whole of my long career no single monument to comfort and support me. I fly to religion; I ask for that grace which in my youth was my fondest hope, but the heart that has been callous to all its natural emotions, can with difficulty bring down its pride before the Deity itself. How can I expect to replant what I rooted up and destroyed seventy years ago? I find not even the seeds of kindly affection. How then can I expect my breast to be warmed with devotion? If there be any unnatural thing more awful than another to the contemplation, it is an old man on the very verge of the grave, who has lived entirely in vain—to whom the noble ends of being have been an empty sound-around whom the shades of evening are closing, and yet no star visible! But when —as in my miserable case-when through life he has been haunted by something which told him that he was not pursuing his best endwhen in old age, extreme old age, he feels this phantom still behind him, and has travelled far enough in the mazes of wisdom, to know that he who would be happy hereafter must set his affections on things above-when such a being begins to penetrate the veil which conceals this life from the future, how full and overflowing must his cup of bitterness be!

THE MOONBEAM.

WHEN twilight has faded from ocean's wave,
Like fun'ral flowers from a soldier's grave,
And the winds of eve in the darkling wood,
Breathe out their wild music to Solitude;
Adown from thy palace of cloud and star,
That builds in revolving glory afar,
Thou'rt come on thy pinions of dewy light,
Oh beautiful spirit of quiet night!

Thou'rt fall'n; and pure as the silver blossom,
That gleams on the young bride's swelling bosom,
And bright as the jewel of Ethiop's queen,

Thy ray on the wild, dark billow is seen;
It fires the deep wave, and the sleeping bark,
With her snowy wing hails the illumin'd mark;
And down through the corals of ocean's grove,
The gold fish out in thy radiance rove.

But thou art the spell to a nobler birth,
In the spirit that moves on the face of earth;
For the poet that ponders on silent night,
Is fired with the rays of thy hallow'd light,
And wrapt in the shadows of fancy's dream,
Oh thou art the life of his pregnant theme!
Oh thou art the eye-beam from heav'n stealing,
That melts the pure seal of his sacred feeling.

H. P.

THE EDITOR'S TABLE.

We know nothing of a more restless tendency than one of these fine, old fashioned, June days-one that begins with a morning damp with a fresh South wind, and gradually clears away in a thin white mist, till the sun shines through at last, genial and luxurious, but not sultry, and every thing looks clear and bright in the transparent atmosphere. We know nothing which so seduces the very eye and spirit of a man, and stirs in him that gipsey longing, which, spite of disgrace and punishment, made him a truant in his boyhood. There is an expansive rarity in the air of such a day-a something that lifts up the lungs and plays in the nostril with a delicious sensation of freshness and elasticity. The close room grows sadly dull under it. The half open blind with its tempting glimpse of the sky, and branch of idle leaves flickering in the sun, has a strange witchery. The poor pursuits of this drossy world grow passing insignificant; and the scrawled and blotted manuscripts of an Editor's table-pleasant anodyne as they are when the wind is in the East-are, at these seasons, but the "diary of an Ennuyeè”—the notch'd calendar of confinement and unrest. The commendatory sentence stands half completed; the fate of the author under review, with his two volumes, is altogether of less importance than five minutes of the life of that tame pigeon that sits on the eaves washing his white breast in the spout; and the public good will, and the cause of Literature, and our own precarious livelihood, all fade into dim shadow and leave us listening dreamily to the creeping of the sweet South upon our vine, or the far-off rattle of the Hourly with its freight of happy bowlers and gentlemen of suburban idleness. What is it to us, when the sun is shining, and the winds bland and balmy, and the moist roads with their fresh smell of earth tempting us away to the hills-what is it, then, to us, whether a poor