sea of twittering ecstasy upon the morning and evening air. It does not ascend by gyrations, like the eagle or birds of prey. It mounts It mounts up like a human aspiration. It seems to spread out its wings and to be lifted straight upwards out of sight by the afflatus of its own happy heart. To pour out this in undulating rivulets of rhapsody, is apparently the only motive of its ascension. This it is that has made it so loved of all generations. It is the singing angel of man's nearest heaven, whose vital breath is music. Its sweet warbling is only the metrical palpitation of its life of joy. It goes up over the roof-trees of the rural hamlet on the wings of its song, as if to train the human soul to trial flights heavenward. Never did the Creator put a voice of such volume into so small a living thing. It is a marvel almost a miracle. In a still hour you can hear it at nearly a mile's distance. When its form is lost in the hazy lace-work of the sun's rays above, it pours down upon you all the thrilling semitones of its song as distinctly as if it were warbling to you in your window. The only American bird that could star it with the English lark, and win any admiration at a popular concert by its side, is our favorite comic singer, the Bobolink. I have thought often, when listening to British birds at their morning rehearsals, what a sensation would ensue if Master Bob, in his odd-fashioned bib and tucker, should swagger into their midst, singing one of those Low-Dutch voluntaries which he loves to pour down into the ears of our mowers in haying-time. Not only would such an apparition and overture throw the best-trained orchestra of Old World birds into amazement or confusion, but astonish all the human listeners at an English concert. With what a wonderment would one of these blooming, country milkmaids look at the droll harlequin, and listen to those familiar words of his, set to his own music: Go to milk! go to milk! Dear Miss Phillisey No cheese, no cheese, It is a wonder that in these days of refined civilization, when Jenny Lind, Grisi, Patti, and other celebrated European singers, some of them from very warm climates, are transported to America to delight our Upper-Tendom, that there should be no persistent and successful effort to introduce the English lark into our out-door orchestra of singing-birds. No European voice would be more welcome to the American million. It would be a great gain to the nation, and be helpful to our religious devotions, as well as to our secular satisfactions. In several of our Sabbath hymns there is poetical reference to the lark and its song. For instance, that favorite psalm of gratitude for returning Spring opens with these lines: "The winter is over and gone, "The thrush whistles sweet on the spray, "The turtle breathes forth her soft moan, The lark mounts on high and warbles away." Now not one American man, woman, or child in a thousand ever heard or saw an English lark, and how is he, she or it to sing the last line of the foregoing verse with the spirit and understanding due to an exercise of devotion? The American lark never mounts higher than the top of a meadow elm, on which it seesaws, and screams, or quacks, till it is tired; then draws a bee-line for another tree, or a fence-post, never even undulating on the voyage. It may be said, truly enough, that the hymn was written in England. Still, if sung in America from generation to generation, we ought to have the English lark with us, for our children to see and hear, lest they may be tempted to believe that other and more serious similes in our Sabbath hymns are founded on fancy instead of fact. Nor would it be straining the point, nor be dealing in poetical fancies, if we should predicate upon the introduction of the English lark into American society a supplementary influence much needed to unify and nationalize the heterogeneous elements of our population. Men, women, and children, speaking all the languages and representing all the countries and races of Europe, are streaming in upon us weekly in widening currents. The rapidity with which they become assimilated to the native population is remarkable. But there is one element from abroad that does not Americanise itself so easily and that, curiously, is one the most American that comes from Europe in other words, the English. They find with us everything as English as it can possibly be out of England — their language, their laws, their literature, their very bibles, psalm-books, psalm-tunes, the same faith and forms of worship, the same common histories, memories, affinities, affections, and general structure of social life and public institutions; yet they are generally the very last to be and feel at home in America. A Norwegian mountaineer, in his deerskin doublet, and with a dozen English words picked up on the voyage, will Americanise himself more in one year on an Illinois prairie, than an intelligent, middleclass Englishman will do in ten, in the best society of Massachusetts. Now, I am not dallying with a facetious fantasy when I express the opinion, that the life and song of the English lark in America, superadded to the other institutions and influences indicated, would go a great way in fusing this