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That longs for marvels, in its longings bold,

The story of your flight, the experience yet untold.

The world is yours, for ever, generous winds!
Ye have won all its avenues; have swept
Where nature in her stern dominion binds

The waters in ice-fetters, nor have crept,
Though the sad sun himself in Heaven hath slept
O'ercome with chills of apathy; and thence

Have brought the doom to flowers, that, unbewept,
Do not all perish ;-yet 'twould recompense

Your wrong, to share with us your strange intelligence.

The cultured and the wild, the height, the plain,
Ancient and present seasons, all are yours!
Ye have heard Israel's monarch harp complain,
Have swept old Homer's lyre on Hellas' shores,
Hearkened while Dante's savage soul deplores,
And Milton moans his blindness in your ears,—

Yours only!-Oh! how boundless are your stores
Of treasured legends: yield them to my prayers,
Make fruitful all the thought to rove through perishing years!

Methinks, as now your billows from below

Roll upwards, and with generous embrace
Swell round me, that I hear a murmuring flow
Of song, which might be story; and I trace
The faint far progress-men, and time, and place,
Cominencing in relations fit,-till start

The actors into action;-art with grace
Appealing to the kindred in our art,

'Till all grows life and light, for fancy and the heart.

I climb the mighty pyramids, and scan

The boundless desert-vacaut, vast, and wild;
Yet, still I see the ancient prints of man!-
To sweep away the sand above him piled,
And pierce his vaults-reveal him as the child
Of an ungoverned passion, fierce and strong,

Rending his way to power;-his nature fill'd
With savage lusts that teach a joy in wrong,
While vengeance broods above, nor spares the usurper long.

How, as your murmurs swell upon the sense,
Grow they to voices, and inform the ear!

The Imagination, in its dream intense,
By natural consequence becomes the seer;
The vanish'd ages at its will appear;

The gates of Nimroud open: o'er the plain

Stream forth the servile myriads, dark and fair,

In fatal pomp, the power is wed to pain

Sennacherib leads the host, and piles the fields with slain.

And Judah, as a captive in his hands,

Droops to his dungeon. The sad wife and maid

Go to their lowly toils in stranger lands:

Their silent harps among the willows laid,

Resound not, though by the fierce conqueror bade,

Respect the glorious God-rejoicing strains

That ever, inorn and eve, glad tribute paid

To the great Giver of their happy gains,

Ere guilty deeds had changed their raptures into pains.

Their mournful harps, yet swept with trailing wings,
To unseen spirits; with a power to cheer,
The sorrowful chaunt re-opened sacred springs
Of love and worship: the consoling tear

Though salt had yet its sweetness, and made clear
Jehovah's promise of that coming hour,

Howe'er remote, the dawn of happier year,

When in the fullness of his wakening power,

The widowed bride should wear, once more, the bridal flower.

Thus, on your wings ye bear to unknown times,

The Empire's conquering shout, the captain's song;
Your voices are the voices of all climes,

All ages--rise and fall-the weak, the strong;
The cry of grief or rapture, praise or wrong,
Moves with your choral pinions;-ages die;
But still their accents rise and linger long,
Even as the light from stars that fleck the sky,

Will strain through space though they no longer burn on high.

I list ye, and these valleys teem with life;
The desert puts on verdure; cities soar
Beneath the mountain; and the glorious strife

Of purpose and performance even more

Resounds from human haunts; the generous lore Recalls the beautiful when earth was young;

Legions of glorious aspects ye restore-

Shades of these mighty minstrels who have sung
When Nature was a child, and Art first found her tongue.

I travel with ye o'er each sacred spot,

Made holy by the march of mightiest men; Here was the altar-place: this mystic grot Harbored a muse: within yon wooded glen, Pan marshalled all his satyrs;-here, again, Gathered the little phalanx of the free,

Prepared to welcome the last struggle there, For shrines and temples, dear to liberty,

The gift of shadowy fires, that watch'd the strife to see.

Where the glad nation, lapsed in summer bliss,

Forgot her vigilance-where the conquering race Stood forth, and bridged with death the precipice That kept them from the bright luxurious place, Ye lead me still,-till, meeting face to face,

1 gaze upon the past, o'er walls of time,

Each circumstance of power, and pride, and grace, Unveiled, with realms of each delicious clime,

Where glory wraps her pall around the hills sublime!,

What empires ye unfold to me, blest airs,

That travel o'er all wastes of time and earth;-
Those mighty shadows, when the strife was theirs,
Have felt your pinions, and, with sense of mirth,
Thrown wide their bosoms, feeling a new birth
In your cool breathings; in the storm of fight
Ye swept the plain, and to the soul of worth
Brought cheer, in echoing anwers of great might,
From other god-like souls that strove for home and right.

Oh! sing for me, for ever, from your heights—
Roll from your deep abysses the proud strain
That teaches power, and tells of wild delights,
Of a sad grandeur, half allied to pain;—
O billow anthems, upward swell again,
With all your awful voices, that unite

The ages with their Gods;-a shadowy train,
That trail great robes of purple on the sight,

And, in the maturing soul, look down with eyes of night!

THER

MINING VANITIES.

"Sed itum est in viscera terræ:

Quas recondiderat, stygiisque admoverat umbris,
Effodiuntur opes irritamenta malorum."-Ovid. Met.

"Innumerable furnaces and pits

And gloomy holds."Alexander Smith.

"Seven up."-The Broker.

HERE is a wicked street, that is overtopped and crossly frowned upon by the steeple of Trinity.

Banks and railroad companies inhabit it, and various are its receptacles of floating capital. Digging has become incorporate therein; and bad men do unscrupulously go about to bury their loose talents in the earth, by way of a serious and paying investment. I am moved to apostrophize the iniquity.

What have I to do with thee, thou Wall street, stocked with ephemeral "fancies!" I and my friends look down upon thee, from the garret and dormer windows of a sublime independence. How little thou art! Thou art content to control the small destinies of a nation! Thy name is in the mouth of the political economist. Thou art nothing-the mere mainspring of the State-a piece of mechanisin! Away with thee! Thou hast body. Thou art earth-born, mortai. Thou feedest men. Thou pamperest them with bread. Thou buildest cities and ships, and sendest forth mer ehandise, and makest civilization vulgar and universal. Thy mean-spirited bankers support the charities of christendom with MONEY! I hate thee! Thou knowest naught of ethical mysteries and metaphysics. Thou art dusty. Thou Lever tastedst pure ether. Thou never dwelledst in lofts and celestial observatories.

It is true, thou hast backers. Practical men love to look upon thee, and in

thy ebb and flow, to watch the "tide of times." Philosophers justify thee, and say thou art a necessary development of progressive and associated humanity. The Arts do smile upon thee, and Religion accepteth thine alms.

But for all that, I deal not in thy securities.

-Oh, what a "suggestive" subject! If it were my trade, now could I sermonize till doomsday. But I feel that the sprit of Homily is exhaled already— a transient inspiration that came upon ine, unexpectedly glancing over the stock-book of the Mining Board.

The truth is, I have something to say about mining, in the concrete; something experimental about the modus of mining; something in the way of autobiography-instructive, descriptive; something in the Gradgrind line of facts; and my only anxiety now is, to make the transition easy, from a moralizing vein to a copper vein. There is but one route.

We take the cars-cross to Philadelphia-get upon the Reading Railroad, and ride fifty miles. Here we descend at a lonely station-cross a bridge with a river under it, and then another bridge with a canal under it-come to several warehouses, a store and a dwelling, a great many nails lying about in kegs and otherwise, and a score or two of pigs (iron), all on the right bank of the canal. We follow the road along the canal a few rods, and discover grist

mill and a tavern, built of stone, and four or five other stone houses, huddled together sociably. Here are a corner and cross-roads. We turn to the right, and pass through a street of small stone houses with courtyards. On one side, about half-way along, is a little stone church, and at the end of the street, a large rolling-mill, where they roast their pigs and turn them into nails. Close by are a stone office, and a stone coopering shop, where they make kegs for the nails; a stone table, too; and, in sight at the top of a hill, a pleasant house, not of stone, pleasantly shaded, and with pleasant grounds, well laid out, where live the Iron-masters.

Passing these, and more stone houses beyond the rolling-mill, we go on into the back country, through wild scenery: catching a glimpse, among the woods, of a great smelting furnace devoted exclusively to pigs; crossing a number of bridges over streams of various sizes: climbing a number of hills; and meeting and overtaking many heavy teams, loaded with ore for the furnace, or pigs for the rolling-mill, or coal, or bags of copper for the canal.

The road is worst in the known world. It cannot be said to possess ruts-it is made up of ruts-ruts three feet deep, crossing each other at impossible angles, and qualified by a gentle filling in and overflow of Broadway mud (as it was before the advent of Genin).

We pursue this road for nine miles, and our journey is ended.

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There, near a century ago, a party of miners went a-digging for copper. They threw out a considerable quantity of dirt, and made a deep hole. They had engine, of the water out.

an expressly imported horse-power, to pump

They dug and blasted without regard to expense, and "timbered" as they went down, in true Cornish style, until they bad reached a depth of two hundred feet, more or less, when I forget what-somebody fell in, or the water was too strong for them, or the captainminer got drunk, or died, or their money gave out in consequence of which, the mine was abandoned and went to ruin.

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Meanwhile they had found no copper to speak of." There were indications in abundance; indeed, quite a heap of surface ore betokening a vein thereabouts, but no vein was discovered. So the land passed into the hands of an

Iron Company, and was probed ferrugi nously, to some extent, and with some

success.

But the superstition died not, that there was 66 copper there somewhere;" and the legend of the old mine was perpetuated and confirmed by the daily turning-up of incredible specimens of malachite, and by a decided sprinkling of the yellow sulphuret, which bothered the iron men.

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At last the fame of their possibilities reached New York; and the "Mine Holes," as they had come to be called (diminutive holes "), were visited by Gothamites, who leased the right of search for copper, set up a rickety "whim," brought a couple of blind horses, a pick or two, some chisels and a spade, built a cabin, and started a new shaft. I saw the newly opened mine in this embryo state.

