THE GARDEN GATE.
"Stand back, bewildering politics!
I've placed my fences round;
Pass on, with all your party tricks,
Nor tread my holy ground.
Stand back—I'm weary of your talk,
Your squabbles, and your hate:
You cannot enter in this walk—
I've closed my garden gate.
"Stand back, ye thoughts of trade and pelf!
I have a refuge here;
I wish to commune with myself—
My mind is out of gear.
These bowers are sacred to the page
Of philosophic lore;
Within these bounds no envies rage—
I've shut my garden door.
"Stand back, Frivolity and Show.
It is a day of Spring;
I want to see my roses blow,
And hear the blackbird sing.
I wish to prune my apple-trees,
And nail my peaches straight;
Keep to the causeway, if you please—
I've shut my garden gate.
"I have no room for such as you,
My house is somewhat small:
Let Love come here, and Friendships true
I'll give them welcome all;
They will not scorn my household stuff,
Or criticize my store.
Pass on—the world is wide enough—
I've shut my garden door.
"Stand back, ye Pomps! and let me wear
The liberty I feel.
I have a coat at elbows bare—
I love its dishabille.
Within these precincts let me rove,
With Nature, free from state;
There is no tinsel in the grove—
I've shut my garden gate.
"What boots continual glare and strife?
I cannot always climb;
I would not struggle all my life—
I need a breathing time.
Pass on—I've sanctified these grounds
To friendship, love, and lore:
Ye cannot come within the bounds—
I've shut the garden door."
Poetical Composition.—If metre and melody be worth anything at all, let them be polished to perfection; let an author "keep his piece nine years," or ninety and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can—at least, as musical as his other performances. Not that we counsel dilatory and piecemeal composition. The thought must be struck off in the passion of the moment; the sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil, and be forged in a few seconds: true; but after the forging, long and weary polishing and grinding must follow, before your sword-blade will cut. And melody is what makes poetry cut; what gives it its life, its power, its magic influence, on the hearts of men. It must ring in their ears; it must have music in itself; it must appeal to the senses as well as to the feelings, the imagination, the intellect: then, when it seizes at once on the whole man, on body, soul, and spirit, will it "swell in the heart, and kindle in the eyes," and constrain him, he knows not why, to believe and to obey.—Fraser, for June.
Poetry of the Last Age and the Present.—A writer in the last number of Fraser's Magazine says well that, "there is in periodicals and elsewhere, a vast amount of really poetic imagery, of true and tender feeling, and cultivated ingenuity, scattered up and down in the form of verse. We have no new great poets, but very many small ones—layers, as it were, and seedlings from the lofty geniuses of the last generation, showing in every line the influence of Scott, Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, and their compeers, seeing often farther than their masters saw, but dwarfs on giants' shoulders. Not that we complain of this. Elizabethan ages must be followed by Caroline ones; and our second Elizabethan galaxy is past; Tennyson alone survives, in solitary greatness, a connecting link between the poetry of the past and that of the future. In poetry, and in many other things, ours is a Caroline age; greater than the first one, as every modern cycle in a God-taught world, will be nobler, richer, wiser than its ancient analogue; but still a merely Caroline age—an age of pedantries and imbecilities, of effete rulers, side by side with great nether powers, as yet unaccredited, anarchic, unconscious of their own laws and destinies—an age of formalisms and Pharisaisms, of parties embittered by the sense of their own decrepitude—an age of small men, destined to be the fathers of great ones. And in harmony with this, we have a poetic school of Herberts and Vaughans, Withers and Daniels, to be followed hereafter, it may be, by a Milton, of whom as yet the age has given no sign."
Death-bed Superstitions.—The practice of opening doors and boxes when a person dies is founded on the idea that the minister of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door, (which alone would serve the purpose,) crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid. An open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the departed were at least assured that they were not made the unconscious instruments of torturing the departed in their daily occupations. The superstition prevails in the north as well as in the west of England; and a similar one exists in the south of Spain, where I have seen it practiced. Among the Jews at Gibraltar there is also a strange custom when a death occurs in a house; and this consists in pouring away all the water contained in any vessel, the superstition being that the angel of death may have washed his sword therein.
Old authors notice the training of camels to move in measured time by placing the animal on gradually heated plates, and at the same time sounding a musical instrument.
An Arab Game.—The Arabs are far more amusable, far more jovial and open-hearted. They have their coffee-houses every night, and their religious festivities periodically; they play at all sorts of complicated games, resembling draughts and chess, and find means ingeniously to vary their sports. If they compromise their dignity, they succeed in whiling away their leisure time far more successfully than the pride-stuffed Levantine. One of their amusements—called the game of plaff—is worth mentioning, especially as it is not only indulged in by the vulgar, but formed the chief delight of the venerable Moharrem Bey himself. Two men, often with respectable gray beards, sit on a carpet at a little distance one from the other. All Easterns are usually dry smokers; but on this occasion they manage to foment a plentiful supply of saliva, and the game simply consists in a series of attempts on the part of the two opponents to spit on the tips of each others noses. At first, this cleanly interchange of saliva goes on slowly and deliberately—Socrates never measured the leap of a flea with more seriousness—but presently one receives a dab in the eye, another in the mouth. They begin to grow hot and angry. "I hit your nose," cries one. "No, it was my cheek!" replied the other. They draw a little nearer, in order to ascertain the truth by feeling; spit, spit, they still go, like two vicious old cats; their palates grow dry; their throats become parched; but the contest continues, and they exhaust themselves in making spittoons of each other's faces and beards. Hamlet and Laertes were not more eager and desperate. "A hit, a very palpable hit!" they exclaim, as they hawk up their last supply of ammunition. Each denies the truth; they mutually proceed to a verification, and the game of plaff often ends in a regular match of nose-pulling.—Two Years' Residence in a Levantine Family.
A Marriage in America.—A respectable farmer came in from some distance, and married the cook. The bridegroom was about fifty, and the bride was thirty years of age. The landlord and many of his boarders assisted at the ceremony, which was performed in the evening, and those of the boarders who had not been present were invited in afterward by the bridegroom to partake of wine and cake. After all were charged, he gave this sentiment, "Friendship to all, love to a few, and hatred to none." So systematically were matters managed, that next morning the bridegroom was sitting in the stove at the bar at seven o'clock, and at half-past seven breakfasted as usual at the public table, at which, of course, his wife, the cook, did not appear, and in the afternoon the happy pair left for their home. When I asked the landlord what the wife was like, he answered, "She is as pretty as a picture, and straight as a candle."—Sir J. Alexander's "Acadie," just published.
Arabian Nights Entertainments in our own Time.—The Arabs, who have among them most imaginative and finished improvisatori, compare the elegant movements of a beautiful bride to those of a young camel. The Thousand and One Nights, like most clever fables, have some foundation in fact, as is well known to the friends of the Arabian man of rank, who keeps his professed story-teller as an indispensable part of his establishment. African travelers relate that these friends will assemble before his tent, or on the platform with which the house of a Moorish Arab is roofed, and there listen night after night, to a consecutive history, related for sixty or even one hundred nights in succession. The listeners on such occasions have all the air of being spell-bound, especially while hearing some of their native songs, which are frequently extemporized, full of fire, and appealing with irresistible force to the passions. "I have seen," says Major Denham, "a circle of Arabs straining their eyes with a fixed attention at one moment and bursting with loud laughter; at the next melting into tears and clasping their hands in all the ecstacy of grief and sympathy."—Leaves from the Diary of a Naturalist.