talking of ladies, allow me, my dear fellow, to suggest that this little chat of ours, though wonderfully pleasant, is doubtless keeping our gentle friend awake. There shall be dullness of bright eyes on our conscience tomorrow. Would a seat a few miles further down the lake suit your convenience as well ? Presto! Upon the hint, he is gone. With a bend of his well-set head that would have become the Bayard, he is off across the water, and we shall hear his last good-night presently full six miles away. Good-night to you, old fellow, and joy be with you! Well hast thou illustrated that rare point of courtesy that taught thee, finding thyself de trop, to 'stand not upon the order of thy going, but go at once.' May the patent-leather step of the cockney that would harm thee (if he could) be guided by a kind PROVIDENCE elsewhere for ever!

The night is now far spent. The unwonted exhilaration produced by the scene subsides, and sleep, even like the sleep of an infant, comes at last.

L I NE S.

YEARS shall be thine, O man!

Of life, long years
For thee shall lengthen out, until life nears

Its longest span.
Wealth shall be thine, O man!

Uncounted gold !
The sum of every wish, an hundred fold,

Crown every plan.
And power and kingly might:

On bended knee,
Shall millions of thy fellows bow to thee,

And hold it right.
All depths of human lore,

All man may know
Of skies above him, or of earth below,

Thou shalt explore.
Of love, the dearest dream

That ever lent
Possession rapture, in its ravishment,

For thee shall seem.
All shall be thine, O man!

And thou shalt sound,
Of human joy and woe, all depths profound

That human can.
But gold nor kingly power

For thee shall save;
Nor love's sweet dream, nor learning, from the grave,

Of life, one hour.

Awakel imperial form!

Ere thou art lain,
With common clay, in common earth again,

Food for the worm,

Awake! and view thy pall,

Thy grave-yard gear,
The hollow pageantry that mocks thy bier,

And speaks thy fall;
Late seated high on throne

Of royal state,
The elements themselves appeared to wait

On thee alone,
And smiling Fortune all

Her plenty poured.
Of God the chosen, and of man the lord,

Thyself didst call.
Far stretched o'er sea and land,

Thy sceptred sway,
Thy will the law, and death to disobey

Thy least command.
The meanest living thing

Might look with scorn
Upon thee now, of all thine honors shorn.

No more a king,
But lower than the least

That feared thy frown ;
And, in creation's scale, descended down

Below the beast.

'Ho! living kings on thrones!'.

Not this dead king's,
But the clear voice of human Freedom rings

In clarion tones.
'Ho! kings upon your thrones!

What streams must flow
Of human gore, what heaps on heaps must grow

Of human bones;
What countless thousands slain

Sleep their last sleep;
Strew the red plain, or whiten in the deep,

That ye may reign ?
What gallant armies down

Into the grave
Must sink, the pathway to a throne to pave,

Or hold a crown
Upon one kingly head ?

Not all the crew
Of shipwreck, famine, pestilence, with you

Can number dead!

"Dead! that in battle shed

Boon, their brave bloud,
And fighting fell, like heroes, where they stood.

For you they bled;
Allured by kingly craft,

Whose hateful arts
Called country's sacred name to fire their hearts.

Ye gazed and laughed,
They died to rivet chains

With which ye bind
Your fellows, and establish o'er mankind

Your gloomy reigns.

· Dead! deep in dungeons down,

Condemned to rot,

"And nations dead! that live

As live the brutes,
Which have no mind, nor human attributes

That mind can give.
These have, and use them not,

But basely bear
Their brutish bondage: born such chains to wear,

They deem their lot
To be the one ordained

By Nature's law.
These are more free, but these they never saw;

Nor have they gained
Of human progress aught.

The tyrant knows
Such gain signals his downfall, and he throws

Fetters on thought ;
And every knowledge-way

And source of light
He closes up. The despot loves the night,

And dreads the day.
But higher laws are made

Than he can make :
He bids the nations sleep: who bids them wake

Will be obeyed.
With multitudes is might,

Not with the few;
With them the fatal lesson, taught by you,

That might makes right.'
And still my day-star burns :

Hope of the free,
To tyrants death, to subjects liberty,

Where'er it turns.

AN ANTI-PROHIBITION EPIGRAM.