hitherto insoluble element, and blending it harmoniously with the best vitalities of the nation. And this consummation would well repay a special and extraordinary effort. THE BLACK COUNTRY ·FROM WALKS IN THE BLACK COUNTRY. In The Black Country, black by day and red by night, cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe. It is a section of Titanic industry, kept in murky perspiration by a sturdy set of Tubal Cains and Vulcans, week in week out, and often seven days to the week. deed the Sunday evening halo it wears when the church bells are ringing to service on winter nights, glows "redder than the moon," or like the moon dissolved at its full on the clouds above the roaring furnaces. It is a little dual world of itself, only to be gauged perpendicularly. The better half, it may be, faces the sun; but the richer half, averted thence, looks by gaslight towards the central fires. If that subterranean half could be for an hour inverted to the sun; if its inky vaults and tortuous pathways, and all its black-roofed chambers could be but once laid open to the light of day, the spectacle would be a world's wonder, especially if it were uncovered when all the thousands of the subterranean roadmakers, or the begrimed armies of pickmen, were bending to their work. What a neighing of the pit-horses would come up out of those deep coalcraters at the sight and sense of the sunlight! What black and dripping forests of timber would be disclosed, brought from all the wild, wooded lands of Norway, Sweden, and Canada, to prop up the rough vaults and sustain the excavated acres undermined by the pick! Such an unroofing of the smoky, palpitating region would show how soon the subterranean detachments of miners and counter-miners must meet, and make a clean sweep of the lower half of that mineral world. For a century or more they have been working to this end; and although the end has not come yet, one cannot but think that it must be reached ere long. Never was the cellar of a district of equal size stored with richer or more varied treasures. Never a gold-field on the face of the earth, of ten miles radius, produced such vast values as these subterranean acres have done. To be sure, the nuggets they have yielded to the pick have been black and rough, and blackened and rough men have sent them to the surface. And when they were landed by the noisy and uncouth machinery of the well and windlass, they made no sensation in the men who emptied the tubs, any more than if they were baskets of potatoes. But they yielded gold as bright and rich as ever was mined in Australia or California. Nature did for the ironmasters of the Black Country all she could; indeed, everything except literally building the furnaces themselves. She brought together all that was needed to set and keep them in blast. The iron ore, coal, and lime the very lining of the furnaces were all deposited close at hand for the operation. Had either two of these elements been dissevered, as they are in some countries, the district would have lost much of its mineral wealth in its utilization. It is not a figure of speech but a geological fact, that in some, if not all, parts of this remarkable region, the coal and lime are packed together in alternate layers in almost the very proportion for the furnace requisite to give the proper flux to the melted iron. Thus Nature has not only put the requisite raw materials side by side, but she has actually mixed them in right proportions for use, and even supplied mechanical suggestions for going to work to coin these deposits into a currency better than gold alone to the country. There are no statistics attainable to show the yearly produce of this section, or the wealth it has created. One would be inclined to believe, on seeing the black forest of chimneys smoking over large towns and villages as well as the flayed spaces between, that all the coal and iron mined in the district must be used in it. The furnaces, foundries, and manufactories seem almost countless; and the vastness and variety of their production infinite. Still, like an ever-flowing river, running through a sandy region that drinks in but part of its waters, there is a stream of raw mineral wealth flowing without bar or break through the absorbing district that produces it, and watering distant counties of England. By night and day, year in year out, century in and century out, runs that stream with unabated flow. Narrow canals filled with water as black as the long sharp boats it floats, crossing each other here and there in the thick of the furnaces, twist out into the green lands in different directions, laden with coal for distant cities and villages. The railways, crossing the canals and their creeping locomotion, dash off with vast loads to London and other great centres of consumption. Tons unnumbered of iron for distant manufactures go from the district in the same way. And all the while, the furnaces roar and glow by night and day, and the great steam hammers thunder; and hammers from an ounce in weight to a ton, and every kind of machinery.invented by man, are ringing, clicking, and whizzing as if tasked to intercept all this raw material of the mines and impress upon it all the labor and