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tried for high treason? Certainly not. Should they be tried as assassins, and if found guilty of the attempt, be sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered? Certainly not. Should they be simply hung? Certainly not. There would be another morbid candidate for all the same honours in less than a fortnight.

How, then, put a stop to this stupid and purposeless mania? By destroying all the fine" effect,"-all the popularity,-and by degrading "the hero" in the public eye, and in his own estimation, to the same degree which his low nature most essentially merits. No excitement of Cabinet ministers,-no sudden suspension of business in both Houses of Parliament,-no galloping about from parks to palaces. Let the chief officer of police and a magistrate deal with the offender in the most summary manner. If found guilty of insulting Her Majesty, let his sentence be that of a whipping at the cart's tail, the greatest care being taken not to hurt his back, so as to make him an object of pity. Let him be walked a good distance, under the infliction of the softest "cat"- -a lash without a single knot-and after this set him in the stocks for the rest of the day. Never again let "his name and deeds" be mentioned, but transport him in the most quiet and contemptuous

manner.

There would be no more heroic candidates for honours such as these; no more craving of insignificant morbid natures to produce an "effect" like this. The mania for being an extraordinary young man, who intended to shoot the Queen, would instantly be stopped.*

*This suggestion was in print before the late Act for the better Preservation of Her Majesty's Person was mooted; but as that, though adopting much that is here suggested, does not command the contemptuous treatment that is so rightly advocated, the article has not been altered.-ED.

SONNET.

UPON an ocean, more capricious far

Than that vast sea that heaves beneath the star,

Is my soul launched, a small lone bark
Tossed by the boisterous wave and sullen gale:
A speck upon the waters, a sea mark

O'er which the heavens frown and winds prevail.
How like a swimmer, spent with his vain toil,
Treads o'er the heaving waste my weary soul;
Successively the endless waves around me coil,
And o'er my life's sad way their billows roll.
The Star that guides me, bright and heavenly shines,
But sometimes dimmed or hidden are her beams,
And then the lost and wandering soul resigns
To the all fathomless abyss life's dreams.

BIOGRAPHICAL RECREATIONS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

THE

SORROW OF A GOOD DAUGHTER-NEW-YEAR'S DAY-THE DERBYSHIRE
VASE-THE OBJECTS OF MARRIAGE-MISTRUST.

THE long catacomb-road of her future could not, I think, appear to Adeline more misty or more mountainous than Scotland, or darker than the countenance with which Lismore's sister met her about a league from Glasgow. Jane Gladuse had been early left a widow, with no other token of her bondage than the wedding-ring; as we put on the heron caught in falconry, a ring bearing the name of the prince and the date of the capture, and then let it fly. She was a young lady of nine and forty, and belonged to the class of widows who (like green tea) may be five times infused—that is, married-without especial loss of aromatic power. At this very time there was, seated in London, a second infuser, or subscriber to her second edition, who promised soon to exchange his Winter amusements for the Spring-cures of Glasgow. It was not the arrival of her brother-whom she loved as dearly as she did her second subscriber-that displeased her; but his mourning train, which was more hateful to her than Robespierre's tail, since it was probable that his marriage would quash hers. As long as he remained unmarried, the half of his income passed to her-as it were a celibacytax. Now hitherto, as we well know, not only had every maiden given him unconscious warning against matrimony, but even Jane herself, who, as her brother had been witness, lived with her lord on by no means the same terms as Xantippe with Socrates-for the Greek had patience, and his wife children. The contemplation of her wedded life, the romantic hopes he entertained of his own, and his opinion of the possible agreement between husband and wife, are the best interpreters of a very sarcastic ornament of his hall. We know, namely, that if in one niche 'of a hall there stand a stove-statue, there must also, in another niche, stand another statue in outward appearance the same, but not used for the same purpose, or the castle would be burned down (as, for instance, was that of Prince Esterhazy). Now, in the niche which was used as a fire-place, Lismore placed a Cupid-in the other a Hymen.