NEAL Dow of Maine's a mighty man,
He puts down liquor when he can;
He gets the sogers for to shoot

Their guns at rum-destroying people,
And brings all Portland out to boot,

By ringing fire-bells in the steeple;
And by the smoke, and balls, and row,

He shows he is Neal Dow-de-dow !
New York, June, 1855.

BY PROFESSOR JAMES J. MAPES, EDITOR OF 'TIE WORKING FARMER.

This element might well have been selected by the Divine writers as the emblem of natural truth, pervading all things, embracing all things, receiving and conveying all things, the attorney and actor in all of Nature's laws. The ultimates of water, and water itself, have been the great agents in the earth's configuration and progress. Its constituents are to be seen in every known substance as found by men and animals. No growth, decay, or combustion can proceed without them; no life can continue in their absence; no atmosphere can be respired which does not contain them; and when combined as water they possess new functions, with extended if not universal usefulness.

To the farmer of all others, a full knowledge of the constituents of water, and the part they play in Nature's laboratory, is most important. In their individual character they are known as oxygen and hydrogen, two gases colorless and inodorous. Our atmosphere is largely composed of oxygen. The chief ingredient of plants, carbon, is dissolved in oxygen by the various changes or decay, combustion, etc., forming carbonic acid, and in that form, and that only, can carbon be appropriated by plants, thus forming ninety per cent or more of their dry weight. All the other constituents of plants have oxygen in their composition, for all the elements found in the ashes of plants are oxyds. No plant could exist or form without them, and therefore animal life is due to them, and is sustained by the elements of water as a chief agent of its continuance. All the rocks are oxyds, and therefore all the soils, for they are the debris of the rocks. Hydrogen, the other constituent of water, is scarcely less important than oxygen, and when the two are combined as water, then new functions arise not common to the ultimates in their separate character as such, which are still more recognizable as the mundane agent of God; for like the

coalescence of two thoughts giving birth necessarily to a third, so the coälescence of these two gases forms a fluid, which for all time, and every second of time, is active in the performance of some new duty, giving birth to some new combination from which arise new functions, and thus the whole of Nature's laws in their combination and permutation, work out by the presence of water and its constituent functions, all those realizations which go to establish the results necessary for the happiness of man.

Water is Nature's motor. . By it the rocks and soils are moved during floods like feathers in a whirlwind, and thus was the mixing of soils brought about to fit the earth for the use of man. By its means we have an horizon, for none could exist without it.

Water forms, pervades, and cleanses the atmosphere, fertilizes the earth, and furnishes more recognizable means of life to plants, animals, and man.

Trace water through Nature, and see the many functions it performs, which man knows only from observation, and could not know by thought alone, besides the thousands of functions, the modus operandi of which is beyond his power to observe, and the thousands of results which neither his observation nor thought can at all conceive ; nor could the laws of Nature continue their progressive acts without this new compound.

Who can tell why oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water ? Where and when do they combine ? When and where is water decomposed ? Why is its mean bulk at forty degrees of heat, and why does it swell with uncontrollable force, entirely beyond the strength of any known material to withstand, when you cool it below or heat it above forty degrees?

If it were not for this exception of water, how could the rocks ever have been disintegrated to form soil ? If such exception did not exist, why then, as water on the ocean's surface would part with its heat and become ice, or cool below forty degrees, it would sink and give place to warmer particles from below, until in the course of a single day our ocean would become ice. If it were not for this exception to general law, the water pervading each molecule of every plant and animal, would cease to lubricate them, and they would cease to grow; and were it not for the powers of water as a solvent, which powers are not common to its constituents, all progression in change of configuration in vegetable and animal life would cease — the very clouds themselves would pass away, and the earth would become a void.

Water pervades all soils and rocks, and is capable of carrying from particle to particle, without increase of its own bulk, every substance which may be dissolved in it, while others are mechanically received by it without increasing its bulk. Of many of the gases, water will receive several times its own bulk ; thus carbonic acid, resulting from the decay of organisms, is received by water and carried to such other parts of progressive nature, as require its sustenance. It receives and gives up such gases without any change of its own composition, leaving its quality as water unabridged. It pervades the hardest rock and every soil. No chemical change can go on without it or its constituents.