skill which human hands could give to it. Within this arrondissement of the industries and ingenuities of nature and man, may be found in remarkable juxtaposition the best that either has produced. Coal, iron, salt, lime, fire-brick, and pottery clay are the raw materials that Nature ĥas put into the works as her share of the capital. And man has brought his best working science, skill, and labor to make the most and best of this capital. If the district could be gauged, like a hogshead of sugar, from east to west, or by some implement that would bring out and disclose to view a sample of each mile's production, the variety would be a marvel of ingenuity and labor. That is, if you gauged frame and all; for The Black Country is beautifully framed by a Green Border-Land; and that border is rich and redolent with two beautiful wealths-the sweet life of Nature's happiest springs and summers, and the hive and romance of England's happiest industries. Plant, in imagination, one foot of your compass at the Town Hall in Birmingham, and with the other sweep a circle of twenty miles radius, and you will have "The Black Country," with all its industries, in a green velvet binding inwrought or tapestried with historical scenes and early playgrounds of brilliant imagination and poetical fiction. Just pass the gauging-rod of mechanical enterprise through the volume from Coventry to Kidderminster, and see what specimens of handicraft it will bring out and show, like a string of beads of infinite variety of tinting and texture. See what wares intervene between the two opposite extremities between the ribbons of Coventry and the carpets of Kidderminster; or between the salt bars of Droitwich and the iron bars of Wolverhampton. Then let the historyminer run his rod through and see what gems he will bring out between Lichfield Cathedral and Baxter's Church at Kidderminster, or between Stratford-on-Avon and Kenilworth or Warwick Castle. Let him notice what manner of men have lived within this circuit, and what manner of mark their lives and thoughts made upon it and upon the wide circumference of the world. Then let him travel from rim to rim of the district, and study its physical conformation and its natural sceneries, and he will recognize their symmetry with the histories and industries with which it teems. Walking and looking in these different directions, with an eye upon these different facts and features, I hope to see and note something which shall enable readers who are not familiarly acquainted with the district to get a better idea of its character than they had before acquired. ALFRED B. STREET. THE early associations of Mr. Street were of a kind favorable to the development of the tastes which mark his literary productions. The son of the Hon. Randall S. Street, he was born at Poughkeepsie, on the Hudson, and at an early age removed with his father to Monticello in Sul sufficient to form a volume of similar size. He has also written a narrative poem, of which La Salle is the hero, extending to some three thousand lines, which still remains in manuscript. He is besides the author of a number of prose tale sketches, which have appeared with success in the magazines of the day. Mr. Street's poems are chiefly occupied with descriptions of the varied phases of American scenery. He has won a well merited reputation by the fidelity of his observation. As a descriptive writer he is a patient and accurate observer of Nature,-daguerreotyping the effects of earth and air, and the phenomena of vegetable and animal life in their various relation to the landscape. Ile has been frequently described by critics by comparison with the minute style of the painters of the Dutch school. Mr. Tuckerman, in an article in the Democratic Review, has thus alluded to this analogy, and to the home atmosphere of the author's descriptions of American nature:-"Street is a true Flemish painter, seizing upon objects in all their verisimilitude. As we read him, wild flowers peer up from among brown leaves; the drum of the partridge, the ripple of waters, the flickering of autumn light, the sting of sleety snow, the cry of the panther, the roar of the winds, the melody of birds, and the odor of crushed pine-boughs are present to our senses. In a foreign land his poems would transport us at once to home. He is no second-hand limner, content to furnish insipid copies, but draws from reality. His pictures have the freshness of originals. They are graphic, detailed, never untrue, and often vigorous; he is essentially an American poet.” Mr. Street studied law as well as nature, at Monticello, and on his admission to the bar removed to Albany, where he has since resided. He married a daughter of Mr. Smith Weed, of that place, and has for several years hell the appointment of state librarian. A Mr. Street commenced his literary career at an early age as a poetical writer for the magazines. His first volume, The Burning of Schenectady, and other Poems, was published in 1842. The leading poem is a narration of a well known incident of the colonial history of New York; the remaining pieces are of a descriptive character. second collection, Drawings and Tintings, appeared in 1844. It includes a poem on Nature, of