Adeline opened an indulgent, friendly heart to the woman whose brother had given her so much besides his affection. She was, indeed, the lovely antipode of most maidens, who think they can never be too distant with their own sex, or too agreeable to the other, thus dispensing both their reserve and their graciousness where each is least appropriate. The young lady, Jane Gladuse, grieves me to the heart; for, as Lismore and Adeline were driving up to the door, she could not helpdo what she would-loving her future sister. "How pale she is the good foreigner-so sad and tearful I never saw any one "-and, as she thus thought, the total eclipse of her countenance became partial only. For she was as compassionate as she was envious and deceitful,

and the most upright tears and the falsest words flowed from her with equal readiness. She could not sympathize with her fellow creatures unless they were utterly wretched, and was their best friend as long as they were in trouble; but no sooner were they out of it, than she began to envy and thwart them. Unlike the veteran courtier, she never could bestow her friendship on the fortunate.

A troop of female domestics had preceded Adeline across the Channel, taken possession of the eighth floor of Lismore's house,-in Scotland, the houses have often, in Edinburgh for example, twelve stories, and fitted it up for her. This lofty region Lismore allotted to his beloved; for the lovely panorama round Glasgow, and the river Clyde paid homage to it, as to a throne, and he thought the wide perspective might divert her sorrow. But, in foreign lands, an extensive prospect has often a contrary effect. When, for the first time, she was alone in her apartments, she wept bitterly, and in the very room long since destined for her mother; but, at the same time, asked her heart the accusing question, how she could ever sufficiently thank the noble-minded Lismore for the odoriferous flower-beds with which he was planting the whole course of her existence?

Would that I could expel from Adeline's bosom the Winter, (since Nature needs the strengthening Spring-cure,) as entirely as it is wanting in warm countries. As the maladies of Spring originate in Winter, so did her Winter surround her with a malaria-laden mist, and every breath she drew contributed to the Spring-fever of her heart. Well might she mourn! for the approaching Spring was that in which Lismore had promised her mother that he would celebrate the wedding feast of Nature with his own, and interweave his honeymoon with the honeymoon of the season.

After the first day, during the voyage and journey, Adeline had been less abstracted-calmer-more attentive to him; so that he might reckon the fair stream of his hours, not, like the ship's crew, by sand and drinking glasses, but by the soft glances which a grateful eye, whenever it was tearless, bestowed upon him. In Glasgow, the socalled Scottish Paradise, he expected to find his own Paradise in full bloom; but here his little heaven closed again. Adeline's behaviour was characteristic of her whole sex in travelling; for it is then that women most feel the need of manly support. But in the better apartments, in which were so sadly imaged the fair apartments of her early youth, and the last wretched ones of her mother, the brief calm of her mind was over. Grief seized her swelling heart, and pressed from her eyes the tears which had not flowed during the voyage. Lismore's sister, who was the pier-glass of her fellow beings, and was never either the first or the last to weep with those that weep, melted the soft one still more; for the least sand-grain pressure of a thought, of a resemblance, made her full eyes overflow. Could she look into the saucer of her teacup, with its enamelled rose and two rosebuds, without thinking of her mother, who had always worn and cherished real roses, and on whose dying bosom she had placed a silken rose, the real being then out of bloom?-Could she lay her hand on her heart without pressing it, as on a thousand thorns, on the soft locks which had fallen, not from her own head, but from that of her buried mother ?—And ah,

did not a hundred other chances frown on Lismore's hopes of drawing her heart, now deep in the burial vault, out into the clear sunshine of life? Let me give but one instance.

On the forenoon of New-year's day she entered a church with Lismore's sister. There was no congregation; but beneath the floor they heard singing, indistinct and mournful, as though the mouldering dead were chanting their subterranean dirge. What a source of painful associations to Adeline, on this the first New-year's morning of her orphanage !-The circumstance is thus accounted for. The Scotch churches have two, often three stories. In the early churches, the same preacher delivers, successively, two sermons, (often on the same text,) each, however, on a different floor, and accompanied by different singing. Thus Adeline had heard, in the second, the subterranean sounds of the first story. Fate, as though determined to overshade the first day of the year with many a dense Scotch cloud, showed them, as they left the church, ten men, lying on the snow-covered mounds, in convulsions, and uttering loud cries. Ten ghosts had seized and frozen Adeline's heart ere her companion could say that they were merely men who had been carried out of church in a trance, and who, in a short time, would depart of their own accord, without carrying with them, either in their minds or their persons, a trace of what had occurred.

