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The train it ran off and did leave me; I could nae get over the nicht.

I tried for to walk the brig over, my head it was a' in a whirl;

I could na'-ye know the sad reason—I had to go back to my girl! I hope ye'll tak' kindly to Maggie; she's promised to soon be my wife;

She's a darling wee bit of a lassie, and her fondness it saved me my life."

But, tempest, a bright star in heaven, a message of comfort sends

back,

And draws our dim glances to skyward, away from thy laurels of

black;

Thank God that His well tempered mercy came down with the clouds from above,

And saved one from out the destruction, and him by the angel of love.

Will Carleton.

THE IDEAL IN EXPRESSION.

The mind has a creative energy. It reads the visible in the light of the invisible; it discerns the ideal behind the face of the real. We do not want the unreal, but we want the real idealized. You never saw such faces as those of Raphael's Madonnas; you never saw such forms as those which Phidias and Michael Angelo carved into marble; you never saw such groups as those of Correggio and Titian. These are the ideals of beauty and strength, and when art abandons the ideal, it offends and degrades the æsthetic taste.

The charm and the power of literature are in the ideals which it creates, as in Milton's Paradise Lost, in Dante's Inferno, and in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The true poet is always a philosopher, who makes nature and life radiant with the glow and the glory of an invisible world.

You never heard men speak, you never saw them act, as they do in Shakespeare's dramas. There is real life and movement; but the reality is intensified, because idealized. The figures are only the drapery of the thought; the good is shown at its best, and the bad

at its worst.

Love lives in the imagination. We say it is blind because it sees "Helen's beauty on the brow of Egypt." But love sees more than the receding brow: its eyes are on the heart whose radiance floods the dusky face. All this is the work of the imagination, but it is not, therefore, imaginary. The ideal is there, discerned by the mind, and that gives to every physical defect a new and fair perspective. Such being the imperial rank and scope of the imagination, it is entitled to careful cultivation by all who would be masters of the art of expression.

Language is the most subtle and plastic of all instruments. And tone is that indescribable, irresistible quality born of true emotion, and passes like an electric shock from reader to hearer. Speech is one of God's noblest gifts to man, and it should be kept firmly to its divine intention-to make plain and radiant the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For if we must part with either beauty or truth, we will hold fast to truth even in a beggar's garb. But beauty and truth are twin-born. He who made the world strong, has also made it fair; and we only follow his example when we fit speech to thought, arranging with artistic skill our apples of gold in finely chased baskets of silver.

SENT TO HEAVEN.

I had a message to send her,

To her whom my soul loved best;
But I had my task to finish,

While she had gone home to rest.

To rest in the far bright heavens,
Oh! so far away from here;
I could not speak to my darling,
For I knew she could not hear.

I had a message to send her,

So tender, and true, and sweet,
I longed for an angel to bear it
And lay it down at her feet.

I placed it, one summer's evening,
On a cloudlet's fleecy breast,
But it faded in golden splendor,
And died in the crimson west.

I gave it the lark next morning,
And watched it soar and soar,
Till its pinions grew weak and weary,
And it flutterd to earth once more.

To the heart of the rose I told it,
But the perfume rich and rare,
Growing faint on the bright, blue ether,
Was lost on the balmy air.

I placed it upon a censer,

And watched the incense rise,

But the clouds of rolling silver

Could not reach the far blue skies.

I cried in my passionate longing,
"Has earth no angel friend
Who will carry my love the message
My heart desires to send?"

Then I heard a strain of music,

So tender, and pure, and clear, That my very sorrow was silenced, And my soul stood still to hear.

It rose in harmonious rushings
Of mingled voices and strings,
As I tenderly laid my message

On the music's outstretched wings.

I heard it float farther and farther,
In form more perfect than speech,-
Farther than eye can follow,

Farther than soul can reach.

I know that at last my message

Has passed the golden gate,
For my heart no longer is restless,
And I am content to wait.

THE DESTINY OF THE NATION.

[EXTRACTS-PARKER PILLSBURY ON THE FUGITIVE SLAVE law.]

We were told this afternoon, Mr. President, much of the greatness and grandeur of this old commonwealth of Massachusetts. We were reminded of her achievements in the settlement of New England and of the country, and especially of her sublime position in the Revolutionary period-that dark time that tried men's souls!

But what must be said of Massachusetts to-day? Behold her in the congress of the United States! See how her strong men quail before the haughty slave power; almost like the poor victims of the plantations under the driver's lash. One Massachusetts congressman pledges over his wine the sentiment, "Our Union, however bounded!" and another, "Our Country, right or wrong!" And the whole slave power at the South shouted, Amen and Amen!

When the sage of Monticello, beholding the tears of the oppressed, exclaimed, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever!" it was prophecy dictated by inspiration. By a moral evaporation has our guilt beca ascending, until the dark cloud hangs suspended in the heavens, all charged with thunder, too soon to hurl the bolts of all nature's righteous indignation down upon us.

Sorry philosopher is he who thinks to stay the desolation. Nature must be false to herself, must repeal her eternal mandates, or the dread prediction shall be fulfilled.

And Massachusetts still boasts herself a sovereign state. Even now her legislature is in session, enacting and revising statutes as if for self-government, when she has given her sanction, heart and hand, to aid in hunting the fugitive slave-protecting the vulture as he swoops to his prey.

.Massachusetts should set her legislators to more befitting work. She should send them to the base of Bunker Hill monument, with

mattock and spade in hand. Then let them begin and dig a grave that shall reach to Plymouth Rock. And in that grave-dark, deep, dreadful-bury the old and hallowed histories of Pilgrim and Colonial days, with the registries of deeds heroic, and sufferings sublime in intensity, written often in blood and tears of women as well as men, martyrs in the holy cause of civil and religious liberty; there entomb all the ancestral greatness and glory, all the sacred memorials, of the Massachusetts of other, older days.

And let John Quincy Adams, who honors our convention this evening with his presence, and whose recollection reaches back beyond Lexington and Concord, where were fired the Revolutionary shots "heard round the world,”—let him stand chief mourner at the solemn obsequies.

Let Bunker Hill monument and Plymouth Rock be head and foot stones over the grave, and then let the billows of the near Atlantic wail her sad requiem till time shall be no more.

BOBOLINK.

I really think,
Mr. Bobolink,

With your rattling, rollicking spink-spank-spink-
You're the noisest bird of June;

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