decided merit in its descriptions of the phenomena of the seasons, which was pronounced by the author in 1840 before the Euglossian Society of Geneva College. In 1849 Mr. Street published in London, and in the same year in this country, Frontenac, or the Atotarho of the Iroquois, a Metrical Romance, a poem of some seven thousand lines in the octosyllabic measure, founded on the expedition of Count Frontenac, governor-general of Canada, against the powerful Indian tribe of the Iroquois. The story introduces many picturesque scenes of Indian life, and abounds in passages of description of natural scenery, in the author's best vein of careful elaboration. In 1842, a collection of the poems of Mr. Street, embracing, with the exception of a few juvenile pieces and the romance of Frontenac, all that he had written to that period, was published in New York. He has since contributed to various magazines a number of pieces THE SETTLER, His echoing axe the settler swung Loud shrieked the eagle as he dashed And the first sunlight, leaping, flashed The soul that warmed that frame, disdained The paths which wound 'mid gorgeous trees, The winds that swelled their harmonies Through those sun-hiding bowers, 'Mid the black logs green glowed the grain, And herbs and plants the woods knew not, Throve in the sun and rain. The smoke-wreath curling o'er the dell, Of deeds that wrought the change. The violet sprung at Spring's first tinge, His garden spade, or drove his share He marked the fire-storm's blazing flood With streaming bough and severed root, His gaunt hound yelled, his rifle flashed, The beaver sank beneath the wound When liberty sent forth her cry, Who cumbered Bunker's height of red, AN AUTUMN LANDSCAPE. A knoll of upland, shorn by nibbling sheep Masses of woods, green strips of fields, ravines, Expand upon my sight. October's brush The scene has colored; not with those broad hues And the faint sunshine winks with drowsiness. In 1859, Mr. Street published The Council of Revision of the State of New York; its History; a History of the Courts with which its Members are Connected; Biographical Sketches of its Members, and its Vetoes (Albany, royal 8vo, pp. 573). This council was created by the constitution of 1777. The section creating it was introduced by Robert R. Livingston (afterward chancellor), in the convention, the original draft being in his handwriting. The governor (for the time being), the chancellor, and judges of the Supreme Court, or any two of them, together with the governor, were constituted the council to revise all bills about to be passed into laws by the legislature, and for that purpose were required to assemble from time to time at the sessions of the legislature, without salary or consideration. All bills were required to be presented to them, and their objections to be returned in writing to the branch of the legislature in which the bills originated, who entered the objections in their minutes, and reconsidered the bills. If, then, two-thirds of the Senate or House passed the bills, notwithstanding the vetoes; that is, if the branch originating the same passed the bill by two-thirds, the vetoes were sent to the other branch, and if two-thirds passed it there, the bill became a law. council was abolished by the convention of 1821. These vetoes, written by eminent men of old, George Clinton, Jay, Kent, Lansing, Livingston, De Witt Clinton, Spencer, Thompson, Mr. Street collected, and wrote biographies of the old governors, George Clinton, Jay, Lewis, Tompkins, Clinton (De Witt), Yates, and Lieutenant-Governor Taylor; Chancellors R. R. Livingston, Kent, and Lansing; Chief-Justices Richard Morris, Robert Yates, Smith Thompson, and Ambrose Spencer; and Justices John Sloss Hobart, Egbert Benson, Jacob Radcliff, Brockholst Livingston, W. W. Van Ness, Jonas Platt, and John Woodworth; and histories of the old The Court of Chancery, Supreme Court, Court of Errors, Surrogate Court, Court of Exchequer, and Court of Admiralty, from their commencement. The history of the Supreme Court is quite extended. Many of these biographies had never before been written, and materials were collected with great labor. In 1860, Mr. Street published a graphic narrative of adventures in the Saranac Lake region of the Adirondacks, entitled Woods and Waters; or, Summer in the Saranacs (8vo, pp. 350). A new and revised edition of this work appeared from the press of Hurd & Houghton, in 1865. A companion to this volume appeared in 1864, Forest Pictures in the Adirondacks, a holiday publication, in small 4to, consisting of sixteen engravings, as the title describes, from designs by Mr. John A. Hows, with an equal number of original poems, by Mr. Street, illustrative of the drawings, the whole composing a single poem in unity of design. Mr. Street has also ready for the press a sequel to Woods and Waters, entitled Lake and Mountain; or, Autumn in the Adirondacks, and Eagle Pine; or, Sketches of a New York Frontier Village, which will probably appear at an early day. He has also compiled a Digest of Taxation of all the States of the Union, published in 1863. ** A collected edition of Mr. Street's Poems was published in 1866. These abound in picturesque sketches of nature as seen by the eye of a true artist-student, with many descriptive passages of rare excellence. Three years later appeared The Indian Pass, an account of a tramp through the woods and of mountain explorations in the Switzerland-region of northern New York. From the latter this glowing extract is taken, relative to a climb "5400 feet above tide a glorious mile in the air.” **ASCENT OF MOUNT MARCY FROM THE INDIAN PASS. A pine was sounding its low anthem to the sunrise as I awoke, and prepared, with my guides, for the labors of the day. They were to be the most arduous of all, for they included the ascent of Tahawas, the Sky-Piercer, known generally as Mount Marcy. Tahawas, the SkyPiercer! grand name for the soaring eagle of the stately Adirondacks! At length we came to a little green dell, bare of trees, bordering on the Opalescent, which we traversed a short distance. Then the trail suddenly turned, leaving the river widely to the left. We were probably a mile from its source, which lies, as before stated, in a small meadow on the lofty flank of Tahawas. This meadow is four thousand feet above tide, and gives birth also to a branch of the West Ausable, flowing from the opposite rim at the north. The trail now became immediately steep, and Merrill suggested a lunch before proceeding farther. Although we supposed ourselves on the slope of Old Tahawas, neither of the guides, this visit being their first on this side, could indicate the fact with certainty. On wound the stealthy trail like a serpent, on, on, through the close and to us, unknown woods. With our cordial of tea glowing in my system, I again started, preceded by my guides. And now came the real tug! Up, up, up, without intermission! Drawing ourselves by pendent boughs, inserting our feet into fissures of the rocks, clutching wood-sprouts and knotted roots, and dangling by live saplings, up, up, up, with not a solitary level spot, we went, climbing thus our mountain ladder. Loftier, as we went, rose the grand breast of an opposite mountain that we set down as Mount Colden. Up, up, up, the magnificent flank of Colden now heaving on high like an enormous ocean-billow piled from hundreds of its fellows. It was awful, the sight of that mountain! its frown fairly chilled my blood. But up, up, still up. The trees that had hitherto towered into the sky, dwindled perceptibly, warning us that something was to happen. Up, up, still up. Lower and lower the trees. Barer and barer the rocks. The noble pine of a quarter of an hour ago is now a sapling of a dozen feet. What will happen? What dwarfing power broods above to cause this change? But upward, still upward. Owing to the difficulties of the route, clinging to every object that presents, I cannot look upward! Steeper, if possible, the trail! clutch, to drag myself ponderously upward, is the miniature pine whose stem, a short time since, would not crack; no, although the angriest blast were hurled against it. What is to happen? It was weird; it was awful! A sensation of dread began crawling through my frame, something portentous and threatening to whisper hoarsely in my ear. What causes these haughty forests to bow their grand crests, and grovel upon the rocks? WHAT? See! the shrub I Up, up, still up! The shrub lies flat, a stiff verdant wreath, a mere crawling vine, a thing of A wire, with scarce life sufficient to keep life! chill breath too, commenced to permeate the air, the breath of some monster whose lair was above. Be warned in time, O mortal, and approach no nearer! Desolation and death frown before thee, and ha! I chanced to look up; and lo, a rocky dome, a dark pinnacle, an awful crest scowled above my head, apparently impending over it, as if to fall and crush me; kept only by some invisible agency from hurling itself downward upon my devoted person! What was it? It was the stately brow of old Tahawas, the Piercer of the Sky! Throned in eternal desolation, its look crushing down the soaring forest into shrubs, there it towered, the sublime King of the Adirondacks, its forehead furrowed by the assaults of a thousand centuries. There it towered, beating back the surges of a million tempests! There it stood - and by Jove, if there isn't a lizard crawling up there! or, stop, let me see. Upon my modesty, if the lizard, by the aid of my glass, doesn't enlarge itself into Bob Blin! and there is Merrill following. And so I followed too. Showers of stone, loosened by my guides, rattled past. Still up I went. Over the precipitous rocks by clambering its cracks and crannies, through its tortuous galleries, along the dizzy edges of the chasms. A score of times I thought the summit was just in front, but no; on still went my guides, and on still I followed. I began to think the nearer I approached the farther I was off. But at last Merrill and Robert both became stationary, in fact seated themselves, their figures sharply relieved against the sky. Surmounting a steep acclivity, then turning into a sort of winding gallery, and passing a large mass of rock, I placed myself at their side, and lo, the summit! Famished with thirst, I looked around, and basins of water, hollowed in the stern granite, met my gaze real jewels of the skies, rain water; and truly delicious was it. Next, |