The good Lismore, into whose heart every pang which pierced hers penetrated, could not guess from how many he might easily have saved her. However she might, in the evening, have retired to her chamber with that brightness of sorrowing eyes which so moves me, yet in the morning she appeared with them dull and heated; and this, merely on account of a-hatter and a pin merchant. They both lived over the way the former on the second, the latter on the third story of the same house. As is the custom in many Scotch towns, the goods in which they respectively dealt were not hung out, but painted on the usual yellow ground of the wall. Above, in the back-groundthat is, on the third story-were seen picture-heads;* and below, in the middle-ground, on the second, the hats, as it were, which had fallen from them. Ah, blame not an orphan sojourning in a strange land and mourning between the shadows of two monuments, if her eye-which sleep can close, but not dry-find as sad and as deadly resemblances between the bare and the beheaded head, as between the rising of the sun and the ascension of her mother, which that rising hastened !-Blame her not, I say-and you cannot blame her, when you hear that every dream showed her her mother, wearing, next the crucifix on her bosom, a fresh rose laden with dew, and saying to her-" Adeline, what keeps thy father at Paris so long? Let us go and seek him."

Ah, bereaved one! When at night thou comest to thy bed, that temple of the prophetic oracle, forget not that amid the death-dance of our hours upon the earth-that dissecting-hall of time, which, with

* In England, a head suspended outside i the sign of a pin-shop.

its hair-saw, splits our short fifty years into seconds, and all firm forms into crayon images-forget not that dreams fix the crayonportrait of our beloved, and, as the echoes of Time, give back to us every buried voice which, in better days, harmonized with our own, and which is now either too high above, or too far beneath us!—Ah, without dreams, which place us amid a universe of mosaic work full of tulips and jewels, and surround the prostrate living with the prostrate dead-ah, without dreams it would be too long ere we again saw our brothers, our parents, our friends; every year, death would rob us of too much, did not dreams hang sleep, the antechamber of the tomb, with the portraits of those who are in the second life. Indeed, poor Adeline, poor Julia, ye need a whole day to forget a night in which, in the billowy water-mirror of dreams, ye once more beheld the closed grave and the closed wounds, afresh and too widely torn open.

As Lismore could not readily share the lasting, but only the vehement sorrows of another,-sympathy with the latter demanding fire only-that with the former, cold reason, and his own endurance wearying out another's-he could at first-although he would gladly have sucked into his own soul all the gnawing poison-drops of her grief-do nothing but increase her sorrow, and thus enable himself to suffer with her. In vain he reproached himself with making her but the more inconsolable by his eloquent remonstrances; he could not restrain the torrent of his emotions. But chiefly he blamed himself on account of the new year; and for the following reason:

He went up to her room at noon, and, by his New-year's gift, increased the burden on the oppressed heart of his beloved, whose road from church had to-day been through a cypress avenue. The present was a vase of Derbyshire spar, adorned by a painting of his own invention, peculiar and double-meaning. Venus Urania, near whom flutters a butterfly as her symbol, leans on a burial urn with her hand before her eyes; Cupid stoops towards her, and with one hand takes hers from before her eyes, to wake her,-for Aurora with her two-winged steeds is ascending,-while with the other he holds his torch reversed, either to extinguish or avert it, that he may not singe the butterfly, which hovers over a wreath of flowers lying on the ground. But all this might also signify Adeline veiling her tearful eye-the flower-wreath, the last adornment of Greek corpses and burial urns, lying as food for the butterfly, the symbol of the departed soul-Cupid extinguishing his torch in order to spare the garland and the Psyche, but anxious to draw away the weeping one, lest Aurora-whom the Greeks accused of causing early deaths-overtake and seize the beloved. On presenting it, Lismore only uttered the fair wish-"This year may it (the vase) bear the better meaning." Adeline immediately understood the mythological double sense, and, while her long, warm look trembled like the varied colours on the transparent silver of the spar, gave him with a smile this unexpected answer;"As it has two meanings, it may also have a third. One might fancy that Aurora had already been with the sleeper, from whom the butterfly has just flown; but the Genius who seeks to fold her

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