him, he stirred not, he slept on -but his eyes, his large, his quiet, stony eyes, always large, always still, were at this very moment open and motionless. More distended, more protruding, and more icylooking than ever, it seemed as if some leaden hand had raised the lids, that space itself might be scared by their fixedness.

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The body of Bertha shook before the spectacle. It was long before her speech returned to her; but it did return, and she wept, and she fell on her knees, and she called his name. Karl, my dear Karl,my love my life!" He breathed, his chest rose and fell, but no answer came from him. She seized him violently and screamed. Karl jumped up. The candle fell from her hand, and she sunk upon the floor. The moonbeams mantled her with their cold light. The appearance of Karl's features, as he rushed to Bertha and spoke to her, was truly awful. It was not anger, it was not fear, it was not remorse. It was phrenzy and weakness-human weakness and distress. He clasped his hands, and bending over the poor wretch, whose face was buried in the earth, in a piercing, heart-rending tone, he cried, "My child, my wife! I CANNOT, I CANNOT-it is my curse- -I CANNOT CLOSE THESE MARBLE MOCKERIES!!!"

Dear Mr. Hood,

I am very much obliged to you for the loan of that interesting work, "The Grim Spectre of Schaffenwalden;" but please do not send me any more of the same kind. I read it last night, and I can truly say, I never suffered so much in my life from any undertaking. I retired, it would be a mockery to say, to rest-at one o'clock this morning no, it was to dream and perspire; from one until three, the Grim Spectre of Schaffenwalden danced without ceasing at the bottom of the bed: from three till six, I was oppressed with the vision which I commit to paper, and now send for your edification. Publish it-do what you please with it -but I beseech you entertain a proper esteem for past favours, and send me no more Spectres from Schaffenwalden.

January, 1845.

Your faithful

BENJAMIN JONES.

LE CRIEUR, en dehors. Il est trois heures. Tout est tranquille. Dieu veille. Dormez !

SOME writers acquire by practice a trick of rapid composition, like juggling. They pour in cups of coffee, and pull out ribands of sentences; just as a mountebank eats a handful of wool, and straightway draws from his mouth some forty yards of sarcenet. The hues in both cases are gay enough, but the fabric is apt to be flimsy; the iridescent sentences even sorrier in this respect than the shot silk.

"Can you come to Antigone to-night?" said I, thrusting my head into the sub-editor's room at a Weekly Newspaper Office.

"How much does it want to the time?"

"An hour and a quarter."

"Well, I have eighteen new books to look into and notice. If I get done in time I'll go with you."

"Sharp work," said I.

"Not particularly. They are short paragraphs; only a column and a half altogether."

"But the reading?"

"You don't seriously think we read books?"

"How the deuce, then, do you form your opinion of them?"

"We cut 'em open-and smell the paper knife."

Other authors, less cunning at the craft, require time to let their thoughts grow;

"June rears the bunch of flowers they carry,

From seeds of April's sowing."

They create for a week, and write for an hour. Theirs is no juggler's riband, but genuine warp and weft from the delicate loom of the brain; choice work of the Weaver that sits within, and throws the light shuttles of thought.

These be they who sit for hours with idle pen, day-dreaming, and fastidiously choosing of phantoms; long travailing in doubt and mistrust; long cautiously ripening their acquaintance with accepted Shadows; till at length, in happy hour, the pent-up fountains of the heart are stirred and loosened, the pulse begins to beat, the noiseless wheels go round, the nerves run music, all that was cold becomes empassioned, all that was vague, intense and definite, and the flying pen can scarcely now keep pace with the swift and cloudless imagiuation.

Alas! poor Dreamers, how long shall cruel Destiny thrust her hated Hour-glass into your left hand, to rule the wayward feather in your right; vexing, with earthward sand, the sky-accustomed plume? How long must ye hurry and spoil the fine mechanism of the brain, as schoolboys fizz a watch? playing at dominos (so to speak), with disjointed fragments of thought and phraseology; and too happy if here and there a felicitous expression, or casual flash of fancy, disguise the intrinsic meanness of the patchwork. This intellectual bondage is of all slaveries the most intolerable, because it is of all the most intimate. Fetter and thong can only bruise the flesh, and trammel the mere levers and hinges of the limbs; this subtler tyranny penetrates beyond the outworks to the very citadel of life; invading the high-domed "palace of the soul;" laying hold on the fibres of the brain itself; and touching, with accursed hand, the sacred ark of Reason.

Such, in lesser degree, had been my evil case the other day for fourteen fretful hours; constrained, by a rash promise, to embroider before midnight as many spangled pages. As the clock struck, I delivered the last blurred sheet to the printer's devil- heartily thanked God and went to bed in cold feet.

To bed, but not to sleep. For my brain, restless though exhausted, kept working and working on, like a coffee-mill with nothing to grind. I could keep my eyelids shut only by an effort: - the moment my will let go of the muscles, they sprang open again to their full extent; and my hot eyeballs, ranging through the dark, scooped out an immense black dome, in the midst of which I lay-like an emmet under the dome of St. Paul's. As I peered out into the gulf of darkness, I saw a dull red spark, glowing, self-suspended, miles away, as it seemed, in the void; now dwindling-receding-vanishing; anon, mysteriously rekindled, and revealing, as it brightened, the slender smoke-thread sent up by its burning, and the black wick of the candle on which it slowly preyed. And when, at last, contracting to an intense white speck, it suddenly went out, the hollow dome, deprived of a fixed point, began to rock and flicker; repeating, in immense palpitations, the giddy throbbing of my brain. And soon the vast concave began to fill; at first, with confused motions as of drifting vapour-dumb mutterings- entangled colours and a vague tumultuous sense of numbers, and gathering multitude;