You can hardly imagine a more forlorn picture, than that whimsical and shaky windlass; pitched, awry, on the side of a steep bank (not even a sandbank, but a bank of the deepest and most irretrievable mud); a barren heath stretching out indefinitely behind it, with a few hillocks of refuse ore near by, to relieve the monotony; and a blind, dizzy, broken-down, spavined skeleton of a steed, eternally turning, and turning, and turning about it. You have seen, at work in a farm-yard, a trembling and creaky old churn, of one sheep power:-Well, set it out alone, on a New Jersey flat, and set it going, and you will have an antitype of that solitary whim.

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But from this small beginning, the mine grew to be famous. For, just beside the diggers, as the shaft was going down, there was found, unstirred, and close to the top of the ground, an inexhaustible deposit" of carbonates, green and blue, only waiting to be dipped up and carted away. There could be no mistake about the extent of it, for there was one end exposed, so many feet thick, and testifying an evident infinity of background.

And now the stockholders strutted upon 'Change, and fat dividends were talked of as a thing of to-morrow. The stock was held aloof as too precious for the general market, and, of its own accord, went up to fifteen! The excitement was select, but intense, and there was reason for it.

But, happy is the man who places not his dependence upon malachite. A few

months of digging, and the "deposit," whose depth was measureless, and whose breadth beyond computation, began to dwindle and grow beautifully less, until it had well nigh died out altogether: and the stockholders threw dust in the air, and put on sackcloth, and blamed the president.

But the company went on digging, and hoping, and sinking their shaft, and feeling about for the undiscovered vein, that was still "there somewhere."

Perhaps I should inform the ignorant of the distinction between a "deposit " and a vein, or "lode." One is supposed to be the bed of an ancient stream or body of water—the copper in it having been brought from some distant source, and deposited, usually in the form of a carbonate. While the other is formed of more valuable combinations of the metal, found in fissures of rocksprobably in a primitive state-and often extending continuously for considerable distances. Deposits are of uncertain quality and permanence, and are little depended upon in mining. But, a good "lode" is the miner's extremest ambition.

So they were undiscouraged-the "Mine Holes" men-and kept their works going, and still scraped away at their carbonates, and failed not to send copper to Bergen Point, when it was good enough. They had a contrivance for grinding up poor ore, to make it marketable, which shall be described in due time.

I let the ridiculous "whim," churning, desolate, upon its mud-banks, and went comfortably home with a laugh. But, three years passed away, and found me (after a short sojourn at Washington) cross and misanthropic-the belabored and decapitated victim of a venal administration. Sick of governments, and di-gusted with polite friendship, I determined to escape those corruptions; and forthwith abjuring civilization, fled (disguised in a beaverteen coat and cowhide boots) to Pennsylvania and the

Mine Holes." It was early winter. The place was inaccessible and dreary as ever, but there were changes in it. Let me astonish you by a new description.

An immense, irregular, and jagged excavation! In one part scooped out, asin shaped, to the depth of some sixty leet; in other parts, varied with pits and ongh elevations-with channels cut etween high embankments, and caverns ewn away and blown out of the rocks.

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Here and there veins of bluish soapstone streaking the interspersed banks; sometimes a little green carbonate of copper. To the left-the out-crop of a huge trap dyke, that is visible for about a hundred feet, and then disappears precipitately, in the direction of the Carnatic. this, the mouth of the hundred year old shaft; fallen together, and scarcely noticeable, among the more modern packings; its timbers rotted and protuding from the soil. Running zigzag across these extraordinary "diggings," and leading from different points of the surrounding elevation to their remotest recesses, are cart roads innumerable. Along these roads, stout horses, yoked tandem to small carts, and urged by boy drivers of doubtful morality, are dragging such stuff to the surface as the workmen below can find to exhume, and returning continually for more.

These

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are the Holes," proper. There lay the "deposit," so long unwithdrawn, and so meagre when it was out-and there the workmen are busy, now, at the "pickings" that are left of it.

To the right is a tall, frame building, of a dingy black, and five stories, groaning with the weight and rumble of heavy machinery. An engine-house of stone, next to it, of smaller dimensions, is puffing from a pipe in the roof, and contains the driving steam-power (sixty horse). Close under the lee of these buildings, and beyond them, as you stand, is the "whim," in full revolution, propped up and made ship shape, and turned by a quadruped, blind, I confess, but otherwise in good case; indicating oats. The shaft is under cover. The buckets, as they come up, are emptied by the bucket tender, and the material is given over to an inspector to be sorted. This material from the shaft, or the stuff from the "Holes," even the small proportion of it which is considered valuable, contains a large per centage of iron, a very little copper, and a plenty of dirt. The dirt is got rid of, by hand, as well as may be, in the sorting, and the residue is taken to the tall building above mentioned, for purification.

Here, on the first floor, it is broken by hammers, to a certain uniformity, and then shovelled in between two enormous iron rollers, which crush it to a nut size. Another set of rollers, underneath, reduce it to powder, and it is then caught up and conveyed by a system of clevators to the fifth story.

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