Met he life’s long shock.
Yet not all blank and desolate
Was this poor man’s earthly state;
Hope, toil, content, can soften fate,
As the moss the rock.
O! lost Brother! still and cold,
Sunk like rain into the mould,
Silently, unseen, untold—
Thou ’rt a God-sown seed!
It is a sad sight to look upon the corpse of a laborer, cut down in the midst of a toilsome life; his hard, knotty hands clasped upon the still breast, and the strong limbs laid in serene repose. And yet how happy the change! No longer does he ask leave to toil; no longer is he at war with poverty, for death has made it a drawn battle. He ‘rests from his labors’ where the rich and the poor meet together, and he hears no more the voice of the oppressor. ••• Perhaps our readers will have observed that the Sketches of East Florida are from no common pen. The description which has been given by the writer, of the delicious climate in that sunny region, may to many ‘Northeners’ seem exaggerated; but such is not the fact. A friend writing recently from St. Augustine, thus playfully alludes to the effect which the climate produces upon a New-Yorker: ‘If a business-man could be caught up from the whirl of Broadway, and dropped in a warm climate, say that of St. Augustine, and left under a fig-tree to his own reflections, his first thought doubtless would be for an omnibus ‘right up.’ ‘Rather queer!’ he would say; ‘a hot sun, sandy street, and not a carriage to be seen! There’s a man out in his slippers, and a woman with her head tied up in a handkerchief—may-be a night-cap; probably some old Dutch settlers that went to-sleep with Rip Van Winkle. Wild turkeys, as I live, all about the market!—and oh, Lord! there’s a little nigger with only a shirt on! Halloo there! you little nigger! tell me the way to the Broadway coaches! No coaches? no omnibii? Well, where’s your five-o’clock boats?—where’s your Harlaem rail-road? I want to go back to town!’ Such would probably be his first go-off; and the next impulse would be to run, shout, cry fire! or murder!—any thing to produce a sensation; but unless very soon about it, he would find himself yielding to some strange influence hitherto unfelt; and it would be amusing to notice how soon the fretting restless man of the forty-second latitude would be tamed down in the thirteenth to the equanimity of a child asleep. The climate enters within the man, and brings out one by one some hidden and better impulse, at the same time laying a gentle hand upon his rougher humors; so that when he would shout, he hums, and when he would laugh, he smiles only; and in undertaking to run, he is caught about the waist; and goes floating smoothly around in the ground-swell motion of the Spanish-dance.’ ••• We perceive that the Copy-right Question has been thus early brought before the National Legislature. From the present aspect of things we may indulge a well-grounded hope that authors who have worn themselves out in making other people happy, will not hereafter be left to perish amidst age and infirmity, unrelieved by the fruit of their labors. There is one argument exceedingly well illustrated in the recent address of the ‘Copy-right Club.’ In allusion to the floods of trash which have for months inundated the Atlantic cities and towns, the writer, addressing himself to American citizens, observes: ‘In all other circumstances and questions save that of a literature, you have taken the high ground of freedom and self-reliance. You have neither asked, nor loaned, nor besought, but with your own hands have framed, what the occasion required. Whatever stature you have grown to as a nation, it is due to that sole virtue; and by its exercise may you only hope to hold your place. In almost any other shape than that of silent books you would have spurned the foreign and held fast to the home-born; but stealing in quietly at every opening, making themselves the seemingly inoffensive and unobtrusive lodgers in every house, they have full possession of the country in all its parts; and another people may promise themselves in the next generation of Americans, (as the question now goes,) a restored dominion which their arms were not able to keep. The pamphlet will carry the day where the soldier fell back.’ ••• We derive the annexed stanzas through a Boston correspondent. He assures us that the work of art which they commemorate is most honorable to the genius of the sculptor, who has been winning laurels ever since his removal to the tasteful city: