Here is a very beautiful thought of that strange compound of Scotch shrewdness, strong common sense, and German mysticism, or un-common sense—Thomas Carlyle:
"When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man. Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of Time, and there remains no record of them any more: yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar! 'What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!'"
There is probably not another word in the English language that can be worse "twisted" than that which composes the burden of the ensuing lines:
Write we know is written right,
When we see it written write:
But when we see it written wright,
We know 'tis not then written right;
For write, to have it written right,
Must not be written right nor wright,
Nor yet should it be written rite,
But WRITE—for so 'tis written right.
We commend the following to the scores of dashing "spirited" belles who have just returned disappointed from "the Springs," Newport, and other fashionable resorts. The writer is describing a dashing female character, whose "mission" she considered it to be, to take the world and admiration "by storm:"
"With all her blaze of notoriety, did any body esteem her particularly? Was there any one man upon earth who on his pillow could say, 'What a lovely angel is Fanny Wilding!' Had she ever refused an offer of marriage? No; for nobody ever had made her one. She was like a fine fire-work, entertaining to look at, but dangerous to come near to: her bouncing and cracking in the open air gave a lustre to surrounding objects, but there was not a human being who could be tempted to take the dangerous exhibition into his own house! That was a thing not to be thought of for a moment."
"In your Magazine for July," writes a city correspondent, "I notice in the 'Editor's Drawer,' an allusion to and quotation from 'The Execution of Montrose,' the author of which you state is unknown or not named. You seem not to be aware that this is one of Aytoun's Ballads, which, with others, was published in London, under the title of 'Lays of the Cavaliers.' But why did you not give the most beautiful verse: